search term funnies
Every once in a while, instead of doing something productive, I look at the search engine terms that send people to this blog. The latest offerings were thought-provoking.
Moloch – yay! I love to turn up on Google for that.
Comitatus in Grendel — well, yeah, I guess some of it was. Burp.
Grendels Mothers – now THAT is an interesting idea.
Bridget Jones — dear reader, I doubt you got what you came for.
ways to keep from puking while running — Best. Search. Term. Ever. I’m honored to have been a hit for this one.
grad school, thesis, teaching
I got a real, live acceptance to a PhD program in English. Wow. At a place I would love to go to. Waiting on more info about money, the great decider.
Thesis intro and chapter one is circulating amongst committee members. It only had one little gouge in it that I didn’t manage to fill in time. In my defense, I wrote about a quarter of it with a fever and on incredible amounts of over the counter cold medication. I’m proud that it’s even in English and I remembered to staple the pages.
Finally, a student emailed me today to show me his Works Cited page and ask me if he had compiled his cross-referenced entries correctly. I wasn’t making them do cross-referencing. I never even told them about cross-referencing. My student is *reading the supplemental textbook.* This is where I would put my Snoopy Dance icon if I had one.
Thesis? What thesis?
“Yet in vain a paynim foe
Armed with fate the mighty blow:
For when he fell, the Elfin queen,
All in secret and unseen,
O’er the fainting hero threw
Her mantle of ambrosial blue,
And bade her spirits bear him far,
In Merlin’s agate-axled car,
To her green isle’s enamelled steep,
Far in the navel of the deep.
O’er his wounds she sprinkled dew
From flowers that in Arabia grew.
. . . . . .
There he reigns a mighty king,
Thence to Britain shall return,
If right prophetic rolls I learn,
Borne on victory’s spreading plume,
His ancient sceptre to resume,
His knightly table to restore,
And brave the tournaments of yore.”
Thomas Warton
The Grave of King Arthur
***
Ahem — sorry, I had to scrape the bile off my tongue. That poem makes me throw up in my mouth a little.
Hey, while you guys are all surfing blogland, you’re missing out on a chance to own the find of a lifetime. Where else can you get a Bronze Age ceramic figure (discovered next to King Arthur’s body in Glastonbury Tor) haunted by the spirit of a Druid priest named Perrin — for only $9.99 plus shipping?
Hey, don’t blame me, blame the cold medicine. I can’t believe they took Sudafed out of all the stores and left this Alka Seltzer cold and flu fizzy stuff lying around. Whu. I feel sorry for the students whose papers I’ve graded tonight.
Well, back to grading and sniffling. I hope Perrin and the spirit of King Arthur are still waiting for me when I get back.
thesis thesis thesis
So I’m tightening up Chapter One and I think I need more about food and drink as media of symbolic exchange in Beowulf. I *know* the chapter needs more pages lol….
Dear internet gods,
I’ve got Irving on ealuscerwen, De Roo on fatal feast metaphors, Rosier on hands and feasts. Who/what am I missing here for secondary stuff?
(Don’t laugh. I once posted that I wished I had a laptop. Someone with a laptop he no longer used mailed me his laptop – for free. I make my offerings to the internet gods [actually, that might more properly be St. Expedite, I'll have to give it some thought.])
Hardly quiet, but not much online time
I don’t know if I can keep up with reading or writing in the blogger and livejournal and wordpress worlds like I was (which isn’t to say I was doing a bang-up job in the first place), as I deal with two sections of a class I’m teaching for the first time, the finalization of my thesis and gearing up for defense, and the regular coursework. It’s crazy crazy, and there are a lot of conversations I’m missing out on, but it’s nose to the grindstone time (note to self: go look that phrase up).
In good news, I’ve gotten an interview/visit invitation for a PhD program already, so the idea that some adcom somewhere doesn’t think I’m a total moron is pretty nice, even though I’m mortified at having to interview and am scrambling to find someone to teach my sections while I’m out of town. I am trying to tell myself that I’ll have to screw up pretty bad to not get in, that they can’t possibly spend the money to fly up a huge “finalist” candidate pool and then pick only a small percentage of them, but the concept of having to interview for this slot is still mortifying as I really do come across better on paper than I do in person. I’ve never heard anybody flail on a conference question as badly as I did at SEMA last year, and I’ve been to plenty of student conferences. I just flail when put on the spot — I minored in flailing. I wish I could send a clone, only one minus the tendency to flail and full of the ability to have friendly , easygoing conversations with strangers who intimidate me. I don’t do that well, either.
The Studio of Cynthia Large
Fine art with a literary twist — the Julian of Norwich paintings are my particular favorites.
English wine and Taunting, Bridget Jones style
Because my friends are funnier than I am, and after eight solid hours of thesis-wrangling, I have Nothing To Say.
An online friend posted her pitch for a sizzling new show, and I reproduce it in full:
“New, from Dan Brown…
“þa Dag Wincynnes Codd”
When a pair of devoted sommelieres embark on a quest to taste the lost barrel of wine that supplied the last supper, they find themselves at the center of the biggest coverup in English history—and in the cross-hairs of a conflict that has raged since the Roman Empire.
When a puzzling manuscript suggests that the famous “win suðan”—whose legendary power of intoxication led to the brutal beating with cow skulls and subsequent headlessness of a renowned English bishop—was not French as history has taught, ruggedly-handsome Oxford theology professor Coonwolf is forced to confront a question that could rewrite English history as we know it:
What if the English *can* make decent wine?
With the help of Emma, Oxford’s attractive and promiscuous professor of French and Gender Studies, and Thelred, her incompetant but plot-necessary sidekick, Coonwolf follows the clues left by the manuscript: onto leaky Sutton Hoo reproductions, through anthropomorphized weather disturbances, down wells, up icebergs, into chicken-pens, through the month of December, and beyond.
And all the while he is being pursued by a mysterious one-eyed man with blood on his hands and garlic on his breath.
What are the secret English vinyards? Is their wine really palatable? How can we get some? Do we actually want some? What does this have to do with the Danish? How many STDs does Emma really have?
All this and more will be answered in…
“þa Dag Wincynnes Codd”
[end paste. Stay tuned for Episode One, coming soon to a SciFi channel near you!]
And another, in response to a very, er, very internet snippet I found which I will neither reprint in full nor link to but which contained such nuggets as “The life of the Anglo-Saxon warrior was a life of dreariness and misery….Still, there was music, art, jewelry making; life appears to be transient, but men create long-lasting works, almost like an anachronism…”
My friend, the Fearless Girl Reporter from Silent Hill, speculated on the possible source material for the complete version of this paragraph — perhaps it was some “archival Anglo-Saxon warrior’s Bridget Jones-style diary found somewhere in Merry Old England, possibly etched into a chalk cliff somewhere,” she suggested.
“Dear Diary,
“My life is one of dreariness and misery. V. sad. Tomorrow is my 26th birthday. Expect to pop off shortly – at least, that’s what Wulfhurst says. And he should know! He’s 32 – practically ancient! Ah well, at least I have art, music and jewelry. Sigh.”
Review of SciFi’s Grendel on Unlocked Wordhoard
After my earlier post, a friend offered to Tivo this for me (I think that’s a verb — I’m not very tech savvy). We’re going to come up with a way to make the viewing of this, ahem, monstrosity into a drinking game.
Malory, Fractals, and James Earl
isomeme on livejournal happens to be reading Malory at the same time I am, though he’s doing Vinaver and I’m doing Cooper. He’s noted two amusing/interesting things in his reading so far, and I have permission to quote the first. Vinaver notes the confusion of the French sources, but argues for an overall sort of structure in the French tales (I have not read Vinaver’s introduction). isomeme writes:
“The editor goes on at length trying to convey the seemingly chaotic yet subtly structured and entirely harmonious pattern that results from the repeated application of these transformations. But by the end of the first paragraph, I was practically shouting “It’s a fractal!” Fractal geometry is created using very similar repeatedly-applied rules, and results in analogous self-similar structures, with the same kind of elusive, chaotic harmony of form.”
I don’t know much about fractals — indeed, not enough to really comment on this. The transformations my friend is talking about refer to things like taking an element of an established story and elaborating on it in a new story, or a story might have an area expanded and then reinserted into an existing narrative, creating a new tale with new divisions and a “new, improved” middle segment.
This leads me back to Beowulf, though, like just about everything does, and dug out James Earl’s Thinking about Beowulf from last semester’s stack. Earl writes of the Mandelbrot set on the cover of my edition that the “metaphor is visual, not linguistic.” Once I think about this way, I can buy it — I am having trouble tying the creative (and political, and didactic) impulse(s) involved in selecting and selectively translating and redacting various tales to anything so mappable as a fractal’s behaviour — the problem with thinking of these stories’ permutations as having little copies of themselves buried in the original and being, really, pretty similar, is that the original is hardly recoverable, and we don’t have a Grimm’s law for back-engineering the prototype of a tale. (I don’t think.) The mathematical stuff just doesn’t work for me, though that could have a whole lot to do with my utter lack of understanding of most things mathematical.
But Earl says, “Poems…have what Mandelbrot calls fractal coastlines. They sit on their pages like so many discrete little islands, but the closer we look, the more indefinable and complex their edges become; ambiguity and intertextual connections become apparent, adn soon all attempts at measurement veer toward infinity…. Subtleties revealed at higher magnification routinely nullify earlier impressions….Language is fractal in this way; and literature, particularly poetry, specializes in this vertiginous effect, as it plunges asymptotically toward the immanent and the transcendent” (7).
I dunno. What do you think?
I’ll post the other funny after I get permission and a picture I think I’d like to use to illustrate it.
***
Earl, James. Thinking about Beowulf. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994.
