Slouching Towards Exhaustion
My thesis won’t die. I went back into my first chapter to “unpack” a few things I had rushed through before and now it’s like trying to stuff maggots up a hosepipe, as my colorful great uncle used to say. The damned paragraphs just won’t stay put. Life of its own etc. But one way or the other I’m defending next month. It doesn’t have to be good — it just has to be done.
And I’m going off for a PhD program this fall, for sure and for real. I’m finally going to learn Old English. That makes me so happy that I’m a little embarrassed to admit it, but what the hell.
Finally, an internet friend posted a link I thought I’d share, even though you tech savvy folks have probably known about it for a while. It’s Gode Cookery, home of “How to Cook Medieval.” Coqz Heaumez, anyone?
Arthur and the Man of the Mount of St. Michael (or, recycling old reading drafts in lieu of real content)
In “Arthur and Lucius the Emperor of Rome,” Arthur meets a giant on St. Michael’s Mount. A dizzying array of epithets are applied to the giant, attributing to him a mix of animal and (negative) human characteristics. Among other generally disparaging words used to describe the giant, such as “sot,” “carl,” “warlock,” “tyrant,” “dog’s son,” “glutton,” and “wight,” he is twice referred to as a “freke.” Cooper glosses freke as creature — not necessarily man, not necessarily animal, but some created living thing. The OED, however, hints at a more complicated value for the word than the gloss implies; in fact, “creature” is not given as an entry. Given the context in which the giant is situated and the other epithets used to describe him, the gloss of “creature” seems less than fitting. Instead, the term seems to be more value-laden than Cooper’s careful “creature” conveys.
Freke is the noun form of the adjective freck or frack; the substantive form is defined, “properly, one eager for a fight; a warrior, champion; but usually a mere poetic synonym for ‘man.’”[1] It appears that some poetic words for “man” seem to start out describing an ideal type or behavior and gradually come to stand for the larger class of which that ideal type is a member – e.g., the shift from “warrior” to “man.”[2] In this case, though, the text glosses freke (twice) as “creature” – not warrior, and not man. And as a creation, the giant is apparently singular: “he was the foulest wight that ever man saw, and there was never such one formed on earth, for there was never devil in hell more horribly made” (90). Cooper’s strangely neutral gloss nevertheless allows for a reading of the giant as possessing some human characteristics when the passage is read as a whole, despite his singularity.
on libraries and writing
I used to go into the library and look at the shelves and shelves of books much in the way I used to stare at the stars — I was aware of my mortality, my limitations, my *compactness* in comparison to what was “out there,” but it instilled in me a sense of wonder, of excitement, of of hunger, even, about possibilities and expanding borders. I used to feel excitement in the library, and wonder under the night sky.
Now, though, I feel intimidated in the library, and I try very hard to stay near one or two sections so as not to get distracted from my thesis. There is so much, even in this small corner, that I will never have the time to read. There is so much I *could* write that I do not have time to write. I am of an age where I must voluntarily shrink my boundaries in order to focus enough to get anything done, and that has been weighing heavily on my mind lately as I ruthlessly cut gobbets out of my thesis draft, apply for PhD programs that want to know what I want to write my dissertation on, and struggle to balance all of this grading, teaching, writing, reading, and student-ing I have to do.
The library scares me now. I don’t want to pass doors to walk through others. Maybe this is just a symptom of thesis writing, but I think it has a lot to do with the experience of being a good ten years older than most of the people I met at the prospectives weekend, and realizing that I might, if I’m lucky, get tenure somewhere a scant eight or so years before my little brother will be thinking about retirement.
It’s not the retirement, it’s just the age. I need to get over it, I know, but I don’t know how. For the moment, I need to stop feeling sorry for myself and get my butt to the library to haul Baker, Orchard, Shippey, Baudrillard, Magennis, and a crapload of sagas home.
I will make a “content post” soon, really, I will.
On the digital, the analog, and being a “prospective”
I have been neglecting this blog terribly, but alas — analog life intervenes.* The analog and the digital often meet in quirky, pleasing ways, though, and this weekend was one of them, as I met a person “in the flesh” who I’d only ever corresponded with via another blogging site before now. We interviewed at the same school. (While that could be a terrible way to meet, as you’re essentially competing with your new buddy for admission and a funding package, and not everybody there is going to make the cut, I didn’t get a lot of that dynamic this weekend. Being the only potential medievalist there probably helped. It also, tangentially, underscored the importance of being able to talk to non-specialists about this specialized stuff, a skill which the interview visit helped me realize I need to further hone, though thesis writing has brought it to my attention already.)
My first interview didn’t go so well. I was faced with a pedagogy question that I was completely unprepared for, and the flailing ensued — I never quite recovered from the suck that was that question, though I didn’t hit the ground running in that first interview anyway. I was asked how I would incorporate my work/interest in Old English poetry into a freshman composition classroom. As my advisor wryly remarked, the proper answer to that can only be something along the lines of, “Well, I like to start my composition classes with a discussion of the Old English inflectional system. I find it breaks the ice.”
Long ramble on how different the student body at this school would be compared to the schools I’ve attended previously will have to wait. In any case, I left with a favorable impression of the department overall as well as some very real concerns about the prospect of being not only the only student medievalist in my year, but the only student medievalist in the department. Assuming I get good news here, and get good news from one other place at the top of my list (I still haven’t heard from six of the eight schools I applied to), this will be an incredibly difficult decision to make. However, I should note that I am quite aware that it beats the “So will I try to get a job teaching 4/4 as a new intern or shall I work at the local coffeehouse this year” type of decision.
And now, I have papers to grade. In lieu of real, new content of interest to medievalists, I think I might recycle a brief response to something I wrote about Malory, since it touches on some discussions that were going on over at In The Middle.
* This is a terribly faulty opposition considering the way I’m using the term analog, but that will also have to wait.
