more on the spancel
Thanks to Eamonn Kelly, some more info on the spancel has finally come ’round to this blog. Thanks so much, Eamonn!
MEARCSTAPA info, MEARCSTAPA swag, and 21st century Blemmye
What, you may ask, is MEARCSTAPA?
The acronym stands for Monsters: the Experimental Association for the Research of Cryptozoology through Scholarly Theory And Practical Application.
The word is from Old English, and is used to describe Grendel in the poem Beowulf:
Wæs se grimma gæst Grendel haten,
mære mearcstapa, se þe moras heold,
fen ond fæsten…
A mearc is a limit, boundary, borderland, “mark” – a liminal space.
A mearcstapa is one who walks those spaces – a mark-stepper, a border-walker.
The organization has a blog and a mission statement.
MEARCSTAPA officers and founding members Asa Mittman and Jeff Massey were seen sporting cool logo t-shirts in Kalamazoo, Michigan the other day. Trust me, you want one.
You can get your own shirt or other cool swag at cafepress.
In other news, when I got home from Kalamazoo, my mother and daughter had something to show me. They said they’d found a modern-day blemmye. What do you think?
Blemmye from the Cotton Vitellius MS.A
An Adipose (a short little villain from the 2008 Dr. Who series. These adorable little things are made out of human body fat. They form themselves and walk away from the body of their, er, ‘hosts,’ killing them in the process).
kalamazoo
Someone here at Kalamazoo mentioned this blog to me yesterday, saying, “I remember your old blog, yeah.”
Oy. Yeah, it’s been a while.
But after two back to back panels today, right on the heels of the final Latin exam last Monday and 100 pages of more or less polished prose that had to be turned in in the last half of this semester, I am officially done jumping through hoops and can breathe again. At least until Monday, when I get back home and have to get my orals list together in a big damn hurry before all the people on my committee scurry off to England for the summer.
Then I have to read everything on the damned thing by September.
But that’s ok – I’m not complaining. I just made it through the Worst Semester Yet and I am still in one piece. If this semester didn’t kill me, nothing will. I just opened a beer, but I think my real reward might be going to sleep before midnight for the first time in over four months.
I have been in my room for most of my stay here trying to finish the paper I gave today but couldn’t really start until my coursework crap was done Monday, so I can’t tell you a great deal about this Kalamazoo experience, except that the brief foray out into the Wide World (well, the BABEL party) was a great deal of fun. The panel I was on had very good papers on the Grendelkin and on serpent women with scarlet lips, and the MEARCSTAPA roundtable on Monster Theory was thought-provoking, productive, invigorating, and inspiring – it was a pleasure to talk with those folks and with the people who attended, who brought brilliant comments and perspectives to the discussion and who helped me get my mental groove back in a big way.
I am actually going to go to *other people’s sessions* tomorrow! The pressure is off! I have two glorious days of relative freedom! I get to crack endless Beowulf jokes!
Ok, I got all that enthusiasm out of my system. Back to the usual Crankiness, Doom, and Gloom 
