Small links-fest
Sep. 29th, 2007 11:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
highlyeccentricGreetings! On this here friday i bring you a collection of links, to exiting and interesting blogs. Some of them I've been reading for some time now and have probably linked to before. Others are recently discovered.
On the intellectual side: check out Jonathan Jarret in "A Corner of Tenth Century Europe" as he navigates the nature of property ownership in the middle ages.
After some musing I at least came up with an answer that works for me, and predictably has a lot of Matthew’s thinking in it (there were reasons I worked with him, after all). I would say that medieval ownership is not of the actual land, as we might conceive of it, to do with it as you like. Neither however is it separate from the land as Matthew’s view might sometimes seem to imply. I think medieval landed property is the right to take revenue from an identified place.
(emphasis mine) interesting stuff, which will require your brain to be functioning as you read it.
While your brain is on, and only if you're feeling nerdy, proceed over to Heavenfield and read about Northumbrian Ethnogenesis. Or about my favourite people, the Venerable Bede and St Æþelþryþ.
A new discovery, courtest of Dr Virago at Quod She, is The Last Protestant Dinosaur. A useful reminder, for those of us over-exposed to Peter Jensen, that there are thinking Anglicans out there. I'm not going to agree with him every time, but you definitely can't say that he doesn't think long and hard about his beliefs. Check out his musings on "The way the truth and the life", his problems with Canterbury ("what could we through into Boston Harbor to protest prelacy without representation?") and his contemplations on the "Queen of the Sciences".
I quote from the latter:
For me, relinquishing our crown seems like a strong strategic move in the way that all death to false persona releases energy for new life. So many pastors tell me of the struggle to get the attention of their upwardly mobile families who have worked out strategies for passing on achievement and economic success to their children. Clearly they have declared where their self-interest lies and, considering the goals they articulate, they are wise. After all, getting involved with a living God with a track record of complicating the lives of her followers seems a risky investment at best - a junk bond, maybe... Spiritual journeys should be preceded by warning labels: "Warning this ride may cause extreme discomfort and get between you and your money."
Much less challenging but no less fun, i recommend Scribal Terror, for weird and whacky news and pictures. For example, check out the best security guards for chickens.
Also new, via Unlocked Wordhoard and In The Middle, is Dan Reimen of Wrætlic. I quote from his introductory post:
This is the first time I was supposed to stand in front of 160 students and "teach"--if thats what we are calling that activity. I hope, really and desperately, that in the end I did "teach." But the upshot of the whole thing was having to somehow work with the mandate of historicizing a text I would much rather treat like a lover (and I think this is a theoretical statement, which is to say a poetic one): being faithful and betraying, singing about and cursing, getting bored with it, and simply drifting off in wonder about it--then of course there is still the activity (of reading) itself. The best moment of the whole lecture--I think--occured when stopped and simply read about 30 lines of the poem. Following Tolkien's old mandate, I read the damn thing as a poem and these students looked up suddenly and were stunned. This, this boring thing they read disparate translations of and would be forced into using as "evidence" for some kind of ill-fated essay written under timed duress on the "Making of the West" (which is the title of their dept.-chosen text)--this was a POEM. And I do not mean that in a historically frozen sense. I mean that they percieved that this was a poem to some other reader too. Perhaps they remained unwares of that final bit, but I think I could see it in their hairs standing on end. (emphasis mine, again)
I love him for the love he has of the text. Lovely text. Sexy language. (or is that just me?)
Speaking of love for language, I greatly appreciated Mary-Kate Hurley (Old English in New York)'s recent post over at In The Middle. She considers the concept of "endangered languages" and the human cost in language loss. Then she turns to her own dead languages, and her difficulties translating OE into modern english.
LJS's response was interesting. He discounted genre as a factor -- rather, he explained my problems with translation as a function of loving language. More precisely, a function of loving Old English more than I'll ever be able to love modern English. I'd never really thought the problem through in those terms, but it makes some sense. I nearly always go for the too-close-to-the-original in my translations. I think it's because I'm worried what my inability to be truly faithful to the original language I'll lose something vital. Or worse yet -- something still living in the dead language.
yes indeedy.
And she has some interesting things to say about translation and preservation of languages not-quite-dead-yet. Go, read.
And to round off with something frivolous: Geoffrey Chaucer speaks out in support ot Britney Spears.
On the intellectual side: check out Jonathan Jarret in "A Corner of Tenth Century Europe" as he navigates the nature of property ownership in the middle ages.
After some musing I at least came up with an answer that works for me, and predictably has a lot of Matthew’s thinking in it (there were reasons I worked with him, after all). I would say that medieval ownership is not of the actual land, as we might conceive of it, to do with it as you like. Neither however is it separate from the land as Matthew’s view might sometimes seem to imply. I think medieval landed property is the right to take revenue from an identified place.
(emphasis mine) interesting stuff, which will require your brain to be functioning as you read it.
While your brain is on, and only if you're feeling nerdy, proceed over to Heavenfield and read about Northumbrian Ethnogenesis. Or about my favourite people, the Venerable Bede and St Æþelþryþ.
A new discovery, courtest of Dr Virago at Quod She, is The Last Protestant Dinosaur. A useful reminder, for those of us over-exposed to Peter Jensen, that there are thinking Anglicans out there. I'm not going to agree with him every time, but you definitely can't say that he doesn't think long and hard about his beliefs. Check out his musings on "The way the truth and the life", his problems with Canterbury ("what could we through into Boston Harbor to protest prelacy without representation?") and his contemplations on the "Queen of the Sciences".
I quote from the latter:
For me, relinquishing our crown seems like a strong strategic move in the way that all death to false persona releases energy for new life. So many pastors tell me of the struggle to get the attention of their upwardly mobile families who have worked out strategies for passing on achievement and economic success to their children. Clearly they have declared where their self-interest lies and, considering the goals they articulate, they are wise. After all, getting involved with a living God with a track record of complicating the lives of her followers seems a risky investment at best - a junk bond, maybe... Spiritual journeys should be preceded by warning labels: "Warning this ride may cause extreme discomfort and get between you and your money."
Much less challenging but no less fun, i recommend Scribal Terror, for weird and whacky news and pictures. For example, check out the best security guards for chickens.
Also new, via Unlocked Wordhoard and In The Middle, is Dan Reimen of Wrætlic. I quote from his introductory post:
This is the first time I was supposed to stand in front of 160 students and "teach"--if thats what we are calling that activity. I hope, really and desperately, that in the end I did "teach." But the upshot of the whole thing was having to somehow work with the mandate of historicizing a text I would much rather treat like a lover (and I think this is a theoretical statement, which is to say a poetic one): being faithful and betraying, singing about and cursing, getting bored with it, and simply drifting off in wonder about it--then of course there is still the activity (of reading) itself. The best moment of the whole lecture--I think--occured when stopped and simply read about 30 lines of the poem. Following Tolkien's old mandate, I read the damn thing as a poem and these students looked up suddenly and were stunned. This, this boring thing they read disparate translations of and would be forced into using as "evidence" for some kind of ill-fated essay written under timed duress on the "Making of the West" (which is the title of their dept.-chosen text)--this was a POEM. And I do not mean that in a historically frozen sense. I mean that they percieved that this was a poem to some other reader too. Perhaps they remained unwares of that final bit, but I think I could see it in their hairs standing on end. (emphasis mine, again)
I love him for the love he has of the text. Lovely text. Sexy language. (or is that just me?)
Speaking of love for language, I greatly appreciated Mary-Kate Hurley (Old English in New York)'s recent post over at In The Middle. She considers the concept of "endangered languages" and the human cost in language loss. Then she turns to her own dead languages, and her difficulties translating OE into modern english.
LJS's response was interesting. He discounted genre as a factor -- rather, he explained my problems with translation as a function of loving language. More precisely, a function of loving Old English more than I'll ever be able to love modern English. I'd never really thought the problem through in those terms, but it makes some sense. I nearly always go for the too-close-to-the-original in my translations. I think it's because I'm worried what my inability to be truly faithful to the original language I'll lose something vital. Or worse yet -- something still living in the dead language.
yes indeedy.
And she has some interesting things to say about translation and preservation of languages not-quite-dead-yet. Go, read.
And to round off with something frivolous: Geoffrey Chaucer speaks out in support ot Britney Spears.