Strong Verbs Are Just Better

My DW account has lapsed, due to Reasons, and I don't have any of my medieval-specific icons atm but I enjoy the insight into which icons I DO use most (I think that's what it's picked? Or maybe I just like the random selection).

The Meme of the Day on twitter yesterday was making "I had a joke about _x_ but it was _y_" with classical mythology figures. When I started this thread I had only seen Greco-Roman versions and a few Egyptian; by now it's everywhere.

I am actually quite proud of most of these, and certainly of the fact I produced them ALL. The fact I produced them all may either be a side effect of ADHD meds #6 (less-than-half-dose version) or a consequence of coming off #5 to start #6. Am I hyper or am I just Like This? Who knows.

This one time at Christmas I totally lost my head and started telling jokes about Gawain.

— Amy, mostly hat (@amisamileandme) August 19, 2021

Text, for posterity: "This one time at Christmas I totally lost my head and started telling jokes about Gawain."

And almost fifty more:

If you ever heard me tell a joke about the Canterbury Tales, I regret it; it was too worldly and I retract it utterly.

I’ve got a great joke about medieval romance: I read it in A Certain Book, and if you will listen to me for a time, I will tell it to you as best I know how - though I am but a poor joker - in our English tongue…

Do I have a good joke about Peter Abelard? Well… yes and no…

I want to tell a joke about Chaucer’s Pardoner but I haven’t got the balls for it.

I challenged Origen to a joke-off but HE didn’t have the balls for it.

I hate to break it to you but there never really was a joke about King Arthur.

Lord, help me stop making jokes about Augustine of Hippo - but not yet.

I fell asleep and in my dream, William Langland started to tell a joke but it turned into a really long and tedious sermon.

I’ve heard a lot of jokes about 14th century social history but they’re all revolting.

I had to take my Beowulf joke off my OKCupid profile, it was making me undatable.

I decided not to make jokes about the Codex Amantianus, the subject is too heavy.

I DO have a joke about Robert Cotton’s library, though, it’s totally lit [fire emoji]

My joke about the Dream of the Rood fell flat and I had to explain it, which was annoying, and in the end there I was, talking, cross…

I told Margery Kempe a joke and she cried about it.

I was hoping to tell a joke about the cathedral called ‘The Ship of the Fens’ but it’s ely difficult to remember

I’m working on a joke about the Sermo Lupi ad Anglos, but it keeps getting so long, and so worse, and so it shall, by necessity, for the people’s sin…

I had to stop making jokes about medieval abbreviations, but I miss ⁊.

I had a joke about hell in Genesis B: it was long and windy.

I was asked to make a joke about an Old English noun; I declined it.

You’ve all been waiting for a joke about Chaucerian rhyme schemes, and at last I’ve got one for you - final-e.

I’ve heard there’s a really good joke about the formation of the biblical canon, but it’s probably apocryphal.

I told a dragon a joke about St Margaret but he found it hard to swallow.

We had planned to develop a suite of jokes about Joseph of Arimathea but we just can’t find the staff.

I’d like to tell a joke about The Seafarer, but I’m all alone in a boat and I have no friends.

I had a joke about the foreskin of Christ… and so did five other people.

I’ve been struggling to write a joke about Salome but I just can’t get ahead…

My joke about the Physiologus is actually a theological metaphor.

Jokes about Monastic Orders? Oh yes, I make them regularly.

I once made a joke about how to have appropriate marital sex according to medieval moral standards, but I didn’t enjoy it.

Once I told a joke about the Play of the Crucifixion and I totally nailed it!

Absolutely no one reads all the jokes about the Prose Tristan.

My joke about 13th century Franciscan politics is un-Conventual.

My joke about monastic hours gets longer in summer.

Have you “yerd” my Chaucerian dick joke?

I’ve got a joke about sin, it’s very original.

When I’m sad I make jokes about Boethius, it’s a real consolation.

There are two kinds of jokes about medieval sex: the active and the passive.

I was going to make a joke about the Welsh at Crecy, but it was really drawing a long bow.

I don’t make jokes about the Arthurian mosaic at Otranto, that’d be too catty.

Sure I make jokes about marginalia, but I’m only monkeying around.

One good thing about Enide is she always has a joke to hand: her husband.

I heard Sir Gowther tell a joke once, he made a complete dog’s breakfast of it.

No one believes I made a great joke about impotence trials, because it didn’t stand up to inspection.

It’s difficult to make jokes about the temptation of Benedict- a real thorny problem.¨

All my jokes about medieval theories of reproduction are seedy.

Did anyone hear Le Goff’s joke about the Middle Ages? It was really, really long.

I could make a joke about the death of Roland but I don’t want to blow my own horn.

I’ve got a joke about medieval education but it’s too trivial.

I won’t tell you my joke about the evolution of French from Latin, it’s vulgar.

You know who’s great at telling jokes? Prester John. He’s going to ride over the horizon any day now with his army of morally righteous comedians…

Me: three French noblewomen walk into a tavern…
Chorus: what were their naaaaames?
Me: Jeanne.

The last one doesn't fit the format but will be recognisable to anyone who's been to Sydney University Musical Society camps. Unfortunately, that doesn't involve many historians of medieval France.

Anyway: Jeanne-fail aside, this is, I think my magnum opus. All shall love me and ... facepalm.

I taught the Old English Apollonius of Tyre followed by Gower's Apollonius, over a two week block earlier this month. It was really striking how much the students found the OE Apollonius inaccessible - unemotional, lacking in character development (true, i'll grant, for most characters), and Gower's more accessible on account of it's greater degree of emotionality.

What I found really odd was that *I* saw emotions in the OE - especially in the part of the narrative where Apollonius is overcome with homesickness in the great hall, and his hosts observe his grief and send the princess to talk to him. He's reluctant to talk, but he does give some of his story, and then he finds solace in music.

My boss-colleague had taught the Old English elegies (two of - The Wanderer and the Seafarer) in a two week block before that, and we'd spent ages talking about the passage in the Wanderer where the speaker remarks that it is an 'indryhten Þeaw' to 'bind fast' one's 'ferðloca' and keep his thoughts to himself. Now, MF and I had a bit of a wrangle in class over indryhten Þeaw, which the Longman edition translates as 'courtly virtue'. Virtue, I'll grant, but I want to translate that as... 'with-lorded', I think. I see why the translation 'courtly' works, but still, it's so lexically anchored to the concept of having a dryhten. ANYWAY. One who is worthy to belong to a lord will exhibit the virtue of binding fast his soul-locker.

I never did care for the elegies much; I hadn't re-read them since literally undergrad (and I couldn't swear I'd actually read them all; certainly not translated them) before this. But even without that, I guess I'd picked up, partly from the ethos of OE prose and partly from secondary lit, how this works - that it's exposing and shameful to have to exteriorise your emotions. The elegies are a particular exception, in that while they have a LOT of emotion going on, they're specifically designed to lament - to give shape to the emotions otherwise bound in the soul-locker.

The end result was I had a WILDLY different experience of the two Apolloniuses to my students. I've taught these two together before, and I don't recall being so struck by this part. (A current student has really interesting ideas about a throughline between the Seafarer and Gower's Apollonius, which I would never have thought of!) And I just... really struggled, I think, to get across what I saw.

Something I thought of, in the shower later, was that the OE prose narratives, and to a certain extent the *narrative* poetry, reminds me of modern Japanese fiction, in the way it handles emotion. Hard to say, I've read a lot more of the former than the latter, and I haven't read the big names (Murakami, etc) that people will immediately think of. But in my mind are things like Banana Yoshimoto and Sayaka Murata, Takaishi Hiraide, and even this short story by Aoka Matsuda I read this week. Apparently I didn't comment on this when I finished Convenience Store Woman but I remember thinking about it at the time: how Japanese first person narratives manage to be immediate, close first person, but still give the speaking protagonist a sort of... emotional privacy. You can tell there are emotions there, but you don't get the up close nitty-gritty of it. I forget the words for the distinction between emotional-bubble and emotional out-bubble people, but I don't think it's that the audience are emotional out-bubble. It's that the audience are expected to do some WORK, as emotional-in-bubble, and not demand complete cathartic emotional immersion.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, I've become close with someone who's a native German speaker (although not Swiss), and discovered that my emotional expression arsenal is wildly ill-suited to people who are neither Australians/Kiwis nor Brits nor steeped in Old English lit. I LOVE understatement, you see. 'You're not so bad yourself', for instance, is a well known example, meaning 'I am quite fond of you' (insert US-UK problems for quite - Australians use both meanings, although mostly the UK, and usually intuit which). I use all those 'praising with faint praise' idioms and then have just... wildly overcommited to litotes as a rhetorical device. 'Not the worst thing that happened to me' is probably Pretty Damn Good. And I think it's, in my case, actually partly influenced by OE lit, where pronouncements like 'he was not unworthy to ...' are high praise. (Right after having a communication fail on this axis I opened something to find bedlamsbard describing a moderately useful work event as 'not unuseful'. It's the medievalism, I tell you. But I would use that phrase for either something moderately useful or something AMAZINGLY useful, and I'm not sure Bedlam would for the latter. I wouldn't for something *fairly* useful, though. LITOTES!)

There's a whole complex here where I'm BOTH someone who is emotionally transparent, and someone who has trouble emoting on *purpose* (let alone co-emoting. I don't like people seeing me to the airport, oh no). And where I'm someone who has, let us say, not the most stellar track record with social nuance, AND a huge love of figurative language, especially for emotion. I am enormously on team 'straight up explicit communication' and also intensely into oblique communication, especially as expression of care.

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Currently Reading: Much the same as last time, honestly. I... read stuff. Every second day at least? But I never finish anything.
Fiction for fun: 'Three Daughters of Eve' is coming along. It's not what I really want to be reading right now (I feel like brain candy, but very little of that is ON my tbr, since I took an indefinite break from indie romance, so here we are). I'm enjoying the retrospective timeline and finding the grown-adult one tedious, but I assume that's intentional. I can also tell, loud as a clanging bell, the retrospective is going to end with a student/teacher affair, which is... not what I signed up for, but I suppose it's a strength of Shafak's craft that I'm still on board even though that's obviously how it's going to pan out?
Poetry: Still enjoying The World's Wife. Still not sure that ANYTHING in here beats Mrs Icarus. I am making headway again with Paradise Lost courtesy Anthony Oliveira; just got to the critical splitting point in Book 9.
Lit Mag: Hey I read THREE whole things from the autumn Meanjin. Never mind that it's nearly time for the summer issue and I haven't read winter or spring.
Non-fiction for fun: All on hiatus.
For work: still puttering through Jost's collection on Chaucerian humour, which remains stuffy (but sometimes in useful ways). Almost finished Heng's The Invention of Race but got stalled halfway through the Mongol chapter, a bit... o_0 about the way she writes about them. Certainly she doesn't execute the same careful disambiguation between what her Latin SOURCES say about barely-human Mongols and her own narrator voice as she does with the Arabs. (Also... clashes wildly with Lomuto's take in 'The Mongol Princess of Tars'???)

Recently Finished: Two whole things!

Trelawny of the 'Wells': A Comedietta In Four Acts by Arthur Wing Pinero

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I made it to the last of wildeabandon's playreadings and I'm really glad I did. This was a whacky play, SIMULTANEOUSLY a 19th c melodrama and a late 19th c drawing room comedy, and if I was a 19th century-ist I would be putting it on undergrad syllabi at once. A++ work, Arthur Wing Pinero, whoever you were.

Would LOVE to be involved in a production, but as it would lose ALL its attractions if it had anything less than full 1860s dress, I doubt I ever will be.



View all my reviews

I also finished Miroirs arthuriens entre images et mirages, with... mixed feelings. Next week will be devoted to figuring out how to give a mixed review that showcases its best aspects (as I think a bilingual french/english collection that's mostly French in... approach? I guess? is an important thing to exist) without overselling it. I think my basic takeaway is: if your institution TEACHES both medieval French and Medieval English, order it. If not, perhaps not.

Online Fiction:

Aoko Matsuda, trans. Polly Barton, introduced Carmen Maria Machado (Electric Lit), Peony Lanterns. A ghost story. A story of an unemployed salaryman.

Eris Young (The Selkie), The Archivist. Dark; several kinds of violence. But oh. It's... a thing. Oh yes. I think it will appeal to people who liked My Love, Our Lady of Slaughter in particular, although in some ways it has more in common with A voyage to Queensthroat.

Up Next: So many things I feel dizzy. I really want to finish either Three Daughters or Meanjin so I can move on to something else for fun. For work and work-adjacent I just have an Endless Pile. I'm trying to install a half hour reading segment each day, with... less than total success.

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Links of Note:

Barbara Caine (History Workshop), Reading and writing friendship: Ruth Slate and Eva Slawson. This is the GOOD SHIT, yes.

Lorrie Moore (The New Yorker), Face Time. On COVID, care, and death.

Michael Blair Mount (Longreads), My year on a shrinking island. For some reason I missed the author's name and (inferred) gender and for 2/3 of this thought it was by a woman. It's interesting, though not surprising, how my response changed when I realised not. Oh, right, you're (read as) a MAN, that explains how you can up and move to Martha's Vineyard with no context. Oh, right the women you're going home with make you STRAIGHT, that's why there's no ~extra guff~ about partner choice. Right. Regardless, as an essay, it has the thing I most value: sense of place.

Therese Mailhot (Guernica), I used to give men mercy. This is... notable. I'll be adding her memoir to my (unfeasible) TBR.

Rachel Sugar (Vice), What was fun. This is both interesting and unsatisfying. I hope to come back to it and write a post on Fun.

Lidia Thorpe (Crikey, 2019), Djab Warrung people have been failed at every turn. If you've been keeping tabs on the destruction of the Djab Warruing trees, and like me were wondering what was up with the Vic govt claiming they had consulted traditional owners while many Djab Warrung claim they hadn't: here's an explanation.

Roland Betancourt (Time), The Hidden Queer History of Medieval Christianity. Some of this is same old, same old, but really !! is Betancourt's account of a document *condemning* the Byzantine adoption-of-brotherhood rite as inviting immorality. It goes a long way to confirming Boswell's reading of that rite, and, like... I was so suspicious. So were many other people. It was the LEAST supported part of Boswell's second book. Anyway. Will be reading Betancourt's book as soon as I beat down the TBR a bit.

Mary C. Flannery (TLS), Does that star-spangled banner yet wave?. There are, I suspect, things missing from this, but I know writing it meant a lot to MF and going by Twitter it has spoken deeply to other Americans (and not all of them white). I'm still a bit ??? at the idea of having feelings about one's anthem other than an impulse to satire that ends up more moving than the original, so I am ill equipped to comment.

Carmen Maria Machado (Guernica, 2017), The trash heap has spoken. On fat women taking up space.

Occasioned by sending my boss a copy of The Problem of Susan (which is cited in my PhD, don't even ask):

I was about fifteen when Dad borrowed ‘Smoke and Mirrors’ out of the library. He read ‘Chivalry’ and immediately thought ‘Amy must read this!’ but couldn’t bring himself to give me the book. He read Chivalry aloud to me (it’s brilliant read aloud) and then was like ‘but I can’t give you the rest of the book’.

Me: why?
Dad: it’s just. It’d make me uncomfortable.
Mum: R, what are you reading?
Dad: it’s not that bad! She’d probably like it! There’s this great Snow White retelling, but it’s. It’s got some things. I can’t just give it to my daughter.
Me: uhuh.

So I waited until Dad went away for work for a few weeks, and then got the local mobile library truck guy to order it in for me (at 15 I had free interlibrary loans). When he got back it was lying on the kitchen table.

Dad: you read Smoke and Mirrors?
Me: You said you couldn’t give it to me, you didn’t say I couldn’t read it.
Dad: True.
Me: It was a great Snow White story.
Dad: Yup.
Both of us: *look into each other’s eyes and know that means we both have also read the same sci-fi erotica*
Dad: SO ABOUT THAT BEOWULF ONE. WEIRD, HUH?

And I think that’s how I first found out about that Beowulf was a medieval poem I should care about: because I hadn’t understood Gaiman’s weird eighties-LA-beach-culture retelling, and wasn’t going to let that kind of thing slip past me again.