Strong Verbs Are Just Better

1. No Reading Wednesday post yesterday because a) travel and b) haven't finished reading anything and only started one thing.

2. I have now handed the final hard copies of my PhD in. Thus the travelling: Sun-Wednesday to and from Geneva. Saw friends, had many many weird feelings (mostly... angry? I was ANGRY at my PhD, i don't even know), got some stuff out of storage, including my German and Latin grammar drilling books.

3. Other travelling: St Andrews last weekend, Oxford coming up the weekend before Christmas. St A was beautiful, A+ I intend to go back.

Also, as noted in my flocked post, there's a Tumblr Implosion going on. Not to mention the insidious facebook policy change. The internet is, as someone aptly noted, not going tits up but rather tits-away. I have a lot of opinions but most of them are a. unsurprising and b. not particularly eloquent compared to many. conuly had a good set of round-up links if that's of interest to you.

Please enjoy this photo of a Musk Lorikeet which I took at home in August. I'd never seen them before, but they were chilling in the backyard, down by the water:

Tonight I made aloo gobi, and combined it with packet palak paneer (I draw the line at making my own palak paneer. I don't know where to get paneer, for a start), and lo, it was tasty. And it hasn't made me any more nauseous than I was before.

The figure skating Euros are this week and I am very looking forward to having something to fixate on that's not work.

I have had this icon since 2008. Ten years of my goddamn life, guys.

What Are You Reading (Actually On A!) Wednesday:

• What are you currently reading?
• What did you recently finish reading?
• What do you think you’ll read next?

What are you currently reading? Some changes this week!

Poetry: still working through the same two anthologies, but have finished the poetry course reader.

Ulysses: I'm running two chapters behind at the end of term. Oops!

Primary Sources: Still on the Romaunt of the Rose, ugh. I've decided to shelve the Anglo-Norman Horn for a while and proceed swiftly through the translation in The Birth of Romance in England instead, to see if there's anything actually useful in it. Of Arthour and of Merline is turning up an Evidence for me. Whoo. Evidence.

Secondary Sources: Jaeger's Ennobing Love is fascinating and has such lovely prose! I'm not sure why I've never read it before... Foolish me.

No fiction for fun atm, because I'm between books.

What did you recently finish reading

Poetry: Well, the first-year course I'm teaching finished, so I've finished with Prof Early Modern's poetry selection. Apparently this year he provided the ultimate unobjectionable poetry combination - the most disliked was Owen's 'Strange Meeting', which he won't take off the course because it's such a good example of half-rhyme used systematically. Apparently in previous years, though, students have vehmently objected to one or more poems by a much greater margin than they did this year.

Fiction:
Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall: oh wow, was that a ride! I'll review in full later, but wow. I was carrying it everywhere with me, toward the end.
Brad Boney (yes really), The Nothingness of Ben: I tagged this on goodreads on the recommendation of someone's What Are You Reading reports - I can't now recall who. It's an ebook from Dreamspinner Press, featuring Ben, a hotshot lawyer whose parents die unexpectedly, leaving him with custody of three brothers in Austin, Texas. Enter Travis, flopsy-haired good-hearted mechanic. There follows a surprisingly well-rounded plot, in which Ben and Travis both get a grip on their lives, and Ben handles realistic parenting challenges. I tagged this ages ago when I had a burning desire for fiction which demanded little of me and pressed emotional buttons - but I couldn't justify buying it or any of the seven other M/M romance novels I shelved. Recently that state of readerly need recurred, an I could spare the cash. WHEE.

What will you read next:

My winter reading list is long. I'll be leaving Chaucer behind while I travel (too heavy) and ploughing through the National Library of Scotland's transcription of the Auchinlek MS instead - assuming it doesn't persist in crashing my browsers.

In addition to Ennobling Love I'm looking forward to The Arthurian Way of Death and McKeon's The Origins of the English Novel.

For fun purposes, a slight step up from The Nothingness of Ben, I've bought and stashed on my Kobo Joanne Horniman's About a Girl. It'll probably give me expat angst as well as lesbian YA feels.

While at Jon's place I might make him happy and read Cold Comfort Farm.

Heyhey - I went AWOL last week, due to a combination of things involving transportation confusions, time zones, and a bushfire. I tried to drop a note on Notorius' post, but it got lost since I used openID which goes under my blog title (nakedphilologist). Anyway - I ought to have been able to check in just before things closed (our Monday is your Sunday), but assorted fails got in the way.

I did do up goals for the week, though.

First thing is, as of last week, I need to downgrade my project to one chapter only; I didn't meet my first week's goals *except* for the one which said 'talk to my supervisor about deadlines', but since I did manage that, I've got extension paperwork in progress.

This week I sketched out an outline of both the thesis and the chapter, and tidied up some more notetaking.

The coming week is a non-teaching week, so I'll have two sorts of goals.

Taking a leaf out of Saltimata's book, a process goal - do some thesis work and some marking each day. I tend to zone in on one or the other, to the detriment of both. That affects my pacing, not only because the middle of the week becomes a blur of teaching, but because when health problems come up (which they do, remarkably often for me at the moment) it seems to be my own work that suffers. So I need to work on mixing the two sets of work, and pacing them both better.

Writing-wise, I will:
- mark up this one book I just realised I hadn't read and need to
- grab the 2000 words discarded from the last chapter and shape them up into the first part of the new one
- write a (probably to be deleted) introduction-to-the-new-chapter to go with them

I would like to do more than that, but, well, we'll see how we go.

Things what I have to do next week:

- skeleton/plan the next chapter
- re-do some kind of overeview of the entire thesis (also, talk to supervisor about timeline; possibly have to seek extensions)
- shake up the words I already have, the ones concerning homosexual subtext or lackthereof, into something resembling an argument (should be first 1/4 of a chapter)

-----------------

Nooo, who, me, still going on the _previous_ chapter? Never.

...

how did I end up talking about the politics of gift-giving? There's another thing I thought I'd left behind when I wandered away from Anglo-Saxon studies.

Also, I am writing about clothes. At great length. Wtf, self? How did I go from rape to clothes in the space of five hundred words?

Things which are weird: taking notes in English from an article in french
Things which are ugly: direct translations from french rendered in English while taking said notes. Observe: "allegorie is a general category in which are arranged diverse more specific classical tropes" And, hah, I've spelt allegory wrong, and although I've fixed it here, I keep putting the adjectives in the wrong order, and it's generally hideous.
Things which are surprising: how much french I apparently understand! The fact that I can knock out acceptable direct translations at all (have never tried translating before - french classes were all composition and/or reading comprehension, not translation).

Die in a fire.

Nolove,

me

Either Rosemary Huisman's article on narrative sociotemporality in Beowulf is one of the most earth-shattering things I've ever read, or I REALLY NEED TO GET A NEW IDEA.

I just tried to explain women's role as weavers of social harmony in Anglo-Saxon language/literature/Rosemary's head in my OLD FRENCH THESIS PROPOSAL. This is relevant. I swear.

Welcome to 2008, the Year of the Thesis. You, O blog, will be sharing me this year with the Archbishop Wulfstan of York. What better way to introduce you to his magnificence than with a mutated medievalist meme?

The Rules, as handed down to me by JLJ:

1) Link to the person who tagged you.
2) List 7 random/weird things about your favorite historical figure.
3) Tag seven more people at the end of your blog and link to theirs.
4) Let the person know they have been tagged by leaving a note on their blog.

The tag tree above me:
I was tagged by Jennifer Lynn Jordan who told us about Prester John
She was tagged by Michelle of Heavenfield who told us about St Oswald of Northumbria and who also has a breakdown of her side of the tree here.
She was tagged by Jonathan Jarrett (look, i spelt it right!), who waxed fannish about Count Borrell II of Barcelona.
He was tagged by Magistra et Mater, who first mutated the meme, and who wrote about Charlemagne.

Well, unless you're an Anglo-Saxonist, *any* information about the Archbishop Wulfstan is both weird and random, so let us start at the begining:

1. Wulfstan is best known as Archbishop of York, 1002-1023. *HOWEVER* he was also Bishop of London from 996 to 1002, and of Worcester from 1002 to 1016. There's this funny thing about Worcester and York- they tended to be held together, despite the fact that one was right up in the north and the other in the central-southern regions of Britain. Wulfstan himself inherited both from his predecessor, Ealdulf. According to Bethurum, Worcester was the wealthier and more important of the two, and probably supported York to some degree. Yet York was the Archbishopric, and it is as Archbishop of York that he is remembered.

2. Mind you, that *my* Wulfstan is remembered as York probably has something to do with the fact that Worcester has its own Wulfstan, St Wulfstan (II) of Worcester. A very boring man, I'm sure. To make things more confusing, *my* Wulfstan is Wulfstan I of Worcester but Wulfstan II of York. Wulfstan I of York seems to have been a bit of a dodgy character, but I don't really know much about him.

3. Wulfstan was a bloody impressive preacher with a superb command of the English language. He was noted for his translatory skill in English even during his time in London- we have a surviving letter in which the writer skives off translating stuff for Wulfstan (either into or out of English, hard to tell) on the grounds that Wulstan was much better at it. To add to that, some of his most thunderously eloquent eschatalogical homilies seem to have been written during this early period.
The whole attraction of Wulfstan, as far as I'm concerned, is his writing. I've only translated fragments here and there... But check out his famous Sermo Lupi, in anglo-saxon or in translation, here. Seriously, Hillsong would kill to have this bloke on staff:
EVERYTHING IS GOING TO HELL IN A HANDBASKET. The world is ending. The AntiChrist is coming. Everything is going to hell in a handbasket... and YOU ARE NOT GIVING ENOUGH MONEY TO THE CHURCH. Even the *PAGANS* give more money to their false gods than YOU give to ME... (Very loose paraphrase by me)

4. However, it seems that, unlike Hillsong, Wulfstan was *not* all about the cash takings at the end of the day. Jonathan Wilcox has a very interesting article in Townend (ed), Wulfstan, Archbishop of York, entitled 'Wulfstan's Sermo Lupi ad Anglos as Political Performance: 16 Febuary 1014 and Beyond'. As it happens, Wulfstan was up to his neck in politics and intruige. The Wilcox article constructs a fantastic narrative, which I think I shall tell at some other time. There are battles and parliaments and schemes and betrayals and matrydoms and accidental deaths. For now, let it be said here that apparently said sermon is all about loyalty and betrayal and the decision to call back the exiled king AEthelred from Normandy. Wulfstan was then instrumental in drawing up the law code VIII AEthelred, as part of the restoration process.

5. Also, at the time he gave the Sermo Lupi, Wulfstan was the leading churchman in England, because the Archbishop of Canterbury had been kidnapped by Danes and pelted to death with axe handles and ox heads. How cool is that?

6. We have Wulfstan's own handwriting surviving. This is VERY VERY COOL, people. One day, I will get to touch the pages his hand touched... be still, my beating heart! It's also *useful*, because it's a clear sign of the authenticty of the document, and, if the notes are corrections to his own writings, gives us a fascinating window into the development of his thought.

7. According to Thomas N. Hall ('Wulfstan's Latin Sermons, in Townend (ed)), Wulfstan wrote drafts of his English sermons in Latin. This is curious. I wonder why a native english speaker would take sermon notes in Latin? Some of his sermons exist in both English and Latin, obviously for two different audiences.

~

ok, that was pretty incoherent... coming next time I do some actual work (as a reward): the exciting tale of the Witan of 1014!

Tagging!

I'd like to hear from:
Jeff Sypeck- who, if he's going to talk about Charlemagne, must find seven different odd things to those on Magistra's list.
Brandon Hawk
Dame Eleanor Hull
ajodasso, who has many dead-writer boyfriends she should DEFINITELY tell us about.
and also
Melanie Duckworth,
daiskmeliadorn
and niamh_sage,
the latter three of whom are respectfully requested to broaden the meme's scope as necessary and chose a medievalist-poet, religiously minded woman, and fairy or fairy-ologist, respectively. Or you could do something entirely different, whatever floats your boat.