Fencing Bear at Prayer

It has been quite the summer . First I learned how to search Twitter and discovered what my academic colleagues have really been saying about Milo and me for the past several years . Then there was the takeover of the Kalamazoo Medieval Congress Facebook group by the SJWs . Then there was Milo’s magnum opus  about the controversy in my field . Then there was getting to see Milo and my friends from Three Kraters in person . There there were the invitations to appear on YouTube videos and podcasts . Then there was the Open Letter that the National Association of Scholars wrote in my support —not to mention the thousand-plus signatures it has received . Then there was the continuing pressure on the part of my academic colleagues for me to stay quiet . Then there are all the arguments still to be made on the culture front . A girl might be forgiven for finding it hard to settle down and—as Milo keeps telling me I should — get   back to work! Did I tell...

“to say nothing of all the stuff I do behind the scenes I can never tell you about.”  Not sure why you're defending the indefensible.  —JustJinxed, commenting on Three Kraters Symposium, Episode 58: Politicon Caves to Twitter Outrage and Pulls Milo from Lineup  I get this kind of comment a lot from my academic colleagues, even those who are otherwise sympathetic to me. They don’t know how much I am in contact with Milo or the kinds of things he and I have been talking about , and they tend to assume that Milo is as he has been portrayed in the mainstream media or by Buzzfeed : an agent provocateur, someone who is outrageous purely for material gain, a grifter, not a serious interlocutor, doing what he does for the sake of publicity and nothing else. How is it possible for me to defend such a person? Surely doing so, as one friend recently put it, is at odds with everything I am as an intellectual. Well. My first response must be of course, “Have...

I wrote earlier this week about how senior colleagues keep urging me to get back to my proper work, the scholarship for which I have been trained and on the basis of which I hold the professional position which I do , the implication being that I should not be allowing myself to be distracted with ephemera like, I don’t know, being slandered by colleagues in my field , but rather that I should be concentrating on the work that will last for eternity, or at the very least beyond my own lifetime. I can hear Hamlet now: “Get thee to a library, why wouldst thou be a feeder of liars?” But that, of course, is exactly what I did thirty years ago at the beginning of my training as a scholar—get to a library. That is where I found all the lies! Lies like this one: In the charming story of “the Annunciation” the angel Gabriel appears to the terrified young girl, announcing that she has been chosen to become the mother of god. Her response to this sudden proposal from the godfa...

Senior colleagues in my field are worried about me, that I have been spending too much of my time on the front lines of the culture wars and not enough on my scholarship. This is a bit disingenuous on their part, considering I just published my second major monograph this past year, but they are worried about me and want me to get to work on my third . “Spend your time on your scholarship. That is what lasts,” one of my former teachers tells me. “I do hope that you can get all this behind you and get on with your life. It is all a distraction and a burden that no one should have to bear,” one of my long-time supporters urges me. What should a happy warrior say?  Part of the problem, if there is one, is that I am having too much fun. How could I possibly go back to my old life, having tasted the pleasures of battle? Does Wonder Woman hang up her Lasso of Truth and go home? I don’t think so! After all, what could be more invigorating for an intellectual than a l...