Fencing Bear at Prayer

If a beautiful woman walks into a room, she has a reasonable expectation that a majority of the men who are there will find her attractive and want to talk with her.  Some of them may even be attracted enough to ask her out on a date or, instantly smitten by her beauty, beg her to marry them (or whatever).  Her life (as portrayed in the movies, at least) is one long series of people wanting her attention.  She is always surrounded by admirers and lovers, and she simply expects people to smile at her because they always do. Women like me have a rather different experience in life.  Sometimes, unexpectedly, men randomly smile at us in that way, but for the most part, we are simply ignored unless we are the only one in the room.  Then we might get someone coming up to us and wanting to talk, but rarely is anyone smitten simply by being in our presence.  We learn other ways of holding their attention, but we are always on guard against expecting a favorable ...

My Latin, apparently, sucks.*  I used "the" too much rather than "a."  I can't tell the difference between the future and the subjunctive (even though, in form, they are exactly the same).  But even worse, I failed John .  And the Virgin.  They are, I am told, " too narrow " to appeal to a wider audience.  Even among medievalists. I think I need to cry now. *That is, my ability to translate incredibly technical and abstruse thirteenth-century school Latin sucks.  Like translating Ulysses .  You know.

"If all the world were Christian, it might not matter if all the world were uneducated.  But, as it is, a cultural life will not exist outside the Church whether it exists inside or not.  To be ignorant and simple now --not to be able to meet the enemies on their own ground-- would be to throw down our weapons, and then betray our uneducated brethren who have, under God, no defense but us against the intellectual attacks of the heathen.   Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered.  The cool intellect must work not only against cool intellect on the other side, but against the muddy heathen mysticisms which deny intellect altogether. " Most of all, perhaps, we need intimate knowledge of the past .  Not that the past has any magic about it, but because we cannot study the future, and yet need something to set against the present, to remind us that periods and that much which seems certain to the uneducated is...

I think that I am going to have to slit my wrists.  Or stick my head over the side of the trench so that the enemy can shoot it off.  Or maybe just lie down and die of starvation. Nobody applying to our graduate program has read my work.  Nobody who says that he or she wants to work with me seems to know anything about my research.  Nobody seems to care about anything that I have spent years thinking or writing about.  I don't see why I bother even trying to have a voice.  Unless I am writing about gender (which I don't), I might as well throw in the towel and quit.  Because gender is the only thing that anybody who even thinks about the Virgin (not that anybody in our applicant pool has) wants to think about.  Not devotion.  Not worship.  Not theology.  Just gender. And most of them don't even want to think about that.

AHA Session 267 Sunday, January 6, 2013, 11:00AM-1:00PM Roosevelt Ballroom II (Roosevelt New Orleans) Today is the feast of the Epiphany, the manifestation or appearance of God.  Today Christians celebrate the revelation of the Son of the Most High in the person of Jesus Christ.  Traditionally, in the West, the day was marked by the story of the visit of the Magi; in the East, it is marked as the day on which Jesus was baptized in the Jordan by his cousin John.  Both were instances of revelation, of God's becoming present to the world, not mystically or spiritually, but actually, in the body of a baby born of a woman, in the body of a man anointed by the Holy Spirit and acknowledged by a voice from heaven as God's Son. So what?  What does this feast have to do with us, sitting here in this hotel conference room rather than in the pews of a church?  Is it appropriate to call our attention to the fact that in the Christian calendar, today is one of the holie...

I was having a pretty good day today.  My writing is coming along better than I ever dreamed it could (see "Brief Regular Sessions").  My son got his autumn grades today and is doing brilliantly, even in History (not his favorite subject, I am sorry to say; that would be Math).  We got our new internet service installed today, so we have WiFi again.  And I might even make it to practice tonight for the first time in over two weeks. And then I read another set of applications to our graduate program.  Let me tell you, any of you who are thinking about a career in academia, don't.  'Cause you know what?  You will spend eight years (on average) in graduate school, another six or seven proving yourself in order to get tenure (if, that is, you are lucky enough to get a tenure track job, hardly a guarantee), another ten or twelve developing your next major research project (again, if you are lucky enough to get time off from your campus responsibilities, a...

"The ignorance, prejudices, and groupthink of an educated elite are still ignorance, prejudice, and groupthink--and for those with one percent of knowledge in a society to be guiding or controlling those with the other 99 percent is as perilous as it is absurd.  The difference between special knowledge and mundane knowledge is not simply incidental or semantic.  Its social implications are very consequential.  For example, it is far easier to concentrate power than to concentrate knowledge.  That is why so much social engineering backfires and why so many despots have led their countries into disasters. "Where knowledge is conceived of as Hayek conceived of it, to include knowledge unarticulated even to ourselves, but expressed in our individual habits and social customs, then the transmission of such knowledge from millions of people to be concentrated in surrogate decision-makers becomes very problematic, if not impossible, since many of those operating with such...

"The envious want to be superior, for their self-esteem depends on outranking others in the relevant field of comparison.  Their own identity hangs on excelling others, but only those others who threaten that identity, that is, those close enough to be compared as rivals.  If we reflect on whom we envy, we are likely to discover how we define our identity and where we see that identity as most vulnerable.  Envy generally strikes in areas where another's superiority seems to threaten or lessen our own excellence and where that comparison leaves us feeling inferior in a way close to our identity." --Rebecca Konynyk DeYoung, Glittering Vices: A New Look at the Seven Deadly Sins and Their Remedies (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2009), p. 49. So, okay, I made a list: " Whom do I envy?  That is, whom do I most want to see destroyed, like Salieri wanted Mozart destroyed? "  I won't share that list with you (no, no, no, no, no, no, no).  (It had ten names on it...

In case you were wondering why it is so hard to have an encouraging conversation on campus: "My own candidate for a large group existing in a state of ressentiment [a persisting state of grudgingness against one's circumstances of life, particularly in comparison with others--FB] would be American academics, especially those in the humanities.  They feel themselves, simultaneously, greatly superior and vastly undervalued, above their countrymen yet isolated from them and insufficiently rewarded and revered by them.  They have about them a perpetually disappointed air: one senses they feel that the world has, somehow, let them down.  Sometimes this will reveal itself in a general sourness; sometimes it takes the form of hopelessly radical political views.  These political views, it does not take long to recognize, usually feature a complex shifting and reorientation of society so that people like themselves will be allowed a justly deserved role of power. "The ...

According to R.T. Kendall, Jealousy: The Sin No One Talks About (Lake Mary, FL: Charisma House, 2010), in thirteen steps. Step One: Admit it to yourself . This is easy.  I know that I'm envious, jealous even.  It more or less defines my relationship with my siblings, and I have struggled for years with feeling envious of my colleagues and fellow fencers.  I am envious of my sister for being so beautiful , of my brother for his travels and his training in so many languages .  I am envious of my colleagues for the books that they have published and for their promotions to full professor, particularly those who have been promoted (unlike me) before publishing their second book .  You know, if you have been following me all these years on the blog, that I am envious of my fellow fencers , particularly those who have placed higher in tournaments than I have with fewer years of experience on the strip.   So, we're done with this step, right?  Wrong....

Prof. Delbanco is describing the role of grace in the process of education as it was understood by the Puritan founders of our collegiate tradition, particularly as it is (or should be) dedicated to the psychological and ethical growth of students: "More than achieving the competence to solve problems and perform complex tasks, education means attaining and sustaining curiosity and humility.  It means growing out of an embattled sense of self into a more generous view of life as continuous self-reflection in light of new experience, including the witnessed experience of others. "With these ends in view, Puritans spoke almost indistinguishably about teaching and preaching .  Consider John Cotton, arguably the leading minister of New England's first generation...  By his voice and arguments, but most of all by his manifest commitment to the impossible yet imperative task of aligning his own life with models of virtue that he found (mainly) in scripture, he was mentor to...

"The early American college required its students to study not only scriptural texts and commentaries, but also history and natural philosophy--a tripartite division of knowledge corresponding roughly to today's triumvirate of humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences.  A college aspired to be a place (in [John Henry] Newman's later formulation) where 'all branches of knowledge' are 'connected together, because the subject-matter of knowledge is intimately united in itself, as being the acts and the work of the Creator.'  Its subject was nothing less, in [Jonathan] Edwards's words [Yale, class of 1720], than 'the university of things,' a phrase that preserves the root meaning of the word 'university': the gathering of all knowledge into a unified whole.†  Until the last third of the nineteenth century, this effort to grasp to grasp what Frederick Barnard (the man for whom the women's college at my [Columbia] university was na...

"An overarching conception of medieval culture has fallen into place since the late nineteenth century, which I will call the diminutive Middle Ages (DMA).  DMA is the internalized and sublimated scholarly consensus of a generation of titanic post-romantic and anti-romantic medievalist scholars, a model that has seeped into and saturated current thinking about the Middle Ages, not only in specialized scholarship.  Like embedded levels of software programs, this model sets and limits what can be thought and claimed about medieval culture, and occasionally overrides empirical observation... "Viewed through the lens of DMA, the Middle Ages is a period of small, quaint things and people, of miniatures, humble, little, overshadowed by its big neighbors--antiquity in its past and the Renaissance in its future--a conduit between the two; full of ingenious people and little intricate objects; a curiosity cabinet full to overflowing; a treasure trove of folklore, superstition, and w...

I have too many thoughts in my head, some of them need to come out. In the last several days, I have heard papers on magnificence and monsters, statues and stuff, teaching and the trivium, and then some, all of them now swirling around in my head in a great maelstrom of equal parts inspiration, impatience, and fury, while I wonder how on earth I will ever have time to write even a fraction of the things that I can imagine myself wanting to write, never mind say. My voice is so tired after all of the conversations that I have had when not listening to talks, I know that I have been pushing it too hard. Pushing and pushing and pushing, wanting to shout so many things that I want people to hear and having no way to magnify my voice enough to drown out the nonsense that I hear other people saying. I don’t know which annoys me more. All the limp and ultimately self-destructive arguments about why we should teach the humanities (as if teaching the arts of expression and thought should n...

Okay, right now I am feeling really ticked off at BlogPress. It keeps dropping my posts into the ether. It is a terrible app, don't buy it. It dropped the last post which I tried to upload because it interrupted the upload to ask for a customer rating. Well, BlogPress, you suck. Except I am still using you right now because trying to write directly into Blogger on my iPad is even harder. I suppose if you want (and, as a crappy, hyper-finicky app, can tell when people are complaining about you), you can just make this post vanish rather than posting. But I hope that you don't. I hope that you let me share my thoughts about what it is like trying to pitch your work to editors and how scary that is. How fake it feels to be talking about books that you have thought about writing, when you know very well that ideas are a dime a dozen and why should any editor believe that what you are describing has any hope in heaven or hell of seeing the light of day as an actual manusc...

And I was worried that no one would be able to buy my book at the conference. - Posted using BlogPress from my iPad Location: Timber Ridge Dr,Kalamazoo Township,

So here I am for the first time in I can't remember how many years. I think five, but it could be six. Certainly, I haven't been here since I started blogging, so at least four. It makes me feel not old exactly, but wistful. Wistful for all the times that I came here when I was a graduate student. Wistful for the excitement that I used to feel at the thought of seeing so many colleagues and friends. Of hanging out with my tribe. Of belonging. Which, ironically, I actually do (belong, that is) in a way that I could only dream about when I was a graduate. So why do I feel so disconnected? Partly, I know, precisely because I haven't been here in so long. But I have seen many of the people here in other contexts, so it isn't as if I have been completely out of touch. Quite the reverse, in fact. And yet. There is something missing now that I had (or seemed to have) back in the day, back when the only dream I had was to become one of the professors whom I use...

I think that I understand better now the anxiety that I woke up with the other day , about wishing that I were able to write about something other than what I have read in books.  It's not just my perfectionism.  It is also my habit of noticing. I spend most of my waking life reading in one way or another.  Reading books and articles in my field, preparing for class, grading papers, reading applications for admissions or faculty hires.  Almost everything I do involves the written word. And I'm good at it.  In fact, I think that I am very, very good at it.  It is one of my principal skills: exegesis, reading a text for what it actually says, not for what I want it to say.  To my mind, it's what makes what I write as an academic distinctive: I actually read the texts. And not just read them in order to pluck out whatever bits of information (examples, ideas, arguments) I want to use in order to make some point or other that I have gleaned from read...

I wonder what it would be like to trust my experience as a source of knowledge.  To know something other than what I read in books.  Because then I would have something to write about other than other people's ideas.  Something that I created.  Something that I understood. Why this anxiety?  Because everything I think to write about feels so forced.  Okay, so I'm trying to force this exercise, maybe it's just a part of the process of learning to write in brief, daily sessions.  Step one: start keeping a file of things that I observe that might turn into topics to write about.  What Prof. Boice calls "prewriting": reading, noticing, collecting, taking notes, organizing, filing, outlining. But for blog posts?  I've never needed any of that stuff before, I always just sat down to write when an idea (usually in the form of a title) crystallized and I knew what the gist of the argument was going to be.  And the few occasions when I have...

Are you as disturbed as I am by what I realized at the end of my last post ?  You should be, especially if you are one of my students.  Because if my (or anybody's) ability to write depends on being able to do something that, by definition, only the brilliant and/or hard-working can do, then what hope do you have that I am ever going to be able (not to mention, willing) to teach you how to do it yourself?  Answer: none . Which is yet another of Prof. Boice's destabilizing insights (or, rather, carefully tested hypotheses†) about why academics don't write, having to do with their operating assumptions about what it means to be able to write.   In short: they have themselves never been taught how to write; they have only ever been rewarded for demonstrating their ability to do so.  In consequence, they consider writing not only as something unteachable as such, but also something that to teach would diminish their capacity to recognize brilliance in their own st...