"St. Erkenwald is so hot right now": A SEMA Report

Well, I'm back from SEMA, and I had a pretty good time. There was a little mix-up about registration, which turned out to have been on the University end and not the conference end, and as a result, CEH and I get to have a nice chat with C-- A-- tomorrow or Tuesday about accounting for my presence at the conference. My paper went well, I think, although there was a bit of a debate with sharp-minded older gentleman who caught me out (rightly) in a bit of bad logic, which will be fixed in later versions of the paper; he also suggested another "economic debate" poem, which I'm hoping will turn out to be something really worth contrasting with W&W—i.e. it's too French, too late, too socioeconormative (who says late poststructuralist neologisms are dead?), etc.

Jeffrey's plenary was interesting, though I'll admit I didn't take that many notes; it was mostly cool just to see and hear him speak. He didn't sound quite like I'd imagined him when reading his work, but his voice does fit now: steady and quiet, yet persistent, and delighting in the wonder of discovering with you the awesomeness of the past.

Steven Kruger's plenary was more directly useful to me, though, because he talked about St. Erkenwald, a poem I'd been meditating on since I'd heard an interesting paper investigating its concerns with fame (and House of Fame) the day before. Steven also discussed different forms of conversion, and ways of reading "majoritarian" conversion (i.e. moving from a more secular to a more religious life within one's own faith community) as both like and unlike "minoritarian" conversion (e.g. of the Jews/Muslims/Mongols/Pagans/Heretics).

One curious thread uniting both these plenaries came not from their content but from Eileen's introduction of them. She described the work (and by implication, the lives) of both men as being "obsessed" with things: bodies (Jeffrey), queerness (Steven), time (both). Her use of "obsess," though, worries me, in part because obsession recalls to me compulsion as well, and with it the figure of not only, say, an Amadeus, but also a crazed, hoarding, untrustworthy person. Are we academics so far gone into our specialist cubbyholes that we can unselfconscioiusly refer to the work that we do as obsessing us, possessing us, causing us to give up our reason? I wholly doubt Eileen meant this, implying rather that both men find their own "red threads" that are persistent and fulfilling to discover, and perhaps, ironically, I have myself obsessed about obsession. Even so, it seemed slightly unheimlich at the time.

Other sessions were equally good: the session on Multimodal Teaching; the session in which CEH showed herself once more to be a fine scholar, and in which Lorraine Stock gave a cool paper on the afterlife of Geoffrey's Gomagog; the Chaucer panel in which I was forced to reconsider aesthetics, Sir Thopas, the role of Petrus Alfonsi in Chaucer, and my previous estimation of Carl Franks' work with Thomas Aquinas. Although I didn't get to hang out as much as I would have liked, it was nice to see people again, and to finally meet not only Steven Kruger and Jeffrey Cohen, but fellow blogger Karma, who actually made my afternoon by introducing herself to me.

I also got a mini walking tour of the surrounding area from St. Louis local and fellow SEMA-ite Lloyd (whose last name escapes me). I took lots of architecture pictures, many of which came out well and will soon be in their own album on my Facebook account.

For now, I'm tired, I have groceries to buy, books to read, papers to grade, and television to watch, probably in that order though no guarantees are made. For added fun, I'm coordinating the scoring of the Advanced Comp Exemption Exam this week, which means picking up the 400+ exams from the other end of campus, as well as spending three nights at campus until eight.

Checking In

So, I have a dissertation reading list now, and it's ginormous. I've got some Old English stuff, some Middle English stuff, and some critical stuff, and no, you can't see the list, because . . . well, see previous.

I have, however, finished the Old English stuff, with the exception of the Nowell Codex, which I have a) agreed to read all of, and b) won't read until I can read all of it, which is to say, until I have a copy of Andy Orchard's Pride and Prodigies. I've been keeping a Wiki of my notes (via the increasingly awesome and life-giving TiddlyWiki) on the theory that having organized notes will make the written comps a whole lot nicer.

So yeah, finished the OE stuff, and in addition to seeing exactly what Jeffrey Cohen found so cool about Guthlac, I've been fascinated by the chronological order that the Phoenix seems to keep. Seriously--what kind of bird keeps time? I was also curious about the way that Deor seems to configure himself not as a person but as a series of lived memories: when saying "þas oferrode, þisses swa mæg," he not only takes refuge in the suffering of others, he makes his (comparatively minor) suffering the equal of theirs, while at the same time putting himself on the level of his mythological and social ancestors.

Also, I got an abstract off to SEMA in time for them to extend the deadline—but hell, it's off now, so cool. As far as Kazoo is concerned, I am under the impression that next year's conference program will come out soon, and that I will apply directly to the panel that I think might take me. Then, in what seems to be conference tradition, I will wait until the plane ride up to actually write the inevitably postmodern, buzzword-filled paper, because apparently Kazoo is about the drinking and dancing.

(That was a joke, folks—but I have been keeping up with the Charlotte Allen issue.)

Meanwhile, I keep forgetting this, but I do live and work in a town that is annually invaded by Wal*Mart shareholders, who today seem to have decided to hold their little Nuremburg rallies outside my office. This is why God (or a reasonable facsimile) made mp3 players.

Little Things

I finished a draft of my Medievalism/Nostalgia/The Supernatural/Green Arrow paper on Wednesday, and it's sat on my desk since. Today, I re-read it, and while it's still rough, it's not as bad as I thought it would be or as those solidii would indicate. Now, of course, it's time to print it off, let it sit on my desk until next Wednesday, and see if it's improved any.

Meanwhile, one of my students, in the course of being counseled on her (lack of having a) paper topic, let slip that apparently several of my students find me intimidating. Now, I'm no small guy (I'm not a man-mountain, either, but I digress), and I have a beard and a brain (a bearded brain? . . . see how my mind works? If I weren't a medievalist I'd have been a Gothicist). Still, intimidating? Sheesh.

Anyway, WAQ returned my conference draft with comments, and suggested (and this is a direct quotatation) that I "put more bodies in" so it would jive with SEMA this year. So I will, though I don't see where I'm going to get them—perhaps the barber's?