Muse of Muse

Yes, the muse has to have her own muse. Er, mews. A regular florilegium is Saffron: She never fails to fully digest the flowers I bring home. Currently she has one cabriole paw curled over the top of the laptop screen and is winking down at me as I type.

PLD

Today I have PLD (Post London Depression). I don't know if it is brought on by the jet lag, or by the stifling heat of the Southern summer, or perhaps by the sheer emptiness of this place this time of year but it feels dead dead DEAD everywhere and I want to go back.

Thankfully I ought to have my hands full with packing and schlepping and moving. And writing. But for some reason I haven't schlepped or packed a single thing, and I've only written a few hundred words.

Maybe I'm experiencing urban withdrawal and need another week to adjust. Maybe I just miss my friends and don't know when I'll see them again. In any case, I'm sad and lonely and bored here, and I'm not due for another visit to Montreal until August.

Time to write the book. Because there's really nothing else to do.

Anglophilia

I've been in the UK for over a week now and have gotten completely assimilated. Life here would be lovely, temperate and blissful- If I only had twice as much money, or more. And didn't have to work. I'm currently in Oxford with my friends Dearest B and the evil twin, enjoying a much needed visit to planet academia with people I haven't seen in a year and a half. Soon I'll have tea and catch up with faustus. Apparently everyone is on facebook but me, where they throw sheep and soup at one another contentedly.

In London I've seen two Mozart operas, two shakespeare plays, and two early modern manuscripts at the British Library. I've also eaten the best curry in my life and some very good Turkish food, and encountered people who have actually heard of the university where I teach, which, in London and Oxford is a miracle in and of itself.

More proper blogging later, I just wanted to post a quick update and let everyone know all was well. Please send money.

London-Bound

I leave for London the day after tomorrow. At the moment I'm drawing up a research and writing plan: I need to figure out what to do with my first chapter, whether I want to toss it and rewrite it entirely with a new argument about the same old text, or whether there are salvageable bits; I need to finish researching and writing my final chapter.

But the reading rooms of the British library aren't open all night long and they're closed on Sundays. Plus it can take up to half a day to get the books I need and I can only look at manuscripts until 5pm.

So I'll have some time to do a little exploring. I've spent lots of time in London, but I always stayed out of the way in Crouch End with my family friends. This time I'll be in Bloomsbury. I don't feel as if I know London particularly well. It's so big. The only place in the UK I know really well is Oxford, and that's because I lived there for a year and then dated someone there for almost two years. But back to London: I'm planning on doing some London walks, and already have plans to see an Opera with my mom's best friend, visit family friends, catch up with Oxonians and catch Othello at the Globe. And a pilgrimage to Ormonde Jayne, my favorite perfumer, which has a tiny shop in the Royal Arcade between Albemarle and Old Bond street and makes otherwordly scents out of black hemlock and violet and coriander, and of course I'll hang out in Islington and the East End. But I was wondering if any of my loyal readers (do you still exist?) who have much more London knowledge than I do, might want to make some suggestions of places off the beaten path for me to explore whilst there. Am I missing anything great? What are your London secrets that you don't mind divulging? Where is the best curry? What's your favorite pub? Which parks are hidden and beautiful?

And the Livin' is Easy

So I've been traveling a little bit this summer. Immediately after grading I dropped everything and headed off to Montreal for a week. It was relaxing and, well, at least there were two days of good weather! I saw lots of old movies and plasticized corpses and I ate really well (the advantages of dating someone with a newfound cooking obsession) and generally had a very nice time.

I returned to get everything in order here before going to London for two weeks. No fun- research only. I keep saying this again and again hoping that maybe it will come true and I'll actually get a lot of work done there instead of spending a lot of money I don't exactly have at the moment and pubbing it every evening . . . I'm really looking forward to it though. Haven't been to the UK in a year and a half and I miss the green and pleasant land terribly, along with all my friends there. I've also got a large number of academic pals who will be in London and Oxford whilst I'm there, including my closest colleague friend, who will actually be staying in the same B&B as me. No fun- research only. No fun- research only.

Then I'll return June 20 and begin packing and carting my things over to The New House. Once I'm settled there, I'll divide my time between planting lovely things in the garden (roses, rosemary, lavender, thyme); hunting for mid-century modern furniture, and cranking out my manuscript in my office on campus. Probably mostly cranking in the office, hopefully not sans manuscript and articles.

Yee-Haw

Done with grading. The summer awaits. Not thinking about the book and the articles. Not thinking about the book. Maybe thinking a little about the articles. Mostly thinking about sleep.

House Love

Yeah, you know you want it. You feel the love. Rooms you want to paint in Benjamin Moore "Evening Sky" and "Incense Stick." Arts and Crafts furniture you want to purchase and place in the rooms. Rose bushes you want to plant outside the bedroom window. Ooh, baby. Feel the house love.

I'm moving there in two months. I sometimes stay awake at night decorating and redecorating the rooms, adding a back patio rose garden and purchasing countless imaginary kilims for the back sunroom at imaginary Ottoman bazaars (don't forget to bring me back some from Turkey, M&D! Just because I can't go to the wedding there doesn't mean I don't deserve kilims!).

Here's an old picture of it from last summer before it was painted (now it's light green with white trim). The previous tenants were landscape designers who practiced in front and on the sides of the house. They ran a little stream through the front like a brook that is really a pump-fountain. I can turn it on if I like. The backyard is huge and hilly and unfinished. I wonder how much it would cost to cover it with daffodils. In the living room there is a working fireplace with the original iron "summer door" which will keep out the drafts and birds and also the cat. I can burn logs there in the winter and roast marshmallows even.

I can't wait.

The Shakespeare Authorship Question

Some time early in the semester I was randomly contacted by William Niederkorn to complete an online survey about the "Shakespeare Authorship Question" in my teaching. I duly completed the survey and have just received a follow-up e-mail with a link to the survey's results in The New York Times.

It's not particularly interesting. 82% of us (295 randomly selected Shakespeare professors at colleges and universities) think the authorship question (did Shakespeare write Shakespeare?) is irrelevant to the study of the works, and only 6% thought there was a good reason for discussing it at all. 11% said that possibly there was good reason.

What bothers me is not the fact that this poll tells us what we already knew, but that the New York Times didn't really do or say anything new or thought-provoking with the survey. The article ends with an anonymous Shakespearean wishing more people were as interested in the plays as they were in the authorship question, evidently a sentiment most of us echoed in our responses.

But why do a survey like this anyway, if you're just going to conclude that "Professors believe in him"? The tin echo of the language of religious faith aside, what's the point? It would've been far more interesting to interview professors about their pedagogy and methodology- how do they teach Shakespeare to undergraduates? To graduates? The authorship question has never been taken seriously by most of us, but the stability of the body of work known as 'Shakespeare' has already been toppled by scholars of material textual studies, and that some 14 years ago.

Do we all combine history and research in our teaching? Do we talk about "the genius" of Shakespeare in our 100-level courses, push students to discover textual contradictions (perhaps put there by Shakespeare himself) in our upper-level undergraduate seminars, and then ask our graduate students to accept the fundamental instability of the material text and the consequent loss of 'Shakespearean' identity? Has anyone been able to present a consistent picture of Shakespeare scholarship to their students of all levels? I think we are constantly lifting 'Shakespeare' up and breaking him (or it) down in our teaching, and also in our scholarship. I would have liked the New York Times survey to have done something more with its assessment: It's not simply that most of us don't think the authorship question is relevant; it's that we're asking our students to engage with the text in (frequently contradictory) ways that will seem new and exciting to most armchair Shakespeareans. Shame on this article for not articulating that.

Stuff I Learned in English Class

It's that time of year again. The time when students write silly things in their papers and I feel guilty for pumping them full of insufficient and erroneous information.

Today I learned that:

"Raping women was common in medieval times. Men would frequently rape women as a means of expressing their power and demonstrating their dominance over women."

I also learned that:

"When I say romantic love, I mean a love that hits you like a brick wall when you first see someone."

More coming up . . .

Pick Yourself Up

This is my all-time favorite number from Swing Time (1936), my all-time favorite Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movie. And it is here, on Youtube (though you have to click on the box above twice and watch it on the Youtube site but it's worth it).

Why do I love it so much?

- Because Fred mischeviously pretends he doesn't know how to dance

- Because she's a terrible teacher

- Because when they finally dance it's like they just discovered that they speak the same language

- Because of the art deco dancing studio with the little white fence

- Because they make it seem so easy and so egalitarian

Poking my Head Up Briefly

I'm buried under a mountain of final papers and exams. Oh, about 90 of them by the end of the semester which is in about two weeks. I also have two students defending their MA theses this week and I only got the theses last week and weekend. When did MA theses become like dissertations? 153 pages, 4 chapters, a scholarly introduction and it will be longer when she adds all the footnotes she's missing. Oy, Gevalt!

Ok, that's enough for now. I must return to my little house built out of papers.

Postscript: Pseudonymous Cat

In a conversation last night at the hotel bar, another blogger asked me what my cat was called.

"Saffron," I replied.

"Oh, so it is Saffron," she said.

"Yes," I replied, looking at her quizzically.

Then we both laughed because of course she thought I might have come up with a blog pseudonym for the cat, the way we do for our friends, colleagues, partners and institutions.

"An Antic Blogsposition": On Playing a Part, Disguise, and Being Funny

I'm at a big important annual conference. And I am having a wondeful time.

Perhaps it's because I'm surrounded by Shakespeareans, but I'm thinking about plays and players today. One of the best things I've discovered about blogging anonymously (though most of my dear readers know I am much less anonymous than those blogs I love to read and support), is that it is rather like play acting. One takes on a new identity that permits a liberty of language and expression only associated with performance and with assuming a role. In the same way that Rosalind-as-Ganymede really begins to relish the rhetoric, wit, and play of her newfound pants role, and Hamlet is able to transcend class barriers by insulting Polonius and ceding the platea to the grave-digger's joke routine, blogging under a pseudonymous identity permits a certain freedom and jouissance.

Which makes me think about a discussion I had over lunch yesterday with a gentle and sage senior professor at a small obscure university who expressed such a delight for our profession that it momentarily humbled my vaulting ambition. We were talking about Shakespearean clowns. He laid out his theory that clowning and "clowniness" is transferrable from character to character on the Shakespearean stage. Wit is, in other words, infectious, and easily picked up by characters surrounding a clown. He cited Viola's playing with Feste in Act V of Twelfth Night and of course Hamlet and the Gravedigger.

Since I have been investigating the philological and cultural impact of "antic/antique" for some time, I brought up the connection that Margreta de Grazia makes between Hamlet's "antic disposition" and clowning, that to have an antic disposition means to play the fool on the Renaissance stage (and to play the medieval vice character on the Renaissance stage). He concurred with me very graciously.

But what my research on "antic/antique" has also uncovered is that "antic" frequently meant "disguised" in the Renaissance, so in many ways it's not just about clowning but also about the way an assumed identity allows for a freer circulation of wit, humor and social critique.

Which is precisely what pseudonymous blogging at its best is all about. And that is the reason why it has to continue. At the conference, I may or may not have privately "made discovery" of a number of pseudonymous bloggers I greatly respect and depend upon for their humorous critique and celebration of the profession. However whether this is true or fabricated, I shall vehemently refuse to "delate" on them. Also, if wit is indeed transferrable, perhaps some of it might rub off on me.

In order for the academic blogging community to survive, we need to maintain their antic dispositions: Let them be well used, for they are the abstract and brief chronicles of our time. And they are also very funny.

Spring is Here

Spring arrived yesterday. There are blossoming trees, soft green grass and chartreuse buds everywhere creating a kind of green haze in the air. Or maybe that's just the pollen.

Spring Break was deliciously relaxing and fun, full of cooking, hiking in the nearby foothills, and watching Lubitsch, Godard, and Murnau. Although we learned that rabbit shouldn't be roasted, and that quick rising yeast is not the same as Fleischmann's instant, I still enjoyed the best Italian meatballs and tomato sauce made from scratch I've ever tasted, pulled off a pretty decent creme caramel, and our morning crepes outdid any crepe I've had in Montreal.

No matter how hard we looked, we couldn't find a "comfort station" of any kind near the parking lot on our second mountain hike/clamber unless you count the poorly stocked bathrooms and the 65 cent soda machine from 1981. We did, however, find some pretty amazing barbecue in a local joint furnished with an excellent jukebox playing the Orioles, and decorated throughout with vintage tin advertising signs including one very old and rusty sign for the emerging "Goody" aspirin brand that read: GOODY: "They are good."

After bidding farewell to my dear visitor - who didn't believe we had a "Billy Graham Parkway" until we were actually driving down it - I took off for the exhausting and disorienting (disorientating, for you brits) conference. I don't think there is anything that leaves one feeling quite so uprooted and repotted than taking off for a weekend of intense and heavy conferencing and returning to teach three classes and hold office hours Monday morning. I felt as if I'd stepped in to understudy an actor in an unfamiliar play at the last moment and had somehow lost the script.

Thankfully, the library book sale redeemed me at the end of the day. I purchased an old 50-volume set of seemingly randomly labeled literary "classics" that don't seem to be quite so canonical anymore for $10. What made the editors decide to follow Smith's "The Wealth of Nations" in with Vergil's Aeneid, and Vergil with Cervantes? For $5 I also got a possibly complete (lacking only "The Two Noble Kinsmen") Yale Shakespeare, adorable tiny faded blue clothbound editions of the plays and poems edited in the 30s. It's fun to see what earlier editors have done without explanation, but of course more fun to fill my mammoth floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Now my students will think I'm smart and educated.

RSA Annual Venting

This was quite possibly the poorest organized RSA conference I have ever attended. I was stuck out in the boonies near the Miami airport in one of two "overflow" hotels that somehow cost more than the rooms in the conference hotel, despite being farther away and very close to a major highway not to mention low flying planes. I may have depleted my cash supply in my current checking account simply to pay for the cab rides back and forth to the conference, and this even includes cab rides split between two and three people.

Then there was the difficulty of getting to the beach, the ash-strewn South Beach (or so I heard-- I never actually managed to see it) populated by loud, hormonally challenged undergraduates.

Yes, there was good food to be had in South Beach. There were also beautiful Art Deco hotels. And $12 mojitos, which were good, but not $12 good. It was also ridiculously noisy. Maybe I'm just getting too old for that sort of thing, but half the time I could barely hear what my friends were saying.

Most of my gripes have already been stated with more panache by my colleagues (collblogs?) over at Blogging the Renaissance, so I won't prolong the vent.

But I will say this: We Renaissance scholars are not generally a bunch of complainers. We usually neither cant nor rant. Ok, we do a lot of both, but when we go to conferences, we like to forget about all we have to cant and rant about. We like to stimulate our minds, share our work, and enjoy good food, good company, and good wine.

Most of us, when provided with some basic comforts, find this relatively easy to do. This year it was much more difficult. Because of this, I would like to propose that some changes be made for the safety of future RSA conferences:

1. Don't name panels silly things like "Perspectives on English Literature IV" and "New Technologies and Renaissance Studies I, II, III, IV and V: Exploring the online Archive"

2. Don't stick Stephen Greenblatt's panel in a tiny side room that seats 10.

3. Don't make us pay $3 for crappy Starbucks coffee and $1 for a teaspoon-sized muffin.

4. Don't make it impossible for us to print out our papers without paying $5 to use your crappy computers in the business center. Don't cut off my internet connection every three minutes, crappy airport hotel! I'm trying to write!

Needless to say, I doubt I'll be at RSA next year in Chicago and I'm sure SAA in San Diego can only be loads more fun. Or at least loads more comfortable. At least I think it may be so in Denmark . . .

Despite the monumentally crappy organization of this conference it was still nice to see my dearest scholarly friends and to make new ones. And I met those I'd wanted to meet, who turned out to be generous and kind and silly and fun. And I may have solved a little mystery I wondered about.

So it really wasn't so terrible. But 50% of the time, I really rather would have been at home with my cat.

Spring Break Woo-Hoo

It's "Spring Break Woo-Hoo!" The campus has entirely emptied out, and I've got plans for a much needed drink with three of my gal pals this evening.

So why am I still here, you might ask.

Well, my friends, I am still here because I have thirty Shakespeare midterms to grade and another thirty revised first papers to mark from my writing seminar. Those I don't have to return immediately after spring break, but I don't want them hanging over my head.

Yes, I am that good. I will stay in my office until all of the midterms are graded and most of the papers are re-marked. Then I will go out with my friends. Then I will go home and sleep, getting ready for The Big House Clean. I am soooooo good. Then I will have a visitor from the Great White North for a whole week when it will finally be "Spring Break Woo-Hoo." We plan to sample off-the-beaten-path barbecue, wander around the artsy-fartsy, hippie-dippie mountain town, and partake of that oh-so-forgotten-American-diversion, the drive-in.

Once More unto the Thirties

31 today. Officially into the Thirties. And a prime number. That has to be worth something.

It's been a good birthday. I don't know if it's because 1) I'm an only child with parents who miraculously are still together, 2) I'm just ridiculously optimistic sometimes against all odds, or 3) I'm self-centered and spoiled (refer back to 1) but in 31 years I've never had a bad birthday. Kinne hurra.

Today has been no exception. The wind and the rain raged last night, turning off the power and causing some trees to fall. But I awoke this morning to a cloudless blue sky and the sun glinting off tree branches laden with buds almost ready to open.

It is also Saffron's birthday today- she's 5. We celebrated at breakfast: I had a cupcake; she had salmon flavored hairball remedy.

In addition to Saffron, two of my closest friends share my birthday and one of them is my evil twin. We were born half an hour and 1500 miles apart on the 2nd of March, 1976. Both friends are brits and oxonians. Happy Birthday, you two! Maybe some day we'll spend our birthday drinking one another under the table in a pub in Jericho. I'll lose.

When I got to work and turned on my computer today I received another unexpected birthday gift: a letter from the university president. And no, I am not being sarcastic, which I normally would be. There is to be a salary increase. Remarkably, it will affect me, and may indeed be more than 10%:

"With regard to faculty increases, we must consider carefully those in the assistant professor ranks, where the greatest salary disparity exists between us and a group of peer institutions. I have encouraged the Dean to give special consideration to those departments whose salaries lag furthest from their peers at other institutions."

Yay, yay, YAY!

New Perspectives

We're almost all done with our tenure-track hiring in my department. We did pretty well-- we made four offers and three of our top choices accepted. The fourth one turned us down for a bigger research institution in a really cool city and who would blame her? We had another person out just this past week and the department split along generational lines for the first time. All the junior faculty and only two of the senior faculty voted overwhelmingly enthusiastically to offer this person a job. The remaining senior faculty had already made up their minds and refused to be swayed by our attempts at persuasion. It was kind of fascinating to me, because it marked the first time we were unable to reach a consensus as a department despite everyone's attempts to understand one another. It was as if we were speaking different languages: They could not understand why we were so excited about this person's scholarship, and we could not understand why they were not. It was the first time we really disagreed, and everyone-- both generational camps -- felt a bit morose at the end of the day. It's a good thing the weekend appeared to give us some distance and perspective. And in the end, we did really well. We managed to agree on our first four candidates and to get three out of four, three really phenomenally good scholars and teachers from the top universities and programs in the country. And it's kind of heartening to know that even though we couldn't see eye to eye on the last candidate, there was a general sense of sadness that this happened, rather than anger or resentment. I'm sure this kind of thing happens in every department, especially in one like mine at a school that is in the midst of redefining itself; it's a sign of the times.


This weekend I'm buried in fellowship applications for summer research and I've got to write my SAA paper and book flights to Miami and San Diego for conferences and New Orleans for a wedding. I also have to study the state driver's manual and get my state license. I've put it off for too long and my license expires next week. There was so much to do I felt a bit nauseated and overwhelmed yesterday. So instead of jumping in to it, I cleaned house. It was warmish so I opened the windows and aired it out. I vacummed and swiffered and laundered and scrubbed. I baked cornbread and made Assam tea. I bought a bunch of fresh parrot tulips, emptied them into a large mason jar and plopped it on the dining room table. And I rearranged the furniture in my living room. Which is possibly the best thing I could have done because it feels fresh and new and has given me a subtly revised perspective. I now have to orient myself in this space in a different way. It's oddly mind-opening. After all the cleaning and re-organizing I was finally able to sit down with a clear head and pound out my research proposals without feeling a single palpitation or stomach somersault.

The daffodils are up and it's raining which is turning all the tree-trunks and limbs green-brown. The power just went out on my block so I've lit candles. It smells like cocoa, tuberose, red amber, and lemon basil. Spring break is in two weeks and my birthday is in six days.

Lagging behind in blogging

Dear Readers,

I'm sorry I haven't been posting much lately. I'm tired. Exhausted, in fact. I've got over 60 students this semester (no, those of you at big research institutions are not allowed to mock me with your laughter-- you don't have to mark 32 "composition" papers every other week, composed by students with little command of English). I'm teaching three days a week, and on the off days I'm required to attend all these job talks, lunches, dinners, and interviews with our job candidates (three searches) as they plough through their campus visits.

Time for my own work, you ask? Ha! The best I can get in is a stolen hour here and there in my office between classes and meeting with students. But it's better than nothing, I suppose.

End of sob story. I'm not asking you to pity me; I'm just explaining why I haven't had much time or energy to blog.

March and April will be full of conferences and a wedding, all in warmer climes. Summer will hopefully follow with trips to London and Montreal, and maybe a move to a new abode -- a craftsman style cottage with a beautiful garden I've been coveting since my friend moved there. Now she's got a job at an Ivy, so the house will be vacant in June. I know my current apartment is no hovel, but it's rather isolated and the place I want is near the Art School and a beautiful park. It's also got a wrap around porch, jewel-toned rooms, and a working fireplace with an original antique iron door (useful against adventurous kitties).

A Charmed Life

Sometimes I think I'm leading a bit of a charmed life (poo! poo!-- that's me spitting over my shoulder to avert the evil eye. I'm also rubbing my blue eye bead and muttering kinne hurra and im sh'allah).

I recently made the hour and a half drive to Prestigious Research Institution to attend a mini-conference. There were a number of well known invited speakers, including one of my former dissertation advisors. Although I wasn't greatly inspired by any of the talks, I miraculously managed to relax and have a nice time. And for the first time I wasn't nervous about making a good impression-- in part because I was so exhausted from the week before, teaching 3 classes Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and courting and evaluating three job candidates (with 3-5 more to go), not to mention reviewing all their materials.

Lunch involved trading silly stories and going for a walk with senior scholars who have majorly influenced my field. They were all very easy-going and kind.

After the closing reception, I began to say my goodbyes but suddenly found myself pulled along to dinner-- a catered dinner in a private room in a very fancy restaurant, arranged just for the occasion of the conference. It wasn't until the pause between the second and third courses (chicken breast poached with squash and currants and flourless tea-scented chocolate cake with meyer lemon ice cream), and long after the appetizer (lobster and white bean soup), that I suddenly realized I was the only person at the table who hadn't been invited to give a talk or chair a panel. I was also the youngest, but that probably doesn't matter.

The main thing was that somehow or other these good people opened their arms (and their restaurant) to let me in. And I didn't plan for it. But now I've got some new friends and colleagues at Prestitgious Research Institution, and equally important, an active community of early modernist scholars with which to correspond and share work.

I spent the remainder of the weekend with a good friend who lives nearby and works in medicine at Important State Research Institution. We wandered around the charming college town and she took me to her favorite coffee house, which has a glassed-in terrance and sits in the middle of an overgrown garden. And there I ran in to an old accquaintence from grad school who has been teaching at Important State for three years and loves it and loves the area. It was serendipitous (I'd forgotten he was there) and delightful. I felt as if I could finally breathe.