Another one bites the dust...

As of noon today, I have finished my 7th semester at WMU, and am so close to actually doing real work on my dissertation that I can taste it.  And it has that "old book" taste... mmmm.  Papery.  So that's the job for the next year and a half.  In the spring, I'll be teaching Brit Lit I for the first time (yay Beowulf), and Curtis and I will be going to Prague in July.  Me to work as a teaching assistant and take a class, him to sit around and get some writing done.   In Prague!!! 

In other "life news," Curtis and I have taken in a third cat:  Oscar.  Here he is, wearing an elf hat  rather unhappily.  Poor guy... he's sorry he camped out on our doorstep now!  Obviously, I'm in full Christmas mode, forcing all people and animals near me to join in the "fun."  So far I've stuffed Curtis with Christmas cookies, decorated the house, watched "A Christmas Story" 40 times, bought mincemeat pies, terrorized the cats by putting them in seasonal costumes, and watched the snow fall while drinking hot chocolate.  Love that Michigan weather!  

The end is near...

But on the bright side, I have an idea for a dissertation (ecocritical readings of Old English-- I'm going to tear up the holt and the edg and sae and worold) and it's snowing outside now. Kalamazoo's first snow of the year-- on December 1st! A bit late. But also on the plus side, I get to eat the first chocolate in my advent calendar. Sweeeeeet.

Those are demons holding up a cauldron in Hell on the "doomsday stone" in York Minster.

Medieval Congress

No, this is not a commentary on the country's current legislature... this is a reflection on last weekend's 42nd International Medieval conference at Kalamazoo! I presented a paper on publishing murder in Norse sagas... and I'm still shell-shocked at the reaction. Granted, I didn't change much about the paper from the time I did a dry-run in February to the day I presented in May, but I was unprepared for the criticism I received. You always dread the Q&A sessions, but in my experience, you usually get questions that you can either answer with "that's an interesting point... I'll consider that as I continue my research," or you get questions that focus on an area of your research that you actually had to cut out of the final paper. Either way, you can deal pretty well. Not this time. It was around the time when Walt Whitman, Santa Claus, and some guy from Cornell who was sitting in the corner started to argue against my points among themselves that I felt like I never wanted to do this again. My friends tell me that "they were arguing amongst each other; they weren't talking to you," but somehow this doesn't make it any better. After the Q&A was over, my advisor from my undergrad years came up to the table and said, "Great job, Ilse, but you know the next layer has to be linguistic." Now, I love this woman, but at that point in the day, I was just a bit too shaken to take anymore criticism. What I needed was to be wrapped in a warm blanket of unconditional acceptance and congratulations from my friends, and then to be given an Appletini. Love and booze, people... that's all that's necessary.

Blah. So that was little-to-no fun. However, I did get to see my friends from York, which made the experience worth it. And of course, the Saturday night dance (think of a wedding reception and bar mitzvah smashed together. Now populate it with medievalists who have one night a year in which to get funky) is worth the requisite stress of presenting a paper. And one week later, I'm still alive... not cowering in my bedroom, rocking back and forth. I'm saving that for next year.

Da da dah... my digital story! (warning: it's depressing)

Awesome cat names!

For Mel, I'm updating this post with pictures of MY cats... on the left is Hoppity, on the right is Maxine. Hoppity is the bad one. Maxine barely tolerates him. Anyhoo, so here's an EXPANDED list of cat names that I will use in the future:

Xerxes

Thulsa Doom

Mr. Roboto

Pacman (or Ms. Pacman)

Q-Bert

C. Montgomery Burns

Craphonso

A new idea: creating the "boc"

Okay, so here's an activity that I thought up last night, in case I ever get to teach a course in medieval literature. I want to give students an idea of how illuminated manuscripts were put together, and let them see that authorship was a blurry thing then, as it is now in webpage (really just wiki) design. So I'll break my students into groups of four... each person will be assigned an identity: the scribe, the illuminator, the binder, and the jeweler. They'll work together to create an online version of a "boc"-- a manuscript. They can either do this in the form of a website or a wiki. I'll give the scribe a series of different versions of a story, and he / she will have to compile them into one, and write out a single text, choosing a particular script and size, and leaving room for the illuminator to draw pictures. Next the project passes to the illuminator, who colors in initials and illustrates the story. Then the "boc" goes to the binder, who has to link all the various pages together in the proper order, and publishes the thing. Finally, the jeweler gets to adorn the first page of the boc with images of jewels... okay, so that last job is pretty dumb, but maybe I can combine it with the binder. For inspiration, they can look at images of the Lindisfarne Gospel and Book of Kells, or the Junius manuscript, or illustrated Apocalypses. It'll be crazy-go-nuts!

a monstrosity of word-processing and digital storytelling

Apparently I'm on a roll with blogging today (it's because I'm procrastinating). Weeks ago, Allen suggested a teaching technique he's used in which he has an entire class "word-process" Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn," with each student rearranging the text to create a new poem. I REALLY like that idea, but I've found some ways to extend and complicate it. A friend of mine described an activity he uses in creative writing class, where he has students rewrite a poem as a prose story-- they have to expand the text to create character, motivation, setting, etc... it gives students a good idea of the necessary economy of poetry, and the differences between the genres. After this, he has the students replace all the nouns and adjectives in the poem, so that they can see how, even with different subjects, the form and structure will remain intact and will dictate the way the poem works. SO.... here's my idea: have a big project in English 1100 where, on day 1, students rewrite one poem in prose. Let's say we stick with Keats. So first they rewrite it, expanding and filling out gaps in the poem to make it more understandable to themselves. Day 2, they replace nouns / adjectives in the poem, to see what Keats is doing with the structure. Day 3, they use word-processors to rearrange the poem and create something original. Day 4 and beyond, the students will create digital stories of the new poems they each created! So I can see this spiralling out of control and becoming a monster project... but at least it would be an interesting monster.