Divided Time

I really feel like I ought to have something really intelligent to say to make up for the previous post about social media for academics and cat photos (and to get it off the top of the page) but every ounce of the fairly minimal amount of brainpower that I am finding myself able to muster is going towards finishing a first draft of the last chapter of the book, a draft that I know isn't very good but just needs to be put on paper, integral and complete-ish, so I have something to start working from, something that I can transform from its boring and derivative beginnings into a final chapter that's more fitting to the rest of the book. I really envy people who manage to blog thoughtfully and regularly and at length while getting work done.

Dissertation Advice vs. Book Advice

A piece of advice that I got while I was writing my dissertation was that at the end of every week, I should step back and assess the new work I had done and its place in the bigger project, and then write a new, maybe even a totally reorganized, table of contents that would better suit all the new work rather than just shoehorning it in. It was advice from a professor who was very invested in the readability of academic writing and in innovation in the scholarly monograph as a form.

And as dissertation advice goes, it was actually pretty worthless.

(Pause to be struck down by lightening arranged for by the now-deceased and very-much-missed advice-giver.)

Because my own dissertation was such an extreme version of a quick scramble to finish, I don't know that I could articulte why, in any broad sense, it would be such a pointless exercise. Perhaps because dissertations are just one of those conservative forms of writing that don't benefit from a lot of creative reorganizing? Perhaps everybody is just scrambling to finish, even if it's on a slightly less compressed schedule than mine and if the only good dissertation is a done dissertation then anything more than a basic organization isn't a top priority?

It turns out to have been great book advice, though.

The weekly TOC reivision wasn't something I had activley thought about until I realized in the last few weeks that it was, more or less, what I have been doing as I make a final push to finish up my book manuscript. I'm not revising my TOC weekly, but as I do even what I would consider to be superficial editing, it is making me think, to a surprising degree, about the structure of the project. I have done a lot of shifting around of the order of the chapters (which turns out to have revealed a really major flaw in my tagging system for Zotero — when you've tagged a bunch of references as "chapter two" and it's suddenly chapter three or four, you still have to keep track of the old organization and sync it to the new one). I have had a chance to really consider what ought to be in a general introduction and what a first chapter is for, anyway. Where the little-picture editing has been especially helpful in the big-pictures is in allowing me to generally tighten up the parameters of the project, which has most recently manifested itself in my definitive decision that the book will be five chapters and not six (or even the seven that it was for a brief period this winter) because a subsequent reception history can, for a project like mine, be handled responsibly in a single chapter even if it could be the subject of its own book.

Every time I've made a change I have rewritten the TOC and saved the newly-reorganized document as a new file. And even though in the most recent reorganization I've added sections to several chapters, the ultimate overall effect really has been to tighten the project up and give it more focus with each incremental change. It does make sense that better organization should have that effect, although I'm not sure that the mental process has been quite as linear as that.

Just my two cents about reflecting on dissertation advice from the perspective of being pretty far along in the dissertation-to-book process and filing procedural things away for later even if they don't help at the time (all of which reminds me of something else I was told while dissertating that was as true then as it is now: It all comes together in the last few months).

***

Any dissertation advice that you got that was awful as dissertation advice but turned out to be really helpful for the book? Or vice-versa?

A Love Letter to Judah ibn Tibbon (Or, a Paragraph that Probably Won't Make the Final Cut)

The third chapter of my book project is about the poetics articulated across the oeuvre of Judah ibn Tibbon.

It ends with a final section that I am terming an excursus that examines the poetry written by an author so actively engaged with the literary-critical traditions of Arabic poetics. Even though the first three chapters are currently out for review, I had not yet written the excursus. It doesn't really interrupt the flow of the book one way or the other, and it is set up as something of a stand-alone section; so I didn't begin to write it until this morning.

I expect that the first paragraph that I've written won't survive in the final version. I'd like it to, but love isn't a response permitted to literary critics and cultural historians, especially the ones who are trying to prove themselves in their first books. Writing in one's own voice is not something that is supposed to happen in academic monographs. And so this is what I shan't say in my book about Judah, the terrible poet whom I've come to adore:

One of the pleasures of undertaking a project such as this one is really getting to know the subject and to begin — in a historiographically and literary-critically problematic process — to feel a real kinship with him. In this case, I have come to appreciate above all else Judah ibn Tibbon’s reserved, wicked sense of humor. Eight hundred years dead, he can still make me laugh. And so when I say that Judah ibn Tibbon was a terrible poet, I do so with a real love of the man, a genuine sympathy towards his intellectual program, and an ongoing appreciation of his style. He was a great and engaging and thoughtful prose writer and that is what has made it possible to live with him in my head, as I have, day in and day out, for almost the last five years. But a poet he was not (though I love him all the same). He falls into the category of historically — and even literarily — important but bad poets, where he is joined by the likes of Meir Halevi Abulafia, leaving behind a poetic legacy that must be contended with  if not enjoyed.

Professor of Symbology

I have to assume that if, upon reading the first sentence of a proper academic article, one's first thought is: "Huh. Maybe Dan Brown was on to something," somebody has done something horribly wrong; I'm just not sure if it's the author or the reader.

When the DaVinci Code first came out, there were all kinds of discussions in the popular press about whether Brown's fictional Professor Langdon really could hold a professorial chair in symbology at Harvard. General consensus was no:

Harvard: No Symbology Here

Can You Really Be a Professor of Symbology?

Apparently this is one more instance of the popular press misunderstanding the lengths to which we academics sometimes go to make sure we are very precise in our distinctions between terms and fields of study. To wit, while reading Michael Camille's Image on the Edge, I came across a reference to the following article:

Turner, Victor. "Liminal to Liminoid in Play, Flow and Ritual: An Essay in Comparative Symbology." Rice University Studies 60:3 (1974). 53-92.

Turner is (was?), the biographical information in the article explains, a professor of social thought and anthropology at the University of Chicago. So in keeping with the need to be very precise about this sort of thing, no, one cannot be a professor of Symbology. But that certainly shouldn't stop anyone from writing about it.

Slashing Now, Burning Later

Indestructible Prose

A Wikipedia Dissent

There's been a lot of talk lately about the value of scholars participating in Wikipedia editing.

There were some declarations of victory from the digital humanities community when this obituary appeared, fronting the work of its late subject in editing tens of thousands of Wikipedia articles. To me, though, it didn't seem like a great victory for DH nor a great way for a scholar to be remembered.

I have to question the tact of declaring academic-disciplinary victory on the basis of an obituary, especially one of someone who died so young, but I might also be saying that out of a sense of my own discomfort about likewise using an obituary, especially one of someone who died so young, to make a point. I should just add that fundamentally, I'm critical of the priorities of the obituary and the positive response to it in the digital community, and not of the work of the scholar memorialized. I probably wouldn't even have written about this were it not for the proliferation of scholarly Wikipedia write-ins that have been happening this year, the next one I'm aware of being scheduled for Kalamazoo. Details are here.

I absolutely believe that as scholars we have a responsibility to disseminate our knowledge the general public but I don't think that Wikipedia editing is a worthwhile focus.  The inherent structure of wikipedia is such that this endeavor is, in effect, shifting sand from one pile to the other and hoping that it doesn't get moved back. One could spend four days or a career editing entries with no guarantee that one's work won't be overwritten or undone. It might be a striking metaphor for life and humanistic endeavor, and it might even be just a very extreme version of what all of us are doing, but the degree of difference seems important. Or, as my late mentor put it aphoristically: The only things that last are books and children. That's not to say that I believe only in books or that I do not believe in digital work; rather that Wikipedia editing is neither digital scholarship nor good public outreach.

And what's more, having scholars edit articles, either in an organized or disorganized fashion, in an order or at random, still does not make Wikipedia a scholarly resource. Wikipedia is still always going to be the thing that I tell my students they can't use. There's no reliable way to identify which articles have been fixed by scholars, whether the fixes haven't been edited by somebody else with a less-than-scholarly agenda, and I can't identify which scholars have written which articles. Add those to all the existing reasons — the obvious one about it being something that anyone can edit; the more existential one about what it means to call an article "scholarly" within a digital work that is itself not scholarly; and perhaps the one that should most bother all of us and especially the people spending their time on this: Wikipedia does not allow editing based on primary sources.

The account of one historian's attempt to edit the entry for his own subject matter is very instructive of all these problems.

Finally, the current iteration of Wikipedia writing-in requires the physical presence of medievalists at the big national conference in Kalamazoo, MI, a place that is difficult and expensive to get to for a meeting that medievalists who don't work in very traditional areas of scholarship often don't find to be useful. Several people have asked on the listserves whether they can participate remotely and have been told that no, they must be present in Kalamazoo to watch a demonstration. The preposterousness of requiring that Wiki editors be physically present at the edit-a-thon seems to cut at the heart of a digital enterprise and seriously talks down to medievalists as a group. There are people asking to volunteer at a distance; presumably those are the ones who are comfortable reading through documentation that, theoretically, anybody should be able to read through — after all, isn't that the point of Wikipedia? — and getting themselves started. What does it mean for a digital project to be catering, on the production end, to technophobes?

Briefest of updates, added 5/4/14, after the jump:

Footnotes

I often think that writing without a lot of clutter and footnotes is the ideal for readable academic prose, but I'd be lying if I didn't say that I also derive a lot of pleasure from really top-notch championship-level footnoting. These are my notes from chapter three of my book, which I'm presenting at Cornell next week. It's not quite done — there's a little bit of chapter to be fleshed out and a few footnotes to be fixed before I submit three chapters to the publisher — but it was done enough to circulate before the colloquium; and the footnotes are deeply satisfying.

***

¹³⁰ Ḥasan ibn Rashīq al-Qayrawānī. Kitāb al ‘umda fī maḥāsin al-shi‘r, ed. M. al-Dīn. Beirut: Dār al-Jīl, 1967.

¹³¹ For a setting of Ibn Ezra into an Arabic poetic context, see Raymond P. Scheindlin. “Rabbi Moshe ibn Ezra on the Legitimacy of Poetry,” Medievalia et Humanistica 7 (1976): 101-15.

¹³² Judah al-Ḥarīzī, who will factor into the next two chapters, left a similar literary footprint in prose composition, using the full range of Arabic literary models to defend and elevate writing in Hebrew.

¹³³ This is not meant to suggest that Judah Halevi and Moses ibn Ezra represent anything like the totality of Arabizing Hebrew poetry or poetics — or even the totality of the form’s responses to the condition of exile and the status of a minority culture. However, as poets who were also authors of some of the most significant works of poetic theory to have emerged from the Andalusi milieu, both in situ and as they contemplated religious and cultural exile, they are apt as reference points for contextualizing the Tibbonim as poetic thinkers within both Andalusi and exilic contexts.

¹³⁴ For notions of local knowledge and culture, see Clifford Geertz. Local Knowledge. New York: Basic Books, 1985. For the foundational statement of polysystem theory (also referred to as Tel Aviv post-structuralism), see Itamar Even-Zohar. “Polysystem Theory,” Poetics Today 1 (1979): 287-310. It was Rina Drory’s work Models and Contacts: Arabic Literature and its Impact on Medieval Jewish Culture. Leiden: Brill, 2000 (originally published in Hebrew in 1988) that specifically applied polysystem theory to the Iberian context. In general, I find polysystem theory to be somewhat more productive than other current theories used for framing and contextualiziang and organizing our understanding of the cultural history of medieval Iberia. In particular, it demands particular attention to the elements that make up the polysystem, thereby yielding precise and detailed text-based readings that can account for broader cultural phenomena, moreso than theories of cultural hybridity that draw upon the work of Homi Bhaba in postcolonial studies. As a branch of post-structuralism, polysystem theory is particularly devoted to breaking down the binary oppositions of center-periphery and canonical-noncanonical, pairings that are particularly detrimental to the material within traditional study of both Semitic- and Romance-language literature in the Maghreb. Entanglement and itra-actional theory have also become increasingly popular as ways to account for cultural contact, borrowing, on the basis of the writing of Karen Barad, from particle physics for metaphyiscal purposes; however, the use of this theory for explicating cultural contacts outside the realm of the study of material and manuscript culture is, to my mind, unnecessarily elaborate and its utility and the benefit of its utility questionable.

¹³⁵ Qur’ān 12:2, trans. N. J. Dawood.

Genizah as Library

Atlas Obscura is an interesting site to follow for ideas for quirky places to visit and quirky places to fantasize about visiting. This week they ran a photograph of of a monument in a Jewish cemetery in Austria.

It is conceived of as a library but, I think, speaks to some of the questions about genizah practice in different communities, placing old worn out sacred books and implements in the cemetery as the proper disposal. The idea of genizah-as-archive that is sometimes bandied about is a flawed one because it misrepresents chaos as organized. Genizah-as-lending-library does something else in the space between life and death.

***

I'm ambivalent about posting this as a single, undeveloped thought because I think I want to write more about it, and I'm not sure if this is staking out the territory or scooping myself (or setting myself up to be scooped). I'm so sick of my book, and there's so much new I'd like to be working on already and I'm despairing of the fact that I won't get to do or think about anything else for at least another year still. I hate the pace of the academy. Deadly.

This is Not a Sign of the Apocalypse.

I did something that a lot of my colleagues would consider to be unconscionable. I used that book. In a graduate seminar.

And you know what? Everybody's okay and nobody believes that anyone was nice to anybody else ever in the Middle Ages. Promise.

I'm teaching my first graduate seminar this semester, an introductory-level graduate course called Faith and Text in the Spanish Middle Ages. It is a set of case studies in cultural and literary history that is designed to give an overview of the major literary and religiocultural traditions of the Iberian Peninsula. My predecessor retired several years before I was hired and hadn't been teaching for several years before that; amongst the student population here, there is no institutional memory of the Middle Ages, however you want to define that, as a thing that happened in Spain. In other words, I knew this had to be a very introductory-level course. Even so, after the first couple of weeks it was clear that I was still pitching a little too high in terms of the background that students were missing.

To remedy the situation, I made an uncontroversial choice and added in relevant chapters from Richard Fletcher's useful if imperfect political history, Moorish Spain.

But I also asked my students to read Ornament of the World.

I explained to them why I had left it off the syllabus to begin with. Principally, this was because it is not a work of scholarship and so it really isn't designed or appropriate for a graduate seminar. But I also gave them the other reason why: Having been a student of its author, I have taken unusual flack from colleagues, most often in history, for being soft on the work. For wanting to defend it because its author was my teacher. For being incapable, because of that personal connection, of seeing it for the assault on history that it is. Not my words, of course.

One of the other scholars who was with me at the Katz Center last year took it upon herself to reeducate me about why the book was such a travesty after I suggested, during the opening session of the semester when we all attempted to stake out some common intellectual ground, that a caricature of Ornament's "culture of tolerance" was not necessarily what we needed to gird ourselves against because it wasn't a scholarly work, but was rather a book intended for a general audience of interested lay people.

She understood, she told me later that day in a kindergarten-teacher voice, that she must have hurt my feelings. I didn't tell her that I'd heard it all already. That I'd heard it all from my own professors at Yale, the author's own colleagues who referred to her (to undergraduates, mind you!) as "la que ve moros por todos lados" — the one who sees Moors everywhere she looks. That I'd heard it all from people with gripes about exile and with petty jealousies about publishing. In my co-fellow's mind I obviously couldn't be objective and needed to be made to see the light. After all, she told me, in a line of reasoning I still don't quite follow, people might read the book and cite it in their scholarly works and then it will become part of the scholarly narrative. I insisted then, as I do now, that if a historian or literary critic can't distinguish between a work of scholarship and a work of popular writing, that it is hardly the fault of the popular book. I voiced this objection and was met with a promise of examples of historians and classicists citing Ornament in their scholarship and a lunch date to discuss why this was such a big problem.

What I could never make this other fellow see was that my feelings had nothing to do with any of it. All of this came about because I had the temerity to suggest that we oughtn't decimate the book in a scholarly setting not because it is unassailable but because it is not a work of scholarship. It is a question of audience, a question of venue. Feelings have nothing to do with it. I bear my soul in my scholarship and it is deeply personal but my feelings are not at stake. Even so, this particular conversation managed to burrow deep under my skin, even as I came to have increasing reason to doubt this colleague's professional judgment. The only thing this other scholar — senior to me, a stranger to me — could see was one of Maria Rosa Menocal's students refusing to bash, without qualification, her book that was never intended for a scholarly audience and was always only a literary history, never a political one. Other scholars who dislike the work are often a bit more subtle than this colleague was, and for narrative and illustrative purposes, I suppose I'm lucky that her efforts were so blunt-edged. But the criticisms of the book and of the students is nothing unusual.

Because of where my realization about needing to backtrack and backfill and back form came in the course of the semester, we focused particularly on the chapter that compares the very literarily-informed biographies of the poet Judah Halevi and the mythologized Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, el Cid. Its major focus on the relationship between poetry and prose narrative cut straight to the heart of how I wanted to teach the relevant texts. And I asked the students to read a variety of primary sources from Halevi's life, as well as explicit and indirect critiques of Ornament's treatment of them. We talked about his reliance on Isma'ili terminology in his philosophical work even as he was rejecting the forms of Arabic poetry. We talked about the various exiles of various Arabophone Hebrew poets. I walked away feeling like I had made Halevi out to be a bad guy — but crucially, a very different kind of bad guy than the one Hillel Halkin accuses Menocal of making him to be and, equally crucially, not uniformly a bad guy. We talked in some detail about the cultural paradoxes that are the backbone and the highpoint of Ornament and the most often misread by its critics.

A culture of tolerance that means total interreligious respect and harmony is not the version of the narrative that I would want graduate students to come away from my class with; and it's not the version of the narrative that they'll come away with. (And if we're honest, it's not even the version of the narrative that's there in Ornament even if that's what people take away from it.) The kind of convivencia that obtains in my classroom is the kind where Jews, Christians and Muslims physically cohabit the same space, read the same kinds of books and interrogate their ideas in similar ways.That is also the convivencia of Menocal's more scholarly works, the graduate-level appropriate ones that I also had my students read and that are often ignored by these intellectually neo-conservative reeducators who would see us return to the grand nationalist narratives of Sánchez-Albornoz and Fanjul. But in terms of giving my students an overview of the material and orienting them towards a cultural-historical methodology deeply informed by literature, as my research methodology is and as my classes are, asking them to read Ornament worked really well. Our few class sessions since then have gone much smoother and the discussion has been more involved; and in a two-hour seminar with three non-specialist students, that's no small victory. Convivencia is not an all-or-nothing proposition.

To the naysayers: Naysay away.

My real mistake was letting them live on in my head for as long as I did and for not starting out the first week with Ornament as a useful if imperfect cornerstone.

#AmtrakResidency

Because having the better part of a week to sit on a long-distance train and do nothing but write sounds ideal, I applied for the new writers' residency program that Amtrak just launched. The application was pretty simple — in 2000 characters, address why you want one of the writers' residencies and how it will benefit you — so I knocked it out and sent it off. It's not exactly . From Twitter traffic on the #AmtrakResidency, it sounds like a zillion people are applying for the 24 spots, so I don't expect it'll work out, but it would be a nice treat, once I finish my book manuscript, to have time and space in such a congenial setting (I love train travel!) to work on the other project I have going — sporadically, out of necessity — on the side, a book for a more general audience.

This was my 2,000 (well, 1,973) characters' worth:

I would like to hold an Amtrak residency to complete a draft of a book in progress, tentatively entitled Empire’s Companion: How Reading Shaped the Conquest of the New World. This book will be a history of the books read by Spanish conquerors before they set off to the New World, and how the stories and ideas contained therein influenced their understanding of their own imperial project. These books included everything from works of fantasy, with descriptions of monsters and dragons that informed how Europeans saw the new species of birds, fish and mammals they encountered in the New World, to works of political theory that influenced the ways in which they treated the native American populations. This is a book intended for an audience of interested lay readers (i.e., not professional historians); and as a work of scholarship for the general public, I think that this project dovetails nicely with the public-intellectual goals of the Amtrak Residency program.

There are two main ways an Amtrak Residency would benefit my writing: 1) My project is about the conquest of a continent, and first-hand exposure to the sheer distances and changing landscapes across North America will give me some much-needed perspective on the scope of my subjects’ imperial undertaking. 2) Normally, I write mainly for an academic audience. This means frequent interruptions to the actual work of writing in order to check obscure references write detailed footnotes. This leads to a lot of jargon and minutiae not suitable for general readers. I have already done the bulk of the research for this book, and an Amtrak residency will help my writing by letting me do nothing but writing. By removing myself physically from my own personal library and my university library, I will be able to think solely about the craft of the prose and the narrative. I’ll have to go back and double-check references later, but the reader-friendly shape of the book will have already taken form.

Anatomy of a Rejection

(This is the coda to these two posts.)

The email began, "I'm afraid the news is not good..." and pretty much went downhill from there. The more I read, the more capricious the decision seemed.

Jewish Quarterly Review should have been a good fit for this article as a journal the covers many disciplines united by their treatment of Jewish material. And on top of that, it's also the place where the editio princeps of the poem I analyze in the article was published by Nehemia Allony; that is to say, there were historiographic reasons for my choosing that journal on top of all the others. I don't necessarily want to position myself in Jewish Studies, although many people would place my work there, but at the same time, because this is something that I wrote while I was at the Katz Center, giving their journal right of first refusal seemed like the right (and, to be fair, expedient) thing to do. I  just wasn't expecting them to exercise it quite so literally and refuse.

I'm not enraged over the article's rejection. I'm enraged because it seems to have been made on other-than-scholarly grounds. You might be thinking at this point that anybody would say this and that of course my own work is in my blind spot and maybe the article actually sucks and JQR was right to reject it; but one of my strengths is that I'm capable of reading my work pretty honestly and I do that. I've had one other outright article rejection, and in that case I had no qualms about it. I thought it was worth sending in because it was at a standard of work that that journal published, but it was definitely not as good as it could have been and certainly wasn't my best work. I submitted that article and just sort of hoped that nobody would notice its flaws. They did. And I was okay with that. But in this case? This is a good article. The documentation is meticulous and it offers a way to make sense of a poem that people have spent eighty years throwing their hands up in the air over. The people whose opinions I value, and who are honest with me about the quality of my work, think it's good. I know it's good. And yet I have this infernal, perplexing rejection letter.

As angry as I am, I didn't tear the letter up in pique, but rather in resignation. I had held out a fleeting hope, as I received the paper copy, that it would say something different than the email; of course it didn't, and I was foolishly disappointed anew.

That's not to say that I'm not angry. I did a lot of venting during that first week or so in real life, and it seems that everyone I've vented to has a story about JQR being capricious or taking forever to simply reject a piece or sending things out to inappropriate reviewers or generally being a den of nepotism. (Although oddly, in this case, I ought to have benefitted from the nepotism since, as I said, this is the in-house journal of the research institute where I was a fellow last year, a research institute where we all got a spiel about how much the journal likes to publish the work of former fellows. This, of course, then leads to a really destructive spiral of wondering how bad my work must really be if I couldn't even succeed when the deck would appear to have been stacked in my favor — not a rational or realistic way of thinking about things, but present nonetheless.)

When I'm done venting, and when I have the article accepted by a more suitable journal, I'm thinking that I might tone down what follows here, put it all together and send a sort of "anatomy of a rejection" to the dead letter series; I'm imagining it'll be something like The Lifespan of a Fact, a running gloss on the text and the reviewers' paratext. Realistically speaking, it'll probably not happen. For the meantime, anyway, if not posterity,  what follows the jump is, essentially, my review of one reviewer's final response to my article.

Anatomy of a Revise-and-Resubmit, parts II and III: Questions of Audience

Part II: Discipline and Disagreement

I used three of the four reviews of my original manuscript to greater and lesser degrees in revising it. I believe I know the identities of reviewers A and B because their writing has such a strong sense of voice about it and because the concerns expressed in their reviews were so specific to their own research. Reviewer B is the closest to the material and to the discipline, and so it is not surprising that reviewers A and C had some more basic questions about how I was reading the imagery in the poem. (The crotchety Reviewer C, who called my discussion about Dunash's wife and Deobrah "so much hot air" went as far as to say, in his perfected condescending tone, that he couldn't tell whether I was trying to write history or literary criticism, and essentially asked me to justify the value in interpreting poetry; it's possible that that's a valuable conversation to have, but at the same time, I think it's fair that an article that is a reading of a poem — even a thick-descriptive, New Historicist reading — should be able to assume as a first principle that need not be justified before getting started.) To try to address their concerns, I added a methodologies section that offers a basic overview of the concrete and metaphorical ways in which Arabic poetics uses jewelry and personal adornment imagery, like the imagery in Dunash's wife's poem.

In the end, Reviewer B was the only one who read the revised manuscript; and naturally, it was his considered opinion that the methodologies section "adds nothing" to the discussion. I'll be horrible and quote myself in an earlier post here when I say that "on the one hand, he was right. [And to be perfectly frank, I resented having to write an introductory overview of Arabic poetics for a research article, especially to placate a reader who wasn't necessarily prepared to be charitable about the value of reading and interpreting literary texts, but I also understand the value of contextualizing material for a more general academic audience and so I just did it.] But the other hand, working on the assumption that the readership of the journal would be as as disciplinarily varied as the cross-section of the reviewers, he's wrong. But either way, it was up to the editor to have made this clear" and not to have left me shooting at a moving target or writing for a shifting (or overly specialized) audience.

Part III: Expertise

In the introductory section of the article, I drew a comparison between how the secondary literature treats the Jewish, female poet writing in Hebrew who was the wife of a famous male poet and whose work was the focus of my research and how it treats a Jewish, female poet writing in Arabic who was the daughter of a famous male poet.

The mysterious fourth reviewer responded to this comparison with the admonition that "one must never speak of Jewish and Arab poets as though they are one and the same. This is clearly not the case."

I didn't even have to look at the review to quote from it; this comment is seared into my mind.

What, exactly, then, would this reviewer like me to do about the fact that Qasmuna was Jewish poet writing in Arabic? Or that Judah al-Harizi (a Jew, in case his name wasn't a dead giveaway) wrote poetry in Arabic? Or the three treatises I can think of quickly off the top of my head in which the authors explicitly write about the Arabic poetic meters they are using in their Hebrew poetry?

During this period in the Iberian Peninsula, there is no difference between Jewish and Arab poets; it is a false contrast that attempts to equate religion with language in a way that no poet and no reader from this period would recognize and that no modern reader can recognize if he or she reads the material honestly and without some modern Middle Eastern political agenda infused in his view of the Middle Ages. That Arabic and Judaism (or Christianity, for that matter) could be mutually exclusive is a mistake I do not allow my undergraduates to make without penalty.

This review betrayed an approach to the relationship between religious identity and language choice what was so quite frankly wrong — although I called it "different from mine" in my covering letter to the editor when I resubmitted my revised manuscript — that I have to wonder how and why he was allowed to review my work. I think, to her credit, the editor disregarded that review; although in light of the fact that the article was ultimately rejected and that one of the aspects that she cited in sort of justifying her decision was that the readers reacted strongly to it, I'll always wonder a little.

This was an audience I was never going to be able to please.

Anatomy of a Revise-and-Resubmit, part I: Writing While Female

I've just recently received word about the final disposition of an article I submitted for possible publication in the Jewish Quarterly Review: after an initial decision of revise-and-resubmit that led to some really major revision of the piece, the article was ultimately rejected. The process was flawed at every stage and doesn't inspire a huge amount of confidence in the value or merits of the double-blind peer review process as the sine qua non it is often thought to be. The next few posts will reflect upon the process.

***

Just for some brief contextual reference, here is the abstract that accompanied the article:

 Of thousands of poems written in Hebrew between the closure of the canon of the Hebrew Bible and the dawn of modernity, a single exemplar is identified as having been written by a woman. Modern scholarship concerning this poem has primarily been interested in it as a unique and curious artifact of a woman writer working in Hebrew. The present article will reconsider that poem in light of documents in the Cairo Genizah that deal, from a documentary perspective, with the same concerns and activities that the poet treats in verse, specifically the ways in which women supported themselves financially in the absence of their husbands. This study will argue that the work of the supposed Andalusi Hebrew poetess reflects economic and social realities faced by women in Muslim Spain and more broadly in the Mediterranean society documented in the Genizah. The exchange of personal effects between the woman depicted in the poem and her husband stands as a literary comparison for records of similar exchanges and calls for both a more historicized reading of Genizah poetry and for studies of this poem that move beyond the question of the poet’s gender.

***

As much as I wanted to ignore the question of authorship and all the attention paid to the poem because it might have been written by a woman, my methodology was, nevertheless, a little bit programatic in this respect. I was drawn, in large part, to this poem because I was really bothered by what, to me, seemed to be very condescending treatment of it and of its ostensible author in the very small amount of scholarship devoted to it. I mentioned this in the introduction to the article and offered a very brief intervention.

One of the anonymous reviewers put on his best condescending air in order to make the following comment on that section:

“So much hot air about a non-issue! It is true that Fleischer and Rosen say that there were no women poets in Hebrew since Deborah. No one made a “comparison” or “identification” with Deborah. To make an issue out of it is not to be able to discern what’s important and what’s unimportant.”

Actually, it’s not a non-issue, and here’s why, explained with text borrowed here from a footnote I added to the the article as I revised it:

“I think that it is important that when we speak about this poem we perhaps moderate more carefully the gendered language with which we describe Dūnash’s wife. For example, even though this poem is rarely given scholarly attention, when it is, some mention is always and invariably made to the gap in women’s Hebrew poetry between the biblical figure of Deborah, whose exploits are recounted in the so-called “song of Deborah” expressed in her literary voice in Judges 5 and the wife of Dūnash; the latter is described as the literary heir to the former, the heritor or lamplight or bastion of Hebrew verse ostensibly written by women. Although it has recently been suggested to me that this is never intended as a serious comparison between the two, it seems that the persistence of the juxtaposition of Deborah and Dunash’s wife ensures a certain, likewise persistent, flattening out of the distinctions between the very limited number of women authors and women’s voices in literature. Especially if the comparison is superfluous or unserious and serves no real purpose but could, rather than illuminate our understanding of the text have a deleterious effect on reading and interpreting it, I should think that it is an analogy best consigned, quite deliberately, to the literary-critical scrapheap; when the identification of the poet as a woman at all is in doubt, this is particularly important.”

Don't even get me started (and I didn't even try to address this in the article) that we in the field, both colloquially and in print, refer to the poet, known as the wife of a poet named Dunash ben Labrat as "Mrs. Dunash."

During my first year of graduate school, after a week on feminist theory in an introduction to theories and methodologies in the field course, I asked the professor what the expectations generally were for women scholars to do feminist scholarship or write on women authors. I did not, I told her in no uncertain terms, want to be pigeonholed as a “girl Arabist.” And she gave me this incredibly sensible, sensitive answer, which was to say that no, I definitely didn’t have to do feminist scholarship or write about women, although some people might occasionally ask me why. She continued that it was possible, though, that in the course of reading text in line with whatever critical schools of thought I might ultimately decide to be valid, I might, by virtue of being a “girl Arabist” (something I couldn’t ultimately do anything about being, she pointed out to me) notice things that a male colleague might overlook or that I might be sensitive to certain textual resonances by virtue of being a woman.

This is not to say that all women readers would all notice the same things, or even that all women readers are uniformly sensitive to the same elements of writing by or about women. (The aforementioned Rosen, after all, is also a woman.) But I think this is one of those cases where the critical status quo bothered me because of the complicated gender issues in the text and in the academy in a way that male colleagues — and I am only assuming that this anonymous reviewer is a man — can overlook and call a load of silly, dithering, girly hot air. Maybe being a girl Arabist isn’t such a bad thing in the end if it means getting to stick it to the guys who read carelessly because they can or because they fail to recognize a problem that doesn’t affect them.

There's no need for condescension; and it might even be worth giving authors the benefit of the doubt that they are, in fact, identifying a real problem. Seems to me that asking for clarification is preferable to dismissing the suggestion out of hand and more in keeping with the scholarly mission of the endeavor.

Setting the Field Ablaze

To Gift the Gift of Neologism

"Necessity," wrote Thomas Jefferson, "obliges us to neologize," thus defending the idea of a living language and also creating the meta-coinage to neologize.

Neologisms are a favorite whipping boy of linguistic prescriptivists, people who hold high the standard of a pretty frozen canonical sense of a language; and they bash people over the heads (usually only verbally) who suggest that usages that depart from this standard, rather than choosing to observe and describe language as it is actually used in a variety of contexts and registers, from the literary to the colloquial, and acknowledge the inherent grammaticality even of non-standard forms of a language. (It should be pretty clear which side I come down on.)

In the same way that stupid criminals and inept terrorists make me feel better about the state of the world, ignorant prescriptivists make me feel better about the state of thinking about language: they're dinosaurs paving the way to their own extinction. (Not to mix metaphors or anything. I mean, it's not like a T-Rex could use a cement mixer to pave anything with those tiny little arms.)

I've been cognizant of this phenomenon lately because I just submitted an article to a journal that contains several occurrences of a word that is not a neologism, but is rather a relatively new revival of a usage that dates back to Shakespeare's time; yet it is, nonetheless, a favorite rallying cry for prescriptivists without a sense of history: the verb to gift. People who dislike the word tend to single out Apple, in particular, for special scorn for verbalizing the noun gift in its iTunes user interface.

But they're sorely wrong, as the word is attested as a verb as early as the sixteenth century and commonly in the seventeenth.

The revival of the usage of gift as a verb in common parlance is almost definitely related to iTunes selecting it as the verb of choice to indicate the action of paying for music or videos to be sent to somebody else in the same way that Netflix is neatly responsible for the restoration of the word queue to the American English vernacular.

It's definitely not new, though.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

In Excess of a Punctuation Quota

This is a sentence in a book I am reading, punctuated as it appears:

"Some historians 'fake' a 'mood' and 'manhandle' a text to suit premeditated results."

The punctuation has completely derailed my focus from the subject at hand as I ponder the following:

• I can only assume that the copy editor was so frightened by the scare quotes that he left them alone.

• The chapter is about Arabic war poetry, but I think the sentence, decontextualized, could just about be submitted to the bad sex writing contest.

• Given the combined overuse of scare quotes and the general point being made, why did the author write about other historians' results rather than their "results"?

Anyway, if we find ourselves with a quotation mark shortage later in the year, you'll know what happened.

Reviewing Ad Hominem

I am reviewing an article for a journal and I am going to recommend against its publication. In spite of that, having been on the receiving end, recently, of a blind peer review report that was completely off-base as well as just nasty, and having been made aware of the pitfalls of reviewers trying to use the process to force their own agendas onto other scholars in ways that I don't consider appropriate, I am trying to parlay these experiences into writing a better review.

The process has definitely given me an appreciation for how easy it is to inadvertently fall into ad-hominem attacks against the author of the article, even if that isn't really what you mean to say.

So for example, where I had originally written, without really thinking about it:

"The author does not appear to have a comprehensive grasp on the panorama of [area of my subfield redacted to protect the innocent]."

I changed the text of my report to read:

"The article does not reflect a comprehensive picture of the breadth and variety of [redacted things in this area of my subfield]."

It's still critical and it's still, honestly, quite harsh. However, I'm not insulting the author by suggesting that s/he doesn't know the material; just that his/her knowledge, which I assume to exist by virtue of the fact that s/he is at the stage of submitting articles to peer-reviewed journals, is not reflected in this particular presentation of the material.

When I have received critiques of my work, I have found the detailed, critical, harsh ones that engage deeply and in detail with the work itself to be incredibly valuable; and I keep going back to them over and over again as I revise. But I find myself tuning out the ones that resort to ad hominem criticism. Even if it is an understandable rhetorical misstep on reviewers' parts, I think it's just a better use of everyone's time and intellectual resources to make a real effort to present critiques of work in ways that do not put their recipients on the defensive. 

A Good Bribe Gone Bad

I have two book reviews that are, at this point, seriously late. They may only be a little late by the standards of book review editors, who often have two-year-long queues of review backlog and appear not to really care when new reviews come in, but for my own comfort with deadlines and my desire to get things crossed off my to-do list, they are seriously late and need to get finished. By me.

So I brought both books to England with me with the promise that if I finished the reviews, I would allow myself the indulgence of mailing the books home rather than schlepping them along in my suitcase to Israel. It seemed a little like overkill but a bribe has to involve a real and desirable reward; and the promise of not having to lug two not insubstantial books — one a hardbound single-author monograph of typical length and the other softbound but a museum exhibition catalogue printed on luxuriously heavy paper — around with me seemed like a good one.

The only trouble is that it didn't work. In addition to my work in the libraries I came to visit, I have, with the exception of a few references that need checking when I get home, basically completed the last chapter of the book manuscript and written 1500 words of a 10k-word chapter for an edited collection that isn't due to the editors until February.

There's nothing like having less desirable tasks at hand to increase productivity. I guess I'll have to find some really unpleasant task to undertake that will make writing book reviews seem like the only thing worth doing.

Anybody have some stables that need mucking?

I'll Never be Worth $5.7 Million to Anybody

An article in today's New York Times headlined "NYU Gives Its Stars Loans for Summer Homes" has generated a lot of buzz in the twitterverse and blogosphere, as well as here on campus, where the topic has been the subject of some discussion for a while already. The article contains more details than I'd seen previously on the topic, including the $5.7 million loaned by the university to the dean of the law school to buy two homes, one in the city and one outside of it.

With the caveat that I'm sidestepping the real point of this article, which is about executive compensation in universities relative to other expenses (including faculty salaries and student financial aid packages) and about transparency in university spending, I found myself most preoccupied by the extent to which this article demonstrates that the university values us not for any merit inherent in our work but to the extent that other people or institutions value us. The article quotes a university spokesman as saying that "certain loans help retain faculty members who 'can easily pursue a financially rewarding professional career instead of choosing the path of university scholarship and teaching.'"

Let's concede that in an ideal world, intellectual endeavors would be valued on their own terms. But let's also concede that we don't live in an ideal world. Assume that in every other area of human activity, people are valued for what they produce and its market value, and that academics are valued for the opportunity costs they incur for being in the academy rather than plying their trade elsewhere. Professors in the law school are compensated on the basis of what they would earn as lawyers; engineering and physics professors earn salaries commensurate with engineers and physicists working for the space program or making sure that buildings don't collapse. And in the humanities? We have virtually nowhere else to go (and certainly nowhere higher-paying), so there are no astronomical salaries or glitzy perks to be matched.

To be sure, this is in large measure because American society, by and large, looks at pure knowledge, at history and literature, with disdain; there are all sorts of measures that indicate this. But to what extent have we in the humanities contributed to our own undervaluing? Have we hamstrung ourselves?

In the hard sciences and in law, not only do university faculty have other career options, but they also routinely do some work outside of the university walls: in consulting, in government, etc. In the humanities, though, when someone dares to write for a general audience — say, to try to explain that maybe there's something to be learned from the Middle Ages, or to tell a little bit of an early-modern Indiana Jones story that is simply going to grip people, fascinate them, and maybe, just maybe, make them want to learn more, read more and see more —a full-on Greek-tragic chorus rings out in condemnation and foreboding at the simplification and the dumbing down, even if that's not what's really happening. In contrast with the sciences and the legal academy, when scholars in the humanities work outside of the ivory tower, they often stop being taken seriously inside it. Is it any wonder we can't make a better argument for our own value, however true or just or right or self-evident that argument may indeed be?

I'm not even going to try to argue that it shouldn't be the case that we have to talk to "normal people" about what we're doing, to wring my hands and lament such extramural contact as a necessary, unfortunate side effect of the declining place of the humanities in the academy as well as in society at large. I don't actually think it's a bad thing. If we start making our work accessible to general audiences as well as to academic ones, everybody wins: These obscure, esoteric topics that we all believe in so passionately can interest and benefit a much wider range of people; and maybe as a side effect, we ourselves can become more valuable.