A Personal Cartography of Cordoba

Surprises aside, this was a brilliant place to teach.

We got off the bus in Córdoba a week ago today just in time for lunch. The itinerary gave students an hour and a half before we would meet in the patio of the orange trees just  outside the Great Mosque where, the itinerary said, they would be required to take audio-guides as they walked through the cathedral. And so when my colleague asked me if I had given thought to what route I would take the students on through the cathedral, I answered her that I thought I would leave them to their audio guides and just make sure that I visible at several key points on the walk through to answer any questions they might have.

Turns out that the term "audio-guide" does not mean the same thing in Cordoba as it does in Madrid. This wasn't a false-friends situation in which I assumed a definition for a Spanish word on the basis of an English counterpart; the "audio-guías" at the Prado Museum and even at the Alhambra are exactly the same as you find anywhere else; the audio guides in the Great Mosque of Cordoba are just a speaker system so that a guide can address her group through a microphone and headphones without having to shout and disrupt the quiet and the sanctity of the space. "You are," my colleague said, "the audio-guide."

 Fortunately, even though I haven't been there in fully a decade it's a space I know quite well and whose history I know quite well. It's still the first time I've taken students there, though, and so my colleague drew me a map to show me how she walks students through and what she thinks is important to tell them and what seems like an excess for intro-level students.

This map, drawn for me alone, is the very best souvenir of Cordoba. It's going up in a small frame in my office when I get back.

It speaks, I think, to the very individual ways in which any of us relates to a monument. This is a description of the Great Mosque of Cordoba by a medievalist for another medievalist that reflects the intimacy with which we both know the space. It speaks to the Mosque as a site for teaching as much as it is for anything else for anyone else who might have been there on that day or any other day in the past.

Mostly we think of maps as being for people who are lost. This one says not how much I needed to be told how to make my way through the space, but how much I didn't need to be told; not how much I needed it, but how much I did not.

Even where you might be able to read this map as a way to walk through the space, unless you are its intended reader (me) or one of the few other people in this world with her intellectual and professional profile you can't see where it says "tell them about the flying buttresses" or where it says that al-Hakam II was vain caliph with no sense of political expediency or where it explains how much more advanced engineering was in the tenth century than in the ninth, or the eighth, or in Rome. You might or might not know how many times this space has been consecrated and reconsecrated in the name of competing visions of the same God; I see it written here in ink. Personalized, this is a map through history and ideology as much as it is through space.

Titus Burkhardt described the Great Mosque of Cordoba as a forest of mathematics and history. This isn't the map that could have saved any Little Red Riding Hood walking through it, but it did save me.

The paradox of this map is its explanation of its own innecessity. And the one who can understand it will understand.

Pass (Part III)

Part I is here and Part II is here.

I attended a public magnet high school in San Francisco that, while I was a student there, was just coming out from under federal supervision — a consent decree that had been in place since the year I was born — because the school’s population was considered to be insufficiently diverse: too many Chinese and Chinese-American students, the Northern California circuit of the United States District Court had ruled. Despite the federal supervision and an admissions scheme that required different test scores for students of different racial and ethnic groups, the plurality of the student body was still Chinese-American.

Lowell was a relatively comfortable place for me. After a miserable four years in a private middle school full of new money and a false, forced doctrine of multiculturalism that paid lip service to celebrating other cultures and made tokens out of the one black kid, the one Asian kid, the one Jewish kid in each class, I suddenly inhabited a world where I didn’t get mocked for — forget about not having — not caring about designer clothes and not going on outlandish ski vacations, and where being smart wasn’t bad or even all that exceptional. I still didn’t find myself in the default position, but it wasn’t uncomfortable. I remember that there was the occasional indignity or insult, but they were so minor that fifteen years on, I don’t even remember the details. It wasn’t always a walk in the park — it was high school, after all — but most of the fights I had were about editing the school newspaper rather than race.

Linguistically I was well on the outside, though I learned enough to at least be able to be polite. One of my classmates whose parents spoke limited English taught some of us who were her friends how to ask for her on the phone so that when we called her house we didn’t just have to shout: “Cynthia? Cynthia!” into the receiver at her mom and dad. I may not know how to do anything in Cantonese once I get Cynthia on the phone, and I wouldn’t even be able to understand if the answer were something along the lines of her not being there and might I want to leave a message, but I do at least know how to ask that the phone please be passed to her: “Mm-goi Cynthia tieng denwa?”

And when anyone in the media or from outside of Lowell would write or say anything negative about Chinese-Americans as a group or when parents of some of the white kids would go on about how there were just too many Asian kids who were making the environment of academic competition intolerable, I would start to feel not just angry but defensive, reflexively thinking: “Those are my people you’re talking about!” Even though, of course, they really weren’t. Maybe the most extreme example of that perspective came on a very early college-visit trip I made to the Washington University in St. Louis. I came through Kansas City, and when I stepped off the plane and into the airport, my panicked reaction was: “There are all these white people here. I bet I totally stick out.” It took me a few minutes to realize that I was the only one there who would ever think to peg me as Asian rather than white. I may have been so comfortable in my majority Chinese-American high school that I was (and still sometimes am) uncomfortable in a veritable sea of white people, but I also recognize that in most of the country, it’s a privilege that I’m the only one who knows that. At the same time, my experience in my particular, cosmopolitan corner of the world means that I don’t take the privilege of invisibility for granted on the occasions that I do have it, as I did at a distance from the crowd in the Kansas City airport. I can step out into the wider world and disappear, but I also know what it’s like to stick out, both in reality and in my own imagination.

In my professional life I have come across a startling number of people in my pretty obscure, pretty narrow academic field of study who were also products, if not of Lowell then of the San Francisco Unified School District. One of my other colleagues — senior, well-liked and respected, widely published, and a graduate of Washington High School, the school I would have attended had I not gone to Lowell — who suggested that it was something about that environment that had primed us to study religious, cultural and language contact in the medieval Mediterranean basin, something about those cosmopolitan grungy, badly-lit hallways and centralized clock systems that never worked right, those transcendent red terry gym shorts, the native hybridity sprung up in the classrooms that were too cold in the mornings and too warm all October, something from there that called us inexorably to the Med. The way she put it was this: There are lots of languages around you, some of which you understand and some of which you don’t, and that’s okay. It scales up: There are a bunch of cultural modes at play, all of which you can participate in and draw upon to lesser and greater extents without it being appropriation because the presence of different cultural paradigms is simply the mode in which everyone operates: You’re no longer responding to being in the minority or the majority, but living in a microcosm that, if never perfectly, draws upon all.

Convivencia is a term that has become a hot potato in my field. Literally it just means the state of living together and, at its core, describes readership and other cultural practices where there is significant overlap amongst Jews, Christians, and Muslims, specifically in Spain. But, largely through a deliberate collective scholarly misreading of a popular book that restricts itself to cross-cultural literary contacts, the term is viewed as an intellectual crutch, signifying a sort of happy-go-lucky kumbaya attitude in which members of the three Abrahamic faiths respected and enjoyed each other’s religious traditions and ushered in a Middle Ages in which people weren’t running around killing each other willy-nilly for God or territory. But that’s not what it is at all; I like to think of it more along the lines of people from different religious traditions reading the same kinds of things and asking the same kinds of questions, not so much in parallel but because they are living and practicing their religions within a single multivalent culture.

But to those of us who grew up like that, an honest reading of convivencia makes good, visceral sense. Even though they were East Asian rather than Mediterranean languages that surrounded us, the kind of community that one finds in San Francisco, especially in the public schools, is what made convivencia not a theoretical term, not something that needs explication or qualification, but simply what I believe it to be: a local, natively hybrid mode of cultural production. It simply is what it is; and I am lost in the textual places, be they the Twitterverse or a student research paper, where it is otherwise. 

Pass (Part II)

Part I is here. Just a heads up: This post quotes from a play that uses the f-word. I've reproduced it intact in the quotation.

***

Jews as white folk? This is where the terminology becomes problematic because it conflates religion and race, although that’s really a separate matter that deserves its own post. But this terminology also attempts to inextricably conflates race with power, implying that just because I look European-ish I am a part of the power structure. The idea that whiteness is the proxy for power reminds me of the scene in Angels in America when Roy Cohn, the fictional alter ego of the eponymous man who tried the Rosenbergs and pulled the strings at HUAC, explains that he’s not gay even though he sleeps with men because he’s also powerful:

“Your problem, Henry, is that you are hung up on words. On labels. "Gay", "homosexual", "lesbian"; you think they tell you who a person sleeps with, but they don't tell you that. Like all labels, they refer to one thing and one thing only: Where does a person so identified fit in the food chain? In the pecking order. Not ideology or sexual taste, but something much simpler — clout. Who owes me favors. Not who I fuck or who fucks me, but who will pick up the phone when I call. To someone who doesn't understand this, homosexual is what I am because I sleep with men, but this is wrong. Homosexuals are not men who sleep with other men. Homosexuals are men who, in 15 years of trying, can't get a pissant anti-discrimination bill through City Council. They are men who know nobody, and who nobody knows. Now, Henry, does that sound like me?... Roy Cohn is not a homosexual. Roy Cohn is a heterosexual man who fucks around with guys.” (Tony Kushner, Angels in America)

Heterosexual as powerful, white as powerful, those careless substitutions are harmful all around, I think. To describe "bad feminists" with the term "white feminists" racializes social evil even in spite of all the caveats that one can be white and a feminist and not be a "white feminist." It conflates an oppressed class with an eternally, existentially, definitionally powerless one. If white is a proxy for power, then nobody else can ever even aspire to have it. The converse is just as harmful: witness a recent blog post (relevant because tenure and race have become conflated in what Another Damned Medievalist has termed the “winter privilege wars”) in which the author was given the pseudonym “Adjunct Nate” in spite of his not being an adjunct because he “has solidarity.” It ends the conversation before it begins it because nobody who isn’t an adjunct (or an honorary one, as determined by whom?) can possibly be on the “right” side or have anything productive to say. The terminology becomes pernicious destiny.

What’s more, in terms of facilitating a broader conversation in which those “white folks” begin to behave and discuss in more productive ways, then railing rightly against a warped system or structure by making broad claims about white folk is going to put a lot of white folk on the back foot. And sure, an ideal reaction would be for those people to take themselves out of it and not to react by saying, well, I’m not like that! I know this probably puts me in the bad or useless ally category, but I see it simply as realistic. (And frankly, given that the standard-bearer of what constitutes a good ally has herself just been caught out making fun of interracial families, perhaps the absolute authoritativeness of her opinions in such matters and her poetics of discourse ought to be revisited.)

Defensiveness is going to be a suboptimal but natural and not uncommon reaction; and it seems that it would be better all around to have both a more precise discussion and one that allows more people to participate. I know that critical race theory has moved beyond this, that conversations about being a good ally are done and dusted, but I’m not sure they should be. There’s something deeply twisted about ADM feeling that she has to write, in the post linked above: “I don’t want anybody to think I think like that.” I don’t want anybody to think I think like that either; in other words, don’t assume that I’m one thing intellectually or in my approach to the world because I'm in your category of white people.

The idea that being allied or supportive or just a basic not-bad person requires simply taking everything that’s dished out, and that there’s only one correct way to have these conversations, and that white people should be shouted down and should be shut out for even asking questions; to my mind, activism and education go hand in hand. It’s not a question of understanding or approving but simply of being practical and realistic. I’ll put the nail in my own coffin and quote Claire Potter, who has been demonized as an arch-conservative (which, I think, says something more about the academy at large than it does about her): “Allies don’t let allies make excuses; they push for better analysis.”

Anything short of that is a Catch-22 in that it forces people to say, oh, I’m not that kind of white person, I don’t think like that, which is also an unacceptable thing to say:

The Twitterverse is sweeping a spokesman and her movement on its shoulders as its current hero-darling. It’s a popular message that it’s easy for people to get on board with unquestioningly. It makes me want to exercise my prerogative as a medievalist and disconnect from the web. I know exactly what criticisms I’m going to receive for saying what I’ve said here, and I realize it may be stupid for me to post this now, when I don’t have time to play along or argue back because I’m trying to finish a book project. But I think it’s worth being a little critical before adopting and heralding and celebrating a subtly-but-deeply flawed message of justice.*

The twin rhetorical techniques of piling on and shouting down is just a long winded, cathartic way of saying: Get out. (And I know that saying this opens me to charges of “tone policing.” Go ahead. I’ll wait.) But two cases where other academics were trying to think through structural issues this winter are perfect counterpoints that illustrate the problem. Claire Potter, quoted above, is a prominent academic blogger who wrote about the extent to which internet rage is or isn’t a productive response to the sorry state of the academy; and the raging internet didn’t hesitate in proving her point by piling on, heavy-handedly shouting down, ad hominem attacks, and frivolously declaring victory. Karen Kelsky, who blogs job market and professional advice, tried to tie that broader discussion of the horrifying state of the academic hiring to the ongoing discussion on Twitter amongst activists and academics about racism, structural and otherwise. She wrote an exceptionally offensive post in which she completely appropriated and minimized the conversation on race by comparing white people to tenured professors in the way that they take advantage of a system that is rigged in their favor. And oddly, despite how so clearly offensive it was, the web response, at least where I was looking, wasn’t so much unbridled rage but rather explanations about why different people found every aspect of the post problematic; and the blogger listened and apologized in a genuine and unqualified way.  It was obviously really big of her to apologize straight-up with no rhetorical curlicues or contortions. But I suspect that the fact that there hadn’t been a great piling on, that people explained what they found problematic or offensive about her argument, and encouraged her to read specific things to educate herself more, that all of that made it easier to apologize than it might have been from a beaten-down position.

Am I making this about me? Yeah, I am. And that’s because I’m thinking about this from my own perspective as someone who wishes she had done a better job in handling an issue of structural racism that came up in her classroom, as someone who is still trying to work out how to balance her pastoral role against her pedagogical one. I’m thinking through it in the way I know how to think through things — by writing about them, by reading, by talking to other people. I don’t really want to participate in the discourse that I have found, though; but I suspect that’s ideal because I’m smart enough to know that in so many ways I’m not welcome there.

For the most part, this just makes me want to stay farther away from the corner of the Twitterverse I have begun to inhabit; it has stopped being useful and interesting and has become more like distracting, hurtful background noise. There are more examples and problems I’d like to draw in, but this has already gotten quite long, so I’ll stop here with this: I went online, I found a relevant discussion that wasn’t going to be productive. I couldn’t join in and I couldn’t even just plain quietly walk away without being rendered some other kind of caricature:

There was never a way in; but even for a bystander looking in from the outside there is also no way out.

***

Pass (Part I)

I’ve been futzing around with versions of this post since the very beginning of December, since I read the first draft of a student research paper that spoke more to modern day race and class privilege than to anything about the Middle Ages and did so in a way that, at least as far as teaching goes, was new and challenging for me to know how to approach. What you’re reading now has been up and down and up and down on and off the blog in two major forms with some tweaks since then. I’m calling this the final version although, as I tell my students, there’s no such thing as a final draft. This probably isn’t the totality of what I want to say or the best way I could articulate it. It’s certainly not extensively researched since all of my research energy is pointed firmly at those same Middle Ages that my student so skillfully managed to ignore. Writing that sentence feels funny, too, since I don’t normally encourage a firm division between modern and medieval, having been the student of medievalists of the sort who firmly consider Salman Rushdie to be part of their purview and who wouldn’t do but keep close tabs on the modern goings-on in the regions whose histories they write. I guess I’m struggling with time management in all sorts of ways.

“Give it to me in narrative form,” one of those medievalists used to say, when I would get ahead of myself. So here goes:

This all began while reading, as I said, a first draft of a student research paper. I had to start out by explaining that Benzion Netanyahu was definitely not the same person as Benjamin Netanyahu, and while yes, his conservative politics may have influenced his historian’s judgment, it had very little to do with the premiership of Israel. And in any case, you ought to know what you’re in for when Netanyahu is the most reliable source on a bibliography. Ultimately, using the argument from the web site of a Holocaust-denying Catholic priest as its backbone — you’d be forgiven for thinking that I hadn’t spent parts of several class sessions or given handouts and detailed instructions on how to critically analyze secondary source material — the paper argued that the lesson of the Spanish Inquisition was that racial and religious minorities, including African-Americans whose voting rights had been curtailed and Muslims who had become the targets of everything from surveillance to violence in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, should understand that these restrictions and worse came into being because the people in power just feel really threatened by them, and that the onus of that fear lies on those minorities to understand that.

I honestly don’t think that my student is a racist in the conventional sense of the word. I think that it was in some kind of earnest, unexamined sympathy that she was trying to argue that everything from the Inquisition that nobody ever expects to civil rights violations in New York City in the 21^st century aren’t actually justified but are based on irrational fear; but it doesn't really make much of a difference. I tell my students to avoid the intentional fallacy in reading texts, and I'm not going to make it in reading theirs.

The thing is that I took the coward’s way out. When I was a college student, I detested professors who injected modern politics into unrelated class discussions. I didn’t want everything to boil down to George W. Bush or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or — no, those were the two main things — even if I agreed with them on at least one and a half of those issues. I don’t want to be one of those professors who goes off on tangents because she’s sure she’s right. When I talk about the modern world in my classroom or in my office, it’s because we are talking about Adonis’ appropriation of the petty kingdoms of al-Andalus as a metaphor in his poetry or because Salman Rushdie is firmly a part of my brief. I mostly don’t want to go near anything that isn’t firmly grounded in text, and all the moreso with students. And so I didn’t try to explain to my student that no, it’s not the responsibility of African-American voters to understand that the power structure feels threatened that they might effect change and it’s not up to any Muslim in America to suborn the fear that his religion might inspire in the mind of the bigot. I told the student to take all the references to the modern world out of her paper on the Spanish Middle Ages, and in doing so, I failed as a teacher and as a human being. I don’t believe that the modern should be pulled out of the medieval. And I think that this kind of pernicious, unlearned, pervasive attitude about the relationship between the majority culture and minorities is so clearly wrong that there’s no debate in whether or not I should address it or whether I am right; but I am equally certain that someone bashing George W. Bush in the classroom believed the issue to be as clear-cut and obvious and with only one right answer and I didn’t want to risk becoming that professor.

I did write a blog post about the whole issue though, and went into a little bit more detail because it happened to be during the brief interstice when this space was password-protected and restricted to people I know in real life and have gotten to know reasonably well online; it was always FERPA-compliant but it went into greater specificity than I was comfortable doing for a general audience. Even this is probably too much; the student could recognize her paper if she were ever to come across this, even though nobody else can.

By coincidence, a tweeter I had started following a few weeks earlier because of some very on-the-nose observations she made on anxiety in graduate school and the academy, weighed in on what is more her main topic of writing an activism in a way that was very relevant to what I was thinking about:

That was exactly what I had been wondering, and more specifically, wondering about how to address it in the classroom. I almost retweeted the remark before realizing that it was the opening salvo in a jeremiad against white folks that I just wasn’t comfortable participating in, including these two:

I was trying to figure out how to attend to this particular problem, but I definitionally needed to figure it out first. Obviously these comments weren't personal, but they also marked thinking about this issue (and thinking about it in the way that I usually think through things, by writing) as something that I oughtn’t do because I’d never do it right.  And there’s a lot wrong with that: Even if this sort of discourse pigeonholes me as white folk, I don’t fit in as neatly as the theorists and the activists who rely on their work might like; the terminology perpetuates the problem; and this line of rhetoric disregards both human nature and the fact of cosmopolitan enclaves that treat the whole issue of race and culture in a completely different and incompatible mode. There’s a lot there. This is going to end up being a three-parter.

Critical race theory says that I’m a white person. And if you don’t look too carefully or talk to me, I can be pretty invisible in lots of parts of the United States, though as a friend who grew up partly in the American South pointed out to me, I’d never pass, even visually, there. I know that the extent to which I can pass is a privilege, whatever its limitations. But I’m also Jewish, and in spite of several scholarly arguments to the contrary, my lived experience as an American Jew makes me pretty definitively not a white person in the way the term is used as a critical category.

The fact that this part of the Twitter conversation could include a remark in which someone, mocking Jewish people who try to insert themselves into the right side of the debate, could do so with a caricature whine that would be unthinkable to pour into the mouth of any other minority group: “What about the JEEEEWWWWS?!” suggests to me an othering that negates the “whiteness” it tries to impart. (I unfortunately don’t have a screenshot of this one because at that point I was so disgusted that I figured I’d never write about this; if I remembered the exact number of Es and Ws, I might have a better time locating it through Google or the Way Back Machine, but alas.)

I’m white-looking enough that I can mostly pass, except to the little old Russian ladies on the bus or in the copy shop or at the airport who register that we have something phenotypically in common and start jabbering away to me in Russian, refusing to believe my protestations that I simply can’t understand them. Because even though I consider myself fully American, even though I’ve never been to Russia and (clearly) don’t speak the language, there is something — my cheekbones? my hairline? — that marks me to coteries of little babushkas as being as foreign as they are.

I’m white-looking enough but a college roommate still told me that I didn’t “look American.” That I looked more exotic, like a “European beauty” — I know that must sound like I’m satirizing, cartoonish as it is, but I’m quoting what I suppose was meant as a compliment.

I may look white at first glance and may have much privilege that results, but I still have to negotiate how to respond to a “you people” speech from a U.S. Customs official when I (a U.S. citizen, by the way, only and always) returned from giving an academic talk in Israel and, having been awake at that point for close to 36 hours, made a mistake in filling out my customs and immigration form. I have to figure out how to tell someone I consider a close friend (and apparently I have defaulted to the inadvertently passive-aggressive mention in a blog post method) that describing someone as “Jewish” isn’t at all offensive, actually, but then backpedaling (that even believing that she needed to backpedal) by saying “no offense, but I could tell by his nose” is super offensive and tied in with all kinds of murderous historical stereotypes. I don't want to have to trot out a litany of insults, but even though I may look white at first glance, and even though critical theory may declare that I am white, it’s 2014 and I still have to talk about the extent to which I can or can’t pass in mainstream American society.

And then there is the Gestalt, the famed immigrant mentality that has never really died out. I am a fourth-generation American. I had the luxury of knowing that my parents were mostly kidding when I brought home tests with high scores and they would ask: “So, nu? A 97? What happened to the last 3 points?” But they still asked. And I also knew just as readily that when my grandparents were asking that question, they were mostly not kidding; and I know this because I grew up hearing, over and over again, the story about how my grandfather’s older brother participated in a prestigious medical training program in the Air Force, the top ten graduates of which were guaranteed a spot in an equally prestigious civilian medical school, with the promise that they would continue to serve once they finished their education; and the year that my great-uncle Arthur graduated tops from that program, the medical school slots went to graduates #2-#11, Christians all of them. We still had to be the very best because even that would never, ever be a guarantee. I know that I attended Yale within a generation of the Jewish men who had managed to gain admission despite the explicit quotas that imposed upon them higher expectations and lower possibilities of success; and to a one, at least among the ones I know, they were permanently warped by that environment. Every time some pundit comments on how the Jews control Hollywood or the economy or the news media, I am reminded of how tenuous whatever gains we have made remain. I have spent my life not belonging anywhere I have found myself. That’s partly a different story, but it’s also partly because however much I might see myself as a Jewish American, the world sees me as an American Jew. Jews may have some "access to whiteness" — sometimes good access, even — but we’re definitely not white folks.

The Nabokov Genizah

 Bury.

That is what was supposed to happen to a thousand years of documents written in Hebrew characters and hidden away in a room, a genizah, until they were rediscovered by European scholars in the nineteenth century. They were never removed to the Basatin Cemetery for interment and survived in that room until they would become, in the nineteenth century, the single most important source for biblical and para-biblical study, and even moreso for the history and literature of Jews living in the Islamicate Mediterranean and, some argue, for that wider Muslim society as well.

Efface.

Expunge.

Erase.

Delete.

Rub Out.

Wipe Out.

Obliterate. 

All those things were supposed to happen to the index cards, the hand-written fragments, containing the last novel written by Vladimir Nabokov and left unfinished at the time of his death. The list of instructions still exists in his own hand. Like their thousand-year-old counterparts, his cards did not meet their fate.

Instead, they appeared in print.

A book that appears between boards offers the promise of a completed work, if not a coherent narrative. The challenges that it may throw down before the reader usually do not include the very technical aspects of reading. The Original of Laura defies the promises of its outward form, though, and it becomes as much a contemplation of the shape of text and the value of fragments as much as anything else; certainly it is that more than a novel. That old aphorism about not judging a book by its cover is wholly in play here. The novel is unfinished, but the book is not just about the novel. Rather, it is about forms of writing.

The hardcover edition of the book yields one more way of experiencing the text: The index cards are perforated and punch out of the book, leaving a stack of reproduced handwritten cards next to a book whose pages have eight lines of printed text beneath an empty frame with a view all the way to the back cover. The book achieves a wide audience in a form that, usually, definitionally is limited to a single solitary reader at a time. It universalizes and popularizes manuscript reading.

About a third of the way through the reading The Original of Laura, I realized that I was thinking about reading a novel at eight lines to a page: about speed and about prose-poetry and about fonts. I was thinking about Nabokov's handwriting, about the subtle changes in script that dying brings about, a microcosm of the changes wrought over a person's life, from learning to write the letters to owning a consistent and reproducible signature: the paleographic equivalent of a man's life flashing before his eyes. What I was not thinking about, indeed, what I could not have told you about at all, was what the story was about. I had a vague sense of the characters but not of a plot, even the sketchiest outline or faintest sense of where it all was going.

I have a vague sense that the fragmentary nature of the work complements (coincidentally, by nature) the content of the work. A text that can write about "identifying her with an unwritten, half-written, rewritten difficult book..." But that mostly got lost in the technical aspects of reading it through the first and second times.

I will have to read the book again before being able to write about how the text relates to its context, but for now it is the form and the act of reading it are what interest me.

I found myself struggling, at first, to read the cards penciled-in in the hand of a dying man, but soon I found myself reading in stereo in a manner that will be familiar to anyone who has read a manuscript with an edition of the text close at hand: First reading the hand-written and casting the occasional eye down at the print, but soon reversing their positions, mostly reading the print and glancing up at the manuscript. The only way to really read is to take the edition away: to choose one or the other.

Fighting the physical form of the text and becoming so fixated upon the words and the shape of the words that the very existence of a bigger picture — well, there is no bigger picture. There is something that the reader absorbs by reading in this way and by pulling back in tiny increments until the reminder of that bigger picture hits her like a shockwave; the details are all there, impressed in her mind, and the result is simultaneously panoramic and high-definition.

And finally, there is the question of the disposition, the thing that both The Original of Laura and the Genizah cache are best remembered for.

Yet ultimately, neither was meant to be destroyed. Transfer to the cemetery stopped by the twelfth century, if not earlier. And Nabokov's son, Dimitri, writes: "The lesser minds among the hordes of letter writers that were to descend upon me would affirm that if an artist wishes to destroy a work of his that he has deemed imperfect or incomplete, he should logically proceed to do so neatly and providently ahead of time. These sages forget, though, that Nabokov did not desire to burn the Original of Laura willy-nilly, but to live on for the last few card lengths needed to finish at least a complete draft."

And so we read them together. In this crossing of intention and memory, the secular approaches the sacred and the modern the medieval.

Joining the Ranks of the Popularizers and Hybridizers

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool. —T.S. Eliot, The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock

At the infamous roundtable at the start of the year, the one where we came to the inescapable conclusion that while there is lots of interesting stuff happening in various parts of the worlds at various times that include the years 1198-1304, ultimately the thirteenth century, the theme for the year, is not a valid critical category, one of the fellows took a gratuitous swipe at the vision of the middle ages presented in a book that was written for a general audience and has become popular for teaching undergraduates and recommending to interested lay readers. Without defending the book or its author, I suggested that perhaps that book and its overarching themes didn't belong in a scholarly conversation amongst social, intellectual and material historians and scholars of literature and mysticism working from the middle of the twelfth century well into the fifteenth with no common research language and spanning the earth from the Islamic world through Ashkenaz, all struggling to figure out the terms of an academic conversation meant to last a full year.

Lewis and Lawrence on Stage and Screen

In the last few weeks I've seen two theatrical productions that were related closely to the history of religions: the film Lawrence of Arabia and a stage adaptation of C.S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters.

Lawrence is one of my favorite movies, but it's been an age since I've seen it. I've always wanted to see it on the big screen, so it was a real treat to do so when it was re-released for the 50th anniversary. It took a while to get used to the aesthetic because even though the film was digitally remastered, the definition is unchanged and is much grainier than contemporary movies; after a while, though, I wasn't even noticing it. I walked away this time feeling much less sympathetic for Lawrence, at least the Lawrence who is the protagonist of the film, if not for the flesh-and-blood historical figure.  It left me wondering about hubris and foresight. I've read parts of Seven Pillars and Lawrence's dissertation on the Krak des Chevaliers but I came away from the movie deciding it was time to read some biographies, as well. I've started with one called Lawrence and Aaronsohn; it's so far not doing much to make me more sympathetic to Lawrence than I had been feeling. I want to write more about this at a later date, once I've had a chance to think more thoroughly about some of the bigger issues.

***

I love C.S. Lewis' writing on Christianity and on the Middle Ages, and so I was thrilled, albeit briefly, to be able to see this stage adaptation of The Screwtape Letters. That is, I was thrilled until the curtain went up. The set design was over the top, the actor seemed not to be in control of his body or his voice, and the imagination of the character Toadpipe was far more Tolkien than Lewis, as if the production team had thrown all of the Oxford-based medievalist/fantasy writers into a hat and pulled something out at random. I think that the theater company's goal of making Christian art more widely accessible and opening dialogue between religious and secular people is admirable, but to do it at the cost of the art reinforces the stereotypes it is trying to break down. I found myself thinking, "Well, at least the text is good," and then catching myself. Of course the text was good!

In Defense of Strange Hispanists (A First Attempt)

Edited to add: I was hired by a Spanish department, so it should go without saying that what I'm describing here isn't the case across the board. But it's certainly the norm.

It shouldn't be as easy as it is for me to get complacent about my place in at least two broadly-defined fields; but every time I have to stand up and defend myself and my intellectual work and its place within the academy, I find myself dismayed and newly surprised. I'm comfortable with the precarious position of the object of my study because taken on its own terms, it's not precarious or odd or contrived at all. It is so correct to look at text and history in the way that I do that I sometimes forget that to interlocutors whose view of the intellectual landscape is shaped by the contours of the modern university or by historical narratives that — for the sake of convenience or nationalism or laziness or a thousand other things — choose (or are unable even to choose) to set aside parts of the panorama even the most basic, central aspects of my work seem marginal or irrelevant. I have been so fortunate in finding kindred spirits everywhere I've landed that it's easy to forget that most people out there aren't.

I joke sometimes that I'm the odd-duck Arabist in the back corner of the Spanish department, but I'm still surprised when it turns out that I can be viewed, in all seriousness, in just that way. In truth, though, I'm a Hispanist. A strange Hispanist, to be sure, but a Hispanist nonetheless.

It turns out that there is such a thing as a stupid question, and I'm sick of being asked them: "Have you actually read the Poema de mio Cid?" or "Do you actually believe that Don Quijote is the translation of an Arabic manuscript?" A question like the first, that incredulously wants to make sure that I'm in some way credentialed according to a traditional curriculum belies the questioner's own intellectual provincialism; just because he doesn't see value in learning about Iberia's intellectual heritage doesn't mean that my view is similarly limited in the other direction. I work primarily with Arabic and Hebrew texts, but I'm well aware of the places they intersect and converse with Romance language texts because I don't section off material along either linguistic or modern-national lines. (And yes, I have read and taught the Poema de mio Cid. I have lost count of how many times I have read it, in fact.) As for a question like the second, I don't know what to do with it. How does one even answer that? No, because I'm not an idiot? No, because I know what fiction is? No, and there's nobody on the face of planet earth who thinks that; why would you even ask? It's the sort of question that I'm sure, one day, if it's ever posed to me again, will get me into serious trouble; I have a very black sense of humor and deadpan delivery, and I'd be sorely tempted to say: "Of course. I've worked with the original manuscript in the BNE."

This is a difficult topic to write about in the abstract, but the deflated state of the question requires that to a certain extent. In the early days of the field, there was really an opposite position to argue against: You were a partisan of Américo Castro or of Claudio Sánchez Albornóz. You believed in the Reconquista or you didn't. Instead, today it's more a question of dealing regularly with folks who have kind of grudgingly accepted that the Arabic material is relevant but think that signing up for one seminar in graduate school will qualify them to teach the Andalusi material and make them really super appealing to search committees far and wide. It's a question of dealing with the petty jealousies and resentments of those who think that dilettantism is the answer to all their problems, the ones who think that a semester or two of Arabic will serve them well rather than make them more foolish and intellectually dangerous to themselves and others.

Not every medievalist who works on the Iberian peninsula needs to work on the Arabic material, though. There is lots of room to do good, interesting scholarship on the Romance language materials and contexts. And what's more, I predict that the Hispanists of the more traditional ilk who will have the best success aren't the ones who, grumbling, attempt to do my thing and do it badly or half-cocked, but rather are the ones who do their thing and do it really, really well. Normal Hispanists and I agree on one thing: We both hate that my particular sub-discipline has become trendy. They hate it because they're not just left out of what's scholarly on trend but are in fact linguistically locked out, and I hate it because I end up having to deal with people like them, who approach my material not because it's fascinating and wonderful, but rather out of resentment, jealousy, anger and a sense of obligation, because they want in on the trend. I do sort of wonder what's going to happen when, in a few years, the Andalusi material isn't sexy anymore, and those of us who actually work on it are still laboring away, quietly, in the trenches on a really important piece of the history and literature. Will the normal and the trend-driven simply move onto the next thing? If a major theoretical work comes out about striped trousers, will all the discourse suddenly have to do with whether we can understand a line of text to mean that the Cid wore striped trousers? Where does that leave whatever it is that they are passionate about? Are they passionate about or interested in anything at all? Or are they more taken with the idea of being a literary critic? What is the value in that?

It is a question of corralling the people — even and especially the ones who really do know better — who think that the study of Spain should be limited to Spain and explaining that I can't afford the luxury of ignoring Cairo and even if I could, I also don't see ignoring Cairo as a luxury or a methodologically desirably outcome. It doesn't mean that I don't principally and wholly work on the literature of Iberia. Through contact with the Cairene community, a lot of Andalusi material ended up in the eastern Mediterranean, which thus becomes an important context for understanding that Andalusi material. Why would I want to leave out a cipher that can help me make better sense of what I work on? I wouldn't. It's worth remembering, too that the modern world itself, the one that bounds the Peninsula as though any medieval writer would understand such a boundary, couldn't keep Egypt and Spain as far apart as anyone would like.

In truth, I feel like I'm getting it from all sides, a little bit.

Yes, I am a Hispanist, even though I work with sources that are not all written in an incipient Ibero-Romance or Castilian or Spanish — or a Romance or Indo-European language at all. I'm a Hispanist even though some of my best sources ended up in Cairo during the Middle Ages, nevermind the ones that ended up in France, Israel, the United Kingdom and the United States in modernity. This thing that we now call Spain had a wide reach back then. If it sounds like I'm tilting at windmills — See? I can allude to the canonical of the canonical, too — then that's good; that's exactly what I want. I want this kind of defense or apologia to seem redundant and self-evident to everyone who reads it. But it doesn't yet. And until then, I'll just keep saying it: I belong, and I am right.