Week in Links (Another Dairy-Based Edition)

It cannot be in compliance with the health code to put Beatles in the meat balls.

Paul is Dead 

***

This is bad news for academic publishing, which is already not nearly as streamlined or good at its gatekeeping function as it would like to think itself to be. And frankly, I'd think that T&F might embrace the editors' suggestion of adopting an iTunes-type model for academic articles. 

Resignations Threat over Taylor&Francis Censorship

If academic publishing smells bad, at least books still smell good. Here is a chemical explanation of why:

What Causes the Smell of New and Old Books?

The back-and-forth about whether the binding of Harvard Houghton FC8.H8177.879dc (could they use a more inscrutable system for their shelfmarks?) does, in fact, represent an example of anthropodermic bibliopegy appears to have swung back:

Caveat Lecter

And a lovely tribute to independent bookstores of New York.

Literary prescriptivists are just about as bad as linguistic ones. While I agree with a premise that adults should be reading a wide variety of sophisticated books (and even this is not a hard and fast rule — ultimately, people should read what they like), I cannot abide an article that includes the sentences "Fellow grown-ups, at the risk of sounding snobbish and joyless and old, we are better than this" and "Books like The Westing Game and Tuck Everlasting provided some of the most intense reading experiences of my life. I have no urge to go back and re-read them, but those books helped turn me into the reader I am today. It’s just that today, I am a different reader." I reread the Westing Game a few years ago for the same reason I periodically reread the apparently more respectable Tender is the Night, and for the same reason that this author gives for not rereading young adult lit: because those are the books that made me the reader I am now. When I reread The Phantom Tollbooth as an adult, I realized how much of its raucous humor went straight over my head as a kid. Condemning adults reading children's literature doesn't only make you sound snobbish, joyless, and old; it makes you sound like a dreadful, unimaginative reader.

Adults Should Be Embarrassed to Read Children's Books

***

In Finland, PhD graduands receive a top hat and a cane. (Of course, what this means is that beyond just being a snappy dresser, Moomin Papa has a PhD!)

Academic traditions

Eight reasons why medievalists should use Twitter. I disagree pretty strongly with #2. On the tweeter's end, I've live-tweeted a couple of talks, and I find it to be a very distracting form of note-taking. When you're trying to edit down your tweet to 140 characters or figure out where to break a longer thought into two or three tweets, the talk keeps going on and you're not giving it your full attention. On the reader's end, I've only ever seen one live-tweeted talk that I thought was helpful. The person basically gave a topic sentence for each paragraph and didn't use a lot of abbreviations and jargon. Most live-tweeting, I find, is too stream-of-consciousness, too much like the tweeter's personal notes, to be useful to others; and it's awful clutter in a timeline. I've started muting or temporarily unfollowing people as they live tweet conferences. On the other hand, I'm completely on board with #5. That's my primary motivation for being a medievalist on Twitter.

#medievaltwitter revisited

***

< political rant >

This is about politics, but it's also about the culture of monolingualism in the US that treats anyone who seems foreign, broadly defined, as suspect: It's clear that the GOP machine is working the trade of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl hard for political points. It's also clear that there's a lot of unhappiness in the ranks over how the whole situation was handled from the beginning. (One retired officer, on the other hand, retorted by saying that even if he had wandered off alone when he was captured, it doesn't matter: "We rescue guys who have done stupid stuff all the time.") But somehow, getting other soldiers from his platoon to say that he was strange and didn't deserve to be rescued because he was studying critical languages doesn't strike me as being the right move. Really? You're trying to sell this as not being a monolingual, xenophobic, imperial war on Islam and you're going with: God, what a weirdo, trying to learn the local languages. He must have been a communist Muslim terrorist traitor?

“'He wouldn’t drink beer or eat barbecue and hang out with the other 20-year-olds,' Cody Full, another member of Sergeant Bergdahl’s platoon, said in an interview on Monday also arranged by Republican strategists. 'He was always in his bunk. He ordered Rosetta Stone for all the languages there, learning Dari and Arabic and Pashto.'”

Bergdahl's Vanishing Before His Capture Angered His Unit

< / political rant >

The blogger-train wreck I regularly read as though I needed some regular dose of aesthetic and cultural disgust — now that, and not the Chronicles of Narnia, is a reading choice to be ashamed of! — has finally written a post that gives some psychological insight into why the punchline of so many of her anecdotes is some variant on: "It's like an old Jew!" I still wish she would lay off it, though. A choice to become as offensive and artlessly bigoted as an oppressor makes the victim the same thing and to do so under the rhetorical guise of academic authority is gross:

Jews

The Week in Links (Free Frozen Yogurt for Naval Personnel Edition)

I wish I had something to contribute to the discussion about "trigger warnings" on syllabi. I don't, except to say that I think it's a terrible idea, especially as universities are starting to institute other kinds of restrictive speech and communication policies. Here are two people who do have something helpful to add, though:

Treatment, not Trigger Warnings

Trigger Warnings and the Novelist's Mind

On balancing intellectual and economic pressures in academic publishing:

A World Digital Library is Coming True!

More on rescuing the Timbuktu MSS:

The Book Rustlers of Timbuktu

Penn's Schoenberg Institute is posting video introductions to many of the objects in their collection:



Forget about the two-body problem. Some thoughts on the one-body problem:

Wandering Scholars in Search of Tenure and Love

The homage-to-Borges is a very dangerous genre. This example of it, though, is wonderful:

Adventures in the Branch Library of Babel

This is the tweet of the week. Nice to see a historian being open to some of the fluidities between historical and literary study and writing:

A lot of the ancient history written by academics is in fact closer to literary criticism (& I mean that as a compliment...)
— Tom Holland (@holland_tom) May 25, 2014

End of the Semester in Links

NYU's new broad and vague social media policy was unveiled on the same day as a Chronicle of Higher Ed. article about how the president of the university is increasing his social media presence in order to be more "relatable." I have an awful lot of opinions about the policy and about the unfortunate media-attention coincidence, and I'm really struggling with how much it is prudent and, crucially, permissible for me to say. I don't want to behave like a coward but I also don't want to risk my job.

NYU's New Electronic Communications Policy

#JSex is Ready to Cuddle

That said, there are aspects of the academic Twittersphere that I am, similarly, unhappy with right now, but I started to write a bit of a blurb here and it was becoming full-on, standalone post length, so I'll save that for another moment. Ultimately, though, it's not up to universities to regulate the ways in which scholars use social media; rather, these are conversations we should be free to have amongst ourselves.

***

Abandoned manuscript libraries in Mauritania:

The Lost Desert Libraries of Chinguetti

... and abandoned bookstores in New York City:

The Lost Booksellers of New York

Some collections try to make it impossible for the books to disappear:

Reading in Restraint: The Last of the Chained Libraries

... while others actively dump their books:

Colby College Sacks the Stacks

A Library Without Books?

***

This is a little too vague to really be compelling, but it raises an interesting issue:

On Not Normalizing Anti-Semitism in Medieval Studies

In further news of biases in academic work: I cannot fathom being a heritage student in a class taught by someone who could write in such an essentializing way about "Hispanics." Fancy a university telling her that she might not be effective in teaching said heritage students (and I don't think its about authority as a non-native speaker). Nor can I imagine that being a heritage student whose professor thinks she is, by virtue of her heritage, lazy with flashes of occasional brilliance would be much better than being a non-heritage student whose professor thinks she is, by virtue of her different heritage, a bit dim but a hard worker. This is a blogger who is periodically super offensive about Jewish people (claiming it's okay because she's "ethnically" Jewish) and who shamelessly bullies people who disagree with her. I should just stop reading but I keep at it because it's like a train wreck with a Yale PhD. Just can't look away.

***

Slate published a series of maps this week on language distribution in the US:

What Language Does Your State Speak?

I was a little surprised by a few aspects, including the claim that Tagalog was the widest-spread Asian language spoken in California, but I figured that the Bay Area, where Chinese dialects are prevalent, just must not be representative of the state as a whole. But, in fact, there were some errors an Asian-American think tank presented some correctives (with a lovely nod to Slate's recent odd genre of "you're doing it wrong" pieces):

Slate, You're Doing It Wrong

And just for good measure, here is a time-lapse historical map of Europe:

***

When this piece appeared, the post-ac blogger Rebecca Schuman performed an odd credit-taking rhetorical dance over at her site wherein she "passed the torch" of the anti-grad-school think-piece genre to this author; but this piece is really in a different league.  The author writes: "The library is capacious and well-stocked. The undergrads are smart, if uncurious, and generally work hard. This should have been an ideal setup. And yet graduate school has been a drag. This is because I allowed myself to get caught up in the banalities of professionalization, the most common feature of graduate education in the humanities."

Finishing School

And on the flip side of the quality spectrum in writing about the perils and pitfalls of graduate school, all I have to say about this is: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! (Well, that and the fact that the Guardian higher ed section seems to have lost its way quite badly. Here they are blaming the Babylonians for university lectures being so boring.)

Five Things Successful PhD Students Refuse To Do

***

"Night owls are more creative and smarter. Daylight-based schedules are a convention, and it takes a high IQ to think of a new way of structuring each day."

The Upside of Being a Night Owl

I'm definitely having my students read this in conjunction with "Death of the Author" the next time I teach it:

Famous Novelists on Symbolism in their Work and Whether it Was Intentional

Speaking of the relationship between authors, their intentions, and their texts, it's shocking to me that this lawsuit had the outcome it did, given the state of the study of the novel and our current understanding of the relationship between memoir and fiction. I guess it's true what they say about the law not keeping pace with intellectual life:

Fake Holocaust Memoirist Owes $22.5

An awesome resource for people interested in digital humanities and computational linguistics:

An Introductory Bibliography for Corpus Linguistics

***

Since it's been a while since I last did one of these, here are two favorite tweets from the time period covered:

Sir Leonard Woolley and T. E. Lawrence at Ur. #archaeology http://t.co/ZyTgDwCSYl pic.twitter.com/wyI2tm9pa4
— volkan (@arzawa) May 9, 2014

The first known person ever to use parish records to track mortality levels was the Spanish priest Sancho de Moncada, from Toledo, in 1619.
— Tom Holland (@holland_tom) May 12, 2014

The Week+in Links (Coming Up for Air Edition)

I'm still alive. I just have nothing to say right now. Here are some links in the meantime:

Other people might have known about this already, but I've only just found out about it — a site that lets you search Lane and Hans Wehr simultaneously. It's very spiffy.

Al-Mawrid Reader

A proposed alternative to blind peer review:

Origins of Courteous Review

***

Apparently there is a Moorish-revival palazzo in Italy. I require additional information about the restoration history of the building — was the painting an imaginative over-restoration in the 19th century as it was at the Alhambra? — and a trip to Tuscany:

Amazing Technicolor Castle

A scathing review of Arabic poetry in English:

Adonis, Mistranslated

Jewish medievalists on Twitter celebrate Passover by sharing links to illuminated Haggadah manuscripts. Here are a few that have been going around:

45 Hebrew Manuscripts Go Digital

The Prato Haggadah

Two museum exhibitions in New York are displaying art of Jews in the Islamic world:

Centuries of Judaica From Life and Rites in Muslim Lands

A colleague of mine is doing some interesting work on the incorporation of Arabic materials into chivalric romances in Spain, and is presenting it for a more general audience:

Boy Meets Girl...

***

It has been a couple of really bad years for my field, with really prominent people dying really young. Remie Constable will live on in the profession not only through her meticulous scholarship but because she edited the sourcebook we all use to teach undergraduates. I had the privilege of getting to know her a bit last year at the Katz Center, and she was just a lovely, generous senior colleague: 

In Memoriam: Olivia Remie Constable

***

The British Library has updated its 2011 guidelines about not wearing white gloves while handling manuscripts, though the upshot is still the same — don't — even if medieval scribes (like the one in MS Hunter 36) appear not to have followed that admonition.

White Gloves or Not?

***

Finally, the tweet of the Week+, because  I'm sure that I'm weird enough that if I had been a kid now rather than in the 80s, I would have been medicated into normalcy:

I will forever be grateful for being a child in the 1980s, when you could daydream and be strange without it being a disease.
— Sarah Kendzior (@sarahkendzior) April 13, 2014

The Week in Links (Bread and Salt Edition)

Jorge Luis Borges had a theory about camels. In his essay on the 1,001 Nights, he writes that the tales with camels are easily identifiable as the ones written not by Arab authors but by later French Orientalists since camels were such a part of daily life that they wouldn’t have been remarkable as details for the former but would have seemed to the latter like a good way to add a dash of authenticity. In short: The more camels in a text, the less authentic that text and the less proximate the author to that text. It turns out that the theory holds up with respect to temporal proximity as well as to geographic and cultural proximity: A new study suggests that camels had not yet been domesticated for human use when the events in the biblical book of Genesis are set. It’s a bit odd, though, the way the author of this report goes out of his way to assure, even with his tongue firmly planted in his cheek, readers that the veracity of domestic camels is plausible in the New Testament.

Camels Had No Business in Genesis

Nick Kristoff is criticizing academics for making ourselves too irrelevant to be productive in society. There’s certainly a segment of the population that fits the bill, but at the same time, a lot of the critique is unfair or off-base. In a lot of instances, when academics do speak up, people who are in positions to act on that knowledge and information just don’t listen. How many historians who cover all periods of Middle Eastern history spoke up before the recent invasions of Iraq and explained all the precedents for a failed assault? Nobody listened. I agree with a lot of what he says, particularly the deleterious effect of the pressure to speak to ever-shrinking circles of experts and getting picked apart for trying to write clearly and from a position of intellectual breadth. It’s something I’m slowly but surely trying to solve for myself (starting out with speaking to general audiences and the more recent advent of “medieval PSAs” and trying to figure out how to amplify the project and make it a bit more content-heavy). For lots of examples of academics who do engage  really seriously in public discourse, follow the Twitter hashtag #EngagedAcademics.

Professors, We Need You!

With all that said, as far as critiques of the involvement of intellectuals in public life, this is older but far more trenchant:

Writing Without Footnotes

And finally, John Green has begun a “crash course” series in literature.

This is going to be less useful than the world history series both because it’s mostly dealing with Anglo-American literature and because the framing and the answer to the central question of why we read isn’t actually all that great. There are a few gems, though: 1) The open letter to authorial intent; 2) This: “I’m not going to ask you to go symbol-hunting because reading is supposed to be a treasure map where you find symbols and write them down and then get an A in English class”; and 3) The use of “Marquez” and “Faulkner” as stand-ins for curse words.

Week in Links (The 'Polar Vortext' is a Freudian Slip Edition)

On biblioclasm and its aftermath:

On the Trail of a Dismembered Book

And the other end of the book history spectrum, from the same medievalist. Or, on disseminating Beowulf in 100 tweets:

Text Technologies: #Beow100

The Elegance of Beowulf in 100 Tweets

If we're tweeting texts, then it's only sensible to think about the medium in terms of manuscripts and marginalia:

#medievaltwitter

"The only way we'll really know anything about how scribes learned to write and copy is by building a time machine, but that is beyond the scope of this project."

lol my thesis

Medieval knitting:

Sutton Hoo helmet tea cosy

Coverage of a Yale English professor's death is appalling. The reporter invited student speculation on the decedent's personal life and a "biographically hortative" former townie with a chip on his shoulder is making it all about him in the comments thread. Whatever ultimately happened, a young guy is dead and it's tragic:

See's Death Meth-Induced

***

Two items in interfaith relations news.

Forget demographics. Onomastics is destiny:

The Trials and Hopes of of a Jordanian Muslim Named Yitzhak Rabin

Great image—click for full pic/context. MT @hadasakadasi An #interfaith prayer experience at @hkairport: pic.twitter.com/1IcwY4AgJS
— Tablet Magazine (@tabletmag) January 6, 2014

***

Spolia from the Great Mosque of Córdoba produce cartoonish shadows:

Love this! RT @mattgeraghty: Zoinks!!! Scooby Doo spotted in the shadows at the Met. @mattgeraghty @metmuseum pic.twitter.com/vELrNzseqI
— metmuseum (@metmuseum) January 7, 2014

***

I have only ever been to the MLA once. I'm never going again. I'm not even going to reproduce the headline here for the link. Also, be aware that this may not be safe for work.

***

And finally, back to where we started, with biblioclasm. Forget about the week in links. This is the week in libraries destroyed, by country. Notice what percentage of these libraries are not in an active war zone:

Canada

Lebanon (with efforts to rebuild the collection)

US of A

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland:

A sad day to be a Librarian - a stunning collection has left the Cathedral Library to who knows where #Mendham pic.twitter.com/Vc2ftce1Ol
— Karen Brayshaw (@KarenBrayshaw) January 2, 2014

#Mendham ...GONE... pic.twitter.com/byJ2lKUOLo
— Karen Brayshaw (@KarenBrayshaw) January 2, 2014

Clearly not enough people following Geoffrey Chaucer's advice:

How to promote libraryes? Yn steade of callinge somethinge awesome, calle yt 'a librarye.' As yn, 'whoah, that songe ys a librarye.'
— Chaucer Doth Tweet (@LeVostreGC) January 4, 2014

The Week in Links (1960s Remington Quiet-Riter Edition)

This looks like a hoot. So to speak. I want to visit before it closes:

Torah Animal World Museum in Brooklyn to Close Its Doors

I would fund this study:

On the Transfer of Skills Derived from Cat Ownership/Ownership by Cats to Academia

On some of the claims about the superlativity of Arabic:

Does Arabic have the most words? Don't believe the hype.

***

Nicholas Kristof wrote about why he's no longer going to be bylined as "Nicholas D. Kristof": "I think in the Internet age, the middle initial conveys a formality that is a bit of a barrier to our audience. It feels a bit ostentatious, even priggish. If my aim in my 20’s was gravitas, now I want to reach people and connect with them, and I wonder if the stuffiness of the middle initial isn’t a little off-putting." I have to admit that I like that writing and publishing with initials rather than my first name keeps a bit of distance between me and anyone who reads my work or is in touch with me professionally — and it does do that. But  he also points out that he (unlike me) isn't going to be confused with any other Nicholas Kristof:

What's Missing in My Byline?

Later in the day, he commented that more people had tweeted about his byline change than about the current state of child-trafficking in Haiti, the topic of his current reported columns and asked that anyone who tweeted about the former also tweet about the latter. So in that spirit:

A Girl's Escape

***

NPR did a story on Jewish food in Latin America, with links to some interesting cultural and culinary fusion blogs:

Cooing in a Latin-Jewish Melting Pot

Lime Chicken in Soup: A Mash-Up Tale
(This one includes the fabulously code-switchy phrase: "Ay, que balagán!")

Challa-peño

***

In the last few weeks, I wrote posts about some of the problems I saw in the two big conversations in the academic Twitterverse: the one on trying to deal with structural racism in the classroom (which I've since taken down for a variety of reasons, so no link) and the other on the job market and the general state of the academy. Now somebody has gone and combined the worst of both in one convenient post, conflating them in such a way that it's pretty much equal-opportunity offensive. One blogger even deemed it, already on the first of January, to be the the worst blog post that would appear all year:

How The Tenured are to the Job Market as White People are to Racism

To be fair, the blogger apologized within the day. One thing that surprised me about how this played out was that the response to this piece was not just a huge big internet dogpile of outrage. People calmly and rationally explained what was wrong with the post and explained relevant terms and concepts rather than dismissing the poster with a "go educate yourself." (I have to admit I didn't follow this kerfuffle intensively, so it's possible that this was happening in certain corners, but I didn't see it where I was looking.) But the fact of the matter is that if there was a tops recently that deserved to be piled on and written off it was this one and not, say, Claire Potter's piece on why internet outrage maybe isn't hugely productive (see links in last week's roundup). And yet here, there was civil, rational discourse, thus proving that I will never understand the vicissitudes of the hive-mind of the internet. It was big of the blogger to apologize and to do so in a non-weasely manner, and unqualified apologies should always be forthcoming when they are needed; but at the same time and with human nature being what it is, I suspect the fact that she wasn't mocked onto her back foot made it a bit easier to do that without resorting to defensiveness:

The Problem With My Analogy

Can I just mention that I find the use of tenured as a noun, especially in its plural form, as grating on my ears as when GOP shills use the word Democrat as an adjective? It's doing the same thing, too, namely attempting to delegitimize an opponent seen as powerful through curious grammatical subterfuge. See the blogger's comment of 12/31 at 12:55am for the offending usage:

The Post-Academic's Guide to Academic Professionalism

Anyway...

***

"Erickson's songs form a mini-cycle of medieval Arab poems from Spain's Andalusia region dating from 900 to 1100 AD. Their poets -- with lapidary names like Ibn Hazm, Al-Asad Ibrahim Ibn Billitah from Toledo, Yusf Ibn Harun Al-Remedi from Cordoba, and Bakr Al-Tartushi from Eastern Andalusia -- are near-lost identities from Islam's Golden Age. (Erickson told me in a later telephone conversation that he discovered the obscure texts in a used-book store.)"

My fellow Americans: Just because a poet from another time, place, or literary-linguistic tradition was unfamiliar to you doesn't mean that his work was lost and needed you to rediscover it:

Four Arab Love Songs

Rediscovering the Intricate Verse of Federico Garcia Lorca

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And this week on Twitter, medieval and modern mummery:

Mummers, Bodleian Library, Oxford #Medieval #marginalia #Mummers pic.twitter.com/th9J8zd9Y8
— Aine Foley (@AineMedievalDub) January 2, 2014

From the @AP: A civil rights group is protesting blackface comedy in Philadelphia's New Year's day parade.
— Today in 1963 (@todayin1963) December 31, 2013

Earlier, parade officials said they wouldn't award prizes to participants in blackface.
— Today in 1963 (@todayin1963) December 31, 2013

One city official said he wasn't sure if the city could prohibit blackface at Philadelphia's parade.
— Today in 1963 (@todayin1963) December 31, 2013

"We have no choice but to use our bodies to stop the parade," members of Philadelphia's chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality said.
— Today in 1963 (@todayin1963) December 31, 2013

Re the previous RT of @todayin1963, I was at the Mummers' Parade in Philly last year (http://t.co/KRMHAmv4E9 …) and it was so obvious (1/3)
— S.J. Pearce (@homophonous) December 31, 2013

that even now, the only reason people *weren't* performing in blackface was because it has finally been prohibited. Racial dynamics & (2/3)
— S.J. Pearce (@homophonous) December 31, 2013

pretty clear (de facto, but still) segregation were shocking. Literally a medieval tradition but also medieval in the colloquial sense.(3/3)
— S.J. Pearce (@homophonous) December 31, 2013

Week in Links (No Password Needed Edition)

Early modern crypto-Jews and art auctions. What could be bad?

Big Sell at Sotheby's for Painting of a Boy at the Center of Notorious Historical Case

***

"There's a basic question: is she more committed to improving the lives of adjuncts and unemployed PhDs, or to celebrating the demise of the old academic model and mocking those still trying to navigate within it?"

With the caveat that nobody deserves the kind of online harassment and abuse that Slate's new higher ed/post-ac columnist has received of late, the blog post that I've just quoted from precisely identifies the problem I see with her work:

If I can't love her, no one will

***

This is an old post, but was tweeted this week by one of the digital humanities folks I follow and is on a topic close to my heart at present:

Peer Review or Smear Review?

And another academia hobby horse of mine:

Whose Dissertation is it, Anyway?

Apparently medieval Arabic poetry is nearly lost and obscure if the countertenor currently performing their works set to music had never heard of them before coming across their work in  a used bookstore:

Four Arab Love Songs

Week in Links (Old Ironsides Edition)

Things may be different in mathematics and the sciences, but having been on the receiving end of a paper rejection because the reviewer just wasn't very excited about my article, all I can think is that this person is on a power trip and doing a colleague and their field a disservice.

"The paper does represent a huge amount of work, but other researchers would have probably done something more appealing with the data than the authors."

Your Paper is Really Boring

***

I really want this job. It is clearly covert ops masquerading as a librarianship:

Position Available: Private Library in Abu Dhabi

***

I have started watching Elementary because of this:

Solomon Ibn Gabirol was mentioned on the latest episode of Elementary.
— Shamma Boyarin (@ShammaBoyarin) December 8, 2013

I started at the beginning, although I suspect that might have been overkill as far as getting the Ibn Gabirol reference in its context. It's not very tightly written, but (with one notable exception so far) it's a great New York show, much of which is shot in my neighborhood. It's also inducing tremendous guilt as I think about how little Conan Doyle I've read.

***

Some reportage on a new tumblr on people of color in medieval art. An impressive project, although I do question the level of sophistication and depth of someone working on such a project who still refers to Spanish Muslims by the racially charged and imprecise term "moors." That's a layperson's mistake.

The Week in Links (Antibacterial Edition)

I've been laid up with pink-eye and some kind of Victorian-era respiratory infection, so this week it's going to be a short roundup.

The discussion of peer review continues over at Flavia's:

The Sorrows of Peer Review

***

"At this point, a crisis of conscience ensued. Should I hoof it off the library to see if I could track it down, or should I get on with finishing and fudge it a bit, with a reference to some website. You'll be pleased to know I decided on the library."

With emphasis on that excerpt, I'm going to share this column by Mary Beard with my freshmen tomorrow when I return their annotated bibliographies, some of which were excellent and some of which cited sources like www.history.com and www.spain.com.

Enoch Powell and the Chatty Barber

***

This is the top-books-of-2013 list that most and most-consistently appeals to me:

Best Books 2013: Slate Staff Picks

An interesting subject, but really not very good photographs:

Behind Closed Doors with the Women of Saudi Arabia

Whoa. That is all:

The Chalice that Helped Make Possible the Iran Nuclear Deal

And the Twitter conversation of the week, selected because they manage to touch simultaneously upon humorous manuscript marginalia *and* the vagaries of the peer review process:

"I spell it Chanukkah" said the red dragon, "Well I spell it Hanukah" said the blue: http://t.co/pxuBWio5XC (@BLAsia_Africa @BLMedieval)
— Shamma Boyarin (@ShammaBoyarin) November 28, 2013

@ShammaBoyarin I'm just wondering how these Britons and Saxons ended up in a Hebrew manuscript? @AdrienneBoyarin
— Sjoerd Levelt (@SjoerdLevelt) November 29, 2013

@SjoerdLevelt @AdrienneBoyarin I think this points to a lost Hebrew translation of Geoffrey of Monmouth. Want to co-publish our findings?
— Shamma Boyarin (@ShammaBoyarin) November 30, 2013

@ShammaBoyarin @AdrienneBoyarin Absolutely! (God knows more speculative Arthurian hypotheses have made it into press as if fact)
— Sjoerd Levelt (@SjoerdLevelt) November 30, 2013

The Week in Links (Victorian Sanitarium Edition)

There's medieval Arabic and Hebrew poetry like this:

Rap Song With Lyrics That Do Not Use the Letter E

This week in history: Somehow I never realized that both C.S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley died on the same day as JFK.

An Essay on Unseen Truth

This is very bad:

Damascus. Great Mosque. Façade of the Inner Courtyard Suffers Damage from a Shell

This may be cause for optimism:

Preserving the Iraqi Jewish Archive

And my favorite tweet this week:

Renaissance scholars need to understand that what they study is a part of the medieval period.
— Steffen Hope (@HopeSteffen) November 24, 2013

I often talk to Renaissance/Spanish Golden Age scholars as though they work on my same material because, as far as I'm concerned, the Middle Ages doesn't end until the very beginning of the seventeenth century, and every single time I am forced to remember anew that they don't see themselves as medievalists.

The Week in Links (Fear and Loathing in the Academy Edition)

I'm not sure whether I feel better or worse knowing that this sort of feeling doesn't seem to go away even as one progresses in one's career. But this is a really good post that captures some very familiar feelings and approaches (or lack thereof):

The Many Stages of Self-Loathing — I Mean Writing

And some practical tips. Although I have to say I really disagree with this column's position on who/whom. It is often very useful to have the oblique case marked.

10 Grammar Rules You Can Forget

This is irresponsible. If the author thinks that any given (or even most) of her students aren't qualified for what they are applying for or that she can't write them a good letter, then she shouldn't write for those individuals; but to blanket refuse to write letters because she doesn't approve of the program to which the students are applying is a deeply unfair power trip. My general feeling is that it's the place of recommenders to be supportive or unsupportive of their colleagues or students who are applying for things (jobs, fellowships, whatever) but not to dictate the trajectory of their careers by cherry-picking which applications they will or won't support.

Why I Stopped Writing Letters of Recommendation for Teach for America

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Katie Roiphe has written before about how having a PhD in literature made her a better journalist because it made her a better reader, and she proves it in this next link with a deft critical reading of the documents of the most recent academic sex scandal.

I've been lucky enough never to have been in a situation in which I could have become involved with one of my professors, and I'd like to think that even if I had, I'd be smart enough to walk away. But, too, the first great love affair of my life was an end-in-disaster dalliance with a senior colleague, though the disaster was of the personal, not the professional, and not at all to the same scale. Nevertheless I have good working knowledge of the murkinesses and fuzzy boundaries and ambivalences and contradictions that Roiphe talks about. On the basis of my own experience, this rings true:

"Colin’s description of Nicole is that she was “original, quirky, highly intelligent, strong willed.” He said, “It was impossible she was manipulated by me.” Ben’s description of her, on the other hand, is filled with stories of her weakened, anxious, often “bawling her eyes out,” of him stepping in, protective, outraged, and her vulnerable, injured. After I talk to both of them, it is hard to reconcile Colin’s Nicole with Ben’s Nicole. In the emails, however, you can read conflicting feelings. At times, she seems exuberant, clever, playful, eager, warm. At other times, she seems to be pulling back, apologizing, making excuses. Colin now says he did not see it, but a bright strand of ambivalence is clear in moments of stiffness, a return to formality, a psychic retreat. This is not surprising to me: a 26-year-old with a boyfriend, intrigued, flattered, weirdly drawn to a 61-year-old man, yet not wanting to go further, to enter a fully fledged sexual affair. Can one be attracted but wary, invested but anxious, warmly engaged but freaked out, intrigued but put off?"

The Philosopher and the Student

There has been some criticism of this reading as misogynistic and victim-blaming but I think that the paragraph I cited above really gets to the heart of it. This shows how she was the victim. She was Colin's Nicole and Ben's Nicole and never just Nicole; and she was in over her head even as there were intriguing or titillating elements in the lake that was drowning her. This paragraph in particular read sympathetic to me.

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Because this is at least nominally a medieval blog, here is a nice post on marginalia:

Life on the Edge

And for people who need to work on texts in non-Roman alphabets, these have been archived for use during the government shutdown:

Library of Congress Transliteration Tables

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And finally, an amusing hashtag to follow on Twitter this week is #IndianaJonesAcademicMovies for amusing if predictable puns like "Indiana Jones and the Graders of the Lost Ark" and "Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Archive" and then more amusing, less predictable and more non-sequiturious like "Indiana Jones and the Judicious Sprinkling of Compound German Nouns."

The Week in Links (Breakfast Edition)

I'm starting out with the very best link ever: An Arabic translation of Lewis Carroll's poem Jabberwocky. I hate to criticize, because it's fantastic, but the tradition of Arabic poetics is so rich and deep that I think that with a few tweaks, this could have been made even more impressive. That said, it still is worthy of best link ever status:

Jabberwocky in Arabic

Moving on from made-up Arabic, here is a brief post on region-specific reasons not to conflate Modern Standard and Classical Arabic:

Anachronistic Arabic in Algeria

In re: regional dialects, though in English, this is a really interesting quiz that measures the respondent's accent and usage against very narrow regional bands of English.  It's long, but very accurate (or completely fabricated and just using the data from my cookies). At the end, it asks you your current place of residence and the city where you grew up before giving a list of the five cities whose accent and dialectal features most resemble your own.  My top two were given as New York, NY and Stamford, CT. It's eerie because I listed San Francisco, CA as my childhood home — in other words, New York and San Francisco were the only two geographic data points that the quiz had about me — but I was born in Stamford and lived there until I was 10 years old. Some of the questions did make me wonder about the extent to which the quiz was measuring for class as much as for region, but I'd have to read the documentation to be sure.

Full Dialect Quiz and Survey

Short Dialect Quiz and Survey

From computational linguistics to computational literature. I don't believe it's the end-all and be-all, but I do think it can yield some interesting results, especially for understudied corpora:

Computational Linguistics an Literary Scholarship

O, German existentialists! The Americans you have to worry about are not the ones who have embargoed PhD dissertations, but the ones who invent their PhD out of whole cloth and have no dissertation, embargoed or otherwise:

Why Care About the O'Bagy Affair?

Jonathan Franzen is preciously horrified that writers he previously respected might deign to use Twitter. Not directly in response, Mary Beard explains its value:

What's Wrong with the Modern World?

Why Tweet?

The fact of the matter is, nobody's writing schedule/system/approach (and that includes medium-stakes writing and thinking and decompression time!) looks like anybody else's. For example, I blog in the morning because it helps getting the juices going, while for many people I know, that would represent a waste of their most productive time of the day.  I love Peter Ackroyd's books, and there's something about his writing schedule that makes me reassured about my own:

Peter Ackroyd's London Calling

The Week in Links (The I Hope I Have Something Interesting To Say in this Space Soon Edition)

I've been saying pretty much since my first entry into it that the peer review process is really badly broken. Here's an unusually frank discussion of a really concrete breakdown in that process:

Reviewing JDH Roundup

This is a web exhibition put together by last year's Katz Center fellows with objects from the Penn library collections. The exhibition is about as weird as the group of fellows was. (I say that mostly affectionately):

Thirteenth-Century Entanglements

And an interesting post on a lone Algerian Isagoge manuscript:

Isagoge

From medieval in Algeria to medievalism in present-day Cairo:

Back to School, Cairo 2013: A Return to the Politics of Fear?

"I'm not saying Palin is fluent in the language, but she did use the Arabic word "Allah." She could've simply used the word "God" instead of Allah since it has the identical meaning. (Christian Arabs use the word Allah when speaking of God in Arabic.) I think deep down she wanted to show off her language skills.But Palin went with the Arabic. Why? Because I think deep down she loves the language. And I bet Palin knows even more Arabic words such as humus, falafel and possibly babaganoush."

This is a good article that touches upon two issues: Why it is inappropriate to substitute the word "Allah" to talk about God in Islamic contexts; and the possible medieval origins of the phrase "kill them all and let God sort it out."

Sarah Palin's Offensive Remarks About Syria

In the wake of a recent sex scandal in the world of academic philosophy (and sadly, hardly the only recent sex scandal involving older male professors and younger female graduate students) the New York Times has published five pieces about women in philosophy. Since Arabic and Islamic Studies is still a pretty male-dominated field that sees some of the venerable fathers of the discipline wondering aloud whether women can be competent Arabists, these are of particular interest to me:

Women in Philosophy? Do the Math

What's Wrong with Philosophy?

The Disappearing Women

Academia's Fog of Male Anxiety

The Double Bind

And sadly, the last of a breed has died in New Haven:

Typewriter Stalwart Dies at 96

Week in Links (The 'These Lingonberry-Flavored Meatballs are Not Halal' Edition)

It takes some serious balls, and not in a good way, for a graduate student to write a review like this. The author's response follows, and as an example of the author-response genre, which is usually never good even when the review is egregious, it's not half bad.

The Experience of Beauty in the Middle Ages

This is a really interesting look at some of the very the complex religious and linguistic issues that were raised when a judge in Tennessee forcibly changed a boy's name from Messiah to Martin, ruling that "“The word ‘Messiah’ is a title, and it’s a title that has only been earned by one person and that one person is Jesus Christ.” Of particular interest to me are the First Amendment questions and the use of Hebrew theophoric elements in Spanish names.

In God's Name

How cool that there's a Hebrew-language bilingual academy opening in Harlem! The article, though, made me a bit sad with its interview of a prospective parent who commented, oh-so-ahistorically that "African-Americans and Jews, it seems like a world apart, but we are pretty much the same." The affinity is well and good, but the neglect of the historic 20th-century relationship between many African-American and Jewish communities shows how quickly we all forget.

Hebrew — In Harlem It's Not Just for Jews Anymore

Sometimes Slate publishes really interesting material and sometimes they completely fall flat. This week they managed the latter. The headline of this map is actually as it appears below, and a series of caveats appears in response to the asterisk.  I looked at the map before I read the caveats and wondered why a whole bunch of Indian Ocean islands that are documented in Genizah and other medieval Arabic trade sources were listed as having been unknown to humans before the European Age of Exploration. And then I noticed that one of the footnotes excepted Arab seafaring merchants from the category of humans. The concept for the infographic was great and potentially really interesting but the execution pretty poor.

Actual European Discoveries: Land Unknown to Humans* Before the Age of Exploration.

And, because you always hear about interesting things while at parties with lots of overeducated nerds. It's not news this week except to me — just about twenty years old, in fact — but apparently there are some German historians who think that the seventh through tenth centuries never happened but rather were a vast conspiracy cooked up by the Catholic Church, and that we are actually now in the year 1716:

The Phantom Time Hypothesis

Also not news, but sent to me by a colleague when I mentioned that Nazis had blown up my books:

Books for Victory