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.

***

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."

Avoiding Panic Through List-Making

As you may have gathered, I'm feeling a little overwhelmed on the verge of an all-out panic attack with what I have to accomplish this week. I am giving two talks (and am wasting a lot of energy being angry with myself for agreeing to one of them, which will be happening in between teaching my two classes on Monday, which is already a long day for me). My master to-do list is such a mess of my impossible handwriting, cross-outs, additions, and strange vector annotations that I'm just going to make a nice, clean, black-and-white list for myself for tomorrow and the rest of the week.

Must happen today:
[[Grade 16 8 4 3 2 1 freshman essays]]
GRADE ALL THE ESSAYS!
Prep freshman seminar (general plan done, just need to annotate texts for quick reference in discussion)*
Prep senior seminar
Finish writing Vanderbilt guest lecture (what was I thinking?!)*
Change the cat litter
Swim
Clean kitchen

*waking up early Tuesday to finish these.

Must happen this week:
Write Friday colloquium talk
Practice giving friday colloquium talk
Prepare spreadsheet for department budget committee meeting
Compile writing plan for writing group
Make work plan for fall break
Submit AOS abstract
File research account paperwork

Would be nice to have happen this week:
Read/translate Halevi's Risala on Arabic meters
Return to work on poetry/poetics book chapter
Finish medieval women for non-academic readers piece

Things that need to happen related to this week's work but don't necessarily need to be finished this week:
Transform colloquium talk into Gedenkschrift article (for a general medieval audience)
Polish book chapter related to colloquium talk for distribution to the Mediterranean Seminar (for a specialist medieval audience)
Grade seniors' essays


I'll leave making plans for the rest of the stuff encroaching in on me until Wednesday or Friday. Can only do so much at a time.

The Enemy of the Good

I suspect that in this profession we're all plagued by perfectionist tendencies. I know I am. It's what makes for good philology and for a reputation of being the sort of person with total, detailed command of a variety of archival sources. I'm good at what I do because I can put on the blinders and completely immerse myself in one thing until it's completed to my satisfaction.

And so even though my main focus is research rather than teaching, my basic personality is having a hard time letting go and just doing a good enough job on my teaching rather than shooting to do the ideal job. There's that old saying, "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good." That's my goal for grading this set of essays.

At Cornell, there is a really well-developed, well-thought-out freshman writing program with an intensive six-week course and hands-on practicum for the graduate students who teach in the program and a very detailed set of guidelines for how to grade and comment upon essays that includes making minimal annotations in the margins and a long narrative comment on separate paper that engages with the student's work in the same way (if not at the same level) one would engage with a colleague: discussion rather than prescription, guidance rather than correction, response rather than reaction. That's where I learned how to write really thoughtful assignments and how to comment effectively on the responses to those assignments. It's good and it works and it's super time intensive and I'm having a hard time letting it go.

But you know what? I'm giving two talks this week, including one on Monday between teaching my two classes. I have four — count 'em — articles all with deadlines before the end of the term. They would be totally manageable if I didn't also have to have a draft of the book finished by January in order to stay on schedule to get the book out in time for my tenure review. And if I try to write a page of comments on each of sixteen freshmen's papers, I'm not going to have a second left to write the talks for next week let alone even look at the book manuscript.

So this time, even though I know it's not as pedagogically sound as it could be, my students are going to get comments in the margins of their papers. They'll be thoughtful, but they'll also be mainly corrective. I'll aim for full-page narrative engagement next time. If I try for perfect, the grading isn't going to happen until after the next assignment is out, and that's a real failure. Good is what I can swing right now; perfect is going to have to wait.

Spam on Academia.edu

It took me a while to get used to academia.edu, especially to having random people I'd never met or who weren't even in my field following me, to the etiquette for following senior scholars, and to some of the inefficiencies of the internal search engine. Eventually I stopped having the reflex reaction of looking over my shoulder when I got an email that said that someone was following me; I even grew to like the statistics (although those have been offline more than not lately).

But a new issue has cropped up and I'm pretty unhappy with how they're handling it. I'm all of a sudden being followed by a very obviously fake profile: "Que Ball" from Amherst, MA. No academic affiliation. A few interests are listed that coincide with mine — it's tailored spam, but it's still spam. It's not following anybody else, and nobody is following it. Posted by one of those people who doesn't know the difference between cue, que, and queue. Honestly I'm equally weirded out by the possibilities that somebody is playing a joke on me or that such a level of spam sophistication has made it through onto academia.edu.

This is meant to be a professional site, and I think it looks really unprofessional and jokey to have such an obvious fake following me. Nothing happened in response to my flagging it as spam and as fake. (In fact, I wouldn't mind if other site users were also to flag it as fake; perhaps a critical mass will get their attention.) After I reported it manually by email,  some support person wrote back to me and said that there was no activity on the account; I wrote back to her saying that seemed like all the more reason to remove it as fake and mentioned how unprofessional I felt like it made my profile look by association.

To their credit, they wrote me back. Demerits for the answer, though:

"Due to privacy reasons, we cannot go into a user’s account and change his settings without justification. I apologize for the inconvenience, I understand that it must be frustrating to have an unwanted follower. We currently do not offer a way to block/ hide fake followers, but our team is brainstorming ways on how we can include this feature onto our platform!"

It seems to me that being so obviously fake (Que Ball?!) is a justification; what's the point of having a "report fake profile" option if it doesn't lead to anything being done? As for ways to allow users to block followers, fake or otherwise, the technology obviously exists: Facebook and Twitter both offer that option.* I could understand a professional site wanting to make it harder for users to block legitimate followers: it becomes a less useful service if, say, for example, some hot-shot full professor were to block all followers whom he deemed not worthy of his status. But there has to be a happy medium to allow users to "force-unfollow" obvious fakes.

It's not that big of a deal in the grand scheme, but it's also a bit more than frustrating. The fact that this is a professional site makes a difference. And as a young, new, female professor, professional image matters and I'm trying to keep mine as polished and as much in my control as possible.

I'm not like I'm asking them to dump an undergraduate off the site or somebody whose work I disagree with. I'm not even asking them to dump this fake person off the site; just to make him stop following me.

It's not enough for me to quit the site yet, because I do think it's useful. But I'm uncomfortable and unhappy about the situation, and, as somebody who is perfectly comfortable with creating a basic web site on her own with any number of digital publishing sites, it won't take much for me to find reason to leave, only use my own personal professional site, and keep track of the current research in my field on my own.

*ETA, 8:30 pm: As if to make my point for me, a Twitter account called @NYUhotties just started following me. Even though I tweet more informally, my account is related to my teaching and research life here at NYU and so it would be dramatically inappropriate for me to be anywhere near that account: not even not following it, but also having it not follow me. (Nevermind that it's gross and creepy and I wouldn't have wanted such tweeters following me regardless.) In two clicks, the problem was solved and I had blocked the account.

Today's (Art-Historical) Damage

Visited the Met today. Books were 20% off for members. Bought these. Now having them guarded by a fuzzy heraldic animal that is extremely pointy at five of six ends.

New York Multiculturalism

Hare Krishnas at the Chabad sukkah.

Paved Paradise and Put Up a Dorm

I don't walk down 12th St. between 4th and 3rd especially often, and I'd never noticed this building before today. It looks like NYU sliced the back off a church and put a dorm up in its place. This is just a quick snap from my iPhone; since it's an NYU dorm I didn't really feel comfortable going back and lurking around and taking pictures with a better camera. But here are some, along with an explanation of what happened. Turns out NYU sliced the back off a church to put a dorm.

This Post Brought to You by the Letters F, E, R, P & A

I carried out a very interesting thought exercise in the realm of low-level computational linguistics this morning while grading my students' first essays. Unfortunately, because I'm blogging under my own name and because my seminar is so small, saying anything at all about it could identify the student and place me in violation of FERPA (also just be a huge pedagogical misstep). So, here I am, thinking deep thoughts about writing and teaching, and all I can do is tease you about just how cool they are. There have only been a few moments when I've regretted the decision not to blog pseudonymously, but I think this is one of them.

Love, Literature and Lunacy

The most recent kerfuffle over gender and authorship has taken off now that David Gilmour, a Canadian novelist who teaches at the University of Toronto, explained that he only loves the writing of "serious heterosexual guys" enough to teach it.

Oh, except for Virgina Woolf, but she's just too confusing for undergraduates.

Forget for a moment the wrong-headedness and the literary insensitivity required to love only books written by straight men and to consider them the only "serious" ones. Forget about the completely uncritical categorization of literature as "serious" or not.

It was a damned stupid thing for him to say beyond all those reasons because of the blow it dealt to those of us who believe that love is and by rights should be a criterion in studying literature. Don't get me wrong. My teaching is critically rigorous; and I don't only teach works that I love. In fact, there's one major canonical medieval Spanish work (that shall remain unidentified) that I *hate* but I teach it anyway (and do a really good job of it) because it's the professionally responsible thing to do. Maybe professional irresponsibility is a luxury that can be afforded by a single individual who is one of several covering one linguistic-literary tradition from one general time period, but I'm still not sure (to put it mildly) that it's a good idea to take advantage of it.

I'm a scholar who shamelessly loves her poets and her translators. I'm also a teacher who sometimes begins class by asking students whether they liked what they read and using that as a point of entry into a more critically informed discussion. And perhaps paradoxically, I don't love literature uncritically.  The L-word is a bad one in certain critical circles; and I fear that by conflating love with shameless bias and ignorance, Mr. Gilmour has made it a bad one in even more.

ETA, 11pm: In response to Gilmour's claims that he was quoted out of context, the full transcript of the interview has been made available online. The man who claims to love only serious literature describes Chekhov as "cool."

Umayyad, Underwear, Upper Class...

This is a post to celebrate Banned Books Week. The most challenged book in America this year was a children's book called Captain Underpants. Because, you know, children might find out that people wear them. Turns out that people wore and wrote about remarkably similar ones in the Middle Ages.

From the index of Y. Stillman. Female Attire in Medieval Egypt. 1972.

Umayyad, underwear, upper class.

Even if you've decided to bear with me through the repetition of the end of the index of Yedida Stillman's (z"l) dissertation, you might already be thinking: This is going to be complete pants! But please let me explain why I've used the word "underwear" twice — no, thrice — already in this blog post; I promise I'll be brief.*

If you're looking, as I have been lately, to read about medieval outerwear in A Mediterranean Society, you'll find it in a chapter on clothing in volume IV, after several pages about, well, innerwear. And in perusing it, I have noticed that, perhaps without even realizing it, Goitein documents more than ten attestations of tighty-whities in the Genizah society.

Yep.  Just like Eli the fanatic would do from the pages of Philip Roth's fiction nearly a millennium later, tenth-century Cairene Jews wore BVDs. (So, yes, this is really more about Fatimid underpants rather than Umayyad undergarments.) 

Goitein writes:

"Only in a marriage contract from the little town of Damsis in the Nile Delta are the pants listed, but in Hebrew, as we would circumscribe "unmentionables" by writing the word in Latin. The price, half a dinar, was exceptionally high. As illustrations show, the underpants of working people were short and tight, those of the middle class and women longer and fluffy, but entirely different from the later Near Eastern breeches, sirwal, which were excessively wide in their upper part but corded up beneath the knee" (Med Soc. IV.ix.B.1, p. 162).

To parse this observation out, what is being described here is tenth-century tighty-whities, worn by members of the lower class, in contrast with more comfortable and luxurious underwear worn by women and men in the upper echelons of society. Goitein seems to be relying heavily on visual evidence here (citing Richard Ettinghausen, in particular), though I am dying of curiosity to know what Arabic word he had in mind when rendering "fluffy" in English; there are about ten documents that contain references to underpants that could be chased down for adjectives.

As a matter of historiography, I am deeply curious about the circumstances under which Goitein and other scholars of his generation would be writing about garments in English and then find themselves switching code in order to write the already-tamed unmentionables in Latin. I suspect that it was rather a different sensibility than the one that moves people to pull Captain Underpants from libraries. Nevertheless, call in the censors.

*I have never in my life so acutely felt the need for a snare drum and cymbal.

To Gift the Gift of Neologism

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's definitely not new, though.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

I'm Not Dead Yet!

I'm cognizant of the fact that I've not been updating much and that recent posts haven't been hugely content heavy. Beyond the usual start-of-term chaos, I'm chalking it up to my readjusting to the classroom after fifteen months on research leave and having to remember how to manage my research time while teaching, to the high holidays, and to a variety of personal nonsense. I have about five half-finished posts and a bunch of semi-academic books to review here, so this is just poking my head up above the water line with a brief plea to bear with me. I'm still here, and I'll get back to being interesting very soon!

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

Codicological Factoids

I spent all of last week at Stanford attending the Islamic Manuscript Association's Introduction to Islamic Codicology workshop, taught be the expert in the field. I would strongly recommend it to anyone with an interest in the subject matter. The approach of the course was largely taxonomic, but that meant that we worked systematically through all of the relevant technical vocabulary insofar as it is currently understood (read: a lot less well than for western European codicology).

It doesn't make for a hugely compelling post, but here are a few of the punchiest, pithiest factoids I gleaned:

• Arabic has a verb — zakhrafa — the base meaning of which is "to forge," but which can be used used more specifically to mean "to forge Qur'ān manuscripts in polychromatic ink."

• Kabīkaj is the jinn of papyrus, invoked at the beginning of copied codices to protect the book from insect damage.

• Opening supplications are often genre-specific formulae. For example, an astronomical text will begin by praising the God who created the heavens and earth, whereas Qur'ān commentaries will begin by praising the God who ennobled the reader with His book or who caused the truth to be known.

• "The best way to read a difficult passage is not to freak out."