South Park and Beowulf

I suppose this post is really a little off topic. But I found it so odd and striking that I had to share.

I'm reading an article by Gale Owen-Crocker titled "Horror in Beowulf: Mutilation, Decapitation, and the Unburied Dead" published in a festschrift for Don Scragg. In the midst of this article, making a point that having a decapitated head paraded around the hall would be a bit of a shocker for the audience within and without the poem, the author remarks on modern audiences' desensitization to such extreme violence. She then illustrates this point by citing the parody of such extreme violence and our immunization to it by referring to South Park and Kenny's frequent deaths by often horrific means. "Oh my God, they killed Kenny" and Grendel in the same sentence...if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn't have believed it.

Offprints Free to a Good Home

I don't know why journals give you hard copy off-prints anymore, instead of just PDFs. Anyway, in the process of straightening my office, I ran across a stack of old offprints of mine. If you want a hard-copy of either of the following, please send me an email with your mailing address and which one you'd want, and I'll be happy to pop one in the mail for you. First-come, first-served (until they're gone).

• “The Provenance of the Descriptio qualiter Karolus Magnus: Remembering the Carolingians at the Court of King Philip I (1060-1108) before the First Crusade,” Viator 39 (2008): 93-117.
  
• “Asleep at the Wheel? Apocalypticism, Messianism and Charlemagne’s Passivity in the Oxford Chanson de Roland,” Nottingham Medieval Studies 43 (2003): 46-72.
  

In fact, if anyone else has any offprints they'd like to get rid of, please feel free to add them to the comments section here with your contact information. Alternately, email me and I'll add them to the body of this post.

The Public Intellectual

The most recent Carnivalesque, over at Notorious Ph.D., has generously spotlighted an older post of mine on being/ trying to be a public intellectual. It even got picked up by a French history blog. Anyway, with the renewed interest (and site traffic), it seems an appropriate time to revisit some of the issues raised and see where we are.

Things like the coming blog forum on Judith Bennett's work (again, Notorious Ph.D.'s doing) give me hope. It's specialists sharing their specialized readings with a larger public. Sure, not everyone's going to read these types of posts (my own webtraffic, for instance, is rather meager) but some will, even if they stumble across the site totally by accident. But will they listen to us? Do our degrees -- by which I mean the expertise we've accumulated by studying theory and context and all that other good stuff -- matter? I said yes before and I stand by that in an objective sense but in what more realistic, inherently subjective sense do our degrees matter?

I raise this because I think this is a particular moment when academics ought be forceful in articulating their thoughts about ideas/ instances where their expertise is particularly appropriate. Despite what Stanley Fish has to say, this is what it really means to have a "free marketplace of ideas." People can think what they want, they can argue for it vigorously, but people should also know that there are good reasons that certain people think about things the way they do. Are Ph.D.'s always right? Well, I almost couldn't write that last question because it seems so laughable to me. Personally, I find teaching undergraduates extraordinarily rewarding because they approach things in fundamentally different ways than I do and force me to justify my ideas and oftentimes fundamentally rethink them. I wish there were more fora for these types of interactions, even outside the university's walls.

But I more wonder about your thoughts here -- especially the majority of you, who seem to find this site by (still) googling "medieval porn". Is there space in this country for public intellectuals? Does that (necessarily) mean graduate school? Does it mean something else?

Gatorade Gets Medieval

Thanks to In the Medieval Middle, we find Kevin Garnett and his intrepid band (including Derek Jeter, Jimmie Johnson, Usain Bolt, Misty May-Treanor, Keri Walsh, and Alicia Sacramone -- with cameos from Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Michael Jordan) traipsing across the Monty Python-esque landscape in their search for a new energy drink. Awesome.




PS -- Sorry for the short posts lately. More will be coming (hopefully) soon...

Medieval Answer to a 21st Century Problem?

Quite apart from the somewhat historical inaccuracies and assumptions, I nonetheless found today's political cartoon by Matt Bors humorous and thought I'd share:

http://www.mattbors.com/archives/489.html

Congress Program

The 2009 Congress Program is live and online! Spread the word:

http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/index.html