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cruising in the ruins: the question of disciplinarity in the post/medieval university 2nd Biennial Meeting BABEL Working Group 20-22 September 2012
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cruising in the ruins: the question of disciplinarity in the post/medieval university BABEL Working Group, 2012. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commerical-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit: http://creative commons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0. This work is Open Access, which means that you are free to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work, and you may also adapt and remix the work, as long as you clearly attribute the work to the authors, that you make the terms of this Creative Commons license clear, and that you do not use this work for commercial gain in any form whatsoever. That is what the Creative Commons legalese tells you. BABEL encourages you to do whatever you want to do with this work, as long as it advances the general well-being of anyone or anything at all, including yourself, an aardvark, or a coffee cup, and everything and anything else you can think of. Turn this book into a trim sports jacket, use it to shelter a pigeon with a broken wing or to prop up a broken table, convert its lines into heroic couplets and read it aloud on street corners for nickels and dimes from kind passers-by, do not swat but shoo flies with it, cover it with marginalia and then store it in a shoebox for a retro futurearchaeology. Vive la commons! First published in 2012 by punctum books Brooklyn, New York http://punctumbooks.com ISBN-13: 978-0615697659 ISBN-10: 0615697659 The BABEL Working Group is a collective and desiring-assemblage of scholar-gypsies with no leaders, no followers, no top and no bottom, and only a middle. BABEL roams and stalks the ruins of the post-historical university as a multiplicity, a pack of misfits, looking for other roaming packs and multiplicities with which to cohabit and build temporary shelters for intellectual vagabonds. Cover image by Lori Nix, from The City (http://www.lorinix.net/the_ city/02.html), with kind permission of the artist. All black-and-white photos of Boston Ruins by Genie Giaimo (geniegiaimo@gmail.com), and Martyr-Saint I, Martyr-Saint II, and Other Half by Robb N. Johnston (www.robbjohnston.com). Cover design (as well as design of conference poster) by Megan Roche Tarquinio.
d ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The BABEL Working Group would like to thank the following groups and individuals for their more than generous financial and managerial support of our 2nd biennial meeting in Boston, and also for their organizational esprit de corps: Arthur Bahr (Literature Section, M.I.T.), Alexis Kellner Becker (Department of English, Harvard University), Erika Boeckeler (English Department, Northeastern University), James Buzard (Head, Literature Section, M.I.T.), Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Department of English, George Washington University), College of Arts and Sciences (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville), College of Humanities and Social Sciences (Northeastern University), Linda Collins (English Department, Northeastern University), Committee on Medieval Studies (Harvard University), Mary Crane (English Department, Boston College), Cheryl Delaney (English Department, Northeastern University), Jean Duddy (English Department, Northeastern University), English Department (Northeastern University), Deborah Fitzgerald (Kenan Sahin Dean, School of Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences, M.I.T.), Genie Giaimo (English Department, Northeastern University), James Glaser (Dean of Academic Affairs, School of Arts and Sciences, Tufts University), Laura Morgan Green (Chair, English Department, Northeastern University), Maureen Hays (Interim Dean, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, College of Charleston), Diana Henderson (Dean, Curriculum and Faculty Support, M.I.T.), Humanities Center (Northeastern University), Institute for the Liberal Arts (Boston College), Mon. Sparkles Joy (Director of Marketing, punctum books), Marina Leslie (English Department, Northeastern University), Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute (George Washington University), Julie Orlemanski (English Department, Boston College), Karen Overbey (Department of Art and Art History, Tufts University), Peter Probst (Department of Art and Art History, Tufts University), Rosalind Pyne (Palgrave Macmillan), School of Arts and Sciences (Tufts University), Aldemaro Romero (Dean, College of Arts and Sciences, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville), School of Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences (M.I.T.), School of Humanities and Social Sciences (College of Charleston), Myra Seaman (Department of English, College of Charleston), Wendy Shaw (Associate Dean, College of Arts and Sciences, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville), Robert Stanton (English Department, Boston College), Megan Roche Tarquinio (English Department, Northeastern University), Georges van den Abbeele (Dean, College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Northeastern University), Nicholas Watson (Department of English, Harvard University), Amy West (Department of Art and Art History, Tufts University), and Jean Whitman (Palgrave Macmillan).
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A very special gratitude and a thousand loud huzzahs are extended to Kathleen Kelly (English Department, Northeastern University) for her duties as chief meeting strategist extraordinaire. This gathering simply would not have been possible without her. BABEL showers her with dozens of virtual Chinese tree peonies and a case of virtual Veuve Cliquot.
SCHEDULE OF EVENTS
REGISTRATION + BOOK/JOURNAL DISPLAY + COFFEE, ETC. BALLROOM, CURRY STUDENT CENTER, 2ND FLOOR THURSDAY, NOON 5:00 PM FRIDAY, 9:00 AM 4:00 PM SATURDAY, 8:30 AM 2:00 PM
*ALL SESSIONS, EXCEPT FOR PLENARY TALKS, ARE IN NORTHEASTERN UNIVERSITYS CURRY STUDENT CENTER, 2ND & 3RD FLOORS
Thus I propose an abandonment of disciplinary grounding but an abandonment that retains as structurally essential the question of the disciplinary form that can be given to knowledges. This is why the university should not exchange the rigid and outmoded disciplines for a simply amorphous interdisciplinary space in the humanities (as if we could still organize knowledge around the figure of Man). Rather, the loosening of disciplinary structures has to be made the opportunity for the installation of disciplinarity as a permanent question. . . . [which would] keep open the question of what it means to group knowledges in certain ways, and what it has meant that they have been so grouped in the past. ~Bill Readings, The University in Ruins
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SESSION 1. THE INTER-DISCIPLINE OF PEDAGOGY MCLEOD C.322
Organizer: Mary Dockray-Miller (Lesley University) Presider: Mary Dockray-Miller This roundtable panel will explore issues around the place, value, and practice of undergraduate pedagogy in the contemporary university. While university mission statements routinely include references to excellence in teaching and learning, public discourse around undergraduate education now focuses a sometimes vitriolic critique of liberal arts faculty and academic processes that value research over teaching (for example, see Derek Boks 2006 Our Underachieving Colleges or Craig Brandons 2010 The Five-
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SESSION 2. GETTING MEDIEVAL ON MEDIEVAL STUDIES MCLEOD A.318/B.320
Organizer: Elly Truitt (Bryn Mawr College) Presider: Elly Truitt This roundtable panel will explore the concatenation of medievalism in popular culture and medieval studies. Put more bluntly and in less boring terms, how can the Potterverse, Westeros, the World of Warcraft, The Knights of Badassdom, Your Highness, and LARPing teach students about the Middle Ages and the various ways that the medieval period is portrayed in contemporary culture? We will also debate the reasons that Medieval Studies is often still seen as marginal or arcane within the academy at the same time that MMORPGs have tens of millions of unique users, Rennaissance Faires are held every weekend throughout the country, and Game of Thrones is the hottest new show on HBO. Panelists will give short presentations, followed by questions, debate, and discussion.
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Speak Friend and Enter: The Curious Lure of Dungeons, Dragons, Middle-Earth, and Medieval Derring-Do Ethan Gilsdorf (independent critic and journalist, author of Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks) Maximilian I, The Last Medieval Knight: Then and Now Darin Hayton (Haverford College) Medieval Drag, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the SCA Myra Seaman (College of Charleston) The Curious Margery Kempe Jamie Taylor (Bryn Mawr College) Sex, Stoners, and Rock n Roll: Screening Medieval History Elly Truitt (Bryn Mawr College) RESPONSE: Christine Neufeld (Eastern Michigan University)
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The intimacy with an unknown body is the revelation of . . . distance at the very moment we appear to be crossing an uncrossable interval. Otherness, unlocatable within differences that can be known and enumerated, is made concrete in the eroticized touching of a body without attributes. A nonmasochistic jouissance (one that owes nothing to the death drive) is the sign of that nameless, identityfree contact contact with an object I do not know and certainly do not love and which has, unknowingly, agreed to be momentarily the incarnated shock of otherness. In that moment we relate to that which transcends all relations. ~Leo Bersani, Sociability and Cruising
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SESSION 3. MEDIEVAL TOUCHSCREEN BALLROOM, SECOND FLOOR
Co-Organizers: Bettina Bildhauer (University of St Andrews) + Elizabeth Robertson (University of Glasgow) Presider: Elizabeth Robertson This session will consist of seven short papers by people working in different disciplines, each responding to a single object: a piece of skin, the relic of Mary Magdalenes forehead in St Maximin, France, supposedly miraculously preserved because this was where Christ touched her just after he rises from the dead (see Katherine L. Jansen, The Making of the Magdalen: Preaching and Devotion in the Later Middle Ages). Although speakers are in no way constrained to represent their discipline, we expect the session to illustrate the different (or perhaps similar) insights that emerge when observers trained in various
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disciplines approach the same object. The session therefore will be a practical enactment of what different disciplines do and how disciplinary collaboration can enhance (or perhaps diminish) understanding. Although this particular piece of skin will not be present in the room, it is hoped that the materiality of the concrete object will focus discussion. Members of the audience are encouraged dare we say required? to contribute their responses to this single object to the discussion. Dont Touch Me, But Let Me Touch You: Mary Magdalene and the Enigma of Touch Elizabeth Robertson (University of Glasgow) Skin Deep Robert Pasnau (University of Colorado at Boulder) When Mary Runs: Fleeting Touch, Surface Theology Cary Howie (Cornell University) TouchingVirtue Holly Crocker (University of South Carolina) Isaacs Touch Kirk Ambrose (University of Colorado at Boulder) Skinning Saints: Mary Magdalenes Scalp, Christs Foreskin, and Madeleine Sophies Lips Catherine Mooney (Boston College) Getting Under the Skin in Psychiatry Gerda Norvig (Clinical Psychologist)
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SESSION 4. FAMILIES OLD AND NEW MCLEOD C.322
Co-Organizers: Peter Buchanan (Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto) + David Buchanan (North Dakota State University) + Dan McKanan (Harvard Divinity School) + Amy Virginia Buchanan (Independent Performer) Presider: Peter Buchanan In 1976, M. L. Buck Buchanan, Chair of the Department of Animal Sciences at North Dakota State University, passed away. This panel is comprised of one of his children and three of his grandchildren; at the time of his death, one of us was in graduate school, one was a child, and the other two had yet to be born. However, long after his death, visits with family were characterized by two things: the presence of Coca Cola and talks about whats been going on in our lives. We want to start with the fact that we are not atoms propelled into motion by our interactions with universities, but are already in motion,
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SESSION 5. GOING POSTAL: NETWORKS, AFFECT, AND RETRO-TECHNOLOGIES MCLEOD A.318/B.320
Co-Organizers: Jen Boyle (Coastal Carolina University) + Eileen Joy (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville) Co-Presiders: Jen Boyle and Eileen Joy This session will examine the question of network affects, specifically in relation to (re)turns to outmoded communication technologies, such as the postcard (www.post secret.com) and the cassette mixtape (www.tinymixtapes.com). In what ways do these supposedly outmoded forms of communication serve as important switching stations or branch offices for affective-communitarian postal systems that participate in what Derrida would say is both a lack and an excess of address (The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond)? What is the historicity of various postal systems (both real and
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imagined) and their relation to affect, as well as the ways in which they engage in what Derrida termed postal maneuvering, where we see the entangled operations of relays, delay, anticipation, destination, telecommunicating, network, the possibility, and therefore the fatal necessity of going astray? How to think more strategically about the temporal lease-dates of certain postal systems, especially in an age when the acceleration of everything has become so profound (such that, celluloid cinema, now in its twilight, had a good run of only about 100 years, DVDs have come and will likely be gone in less than 20 years, and yet the printed book, somehow, hangs on after 500 years)? How might we better explore how specific, networked engagements with older communication technologies (pre-Internet and even premodern) enable valuable virtual spaces for what the social theorist Scott Lash calls aesthetic reflexivity, and what affective communities and sub- or extra-institutional spaces might be crafted through networks relying on (re)turns to outmoded technologies, such as the letter, the book, the coded message, and so on? I nevere dide thing with more peyne / Than writen this: Hyperlinks, Dead Letters, Intercepted Messages in Chaucers Troilus and Criseyde and The Man of Laws Tale David Hadbawnik (University of Buffalo, SUNY) Post By a Thousand Cuts: Hotel of Magical Thinking Wan-Chuan Kao (The Graduate Center, CUNY) Sir Orfeo in the Gutter: Repurposing an Old Story Through Found Objects Emily Russell (George Washington University) Return to Sender: Tracing the Ephemeral Networks of the Disputed 2009 Elections in Iran Nedda Mehdizadeh (George Washington University) A Miltonic January Ahmed S. Bashi (Artist-Artifacter)
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Thursday, Sep. 20th 5:30 7:00 pm @The Colonnade Hotel [reception afterwards: 7:00-8:00 pm] 120 Huntington Avenue Room: Huntington I
PL(AN)E(T)-NARY SESSION I:
JEFFREY JEROME COHEN (GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY) + LINDY ELKINS-TANTON (CARNEGIE INSTITUTION FOR SCIENCE) THE DEEP AND THE PERSONAL: THE EARTH, TIME, AND THOUGHT
In all disciplines researchers approach common questions: Where are we from? How do we comprehend nonhuman scales of time and being? What is the relationship between Earth and life on Earth? Do our all too human limitations compel us to apprehend the world only in anthropomorphic terms? Critical theorists, historians, observational scientists, and artists use tools so different as to be unrecognizable to each other, and as they reach each increment of new understanding they describe their conclusions with incompatible vocabularies. To surpass the barriers of understanding between disciplines, various frameworks and conclusions can all be assessed together by answering the meta-questions, What interpretive power does your theory convey? What does it reveal that previous theories did not? And what critical confusions does it clear up? Does knowledge progress in a linear fashion? Can supposedly surpassed modes of knowing the universe offer insights that resonate with and perhaps even advance contemporary modes? What is the most effective way to convey knowledge about time scales and distances too vast to be easily understood? Can art (which often works on an affective register) and science (which generally relies upon a more cognitive method) ally themselves in a project of thinking beyond the local and the merely human? In this question-and-answer format, Cohen and Elkins-Tanton will take turns asking these common questions, and answering them with attention to the meta-questions that allow us to bridge and compare their seemingly remote disciplines. Elkins-Tanton will explain her research and the stateof-the-art in planetary physics in understanding the timeline and mechanisms of the formation of our solar system, and Cohen will speak about his recent work on medieval understandings of the animate nature of matter (especially stone), the complicated ways that deep time have been historically imagined, and the recent philosophical movement known as object oriented ontology.
. . . by relinquishing the claim to join authority and autonomy, the scene of teaching can be better understood as a network of obligations. . . . As such, the transgressive force of teaching does not lie so much in matters of content as in the way pedagogy can hold open the temporality of questioning so as to resist being characterized as a transaction that can be concluded, either with the giving of grades or the granting of degrees. ~Bill Readings, The University in Ruins
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SESSION 6. DIGGING IN THE RUINS: MEDIEVALISM AND THE UNCANNY IN THE ACADEMY I BALLROOM, SECOND FLOOR
Co-Organizers: Laurie Finke (Kenyon College) + Martin Shichtman (Eastern Michigan University) Co-Presiders: Laurie Finke + Martin Shichtman Flaneur: Carolyn Dinshaw (New York University) On February 27, 1949 a fire broke out in Kenyon Colleges oldest landmark building, Old Kenyon, killing nine; there are reports that spirits walk in its ruins even after rebuilding, swelling the ranks of college ghosts. The college archive actually has a folder labeled ghosts. Doesnt every university older than 100 years have similar tales? The two panels on Medievalism and the Uncanny (Sessions 6 and 12) propose to explore the Uncanny
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SESSION 7. FUTURE-PHILOLOGY
Sponsor: Society for Future Philology [SFP] Organizer: Daniel Remein (New York University) Presider: Daniel Remein Future-Philology (FP) is a sub-discipline/methodology of Philology writ large. Philology is often mischaracterized as only interested in the past. Philology remains perhaps most commonly characterized as a discipline or method to be brought to bear on the vast corpus of texts from human history, especially in relation to those languages slandered as dead, and is also often seen as hostile to presentist or future-oriented thought. FP distinguishes itself from Philology writ-large negatively as a corrective to this partial error and positively as a science fiction avant-garde from within the ranks of those most trained to read languages from the past. The philia (love) of philology is directed at Logos and not
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limited to incarnations of no-longer-spoken human language. Nor is it so certain that philology writ large, much less the specific and particular focus of FP, could be circumscribed as either discipline or methodology. This panel will herald the Society for Future Philology (SFP) with a set of remarks delineating the field of FP and modeling its practice around a set of central questions: is Philology in general or FP to be understood as discipline, as method, as theory, or as what else (field, orientation, etc)? How is SFP to care for the future? What is the future of language and who is attending to it and why? How do we read/love the logos of the future? What can FP do that nothing else can how and why should it be distinguished as a part of the humanities? Future-Philologists: Matthieu Boyd (Fairleigh Dickinson University) Michael E. Moore (University of Iowa) Chris Piuma (University of Toronto) Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei (University of Aberdeen) Michelle Warren (Dartmouth College) Lisa Weston (California State University-Fresno)
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SESSION 8. INTELLECTUAL CRIMES: THEFT, PUNKING, AND ROGUISH BEHAVIOR MCLEOD A.318/B.320
Co-Organizers: Craig Dionne (Eastern Michigan University) + Steve Mentz (St Johns University) Presider-Flaneur: Diana Henderson (M.I.T.) All our ideas come from somewhere else. We may claim possession for a while, but they never start as ours, and never stay ours for long. Once in a while we think certain ideas are our own, or that they materialize from some mysterious unknown place, or that they emerge from the fleeting-ness of the literary encounter. But mostly we may as well admit it we steal them, hold on to them for a while, and then misrepresent them on their way out. This session reveals the not-so-scandalous truth of intellectual theft to think past simplistic ideas about intellectual property toward more dynamic, open, and uncomfortable misappropriations, misreadings, and other forms of exchange. Marlin Twine Steve Mentz (St Johns University) On Getting Punked Craig Dionne (Eastern Michigan University) I Was So Right About That: Social Class and the Academy Sharon ODair (University of Alabama) Mentoring, Influence, and Theft Adam Zucker (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)
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Take ecstasy with me . . . becomes a request to stand out of time together, to resist the stultifying temporality and time that is not ours, that is saturated with violence both visceral and emotional . . . . We know time through the field of the affective, and affect is tightly bound to temporality. But let us take ecstasy together. ~Jos Esteban Muoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity
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SESSION 9. IMPURE COLLABORATIONS BALLROOM, SECOND FLOOR
Co-Organizers: Brantley L. Bryant + Sakina Bryant (Sonoma State University) Co-Presiders: Brantley L. Bryant + Sakina Bryant Flaneur: Jeffrey J. Cohen (George Washington University) This panel explores collaborations that challenge the customary professional expectations of academic being-together. What kinds of shared work beckon beyond the sanitized templates for objective (pure) and professional academic collaboration? How can we best make visible the ways in which that affinity, friendship, eros, identity, political engagement, and other off-the-CV connections give us ways of working outside of often constrictive and normative academic hierarchies and working conditions? Our Childhoods: A Sororal Collaboration Natalia Cecire (Yale University) + Maria Sachiko Cecire (Bard College)
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SESSION 10. ENJOYING THE END (AGAIN) MCLEOD C.322
Organizer: Brianna Jewell (University of Texas at Austin) + Jenni Sapio (University of Texas at Austin) Presider & Respondent: Michael Johnson (University of Texas at Austin) Our proposed panel is a political, polemical, and at times personal intervention. We are a group of five graduate students from the English Department at the University of Texas at Austin, working together to articulate a raison detre, a methodology, and an ethos that will carry us through and anticipate the coming decades of scholarship. As students of medieval literature, and as people excited about the culture of the Middle Ages, we are concerned especially with the fate of medieval studies, both within the university and outside of it. Our investment in medieval studies joins us. But we are separated even as we begin to imagine our communion. Some of us think that theorizing affective relationships to the past is productive, and ethically imperative, while others of us argue that focusing on the body is historically irresponsible and masturbatory. Some of us relish print culture and issues of translatio in order to find our bearings in the medieval past, while some hear medieval womens voices where others have not yet heard them, and some trace the travel of Latin, Anglo-Norman, and Middle English texts to queer and unforeseen locations. Where we rub up against each other, we feel and begin to identify the ends of our approaches. And we wonder how open we are to or how we change
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through an encounter with an others end. Do we maintain ourselves, our positions, our approaches, so that we can continue to generate friction with the bodies outside of us so that we can enjoy the end again (and again)? Each panelist will perform an act of reading, a pedagogical and critical model of touching the past, which will vary as our own personal and erotic inclinations diverge. Cruising, fucking, poking, erotica, sluts, promiscuity, and orgasm will be figures in our discourse about the field, about our shared medieval objects and our fractious academic desires. We will be cruising through various methodologies (philological, technological, psychoanalytic, geographic, popular, biographic, and ritualistic) in order to test the rigidity of their boundaries and to discover their amorphous points of contact. Discussants: Raul Ariza Barile (University of Texas at Austin) Brianna Jewell (University of Texas at Austin) Aaron Mercier (University of Texas at Austin) Jenni Sapio (University of Texas at Austin) Christopher Taylor (University of Texas at Austin)
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The university is where thought takes place beside thought, where thinking is a shared process without identity or unity. Thought beside itself perhaps. The Universitys ruins offer us an institution in which the incomplete and interminable nature of the pedagogic relation can remind us that thinking together is a dissensual process; it belongs to dialogism rather than to dialogue. ~Bill Readings, The University in Ruins
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SESSION 12. DIGGING IN THE RUINS: MEDIEVALISM AND THE UNCANNY IN THE UNIVERSITY II BALLROOM, SECOND FLOOR
Co-Organizers: Laurie Finke (Kenyon College) + Martin Shichtman (Eastern Michigan University) Co-Presiders: Laurie Finke + Martin Shichtman Flaneur: Marget Long On February 27, 1949 a fire broke out in Kenyon Colleges oldest landmark building, Old Kenyon, killing nine; there are reports that spirits walk in its ruins even after rebuilding, swelling the ranks of college ghosts. The college archive actually has a folder labeled ghosts. Doesnt every university older than 100 years have similar tales? The two panels on Medievalism and the Uncanny (Sessions 6 and 12) propose to explore the Uncanny that haunts the site of the university, a site dedicated to reason, critique, and empiricism. How do we incorporate the mystical, the spectral, those things we cannot see but only
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SESSION 13. ALL IN A JURNALS WORK: A BABEL WAYZGOOSE MCLEOD C.322
Sponsor: continent. journal Co-Organizers: Nico Jenkins (Husson University) + Isaac Linder (European Graduate School) Presider: Nico Jenkins Traditionally, a wayzgoose was a celebration at the end of a printers year, a night off in the late fall before the work began of printing by candlelight. According to the OED, the Master Printer would make for the journeymen a good Feast, and not only entertains them at his own House, but besides, gives them Money to spend at the Ale-house or Tavern at Night. Following in this line, continent. proposes in its publication(s) a night out and a good Feast, away from the noxious fumes of the Academy and into a night of revelry which begins, but does not end, at the alehouse or Tavern. continent. proposes that the thinking of the Academy be freed to be thought elsewhere, in the alleys and
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doorways of the village and cities, encountered not in the strictly defined spaces of the classroom and blackboard (now white) but anticipated and found where thinking occurs. Historically, academic journals have served a different purpose than the Academy itself. Journals have served as privileged sites for the articulation and concretization of specific modes of knowledge and control (insemination of those ideas has been formalized in the classroom, in seminar). In contrast, the academic journal is post-partum and has been an old-boys club, an insider trading network in which truths are (re)circulated against themselves, forming a Maginot Line against whatever is new, or the distinctly challenging. All in a Jurnals Work will discuss (in part) the ramifications of cheap start-up publications that are challenging the traditional ensconced-in-ivory academic journals and their supporting infrastructures. The panel will be seeking a questioning (as a challenging) towards the discipline of knowledge production/fabrication (of truth[s]) and the event of the Academy (and its publications) as it has evolved and continues to (d)evolve. Issues to be discussed will revolve around the power of academic publishing and its origins, hierarchical versus horizontal academic modules (is there a place for the General Assembly in academia?) and the evolving idea of the Multiversity as possibilistic site(s) of a (BABELing) multivocality in the wake of the University of Disaster. Jurnalistes: Nico Jenkins (Husson University + continent. journal) Adam Staley Groves (National University of Singapore, Tembusu College + continent. journal) Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei (University of Aberdeen + continent. journal + Uitgeverij) Daniel Remein (New York University + Whiskey & Fox) Eileen Joy (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville + punctum books)
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SESSION 14. ECOMATERIALISM MCLEOD A.318/B.320
Co-Organizers: Jeffrey J. Cohen (George Washington University) + Lowell Duckert (West Virginia University) Presider: Joseph Donaldson (Northern Illinois University) Flaneur: Lindy Elkins-Tanton (Carnegie Institution for Science) This session previews work that will be included in a special issue of postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies in 2013 (Vol. 3, Issue 1: Ecomaterialism, eds. Jeffrey J. Cohen and Lowell Duckert). Taking up Jane Bennetts challenge in the last chapter of her book Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things to rethink environment and landscape from an actor-network point of view, the papers focus upon the meeting of ecocriticisim with other modes of theoretical and critical inquiry. Rather than a traditional ecocritical mode that traces the interface of human with landscape, we are interested in reconceiving ecomaterial spaces and objects as a web of co-constituitive and hybrid actants.
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Friday, Sep. 21st 5:30 6:45 pm @Northeasterns Alumni Center [reception afterwards: 6:45-7:45 pm] 716 Columbus Place 6th Floor Pavilion + Faculty Club
context of recent attempts (in the new materialisms, in object-oriented philosophy, in neo-vitalisms, in ecological theory) to articulate a distinctively material form of agency or efficacy. I find help for this project in Walt Whitmans invocations of sympathy in Leaves of Grass (1891-1892). For Whitman as for Paracelsus, sympathy is a force that often goes unremarked as the ordinary fact that materials always have some leanings: sunflowers tilt toward the sun, stones tend toward the ground, human heads have a propensity to tilt slightly to one side when listening closely. I examine both the kind of sympathy that Whitman sees at work between the bodies of people and the bodies of animals or landscapes, and then the even stranger mimesis by which a set of bodily postures (tilted head, bent back, open mouth) can, he avers, align itself with a set of democratic moods or ethical dispositions (nonchalance, industriousness, civic affection).
Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Editor
Dark Chaucer: An Assortment Myra Seaman, Eileen Joy and Nicola Masciandaro, Editors
Speculative Medievalisms: Discography The Petropunk Collective, Editors punctum books is an open-access and print-on-demand publisher dedicated to radically creative modes of intellectual inquiry and writing across a whimsical para-humanities assemblage http://punctumbooks.com
Thomas Meyer reads from his translation of Beowulf (published by punctum books in August 2012) Friday, Sep. 21st @10:00 pm* Kitchen www.kitchenbostonmass.com 560 Tremont Street *after midnight, inspired by Meyers reading, longships will depart from the Boston Harbor for raids along the New England coast in search of chintz, lobster rolls, and arable land
Under fortuitous conditions, the good humor of enchantment spills over into critical consciousness and tempers it, thus rendering its judgments more generous and its claims less dogmatic. I pursue life with moments of enchantment rather than an enchanted way of life. Such moments can be cultivated and intensified by artful means. Enchantment . . . is an uneasy combination of artifice and spontaneity. ~Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, Ethics
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SESSION 15. THE URMADIC UNIVERSITY MCLEOD A.318
Organizer: Tony Fry (Griffith University, Australia) Presider: Tony Fry Flaneurs: Sans faon (Charles Blanc + Tristan Surtees) The Urmadic University is a project that confronts the defuturing nature of education in error a fundamental condition now intrinsic to higher education globally. It recognises that it is not sufficient to find ways to work within the ruins of the institution (Bill Readings), nor to revitalise the spirit of the Enlightenments university project (Derrida). Rather, in worlds of unsettlement those worlds within the world made unsustainable new knowledge, educational practices and institutional forms are urgently needed. Nomadic education starts to talk of such new knowledge (Semetsky et al), and a very basic start has been made to advance institutional transformation by developing the idea and content of the university that can move (the Urmadic
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University). However, to create knowledge able to remake the university, and break the extant institution from its instrumentalised and degenerate service provision to the status quo, a major reframing of what there is to learn is required. Against this background and challenge, the panel will present a historical analysis, contemporary argument and a politico-pedagogic strategy. The Critic: Looking Back at Two Epochs of the University and the Urmadic Form of its Futuring Tony Fry (Design Futures, Griffith University) The Educator: How to Learn and How to Teach in the Frame of the Urmadic Cameron Tonkinwise (Design Thinking and Sustainability, Parsons The New School of Design) The Student: What I Have Learned So Far in the Proto-Form of the Urmadic University Bec Barnett (Design Practice Intern, Goldsmiths College, University of London) RESPONSE: Georges Van Den Abbeele (Northeastern University)
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SESSION 16. SYNAESTHETICS: SENSORY INTEGRATION AGAINST THE DISCIPLINES ROOM 333 [SENATE CHAMBERS]
Co-Organizers: Holly Dugan (George Washington University) + Lara Farina (West Virginia University) Co-Presiders: Holly Dugan + Lara Farina That the Universitys task is the production of abstraction from sensory perception is readily apparent from both its division of the senses among the disciplines and its resistance to incorporating some sensory experiences altogether. While sight and sound find their disciplinary homes in Art History and Music, for example, taste, smell, and touch are generally relegated to the non-academic study of connoisseurship (such as perfumery, wine tasting, and other forms of luxury expertise). Yet the division of the senses into the traditional five divisions, each with its proper field of use, has seldom gone unchallenged in the past or the present. Recent studies of sensation have argued in particular that it is time to heed the interaction of supposedly distinct senses and to think about new constellations of sensory experience. Whether they take the form of the neurologists multimodal sensory integrations or the alternative sense organs described by disabled writers and performers, these re-organized sensations suggest a need for (interdisciplinary?) (anti-disciplinary?) methods of understanding. Transmodal Poetics: Medieval Neurology, Synaesthesia, and Literary Disability Jonathan Hsy (George Washington University)
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SESSION 17. HOARDERS MCLEOD A.318/B.320
Sponsor: The Material Collective Presider: Maggie Williams (William Paterson University) Flaneur: Jane Bennett (Johns Hopkins University) Discovered in 2009 near Litchfield, England, the Staffordshire Hoard is the largest collection of Anglo-Saxon metalwork yet found: over 3500 items of gold and silver, all probably martial in character and all of exceptional craftsmanship. The Hoard may have been battle treasure, stripped and buried for safekeeping, and never recovered though little is known of its origins or context. Taking as our trysting place this object which is at once singular and collective, these two sessions, Session 17: Hoarders (in which we operate in the perspectives of individual disciplines: art, art history, conservation, museology) & Session 19: Hordes (in which we perform collaborative and collective approaches, and migrate across disciplinary borders), feature responses to the Staffordshire Hoard from medievalists, artists, scientists, performers, poets, curators, art historians, educators, and philosophers. This unfolding depends on conversation across temporal and methodological divides: curious collaborators will explore both the particularly inflected knowledge[s] of disciplinary approaches, and the possibilities for collective insight. Mediating Meanings: Conservation of the Staffordshire Hoard Brian Castriota (Institute of Fine Arts, New York University) Garnets, Gold, and Dirt: The Edges of Materiality Karen Overbey (Tufts University) The Hoard Speaks Nancy Thompson (St Olaf College) + Ben C. Tilghman (Lawrence University)
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SATURDAY :: 22 September
From Hoarders to the Hoard: Giving Disciplinary Legitimacy to Undisciplined Collecting Jennifer Borland (Oklahoma State University) + Louise Siddons (Oklahoma State University) Thieves and Reivers Charles Fetherolf (Graphic Novelist) A Performative Think-Fest You (yes, You)
a [15-minute break] a
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Play values experimentation. When we play, we are more open to the new, from within and without. We become neophiles and innovators, making active use of our imaginations. Playing and pretending are crucial to the becomings of living creatures, to adaptation and behavioral flexibility; . . . Play teaches vital skills; it is transformative and transforming. We can neither thrive nor survive without it. And it is highly contagious, a powerful medium of affect transmission. ~Aranye Fradenburg, Living Chaucer
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SESSION 18. PARTS, WHOLES, AND THE NEW MCLEOD A.318
Sponsor: Organism for Poetic Research [OPR] Co-Organizers: Daniel Remein (New York University) + Ada Smailbegovic (New York University) + Rachael Wilson (New York University) Presider: Erika Boeckeler (Northeastern University) A number of recent methodologies have been emerging across a range of disciplines and fields in an attempt to think anew the problem of parts, wholes, and the new, and to reframe this question as of pressing importance to both the humanities and the sciences. Briefly put, this question asks how things can seem at one point discrete and radically particular, and yet also seem either subsumed as mere parts of a larger phenomena or to give way to entirely new phenomena which do not seem reducible to their previously extant constituent parts. Systems theorists have considered how a system can produce
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something anew which is irreducible to the parts which precede it diachronically or which make it up at any synchronic moment. Between the CERN accelerator, the Hubble telescope, and String Theory, experimental, observational, and theoretical physics all remain poised to significantly reframe the question of emergence on both micro and macro scales. Given the recent reframing of this question as essential for contemporary philosophers, critics, poets, and scientists, this panel will measure the capacities and limits of these and other discrete disciplinary approaches to the question of parts, wholes, and the new. While it is tempting to proceed via an interdisciplinary patchwork, we would like to explore what a reliance on disciplinary differences might bring to this set of questions. What can different disciplines do in relation to this problem that others cannot? What irreducible disciplinary or methodological differences does this problem bring into relief and why? To what extent are different disciplines or methodologies capable or desirous of describing the relations of parts, wholes, and the new, as opposed to producing, multiplying, or inflecting such relations (and to what extent could this reframe the question of disciplinarity in terms of an odd realignment of parts of the sciences and of the humanities: observational science/descriptive criticism vs. experimental science/ poetics)? Discussants: Aranye Fradenburg (University of California, Santa Barbara) Deirdre Joy (Evolutionary Biologist) Dorothy Kim (Vassar College) + Laura Lebow (Vassar College) + Jillian Scharr (Vassar College) Ada Smailgebovic (New York University) Dan Rudmann (University of Texas at Austin) Daniel Remein (New York University) RESPONDENT: Michael ORourke (Independent Colleges, Dublin)
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SESSION 19. HORDES ROOM 333 [SENATE CHAMBERS]
Sponsor: The Material Collective Presider: Karen Overbey (Tufts University) Discovered in 2009 near Litchfield, England, the Staffordshire Hoard is the largest collection of Anglo-Saxon metalwork yet found: over 3500 items of gold and silver, all probably martial in character and all of exceptional craftsmanship. The Hoard may have been battle treasure, stripped and buried for safekeeping, and never recovered though little is known of its origins or context. Taking as our trysting place this object which is at once singular and collective, these two sessions, Session 17: Hoarders (in which we operate in the perspectives of individual disciplines: art, art history, conservation, museology) & Session 19: Hordes (in which we perform collaborative and collective
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SESSION 20. WILL IT BLEND? EQUIPPING THE HUMANITIES LAB MCLEOD B.320
Co-Organizers: Allan Mitchell (University of Victoria) + Myra Seaman (College of Charleston) Co-Presiders: Allan Mitchell + Myra Seaman Flaneur: David Kaiser (M.I.T.) This session will be a laboratory in which participants will test hypotheses about what, in addition to sexy metaphors, might be the product of humanist encounters with the hard sciences. The working question will be: can the humanities and the sciences interface, and if so, what might that look like? Such hypotheses might seem belated and unnecessary, given the growing evidence, for example, of humanists application of information
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technology in sites such as the digital humanities, literary forensics, and distant reading, or the development of a cognitive literary studies or so-called new materialisms. The aim of the session will be to retool the laboratory such that light and not only heat will be generated from the collision of the sciences and the humanities. Can smashing the two together produce new ways of knowing? Can it affect the core content of the humanities as well as its styles? The organizers anticipate that humanist experimenters will pursue a range of possibly competing hypotheses. Collaborative ARGs: Modeling Heart and Science Among the Ruins Tina Kelleher (Towson University) Is Physics a Discipline? Liza Blake (New York University) What if Everything is Always Unruly Complexity? From Mathematical Ecology to Raymond Williams and into Open Spaces Beyond Peter Taylor (University of Massachusetts, Boston) Calibans Umwelt: A Dream of Biological Carpentry Haylie Swenson (George Washington University) Cabbages and Kings: Mathematics and the Humanities Elizabeth Sklar (Wayne State University) + Jessica Sklar (Pacific Lutheran University) Alchemical Allegory Kathryn Vomero Santos (New York University)
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SESSION 21. WHAT IS CRITICAL THINKING? MCLEOD C.322
Co-Organizers: Valerie Allen (John Jay College of Justice, CUNY) + Ruth Evans (Saint Louis University) Presider: Alexis Kellner Becker (Harvard University) Everyone in educational institutions claims to exercise critical thinking, yet few agree on what it means. The use and abuse of the phrase creates an empty/full semantic category, powered by hot air yet still somehow meaningful: a kind of pedagogical and intellectual equivalent of the over-used term excellent that was the subject of Bill Readings critique of the culture of excellence promoted by US and UK universities in the 1990s and beyond in his book The University in Ruins. Before we trot out critical thinking on next semesters syllabus as a skill we aim to practice ourselves and develop in our students, or before we claim that its true home is in our discipline rather than anyone elses, let us use this session to think further think critically about its meanings. Having read some common texts in advance (see below), we aim to generate no answers,
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The University (and, more especially, says Derrida, the Humanities) have a responsibility to foster events of thought that cannot fail to unsettle the University in its Idea of itself. For this to happen, the special institution that the University is must open itself up to the possibility of unpredictable events (events worthy of the name as Derrida often says, being by definition absolutely unpredictable) in a way that always might seem to threaten the very institution that it is. On this account, the University is in principle the institution that lives the precarious chance and ruin of the institution as its very institutionality. ~Geoffrey Bennington, Foundations
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SESSION 22. #OCCUPY BOSTON: HUMANITIES AND PRAXIS MCLEOD C.322
Organizer: Julie Orlemanski (Boston College) Presider: Julie Orlemanski How do we experience the relationship between the humanities and political praxis? How do we conceive the connections between reading and doing, interpretation and action as well as what separates them? This panel is composed of participants whose paths crossed in the course of the #Occupy Boston movement. We first encountered one another as protesters, citizens, or members of the 99%, but we also share the fact that we study or teach in the humanities. The coincidence of those two circumstances, like the coincidence of terms in this sessions title, creates the occasion for our conversation. Topics to possibly consider during this session: economic inequalities within higher
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SESSION 23. SE7EN UNDEADLY SCIENCES: THE TRIVIUM AND QUADRIVIUM IN THE FORKING MULTIVERSITY ROOM 333 [SENATE CHAMBERS]
Co-Organizers: Scott Maisano (University of Massachusetts, Boston) + Alex Mueller (University of Massachusetts, Boston) Presider: Alex Mueller What do you do with a university in ruins? Stick a fork in it. Better yet, stick two forks the trivium and quadrivium in it. In David Finchers nineties neo-noir film, Se7en, a serial killer is determined, la Bill Readings, not to let the question of disciplinarity disappear. Rather than bemoaning a generalized (or interdisciplinary) corruption or rottenness at the heart of modern culture, he seeks to remind the world of the specificity medieval theologians once attributed to the seven deadly sins. Likewise, this panel calls attention to the particularity of the seven liberal arts aka the seven liberal sciences at the heart of medieval curricula and attempts to reimagine the relevance and resonance of these capacious categories vis--vis todays posthumanities and tomorrows multiversity. How might the trivium and quadrivium reconstitute the university in ruins as a Borgesian garden of forking paths? Such a labyrinthine vision of higher education is often the object of critique from those who insist that postsecondary schooling should be a career-driven, efficient, straight line (the shortest possible distance) to employment rather than a wandering series of left turns through the liberal arts that result in less tangible manifestations of personal, communal, civic, or environmental enrichment. Furthermore, our understanding of the liberal arts has been immeasurably transformed by discourses of humanism that have privileged human cognition and
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experience over and above those of the non-human animal, the vibrant object, and belief in the metaphysical or transcendent. Ultimately, this session aims to track the past, present, and future of the seven liberal arts, not only as they were defined by Martianus Capella and medieval schoolmasters, but also as they might have been defined and might yet be defined in postmedieval curricula and disciplinary fields.
Grammar: Christopher Cannon (New York University) Rhetoric: Jill Ross (University of Toronto) Logic: Eleanor Kaufman (University of California, Los Angeles) Geometry: Maura Smyth (Harvard University) Arithmetic: Shankar Raman (M.I.T.) Music: Bruce Holsinger (University of Virginia) Astronomy: Scott Maisano (University of Massachusetts, Boston)
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SESSION 24. WILD FERMENTATION: DISCIPLINED KNOWLEDGE AND DRINK MCLEOD A.318
Co-Organizers: Nathan Kelber (University of Maryland) + Rob Wakeman (University of Maryland) Co-Presiders: Nathan Kelber + Rob Wakeman In the shadows of every university, the Alehouse provides a common font for our very best (and very worst) non-hierarchical thinking. If we re-sound our disciplinary wells, we will find that the aquifer beneath is infused with alcohol. Our goal is the inebriation of disciplinary limits: how might beer and wine prickle, tingle, blur, buzz, and nauseate the academic conversation? How might the abrogation of our disciplinary inhibitions encourage originality and creativity, new conversations, and new forms of knowledgemaking? We propose to re-imagine the paper session as a drinking game, with rules for engaging, celebrating, and disciplining academic thought. Because discipline means more than mere memory and theory, but also praxis, we will be offering our own 14th-century style craft brew as a catalyst for discussion. Our aim is to bring post-conference conviviality into the conference session. We will examine the alehouse (like the afterconference) as a space that breaks down academic hierarchies and disciplinary limits. The result, we hope, will have the atmosphere of the anti-salon a space for serious thinking in the Dionysian raw. What vigorous meditations, narrations, ramblings, and other forms of learned storytelling does Harry Baileys game provoke? What generic investigations result from the experiences and expertises of a diverse band hooked up, in the Democritean sense, at the Tabard Inn? Shunning the droning of papers, our commedia dellarte takes place within the performative social order of the alehouse. The relationships between panel and audience will be liquid, allowing sufficient room for risk, error, openness, and honesty. This session will also seek to invoke the spirits of all alesquires and ale-wives, tapsters and ostlers, butlers and chamblerlains, pot-companions, lick-wimbles, malt-wormes, and vine-fretters.
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David Swain (Southern New Hampshire University) Will Meyers (Cambridge Brewing Company) Susan Forscher Weiss (Peabody Institute, Johns Hopkins University) April Oettinger (Goucher College)
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SESSION 25. THE HISTORIOGRAPHIC GHOST MCLEOD B.320
Organizer: Stephen Higa (Bennington College) Presider: Stephen Higa In this session, historians (of many kinds) present creative pieces about the encounter with the historiographic ghost. In the course of our work, at what point do the ghosts of our subjects the remnants, shadows, fragrances, muffled voices, sudden shifts in temperature or fleeting brushes against the skin come back to haunt us? How do we take into account the apparition, the revenant, and the necromantic in historical inquiry? How do historians navigate the danger and taboo of flirting with the dead? How does taboo affect history as discipline, structure, and institution? In engaging such questions, this session will gesture toward a history that claims the power to transgress, endanger, frighten, and transform. Let a Sleeping Horse Lie Christopher Guilbert (Poet) Danse Macabre Maura Coughlin (Bryant University) Set Fire to the Canon: What Ethnographic Navet Can Offer to Historiography Saffo Papantonopoulou (The New School for Social Research) Rhode Island Murder and Horror Stories in Performance: Adam Emery, Mercy Brown, and the Devils Footprint Jacob Richman (Brown University) Mucking Around in the Time Machine: Historians and the Archival Gaze Michael Becker (Brown University) Le Romaunt Noir Sarah Langley (University of Montana) Video-Poem Sarah Golda Schwartz (Poet)
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SATURDAY :: 22 September
The Golems Ghost: The Tech of the Rabbi of Prague, Comics, Science, Fiction, and the Skin I Live In Gila Aloni (Association des Mdivistes Anglicistes de l'Enseignement Suprieur) IMAGES, APPARITIONS Beryl Schlossman (Northeastern University)
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Saturday, Sep. 22nd 4:15 5:30 pm @Gordon Chapel Old South Church 645 Boylston Street
PLENARY SESSION III SANS FAON & CAROLYN DINSHAW + MARGET LONG
SANS FAON [CHARLES BLANC + TRISTAN SURTEES] WHATS ART GOT TO DO WITH IT?
Your language is of a remarkable purity, hygienic. But we dont make, you have to understand, children with Hygiene. Quite the opposite! Creation is always a filthy fight. ~Louis Ferdinand Cline, Lettre Ernzt Bendz, Cahiers de lHerme Sans faon began as an investigation between an architect and an artist and this discussion across disciplines has been the backbone of our art practice over the past 12 years. The desire to explore further the possibilities of working between traditional fields and facilitating cross-fertilization has culminated in one of our current projects Watershed+, which well talk about in this session. As we focus on function, efficiency and economy, the capacity of science and engineering to engage the public, or to contribute to our enjoyment of a place, becomes ever more obscure. Answers cannot come from any one specialty or field of expertise, quite the opposite. There is a need for an expanded dialogue between disciplines in the way we build and understand our environments. Watershed+ originated from the ambition to create a stronger connection between the public and their watershed natural and constructed. Hosted by the Water Services department (UEP) of the City of Calgary, Watershed+ represents an innovative approach to public art. The focus of Watershed+ is not the creative object or the aesthetic but the development of the creative thinking. The program aims to develop awareness and pleasure in the environment, not by changing water
management practice, nor developing a uniform visual language, but by creating a climate of opportunity for water initiatives. Through a range of initiatives, new commissions, creation of multidisciplinary design teams and general creative dialogue, Watershed+ involves creative practitioners and develops creative practice from the conception stage. The program represents a major step in implementing new working methods and processes by embedding artists and, more specifically, their creative process within UEP core activities.
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Please join us Saturday evening for a collegial gathering: 22 September 9:00 pm-ish to midnight-ish or so @Karen Overbeys 160 East Berkeley Street Apt. 306 Boston, MA 02118 corner of East Berkeley and Harrison grey/brown building *to be buzzed in, please call or text Karen [917.374.2629], Eileen [513.827.5888], Myra [843.367.0094], or Kathleen [617.413.8819]
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I am for those who believe in loose delights, I share the midnight orgies of young men, I dance with the dancers and drink with the drinkers. ~Walt Whitman
www.thesartorialist.com
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DIRECTIONS
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On the subway: that is, the MBTA, or simply the T. Get an app: MBTA.com, MBTA Tracker, OpenMBTA, NextTrainT. Heres an article on navigation apps: www.boston. com/travel/boston/gallery/nav_apps/. [Refer also to maps provided in registration folders.] Getting to NU: Sessions All sessions are in the Curry Student Center. The McLeod Suites are on the third floor, and the Ballroom is on the second. See http://www.northeastern. edu/campusmap/. Walking from the Colonnade or the Midtown, turn left on Huntington Ave and stay left. Cross over Mass Ave, and pass the Huntington Theatre and the Boston YMCA (where NU began, as a night school for working-class men). NU immediately follows. Turn left at the quadrangle with the big NU sign: Blackmun Auditorium/Ell Hall is right in front of you. Walk along either side to the Curry Student Center, which is connected to Ell. From the Green Line, walk onto campus to the quadrangle with the big NU sign. From the Orange Line (Ruggles Station/commuter rail), walk onto campus down Forsyth to the first right. Take it past the Egan Center and follow the path as it turns left past Snell Library and opens into a quad. Cross to the Curry Student Center. Getting to Plenaries Plenary 1, Thursday, 20 September: see the Back Bay map. From campus, take a right on Huntington to the Colonnade Hotel, 120 Huntington Ave. About a 15-minute walk, or take the Green Line toward downtown to the Prudential stop. Plenary 2 (NU Alumni Center), Friday, 21 September and Plenary 3 (Gordon Chapel, Old South Church), Saturday, 22 September: see the maps in your registration folders for directions. Parking Youre in competition with students for spots on the street, almost all of which are metered, on Thursday and Friday. Saturday may be a tad better. You can park (and pay) in the Renaissance Garage on Columbus Street, and access the campus through the Ruggles T stop/commuter rail station. (It has a Dunkin Donuts.) Once on campus, turn right to head to the Curry Student Center (see directions, above). Sometimes the Renaissance is full, and the attendant will direct you to another garage. Directions to and from Hotels The Colonnade (120 Huntington Ave) o T: Prudential Stop, Green E Line. o 12 to 15-minute walk to NU.
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RESTAURANTS/BARS + SIGHTS
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ON IRISH BARS
While the Cambridge Brewing Company (www.cambrew.com; 1 Kendall Sq, Cambridge) is the official BABEL go-to pubsee Session 25: Wild Fermentation: Disciplined Knowledge and Drink, in which CBC brewer Will Meyers is presenting, and see the map in your packetyou have many other choices. The number of Irish pubs in Boston is legion. Legendary. Some are down-and-dirty bars, others are tarted up for tourists, some are sports bars, and others feel like Irelandnot that down-and-dirty, tarty, and loud and annoying sporty doesnt. Many are simply neighborhood bars. Most have live music. You may want to take the pilgrimage to Dorchester and South Boston (Southie) for a few famous ones. However, for ease of travel, consider our favorite Boston pub (pigs-in-blankets!), Emmets, near the State House (6 Beacon: http://emmetsirishpubandrestaurant.com). Take the Green Line to Park St. Also, and much more neighborhoody, the Brendan Behan Pub, 378 Centre S., Jamaica Plain (www.brendanbehanpub.com/). Take the 39 bus or the T (Jackson Sq, Orange Line). An Tua Nua (835 Beacon St) plays 70s and 80s hits on weekends. The Dropkick Murphyss favorite spots are rumored to include the Silhouette Lounge (200 Brighton Ave., Allston), Joeys (416 Market St., Brighton), and The Irish Village (224 Market St., Brighton). Theyre playing the Bank of America Pavilion on the harbor on the 21st. And while not Irish, the Sunset Grill & Tap (130 Brighton Ave, Allston) offers craft beerand mead on tap. In Cambridge, in descending order of greatness: The Druid (1357 Cambridge St), The Plough and Stars (912 Mass Ave), and, because its easy if youre in Harvard Square, Tommy Doyles (96 Winthrop St). If youre out this way, you might want to travel a bit further to Davis Sq, Somerville (on the Red Line), and go to the Burren (247 Elm St). Two others: Kinsale (2 Center Plaza, Cambridge St) and Asgard (350 Mass Ave). The oldest pub in Boston is supposedly the Bell in Hand Tavern (45-55 Union St), est. 1795 (http://bellinhand.com/homepage), which you can visit going to or returning from the North End.
RESTAURANTS
Dinner The list of restaurants, below, represents favorites that some of us go to again and again.1 There are, however, many other options: one can stroll down Tremont (pronounced trehmont) and Columbus in the South End and find any number of restaurants (such as B&G Oysters, The Butcher Shop, two French restaurantsAquitaine and Petit Robert and Columbus Caf). One can go to Chinatown, where chefs come and go and reputations rise and fall (take the Orange Line to the Chinatown stop, or the Green Line to Park St, and cross through the mega downtown shopping area). We have a version of Little Italy called the North End (Haymarket stop on the Orange Line or North End on the Green Line) with small winding streets crammed with restaurants (dont miss Mikes for pastry and espresso). If you decide to go to the Aquarium (which is a great way to see the Boston Harbor), try the Black Rose, a once quite rascally Irish pub. And of course theres Faneuil Hall (pronunciation a point of contention in Boston: try fannel) on the harbor, which is a complex of shops and restaurants. Near here is the oldest restaurant still operating under the same namethe Union Oyster House, since 1714. The food is ok, but come for the oystersunless you go to Neptune Oyster near the North End. UOH = history in the uneven floors; NO = stylish and way delectable. Charlestown, adjacent to the North End, is a piece of old Boston (Bunker Hill is here), and Charles St (Beacon Hill) is another (on the Red Line, or a good sightseeing walk from NU down Newbury St and through Boston Common): both neighborhoods have a galore of restaurants. Try Lala Rokh for Persian food on Cambridge St, around the corner from Charles Stand, since youre in the neighborhood, check out Clink for a chic bar scene: its in the Liberty Hotel, once a jail. Really. Also at the hotel is Scampo: amazing high-end Italian food. Finally, while the food is overpriced and not so great, you can sit at the bar at the Top of the Hub at the top of the Prudential on a clear day or night, and get a spectacular 360 view of the city. Theres also an observation deck at the Prubut no champagne. Not all restaurants listed below take reservations, but many have bars in which one can wait or eat. Otherwise, reservations are recommended. ! If youre staying at the Midtown, you get a 15% discount on all meals at Brasserie Jo at the Colonnade. The tarte flambe classique! Ask for coupons at the front desk.
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Contributors: Kathleen Kelly, Marina Leslie, Karen Overbey, and Robert Stanton.
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Bars/Restaurants :: Sights
Boston, walkable (that is, within a mile and a half) from NU and points in the Back Bay (! = closest to NU):
!Addis Red Sea (www.addisredsea.com) 544 Tremont St Boston (South End); 1755 Massachusetts Ave Cambridge (617-426-8727) o Boston isnt crammed with Ethiopian restaurants, but this one is excellent. Two locations. Yummy Ethiopian/Eritrean, with a small beer/wine selection. The Beehive (www.beehiveboston.com) 541 Tremont Street, Boston (South End) (617-423-0069) o A huge space with lots of room at the bars and tons of seating for dinner; live jazz, tasty whiskey selection. Also does a great weekend brunch. ! Brasserie Jo (www.brasseriejoboston.com/) 120 Huntington Avenue, Boston (617-425-3240) o At the Colonnade. Great bar for hanging out. Love the steak tartare. Fab mousse. A straight-ahead Americanized French Bistro menu, with veg options. Good wine selection, beer selection uninspired. Pricey. Bukowski Tavern 50 Dalton Street, Boston (Back Bay) (617-437-9999) o A dive bar institution. Overhanging the Pike for even more of a down-and-dirty feel. Basic menu. Two doors down from the Summer Shack. Coppa (www.coppaboston.com) 253 Shawmut Ave, Boston (at Milford St) (617-391-0902) o Enoteca. Great for grazers. ! Darryls Corner Bar and Grill (http://darrylscornerbarboston. com) 604 Columbus Avenue, Boston (617-536-1100) o The food is ok. But the blues and soul music make it worth it. If you sit in the front room, be prepared to get blasted out of your seats. The back room is quieter, but not as fun. DeLux Caf 100 Chandler Street, Boston (Back Bay) (617-338-5258) o Little corner dive bar, with good food. Franklin Cafe (www.franklincafe.com) 278 Shawmut Avenue, Boson (South End) (617-350-0010) o Great cocktails, very good food (at bar and booths); tiny, loud, cool crowd. The Gallows (www.thegallowsboston.com) 1395 Washington Street, Boston (South End) (617-425-0020) o Excellent cocktail bar and restaurant; fun and crowded. Reservations for 6 or more only. Jacob Wirth Restaurant (www.jacobwirth.com) 31-37 Stuart St, Boston (Chinatown) o Serving delicious schnitzel, wurst, and beer since 1868. Now with gluten-free options. On Fridays, theres a massive sing-a-long fest in the main dining room. You can sing, or eat in the large bar.
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Boston, by T or cab: Elephant Walk (www.elephantwalk.com) 900 Beacon St, Boston (Fenway); 2067 Massachusetts Ave Cambridge; 663 Main St, Waltham o Excellent Cambodian and French-Cambodian cuisine. Three locations.
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Bars/Restaurants :: Sights
Fugakyu (www.fugakyu.net) 1280 Beacon St, Brookline o First-rate Japanese restaurant in Coolidge Corner. Exotic cocktails and great food. The largest Japanese restaurant in New England, according to the website. Sit at the bar and watch dishes float by. Sit on cushions in an authentic Japanese dining room. Check out the chrome, red and black bar straight out of a James Bond film. Meritage (www.meritagetherestaurant.com) o Expensive and lovely menu where food is all paired with wines. Pho Lemongrass (www.pholemongrass.com/specials.htm) 239 Harvard St, Brookline o Excellent, reasonably priced Vietnamese food in Coolidge Corner. Sol Azteca (www.solaztecarestaurants.com/bostonmenu.htm; www.solazteca restaurants.com/newtomenu.htm) 914 Beacon St, Boston; 75 Union St, Newton o People dont come to New England for the Mexican food, but this is excellent. Two locations (the Newton one is tucked away in a courtyard in Newton Center, with a beautiful leafy deck). Taberna de Haro (www.tabernaboston.com/) 999 Beacon Street, Brookline o Elegant, high-end tapas. Favorite dessert: chocolate truffles with grilled crusty bread sprinkled with cocoa powder, salt, and olive oil. Trade (http://trade-boston.com/) 540 Atlantic Avenue, Boston (close to but not on the waterfront) 617-451-1234 o A new, casual restaurant that is getting good reviews, and is open late: www.bostonmagazine.com/articles/2012/01/restaurant-review-dining -out-at-trade/. O Ya (www.oyarestaurantboston.com) 9 East Street, Boston (near South Stationthe Leather District) o Japanese. Rated by Frank Bruni the #1 restaurant in the Top Ten Outside of New York in 2008 and chef Tim Cushman was named by the James Beard Foundation as Best Chef, Northeast Category, 2012. Tiny place where reservations are a mustbut you can sometimes score seats at the bar, which they book through Open Table. Super expensive. Magical.
Cambridge and Somerville, by T or cab: Addis Red Sea (www.addisredsea.com) 544 Tremont St, Boston (South End); 1755 Mass Ave, Cambridge o Again, Boston isnt crammed with Ethiopian restaurants, but this one is excellent. Two locations. Cambridge 1 (www.cambridge1.us) 27 Church Street, Cambridge o Our favorite area pizzasimple, thin crust, fresh. Try to sit in the back, which has tall windows overlooking the Old Burial Ground, est. before 1635. Very reasonable. Dali (www.dalirestaurant.com) 415 Washington St, Somerville o The flagship tapas bar of the Leon family, with several spinoffs (see Tapeo). Richly, gaudily decorated, great tapas menu, and veg, vegan, and gluten-free dishes. Always packed, and no reservations, so you may have to squeeze up in the bar for a bit.
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Breakfast and Lunch near or on Campus Well be serving coffee, tea, and water outside the session rooms. Well have a fruit bowl and some snacks as well. All the details for on-campus dining, including some venues not listed here, such as campus cafeterias: www.northeastern.edu/registrar/husky-debitcard.html#restaurants. Food Venues in Curry Student Center: Kigo Kitchen (Asian) On-The-Go (convenience store) Popeyes Fried Chicken
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Bars/Restaurants :: Sights
Starbucks (in afterHOURS) Sweet Tomatoes Pizza Taco Bell The West End (mega salad bar) UBurger
Other On-Campus sites: Chicken Lous, on Forsyth off Huntington o The oldest food truck on campus, now permanent. Breakfast sandwiches and lunch options. Love the spicy fries: ask for em well done. Dunkin Donuts, Hayden Hall & Shillman Hall H3 Food Truck in the quad outside the CSC, in front of the library o Various lunch options. International Village Cafeteria, Columbus Ave. o All you can eat buffet for $11.60. A series of stations: American, Chinese, Indian, Italian, Middle Eastern, with plenty of vegetarian options.
Opposite the NU Campus on Huntington and/and near Forsyth: Au Bon Pain at the Marino Center Boloco Boston House of Pizza Boston Shawarma Conor Larkins (standard college bar and bar food) Qdoba Mexican Wollastons at the Marino Center (convenience store, sandwiches)
At the Corner of Huntington and Gainsborough St. (if you are coming from the Colonnade and the Midtown, before campus; if you are on campus, turn left on Huntington toward downtown): Uno Chicago Grill (280 Huntington) Panera (289 Huntington) Pho and I (267 Huntington) Our House East (52 Gainsborough) bar, bar food Pavement Coffeehouse (44 Gainsborough)
Other Locales Close to Campus: Woodys Bar & Grill (fresh pizza and other dishes) 58 Hemenway St (take a right on Gainsborough and left on Hemenway) Symphony 8 (8 Westland Ave) restaurant and bar Sinsa 8 (8 Westland Ave) Irish casual, pub food and more
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The Museum of Fine Arts | 465 Huntington Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts 02115 | MFA T Stop (a short walk for NU) | www.mfa.org The Institute of Contemporary Art | 100 Northern Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts 02110 | World Trade Center T Stop (or get out at the Aquarium stop (Blue Line) and walk along the harbor) | www.icaboston.org The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum | 280 The Fenway, Boston, MA 02115 | MFA T Stop (a short walk for NU) | www.gardnermuseum.org Boston Public Library | 700 Boylston Street, Boston, MA 02116 | Copley T Stop | www.bpl.org (go for the Edward Austin Abbey Murals: www.bpl.org/central/ abbey.htm)
The Freedom Trail & Other Popular Boston Tourist Destinations | Park Street T Station | www.cityofboston.gov/freedomtrail/bostoncommon.asp Shopping on Newbury Street | Hynes & Copley T Stops (also Downtown Crossing, Copley Place, and the Prudential Mall) | www.newbury-st.com/
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Get outdoors: the Arnold Arboretum was designed by Frederic Law Olmstead as part of the Emerald Necklace a series of linked green spaces in Boston (http:// arboretum.harvard.edu; Orange Line, Forest Hills stop or 39 bus, Custer Street). Boston Harbor cruises are another outdoor option. The New England Aquarium (Blue Line, Aquarium stop; http://www.neaq.org/index.php). One might want to go across the river to Harvard Square (Red Line, Harvard Sq stop) for sightseeing, dining, and shopping, as well as for the museums on Harvards Campus (www.harvard.edu/arts-museums). The Fogg and Busch-Reisinger Museums are undergoing renovations, but the best of the collections are on view at the Sackler. Mt. Auburn Cemetery (www.mountauburn.org/) is a short bus ride (the 74 or 73; pay when you get off) from Harvard Sq. Not only a great place for a walk on a fine September day, one might visit the graves of John Bartlett, Edwin Booth, Buckminster Fuller, Julia Ward Howe, Harriet Jacobs, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and many other notable Americans. Climb the tower for a great view of Boston. Runners and walkers: head to the Charles River. One can cross back and forth between Boston and Cambridge over various bridges. Great views of the city and harbor.
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GLOSSARY OF PROPER NAMES
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. . . it smells like teen spirit in here ALLEN, VALERIE [SESSION 21] | Valerie Allen is a professor of English literature at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY. She teaches new teachers at the Graduate Center and in the Interdisciplinary Studies Program at John Jay. She has published (with Ares Axiotis) on philosophy of education in relation to Heidegger and to Nietzsche. Shes wickedly stylish. (Email: vallen@jjay.cuny.edu) ALONI, GILA [SESSION 25] | La Signora Aloni has, at any rate, no fear that she will shock anybody. Her ambition is to create a sensation, to have parsons at her feet, seeing that the manhood of Barchester consisted mainly of parsons, and to send, if possible, every parsons wife home with a green fit of jealousy. None will be too old for her, and hardly any too young. None too sanctified, and none too worldly. She is quite prepared to entrap the bishop himself, and then to turn up her nose at the bishops wife. She does not doubt of success, for she has always succeeded; but one thing is absolutely necessary; she must secure the entire use of a sofa. (Email: gilaaloni@aol.com) AMBROSE, KIRK [SESSION 3] | Whether Kirk shall turn out to be the hero of his own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin Kirks life with the beginning of his life, we record that he was born (as we have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve oclock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and he began to cry, simultaneously. (Email: kirk.ambrose@colorado.edu) ARIZA-BARILE, RAL [SESSION 10] | Ral Ariza-Barile is a doctoral candidate in the English Department at University of Texas at Austin. His interests are in comparative medieval literature, especially Middle English, Old French, Anglo-Norman, and Iberian. He is currently writing his dissertation and working on an article tracing the development of the Alexander legend in Norman England and Iberia. (Email: arizab.raul@gmail.com) ARONSTEIN, SUSAN [SESSION 6] | Susan Aronstein is the author of Hollywood Knights: Arthurian Cinema and the Politics of Nostalgia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) and the New Perspectives on Medieval Literature volume, An Introduction to British Arthurian Narrative (Florida, 2012). She is also co-editor, with Tison Pugh, of The Disney Middle Ages: A Fairy Tale and Fantasy Past. (Email: aronstei@uwyo.edu) BAHR, ARTHUR [MEETING HOST] | Arthur Bahr joined MITs Literature Faculty in 2007 with a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. In 2012 received the James A. and Ruth Levitan Award for Excellence in Teaching, and his first book, Fragments and Assemblages: Forming Compilations of Medieval London, will be published by University of Chicago Press in early 2013. Arthur can also be found serving as a National judge with the United States Figure Skating Association; undertaking long, involved, and sometimes overly ambitious cooking projects; listening to Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, Vampire Weekend, Ra Ra Riot, and a wide range of baroque opera. (Email: awbahr@mit.edu). BARNETT, REBECCA [SESSION 15] | Rebecca (Bec) Barnett is a redirective practitioner working in the field of design. One of her current areas of focus is the transformation of education. Through this she is involved in the development of the Urmadic University. Rebecca is currently working on a number of projects with Pi Studio, Goldsmiths, University of London. (Email: rebeccabarnett@ live.com)
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GERVEN OEI, VINCENT W.J. [SESSIONS 7, 13] | Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei studied compostition, linguistics, conceptual art, and philosophy in the Netherlands, USA, and Switzerland. He is visiting scholar at the Centre for Modern Thought at the University of Aberdeen, and teaches at the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague and the University of New York in Tirana, Albania, where he lives. Van Gerven Oei runs the independent publishing house Uitgeverij and is contributing editor of the journal continent. His current research interests are the histories of etymology, politics, pain, and philology. (Email: Vincent@vangervenoei.com)
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WAKEMAN, ROB [SESSION 24] | In personal appearance Rob Wakeman is the most singular of beings. He is certainly very handsome. He has his sister Madelines eyes, without their stare and without their hard, cunning, cruel firmness. They are also very much lighter, and of so light and clear a blue as to make his face remarkable, if nothing else does so. On entering a room with him, Ethelberts blue
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W. dreams, like Phaedrus, of an army of thinker-friends, thinker-lovers. He dreams of a thought-army, a thought-pack, which would storm the philosophical Houses of Parliament. He dreams of Tartars from the philosophical steppes, of thought-barbarians, thought-outsiders. What distances would shine in their eyes! ~Lars Iyer www.babelworkinggroup.org