thanks, Cicero

Today in 43 BCE, Marcus Tullius Cicero's luck ran out, and he was caught fleeing down the Italian coast by Octavian's soldiers, and killed.

Cicero is one of my favourite historical figures. I was trying to decide what I should post in memory of him, and I couldn't choose. There's the hilarious speech for the defence of a guy called Caelius, which totally ignored the actual charge against him and instead committed wholesale character assassination of the sister of the guy bringing the charge, who was alleged to be behind it because she was his jilted mistress, and with whom Cicero had a long-standing feud; the story is that it was a feast day, and none of the jurors wanted to be there, but had been dragged in by the insistence of the prosecutor, so Cicero repeated totally salacious gossip about the sister's beach villa toyboy lifestyle and her alleged sexual relationship with her brother until they could all go home.

There's also the brilliantly cranky letter to a friend of Cicero's who was running for office, who wrote to Cicero while he was a provincial governor out in the godforsaken deserts of Bithynia, asking if he could send him some panthers for some games he was putting on. Cicero, basically, tells him he's got better fucking things to do than find him panthers. Then there's the letter where Cicero writes about how bizarre Latin swear-words are, and how annoying is that everyone giggles when you say 'witnesses' (testes) or 'when we...' ('cum nos', which sounds like 'cunnos', which means, uh, guess), on and on through several paragraphs. It is because of Cicero that we know what a number of swear words mean, and that they are swear words. Thank you, Cicero. Or there are the heartbreaking letters he writes after the death of his daughter, and his obsession, that lasts for several months, with building a huge memorial for her, and getting the right kind of marble; there are the perfectly constructed, scathingly acerbic speeches against Mark Antony while he was off having a civil war, and the fantastically understated letter about having dinner with Julius Caesar when he used Cicero's villa as an overnight stop while marching into Rome with his army.

I love Cicero because he was neurotic, ambitious, brilliant, witty and acutely sensitive; he was too clever, maybe, in the end, to win. He could see both sides of the argument too well, and wanted to keep friends too much. He was very proud, prone to depression when he wasn't working 18 hours a day, he hated getting sick. He loved writing, but he also loved people. He was cranky and impatient and arrogant, sometimes, but he wasn't cruel. He loved his family and his friends and his home, even when they betrayed each other.

I also love him because he was there, right there in the middle of it all as one of the most important political and geographical structures in the world was reforged into an entity that would shape Europe into what it is today, and we know about it in literally day-to-day detail because of his letters.

Spare a moment today to think of Cicero, on the Italian coast, on his cart in the rain. He'd been the most powerful man in the Roman Republic, at one point - arguably one of the most powerful men in the world. He survived one power changeover by the skin of his teeth, but he couldn't get through two. He was in his sixties, divorced, his daughter was dead, and he probably knew he'd left it too late to run. RIP, Cicero.

this blew my *mind*

I love talking to people who come at my subject from a different angle completely to me; war gamers, collectors, blacksmiths, costumers, replicators. People who use google maps and an algorithm to work out whether the Persian army could have covered x distance in y days. People who run down beaches naked and then wearing armour to see how fast they can go. People who build swords, who run campaigns in scale, who cook pies. I don't understand objects or things, I like stories. But I've never seen anyone explain to me so clearly how an object can /be/ a story, how one can re-tell an object the same way one can re-tell a story. I have a feeling I'm going to be thinking about this video for a while.

Adam Savage (of Mythbusters) on his obsession with the Maltese Falcon -

http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/488

Glossa

Glossa - new online Latin dictionary, with extended definitions, related words, usage. Oh, it's so SHINY.

Ian Thompson

Woke up this morning to this.

I'm very shocked and saddened. I often attended services at Kings College Chapel while I was there, although I was not a believer; the unquestioning, undemanding support I received from the people there, including Ian Thompson, is one of my happier memories of Cambridge. He was always kind to me. I don't know anything about the allegations, but, based on what I knew of the man, I'm sorry that this is the epitaph he receives.

Towards an Erotics of Reception: CFP

I am co-running this conference with an awesome colleague at Bristol, and I am VERY EXCITED ABOUT IT. Do not be fooled by my location in Toronto - the conference will be in Bristol, in the UK, next summer.


DESIRING THE TEXT, TOUCHING THE PAST: TOWARDS AN EROTICS OF RECEPTION

A one-day conference co-organized by

The Bristol Institute of Greece, Rome and the Classical Tradition & the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto

University of Bristol, 10 July 2010

Keynote Speaker: Professor Carolyn Dinshaw, NYU

CALL FOR PAPERS

In reading Cicero's letters I felt charmed and offended in equal measure. Indeed, beside myself, in a fit of anger I wrote to him as if he were a friend and contemporary of mine, forgetting, as it were, the gap of time, with a familiarity appropriate to my intimate acquaintance with his thought; and I pointed out those things he had written that had offended me. (Petrarch, Rerum Familiarum Liber I.1.42)

Love, desire, fannish obsession and emotional identification as modes of engaging with texts, characters and authors are often framed as illegitimate and transgressive: excessive, subjective, lacking in scholarly rigour. Yet such modes of relating to texts and pasts persist, across widely different historical periods and cultural contexts. Many classical and medieval authors recount embodied and highly emotional encounters with religious, fictional or historical characters, while modern and postmodern practices of reception and reading - from high art to the subcultural practices of media fandom - are characterized by desire in all its ambivalent complexity. Theories of readership and reception, however, sometimes seem unable to move beyond an antagonistic model: cultural studies sees resistant audiences struggling to gain control of or to overwrite an ideologically loaded text, while literary models of reception have young poets fighting to assert their poetic autonomy vis-a-vis the paternal authority of their literary ancestors.

This conference aims, by contrast, to begin to elaborate a theory of the erotics of reception. It will bring together scholars working in and across various disciplines to share research into reading, writing and viewing practices characterized by love, identification, and desire: we hope that it will lead to the establishment of an international research network and the formulation of some long-term research projects. In order to facilitate discussion at the conference, we will ask participants to circulate full papers (around 5,000 words) in May 2010.

We now invite abstracts of 300 words, to be submitted by email by 30 November 2009. Abstracts will be assessed on the basis of their theoretical and interdisciplinary interest. We particularly welcome contributions from scholars working on literary, visual and performance texts in the fields of: history, reception studies, mediaeval studies, fan studies, cultural studies, theology, and literary/critical theory.

Some ideas which might be addressed include, but are not limited to:

* Writing oneself into the text: self-insertion and empathetic identification
* Historical desire: does the historian desire the past?
* Hermeneutics and erotics
* Pleasures of the text, pleasures of the body: (how) are embodied responses to the text gendered?
* Anachronistic reading: does desire disturb chronology?
* Erotics and/or eristics: love-hate relationships with texts

This conference is part of the 'Thinking Reciprocity' series and will follow directly from the conference 'Reception and the Gift of Beauty' (Bristol, 8-9 July 2010). Reduced fees will be offered to people attending both conferences.
If you have any queries, or to submit an abstract, please contact one of the conference organizers:

Dr Ika Willis (Ika.Willis@bristol.ac.uk)
Anna Wilson (anna.wilson@utoronto.ca)

In defence of historical RPF (real person fiction)

Guy Gavriel Kay speaks out against writing historical RPF.

I actually saw him give this talk several months ago at ICFA, and I meant to make a post about it, so this saves me having to reconstruct his argument from memory and then argue against it. I partially resent his kids-these-days rhetoric:

What is at work today is linked to a general erosion of the ethical value of privacy and a parallel emergence of a widespread sense of entitlement to look at – or to make use of – the lives of others.

Yes, yes, and children don't listen to their elders, and the Greeks are clogging up the Tiber. For God's sake, speculative biography is hardly a new genre. And yes, no doubt the internet and reality TV have changed the way we think about the individual, but he talks as though Facebook and Twitter and Myspace were only ways of looking at others, rather than ways of constructing oneself as a textual being in a new arena of communication. He fails to understand that people consciously make textual simulacra of themselves on these sites - they don't open up windows to their souls, even if they think they're doing that. They are not victims of technology. They join these sites, they volunteer what personal information they like, and they allow who they wish to see it. People use reality TV shows - with varying degrees of expertness, true - as ways to further their careers, and build their public image in a certain way, just as Ovid circulated his poems and Augustus his statues. This is an age of mass autobiography, not of the erosion of the privacy of the individual.

I also dislike his pretensions in claiming to be striking a blow for ETHICS in his books, when a nasty part of me wants to note that changing the names of the (very recognisable) characters in your historical fiction to make it fantasy is a nice dodge for avoiding the other annoyances of writing historical fiction, like research*, or (as he himself notes) avoiding offending people with your portrayal of national icons (especially as, with the life of El Cid, it's the national icon of a culture not his own). And I dislike that he's using his own books as a platform to trumpet his views about a modern phenomenon which I really don't think is comparable to writing books about the emperor Justinian and changing the names, actually.

*Although I should note that by all accounts, he does a lot of research, and I do enjoy his books.

My personal reactions aside, it's an interesting point he's raising, but I think the thing is that he has pulled together long-dead historical figures and people who have died within living memory as being ontologically the same. He writes about long-dead historical figures, and claims to be defending them by changing the names, but note that he doesn't protest against Mary Renault's Alexander books, or the TV series Rome, or I, Claudius - possibly because the latter is a rewrite of Tacitus, which might explode Kay's claim that the world has started falling since Facebook. He claims that Justinian and Eleanor of Aquitaine and El Cid are the same as people like Wittgenstein and Marilyn Monroe, people who are still remembered as real people by others who are alive today, who have living relatives. But, realistically, Monroe and Wittgenstein are dead; speculation on what they thought and how they acted is not going to hurt them, unless you believe in an aware afterlife, which isn't under discussion here. But it's true that fiction written about the recently-dead claiming to 'know' their real selves (if anyone really does that) has the potential to hurt the living who loved them and remember them. Whether or not writers should be allowed to do that is a different issue.

But for people who don't exist in any way now except in text - and history is text - what's the difference between writing stories about them, and fanfiction? I've long been fascinated by the way RPF and RPS, fanfiction about 'real people' (boybands, actors, even politicians), reads the public constructs of stars - their publicity photos, their interviews, their twitters - as texts to be plundered and expanded upon. Fandom knows, as Kay doesn't, that when people carry themselves a certain way in the public eye, when they tell their friends, subjects and biographers about themselves, when they have statues placed of themselves in the forum and write lawcodes, they're writing stories about themselves. And authors writing stories based in those pre-existing worlds, about those pre-created characters, is fanfiction. Perhaps he's against fanfiction too, I don't know. But the interesting thing about Kay's argument is that he puts his finger on where fanfiction and historical RPF and history start to blur into each other - if you take his argument to its logical conclusion, you also start to argue that it's unethical to write history about historical figures, because we can't claim to understand their motivations, and shouldn't try.

But by using motifs of time and history in a fantasy setting we are acknowledging that this educated guesswork, invention, fantasy underlie our treatment of the past and its peoples - and we are not claiming a right to do with them as we will.

When Peter Brown wrote his biography of St. Augustine, was he doing with him as he would? Perhaps historians should acknowledge their educated guesswork, invention and fantasy more clearly. That's a serious point, but again, I think Kay is being facetious in his conflation of the textual construct of a person with the real person. A book does not manipulate a person's physical being; it may alter and taint others' memories of them, but that's something different, and he has not made that distinction.

I also notice that Kay only cites major historical figures - El Cid, J Edgar Hoover, Marilyn Monroe, Wittgenstein. These are (even if you forget the enormous historical gap and the difference in the nature of the sources we have for these figures, as Kay seems to want to do) all people with voices. They can speak for themselves - people can go back and read what they wrote, or read reports about what they did and said. Writing stories about them doesn't change that. If Kay is really concerned about the invasion of privacy of people of the past, why doesn't he talk about the historical novels about people without speaking parts in history? What about Bagoas the eunuch, or Pullo and Vorenus, or the girl with the pearl earring? Kunta Kinte?

The Wikipedia article on 'Roots' sets the book/series' lack of historical truth against its social impact in modern America, and quotes Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., "Most of us feel it's highly unlikely that Alex actually found the village whence his ancestors sprang. Roots is a work of the imagination rather than strict historical scholarship. It was an important event because it captured everyone's imagination."

There are ways of doing history that involve more leaps of the imagination than others, and they end up on the fiction shelves, but I don't think they're any less valuable. Perhaps it is entitlement to think one can write the story of a person who lived centuries ago, worked as a cleaner or a prostitute or a common soldier, and died; but there's a value in it, too. If we're talking about respect for the dead, isn't that a fitting memorial? If we're talking about the value of these stories for the living, isn't it important to help people find a way into history through ordinary lives that remind us that there were real people in the past? That the history of western Europe isn't a sea of dead white men?

It's also worth noting that on the social networking sites that Kay dislikes so much, people who haven't had voices in the past, who haven't been able to write their own biographies, are doing so. Sure, it's threatening to suddenly be faced with people claiming the right to write their own stories, when previously the subgroups of the silent majority could be written about with impunity. And it should make us think twice about what, exactly, we're doing when we write other people's stories for them and claim their authority. But Kay's problem seems to be based on the belief that to write the history of a long, long-dead person is to affect them in some fundamental way; to do something to them. But those long-dead people he's talking about, all of whom left writings or writings about themselves, they were all intelligent, powerful people who manipulated their own press, maybe with more skill than people on Facebook, but it's basically the same. They knew what they were doing. We don't have access to their real selves, but only the stories they wrote about themselves. I'm a fan and a historian, and I don't see any problem with writing stories about their stories. I do see problems with writing stories about people who are alive today, or who just died and whose families are alive, or who are national icons and are important to people, but those are for other reasons, and Kay doesn't mention those things as part of his argument.

The questions I think we should be asking aren't whether it's the same thing to write a story about Julius Caesar or Princess Diana. I think it's fairly clear that it isn't. What we should be asking is, to what extent is academic history different from historical RPF? If we changed the names and added an extra moon in the sky as Kay does, would it be fantasy, and if so, should we acknowledge that? Is it morally right to write the stories of long-dead people who didn't get the chance to write their own? Is it morally right to not?

Jerusalem syndrome

Today I went to the John Soane Museum in Central London. It's a house designed and built by this famous late 18th/early 19th century architect and collector, stuffed to the gills (or the eaves?) with bits and pieces of antiquity. It's quite extraordinary bit of historiography in spatial form. It made me realize how displays in modern museums serve to space out, categorize and map history in a way that gives the false impression that the past is easy to understand. There's something much more true, somehow, about stolen bits of history piled indiscriminately on top of each other, going up beyond your eyeline, hidden in secret rooms and suddenly leaping out at you from around a corner. The website says that Soane meant his museum for 'amateurs and students'. It seems to me that the most important thing I learned from my undergrad is that the past is extremely impressive, very present and totally incomprehensible. Bring back Victorian curatorship, that's what I say.

It's an amazing place, really worth a visit (and apparently they're going to do some major renovations soon, so get there fast); it's very interesting, architecturally, too, full of invisible skylights you can't quite see, all yellow glass and mirrors. There's also a small exhibition there right now of photographs of Rome taken by a Scottish priest in the late nineteenth century. In contrast, there's a lot of curatorial (is that a word?) comment on those; they explain in detail what each ruin is, when it was destroyed post-photograph, etc. They also provide a lot of cuttings from contemporary historians and guidebook writers describing the ruins as they are photographed; a recurring theme was that the ruins looked far nicer before the Italian government stripped all the flowers and trees off them and left them bare hunks of rock. It's funny, I don't think of ruins as being part of the landscape in that way. One thinks of them just sort of existing outside of nature, as if only humans could take away bits of marble or build over foundations, and only pollution could erode stone. I'd love to see the Roman forum the way this historian described it, all shaded by trees and full of flowers.

*

Today I also learned about Jerusalem Syndrome - did you know that there is a recognized medical phenomenon of people, sometimes with no previous history of mental illness, becoming psychotic on entering Jerusalem? Symptoms of Type 3 (uncompounded by previous mental illness), which tour guides are told to watch out for, include (lifted from Wikipedia):

1. Anxiety, agitation, nervousness and tension, plus other unspecified reactions.
2. Declaration of the desire to split away from the group or the family and to tour Jerusalem alone. Tourist guides aware of the Jerusalem syndrome and of the significance of such declarations may at this point refer the tourist to an institution for psychiatric evaluation in an attempt to preempt the subsequent stages of the syndrome. If unattended, these stages are usually unavoidable.
3. A need to be clean and pure: obsession with taking baths and showers; compulsive fingernail and toenail cutting.
4. Preparation, often with the aid of hotel bed-linen, of a long, ankle-length, toga-like gown, which is always white.
5. The need to shout psalms or verses from the Bible, or to sing religious hymns or spirituals loudly. Manifestations of this type serve as a warning to hotel personnel and tourist guides, who should then attempt to have the tourist taken for professional treatment. Failing this, the two last stages will develop.
6. A procession or march to one of Jerusalem's holy places.
7. Delivery of a sermon in a holy place. The sermon is usually very confusing and based on a plea to humankind to adopt a more wholesome, moral, simple way of life.

The article cites the Book of Margery Kempe as evidence that this existed in the past. I think that pathologising in that way is a totally pointless way of shutting down discussion about texts, but it's interesting that this is a recorded phenomenon. It makes one wonder about the physical power of mental associations with places. Apparently it's discussed in relation to Stendahl Syndrome, a mental effect that can happen when people are exposed to immense or overwhelming beauty in art or nature. Multiple recorded cases of dizziness, confusion and hallucinations in Florence in the nineteenth century, apparently.

wasted

Today I crashed and burned in my Latin class while trying to tell my students a very funny joke using the gerund.

"... so you see," I said (after explaining the gerund), "If anyone asks you, 'Cur Latinam linguam studes?', you can say, 'Facio ad ridendumz' which means of course, 'I do it for the lolz.'"

... silence...

"No? The lolz? Anyone? LOL?"

A student, looking bewildered: "Like... laugh out loud?"

Me, running out of steam, "Yes! And, you know, if you do something for the lols, you... it's what the kids say these days! You know what, never mind."

Student: "So you've added the 'z' onto the gerund to..."

Me: "It's a VERY FUNNY JOKE."


Jeez. I should take it on the road, I'm wasted on these guys.

missed connections

Came across this via a friend - Advertising for Love, a blog which regularly posts personals ads from New York papers of the 19th century! Follow the mysterious coded messages of 'Salla Rand and Lilla Rand'! Wish that the lonely widow and respectable matron who advertised a year apart found each other! Laugh at the colonel and his booty calls! Wonder if the 'Romeo' ever found 'any of the young ladies who were on broad way last week' to form a 'matrimonial alliance'! It's great.

like a sex machine

I've been reading about Victorian pornography recently. I've always wanted to know more about Victorian sexual ethics after learning about curators painting penises off Greek pots. Came across (ahem) this post about the history of vibrators: pretty cool. Just as I thought I couldn't justify doing reading that was in no way related to my research, one of my students pointed me to The Reenchantment of the World. From the synopsis:

What we aim to show, in this edited volume, is that modernity produces an entirely new array of strategies, compatible with secular rationality, for re-enchanting a disenchanted world.... Those who desire a universal order (kosmos) may find it, now in intermittent fashion, in secular epiphanies, moments of being in which, for a brief moment, the center appears to hold; those who, on the other hand, require a reason for their existence and effort, find it in the last place they would have looked: science, not merely a destroyer of beliefs but also, as Renan understood, their replacement.... for a hierarchy of significance, there is the genre of detective fiction, in which everyday objects become, once more, potentially salient; for mystery, there is the perennial fact of our bafflement in face of the world, a fact which enlightenment, ironically, serves more and more to confirm. And the hankering for other worlds, once satisfied by visions of paradise, is now satisfied by the creation of “secondary” or “virtual” universes (J.R.R. Tolkien and Star Trek providing respective examples)—universes whose fictitiousness is, at the same time, always acknowledged. Just like their premodern predecessors, these rational forms of enchantment are also catalyzers of community.

So, a movement from the eighteenth century to the present in which genre fiction, imaginative engagement with it, and fan community fills the gap in our hearts left by the loss of religion. I listened to an interview with the editors of the book on Stanford's Entitled Opinions podcast (which promises to be very interesting, despite the portentious tone, and the fact that I'm not sure they could have come up with a title that made me more inspired to smack them in the face), and they talked about Sherlock Holmes fandom, how Conan Doyle was a lapsed Catholic turned spiritualist who believed in fairies. The early fan community, the Baker Street Irregulars, and their essays about Holmes, arguments over canon, etc. "Sherlock Holmes was the first fictional character whom people talked about as if he was real." And how Moriarty was an allegory for the devil.

They came *so close* to saying that Holmes was an allegory for Christ - and then, are the fan essays about him, the obsessive biographing and arguments over canon all really like the same communities, the same communal practices for Christ? I've been thinking, experimentally, about medieval receptions of the gospels as fan texts for a while now, and I think if I were to write a giant history of the fan which would, in part, be the history of the religious, and had wondered about Holmes fandom as a moment where religious faith in Christ and the imaginative fleshing-out of a character on the page are confused, or blurred, or are revealed to be the same. Did you know that many of the Baker Street Irregulars were Bible critics?

So, I am not finished reading about Victorians. Maybe I'll move on to a slightly less sexually explicit form of love. (Although Holmes and Watson were totally doing it.)

more on pleasure

More thoughts about the Kalamazoo Pleasure panel. I continue to have the feeling that I completely missed the point, somehow. I remember that a man at the back of the room put up his hand at the end and said that he was from Alaska, and that he'd been moved to tears by the panel; afterwards, my friend suggested that for a scholar isolated from other medievalists who only gets to talk to them once or twice a year, being able to be in a room with a hundred colleagues and being told that it's okay to love what we do is enough of a point. And maybe it is, or maybe I was looking in the wrong place. I think my frustration partly came from my own pet quarrel with Fan Studies, that up until very recently -

- and from this point I'm going to be making vast generalizations based on my own, incomplete reading in the field, and if you know better, please correct me -

- much of the scholarship is very much on the defensive in exactly the same way that I felt the panel was. I am tired of reading articles which spend half their argument on whether or not fan texts are worthy of study, and that frustration bled over into the way I felt about the pleasure panel.

In Fan Studies, that defensiveness has come from people having to present their work to a very hostile academy, and also at conferences where their audiences have to first be convinced that the field exists. It is also a consequence of the way the field has evolved; before Jenkins (and a little after), most scholarship on fanfiction was done by non-fans who took, as I said in my blog, a very pathologising line ('socially/sexually frustrated women find outlet in writing erotica about Kirk and Spock, etc'), or were simply inaccurate - Camille Bacon-Smith's 'Enterprising Women' is, I've heard, a good example of both, although I'm still trying to get my university library to buy it so I can read it.

Jenkins was one of the first to 'come out' as a fan in his academic scholarship, and much of the last twenty years of Fan Studies has been taken up by 'acafans' - academics who both work on and are involved in fandom - finding a way to negotiate between their scholarly interest in fandom and their own avowed emotional involvement in it, and working out what level to pitch their work. One of the problems, as I'm sure you know, is that fandom has a vocabulary all of its own which can make it very difficult for non-fans to read academic work on fandom - or even fans of the X-Files to read work on Buffy fandom - without a fairly detailed primer. This seems to rob conference papers, particularly, of sophistication, because they spend so much time explaining terms and context, but I've seen it in articles too.

I think that finally, finally, the scholarship is now moving on from the question of whether fan texts are worthy of study, and are starting to ask interesting questions about the texts and practices themselves, now its authors are more confident both about their right and ability to speak as academics and fans, and also about having a knowledgeable audience in their field. As the field grows and gains confidence, this will change.

Anyway, I felt as if the pleasure panel was struggling with those questions that I wish Fan Studies would move on from - is it okay to be fans and academics? Is it okay to blur our academic and fannish selves and voices? I read the panel in the context of that argument, and within that context it seemed both out of date and irrelevant, hence my bewilderment. I'd be very interested to know the actual context of the panel - what was it arguing against? What was it for?

where's the love?

This is my first attempt at posting on my new(ish) blog for my academic self. I have a fannish self, too; dealing with the contradictions of being an medievalist and a fan and an aca-fan are one of the things I'll be thinking about a lot over the next few years, and it's appropriate that I should start by posting about my first ever attendance of the International Congress of Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo, Michigan.

I attended a number of interesting papers at Kalamazoo, but I quickly realized that the point of Kzoo is to meet people, to have conversations; I saw that the old hands were spending just as much time reconnecting with old department friends as they were going to papers. It made sense, then, that I got far more out of the three round table discussions I attended. The first was entitled 'How to get the Medieval Studies you want' (there is a nice write-up of it here). I went to this expecting to be completely depressed by people talking about the impossibility of getting grants, the growing belief in the irrelevance of Medieval Studies, and general predictions of the apocalypse, but instead I was blown away by the energy and optimism in the room. People were talking about relevance, about interdisciplinarity, about positive ways to persuade your university administration of the importance of your subject. It was exciting and inspiring. Eileen Joy of BABEL also talked about pleasure, about taking pleasure in our work, which is something I feel very strongly about, but I'll get to that.

The second round table discussion, 'Are we enjoying ourselves?' was about pleasure. I was really disappointed and bewildered by this panel, and it took a couple of hours hashing it out with my friend C to work out why. The high point was Carolyn Dinshaw's excellent and fun exploration of amateurism vs. professionalism in medieval studies, and that was what I wanted to hear about: does it make a difference, to oneself and to others, to take pleasure in one's work? Does it affect the quality of your scholarship? The academy has traditionally looked down on the amateur who does it for love - can one be a professional who does it for love? Is there, in fact, a professional who does not do it for love? What other reasons can one do medieval studies for? Can't we do what we do out of, say, wish to be bored, or anger, or duty, or a wish for power, influence or money? Do we have to disclaim these things, if we have to disclaim pleasure? If not, why not? To what extent is pleasure different from other motivations, and is it more or less valid? Do we, or should we, pretend to or not to feel pleasure in what we do? But the panel seemed to stop at, 'We feel pleasure in our work.'

All the way through this, I couldn't stop thinking about a panel I attended earlier this year at the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts, on the history of sci-fi criticism. It turned into a fascinating and nuanced discussion on the growing professionalisation of what had originally been purely amateur scholarship, by fans for fans, and on the way this had changed both the scholarship itself and the way it was perceived by fans and the academy. The criticism itself had become, in general, better informed and more accessible to academics outside the field and to posterity, citing its sources and drawing on contemporary literary theory. But at the same time, this use of theoretical language and increasing specialization as the field expands and evolves has made it less accessible to fans, while sci-fi scholarship is still marginalized within the academy as being less professional, too involved - it's a lifestyle, rather than a field of study. They're too fannish.

All the way through Kalamazoo, I was interested in the differences between it and the ICFA: both are huge conferences, both have an acknowledged fannish contingent (ICFA has late-night RPG sessions and author readings, Kzoo has mead-tasting, panels on WoW and Harry Potter, and Society of Creative Anachronism meetings), both have a remarkable mix of first-timers giving papers of varying quality, and big name old-timers. Kzoo was slightly less informal in dress code (although that may be the difference between a campus in Michigan and a hotel in Florida), and was a more solidly 'academic' conference, and I supposed that was the difference between Medieval Studies and Sci-Fi/Fantasy Studies, or, in my case, Fan Studies. But then I went to the last of my three round table panels, a Tolkien round table on Tom Shippey's contribution to the field. By that time, I was having a serious case of conference burnout, and I flopped down into my seat, intending not to stay, but then I instantly felt at home, and sat there for two hours. I'm not a Lord of the Rings scholar, but I'm a fan, and I felt like I was back among my people, and I didn't have to pretend to be something I wasn't anymore. But I'm not sure what it was that I'd been pretending to be. Grown-up? professional? objective? pretentious? And why did I feel that the Tolkienists weren't one or more of those things?

I'm not quite sure what the difference was between the atmosphere in that room and the atmosphere in the - far more crowded and excited - room where we were all talking about pleasure, but then I wondered why nobody who worked in Tolkien Studies had been in the panel full of serious medievalists doing fancy, fashionable theory and talking about what big fans they were, without using the word, or really talking about what it might mean to use it. Tolkienists are a prominent community at Kzoo every year who face, in their institutions and by the wider academy, being labeled as amateur purely because of what they study, because, among other reasons, their pleasure in it is assumed.

I think that, if we are to talk about how we may use and experience pleasure as academics in medieval studies, we have to talk to the fans of sci-fi and fantasy. There is such a huge overlap between our populations; many of us lead double lives and fear any blurring between our professional and fannish identities. I wish that I'd made it to the panel on blogging and online personas (happening, ironically, at the same time as this Tolkien round table), as I'm willing to bet that a lot of the people in that room were fans as well as academics, and I would have been interested to hear whether people were talking about that.

Fans, and scholars of traditionally fannish texts, are in the process of developing a theory and praxis of dealing with their own emotional involvement with the texts they study. This is not a new thing. If we, as medievalists, want to create a scholarly community that is more like fandom, the kind of community that BABEL proposes - (nominally) egalitarian, internet-based, communal, avowedly pleasurable and pleasured - then why does nobody seem to be talking to the people who are trying to create professionally respected scholarship from within that kind of community, who are struggling with being too relevant to modern society and culture? Fan Studies and Medieval Studies are natural allies. Fans permeate medieval studies, and medievalness seems to be a quality that permeates the most popular of fan texts - Lord of the Rings, WoW, Harry Potter, Buffy, even Dan Brown. I'm told that every year my department gets at least one proposal from a person who self-identifies as an elf.

I met literary criticism and fan criticism at about the same time, and my approach to texts has been shaped equally by both. I read medieval Latin literature as a fan, and I read pop media texts as a medievalist. I want to write my thesis on affective engagement with texts in medieval literature, on medieval fans. What I want to know, I suppose, is where are the fans in medieval studies? What is the difference between being a fan and a medievalist? Is it just the difference between wearing a suit and wearing a bow and quiver?