Quiet now

...for something over two weeks.

Yes, it's Beatlemania

Or for you Canadians, Trudeaumania, 1968.   See this.

Two useful resources for HIST 3116, Crusade and Jihad

Although I hope all my students in this fall course are enjoying the perfect weather I've been out in today, there will come a time when this post will prove useful.  I'm noting two resources, one online, one in print and in the Nipissing University library.

The online resource is Crusades-Encyclopedia, a large and varied assemblage of useful texts and commentary.  It has been lovingly compiled by the energetic Andrew Holt.  This is the place to go for a lot of things:  a historical text our library does not have, what a famous scholar said that made the scholar famous (historiography!), or a short introduction to many, many basic terms, persons, and places.    

If you need quick help on some medieval subject not obviously to be found in Crusades-Encyclopedia, and the library is handy, go looking for The Dictionary of the Middle Ages at Library of Congress class D 114.  Despite the name, it is a 13 volume encyclopedia which will be quite good for initial orientation or basic fact checking on a great many subjects, including many aspects of the Crusades.

Happy exploring!

Need a good scare?

From the Group News Blog.

On the road

For the next three weeks I will be on the road and for two of those I will be off the net. I think a lot of potential readers in the Northern Hemisphere at least will be out and about, too.

Nevertheless, the number of visitors here will probably pass 200,000 while I'm traveling. It's not 50 freaking million page views, but it's still quite a number. I guarantee my books have sold all together only a few thousands.

I looked for a good picture of an odometer or the number 200,000 and this is the best I could come up with:

Iron age technology on the web

Darrell Markewitz has been experimenting with Iron Age technology for at least 30 years now. I've covered some of this projects here and it occurred to me recently that I should point my readers to his blog, Hammered Out Bits. it's a real "log" of projects in process and ideas and problems that come up during those projects. I am sure, for instance, that some of you will be interested in hearing what he has to say about working meteoric iron. If you really get interested, don't stop at Hammered Out Bits, but go on to the Wareham Forge site.

The Omar Khadr interrogation tapes

This morning I was asked to comment on the release of the Omar Khadr interrogation tapes, or at least on issues arising from the interrogation itself, for local radio station KCAT. I don't know if or when the interview may be broadcast, or what it will sound like when edited, but you can pretty much see my point of view in this Globe and Mail opinion column by Ed Broadbent and Alex Neve, which I found about an hour later on the Globe's website. This is an excellent summation of the issues.

University professors have it easy!

All that time off in the summer!

I'm not complaining, I think I've got a great job, but I would like to point out that there's always plenty to do.

Note, for instance, what a newly tenured medieval literature professor in the United States is doing in the next five weeks, on top of attending an important conference in Britain (and here I directly quote):

* Re-write article due August 15th according to feedback from collection editors -- some of which feedback I got orally at Kalamazoo, and have been working on, but most of which I just got about a week ago.
* Finish academic book (on planes and trains while away) and write review for - gulp! - Speculum (my first ever for them).
* Read dissertation and prepare for as yet unscheduled August defense. Thank god I'm the outside reader. Note: my first dissertation committee position ever.
* Read MA thesis and prepare for early-August defense.
* Correct proofs of article (possibly with stolen time at Famous Author conference if editors won't give me a 5-day extenstion). I just got the PDF of the proofs 10 minutes ago and they're due July 25th. I'm leaving tomorrow and I'm still fine-tuning my paper, doing laundry, packing, etc.
* Prepare for and organize department orientation for non-TA students.
* Meet with colleague with whom I will be the dramaturge for a 2010 production of medieval drama (he needs to plan the season this far in advance and we have to settle on which plays and what form of text -- simply modernized or truly translated).

This kind of stuff is just as much a part of her job as teaching in a classroom. Sure, she could maybe now get away with doing less, but the only reason she has a permanent job and a tenured one at that, in a profession that has many more talented candidates than positions, is that she has always worked hard. And indeed she wants to work hard.

But there's not a lot of lying around in the summer drinking mojitos involved.

A thought-provoking characterization of the First Crusade

From Christopher Tyerman's huge history of the Crusades, God's War (p. 89):

Part revivalism, part politics, part a search for release in personal renewal, both a manipulation of popular beliefs and prejudices common to all social groups and an attempt to channel these towards a narrowly laudable yet essentially familiar and explicable end, the summons to Jerusalem succeeded because it caught the imagination of a society not necessarily ready but psychologically, culturally and materially equipped to answer the call. In the level of official enthusiasm, in the rapidity of popular acceptance, in the extremes of response, in the widespread uncertainty, indifference and regional variation shadowing extravagant and well-publicized bellicosity, 1096 was the 1914 of the Middle Ages.

Time for some more Crown of Creation

The Jefferson Airplane on the Smothers Brothers Show.

I feel a desire to point out that the words of this song come, more or less, from an excellent post-apocalyptic novel by John Wyndham entitled The Chrysalids (UK) or Rebirth (US). This book was an assigned text in one Toronto high school for years, presumably until too many copies fell apart. Not a bad choice. Perhaps it led a few students to conclude "I've seen their ways too often for my liking" a little more quickly.

A Big Picture of the Tour de France

... and there are more, maybe even better...

What Iran wants

Expert commentary from Foreign Policy. Thanks to Laura Rozen for the tip.

Ancient holiday resorts

A while back, Dee Barizo sent me a link to an interesting article on the History of Print, which I mentioned here. If you missed it, have a look.

Now that same industrious guy has alerted me to a site devoted to travel information which includes some special interest pages. Dee thought you good readers would be particularly interested in this collection of ancient holiday resorts. But don't neglect to look at the list of other recent posts on travel related topics. One I liked is entirely modern: 8 More Abandoned And Decayed Hotels From Around The World. Have fun!

NGC 7331 and the Deer Lick Group

Island universes galore! Another beauty from Astronomy Picture of the Day.

Click on the picture for a better view.

The future of academic publication

In my usual daily wandering through a number of blogs, most of them concerned with foreign policy and American politics, I ran across this post at the blog Open Left. It is a response by Chris Bowers to another blog post by David Appell that basically argues, in an unfortunate ad hominem fashion, that blogs are worthless for discussing any serious issue. (The critic includes his own blog in his rather sweeping statements.) Rather, he says one should go to serious magazines and journals for the real stuff since what you find there is backed up by in-depth investigation.

I could reply to Appell myself, but I am more interested in something that Bowers says in defending his own devotion to blogging:

I have a personal stake in this, of course. Before I became a blogger, I spent my entire 20's trying to become an academic (English and critical theory was my focus). While I struggled to produce a handful of conference papers or publishable articles during that decade, in my four years as a blogger I have published about 4,400 articles that have received about 50,000,000 direct page views, 46,000 incoming links, and over 100 Lexis Nexus mentions. Had I stayed in academia, none of this would have been possible, and I would have continued to receive an endless series of rejections from the gatekeepers. The "experts" that Appell describes did not see the same value in my writing huge numbers of other people clearly have. Either they were wrong about my writing, or I just wasn't writing about the best topics for me. Probably a combination of both, but I'm pretty sure the balance of evidence shows they were wrong. (Man, I am still really angst ridden about this.)

It seems likely that somewhere in Bowers's soul he thinks of himself as a failed academic. I, as an employed and high-ranking academic at a small but respectable academic institution, think he has nothing to apologize for (I am talking about activity level, not the specific things that he has written.) He does talk about important issues. And I note that if he and others like him had left it to the established media to cover and interpret what is going on in the world, things would be much worse than they are now. But again that's not the point of this post. The point is this:

50 million freaking direct page views!

In that fact I see the doom of the academic journal as it now exists, in particular the paper version thereof. Fifty million direct page views!
I don't fear for the academic book actually, because I think books, at least good ones, provide an in-depth experience that nothing else has been able to rival so far. But when it comes to investigating the small pointsthat lead to the big insights, or clear up the small mysteries that clarify the big picture, why not do it all electronically? (Preservation questions apart of course; again, nothing beats paper yet. And there are other practical questions to be considered.)

I am quite aware that most so-called academic blogs, including my own, are made up of snippets that may or may not be developed into some important scholarly contribution -- and usually not. But blogs and the habit of reading them is a rather new thing. See how they grow.

One example of the direction they might go can be seen in the medievalist group blog In the Middle. Here some like-minded scholars, with a penchant for complex literary theory that sometimes leaves me behind, are throwing out some of their best new ideas in what might be seen as half developed form, so that their blog partners and any passing reader can think about them and comment, favorably or unfavorably. This is not instead of the usual academic activity. Material on In the Middle relates directly to conference papers, potential articles, and monographs being worked on by the blog owners, material it should be noted that otherwise I never would have heard of (being a more or less conventional historian). I'm part of an unexpected audience that was attracted to the blog by a reference to some other blog. And there must be many others, all of whom are in a position to comment, at whatever length. Who knows what some half-random reader may say that may contribute to this remarkable productivity?

This is just one way the Web can work for you.

Working academics who are reading this: be honest. When was the last time you sat down with a congenial group and really kicked around an idea that appeared in an academic article? There's nothing better for getting the intellect really working, for shooting down mistaken ideas, for putting together half-formed thoughts into useful ones. But they are rare, those in-person opportunities. But the Internet, for us lucky ones, is always available. And damned cheap to compared to paper journals.

PS: what about copyediting, you ask? It's dead anyway, as I'm here attest on the basis of much recent reading of ink-on-paper publications by big-name scholarly presses.

Image: Fifty million marks, Germany, 1923.

PM Harper not responsible for anything important

Certainly not the well-being of Canadian citizens!

Perhaps someone should ask him who he works for.

From the Canadian Press:

Speaking to reporters in Tokyo - where he met with the Japan's emperor and prime minister following this week's G8 summit - Harper said the Liberal government of the day knew about Khadr's treatment in Guantanamo Bay.

"The previous government took a whole range, all of the information, into account when they made the decision on how to proceed with the Khadr case several years ago," he said.

"Canada has sought assurances that Mr. Khadr, under our government, will be treated humanely. We are monitoring those legal processes very carefully."

The prime minister then said Canada "frankly, has no real alternative" to the U.S. legal process.

However, Khadr's U.S. military lawyer, navy Lt.-Cmdr William Kuebler, took issue with that in an interview Thursday on CTV's "Canada AM.

"I think that what is being done to Omar Khadr right now rest squarely on the shoulders of Prime Minister Harper," Kuebler said.

"There is very little question that if Canada, the last western country to allow its citizen to be detained in Guantanamo Bay, demanded Omara's repatriation from Guantanamo to face due process under Canadian law, that the U.S. government would heed that request," he said.

Kuebler said the Canadian government has known since at least 2004 that U.S. assurances regarding the treatment of Khadr were false, "yet continued to hide behind those assurances in allowing Omar to be detained in Guantanamo Bay."

He said videotaped interviews with Khadr are expected to come out in the next few days and that the contents are likely to be "quite powerful."

Is this a fake?

The bronze statue above, the Lupa Capitolina, is a famous 5th century BC depiction of the wolf who suckled the founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus. (The boys themselves have been long known to be Renaissance restorations.)

Now news comes out of Italy that the wolf, too, may be late (13th century A.D.?), and produced by a method unknown in antiquity.

For more details, see the story from the BBC.

Just goes to show you how our links to the past are always uncertain, or maybe, as Henry Ford said, "the bunk."

And another video goes viral...

...one can hope.



This may be the top cultural achievement of the 21st century (so far). I'm not kidding. A bit of an antidote to all the crap flying around.

Thanks to Jennifer Lynn Jordan at Per Omnia Secula for alerting me. "Pretty remarkable" indeed.

But...no yoga? :-)

Update: more on the video. The NY Times is right to say the Internet is central to the matter.

An attack on Iran?

The Group News Blog has collected material in video and text about the big "war and peace" issue of the summer.

Historians: write like this

I guess it would be boring if everyone wrote alike; but the world could certainly use more scholars like Patricia Crone, author of God's Rule, and many other works on Islamic history. The clarity and grace with which she explains complicated phenomena are a joy to see. for instance, this passage from page 340 of God's Rule:

To a greater or lesser degree, all Sufis stepped out of the social rules for a realm of freedom, permanently, temporarily, or just momentarily, to escape the endless demands of family and friends and the rigid rules of social etiquette, seeking to find a deeper meaning to life. Originally, they did not form a hierarchy themselves. But all places of escape fill up as news of their attractions spreads, and all develop organization in the process. By the end of our period, the Sufis were no longer back-packing tourists in an untouched and exotic world. The great Sufi orders were under formation and there were now Sufi hierarchies in this world reflecting angelic hierarchies in the next. The leaders of such hierarchies, though wealthy and influential, still did not have actual political or military power, but that too was to come, especially in tribal areas, if only after our period.