On Dabbling

I'm delighted to report that this blog now features a gorgeous slideshow of gorgeous, gorgeous western-ness. If you click on the photos, you should be able to view them in larger scale through Picasa. I guess that would also tip you off on how to contact me, should you ever feel an inexplicable wish to do so.

I am also excited about tomorrow's teaching. [Okay, so I started this entry yesterday, and that is now "today's teaching," on which more later.] I am participating in another microteaching session, but this time, I get fifteen minutes. So, we will be talking about Grimm's Law and Verner's Law. The added bonus is that part of my lecture for 7 October (sound-changes and strong verbs) is now planned. The bottom line is that I enjoy teaching anything anybody will let me teach (Latin, Old English, math, palaeography, music, whatever), but I have also made another realization: if I am going to try to do this job for the rest of my life, then I want to be doing research, surrounded by other people doing research, and working with grad students as well as undergrads. In practical terms, this means that I need to be prepared for several years of hard work in jobs that might not be my ideal. More fundamentally, this has required a fresh confrontation with my identity as a dabbler.

It is because I am a dabbler (well, partly because of this) that I didn't attempt to study music as an undergraduate, although it was one of the most difficult decisions I have ever made. It is also because of this that I took a math degree - I satisfied enough requirements on entrance that it allowed me to continue taking all sorts of other courses along the way, which is no mean reward at a place like the University of Chicago. The most potentially disastrous aspect of grad school seemed to me, before I arrived, that I would someday be asked to take the time to become really good at one thing. I wasn't sure that I had it in me, and I think I have shown my true colours by setting out to write a thesis that spans a thousand years. I still can't quite believe my committee fell for it. Oddly, in the midst of it, I think I have actually found a stronger overarching argument about linguistic distance and textual community, and I find it ironic at best that someone like me, unable in the general way to see the trees (let alone the forest) for the knots and twigs, is writing something that I hope to one day turn into a book about a Big Idea.

But being a dabbler carries its share of dangers, nonetheless. While I hope that my interest in a variety of topics is helping me to think broadly about the questions I pose, I cannot deny that I have uneven mastery of the background material for my various chapters. There are many scholars who have brought to their work sufficient breadth that they have revolutionized the thinking across a range of specializations, but that means an awful lot of material to get to know. Even if you know your stuff, I'd imagine that there might still be a lot of resentment. Part of my Wulfstan chapter represents an attempt to scrabble away a bit more at the question of Wulfstanian imitators and how we can (or can't) tell whose was the authority or the voice behind what we read in the manuscripts. Just this morning, I was reading an article where Dorothy Whitelock argues that there probably weren't Wulfstan imitators because his reputation for eloquence was already established by 1002. She cites a letter written by a guy who declined to do some translation for Wulfstan, ostensibly because Wulfstan's style just couldn't be lived up to. I suddenly thought, Gosh, I don't know. Wulfstan's Latin was clearly not as good as Ælfric's Latin, and yet he was a hugely influential man who held ecclesiastical positions of far greater prominence and wrote laws for and advised both Anglo-Saxon and Danish kings of England. Ælfric and all of the other Latinists and exegetes who were stuck in little, backwater abbacies must have really resented Wulfstan. Maybe this poor guy was just tired of being one of the backs on which Wulfstan stood, and so he allowed himself an asinine moment. Bottom line: I hope that with hard work my dabbling tendencies will help me to ask interesting questions, but I know how thin the ice is in some spots. (For example, I have already started thinking about things I want to read or reread between my submission and my defense, and I'm also trying to take note of the questions that I think my examiners should be asking about various parts of my dissertation.)

I have selected a job that I can do without creating severe pain for myself, which is what I feared it would be like to be an organist in a serious way. (Having done more work for money over the last four years in Toronto, I am less certain of this now.) Playing the organ, really practicing something hard, is one of the very few things that makes me think, "Well, I must be a fish because this is obviously water." (Running is also this way, and singing, too.) Sadly, there's more to a job than feeling exhilarated by it. I don't do enough of that kind of practicing, but this makes me wonder what is meant in Gaudy Night by the idea of doing the job you're meant to be doing. I'm not certain that the things I feel I'm meant to be doing correspond exactly to jobs I'm meant to be doing, to careers I'm meant to be pursuing. And so I do not practice enough, because I have another job, and so I am not good enough to go back and be an organist - never was, truth be told.

Fortunately, that other job has so far allowed me to be inquisitive about many different things, and I value that. When I was fretting about making the undeniably selfish decision to begin graduate work in Old English, of all things, I sat down with one of my undergrad profs from UChicago and asked her opinion on the question. She said that her job was to ask tough questions of students and to get them to start asking tough questions. "The fact that you're asking this at all means that I've done my job."

The hard part, of course, is finding the tough answers. It's difficult for me to say that "proper feeling" will not stop me from doing my "proper job," when there is so much amiss in the world, but I suppose that starting with tough questions is just that: a start. I can't promise to ever feel easy in my mind, but I think this is enough to go on with for now.