conversio ut orator

The past few weeks the impetus of the blog seems to have failed for one reason or another. One such reason (not a large one, it must be said) is the fun and distraction of teaching a course on the historical and cultural context of English literature, 600-1660. Last week's class was about Bede (and "The Ruin", Caedmon's Hymn, and "The Dream of the Rood"); a lot for just two hours of class time.

Tomorrow's class is on just one work: Beowulf. I'm very excited to be able (at last!) to teach about Beowulf. Perhaps more excited than will be good for the class. If anybody's interested, I'll be sure to let you know how it went.

But tonight is the Vespers of the Feast of St Jerome, translator of the Bible from Hebrew and Greek into Latin. He defended his translation method as "translating not like an interpreter but like an orator": making an attempt to convey the beauty of the original, rather than (woodenly) its meaning. As this is the blog of a historian and translator, the occasion can hardly be allowed to pass uncelebrated. So today's collect:

O God, Who for the expounding of the Holy Scriptures didst raise up in Thy Church the great and holy Doctor Jerome; we beseech Thee, grant that by his intercession and merits we may, by Thy help, be enabled to practice what he taught us both by word and by work.

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Displacement activity

Well, the sound of stone being worked with a circular saw is keeping me from focusing on the work I should be doing, so a quick update on the blog might at least be something.

Tuesday I taught about Northern Ireland in the course on "the English-speaking peoples of Europe"; the Tuesday before about the Republic; the Tuesday before that I cancelled the class because of my hand being in plaster - how can I possibly teach if I can't even shave?

Two of my students have asked me whether they can reschedule my exam rather than have to sit two exams on one day. It's a question that would never even have crossed my mind as a student. But it was rather touching when one of them whined "But the other exam is really important!" Such charmingly comical unfamiliarity with even the most basic principles of wheedling!
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Lenten Stuff

It's Annunciation Eve (so I'm getting in a bit of anticipatory blogging), and I wish I knew more about the solemnities that fall in Lent (that is, from the point of view of how "Lenten" a celebration ought to be: feasting and fasting are both important, but hardly combine well).

Between evening meetings and losing my voice for a fortnight, reading out the Imitation in modern Dutch has been a slow business. We've only just got to book I, chapter 13, and a passage that could have been written for me:

Some are kept safe from great temptations, but are overtaken in those which are little and common, that the humiliation may teach them not to trust to themselves in great things, being weak in small things.

Thursday last week the cardinal came and gave a lecture at the parish I help out in, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of its foundation. He speaks very well, and says very sensible things. His pastoral letters, his lectures, his essays and his sermons always contain, and convey, so much wisdom. How have things come so badly unstuck on his watch? You wonder why someone so sensible seems so reluctant to do anything about it.

On a lighter note, looking for material to illustrate a lecture on (among other things) the BSE crisis, I came across this rendition of Roast Beef of Old England:



Hardly Lenten fare. But Fielding: what a genius!
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First Sunday of Lent

I've given up blogging and facebook forLent, but Sundays are always feastdays, and I intend to celebrate that fact unfailingly.

Lenten reading so far: Mike Aquilina, The Mass of the Early Christians. Very readable, very clearly arranged, and with very short excerpts, it's making me rethink how I'd organise a projected European Identities: A Historical Sourcebook (were I ever to get the go-ahead from a publisher to write the blasted thing). More than that, it's giving me a much clearer appreciation of how ancient some attitudes are that I've always associated with the Tridentine Church and thought of as personal preferences (mostly personal preferences that I share, but have never wanted to press on others). Note to self: must read more Church Fathers.

For reading out loud at bed-time: Thomas a Kempis, De Navolging van Christus. In jonge taal hertaald door Mink De Vries. That is, the Imitation of Christ in a fairly free translation into contemporary colloquial Dutch. Number one daughter is surprisingly unkeen (and it's not as though I'm going to force anyone to listen to it); number one son is surprisingly keen, but in a very understated, not-wanting-to-show-it sort of way that warms the heart. Is it just me being English, or would any parent delight in a child that showed reserve?

Teaching about the end of the British Empire last Tuesday I was amazed to discover that most of my class, second-year undergraduates (so in the 19-21 age range) didn't have any idea what Apartheid was. Even taking into account that most of them would have been just born when it ended, one has to ask: what do they teach them in these schools?

And having just got back from an afternoon at the zoo, I realise I'm missing the first of the planned monthly Taizé prayer meetings in the Salesian house near here. Ack! This is what comes of having the first days of Lent coincide with the half-term holiday.
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Honour system

There's an Irish pub in Louvain-la-Neuve (of course - where is there not?) and I popped in this lunchtime for a quick coffee to buck me up before spending two hours talking about Beveridge, Butler and Bevan. The decor includes bookshelves piled, higgledy=piggledy, with old books - mostly novels I've never heard of by authors whose names mean nothing to me, but also an accounts book for a business in Belfast in the 1910s, some history books, and a biography of John XXIII produced during his lifetime. The effect is rather as though someone had emptied a couple of boxes of their gran's books all in a pile. And among them was a 1938 edition of Murder in the Cathedral (first published 1935).

My late 1980s Faber paperback edition, full of marginal and interlinear notes for A-level English Literature, looks considerably tattier than this third edition hardback, so I asked at the bar: "Would you be willing to sell me one of the books?"
Reply: "They're not for sale, they're for decoration."
Question (holding up Murder in the Cathedral): "So you wouldn't be willing to let me buy this off you?"
Reply: "No, sorry. But you can borrow it if you promise to bring it back. Or another old book to take its place."

And the deal was done.
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The mind is a funny thing

Taught my first class in Louvain-la-Neuve today (course description here).

For about half an hour before class started, there was a tune going through my head. It was only afterwards that I could put my finger on what it was:



The mind is a funny thing.
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Wikiality

No doubt it was misguided of me to register at wikipedia and start editing and adding articles (as anyone with internet access can do). I've started doing it myself in the knowledge that there are some students you can't beat away from wikipedia with sticks, and in the hope that I can at least help ensure the quality of some of the information.

For non-essential information, such as people mentioned in passing in songs, news stories, comedy programs, and so on (like Joe DiMaggio, for instance) I use wikipedia a lot, mainly because if it's got a relevant article it comes up high on google searches, and Sloth is a besetting vice. And once you know that you can add or edit articles, and know how to (it really isn't hard), your fingers start to itch whenever you spot a typo, or a bit of non-standard syntax, or a false fact. And especially when you come across a "propose deletion as this subject lacks notability" tag, that the user-editors wouldn't dream of attaching to an article devoted to an article about a cartoon character, plastered across the top of an article on a well-regarded 20th-century German philosopher (at least it wasn't Heidegger; oh would that it were!).

The experience of a fortnight's midnight editing leads to two thoughts.

Firstly, I came across an exchange on one of the editorial "talk pages":
(student) editor1: "Wikipedia can be pretty useful when you're a student:)"
(once burnt but still student?) editor2: "But watch out with it, you may find a lot of information your professor doesn't agree with..."
Is this not a little like an apprentice joiner saying "I found a perfectly good flatpacked chest of drawers in IKEA, but my teacher wouldn't give me marks for it"? Or a trainee chef turning up to an exam with a readymeal?

Surely, since a professor should be judging whether the student has acquired the ability to establish findings (rather than simply find, learn and reproduce them), the question is not "disagreement" with "information", but a perception of the student's failure to grasp the nature of the process they are supposed to be undergoing? I've already said that I use wikipedia myself for some purposes, and I can add that my house is full of IKEA bookshelves, and my freezer half-full of readymeals (the other half is loaves of one-day-old bread bought at knock-down prices) - but I'd no more expect a student to think it was OK to use wikipedia in an essay than to think IKEA is joinery or a readymeal a proper dinner. If students don't even realize that this is where the issue lies, how can it be made more explicit to them?

Secondly, it's apparent that the majority of user-editors are American teenagers. Who else has the time and the internet access (and it must be said: the selfless urge to share facts and factoids) in such numbers? Not many adults will have the time, even if they have the access and the urge (it isn't as though I've finished all the work I should be doing in the "here and now" - which raises the question of what the hell I'm doing blogging, but we'll put that aside for the present). Of course, knowing how sharp you are, my reader, you must be thinking I'm a bit slow if I've only just realized that (about the teenagers, not about the blogging). But here comes the thought these students that I warn and warn not to use wikipedia as a source (and I've had an essay handed in that footnoted wikipedia on every page) - perhaps if I set them the task of adding or editing a wikipedia article, their reaction would be like mine on getting a driving license: "Oh no - this must mean there are drivers out there no better than I am!" Knowing their own ignorance, they would never trust it as a source again. Or would they lack the self-knowledge to reach that obvious conclusion?
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