Telling stories

As an historian I just tell little stories. Or, as Carmen puts it, "You just make crap up!" Actually, I don't have to make stuff up. The story of real people is so improbable that I don't need to.

Here is a Canadian-born French author talking about stories, and explaining a lot about French intellectual history in the late 20th century:

“After the war French writers rejected the idea of narrative because Hitler and Stalin were storytellers, and it seemed naïve to believe in stories. So instead they turned more and more to theory, to the absurd. The French declined even to tell stories about their own history, including the war in Algeria, which like all history can’t really be digested until it is turned into great literature. Francophone literature doesn’t come out of that background. It still tells stories.”

You can find the whole article, which is about the French language and how it has burst the narrow bounds of France and true 'Frenchiness.'

suddenly I have the strangest desire to get back to reading "La Reine Margot."

Clemens' Notebook

This is a post more or less to myself, so I have a convenient place to stash some info I may need in the future for my Migrations in World History Class.

This is a review of Peter Heather's new book, Empires and Barbarians. Everything I have read by Heather has been excellent and this one promises to live up to that standard.

Heather has a fine track record in rescuing historical babies from being thrown out with the revisionist bathwater. His The Fall of the Roman Empire put a new case for the old view that barbarian invasions were an important factor in the collapse of the Roman empire. Empires and Barbarians partly overlaps with that, reinstating mass migration as an important phenomenon in the first millennium and one key factor in the formation of modern Europe.

This is not merely an attempt to turn back the ­historiographical clock. Heather has no patience with the old “billiard ball” model of migration — in which, as Ammianus saw it, Huns bumped into Goths and so pushed them towards the Roman empire. Instead he has tried to look at the first millennium afresh, using modern theories of migration and its motives. We are not dealing with anything like the vast Rwandan exodus, but many of the claimed movements would fit the patterns observed in recent history: people tend to move from poorer to richer regions; groups with a tradition of migration tend to be more mobile than those without; people tend to migrate to areas about which they have information. All those conditions apply to Ammianus’s Goths moving towards the Danube.

I suppose I will have to buy this one. Perhaps more difficult even than spending $$, I will have to find time to read it.

Those Clever Canadian Scientists

From "Science Now" (via Andrew Sullivan) comes this startling experiment performed by our death defying neighbors to the north:

Jeffrey Mogil of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and his colleagues noticed that male mice spent less time licking the site of a painful injection--indicating that they had less pain--when a scientist was present. To investigate whether it was the sight or smell of a human that caused the effect, the researchers acquired a promotional cardboard cutout of [Paris] Hilton from her television show The Simple Life ("A special order," says Mogil's collaborator Leigh MacIntyre).

As in humans, Paris's effect appears to be gender-specific. Male mice spent less time licking their wounds when fake Paris was in sight, but females showed no such effect, the researchers reported ... When the team put up a screen to block the rodents' view, the effect went away. Following a Paris Hilton encounter, male mice--but not females--also had lower-than-usual expression of a gene called c-fos in a part of the spinal cord that transmits pain signals to the brain, suggesting reduced neural activity in this pain pathway.

Mogil suspects the analgesic effect has something to do with stress.

I wish that I had made this up, but I am not that clever.

Professors, Sex, and Reality

Just in case you were wondering what I do with my life as a university professor (and I know I work for a real university because it says so on the front gate, and on my business card) I have to tell you that it is a lot less cinematic than you see on the cinema. Take my word for it.

If you don't, read this.


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Herodotus was right!!!!

I've been waiting for this news since I was twelve years old (just ask my little sister)!

Late breaking news from The Week:

Italians in Tuscany originally came from Turkey, genetic evidence shows. Ancient Greek historian Herodotus wrote that the Etruscans, who dominated much of the Mediterranean before the Roman era, came from Lydia, now called Turkey. Modern scholars, though, have long scoffed at that claim, saying the ancestors of today's Tuscans evolved locally. But two new Italian studies support the Turkish connection. Both Tuscan men's DNA sequences and Tuscan women's mitochondria resemble their counterparts in parts of modern Turkey far more closely than in other parts of Italy. In Herodotus' fifth century B. C. account, a famine in the 13th century B. C. forced the Lydian king to send half his people west to seek a new life.

Isn't modern science wonderful.

Next week, the Melungians.

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The Master of the Temple

Since you have born with me will I have complained about finishing my paper on Robert of Craon, second Master of the Temple, here is a key paragraph from it, summing up why I thought the guy was important.

Birth, upbringing and training had prepared Robert for this position. He was a product of a family with a tradition of loyalty to the counts of Anjou, of excellence in command, be it military, judicial, or social, and of deep religious feeling. As a youth he had been present to see Pope Urban II, a guest of his grandfather's, call for what would become the First Crusade, and he had seen his grandfather and his uncle leave on the crusade, never to return. He grew up knowing both Robert d'Arbrissel, one of the most famous of the wondering preachers and Geoffrey of Vendôme, a powerful prince of the Church. He had also seen that same Geoffrey humiliate his older brother in the full curia of Anjou. In his career in Aquitaine he had displayed talent and vigor as a military leader for Count Vulgrin. And as a younger son with nothing to inherit, giving up a wealthy heiress, perhaps moved by his father's own deep religiosity, he had found the perfect solution in the military order of the Templars. The organization and wealth that allowed the Templars to gain their reputation, for good and bad, was in large part the legacy of Robert of Craon.

Wait for the movie. The article is a bit academic.

Mora loses another one!

After weeks of truly inspired procrastination, just when it looked like my own personal demon, Mora, would win another round, I came from behind and completed my paper. I admit it was a little too close for comfort. I only had half of it done when I got on the plane with Maeread's mother, Maire (pronounced almost like 'Mora' now that I think of it). We got to Detroit an hour late, thanks to NWA, got a rented car and drove across Michigan. Other than a fortuitous stop at a great German restaurant it was a pretty dull trip. We got to our rooms about midnight and I went right to bed, plotting carefully in my mind exactly what I would have to write today.

Got up early, spent almost the whole day in my room writing the rest of the paper out in longhand - making great use of one of my favorite fountain pens by the way - and got it finished 25 minutes before I had to rush downstairs and deliver it.

It was a great paper. Everyone said so, although they were a little puzzled why the ink was still wet.


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Blogging from beautiful Western Michigan Univerisity

I have been busy, and tired. My little sleep apnea mask that I have been using for the last two weeks seems to do absolutely nothing for me. It doesn't help that Roger the Respiratory Technician says that everything is working right and I am using it right. It just doesn't work for me. It also doesn't help that Roger says "Gee, that's never happened before."

So I am not sleeping well because the mask is uncomfortable, but I am still suffering from the sleep deprivation of the apnea.

BUT ... I am in beautiful Kalamazoo at the biggest collection of medievalists in all of creation. It's a fun bunch if you are into weird body language. Still, I am enjoying it, especially since I came with Maire and have met lots of old friends.

The Chariot Paper: An update

Ha! It is 11:30 on Friday night and the paper is finished. Covers the spread of chariots from Greece to China, and from Siberia to Egypt. Spent the afternoon selecting four or five pictures for a powerpoint presentation. The paper is brilliant - well, by definition a mediocre paper that is done is better than a brilliant paper that is not done. I learned that in graduate school.

So bright and early I will run up to school and listen to the keynote address by a BIG NAME from California (why do they always end up in California) and then find a place where I can nap until I deliver my paper at 1 pm.

(and, of course, thanks to Anactoria for that little update on how time was running out).

Some Hard Questions for my Profession

In The American Scholar Thomas Mallon has some tough questions about the future of the humanities. Here's one:

How can the contemplative mind survive in the multitasking, ADD-inducing world of digitization? Are we willing to face the downside of this great electronic boon? Do we really want students reading electronic texts of the classics that are festooned with more links than a Wikipedia entry? Aren’t a few moments of quiet bafflement preferable to an endless steeplechase across Web page after Web
page?

For the other nine, click here.