This seems as good a day as any to borrow pages from fellow blogger Nikki Faith and Gratefulness.org and list things I’ve been thankful for this week:

1. My family–they know who they are.
2. A chance to get to know one of my colleagues a little better as we met to talk over her research project. I don’t know if I helped much, but a good meeting all the same.
3. Bishop  Alexis Bilindabagabo, who spoke at Campbell and at my church last week about the ministry of reconciliation and peace-building.
4. Faithful friends, especially C, whom I’ve known since grad school days, and who is an inspiration and encouragement in many ways.
5. A good book—am currently finishing Dorothy Dunnett’s King Hereafter, which I skimmed & dipped into here and there to prepare a conference paper. Now I can really enjoy it—again.
6. My two cats, who think they own me, but amuse me anyway. They wanted to be #1 on the list, but I have to maintain some order.
7. New shearling slippers from L.L. Bean—I am now ready for winter. Bring it on!
8. Actually getting my SC4 proposal in before the original deadline, so now I don’t have to worry about it until Spring. Hmm–was that gratitude, or gloating? I’d better quit while I’m ahead.
9. Nov. 8—birthday of Dorothy Day

Enjoyed Saturday so much, what with the housekeeping, errands, visiting, and shopping. that by the time I got home I totally forgot about blogging. This less-than-tweet-length post must serve as my make-up for 11/7. There’ll be a full-length 11/8 post later.

I am grateful that it’s Friday. In my last class of the day, a student asked if teachers were as happy to get to Friday as students, and my honest answer was “Yes.” But then we both agreed that some weekends there was so much work to do that there wasn’t much to celebrate.

Not today. Although I do have some work planned (nothing new about that), I’m also looking forward to fellowship and inspiration tonight as my church sponsors a screening of the documentary As We Forgive:

Could you forgive a person who murdered your family? This is the question faced by the subjects of As We Forgive, a documentary about Rosaria and Chantal—two Rwandan women coming face-to-face with the men who slaughtered their families during the 1994 genocide. The subjects of As We Forgive speak for a nation still wracked by the grief of a genocide that killed one in eight Rwandans in 1994. Overwhelmed by an enormous backlog of court cases, the government has returned over 50,000 genocide perpetrators back to the very communities they helped to destroy. Without the hope of full justice, Rwanda has turned to a new solution: Reconciliation.

But can it be done? Can survivors truly forgive the killers who destroyed their families? Can the government expect this from its people? And can the church, which failed at moral leadership during the genocide, fit into the process of reconciliation today?  (synopsis from film website)

Since my cousin’s family has been living and working in Rwanda for several years, I’ve become interested in this country and its struggles.

Medievalists.net is one of my favorite sites. They collate all kinds of fascinating (to medievalists, anyway!) articles and news stories, like this one on their blog, about an NC State research project to trace the source and dates of medieval manuscripts using DNA testing on the parchments:

North Carolina State Assistant Professor of English Timothy Stinson . . . says genetic testing could resolve [problems in determining manuscript origins] by creating a baseline using the DNA of parchment found in the relatively small number of manuscripts that can be reliably dated and localized. Each manuscript can provide a wealth of genetic data, Stinson explains, because a typical medieval parchment book includes the skins of more than 100 animals.

It’s exciting to see science, history, and literature working together!

They also provide a trove of images of the recently discovered Staffordshire Hoard of Anglo-Saxon-era gold & gems, and an interview with Ian Mortimer, author of A Time Traveller’s Guide to the 14th Century. Although the title initially makes me think of one of the best books about time-travelling to the 14th century, Connie Willis’s The Doomsday Book, it seems as if Mortimer may have found a way to make history come alive:

The idea that became Time Traveller’s came to me in 1993. It was to write a history book that not only appealed to the reader but also directly prioritised their interests. Being a fan of the Douglas Adams books, my first idea was a ‘hitchhiker’s guide to history’. I planned to include all the extraordinary facts I knew about the English past, from Henry VIII passing legislation requiring those guilty of mass poisoning to be boiled alive (it was enacted twice), to nineteenth-century wife sales, reactions to public executions, great escapes, secret treaties, etc.

Sounds a bit silly on the surface of it, but he seems to have done the serious research and I suspect you’d know a lot more about life in the 14th century after reading Mortimer’s Guide than after reading Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror–which medievalists have probably read anyway.

…”It’s a small world,” because then you’d have one of the top-ten “Get out of my brain!” songs circling horribly around in there, and it would be my fault. It’s probably already happening. I’m sorry. I could also have called the post “It’s all connected,” because I’m thinking of how once you have spent a lot of time with a book, an author, a TV show, or anything, many other things either remind you of that original “fandom,” or really are connected to it, sometimes in unexpected ways.

For example, earlier this week, my British Lit survey classes were reading book 4 of Paradise Lost, in which Satan faces the flipside of his boast in bk. 1 that “The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n” (1.254-5), when he leaves Hell for Earth, only to realize “Which way I fly is Hell, myself am Hell” (4.75). This morning in chapel, the speaker gave a modern example: a criminal in solitary confinement is not alone; he is only confronted with himself and his crime(s).

A less dire example: ABC’s revised sci-fi show V (reviews by Todd Hertz, Nik at Nite, Nikki Faith) has cast actors from a number of previous sci-fi shows that fans should recognize, including Morena Baccarin (“Inara” of Firefly) and Alan Tudyk (“Wash” from Firefly and “Alpha” from Dollhouse). Executive producer Jeffrey Bell used to work with Joss Whedon on Angel, and in an interview with Todd Hertz, referred to Buffy:

What does sci-fi allow you do in terms of storytelling that maybe other genres don’t?

What I love about genre storytelling is it allows you to tell stories as metaphor. When they first started Buffy the Vampire Slayer, they’d talk about each episode’s “themons” as opposed to demons. For instance, you had the girl in high school who turned invisible as a metaphor for being the shy, wallflower girl who feels like she doesn’t exist. And then, the very idea of a hellhole being under the high school? That’s one of the great metaphors in television. With these genres, you can tell really rich stories that don’t feel literal. You can talk about areas that people may not want to sit and watch a show about—but mask it in action, fantasy or science fiction and make it more palpable. I love that.

So do I! And “themons”?! Has anyone connected to Mutant Enemy mentioned that before? How great is that? I’m totally using it (properly attributed, of course!) in my next essay on BtVS.

WILLOW: It’s all connected. The root systems, the molecules…the energy. Everything’s connected.(Buffy 7.1 “Lessons”)

No, not my students! Most of them are pretty lively. The recently past holiday brought out the yearly news stories about monsters of the curriculum with the implied or explicit question: are you wasting your money on this crazy pop culture stuff? My dear father sent me a syndicated AP article from his local paper on such “Monster classes”—”Curriculum is heavy on zombies, vampires.” It included comments from Joss Whedon expert David Lavery and an interview with Cal-Berkeley professor Marina Levina:

“For a lay person, I suppose it does sound liike, What? Do you watch horror films all day?” she said. “But it’s a really tough class. Students don’t automatically do well in it, because it does involve a lot of serious theory.”

That’s right—people think it’s just entertainment, but we’re using it to teach analytical skills of various kinds. The ability to watch & analyze simultaneously is a skill in itself, not unlike analytical reading. We’re working on it.

The last time I posted in this irregular series was in January, marking the passing of my grad school Middle English professor, George Kane. Before that, I wrote about my boarding-school teachers. In between, I completely skipped high school and college, but not because I didn’t have important and memorable teachers.

Actually, all my high school teachers were quite impressive, given that many of them were conscientious objectors who had chosen to teach at an American school in central Africa as an alternative to serving in the military in the late 1960s. High standards, concern for the community and the world, and a sense of adventure and possibility—they demonstrated all these values along with the subjects they taught.

My senior year, Mrs. Wiebe also supervised the school newspaper and yearbook, and I worked on both. These enterprises took on great importance in our small pond. The only professional work on either was the printing. The photography, layout, writing, art, and editing was all done by students. Compared to today’s glossy computer-generated productions, they look quite amateurish—but amateur in the original sense of work done for love. Along with a bit of competition and desire to snap the administration’s suspenders. I also wrote reams of bad poetry which seems to have been admired by some at the time.

A friend from those days reminded me recently that she and I wrote a play together. She sent it to me, but I’m afraid to re-read it. Maybe later.

Wrapping this post up, I think I’ve figured out why I  haven’t done more of this recently. I started the draft at about 2:30; was interrupted three or four times; it’s now almost 4:30. If I’m going to keep this up, must either write shorter posts, or find uninterrupted time.

My plan for blogging more regularly: Sign up for NaBloWriMo, a.k.a.

Nothing says “new project” like new equipment. I may have always had this idea, but I’ve also observed it in my near & dear: new school year=new notebooks & pens/pencils; new hobby=special clothes, gear, etc. Fortunately, NaBloWriMo requires nothing more than dedication (actually the hardest part), ideas, and a new computer mouse. My amateur diagnosis on the old mouse was that it suffered from early-stage left-button failure. Trying to edit when you can’t reliably highlight more than one word is really annoying.

My colleague Ken Morefield is participating in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). I salute his superior ambition and creativity!

My plan is to post about the usual things, just more often. And especially, to get on with the Buffy rewatch project.

Let this be a lesson to us all (especially me)—this is what happens when you don’t blog for a month or more & people stop checking. I missed “Chaucer”’s enthusiastic post on the Middle English version of Twilight, or rather Vespers:

Sure, the prose kynd of maketh Dives et Pauper look lyk George Orwelle, but the storie pulleth me yn….

In this fyne book of sparklie vampyres, Bella Cygne moveth from Essex to Yorkshyre to lyve with her fathir, who ys a sheriff and escheator. At a scole ful of recentlie coyned stereotypes, she witnesseth the fayre skyn and fashion-sprede slow-mocioun hotenesse of the Cu Chulainn clan, the which have all eaten long ago of the magical Irisshe Salmon of Really Good Hair (oon byte of this magical salmon and ye shal have good hair for evir). Aftir Bella doth see the hottest of the clan, Edward, stop a wagon wyth hys bare handes, fight off twentie churles, and brood so much he did make Angel look lyk Mister Rogeres, she doth realise that the Cu Chulainns are vampyres. But they are good vampyres, who drinke wyne. Ther is considerablie moore sexual tensioun than in Piers Plowman.

We are amused. Also amusing: Castle’s many Whedon-allusions in the Hallowe’en episode. (For some reason WP is not allowing me to embed video today.)

My resolution for November: to post more frequently. Much more frequently. You’ll see.

Carmen at in the open space tagged me with a Bible Movie Meme started by Matt at Broadcast Depth. It asks you to name your three favorite “Bible movies” and one that you would like to see made. Like her, I’m taking some liberties with the directions (we share at least one favorite). My colleague Ken Morefield has posted his (cautious) favorites as well.

1. Ben Hur—OK, maybe not really a Bible movie, but since it’s subtitled “a tale of the Christ,” I think it qualifies. Defines the term “over-the-top Hollywood epic”—well, after Lawrence of Arabia—and also embodies Biblical values of grace, healing, rebirth, and forgiveness. Plus, chariot race. It’s extreme, but also somehow irresistible. Sort of like Gone with the Wind, but that is more of a guilty pleasure.

2. Kings—not a movie, but this 13-episode TV revision of the story of Saul and David from 1 Samuel brought us some of the most intriguing treatment of religion, faith, and contemporary culture in recent years. Shiloh—which looks a lot like a somewhat futuristic New York—is the newly rebuilt capital of the kingdom of Gilboa, with “Silas” (Saul) as its divinely appointed king. Of course it was too too good to last. Well, maybe not TOO good—at times the sort-of Shakespearean style writing falls between high and low stools, but Ian McShane as King Silas usually makes it work somehow anyway. There’s plenty of material left in 1 & 2 Samuel to have kept this combination spiritual family drama/battle adventure going for a while.

3. The Gospel of John—It may not be the most artistic gospel film ever, but I was particularly taken with Henry Ian Cusick’s charming and compelling Jesus (and that was before I’d seen the actor in anything else, such as Lost). The low-key but generally authentic settings put more emphasis on the text, and one is struck by Jesus repeated statements, “I am telling you the truth.”

Arg…I had to edit this post in a major way twice as I was distracted and hastily stopped after #3.

So really, a movie based on the Bible that I would like to see made? That’s a difficult one, but what immediately came to mind was the Anglo-Saxon poem “Judith,” based on the apocryphal book of Judith. For one thing, it has plenty of battle action; and secondly, it has the wise, beautiful, courageous, and wily Judith. And a beheading. On the other hand, it is kind of talky. But the book is always better than the movie.