Status Update: Alive

It's just past midnight as I write this, a little over a month since my last update here. Allow me to apologize for the gap. Trying to find a job all summer was draining, but I have found work, as well as gotten some good work done toward the Beowulfiana project. So a brief overview of what the past month has held for me is in order.

Work

I got a job. It's not an academic position, but it is work-from-home and should help keep the lights on. It's in the legal field, which is pretty neat, as I'm learning a lot about how the sausage is made in terms of immigration as I'm working directly with helping petition letters get written. It's a fairly solid gig and I'm liking it so far. There's a lot of research in various disciplines that I'm getting out of it, so I am learning a lot and enjoying that part too. But, it's rather draining each weekday to be working on these letters for eight hours. It doesn't leave a lot of good headspace for doing my own research and keeping up with my personal life. But I also have only done the job for a few weeks, so it might just be some acclimation time. Anyway, I'm glad to have paying work, even if it's not in academia.

Presentation

So at the beginning of July I was contacted by a student from a university in India who works on the student committee for bringing in guest speakers for their webinar series. We happened to be active on a discord server about literature and it just kind of happened. Anyway, after discussing it and it getting kicked up to a larger university, CHRIST (deemed to be) University in Bengaluru, we got a date set up and I had to devote what time I do spend on research to preparing the presentation. As we got close to the time of the presentation, Iowa got hit by a massive storm that knocked internet and power out for a whole lot of people. I was lucky I didn't lose power, but I did lose internet for a few days right as I was starting the job.

I managed to get the presentation pushed back a week, which allowed me to make some tweaks and get it to a point where I felt it was good. When I gave the presentation, it felt fantastic. There were over a hundred professors and students watching and I got some really good questions. The presentation was largely an outline of the basic things I've been noticing as Iook at various versions of Beowulf and teasing out some of the implications and questions I want to try and answer in the course of my research. So nothing firm, all kind of early going, but a good prelude to my eventual paper for Kalamazoo 2021. So I feel very good about it.

New Beowulf

Maria Dahvana Headley's translation of Beowulf is shipping and should arrive in my mailbox any day now. I am certainly interested to see what she does with the poem, but more importantly I'm curious to see what apparatus she includes in terms of translator's preface. From what I have seen online, the opening goes like this:

Bro! Tell me we still know how to talk about kings! In the old days,

everyone knew what men were: brave, bold, glory-bound. Only

stories now, but I’ll sound the Spear-Danes’ song, hoarded for hungry times.

I don't know how I feel about it, at least in isolation. Maybe I'll like it more as I read the whole thing and see how the tone is working across the text. Maybe I'll hate it. I do know her handling of Grendel's Mother will be very telling for me.

Anyway, as far as a set schedule for posts, I'm trying to figure out what to do on that front now that I have the new job but no longer have the presentation weighing on me. I'll probably get back to it soon enough, and maybe keep the Metal Flower posts to when I can find the time for them so I can focus on an annotation as a weekly post. I'll come up with something, anyway. For now, I'm just going to see where the whaleroad takes me.