Lines Written in the Program of the Biennial Meeting of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists

by Eileen A. Joy

Lines Written in the Program of the Biennial Meeting of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists represents actual lines spoken on the first day of the Biennial Meeting of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists, held at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Wisconsin from July 31 through August 6, 2011. The lines are presented in the order in which they were actually spoken in order to give a sense of chronology, however ridiculous, and were chosen randomly for their lyric qualities, and cribbed quickly. The work is thus meant to be one of amanuensis more so than original writing, and only punctuation, capitalization, and other such minimal embellishments were added later. The aim, when cribbing, was also to try and catch those moments when the personal spilled over into the scholarly, and vice versa, and to also lend a sense of the whimsical to those aspects of all conferences that could be termed ordinary and ritually the mention of items on hand-outs, PowerPoint images, attribution of sources, direct quotations, questions from the audience, and so on.Typically, the academic conference does not lend itself to aesthetic elegance or rapture. One has to be vigilant to be happy to be alive, and to be mindful of the world’s wonder, during most academic conference sessions. This is not to say that one never learns anything useful or exciting, or doesn’t meet really interesting persons whose work is stimulating, or never falls in love at an academic conference. One does. But rarely does one fall into the throes of Whitmanesque over-stimulation, either. But no derision nor insult to the academic conference is intended here; rather, the thesis is that beauty is everywhere you look (and listen).

32 pages, Paperback

Published March 14, 2013