preche yt!

Educacioun ys nat a busynesse, yt ys an enterpryse for the common good, nat only for thys tyme but for al ages bifor us and beyond us.

— Chaucer Doth Tweet (@LeVostreGC) February 4, 2015

Reckoning

So the other day I was on a long lunch buying a new, say, widget and, after a detailed discussion on current trends in widget design, fell to talking about Widget Guy's nefarious past as a Physical Anthropology undergraduate on a Romano-Dacian tomb excavation in Serbia back in probably the 80's. How we got on that subject I have no idea, but it led in turn to a discussion of the now-defunct Classics program at the uni we both attended, and the fact that, although we both work in jobs that -- on paper -- have little to do with what we studied as Humanities undergrads, we still actually value the work we did there. More to the point, and an exponentially more important point it is, neither of us consider our education to have ended just because at some stage we got handed nicely printed sheets of vellum. Then other customers came in, and he had to get back to work and I had to get back to the Borg Cube.

The Borg Cube is an interesting case study in that it is filled with people who are either Accountants by training or they are not. Those who are not fall generally into two categories: those who have college degrees in something interesting and those who have none. Of the three other people in my immediate pod, two are high school graduates and one has degrees in Economics and Public Administration. Over the wall is someone with a degree in Piano Performance. There's a bass player down the aisle, and in the aisle nearest
 the windows is an honest-to-God self-confessed English Major. (Over beyond the atrium is a guy who has the Opera News cover with Ambrogio Maestri pinned up on his wall -- I haven't figured out his deal yet.)

They don't teach Platonic solids in Accounting either.

Then there's my buddy, we'll call him K. He's got an Accounting degree, and he's a news junkie. We spend what our bosses probably think is an inordinate amount of time talking politics, and those conversations are fun and interesting and wide-ranging. So when I got back to the Cube, I told him about this conversation I had with Widget Guy. Interestingly, the thing that I found cool -- the fact that this conversation about archaeological excavations had cropped up in such an unexpected place at an unexpected time -- was what he thought was funny. As in "Hahahaha! a guy who majored in Anthropology is selling widgets! How pathetic! Isn't that hilarious and totally justifies every [lame-assed] notion ever floated in the mainstream press about 'useless degrees'!" Of course, attendant on this is a subtextual "Yay me for being smart enough to choose Accounting! At least I'm not that guy!"

Except, K, you are that guy. Which is to say not Widget Guy, but the Mythical Creature that looms so huge and pale in your imagination, standing in a corner with a sign around its neck that says Widget Guy: Humanities Major. Let's examine:

Widget Guy has two lives: one where he has started, grown, and maintained a successful business for at least the last decade, and one where he's kept up with developments in Physical Anthropology (and there have been a lot since he walked off the podium with a sheepskin, so this isn't just reading the latest outdated Missing Link Discovery! Weekly Report on Yahoo News).

K, on the other hand, has one life, comprised almost entirely of work and family. And much of what he experiences with family he grouses about later at work. We can only hope he grouses about work to family on the flip side, because fair is fair.

Conclusion: K, you don't get out enough.

Widget Guy is naturally gregarious, which is a benefit when working in retail, particularly in an independent business where the owner is doing most of the customer service and all of the business networking.

K is also naturally gregarious, which is not a benefit when you're supposed to be hunkered down in your Borg subcube doing Borg subwork.

Conclusion: K, you are trapped in a tiny cube.

Widget Guy has kids. One is in an Architecture program at a major tech school. The other is looking at Classics programs at the dreaded Expensive Liberal Arts Colleges. Widget Guy doesn't seem worried about them. He says that Classics Department chairs have made a point of asking him, the parent, if he supports his kid's interest in majoring in Classics. Of course he does. Why? Because in his other life he is not Widget Guy but Romano-Dacian Tomb Excavation Guy.

K also has kids. K worries a lot about them. They're out of college, struggling as kids in their twenties usually do. He's not sure they've chosen wisely or well in their college careers, and he wonders how long he will have to support them.

Conclusion: K, not only are you trapped in a cube, but you have convinced yourself you cannot afford to leave. Ever.

So while we allow the public discourse on higher education to make bogus and weirdly manichaean divisions between the Marketable and the Non-marketable, maybe we should also recognize that we are tending to confuse the concept of Education with the concept of Training. Education is about developing habits of mind. Training is about learning how to do a job. K's inherent assumption, the thing that made him laugh, is as common to the Borg Cube as it is elsewhere: that Humanities people are losers who wasted their college education in frivolous pursuit of useless knowledge, while the smart ones had the foresight to dedicate their undergraduate careers to something perceived to be useful, practical, lucrative (maybe), and...finite.

What's the bottom line, then? Consider the examples above, then extrapolate. If the educational agenda you promote results in the collective habit of mind being able to reckon only in terms of Profit and Loss, what more does that create than a culture of impoverishment?

St Jerome sez: Whatever you do, it will surely end in Hell, so smoke 'em if you got 'em.

Orfeo in Shetland

Since these are the days for traffic between this place and the other. I will only point out possible causal relationship, in this version, between instrument and outcome. Also the cool linguistic fragment in the refrain, which is thought to be Norn.

via Mudcat

KING ORFEO

Der lived a king inta da aste
Scowan urla grun
Der lived a lady in der wast
Whar giorten han grun oarlac

Dis king he has a hunting gaen
He's left his Lady Isabel alane

"Oh I wis ye'd never gaen away
For at your hame is dol an wae

"For da king of Ferrie we his daert
Has pierced your lady to da hert"

ftƿ!

It is reported by an anonymous source within the campaign that Romney's speech in London will address the "special relationship" between the Geats and the Spear-Danes, and at the planned fundraiser among US bankers in London, there will be a giving out of many rings, and the drinking of muchel mead in the golden hall, with a session of vaunting to follow. After that they will all be eaten by Grendel.

Axe Age: Sequentia ~ The Rheingold Curse @ Ozawa Hall

 So while Mother Nature, with the able assistance of All Humankind, celebrates the Woody Guthrie centenary with weather to remind us what those Dust Bowl songs are all about, and while we water discreetly the Thirdfloorian tomato plants from the bucket under the drippy shower head and the neighborhood rodents eat the impatiens (and even I'm beginning to think they look so green and tasty) and thoughts turn all Frank Herbertish...Well, could be worse. Those moron Trojans are about to drag that ugly horse thing through the gates of the city. Not that that wouldn't serve as an apt metaphor -- "irrational exuberance", as they used to say in the financial sector, back when they were thought to have gotten over it -- but thankfully there are other venues for that vein of commentary. Still, wouldn't it be funny if it turned out we're all Agamemnon?

 No.

But while we're on the epic subject of Epic subjects...

The disclaimer up front should be that the Thirdfloorian delegation is a sucker for anything that brings that Old Norse textbook down off the shelf (I was wanting the infinitive of "grat", which they do a lot of both in The Rheingold Curse and also in Scottish muckle sangs, including one of our recent enthusiasm). And I'm a fan of Benjamin Bagby's theoretical Beowulf reconstruction, not just for its historical/performative element but also because it's fun. (Especially the part where Grendel noms the Ring-Danes, which has a certain appeal for any Godzilla movie-loving ten year old. Which I was, once.) The Rheingold Curse is, likewise, a theoretical reconstruction, involving a lot of philological rooting around in Icelandic print and sound archives and the archaeological record of northern Europe, with an ear out for current trad sources like Icelandic rimur and Faroese chain dance ballads, presumably like this one (Regin Smiður being the rough equivalent of Mime):



The end result is a selection of poems that together tell the story with which any Wagnerite will be reasonably familiar: a prophecy, a hero, a gold hoard, a ring, dwarves and dragons, a valkyrie, a guy with a hall and a sister, betrayal, revenge, murder. Plus House of Atreus style infanticide/cannibalism. Also, a snake pit (incl. commentary on proper heroic comportment when confronted with same) which Wagner should totally have left in.

Sequentia scored the piece for three voices, reconstructed Germanic lyre, medieval fiddle (very much on the hardingfele end of the fiddle spectrum), wooden flute, bone flute, and frame drum.  It begins with the high pitch of the bone flute (sounding something like a willow flute) and a calling of the listeners to order that's not far off a kulning. Then it's the creation story, with pre-creation one-voiced and creation two. Once the Ask & Embla preamble is done, the real story begins, and ends -- you know how it goes -- as it began, with two-voiced prophecy and a bone flute.

 I'd love to talk about the details more, but I don't trust my memory at ten days' remove, and here's where we run into something fantastically rare in this on-demand world of ours: the inaccessibility of an out-of-print recording. If you really want an experience from the Days of Yore, never mind the mead hall...