This Is Not Serious Business: My First Paper at Kalamazoo, Part 2
Merry Christmas, Happy Hogswatch, etc. to all!
I want to finish the story of my first paper at Kalamazoo now. To recap: I presented my first paper at the Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo last spring on Merlin.'Yes, the BBC's Merlin. Moving on.
Although I knew what I wanted to deal with in the paper-- specifically, that both "Excalibur" and "Sins of the Father" clearly use elements of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and isn't that neat?-- I wasn't sure what my argument was going to be until I actually wrote the paper, which did not happen until, if I remember correctly, only a few weeks before the conference. I had a lot of anxiety built up about it, but I ended up really liking what I came up with. I decided against using video clips for fear they would malfunction on the day (which did, in fact, happen to someone in another session and nearly happened to everyone in ours), so I just described the scenes I was talking about pretty thoroughly, and the people I sent and read it to said that I was clear and they could follow the argument. In fact, they liked it. This was encouraging.
I stayed with celtic_songster at Kzoo this year, because she's actually in the program at Western Michigan, and this meant getting up obscenely early every day of the conference so that I could ride to campus with her, where she was working in the exhibits hall when not attending sessions. It also meant that on more than one occasion I napped in the exhibits hall lobby. Still, she and I had great fun seeing Spamalot, getting Taco Bell, accidentally terrifying each other with scary stories, and going on a shopping trip on which I bought her an iron because I needed one pretty immediately and she probably would need one soon in her professional life. She was also my last test audience for the paper before I actually gave it, and I vividly remember sitting on her floor and marking up words to emphasize based on her advice.
There were some really good sessions last year-- I even attended one with another paper on Merlin, one from someone who liked it this time. I did not attend any other sessions the day of my own. There weren't really any that particularly interested me, and I'd be too nervous leading up to my paper to pay attention to anything. I was really emotionally strung-out in the morning, but I felt better after some beautiful texts from Bethany. I wandered the exhibits hall for a few hours and met up with friends for lunch. After that, there was still a session to go before mine, and I spent the entirety of that time pacing an empty room in the exhibits hall, practicing my paper under my breath and trying to psych myself up.
By the time I got to the room where my session was held, the top margin of my paper was all marked up with messages of encouragement to myself-- mainly some lyrics to "You're the Voice," "DFTBA," and "This is not serious business." The latter had become my mantra for that paper. Any time I started to freak out and take it all too seriously, I had to stop and remind myself, "You are giving a paper on Merlin. Not Chaucer, not Langland. THIS IS NOT SERIOUS BUSINESS. You are lucky enough to be in the exceptional position of getting up in front of a bunch of Arthurian nerds to talk about this show that you love for twenty minutes. Remember that you love it. Let them see why you love it. HAVE FUN!"
And you know what? I really did. I was lucky enough that a couple of friends came to watch me, as well as one former professor and one current professor, all of whom I adore. The session also had exactly the right tone-- everyone was pretty affectionately snarky and lighthearted about their subjects. One of the other presenters came up to me afterward and said that she'd been afraid that her paper would be too comedic for the session, but then I started talking and she knew it was okay. Awesomely, each paper ended up building really well upon the previous one, to such an extent that it seemed almost like my paper was deliberately responding to some of the issues brought up in the first one. I got laughs in all the right places, and in some unexpected ones, too. Like, starting with the first sentence. After that, it was a breeze. As soon as they started laughing, it started to feel more like performance, and performance I can do.
And then we ran out of time for questions! Which should have been a disappointment, but actually felt like a huge relief to me. Questions were the part I was dreading the most, especially since a certain person was unexpectedly in the audience-- a person in my field who scares the crap out of me for various reasons, not the least of which is her tendency to go after people like a shark in the Q&As. I had always said that if I ever gave a paper in her specific area, I would post somebody at the door to tell her it was the wrong session. The fact that this was not her specific area made the chance of interrogation less likely, but still. I'm sort of fascinated by this person, honestly, and when she walked in, I desperately looked around for an eye to catch in order to express my feelings, which were, roughly, "!!!CAN YOU BELIEVE THIS!!!" The one time I looked at her during my paper, she looked fairly bored, but I have it on good authority that at one point she turned around and gave a dirty look to a person who was fiddling with a water bottle, so I guess she was interested, which is great but now I am on her radar and there is no going back.
I'm not going to post the whole paper here or deal too much with its contents, because afterward I got some really great encouragement to turn it into an article, which I may still do. But I will give you the intro paragraph, which I wrote and delivered with the sentiment, "I can't believe I get to say this stuff in an academic paper." I wanted to put it right out there what kind of show Merlin is, and still say, "BUT DON'T DISMISS IT, ACADEMICS, BECAUSE IT IS MORE THAN THAT, TOO." So, here you go:
"Merlin, the BBC’s Saturday-night serial adaptation of the Arthurian legend, is far from faithful to its centuries of source material. In a tradition that has produced so many re-imaginings and re-interpretations, this is not an easy claim to make, but in its central premise, Merlin departs sharply from the standard setup most authors and filmmakers adopt-that Merlin is old and wise by the time Arthur comes out of obscurity to be made king and marry the noble lady Guinevere. This series presents a young Merlin acting as manservant to the equally young Prince Arthur, a King Uther relentlessly persecuting sorcerers well into his son’s young adulthood, and a Guinevere who spends her days arranging flowers for the king’s ward, the Lady Morgana. There is a giant, CGI dragon under the castle who gives cryptic advice with the voice of John Hurt, and the Lady of the Lake is a werepanther. Yet occasional allusions to not only The Sword in the Stone, but to Geoffrey of Monmouth, Malory, and Tennyson demonstrate that this lack of fidelity does not originate in lack of knowledge, which raises the question of why Merlin presents the legend in the way it does and what messages it conveys through what it includes and what it leaves out in its adaptation. One text for which Merlin seems to bear a particular affinity is Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and in examining how the poem is used in the two episodes which allude to it, we can see in place of the trial of Arthur’s Camelot through his best knight a trial of Uther’s Camelot through Arthur, allowing the son to attempt to define himself against the failures of his father."
So that was my thesis, and I talked primarily about the appearance of the Black Knight in "Excalibur" and the Beheading Game scene in "The Sins of the Father," and I got to get worked up about how much Uther sucks, which I always enjoy. Afterward, several people came up to me and said they really enjoyed my paper. I got some really lovely compliments from strangers and from my professors and friends both at the time and also occasionally during the rest of the conference. One of the complimentary strangers was the very person whose paper the previous year had made me want to write my paper in retaliation. I genuinely felt like maybe I had made her look at the show in a more positive light. Checkmate, my friends. Plus I had a kind of instant bond with the other presenters in my session, and we chatted a good deal and hung out at the dance in such a way that I was like, "Am I popular now? Like, one of the cool kids? What is this life?"
I was as overwhelmed with people's kindness during the last part of the conference as I was overwhelmed by anxiety at the beginning. I came out of it feeling elated. So that's the story of the paper I gave on Merlin. It was a wonderful experience, and I would definitely recommend my method of sidling into academia to others. Also work the word "werepanther" into your paper if you possibly can.
I want to finish the story of my first paper at Kalamazoo now. To recap: I presented my first paper at the Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo last spring on Merlin.'Yes, the BBC's Merlin. Moving on.
Although I knew what I wanted to deal with in the paper-- specifically, that both "Excalibur" and "Sins of the Father" clearly use elements of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and isn't that neat?-- I wasn't sure what my argument was going to be until I actually wrote the paper, which did not happen until, if I remember correctly, only a few weeks before the conference. I had a lot of anxiety built up about it, but I ended up really liking what I came up with. I decided against using video clips for fear they would malfunction on the day (which did, in fact, happen to someone in another session and nearly happened to everyone in ours), so I just described the scenes I was talking about pretty thoroughly, and the people I sent and read it to said that I was clear and they could follow the argument. In fact, they liked it. This was encouraging.
I stayed with celtic_songster at Kzoo this year, because she's actually in the program at Western Michigan, and this meant getting up obscenely early every day of the conference so that I could ride to campus with her, where she was working in the exhibits hall when not attending sessions. It also meant that on more than one occasion I napped in the exhibits hall lobby. Still, she and I had great fun seeing Spamalot, getting Taco Bell, accidentally terrifying each other with scary stories, and going on a shopping trip on which I bought her an iron because I needed one pretty immediately and she probably would need one soon in her professional life. She was also my last test audience for the paper before I actually gave it, and I vividly remember sitting on her floor and marking up words to emphasize based on her advice.
There were some really good sessions last year-- I even attended one with another paper on Merlin, one from someone who liked it this time. I did not attend any other sessions the day of my own. There weren't really any that particularly interested me, and I'd be too nervous leading up to my paper to pay attention to anything. I was really emotionally strung-out in the morning, but I felt better after some beautiful texts from Bethany. I wandered the exhibits hall for a few hours and met up with friends for lunch. After that, there was still a session to go before mine, and I spent the entirety of that time pacing an empty room in the exhibits hall, practicing my paper under my breath and trying to psych myself up.
By the time I got to the room where my session was held, the top margin of my paper was all marked up with messages of encouragement to myself-- mainly some lyrics to "You're the Voice," "DFTBA," and "This is not serious business." The latter had become my mantra for that paper. Any time I started to freak out and take it all too seriously, I had to stop and remind myself, "You are giving a paper on Merlin. Not Chaucer, not Langland. THIS IS NOT SERIOUS BUSINESS. You are lucky enough to be in the exceptional position of getting up in front of a bunch of Arthurian nerds to talk about this show that you love for twenty minutes. Remember that you love it. Let them see why you love it. HAVE FUN!"
And you know what? I really did. I was lucky enough that a couple of friends came to watch me, as well as one former professor and one current professor, all of whom I adore. The session also had exactly the right tone-- everyone was pretty affectionately snarky and lighthearted about their subjects. One of the other presenters came up to me afterward and said that she'd been afraid that her paper would be too comedic for the session, but then I started talking and she knew it was okay. Awesomely, each paper ended up building really well upon the previous one, to such an extent that it seemed almost like my paper was deliberately responding to some of the issues brought up in the first one. I got laughs in all the right places, and in some unexpected ones, too. Like, starting with the first sentence. After that, it was a breeze. As soon as they started laughing, it started to feel more like performance, and performance I can do.
And then we ran out of time for questions! Which should have been a disappointment, but actually felt like a huge relief to me. Questions were the part I was dreading the most, especially since a certain person was unexpectedly in the audience-- a person in my field who scares the crap out of me for various reasons, not the least of which is her tendency to go after people like a shark in the Q&As. I had always said that if I ever gave a paper in her specific area, I would post somebody at the door to tell her it was the wrong session. The fact that this was not her specific area made the chance of interrogation less likely, but still. I'm sort of fascinated by this person, honestly, and when she walked in, I desperately looked around for an eye to catch in order to express my feelings, which were, roughly, "!!!CAN YOU BELIEVE THIS!!!" The one time I looked at her during my paper, she looked fairly bored, but I have it on good authority that at one point she turned around and gave a dirty look to a person who was fiddling with a water bottle, so I guess she was interested, which is great but now I am on her radar and there is no going back.
I'm not going to post the whole paper here or deal too much with its contents, because afterward I got some really great encouragement to turn it into an article, which I may still do. But I will give you the intro paragraph, which I wrote and delivered with the sentiment, "I can't believe I get to say this stuff in an academic paper." I wanted to put it right out there what kind of show Merlin is, and still say, "BUT DON'T DISMISS IT, ACADEMICS, BECAUSE IT IS MORE THAN THAT, TOO." So, here you go:
"Merlin, the BBC’s Saturday-night serial adaptation of the Arthurian legend, is far from faithful to its centuries of source material. In a tradition that has produced so many re-imaginings and re-interpretations, this is not an easy claim to make, but in its central premise, Merlin departs sharply from the standard setup most authors and filmmakers adopt-that Merlin is old and wise by the time Arthur comes out of obscurity to be made king and marry the noble lady Guinevere. This series presents a young Merlin acting as manservant to the equally young Prince Arthur, a King Uther relentlessly persecuting sorcerers well into his son’s young adulthood, and a Guinevere who spends her days arranging flowers for the king’s ward, the Lady Morgana. There is a giant, CGI dragon under the castle who gives cryptic advice with the voice of John Hurt, and the Lady of the Lake is a werepanther. Yet occasional allusions to not only The Sword in the Stone, but to Geoffrey of Monmouth, Malory, and Tennyson demonstrate that this lack of fidelity does not originate in lack of knowledge, which raises the question of why Merlin presents the legend in the way it does and what messages it conveys through what it includes and what it leaves out in its adaptation. One text for which Merlin seems to bear a particular affinity is Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and in examining how the poem is used in the two episodes which allude to it, we can see in place of the trial of Arthur’s Camelot through his best knight a trial of Uther’s Camelot through Arthur, allowing the son to attempt to define himself against the failures of his father."
So that was my thesis, and I talked primarily about the appearance of the Black Knight in "Excalibur" and the Beheading Game scene in "The Sins of the Father," and I got to get worked up about how much Uther sucks, which I always enjoy. Afterward, several people came up to me and said they really enjoyed my paper. I got some really lovely compliments from strangers and from my professors and friends both at the time and also occasionally during the rest of the conference. One of the complimentary strangers was the very person whose paper the previous year had made me want to write my paper in retaliation. I genuinely felt like maybe I had made her look at the show in a more positive light. Checkmate, my friends. Plus I had a kind of instant bond with the other presenters in my session, and we chatted a good deal and hung out at the dance in such a way that I was like, "Am I popular now? Like, one of the cool kids? What is this life?"
I was as overwhelmed with people's kindness during the last part of the conference as I was overwhelmed by anxiety at the beginning. I came out of it feeling elated. So that's the story of the paper I gave on Merlin. It was a wonderful experience, and I would definitely recommend my method of sidling into academia to others. Also work the word "werepanther" into your paper if you possibly can.