Review: “Bel Nemeton,” Jon Black

I met Jon Black in Denton, Texas while I was going to school, and I count Black a friend, though we haven’t seen each other or had a long face-to-face conversation in ages. He lives in Austin; I live in DFW. Where I was working on a Ph.D. in Shakespeare studies, Black earned a double B.A. in Political Science and History, worked for the State for a time, worked as a music journalist, as a ghostwriter, and I’m sure more. Black has always had a passion for history, for a vital engagement with world cultures on their own terms, for imagination, and for community. He has had the occasion and joy to travel far afield, and I’m certainly jealous of him in that regard.

I heard Black had written a short story for the After Avalon collection of short stories, and I acquired a copy on Kindle, but I didn’t get to it immediately. It was only after I was unable to sleep during the early morning of November 9, 2016 that I opened up “Bel Nemeton” and read the short story that inspired this new novel, Black’s first full-length foray.

“Bel Nemeton” was a blessing that night.

Accordingly, I took up the opportunity to get my hands on an advanced review copy of this novel. Black had expressed his keen interest in my opinions after the initial short story and at some point during the drafting process for Bel Nemeton, and as is my wont, I offered several opinions—at length—over Facebook Messenger.

Some Mild Spoilers Follow

Recent Readings

Here’re a few of the things I’ve read that haven’t been (specifically) for a class lately:

Black Central Europe

Per the website, “Black Central Europe (BCE) is a network of scholars who promote the study of Black people in Central Europe’s past and present,” including a map project of central Europe pinning where different events took place. For me, I found the Sources page more immediately accessible and arresting, with the sources broken down along period lines–from 1000 CE and later.

Edit: and h/t to MedievalPOC

The Medieval’s Allure for Racism & Hatred

From S. J. Pearce’s post “BOTH SONS OF SPAIN”: MEDIEVAL JEWS AND MUSLIMS IN THE IMAGINED NATION:

I want to let you in on the dirty little secret of my field, Medieval Studies: The Middle Ages is incredibly attractive to white supremacists. For people whose vision of a backwards-looking, great world is one with white Christian men in positions of power and the rest of us put in our places, the Middle Ages is a fertile ground for fantasy, where it seems very easy, at least superficially, to ignore the integral role of an incredibly diverse population. There are legends like King Arthur, images like the Bayeaux Tapestries, and long histories of Crusading that, on the face of it, make the Middle Ages look very white and like a world very divided neatly into categories of “us” and “them.”

Pearce’s post includes her contribution to her department’s recent teach-in at NYU in response to rising “Islamophobic and anti-Semitic vandalism on campus.”

h/t to MedievalPOC on Tumblr

Age, Abuse, Fathers & Kids in Lear

Let me talk to you a bit about King Lear. Lear puts his daughters on the spot: consider how Lear seems to spontaneously ask his daughters, in birth order, to tell him who loves him best—with that daughter earning the most/best land for her dowry. Now, many productions choose to begin with Goneril and Regan as conniving, scheming, and Machiavellian. However, what if they’re put on the spot. Keep in mind how emotionally abusive Lear acts here and how bad his parenting must have been and how manipulative this is on behalf of Lear.

Race in Bronze Age & Medieval Britain

I believe I’ve pointed here and elsewhere to The National Archives’ exhibition on Asian and Black History in Britain, which is good for getting a grounding in how diverse Britain had been in the medieval and early modern periods. I have to give kudos to twitter user @medievalpoc who’s tagline is “People of Color in European Art History: Because you wouldn’t want to be historically inaccurate.” @medievalpoc is where I came across most of this information originally. Today, @medievalpoc pointed me (and others) to Dr. Caitlin Green of Cambridge. Dr. Green has been working on these same topics as well. I just came across a collection of posts she made on twitter, which you can see via storify via this post, focusing on Bronze Age Britain and into the medieval: she also has her blog here. Dr. Green points to several research articles on these topics.

Reading Poetry at the Library Mall

On Thursday, October 6, the Writing Center at UT Arlington sponsored a poetry celebration at the Library Mall on campus. I showed up to share some of my favorite poetry.

I started out with Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130, as one does:

The Post about Star Trek

It’s the 50^th Anniversary of Star Trek (or it was on September 8), and I felt I’d add my contribution to the occasion.

I first encountered Star Trek with The Original Series in its syndication on a local station back in the late 1970s right before I went into kindergarten. I loved it. I wanted to be Captain Kirk. I wanted to have my own Mr. Spock best friend. I had this one red shirt that was my Scotty Shirt. I remember forming a landing party at recess in kindergarten with my friend at the time, who got to be Spock, but we had to stop pretending our fingers were phasers. When Star Trek: The Motion Picture came out, well, I had no idea what was going on, but a slew of Star Trek toys came out.

Tentatively Coming This Spring 2017

Update: On hiatus for the time being, sadly!

Sci-Fi & Fantasy Short Fiction (ENGL 2303)

Margaret Atwood described science fiction as what “belongs on books with things in them that we can’t yet do, such as going through a wormhole in space to another universe.” In contrast, Warren Ellis observed how “[s]cience fiction didn’t see the mobile phone coming,” let alone how we use smartphones to make “amazing things happen by pointing at it with our fingers like…wizards.” Ellis argues that Sci-Fi fundamentally concerns itself with the present and about how we imagine the world might become. Accordingly, Sci-Fi arguably says more about the culture that produces such stories than about the future. In a similar manner, Michael Moorcock argued that “[f]antastic fiction is like the majority of modern fiction primarily fashionable, written for a particular audience at a particular time.” In this course, we will look at a selection of short fiction in the Sci-Fi and fantasy genres, including works by Moorcock (The Elric Saga), Ellis (Gun Machine), Ursula la Guin (Earthsea), Arthur Machen, J. R. R. Tolkien, Neil Gaiman, Ray Bradbury, Charles Stross, Kurt Vonnegut, H.P. Lovecraft, Octavia Butler, Lavie Tidhar, Dunsany, Mary Shelley, Nisi Shawl, and others. This course includes a Signature Assignment project as well as other shorter writing assignments. We will consider the purposes and contexts of speculative fiction. This course samples these genres rather than attempting a comprehensive examination.

Image: “The Ship of Yoharneth,” Sidney Sime’s illustration for Lord Dunsany’s “The Gods of Pegana” (1911)

The End of Summer, The Looming Fall

I taught a British Literature survey course back in June and July ranging from Beowulf to Paradise Lost, and I also supervised three English Department interns at UT Arlington who worked with Fort Worth Weekly, Fort Worth, Texas: the city’s magazine, and with Literacy House via the Arlington Public Library. Check my twitter feed for links to some of the articles the publishing interns produced over the summer.

Meanwhile, the fall semester is looming, and I’ve been working on new class prep for Shakespeare. In the past, I’ve taught As You Like It, Richard II, 1 Henry IV, Othello, Macbeth, Hamlet, and the sonnets. For this coming year, I’m planning on teaching Much Ado about Nothing, Richard III, King Lear, and repeating Othello, Macbeth, and the sonnets. Many of my students taking the course are folks pursuing teaching certification, and I like to give them a grounding in Shakespeare’s works, contexts, and more that they can hopefully adapt in teaching Shakespeare at the high school level.

I’m also teaching technical writing, and I’ve decided to change up some of my assignments in that course. Previously, I’ve had a range of assignments that have students produce various kinds of technical and professional documents: resumes, cover letters, brochures, instructions, and formal reports. I also have had several service learning-related projects, most recently on behalf of Meals On Wheels, Inc. of Tarrant County. For this coming year, we’re going to do a couple of projects in cooperation with Arlington Public Libraries. I’m also changing up the assignment load some: I’m rolling the instructions and formal reports together into a “Career Development Project” and include a presentation version of that project. The project requires students to investigate the best routes towards pursuing the kind of careers they aspire to, from education and into entering the workforce.

I’ll also have more interns to supervise, even as I head up interns working to help develop a social media initiative for the Department of English, more advising internships, and at least one intern working with Arlington Public Library as a documentation specialist.

Right now, I’m in the process of getting Blackboard sections ready for the Fall term: setting up individual quizzes, uploading files, organizing things. This process is probably the most tedious part of the prep for a new term.

Image: from a late summer day last year on campus