Chris Piuma
Look, I’m fine, and you’re probably fine, and this is all lovely and fine, and I don’t really have any complaints, and I don’t want to stand here honking and screaming and telling you that you have to do this and you can’t do that, because really I’m fine, and you’re fine, and this is all lovely and fine, and I have my ways of doing my thing, and you all have your ways of doing your thing, and we have developed and will continue to develop ways of communicating and connecting and intersecting and in-tercalating and networking and perverting and permuting and exchanging and pollinating and multiplying and shuffling and alphabetizing and taxonimizing and trans-lating and transposing and creatively mishearing and misreading and assembling and reassembling and
pleas-uring and tantalizing and polishing and abrading and interrogating and sculpting and remodeling and renovat-ing and flipprenovat-ing and overturnrenovat-ing and revolutionizrenovat-ing and transcending and eventually nostalgically or elegiacally recalling and reciting and reenacting and recreating and repositioning and reconsidering and reattaching our vari-ous things like so many Lego bricks or Tinkertoys or sex-ual organs, and this is fine, and I’m fine, and you’re F-I-N-E fine, and this is all lovely and fine, but, and this is a small but, there’s a little thing I’m worried about, or maybe not worried about but maybe bored by, or maybe not bored by but frustrated with, or maybe I’m frustrated and bored and a little worried, even though I’m fine, and this isn’t meant to detract from your own fineness, or how lovely and fine all this is, because it really is lovely and fine and you really are fine, but: Could you stop talking about England? Could you stop talking about English literature quite all the time? Or English history? Or English art or whatever? Although really, English literature. And I know that you’ve tried and I know that twenty years ago, even ten years ago, even five years ago, even last year it was worse, but perhaps you’re unaware that you—the collective you, the aggregate you, the blurry you—are still so assured in the self-evident centrality of English. And, in a way, you know, it’s fine, English literature is fine, I enjoy it, you enjoy it, it’s interesting, there’s lots of inter-esting stuff to talk about about it, we could talk about it all day, you’re going to talk about it all day, and you can, that’s your thing, and it’s fine, and you’re fine, and you do a great job talking about it, and it’s all lovely and fine, and if medieval English literature were all the literature in the world then really would that be so bad?, it could be worse!, and so why should I be worried or frustrated or bored that your sense of medieval literature is so dogged-ly focused on English literature, OK there was some blur-ring between English and French at the time so maybe also French literature, we all love Marie de France, but perhaps not as much as we all love Chaucer, I love Chau-cer, you love ChauChau-cer, we all love ChauChau-cer, some of you are Chaucer online, and Chaucer’s fine, and I’m fine, and
MINIATURE MANIFESTOS 99
you’re fine, and talking about Chaucer is lovely and fine, and we could talk about him all day, in any number of ways, to talk about whatever else we want to talk about, and so what else do we need? We’re practically self-sufficient here: a tale of Chaucer, a loaf of Theory, and thou. And this is a lovely way to spend a day and all this makes perfect sense, especially for those of us who are Americans, because we speak English, and English came from England, and America came from England, right?, and it’s really important to remind ourselves, and espe-cially our students, and, when we can, the general public that we have a strong and a natural connection to Eng-land by virtue of living in America, no matter what our individual backgrounds are, and so of course if we’re studying literature we’re going to study English litera-ture, America→English, English→England, thus
America→England, America→England,
America→England, America→England,
America→England, America→England,
America→England, America→England,
America→England, and we don’t need the rest of the world—we don’t even need the rest of the UK—because I’m fine, and you’re fine, and this is all lovely and fine, and we’re all having a great time, and we could do this all day, and surely we’re smart enough that we’d notice if there were a problem here, and we can be proud of ourselves, because taking the medie-val seriously—hell, taking literature seriously—in this world, in this time, in this country, in this economy, is radical enough. And anyway, who the fuck wants to learn all those languages.