Oh, how lovely. Blogger has started seizing up just before midnight. (The previous post was written around 11:15.) Maybe I should devote a few dollars to new webspace and a little of my vacation time to playing with Movable Type. After all, my twenty or so semi-regular readers really need instant access to my pearls of wisdom, right? And, besides, playing with code is fun when neither grades nor jobs are involved. Hmmmm. Bearing in mind that I am a control freak and will not consider any options that give me less control over presentation or content (e.g. LiveJournal, Diaryland), does anyone have opinions about this one way or another?

Happy Valentine's Day, everyone!

As I understand it, there are two possible candidates for the titular Saint Valentine, a first-century Roman priest and a third-century central Italian bishop. Both were martyrs, and any association with the cause of romance clearly happened much later. There are also two possible (not mutually exclusive) explanations for how this date became associated with lovers in the first place: the common belief (dating at least from the late Middle Ages) that February 14th was when birds mated, and the Roman purificatory festival of the Lupercalia held in mid-February and dedicated to the ancient Roman wolf-god Lupercus, later identified with Pan/Faunus by Greco-Roman authors. Lupercalia celebrations featured the sacrifice of sexually active animals, copious drinking and feasting, and a public race run by goatskin-loincloth-clad young men who whipped bystanders with goatskin whips or thongs (februa) as they passed. (The februum -- related to modern English "fever" and, of course, the month of February -- connoted purification, but its touch also provided good luck and an increased chance at conception. At least, this provided an excuse for proper Roman matrons to watch the race. The purificatory aspects of Lupercalia were absorbed into the Christian Lent by the fifth century, but the lascivious aspects seem to have wound up in the feast of Saint Valentine.)

My own observance of the holiday is sadly lacking in scantily clad young men, leather, or whips. I do have chocolate, however, and cards from friends and family (which are vastly preferable to animal sacrifices). I am also enjoying a warm and fuzzy feeling of goodwill towards all the happy couples out there and the pleasant suspicion that someone, somewhere, could use the information in the above paragraph to write a bang-up Giles/Ethan and/or Oz Valentine's Day fanfic. I, however, am off to a luncheon meeting to discuss something entirely different, so the offer is open.

This afternoon's useful tidbit of information, gained through extensive labor that was mostly not mine: the ubiquitous medieval analogy comparing reading Scripture for its true spiritual meaning (viz. Paul of Tarsus) to the separation of grain from chaff (viz. half a dozen places throughout the Bible) originates not in Scripture, and not in Augustine (although it sounds as if it should, it almost does, and D.W. Robertson even claims that it does), but in Gregory the Great's Commentary on the Song of Songs. Said analogy then makes it into various medieval sources such as Alan of Lille's De planctu naturae and Richard of Bury's Philobiblon. It winds up at the end of the prologue to Chaucer's Nun's Priest's Tale, as alert readers may have guessed from the title of this entry, and is quite probably somewhere in Boccaccio -- but as I am no specialist in medieval literature, I have never properly learned Boccaccio, and haven't read him in some time. Perhaps one of the many medieval lit types (how long till someone gives in and organizes a con at Kalamazoo in May?) occupying Buffy fandom can fill me in. The rest of you can just consider applying this metaphor to my journal entries.

I don't usually bother with the dining halls here at Large Midwestern U., but my academic subunit has a visiting scholar this week, and I've been joining her for a couple of meals -- which the subunit pays for if they are on campus. Therefore, my lunch consisted of grilled tilapia (appropriate for Ash Wednesday, no?), potatoes, salad, and fro-yo. Sitting at the end of a long table with my lunch companions and watching the social groupings ebb and flow around me, I was reminded of how much I do not miss college. (Most people, I think, are bitter about high school. I was a late bloomer.) I much prefer not having anyone in loco parentis except my actual parents, whose locus is far enough away that we can chat regularly on the phone and engage in visits several times a year without my feeling too obviously overprotected. I also love being able to eat and sit and live and date (or not date) and go anywhere I darn well please. I love to travel, to vote, to subscribe to my choice of magazines. The lack of all-you-can-eat frozen yogurt is a small price to pay. Heck, I sat down and paid all this month's bills this morning and I still love being (well) into adulthood.

This, I think, explains my lack of sympathy for many popular TV shows: I like being grown up, but the protagonists on these shows don't do a great deal of growing up, nor do they have positive role models for the state of being grown-up. (Let me note that "growing up" is not the same thing as "getting married," "having kids," "losing your sense of humor," or even "having your own [inexplicably nice, because this is TV] apartment." The characters on Friends aren't especially adult most of the time; the characters on Seinfeld never were. But I don't care about those shows for other reasons.) If you took the current season of Buffy and replaced all dialogue from reasonably adult figures with Peanuts-style disembodied voices saying "Waaanh-wanhhh-waaanh," you'd lose maybe ten minutes of dialogue all season, and 70% of it would be from before Giles's departure. Angel, for all its flaws, at least occasionally features adult people I can relate to (although less and less occasionally). I caught the last ten or so minutes of Smallville last night when I got in and was favorably impressed by the fact that Clark's parents actually seem to play active roles in their son's life while treating him as an independent moral agent. Lex's father does the former (sort of) without really managing the latter, which is why their interaction is so horribly dysfunctional. (The same critique could be applied to 7th Heaven, only there they don't realize it's wrong...oh, and I just got a really unfortunate mental picture from thinking about how that last scene with Lex would play with characters from 7th Heaven. Excuse me while I go scour my subconscious.) If Smallville keeps going with episodes in which it's nearly impossible to tell that some of the characters are in high school, I might even consider watching again...as long as nothing else is on and I'm home anyway.

Now, back to doing things so that I can maintain my adult status of being able to pay those bills.

The latest (and, God willing, the last) round of revisions has been posted off to all the relevant people. I'm getting more and more serious about mentioning FedEx in my acknowledgments, along with the dozens of trees who died for this dissertation. And it's sunny, and warm, and I remembered to eat for the first time in 24 hours, which is always a good idea. Now all that's left to do this week is a decision on whether or not I can justify reviewing a manuscript article that a journal wants me to review (it'd be fun to read, but is slightly outside my immediate research specialty) and the long-delayed Freelance Writing Project From Hell (more about that when I actually get around to it), along with some extremely dull things like laundry and grocery-shopping. Since I don't want to do any of those things, I'm going to go on another Buffy-centric ramble and obsess about demons instead. (Yes, I know it's sad. If I ever take up needlepoint, I'm embroidering the above quotation -- from Wesley in "Heartthrob," if you don't recognize it offhand -- on a pillow.)

I was trying to figure out Spike's status as a moral agent, and I realized that this depends on whether one thinks "demon" means anything moral in the Buffyverse. From their inception (and for various reasons), Buffyverse vampires have borne an eerie resemblance to traditional Christian demons, i.e., fallen angels: they have assorted superhuman powers but lack the ability to perform truly virtuous acts and have wills permanently deformed towards evil. The interesting thing about this is that in the Buffyverse, vampires aren't fallen angels, they're fallen demons -- fallen, it seems, from "pure demon" critters like Olvikan (the transformed Mayor), and possibly Vocah, "warrior of the underworld." Also, neither vampires nor "pure demons" are strictly immortal, while Christian demons and angels usually are. That aside, though, the Jossverse begins as an inversion of the Christian paradigm that fits in nicely with the inverted creation account in "The Harvest." All the demons but one, and all the vampires, are irredeemably evil. If you only take Buffy seasons 1-3 and leave out Whistler, you've got a really depressing but logically consistent universe. Vampires (with the sui generis exception of Angel) could reasonably be made use of, but they had to meet a dusty end sooner or later; otherwise, they would just continue to work evil at some level.

However, there's Whistler. In "Becoming," he introduces himself to Angel as "a demon, technically. I mean, I’m not a bad guy. Not all demons are dedicated to the destruction of all life." Buffy calls him "an immortal demon sent down to even the score between good and evil." (By whom? From where? Oh well.) Whistler may not be good, but he probably isn't evil, either. From this case alone, we can deduce that Buffyverse demons, "technically," are capable of a variety of moral stances. Many of them seem to be wedded to specific causes and probably specific moral stances: witness creatures such as Skip, who works for the Powers That Be, or D'Hoffryn, who works for the "Lower Beings." On the other hand, many of L.A.'s demon denizens are fully assimilated into human society and are, apparently, stuck with the same range of freely chosen good and evil as human beings (e.g., Lorne, Merl, Doyle's Brakken relatives, and so forth). While most people who think about Buffyverse demonology have hissyfits trying to separate superhuman demons from merely nonhuman demons, I'm indifferent; the "technical" meaning of demon seems to be the broadest one possible. (How do I know they're all "technically" demons? Well, can you imagine Wesley using the non-technical meaning of "demon"? I rest my case.) However, a subset of these California-dwelling nonhuman "technical" demons, like the superhuman demons which inhabit vampires, are in fact "irredeemably evil." Wesley says as much in "That Old Gang of Mine." So the technical definition of "demon" connotes absolutely nothing in terms of morality, neither good nor evil nor free will to choose between them. That doesn't mean that there are no moral absolutes, just that the term "demon" doesn't imply any of them in the most technical sense of that term.

There are two major definitions of "demon" in the Oxford English Dictionary: "a supernatural being of a nature intermediate between that of gods and men; an inferior divinity, spirit, genius" and "an evil spirit." I suspect that there are actually three definitions for "demon" in the Buffyverse OED:

(1) Any sentient being which is neither human (although it may inhabit a human host) nor divine (approximating OED definition #1). Technically correct. Common usage in mixed human-demon societies, such as certain neighborhoods in L.A. Cf. also "demon dimension."

(2) Any sentient being which is neither human (although it may inhabit a human host) nor divine and is irredeemably evil (approximating OED definition #2). Standard terminology in introductory Watcher materials, such as the Slayer's Handbook, and common usage in human societies which deny the physical existence of demons, such as Sunnydale.

(3) Archaic. A sentient being which is superhuman but subdivine and can only manifest on this plane of existence through Ascension or other major dark ritual. Irredeemably evil. Usually super-sized. Synonymous with "pure demon" and "Old One."

Obviously, these definitions overlap. Spike qualifies as demon(1) and demon(2). It's a pity that the characters on Buffy don't speak a little more precisely, but I don't think there's anything in what is known of Buffyverse demon morality which implies that Spike is either simply amoral or that he is a moral agent capable of redemption (unless he gets a soul from someplace).* In a universe of moral absolutes, Spike is irredeemably evil. And I'm going to have to write another Buffy Studies article or something to justfy the amount of time I've put into thinking this through. ;)

* -- Saying "Spike is a demon, and therefore irredeemably evil" implies that the speaker is using definition #2. Saying "Spike is a demon, but we must be culturally sensitive to this" implies that the speaker is using definition #1 (I hope). Saying "the fact that Spike is a demon doesn't make him irredeemably evil" is technically and logically correct, if the speaker is using definition #1, but it's also amphigory -- that is, it has no actual meaning. Saying "not all demons are irredeemably evil, so Spike may not be irredeemably evil" is amphiboly -- that is, it creates a double meaning where there is none -- because it is only true with reference to definition #1 but tends to be read as implying definition #2 as well. Saying "not all demons are irredeemably evil, so not all vampires are irredeemably evil" is logically flawed and amphibolous... and it makes my eyes cross trying to sort it out, so I'll leave it at that.

Hmph. I was going to post about what a good mood I was in, but Blogger ate the post. Nevertheless, the latest round of dissertation revisions have been duly discussed with the relevant persons and are under way once more. (At this point, I'm really just dealing with the last ten pages of the dratted thing. I'm also congratulating myself on my mastery of one of those lesser-known aspects of advanced graduate training: basic tele-stalking techniques. It must've been much more difficult to catch professors in their offices when you couldn't pull up their class schedules online or tell when they'd last checked their email.) Those of you offering congratulations on the dissertation, please note that I am holding off on announcing completion until I actually turn in the proper copies with the proper forms to the proper office at Unspecified University. I did, however, just order my archival-quality bond paper for creating those proper copies. Library-and-archival-supply catalogs are fascinating, even online. I want some acid-free cartons. And maybe a few acrylic-coated folders.

In totally unrelated news, I've decided that I prefer Isidore of Seville to the Archangel Gabriel as a patron saint of the Internet, but only if we get Ludolph of Saxony as the patron of fanfic. Ludolph isn't a saint just yet, but he wrote the most influential Bible fanfic in late medieval and early modern continental Europe. I don't see why the Vatican can't get around to at least beatifying him.