Today is the feast day of Saint Thomas Aquinas -- even though it's neither his birth nor his death, but the anniversary of his body's translation to the Eglise des Jacobins in Toulouse in 1369, and yes, I just looked that up for someone else, why do you ask? Anyway, some people are just a little whacked out about Aquinas here at Boondoggle U. -- and by "some people" I mean "our Philosophy department," and by "a little whacked out" I mean "spending the day performing continuous readings of the Summa in each reader's language of choice." I mean "whacked out" in a good way, of course; I even read a few paragraphs for them -- in Latin, scilicet. Next year I'll have to try and find the alleged Klingon copy that people kept making off with, if only because I want to see whether or not the concept of discretio really translates into Klingon....
The project of reading the entire Summa out loud -- skipping all the replies and objections, which strikes me as Just Wrong, but it's not my pet project -- will apparently take nine years' worth of feast days. This isn't quite as long as it's taken me to come up with ten favorite novels for a recent meme, but close. My first difficulty was the specification of novels -- although I suppose I should be grateful, really, since this list would become entirely impossible rather than merely implausible if I had to throw in other genres. On the other hand, novels aren't really my cup of tea; there are any number of them which I acknowledge to be Extremely Good but which I don't especially care to read. I've also decided to confine the list to English-language novels, because otherwise I'd spend another two days trying to decide whether San Manuel Bueno, mártir, as a novella, belonged on the list -- although that also means leaving out García Marquez and Lispector. And I've enforced a strict one-book-per-author policy. And I've reminded myself that popular histories are probably not quite the same as novels, autobiographies are definitely different, and apocryphal acts are too complicated to go into. Finally, I've checked to see whether I'm missing anything obvious, but I probably am.
Anyway. The First Lines of One's Ten Favorite Novels Meme, in alphabetical order for lack of anything better:
"Harriet Vane sat at her writing-table and stared out into Mecklenburg Square." (Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night)
"It might begin: The thrush has his anvil on one fallen stone in a heap, gold and grey, roughly squared and shaped, hot in the sun and mossy in the shade." (A.S. Byatt, Babel Tower)
"One thing was certain, that the white kitten had had nothing to do with it--it was the black kitten's fault entirely." (Lewis Carroll, Through The Looking Glass And What Alice Found There.)
"Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch Hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage; there he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one; there his faculties were roused into admiration and respect by contemplating the limited remnant of the earliest patents; there any unwelcome sensations, arising from domestic affairs, changed naturally into pity and contempt." (Jane Austen, Persuasion)
"The primroses were over." (Richard Adams, Watership Down)
"The big kitchen of the Murrys' house was bright and warm, curtains drawn against the dark outside, against the rain driving past the house from the northeast." (Madeleine L'Engle, A Swiftly Tilting Planet)
"The first day I did not think it was funny." (Nora Ephron, Heartburn)
"This book is largely concerned with Hobbits, and from its pages a reader may discover much of their character and a little of their history." (J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings)
"Three young men stood together on a wharf one bright October day awaiting the arrival of an ocean steamer with an impatience which found a vent in lively skirmishes with a small lad, who pervaded the premises like a will-o'-the-wisp and afforded much amusement to the other groups assembled there." (Louisa May Alcott, Rose in Bloom)
"When April with its sweet showers has pierced the drought of March to the root, and bathed every vein of earth with that liquid by whose power the flowers are engendered; when the zephyr, too, with its dulcet breath, has breathed life into the tender new shoots in every copse and on every hearth, and the young sun has run half his course in the sign of the Ram, and the little birds that sleep all night with their eyes open give song (so Nature prompts them in their hearts), then, as the poet Geoffrey Chaucer observed many years ago, folk long to go on pilgrimages." (David Lodge, Small World: An Academic Romance)
Trying not to write explanations for most of these is more difficult than doing so, but I think I'll enjoy the discreet psychological exhibitionism of putting such a list out there without further ado. Okay, just a bit of ado: there seems to be an inordinate amount of Heinlein popping up on peoples' lists, so I'll mention in passing that my favorite Heinlein is neither Stranger in a Strange Land (I'll stick with the Gospel of Matthew, thanks) nor Time Enough For Love (Lazarus Long is supposed to be appealing why again?), but The Cat Who Walks Through Walls. This is, of course, because I want to be Gwen-Hazel. And that's really all you need to know about me.
I think I may have just achieved the apotheosis of geeking out. (Apart, that is, from using the word "apotheosis" in casual conversation.) See, I was reading an article in Critical Inquiry... online... and then I started thinking about parallels with Buffy the Vampire Slayer... and then I decided that I just had to blog about it, if only because certain linguabloggers of my acquaintance would probably get a kick out of it. And then I decided that I'd really much rather write about the uses of language than, er, go out tonight. Although I do have plans for the rest of the weekend.
Boondoggle U. has an electronic subscription to CI (I just love living in 2003), but I think the article in question is available even to non-subscribers here. If that doesn't work, though, just go find the Winter 2003 issue and turn to Peter Goodrich, "Distrust Quotations in Latin." The title pretty well sums up the article's thesis:
...[T]he less that Latin is known and used--the rarer its comprehension in professional and academic circles, let alone in the rest of the public sphere--the more powerful and persuasive its manipulative or political effects. Latin may be misused, but it is precisely its misuse that marks its rhetorical force and its likely future. ... The history of Latin is also the history of the ignorance of Latin.
Goodrich's examples range from the confusingly titled 1735 Histoire des tropes (ahem) to the U.S. Supreme Court's mystifying appeal to judgment per curiam in its Bush v. Gore decision, and his points are sound, if probably not super-innovative.* Latin is not dead, no matter what people chanted in the streets in May 1968; it lives on in etymology, diction, metaphysics (whether pre- or post-Heideggerian is anyone's guess), and a host of nasty little phrases the principal purposes of which are to demonstrate one's erudition and/or confuse the bejesus out of one's opponents. Insofar as Latin really is becoming a dead language, Goodrich argues, it echoes (and perhaps precipitates?) the "diminution and fragmentation of the public sphere" to which it has always been linked. In other words, "the contemporary function of Latin is rhetorical. It acts as a sign, a figure or trope, the conduit of extremity of emotion. It indicates a charge or condensation around the subject or judgment being delivered."
What's this got to do with the price of tea in Sunnydale? In the episode "Superstar," Xander (the show's only 100% normal, non-superpowered character) is trying to explain how magic spells work and notes in passing that "you can't just go 'librum incendere.'" As anyone familiar with comic devices and some basic English cognates could probably predict, the book in front of him promptly bursts into flames, inspiring Giles to utter the quotation from which this post takes its title. That was a comic moment, of course, since Xander has never shown a lick of Latin literacy otherwise -- but it's also a telling moment, because Latin means something very specific on Buffy. On the one hand, Latin is a language of power in the Buffyverse: this is what lies behind the "librum incendere" joke. Latin words frequently have power which their English equivalents lack, turning wish into reality in areas ranging from disinviting vampires to summoning assorted spirits to creating party decorations. Sometimes, as in the book-burning joke, the use of Latin appears to be the only thing necessary for a given action to succeed: in the Angel episode "I've Got You Under My Skin," for instance, the show's vampiric hero manages to conduct a successful exorcism in Latin, despite his rather spectacular lack of relevant clerical qualifications (not to mention his politic omission of the full Trinitarian formula). It's probably not unimportant that Angel the souled vampire seems a lot more powerful whenever he loses his soul and becomes the Latinate Angelus, Scourge of Europe.
But Buffyverse Latin is not only magical; it's also oddly universal. Extremely important, obscure, or specialized spells tend to be in other foreign languages (German, Sumerian, Romanian, Gaelic, etc.), and exceptionally powerful magic-users often switch from Latin to plain English -- Willow is the obvious example, and equally telling is the fact that her reversion from super-charged dark-magic user to ordinary powerful witch in S7 has included a shift back into Latin for most of her spells. But Latin is the default language of magic, adopted by demons, vampires, and humans ranging from witches to chaos mages to Watchers to amateur demon-summoners to evil lawyers with no apparent regard as to the logic of each individual choice.** In fact, Latin is also almost universally comprehensible on the show; practically everyone except the notoriously language-challenged Buffy has spouted it at one point or another, and in "The Yoko Factor," Giles becomes so annoyed by a floppy disk with encrypted data that he expresses a (drunken) preference for nonsensical Latin, pointing out that "at least when that made no sense, the Church approved."***
There's definitely an element of mystification here -- and I don't just mean the questionable grammar of many of the Latin sentences on the show, although I'd dearly love for someone to parse the Latin phrase which Angelus translates in "Passion." Throughout the runs of Buffy and Angel, Latin has been an astonishingly catholic indicator of some combination of knowledge and power (and let's not forget that the First Evil reads Foucault). It's no surprise that the Watchers' Council, the locus of knowledge, power, and secrecy up through Buffy S7, happens to name its Slayer tests in Latin, or that the mysterious theologian/mathematician Josephus du Lac ("What's My Line?") encrypts his esoteric wisdom "in archaic Latin so that nobody but the sect members could understand it." And yet... everyone and her demon ally can speak Latin. This, I think, is why the Goodrich article reminded me of Buffy: the closest thing to a "public sphere" in the Buffyverse is precisely the supernatural world of demons, vampires, and Slayers where Buffy spends most of her time and which is held together by Latinate magic. As with legal Latin, Buffyverse Latin isn't strictly esoteric, even though it's somewhat mystifying: rather, it indicates a "charge or condensation around the subject or judgment being delivered" in a more literal sense of "charge" than Goodrich probably had in mind.
Now, back to... OK, trying to find a decent basketball game while flipping past pre-pre-pre-game coverage of the latest Super Bowl -- speaking of gratuitous use of Latin (here, just the Roman numerals) and the public sphere! Me, I plan to spend the weekend doing fun things with Hebrew, of which more later.
* -- His remarks about the extent to which Latin was the only possible language for either liturgy or theology are actually more appropriate to post-Tridentine Catholicism than to late medieval Christianity -- I could discuss the usefulness of the Repertorium inquisitorum as a source some other time -- but this is a fairly minor point. Goodrich is clearly a legal scholar rather than an historian of religion, and I am willing to take him at his word about the persistence of Latinity in English common law, where his citations are far more numerous.
** -- If we approach this in a semi-logical fashion... why should self-identified "pagan" witches or thoroughly non-human demons be casting spells in Latin? (The other examples I gave make varying amounts of sense.)
*** -- This isn't universally correct, either, but one must make allowances for Giles's state of mind, and for my reluctance to say anything negative about Giles. ;)
Etymology is hardly ever apolitical, and I've yet to find a good estimate for what percentage of words in rabbinic-era Hebrew are actually borrowed from the Hellenistic Greek culture the rabbis supposedly resisted, but there are quite a few in the regular vocabulary I use to describe my religion -- "synagogue" is the most obvious. But one of my favorite not-exactly-Hebrew words is "trupp," simply because I spent years thinking to myself, "that doesn't sound like Hebrew" before I finally went and looked it up. It's not, of course; it's a slightly Germanicized pronunciation/transliteration of a Hebraicized version ("trop") of the Greek word tropos, "turn," which was adopted wholesale into Latin as tropus and from which we get English "trope" and a bunch of words ending in "-tropy."
"Trope" in English mostly means "a figure of speech," although those of my readers familiar with early music may also remember that a trope is a musical "turn," a cadence at the end of a melody. "Trupp" -- there is a proper Hebrew word, teamim, but I don't know anyone who uses it -- is (are?) the system of cantillation markings by which one chants Scripture during services. These markings look something like -- and evolved during the same time as -- the vowels in the Masoretic text of the Tanakh; many of their names refer to the hand signs which they replaced (for example, there's one that means "stretching"). In other words, they're old, have funny names, and are slightly esoteric; in the synagogue where I grew up, we never even mentioned them. It will come as no surprise to any of my readers that I've been curious about trupp for nearly two decades. I learned a bit about the markings for my Bat Mitzvah, but mostly stuck with memorizing the Torah portion wholesale. Meanwhile, my aunt -- the one responsible for teaching me how to chant my Bat Mitzvah Torah portion after the rabbi had given up on me -- has gotten more and more into recreational Torah reading over the past five years, to the point that she actually organizes all the readers for the very large synagogue she's on the board of. So I convinced her to try teaching me again a few months back, and one visit (last month) and a lot of in-car tape-playing later, I knew my trupp. Well, most of it. I'm good with deadlines, so I set one up for today.
This morning, at the Conservadox minyan, I did the reading for the second aliyah about 98% perfectly (there are a few melodic transitions I was slightly wobbly on, and there's this one trupp where I always want to do vibrato, but I don't think anyone except my aunt would notice, and my pronunciation was spot-on). For any of you who are curious, this involved learning the melodies to the trupp, learning the forms of the assorted trupp markings, figuring out how to apply each melody to the words in my particular reading (where to place stress, etc.), then memorizing all the trupp in my reading, along with the vowels, so that I could read six verses from a Torah scroll with nothing but consonants. After all, Torah scrolls are intrinsically nifty -- at least, in my view they are, and I think I may just have figured out why I enjoy handling parchment-based manuscripts in other walks of life -- but they're not very reader-friendly.* Truthfully, all of this is a lot easier than it sounds, especially for someone with a decent musical ear and a good memory. But I'm still very proud of myself.
In further proof that the universe was working with me on this occasion, today's Torah and Haftarah readings both featured women singing -- Miriam at the Red Sea and Deborah after defeating Sisera.** Our minyan had mostly men reading (there were only 13 adults there total), but my aunt scheduled a complete slate of female readers for her synagogue, which seems just about right. And while I'm well aware that all of these tunes and words are a figure of speech (in the strict sense) for getting at Something Else, they're fun on their own terms, too. It's a two-step program of sorts, you see: "The Lord is my strength and song, and is become my salvation." Emphasis mine, which is the point of the trupp; the resultant melody will run along at a fairly steady pace until it hits something important in the text, and then it starts rising or falling or occasionally both. And... oh, look, just take my word for it: this is fun.
In fact, the only problem is that this seems to be an addictive hobby. (The word "fandom" is not inapplicable.) It'll be easy enough to keep reading Torah once a month at the minyan -- I already looked up next month, and it'll be a relatively dull passage about priestly garments (although I'm sure I can get excited about ephods if I try hard enough), but there were a few of the regular Torah trupp markings that my portion today didn't hit, and I want to keep my hand in. Then there are different melodies for Haftarah, and for the assorted readings we do for the holidays; those would be fun to play with. But what I really want to do next is learn how to lead morning and afternoon prayers -- with the scary Orthodox liturgy, because once I can do all that, I can do any level of formality. And once I know how to lead prayers and read Torah and Haftarah, then... well, I'll think about it in a few years, okay?
Now... ephods. Yay, ephods.
* -- Yes, I picked the shortest available reading -- I'm not that much of a masochist, and this minyan does the readings Orthodox-style, going through the entire Torah in a year, so some of the readings are looooooooong.
** -- And, yes, that does explain why I had all that information about the Ten Songs at my fingertips a few weeks ago. My reading came before the Song at the Sea, though; in the Orthodox-style divisions, that's the fourth, and it goes on forever. Maybe next year.
It's the first week of classes here at Boondoggle U. My classes have already had their first course meetings. In one class, the textbook won't come in until next week, and half the students thought they were getting a completely different subject (because the course numbers are the same -- this is Exhibit Z in the Why We Should Really Revise The Course Catalog Once Every Five Years debate I've been having with certain of my colleagues). In the other class, the bookstore seems to have mysteriously ordered an extra book for my section, and half the students showed up fifteen minutes late, because the Registrar's office cleverly scheduled my two back-to-back classes at opposite ends of the campus and could not be convinced to move the second one somewhere more appropriate (still across campus from my office, mind, but in the same room as the first class) until 5 pm last Friday. Apart from those minor details -- and a few individual student crises, but I won't discuss those on here -- the dramatic readings of the syllabus classes went just fine. However, I think I've already exceeded my semester's quota of Apologies For Things Not Even Remotely My Fault.
In further exciting teaching news, after my discovery in the final week of last semester -- don't laugh! -- that it's much easier to teach a class during which students are watching a movie, I thought I'd check to see whether B.U. might own one or two short videos appropriate for the new class I'm teaching this semester. We have a pretty decent video library in certain subjects, and I've come up with some promising possibilities. But when I read through the entire list of videos owned by the University for classroom purposes, I found some surprises:
Yes, thank you very much, I do make my own fun.
When I began my graduate education at Unspecified University some years back, the concept of offering teaching workshops was just starting to catch on there. Unspecified University, you see, has a very high institutional opinion of itself (for good reason in most cases), and has a faculty full of what an acquaintance once called "eight-hundred-pound tenure gorillas."* This combination did not make for an enthusiastic rush into the "teaching movement," since workshops might imply that either (a) UU's faculty somehow needed help with their teaching, or (b) UU's faculty had nothing better on which to pride themselves than their teaching. In point of fact, most of my professors at Unspecified University were very good teachers, and by emulating them I can do an absolutely brilliant job of teaching, provided that said teaching involves a graduate seminar. Now, I always looked forward to graduate teaching, and even wound up in one of the few jobs where that's a distinct possibility by 2004 or thereabouts, but I knew perfectly well that I also needed experience teaching undergrads. And my department -- laudably enough -- avoided hiring us out as TAs for more than a semester or so, such that we had to compete for whatever external teaching experience we could talk our way into. So, as teaching workshops gradually began to pop up around me, I thought it would be a good idea to attend the one or two a year for which I was eligible. These workshops were optional, and sometimes even required competitive effort on my part to get into; they were also fun, mildly inspirational, and included free food. I alluded to them in assorted job-seeking cover letters, and I like to think they helped. Still, I didn't entirely get why someone who was actually teaching full-time, and with reasonable success, would want to keep attending these sorts of events.
My father has attended a lot more teaching workshops than I have, since he teaches at the sort of "university" which is really a college but changed its name to "University" under the (mistaken) impression that it would sound more dignified -- in other words, just the sort of place to hop on board the teaching-workshop bandwagon as early as humanly possible. As far as I can tell, these teaching workshops, many of them mandatory, have given Dad an interest in requiring students to do writing-intensive assignments and an abiding distaste for the term "facilitator," but little else. Of course, I refer to my father's workplace as "Bizarro University," because -- judging from Dad's reports, which might admittedly be a trifle biased -- many of its policy decisions are bafflingly opposite from anything I would have thought advisable or even acceptable in the world of academia.** Bizarro University's attitude towards its faculty can best be summed up in a single news dispatch, part of which I already mentioned: after the end of this past semester, and beginning on the day when final grades came due, my father was required to attend a two-day workshop on "customer-oriented teaching." However, I failed to share the pièce de resistance: this workshop was called, with no apparent sarcasm or cognitive dissonance, "[Bizarro] Cares."
Dad's impression of the event, he told me afterwards, was that it wasn't too bad; he had enjoyed getting to know some of his newer faculty colleagues there, and they had paid very little attention to the invited speaker. Everyone was late anyway, since the workshop began a full hour before final semester grades were due. Unfortunately, there was no free lunch and no compensation for the faculty's time. However... there were toys. Apparently, the toys were left on the tables for faculty to play with during the workshop (we won't get into what this says about the workshop); in typical Bizarro fashion, they were supposed to be given back at the end of the workshop, but Dad figured that he deserved them, especially since he was on his way to pick his daughter up from the airport. By the time we stopped at a decent barbecue joint for a very late lunch, I had located a plastic wand full of glitter, a squishy foam ball, an optical illusion spinning thingummy, and a Bizarro University mug filled with various types of generic-brand chocolate candies in the back seat of the car. I told Dad that I could sort of see attending workshops for toys, especially glittery ones. He told me that I had to share the chocolate.
My own recent teaching-workshop experience was, I think, an improvement: I signed up of my own free will, and apart from the usual free pens and scratch pads (one especially frightening pad has pre-printed to-do lists including "visualize today's goals"), I got a spiffy translucent blue plastic travel mug, a foam noodle (the kind you wave at athletic games) in Boondoggle U.'s team colors, and some packs of gum from some printing company or other. (No glitter, though. Should've mentioned that on my evaluation.) Breakfast featured Krispy Kreme doughnuts (a sure way to my heart, not to mention the end of my 2003 plan to cut back on refined sugar), and lunch was very tasty; both were free. Also, the workshop part wasn't half bad. The keynote speaker used the dreaded t-word every other sentence, but once I stopped twitching at each injunction to "use technology" and filtered out all the introductory business about how Computers Are So Intimidating To Us All, Aren't They?***, there were some interesting reflections about how a teaching approach combining lecture, discussion, and online notes and resources could appeal to a wide variety of student learning styles. I also enjoyed the parts where some of my colleagues discussed their own web- or CD-based projects (because, frankly, simulators are cool no matter which discipline they're about).
What frustrates me, though, is that most of the "technology" talk is either obvious or something that I simply don't have time to do just now. I'm busy making up new courses and fixing the old ones, for crying out loud! Sure, I can toss syllabi and handouts online as I usually do, maybe throw in a threaded bulletin board courtesy of our annoyingly limited classroom software package (OK, anything which won't allow me to edit HTML on every page is "annoyingly limited"), but there's no way I'm going to sit down and write up a simulator program for anything right now, and I already have a fairly good idea of what (and where) the major online resources are for the courses I'm teaching. What my evaluations tell me to focus on is, in fact, evaluation; in keeping with the Not Actually Teaching A Graduate Seminar This Year model (or perhaps the Most People Were Not Like Me In College model), my students don't seem to appreciate simply being told to do the reading, come to class and discuss it, then write a paper about whatever interests them. They want reading quizzes -- so help me, that's what they wrote in evaluations for the class where I didn't have them. (Of course, for the classes where I did, they wanted less reading.) Perhaps I should put the reading quizzes online?
You know what I really want a workshop on? How To Wake Your Students. My personal preference is to ignore anyone who's not snoring or drooling, but apparently, my wakeful students find it distracting to have someone (it's always the same one or two; I don't think my classes cause widespread narcolepsy) dozing off next to them. The problem is also somewhat logistical: most of my sleeping students sit at the back of the classroom. Should I zip down the (fairly narrow) aisles of the classroom and gently tap their shoulders while in mid-lecture? Should I pause class discussion for a session of loud name-calling? Should I pause class discussion for a demonstration of the time-honored point-and-laugh technique? Should I pause class discussion to simply ask the person next to them to shake the sleeper awake, and how do I do this during the first week or two, when I'm still learning everyone's names? Should I incorporate lots of extremely loud sound effects, and frequent movement of desks for small-group discussion, into my lesson plans? I would apply something I got from my most recent teaching workshop to this problem, but the foam noodle is too short to reach and too light to throw accurately. Perhaps a Nerf boomerang? I am open to suggestions -- or toys.
* -- I suspect that this phrase originated as part of a joke, the punchline of which is "Anywhere it pleases."
** -- Dad would probably say that I have led a sheltered academic life, and he is somewhat correct, but I read The Chronicle of Higher Education religiously, and I am convinced that Bizarro University is a Chronicle exposé waiting to happen.
*** -- Note to any and all teaching-workshop organizers: I realize that the average age of any university faculty is probably in the upper 50s, but I am comfortably under 30. I've been using computers for fun and profit for roughly twenty years, and probably would've been earlier had I been born into a wealthy or computer-literate family. Not only do computers and pretty much any software package imaginable fail to intimidate me, using them strikes me as barely worthy of special mention. Now, I'm a bit young and perhaps a bit techno-geeky as new faculty go, but think about the average age of your faculty in ten or fifteen years. People my age are intimidated by typewriters, OK? Sooner or later, you'll want to start skipping over the Computers Are Our Friends part of the program.
[This didn't show up for a few days because I started a draft before the New Year and forgot to change the post date to 2003 when I amended it to 1/4. Oops. ;)]
There are still two days of Christmas left, but I think it's safe to say that the season during which it is even vaguely appropriate for me to sing Christmas carols in public is well and truly over. It's a pity, really -- there are no good song-laden holidays coming up in the Jewish calendar until Purim. Now, I'm extremely fond of sacred music from my own and other traditions, I've spent a fair amount of time in both choirs and choral groups, and I tend to give myself a dispensation to ignore the theology of whatever I happen to be singing -- but I'm not always comfortable with this. Practically speaking, of course, it keeps my blood pressure manageable and allows me to enjoy the music I love. On the other hand... I don't want to argue that singing, especially singing about God (or reasonable approximations thereof) is entirely meaningless. Which reminds me of something I read recently.
It's a baraita, of course -- an unattributed one, in Sanhedrin 101a, to the effect that reading a verse of the Song of Songs as if it were a song "brings evil to the world." As is often the case with baraitas, this could mean any number of things. The most obvious reading, that one ought not to sing the Song of Songs at all, is impossible, because it's sung (well, chanted) annually during the Passover holiday, with excerpts all over the place in other liturgies. In fact, the majority opinion on what this means is something of a stretch; Rashi, in one of his less literal moments,* concluded that the baraita referred not simply to the Song of Songs, but to any part of the Hebrew Bible's being sung for merriment instead of in services with the proper cantillation. (After all, as Rashi pointed out, the Song of Songs would be a logical test case for this; very few people have the urge to break into song about, say the construction of the Ark of the Covenant.) Since Rashi tended to set standards for Ashkenazic Judaism, this decision led to numerous later authorities trying to make sense of the patent fact that many, many verses from the Hebrew Bible have been featured in non-cantillated tunes for millennia as parts of prayers and liturgical poems. Distinctions are made, explanations are offered, and things get very ugly very quickly. The nice thing about being a Reform Jew, and thus halakhically responsible for myself, is that I can go with the minority opinion and preserve my ability to sing "Turn, Turn, Turn" in good faith, to say nothing of "Hark The Herald Angels Sing."
The minority opinion, fortunately, is somewhat saner. It has to do with the nature of the Song of Songs -- erotic love poetry, and pretty good stuff at that,** which got into the Biblical canon by the skin of its teeth, and on the strength of a lot of people insisting, repeatedly and rather shrilly, that it was an allegory of God's love for Israel. Nevertheless... how shall I put this? While reciting the generations from Abraham to Moses out of context is unlikely to get anyone laid, I can assure you all that parts of the Song of Songs have definite potential for such a task even in this day and age (although I'm obviously not meeting the right men, and that is a post for another day and age). This interpretation is even bolstered by a parallel passage in Tosefta Sanhedrin condemning singing the SoS at weddings, not to mention an alternate version of the original passage which focuses even more clearly on issues of content: "one who reads a verse from the Song of Songs, or one who makes it into a song...."*** So the baraita I started with seems to be warning against using this particular not-immediately-obviously-holy book for inappropriate purposes. I'm fine with that, provided that we take a fairly narrow definition of "inappropriate purposes" -- since Rabbi Akiba was wrong about Bar Kochba, I'm not seeing why I have to agree with him about wedding etiquette, but I will happily concede that anyone who drags the Song of Songs onto, say, a reality show, will definitely have no share in the world to come. Also, I'm sure Rabbi Akiba would agree with me when I say that "Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer" is an Edomite (loosely translated, "redneck") abomination.
For those of you not immediately impressed by Rabbi Akiba, though, I have an idea about what God thinks, too -- the Song of Songs is a very good test case for content- as well as context-related inappropriateness. And the consensus of the received tradition is that God thinks the Song of Songs is really nifty. Another baraita, originating around the same time as the first one, claims that the Song of Songs is the ninth of ten songs which comprise a sort of mix tape made by God for Israel, summarizing the high points of their relationship; the tenth song, unsurprisingly, is scheduled to arrive sometime in the future.**** The first eight songs vary, depending on the source they're taken from, but the Song of Songs weighs in as the ninth song on all the lists -- a final seduction of sorts, on an allegorical level or not. So I'm thinking that it might be sexy, but it's definitely not meaningless. And if the Song of Songs can be a song to and about God, I imagine She can figure out what I'm getting at with the occasional Christmas carol or Mass cycle.
Now, if I can just get "O Come All Ye Faithful" out of my head in the next couple of days....
* -- One might suspect that Rashi had had a bit too much exposure to the strains of eleventh-century Christianity which produced such fun-loving figures as Peter Damian.
** -- My exposure to premodern erotic love poetry is hardly extensive (more's the pity), and all I know about the Egyptian nuptial-song parallels to the SoS is that they exist, but I'd definitely put parts of the SoS up against parts of, say, Sappho or Catullus.
*** -- I know this version is in the Yalkut Shimoni (a sort of medieval Norton Anthology of Midrashic Literature), but I think it might also come up earlier.
**** -- Depending on which of several lists one follows, the first eight songs included: Psalm 92, which tradition attributes to Adam at creation; the Song at the Sea in Exodus; the song at the well in Numbers 21; Moses' parting song in Deuteronomy; Joshua's song to stop the sun; Deborah's song after victory over Sisera; Hannah's song after she received her son; David's song of thanks for a safe getaway in II Samuel 22, and Solomon's song after dedicating the Temple in Psalm 30 (this knocks Psalm 92 off the list). The song of Isaiah 30:29 sometimes features as #1 and sometimes as a prediction of #10, which was often read messianically. (While I was poking around online looking for those Psalm numbers, in fact, I found a Messianic Jewish list of the songs which claims that Revelation 5:9-10 is the tenth song. This cracks me up for complicated reasons having to do with parallel canon formation, but also reminds me to point out that Origen did over the Ten Songs for Christianity earlier and better.)