ASECS and PLMA

Okay, someone needs to apply for the job of Editor for the Journal of the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies.

No, seriously, one of you people out there go and do it. I'd do it myself, but I'm not qualified and I haven't subscribed to that journal for years (I'm just a ghost in their mailing list).

I have a tendency to hang around libraries, and in doing so I have a tendency to notice journals that look interesting. One of the strange occupational hazards of being a librarian, though, is the fact that you rarely ever read anything in a library.

Other people come into libraries to read stuff, librarians don't. If we can't take it out of the library to read it at home, we tend to not read it at all. Or, if we do, it will be a quick skimming whenever we can remember the thing exists.

So, as a result, if a journal catches my eye on more than one occasion, and I think I want to have a good look at the articles in that journal, I will often consider subscribing to it for a year, just to see if I want to keep subscribing to it.

It has to be said, the answer is usually "no". Turns out having things to read come to your house on a regular basis is actually a bit of a burden. The new issue turns up just in time to remind you that you haven't yet read more than a few paragraphs of the old one...

Anyway, the ASECS journal was one of the ones I subscribed to for one year. The situational irony of it all is that I was always more interested in the articles in ASECS than I am in the articles in the PMLA (which I've been getting for a few years) - which are oddly boring for a journal covering comparative literature.

My membership in the MLA is up for renewal, and I don't know whether I should keep up my membership because it sounds good ("I'm a member of the Modern Languages Association"), or if I should let it lapse because the journal is something I've come to dread.

"Oh, the next issue of the PMLA is here. It appears to have articles about the use of dogs as a metaphor in Marlow's early plays. And then there's this article about how the colour red seems to be of significance to some Spanish author who wrote depressing novels only lecturers in Spanish Literature have ever read. Oh, and someone is once again talking about Beowulf - because there is no other text."

And, you know, the dog thing might be interesting if the dude wasn't harping on about it for almost 4000 words - or if any of these people could write a decent essay. It's like they've forgotten the primary point of an essay is convey ideas to an audience (rather than to sound incredibly well-read and highly educated), so a reader can easily find herself three pages in and still have no idea what the deuce the blighter is talking about.

And (and I mean this in the nicest possible way) SHUT UP ABOUT BEOWULF.

Every time I think I might actually be interested in reading Beowulf, I remember that it seems to turn people into fusty old academics who can't read a good story for the sake of it and need to write reams and reams of papers about whether or not the incestuous characters are more significant to the deeper interpretation of the text than the sexually repressed baby-eaters - keeping in mind that the evidence that any given character might be either sexually repressed or a baby-eater hinges entirely on four words spoken by a serving wench in a bar scene that only appears in one copy of the source texts.

And those words are usually something along the lines of: "like a sweet babe".

So, I look at the PMLA and think "Oh, good grief, it's another one. Do I need to pretend I actually want to read this thing, or can I just throw it directly into the bin? I suppose I should take the plastic wrapping off it first so that I can stick it in the recycling section..." Which does seem like a bit of a waste of money.

I mainly joined the MLA as part of the grand plan of eventually doing a PhD in Comparative Literature, thinking that I'd try to get a few articles published in the journal to go towards my "portfolio". But quite frankly I'm not sure I could actually write for the PLMA. You can't write what you never read, and I struggle to read most articles in the thing.

Someone needs to create a PMLA for the MTV Generation - something where the articles a shorter, sweeter, clearer and sound less like you've been trapped in a lift with a 60 year old academic.

And where articles on Beowulf are rationed to one really good one per year. It can be like a competition - "My article on Beowulf was so good it managed to make it into the 2012 PMLA-X spot!"