two talks and a set of awards

Stanford sponsored a couple of online talks that looked interesting.

The first one was by a calligrapher who's undertaking the job of reproducing, in fresh calligraphy on fresh vellum, the entire text of Beowulf. This seemed like a promising idea until my heart sank as the calligrapher revealed that 1) she doesn't read Anglo-Saxon; 2) she doesn't understand the script that Beowulf was written in. She just intends to reproduce verbatim the strokes of the original without having any idea what they represent.
That's bad enough, but then how do you do this for a text parts of which have been lost through decay and having the edges of the sheets burned off in an 18th century fire? You can research what scholars think the lost words and letters say, but without knowledge you can't make your own decisions about which ideas you think are right; and if you don't know the language or the script you can't possibly draw those characters in a way that will look real.

The second talk was by a pair of scholars on the intersection of art, sex, and the law. One was telling the story of NYC avant-garde artists in the 1960s (Nam June Paik and Charlotte Moorman) and their problems with obscenity prosecutions; further on how their archives have been mucked up by pandemic-forced moves and will take years to straighten out again. I was relieved when the start of the talk, giving the artistic context, was littered with the names of lots of other people I've heard of, from LaMonte Young to Yoko Ono, so I had a knowledge base to hold on to.
The other speaker was more academic in style and I had a harder time following her drift, but the main point seemed to be how NAFTA-initiated intellectual property restrictions are making it hard for Mexican trans people to import specific fashion and artistic supplies from the US. On top of the difficulties you can already imagine about being trans in Mexico. So that was interesting if regrettable to hear about.

This year's Mythopoeic Awards were announced today. The online awards ceremony was a glorious bouquet of mispronunciations, and the winners struck me as mixed. I was only able to vote in the Myth and Fantasy Scholarship category, and while Anna Vaninskaya's Fantasies of Time and Death was not my top choice, I considered the top three to be nearly equal in quality, and this was one. I was out on the Inklings Studies category because of having an essay in one finalist collection, but I did express my opinion on the other finalists, and I did not put Tolkien's Lost Chaucer by John M. Bowers on top. As a history of Tolkien's ill-fated scholarly Chaucer edition I thought it quite useful; as a description of Tolkien's unpublished Chaucer scholarship somewhat less so, and as a literary source study on Chaucerian influence on The Lord of the Rings, well, that part would better have remained unpublished. No, the outstanding books of the year were Catherine McIlwaine's Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth (the Bodleian Library exhibit catalog) and John Garth's The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien, with the former taking the edge since this was its last year of eligibility.
B. was pleased when A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking by T. Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon) took the Children's Literature award. I'd read, or started to read, two of the Adult Literature finalists, but I didn't like the winner, The House in the Cerulean Sea by T.J. Klune, as much as Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Bowers' and Klune's acceptance speeches in which they express wonderment that their work was considered worthy of the award may be more level-headed than they realize.