AQATSA Update, No April Fools' Joke!

[inverarity]

I feel like staying off the Internet tomorrow. I know this makes me sound like a humorless grumpy-pants, but I hate April Fools' Day. Yes, it's just so cute when every web site covers their home page with monkeys, tells us they've been bought out by the Russian mafia, changes their color scheme to pink and chartreuse, announces that they've sold your personal information to a finance start-up company in Nigeria, or whatever other clever idea they come up with. Hah hah. So I have to spend all day going "WTF?" and then remembering "Oh yeah, it's April 1."

So anyway, I guarantee this post is 100% April Fools Free.


Current word count: 186,392.

Below is preliminary line art for the cover of Alexandra Quick and the Stars Above. I made a few change requests (like holding her wand in her right hand, and pointing out that Alexandra should be a little bit skinnier), but I like it and am looking forward to the full color painted version.

Comments

On scholarship and research

[inverarity.livejournal.com]

Fabio,

I am honestly, sincerely not trying to fight with or insult you here, nor were my previous comments meant to do so. I ask that you take a breath and read what I am saying here before you assume (as you often accuse me of doing) ill intent in my words. I don't see how anything I posted in this thread was hostile, close-minded, or rude.

First, you just admitted that you're furious because I didn't read a bibliography that isn't there. If the fellow in charge of publishing your book didn't include it, then you should be furious at him.

I do not disrespect the work you put into History of Britain. On the contrary, I respect enormously the time it must have taken to research and write it. It's clearly a subject you are passionate and knowledgeable about (and you'll notice I have not criticized the substance of what you wrote in it). I've even suggested to you more than once that you should pursue a self-publishing angle if you can't get an academic publisher to handle it. There are ways you could get it seen by more people than will currently find it on an obscure web site.

That said, the mere fact that someone spends a lot of time writing something is not reason in itself to give it credence; surely you know that.

No, I did not read History of Britain. I only skimmed a bit of it. I'm sorry -- that's not my area of interest, so I'm not going to read multiple self-published volumes on a subject I'm only vaguely interested in.

I did, however, observe that in the little I skimmed, whenever you made an assertion that appeared to be your own analysis (as opposed to a statement of documented fact) there is little to back up your opinion; you expect the reader to take your word for it. A representative sample I just picked at random:

Patrick, the great saint of Ulster, was a less likely subject, and it has been suggested that the book was part of a complex diplomatic manoeuvre to draw the still schismatic North into the Roman Catholic church by acknowledging the primacy of Armagh, the see of St.Patrick's successors and the North's greatest bishopric, in exchange for Armagh's adhesion to Rome. Anyway, Muirchu was an outsider rather than a member of the Armagh succession with its Patrician claims, and may have suffered less from the lust to glorify Patrick at all costs.

Those boldfaced portions are parts that on Wikipedia would get "[citation needed]" tags. I'm not saying your suppositions are right or wrong; I have no idea. I'm saying that even while reading scholarship on a subject I'm not familiar with, when I see claims made, I want to know if the author has reason to make them or if he's pulling them out of his ass; without citations or being an authority on the subject myself, I have no way of knowing which. This is something that would be pounded into your head if you went to grad school and did this for your thesis.

Do you see what I am trying to say here? It is not "fpb is an ignoramus and doesn't know what he's talking about." It's "fpb makes assertions of fact and then flips out when people don't automatically defer to his claimed authority on the subject."

I posted all of the above as calmly and reasonably as I could, taking it on faith that you'd make an effort to read this without just blowing up at me. Please don't disappoint me.

Re: On scholarship and research

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Are you serious? The first bolded passage is not only irrelevant to the main course of the argument, it is unproven and unprovable; and the second is my own suggestion about the significance of Muirchu's undoubted Southern origin on his attitude to Patrick and to Armagh! As for Armagh's claims over Patrick, that is part of a monstrously complex set of problems which I have elsewhere called "brain-boiling", but that Armagh did make such a claim is not in doubt and I described the fact (with quotations) elsewhere, as well as adding an appendix (heavily sourced) on a later, political use of the legend. I swear that I don't even understand your criticism here: should I not publish my own interpretation of facts unless every sentence starts with "I think""?

Re: On scholarship and research

[fpb.livejournal.com]

No, I did not read History of Britain. I only skimmed a bit of it. I'm sorry -- that's not my area of interest, so I'm not going to read multiple self-published volumes on a subject I'm only vaguely interested in.

But you ARE going to reach polemical views of it and propagate them without visible self-doubt. What was it you said last time about pseudo-scholarship?

Re: On scholarship and research

[inverarity.livejournal.com]

In most fields, saying "it has been suggested" without saying who suggested it will get serious side-eyes from reviewers. Have you ever asked someone in this field to look at your work? Do you think academic peer reviewers would be gentler on you than I have been?

I haven't said anything polemical about your work. I've said it's not peer-reviewed and of questionable academic merit since you haven't been through the process that teaches you to write scholarship that will stand up to challenge, as is evidenced by the angry and uncomprehending way you respond to challenges.

Sigh. You're doing that multiple-posts thing again. I can only assume you're not taking a breath and collecting your thoughts, but dashing off angry notes as quickly as you think of them.

Re: On scholarship and research

[inverarity.livejournal.com]

Dude, I'm not the one digging myself into a hole, nor the one with a stack of apologies owed.

But you clearly don't even understand what "peer review" means. Literally. You don't.

Also, your HTML is borked.

Re: On scholarship and research

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I know exactly what peer review means, and I pointed you at two publications, including one book, from very respectable learned societies. Dig, dig, dig, dig diggety dig...

Re: On scholarship and research

[fpb.livejournal.com]

You have taken a passage that was actually intended as a side-glance, of little importance and no evidential value, and not even paid attention to the meaning of the "Anyway" that starts the second part. In English, "Anyway" at the start of a phrase or sentence implies that, whatever side issue or unprovable fancy we had been pursuing up to there, we are now going back to more solid ground; "Anyway, Nixon was President and ought to have known"; "Anyway, they scored and won the game, whether or not the ref was on their side." As for your fanciful claim that I did not subject my work to peer review, I will not even ask you to take it back - submission to sixty or so publishers ought to be enough, and publishing on the internet hardly means hiding it away - but I will tell you that your view of me would greatly have surprised the Belgian Society for Celtic Studies, who published my first book (http://www.sbec.be/index.php/publications/memoires.html), or Dublin's Institute for Advanced Studies (http://www.dias.ie/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=596%3Ationol-2003&catid=23&Itemid=153&lang=en), not to mention any amount of more informal groupings in Oxford and elsewhere. And where is it written that to publish something on the Internet is to remove it from peer review? I can point you to at least one peer-reviewed magazine (Aarhus University's Classica et Medievalia) who didn't think so. I don't expect an apology from you when I've never had one however often you may have been wrong about me; but I remind you of the good old proverb that when you are in a hole, the best thing you could do is to stop digging.