Wandering in the Waste Borderland

The Stack of the Week and our featured grad-student post

Photo by Greg Bulla on Unsplash

Dear reader,

Our “word of the week” on PCF (not a regular feature!) has been mearcstapa, which, as we have discussed, may be translated in various ways. One possibility, which we find in the glossary of the standard edition of the poem is “wanderer in the waste borderland.” Borderlands are fraught places, full of peril, natural and political, as we were tragically reminded this past week, with the deaths of a Mexican mother, Victerma de la Sancha Cerros, and her two children as they attempted to cross the Rio Grande.

Wars are being fought over borderlands in our own time, as they have been for centuries. I was reminded of another such war in this week’s installment of the War and Peace slow read over at

Footnotes and Tangents

, as Prince Andrei leaves his pregnant wife in order to join the Russian effort to stop Napoleon’s army. And of course, borderlands are dangerous places in Beowulf as well, with outcast “monsters” and looming Swedes, Frisians, and Jutes, ready to strike out across the desolate, “in-between” spaces.

Cultural, metaphorical borderlands may be less perilous (though not always!), but they are still defined by tension: areas of cultural blending and/or appropriation, cross-disciplinary academic study, discourse that challenges traditional thinking. Dwelling in these types of metaphorical borderlands requires its own kind of courage, and in certain times and places it may be dangerous.

The author of The Stack of the Week,

Susan Bordo

, has demonstrated this sort of courage for years, and

BordoLines

is aptly named for multiple reasons. Her work crosses academic and cultural borders, as well as borders between academia and the wider world.

Susan is, I think, one of only two writers on Substack whose work I have actually taught in a class (the other being

Junot Díaz

). Specifically, I have taught “The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity” from her remarkable book, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body, which is included in the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Indeed, she is required reading for anyone interested in the body and culture. She writes, at the beginning of the aforementioned chapter: “The body—what we eat, how we dress, the daily rituals through which we attend to the body—is a medium of culture.”

These interests make her a unique voice in cultural criticism, which she addresses in her newsletter across topics ranging from film to literature to television to politics. Her work is accessible and compulsively readable for specialists and non-specialists alike. Subscribe to her newsletter and dip in wherever you like, and you will be drawn in by her powerful, edgy prose and by her generous spirit. Her recent piece on “Coupledom Deconstructed,” for example, is a tour de force:

Coupledom Deconstructed: “Maestro,” “Anatomy of a Fall,” “Succession,” “The Morning Show,” “The Diplomat,” and…me.

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Curiosity Killed the Kat

Our grad-student featured post this week is by Kat Deal, a second-year MA student in literature, who is also a talented singer, songwriter, and guitarist. Her piece this week is about that other wanderer in the waste borderland and Kat’s favorite character in the poem (!), Grendel’s mother:

grendel's mother is mothering

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Nota Bene

I discovered this week that I can make playlists on Spotify, even though I don’t have a premium account, so in future the PCF playlists will be available on Spotify as well as Apple Music. Here are this week’s links:

The Rotation from PCF on Apple Music

The Rotation from PCF on Spotify

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I’ll be back on Wednesday for week three of the Beowulf Challenge. Meanwhile, I’ll try to catch up with the comments.

Thanks for reading, from my fancy internet typewriter to yours.

Photo by Jeffrey Surju on Unsplash