What is today the Sidney-Spenser Discussion List started as a listserv managed by Risa Bear on the darkwing server at the University of Oregon, sometime in the 1990s, back in the days before JStor and spam, when the OED was a book and Mark Zuckerberg was still in high school. A lot has changed since then, but one thing that has altered comparatively little – which is almost a surprise, when you think about it – is email. As platforms and spaces have evolved, along with the devices that deliver and mediate them, and the haptic habits, acoustic cues, and attentional deficits that accrete around them, email has remained almost a constant, a little reservation for free text in an increasingly frenetic, formalised, commercial, and distracting online world. In reflecting on the dynamic and operation of the Sidney-Spenser list in that time, on its varied and evolving community, and on the ways in which it subtends work on Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser within our discipline, I was struck by the way in which the list – a little like Spenser’s works – has a strange historical status in its own time, as if a piece of vital archaism. And this led me to think that many of the list’s most conspicuous features – its newsiness, its humanist chumminess, its encyclopedic energy, its wit and humour, its occasional prophetic zealots, its troubled mediation of the boundary between the centre and the margins, its fractious social and cultural capacity, its tendency to the idle excursus, its propensity for contributors with allegorical names – also seem to imitate its subjects.
The open textual space of the discussion list, a throwback to ASCII-er times, has preserved and encouraged some types of intellectual and professional community that seem valuable. While the list (as a metonymy for its members) can hardly be called complete or even representative of the full population of Sidney or Spenser enthusiasts, or scholars, or enthusiastic scholars, it does anyway offer us the possibility of imagining and enacting a version of that community. And as in a paratextual space, within the parameters of the list we can perform certain rituals and operations that constitute us as a community, even as we also do the time-honoured work of subjecting that community to stress, conflict, and renewal. Advertisement, irony, self-promotion, idealism, colloquy, teaching, and musing here rub shoulders with debate, polemic, and sometimes even ridicule. These interactions can run the full gamut between performative (often ambitious) self-curation and hotheaded (sometimes lamentable) self-exposure; but they all help all of us, painful though the process may sometimes be, to interrogate and negotiate the humanity and sociality that doesn’t so much lie behind our academic work, as ripple and flex through it. One of the great things about the Sidney-Spenser Discussion List, otherwise a poor cousin to the slick, quick, thick schtick of the livelier social media platforms, is that it allows, even requires, us to imagine ourselves as a we: like the conferences and departments which the list sometimes seems to shadow, but more largely, more diffusely, more ethereally, it is a common space for dialogue where what is most logged is the difficulty and strangeness, the difference, of that commons.
The list, by the way, is open to you all. See you as us there.
51.3.4
Comments
To those who follow the Sidney-Spenser list, it'll be no surprise that I cherish it, warts and all, techno-anachronism as it may be. In my experience, no other social media platform work as well for the kind of communal, collegial, exchange of ideas Andrew describes. I have no desire for it to be faster, nor for it to include selfies or dance videos, and I'm delighted that responses can run on as long as they like. Threads like the latest on FQ1 and sexuality just make me feel good about my choice of vocation and what we do. Huzzah!
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