Rhymes With Truculent

Review: Texas Gothic, by Rosemary Clement-Moore

2011-08-08T13:00:00.000-07:00

I snatched this up after The Book Smugglers alerted me to the fact that it was like a cross between Nancy Drew and Scooby-Doo. Texas Gothic sounded perfect for Friday night reading, in between helping guests at the historic building where I work as a history docent. While I love the serious and thoughtful portrayals of real-life issues that YA authors provide, sometimes, I just want to read about colorful characters bumbling around and getting knocked on the head.

Don't get me wrong -- I'm not saying that either Amy Goodnight, or her sister Phin, are incompetent -- they're very competent in their own areas of specialization. Phin is an amateur paranormal scientist; Amy, who's the featured protagonist, is learning that her area of specialization is holding things together. But they're also very realistic college-age characters, rushing from one thing to another, thinking ahead, but not quite thinking of everything.

Nancy Drew and Scooby-Doo are entertaining in part because they're ensemble works, full of characters who each have their own foibles, and Clement-Moore excels at creating a similar ensemble here, made up of the Goodnight family, their neighbors, and a group of archaeology grad students. Everyone is briefly and concisely sketched out; they're distinctive enough that there's no chance of mixing them up; and their quirks are what advance the plot. It's very smooth.

My one criticism is that it was far too easy to tell exactly who one of the eventual villains would be, and the other one was only half-surprising: I knew that s/he would be a member of a particular group, and s/he was. That said, I would be utterly delighted to see more novels featuring the other members of the Goodnight family, or in which we learn more about Amy, as she develops her understanding of what it means to be the one that holds it all together.

Oh, and +10 for the reference to The Mystery of Udolpho.

Read if: you like wisecracks about Nancy Drew, you enjoy books that want to alternate between suspenseful and wacky, and you like reading about hijinks more than disturbing suspense.

Avoid if: you're looking for creep-factor more than fun, you want a really challenging mystery, or if you're looking for a story that digs deeply into magic, rather than just a pair of kids solving mysteries who happen to be magical.

Thoughts on HP 7.2 (minor spoilers)

2011-07-16T19:49:00.001-07:00

I remember vividly that I found the very first film rigid and dull, and joked afterwards that it would have been much more entertaining had I been gently buzzed on Oban. When did I start to like the films? I certainly thought that HP2 was an improvement. Nos. 1 and 4 remain my least favorite. Having seen the final film, I would like to go back and watch all the others in a row.

I can't sort out at all how much my reaction to the final film is based on the film itself, and how much based on having watched a large group of children grow up, and then to see them fighting for their lives. (of course, not really fighting for their lives; but it's as Dumbledore says: "of course it's happening in your head-- that doesn't make it any less real" -- and that's certainly true of watching Harry, Ron, Hermione, Neville, Fred, George, and Ginny-- and Luna, too.

Things that made me tear up: exit, on dragonback (and the dragon's quiet cry of relief? Joy?), and the sight of Thames-threaded London. Professor McGonigal readying Hogwarts; Snape; and Neville. and Fred and George. It's unusual for a film to provoke that sort of response in me.

I wished that it had been longer-- or no, perhaps that's not right , because I thought it well cut. I suppose I mean that I wish I had watched the first part directly before the second part. I was hoping that theaters would do a double feature, showing part 1 at 9p.m. and part 2 at midnight. Though I've never been a midnight showing person, that would have gotten me into the theatre.

I was delighted with Neville Longbottom's featured moment in the spotlight, though it made me sad that his status, as explained in the books, did not make it into the films.

The Snape/Dumbledore confrontation was wonderful. Was it just me, or was the edit of Dumbledore amplified so that he was an even darker figure than he had been in the books? Speaking of which, Harold Bloom and A.S. Byatt can kvetch all they like: I used to half agree with them, but the developments and revelations surrounding Dumbledore and his relationship with Harry, and Grindelwald elevate the series into a far more adult storyline. Though Rowling handles the dark complexity more subtly than the YA authors who were mentioned in last month's Wall Street Journal scrimmage, she's dealing with equally difficult, and important, territory.

Scattered questions and observations:

And was there a rather unexpected development in Neville's feelings for another character? I had thought that Rowling established something else as canon, but I was delighted by the line, if I heard it correctly.

It's a little strange watching a film where characters can and are dying, when at the same time I'm watching Torchwood: Miracle Day, which is about a world in which people stop dying.

And speaking of not dying, I've been thinking all afternoon about Hermione's decision to simply leave her family-of-origin behind. I don't want to complain that it's under explored, exactly-- on the contrary, Hermione is the character with whom I can most easily identify, and her relationship with her family is part of that. I do think, however, that in a series that is ALL about family, that her actions go strangely unremarked upon. But perhaps the HP academic essayists have discussed it, and I simply haven't found the essay?

All in all, I think I'm looking forward to Pottermore...perhaps more than I was earlier.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

DRSI, Day 1 Thoughts and Questions

2011-06-26T08:15:00.000-07:00

I'm very lucky to be a Fellow in the UW Simpson Center for the Humanities Digital Research Summer Institute, led by my recently graduated colleague from the English Department, Jentery Sayers. The other Fellows are from a range of different fields: genetics, social work, anthropology, comp lit, women's studies, and musicology.

The DRSI is a pilot program, so what each of us will take away from it is uncertain (though I have no doubt that it'll be useful). One of the points that came up in that first meeting is that reflective writing and documenting process is valuable -- not a new insight, but it's good for me to be reminded of it.

There are a few useful questions that I thought were raised just in the first session, and that I want to hang onto.

Neena's Sindhi Voices Project is working to provide an archive for narratives from Sindhi elders (defined as "individuals that, after the 1947 partition of India, left Sindh, stayed in Sindh, migrated from India into Sindh, and those that received emigrant Sindhis"), and a field kit, available in multiple languages, to help people gather those stories. The archive is ubiquitous in literary and historical studies, so I was thinking of the project as an archive, but on reflection, 24 hours later, I think I'm wrong to do that -- the field kit, and other materials like it, that the SVP produces, are central, rather than just being apparatuses that allow the archive to be created. I say this thinking of Neena's comment that one of the responses to the project is excitement from young women who have helped gather stories, because the project is helping them gain primary experience in what journalism is. However, as she herself acknowledged, one of the challenges of the SVP is finding a way to bring the stories to the elders themselves, and that will probably involve something like a traveling exhibit, or other hybrid version.

The question that this raises, for me, is how does the digital facilitate and support the nondigital?

Mary's Georgian in Seattle website is also what I think of as a community cultural site, bringing together stories, and eventually film and music. Its title ties it directly to the population in Seattle, while its eventual goal (if I understand correctly) is to present Georgian culture that informs users both about what Georgia is, and its conflict with Russia. Listening to Mary speak, I was struck by her emphasis on how many people assume that Georgian means "a subset of Russian" (-- in fact I made the same sort of careless mistake in thinking that Velimir Khlebnikov was Georgian because he'd been associated with the Futurist movement in Tbilisi). In one sense, then, the website is meant to be a repository of art that might help outsiders get a clearer sense of what it means to be Georgian. Emphasizing both Seattle and Georgia prompts me to think about the relationship between the local and the global, because the local will never go away, at least; I doubt it will in my lifetime. Can a local area become a satellite of advocacy/culture for a different local area, or for a place to which it's only connected through the technology of globalization? In regards to Mary's website, this is a geopolitical question; however, it has ramifications for the development of digital humanities resources, specifically digital humanities centers, as the landscape of academia shifts towards distance learning.

The other thing I heard, however, was how small the Georgian community in Seattle is: everyone knows everyone. And what I hear in her presentation, and see in her website, is the importance of creating a digital homestead, and I hear in that the echo of the excitement of Geocities neighborhoods, back in the late 90's. Her site, I think, will have a different meaning (and serve a different purpose) for those people who produce it, than for those who read it. When we evaluate the worth of a site, we need to look at its value for both producers and users. Sometimes those will be the same group of people -- but not always.

I'm still thinking about this, because near the end of the day, we were reading Sharon Daniel's narrative of her Public Secrets project in her article "Hybrid Practices," which appeared in Cinema Journal 48.2, as part of a thematic section on digital scholarship and pedagogy. In the article, Daniels writes that "the women who have participated in Public Secrets are highly politicized and are seriously committed to this endeavor. They are quite literally historians and theorists who speak out in an effort of collective resistance" (157). I reacted poorly to that statement, because Daniel was defining historian as someone who had undergone a particular experience, rather than someone who had completed a specific program of formal studies. It's the problem of evaluating the authority of primary vs. secondary sources -- and it's not a new problem to be sure, but it feels perilous when I think about it in terms of digital humanities projects, because the goal of so many technologies is to create the illusion of unmediated, raw, data. The intro to Public Secrets, in which Daniel provides the context for the project, is accompanied by a button in the lower righthand corner of the screen, inviting users to "skip sequence," as though the "real" substance of the project.

And the voices of the women who contributed are the substance of the project -- and they are historians and theorists, and anyone who says otherwise, including me, probably needs to check their privilege. I'm still struck, though, by Daniel's self identification as a "context provider" (her phrase), when the most overtly visible sign of her contextualizing is something that people are invited to skip. Every aspect of the site is part of the context that Daniel is providing, of course -- but it's a graphical context, and easy to dismiss as presentation, rather than as part of the research.

On the one hand, this reminds me of scholarly editions whose editors have attempted to minimize, or erase entirely, their editorial presence, as though they made no decisions, and came as close as possible to traveling back in time to bring you the original texts. I find these efforts disingenuous, even when having a seemingly pristine edition seems useful: the Editor(s) made decisions in producing it; and chances are, the Editor(s) got the privilege of making those decisions by exerting their authority and knowledge in overt ways, i.e., by demonstrating their comprehensive scholarship regarding the author and text.

No one has said, "oh, digital humanities is all about producing primary sources and getting rid of those nasty pedantic scholars," at least, not to my knowledge -- but in thinking about Public Secrets, and how Daniel herself presents it, I realize that it needs to be. (ETA: Or rather, I'm acutely aware that it makes me feel highly vulnerable as a young academic to describe myself as a context provider, in terms of how people might interpret that role, and its connection to the years I've spent in a formal uni program. And I'd like to feel less vulnerable, or figure out why I'm feeling vulnerable and what I can do about it.) Digital humanities methodologies are attractive because they facilitate making primary sources accessible -- but how do these same methodologies affect our standards for good secondary criticism?

This last question is probably the one that has the most relevance for my own project (link coming soon!), which involves specific mentions of prices in a wide range of different types of documents: partially, because my project, like so many, can give the illusion of magically summoning prices together, untouched, from their source texts, for users to compare -- and also, because the project develops directly from an argument that I'm making about the grounds for literary economic criticism. However, I think that needs to be its own post. Suffice it to say, DRSI is going to be a really interesting workshop, and I think I'll get a lot out of it.

Magic gadget: a review of the iPad 2 after one week of using it.

2011-05-28T09:39:00.001-07:00

As soon as rumors started buzzing about the iPad, before it even had a name, I started thinking about how well it would work for me to be able to type on a tablet. The iPhone wasn't awful for typing, but it wasn't great, and I was sure that years of playing piano would make it easy for me to adapt to the shape of the onscreen keyboard of a tablet, if only the whole thing were larger than 3x5.

But I didn't buy one when they first came out, because my iPhone was still under contract, and what I really wanted was a device that would allow me to videochat with people. When the iPhone 4 came out, I was excited, but only in the hope that it meant that future iPads would have videochat capability.

I wanted three things:

1) the ability to be online without being dependent on wifi

2) videochat

3) a device that would allow me to do this without a contract, and without having to pay a monthly cellular minutes plan.

Even when the iPad 2 was announced, and it sounded perfect, I didn't line up the first day to get one (though I wish now that I had). I did line up at my local Apple Store a couple of times, always thwarted; and almost ordered from the website, despite having heard stories of horrendous wait times. In the end, my university bookstore, which had my name on a waitlist, called me to say that they finally had received a few internationally-compatible 3G models, and did I still want one? I did indeed.

I wavered between choosing capacity, ending up with a 32gig model. I might have gone for a 64, but it turned out that none of those had come in. I could have kept waiting -- but my 3.5 year old iPhone has been more and more glitchy; and since I use my connection both for facilitating transportation, and for checking food ingredients to deal with celiac disease, I didn't want to wait any longer.

As of this morning, I've had the iPad for exactly one week. Here's what I love, so far:

Working with PDFs: Since I'm an 18th/19th century lit/history scholar, I spend a great deal of time in Gale's Eighteenth Century Collections Online. While ECCO makes accessibility so much easier than, well, having to travel to libraries and archives, its interface is a little cumbersome: you have to click one place to turn the page, click in a separate table to scroll through the page, click another button to turn the page again...and you can't actually mark up the document. If you download it (if your school has a license for such things, as mine does), then if you have Acrobat Reader Professional, then life gets easier -- you can OCR the book, and highlight, and annotate to your heart's content -- except that Acrobat isn't really made for the landscape screen, and if you get near the bottom of one page, and click in the wrong place, then suddenly you've switched to the next page without knowing it, and .... well, it's frustrating.

Enter iAnnotate for the iPad, which automatically OCRs documents, and has a better, less buggy and more intuitive set of controls for marking them up. The pages glide by easily and smoothly, no jumping around. Working with an ECCO document on the iPad is the closest that I've come to reproducing the experience of looking at it in the BL without actually being there. NB: of course, the iPad can't replace that, nor should it -- there's a wealth of data that's only possible to access via the actual, physical copy. But it feels amazing to me that I can enhance the online experience of working with a document by viewing it in a way that feels closer to turning pages, and even reproducing the posture and angles of reading a physical book. I'm a great fan of muscle memory as a significant part of the reading experience.

ETA: Actually, iAnnotate can only enable underlining/highlighting/search functions if you've already OCR'd an ECCO document previously -- so you still need Acrobat Pro. For me, this is a tiny extra step that doesn't bother me in the least; not when I can have all six volumes of Dodsley's Poems By Several Hands in a format that permits markup.

I also have been using iAnnotate to comment on student papers; highlighting, underlining, commenting, and occasionally marking up sentences (rarely a priority for me). I can save a document, and send it back to the student -- in fact, iAnnotate and the iPad streamline this for me, because there's a button in the app that I can use to pull up an email, that has the document already attached. I'm using Dropbox, which I haven't used before, and it's made it easy for me to access essays that I commented on using my laptop, too. This last week, both my classes had student conferences. On the first day of those conferences, I brought my laptop, not having been entirely confident that I had access to everything I needed and that I'd configured everything properly. I didn't need it. And the rest of the week, I didn't bring it.*

Typing: I thought I might need to buy one of the separate keyboards and docking systems. I don't. In landscape orientation, there's not that much difference between typing on a full-sized keyboard -- or at least, I don't feel that much difference. Adapting was easy, and by my second day of working with the iPad, I wrote several students responding to paper proposals using it, without a noticeable delay in work speed. It's wonderful how much easier it is for me to type on an iPad than on a netbook like the Acer Eee PC. And of course, I'm not having to deal with the buggy mouse controls, either.

This is enough to say for now, though I'll post more as I use the iPad more. My only other significant first impression is that because the iPad has better functionality for me in terms of typing and annotating PDFs, I'm far more likely to use it for those things when I'm in transit, whereas with the iPhone, I was more likely to surf the web out of boredom or habit. I actually marked up two papers yesterday on my busride downtown! It was great!

*: The inCase backpack I've had for the last 4 or 5 years has been excellent: it's protected my laptop, and has lots of room for carrying other stuff. The problem is that I tend to fill it up; and my laptop already ways about 6.5 pounds. Last summer, the S.E.L. couldn't believe how much I hauled around with me on a daily basis. He tried to talk me into a wheelie-bag, but I didn't ever find one that met my requirements. And if I carry my laptop, I inevitably find that I fill up the rest of the backpack, too. One of the wonderful things about having the iPad is that because it's smaller, I don't bring the backpack -- and I don't fill it up. And it's wonderful being less tired from hauling it around. Strictly speaking, this is a behavior issue as much as it is a hardware issue: I *could* just decide not to carry around so many books. But it's an advantage, all the same.

Review: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland In a Ship of Her Own Making, by Catherynne M. Valente

2011-05-17T01:17:00.001-07:00

I really wish I'd had more time for blogging lately, but between my own class, and taking on a friend's class for the rest of the quarter, as she has a gorgeous new baby -- well, time is a precious commodity. I hope to be blogging more soon; and I do have a couple more reviews to get out this week.

One thing I'm pleased about: I've learned that I'm more productive when I take time for pleasure reading throughout the quarter, rather than as a vacation. Learning that meant that I read Catherynne M. Valente's The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland In a Ship of Her Own Making two weeks ago, when it was briefly offered as a free download from the publisher's website. Last week, I rushed out in the middle of a very busy Wednesday, just so that I could buy it in print.

I'm already reading it through a second time. Some day, I need to post about that: how my new reading behavior involves reading the same books several times in succession. I'm not sure why, though stress and lack of time probably has something to do with it.

I haven't read any of Valente's novels before, though Palimpsest is on my to-read list, and will be bumped up now; and I even have a copy from my Hugo Voter's Packet conveniently available. What I loved about Fairyland; what made me want to take the book to bed with me for reasons entirely separate from the marvelous portrayal of feminine ingenuity and strength, was how much it reminded me of the Oz books, both those by L. Frank Baum and by Ruth Plumly Thomson. I haven't had a chance to read about Valente's own history with the Oz books; but Fairyland is clearly a descendant of them: you travel there by wind, you must pass through a perilous sea (instead of a deadly desert), and there is an established society, with a ruling monarch. But it wasn't those things that made me seek out every Oz book I could lay my hands on when I was growing up: it was the delightful weirdness of them, and the Ozian inhabitants. As soon as Dorothy, or Betsy Bobbin, or Trot, or whomever sets out to explore, for whatever reason, they're sure to encounter people who are paper dolls, or sentient rabbits, or living pastries; or whatever else the author could dream up. I wish I had time to write about the oddity of the politics in Oz: I don't tonight. I can barely articulate what it is that made me love the series so much, except that I found it absolutely believable, as a child, that all these strange kingdoms would exist, and give rise to the political squabbling that more often than not, drives the main plots of the novels.

Valente reinvents and reinvigorates that same odd and whimsical imaginative voice in this novel, and to better effect than Baum or Thomson. As I've read the columns by Mari Ness on the Oz books, over at Tor.com; I've been rather dismayed to realize what I was reading. Ozma, for all that she started out in the series as a boy, and should have been the basis for a wonderfully queer existence, doesn't live up. Fairyland, however, lives up in spades.

There are lots of reasons for buying this book: because you like coming of age stories, stories about strong female characters; stories featuring creative interpretations of what dryads can be -- but for me, what dominated even beyond all those features was how much it felt like reading an Oz book -- but one that had been written for me, and for the 21st century today.

Teaching, and making mistakes, and learning from them

2011-05-03T12:56:00.000-07:00

What I'm learning about teaching this quarter is how to work with a non-ideal situation, or rather, that engagement is something that you can't necessarily teach. It's really challenging; in fact, it feels, a lot of the time, like I'm failing. Not all of my five students come to class for each meeting. Two are in the habit of coming late. I've had classes where two have shown up, and where only one student has shown up. It's tricky to know how to adapt, on the day you'd planned to teach counterarguments and the use of textual evidence, when the four students who need the most help (based on their drafts) aren't there. I tend to teach using a library of handouts, which I upload to a course website after the class is done, but I've been a little reluctant to upload them the same way, lately, feeling that to do so just makes it easier for students to skip class.

This morning was a class group conference -- our first. I'd done a round of individual conferences with students previously, to give them a good framework. One student was absent because of a medical emergency; the other was simply absent, and had not bothered to upload a paper draft, to contact me, or respond to an email from his/her peer reviewer.

The conference went well anyway, but at the end, one of the students asked whether the others were still enrolled. I turned this, clumsily, I think, into a reminder about how writing is adaptive, and something we do in a group -- we work with the people we have -- but it was a hard question to answer.

I think that one of the benefits of this class is that it is demonstrating to the current students the importance of their participation: that the class really is a combination of their efforts and mine. It's demonstrating that the hard way, mind you, because there have been times where the energy is pretty flat. One student asked whether we could work on the papers for the linked lecture course. "We can," I replied, "but if we're going to do that, then we need to have more regular and timely attendance." To their credit, they all looked embarrassed.

I'm still worried that I'm going to get slaughtered in evals. The most challenging part of this has been handling preparation: the 3 students who attend most regularly are reticent to contribute, and see the readings as largely irrelevant. Ideally, I'd like to teach a very adaptive tutorial course, but it's tricky to do so with very quiet class members. The alternative is preparing material according to what I think they ought to know, and need to work on. This is what I do -- and then I adapt as they ask questions -- but it still ends up a bit flat. I feel like I'm moving between responding to their questions, teaching them things that they need to know, and talking with them about the material in an attempt to help them find a way into it (while acknowledging to them that part of being a student, and a reader, is committing to find a way to make something interesting, even if it doesn't seem that way.

What am I learning? I am learning that I have a knee-jerk reaction of thinking that because there are fewer students, I should be able to teach them more effectively. That's not true: having fewer students makes the differences between their experience levels all the more stark.

I'm learning that I need to make sure I keep my explanations and examples of practices brief, and become more sensitive about when to stay the course with a difficult example, and when to change tactics.*

I am learning that I need to foreground working together, and that I don't have a pedagogy that effectively does this. I'm not totally flatfooted: I provide detailed instructions for peer review, examples of what to do and what not to do; I emphasize the importance of being specific, rather than general. What I don't have is an effective pedagogy (or any formal method at all) of teaching reading and engagement as vitally collaborative skills. My syllabi include language about how writing and academic discourse are both collaborative activities -- but crikey, it's hard to turn that into activities within the classroom: to find a rich and compelling set of reasons for why it matters to think about what you are contributing to a classroom, and how you're engaging with the other people in it.

I am learning that I have to set my own standards for success, and that these standards are somewhere between "I can tell I'm teaching successfully because I'm seeing improvements from students in these specific areas" and "I believe I'm being successful because I know that this is an important aspect of writing and reading, whether or not I manage to convince the students of this." This is the hardest part, in some ways, because it's so easy to think "they're not getting it! I must need to teach it differently!" and to feel despondent. I'll be honest: I'm feeling this plenty, because teaching such a small group feels very different: if I teach informally, it feels like I risk leaving out important stuff; if I teach formally, it feels like I'm teaching too impersonally, and failing to take advantage of the intimacy of the small group.

The classroom is a collaborative environment. I've always believed that, but I haven't understood it as I'm coming to understand it this quarter. I feel like I've made mistakes, but then, so have my students. We have 4.5 weeks left, in which they'll write 3 papers (two for their linked lecture course, one more for me). From that perspective (3 papers, instead of 4.5 weeks), we have a chance to do really productive work. I'm nervous, but I hope that articulating where I am now will help me use my classtime effectively; and perhaps even more importantly, will help me remain focused and thoughtful about my teaching, even when I'm working with students who are not as actively engaged as I would like.

* To some degree, I think this is my inner perfectionist telling me "be better, be smarter, be more perfect!" -- but I think that it's good for me to think about the value of brevity.

Review: Barbara Hambly's Those Who Hunt the Night

2011-04-28T14:01:00.000-07:00

Several of Barbara Hambly's novels have been released in eBook format recently; and I didn't hesitate to offer to review a couple in exchange for a free copy. I haven't read any of Hambly's novels, but I've been hearing about them for years, so I was excited to have a reason to put them onto my official to-do list.

Those Who Hunt the Night is the story of Oxford don James Asher, a one-time player in the Great Game (can you ever really leave?); and the circumstances that lead to his being coerced to investigate a series of murders among the vampire population of London in 1907. I say coerced because Asher is no paranormal enthusiast; he has to be convinced by Don Simon Ysidro, the vampire who is certain that only a human can help -- and who does not scruple to threaten Asher's wife Lydia, in order to provide motivation.

Certain aspects of this novel are exactly what you would expect: Don Simon is elegant and arrogant; Asher is thoughtful and poised as befits a member of Oxford's New College; his wife Lydia is courageous and intelligent and beautiful.

But Barbara Hambly is not a lazy writer, and so she doesn't stop with what you would expect. I especially appreciated how much thought had gone into the complexity of vampire society, mores, and existence -- and how important the worldbuilding was to the central mystery itself. I have problems with authors who characterize all vampires as arrogant and predatory; problems, too, with authors who are content to characterize all vampires as old and world-weary just to dazzle readers with the prospect of a 926-year-old being whose perspective we can barely imagine. I have never thought as much about vampires, and what questions might arise from their existence as I did while reading Those Who Hunt the Night, and last night I went to bed shuddering at the scenario that had been presented.

Truly, I can't remember the last time I actually contemplated vampires as frightening, rather than dark/tortured/sexy.

I found James Asher, the chief protagonist, a little dull in comparison. He's very appealing in that he's intelligent and capable without being an alpha male, and that his affection, respect, and admiration for his wife Lydia are an important part of his characterization, rather than just trimmings. He has a backstory that I'd like to know more about (maybe it will be explored in the other two James Asher books?), but which doesn't surprise me. Hambly is careful, I think, to write him so as to be appealing, but to not make him so progressive as to be terribly anachronistic.

Lydia Asher is more interesting -- though really, she and her husband are both secondary to the details of the vampires. I didn't mind that at all, given that the vampire plot was so interesting. What we learn about Lydia is integral to the main mystery plot, and I had enough of an introduction to her to want me read about her in more books. She is somewhat myopic, and I was delighted that the novel takes into account the stigma against wearing spectacles in the early 20th century; also that her choice to study medicine (and the controversy that such a choice entails for a woman) is treated frankly, and without being overdramatized as a narrative of Enlightenment For Teh Wimminz.

In short, Those Who Hunt the Night is that rare phenomenon: a cracking great mystery which you can enjoy without having to bite your tongue at thoughtless writing, or social hierarchies that make you wince in displeasure.

And this is an especially great time for it to be reborn as an e-book -- it's the perfect story to read if you're playing Echo Bazaar -- in fact, as I was reading it, I thought that it could well have been part of the inspiration for Fallen London, since the atmospheres in the game and novel are wonderfully congenial.

The Classification Essay: what happened

2011-04-11T23:05:00.000-07:00

This is one instance that makes me wish I had a larger class, just to have a greater range of students. On the first day, when I gave the assignment out, one student stopped afterwards to say how excited he was, that he'd read some Aristotle in a previous class, and had all sorts of ideas about what he might do. Then he dropped, but my sense was that his excitement was genuine. When I posted the assignment on Facebook, it got an energetic response from academic colleagues, but more than that -- it seemed like wherever I went that week, other friends outside of the academy said that they'd been thinking about it. In church on Sunday, the homily referenced sorting things, and one of the other choir members turned around and said that she'd been thinking about it all week.

I think I explained in my previous post that this was an assignment that I gave with little accompanying prep, other than the detailed instructions and rubric. If I had paired it with readings, they'd have been from Weinberger's Everything is Miscellaneous, but I thought that if I gave the students a run-through of the various systems of classification, that it'd be enough to get them going. What I introduced were examples of binary classifications, materialist classifications, systems centered around a particular type of object (i.e., books -- so, Dewey Decimal and Library of Congress), and systems ranking a specific quality (biggest, best, scariest, etc.)

This assignment was intended to show me what they could do: I was not expecting perfect results. The students were aware of the fact that though I would fill out the rubric in determining what their formal grade might have been, that they would get full points for completing the homework. I wanted them to see how I approached grading.

I would call the results mixed. Rather than devise an original system of classification, the majority framed their essays around the question of what to take with them if their home was on fire. One student wrote about the system of organization dictated by a particular type of residence, and one classified only one particular set of objects -- the equivalent of baseball cards. One thing I didn't ask them to address is functionality. If they were developing the system because the Singularity had occurred, or if constraints on space (because of flooding, population growth, etc.) had made it necessary for possessions to be uploaded to the web, could they devise a system that they could use to retrieve things? Would that have made the stakes of the classification system more clear? Maybe, but maybe not. No one in the class has much of a web presence, other than on Facebook, so sorting and tagging is pretty new to them.

Because I could respond with specific questions about the choices they'd made, and because there were motions and starts of useful insights and questions, I think the assignment was at least partially successful. One of my primary goals in assigning it was to learn something about the students' personalities and writing styles, and I also think it was effective in that regard.

However, I'm not sure that the assignment itself was especially useful as the students responded to the question. Classifying possessions according to the "what would you take out of a burning building?" question is the equivalent of coasting; and I specifically asked students to devise a system, rather than write about the one that they'd always used. The point (as I intended it) was for them to create a system, rather than simply describe a conventional question or sorting mechanism -- the idea being that arranging things differently would make them consider their property in a new light; and also think about organization and classification as activities that are part of everyday life -- not just part of academic essay writing.

Preliminary findings:

I think I gave out this assignment too soon, and fumbled it in wanting it both to be a personal essay, and an analytical one. Without doing at least a little more reading in the genre of political theory, the significance of classification -- and its relationship to politics -- doesn't come through. It's too foreign a question for students to answer in the way that I hoped they would. I should have started by asking students to write about what mine did write about: their stuff, and how they organize it (or don't) right now -- and then, I should have asked them to think about how to develop an original system of classification. I probably should also have streamlined the assignment sheet. In trying to make things clear, what I achieved was clutter.

That doesn't mean that the assignment can't work. At least, I don't think it does. I remain committed to the idea of an assignment that can be both personal and analytical. Two articles in Inside Higher Ed, by Dan Berrett and Barbara Fister only make me more certain that it's worth experimenting with this further. To summarize, (though both are worth reading in their entirety), Berrett describes the findings of the Citation Project: that students copy chunks of texts and use them in their papers without a solid understanding of the quotes' relation to their originary texts, or the underlying arguments and contexts. Fister looks at various findings discussed at the 4Cs conference, and the energy that she sees students bringing to writing outside of academic contexts -- in "everyday research" -- and argues that the way forward is to "abandon the traditional research paper," at least for students who are inexperienced with academic work.

What I'm doing next:

I think there's got to be a useful way of building on this assignment. It didn't work perfectly -- but despite that, my sense is that the students liked writing about their stuff, and what's important to them.

The question is, how do I turn the classification paper into an assignment that also helps my students engage with Locke, and Marx in detailed ways; and with the specific subject of political theory?

I'm not going to try to do this immediately, especially because I'm planning to hand out the second essay sequence on Thursday of this week, and I have a prompt question that, while fairly traditional, is a question that any student in political science, and especially in political theory, needs to consider.

I would like to make a revision and expansion of the classification essay my third essay sequence for the quarter, and in that sequence, I'd like to ask students to develop a system of classification for their possessions according to Locke's principles in the Second Treatise of Government or Marx & Engels' in the Communist Manifesto, and to explain their rationale for categories; and to describe how their classification alters the meaning of their property. I'd like to do this partly because both Locke and M&E are writing materialist arguments. This isn't just my view; it's also the way that the lecturer is presenting them. It makes sense to me to develop a way into them through property. It also makes sense to me to attempt to find a more personal, and more concrete, way of asking students to engage with Marx. I've taught the Manifesto before, so I know, that could backfire -- I think it might if I didn't emphasize personal and concrete.

I anticipate that completing this assignment will involve thinking about 1) what defines ownership, and different types of ownership, 2) objects that facilitate their participation in the political sphere, or public life, as opposed to private life, 3) objects for which the use is governed by law, or which is regulated or dependent upon higher powers (Comcast, Amazon, Apple), 4) objects that can be said to increase power, (depending on how power is defined), 5) objects which are both concrete, and abstract. These are what occur to me today, as I consider this.

I'm certainly thinking about the texts when I name those five areas of thought, but more than that, I'm thinking that this assignment would prompt students to determine what ideas and principles their chosen author prioritizes and why (in order to determine what their classification style should be); and how those priorities advance an argument (i.e., what are the results of organizing life according to these priorities). I'm also planning to encourage them to think about what sort of scheme of organization the authors themselves use; and what they're trying to represent by adapting that scheme. Most of all, I'm hoping to find ways to build bridges between the abstract and the concrete, and back again.

If you have questions or comments, or critiques regarding this assignment (both the original form, and what I'm planning to do next), I would not only welcome them, but would be grateful for them. So, most likely, will my students.

* But is this an artificiality that is a good part of academic work? Or is it pernicious navelgazing?

In which I attempt to catch up, at least on blogging about teaching

2011-04-07T11:14:00.001-07:00

I'm finally coming out of the most ghastly bronchitis bug that I've tangled with since my sophomore year of college. 16 days, and I'm still dealing with a lingering cough, altered voice, and an inability to function in polite company without Kleenex handy.

I've never been so ill at the start of a quarter, and so it's both a blessing and a curse that I've ended up teaching a writing course linked with a political theory course, and which has only 5 students in it. (The writing links were underenrolled, and my section was the earlier of the two offered, and the professor teaching the poli sci course emphasized how hard the writing load would be. I can't say I'm surprised that some students shied away from both his class and mine, since we both have separate essay assignments (even if they are oriented towards the same readings).

I planned a number of things for this quarter: perhaps most importantly, a course website, and the intention of having the students blog throughout the quarter. In the past, I've had them use Catalyst GoPost, and I'll say up front that I haven't been all that smart about how I used it -- both in terms of thinking about making it a mini-knowledge site; and in terms of creating useful and specific assignments for the students. Instead, I wanted them to respond to each lecture, and A) that's too much, and B) it's not effectively goal-oriented -- so it didn't succeed in creating a genuine conversation between my classroom and the lecture classroom.

This time, I used and added to several of the blog assignments linked to in this Profhacker post; and used a rubric. I've encouraged the students to use the blog in the way that helps them -- i.e., as a space to talk about the more formal writing assignments, and as a space to apply the political theory texts that they're reading to current events, or other situations as they see fit. The rubric still dictates that they have to display a high level of engagement with the text, but I'm hoping that the blog will give them the space to engage with Aristotle, Locke, etc., in multiple ways (which they are explicitly not encouraged to do in the formal essays for either the lecture course, or mine.

In my case (and I suspect in the POLS professor's, too, but I can't speak for him), it's not that those alternative methods of engaging with a text aren't valid, but just that the focus of the course is to have them practice a very specific style of essay writing that is widely demanded in academia, and in poli sci specifically. I explained that. Rather than have them write texts that were supposed to be about practicing academic writing, and which I would have to constantly nudge them back towards more focus and seriousness, I'd much rather say that the blog is a space where they have more freedom, and that their goal is to demonstrate a range of engagements with the course subject matter.

I'm doing everything I can to make the course website a good knowledge site as well -- posting answers to questions that I get asked each quarter; posting links to sites like Memidex and Natural Readers under a writing hacks tag. I only have two so far; I need more, but I think if I keep posting steadily, that part of the site will get better and better.

I've asked the students to tag their posts (in fact, I've made it a requirement for them to get credit). None of them had blogged before, so I wanted to avoid overloading them with new tech, but I did want the site to be a useful tool, in some way other than merely making it searchable. So far, it's working. The first week, only 3/5 students posted in time to get points, and I had to remind them all to tag their posts. This week, they all posted on time, and I didn't have to do any reminding about tagging.

But I don't like asking students to do random stuff, so I'm trying to make tagging and classification a major subtext of the class. That's where my personal property classification assignment comes in. To give credit where credit is due, it was inspired by a comment by Johanna Drucker, who said that she asks students to develop such a system in her classes -- but that was all she said, and I didn't get a chance to ask her more.

I wanted to develop it for use with political theory partly as an interesting personal essay (more interesting than the literary autobiography that I've used in the past with comp classes), and as an introduction to the idea that classification is an inherently political act (whether arbitrary, material, or any one of numerous binary organizations), and suggest that thinking about texts in terms of the authors' classification schemes is a useful way of making heavy content more clear, and breaking it into manageable chunks.

I also really wanted to have the students develop something that was their own thinking, but was not a traditional argument.

The essays have been turned in, and I'll look at them tomorrow, and report back in terms of what I've got. I think that classification is helpful in terms of reading texts, but it's a little hard to say. The Nicomachean Ethics are hard no matter what you do with them; and I think that it'll take a little while for classification as reading to catch on (and no doubt, I can learn to teach it more effectively) -- but I'm excited to keep working on that.

And today, Susan Brown, of the Orlando Project, visited and gave a wonderful, 2-hour demo of the textbase, and then, after less than an hour's break, another talk(!), and I probably don't need to tell you, but I will anyways, how exciting it was to read the scholarly introduction, and see the following statement, and feel like I'd made exactly the write choice in deciding to work on foregrounding classification in this course, and in future courses:

We observe simply that while the work of recovery made a broader literary history both newly possible and newly necessary, the unanswered criticisms of the genre contributed to the continued absence of integrating histories of women's writing, or of revised general histories that take women's writing into account.

But the Orlando Project, and why it's important to me, deserve a whole separate post, and I think I need to save it for later this weekend.

Using Twitter at #sts11, and at academic conferences in general

2011-03-20T15:38:00.000-07:00

On the last day of the conference, Barbara Bordalejo was gleefully tweeting about showing Twitter to Paul Eggert and Peter Shillingsburg, and then Marta Werner, which is excellent — I wish I’d thought of showing them myself, because they’ve certainly all shown me amazing things, and it would be only courteous to return the favor. But I can still do that. This post, then, is written for an audience who haven’t used Twitter before (at all, or who use it, but not within a conference.) It’s long, but broken up into sections; read one, or all, as you like. I want to avoid asserting baldly that everyone should be on Twitter when they attend a conference. Different styles work best for different people. But if you're curious about it, then this post may be useful to you.

Tweeting to promote, and document
Tweeting to interact
Twitter can make conferences more professionally useful
Too big to tweet: Peter Shillingsburg’s Presidential Address
Twitter and conflict; or, Twitter isn’t enough — but sometimes, neither is spoken discussion.
Tweeting in a textual context
But can’t you get ADHD from Twitter?
What I don't know

Tweeting to promote and document

This was my first time tweeting at a formal conference (as opposed to at a THATCamp); which meant I had to figure out what I wanted to say. At the first session I attended on Wednesday afternoon, How to Do Things with NINES, there were only 3 people, including me, and tweeting wasn’t especially conducive to interacting fully with them; but I did send out a couple of messages describing what we were doing; knowing that people in the other sessions would be doing the same. And Typewright, which we ended up discussing as much or more as NINES itself, is worthy of more buzz: it’s a tool for crowdsourcing OCR correction in databases like ECCO, and one of the most exciting features of it is that once a user has corrected a full text, Gale will give him/her the rights to it. (My podcast scholarly edition, which I spoke about at MLA 2009, languishing in part precisely because of rights issues), should finally become a reality, once Typewright goes live).

On the chance that other people hadn’t heard about Typewright I wanted it to become part of the #sts11 tweetstream; and also briefly think, publicly, about how users might be credited/identified with their work. (The creators haven’t decided how the attribution system will work, and there are still issues with Typewright to be worked out — for example, what if some lines are partially corrected, but not fully? How will their status be recorded in the system? One of the lines we looked at had a word with an ink blot at the beginning, and as far as we could tell, it said “bish’d” — so though that line has been mostly fixed, it isn’t entirely legible.) Andy Stauffer is excited about the potential of using Typewright in the classroom, and so am I, but I’m also excited about it as a potential gateway drug for more intense work using digital tools. It’s simple enough that it should feel accessible to scholars who are leery of using a computer for anything more than word processing, it’s accompanied by definite rewards in the form of the textual rights (though I wonder how much people will be motivated to work on editions of Pamela and/or Clarissa.

I also want to know what happens once an edition has been corrected. Once someone’s claimed the first edition of Swift’s “The Lady’s Dressing Room,” by correcting it, will it no longer be possible for anyone else to do the same thing? What if I find that someone has corrected half of a pamphlet, and I finish up the other half? Do I have to make a distinct change in every line, or only click the button to show that I’ve reviewed it and it’s correct?

Enough about Typewright, for the moment — back to tweeting.

Tweeting to interact

In the panels themselves, I tweeted to describe content and approach (which seemed especially important in the more non-digitally oriented panels, to break down any assumptions that there was a straight-up divide between the digitalists and textualists. I tweeted to capture any single phrase, idea, or question, quoting it if possible, given space. And I tweeted to ask questions; sometimes questions that I planned to ask the panelist, but which seemed more widely applicable, and sometimes questions that someone else might answer.

I marked when someone said something that thrilled me, or that captured something of the reasons that I have been drawn to this work. Is this any different than complimenting someone less publicly, at the end of a panel, or when you encounter them in the hallway at a conference? No, not in one sense, if the person is on Twitter, and yes, in another, because in order to make that compliment public, I needed to at least attempt to articulate it in a form that would be coherent for others. I think of this sort of complimenting as akin to exchanges that I’ve heard offline among academics, where someone praises a book, or a scholar, and this is where I sound cynical, because sometimes the praise sounds like namedropping, and what I like about reading people’s tweets about something that impressed them is that I often get a much more particular than general, non-specific sense of “X is so great.”

I met people through interacting via Twitter whom I wouldn’t have met otherwise. And because I met them through Twitter, I’m more likely to be in touch with them in future months, rather than depending on remembering to email them (and trying to say something intelligent in said email).

Twitter can make conferences more professionally useful

Every time there’s a meeting at my university for dissertating (or about-to-be-dissertating Ph.C.s who are preparing for the job market, someone asks “should I go to conferences?” And without fail, the Placement Committee says, “no, probably not. Conferences aren’t really useful at that stage.” You may or may not end up at a panel at 8:30 a.m. on the first day, or at 4:00 p.m. on the last day; you may or may not have an opportunity to meet senior scholars. To be maximally successful at conferences (especially those labelled as “important,” which are usually large), especially as a graduate student, you need to be adept not only in producing intelligent content for your paper, but also at self-presentation. This includes the ability to be involved in cogent, concise conversation, and to respond with provocative questions. Neither of these are skills that are taught in graduate school in most humanities departments (excepting theatre); they’re part of what’s often thought of as natural talent or charisma, or an aspect of mentoring. Oh, and speaking of mentors, that’s something else you often need to succeed at an important conference: a senior scholar who knows you and gives you introductions, and credibility. And just to be in the right place at the right time, poised for an interaction with someone who is not rushing to another panel, or to meet someone else.

A digital forum that’s simultaneous with an academic conference (be it on Twitter, or identi.ca) changes that, because your interactions with other people, be they senior or junior, take place over a few days, rather than in 5 minutes, and more likely, when the people you’re interacting with have enough energy to be social.

Too big to tweet: Peter Shillingsburg’s Presidential Address

Sometimes it was easy to draw out single thoughts for repetition, but tweeting the STS banquet, and Peter Shillingsburg’s presidential address, was extraordinarily challenging, because the address was beautifully written, and bold and cogent, and yet most of Shillingsburg’s points would not have fit within 140 characters, and his words were so carefully chosen that I could not entirely feel comfortable trying to paraphrase him with shorter synonyms. I tried to condense occasionally, because I did think it important to amplify his voice to an outside audience, who might not encounter the speech when it is (I trust) published in the Textual Cultures journal. I think it will be an address that is remembered and studied in years going forward, but studying textual transmission has taught me just how much transmission (or transformission) and preservation is the work of many, rather than one, and it is precisely because of that learning that I found it important to tweet.

Yesterday morning, at 5 a.m., I encountered Peter in the hotel lobby, as we were both on the way to the airport, and as impressed as I was the night before, I was even more impressed because he was articulate enough at the arse-crack of dawn to say that he’d read the tweets attempting to capture some of his ideas. “Some of it seemed like transcription,” he said, “and some questions, and some misunderstandings.” I had acknowledged that it had been challenging to capture, though both Barbara Bordalejo and I had felt that it was important to do so. Peter said that he wasn’t sure whether he should get in and start clarifying, or let it be; and I didn’t have an immediate answer that I could give as I headed out the door to the shuttle. As I thought about it more, I’m inclined to say that while he could respond by joining Twitter, it’d be more effective for him to respond with a post on a website. He could even use Storify to do so. The primary purpose, though, of tweeting, was to accent the address as the finale of the conference, both to pique interest in it immediately, and later, when anyone searches the #sts11 tweetstream, and eventually, when it’s published in print. The secondary purpose, at least for me, was to think actively and respond, as I would in a classroom or in conversation; because I articulate differently when I am doing so publicly than privately*. I don’t think anyone reading the tweetstream would ever think to formally quote Peter via @paigecmorgan, @bordalejo, or others; the tweets serve more as constellations — navigational guides twinkling in the dark (but beware of will’o’wisps, which conceivably exist.) And I note that no one, including me, made purely descriptive statements, like: “Shillingsburg is discussing the intersection of bibliographical criticism and McKenzie’s sociology of texts, and the issues that arise for scholarly editors from their intersection.” It would have taken two tweets, but we could have — and chose not to. Why is that?

Twitter and conflict; or, Twitter isn’t enough — but sometimes, neither is spoken discussion.

There was a great moment in the end of the spatial technology roundtable on Thursday afternoon, when @samplereality tweeted “Data visualizations are a symptom of screen essentialism.” This comment might have stayed submerged in the backchannel if @mkirschenbaum hadn’t asked him about it directly during the question-and-answer/discussion section. And I’ve been thinking about the exchange ever since, and not just because it raised interesting questions for me about the approach of digital humanists vs. traditional textualists (about which I’ll say more later), but because I think it captured a certain richness of dialogue that’s only possible with both backchannel and spoken discussion. Sample’s statement was so compact that it sounded dismissive; whether to sound dismissive was his intention or not, I won’t speculate. But his point about the danger of uncritically accepting data visualizations is quite valid. If I recall correctly, he was on the point of leaving the room when Kirschenbaum called attention to his statement; but as a result, the panel, and the rest of the room, had a chance to respond to it.

I don’t know why Sample was only willing to issue his critique on backchannel, rather than vocally, but I also don’t know whether, if he had phrased it as a spoken question, the statement would have had the same compactness and weight that it did, which for me, helped to characterize the urgency of the critique. It would have been a different discussion if it had been conducted entirely audibly, not least because I think that it would have been much more challenging to articulate a potential problem with data visualizations while effectively managing vocal tone. When voiced, it sounded less barbed, because Matt Kirschenbaum was reading it, rather than Mark Sample saying it. If he'd spoken, rather than tweeted, we would have had a different version of the discussion — and I think I prefer the one that we had.

Tweeting in a textual context

I’m sure that someone before me has made the connection between Jerome McGann’s radial reading, as discussed in ch. 5 of The Textual Condition, and Twitter, even though I don’t see any blog posts on it in a preliminary search. For any non-lit-crit readers, radial reading, in McGann’s own words, “involves decoding one or more of the contexts that interpenetrate the scripted and physical text” (119), and it’s associated with intertextuality and allusion, which have long been foundational tools in academic writing, especially in the humanities. It’s the idea that no text exists in a vacuum, and that in many cases, authors intentionally direct readers to read other things.

To tweet at a conference, which often involves reading (albeit quickly), the tweets arriving in the hashtag stream, is to read radially. Is it to write radially, as well? Transcribing and summarizing isn’t what I’d originally conceived of as radial writing, but I think that’s because my preconception is that radial writing has to involve a more brilliant/exalted response than just repetition. Some radial writing does, obviously. However, I think to dismiss the value of transcribing and broadcasting through repetition or paraphrase is to uphold the bias towards solitary authorship (and implicitly, against collaboration) that’s been longstanding in the humanities. McGann acknowledges that radial reading is “the most advanced, the most difficult, and the most important form of reading because radial reading alone puts one in a position to respond actively to the text’s own (often secret) discursive acts” (122). Tweeting at a conference is advanced, not because it uses technology, but because it requires decision making about what to type, and how to type it (this should be familiar to writers everywhere), and that’s difficult to do. I haven’t heard any discussions about conferences as texts, and I’d bet that’s because the discursive acts that they represent often are secret, or rather, secreted — in electronic files, which may be forgotten, or may appear in journals and books months or years later, and may or may not be available at an affordable economic price, and may or may not be found by conference attendees.

From reading tweets, throughout the conference, I gained a sense, sometimes very specific, sometimes not, of what was going on in other panels. I didn’t always read these tweets as they were being sent; checking the hashtag was something to do at breaks, lunch, and in the evening. Sometimes I found it difficult to tweet and focus at the same time; but other times, the listen-and-transmit mode wasn’t an obstacle at all. I know that there are things that I missed; that tweets don’t adequately substitute for the experience of being at a panel. But I could hardly help but be appreciative of them. Some of the things that I’m thinking about as a result of the #sts11 twitterstream that I would otherwise have missed:

1) Platform studies, which I’d never heard of, via @mkirschenbaum: Editing is platform studies and platform studies is editing. This seems obvious in retrospect. #sts11

2) How location affects reading, via @samplereality: How can we talk about books without talking about where we are when we read them? The location and posture of our physical bodies. #STS11

3) via @KLeuner: martha nell smith: Is it a fantasy that texts are more dynamic in the digital world? #sts11

4) via @KLeuner: Marta Werner notices there are only women at Editing Digital Feminisms panel #sts11

5) After the discussion about data visualization started in the geospatial tech roundtable, I was wondering how crowdsourced data might affect the degree of trust we put into it. But I wondered if I was being silly to ask such a thing. @mattlaschneider encouraged me to do so, and also reminded me of Randall Munroe's crowdsourced color survey.

I haven’t seen very many statements trying to define what Twitter is for, in the context of a conference. Maybe that’s because no one wants to try and limit what micro-blogging can do — but here’s an alternative reason: it’s controversial to suggest that Twitter is useful because saying so calls attention to the weaknesses in current academic infrastructure and culture. By weaknesses, I mean not only the factors that have made conferences less productive in the past, but also economic constraints that I’ve heard referenced that make it less common to have teaching appointments funded by more than one department; and the often intense workload that non-tenured faculty members face. It calls attention to the common tendency to assume that only faculty and graduate students hoping to become faculty are scholars, while staff members aren’t.

In short, the discomfort surrounding Twitter, and the potential advantages of using it (whether using means actually tweeting, or just reading) are entangled with the social structure and customs of academia (and probably broader literary culture, as well.)

But can’t you get ADHD from Twitter?

The concerns I’ve seen raised most often about Twitter-use during conferences (and at other meetings, too, but for this post, I’m not addressing those other settings) is 1), that users who are tweeting aren’t listening to the talk, and 2), which follows that concern, that users who are tweeting are being disrespectful. The first is a little tricky, because users who are new to the platform will certainly find the multitasking of tweeting and listening challenging. Then again, when I’ve relied on writing notes at conferences, I’ve often heard the speaker say something that flashes in my mind, and sets off a whole chain of other ideas and questions. In those situations, I have to choose whether to try and write them down before I forget them, sacrificing my attention to the speaker; or keep focusing, and hope that I can remember what started the domino chain of ideas. In short, this multitasking problem has existed for as long as we’ve been taking notes, no matter in what format. Furthermore, short attention spans are hardly endemic only in tech use — if anything, the traditional conference format, with concurrent panels and minuscule breaks between sessions, does far more to promote brief encounters that are never followed-up on than a site like Twitter, where anyone who adds me as a result of what I said at #sts11 will keep seeing what I say (or drop me for posting too much about sci-fi and cats).

As for the idea that tweeting during a session is disrespectful, even when the tweets are positive — well, I haven’t heard that particular judgment from any of the textualists that I know, and I’m glad, because it would be just as easy for people to question the respect or disrespect arising from the work of producing critical apparati, and emphasizing the collaborative authorship of single works, or whole oeuvres. I’d stake a lot on Jack Stillinger’s Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius being unwelcome to at least a few of its subjects. I also think that the idea that tweeting during lecture is disrespectful is not a new conflict. Long before Twitter, I heard teachers expressing either perturbation that their students were frantically writing notes without looking up, or alternatively, that their students stared at them, and never wrote anything down. In that sense, Twitter really is just the pen and notepad in a different shape. **

It would be interesting to talk more about the ethics of radial reading on the internet, and our habits in doing so, because the choices that people have made in radial reading, and continue to make, have considerable force in arenas outside of academia. When I say this, I’m thinking about everything from radial reading habits as they effect our consumption of news (especially political content) to situations where people produce content both under their own name and under a pseudonym, and the controversies that arise therein.

What I still don’t know

I hardly think that this post is definitive on the subject of tweeting at academic conferences; so here are the things I don’t know:

1. Do you have to be participating as a Twitter-user in order to get the benefit of a conference stream? Does it work as well if you’re just reading? (As someone looking forward to reading the #asecs11 stream, I think that reading is valuable — but that’s partly because I can respond to the Twitterers if I choose to. Someone without an account can’t.

2. A question especially for people like Peter Shillingsburg, Paul Eggert, Marta Werner, and Martha Nell Smith, all of whom had remarks tweeted throughout the conference — but this goes for anyone whose work is talked about in Twitter, but doesn’t have an account. What does the discussion look like to you? And if you decide to respond, what format might you take?

ETA, a restatement of the above question from Kirstyn Leuner, which I think is more effective and direct at what I was trying to get at with question #2: Are all conferences and conference papers equally public? And is it *always* ok to tweet out conf papers, as convention?

3. Who do conference tweeters see as their audience? And what choices are they making in order to serve that audience? (Links, non-links, use of twitlonger, etc.

4. Is there a minimum number of people who need to use Twitter in order to make a conference twitterstream useful? How do we say when a stream is helpful and when not?

*This is not to say that one is better than the other; or that what is true for me is true for anyone else, but I find that when I am thinking privately, I tend to be documenting, and when thinking publicly, I tend more towards constructing. I wanted to be constructive at STS in general, and with the Presidential Address in particular, because I find I am often able to reach new heights when I do, in a way that I cannot always do in private.
** Also, though I’m saying so flippantly, I can’t help but think about what it would look like to compare the rudeness of tweeting during a panel with the rudeness of the printed matter created as a rivalry between Alexander Pope and Edmund Curll.

Dido's Lament, by Alison Moyet

2011-03-08T22:34:00.000-08:00

This? Is EXCELLENT.

Book Review: Bumped, by Megan McCafferty

2011-03-07T22:37:00.000-08:00

When a virus makes everyone over the age of eighteen infertile, would-be parents pay teen girls to conceive and give birth to their children, making teens the most prized members of society. Girls sport fake baby bumps and the school cafeteria stocks folic-acid-infused food.

Sixteen-year-old identical twins Melody and Harmony were separated at birth and have never met until the day Harmony shows up on Melody’s doorstep. Up to now, the twins have followed completely opposite paths. Melody has scored an enviable conception contract with a couple called the Jaydens. While they are searching for the perfect partner for Melody to bump with, she is fighting her attraction to her best friend, Zen, who is way too short for the job.

Harmony has spent her whole life in Goodside, a religious community, preparing to be a wife and mother. She believes her calling is to convince Melody that pregging for profit is a sin. But Harmony has secrets of her own that she is running from.

When Melody is finally matched with the world-famous, genetically flawless Jondoe, both girls’ lives are changed forever. A case of mistaken identity takes them on a journey neither could have ever imagined, one that makes Melody and Harmony realize they have so much more than just DNA in common.

From New York Times bestselling author Megan McCafferty comes a strikingly original look at friendship, love, and sisterhood—in a future that is eerily believable.

Apparently, the inspiration for this upcoming teen dystopia was the question "What if teenagers were the only people who could have babies?" It's an idea that has the potential to be gimmicky, but in a lot of ways, the book (first in a trilogy, I suspect) manages to dodge that bullet. It dodges it, or did for me, because McCafferty's Harmony is a pretty accurate portrayal of vociferous Christian adolescence, obsessed with using this life to prepare for the next one, and spouting an inner monologue that I believed. That makes this particular dystopia a bit different from other recent ones, like Matched, because the conflict between the two sisters' ideologies takes center stage, and the story is as much about the two struggling with each other as it is about each sister struggling with the larger societal rules and standards.

I found both Melody and Harmony believable, despite niggling annoyance with the need to saddle them with names that scream cliché -- at least the characters themselves explain that, and actually, now that I think about it, the names serve another purpose during the story. Melody is ambivalent about her position as a professional reproducer, but surrounded by friends who have different positions and views towards professional pregnancy, and McCafferty is thoughtful in her worldbuilding enough to allow the teenage mothers to take a number of different paths, most of which are acceptable, and don't lead to chilly, dystopian euthanasia, or anything like that. And the society does have certain rules that can't be broken, and when Melody's friend Malia breaks one of those laws, Melody's reaction to her is somewhere between sympathy and condemnation. It's painful to read this, but it feels true to the portrayal of someone who's been socialized to believe in a world working a particular way. Nor does the narrative linger too much on the melodrama of Malia's situation, and Melody's rejection of her.

Harmony is equally complex, ping-ponging between excitement and nervousness as she tries to keep track of her own intentions, which are by no means set in stone. There's one part of her character development that I was a little uncertain about, but it's something that confuses me when I see it in life, too -- so this just meant that I had to revisit that little pocket of mental controversy.

Since there are two female characters, there are two main male characters, both imperfect in different ways. I'm fairly certain, at the end of this volume, who's going to end up with whom, but I wasn't sure throughout, and I'm not 100% positive. Neither of the male characters is perfectly secure and knowledgeable; in other words, no danger of either becoming the enlightened source of knowledge to whom the poor, confused, stupid female characters have to run to.

I wish we'd seen more of the world outside the lives of the two protagonists. McCafferty makes the vocabulary of pregnancy part of the worldbuilding: terminate, fertilicious, barren -- all are ubiquitous in everyday conversation, with slightly tweaked meanings from their usage now (well, not fertilicious!). And we see how pregnancy affects the already complex social networks of teenage girls and boys, and how the Facebooking of the world has advanced further and further. But I did find myself wanting to know more. According to the book, the spread of the disease causing infertility by age 18 had become evident four years earlier. Having the culture of teen pregnancy develop so quickly seems a little fast, but that's partly because I don't know how else the world was different prior to the discovery. There's no mention at all of STDs, which I was willing to accept, and suspend disbelief for, but which strikes me as a bit handwavy. There's no mention of homosexuality, which seems like it ought to still exist.

As you can see, I'm not without quibbles. That said, was it a dystopia that made me think? Yes. Did it dodge stale gender characterizations? Absolutely. Am I curious about what will happen in future volumes? Without a doubt.

On a score of 1 to 10, this gets an 8. Bumped at Amazon.

Late Eclipses, by Seanan McGuire

2011-03-01T21:41:00.000-08:00

When I learned that there was going to be a series about a changeling detective named October "Toby" Daye, I thought that it sounded like a weird mix of things that didn't work, plus a healthy helping of Mary Sue, and ZOMGeleventy!, I was so wrong, and I am so glad.

The series has changed with every book. The first one was noir-ish, and the second was an Agatha Christie-style country house mystery. Except that Dame Agatha never thought about the possibility of writing about a dryad, who, losing her forest, ended up in a server tree. The third book managed, improbably, to be a story about the boogey-man that was also a thoughtful meditation on female strength and sexuality, and about the difficult boundary between healthy and unhealthy self-reliance. I thought it was a little heavy the first time I read it, but that's more because it was about stuff I'd rather not think about, and the second, and especially the third time I reread it, I found myself appreciating the fact that it was precise and spare: McGuire doesn't mince words when she's dealing with dark stuff -- she gets right there, and then doesn't wallow.

The new book, Late Eclipses, shouldn't be read unless you've read the other three first. You could make sense of it if you really needed to -- it has those nice little cues to catch up new readers, and +10 to Seanan McGuire for making them reflect the character development that's happened since the series started, so that readers who aren't new still learn new things in the "Previously in..."

But you wouldn't enjoy it the same way, because most of the action (both dramatic and subtle) in this volume has been built up in the previous three, and because I understand how the world works, I can think about the story as I read in a way that I couldn't otherwise.

One of the things that I like about this series is that each volume so far has had a different pace. This volume moves extraordinarily fast. A lot like one of Lee Child's Jack Reacher books -- or like Die Hard films -- except that neither of those are about complex fae politics, family conflicts, and serial poisoners, all at once. In short, it's like a Jack Reacher book, except that it's SO MUCH BETTER. By better, I mean that I can think about what's happened, and how it might relate to my own life, and how it affects the world in the books; and also that I've only read one Jack Reacher book, and it was fine, but it didn't make me want to reread, or rush out and get the others.

The Toby Daye series is like the best episodes of the new Doctor Who series: when Russell T Davies wasn't faffing about; or more recently, like Steven Moffat's weeping angels two-parter. Here's what Publisher's Weekly said:

In October "Toby" Daye's fourth outing, following 2010's An Artificial Night, the half-Fae private detective is once again run through the wringer when problems plaguing the San Francisco Fae community strike home on a personal level. First, in an unprecedented, unexpected move, the Queen of the Mists promotes Toby to countess. Given that the Queen hates her, it's quite obviously a trap, but not something Toby can refuse or avoid. Subsequently, several of Toby's closest friends are struck down through poison and illness, and she's accused of murder. Has an enemy from Toby's past resurfaced, or is she losing her mind? Physically, emotionally, and magically drained, faced with tragedy and despair, Toby's forced to deal with the long-hidden truth behind her Fae heritage. In this tightly plotted adventure, McGuire mixes nonstop action with a wealth of mythology to deliver a wholly satisfying story. (Mar.)
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

I still have questions (as well I should, because the series isn't over yet), but with each book, I've felt like plenty is revealed, and plenty of new developments are introduced. There aren't awful cliffhangers. (Unless you count the scene that's included at the very end, as a preview of the next book, which manages to be both tense, and hilarious in a way that reminds me both of James Bond and Doctor Who.)

Read if: you like mysteries, action films, stories that are subtly about family/growing up/broken relationships but that don't put those conflicts in the main spotlight, romances that develop slowly, main characters who make mistakes, series where the overarching story is revealed bit by bit in multiple books.

Avoid if: you can't stand it when characters die, you require romances to have lots of hot and heavy sex, or you need the Massive!Overarching!Story to be revealed in one volume.

I try to avoid broad statements about the BestBookEver, because I don't believe there's only one, but this series is in ppbk for 7.99 each, and 6.99 on Kindle, and really, I can't think of another set of books being published right now where you're getting so much bang for your buck.

Get it at Amazon -- or better yet, go to your local brick and mortar.

Welcome to the future!

2011-02-18T21:56:00.000-08:00

This week I have mostly been dissertating and engaging in social activism. I might have reason to get into the latter in more detail, but perhaps not yet.

I have also been shopping, however -- well, I purchased two things that have made my week.

The first was a Possum umbrella. I have a fraught relationship with umbrellas, as I am prone to abandoning them on the bus after setting them on the floor; and umbrellas are likewise prone to betraying me by turning inside out or simply snapping a rib or two at slight provocation. The fact that I am in the habit of buying cheap umbrellas does not help, so the abandonment and betrayal is an endless vicious cycle.

Possum's design is brilliant in that the umbrella comes contained in a small zipper pouch. Lots of umbrellas do, of course -- but this pouch, after you take the umbrella out, also contains a small canvas tote -- dimensions about 10" x 10". The zipper part, which is still its own pocket, and which can be closed, is at the bottom of the pouch.

This means that when I'm running errands in the rain, I can unzip the umbrella, and then, as I go into buildings or onto the bus, collapse it and stow it in the tote bag, which stays safely on my shoulder.

I can also stick 4 or 5 books in the tote, and zip the umbrella into the bottom, and trundle off to the coffee shop, safe in case of rain. (But this is only a good solution when I'm only going to one destination; otherwise I might be in a situation where the tote bag was the only carrier for both the books and the wet umbrella.)

I'm extraordinarily pleased. I've also tested the umbrella in a storm with 36 mph gusts, and though it reversed a couple of times, it snapped back just as quickly, and apparently with no damage.

Most people wouldn't think of the future as heralded by an umbrella that's harder to lose. I do.

The other purchase was a Livescribe Echo Smartpen. I'd heard of smartpens before, but somehow I imagined that they were strictly smart because they had a convenient tiny recorder in the head of the pen. Only in the last week have I found out more about what they can do, specifically that they allow your handwriting to be easily digitized, and with an additional application, transcribed into plain text.

I don't think I've written here about my ongoing dilemma regarding iPhone vs. iPad, and which one will meet my needs better. I won't go into that, because it's mostly personal minutia, but one of the issues that's kept me off the iPad bandwagon is that I think best by writing in longhand. On paper. Ideally with BIC mechanical pencils, but pens will work -- the important thing is the feel of the paper, as opposed to a stylus on a flat screen. I've thought about whether it might be possible to become comfortable thinking through typing with my fingers on the iPad screen, but I'm not certain, and one of the major issues that's bugged me in regards to the iPad is that I'm worried that I still won't be able to think as clearly typing on it as I can when I write things out.

I write things out all the time, hence the massive stacks of paper that make up each dissertation chapter, and through which I often scrabble, searching for the paper on which I made notes on any given date. It's not entirely messy, because I can almost always remember the color of the ink, the style of script I was using -- but it's not especially efficient, either. And if I want to do something with the notes, then I have to type them into the computer. Sometimes that creates an opportunity for revision, but often, it just adds a delay that I don't especially appreciate.

And yet, though I've adapted tremendously to the net in so many ways, I've never stopped feeling like I can think better through writing things down than I can by typing them. I spent most of today being increasingly frustrated, feeling like my argument was unraveling as I tried to integrate ideas from Jameson's Political Unconscious into it. It took less than 30 minutes of working with the smartpen to regain my footing.

I'm annoyed that the transcription application is separate rather than being included, and I would love it if the pens were rollerball, rather than ballpoint, but that doesn't dampen my enthusiasm in the least. This solves all sorts of problems, not least making it easier for me to go off to the coffee shop without taking my laptop and the temptation of the whole internet in large screen format with me.

The Social Network

2011-02-13T22:42:00.000-08:00

Today has mostly been a succession of feeling stiff/achy/headachy/unwell, though I did begin by singing in a liturgy, and that was productive.

Last night I watched The Social Network, which is about the origins of Facebook, and then, back to back, Mamoru Hosoda's Summer Wars, an animated feature about a potentially world-destroying crisis that takes place in a global social network. I hadn't had the least interest in seeing The Social Network, but I've been hearing enough about it to be curious now that it's up for a Best Picture Oscar; and it seemed that the two films would be interesting companions.

That was a correct instinct. But sometimes I can review films at great length, and I'm not inclined to with either of these. TSN was extremely well-acted, well-directed, and well-organized, but left me unsettled, I think because I tend to avoid watching two hour films in which male privilege is the dominant storyline and impetus, and women are just sex objects. This morning, I found out that Aaron Sorkin had adjusted aspects of the history in order to make his narrative tight. At first I was supremely unimpressed, and then, chewing my lip, acknowledged that it was a very meta thing to do, to put tiny fragments of people's meetings together and make them into a story, which is driven in part by the way that other people perceive those fragments.

But more than one film review called the film "expressively Shakespearean" or a classical drama of betrayal and ambition, and that, I don't understand. Surely being about ambition, or containing a betrayal, does not thereby make a film Shakespearean? Nor does it make it classical drama. In fact, the film is largely driven by the jumping between time periods, and I know that Shakespeare doesn't hold to Aristotelean unities (except in The Tempest), but I also don't think he tells stories in pastiche mode, or even stories that work well, as pastiches of moments!

Defending it on Facebook, a friend of a friend identified it as one of the movies perfectly capturing the way we live now, and I suppose that's true for a lot of people. It didn't feel that way to me. I could tell you about BonC, which I joined as a freshman in college, while Mark Zuckerberg was just getting started programming. or the excellent Murrys v. Austins Alternate Superbowl post over at Phantom Scribbler's (comments, alas, gone due to Haloscan's disappearance). The latter took place before I joined Facebook, at the urging of a particularly bright class of composition students -- after which my account languished until the women I knew from blogging suddenly migrated.

Then, there were several months of throwing sheep, cows, leprechauns, and Helen Vendler, via the custom poking applications. I had no idea who Mark Zuckerberg was, or what "poking," as defined by a single button on people's profile page, was, and certainly no use for Facebook as a tool for dating or casual sex.

Facebook might have made social networking easier for many people to understand and take part in. But to see it as The Social Network is to erase the development that was taking place on blogs, on Livejournal; and which wasn't engineered strictly through the actions of the young teenagers looking for sex. I think that's what makes the film hard to accept/enjoy for me. To appreciate it as epic, I have to buy into several conventional views about programming as a male thing, and about the internet as a tool in which the young are the most innovative/creative. I can understand how those conventional views came to be held, but it feels bizarre to see them enshrined again in this film. Even though I can't deny the importance of Zuckerberg's creation, it feels inaccurate to watch the lives of Eduardo Saverin, Zuckerberg, and Sean Parker magnified to this scale, given the definitive article: The Social Network. Instead, it's a film that one watches with the feverish intensity with which one reads a particularly incendiary comment thread. And as huge as it seems, in terms of the development of social networks, I think it's just as insignificant. It's very well made, but it shouldn't be watched by itself.

I'll write about Summer Wars, which I think is excellently paired, tomorrow evening.

What is the key of satire?

2011-02-10T20:02:00.000-08:00

Glad Day: a personal journey around the world of William Blake

C & P 2010 Guy Pearson

issimo ICD1757

One of the most surprising tracks on Pearson's album, which mixes vocal and instrumental pieces, is the third track, a representation of William Blake's early prose satire, An Island in the Moon. It's beautifully lilting, and immediately made me think about what it might be like if Hayao Miyazaki decided to adapt it for an animated feature. Pearson, like Miyazaki collaborator Joe Hisaishi, has a good ear for waltzes.

I think of satire as caustic, which at first might suggest a minor key, but on glancing around at some of the discussions on interpreting An Island in the Moon (summarized conveniently at Wikipedia and discussed in a more academic tone at the Blake Archive), and then wandered off to look at the text itself, Pearson's choice seemed entirely appropriate: the work, after all, is a social satire, ornamented with virtuous cats, and flocks of swallows. I can almost see Miyazaki making it brilliantly, for that matter. Blake's satire is sometimes heavy, in other works -- and even later in Island -- but Pearson's choice to score in a minor key reminds me that Blake's satire can be seen as part of the larger satirical style that shows up all through the 18th century.

There are a lot of musical adaptations of Blake's poetry, but though I've admired them or disliked them, enjoyed them, and carried them about with me as a soundtrack for walking, I think this is the first time that I've been prompted by a Blake cover to revisit the source material. I'm very impressed by that -- it is exactly the sort of experience that I enjoy having, and it is all the better because I wasn't expecting to have it.

Pearson performs the instrumental music himself, using a synthesizer to augment piano with occasional strings and percussion; in just over half of the songs, Rachel Major (soprano), James Savage-Hanford (tenor), and occasionally Milo Harries (baritone) give voice to Blake's words. Major and Savage-Hanford, who are featured most, have light and clear voices that blend well together -- there's a little vibrato for luminosity, but nothing heavier; and they're effective at setting off Blake's rhymes without overdoing it. I don't want to exclude Harries, however, because he's the soloist in "The Ecchoing Green," which is one of my favorite pieces on the album, and I can tell it's going to be a pleasant earworm in the next few days.

My taste for synthesized music is best described as underdeveloped as a result of snobbishness -- I don't often care for it -- but this album gets past my skepticism because the combinations of instrumental voices are adeptly chosen, and give more depth to the transitions within the songs. He ranges throughout from the light and lyrical to the cinematic, in orchestration. There are a couple of moments where the texture felt heavy to my ear, but only a couple; and they don't dim my delight with the blends elsewhere -- track 13, a cover of the Songs of Experience "Introduction" and "To Tirzah" is exquisite, and like the Island cover, it prompts me to go back to the poems and reconsider them.

In almost every Blake cover I hear, I find, at the very least, intrigue in thinking about the composer's choices. But I don't always feel compelled to listen to them more than once. Glad Day, however, is an album that I'm very pleased to have in my library.

Glad Day is available on iTunes and on Amazon, as well as in CD format from Guy Pearson's website, where you can hear a few of the tracks -- including track 13 -- in full.

Acquisitions

2011-02-09T11:52:00.000-08:00

Brought to you by the discount sale at the bookstore transitioning from brick and mortar to online, with the assistance of the "Ok, where do I start with that?" posts on Tor.com and Among Others, and also my own curiosity. No links, because that would take more time than I can justify right now. And yes, I did just read Nine Princes in Amber last week, and Zelazny had me at "I was garbed all in the color of Moby Dick and vanilla ice cream."

Bohnhoff, Maya Kaathryn. The Spirit Gate. (Slightly weird spelling of author’s name forgiven, because I am a sucker for stories about labor, politics, and religion.)

Bradley, Marion Zimmer. Hawkmistress!

Broxon, Mildred Downey. Too Long A Sacrifice

Caudwell, Sarah. The Shortest Way To Hades

The Sibyl in Her Grave

The Sirens Sang of Murder

Ford, John M. The Dragon Waiting

The Last Hot Time

Jacques, Brian. Castaways of the Flying Dutchman (I’ve never read this series of his!)

Hambly, Barbara. The Silent Tower

Henderson, Zenna. The People: No Different Flesh

MacAvoy, R. A. The Book of Kells

Tea with the Black Dragon

MacDonald, John D. Ballroom of the Skies

Offutt, Andrew J. Evil is Live Spelled Backwards

Platt, Charles. The Silicon Man

Robinson, Spider and Jeanne. Starseed

Warner, Sylvia Townsend. Kingdoms of Elfin

Zelazny, Roger. The Courts of Chaos

The Guns of Avalon

The Hand of Oberon

Knight of Shadows

Prince of Chaos

Sign of Chaos

Sign of the Unicorn

Trumps of Doom

Notably, sadly not on shelves: Katherine Blake/Dorothy Heydt, and only Brightness Falls From the Sky by Tiptree, which I already have.

Ursula Le Guin BBC interview, and a question

2011-02-08T13:31:00.000-08:00

I have little to say today, mainly because I'm getting over a celiac flare-up.

But in the meantime, if you haven't heard it yet, this recent BBC interview with Ursula Le Guin is excellent and charming in a number of ways. I'm afraid I find her interviewer rather obtuse in many of his questions. However, listening to their conversation, I thought of conversations that I've had with the SEL about graphic design and typography choices. Sometimes, he will acknowledge, an ugly combination is more effective than elegance at grabbing people's attention.

Along those same lines, I think that the interview is a lovely portrait of Le Guin that a questioner more knowledgeable about science fiction would probably not have been able to create.

What do you think? And if you remember other interviews/conversations that are particularly striking, were they good because the interviewer was knowledgeable and well-researched, or specifically because s/he was a bit daft or ignorant?

A Funeral at Redwall

2011-02-07T08:25:00.000-08:00

The BBC is reporting that children's author Brian Jacques has died, at age 71.

My elementary school librarian, Mr. McKay, saved Redwall for me, so that I could read it first. I didn't know about it, of course -- it was the first book that Jacques had published in the US. He simply took me aside, and collected it from his office, and said he'd thought I'd want to have first crack at it. 1986 means that I would have been going into 4th grade, and it was around that time that the elementary school library made a special exception for me. Normally, the rule was that you could check out the same number of books as your grade level -- 4 for 4th grade, etc. -- but I was allowed to check out as many as I wanted.

That? Was heaven.

Actually, a lot of things about the library, where I spent most of my recess time, were heaven, including the fact that one could work as a page, reshelving books, and sometimes, be allowed to climb on top of the bookshelves to dust them, or to rotate through posters and artwork on the wall. And that in payment, one was allowed to choose selections of laminated bookmarks made using Apple Clip Art on Astrobrights paper.

But that's another post. I had never read anything like Redwall. Babe, the Gallant Pig, had come out a couple of years earlier. I'm not sure if I had read Watership Down by then, but I think not, and I think it would not have struck me as being in the same genre. The fattest fantasy book I'd read at that point was The Hounds of the Morrigan, by Pat O'Shea -- so I had just discovered, you might say, the pleasure of a big fat book, as opposed to what I think of as elementary school sized books, usually just over an inch thick.

I had never read a book with such careful, detailed worldbuilding, and yet one which was written for children. Part of me wants to say, of course! Children are interested in treats, and in eating, and so it is natural that one way of conveying the wonder of a world would be to describe the wonderful things that are eaten in that world's parties. And I also know how much I learned from Jacques: the names of herbs, and how important they were for flavoring; that fruit and mint could go together, that honey and cream were pure decadent delight. It isn't that my mother was a poor cook -- she wasn't -- but I wasn't always involved in food preparation, and when in Redwall, I stood over Friar Hugo's shoulder by default.

Redwall was the first book I read in which there was detailed, intentional, cruel violence;* where characters with names didn't just die in battle (as is gently implied in the Narnia books), or die tenderly at the book's finale, as in Old Yeller and Where the Red Fern Grows, but were killed in callous accidents and intentionally. The body count started within 12 pages of the story beginning. I knew it was a serious, and rather adult book, because there were mentions of hell, but I also knew that it was a book that was easy enough that I could just sink into it without having to puzzle over sentences and paragraphs that I didn't fully understand. I had tried to read The Name of the Rose a little earlier, having found it in the mystery section of the public library, and thinking that since I liked murder mysteries, and that since it was thick like The Hounds of the Morrigan, and about an abbey, which I found interesting, and since it had a beautiful cover... -- but needless to say, I didn't get very far, which is just as well.

In Redwall, I found a detailed portrait of a community, where there were multiple characters who wandered in and out of the spotlight, who clearly were busy living their lives, and doing the various work of keeping an abbey running. Matthias, who was discovering his own capabilities, Methuselah, who kept records, and Constance the badger, who clearly was the dominant fighter, and whom Jacques felt no need to temper with more flowery feminity. And I watched, captivated, as that community reeled, and changed, confronted with an outsider who wanted simply to torture, to kill, to possess them. There was a typical quest/coming-of-age story in the middle of this, for Matthias, and I loved that, and took time to memorize the "I -- am that is" poem that is so important to the plot's development. But there was so much more than that, too! The history of the abbey is vital to surviving the conflict; and the way that the abbey is situated in the midst of a landscape where it is one culture, interacting with other cultures of varying compatibility, neutrality, or hostility -- sparrows! and Guerilla Shrews! -- I had never seen anything like that in my life thus far. Not told that way. I knew Jason and the Argonauts backwards and forwards, and was in the habit of reading mythological dictionaries to try and find more stories, but the tellings of Greek myths in collections and dictionaries were not attempting to be an adventure novel, and so they could not in the least compare with what Brian Jacques had done.

I remember how horrified I was by the actions of Selah and Chickenhound, and the way it felt to learn what happened to them. Reading Agatha Christie and watching Murder, She Wrote, I knew plenty about murderers, but I didn't really know about stories of betrayal that occurred in the middle of the story, of double-crosses -- I hadn't read any noir at that age. And then, when Asmodeus appeared on the scene, it was approximately like discovering that Twinkies had a creme filling.** Multiple problems that had to be dealt with, each one dangerous in a different way! I had never seen such richness between the covers of a book. And what makes Redwall extra special, along with The Hounds of the Morrigan, is that it is one of the first times that I can remember beginning to think carefully about what an author can do, and has to do, in order to make a book be brilliant. Before that, I had simply swallowed books whole, swimming through them like warm water, and this is not to say that I read through them hurriedly without enjoyment -- but stories were the air I breathed, and I am not sure that I gave much thought to how that air was produced, and the choices that went into it.

A few years later, Brian Jacques actually came to my elementary school -- but I was in junior high. My second brother, who loved the books as much as I did, took my copy of Mossflower to school to have it autographed, and, horror of horrors, had it signed to him, instead of me. At the time, I was furious, and only slightly mollified when said brother bought me another copy of the book. It's forgiven, now. The landscape of Redwall was an escape for both of us, in the midst of family turmoil. I couldn't see that years earlier, when A. was tormenting me by being Baby Rollo, who was so quick and heedless to drop into rhyming song, who knew that joy was in singing; or any one of the other various rambunctious Dibbuns; but in hindsight, I am endlessly grateful that we both found that escape.

In the middle of the long list of Redwall books, A. and I agreed that they had begun to seem formulaic to us. But I recall that we were both delighted by Loamhedge and Rakkety Tam, and I shall look forward to catching up with the more recent books in the series, and the final novel, when it arrives later this year.

I never got the chance to thank Jacques. It seemed that I was always finding out about him being in town the day after he had been, or when I was scheduled to be somewhere else. But one night, when he was at the University Bookstore, or rather passing through it, on the way to a sold-out signing at Kane Hall on the UW campus, I caught sight of him in the midst of an entourage. And I hadn't seen the announcements that he was in town, didn't know who he was at all, only that he was in a cluster of people, and looked familiar, almost like someone I had seen on TV. And then my eyes landed on a poster announcing the event, and that it was sold out, and I realized, and sucked in my breath, and stared at him in shock -- and somehow, 20 feet away, he realized, and looked right at me, and I grinned at him as happily as I could, to try and say thank you. And he smiled back. So I think he understood.

After I finished Redwall, I wasn't content with simply chanting the "I -- am that is" poem over and over; so I went back and memorized the prologue: "It was the start of the Summer of the Late Rose." For a long time, when I thought of beautiful writing (as a quality in itself, quite distinct from a good story), that passage was at the forefront of my mind. I think it's time I refreshed my memory of it, and knocked the dust off.

* ETA: I know -- obviously, I hadn't yet found the indescribably great Pork, and others, by Cris Freddi.

** I know, it's kind of sacrilegious to talk about Twinkies in the same post that I'm writing about food in Redwall Abbey. But it was the question that everyone in elementary school pondered -- how did the creme filling get inside the Twinkie?

Review: Tender Morsels, by Margo Lanagan

2011-02-06T10:38:00.001-08:00

This will be a quick review, partly because of time constraints, and partly because I'm finding it difficult to think about how to discuss the book at length. It's a hard book to read, and I fear that any lengthy discussion of it would turn too quickly into a discussion of some of the ideas that it provokes, and then it would become something other than a book review. Not that such a discussion isn't worth having -- I've just been having it in a few too many places recently, and to host it here, right now, would feel repetitive of what I've already said elsewhere.

I learned about Tender Morsels through the controversy described by Scott Westerfeld here. I'm very glad I did, and I hope it gets more attention from that controversy, because it deserves it.

The other reason that this won't be a long review is that I think I can say concisely what makes Tender Morsels unusual, and worth reading:

Almost everything -- every major event -- that occurs in Lanagan's novel is the result of some form of failure or mistake: either a failure of compassion and kindness, or courage, or strength; or intentions that have a little goodness in them, but a lot of selfishness; or are outright selfish, though the selfish person may still have flashes of kindness.

That doesn't mean that there isn't bravery and love and generosity, too. There is. But what Lanagan does; how she weaves them together, seems to me to subvert a lot of our ideas of what a novel is in the first place. Certainly it subverts what I think of as a tenet of the YA genre, which is that the stories are about the protagonists rising up, coming into their own, triumphing over struggle. Tender Morsels doesn't negate that -- but it subverts it. It's the most interesting portrayal and story about agency that I've seen in recent years, and maybe ever.*

At some point, I'd like to say more about it. I just need to think for a while before I do.

* This is meant as a compliment, but of course, there's a great deal that I haven't read. Disclaimer issued so as not to make the superlative hollow: there may be other books with equally interesting and complex portrayals of agency -- but I still think it worth commenting on when I stumble on something that stands out in the history of my own reading.

Among Others, by Jo Walton

2011-02-04T21:59:00.000-08:00

There is apparently a controversy about the magic in this book, and whether it's real, or a manifestation of PTSD or mental illness or both on the part of the narrator, Mori Phelps. I'm not the least bit surprised by that, given the blurb on the front cover by Robin Hobb, which includes the comment "...if you remember the magic you used to do...," and when I got the hardcover (having started the book in Kindle, and then abruptly lent it to someone else because I knew I could just get a dead-tree copy, and that I wanted one), I was deeply suspicious. At the time, I wasn't very far into the book. To talk about magic as something you used to do when you were a teenager sounded to me like an invitation to read the book as nostalgia for the way things used to be, rather than as a serious story.

I'm not saying that's Hobb's intention, mind you. It's just what it seemed like at the time.

Onto the book: I think it's strong and splendid, and one of those books which might cause people to say, "oh, anyone could do that; it doesn't take any effort as long as you love books," because Walton makes it look natural and effortless.

It's a bit difficult to talk about how the book works and what makes it good without dropping into spoilers, though I can do so a little more effectively if I talk about it in relation to my own life -- though then I worry that I'll sound self-centered, and worse, boringly so. Among Others is being marketed as a book that feels uncanny if you happened to be a teenager reading sci-fi/fantasy in the late 70s and 80s. (I wasn't). Mori Phelps is a character who makes people think that Jo Walton is their "secret best friend." I didn't feel that, especially because I didn't know that Heinlein and Zelazny and Tiptree existed back when I was 14, and reading Piers Anthony* and David Eddings, and Robert Lynn Asprin, and Douglas Adams.

What I did though, when I was 9 or 10, or 11 at most, and discovered Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane via the BBC adaptations, was to adopt them as parents. Mine loved me, quite clearly, but equally clearly, they couldn't be the parents I needed. That's heartless, I know, but it's also true, in that it was becoming clear that we had incompatible views of morality and politics, and that it was going to get worse, rather than better. And their constant arguments were dangerous. At the time, I couldn't have articulated why in terms of self-esteem, independence vs. co-dependence, and personal boundaries -- but it was around when I was 10 that I really began to understand that they were dangerous. Not evil, but dangerous. It is a very hard lesson to learn; I wish no children had to learn it.

In response, I adopted Lord Peter and Harriet. And I wished, over and over again, rather like Holly and Ivy in the Rumer Godden novel, because that was what I had for reference, that I could grow up to be as strong and intelligent as Harriet Vane. (I didn't necessarily think that meant academia or even writing and literature). I went so far as to bargain with the powers that be, to say that I would accept an ordeal like that which Harriet went through, if it meant that I could develop the ability to think and imagine and be strong in that way. I may have had vague thoughts about an equivalent Lord Peter, but they were just that: vague thoughts -- because though I admired him terribly, he wasn't the point, nor did I think that wish was a good one to try to make.

What Among Others does is provide a context that allows me to think through what I was doing when I made that adoption, and that bargain, and everything that arose from it later. The satisfaction that I get from it, then, is very personal; because it reveals to me that something I hardly thought could be a story's central focus can be one. I do think that that's a mark of lovely work; to take something that seems, for whatever reason, difficult to capture at all, and show that this insubstantial or deeply buried quality can be a story in itself. If you go down to Felpham and Bognor Regis on an overcast day and look at the sea, you can see strange lights shining out of it -- and I've seen paintings that capture those lights brilliantly. This book is rather like the first painter who saw those lights and knew that they could be the subject of a painting, and set out to do so, and succeeded.

Walton writes about families as brilliantly as she writes about magic, so it's not really any surprise that the charged energy between family members features as heavily as any energy from spells. Thinking about this, I realize that one of the things I like best of all is her method of portraying the inevitable convergence of the two: impossible that the charges of magic wouldn't end up involved in family; and even more impossible that family dynamics wouldn't effect the way that one practiced magic, and how its effects manifested. Moreover, someone who was influenced by magic (whether by practicing or being practiced upon) would think about everything differently. There's a passage I really like at around p. 64, which, oddly enough, lines up perfectly with one of the critical essays I was reading last week, though I won't say whose, or tell you any more than that. I will admit that I like books when they manage to think through complex ideas in quick, trenchant asides, without being unnaturally didactic, and if you like that, then you'll probably enjoy this one.

I realize that this is getting a bit long. Though I suppose if you read this long, then you thought it was worth it, so. Plotwise, it's an odd book and meandering book, whose style I'd described as overlapping episodic if I had to give it a name. If you've read other Walton, especially books like The Prize in the Game, (which, I know, people who have known me in other blogs are sick of me harping on, but in many ways, it feels like my Lord of the Rings, I'm that fond of it) -- then the style of action is a lot like that. I wonder how people are struck by a confrontation that happens late in the book; because I found it entirely convincing, and beautifully written, but it parallels confrontations that I've had myself, so I don't feel the least bit capable of evaluating how it will hit other people. ETA: looking around, it seems that a lot of people find it rushed/tacked on. I didn't -- but how to explain the electricity in such a meeting to people who've escaped having it, and how that electricity builds for weeks or months in advance? I despair, for the moment.

I hope there will be a sequel, though I can understand the challenge of undertaking such a thing. Actually, no I can't. I've never written a sequel, after all. But I think that one of the compliments that I can give Among Others is that it's entirely possible to think about a sequel and want one badly, and what might happen in it, and just as possible to think that the characters' lives went on, and that the events of the sequel are occasionally barely visible. I don't do magic anymore**, except by accident when reality goes a bit transparent and I can see that someone is about to phone, or that I'm about to lose my wallet, but I think I can sort of see Mori Phelps occasionally. Not in an exactly intelligible form about which I could say, "oh, this will happen in the sequel," but see all the same, much as she can see fairies. This is an unusual thing to say about a book, and a really odd way to end a review, but I appreciated the effect to no end, and think it a remarkable thing to pull off.

* I fully agree with the brief aside comparing Anthony to one of the literary greats; also, though I have problems with much of Anthony these days, Dragon on a Pedestal is somehow good every time I read it, and some day, I will get round to explaining why that is. If I figure it out myself.

** Actually, no, that isn't true. A lot of my research, and what I've found, is really only explainable if I acknowledge that it's the hybrid of critical thinking and divination. But that's a different sort of magic, not dealt with in this story.

Paraphrasing

2011-02-04T21:52:00.000-08:00

All day long, or most of it, and well into the evening, I worked on paraphrasing Percy Shelley's A Philosophical View of Reform, rewriting it in my own language. This is for two reasons: one, his tendency towards long compound complex sentences, and sometimes second phrases, is, um, overly evident. (To be fair, he didn't publish the work, so it's not like he was sloppy about prepping it; and I don't write neatly when I'm drafting, either.) Two, it's really easy for one treatise on the rights of the poor and the oppression of the rich to sound like another, and to lose sight of the individuality of the author's perspective. Paraphrasing in detail is the best way that I've found to avoid this. I don't think it's ever served me badly. I finished the middle section today; tomorrow I'll tackle the shorter 1st and 3rd chapters, and I think they'll either go much faster, or that I've found my way sufficiently into Shelley's head for the paraphrasing not to be necessary.

It's often slow work, but I have to admit that it leads to good and useful insights. I'm very pleased with what I learned. But man, am I ever tired.

The first things I remember reading, or being read

2011-02-04T10:41:00.000-08:00

(Because in the comments to the previous post, we've gotten into a discussion about how one develops preference for genre fiction, or lit fic, and to what degree that preference is innate and hardwired, much like one's sexuality.)

First and foremost, Bill Peet's The Caboose Who Got Loose. This one was read to me, but I memorized it, and I think it's responsible for my love of dactyls (Trochee fixation wasn't actually my syndrome, recognizable as it is.) Anthropomorphized train cars, and houses! Though the illustration that stayed with me for years, more than any of the others, was of a train yard at night, and a little house, suspended above the tracks, where a night watchman lived. That, to me, was another world, and moreover, one that I wanted to get to, and live in: to be high over the world, in a light place overlooking the dark place where people travelled. (There was also Chester the Worldly Pig, and The Whingdingdilly, but neither of those compared, really, to Caboose).

Secondly: books about marine life. One had lots of pictures, in color; the other was more like an elementary school textbook, mostly text, and brown and white sketched illustrations. I fixated on jellyfish, and on diatoms, and on the chambered nautilus.

Thirdly: a big treasury of Beatrix Potter, in which, as I recall, the stories that I wanted to hear repeatedly were "The Tailor of Gloucester," and "The Tale of Two Bad Mice." The best part about the latter was when Hunca Munca and Tom Thumb try to eat the dolls' food, and find the wax ham inedible. Wax fruit: more fascinating than any fart joke.

I knew fairytales, at least, I knew Little Red Riding-hood, because I suffered my parents and grandparents to help me act it out, utilizing the armoire for the woodsman to jump out of.

Dr. Seuss, specifically Hop on Pop, and The Cat in the Hat. The Cat in the Hat Comes Back was vastly superior to the original. Green Eggs and Ham made me very, very uncomfortable (early aversion to people who won't stop pestering you?) Horton Hears A Who was also vastly superior to Horton Hatches the Egg, mainly because I figured out that the Grinch had to be much tinier than I had realized. (This led to a brief phase in which I wondered whether the world as we knew it might be contained on a piece of lint stuck under God's toenail.)

Ezra Jack Keats' The Snowy Day, which, now that I think about it, is very much a book about the world being transformed into another place.

There was Captain Kitty (go look at the illustrations!), which totally explains my love for the lime helmet LOLcat. And again, voyages, and other worlds.

And The Wheedle on the Needle, which I loved, and Leo the Lop, which I loved a little less, I think mainly because of the embarrassment phobia.

The Year At Maple Hill Farm, lovely for all the detail in the illustrations.

There was also an easy reader book about a mouse exploring a house, fascinating because it was illustrated with photographs, rather than drawings.

And there was Professor Wormbog's Gloomy Kerploppus: A Book of Great Smells. There were other Mercer Mayer books in the Little Critter series, but mostly I did not like them, because they were mostly about what I should and shouldn't do.

There were others: The Poky Little Puppy, The Little Engine That Could (fascinating because of all the things that could be carried on a train, which made up for the stupid didacticism of the story), a Little Golden Book version of A Child's Garden of Verses.

Later, there were the Something Queer books, which also made a huge impression -- but the ones above were what I owned, and what I read, or had read to me, before I got to the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and on from there.

On believable characters, and reading sci-fi

2011-02-02T20:13:00.000-08:00

After writing yesterday's review of Bradford Morrow's The Diviner's Tale, I was startled this morning by one of the comments on this article in The Guardian, about whether speculative fiction was ready to break into big awards like the Booker Prize. One of the commenters responds as follows:

I think it is probably not the best idea. I have read a lot of science fiction and the problem lies with the characters, it seems as if all SF writers are incapable of producing a believable character, especially if it is an Alien character, which does not end up sounding like your English Teacher from High School. Morever, some of the more fantastical elements of simply making up names for alien cultures, with wobbly bits, it is absolutely confusing and mostly ridiculous. There is always a war going on in which not much seems to be happening.
Proper fiction, got which some niche should be preserved, should as a starting base point have believable characters. I am fairly sure that it is beyond the capabilities of any Fantasy/SF author to come up with anything more than Carboard charachters, whereas novels rooted in reality have more dimensions more reference points to peoples lives, so is probably superior. (emphasis mine)

The funny thing about this is that it is precisely what I would say about most literary fiction. I had to rack my brain and my bookshelves to find literary fiction titles/authors whom I loved, and thought of as having believably complex characters (the latter being the condition for the former). I did think of one, and immediately: Siri Hustvedt's What I Loved, which I've read over and over again, and never gotten tired of. Now that I think about it, I also enjoyed Michael Cunningham's The Hours, though I don't own it. Let's see: I also was absolutely delighted with Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City, and the sequels that followed. For the most part, literary fiction, no matter how many titles I look at, and what awards they're up for, give me the sense that the authors carefully followed a formula akin to that of the sonata form, carefully choosing objects and character traits that they felt were both unusual and poetic. This was how I felt about the house dragged across the ice in E. Annie Proulx's The Shipping News.

But I remember my delight at reading Pamela Dean's Tam Lin, when a friend lent it to me as an undergrad, as being a book that seemed to be written about the same world I lived in, or closer to it -- my university and my own development did not present the opportunities of Nick, Robin, and Thomas. In jr. high and high school, I read Terry Brooks, and David Eddings, and Piers Anthony, and a lot of Star Trek novels. It seems funny that I read these (most of which I now think of as fluff) at the same time I loved Dorothy L. Sayers and Noel Streatfeild, who wrote what I think of as utterly believable characters, and who seemed to see the world as I saw it (and thus to be confronted with adventures and problems like my own). When I got to college and someone introduced me to Carolyn Heilbrun's Kate Fansler detective stories, I felt that I had found someone writing about a woman who I hoped to become.

I don't remember when I started reading current sci-fi/fantasy, exactly. However, I will never forget the experience of reading Sarah Monette's Doctrine of Labyrinths series, and thinking "oh, my God, I had no idea that it was even possible to capture life, and its disappointments and victories, in this way." I'm afraid that's not an especially original eloquent blurb, but it's what I felt at the time, and what I still feel when I go back to the whole quartet to reread it, which I do about every year. If you're curious, you should rush right out and buy the series, or at least the first volume, and you should pay no attention to the cover art, which gives the impression that Melusine is a soppy bodice-ripper. It's nothing of the sort. Though it is a series in which sex, both abusive, and non, plays a major role. And it's what I would hold up as an example and standard to literary fiction authors who feel that they simply must include a sexual abuse plot in their novels: that is how you do it.

Monette isn't the only sci-fi/fantasy author who has been able to reach me, though she was the first, and the one who did so most dramatically. I think it's fair to say that she's the reason I began paying attention to other sci-fi authors, and to blogs at Tor. I haven't time tonight, but at some point, I would like to write more about why the other major genre that I read is YA Lit.

So, if you're reading this: is there a book, series, or genre, that amazed you, that knocked you flat by portraying the world more richly than you imagined was ever possible?

Review: The Diviner's Tale, by Bradford Morrow

2011-02-01T20:54:00.000-08:00

In hindsight, I should have heeded my suspicions when I read the review of this book on BoingBoing, because it was praised as "literary," and in my experience, that means that it has pretensions to being a grand novel of sentiment and rebirth, when mostly, it's just clichéd navelgazing, with the increased likelihood of one particular plot device.

But the UK cover, which I thought (and still think) rather lovely in its design tempted me, and when I downloaded the sample chapter from Amazon, I genuinely thought the author's voice (or rather, that of the main character, Cassandra, equally lovely). Though I was immediately suspicious of anyone who would name a character who divines (primarily water, but also the future) Cassandra, I was drawn in. Not enough to buy the book, mind you, but enough to take time to go to Barnes and Noble and find it, and settle down at a table to have a closer look. I was drawn in even after finding a review on Amazon that mentioned the "tragic things" that befell the character when she was a child.

I'm afraid I didn't end up liking the book at all, despite the author's clever voice, and generally likeable characters. Morrow seems to want to use the supernatural (the divining talent) as a hook, but not one that will have any real force in determining what happens in the story's main mystery, so there's no real logic in the way that the mystery develops and unravels. This is a great pity, because I don't think the mystery was really necessary at all. There is plenty of conflict without it, involving, variously, religion, disease, different generations, and the tensions associated with fitting or not fitting into one's community. There's an acknowledgement thanking a divining group for help with research, and I can wholeheartedly say that I loved reading about Cass's divining work, and her relationship with her father Nep, also a diviner. I can imagine loving this book wholeheartedly.

But I don't recommend it. Part of the problem is that I don't think the mystery is well woven into the rest of the plot (which is a great mistake when you consider that this book is being shelved in the mystery, rather than the litfic section). And to go further into that, I need to spoil the plot, a bit.

Spoiler: central to the development of this novel is the revelation that Cassandra, the protagonist, was violently molested at age 7 by a friend of her elder, now-deceased brother. Morrow goes into a fair amount of detail, and I suppose I can say that the abuse scenes didn't feel as formulaic as they might have; but I was left wishing that I could remind the authors of the literary fiction genre (because that's the genre that Morrow seems to write in usually, judging by his Amazon listings) that there are more ways to create a complex, sensitive female character than to molest her. The molestation does help a major piece of the puzzle fall into place (actually, it drops the villain into the reader's lap, which is why I say that this is a poorly woven mystery), but other than that, it seems that it's there principally to add poignant drama to the story. And its principle effect, on this reader, is to make me think, "oh, the author got lazy." Morrow's not the only one who does this. It's related, I think, to the "dead women on book covers sell better than dead men," the crime procedurals that slowly film women being tortured and murdered. And countless authors seem to think that childhood sexual abuse/molestation/rape is the easiest way to amplify the profundity of their plots. It's not that abuse can't ever be written about, but there seem to be a whole lot of books where the point of the abuse is that it's somehow necessary to show that the female character's childhood had meaning beyond playing with dolls, books, frogs, or what-have you. That the said female character grew up; her adulthood proven by the pain of being assaulted.

All I can say tonight is that if that's their idea of how to write a character whose life has meaning, then I have no interest in their books. And I will laugh out loud when I see someone blurbing such books as "original."

what might an interdisciplinary research methodologies course look like?

2011-02-01T13:42:00.001-08:00

This morning, I was sorting through readings by E P Thompson, James Chandler, Ian Duncan, Fredric Jameson, and Alex Dick this morning, and juggling various strong opinions on the intersection of literature and economics, literary history, and the relation of history and historicism to the formation of political economy and economics. And I'm getting somewhere good with this, rather than just somewhere horribly muddled. But I felt a bit disheartened, too, because if I think back in my coursework, I can remember a lot of discussions tremendously well, but among them, there's little or nothing about how to develop a research methodology, or choose one (or most likely, a combination of those two) that addresses the challenges of interdisciplinary research.

The closest thing to a discussion like this took place in a Textual Studies course on early printed texts, which in addition to looking at the development of print from Caxton through the 18th century (the professor was a specialist in 18th century novels and dramas), and also covered the history of the emergence of textual studies/bibliography, and its fractious relationship with literary criticism in the 20th century. And that was nice, but it didn't address the issue of textual studies as interdisciplinary, understandably, because the whole point was to valorize it as worthwhile.

What I was wishing for this morning, was the memory of seminar discussions about the challenges of writing literary history, of balancing between close readings of literature and combining them with detailed factual and statistical research, not just on issues like book buying and readership (which I think of as a fairly usual place for lit critics to go to when they want to buff up an argument with historical data), but also poverty, famine, religion, politics, agriculture.* I don't mean that I wish someone had taught me how to do it "right," because it's entirely clear that there's not one single right way -- but I wish I had memories of discussions about the different effects of choosing one approach vs. another.

Part of that is no doubt that I'm working with three fields that really do have a fraught relationship. I can point to booklength discussions about whether literary history is or isn't possible, essays on the same, and quick little daggers flung in reviews about attempts to write literary history, directed, I think, at practitioners from both lit and historical backgrounds. Meanwhile, I'm still talking with several people who work on lit and econ. about the grenade that Mary Poovey lobbed when she published Genres of the Credit Economy in her assertion that literature simply wasn't a good medium for studying economics.

Anyway, assuming that I'm not the only one who wishes that there had been a course to directly address the issues of interdisciplinary research methodologies, here is a rough vision of what a course might look like, and/or might cover.

Disclaimer: I'm in a lit. program, and for the moment, I'm imagining this course based on what I wish had existed. I'd love to hear suggestions that might make it a course that would be useful for students in other disciplines as well. I think it might work best if it were oriented towards interdisciplinary research methods in the humanities, rather than IDRM across the board encompassing everything -- but that's just my temporary, preliminary opinion.

1. I think it would start by looking at disciplines that are so interwoven with literature that we barely even think of them as separate anymore: classics, history, and psychology. It would look at the emergence of literature departments in the 19th century as a separate discipline from classical studies, and probably review the literary/historical biography/New Criticism debates.

I know that these are old chestnuts, but I'd like to think that there are worthwhile and useful questions and points to consider, in terms of the intentions behind these early disciplinary combos, and in terms of the objections that were raised to them. And at the very least, I think that they merit being reviewed as formative influences on the discipline of literature today. The same goes for theory and psychoanalytic criticism.

How much time was spent on any of these would depend on the professor, but I imagine that this would account for between 30 and 50% of the entire course.** Readings, off the top of my head, might include: E.P. Thompson, Terry Eagleton, David Perkins, Rita Felski, Martha Nussbaum, Clifford Siskin, John Guillory, a selection from Theory's Empire...this list is not definitive.

2. From there, the course would shift into a more focused look at specific areas of interdisciplinary research that are currently active. Lit./econ. would be the subject of one week, and it probably wouldn't be a bad idea to spend another week on New Historicism. Other focuses might be anthropology/social sciences, public humanities and/or activism, history of science.

This would be the most challenging part of the course to put together, because the subject material would largely consist of a couple of readings from each of the interdisciplinary areas, in which the authors made direct claims or comments on the nature of the study, or which were otherwise emblematic of the particular area. Alternately, there's no reason that source material couldn't consist of digital archives, tools, etc., where those were available.

3. An exhausted, overcommitted professor could run this course and have it be useful just by using the standard method of having the students sign up to present on the readings and raise discussion questions each week. He or she would provide perhaps the most leadership in the beginning of the course, during those weeks where the focus is on literature and its origins as an interdisciplinary field. (I suppose that if I have an agenda for the course, that's part of it - the idea that literature has always been interdisciplinary).

I don't mean that he/she could tune out for the rest of it, because I would be counting on him/her to provide the sort of guidance and knowledge that only comes with having been a professional academic for longer than grad students have been -- for being familiar with different trends in research that have risen and fallen over time. I strongly suspect, however, that if the students were given some guiding questions to use: what specific goals arise in interdisciplinary research? What types of arguments does IDR lend itself to? What relationships can we see between the disciplines that are joined? -- that they could have lively and useful discussions which might later be useful to them while they were writing dissertation chapters. There's a lot of material that could be covered, but I've had some courses, one in particular, that overwhelmed with reading, and yet the massive avalanche of material, not to mention the syllabus itself, was useful and valuable, and I can still remember it in a fair amount of detail.

4. What would students get out of this? Primarily, an acquaintance with a bunch of readings outside their primary areas, in a context which included focused discussion about methodology -- what the authors were trying to do, and why. Probably, a useful final project/essay for this class would be to undertake an interdisciplinary research project/paper in one's own area. This assumes that the students are interested in IDR, but surely that's a safe assumption. It's an opportunity, then, for the student who's interested in literature and gender, to work on developing an argument that is overtly interdisciplinary, while thinking critically about what it means to be interdisciplinary, in terms of the types of sources used, and the types of questions raised.

Secondly, I hope the class would provide students with a space to think about the politics of interdisciplinary work, and probably the politics of the humanities in general. There's lots of territory there for literature, and surely for history, and library science, and philosophy, too. It's possible that what I really want, and am not fully articulating, is a class on the politics of literary study. (I do want that class.) But what I really wanted this morning, is a class where we might read Stephen Greenblatt one week, and Bruce Robbins Upward Mobility and the Common Good: Towards a Literary History of the Welfare State the next, and later, read Amartya Sen, and ask, in each case, what are they doing, and how, and why? And what does it look like when we discuss them as part of a sustained exploration? Are there techniques that are shared between all three? And assuming that there common techniques, that there are also differences, then what are they?

This is just one way that such a course could be put together. There are tons of others. The brilliant thing is that though such a course couldn't cover everything, that it would prompt insights and questions that would be transferable to other areas of interdisciplinary research, that might provide at the very least, a starting point for thinking about choices that one makes in developing an interdisciplinary research methodology.

But this is only a rough draft. How would you improve it?

ETA: I realized that by some standards, this may not look like an interdisciplinary research methodologies course at all -- surely that would involve techniques like statistics and ethnographic research being taught, right? I heartily agree, and if someone offered that class, I would have camped out all night in front of registration, just to make sure I got in.

One reason I didn't propose that class is that at the moment, my department would say "we don't have anyone who could teach that." I think a lot of departments might be in those straits. But the other reason I didn't propose that class is that there seems to be plenty of interdisciplinary work that shows up in books and essays even without bringing in quantitative research, and yet, is quite central to the author's main argument and/or his or her grounds for raising questions. And maybe that's Cultural Studies 101 stuff, but I sure would love it if we could interrogate it in the process of constructing seminar papers, conference papers, essays, abstracts, and dissertation chapters.

*And I don't just mean how to write Marxist criticism, though that certainly would be an applicable discussion to have.
**I'm thinking in terms of quarters, since that's the only system I've worked in. Semesters might work differently.

interdisciplinary pedagogy for literature and economics: a syllabus

2011-01-29T16:17:00.000-08:00

Part one

Part two

Part three

Enough nattering about: here's a syllabus to suggest one way that this course could be taught. It's designed to cover a lot of ground, time-wise, but through a series of careful hops, rather than reading everything, or pieces of everything.

ENGL ###: Where Literature and Economics Meet

We do not think of the disciplines of literature and economics as having much relevance to each other: the former is about stories that are imaginary, and read for pleasure; while the latter is about “real” situations which affect the wellbeing of individuals, cities, and even nations.

This course is about investigating that conflict, and about seeing it not just as a conflict, but as a dynamic relationship between two disciplines that has developed throughout the last three centuries. We’ll be using the techniques of economic analysis to read literature in new ways; as well as exploring how imagination, creativity, and metaphor are vital components in the discipline of economics. Among the questions we will consider are: On what grounds do literature and economics intersect? Can we use math and statistics to study novels and poetry? What happens when we look at literature as a knowledge-producing discipline? What changes when we consider economics as a science of human emotion? How do authors use economic forces to create literary genres? How do economists use storytelling in order to do their jobs?

In the course of the quarter, we will read primary sources in the genres of fiction, poetry, and economic theory; and secondary sources that provide useful contextual information, and help situate both disciplines in their historical context. You’ll learn about how practitioners in each field have critiqued and/or embraced the other, and in studying the way that economic analysis affects the way that literature can be interpreted, you’ll gain greater insight into the reasons for tensions between the two fields today. You will also be able to look at each field separately from very new perspectives: how can literature work as a science? How can economics work as an art?

This course cannot substitute for a traditional economics class, and is not intended to serve as an economics course for non-business majors. Instead, it’s meant to give you the opportunity to explore how the two fields have shaped each other, and to provide you with a foundation for further study involving literature and economics, as well as experience that will be useful in looking at the intersection of other humanities and hard science fields.

By the quarter’s end, you should have developed:

• Familiarity with the common ground between the fields of economics and literature, and the relationship of the two disciplines to each other.

• Knowledge of economic principles and questions that affect literature production.

• The ability to form new critical questions about both literature and economics, and to analyze and discuss the role of each in terms of their categorization as art or science.

• Familiarity with the critical concepts of authority, ideology, and economic behavior, and with the different types of reasoning and literary devices that are common to both literary and economic genres.

• The ability to think critically about how knowledge about economics is distributed through multiple sources.

• Critical thinking skills for searching, gathering, evaluating, and presenting search data.

• Practice writing in different genres, including formal academic essays, and writing for the web.

Reading Schedule

Week 1: Defining economics, defining literature
Reading: various brief excerpts defining economics, and defining literature

Week 2:
Defoe: “An Essay on Publick Credit” (1710)
Maynwaring: “An Excellent New Song, Called Credit Restored” (1711)
Addison: “A Vision of Public Credit” (1711)
Smith: Excerpt, The Wealth of Nations (1776)
Wordsworth: “The Old Cumberland Beggar” (1800)

Week 3:
Malthus: Excerpt, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798)
Blake: “The Chimney Sweeper” (Songs of Innocence) (1789)

Week 4: “Professional” authors, and publishing in the 18th century
The rivalry of Edmund Curll and Alexander Pope
Pope: “Moral Essays: Epistle IV” (1733)
Pope: Excerpts from “A Further Account of the Most Deplorable Condition of Mr.
Edmund Curll, Bookseller, Since Being Poisoned” (1716)
Curll: Excerpts from “A Compleat Key to the Dunciad” (1728)

Week 5: The emergence of the genre of economics
Ricardo, Excerpt, On the principles of political economy and taxation (1817)
Martineau: Excerpts from Illustrations of political economy (1832-4)
Dickens: “Bill-Sticking,” (1851) and “Shops and their tenants” (1839)

Week 6: The gay science vs. the dismal science
Excerpts from J. S. Mill and Thomas Carlyle
David Levy: Excerpt, How the Dismal Science Got Its Name
Ruskin: “The Veins of Wealth” (1860)

Week 7: Economics in the literary industry today:
Greco, Rodriguez, Wharton: “Changes in the book publishing industry, 1945-2005”
Dustin Kidd: “Harry Potter and the Functions of Popular Culture”
Ted Striphas: “A political economy of commodity codes”
Chris Anderson: Excerpt from Free: the future of a radical price

Week 8: Defining economics, defining literature II: the classification of arts and sciences
Martin Gardner: “Science and the Unknowable”
Karl Popper: “The Problem of Induction”
Paul Kristeller: Excerpt, “The Modern System of the Arts”
George Dickie: Excerpt, Art and Value
Daniel B. Smith: “What is Art for? (NY Times website)

Week 9: The transmission of economic information and authority
Student website presentations

Week 10: The conflict between literature and economics
Review of readings from Week 2 & 3
Focus question: When do literary and economic texts represent the real, and when do they represent the ideal?

interdisciplinary pedagogy for literature and economics, continued

2011-01-29T10:26:00.000-08:00

Part one

Part two

The challenge is that there's so much that could be done. As withneedle suggests in comments for part two of this series, you could do econometrics regarding genre creation and production (and Google ngrams makes that possibility all the more fascinating); you could look at character choices through the lens of economic behavior, taking into account that economic behavior encompasses far more than the obvious questions of to buy or not to buy, to invest or not to invest.

In order to make the class most useful, however, I think that it's necessary to find a way of making the integration of lit and economics into a sort of narrative in itself, something that helps avoid the combination simply becoming a gimmick. Narratives aren't an unmitigated good -- the inherited narrative of conflict between literature and economics has done plenty of damage -- and yet I think the best way to counter that damage is to show that different narratives exist as well.

The idea is that literature can help us understand the history of the discipline of economics – how it might have become an art, but instead became a science, and why it has remained a science. This is a slightly different way of looking at Mary Poovey's positioning of imaginative writing as a genre whose original purpose to help mediate value -- if she's correct in doing so (and I think she is), then the implication is that looking at how literary texts confront economic issues differently over time will naturally lead to understanding more about how the discipline of economics, and its cultural context, changed over time. A sustained course of study in lit. and econ. couldn't replace a quarter spent reading David Ricardo, Jeremy Bentham, James Mill, J. S. Mill, William Stanley Jevons, Carl Menger, and Alfred Marshall -- but neither could that course replace one mixing those economists with Ruskin, Dickens, Harriet Martineau, and Charlotte Brontë (or any other combination of literary and hard economic writers).

Today we see imaginative writing as an art, and economics as a science. Whether economics is actually a science, or will remain one, is a question that's been posed implicitly for years in any comment that implies that it takes mysterious talent or arcane knowledge to prosper using economic knowledge. It's posed more directly by David Brooks in a recent NY Times op-ed, which is then dissected by the late Maxine Udall. Notably, Brooks' idea that economics will "blow up" as a field centers around the role of mathematics vs. interpretation (or as Brooks puts it, "a subsection of history and moral philosophy"), and how important each one of these approaches is to producing economic knowledge.*

I think what Brooks is missing, or not addressing, is that the conflict that we're facing now is an echo of debates surrounding the emergence of the discipline of economics originally, both in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For a long time, depending on the author, a treatise might have an approach that was grounded more in mathematics, or in theory. By the mid-nineteenth century, economics was being discussed and written about as a science (and for that matter, "science" had taken on the meaning that it has in contemporary usage). In 1895, the London School of Economics and Political Science was founded; by 1901 it had been recognized as part of the University of London, and its degrees of BSc and DSc recognized as the first university degrees oriented towards the social sciences. But economics did not become a science, and has not remained one, without conflict.**

One of the costs of remaining a science is that economics has to display a different perspective on data than it would if it were an art. You could do an interesting study on the querelle des anciens et des modernes as it works differently in the arts and sciences, I suspect. But literature’s status as an art, its perspective on looking at information over long periods of time, and from different perspectives than economics, is one of the characteristics that makes it a useful platform for looking at economics. It avoids the tendency to look for norms and averages, and to make assumptions about whether aspects of economic livelihood are endogenous or exogenous (see Udall). It's why the two disciplines need each other.

* David Brooks is not an economist. Udall was, and she defends her discipline against the prediction that it will explode by acknowledging that in order to progress as a science, practitioners of economics need to diversify our methods for "conceptualiz[ing] and relat[ing] our theories to real-world phenomena."

** Just for giggles, check out the Google ngram for "art of economics." It's not as precise as I would like; for one thing, it's hard to tell exactly where single years match up with spikes in the data. But I do think it's interesting how it spikes up and down, and how several of those spikes seem to coincide with memorable financial crashes.

Observation

2011-01-26T19:15:00.000-08:00

I went to the first meeting of a procrastination/perfectionism group tonight, because I would like to be more capable at working through my internal censor when it inevitably starts grinding at me.

Of the other group members I shall only say that they made me feel welcome and seem like smart and courageous people. Not seem like. Are.

At one point, we were talking about feeling as though we don't read fast enough (I have yet to feel like I read fast enough. I either read too slowly, or too fast. Enough is elusive.) And it occurred to me that it's helpful to me to think of reading academic book chapters as not unlike proceeding through a level of Super Mario Bros. In a level of SMB (whichever version you prefer), you learn the shape of the level. And you get some coins, and some points, and maybe a mushroom, or a fire flower, or a star -- or maybe you don't! -- but you get that familiarity with the level, and you get through to the end so that you can go on to the next one. Maybe it's a really sweet level where you know where the warp tube is, or maybe it's more like 5-3, where you get pushed along and there are trees and sinking platforms. But you get through it. That's the point.

And a lot of academic reading is like that. The point is to establish familiarity.

Mind you, there's also close reading, where you focus intently, and go slowly, and pay attention to every word and how the sentences fit together.

Those two types of reading are no more the same thing than sanctioning (censoring/punishing) and sanctioning (approving). Much of the time, the two types of reading are used for very different purposes. They're not the same.

There are more complicated and intricate ways that I could keep exploring this and taking it further, but it isn't really necessary to do that in order to get to the observation that's most useful to me (and might be to you, if you're someone faced with an enormous reading load).

What's helpful is that I remember that reading a difficult chapter is in many ways like SMB 5-3. The point is to get familiar enough with it to get through it intact, fire flower, 1up mushroom, or not.

Review: The King's Speech

2011-01-25T23:41:00.001-08:00

I'd been excited on seeing trailers, but for whatever reason, when I actually had time to go see this, as of about 10 days ago, I was lackluster, thinking that it would disappoint me by being obvious Oscar bait. But tonight was the SOTU, and I found myself wanting to watch something other than the POTUS (though I did read the speech directly upon coming home).

It's a really lovely film, and what struck me about it most is that it's wonderful in a lot of different ways. I thought it would end up being a film about a stammer, and about that familiar narrative that reminds us that even the most powerful people need friends. But in fact, it seemed to be also a film about aging, and how our fears age with us, and about bravery, and about being constricted by formality (because it was about the constrictions that you can't escape, as well as some cheap narrative about overcoming them). I think it's probably a measure of the quality of the film making that many of the moments in the film were vividly portrayed enough that I thought of them as both their own, tiny, films, and as part of a larger whole.

Admittedly, I'm probably part of the target audience for the film: I struggled for years with speech impediments, including a stammer; and I still feel anxiety not so much about being in the spotlight, but being in the spotlight in a position of authority.

I did love it, though. Not once did I want to take out my phone and see what time it was. I don't think there's a bad performance in the whole piece, and the way the dialogue transitioned from the serious to the acerbic to the sentimental was marvelous. David Seidler, who wrote the screenplay, hasn't written anything previously that I think of as remarkable, so it's pretty interesting to me that this came out so wonderfully. Maybe it's an indication that he's a brilliant editor of other material, i.e. Logue's diaries, etc? I suspect, right at the moment, that the best screenplay award will go either to him, or to Christopher Nolan for Inception.

One final thing: I think this is the first Desplat score that I've actually liked.

What I've been reading

2011-01-25T10:45:00.001-08:00

I'll get back to the economic pedagogy posts later tonight, but I wanted to briefly note what I've been reading in the last year. I'd meant to do a best books read in 2010 post, but it looks as though I may not find the time. All of these are things I'd like to come back to and write more about, at some point.

All of these, and the ones listed below, I liked well enough to endorse here.

Plain Kate, by Erin Bow: okay, this was my favorite book of 2010. It'll get its own post soon.

StarCrossed, by Elizabeth Bunce: first book in a new series, looks as though it's going to have an interesting and complex take on politics and religion.

The Case of the Missing Marquess, by Nancy Springer: best surprise of 2010, because I had seen the Enola Holmes books in the bookstore, and reacted to them with the contempt that only someone who started reading ACD in 5th grade can manifest. "Who needs stupid books about Sherlock Holmes' kid sister?!" But then I read the w00t list over at Book Yurt, and was intrigued, and tried the first one, and was blown away by the balance of plot, strong character writing, and feminist thought that's so well integrated that it didn't feel didactic. I wish I'd been able to read these when I was 11 or 12; I really needed them then.

Behemoth and Leviathan, Scott Westerfeld: read on the plane ride back from London, which is usually gloomy since I am traveling in the Wrong Direction, and they were so much fun that I was cheered up and less inclined to mope. Mostly.

The Miracle Stealer, Neil Connelly: well-written portrait of conservative Christian culture (or at least, the version that I grew up with) that neither condemns it nor smooths it over. A good story, too.

All Clear, Connie Willis: I fully agree with the issues raised by Dame Eleanor, here, and yet, what struck me after I finished this was that for at least 48 hours, I would intermittently wonder what Polly and Merope were doing right now in 1940; and then have to remind myself that they weren't real. And in getting me to think that, I think the book did its job.

Monsters of Men, Patrick Ness: best/strongest ending to a trilogy EVER. In my experience. Needs its own post.

A Fistful of Sky, Nina Hoffman

A Mathematician's Apology, G. H. Hardy

Just Kids, Patti Smith

An Artificial Night and A Local Habitation, Seanan McGuire

Blameless, Gail Carriger

Rampant, Diana Peterfreund

The Name of the Wind, Patrick Rothfuss

Naked in Death, J. D. Robb

Tongues of Serpents, Naomi Novik

The Housekeeper and the Professor, Yoko Ogawa: I like stories about math. This is a good one.

Changeless, Gail Carriger

Enchanted Glass, Diana Wynne Jones

Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro

Parasite Rex: Inside the Bizarre World of Nature's Most Dangerous Creatures, Carl Zimmer

My Mother Was A Computer, N. Katherine Hayles

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson

Who Fears Death, Nnedi Okorafor: you should read this.

Silver Phoenix, Cindy Pon

Stealing the Elf-King's Roses, Diane Duane: unexpectedly wonderful urban technofantasy -- not what I was expecting from the title.

I Am Not A Serial Killer, Dan Wells: very good, and I need to find time to read the sequels.

Alcestis, Katharine Beutner: read this if you would like an expansion of the Persephone myth and/or stories about women with sexual desires/agency

The God of the Hive, Laurie R. King

Feed, Mira Grant

Ash, Malinda Lo

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson: I liked this, but I think it's telling that I haven't rushed out and read the other two books in the series.

The Weed that Strings the Hangman's Bag, Alan Bradley: somehow I didn't love this quite as much as I expected to. Might be me, and not Flavia.

interdisciplinary pedagogy for literature and economics: why it matters

2011-01-20T19:26:00.000-08:00

Part one

So, yes, there's a big conflict between economics and the humanities. I think that literature becomes a major face of the humanities in that conflict, and so does art -- there are more stories about flaky artists and poets than there are about flaky historians and philosophers. But that's not really important. What's more important is that the conflict is also between economics and everyone else. That's a grammatically crude way of putting it, I know, but it's also a crude, rough conflict, messy because it can be fought on the grounds of knowledge or on the grounds of wealth. Both knowledge and wealth are forms of power, but they're not quite the same, are they? Or are they? Is one superior to the other, and why? There's no universal answer; and attempting to find one gets into even more unanswerable questions and sensitive subjects, such as the unpleasant question of whether I'm genuinely smart, or just lucky.

One consequence of the baggage surrounding economics is that it ends up buried in layers of mystification, political partisanship, and probably just general caution. Discussing it is like bringing up religion at a dinner party -- a risky idea. But the consequences of our reluctance to attempt to make finance a more public subject* is that financial illiteracy is a huge concern.

My ideas for classes aren't going to solve these problems. It'd be foolish of me to claim anything more definite than that I think they might help, rather than aggravate further. I think my point, my reason for bringing this up, is that it's really difficult to develop an effective interdisciplinary pedagogy for literature and economics without at least some consideration of these issues. What you get, most likely, is the same dull round of literary authors critiquing the market, and an arc that's meant to develop the realization that their thoughts regarding the market were actually more complex.

Let me be perfectly fair and direct: unless you are willing to develop a more interdisciplinary pedagogy, you cannot escape that same dull round. Therefore, it's not the fault of the instructors who teach such classes that they're stuck here; and I do not intend these posts or my ideas as a critique of their work. Institutional support is often low or nonexistent for any interdisciplinary work,** and the combination of literature and economics is not exactly an intuitive combination.

I should also note that the conflict between literature and economics isn't one that's only important to the practitioners and students of literary studies, or to the general population at risk for financial illiteracy. It's also important for economics, as Richard Bronk explains here, in a brief essay about his book, The Romantic Economist:

My starting point for The Romantic Economist was an observation made during seventeen years working in the world of finance. I was struck by an important mismatch between the way economists usually model economies and the way markets often work in practice. Economists normally rely on essentially static equilibrium models to make predictions about markets, and they assume that economic actors optimise their trading possibilities on the basis of rational expectations. Yet, as we are daily reminded, markets are dynamic and creative processes characterized by relentless innovation, self-reinforcing emotional spasms and massive uncertainty. And, in this uncertain world, individuals are driven as much by emotion, sentiment, intuition and imagination as by rational calculation and probability forecasts of future utility.

Bronk, whose book I haven't finished in entirety yet, but which I recommend, is a very rare creature indeed, which is to say, someone approaching the two discourses from a background with more experience in finance than in academic studies of literature. He's not the only one to remark on the importance of emotions and sentiment -- the topic of behavioral finance and its implications for the efficient markets hypothesis (EMH), is being considered by others as well.

And it would be interesting to have a class looking specifically at sentiment in the markets, and sentiment in the novel. But I'm not proposing that, at least, not quite yet.

*And no, I know that this wouldn't be easy, that there are myriad issues of embarrassment and self-consciousness and dangers of ostracization and so forth.

**I am lucky to be at an institution where the support for interdisciplinary pedagogy is pretty damn good.

interdisciplinary pedagogy for literature and economics: some background

2011-01-20T14:53:00.000-08:00

I'd like teach classes that integrate literature and economics. Not just classes where the theme is credit satires of the 18th century or Victorian portrayals of the working class, but classes where it's foregrounded that literature and economics are two different knowledge producing disciplines, and that share methods. In both, imagination, metaphor, and logic are vitally important tools.

There's a lot of fractious posturing and well-rehearsed conventional thought about how literature* and economics aren't compatible. Those wacky poets and novelists, they have no head for money; while the cold-blooded economists have no heart, and maybe even no soul.

Among academics, there's also a lot of discussion about how both literature and economics are genres that could be called creative writing -- you write a poem, I write a check, and hey, both of them are creating something that isn't really there!. Money is valuable because we agree that it is, says John Locke; we agree that "a little piece of yellow metal, which would keep without wasting or decay, should be worth a great piece of flesh, or a whole heap of corn" (Sec. 37). It's really no different than the suspension of disbelief that we use when we're reading novels.

It became trendy a while back to suggest that lit. and econ. were rather two halves of one discourse, separated at the fall like the original humans in Aristophanes' account. Mary Poovey goes the farthest in that regard, writing that imaginative writing (as we would define it today) was one of three genres in existence at the end of the seventeenth century, whose main purpose was to mediate value. (The other two were money itself, and writing about money: shipping ledgers, economic theory, etc.) Marc Shell and Kurt Heinzelman, who produced some of the earliest writing on the genre, made similar moves; Heinzelman, if I recall correctly, is the first to wonder whether it would be possible to identify a point at which the discourse of literature and that of money really and truly parted ways for the first time. Money and fiction, like Sophie Zawistowska and Nathan Landau, the original star-crossed lovers. Or maybe more like George and Martha.

This idea of the two as separate halves of the same discipline has been made credible in part by the recognition that the Romantic poets and writers weren't quite so staunchly anti-commercial as previously thought; that their views on the subject were more complex than those of the stock character artists and writers in La Boheme. I'm summarizing here, and compactly, but Philip Connell's Romanticism, Economics, and the Question of 'Culture' provides a lot of historical data on the details.

Truthfully, I'm a little leery of the positioning of lit. and econ. as sundered discourses, because, as Rob Mitchell writes, "while metaphors, tropes, and modes of perception originating in finance may infiltrate literary discourse (and vice versa), if such slippage characterizes every other cultural discourse -- law, politics, medicine, etc. -- then finance and literature begin to seem like arbitrary points of departure and analysis" (8). But it might be right. My problem with it, and this is something I bring up because it's central to the question of a pedagogy uniting the two, is that it ends up being more distracting than useful. It's a move that feels defensive to me, like the lit. side is trying to passively and subtly assert its own importance in relation to finance, by connecting the two.

The conflict between them is huge -- let's acknowledge that. It's not just a catfight -- professional organizations in the humanities are counseling academics to find ways to "emphasize its practical and economic value." It's being called the "Crisis of the Humanities," and looking back over the multitude of articles covering it in the last three years (more than I can list here), there's been little or no development in the argument. It just gets more and more dire as arts and foreign language departments are shuttered.

I don't have an answer to that conflict, or some big insight that solves that problem. But I do think that it, meaning the conflict between the two, needs to be actively considered in the process of developing courses and pedagogy that brings the two subjects together, because otherwise, I don't think those arguments can move forward -- or at least, it's much less likely that they will.

I'll start addressing how we might surmount this problem in my next post in this series.

*(which, for today's purposes, I'm using to mean both the creation of fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction AND the study of said literature)

Trying out a new aphorism.

2011-01-18T20:16:00.000-08:00

The difference between art and economics is that in the former, only the geniuses are mad, and in the latter, everyone is.

I promise there will be a real blog post soon.

2011-01-18T19:11:00.000-08:00

But if you're looking for something to read, you should go and check out the excerpt of Jo Walton's Among Others at Tor.com.

I've been thinking about writing a Jo Walton post all weekend, because I went out Saturday night to buy eggs, to make bread, but the little convenience store 3 blocks away only had extra large eggs. Honestly, why? Surely it would make more sense to have regular-sized eggs on hand, for people who buy them both for eating plain, and cooking?

So I walked another 8 blocks, to the big grocery, where there were eggs, standard large size, thank you very much. And I bought them. And I would have walked home, but it was raining, and I thought, oh, I could walk to the university bookstore and see whether they have Among Others in stock, because I am curious about it and have heard that it is appearing early.

They didn't. What they had was Lifelode. Lifelode! Which I have been curious about for two years, but thought I might never encounter in the wild.

And $25 is a lot of money to pay for a book without seeing it first, especially when you are a reader who is either enraptured or entirely unmoved by the author's books. I don't mean this as a criticism of Jo Walton; it's just that she writes books that move a lot of different people, not all of whom are me.

Anyways, I looked at Lifelode long enough that I missed the first bus. And then the second. And then I gave up and bought it, resolving to skimp on the gluten-free treats and other luxuries, and reminding myself to hang onto the receipt in case I didn't care for it.

I needn't have worried though, because I love it just as much as I love The Prize in the Game, which I still think is the closest that any book has come to duplicating the music and intensity of feeling that I associate with opera in print.

You should buy Lifelode if you loved The Prize in the Game, or if you have a spare $25 around, but you probably don't -- so if you see it in a bookstore, then for god's sake, take the time to look at it, because it's worth missing buses for.

Anyways, I was uncertain about whether I would like Among Others, because what if I felt like I was reading it through a filter that stripped it of all emotion (which, sadly, is how I felt about both Ha'penny and Half a Crown, and I don't really understand why, which makes it all the more vexing. I'm pretty sure it's me, and not Jo Walton -- I should be clear about that.) I liked Farthing very much indeed.

But I'm reading it right now, in between bouts of working on another project, and it is very good indeed, at least at 15% of the way through. I'm not going to link to any of the reviews that are all over the place, because I'm of mixed minds on whether they'll be any good; I only started to read each, and then decided they were telling me something I'd rather hear from the book itself.

Instead, here are two quotes:

‎"Until the end, knowing them brought us nothing but good. And in the end, I don't think they understood. No, they did. They were as clear as can be. It was we who didn't understand.
I wish magic was more dramatic."

"Because this is after the end, this is all the Scouring of the Shire, this is figuring out how to live in the time that wasn't supposed to happen after the glorious last stand. I saved the world, or I think I did, and look, the world is still here, with sunsets and interlibrary loans."

And if they don't make you curious, well, then nothing else I can say would.

I might post a real review, if I think there's anything I can say about it when I'm done reading that will be useful to you. I might attempt to review Lifelode, except that it would be better if you read it without hearing me go on and on first.

The best thing about Jo Walton's writing, for me, anyways, is that she knows how to write about the searing intensity of feelings, not just joy or sorrow or raging anger, but everything in between, too, tranquillity, and even the light stirrings of desire. And she knows how to write about people not only feeling, but people seeing other people feeling, and reacting; and she does all this without the least bit of telling, rather than show. I don't know how she manages it, because it ought to be telling, especially in the latter case -- but it's always wonderfully natural -- the realization rising naturally from whoever is having it.

I suppose this is a real post; it's just sort of a scattered excited one, though I'm very serious, not feeling flip at all. A nice contrast, then, to diss reflections.

Through hell and back, part 3, the end

2011-01-17T13:53:00.001-08:00

At some point near the end of December, or the beginning of January, I started referring to the chapter as the Lernean Hydra, because it felt as though with every component of it that I organized, I realized that there were two other bits that needed work. Ironically, that was actually the point at which I also began to believe, really and truly, that the end was in sight.

Well, the first end. M will have feedback, and I've already mentioned specific areas of concern to him that I'll want to keep improving. But I could actually identify the specific components of the argument, and the way that they needed to fit together that would make them compelling; I knew, too, what I was leaving out, and why I was leaving it out at this point.

And then it did start to be fun. I glanced back at a source from 1932, and realized that it treated my subject much differently than it's handled today, and it allowed me to add a nice show-not-tell component in the front of the chapter. I started to be excited about the fact that I was starting the chapter with a mid-century parody that gleefully roasted the poem which had been my main subject in the previous chapter, and that also supported my interpretation of it.

I did have to rearrange things, and I kept making voice memos on my iPhone about specific bits of tinkering I could do, tweaking tiny things that would make the argument as a whole more nuanced, more exciting. Honestly, I sometimes think that the best part of the iphone for me in terms of academic work is not InstaPaper, or Dropbox, or anything of those sophisticated apps that keep appearing -- it's that when an insight hits as I'm walking along, I don't have to stop and fumble for a pencil and paper, or try to write as quickly as I can think. I just have to yank out my phone and start talking.

There's little to say about the last parts, or little that I think will be helpful. On the day before I turned in the chapter, a discussion that I've been wanting to write for three years suddenly became clear, or rather, I knew how to start the first sentence, and then the second sentence, and so on. I didn't realize it at first, which is why it's written on a string of yellow 4x4 post-its that you can see on top of a pile of papers in my first post about this.

By that point, I was making lists of things to do, labeled high priority and low priority, and enjoying the satisfaction of crossing them off, one by one. And then came the moment when it was finished.

And then I realized that I was out of printer paper. Oops. (But this is what campus libraries are for, I suppose).

Today I'm prepping a fellowship application, and making plans for the next part of the diss. This requires a bit of thinking, because where I'd originally planned to do 5 chapters, it looks increasingly like I really only have room for 4. On the other hand, a lecture that I went to on Friday afternoon helped to crystallize a few ideas, and I think I know what the main subject of the conclusion will be, and thus, what direction this will go as I turn it into a book proposal.

Of course, M. might write back when he's read the chapter and say that I'm loony. But I don't think he will. He might say that the chapter needs a lot of work, though. That's okay. That, I can deal with.

Writing these reflections may be useful for other people, or may not. They've been very helpful for me, not only because they've allowed me to become more conscious of the matryoshka issue, and how that affected my mood; and if I can put that to good use in moving forward, then these three posts will have served their purpose completely.

I hope, if you land here, that reading these posts will be helpful for you, whether because they're a concrete record of someone else flailing about in frustration, or because you can feel superior, having flailed less, or flailed more gracefully. Or maybe just because using the voice memo feature on your ipod or smartphone will be helpful. Whatever the case, if you're here because you're in the midst of writing a dissertation or thesis chapter, I wish you well.

Through hell and back, part 2

2011-01-16T00:56:00.001-08:00

School started. A lot happened. My director would have liked me to go on the job market (I would have liked to go on the job market!) – but in trying to summarize the dissertation and its chapters in a snappy coherent way, I ran aground: I just didn’t know the specifics of where each chapter was going in a way that meant I could summarize it in brief sentences, and yet have it sound like it was either finished, or on its way to being finished. I couldn’t even do that with the chapter I was working on, because the Aha! moment I’d had at the end of September would have sounded incoherent alone – it was a part of a good argument, but not enough.

With a colleague, I ran an unconference.

And I kept writing, if you can call the above fragmentary activities writing. In hindsight, I wish I’d given myself more time off. I did watch about 2 hours of television a week, and there were some nights where I was incredibly diligent, and others where I had a really hard time not putzing around on the internets. I always stuffed a book or article in my purse when I went out, and I should have given myself permission to just lay off. It was like I had a grindstone for a nasal piercing. Not cool. Not good. In this quarter, outside of plane reading on an emergency trip to London, I read 3 extracurricular, non-work-related books. For me to read 1 book per 3.3 weeks? Is insane, and not good.

I didn’t really realize how tense I was, only that my handwriting seemed to be getting worse and worse, and that, too, was frustrating. Then, mid-November, I treated myself to a massage, and discovered that my handwriting immediately showed a dramatic improvement.

Looking back at a draft document at this point, I can see that what I was doing was deleting a lot of ineffective, unambitious framing that I had crafted during the summer and early fall, and replacing it with better, albeit much rougher framework that took into account the historical economic argument that I was developing. By this time, the chapter had ballooned into 40-45 pages, and so I was also going through and highlighting the sentences and paragraphs that seemed to be most clear in communicating my point.

A note: in case it's not clear from other posts on this blog: I am not a linear thinker. In fact, I tend to instinctively think that the best arguments sliver seemingly unrelated ideas together, only to draw them together in the end. I think this instinct comes both from my proclivities for poetry, and for detective novels, and it has taken a very long time for me to learn that what I think will make the piece more interesting to the reader will not necessarily make it more helpful.

Actually, I haven't learned that yet. Near the end of this chapter, when all the pieces really were falling into place, I created a word document that loosely outlined the progression of ideas in the first half of the chapter in what I thought (and thought carefully!) was an organized fashion. Three days before I turned it in, I looked at that section with consternation, realizing that it just wasn't as smooth in its delivery of ideas as I had thought it would be. When I created a descriptive outline, I realized that it leapfrogged, paragraph to paragraph, between the 18th and 20th centuries. And it wasn't that the result was awful, but it was not going to be helpful in educating my readers about the background for the argument involving specific literary texts.

I set out to fix it so that it moved, in a mostly chronological fashion, through the 18th century, and then the 20th. It took a full day to do this (via the first descriptive outline, and then the second, with Very Specific Notes about transitions and linkages, and finally, the stitching everything else together. I still don't quite understand why that should have been the case; it doesn't seem as though it should have been such a slow process.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

After the end of the quarter, and grading, I went back to basically full-time work. I did go see Tangled (it's interesting -- the story in the film actually makes about ten times more sense than the "original"), but mostly, I just worked at the chapter. It wasn't that I was dedicated or enthralled in some sort of romantic passion for the problem that I was dealing with. Mainly, I felt like my arse was on the line, and my entire credibility with my director, the department, etc.

Then I had another breakthrough, on December 13th, when I went back to look at a secondary source, and realized that the way its author was framing his argument was really helpful -- not so much as a direct model for my argument, but because the way he was constructing it made it a really useful foundation for the argument that I was trying to develop. I had been having a hard time balancing its abstract and concrete dimensions so as not to make them look flimsy as all get out. And rereading D.'s chapter, I found part of the clarity that I had been looking for. I wrote 300 words paraphrasing his argument, and explaining their relation to mine, and those 300 words went straight in, in the end, unaltered, and they were part of 1300 words that I've been trying to articulate for three @#%%^#@(*%$#@$ing years.

I stopped work for 4 days, from the 22nd, to the 26th of December, prompted as much by the fact that I was just a bundle of panic attacks and nerves as the Christmas holidays.

I actually pounded through and finished, then, just before New Year's (or was it just before Christmas?), swearing that I just wanted to be done, that I would let M. tell me what he made of the argument, and not worrying about the sloppiness of the readings. I wanted so badly to be done, to hand something in, to feel more competent than worthless.

Of course, when I went through and looked at the thing before sending it off, it clearly wasn't done; the readings were there, but without the framing commentary that would be necessary to make them compelling, and that would connect the parts of the chapter together. FAIL. AGAIN.

One of the hardest parts of this chapter was internalizing the range of strategies that I had available to me for constructing an argument. I was thinking about this same challenge before the quarter started, looking at a couple of undergraduate composition papers that were meant to respond to a text that was about the dominant mood and atmosphere in Europe between WWI and WWII. The freshman students had, not surprisingly, had a difficult time with it, and it seemed immediately clear to me that part of the problem was that the very idea of writing about something as abstract as mood or atmosphere would have been entirely foreign to them; so foreign, in fact, that they might naturally have assumed that the scholarly text they were responding to was about something else, that all the stuff about mood and emotions was just the author being fancy.

I wasn't quite that naive; I did know about the different types of arguments that scholars used, and that few ideas or things were off-limits. But knowing that an argument about economic authority might be used, and realizing that I was constructing such an argument myself were two different things, and I do wish I had figured out a way to practice that as a graduate student doing coursework, and that it had been the subject of some form of workshop discussion in my seminars. I understand why it's not; or I think I do: many of the graduate professors currently teaching today weren't taught to teach writing (or perhaps taught to teach at all), and the assumption is that if you know how to write a sufficiently effective essay to get into graduate school in English, you must be good enough to figure out the intricacies and variants of argument styles.

Enough with the soapboxing. Despite the frustration of thinking I was done, and then realizing I wasn't, I did know that the chapter was starting to come together; I did begin to believe that it would be effective, and I believed I was close enough that I could be excited about it, and realistically, I have no idea where I would be without that vital burst of adrenaline. Not finished, I think.

Through hell and back: the downs and ups of one dissertation chapter (part 1).

2011-01-14T22:44:00.001-08:00

Hey, look! It's a finished dissertation chapter!

From the top:

And from the side:

But hey, wait a minute. Neither of those are the finished chapter, which is a compact 77 pages, tucked into my director's briefcase with a bottle of single malt that I brought back from London.*

It's been in the works for about 6 months, this chapter, by some measurements; longer, if you consider that it's a close companion to the chapter that came before it. By those standards, it's been maturing for 11 months or so. And in the middle, I took a couple of months where I was working on a grant project that was only loosely related. I don't have any illusions that turning the chapter in today makes it done; in fact, as I told M, my director, there are some specific areas where I know it can be improved. But it's at the point where I could hand it off to M and be fairly confident that the chapter accomplishes a large chunk of what I want it to, and in the areas where it's weaker, either my intentions will be clear, or the fact that they're not really clear won't destroy the strength of the whole chapter.

I wanted to write about it while the experience was still fresh (I just turned it in today!) both for my own records, and in case other people who wander in to this blog want to know what one person's experience of writing a diss chapter was like. I ran into a classmate a couple years behind me in the mailroom this afternoon -- he's just starting to write, and hearing that I had just turned mine in, he said "Huh. So they can actually get finished?" And because I am not an asshole, I said they could, but not without recounting a bit of my hair-tearing and gnashing of teeth.

Disclaimer: all these experiences are mine, and may not apply to anyone else's dissertation chapter.

For a while, M and I were looking at the chapter as mainly important as the companion to a flashy chapter that came before it, proposing an unusual reading of a once-popular poem, backed up carefully with plenty of historical research. Chapter 2 dealt with a handful of poems, ranging from the canonical-but-not-read-anymore to the obscure-to-all-but-academics to the obscure-even-to-most-academics., and their genre. It was meant to be the natural extension of the argument in Chapter 1, applying to the neglected genre of the once-popular poem. I don't know why I thought it would be a quick pounding of the keys to get it done, though maybe it was just eagerness to get the chapter done -- after all, getting the first one done had been a struggle, both because the argument dealt with two fields (lit and econ.) and because part of the time, while working on it, I'd been unknowingly struggling with celiac disease.

But I thought I had it; I put together a 3 page abstract of the thing before leaving for England for the summer. I did manage to spend some time on it while there, but it was flat; so flat that if I'd written it and given it to M, I think he would have described it as bland. And nothing more.

Bland.

Bland.

It's not what you want a dissertation chapter to be. And it wouldn't have been a good support for the previous chapter -- if I'd let it stay bland, I fear it would have undermined the previous, more ambitious chapter, and suggested that the argument it presented was little more than an anachronistic gimmick.

So I wrote. I read the three poems I wanted to write about in detail over and over; I read criticism, and history, and economics, and sociology, often feeling as though none of the criticism (from whichever discipline) was making any lasting impression. I had a 6x9 Moleskine notebook, and I wrote in that, day in, day out. A lot of days, I think I hit 1000 words; but not all. I used the Pomodoro method. I stayed away from FB and Twitter (mostly).

It felt like I got nowhere.
"
I wrote notes that were brief terse phrases: "connect _________ with __________." Does Scholar B's concern apply here? To what effect?"
I wrote lists arranging the various components of the chapter and its arguments. And where the subarguments fit in. I drew arrows between certain main and sub arguments just to make sure I remembered the potential connections between them. Sometimes, because I felt prone to forgetting, I scribbled furious notes in the margins of my moleskine, reminding myself not to forget vital points of connection. I didn't forget them, mostly, but I didn't manage to do anything with them, either. During this time, I was working from approximately 10 in the morning to 8 at night on this, some days, and some more like 4-8, having spent the other part of the day on grant work.

Now, in hindsight, I can see that the stuff I was mulling over was useful, that it was almost certainly the basis that allowed me to make the leaps that I've made, especially in the last month. At the time, it felt like nothing, and that felt terrible, and I wanted to beat myself up for not knowing more about econ than I do, while I simultaneously reminded myself that self-flagellation would accomplish nothing. I wrote letters to friends and mentors, not to send, but to attempt to explain what I was trying to do, in the hope that it would help me make it clear in more formal academic language what I was trying to do. I think I had about 30 typewritten pages by the end of summer, and about 20 handwritten ones.

I came back to the states from England at summer's end, feeling fairly embarrassed about not having produced a finished chapter. M was invaluably neutral, both encouraging and non-threatening without giving any sense of coddling. I got down to work, both in terms of the chapter and prepping for teaching a new class. I read more primary sources. I read more secondary sources. I tried to make sure that the argument that I was trying to work with in terms of secondary crit matched up with the readings of the poems. It did, but it still felt flat.

So I worked, meaning that I read, and write, and tried to be tolerant of my writing when I was writing clumsily, because eloquence wasn’t the point at this stage. Sometimes, this worked well, but sometimes, I’d come back and look at something I’d written a few weeks or days (or months) earlier, and be appalled at the sloppiness of it.

My writing process is a little odd (compared to the way it worked when I was just writing 8-10 or 12-15 page papers), in that I often have a main Word document with the current draft of the chapter, and then as it progresses, I tend to draft in separate TextEdit documents, often almost freewriting, but sometimes veering into more formal language when I realize how I want to get a point across. Sometimes, sections of these documents end up pasted into the main dissertation, but often they don’t. Some of them are me actually thinking, and some are like the short papers that graduate professors often ask students to write as a way of “teaching” the assigned readers. I’ve grown really attached to this style, whether I’m using Scrivener (which I’ve done for one chapter) or just using TextEdit, and saving documents in a folder. I like Scrivener, but the font and formatting issues sometimes drive me nuts – or to put it differently, sometimes I really like composing in plain text. I also, much of the time, feel like I can’t think straight unless I’m writing, rather than typing.

I held lengthy, detailed dialogues with the authors of criticism in the margins of their pages. I marked things with bookdarts. I made diagrams mapping the congruence of ideas between the texts, and the criticism.

I worked on the chapter most of the time, which means that when I wasn’t planning lessons, I was peering at my notes, or rereading Barbara Herrnstein Smith, or E.P. Thompson, or simply trying to sit still and think. I videochatted with the SEL each night; and he was valiantly supportive and caring, meaning that he asked me good questions and listened to me try to talk through the argument, and encouraged me to go to bed, rather than try to subsist on 3 hours of sleep a night (noting, as I recall, that Margaret Thatcher had claimed that she was able to do so (but implying, was she really who I wanted to emulate? No.)). I wrote letters to the SEL in response to his questions, also unsent, and one of them, dated 26 September, became a document that I went back to again, later, as I was trying to sort things out.

At the end of September, one night, at about two in the morning, the imaginary dialogue that I was having with one of my economic critics suddenly clicked into place, and I knew I’d realized something important. I filled three or four single-spaced pages in my Moleskine, and noted on Facebook that what I thought the chapter really needed was for me to be gutsy and risk-taking both in terms of the lit-crit argument and the economic argument. (And that is certainly true. But one of the most unfamiliar parts of dissertating is understanding the larger and smaller arguments that fit together in the chapter, and how they fit together. I thought at the time that I was almost done, and yet I obviously, absolutely wasn’t.

If I could go back and tell myself one single thing, it would be a reminder that a dissertation chapter is made up of arguments linked and nested like matryoshka dolls, and that finding a piece of the argument is occasion for celebration. Instead, I treated it like the buzzer indicating the start of the Final Jeopardy round, meaning that I had 3 days to finish (my arbitrary estimate of the 5 minute FJ in terms of chapter writing) – and then became terribly angry and dejected when I didn’t manage to follow through. I thought I was betraying my director, my SEL (whom I excitedly told that I was close to being done over and over again), and most of all, myself. And this experience really colored the 4 months of writing that followed, such that, on New Year’s Eve, I thought (and rejected) writing a Facebook status about wishing that I could spend less of 2011 feeling utterly incompetent.

It was not that bad, by the end of 2010. In fact, it was getting a lot better. But because I hadn't grasped the matryoshka concept, I felt rotten about not having finished, instead of feeling good about having climbed this far up the slope of the chapter.

That is the foremost thing I'm going to attempt to remember as I move forward with the next chapters.

* I hadn't actually intended to give them both to him at the same time, but like I told him, it's a long chapter, and will take a little while to consume The whiskey will take longer to consume, and it's the better quality object.

Zaw Artisan Pizza and Mariposa Penguinos

2011-01-14T21:07:00.000-08:00

Myth: I was sure that only buff male athletes ate whole large pizzas in one sitting.
Fact: I eat whole pizzas from Zaw Artisan Pizza in one sitting.
Fact which is almost too good to be true, but is true, nonetheless: I don't feel awful and overstuffed afterwards. This is not because the pizzas are skimpy, though they are intentionally thin-crusted.

If you're in the Seattle area, and you like pizza, and especially if you're on a gluten-free diet, you need to check out Zaw. Actually, if your home is within moderate driving distance of Seattle, you need to check out Zaw. They make the best pizzas that I've ever had. And the pizzas are unbaked, so if you need to pick one up on your way home from work and pop it in the oven a little later for your family, you're fine.

I did not plan to eat the first Zaw pizza that I bought (pumpkin puree, roasted pumpkin, maple syrup-caramelized onions, Isernio's spicy sausage, and mozzarella) in one setting. But once it came out of the oven, there was just no way I wasn't going to. And if I hadn't, my cat, who kept trying to grab pieces of it, would have figured out how to get into the refrigerator before I could eat the leftovers.

I don't think I need to say anything else about them, except that any restaurant that comes up with a pizza with prosciutto and arugula is taking the art of the pizza to a whole new level. And the Cowardly Apricot pizza, which I had tonight, is equally sublime.*

The only other points that I should make are that they have reasonably priced bottles of wine, and salads: and in said salads, they do not skimp on the cheese.

*Yes. I am a Romanticist, and I called a pizza sublime. Not just any pizza. Zaw pizza.

***

Another true story. When I was in elementary school, I sat next to two boys, Nathan Zwink and Jesse Harris, and sometimes they were jerks, and tried to flip up my skirt, and other times we got on just fine and built tunnels in the school sandbox, and dug deep enough to hit water (about 10-12"), and crafted networks of tunnels and "underground" lakes.

And in 4th grade, Nathan and I were in the same class, and seated near each other, and every day at lunch he offered to trade me his Hostess Choco Bliss for my Fruit Roll-up, and I eagerly accepted. My household was one in which Hostess products were absolutely forbidden, as was Wonderbread.** I have no idea why Nathan was so willing to trade. Was it an elementary school crush (as one friend has suggested)? Or did he simply prefer fruit roll-ups (which, I won't deny, are delicious), to Hostess products?

That daily lunchtime trade is one of few aspects of elementary school that I vividly remember. A couple of years ago, I had a chance to eat a Hostess chocolate Ding Dong, and, well, it just didn't hold up to my 4th grade memories. The Choco Bliss, I realized, was as ephemeral as the memories evoked by Proust's madeleine.

Or so I thought, before I got hold of the Penguino cream-filled chocolate cupcakes by Mariposa Bakery.***

They were so good that they led me straight to a moment of religious aporia: do Hostess cupcakes have souls, and do they believe in the transmigration of the soul?

Because if they do, then the really good Hostess cupcakes are rewarded by being reincarnated as Mariposa chocolate cupcakes. The prospect is so appealing that it almost makes me wish I were a cupcake. More than that: it makes me wish that I could be good.

Do I need to say any more? No? I didn't think so.

**(Oh, Wonderbread, how fascinated I was by your celebratory packaging; how disappointed by your spongy reality.)

*** You can get them by mail order, but they might also be in stock at your local Whole Foods, or Metropolitan Market (if you're in Seattle.)

A dream job

2011-01-05T23:50:00.000-08:00

Note that I say "a" and not "the."

I live in what is, most of the year, an adorable and enviable apartment. Hardwood floors, a fireplace, a tub, black and white tile in the kitchen, crystal doorknobs, with plenty of windows, lots of light, and even a small yard and garden.

But it has single-paned windows, and not especially wonderful insulation, and in the winter, especially when the temperature range is 25-40F, it is a singularly unpleasant place to be, and one that holds heat badly.

I was whimpering about this on FB, when my friend J., whose husband was traveling overseas for a week, invited me to come and stay with her in her lovely, warm, insulated house. I hesitated just a tiny bit, though really I could have kissed her. Repeatedly. Being cold is miserable, and I am sensitive to it, even when I'm wrapping myself in microfibers and fleece and down blankets. I find it challenging to type and read if I restrict my mobility too much, and I don't love the utility bills that accompany the warmth of my heaters.

"You don't mind if I cook, do you? Because I have a 5 pound squash I need to do something with...."

No, she didn't mind (though I shouldn't feel obligated), and in fact, she loves squash, while her husband doesn't so much. Brilliant!

Last night I made squash pancetta risotto; tonight I took the rest of the squash and turned it into an apple-squash soup, and served it up with kale crisps and an eggplant-tomato tartare. I had to reassure J. that this was normal behavior for me (well, normally I might not do all three on the same night), and that, in fact, I was in heaven, having a chance to cook for an audience.

Tomorrow I actually will keep it ultra-simple: Greek salad, and yam fries. (I do seem to be in an orange root vegetable phase, but I'm taking care that each version tastes different).

But it got me thinking. What I would love, is this: if people could hire me to come to their house, learn what they like to eat, and cook dinner for them each night, in quantities that would provide leftovers for the following day's lunch (optional, since I know that some people are decidedly anti-leftover), for periods of 3-7 days. I wouldn't need to live in, though I'd need access in the afternoon each day if they weren't home.

I wouldn't want to do it for less than three days; and I don't think I'd want to go more than seven. Maybe no more than five in a row. I wonder if a market for that exists: a sort of staycation treat, perhaps? Appealing to people who like restaurants, but would like a restaurant experience customized to them, and/or who don't love the hassle of going out. All dishwashing included, natch; and for an additional fee, I'll teach them to make the dishes themselves.

2011-01-02T20:06:00.001-08:00

Do not hurry; do not rest.

2010-12-30T15:04:00.001-08:00

I have been working on this chapter intensively for the last 3 months, albeit while teaching a challenging but rewarding composition class. Before that, I was working on it while trying to work on a research grant in sort of, but not precisely, the same area.

Before that, I was working on it in the sense that it's highly connected with the subject of another chapter. On good days, I think of them as the Wonder Twins; on bad days, as Tweedledee and Tweedledum.

It remains to be seen whether the agony that I've put myself through in trying to weave the arguments together is worth it; whether it will convince my committee. Though I'm very hopeful. I stopped, right around Christmas, because I was too exhausted, and too stressed, and was only making myself more upset and less able to progress than the reverse.

I went back to it 4 days ago, and I'm pretty sure I've just gotten the whole damn thing sorted in terms of order, so that it appears to be a human form, as opposed to a leg and an arm attached to a giant ear. Or a mostly human form with an extra arm protruding from its arse.

Today, for whatever reason, I'm tending to think of it in terms of Doctor Who romance fanfic. This results in various metaphors that I shouldn't record here in public. But we'll see if my giddiness gets the better of me as I finish putting the sections together.

Poirot: Murder on the Orient Express

2010-12-29T02:16:00.001-08:00

I have been watching this in tiny installments since Christmas, and only recently finished it. The Guardian didn't care for it much; and I had low expectations, because the script rewrites on some of the adaptations have been rather horrendous.

But.

It was riveting, and made me want to go out and watch the whole Suchet-Poirot canon from start to finish (well, so far) -- there aren't that many more to go, and as far as I know Suchet is planning to go up through Curtain. If this was any indication, he's read the rest, and knows what is coming. This installment was Poirot both brittle and strong as iron; it made me think of him both as intensely human, in a way I can't remember feeling before -- but also as akin to the Doctor. Am I seeing Timelords everywhere?

It shouldn't have worked. The source material is charming, but flimsy; the scriptwriters put in a Hammer of Symmetrical Foreshadowing early on that should have made me turn it off in disgust. But Suchet is incandescent; the rest of the cast (Eileen Atkins and Barbara Hershey among them) are none too shabby either, but they would fall flat if they had a lesser incarnation of Poirot to face off against.

Disclaimer: I haven't read Orient Express lately; I cannot and am not commenting on the precise fidelity of the adaptation of the novel. But when I finished the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew in 3rd or 4th grade, I went straight into Poirot; he was childhood and adolescence for me; and it's with that certainty that I say that this was an entirely true vehicle for his character.

I will get back to the Midnight Folk.

2010-12-28T21:41:00.000-08:00

Soon.

Tonight, though, I watched the season finale (well,the final two episodes) of Tower Prep on the Cartoon Network. I was kvetching about the show a couple of weeks ago. It started strong (The Prisoner, but set in a prep school), and then the four main characters seemed to turn into lazily written flat characters: the jock, the clown, the pretty girl, the slightly less pretty girl -- and they got lazy, and the two girls seemed to be only interested in boys. BOOOOOOOOORRRING.

But I did keep watching. Last week's episodes were much better, in that we started to learn more interesting things about the backstory of the school, and the relationships between the characters started to become more complicated.

This week's episodes were wonderful. They worked really well, because the plot lines, honestly, were simple, and so the complexities between the characters themselves became what moved the story forward. In previous episodes, there's been a tendency to do the opposite -- to have an intricate story that really leaves no room for anything more than four flat archetypes. We saw, for the first time, major tension between the Fab Four, and it had little to do with who really likes who (and thus it escaped falling into the realm of cliche).

If you have a tween, or teen who likes adventure shows, I think s/he might enjoy this. You both might get a little annoyed at the mid-season, but maybe you won't -- or maybe only you will. And the last five episodes pick right up and fly.

I really hope it comes back for a second season.

Matched, by Ally Condie (with brief spoilers in ROT13)

2010-12-26T21:23:00.000-08:00

My friend Els mentioned Matched as the hip new teen dystopia on Facebook.

I was only mildly curious -- a dystopian teen romance? Again? I don't remember teen romance being the dominant plot complication when I was reading YA fiction in jr. high and high school. When I read the excerpt on my Kindle, I appreciated the fact that the Society still seemed to allow choices between being a Single, or Matched, and that even after being Matched, the marriage was not a sure thing.

I appreciated the fact that Cassia, the female lead character, does something early on that I found both wrenching and cowardly. She's also allowed to enjoy food, be angry, and a bit judgmental at times. She's also realistically short-sighted, while still being very good at her job, meaning that she has plenty of autonomy. I was a bit less impressed by both the male characters who form the other two angles in the love triangle: Xander is blonde and mostly perfect; but SPOILER BACHELOR #2, while he's of a different status according to the laws of Society, is so perfect that he's able to carefully manage the degree to which his perfection is visible.

I'm afraid that the characters do tend to feel to me like detailed calculations of People Who Live In a Perfection-Based Dystopia And Are About To Realize That It's Problematic. That's one of the major challenges of this genre, I suppose, if not THE major challenge -- you have to write characters who appear perfect enough that they're comfortable with life as it is, and thus have somewhere to go in the course of the story. I'm resistant to the idea of comparing books to other books directly -- stories are usually too different to be so easily compared. But when I tried to think about a story that had presented a family in a perfection-based dystopia well, one did immediately occur to me, and what I remembered was that the book had opened with the mother cursing, loudly enough, it's implied, to wake her sleeping children.

Of course, now that I think about it, that story is about a family who ends up on the wrong side of the dystopia immediately and knows from the start that its society is problematic, so the novel is a slightly different species than this one.

While the characters feel a bit too smooth, I have a good deal of admiration for the worldbuilding, which involves plenty of nice details, not all of which seem likely to be Key Plot Points, and some which might. There are a few different plots being woven together, and I couldn't predict throughout precisely what was going to happen next. There are almost jokes, though not quite, and I realize that this is what I'd like to see: a dystopian novel where the Big Bad Authoritarian Euthanizing Society is also capable of laughing at fart jokes. I don't think that's a contradiction in terms. I guess I have to give Condie credit, though, because she comes close. And I really did appreciate the portrait of a group of individuals slowly cracking throughout the first part of this trilogy.

In summary: you'll probably enjoy this if you a) like YA romances, b) would be interested in reading about one individual discovering that her world has more flaws than you realized, or c) like government conspiracy stories.

You probably won't enjoy it if you're hoping to be genuinely startled by anything in the plot, and are turned off by fairly traditionally gendered characters. At least, there's nothing surprising in this volume. I did start thinking right away about a couple of things that would make the story more interesting -- and whether they are entirely my own invention or subtle clues planted by the author, I don't yet know -- and I'm putting them in ROT13 for the sake of the unspoilered:

1. Rneyl ba, Xl nccrnef sbe n oevrs zbzrag gb or zber bs n cynlre/syveg guna Pnffvn unf gubhtug. Vg jbhyq or hggreyl snfpvangvat, naq ragveryl oryvrinoyr (gb zr) vs guvf jrer gehr, naq vs ur jrer gryyvat uvf fgbel gb ng yrnfg bar be gjb bgure tveyf.

2. Yvxrjvfr, jr qvfpbire rneyl ba gung Knaqre naq Xl obgu xabj rnpu bgure, nf jryy nf Pnffvn. Knaqre xrrcf na rlr ba Xl orpnhfr ur frrf uvz nf n cbgragvny eviny sbe Pnffvn'f nssrpgvba, naq urycf uvz yngre ba, nccneragyl bhg bs ybir sbe Pnffvn. V guvax vg jbhyq or zhpu zber vagrerfgvat, gubhtu, vs shgher abiryf erirnyrq gung Xl, naq abg Pnffvn, jnf gur pragre bs gur ybir gevnatyr. Ohg nf sne nf V pna gryy, guvf vfa'g n jbeyq jurer ubzbfrkhnyvgl rkvfgf, naq fvapr Pbaqvr unf n uvfgbel bs jevgvat abiryf jvgu n eryvtvbhf orag sbe gur YQF nhqvrapr, vg frrzf hayvxryl gung gung jvyy unccra.

Christmas memories

2010-12-25T21:53:00.000-08:00

I've grown bored with the #reverb10 prompts, but saw someone else (now I can't recall who) blogging about family Christmas traditions; and reading the post made me realize that I should put down a few of mine, rather than assuming that I'll always remember them easily.

What I remember about getting the tree, and decorating it, is that it brought on inevitable arguments between my parents. We had a living room with gigantic ceilings (20 feet?), and so, traditionally, we cut a tree from the 5 acre parcel of property that the house stood on. But getting the right height, and getting it in through the front door (and then getting the lights on) was often a challenge. The benefit of such a tree, however, was that there was always room for all the ornaments. No need to pick and choose.

A lot of what I remember involves the lead-up to Christmas, and our anticipation, which was such that my brothers and I used to wake up and tear downstairs at 3 or 4 in the morning to open stockings, and then try to get our parents up by 5. This, they informed us, was strictly not on, and a rule was made that we could not go downstairs before 6. Reliably, we were awake by then, and congregating in one bedroom, staring at the clock as the numbers blinked forward, before practically falling down the stairs at 6 in our hurry. It's a wonder no one broke bones on Christmas morning.

Not knowing how stockings worked in other children's houses, I never stopped to think of whether our traditions were odd, but now I look back and think that they were an indication of our being a foodie family, or maybe an early indication of my own foodie-ness. We had tangerines and chocolates, as is traditional -- but one year, I asked for a stocking full of Granny Smith apples, and got it, and was duly thrilled. I was equally thrilled to find a whole can of black olives. I can't remember whether I requested those specifically, but saw it as a great treat, and not any sort of mediocrity. To have a can of olives that it was not necessary to share, and which one might eat however one pleased (i.e., first mounting each olive on a finger tip) was highly satisfying.

I think we got other small trinkets -- wind-up toys, hair scrunchies, micro machines, marbles -- but what I appreciated most was the food.

Friends in elementary school loved the film A Christmas Story, which my parents informed me was "vulgar," but we loved watching the Disney special "Mickey's Christmas Carol," and to this day, I find that I have the whole thing memorized in my head, and when I watch it on YouTube, I know precisely what's coming a few seconds before it does.

One year, when things were particularly bad financially, we got presents from a charitable organization. My parents felt (rightly, I think), that they were more generous than we needed them to be, but I did NOT appreciate the fact that what they gave back on my behalf were a bunch of Sweet Valley High books, which I would have liked to read, trashy or not.

The most horrifying Christmas, though, that I can remember, is one that I thought wouldn't happen. Christmas Eve, I was wearing cowboy boots, and my brothers and I were outside, and the eldest of the three (2 year younger than me) was whipping me with a thin branch switch. When he wouldn't quit, I pirouetted round, and kicked him in the stomach. My mother, furious, told me that Christmas was canceled, and I, horrified, believed her. I spent most of the evening in my room, crying into my pillow. The next day, all was forgiven -- but the memory of thinking that I had ruined/lost Christmas is still vivid, and terrifying.

5 things make a post

2010-12-25T21:29:00.000-08:00

1. Not quite a year ago, I was in Philadelphia, newly aware of my gluten intolerance, and appalled at the prospect of baking with multiple types of flours. F-ck bread, I said to a friend, more than once. I don't need it, and my life is better without it.

Fast forward to now, and I have upwards of six different varieties of flour in my fridge, and I have made three batches of cookies using Shauna James Ahern and Danny Ahern's AP flour mix. I think the most amazing ones so far have been these cranberry-pistachio rounds, which are very like shortbread, and are pure heaven straight out of the oven. I don't know if they'd be equally good with plain old white flour, but you should probably try them that way, and find out.

2. This year's Doctor Who Christmas Special is the best one ever. I might even watch it for a second time, just to appreciate it. Also, if you're new to Who, for the most part, this is a good entry point. You'll miss one of the running gags, but you'll see the brilliance of Pond and Eleven, and then you can go watch Series 5, and by the end, you'll understand the previously obscure gag about the centurion costume.

3. Sadly, the adaptation of M R James' "Oh Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad" is as stupid as Doctor Who is brilliant. I like non-traditional adaptations (see my rapturous endorsement of the Doctor Who Christmas Carol above) -- but this is really just "Who's Got My Hairy Toe?" with James' name and title stamped on it; and John Hurt and Gemma Jones doing a Very Special Story about dementia. It's nicely filmed, and nicely staged, by which I mean that sea foam green is a good color for connoting creepiness, and that the prop bust that features heavily in the story is genuinely creepy (did they make it, or find it, I wonder?) But James is never maudlin the way that this story is, even if I appreciated the symmetry of describing someone with dementia as "the opposite of a ghost," a physical remnant of a dead person, rather than a spiritual one.

4. This review of Bush's Decision Points in the LRB is wonderful. And also horrifying.

5. Chicago writer Cliff Doerksen has died; and in celebration of his life, I offer you his take on the American history of mince pie.

Brave enough to be wrong.

2010-12-20T19:09:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure I am, yet; but I would like to be, because the alternative is like running on top of a barrel in a fast stream.

This is me, just stating that for the record, that is the level of courage to which I aspire.

Reading "The Midnight Folk", by John Masefield

2010-12-14T09:37:00.000-08:00

I shall get back to #reverb10 posting at some point.

This morning, I started reading John Masefield's The Midnight Folk, so a few observations on that:

I remember, the first time I read The Box of Delights, feeling confused by the presence of Caroline Louisa, and the Joneses, who were clearly so familiar to Kay Harker, and yet so unfamiliar to me. (It wasn't that I couldn't get a clear sense of them; I could! But I was still on the outside looking in, in comparison with Kay and the omniscient narrator.) I thought, at the time, that the problem was that Masefield was being a little careless because novels weren't his normal territory. This was lazy thinking on my part, since a glance at Masefield's Wikipedia page proves me wrong. So does his first novel featuring these characters. I haven't met either Caroline Louisa or the Jones family yet, but as I'm learning more about the characters so far, I'm moved to wonder at what point it became necessary to assume that in sequels and series books, authors needed to provide background material in case readers were new to the characters. Masefield does nothing of the sort in the sequel to Midnight Folk.

He also doesn't address physicality in the way that I think of as standard for children's books now -- the passage where we learn that the main character has a thin, plain face, or is not pretty, but striking; or where we learn that an antagonistic adult figure is going to be either fat, or so skinny as to be bony. Instead, I give you the passage where we learn more about Kay's governess:

The governess's Christian names were Sylvia and Daisy. Kay had read a poem about a Sylvia, and had decided that it was not swains who commended this one, but Mrs Tattle and Mrs Gossip. He loved daises because the closer one looked at them the more beautiful they seemed: yet this daisy was liker a rhododendron. She was big, handsome and with something of a flaunting manner, which turned into a flounce when she was put out.

It's a lovely bit of double character development, because we learn not only about Sylvia Daisy Pouncer, but also more about Kay Harker as well: that he loves daisies, and why, and that he thinks of other people in terms of flowers. Though there are clear delineations of masculine and feminine characteristics, the idea that femininity is anathema to males isn't there: a memorial for Kay's great-grandfather describes him as "manly in Fortitude, womanly in Tenderness."

On a related tangent, I tickled to learn that Abner Brown, the main male villain, is something of a landscape enthusiast -- as he explains, "I fell right plumb in love with this green countryside, so full of real old buildings; so I just didn't rest till I'd taken Russel's Dene, that Queen Anne Mansion, in the oak wood, where tradition says the Druids once practised their rites." Acquiring the building is certainly tied in with his own occult proclivities, but that's not the whole of it. How many villains can you think of who admit to falling in love with their surroundings?

One final note, for now: this is the first novel that I've read that seems to be centered around postcolonialism: in this case, the colonizing activities of Spain in South America, and the struggle of the South Americans to break free. Uncomfortably, this novel is about the treasure of the "great cathedral of Santa Barbara," which consisted of "church ornaments, images, lamps, candlesticks, reliquaries, chalices and crosses, of gold, silver, and precious stones," and I'm all too aware of the complacency with which these things are assumed to be unquestionably the property of the priests and bishops, rather than the rebel natives. On the other hand, Masefield writes that "the South American States were then breaking loose from Spain" without any trace of criticism or questioning of why they would want to do so. I'll be curious about how this develops as the story moves forward.

Christmas reading: John Masefield

2010-12-13T07:27:00.000-08:00

In my last #reverb10 post, I vowed to start the day off right, rather than with the Internet, in bed. It felt very good to allow myself to wake up by reading for half an hour; and I realized, as I read, that I was freeing myself of some of the pressure to keep tabs on everything else going on, and allowing myself to start the day more gently. I didn't really realize that I felt such pressure -- but perhaps I do.

And I had a good book to read. When I was about 8, I stumbled on a PBS Christmas special, made the year before for the BBC. I'm quite certain that I was no more than 8, because I remember how careful I was to remember when the second part would air, a week later than the first -- because we had no VCR. (By the time the Lord Peter Wimsey adaptations that I loved so much came on in 1987, we did.) Here is the opening that I loved on sight:

You can actually find the whole series on YouTube, if you are patient about watching it in 10-minute increments.

I understood that it was based on a book, though I thought it surprising that the book was by John Masefield, whose poem "Sea Fever" I already knew and loved. (I cannot remember whether Star Trek introduced me to that poem, or whether "The Ultimate Computer," the episode in which it's first mentioned, was one of the first I saw, and which confirmed with no more doubt that Star Trek was the Best Thing Ever, to quote a poem about the sea.)

But it took me a long time to find the book that The Box of Delights was based on. None of my library systems seemed to have it, nor did anyone suggest anything like interlibrary loan to a 10-year-old elementary school student. I knew it must be a good book, because even the alternate title, When the Wolves Were Running, felt strange and wonderful -- how clever, I thought, to make the title of a book about a when, instead of a what. It wasn't until grad school that I found a copy in the library here, at the university, and read it through. I wanted my own copy, but had a terrible time finding one that wasn't horrendously expensive. Then the New York Review of Books published an edition, and my heart leapt, only to learn that it had been abridged. It was only on my recent trip to London that I was able to get hold of the unabridged version, published by Egmont, along with The Midnight Folk. And both illustrated by Quentin Blake! It couldn't get much better. I thought the latter was a sequel, but realized differently, this morning, as I read, that Kay Harker recognizes the name Abner Brown:

'So it's Abner Brown and his gang again,' Kay muttered. 'I am up against Magic, then, as well as Crime.'

I reprint this sentence purely because the casual recognition of fighting foes on two levels is part of what makes the atmosphere of Masefield's novel so lovely. But this morning when I stumbled over it, I frowned, and got out of bed to check the publication date of The Midnight Folk. Sure enough, it's the first of the two, so I shall put down The Box of Delights, but only to read Kay Harker's adventures in their proper order. There will still be time to reach the second (and watch the BBC series) before Christmas.

Note: The Guardian is featuring The Box of Delights as part of its Season's readings series -- if you, like me, are a fan of Christmas stories, take note!

Very Personal Ads, #1

2010-12-12T13:59:00.000-08:00

Havi Brooks, who created the website and accompanying life curriculum at The Fluent Self, is a professional destuckification consultant. Her business partner is a duck named Selma.

Seriously, what's not to love about that?

I've been peering at The Fluent Self periodically for over a year, but only recently am I getting frustrated enough with my own obstacles that I'm ready to start actually experimenting with Brooks' strategies. One of them is asking for the things you want. No, no, not in the Prayer of Jabez "Oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz" way. Things that can't simply be solved by money at the outset. Things like figuring out a way to accomplish something, or finding a collaborator, or just getting over obstacles of the self. Or asking for the perfect house to find you, which was apparently the impetus behind the first Very Personal Ad. Brooks writes that she needed "to make a regular practice of trying to feel okay asking for stuff. Even when the asking thing feels weird and conflicted."

I think I should experiment with the same thing. Seanan McGuire writes letters to the Great Pumpkin, that serve a similar purpose. I might try something like that, but I think I'll start without limiting myself to one addressee.

And for now, I'll start small, or at least, start short:

1. I have this bizarre habit of having a realization that clears up something I've been working on (most often in a dissertation-related context), and then having a strong instinct to get up and do something else, rather than following through. It's almost like I'm trying to prevent myself from actually taking full possession of the idea, once I've found it. Was that me, sneering at Emerson and his awareness of intellectual property a couple of days ago? Well, if I was sneering, then it was because I've been exhibiting the polar opposite tendency -- to refuse to even attempt ownership of the idea.

I'm getting better at not allowing myself to do this; at making sure that I get the clarity of the revelation down on paper -- most of the time. But I would really, really, really like to start aggressively taking possession of my own ideas and working with them, rather than running away from them.

And that's it for this week, in terms of VPAs. I'll look back at this one and write a new one next Sunday.

#reverb10 - Day 11: a very messy set of answers

2010-12-11T23:16:00.000-08:00

December 11 – 11 Things What are 11 things your life doesn’t need in 2011? How will you go about eliminating them? How will getting rid of these 11 things change your life? (Author: Sam Davidson)

You can see by now that I can be awfully lax about these prompts when I choose to be. I'm not sure I can write the answers that I want to this one, but I can start.

1. Crushing self-doubt: I'm increasingly conscious of the fact that part of me has given up on myself. At the same time, I'm aware that this view is distorted -- and I can think of instances, in the very recent past, that prove to me that it's wrong. But there are also times when I'm surprised at myself; at my mere ability to focus. Friday I worked all day long on an editing project, moving steadily through 70 pages of text; and at the end of the day, I was both delighted and surprised, because I realize that I'd concluded from the start that I was wholly incapable of that level of focus.

2. A deep-seated fear that the work I do doesn't contribute to the rest of the world, or rather, isn't the contribution that the world needs most. With everything I see happening, from the hunger of people on the streets, to an increasing inability to use analytical reasoning, or willingness to display compassion, why does the world need me to dig up perspectives on economic development in 18th and 19th century Britain? It sounds, I know, as though I've read too many of those "the humanities are worthless" articles in the mainstream media. It also sounds as though I'm beating myself up for not being capable of being Christ himself on the cross, right here and right now. Not really a valid thing to beat myself up about, honestly, or even a good one, because that bit of scripture in Matthew (25:40, I think) about "even what you do for the least of my brothers, you do for me") can be interpreted, I think, as being also applicable in that even the least good things are still important.

I need to keep on exploring this one. Part of it is clearly just depression, but part of it *is* about my own engagement with the question, "What do the humanities have to offer the world today?" and I do have an answer to that. I'm just terrified to explore it, or not sure I'm capable of doing so (see item #1 above).

3. Less clutter. I think that the Christmas present I give myself should be an entire day for sorting through old papers, and getting rid of stuff I don't need. I've gotten better about not acquiring more junk, but I need to get better at divesting myself of old junk that remains.

4. Too much work at the wrong time, or not enough of the right sort of social activities. This is a complex one, all tangled up with the first two parts of this list, but also with my own shyness, and the problem of not feeling especially at home in this city. I've felt out of place here for years. This doesn't mean that I don't appreciate the marvels of living in a town with good options for gluten-free groceries, farmers' markets almost every day of the week (if you know where to look), and a poetry bookstore. But I'm conscious, especially now that I'm back from a quick trip to London, of how much I miss not only the SEL, but also the city itself.

I have friends here, who I like spending time with. I am lucky to have them close by, and I should take advantage of that fact. Setting up social activities is not procrastination by default.

That's four things. Supposedly, I need seven more. I'm not sure that I'm quite self-aware enough to identify the other seven.

5. Too much internet at the wrong time (or, maybe one of the things I don't need is a SmartPhone). I first started using the internet as a wake-up tool during my senior year of undergrad, when I would wake up, and crawl from one end of the bed to the other, where my desktop computer was, and dial up the internet to read Slate first thing in the a.m. Now I check my email, a couple of blog listings, and a friendslist on LJ, and Facebook, and Twitter. I'm embarrassed to admit that there's a bit of voyeurism in this: I want, quietly, to see the world bustling about. But doing this tends to start off the day with distraction, with an attempt to escape myself. It might be better if I started off the day by allowing myself to read a chapter of a book in order to wake up. That's still a form of escapism, but it's escapism where I feel more present, and not less. I think that I should try doing that for a week, starting tomorrow.

6. Cripes. I have no idea. I think I'll stop here, because the five things above are things that I *can* begin to deal with; and I suspect that as I deal with them, other things will become more clear.

ETA:

7. New Kid's post for today mentions jettisoning distance from family. Like her, I don't have a magic way of just choosing to end the distance between Seattle and London and the SEL, so I don't know how to do this. But I'd like to find a way, so I'm putting it here, for the record.

Tower Prep Review

2010-12-11T18:54:00.001-08:00

I usually manage to watch about one 50-minute hour of television per week. In winter/spring that's Doctor Who; in early fall it's the Sarah Jane Adventures. I used to be a devoted Criminal Minds fan, but the writing has declined, and after they dropped JJ Jareau and made plans to minimize Emily Prentiss, there just wasn't enough there to keep me watching.

And this was why I was so excited when Seanan McGuire started blogging about Tower Prep.

It seemed like a great show at first, for all the reasons that Seanan mentions: atypically gendered roles, pretty good jokes, an intriguing plot: pretty perfect brain candy. I didn't mind if it was geared towards younger viewers.

But the plots of each episode have gone in directions that don't seem to be connecting, and aren't being followed up on. Each episode is a standalone that then just gets casually referenced later on. And the characters, who I originally liked, seem to be falling into fairly flat rotations of shtick, and turning into whiny, self-absorbed students. The most recent episode, Field Trip, featured them plotting to make their lab partners do all the work on an assignment so that they could work on their escape plan. Maybe I'm still bitter from being the lab partner who ended up doing most of the work in high school, but I wasn't impressed -- nor was I delighted with the continual mocking of geeky, opera-loving Fenton.

To be fair, there was a scene between Ian and Cal that was thoughtful and interesting, but it seems unlikely that we'll get that dynamic again, given what happened. Will we find out why Cal chose what he did? If we do, I'll be delighted, but I'm not counting on anything.

For me, the moment that said everything about how the show has fizzled since its opening was when Ray, Emily, and Fenton put their heads together at the end of Field Trip, and I thought "Man, I wish Tower Prep were about these three teaming up!"

I don't suppose the writers are going to humor me and change focus; but if they do, or even if Team REF does continue to work together, I'll be back. Otherwise, so long, Tower Prep. You are not even worth my $1.50 per week on iTunes.

#reverb10 - Day 8 - Beautifully Different; or, Capitalism is Everywhere - a lecture-rant

2010-12-08T07:34:00.000-08:00

December 8 – Beautifully Different. Think about what makes you different and what you do that lights people up. Reflect on all the things that make you different – you’ll find they’re what make you beautiful. (Author: Karen Walrond)

The students in the political theory class for which I teach a linked writing course were really excited about reading Emerson's "Self-Reliance," because it showed "how important it is to be yourself, and to be different."

They hear this message everywhere. I'm not blaming Emerson for it. On the contrary, "Self-Reliance" is a wonderful illustration of why the cliched fetishizing of being special is subtly insidious. It's the backbone of modern capitalism. I don't see this being discussed very often, so today, I'm adapting the lecture that I gave my students several weeks ago. All citations are taken from the Dover Thrift Edition of "Self-Reliance and Other Essays."

At the close of "Self-Reliance," Emerson rejects "the reliance on Property" as "the want of self-reliance," which might appear, on the surface, to be a very Marxist position. But as he clarifies, Emerson explains that what he hates is inactive property, which "merely lies there," while "that which a man does always by necessity acquire" and which "perpetually renews itself wherever the man breathes" is not only acceptable, but ideal (37). Power, he wrote earlier, "ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state" (29).

This is Marx's definition of well-used capital; the bourgeoisie's constant revolutionizing of the instruments and means of production. Revolution doesn't mean only revolt, in this sense -- but also revolve -- the maintenance of a continual cycle.*

Emerson's very first example of the importance of being true to one's own individuality defines individuality in the terms of intellectual property: if we fail to take possession of our own ideas, then "to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another" (20).

The shame has nothing to do with being right or wrong in one's thought -- it's about someone else having claimed it as property, and taking control of how it's shared out. Self is the ultimate capital, the "plot of ground which is given to [man] to till" (20). One of the things that makes Emerson remarkable as a voice of capitalism is that his assertions so easily reinforce the positions of both the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.** "Accept the place the divine providence has found for you" sounds like humility, but then he clarifies we "must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny; and not minors and invalids in a protected corner .... but guides, redeemers and benefactors" (20).

Emerson's real ideal is to speak from a position of wealth and power: youths are not just to be accepted because they are self-sufficient, but capable of making their elders redundant (21). This is the humility of the capitalist system: the people who are to be revered are the ones who are capable of making you obsolete. The ideal man who does interact with society does so in the following way: he can "utter opinions on all passing affairs, which being seen to be not private, but necessary, would sink like darts into the ear of men, and put them in fear" (21). In other words, making other people fearful is not only his prerogative, but his responsibility. The risk of entering society in more communally-oriented ways is that one might have to give up or reduce one's ability to be seen as superior to others. Dick Cheney would love this guy. Why haven't we heard yet about how Emerson is his ideal of American patriotism?

If the self is capital, then virtue is expenditure (22) -- monetary charity to another who "does not belong to me and to whom I do not belong" is a waste; to act virtuously is a penance, a payment. To ally yourself to dead capital, rather than focusing on the importance of renewing capital, is not just to make an unprofitable economic choice, but to obscure the self. This is what makes "Self-Reliance" insidious, and what makes it the embodiment of capitalism -- of personal worth and identity being commuted into exchange value. It gives lie to the earlier statement about aspiring to be a redeemer or benefactor.

Nor is Emerson merely expressing an emotional mood of capitalism that simply affects how one thinks about oneself and how one thinks about others. There are significant ethical ramifications as well. People love to quote Emerson's aphoristic statement that "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds" -- most often, I see it referenced in regards to piddly grammatical errors, matters of less and fewer. It's appropriate in that context, but Emerson is invoking it in regards to past words and acts; rejecting the judgment of the eyes of others. There's wisdom in that, to be sure, but Emerson's rejection of caring about whether you are wrong, or misunderstood, looks different if we think about it in conjunction with Marx's description of the cycle of commercial crises brought on by the bourgeoisie:

It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these crises, a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. [...] The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented. (Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto

Emerson's rejection of foolish consistency is a rejection of responsibility, justified by the possibility that to be responsible for others would be a violation of one's self.

Is there social justice in "Self-Reliance"? Emerson says that "We want men and women who shall renovate life and or social state, but we see that most natures are insolvent, cannot satisfy their own wants, [and] have an ambition out of all proportion to their practical force" (32). In other words, they're ineffective at exerting power and managing their self-capital successfully. Naked self-interest becomes all in all, and greatness is to be able to claim that nugget of intellectual property and control how it's shared among others. "Every new mind is a new classification," writes Emerson, and a truly great mind is the one which "imposes its classification on other men" (33).

That's the social justice that results from making nonconformity the supreme virtue.

Like Marx, Emerson sees society as "undergoing continual changes" -- we have changed in vulnerability from the New Zealander (who has far less property), in technology (the coach, the watch), and therefore, the institutions that define how property is owned and protected (37) are equally ephemeral. A man is better than a town in that a town, by Emerson's definitions of the ways that people organize, cannot really bind together as equals to accomplish anything. Not only is his perspective of the importance of exerting power over others contra to Marx, but his view of the inability of others to organize effectively explains why he would have put little or no faith in Marx's proposed proletariat revolution. To assume "free development for each" and "free development for all" would require a conformity that is unacceptable.

I think I've gone on quite enough, and less stylishly than I'd like to, because this is a very hurried adaptation of lecture notes. But when I hear "what's different makes you beautiful," I can't help but think that it has opposing meanings, depending on whether it's taken in a private or public context. Everyone I love is beautifully different, and the privacy of the way that I perceive that difference in each of my friends is what keeps me going, especially when I'm stressed and freaked out over one thing or another. But in a public context, "what makes you different is what makes you beautiful" is, all too often, just another way that capitalism is all-pervasive.

* See also Reinhart Koselleck, "HISTORICAL CRITERIA OF THE MODERN CONCEPT OF REVOLUTION."

** And yes, I'm aware of Emerson's seeming opposition to capitalism, in that he was opposed to Smith's division of labor. I stand by this argument.

#reverb10 - Day 6 - Making!

2010-12-06T18:23:00.000-08:00

Make. What was the last thing you made? What materials did you use? Is there something you want to make, but you need to clear some time for it? (Author: Gretchen Rubin)

Things I've made recently:

1. Cookies, for myself, and crackers, and pizza dough -- this is the first time I've really gotten into gluten-free baking, and I am dying, if only metaphorically, to try out this recipe from the Gluten-Free Girl for GF gingerbread.

2. A last-minute trip to London, to be part of the Blake Society's 25th Birthday Party at Tate Britain.

3. A surprise present for a friend, because I was picking up a book in London that I knew we'd both want, and that she was unlikely to have (she didn't). These sorts of surprise packages are one of my favorite things to make. They don't have to be expensive -- just something unexpected.

Things I'm in the middle of making:

1. A dissertation

2. A hollowed-out Loeb Classic wallet, for my friend Kate. This will be the second one I've made, and I'm improving some of my design choices from the first version. So far, so good -- but I need to finish it!

Things I want to make:

1. Dorie Greenspan's Hachis Parmentier

2. Braised Pork With Chiles and Cumin, by the Gluten-Free Girl and the Chef -- but doing so would require me to have a slow cooker, and I haven't got one. Bah.

3. A syllabus and course plan for my Political Theory juxtaposed with YA Lit course. Not saying anything more about that is the best thing here -- because it puts more pressure on me to actually write the whole thing, and get it out of my head.

#reverb10 - Day 5 - What I gave up.

2010-12-06T06:48:00.000-08:00

Let Go. What (or whom) did you let go of this year? Why? (Author: Alice Bradley)

I'm a little bit behind, which I don't mind, but it's worth it to me to try and stay on the tail ends, rather than falling further.

This summer, I gave up what felt, at first, like part of my independence. Serious stuff for someone who self-identifies as feminist. I lived, for the first time, with my Splendid English Lover (SEL), across the pond, while working on a research grant. It was a very new thing for both of us, as we've always been long distance with short visits that for reasons I won't go into here. (no, nothing scandalous; just not my story), haven't actually included spending the night under the same roof. It was a very new thing for me, since I've never lived with anyone with whom I'm romantically involved, and haven't lived with family of any sort for more than ten years. I haven't even had roommates for the last four, excepting the kitty, who has yet to pay the rent.

I figured that I would buy groceries, buy a lot of my lunches out -- not add tremendously to the expenditure of the household (and by tremendously, I meant "as little as possible") -- so I was rather taken aback when the SEL proposed that I should raid the fridge for lunches, and let him know when I ran low on GF cereals, crackers, etc. It felt foreign to me to allow someone else to buy those things for me; moreover, it made me think of living as a teenager with a controlling family whose rule was "as long as you live in our house and we provide for you, you follow our rules."

I wrote a couple of days ago that not providing for myself and being completely independent made me feel like I ought to be shot or shoved off of a tube platform, or even that I ought to jump myself. Before you tell me to check myself into a mental hospital, stat -- no, I wasn't about to accede to the little voices in my head. Hearing them, acknowledging them, and dismissing them is what I've found to be the best strategy. Writing today, though, I can acknowledge that crumbs! -- that PTSD from a difficult adolescence is still with me.

And so I found it rather challenging to accept the SEL's caring for me. He made me gin & tonics when I came home from the archives, baked me gluten-free puddings; fried eggs for me some mornings (though he also taught me to fry my own*). Other mornings, if I seemed to be forgetting that I was allowed to have fresh fruit from the fruit bowl, he'd simply slice a plum, and offer it to me.

Does it sound bizarre to you that I would forget that I was allowed to have fresh fruit? I suppose it does, but I often did. I thought of it as the best food, and thus that I should not allow myself to partake of it. No one had suggested anything of the sort, of course, but my subconscious, it is mighty and twisted.

I even found it nervewracking that he would make us both dinner at the end of the day. What if I like this too much?, I thought. What if I find that I'm incapable of cooking for myself afterwards?

I didn't find that allowing someone else to make me dinner destroyed my own ability to cook, or reduced me to some former shadow of myself. That shouldn't be surprising, though it is to me, sometimes, when I contemplate it. It's an index of how thick some of my mind-forged manacles are; how difficult it is to finally allow them to slide off my wrists, even when they've been unlocked for years.

I could write much more about this** -- but I mustn't -- there's too much to do. What I did find, though, quickly:

1. the SEL is a wonderful cook, and not coincidentally, wonderful at plating. Apropos of this, gooseberries are the best summer fruit ever.

2. Power and equality in a relationship are far more complex than I had previously thought; there is no calculus that will simply measure equality based on who is cooking dinner and who is chopping vegetables. It is wonderfully relaxing, by the way, to end the day by chopping vegetables, without having to worry about what is going to happen to them or when they have to go into the pot. It is lovely to make dinner with someone else; lovelier still to be a test case for things like whipped cream spiked with single malt whiskey. Beauty is someone who will allow you, every once in a while, to fry him an egg in the morning.

3. I am defined by much more than my own ability to be traditionally domestic. This is a very good thing for me to learn, because honestly, when consumed by research and dissertating? I'm not a great domestic. Dishes sit around unwashed; and I eat raw veg, cheese, and fruit, and crisps, because they're quick. There's nothing wrong with this -- as a diet, I could do a lot worse -- but I know that part of my consternation this summer was feeling that I wasn't meeting standards of femininity; and feeling that I ought to be able to excel simultaneously in both areas (careerism and domesticity) at once, even though I resent mainstream patriarchal culture when it suggests that I am failing by not being able to do this.

In short, what I gave up wasn't my independence at all, but instead some lingering stale gender traditionalism that benefited neither me, nor the SEL. His abilities and instincts for caring and cooking ought not be marginalized merely because of his gender. I gave up, too, some old nightmarish mind games from my past -- preconceptions that were only hurting me, when I didn't even realize that they were still so much a part of my everyday existence. I fear they're not wholly gone -- when I am my own enemy, I am at my most tenacious -- but I am more free of them than I have ever been before; and that is something that I want to remember.

*Yes, as appalling as it will sound to those of you who know how much I love to cook, I had never learned to fry an egg, and always been rather terrified of getting it wrong. A study in contradictions: that would be me.

** I should certainly, by some logic, explain how I was fitting into the household, since I had my own domestic work to do -- but that is another story for another time.

2010-12-04T15:42:00.000-08:00

I am extraordinarily edgy about the current section of dissertation. I'm not precisely sure why -- but then, there may not really be a good reason -- it may just be overflowing edginess. (If neurotic energy could be converted into heat, I'd have a cozy apartment.)

I might as well say something about it here, and maybe that will get me over the obstacle. I write about 18th century English poetry that engages with economic development. (I write about 19th century English poetry that does the same thing, but we'll save that for another day). Perhaps, when you read the above, you thought, "Oh, she's dealing with Pope and Swift, or Johnson and Gay" -- but you'd be wrong. I deal with Young, and Blair, and Beattie, and Yearsley. I'm exhuming the Graveyard School*, and sorting out rather wilder, more mixed economic perspectives. Critics have usually dismissed them as being little more than continuations of 17th century Puritan spiritual commerce metaphors, exhibiting little more than an obsession with the binary of earthly and eternal value, and a desire to frighten readers into conversion.

I've got plenty of material to hold a discussion suggesting that it's more complicated. I'm even discussing several reasons why we've failed to see the nuances within this poetry as relevant to economics.

What makes me really nervous is the stance that I'm taking in regards to capitalist thought. Late 17th - early 18th century England is seen as a turning point in capitalist development. Whether you argue (as Appleby and Weber tend to do) that it's the turning point, or whether you're aligned with Sombart and others who see capitalism emerging much earlier in the Mediterranean states, it's hard to deny that capitalist thought is present in England at this point. I certainly don't want to deny that. But capitalism doesn't suddenly take hold universally. To analyze reciprocal exchanges, pursuits of profit and loss, and attentiveness to economy as capitalism is, as Barbara Herrnstein Smith notes, both ethnocentric and reductive. This sort of analysis tends to group everything that progresses towards modern capitalism as important, and everything else as less relevant.

It's easy enough to be wary of this pitfall when analyzing non-Western societies or ancient societies without clear connections to the rise of modern capitalism.

However, I'm taking the position that it's just as important to be cautious of such reductionism in looking at texts from 18th century England, because it's unwise to assume that merely because capitalist economics were on the rise, all or most individuals exhibited capitalist views. Being incautious of middle grounds in economic thought (that are arguably not modern capitalism, but that are also arguably not mercantilism, either) is part of what's led us to contemplate two possibilities for economic development. 1): the homo economicus, for whom all commerce is instinctive and natural, or 2), what Herrnstein Smith (though she's certainly not the only person to draw this distinction) refers to as the "fall into Commerce," wherein all economic behavior becomes earthly and temporary, and all value is classified as sacred or profane.

The Graveyard School is practically created by the opposition between these two possibilities. I'm being a bit extreme, putting it like that, but I'll stand by it. It's more like a combination between the two, but if analyzed in terms of whether it's progressing towards capitalism or not, then it looks as though it isn't, and immediately gets shunted into woo-woo-divine-economy territory.

I suppose that taking this position makes me nervous because in some ways, it's a pretty basic error.

Let me be clear -- I'm not saying in the least that all critics of economic lit have botched this, or that it invalidates analyses of Swift, Pope, etc. -- though the commercial satires themselves did contribute to this problem, because they set a precedent that imaginative depictions of finance would be seen by later critics as mocking and sharply criticizing economic structure, instead of being considered as theorizing about the structure itself.

Back to the basic error of studying through the lens of "capitalist/smart" vs. "not capitalist/primitive," it excludes a lot of data that's relevant to economic decision-making. And even if it is primitive (because arguably, in a number of cases, it is), the problem is that primitive, in the case of these poems, has been synonymous with Not Worth Studying. To be fair, there's pressure from the econ. side of things, where ideas and principles are constantly churned, with the new replacing the old. This is just one of the factors that contributes to a fractious relationship between humanities and economics.

This largely why the position I'm taking makes me jittery, I suppose. In asserting that certain aspects of the way critics have handled the history of economics have been reductive, I'm also pursuing knowledge that the discipline of economics would not consider relevant. That's not the end of the world, though.

The other thing that makes me nervous is that it feels challenging to set up a useful framework for discussion for texts that I'm claiming are middle ground. Pre-capitalism isn't necessarily the best description for them. In some ways, it's accurate enough, and maybe you could argue that to link them with capitalism would be useful in expanding what capitalism is, and how it developed. Maybe. I don't think so at the moment, though. In the poems that I'm working with, it makes much more sense to me to describe the authors as working to construct different forms of economic authority. I really do think that's the best way of characterizing them; it finds a common feature (which I know, I'm not fully explaining here), and yet gives me room to discuss how each author establishes and wields this authority differently. But it makes me jittery, because, after all, I'm not trying to construct an argument that they do so in a capitalistic fashion.

Getting that off my chest was useful.

* Why yes, it is risky of me to use one umbrella for all of the poets who've been classified or associated with the graveyard school! Bear with me, though. For now, think of it as including poems that prominently feature the opposition of eternal and earthly value, and a moralistic, scolding commentary on commerce and consumption.

#reverb10 - Day 3

2010-12-03T21:22:00.000-08:00

Prompt: Moment. Pick one moment during which you felt most alive this year. Describe it in vivid detail (texture, smells, voices, noises, colors). (Ali Edwards)

I'm often put off by "pick one moment" prompts, partly because if there's a moment, or moments when I felt most alive, chances are pretty good that I'm reluctant to put it on the internet for all to see. And the moment of being alive has such a cliched association with happiness. And sometimes I'm most alive when I'm cranky, or pissed off. But there's no rule in the prompt that says I couldn't discuss one of those cranky moments, is there? Or tired moments?

I can't deny that I am acutely and uncomfortably alive when writing a conference paper; that doing so captures both the highs and lows of living. There's the point at which I am unquestionably a living mess, the point at which the mess begins to transform itself into something coherent, the point at which I remember that I am a single living thing among many, and then, afterwards, the blessed release of wonderful, unconcerned lightness. I was in a hotel in Oxford, and so happily free of encumbrances that I almost answered the door to room service while wrapped in a tiny towel. And the moment when I realized what I was doing? Oh, yes, that was very much a moment of feeling alive, too.

#reverb10 - Day 2

2010-12-02T18:09:00.000-08:00

December 2 – Writing. What do you do each day that doesn’t contribute to your writing — and can you eliminate it? (Author: Leo Babauta)

It's a measure of how stressed I am of late that when I got this prompt, I wanted to throw up my hands and say "I have no idea. Everything." It's taken all day to come to something like an answer with more perspective, and even that perspective is uncertain, because I feel like I don't know the answer for certain. I can block out the internet with apps like Leechblock, Chrome Nanny, Freedom, and Self-Control; or I can let it in, because I find that I feel that I'm writing less in a vacuum when I can periodically chatter a bit on Facebook or Twitter.

Neither one helps, really: I still feel like I have to work harder, and harder, while feeling at the same time that I don't know how to work any harder than I already am. The result is that sometimes I have days like today, where I'm so tired I can't focus at all. I should take breaks before I reach that point of exhaustion, but it never feels like I've worked hard enough to earn them, and the result is that each time I take one, I despise myself a little bit more.

This really doesn't work well.

I have a friend who is ruled at times by jealousy. I was ruled by jealousy once, several years ago, and found the process dismaying enough that I swore up and down I'd never be again. But if I've let myself feel a tinge of pride at the fact that I've succeeded there so far, then I need a bit of a comeuppance, because I'm easily ruled by self-doubt, more, perhaps, than the friend ruled occasionally ruled by jealousy.

The result is that I feel that I have to check everything, over and over; that if I step away from my work for a day, I feel as though I've forgotten my place entirely, and have to start over again from the beginning. This is because I tell myself that I know nothing; I am entirely unwilling to countenance the thought that I might learn. In my head, I am incapable of learning, of change. And yet I know this isn't true; I can point to areas of my life where I have grown and changed in the last five years, where I feel more human, and less isolated than I have for most of my life.

What can I do about this problem? I love my subject, but it is difficult to transform that love from contemplation to action, when my concept of my own activity is soaked with self-loathing. And I'm skeptical that I can just slough it off the way I beat jealousy, if only because this is a problem that has been with me for far longer; which has shaped who I am. In moments of clarity, it occurs to me that much of the hardest work I have done has emerged less from love than fear.

That last point is hard to face. I don't like evaluating the balance of my life using it, because I know how much lands on the side of the scale marked fear.

And yet, I can remember clearly the end of my sophomore year in college, staying up most of the night to write an essay on Euripides' Medea, without relying on caffeine, because I loved it enough that I didn't feel I needed it. (Also because I was young enough that I didn't need it.) And that same love has characterized my research of the last few years. If I had been wholly ruled by fear, I wouldn't have been able to stay as calm as I have throughout, I think. I think.

So, what can I do? If it's not possible to simply regain freedom from self-doubt in one fell swoop, then can I establish a few guidelines for better combatting it? I think I can. So, how do I set up concrete steps to act from love, rather than fear?

1: I need to go to the internet because I want to, not because I'm feeling inadequate. Doing this may involve setting Self-Control the night before, so that I'm blocked in the morning, in order to avoid being overwhelmed.

2: I need to acknowledge that a balance between work and leisure is healthy; that it serves a purpose of allowing me to examine ideas freshly.

3: I need to believe and know that mistakes, when I make them, can serve a purpose. Right now it just feels like they slow me down, and that's bad.

I'm going to stop this here for now, with the resolution that I'll come back to this post and keep exploring.

Unfamiliarity and Perspective

2010-12-01T19:08:00.000-08:00

This year, I'm taking a crack at doing #reverb10. Care to join me? Details here.

December 1: One Word:

Encapsulate the year 2010 in one word. Explain why you’re choosing that word. Now, imagine it’s one year from today, what would you like the word to be that captures 2011 for you?

I think the best word for the previous 11 months is unfamiliarity. For the first time, I've lived with a major food allergy, one that has meant being the person with special needs, the one whose health requirements have a potentially major effect on others. I finished a dissertation chapter (and hope to finish 1 or 2 more before this year ends). I undertook my first major unsupervised archival research project. I lived with someone with whom I'm romantically involved. I lived in London, which, even for only 2.5 months, is much different than being there for 2.5 weeks (my longest stay previously). I let someone make dinner for me each night, which is certainly unfamiliar in the context of my adult life.

Some of the associated unfamiliarity I've dealt with well; and it has unquestionably been good for me to learn what it feels like to be the one who has to ask others to adjust their choices. I don't enjoy doing that; and sometimes I've felt downright angry when my gluten allergy makes me into an inconvenience -- but I have an inkling of what other people with more challenging disabilities feel in similar situations. I hope this allows me to be more empathetic with them.

Other aspects of it, not so much. Being taken care of at all made me acutely aware of my own self-negativity: I thought, at various times, that someone ought to shove me off a tube platform, or simply take me out and shoot me. Yes, I know that this is disturbing. I've internalized the view that George Bernard Shaw presents in this video extraordinarily intensely. This is partly the product of my upbringing in a conservative Christian family, and perhaps also more broadly an aspect of American socialization: I think of dependence as fatal, and fear it.

The unfamiliarity of dissertating is also a challenge. Writing arguments? That I've done. But blending literary, historical, and economic perspectives presents a greater challenge than I've faced in the past. Or maybe that's not quite it: what's unfamiliar is the sense of the potential importance of the work, combined with the sense that it's simply a hurdle I have to climb over to finish.

I need to finish this up if I'm to have it done on schedule.

For next year, I hope the word that resonates throughout it perspective. I need it desperately, as I did this summer. I found it this summer, but I found it in desperation, as I struggled to learn to read documents written in Chancery hand, realizing that my research grant would be the start of something that might last years, rather than being completable in three months. What I need is to allow myself to have perspective from the beginning, as I make decisions about balancing work and leisure; as I evaluate the way I spend each day, determining what I have accomplished. I need to remember that not every day will be characterized by breakthroughs, and that the lack of constant breakthroughs does not mean that I am a failure.

And I am seeking perspective, too, as I think about the worth of the work that I'm doing, the reasons that I'm pursuing a series of arguments about the imagination in economics, and in literature that's more than a century old. It doesn't always feel like digging through old poetry is the best way to develop insights that will serve a purpose in today's chaotic economic situation, though I very much want to produce something that will be of interest to more than just members of the literary academy. And yet my primary responsibility is to those texts -- not to creating something that's immediately and remarkably relevant today. Perhaps in being faithful to them, rather than trying to be both a lit scholar and an observer of contemporary economics at the same time, I can find the way forward.

“Perspective,” he would mutter, going to bed.

“Oh che dolce cosa e questa

Prospettiva.” Uccello. Bird.

And I am as greedy of her, that the black

Horse of the literal world might come

Directly on me. Perspective. A place

To stand. To receive. A place to go

Into from. The earth by language.

Who can imagine antelope silent

Under the night rain, the Gulf

At Biloxi at night else? I remember

In Mexico a man and a boy painting

An adobe house magenta and crimson

Who thought they were painting it red. Or pretty.

So neither saw the brown mountains

Move to manage that great house.

The horse wades in the city of grammar.

--Jack Gilbert

The irresistable lure of quantity.

2010-11-14T10:07:00.000-08:00

I've lost most of the Hebrew that I taught myself several years ago -- though of course I hope and think that it would come back if I took the time to rediscover it. But one thing I haven't forgotten is the phrase "ha'avodah hi chayim," or "work is life." I scrawled it in the corners of notebooks, on tests like it was a jr. high crush, as though I were testing out my first name with the surname of a boy I liked. I did this all through my first case of mono, and through my second, and then through my supposedly impossible, but clearly very real third. Given the amount of folklore that I read, you'd think I'd be better at recognizing a demon lover when it presented itself.

In the last month, I've scrambled around working at things without being especially productive, due to several rather unhealthy and misguided views of my own work system. Perhaps unveiling them here will help me move past them.

Myth: When I stop working, it's because I am, generally, an ineffective person with a deficient brain.
Truth: Stopping work allows me to explore the same idea from a different perspective. Even better, to move away from an idea, or project, or subject altogether is one of the only ways (if not the only way) to see it with new and fresh eyes.

I do take breaks: see movies occasionally; watch television; read YA books -- but whenever I do, it's with the gnawing sensation that I shouldn't be -- that until the dissertation is finished, I should have no breaks at all. But first, thinking that doesn't actually make me productive. And secondly, I already know that if I allow myself to keep believing this, that I'll just substitute something else for the dissertation after it's complete, whenever that is.

This isn't actually an appealing prospect. In fact, I almost think that I could argue that it makes me slower at progressing: when I'm facing a devil I know, why would I be in a hurry to replace it with a new one?

And sometimes, I actually go so far as to promise myself a fun outing, and then not make the progress I said I would -- meaning that I end up denying myself the outing. Maybe this looks like holding myself accountable -- but I'm beginning to think that part of me feels more virtuous if I skip the outing and try to work more instead.

It's a quantity vs. quality argument; and my own self-doubt means that it has a particularly insidious effect: if I constantly downgrade the quality of my own thoughts and work, then I teach myself that the only way to surmount the poor quality of my own work is to increase the quantity of it. That's not helpful.

There's a poem by Selima Hill that's applicable:

Overwork is Just a Kind of Laziness
(from Red Roses)

Overwork is just a kind of laziness
for people who enjoy being thin.
It winkles on the foreheads of the meek
and bythe afternoon a warm casced
rumbles down their necks
like scarlet rocks.
Workers rolle on workers with such diligence
everyone forgets how to stop!
They keep themselves alive by drinking coffee
and then by thinking thoughts of being dead
but when they find they really are dying
then they hear it call across the city,
across the golden halls--
that place called Home!
It's easy to be lazy when you're dead
but first they want to laze around at home!

---

What I think I need to bear in mind here, most of all, is that I allow myself to think of not having anything except work. In the past, I've allowed myself to think that I don't have any really meaningful home, or alternative to work. The reasons for this aren't important to list here and now, but in the last few months, I'm more aware of the fact that I *do* have a home, as complex (and sometimes intangible) as it may be. The people in Hill's poem try to pretend that there is no home, or to be deaf to its calling, and they succeed, right up until the end. I could put this in terms of economics, I think: you have two resources, labor and leisure, and call them both different types of capital. Labor as capital is problematic, as Marx and others have explained at length: sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. As an academic, I happen to be in a profession where my own labor can produce capital that I can use, in the form of scholarship, lesson plans, etc.

But even putting aside the complexity of labor/capital for a moment, leisure is capital that has to be used in order to be renewed. It can't be saved up, except in very limited ways. You can't, for example, transfer vacation time earned at one job to the next job.

I feel like I'm getting down to points that are so obvious they're idiotic; but here's the other one I need to make: leisure isn't money -- you can't earn interest on it by saving it. But it's still capital, and still serves a beneficial purpose, even if that purpose doesn't have transparently qualitative results. Maybe I'm mainly making these points for my own benefit, and for the benefit of other people who are equally neurotic and/or driven, so I'll finish this off until I have something more to say about it; and end with two things that I want to remember.

1. Delayed gratification is not universally applicable. It certainly may be in regards to the question of buying things on credit vs. through saving -- but for everywhere else, I think at the very least it must be treated as unproven.
2. Leisure serves a purpose.

RED: a spoiler-free review

2010-10-29T21:28:00.000-07:00

This is not a deep film. It is silly every chance it gets. But the entire cast is eminently watchable while being silly.

Although, if you think John Malkovich has gone overboard with wackiness lately, then you might object. And conversely, there are not quite enough opportunities for Rebecca Pidgeon to be silly.

Though having Rebecca Pidgeon at all is very good for the film; verily, any film would be improved by the presence of Rebecca Pidgeon. I think, for example, that she would be a top candidate for that little cameo in The Hangover 2 that is garnering so much controversy.

Could that be the next Tumblr meme, like Selleck Waterfall Sandwich? Rebecca Pidgeon Replaces Mel Gibson?

Why haven't you mentioned Helen Mirren yet, you say? Because I hardly need to. Helen Mirren as a CIA assassin is so good as an idea that it almost doesn't need to be realized; and you might think, watching it, "gosh, wouldn't it be great if there was another Prime Suspect series?" But she is great; and so is Brian Cox.

The plot barely makes sense, when it unravels, though I suppose all it needed to do was give Our Venerable Heroes something to do. I expect a little better of Warren Ellis.

On reflection, though, I think that the only plot I would really have been satisfied with would have allowed for a romance between John Malkovich and Rebecca Pidgeon.

Further adventures in gluten-free baking

2010-10-27T22:51:00.001-07:00

I didn't really have much interest in gluten-free baking when I first got my celiac diagnosis. Too fiddly, too expensive; and just the thought of bread made me feel a little ill.

Fast-forward 7 months: I went to London, found lots of GF products, came home disgruntled that the US had so few in comparison. And then the new Gluten-Free Girl and the Chef cookbook came out.

So far, I've made the baked eggs, the waffles, and the chocolate peanut-butter brownies. The waffles didn't turn out well; but I think that has more to do with my unfamiliarity with waffles than anything else. Tonight, I made the pizza crust, which is in the book as a cracker recipe.

I wonder if the scale I got recently* is a little off, because the book shows both grams and cups, and the volume of my measurements looked like it was more than it ought to be. But hey, all in proportion, right? And the upshot was that I had enough for this and for this.

The pizza is topped with a caramelized onion and shallot, a sliced Arkansas Black apple, an Apple-Chardonnay sausage from Trader Joe's, and some grated Gouda. Turned out deliciously, though next time, I want to find a more traditionally savory sausage (my choices were sweet apple, apple-chardonnay, and jalapeno.

I was really pleased with the crackers, maybe because I was able to roll them thin enough that they really do feel like crackers, not just thin bread. Mind you, I kept them in the oven for about 18 minutes -- first 10, then 5, then 1, 1, 1. That's a little longer than the recipe suggests, but it's fine if you keep a close eye on them.

A lot of the rosemary that I'd pressed in fell off when I broke the crackers, so I need to press harder next time (I was a bit nervous, never having made crackers before.) Next time, though, I'm going to make tomato-basil-garlic.

* I can hardly believe I've waited this long to get a scale. It's not that it's more precise for recipes, though it is - it's that it's so much easier than fiddling around with measuring cups. Do you know how many powdered, dry ingredients I've spilled while trying to level them out with a knife? Too many. Now I put a plastic container on the scale, zero it out, and dump things in gently until I get to the right amount. So. Much. Faster.

Note to self, re: teaching

2010-10-25T21:38:00.000-07:00

1. When you see that the professor teaching the primary lecture course with which your writing course is linked has assigned hefty chunks of Marx and Rousseau with one day of lecture for each, be afraid. Be very afraid. And be prepared to do triage.

THATCampPNW 2010 post-mortem

2010-10-24T15:44:00.000-07:00

Last year, when I was swamped, and overwhelmed, and exhausted (and right about to get really ill with what I now know is celiac disease), I went to an unconference in Pullman, called THATCamp.

Or, actually, THATCampPNW. It was amazing. I met great people, got new ideas, and felt more energized than I often do at traditional conferences. This year, my colleague Jentery Sayers and I coordinated a second THATCampPNW, and as chaotic as it felt at times, it seems to have been a success. Here's what I learned. Or at least, part of it. I think it would take more than one blogpost to cover it all.

1. Don't miss the opening session: "The opening session is the most interesting one," said Jentery, a few minutes before ours started; and whether or not he was right, what I found is that it's the most important one, in terms of learning about other people's interests. I felt as though the session titles were vague and abstract; if they'd appeared as paper titles, I'd have called them bland. That's part of the point of an unconference, I suppose -- no energy needlessly expended on cute wit -- but I never did feel like I entirely caught up on the conversation.

2. Hire someone to hold down the fort (if you're the coordinator). We didn't think about this in advance, which is a little dim of us, considering that our base was in the Simpson Center for the Humanities; a really nice space -- but one that can't be left unattended. The two sessions I did make it to on the first day were dictated by their location, i.e., where I could be and still be easily accessible/keep an eye on things. And they were good, but it's not really the THATCamp experience I had imagined I'd have.

3. Don't assume that everyone coming is tech- and THATCamp-savvy. Sure, many, perhaps most of them may be using smartphones with map capabilities, and may know how the THATCamp format works. In our case, though, we had a mix; and while I'd thought of the map issue, what we hadn't provided was a half-page "Welcome to THATCamp! This is how things work" sheet. It was telling, then, that at our wrap-up session, one of the comments was "I didn't really realize that if I proposed a session topic, I should be ready to serve as facilitator, and ready to start the conversation." Not that facilitating is always necessary; in fact, being willing to get out of the way and avoid authoritative pontificating is vital. But being aware of both possibilities is the main point.

4. Assume that things will go wrong. In our case, it was a catering snafu, and probably pretty mild, though certainly a pain. But it didn't interfere with THATCampPNW's success in itself, so, on the whole? Win. Refreshments were good, and there were plenty of them.

5. Colleagues are awesome. This would never have happened without Jentery Sayers, who is far more advanced at networking and being social than I am.

There are a few things I'm still thinking about. We had several adds and drops in the final week. (Luckily, we had a waitlist, so there was no danger of attendance being noticeably sparse.) Even so, I'd say that about 20% of our attendees didn't show. Since we'd planned on having 90 people, this wasn't a big deal -- having 70 was plenty; and in fact, I think it was better than having 90.
But I'm struck by the fact that probably half of the people who were determining Sunday's sessions didn't actually attend them. Is there a better way of setting them up? I'd like to think so.

Finally, and I'll end with this for now, having a wrap-up session (as we did) is good, but I wonder whether we could do more for continuing conversations later on. Does the main THATCampPNW site need a Missed Connections post for people to comment on? Maybe, because one of the things I kept hearing was that people wanted to have conversations that were shortened or simply didn't happen due to time constraints. I know that the document created during the wrap-up session will be posted, and I know at least one BootCamp instructor planning to post an online version of her session. We ended this year with an offer to host THATCampPNW 2011 at WSU Vancouver, and I think that's a positive achievement -- a level of certainty that we didn't have last autumn at Pullman. It's good to know that even if conversations were cut off, we have a place where they can be restarted.

Catfish (a meandering review)

2010-10-02T21:38:00.000-07:00

After I saw Catfish today, I wondered why I'd been so intrigued, and after a moment, I remembered that I had heard a short NPR story on it, teasing the "riveting" final 40 minutes, the amazing twist ending. Darn you, NPR, for making me believe you when you say something is riveting. Often, you're right -- but not every time.

This morning, videochatting with my partner, I mentioned that I might see Catfish, and I think I said something like "it's a documentary about a relationship on Facebook, it has some sort of twist, and I'm curious about the storytelling." He passed me this article in response. From his perspective, I'm experienced at Facebook -- I have 269 virtual friends, and I'm on it most every day. I thought, later that morning, of trying to explain that I don't feel like I'm part of the classic FB crowd; I had to be told what it meant to "poke" someone, and never used any of the numerous actions with anyone without great irony. From poking came SuperPoke, which, if I recall, had a write-your-own custom poke option; and so in my peak superpoking period, I threw Helen Vendler at several friends. (Much better than throwing sheep, and I promise you, I would never throw Helen Vendler at anyone who wouldn't appreciate her.) Later, the same friends and I discovered that the "teabag your friend" option corresponded to the teabagging entry in the Urban Dictionary, and we were equal parts titillated and horrified.

"Look at me," I wanted to say to my partner; "even I exhibit fogeyesque horror at the things kids do these days."

But I didn't have time to write him, because after getting back from the farmer's market, I had to rush downtown to play a sexy secret agent for a company that does corporate teambuilding games.

I got to my assigned spot, planted myself at the bar, and explained to the bartender what I would be doing for the next couple of hours. He was amused. So was the couple who were sitting a couple of places away, who were equally intrigued by my English accent. I didn't really want to break character, or explain why I have the accent, or anything, so when they asked where I was from, I just shrugged, and said "Oh, I'm from London -- but I've lived here most of my life. Where are you from?"

And they said they were from Montana, which, of course, they said, I wouldn't know. (Why would a Londoner know about Montana?)

But I did. And I told them how I had been close friends with a girl who lived in Great Falls, and her family. They were incredulous. "But we were from Great Falls before we moved out here! What did you say her name was?"

I hadn't said. And Great Falls is a swarming metropolis compared to many cities in Montana. Wait, what am I saying? There aren't even that many cities IN Montana. But of course, this nice couple who I'd just casually sat next to at a bar knew my friend's family; were still close to her aunt and uncle.

They thought it was amazing and hilarious. (So did I.) But if they call up C's family, and try to tell her that they met C's childhood friend from England, I imagine they'll get some strange reactions.

I put three teams through their paces. They had to use their best pick-up lines to get my phone number. When they were pitiful, I mocked them; when they stepped it up and started pretending with energy, I rewarded them with higher points. Along the way, they bought me a couple of glasses of wine. A nice afternoon. And I got done just in time to scurry up the street to catch the 15:00 showing of Catfish.

So, Catfish. Spoilers here, at Wikipedia; and more obliquely here, at an article critiquing the film. Spoilers here, too, I suppose, but I'll give you a few carriage returns in case you want to look away.

Still here?

Catfish is about a woman who lied on the internet. To an extreme extent, I suppose, because creating 15 Facebook profiles is ambitiously imaginative.

People have been lying on the internet since long before Facebook. I had a brush with an elaborate internet liar in my first couple years of college, through an early shipper fandom group for Picard and Crusher on ST:TNG. I've read stories about others. Uncovering one is as strange as the first time you reached into a pond and scooped up a cluster of frog eggs; felt slime where there ought to be water, and perhaps saw the small black tadpole bodies beginning to wriggle their way out.

But frog eggs are everywhere, and so are internet liars. The Schulmans and Joost act as though Facebook have suddenly made these deceptions possible, as though it's some sort of grand advance allowing so much more intimacy than before, and the chance to be intimate with strangers. Clearly, they're too young to have ever been active in Usenet groups.

As the film ended, people were murmuring about how sad Angela was, and how bizarre, and how nice Nev Schulman was, and all I could think of was "Jeebus, folks, haven't you ever desperately wanted to be someone else? Or imagined what it would be like to be someone different?" I couldn't help thinking about how easy it is to slip in and out of different facets of my personality in Seattle. If I want to be a sexy Brit for an afternoon, and get paid to sit in a bar and heckle teams, I can. And there are much easier ways of indulging in feeling like a different sort of person: usually, it's as simple as going to a different neighborhood. It's much easier to do than in small rural towns like Ishpeming, MI. For three upwardly mobile guys in NYC to not get that? I guess it's not surprising, but I still found them sad; the filmmakers as much as the family.

At the end of the day, then, I guess I am old in internet years, if old means that I know that people will go to a lot of trouble to find ways to love and be loved.

"You've changed. You're daring. You're different in the woods."

2010-08-18T16:01:00.000-07:00

Into the Woods was the musical that made me like rap music -- well, made me receptive to it -- and was also the musical that introduced me to Stephen Sondheim. I brought home the soundtrack from the library because it was a musical, and it was about fairy tales, and really, that in itself was enough.

I think I was 12. 13? There was an awful lot that I didn't pick up; I knew that it was different from Rodgers & Hammerstein, but if you'd asked me how, I'm not sure that I would have been able to say anything more than that it sounded completely different in terms of rhythm, melody, and harmony. Now I can think back to some of the more saccharine R&H numbers (Surrey With the Fringe On Top, anyone?) and Andrew Lloyd Webber's cloying Puccini imitations, and think, with horror, that were it not for Sondheim, musicals would have become intolerable.

This isn't to say that Sondheim can do no wrong. I think that Sweeney Todd is amazing; so well-crafted that I dare you to find a single word or note that's superfluous. But what makes Sondheim great is that he could set insecurity, annoyance, and ennui to music -- and that's probably also his greatest weakness. I remembered feeling, when I finally got to see the video of the original Broadway cast, that the second act was less tight than the first one; that the stories just get sort of mushed together. Getting thrown together by chance rather than by choice is part of the point, I know, but it felt sloppy, too.

I didn't know that Into the Woods was playing in London, let alone at an outdoor stage in a wooded grove in Regent's Park, until I went to the Sondheim prom, and people were talking about it; and lo, when I went got home most of the good seats were gone, but I scored one in the fourth row center section.

The set is quite elaborate: three levels of platforms stretching across the stage; each tall enough to stand on, and ladders and stairs running between them. Rapunzel's tower at the center, in the back. And trees all around. The costumes were rather Tim Burtonesque, but it worked. The Witch seemed to be midway through a transformation into a tree (which meant that she had creepily root-like figures), but midway, turned into Louise Brooks (with more of a mod-Victorian outfit than flapper look, though). She really did own the part, and I did not find myself making Peters comparisons (aside from being aware of slightly different rhythms in her opening number, and this only goes to show how many times I've listened to that track over the years).

I thought that the whole cast was outstanding, though. You need a strong Witch, and a strong Baker's Wife especially, and you'd better have an interesting Red Riding-Hood, if you're not going to just skate through. This production had each of those things, but I was equally aware of the chemistry between the Baker's Wife and the Baker, and the parallel (but not identical) sexual awakenings of Red and Jack, and how much this show is about the ways that parents and children can and do wound each other as much as it's about sex.

There's one innovation that this production does that works particularly well: the Narrator, traditionally played by a Bettelheimesque man in a suit, becomes a child, probably 10-12, who has run away from home, into the woods, with a sleeping bag, a lunchbox, and a small backpack of toys who become representations of the various figures. This adaptation is so effective that I wonder that no one has thought of it before. Or maybe they have?

In short, sure, it's not the razor-sharp libretto of Sweeney Todd, but with a strong cast, the stories echo each other, rather than merely repeating. And the setting, in which the story deepens and darkens as the sun drops down out of the horizon, really couldn't be improved. In the second act, dusk had fallen, but the whole sky was an eerily washed-out orange, and the trees were lit with blue lights, which made them appear to have an ashy-grey patina; and it was a perfect accompaniment for the darkness of what takes place. Just as the Baker and the Old Man begin to reconcile, the orange had faded away, and the lightest of rain showers (delicate as lace) fell for a few minutes, only to ease away in the very last song, and in time for the curtain call.

If you miss a beat, just find another.

2010-08-10T14:58:00.000-07:00

Do I really have 25 posts on this blog?

I suppose I might. And yet I keep on letting it sink into oblivion, but once again, I'm going to try to pull it out.

This summer, I'm in London -- I've been here for 40 days; and I have about 35 left. I'm balancing between work on a research grant, dissertation work, spending time with my partner, and seeing wonderful art, theatre, and music. So far, this is what I've learned, or seen:

* Enron, Lucy Prebble's semi-musical about selling ideas and corporate collapse, only failed on Broadway because its satirical portrayals of corporate culture pale in comparison to the way that members of that corporate culture satirize themselves every day.

* The Tempest is a very hard play to do well when you are being traditionalist, as the Sam Mendes production at the Old Vic is. Christian Camargo's Ariel is intriguing enough, but the rest was such a lifeless fidelity to the script that I found myself genuinely fascinating by the lighting design.

* On the other hand, the same cast presented a stunningly good As You Like It, such that I forgot entirely that I was watching a play at all. And I think they are to be commended all the more for inhabiting the script so thoroughly while remaining so traditional.

* The V & A Small Spaces exhibit is as wonderful as you would expect it to be. I climbed in Ratatosk, thought that I could probably sleep very comfortably in the In-between architecture, and of course, climbed up through the space that has gotten the most attention, Rintala Eggertsson Architects' Ark, the "flat made entirely out of bookshelves." It's not really a flat, as there is hardly room to sleep anywhere, but it is a fascinating and restful space. Most fascinating, to me, anyways, was the fact that though it was chock full of books of all sorts, my eyes kept landing on books that were familiar to me, that I might have on my bookshelf. This could not have been simply a question of recognizing the spines, as many of the editions were not ones that I owned or had seen before. When I first entered, I spotted several Henning Mankell novels, and later on, found Marguerite Yourcenar, Harper Lee, John Betjeman, James Herriot, and Jean M. Auel. I even spotted a paperback edition of Harriet Walter's memoir, Other People's Shoes. I don't know if other people have the same experience, but it would be interesting to know if they did.

This weekend I...

2010-03-15T16:14:00.000-07:00

...completed week one of Couch to 5K; revised and finished one section of dissertation chapter, outlined the next, baked gluten-free bread, installed Adobe CS 4 Design Premium, taught myself more InDesign, and proofed/did minor revisions on a Blake Society publication, sang in a Sunday evening service, caught up with an old friend, went to Purple Cafe, saw Jordi Savall and Hesperion XXI, and wrote back to a student about his grant application.

Review: A Local Habitation, by Seanan McGuire

2010-03-10T21:45:00.001-08:00

This will be a quick review. But you know, I hope, that if I'm allowing myself to write a review as a reward for dissertating, that it must be good, right?

First, here's the update on the ebook situation that was so vexing me in my last post. I was still grumpy about the delay, but it occurred to me that I could make an unfortunate situation into a good one by buying the print edition and giving it away to a local women's shelter (and that this was more important than my stupid frustration with Daw Books), and secondly, that if A Local Habitation were a trade paperback for sale at approx $15, the cost of the print and Kindle editions combined, I would have bought it without hesitation.

When I finished it yesterday evening, I was very pleased with myself for making the decision to go ahead and get it. The worldbuilding continues to be great. I think that this is the first time I've read a novel about fairies set in the "real" non-faerie world, and believed it. The concerns and issues are that carefully thought out, as are the mistakes that people make in trying to navigate both spaces.

The characters are great. We see Toby dealing with new situations, quite different from those in Rosemary and Rue, and learn more about her in the process. There are not too many characters, but I almost wish that it were possible to know more about the ones in this novel than I found out. That's meant as a compliment.

The mystery is interesting, and good. I did, admittedly, figure out whodunnit kind of early, because (obligatory ROT13: Vs Tbeqna vf gur bar jub pna svk cubarf fb gung gurl jbex bhgfvqr bs gur Xabjr, gura vg znxrf frafr gung fur jnf gur bar zrffvat jvgu gur cubarf fb gung Wnahnel pbhyqa'g trg guebhtu gb Flyirfgre. Vf guvf nyzbfg gbb boivbhf? Lrf, rkprcg gung tvira Gbol'f ynpx bs grpu-fniil, vg qvq znxr frafr gb zr gung guvf jbhyq gnxr ybatre sbe ure gb tenfc.)

But I wasn't positive until I figured out why, and that took much longer, though the clues were indeed right there in front of me. And that, for me, makes a damn fine novel. I look forward to the next book, and hope we find out more about why the Queen of the Fairies seemed so mentally unstable in Rosemary and Rue.

But in the meantime, I'll happily reread ALH again in a couple of weeks. For me, that means that it's in a class with books by Joan Aiken, Noel Streatfeild, Sarah Monette, and Scott Lynch. Books that make me really, really happy.

Publishers behaving badly.

2010-03-06T09:28:00.000-08:00

I can't remember where I heard about Seanan McGuire's Rosemary and Rue, but I liked it so much that when I got to the end of the Kindle sample chapter, I clicked "Buy now" as though I were just turning another page. No hesitation.

It didn't disappoint. McGuire's urban fantasy is full of fairies: caite sidhe, rose-goblins (like cats, but with bodies formed from rosebush branches, thorns and all), mixed race changelings -- and not a hint of twee in the whole thing. Instead: political intrigue, delayed revenge, and the tension surrounding relationships that have been left hanging. Someone described it as fairy noir, and that description is dead-on accurate. I was so happily drawn in that I didn't feel the need to speculate on who was behind the murder that's the main focus of the volume. There's another, larger plot that McGuire introduces, and I have the feeling that the two are probably connected. But enough is resolved in the first volume that I was happy to sit and wait for a sequel. A couple of weeks later, I read Rosemary and Rue over again, and liked it just as much. I told my friends about it. Even though it's part of an unfinished series, I said, you'll love it, and feel satisfied.

Fast forward to January, when I remembered that I should start looking for the second volume. Amazon listed the Kindle edition of A Local Habitation as being released on March 2, 2010, simultaneous with the printed edition. I pre-ordered. I love pre-ordering books on Kindle. At midnight on the day of release, they instantly appear, and I can read a chapter, maybe five, before waking up to finish on the day of. Or, I can start reading the next day without getting out of bed at all!

Don't get me wrong. I loved Harry Potter release parties. But the decadent pleasure of having a book appear as though someone had set it by my bedside, knowing that I would wake up excited about it? Brilliant. Utterly brilliant.

Of course, that didn't happen this time. On February 25th, an email from Amazon arrived:

We're writing because the publisher has changed the release date for the Kindle version of the book listed below:

'A Local Habitation' by Seanan McGuire
Link to the Kindle Title: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0030CVRDE
The old delivery date was: 3/2/2010
The new delivery date is: 3/9/2010

Disappointing, especially because I'd scheduled a minor medical procedure (MMP) for March 2nd. I'm supposed to rest after this MMP, and while I normally hate lying around in bed, having a new Seanan McGuire book would have kept me blissfully, patiently still, and happily reading.

But then the MMP had to be rescheduled - for March 9th! All was right with the world. Until I woke up this morning to the new email from Amazon:

We're writing because the publisher has changed the release date for the Kindle version of the book listed below:

'A Local Habitation' by Seanan McGuire
Link to the Kindle Title: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0030CVRDE
The old delivery date was: 3/9/2010
The new delivery date is: 3/16/2010

I understand that publishers are worried about losing profits on ebooks, especially when they're having to negotiate with Amazon and Apple, who are each trying to outdo each other. But changing the Kindle release date each week is the worst sort of buyer manipulation, and at the moment, I don't feel much like buying "A Local Habitation" at all. McGuire's own suggestion that Kindle owners buy a print copy, and then donate it to their local women's shelter is great, and I may eventually do that. But at the moment, I've cancelled my Amazon order, and am not buying at all. It's less frustrating than waiting for another email to show up, informing me that the new Kindle release date is March 23rd. March 30th. April 6th?

I used to buy fewer than 10 new books per year. As a graduate student, my budget for them is pretty limited. But I love books, and my apartment is full of them. Therein lies the other reason for not buying more new books: my apartment is full of them. Books on the shelves, under the bed, on the floor...and the fact that I'm finishing a doctoral degree makes it likely that I'll be moving somewhere, maybe somewhere far away. Buying printed books is, in general, a bad idea for me. When I buy used, at least I'm spending less money on something I'll probably have to get rid of anyways.

I got the Kindle for iPhone just about a year ago. In that year, I have purchased not just 10, but 65 brand new books. At Christmas, I got a full-sized Kindle. If I total up the money I've saved in discounts, the Kindle mostly paid for itself. I never used to browse bookstores looking to see if there was anything new. Now I do so regularly. Surely, publishers, I'm not the only one whose book buying habits are changing. But I've also never felt so jerked around by a publisher, and so reluctant to spend money on a book at all.