Because the amount of fiction reading I do is directly proportional to the amount of time I spend at the gym--and because the gym is not the place for complicated, experimental fiction--I've been whipping through novels lately. The one I finished most recently is Gillian Flynn's debut novel, Sharp Objects which I picked up after having read and loved Gone Girl a couple of years back.
Sharp Objects isn't as strong of a novel, though it's very good. Suspense/mystery/crime isn't my preferred genre, but both Gone Girl and Sharp Objects have stuck with me for reasons that are only loosely connected to genre. I guess the easiest way of putting it is that I can't stop thinking about Flynn's women. Both novels are narrated by the kind of women who are familiar from crime fiction, but who usually aren't given the chance to speak for themselves. You know: tough, beautiful, damaged, and dangerous to themselves or others. The kind of woman the male hero gets entangled with--and usually tries but fails to save.
But the women in Flynn's novels get to be more than just enigmas or objects of fascination; they show us heterosexual femininity under pressure. Some of her female characters are monstrous (Sharp Objects has a lot of these, from country-club backstabbers to suffocating mothers to mean-girl tweens), but even their monstrosity seems just a twisted and exaggerated version of types we all know. We know those types, because we live in a world where many women feel the pressures of femininity. And so they have coercive sex at 13; shun and shame other women for fear of losing status; transform themselves into perfect homemakers and spend their days shopping and decorating and drinking themselves into stupefaction.
Flynn's women are not tragic victims and they're far from feminist heroes. But in indirect and often self-serving ways, they make a feminist point about our social scripts for women. The famous "cool girl speech" from Gone Girl may have been delivered by an extremely unreliable narrator, but as its popularity suggests, it's a sentiment a lot of women relate to. As someone who was an awfully angry teen and twentysomething (though quiet and almost entirely unrebellious), I tend to believe there's a lot more female rage out there than we talk about. In Gillian Flynn, the fury of the pretty girl and the hostility of the good girl are all right there. It's a reality I appreciate seeing depicted.
Showing posts with label Leisure Reading. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Leisure Reading. Show all posts
Thursday, January 29, 2015
Tuesday, January 13, 2015
Benefactors, fairy godmothers, and others
The other day, completing my winter blitz through piles of unread periodicals, I encountered the latest in Jenny Diski's series of essays about her extraordinary relationship with Doris Lessing--which began when Lessing, a virtual stranger, took in the fifteen-year-old Diski after the latter's homelife exploded and she was sent to a mental institution.
Reading Diski's account of her anxious and uneasy adjustment to her new home--why had Lessing taken her in? would Diski ever be clever enough to join Lessing and her friends in convesation?--I found myself fumbling to dredge up details from the previous essay: Diski had nicknamed Lessing "Benny," right, for "The Benefactor?" No: that was what Gary Shteyngart called his quasi-parental figure in Little Failure. And was it Diski who described her fear of seeming stupid in front of her boyfriends and their political and academic families? No: that was the fictional Elena Greco, in Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels.
It is, I suppose, a coincidence that several of the things I'm reading right now have some overlapping themes and plotlines. But it isn't such a coincidence that three different accounts of intellectual and artistic self-fashioning should involve similar figures and similar anxieties--even though these stories take place in three different countries and two different generations.
On the surface, Diski's experience seems to be an extraordinary outlier: how amazing for an aspiring writer to be literally (if not quite legally) adopted by a famous novelist! But the young Shteyngart has a similarly complicated relationship with a t.v. writer friend-of-a-friend who takes an interest in him and his work; and though Elena has no single comparable figure, Ferrante's novels show her fixating on various teachers, boyfriends, and classmates as models for the kind of intellectual and public figure she'd like to become.
Indeed, aspects of all three experiences are probably familiar to anyone who has struggled to become anything: how does any of us learn to inhabit a new self, if not in response to others?
Most of us don't have a mentor or a patron, but take our models from among our peers. I sure did: in college, in grad school, and in the interstitial years between the two, I fixated on the people I thought of as truly smart--literary, cultured, whatever--and how they talked about things and moved through the world. I was attracted to but abashed by those who spoke well, who had opinions, who knew stuff about stuff. It amazed me that my peers had things to say (circa 1995, circa age 20) about what Tina Brown had done to The New Yorker, or the politics of senators from states other than their own, or the fortunes of American musical theater over the past twenty years. I studied them carefully and tended to have crushes on the men--perhaps feeling that though I didn't have the requisite talents, maybe I could date my way in.
Self-fashioning is always a complicated and anxious process, but if there's any lesson to be drawn from Diski, Shteyngart, and Ferrante's accounts, it's that it isn't any easier with a fairy godmother (Diski's semi-ironic name for Lessing), or a Benefactor, or any other singular mentor or maestro; the people we model ourselves on are also those we struggle to diminish and separate ourselves from: the erstwhile idol becomes only a t.v. writer or only a high school teacher; not really an original thinker--or simply judgmental, unkind, or limited in all the ways that human beings inevitably are limited.
I was never really friends with any of the people I took as my aspirational models, and I'm not friends with any of them now. They were useful projections and fantasies, but equally useful to be able to outgrow.
Reading Diski's account of her anxious and uneasy adjustment to her new home--why had Lessing taken her in? would Diski ever be clever enough to join Lessing and her friends in convesation?--I found myself fumbling to dredge up details from the previous essay: Diski had nicknamed Lessing "Benny," right, for "The Benefactor?" No: that was what Gary Shteyngart called his quasi-parental figure in Little Failure. And was it Diski who described her fear of seeming stupid in front of her boyfriends and their political and academic families? No: that was the fictional Elena Greco, in Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels.
It is, I suppose, a coincidence that several of the things I'm reading right now have some overlapping themes and plotlines. But it isn't such a coincidence that three different accounts of intellectual and artistic self-fashioning should involve similar figures and similar anxieties--even though these stories take place in three different countries and two different generations.
On the surface, Diski's experience seems to be an extraordinary outlier: how amazing for an aspiring writer to be literally (if not quite legally) adopted by a famous novelist! But the young Shteyngart has a similarly complicated relationship with a t.v. writer friend-of-a-friend who takes an interest in him and his work; and though Elena has no single comparable figure, Ferrante's novels show her fixating on various teachers, boyfriends, and classmates as models for the kind of intellectual and public figure she'd like to become.
Indeed, aspects of all three experiences are probably familiar to anyone who has struggled to become anything: how does any of us learn to inhabit a new self, if not in response to others?
Most of us don't have a mentor or a patron, but take our models from among our peers. I sure did: in college, in grad school, and in the interstitial years between the two, I fixated on the people I thought of as truly smart--literary, cultured, whatever--and how they talked about things and moved through the world. I was attracted to but abashed by those who spoke well, who had opinions, who knew stuff about stuff. It amazed me that my peers had things to say (circa 1995, circa age 20) about what Tina Brown had done to The New Yorker, or the politics of senators from states other than their own, or the fortunes of American musical theater over the past twenty years. I studied them carefully and tended to have crushes on the men--perhaps feeling that though I didn't have the requisite talents, maybe I could date my way in.
Self-fashioning is always a complicated and anxious process, but if there's any lesson to be drawn from Diski, Shteyngart, and Ferrante's accounts, it's that it isn't any easier with a fairy godmother (Diski's semi-ironic name for Lessing), or a Benefactor, or any other singular mentor or maestro; the people we model ourselves on are also those we struggle to diminish and separate ourselves from: the erstwhile idol becomes only a t.v. writer or only a high school teacher; not really an original thinker--or simply judgmental, unkind, or limited in all the ways that human beings inevitably are limited.
I was never really friends with any of the people I took as my aspirational models, and I'm not friends with any of them now. They were useful projections and fantasies, but equally useful to be able to outgrow.
Tuesday, August 19, 2014
To toss into the dumpster at first light
In my twenties, I finished every novel I started--even those I was sure I hated by page 50. Partly this was about how much leisure time I had, in those days of fewer obligations (and a job that did not involve hundreds of pages of reading a week). I think, though, it was also about my distrust of myself as a reader: reading was important to the identity I'd constructed, and since most the novels I read were "classics," or influential, or somehow of the moment, I felt I couldn't just say "yuck," and set one aside. There were books I read all the way through only to throw across the room or toss in the trash, but I finished them. I needed to finish them in order to know that I disliked them, and to be able to formulate a reason why.
These days I have no such scruples. I try to make it to page 100 before setting anything aside, but life is too short to read crappy books--even well-reviewed crappy books, even books I've paid good money for, even books I expected to like. With this policy in place, it's rare that I read anything all the way through that elicits a sentiment worse than a "meh." But friends, I have now--for the first time in maybe a decade--finished a book that I want out of my house immediately. It cannot remain on my shelves. I can't bear even the sight of its spine from across the room. That book is Joshua Ferris's To Rise Again at a Decent Hour.
Now, it would be unfair to call this a bad book; it's well-crafted and people I respect liked it a lot. But somewhere between pages 100 and 337 it went from "has its charms, but not really doing it for me" to "OMG THIS IS EVERYTHING I HATE ABOUT EVERYTHING." I could say the problem was that I found nothing emotionally true or interesting about the characters. I could say there wasn't much of a plot. But the thing I really can't forgive this novel is its vague, sentimental treatment of religion (or the spiritual, or the existential, or whatever--they're all kind of mushed together in a lukewarm soup).
You know how some people are all, "I wish I could believe in God! I think religious people are, like, so lucky. I mean, even if they doubt or whatever? They still have this thing to fall back on--a community, a history. Something that gives life meaning. And sometimes, in religious spaces, I feel at home; I really do. I just don't, you know: believe."
This is a book about that guy. And the book has no perspective on belief or unbelief that is any more nuanced or interesting than his.
*
Readers: what was the last book you tossed aside lightly--or threw with great force? And why?
These days I have no such scruples. I try to make it to page 100 before setting anything aside, but life is too short to read crappy books--even well-reviewed crappy books, even books I've paid good money for, even books I expected to like. With this policy in place, it's rare that I read anything all the way through that elicits a sentiment worse than a "meh." But friends, I have now--for the first time in maybe a decade--finished a book that I want out of my house immediately. It cannot remain on my shelves. I can't bear even the sight of its spine from across the room. That book is Joshua Ferris's To Rise Again at a Decent Hour.
Now, it would be unfair to call this a bad book; it's well-crafted and people I respect liked it a lot. But somewhere between pages 100 and 337 it went from "has its charms, but not really doing it for me" to "OMG THIS IS EVERYTHING I HATE ABOUT EVERYTHING." I could say the problem was that I found nothing emotionally true or interesting about the characters. I could say there wasn't much of a plot. But the thing I really can't forgive this novel is its vague, sentimental treatment of religion (or the spiritual, or the existential, or whatever--they're all kind of mushed together in a lukewarm soup).
You know how some people are all, "I wish I could believe in God! I think religious people are, like, so lucky. I mean, even if they doubt or whatever? They still have this thing to fall back on--a community, a history. Something that gives life meaning. And sometimes, in religious spaces, I feel at home; I really do. I just don't, you know: believe."
This is a book about that guy. And the book has no perspective on belief or unbelief that is any more nuanced or interesting than his.
*
Readers: what was the last book you tossed aside lightly--or threw with great force? And why?
Saturday, May 24, 2014
Ars longa, legere brevis*
With a couple of weeks of breathing room between deadlines, I've decided to turn my energies to the stack of academic books I purchased at conferences over the past year. They're all in my subfield, but none is urgently related to anything I'm working on, so this has the benefit of feeling both virtuous (hey, I'm working! This is totally work!) and a bit decadent (I'm reading for fun! I don't have to read any of this!). So far I've finished two of your basic 200-page monographs and started a third, and I'm partway through a 600-page brick of a book, which I decided to tackle a chapter a day. It's been lovely. Even more lovely is that many of these books are by friends or friendly acquaintances.
But the fact that I know some of these authors and that I just published my own book has made me reflect uncomfortably on how I read. As I've mentioned before, a lot of my scholarly reading these days gets done in a search-and-destroy, slash-and-burn kind of way: I power through a book in a day or two, extracting the gist and the ideas most useful for my own work, skimming the chapters on less-relevant topics, and then moving on to the next one. It's like bolting a meal rather than savoring it: it gets the job done, energy- and nutrition-wise, but it doesn't do the food or the cook justice.
That's not quite how I'm reading these books--there's no point in rushing through books I don't urgently need to read in the first place--but it would be incorrect to say that I'm reading them as slowly or as carefully as they deserve. I'm reading them moderately briskly, with time to linger over cool things here and there, but with the expectation that I'll be coming back to the best ones in the future and don't need to digest everything now.
That's true enough; a good book is a long-term resource, which is why I buy so many. But the fact that I spent ten years writing my own 200-page monograph nags at me when I buzz through someone else's over just a day or two. If if I needed anything to make me feel even more keenly the triviality, the disposabilty of my own work, it's how speedily I read someone else's.
------
* I know! The bad Latin, it burns.
But the fact that I know some of these authors and that I just published my own book has made me reflect uncomfortably on how I read. As I've mentioned before, a lot of my scholarly reading these days gets done in a search-and-destroy, slash-and-burn kind of way: I power through a book in a day or two, extracting the gist and the ideas most useful for my own work, skimming the chapters on less-relevant topics, and then moving on to the next one. It's like bolting a meal rather than savoring it: it gets the job done, energy- and nutrition-wise, but it doesn't do the food or the cook justice.
That's not quite how I'm reading these books--there's no point in rushing through books I don't urgently need to read in the first place--but it would be incorrect to say that I'm reading them as slowly or as carefully as they deserve. I'm reading them moderately briskly, with time to linger over cool things here and there, but with the expectation that I'll be coming back to the best ones in the future and don't need to digest everything now.
That's true enough; a good book is a long-term resource, which is why I buy so many. But the fact that I spent ten years writing my own 200-page monograph nags at me when I buzz through someone else's over just a day or two. If if I needed anything to make me feel even more keenly the triviality, the disposabilty of my own work, it's how speedily I read someone else's.
------
* I know! The bad Latin, it burns.
Wednesday, September 25, 2013
Making mystics out of cheeses
The September 16th issue of the The New Yorker contains a wonderful collection of entries from a journal Flannery O'Connor kept in 1946, while at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. They're prayers to God, funny, lovely, and peculiar little things that address an enduring artistic problem: success depends upon ambition, drive, and egotism--but also upon real self-knowledge and humility.
The link requires subscriber log-in, but here's a taste:
I love all of this, but especially the first and last metaphors: an artist needs to be careful not to mistake her own massive shadow for substance, or to let it obscure what she's trying to communicate. But sometimes an artist--like God--can take a piece of cheese and turn it into a mystic.
The link requires subscriber log-in, but here's a taste:
Dear God, I cannot love Thee the way I want to. You are the slim crescent of a moon that I see and my self is the earth's shadow that keeps me from seeing all the moon. The crescent is very beautiful and perhaps that is all one like I am should or could see; but what I am afraid of, dear God, is that my self shadow will grow so large that it blocks the whole moon, and that I will judge myself by the shadow that is nothing.
[. . . .]
[A]ll my requests seem to melt down to one for grace--that supernatural grace that does what ever it does. My mind is in a little box, dear God, down inside other boxes inside other boxes and on and on. There is very little air in my box. Dear God, please give me as much air as it is not presumptuous to ask for. Please let some light shine out of the things around me so that I can. . . .Oh dear God I want to write a novel, a good novel.
[. . . .]
What I am asking for is really very ridiculous. Oh Lord, I am saying, at present I am a cheese, make me a mystic, immediately. But then God can do that--make a mystic out of cheeses.
I love all of this, but especially the first and last metaphors: an artist needs to be careful not to mistake her own massive shadow for substance, or to let it obscure what she's trying to communicate. But sometimes an artist--like God--can take a piece of cheese and turn it into a mystic.
Saturday, March 23, 2013
Lean In
It's been a quiet spring break around these parts, with the nasty weather conspiring to keep me mostly indoors watching Marx Brothers movies and plowing through three solid months' worth of magazines. (Side note: when did magazines become so impossible to keep up with? oh, right: around the time I started wasting my life on the internet). But in the midst of that feverish whirl of activity, I also found time to read Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In.
In brief, it's awesome. I actually and literally don't understand most of the criticism it's attracted, almost all of which seems to have been written by people who haven't read the book: she's blaming women for not getting ahead! She denies there's any need for structural reform! She's denigrating women who stay home or who just aren't that ambitious! She's another privileged white lady who doesn't realize that most women have other problems!
In fact, Sandberg addresses all of those objections pretty thoroughly. Now, I'm also a (relatively) privileged white lady, and I don't have kids, so maybe I just missed the part where Sandberg told women who've stepped out of the rat race that they totally suck and deserve what they get. But frankly, I think those invested in the "mommy wars" (I can't believe I actually typed that noxious phrase) just made assumptions about what Sandberg was probably saying or where her blind spots must necessarily be.
The core of her argument is that structural reform is urgently needed, but in order to achieve it we also need more women in positions of power. Moreover, when Sandberg was in college and grad school, she heard a lot about the external obstacles to women's advancement, but nothing about the internal ones: the ways that women unintentionally slow-track themselves. So that's what she's focusing on.
Sandberg isn't the least bit dismissive about the attractions of staying at home and raising kids; in fact, she spends a lot of time talking about the importance of having a satisfying domestic and personal life and is supportive of whatever choices a woman ultimately makes. But she wants women to have real choices, and while some of those choices are dependent on structural matters outside of their control (like whether their employer even offers a paid maternity leave--as mine, for example, does not), others aren't: whether you have a partner who is willing to fully pull his or her weight at home; whether you're willing to ask your partner to step up; whether you asked for what you needed to be happy at your job, or just assumed it wouldn't be available. I found especially compelling Sandberg's argument that people who are really excited about and challenged by their jobs are less likely to leave.
And maybe most importantly, all women, whatever their economic status or their work-life decisions, benefit when more women are in positions of power. So while no woman should feel obligated to keep working or to aspire to leadership just for the good of the sisterhood, we should all care about making sure those who want to rise can do so. And the more women there are in positions of power, the harder it is to dismiss any one as a "bitch," or "ball-breaker," or whatever: it's the rarity of women in power that attracts the vitriol and the who-does-she-think-she-is?
But to talk about Sanberg's "argument" in some ways misrepresents the book, which, although it's making a serious point, is also warm and generous and extremely funny, with lots of practical advice for negotiating around, neutralizing, and drawing attention to sexism in the workplace and the home. It's also chock full of fascinating research. It's an easy read but an inspiring one, a work of big-tent, unapologetic feminism.
Have any of my readers read it? What did you think?
In brief, it's awesome. I actually and literally don't understand most of the criticism it's attracted, almost all of which seems to have been written by people who haven't read the book: she's blaming women for not getting ahead! She denies there's any need for structural reform! She's denigrating women who stay home or who just aren't that ambitious! She's another privileged white lady who doesn't realize that most women have other problems!
In fact, Sandberg addresses all of those objections pretty thoroughly. Now, I'm also a (relatively) privileged white lady, and I don't have kids, so maybe I just missed the part where Sandberg told women who've stepped out of the rat race that they totally suck and deserve what they get. But frankly, I think those invested in the "mommy wars" (I can't believe I actually typed that noxious phrase) just made assumptions about what Sandberg was probably saying or where her blind spots must necessarily be.
The core of her argument is that structural reform is urgently needed, but in order to achieve it we also need more women in positions of power. Moreover, when Sandberg was in college and grad school, she heard a lot about the external obstacles to women's advancement, but nothing about the internal ones: the ways that women unintentionally slow-track themselves. So that's what she's focusing on.
Sandberg isn't the least bit dismissive about the attractions of staying at home and raising kids; in fact, she spends a lot of time talking about the importance of having a satisfying domestic and personal life and is supportive of whatever choices a woman ultimately makes. But she wants women to have real choices, and while some of those choices are dependent on structural matters outside of their control (like whether their employer even offers a paid maternity leave--as mine, for example, does not), others aren't: whether you have a partner who is willing to fully pull his or her weight at home; whether you're willing to ask your partner to step up; whether you asked for what you needed to be happy at your job, or just assumed it wouldn't be available. I found especially compelling Sandberg's argument that people who are really excited about and challenged by their jobs are less likely to leave.
And maybe most importantly, all women, whatever their economic status or their work-life decisions, benefit when more women are in positions of power. So while no woman should feel obligated to keep working or to aspire to leadership just for the good of the sisterhood, we should all care about making sure those who want to rise can do so. And the more women there are in positions of power, the harder it is to dismiss any one as a "bitch," or "ball-breaker," or whatever: it's the rarity of women in power that attracts the vitriol and the who-does-she-think-she-is?
But to talk about Sanberg's "argument" in some ways misrepresents the book, which, although it's making a serious point, is also warm and generous and extremely funny, with lots of practical advice for negotiating around, neutralizing, and drawing attention to sexism in the workplace and the home. It's also chock full of fascinating research. It's an easy read but an inspiring one, a work of big-tent, unapologetic feminism.
Have any of my readers read it? What did you think?
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
"Memory is the sense of loss, and loss pulls us after it."
While on vacation I re-read Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, which I first read years ago and remembered loving but of which I'd had no clear memory. It's a wondrous book, possibly a perfect one, built more like a poem than a novel. Here's a taste:
Those who have been reading me long enough may have divined that my only real subject, my only real obsession, is how we make meaning out of the past and how we grapple with our sense of loss (past, present, or anticipated); it's probably why I blog, and it is, after a fashion, the subject of almost all my scholarship. So maybe I'm a peculiarly ideal reader for this novel. But if you haven't read it, do. And if you haven't read it recently, read it again.
Cain murdered Abel, and blood cried out from the earth; the house fell on Job's children, and a voice was induced or provoked into speaking from a whirlwind; and Rachel mourned for her children; and King David for Absalom. The force behind the movement of time is a mourning that will not be comforted. That is why the first event is known to have been an expulsion, and the last is hoped to be a reconciliation and return. So memory pulls us forward, so prophecy is only brilliant memory--there will be a garden where all of us as one child will sleep in our mother Eve, hooped in her ribs and staved by her spine. (192)The book is also a better and more affecting meditation on loss than Didion's Year of Magical Thinking (which I read and liked) or any of the other recent memoirs of grief (most of which I've read only in long excerpts). This is Robinson describing what the rest of us might call, with clinical ugliness, "obsessional thinking"--the inability to let go of the past or the people in it:
[H]ere we find our great affinity with water, for like reflections on water our thoughts will suffer no changing shock, no permanent displacement. They mock us with their seeming slightness. If they were more substantial--if they had weight and took up space--they would sink or be carried away in the general flux. But they persist, outside the brisk and ruinous energies of the world. (163)But in fact, it's not really grief Robinson is writing about so much as the human condition: transient and marked by loss and hopeful of an escape which is also a transcendence. That's what's wrong, I think, with so many memoirs: they assume that their particulars are, if not universal, at least of universal interest--while not actually being able to capture the truly universal or imagine anything beyond the author's own experience. Maybe that's only due modesty, when the subject is oneself. Maybe fiction is a better place for reflecting on how personal pasts intersect with national ones, or for making claims about the human condition.
Those who have been reading me long enough may have divined that my only real subject, my only real obsession, is how we make meaning out of the past and how we grapple with our sense of loss (past, present, or anticipated); it's probably why I blog, and it is, after a fashion, the subject of almost all my scholarship. So maybe I'm a peculiarly ideal reader for this novel. But if you haven't read it, do. And if you haven't read it recently, read it again.
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Lazy, hazy, &c.
I haven't been doing much since sending off my book manuscript. I should be working on my scholarly edition--but I failed to transfer the digital images of the text I'm transcribing from my desktop to my laptop. And I should be working on my syllabi, but the one that needs the most work requires access to books in my campus office. And I myself am in Cosimolandia: I've been here for five weeks, and I need to remain here a while longer to get a final appointment with the vet who's been treating one of my cats. (Long story, but he'll be fine.)
So with no easy or sensible way to retrieve the necessary items until the week before classes start--and knowing that I'd be plunged into course-prep mania during that week regardless of what I did now--I decided to enjoy the intervening 15 or 16 days. I've been working my way through the bag of books I brought with me, most of which qualify in some vague way as scholarly or intellectual, but none of which are relevant to my own projects. I've been catching up on back issues of The New Yorker and the LRB, hanging out with my cats and with Cosimo, going to the gym, watching the final seasons of The Wire on DVD, and periodically going out to a baseball game, a movie, or a museum.
It's pretty nice, I gotta say. And when I return home, Cosimo comes with me: he's on sabbatical in the fall and will be spending it in Cha-Cha City. So although this summertime indolence can't last much longer, the domestic pleasures will, I imagine, continue.
So with no easy or sensible way to retrieve the necessary items until the week before classes start--and knowing that I'd be plunged into course-prep mania during that week regardless of what I did now--I decided to enjoy the intervening 15 or 16 days. I've been working my way through the bag of books I brought with me, most of which qualify in some vague way as scholarly or intellectual, but none of which are relevant to my own projects. I've been catching up on back issues of The New Yorker and the LRB, hanging out with my cats and with Cosimo, going to the gym, watching the final seasons of The Wire on DVD, and periodically going out to a baseball game, a movie, or a museum.
It's pretty nice, I gotta say. And when I return home, Cosimo comes with me: he's on sabbatical in the fall and will be spending it in Cha-Cha City. So although this summertime indolence can't last much longer, the domestic pleasures will, I imagine, continue.
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
Fundamentalism isn't fundamental
One of the books I've been reading for fun this summer is Karen Armstrong's The Case for God. I haven't read any of Armstrong's other books, but this one is great--a defense of religion that's quite unlike most defenses of religion, including those from the left. For one thing, Armstrong is ridiculously learned, which means that her book ranges confidently through Eastern and Western religions, and their historical developments and intersections. Her essential claim is that all religions (though the Abrahamic faiths are her primary focus) are at their core not about theology, or accepting a specific set of beliefs, but about the attempt to apprehend the unknowable and to live a life that reflects that attempt. In less skilled hands this might boil down to a vague, just-be-nice-to-others-and-go-to-yoga form of spirituality, but Armstrong's book is so deeply rooted in the particulars of different faith traditions that this doesn't happen.
From my perspective, the most important point Armstrong makes is that fundamentalism--taking sacred texts literally--is a quite recent development, and one that emerges out of a desire to hitch religion to scientific rationalism. As such, fundamentalism isn't about going "back to basics" at all: it's an active rejection of the richer and more complicated reading practices (and, Armstrong would argue, of the religious experiences) of centuries of believers. This impoverished understanding of religion also underlies the more dogmatic and crusading of today's atheists, who assume that fundamentalists are, as they claim to be, the only authentic exemplars of religious belief.
There are things to quibble with in Armstrong's book, which is, in its mild-mannered way, polemical and somewhat partial. But it's a refreshing and invigorating read for those who care about religion and the varieties of religious experience.
From my perspective, the most important point Armstrong makes is that fundamentalism--taking sacred texts literally--is a quite recent development, and one that emerges out of a desire to hitch religion to scientific rationalism. As such, fundamentalism isn't about going "back to basics" at all: it's an active rejection of the richer and more complicated reading practices (and, Armstrong would argue, of the religious experiences) of centuries of believers. This impoverished understanding of religion also underlies the more dogmatic and crusading of today's atheists, who assume that fundamentalists are, as they claim to be, the only authentic exemplars of religious belief.
There are things to quibble with in Armstrong's book, which is, in its mild-mannered way, polemical and somewhat partial. But it's a refreshing and invigorating read for those who care about religion and the varieties of religious experience.
Saturday, July 03, 2010
The big picture
I'm on record, on this blog, as not being much of a systematizer or theorizer. I've never been a top-down thinker, and neither have I had much of a knack for synthesis.
I've had mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, I know myself to be a good detail person. I'm a patient accumulator of data, a subtle close-reader, a relentless reviser, and someone who's content to fuss with something she thinks might be important--though she can't say why!--until its significance gradually comes into focus. But on the other hand, I'm not a quick study. I don't speak well or persuasively off the cuff, and I have a hard time framing or even understanding the larger significance of my work. Those aren't merely superficial skills (although in some people they are); they speak to intellectual agility and intellectual depth.
So I've spent a lot of time both envying and deriding people who are systematizers. I've been impatient with theorizers for being bad on the details and suspicious of theory itself for being too totalizing.
It comes, therefore, as a bit of a shock that all I seem to want to read right now are some major systematizers. I'm happily splashing around in Freud and Weber and Nietzsche, Lacan and Derrida and Jameson.
I'm not sure what this is about. Maybe it's about filling in some gaps in my education, or taking my studies in a new direction. Maybe it's about searching for a new and better language for my own ideas. But I do think it has to do with my nearly being done with the work I began in grad school, the project that was once my dissertation and is now a very different book. I'm a much better thinker now, and a better synthesizer. Along the way, it's become clearer to me that the point--the utility--of a particular theoretical model doesn't depend on its being right in all its details, applying to every situation, or answering every question.
Also? I'm having MY MIND BLOWN. On, like, a daily basis. And maybe that's its own justification.
I've had mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, I know myself to be a good detail person. I'm a patient accumulator of data, a subtle close-reader, a relentless reviser, and someone who's content to fuss with something she thinks might be important--though she can't say why!--until its significance gradually comes into focus. But on the other hand, I'm not a quick study. I don't speak well or persuasively off the cuff, and I have a hard time framing or even understanding the larger significance of my work. Those aren't merely superficial skills (although in some people they are); they speak to intellectual agility and intellectual depth.
So I've spent a lot of time both envying and deriding people who are systematizers. I've been impatient with theorizers for being bad on the details and suspicious of theory itself for being too totalizing.
It comes, therefore, as a bit of a shock that all I seem to want to read right now are some major systematizers. I'm happily splashing around in Freud and Weber and Nietzsche, Lacan and Derrida and Jameson.
I'm not sure what this is about. Maybe it's about filling in some gaps in my education, or taking my studies in a new direction. Maybe it's about searching for a new and better language for my own ideas. But I do think it has to do with my nearly being done with the work I began in grad school, the project that was once my dissertation and is now a very different book. I'm a much better thinker now, and a better synthesizer. Along the way, it's become clearer to me that the point--the utility--of a particular theoretical model doesn't depend on its being right in all its details, applying to every situation, or answering every question.
Also? I'm having MY MIND BLOWN. On, like, a daily basis. And maybe that's its own justification.
Friday, June 11, 2010
Old technologies
I recently started getting home delivery of The New York Times. Readers of extremely long standing will remember that I attempted to subscribe when I first moved here, but was thwarted--and since it was an expense I couldn't justify when I was living in the big city on a grad student stipend, I haven't been a subscriber for the better part of a decade.
But now, suddenly, home delivery is available in my area. It's been amazing.
I never got used to reading newspapers online, so mostly I didn't. Sure, I'd go to the homepage and read the headlines, or I'd search for things I knew I wanted--a theatre review, say, or the latest coverage of a particular event--but I got most of my news from the radio.
The newspaper is an elegant piece of technology, designed to deliver its particular content in an optimal way, but online newspapers don't mimic that experience. They're clunky and inefficient, difficult to skim, and clicking on a story becomes a commitment: you're locked into reading just that story, and you can only read it sequentially.
But now, in just 20-30 minutes, I can flip through my entire newspaper, read every headline, and dip into and out of stories at will. For the first time in years, I'm on top of basic sports and business news--two subjects that I care about, but not enough to click over to those separate sections in the NYT online, and then click on each individual headline for articles that I probably don't want to read in full anyway. In about 15 seconds a day, I can keep tabs on my hometown baseball team and all the other teams' relative rankings (though given how poorly my team has been doing, maybe I'd be better off without that particular benefit).
There are physical pleasures to newspapers, too. I like the oversized sheets of paper and the ink that transfers to the ridges of my fingers. I like spreading the pages across my dining room table and sitting in the sun with a cup of coffee, a cat or two, and sometimes Cosimo. I like the routine and the ritual, and the fact that reading a physical paper takes me away from my office and my computer, where I spend too much time anyway.
But mostly, I'm marveling at the technology itself. I'm glad it still exists.
But now, suddenly, home delivery is available in my area. It's been amazing.
I never got used to reading newspapers online, so mostly I didn't. Sure, I'd go to the homepage and read the headlines, or I'd search for things I knew I wanted--a theatre review, say, or the latest coverage of a particular event--but I got most of my news from the radio.
The newspaper is an elegant piece of technology, designed to deliver its particular content in an optimal way, but online newspapers don't mimic that experience. They're clunky and inefficient, difficult to skim, and clicking on a story becomes a commitment: you're locked into reading just that story, and you can only read it sequentially.
But now, in just 20-30 minutes, I can flip through my entire newspaper, read every headline, and dip into and out of stories at will. For the first time in years, I'm on top of basic sports and business news--two subjects that I care about, but not enough to click over to those separate sections in the NYT online, and then click on each individual headline for articles that I probably don't want to read in full anyway. In about 15 seconds a day, I can keep tabs on my hometown baseball team and all the other teams' relative rankings (though given how poorly my team has been doing, maybe I'd be better off without that particular benefit).
There are physical pleasures to newspapers, too. I like the oversized sheets of paper and the ink that transfers to the ridges of my fingers. I like spreading the pages across my dining room table and sitting in the sun with a cup of coffee, a cat or two, and sometimes Cosimo. I like the routine and the ritual, and the fact that reading a physical paper takes me away from my office and my computer, where I spend too much time anyway.
But mostly, I'm marveling at the technology itself. I'm glad it still exists.
Monday, December 07, 2009
Unacknowledged influences
Most of the influences on our scholarship, teaching, or even departmental citizen-hood are obvious and spring readily to mind: we all have crucial professors from college or grad school, seminal books in our field, and sometimes coaches or bosses or mothers whom we credit, effusively, with shaping aspects of our work ethic or our teaching persona.
But I suspect most of us also have unacknowledged influences: people and works and ideas that spoke to us at one point in time or during one stage of our lives, but that seem crazily or only counterintuitively related to who we are and what we do now.
For me, the most important of those mostly-forgotten influences is Camille Paglia.
I hadn't realized this myself until SEK's posts on Paglia several weeks ago, which made me think, for the first time in any real depth, about the effect she had on me when I was in high school and college.
I was 16 when "Rape and Modern Sex War" was published in the Sunday opinion section of my hometown newspaper, which must have been within weeks of its first publication in New York Newsday in early 1991. I found it electrifying. I loved the way she wrote, and the personality that I perceived to be behind it: smart, aggressive, take-no-prisoners. I couldn't remember ever reading a woman who wrote like that.
When Sex, Art, and American Culture was published the next year, I bought it and read it straight through--even though I didn't understand a great deal of what she was writing about (I had no idea what the culture wars were, or most of what was at stake in them). I went to see her when she came to speak on my college campus in 1994 or 1995, and then bought her second collection of essays, Vamps and Tramps, when it came out around the same time. Somewhere I picked up a cheap hardback of Sexual Personae, and looked forward to the day when I felt I'd be able to understand it (I did finally read it over winter break of my junior year).
But then, around age 22, I stopped reading her. Partly it was that Paglia's moment had passed and partly it was that her writing, as SEK notes, became lazy to the point of embarrassment and self-parody. But mostly I stopped reading or paying attention to her because I had other and more relevant sources for whatever she'd once given me--and since I wasn't reading or rereading her as an adult, it took me a long time to realize that we were largely not on the same side when it came to the culture wars, or feminism, or very much, really.
Still, from ages 16 to 22, I loved her. Partly it was the intoxication of her prose style (and dudes, think about it: I now work on Milton's polemical prose), but it was also that I had never encountered anyone like her: a female public intellectual who wrote and spoke as freely about pop culture as about high culture. I had had smart female teachers, and I must have seen female experts or academics on television, but I'd never seen a woman whom I perceived to be intellectually serious who was also fierce and mouthy and colloquial, or who came from a family background that was outside the usual centers of intellectual power.
I don't know that I needed Camille Paglia to become the academic and the woman and the writer that I am today; other models would have come along, and they did. But I'm grateful to her all the same.
-------------------------------
What are your unacknowledged influences?
But I suspect most of us also have unacknowledged influences: people and works and ideas that spoke to us at one point in time or during one stage of our lives, but that seem crazily or only counterintuitively related to who we are and what we do now.
For me, the most important of those mostly-forgotten influences is Camille Paglia.
I hadn't realized this myself until SEK's posts on Paglia several weeks ago, which made me think, for the first time in any real depth, about the effect she had on me when I was in high school and college.
I was 16 when "Rape and Modern Sex War" was published in the Sunday opinion section of my hometown newspaper, which must have been within weeks of its first publication in New York Newsday in early 1991. I found it electrifying. I loved the way she wrote, and the personality that I perceived to be behind it: smart, aggressive, take-no-prisoners. I couldn't remember ever reading a woman who wrote like that.
When Sex, Art, and American Culture was published the next year, I bought it and read it straight through--even though I didn't understand a great deal of what she was writing about (I had no idea what the culture wars were, or most of what was at stake in them). I went to see her when she came to speak on my college campus in 1994 or 1995, and then bought her second collection of essays, Vamps and Tramps, when it came out around the same time. Somewhere I picked up a cheap hardback of Sexual Personae, and looked forward to the day when I felt I'd be able to understand it (I did finally read it over winter break of my junior year).
But then, around age 22, I stopped reading her. Partly it was that Paglia's moment had passed and partly it was that her writing, as SEK notes, became lazy to the point of embarrassment and self-parody. But mostly I stopped reading or paying attention to her because I had other and more relevant sources for whatever she'd once given me--and since I wasn't reading or rereading her as an adult, it took me a long time to realize that we were largely not on the same side when it came to the culture wars, or feminism, or very much, really.
Still, from ages 16 to 22, I loved her. Partly it was the intoxication of her prose style (and dudes, think about it: I now work on Milton's polemical prose), but it was also that I had never encountered anyone like her: a female public intellectual who wrote and spoke as freely about pop culture as about high culture. I had had smart female teachers, and I must have seen female experts or academics on television, but I'd never seen a woman whom I perceived to be intellectually serious who was also fierce and mouthy and colloquial, or who came from a family background that was outside the usual centers of intellectual power.
I don't know that I needed Camille Paglia to become the academic and the woman and the writer that I am today; other models would have come along, and they did. But I'm grateful to her all the same.
-------------------------------
What are your unacknowledged influences?
Monday, August 31, 2009
What I did on my summer vacation
Or: wheels within wheels
It's a well-know phenomenon: the way that, when you're deeply engrossed in one project, everything you do and read and encounter suddenly seems totally relevant. And indeed, nearly everything I read within my field this summer--no matter how far outside my subfield--got fringed with Post-It flags and incorporated as citations or sometimes entirely new paragraphs within my manuscript.
But as the summer wore on, I kept having that tingly feeling that I was encountering super-important, majorly relevant stuff . . . even when whatever I was reading or watching or doing had no possible connection to my book.
And so perhaps my real project this summer wasn't the book so much as a personally and intellectually coherent life, one in which everything felt connected in meaningful ways (though I'm not sure I can articulate all of them).
Forthwith, then, the stuff what I done this summer:
Writing/research stuff
It's a well-know phenomenon: the way that, when you're deeply engrossed in one project, everything you do and read and encounter suddenly seems totally relevant. And indeed, nearly everything I read within my field this summer--no matter how far outside my subfield--got fringed with Post-It flags and incorporated as citations or sometimes entirely new paragraphs within my manuscript.
But as the summer wore on, I kept having that tingly feeling that I was encountering super-important, majorly relevant stuff . . . even when whatever I was reading or watching or doing had no possible connection to my book.
And so perhaps my real project this summer wasn't the book so much as a personally and intellectually coherent life, one in which everything felt connected in meaningful ways (though I'm not sure I can articulate all of them).
Forthwith, then, the stuff what I done this summer:
Writing/research stuff
Revised two MS chapters and began minor/cosmetic changes to two moreOther stuff read
Came up with a new title and organizing principle for the book, as well as a new way to frame its topic
Read two recent books and wrote a single book review (vastly late, but whatever)
Reviewed one book MS for a publisher
Read a new book in my field that I was afraid might overlap too much with mine (it doesn't)
Got a contract for an edition I'm co-editing
Two chapters of Cosimo's book (and he read one of mine in return)Stuff seen
Four chapters of my scholarly LTR's manuscript (and he read some of mine)
A couple of friends' essays- or chapters-in-progress
Calvin Trillin, Remembering Denny
Richard Russo, Empire Falls
The book for RU's summer reading program
A friend's recently-published novel
François Cusset, French Theory
Eve Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet
Fredric Jameson, Political Unconscious
The Odyssey (audiobook)
The Aeneid (audiobook)
Lolita (audiobook)
Months and months' worth of back issues of The New Yorker and Commonweal
A couple of seasons of The Tudors and one of Mad MenStuff done
Productions of Coriolanus and Fences
Evey and her band rocking the farmers' market
(500) Days of Summer, The Hangover, Julie & Julia, Summer Hours, Theodora Goes Wild, The Apartment, Madam Satan, Z
Taught a summer class (and put the money toward my credit card debt)My classes start tomorrow. I'm not remotely ready. But boy, was it a glorious summer.
Attended two weddings
Went to California twice, first to see my grandmother and then for her memorial service
Spent a week in New England
Met Cosimo's family, as he met mine
Adopted a second cat
Ate and drank and ate and drank on deck after sidewalk after patio
Had one of my closest friends move away
Saw old friends in Boston and New York--and ended the summer with a long lovely visit from Bert this past weekend.
Tuesday, June 09, 2009
Textual scholarship is bunk
Several weeks ago I picked up an edition of Golding's translation of Ovid at a used bookstore. It was $12, and since I only wanted it for casual reference, I didn't care about having an especially scholarly edition. This looked like a perfectly serviceable transcription.
It is, and I'm happy with it. But I didn't expect its editor to be so aggressive about not having undertaken a more bibliographically ambitious edition. This is from his note on the text:
So those of you currently collating and shit? Stop right this minute!
It is, and I'm happy with it. But I didn't expect its editor to be so aggressive about not having undertaken a more bibliographically ambitious edition. This is from his note on the text:
This present edition is based on the copy of the first edition (1567) now in the Library of the University of Illinois. Its purpose is simply to present the pleasant and delectable work to a reader interested in what must have been one of the favorite books of the young Shakespeare. . . . It is not, then, primarily a textual edition--one scrupulously based on a collation of many copies of the first and later editions, with the laudable purpose of arriving at a text scientifically as pure as possible--purer, in fact, than any Elizabethan ever happened upon. The boy from Stratford, for example, probably not long before 1580, would simply have picked up a copy of the book; it would not have occurred to him to compare it with other copies for variants in phrasing, spelling, punctuation, most of these due to human accidents--to the extra tankard of beer the compositor had at lunch, to the pretty girl who brushed by his window and set his hand a-fumbling among the letters, to failing light or weariness at the end of the day.Wow. Contempt for textual scholarship just drips from those lines, doesn't it? Oh, those textual scholars, with their "laudable" (by which I mean, sweetly pathetic) devotion to a "scientifically pure" text! They should drink more beer and eye more pretty women and really, you know: live life. Like Shakespeare! And Golding's compositor! (And perhaps Professor Nims himself, who appears from his acknowledgements to have fobbed most of the edition's actual labor off on the English department's secretaries and typists.)
Ovid's Metamorphoses: The Arthur Golding Translation, 1567, ed. John Frederick Nims. New York: Macmillan, 1965
So those of you currently collating and shit? Stop right this minute!
Sunday, August 31, 2008
How The University Works
My review of Marc Bousquet's How the University Works is long overdue--I received a copy of the book in January and read it in June--but I've been thinking about it all summer and following Bousquet's related blog off and on for most of 2008.
As longtime readers know, I was an organizer for INRU's graduate student union. This was rarely something I enjoyed; in fact, I spent a lot of time resenting the way that the logic of my belief in unionization seemed to commit me to doing more than just signing a card and going on strike once in a while. I hated phone banking and I hated foisting myself on people who had no desire to talk to me, and I made fun of the earnestness and encounter-group-speak of the coordinating committee. Still, I kept doing it. (Come the revolution, Flavia will complain for a week straight--but she'll probably show up anyway, with a checklist and an extra pair of mittens.)
As reluctant an organizer as I may have been, I learned a lot about the history of academic labor and the creeping corporatization of the academy; much of what Bousquet says, then, shouldn't be news--but months after reading his book, I still can't get certain things out of my head.
First among these is Bousquet's treatment of what he calls "job market theory." I thought that casualization (and the complicity of grad programs in this process) was something I fully understood, but by reframing the issue, Bousquet has made me think about it in a new way.
According to Bousquet, the term "job market" was once simply a description of the bazaar-like atmosphere at the annual conventions of the MLA and other professional organizations, where buyers and sellers (or departments and job candidates) came together to check each other out; at some point, though, the term began to be used as if it described an actual labor market, resulting in the widespread belief that "the system of graduate education produces more degree holders than necessary, and that this 'overproduction' can be controlled 'from the demand side' by encouraging early retirements and 'from the supply side' by shrinking graduate programs" (20).
As Bousquet notes, however, the idea of a market "operates rhetorically and not descriptively" (21), and on some level we all know this: the demand for college instruction is no less today than it was a decade or three ago, and it is unlikely that the "oversupply" of PhDs, relative to this demand, is actually very large; what has declined is the number of tenure-track jobs. Despite this knowledge, most faculty and even graduate students regard this decline as a temporary or local phenomenon: the result of hard economic times and belt-tightening at the institutional or state level.
Bousquet argues that this is not only not temporary, but also not a sign of a "'system out of control,' a machine with a thrown rod or a blown gasket. Quite the contrary: it's a smoothly functioning new system with its own easily apprehensible logic, premised entirely on the continuous replacement of degree holders with nondegreed labor (or persons with degrees willing to work on unfavorable terms)" (24).
The use of market language permits faculty inaction (except around the edges, when it comes to reducing the number of admitted students, "professionalizing" those already there, or pulling such strings as may be available for their own advisees) and makes the relationship between faculty and graduate students
In sum, job market theory frees those who have tenure (or jobs that are tenure-track) to believe that they can do nothing much more than shake their heads and thank their stars, even while labor conditions worsen for them as much as for members of the academic underclass.
The sharp analysis that Bousquet brings to the idea of the job market is present throughout the book. In his treatment of the "informationalization" of the academy (an awful term, but never mind), he points out that the paranoia online education inspires in some faculty is largely misplaced--not because online education doesn't have the potential to eliminate tenure-track faculty (and gut the educational experience in any number of other ways), and not because individual institutions might not be trying to do just that, but because the place that such cynical, cost-cutting moves are really happening, and have been happening for decades, is in the old fashioned, bricks-and-mortar classroom, where courses are already more likely to be taught by adjuncts and grad students; by contrast, the expenses of getting online education up and running often outweigh the potential savings.
As grim as the picture Bousquet paints is, reading his book was oddly inspiring; if the market reflects tough economic times and an oversupply of PhDs, all we can do is hope for the best for ourselves and our students. But recognizing that the system has its own efficient but appalling logic--a logic that serves neither faculty nor student interests--means that waiting it out isn't possible, though action might be.
Time to make some goddamn phone calls.
As longtime readers know, I was an organizer for INRU's graduate student union. This was rarely something I enjoyed; in fact, I spent a lot of time resenting the way that the logic of my belief in unionization seemed to commit me to doing more than just signing a card and going on strike once in a while. I hated phone banking and I hated foisting myself on people who had no desire to talk to me, and I made fun of the earnestness and encounter-group-speak of the coordinating committee. Still, I kept doing it. (Come the revolution, Flavia will complain for a week straight--but she'll probably show up anyway, with a checklist and an extra pair of mittens.)
As reluctant an organizer as I may have been, I learned a lot about the history of academic labor and the creeping corporatization of the academy; much of what Bousquet says, then, shouldn't be news--but months after reading his book, I still can't get certain things out of my head.
First among these is Bousquet's treatment of what he calls "job market theory." I thought that casualization (and the complicity of grad programs in this process) was something I fully understood, but by reframing the issue, Bousquet has made me think about it in a new way.
According to Bousquet, the term "job market" was once simply a description of the bazaar-like atmosphere at the annual conventions of the MLA and other professional organizations, where buyers and sellers (or departments and job candidates) came together to check each other out; at some point, though, the term began to be used as if it described an actual labor market, resulting in the widespread belief that "the system of graduate education produces more degree holders than necessary, and that this 'overproduction' can be controlled 'from the demand side' by encouraging early retirements and 'from the supply side' by shrinking graduate programs" (20).
As Bousquet notes, however, the idea of a market "operates rhetorically and not descriptively" (21), and on some level we all know this: the demand for college instruction is no less today than it was a decade or three ago, and it is unlikely that the "oversupply" of PhDs, relative to this demand, is actually very large; what has declined is the number of tenure-track jobs. Despite this knowledge, most faculty and even graduate students regard this decline as a temporary or local phenomenon: the result of hard economic times and belt-tightening at the institutional or state level.
Bousquet argues that this is not only not temporary, but also not a sign of a "'system out of control,' a machine with a thrown rod or a blown gasket. Quite the contrary: it's a smoothly functioning new system with its own easily apprehensible logic, premised entirely on the continuous replacement of degree holders with nondegreed labor (or persons with degrees willing to work on unfavorable terms)" (24).
The use of market language permits faculty inaction (except around the edges, when it comes to reducing the number of admitted students, "professionalizing" those already there, or pulling such strings as may be available for their own advisees) and makes the relationship between faculty and graduate students
paternal, administrative, and managerial. . . . Whatever actions faculty might take to secure their own working conditions, job-market theory defines their responsibility toward graduate students and former graduate students not as a relationship of solidarity with coworkers but, instead, as a managerial responsibility. In multiple roles. . . the tenured [see] their responsibility to graduate employees through the lens of participating in the administration of the "market." (20)
In sum, job market theory frees those who have tenure (or jobs that are tenure-track) to believe that they can do nothing much more than shake their heads and thank their stars, even while labor conditions worsen for them as much as for members of the academic underclass.
The sharp analysis that Bousquet brings to the idea of the job market is present throughout the book. In his treatment of the "informationalization" of the academy (an awful term, but never mind), he points out that the paranoia online education inspires in some faculty is largely misplaced--not because online education doesn't have the potential to eliminate tenure-track faculty (and gut the educational experience in any number of other ways), and not because individual institutions might not be trying to do just that, but because the place that such cynical, cost-cutting moves are really happening, and have been happening for decades, is in the old fashioned, bricks-and-mortar classroom, where courses are already more likely to be taught by adjuncts and grad students; by contrast, the expenses of getting online education up and running often outweigh the potential savings.
As grim as the picture Bousquet paints is, reading his book was oddly inspiring; if the market reflects tough economic times and an oversupply of PhDs, all we can do is hope for the best for ourselves and our students. But recognizing that the system has its own efficient but appalling logic--a logic that serves neither faculty nor student interests--means that waiting it out isn't possible, though action might be.
Time to make some goddamn phone calls.
Thursday, August 21, 2008
Summer reading
As serene as I may be in the knowledge that four whole weeks of summer stretch out before me, my first day of classes nevertheless arrives on Tuesday.
It would be hard for a summer to be worse than last summer, but even given its modest competition, this summer still feels like the most pleasurable one I've had in years. I haven't taken any big vacations, and though I've gotten a fair amount of work done, no huge hurdles have been lept or grand visions acquired. Really, the most notable thing I've done is read.
Now, I read all the time, but usually I'm reading in catch-up mode: gotta get this book read for class on Thursday, or that one before my reading group meets tomorrow--or this other one in order to finish off my article revisions. Such obligatory reading can still be quite pleasurable, and I've spent long lovely hours in bed with a cup of tea and The Faerie Queene or in a coffee shop with a notepad and some volume or other from Cambridge University Press. Still. . . it's obligatory.
But this summer, for all my to-do and to-read lists (and my tiresomely Protestant tendency to see all projects as self-improving ones and thus Not To Be Shirked), I felt that I actually had time to explore. My fellowship allowed me to look at all kinds of random Early Modern shit; prepping for my new fall class sent me through dozens of articles and perhaps a half-dozen books; and spending a month in a city where I knew no one gave me an excuse to work through several scholarly books only tangentially relevant to my own research.
I'd characterize all of the above as relatively fun reading--on the grounds that anything not immediately necessary must be fun--but this summer I also did more leisure reading than I have in years.
A couple of months ago Prof. de Breeze had a great post on how little leisure reading he himself does these days. It was a post I related to, as I'd been worrying about the declining number of novels (&c.) I've been reading over the past few years; a couple over winter break and a couple over the summer, usually, tending to fall into two categories: either Classics I Should Have Read Long Ago or temporarily engrossing but ultimately forgettable contemporary fiction. I was starting to wonder whether maybe I just wasn't a leisure reader any more--or whether there was something about my life that made contemporary fiction feel less relevant.
As someone who has always read and whose livelihood depends on students who themselves identify as readers, that possibility was disturbing but not unplausible; I'd long since stopped reading the short fiction in The New Yorker, at least in part because it felt the least urgent: given the finite amount of my reading time, I concluded that the nonfictional stuff was what was interesting, topical--and much more likely to come up in dinner-party conversation.
So I'm pleased to report that, this summer, I got my leisure-reading groove back. This is what I read:
And if that isn't a justification for 14 weeks away from the classroom, I don't know what is.
It would be hard for a summer to be worse than last summer, but even given its modest competition, this summer still feels like the most pleasurable one I've had in years. I haven't taken any big vacations, and though I've gotten a fair amount of work done, no huge hurdles have been lept or grand visions acquired. Really, the most notable thing I've done is read.
Now, I read all the time, but usually I'm reading in catch-up mode: gotta get this book read for class on Thursday, or that one before my reading group meets tomorrow--or this other one in order to finish off my article revisions. Such obligatory reading can still be quite pleasurable, and I've spent long lovely hours in bed with a cup of tea and The Faerie Queene or in a coffee shop with a notepad and some volume or other from Cambridge University Press. Still. . . it's obligatory.
But this summer, for all my to-do and to-read lists (and my tiresomely Protestant tendency to see all projects as self-improving ones and thus Not To Be Shirked), I felt that I actually had time to explore. My fellowship allowed me to look at all kinds of random Early Modern shit; prepping for my new fall class sent me through dozens of articles and perhaps a half-dozen books; and spending a month in a city where I knew no one gave me an excuse to work through several scholarly books only tangentially relevant to my own research.
I'd characterize all of the above as relatively fun reading--on the grounds that anything not immediately necessary must be fun--but this summer I also did more leisure reading than I have in years.
A couple of months ago Prof. de Breeze had a great post on how little leisure reading he himself does these days. It was a post I related to, as I'd been worrying about the declining number of novels (&c.) I've been reading over the past few years; a couple over winter break and a couple over the summer, usually, tending to fall into two categories: either Classics I Should Have Read Long Ago or temporarily engrossing but ultimately forgettable contemporary fiction. I was starting to wonder whether maybe I just wasn't a leisure reader any more--or whether there was something about my life that made contemporary fiction feel less relevant.
As someone who has always read and whose livelihood depends on students who themselves identify as readers, that possibility was disturbing but not unplausible; I'd long since stopped reading the short fiction in The New Yorker, at least in part because it felt the least urgent: given the finite amount of my reading time, I concluded that the nonfictional stuff was what was interesting, topical--and much more likely to come up in dinner-party conversation.
So I'm pleased to report that, this summer, I got my leisure-reading groove back. This is what I read:
August Wilson, The Piano LessonSome of the books I read were merely good--a fun way to pass the time and a means of shoring up, ever so slightly, my claims to familiarity with the current literary scene. Others, though, reminded me of what made me a reader and a writer in the first place.
Richard Russo, Straight Man
Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End
David Mamet, American Buffalo
Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach
Tom Perrotta, Joe College
(Plus eight to ten Hernandez Brothers comics and the opening chapters of The Yiddish Policeman's Union.)
And if that isn't a justification for 14 weeks away from the classroom, I don't know what is.
Friday, May 30, 2008
Have cat, will travel
Tomorrow, before daybreak, Nero and I are boarding a plane for State Capital That Is Also Home to a Major University. SCTIAHTAMU (pronounced: sk-TEE-ah-ta-MOO) is not a place I have ever visited, or where I know a soul. However, it is home to the institution that awarded me a bunch of money to do research, so we're off for a month.
In addition to knowing no one, I will not have a car, and my sublet has neither a television nor internet access (though there's free wi-fi on campus). So I anticipate spending a lot of time in the library, or in my own little campus office, Getting Stuff Done. In addition to books for research, I've also packed TEN novels purely for leisure-reading purposes.
The last time I did any serious leisure reading? Was longer ago than the last time I did any serious writing. I'm hoping the immersion method--or maybe it's shock therapy--serves me well on both counts.
In addition to knowing no one, I will not have a car, and my sublet has neither a television nor internet access (though there's free wi-fi on campus). So I anticipate spending a lot of time in the library, or in my own little campus office, Getting Stuff Done. In addition to books for research, I've also packed TEN novels purely for leisure-reading purposes.
The last time I did any serious leisure reading? Was longer ago than the last time I did any serious writing. I'm hoping the immersion method--or maybe it's shock therapy--serves me well on both counts.
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
The consolations of narrative, or, late again to my own blogiversary
In a recent post, Mean Something wrote about a friend who had suffered a loss and whom she was considering sending a book--but which one? Her post became a meditation on "consolation" and the works in which we find it, and she asked her readers to come up with their own list of five books that they turn to when in need of consolation: not works that are in some obvious way about loss or intended to console--nor works that are purely escapist--but that are, for whatever reason, comforting to the individual who chooses them.
As MS suggests, what we find consoling tends to be highly individualized, and I'm not sure that it isn't somewhat arbitrary, too: the state of mind we bring to a work determines what we find in it, and if you come to a book in need of consolation, it's likely enough that you'll find it (along with lots of other things, which you may then feel free to disregard).
At any rate, the books that I read semi-regularly aren't consoling in any ordinary or expected fashion. These include:
Consolation, for me, resides in narrative (something that Sfrajett wrote about beautifully several months ago). Other people's stories remind us that we all heal and change and grow, and that there's usually something good lurking around the corner that we can't now imagine.
But as the books I've chosen suggest, it's not the happily-ever-after part that I fixate on, but the attempt to get there. Happy endings aren't magic, something that God or the universe gives us or doesn't--we make them, to a degree, for ourselves. We may not be able to change the past or be fully in control of what happens in the present, but we are in control of the meaning we assign those events, and we rewrite our scripts continually, making something new and comprehensible out of what seem, in the moment, to be narrative dead ends.
I'd been writing this post in my head for a day or two when Guy and I happened to go see Hiroshima, Mon Amour and Last Year at Marienbad as part of an Alain Resnais retrospective. Both movies deal with the problems of memory, and both have a narrator who is trying to force the past and present into some kind of relationship. But Hiroshima (which I loved) shows life fucking going on--even with the past lurking behind every corner--while Marienbad depicts the suffocating inability to let go of the past or to incorporate it into a comprehensible narrative. I actually found the paranoid-obsessional tape loop of the movie's consciousness pleasurable, at least at times, but for very different reasons than Hiroshima or the books I've listed above.
This brings me, somehow, to the fact that yesterday was my three-year blogiversary: two years in this space and one in my previous one. I started blogging as I was finishing my dissertation and preparing to start my first full-time teaching job, and I've continued it through a second job search, a move, and adjustment to life on the tenure track. Sometimes I think that the five or six hundred posts I've written in that time are just a tape loop, continually revisiting the same issues with tiresome repetition--but although my archives do demonstrate my own paranoid-obsessional patterns, I think there's narrative there, too. Thanks for sticking around and helping me find it.
As MS suggests, what we find consoling tends to be highly individualized, and I'm not sure that it isn't somewhat arbitrary, too: the state of mind we bring to a work determines what we find in it, and if you come to a book in need of consolation, it's likely enough that you'll find it (along with lots of other things, which you may then feel free to disregard).
At any rate, the books that I read semi-regularly aren't consoling in any ordinary or expected fashion. These include:
Evelyn Waugh, Vile BodiesWhat do these works have in common? Failure more than success; the discovery of ugly things about other people or oneself; good times that prove to be fleeting and a past that can't be returned to. Those things would not, one would think, make for agreeable reading when one is feeling low--but if there's something more than aesthetic consolation that I find in these works, it's the reminder that, fuck it: life goes on.
John Cheever, The Stories (I flip through the volume at random, but "Goodbye, My Brother" and "The Swimmer" always get read)
Tom Stoppard, Arcadia
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye
Consolation, for me, resides in narrative (something that Sfrajett wrote about beautifully several months ago). Other people's stories remind us that we all heal and change and grow, and that there's usually something good lurking around the corner that we can't now imagine.
But as the books I've chosen suggest, it's not the happily-ever-after part that I fixate on, but the attempt to get there. Happy endings aren't magic, something that God or the universe gives us or doesn't--we make them, to a degree, for ourselves. We may not be able to change the past or be fully in control of what happens in the present, but we are in control of the meaning we assign those events, and we rewrite our scripts continually, making something new and comprehensible out of what seem, in the moment, to be narrative dead ends.
I'd been writing this post in my head for a day or two when Guy and I happened to go see Hiroshima, Mon Amour and Last Year at Marienbad as part of an Alain Resnais retrospective. Both movies deal with the problems of memory, and both have a narrator who is trying to force the past and present into some kind of relationship. But Hiroshima (which I loved) shows life fucking going on--even with the past lurking behind every corner--while Marienbad depicts the suffocating inability to let go of the past or to incorporate it into a comprehensible narrative. I actually found the paranoid-obsessional tape loop of the movie's consciousness pleasurable, at least at times, but for very different reasons than Hiroshima or the books I've listed above.
This brings me, somehow, to the fact that yesterday was my three-year blogiversary: two years in this space and one in my previous one. I started blogging as I was finishing my dissertation and preparing to start my first full-time teaching job, and I've continued it through a second job search, a move, and adjustment to life on the tenure track. Sometimes I think that the five or six hundred posts I've written in that time are just a tape loop, continually revisiting the same issues with tiresome repetition--but although my archives do demonstrate my own paranoid-obsessional patterns, I think there's narrative there, too. Thanks for sticking around and helping me find it.
Tuesday, January 08, 2008
Learning as dis/recovery
Over the past few days I've been making some headway on my long-deferred project of giving myself a crash course in literary theory, a subject largely and mysteriously absent from both my undergraduate and graduate training. My goal is modest: basically, to learn enough not to reveal myself publicly as an idiot.
I have a few textbooks and anthologies spread out on my coffee table (thanks partly to recommendations by Sisyphus and Horace), and I'm picking through various schools and theorists, reading all the headnotes and a good selection of essays. As I expected, it's been a deeply pleasurable activity. Much of what I'm reading is exciting in its own right, and some of it beautifully expressed, but my pleasure derives at least in part from the discovery that I know more than I thought I did, and in some ways what I'm really acquiring is a better context or frame for that knowledge.
It's satisfying to learn where certain terms that I've long understood and sometimes even used actually come from, or seeing how Thinker B was influenced by Thinker A. I recall having had a similar "a-ha!" experience late in my junior year in college, when I'd taken enough literature classes that I finally felt I had a general sense of the whole--how all those disparate periods, genres, and authors fit together.
In this case, though, I'm not just fitting things into a historical or intellectual progression, but realizing that I've already been (however un- or semi-consciously) trained in much of this. That stuff that I do with texts? There's a method to it! Or there could be! I haven't just been fumbling along, making shit up.
This, in turn, makes me think about the way we teach our students to read and work with texts. Obviously, I don't teach theory qua theory, but I do expect my students to be able to ask certain kinds of questions about the works we read, and to approach them in ways that produce meaningful analyses and richer readings. Those questions and approaches aren't my approaches, of course--they reflect the ways that I and most literary scholars of my generation have been trained--though I may be guilty of having too readily assumed that they're the obvious or only ones.
Still, much of what we do in the classroom is similar to my own project over the past few days: not teaching students new things so much as showing them what they already half know. There are, of course, things that have to be learned from the ground up. But the older our students are the more likely it is that we're teaching them to focus or reorient skills that are already there; we're just helping them to be more thorough and more self-aware about the process.
Is that wishful thinking? Well, maybe. But even if it's not true for every student, it's surely pedagogically useful to conceive of literary analysis (both its acquisition and its exercise) in these terms: as "discovery" in the old sense of dis- or un-covering something that was there all along.
I have a few textbooks and anthologies spread out on my coffee table (thanks partly to recommendations by Sisyphus and Horace), and I'm picking through various schools and theorists, reading all the headnotes and a good selection of essays. As I expected, it's been a deeply pleasurable activity. Much of what I'm reading is exciting in its own right, and some of it beautifully expressed, but my pleasure derives at least in part from the discovery that I know more than I thought I did, and in some ways what I'm really acquiring is a better context or frame for that knowledge.
It's satisfying to learn where certain terms that I've long understood and sometimes even used actually come from, or seeing how Thinker B was influenced by Thinker A. I recall having had a similar "a-ha!" experience late in my junior year in college, when I'd taken enough literature classes that I finally felt I had a general sense of the whole--how all those disparate periods, genres, and authors fit together.
In this case, though, I'm not just fitting things into a historical or intellectual progression, but realizing that I've already been (however un- or semi-consciously) trained in much of this. That stuff that I do with texts? There's a method to it! Or there could be! I haven't just been fumbling along, making shit up.
This, in turn, makes me think about the way we teach our students to read and work with texts. Obviously, I don't teach theory qua theory, but I do expect my students to be able to ask certain kinds of questions about the works we read, and to approach them in ways that produce meaningful analyses and richer readings. Those questions and approaches aren't my approaches, of course--they reflect the ways that I and most literary scholars of my generation have been trained--though I may be guilty of having too readily assumed that they're the obvious or only ones.
Still, much of what we do in the classroom is similar to my own project over the past few days: not teaching students new things so much as showing them what they already half know. There are, of course, things that have to be learned from the ground up. But the older our students are the more likely it is that we're teaching them to focus or reorient skills that are already there; we're just helping them to be more thorough and more self-aware about the process.
Is that wishful thinking? Well, maybe. But even if it's not true for every student, it's surely pedagogically useful to conceive of literary analysis (both its acquisition and its exercise) in these terms: as "discovery" in the old sense of dis- or un-covering something that was there all along.
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