February 09
MLA Confidential, Part 1
Slow dissolve: Manhattan, fifteen years ago. I walk a few blocks from my place on Third Street-- next to an anarchist squat, across from the NuYorican Poets Cafe--to the headquarters of the Modern Language Association (MLA), then in Astor Place.
I explain the agenda of the Graduate Student Caucus (GSC) to the director of the association, Phyllis Franklin. We want MLA to educate the public about the majority contingent workforce.
Inspired by a California law that set 75% as a minimum standard for classes that should be taught by a full-time stable faculty, even in its community colleges, we want MLA to establish educationally sound full-time/part-time ratios in the disciplines it represents.
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February 07
Tonight we’re gonna blog it like it’s 2666
Not tonight, actually: but sometime this week. I got Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 for Christmas, and now I’m finally getting around to reading it. As I’m sure you know, Bolaño wanted this huge novel published as five separate books—here’s the ‘Note From The Author’s Heirs’ with which the book opens:
Realizing that death might be near, Roberto left instructions for his novel 2666 to be published divided into five books corresponding to the five parts of the novel, specifying the order in which they should appear, at what intervals (one a year), and even the price to be negotiated with the publisher. With this decision, communicated days before his death by Roberto himself to Jorge Herralde, Roberto thought he was providing for his children’s future.
The note goes on to explain how blithely his executors disregarded this decision, hence the microwave-oven-proportioned book sitting on the desk in front of me. My plan is to blog my reading, book by book, as I go through it. I’ll start with book 1, ‘The Part About the Critics’, later this week. Wednesday, maybe. If you wanted to read along with me, comment and so on, that would be very nice. But I’ll understand if not. I don’t mind blogging in a vacuum. For are we not all, in an existential sense, ultimately blogging in a vacuum?
I have never previously read a Bolaño novel; but if this one’s half as good as the hype suggests, I daresay I’ll go back over his backlist. The Savage Detectives is supposed to be pretty good.
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February 04
On Meditation As A Western Practice
(x-posted to The Kugelmass Episodes)
Many of the people I know, myself included, have tried meditating at some point in their lives. I know some people who have gone to meditation retreats for days or weeks. I don’t currently meditate, but I have been considering starting up again. I’m finding it hard to begin again, though, because I fundamentally don’t know what meditating means.
Now, of course, it may not be necessary to know what meditating means. It is relaxing, it is supposed to clear the mind, and that is perhaps sufficient. Yet I am uneasy about the fact that Westerners who meditate do so in a widely divergent manner, and that there is no consensus on how one should meditate or about its nature as a discipline. Furthermore, meditating is almost universally considered a healthy practice, in the same way as “getting exercise.” If I told you that I sat in a warm bath for fifteen minutes a day, you might not have much reaction at all, or you might consider me a bit self-indulgent. However, if I announce that I meditate for fifteen minutes every day, most people will act as though I’ve admitted to great willpower and good sense.
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February 02
Human Rights, Empathy, and Literature
Writing at OnFiction, Keith Oatley follows Lynn Hunt (Inventing Human Rights, 2007) in arguing that the notion of equality of rights among humans is at least partially grounded in literature:
Hunt’s finding is that invention of the idea of the equality of rights, declarations of rights, and the changes in society that have followed them, depended on two factors. One was empathy, which really is a human universal. “It depends,” says Hunt, “on a biologically based ability to understand the subjectivity of other people and to be able to imagine that their inner experiences are like one’s own” (p. 39). The other was the mobilization of this empathy towards those who were outside people’s immediate social groupings. Although Hunt does not attribute this mobilization entirely to literary art, she concludes that the novel contributed to it substantially. “Reading novels,” she says, “created a sense of equality and empathy through passionate involvement in the narrative” (p. 39). Many novels contributed. One that Hunt discusses is Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) written by a man and inviting empathetic identification with a woman of a humble social class.
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February 01
eBooks, Piracy, and Stockpiling
Caleb Crain’s excellent overview of what 2010 may have in store for book sales makes a very convincing case for the significance and likely effects of Amazon’s decision this week to use a “nuclear” option on a recalcitrant publisher, Macmillan. Amazon caved sometime after Crain had post, but his analysis of the move’s importance and the background for it is very much still worth reading.
Crain argues that what is being fought over between Amazon and Macmillan is not, in fact, profits or even profitability (he says the way this particular argument is playing out is in effect a contest “to see to see who can lose more money” per book) but simply over who is controlling the “intermediary steps somewhere between the creation of a book and the reading of it,” although I would change the phrasing to “whether publishing companies can retain control over those intermediary steps, which include negotiations over royalties, price points, and the strategy of whether and how to release eBooks alongside printed books.” Crain’s phrasing makes it sound like either side could potentially lose control, but that’s not entirely accurate—Amazon has a lot to win but not much to lose; publishers could lose a whole lot, but they have very little (if anything) more they can win by facing down Amazon’s demands—even retention of what control they have now does not exactly look like a prize the way things have been going. (Crain in a way acknowledges this earlier in the post.)
Crain also discusses Amazon’s strategy for the Kindle, and does so very insightfully:
When Amazon first introduced its Kindle reading device, the reception was tepid. But Amazon improved the device in later models, and thanks to its aggressive low pricing on e-books, it now reports that the Kindle and e-books are selling briskly. In other words, with the money that it has lost by discounting e-books, Amazon has bought market share for its e-book reader and for itself as an e-book retailer. To put it still another way, Amazon sped up the American public’s adoption of e-books by unilaterally lowering the American public’s idea of what the natural price of an e-book should be.
Essentially, Amazon’s decision to convince consumers that $9.95 is the right price for an eBook has backed Amazon into a corner, but it still has the publishers as a buffer between it and the wall. Any pressure from consumers on the price point, and it will be the publishers who get squeezed.
What also gets squeezed, or I should say what gets squeezed the most, is the ability of publishers to continue printing books on paper. As Crain says, “It may not be possible for a single company to publish e-books at that price and also retain the infrastructure necessary to publish ink-on-paper books.” I added the emphasis, but I think it’s pretty obvious that it has to be there: as I noted above, one of the forms of control at stake in this haggling over price points is the publisher’s ability to determine how or even whether to release eBook versions alongside the printed product. If Amazon is committed to wresting control over price points for eBooks, it’s also exerting indirect control over what the profit margins have to be for printed books to compensate for the losses incurred over eBooks. Being print-first (organizing one’s whole production chain from acquisition to fulfillment around the print copies of a book) may end up being a luxury no publisher can afford.
That’s the supply side, more or less. Being (at this point) completely unconnected to the supply side (knowing only a couple of people well who work in publishing and virtually no authors), I’m more interested in the demand side. Here are some thoughts:
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The End(s) of The Mill on the Floss
I’ve been re-reading George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss for a graduate seminar I’m offering this term (what luxury, to be reading five George Eliot novels in a row!) and I’m in love with it all over again, especially the end. Well, OK, not the very end, which is (as critics have been pointing out since 1860) jarring, confounding, and depressing. But the last several chapters thrill me--and as I read them this time, I’ve been trying to figure out why. They aren’t as beautifully written or evocative as the earlier parts of the book treating Tom and Maggie’s childhoods. There are some false notes of melodrama that betray, I think, some lingering uncertainty about authorial tone that would be resolved by the time Eliot wrote Middlemarch ("[she] glared at him like a wounded war-goddess” may be the worst of these). The machinery of the plot creaks a bit. Still, once we are launched into the turbulent seas of Maggie’s terrible dilemma, I feel that we are engaged, with her, in a struggle of genuine moral significance, a conflict over what the narrator aptly describes as “the shifting relation between passion and duty,” which, as she says, “is clear to no man who is capable of apprehending it"--that is, once you recognize the complexity of the problem, its solution becomes more, rather than less, obscure. When Maggie drifts away with Stephen, she temporarily abandons “the labour of choice” that has made her life so burdensome to her so often before. What a relief, to stop deciding! “All yielding is attended with a less vivid consciousness than resistance,” the narrator observes; “it is the partial sleep of thought; it is the submergence of our own personality by another.” That soothing condition is illusory, however: “the morrow must bring back the old life of struggle.”
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January 29
Howard Zinn: A Public Intellectual Who Mattered
A guest post by Henry Giroux
In 1977 I took my first job in higher education at Boston University. One reason I went there was because Howard Zinn was teaching there at the time. As a high school teacher, Howard’s book, “Vietnam: the Logic of Withdrawal,” published in 1968, had a profound effect on me. Not only was it infused with a passion and sense of commitment that I admired as a high school teacher and tried to internalize as part of my own pedagogy, but it captured something about the passion, sense of commitment and respect for solidarity that came out of Howard’s working-class background. It offered me a language, history and politics that allowed me to engage critically and articulate my opposition to the war that was raging at the time.
I grew up in Providence, Rhode Island, and rarely met or read any working-class intellectuals. After reading James Baldwin, hearing William Kunstler and Stanley Aronowitz give talks, I caught a glimpse of what it meant to occupy such a fragile, contradictory and often scorned location. But reading Howard gave me the theoretical tools to understand more clearly how the mix of biography, cultural capital and class location could be finely honed into a viable and laudable politics.
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January 28
Original Aura
This isn’t a particularly deep point. But I was struck, looking at this image of the only original manuscript copy of Paradise Lost (h/t), at how much more it affects me precisely because I’m seeing a digital reproduction of The Original:
Mainly, of course, I just wanted to share this image. But it’s a strange inversion on the vulgar Benjaminism of clearly dividing between Art and mechanical reproduction, between the initial distinction I want to draw between aura and no aura. Somehow this thing has the aura that it has (at least for me) precisely because it’s been digitally reproduced. But then, I guess Benjamin would never have written that essay before mechanical reproduction, would he?
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January 27
Should We Be Talking about Louis Menand’s New Book?
Louis Menand’s The Marketplace of Ideas has come out and is generating a fair amount of discussion online. I found the excerpt from it published in Harvard Magazine interesting, particularly his emphasis on some of the indirect costs of professionalization. But the suggestions he made there about reforming PhD programs seemed at once wildly impractical and strangely dismissive of the content of humanities research--strange, that is, from someone who seems to have a fairly strong profile as a researcher himself. I’m interested enough, I think, to read the book and see what he’s really arguing for (or against, or about). The Valve seems like a place where a lot of people hang out who might have ideas about things like ‘reform and resistance’ in the academy. Should we have an informal book event of some kind? Perhaps just setting a date by which anyone interested will read it (in a month or so, say) and then we’ll have an opening post and everyone can jump in in the comments?
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January 26
Avatar and Disability
Writing at Open Salon, Bill the Lizard (guesting for Chauncey DeVega) puts disability front-and-center in a reading of Avatar:
What many people seem to forget is that Jake Sully, the main character, is established early on in the story as being both an ostracized and emasculated character. Thus, he does not fall into the classic white privilege archetype that you see in white guilt fantasy.
Jake Sully is emasculated in a literal sense because of a combination of physical injury, financial inadequacy and family tragedy. Not only is Jake Sully a Marine who cannot walk or fight, but more tragically he knows that there is a cure for his injury, but cannot afford it. Further, Jake’s closest relative, his twin brother, has been killed in a meaningless act of violence that Jake could not prevent, and now Jake is now forced to step forward into a position that he does not feel he is smart enough to handle.
Thus, he compares Sully to Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises. Bill the Lizard goes on to point that, because of his disability, he did not enter the Avatar program from a position of privilege and entitlement. He was determined to “to apply his knowledge and skills towards his own self-care and development” had is “forced to operate outside of the two dominant spheres of influence at the Hell’s Gate facility on Pandora: the soldiers and the scientists.” That is to say, he entered the program as an Other. Thus “while the scientists are slowly accepting him, it’s very apparent that Sully would rather immerse himself within the Na’vi culture through his interactions with Neytiri.”
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January 24
Behold The Man II
I’m thinking of writing a variant of this famous novel, with the following premise: a time traveller (an American) returns to the Holy Land c.AD33 with the following macabre mission: to shoot Jesus with a high-power, 21st-century rifle, after he has been crucified and resurrected but before he ascends to heaven. The early stages of the novel would make narrative play with the questions of who and why, teasing the reader with possible motivations—is he a radical atheist? An agent of Satan? Of a rival religion? Perhaps his intention is to prove that post-resurrection Jesus is unkillable (that, let us say, he has not simply spent three days in his tomb recovering from serious but not fatal wounds inflicted upon the cross). The later stages would pay off these questions, and reveal what happens when the ressurected Christ is shot at.
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January 22
Kindle or Netbook?
Ebooks are here to stay, but how will you read them?
As sales suggest, dedicated reading devices--Kindles, Nooks, etc--have begun to meet the expectations of leisure readers and business travelers. (Those expectations have been changing as well, after the socialization represented by a quarter-century of reading on screen.)
Providing fast, inexpensive and even free access to many titles, portability, adjustable type, searchable text, and a growing list of other functions, these devices meet many readers’ needs on both airplanes and nightstands.
But these dedicated devices just aren’t ready for the prime time of academic and professional use. Limitations and glitches in their annotation functions, difficulties with copying text, and even the need to mimic the paperback book experience present real issues for the scholar, student, lawyer and engineer.
Also, rather than remedy these defects: the teams developing next generations of these devices are focussed on other issues--larger screens, color display, the ability to do email, surf the web and upload other documents and media.
Where are these devices going? It seems pretty clear. Larger, a touch heavier, more functional--their competition is driving them all in the direction of becoming netbooks, the lower end of which retail in the same $200 to $300 price range that the dedicated devices are getting, but which already offer tons more functionality.
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January 18
Don Draper is, of course, never himself.
Let me open with a quick clarification about the previous Mad Men post. As to the purview of self-fashioning, we all do it. In blog terms, you know me as this guy, i.e. the one who caught those students, made that other one extremely uncomfortable, is frequently victimized by the library, hid his cancer from his wife, etc. Those are the stories I tell about myself to explain myself to myself. To quote Gertrude Stein from Everybody’s Autobiography:
Identity is funny being yourself is funny as you are never yourself to yourself except as you remember yourself and then of course you do not believe yourself. That is really the trouble with an autobiography you do not of course really believe yourself why should you, you know so well so very well that it is not yourself, it could not be yourself because you cannot remember right and if you do remember right it does not sound right and of course it does not sound right because it is not right. You are of course never yourself.
The phrase “of course” captures the central irony of all self-fashioning: we know, of course, that we are more than the sum total of the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and yet we only understand ourselves, and can only be understood by others, through those stories. In case you ever wanted to know why narrative diversity is important, there you have it: the more narrative modes available, the more possible understandings of themselves the people who encounter them can have. This is self-fashioning at its most mundane, and in terms of Mad Men, this is why Peggy Olson becomes more modern: once she understands herself in terms of the upwardly mobile career-oriented woman, the audience understands her frustrations in terms of the conflict between that meritocratic fantasy and the realities of being a woman in a male-dominated working environment. She becomes more recognizably modern not because the world she inhabits does, but because the way she responds to that changing world elicits a chorus of “of courses.”
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January 16
I Don’t Care What The Critics Say, I Love Mad Men (and the Sopranos and the Hills)
(x-posted to The Kugelmass Episodes)
I’ve just finished Scott Kaufman’s very enjoyable post, “Don Draper as an unraptured Emma Bovary,” and feel moved to respond.
Scott observes, quite insightfully, that the difference between Don Draper and other, younger characters on the show, including Pete Campbell and Peggy Olson, is that Draper is stuck in a single historical moment, that of Advertising’s Golden Age. Even as history takes place around him, ushering in a new age of research-driven ads and social upheaval, Don remains a rock. For Scott, this turns Draper into something of a fiction. Other character show a realistic tendency to move with the zeitgeist, making him less real, and in fact it is his unreality that allows us to forgive his misdeeds—unlike the sins of Pete Campbell, which we “revile” because they are all too familiar, Draper’s lapses seem to take place in an aesthetic otherworld where all is permitted. There are no sins inside the gates of Eden.
Scott has done a beautiful job pinpointing Don’s relation to “history,” as the show understands it; he has also used Draper as a convenient poster boy for a set of attitudes about aesthetic self-fashioning with which I must take issue. Pete Campbell is not more “real” than Don; on the contrary, he is far less real to us, as I will show with a little help from Entourage, The Sopranos and The Hills.
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January 15
Don Draper as an unraptured Emma Bovary
(x-posted twice-over because this is the closest I’ve come to actual literary analysis, as opposed to comp-rhet material, in ages. As you might can tell, I’ve had some difficulties thinking of myself as a proper literary scholar of late, and have absented myself from these parts because of it. What can I say—other than when the profession refuses to treat you like what it trained you to be, you stop thinking of yourself in its terms. But enough of that. Here, have a post!)
As I noted in the comments to this post, it was only a matter of time before I started Mad Men; however, as I’ve studiously avoided reading about the show for the better part of two years now, I’m not sure my insights into it will be all that insightful. Still, I’ll soldier on, with the caveat that I’m about to watch the eighth episode of the most recent season and would rather not have it spoiled. Not, mind you, that I think it could be, as the one of the defining features of the show is the thundering predictability of its characters. That’s not as an indictment of Matt Weiner or his writing staff, merely an acknowledgment of the show’s central conceit: these are people who want to be left behind when the rest of the world is raptured by history—at least at first.
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