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Monday, September 15, 2008
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss
This place looks familiar. But maybe it’s me. Last time I was here, as Adam kindly noted, I was a bit different. When I took my leave in May 2007, I wrote:
[T]his is the probably the last substantive post you’ll see from me here until sometime in 2008. I’ve explained why over here, but I’m sure it’s no mystery why someone in the final push to finish his dissertation doesn’t have time to write formal posts. I’ll still be blogging research notes and uninspired parodies over at Acephalous, however, so I hope you’ll stop by. If not, I’ll see you when Battlestar Galactica returns.
Since it is 2008, I suppose I didn’t technically lie—but I did accept the editorial reins back in February and, if I’m not mistaken, tomorrow’s Halloween. (As a friend recently told me, you’re three months from finishing your dissertation for two years, then you’re done.) Although I haven’t been around, I haven’t been absent either. Joe and I have recruited new contributors; I’ve processed new memberships (for “people” whose email addresses don’t have Russian domains); I’ve moderated comments (by “people” who don’t offer deep discounts on sin); and I’ve arranged book events (like the Trilling one, which I arranged for someone else to moderate, and Rohan’s “Summer Reading Project” on Adam Bede, which I’m stealing credit for because it turned out so well people complained about the Trilling).
Let me pull that last bit from the parenthetical. Having enjoyed the Eliot event, Sue G-J expressed disappointment in our choice of Trilling. There are two ways to look at this—we can dwell on the fact that a reader wasn’t tickled by an upcoming event, or we can consider the fact that Rohan’s Adam Bede event was so beloved she raised our reader’s expectations about all future book events. I’m not about to complain about a demanding, committed audience—but I will take a moment to remind members of it that The Valve can’t please all of its readers all of the time.
The success of a book event isn’t defined by the number of comments it generates. The Theory’s Empire event resulted in thousands upon thousands of comments, yet when John started sifting through them—correct me if I’m wrong here, John—so many were boilerplate articulations both reactionary and bland that he included very few in Framing Theory’s Empire. Whereas with The Journey Abandoned event, there have been relatively few comments, because not that many people were familiar with Trilling (and many who were hadn’t had time to read The Journey Abandoned before the event). I don’t want you to misunderstand me: we treasure comments. But with an event like the Trilling one—that is, about the first edition of a recently-discovered novel by a towering intellect now only remembered, as someone I don’t particularly care for recently told me, as “that Columbian Jew”—the purpose of this type of book event isn’t to generate comments so much as start a conversation. Ideally, the first result of a search for The Journey Abandoned will be Stephen Schryer’s introductory post, but if Google takes a curious soul to one of Geraldine Murphy’s generous responses, and she works her way back to Mark Shechner’s anti-post, I hope she recognizes that the quality of Shechner’s argument overwhelms its persuasiveness and adds The Valve to her RSS reader.
In short, The Journey Abandoned event was different by design—but it’s not the only design we have. In the months to come, I’d like to:
- Repeat the success of the Adam Bede event. Later this week, I’ll open the floor to suggestions as to what book should be covered next and ask for non-contributors who would like to volunteer as moderators. Rohan did a phenomenal job, but she put a lot of time into it; unless we want to limit future reading projects to the summer months, we’ll need to distribute some of the labor around.
- Host less ambitious events on literary works: poems, short stories, and the like. These won’t be as formal, and I’ll leave decisions as which shorter works will be evented up to individual contributors. But as with the first bullet, so to the second: I’m open to recommendations and more than happy to have non-contributors moderate the discussions. If you think there’s a pressing need to discuss a particular Kate Chopin story, you may not be alone.
- Organize smaller events around academic articles. As I’ll argue this afternoon, the new issue of American Literary History—devoted to paying “a finer attention to the business of reviewing”—would be a fine place to start the academic angle, inasmuch as those articles have comment-boxes and every academic has something to say about the sorry state of academic reviewing.
- Listen to John, who just wrote: “Obviously we here at the Valve wisely stage these books events. Good on us. We should find time to do more of that.” I’ve already lined up three. The first will be on Caroline Levine’s Provoking Democracy: Why We Need the Arts; the second, Jenny Davidson‘s Breeding: A Partial History of the Eighteenth Century; the third, Mark McGurl’s The Program Era : Postwar Fiction in the System of Higher Education.
I hope you stick around.
Comments
Perhaps, every so often, we could have an open thread, where anyone can say anything, as long, of course, as it’s within the general purview of the Valve’s mission.
Congratulations, Scott, and thanks for setting all of this up.
We should come up with new terminology or something, because there are now two kinds of book events that the Valve has done. The book event as John designed them was typically about a work of literary criticism or theory or about humanist education, and had a number of expert posters lined up in advance. The Adam Bede thing was a reading group event, or whatever you want to call it, on a novel rather than a nonfiction work, and with the center of gravity shifted dramatically towards the comment box.
The three events that you’ve lined up are book events of the first type, so I’d think what we’d want is another reading group or two. I think the books chosen should be either minor works by major authors (e.g. Adam Bede) or major works by minor authors—doing a literary classic will just drown people in the already-said.
My own suggestion is The Silver Stallion by James Branch Cabell: it’s arguably one of his best works, I don’t think we’ve done any early 20th century American fiction yet, and it’s been reprinted a number of times. I’d be interested in seeing what contemporary critics have to say about it. Alternatively, we could go back to John’s suggestion of Frankenstein. I know that the last time I suggested this, it was mentioned the some people aren’t into F & SF, but really, I think that there’s enough going on so that it doesn’t matter if something isn’t to someone’s particular interest.
I really like the idea of small-scale “events” organized around articles. Inevitably not everyone will be equally interested in every choice, but the issue of ALH you’ve flagged for a first round certainly sounds like something about which lots of people will have something to say.
Rich is right to point out the ‘book club’ aspect of the Adam Bede event: the discussions were deliberately loose and open-ended, and thus not actually much work, beyond showing up on time every week. I’m glad it seems to have been a successful experiment. Doing something similar but with shorter texts is a good idea for this busier season when lots of us have a lot of ‘required’ reading already.
My timing has been off. It turns out I had read Adam Bede in February. I didn’t want to re-read it during the summer or even worse play the spoiler role, not remembering what happened in which chapter. On the other hand, I didn’t have time to locate a copy and read Trilling’s novel during the first few weeks of my semester.
I wasn’t particularly pleased to be singled out for comment on this, Scott, even in reverse initials! I just wanted to express a point of view, not start a campaign ... boy, you guys at the Valve are so touchy (and after I wrote you such a nice comment on joining the ranks of the under paid and over qualified, too)!
Very sneaky, Scott - you’ve corrected my initials and made nonsense of my comment!
Sorry about that, Sue. I edited the comment and meant to respond sooner, but other pressing matters arose. For what it’s worth, I didn’t intend to “single you out,” merely use you as an example of a reader who responded positively to some of the things that we’re doing. I’m really not being devious here—I love that you love what Rohan’s up to, and apologize for getting distracted this afternoon.
No probs, ‘Bones’(lol), just thought that you made it sound as though I was ‘Disgruntled, UK’, or something. I’m just wedged in the nineteenth century, I suppose! Have a nice weekend.
p.s. Do you get loads of ‘Beam me up’ jokes from students?
I LOVED the Adam Bede event, and I agree with Rich that it was very different from the three upcoming contributor-based scholarly book events. In the case of “our” event, success could be very much defined by the comments because they became a back and forth discussion that elucidated deeper meanings of the book for the participants. I would think the next AB type event should focus on a shorter book just because summer’s over and we’re all busy; however going with very short works might dilute some of the pleasures of a “group read” which develop only after the commenters became comfortable with each other over time.
And I liked the suggestions of Frankenstein (timed for Halloween?) or Henry James.