Virginia Woolf Speaks! October 23, 2008
Posted by kmiddleton in Uncategorized.2 comments
Courtesy of The Guardian UK, The BBC announced this week that they’re releasing CD’s that feature audio recordings of famous authors, including Vladimir Nabokov, F. Scott Fitzgerald, a drunken Raymond Chandler (surprise), and the only known surviving recordings of Virginia Woolf. At the link itself, you can hear a snippet of her discussing writing. I have to confess that she sounds nothing like I expected, and I suspect that’s entirely because of my modern ear. I think I wanted something at once more dulcet and a bit less posh. But there is a frisson of hearing her characteristic prose in her own voice. Here’s a brief self-transcribed snippet from the bit you can hear at The Guardian (which begins at about 1:40 or so).
Do we write better? Do we read better than we read and wrote 400 years ago, when we were unliteratured, uncriticized, untaught? Is our modern, Georgian literature a patch on the Elizabethan? Well, where are we to lay the blame? Not on our professors, not on our reviewers, not on our writers, but on words. It is words that are to blame. They all the wildest, freest, most irresponsible, most unteachable of all of these. Of course, you can catch them and sort them and place them in alphabetical order in dictionaries. But words do not live in dictionaries, they live in the mind…
There are some complicated thoughts here about the place of the modern writer in the teleological trajectory of literature, and it would be no small task to articulate Woolf’s representation of the Word itself. I’ll leave this for the Woolf scholars to sort. In the meantime, I think I’ll call up the library and ask if we can order the CDs. I can’t wait to hear the full 8 minutes of Woolf’s recording, as well as the others.
As a sidenote, this came my way via Tina Brown’s new venture, The Daily Beast. (Some might remember Brown as a former editor of the New Yorker and Vanity Fair. As with all things Brownian, it’s big and theatrical and snarky. But it’s also looking for the intersections of politics and culture in ways that I think many political blogs (like the Huffington Post) don’t quite manage. Give her a read.
The Times on “Teaching” September 20, 2008
Posted by kmiddleton in pedagogy, pop culture.Tags: Add new tag, pedagogy
4 comments
Reading the New York Times Magazine’s College Life issue this morning was nothing if not a reminder that representations of cultures are seldom analogous to the material realities of those who live in them. I’ve written here before about popular representations of professors (and how those resemble approximately 2% of my colleagues), but the Times today expands its reach to include not just professors, but teaching and writing as well.
It begins with an article titled “Those Who Write, Teach.” The title suggested to me, as it would to many in the profession (particularly those of us at teaching institutions), the long-standing conversation about the connections between scholarly work and teaching. In essence, how does your research inform what you do in the classroom, and vice versa? How might you address the very real difficulties of carving out time to stay current in your field while attending to your students’ learning processes?
Instead, “Those Who Write” is a first person piece by David Gessner, in which he describes the plight of the writer “in captivity”—i.e., trapped by an academic job that slowly sucks the wildness out of him and his writing. To be fair to Gessner, there’s not a teacher alive who doesn’t fantasize about what she could be doing if she weren’t grading papers, fielding student questions, preparing for class. But I can’t help getting my feathers ruffled by two things here: first, the ambivalence of the title worries me. Is it referencing the old inspiring saw “those who CAN, teach,” and thus making writing (here strictly defined as creative writing) the equivalent of ability? Or is it more insidious, calling to mind instead the insult “those who CAN’T, teach” and thereby insinuating that writing within the confines of the academy eventually leads to a lack of ability?
Second, Gessner’s image of the work of teaching troubles me. Even as he critiques an earlier era of creative writing pedagogy (”learn by osmosis” from the “great man or woman”), he cites his love for teaching as one that’s grounded in sharing his work, in being a great entertainer, in being surrounded by people committed to writing. On top of this, the job provides a stable daily structure, a “badge” of legitimacy, and the aggregate of all of this moves toward balancing the ways in which he must trade “reading great literature and communing with writers of the past” for “apprentice writing.”
There’s something crucial that’s missing from Gessner’s description of teaching, and that is arguably it’s most important characteristic: the one where you learn from your students, and learn to teach them to learn. I’m in deep cliched water here, I have no doubt, but it’s very simply true: there is great joy and daily reward from the surprise of what students see that you’ve missed; in experimenting with various approaches to connect what they already know with what you hope they’ll take away from any given text.
The innate reciprocity of teaching is also missing from the Times’ second article: Virginia Heffernan’s study of professors on YouTube. I’ll spare you the close textual analysis here, but suffice to say that as she ranks and assesses the available videos, she constructs a very particular equation: virtuoso teaching=charismatic lecture=box-office gold. I have no interest in rehashing ye olde lecture vs. seminar debate. A great lecture is all of the things that Heffernan so closely observes in the videos she cites. Yet I can’t help but flinch at such a medieval definition of teaching. A “sage on the stage” is still that, even if the stage has become an international and digital one. There’s a special irony here too, of using one of the most popular forms of Web 2.0 technology—a designation that highlights the interactivity of the medium—to relay content without reciprocity.
The “college life” issue is one of many recent representations of college life (see Smart People, Elegy, the movie College for god’s sakes). Any more, and a careful cultural critic might begin to suspect that we’re hell-bent on representing a single professor and his/her well-wraught pedagogical urn in order to distract ourselves from all of the other types of college experiences out there.
Wallace Elegy September 13, 2008
Posted by kmiddleton in reading.Tags: david foster wallace
add a comment
I just peeked at the New York Times for a moment, and was absoutely shocked to see the latest AP news that David Foster Wallace is dead. According to the very short AP story, Wallace’s wife discovered that he’d hung himself. What a tragedy.
I read Infinite Jest in 2000, in the month between finishing my qualifying exams and getting married and moving to a new city. It was the perfect novel for that moment: utterly diverting and weird (buried heads and cross-dressing CIA agents), surreal and sincere by turns. It was the perfect distraction from the endless details and free-roaming anxiety of moving, of beginning the dissertation. It was nothing like what I had crammed in my brain for the preceding months, but an excellent test of all of the theories and interpretive strategies and thus reminded me why I wanted a career in English Studies in the first place.
Infinite Jest is a novel that begs you to read it again the minute you finish it. Wallace peppers the novel with spot-on characterizations of contemporary American life (corporate sponsorship of years, negotiating national ownership of toxic waste, television taken to its logical conclusion), but witholds their narrative origins, hiding them deep in the text. In the weeks it takes to finish the book, you develop a relationship with it (as well as a significant bicep muscle from carrying it around). It makes you a careful reader, an almost paranoid interpreter, a bit desperate to skim through scenes, but afraid that you’ll miss something. Making it to the end is the perfect ambivalent moment: a relief that you’ve made it through, and the simultaneous realization that the conclusion makes the rest of the novel clear, and that you need to begin again.
I’ve since read some of Wallace’s other works (The Girl with Curious Hair; The Broom of the System; his unbelievable, replete-with-footnotes essay on grammar for Harper’s Magazine ), but none of them were able to replicate the same reading experience for me. Periodically, when I’m fantasizing about the perfect class to teach, I imagine that a semester spent with Infinite Jest would be a once-in-a-lifetime experience for students—a kind of contemporary literature boot camp. Of course, then reality sets in: can I really justify dragging undergraduates through 1100 pages of weirdness on a whim?
Perhaps it’s time to revisit the idea, or at least to revisit the novel myself. It seems like a fitting tribute to an brilliant author dead long before his time.
***updated to add: Here’s a lovely farewell to Wallace from Times book doyenne Michiko Kakutani.
Twitter-pated August 16, 2008
Posted by kmiddleton in new media, pop culture.Tags: olympics, twitter
add a comment
I know people who simply lurve twitter. It’s the new cool thing! It’s a microblog! Follow your friends! It’s internet poetry! I wanted to get it, really, but it wasn’t quite working for me. What would be the circumstance wherein I’d want to read such short, of the minute posts? I like the lengthy, meandering blog post, after all. Preferably with pictures!!
But then (and you knew this was coming, right?), I happened upon Slate’s Olympic coverage via Twitter. You would think that there’s nothing else to be said about the Olympics right now. I love me some televised competitive swimming, but this is just getting ridiculous. The whole world knows Michael Phelps’ torso measurement, as well as what he has for breakfast—because it’s on CNN. Fashion magazines are covering beach volleyball; Perez Hilton is tracking medals and opening ceremony cover-ups, for crying out loud. In this climate of neverending sports-cum-nationalism information flow, what kind of coverage could we possibly be missing?
Enter the fabulous one-liner. A few choice quotes:
Slate’s coverage of Dara Torres informing the judges to wait for the Swedish swimmer to change her torn swimsuit; an event heralded as the apotheosis of sports ethics on NBC, merits this tweet: “Torres pointing out the Swede’s torn swimsuit is the greatest act of Olympic sportsmanship since Lochte gave Phelps half his sandwich.”
On the controversial win for Michael Phelps’, wherein he touched the wall 1/100 of a second before the Serbian swimmer. Some cry conspiracy, and Slate’s tweet reads: “No conspiracy, Phelps just has the ability to alter space-time. That’s what he’s doing with that dolphin kick.”
Suddenly, Twitter makes perfect sense to me. It’s the transcendental medium for the one-liner, and I prefer the ones that are sarcastic shots over the bow, capable of puncturing the balloon of teary-eyed national sentiment and/or athletic fetishism. In feed form, the tweets are reminiscent of those magical conversations with your smartest friends, whose reactions to absurd events reduce you to tears of laughter.
The Twitter folk position their application as one in which users answer the question “What are you doing?” I can help but wonder whether a better use might be to answer the question “What are you seeing?”
Troof. August 2, 2008
Posted by kmiddleton in research, whining.2 comments
I just sent off my article to the patient and long-suffering editor this morning and then immediately jumped in the car to catch an afternoon train to NYC for a family visit. Whew!
It would not be an exaggeration to say that I’ve been thinking about the topic for the article (fan videos and their development of narrative) for 7 months or so. At least I seem to remember that it was a cold dark night in my office finishing up the proposal it.
One might think that with all that time and thought that the article would write itself, or at the very least flow trippingly off my fingertips and onto the page. (That is, after all, what my own delusional brain was depending on…).
Instead, it was days of grappling in the dark, wringing out pages that may or may not be relevant to the argument. When the time came to give a provisional draft to a gracious reader, the main editorial comment sounded somehow familiar: “your argument and energy really starts to emerge here at the end. Have you considered starting with that?.”. And I’m back in the writing bush leagues.
I’m transcribing this rather humiliating scenario becauseI do so love to publicly flog myself for my own shortcomings, but more importantly to remind myself (and the three readers of this blog) that the process of writing and thinking are never as straightforward and fast as I expect them to be. They are, in fact, almost as painstaking and frustrating as typing this entire post with one finger as I await the onslaught of the big family trip in the hot hot city.
Wish me luck.
Read Only July 27, 2008
Posted by kmiddleton in new media, reading.Tags: internet, reading
3 comments
The NY Times today released the first part of a series dedicated to investigating “how the Internet and other technological and social forces are changing the way people read.” Hoo boy. Let the games begin.
On first read, I’d say that author Motoko Rich strives for an admirable balance between two factions dedicated to defending their particular reading practices. For every study of declining test scores and reading for pleasure, she cites online readers’ descriptions of their own practices or new literacy scholars.
From this format, we can see a surprising tone that both boosters and naysayers of digital reading share: a relatively consistent dismissal of alternate format. For instance, Rich cites Dana Gioia of the NEA:“Whatever the benefits of newer electronic media they provide no measurable substitute for the intellectual and personal development initiated and sustained by frequent reading.” At the same time, we have fluent digital readers who have this to say about print books: “The Web is more about a conversation. Books are more one-way.”
The article carefully cites the number of material factors to consider as we weigh a shift in reading habits: the socioeconomic benefits of print literacy, its deep integration into school curricula, the challenges it presents for students with learning differences. But these considerations are buried deep on page 3 of the article, in a way that suggests they’re simply fodder for the bigger issue–the deep psychological investment in the way that reading inflects our daily lives, and that no one is willing to be told that their preferred method is lacking in some way.
I find myself perched uncomfortably between these two ways of reading and the assumptions of superiority they promulgate. When Gioia says: “What we are losing in this country and presumably around the world is the sustained, focused, linear attention developed by reading,” a portion of my heart goes pitter pat. Does reading a novel require that sustained attention? Obviously. And I’m willing to believe (until a neuroscientist tells me different) that there’s a cognitive benefit to it, as well as a pleasure to be taken in it. But I’m also not willing to believe that all digital reading is the short-attention span theater that Gioia assumes and of which Rich provides examples. When Nadia is reading fan fiction stories that run “45 web pages,” we’re talking about focused attention, and we’d have to study Nadia’s reading practices to convince ourselves that it wasn’t sustained or linear. In addition, the statement ignores the sociality of reading a number of digital sources on a similar topic.
On the other side of the fence (here I am, perched on a cliche), I’m taken aback by the digital readers’ characterizations of books. At least two of the young people interviewed take issue with books’ unitary nature–either as a fixed plot structure or singularity of voice. This also seems to be a mis-characterization of what print readers love about books, wherein the process of interpretation makes a book an archive of alternatives. [This assumes, of course, that you include interpretation in your definition of reading, I suppose.]
I’m anxious to see how others perceive the coverage in the Times. For now, however, I’m struck by the gulf between readers, and the very little coverage (and study?) of how omnivorous readers characterize pleasure, benefit and drawbacks of their reading practices across media
Stop the Press! July 24, 2008
Posted by kmiddleton in new media.Tags: iphone, itouch
add a comment
Sweet fancy Moses, apparently I can now blog from my ITouch, thanks to a WordPress app that comes via the new suite of iPhone 2.0 software. Hot diggety? Now no subject is safe from my critical eye? Every piece of pop culture shall know my wrath?
Will this make me a more consistent blogger? My guess is no, probably just one with fewer excuses and thus more guilt about my spotty blogging schedule. Of course, if this post is any indication, the new app may well turn me into a one-fingered typist. So long, carpal tunnel syndrome—and good riddance!
Stay tuned for further updates, gentle readers.
