Postmodern Listy-ness July 21, 2009
Posted by kmiddleton in reading.3 comments
It’s really all about the list, no? Somewhere, someone is articulating a complex theory on our media fascination with the list. In the meantime, however, I couldn’t help but post a link to the LA Times list of “61 Essential Postmodern Reads.“
The list is interesting for a number of reasons. First and foremost, it’s annotated! With graphics! And while my punctuation here might indicate a sarcastic appreciation for the aforementioned qualities, it is an easy way to understand why a particular book made the list, and also a quick and dirty representation of their criteria for inclusion. I’m a bit surprised to see that all of the criteria focus on form (e.g., “author is character,” “includes historical falsehoods,” and the needing-of-more-detail “plays with language”). Formal criteria allow the lister, Carolyn Kellogg, to include a number of intriguing picks that don’t always get included in the postmodern canon—Tristram Shandy, for instance, which gets a hearty “amen!” from me—or The Metamorphosis. But it also allows for a couple of real head-scratchers—The Scarlet Letter, anyone?
As any of my poor, put-upon students in the postmodernism seminar can tell you, I’m highly suspicious of a postmodernism defined solely on the basis of form. You don’t have to worship at F. Jameson’s feet to consider the idea that content might be part of the postmodern equation. And you don’t have to buy everything Linda Hutcheon ever thought to mull over the notion that an attempt at political/ideological intervention can be part of a postmodern aesthetic movement.
Those caveats (or screed. call it what you will) aside, however, the list does what many good lists do: it provides a basis for readers to debate inclusions, exclusions, and criteria. A look at the ever-expanding comments is a testament to Kellogg’s work. Take a look-see.
Wallace Elegy September 13, 2008
Posted by kmiddleton in reading.Tags: david foster wallace
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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.
Read Only July 27, 2008
Posted by kmiddleton in new media, reading.Tags: internet, reading
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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
Cult Books? May 5, 2008
Posted by kmiddleton in pop culture, reading.Tags: cult, novel
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Given that lists are always fascinating and disappointing, there’s a great piece up at the Telegraph on the “50 Best Cult Books” (hat tip to Whitney). The authors have a difficult time constructing the criteria for the category, as any of us would. What do you count as “cult”? What makes it so? For all of the possibilities, the one that stuck with me was this:
we were looking for the sort of book that people wear like a leather jacket or carry around like a totem. The book that rewires your head: that turns you on to psychedelics; makes you want to move to Greece; makes you a pacifist; gives you a way of thinking about yourself as a woman, or a voice in your head that makes it feel okay to be a teenager; conjures into being a character who becomes a permanent inhabitant of your mental flophouse.
Evocative and metaphoric it may be, but it’s a viscerally satisfying way to differentiate the cult novel from the bestseller, the merely popular, the truly weird. I’m particularly taken with the notion of the book as totem. Perhaps I’ve spent too much time on college campuses, but aren’t there always students (and professors, for that matter) that carry a particularly dog eaten copy of the cult book around with them? Doesn’t it become one of the ways that we identify our essential, unique identities (you know, the one that we share with 400,000 other people)? Aren’t those the ones with the characters that speak to us, make us right with the world, or at least explain the wrongness of the world and our own alienation?
Having said that, the Telegraph list can’t help but disappoint. To their credit, it’s a staunchly historical and multi-national list (including The Sorrows of Young Werther and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas—I don’t know how many other categories can claim that). It’s multi-genre as well, featuring self-help books, novels, and philosophical tomes (Godel Escher Bach? I dragged a copy of that around with me for years before I gave up). But the scope robs it of something too; perhaps it’s modern resonance? Were 19th century cult readers—even if they did off themselves in a tribute to Goethe—like 1960’s drug-addled cult readers? Is every cult the same?
For this reader, the comments become the saving grace of the list. Give them a read, and you’ll find yourself testing your own definition of “cult.” The Lovely Bones? Um, no. It was beautiful and sad and a page-turner, but not a cult classic. Fight Club or Trainspotting? Now you’re talking. It’s become a cliche, now, for sure, but it’s almost impossible to read Fight Club without getting sucked into it as a world view. It’s insanely quotable too—maybe in the future we WILL all be wearing leather clothes… While I’m not a huge Philip Dick fan, he certainly deserves a place. And to the commenter who asks whether a book that’s assigned for high school reading can be counted (we’re looking at you, To Kill a Mockingbird), I can only say amen.
Tunnel Vision September 9, 2007
Posted by kmiddleton in new media, pop culture, reading.2 comments
I suppose it’s an occupational hazard for academics, the phenomenon wherein texts that float across our consciousness tend to be subsumed and codified by our current research and teaching. Or at least this is what happens to me. As occupational hazards go, it could be much worse; I’ve never been stuck in a mine, I’ve never had a patient die on me. I may be well on my way toward carpal tunnel syndrome and a Mr. Magoo style myopia, but that’s about it.
So I recently discovered the singer/songwriter Rufus Wainwright. I know, I know, where have I been? What pop music planet have I been living on, that I’ve avoided RW? Let’s be honest; if left to my own devices, I’d be huddled in a corner listening to Squeeze’s Greatest Hits on infinite repeat. Be happy that I’ve made it out of the 80’s. The point of this, of course, is two-fold, First, how the world has changed since the last time I tried to find out information about an artist. Not only can I look up Wainwright’s entire catalog on iTunes, I can google the lyrics to songs, read his Wikipedia entry, see his MySpace page, and cruise YouTube for videos. This beats the hell out of Tiger Beat, I must say (TB was, if I remember correctly, my primary source the last time that I wanted info on a singer. That might have been Simon LeBon. It’s all very fuzzy now).
So onto the second point: YouTube. In addition to featuring a significant collection of fan videos of Wainwright, the site also houses a few of his professional music videos. The one I’m currently obsessed with?
The audio track of “Rules and Regulations” is just fine on its own, but there’s something about this video that pushes it into the realm of transcendent. I’ve been trying to put my finger on it for days now as the tune tumbles around in my brain. Since I’m re-reading a slew of postmodern theory right now, I thought for awhile that it was the video’s irony that was doing it. In some ways, it’s a beautiful pop culture take on historiographic metafiction. Wainwright takes all the signifiers of Victorian masculinity (the gentlemen’s club, the group excercising) and reveals them in all of their homoerotic glory. [Or as Caitlin2489 writes: " If this isn't the gayest thing. Rufus, darling, you've out-done yourself." Couldn't have said it better myself.] Linda Hutcheon would be so very proud!
Later, however, I found myself reviewing the introduction to Todd Gitlin’s book Media Unlimited, in which he argues (in part) that while we tend to say that we go to media for information, our interaction with media is really about feeling—media produces not a conscious analytic making of meaning, but rather an unconscious emotional response. While I think that this needs to be qualified a bit (which Gitlin later goes on to do in the book), I wonder if that isn’t a more authentic approach to explaining my fascination with this video. Really, when I think about it, I get the giggles. It’s his interaction with the camera, I think—that knowing, deadly-serious and thus definitively tongue-in-cheek, twee awareness of his surroundings and how the audience must be perceiving it.
There’s also, of course, the possibility that it’s neither, but that my courses this semester have colonized my brain. While I figure it out, I’ll keep on watching the video. Hee hee.
Guilty Confession #1 August 14, 2007
Posted by kmiddleton in new media, reading.add a comment
I am a balky and generally irresponsible user of RSS feeds.
I know that they are revolutionary and wonderful. I know that they will bring information to you, instead of you having to go and seek out the information. I know that they are far more time efficient than clicking on individual sites to see if they have been updated.
I know.
Part of me quails at having to add everything that I currently read in granular form to a aggregator. I’m sure that if I just sat down and did it, it wouldn’t take nearly as long as I think it would, and I’d be happier for it. [Of course, this brings up the question I've asked here before: which reader, my friends? Ashley suggested Newsgator, and after using GoogleReader last semester for my class, I'm still digging it. But it's been months! So, is there anything out there that's new and world-shaking in the universe of aggregators?]
My larger objection to aggregation is this: I really miss the aesthetics of the page. Most of the feeds I read are blog feeds, which means that there’s a pretty tight correlation between form and content. Bloggers, like many web writers, are increasingly attentive to the ways that their page reflects their identities, their proclivities, the tone of their writing, etc. Hence, the development of templates and widgets in both Blogger and WordPress. While a reader will pick up pictures occur within the post itself, they neglect (by necessity) the other aesthetic and semiotic components of the site itself.
I wonder if the next wave of feeds will find a way to attach aesthetic elements to your feed that will appear in various readers?
What I Did on my Summer Vacation August 8, 2007
Posted by kmiddleton in pop culture, reading, research.add a comment
Whoa. A month away from blogging. I feel as if I should have some really good excuse. [I don't.] Instead, I have a bulleted list of what I’ve been doing instead. Think of it as a shorthand take on the classic back-to-school essay topic.
- I’ve been out to Redlands, CA, home of my alma mater, and spent a delightful weekend arguing with brilliant people about how best to read J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace.
- I incidentally discovered that the exterior summer shots in The Rules of Attraction were shot at said alma mater. This is ironic, given my sick fascination (shared with some students. They know who they are!) with all things Bret Easton Ellis. Less so with James Van der Beek and his enormous noggin.
- I spent about a week in fabulous Las Vegas. This is less exotic and exciting than it sounds, as I grew up there and so it feels a bit like returning to Mayberry. I did, however, get a chance to visit the Neon Boneyard, which is the coolest social history project I know. I have many pictures. A future blog post may be a bit like your grandparents’ slideshows of Yellowstone.
- I painted the interior of my house. A lot. You know the callus that you have where you hold a pen (assuming that people still hold pens)? Mine is now twice as big, because I hold a paintbrush the same way.
- I started reading for my fall classes. With a little trepidation, I chose a book that I had read as a graduate student–Richard Powers’ Galatea 2.2. The first time through, as a 25 year old, I was utterly unable to get past the protagonist’s chauvinism, and I gave my poor, long suffering professor (later my dissertation director) no end of trouble about it. This time through, of course, I think it’s brilliant. Raise your hand, all of you who think I’m about to get it from my students in the fall?
Somewhere in there, there was also a fabulous pesto, a Marxist reading group, research on rape narratives, beginning the final Harry Potter novel, programming a new cell phone, etc. But that about covers my month off. Now begins the frantic lead up to the start of classes at the end of August. On your mark, get set…
