This past February we had the privilege of hearing from Dr. Anthony Grafton from Princeton University at our Humanities Symposium at Messiah College. Grafton is a formidable scholar and intellect, and a generous soul, a too rare combination. The following video is his keynote lecture for the Symposium. Grafton’s instincts are conservative, readily admitting his undying love for the codex and its manifold cultural institutions (libraries, used bookstores, even Barnes and Nobles). At the same time, he is under no illusions that the future of the book lies elsewhere. His lecture looks at what is threatened, what should be valued and protected from the fast, but also what might be a potential for the future of the book, and what values we should bring to bear to shape the book, which is, after all, a human institution.
Many thanks to Derick Esch, my work study student, for his work in filming and producing this video. Other videos from the symposium can be found at the same vimeo page.
Sometimes I think we humanists “of a certain age,” to put the issue politely, imagine digital humanities as an optional activity that will be filled by an interesting niche of young professors who take their place in the academy as yet another niche sub-discipline, something that research universities hire for and small colleges struggle hopelessly to replicate. It may be indeed that small colleges will struggle to integrate digital humanities in to their own infrastructures, but I think the general picture of Digital Humanities as an optional sub-discipline will simply be unsustainable. The argument smells a little of the idea that e-books are a nice sub-genre of texts, but not something the average humanist has to worry that much about. I think, to the contrary, that digital humanities and the multitude of techniques that it entails, will become deeply integrated in a fundament way with the basic methodologies of how we go about doing business, akin to knowing how to do close reading or how to maneuver our way through libraries.
Although pointing out this fact is not his main point, Matthew Kirschenbaum–already a Digital Humanities patron saint in many respects–has an essay in The Chronicle that points to this fact. Kirschenbaum is currently interested in how we preserve digital material, and the problems are just as complex if not moreso than the general question of how and when to save print materials. Moreso to the degree that we cannot be sure that the current forms in which we place our digital intelligence will actually be usable five years from now. The consequences for humanities research and writing are profound and must be considered. From Kirschenbaum:
Digital preservation is the sort of problem we like to assume others are thinking about. Surely someone, somewhere, is on the job. And, in lots of ways, that is true. Dire warnings of an approaching “digital dark ages” appear periodically in the media: Comparisons are often made to the early years of cinema—roughly half of the films made before 1950 have been lost because of neglect.
But the fact is that enormous resources—government, industry, and academic—are being marshaled to attack the problem. In the United States, for example, the Library of Congress has been proactive through its National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program. Archivists of all stripes now routinely receive training in not only appraisal and conservation of digital materials but also metadata (documentation and description) and even digital forensics, through which we can stabilize and authenticate electronic records. (I now help teach such a course at the University of Virginia’s renowned Rare Book School.) Because of the skills of digital archivists, you can read former presidents’ e-mail messages and examine at Emory University Libraries a virtual recreationof Salman Rushdie’s first computer. Jason Scott’s Archive Team, meanwhile, working without institutional support, leaps into action to download and redistributeimperiled Web content.
What this suggests is that Rushdie’s biographers will have to not so much know how to sift through piles of letters, but how to recreate digital archives that authors themselves may not be interested in preserving. Biographers of the present and surely the future, will have to be Digital technicians, as well as close readers of the digital archives they are able to recover.
Kirschenbaum goes on to suggest that most of us must do this work on our own, and must do this work for ourselves, in preserving our own archives.
But despite those heroic efforts, most individuals must still be their own digital caretakers. You and I must take responsibility for our own personal digital legacy. There are no drive-through windows (like the old photo kiosks) where you can drop off your old floppies and pick up fresh files a day or two later. What commercial services are available tend to assume data are being recovered from more recent technology (like hard drives), and these also can be prohibitively expensive for average consumers. (Organizations like the Library of Congress occasionally sponsor public-information sessions and workshops to teach people how to retrieve data from old machines, but those are obviously catch as catch can.)
Research shows that many of us just put our old disks, CD’s, and whatnot into shoeboxes and hope that if we need them again, we’ll figure out how to retrieve the data they contain when the time comes. (In fact, researchers such as Cathy Marshall,at Microsoft Research, have found that some people are not averse to data loss—that the mishaps of digital life provide arbitrary and not entirely unwelcome opportunities for starting over with clean slates.)
This last, of course, is an interesting problem. Authors have often been notoriously averse to having their mail probed and prodded for signs of the conflicts and confessions, preferring that the “work” stand on its own. Stories of authors burning their letters and manuscripts are legion, nightmarishly so for the literary scholar. Such literary self-immolations are both harder and easier in a digital world. My drafts and emails can disappear at the touch of a button. On the other hand, I am told that a hard drive is never actually erased for those who are really in the know. Then again, the task of scholar who sees a writers computer as his archive is in some ways vastly more difficult than that of the writer who was an assiduous collector of his type-written drafts. Does every deletion and spell correct count as a revision. What should we trace as an important change, and what should we disregard as detritus. These are, of course, the standard archival questions, but it seems to me they are exponentially more complicated in a digital archive where a text may change a multitude of times in a single sitting, something not so possible in a typewritten world.
Well, these are the kinds of things Kirschenbaum takes up. And having the tools to apply to such questions will be the task for every humanist in the future, not a narrow coterie.
Book lovers have always turned a blind eye to the god Mammon, remembering only with regret the fact that the house they live in with their truest love was bought and paid for by the leering uncle down the street. Jonathan Gourlay took up that ill-begotten relationship in a nice personal essay on the demise of Borders. For Gourlay, Borders was an opportunity missed whose demise was figured long ago in it’s decision to skip a flirtation with the labor movement and bend the knee to a corporatist ethos.
“For Borders, which first opened in 1971, the end began when it was sold to K-Mart in 1992. By the time I got there, three years later, only a few of the stalwart Borders believers remained to try to change the store from within. Within a few months of my arrival, Neil gave up and retired to play in his band, The Human Rays. I don’t know if the band was real or Neil just thought it was amusing to retire and join The Human Rays. His friendly management style didn’t jibe with the new owners.
“Neil’s replacement was a guy named Doug. Doug had the personality of a pair of brown corduroy pants. We all hated Doug. We hated him because he was not Neil. Underneath that hatred was a hatred of what Doug represented: corporate masters and the loss of our own identity. With Neil we labored under the impression that we were cool. Under Doug we just labored.
This romantic vision may have a grain of truth. But it’s worth remembering that scrolls and codexes(codices?) required immense amounts of money–and so wealthy patrons who had to be appeased–to produce. And at some level when you come down to it a book is a commodity as surely as a coke can. So we like to imagine ourselves as counter cultural in our love of texts, but that romantic ethos is purchased at a price like everything else.
The promise of the Internet is in part the idea of thinking and writing and reading without the necessary intervention of the dollar bill. But is that too just a romantic fancy?
David Rothman over at Teleread announced today that I’ll be blogging for them on a semi-regular basis. As I’ve indicated on this blog in the past, I think Teleread is a very good portal for getting good information about all things reading, with a special emphasis on e-books and the general interface between the digital world and books. Also, though I’m not involved in this whole end of things, they function as an advocacy group for universal computer and open library access. A worthy cause in my estimation.
David wasn’t dissuaded by my protestations that I don’t consider myself an expert on reading, e-books, or blogging. I’ll try to keep it from being too much the amateur hour.
But wait, some people are saying that blogging is THE amateur hour, to the destruction of our civilization. So perhaps I’ll just do my best to contribute to the end of all things.
Seriously though, as this blog reaches its one month anniversary, I’ve realized that I’ve been thinking at least as much about how blogging works as writing as I have about how reading is functioning in our contemporary culture. Russell Jacoby, whom I generally respect for his now somewhat ancient call for a renewal of public intellectual work, wrote a kind of scathing dismissal of the contemporary academy, and along with it a rather sniffy dismissal of blogging.
I think Jacoby’s categorical thinking is part and parcel of our problem in grappling with the nature of reading and writing—and thinking and intellectual work—in the contemporary world. It is true that blogs are somewhat ephemeral, but on the other hand, how many of the many periodical essays of the 1950s do people really remember. Moreover, if blogging specifically eschews the media of print and permanence, we might ask what kind of intellectual work, what kind of cultural work generally, is being done by this kind of writing?
It seems to me to apply the standard of permanent value to any public intellectual work is wrongheaded. The things Edmund Wilson and Lionel Trilling had to say in the 30s, 40s, and 50s can hardly apply to our world at the dawning of the 21st century. But more importantly, they did a specific kind of public intellectual work that was appropriate for the media and age in which they worked.
Blogging can be “id writing” as described in the NyTimes the other day. But it can also be a kind of intellectual and cultural work much different from those that we are used to. The 1950s saw both a lot of what we now envy as influential public intellectual work, and it also saw the explosion on the scene of Playboy magazine. Perhaps this was why people claim even yet today to buy it for the writing.
My point is that magazines and middle to upper middle brow journals were a media through which to do particular kinds of intellectual work. It seems to me that blogs and other kinds of interactive and multimedia formations are the site of potentially important intellectual work today.
But what is the nature of that work. How does it differ from that of the past. Well, for one thing, I think it aspires more to the kind of interchanges that go on in coffeeshop culture of the 18th century, where intellectual work was not yet located (imprisoned?) in as yet undeveloped academy. It’s even much more like the intellectual work that goes on in classrooms or in informal exchanges with colleagues and students after a lecture or reading.
Academics mostly sniff at this kind of thing as beneath their consideration. But it seems to me that it is precisely out of these kinds of exchanges that enduring and important intellectual work comes from. This is why I decided to start blogging a month ago. I wanted to imagine an intellectual space, a conversational space, that wasn’t imprisoned by the conventions of academic work. I also wanted to imagine doing writing that was more like the energy I feel in conversations with good friends about topics I care about deeply.
I think, honestly, that this will lead to another kind of writing that is more conventional. I still want to publish a book on the reading in the contemporary cultural imaginary. On the other hand, just because I continue to envision a more conventional form of intellectual work, I think I’m coming to think that we are mistaken if we think that blogging or other kinds of intellectual exchange on the web can only be justified if they lead to that kind of thing. If they do, great. But if they don’t they are their own kind of good. When Jacoby criticized blogs for the ephemerality, he is holding out the standard of books, and even more books that continue to be read decades after they are written, as the only worthy definition of intellectual work. I dispute that. The immediacy of blogging, the effort to grapple in written words with difficult problems, the opportunity to have friends and strangers read or respond, these are their own goods. This is a kind of intellectual work worth doing regardless of what other forms it may lead to, and regardless of whether it leads anywhere else at all. Just as the engagement I have in my classroom is its own good and produces knowledge worth having in me and in my students, the process of writing, of thinking through issues on a daily or weekly basis, is a knowledge worth pursuing even if it disappears next week or next year.
Well, enough for now. I’ll try to come back later and put in some links for Jacoby’s piece and some other things I refer to in this post. Right now I’ve got to go party with my wife. She thinks I love my blog more than her, so I better go prove her wrong.
Sarah Boxer has a review of books on blogging in the most recent issue of New York Review of Books. Ok, at least it’s interesting to me since I am a relative latecomer to blogs and blogdom. In any case, it’s evident that blogs have become a major seller in the book industry, no matter how much those of us who are book aficionados worry that blogs are contributing to the demise of books and reading of books.
Who after all, has time for reading any more. I certainly don’t; I’ve got to get this blog written.
Anyway, a healthy sampling of the industry covered in Boxer’s review. These include, among many others:
We’ve Got Blog: How Weblogs Are Changing Our Culture compiled and edited by John Rodzvilla,
Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob by Lee Siegel
Republic.com 2.0by Cass R. Sunstein
Blogwars by David D. Perlmutter
The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet by Daniel J. Solove
We’re All Journalists Now: The Transformation of the Press and Reshaping of the Law in the Internet Age by Scott Gant
Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation That’s Changing Your World by Hugh Hewitt
The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture by Andrew Keen
Naked Conversations: How Blogs Are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel, foreword by Tom Peters
Blog! How the Newest Media Revolution Is Changing Politics, Business, and Cultureby David Kline and Dan Burstein
I’ve read none of these save for some excerpts on the web, but what I can gather from the titles and from those excerpts, as well as from a few extant interviews with several of these authors, most of them view the blogosphere with some fear and loathing. From what I’ve seen, this is unfair, but I did pick up a couple of good interviews that you can judge for yourselves, a video interview with Lee Siegel and a radio interview with Daniel Solove.
Anyway, back to Boxer’s review. I’m most interested in what she has to say about the ways in which blogs change writing and reading. This, after all, is why I got started on this blog in the first place, thinking that it would be an interesting way to keep myself writing and thinking about reading—thinking all the while that I would be pointing toward a conventional book. I still think that, but I’m not quite so sure about how natural or inevitable the connections are. As one of my colleagues pointed out, we don’t even call it writing. We call it “blogging” as if we had to come up with a different verb to get at the phenomenon itself.
In Boxer’s words:
“Are they a new literary genre? Do they have their own conceits, forms, and rules? Do they have an essence?
“Reading blogs, it’s pretty clear, is not like reading a newspaper article or a book. Blog readers jump around. They follow links. They move from blogs to news clips to videos on YouTube, and they do it more easily than you can turn a newspaper page. They are always getting carried away—somewhere. Bloggers thrive on fragmented attention and dole it out too—one-liners, samples of songs, summary news, and summary judgments. Sometimes they don’t even stop to punctuate. And if they can’t put quite the right inflection on a sentence, they’ll often use an OMG (Oh my god!) or an emoticon, e.g., a smiley face 🙂 or a wink 😉 or a frown 😦 instead of words. (Tilt your head to the left to see the emoticons here.)
“Many bloggers really don’t write much at all. They are more like impresarios, curators, or editors, picking and choosing things they find on line, occasionally slapping on a funny headline or adding a snarky (read: snotty and catty) comment. Some days, the only original writing you see on a blog is the equivalent of “Read this…. Take a look…. But, seriously, this is lame…. Can you believe this?”
I’ve noticed all this, of course, in my own digital peregrinations, and it makes me think that I’m really not writing a blog at all. As I told a friend earlier today, I don’t think I really blog at all. I write too much, there are no pictures—or too few—and I don’t use four letter words with aplomb.
I also use words like “aplomb,” which is a sure sign of geekishness in blogworld.
I am also, in my general estimation, too organized for my own good. Thirty years of English studies have left me incapable of writing in something other than paragraph form. The one sentence paragraph still strikes me as an oxymoron, save for the occasional literary effect.
(Secret confession—I also go back and correct my blog grammar. Cardinal sin, I know, but I can’t help myself. I wish I could throw off subject/verb or number disagreements with the same aplomb—there’s that word again—that I see throughout the blogosphere, but I’m appalled when I find a misplaced modifier and wonder what kind of example I am setting for all those students whose lives are being ruined by poor grammar.)
More seriously though, I do think that the fragmentary and fluid quality of blogging is very different from the things we normally consider when thinking about critical reading and coherent argument. Does this matter? I tend to think it does. My guess is that students increasingly have difficult times making arguments, or having patience with extended arguments elsewhere, because they are more used to the kind of ad hominem and ejaculatory declamations they get on the web. “Dude, check out the moron talking about evolution on YouTube.” Of course, they get this from Bill O’Reilly any more as well, so perhaps we can’t blame blogging.
Secret confession II: I only use the word “ejaculatory” in written prose. Perhaps I am afraid my late adolescent students will start snickering in class. Perhaps I am afraid my inner adolescent will start snickering in class.
I have also noticed the tendency of bloggers to cite and not write. I’m intrigued by this. I see two things happening with the tendency for many blogs to be compilations of text and image pulled in from elsewhere. On the one hand, it’s the part of blogging that’s much more like conversation than it is traditional expository writing. It’s like sitting down with friends and saying, “Dude, check out this cartoon in the newspaper.”
Ok, so most people who use the word “dude” don’t read newspapers anymore, but you get my general drift. This part of blogging is like sharing things with friends. Correlatively, reading blogs is a little bit like sitting down to talk with friends.
The other thing that I think is going on is that the compilations are a kind of sampling. As I’ve written elsewhere on this blog, there’s a sense in which texts and images in the current world are more like raw materials that have to be compiled in new and interesting ways. Just as collage is interesting partly for the individual elements, but even more for the way those bits come together in a new whole. Whereas writing has usually been conceived of as commentary on or representation of an external world, there’s a way in which blogs are reorganizations of or recreations of the visual, verbal, and audible text of the internet. The internet is the external world and the blog is its recreation. A kind of perfect self-referentiality to the degree that bloggers eventually start sampling one another, as even I have done in this blog. Bloggers sample other bloggers, and one sign of your importance is the number of times others will say check this out, and then copy your whole blog in to theirs.
Boxer goes on to note the pervasive emphasis in the blogosphere on scatology, pornography, and profane invective. As she puts it.
“Blog writing is id writing—grandiose, dreamy, private, free-associative, infantile, sexy, petty, dirty. Whether bloggers tell the truth or really are who they claim to be is another matter, but WTF. They are what they write. And you can’t fake that. ;-)”
Well, she’s not wrong here, to the degree that I’ve bothered to plough around the blogosphere. On the other hand, I have noticed a generally different tone in blogs devoted to books and reading. They generally don’t get their work done with profanity or inane references to enlarged or swollen body parts. It may be that I don’t get out enough, but I see no books-and-reading bloggers out there making their way by telling people they disagree with to go do an anatomically impossible act to themselves or by telling the authors whose books they dislike to put their texts where the sun don’t shine.
(You see, I am far to polite, discreet, and refined to even spell out the bad words)
Seriously though, it seems to me that Boxer is wrong to make as grand and encompassing a characterization as she does. Blogs strike me as being as various as …well…books or conversation. Different regions of the blogosphere develop different tendencies and propensities, different likes and dislikes. One thing I like about blogs on books is that they don’t pretend that using profanity is somehow inherently useful, don’t assume that dirty jokes necessarily communicate anything worth thinking about, don’t assume that being shocking is the same thing as being insightful.
My guess is that book readers have reconciled themselves to their anonymity and have less need to be noticed on their blogs. By contrast, some bloggers are the internet equivalent of Brittany Spears. Anything to get attention.
I have no proof of any of this, but it seems to me that blogging is something like a third sphere, something different from either orality or literacy. Combining some aspects of both, but going beyond either with its nearly infinite ability to play the bricoleur.
AT least this is what I see as the possibility. I am a hopeless essayist. I need to let out my inner id. Let the blog flow. Death to the paragraph. Vive la Fragment. Spoken with a good French accent.
The New York Times reports today that five of the best selling novels in Japan last year were originally written on cell-phones to be read on cell phones.
Of last year’s 10 best-selling novels, five were originally cellphone novels, mostly love stories written in the short sentences characteristic of text messaging but containing little of the plotting or character development found in traditional novels.
What is more, the top three spots were occupied by first-time cellphone novelists, touching off debates in the news media and blogosphere.“Will cellphone novels kill ‘the author’?” a famous literary journal, Bungaku-kai, asked on the cover of its January issue. Fans praised the novels as a new literary genre created and consumed by a generation whose reading habits had consisted mostly of manga, or comic books. Critics said the dominance of cellphone novels, with their poor literary quality, would hasten the decline of Japanese literature.
I can’t really say anything about cell phone novels, never having read one. (I am not yet a disciple of Pierre Bayard). And so far they seem to primarily be a Japanese phenomenon, though Harlequin is trying to replicate Japanese success in Britain and the United States. Perhaps the genre better fits a Japanese culture where everything is cramped and hurried—no room for books while your being squashed on to the subway? No problem. Download the latest to your cellphone and read.
I’m intrigued with several aspects of the phenomenon. First, to my mind it confirms my sense that when we are talking about crises in books and reading we have to be more precise and talk about reading as a multiple and variegated phenomenon rather than a singular phenomenon. Most of the novels are apparently more or less romances in the Harlequin vein. With all appreciation for my colleagues who have made the case for the cultural seriousness of romance, the genre itself has hardly aspired to high cultural seriousness, and certainly hasn’t worried a great deal about linguistic complexity, semantic layering, or intricacies of plot.
Given this, what difference does it make that this kind of pleasure—or something like it–is delivered via a cell-phone, an ipod or something else. On the other hand, if this is the kind of thing that digital utopians have in mind when they talk about digital reading, I’m not sure I’m reassured. I remember n+1 ranting a while back that everyone is so obsessed with the reading crisis that we tend to laud folks for reading anything and everything. I tend to agree. If people want to entertain themselves with graphic novels, I have no problem with that. But let’s not imagine it as an experience that will develop their sense of the possibilities of language—or even the imagination generally—on the order of War and Peace or Toni Morrison’s Beloved.
The dominance of the romance genre is intriguing to me as regards to gender as well. Apparently most of the people reading and writing these things are women. What would it be about the romance genre, and about young female readers in Japan, that would make this particular media effective and important. This is a culturally important and interesting question apart from the question of whether such “novels” do anything for the mind or imagination beyond fill space while marking time. I suspect that young men are playing video games on their cell phones while young women are reading romance novels. Why is this stereotype of the male who reads nothing and the female who reads brain candy so prevalent, even in a digital world, and even in Japan. This is not an American phenomena, and it isn’t a legacy of Victorian England.
Last question would be about the enduring appeal of printed matter. Apparently it’s pretty common to put these cellphone novels out first via text messaging, but the goal for many of the young women writing them is to get in print. One young woman named Rin wrote her novel while commuting to her part time job, uploading text to an online service. She later sold it to a publisher and went to 400,000 copies in hard cover. Hmmm. I’m not sure what is going on with that, and I wonder what the distinction would be between experiencing the form in short bursts over a cell phone and then actually getting the thing between hard covers.
Something tells me that the media of a linguistic work of any kind determines, or at least significantly determines, its ultimate shape and the possibility of its reception. Certainly, of course, this is the case to the degree that cell phone novels are made up of short sentences and lack character development and plot development. (How to think of this as a novel is another question that I won’t bother trying to answer without actually reading one).
I only have instances going in the opposite direction. I joined up at DailyLit.com and trie to read Dostoevsky’s The Idiot via once a day email delivery of the equivalent of four or five pages a day. It may just be that I’m old fashioned, but I found the reading experience relatively frustrating, and felt that the book format—at least for this kind of work—was technologically superior to a digitized format regardless of all the bells and whistles my computer to bring to bear on the experience. If I forgot who a character was, or what had happened since I last looked at the email, it was annoying to have to search back through emails to find the last instance of a character doing something. And if I got really engaged with a scene, I either had to stop completely, or I had to interrupt the reading process, go to the website, and download the next installment. With a book format, reminding oneself of the book’s past is a simple matter of flipping a couple of pages back and saying, “Oh yeah, I remember now.” And to go on one….goes on.
Cellphone novels have evidently had some success in digitizing Japanese classics, but I suspect that formats like a cellphone will ultimately only succeed in new cultural forms they shape for this new media. The efforts to create digital book readers like the Kindle are efforts to create formats that replicate as closely as possible the experience of reading a traditional book while creating new possibilities for reading associated with new media. It may be that we can come up with one, and it may be that we will gradually come to appreciate older forms in this media. Many things that were once on scrolls we now read effectively in book form. However, a cellphone novel is not trying to replicate the traditional form at all.
I’m not holding my breath, but I probably need to download one of these novels and try it out before declaring that you can’t read War and Peace on a cellphone.
A response of mine to Fish’s latest arguments about the Humanities was posted today in the comments section of the Times at Fish’s blog. I think I’m going to write my parents and tell them I’ve now been published in the New York Times! However, they think it’s a liberal rag. I doubt they will mention it to their friends at church. (Side note: What exactly is a liberal rag in digital world–liberal pixels? liberal electrons? Maybe an e-rag. I like it.)
My comment ran as follows:
I wonder whether the refutation of Dr. Fish’s position lies within the framework of his own argument, at least insofar as English studies is concerned. He begins with a marvelous disquisition on the way language works and means–or does not mean what we think it means–in Herbert’s poem. He ends by saying “I can remember countless times when I’ve read a poem (like Herbert’s ‘Matins’) and said ‘Wow!’ or ‘Isn’t that just great?’”
The rhetorical shape of his argument–to say nothing of its length–makes us conflate these two moments, and we find ourselves agreeing with him when he says, “I cannot believe, as much as I would like to, that the world can be persuaded to subsidize my moments of aesthetic wonderment.”
However, these are two very different moments of response, two very different pleasures, we might say. In the final instance, who, after all, would pay for us to say to one another “Gee whiz, isn’t literature grand.” The first instance, however, is an exemplary instance of close reading learned through a substantial amount of reading,training, and practice (in both reading and writing). Fish’s close reading points to the particular role that literary studies can play–though it often fails to play–in understanding the nature, history and possibilities of written language.
If I am right about this, a rationale for this kind of study lies not in Fish’s aesthetic wonderment, but in rhetoric and philology. Surely the way written language works in the world deserves the kind of careful scrutiny we give to bacteria and to economics. We don’t need to think of the utility of this kind of study in immediate terms. The study of pure science or mathematics, for instance, proceeds without any clear sense of it’s immediate utility, and students are required to study chemistry even when the day to day practice of their lives rarely requires it’s application.
Similary, we might say the careful study of how written language works need not be justified by it’s immediate application, but by a general sense that it is better to have human beings in the modern world educated in the ways language has functioned and can function and may function. A related gesture would be to return to a recognition that the study of literature can exist in part to create better writers–something that most English departments these days choose to see as beneath the seriousness of their enterprise. However, undergraduates that have understood the textual dimensions of complex, dense, and difficult texts may be in a better position to apply that understanding to their own writing in the future.
Ok. Again. Not. However, I remain fascinated by the rhetorical irresponsibility that blogging makes possible.
In keeping with the literary politics of the season, the New York Times reports this morning that there’s a new book out with women writers reflecting on Hillary Clinton. The title, Thirty Ways of Looking at Hillary Clinton, recalls Wallace Stevens “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Bird.” The choice apparently reflects the content of the book since Stevens’s poem is all about how perspective makes and in some sense is the object of our reflection.
I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.
III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.
Ok, I hope you have a better time making sense of this than I do with my students. After saying “This poem is about perspective” conversation mostly comes to an end and we twiddle our thumbs for fifty minutes. Nevertheless, the blackbird, and apparently Hillary, are nothing apart from how we construct them in our imaginations.
Kakutani isn’t terribly impressed, but I have to say that I find Kakutani too often follows the unacknowledged dictum of many contemporary book and movie reviewers: Slander everything unless you find it absolutely impossible not to. Finding fault too often substitutes for seriousness.
“On a shelf in my kitchen is a campaign button that I picked up during the 1992 presidential race. Over a photo of Hillary (bangs and headband phase—which was basically my look then, too) are the words ‘Elect Hillary’s Husband.’ Back then, the slogan produced a kind of giddy frisson: not only was the candidate just like someone I could have gone to college with—a baby boomer—but his wife was, too. And she had a job! I had only known first ladies as creaky battleaxes who sat under hairdryers and wore brooches. The thrill associated with that button feels far away now, and it’s hard to know exactly why. There’s no doubt that the rinky-dink scandals of the Clinton administration and the dismal parade of special prosecutors took the gleam off the fresh start that the Clintons brought with them to Washington. But that doesn’t quite explain how now, fifteen years later, there is not more simple exuberance at the idea that we may be about to elect our first woman president.
….
“No other politician inspires such a wide range of passionate responses, and this is particularly true among women. As I talked with women about their reactions to Hillary, some themes came up again and again. Many women were divided within themselves as to how they feel about her, and I noticed a familiar circle of guilt: these women believe they should support Hillary as a matter of solidarity. But, because they expect her to be different from (that is, better than) the average male politician, she invariably disappoints them; then they feel guilty about their ambivalence. Some feel competitive with her. Having wearily resigned themselves to the idea that ‘having it all’ is too much to hope for, they view Hillary as a rebuke: how did she manage to pull it off—or, at least, to appear to pull it off? Other women say they want to like her but are disturbed by the anti-feminist message inherent in the idea of the first woman president getting to the White House on her husband’s coattails. Then there are women, like the late playwright Wendy Wasserstein, who are queasy over the way Clinton’s popularity spiked only after she was perceived as a victim. When it became clear that Hillary was going to stand by her man after the Lewinsky fracas, Wasserstein wrote a disheartened Op-ed piece in the New York Times. ‘The name Hillary Rodham Clinton no longer stands for self-determination, but for the loyal, betrayed wife,’ she wrote. ‘Pity and admiration have become synonymous.’
Side note: Morrison’s text is one of many that echo Stevens’s poem. Gates’s Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man, Smiley’s Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Novel. A quick Google search shows 44,600 references to the phrase “Thirteen Ways of Looking.” There are, I guess 17 extra ways of looking at the prismatic Hillary Clinton. I find Wallace Stevens resilient popularity and influence on our culture a bit boggling. Maybe it’s because most of us are leading the dull lives of insurance salesman and long to release our inner poets.
Thus the popularity of blogging? Anyone can be a poet now. Everyone is.
Peter Kerry Powers 