mowabb: books

Bill/Steve

What a great idea: Bill and Steve are getting it on! Bill who? Steve what? Read the stories and see for yourself. I hadn't thought of this before, but I wonder if there are any slash stories about, oh, I don't know, Shrub and Cheney? No! Shrub and Putin (reportedly Shrub calls the Russian president "Pooty-poot" or something like that). Hmmm...

Fun With Words

Logophilia, a new site for word lovers, will introduce you to a new word each day, or a new use of an old word. Meanwhile, if you're a person of few words, you might appreciate The Bible in Five Words. Hilarious! See The Five-Word New Testament as well. I'll get you started:

Matthew: Verily, Christ was way cool. Mark: Verily, Christ was the whip. Luke: Verily, Christ was the shiznit. John: Christ was one cute baby!

Summer Reading

If you're looking for a good book, you might find some good suggestions in A Peek Into Professors' Pleasure-Reading Packs. For Sci-Fi fans, there's Diplomatic Immunity, "Lois McMaster Bujold's latest installment in her sci-fi series about the Vorkosigan family." I've never heard of it, but then, part of the fun of summer reading is trying something new, isn't it? My summer reading so far has consisted of Straight Man by Richard Russo, half of The Corrections by Jonathon Franzen (I passed it to a friend before I could finish it but I'll definitely read the rest as soon as I get it back), and The Lecturer's Tale by James Hynes. All are somehow related to academia and I'm loving them -- great hilarity derives from mocking ivory tower theorists and their largely petty problems. I do wonder how these things play to people who haven't been through the academic ringer (grad school in the humanities, mostly is what I'm thinking here). Have you read any of these books? Any thoughts? What are you reading this summer?

Books: Commodity or Art Object?

Did you know Barnes n' Noble keeps "subversive" and "experimental" books behind the counter so you have to ask for them if you'd like to buy them? In Novel Concepts, Dennis Loy Johnson laments the decline of reading, the rise of publishing and bookselling conglomerates, and introduces us to the Dalkey Archive Press as something of an antidote to both. As a spokesperson for the press says:

being a non-profit "allows us to do all kinds of things other publishers would think was crazy," but then goes on to add, "such as keeping a book in print forever!"

Yeah, what a crazy idea! I mean, I'm not wild about the idea of books as art objects (the idea seems to play too well with the whole romantic notion of "literature" and author as god/genius, which I don't really think helps anyone), but it's sad to see books reduced to commodities as well. Can't there be a middle ground? And can't we publish on demand, by now, so no book ever has to go out of print, ever again? Still waiting for Eldred to win and for us to get a Napster for books.

Pledge of Allegiance

As politicians and pundits continue to rage about the fact that anyone would dare question the Pledge of Allegiance, more, um, reasonable people are asking questions about the pledge. NPR's "All Things Considered" (the afternoon/evening news program) ran a good story on the history of the pledge yesterday. And today Craig's Booknotes points to another history of the pledge. According to Cheryl Taylor:

The original pledge was: "I pledge allegiance to my flag and to the Republic for which it stands: one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."

The pledge was changed in 1924 (replacing "my flag" with "the flag of the United States of America") and again in 1954, when the "under God" was added. Both the early 1920s and the early 1950s were times when certain American traditions (including the American tradition of thinking ourselves more secure in the world than any other people) were under threat from a changing world. We seem to be in a similar period today, so perhaps we should just dispense with this whole nonsense of this old pledge and go all the way. "I pledge blind and happy obedience to anything multi-national corporate interests want to do to me, to anyone else on the planet, or to the planet itself." Ok, it needs work, but you get the idea. p.s.: I just noticed, Craig's Booknotes also points to a few more salient facts about the pledge. I betcha didn't know it was written by a socialist, didya? And waddayaknow! The pledge's author, Francis Bellamy, was the first cousin of Edward Bellamy who wrote Looking Backward, an important but rather overlooked American utopian novel.

Free Literary Map of New York

Billed as "your personal guide to New York's literary secrets," the Literary Map of New York looks like it could be fun. I'm not going any time soon, but something to keep in mind.

To obtain a map, please stop by the Center at 20 West 44th Street in mid-Manhattan and pick one up. Or if you live out of town and would like a map, send a self-addressed 12 x 9 envelope with 57 cents postage to the Small Press Center, 20 West 44th Street, New York, NY 10036.

Minority Report

A pseudo-review and a few thoughts about the movie and some comparisons to the Philip K. Dick short story on which it's based. Also, if you're a Dick fan (it sounds bad, but I mean it in the best way), you might be interested in this paper I wrote a few years ago on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (popularly known as "Blade Runner"). It makes heavy use of Baudrillard, and I was partially inspired to write it by my first few viewings of "The Matrix," so fans of either of those sources might find it interesting as well.

Oops!

According to Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Katherine Anne Porter (American writer, probably most well known for the short story "Flowering Judas" and the novel, Ship of Fools) once said: "It is my firm belief that all our lives we are preparing to be somebody or something, even if we do not do it consciously."

Remember Cyberpunk?

Remember it? Is it gone? Some folks over at Flutterby are lamenting the cool visionary hope of the cyberpunk of their youth. Some great comments about the difference between the cyberpunk dreams of the 80s and early 90s and the reality we live in today. But they make it sound as if the whole genre died once the Internet went mainstream. While I admit I haven't seen anything I'd call "cyberpunk" published recently, I find it hard to believe no one's writing in this vein anymore. Technological advances have not ended, and the punk ethos of jamming the system has not lost any of its edge, as far as I'm concerned. The cyberpunk landscape of today's future might look a lot different than the landscape these folks are nostalgic for, but then, that's the point of cyberpunk, isn't it? [via markpasc.blog] (Bonus: One of the comments on Flutterby mentions the Blink digital camera. Only 2 inches square and $39. How cool is that!? But will it work w/a Mac?)

What Makes A 'Great' Book?

As a followup to the comments below about "great" books, I've been reading more about Faulkner recently and just came across this from Twentieth-Century Southern Literature by J.A. Bryant Jr. (p. 78):

Faulkner, who had completed the bulk of his major work by the time of [Thomas] Wolfe's death in 1939, was only lightly regarded by the American public during that period. By 1945 only one his books, the notorious Sanctuary, remained in print, and he had alredy begun to slip into semiobscurity as a minor master of what was commonly called Southern Gothic.

Of course, Faulkner is now widely regarded as a master of 20th century American fiction. Why is that? It's not because his writing changed between the publication of his books in the 1920s and 30s and the time he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949; rather, what changed were his readers and the dominant ideology that determined "greatness." (Cleanth Brooks' books about Faulkner and his popularization of the "New Criticsm" certainly had something to do with this.) The point is that there's nothing inherent within a text that makes it "great"; a book's "greatness" will always depend on its readers.

Correction and Apology

In Hating "Great" Books I took Tom Bissell to task for not having read some books he "condemned." Bissell kindly read my comments, and posted his own. Below is my apology and correction. Tom: You are absolutely correct -- your article did not condemn anyone. I apologize for mischaracterizing the main point I think you were trying to make (namely, not that these books are bad, but that you dislike reading them -- correct?). I got the list of writers you "condemn" from the letters responding to your piece. That was shoddy work, obviously. I had read your article days earlier, and didn't remember precisely which authors you singled out, other than Faulkner, of course. I really enjoyed your article, and I appreciate both your perspective and the fact that you're not afraid to express it to a "literary" audience that can, indeed, be "clerky" and immovable in its opinions about "literature." I'm near you in age, am also involved in the "literary" world, and have often felt a good deal of my own frustration (and shame) when books that are supposedly "great" don't seem so great to me. The title of my post ("Hating 'Great' Books") was actually intended to question the "greatness" of these books. Perhaps it wasn't part of your point, but I think the fact that the supposed brilliance of these texts is not available to a large number of readers suggests that they're not necessarily so "great" to begin with -- it's only that "clerky" literary establishment that deems them as such, so why should you, or anyone else, need to be ashamed if you disagree? A more serious thought your article sparked in me was a comparison between what you call "a work of literature's temperament" to what Georg Lukacs has called a text's weltanschaung, or worldview. (See around page 19-20 of The Meaning of Contemporary Realism if you're interested in tracking the connection. Lukacs is often dismissed as a dogmatic old-school Marxist curmudgeon, but sometimes I wonder if critics who say that are throwing the baby out with the bathwater.) Of course, whereas your description of "the nearly cell-level sensation [a work of literature's] voice provokes in a reader" refers to an individual response to a text, Lukacs is talking about something I think he'd like to consider more universal, something available by anyone who reads a book. The real trouble is that no text says the same thing to everyone, which is really what your piece is saying. And that, I might add, is also what the letters responding to your piece (and my response here) also show: Readers simply cannot be trusted to "get" your intended meaning, no matter how hard you try to communicate clearly. Nevertheless, I apologize for misreading you in this case (although I assure you it was not "willful"). Anyway, thanks for reading this and I look forward to reading your future work.

Hating "Great" Books

Tom Bissell's recent essay about books he's ashamed of being unable to read has sparked some great comments on Salon, largely from people who want to defend the "great" books. William Faulkner is high on Bissell's list of authors he really can't relate to, and having spent some time recently reading a good deal of Faulkner I can say that I can understand where Bissell is coming from. However, I also think that, for example, As I Lay Dying or The Sound and the Fury are worth the effort it takes to get through them. You may never "like" or "relate to" a book like this, but, again, I think that's part of the point of the book. Faulkner's characters aren't, by and large, very likeable. His scenes are often hot and sticky and dirty and creepy and all the kinds of things we'd really prefer not to think about. But a lot of the world is like that -- uglier than we'd like it to be -- and we can't just "choose" not to look at or think about those parts of life because we don't "like" them. In fact, many of the writers Bissell denounces -- Henry James, R.W. Emerson, Theodore Dreiser, Herman Melville -- are writers whose texts seem explicitly to challenge their readers' vision of the world. As readers, we often don't like to face our own stereotypes or to see the the things we take for granted exposed as illusory or corrupt, but it's something we probably should do now and then, don't you think? At the same time, a lot of "great" books really are overrated. Bissell's great mistake was in admitting he'd never really read most of the writers he condemns. Now if he reads them and still hates them, well, then he might have something...

Sci-Fi Resources

Sam Gentile's Science Fiction page is a great sci-fi blog with a bit of an update on the "Matrix" sequels. Gentile's list of Must Have Science Fiction Classics is also worth a look. I haven't read most of them, so someday when I'm not neck-deep in "literary modernism" and the so-called "Southern renaissance" (my current project) I'll have a lot of good reading to do.

Is Solipsism the "Infinite Jest"?

Hang with me here, book lovers. This may go nowhere, but it seems worth noting. First, you have to understand that I'm a huge fan of David Foster Wallace and his epic and genre-defying novel, Infinite Jest (easily one of my top 5 books of all time). Even though I haven't read it in a while, I think about it often and follow conversation about it on the Wallace discussion list. Recently that list pointed to an interview with Wallace in which he said that he loves Wittgenstein because

he realized that no conclusion could be more horrible than solipsism. And so he trashed everything he'd been lauded for in the "Tractatus" and wrote the" Investigations," which is the single most comprehensive and beautiful argument against solipsism that's ever been made. Wittgenstein argues that for language even to be possible, it must always be a function of relationships between persons (that's why he spends so much time arguing against the possibility of a "private language").

One of the main subplots of Infinite Jest revolves around a character who goes by Gately and who ends up living in an addiction-recovery halfway house (Ennet House, I believe it's called, though it's been too long since I read the novel to be sure about all these details) and spending a lot of time at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. So Wallace is clearly concerned with both issues of solipsism and addiction/AA. That's why I immediately thought of him and IJ when I read this Chronicle of Higher Ed. article about AA, addiction, and academia, in which the anonymous author basically concludes that, like Wittgenstein's "Investigations," AA is basically an argument against solipsism:

It's true that AA addresses individual problems rather than the larger problem of addiction in culture. But the same could be said of any therapy or medical treatment. More than that, the standard leftist critique of "fetishizing the individual" over-simplifies AA's model of recovery. The paradox of AA is that while it focuses on the individual, it works only in the context of a relationship or a group dynamic, one drunk talking to another. And a social dimension is built into the 12th of the famous steps, which charges us to take action, to spread the word, and to keep an eye out for the next alcoholic. For me, that was the impetus to write this essay, and to "come out" to a student who is addicted and in trouble.

The similarity between DFW's comments about Wittgenstein to the above thoughts on AA lead me to conclude that Gately and the AA/addiction parts of IJ are at least to some degree arguments against solipsism and for community. AA becomes for Wallace a trope for language itself. Also, by extension, any argument against solipsism might also be an argument against the kind of poststructuralism/postmodernism that was circulating in literary communities when DFW was working on IJ. So while I've often heard IJ described as "pomo lit," I wonder if it's actually anti-pomo, which might only make it more seriously pomo in that it incorporates arguments against itself into itself. At any rate, it's interesting to think of AA as a sort of antidote to the fear that we've "lost our way" in the world, that we can't know anything, etc. This suggests an explanation for AA's late 20th century growth and mainstream acceptability, as well as the rise of addiction that makes AA necessary in the first place. Is addiction the ultimate expression of solipsism?

Great Strip

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: The Boondocks is the best comic strip around these days. Those of you who think the media is not doing a very good job these days (that would be lots of people with blogs, I imagine) should check out Sunday's strip -- good stuff. For more: John Nichols did a great piece about "The Boondocks" and Aaron McGruder (the strip's author). McGruder has been doing a lot of strips about "Attack of the Clones" recently -- too many, I was thinking. But that buildup began to pay off yesterday and today. Huey finally saw the movie and... well... It never ceases to amaze me how truth so regularly is stranger than fiction... ;-)

CyberPunk Clues

Rick Klau positively reviews Stephen Bury's (a.k.a.: Neal Stephenson's -- I did not know that) Interface. Klau also recommends Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, which is indeed excellent. However, for me the quintessential Stephenson is still Snow Crash, which easily ranks in my top-five best books of all time. If you liked William Gibson's Neuromancer, you'll love Snow Crash. (If you liked these books and have related recommendations, please let me know -- I'd love to read them.) Klau also offers some terrific links to more on Jean Baudrillard and The Matrix. And speaking of Snow Crash and Neuromancer, Radio Bump notes that Orson Scott Card's 80s hit, Ender's Game, is being made into a movie. The book has obviously been hugely popular -- it's ranked 807 on Amazon's sales rankings and its 4.5 star rating is based on 1,050 reviews. I recall really liking the book, but, well....

Where's Baudrillard?

Brent Staples claims to have learned something about French philosopher Jean Baudrillard's opinions of "The Matrix," a movie that borrows heavily from Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation. However, Staples' short piece on the subject has a lot less of what Baudrillard thinks of "The Matrix" and a lot more of what Staples thinks of Phillip K. Dick and Hollywood's penchant for misinterpreting science fiction. Of course Baudrillard would say that no movie could do justice to his book -- no surprise there. But the fact that "The Matrix" spends most of its time in the world of the image (the "virtual" world) is not sufficient evidence that the film misunderstands what's at stake in Simulacra and Simulation. I also think Staples' analysis doesn't do justice to the other allusions in "The Matrix," including Althusser's concepts of ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs). The contest between image and "real" is only way to frame the more central issue of the various problems caused by our imaginary relationship to our real conditions of existence. And on the question of "Blade Runner": I wrote a short paper on the film and Dick's book -- perhaps I'll find time to post it soon.

A Little Break

I've got to cut down on the couple of hours a day I've been spending surfing and posting. I'm also reconsidering my approach to political news -- I suspect many potential readers leave my pages when my politics are screaming at them rather than attempting to have a conversation with them. I'm a teacher, so one of my instincts is to spell things out the way I think they are, which often ends up sounding didactic and offensive. I've seen students completely turn off to this before, and I've learned in a classroom that it's better to lead a horse to water than to try to force it to drink (sure, there are horses and water in the classroom -- when's the last time you were at school?). It's about tone and often about restraint and humility; most important of all, it's about not sounding like you think you know the truth. Remember: there is no spoon. So on a slightly lighter note, I saw "About A Boy" last week and absolutely loved it. (Check the review from The NYT.) I haven't laughed so hard during a movie in forever. My impression is that this was Hugh Grant's best-ever performance, and Nicholas Hoult is a great pesky, brutally honest and incredibly resilient 12-year-old. Toni Collette (from "Muriel's Wedding" fame) also does a terrific job. Reviews of the book more or less agree with my impressions. Tonight we're planning to see "Insomnia," which I don't really expect to be as good, but Al Pacino and Robin Williams directed by Christopher Nolan (the man behind "Memento") is at least very promising. We'll see. (In the movie category: Did you know there was a recent film adaptation of Herman Melville's classic, "Bartleby the Scrivener"?)

Scary Funny, and Then Some

Via DayPop: The hilarious, scary, and very smart cartoon strip, Get Your War On is going to be made into a book with some proceeds going to land mine relief efforts in Afghanistan. This strip pushes buttons on so many levels, I don't even know where to begin.

Poetry and (blogging) Hypertext?

Dive into Mark recently discussed an article at Kuro5hin about misleading emoticons. Mark included the "Waka Waka" poem, which I had never seen but which I think would be great for teaching poetry to poetry-shy contemporary students (for many of whom poetry is like Latin -- a "dead" language). From Dive into Mark: First, the poem itself (there are many versions, this is just one):

<> ! * ' ' #
^ " ` $ $ -
! * = @ $ _

% * <> ~ # 4

& [ ] . . /

| { , , system halted

In English, this reads:

waka waka bang splat tick tick hash caret quote back-tick dollar dollar dash bang splat equal at dollar under-score percent splat waka waka tilda number four ampersand bracket bracket dot dot slash vertical-bar curly-bracket comma comma crash

In a related vein, more and more people are posting their creative writing (short stories and novels, as well as poetry) online. This is nothing new -- vanity pages devoted to poetry were among the first (and often worst). But there's some great stuff out there. The best (and most experimental) I know of is Douglas Rushkoff's Exit Strategy. Today markpasc.blog links to a new novel (in progress) for our enjoyment (this one posted via Radio: American Invisible. If you read this and know of other online novels/short stories -- especially those posted or developed with blogging software, please let me know.

Excellent Finds

Literacy Weblog offers an abundance of terrific, smart, and thought provoking links, plus it has the backlinks in effect. Too bad it has no RSS subscription option, but you can't have everything. I found this via Dr. Laurel Clyde's article on blogging at FreePint. Clyde also has an academic web page about blogs -- the first I've seen. While I'm at it, Clyde also provides links to more great sites, including:

Crag's Booknotes: I think I've been here before, but again, since it has no subscription option I'm less likely to make it a daily read. I need to change that. Saturday's entries offer a wealth of great links to the ongoing developments in post 9-11 investigations, accusations, etc. The highlight is the full text of Georgia Democrat Cynthia McKinney's statement on terrorist warnings. McKinney says: Because I love my country, because I am a patriot, and because the American people deserve the truth, I believe it would be dangerous, loony and irresponsible not to hold full congressional hearings on any warnings the Bush Administration had before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Ever since I came to Congress in 1992, there are those who have been trying to silence my voice. I've been told to "sit down and shut up" over and over again. Well, I won't sit down and I won't shut up until the full and unvarnished truth is placed before the American people. Go McKinney!
Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog: The title is pretty self-explanatory. One of the only blogs I've seen to actually link to The Chronicle of Higher Education.
The Laughing Librarian: Great library humor... Here's a taste.

Sharing Words

NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday ran a short bit this morning on BookCrossing -- a web site that encourages people to share their favorite books with random strangers by leaving them in public places. You know the feeling you get after reading a book that speaks to you, that touches your life, a feeling that you want to share it with someone else? BookCrossing.com gives you a simple way to share your books with the world, and follow their paths forever more!