Works Cited

2012-01-26T12:39:00.000-05:00

The lemur-student can see
that an aye-aye is not
an angwan-tíbo, potto, or loris.

—Marianne Moore, "Four Quartz-Crystal Clocks," Complete Poems 115-16

2012-01-26T09:56:00.000-05:00

Let's talk about children. I don't trust them. They are just biding their time until we're gone, and then they get our stuff.

—Stephen Colbert, interview with Maurice Sendak, 1/24/2012

2012-01-21T19:33:00.002-05:00

Since [Rousseau's] time, and largely thanks to him, the Ego has steadily tended to efface itself, and, for purposes of model, to become a manikin on which the toilet of education is to be draped in order to show the fit or misfit of the clothes. The object of study is the garment, not the figure. [...] The manikin, therefore, has the same value as any other geometrical figure of three or more dimensions, which is used for the study of relation. For that purpose it cannot be spared; it is the only measure of motion, of proportion, of human condition; it must have the air of reality; must be taken for real; must be treated as though it had life;—Who knows? Possibly it had! (7-8)

— Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams

My new course website...

2012-01-17T21:49:00.000-05:00

is here.

2012-01-15T12:58:00.000-05:00

My name is Acutifolius: having sharp edges. Underside of each frond like a powdery line of Braille. (19)

—Hillary Gravendyk, "Botanica" (I), Harm

Hello, students.

2012-01-13T18:24:00.000-05:00

My analytics inform me that a bunch of people from around the country are googling me at the moment. I'm fairly sure I haven't become famous, so I can only conclude that the googlers are my new students. So this is a post for them.

Hi, students. I'm looking forward to meeting you on Wednesday, bright and early at 8:30 am. As far as I can tell, there are only seven of you. We should be able to have excellent discussions with such a small group. A small group also poses some challenges, though; in particular, you all have to be pretty well on your game, because there's no room to hide. (Translation: if you don't do the reading, I'll definitely know.) Keeping me posted on problems that come up should help the class go smoothly; because we're a small group, we can be extra nimble and reassess as needed.

You may have noticed that I'm not regular Emory faculty. I'm a postdoctoral fellow at the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry, that charming house on North Decatur Road, across from Glenn Memorial. I've been here all year doing research, but this is the first and very likely last course I'll teach at Emory. Previously I was a fellow in the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley, where I also did my Ph.D. Although this is a temporary appointment, I take teaching at Emory very seriously; I'm still in touch with many of my former students, and hope I'll stay in touch with you too.

At Berkeley I taught a number of courses in poetry and fiction, mostly American lit, but some British and French too. My most recent course was a delightful upper-level undergraduate seminar in American poetry called "Didactic Modernism." I miss Berkeley students, but I hear Emory students are pretty great too. You can read some of my thoughts on teaching here.

Are you wondering whether you need to fear me? You don't. I'm not an "easy" teacher; I have high expectations for you. But I also want to help you meet those expectations.

There are a few things I expect you to have nailed down on your own, of course—basic grown-up stuff like doing the reading, showing up to class, and keeping track of the course schedule. If you have a high school diploma (and you do), then that stuff should be no big deal. We will be doing some genuinely challenging work, however, and I expect to need to walk you through a few things. Because I'm old and decrepit (compared to you), I sometimes forget which concepts and readings are hard. If I seem to have forgotten, do me a favor and remind me.

While you'll meet me in my capacity as a teacher, it's important for you to know that I'm also—indeed, primarily—a researcher. Although it may not be obvious in class, my research is an important part of my teaching; it lets me design courses that have never been taught before, and integrate the most recent and interesting scholarship into your education. I don't just want to dump facts or concepts into your head; I want to draw you into the process of making knowledge—i.e. research—that I find so exciting. I want you to come out of this course knowing some new things, but just as importantly, I want you to come out equipped to find out things that no one else yet knows or has been able to describe.

I think this course is going to be a lot of fun. Do you have questions? Lay them on me; I'm at ncecire@emory.edu. I'd be happy to hear from you.

See you Wednesday!

In defense of transforming DH

2012-01-08T18:06:00.005-05:00

This is a reply to my Emory colleague and THATCamp Theory collaborator Roger Whitson's post "Does DH really need to be transformed? My Reflections on #mla12." Roger's post registers some thoughtful reservations about the aims and rhetoric of the #transformDH group, to which I'm sympathetic. I detect in the oppositional rhetoric of #transformDH, however, a history that makes me appreciate the kind of transformation for which they are calling. I hope that by briefly discussing that history, I will be able to elucidate what it is that I appreciate about #transformDH's efforts and, yes, their rhetoric too.

Roger writes,

Do we really need guerrilla movements? Are war metaphors, or concepts of overturning and redefining, truly the right kind of metaphors to use when talking about change in the digital humanities? It seems to me that the word “guerilla” reappropriates the collaborative good will of the digital humanities, making it safe for traditional academic consumption and inserting it into the scheme Stanley Fish and William Pannapacker highlight. Yeah, we see the cool kids at the theory table, but we want to be the cool kids, so we’re going to fight them until we can be the cool kids. But if my experience with the MLA is any indication, the digital humanities doesn’t need to be changed. I can already see it changing the atmosphere of the MLA, making it easier for people to connect with each other, enjoy their time together, and conceptualize new and exciting work. It’s not perfect – as the job crisis still lingers, humanities programs are still threatened with cuts, and too many adjunct teachers suffer from job insecurity, a lack of benefits, and too much work for too little pay. But, the MLA I saw this year gave me hope that more people were interested in working together to deal with these issues in a productive way – rather than worry what table they were sitting at.

This is an instance in which vocabularies collide.

The valuation of the guerilla, the oppositional, the maroon, and the fugitive that characterizes #transformDH is, as I see it, clearly indebted to the legacies of queer theory and critical race studies (I'll focus on the former for now). Bill Germano, in his recent retrospective of Duke UP's Series Q, usefully quotes the introduction to the landmark Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader (1993): "Like women's studies, lesbian/gay studies has an oppositional design." Michael Warner's piece on Series Q similarly notes the insistence on self-difference that has characterized queer studies, observing that in 1990, the very term "queer" was "manifestly provocative."

This language, then, has a history that draws not only on the sometimes aggressive affects of the much-deprecated Theory but also the activist dimensions of the little-t theories (gender, queer, critical race, disability) that have emerged from it, and which have been associated with personal and professional risk and often literal bodily harm.

It's true: this is not a language that comports very well with the dominant rhetorics of digital humanities, which emphasize openness, collaboration, and inclusiveness—which are, in short, liberal. But as I understand it, that's really the point of #transformDH. A liberal, inclusive, always-collaborative, never-oppositional digital humanities is a digital humanities that can afford to be above the fray, a digital humanities for which theory is, well, theoretical, mere yack, and not a tool for activism or indeed survival. Such a digital humanities can imagine that the stakes of cultural criticism are really as low as getting to sit with the cool kids at lunch in a high school; or rather, it does not acknowledge (despite the shocking mortality rate among queer adolescents) that not getting to sit with the cool kids is ever anything but a metaphor, that its stakes are ever other than trivial. And that is "the (raceless, sexless, genderless) technological" that the #transformDH ASA roundtable quite rightly set out to critique.

Despite the liberal rhetoric of digital humanities that currently circulates most widely—a rhetoric, I might add, that has the qualified virtue of making digital work seem congenial and unthreatening to corporate and government funders—I don't think digital work does necessarily think of itself as above the fray. "The Real Face of White Australia" is just one example of important digital projects that aim to actively transform perceptions in the social sphere. Lauren Klein's wonderful work on what social network analysis can tell us about otherwise invisible ghosts in the archive likewise engages in a powerful form of recovery.*

In that sense, I agree with Roger. Digital humanities doesn't need to stop doing the critical work it's already doing. But #transformDH suggests, to my mind rightly, that the jolt of the oppositional can be powerful, when it is rooted in a critical activism that builds on the little-t theories that have preceded and exist alongside it, rather than manifesting as nerdy beleagueredness.** Germano reflects that "[s]omeone once remarked to me that scholarly publishing in gay studies was a conflict between the nerdy and the naughty." This conflict seems to me to have re-emerged in #transformDH's invocation of oppositional rhetorics, in a way that I believe to be productive. Sometimes we need collaboration, and sometimes we need solidarity. And perhaps even such fine adjustments require some transformation in the way we understand our work.

-----

*The version of this work that Lauren presented at MLA this year explicitly engaged Alan Liu's MLA 2011 call for a renewed commitment to cultural criticism in digital humanities.

**"Nerdy beleagueredness" alludes to an argument I have made previously, that digital humanities occasionally appropriates the rhetorics of oppressed groups by self-identifying as "nerdy." I have never fully fleshed out my thoughts on nerdiness, but it is an ambivalent formation, to say the least. After all, as C. J. Pascoe has shown, it is a thin line between "nerd" and "fag." But this brings us again to the issue of lunch tables, which are not always metaphorical.

Germano, William. “The Q Factor.” The Chronicle of Higher Education 1 Jan. 2012. Web. 8 Jan. 2012.

Liu, Alan. “Where is Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities?” 7 Jan. 2011. Web. 8 Jan. 2012.

Pascoe, C. J. Dude, You’re a Fag : Masculinity and Sexuality in High School. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Print.

Warner, Michael. “Queer and Then?” The Chronicle of Higher Education 1 Jan. 2012. Web. 8 Jan. 2012.

2012-01-06T19:16:00.000-05:00

I can't believe it—I almost let an MLA go by without posting the annual link to that seasonal classic, "Margery Kempe at the Feeste of MLA."

Fixed.

2012-01-04T12:11:00.002-05:00

The days are wonderful and the nights are wonderful and the life is pleasant.

—Gertrude Stein, "Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia," 1913

Children dressed as animals dressed as children (or, The Meaning of Christmas)

2011-12-20T18:17:00.003-05:00

Cuteness, I have argued, often rests on a double mimesis. It's not that the child is dressed as an animal so much as that the child is dressed as an already anthropomorphized animal.

Lee Edelman's No Future famously repudiates the politics of "for the children," a politics that imagines a capital-C Child that "marks the fetishistic fixation of heteronormativity: an erotically charged investment in the rigid sameness of identity that is central to the compulsory narrative of reproductive futurism" (21). In what Heather Love has called Edelman's "star turn as Milton's Satan" (an absolutely right-on description), the unthinkable call to arms is absolute:

Fuck the social order and the Child in whose name we're collectively terrorized; fuck Annie; fuck the waif from Les Mis; fuck the poor, innocent kid on the Net; fuck Laws both with capital ls and with small; fuck the whole network of Symbolic relations and the future that serves as its prop. (29)

Against the Child and reproductive futurism, Edelman counterposes a sinthomosexual figure, which he describes first of all in the character of Charles Dickens's unrepentant Ebenezer Scrooge. The sinthomosexual is not quite gay, although he (usually he)* is certainly queer. Sinthomosexuality is not an identity but a function, the kernel of unreasoning negativity without which we have no Symbolic order. In A Christmas Carol, Christmas is a festival of reproductivity in the name of the Child, in which all children (innocent Victorian ones) are subsumed under the sign of the Christ-child.

[It will surprise no one that the processional for the King's College Advent service, the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols,** is always "Once in Royal David's City." The first verse is sung by a soprano choirboy (never a woman, of course!), and it is itself a Victorian children's hymn, first published in the 1848 Hymns for Little Children. The third verse is especially pointed in this regard:

And through all his wondrous childhood
He would honor and obey,
Love, and watch the lowly maiden
In whose gentle arms he lay.
Christian children all must be
Mild, obedient, good as he.

Theologically, the song is rather remarkable. But I digress.]

Scrooge's rejection of Christmas is merely a particularly recognizable subset of a broader rejection of reproductive futurism, and is for that reason depicted as monstrous. Who could hate Christmas? It's queer, unthinkable, and must be corrected—at least in the novel.

Thus, as Edelman writes, Scrooge is "converted to futurism through his life-changing vision of a futureless future," and thus "is granted the very gift of life he gives to Tiny Tim. But granted it only insofar as he gives that life to Tiny Tim, becoming a 'second father' to the boy by renouncing the intolerable narcissism that futurism projects onto those who will not mirror back its own Imaginary form" (50).

As early as 1993, Eve Sedgwick had already sketched out some of the consequences for queer theory of the ideology surrounding American Christmas, in which religion, capital, state, and "family" merge in a unison chorus of "'tis the season."***

What’s “queer?” Here’s one train of thought about it. The depressing thing about the Christmas season—isn’t it?—is that it’s the time when all the institutions are speaking with one voice. The Church says what the Church says. But the State says the same thing: maybe not (in some ways it hardly matters) in the language of theology, but in the language the State talks: legal holidays, long school hiatus, special postage stamps, and all. And the language of commerce more than chimes in, as consumer purchasing is organized ever more narrowly around the final weeks of the calendar year, the Dow Jones aquiver over Americans’ “holiday mood.” The media, in turn, fall in triumphally behind the Christmas phalanx: ad-swollen magazines have oozing turkeys on the cover, while for the news industry every question turns into the Christmas question—Will hostages be free for Christmas? What did that flash flood or mass murder (umpty-ump people killed and maimed) do to those families’ Christmas? And meanwhile, the pairing “families/Christmas” becomes increasingly tautological, as families more and more constitute themselves according to the schedule, and in the endlessly iterated image, of the holiday itself constituted in the image of ‘the’ family.

The thing hasn’t, finally, so much to do with propaganda for Christianity as with propaganda for Christmas itself. They all—religion, state, capital, ideology, domesticity, the discourses of power and legitimacy—line up with each other so neatly once a year, and the monolith so created is a thing one can come to view with unhappy eyes. What if instead there were a practice of valuing the ways in which meanings and institutions can be at loose ends with each other? What if the richest junctures weren’t the ones where everything means the same thing? (5-6)

Christmas is about capitalism—of course; everyone knows that, albeit usually in the context of bemoaning it. Sedgwick's insight is that Christmas's univocality allows each of these sites of power—capital, the state, "the" (heteronormative, reproductive) family, religion—to stand in as a metonym for all the rest. You buy Christmas presents because you love your family because the Christ-child loves you because you love the Child because the Child is the future of the nation, and round and round. Christmas has meaning, we are continually assured, and it is all the same meaning—the single, univocal meaning that the unmeaning sinthome both opposes and makes possible. If Christmas is about "meaning," then a purely negative Scrooge is the reason for the season.

What's missing from Edelman's account, of course, is any serious consideration of the actual child— not Annie or the waif from Les Mis or Tiny Tim, but the real children whose debt-burdened future is illogically invoked as a reason to cut public school funding, for instance.**** This is a perspective that Kathryn Bond Stockton takes up in The Queer Child (2009), and a place where the relation between children and animals returns.*****

Why are children so cute when dressed up as animals? I keep returning to this question. Here is Ralphie in A Christmas Story (1983), dressed as an animal as part of the same ritual of gift-giving that will eventually unite him with the toy gun he so desires.

Ralphie's abject, miserable cuteness is inseparable from the ritual of gift-giving; indeed, it assures that the queerly gender-bending aunt who sends him the bunny suit (she believes that he is "perpetually four years old [and] also a girl") is domesticated into "the" family. With Ralphie's appearance on the stairs, the aunt's failure to respect gender norms and her likely spinsterhood are recuperated by the forces of Family and Christmas present. Cuteness overcomes queerness, and must do so at any cost to the child's dignity, for example.

Of course, you know what's coming after all this queer theory is a YouTube clip of an Old Navy commercial.

This is one of those tiny artifacts that one comes across, that's so overdetermined it leaves one nearly speechless. My first reaction was really "CHILDREN DRESSED AS ANIMALS DRESSED AS CHILDREN. SCROOGES." And I can't say I've progressed much beyond that. The ad is for something you are supposed to buy for a child, presumably as a Christmas present: "critter hats," which deck the child in bits of an anthropomorphized animal. We are meant to buy them for Christmas in more than one sense: they make great presents, but they also convert "the holiday's Scroogiest Scrooges" with their cuteness. Scrooge here is not a literary reference, not a character, not a person. A "Scrooge" is a function—the sinthomosexual who poses a threat to Christmas and to the child, who must be converted in order for Christmas to be saved.

This ad, which scores a point for capitalism (buy our hats!) by mobilizing child/animal cuteness against queer Scrooginess, seems indeed to belong to a broader genre of the Christmas conversion of the sinthomosexual. There is the text it literally cites, of course—A Christmas Carol. But where does the double animal/child mimesis of cuteness come from?

Exhibit C: How the Grinch Stole Christmas. The Grinch is the quintessential sinthomosexual; indeed, the song from the cartoon special that describes just how repulsive the Grinch is has become something of a holiday standard.

The Grinch himself is not cute; he can't be, despite being a cartoon figure. Comical, sometimes, yes, but not cute.

He is, however, accompanied by a long-suffering cute companion, his dog, made cuter in his more intense suffering when the Grinch straps some antlers to his head—an instance of animals dressed as other animals, which amounts to animals dressed as children dressed as animals. Before we ever encounter Whoville, the cute dog is the yardstick against which we may measure just how dreadful the Christmas-hating Grinch is; each of the Grinch's schemes is met with more of the dog's cute suffering.

But in the end it is Cindy Lou Who, an antennaed child, whose cute innocence is revealed as what is at stake.

This animal-child is not the direct cause of the Grinch's change of heart (just as Tiny Tim does not directly cause Scrooge's conversion), but she is of course the beneficiary. In a final scene, a reformed Grinch in a Santa suit carves the roast beast and paternally hands a slice to the antennaed girl, who in turn hands it to the antlered dog. The outsider Grinch is now part of the family, a family of innocents and cute animal-children in whose interest he must now think, and in contrast with his earlier abuse of the dog.

This is one way that animals are part of "the meaning of Christmas": they mobilize that apotheosis of Child-hood, cuteness—four out of five Scrooges agree.

This post and the Connelly citation are very much indebted to my sister Maria Cecire's dissertation chapter on the medieval "Christmas challenge," its adaptation in twentieth-century children's literature, and the Victorian construction of Christmas as a children's holiday.

[Added 12/29:] Thanks to Aaron, Gerry, Adam Kotsko, Mark Wood, and blckdgrd for links.

*Edelman rather pulls back on the question of the female sinthomosexual, seeing it as a complication that might dilute the force of his argument. Disgruntled as I am to see femininity once again treated as the deviant exception to the rule instead of half of humanity and therefore central to the question of what the rule really is, I must concede that I am swayed by No Future's formal brilliance (Edelman 165-6n10).

**And also the Emory University Lessons and Carols.

***See also this post at A Map of the Country, from which I cut and pasted the same Eve Sedgwick quotation (thanks!). The post addresses the pitting of gay people against Christmas in a campaign ad by Rick Perry. While to the average viewer, "gays in the military" and "war on Christmas" seem like a complete non-sequitur, Sedgwick observes that the national ritual of Christmas demands, above all else, affective uniformity, in which we all go shopping, we all "get in the spirit," and we all spend time with the heteronormative (and, as the my generation's bitter joke has it, homophobic) families that we all have and are exhorted to value above all other relationships. Queerness itself is a serious challenge to those univocal silver bells.

****Generally speaking, the language of what children owe and are owed is exceedingly strange.

*****Despite thinking that The Queer Child is overall a terribly compelling and smart book, I'm almost entirely unpersuaded by Stockton's account of "the interval of animal." The argument hinges on the fact that metaphor always includes a moment's delay, and that, I think, is too broad a phenomenon (not to mention difficult to document except by appeals to intuition) to account for the specific associations we see between animals and children.

Connelly, Mark. Christmas: A Social History. London: I.B. Tauris, 1999. Print.

Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2004. Print.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. "Queer and Now." Tendencies. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1993. Print.

Stockton, Kathryn Bond. The Queer Child: Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2009. Print.

Why not to use Google+:

2011-12-12T12:25:00.002-05:00

It is Facebook.

2011-12-11T06:31:00.000-05:00

Shorn of speech, incapable of standing upright, hesitating over the objects of its interest, not able to calculate its advantages, not sensitive to common reason, the child is eminently the human because its distress heralds and promises things possible. Its initial delay in humanity, which makes it the hostage of the adult community, is also what manifests to this community the lack of humanity it is suffering from, and which calls on it to become more human. (3-4)
—Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman (trans. Bennington and Bowlby)

2011-12-10T13:52:00.001-05:00

Joe Díaz, an Emory philosophy grad student, was arrested outside the Woodruff Library the other night. Read his account.

2011-12-10T12:04:00.001-05:00

Of all the Ryan Gosling Tumblrs (shout-out to medieval history), Feminist Ryan Gosling is still the funniest and best.

2011-12-09T19:23:00.000-05:00

My article "Marianne Moore's Precision" is in the new issue of Arizona Quarterly.

2011-11-25T16:04:00.001-05:00

“It was important for the organization to be aware of the comments their students were making.” Jones-Sontag says. “It’s also important for students to recognize the power of social media, how lasting it is. It is on the Internet.”

N.b. the reasoning advanced by the KS governor's office—"it's important to be aware of the potential adverse consequences of doing things on the internet, so we will personally rain those consequences upon you in full"—is exactly the same reasoning advanced by trolls.

Via Anne Boyer.

On bibliography-dumping

2011-11-25T10:12:00.002-05:00

A widespread form of feedback to a junior colleague is what I hereby name "bibliography-dumping."

This is the practice of naming books and articles that you think a junior colleague ought to read, usually in response to hearing about that junior colleague's work. (This occasionally happens with a peer, but it's much more common with a junior colleague or a student.) Sometimes we recommend just one or two books, but all too often it's several. It's an incredibly common practice, and for a long time I've thought nothing of it (an occasionally engaged in it), because I think it's generally well meant.

I've been on the receiving end of many a bibliography dump in the past, of course, especially in grad school. But it's only recently, as a witness to (and occasional inflicter of) bibliography-dumping, that I've started to see it as problematic. It's taken me a little time to figure out why the bibliography-dump isn't necessarily the helpful gesture it's meant to be, but after some pondering, I believe I've detected a reason or two.

When I bibliography-dump, I might think I am saying: "Hey, I am interested in your work; it reminds me of a bunch of things I read! Let me name some! Enthusiasm!"

But the student in question hears: "I, your senior colleague, very strongly suggest that you read ten books only tangentially related to your actual project."

We're nerds; we relate to one another by talking about books. And it's usually in the spirit of bonding that we start naming books that a colleague's work reminded us of. So we're having a good time free-associating about media theory (or whatever) and at the same time patting ourselves on the backs for being so helpful, while our students frantically scribble down the titles we're spouting off.

But let's be real: most of the time, we're not helping. The truth is that it doesn't take that much work to suggest books; suggesting books is basically an associative process. It doesn't require deep engagement in the way that a truly good question does. So when we start naming books, it may be well meant, but it's actually a little insulting if we're doing it in lieu of taking our colleague's argument head on.

Of course, it is helpful to name relevant books. But the operative word there is "relevant." But do I, having just sat through my junior colleague's formal or informal presentation, have a good enough sense of the project to know what's relevant? Related is not the same thing as relevant. It's easy to find books that are related. It's hard to find books that are relevant. And nobody needs help doing their very basic, first-pass, the-keyword-is-in-the-title research. If I think I understand the project well enough to name resources that are relevant, then I should understand it well enough to ask an actual question. So, y'know, I could try that.

I can think of two situations in which the bibliography-dump is actually useful.

1. The person giving the presentation is actively looking for resources on [X]. Sometimes, despite diligence and all our catalogue-fu, it can take a lucky break to strike the article or bibliography that will let you into the world you're looking for. Usually such a need will be made apparent through the use of sentences like "I am looking for resources on [X]." By the way, if there is any feminist scholarship on the creepy oeuvre of Anne Geddes, I wish to enter that dark underworld, so tip me off.

2. You need to save the presenter from ignorance of a resource so foundational that your failure to mention it would be scandalously irresponsible. For instance: someone writing about feminist approaches to objectivity who has never heard of Sandra Harding.

If either of these two situations presents itself, we should go for it. Otherwise, by bibliography-dumping, we are only contributing to student angst and scope creep, while failing to really interrogate the project at hand.

2011-11-15T16:31:00.002-05:00

Martha Goodwin was single, and well along into the thin years. She lived with her married sister in Whilomville. She performed nearly all the house-work in exchange for the privilege of existence. Every one tacitly recognized her labor as a form of penance for the early end of her betrothed, who had died of small-pox, which he had not caught from her. (432)

—Stephen Crane, The Monster

2011-11-14T13:20:00.000-05:00

From a land toward which their faces were bent came a continuous boom of artillery fire. It was sounding in regular measures like the beating of a colossal clock—a clock that was counting the seconds in the lives of the stars, and men had time to die between the ticks. Solemn, oracular, inexorable, the great seconds tolled over the hills as if God fronted this dial rimmed by the horizon. (945)

—Stephen Crane, "Death and the Child" (1897), in Prose and Poetry, ed. J. C. Levenson (New York: Library of America, 1984)

2011-11-11T22:15:00.001-05:00

Nobody has occupied Emory. These days I see protests at Cal on YouTube instead of out my office window, or in front of my face.

I recommend:

Aaron Bady, "The Grass Is Closed"
Rei Terada,"'Not Non-Violent Civil Disobedience'"
Rei Terada, "Another Reality" (Remarks at UC Irvine protest, 11/09/2011)
Colbert

From Aaron's post, a video taken on 11/9:

The first woman pulled by the hair by police is Celeste Langan.

UPDATE: Celeste has written rather wonderfully about her arrest here:

Students are so concerned about their economic futures that they sometimes feel constrained in their choice of courses and majors, too anxious about acquiring the proper credentials for employment to explore areas of intellectual inquiry that might interest them but don't appear to have an instrumental value. When I was teaching Walden last month, I couldn't help but notice how incisively Thoreau diagnoses the effect of "insolvency" on the capacity to think and live freely; the time people spend reading and thinking, he suggests, is increasingly regarded as time "stolen" and "borrowed" from wage-earning.

I note the same narrowly pragmatic thinking in the haste with which the police acted and Chancellor Birgeneau's justification for his decision to authorize the police action: "We simply cannot afford to spend our precious resources and, in particular, student tuition, on costly and avoidable expenses associated with violence or vandalism." No one wishes to "waste" resources in this climate. Yet if one follows this logic one can see the looming threat: lawful assembly, peaceful dissent, and free inquiry—even so-called “breadth requirements”--can all entail some cost. They interfere with “getting and spending.”

2011-11-11T10:23:00.003-05:00

Such blogging fail. I am now just posting Twitter conversations wholesale. But hey, Storify's interface is a lot better than it used to be!

The conversation below is based on Patrick Murray-John's post "Theory, DH, and Noticing," which enlarges on ideas in this comment.

2011-11-04T12:08:00.000-04:00

I really want to engage in the smart conversations that are going on here and elsewhere, and in particular I owe Jean Bauer a comment, not to mention responses to comments on previous posts here. But OMG, I need to work on my book! Hoping to get to everything this weekend.

American nerds go to THATCamp

2011-11-03T13:21:00.001-04:00

[TL;DR: Ed Finn is smart; nerdiness warrants contamination by the real; here's a Google Doc for THATCamp Theory.]

* * *

Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending (Arcade blogger!) Ed Finn's very smart talk, "American Networks, American Nerds" at the new Emory Library Digital Scholarship Commons (DiSC). In the talk, Ed described the networks among different books in Amazon's recommendation algorithm and reader reviews, as well as in professional reviews.

Emory DiSC gives these out at talks. Yes, they really do.
Image shamelessly stolen from Miriam Posner's Twitter feed.

(It's worth noting that here "books" mainly meant novels, but really were, in the end, books, in the sense of physical widgets that Amazon ships to you, or teleports or whatever to your Kindle. The analysis that Ed did on David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest and Junot Díaz's Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao could not have been done with, say, Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art.")

Ed argued (in part) that these networks substantiated each author's claims to a form of "nerdiness" that manifests as specialized knowledge, and in particular a specialized lexicon and set of cultural references. In Wallace's case, nerdiness manifested in a "difficult" style that led readers and Amazon to continually refer readers of Wallace to more Wallace, who supplied a stylistic "crack that readers couldn't get anywhere else." (I'm paraphrasing, but I'm pretty sure the word "crack" came up.) For Díaz, nerdiness manifested in the persistence of network associations with names like "Tolkien" and "The Fantastic Four."

Ed also noted, however, the prominence of the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo in Díaz's networks, in what Díaz calls a "contamination" of the nerdy by the real (and vice versa). Ed quoted Díaz as remarking that (I paraphrase), as much as the real resists nerdiness, nerdiness also strenuously resists contamination by the real. In Oscar Wao, however, Díaz disallows any boundary between nerd and "real" worlds. Even nerds have to live in reality, and reality likewise contains Tolkien fans.

Provocatively, Ed suggested that the "nerdiness" of Wallace and Díaz might have something to teach us about the nerdiness of digital humanities. Indeed, through his "middle ground" approach (as opposed to "close" or "distant" reading),Ed seemed in retrospect to have effected a rapprochement between the nerdy (network visualizations) and the real (the social practices of reading and writing).

The term "nerdy," of course, was ripe for questioning. As Ed had remarked in passing (and doubtless explores more deeply elsewhere), Wallace's and Díaz's respective nerdy networks were overwhelmingly male. And there's a way in which DH's identification with "nerdiness" taps very much into the version of nerd identity—seen also, if differently, in both Wallace and Díaz's nerdinesses—that manifests as wounded (and defensive) masculinity. I argued in a previous post that the defensive posture at times characterizes discussions of DH, which occasionally even seems to borrow the language of struggle and resistance traditionally used by queer activists, activists of color, disability rights activists, feminists, etc., even while, in many institutional settings, magically turning out to be disproportionately white and male.

In thinking about Wallace and Díaz's literary networks in the frame of "nerdiness," I couldn't help thinking about Kathleen Fitzpatrick's argument in The Anxiety of Obsolescence* that moral panic over the alleged decline of the novel in the face of television is in effect a "melodrama of beset (white) manhood," fueled by a sense of embattlement on the part of a "nerdy" class of white male authors whose cultural capital is diminishing, less due to television specifically than to the increased status of mass culture, as figured by women and people of color.

Ed's comparison between the nerdinesses of Wallace and Díaz and that of DH, then, raises the specter of (as Roger Whitson bluntly but accurately tweeted my phrasing of it during the Q & A) nerdiness as a place for white men to feel embattled. One of the key points that Bethany Nowviskie brings up in "What do Girls Dig?" is that the tropes and memes by which we describe DH bring connotations with them that can be unintentionally exclusionary or otherwise problematic. And it's not that we need to jettison them, necessarily; lots of people can get on board with the term "nerd."*** We just need to know that "nerd" also names a history. If we're going to be nerdy, let's make it a nerdy that's contaminated by the real.

* * *

I'm long overdue in responding to some smart and provocative posts that responded or linked to my THATCamp Theory post: Roger Whitson's "Hacking THATCamp Theory," Amanda Phillips's "#transformDH - A Call to Action Following ASA 2011", Ted Underwood's On transitive and intransitive uses of the word 'theorize,' and Ben Schmidt's "Theory First."

All of these posts warrant careful reading on their own, and in truth it would not be possible for me to engage all the issues they bring up this afternoon. But one concern continues to resurface in all of these posts, as well as in the Twitter conversation around my initial post, namely that theory, too, can be a site of power, one that has played all too well with the academic star system in the past, leaving people who now greatly benefit from DH (junior academics, people at teaching-oriented institutions, geographically peripheral institutions) in the cold. (As Ted put it, with that excellent Twitter bluntness, "capital-T Theory = power.") Now, the time when big-T Theory actually had power was my juice box days, so my appreciation of this fear of theory's power is purely conceptual. I started graduate school in the post-Theory, pre-DH era,**** when you couldn't swing a cat without hitting some senior scholar exhorting The Young to save the humanities with The Next Big Thing (and assume all the risks, of course).

Well, The Young (not me, but people like Ben and Amanda and Aditi Muralidharan) went and did it; they made the Next Big Thing, and a lot of the senior scholars who were already working in pre-mainstream DH frequently even had their backs while they did it, which is more than can be said of an earlier era, perhaps.

But the same critique that was once leveled at Theory (which should not be conflated with lower-case theory, and which has not always been entirely congenial to some of the very productive fields that built on it, e.g. critical race theory, queer theory, postcolonial theory, feminist theory, disability theory) has been, and is frequently, leveled at DH. Quantitative methods have long claimed a special epistemological priority—one of big-T Theory's great virtues was and remains its ability to interrogate the grounds of that priority—and they seem, now more than ever, to dominate a public sense of the real, as much on the moderate (i.e. liberal) left as on the corporate right.***** Only a radical faith in the reality of the quantitative could allow entirely fictive financial structures (their mathematical validity is the only real thing about them) to determine so much policy. Micha Cárdenas's observation of the parallels between the Last Big Thing and the Next Big Thing is right on point in this regard. The question is not who is more oppressed (a false question) but rather how, as all of the above-cited suggest, hack and yack can, like Captain Planet, combine powers for awesome. As Ben writes,

The digital humanities is perfectly poised at the moment to optimistically and beautifully affirm the world through all of history as it is now, full of progress and decentralized self-organizing networks and rational actors making free choices; or it might also try to take up what Adorno called the only responsible philosophy: to reveal the cracks and fissures of the world in all its contradictions with otherwordly light. That's the demand placed on DH by theory, and it needs to come first: all else is mere technique.

We've created quite a lot of yack on this topic, and I think that's a good thing. But it's increasingly obvious to me and many others that it's well past time to bring the hack. Today I registered the THATCamp Theory name on the central THATCamp site and set up thatcamptheory at gmail dot com and @THATCampTheory. I also made a Google Doc for those who want in on the planning (o please). Obviously I'm not "in charge" here (contra Ben I didn't "start" anything!—see the post by Alexis Lothian that started me starting). I'm just another ridiculous postdoc with a blog, so I hope to see THATCamp Theory build substantively on all the rich discussions that have been happening lately (and special shout-out to Patrick Murray-John's useful suggestions).

So come on in, nerds. Let's do it.

*Yes, the whole damn book is online. That's some classic KFitz awesomeness right there. (And you can also buy it.) Also? KFitz: writing about DH, even when she isn't.

**There are actually several registers of nerdiness at work here. There are the grammar fanatics and comic book enthusiasts on which Wallace and Díaz respectively draw—a lived and then represented nerdiness. There's the nerdiness represented by the genre of postmodern fiction to which Wallace and Díaz both belong, the register that Kathleen addresses in Anxiety. There's the nerdiness of the literary networks within which Infinite Jest and Brief Wondrous Life respectively live. And finally, there's the nerdiness of visualizing and analyzing those networks, the nerdiness of the digital humanist.

***Ed observed in his response to me that there's been a recent mainstreaming of nerdiness, especially of the "obsessive fan" variety (I know for sure I read an article by a nerd bemoaning the way the internet and Peter Jackson had lowered the bar for entering nerddom—William Gibson tweeted the link—but of course I can't for the life of me remember who wrote it now). This is indisputably true. But as far as I can tell, such mainstreaming has not appreciably led to the defusion of melodramas of beset manhood. Everyone remembers this, right? Also this?

****Apologies to Charles W. Chesnutt.

*****See, e.g.: Nate Silver; Freakonomics; the Harper's Index; the so-called "bikini graph." If I ever write Puerility (good Lord willin', creek don't rise, etc.) I will ideally have something more complete to say about this.

2011-10-31T13:16:00.001-04:00

What's so eerie about Stephen Crane's Black Riders (1894) is that it's full of love poems, and they're seriously cheesy.

Most of the book is stark, ironic, cosmic, and to some degree these elements enter into the love poems. But whereas the other poems are full of twists and turns that are witty in the same measure that they are cruel, in the context of the love poems the same twists and cruelties seem bathetic. And whereas the book's formalized, ritualistic language usually renders the poems mysterious and darkly comic, in the love poems it's embarrassing.

In poem 31, for instance, a group of workers builds something large out of stone. While they're admiring their handiwork, the edifice falls down and squishes them. And that's the end of the poem. It's like ra-ee-ain on your wedding day, and it's kind of funny.

But what to do with something like poem 40?

AND YOU LOVE ME

I LOVE YOU

YOU ARE, THEN, COLD COWARD.

AYE; BUT, BELOVED,
WHEN I STRIVE TO COME TO YOU,
MAN'S OPINIONS, A THOUSAND THICKETS,
MY INTERWOVEN EXISTENCE,
MY LIFE,
CAUGHT IN THE STUBBLE OF THE WORLD
LIKE A TENDER VEIL,—
THIS STAYS ME.
NO STRANGE MOVE CAN I MAKE
WITHOUT NOISE OF TEARING.
I DARE NOT.

IF LOVE LOVES
THERE IS NO WORLD
NOR WORD.
ALL IS LOST
SAVE THOUGHT OF LOVE
AND PLACE TO DREAM.
YOU LOVE ME?

I LOVE YOU.

YOU ARE, THEN, COLD COWARD.

AYE; BUT, BELOVED—

That repetition, that breaking off—that's classic Crane. But the repeated demands for love and on love's behalf are, weirdly, classic Crane too, and they're difficult to square with the acceptance, elsewhere, of cosmic ironies in which love and sentiment are entirely—often comically—beside the point. (Think of the woman who weeps for a drowned lover in poem 38—her grief mirrored by that of the king of the seas, who is seriously sick of having corpses rained upon him. Both would stop the deaths if they could.)

Even a poem like the one above has its moments. I'm struck by "the noise of tearing," for example. The second speaker (the coward) speaks into being a metaphorical veil that comes to have such material presence that it may tear, producing a noise, and it's the noise of tearing that the coward must avoid.

But aren't such subtleties rather steamrollered by "YOU LOVE ME?"

It's not sentimentalism exactly, but something like it continually punctures Black Riders. What a curious book.

Cyclorama

2011-10-25T15:55:00.000-04:00

I've been wanting to do some Atlanta blogging lately, but I never seem to have time. This morning Bart and Colleen and I went to the Atlanta Cyclorama, which was as awesome as you might expect (i.e. super awesome). The painting itself is of course cheesy, and the voiceover that they do for the tour does a little of that Confederate nostalgia thing, but they didn't lay it on as thick as I expected they would (I grew up in Virginia, so). The Clark-Gable-as-dead-Union-soldier figurine in the front? Amazing. I was surprised to learn that all the tchotchkes at the base of the painting were added in the 1930s, since such effects are sort of classically 1890s. But the painting was on tour in the 1890s, so I guess that makes sense. And it's a reminder of the unevenness of the way we periodize media—Frederick A. Lucas talks a lot about cycloramas in his 1920s pamphlet on the AMNH dioramas, for example. It was also, shall we say, sociologically interesting to observe the people who were on this cyclorama tour.

Sooner or later I want to write up something about the High Museum, which currently has some cool stuff on loan from MoMA, but I guess that isn't going to be today.

I may as well throw out the obligatory Americanist point, though: the High Museum has a building called the Wieland Pavilion. Seriously!

In case of fire, people, stop, drop, and roll.

When DH Was in Vogue; or, THATCamp Theory

2011-10-19T11:18:00.004-04:00

"More hack, less yack," they say. I understand the impulse, and to some degree admire the rough-and-tumble attitude of those in digital humanities whose first priority is Gettin' Shit Done. Hell, I like Gettin' Shit Done.

But as I've mentioned before, I cannot agree with the distinction between theory* and practice that this sets up, nor the zero-sum logic that it implies (i.e. in order to do more you must speak less).

I've long found the complete domination of THATCamp Bootcamps by technical skills from the CS side curious to the point of illogical. (It turns out that this post is an elaboration of my THATCamp SF post of about a year ago.)

We seem to have a tendency to think that the "humanities" part of DH is stable, that we sort of already have it squared away, while the tech skills are what we need to gain.

But the whole reason DH is theoretically consequential is that the use of technical methods and tools should be making us rethink the humanities.

In The Big Sea, Langston Hughes retrospectively snarks on those at the center of the Harlem Renaissance who "thought the race problem had at last been solved through Art plus Gladys Bentley" (228). In the same way, "when DH was in vogue," there's a temptation to believe that the academia problem has at last been solved through the New Criticism plus TEI.

It's the "plus" that makes Hughes's comment so snarky: he puts his finger on the merely paratactic, additive concatenation that we're tempted to make of what can and should be a much more paradigmatic change. In other words, we do not have the humanities part squared away. Nor, for that matter, can the digital be imported wholesale.

Gladys Bentley

And so I think it's time we insisted a little more strongly on theorizing all that hacking. There are some theoretical keywords for DH that get used in woefully unrigorous ways—keywords like "archive"; "labor"; "biopower"; "embodiment"; "disability" and "access"; "map"; "narrative"; "identity"; "author." You show up at a THATCamp and suddenly folks are talking about separating content and form as if that were, like, a real thing you could do. It makes the head spin.

I don't mean to caricature, much less insult, DH scholarship. We all know of many DH scholars who do theoretically and historically rigorous work, and I think most DH scholars try to be fairly intentional, if not necessarily "theoretical," about their processes. And to be clear, I, too, routinely use Drupal content types with a field labeled "author." Sometimes you have to make a black box in order to build something bigger and more complicated on top of it; in fact, much of web programming now operates on that very principle ("modularity").

But—perhaps largely due to the recency of the field's entry into the mainstream—much of DH is still characterized by that "plus." Although it would be fair to object that there is undertheorized work in all fields, not just DH, I think the "more hack less yack" culture makes this tendency more widespread and more acceptable in DH than elsewhere; indeed, I occasionally get the sense that some see DH as a refuge from theory. The whole notion of "best practices," pervasive in tech and industry, lives uneasily with theoretical critique. And the pedagogical emphasis on quick entry into the field—and the incredible success with which THATCamps, DHSI, and other initiatives have brought huge numbers of humanities scholars meaningfully into the orbit of DH—is admirable, but comes with some costs that would bear mitigating.

I'm writing this post in part because, after a long conversation with my sister (Maria Cecire) about her first THATCamp experience, these issues have been on my mind. (I'll leave it to Maria to add her own comments, if she chooses.) And then, yesterday morning, I read Alexis Lothian's smart post on the LA Queer Theory conference and her upcoming ASA roundtable, which issued some timely challenges to the way we've been allowing DH to develop.

I was particularly struck by part of the ASA roundtable description, which, without accusing anyone of bad faith (and I agree; I don't think there is any), asks why the digital suddenly seems so congenial to the humanities just when ethnic studies departments and on-campus women's centers are getting axed (not to mention philosophy departments). The questions that roundtable poses get at what we stand to lose when we fail to theorize practice, or when we leave our theorizing implicit.

In an era of widespread budget cuts at universities across the United States, scholars in the digital humanities are gaining recognition in the institution through significant grants, awards, new departments and cluster hires. At the same time, ethnic studies departments are losing ground, facing deep cuts and even disbandment. Though the apparent rise of one and retrenchment of the other may be the result of anti-affirmative action, post-racial, and neoliberal rhetoric of recent decades and not related to any effect of one field on the other, digital humanities discussions do often elide the difficult and complex work of talking about racial, gendered, and economic materialities, which are at the forefront of ethnic and gender studies. Suddenly, the (raceless, sexless, genderless) technological seems the only aspect of the humanities that has a viable future.**

It is not so much that DH is gaining at the expense of these programs (there's no direct correlation) as that something is making it easier to fund DH just as it's getting harder to fund ethnic studies and queer studies. And so far, despite the best of intentions, DH has not done a good job of theorizing either that disciplinary shift or its political implications—let alone "what is an author." That's why I think we should probably get over that aversion to "yack." It doesn't have to replace "hack"; the two are not antithetical.

So now, a few questions.

First, what are the key theoretical ideas that DHers need to think about? I've proposed words like "narrative," "biopower," and "author." "Medium" seems like another obvious one. But I'm sure others would argue that different concepts lie at the heart of DH—or that, in fact, we need to be considering the non-obvious theoretical concepts.

And second, what might a THATCamp Theory look like? (Besides the obligatory black turtlenecks, obviously.) I've often thought we needed humanities-based bootcamps on (e.g.) narrative, time, and surveillance. But I could also imagine sessions that look at different mapping projects in light of critical theories of space, or or that consider the interstitiality of iPhone apps and Twitter in light of queer and feminist theorizations of time.

"Cecire," you might be thinking, "that sounds a hell of a lot like media studies, not DH." Fair. But perhaps that division itself is overdue for some repositioning. Perhaps a THATCamp Theory would take some of the theoretical questions posed by Alexis Lothian and her co-panelists, and lead to digital projects (the "building" that we are so fond of placing at the center of DH) shaped by those considerations. And as Maria observed to me backchannel, "this need not be for theory wonks only, but for anyone who can step back and get meta (which *should* be all of us - regardless of training)."

Over the last several months, I've found myself returning to the Harlem Renaissance as a metaphor for DH. In part it's because DH seems to have the same sorts of identity crises that the Harlem Renaissance did. "What is DH?" is the question we still constantly ask ourselves—not in the "I know it when I see it" way that we ask "what is modernism?" but sincerely.

Similar to the Harlem Renaissance, too, is the compulsive self-listing, self-mapping, self-visualizing, and general boosterism of (e.g.) totting up the number of DH panels at this year's MSA, MLA, ASA, AHA, etc., comparing this year's number of DH panels to last year's, comparing the MLA to the AHA, und so weiter. It reminds me of Alain Locke's lists of black writers—look how many we have! Have we not arrived?

And apart from Hughes and a few others, we see in the Harlem Renaissance a good deal of the target of Hughes's satire, Art plus Gladys Bentley—painfully derivative capital-A Art, glued to some of that Harlem vogue.

The comparison breaks down, of course. DH is not historically or substantively similar to the Harlem Renaissance, and in particular lacks the moral and political force of the Harlem Renaissance's sometimes misguided but deeply consequential efforts. But the way that the comparison breaks down is perhaps as important as the ways in which it holds. For one thing, it makes it all the more surprising when "the (raceless, sexless, genderless) technological" is rather unselfconsciously represented as somehow beleaguered in just the same way that women, the working class, and minorities have been.***

To note the internal tensions that the Harlem Renaissance and DH share is to raise the question: why does DH as a disciplinary formation—incongruously—seem to have so many tics in common with the Harlem Renaissance? What is the moral and political force of DH—what are its cultural and institutional consequences? Are we content to suppose that it has no such force, or ought we not inquire?

Langston Hughes is right. Art plus Gladys Bentley is not going to get us where we're going, and the problem isn't Art, and it isn't (the queer black woman artist) Gladys Bentley; it's the plus.

It's time for THATCamp Theory.

UPDATE. There's nothing having a post retweeted to remind you that most conversation on the web does not happen via blog comments. Here are a number of related links:

Via Miriam Posner, Boone Gorges's G+ post "Dude ranchin' at THATCamp"

Matt Gold reminds us that his forthcoming edited collection Debates in the Digital Humanities takes up some of these concerns.

Jentery Sayers observes that THATCamp PNW (Social Justice) also seeks to address these issues. "Regarding DH convo about theory: #THATCamp PNW (Social Justice) will have 4 workshops blending cultural crit & tech practice. Details soon."

@THATCamp also points out the Theorizing the Web conference.

* * *

Hughes, Langston. The Big Sea. Introd. Arnold Rampersad. 1940; New York: Hill and Wang, 1993. Print.

Title: Hughes's "Art plus Gladys Bentley" line comes from a chapter in The Big Sea titled "When the Negro Was in Vogue." David Levering Lewis adapted the title for his 1989 history of the Harlem Renaissance, When Harlem Was in Vogue.

*I'm going to use the word "theory" a lot in this post. I mean it as a catch-all term for thinking through the philosophical and cultural consequences of things, rather than the 1980s theory wars caricature known as capital-T "Theory." I love me some Derrida, but that's not really the point.

**I, too, would rather be a cyborg than a goddess, but I can't help noticing from time to time that I am, in fact, a woman.

***The resonances here with what Tim Yu has called "the ethnicization of the avant-garde" are notable.

Thanks to Maria for a productive conversation on these subjects the other night. Thanks to Aaron for comments on an earlier draft of this post.

Best of

2011-10-12T07:10:00.000-04:00

I finally bothered to put together a "Best of Works Cited" page. "Best" might be a misnomer, but there it is.

Kind of blue

2011-10-11T06:05:00.000-04:00

I'm not at all a food blogger, for a number of reasons. Primarily, I cannot follow a recipe to save my life. Halfway through I always decide a recipe is really more like a guideline or a suggestion. As I've mentioned before, if I ever had a food blog it would have to be called "Whatever; It's Probably Fine."

But mostly, I'm just not very interested in writing about food. I prefer to eat it.

That said, there is something beguiling about the vast assortment of grains available at Your DeKalb Farmer's Market, the enormous and bizarre food purveyor in Decatur that is filling in the gap in my life where the Berkeley Bowl used to be. And it's autumn, so, in short, I've made some cookies.

Let's call them "Kind of blue" cookies, or "I am easily distracted by grains" for short. This makes a small batch, because, in addition to being easily distracted by grains, I live alone and never need a zillion cookies at a time. I imagine the recipe could be scaled up, although I haven't bothered to try.

Ingredients:

1/4 c softened unsalted butter (or salted; who cares?)
1/2 c white sugar
1 large egg

1/4 c each: coarse semolina; white flour
1/3 c blue cornmeal (or a little more)
1/4 tsp baking powder (I say this as if I measured it, but obviously I didn't; just dump a little in)
sea salt: use your judgment

If you care about form, use Standard Cookie Procedure: cream the sugar into the butter, add the egg, combine the dry ingredients in a separate bowl, then put the dry ingredients into the wet and stir until just combined. I think the butter/sugar step is the only one that really needs to be kept separate.

This does not call for a Kitchen-Aid.

Drop the dough onto parchment paper (trust me, I speak from bitter experience) with a spoon (use your judgment) and bake at 400F (or whatever) until they're, you know, done.

If you should happen to forget the salt and wind up sprinkling it on top of the cookies while they're in the oven, not that I have done this or anything, the results are, I think, intriguing in a good way.

Nobody cares if they're uneven. They're made of sugar, for God's sake.

N.b. there is no vanilla extract in this recipe. If you are one of those people who dumps vanilla in everything willy-nilly, well, go for it. I, however, am a believer in the flavor of flour and butter, and prefer to protect its purity. Long-time acquaintences will recognize in this philosophy the origins of the Scone Principle as well.

MSA 13

2011-10-10T06:54:00.001-04:00

It seems that the era of liveblogging is over, at least for me. In fact I barely tweeted, thanks to my janky phone. But I had a blast at MSA, as usual; I particularly enjoyed a talk by Karen Leick on Gertrude Stein's reception in the 1960s (the whole panel was great, in fact) and Benjy Kahan's provocative talk on climate and temporary homosexuality.

I felt that my own panel, "Against Innovation," went very well, despite a minor a/v fail; Stephen Ross and Joel Burges gave rich and interesting talks—Stephen's a metacritical meditation on haunting in modernist studies in several registers, and Joel's a clever look at the formalization of obsolescence in Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox. Ted Martin was our panel chair and kept things moving along admirably, and the people who showed up to the panel asked smart and difficult questions.

Beyond all the talks, of course, it was wonderful to see old friends and meet new people. MSA always wisely supplies ample breaks between panels and free-flowing coffee, which make for great conversations. I'm coming away from this MSA with lots of energy for my book, new readers for some unbearably delayed work in progress, and the general excitement of being reminded that I'm not the only one interested in these things.

I also came to the decision over the weekend that I should make a habit of posting my conference talks to the web, which is something that lots of people already do. I haven't done it in the past for a variety of familiar reasons—not feeling as though the idea were well enough developed or the talk well enough written; or the thought that I might develop the talk into an article one day.

Well, I'm starting to think better of these fears (let's call a spade a spade). It's not going to shock anyone that twenty-minute conference talks tend to be a little undercooked, for one thing. It's true, my conference talks aren't always well wrought urns. I think I can live with this revelation about my scholarly practice being made public. (By the way, my conference talks are also intentionally informal in tone—I believe I use the phrase "random garbage" in this one, for instance. I consider this a feature, not a bug.)

And as for thinking I might develop an idea—sometimes I do and sometimes I don't—but mostly I don't. And in this particular case, I'm pretty sure I won't. I have an article in the works that's related to the talk I gave at this year's MSA, but quite different in focus.

So, in short, here's my MSA 13 talk: "The Time-Sense: On Stein's Repetition."

2011-10-05T06:42:00.000-04:00

You may laugh at an animal, but only because you have detected in it some human attitude or expression.

—Henri Bergson, On Laughter

My missing books!: a crucial update

2011-10-04T17:28:00.000-04:00

So... it turns out that someone in New York (a poet, in fact) received twenty-two of my precious missing books in the mail, all jumbled up with books of hers. It wasn't all of my books (Arcades Project? still missing), and in addition she wound up with three books belonging to an unknown third party. But my copy of This Sex Which Is Not One was in there, along with my complete Plato, my Myra Jehlen (what, I needed it just yesterday) and my Gubar-annotated A Room of One's Own.

Now I'm starting to have hope that my other books may return to me through the magic of the internet. (Yup, she googled me.)

So IF YOU HAVE MY BOOKS!: I really miss them. Send them?

2011-10-02T15:50:00.000-04:00

Look, I just have to put this out there after hearing this song piped into a few too many establishments this weekend. Adele's single "Someone Like You" is the worst. torch. song. ever.

Oh, it's pretty well constructed as a song. But the total abjection expressed in the pleading, self-abasing lyrics is just embarrassing. Come on, lyric I, have a little self-respect! Be less passive-aggressive! And get yourself a couple of backup singers going "sha-la-la" in the background! Contrast this with Amy Winehouse's textured, grown-up treatment of the same:

So much better. Public spaces of Atlanta, you are welcome to play Amy Winehouse as much as you like.

And now, back to Very Important Research.

2011-09-29T12:14:00.000-04:00

"Popcock!" said Gertrude Stein.

With this unusually lucid and brief remark the writer who has grown famous for her "a rose is a rose is a rose" style dismissed recent efforts of scientists to explain her work.

"Popcock is popcock is science is popcock," Miss Stein might have been expected to say. But she did not, according to her report. For once, she failed to repeat herself or to bewilder her hearers.

The scientific explanation is that her writing is done with her wrist and not with her mind. Automatic writing is the scientific term for it. Miss Stein not only disagrees, but takes the view that her writing does not need explaining.

If you have seen her play, "Four Saints in Three Acts," or have read ay of her other strange writings, you probably feel that she needs as much explaining as that other famous "stein"—Einstein—who also always draws a capacity crowd but whom hardly anyone in the audience understands.

—Jane Stafford, "Gertrude Stein Explained," Science News-Letter, 2 March 1935

2011-09-27T13:54:00.001-04:00

Literary history is not really about priority, but about agency; not who did it first, but who coordinated doing with knowing, poetry with poetics. (210)

—Jed Rasula, Syncopations

2011-09-26T19:01:00.001-04:00

It is understood by this time that everything is the same except composition and time, composition and the time of the composition and the time in the composition. (526)

—Gertrude Stein, "Composition as Explanation"

It's not "the job market"; it's the profession (and it's your problem too)

2011-09-25T11:37:00.000-04:00

I enjoyed Kathleen Fitzpatrick's recent piece in the Chronicle* on risk-taking and the responsibility of mentors to back up those junior scholars who are doing nontraditional work. The piece's key insight is that it's one thing to urge people to "innovate" and quite another to create the institutional frameworks that make innovation not only possible but consequential.**

Kathleen's observation comports with some ideas that have been floating around in my head lately, especially around "digital humanities." I and my Fox Center colleague Bart Brinkman were recently called upon to define digital humanities for the other fellows in residence, and in the process of talking it over with Bart, and during the discussion at the CHI, I've come to realize that I have some real pet peeves around the notion of the "job market" that come into relief specifically around the field of digital humanities.

It boils down to this: peeps, we're all connected.

The recent rise to prominence of digital humanities is indistinguishable from its new importance in "the job market" (I insist on those scare quotes); after all, digital humanities and its predecessor, humanities computing, have been active fields for decades. What's happening now is that they are institutionalizing in new ways. So when we talk about "digital humanities and the 'job market,'" we are not just talking about a young scholar's problem (or opportunity, depending on how you see it). We are talking about a shift in the institutional structures of the profession. And, senior scholars, this is not something that is happening to you. You are, after all, the ones on the hiring and t&p committees. It is a thing you are making—through choices that you make, and through choices that you decline to make.

There's something a little strange about the way that digital humanities gets promoted from the top down; it gets a lot of buzz in the New York Times; it's well known as dean-candy and so gets tacked onto requests for hires; digital humanities grant money seems to pour in (thanks, NEH!) even as philosophy departments across the country are getting shut down; university libraries start up initiatives to promote digital humanities among their faculty. I am waiting for the day when administrators and librarians descend upon the natural sciences faculty to promote history of science. No, I really am.

So it seems quite natural that there should be wariness and resistance to the growing presence of digital humanities. Perhaps there is some bitterness that you might get your new Americanist only on condition that her work involves a Google Maps mashup, because it was easy to persuade people that your department needed a new "digital humanist," whatever the hell that is, and it was not easy to persuade people that you needed somebody to teach Faulkner.

The situation is not improved by the confrontational attitudes of certain factions of the digital humanities establishment (such as it is), which are occasionally prone to snotty comments about how innovative DH is and how tired and intellectually bankrupt everybody else's work is. (Not so often, I find—but even a little is enough to be a problem.) Under those circumstances, DH seems clubby and not liberating; not a way of advocating the humanities but an attack on it, and specifically on the worth of that Faulkner seminar that you teach, and that non-digital research that you do. Why, an established scholar might reasonably ask, should I even deal with this "digital humanities" nonsense? Shouldn't I just keep teaching my Faulkner seminar, because somebody ought to do it, for Christ's sake?

Well, whatever else DH is, it is highly political, and it has political consequences. So, in short, no.

I'm persuaded that the widespread appeal of DH has much to do with the leveling fantasy it offers, a fantasy of meritocracy that is increasingly belied elsewhere in the professional humanities. As Tom Scheinfeldt points out in his useful "Stuff Digital Humanists Like,"

Innovation in digital humanities frequently comes from the edges of the scholarly community rather than from its center—small institutions and even individual actors with few resources are able to make important innovations. Institutions like George Mason, the University of Mary Washington, and CUNY and their staff members play totally out-sized roles in digital humanities when compared to their roles in higher ed more generally, and the community of digital humanities makes room for and values these contributions from the nodes.

This is true. Those involved in digital humanities have also seen the ways that THATCamps, blogs, and Twitter allow junior scholars and scholars at non-R1 institutions to cut geodesics across the profession, allowing them to spread their ideas, collaborate, and achieve a certain prominence that would have been impossible through traditional channels. I'm convinced that real possibilities lie here.

And as traditional scholarly publishing becomes more and more constricted and humanities department budgets are slashed, the fiction of academic meritocracy becomes harder and harder to sustain. Perhaps on the web, we think, through lean DIY publishing and postprint review, meritocracy (or its semblance) can return to the academy. It seems at once a way forward and a way to return to a (fabled) time when people cared about scholarship for the sake of scholarship—not because they needed X number of well-placed articles or a line on the cv or a connection at Y institution without which their careers would disappear. Perhaps DH offers us a way out of the increasingly rationalized death-spiral of "impact scores" and credential inflation. Perhaps it will let us out-quantify the quantifiers, or sidestep them altogether.

Of course, the web always comes with liberatory rhetoric that usually turns out to mean little more than "what the market will bear," and the ostensible meritocracy of digital humanities in the present moment is really no more than a misalignment between its alternative (and potentially even more aggressively capitalistic) value systems and those of the institutionalized humanities more generally. It can be disturbingly easy for the genuinely progressive intentions of digital humanists to become assimilated to the vague libertarianisms of "information wants to be free" and "DIY U," and from there to Google Books and charter schools and the privatization of knowledge—an enclosure of the digital commons ironically in the name of openness. At the same time, the naming of the "alt-ac" "track" (it is generally not a track, of course, by definition) seems to provide new opportunities for young scholars even as it raises research expectations for staff and requires those on the "track" to subordinate their research interests to those of the institutional structure that employs them. Digital forms are exceptionally good at occluding labor. How to navigate those waters thoughtfully—to realize the real promise of DH—is a question to which we must all apply ourselves.

So you see what I mean when I say that "digital humanities and 'the job market'" as it now manifests isn't a narrow, merely administrative sliver of life of interest solely to junior academics who are still gravely listening to advice about how to "tailor" the teaching paragraphs in their cover letters. Digital humanities has become important to "the job market" exactly insofar as it is causing major shifts in the institutions of the profession. These shifts are political. And if you are in my profession, then they are your concern.

*I know, "enjoyed" and "Chronicle" in one sentence... mirabile dictu.

**As we all know, I have a complex relationship with the word "innovation" and do not consider it an unqualified good, nor a transhistorical value. For today, however, we will leave that particular word a black box.

Thanks to Bart and Colleen for sitting through a less-worked-out live version of this rant last week.

Saying hey

2011-09-23T10:56:00.000-04:00

Via Ben Friedlander on Twitter, I was recently treated to Anne Boyer's "Damnatio Memoriae." Please read it--it's short and brilliant.

As Miriam Posner points out, it's oddly moving, not in spite of its repetition of the hilariously banal phrase "saying hey," but because of it. It serves as a subversively anti-dramatic counterpoint to the question, "Can the subaltern speak?" After all, here they are, saying hey. Only they're saying hey across the centuries, across the continents, "across deep time." These mysteries of the low register are the genius of flarf and the reason it's poetry, even if it's irritating poetry. Why does lameness sometimes flare out in the form of awesomeness?

[Better than Storify? Worse? I sometimes think Twitter conversations amount to more than the sum of their parts, but it can be difficult to render them usefully on a blog.]

2011-09-23T10:29:00.000-04:00

Beddini (reading a telegram): 'Come ahead stop stop being a sap stop you can even bring Alberto stop my husband is stopping at your hotel stop when do you start stop.' I cannot understand who wrote this.

Dale: Sounds like Gertrude Stein.

—Top Hat (1935)

2011-09-22T11:05:00.001-04:00

Etta Cone offered to typewrite Three Lives and she began. Baltimore is famous for the delicate sensibilities and conscientiousness of its inhabitants. It suddenly occurred to Gertrude Stein that she had not told Etta Cone to read the manuscript before beginning to typewrite it. She went to see her and there indeed was Etta Cone faithfully copying the manuscript letter by letter so that she might not by any indiscretion become conscious of the meaning. (713)
—The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

All you need to know, really.

2011-09-19T12:06:00.000-04:00

Books that I appear to have lost in the move:
The Arcades Project
Jen Fleissner's Women, Compulsion, Modernity
Ugly Feelings
The Wings of the Dove
all of my Fredric Jameson (??--this was several volumes!)

So much bitterness.

Consensus and knowledge according to Colbert

2011-09-16T15:28:00.000-04:00

I wonder what folks would think of teaching this Stephen Colbert clip (September 14, 2011) alongside Leviathan and the Air-Pump or Laboratory Life.

This clip brings the issues at stake in the notion of scientific consensus into rather stark relief, reflecting as it does on current public health policy. It also puts a brake on any too-quick readings of science studies that might construe the political nature of expertise as a debunking of expertise.

In the clip, Colbert mocks Rep. Michele Bachmann for presenting as truth an unnamed stranger's claim that the HPV vaccine (Gardasil) caused cognitive dysfunction in her daughter. The segment is funny, but it's also uncomfortable when we see how very flatly Colbert pits "the entire medical establishment" against "some lady." It's not a joke about method; it's a joke about authority, and who doesn't have it. Bachmann doesn't have very many people on her "team."

The clip forces us to confront the substantiveness of expertise as well as its political nature—its reliance on modest witnesses, on trustworthiness. Bachmann's statement genuinely doesn't hold up; it's about as epistemologically unsound a way to establish fact as we can imagine—it's no more than hearsay. But the reason it's hearsay to begin with is that we know so little about this woman or her daughter, about her methods, about her discernment. We don't have enough of those markers of trustworthiness.

Colbert is interesting when it comes to issues of consensus and knowledge. I've taught Colbert's segment on "Wikiality" before in the context of a media studies unit on wikis and citation. In it, Colbert pushes an extreme relativism that the bit is supposed to mock; the idea (contrary to the suggestion in the more recent clip about Michele Bachmann) is that reality is not determined by consensus, and a wiki encyclopedia is therefore an epistemologically untenable free-for-all.

That Colbert fans rather persistently vandalized the "elephant" entry on Wikipedia just to prove his point shows both Wikipedia's limitations and its relative strength: most of the time such things don't happen on Wikipedia. Colbert's overstatement of the consensus narrative led most of my students to come to see consensus as a potentially epistemologically strong method, under some circumstances, i.e. more than a mere convention. More practically, it led many of them to understand Wikipedia as a tenable project—without, however, losing sight of its limitations. It made for a very productive discussion, and I suspect the more recent clip would too.

2011-09-07T23:06:00.001-04:00

Modern Female Automatisms

2011-09-04T16:36:00.000-04:00

I'm not teaching this semester, but my book list for next semester is due exceedingly soon. I think it'll have to be one of those late-nite activities, since looking up ISBNs doesn't take a lot of brain. ("Night," when preceded by "late-," is properly spelled "nite." True facts.)

I've done a poor job of articulating the course's interest and importance of late, mostly because I haven't been in the teaching zone, but it's about gender and the discourses of automatism circa 1900, and is in some degree related to the talk I'll be giving at MSA next month on Stein and repetition. Repetition structures normality and (as a "compulsion") pathology, habit and obsession; it's evidence of mechanicity and, in its ability to provoke laughter, also a site of evidence of the human. Butler brilliantly makes repetition the scene of gender.

We'll read/watch some of the classic Lady Robots texts of the Gilded Age and early C20—L'Ève future, Metropolis, "In the Cage," "Melanctha." We'll also look at some contemporary nonfiction theories of mechanicity and gender, like Otto Weininger's theory of variability, the biometrics of Lombroso and Berthillon, and of course Freud, contextualizing them in more recent work by Haraway, Oreskes, Kittler, Hayles, and Fleissner. I had sort of a lovely (that is, entertaining) Twitter conversation with Chris Forster, Jentery Sayers, and Stephen Ross (probably among others) a week or two ago about modernist humor and the role of gender in Michael North's Machine-Age Comedy, which is one of the problems I intend for the class to investigate.

Roughly, the course will use the rubric of "automatism" to look at female labor; the gendering of humor; affect and the human; objectivity and knowledge; psychopathology c. 1900; and biological determinisms.

Needless to say, I'm still in that grandiose, overly ambitious phase of syllabus-planning. I haven't done all the necessary cutting down, which will have to happen soon. I'm also contemplating some sort of introspective exercise (observing one's repetitions, or the like) that I haven't quite worked out yet. Suggestions welcome.

Not blogging as a way of blogging

2011-08-25T07:28:00.000-04:00

Here is my advice to anyone who is thinking of firing off a peeved response to something someone else wrote about them on the internet:

Refrain and maintain.

2011-08-20T08:29:00.001-04:00

Why, hello. Guess it's time for a new semester.

2011-08-05T08:29:00.000-04:00

Via Rebekah Higgitt, a Tumblr on "The Art of Google Books." They're images that break the illusion that the books have been spiritually whooshed whole and entire into the ether.

[Related.]

New stuff

2011-08-04T13:23:00.000-04:00

I sure have been neglecting this blog lately, and all I have of late is a little linkspam.

First of all, Ryan Cordell writes on the overly-Facebooky-but-okay-I-guess Google+ about a cool project for people who want to get started in digital humanities but aren't sure where to begin:

Know someone who wants to get started in the digital humanities but doesn't know how to do so? They should apply for DHCommons' preconvention workshop at MLA 2012, cosponsored by NITLE and the Texas A&M Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture. Representatives from a range of prominent DH projects and centers will be on hand for training and consultation.

Apply here.

And second, we've finally launched Colloquies at Arcade! Here's my Ed Blog post introducing Colloquies, the Colloquies landing page, which will soon have more than one Colloquy on it (specifically, on September 1, when I release the next Colloquy), and our very first Colloquy, "The Contemporary Novel," introduced by the great Lee Konstantinou.

And, shhh, Arcade may also be seeing a long-awaited up-hay-ade-gray.

Oh, and I switched my California driver's license over to a Georgia one. Guess I'm a Georgian now.

Image: Peaches. Bryan Costin, 2005. CC NC-BY-SA 2.0.

Coffee in Atlanta

2011-07-25T20:15:00.000-04:00

[A report, after four days of intensive investigation, punctuated here and there by "apartment-hunting."]

1. You can buy Blue Bottle beans at Star Provisions on Howell Mill Road. When I saw the Bella Donovan I nearly wept with relief.

2. Steady Hand on North Decatur (right by the Fox Center!) brews Intelligentia, which is respectable. I don't know what their funky apparatus is, but it produces a clean brew that does a good job of revealing the character of the bean.

3. Octane on Marietta brews Counter Culture, and I was favorably impressed; it is, like the coffee from Steady Hand, nuanced third-wave stuff. But they brew it in a French press, apparently with a finer grind than is really appropriate for a press, and the result is a rather muddy brew even after you've let it settle. Good coffee, but advantage goes to Steady Hand for texture.

4. I want to like the local roaster, Batdorf and Bronson, and they seem, you know, perfectly fine. But so far I'm not thrilled by it or ready to adopt it as my new local coffee. Aurora and the Bakeshop brew it and dispense it in an air pot—which is to say, it's morally okay to put this coffee in an air pot. This is, I would say, perfectly acceptable coffee, but I wouldn't go out of my way for it.

5. Urban Grind's coffee, I am sorry to say, is a disappointment.

2011-07-24T23:34:00.000-04:00

So, like, I'm in Atlanta?

2011-07-21T02:47:00.000-04:00

Another question about G+ integration with other Google products: when will I be able to share a GDoc with a circle?

And: when that happens, will Google's total infiltration of the universe be scary/ier?

And: have cats weighed in on the issue?

(Duh.)

G+, briefly

2011-07-10T15:44:00.000-04:00

I'm trying out Google Plus, because I'm a sucker like that, and also because Google already owns most of my life, so what's the loss? (Copies of my diss on GDocs, etc.)

Apart from a brief exploration of Facebook (which is ridiculous), I have hitherto confined my internet activities to the public: a blog with my name on it, a Twitter account with my name on it. This seems to me to be right and just. (Well, I am pseudonymous on one other social network that will remain nameless but which is by far the best designed and most useful social network I have ever seen.)

G+ offers the same temptations as Facebook: the walled garden, the ability to form little clubs. That's both the good news and the bad news, I guess.

I've heard it said (a lot) that big search is dying (because spammers and similar are so good at SEO) and social search is the future. That strikes me as likely. This changes the nature of the "publicness" that I've tried to maintain in my web presence, but I'm not sure how just yet.

It occurs to me that there may be a day when G+ has nicer integration with Blogger blogs than just the ugly "+1" button, since both are Google properties. (The social network that shall go nameless has fairly nontrivial integration with blogs.) Blogs are said to be an old new medium, but I still like them. They're a damn good place to put text.

A note on commentary through taxonomy:

One thing I love about Twitter that G+ doesn't have is hashtags. This is a feature of its nonpublicness. Tagging is one of the best things about the web; commentary through taxonomy has become standard, and this is a curious and lovely thing. So far you can't really do it with G+. But this is the internet, so I'm sure people will eventually find a way.

2011-07-05T20:52:00.000-04:00

Sweet FSM. I packed one (1) box of books. It barely made a dent in my shelves, and I nearly died schlepping it down to the Elmwood post office.

This is going to be a trial.

2011-06-30T18:45:00.000-04:00

Today is officially the last day of my appointment at Cal, although I'm around for a few more weeks. I'm still somewhat in denial of my impending move to Atlanta, where I'll be a fellow at the Fox Center at Emory for the next year. Part of that is my reluctance to leave the Bay Area (and my fantastic 1908 Leola Hall-designed Elmwood apartment); most of it is the enormous pain in the ass of a cross-country move.

Hall was known for her built-ins.

But I'm looking forward to the year's work, which will mainly be on my book, and to hanging out with my new Emory and ATL-area colleagues. I'll also teach an undergraduate course in the spring. (On lady robots? Undoubtedly.)

Including my postdoctoral year, I'll have spent nearly eight years in Berkeley. It's been a good run.

[Obligatory Georgia-related link. Come to think of it, I probably need a playlist if I'm going to get all this packing done. Suggestions welcome.]

Such a doll

2011-06-26T10:23:00.000-04:00

Everyone knows that Teen Talk Barbie never said, "Math is hard; let's go shopping!" It caught on nonetheless; there was something about the phrase that made people think that, yes, this is just what a talking Barbie would say.

Speech is one of those things that is supposed to set "the human" apart from "the inhuman," as what Anca Parvulescu describes as "one in a series of properties invoked as [the] minimal difference, a catalog that offers something to hold on to whenever the human risks contamination with the nonhuman" (4).* Animated dolls occupy a special place in western lore as objects that particularly challenge that distinction, though these minimal differences like (realistic) speech and (real) laughter are sticking points where the distinction is nonetheless upheld.

Still, dolls and automata are powerful figures for women in particular, or rather, the distinction between a woman and a doll has frequently seemed to be particularly easy to erase, from Galatea to Coppélia to the aestheticized-into-objecthood daughter Pansy in The Portrait of a Lady. Michael Taussig notes of a collection of eighteenth-century automata that the figures represented include "everything but the white male. There are negroes in top hats and tight breeches, the 'upside-down world clock' with a monkey playing the drum, ... and women—especially women" (213-4).

Women's propensity to be confused with dolls, and the triumph of artificiality in that confusion, is perhaps one of the sources of anxiety that has long surrounded the Barbie doll in particular as an "unrealistic model" for girls. Barbie's nonhuman appearance—her slender foot perpetually extended for the high-heeled glass slipper that would make of her a princess—registers not as uncanny but as ideal.

The talking Barbie's speech is therefore the place where the inanimate doll gets a chance to seem more "lifelike," and, by the same stroke, the place where it is feared that her "lifelike" quality will reveal the lifelike dimension itself (what women are "really like") to be, in essence, no more than the mechanical, unthinking doll with which women are so often conflated.

Enter "Math is hard; let's go shopping!" As Benjamin Zimmer documents in the LL post linked above, "math is hard; let's go shopping!" is an abbreviated pairing of two real phrases that Teen Talk Barbie originally played,"Math class is tough" and "Want to go shopping? Okay, meet me at the mall." The urban legend version stages an exchange; the newly more-lifelike (talking) Barbie eschews "hard," intellectually challenging math in favor of (pleasurable?) shopping.

The two things are of course gender-coded. But more importantly, they're gender-coded on precisely the grounds on which women are confused with dolls. The math signifies intellectual activity, which Teen Talk Barbie legendarily renounces because it is "hard"; at stake here is not only intellect but volition, the will to take on what is difficult and to engage in ("hard") work. At stake is the possibility of being all there. Teen Talk Barbie doesn't have it, of course. But it is perfectly believable that she can engage in shopping, which Rachel Bowlby has described as, at least in certain versions, a fully automatized leisure activity. The female shopper, as figured in the late nineteenth century, is devoid of volition and powerless before the commodity, seized by an insatiable desire not genuinely her own. (The classic portrayal is in Zola's novel Au Bonheur des dames.)** She is rendered an automaton before the bargain table.

For the patently unrealistic yet more-real-than-real-women Barbie to come alive by saying "Math is hard; let's go shopping!" is thus a bigger betrayal than just the usual reinforcement of gender stereotypes around STEM fields. The whole point of automata is for them to become self-aware, rise up, and shake off their oppressors (us). The betrayal of Teen Talk Barbie, succinctly rendered as "Math is hard; let's go shopping!," is that she uses her moment of speech not to become self-aware and subvert the inhuman decorativeness for which she was designed, but rather to reject cognition and embrace the doll-like automatism that is already attributed to real women. That is: inhuman Barbie is representative of real women, more representative than the real women are, and what she "says" goes.

The above image is a Creative Commons licensed Flickr image. The photographer's caption reproaches Barbie for, well, being a doll: "empty-headed." Tellingly, the sole comment to date reads, "i've met women with a gaze like that... scary indeed."

Whatever women may do to protest the untruths of Barbie is moot whenever Barbie, and dolls in general, are already posited as the truth of women.

* Parvulescu is alluding to laughter in this description--laughter being another candidate for that minimal difference.

** There is also a twentieth-century "savvy" female shopper—the two kinds of shopper always exist in tension, as Bowlby explains. Judging from ads, the volitionless shopper seems to buy chocolate and desserts, while the wily shopper buys cleaning supplies.

See also the "X is hard" Snowclones Database entry.

Bowlby, Rachel. Carried Away: The Invention of Modern Shopping. New York: Columbia UP, 2001. Print.

Parvulescu, Anca. Laughter: Notes on a Passion. Cambridge: MITP 2010. Print.

Taussig, Michael. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. New York: Routledge, 1993. Print.

Image: Barbie. Pete Lounsbury, 2004. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

2011-06-25T14:30:00.000-04:00

This cartoon from Abstruse Goose needs to be in every freshman handbook.

Via Lisa Wade at Sociological Images.

2011-06-23T16:30:00.000-04:00

So... who exactly are all these people who worship social media uncritically? Thank goodness Bill Keller is here to save us from them.

[Background.]

[I mean, are you telling me that Twitter can't topple dictators? I am shocked.]

2011-06-22T14:56:00.000-04:00

I'm just going to throw this out there for no good reason. It bugs me that the whole entire internet seems not to have identified the brilliant quotation at the end of Janelle Monáe's track "Wondaland." One dude even thinks it's from the Randall Thompson "Alleluia." Absurd. It is obviously a variation on the refrain from "Ye Watchers and Ye Holy Ones." Come on, internets; I expect better.

This has been a PSA.

2011-06-20T12:58:00.000-04:00

A few links on HPS, publicness, public knowledge, etc., etc.:

A charming rant by Dominic Berry on "HPS on't telly":

It looks as though TV is just catching up with what David Phillip Miller has called the ‘Sobel effect’, the seemingly endless growth in popular science and science history writing triggered by Dava Sobel in the 1990s. In the particular case of the programme which sparked this blog post this is literally so, for John Emsley, one of the more prolific contributors to this popular history of science movement, was a key consultant on Jim Al-Khalili’s Chemistry: A Volatile History which is currently being repeated. Much of this programming is bad, just bad. And most irritatingly, history of science seems to be something anyone thinks they can just pick up and spout off about. One of the most recent and partiuclarly aggravating examples of this was Niall Fergusson’s use of Newton and Boyle as the prime example of how the Royal Society thrived due to collective enterprise. Fuck sake.

More recently and perhaps more reflectively, Rebekah Higgitt on history of science spoiling everybody's party (with great links and comments):

As regular readers will know, one of my abiding interests is the relationship between academic history of science and popular history of science or, more specifically, how to make historiographically-informed books into readable texts. It’s an issue that has been around for some time, prompting comments by David Miller on the ‘Sobel Effect’ back in 2002 (when he told “The Amazing Tale of How Multitudes of Popular Writers Pinched All the Best Stories in the History of Science and Became Rich and Famous while Historians Languished in Accustomed Poverty and Obscurity, and how this Transformed the World”). This wasn’t just sour grapes, but an analysis of the effect on the publishing marking and an important discussion of how more recent trends in historiography tend to complicate narratives and question accounts of discovery as a heroic process.

James Sumner has a satisfying rant about "first-talk" — the first computer, the first refrigerator, the first whatever — in the history of technology, and how it is always absolute garbage.

I’m paid a lot of money not to write like that, but he’s saying what I’m thinking. First-talk, far too often, reduces to an annoying game which gets out of the historical record pretty much what it decides to put in. It’s a distraction. Real technical change is gradual, and rich in independent overlapping discoveries. That’s not a fussy academic quibble: it’s a point small children can grasp.

And only semirelatedly, Iain Pears offers the most thoughtful assessment of A. C. Grayling's New College of the Humanities that I've yet seen. (It's also one of the few that takes the time to debunk the idea that NCH is an "American-style university": "Swarthmore and Bryn Mawr do not, I think, download curricula from the internet to teach their students.") The golden insight comes at the end:

Professor Grayling is acting because he considers the battle within the national university system to be lost. But in some ways it has only just started, after long delays.

It was the duty of his generation to fight that battle, but it did not. Had serious opposition been mounted 10 or 20 years back then there might have been some chance of success. But his generation was extraordinarily supine.

Collectively, they let it happen, and contented themselves with gaming the system. That worked, and some gained as much celebrity as academics can get in a culture which cares little for scholarship. But these are not the people who should now be delivering lectures about saving the humanities: they had their chance, and they blew it. A little more activity when they were in their prime and the humanities might not have needed saving; a little more humility now and the reception given to their proposal could have been radically more favourable.

Now we're really straying from the original topic, but I really enjoyed Alex Golub's debunking of the idea that creativity is the same thing as spontaneity.

Of course, overall I agree with Robinson’s point: as someone with a long history of performance in drama and music I am often shocked at the cultural barrenness of my students. We have created a system that teaches them that music comes out of machines, not them, and most serious dance they see on television has more in common with a strip tease than Alvin Ailey. Arts education, like physical education, or the craftwork that goes into creating visual art, is desperately needed in our schools’ curriculum at both the secondary and tertiary level. It’s an important part of learning to be human.

But what that education is — what enables creativity — is often quite different from what people imagine. It requires more training and discipline, not less. In other words: being socialized into a culture of practice. This is a lesson that any athropologist — or any artist — should remind us as we think about education in this country today.

And a reminder to myself: never, ever read the comments at Inside Higher Ed. They are like YouTube comments, only about things that matter.

Poetry in the wild: Longfellow edition

2011-06-11T21:17:00.000-04:00

I love these instances of poetry in the wild—moments when you see poetry being deployed to unlikely ends, or when you see the general public being called upon to recognize something that you're usually called a hopeless nerd for studying. A few weeks ago I took note of a Businessweek article that was briefly viral, whose most quotable and quoted line was

"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads," he says. "That sucks."

And then there is this gem, from a pharmacy in Rockridge:

So I couldn't help being struck by the widespread mockery of Sarah Palin's mangling of the story of Paul Revere. It's not that she wasn't wrong--of course she was wrong, completely. It's that everyone knew with such certainty just how wrong she was, and that they had the goods on the truth about Paul Revere.

And why did everyone know the real story of Paul Revere?

Do I even have to ask? Because of Henry frickin' Wadsworth Longfellow. Everybody heard that poem in grade school and knows at least bits of it by heart.

Here's how Comedy Central blurbed Jon Stewart's June 6 segment on Palin. Note the direct quotation from Longfellow.

Stephen Colbert likewise quoted Longfellow in his segment on Palin. In fact, he comically bowdlerized the poem, and getting the joke depended on remembering the original:

"It's just like we all learned in grade school.'One if by land, bells if by two, hey, British, you're warned, sailed the ocean blue.'"

The Colbert Report

Both Stewart and Colbert take special note of Palin's language, a "folksy word salad," as the Stewart blurb calls it, "a random string of words," as Colbert puts it. The focus on the disorder of Palin's words seems to register some indignation at the departure from Longfellow's rhymed, aggressively accentual verse, which neither can help quoting.

Normally nobody cares at all (or even notices) if a politician messes up some history; in fact, outright misrepresentations and lies are pretty par for the course in politics. Yet this particular screw-up briefly had everyone in a lather, and I think it has everything to do with the poetry. Sarah Palin did fail a sort of knowledge-test, but it was more a test of national folklore than of history (even though of course the national folklore is being called history). It seems to be less offensive to most people that she got the history wrong (which of course she did) than that she didn't know Longfellow's poem. One if by land, two if by sea! What, were you raised by wolves?

From a historical perspective, the idea of Henry Wadsworth "I wrote The Song of Hiawatha" Longfellow as some kind of neutral, unimpeachable historical authority is pretty hilarious. And from a literary perspective, it's puzzling to be reminded how powerfully such a bad and, in some ways, marginal poem has lodged in the national consciousness, while poems we poetry critics might all think of as central—Wallace Stevens's "Sunday Morning," for example—languish in relative obscurity. Who decides what poems (if any) get taught in elementary school, and for what reason? How many teachers have taught "Paul Revere's Ride" not as poetry (fair enough!) but as history? For how many people is this one of the few poems they learned in school--or even the only poem?

This is why poetry is so interesting to observe in the wild. You never know what it's going to do.

[UPDATE: Jill Lepore does it better.]

2011-06-10T20:17:00.000-04:00

I spent a week fiddling with the back end of Arcade, and all I have to show for it is a blog post.

Sentimental Spaces

2011-06-08T14:37:00.000-04:00

“And what a quantity of animal beings there are in the being of a man!”

— Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

My essay "Sentimental Spaces: On Mei-mei Berssenbrugge's Nest" is now up at at Jacket2.

One of the many nice things about Jacket2 is that it's fully online and open access. There are some drawbacks to this, of course: in MS the article is about 27 pages, which makes the lack of pagination in the online version perhaps a little heartwrenching. But the trade-off is that you don't need a library subscription to read it. (I'd be happy to send a pdf to anyone who really feels that the pagination issue is beyond the pale.)

Many thanks to the great Julia Bloch for the opportunity, and for the patient editing.

2011-06-05T14:29:00.000-04:00

My "Facebook is ridiculous" post of yore can never match the gloriousness of this rant. Via Aaron.

2011-06-05T09:53:00.000-04:00

A link this morning: Alice Bell on why calling for "scientific literacy" doesn't make sense.

This is apropos of her observation that what one of her FB friends called "the ultimate scab university," the New College of the Humanities, seems to place an awful lot of emphasis on "scientific literacy," by which they seem to mean "a list of Richard Dawkins-approved articles of faith supplemented of no particular understanding of why you should believe them or even what it means to believe them."

[Nina Power on the New College of the Humanities and its parasitic use of University of London resources:

Students of the new college will apparently ‘use many of the resources of the University of London: the exceptional library in Senate House, the University of London Union with its many societies and sports activities’ - how is this even remotely allowed? If you’re going to set up a private college, at least have the decency to buy your own fucking resources.

Also, a really spectacular rant in the Guardian by Terry Eagleton.]

2011-06-03T15:13:00.000-04:00

We should really declare a moratorium on calling things "labs" willy-nilly.

Y'all know who you are.

Apparently the semester is over

2011-06-03T00:29:00.000-04:00

I've started many a blog post in the last few weeks, only to discard it, dissatisfied. I'm in a bit of a strange lull lately, despite having the usual gigantic heap of work on my hands. I submitted an essay relatively recently, but not the essay, and I'm on the fence about how deeply to revise the essay right now (versus after I hand it to some readers). Common sense tells me to cobble together something remotely worthy of a response and send it out for feedback, because I've been staring at the thing for too long. Reading the essay tells me to scrap the whole thing, go vegan for three weeks, maybe seek enlightenment, and then try again.

I'm hoping for some middle ground, since abandoning cheese just isn't going to happen.

I've meant to do some critical reflecting on the course I most recently taught, Didactic Modernism. I've actually written pages on the subject (scrapped). Partly those pages veered into reminiscences about books I've read, courses I've taken, things I wish I knew.

How you never really know what your students are thinking. How you, as a student, often only find out what you're thinking after the lapse of years. As a teacher, likewise.

How strange course evaluations are. How Alan Jacobs argues that course evaluations should be given at least a semester after the course has ended. How a student said that my expectations for the final exam made me "as pompous as Ezra Pound." How I chose to read this as evidence of the student's having learned that Ezra Pound expects you to know a lot, which is true. Also that Ezra Pound could be pretty pompous. Also true.

How another student said that Berkeley should give me tenure. How this saddened me for a variety of reasons.

In short, I seem to be too near to it still to do anything but ramble.

The essence of it is that it seems difficult to separate one's teaching methods from one's memories of being a student, even when you remember that you were by definition an atypical student. And I can't kick the belief that what makes a course a great learning experience is incredibly arbitrary and contingent. It is the lot of an English major to sit through many sub-par discussions. The trade off is that you've read Moby-Dick, and carefully. You forget the one, and remember the other, and return to it for the rest of your life.

How do you create the conditions for that? Well, you assign Moby-Dick, for one thing. But of course there's more to it. But what is that more, and for whom?

I was the kind of student who responded well to being set tasks. Given something hard to do, I rose to the occasion. I was a nerd; that's how I ended up in grad school! This is clearly not the case for all students. I've heard many students say that as soon as something is an assignment, they don't want to do it; it sucks out all their creativity and they stop trying. Also that if something isn't required, they won't do it.

This may be the first semester I've given an extra credit option. The option, in this case, was to do something slightly more onerous than a standard course blog post, in order to make up for missed blog posts of past weeks. Here was an interesting scenario. You couldn't lose credit, but you could gain it. There was no penalty for trying. (There is, some might point out, never any penalty for trying, insofar as getting no credit is always worse than getting a low grade. This seems to be beside the point when it comes to the psychology of grades.) Several students decided to do extra credit. Some really really needed it; some only sort of needed it. One asked if she could do it when she did not need it. There were easier and more difficult ways to do this extra credit, and some chose more difficult ways.

How can you rig a course so that it all seems like extra credit? Would it even be wise?

I once memorized "After great pain, a formal feeling comes" "for" a course, while studying for the final. The course was a pretext; I memorized it for the poem.

You never know when your students are doing that, or doing something like it for a different class--not that you necessarily want to know.

The pedagogical uses of grading continue to puzzle me. Clearly it functions differently for different people. In some ways it's a form of gamification, which some people find motivating and others find stressful and demoralizing. Grades certainly confuse the issue of learning.

These are, of course, questions I've been pondering precisely because my students this semester were so very excellent. It so clearly wasn't all about carrots and sticks for most of them. So then--what? Did I already do my bit by assigning Gertrude Stein? Will my students remember Tender Buttons forever?

On these matters my course evaluations are silent.

2011-05-26T20:31:00.000-04:00

Back in Berkeley. The finger is healing, and I am behind on work, as usual. Looking forward to getting back to my regular research routine.

2011-05-22T14:59:00.000-04:00

Upon consideration, while that Ruby on Rails workshop didn't equip me to actually develop my own web apps in five magical hours, it did remind me that I can fiddle around with the back ends of things and understand how they work. I predict that I will be giving the Arcade tech editor considerable heartburn in the coming months. ("Hey, what does this do?" *explosion*)

2011-05-20T13:04:00.000-04:00

Report: the niece is excellent.

Railsbridge workshops

2011-05-16T11:07:00.000-04:00

I've been meaning to mention for a while that earlier this month I attended a free Ruby on Rails outreach workshop for women in San Francisco, run by volunteers from the SF Ruby community and funded in part by Railsbridge.

It was well planned, informative, and (did I mention?) free. Plus, feminist! I think I may not have been in quite the right class for what I wanted to learn, but that was my fault and not theirs. I think it will be a long time before I develop any meaningful competency with Ruby on Rails, mostly because after research, teaching, and (sweet FSM) moving, I don't have a lot of time to devote to dicking around with web apps, which is really what I need if I want to learn anything. Still, I hope to try and keep up over the summer, and perhaps try to connect with the Ruby community in Atlanta as well.

I attended my last Saxon Circle meeting last week (we're still in the middle of Andreas, and as usual I have no idea what the hell is going on...God is dressed as a sailor?). It gave me a reason to reflect that, as terrible as my Old English is, it would be even worse if I hadn't been doing a tiny bit of (error-ridden) translating each month for the last eight years.

Practice, man.

Anyway, the point is: if you're a woman in the Bay Area and are interested in learning Ruby on Rails, head over to the SF Ruby group. I think I was your typical cranky, resistant student ("IT'S NOT WORKING. WHY ISN'T IT WORKING.") and they were still super great to me.

Gamification (or the Romance of Accumulation)

2011-05-14T10:32:00.000-04:00

I haven't yet had a chance to discuss Mark Sample's recent, very compelling post about "gamification," the tendency to turn everything into a game (for points) whether or not it's appropriate. Mark writes:

I oppose the general trend toward “gamifying” real world activities—mapping game-like trappings such as badges, points, and achievements onto otherwise routine or necessary activities.

A better term for such “gamification” is, as Margaret Robertson argues, pointsification. And I oppose it. I oppose pointsification and the gamification of life. Instead of “gamifying” activities in our daily life, we need to meanify them—imbue them with meaning. The things that we do to live, breathe, eat, laugh, love, and die, we need to see as worth doing in order to live, breathe, eat, laugh, love, and die. A leaderboard is not the path toward discovering this worthwhileness.

I mostly share Mark's sense that gamification is a scourge. But I'm also extremely curious as to why it's compelling. The mere accumulation of points, which is predictable and sequential, should be incredibly boring. Incredibly boring. And yet somehow it isn't; somehow it's at once soothing (five points...six points...) and anxiety-inducing (Will I make it to seven points?...Cliffhanger!).

As someone who studies experimental literature, I'm not deeply committed to either meaning or narrative as self-evident goods, and I am actually one of those weirdos who enjoys reading Stein, but the narrative power of mere counting remains a puzzle to me--an interesting one.

I'm pasting my comment on Mark's post below, not because I've said anything brilliant but because if anybody has any leads, I'd like to hear about them.

It strikes me [...] that the proverbial elephant in the room is the pervasive gamification of learning, through grades, credits, and the like, which leads to the perverse practice known as "grade-grubbing." (Not to mention the mistaken impression in some quarters that the letters "B. A." have, or should have, the powers of the One Ring.)

I mostly hate grades, and not just because I hate grading.

But I do think there's something to be said for having to discipline oneself into a practice--to do something before one understands why one is doing it. (Learning to code almost always starts out like this, or at least it has for me--just follow these instructions, use this syntax, make this thingy that says "hello world." A week later, you understand why you were doing what you did, and you understand it because you did it.)

With thinking persons, usually the extrinsic motivation of the grade flips over into an intrinsic interest in what it is that one is doing--it has to, because it's just too boring to merely do things to rack up points. When that flip doesn't happen, we get grade-grubbing--people who think the points are (as it were) the point.

Perhaps that flip happens when you start to understand enough of what you're doing that it starts to become more interesting than racking up points. Racking up points, which is a sort of degree-zero narrative, is more interesting than a series of arbitrary, meaningless, and repetitive tasks, which is how some people see school. (And it's worth noting that, to the beginner, most complex things seem arbitrary and meaningless--until they don't.) So gamification is a relief from such tasks. As you say, the desire to gamify life processes seems to signal an inability to imbue them with more complex or interesting narrative (or, say, poetic!) significance. But it seems as though there are moments when gamification can be, and is, used strategically as a bridge into significance.

There's a very striking section of Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative in which Equiano is going about trading various goods (limes, glassware, turkey). It's all about the numbers, and what I once called a "romance of accumulation" (in a seminar paper lo these many years ago) takes over the "interesting" narrative. Equiano's racking up points. But he has to give some bulk and narrative to the tedious process of accruing enough money to buy his freedom, so the romance of accumulation must serve. A similar racking up of points appears in Thoreau's Walden, when he is literally bean-counting.

Which is to say that "gamification" is an old and strange narrative strategy. I don't quite know what to do with these C18/19 examples, but I've long wondered about them, and the role of the romance of accumulation in American literature and culture more broadly.

Telephone; or, Some thoughts on publicness

2011-05-14T03:43:00.000-04:00

Please note that my office telephone has been disconnected due to budget cuts implemented by the state of California.

--Professor Ian Duncan's email signature file

Call all you want, but there's no one home

And you're not going to reach my telephone.

--Lady Gaga

There's a Telephone-like quality to news of the effects of the statewide California budget cuts on individual UC campuses, departments, and programs. You remember the game from early childhood--you pass a message around the room, whispering from ear to ear, and then giggle at the end when the original message is juxtaposed with what the last person finally heard.

This is partly because it is genuinely difficult to understand the distribution and effects of budget cuts (why were East Asian language courses radically cut just when a new East Asian library building was going up? an observer might, with fairness, ask).

But it's also because it's difficult to get an official account from anybody. With budget cuts comes a stigma, and therefore a dilemma. It is difficult to fight budget cuts without clearly representing how badly they damage the department and the university. But as soon as a department or a campus admits to having been hurt by cuts, it faces a loss of prestige and a concomitant flight of talent. Part of the damage that the budget cuts inflict comes from anybody knowing about the damage--or thinking they know.

The result is a mixture of genuine confusion and official obfuscation, in which information flows primarily through rumor and statistics--the latter to be understood as the superlative successor to Mark Twain's "lies" and "damned lies."

And that's how the UC budget cuts' effects on my department came to be emblematized, through a Telephone-like process, by telephones.

It's well known by now that English faculty at Berkeley no longer have office phones. Ian Duncan (to his credit, in my opinion) said so in his email signature file for about a year. Evidently there are members of UC administration who consider us a "bad" department for having let on about this fact. Anecdotally, I hear it's whispered among (and sometimes, by competing departments, to) prospective graduate students that our lack of phones is an emblem of how terrible the cuts have been for us.

Well, it is--an emblem, that is. But surely we English scholars can think a bit critically about just how that emblem signifies.

William Deresiewicz's recent, much-circulated, and rather good article in The Nation casually dropped the following statement: "Stipends are so low at the University of California, Berkeley, the third-ranked research institution on the planet, that the school is having trouble attracting graduate students."

I can't speak for other departments at Cal, but I know that the statement is not true for English--at least not this year. It's not that graduate stipends aren't low (they're graduate stipends; they're low by definition), and in fact we also had unusually low yield this year. But informal surveys (rumors, rumors) suggest that our peer departments did too.

So while it's tempting to make a causal narrative out of it, as Deresiewicz does, in this case the narrative seems unsupported by the evidence.

In fact, graduate stipends in Berkeley's English department are commensurate with those offered at much wealthier peer institutions. For instance, although we joke about our transbay colleagues at Stanford ("You get a car! You get a car! Everybody gets a car!"), the truth is that their fellowships ^for incoming students as of this year^* don't materially exceed ours. It's perhaps a little janky that our fellowship packages are often cobbled together piecemeal due to the bureaucratic idiosyncrasies and, yes, economic constraints, of being at a public university. But that's always been true of Cal.

Here's the thing about the phones: they're symbolic, in more ways than one. Part of the reason they seem like such a basic infrastructural need is that they're such an old infrastructural need. In point of fact, they don't get a lot of use, and are a low priority--that's why getting rid of phones was a very reasonable response to budget cuts. The Wesleyan historian Claire Potter, who blogs as Tenured Radical, recently wrote, "Take my phone. Please." After all,

By doing this, you could free up some money in our zero-sum budget game to reduce the cost of my benefits or bump up my research money. Or give me a tiny bonus to subsidize my cell phone costs. Or keep the money and allow me to deduct the cost of my mobile from my taxes as a legitimate business expense. And it would clear a lovely space on my desk where I could put a vase of spring flowers -- or a box of Kleenex, to prepare for the next round of budget cuts.

She's alluding to budget cuts at a private university, by the way.

Sure, it's pretty bootleg that we can't afford phones, and if you have enough bootleg working conditions it becomes a serious problem. If anyone from the state legislature is reading this: THIS NO PHONES SITUATION IS COMPLETELY BOOTLEG. But in and of themselves, office land-lines are not indispensable for teaching or research. In contrast, graduate fellowships are, increasingly, indispensable. So yeah, there's no phone on my desk, but our entire incoming graduate cohort--of modest size, for us, but nonetheless bigger than the incoming cohorts of our peer departments--is funded, because people in the department worked to make it happen. It's about telephones, and it isn't.

A department's reputation is as fragile as a lady's, and as easily damaged by rumors, whether accurate or not. Much ado about nothing can still make young Claudios considering graduate study wary of committing to a Hero who seems less than ~~virtuous~~ solvent.

But the aptness of the analogy should make us pause over how we are tempted to react to rumor. Ought we try to hide the damage the budget cuts inflict, as if defending our maidenly virtue?

I'm inclined to agree with the aptly named, clear-sighted Krystal Ball, the 2010 congressional candidate who refused to be intimidated when opponents challenged her virtue by circulating sexual photos of her on the internet. Instead of trying to suppress the photos, she challenged the premise on which they were meant to discredit her--what she correctly identified as "the tactic of making female politicians into whores," as if the unseemliness of being both a woman and public made her (tautologically) unfit for public office.

After all, what do the rumors say? That UC is struggling economically?

Shocking.

Let's re-examine the premise that the cuts that we are continually fighting are some kind of embarrassment for the department.

Berkeley English is and has been great, but it was never because it was rolling in cash. We've always been public.

To suppose that Cal's vulnerability to cuts is embarrassing--to whisper, Telephone-style, about our telephones--is, fundamentally, to think that our publicness is embarrassing. It's worth noticing that that's a political premise. Like a woman running for public office, or the rumors themselves, we do a little too much circulating for comfort, it seems.

What has happened to our national discourse when the idea of a truly great public university seems an oxymoron? Not to put too fine a point on it: if you think Berkeley's publicness is an intellectual liability, then you are part of the problem--the national problem of that perverse and pervasive neoliberal reflex, not "always historicize" but "always privatize." By the same tautology as that applied to women running for office, the very fact that we're public is assumed to be a disqualification for serving the public. Always privatize.

The Berkeley English department challenges that premise. Cal's publicness is part of its greatness, across the university and within the English department. There were UC-wide faculty and staff furloughs last year; it was the faculty that pushed for a graduated scale that would at least partially protect lower-earning university employees from the full force of the impact--an improvement on the blunt two-tiered model first proposed by university administration. And I've repeatedly seen Berkeley faculty stand up for the labor rights of graduate instructors and of non-academic staff. Our graduate students--and our postdocs--are unionized. Are yours? Or have your tenured faculty persuaded themselves that graduate instructors are "apprentices"?

People don't come here for the money--you couldn't, really. It's an exciting place to be, partly because, frankly, we can't just buy famous scholars (ten years after they've made their marks on the field)--we have to cultivate them ourselves. Our undergraduates, largely products of the California public K-12 system, are often less polished than those at private institutions, but they're also creative and diverse and ferociously intelligent. Some of our best are community college transfers--mature, curious students who really know what they want out of an education.

Economic scarcity makes some things difficult at Cal: that's a fact. We can ill afford further cuts. I'm furious at public disinvestment in higher education, and I fear that recent drastic tuition hikes will forever alter the quality of our wonderful student body. Also, whoever it was who floated that online course evaluations idea: total fail.

But we know how to make the best of what we have, to protect the least secure among us, and to advocate for humanities research and teaching. We do it damn well, all while producing some of the best research and best-trained students in the country.

No need to whisper. No need at all.

[UPDATE: Dean Andrew Szeri's response to Deresiewicz (scroll down)]

*clarification added 5/14, in a characteristically slimy way.

Goble, Mark. "Cameo Appearances; or, When Gertrude Stein Checks into Grand Hotel." MLQ 62.2 (2001): 117-63 [pdf].

Halberstam, Jack. "You Cannot Gaga Gaga"

2011-05-13T14:12:00.001-04:00

Annoyingly, a systemwide Blogger glitch has caused yesterday's post on telephones to disappear, along with some queued material. If it doesn't reappear over the course of the day then I'll simply re-post.

[Which is to say: thanks to those who kindly linked to yesterday's post, and I'm sorry that that link is now broken. I hope it comes back.]

[As of 3pm: the link is back, but yesterday's comments have disappeared. Alas.]

Facts for graduate students

2011-05-13T13:54:00.000-04:00

When your friends take a qualifying exam, you should:

1. bake them cake

2. take them out for drinks after

3. yes, even if your own quals are the next day.

Furthermore, it is not acceptable to allow any member of your cohort to take quals without said cake or drinking, or equivalent celebratory/stress-relieving activities. Moreover, it must not be incumbent on the examinee to arrange the festivities.

This has been Collegiality 1-0-frickin'-1.

Against Innovation

2011-05-10T12:51:00.000-04:00

File it under "things that started out as a joke and became increasingly awesome." My panel "Against Innovation," with Stephen Ross and Joel Burges, was accepted for MSA 13. Hurray!

Modernist studies continues to place stress on “making it new,” borrowing from modernism’s own rhetorics, as MSA 13’s theme, “Structures of Innovation,” suggests. The idea of innovation, like that of “modernism” itself, is inherently complex, always implying a temporal forward motion often freighted with underexamined ethical and epistemological implications. Indeed, as Jed Rasula has recently shown in the pages of Modernism/modernity, the notion of newness in modernism was as multifarious as it was pervasive, standing in as a term of aesthetic approval or as a formal description as often as it made a historical claim. This panel therefore seeks to illuminate the temporal structures of modernism and its afterlives that operate “against innovation”: repetition, queer time, haunting, and obsolescence.

Natalia Cecire’s paper, “Repeating Stein,” considers the ways in which repetition troubles the very notion of “formal innovation.” Via Gertrude Stein’s “continuous present,” Cecire examines repetition’s dual role as a marker of the Freudian death drive and a hallmark of the “formal innovation” of the avant-garde. Jennifer Fleissner and Lee Edelman read repetition as figuring, respectively, the compulsive futurity of a female modernism (suggested by the typist’s “automatic hand”) and a queer refusal of “reproductive futurism”—that which propels modernity forward and that which refuses futurity altogether. Questioning the professional reproductive futurism of modernist studies, Cecire models a reading “against innovation” that seeks to illuminate the ethical and epistemological investments in temporality that continue to shape our understanding of modernism.

Stephen Ross takes up the structure of return by way of a metacritical consideration of historical studies of spiritualism and the occult in his talk “The Haunting of Modernist Studies.” For modernism and its critics alike, he argues, what is proclaimed as new not only encodes key dimensions of the immediate past, but indeed does so in precisely those terms most clearly identified with the dynamics of haunting. Taking studies of spiritualism and the occult as his case study, Ross argues that the historical-materialist turn in modernist studies has powerfully revived the field of modernist studies—but in doing so continually also raises the ghost of the old “high” modernist studies with which, like a mourner, the field cannot bear to part. The result, he suggests, is a melancholic modernism with which the field must engage if it is to sustain its resurgent impetus.

In “The Old-Fashioned Mr. Anderson,” Joel Burges examines a modernist aesthetic that, when dislodged from the historical time of modernism, turns “making it new” into making it obsolete. Wes Anderson’s stop-motion animated film Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009), Burges argues, pits itself against innovation by embracing technological obsolescence as an aesthetic horizon for cinema, wagering on an analog modernity in a media moment in which the “digital revolution” is the presumed future of film. In doing so, Anderson pays homage to two self-consciously innovative films from the modernist era, one the product of Hollywood, the other of the international cinematic avant-garde: King Kong (1933) and Le Roman de Renard (1929-1931; 1941). Fantastic Mr. Fox thus insists that that the obsolete rather than the innovative, is now the privileged temporal and historical horizon of art in the present.

See you in Buffalo!

2011-05-07T11:04:00.000-04:00

Important fact: in addition to the Animals Dressed as Other Animals Tumblr, there is an Animals with Stuffed Animals Tumblr. The former is more uncanny, the latter cuter, but obviously the two are of a piece. In the latter the animal confronts the simulacral animal; in the former the animal wears it.

Rough draft

2011-05-04T20:28:00.000-04:00

It strikes me that Tuesday's post is actually just an expansion of a series of tweets and retweets. This blog is called Works Cited, so in the interests of citation, here is, as it were, the rough draft:

Semirelatedly, apparently Google has just renamed its search group the "knowledge" group.

This is completely hilarious.

2011-05-04T13:06:00.000-04:00

Posted without comment.

Via @wynkenhimself.

The visible hand

2011-05-03T11:07:00.000-04:00

Things on the internet are not made by magic; they're created by human labor. Who pays for that labor, and to what ends? Often, private corporations like Google pay for it. Wherefore?

Siva Vaidhyanathan's recent piece in the Chronicle argues that "Our uncritical dependence on Google is the result of an elaborate political fraud. Google has deftly capitalized on a decades-long tradition of creating 'public failure,'" which is to say, setting public projects up to fail so that private interests can swoop in and save us from our "broken" public sector:

Public failure may occur when the public sector has been intentionally dismantled, degraded, or underfinanced while expectations for its performance remain high. [...]

In such circumstances, the failure of public institutions gives rise to the circular logic that dominates political debate. Public institutions can fail; public institutions need tax revenue; therefore we must reduce the support for public institutions. The resulting failures then supply more anecdotes supporting the view that public institutions fail by design rather than by political choice.

[...]

Google officials, promoting their effort to scan millions of books purchased with public money [e.g. University of California, University of Michigan --N.C.] and donated by shortsighted universities, claimed they were trying to preserve libraries and perform an essential public service—just the sort of service that our great university libraries could have been working toward had they been allowed to succeed. Publicly supported institutions fail, so we leap into the arms of the private actor, ready to believe its sweet nothings.

Google Books is certainly read by most as a sort of public service that happens to be provided by a private corporation. Remember when the Bibliothèque Nationale de France resisted Google's digitization offers, only to later concede that they lacked funds to carry out their digitization project (the excellent Gallica) on their own? "La BNF se laisse séduire par Google," Le Figaro reported, using the language of sexual danger that Vaidhyanathan picks up in his Chronicle piece.

I'm largely persuaded by Vaidhyanathan's argument, although the persistence of this language of seduction (all literary critics know what comes next: betrayal) probably warrants further cogitation.

That ~~Lovelace~~ Google has practically unlimited funds to pour into whatever it wants is widely taken for granted, and it's well known as a place that is generous with said funds, especially with its workers. But despite its much-touted mission of non-evil (evil is such a strong word, isn't it?) its practices seem increasingly disturbing, including when it comes to digitization. Via Ryan Shaw, I recently came across the bizarre narrative of Andrew Norman Wilson, who says he was fired from a Google contract after inquiring into, and trying to document, the working conditions of "ScanOps":

They scan books, page by page, for Google Book Search. The workers wearing yellow badges are not allowed any of the privileges that I was allowed – ride the Google bikes, take the Google luxury limo shuttles home, eat free gourmet Google meals, attend Authors@Google talks and receive free, signed copies of the author’s books, or set foot anywhere else on campus except for the building they work in. They also are not given backpacks, mobile devices, thumb drives, or any chance for social interaction with any other Google employees. Most Google employees don’t know about the yellow badge class. Their building, 3.14159~, was next to mine, and I used to see them leave everyday at precisely 2:15 PM, like a bell just rang, telling the workers to leave the factory. Their shift starts at 4 am.

They are not elves; I repeat, not elves. Today Glenn Fleishman tweeted the picture below (via @GreatDismal):

hand spotted in a Google Book by Glenn Fleishman

Whose hand is this?

The image reminded me of Caleb Crain's post on encountering the finger of a Google technician in a translation of a Kant essay. As he wrote in a review of Adrian Johns's recent book on copyright and piracy,

... Kant didn't think that an author could mount a strong legal case against piracy based on property rights in words. After all, even after pirates copied an author's words, the author himself still had them. It was better for an author to argue that his book was not an object but an exercise of his powers which "he can concede, it is true, to others, but never alienate". In other words, Kant explained - in a passage partly obscured by the fingers of the Google technician who turned the pages in the scanner - a pirated book was not to be understood as property that had been stolen; it was rather a speech act that had been compromised. The business arrangement that an author made with an editor might make it look as if words could be traded like watches or pork bellies, but it just wasn't so. Could there be a fitter representation of copyright's contemporary plight than the fingers of a Google technician obscuring Kant's defence of writer's rights? An author's consent, Kant cautions in a footnote, "can by no means be presumed because he has already given it exclusively to another", yet Google is struggling to effect exactly this sort of transfer of consent today, as it attempts to win approval for a legal settlement in the United States that will allow it to republish works whose copyright owners have not come forward. I couldn't have read Kant's essay so easily without the Google technician's labour - in fact, without Google, I might not have got around to reading it at all - but her fingers were nonetheless in the way. The internet's attitude toward Kant's words is ambiguous, combining respect, appropriation, liberation and accidental vandalism.

hand spotted by Caleb Crain

This scan is particularly ghostly, the hand covered over with a second hand reasserting the text of the Kant translation.

The hand--always the synecdoche for the worker (the mediator between the head and the hand, we learn in Metropolis, must be the heart)--is inserted literally into our view of the text, disrupting for a moment our sense that Google Books are, quite simply, books that have been "put online," as if books themselves could simply leap media and enter a disembodied realm. The intrusion of the hand shows us that these are photographs (of a sort) and that someone must have made them.

In an inversion of our usual intuition that images are less mediated than text, these hands make us realize that Google Books made us feel as though digital texts were unmediated--were the books themselves. In contrast, the awareness that the digital object is an OCRed image of text--a photograph of its own scene of production, complete with visual evidence of the hand that wrought it--forces us to acknowledge the strange backwards ekphrasis (text to image to fallen, "corrupted" text--OCR is a silent diplomatic edition) in a Google Book, the labor by which it was created and uploaded, and the person who labored, now knowable only through the operative, synecdochal appendages that both create and corrupt the digital object.

This is not to argue for some kind of metaphysics of book presence wherein only a paper book is a real book, not haunted by ghostly disembodied hands. Our tendency to efface the digital laborer, as well as the work of editors, designers, etc., is precisely what enables the widespread belief that e-books are necessarily cheaper to produce than paper books, as if the cost of the book lay in the printing. At least with the heft of paper one is reminded that there was, somewhere, a scene of labor. A Google Book effaces the medium of the medium, until a latex-draped finger appears before us, as if to reassert the tactile element always running beneath the digital.

Obviously, this is a Blogger blog, i.e. run on Google resources.
More on GB hand scans:

The Art of Google Books Tumblr

Rebekah Higgitt

BoingBoing, 2009
Sydney Morning Herald, 2007
Wired, 2007--basically a link to Techcrunch
Dan Cohen, 2006, linked by Philipp Lenssen and Barry Schwartz

Best minds

2011-05-02T19:02:00.000-04:00

I've seen this Businessweek article circulated a lot recently. The quotable quotation with which it's inevitably accompanied is the following:

"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads," he says. "That sucks."

It seems to me that there's something significant about the fact that it's a citation of Ginsberg. There's an implicit juxtaposition of the two fates, thinking about how to make people click ads and being destroyed by madness, that manages to draw power from the unlikeness of the two terms, while at the same time suggesting a certain commensurability: there is a certain madness to spending all your time trying to get people to click ads. This is not a poetic Howl; it's a Businessweek article--not a howl, in short, but a tweet. The many retweets, however, seem to suggest that it's what we've got.

What, indeed, are the best minds of my generation up to? Implicit in the very question is a nostalgia for a time when they read poetry.

2011-04-25T13:45:00.000-04:00

Many thanks to Andrew Sullivan at The Daily Beast and Ta-Nehisi Coates at The Atlantic blogs for linking to my recent editor's post over on Arcade. All no doubt due to the Bady Bump, for which Aaron, too, is due thanks.

I hope the extra exposure leads more academics to consider finding ways to think in public.

[Update 5/23: Thanks, also, to BookForum.]

Also: I must admit to feeling a little smug about getting a Marianne Moore line into circulation outside its usual territory. The 1924 version of "Poetry" forever!!

2011-04-25T08:42:00.000-04:00

This week is going to be--I believe the term is--out of control.

2011-04-22T14:11:00.000-04:00

The Flapper [serial]. Chicago: Flapper Pub. Co., 1922. E Pam #7092, v.1 no.4 Library has: v.1 no.1, 3-4, 6-7.

"What the FLAPPER stands for: short skirts, rolled sox, bobbed hair, powder and rouge, no corsets, one-piece bathing suits, deportation of reformers, non-enforcement of Blue Laws, no censorship of movies, stage or the press, vacations with full pay, no chaperons, attractive clothes, the inalienable right to make dates, good times, [and] honor between both sexes." F, N, P, PA

There are few things as delightful as a good women's history collection.

How Public Like a Frog

2011-04-20T14:46:00.000-04:00

Over at the Arcade Editors' Blog, I've just posted some more of my usual ramblings about academic blogging. I may enlarge on the issues raised in the final paragraph at a later date, since they relate to teaching and some particular problems I want to solve.

2011-04-17T22:54:00.000-04:00

I want to applaud UCLA Chancellor Gene Block's recent LA Times piece, which points out that the very politicians who are currently blandly countenancing massive cuts to California's Master Plan for higher education have gotten where they are now in part on the strength of their California public educations.

And what of the legislators who have refused Californians the right to decide whether they want to face such a scenario? Perhaps they will excuse me, but I detect a certain irony in their posture. A majority of them graduated from California's public universities and colleges, and greatly benefited from the high-quality, low-cost education they received.

Overall, two-thirds of the Assembly and Senate members attended a community college, Cal State or UC, many of them two or three of these institutions. These leaders, in other words, built their careers in public service upon the foundation of the state's esteemed Master Plan for Higher Education — now in tatters — that assured an education to every qualified student in California. Of the 42 Republicans in the Legislature — none of whom has yet to provide one of the two GOP votes needed in each chamber to put the tax extension on the ballot — 29 are products of the state's higher education system. They include the Senate and Assembly minority leaders — who attended Los Angeles Valley College and Fresno State, respectively — as well as the vice chairman of the Assembly's Higher Education Committee, who went to UC Irvine.

Those who once benefited from California's excellent, low-cost public higher ed system are hypocrites and worse if they won't maintain that system for today's qualified California students.

2011-04-15T17:35:00.000-04:00

our eyes squinched up like bats

Hass, Robert. Sun Under Wood. New York: HarperCollins, 1998. 4.

Holloway Sampler: Environment, Domestic Labor, and Poetic Form (4/26)

2011-04-14T14:45:00.000-04:00

My fellow Fellows, Brendan Prawdzik and Jessica Fisher, and I will be presenting new work on April 26, 4-5:30 pm, 300 Wheeler ("the media room"). Special thanks to Brendan for making the flier and telling me I didn't have to wander around Wheeler posting them.

Natalia Cecire, “Sentimental Spaces: On Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s Nest”

Brendan M. Prawdzik, “Needlework, Gardening, & the Eco-Historical Imagination of Marvell’s Upon Appleton House”

Jessica Fisher, Poems from her forthcoming book, Inmost

Should be a good time. Plus, free food.

2011-04-14T10:20:00.000-04:00

"We need a vocabulary for," "we need terms for thinking through," "we need an ecology of," "we need an aesthetics/ethics/epistemology of."

I can see why one makes this gesture. But one is tempted to answer: If we need it, then make it. I propose this vocabulary for, I propose these terms for thinking through, etc.

It's easier said than done. But then, that's why it's more often said than done.

And if we need it, then we should get it, no?

Housekeeping

2011-04-13T14:08:00.000-04:00

I just spent ten minutes tidying up the links at right, adding a new section on digital publishing and archives. I think I may be missing a few things, but that's how it goes. I still can't bring myself to effect the inevitable migration to Wordpress, for some reason.

In other news, I'll be making a quick research trip to Duke next month to avail myself of their delightful women's history collections. Folks in the area, anything I should Absolutely Not Miss?

2011-04-09T22:59:00.000-04:00

Spotted on College Ave. the other evening. Natural light, blurry cell phone cam.

"TT" stands for "tenure-track," right?

I'll dig with it?

2011-04-08T16:07:00.000-04:00

I already mentioned it on Twitter, but I'd just like to make another plug for Bethany Nowviskie's great post on data mining and gender, "What Do Girls Dig?"

I was actually slightly shocked to see the estimable Brett Bobley tweet that the organizers of Digging into Data had noticed the gender imbalance (of two women out of a total of thirty-three speakers!) and were scratching their heads over it.

Really? Not that keeping track of these things is Brett's full-time job, but didn't we just have this conversation about the VIDA stats? Aren't there standard, time-tested answers to these questions of which all people who care about equity are aware? Maybe I'm projecting, but I felt as though the many responses Brett received on Twitter included a strong subtext of "duh"--and rightly.

Tanya Clement's comment that highly educated, capable women often play important but disempowered roles in DH projects is spot on; as Brett writes, "The speakers are the project PIs." No kidding! As Katha Pollitt recently wrote in response to the VIDA stats (you know, that conversation we just had), "Women are often managing editors, a position with lots of work and not much power."

There are a lot of factors that contribute to these circumstances, as Bethany notes:

I'm sure that gender imbalance in this area has little to do with the "Digging into Data" process and more with broader issues, going all the way back (yes, that chestnut) to STEM education for girls in the public schools -- but mostly, I suspect, it is about the number of female academics both qualified and inclined to do this work, and who find themselves both at a stage of their careers and possessed of adequate collaborative networks to support their applications for such grants.

But to me, her most interesting observation was about the gendered language with which data-mining itself is often presented.

Although it wasn't really what I was going for, I respect my pals' advocacy, highlighted above, for funders' launching of an aggressive campaign to identify and mentor more women applicants for the "Digging into Data" program. And clearly there's institutional work to be done on the level of our schools, colleges, and universities. But personally, I feel less strongly about both of those things than I do about the need for the whole DH community to be as thoughtful as possible about the way we describe this kind of work -- the language we use.

I've heard three kinds of responses from female colleagues and students about the "Digging into Data Challenge." One (the rarest) is simple enthusiasm -- though it's interesting that presumably few women applied and none of their projects were compelling enough to fund. Another is trepidation: "Is this too hard-core? Involving too much math or statistical analysis I never learned? Do I understand the scholarly possibilities and have the support network I'd need?" In other words: this is a challenge. Am I competitive? (in every sense of that word).

As Micah Vandegrift commented on the post, "mining" is very much a gendered occupation! Add in the fact that the "digging into data challenge" sounds like some kind of extreme sport and you have a very odd rhetoric for scholarship.

The title of this post is of course a reference to Seamus Heaney's ode to masculine labor, "Digging." (Yes, I was forced to study this poem in high school. Mr. Lilley, you were cool, but no love for this one.)

The poem's speaker contemplates the pen that "rests[] snug as a gun" in his hand, contrasting it with the spades that his father and grandfather wielded in their work. There's a moment of anxiety as the speaker realizes, "I’ve no spade to follow men like them," before remembering that he has his pen. "I'll dig with it."

If you think you can hear Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar gently inquiring, "Is the pen a metaphorical penis?," Heaney pretty much hits you over the head with the answer, and, spoiler, it is "yes." The PIs (the speakers, the authors, the creators...) were all male? You don't say.

"By God, the old man could handle a spade./ Just like his old man." Seriously.

I'm on the fence about issuing the standard disclaimer about the good intentions and real efforts of Brett and the NEH to make equity a priority. This is a sort of cop-out solution, with my mini-sort-of-disclaimer here. Of course they are well intentioned and they do make real efforts. The NEH has done a lot to support digital humanities, and I'm thinking of them as the government prepares to shut down. This is not in any sense a personal criticism. But, institutionally speaking, two women speakers out of thirty-three is manifestly absurd, and having no notion about how to address it is also seriously odd. I find it disheartening that these disclaimers are still obligatory, because this is 2011, and we are long past the point where having good intentions but not good results yet is okay.

2011-04-04T18:55:00.000-04:00

Speaking of periodization and time, here's a corporate interpretation thereof.

"Fashion flies away, style remains. Mexx. Style is Timeless."

Photo taken in downtown Vancouver with my trusty old-school cell phone. Notice the artful glare on the window.

The slogan is an eerily apt gloss on the way we talk about literary aesthetics now. What's the difference between a "fashion" ("Amygism"?) and a style ("period style"; "avant-garde")? "Fashion" is understood as, by definition, arbitrary and nonhistorical (that is, not consequential for history), even though recent modernist studies have paid a lot of attention to fashion (the clothing kind). Style, on the other hand, is something that influences what will come after, and therefore persists through history.

That's not, of course, to say that it's "timeless" (or, as the sign would have it, "Timeless"). For literary critics, style is historical; for Mexx, style transcends time and counteracts its force. Message: buy our clothes; you will never need to get rid of them because they transcend time.

YUP. Timeless.

2011-04-02T19:14:00.000-04:00

I wrote briefly about my ACLA seminar on periodization yesterday over at my course blog (part of my campaign to make it clearer to students what it is that I do all day). Today's papers by Claire Bowen, Colin Gillis, Nathan Suhr-Sytsma, and Angela Naimou were excellent. Claire's paper in particular responded to some of the points raised in yesterday's session, particularly the papers by Jordan Zweck and myself, and was therefore of great interest to me. Claire provocatively asked why the term "generation" becomes pervasive in the twentieth century, pointing to patterns in that terminology and the tendency of poets of the twentieth century to begin to appropriate the voice of a generation. As with yesterday's session, we were sorry to end the discussion.

Let me go on record with my belief that this seminar format works very well.

2011-03-31T23:45:00.000-04:00

Well, the last week was nuts and the next week promises to be nuts as well, but in short: my laptop is back in business, that MLA panel proposal is in, and I'm at ACLA. Looking forward tomorrow's seminar.

Criticism, creation, enthusiasm

2011-03-23T15:27:00.000-04:00

I have to return to the subject of fans and criticism for a moment, especially after the deep irony of the minor Eyresses incident. (Poor Roberta C. Holloway, she never signed up for any of it.) There really is something utterly appropriate about being read absolutely backwards on the internet. As the Gregory Brothers (remember Autotune the News?) would say, "everything sounds better."

In a journal--say, in Critical Inquiry's occasional article-response-response pairings--one likes to see an absolutely cool, faintly patronizing takedown of the misreader, one that gently suggests that the misreader has quite understandably made an error in her or his translation of the Latin -- yes, that would explain such a tragic misunderstanding. Every once in a while you might get a puerile yet awesome lashing out, like Michael Taussig's response [pdf, Wiley paywall] to Martin Jay's review [ditto] of Mimesis and Alterity, but the principle is the same. The misreader has transgressed.

In scholarship, it makes sense that a baseline level of comprehension is expected. Scholarship is usually quite sincere about the idea of communication. But it seems to me that that's also why it so rarely has room for understanding the critical power of misreading.

And that brings me to Dana Vachon's recent, amazing essay "Arms So Freezy: Rebecca Black's 'Friday' as Radical Text." The opening gives you an idea of the piece's brilliance:

Rebecca Black wakes somewhat too perfectly in the early scenes of her viral video, "Friday." Her eyes open exactly as the clock beside her bed flashes seven. She wears full make-up. Rare for a teen, she isn’t tired, longs not for any receding dreams.

Her cultural debt is less to Molly Ringwald in Sixteen Candles than Evie Vicki the robot girl from Small Wonder, we realize, as in a voice controlled by Auto-Tune she enumerates the banalities of an anti-existence: “Gotta be fresh, gotta go downstairs, gotta have my bowl, gotta have cereal… gotta get down to the bus stop.”

She offers the camera a hostage's smile, forced, false. Her smoky eyes suggest chaos witnessed: tear gas, rock missiles and gasoline flames. They paint her as a refugee of a teen culture whose capacity for real subversion was bludgeoned away somewhere between the atrocities of Kent State and those of the 1968 Democratic Convention, the start of a creeping zombification that would see youthful dissent packaged and sold alongside Pez and Doritos.

The piece is, of course, a travesty. It's a travesty of everything the "Friday" video is about (or isn't about), a reading thoroughly against the grain, a recuperation of the unrecuperable. In one fell swoop, Vachon parodies both Black's video and the serious pop culture criticism that generates miles of (you said it) fan criticism, and the best part is the glorious persuasiveness of it all, the thickness of the description, the way it forces you to concede that, after all, Vachon does have a point, and "Friday" really can be read as a radical text, which either tells you something terrible about criticism or something perfectly wonderful.

Vachon's piece isn't criticism, not exactly. Phil Nel's post is closer to what we'd normally call criticism. But as Phil rightly notes, Vachon's piece puts his to shame. It's a performance. It's the article's exuberance, its fearlessness, its sheer creativity that makes it so thoroughly exceed its abject object of study and become a little internet masterpiece in its own right. It commits to the project.

It's worth noting that the brilliance of the creation depends in part on the meagerness of the materials with which Vachon has to work. It's not so much that the hordes of fans have terrible taste and that's why they're all talking about Rebecca Black (or the news, or Céline Dion, harbinger of the end of taste). You autotune something banal, corporate, and content-free, like the news, not Bach's B minor mass. It gives you space to play, to create. That's why the criticism of enthusiasm need not be a form of appreciation. In this case, in the remix/appropriation logic of the internet, it's more like transfiguration. Travesty and love are intertwined in the criticism of enthusiasm. As is right and proper.

[related]

Jay, Martin. "Unsympathetic Magic." Rev. of Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses by Michael Taussig. Visual Anthropology Review 9.2 (1993): 79-82.

Taussig, Michael. "Michael Taussig Replies to Martin Jay." Visual Anthropology Review 10.1 (1994): 154.

Wilson, Carl. Celine Dion's "Let's Talk about Love": A Journey to the End of Taste. New York: Continuum, 2007. Print.

2011-03-23T13:42:00.000-04:00

Spotted on a bulletin board on the first floor of Wheeler Hall this morning:

Rankine, Claudia. Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. St. Paul, MN: Graywolf, 2004. Print.

2011-03-22T14:21:00.000-04:00

Sigh. Away from the internets for a day and I find that my recent response to Roland was construed exactly backwards by a writer for Eyresses.

Alas, writing is an instance of partible personhood, and folks will construe it as they will. I suppose I could ask that the poster re-read, but it would be hypocritical, I think, to contest her creative reappropriation of my words!

2011-03-22T14:04:00.000-04:00

My Macbook is in the shop after acting up in some truly annoying ways. I don't think the problem is serious (the inverter or--I hope--the inverter cable), but in the meantime I am writing things in longhand. It's very, very strange. I usually write using a combination of handwritten notes (usually involving diagrams and sketches and little arrows here and there), typed notes in TextEdit (often quotations and freewriting), and a main document in Word. Right now I'm really missing those poorly labeled .txt files sitting on my desktop.

Anyway, replying to email and such is going to be spotty for a while.

The criticism of enthusiasm

2011-03-21T16:51:00.000-04:00

[Update | Greetings, visitors from Eyresses. Thanks for clicking through; I hope you'll read what I've actually written. I'd love it if you also clicked through to Roland Greene's post, to which this is a response.]

* * * * *

This is a response to Roland Greene's post "The Social Role of the Critic," cross-posted from the comment thread at Arcade.

* * * * *

Roland writes:

The fact that so many blogs are produced by enthusiasts is a symptom; critics are not enthusiasts.

This is perhaps the central point that fan studies would contest. One can have reservations about fan studies, but I think there's something to be said for the notion that there can be a meaningfully critical criticism of enthusiasm, what Catharine Stimpson long ago called "reading for love." I've heard Roland argue elsewhere that perhaps close reading ought to be rethought vis-à-vis other modes of critical reading, like translation. I could imagine this argument compassing creative responses of greater or lesser craft as well, as scholars like Julie Levin Russo have suggested, most recently at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference a few weeks ago.*

It is probably not an accident that so much of the critical fan culture that inspires so much scorn is driven by women (think Eyresses or Gaga Stigmata). Feminine reading is by definition uncritical reading, as we see in that scene in Nana (1880) in which Nana, mass culture in the flesh, reads a naturalist novel about a character very much like herself and doesn't "get it." But as theorists of children's literature have pointed out, sometimes enthusiasm is only made possible by a radical imaginative rereading--or rewriting--of the text that does indeed tell us something about literature that's different from what literature tells us about itself. To return to Nana, for example, to be a reader gendered "feminine" is to constantly love literature only insofar as one can critically reread or, indeed, rewrite the elements that figure you, the reader, as, oxymoronically, a non-reader, one who is incapable of reading critically or of "getting it."

The question that Arcade itself, with its three rubrics of "Conversations," "Transactions," and "Publications," raises is what an e-journal is besides a blog, and what a blog is besides an e-journal. Is the front page of Arcade simply a continuum from the raw to the cooked? Do these rubrics differ in degree or in kind?

As my colleague Monica Soare has posed the question, what besides gender and class is the difference between the gendered and classed terms of "enthusiasm" and "connoiseurship"?

*Naturally I heard of this through the high-pitched, fluttering, terrifyingly feminine interface with mass culture known as Twitter, where a bad music video performed by a thirteen-year-old girl has been trending for a week, above several quite major news events, largely on the strength of an outpouring of scorn that was, oddly, directed specifically at the female child in question, rather than at any of the many adults actually responsible for the video.

Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide. Bloomington: U of Indiana P, 1983. Print.

Stimpson, Catharine R. "Reading for Love: Canons, Paracanons, and Whistling Jo March." New Literary History 21.4 (Autumn 1990) 957-976. JSTOR. Web. 21 March 2011.

2011-03-18T15:01:00.000-04:00

At a conference in Orono, in 1996, I heard Robert Von Hallberg disagree with Ann Charters about Langston Hughes' poems, arguing that Hughes' poetic achievement may be overstated. Her response: "The poems weren't written for you." In other words, the audience Hughes imagined did not include white literature professors, but a largely uneducated urban black one. In other words, poems written for such an audience can't be compared to those written for an audience imagined by, say, T.S. Eliot, according to the same critical criteria. Von Hallberg was right to counter: "That's not a defensible intellectual position." In other words, you can't promote the aesthetic value of one work over another based on exceptional reasoning; for one thing, it's condescending to the poet and the poems. Yet she wasn't wrong: people value the poems, regardless. The poems make their impact outside the arena of responsible evaluative criticism.
--Joshua Weiner

Many poets and critics have responded to Claudia Rankine's call for statements on poetry and race. Highly recommended. Read them here.

Staying informed: a bridge too far

2011-03-16T14:19:00.000-04:00

Naomi Schaefer Riley mentions Philip Nel's "what do professors do all day?" blog series in her recent Chronicle article. And again I ask myself: why do I ever read the Chronicle?

I am willing to believe that children’s literature is a legitimate field of study. But the idea that in order to teach Kansas State undergraduates about it effectively, one needs to “keep up with the literature” seems to me a bridge too far. And I bet you it’s a bridge too far for many state legislators as well.

Staying abreast of the field is "a bridge too far"? What?