Downgrading

In case you were wondering whether the new UCB library catalogue, OskiCat,* could interface with Socrates (Stanford's catalogue) the way that our old catalogue, Pathfinder, could, the answer is no.

Argh.


*Most undignified name ever.

Infuriating.

Cathy Davidson on new tools to save scholarly publishing in a digital era. This is smart.

"Open access" doesn't matter if there is no one who wants to "access" what is "open." In other words, our demand for information that is free has to be accompanied by a responsibility to teach/support/develop a readership vitally interested in that information. If learning and curiosity are impoverished, who cares if our archives are lock-box or open? Why poor millions and millions into digital projects if there is no public excited to take advantage of such archives? Technology and information cannot be divorced from learning and the imperative to teach far and wide, beyond a handful of specialized scholars. We need "Citizen Scholars." And we need "Citizen Educators" for the new information technologies or why bother?

Look for the fun surprise at the end!

Related:

*A Stanford study suggests that writing on the web makes you a better writer. Writing more makes you better at writing -- who knew? (Chronicle)

*Pedagogical applications of Twitter (Washington Post)

A response to Aaron Bady

Apropos of a conversation here.

Aaron,

I think what I keep taking exception to (and I felt this way about your Double Indemnity post as well) is just this repeated methodological gesture: "Yesyes, it's misogynistic, but that's not what's important here."

I can understand why one would make this gesture as a kind of self-regulation, if one is explicitly guarding against one's own critical tendencies. In a sense I'm criticizing you for doing a thing you never meant to do. But you keep seeming to mean to do it, and I think you should consider trying to put an end to that.

Here 'tis: You tend not to represent these moves as self-regulation; instead they seem to stage interventions in someone else's reductive reading. It's staged not as self-regulation but as intellectual correction: "Here I am to tell you why your reading is simplistic."

The reason this doesn't sit well with me is not personal but positional. This self-regulation-posing-as-intervention seems to misrepresent a position of privilege as critical sophistication, even objectivity. Because the misogyny is not directed at you, you get to say that it's not the important thing about the movie, and this gets turned into a critical virtue.

As a feminist critic who never saw the man-child as a remotely viable alternative to father-knows-best (because they are equally misogynistic), I cannot and will not say that misogyny is not the important thing. These are not abstractions to me, and I do not think it would amount to better criticism to proceed as if they were.

You say that these positions are differently misogynistic, and that the difference is illuminating. You are right about that as far as it goes. I've been arguing that it nonetheless doesn't go very far, because, as you have readily pointed out, these internal dynamics of an oppressive system are not explored in a way that can even countenance, much less suggest a path toward, a genuine refusal of that system. I don't see where it gets us to applaud male directors for making visible contradictions that feminists -- and not just academic feminists -- articulated, raised consciousness about, and fought to ameliorate thirty years ago. It's like applauding Mark Twain for suggesting in Huckleberry Finn that there are some contradictions in slavery. (I certainly don't want to dismiss HF in general, but on political grounds it's distinctly too little, too late.)

I agree, of course, that "Judd Apatow is sexist, sexism Judd Apatow, -- that is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know" would be an unenlightening reading. I also think the dream-work model of ideology is productive. Your ideas, as they say, are intriguing to me, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter blog.* Where I'm getting caught up is the moment when it seems to translate into a criticism that wants to be both political and detached, where detachment appears to be enabled primarily by privilege. I'm not sure it's possible; I'm even less sure that it's desirable.

*(Actually, I already do.)

Another one for the "my alma mater sometimes embarrasses me" files: Twitterature.

Admittedly, I am primarily interested in Twitter because of its potential pedagogical applications.

Update: The Chronicle has more.

(Via HUP. Yes, Twitter.)

A simian nativity

I go into the Valley Life Sciences Building quite often to use the biology library, which is filled with treasures. Outside the library is an exhibit space, where I once heard a couple of eight-year-olds disdainfully denying the aura of a mere cast of a Tyrannosaurus rex skull. I quote: "That's fake." (It was excellent.)

Owing to the Darwin bicentennial, I think, there is currently an exhibit on evolution in that space. As the photograph above indicates, it is a rather odd arrangement. Various primate skeletons (one of them human) crowd around a grave-manger where lie casts of Australopithicus afarensis bones, as if to pay tribute to the newborn/long dead missing link. The chimpanzee skeleton crouches like a sheep; a gracile ape (I don't remember the name) hovers overhead like an angel -- or like a crucified, er, ape.

Joining the great sugar-cookie question of our time:

Time scales

Giles Slade's Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America offers a history of planned obsolescence.

Made to Break is a history of twentieth-century technology as seen through the prism of obsolescence. America invented everything that is now disposable, Giles Slade tells us, and he explains how disposability was in fact a necessary condition for America's rejection of tradition and our acceptance of change and impermanence.

I recognize the irony of thinking this just after joining Twitter, which is perhaps the consummate purveyor of Benjaminian information, "[t]he prime requirement [of which] is that it appear 'understandable in itself'" (89). But it seems to me that the same desire for innovation as such characterizes contemporary scholarship: forward-thinking yet wasteful. Scholars keep hoping for the newest "killer app" -- indeed, we keep hoping to publish it ourselves (nobody wants to be doing ordinary science; everybody wants to be Einstein). And yet old theoretical ideas are still productive. I'm not talking about theory (TM) so much as scholarship per se. I just finished reading Carolyn Dinshaw's Getting Medieval, which is ten years old and yet full of ideas that were new to me, and not only new but theoretically rich. We will certainly continue to teach Foucault and Barthes, but will we teach Dinshaw and Halperin? Perhaps this is just griping over canonicity, and perhaps my view of this is skewed by my position as a young(ish) scholar. But it seems, you know, wasteful to produce so much knowledge at what seems like a fairly pressured pace. I remember a professor talking about the time she spent reading George Saintsbury's History of English Prosody. "I don't know why I thought I had time to do that," she said, laughing. But: oughtn't she have that time?

One is tempted to argue for a "slow scholarship" movement parallel to "slow food." Like slow food, it would be problematic. It would require the revaluation of time (difficult), and if there ever was a golden age of slow scholarship it probably rested on the unpaid or underpaid labor of women and people of color, as in the case of food. What's odd is that in contrast to publish (something very innovative)-or-perish, the dissemination of literary-critical ideas through popular culture, and even in teaching, seems quite slow. Witness high schools: still New Critical and proud. And yet it is precisely mass culture that is (alleged to be) the culture of planned obsolescence. From a mass-cultural perspective, literary criticism itself is outdated. Or as Carolyn Dinshaw says of her historical period in particular, "This American present abjects the medieval -- in such manifestations as Gregorian chants -- as irrelevant, by definition lifeless and inaccessible" (177). What Dinshaw is pointing out is a conflation between the ideas of "old" and "obsolete." Perhaps what is at issue is not fast or slow but a multiplicity of time-scales, as Mark McGurl suggests, that are not (cannot be?) aligned.

Lorine Niedecker writes: "I must possess myself, get back into pure duration" (28).

Indeed.



(Via Harvard UP.)

Benjamin, Walter. "The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov." Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken, 1968. I am aware of problems with these translations.

Dinshaw, Carolyn. Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern. Durham: Duke UP, 2009.

Niedecker, Lorine. Collected Works. Ed. Jenny Penberthy. Berkeley: U of California P, 2002.

Every single university press is currently tweeting the Chronicle's coverage of AAUP. That's old news, Columbia UP!

Paul Muldoon on Stephen Colbert

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Paul Muldoon
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Stephen Colbert in Iraq

In the interview Colbert mentions that he has also interviewed Pinsky. I await Ron Silliman's commentary on that score.

Skg's Juneteenth post links to an unbelievably great letter from an ex-slave, Jourdan Anderson, to his former master, responding to an offer to return to the plantation as a worker (paid, evidently).

The sarcasm is priceless:

I got your letter and was glad to find you had not forgotten Jourdon, and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again, promising to do better for me than anybody else can. I have often felt uneasy about you. I thought the Yankees would have hung you long before this for harboring Rebs they found at your house. I suppose they never heard about your going to Col. Martin's to kill the Union soldier that was left by his company in their stable. Although you shot at me twice before I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are still living.

I highly recommend reading the whole letter.

Black Oak Books

Black Oak Books closed its store on May 31. (They say that they are still taking orders online!) Alas and woe: it had the best used math section in Berkeley, and it was the only place I could find a copy of Hope Leslie (1827) when I was studying for my qualifying exam.

Berkeley is still a good book town, what with Moe's, Pegasus, University Press Books,* the tiny-but-cute Analog Books on Euclid, the endearingly weird Other Change of Hobbit, and of course Small Press Distribution. Even Shakespeare & Co. is a lot better than it used to be. But Cody's-that-was is still an empty shell on Telegraph, and what kind of vulture would move in, anyway?

Nigel Beale argues that between rents and states' decisions not to tax Amazon orders, most independent bookstores are doomed, and he laments the loss of "unique places to browse, touch, talk about and buy books," urging, "Patronize your local independent bookstore, new and used." (Via Neil.)

Ron Silliman, in contrast, has met the issue with a tone of weary resignation for a long time.



But on the other hand, he chronicles the losses faithfully.




*Thanks for reminding me, Ed. Can't believe I forgot that one.

"You can't get much more scientific than graphic representations of how this product works on your skin cells."