Once upon a time I would have blogged not only THATCamp Theory but also MSA. As it is, however, all I seem to have in me is an acknowledgment that the Las Vegas airport has free wifi. Which is, I suppose, something.

I don't like the family Stein,
There is Gert, there is Ed, there is Ein;
Gert's poems are bunk,
Ed's statues are punk,
And nobody understands Ein.

—"Stein's Way." Unsigned review of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, by Gertrude Stein. Time (11 September 1933): 57-9. Print.

And that's not even the best part of the review.

One more gem:

[AABT] has been approved by the bluestocking Atlantic Monthly (where part of it was serialized).

Bluestocking.

Thank you, Sterling Memorial Library; I love you.

Manners and the live-tweet

It's strange to see a conversation happen in your Twitter feed, mainly among people you know, and then watch that conversation get written up at Inside Higher Ed. Such was the recent "Twittergate," ironically so dubbed by Roopika Risam. The question was whether and under what circumstances it is ethical to live-tweet a conference.

I have a hard time taking the question seriously. I tend to sympathize with Eleanor Courtemanche's quip:

For me, #twittergate is ALWAYS that tweets from conferences are TOO BORING (exc. mine, & OK all those from #navsa12)

— Eleanor Courtemanche (@ecourtem) October 1, 2012

If we do any sort of public writing, whether on blogs, in print, or elsewhere, then we have had to make our peace with the partible personhood function of writing. You will be misread, misquoted, taken out of context, and distorted. And that's if you're lucky and are read. How dreary to be somebody!

Conferences are a sort of academic Facebook; they give the illusion of privacy and safety, while you're under a diffuse but constant surveillance. A certain segment of Facebook fans has a horror of Twitter and its public ways, because on Twitter that illusion of privacy is gone. But you know: it was only ever an illusion. Live-tweeting a conference only reveals and makes searchable (and renders amenable to response) the Telephone-relays already pervading our academic life.

I think the earliest blog post on the subject, Tressie McMillan Cottom's, is also the most interesting and nuanced. She addresses the most substantive critiques of live-tweeting: that it participates in the tendency of "openness" to devolve into commodification, and that it violates the speaker's expectations.

Still, the Inside Higher Ed article seems to unintentionally make the case that we have less to fear from Twitter than from journalism. As Alexis Lothian and Mark Sample observe, Twitter was responsible and careful where Inside Higher Ed was not.

I want to add only one thing, which irks me every time a conversation on the etiquette-ethics spectrum comes up. (That etiquette is so often discussed as an ethical imperative is itself, in my opinion, a problem, but a different one.) Inevitably there are calls for "BASIC MANNERS" and "COMMON CIVILITY" and "just don't be RUDE didn't your mama teach you better" and the like. I have no sympathy with the position that live-tweeting is just obviously rude.

There is no such thing as "basic manners." "Polite" (or socially affirming) in one context is rude in another, and vice versa. Or your mama may not have taught you "better." Maybe you had a bad mother; is that supposed to be the point? Why bring people's mothers into it? I like a fast conversation in which the conversants are so excited that they interrupt one another; I interrupt people, they interrupt me. Is this rude? Sometimes. Other times, as a friend once said to me when our interruptive conversation turned meta, "whatever; I'm from New York."

In Gender and Discourse, Deborah Tannen argues that the social meanings of linguistic acts are cultural, contextual, and mutually produced by conversants. Interruption can produce sensations of affirmation; the linguistic gestures of solidarity can be confining as well as affirming. "For example," she writes, "one can talk while another is talking in order to wrest the floor; this can be seen as a move motivated by power. Yet one can also talk along with another in order to show support and agreement; this must be seen as a move motivated by solidarity" (19). Moreover, "the two...are not mutually exclusive" (19).

So what is "basic manners"? If we take seriously the diversity of experience, then it's certainly not a universal baseline about which we get to wag our fingers. We need an academic bestseller on "the dorky art of faux-pas," because I feel that this fact is underappreciated. Academia remains deeply riven with racial and especially class codes that are absolutely inscrutable to, for instance, first-generation academics. ("Didn't your mother...?" "No, my mother has no notion of how to comport oneself at an academic conference, nor is she especially clear on what an academic conference is.") As Lisa Delpit has so powerfully shown, a white teacher's politeness can, to her black child student, be no more than a maddening obfuscation.

I taught Melville recently, so I'm going to leave the last word to Melville:

Shifting the barrow from my hand to his, he told me a funny story about the first wheelbarrow he had ever seen. It was in Sag Harbor. The owners of his ship, it seems, had lent him one, in which to carry his heavy chest to his boarding house. Not to seem ignorant about the thing—though in truth he was entirely so, concerning the precise way in which to manage the barrow—Queequeg puts his chest upon it; lashes it fast; and then shoulders the barrow and marches up the wharf. "Why," said I, "Queequeg, you might have known better than that, one would think. Didn't the people laugh?"

Upon this, he told me another story. The people of his island of Rokovoko, it seems, at their wedding feasts express the fragrant water of young cocoanuts into a large stained calabash like a punchbowl; and this punchbowl always forms the great central ornament on the braided mat where the feast is held. Now a certain grand merchant ship once touched at Rokovoko, and its commander—from all accounts, a very stately punctilious gentleman, at least for a sea captain—this commander was invited to the wedding feast of Queequeg's sister, a pretty young princess just turned of ten. Well; when all the wedding guests were assembled at the bride's bamboo cottage, this Captain marches in, and being assigned the post of honor, placed himself over against the punchbowl, and between the High Priest and his majesty the King, Queequeg's father. Grace being said,—for those people have their grace as well as we- though Queequeg told me that unlike us, who at such times look downwards to our platters, they, on the contrary, copying the ducks, glance upwards to the great Giver of all feasts—Grace, I say, being said, the High Priest opens the banquet by the immemorial ceremony of the island; that is, dipping his consecrated and consecrating fingers into the bowl before the blessed beverage circulates. Seeing himself placed next the Priest, and noting the ceremony, and thinking himself—being Captain of a ship—as having plain precedence over a mere island King, especially in the King's own house—the Captain coolly proceeds to wash his hands in the punch bowl;—taking it I suppose for a huge finger-glass. "Now," said Queequeg, "what you tink now?—Didn't our people laugh?"

—Moby-Dick, Ch. 13

-----


Delpit, Lisa. Other People’s Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom. New York: The New Press, 1995. Print.

Tannen, Deborah. Gender and Discourse. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996. Print.

Arrived today in the mail: volume 1 of LIES: A Journal of Materialist Feminism. Get your own.

(Also arrived in today's mail: a Comcast bill. You win some, you lose some.)

"Dare to write clearly and engagingly whatever the audience, Helen Sword urges junior and senior scholars alike in a myth-busting guide to good academic prose."

Yes, dare. Don't be a moral coward like everybody else.

I grew up in southeastern Virginia, and I was always struck by the fact that Smithfield—the whole town—smelled like ham.

Well, now I live in New Haven, and my neighborhood smells like pizza. Frankly, I prefer it to the ham smell. But it does sort of leave me permanently feeling like eating pizza.

Did you register to vote?

Apply to THATCamp Theory!

Applications are here. It takes two minutes! Go!

THATCamp Theory is October 13-14, 2012
Plangere Writing Center, Murray Hall
Rutgers University
New Brunswick, New Jersey

Readings in American Lit syllabus

The course syllabus for Readings in American Literature, §02 and §03, is available as a pdf here.

Three weeks of Moby-Dick

Friends and Melville fans, I am teaching Moby-Dick this semester as part of a Readings in American Lit course.

My specialization centering some fifty years later, I am not one of those people who teaches this hoary beast (so to speak) every semester, so far from being bored by the prospect, I am thrilled.

I've mentioned this to a number of people, and many have replied that they've never read Moby-Dick. They've thought about it, but they've never had the occasion, or the time, or they've felt it was really the sort of thing you needed a course context within which to read it.

So I invite any interested parties to read Moby-Dick alongside me and my students, August 31 through September 19.

What would this entail?

1. The most important thing—really the only important thing—is reading the novel. A schedule is posted below.
2. My course blogs are sadly closed to the world, but I will post briefly here over the course of the three weeks; you're invited to read and comment. [UPDATE: it's possible my course blogs can become public. More soon.]
3. If you like, blog your own responses to the novel.
4. My course Twitter hashtag this semester is #f12ral (which stands for Fall 2012 Readings in American Lit). You are welcome to join in on any Twitter discussion, and if you blog about your reading, please tweet a link with the hashtag.

If you decide to read Moby-Dick with us, I'd very much like to hear from you about it. Drop me a line, leave a comment on this post, or tweet using the hashtag. If anyone decides to join us, I'll let my students know; I think they'll be tickled.

Most of the people who will encounter this post are not full-time students and will find the schedule a little onerous; it's 135 (short) chapters in just three weeks. You might fall behind in the reading, and that's no moral failing. All I can say is that it can be done (I think I had even less time to read it in college—maybe a week), and it will be done by my students, and maybe also by you.

The edition we are using is the Norton Critical. I will confess that I am not enormously a fan of this edition: neither the thin Bible-paper that makes the text bleed through from page to page, nor the distracting footnotes that turn out to be no more than dictionary definitions for relatively common words for, I suppose, potential readers with exceedingly narrow vocabularies. Nonetheless, this is the standard edition in my department and I did not have the choosing of it. Moreover, if you wish to read some contemporaries accusing Melville of lunacy, the Norton's got you covered. I see no reason to disdain the Penguin, however.

Schedule:

F 8/31	Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, “Etymology,” “Extracts,” and chapters 1-15
M 9/03	Labor Day; class will not meet.
W 9/05	Moby-Dick, chapters 16-42
M 9/10	Moby-Dick, chapters 43-78
W 9/12	Moby-Dick, chapters 79-87
M 9/17	Moby-Dick, chapters 88-126 [Rosh Hashanah]
W 9/19	Moby-Dick, chapters 127-135 and epilogue

THATCamp Theory

It's happening.

Hyde Park

The Seminary Co-op: the bookstore of my heart.

It's been a few years since I last visited Chicago. I'm in town for a wedding, and for some reason the weather decided to be perfect. I know that there are others who will understand that although Chicago is a large city, full of museums and restaurants and interesting neighborhoods, there is something that always pulls me back into the Hyde Park vortex. Could it be the books?

Random northside café. Evil RSI-aggravating mugs are a strike against them.

When I went to the Seminary Co-op, which hasn't yet moved, I was shocked to see that they didn't have Jen Fleissner's book on the shelf, and they only had one of Ian Hacking's books on statistics in the history of statistics section. These are, indeed, outrageous omissions (Women, Compulsion, Modernity is a Chicago title, for FSM's sake!), but it was wonderful to be in a place where I could have such expectations in the first place. And it's easy to imagine that they were probably gone because someone in the neighborhood had recently bought them.

Powell's. <3>

The Regenstein Library, plus
the new robot-operated underground stacks.