November 23
Holiday Shopping For a Kindle or Ipad? Why You Should Wait
Dell’s Kindle Killer
Just when you thought that everyone was going to buy a CB radio/pet rock/mood ring/Betamax/eight-track, you had the courage of your convictions and held off. Good for you.
You probably also haven’t yet tied your mobile media consumption to either Apple or Amazon. Double good for you--waiting a year has paid off. Now you can buy a lightweight mobile media viewer/tablet PC that is also a full netbook computer.
For the same price as the iPad (about $550) Dell’s just released the device that is the likely leader of the pack, the Inspiron Duo. It’s a nifty flip-screen netbook that they’re calling a tablet/netbook hybrid, but which one day they’ll just call “a personal computer.”
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November 10
Parting
This, the control panel tells me, is my 199th post to The Valve. It will also be my last, and rather than simply drift into silence I thought I’d mark the fact by saying goodbye. Like Rohan, I’ve decided it’s time for me to move on. I began a contributor here in Jan 2006; signing off towards the end of 2010 has a nicely Presidential-termish ring to it.
And it is long enough, I think. A forum like this needs to renew itself periodically, and would grow stale indeed if the same old voices simply churned the same old and the same old over and again. Not that I haven’t had a blast, because I have. Were it not for this Literary Organ I would never have met some of the smartest critical minds it’s been my pleasure to know. Writing here, and for this audience, has stretched me (in a good way), stimulated me, brought me a great deal more pleasure and insight and joy than contumely—though, of course, there’s been a fair bit of that too. But above all it has taught me an immense amount. I’m very grateful. Thank you everybody: I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve. Which is my cue to put on the magic ring and slip, invisibly, away.
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November 04
The Language of Developmentalist Literature
Lapata wrote a great post at Chapati Mystery on the special issue of Granta devoted to Pakistan (her second; the first was here). Building on Sepoy’s earlier critique of the issue, she targeted the use of “development” language to describe the development of Pakistani literature:
“…Aside from the ludicrousness of talking about the development and progress of the novel or short story in the same style as one might discuss the building of bridges and the paving of roads, there is also the fact that very few literatures of the world are in their infancy. “Yes!” You might interject, “But surely the novel and the short story are quintessentially modern forms!” Indeed, perhaps they are (though there are many arguments to the contrary). Nonetheless, these forms date back to at least the late nineteenth century in most Indian languages. Other genres of writing in the modern Indian languages stretch back much further than that, some to the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries, or even earlier, to say nothing of the antiquity of Sanskrit.
And she critiqued what she called “Cocoonistan,” the ability of Anglophonic readers to cocoon ourselves away from everything that doesn‘t confirm what we think we already know:
“…English, as the most powerful international language, dominates world conversations on just about everything, but wraps its native speakers in a cocoon that renders them increasingly unable to hear conversations that were not meant for their ears. The cocoon can alienate us from cultural diversity and deafen us to voices that are not speaking directly to us. In this way, as in many others, globalization both broadens our horizons and shrinks them dangerously. Nowadays, development discourse is often used to discuss the great progress that is being made on the front of new writing in English in India, and more recently, Pakistan. Besides the fact that this discourse infantilizes the literary output of writers in English, it paves over the very existence of literary traditions in other languages. As an English-speaking person who likes to read non-English literature from South Asia, I often feel irritable on encountering pronouncements about the extreme youth and great promise of Indian or Pakistani literature.”
This is all right and true. But what spurred this reflection was a quote from John Freeman (Granta’s editor) in a Dawn article, and I want to take some time to turn that quote inside out (in the particular metaphor I’m laboring under, that quotation is like the hip pocket of a pair of blue jeans that still has some change squirreled away in it). What, after all, does it mean to say that we are cocooned in the language of “development”? What is development discourse?
First, the quote. In response to the interviewer’s suggestion that Pakistani fiction has really come into its own “internationally,” Freeman agreed and replied:
…yes, they’re all writing in English. But in a lot of countries early in the development of their literature – I’m thinking certainly of the United States – people who were writing were well-to-do, Henry James and Edith Wharton for example. And they left the country and went to Paris…
Lapata’s response was to remind Freeman that non-English literatures—in Urdu, for example—are vibrantly continuing their centuries-old tradition of existing and being important; if English language writing is, in some sense, “maturing” now—which seems to mean, in practice, that suddenly Anglophones in the West are reading it—this doesn’t necessarily represent Pakistan’s literature as a whole. But Freeman’s response to Lapata was more or less to double down:
Continue reading "The Language of Developmentalist Literature"“On your point about developing literature, I did not mean to suggest that Urdu literature or any other within Pakistan was without a history or developing…I was referring more to literature which develops within the nation state. The Pakistani nation state is very new; just as when Wharton and others were writing, so was the American nation state. But that doesn’t mean that native American story-telling or pre-revolutionary American texts do not qualify as literature…simply that when a nation declares its independence a different sort of clock starts, especially early on, since the writing starts to help define borders as much as lines drawn up on a map…I made a decision early on to focus on Pakistan writing of the modern nation, not of the region or of its languages. We never intended this issue to be representative or exhaustive, but since we are the magazine of new writing, we decided to focus on what was new…"
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October 26
When “English” Isn’t Literature
This video is going around under the title of “So You Want to Get a PhD in the Humanities?” It probably has some relevance across the liberal arts, but the piece is more narrowly about the declining role of traditional literary scholarship in English studies, a topic I’ve written about before.
I’m particularly interested because I’m heading my (English) department’s curriculum committee this year and surveying student reaction to concentrations we’re considering. We haven’t even finished collecting responses, but it seems clear that many students from a wide variety of majors remain interested in at least some areas of traditional literary study for personal interest, or to fulfill a distribution requirement.
But when you ask what interests might lead students to make the larger commitment to a minor in English, or a major, the picture tilts. So far, science, business and other humanities majors say they are most likely to consider a minor in English in a diverse set of fields that I would characterize as either a) involving the production of texts, ie, writing or b) the intersection of disciplines.
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October 14
Humanities programs subsidize science and engineering
SUNY Albany’s suicidal decision to cut programs in French, Italian, Russian, classics, and theater has, once again, stirred up talk about the fate of the humanities. In this context you might look at this piece by Robert Watson at UCLA, Bottom line shows humanities really do make money. Here’s the money graphs:
Of the 21 units at the University of Washington, the humanities and, to a lesser degree, the social sciences are the only ones that generate more tuition income than 100 percent of their total expenditure. Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors, recently cited a University of Illinois report showing that a large humanities department like English produces a substantial net profit, whereas units such as engineering and agriculture run at a loss. The widely respected Delaware Study of Instructional Costs and Productivity shows the same pattern.
Because that evidence runs up against the widespread myth that other units and departments subsidize the humanities, and up against such well-entrenched forces within the university, it is regularly ignored or even suppressed. In the 1990s, UCLA invested huge amounts of money setting up Responsibility Centered Management, an accounting system eventually used at many universities to evaluate all the real costs of different units and the revenue they actually produce. The goal was to make budgeting fair and transparent. However, according to administrators then prominently involved in the process, when the initial run of those intricate spreadsheets showed that the College of Letters and Science was the most efficient user and producer of money, and the health sciences were far less efficient, RCM was abandoned.
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October 10
Ebert Defends Literature on the uncharted seas
I’ve recently become interested in Roger Ebert. As I’ve indicated earlier, he’s long served me as a reference critic, someone I’d consult on movies that interest me. My current interest extends beyond that.
The nature of my current interest is not entirely clear to me. Oh, sure, Ebert is one of the most prominent intellectuals in America these days, and is readily available on the web. As is Stanley Fish. That Stanley Fish is an intellectual is obvious on the face of it. But Roger Ebert, he’s a film critic, no? Yes, and we don’t normally think of film critics as intellectuals. But there are film critics and there are film critics.
And Roger Ebert is more than a film critic. Perhaps he’s always been more than a film critic. But it’s his writing in his blog that interests me, and that’s what’s prompted me to think of him as an intellectual. Yes, I find it just a bit strange. But I’m going with it. He’s not the type of intellectual Stanley Fish is, but an intellectual he is. And, for what it’s worth, he’s more widely known.
And that’s worth something. Just what, I don’t know. But something, and that something is part of my attraction.
You may have heard that Ebert’s been kicking up a fuss about video games. He doesn’t think that they can ever be art. This little tempest in a teapot led him to Tweet and then blog a simple question: “Which of these would you value more? A great video game. Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain.” The answer came back 13,823 to 8,088 in favor of video games.
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October 08
The Crisis in the Humanities
Nina Paley is the creator of Mimi & Eunice and is unleashing them on the world under a copyleft license.
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Dear Reader, Can’t we come out and play?
Nina Paley is the creator of Mimi & Eunice and is unleashing them on the world under a copyleft license.
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October 07
The Author Has Died
Nina Paley is the creator of Mimi & Eunice and is unleashing them on the world under a copyleft license.
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October 05
Off With Our Heads!
A funny thing is happening in the United States. Across the country, headless schools are opening. One opens this fall in Detroit: the teachers’ terms of employment are still governed by their union’s contract with Detroit Public Schools, but they will administer themselves on a democratic, cooperative basis. In just the past couple of years, schools run by teacher cooperatives have opened in Madison, Denver, Chicago, Boston, and New York. Milwaukee has 13 teacher-run schools.
These aren’t universities. They are elementary schools, kindergartens, high schools of the arts and humanities, high schools for budding scientists and programmers, high schools for social justice. Sometimes four or five co-operatively run and publicly-funded schools share the same building and grounds. Few of them operate in wealthy neighborhoods. Nearly all of them serve students who are struggling because English isn’t their first language, or because their homes and neighborhoods are scarred by poverty, neglect, substance abuse and crime. They are generally successful by any measure, even the fatuous assessments of standardized testing. They are broadly popular with students, teachers, and parents.
Over the next few years, dozens--perhaps hundreds--of similar schools will open in Los Angeles: teachers will have control over curriculum, work rules and every facet of academic policy. In every school, councils of students, teachers, and parents provide active, intellectual leadership. Every school has a student-, community- and teacher- centered system of governance imagined from the ground up by faculty and citizen co-proposers. They will all have at least one principal administrator, so they have not amputated the head, only shrunken it. Nonetheless it is clear that community leaders, students and teachers will hire, evaluate and severely circumscribe the authority of their (usually) solitary administrator in a self-conscious, explicitly distributed system of leadership.
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September 28
Education Nation: Policy Summit or Puppet Show?
I’d like you to imagine the following. Suppose we are going to have a national summit on health care. Do you not suppose that a substantial number of the voices included would be from professionals in health care, including doctors and nurses? Would you have 3 people with just the head of the AMA to represent doctors?
Or how about legal reform – would not lawyers scream if such a conference were organized without a substantial portion of the main participants being members of the profession representing the range of opinions within the legal field?
Why then is it when it comes to education that people think it is appropriate to have major discussions about education without fair inclusion of the voices of those who bear the greatest burden for the education of our children, the parents and the teachers? --Kenneth Bernstein, Cooperative Catalyst
So I tied off my upper arm and mainlined anti-nausea drugs Sunday and Monday in order to stomach hours of biased, dishonest, irresponsible NBC hate propaganda paid for by, you guessed it, for-profit higher ed vendors and foundations devoted to privatizing public schools.
Just as Obama’s pursued the Republican party line on education, NBC has taken a page from Fox News and Oprah. Their lineup on a two-day policy summit with a dozen conference panels --you know, the kind of panels usually filled with folks with credible expertise in the topic--features politicians, astronauts, tv anchors, musicians, corporate executives, and charter school entrepreneurs.
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Franzen’s freedom and Unfinished Realism
I could be wrong about this. I haven’t finished Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, so I’m open to having my impressions of the book thus far—superbly written but sort of wrong—revised by the rest of the novel. But I started reading the book because part of it addresses mountaintop removal mining in West Virginia, something I have a close personal connection to. Or, rather, I have a close personal connection to the activists in West Virginia who are working to stop it: my mother is the founding director of OVEC, an environmental and social justice group based in Huntington, West Virginia, and I worked and volunteered for them when I was a teenager.
Yesterday, my mother—who is also reading the book—wrote me this in an email:
I’m reading Freedom - note that most of the people at DC rally are “youthful”, not over 60 as Franzen said. Good book- but wrong abt calling the main MTR activist "dull eyed” - I know of NO dull eyed activists, what an oxymoron!
She’s talking about this rally. What strikes me about how Franzen has portrayed environmental activist types in the book is how familiar they are, how closely they fit particular media stereotypes of what activists are supposed to be like. But the environmental activists I know, in life, do not particularly fit these stereotypes. If some do, it’s because activists come in all types, which is another way of saying no more than this: the “familiar” activist type we know is the fiction of a culture that deeply distrusts activists (when they don’t come with a conservative pedigree, that is), and so, produces a narrative singularity to explain them.
Where this stereotype of activists comes from is not what I want to talk about. What has nagged at me as I read this book is the point where the novel’s realism falters as it attempts to comprehend reality: its reliance not just on the “activist” figure we think we know but on the fiction that there is a singular activist figure we ever could know. Amelia Atlas and Andrew Seal are completely right that “realism” is the key term in comprehending what Franzen is trying to do here, but the flip side of realism as a method is the problem of unintelligibility and noise: you become increasingly bad at registering the more confident you become in your mimetic reach. The more comprehensive you claim to be in rendering reality legible, the more noise you necessarily screen out as you produce that intelligibility.
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September 13
The Faith of Graffiti, Redux
Norman Mailer and Jon Naar. The Faith of Graffiti, New Edition. It Books, 2009.
Conceived by designer Mervyn Kurlansky, executed by Jon Naar (photographer) and Norman Mailer (writer), and named by CAY 161 (writer), The Faith of Graffiti hit like a bomb when it was first published in the Spring of 1974. Graffiti was still young, hip-hop didn’t exist, and the war in Vietnam was still taking lives. Faith got a full page in the New York Times Book Review, helped, no doubt, by Mailer’s name on the jacket. But Mailer’s remarkable essay wouldn’t have meant jack if its hopes and claims weren’t supported and amplified by Jon Naar’s powerful photographs.
One can’t have an art book without photographs of the art, but Naar’s photographs are more than that. For he’s not photographing self-contained works framed to be hung on walls. The names he’s photographing – for that’s what graffiti is, names, variously written, embellished, tricked out, disguised, and transformed – do not imply natural boundaries. They’re written directly on walls, then in New York City — though Philly’s Cornbread was up first. Wherever arms could reach, names followed. (You can see some of these photos at Naar’s website.)
Here’s the wall of a paddleball court: COMET, BABY 183, Bingo, STiTch I, KEY II, FAST ED, PiE, Barbara 62 — 10s and 100s of names, a community of names, on this one wall. Naar has framed this shot by two paddleball players, backs to us. Then there’s FRANK 136 in large white letters on the surface of a playground, a girl skipping across at the upper right, two boys and a basketball, upper middle, and a name-laden wall across the top edge, those names showing the beginnings of the elaborations that would become pieces, aka masterpieces. Elsewhere: MARiA I, FRANNY, and CHETTA in bright red, TooTs and Sissy in blue and red, and others, all on a deep green background, flecked here and there with yellow. What about three TUROK 161’s, two FRANK 207’s (plus three stars and a crown), all on the red side of a subway car. Or: “Rube” in bright red followed by an “N” just scratched on a metal surface – RubeN – with four tic-tac-toe games to the lower left.
In many photos the city and the people take up more space than the graffiti, thus placing the graffiti in the life of the city. Where it is / was / belongs. Yes, the subway cars (inside as well as out) and platforms and stations, but also the steps and stoops, apartment houses, trees, statues, parks, fences, bridges, underpasses, shacks and sheds – the fixed and mobile infrastructure of the city. Some of the writers posed for Naar, he got some action shots too, and there’s a blurred photo of some police cornering some writers. In many shots we see people just going about their business on the streets, on buses, and in the subways.
And light playing about all of this.
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U.S.A., by John Dos Passos
What is to be done with U.S.A.? Like a few other novels, John Dos Passos’s trilogy is one whose stature substantially exceeds the general reader’s familiarity with it, and so one of the inevitable questions that arises when bringing it up is “what kind of novel is it?” a question which is code for “what relationship might it continue to have to readers today?” a question which is itself code for, “why should I read it?”
U.S.A. is a tricky novel to place, and therefore it’s surprisingly difficult to make a case for why “you,” the general reader, should knock about through its 1300 pages. For reasons I will get into in a moment, it’s not exactly a historical novel, or at least it will not satisfy someone looking for a historical novel. It also fails to satisfy as a modernist novel, regardless of whether your flavor of modernism comes in Hemingway or Joyce. It is experimental, but its experiments push against language and narrative in ways that will probably seem too regular, too machined, and not “difficult” enough to someone of the latter persuasion. To a reader of the former, the Lost Generation mythos is here as well, but the glamour of war-time Paris and Italy or the Jazz Age is much shabbier, less heroic. Drinking here is occasionally if not often boring (one might compare the liquors consumed in Hemingway relative to Dos Passos; I imagine those in Dos Passos are typically cheaper, less savored, and less specific), and violence and sex aren’t Capital-T Themes so much as things characters do or don’t do.
It also won’t really do as a “relevant” novel, a novel which “speaks to our time.” It would take a great deal of effort to discover more than a partial reflection of 2010 in its characters, its plot, or especially its concerns. And yet, unlike, say, Mad Men, it would also be difficult to glean contrasts—favorable or unfavorable—which allow us to congratulate or castigate ourselves on our progress or backsliding. The stories of emergent industries or professions (automobiles, airplanes, public relations) look so little like the internet start-ups of today, and the enormity of class conflict and working-class consciousness which makes up so much of the trilogy is basically unrecognizable in the present.
Race and gender roles are more crudely created and enforced by the characters than we are used to seeing today, but there is also a casualness and simplicity to them that undercuts any feeling of knowing better; in a very disturbing way, Dos Passos does not make race and gender into problems for the reader, giving her no real opportunity to feel more enlightened than the characters in the way one is directed to take very conscious note of Don or Betty Draper’s prejudices and insensitivities, or in the way one can’t avoid squirming at a particularly caricatured portrayal of a black servant in a 1930s film. There is certainly a shock, as there always is, at running into an epithet or a mark of prejudice in the trilogy, but that shock does not reverberate into the book in any way we are by now accustomed to, and that lack of reverberation impedes the formation of any sense of where one stands in relation to the book or to the characters.
In a very similar manner, Dos Passos’s whole attitude toward history—or even to the United States—interrupts the formation of any stable relationship to the reader’s own views of the U.S. or U.S. history. U.S.A. as a whole is neither comfortably historical or comfortably “contemporary;” somehow Dos Passos blocks both the feeling that his novel is safely in the past and the feeling that it can serve as an analogy for the present. This is perhaps not too surprising, though. Even among his peers, Dos Passos’s feelings about America were, shall we say, idiosyncratic and arguably unstable; after years of being a both vocal and visible activist in Leftist politics, Dos Passos took a hard swing to the right during the Cold War; hardly unique in his time, but, for a variety of reasons, his apostasy was much more puzzling and less explicable. Yet that idiosyncrasy is not the reason for this neither-past-nor-present feeling of the novel, or not quite.
A quite substantial part of the problem—or, if it’s not a problem, and I don’t think it is, it is at least a situation that appears to the reader as an obstacle to understanding—is that the U.S.A. trilogy takes part in what might validly be called a myth (or a grand narrative) which has very little purchase on the minds of Americans (or readers of American fiction) today. Michael Denning, in his book The Cultural Front, calls this myth “the decline and fall of the Lincoln Republic.” (And I should probably say now that by myth, I mean to emphasize less the validity or truth-content of the narrative but rather its role in people’s lives, as a story that organizes experience and history into a knowable and comprehensible shape). In a subsequent post I’ll examine that myth and where it has ended up in the present, and why it is difficult to access today.
In the meantime, if you’ve been reading along, or have read the U.S.A. trilogy in the past—or other Dos Passos novels—please consider this an open thread; talk about your experiences with Dos Passos and how you think it fits into the larger literary landscape.
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September 06
Party in the U.S.A.: The Big Money, by John Dos Passos
There will be a post looking at the trilogy as a whole and trying to place it in the landscape of American literary history as that history looks to someone at the present moment, but for now, I’ll simply complete the inventorying project of describing the contents of this last volume of the U.S.A. trilogy.
Some of the most famous “Camera Eye” sections of the trilogy are to be found in The Big Money, in particular Camera Eye 50, which some of the more biographically-oriented critics consider the climax of the trilogy, as it depicts Dos Passos’s own efforts trying to save the lives of Sacco and Vanzetti—supposedly the experiential germ or origin of the project:
Continue reading "Party in the U.S.A.: The Big Money, by John Dos Passos"they have clubbed us off the streets they are stronger they are rich they hire and fire the politicians the newspapereditors the old judges the small men with reputations the collegepresidents the wardheelers (listen businessmen collegepresidents judges America will not forget her betrayers) they hire the men with guns the uniforms the policecars the patrolwagons
all right you have won you will kill the brave men our friends tonight…
America our nation has been beaten by strangers who have turned our language inside out who have taken the clean words our fathers spoke and made them slimy and foul
their hired men sit on the judge’s bench they sit back with their feet on the tables under the dome of the State House they are ignorant of our beliefs they have the dollars the guns the armed forces the powerplants
they have built the electricchair and hired the executioner to throw the switch
all right we are two nations
America our nation has been beaten by strangers who have bought the laws and fenced off the meadows and cut down the woods for pulp and turned our pleasant cities into slums and sweated the wealth out of our people and when they want to they hire the executioner to throw the switch
but do they know that the old world of the immigrants are being renewed in blood and agony tonight do they know that the old American speech of the haters of oppression is new tonight in the mouth of an old woman from Pittsburgh of a husky boilermaker from Frisco who hopped freights clear from the Coast to come here in the mouth of a Back Bay socialworker in the mouth of an Italian printer of a hobo from Arkansas the language of the beaten nation is not forgotten in our ears tonight
the men in the deathhouse made the old words new before they died…
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