That bwessed event

I’ve been wanting to write this blog post for a while, but more pressing personal and work events have intervened. So here it goes; it's a bit long, but believe me, there are lots of other interesting details I'm leaving out in the interest of coherence.

Marriage has been even more of a political issue lately than usual; marriage equality has become the focus of the gay rights movement. In particular, it has been argued by conservatives that marriage between one man and one woman who love each other and produce children is an age-old tradition essential to a stable society. While I’ve always suspected this to be a specious argument, I realized I didn’t really know anything about the history of marriage, so I decided to read Stephanie Coontz’s 2005 book Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage. Reading it reinforced an aspect of history that a fantastic college professor of mine was the first to make me realize: history is not an upward or downward line of progress. It goes in cycles, and what is valued by society depends on that society and how it's organized. The same goes for marriage.

Coontz details how marriage, for much of history, had a lot more to do with economics than legal standing, religion, or morality. People married in medieval Europe to bring together families and resources. "Women's work" like growing food, tending animals, cooking, and making clothes, were valued as economic contributions as long as the barter system was around; when cash became more prevalent, the idea of the separate domestic sphere came about. The idea of each household being its own economic unit, instead of being connected to larger families and communities, is inseparable from capitalism.

Coontz traces marriage through many different societies and iterations, and the last paragraph of her book sums up:

Over the past century, marriage has steadily become more fair, more fulfilling, and more effective at fostering the well-being of both adults and children than ever before in history. It has also become more optional and more fragile. The historical record suggests that these two seemingly contradictory changes are inextricably intertwined.” (p. 301)
 
To me, this suggests that you can’t have it both ways; you can't insist both that the nuclear, child-producing family is the only acceptable arrangement, and that marriage should be based only on love. Coontz paraphrases a psychiatrist whose voice was a dissenting one in the 1950s, who said that "people were loading too many ‘psychological and symbolic functions’ on the nuclear family, an institution too fragile to bear such weight.” (p. 234) It's my opinion that people should be allowed to come up with whatever households or arrangements work for them. I think you should be able to designate whomever you want to visit you in the hospital, or inherit your property. Right now in the U.S., you literally get a tax credit for being heterosexually married or having a child. Our government exclusively rewards the nuclear family structure, even when a large part of its population is living outside it - and this reward doesn't seem to be motivating anyone to buy in.

Meanwhile, "manufactured nostalgia" (Coontz's phrase) is nothing new - she cites the Roman emperor Augustus, who, to boost the birth rate, ushered in a raft of pro-family government policies, nostalgic for the days when women were more obedient, industrious, and weren't allowed to drink wine. All this contributes to my mixed feelings about marriage equality as a goal for the gay rights movement. As things stand right now, legal marriage is the only door to many rights that I think same-sex couples should have, so I think it is a worthy goal. In the long run, however, I think it shortchanges everyone with more complex situations.

The government and the church weren't always so up in marriage's business. Coontz points out, as did Dan Savage in his book The Commitment, that in twelfth-century Europe, even the Catholic Church operated by a doctrine that "if a couple said, using the present tense, ‘I take thee as my husband’ and ‘I take thee as my wife,' they were married." (p. 107) No witnesses were required, no clergy, no legal documentation. Their personal commitment was what mattered to them and the world. That's the kind of marriage I could believe in.

All quotes from Coontz, Stephanie. Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered Marriage. New York: Viking, 2005.

Everybody's reading it

I just read over my last post, and realized this one will be somewhat related. But not as long!

Okay, so I have a friend - let's call him Ben. Ben forwarded me a web page the other day with a writer's snarky comments about adults reading YA books, specifically The Hunger Games and Twilight. This despite the fact that he knew I had just read The Hunger Games trilogy, and despite the fact that he read and liked the Harry Potter books. When we talked about it later, two clarifications of sorts emerged. One: he felt that the first Harry Potter book was written without cynical forethought about franchising or movie deals, and that Twilight and The Hunger Games were. The second, which I could much more get on board with, is that part of what he was reacting to was a societal attitude that everyone, of all ages, should read YA books, and specifically these three series.

I could understand that. There are certain books I haven't read and movies I haven't seen that are generally assumed everyone has - the Stieg Larsson books come to mind, as do Dirty Dancing and Avatar. Some of these, I'll admit, are a contrarian point of pride with me. (Cf. Pretty Woman.) I do find it annoying when people make inside references without prefacing them with "Have you read..." or "Have you seen..." I don't think it should be assumed that everyone likes - or should like - the same things.

What I do bristle at is anyone being judged for what they read. The fact that Ben and I share a profession made me all the more chagrined at our exchanges (though I know he would never inappropriately judge a patron). It's my personal and professional opinion that the best reading diet - like the best information diet - is a varied one. Varied subjects, forms, styles, author backgrounds - no one broadens their horizons much in an echo chamber. But that's just my opinion. If someone's reading tastes are confined solely to superhero graphic novels, Regency romances, flarf poetry, new historicist tomes, or the Great Books series, I don't think they should be judged. Everyone has different tastes - and everyone reads for different reasons. Readers should be celebrating their commonality, not tearing each other down.

*gets down from soapbox*

Every book its reader

The conventional wisdom about an exercise program goes: if you miss a day or two, don't dwell on it - just start again. Substitute "blog" for "exercise program" and "six months" for "a day or two," and here I am. I cleaned up the blog roll a little, and now I'm just going to jump back in. And let me tell you: this entry is about a lot of really big ideas that greater minds than mine have considered. So, caveat: I know that I'm just a person who likes to read, and read some articles and books, and has opinions. I'm not claiming to be an expert of any kind. Oh, and one more caveat: this is gonna be long.

Okay, caveats gone. Here's the sequence of events that led to what I wanted to write about:

1. I read Freedom by Jonathan Franzen, and loved it.
2. I read about the comments made by writers Jennifer Weiner and Jodi Picoult about the New York Times Book Review's bias toward white male readers. Some firsthand stuff, some secondhand. My initial reaction, to be honest, was defensive annoyance. (Keep reading; stay with me.)
3. Over a year passed, during which I heard a couple of friends say they hadn't enjoyed Freedom, one of the main reasons cited being the way Jonathan Franzen wrote the female characters in it, particularly Patty.
4. I read this article in the Phoenix about NPR's own lopsided ratio of male-to-female author coverage.
5. I decided that before I made any more judgments about this whole thing, I should read one of Jennifer Weiner's books, so I checked out Good in Bed from the library.
6. After I finished it and I was thinking about this entry, I caught up with an episode of Pop Culture Happy Hour, an NPR podcast you should be listening to, where they were talking about some of these very issues. Namely, they discussed fiction and the ways it can be enjoyable and difficult, and what constitutes "literary" fiction.

I've been thinking a lot about all this, and let's just get a few, perhaps contradictory statements out of the way first: I enjoyed parts of Good in Bed, but ultimately did not like it very much. I consider myself a feminist. While I love Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own" and believe in its pragmatic message of "just try harder," I also don't think that's the only piece of the moving-toward-equality puzzle. And (this may be the most revealing of all, but not a surprise to those who know me), yes: I was an English major.

Because I was an English major, and taught by faculty who focused heavily on language, I came out of college thinking that in literature, the style of a novel or story or poem should support the substance. Words should do the double duty of conveying literal meaning, but also characterizing a person, or creating a mood, or pulling a thematic thread throughout the work. I think the best books do that. But even writing that phrase "best books" feels reductive. Maybe great books is a better phrase. Even by saying "great books," I realize I'm making a personal judgment sound like an abstract one. It's still personal. The books I personally love best do this: Mrs. Dalloway. The Poisonwood Bible. A Visit from the Goon Squad. Possession. And yes, The Corrections. (All, with one glaring exception, by female authors.)

I think it was Glen Weldon on the episode of Pop Culture Happy Hour that described Isaac Asimov's prose as "workmanlike." That's how I felt about Good in Bed. When describing a character, Weiner sometimes (not always) gave a list of physical characteristics or clothing that (I felt) were meant to help me visualize the person rather than help to characterize the person. Early in the book, the main character literally looks in the mirror and describes herself. That's all fine; it's just not what I enjoy reading.

I also feel that great books should be, in some way, challenging. Take A Visit from the Goon Squad. Did the chapter told in PowerPoint slides put me off? Yeah. But the rest of the book was so creative and good, and gave me so much to think about, that I accepted it. I guess I can let slide a lot of other things if I feel like either a) the prose is beautiful enough to carry me through, b) I feel like I can trust the author when things get a little screwy, or c) both. Sometimes there are things I might not get; sometimes there are insights a reader might have that the author never thought about. No two people will ever really read the same book.

Also, one of the reasons I read is to learn about, or live for a little while with, ideas or people I didn't know anything about before - to have new experiences. I don't always want to read about people like me, though I have, and that's fine too. I guess I could contrast that with the fact that I don't necessarily want to read a kind of fantasy fulfillment plot, which is how I felt about Good in Bed. I was totally on board with a book about a woman I didn't have too much in common with, until unlikely coincidences and great fortune steered the book into romantic-comedy territory. I am not knocking romantic comedy - I guess I just prefer it in film.

Coming back to the gender question, I didn't feel one way or the other about how either Franzen or Weiner wrote their female characters. I didn't particularly recognize myself or any of the women I know in either Cannie Shapiro or Patty Berglund, but that wasn't central to my enjoyment of either book. (I will say, though, that I wish the daughter Jessica in Freedom had either gotten more attention or been left out entirely.) I don't think that either was a "truer" representation of women. I also know several intelligent people who would probably disagree with me there.

I have no doubt that there is male bias at both NPR and the New York Times Book Review, because there's male bias in every part of our society. Both men and women are guilty of it, and women should demand equal coverage in these outlets. Equal coverage, but honest reviewing. And this is where it gets tricky. Because what gets a good review? Are reviewers privileging male voices by reviewing male authors' books well? Maybe there is some of that going on, but I think the problem is that there's an idea of abstract goodness or badness.

I read book reviews in a professional capacity - I have to decide what to buy for the library. That's why I appreciate review publications like Library Journal, that identify books as "for fans of X author" or "readers of Y type of fiction" rather than ranking them in some kind of literary hierarchy. They're subscribing to two of S.R. Ranganathan's five laws of library science: Every book its reader; Every reader his [or her] book. There are readers who like Good in Bed; I don't happen to be one of them. There are readers who like Freedom; I happen to be one of them. I don't think anyone should be forced to read something they don't enjoy just because some outside person or publication says it's the best book ever.

I'll leave it there. I could go on even longer (!) about several ideas in this post, and I probably will in the future. If you're still reading, thanks for indulging my desire to write about things I think about. That's what I really love. A Room Full of Books: back with a vengeance!

Summer reading

Even though I'm no longer a student and have the summers off, I do work at an academic institution where the summers are quiet and there's a rush of activity in September. So I still like the concept of tackling a long book, or a book I've been meaning to read for a long time, in the summer. When I was in high school, the books were assigned - Bleak House, In Country, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Later, I took on books that seemed to need the boundaries of summer to push me to finish them: The Brothers Karamazov, Pale Fire, and last summer (as chronicled here) Infinite Jest.

This summer, I read James Gleick's book The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood. When I bought it, I unabashedly judged it by its cover. Usually, I'm not really interested in books whose titles follow this model - e.g., Cod: The Fish That Changed Everything, or The Tipping Point: Whatever its Subtitle Was. But this book didn't seem gimmicky or patronizing. And in this case, judging the cover was correct. While reading The Information, I was often challenged. I had to stop and read passages multiple times to understand them. And, despite having an advanced degree in a subject that includes the word information, I realized that I didn't expect a lot of what the book was going to cover, especially in the chapters covering the present day. There was a lot more about numbers than I expected, which just shows my bias toward verbal information - not the majority of information around today. Even the words I'm typing will be posted by some process involving a lot of zeroes and ones.

In any case, this is definitely a summer reading book: long, challenging, and probably best broken up with a shorter, lighter work here and there. There were (as usual) a couple of passages that stuck out to me. Two are related to information skills, or verging on information literacy (a documented professional and personal interest of mine). The first is a quotation from Gregory Chaitin, a mathematician and computer scientist:

"The computer does not have that capacity [of a friend], and for our purposes that deficiency is an advantage. Instructions given the computer must be complete and explicit, and they must enable it to proceed step by step." (p. 349)

This is what I have a hard time communicating to college students. In their minds, Google understands what they're thinking, and in a lot of cases, it does. But it doesn't occur to them that there are imperfect processes, that don't involve intuition, going on behind that search. Which leads in to the second quotation, from Lewis Mumford:

"Unfortunately, 'information retrieving,' however swift, is no substitute for discovering by direct personal inspection knowledge whose very existence one had possibly never been aware of, and following it at one's own pace through the further ramification of relevant literature." (p. 404)

In library stacks, of course, one would call this "browsing."

The last one - and I just now realized that all of these are Gleick quoting someone else - is from Tom Stoppard's Arcadia (and points out to me what a huge hole I have in my reading, having never read any of his plays). It's about the burning of the library at Alexandria.

"You should no more grieve for the rest than for a buckle lost from your first shoe, or for your lesson book which will be lost when you are old. We shed as we pick up, like travelers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language." (p. 379)

I don't know exactly what I think about this idea, but I found it very interesting and moving.

Anyway. I recommend the book - it's full of things I didn't know before - but you may want to wait until you have a long stretch of time to devote to it.

"The specificity and strength of my relation"

This week, I read a book I've been meaning to read for a while: Maggie Nelson's Bluets. I first came across Maggie Nelson's work when I was working at my college library, shelving on the level with the Ns and Ps. Since I was working on my own senior project writing poems, I often pulled volumes straight from "to be shelved" to read, and this was the case with Nelson's book The Latest Winter. I loved reading that book, her later Jane: A Murder, and now this one.

After reading a review of Bluets, I wasn't sure where to look for it at the bookstore - literary nonfiction, poetry, fiction? As it turns out, I had to have it specially ordered anyway, but I guess what I would call the short, numbered pieces in the book are meditations. In fact, that may have been what the reviewer called them, and I'm just plagiarizing. They're meditations on blue: the color, but also the concept, and other, related concepts: depression, heartbreak, drowning, holiness. It's a very moving book. The writing is literate and honest. There is a lot to think about, and I'm still thinking about a lot of it.

Aside from all that, though, the experience of looking for it in the bookstore, and of reading it, underscored a transition (?) I've been going through lately. I've talked to a couple of people recently who asked me, "Are you still writing poems?" And I am, but far fewer than I used to. Often I find myself with thoughts I want to write down, but at a loss for their proper vehicle: they just don't make a good poem, or even part of one. Reading writers like Maggie Nelson and John D'Agata make me wonder if I should just accept this, write, and then shape whatever it is, whether it turns out to be a poem, an essay, or something else. I'm reminded of the retrospective essay I had to write to complete my English major. I wrote about taking a fiction writing class as a freshman, how it made me realize that I wasn't cut out to write fiction - that I cared so much more about individual words and sentences than plot and dialogue, and should probably concentrate on poetry instead. I wonder if this a similar shift is going on now.

Within Bluets, Maggie Nelson comments on what she's writing and how she's writing it:

"...I imagined creating a blue tome, an encyclopedic compendium of blue observations, thoughts, and facts....I thought I had collected enough blue to build a mountain, albeit one of detritus. But it seems to me now as if I have stumbled upon a pile of thin blue gels scattered on the stage long after the show has come and gone...." (91)

And (referring to Leonard Cohen's song "Famous Blue Raincoat"):
"...I have always loved its final line - 'Sincerely, L. Cohen' - as it makes me feel less alone in composing almost everything I write as a letter. I would even go so far as to say that I do not know how to compose otherwise, which makes writing in a prism of solitude, as I am here, a somewhat novel and painful experiment." (41)

And finally:
"It does not really bother me that half the adults in the Western world also love blue, or that every dozen years or so someone feels compelled to write a book about it. I feel confident enough of the specificity and strength of my relation to it to share." (61)

The thoughts I have, the ones I want to write down - about street names in New England and human behavior and adulthood and a bunch of other stuff - I don't know yet which ones I feel confident enough in their and my specificity to share. But I think I'm going to have to stop tying them to one form to find out.

All quotations from Nelson, Maggie. Bluets. New York: Wave Books, 2009.

Father's Day

So, life has been busy, and it's about to get busier in the next few months. I have some topics in mind to write about later on. This entry is not about books.

Today is Father's Day, a day I don't normally give too much thought, other than wondering where the apostrophe goes (I think it's where I put it). This year, as usual, I bought a card and sent it to my dad. It's mostly a ceremonial gesture, and not doing it would be more trouble than it is to do it.

I don't hate my dad. He's a human being who's made mistakes (like me). Most of his big ones are in the distant past, and I've forgiven them. When I at long last came out to him two years ago, though, he didn't speak to me for six months. It seems to me like we've both decided to keep it cordial, and not to excavate emotions and history and all that. Sometimes people just aren't close to one or both of their parents. I get it.

So I wasn't thinking too much about today - just another silly holiday to sell barbecue aprons or whatever - and to make people who don't have fathers feel bad. But then I turned on the radio yesterday and "This American Life" was airing a Father's Day show (the show will be posted at 7:00 on Sunday evening, here: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/). One of the stories was a remembrance by Michael Ian Black of his father, who died when he was a kid. Near the end of the story, he said something to the effect of: he didn't miss his father any less as time went by; he missed him more. And that got me thinking about the person who, for me, comes closest to what people talk about when they talk about what makes a good dad: my stepfather, Jeff. I know I've probably written a lot about him on this blog; I know I've written a lot of poems about him. He was only in my life for four years, but they were formative years, and I do miss him more now than when he died over ten years ago. He wasn't perfect, and we disagreed on a number of subjects, but we respected each other. He was interested in the things I liked because I liked them. He came to my orchestra concerts and left college brochures in my room with Post-its attached in his terrible handwriting; he thought I should apply to Wellesley and Middlebury.

One of my favorite memories of Jeff is a time we were watching TV and an infomercial for this fancy pen set came on. Fancy pen sets were the kind of thing that got me excited in high school. Fancy pen sets, Indigo Girls, and The Mists of Avalon: that's the kind of teenager I was. Wellesley and Middlebury, indeed. I commented that they looked cool, or something along those lines. He picked up the phone and ordered them right then. I'll be thinking about him today, grateful for his enthusiasm and love.

What librarians do

Lately, I've been reading columns about librarians that trade in bold statements like "reference is dead" or "if libraries don't catch up, they'll be dead" - lots of death language, actually, now that I think about it. I have to catch my own reactions to these, because I don't want to be reactionary in a self-preservation kind of way. But I have this instinct that the recommendation, personalization, and monetization aspects of much online information (which I guess is supposed to replace resource description and reference) doesn't apply to every information need. What librarians have always done is just being called by new words now - curation, for instance. And you can post all the books and images online you want, but without good metadata, search does you no good.

Anyway - if the first paragraph is all my own ranting, this one is about the validation I found in the introduction to All Facts Considered by Kee Malesky. For those of you who don't listen to NPR around the clock (even the credits), she is a reference librarian there. FIRST of all, Malesky refers to librarians as "generalists, people who know a little about a lot of things" (2). She took the words right out of my mouth/blogger profile! Then she gets at one of the fundamental functions of librarianship:

"Knowledge is inherently ambiguous and any system of classification is arbitrary; one could argue that it's absurd even to attempt to sort things into categories. But sort we must because it's in our nature, and because it's necessary to make information manageable. (Managing information is something that all librarians do every day.)" (4)

Leaving aside the huge amount of information that is neither online nor machine-searchable, and leaving aside the access (financial and physical) much of the country, and world, has to broadband or mobile Internet, there has not yet been a substitute invented for helping people adjust their searching keywords or techniques based on a good reference interview. That reference interview can be through e-mail, chat, text, or the brain-chip instant-communication I'm sure will be here soon. When the consequences of finding the right information matters to people (whether it's health information, articles for a research paper, or correct facts for a NPR piece), the way information is organized and having someone to help you is where librarians thrive.

This is a "rah-rah librarians" post. I admit it. I needed to create my own antidote to the gloomy "the Internet always knows exactly what you want" stuff I've been reading lately. (Which doesn't preclude adapting and learning new things...see below!!) And I'll close with it, too. Kee Malesky, take it away:

"I've always believed that being a librarian is a vocation, a calling, and not just a job. What we do matters in the world. Every moment of the day, I must be open to learning something that will help me to be a better librarian." (5)

All quotations from Malesky, Kee. All Facts Considered: The Essential Library of Inessential Knowledge. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2010. Print.

Talisman of the Moment: Peggy Olson

Roger Sterling: Peggy, can you get me some coffee?
Peggy Olson: No.

-from Mad Men, Season 3, Episode 13

In my cubicle at work, I have a Mad Men calendar, and the April picture is the one at right, of Peggy Olson. I have found myself looking up at it a lot, thinking that she is the appropriate character to accompany the month I was born. I can relate to Peggy's pragmatic feminism. She doesn't have lofty ideals about civil rights like Paul Kinsey; she's just tired of being treated like crap because she's a woman. In this picture, she knows that guy in the shadow of the subway stop is staring at her - but what else is new?

Is Peggy sometimes abrasive? Does she know she's working for The Man even as she makes inroads for women? Does she have a lot to learn? Yes, yes, and yes. I'm grateful for this calendar month; it reminds me that I am still learning how to be an adult and a person in the world. Peggy is far from perfect, and so am I.

Sex at Dawn: An Exercise in Evaluating Information (Part 1)

Writing an entry that includes "Part 1" implies that there will be a Part 2. Fair warning that this may or may not happen.

Okay. So I recently finished reading Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá. I had heard Ryan as a guest twice on Dan Savage's podcast (one of my favorites, which can be downloaded here). I was intrigued by its central concept (basically, a takedown of what is commonly thought of as "natural" about human sexuality). In terms of content and style, it was an enjoyable and thought-provoking book, though I wish there had been more about homosexuality.

As I was reading, however, I found myself thinking about work. That is, the part of my job where I try to think critically about information and research I encounter, and ask students to do the same. You know, what librarians call information literacy. With each point they made, I tried to ask the questions I'd expect students to ask: Is this argument sound? Do I trust the sources the authors are citing? Are they citing where they need to be? What follows are some preliminary thoughts and examples, with (possibly) more to come.

My first thought is my first problem. If you're writing a book that says that many accepted "experts" have drawn incorrect conclusions, and that even the ways they collected data were often flawed, it's not easy to apply tests of authority and accuracy to the sources authors cite. In other words, how can you compare against established sources when the central argument is that many of those sources are wrong?

That being said, I have some minor quibbles with citation. Sometimes statistics are not cited. Sometimes a citation will be nothing but a URL, with no corresponding entry in the list of references, which raises my librarian hackles; URLs are changeable things. There are also some examples of different standards the authors have for accuracy: for example, looking at two studies on sexual arousal, they point out the importance in one of reported sexual arousal versus measured physical arousal (gone unnoted in the original study). But the next study mentioned studied only reported physical arousal, and used a different method to measure. (pp. 276-277)

That's an example of one place where I think the book's argument could be tightened up. Also, while I accepted the argument about agriculture being the advent of war, competition, and concern with paternity, I didn't think the authors explained as well as they could have how that led (in their view) to the subjugation of women.

In any case, this entry is long enough already. More in Part 2 (maybe), but I do just want to say this. I am nitpicking because I think the argument in this book is extremely important. Even if it's not the most logical or most "true" interpretation of anthropological and evolutionary data, I think that if people even considered it as a point of view, we might be a lot less unhappy. I'm not (and they're not) advocating dishonesty in any way (i.e., lying to your partner about sleeping with someone else or violating an existing monogamous agreement). But if people (and politicians) could acknowledge that sexual monogamy is neither easy or natural, maybe we could stop running people out of office and berating them for it.

"The grand test of virtue"

I finished Down and Out in Paris and London a week or two ago. Until I started reading it and saw the category "Fiction" on the back, I had assumed it was a memoir. From what I can gather, it's based on Orwell's experiences, but Orwell generally had money and family to fall back on, unlike his Down and Out protagonist. I may be the last person on earth to read it, but if you haven't: the first part is basically a depiction of the working poor (in Paris), while the second is a depiction of the homeless (in London). The book was first published in 1933, but some of his observations about poverty are no doubt still true, and the book in general felt modern - as Orwell seems to be able to do. I can't help comparing his language and ideas with those of Virginia Woolf, whose diary I'm picking back up (Volume 2). Woolf is an admitted snob and a total classist, even as she worries about money and writes some of the most beautiful and universal prose I've ever written. Orwell, on the other hand, knows the lives and humanity of all "classes" of people, and writes in a straightforward way that I also admire. It's interesting to read them so close together.

Anyway, here are some passages out of Down and Out that I found the most thought-provoking.

Orwell describes the life of a plongeur, a restaurant worker who washes dishes, among other tasks - a life with long hours and one lived day-to-day:

"...they have simply been trapped by a routine which makes thought impossible. If plongeurs thought at all, they would long ago have formed a union and gone on strike for better treatment. But they do not think, because they have no leisure for it; their life has made slaves of them." (p. 116)

If the working poor have no time to think, the homeless have been ground down to either an inability to think, or sheer boredom:

"He was probably capable of work too, if he had been well fed for a few months....He had lived on this filthy imitation of food till his own mind and body were compounded of inferior stuff. It was malnutrition and not any native vice that had destroyed his manhood." (p. 153)

These last two passages get at the heart of the class system and capitalism, and I think they apply equally to present-day America:

"Very few cultivated people have less than (say) four hundred pounds a year [middle class?], and naturally they side with the rich, because they imagine that any liberty conceded to the poor is a threat to their own liberty." (pp. 119-120)

"Then the question arises, Why are beggars despised? --for they are despised, universally. I believe it is for the simple reason that they fail to earn a decent living. In practice nobody cares whether work is useful or useless, productive or parasitic; the sole thing demanded is that it shall be profitable. In all the modern talk about energy, efficiency, social service and the rest of it, what meaning is there except 'Get money, get it legally, and get a lot of it'? Money has become the grand test of virtue.
...
A beggar, looked at realistically, is simply a business man, getting his living, like other business men, in the way that comes to hand. He has not, more than most modern people, sold his honour; he has merely made the mistake of choosing a trade at which it is impossible to grow rich." (p. 174)


All quotations from Orwell, George. Down and Out in Paris and London. New York: Harcourt, Inc.: 1961.

Ghosts, machines, etc.

The other day, I finished reading Matthew Zapruder's book of poetry Come On All You Ghosts. There are many reasons, both trivial and not, for me to like it. The trivial ones include our shared alma mater, and references in the poems to artists I like (Neko Case, David Foster Wallace). The non-trivial are the poems themselves and how they're written. While I occasionally lost the thread reading a poem, I always assume that's my failing. One of my biggest problems in writing poems is slavishly sticking to narrative form. This is not a problem (at least in the final product) for Zapruder.

Okay, so now I'll let the poems speak for themselves, in excerpts, anyway, below. I also recommend the poem "Letter to a Lover," one of my new favorite love poems, which can be found in its entirety on the Copper Canyon Press website.

I can't help but love this one:

"...Come home
those who love a librarian aspect. I am one,
for give her time and she will answer any question
no matter how spiral, no matter how glass,
so slow to judgment you can sit among her
like a reading room and read and think
until the docents come, they move as trained,
as trained they place a careful hand on our shoulder."
-from "Never Before," p. 38


I like these opening lines that get at postmodernism and reality TV:

"In old black and white documentaries
sometimes you can see
the young at a concert or demonstration
staring in a certain way as if
a giant golden banjo
is somewhere sparkling
just too far off to hear.
They really didn't know there was a camera.'
-from "Global Warming," p. 83


The last lines of the book refer back to Zapruder comparing a poem to a machine:

"Come on all you ghosts,

you can tell me now,
I have seen one of you becoming
and I am no longer afraid,

just sad for everyone
but also happy this morning I woke
next to the warm skin

of my beloved. I do not know
what terrible marvels
tomorrow will bring

but ghosts if I must join you
you and I know
I have done my best to leave

behind this machine
anyone with a mind
who cares can enter."
-from "Come On All You Ghosts," pp. 107-8

All quotations from Zapruder, Matthew. Come On All You Ghosts. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2010.

That New Year feeling all year long

The first month of the year is almost over. For me, it's been a challenging one. Between the weekly blizzards (and all the slowing and hazards they create), dreams that make me think about stuff I don't want to, and a rocky start to taking steps to be healthier, my simple-sounding New Year's resolution ("manage stress better") is taking a beating. And one thing that is keeping me determined is this playlist I made. I know it sounds trivial, but the lists I make myself help to propel me forward and reinforce what I need to tell myself. I had actually just made one in December, so this one is more of an EP-length, so to speak, and it doesn't have a specific order, which is a departure from the usual. There are two songs on it by the Decemberists, whose new album I really like, a lot. (It's something new, but it's still them.) I'm going to put the list below.

Sorry for the short, non-book-focused, entry. My reading lately has been for specific purposes (book group, writing an entry for a reference book), but I'm chugging along in Down and Out in Paris and London, as well as Matthew Zapruder's latest poetry collection Come On All You Ghosts, so hopefully I'll write about those soon.


Oh January (order should be shuffled):

"January Hymn" - the Decemberists
"Medicine Wheel" - Aimee Mann
"Dia de Enero" - Shakira
"Don't Carry it All" - the Decemberists
"This Year" - the Mountain Goats
"Calendar Girl" - Stars


"Calendar Girl" really should be my personal anthem - focusing on being alive rather than worrying about how and when one is going to die. And I have this episode of This American Life to thank for the Mountain Goats song.

Ring that bell

In prior years, I have been known to slip change into the Salvation Army bucket. But I just don't think I can do it anymore. I had heard a lot about the SA being anti-gay, but I thought I'd check it out for myself. Here are the secondary sources I consulted about the SA's policies (which talk about homosexuality, but also about checking IDs and immigration status of those they help - which they seem to have stopped doing once it was publicized).

• "The Salvation Army: Naughty or Nice?" by Phil Bronstein in the San Francisco Chronicle
  

• "The Salvation Army: Good Works, Questionable Politics" by Shea O'Neill in SF Appeal
  

• "Salvation Army in Chicago..." (no author listed) in Huffington Post
  

And finally, let's go to the source: Salvation Army's own policies on many issues, including homosexuality (which is OK as long as you don't sleep with anyone). The Salvation Army says they won't discriminate against anyone in need, but reserves the right not to hire anyone who doesn't share their beliefs.

I know that the SA has helped a lot of people all over the world, but they're not the only ones. So this Christmas, instead of dropping money in the red buckets, I'm giving a donation to Rosie's Place, a homeless shelter serving women in Boston. I urge my legions of readers to find a worthy local charity in their area and follow suit.

Um, that's all...no books in this one, just liberal propaganda. :) Happy holidays to all.

Middle ground

Well, looks like I'm slowing down in posting from previous years to about one post per month. I think I can live with that, if my legions of devoted readers can.

I've had this book - The University of Google: Education in the (Post)Information Age by Tara Brabazon - on my desk at work for a long time, and in the spirit of clearing things out before the new year, I finally read it (or most of it, anyway). I found it to present the best balance between two attitudes I normally encounter when it comes to information and learning: on the one hand, that the Internet/social media/Google are intellectually ruining us, and one the other hand, that Google/crowdsourcing /anything 2.0 have changed everything, and we don't need stodgy forms of information like books or indexes anymore.

Instead, Brabazon, a professor media studies in the U.K. (her website is here), combines her observations from teaching with studies and articles about online learning and related issues. This combined approach, also, is a breath of fresh air. One of my bugbears in this area is when people take their own experiences and generalize them without any outside support. There are two passages from the book at which I found myself nodding particularly vigorously; here's one:

"The second assumption of flexible learning is that 'new' technologies intrinsically create a productive learning environment....Technological platforms require care in their introduction. Only the applications that assist student learning should be mobilized, and this requires clear learning rationales to be determined. Technology does not create high quality learning resources: teachers and librarians do....Technology does not create learning. Teachers do not create learning. Students do not create learning. Instead, the space between students and teachers summons the transformative dialogue of an educational encounter. In that space may be an internet connection or a PowerPoint presentation, but just as likely it could be a soccer ball or a guitar. The best of teachers are able to deploy diverse sources to tease open these spaces between teachers, students and learning outcomes. They are not being valued in a flexible age." (emphasis mine; pp. 82-3)

Basically, there are no easy answers, especially when it comes to education. This, to me, is self-evident, but it's clear from discussions about technology and education, especially in the United States, that my view is not a widely held one. Here are the other lines, taken from later in the book:

"Information has no value in and of itself. It must be sorted, contextualized, and evaluated. When information is the aim, when information becomes a commodity, the interests of those groups already in power are reinforced. ... The consequences of digitisation are that it increases the speed and spread of information. Yet the quantity of trivial data that survives also increases. The crap of a culture is stored on multiple hard drives and endlessly returns through Google." (emphasis mine; p. 162)

Writing things down and providing access to them used to be much more precious and costly, so people wrote down only what they felt was most important. Current technology allows us to save virtually everything (though not necessarily find it as easily - you can't search for the subject of a photograph unless somebody labels it). Is this a re-definition of what's important? If so, prepare for the next generation's heads to explode with the sheer mass of it.

Anyway, I know that was a bit of a long post, but I highly recommend the book. It's well-written, concise, and insightful.

All quotations from Brabazon, Tara. The University of Google: Education in a (Post)Information Age. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007.

Precisely

I've been thinking a lot about language. And my forthcoming thoughts might not be the most eloquent thing I've ever written (I'm under the weather and can't find the initial notes I made on this topic), but I'll do my best.

First of all, I've been reading (as I've been meaning to for a long time) Naomi Baron's book Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World. It was published in 2008, and is already out of date in some ways - she talks about instant messaging and text messaging in totally separate ways, when the iPhone and its ilk have basically combined the two. Baron doesn't bemoan the degradation of language or anything over-the-top like that. She is trying to study the effects and evolutions of language online. But the following passage struck me:

Suppose I'm looking for some information on evolution. But it's late at night, or I'm feeling lazy, or I'm not sure of my spelling, so I type 'cHarlz dARwon" into the search box. Google politely inquires, "Did you mean charles darwin?" Sure, Google, that's exactly what I meant (give or take some capitalization). Thank you for obviating the need for me to express myself clearly. The problem is that if I come to rely on Google to figure out what I meant to write, what is my motivation for expressing myself precisely in the first place? (page 179)

I'll leave aside the information literacy implications of this paragraph and stick to the subject. The last sentence resonated with me, since precision in language is something I value very, very highly. I associate precision of language with thoughtfulness; the writer or speaker cared enough to think about how to say exactly what she meant. It's why I like reading (good) poetry. I get frustrated when I hear students or reality show actors utter barely constructed sentences with phrases like "it's almost to the point where" or so many "likes" and "I guess"es that any meaning is obscured. This lack of precision manifested itself in politicians and pundits over the past week, too. "Does the president get it?" "The American people are saying we need to turn this baby around." What do those sentences even mean? The more abstract and vague these talking points, and the more they are blindly repeated in the face of thoughtful, specific questions, the more frustrated I get.

I think that's all I have to say for now on the subject.I'm certainly not perfect, and I don't always say exactly what I wanted to (especially when speaking), but I try. And I just wish that people in general (but especially public figures) were more thoughtful about their words.

Quotation from Baron, Naomi S. Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.

We now pause for matrimony and long novels

I'm always pleasantly surprised when people complain to me that I haven't updated the blog in a long time. And I haven't, due to several factors. These include: The beginning of the academic year and its attendant workload. Having to finish a library copy of Jonathan Franzen's 562-page Freedom in four weeks.

And probably most of all, being involved in, and traveling to, three weddings. As calzone (in my blogroll) pointed out recently, these things are a lot of work. They also provoke a lot of thought and bring up a lot of emotions. First of all, there's the whole tradition of marriage, with its patriarchal overtones and its being recognized for same-sex couples only in a small handful of states. Wedding #3, for example, was a traditional Catholic one, with a lot of talk about children. Wedding #2, on the other hand, had part of the Massachusetts Supreme Court decision about same-sex marriage printed on the back of the pamphlet. And then there was the crying. I cried at all three weddings. I had met the couple of Wedding #1 once, but the groom's vows were so touching I teared up. One of the readings, along with the unrestrained happiness on the couple's faces, got me at Wedding #2. And it was a double feature at Wedding #3 - the groom started crying when he saw the bride, so I did too, and then when there was a prayer for "those not with us today," I lost it thinking about my stepdad. He's been gone for ten years, but every now and then a memory or thought of him overwhelms me.

Anyway. That's what I've been doing lately. I highly recommend Freedom, by the way. I recommend, with reservations, Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals. It is a deadly serious book - no jokes or inspirational moments or letting you off the hook (read Michael Pollan or Mark Bittman for that) - Foer presents a raft of facts and comes to what seems like the only logical conclusion. The whole thing is pretty depressing, but fascinating, and urgent.

There's your random-thoughts post. I promise to post more regularly this fall and winter.

Poet Persona

Last summer, my big heavy book was the correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. I kept thinking about Bishop's work and her life. Her poems (and I'm sure I'm repeating myself here) are nearly perfect; I would probably kill to write poems like that. But would I have wanted her life? She had sorrows early and late in life, suffered from asthma and alcoholism, and seemed always to be worrying about money. In the letters, she is always promising to take trips to see Lowell and other people, and rarely follows through - whether due to money, the vagaries of the Brazilian government (she lived in Brazil for many years), or something to do with Lota, her longtime partner. I got the sense that sometimes she felt stuck in Brazil. On the other hand, her isolated geographic position allowed her to be dismissive of things like awards, readings, and teaching honors - all of which she seems to have disliked.

This got me thinking about some of my favorite poets' lives, and whether I'd like being in them. While I certainly wouldn't say no to James Merrill's independent wealth (read: time to read and write and travel all the time), it doesn't sound like his childhood was any picnic. And even though he had lots of friends and lovers, there's something lonely in his poems, especially the later ones.

Then there's Philip Larkin, a fellow librarian. I love his sharp, dry poems, and his Collected Poems is the book I give to friends who claim not to like poetry. According to the Poetry Foundation, he hated the limelight even more than Bishop, and grew more and more reclusive after publishing his last book in 1974 (he died in 1985). He appears to have been a serial romantic partner (sometimes monogamous, sometimes not, but apparently with the agreement of the other parties). I admire that he managed to be both a good librarian and a good poet. But it does seem like he was terribly cranky most of the time.

And finally, there is Amy Clampitt, whose appearance on an episode of the Poetry off the Shelf podcast I was listening to this morning jump-started this whole line of thought. I had never heard of Clampitt until we studied her in a class I took my senior year in college. My professor invited a critic who'd known her to talk to the class, and the details of her life delighted me. She published her first book at age 54 - a fact that comforts me when I get all Sylvia Plath-y about how time is ticking away on me as a poet and a person. (Notice I left SP out of this entry altogether. Clearly.) And Clampitt was also a reference librarian, for the Audubon Society. The visiting critic told us that she met her partner at a Communist rally when they were both on the older side, and that they kept separate apartments. They only got married when one of them was dying (can't remember if it was him or her) so there wouldn't be legal trouble. There was a poet on the podcast who's currently living in her house in Western Mass. on a residency. (I kind of want to apply.)

And her poems - while they don't blow me away every time - are really good. They're about - and I swore I wouldn't mention the David Lipsky book about DFW till later, but I have to - about the kinds of things DFW said, in that book, that poetry needs to be about for people to care about it again: the 9-to-5, and married people sleeping in the same bed. (I can't seem to find the exact quote.) So yeah, I guess Amy Clampitt is as close to a poetic idol as I'm going to get.

(All these poets are bio-ed and critic-ed and bibliographied very well over at the Poetry Foundation.)

Infinite Jest Diary #9: Final Thoughts

So I finished the book last Thursday night, and had to plunge the next day into a series of social engagements and obligations, so could not post to the blog.

I finished the book around 11 PM, then spent about an hour and a half searching online (and reading a lot of the Infinite Summer posts) to see what various members of the community of readers thought about the ending and the book as a whole. There is a quote by DFW about the end that I kept coming across, and that I think is very appropriate, but it sort of spoils it from the beginning if you read it and haven't read the book. So I'll just link to one of the places I found it, a blog post with some other interesting ideas about the book. Scroll down to just below the image of a map.

What I can say without spoiling anything, I think, is this: what's insane about this book is that it immediately demands to be read again. Not because it was so much fun the first time around, but because in order to understand it, you really do have to read it again. At least the way I'd been reading the book. Maybe if I'd read it in a shorter amount of time, I would have been more aware of what to be looking for and how to be reading. Also, DFW's original title for this book was A Failed Entertainment. That works too, I guess, but Infinite Jest is a perfect title. It works on many different levels, more than I thought in the middle of the book.

I'm glad I read Infinite Jest. Yes, I have questions without answers. Some things in the book lead nowhere. Some are only suspected of leading somewhere. DFW withholds some information, and gives you what feels like way too much of other information. People and events and tragedy and comedy and violence and consumerism and entertainment are all exaggerated, because that's the kind of world the book is set in. I believe the book is meant to challenge its readers, and that meeting all the book's challenges as a single reader is impossible. It demands study and speculation. And for that, I have to say, I come away from the experience with more awe than annoyance.

Infinite Jest Diary #8: Home Stretch

Progress: currently on page 938

That's right, ladies and gentlemen. 43 pages to go. I think I may finish this thing tomorrow. I have to say, I'll feel relieved when I do, though I've enjoyed the experience very much. The only problem? It's becoming clear to me that this is a book that demands a second reading. NOT back-to-back; that's for sure. Maybe someday in the future when I've read some criticism (I'm interested to see if there's been anything written on the multiple narrators in the book). (Or maybe the many uses of the word "entertain.") And maybe after I've re-read Hamlet. I'm going to try not to give anything away as I report on the final pages of the book.

Here are some quotes, passages, etc....

"This so-called 'psychotically depressed' person who tries to kill herself doesn't do so out of quote 'hopelessness' or any abstract conviction that life's assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom [this] invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise." (p. 696)
Well, here's me being presumptuous, but this sounds awfully like someone who knew what that feeling was like. And it's really sad.

Endnote 304 is all about a student doing research - the incredible machinations one goes through to plagiarize something successfully vs. spending that time writing the damn thing yourself. It's an interesting passage for someone interested in information literacy...like me.

There's a passage that starts on page 896 where Hal considers all the times he'll repeat a given task, and all the times he'll breathe in and out, and all the food he'll eat - and becomes overwhelmed and discouraged by the thought. I've often thought about this too; so much of what we/I do is maintenance and repetition. This can depress you if you think about it too much, which of course is Hal's forte.

Then I don't know what I think about this:

"It now lately sometimes seemed like a kind of black miracle...that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end....We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately - the object seemed incidental to this will to give oneself away, utterly. The games or needles, to some other person." (p. 900)

This seems to me to be sort of a statement on both addictions and pseudo-addictions, and maybe the unavoidableness thereof. Maybe this is the antidote to thinking too much about thousands of breaths and breaded chicken cutlets...and some people take it to a dangerous level.

Okay, word time. Note: I am not including the barrage of vocabulary words on page 832 partially because I think you're not supposed to know what they mean along with the character who's hearing them, and partially because I'm tired.

1. hanuman (n.) An Indian monkey, Presbytis entellus, venerated by Hindus.
2. veronica (n.) A large genus of scrophulariaceous plants (herbs or shrubs) having leafy stems and blue (rarely white or pink) flowers borne in racemes or spikes.
3. gonion (n.) The outermost point on the angle of the lower jaw on each side.
4. entrepôt (n.) Temporary deposit of goods, provisions, etc.; chiefly concr. a storehouse or assemblage of storehouses for temporary deposit. Also fig.
5. colposcope (n.) Entry for colpo- prefix: comb. form of Gr.

womb, used = vagina in terms of Path., Surg., and Anat.

6. parturient (adj.) About to give birth; in labour; (of a plant) bearing fruit (obs.).
7. olla podrida (n.) 1. A highly spiced stew of Spanish and Portuguese origin, made from various kinds of meat and vegetables - or - 2. A diverse mixture of things or elements; spec. a mixture of different languages.
8. strigil (n.) An instrument with a curved blade, for scraping the sweat and dirt from the skin in the hot-air bath or after gymnastic exercise.
9. hulpil (n.) According to the Infinite Jest wiki, "probably a misspelling of "huipil," which is a kind of thin Mexican blouse"
10. parotitic (adj.) related to the inflammation of either of a pair of large salivary glands situated just in front of the ear
11. atheling (n.) A member of a noble family, a prince, lord, baron; in OE. poetry often used in pl. for ‘men’ (viri); in later writers often restricted as a historical term to a prince of the blood royal, or even to the heir apparent to the throne.

Infinite Jest Diary #7

I think I'm going to set this one up in fragments, since that's about all my brain can handle in this humidity wave.

Progress: currently on page 687

Thoughts:
Obviously, in my profession, I read a lot about e-books. I've long thought the format lends itself better to some kinds of books than others. I think this would actually be a great book to read on something like an iPad. It might reduce the weight (the Apple site specs put the iPad at 1.5 pounds), and would definitely reduce the bulk. You could pop out to the dictionary or the Infinite Jest wiki; you could track characters and organize notes. I'm not saying I find the print version of the book difficult to do all these things, just that this particular book would be a good candidate for electronic form, in my opinion.

On a totally different note, characters utter a lot of malapropisms in this book; I think my favorite is Gately referring to a poet named "Sylvia Plate" on p. 593.

And here's a sentence I think sums up a lot of DFW's narration, not just in this book: "All this appraisal's taking only seconds; it only takes time to list it." (p. 609)

Quotes:
"At a certain level of abstraction it's like the brain recoils." (p. 570) Said about a science class, but obviously applicable to all disciplines. I reached this point in calculus.

"[P]eople of a certain age and level of like life-experience believe they're immortal: college students and alcoholics/addicts are the worst: they deep-down believe they're exempt from the laws of physics and statistics that ironly govern everybody else." (p. 604) This one was particularly authentic for the description of Boston-area pedestrians who cross the street whenever they feel like it - more than other cities' pedestrians, I think.

"Mario'd fallen in love with the first Madame Psychosis programs because he felt like he was listening to someone sad read out loud from yellow letters she'd taken out of a shoebox on a rainy P.M., stuff about heartbreak and people you loved dying and U.S. woe, stuff that was real. It is increasingly hard to find valid art that is about stuff that is real in this way." (p. 592, emphasis mine) This, to me, is DFW articulating postmodernism in one sentence, and it resonated, a lot.

Words:
1. caparison (v.) To put trappings on; to trap, deck, harness. Also fig.
2. cathexis (n.) The concentration or accumulation of mental energy in a particular channel.
3. rhynophemic (adj.) According to the Infinite Jest wiki: "a misspelled reference to rhinophyma, the reddening of the nose common to alcoholics"
4. anomic (adj.) Related to a form of aphasia characterized by inability to recall the names of objects.
5. saltire (n.) An ordinary in the form of a St. Andrew's cross, formed by a bend and a bend sinister, crossing each other; also, a cross having this shape.
6. tektitic (adj.) Related to one of the small, roundish, glassy bodies of unknown origin that occur scattered over various parts of the earth.
7. anaclitic (adj.) characterizing a person whose choice of a ‘love object’ is governed by the dependence of the libido on another instinct, e.g. hunger; also in extended use, characterized by dependence on another or others (see quots.).