Unstable Euphony

On My Door - Anderson Cooper

2012-01-25T08:00:00.000-05:00

Anderson Cooper actually used the door knocker

to knock on my door today.

He kept knocking once the door was open.

"Anderson...Anderson."

He made eye contact with me,

but kept knocking.

I was trying hard not to be the next one

to speak. I thought,

"Surely he'll stop when he's satisfied

and come in the house."

But it was as if he had heard my thoughts

and had it in his mind to be contrary.

He stopped knocking,

took one step forward,

then spun around and bolted down the steps

and across the street at a dead run.

I couldn't see him once he turned the corner

at the end of the block.

On My Door - Andy Warhol

2012-01-18T08:00:00.000-05:00

Andy Warhol knocked on my door today.

He began to speak before

I could get the door open wide enough

to see who it was. I interrupted his already-running

harangue with a non-plussed,

"Oh, Andy, come on in."

Only, he didn't want to be invited in.

He wanted to have a vigorous conversation

with me in the house

and him on the stoop.

Well, he didn't say this exactly,

but it was obvious from his posture

and demeanor.

So we talked like that,

me and Andy Warhol,

for probably twenty minutes before I said,

"This is ridiculous, Andy."

And do you know what he said?

"Why?"

Recent Reads/Listens

2011-11-19T11:48:00.003-05:00

Fiction

Robert Coover - Spanking the Maid
Robert Coover - The Public Burning
Maxine Hong Kingston - Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book
David Foster Wallace - Girl With Curious Hair
John Barth - Lost in the Funhouse

Criticism

Marianne DeKoven - Utopia Limited
Geoffrey Galt Harpham - Language Alone: The Critical Fetish of Modernity
Amy Hungerford - Postmodern Belief

Music

Adele (amazing tone to her voice)
The Weakerthans (it's that time of year!)
Bon Iver (like The Weakerthans, fall and winter seem the most appropriate times to listen to Bon Iver for reasons I don't entirely understand, although I do listen to The Weakerthans year-round)
Iron & Wine
Marvin Gaye (borrowed this amazing 4-disc box set from my friend Dan)
Pete Yorn (a personal revival of Musicforthemorningafter) - thinking of you, Thad!

Kids and "Witchy Woman"

2011-10-29T19:41:00.002-04:00

So we took our son to his first Halloween event today. We dressed the poor kid up like a sheriff and then took him to listen to a woman reading books to a whole group of children at a local big box book store. As I stood there watching him watching the woman reading I was struck by how everyone in the area seemed completely oblivious to the smooth stylings of The Eagles singing "Witchy Woman" while a bunch of kids listened to children's Halloween stories.

I finally leaned back to a fellow father standing in close proximity and said quietly, "There's something especially appropriate about listening to "Witchy Woman" during a children's story time." He laughed and indicated that he hadn't even noticed. I thought it was pretty funny and that nothing could really top it, until the 1966 hit "Little Red Riding Hood" came rolling out of the store's speaker system.

A Baseball and a Baseball

2011-10-17T18:45:00.005-04:00

What is the difference between a material-physical baseball and the word-sign baseball? Are they not two different versions of the same thing? You can "do" things with both of them. There are ways in which each one depends on the other for certain experiential phenomena. We certainly cannot "talk" or "write" about the one without the other?

So, perhaps what's important is that when it comes to the interaction of two or more human subjects in relation to a baseball, the material-physical object and the word-sign object are equally important/valuable/valid? Although, two people can share a game of catch without a word, and could ostensibly know or intuit what to do with the material-physical object without any familiarity with the word-sign. Likewise, two people could share a book, or independently read a book, that employs the word-sign without any familiarity with the material-physical object.

Are both a kind of object and a kind of sign. Is anything not a sign? I'm interested in breaking down the clear distinction between material objects and the signs we supposedly "use" to communicated things about the material objects. Are the signs not also material objects, and are the material objects not also signs?

Seasons

2011-09-26T08:00:00.000-04:00

I love fall.

Winter is pretty much the worst except for the fact that I'm not constantly hot and I don't get drenched in sweat walking/biking back and forth from home to school.

Spring is pretty great because it signals the end of winter, but I have terrible allergies and live in one of the top 10 worst allergy cities in the United States. Spring is way worse than fall for me so...while I look forward to summer I usually feel like crap for about a month.

It's true: summer is the absolute best of all time. I'm definitely more of a beach person than a mountains person (it seems like most folks who grow up or live in NC are one or the other). I love the water, I like going to the beach or the lake, spending time outside with friends, playing outdoor games, watching baseball at night when it's almost-dark. Our guilty-pleasure reality shows are on in the summer. Summer's awesome!

But fall! Fall my be my favorite season. My walking/biking is usually warm and sunny but not sweaty, it gets cool at night but is pretty warm during the day. The sun (and shadows as my wife explains to me) look different. COLLEGE FOOTBALL. Back-to-school. These are two of my favorite things in the world! The summer afterglow might be what I love most about the entire year.

Seasons!

Technology: Always and Forevermore

2011-09-19T08:00:00.001-04:00

I've never been super big into the latest gadget or tech stuff, but back at the beginning of the semester I finally broke down and got a small netbook to replace the big ole clunky laptop I've been carrying around since 2007. My primary goal was to save my back since I walk/bike up to school everyday, and carry the same stuff to the other school where I teach on Fridays. The laptop was seriously killing me. I couldn't carry anything else with it without wearing myself out x2.

The netbook is small, so up at school I have a keyboard and little mouse I hook up to it, and at home I hook it up to our desktop monitor. But it's a dream in coffee shops, and it's lighter than a lot of books. It's got one more gig of RAM than our desktop! and plenty of storage since all I use it for is word processing and music.

In hindsight, I was thinking I should have done in this a few years ago, but the kind of netbook I got didn't really even exist a few years ago! What are you doing technology?! Always getting better. In this household we obey the laws of thermodynamics!

Whiteness and the U.S. Census

2011-09-12T08:00:00.000-04:00

In the first two weeks of the semester my multiethnic literature class has looked at census categories for race from 1800 to 2010. One student made the brilliant observation that while the various categories for "black" have changed constantly over the last 200 years, "white" has remained a pretty stable category.

For example, on every single census from 1800 to 2010 there is a category for "white." In the earliest two instances, you have "free white males" (1800) and "free white persons" (1840-subsequently subdivided into "male" and "female"). After that, with the exception of 1930-when you were simply asked to write in a description of your "color or race," "white" is a stable category.

Conversely, here are all the various categorizations of "black":

slaves
free colored persons
black
mulatto
negro
African American

Later on in the semester we're going to read Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark (1992), in which she interrogates whiteness as a supposedly stable identity marker throughout American literature.

Thanks to my good friend Scott Gibson who brought the census data to my attention and suggested I use it in this class!

The Coolest Things

2011-09-05T08:00:00.001-04:00

My students were reading Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 last week, and I asked them to come up with their own illustrations of the muted post horn that pops up repeatedly throughout the novel, and to think about what the horn was symbol for.

Perhaps the coolest version they came up with was a drawing of a clarinet, or something that resembled a clarinet, playing into a microphone that was wired into a speaker system that fed three separate sets of headphones.

The group's point was how the post horn seemed to be symbolically significant in a different way for each group who encountered it. Smart. This observation led us to a discussion of how Pynchon frustrates symbolism as it's typically understood.

You get a bunch of people in a room, give them something complicated to engage with, and ask them to think about that thing in an active way, and they'll almost invariably say the coolest things.

Genres

2011-08-15T08:00:00.000-04:00

As a general rule, I've always loved prose fiction more than any of the other literary genres. I'm a huge fan of poetry as well, but have never felt the same passion for drama. However, over the last year or two, I've needed to teach more drama than I have in previous years, and I had to read a bunch of new-to-me plays last year when I was preparing for my comprehensive examinations.

Basically, my exposure to so much drama has really elevated my appreciation and enjoyment for this genre. I'm not sure how valuable it is to think of literature solely in terms of the traditional genres, but I think it's one useful approach.

Here's my current genre breakdown:

Prose Fiction - most of my academic/scholarly work focuses on the novel. I write some on short fiction as well. I am most heavily invested in fiction, and it was the novel that initially pulled me into this line of work and thought that I love so much.

Poetry - I've always loved the idea of poetry more than poetry itself, but after a few years of reading, writing, and teaching poetry pretty intensively, I must say that I now sincerely love poetry. It took me a long time to come to grips with the idea that a poem is much more like a painting or a moving song than it is like an essay by Emerson or a novel by Silko, but since coming to terms with this experience of poetry, my love for the genre has increased a hundred fold.

Drama - Never having been a big fan of drama, when I began to recognize its unique place between story and narrative I was surprised by how much I truly enjoy plays. A few favorites are Amiri Baraka's Dutchman, Susan Glaspell's Trifles, August Wilson's The Piano Lesson, and Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire.

Reading drama is not like reading prose fiction because there is no narrative voice between the action and the reader.

Twitter

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

I don't have a Twitter account, and don't really follow anyone religiously. Given all my interest in sports and my limited time to actually watch or read about them, Twitter would probably be a great way to stay up on the latest news. There are a couple of cool sports writers who maintain super-active accounts. Anyways, one of those guys, Adam Schefter, who's a contributor for ESPN and an NFL expert, recommended this Twitter feed as a good one to follow for writers:

http://twitter.com/#!/advicetowriters

It's maintained by Jon Winokur, who maintains a corresponding website HERE.

Summer Brainlessness Breaks

2011-08-01T08:00:00.000-04:00

My work schedule is and has been pretty steady all summer:

1. I go up to the office from about 8am until lunch, call it 11:30am or noon, depending on how things are going;

2. I go home for a couple hours, eat, play with the kid, chill, watch some ESPN;

3. I go back up to the office or to the library from about 2pm until quitting time, call it 4:30 or 5:00pm.

The exceptions are:

1. Wednesday afternoons I meet with my writing group;
2. Sometimes I don't go back after lunch on Fridays.

What this fairly rigorous schedule has allowed me to do is basically play with my son during that long lunch break, every late afternoon, and all day on weekends. And it has also allowed me to watch terrible, brainless tv with my wife in the evenings. This guilty pleasure has become a pretty regular feature of our summers over the last few years. We usually follow a couple reality shows like Big Brother and Hell's Kitchen.

Sometimes I feel like I actually enjoy these brainless shows, other times I tell myself that it is the brainlessness that I actually like. The bottom line is that my mind is totally removed from my work, and so it doesn't get as worn out as it did when I used to try to work, read, write, study every waking hour back when I was still doing coursework.

Let's hear it for brainless activities!

Julia Alvarez, Narrative, and Time

2011-07-25T08:00:00.000-04:00

Julia Alvarez's novel How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (1991) is one of those books that gets better every time I pick it up. I've just reread it this past week as it's going to figure in one of my dissertation chapters, and I'm astounded at the complexity of the narrative.

If you haven't read the novel, it's narrated in both 3rd and 1st person, about and by four sisters. It works in reverse chronological order from the late 1980s back to the mid 1950s. It's divided into three main parts, with five chapters in each part. The final part includes chapters narrated in 1st person by all four sisters, and finally explains why the family left the Dominican Republic and came to the United States, where much of the action in the previous chapters takes place.

Other cool books that work with multiple narrative threads and/or play with time that I like:

Don DeLillo's Underworld
Martin Amis's Time's Arrow
Chang-rae Lee's A Gesture Life
Leslie Silko's Ceremony
Toni Morrison's Jazz
Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo and Flight to Canada
William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!
David Mitchell's Number9Dream

Keeping Up

2011-07-18T08:00:00.000-04:00

Right now I'm incredibly consumed by my dissertation work, but I'm also trying to read some stuff for fun, and just as importantly, listen to some new music. Here are some cool books I've been reading lately and some amazing new music:

Books
Marilynne Robinson - Home (novel) & The Death of Adam (essays) - ok ok so this is partly for the diss. and partly just for fun.

Cormac McCarthy - All the Pretty Horses & The Crossing - I still need to read Cities of the Plain, which is the last book in this series, which is called The Border Trilogy. These books are haunting. Even though it's so normal to see outrageous violence even in 30-second commercials, and to read it in everything from comics, to blogs, to novels, not to mention the nightly news, McCarthy's characters encounter and create violence that seems entirely necessarily even in its most gratuitous forms. And yet, I'm continually shocked.

Music
David Bazan - Strange Negotiations (new album. fantastic)

Death Cab for Cutie - Codes and Keys (new album. amazing)

Foo Fighters - Wasting Light (there are a few songs I really like, and would be interested in hearing what others of you think about the Foo in general)

Good Ideas

2011-07-11T08:00:00.002-04:00

I just read Steven Johnson's Where Good Ideas Come From at the recommendation of Cal Newport. It was a good read as far as this brand of pop science, work studies, intellectual history goes. I read it on the beach this past week and marveled at Johnson's ability to thread various historical narratives from Darwin to YouTube together in a coherent manner.

One basic argument that Johnson develops is that good ideas are more easily generated in environments where humans are interconnected in extensive networks rather than in environments where humans are isolated, working alone. Thus, urban locales tend to see the birth and growth of more good ideas than rural or isolated locales. The working example he chooses is a live coral reef. Ideas seldom come in a flash of lightning or some other single moment. They're more often cultivated over long periods of time and constructed out of a variety of materials and ideas culled from diverse sources.

He sums up his findings on where good ideas come from by offering a list of healthy and productive strategies for developing good ideas:

"Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle, reinvent. Build a tangled bank."

Forgetfulness

2011-07-04T07:00:00.003-04:00

I love to teach Billy Collins's poem "Forgetfulness" during the last week of literature classes.

If you've never heard it, read it, or if you have some kind of hipster-too-cool-for-school attitude towards Billy Collins just like you used to have towards "indie" bands that went "mainstream," you can hear it HERE.

The poem is beautiful and funny. I think humor is what I'm most drawn to in Collins's poetry, overall. Not to say that there aren't other amazing elements to his work (especially awesome tone and sound).

The poem I need to write would capture the feeling I experienced the day after my summer Intro. to Literature class ended and I realized I forgot to share this poem with them on the last day...

New Endeavors

2011-06-27T09:00:00.002-04:00

For those of you who have noticed the pick-up in posts about academia, writing, planning, etc. it may interest you to know that I've started a new blog, Constructing the Academy, where I'll be posting more regularly on these topics.

Unstable Euphony will remain a more personal, eclectic blog. It just became clear to me that the voice of these other posts, and my interest in academic professionalization were pretty strange in the context of this blog. So, if you're interested in academia, I invite you to visit the new site, and if you're interested in following musings on poetry, music, best-ofs, and things I learn from my students, please keep Unstable Euphony bookmarked.

Do You Need More Than That?

2011-06-21T19:08:00.002-04:00

I never cease to be amazed at what we so desperately want out of a poem. Today in the summer class I'm teaching, I split the students up into groups and asked each group to choose a poem to explore. Here are the directions I gave them:

1. what emotion does this poem enact in you? (try to narrow it down to one word or a very short phrase)

2. HOW HOW HOW does the poem enact that emotion? (what words, sounds, images, etc. make you feel this way?)

3. what color is this poem?

4. who is the ideal person to read this poem? (someone recognizable, famous, etc.)

5. if you had to compare this poem to a song, what song would it be?

One group chose Paul Muldoon's amazing poem "Symposium." When it came time to share their findings, the Muldoon group explained to the rest of the class how this poem made them feel grateful, that the idea of the poem was to thankful for what you have. They suggested that Barack Obama would be an ideal reader of the poem because he came from very little and has accomplished so much.

The students so badly wanted to dig up some deep meaning in the poem. I asked whether or not they found the poem at all humorous. They said they did, and even seemed to understand that the poem is funny because it takes quaint, old, pithy, cliche sayings and continuously mashes them up and mixes them together:

You can bring a horse to water but you can't make it hold
its nose to the grindstone and hunt with the hounds.

The poem makes me laugh every time I read it. I asked them to parse the various sayings that are being confused by design in the poem, and they knew most all of them, including the older ones that are even a bit beyond the grasp of my generation. Of course, maybe there is something to the whole idea of thankfulness in the poem that the students discussed, I suggested, but it seems to me that the poem is just funny, playful, silly, and a little smart. And I don't need it to be more than that!

In case anyone's interested, here are the other poems I included:

Langston Hughes "I, Too"

Dylan Thomas "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night"

Gwendolyn Brooks "We Real Cool"

Rumi (translated by Coleman Barks) "What Was Told, That"

Kim Addonizio "What Do Women Want"

Harryette Mullen "Black Nikes"

Gertrude Stein from Tender Buttons [Objects] "A CARAFE THAT IS A BLIND GLASS" and "GLAZED GLITTER"

Following Through

2011-06-11T15:00:00.002-04:00

Enlightened and challenged by Tanya's post on semester planning I set a series of major goals for myself for this past semester. Today I finally had time to look back at my semester goals and how they broke down over months, weeks, and days. I had four major goals. Here are my results:

1. write and present lecture for the residential college.

I completed this goal, and presented the lecture on March 21

2. complete dissertation prospectus and get it approved.

My committee officially signed my documents on April 20

3. revising/writing journal article and submit by April 7.

I completed the article and got it submitted by May 10

4. write and present research on DeLillo's short fiction at ALA conference.

I presented my research on 5/28 and it went very well

I was able to accomplish all of my goals, although one took me an entire month longer than what I had planned for. I feel super satisfied that I finished these four important tasks. Now I'm doing the same thing for the rest of the summer. My conference paper becomes my new article goal, and the prospectus is replaced by specific chapter goals on the dissertation.

Tanya's advice proved extremely helpful, especially when enacted alongside Thomas's theory of the happy writer and Jonathan's many explanations of writing in the a.m. and reading in the p.m., one example of which is here.

The more I put these ideas into practice and make feeble attempts at articulating my own versions of the same basic principles, the more efficient and effective my working process gets.

Keeping Track

2011-06-06T15:53:00.002-04:00

I've happened upon a cool way to keep track of my progress on the daily writing of my dissertation. But this method will work for anything. Whether you're writing poetry, prose, or working on any kind of project really, I find it helpful to be able to follow the big picture of things.

I've created a gmail account exclusively for my dissertation. Each day that I work on it, I email it to this email address and write myself a short note in the body of the email. Something like: "slugfest" on a bad day, or "feeling good" on a good day. When I open that account I can see, not only how many days I've spent on the project, but I can also see how I've felt about it overall.

I've even created separate folders for the Introduction and Chapter 1. I'll do the same for the rest of the chapters and the conclusion as I make progress.

The whole thing started out of paranoia for losing the document at some crucial stage, and now it's turned into a really healthy part of the process. You can do the same for virtually any project.

Finished Prose

2011-05-30T11:40:00.003-04:00

I've found myself struggling with the first chapter of my dissertation. It's not that I don't know what I'm doing, or that I don't have a plan. I'm good at being prepared, well-rested, and disciplined. My problem is a new one for me: I keep catching myself laboring to write finished prose the first time through a claim.

I typically like to write my way through an idea and then go back and work with what I have. But for some reason, I keep unconsciously trying to write the first draft like it's got to be the last draft. I'm sure this is a problem I'll work my way through, but it's proved exhausting and a little discouraging.

So today I'm just going to narrate what my claims are doing to myself in my writing: "what i want to accomplish in this paragraph is 'x' so that I can show 'y' and provide my audience with context for 'z'" and so on. In this way I hope to write my way into a healthier process. We'll see if it works...

The ABD Post

2011-05-04T14:39:00.000-04:00

I'm now ABD!

Let's get this show on the road.

Changing Spaces

2011-04-16T13:17:00.004-04:00

This semester has been crazy as we added a new member to our family! This amazing process was nearly 2 years in the making and required me to take two international trips, one during the second week of class and one just before spring break. Upon returning and beginning to adjust to life with a kid, I quickly realized that my writing space was going to have to change.

We have only two rooms, so naturally, the "office" is now a nursery. It quickly became apparent that working in the nursery was going to be impractical, and so for the first time in my entire life, I've been doing the bulk of my work in the university library. I've written every paper, project, article at the same desk since my freshman year in college, and so I was initially freaking out. How would I work without all my normal materials at my fingertips? I can't carry my whole desk with me to the library.

What I've discovered is that with all of the ways my writing process has changed as a result of following Jonathan's, Thomas's, and Tanya's blogs, writing up at the library as opposed to my desk at home is not such a big change. I'm never writing an entire article. I'm never writing an entire conference paper. I've grown as a writer to where I'm disciplined enough to tackle one aspect of any given project per day. So I can work on my ongoing article up at the library on Monday morning because I know the precise task I need to complete to make substantial progress for that day, and that task only requires that I have my laptop, the primary text, and the notes I've taken on the secondary texts that I'm going to need for that day.

In fact, I've found that working up at the library for very specific blocks of time has made me more productive during that time, and way less burdened at home. Now, when I'm home I'm home, and when I'm in the library I'm at work. I may read at home, take notes, or surf the library databases/catalog, but for the most part, my work is getting done up at the library in 3 hour chunks of time over the course of 4 days a week.

Here's the basic schedule I've built around my teaching and other responsibilities. Maybe seeing this model will help other folks see the possibilities of their schedules:

Monday
Library: 9-12
Lunch/home
Library: 2-5

Tuesday (this is the tightest/busiest day)
Teaching/office hours: 8-1
Lunch/home
Library: 2-5

Wednesday
Library: 9-12
Lunch/home
Writing Group: 3pm

Thursday
Teaching: 8-11am
Lunch/home
Library: 2-5

Friday
Teach all day at SEBTS

So you can see, I have 5 blocks of 3 hours each devoted exclusively to my own work. That's 15 total work hours to spend not on course prep, not on service, not on students, not on anything except my own work (for now: an ongoing article I've almost finished and my dissertation prospectus). And there are plenty of gaps in the middle of the day (2-3 hour lunch breaks) where I can spend time with my family. We walk to our local park, play at home, etc.

I do other work, like teaching prep, during my office hours on Tues. (2 hours), and at random times when the baby is asleep or my wife is otherwise occupied. It's worked out. The point is that now I know I can do it with the new family addition, I can adapt over the summer and into next fall!

Getting a Vision

2011-04-11T10:01:00.003-04:00

Over at Get a Life, Phd, Tanya Golash-Boza offered a super helpful post on having a vision a few weeks back. As a grad student entering the dissertation phase of my degree program, I was a little overwhelmed at the idea of thinking about my vision for five years from now, let alone the overall vision for my career. But when I sat down the other day and tried to write my way through the different levels of understanding my professional vision, I found that I was not only able to articulate my vision for the next five years, but also that doing so was extremely reassuring. I found that I could avoid putting things off due to that old feeling of, "well, everything is so big that I just don't know where to start."

Here's what I sketched out according to Tanya's plan (overall vision, five year vision, semester plan, weekly plan, daily work):

Overall Vision
I'm not totally sure about the overall vision for my career yet. Do I want to be a full-time professor, an administrator, president of the MLA, a 9-5 teacher, a big-time scholar, head of some think-tank, curriculum designer? I'm just not quite sure.

5 Year Vision
My five year vision is much easier. Seeing how I still have at least one full year left in graduate school, and seeing how the job market is so tough right now, my goal for five years from now is simply to be in a tenure-track job.

Semester Plan
If I'm ever going to get a tenure-track job, I have to have a phd in hand, so to that end, my goal this semester has been, and continues to be, to get my prospectus finished and approved. I need to be ABD and writing my first chapter by the end of the semester. I also have a conference paper to present the last weekend in May, so I'm working on that in bite-sized reading/writing sessions each week.

Weekly Plan
Knowing my semester plan makes my weekly plan easy at this point: I'm working on the prospectus! But with an eye toward the 5-year plan, I'm also working on an article and trying to be the best teacher I can be, as both my research and teaching will play into my success on the job market.

Daily Work
With those weekly plans in front of me, my daily activities are no-brainers: I've got to take each of these projects on one small chunk at a time, one chunk per day. So, this morning, I've already done an overhaul reading of my most recently-completed prospectus draft, and sent it off early to my committee chair. Now, I'm taking a short break with this blog post, and I'm getting read to start rereading one of the primary texts I'll be working with in my first chapter. I'll take a 2 hour lunch break at 12pm, and then work on more diss. reading and my article this afternoon from 2-5pm. Tomorrow I'll teach and hold office hours (during which I'll plan for teaching and meet with students), and then work on the article/conference paper from 2-5pm while I wait to hear back from my committee chair on the prospectus draft.

This whole crazy process is not only doable, it can be enjoyable! Thanks, Tanya!!

Remembering Why

2011-04-06T19:32:00.002-04:00

I sometimes forget why I do what I do (spend hours reading/writing/researching/teaching/grading/working with students). But over the last few weeks I've been on a fiction-reading kick like I haven't experienced in a long time. Sure, last year I read more than I've probably ever read in my entire life as I prepared for my comprehensive exams, but the last few weeks I've been reading in a different way. I've been reading for the sheer pleasure of reading. I used to tell myself all the time that going into academia would be so awesome because I'd get to make my living doing the things I love to do. That sentiment has turned out to be very true so far. And it's a great feeling each time I have a little shock and think to myself, "oh yeah, this is what I've always wanted to do!"

The books that recently reminded me of how much I love books are:

Percival Everett I Am Not Sidney Poitier
Percival Everett Suder
Joseph O'Neill Netherland
Colson Whitehead The Intuitionist

The Intuitionist was not my favorite read lately, but I was on such a great reading high from Everett and O'Neill that I cruised right through it. I love reading. Anyone who hasn't read Percival Everett should at least read his 2001 novel Erasure. Please, do it for me. No, do it for yourself!

Fundamental Disconnect

2011-03-25T19:12:00.002-04:00

Here's an important and fundamental disconnect that novice writers often struggle with, and that more experienced writers often forget about:

We write, not to show that we know stuff, but to communicate an idea. Some may take exception to my particular phrasing, "to communicate an idea," but I'm willing to stand by this phrase. Student writers trip over this disconnect all the time. As students they're used to taking tests and quizzes to show that they know stuff, to prove that they've done work. So, it's not that unreasonable for them to approach writing in the same way. After all, their papers are usually perceived as just one set of percentages in the breakdown of their overall grades. They approach their writing thinking that the goal of the paper is to show the professor that they have knowledge.

As an aspiring academic somewhere between student writer and seasoned professional writer, I have to keep this distinction before me at all times. I have to think consciously about the fact that when I write, I'm not trying to show people that I know a lot about a given text. Who cares? I'm communicating something of significance about the text to my audience.

Awesome New Blog to Follow

2011-02-20T14:26:00.002-05:00

Here's an awesome new blog I came across via Jonathan Mayhew's Stupid Motivational Tricks. Unlike this blog, which is an eclectic and unfocused mixture of posts on everything from poetics, to baseball, to academic professionalization, Get a Life, PhD focuses on strategies for how to "Succeed in Academia and Have a Life Too."

Grad Students & the Research Agenda

2011-02-16T18:49:00.003-05:00

I've been thinking about Jonathan Mayhew's idea of the research agenda over the past few days, and how it might be tweaked at different stages in the academic career. Mayhew, for example, is an expert in his field, a senior scholar who has been researching, writing, publishing, and teaching Spanish poetry for quite some time. He articulates his research agenda, saying,

"My research agenda is to better the state of poetry criticism in my field (modern, contemporary Peninsular literature) by relating it to larger intellectuals trends in intellectual and cultural history; to trace the genealogy of the late modern movement in contemporary Spain; to integrate the contribution of Lorca into modern Spanish poetry in a more convincing way."

Mayhew's explanation of his research agenda is clear and concise. But what about someone like me? I'm a graduate student, a jr. scholar in my field. I know what critical conversations I'm interested in, and I'm even beginning to contribute to them, but I definitely cannot articulate my own research agenda like Mayhew can. Thankfully, Mayhew acknowledges the fact that his research agenda continues to fluctuate as he himself continues to research, write, and grow. Obviously, some consistency is absolutely necessary. For example, Mayhew's research agenda has probably never included the environmental ramifications of recycling.

As a grad student, or as a jr. scholar more generally, the research agenda can become a double-edged sword if not understood properly. Early on in an academic career, before a research agenda can be clearly defined, it would be easy to miss out on potentially productive projects for fear that they might come to seem aberrations in your research agenda. A jr. scholar might shy away from a project that could ultimately become a constitutive element of her evolving research agenda.

But beginning to develop a research agenda at an early stage can also be very helpful. It can save a jr. scholar from spreading himself to thin, from chasing after every shiny thing that might appeal to her, from building a CV that demonstrates no coherent intellectual narrative. That's why I'm so glad Mayhew included the reference to how his research agenda continues to evolve, even as an experienced and successful scholar in his field of expertise.

Most importantly, the very idea of a research agenda can provide jr. scholars like myself with a concrete opportunity to stop and ask ourselves what we are contributing, or plan to contribute, to our chosen field of study. In trying to articulate my own research agenda this week, I developed a better big-picture understanding of what I was doing, and also had a nice "aha" moment when I realized that I am in conversation with another scholar I had previously overlooked. This kind of meta exercise should be a part of our daily lives as academics, and as jr. scholars especially.

***
Mayhew goes on to say more about the research agenda HERE and HERE.

Hooray Report!

2011-02-14T09:01:00.002-05:00

Pitchers and catchers report today!! Come on, spring! Do it! Do it! Do it!

Nathaniel Mackey

2011-02-11T23:19:00.005-05:00

I rode with two friends over to Durham last night to hear Nathaniel Mackey read from an ongoing, longer work of poetry in David Need's fabulous Arcade Taberna reading series. Mackey was, as expected, on point and in great voice. I've had the chance to get out to a few readings for the first time in a while recently, and what I notice is that I've come to a place where truly stellar poets stand out now in a way that they didn't stand out for me in previous years.

...and Mackey stands way out! What voice and presence, yes, but it's so much more than that. If a significant element of poetry is its ability to make us feel emotions we have felt before in new ways, to experience language we have experienced before in now-unexpected circumstances, then Mackey is a very special poet indeed. I felt what I can only describe as a sense of community in a new way as I listened to Mackey read from this new and, as yet, unpublished work.

I've been reading from his newly reprinted novel Bedouin Hornbook, which appears in From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate Volumes 1-3 (New Directions 2010), but I'm going to have to get my hands on some of his poetry. I don't own any of his poetry volumes at present, and that has to change!

Getting It & Feeling It

2011-02-08T13:48:00.004-05:00

In explaining to my Intro. to Literature students the ways in which poetry is different from prose, I had one of those awesome teaching moments when my attempts to articulate an idea in my exchanges with them led me to think: "Yep. That's it." As usual with such introductory discussions of poetry, this discussion began with me trying to reroute their ideas of "getting" poetry to a sense of "feeling" poetry.

We were discussing Helen Vendler's ideas about how poetry isn't always primarily concerned with conveying a message, and I had them read a difficult prose passage and then write down questions to ask of the text. They wrote things like:

1. what does it mean?
2. what does the author mean here?

Then, I had them look at Van Gogh's "The Starry Night" and write down questions to ask of the painting. They wrote things like:

1. what is the dark tower-looking thing?
2. why is there a big swirl in the sky?

Next we talked about how poetry is a lot more like the Van Gogh painting than the prose passage. That really helped, but the awesome moment came when reading Yeats's "The Lake Isle of Innisfree." We listened to Yeats reading the poem, and then we took turns reading our favorite parts. The class was most interested in the contrast between the idyllic imagery/language of the cabin in its natural setting and the gray, paved roadway.

Eventually, the conversation led to a point where I said something like, "Do you all feel that feeling of the difference between the warm, bee-loud glade and the misty, gray pavement?" They kind of nodded, and I said something like, "If you feel that difference, then you get it. You get the poem." And although my head has known for a long time that poetry is a thing imagined, an enactment of emotion, that moment of exchange with the students was the moment in which I think I have best understood such ideas. I realized for myself that I get this poem because I feel that contrast between (most simply) country and city, and I can connect with that longing because of the way Yeats has crafted the poem.

I've always loved that poem, and now I love it even more for the pivotal intellectual and personal milestone it now marks...after years of reading and teaching it!

Being a Happy Writer

2011-02-05T11:28:00.002-05:00

I'm indebted to Jonathan Mayhew and Thomas Basbøll for helping to revolutionize my writing, both in terms of process and product, over the last year or so. I especially appreciate Thomas's post about happy writers, which has helped me explain my own process to other writers.

As I prepped for teaching Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography this past week, I marveled at the extent to which Franklin's work plans point towards the strategies I've picked up from Jonathan and Thomas. Franklin must have been a happy writer.

Getting It

2011-02-03T13:30:00.002-05:00

One of the most important problems that writers face is reconciling the writing process with the writing product. Of course, discussions of process and product are old hat in the world of English studies, but what I've come to realize lately is that what most novice writers struggle with is not so much understanding the difference between process and product, but coming to grips with this distinction at the right time.

Today I had what I think of as a classic talk with my ENG102 students as we discussed that the process I'm asking them to go through in their writing is inductive. In other words, they shouldn't set out to prove a point they already fully grasp, but should set out to explore an idea about which they will inevitably develop their own ideas. After going through this process, however, I pointed out that the product they are being asked to produce does not mirror their inductive process, but is, in fact, deductive. By this I mean that in most academic writing it is commonplace to state your main idea/argument up front and then spend the rest of the essay working it out for your audience.

Thus, there is somewhat of a disconnect between the process and the product, and I think it's this disconnect that is so often poorly communicated in writing classes. The process we're asking them to go through is inductive, whereas the product we ask them to produce is deductive. Most composition instructors are aware of this, even most English professors are aware of this, but I'm not convinced that the majority of instructors across academia offer much metacommentary on this subject. I have found that students are almost always able to manage this disjunction effectively when it is clearly explained to them, but it seems to be rarely communicated.

My earlier point about novice writers coming to grips with this idea at the right time is best demonstrated by my experiences with moving this "talk" around in the semester. I've had this talk with students before papers are due, and after papers are due, but what I've found is that we need to talk about the inductive process and the deductive product both before and after the first round of essays. They get the concept when we talk about it before the due date, and the really gain a new understanding of its ramifications after I return papers. Many of them will inevitably turn in an essay in which the steadily write their way into a good idea, showing me the process they should have gone through before they drafted the essay they actually turned in to me. We will talk about the process and product again on that day when I return papers, and eyes will light up. They'll be like, "Oh, yeah. Now I really see what you're saying." I have found that if I stay patient with them, trust the process, and grade graciously during that first round of essays, their future writing improves dramatically.

Recent Finishes (Towards Getting Back on Track)

2011-01-24T13:44:00.002-05:00

Ishmael Reed The Terrible Twos
Susan Daitch Storytown

We traveled internationally recently and I could not read a single thing on the plane. So, here are the things I planned to read on two exceptionally long flights that now need to get read here at home:

Ishmael Reed The Terrible Threes
Nicole Krauss The History of Love
Nicole Krauss Great House
Don DeLillo End Zone
Sherman Alexie Ten Little Indians (I did manage to read a couple stories from this collection. They were great)

I started, and only have 65 pages left in, Nathaniel Mackey's Bedouin Hornbook

Censoring Mark Twain

2011-01-10T13:27:00.003-05:00

As I'm sure most people in the literary world have heard by now, a new edition of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is being published by NewSouth. This new edition has garnered much public attention because as NewSouth explains, they have replaced "two hurtful epithets that appear hundreds of times in the texts with less offensive words." If you're unfamiliar with this story, you've probably already surmised that one of the words is the N-word, which has been replaced with "slave." The other is the word "injun," which the publishers have replaced with "Indian." NewSouth offers their rationale for this censorship here. (this cover image is the property of NewSouth)

I can't help but disagree completely with this decision. However, I do sympathize with one aspect of Dr. Alan Gribben's argument. Gribben suggests that the book is being voluntarily censored by schools and teachers who do not want to deal with the powder keg that comes along with the novel's use of these words. That said, the censorship of this text is unconscionable for these reasons:
1. censoring these words creates the old metaphorical slippery slope that might lead to censoring other things;
2. censoring these words fundamentally misrepresents Twain's writings. it's like saying, "Twain said x" when Twain really said "Y." in other words, censoring these words is lying;
3. censoring these words might lead some to misread Twain's use of them in the first place. I would argue, and many would agree, that Twain was a staunch anti-racist, at least when it came to the treatment of African Americans;
4. censoring these words is tantamount to erasing a dark and problematic element of United States history that is integral to ongoing fights for racial equality on various social, cultural, and political fronts in the present. it's like trying to rewrite history to make it appear a little less racist.

But don't take my word for it. Listen to this awesome interview with Ishmael Reed. I just posted about Reed yesterday, and so he was fresh in my mind when I finally got around to reading a little more about this controversy this morning.

The Terrible Twos

2011-01-09T20:11:00.002-05:00

I keep getting distracted from reading Ursula K. Le Guin's The Compass Rose by texts that I would rather read on impulse. Ishmael Reed's 1982 novel The Terrible Twos was the culprit this time. I read the entire novel last night and this afternoon. Granted, it's not that long, 180 pages, but it usually takes me more than a day to read just about any novel no matter the length. As usual, Reed is hilarious, overtly political, and totally unafraid. He's truly a fearless writer, and has been one of my favorites for a while. His 1976 novel Flight to Canada teaches amazingly.

I don't know why Le Guin's book has proven unreadable for me so far. I keep taking stabs at it, and I've read the first two stories now, but I just can't seem to sustain a reading. Some books are just like that. I finally realized the irony of being unable to focus and read it when I was studying the cover of Reed's novel and it hit me that I was acting like a two year old who can't finish a task! Funny!

Unexpected Vietnam

2011-01-06T20:18:00.003-05:00

I've just finished Jayne Anne Phillips's 1984 novel Machine Dreams, and I've gotta say that I didn't expect it to be a Vietnam novel. Of course, the novel is much more complex than that, but it closes in on Vietnam as the novel gains momentum in a really unexpected way that worked well for me. I would rank it right up there with Tim O'Brien's 1990 classic The Things They Carried, which is much more well-known than Machine Dreams.

The characters in Machine Dreams were amazing, and I felt like I wanted to hang out with them. The novel is structured in some long and some short sections, divided according to various characters and years. There are a few epistolary sections as well.

I've been reading even more in prepping for my dissertation than I did in preparation for my comprehensive exams (perhaps an embarrassing admission...), and this book has jumped out at me as being one of the most pleasurable texts I've read over the last few months. Sometimes I run across novels or stories that I really appreciate, other times I like the idea of a book, and still other times I might find a text valuable. But none of these reactions necessarily imply a sense of reading pleasure/enjoyment.

I've also just finished:

Linda Hutcheon - The Politics of Postmodernism - this is a book I've read and used in the past, but never read cover-to-cover until now. I highly recommend both of Hutcheon's classic books on postmodernism (the other being A Poetics of Postmodernism). She synthesizes other canonical postmodern scholars clearly and concisely, and is incredibly readable.

I'm about to read:

Ursula K. Le Guin - The Compass Rose

Gender Inequities in Publishing

2011-01-04T13:37:00.002-05:00

Problems raised by Elisa Gabbert last year in the wake of the We Are Champion all-male second issue seem to go all the way to the "top," as evidenced by this open letter to The New Yorker from Anne Hays, as reprinted on Jezebel.com

I have been thinking about this problem more lately in relation to the slow but steady development of my dissertation project. Some of my friends have been struggling with making sure that their projects represent a fair spectrum of writers across typical racial, ethnic, and gendered boundaries. Because my project is organized thematically, and not by author or text, I have found that my work crosses these boundaries organically/inductively. I do make a conscious effort, I think, to make sure that I do not ground my arguments and analysis in texts by writers of only one race or gender, but since my argument comes from the texts themselves it requires me to think about the identity of the author second and not first.

The good thing about this process is that as the dust settles and I look at the text I have chosen to draw from, they have turned out to be incredibly diverse in terms of authorship. I think this result is indicative of the nature of my content, namely, I'm trying to contest conventional ways of theorizing a particular literary paradigm, and in doing so I cannot target certain writers or texts. Instead, the texts have had to present themselves to me. I have had to induct, rather than deduct, my own critical approach, and this has led the texts themselves to determine what I'm doing rather than some preconceived critical notion, and this inductive process cuts out much of the typical "diversification" problems.

Not Caring So Much

2011-01-02T19:30:00.003-05:00

For a long time in my life I was really worried about liking things that other people thought were stupid. I was most self-conscious about music. I have been worried about whether or not other people thought music I enjoyed was too "pop" or "popular" or whatever ever since junior high. I played in a few bands in high school and college, and was really into the whole "indy scene" during that time. And to this day, most of the bands that I enjoy would probably be identified as "indy rock." Along with that whole deal comes certain assumptions about what kinds of music one should not like.

It took me a long time to finally come to grips with the fact that what I love when it comes to music is pop melody in the literal sense. By this I mean that regardless of genre, style, artists, time period, I love music with a very catchy melody. For this reason I love the Beatles, T.I., Band of Horses, David Bazan, Sam Cooke, Tift Merritt, John Legend, The New Pornographers, The Weakerthans, Alicia Keys, James Taylor, and even Taylor Swift. Shouldn't that be embarrassing? I admit, it was difficult to type "Taylor Swift" in this blog post. But the melodies in her songs are so nice and catchy. I think maybe some of the other artists in that laundry list might resent being listed alongside other artists in the list.

I guess I'm just getting to a point where I'm ok with liking what I like. I don't know if it's an age thing, or a personal turning point, or what, but it applies to other areas of life as well: books, movies, sports, food, etc.

Best of; Worst of; Craziest of 2010 - Pretty Random

2010-12-31T10:16:00.007-05:00

This is my personal best of, worst of, craziest of 2010:

*Disclaimer: I'm woefully behind on music, and I blame comprehensive exams*

Best New Music:
T.I.
Neon Trees
Tift Merritt
Kanye West

Best New-to-me Music:
Mumford & Sons
The New Pornographers
Spoon
Bob Schneider
Annie & the Beekeepers
The Low Anthem

Hands-Down Best New Album of 2010:
Band of Horses - Infinite Arms

Best New Films I Saw:
True Grit
Howl

Best New-to-me Films:
The Hurricane - The story of Rubin "Hurricane" Carter played by Denzel Washington
Who Killed the Electric Car
Into the Wild
Leaves of Grass
Death at a Funeral
Inglorious Basterds

Worst Films I Saw:
The Men Who Stare at Goats
The Brothers Bloom
The Invention of Lying

Best New Books:
Point Omega - Don DeLillo
The Trees Around - Chris Tonelli

Best New-to-me Books:
Unaccustomed Earth - Jhumpa Lahiri
How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents - Julia Alvarez
Reservation Blues - Sherman Alexie
The Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee
Hobomok - Lydia Maria Child
The Marrow of Tradition - Charles Chesnutt
American Indian Stories - Zitkala-Sa

Best Short Stories:
"Little Expressionless Animals" - David Foster Wallace
"Do Not Go Gentle" - Sherman Alexie

Worst Books:
The Pioneers - James Fenimore Cooper
The Puttermesser Papers - Cynthia Ozick
The New York Trilogy - Paul Auster (I know, sacrilegious for somebody in my field of study)

Craziest Sports:
Lebron James and the "Decision"
Landon Donovan goal against Algeria
Cliff Lee doesn't sign with Yankees (!)
"My" Reds actually make the postseason
Tiger Woods doesn't win a major tournament

Worst Sports:
Brett Favre saga continues (and hopefully comes to an end)
Jets strength coach trips Dolphins gunner on the sideline

Best Sports:
Michael Vick makes comeback and is named to Pro Bowl

Hands-Down Best Sports:
Uconn women's basketball breaks the UCLA men's consecutive wins streak

Best World:
World Cup in South Africa

Worst World:
Ridiculous Oil Spill in Gulf of Mexico

Best criticism:
Samuel Cohen - After the End of History
Linda Hutcheon - The Politics of Postmodernism (something I would recommend to anyone who wants to work their way into understanding postmodernism)
Vincent B. Leitch - American Literary Criticism Since the 1930s
Lucy Maddox - Citizen Indians
Andreas Huyssen - "Mapping the Postmodern"

Best New Acquisitions (books that I finally got my own copies of):
Nathaniel Macky - From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate (New Directions put out the first three volumes of this series that had gone out of print, the fourth, Bass Cathedral, is still in print)
Jean Baudrillard - Simulacra and Simulation
Jacques Derrida - Of Grammatology and Specters of Marx
Fredric Jameson - Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
Nicole Krauss - The History of Love
David Foster Wallace - Infinite Jest
Sherman Alexie - Ten Little Indians
Amiri Baraka - The Dutchman
Michel Foucault - The Order of Things
Bill Brown - A Sense of Things
Hans-Georg Gadamer - Philosophical Hermeneutics

Best Blogs to Follow:
Elisa Gabbert - The French Exit
Jonathan Mayhew - Stupid Motivational Tricks

Personal Best of: I passed my written and oral comprehensive exams and have moved on into the prospectus-dissertation stage of my degree program.

Happy New Year to everyone out there in the blogosphere!

A Partial Critical Timeline of Postmodernism 1960s-1980s

2010-12-28T11:57:00.000-05:00

1965 – Fiedler, Leslie. “The New Mutants.” Partisan Review.

1966 – Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation.

1967 – Barth, John. “The Literature of Exhaustion.” The Atlantic.

1976 – Bell, Daniel. The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism.

1979 – Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition (trans. 1984).

1980 – Barth, John. “The Literature of Replenishment. The Atlantic.

1980 – Hassan, Ihab. “The Question of Postmodernism.” Bucknell Review.

1980 – Kristeva, Julia. “Postmodernism.” Bucknell Review.

1981 – Habermas, Jürgen. “Modernity versus Postmodernity.” New German Critique.

1982 – Hassan, Ihab. “Postface 1982: Toward a Concept of Postmodernism.” The Dismemberment of Orpheus 2^nd ed. (revised version of “The Question of Postmodernism”)

1982 – Lyotard, Jean-François. “Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?” Critique. (trans. 1984 in The Postmodern Condition).

1984 – Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” New Left Review.

1984 – Huyssen, Andreas. “Mapping the Postmodern.” New German Critique.

1987 – McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction.

1988 – Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism.

1989 – Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism.

Mashing. Reading.

2010-12-20T16:14:00.002-05:00

Just Finished:

Julia Alvarez How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents
Nicholson Baker Room Temperature
Sherman Alexie Reservation Blues

Just Starting:

Toni Cade Bambara The Salt Eaters

Ongoing:

Ihab Hassan The Dismemberment of Orpheus

I'm also listening to some cool new-to-me jams from:

Mumford & Sons Sigh No More

And some not-so-new-to-me jams from:

Pete Yorn
Bon Iver
Sam Cooke

New View On A Persistent Problem

2010-12-17T13:38:00.002-05:00

A while back I wrote a brief post on the "carrot problem" of grades as a primary motivation for students. Well, here's a different perspective on that problem from a student's point of view rather than from an instructor's point of view from Cal Newport.

Newport relies on some current research to argue that we should change our minds about the problems related to "extrinsic motivators" like grades. Check it out.

Reading. Mashing.

2010-12-16T16:35:00.002-05:00

Just finished:

A. M. Homes The Safety of Objects
Walter Abish How German Is It

Just starting:

Julia Alvarez How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents

Ongoing:

Ihab Hassan The Dismemberment of Orpheus

Why Write?

2010-12-14T13:03:00.002-05:00

Grading this recent round of student essays got me thinking about why we write at all. At first I was thinking specifically about why we use writing as a primary mode of learning in formal education, but I have some pretty well-established ideas (mostly taken from Janet Emig's "Writing as a Mode of Learning" pretty old, 1979, I think) on that subject. But then I started thinking about why students think they write, and about why professional writers (from journalists, to academics, to lyricists, and beyond) actually write.

One thing I've noticed about student writing is that it is often rhetorically situated as a means of demonstrating what the student knows. In other words, based on my reading of student writing (and my former experiences as a student writer), I think students often write to show their audience that they've gained knowledge.

While demonstrating knowledge is a necessary by-product of writing, a better aim for most academic writing, and for most writing outside academia, is probably the communication of an idea. By this I mean that I do want to see that students have increased their knowledge bases, but even more so, I want them to communicate some idea of their own. Another way of thinking about this idea is to point out that I can go research and build the exact same knowledge base that they are building through writing their papers, so I don't simply want to hear them report on knowledge that is available to pretty much anyone. Instead, I want them enter into a conversation with the other writers who represent their new knowledge. I want them to formulate their own ideas about whatever it is they're studying, and then communicate those ideas to me. Because I am not them, they can necessarily develop a unique way of looking at their respective subjects that I might not necessarily be able to develop.

The tough part is, of course, that writing is not only a unique mode of learning but also a unique mode of communication, a mode of communication that carries with it unique difficulties that make the communication of ideas difficult sometimes. Take this blog post, the basic idea I'm trying to communicate could be presented in writing in a variety of ways, but I chose a kind of narrative of my thought process that led me to some conclusions about what I want to see out of student writing. This mode is probably not the most effective, or clear, or concise way to communicate my basic idea. In fact, I think my basic idea is more implicitly than explicitly stated in this post, and I guess I'll leave it that way.

Reading. Listening. Watching. Working.

2010-12-01T20:06:00.003-05:00

Reading:

3 Essays on "New Materialism" (just finished this week)

James A. Knapp and Jeffrey Pence "Between Thing and Theory"

John Frow "Matter and Materialism"

Bill Brown "The Matter of Materialism"

1 Book on Things (in progress)

Barbara Johnson Persons and Things

Short Stories (in progress)

David Foster Wallace Girl With Curious Hair

Just Finished

Leslie Marmon Silko Ceremony (for maybe the 5th or 6th time)

Listening:

Christmas Music (that's right)

The New Pornographers Challengers (with "thanks" and a nod to Elisa Gabbert)

Watching:

College Football (every weekend)

College Basketball (Go Pack tonight we need some help in the Big Ten / ACC Challenge)

NBC Thurs. night comedies

ESPN - Around the Horn - Pardon the Interruption

Working:

Dissertation Prospectus (looking to February...)

A slowly sputtering article on Zitkala-Sa

HTML GIANT Reviews the Premises of Books

2010-11-23T10:34:00.004-05:00

I went back and forth a number of times trying to decide whether or not to write this post. My waffling was grounded in a few different thoughts:

1) who cares what I think?

2) how many people will actually read this (obviously connected to #1)

3) am I coming to Foer's defense for motivations that mirror Lily Hoang's reasons for disliking him?

But as you can see, I ultimately opted to write a post in response to Lily Hoang's "review" of Jonathan Safran Foer's new work Tree of Codes.

I want to point out first of all that the "review" is posted under the heading "HTMLGIANT Reviews." Next, I would like to quote directly from Hoang's "review":

"I haven’t read the book (Foer’s not Schulz’s), or even held it in my hands, but something about the premise is striking, memorable, so memorable that it sounds familiar… But more on that later."

Now, I think it's admirable and honest on Hoang's part to admit that she hasn't actually read the book she's "reviewing" for "HTMLGIANT Reviews" before reviewing the premise of the book. However, is this what we're doing now? Reviewing premises of books? What blows my mind is that she admits in the "review" and then in the comment stream that her dislike of Foer's work is mostly grounded in her dislike for the way he presents himself and that this feeling is also grounded in what she characterizes as a "jealous reaction." So she basically admits that her negative view of both Foer and his work comes from her personal feelings towards him as a person although she does not know him personally...and then proceeds to review the premise of the book she hasn't read.

A commenter responding to Hoang suggests that her post is indicative of the feeling that many readers get from HTMLGIANT contributors that if we were simply to place the names of less successful writers on the works of writers like Foer, folks like Hoang would not be nearly as critical of the works, or I guess I should say the premises of the works. What's crazy is that Hoang admits that this characterization is "fair," and then goes on to reaffirm her distaste for what she perceives as Foer's lack of acknowledgment that people have written books for a long time.

To give Hoang credit, in the comments stream she does cite actual reasons based on reading for why she is critical of portions of Foer's 2005 novel, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. On this case, I simply disagree with her assessment of Foer's fiction. Hoang is critical of Foer's characterization of his 9 year old protagonist, Oskar, saying,

Whereas I loved the cleverness, it's a way to circumnavigate the difficulties of writing a child. (It's a trick I've used before. Easier to write a smart, almost wise, child, than a real child. It is easier to write the abnormal, the *exception* than the norm.)

First of all, what does it mean to write a "real child"? Second of all, in a book dealing with the effects of 9/11, is "realism" really an appropriate aesthetic approach? I don't think "realism" is a goal for Foer in this novel. Of course, "it's a trick [she's] used before" and it's also the easy way out. We see surfacing here the "jealous reaction" that admittedly grounds Hoang's criticism of Foer's work. Who decides "the norm"? Are norms not determined through the narrativization of our culture?

I'm sure the same criticism I'm leveling at Hoang could be leveled at me for different reasons, namely, I enjoy Foer's work, and what's more, I see aesthetic and cultural value in both of his first two novels. I have not read Eating Animals, neither do I have a copy of Tree of Codes yet. Thus, I have tried to avoid any defense of this particular text. I simply want to draw attention to a certain culture of criticism. It seems problematic (to say the least) that a critic can call attention to her/his own personal feelings as the basis for criticism, and then forge ahead as though a disclaimer is actually a credential. I mean, should we not read Nicole Krauss's Great House because Krauss is married to Foer?

The Carrot Problem

2010-11-17T23:26:00.003-05:00

I've been thinking a lot lately about why I teach and about whether or not I can teach students anything. I've posted before about my ideas of creating scenarios that simply open optimal learning situations for students. But lately I've been thinking about how no matter what I think as I approach teaching, students are still going to think the following:

"I'm here to write papers, take tests, and produce projects, and if I don't do as well as my professor thinks I should do I'm going to get a bad grade."

Fear is most students' main motivation (carrot to chase). Thus, it's not that they lack motivation. The problem is that this motivation is an unhealthy one if it's the primary driving force behind their intellectual pursuits. Sometimes a little fear can be healthy, but if fear is the only thing pushing you to do something, you're probably not going to be thinking about the task at hand, but about whatever consequence you're afraid of incurring.

This situation leads me to a difficult dilemma: how can I create a learning environment in which students will primarily be motivated by something other than fear? At this point, I can't even posit an alternative (i.e. motivated by their own interests, the energy of their classmates, or even money), I can only say "motivated by something other than fear."

Stepping back from this problem, I think perhaps one central mistake is the entire idea of motivating students. Thinking about giving them a carrot to chase implies that they are the donkeys chasing the carrot. In other words, thinking of teaching as finding the right way to motivate or entice students makes a lot of assumptions about their intelligence. They're not jackasses, and by that I mean, if all we do is hold a carrot out in front of them, they're going to find out pretty soon that that's all we're doing. Why should they chase what they won't catch?

At the moment, the best solution I've been able to come up with for this problem is simply to be as frank as possible with them from the outset. Namely, I can explain to them that we're here to encounter things together that we may not have encountered before, and that I am going to ask them to think about these new things in different ways, especially through reading, writing, and speaking. But with fear still lurking in the shadows, my next challenge is to rethink assessment. How can assignments and grading reflect, and more importantly, enact this teaching philosophy?

My Williams Notebook

2010-11-10T19:14:00.004-05:00

In a cool interview you can listen to on Penn Sound William Carlos Williams talks about his now famous approach to writing in which he purposed to write something every day for a year no matter what. Whether it was a few lines, a complete thought, or just some musings, he wrote a little each day towards poetry, and then went back later and reworked/revised many of these poems into a collection. I've decided to take Williams as a model, but to do a lighter version. Instead of setting a year-long goal, I'm going to take it notebook-by-notebook. In other words, I'm going to write in a notebook everyday until that notebook is full, and then either work back through that notebook, or move on to another and return to the first one later.

Most of the writing I do is academic, and I've decided that I want to write as much as possible in both academic and non-academic settings. That's why I keep this blog, take notes on many critical/theoretical works in notebooks, keep track of my own ongoing scholarly work in Word documents, and write my way into images and ideas in these "Williams Notebooks." I've even been planning my courses in "teaching journals" this semester, planning for classes and then taking notes afterwards to see what does or doesn't work. I figure the more writing I do, the more writing will become a part of my everyday life.

More Poetry Pairings - H.D. and Tony Tost

2010-11-02T13:23:00.006-04:00

I posted recently about the productive class meetings my students and I have recently had as we have read the traditional poets of the "modern American" canon in conversation with contemporary poets. I thought I might post a brief update about an especially illuminating pairing.

A couple weeks ago we read H.D. Our first goal in class was to think about ways in which we could try to conceptualize "modern" poetry from H.D.'s work, rather than simply trying to cram her poetry into some arbitrary "modern" framework as primarily delineated by the prominent male writers of the period. As Margaret Dickie argues in her essay "Women Poets and the Emergence of Modernism": "Behind these acknowledged reasons for overlooking women poets in the history of Modernism is a blindness to the experience in and of their poetry. When their contemporary poets, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, praised their work, they recognized it not for its unique and different properties but for the ways in which it most resembled their own work" (234). So, we spent time looking at H.D.'s "imagiste" work, thinking about Pound's label, and trying to decide whether H.D. was truly an "imagiste" in the way that Pound suggests in "A Retrospect," or whether her work itself is the ultimate form from which Pound derived his own ideas as at least two ways of opening up a conversation about her poetry in relation to the discursive construct we call Modernism. We all really got into this discussion, and some students were beginning to go back and compare/contrast Pound's poetry with H.D.'s!

Toward the end of class we read from The Walls Do Not Fall, the first book of H.D.'s Trilogy. Then we read from Tony Tost's first book invisible bride. We were struck by the confluence of images and ideas. Perhaps most engrossing was the class's observation about the tone and voice of each work. They wanted to talk about both books using language like "prophetic," "biblical," "inspired," and "visionary," just to name a handful. From Tost's book, we focused mostly on the very first poem "The man's Vision begins with the child's Sob." Here's a quick list of just a few images/ideas that the class noticed in both texts, and found most enjoyable:

-vision

-war

-fire/flame

-inside/outside

-word

Chris Tonelli and The Trees Around

2010-10-29T23:38:00.013-04:00

On the heels of the craziest period of my professional life to date, I made a recent long weekend escape to the beach to decompress. As a grad student and jr. scholar, I often feel that every single minute of every single day must necessarily be occupied or else there's something important that's not getting done. So when I made this recent escape it was a literal psychological, emotional, and physical struggle not to carry any work with me. I didn't even want to carry any leisurely reading. I ended up taking only one book, a book that I had been wanting to read ever since I got a copy earlier this year...Chris Tonelli's The Trees Around.

After reading the book once through with no pen in hand, no notes, no nothing, I tried to just think for a moment and get a sense of my sense of the book. The best word I could find to describe the feeling the book left me with was "open." I think this sense of openness is more than simply a result of the final poem of the collection being entitled "Bridge." The sense of openness comes from the way these poems reveal themselves to me, the way they don't ask me to look through them, but to look directly at them.

As I reread the book, taking some notes along the way, this sense of openness became more and more apparent. But what exactly do I mean by "open"? Let me try to clarify my sense of the collection by responding (uninvited) to Joe Hall's musings over on HTML Giant.

I like Hall's frankness, and I agree that one of the central tensions in The Trees Around lies in trying to parse out the ways in which the book's four sections relate to one another. However, I find myself needing to disagree with Hall's analysis of Tonelli's work in comparison/contrast to that of Wallace Stevens. Hall rightly points out that, "Stevens succeeded because he found concrete figures to anchor his investigations. The hollowing out of these figures, the revelation of their interior nada was dramatic." As Randall Jarrell points out in his classic "Reflections on Wallace Stevens,"

Stevens has the weakness-a terrible one for a poet, a steadily increasing one in Stevens-of thinking of particulars as primarily illustrations of general truths, or else as aesthetic, abstracted objects, simply there to be contemplated; he often treats things or lives so that they seem no more than generalizations of an unprecedentedly low order (Poetry and the Age 140).

Hall and Jarrell seem to agree that Stevens is pushing ideas/investigations into concrete/particular figures. For this reason, Stevens's work stands, at times, in stark contrast to many of the other modernist poets who sought "direct treatment of the thing" and "no ideas but in things."

To bring this point back to my disagreement with Hall, he seems to think that Tonelli is trying to do what Stevens does, namely, to ground abstractions in particulars (the interior of which are "nada," as Hall puts it). For this reason, Hall sees the book's final two sections, "For People Who Like Gravity and Other People," and "No Theater" as more successful, more enjoyable even, than the first two sections, "Nostalgia Tree" and "Wide Tree." Leaving aside which sections I liked better than others for a moment, I'll simply say that I don't see Tonelli failing where Stevens succeeds because I don't see him trying to cram abstract ideas into the particulars of his poems.

Instead, I see poems that present themselves to us as nothing more than what they are. Nowhere is this poetic more clear than in the first poem of the "Wide Tree" section, entitled, "Why Poems Can Be More Like Paintings."

The present murders us for the past

having barely grazed the word.

The word-a seagull, high against

the overcast sky, winking

like a fake moustache. It thinks

the factory is the sea. A river-

bed: great depths to receive, great

depths to give away. To the ocean.

The irony is not lost on me that the title of the poem is more abstract than concrete, more universal than particular, but that's the very point of the poem. The poem opens with an abstraction, "The present murders us for the past / having barely grazed the word." and then seems to translate this idea into an image, "The word-a seagull, high against / the overcast sky, winking / like a fake moustache." Doesn't this contradict what I just said about the poems? I would say "no" because it is this very tendency to think of poetry as standing in for some idea, rather than as the idea itself, that creates the need for us to explain "Why Poems Can Be More Like Paintings." In other words, Tonelli calls our attention to our own impulse to reach past the seagull to the word, to the "great depths," "To the ocean." and for this reason reminds us that poems are more like paintings than they are like novels or essays.

We are like the seagulls who think the "factory is the sea." We think that a poem is supposed to stand in for some grand and unfathomable idea, when, in fact, the poem is what the poem is. The poem is the meaning. You don't walk up to a painting in a gallery or museum and pull one corner away from the wall to see what's behind it, and neither should we try to see through the factory of a poem to some ocean it supposedly stands in for.

In this poem, Tonelli purposefully sandwiches his particular (a seagull) in between two abstractions, and calls attention to this very problem as the need for the argument that poems can be more like paintings.

Even when Tonelli seems to be making the Stevens move of "hollowing out" his figures in order to anchor his "investigations" or ideas, as in "Why Poems Can Be More Like Paintings," he does so self-reflexively, to show the problematic nature of such a move. Throughout the rest of the collection I see ideas coming from things, not being relocated in their purportedly hollow centers. All the birds, trees, and furniture are not acting as receptacles but as flowers (there's another one for you), opening themselves up to the world. These poems, especially those in the first two sections, draw their life from their concreteness, not from some ethereal idea or sensibility.

Buy Tonelli's book HERE! Available from Birds LLC

How Chris Tonelli, Elisa Gabbert, and Mathias Svalina Help Students Love Poetry

2010-10-22T23:22:00.002-04:00

While working through a series of exchanges on Elisa Gabbert's and John Gallaher's blogs in response to a high school teacher's questions about poetry, I noticed that many of the "biggest misconceptions" about poetry identified by various contributors to the conversation were things that I have been talking about with students in my modern American poetry class at the small liberal arts college where I teach. I also latched on to Gabbert's advice about how to dispel the idea that poetry is boring. She suggested shaking up what students read, especially by exposing them to contemporary poetry.

As I was teaching Wallace Stevens in class that week, I began to brainstorm ways of bringing in some of my favorite poets who are writing right now as a means of illuminating Stevens. Seeing as how I just got around to reading my most anticipated new book, Chris Tonelli's The Trees Around, and seeing as how there was a "conversation" going on regarding Tonelli's book on HTML Giant, I thought, "Perfect! I'll let my students work through this 'conversation,' which repeatedly compares/contrasts Tonelli to Stevens, and that'll be my connection between awesome contemporary poetry and Stevens!" We did just that in class. Different students had literally asked me on multiple occasions whether or not there are poets today like there were in the time period we're studying in class (i.e. the modernist movement in poetry as typically identified in the works of Pound, Eliot, H.D., Stevens, Stein, Williams, and growing out of "new wood" broken by Whitman and Dickinson"). The students loved reading the HTML Giant "conversation" and then reading Tonelli's work alongside Stevens'. They read Tonelli's "Bedroom in Arles" alongside "The Snow Man," Gabbert's "Blogpoem For Joe" alongside "Anecdote of the Jar," and Svalina's "Creation Myth" (17) alongside "Sunday Morning." The exercise was wildly successful, and a few students even emailed me after class asking for links to these poets' works so that they could purchase them!

Poetry lives!

Stein Says

2010-10-01T20:06:00.002-04:00

I thought Gertrude Stein's "Patriarchal Poetry" was an odd choice for Cary Nelson's Anthology of Modern American Poetry. I thought: "Why not excerpts from Tender Buttons?" I thought: "Why not anything other than 'Patriarchal Poetry'?" In class I constantly found myself saying things like, "Remember: poetry is first and foremost an art form, a thing imagined, emotions freshly enacted," as my students struggled mightily with Stein's work.

Things got a little better when we looked up the word "patriarchal." Things got even better when we didn't lose sight of the poem's form as we thought about what "patriarchal poetry" might "mean." Things got even better when we listened to an interview in which Stein destroys the interviewer's assumptions about "normal Americans":

Interviewer: asks Stein to explain some lines from her poetry

Stein: recites the lines and explains that anyone can see that the words look like and mean the man they are written about (I need a better preposition here)

Interviewer: "Well that's rather hard for us normal Americans to see."

Stein: "What is a normal American? [...] But after all you must enjoy my writing, and if you enjoy it you understand it. If you did not enjoy it, why do you make a fuss about it? There's the real answer."

Frosty Nature

2010-09-05T19:50:00.002-04:00

Thinking about Robert Frost and nature this past week. David Perkins (A History of Modern Poetry) argues that Frost's poetry is "anti-romantic" because it employs a Romantic poetics but for subversive purposes (for example, he seems preoccupied with nature much like the Romantics are, but nature is not necessarily a means to transcendence). I'm not sure whether or not I totally agree with Perkins, but a few things seem clear:

1) Frost loves nature

2) Frost talks about nature a lot

3) Nature is not intrinsically good

4) Nature is not intrinsically bad

5) Frost asks more questions than he proffers answers

"The woods are lovely, dark, and deep"

The Differences

2010-08-23T09:18:00.003-04:00

I'm thinking a lot this week about the differences between poetry and prose. For the first time in my life, I'm teaching an entire class dedicated to poetry, and prepping for this class has given me the opportunity to spend more time with poetry recently than I have in the last 3-4 years in any such concentrated burst. (with the exception of an amazing class I took a few semesters ago on modern poets entitled: Visions and Visionaries)

As I think about how poetry and prose are both similar and different, I'm reminded of what I love about both forms.

I love prose, especially fiction, and most of my scholarly research/writing/publishing focuses on novels. I love reading for meaning. I love connecting ideas across texts, contextualizing texts, thinking about the social, cultural, political implications of texts. I like to think about how novelists' views of the world change or develop or whatever from text to text.

I love poetry because, while I don't feel like I'm as good at reading it, I love reading for aesthetic pleasure. I love listening to words working together. I love thinking about what a linnet is and why the poet would choose that word instead of another. Reading poetry feels like more of a discipline to me, although I'm sure there are many people who feel that reading fiction is a discipline for them. Helen Vendler says that poetry is a "thing imagined." And that's what I'll probably think about for most of the rest of this week.

Bobby Thomson

2010-08-19T18:44:00.004-04:00

A baseball legend has, unfortunately, passed away this week. Bobby Thomson is especially close to my heart as he is memorialized in Don DeLillo's 1997 novel, Underworld, and my recent article on Underworld opens with the famous "shot heard round the world" as blasted by Thomson and recaptured by DeLillo.

Bobby Thomson 1923-2010

New Article

2010-07-11T11:47:00.004-04:00

I've been meaning to post this for a while, but keep forgetting. The journal is Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 51.3 (Spring 2010). My article is titled "Objects & Outliers: Narrative Community in Don DeLillo's Underworld"

Study Hacks

2010-06-07T16:47:00.001-04:00

Here's a great blog that's been around for a few years that I've just found. It's great to geek out on:

Study Hacks

Almost Enough

2010-05-25T21:01:00.001-04:00

To get me to join Facebook:

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/05/24/qt#228174

It is Finished

2010-05-08T13:02:00.003-04:00

Comparatively, I guess this is kind of a small milestone, but it feels significant right now.

The Last Paper

2010-05-04T12:56:00.003-04:00

I'm working on my last seminar paper for graduate school!

Pedagogy

2010-04-20T18:38:00.003-04:00

I've been thinking a lot lately about the most foundational ideas at the heart of my approach to teaching. Of course, nowadays we're all discouraged from talking about creating a classroom that is "student-centered," while we're simultaneously encouraged to develop a pedagogy that is "student-centered." I guess if you become a teacher after certain terms get played out you can't incorporate those terms into your teaching philosophy.

I guess my goal as a teacher at the college level is to create scenarios in the classroom (and, perhaps even more importantly outside the classroom) that will enable students to work through whatever problems questions raised by the content/material we're interacting with. Immediately, then, part of good teaching is working with good material.

It might seem obvious that one assumption of the teacher-student dynamic at its most basic level is that the teacher knows something or has something that the student does not know/have, and that what's supposed to take place is a transference of that thing (usually knowledge, ability, skill). But how did the teacher come to know/possess that thing? Usually, we have to work through a problem ourselves, come up against seemingly unanswerable questions, and push through them to feel as though we've really "figured something out."

For now, I like this analogy:

Teaching college is like teaching someone to ride a bike. You can't just get on a bike yourself and ride around in front of the person your teaching and say, "Got it?" Similarly, in the college English classroom, you can't just show students the writing process, or what a great poem does and say, "Got it?"

When teaching someone to ride a bike, you talk about the action, demonstrate the action, provide training wheels, take the training wheels off, talk some more, hold on to the back of the bike, let go, encourage after disastrous wipeouts, talk some more, try to remember what it was like for you, hold on to the bike some more, let go some more, run alongside, encourage after disastrous wipe outs, let go some more, shout encouragement, exalt in the admittance of another member of the "it's like riding a bike" gang.

No one simply watches their teacher ride a bike and then jumps on and takes off. In the same way, if teachers simply do the work of reading poems or novels for their students, the students will never actually LEARN or ENJOY the poetry or fiction. We have to create an environment that pushes and encourages students to work through texts themselves. Obviously, we can run alongside, encourage after wipeouts, and exalt in successes. That's the fun part.

Jonathan Safran Foer

2010-04-12T23:52:00.002-04:00

I went to see Jonathan Safran Foer read at Duke this evening with a few friends. He was as personable and funny as one could hope. He didn't read much. Instead, he opened with about a 30 minute or so talk about why it can be difficult to talk about writing. Next, he read from his new book Eating Animals for just a few minutes (like 2 pages), and the rest of the time was devoted to discussion. I enjoyed this format, and thought he was pretty candid. Here were the four reasons he gave for why it's difficult to talk about writing:

1) the ant is not an entomologist

2) the rhyme is greater than the poet (which I think he credited to Joseph Brodsky)

3) the book is to the reader what sheet music is to the musician (he credited someone here as well, but I didn't hear who because someone coughed at exactly that moment, and it was just one of those things you experience once at every reading)

4) the writer doesn't know what he thinks until he looks at what he's written (Auden)

Foer vehemently (can you be mild-manneredly vehement) resisted any question/suggestion that even remotely delved into the area of his intentions. He insisted that he had no intention prior to sitting down to write.

I though this was an important emphasis because he wasn't saying he had zero intention, but that he didn't start out with an intention. Sure, he came to realize that Everything Is Illuminated was a novel, at least in part, about communication and how we often have trouble communicating the most important things. But he didn't set out to write a book about this problem.

I was satisfied. I wish there had been more time.

Conferences and The Worthwhile

2010-04-05T23:47:00.003-04:00

I just returned from the American Comparative Literature Association conference in New Orleans this evening (in time, of course, to watch the national championship), and have been thinking back over my panel.

The ACLA conference is unique because you attend the panel on which you present your own research each day of the conference. This format is awesome because it avoids that feeling that is so common with academic conferences where you feel like you just showed up and talked for 15 minutes and then it was over. Sometimes, after such conferences, I simply feel like I'm adding a line to my CV. But at ACLA, you get to build a little community of scholars over the course of 2-3 days.

The discussion is better, the connections are more significant, and the "networking" doesn't feel contrived and/or sleazy. Instead, a genuine community of scholarly productivity develops. 3 cheers for ACLA and another great conference. New Orleans was a great choice, although I must say I'm happy to be home.

Even

2010-03-25T19:12:00.001-04:00

The Huffington Post can see what's going on.

Listen

2010-03-22T20:00:00.001-04:00

Annie & the Beekeepers

New

2010-03-06T11:16:00.002-05:00

Birds, LLC is a new independent poetry press specializing in close author relationships in order to make the most awesome books in the world.

The first two books published by Birds, LLC are The French Exit by Elisa Gabbert and The Trees Around by Chris Tonelli.

SPECIAL PRE-SALE OFFER: Buy the first two Birds, LLC releases for just $20. Pre-Sale offer lasts until March 31st. Books ship the first week in April.

About The French Exit:
It’s a pleasure to listen to the opinions of the narrator of The French Exit. Clear-eyed imagery and wit control the anxiety: “[A] boy at the counter disappears / or I can see through him.” Likewise, in a fine prose poem: “Do not be afraid of angering the birds. What angers the birds is fear.” The energy throughout Gabbert’s collection has the clip of the French exit itself – allons-y! – self-aware, self-sufficient, in control, in touch.
- Caroline Knox

About The Trees Around:
Full of the will and the weather, that great skeptic Wallace Stevens walked to work and wrote his poems, poems you may well already love and believe. (Good, as they say, for you.) And as for Chris Tonelli, he walks in that integrity: read him, and be merciful unto yourself. His foot standeth in an even place. This book’ll make you bloom.
- Graham Foust

The Metamorphosis

2010-03-05T10:24:00.002-05:00

In a bit of a guilty admission, I had never read Kafka's story "The Metamorphosis" until just this week. It is, of course, one of the most referenced pieces of short fiction from the entire 20th century. Written towards the end of 1912 and first published in late 1915, "The Metamorphosis" is a dark and surreal story that asks its readers to operate under fantastic assumptions.

Perhaps what I liked most about the story was that the shock of most of the characters when they discover Gregor has turned into an insect is not shock as a result of his metamorphosis. In other words, it's not that they can't believe a human has turned into an insect. Instead, the shock comes from his grotesqueness.

I think what surprised me most was the complete and utter absence of the possibility that Gregor might transform back into a human, or even into something else. I'll have to think more about this story, obviously, but I don't know whether or not reading it was a pleasurable experience. As I mentioned above with the sense of shock, I liked some of the ideas in the text, but I'm not sure that I enjoyed reading the story.

A Philosophy of Exposure

2010-03-01T09:15:00.002-05:00

As someone who studies and teaches college English for a living, I've come to the conclusion that learning, thinking, writing, reading are all skills that are best developed/honed through continued, consistent exposure. This philosophy might seem obvious at first, but I don't think our practical approaches to all things intellectual reflect this reality.

For example, it has taken me all the years I've been in school to recognize the conventions of academic discourse to the extent that I can begin to put them into practice myself. If learning were simply a matter of being told something and then doing it, I could have been writing and publishing academic articles in college. Instead, I've had to read countless articles to understand these conventions, and I've had to write innumerable seminar papers to practice this form.

Perhaps an interdisciplinary example is helpful here. Think about a professional baseball player. This person has probably been playing baseball for a long time, simply by virtue of his age. Now, try to envision the first time this player stepped to the plate in high school, college, the minors, the majors. I think it's safe to assume that a significant amount of improvement has taken place from high school to the pros. It's not that the player didn't have the capacity to be a pro when he was 15, it's just that, for a number of reason, he wasn't ready yet.

Learning, thinking, reading, writing are the same way. You have to practice, grow, and develop to maximize your potential in these areas. I try to tell my freshmen students in English 101 that we'll cover much more than they'll retain, but that that's ok. The more they are exposed to the ideas we discuss, the more they'll absorb and develop those skills.

If you're interested in growing your brain: Read, read, read. Write, write, write. Play around in whatever library you're affiliated with, whether that be a university or public library. Just get exposed to as much thinking as you possibly can.

Facebook and Why I'm Not On It

2010-02-15T14:07:00.002-05:00

I've recently had a host of folks asking why I'm not on Facebook. It seems that nearly every single person I know, even those I least expect, is on Facebook. Instead of providing a lengthy justification, I'm simply going to link everyone to a post from Elisa Gabbert's blog I read last month.

Amazing Pick-ups

2010-02-14T21:14:00.005-05:00

Who can believe I found both of these in Edward McKay's right here in Greensboro today?! William Carlos Williams' In the American Grain and LeRoi Jones' (Amiri Baraka's) two plays Dutchman and The Slave. Dutchman might be my absolute favorite drama ever...

I also picked up:

Aphra Behn's Oroonoko or, the Royal Slave. (which I have, embarrassingly, never read)

Steven Millhauser's Martin Dressler.

Richard Wright's short story collection Eight Men.

Ian McEwan's Atonement.

Chang-rae Lee's Aloft. (I love his first two novels)

Caryl Phillips' Crossing the River.

The first conference paper I ever gave was a piece on Caryl Phillips' non-fiction piece The Atlantic Sound, and I've wanted to read his fiction ever since. I went on this little spree today as a bit of a distraction, and I had some Ed McKay gift certificate left over from Christmas from my in-laws. I was able to get all 8 of these books (for free with the certificate) for only $23! Used bookstores are awesome. I was most excited by the two I've included in the picture here, because they're the kind of texts you never expect to find anywhere (except for Amazon or something). What a dorky little thrill.

More More Winter

2010-02-02T10:10:00.003-05:00

More Winter

2010-02-01T13:52:00.006-05:00

Winter

2010-01-31T10:59:00.002-05:00

William Carlos Williams

2010-01-11T18:30:00.002-05:00

Williams is one of my favorite 20th century poets. One thing I like about his poetry is that it has generated a contentious body of scholarship. Some critics obviously love Williams' work, while others obviously hate it. While it's not always the case, I usually end up liking writers whose work inspires this kind of critical division, which inevitably leads me to spend more time on their work, and which usually results in me enjoying their work (although not always as I've never turned into a huge fan of Pound's poetry).

I've noticed lately that critics who love and critics who hate Williams all seem to think of him as a contrarian, as someone who simply went against the flow no matter what the flow might have been.

So this week I'm thinking about Williams as a contrarian except for when I read a poem like "The Yachts," at which point I'm not thinking about anything but that poem. Man, that's a good poem.

A New Favorite Blog

2009-12-26T15:34:00.003-05:00

I found the link to this site on Silliman's Blog. Thanks, Ron!!

Scholarly Writing and How to Get it Done.

Goodness

2009-12-23T09:59:00.001-05:00

The Low Anthem - "Charlie Darwin" - HearYa Live Session 8/9/09 from HearYa.com on Vimeo.

New Stuff!

2009-12-22T19:30:00.002-05:00

Reading:

N. Scott Momaday House Made of Dawn
Kenneth Lincoln Native American Renaissance

I'm trying to reconcile the conversation that Lincoln fired up back in the 80s with the way critics are talking about Native American literature today.

Listening:

The Low Anthem (thanks Craig)
Some Christmas music (Death Cab, Charlie Brown, and others)

Watching:

Going to see The Road tomorrow! First time going to see a movie since early summer.

Chance encounters:

The amazing Tim Botta and the inestimable Tom Lisk today on a 5-second trip to Raleigh-by-accident. What an amazing day.

Recent acquisitions:

Ismael Reed The Terrible Threes & Writin' is Fightin'
Charles Taylor The Ethics of Authenticity
Charles Chesnutt The Conjure Woman

All came from the ever-great Reader's Corner in Raleigh, NC.

I've Got Some Great Students

2009-12-21T12:45:00.002-05:00

Here's a video one of my students created this semester for a presentation on Harriet Beecher Stowe. I've got to give it to him for commitment. This was a great class all around.

Essential Rhetorical Texts

2009-11-21T14:06:00.004-05:00

Here's a list of texts I'll be studying for my comprehensive exams. Rhetoric is one of my two secondary areas of study.

Isocrates. Against the Sophists.

Plato. Republic Book X.

Aristotle. Rhetoric Books 1-2.

Cicero. De Oratore.

Augustine. On Christian Doctrine.

Erasmus, Desiderius. Copia: Foundations of the Abundant Style. Ecclesiastes.

De Pizan, Christine. The Book of the City of Ladies.

Vico, Giambattista. On the Study Methods of Our Time.

Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. History.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense.

Bakhtin, M. M. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. & The Problem of Speech Genres.

Langer, Susanne. “The New Key.” Philosophy in a New Key (1942).

Burke, Kenneth. “The Range of Rhetoric.” A Rhetoric of Motives (1950).

Habermas, Jurgen. “Communicative Ethics.” The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory.

—. “The Idea of the Theory of Knowledge as Social Theory.” Knowledge & Human Interest.

Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. & The Order of Discourse.

Kristeva, Julia. “What of Tomorrow’s Nation?” & “The Nation and the Word.” Nations Without Nationalism (1993).

Gates Jr., Henry Louis. The Signifying Monkey (1988).

Spivak, Gayatri. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. Ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (1995).

Derrida, Jacques. “Signature Event Context” Glyph I (1977).

Rorty, Richard. Achieving Our Country (1998).

Of course, not all of these texts are the most representative of their respective writer's interest in rhetoric. The texts are generally geared as much as possible to my own work in community as well.

Currently

2009-11-11T23:38:00.003-05:00

Reading:

Derrida "Signature Event Context"

Foucault from The Archaeology of Knowledge

A bunch of criticism on early American novelist Charles Brockden Brown

Anything about things

A little Melville

Listening:

John Coltrane My Favorite Things

John Coltrane Impressions

Writing:

A painful essay on narrative structure and material objects in Charles Brockden Brown's novel Ormond.

Syllabuses for next semester. What?

Thinking:

About sleeping more and more often

About why it's been raining for 40 hours literally non-stop

Anticipating:

December

Now

2009-10-13T11:04:00.002-04:00

Reading:

The Coquette Hannah Webster Foster
Ormond Charles Brockden Brown
The Scarlet Letter Nathaniel Hawthorne
from The Philosophy of the Present George Herbert Mead
Things ed. Bill Brown
from Marxism and the Philosophy of Language Mikhail Bakhtin
from Cane Jean Toomer

Listening:

Annuals
The Black Keys

Watching:

Awesome Monday Night Football matchup last night
Anticipating 30Rock premier this week
MLB Playoffs-think I'm pulling for the Phillies-as a Reds and Braves fan (born in Louisville, KY and lived 4 years in Atlanta), I normally pull for the NL, and while I'd love to see Torre and the Dodgers come back and stick it to the Yankees, I can't be a Manny fan ever again.

Grading:

Close Reading Essays
Intro. to Narrative Midterm Exams

Caring for:

A sick wife.
Everyone out there drink lots of fluids and pound some vitamin C.

Everything All At Once

2009-10-05T18:20:00.002-04:00

Community
Things
Objects
Narrative
Human Nature
Language
Rhetoric
History
Fiction
Commodities
Consumerism
Systems
Touching
Connection

Bill Brown
Martin Heidegger
Walter Benjamin
Jean-Luc Nancy
Jonathan Safran Foer
Don DeLillo
Jhumpa Lahiri
Brian McHale

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Nietzsche Wordle

2009-09-27T18:02:00.001-04:00

CLICK HERE

Spencer Wordle

2009-09-27T16:36:00.000-04:00

Click Here

American Renaissance Word Map

2009-09-21T20:24:00.002-04:00

Click HERE to check out the results of a new discovery: wordle.net

The site constructs a word map of sorts based on text that you either copy and paste or link to under their "create" page. I copied and pasted the notes I took on F. O. Matthiessen's classic work of criticism American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman.

Imagined Communities

2009-09-03T16:47:00.001-04:00

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Revised Edition. New York: Verso, 1991. xv + 240 pages.

Although Benedict Anderson points out a number of improvements in the “Preface” to his second edition of Imagined Communities (1991), the central argument of this seminal text remains unchanged from its first printing in 1983. Anderson’s claim is essentially that nationalism arose out of and against religious communities and dynastic realms largely by way of print-capitalism, and has its origins in the New World. Because nationalism is rooted in language and not blood, it is imagined, limited, sovereign, and communal. The term “imagined” is meant to evoke, not a sense of falsity or fabrication, but a sense of invention or creation. Nations are limited by their physical borders, sovereign in relation to other nations, and communal because they are “always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship” (7). Spurring Anderson along in his investigation into the origins of nationalism, this “horizontal comradeship” has been the driving force behind the enigma of men and women willing to sacrifice their lives for communities with imagined histories of barely two hundred years.

Anderson approaches nationalism astounded that one of the most historically significant facets of his argument has been continuously overlooked by reviewers and historians alike from 1983 to the present. As he notes near the end of the text, “It is an astonishing sign of the depth of Eurocentrism that so many European scholars persist, in the face of all the evidence, in regarding nationalism as a European invention” (191). In one of many efforts to redress this oversight by readers, he renames Chapter 4 “Creole Pioneers” in the second edition in hopes of getting his point across. The text can be best understood when divided into two major sections. In the first section Anderson explores the formation of the nation-state, and in the second he explores its growth and effects. A 2006 Verso Press reprinting of the second edition also includes a survey of the book’s impact entitled “Travel and Traffic: On the Geobiography of Imagined Communities.”

The first seven chapters of the text focus on the process by which the nation is imagined, modeled, adapted, and transformed. Beginning in the New World, Anderson traces the roots of nationalism to the loosening grip of privileged languages (eg. Latin), entrenched in the culture by religion. The nation-state also came to be imagined as the belief that society is naturally structured around hierarchical dynasties began to fade away (eg. North and South American Revolutions). Thus, far from being a Eurocentric community, the nation-state was, at first, primarily imagined as an anti-colonial community. In fact, Anderson dates the end of the nationalist explosion in the New World around 1820, from which time he also dates the onset of nationalism in Europe. The New World nations are held up as models for the fast-forming nations of the Old World. However, most rising nations in Europe outlawed slavery and were forced to undergo more of a linguistic revolution than was needed in the Americas. In areas outside the West, colonialism (especially European colonialism) led to still other brands of developing nationalism, in Africa, the Middle East, and India and Southeast Asia.

The last four chapters investigate the attachment people feel for their respective imagined communities. Anderson shies away from anti-nationalist sentiments that emphasize nationalism’s role in inspiring fear, hatred, racism, and general disdain for the Other. Instead, he focuses on the nation’s ability to inspire a unique type of self-sacrificial love. He argues that racism is not a product of nationalism, and returns to the importance of language, not blood, as the most significant root of contemporary societies. Language, because it can be acquired by virtually anyone, allows for naturalization in any national setting. Three of the most significant tools in the instantiation of nationalism have been the census, the map, and the museum, and Anderson spends an entire chapter outlining the roles each of these institutions has played in forming attachments between people and their respective nations.

In the context of early American literature, Anderson’s book is extremely helpful because of the depth of both its historical and literary analysis. As has already been stressed, the premise of Imagined Communities is that nationalism first arises in the New World, and thus coincides historically with the literature being written during the 18^th and early 19^th centuries in the Americas. But in addition to analyzing historical aspects of nationalism, Anderson also occasionally delves into an analysis of key literary texts of national import. For example, he investigates the rise of both the newspaper and the novel in the early Americas, and cites Cooper, Melville, and Twain, not to mention important contemporary novelists writing about the colonial period from a worldwide perspective, such as Pramoedya Ananta Toer of Indonesia.

A potential weakness of Imagined Communities is that, although Anderson makes a strong case for his views on the origin of nationalism, he leaves us somewhat hard-pressed as to what exactly should be changed as a result of his argument. True, as Mark Hamilton has pointed out, few other scholars had investigated the origins of nationalism as opposed to its effects prior to Anderson, but simply finding an answer to Anderson’s question of why people are willing to die for a recently imagined community does not seem a grand enough conclusion for such a grand project. Imagined Communities challenges both assumptions about and knee-jerk reactions to the origins of nationalism, and has certainly inspired responses from some of its field’s most respected scholars, such as Anthony D. Smith, Ernest Gellner, and Partha Chatterjee, who all name Anderson within the first few pages of some of the most significant books written on nationalism in the 1980s and 1990s. But perhaps the most important impact this text has had on current scholarship is that it has made the study of nationalism a uniquely multidisciplinary field. Today, understanding the rise of the nation-state has incredible significance for literary studies, history, sociology, anthropology, postcolonial studies, and many other disciplines.

More Poets

2009-08-30T20:43:00.003-04:00

Here's the rest of the poets from my list as it exists (in progress) at this point:

Langston Hughes

Elizabeth Bishop

Robert Lowell

Sylvia Plath

Allen Ginsberg

I'm considering adding a few more names, but am torn because the bulk of my research/writing focuses on prose...

I think H.D. and W. C. Williams are still my favorites. Although, I've got a soft spot in my heart for Allen Ginsberg.

13 Poets

2009-08-19T13:16:00.002-04:00

Because my 20th century exam list focuses primarily on prose works, it contains the works of only 13 poets. I have been reading their poetry and studying their lives at the rate of one poet a day, returning both to those I especially like as well as those I don't. So far I've done in-depth studies of:

Robert Frost
H.D.
Ezra Pound
Claude McKay
William Carlos Williams
T.S. Eliot
Wallace Stevens
Marianne Moore (just today)

I'd have to say that my favorites thus far are, without question, H.D. and Williams. I'm a huge "Prufrock" fan, but overall I like studying H.D. and Williams more than I like studying Eliot.

Tomorrow I'll dive into Langston Hughes, and Elizabeth Bishop is on tap for Friday.

Brief Notes

2009-08-08T10:44:00.003-04:00

Good News for Most People

In the end
it won't hurt
that bad.

I Woke Up

not because I heard a noise,
but because there was a noise.

Rumi says: A tongue has one customer, the ear.

2009-06-19T14:33:00.001-04:00

http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/18/us-climate-report-assailed/

In My Dream

2009-06-18T20:33:00.002-04:00

Egyptologists tried to get me in a dream the other night. I wasn't being haunted by mummies or grave robbers, but by the Egyptologists themselves. Egyptologists.

Such a thing.

Form.

Content.

I knew they were after me because I was object to their subject.

Egyptologists.

Coming Soon

2009-05-29T18:42:00.005-04:00

Looking forward to the forthfomcing Summer issue of Papers on Language and Literature, published by Southern Illinois University! If my article does not appear in the August issue, it should be out in the Fall.

Blacklisting

2009-05-25T22:40:00.000-04:00

http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=98604

Reading

2009-05-19T15:28:00.002-04:00

Salman Rushdie Midnight's Children
Leslie Fiedler Love and Death in the American Novel
Jean Baudrillard The System of Objects
F. O. Matthiessen American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman.

Just Finished:

Gustav Flaubert Madame Bovary
James Joyce A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Don DeLillo Players

Looking At:

The World of Marcel Duchamp

Listening To:

Bob Marley Exodus

Hoping To:

Be at the beach soon.
Write more.

Freedom?

2009-05-10T09:54:00.003-04:00

Of course, I'm never really done, but as of Friday I am 100% done with this semester! Now I can focus on a summer of reading and preparing for the fall. I'm currently working through a bibliography of sources that I need to be familiar with in order to know enough to begin to create exam lists. I'm also catching up on some fiction that I should have read by now, and reading other stuff I've wanted to read since Christmas:

Reading:

Love and Death in the American Novel-Leslie Fiedler
A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man-James Joyce
Enrique's Journey-Sonia Nazario

Listening:

Another Country-Tift Merritt

We went to see "A Night With Tift Merritt" in Raleigh last Friday. Her voice was just as impressive (if not more so) live than it is on her records. The show was amazing, and we had a great time hanging out back home for the weekend.

More info. about my looming dissertation coming soon.

Want Poetry, Have Ears to Hear?

2009-03-17T20:06:00.001-04:00

Car to Drive...Feet to Walk...

Go to Triangulations!

Reading, Listening, Grading

2009-03-15T20:31:00.003-04:00

Reading:

John Docker Postmodernism and Popular Culture: A Cultural History
Donald Barthelme Snow White
Don DeLillo Underworld (only the "Epilogue" left!)
Amartya Sen Identity and Violence

T.S. Eliot Selected Poems
T.S. Eliot Various Essays and Reviews
Henry James The Varieties of Religious Experience

Listening:

Copeland
Death Cab For Cutie
Iron & Wine

Grading:

Yep

Then He Said...

2009-03-03T11:06:00.002-05:00

"A 'part of speech' is only what it does. Frequently our lines of cleavage fail, one part of speech acts for another. The act for one another because they were originally one and the same."
-from Pound's edition of Fenollosa's The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry.

There are no complete sentences because there are no complete thoughts.

Reading:

Pound, Fenollosa, David Perkins, Everything all the time.

Don DeLillo-Mao II (just finished)
-Underworld (about 100 pages in)
Jim Collins-Uncommon Cultures (still)
Criticism-Everything ever written connecting DeLillo to terror, disaster, catastrophe

Amartya Sen-Identity and Violence

Writing:

Just finished a midterm project on Yeats's use of myth to foster nationalism at the turn of the century, hoping to make connections with the new nationalism.

Laying the groundwork for a second midterm project dealing with DeLillo and the West's need for catastrophe.

Revising:

An article on Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.

When In Raleigh

2009-03-01T10:12:00.004-05:00

Go to Reader's Corner.

But first read THIS POST from Tim Botta.