Provenance

2008-05-27T16:00:00.000-07:00

Margaret Soltan's all over Harvard's scandalous endowment. I'm not normally one to participate in the (admittedly enjoyable) ressentiment-related activities of despising some entity's wealth, but in this case, I have to agree and second. Dear Alma Mater of blessed memory operates with tax exempt status while charging one hell of a tuition bill that it could clearly afford to foot for everyone for, like, five hundred years, and I still spent the better part of last night sorting through old papers in preparation for tomorrow's move, a not-insignificant number of which were those familiar cream laid solicitations for my hard-earned, taxable cash. So in addition to begging for my money in order to re-invest it, spending nothing on the activity that earns them tax exemption (like some wino on the corner with a sign around his neck asking for bus fare when, by common consensus, he's going to buy a fifth the second you're out of sight), they're also cluttering up my personal space. Given my feelings about clutter, I'm not really sure which is worse.

Fortunately, some of my cleverer classmates have come up with a way to bite their thumbs (sir) at this gross violation of the spirit of the tax code. From now on, whenever I receive one of those beautiful, tree-killing solicitations, I'll donate a small sum to Harvard Alumni for Social Action, which funds African graduate students and African educational institutions. I encourage all of my fellow alums to do the same.

moving on

2008-04-23T08:32:00.000-07:00

Dear Craigslist,

I would never deliberately underrate your many excellent qualities. You are, for all intents and purposes, my link to the real estate market, the only means by which I seek apartments, free ugly couches, and sundry other goods--moveable and immovable, tangible and ephemeral--and, occasionally, my source of entertainment. (That ad from 2006 where the guy was asking for sex in exchange for a room in an ugly house in Riverside County? Brilliant.)

But it's come to my attention--as I attempt to find a new place to live in San Francisco--that you're not living up to your potential. Half of your ads seem to be written in all caps: which, let's face it, hurts the eye and sounds not so much like the shouting to which it is often compared as it does the ranting of some teenager on MySpace whose best friend just hooked up with her crush: "GO AWAY ASSHOLE I DONT LIKE YOU ANYMORE YOU SUCK." This jejune impression is only confirmed by the general lack of grammar and observance of any consistent spelling rules. Just a hint: you don't capitalize after a comma.

All of this would be nothing, if not for the fact that your ads haven't kept up with the technology that makes them possible. I've heard tell, from the elders of my tribe, that ads for apartments used to appear in newspapers, which charged by the word and which led to a series of commonly understood abbreviations: 4/3/2 w/Chn & gmtk in HD. Which was all well and fine when one was being charged by the word, but with essentially unlimited bytes available for all of our gushing about how wonderful our 450 square foot studio truly is, why do these forms persist? And why--why oh why oh why--in the age of cheap and easy digital photography does anyone bother to put up an ad without pictures?

Perhaps I should provide and illustrative example, chosen at random from the San Francisco board and apparently posted by a professional realtor:

"Rent $1050 deposit $1000.00 2 bedroom 1 bath carport
garbage is paid ava. 4/25/08."

Where's the rest of it, you ask? Well, you see what I mean. This is it. No pictures. No mention of a pet policy. Nothing besides what one could have easily gleaned already from the title of the ad, which was "$1050/2br 1710 Magazine St," other than the status of the garbage pick-up--and I don't know about you, but whether I'll have to shell out $20 a month for my trash disposal needs is the first thing on my mind when I go to look for a new place.

So, Craigslist, I think you'll agree that we have a bit of a problem. I'd like to make a proposal, and I hope you'll consider it carefully. At a minimum, your ads for apartments and homes should include:

1. The price and number of bedrooms in the title, and repeated in the post.
2. The number of bathrooms.
3. Whether it is a freestanding structure, and, if so, whether it has a yard and whether a gardener for that yard is provided by the landlord.
4. What utilities the landlord intends to pay for. If at all possible, these shouldn't break the laws of the relevant state.
5. Pet policy.
6. Any special amenities or features, i.e. ocean view, washer/dryer, bathtub with those nice little circulating jets, comes with its own harem, etc.
7. Amount expected for deposit.
8. Pictures. And not just exterior ones on sunny days, either. You could have punched a hole in the drywall for all I know. Or your bathroom could be pink.

What it should not contain:

1. Any subjective, unverifiable praise. I don't care if you think it's the nicest house on the block. Let me decide that, and then decide whether I care.
2. Barking about how you want good tenants who won't wreck the place. Of course nobody wants tenants who will wreck the place. That's why saying so is completely unnecessary. Offensive, too.
3. Suggestion that I will like it so much that I need to bring a completed rental application and a gigantic check to the first showing. It smacks of desperation and the delusion that the housing market hasn't experienced significant declines since the bad old days of 2004. In all likelihood, you're some speculator who bought up houses by the dozen because "everyone" was making a killing in real estate and you're now trying to unload them as rental properties, but simultaneously sticking your fingers in his ears to avoid hearing the daily reminders that each of your houses is worth $100,000 less than you paid for it. Don't inflict your insecurities on me. I wasn't stupid enough to buy back then.
4. Complicated series of demands about how and when I should get in touch with you if I'm interested. You're the seller here, and in a depressed market (see above). If you don't make things as easy as possible for me, I'm going elsewhere. Your condo is what's known in economics as a commodity: virtually identical in every way to the condo sitting next to it. If your neighbor is easier to reach, I'm going to choose your neighbor. NB: If you're advertising, you know, electronically, you should probably have some sort of electronic way for me to get in touch with you. I hear there's this newfangled thing called "e-mail," which stands for electronic mail. Know it, love it, use it.

If you follow these simple rules, Craigslist, I foresee our relationship as a long and mutually profitable one. If not, I'll probably still use your services, but I'll grumble about it a lot.

Sincere best wishes,

Shannon

The Suburban Condition

2008-04-14T12:23:00.001-07:00

I've been tearing through the subgenre of suburban lit in all of its various manifestations: Cheever, in particular, like I'm on a train fast approaching the hamlet where everyone drinks too much on a Saturday and can't stop talking about it Sunday afternoon, but also some nonfiction anthropological stuff and pop sociology (Perfect Madness, The Mommy Myth, etc.), too. It strikes me that we call Roth a self-hating Jew for Portnoy's Complaint, we don't call Cheever a self-hating suburbanite for "The Swimmer" or "The Five-Forty-Eight." Surely "suburban" is as much a cultural category as Jewishness, for the latter is often denoted as cultural instead of religious. Granted that the former is of a somewhat more recent vintage, but still, it's hard to find a writer raised in its midst who doesn't either reflect its angst or react against it.

I've become something of a self-hating suburbanite lately, cheering on Cheever and shouting at the stroller brigades (inside my head, anyway) to pack it up and get back to work. This trend coincides with something similar in my mother, who--retired now--finds herself appalled by the bunko ladies and soccer traveling league mothers in Michigan and is veritably tetchy with the urge to do something, anything, again. (Spot the heredity.) We have long and involved conversations about the current political situation, which, sooner or later, boil down to a plaintive condemnation of the inwardness of the suburbs and its subsequent bright intense focus on the nuclear family circle to the exclusion of the darkness beyond. "If only they were just aware of something besides midget football league scores," we moan to each other. "Like, you know, the fact that Homeland Security can deport anyone, for any reason." I've started to mix my stereotypes, and categorize suburban mothers with other hated groups, like women who use and/or care about cosmetics too much. In fact, as anyone who's seen a mommy lately could probably tell you, she might be wearing mascara but you'd never know it under the flakes of pureed carrot and oatmeal dregs that have, somehow and improbably, ended up on her eyelashes.

If I were Greek and a peripatetic philosopher, I'd respond to myself as such: It is impossible to know another person's mind completely. Perhaps these so-called soccer moms (itself a troubled and ambiguous category) can spare a few moments from shepherding their wee ones from ballet to Kumon to Tumbling Tots to think about what lies beyond the gates of their stucco subdivisions, and do. Maybe, like the housewives of the Vietnam era, they are the organizers of boycotts and consciousness-raising groups, the creators of entire worlds unknown to those of us who drive out of those gates at 7am every day. Denying other people inner worlds as complex as mine is perhaps my worst and most alarming character flaw, and the first step to all sorts of appalling conclusions with disturbing historical precedents. And it occurs to me that my favorite Dostoevsky novel, The Devils--also set in the suburbs, or a sort of Russian equivalent--is about essentially the same thing: denying human complexity to entire swaths of people. I've always believed that we're drawn to what repels us about ourselves. I suppose I'm drawn to Cheever and the entire class of suburban lit. because that part of my personal history offends me; but then the offended part hits upon The Devils as an antidote to that smug superiority. Literary taste as a regulating system. I like that idea.

The Berkle

2008-04-09T14:22:00.000-07:00

(I don't know why I call it that, but it feels right.)

Provided my husband finds a job offer to his satisfaction, I'm moving to San Francisco to attend Berkeley's PhD program. As reported somewhere below--back when, you know, I was still updating my blog--the visit weekend was incomparable, the faculty smart and genial all at once, the fellowship offer generous, and the department in general conducive to pursuing my research interests in literatures outside of English. I've agreed to write up the narrative of my grad school application season (which I'm tentatively calling A Season of Migration to the North) for the livejournal community which held my hand through the heart-piercing anxieties of the last couple of months, and possibly host on this website other accounts of the same, written by my friends. Much is said about the competitiveness and general cutthroatiness of English graduate students, but our livejournal cohort--and we kind of are our own cohort, no matter where we go--proved itself quite the opposite, quick to jump on the negative, identify it for what it was, and dismiss the occasional anonymous commenter with little ceremony. Helpful and cheerful to a fault, we were genuinely happy to see each other get into programs, even if it meant others of us were out. So much for that myth.

Moving comes with its own anxieties, and I don't even want to admit the amount of time I spend on Craigslist looking for a new place. We're thinking a loft in not-quite-gentrified Oakland or smallish house farther north. I'd like to avoid another Pit of the Soccer Moms, the corresponding one of which my sister-in-law tells me is located somewhere around Walnut Creek, but other than that, I'm pretty open to whatever happens our way. Cheerful, even. For instance, I've stopped composing the list of things and people I hate in my head for most of today.

interdisciplinarity

2008-03-26T18:33:00.000-07:00

My final paper for my Dostoevsky class examined D.'s use of Hamlet--as the quintessential Western text--to portray Russian misreadings of Europe across the character of Ivan Karamazov, an inverted Hamlet with his own response to patricide. So, in short, a ton of fun to write. I seized upon the fact that Ivan's apparition doesn't wear a watch. This paper by Liza Knapp argues that Ivan's devil can't tell time because he doesn't need to, and all of this points to an understanding of theoretical physics--specifically, time as the fourth definition--well before Einstein invented it. I argued that this was a reference to Hamlet's and Horatio's confusion about the time before they see the ghost of Hamlet's father, but that these two interpretations weren't mutually exclusive.

One of the best things about my husband is that he's right-brained enough to read and critique my papers. One of the unfortunate things about my husband is that he's left-brained enough to question the grand theories we humanists tend to invent out of his training as a physicist. Apparently, the idea that Dostoevsky would have thought this up is laughably anachronistic, even if he was familiar with some of the pre-Einsteinian arguments about time, because those arguments weren't about relativity at all, and Knapp's understanding of Ivan's devil relies on relativity.

And thus we see the both the benefits and the pitfalls of interdisciplinarity.

Berkeley was, like, totally awesome

2008-03-19T11:11:00.000-07:00

Well, it was. And that I find myself reduced to Valleyspeak to convey its general excellence--brilliant, accessible faculty; brilliant, friendly classmates; and, you know, the actual town of Berkeley itself, not to mention its proximity to San Francisco--should say something that my list of superlatives doesn't and can't really communicate. By the time I left, there was talk of an interdisciplinary history of the book reading group established with the Townsend Center's funds and any concerns about constantly battling the system to do work in Russian and French literature or in entirely different disciplines altogether had been put entirely to rest. Nobody made me feel the least bit bad about being interested in seventeen different things, and it turns out that roughly 80 percent of the other students write or want to write fiction and aren't particularly afraid to admit it--and one of them even got something published. Even my least favorite event of the weekend--a large and incoherent house party at which nothing was said and nothing was heard--gave off a strong whiff of the collegiality of the graduate students. (Was it the pink lighted punch fountain? Probably.) As per usual, I took my sweet time at Moe's and came home with quite the cache of lovelies, including Bakhtin on Dostoevsky and the first volume of Boyd's Nabokov biography (I bought the second last time I was there). I hesitated over the double set of Moretti's novel anthology, but ultimately returned it to the shelf because of my backpack's space constraints. Later, as I was hiking up a very steep hill to the Berkeley Rose Garden and a view of the sunset over the Bay, I realized I'd made the right decision, as each volume is 700 pages or something like that.

So, in summary: at least seven or eight faculty members with whom to work, the best place in the U.S. to live, a very decent fellowship, classmates who won't cut your throat while you sleep, and the opportunity to work on more or less anything...yeah, Berkeley WAS, like, totally awesome.

Cynical, momentary deviation from the usual topics

2008-03-13T09:15:00.000-07:00

Client No. 9's problems have thus far provided endless hours of distraction from less important occupations, like answering emails, raising our children, and, you know, governing this nation, and one almost hates to add to the noise, noise, noise...but alas, I, like everyone else, Have an Opinion. Fortunately, Slate intuited my opinion and printed it up in an easily read format for wide distribution over the Internet. I think it's fair to say that sympathy for Tilda Wall Spitzer has reached that level called "outpouring" by uncreative journalists searching for a cliche, and that's not a bad thing. Blaming the victim is just as futile here as it is in any situation when a person does something this wicked and stupid to another person, especially one he claimed to love. But every time I see another friend or classmate pick a job because she thinks it will give her the flexibility to go part-time when she has children, or quits because she finds that the world of work is not quite as pliable as she thought it was, I want to take her by the shoulders and shake some sense (and a work ethic) into her. What's going to happen when he leaves you? Or he dies in an unfortunate midlife crisis-related accident? Or the two of you just get sick of each other? Linda Hirshman argues pretty persuasively that the opt-out revolution (whereby highly educated women quit their jobs to raise their children and perhaps do some nominal unpaid charity work) is the worst thing to happen to women...well, ever. She proposes the following rules for use by women who don't want to end up in Tilda Spitzer's situation:

Don't study art (or music, or theater). Use your education to prepare for a lifetime of work.
Never quit a job until you have another one. Take work seriously.
Never know when you're out of milk. Bargain relentlessly for a just household.
Consider a reproductive strike.
Get the government you deserve. Stop electing governments that punish women's work.

My husband told me about an alarming study (I'm having trouble locating now) which indicates that most women are stopping themselves at Step 1--and practically single-handedly accounting for the wage gap between men and women--by deliberately choosing low-paying, low-pressure majors (like education) which will allow them time away to raise their children later. So when their husbands make the argument, "You know, honey, you're only working part-time now, and most of your salary is going towards the babysitter, anyway. Why don't you just quit?" they're completely unprepared to make the response they should, which is this: "I value my job, the money it brings in, and the sense of self-esteem I get from having an identity independent of my status as wife and mother."

A good poem is hard to find

2008-03-05T08:27:00.001-08:00

Or this one is, at any rate. My husband is a Google black belt, and it took him at least fifteen minutes to locate this K. Amis gem, one of my favorite short poems in English.

So in the interests of making Great Literature more available, even to those of us who aren't professional class Googlers, I bring you Aberdarcy: The Main Square.

By the new Boots, a tool-chest with flagpoles
Glued on, and flanges, and a dirty great
Baronial doorway, and things like portholes,
Evans met Mrs. Rhys on their first date.

Beau Nash House, that sells Clothes for Gentlemen,
Jacobethan, every beam nailed on tight--
Real wood, though, mind you--was in full view when
Lunching at the Three Lamps, she said all right.

And he dropped her beside the grimy hunk
Of castle, that with luck might one day fall
On to the Evening Post, the time they slunk
Back from that lousy week-end in Porthcawl.

The journal of some bunch of architects
Named this the worst town centre they could find;
But how disparage what so well reflects
Permanent tendencies of heart and mind?

All love demands a witness: something "there"
Which it yet makes part of itself. These two
Might find Carlton House Terrace, St Mark's Square,
A bit on the grand side. What about you?

Suggested use: Give it to someone planning a romantic getaway in a hideous place. If you really dislike the person, that is.

Memoirs and Consequences

2008-03-04T11:05:00.000-08:00

Another day, another literary hoax. There's something simultaneously unsurprising and interesting about the typical locus of this increasingly common form of fakery, which I'll call the tribulation memoir. The pattern is beginning to calcify into its own genre, with its own conventions:

Americans write about drug addiction; Europeans about the Holocaust. The explanation for this seems to lie in an equivalence between the two, but, of course, there are differences. World War II and the Holocaust were a narrower period of climatic change, an abrupt upheaval, an earthquake. Drug addiction/regulation is erosive, a stream slowly eating away the bricks, a common experience only by virtue of the fact that it occurs in many families and many places. Both appeal broadly, but differently.
The unmasking of the hoaxer occurs in the paper of record, but not necessarily by the paper of record (it's usually accompanied by some favorable excerpt from the book review, as if to preempt the bloggers who will--make no mistake about it--dig this out of the archives within an hour or two. It says, "Look, we know we were wrong about this. We're all human. We were fooled, too.")
The hoaxer provides a minimum of three reasons: one socially altruistic ("I did it for the voiceless, those suffering from addiction, those who can't tell their own stories, etc.", "It's the same book, whether it's truth or fiction," and, finally, the selfish one, "Perhaps I did it to get published."
The editor and publisher rush to assure us all that they were victims, too.
The reportage always opens with a short summary of the book, followed by the second paragraph punchline, "But none of it was true!"

The fact that we can now discuss the tribulation hoax in terms of its conventions leads me to believe that there's something cathartic in the very act of unmasking a fake--that it responds to a deep psychological need. One of my favorite books on literary forgery (K.K. Ruthven's Faking Literature) argues that the revelation of the hoax is a response to verisimilitude: by calling out a betrayal of trust, writers mask the fact that all of literature is a kind of betrayal of trust. For the length of the book, the reader is required to take part in that oh-so-famous contract, the suspension of disbelief. You're supposed to let yourself be fooled, but after giving that initial consent, let the book take hold of you and try to forget that you're being duped altogether. The literary hoax, by piling on an extra layer of distance from reality, becomes the focal point of resistance to verisimilitude, a diversion from the fact that any book worth its salt is in fact intended to distance you from reality.

The tribulation memoir plays a variation on this theme. The hoaxers make a decent argument: why are their books less worthy as fiction than as non-fiction? Ultimately, in asking this, they misunderstand what their audiences seek in reading about descent into addiction, madness, the bowels of the Los Angeles County Child Protective Services, etc. The memoir is a way to circumvent the suspension of disbelief compact, to get a hit of artfulness without the subsequent crash when you realize afterwards, in the cold hard light, that it was all made up. Memoirs are broadly novelistic--and often analyzed as novels--in the sense that they attach themes to otherwise random occurrences, but without the niggling sense of having wasted all of that time and caring on people who don't actually exist. The standards for style can be lower because the style is not, in fact, the point. The point is the suffering and redemption, underlined by a Law and Order-like declaration that this happened to real people (perhaps continues to happen to real people, in the American manifestation of the genre). Of course, no memoir is ever absolutely truthful--any piece of writing is someone's approximation and stylization of reality--but unmasking the outright hoaxes is a kind of affirmation of the memoir genre itself. It reminds us of the differences between stylization and lying, and it should remind us that even non-fiction is a compact between reader and writer. Changing a name or a place or adding an overarching theme to a life that really just is a series of random events involves an acceptable suspension of disbelief; creating an entirely different childhood for yourself to secure a publishing contract is not.

мороженое для каждого

2008-02-27T11:37:00.000-08:00

One of my Russian classmates was talking about a hammer and sickle t-shirt bearing the legend "мороженое для каждого!" ("Ice cream for everyone!") on something he called "Cafe Express." Having searched this out and determined that he probably mean Cafe Press, I'm still coming up empty handed on the t-shirt. And I kind of gotta haves it. Anyone seen it? I suppose the good thing about Cafe Press is that if it doesn't exist, I can create it.

Also, if there's anything more insidious than the way that DaVinci Code references have permeated popular discourse, I don't know what it is. Twice in the past few days I've heard someone use the phrase "sub rosa" when all they really mean is obscure or hidden (or, amusingly, password protected). Interestingly, we were just having a discussion about a similar phenomenon in my Dostoevsky class today. In "The Grand Inquisitor," the eponymous character deliberately confuses the words "tайна" (meaning mystery, as in 'mystery of faith,') and the more provincial "секрет," as in something that children keep from each other. The Grand Inquisitor reduces the mysteries of Christianity (perfect faith) for the dirty little secret that the Church keeps (i.e., that it's really in thrall to the devil). This confusion underpins most of the third part of his argument.

I think what I love most about Russian is the way that it has about five different words to every single English general purpose usage.

The Grand Inquisitor

2008-02-26T09:02:00.000-08:00

For all the sound and fury kicked up about Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor scene ("It will shake your faith," promised my professor) I found it thoroughly unconvincing--almost beside the point, even. Perhaps it's because I don't have much faith to shake, but you'd think that would make me a particularly receptive member of the audience. For those unfamiliar with the argument: Christ reappears in Seville during the Spanish Inquisition, starts performing miracles, and is immediately taken into custody by the Grand Inquisitor and sentenced to death. During the pre-trial, post-sentence interrogation (hey, it was the Inquisition), the latter asks the former why he created a faith utterly disconsonant with human nature; why, when the devil tempted him in the wilderness, Christ didn't turn the stones into bread and agree to rescue by flights of angels by leaping from the roof of the temple. The Inquisitor has an answer: "Thou wouldst not enslave man by a miracle, and didst crave faith given freely, not based on a miracle." In other words, men will follow anyone if given the proper formula of signs (and bread), but Christ misunderstands this facet of human nature and it is the job of the Church to "correct" his work and found its faith for the masses upon the principles of "miracle, mystery, and authority." Miracles always enjoy this treatment in Dostoevsky novels, as a kind of ultimate paradox of belief: if you ask for a miracle, implicit in the very asking is your need for proof, and thus your demonstration that you lack the perfect faith required for the performance of a miracle. The Grand Inquisitor's line of questioning challenges this formulation of the problem by deeming it impossible for the majority of mankind to grasp. They need miracles, he says. They cannot follow "freely," without the compulsion of the miracle to cause them to sit up and pay attention.

To my mind, this is a curious definition of "freedom," one which may have something to do with the etymology of Russian. Dostoevsky throughout this passage uses the word свобода and its variants. This means freedom in a very particular sense, though--as in freedom from something. (One of the first things you learn in Russian is "что вы делаете в свободное время?"/What do you do in your free time?", as in "time free from activity.") But there's another word for freedom in Russian, and it signifies freedom in the political sense of the word in which most Westerners and Western European languages mean it: "воля," sometimes translated as "will." The connotation of the latter is more positive: the franchise, the statement or exertion of one's preferences, etc. The former is rather narrowly "freedom from compulsion." Leave aside for the moment that Dostoevsky's definition of "compulsion" appears to be "evidence" and consider how well the two definitions of freedom equate. They don't. One means "freedom from outside influence" but the other means something more like "the activities associated with freedom." свобода is very nearly the absence of activity. So where a Westerner would shake her head at "freedom" as a state of adhering to a religion in the absence of evidence, it makes perfect sense in Russian.

Tofu scramble

2008-02-21T09:01:00.000-08:00

(The title really has nothing to do with this post. It's just the current ad in my gmail account, and it sort of describes, figuratively, what I'm about to do.)

Berkeley's giving me something called an English Department Fellowship, although I really have no idea what that is or what it entails. (Performing public cartwheels on a quarterly basis? Spending Halloween night in a haunted mansion?) More importantly, they're paying for a visit in March. My general policy is to jump at any opportunity to go to San Francisco, and it's worked well for me so far.

This week will--if last year's notification times are any indication--yield results from Yale, Harvard, and Princeton. An acceptance and funding offer in hand makes me (slightly) less jittery than I was a scant few weeks ago, but still, applying to graduate school isn't for the easily excited or those prone to palpitations. The fact that I'm suffering with my colleagues somehow makes things a little easier to bear. I was on who_got_in yesterday posting a story about the recent hack of Harvard's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and got a friendly rebuke not to title my post, simply, "Harvard." Point well taken. This is usually how people start posts about acceptances, and apparently, I nearly gave someone a myocardial infarction.

I finished "The Moonstone" the other day, and remembered [spoilers ahead] that Sergeant Cuff does return for a curtain call near the end of the book, to unmask Godfrey Ablewhite's disguise. He even provides one of the narratives, and, interestingly enough, it's the narrative that ties the story together from the moment of the diamond's theft to the moment of Ablewhite's death. Still, his role in the actual detection is marginal, and I think this well describes his role as one of the dozen narrators, too. In some ways, it's one of the least interesting parts of the book, simply because it is traditional narrative: it's the chapter that hits you over the head with what a careful reader would have already pieced together from the preceding narratives. So I really find myself in disagreement with T.S. Eliot on this one: "The Moonstone" isn't the longest and best of the English detective novels simply because it's not a detective novel in the traditional sense of the word, where the reader passively watches detection unfold. The reader is the actual detective, privy to all sorts of facts that no single person knows at the time that the action of the book is unfolding. It's a neat and rather modern trick, of which more later. (/spoilers)

I've signed on to Twitter for the pleasure of condensing 700+ page Russian novels to 140 characters. "Brothers Karamazov. Papa to Ivan: Do you believe in God? Ivan: No. To Alyosha: Do you? Alyosha: Yes. The End." Look me up. I'm shannonissima.

ha ha

2008-02-14T14:08:00.000-08:00

*nelson muntzes*

I got my official Northwestern rejection (after the implicit one several weeks ago, after they failed to interview me). Now that I'm in at Berkeley and UCSD, it's hard to care too much about this. I think it's mostly a testament to the arbitrariness of these decisions--which is consolation when one gets rejected and something to pour a little cold water on all that joy when one isn't.

In only marginally related news, my professor wants me to move from the intermediate Russian class to the advanced one. I'm both timid and tempted. The former, because it's conducted solely in Russian. The latter, because it features reading real literature in the original and would help me with my literary Russian. что делать? as they say.

And an extra-gooey Valentine's Day to you, too

2008-02-14T10:26:00.000-08:00

blah blah, corporate hate, Valentine's Day was invented by a secret cabal of chocolate makers, and florists...I still kind of love it. Matt and I have a picnic just because, as two Midwesterners, there's a certain novelty in sitting in a park on a February evening and not losing a couple of fingers to frostbite.

There's a predictable surge of opinions around this time of the year about how to keep the magic alive and what it means to be a good spouse or partner. Most of the advice is either wacky, misogynist, or self-evident. ("Dress up like a tiger and purr your man to bliss!" "Men like to be in charge. Let him order for you in a restaurant.") And I've given serious consideration to renaming February "penis euphemism month" for all of the synonyms of that organ that start appearing in the personal advice columns.

It was therefore a shock and pleasure to come across a genuinely funny, resoundingly accurate piece about romantic relationships. The audience, admittedly, might be rather limited: it's called "The Nerd's Handbook." Valentine's-appropriate excerpt:

A nerd needs a project because a nerd builds stuff. All the time. Those lulls in the conversation over dinner? That’s the nerd working on his project in his head.

It’s unlikely that this project is a nerd’s day job because his opinion regarding his job is, “Been there, done that”. We’ll explore the consequences of this seemingly short attention span in a bit, but for now this project is the other big thing your nerd is building and I’ve no idea what is, but you should.

At some point, you, the nerd’s companion, were the project. You were showered with the fire hose of attention because you were the bright and shiny new development in your nerd’s life. There is also a chance that you’re lucky and you are currently your nerd’s project. Congrats. Don’t get too comfortable because he’ll move on, and, when that happens, you’ll be wondering what happened to all the attention. This handbook might help.

Later in the article, some practice advice:

You love to travel, but your nerd would prefer to hide in his cave for hours on end chasing The High. You need to convince him of two things. First, you need to convince him that you’re going to do your best to recreate his cave in his new surrounding. You’re going to create a quiet, dark place here he can orient himself and figure out which way the water flushes down the toilet. Traveling internationally? Carve out three days somewhere quiet at the beginning of the trip. Traveling across the US? How about letting him chill on the bed for a half-day before you drag him out to see the Golden Gate Bridge?

Second, and more importantly, you need to remind him about his insatiable appetite for information. You need to appeal to his deep love of discovering new content and help him understand that there may be no greater content fire hose than waking up in a hotel overlooking the Grand Canal in Venice where you don’t speak a word of Italian.

Switcheroos and nihilism

2008-02-11T13:33:00.000-08:00

Plodding my way through The Devils and trying to refer to the Russian whenever possible has delayed my essay on Wilkie Collins. One of the problems with reading Dostoevsky is familiarizing yourself with his context. Back when I read Crime and Punishment for the first time in high school, I had the vague sense that the whole thing was one extended argument against something: what, I didn't know. Now I know that it was the hard materialism of Chernyshevsky, et al., and I still find The Devils difficult going. Today's classtime revelation: despite all of that nihilist business about "prejudging" good and evil and freeing himself from remorse, Stavrogin is really just raping twelve-year-olds and perpetrating general mayhem because he's bored. In retrospect, this should have been obvious. In the passage just before he exempts himself from good and evil, he says, "Every extraordinarily disgraceful, infinitely humiliating, vile and, above all, ridiculous situation in which I happened to find myself in my life, invariably aroused in me not only intense anger, but also a feeling of intense pleasure." If the rule of his life really is that he "neither knows nor feels good or evil...that there is neither good nor evil," one would expect that his actions would fall pretty evenly between good, evil, and neutral. Instead, he purposely sets out to do what he himself describes as disgraceful, vile, base, etc. This requires him to prejudge those acts as either good or evil to commit only the latter. This also squares pretty well with what we know of evil, of course: its single-minded pursuit of what I'd call narrative, or the desire to make something happen.

In the meantime, someone over on who_got_in posted one of the more perspicacious things I've read about a disturbing phenomenon: namely, the really bad writing endemic to literature programs. The author traces it to the professionalization of the study of literature (and that, in turn, to the perils of the academic job market). I'd be discouraged, if I didn't know lit. professors who clearly work hard to avoid the jargon trap and apparently enjoy success and publication despite it. One of them teaches me Dostoevsky here at UCSD. James Wood is another, and I'm looking forward to reading his latest.

Flower child

2008-02-06T15:29:00.000-08:00

I just got into Berkeley.

The week or so of blogging Wilkie Collins

2008-02-06T10:33:00.000-08:00

Wilkie Collins is one of those writers your nineteenth-century novel class probably ignored completely. It's a shame, both because of his popularity among his contemporaries (and all of the significance and influence that it implies) and his unusual method of telling stories, which I touched on briefly in the previous post. Over the next week, I'm going to devote this blog to analyzing that structure--where it works and where it fails. A quick preview of my argument: the detective novel genre he's said to have inaugurated grew out of the multiple narrator format he adopted.

The Indomitable Cuff

2008-02-04T14:18:00.000-08:00

Part II in my personal series entitled Literary Comfort Food* is Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone, a multi-narrator extravaganza said to have inaugurated the English detective novel genre, but which I associate more often with its strong, albeit vestigial, Gothic elements. Since genre is fundamentally about what readers accept as its conventions, perhaps it's best to start with the aforelinked Wikipedia article, which lists the following reasons to consider TM a detective novel:

large number of suspects
red herrings
a crime being investigated by talented amateurs who happen to be present when it is committed
two police officers who exemplify, respectively, the 'local bungler' and the skilled, professional Scotland Yard detective

I agree with this assessment, but think it misses a few points, of varying importance. The first is the odd epistolary form, which Wilkins also exploits--to even greater effect--in The Woman in White. Here it functions (and well) as a kind of unreliable narrator to multiply the red herrings. Only when one steps back and finishes the work, with all of its individual accounts, does a complete picture emerge. This of course makes the ending less predictable until, well, you reach the end. The detective novel and the epistolary novel begin to seem almost like a single organic creation in the hands of Collins. The second interesting thing about this is that it makes the resulting narrative its own artifact, or clue. Collins doesn't quite do everything he might have done with this: the ending, and much of the rest of the book, is unambiguous, and there's no indication that we're to regard the manuscript as suspiciously as we might regard any other clue. But this is a kind of self-referentiality that doesn't appear until at least a few decades later, so I think we can forgive him that.

Two problems emerge in considering this a straightforward example of the detective novel genre. (To paraphrase the novel) Problem the First: those Gothic elements I mentioned above (a particularly creepy batch of quicksand which hides bodies and secrets and which one character refers to as her "grave" shortly before making it so) which seem to ally it more closely with its epistolary elements and therefore a far earlier period in English literary history. Problem the Second: Sergeant Cuff, the competent Scotland Yarder, is actually a brother of those fantastic Conan Doyle creations to whom Holmes is always ascribing "a little talent." Like them, he seems to analyze the case primarily based not on the empirical evidence that seems to have won out (if the popularity of CSI and its permutations is any evidence) in the detective genre but on the grounds of such hazy entities as "personal experience of young ladies and their credit woes." As in the Sherlock Holmes stories, the narrative here is the doggedness of the amateur versus the staid complaisance of the professional, who seems to believe that he's seen the full set of the human condition and the crime it inspires. His detecting is mere recitation with a few empirical twists, which is always at alarming odds with the first narrator's depiction of him as the epitome of mystery-solving genius. It's quite the jar for those of us who are reading backwards, from the crime novels of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to their supposed ur-text.

*Definition of the Literary Comfort Food genre:
1) must have read it before
2) must be heard in audiobook format by someone of the British persuasion
3) must have been published pre-Ulysses

Welcome, visitors

2008-01-30T11:11:00.000-08:00

I've gotten some requests to make my grad school central information more visible, so I'm posting it all here:

Read Me.

Personal statement.

Writing sample.

Anatomy of Criticism, in one essay

2008-01-30T08:33:00.000-08:00

A post at the always lively who_got_in community--which, in the absence of any actual admissions decisions to discuss, has wisely strayed scholarly for the moment--got me thinking about which critics have done the most to shape my view of things. Non-English majors often have this discussion about novels and poems, and in some ways, it's probably a more difficult influence to discern. There's no direct route between, say, Persuasion and how you do your job or play nice, or fail to play nice, with others. On the other hand, if you plan to read books and critique critics for a living, it's important to give some consideration to where you start, and with what assumptions.

I don't have an easy answer. As an undergraduate, I thought I should insulate myself from the pester of French criticism and its American apostles and give my mind a chance to deliberate on some of the questions that Derrida, Foucault, de Man, and Jameson seemed so eager to answer for me, particularly about the political dimension of literature. Tending to see the critical establishment as monolithic, I avoided it and chose a concentration where I could practice that comfortable, old-fashioned close reading and, as my rebellion, refused to discuss "texts"--just novels, books, and poems.

This changed once I began to study Russian and Russian literature. Early on I encountered Propp and Bakhtin, structuralists and formalists--that whole host of twentieth-century figures who took a step back from the Romantic view that literary criticism was an exertion of superior taste (yours over someone else's) and instead directed criticism to something external and objective: the ur-story, with all of its little plus-minus signs, charts, graphs, and varieties of dashed lines to indicate deviation and conformity.

And there's something deeply appealing about this, especially when you're about 23 and feel adrift in the literary history of the twentieth-century. Enough psychological research demonstrates that humans are pattern-seeking creatures for sound evolutionary biological reasons (although I've always wondered if our quest for what Gould called "just so stories" about the origins of man are merely another manifestation of pattern-seeking and therefore self-refuting). But this sort of system-building presumes a system, a flaw which Northrop Frye partially acknowledges when he opposes his own schematization of the poetic at the end of Anatomy of Criticism's introduction. But then again this reverts to a matter of personal taste, appreciation, the finer aesthetic sensibilities which contain in themselves no particular justification.

And maybe they don't need to--but then there's this inconvenient little trade called literary criticism, practiced primarily in English and literature departments across our fair land, which, like any trade, needs a central concept of itself to hire its faculty members, admit its graduate students, and teach the doe-eyed 18-year-olds placed in its care how to read a novel and a poem. "Notice the little details which first attracted your professor to the study of literature" is inadequate (and unjust) on multiple counts. Charts objectify the process, and one's mastery of them becomes, like in any hard science, a positive criterion, but the practice fails because it ignores those little details which first attracted your professor (and you) to the study of literature. Deconstructionism attempts to destroy the problem by dethroning the object of study entirely, but, as everyone realized, even throwing out literature qua literature leaves one with the question of its replacement. That sound you hear in English departments nowadays is nature abhorring the vacuum and looking for something, anything, to put in its place.

And, despite my love for Frye and my sympathy for his project, I can't quite bring myself to suggest structuralism. Its utter discontinuity with the practice of reading is only the first problem in a long chain leading to its imposition of scientific professionalism on a field that derives most of its weight and value from the unpredictability of the world and those who inhabit it. It seems that as a group, we English majors have to take refuge in a kind of paradox: writing about literature as if we believed what we said were true, but knowing that however extraordinary our interpretations, our books, our essays in PMLA, they provide no single or systematic answer. For me, at least, this is where the beauty and the terror of criticism lie: in roughly the same time, place, and aspect.

At this point, I haven't the faintest idea whether I'll get into graduate school, succeed there, and subsequently spend my life at this. It occurred to me the other day that while I'd always thought studying literature a good deal easier than creating it, I'm entirely wrong about that. Creation is an organic process that--no matter what our deconstructionists tell us--isn't fundamentally self-reflexive. Taking things apart is far greater cause for inward reflection--self-doubt, we might as well call it--about method. Both are about literature, but this is where their similarities end.

Northwestern

2008-01-28T17:48:00.000-08:00

For the sake of doing what I set out to do, I'm obliged to report some potentially bad news early in the game. Northwestern is the only school to which I applied where a telephone interview is granted to the finalists. Thanks to Livejournal and its wonderfully addictive who_got_in community, I know that some requests for interviews have gone out today. Generally believing the Internet (as I already put it in a comment on that community) to be a thriving black petri dish of speculation and rumor, I decided to call up Northwestern's English Department to get something approximating the truth. The very helpful graduate coordinator informed me that some requests had indeed gone out today, but seemed to think that not all of them had. And although this jibes well with the fact that only one person watching that board seems to have gotten a request, and that a scatter shot pattern of information manifested itself last year, with some hearing three or four days later than others, this announcement is forcing me to deal a little earlier than I wanted with the fact that plenty of clever people with test scores as good as mine or better don't get into graduate school. Like most Americans, and, if psychologists are to believed, most of the world, I tend to think that I'm better off than I really am, that the pieces of life will eventually arrange themselves into a coherent pattern if only I have the ability to discern it--that, in the final analysis, everything will be just hunkydorey. Lately I've had a lot of cause to question this, and as an aspiring critic and novelist find myself attracted to plots motivated by coincidence that looks like artifice only in the eyes of an observer. Which leads me to my back up plan, should it come to pass that I'm deemed unworthy of any PhD program in English: I'm going to write that novel.

Naval battle

2008-01-25T10:36:00.000-08:00

On January 20, the privateer Lynx sailed into San Diego Bay, hoping to find easy prey among the soccer moms, real estate agents, and sundry stoned surfers of our fair city. We later came to suspect that its quarry was Hummer stroller, but when we and 20 or so other brave souls set out in the cutter Californian, we knew not that it planned to take from us that which we wished gone in the first place. We thought only to defend our patria against the incursions of the insidious evil to the north (Orange County).

Our noble ship.

Our quarry.

Clouds in the bay presaged a storm, but luckily the day was fine for a gun battle and our comparably heavier size and larger guns put us at the advantage.

Our fine and seasoned crew, loading the guns.

Our metal saviors.

'Twas truly a fine day.

The old girl did manage to fire at us once or twice.

Yes, those are tiny people way up on the mast.

I suspect this scaliwag was one of her crew. Also, I want a parrot.

But we bested her in the end. She cut tail and fled before we could do her in for good, but it was a successful campaign. The Hummer strollers and related goods of the people of San Diego were safe for another day, and another attack.

(In utter and complete seriousness, the volunteers who manned this incredibly complicated piece of non-digital, all-manual machinery--the official tall ship of the state of California, apparently--deserve some sort of alcoholic prize. Every five seconds they were scrambling around the deck to maneuver the sails, tie off things whose function I never quite understood, and stopping all the while to try to explain to one intensely stupid or very deaf old gentleman that he really did need to sit down when he was on the quarter deck. What I hadn't realized before now was how dangerous these ships really are, outside the usual hazard of tripping on something and ending up in the drink. On the quarter deck, you could also get slapped around by the mast and end up in the drink WITH a concussion. Or one of the little people who climb on the sails could fall on top of you, which would produce much the same effect. Or your knife could slip while you were cutting off some rope. Really. I've never been so grateful not to be a nineteenth-century seaman in my entire life.)

Finding ourselves with a whole five hours before the Maritime Museum closed, we decided to tour the Soviet submarine that, in a great scream of irony, a bunch of capitalist pigs refurbished and brought to San Diego after it was decommissioned from the Russian Navy.

The b-39. What, you think we give our ships names? Like little American girls?

Whether from visceral fear of the Commies or the rather intimidating series of four narrow portholes that one had to climb through to proceed from one part of the ship to the next, I was somewhat afraid to head below deck. What strikes you about any ship--with the possible exception of the massive floating palaces designed to transport retirees from one part of the Caribbean to another, similar part of the Caribbean--is how small a space it really is. Inside the the Russian submarine's sleeping quarters were a series of bunks, stacked 3 x 4. I'm about 5'7. I very much doubt I could have slept the night without kicking a poor fellow Communist in the cranium at least once or twice.

But in the end, I crawled down the ladder and through the portholes and was glad that I did. For one thing, there were plenty of fun Russian signs to translate.

"Stay out." (More or less.)

Damn torpedoes.

Controls. All well and fine, but notice the little sticker in the upper right corner. "Doesn't work."

I'm no expert on Russian naval instructions, or, for that matter, Russian, but I think these are instructions about what doors to close in various situations. "Water and fire" are the first two, but the last means "call" or "summons."

The Russian word for ketchup: "Ketchoop."

Speaking of the mess, drinking anything other than Georgian wine was forbidden on Russian submarines. However, as a kindly plaque informed us, while one Soviet submarine was being cleaned, the staff found over 1000 bottles of vodka secreted away in various locations.

To recreate the real atmosphere of a sub, I asked my husband, who was conveniently wearing a leather jacket, to look like a Soviet submariner:

It came out rather splendidly authentic. I think he might be the political officer.

So naval battles, Communist submarines, and good times all around. San Diego is safe once again, unless Russia's secret plan is to patriate an entire crew into the state of California, have them steal on board the sub at night, and torpedo the unsuspecting harbor. They may be a little surprised by the analog computer they'll need to carry out their brilliant scheme, however.

More can be found here.

Your intrepid photographer.

Nabokov's ghost

2008-01-22T14:13:00.000-08:00

For whatever reason, and despite having read all the way through Brian Boyd's double tome on all things набокового, I missed the fact that the Original of Laura was still sitting in a Swiss vault. (Incidentally, I'm very proud of myself for resisting the temptation to call this the original of the Original of Laura.) The Slate piece on the subject isn't really worth a link, but I suppose I'll give it one, anyway. (It's an extended and whiny appeal, the contents of which you'll be able to guess later.) The basic plotline is this: Nabokov, in high literary dudgeon, left his final manuscript extant with orders for his wife to burn it. Apparently, she blinked, and left the task to their son Dmitri Nabokov instead. Dmitri, who seems to imagine himself a Nabokovian trickster, has issued a series of enigmatic statements about Laura, which situate it both within and without his father's literary legacy. It's now believed for various reasons that it'll be pyrotechnics for the manuscript, but he's also admitted to making a copy.

My initial reaction was along the lines of burn, baby, burn. The reason I like Nabokov is his insistence on the rights of the individual mind against the universe, his patent intolerance for determinism and any one who would deny our human ability to create and recreate our world. It seems an offense against the man's memory not to respect his last wishes, especially about his own novel.

And to some extent, this is still how I feel about it. But my bibliographic viscera are beginning to creep as I hear more about this story. I trust Nabokov to know what usually happens to writers' instructions after their deaths, and I have to wonder if this wasn't some sort of last puzzle, a final test for those who think they know Nabokov. Maybe the so-called Original of Laura is not a novel at all, but a roadmap for reading the other novels, or a final statement about what the hell really happened in Pale Fire, and all we have to do to get it in our grubby little hands is understand the joke.

Real prediction. Something else I've learned from bibliographic history: if there's one copy, there are five copies. Or possibly 10. D.V. Nabokov will die suddenly and at least one of these copies will reach the general public within a month. There will be the usual questions about the copy, whether it's a forgery, how closely it resembles the manuscript, and whether that letter there is an "a" or an "o" and an entire little factory of criticism will spring up over these questions and launch at least three or four careers. As an aspiring academic, it's hard to complain too much about this, although recording it this way doesn't put all of us in the best of lights, does it?

The genitive plural

2008-01-16T10:38:00.000-08:00

One of the most impossible things about learning any language--I'm absolutely convinced--is the difference between theory and use. This hasn't come up too often in my personal experience until now: I've never taken classes with native Italian or French speakers, and as for Latinists...well. But UCSD's Russian program encompasses both native and non-native speakers, the former in the majority, who often moved to the United States a relatively short time ago or at the very least speak quite a bit of Russian at home. This is ordinarily just fine, except when it comes time for grammar.

I should admit at the outset that I love grammar. She's my newfound joy and consolation, and all the lovelier for it, because American schools don't teach her. One tends to learn of her existence for the first time when studying a highly inflected language, like Latin or Russian, when word order ceases to matter and declensions are all. It's like being initiated into a secret cult: suddenly, you unlock that everlasting mystery about when to use "who" and "whom," and you know other initiates by their words and deeds. (I wonder what Derrida would have had to say about this.)

But she's a difficult mistress: capricious, tricky, and hard to satisfy. In Russian, unequivocally, the genitive case is the place where everyone gets tripped up. It's used with all sorts of expressions that are untranslatable into English, and in cases where the expression is translatable, but an English speaker, if she had to use case, would use a different one. Odd vowel insertions, zero endings, and words that don't seem to follow any rules other than the ones they make for themselves round out the challenge.

To our native speakers, this is unacceptable. They've heard their parents and grandparents speak Russian for years, and they know what they've heard: Russians tend to stick an "ов" on the end of all expressions requiring the genitive plural, and leave things at that. None of this tricksy "ей" or "ё" insertion. In a way, I see their point. Languages change over time, generally in the direction of greater grammatical simplicity, and much of literary Russian was itself invented by Karamzin around 1800, anyway. On the other hand, my purpose in the class is to learn that literary Russian, so I need to know why endings suddenly disappear on feminine nouns in the plural, or why you use the singular genitive after 2, 3, and 4, instead of the imminently more logical plural, or, for God's sakes, the nominative.

But then, as I was translating "White Nights," I noticed that Dostoevsky did the same thing to a feminine noun. Illusions shattered, I won't be quite so hard on our native speakers the next time that they claim that Russian was invented to screw with us and the only decent response is to screw her back.

Geek moment

2008-01-15T08:39:00.000-08:00

Okay, so even if you're not a robot and/or monkey overenthusiast like me, you have to admit that a chimp controlling a 200-lbs. robot from thousands of miles away with only the power of its mind is beyond cool.