Provenance

Panda suits are so 2006

2009-03-07T13:10:00.000-08:00

The Chronicle reports that 20 of my fellow students decided that none of the other issues plaguing our country seemed quite so pressing right now as making sure that Panda Express didn't open a location in an Associated Students-owned property on Sproul Plaza. So they dressed up in panda suits and protested outside the nearest outlet of the chain in El Cerrito.

There are all of the usual things to say about my generation's version of protesting: the theatricality that becomes confused with the point, the bizarreness of protesting against a company that's already met your inchoate demands about eliminating trans fats and recycling its utensils, and the fact that you're doing your best to discourage a rental that ASUC really needs to keep afloat and continue representing, you know, your interests.

But I'd also like to say something about the fact that all of the protesters interviewed--and, one suspects, the vast majority of the 1300 people who have signed the petition against Panda--are humanities or social science majors. On Thursday, I attended a panel discussion at Stanford where Andrew DelBanco and Martha Nussbaum talked about the purpose of the humanities in a world where it seems like we can't afford them anymore. If the rejoinders were standard, they still bear repeating: the humanities, in the variety of experiences and ideas they offer, prepare us to understand other contexts and points of view, help us to be charitable when we consider conflicting arguments, and defamiliarize our own contexts so that our way of life doesn't become synonymous with the way of life. Nussbaum in particular emphasized the importance of debate and argument that treats the other side in the strongest possible light. I love the Internet, but there's a segment of the blogosphere devoted to ripping the other side a new one before bothering to extend it the philosophical principle of charity: making the strongest possible case for them, even if they don't make it for themselves, so that your task is the most challenging and the most convincing if you manage to complete it. Fortunately, the Internet's populousness tends to contain its own solution, as you can typically find someone making that case. But it's easy to refrain from following that link, if you've decided that The Corner or the Daily Kos is the font of all knowledge--but this is precisely the habit of mind that a rigorous course in the humanities discourages.

But the question I wanted to ask, and didn't, is to what extent the defense of the humanities that the panelists offered is not the strongest case they can make for the other side. I'll try to make it now. The humanities--especially English and literature departments, which people often consider a synecdoche for the humanities--have positively reveled in obscurantism and jargon for about 30 years now. They address themselves to subjects that often have little to do with literature (cf. every literature class that has turned into an excuse to watch movies), morph into bull sessions for upper middle class kids who imagine themselves oppressed because they have Irish ancestry or are women and spend their time protesting chain restaurants, and, worst of all, the people who should ostensibly be most interested in their defense come up with lame formulations like, "I enjoy books." Nothing wrong with enjoying books--enjoyment of life is one of the purposes of the humanities--but to stop there, to fail to investigate whether other human needs are met by a curriculum that has been in place for thousands of years, is irresponsible, as well as short-sighted. Stanley Fish has, from the first, wanted to be the guy who shuts off the lights, tells everyone to go home, and collects all of the door prizes on his way out, but fortunately, there are people like Nussbaum and DelBanco to push back. But I have a lot of sympathy for the critique of the humanities, precisely because of people like Fish (and Derrida, and Lacan, and every other literary critic who has written a line of truly incomprehensible or silly prose and expected that he should get a tenured sinecure for it). In short, I think that we do it to ourselves. We write and reason badly, and, worst of all, can't explain what we do or why we exist when we're asked. The humanities have become, in other words, unrigorous. We're drifting, and it should be no surprise that chancellors and deans and donors are starting to ask if even our slender shadow takes up too much room on the books.

But I have a little hope left in the vast reservoirs of despair, largely because articulate people like Nussbaum and DelBanco are at least addressing themselves to these questions. I don't find the answers comprehensive or completely satisfying, but I don't think I was meant to. There's a lot of work to be done, despite the impression--too easy to get in the academic world--that everything's been said, done, and studied. We still haven't answered the question about why literature exists. Unlike history, or philosophy, the answer isn't obvious.

why?

2009-03-05T11:50:00.000-08:00

The fiftieth post seems like occasion enough to announce my latest turn of the page, which in this case takes the form of establishing some clearer and more stable idea of why I'm in graduate school than the one I originally supplied ("it's better than a 40-hour-a-week job and even if I don't get a job at the end, at least I'll be smarter and I'll get to read books all day." The last part turned out to be true, at any rate. This weekend, I have to read Great Expectations, most of the Metamorphoses, three chapters of Auerbach, Bakhtin's "Discourse in the Novel," and five books of the Odyssey, because next week I have to read three 150-page books on time, physics, and wizardry in the Renaissance that some professor at Berkeley is hording until the last possible moment of his or her recall period).

But back to the point, I've been getting bored lately. Bored with arguments about ghosts and amputated body parts, about martyrdom and altarpieces. It doesn't have anything to do with the skill or persuasive power of these particular arguments, but more with the fact that it all seems like a dodge, as, indeed, does much of 20th and 21st century literary criticism. Not to sound like the latest chancellor's report about the dire state of the endowment, but in a time when people can't pay for their houses and 60-year-olds wake up every morning with a stock portfolio worth approximately half of what they were at this time last year, who's really interested in whether Wuthering Heights is structured like a language, complete (or, rather, incomplete) with absent signified at its center? I freely admit that my mind starts wandering to my shopping list and my taxes, and I get paid to care about this stuff. The humanities don't justify themselves in any obvious, cancer-curing way, and when literary criticism addresses itself almost exclusively to concerns that appear at first blush inconsequential, or, worse, incomprehensible, we humanists can't respond by flailing around at the question anymore. The question, to wit: what, exactly, are we doing? What does the study of literature offer the world? Finally--and here's the $44 billion question (adjusting for inflation)--why does literature exist?

This question isn't as much the poor stepchild of English departments as it first appears. Martha Nussbaum is posing some neo-Aristotelian answers, and Judith Butler (bless her heart, as my southern friends would say), although I can't really understand a word she's saying, appears to be attempting the same. A field called new ethics claims that the novel developed as a response to a changing moral climate requiring one to engage with the inner lives of others, and the mere fact that others had inner lives at all. Even Bakhtin, back in the 1930s, gestured towards some purpose for literature when he tried to define what made the novel different than everything that came before it.

I think these theories are interesting, but are not sufficient. Nussbaum's answer--that literature fulfills the same Aristotelian niche as ethics, i.e. how to live the good life, except concretized so that the senses interpret and process the evidence without the ineffectual moral philosopher standing by to natter about the right interpretation--seems to miss what's literary about literature. It doesn't provide an answer to why case studies (advice columns, nowadays) aren't just as effective at demonstrating the plethora of fixes that humans get themselves into and the solutions they invent to extricate themselves. The New Ethicists have this problem, too. Presumably it's even easier to demonstrate that people are different from you with a genres like the autobiography or memoir, and these don't even require some cognitive leap over the fact that the supposed other you're meant to recognize doesn't actually exist. Fictionality seems to be the missing term in all of this. Catherine Gallagher, the professor for my novel class, wrote an article about this for Moretti's novel anthology, in which she put forward the claim that one of the functions of fictionality is to shore up our own sense of self by offering characters who are real, but limited. We'll never know more about Anna Karenina the character than we already know, she says, and this serves to remind us that we continue to live and create stories, and that our depths are essentially unplumbable. We're real, in other words, and they're just made up. I like this formulation in theory, but find it completely contradicts my reading experience in practice. I feel very little satisfaction that I'll never know more about Anna, and I don't feel like any more of a person for it. I feel instead great sympathy for one of Thackeray's correspondents, who wanted to know if things turned out all right for Becky after Vanity Fair. There's a way in which (good) fiction becomes more real than reality.

In fact and to the contrary, this sense of limitedness is what I think we find in biography. While fiction allows Thackeray to skip around Waterloo and ahead 20 years, we'd reckon any biography that skipped, say, every other year of Winston Churchill's life, or which omitted World War II, completely useless. Selection (in which one's choices aren't limited, but endless) is a principle of fiction, not of history or biography, and while it doesn't even begin to answer why we need fiction, it at least begins to define what differentiates fiction from non-fiction--which seems like an important starting point. Most of literary criticism has worked on the difference between genres (Bakhtin on the novel and the epic, for instance), but I'm not sure that this more fundamental distinction has really received much treatment since the Poetics. Certainly it's been frought enough lately, with fake memoirs and invented authors, to merit further investigation.

In fact, studying it at the point where it breaks down--why do fake memoirs annoy us, anyway?--is the right methodology. Why does it matter that the genres (by which I mean the real and the not real) get mixed up sometimes? We must be getting two different needs supplied, in the same manner that our bodies require both vitamin A and vitamin C. And this, in a nice neat little nutshell, brings me to the direction in which I think those of us studying literature in this generation need to realign ourselves. Instead of running out to find examples to demonstrate how literature is structured like a language, we need to take about 2000 steps back and figure out why such a question is worth asking in the first place. This will necessarily reorient us towards the humanities proper, the study of the human: literature, story, narrative fiction, whatever you want to call it, does something for humans, and it's up to us to discover what that is.

attack of the erotic

2009-02-24T15:11:00.000-08:00

I'm led to the inexorable conclusion that my fellow humanities grad students aren't getting much, if any, because nobody who's actually having sex can think about sex ("eros," as they rather pretentiously and inaccurately term it) as much as they do. It took most of my self-possession not to guffaw today when one of them--about Jane Eyre, no less--claimed that Jane's consumptive friend Helen becomes an object of erotic desire because we first see her reading. The twisted path by which this conclusion reached was another one of those examples of faulty syllogisms (reading is depicted as desirable, by which we can only mean one kind of desire; Helen Burns is associated with reading, therefore Helen Burns is desirable). Friendship or parts of human experience outside the sexual never seem to enter anyone's mind. Ergo, Dr. Shannon's prescription is more sex, immediately, or at least some very raunchy porn.

If my last few posts have been a bit joyless, I am actually enjoying most of my classes this semester. Today's discussion of Jane Eyre may lead me to grudgingly admit that there's something beyond schadenfreude to appreciate in the book; a parallel structure exists within that in turn points to a kind of earthly paradise achieved in its second half (same number of cousins, but better cousins, and plenty of others, too) but the unsatisfactory nature of this earthly paradise suggests that the Christian utopian element isn't quite as simple as it seems at first. St. John Rivers is a pretty nasty specimen, in other words. As much as I declaim the incursions of comparative literature students, I've colonized their department as well, and enjoy every Monday (almost on an aesthetic level) the erudition of Robert Alter. I'm grateful for the opportunity to read books all the way through, as we're doing with Mimesis, The Dialogic Imagination, Genesis, The Odyssey, and Ulysses.

Today I got an anonymous note from someone, returning a sensitive document I left in a library book. If that person reads this blog, сбасибо большое, тимофей пнин.

recall

2009-02-23T19:41:00.000-08:00

I saw the most amazing thing today while I was at Doe's circulation desk to pick up The Book of Snobs.

DUMB GIRL: I want to, like, recall this book.
CIRCULATION: Okay. Do you have the call number?
DG: You mean the title?
C: (sigh) No, the numbers that you use to find it?
DG: Oh, no, I don't have those.
C: (sigh) We'll look them up.

--scramble, scramble. DG extracts library card from big yellow purse--
C: Okay, great. You'll get an email when it's ready for pick up.
DG: (visibly harumphs) What do you mean? I need it, like, now.
C: Um...it can take up to a week if you recall something.
DG: I don't understand.
C: Uh...
DG: Can't you request it, like electronically?
C: Um, well, I did that, but we give the person up to a week to return the book.
DG: I don't understand. I need it this afternoon. Why can't you get it again?
C: (understanding blooming slowly on her face, like one of those sped up moments in a nature film) Well, you see, this is how the library system works: people check out books, but other people can recall them. But since they might live far away from campus, we give them up to a week to get back to campus and return the book...
DG: I want to, like, talk to the manager.

aemulatio, or something

2009-02-18T15:00:00.000-08:00

Let me preface this by saying that I hate Foucault. I've rarely if ever found anything in the man's work but ideas in various states of half-bakedness, topped by a thin crunchy layer of borrowed erudition: sugary nuggets to catch the fancy of the impressionable as they trip lightly past his pastry shop of human ideas.

With that out of the way, I'll admit a fondness for the Renaissance chapter of The Order of Things. In attempting to explain a paradox I've always felt--why smart people like Erasmus, et al. could revere Aristotelian reason and simultaneously believe that a beauty mark resembling a certain constellation meant that the bearer possessed the properties of Casseiopeia--Foucault defines the epistemology of the Renaissance, identifying the principles by which Aristotle and alchemy could exist in the same individual. Foucault defines one of these principles, aemulatio, like this: "The relation of emulation enables things to imitate one another from one end of the universe to the other without connection or proximity: by duplicating itself in a mirror the world abolishes the distance proper to it in this way it overcomes the place allotted to each thing." Foucault's point in the book is to define the break between the modern and the Early Modern, Enlightenment and Renaissance. I've decided to read the rest of the book, so I'll discover soon enough whether he thinks the postmodern era is more like the former or the latter, but I'm inclined to think the former, based on recent experiences. My fellow English literature people tend to display exactly this kind of logic: "X is like Y; therefore, let us attribute to them the same properties and conclude that, despite all evidence to the contrary, X behaves exactly like Y and thus this poem is all about sea turtles, after all." It makes you want to stand on the nearest available surface, and, like some lunatic at Speakers' Corner, deliver a sermon on causality, excluded middles, and the fact that punning--in addition to being the lowest form of humor--doesn't actually constitute an argument, even if you do it in a foreign language. And if one more person attempts to clobber me over the head with some punning etymology, it may just come to that. These etymologies start to bleed into one of Foucault's other epistemological arguments for the Renaissance--the convenientia, by which things that are in close contact become like one another. Sharing the same root as another word is not, or usually not in our nominally Enlightened era, enough to suggest that place and similitude are the same; or, as Foucault rather nicely puts it, not enough to cause moss to grow out of seashells. Am I exaggerating when I claim that a good 60 percent of arguments in PhD seminars in English literature proceed from these interesting premises? Certainly, but on a bad day, it sure feels like it.

On a brighter note, I've requested the Northern Regional Library Facility's copy of Thackeray's The Book of Snobs, a taxonomy of the species that I plan to update for the modern era. I use modern advisedly, after discovering that I don't really care for postmodern epistemologies.

brainflog

2009-02-02T22:57:00.000-08:00

I submit that there's nothing quite like coming home after an afternoon devoted to flogging your brain with a combination of Genesis, Homer, and Auerbach and discovering that, contrary to all reasonable expectations, your paper on Vanity Fair and the nineteenth-century definition of satire did not in fact write itself while you were gone.

In other news, I disagree with Stanley Fish. This probably suffices as a general rule, but to wit, today: his assessment of Big Love, a show I adore passionately but not passionately enough to pay $50 more a month to get HBO. (Cable already seems like a waste to me. Despite getting some 100 channels, I can tell you definitively and from much past experience that there's nothing on at the moment. Unfortunately, the Internet's markedly more expensive without it and that whole digital switcheroo thingy dingy renders a cable box necessary unless I want to acquire one of those special converters made for old people clinging like the shipwrecked to their rabbit ears. I imagine these boxes having a single large red button.) "Sentimentality" isn't the right word for the aesthetic effect of Big Love. The aesthetic appeal of Big Love is a very old one, and has to do with Aristotle's question of what philosophy is and does. Philosophy is supposed to help you find and lead that ever so elusive good life, and what appeals about Big Love is that the characters appear to genuinely care about that question. Granted, their moral ideas are for those of us in mainstream America something like living in a fun house that's been turned upside down and exiled to Wonderland, but still, no viewer leaves it without the sense that the crazy polygamists are trying, however imperfectly, to find and do the right thing. And it's impossible not to get sucked into this pursuit and to start asking the same questions they ask themselves about the right course of action when, say, your husband is thinking about taking a Croatian waitress as a fourth wife and your son starts dating twins. Afterwards, you ask yourself what it is about this lifestyle that's so wrong, and you have trouble coming up with answers that address themselves to principle and not the specifics of the situation you've just encountered. You've been relativized, in other words, and it's hard to smother this decided weirdness in the same blanket statements that you did before you realized that even polygamists may be in pursuit of something recognizably moral in trying circumstances (i.e. your neighbors keep sending the mainstream Mormons after you).

Now, to bed. The Victorian novel seminar is so crowded that arriving the standard Berkeley 10 late will ensure that you occupy the standing room only section.

This is relevant to mah interests...

2009-01-30T21:12:00.000-08:00

Every society has its verbal tics, secret passwords, and words of belonging. With the beginning of the new semester in graduate school, it's time to prove once again that you know the incantation, the words to Sugar Magnolia, etc. Inevitably this will involve uttering one of two phrases in just about every class, club, or group that renews itself mid-year:

1. "I'm interested in...[the literature of the high Prussian court in 1876, transgressing international borders, beets]."
2. "I work on...[the sherry trade in the mid-Atlantic, genre formation and its significance to pea plants, joining the clean plate club]."

Like many habits of graduate students, I find this one more and more irksome the more I experience it. (It probably belongs on some sort of "Stuff Graduate Students Like" list.) But I've developed a strategy now, and I have high hopes that it will put a nice layer of fiberglass insulation between me and my madness.

I think of the cat. See above.

Bad poems and she-goats

2009-01-21T15:09:00.000-08:00

Margaret Soltan has a sharp little analysis of what made yesterday's inaugural poem so dull. The short answer is the lack of an organizing metaphor. There's really no excuse for its absence in such a short piece. Nor is there any excuse for "brick by brick."

I'm taking an interesting course called Doctor Faustus' Books to fulfill my Renaissance requirement. (I'm not sure why I have this requirement, given that I was an Early Modernist as an undergraduate and took so many Shakespeare classes that I can almost tell you what anyone is going to say about Twelfth Night after I hear the first word of their first sentence. Not that I mind, though: it's a chance to revisit some old favorites and remember why I hate some old enemies. Hi, Spenser.)

The idea is that we're to read everything mentioned or alluded to in the Marlowe play, and thus gain some sort of MLA cocktail party comprehensiveness about the Tudor period, or enough to ask at least one misguided but not too far off-base question of a proper Renaissance scholar on a panel. Nobody's admitted this, of course. You might think from this description that I think the whole thing a sham, but actually I approve of greater comprehensiveness (and comprehensibility) among those fortunate enough to call themselves literature professors. There's a vague and not very well chewed on belief among people who take, for instance, the GRE in English Literature that superficial knowledge of a number of different periods and broad topics in the field is keeping them from something more important, like tallying up the number of times the word "she-goat" appears in the Domesday Book, but I'd argue that it's exactly that sort of micro-specialization that makes professors such good characters in novels and such mockable ones in non-fiction. Superficiality isn't always a bad thing, particularly if it directs you towards theories and ideas that better unify the answer to the question that few of us ever bother to ask ("what's the point of literature, anyway?") and instances that, upon further exploration, prove useful for whatever it is you were so obsessively occupied with in the first place. Maybe there are she-goats in other places, too. Maybe, just maybe, she-goats are the underlying cause of Victorian novels. Or the corpus of Don DeLillo. (The latter is more plausible.) And no one should be so quick to trivialize cocktail parties. Maybe if more people went in with the attitude that, you know, the actual stuff of life happens there, and that it's not such a dreadful thing to know enough about your drinking companion's work to ask a semi-reasonable question about it and get a semi-reasonable reply, the quality of cocktail parties and ergo life would be much enhanced.

Incidentally, I learned something new already. I googled she-goat to make sure it was really a word and not just a funny construct that existed solely inside my head, and I discovered that it was good luck for a Roman man for a she-goat to walk across his path on his way out of the house, because he would think on Caranus, the first king of the Macedons.

So, it's been awhile

2009-01-20T16:34:00.000-08:00

Yeah. The first semester of graduate school proved more difficult than I thought. The written work posed little challenge, but the art of digesting (as opposed to merely consuming) the volumes of reading required time and experience. I buried myself and emerged a bit cannier for it.

But with our new president's call for responsibility firmly in mind, I've resolved to take my original task--providing random Googlers a place to acquire an honest and unvarnished take on graduate school from application to, you know, actually attending classes and stuff--much more seriously.

So: first day, new semester. What's to like? Plenty. One of my cohort mentioned that she'd decided to go to Berkeley for the express purpose of enrolling in Catherine Gallagher's Victorian Novel class. This sort of dedication makes me recall with no small degree of shame the fact that I didn't have a clear idea of what made Berkeley rule uber alles other English PhD programs until I was accepted and actually started researching the question. (This was my attitude towards a number of grad schools, really. I figured there was no point in getting attached to some institution that stood a 90 percent chance of rejecting my application. Don't make my mistakes, kids. Better to have loved and lost, etc.)

A five minutes' conversation with any female in my department would reveal the startling fact that she wants to be Catherine Gallagher. In a seriously stalkerish, identity theft kind of way. When Professor Gallagher left the room to make some more copies for the gaggle (on which more later) and asked us to prepare a short speech on why we were taking the class, the woman sitting across from me said, "Uh, because I've always wanted to take a class with a professor that actually has a Wikipedia entry?" I didn't really get this until I used Gallagher's work on the function of novelistic verisimilitude in conjunction with Bakhtin's for my Novel in Theory paper last semester. It was written simply, clearly, without unnecessary jargon, and produced far more nodding than head tilts. (Gallagher's essay on fictionality, I mean. I'll find out about the paper tomorrow when I go to collect it.) I thought to myself, "Ah ha! So it IS possible to write on theory and not sound like something out of Postmodern Pooh!"

And the first class didn't shoot me in my tender, aspiring little heart. The most interesting part was when--talking about the length and pace of Victorian novels--Gallagher asked about the chronotope of Obama's inaugural address. Alas, I a) hadn't seen it yet, having left for said class before it began; and b) had no idea what a Bakhtinian chronotope is. My glance at "Формы времени и хронотопа в романе" didn't reveal much, apart from its connection to space and time and how these imprint on the narrative. Perhaps Gallagher will elaborate next time.

What I liked less (and this applies to the Novel in Theory class I took last semester, too) is Berkeley's apparent non-enforcement of enrollment limits in seminar classes. So when my enrollment time came up on the registration system last October, I was in Arizona, in a hotel without free wireless. I paid my six dollars and got it so that I could make sure that I was in the classes I wanted. I try not to fall too readily into Wal-Mart-on-Black-Friday trample mode about classes, but what in the world is preventing everyone else from registering on time (they practically broadcast your enrollment appointment to your home television set), and Berkeley from saying "Hey, part of the value of seminars is shooting the shit, so let's make sure everyone who took the time to enroll can do that"? Part of the blame falls on professors, who are understandably reluctant to tell someone who moved across the country just to take one class that it's all full up. But a good half of it is on students who can't be bothered to register until the last minute. Grad students in the humanities are infamous for not getting their shit together, and I don't care until it means that I have to sit in some hot little room too close to someone who has elected not to deodorize and simultaneously try not to breathe while fitting something perspicacious in between the mental meanderings of a Comparative Literature student and the whiny incoherence of an undergraduate.

Speaking of which, if you're going to insist that all people in your department have the chance to enroll, why not start by kicking out the comparativists and the undergraduates? Actually, I'd like to propose a hierarchy of evacuations for over-enrolled graduate classes, based on past experience:

-visiting grad students in comparative literature who don't participate
-visiting grad students in comparative literature who participate, but monopolize every conversation just to bring up their bizarre notion that Don DeLillo is the quintessential American writer. Just like all Americans are cowboys.
-graduate students past their second year in comparative literature--you're supposed to be done with your classes by now
-grad students in comparative literature in general. Jesus, don't these people have their own department? Why are there at least six of them in every class I take?
-too earnest undergraduates who find it absolutely impossible to say less than 500 words on any subject, including cheese and water balloons
-all other undergrads--the rest of us had to be drummed out of classes. Now it's your turn.

Admit it. You agree.

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.