Reading on the Rise

The National Endowment for the Arts has announced a reversal in the decades-long downward trend of American reading habits. The last time they published a major study on reading the hue and cry was great and unabating. Naturally I'd like to attribute this to the grand textual revitalization that the Internet (broadly speaking) has brought about. The dominance of television ended sometime in the late 1990s, a fact we can be sure about because it experienced its golden age just as the empire was crumbling.

Now we've got billions of screens--yes, of course, video hasn't gone away, but we're also doing much, much more reading and even some writing. The blog explosion minted millions of new authors, and whether they stuck with it or not, they all got to experience the thrill of publication in some way. The enduring power of the keyboard in mobile devices and email in all sorts of places is a testament to the fact that we are once again word people. I have no evidence to connect this with the fact that more people are reading fiction (assuming that it's even true, that this isn't a statistical blip). But I'd like to think our enhanced communication landscape is retraining us to appreciate the pleasures of literature.

Finding the Poetry in the Desert of the Real

You've got to love that Slavoj Žižek. I developed a fondness for his inspired/crazed lacanian readings of popular culture when I put together a course on the Matrix trilogy a couple of summers ago. So I think the author of Welcome to the Desert of the Real might have some interesting things to say about the clip below. Fortunately it's my blog so I'm going to say some interesting things instead. But go ahead and watch it first.



What I love about this is the way the creator finds poetry in the many wasted moments of our blasted media landscape. I mean no insult to Charlie Rose, but I love the way the quirks, gaps and nuances that usually speed by too quickly for thought are captured here like fireflies in a jar. The shaggy, lurching bizarreness that makes us human lurks behind even the most poised and professional mask, and I think this clip helps bring it out.

Thanks to friend Dan at Open Culture for posting this!

Pynchon and the Paranoid Sublime

It seems like the holidays happened ages ago, but it's only been two weeks since we entered 2009 and a little less than that since I got back on the dissertation trail. I spent most of my time since the last posting working on a revised dissertation proposal. Once I ascertain that my committee has, in fact, approved that, I'll post some details here.

The other project I've been working on and just completed is a revised draft of a paper on Pynchon and cultural capital in the digital era. I'm arguing that Pynchon's unique success as an author is connected to both his postmodern anonymity and something I'm calling the paranoid sublime. This combination has helped make Pynchon such a critical and commercial success, allowing me to use his career as a model for exploring the new cultural capital. I'm hoping to submit it for publication soon.

The Pynchon paper will eventually turn into one of my chapters, so I'm hoping to work through some of my ideas in this shorter form first.