There was an interesting discussion of the Stanford Literary Lab's second pamphlet, authored by Franco Moretti, over at a group academic blog called Magazine Modernisms. I decided to stick my oar in.
Sunday, August 21, 2011
Sunday, August 14, 2011
Wrestling the Gators of Adolescence
Swamplandia! by Karen Russell
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I really enjoyed this novel, from its lush descriptions of the dystopian swamp amusement park industry to the mystical experience of journeying through the deep everglades. At Swamplandia! all the alligators are named Seth. It took me a little while to figure out where Russell was setting her course between absurdity and pathos, but once I did I really started enjoying the book. The descriptions of Kiwi Bigtree's employment at the World of Darkness, the Walmart of fun factories, were hilarious.
View all my reviews
Saturday, August 13, 2011
Writing in the Real World
It's been a summer of major changes in my life: completing grad school and moving on to my first job as a fellow at Arizona State University. As I adjust to a new position where I am "doing" almost as much as I am "thinking" (for a very word-based, university definition of doing), the impossible has occurred. I've begun to miss the abundant time I used to spend just sitting at the keyboard, writing. And think about writing. And fiddling.
I still do a fair amount of sitting and fiddling in the new job, of course, but my full agenda there does not include any special time for research. There is no gilt-edged appointment in my office Outlook calendar. I need to make that time myself, and I've begun to wish I was a faster writer. I mean, I'm fast enough at drafting proposals, emails and memos, but I don't have the prodigious speed that some academics seem to have for polishing off whole essays in an evening. I can barely read whole essays in an evening.
So my ambitions for this year are to practice the arts of making time and of thinking through problems on the go. It's dawned on me that my new slate of responsibilities is not a temporary condition, and that the period of graduate navel-gazing is done forever.
The positive side of this new reality is that I am actually starting to enjoy working on my own stuff once again. It's still a challenge of will to revise dissertation work for publication, but I am really starting to look forward to some new projects and fresh directions. Who knows, maybe I'll even put more time into this blog?
I still do a fair amount of sitting and fiddling in the new job, of course, but my full agenda there does not include any special time for research. There is no gilt-edged appointment in my office Outlook calendar. I need to make that time myself, and I've begun to wish I was a faster writer. I mean, I'm fast enough at drafting proposals, emails and memos, but I don't have the prodigious speed that some academics seem to have for polishing off whole essays in an evening. I can barely read whole essays in an evening.
So my ambitions for this year are to practice the arts of making time and of thinking through problems on the go. It's dawned on me that my new slate of responsibilities is not a temporary condition, and that the period of graduate navel-gazing is done forever.
The positive side of this new reality is that I am actually starting to enjoy working on my own stuff once again. It's still a challenge of will to revise dissertation work for publication, but I am really starting to look forward to some new projects and fresh directions. Who knows, maybe I'll even put more time into this blog?
Monday, June 20, 2011
Digital Humanities 2011
I'll revise this post later. For now, here are the slides for my presentation in PowerPoint:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5269957/Reading%2C%20Writing%20and%20Reputation.ppt
And a slightly modified PDF (without all the quote fly-ins):
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5269957/Reading%2C%20Writing%20and%20Reputation.pdf
----
I've finally returned to add to this post. I had a great time at Stanford's Digital Humanities 2011, and the conference once again impressed me: quality work and a truly collaborative atmosphere. I was lucky enough to be on a panel organized by Franco Moretti and starring Zephyr Frank and Rhiannon Lewis. I thought it was a huge success and I was thrilled to see it written up in the Chronicle.
This was my third year at Digital Humanities and for the first time I really felt like part of a community where I had friends to see and news to catch up on. The effect was of course magnified because I was returning to my "home" institution, which I hardly saw in the last three years of grad school after I moved to Phoenix. I really enjoyed hanging out with the Stanford DH crew at the banquet and I even got a photo credit. I'm grateful to Franco for the panel, Matt Jockers and Glen Worthey for organizing the whole shebang, and the English department for very generously supporting my trip after I was technically no longer a student there.
As for my talk, I think I'll let the slides and linked abstract speak for themselves. If someone is dying for the voice-over, let me know and I'll try to find some time. For now, onwards and upwards.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5269957/Reading%2C%20Writing%20and%20Reputation.ppt
And a slightly modified PDF (without all the quote fly-ins):
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5269957/Reading%2C%20Writing%20and%20Reputation.pdf
----
I've finally returned to add to this post. I had a great time at Stanford's Digital Humanities 2011, and the conference once again impressed me: quality work and a truly collaborative atmosphere. I was lucky enough to be on a panel organized by Franco Moretti and starring Zephyr Frank and Rhiannon Lewis. I thought it was a huge success and I was thrilled to see it written up in the Chronicle.
This was my third year at Digital Humanities and for the first time I really felt like part of a community where I had friends to see and news to catch up on. The effect was of course magnified because I was returning to my "home" institution, which I hardly saw in the last three years of grad school after I moved to Phoenix. I really enjoyed hanging out with the Stanford DH crew at the banquet and I even got a photo credit. I'm grateful to Franco for the panel, Matt Jockers and Glen Worthey for organizing the whole shebang, and the English department for very generously supporting my trip after I was technically no longer a student there.
As for my talk, I think I'll let the slides and linked abstract speak for themselves. If someone is dying for the voice-over, let me know and I'll try to find some time. For now, onwards and upwards.
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
A Fresh Chapter
The funny thing about milestones in life is that they are not evenly spaced on the road. Rather they seem to appear in clusters, as they have for me over the past month or so.
The first milestone actually felt more like ten or twenty millstones that I hadn't noticed around my neck they were lifted off one by one. After much frantic writing, revising, formatting, proofreading and emailing, I completed and submitted my dissertation! As of now, I am a bona fide Doctor of Philosophy. If you are injured and require assistance, I will read you a poem. “The Social Lives of Books: Literary Networks in Contemporary American Fiction” is currently in processing but should be available from the Stanford libraries website soon.
Second, I am very pleased to announce that I will be joining Arizona State University as a University Innovation Fellow this July. This is an unusual position and I am very excited about the opportunity. My primary focus will be supporting and developing ASU’s New American University initiative, which is an effort to redefine public higher education for the twenty-first century. I'll be working in the Office of University Initiatives and I am looking forward to getting to know my new colleagues.
The first milestone actually felt more like ten or twenty millstones that I hadn't noticed around my neck they were lifted off one by one. After much frantic writing, revising, formatting, proofreading and emailing, I completed and submitted my dissertation! As of now, I am a bona fide Doctor of Philosophy. If you are injured and require assistance, I will read you a poem. “The Social Lives of Books: Literary Networks in Contemporary American Fiction” is currently in processing but should be available from the Stanford libraries website soon.
Second, I am very pleased to announce that I will be joining Arizona State University as a University Innovation Fellow this July. This is an unusual position and I am very excited about the opportunity. My primary focus will be supporting and developing ASU’s New American University initiative, which is an effort to redefine public higher education for the twenty-first century. I'll be working in the Office of University Initiatives and I am looking forward to getting to know my new colleagues.
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
On Reading The Pale King
This was a strange experience for me, having recently spent a lot of time thinking about Wallace for a chapter of my dissertation. Somehow reading this unfinished novel brought the sad fact of his death to life unavoidably to mind in a way that my other DFW research never did.
The novel itself is really enjoyable--I could really see Wallace extending himself into the new style that he was struggling to develop. The various chapters are full of life and intelligence, and seemed in a sense less guarded and cerebral than his previous fiction. I found the whole setting of the novel (an IRS center in the 1980s) to be hilarious and was really drawn into the book in a way that this kind of postmodern fiction usually doesn't (though I love it anyway). That quality was particularly surprising because it doesn't really cohere as a novel and clearly was part of something larger that will never be.
At the end of the text, Michael Pietsch, Wallace's editor, chose to include a collection of notes drawn from the author's working files on characters, potential plot twists and various endings for the book. (Unless, of course, this was also some kind of postmodern DFW gag, but it didn't read that way.) This closing chapter was what really brought Wallace's death home for me. I felt as if I'd been let in behind the curtain and seen the magician preparing his next trick, and he'd seen me see him, and there we both were, feeling upset and depressed and unable to think of a way to correct the situation. With most authors I would find this kind of glimpse into the voyaging writerly mind intriguing. In a different context I would probably enjoy this kind of thing with Wallace, too--I hope to check out his archives at the Ransom Center in Austin one day. But here, at the end of The Pale King, it just made me wish he'd been able to finish the book.
The novel itself is really enjoyable--I could really see Wallace extending himself into the new style that he was struggling to develop. The various chapters are full of life and intelligence, and seemed in a sense less guarded and cerebral than his previous fiction. I found the whole setting of the novel (an IRS center in the 1980s) to be hilarious and was really drawn into the book in a way that this kind of postmodern fiction usually doesn't (though I love it anyway). That quality was particularly surprising because it doesn't really cohere as a novel and clearly was part of something larger that will never be.
At the end of the text, Michael Pietsch, Wallace's editor, chose to include a collection of notes drawn from the author's working files on characters, potential plot twists and various endings for the book. (Unless, of course, this was also some kind of postmodern DFW gag, but it didn't read that way.) This closing chapter was what really brought Wallace's death home for me. I felt as if I'd been let in behind the curtain and seen the magician preparing his next trick, and he'd seen me see him, and there we both were, feeling upset and depressed and unable to think of a way to correct the situation. With most authors I would find this kind of glimpse into the voyaging writerly mind intriguing. In a different context I would probably enjoy this kind of thing with Wallace, too--I hope to check out his archives at the Ransom Center in Austin one day. But here, at the end of The Pale King, it just made me wish he'd been able to finish the book.
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
Nearing the Finish Line
I just sent off the last new chapter that I'll be writing for this dissertation to my committee. What remains is an introduction and a lot of revision, but it's very exciting to be approaching the end of a long, lonely road.
The chapter looks at two younger writers, David Foster Wallace and Junot Díaz, and argues that they both have carved out special positions for themselves through style. Each engages with the idea of the "nerd," which is a figure I've had trouble finding a lot of secondary literature on. There's some overlap with fans and media studies work on online communities, but the nerd is different, and it's a word Díaz in particular has used to describe himself and his work. What's interesting is that the two writers started with the same basic objection to the problems of what Wallace calls "Standard Written English" and came up with radically different solutions. Wallace pushed the envelope with footnotes and postmodern stylistic games; Díaz broke new ground in integrating English, Spanish, and many other cultural and genre dialects, making what he calls the bedrock fact of "unintelligibility" a central part of his fiction.
The chapter looks at two younger writers, David Foster Wallace and Junot Díaz, and argues that they both have carved out special positions for themselves through style. Each engages with the idea of the "nerd," which is a figure I've had trouble finding a lot of secondary literature on. There's some overlap with fans and media studies work on online communities, but the nerd is different, and it's a word Díaz in particular has used to describe himself and his work. What's interesting is that the two writers started with the same basic objection to the problems of what Wallace calls "Standard Written English" and came up with radically different solutions. Wallace pushed the envelope with footnotes and postmodern stylistic games; Díaz broke new ground in integrating English, Spanish, and many other cultural and genre dialects, making what he calls the bedrock fact of "unintelligibility" a central part of his fiction.
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