I realized today that over the last weeks, I’ve begun a series of thoughts here that I haven’t fully followed through on—too appropriately, the thoughts seem to obsolesce before they hit the input screen. My Gibson re-reading, for instance: I found myself making mental notes of possible entries as I read, but then I kept getting sidetracked by other, apparently more interesting topics.
So, two random follow-ups.
I’ve been away for a bit (as those of you reading this—and I quote—“US person’s boring memoirs about his travel trips” (ahem) already know), and since I’ve been back, I’ve been caught in the thick of semester start-up: first-year advising, grading placement exams, preparing for the first day of classes, and generally attempting to get reacclimated. So I’ve missed some things, over the last two weeks, particularly a great series of posts by both George and Elouise about the relationship between the professorial persona, or at least the imagined version thereof, and the personas we adopt online, in these semi-veiled but nonetheless public conversations.
Well. I find myself flabbergasted by the turn this conversation has taken, a turn that does nothing, in my mind, but highlight exactly the issues that George and Elouise were pointing to in the first place.
It began simply enough: George wondered how his students might respond to finding his blog online, and whether his knowledge that some of them might be reading his musings would alter the nature of his writing. This is a question that resonates for me; the first time a student of mine appeared in my comments, my heart did skip a beat. But that appearance was one of the factors that made me seriously reconsider what I was up to here, and which gave me the courage to unmask, to acknowledge that yep, it’s me, out here where I can be seen, and yep, I take this thing seriously. Elouise seems to have gone through much the same process, and has—way more bravely than I, I think—found ways to face the risks of being seen in all (or at least many) of her facets by those who have only come to know her in one.
But it’s a hard choice to make, deciding to let down the shields that protect us in the classroom, to drop the professor-persona and allow students to see us as fully human, warts and all. And so I absolutely sympathized, and agreed, when Liz suggested a private forum, a support group of sorts, in which blogging profs could talk about such issues in relative safety.
What ensued demonstrates exactly the reason that such a forum would be useful, and may be necessary. Liz’s suggestion was taken, both in the comments on her blog, the comments on Elouise’s, and—most hurtfully, given the ad hominem nature of the attacks there—on Wealth Bondage, as evidence of elitism, of a desire to close students out of a conversation fundamentally about them. Which, it seems to me, it was not: it was a self-protective gesture, a desire to reveal one’s vulnerabilities in a safe place. The furious result, and the bruised response—see George’s response today, as well as Matt’s—are precisely evidence of the dangers of stepping outside one’s perceived persona in this new, at times too-public, space.
Alas, the blogging-from-London bit didn’t pan out quite as well as I’d hoped—in no small part because I was having too much fun to stop and reflect on the fun that I was in the midst of having.
Now that I’m back in the SoCal heat, and in the thick of semester-startup, and no longer having any fun whatsoever, I can stop and do that reflecting. So, a few thoughts about London:
London is a good place to turn 36. We spent my birthday at the Tate Modern, and then walked up Fleet Street, through the Strand, to Somerset House, where I made my second visit in four days to the Courtauld Institute Gallery (thanks for the recommendation, Corey!). The best things I saw were the mesmerizing Bill Viola pieces, Five Angels for the Millennium, and Edouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère. Though very different, each has a way of just slightly disrupting one’s perceptions—the discrepancies between the scene and its ostensible reflection in the mirror behind; the uncertainty about the direction of the surface of the water—while simultaneously introducing a profound sense of melancholy. Very appropriate for the birthday at which one has arguably hit the statistical midpoint of one’s life.
London is also a good place to have one last night of being 35. We went to see the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of Brand, which was either pedestrian or monumental, depending. (We found the performances breathtaking, but the play itself painful. But that’s what you get for going to see Ibsen.)
It’s good, in a sense, to be back in California—good to be back at work, good to be back online. London is, however, a difficult place to leave, particularly when you’re leaving someone behind there.
BT has managed to get things up and running here once again (not that we really blame him for the outage, which was admittedly systemic and not individual, but we imagined that a rather delayed shockwave resulting from last week’s nearly forgotten quiz might have thrown a kink into something or other), and thus I’m back in the cafe, pondering what of value I can report from this new geographic vantage.
One thing that I’ve discovered is that my years in New York—where I thought I’d become quite the urban pedestrian—did nothing to prepare me for negotiating London sidewalks. A major part of my clumsiness here has to do with the mix of resident and tourist traffic on the walkways, which results in very different types of traffic jams from those in the Big Apple. There, tourists walk slowly; they walk four abreast; they stop in decidedly inconvenient locales to consult maps and guidebooks and generally stare up. The best means of dealing with said tourists is, of course, a muttered snarl (or a snarled muttering) as one dodges quickly around the obstacle.
Here, of course, I’m part of the problem, and it’s a significant one: tourists (like myself) tend to follow their non-UK senses of direction and order by sticking to the right side of walkways, while residents veer left. The jam-ups come, then, not in the slowness of looky-loos walking in the same direction one is headed, but from the imminence of collisions with those headed at you—when I make the mistake of veering right, I veer right into the path of the oncoming Londoner who is properly veering left.
A resident pal insists I’m making too much of this, and suggests that there’s less order in the sidewalks even than that: that the residents have long since adapted to the rightward leaningness of the tourists and have learned to weave, resulting in what appears to be total discombobulation for those who have not yet learned the city’s walking style. Perhaps it’s the crosswalks, with their lovely pavement-level assistance (look left, you fool!), that have led me to expect readability in a phenomenon that is, finally, illegible.
The internet cafe is a lovely thing—not this particular one, I mean, but the general development. Give the folks behind the counter one unit of the local currency, and receive in exchange some quantity of time on a high-speed connection, to catch up with what you need to catch up with. Today, the currency is pounds sterling, and the unit of time is an hour, which seems to me generous in the extreme.
So, since I have time to burn, a moment from my day: I finally got to see in person three paintings that I’ve stared at for hours in reproduction—Holbein’s The Ambassadors and two Rembrandt self-portraits (the portrait of the artist as successful bourgeois, from his thirties, and the portrait of the artist as old and tired, from his sixties). It took me a while to remember that the primary locus of the reproductions at which I spent so much time staring was John Berger’s Ways of Seeing. And then I wandered around for an hour or so, caught in a brain-loop in which I attempted to reason out the import of my being so moved by seeing the originals of works I’d previously seen in reproduction in a text so underwritten by Benjamin’s dismissal of the aura of originality and the mystification it wreaks.
And then I decided that I’m still jet-lagged, and cut myself some slack in the figuring-it-out department.
Anyway: National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, Whitehall, Lambeth Bridge, South Bank, Hungerford Bridge, Charing Cross, Piccadilly Circus, Regent Street, Oxford Street, Baker Street, Marylebone.
It’s been a day.
Why is it that folks who find Planned Obsolescence via net searches mostly show up in the wee hours of the night?
And why are they searching for:
- what’s after postmodernism
- none of us is as dumb as all of us
- times roman
- helen ludo or genius or brilliant or smart “last samurai”
- rick moody, opinions
- advance reading
- on leave in academia
- intuitionist book summer reading
- greenblatt mla tenure book
- unspoken helen “sports night”
- verizon can you hear me now?
That last is my favorite. I get an average of a hit a day off those commercials. And always around 3 am.
Having finished with the statement, and returning to the Gibson article, I’ve made the last-minute decision to accompany the Significant Other on his business trip to London. I’ll be blogging from there next week, while I reread Pattern Recognition, which combination seems wholly appropriate.
It makes me curious, though: I began this blog during a trip to Hawaii. George recently blogged his trip to Georgia, as well as his experiences at the SHARP conference here in Claremont. And of course Rory has blogged his way around the world. So what is the relationship between the blog, the place it resides, and the space its author currently inhabits? How do we register or imagine or understand movement within the blogosphere (awful word), and movement of the blogosphere within lived space?
I did abysmally on Marcel’s People test. How did you do?
This thread just goes on: today on Salon (via Bookslut), a memoirist accused of fabricating some of the details of her life’s narrative defends the license she took, arguing that the genre of the memoir has been mistakenly associated with journalism, and that its devices are primarily literary, not documentary:
A memoir is a tale taken from life—that is, from actual, not imagined, occurrences—related by a first-person narrator who is undeniably the writer. Beyond these bare requirements, it has the same responsibility as the novel or the short story—to shape a piece of experience so that it moves from a tale of private interest to one with meaning for the disinterested reader. What actually happened is only raw material; what the writer makes of what happened is all that matters. As V.S. Pritchett said of the genre, “It’s all in the art, you get no credit for living.”…
To state the case briefly: memoirs belong to the category of literature, not of journalism. It is a misunderstanding to read a memoir as though the writer owes the reader the same record of literal accuracy that is owed in newspaper reporting or in literary journalism. What the memoirist owes the reader is the ability to persuade that the narrator is trying, as honestly as possible, to get to the bottom of the experience at hand.
Such a misunderstanding suggests to me that there is some cultural assumption of truth-value in written representation that has drawn readers to the memoir as a form, an assumption that precedes the memoirs themselves, and that colors our reading of other literary forms, including the blog. I remain curious, though: where does this assumption come from?
I’m a little flat today, and unlikely to find the inspiration I need for a properly ponderable post. The flatness has something to do with the heat here, which has ratcheted back up to the usual August/September levels of misery, bringing along with it nasty levels of smog and general sinus headache-inducing crud in the air. But the flatness also has something to do with the project I’ve been embarked upon for the last two days: writing the personal statement for my imminent tenure review.
The personal statement is a peculiar genre—neither particularly personal nor particularly constative; forced and artificial while demanding fluidity and naturalness; ostensibly intended to show off the best of your work but aimed at an audience of non-specialists. This is the third such review narrative I’ve had to write since arriving here at the College Just South of the Hill, and I’m afraid I haven’t gotten any better at it. The form brings out my defensiveness, and thus the statement reads as though I’m having to justify my existence to a hostile board of examiners.
So that’s where I’m at—feeling testy and defensive as I work on the statement, and then whiny as I complain about it (because we should all have such problems, to have gotten to the end of a successful assistant professorship at a generous institution with wonderful students). Any advice, encouragement, or inspiration would be much appreciated. I’ll hope to be back in working form tomorrow.
