You know that feeling, where you’re lying in bed with a head stuffed full of nastiness it doesn’t do to describe, doped-up on NyQuil and yet unable to sleep, and the thoughts are flickering through your simultaneously overly-insulated and jangly brain, and one happens past, and you think, “yeah, that’s it, that’s exactly right, that’s what I’ll write about tomorrow,” and you go to sleep, or at least what passes for sleep in the land of NyQuil, and then when you get up in the morning you remember having had the idea but other than that it’s just completely gone?

Um.  Yeah.

So this morning, I’m flipping through a copy of the New Yorker from several weeks back, and I stumble upon this cartoon.  And next thing you know, I’ve got this song stuck in my head, part of which goes:

Oh, there were green alligators and long-necked geese
Hump-backed camels and chimpanzees
Cats and rats and elephants, but sure as you’re born
The loveliest of all was the unicorn

The upshot of the song is, like the cartoon, that the absence of unicorns from the fauna of the present-day can be traced back to a Noah-ark-flood mishap, in this case that the unicorns were too busy playing and being lovely to recognize that they ought to get on the boat.

But here’s the thing:  I’ve only ever heard this song one place, and that’s on an LP I had as a child, which drew its title from another song about the last horse on the merry-go-round, who’s constantly trying to catch up with the others, only one day he looks behind him and suddenly figures out that he’s not last, but first!

I haven’t heard anything off of that record since I was, probably, seven.  And, given the tenacity of the cats and rats and elephants now populating my brain, here’s what I want to know:  Why don’t I have this kind of recall for things I read?

[Part 3 in a series.  Read Part 1 and Part 2.]

My father remarried soon after the divorce, married the woman he’d left my mother for (this piece of information my mother does not deny, nor does my stepmother, through my father denies it, vigorously).  They tried to have children in the ensuing years, but were unable.  I assumed that the child-bearing parts of their lives were over.  Fourteen years ago, when my father was 47 and my stepmother 42-ish, they had S.  The next year came H.

There was something weird about all this, something I either couldn’t put my finger on or didn’t want to question too far.  When my stepmother told me in February that she was pregnant with S., she said that the doctors had no idea how far along she was.  They did some calculations and decided that the baby would be due in early August.  S. was born in April, on Palm Sunday, and looks like she’s three months old in the picture I have of her taken on Easter.  H. was born almost exactly nine months after S.  My mother, who kept up with the story like she was watching a soap opera on TV, told me over and over that something wasn’t right about all this, that S. was not a newborn in that picture, that a 43-year-old woman could not have two babies in just under nine months with no complications.  I was shaken, horrified, infuriated.  I thought I had finished putting all my past problems with my father behind me, and now there was this.  I finally made up my mind that there was no good reason why my father would lie to me, nothing that made sense at least, that S. and H. looked a lot like their parents, and that stranger things have happened.

But then, one September, when S. was four and H. was three, my sister ran into a friend-of-a-friend whose father used to work with our father, who asked my sister what she thought about the new babies.

My father had packed up wife and kids and moved to Saudi Arabia two years before.  He and I had communicated sporadically at best when he was in Texas, and that had dramatically fallen off since his move.  My sister, who was still having crawling trouble when our parents split, had even less of a connection to him than I did.  Neither of us had heard from him in months.  And neither of us had heard anything about any new babies.

But according to this distant acquaintance, my father and stepmother either had had or were about to have twins.  Someone in the crowd of girls standing around my sister asked her, with just the right note of horror, how she could not know something like that.  D. and I, after a panicked conversation, decided not to do anything, to wait and see how long it took the story to get to us.

Two weeks later, D. ran into our stepmother’s sister’s son at school.  He asked her about the babies too.  He’d talked to my father on the phone the night before and had found out that my father and stepmother were adopting two newborn Australian girls.

This was in October.  In early November I finally got a letter from my father, announcing the arrival of R. and R., born in September.  They weren’t sure it could happen, medically speaking, he said, so they hadn’t told anyone.  But the babies and my stepmother were doing fine.  No mention of Australia.  No mention of adoption.  No real mention of my stepmother actually giving birth, though that was the implication.

A few days later, my stepfather’s father died.  At his funeral, a woman who had worked with my father before he left my mother came up and asked me whether the babies were girls or boys.  “He told us she was expecting last time he was in town,” she said, “but I never found out how it turned out.”

I spoke to my father briefly at Christmas that year, and didn’t mention any of this.  I didn’t tell him how furious I was that he did tell his colleagues about the impending babies, that he did tell his in-laws, but that he simply failed to tell his daughters.  I didn’t tell him how much it upset me that I had to question everything he said, that there were always multiple stories surrounding everything he did, that I couldn’t even be sure that his four youngest daughters were his children by blood.  I didn’t tell him how hurt I was that I was clearly not part of his family, and hadn’t been for years.  I just lied and told him that I was in the middle of a letter to him, a letter in which I intended to make all of my feelings clear, a letter that ten years later I still haven’t written.

I’ve never met R. and R., who I think are now ten, and I haven’t seen S. or H. since they were in diapers.  Who they are—much less who my father is—is something that, as it turns out, I’ll likely never know.

Announcing the launch of Palimpsest, a group-authored weblog devoted to open-source teaching resources.  Thanks to George for getting it off the ground.

I just discovered, through roundabout linkage, the blog of a former student of mine, now in grad school studying interaction design.  It’s always nice stumbling across familiar folks doing new stuff.

…but it’s possible that the book review is.

Or at least that the serious book-review publication is.  Witness this demoralizing development at the New York Times Book Review:  as if we didn’t all already know that the NYTBR was skewed toward non-fiction, this is in the process of becoming official editorial policy.  Moreover, what fiction gets reviewed will now lean explicitly toward the airport-novel, and decidedly away from the literary.

What effect might this shift have on the publishing industry?  Will the industry turn away, at least in part, from the NYTBR’s arbitration of success, or will this “marginalization”¹ of literature in the review-world cause the publishing industry to follow suit?

¹I have to put this in scare quotes in no small part because I’ve spent the last several decades (or so it feels) working on a manuscript that’s precisely about how these metaphors of “marginalization” with regard to the literary are (a) untrue, and (b) politically suspect.  I now find myself, in many regards, pondering the ironies of that stance.

To continue yesterday’s thoughts:  The exchange between Matt and Rory in the comments of my last post leads me to ponder the viability of a genuinely open-source model for the exchange of scholarly writing.  Specifically, their conversation has prodded me to think some about the academic distinction between making such work public and publishing it.

On the one hand, what I hope for in rethinking the current model of academic publishing is the most free, most efficient, most sustainable means of sharing scholarly ideas and writing across the widest possible audience—a making-public.

On the other hand, what I feel certain of is that any such new model must accomodate itself at least in some senses to the available standards for the evaluation of a scholar’s academic and institutional contributions.  And this requires, I think, some of the strictures that come with publishing.

By this, I do not mean to fall into the “if anyone can put anything out there, how will we know if it’s any good?” form of internet-anxiety.  One way that we can know something is any good is, of course, to read it, and making-public makes things available to read.

However, one of the most important functions of publishing is less a bozo-filter than a quantity-filter; there’s simply too much stuff to be read, and somehow, it’s got to be organized, categorized, and narrowed down in order for us to find what we need.

This is perhaps the true value of the journal- or press-imprint—less that unworthy stuff has been weeded out (as we all can cite examples of less-than-genius books and articles that have gotten published, as well as brilliant work that has languished unpublished) than that valuable work touching on certain fields has been gathered together in one place.  Knowing that I have found work in Postmodern Culture interesting or useful in the past, I’m likely to go back there looking for more.

The same is true, on the monograph level, of the academic press.  I know, for instance, that MIT Press publishes a slew of stuff in my field that’s both thought-provoking and paradigm-changing, and so I pay close attention to the catalog when it comes out.  Other university presses do much less publishing in my field, and so I know I can let those catalogs slide.

For this reason, among others, I think that a truly viable new model for academic publishing is going to require an “imprint,” a sense in which material has been selected and organized and thus that readers know where to find it.

There’s of course a set of more pragmatic institutional reasons for maintaining an imprint in any new publishing model:  the institutions for which we work (or for which we would like to work) demand it.  A formalized process of peer-review is a must, at many institutions, for publications to be taken seriously (and hence articles in edited volumes, at my institution, “count” for much less than do articles in peer-reviewed journals).  Such is particularly true on the monograph-level; making-public without any of the formalized structures of publishing’s “imprint” will be taken by the institution, regardless of the work’s quality, as no more than a new form of vanity publishing.

The first question that remains for me, though, is whether this “imprint” must remain that of a university or commercial press.  With few exceptions—Matt mentions the University of Virginia Press’s electronic imprint, and MIT, unsurprisingly, also has a number of “digital projects” online—such presses are tied to the dead-tree mode of publishing.  And because of the increasingly crippled nature of this form, “publishing” is becoming more and more restrictive, making less and less work public.

What I want to do is imagine a new means, outside the structures of the university press, to combine the best of the open-source model’s making-public with the imprint-effect of publishing.  There will be more ramblings here, no doubt, as I circle around what that might look like.

Dorothea Salo and Timothy Burke have both turned their sights on the state of academic journal publishing, arguing, in slightly different veins, that the move to electronic delivery of such journals is the most affordable, equitable, and just plain sensible model for publication into the future.  I wholeheartedly agree.

What I’d like to turn to, though, is a topic that Matt and I briefly encountered a while back:  the future of the academic monograph.  While the economics of journal publication have clearly been nonsensical for some time, and while, as Tim rightly points out, shorter texts (such as articles) lend themselves more easily to electronic delivery, because they’re more likely to be read on-screen, we nonetheless have reached a crisis point in academic book publishing as well, at least within the humanities.  The choice, it seems to me, is to remain tethered to a dying system or to move forward into a mode of publishing and distribution that will remain economically and intellectually supportable into the future.

That future mode of publishing must of necessity include some form of electronic distribution.  But what form?  Should academic presses move to a print-on-demand model of publication?  Or should they think more radically about an all-electronic mode, in which full-length texts are made available in formats that are portable, readable on-screen, and printable by the user?

Or, most riskily, perhaps, is there a means of escaping the academic-press model of publication entirely, moving to some new system of peer-review and manuscript-editing that sheds the antiquated structures of press bureaucracy and economics in favor of an open-source, communal mode of intellectual discovery?

If this last, how might we in the humanities set about creating such a system?  The move toward online journal publication began in the sciences, where the crisis first manifested; the move toward a new system of monograph publication must begin with those whose careers are most built around the monograph.  Unfortunately, we’re (stereotypically, at least) also the most likely to work within the old system rather than imagining—and setting about creating—something technologically and structurally new.

This is a project that I’d very much like to work toward, for reasons both professional and personal.  I’d ask that anyone with ideas—and particularly anyone interested in working on transforming such ideas into a workable new publication model—comment here, or contact me.

A new semester.  One old class, and two new ones.  (One overload.) Three new manila folders.  One new courseware package.  And I’m good to go.

The courses, if you’re interested:

• Introduction to Media Studies
• Topics in Contemporary Fiction:  The Big Novel

The third class is a graduate cultural studies course.  I may add a website for it later.  I may not.

Got my pens.  Got my legal pads.  Got my syllabi.  Got my usual first-day jitters.

Happy New Semester, everyone.

Ah, having made our way through the madness of the top-ten lists, award season is upon us.  The Bloggies are of course merely one manifestation thereof.  And while the various film awards are the ones that get the most press (and don’t they seem to be multiplying each year?  As one of my now-emeritus colleagues used to say every year at the increasingly long senior-class awards ceremony, “All have competed; all must have prizes”), I personally find myself most wrapped up in the book award competitions.

And so, I’m thrilled to discover that this year’s National Book Critics Circle Award nominations are out.  Top fiction honors will be awarded to one of:

• Monica Ali, “Brick Lane”
• Edward P. Jones, “The Known World”
• Caryl Phillips, “A Distant Shore”
• Richard Powers, “The Time of Our Singing”
• Tobias Wolff, “Old School”

As the Powers is the only of the five I’ve read, I’m happy to here officially announce him the front-runner.  Let the mud-slinging begin.

Meanwhile, one-time commenter on this site, senior writer for the Chronicle of Higher Education, and momentary object of literary scholars’ wrath the blogosphere over, Scott McLemee has been awarded the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing.  Congratulations, Scott.