I was going to leave this in the comments of my last post, but found myself doing so much fulminating until it seemed worth turning this into a whole nother entry.

So the ugly story:  I get snarky below about the trackback ping I got earlier today from chachacha.co.uk, and opine that the proprietor of said site is using mine to campaign for his Bloggie.  Said proprietor, however, shows up next in the comments, and is actually fairly nice to me despite my snark.

Man, I keep forgetting this whole internet thing is all networked and stuff.  You can get here from anywhere.  And if you got here once, it’s likely you could find your way back.

Well, James, welcome.  And sorry for giving you grief, in what I thought was absentia.

And good luck with the non-campaign.  I do have to say that the great thing about your category is the oddness of the clustering.  If ChaChaCha and ChromeWaves and PopJustice are all, in some sense, a “weblog about music,” well, it’s definitely in different senses.  75 Words is fascinating, and is definitely about music, but is not so much a weblog, no?  And Moby is of course mostly about Moby, and whether that’s the same thing as music or not is open to question.

All of which brings me back around to Liz’s post about the categorization of blogs, which clued me in to the availability of the nominations in the first place.  I’m fascinated by the award categories, and particularly what’s there and what’s not, what’s been added this year and what’s been deleted.  For instance:  gone are the tangential-to-the-blog categories (Best Weblog Ring, Best Merchandise, Best Webcam, Best Reviews or Weblog about Weblogs), replaced by a couple of new geographical categories (British or Irish—which seems to me just asking for trouble—and African or Middle Eastern) and a category that I really don’t understand:  Best Photography of a Weblog.  Not on, but of.  Are we talking about pictures one takes of one’s blog?

The ongoing categories are equally interesting.  There are a slew of geographical divisions, which strike me as interesting in a “place” folks once argued was going to do away with the nation-state.  There are categories like “best meme” and “best essay about weblogs,” “best weblog directory or update monitor” and “best web application for weblogs.” Those strike me as being something akin to the technical Oscars, given at a special banquet two weeks before—very important, but definitely behind the scenes.

But when we scroll down (way down) to the “categories” categories, we get:

• best weblog about music
• best weblog about politics
• best web development weblog
• best computers or technology weblog
• best topical weblog
• best glbt weblog
• most humorous weblog

Arguably that last one should be considered separately from the “categories” categories, but it struck me as referring somewhat more obliquely to the “humor” category.

Anyway, what I’m interested in here is what’s left out—academic blogs, personal blogs, blogs about more than one thing.  And how the categories singled out—particularly politics, music, and technology—wind up getting reified as most important, as we discussed a while back.

I’m a bit conclusion-free this evening, having clearly been caught out writing-before-thinking.  But I wonder whether the divisions among genres in blogging have become so deep, as Clay Shirky suggests, make it impossible to name any one thing that blogging is anymore.

Which starts to suggest that naming the “best” ought to be equally impossible.

The nominations for the 2004 Bloggies are out.

Here’s where I invoke Don DeLillo and Jonathan Franzen on the ways that an artist is cheapened by the presence of an audience.

Or perhaps here’s where I sulk about never being able to elbow my way onto the A-list.  (Damn power law.)

Or perhaps here’s where I merely shrug and begin another year of toiling in relative anonymity, content just to get the work done.

Why I’m glad I moved to California.  If it’s a choice between this:

and this:

guess which way I’ll go.

George has had a no-good, very bad idea, in which I absolutely do not want to participate.  Don’t read his entry.

Oh, and don’t look here, either.

John Brockman, president of Edge Foundation, has posed his annual question to his collection of the digerati:

There is some bit of wisdom, some rule of nature, some law-like pattern, either grand or small, that you’ve noticed in the universe that might as well be named after you. Gordon Moore has one; Johannes Kepler and Michael Faraday, too. So does Murphy.

Since you are so bright, you probably have at least two you can articulate. Send me two laws based on your empirical work and observations you would not mind having tagged with your name. Stick to science and to those scientific areas where you have expertise. Avoid flippancy. Remember, your name will be attached to your law.

The results are fascinating.  Mathematician Keith Devlin’s laws, for instance:

Devlin’s First Law

Buyer beware: in the hands of a charlatan, mathematics can be used to make a vacuous argument look impressive.

Devlin’s Second Law

So can PowerPoint.

So, in the spirit of the exercise:

Fitzpatrick’s First Law

The louder the claims of a cultural form’s “death,” the less likely such claims are to be true.

Now your turn:  what’s your law? [Via Kottke.]

Last month’s MLA-bashing controversy, which surfaced here, at Invisible Adjunct, and at Chun the Unavoidable (among other locations), quickly came to circle around the question of “difficulty,” and in particular whether the perceived abstruseness of contemporary literary theory and criticism are warranted.  Or, as John Holbo put it, “exactly when, and for what reasons, is literary criticism justified in being too hard for the average Chronicle of Higher Education journalist to read?”

This question has resurfaced for me in the last couple of days.  I’ve begun reading, for unrelated purposes, Michael Bérubé‘s Marginal Forces/Cultural Centers, and last night ran across the following passage, quoted from Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s 1988 MLA Presidential Address:

This is one reason, perhaps, why research in other fields—economics, genetics, physics, and so forth—can be, without complaint or criticism, difficult for members of the general public to understand or indeed totally incomprehensible to them, but not research in literary studies.  (I mentioned the sciences, of course, but the contrast holds as well for other humanities disciplines:  archaeology, classics, philosophy, etc.) The difference is that literary studies, and especially English, is, for many people—including, it seems, many journalists—not a discipline at all.  English is simply their own native language, which is understood by anyone who speaks, reads, and writes it; and the only thing that makes English professors special is that—being, perhaps, unable to do anything else—they have chosen to get paid full-time for doing what everybody else does part-time and could do full-time if they were not so busy holding down real jobs.

Not much has changed in 15 years, I’m afraid; questions about whether the “difficulty” of literary criticism is warranted seem to me still directly tied to questions about whether the field is warranted.  What I’m curious about now is how those convictions, that studying literature is not a “real job,” become internalized within the profession, both across the curriculum—such as the all-too-common experience of the social-scientist dean who refuses to understand why the English department matters, other than as a locus for the teaching of writing—and even within the discipline itself.  We’re an intensely self-questioning, self-doubting bunch; witness the periodic recurrence of articles asking (or suggesting responses when students ask) “why study English?” in venues such as Profession.

The issue seems to me to rest precisely in the “profession,” in the sense that what we as professors of literature do, both inside and outside the classroom, is a pursuit worthy of the investment of institutional time and resources, and thus a field whose difficulty, whose professionalization, is warranted.  As Bérubé points out, arguments against professionalization surface on both the political right and left, and both outside and within the field:

Antiprofessionalism may actually be almost a standard, permanent feature of our discipline:  not only because professionalism is considered ‘a threat to individual freedom, true merit, genuine authority’ (Fish 1985, 106) but also because literary professionals inhabit an institution formed in the culture of professionalism but unsure that its machinery for professional self-advancement is sufficiently balanced and justified by the services it provides to its clients, whoever these may be. (23-24)

Bérubé further cites Jonathan Culler’s Framing the Sign on the two models under which universities operate:  “The first makes the university the transmitter of a cultural heritage, gives it the ideological function of reproducing culture and the social order.  The second makes the university a site for the production of knowledge” (33).  Bérubé finally combines these two models within the notion of canon revision, suggesting that the academic study of literature is most important in “its revision of its cultural heritage…. By means of this revision, one might argue, the academy seeks both to ‘transmit’ and ‘produce’ knowledge, to be a cultural archive that takes an active role in the creation of its exhibits” (28). 

While this conclusion is absolutely apropos within the context of Bérubé’s argument (about Pynchon and Tolson and their respective places in the canon), it doesn’t finally satisfy my questions about the cultural anxieties that seem to surround “difficulty” and professionalization in literary studies.  It seems to me that certain fields—the hard sciences and many of the social sciences, in particular—are widely assumed to operate under the second of Culler’s models, and are given no grief for doing so.  Many of the humanities, however, and particularly departments of literature, are expected to operate under the first model, and what new knowledge such departments produce is assumed to be restricted to the discovery, preservation, and presentation of forgotten elements of that cultural heritage.  Why is the exploration of new ways of reading—also known as literary theory—seen as less significant, and more obfuscatory, than new things to read?  Is there a way out of this double-bind, in which the profession faces the failure to be taken seriously, on the one side, and ridicule for its difficulty, on the other?

I’ve been following with great interest a conversation developing over at George’s place on the possibility of creating an open-source collection of resources for teaching literature.  It now appears that the first iteration of such a project will be a group-authored blog.  If you’re in the field, and want to get involved, drop him a line.

The appearance of my old pal Trent in the comments below reminds me:  I’m fast approaching an altogether alarming milestone—the 20-year high school reunion.

Which means that I’ve lived (in my case, substantively, due to having been a year ahead in school) longer since graduating from high school than I had up to that day.  Somehow that doesn’t seem possible; despite having all-too-readily kicked the dust of high school from my feet, with nary a glance backward, those four years seem in some sense too psychically present to be so far into the past.

I do a quick check of the intervening years:  4 years college, 3 years MFA program, 2 years in over-hyped “real world,” 5 years grad school, 6 years here at the College Just South of the Hill.  The math works.  It really has been 20 years.  Impossible, and yet empirically so.

I’m planning on going home for the reunion, assuming I find out when it is.  I missed the 10-year gathering, in part because I’d just re-started grad school, just moved to New York, and was excruciatingly broke.  And in part because the list of the weekend’s events included a family picnic (”bring the kids!”), and I just wasn’t ready to see the folks who’d tormented and encouraged me, those kids, as breeders.

But immediately after the reunion passed, I started thinking about people who hadn’t crossed my mind in years, people who weren’t within my closest circle of friends and enemies, but who’d been in nearly every class I took for those four years, and who’d been the kind of acquaintance you expect always to see, whose absence can go unremarked for ages until suddenly you think—good grief—what ever happened to Amy Wise?  Or Margot Engelmann?  Or Tim Randolph?

It was an odd time to graduate from high school—Orwell’s year, Reagan’s year—not the ideal moment to feel yourself coming into adulthood, perhaps.  But the years since have been really good to me, and I hope to much of the rest of the class of 1984, too.  I’m finally ready to go back and find out where everyone is, offspring and all.

See you there, Trent.

I’m still obsessing about the LSU-Oklahoma game, reading everything I can get my hands (or my mouse) on, and generally relishing the little glow that comes with seeing your—well, I’m not going to go so far as to call it an “alma mater,” as that (a) seems to dignify the relationship I hold thereto a bit too much, and (b) is entirely the wrong gender for this particular issue—your undergraduate institution, in any event, taken seriously for a change.

There’s been a tremendous amount of whining here in SoCal about the season’s final results; no sooner had the post-game award ceremony ended Sunday night, than our local ABC affiliate cut to various USC-types complaining about how half of that crystal football should have been theirs.  Oh, and how LSU didn’t deserve to be there in the first place, because the SEC is a weaker conference than the PAC-10.

To which I’d just like to say:  Please.  USC beat UCLA?  Big deal.  They beat Stanford?  They beat Cal?

Oh wait.  No they didn’t.

The SEC ends the season with 5 teams in the top 25; the PAC-10 with 2.  I can’t be convinced that, by any reasonable standards, USC’s schedule was “tougher” than LSU’s.  There’s a certain bias, I think, amongst the left(-coast) media [insert proper emoticon indicating dripping irony here] against taking SEC teams seriously.

A few writers seem to have gotten it, though.  My favorite assessment of the team, as DN rightly points out in the comments below, is that of Wayne Drehs, over at ESPN.com.  He gets it right in multiple regards, not least of which is understanding the perennial pain of being a long-term Tiger fan (and thus the joy of seeing things work out for once), and the thing that made this team so different:

Playing for LSU, you see, is sorta like playing for the Chicago Cubs or the Boston Red Sox. Over time, they’ve always seemed to mess things up in the end. But on this night, there was no Steve Bartman. No Grady Little.

Sure, things went wrong. A botched snap on the 2-yard line, a blocked punt in front of their own end zone, a pair of penalties that nullified a field goal, a costly pass interference on third down late in the game. But nobody ever freaked. They took the bad bounces, tightened their chin straps and, unlike Mark Prior and Pedro Martinez, bounced back.

Even late in the fourth quarter, while everyone else was holding their breath, while the folks in Norman were waiting for the Tigers to collapse and the folks in New Orleans were waiting for Oklahoma to conquer, the guys in the white jerseys didn’t flinch.

LSU quarterback Matt Mauck threw an interception, the Sooners pulled within one touchdown, then had the ball again deep in LSU territory, and everybody on the LSU sideline just sorta said, “Oh well.”

“It’s nothing new,” Lavalais said. “That stuff’s happened all year long. The offense would turn the ball over on our side of the field, and the defense would have to step up.”

That “oh well” quality—the ability to keep hammering away in the face of setbacks—really set this team apart from every other LSU football (and basketball, but let me not get ahead of myself) team I’ve ever seen play.

And it’s a quality I could stand a little more of myself.

…by the fact that this very site, your own Planned Obsolescence, comes in number 2 in the Google Japan rankings for ”onanism facility.”