“‘Charlie Rose’ by Samuel Beckett”:

While I certainly agree that reports of the ‘death of the novel’ have been greatly exaggerated, and anxieties about new media technologies and the threats they allegedly pose to literature may reflect fears about larger societal changes, it is difficult to accept the conclusion that critiques of technology always function as covert attacks against identity politics. (Enns)

When I first read Anthony Enns’ extremely long review of my book, published early in March on electronic book review, my initial thought was that he just hadn’t read it very closely, and therefore mistook carefully qualified claims for gross generalizations. But gradually it began to dawn on me: his review may be less a misreading than an enactment of precisely the anxious response that I outline in the book. It’s the best explanation I can come up with for the many conflations, reductions, and misinterpretations in the review: I think I touched a nerve.

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I’ve been writing up a storm in whatever stolen moments I can get, and working like a fiend at every other hour of the day, with the exceptions of the ones where I sleep (not enough, and not terribly well) and the ones where I watch season 5 of The Wire, which has completely and totally broken my heart this season by being so devastatingly good that I cannot bear the knowledge that I’ve only got one more new episode to watch ever, and In Treatment, which I began watching out of mild formal curiosity (how long can a narrative series that’s on five nights a week hold up?) but have gotten quite caught up in.

Aside from those bits of narrative pleasure, it’s sheer madness: preparing for class, producing endless amounts of administrative paperwork, responding to ridiculous numbers of email messages. And, not least, event planning.

On the one hand, I hate event planning; I don’t like the kind of organization that it requires of me, I don’t like being responsible for a bunch of details that I honestly don’t care about, and I really, really hate having to wrangle people who temperamentally resist wrangling.

On the other hand, this week’s events — Thursday, the English department’s big annual lecture; Friday, a gala celebration for the Media Studies program, its alumni, and its friends; Saturday, a day-long symposium thinking about the shifts and transitions in media production and consumption being produced by the digital — promise to be amazing.

I intend to sleep all day on Sunday, if I can possibly get away with it. I’ll hope to have something new to say thereafter.

Why is it that, even when I’ve realized that the book I’ve started reading isn’t the text I actually need to be reading — either it doesn’t do the thing I thought it did, or it occurs to me that my attention would be more fruitfully placed elsewhere — I nonetheless feel the need to finish the thing before moving on to another book?

Four years ago, I live-blogged the game (let’s count: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen — fifteen fanatical posts! Mwahahahahaha!) and scared the crap out of my cats in the process of running back and forth from television to computer, screaming at the screens all the while. Last night’s game was a much more laid-back affair, in part because I refused to let myself get invested (the first few minutes of the game seeming to make the case for such reticence, and the Tigers’ long history of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory making any pre-fourth-quarter excitement ill-advised), and in part because I wasn’t home, and wasn’t alone, but was instead watching the game at a friend’s house, and an Ohio State alumna friend at that.

It was, in the end, a good game — LSU’s defense was as strong as I’ve ever seen it — though perhaps it wasn’t quite as exciting as what I’d hoped for. I do find it utterly astonishing, though, that LSU could be the only team nationally to have won two BCS championships in the nine years of the system’s existence, and yet still seem somehow undeserving of the number one spot. Yes, in 2004 the BCS and the AP poll split the number one spot between LSU and USC (as we heard no end of whining about here in SoCal [and can I just note, while I'm on the subject, that while it was a bit embarrassing for the 2003-2004 Trojans to have lost to Cal, losing to Stanford this year ought to exclude them from any top five lists anywhere]). And yes, this year LSU has become the only two-loss team ever to win a national championship (though this one, happily, not a split decision). But in a season in which, as ESPN reminded me this morning, four different teams held the number one spot and nine at least briefly sat at number two, it’s little wonder that the outcome might seem a bit weird.

In any case: Geaux Tigers. Geaux Les Miles. Now, I gotta get back to work.

I’m finally acknowledging this morning that the holidays are over, that there are two weeks left before classes start, and that if I’m going to get anything done, now’s the moment. I’m hoping to return to some regular writing here in this new year, and so am going to begin with a few relatively random bullets, just trying to capture some of what I’ve been pondering.

snow
Originally uploaded by KF

• The big-ass storm that pounded the west coast seems finally to have passed. The radar pictures I watched much of the weekend were quite dramatic — rain, at one point last night, stretching solidly from Palm Springs to the east to the coast, and from southern Orange County to well north of San Luis Obispo. Storms of that size are like a homecoming of a sort — one of a few things that I really miss from Louisiana — but they’re unusual enough to be a bit of a pain here: flooded streets, crap drivers, and a general creeping damp cold that my heating system can’t seem to overcome. On the upside, however, is that the storm has left us with enough snow that the desperation of this year’s drought might be a bit ameliorated.
• The first episode of season 5 of The Wire already has me hooked, but that was pretty much a foregone conclusion: combine my absolute adoration for the show’s narrative strategies, its complex web of characters, and its focus on the systemic obstacles to really fixing serious social problems with the fact that, this year, the media provides the primary system in question, and I’m one hundred and four percent sold.
• I’m back to work on some MediaCommons projects, which I hope I’ll have more to show for, soon.
• I’m also attempting to move forward with my own writing projects, but as usual, they’re getting short shrift. I keep saying that I want to find ways to integrate that writing with posting here, and I keep not following through. I’m determined to get some blog mileage out of the research I’m doing right now, though, and some project mileage out of the blog, too. I’d call it a new year’s resolution if I really believed in those.

More from the homefront, soon.

The other thing I’ve been meaning to post about: my friend Bill Tipper has for the last several months been overseeing the rebirth of editorial content at Barnes & Noble online, in the form of the new Barnes & Noble Review, an editorially-independent book review of the sort that has of late been disappearing from most major newspapers.

This is particularly exciting to me for two reasons: first, because my last job during grad school was as a reviewer for the early Barnes & Noble website, before the competition they were facing from Amazon led them to eschew the editorial in favor of the marketing; I’ve felt for years that they’d made the wrong choice, that readers might be led to make purchases through B&N rather than Amazon if they focused on original content rather than neutral, database-driven volume.

And second, because I’ve got a review up there today, of Daniel Solove’s The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet. It’s awfully nice to get back to a bit of mainstream book-reviewing; I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed it.

The Chronicle covers the Institute for the Future of the Book’s release of CommentPress this week. Overall, it’s a strong article, though with a pretty unfortunate headline.

There’s much I’d like to post about, but there’s only been steadfast, nose-to-grindstone work today, in part because I’m feeling that last week running through the hourglass mighty quickly, but in part because I spent the weekend with Harry Potter, both in print and on film. No spoilers here, I swear; just two quick non-spoily observations, given that my print experience was the Brit edition and my film experience had French subtitles:

1. The French have translated a lot of proper nouns. Like “Hogwarts,” which becomes, if I’m remembering correctly, “Poudlard,” which at least suggests “hog” through its bacony reference, but within which “poud” doesn’t seem to mean anything. (Unless it’s “powdered bacon,” and then I’m even more bemused.) And “Crookshanks,” which becomes “Pattenrond,” which seems like a sort of Germanified “round feet,” which makes a certain sense, I guess, but, I don’t know, loses something in the translation.

2. There sure seems to me to be a lot more “blimey!” in the Brit edition, despite the U.S. editor’s insistence that “there are virtually no differences in the texts of the last few books.”

And with those utterly beside the point but non-secret-giving-away comments, back to work….

I got sucked into a conversation last night over at Unfogged that started out with ogged’s annoyance over what he refers to as the “bitchy whine” at the Washington Post about how Harry Potter basically demonstrates the end of literacy as we know it. Ogged wisely noted that the general claim that no one reads anymore always masks a more specific claim that no one reads anything good anymore, but that because that “anything good” goes unspoken, we’re never required to have the conversation about what “good” means, and where those values come from, and why they should be supported, or undermined, as the case may be.

Wisely, I say, as this argument is at the heart both of my last project and the new one as well. But also wisely because ogged provoked the conversation, comment after comment about the value of literary reading, as compared with the value presented by other forms of reading (including that form of interpretation that one brings to bear on non-textual media such as television). It’s a fascinating conversation, and one that seems to me to demonstrate by example the utter wrongness of the sense that only texts written according to a particular set of conventions, printed on sheets of paper which are collected into signatures and then bound between covers, have cultural merit. The article I’ve just finished writing, which I’ll be posting for comment soon, claims at one point that the deep purpose of all publishing is conversation, of some variety or another, whether the casual discussion among a book group, the formal discussion of a class, or the slow and painstaking discussion (stretched out over decades) of scholars, though the institutional structures that have risen up around reading over the last five centuries have gradually attenuated that social purpose. Here’s a conversation, however, and a great one at that, provoked by a one-paragraph blog entry. So under what definitions would this not qualify as “good”?