[A word to the wise:  what follows is twice as long as it ought to be, and very rambly.  I’m operating on three nights in a row of three hours of sleep, and am correspondingly stupid beyond belief.]

I’ve expended a tremendous amount of energy over the last several months in searching out ways to take this site seriously (yesterday’s entry notwithstanding) as a both a locus for and a form of scholarly thought.  And that’s been good.  I’m largely proud of this site and the conversations that have taken place here, pleased with the writing I’ve done and even more so with the friends I’ve made.

But there are a couple of problems, and I’m not quite sure how to characterize them.  They’re multi-faceted, as problems usually are.  Here’s the first one:  aside from the writing I’ve done here, and a few other ancillary texts (the response to my press’s outside reader’s reports, for instance), I’ve done no writing whatsoever since the summer ended.  And since the summer was almost entirely taken up with research toward the INP, the result is that I’ve done no new scholarly writing in a long, long time.

Of course, I can’t blame this entirely on the blog.  There’s been that little tenure review thing, the manuscript review thing, this weekend’s conference.  And the teaching thing, and my insane expectations thereof.  (Any of my former students reading herein would no doubt be happy to corroborate my claim that I assign what can only be described as ass-loads of reading; my current students would no doubt chime in that this semester I’ve assigned about 30% more reading than usual, and the usual is usually too much already.  Call it a math problem:  on a three-day-a-week teaching schedule, there are a third more class sessions during the semester than I’m used to; in designing the two new classes I’m teaching right now, I stupidly put as much material into each class session as I usually do on a twice-a-week schedule, with the result that… well, let’s just say that even I can’t keep up with my assignments.)

All that’s beside the point, though, which point is that despite the fact that I know, rationally, that I can’t blame the blog for my failure to get any new writing done in the last few months, I’m nonetheless unsettled about the ontological status of the blog within my writing life, at the moment.

The other issue may be thornier, or may in fact be simpler.  I’m not sure which.  Maybe it’s simpler, but harder on some level to admit to.

It’s this:  really, the thing I want to be writing right now is fiction.  A novel.  One I’ve wanted to write for years.  And I can see ahead of me, in the middle distance, the freedom to do so, arriving shortly, announced by a phone call from the dean.  [Insert video of me compulsively knocking on every wooden surface I can find, which, considering I’m writing from an Airbus 319 somewhere over the midwest, is not many.]

There’s a risk involved in this, of course.  It’s been years since I’ve written any fiction, and while I’ve gotten to a point of relative confidence with my scholarly writing, knowing that, even if a first draft of an article is terrible, I can just slave away at it and get feedback and slave away some more until it doesn’t suck.  But a novel:  what if I spend years on it, and no amount of slavage makes it unsucky?

Here’s the other risk—and this is the one that impinges on the blog a bit:  the center of the novel is derived (if only loosely) from certain aspects of my (pretty much nonexistent) relationship with my father.  And there’s some autobiographical writing I’d like to do here around that actual relationship as a means of sorting through some of the issues therein.  And that is a clear change in my “no blogging about the personal life” policy that I’ve had since starting.  (A policy apparently so strict that I apparently can’t even bring myself to refer to it as my personal life—a very odd and, I assume, unconscious slip.)

All this by way of announcing, around the back way, and through a dozen caveats and diversions, that I may be adding some new material here shortly, doing some thinking about personal stuff out here in public.  And also by way of thinking through my nervousness about it.

This nervousness—really, it feels a bit akin to that dream where you realize you’ve gone to class naked—has a lot to do with the absolute separation I’ve had in place between my academic life and my personal life for close to eleven years now; my partner and I have been in a commuter relationship all that time, and so my personal life has gotten conducted out of sight of my colleagues, for the most part, and my work life has happened in his absence.  In 2004, though, both will be in the same place, and so I’m wondering, on many levels, how one does this mixing of the academic and the personal on a regular basis.  That kind of mixing—and the kind of exposure I feel like I’m about to venture out into in terms of my writing, both here and elsewhere—feels like a paradigm shift to me, and yet it’s the kind of thing that most academics, and many bloggers, have always dealt with, and enjoyed.

I suppose it’s a question of redrawing boundaries—having the line between my academic and my personal lives geographically determined for me for so long, I’m uncertain about how to draw that line in the absence of natural borders.  With the blog, too:  the decision not to write about my personal life was never really made consciously, but if I’m going to allow myself to venture now in a memoir-esque direction, how will I know where to stop?

The Swedish Academy has this morning announced that this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature has been awarded to South African novelist J. M. Coetzee.  From the New York Times:

I am working with a student this semester who is writing his senior thesis in part on Coetzee, and so have been trying to catch up in my reading of his work.  It’s a nice confluence, and this citation reveals one of those moments at which the Nobel’s evident political underpinnings are put to admirable use.

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?

Determined to heed Francois’s advice and practice my rereading of Neuromancer in the hope that some of its details might adhere, this go-round, I’ve decided to blog certain of the comments and questions that arise as I make my way back through the text.

And here’s the first, which focuses on Screaming Fist, the Special Forces operation in which the person we come to know as Armitage was damaged:  at the first mention of the maneuver, Case remembers it, and Armitage similarly describes it, as taking place primarily in cyberspace:

“Some kind of run, wasn’t it?  Tried to burn this Russian nexus with virus programs.  Yeah, I heard about it.  And nobody got out.”

He sensed abrupt tension.  Armitage walked to the window and looked out over Tokyo Bay.  “That isn’t true.  One unit made it back to Helsinki, Case.”

Case shrugged, sipped coffee.

“You’re a console cowboy.  The prototypes of the programs you use to crack industrial banks were developed for Screaming Fist.  For the assault on the Kirensk computer nexus.  Basic module was a Nightwing microlight, a pilot, a matrix deck, a jockey.  We were running a virus called Mole.  The Mole series was the first generation of real intrusion programs.” (28)

The second time Screaming Fist is mentioned, however, Julius Deane emphasizes the physical aspects of the run, the aspects that take place in meatspace:

“Famous.  Don’t they teach you history these days?  Great bloody postwar political football, that was.  Watergated all to hell and back.  Your brass, Case, your Sprawlside brass in, where was it, McLean?  In the bunkers, all of that… great scandal.  Wasted a fair bit of patriotic young flesh in order to test some new technology.  They knew about the Russians’ defenses, it came out later.  Knew about the emps, magnetic pulse weapons.  Sent these fellows in regardless, just to see.” Deane shrugged.  “Turkey shoot for Ivan.”

“Any of those guys make it out?”

“Christ,” Deane said, “it’s been bloody years….  Though I do think a few did.  One of the teams.  Got hold of a Sov gunship.  Helicopter, you know.  Flew it back to Finland.  Didn’t have entry codes, of course, and shot hell out of the Finnish defense forces in the process.  Special Forces types.” Deane sniffed.  “Bloody hell.” (35, ellipses in original)

This slight slippage in our understanding of Screaming Fist is, I think, crucial to understanding the novel’s take on the relationship between cyberspace and lived geographic space.  Despite Case’s apparent dismissal of the physical (shrugging when Armitage reveals that one unit made it “back to Helsinki”), despite his sense that, in cyberspace, “he could reach the Freeside banks as easily as he could reach Atlanta.  Travel was a meat thing” (77), these passages suggest that geopolitical boundaries are still operative.  Case’s inability to comprehend or accept the continuing importance of meatspace seems, at the moment, the locus of a significant critique of the cyberculture to come.

More soon…

I’m about to begin a rereading of Neuromancer for that article on spatial metaphors, geopolitics, and cyberspace I’ve been working on.  And it suddenly occurs to me:  I’m re-reading this novel for the umpteenth time.  I’ve read it for fun.  I’ve read it to write about it.  And I’ve read it to teach it.  Three times.  Not all of these readings have been complete or cover-to-cover, but I have had at least two such full-length linear encounters with the novel in the last four years.

And yet:  I have to read it again before I can write this article.

Is it just me—am I just spectacularly forgetful—or is there something in the sped-up twenty-first century computer-engaged television-saturated brain that accounts for this need to revisit a novel each and every time I write about or teach it?  Is this, for instance, the result of a change in educational strategies over the last few decades?  I have marvelled, at times, at the astonishing textual memories that a number of my senior colleagues have; they can not only quote extensively from texts in their own periods and specialties, but have impressive powers of recall of details from texts from all periods.  It’s a power that can quickly make me feel inadequate; I can quote the occasional line here and there, and I can remember the broad outlines of plot and character, but usually very little in the way of detail.

This begins to account for some of that slowness in reading I recently bemoaned; in order to make sure that I have some reasonable recall of a text (particularly something critical or theoretical that I’m hoping not to have to re-read repeatedly), I have to take extensive notes.  But perhaps there’s the problem—maybe Plato was right, and by externalizing my memory in this way, all I learn is forgetfulness.

Today on MetaFilter:  a link to a report of a Pennsylvania man who, accused of spitting at a police officer, has been sentenced to read To Kill a Mockingbird.  The discussion focuses mostly on those texts with some apparent punitive value, the things they made you suffer through in eighth grade.  But I wonder:  if, as Richard Rorty claims, the social and political value of literature is in its ability to help us build a sense of solidarity with those whose life experiences are very different from our own, is there a better way to frame such a reading sentence?  If the task were not punishment but rehabilitation, what would you assign, and for what offenses?  Or, conversely, what offenses would your favorite novels serve as remedies for?

Bill directs our attention to a pretty hefty MeFi discussion of A. S. Byatt’s rather persnickety thoughts about the popularity of the Harry Potter series among adult readers.  Byatt seems, in some utterly inexplicable fashion, to blame “cultural studies” for Potter-mania, suggesting that the “leveling effect” of cultural studies is a result of such scholars being “as interested in hype and popularity as they are in literary merit, which they don’t really believe exists.”

There’s a lot to argue with there—does the study of the popular automatically suggest a failure in merit?  Does an interest in media culture of necessity imply an uncritical celebration thereof?  And what on earth does cultural studies have to do with the average Harry Potter-reading adult?—and the good folks at MetaFilter do lots of that arguing.  And then some.

What can I bring to the table?  First, I have to admit that I have not yet read volume 5, though I did advance-purchase it, and did have a minor conniption fit when I realized that, since I can only receive mail in the office (living in an address-less faculty residence on campus), and since the office is closed on Saturdays, and since we had in fact just moved out of our office and into temporary quarters so hidden from the FedEx guy as to be deemed undeliverable, my delivery would be delayed by Three Whole Days.  After some anxious phone calls and some running around on the part of our summer student worker, I got my Harry 5.0, and happily placed it on my desk, where it remains, waiting patiently for me to finish the other reading I’m doing before plunging in.

In short:  have it; dying to read it; have not yet done so.

I am, however, a student of hype, as Byatt would no doubt consider me, and find myself just as suspicious of those Keepers of the Culture who take such apparent joy in pooh-poohing the popular as I am of obviously market-driven cultural phenomena.  Which is why I was overjoyed to find Charles Taylor’s article, “A. S. Byatt and the Goblet of Bile.” Taylor has the insight to point out that “nothing deserves our respect (or scorn) simply because it’s popular, no matter how popular,” and to suggest that “the literary novelists who get themselves worked up over popular fiction never stop to consider what it is that readers are responding to except, like Byatt, to put it down to the stupidity of the masses.”

These points bear much in common with the argument of my first manuscript, which I recently laid out in part in George’s comments:

The title, at least at the moment, is “The Anxiety of Obsolescence:  The American Novel in the Age of Television,” and the central argument focuses on the apparent conviction embedded in the postmodern novel that it is a form under siege, obsolesced by more flashy contemporary media forms.

But what I’m interested in in that manuscript is not whether the anxiety is warranted—whether the novel is in fact becoming obsolete as a cultural form—but rather what discursive purposes the manifestation of such anxiety serves.  One such purpose is of course the novel’s own continuation; as John Barth suggests in “The Literature of Exhaustion,” one way to deal with such anxiety might be to write a novel about it.  But another such purpose is the intentional self-marginalization of both novel and novelist, such that, as an “alternative” culture, the product and the cultural producer can both benefit from the cachet of edginess—and, not incidentally, appropriate the mantle of marginalization from racial or ethnic or gendered or sexual “minorities.” There’s thus equal parts, in my argument, of nervousness and pleasure in this particular form of anxiety.

Byatt’s somewhat hysterical denunciation of the pleasures of the popular (and, even more importantly, the critical consideration of the popular) suggests that such anxiety might be operative not simply across media boundaries but even within the print form.  The “serious” novelist feels obliged to create distance between her own work and that of her more plebeian but also more successful competitors (what Hawthorne famously referred to as “that damn’d mob of scribbling women”), hinting that her more difficult texts are happiest in their position on the margins of our culture because the mainstream reader is ill-equipped to understand them.

Such bald elitism is pretty difficult to take; hence the uproar on MeFi, Salon, and elsewhere.  But, as Taylor reminds us, there is consolation to be found in the durability of the popular:  Leslie Fiedler, in an interview he gave a few weeks before his death early this year, told of a meeting with a group of “postmoderns” in which he horrified his audience by proclaiming, “Look, let’s be frank with each other: When all of us are forgotten, people will still be remembering Stephen King.”

Neal Stephenson, author of the riotous Snow Crash, the envy-inspiring The Diamond Age, and the at times breathtaking Cryptonomicon is returning to the Waterhouse and Shaftoe families for a bit of a prequel.  On September 23, 2003, Quicksilver hits the bookstores.

A few things to note from that last link:  Quicksilver will apparently run 944 pages, thus exceeding the heft of Cryptonomicon by a full 26 pages.  More importantly, however, Quicksilver is billed as “volume 1” of the Baroque Cycle.  Rumor has it said cycle will extend to three volumes.

Which makes it seem possible that, by the time all’s written and printed, the saga of the Waterhouse and Shaftoe clans—and the interconnected history of post-Enlightenment technologies—could run to nearly 4000 pages.  Move over, Michener.

Yes, mania.  According to the Beeb, not only did the Daily News violate the strictest of literary embargoes by running a story that contained “excerpts and details” about the imminent fifth volume in the series, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, but a Canadian woman (identified only as “Melissa”) was apparently able to purchase a copy of the book at a local Wal-Mart after the store mistakenly put the book on its shelves several days early.

Fortunately for we poor consumers, the Daily News has been slapped with a lawsuit, and, as the article reports, “Wal-Mart has launched an investigation as to how the books ended up on display.”

The good folks at Scholastic, for their part, are at great pains to explain the altruistic reasons for the embargo, the lawsuit, the investigations, the prosecutions, and so on.  As reported by the Daily News itself, “ ‘The book was embargoed [until 12:01 a.m. Saturday] so all kids would have it at the same time, and not to spoil it for the kids,’ Scholastic spokeswoman Judy Corman said.” And in the BBC story, “A Scholastic spokesman said the company hoped ‘this unfortunate situation will not spoil the surprise for millions of children around the country who have been eagerly awaiting the book.’ “

Of course, none of this would have anything to do with hype, would it?

From Slate.  Need I say more?