How happy the lot of the mathematician!

From W. H. Auden's essay "Writing":

How happy the lot of the mathematician! He is judged solely by his peers, and the standard is so high that no colleague or rival can ever win a reputation he does not deserve. No cashier writes a letter to the press complaining about the incomprehensibility of Modern Mathematics and comparing it unfavorably with the good old days when mathematicians were content to paper irregularly shaped rooms and fill bathtubs without closing the waste pipe.

I bet that Great Achievements in Math are debated by mathematicians, too, and not, say, by former Olympians, doctors, or journalists.

Reading Slumps and Other Blogging Blocks

I've been in a bit of a blogging slump lately. Part of it is just that it's that crazy end-of-term time. Not only are there this term's courses to wrap (which, thanks to a very late exam, I won't be able to do until next week), but next term's courses are looming, and any "extra" time I might usually take to do some posting is getting eaten up by seasonal events--with my son now in junior high, that means two holiday concerts, for instance, and then this weekend my daughter's piano teacher held an end-of-year student recital. With family and close friends all approximately 14 days away by Canada Post, there's also the effort (mostly cheerful, if sometimes a bit frantic) to get Christmas gifts organized and shipped off--a task I completed with one final order in to Amazon.Ca last night, hooray. Friday is the last day of school for the kids, so there's an incentive to be well ahead on, well, everything, before the madness family fun begins. And I'm working hard on another piece for Open Letters in between marking papers and fussing with Blackboard sites.

Another significant factor in the blogging slump is that I've also been in a bit of a reading slump. I finished Wolf Hall a while back and thought it was surprisingly good (I know, I shouldn't be surprised if a much-hyped award-winning book by a serious author is good, and yet ... more about that later). But as more and more smart and interesting reviews came out from other sources, I got discouraged about pitching in my own two-cents worth (if I had, I think the only thing I would have emphasized that didn't seem to get a whole lot of play is how intensely written a book it is, and how much, too, it seemed to take up an obliquely Scott-like interest in the neutrality of history, by which I mean that like Waverley, Wolf Hall evokes a moment of historical transition, particularly towards a more secular, political (dare I say, modern?) world, and makes the movement feel inevitable, avoiding either nostalgia or triumphalism, something played out on the pulses of people who manage to feel extraordinarily real--a task in which much contemporary historical fiction fails, about which, also, more in a bit). Anyway, I didn't review it, and since Wolf Hall, I really haven't read anything that I wanted to write about. Ian Rankin's The Complaints was OK, well-conceived, typically well written and plotted, but nothing special. Really, by the time I finished it, I had almost forgotten it wasn't a Rebus novel, so similar were the unifying issues and themes and also the central characters (hmm, a personally troubled cop who pushes the boundaries of his job? where have I read about that before?). Diana Abu-Jaber's Crescent looked really enticing, but I didn't find the central love story very convincing, the politics seemed evasive, and I got annoyed with the interspersed tale-spinning (though I realize this idea of how stories are woven together was meant to be a key idea about the book). I tried Detective Inspector Huss for the second time and still didn't make it past Chapter Three because the writing (or at least the translation) was so wooden. And now I'm nearly finished Kate Pullinger's The Mistress of Nothing and I'm so disappointed in it that although I think I will do a full write-up of it soon, because it is, or could have been, pertinent to the thinking I've been doing about Ahdaf Soueif and Anglophone representations of Egypt (but The Map of Love is so much better) I'm not looking forward to the exercise. The gist of the review will be (unless something changes in the last 20 or so pages) that the book is far too thin, the characters underdeveloped and thus their actions desperately unmotivated, and the cliches in both plot and writing deeply distressing--not least because about two days after I ordered the book (which looked so perfect for me!), it won a major literary award here in Canada.

I think I may be wrong to wait for a book I want to blog about. For some time I disciplined myself to write up everything I read, just to get the practice and to see what I had to say as a reviewer (rather than an academic). Almost always, I did find something to say, and the mental challenge as well as the writing experience was usually exhilirating. And really good books, or even really interesting books, are few and far between. So I'm going to try to get back into that habit. But in the meantime, I'm going to try to finish that little essay for Open Letters, as I promised to have it ready by tomorrow, mark as many papers on Jude the Obscure as I can bear, and try not to panic that in less than a month, I have to give some kind of a lecture on Romanticism and sound as if I know what I'm talking about. Wish me luck!

"Sir Rohan Left Literature"

First of all, don't get your hopes up.

A proper new post is due soon (things have been a bit busy over at The Valve), but just in passing: why did I not know until this week (when someone mentioned it in passing on the VICTORIA listserv) that such a book as this existed? Here I thought I'd run into every possible permutation on and alleged source for my given name over the years, and all the while there's a whole book about "Sir Rohan" just sitting in the Harvard library. OK, it's another case in which it's a man's name, but I've pretty much accepted that I will deal my whole life with mail addressed to "Mr Rohan Maitzen." Given that, I think "Sir Rohan" would be an acceptable alternative.*

Here's an excerpt, then, from Harriet Prescott Spofford's Sir Rohan's Ghost (1860). I'm not sure if I'll have the fortitude to read the whole thing.

In determined attempts to lay this Ghost, Sir Rohan threw himself into the heat of foray and battle. Braver knight there was not in the kingdom; but he left the army, for the shape glided perpetually between his sword and his foe, breathless and with glistening eyes beside him, rode with the same glitter as earnestly in retreat, covered him with its oppressive vacancy when he fell, till sense ebbed away with his blood. Then Sir Rohan essayed oratory and statesmanship; but the shape, so distinct that it seemed as if others too must see it, swayed its long arm beside him as he spoke, and sobbed Banshee-like, with a rustling inspiration, in his pauses. Sir Rohan left the bench and bar. Dissipation opened its arms to receive him, midnight drawing rooms were proud to hold him, gay dances wreathed themselves to his motions, rosy cheeks flushed at his approach. But a pale cheek was beside the rosy ones, an airier form glided through the dancers and did not disturb the set, and with the red wine before him a long white finger plunged down the glass and brought up the glittering trophy of a golden ring. Sir Rohan reformed. Yet perhaps in the dry recesses of old libraries he might be alone, and so he delved deep among musty tomes, striving to bury his heart with the dust of ages that he found there; but another hand shifted the leaves as he read, and eyes devoid of speculation met his as he unconsciously turned for sympathy in the page. When on some rude map he traced the route of conquerors, another finger followed his pointing out spots at which he did not glance, and resting wearily on places he would gladly have blotted from existence; and as his eye wandered in quest of some desired volume on higher shelves, the Ghost fluttered up and down below it. Sir Rohan left literature.

---

*And, of course, the proper pronunciation remains "Rowan." None of that aspirated 'h' stuff, please.

Summer Reading

My daughter signed up for the summer reading club at our local public library. She pledged to read at least 20 new books between the beginning of July and the end of the summer. I pledged to match her. Because it was summer, 'light' reading was fine. Here's how we did:

Rohan:

1. Kate Atkinson, When Will There Be Good News?
2. Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles
3. Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep
4. Lloyd Jones, Mister Pip
5. Dick (and Felix) Francis, Silks
6. Robert B. Parker, The Godwulf Manuscript
7. Nadeem Aslam, The Wasted Vigil
8. Mary Ann Shaffer, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
9. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
10. Sarah Dunant, In the Company of the Courtesan
11. Penelope Lively, Consequences
12. Stieg Larsson, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
13. Ian Colford, Evidence
14. Louise Penny, Dead Cold
15. David Lodge, Deaf Sentence
16. K. Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism
17. Penelope Lively, Cleopatra's Sister
18. Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million
19. Deborah Crombie, Where Memories Lie
20. Joseph O'Neill, Netherland (whew, I'm just squeaking this one in under the wire!)

Maddie:

1. Puppy Place: Princess
2. Princess Power: The Charmingly Clever Cousin
3. Puppy Place: Pugsly
4. Alice Finkle's Rules for Girls: Moving Day
5. What Every Girl (Except Me) Knows
6. Happily Every After
7. Ivy and Bean Break the Fossil Record
8. Clementine's Letter
9. Princess Power: The Awfully Angry Ogre
10. Junie B. Jones, Boss of Lunch
11. Judy Moody M.D., The Doctor is In
12. Junie B. Jones Has a Peep in Her Pocket
13. Ready Freddie, King of Show and Tell
14. Mercy Watson: Something Wonky This Way Comes
15. Ready Freddie: The Pumpkin Elf Mystery
16. Junie B. Jones, Dumb Bunny
17. Canadian Flyer Adventures: Pioneer Kids
18. The Magic Tree House: Night of the New Magicians

She didn't quite make 20, but as she pointed out, she spent a lot of weeks in summer camps that didn't allow any time at all for reading--which strikes me as interesting and unfortunate, in retrospect. Two weeks were in a science camp, so she learned a lot, and two in a "mini-university" camp, also a good mix of education and fun. The YMCA camp was all outings and swimming; these are both good things, and I know we are all obsessing about keeping kids physically active, but aren't books important too? I'm sure Maddie would also want me to point out that we are pretty inflexible about bedtimes. But you see, that's important so that I can get some reading done! And she and I are both proud of all the reading she did.

I enjoyed most of the books I read, but the highlights for me were certainly The Wasted Vigil, Mrs Dalloway, and The Lost. In the Company of the Courtesans and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo were the low points, the first because it was all show and no substance, the second because it somehow managed to be at once prurient and dull. I'm still thinking about Netherland, which I just finished. I have never thought so much about cricket, before, that's for sure; until I read it, the only other literary cricket scene I knew was the awesome match in Dorothy L. Sayers's Murder Must Advertise (I love that scene!).

If you weren't H-- J--, someone would have made you revise this sentence...

To touch successively upon these points is to attempt a portrait, which I shall perhaps not altogether have failed to produce.

I'm just saying, most of us would not put our pens down and say, there, that's done.

Red Hot Classics

Somehow I hadn't seen any of these editions before today, when I ran into a couple of them as I was browsing through Chapters (thanks, again, to parents who hold their children's birthday parties at The Putting Edge across the way!). I'm fascinated by the marketing approach: an unwary reader might well pick these up not even realizing they are "classics" ...which is not necessarily a bad thing, of course. I'm also interested that Jane Austen gets such different covers:

Weekday Miscellany: Reading, Writing, Teaching

It sure is quiet around the blogosphere, including around here. Must be summer! It's not that I haven't been reading, but for some reason--no particular reason--I haven't been writing up as many of the books I read as I used to. At this point I'm more likely to do a full write-up only if a book has deeply engaged me, for better or for worse. This approach makes some sense, but it also means a certain slackening of discipline, so perhaps I'll try to get back in the habit of finding at least something to say about most of my current reading....we'll see. Right now I'm working on quite a varied collection, including Evidence, by fellow Dalhousian Ian Colford, Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (I'm only 400 pages in, but I'm pretty sure I disagree with Val McDermid's claim that I won't "read a better book this year"), and, of course, Villette. I just finished re-reading Villette this afternoon, and I was completely drawn in by the intensity of both the language and the vicarious experience of Lucy's passions and sorrows. In the end, I think I like her because she's a fighter; she has pride, and wit, and perseverance, even sheer cussedness. But I like her best when she cries out, "My heart will break!" More about that tomorrow. Discussion at The Valve has rather petered out, but I'm hopeful that we'll see a surge of energy around the novel's conclusion. Overall there have not been nearly as many comments as during last year's Adam Bede reading, but on the other hand the comments have been extremely interesting and thoughtful. I kind of wish more of the regular Valve authors had participated...but then, catch me reading some of the stuff they post on! So no hard feelings.

As another project, I've been working on a piece about Trollope at the invitation of Steve Donoghue at Open Letters. Now, I'm very enthusiastic about Trollope, and so, it turns out, is Steve, and I love having this opportunity to put my thoughts into some kind of readable form. It turns out, though, that a lot of the self-conciousness I thought I had fought off by blogging all this time has come back: all the material I have so far seems both dry and obvious, and I'm riddled with anxieties about tone and audience. I guess the only thing to do is to keep writing, in the spirit of Trollope himself, who famously said, "I was once told that the surest aid to the writing of a book was a piece of cobbler’s wax on my chair. I certainly believe in the cobbler’s wax much more than [in] inspiration." (Ah, but he didn't know about the internet, which lets you stay quite fixed in your chair but wander, mentally, far from the task at hand....)

And, as September comes relentlessly closer, even as I cling to the hope that I'll make more real progress on my major research projects, I find I can't stop thinking about my fall and winter classes. I actually really enjoy planning classes, setting up the syllabi and assignments, organizing the reserve lists and Blackboard sites and so on. Of course, this is a good thing--but it's also a bad thing, when in fact I don't need to do this stuff so early and should be leaving it until the very eve of my first class, as apparently most of my colleagues do (hence the crowds at the photocopier in early September). I like the concrete tasks involved: there's something satisfying in checking specific items off the to-do list, like "first day handouts" or "links for BLS" or "study questions for Aurora Floyd". But as a result, I often choose to do these tasks instead of the more amorphous, mentally demanding, never-really-done tasks that make up my research. Really, it's a question of self-discipline, so starting tomorrow, I vow to spend at least half of every work day on research and writing. Or maybe I can use a rewards system: for every two hours spent in concentrated work of other kinds, I can spend half an hour getting something in order for the fall or winter.

One of the biggest distractions related to my upcoming teaching is that I want to try some new things (new to me, that is, not new in any sense of breaking pedagogical ground), and so I have to figure out how to make them work. For a winter term class, for instance, a lecture class on "British Literature Since 1800," I am thinking of a wiki assignment that I hope will help students attend to and process the material they hear in lectures, taking more responsibility for it and engaging with it more creatively. My idea (still in development) is to have each tutorial group responsible for its own wiki; a specific student would be responsible for posting his or her notes on each lecture, with the whole group responsible for editing and amplifying them until, by the end of the term, they have a collaboratively-produced study guide for the whole course. I thought perhaps we could liven things up by making a bit of a game of it, with a prize for the best wiki (pizza for the group?). I quite like this idea, in theory anyway. I try hard to make my lectures engaging (though I now understand that I really do talk pretty fast), but I also try hard to make students see that just sitting listening, passively, is not enough. I imagine that this exercise will not only make sure at least someone is listening hard some of the time, but also reveal to them that each of them may hear me differently, may pick up on an example or an argument and think differently about it. I think the wiki format will give them room to challenge each other's interpretations as well as mine, and to put in counter-arguments, link to additional contexts, and so on. But I am only just learning how to use PBWorks (formerly PBWiki), and before I can assign something of this kind for credit I have to be quite confident about the technology myself, and I have to think hard about how to explain it to them and how to define the requirements and expectations. (If any of you have used wikis in your teaching, advice would be welcome, now, before it's too late!)

I'm also thinking about having the students in my George Eliot graduate seminar help me build up a really good website (very primitive version started here): I've been surprised at the relative dearth of good web resources on GE. Here I'm more confident about the mechanics of it, but I need to think through the academic and scholarly aspects: the what, why, and how of the information we would present. I feel as if this kind of project might help them define an audience and purpose for their work that might motivate them more than sticking to the conventional seminar-presentation-and-paper format, though probably a paper would still be part of the course requirements as well. I asked one of my PhD students, now done with her coursework, what she thought of the idea, and she was very enthusiastic, which was encouraging. But again, more thinking and experimenting to do. At least this, like the wiki idea, is for a course that won't start until January.

For fun, I've also just watched both seasons of In Treatment, which I found totally mesmerizing. Gabriel Byrne can come and listen to me any time.

Cry Me a River

I've been thinking about the movies that make me cry. OK, it could be a long list, as I'm the sort who likes to live vicariously through the plots of whatever she watches (what's the point of watching if you are still aware you are sitting in your living room? it's all about escape, right?). It amazes me how some moments never lose their poignancy for me. Yesterday, for instance, my daughter and I were watching West Side Story. I never make it much past the mock wedding, even though neither the (synched) singing nor the acting is altogether convincing:



The gorgeous Kiri / Jose version of "One Hand, One Heart" shows off the score better, but to me there's something about Natalie Wood's wide-eyed innocent beauty that I find heart-wrenching every time.

The ravishing Zeffirelli feature film of La Traviata is another one. I tear up about starting about here...



...and don't recover until the end. The first time I saw it in the theatre, I could barely stand up when it was over. (Of course, Joan Sutherland is the only one who could really sing the whole part.)

Also on my list: Melanie's death in Gone with the Wind, Beth's death in any version of Little Women, most of the Zeffirelli Romeo and Juliet (I gather purists don't love this version, but once again I'm a sucker for youth and beauty), and the last hour of Wit, in which the visiting mentor's gentle reading of The Runaway Bunny should undo even most cool and detached observer.

I think the ability to cry at movies may be a prerequisite for becoming a Victorianist, actually. We all know Oscar Wilde's sneer that it would take a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing. Well, I cry when Jo dies in Bleak House, and there are parts of In Memoriam that I slip past in class because I don't want to risk reading them aloud. (I also wept my way through the final chapters of Captain Corelli's Mandolin and, more recently, A Thousand Splendid Suns.)

OK, 'fess up: I can't be the only sentimental fool out there. What movies (or books, if you prefer) always make you cry?

Miscellaneous Reading Updates

I haven't been doing well blogging my reading lately. Here are some brief comments on recent selections.

I had high expectations for Graham Swift's Waterland. Before I read it, in fact, it was a leading contender for my upcoming survey course on "British Literature Since 1800," for which I figure I can asssign a maximum of two novels, one Victorian (of course!) and one modern or contemporary. As I'm leaning towards Dickens (of course!) for the Victorian novel, I thought, from what I'd heard about it, that Waterland might make a great pairing with Great Expectations. But I was quite disappointed in the novel. Conceptually, it seemed very dated, for one thing: all that historiographical metafiction stuff felt really innovative in the 1980s but now seems to belabour the obvious (and I should know from obvious in this area, as I wrote both my undergraduate honours thesis and my Ph.D. thesis on relationships between history and fiction as narratives). I found the whole "wow he has a really big penis" plot extremely tedious, the family saga stuff uncompelling, and though I can see lots of ways the watery elements lend themselves to metaphorical play, I just wasn't drawn in enough to want to think it through. This novel has been so widely and highly praised that I'm prepared to assume the fault lies in my reading, not the book, but there we are, or at least there I am.

I was also disappointed in Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist, though there at least I did not have such great expectations. The narration is all very smoothly handled, and I thought the ambiguities of the set-up were clever--it does become suspenseful as you try to gage who the listener might actually be and just what purpose underlies the speaker's story-telling. But the absolutely crucial part, the moment in which the narrator turns towards not just fundamentalism but (or so we are led to believe) active hostility towards the U.S., or "the west," seemed to be wholly unearned by what came before: the smile on September 11 does shock the narrator himself, but much of the rest of the novel seemed like retroactive justification for it. The edition I read made comparisons to The Remains of the Day, but the developing self-awareness there is far more convincingly supported by the accidental revelations we receive along the way.

I've been trying to read Midnight's Children. I'm bored by it! It's too digressive, too full of extraneous descriptions (yes, I know, I love Dickens). It lacks momentum. Again, my problem, no doubt, not the novel's. I'll keep trying. But I needed to be reading something for myself that I enjoyed, so I've started Ann Patchett's Run. I'm liking it so far, though it is certainly not capturing my reader's imagination the way Bel Canto did.

I've also been reading more on my Sony Reader. Though I am still a bit disappointed that you have to choose your reading location a bit carefully, I do find that in the right conditions, it is very easy to read on, and I really like the bookmarking and annotating functions. I've just gone through a glossary of terms in post-colonial criticism (sounds like fun, doesn't it?) and I've marked it up so I can quite easily find the bits that I think will be helpful in my analysis of Soueif's In the Eye of the Sun. I am reading a book on Islam and feminism now. I definitely like being able to carry a range of books with me, as I shuttle between home and office all the time and am always debating what to carry along in case I get the chance to squeeze in a little research-related reading. I can certainly imagine reaching a point where it seems annoying that a book is "only" on my shelf somewhere and not on my handy machine.

Coming Soon...

Looks nice, doesn't it? I'm reading through the page proofs this week and they look nice too--though it's hard not to be anxious about whatever stupidities of mine will be revealed when the whole thing finally goes public.

Best Doctor's Note Ever

Much of my February "break" time has been spent marking papers. It's not my favorite part of my job, but it has its good moments. This batch, one bright spot was finding this note attached to a late assignment:

[This student] has been impaired above the neck for the past 2-3 weeks, and this has interfered with her school work.

I'm sure it has.

WHiPS 2009 January 23

Announcing: Write Here in Plain Sight 2009

Dalhousie Writers Offer WHiPS

Yeah, yeah, we know what they tell you about writing. But have you ever wondered how it is actually done? Today you can witness one of the most secretive of all human behaviours – writing. Come for ten minutes or come for seven hours. Come and go from venue to venue.

First introduced to the world in 2007, Write Here in Plain Sight (WHIPS) is a bold adventure in teaching. The project is based on the premise that, as with other skills, learning how to write an academic paper can be significantly enhanced by observing expert behaviour.

Every word, every typo, every moment of writer’s block will be projected on large screens in four different rooms. Audience members witness the horror, the struggle, and the triumph of writing as it is practiced.

Watching the writers will reveal exactly how messy and idiosyncratic the writing process is and how it actually happens. The writers will share their inner-most thoughts as they plow through the process. The audience will get to question what they see as it evolves. In Sunny Marche’s case, the audience will choose the topic, and then be witness to the research, thinking and writing as it happens.

Among the writers wielding their pens at WHIPS are:

• Carolyn Watters, Dean of Graduate Studies, Computer science
• Ian Colford, award winning creative writer
• Lyn Bennett, Early modern poetry and rhetoric
• Sunny Marche, Information systems
• Rohan Maitzen – dedicated blogger and expert in the Victorian novel
• Carol Bruneau – award winning writer-in-residence. She writes for adults and for children; now she writes in front of you.
• Jacob Posen and Seamus Butler – student voluntees for you to compare yourself to!

WHO, WHEN, AND WHERE

Killam G70
* 10:00 a.m. – 12:00 a.m. Lyn Bennett
* 12:00 – 1:00 p.m. Carolyn Watters
* 1:00 – 4:00 p.m. Rohan Maitzen
Killam 4106
* 9:00 a.m. – 11:00 a.m. Jacob Posen & Seamus Butler (students)
* 11:00 – 1:30 p.m. Ian Colford

KC Rowe building – Room 3089
* 9:00 a.m. – 2:00 p.m. Sunny Marche
* 2:00 – 4:00 p.m. Carol Bruneau

Open to anyone who needs to know more about writing! Enter and leave whenever you want as long as you do it quietly.

Yes, that's right: you can come and watch me work on my book review. I think we're supposed to proceed as we normally would, which means I'll need snacks, drinks, lots of breaks, some nice music playing, and an internet connection for procrastinating making sure I'm up-to-date on all the latest blogs I follow relevant scholarship.

Winter Day Miscellany

1. Winter's here.
2. We spent a fair part of today with no power. Brrrr.
3. Happily, I got some of these for Christmas and they are very cozy.
4. Also happily, I had this to read.

A Day in the Life...

My "Things To Do" list for today:

• Prepare notes on Alice Munro, "The Found Boat" for tomorrow morning
• Prepare notes on Bleak House (up to Chapter 36) for tomorrow afternoon (still some work to do here, but class isn't until 1:30...)
  
• Review Reading Responses and Reading Journals from two classes
• Write as many as possible of seven six five reference letters (needed a.s.a.p.)
• Grade as many as possible of a batch of papers on Jane Eyre
• Comment on a Ph.D. thesis prospectus (needed a.s.a.p.)
  
• Comment on an undergraduate paper proposal (needed a.s.a.p.)
  
• Comment on two draft SSHRC proposals (needed a.s.a.p.)
  
• Review a paper resubmitted by a dissatisfied customer student
• Prepare notes on departmental hiring priorities for a committee meeting tomorrow (I'm thinking mental notes are good enough here)
  
• Prepare notes on how best to use money that may be donated for graduate scholarships
  
• Pick up important groceries and prescriptions
  
• Attend parent-teacher interview
• Collect children from after-school program trip to Natural History Museum
• Dinner: cook, feed to children, eat (sitting down if possible)
• Oversee homework, eke out some 'quality time,' do bedtime reading and cuddles
• Read some of book for review (now past deadline)
• Fold laundry, empty dishwasher
  
• Feel guilty about items left undone from this list while watching U.S. election coverage on TV
• Call it quits for the day (but not before staying up until 1:20 a.m. to watch Obama's victory speech!)
  

Maybe going public like this will help me stay on task! (11/5: Also, this list is an interesting historiographical example, in that it records the completely mundane nature of this day from an individual perspective, even as it acknowledges its glancing intersection with 'world-historical' events.)

Recent Reading: Three Novels by Lady Novelists (None of Them Silly)

I mentioned one of these novels, briefly, before: Rachel Cusk's Arlington Park, describing it as "a very angry book, bitter even," and asking whether its manifest bitterness arise from "the realization that social and material privilege make anger seem petulant (such spoiled children, her women seem!)." My retrospective reflections on it have not led to answers about how far it is in fact angry and how far it is a satire on unearned anger. It's certainly an uncomfortable book and one wholly lacking in sentimentality about either marriage or motherhood:

She was in her car, cruising through the rain along the High Street while the turbid seas of Arlington Park parted before her. It was nine-fifteen. Her husband had left the house punctually at eight, and her daughter Jessica was at school by nine; she had a feeling of rapid ascent, as though the members of her household were sandbags she was heaving one by one out of the basket of a hot-air balloon.

It is also an intensely written book, to borrow an expression I recently read used to describe the language of Bleak House--and in fact, Arlington Park at times displays a verbal quality that approximates the Dickensian, in the elaborate opening set piece describing the rain that falls all night across the tony suburb, for example:

The clouds came from the west: clouds like dark cathedrals, clouds like machines, clouds like black blossoms flower in the arid starlit sky. They came over the English countryside, sunk in its muddled sleep. They came over the low, populous hills where scatterings of lights throbbed in the darkness. At midnight they reached the city, valiantly glittering in its shallow provincial basin. Unseen, they grew like a second city overhead, thickening, expanding, throwing up their savage monuments, their towers, their monstrous, unpeopled palaces of cloud.

Perhaps fortunately, though (as this kind of thing is really hard to do persuasively, if you aren't actually Dickens and a genuis), the style is much sparer for most of the novel, though still frequently striking in its images. I was struck by the praise for Cusk's "fearlessness" and "honesty" in the reviews, and I think one thing that drew me to the novel was interest in just what she was being so brave about. I guess I don't really see it. Is the myth of either maternal or marital bliss still potent enough that it takes courage to imagine women inhabiting their domestic roles angrily or selfishly? I suppose it's a kind of anti-chick-lit novel, in which materialism is neither benign nor entertaining and neither Mr. Right nor the right address brings a fairy tale ending--and it acknowledges moments of exhiliration, enough, perhaps, to leaven the whole.

Penelope Lively's Perfect Happiness is written much more delicately--it seems less of a performance. Moon Tiger has been on my top-10 list for many years, but I think this may be the first of Lively's other novels that I've read. It actually surprised me by seeming indistinguishable in tone, scope, and what I might call "depth" from the better novels by Joanna Trollope (Marrying the Mistress, for instance): it focuses on a momentous time in a particular small cluster of intersecting lives and neatly, with precision but without flourish, works through the nuances and complications. I expected something more, somehow, and yet I thought it was both sensitive and intelligent.

I really wanted to like Jennifer Chiaverini's The Quilter's Apprentice. (Why, you ask? Well, I'm an amateur quilter myself, and also it's almost winter, so I will need comfort and distraction--something to read that's cozy but not romantic sounds perfect, and there's a whole series of these, plus actual quilting books.) I almost succeeded in liking it, too, but I had to work against the bad writing (Chiaverini explains too much, for one thing, as if she thinks her readers can't infer anything at all or need to be walked from one piece of furniture to another every time her characters move across the room). There's nothing wrong with the structure in theory, including the division of the narrative into present-day action and reminiscences, but the back story felt incredibly laboured to me. The explanations of quilting seemed forced, though maybe to someone who knew absolutely nothing about the processes or patterns it would be interesting to learn about all this. Would it have been more effective, maybe, to include a 'Quilting Primer' as an appendix rather than incorporating quilting lessons so literally and in so much detail into the body of the novel? The characters, too, seem well-enough conceived and organized, but the characterization seemed so forced. Oh, and while I'm complaining, the language is surprisingly unimaginative: eyes shine, resentments smolder, stomachs tighten, memories are recalled with pangs. Maybe Chiaverini hits her stride further along in the series--and in fact I like the general idea here enough to try another one or two, and without quite the cringing feeling I sometimes get from other kinds of chick-lit (which this undoubtedly is, though of a more domesticated variety than Sophie Kinsella or her ilk). The focus on women's friendships (quilting bees, of course, lend themselves--or could--to nice metaphorical development with respect to women's support networks as well as other kinds of social cooperation) and women's arts (also a theme here, also laboriously developed) just seems less ... icky ... than the other stuff often does. (Quick update: I pulled 'How to Make an American Quilt' from my shelf on my way out this morning--I have only vague recollections of reading it before, but the critical praise it received makes it sound more like the 'great American quilting novel' than this one.)

So: a rather miscellaneous group of books, but they've all been sitting in a "TBB" pile for a while (To Be Blogged, of course) so I thought I'd write them up. The artificial exercise of working with them as a group has made me think a bit about the arbitrariness of categories such as "women's writing," or "women writers," ones we often have recourse to in the academy (for instance, I regularly teach a graduate seminar on "Victorian Women Writers"). I usually draw attention to the problem of that arbitrariness, not least because many of the women writers I teach explicitly wished for their sex not to be a factor in the consideration of their artistic accomplishments. And why should we assume that writers have anything in common because they are of the same sex? At the same time, with the 19th-century writers, I propose there is some justification for grouping them together because, after all, as women they did have some things in common, including the social, legal, and political conditions of their lives and work, and their inevitably vexed relationship with literary traditions (sweeping statements, I know, but useful, and certainly true in their broad outlines). I don't know if I could make any such claim about this little cluster of more contemporary writers, or if my sense that doing so would be misleading (and pointless to boot) reflects back in any way on how I approach the 19th-century material. Something to think about, maybe. Or maybe this is just too random a selection of reading to mean much anyway.

CFP Blues

First, a proposal I worked very hard on even though I had a lot of other things to do was flat-out rejected--no explanation given. But it was in a new area, so you expect some failure at first. Then I saw a CFP that seemed promisingly close to things I know something about (George Eliot, realism, and sympathy)--but it was in a language I didn't understand (something about how "bodily practices inculcate cultural dispositions") so I let that one go by. And now there's a conference I'd really like to go to, because it has great plenary speakers and all kinds of interesting panels and workshops, but its general theme is the kind of work I stopped doing a few years ago in order to explore the kind of thing I did (or would do, if I could) for the other two conferences--so I don't think I can generate a legitimate proposal. I'm actually developing a distaste for conferences with themes. I suspect they inspire a great deal of spurious scholarship, given that most of us can't get funding to attend unless we're presenting and so you have to write up whatever your current research actually is in a way that suits the purpose--which is often defined in ways so broad as to invite all kinds of cute applications of it. And yet my most recent experience with a very open-ended conference program was very discouraging, as the sessions were so many and so disparate that most were badly attended and no sense of scholarly community emerged. (My own paper that time, over which I sweated bullets, was heard by a grand total of about 8 other people.) I do wish I could afford (or get funding) to go to a conference just to learn things and talk with people and get excited about ideas--without having to be on the program myself.

OK, I'm done complaining for now. Time to go do something productive, like trying to describe my current research in a way that fits the conference parameters. After all, rightly understood, what isn't about "Past vs. Present"?

Inquiring Minds Want to Know...

...why the recent flurry of Google searches for "humanism in Charles Dickens" from locations in India? Yes, I admit I peer at my 'Visitor Information' intermittently, mostly as a reality check (it keeps me humble!), but also because it's interesting to see what posts or topics bring people by. Some time ago, for example, I noticed that a number of people searching for Margaret Oliphant ended up here, probably, I speculated, because there just aren't that many other internet sources on her. Being flagged by Footnoted or by better-known bloggers has also brought over readers. But for this trend, I have no explanatory hypothesis. Still, since it took a long time to write up my posts on that topic, I'm happy to think somebody somewhere might be finding them interesting or useful--provided, of course, that they are also giving appropriate credit in their citations.

Barenaked Ladies Rock...for Kids!

Here's a recommendation for those of you out there with little ones: the Canadian rock group Barenaked Ladies has released their first ever kids' album, Snack Time! I'd recommend it for "Crazy ABCs" alone ("A is for Aisle, B is for Bdellium, C is for Czar..." through "P is for Pneumonia, Pterodactyl, and Psychosis" to the end--as they say, everyone knows Apple, Ball, Cat!). And "7 8 9" is awfully clever. ("1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 10--WHAT ABOUT 9?!" I'm not telling, but I bet your 6-year-old knows what happened.) My in-house expert (seen below) also gives a big thumbs-up to "Pollywog in a Bog" and "The Ninjas":

The Ninjas are deadly and silent
They're also unspeakably violent
They speak Japanese; do whatever they please,
And if you tear off the masks they'll be smiling.

Is it just me, or is there something very ... Canadian ... about this album? ("I don't want to be a bother, / But I think you're in my seat.")

(Rockin' to "Eraser")

Recent Reading

Well, Adam Bede, of course...but besides that, I have been doing a bit of other reading lately. First, though, I have to confess that my plan to work through A Suitable Boy has foundered. I don't blame the book, which I was basically enjoying, though I do think the problems I reported before with unfamiliar vocabulary and so on did impede my progress. It just turned out to be the wrong time to start it up, what with my summer course and a chaos of other things. I'm sure the right time will come, but for now it's back on the shelf ripening.

In the meantime, in between the final readings for my course ('A' is for Alibi and Indemnity Only--two quite different revisions of hard boiled detective conventions from feminist points of view) I've been puzzling over ways to tweak my reading list for 'Mystery and Detective Fiction' for next winter, in aid of which I've reread P. D. James's A Taste for Death and Cover Her Face, either of which I thought might be a good replacement for An Unsuitable Job for a Woman. I'm not convinced, however. A Taste for Death is very good, and Kate Miskin provides some of the same counter-perspective on the Yard (though from the inside) that Cordelia Gray gives us in her novel. But it's quite long, and my experience is that in a course drawing large numbers of non-majors it's best not to get too ambitious with the reading load. (Our one fairly long one will continue to be The Moonstone, which is just too good, and too significant in the history of the genre, to pass over.) Cover Her Face is much shorter, but (as James herself remarks about it in her autobiography) quite conventional: Dalgleish emerges as a character with remarkable clarity and specificity, but I don't see how I could make much of the novel for teaching purposes. So I think Unsuitable Job will probably remain. I also read the second of Alexander McCall Smith's series "The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency." I had enjoyed the first one, and I liked this one too, but I can't see my way to assigning it in class. I have had a couple of other suggestions from readers here that I have yet to follow up. What I'm most interested in (in case anyone has further ideas) is something fairly recent (post 1990, at least) that does something new and interesting with the genre of detective fiction. There are many good mystery writers around, but I'm not aware of any particularly new styles or approaches. I'm also looking for something that might go in the gap between The Maltese Falcon (1930) and Unsuitable Job (1972). If you could pick out one important style or writer from the 1950s or 1960s, who would it be?

I also fairly recently finished Sarah Waters's Affinity--not a new release, but the only one of her novels I hadn't yet read. I'm a huge fan of Fingersmith (my most-recommended novel of the last 5 or 6 years), and I also admired Night Watch. Affinity is good too--but for me, not as compelling a read as Fingersmith, maybe because so much of it turns on spiritualism, which (to a dedicated skeptic such as myself) is intrinsically, well, silly, rather than suspenseful. The purely human ingenuity, deception, and malevolence that drive Fingersmith carry far more conviction.

I've also been re-reading Ahdaf Soueif's In the Eye of the Sun. Sadly, my conference proposal comparing it to Middlemarch was rejected, and without any further information than that the conference organizers had received a large volume of proposals--there must still be some reason why mine was not among the chosen ones! (Side note: in this case at least, peer review was far less helpful than the input I received when I aired some of my ideas in blog posts!) But there are other venues, and I'm genuinely interested in thinking through the comparison, so as my summer teaching wraps up (terms papers still to come in and be marked, mind you), I'm trying to get back on track.

I've also rented Season 2 of The Wire. This may undermine my reading plans, but I have a cold and the kids are not in school or camps this whole week, so by the end of the day it may be as much as I can do to lounge and stare.

The Reader

A couple of weeks ago I posted about an article on Scott I found at The Reader Online. I've since spent quite a bit of time exploring the website for The Reader Organization, including learning more about the affiliated "Get Into Reading" program, the "Reading in Practice" MA at the University of Liverpool, and The Reader Magazine itself. Yesterday I also downloaded Issue 29, currently available for free from the website. I am fascinated and energized by what I have found, especially in the magazine, which includes, along with a range of new poetry and fiction, several examples of a genre of writing (or criticism) I have been trying to imagine for about 18 months, namely serious literary commentary written for (but not underestimating) a non-academic audience. For instance, Issue 29 includes a sort of round-table on Wordsworth's The Prelude with contributors including Stephen Gill, Michael O'Neill and David Wilson; an essay by A. S. Byatt on "the ways that novelists have taken up the slack after the absconding of God. Post-Darwin, post-Freud, human identity is an arena of DNA and sex. Can science and our own biological reality offer a route away from our narcissism?"; essays on Conrad; book reviews; and much more, including features specifically designed to help "readers connect." I highly recommend downloading it for yourself and taking a look at this publication, which recently celebrated its 10th anniversary. Perhaps you will find yourself surprised and frustrated, as I am, to be learning about it so belatedly. (Though maybe it is already widely known and I was just unaware of it. Do I blame myself--for having academic ostrich syndrome--or distance--as I am not aware that the magazine has distribution in Canada?) Perhaps you will also find yourself inspired, as I am, to see such a reconciliation between 'readerly' and academic approaches to literature--and grateful to the internet, for making connections and discoveries like this possible...I'm not aware of another publication (or organization) quite like this one, in its joint attention to contemporary and 'classic' texts--though I'd be happy to learn that there are such.