Paper Pills

“My Usual Neurotic Museum Experience”

February 25, 2011 in gewgaws

I am loving this essay by Timothy Aubry in Paper Monument about the acute discomfort that some of us generally-educated-in-the-arts-but-not-all-that-knowledgeable-about-anything folks feel when we’re in a museum. The strongest bits come near the end, when Sorin refers to that semi-ironic, gently distant pose adopted by art viewers who don’t know how to articulate their appreciation, which is reliant upon “the role that youthful irreverence plays as a defensive default pretense.” Or you could go the route of the author, who opts for the inscrutably blank face. Yep, been there. Looking at art in public is hard! I’m gonna go read a monograph.

(photo credit: Ray Sorin)

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You Mean I Won’t Find the Meaning of Life by Reading as Many Books as Possible? Ugh, Forget It.

February 18, 2011 in gewgaws

At twenty I imagined I would spend my middle age reading books that I didn’t have the patience to read when I was young. But now, at forty-one, I don’t even have the patience to read the books I read when I was twenty. At that age I plowed through everything in the Arnoldian belief that each volume somehow nudged me imperceptibly closer to the sweetness and light.

—Geoff Dyer in an excerpt from his forthcoming Otherwise Known as the Human Condition

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Foreign Favorites

February 18, 2011 in the literary conversation

I started reading Chad Post’s serialized essay, “In the Age of Screens,” about three days ago, and I’ve only just finished. I’m a slow and easily distractible reader. Which probably has something to do about reading in the age of screens!

I didn’t agree with everything Post wrote, namely the Manichean categorization of books as entertainment or books as literature, a distinction Post assures us we’ll know when we see. The definition of this distinction is that entertainment “reinforces current dominant cultural modes” while literature “upends beliefs, ways of thinking, assumptions,” which certainly sounds nice, if naive. But if I handed you the summer 2010 catalog of books being published by the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, who can separate the entertainment from the literature? Who’d want to? You’d certainly get a different answer from every person you asked.

More interesting is Post’s assertion that the majority of “influential” books are works in translation. He uses this example: ask an avid reader to name his or her favorite books, and translated works will likely be named. Just when my skepticism rose, Post continued:

What could be better at throwing a wrench into predicted patterns than something coming from an entirely different culture, with a totally different semantic web, and unique way of perceiving the world? And it’s worth noting that although we may initially resist these sorts of titles, it’s the uniqueness, the upending that is most memorable and has the longest lasting impact.

What a lovely thought! And it rings true for me. My most favorite book is Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio but my second favorite book is Bohumil Hrabal’s I Served the King of England precisely because of its exuberantly fluid prose, unique sense of history, and use of peasantly solitude as means to transcendence. Not a message one often encounters in suburban Connecticut.

Which makes me wonder: how many works in translation feature in your list of favorite books?

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Pouring One Out

February 15, 2011 in gewgaws

I found out from reading William Pollitzer’s dry but informative anthropological study, The Gullah People and Their African Heritage, that pouring one out for your fallen homies is a practice that can possibly be traced back to African funereal traditions: “At the ‘settin’ up’ or wake, bread and coffee are usually served to the mourners . . . each of them pours some on the group for the spirit of the deceased, as done among the Efik, the Ashanti, the Dahomeans, and other West African people.”

How coffee became, in popular culture, a 40, neither Pollitzer nor I can begin to speculate.

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Social Media Week, part two

February 11, 2011 in the literary conversation

It’s over! Thank goodness. Back to only being social on the internet.

But before I retreat into bookish reflections, I’d like to recap the latter half of this week’s panels that I attended, because no sooner did I ask “What is a social book?” in my last post that I attended a panel on that very subject.

The standout speaker at this event was Clive Thompson, a writer for Wired and The New York Times Magazine. He brought up three points that I’d like to elaborate on:
- Conversing with your commenters to think more deeply. Thompson’s writing a book about computers…people…changing culture…something, something. Anyway, the point is that he frequently updates his blog to reflect the topic he’s working on and explicitly asks his readers to respond to his initial forays into the subject at hand. He finds that his commenters’ responses lead him to think more expansively about the subject than he would have if he were writing on his own. I love this thought! It reminds me of that brain-tingly feeling I’d get during my English seminars, listening to other students talk and formulating my response. The thoughts I developed in the classroom were more incisive for having been tested and prodded by my peers. I’d like to think—ahem—that if people commented on my blog, that’d provide the push I need to think more deeply about books, reading, writing.
- Ebooks are reshaping books. Thompson meant this literally. He brought up, as an example, publishers’ practices of beefing up slim novels (sometimes with wide margins—students, you’re not alone in this!—and sometimes by asking the author to puff up what ought to be a svelter piece) or cutting expansive ones, because big, heavy novels cost too much to print and ship to bookstores. (Er, by the way, these are Thompson’s accusations, not mine.) With ebooks, you don’t have to worry about this: a novella or long essay is free to be short without facing accusations of looking skimpy on a bookshelf. A doorstopper can revel in its length without having to settle for Bible-thin pages. Ebooks will free the author to write the kind of book he or she wants to write! Or so the rosy vision goes. Of course, if your ideal book has a physical component to it (e.g. Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes), this argument does not apply.
- Digital annotations. Just like readers seek out annotated books in the physical space, readers are seeking annotated books in the digital space. Whether these annotations take the form of traditional footnotes, comments on articles and essays, or simply highlighted passages in novels or textbooks, it behooves device manufacturers and content publishers to provide this auxiliary material—and to make it easier for readers to provide their own, too.
Phew, lots of think about. Unlike the event that ended my Social Media Week, a heckle-fest called Suxorz. The audience was kind of tame (shoulda had more to drink before arriving, I guess?), and the examples were almost too varied to judge. However, I did find it reassuring to know that consumers aren’t offended by inept social media campaigns, but rather by exploitative and invasive social media campaigns. Good news for the bumbling marketer!

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Social Media Week

February 8, 2011 in the literary conversation

Social Media Week, as most of you don’t know, is a multi-city week of panels and events bringing together people from different industries to talk about all things social media. I hadn’t heard of SMW before three weeks ago, and therefore held it in fairly dismissive regard…until my colleague and I were asked to speak on an SMW panel, at which point I held the conference in even lower regard. Any club that would have me as a member, etc.

That said, I’ve attended three Social Media Week panels so far (yes, that includes my own) and have two more on the horizon. I’ll go ahead and eat crow now: these panels have been helpful in prodding me to think further about the intersection of “social” and the act of reading. Some takeaway thoughts and many questions:
- In a panel called The Big Shift, Ann Shoket, editor-in-chief of Seventeen, talks about how her brand expanded from a tangible magazine to the intangible concept of seventeen. This makes me wonder: can book publishers move on from the tangibility of books to become proprietors of intangible content? Seems like they’ll have to—or perish.
- Shoket also encourages publishers to meet readers wherever they are—and, if possible, getting to that place before the readers even arrive. So where are book readers headed now? I’m trying to think of my own reading patterns, and I shamefully admit that I’m spending more and more time on Google Reader. Yikes. What does that imply about where books should go? Into an RSS feed?
- The social book / the social reading experience: what would that entail? I know Amazon tried to make reading social by sharing passages underlined in Kindle books, and GoodReads is a haven for message-board based book clubs, but is there some service out there that more closely approximates the feeling of reading along with other people? I’m not talking about interrupting the reading experience, but enhancing it—and obviously, this isn’t for everyone. Sometimes I read to be alone, too.
It’s so stimulating to think about the way publishing can evolve with reading behaviors, but it’s hard to know how much (not to mention when) these changes will take place.

To be continued…

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Richard McGuire’s “Here”

February 6, 2011 in comics

Thank you Google Reader for bringing this great work by Richard McGuire to me (click soon—not sure how much longer this scan will be up).

I don’t recall ever having seen this kind of temporal palimpsest in comics before. “Here” is an excellent example of how inventive the graphic narrative form can be. And is this the same Richard McGuire as was featured in the McSweeney’s Comics issue (sample page) a few years back? His contribution was easily my favorite of the lot.

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Zadie Smith + Harper’s =

February 4, 2011 in the literary conversation

This past Wednesday, I had the distinct pleasure of attending Harper’s celebration of Zadie Smith as their new books columnist. This happy event is a mighty merger in my reading life. For a long while, Harper’s was my favorite magazine, but sometime in the past couple of years (perhaps with the passing of John Leonard), there was a palpable feeling of slippage, and I strayed…towards The New York Review of Books, where Zadie Smith and Orhan Pamuk were known to dabble in a few essays.

Now that Zadie Smith has decamped for more portable pages (honestly, NYRB is a pain in the ass to read anywhere except on the toilet), Harper’s is certain to reign supreme. Smith has come a long way from pissing off James Wood with her hysterical realist novels; I’d argue that she is now a public intellectual. That she’s done so as a young, earnest woman of mixed race is nothing short of remarkable. Having Zadie Smith up on stages talking about the craft and appreciation of novel-writing galvanizes one into reading more…and reading generously.

This last thought warrants elaboration: Smith talked about wanting to read with the grain rather than against it, giving authors the benefit of the doubt when she reads their novels. How uncommon in book criticism! Or maybe I’m reading the wrong reviews? Surely I’m not the only one who brings a lot of baggage to everything I read. In some respects, this baggage is what makes one an increasingly nuanced reader. But these extra changes of clothes can also make one reluctant to immerse oneself completely in the writer’s environment. To extend this metaphor further (when have I ever resisted!), if you don’t take off your coat, how can you get comfortable in the writer’s home?

Smith’s empathy for the writer’s work is going to play out beautifully in her reviews, I just know it. As a parting note, I leave you with “The Novelist” by Auden, which Zadie Smith quoted entirely (albeit haltingly) from memory. That she cares enough to recite this defense speaks volumes about her kindness, her ultimate optimism in literature.
```
Encased in talent like a uniform,
The rank of every poet is well known;
They can amaze us like a thunderstorm,
Or die so young, or live for years alone.
They can dash forward like hussars: but he
Must struggle out of his boyish gift and learn
How to be plain and awkward, how to be
One after whom none think it worth to turn.

For, to achieve his lightest wish, he must
Become the whole of boredom, subject to
Vulgar complaints like love, among the Just

Be just, among the Filthy filthy too,
And in his own weak person, if he can,
Must suffer dully all the wrongs of Man.
```
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Airing out the Blog

February 3, 2011 in gewgaws

Ahh.

Hello again, friends. It’s good to be back. I went on a blogging strike last spring to protest my husband’s negligence in updating this blog’s back-end, and nine months later, I’ve emerged victorious. There’s still some housekeeping to be done (the About Me section is busted, sorry), but I’m re-dedicating myself to the task of commenting speciously on the things I’ve been reading.

Until I get the first post up and running, here’s a sampling of what I’ve been up to in the past year:
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Currently reading

Recent tweets

“My Usual Neurotic Museum Experience”

February 25, 2011 in gewgaws

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You Mean I Won’t Find the Meaning of Life by Reading as Many Books as Possible? Ugh, Forget It.

February 18, 2011 in gewgaws

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Foreign Favorites

February 18, 2011 in the literary conversation

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Pouring One Out

February 15, 2011 in gewgaws

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Social Media Week, part two

February 11, 2011 in the literary conversation

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Social Media Week

February 8, 2011 in the literary conversation

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Richard McGuire’s “Here”

February 6, 2011 in comics

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Zadie Smith + Harper’s =

February 4, 2011 in the literary conversation

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Airing out the Blog

February 3, 2011 in gewgaws

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