Well, it's official: I'm Program Chair for the 2011 HNS Conference. Huzzah!
Details pending (you know, trifling details, like where and when), though Richard Scott and Ann Chamberlin will soon embark on a hotel-finding quest and shall doubtless emerge victorious. More details then, both here and in official venues like the HNS membership list and the HNS Yahoo group.
I'm thinking I'll organize a complete bacchanalia. After all, the world might end in 2012.
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Friday, July 31, 2009
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Sticks and Stones
And in the "Glad I didn't write that" category....
Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton was a popular Victorian novelist, best known for penning the immortal purple phrase: 'It was a dark and stormy night." (Snoopy owes royalties.) The folks who run the Bulwer-Lytton Bad Fiction Contest have a site that includes a showcase of actual samples of published writing that would make even Sir Edward squirm.
In honor of the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing:
"With listeners leaning over the velvet restraining ropes and angling for pictures, John Glenn urged them to remember Shepard's 1961 Redstone flight in its political context, when the Soviet Union was seducing world opinion with the lingerie of Earth-orbiting technology."
Yes, you did just read that. Enjoy.
.
Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton was a popular Victorian novelist, best known for penning the immortal purple phrase: 'It was a dark and stormy night." (Snoopy owes royalties.) The folks who run the Bulwer-Lytton Bad Fiction Contest have a site that includes a showcase of actual samples of published writing that would make even Sir Edward squirm.
In honor of the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing:
"With listeners leaning over the velvet restraining ropes and angling for pictures, John Glenn urged them to remember Shepard's 1961 Redstone flight in its political context, when the Soviet Union was seducing world opinion with the lingerie of Earth-orbiting technology."
-- Billy Cox, "Shepard Statue Honors American Space Cowboys," Florida Today, March 24, 2000.
Yes, you did just read that. Enjoy.
.
Sunday, July 12, 2009
The Duchess's Diary
(Oh Val, I hear you say: tell us more about critical theory and literacy, please. Well, I'm tapped out - maybe sometime when I'm feeling more boring.)
I've noticed that many, many blogs discuss new and recent historical fiction, but relatively few discuss histfic of the past (historical historical?). So I think I will focus on long-lost (or quasi-lost) gems that deserve to be unearthed.
Today's book I wish I'd written is The Duchess's Diary by Robin Chapman. First published in 1980, the only places I can find it new are Amazon UK and Barnes and Noble. Let's let them sum it up, shall we?
"Maria Isabel, Duchess of Caparosso, falls in love with Cervantes, author of Don Quixote, but believes he has misrepresented her character in his work. Consumed by the need to clear her name, her quest for truth and her progress back into the world with hope restored, is a love story that reaffirms the reader's faith in humanity. "
Aside from having too many commas, that summary pretty much nails it. This book is 120 pages long (a refreshing change from some of the doorstoppers that came along later), and every page is lyrically beautiful. Best of all is Maribel's more-than-ambiguous madness...but just because she's mad doesn't mean she's not also right. It's fantastic. And I wish I'd written it.
Here's the copy I found for a buck at a used book exchange many years ago (though it bears a price sticker in British pounds). Tell me it's not weird and spooky yet also oddly alluring - just like the novel itself.
.
I've noticed that many, many blogs discuss new and recent historical fiction, but relatively few discuss histfic of the past (historical historical?). So I think I will focus on long-lost (or quasi-lost) gems that deserve to be unearthed.
Today's book I wish I'd written is The Duchess's Diary by Robin Chapman. First published in 1980, the only places I can find it new are Amazon UK and Barnes and Noble. Let's let them sum it up, shall we?
"Maria Isabel, Duchess of Caparosso, falls in love with Cervantes, author of Don Quixote, but believes he has misrepresented her character in his work. Consumed by the need to clear her name, her quest for truth and her progress back into the world with hope restored, is a love story that reaffirms the reader's faith in humanity. "
Aside from having too many commas, that summary pretty much nails it. This book is 120 pages long (a refreshing change from some of the doorstoppers that came along later), and every page is lyrically beautiful. Best of all is Maribel's more-than-ambiguous madness...but just because she's mad doesn't mean she's not also right. It's fantastic. And I wish I'd written it.
Here's the copy I found for a buck at a used book exchange many years ago (though it bears a price sticker in British pounds). Tell me it's not weird and spooky yet also oddly alluring - just like the novel itself.
.
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
The death of reading (again)
Every 3 or 4 years, some pointy-head likes to bemoan the death of reading and literacy in general. As a pointy-head myself, I have done enough research to know that these sorts of complaints have been going on for literally hundreds of years. I have a great quote from Harvard professor James Jay Greenough in an 1893 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, in which he laments that the "postal card and the type-writer are eroding the art of letter writing." Beautiful.
Actually, with the advent of the Internet, people are reading and writing more than they ever have before in the history of human civilization. Whether they are doing it well or correctly is not the point. Yet this week one of my colleagues forwarded us yet another article (by Caleb Crain of The New Yorker) about how we're all going to hell in a handbasket, literacy-wise. Below is my abbreviated response (I took out much of the posturing):
I am automatically suspicious of any equation of textual literacy with intelligence and logical thinking, which seems to me frought with the troubling assumption that nonliterate/preliterate people and societies are incapable of rational thought, that they cannot absorb complexities or spot contradictions, etc.
The “death” of any medium often simply means its metamorphosis into another form, which we can choose see as a beautiful thing. Perceptions of death and decline are also very subject to manipulation, as we know: I objected at the time to the NEA report’s narrow definition of “reading” as “reading creative literature,” and I object to it now. Personally I find it kind of neat and inspiring that nonfiction reading is booming, that the 9/11 commission report was a national bestseller. I think we need to be very careful about jumping to these kind of the-sky-is-falling conclusions when faced with suggestions that people are not reading what (and how ) we think they should be reading.
Print is definitely declining, and cost is probably the biggest factor in this. But Crain’s article seems to exploit longstanding popular fears about the “decline” of reading = the decline of civilization. (Note the negative construction of his data: reading levels and time are “declining,” “falling,” “shrinking,” etc. He does not “celebrate” the “growth” of literacy in other media, audial or visual or virtual or what have you. You’d think that, if we’re not reading, we must be sitting around in caves scratching ourselves.)
A hundred years ago, novels were considered brain-rotting trash, and any truly worthwhile humanitarian would be reading philosophy or the classics in his/her free time. Nowadays it is fashionable to disparage television/the internet/texting/video games (Crain himself uses The Sopranos as his example of plebian entertainment), and elevate novel-reading to the highest level of mental, intellectual, and emotional sophistication. I’m sorry, but, reader/writer/teacher/scholar that I am I remain skeptical.
[He also says some stuff about Walter J. Ong's research about orality and literacy, which I find off-base. Normal people will find it boring, though, so I'm skipping it here.]
But I find Crain’s entire approach suspect. Statements like “The Internet, happily, does not so far seem to be antagonistic to literacy” are very puzzling – isn’t the Internet itself the ultimate literacy tool? I worry that Crain has taken the all-too-popular fearmongering view, combined with an unhealthy does of self-congratulation: we who read literature for pleasure are so much better and smarter and more evolved than those who don’t. (He ends his article with nothing less than a dire prediction of the end of democracy!)
As a teacher and scholar of literacy, I am much more interested (as I think we all are) in how to achieve a marriage of the various kinds of orality and literacy - a marriage which is rooted in what our students are actually doing now and what they will be expected to do in the future - than in figuring out who or what to blame.
So I sent that to my department. We'll see if they fire me. :)
Actually, with the advent of the Internet, people are reading and writing more than they ever have before in the history of human civilization. Whether they are doing it well or correctly is not the point. Yet this week one of my colleagues forwarded us yet another article (by Caleb Crain of The New Yorker) about how we're all going to hell in a handbasket, literacy-wise. Below is my abbreviated response (I took out much of the posturing):
I am automatically suspicious of any equation of textual literacy with intelligence and logical thinking, which seems to me frought with the troubling assumption that nonliterate/preliterate people and societies are incapable of rational thought, that they cannot absorb complexities or spot contradictions, etc.
The “death” of any medium often simply means its metamorphosis into another form, which we can choose see as a beautiful thing. Perceptions of death and decline are also very subject to manipulation, as we know: I objected at the time to the NEA report’s narrow definition of “reading” as “reading creative literature,” and I object to it now. Personally I find it kind of neat and inspiring that nonfiction reading is booming, that the 9/11 commission report was a national bestseller. I think we need to be very careful about jumping to these kind of the-sky-is-falling conclusions when faced with suggestions that people are not reading what (and how ) we think they should be reading.
Print is definitely declining, and cost is probably the biggest factor in this. But Crain’s article seems to exploit longstanding popular fears about the “decline” of reading = the decline of civilization. (Note the negative construction of his data: reading levels and time are “declining,” “falling,” “shrinking,” etc. He does not “celebrate” the “growth” of literacy in other media, audial or visual or virtual or what have you. You’d think that, if we’re not reading, we must be sitting around in caves scratching ourselves.)
A hundred years ago, novels were considered brain-rotting trash, and any truly worthwhile humanitarian would be reading philosophy or the classics in his/her free time. Nowadays it is fashionable to disparage television/the internet/texting/video games (Crain himself uses The Sopranos as his example of plebian entertainment), and elevate novel-reading to the highest level of mental, intellectual, and emotional sophistication. I’m sorry, but, reader/writer/teacher/scholar that I am I remain skeptical.
[He also says some stuff about Walter J. Ong's research about orality and literacy, which I find off-base. Normal people will find it boring, though, so I'm skipping it here.]
But I find Crain’s entire approach suspect. Statements like “The Internet, happily, does not so far seem to be antagonistic to literacy” are very puzzling – isn’t the Internet itself the ultimate literacy tool? I worry that Crain has taken the all-too-popular fearmongering view, combined with an unhealthy does of self-congratulation: we who read literature for pleasure are so much better and smarter and more evolved than those who don’t. (He ends his article with nothing less than a dire prediction of the end of democracy!)
As a teacher and scholar of literacy, I am much more interested (as I think we all are) in how to achieve a marriage of the various kinds of orality and literacy - a marriage which is rooted in what our students are actually doing now and what they will be expected to do in the future - than in figuring out who or what to blame.
So I sent that to my department. We'll see if they fire me. :)
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