Blogging

Metablogging: Three Interesting Posts

Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

Like conventional academic criticism, lit-blogging is subject to fits of self-consciousness culminating in metablogging. While a few years ago such posts were likely to be forward-looking and exploratory, about the possibilities of blogging as a new frontier in criticism, the latest round of posts from Dan Green, Scott Esposito, and Steve Mitchelmore are more equivocal. Actually, Dan Green is pretty much just negative:

Literary blogs are (unwittingly, I hope) abetting the capitalist imperative to get out “product” as quickly as possible. New books appear, are duly noted, presumably consumed, and then we’re on to the next one. While sometimes lit bloggers consider an older title, it’s usually by an already established author or a “classic” of one sort or another. Little time is spent considering more recent books that might not have gotten enough attention, or assessing a writer’s work as a whole. Once the book has passed its “sell by” date, nothing else is heard of it and every book is considered in isolation, as a piece of literary news competing for its 15 seconds. The more potential readers come to assume that this is the main function of lit blogs, the less likely it is that the literary blogosphere will have any lasting importance. Literary blogs might let you know who reviewed what in the New York Times, but that The New York Times might not be the best place to go for intelligent writing about books is not something they’ll have the authority to suggest. (read the whole piece here)

Stephen Mitchelmore’s response is almost elegaic, but there’s still a hint of that early utopianism:

I have to admit that for years I was mystified why my blog writings have gone apparently unnoticed, at least in terms of page views. While the most popular blogs were getting thousands a day, I was lucky if This Space gathered 300. I thought, isn’t my review of Littell’s The Kindly Ones better than almost all the others, and didn’t my post on a road traffic accident say more about life’s relation to literature than any journalist’s exposé of an author’s life? Perhaps, however, these explain why it is relatively unpopular. Anyway, I have a difficult relationship with praise and criticism, with self-effacement vying for dominance with aggressive resentment. It is probably best to write, as in those early days of Spike, as if nobody is watching. After having published a dozen or so reviews in print media, I’m nowadays genuinely happier to work for weeks on long reviews or essays and have them disappear into the gaping void. Finding a way to talk about the reading experience is, I’ve realised, the greatest pleasure of writing; where it ends is of no importance. Still, over the last fourteen years of online work, I’ve seen the names of my key writers – Thomas Bernhard, Maurice Blanchot and Gabriel Josipovici – become familiar whereas before they were marginalised. If I have had only a minor role in this, it has made the effort worthwhile.

Yet I still like to imagine an ideal literary website in which the design, the writing and, most of all, the editorial vision offers a unique and dynamic approach to literature and culture in general, countering the banalities of commercial literary sites. So what might it look like? I have an idea but it requires an exceptional amount of work by people who have to earn a living elsewhere. Perhaps such a website is only ever the green ray as the sun sets on one’s hopes. Such a feeling is nothing new and we may learn something from previous attempts in strikingly similar times. (read the whole post here)

Scott Esposito picks up the thread:

I’m not sure how ironic Stephen was being about not understanding why his reviews were lesser-known than those elsewhere (and generally his are of much higher quality that what you’re likely to find in other places), but it’s not too hard to explain. Likewise, the method of building a literary site with high amounts of traffic is not mysterious. Go have a look at the Huffington Post books section, where every week you can find gossip about celebrity memoirs and counter-intuitive lists along the lines of “10 Most Outrageous Outfits From New Book ‘Critical Mass Fashion’ (PHOTOS).” Just make sure to have enough important names within your h1 header, say something contentious but not terribly complex that will generate a billion links, and keep it all short and with a lot of photos. Copy that with your own stable of writers, and you too can build a fairly well-trafficked site. This is not rocket science.

Obviously, some people would shoot for other things in a site besides high traffic, and this points out the problem with focusing on hits as a measure of a website, even though the first question anyone ever asks me about my sites is how many hits they get. But as Stephen’s site demonstrates, you can be influential even without getting major traffic. So choose what you want your site to be, and then do it. (read his whole post here)

“Choose what you want your site to be, and then do it” strikes me as excellent advice. Like every blogger, I wonder at regular intervals what I do this for. I think it’s disingenuous for bloggers to suggest they write purely for themselves: no need to post online, in that case. We all write online in the hope of getting readers. But it doesn’t have to be thousands, or hundreds, to be a satisfying experience (in my case, I average barely 100 hits a day, at least based on the Sitemeter tracking, and we all know that not every hit is an actual reader). If you take Scott’s advice and write what you want–and invest in Mitchelmore’s insight that “finding a way to talk about the reading experience is … the greatest pleasure of writing,” which I think is a large part of the truth–your site will have integrity and reflect your own values as a reader and critic. Then the readers you get will be those you want to enter into conversation with, and the extension to criticism represented by your site will be sincere. I think Dan Green’s disappointment stems from his having had very specific hopes or ambitions for lit blogging. His was one of the first blogs I started reading, and the seriousness with which he took the work and the potential of blogging as an alternative form of criticism was really important to my own developing sense of what the form might allow, what purpose it might serve. While he’s right that there’s a real loss if the overall direction of the ‘litblogosphere’ is towards commercialization and marketing, the form itself remains infinitely malleable. The risk (indeed, the likelihood) is that the good stuff–the thoughtful, independent, eclectic voices–will be drowned out by the louder ones that pander and preen and sell (out). So here I agree with Scott that it’s no good to ‘persist in this “take your ball and go home” attitude.’ The New York Times may not be the be-all-and-end-all of criticism, but it would be nice to be able to harness some of the power of the prestige print publications, now all with notable online presences. If only their blogs and reviewers would play nicely with others and actively seek out interesting independent voices online who represent serious critical alternatives, showcasing them rather than insisting on the tiresomely reductive ‘critics vs. bloggers’ debate. If they really care about the condition of criticism in the present day, they would join in the effort to sustain good discussion, which–whatever its provenance–actually supports their own work by continuing to take books seriously.

Bloggers and Critics: Everything new is old again

Rohan Maitzen7 Comments

My previous post on appreciating book bloggers was in progress as the discussion unfolded on Twitter about ‘book bloggers ruining everything’ (via Ron Hogan, for one, who was watching a discussion from earlier this year between Charles McGrath and Daniel Mendelsohn* that involved a fair number of pot shots at book bloggers [see here if you want to watch it for yourself]). I’ve been thinking that one of the reasons these reductive and dismissive attitudes towards bloggers have any traction at all, and come from such otherwise very smart people, is the problem of filtering.

In blogging (as in every medium) there is good stuff (even some great stuff) and bad stuff (even some really truly terrible stuff). It is probably true, just because of the lack of inhibitions on blogging and other forms of self-publication, that the bad-to-terrible stuff  outweighs the good-to-great stuff by a larger margin than in old forms of print media. It takes patience, curiosity, time and open-mindedness to trawl the vast array of blogs (even in the subset of book blogs) looking for the good stuff. Lots of us do it, because there are real rewards for lovers of books and criticism and conversation. But it’s vanishingly unlikely that someone who gets all their links from the Big Established Sites, including their blogs, will find most of the sites we write for or read, because they all seem to read and link to exclusively other Big Established Sites. The Book Bench at the New Yorker, for instance, has its own often engaging posts, but it links around pretty much exclusively to places like the Nation, or the Guardian, or the Wall Street Journal, or PEN. These are worthy sites, of course, but anybody who’s interested in the Book Bench is probably already following them, one way or another. At most, all the Book Bench is doing is letting us know which pieces in these esteemed sources were of particular interest to them, or saving us the trouble of sorting through more than a couple of our RSS feeds for the day. The blogroll at the Book Bench has 24 links–not a bad start, but all, again, high profile already (mostly other mainstream media outlets, plus Maud Newton, Sarah Weinman, and a couple of the best-known online book sites–The Millions, The Second Pass). Again, all worthy of our attention–well, there’s one on their list I’m not sure about, actually, and why it’s there and not some of the ones I admire, I have no idea.  The Guardian has a smaller and even odder selection; at the TLS, both Peter Stothard and Mary Beard have small blogrolls too, though ones that reflect a bit more idiosyncrasy, which is nice. Still, none of these sites (or a number of other blogs associated with major papers and magazines) seem genuinely bloggish, in that there’s really no sense of the reciprocity I suggested distinguishes blogging as an especially open and generous form. The major aggregator sites (I’m thinking of Arts and Letters Daily, for instance, or Three Quarks Daily) also rarely step outside the rarified world of the ‘top’ sites. It would be refreshing, and good for the general conversation about books (which we’re all passionate about–or at least amateur book bloggers are), if these Big Established Sites would participate in the remarkable opening up of the cultural conversation that the internet has enabled.  Right now, I think  followers of the big sites are bound to feel a bit claustrophobic after a while, not to mention excluded. The exercise of looking for the good stuff among the bad would be tiring and discouraging some of the time, but acknowledging the smart, articulate blogs that are more than what Mendelsohn calls “unchecked effusions”–and doing so in a forum that already has  a little credibility in the world of old media–might help people like McGrath and Mendelsohn stop conflating form and content–or just ignoring content altogether. A good place to start would be with the handful of sites I listed.

*I admit that I was particularly disappointed at the tone of Mendelsohn’s comments (though he does acknowledge that there are some good lit blogs, and his point about chasing ‘hits’ by writing what gets attention is a fair one) because I wrote what I still consider one of my best blog posts about his remarkable book The Lost. What difference does it make that I wrote this sitting in my basement fairly late at night? (I’ll spare you the detail of whether or not I was actually in my pyjamas: the blogger’s wardrobe seems to be an issue of surprising concern to some people.) It’s either good writing and analysis or not. It’s true that I wrote it without the benefit of an editor (well, besides myself–and I’m pretty tough on myself, as I am on others), but the unmediated scrutiny of online readers is another way to test the merits of the result. In my case, I was gratified to be recognized for my work by Three Quarks Daily, where the editors named this post a finalist in their arts and literature blogging contest last year (these contests, by the way, are a great step towards the kind of sorting project I wish sites like this should do–but I don’t notice 3QD linking regularly to the winners or finalists in their regular posts).

Book Bloggers: An Appreciation

Rohan Maitzen7 Comments

Last week was Book Blogger Appreciation Week. I wasn’t involved in it at all directly. I’m not exactly a “book blogger,” I suppose–more of a blogger who often writes about books, if there is such a distinction. I haven’t really been very bloggy lately, either: I haven’t been linking around a lot, or writing posts that respond to other people’s or that intervene in debates that are circulating around the blog world. I used to do more of that kind of thing, and I kind of miss it, as you get more of a feeling of connection if you do, in fact, make connections. But it requires more immediacy than my blogging has had for a while, partly because my writing attention has been spread a little thin recently. I do like taking the time to write longer reviews, but I worry that in a blog, that kind of thing can start to seem rather self-absorbed! And I think it’s not true that, as one fellow blogger recently suggested to me (perhaps tongue-in-cheek?), blogging is all about narcissism and craving attention. Well, OK, there has to be a little of that, even though we all probably insist both to ourselves and others that we do it for the instrinsic satisfaction. We do, but if that was all we wanted, we could just use a scribbler and a pen. But the attention we crave is that of like-minded people, people who will enter into our idiosyncratic interests and share their own, people at once curious and generous enough to come into our space. And we try to get their attention by freely offering our ideas about books, which is also a pretty generous thing to do. So in the spirit of reciprocity that I think is really fundamental to blogging, I’d like to note my appreciation for some other bloggers who write about books. I appreciate in particular that in the world of these blogs, unlike in the world of mainstream book reviewing, you don’t get overwhelmed with multiple and thus inevitably repetitious reviews of the same handful of new books. This is very much the world of publishing’s long tail. It’s a world in which books published in 1798, or 1817, or 1946, or 2007 are all equally vital. It’s a world in which there’s room for personal responses, but it’s not the taste-test world of Amazon “top” reviewers: in this world, it’s expected that you’ll think about your reactions and write about them as well as you can. This is not an exhaustive list of the blogs I follow (neither is the blogroll on the right, which reminds me–I should update that), but it’s a start on acknowledging some of the sites that consistently replenish my own stock of ideas and enthusiasms about books and blogging, as well as my TBR lists.

Wuthering Expectations: ‘Amateur Reader’ has just celebrated the third anniversary of his wonderful blog. This is the site that brought us the Scottish Literature Reading Challenge (eep! I haven’t finished The Perpetual Curate! But I did read all of The Antiquary) and Sympathetic Character Week, among many other finely themed interludes. His posts are smart, entertaining, and often unexpected in the direction they go or the insight they discover. AR manages to have fun with writers from John Galt to Elizabeth Gaskell to Thomas Carlyle (and you’ve gotta love a blog that turns up 19 posts tagged ‘Thomas Carlyle’).

Tales from the Reading Room: ‘Litlove’ is another of my go-to bloggers. The tone is more introspective than at ‘Wuthering Expectations’ but the effect is just as engaging. Each post, whether personal or bookish, is patient and nuanced. You could do a lot worse than spend an hour browsing in the Reading Room archives, where you will find thoughtful encounters with writers as diverse as Orhan Pamuk and Jeanette Winterson, Steig Larsson and Henry James. At the top of the page today is a wry (and, to me, familiar) story about disagreeing over Facebook. I have litlove (and DorothyW of ‘Of Books and Bicycles,’ below) to thank for recommending Rosy Thornton, whose gently incisive academic novel Hearts and Minds I just finished.

Necromancy Never Pays: Jeanne wins the prize for most unusual blog title! (Its provenance is explained in the sidebar, if you click on over.) In addition to reviews and reflections on recent reading, lately including Franzen’s Freedom and Temple Grandin’s Animals Make Us Human,  NNP offers regular doses of poetry (often her choices are new to me) and Trivial Pursuit for Book-Lovers (discouragingly, for a supposed professional, I almost never know the answers!).

Bookphilia: Bookphilia’s Colleen is another blogger who offers not just sharp and refreshingly personal reviews of a wide range of reading material (particular interests include Japanese, French, and 19thC British literature),  but also special features, in her case including ‘Curious Creepy,’ in which she spies (for lack of a more tactful word) on what people around her are reading, and ‘I Interview Dead People’ (including Wordsworth, just for example). Her posts on George Eliot’s Romola are not only spectacularly interesting but were also well timed to show my graduate seminar last term (a) how to work well with such difficult material and (b) how to write great blog posts that invite high-level conversation.

stevereads: Is there anything Steve doesn’t read? With his inimitable energy and enviable fluency, Steve covers  everything from the weightiest historical biography to the fluffiest Harlequin Romance with equal rigor and in equal detail. Wondering which edition of Moby Dick to read? Steve’s your man. Wondering what’s new in comics? Once again… Steve keeps tabs on the ‘Penny Press‘ (those lowly competitors of OLM!), reviews Penguins on Parade, and shares the very different beauties of National Geographic and Paul Marron. He offers his original takes on classics (Green Eggs and Ham, anyone?) and illuminates corners of the book world so obscure we can all only wonder: has he, in fact, read everything?

Of Books and Bicycles: Unlike me, DorothyW has finished The Perpetual Curate, and her write-up is as clear and inviting as her book reviews usually are. She has a knack for making me feel inadequately sporty, what with the whole cycling thing (but I run! not far, not fast, but I do run!). She also writes about teaching and about a wide range of writers, from Sara Caudwell to W. G. Sebald. Like litlove, she participates in the Slaves of Golconda reading group, which has always looked like a fun thing to do. Hmmm…do you think I would want to belong to their club if they were willing to have me as a member?

Bibliographing: Nicole at bibliographing is another blogger I count on for fresh, pithy, but thoughtful perspectives in all kinds of books. She recently weighed in on a little-noticed title by some guy named Franzen, for instance, but she’s as like to write on Melville (didn’t he also write a Great American Novel?) or Roberto Bolano. (You know, as I write up these little blurbs, I start to wonder how, with all the reading going on out there, anybody actually gets any of their real work done…)

The Little Professor: Miriam Burstein’s Little Professor blog may have been the first one I started reading, and it’s still the very best place to go for detailed write-ups of completely obscure 19th-century religious novels. If that sounds dry, well, it’s a testament to Miriam’s style and savvy that while I have never finished one of these posts with any desire at all to read the book under discussion, I have never regretted reading the post itself! She exemplifies the possibilities for academics who want to bring their expertise out into the public eye. A good example is her recent post on Roger Scruton and Newman’s Idea of a University. For something completely different, but also typical of her wit and creativity, try LP in the House.

To all these bloggers, and to everyone else on my blogroll and Google subscriptions, thank you for bringing your intelligence, humor, and passion to writing about books–for free, and for everyone. It’s much appreciated!

Normal Programming will Resume…

Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

I’ve just returned from my trip to New York for the launch of the Open Letters Monthly Anthology. It was a great night for everyone on the Open Letters team, I think, and once we recover from the festivities, we’ll all enter with renewed vigor into getting the September issue ready for its eager public. I also hope to be back to a more regular blogging routine. One important part of that will be getting back into the habit of more frequent but shorter posts. Starting a new teaching term will help with that, as I will suddenly be too busy with the hectic miscellany of lectures and tutorials and assignments and wiki projects to linger over other things. On the other hand, I will also look forward to blogging more once it becomes, again, more of a rarity to have time and attention for things I choose to read.

And speaking of choosing things to read, naturally a great highlight of my trip to New York was my visit to The Strand bookstore (sadly, I didn’t really have any time to browse at Housing Works, where we held our reading, but just knowing that its secret sub-basement exists will be spiritual nourishment for me). I didn’t have enough time to explore all the layers and recesses of The Strand either, but I did find a couple of titles I’ve had on my ‘most wanted’ list for a while, plus a couple of others that were just too enticing to pass up at those prices. Here’s my haul:

Laila Lalami, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits. I have followed Laila Lalami’s blog for some time and I’m really looking forward to reading her novel, which I hadn’t been able to find around here.

Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Leaving Brooklyn. I’ve mentioned Schwartz’s Disturbances in the Field as one of the ‘books of my life’; though sometimes when I really love a particular book I don’t necessarily even want to read others by the same author, in this case I’m keen–and I already like the first sentence: “This is the story of an eye, and how it came into its own.”

Penelope Lively, Family Album. Moon Tiger is another of those books I’ve loved for many years, though in this case I have followed up with several others by Lively–who has never disappointed me so far.

Anita Brookner, Strangers. They had a lot of titles by Brookner and I had a hard time choosing one. I’ve only read Hotel du Lac, which I really enjoyed. This is a very recent one. I admit: I chose it from the many options there partly because I liked the cover.

Shirley Hazzard, The Evening of the Holiday. I also picked up The Transit of Venus recently, so I guess I’m about to go on a very small scale Hazzard binge. So far the only one of hers I’ve read is The Great Fire. I loved the writing but didn’t love the book–this is not a common response for me. In fact, I think usually I would deny that the writing can be separated from ‘the book.’

Henry James, English Hours (introduction by Leon Edel). This was out on one of those $1 tables that line the outside of the store. The first sentences are, well, Jamesian: “There is a certain evening that I count as virtually a first impression–the end of a wet, black Sunday, twenty years ago, about the first of March. There had been an earlier vision, but it had turned to gray, like faded ink, and the occasion I speak of was a fresh beginning.” Now really: could you have resisted this book, for $1, if only to find out what the heck he is going on about in such lovely, nuanced, but oblique language?

Just as an aside, on my visit to The Strand, I happened to be wearing one of my favorite (and oldest) scarves: it’s kind of purple/green/black strips, with a bit of shimmery thread running through the weave. On my way in, the greeter (I don’t know his actual job, but he seemed to be saying ‘hello’ to everyone who came in) said “Hello. I like your scarf. It’s very distracting.” Distracting from what, I had to wonder?

These aren’t the only books I brought back with me, either. I have SD to thank for yet another two, The Art Book (which I only regret not having had in hand at MoMA, where as is actually quite predictable, I bumbled around quite a bit wondering where the actual art was hidden–though I did enjoy the Matisse exhibit) and a review copy, stories by Joe Meno. I’ve promised to write up at least one here at Novel Readings, so more about that eventually.

And at the Metropolitan Museum gift shop, there on the sale table, just as if they knew I was coming, I found this beautiful book on ‘Embroiderers, Knitters, Lacemakers, and Weavers in Art.’ I did come to regret its heft as I lugged it along while walking all the way back down through Central Park, but it promises hours of browsing pleasure, and perhaps some encouragement for the little needlework project mentioned in an earlier post–which I have begun.

But before I can finish any needlework, much less any blogging or other actual intellectual task, I have to recover from several days of poor sleep (sirens, car horns, and garbage trucks not being altogether lullabies to my small-town ears) and really early rising (note to me: it’s all very well to prefer early flights because “then you have the whole day ahead of you when you get there,” but you aren’t as young as you once were and it will cost you).

Another Year of Blogging My Teaching

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

My annual series of posts on ‘This Week in My Classes‘ has come to an end, once again, with the end–not of term, since I won’t file my grades and move on until the 125 exams coming in later this week are marked–but of class meetings. So it’s time again to reflect on what it meant for me to write here about my teaching.

Not much has changed since I first wrote about the experience back in 2008. Then, I emphasized how my initial motivation, to make my work as an English professor more transparent to a skeptical public, had been replaced by a sense of the intrinsic value of being more self-conscious about one of the most important and time-consuming aspects of my job:

I found that taking this extra step each week not only helped me identify the purpose, or, if writing retrospectively, the result of each class, but it made each week more interesting by giving me an opportunity to make connections or articulate puzzles or just express pleasure and appreciation in ways that went beyond what I had time for in class. I pursued links between my teaching and my research projects, for example, as well as between my teaching and my other ‘non-professional’ interests and activities. I articulated ideas suggested by class discussions that otherwise would have sunk again below the surface of my distracted mind. Blogging my teaching enhanced my own experience of teaching. That in itself is a worthwhile goal.

I also noted the benefits of writing more, and more openly: “Though perhaps nobody will read your posts, somebody actually might! And once you realize that, you try to write better–just in case.” And I liked contributing what I hoped might be useful material to the vast reservoir of expertise and enthusiasm that is the ‘blogosphere.’ All of these things are still true, though as I cycle through my classes over the years I am finding that it seems pointless to reiterate what I’ve said before about the readings or themes. I do change up the book list almost every time I offer a course, but rarely by more than one or two books (or else I lose the hard-won benefits of having “prepped” most of the material before–which can be a huge and essential time-saver as I become more senior and take on more administrative responsibilities, and as class sizes, also, creep up, creating more paperwork and demand for my attention from students). Still, this year with the Mystery class in particular it felt a bit repetitive writing up the weekly reports. Yet I still find that when I sit down and make myself give it some thought,  I pretty much always get caught up in writing about something that I find interesting. Indeed, my posts seemed to just keep getting longer!

The biggest teaching challenge for me this year was this term’s Brit Lit survey. I wrote often about the rapid pace of it and the disorienting experience of teaching a great deal of material well outside my comfort zone. Intellectually, though it was exhausting, it was also exhilirating, not least because of the treat of returning to writers I hadn’t paid much attention to since my own undergraduate survey class–though it was also interesting to note how the list of potential inclusions had expanded since those long-ago days (I’m quite sure, for instance, that we didn’t read any Elizabeth Barrett Browning back then, not even “How do I love thee?”). Although the day to day prep was intense for this course (the pay-off will be in the fall, when I get to do it all again), the hardest work I put in was before it started, when I researched and then committed to an assignment sequence involving having the tutorial groups build their own Study Guides using PBWiki. I’m in the middle of evaluating the finished projects now, and I am certainly glad I thought so hard about how to explain the assignment and the evaluation criteria. I was full of zeal and enthusiasm about the wikis when the course began, then I began to feel frustrated when I saw what my current review is confirming: most of the students did just fine on their assigned topic but very few entered with any spirit or creativity into the collaborative aspects of wiki-building. On the other hand, as I read through the final versions of all the pages, I’m satisfied that on the whole they put together a valuable resource–something I expect they are realizing now too, as they turn to them to study for their final exam. Some of them put in a lot of effort, too, and some of them, I think, had a little fun. They all learned something about using computers actively, rather than passively consuming content. These seem like good results to me. I don’t know what they thought about having to do this. I’m sure their course evaluations will tell me!

The other experiment I tried was having my graduate students maintain a course blog. Once they warmed up and got over their self-consciousness, they did a great job: they posted question sets and then followed up with comments, and every week there was a lot of lively online discussion that I thought made our classroom time more focused and energetic. I’m hoping they will post some retrospective thoughts about the pros and cons of incorporating that kind of writing into the seminar. I didn’t think it was that different from posting questions and responses to a discussion board, but several of them hadn’t done that for classes before either, and those that had seemed to find this form more exposed, even though the blog was (and so far, remains) password protected.

Writing this post, I realize that though blogging about my teaching has been interesting but not that revelatory this year, blogging has clearly affected my teaching, by giving me experience in new forms of writing and thinking that I think are worth using in pedagogical contexts and by exposing me to a community of innovative scholars like those at the very successful Profhacker site whose posts on using wikis in the classroom gave me courage (and know-how) to be a little bit innovative myself.

New at Open Letters Monthly

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It occurs to me that the title of this post works in two directions. My original intention was to call attention to the April issue of Open Letters Monthly, which went live this morning and looks, as their new issues always do, full of readerly goodies: John G. Rodwan writes on “Carson McCullers and Her Crowd,” Irma Heldman adds to her series “It’s a Mystery” with a write-up of Erin Hart’s False Mermaid, Ingrid Norton offers a compelling reading of George Eliot’s little-known Gothic novella “The Lifted Veil,” Krista Ingebretson explores some of the complexities of translation as a practice and a genre by way of Edith Grossman’s Why Translation Matters and a recent volume of poetry from the Center for the Art of Translation…and these are only the ones I’ve had a longer look at so far from the typically tempting menu. Also, as always, the cover photograph is stunning. If you haven’t already, click over and have a look around.

But I realized that for those who come by to read Open Letters anyway, Novel Readings itself may also be new. We set moving day for the blog a bit early to get the transition taken care of before the work of preparing the new issue became too intense, so I’ve been part of the OLM blog “family” for a little while now. If you haven’t happened over here before, though, you can look here for my explanation of who I am and what kind of a blog this is.

Happy to Be Here!

Rohan Maitzen7 Comments

Though I’ve been blogging for over three years now, today’s post is my first as a member of the Open Letters family. So I’d like to use it, first, to thank my hosts for the invitation to join them here–they’re a great bunch of readers and writers, and I’m happy to become a regular part of the excellent fare they offer at Open Letters.

My plan is to go on doing pretty much what I’ve been doing; those of you who have kept up with Novel Readings so far, then, should feel at home here despite the new address. For new readers, here’s a quick introduction to me and to Novel Readings. From the beginning, my blog has reflected my identity as both an academic (I’m an English professr) and an avid reader.These are not always roles that go comfortably together. In fact, one of the main reasons I began blogging was to experiment with a style of criticism that might reconcile my two selves. Academic criticism can feel claustrophobic, because of its intense specialization and its dissociation from the concerns and experiences of ‘common’ readers (though there are some good reasons for this, and some good results from it); at the same time, clubby book chat (pleasurable, even valuable, though it is for us personally) can be distressingly solipsistic and indifferent to both the details of the words on the page and important literary, historical, and political contexts. I thought it would be a good thing to participate in critical conversations that crossed those boundaries: that respected both expertise and love, that relished insight as well as different points of view. Blogging makes these conversations possible to an unprecedented extent–and the comment box makes sure they are conversations, not just pronouncements.

I didn’t realize all of this about blogging at first, mind you. I had to feel my way, through an unfamiliar medium, out into the wider world. This was not a movement that came easily: although in some ways the academy  is one of the most intellectually rigorous environments imaginable, it’s also very insular. Even in our most public activity, teaching, we’re alone in the classroom with our students, rarely exposed to the judgmental eye of our peers, much less the general public. We debate each other under very particular conditions: Robert’s Rules of Order, for instance, for internal governance (including curriculum debates), or the well-established etiquette of seminar rooms and conference panels. The often ruthless process of peer review is carried on anonymously–and without the opportunity to reply to your judges. Blogging is different! You put yourself out there–your ideas not always fully formed, your readings often still provisional, your audience diverse, unpredictable, and armed with the “Leave a Comment” option. (At least in blogging, I always have the option to reply!)  Writing up reviews of my recent reading (often of books far outside my official “field,” which is Victorian literature) has therefore been both nerve-wracking and exhilirating. Happily, in my experience, most blog readers are there for the same reason I am: they like developing ideas about books and reading. It’s not a competitive sport! And while I enjoy the exchange of views that sometimes follows a review, one of the main benefits is the intrinsic value of having thought hard about a book before putting it back on the shelf.

Because I am both a reader and an academic, I do post about both kinds of things. As I’ve puttered along, in fact, one idea that grew on me was that another good use of this form could be to make my academic work more transparent. One of my longest-running series, with the unimaginative label “This Week in My Classes,” was inspired by disturbing hostilities I encountered to the very idea of English professors. It has never been an overtly polemical series, though: it’s just a record of my week’s work with my students, with associated musings. I’ve come to value the exercise a lot, for reasons I explain in this post. I’ve also written a number of posts about general academic issues, and some about academic literary criticism–what it is, what it could be, why it sometimes irks or bores me, what’s at stake in it. I’ve done a series of posts looking specifically at books about books aimed at non-academic audiences, too, because I wanted to get a clearer sense of how else, or why else, people read. If you’re interested, that material is  all in the archives, or can be retrieved by searching the list of categories, if you’re interested. I’m sure I’ll be posting more on those topics in the future, too.

And so, on to that future! I look forward to writing more about the things I read and the work I do, with the occasional digression into whatever else catches my interest or makes me want to post about it. I will probably try a few new things here, inspired by the general atmosphere of change that comes with the new site (I’ve been thinking, for instance, about an occasional series on old favorites, or what I think of as “comfort reading”–or what about an “ask the English professor” thread once or twice? if I don’t know the answer, I probably know someone who does!). I thought I might also furnish my new home here with some familiar pieces by re-posting a few things from deep in the archives–maybe just to air them out, or perhaps with some updates, to give them a fresh new look. We’ll see. I hope you’ll stop by and read, and I especially hope you’ll contribute to the conversation.

3 Quarks Daily Arts & Lit Blogging Prize

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

If you’d like to show your appreciation for good blog writing about literature and the arts, click on over to 3 Quarks Daily and take a look at their nominees for the 2010 3QD Prize in Arts and Literature. The editors invited nominations of blog posts of no more than 4000 words, written since February 21, 2009. I’ve begun browsing through the entries and it seems like a lively and predictably eclectic selection. Since they encouraged self-nominations, I threw one of my own posts into the ring, my review of Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost. I chose it because the book absolutely topped my list of notable reads last year, because writing about it as well as I could was important to me, and because I was reasonably satisfied that I had said what I wanted to about it. Also, one of my most trusted readers wrote me to say that she thought it was the best thing I’d ever written on my blog. I have no idea how it holds up to whatever the standard will be for winning the competition, though I think it’s a safe bet, given my obscurity, that it won’t win in the public voting–if you think it’s any good, though, do come by and click on the button for me. Or, if in general you think it’s a good thing that people write thoughtfully about literature and the arts for love, for free, and for everyone to read, vote for whichever post you think exemplifies the best of public criticism.

March 10: I’m very proud to say that my post has been selected as one of the finalists to be judged by Robert Pinsky. Thanks to any of you who went and voted for me or were otherwise encouraging, and thanks also to the editors of 3 Quarks Daily for making me one of their ‘wild card’ picks.

Novel Readings Discovered by the Spammers

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

For the first time since I started this blog three years ago, I’ve been spammed to such an extent that I’ve turned on comment moderation. I’ve always felt that this step slows down discussion–which is hard enough to generate as it is–but it’s certainly preferable to having the comments sections littered with links to pornographic sites or essay mills. So, my apologies to the real readers and writers out there for what I hope will be short delays between when you post your thoughtful remarks and when they appear here.

Novel Readings 2009

Rohan Maitzen1 Comment

It’s time for my annual review of the highs and lows of my reading year.

Books I’m most glad I read, either for the intrinsic richness of the aesthetic, affective, or intellectual experience they offered, for the conversations they generated, or for the ideas and connections they offered for my teaching and research:

1. Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost. This book made by far the strongest impression on me of any I read this year. Devastating though it is, it also manages to be surprising, suspenseful, and sometimes even comical. Mendelsohn manages to be self-reflexive about his research and writing, about his own assumptions and limitations, without ever compromising his dedication to reaching after the truth of the story he is telling or his respect for the suffering of those whose story it really is. It’s a remarkable accomplishment.

2. Naguib Mahfouz, Palace Walk. I ended up enjoying this novel as much for the way it implicitly chastised me for my own assumptions (about fiction, about families) as for the story it told. I’m happy to say that Santa (OK, my mom) sent me Sugar Street and Palace of Desire for Christmas, so I’ll be reading–and, I expect, writing about–Mahfouz again in 2010.

3. Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns. Although (as I say also in my original review) I don’t think this is actually a great novel by literary standards, and in retrospect I feel my own emotional reaction to it was the result of some heavy-handed narrative and ideological manipulation (pain! suffering! injustice! misogyny!), it’s impossible to ignore the very real pain, suffering, injustice, and misogyny of the world it fictionalizes.

4. Mahbod Seraji, Rooftops of Tehran. Unlike A Thousand Splendid Suns, Rooftops of Tehran is not a sensational or particularly populist treatment of its material. It reaches across cultural differences to tell a story of yearning and love, emphasizing feelings that are universal, if differently embodied or characterized based on circumstances. At times a bit heavy-handedly pedagogical, it still avoids the trap of what I am now thinking about as ‘moral tourism’: it isn’t an Iran packaged for mass consumption and political ends, but something more inward-looking and sincere.

5. Charlotte Bronte, Villette. This year’s choice for our summer reading project at The Valve, Bronte’s perverse exploration of thwarted desire, religious conflict, surveillance, and narrative unreliability offers all kinds of fun and surprises, especially for those who think the Victorians were all naive realists. (D’oh! But there really are people who think that. In my experience, many of them are specialists in late 20th-century fiction whose favourite straw man looks a lot like Trollope, but doesn’t have his metafictional savvy.)

6. Ian Colford, Evidence. Understated, even insidious, these stories leave their mark on your consciousness, like inky thumbprints.

7. Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway. It seems somehow significant that I quoted from this novel instead of writing much about it. It’s not that there aren’t ideas in it, or that its form and technique isn’t inviting to criticism, but for me this was a reading experience that was very much about easing up my critical grip (which seemed to be deforming my reading) and savouring the tactile quality of the language. My feelings about this book were also much affected by my thoughts about a special student, Samantha Li; I only wish I had read it before it was too late to talk to her about it.

8. William Boyd, Any Human Heart. Dear students: The main character in this book is not at all “relatable.” Guess what–that doesn’t matter! You don’t have to like him (though by the end I was fond of him after all, as you are of someone you’ve known their whole life). You just have to go along, feeling the pulses of his idiosyncratic life and personality. He has no special insight, into himself or any larger contexts; he isn’t even especially charismatic. But, as George Eliot points out in Adam Bede, most of the people around us are nothing special–we need to adapt our aesthetic to that reality, and it turns out to be a surprisingly moving experience.

9. Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall. Wolf Hall surprised me by not resembling any other historical fiction I’ve read. For one thing, there is almost no exposition. Mantel’s trick of referring to Cromwell throughout as “he,” though it does create the occasional awkwardness, also creates an oddly intimate atmosphere: we are with him, in close proximity, as if standing by his shoulder, but there’s a little separation remaining. First-person narration would have overcome it, but then I think the novel would have felt more artificial, and the emotions would have had to run higher–a mistake in a novel remarkable for its restraint (yes, even at 650 pages, it feels tightly controlled). And the language: it is crafted with the precision of Ian McEwan’s prose, but with a higher sheen of poetic possibility. Here’s a little bit that describes and exemplifies the novel’s characteristically taut balance of eloquence and repression:

There’s a feeling of power in reserve, a power that drives right through the bone, like the shiver you sense in the shaft of an axe when you take it into your hand. You can strike, or you can not strike, and if you choose to hold back the blow, you can still feel inside you the resonance of the omitted thing.

The central conflict is not Henry VIII against God, or fate, or his wives, for denying him a son, or Anne against Katherine, or any of the other stock melodramas of Tudor fiction (and television), but Cromwell, the self-made man, the accountant, the bureaucrat, the statesman, the pragmatist, the modern man, against extremism, privilege, waste, indulgence–and especially against Thomas More, who delights in torturing heretics and seeks a pointless (to him, a martyr’s) death.

10. Nadeem Aslam, The Wasted Vigil. Is it wrong to make something so beautiful out of material so terrible? Is terrorism really analogous to vandalism? Both obliterate the beauty (realized or potential) and the creativity of humanity.

This year I’ll skip over the list of low points. There weren’t many, happily–most of the other books I read were in the OK – to – mediocre range, which only irks me when they win awards.

In last year’s post I noted the expansion of my blogging horizons that came with the invitation to write for The Valve. This year I have been pleased to contribute to Open Letters: I’m glad they made room for my piece on Trollope among their many astute and engaging essays and reviews, and I’ve got a little thing on Felix Holt appearing in their January 2010 issue, so stay tuned for that.

Looking ahead, I’m anticipating an unusually busy term coming up, with three classes including one all-new one and some new kinds of assignments. Still, I hope to have time to keep up my usual series on teaching, and also to fit in some reading for myself. Looking over my year-end posts for 2007 and 2008, it is notable how such ‘pleasure’ reading feeds into my research and teaching (the leading example being Ahdaf Soueif’s In the Eye of the Sun, which went from being just another book I’d read to the lynchpin of a reconceptualized research program). Perhaps something I read in 2010 will end up turning me in another new direction, or adding in some other unanticipated way to my life. But in any case here are some of the books I’m most looking forwarding to reading or re-reading:

  1. Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger. It’s great to feel so confident that a book will be both extremely smart and extremely entertaining.
  2. Hilary Mantel, A Place of Great Safety. Speaking of confidence, Wolf Hall gave me confidence in Mantel as both a stylist and a historical novelist.
  3. Naguib Mahfouz, Sugar Street and The Palace of Desire.
  4. Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf.
  5. Marilynne Robinson, Gilead.
  6. War and Peace. Somehow, it didn’t get read in 2009, but I’m sure it will be there for me when I’m ready for it.
  7. Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy. I’m going to keep putting this on my TBR list until I actually read it.
  8. Dickens, Our Mutual Friend. I haven’t read this since my undergraduate Victorian fiction class in 1989. Once every twenty years seems like a minimum for what I remember as one of the best of Dickens.
  9. George Eliot, Romola. I’ve assigned this for my graduate seminar on George Eliot this term. It was a tough call between it and Felix Holt, but Romola has been on the back burner the longest. When it is good, it is very, very, very good. When it is bad, characters say things like ‘You are as welcome as the cheese to the macaroni.’
  10. Audrey Niffenegger, Her Fearful Symmetry. All appearances (and movie adaptations) to the contrary, The Time Traveller’s Wife is a gritty, suspenseful, intellectual romance. Sure, you have to accept a wacky premise, but for me at least, it was worked through with surprising toughness. So I’m game to see how Niffenegger follows it up.
  11. David Mitchell, Black Swan Green. Because you told me to!