Books of 2023

Huh. 12 years now. That’s a lot of wordpress redesigns. I feel like I’m also starting to develop a reading list for picture books that I genuinely enjoy reading (or at least did  the first 20 times that I read them) so perhaps I should write one of those up separately. I will not read green eggs and ham, I’m tired of it Sam-I-Am. Hashem only knows what my read count would look like if we covered every reread of Horton Hears a Who and Good Night Moon we experienced this year. Speaking of read count…

I observed last year that I was going to officially set my reading goal at 150 so that it would feel like “a push but not a struggle”. That was cute. I think it’s safe to say I read a lot this year. I also think this year was “a lot” so, you know, no actual judgment of myself on how much time I spent in books as a retreat.

And, I mean, this is my retreat. Reading is very specifically an escape and the place that I go when things become too much. It’s also the thing I do when I’m feeling calm and want to enjoy myself. Basically it’s like tea; the situation always calls for it. But specifically the idea that reading is escaping is one that I have to say a little more about. By which I mean I can shoehorn Tolkien into this conversation—as we all know I love to do—where he talks about disdaining literature that offers escape as “confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner and the Flight of the Deserter.”* I do read a fair amount of what might be called escapist literature and I also know that my good friend JRRT would not consider that weird month with a 24 hour long audiobook discussing the nature of freedom and the organization of early human societies to be Escape in the sense that fairy stories offer it, with their glimpse through silver glass of the far off green country. And yet. Books offer a chance to be elsewhere, whether in someone else’s land or someone else’s head, and invite us to try on someone else’s way of seeing the world. And then to come back and see this world anew and brighter. “[B]y the making of Pegasus, horses were ennobled.” In the thoughts of others, we find the way back to ourselves.

Two years ago I wrote about how I use books to make myself. The year after I wrote about how I use books to learn about the world. This year is about how books build the bridge between the two. (Tolkien would want to compare it to the Bifrost.) Who knows what I’ll have to say next year.

And I got to do that 170 times this year. Well, 162 times. Anything that got fewer than 3 stars doesn’t precisely count as escape, although one does appreciate the chance to get annoyed at something that does not really matter. Or, at least, *I* do. There was one 1 star book that finishing it actually counted as escape.

On that note, let’s talk about the ratings.

Basically 133 of the books I read were things I would consider pretty good, ranging from “solid but I had complaints” to “that was an enjoyable experience.” Given the option to rate something 3.5 instead of 3, I am pretty likely to take it. (Which is why I really do appreciate the nuance of Storygraph.) It’s the things that rise above that are most interesting, but we’ll get to those later, I promise.

To translate that into numbers, I read 77 print books, 61 audiobooks, and 32 ebooks

For comparisons sake, I read 20 more audiobooks this year than last year which accounts for the overall shift in numbers. (I also read approximately 10 fewer ebooks and 10 more print books, but that about evened out in the wash. I find that shift more interesting than the audiobook increase, which just comes from having my earbuds in more often.) Incidentally, I made the same remark last year about the percentage of audiobooks that I read growing at the expense of ebooks and it continues to be interesting and I continue not to know what to do with that information.

The other fascinating shift is that my nonfiction reading continues to grow. 25% of the books I read this year were nonfiction, which is a significant jump up from last year, which was 17% (as was 2021) and 2020, which was 6%.

But the really interesting thing, digging a little deeper into those numbers, is that I read 127 fiction books in 2020, 124 in 2021, 127 again in 2022, and 125 this year. So another way to look at my reading increase is that I keep adding more nonfiction to my reading list while my fiction consumption stays stable. So is it that I’m reading more audiobooks and so reading more? Or perhaps its the fact that I keep adding in nonfiction that makes a difference.

So preliminary research into this year suggests that those are one and the same. I am specifically listening to more nonfiction. 58% of my nonfiction consumption was through audio. If I just look at fiction, it’s about 25% audio, 25% digital, and 50% print, rather like last year. I don’t have very good data for earlier than that, but I could probably go and check. Maybe not now.

Anecdotally, I’m definitely seeking out more nonfiction that is a little outside of my normal interests and usually reading it via audiobook. I’m not sure I learn better via listening or simply that I am more likely to try something new if it is in audio form. It is also worth noting that I have yet to figure out how to read with my eyes while knitting so an audiobook is an opportunity to learn and craft at the same time. I am more likely to choose to listen to an audiobook rather than read the ebook precisely because I can do more things while listening. I still reserve print for things I really want and until someone comes up with an actually compelling argument for ereaders on Shabbat, I don’t see that changing.

The downside is that now I am very conscious of these choices and so any future data will be influenced by these preliminary findings, at least for the next week until I forget them.

Now for some fun data!

Once again, most of my reading comes from books published in the 2020s, although the 20th century continues its comback even if not at the same rate as last year. The 19th hasn’t reappeared this year either; possibly because nothing new has come out of it?

As a reminder, I often tag books as more than one genre so this will not add up to 170. This is just a sense of the topics that I covered this year. (With good old uncategorizable making its usual reappearance. It usually means speculative fiction, just weirder than usual.) I also love that Judaism, Sacred, and Theology are three distinct categories that may or may not overlap.

As a reminder, if you want to see this data broken out more or see which books fell into which categories for me, you can find nearly all of it visible on Storygraph, which is set so that you should all be able to see it.

And just a quick check-in on my ongoing project to keep track of authorial gender and to make sure that at least 1/3 of the books that I read every year are by Authors of Color. (Divergent readers for diverse reading.)

Every year I reevaluate whether this is, in fact, a useful metric and every year I fail to come up with a better way to make sure that my reading list stays diverse. While I always appreciate people on social media providing lists of BIPOC authors they enjoy reading, many of the same names keep coming up and I know whether I enjoy their work or not. It still feels like white authors have a certain amount of discoverability where I just trip over new people writing things that interest me, but I have to go out of my way to find new BIPOC authors. Also, white authors tend to have a massive back catalog for me to fall down and I can end up reading five or six books by a single author and many BIPOC authors are earlier in their careers and don’t have that kind of back catalog.

I started this practice in 2018 after 2017 was “I’m going to try to read more books by authors of color” and I got to about 1/4. Which, to be clear, was a big improvement. But my reading list has been far more diverse and interesting and better if I make it an actual rule. At the end of the day, clear metrics that I can easily gauge are the single best way to keep me accountable to myself. There’s a lesson there somewhere.

With all that out of the way, let’s get to the recommendations!

In my ongoing desire to eschew ranking my top ten for any number of reasons (or even sticking to ten), we are continuing last year’s approach of making up awards ranging from the plausible to the extremely niche and giving them to the books for which they were invented. The number of books remains somewhere in between 10-14, depending on how many additional books I successfully sneak in.

Best fairy tale retelling (and the competition was stiff this year, the runners-up are also amazing):

White Cat, Black Dog by Kelly Link. This series of short stories was absurdly good on every level and what Link does by modernizing the setting and allowing the plot to change in order to fit without ever removing the inherent magic of the fairy tale is stunning. Also she retold both East of the Sun, West of the Moon and Tam Lin and I am a sucker for both of those stories.

Best use of second person in a narrative:

The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez. The thing about second person narratives is that they generally are just annoying until someone comes along and actually does something wonderful with the question “why are you being told your story” and Jimenez absolutely does. Because it’s simultaneously a story about displacement and the place of narrative and our relationship to old stories and also a really good story about gods and monsters and the difference between escape and repentance.  I said I wasn’t ranking, but this may be my favorite book this year.

Best depiction of a religiously observant protagonist in an epic fantasy:

The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty. This is a very fun pirate adventure that does a really good job of imagining mythological creatures into the world and Chakraborty has always had a very good handle on writing fantasy and has gotten even better in this new series. The thing that makes this book extraordinary rather than just good fantasy is that she writes Amina as an observant Muslim woman who believes and is bound by her faith and whose missteps are normal (she drinks alcohol in a way that reminds me of eating “hot dairy out”), but who is also doing all the other things people do. Religious characters so rarely get to be anything other than clergy or fanatics and it’s so nice to see this done right.

The Beyond the Golem Award for wonderful Jewish fantasy:

When the Angels Left the Old Country by Sacha Lamb. Speaking of wonderful religious characters, this book was glorious in how it both dove into Jewish myths and held onto the lived experience of being Jewish throughout.The angel and demon chavruta at the heart of the story was beautiful and perfect and there was a single throwaway joke about a golem and nothing else and, while I love a good Frankensteinian hunk of clay, nothing makes me happier than seeing the richness of Jewish folklore explored beyond that. (This award was nearly entitled “To boldly go-lem” but I thought that was too confusing.)

The “I was bawling, you should read it!” award:

A Living Remedy by Nicole Chung. Sometimes I read memoirs because seeing the ways that other people make sense of their life stories and turn their pain into art gives me hope for the world. Sometimes I read memoirs because the author used to write for and edit The Toast. I came for the latter and stayed for the former. 
Honorable memoir mention is The White Mosque by Sofia Samatar, which is weirder but also wonderful and a glorious story about faith and the places people have been and worshipped and how race complicates the relationship between co-religionists and also the history of Mennonites in Uzbekistan is fascinating.

Book that most compellingly shook my brain out and put it back in aired out and in better order:

Enchantment & Wintering, both by Katherine May. Read Wintering first. I think Enchantment works better as a follow-up, but I really appreciated them both and I keep turning the idea of hierophany that May introduces in Enchantment over in my head. (Hierophany – when we make something the object of our worshipful attention, we transform it into an object of the sacred. But it’s about seeing the wonder that is there not about projecting the divine onto it.) Also I learned the first chapter of tractate Chagigah this past semester so the idea of that which is sanctified and that which is made sacred is kicking around my brain. 

Best use of the word Umwelt:

An Immense World by Ed Yong. I loved this book. It’s not easy to write what is basically a list of animal facts as a compelling story but wow does Yong manage. If you’ve ever stared in wonder at a fish in an aquarium staring back at you or get annoyed when people talk about five senses, this is a great choice of a book. Also for people who enjoy nature documentaries.
Runner up: Naming Nature: The Clash Between Instinct and Science by Carol Kaesuk Yoon. I love a good history of science book and Yoon does an awesome job here, but this book was specifically useful in concretizing an idea about how I understand halakha and I don’t think I’ll ever be able to go back.

Most Obscure Work by a Well Known Author:

Worlds of Exile and Illusion by Ursula K. Le Guin. This collection of three of Le Guin’s earlier novels really capture the way that she has always been doing interesting things especially when it comes to thinking about how people live in their worlds and how cultures do cultural things. Not to mention how economic and technological divides sow chaos. These books are a little less intricate than her later works and part of their appeal was precisely that she was still asking so much of even straightforward plots. 

Book that most compellingly shook my brain out and put it back in the wrong way round:

When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut. I don’t even know what to do with this book, how to talk about it or even how to recommend it. It is weird and playing with history and fiction in interesting ways even as it is setting out to think about what it’s like to live in a world that is not unknown, but unknowable. How do we live with that? How do we understand the relationship between discovery and destruction? What do you do with a book that treats history itself as unknowable even as it invents stories about it? Should I take up gardening?

Book that is as old as I am that I never read and that is, in fact, as good as everyone says:

The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle. This is a masterpiece, as is the movie that it engendered (in all its 80s animated glory), and I’m kind of glad I didn’t read it as a child because then I could read it for the first time as an adult and just sit with it. It’s a story with strangeness and depth and while I appreciate modern literature a lot, I also sometimes miss the willingness of authors in the 80s and 90s to point blank refuse to explain things because that’s not how fairy stories work. This book is not about the following things, but it is absolutely recovery, escape, and consolation.

Maybe next year I’ll only read 20 books that way I don’t feel bad leaving off so many wonderful books. If you want more recommendations, anything that got 5 stars or 4.5 stars come highly recommended, although I mentioned many of them already.**

See you next year!

——-

*All citations are from Tolkien’s essay “on Fairy Stories”. Next year I’ll aim for the monsters and the critics?

**With the caveat that, realistically, Verlyn Flieger’s book on language and logos in the Silmarillion is 5 stars for a very particular reader (it’s me. hi.) but maybe not if you’re not into that thing. So, you know, common sense and all that.

Podcasts and Cast Ons

In the interest of full disclosure, I should probably let you know that I should be doing something else right now.

Writing the prospectus for my dissertation comes to mind.

It’s amazing how I can have such a clear idea of what I’m doing and why and then I sit down to type out all my thoughts and it all comes out in this jumble of academicese and passive voice. The past two days have been all about turning lines like this: “This project opens up the possibility of the exploration of” into “I will explore” and even then I find myself relying too much on ex words. I’m making a list and every time I get through a paragraph without using explore, explain, examine or extrapolate, I explode with joy and the desire to exsanguinate someone is extinguished.

So this post is me actively taking a break from dissertation work to talk about something else. Like crafts.

I learned how to knit over winter break. It was very exciting. First, I made a misshapen square (the technical term for which is a trapezoid, I suppose). Then I made a longer one, which moved into misshapen rectangle territory (which is still a trapezoid, so perhaps I should just stick with that term). Then I made a coffee cup cozy,. I used to think that coffee cup cozies were the most useless things in the universe, bar none. Of course, when you need to knit something fairly simple that does not need to fit a human being and should be completed within a reasonable amount of time even when you are a rank beginner, the purpose of the coffee cup cozy becomes clear.

I made two.

The second ended up larger than anticipated and is actually a small tea cozy that lives on the small tea pot (it holds two medium or one very large mug’s worth of tea) that lives, in turn, in my office. It looks very…handmade, which I suppose fits in well with the larger ethos of our lab.

After that accomplishment, I decided I wanted to do something bigger. Something I could wear. Not something as ambitious as a hat yet, because those tended to have designs and cables and things more complicated than I could handle. So I made a cowl.

In retrospect, I shouldn’t have tried knitting in the round until I had made a few more things not in the round, because it was significantly more difficult to keep an even tension (which I can’t do anyway). But the thing has achieved thinginess–it has become the object I was intending to make–and I now have a cowl to keep my face warm when the temperature drops to the low 50s at night.

You all hate me right now, don’t you?

And now, because I don’t want to leave you with the impression that I only produce misshapen round objects that keep things warm, here was my other fiber project. This one was crocheted and I’ve been crocheting on and off since I was 15 and fairly consistently for the past few years. So I’m mostly past the ‘it’s a very nice blob, what is it supposed to be?’ stage.

I would have posted this one earlier because I am quite proud of it except I wanted it to be a surprise for its recipient. Well, for its recipient’s mother. Its recipient is 6 months old and does not read my blog. Actually, the “my blog” in that statement is probably irrelevant. In any case, that was a thing that I made.

For reference, this was the picture I sent to a certain spouse of mine three quarters of the way through the process with the caption “Bunny Antoinette”

Apparently, the history department has just taught the French revolution that week. Every so often, my timing achieves impeccable.

This sudden increase in crafting has had a few other effects. Knitting is just one of those things that can’t be done with a book in hand and, honestly, part of why I try to spend some time doing this stuff is because it’s time that can’t be spent working, but is still time spent making things. I feel productive because I am, after all, producing a thing. But I also get bored easily and I need something to do while I knit or crochet.

The obvious answer is television. Except…not. It’s not that there aren’t really good shows on and it’s not that I’m not consistently impressed with the quality of acting and storytelling on tv these days. It’s just that I sit down to watch tv and think of something else I want to do. I find myself reorganizing my closet by color (which is not as absurd as it sounds; it helps me get dressed faster in the morning) or roasting squash for later in the week. I have television issues. I’ve been in the middle of the same season of Game of Thrones for nearly a year even though I really enjoy the show (thank you, Peter Dinklage!) , but I just can’t convince myself to watch the rest.

However, this is not a post about the weirdness of my psyche. The obvious solution to my problem is audiobooks and podcasts. I’ve been getting particularly into the latter recently because there is something nice about listening to entertaining people talk about things in the comfort of your own home. I don’t really want complex narratives or impressive world building. I just want people to amuse me for an hour or so at a time. It’s not so much to ask and podcasts readily deliver.

Also, unlike real people, you can pause them when the thing on the stove it about to boil over because you’re trying to knit and cook at the same time.

The moral of this story is “don’t knit and cook at the same time”.

So, dear readers, any of you podcast people? Any recommendations for me? Feel free to comment or pick some other part of this post to respond to.

Best of Books, the 2013 Edition

So graduate school has had a measurable effect on my reading. The year I started at UCSB, I read 119. The year after I read 99. This year, I’ve read 82. At this rate, I won’t be reading anything at all by the time I get my Ph.D. Which, as I understand it, is traditional.

This year was a bit odd, though, because I couldn’t figure out a good way to count books that I read for my exam and, worst for me, Goodreads only keeps track of books that one has read, not books that one has reread. So I chose to reread fewer books this year because Goodreads doesn’t add that to book count. So the number of pages that I’ve actually slogged through this year is significantly higher once you take into account that I reread Middlemarch, Bleak House and Vanity Fair, each of which are charmingly huge doorstoppers although the first two in particular are some of my favorites.

So, without further ado, this year’s reading graph:

 

For those curious, last year’s graph can be found here: Textual Retrospective, 2012.

Notes – I realize that there is a section for fantasy, science fiction AND speculative fiction. These are all different things, I promise. Fantasy and SF are exactly what they say, speculative fiction refers to fiction where something in the premise of the text is outside of the realm of realism, but is not well-enough defined to fit into either genre is particular.

As with last year, I will also be listing my standout favorites from each genre with more than three books. And then any other really great books. You should, by the way, assume that any fictional book that makes it onto this list will have fully-realized and complex characters as well as an excellent depiction of the setting.

1. Best Classic reread – Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. Given that fully half of this section is Faulkner, this came as no surprise.
2. Best Speculative Fiction – Life After Life by Kate Atkinson. Brilliant premise (even though all the reviews saying “OMG, this is so clever!” left me feeling a bit like it was overhyped) and the way that she melded a sweeping historical novel with a realist British novel and then put a speculative turn to both of them was an impressive feat. This isn’t really a mystery, at least in Atkinson’s traditional sense, but it uses the same tools that her mysteries do in that it relies on character’s reactions to events to make things memorable and expects the reader to use what they know about the characters to piece together what is happening. And Atkinson’s characters are always so great that you want to delve deeper and figure out what makes them tick.
3. Best Science Fiction – The Best of All Possible Worlds by Karen Lord. She reminds me of Lois McMaster Bujold in that her science fiction focuses on what happens to people in radically new situations usually brought about by science. This book focuses on questions of culture shock and displacement, using an intricately conceived future world as the background for playing out what it means to be a person.  (Runner up is Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie for, actually, the exact same reasons.)
4. Best Fantasy – Alif the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson, which narrowly beat Neil Gaiman’s Ocean at the End of the Lane. So many good books on this list, but Wilson’s stood out to me perhaps because I’ve seen other authors attempt this kind of world (Ian McDonald in Dervish House, Saladin Ahmed in Throne of the Crescent Moon), and while those were good, Wilson’s is the first that seems transcendent. This book manages to be everything: cleverly post-modern, heavily mythical, balancing denouments that rely on a computer whiz with others that pay homage to Arabic traditions. And she handles the religious aspects of working within an Islamic society incredibly deftly, which allows her religious characters to achieve a level of complexity that people who care about religion rarely get to reach in fantasy. The thing that struck me the most about this book, especially given that it’s a first novel, is that Wilson never seemed to me to falter.
5. Best Nonfiction – Scripting, Reading, Motions by Manuel Portela wins for most useful content and presentation, How to Do Things With Books in Victorian England wins for best written and most fascinating tidbits. I can’t really recommend anything on this list, although if you like reading stuff from University presses and care about New Media, Psychology of Reading or the Bookishness of Books, feel free to ask for my thoughts.
6. Best Young Adult Fantasy – The Girl of Fire and Thorn by Rae Carson. It probably beat out the other two contenders because I got to finish the whole trilogy this year and that’s informing my choice. Still, it was awesome! It revolves around a female character whose growth is incredibly realistic and who isn’t forced into traditional strong-like-men roles. Also, Carson takes religions in fantasy seriously, not as excuses for gods to intervene or to invent swears, but as real practices that inform people’s lives and actually have schisms, laws and rituals constructed around them.
7. Best Not-Appearing-in-Other-Lists – Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Adichie’s book is brilliant on several levels, but what worked best for me was how it, like Atkinson’s balanced the macro and micro levels of events. On the one hand, this was a book about what it means to be African in the US rather than African American. It was about identity and what it means to suddenly be different and become part of someone else’s history. At the same time, it’s the story of two people reflecting backwards and forwards on the choices that defined her life and the compromises she made or did not want to make. But they’re not really two stories, in the same way that no one is separate from their cultural identity, precisely because Adichie understands how the two aspects of the same story are meant to be woven together.

So that’s it for this year. For more information, such as the full list and my occasionally useful ratings and reviews, feel free to meander over to my Goodreads Page.

And, of course, if you have any comments on these books OR any recommendations for me, please let me know in the comments.

The all-seeing and un-seeing eye

That title is far more pretentious than a post about installing a webcam and getting new glasses deserves to be.

Welcome to academia.

I originally signed up to do this digital humanities thing out of some misguided idea that I could stick it to post-modernism through the power of the software. (If you’re imagining a humanities major holding up a motherboard and screaming “The power of computing compels you!” at the dark forces of French philosophy, then you think like me and you might want to get that checked out.) Which is amusing, because my pursuit of digital humanities is what led me to UCSB and two+ years here has actually brought me to terms with most of post-structuralism’s excesses and led me to practically embrace post-modernism (I blame Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves in particular for the latter). So DH has not been what I expected. I somehow assumed it would mostly consist of finding interesting questions by plugging numerical data generated by one incomprehensible piece of software into another equally baffling program and then interpreting the results.

So, here’s a short list of things I was wrong about:

• You’re expected to understand the software. (I’m beginning to regret spacing out during college when my engineering friends would insist on explaining their homework to me.)
• If the software doesn’t exist, you’re expected to put it together yourself. Riiiiiiiight.
• That’s only one very small corner of the DH world. There are so many other approaches that focus on the (im)materiality of new media, the philosophy of hacking or of F/OSS (Free and Open Source Software), the History and Future of the Book, and anything else that had a chapter heading on my exam list.
• There’s a certain practical element where you may find yourself very quickly learning Applescript while the head of the head of your lab is up among the acoustic tiles attempting to figure out the best place to put our new webcam.

The story of the webcam is fairly simple. We want to record all our events (all the cool labs are doing it!) and, because we are the Digital Humanities lab on campus, we should have an easy setup that requires minimal effort on our part so that the video is simply captured for every event. Think Apple’s “It just works” on a shoestring budget and with the world’s ugliest carpeting.

So that meant we needed a camera in place at all times, preferably cheap (see budget) and mounted on the ceiling because there is no space in the lab at the moment (nor will there be in the foreseeable future). And we needed to set the camera to record automatically so that our capture of a given event would happen whether or not those of us in charge remembered to start recording at the beginning.

Our fearless leader took care of the former part, experimenting with 101 ways of sneakily snaking cables up the walls and across the ceiling to make the camera as unobtrusive as possible. By the end, we achieved a certain NSA-esque, spy-cam-coming-out-of-the-tiling vibe that fits in well with the slightly shady air that DH has in the academy. As my boss said – “If we’re not being a little bit sketchy, we’re not fulfilling our role as the dark other in the department.” (Why yes, I love my job.)

But we still needed the camera to turn on, record and stop without our intervention, which is where I came in. Apparently, most people who want cameras to automatically turn on and off at certain times or intervals are interested in home security. There’s a ton of clunky, over-engineered programs for spying on your house and practically nothing light and simple for what we wanted. That’s how I ended up in Automator, following a set of fairly simple directions online for linking a recording to an iCal event and renaming it as you go. That last explains why I was frantically learning just enough Applescript to automatically name the new recording with the center name, date and time.

And it worked. We had our first event on Tuesday and, apart from one glitch which will be fixed now that I know to use a designated iCal calendar for this sort of thing, it performed exactly as advertised. We now have the seminar captured and have already excerpted out a short clip to post on our website (which won’t exist in a usable form until next Tuesday, but one thing at a time). Our next job is to wrestle with two more pieces of terrible software, Quicktime and iMovie, to turn the raw footage of the whole event into something upload-able. Yay.

So I feel like I accomplished something this week – which is good because this whole “Learn R” thing is not exactly calculated to make me feel as though I am making grand strides in the world of statistical programming. I can generate charts of the relative frequencies of every word in Moby Dick (although, since there are 16,873 unique words in Moby Dick (higher than average, yes), I don’t know why I would WANT to). For those of you wondering why the whale, it’s because the book I’m using uses Moby Dick as its teaching text and its easier to make sure that I’m on the right track if I’m getting results that look like those in the book. So, yes, that’s crawling along and between the Learning of R, the running of my first event and the attending of the inaugural events for “Literature and the Mind” (which were amazing and everyone in charge of planning and running them deserves a high-five or a hug based on their preferred form of interaction), it felt like a productive week.

Which was good because I’ve read nothing this week. Well, other than the assigned readings for today’s colloquium and one or two really interesting things on Twitter. That’s because I left my work-ethic in the month of June my glasses were at the optometrist’s being fitted with new lenses. So my options have been contacts or nothing. Most of you are well aware that I wear my contacts all the time (some of you may never have seen me in glasses). But I’ve been trying to be good about taking them out at night and reading while wearing glasses. This developed into something of a habit, where I would take my lenses out around 10 and then go to bed at 12 after reading (she says optimistically, knowing full well that most nights are spent laughing at gifs on Buzzfeed). When 10 rolled around this week, though, I couldn’t take my lenses out because I can’t see without them and my eyes were tired and annoyed and refused to do something productive like read a book because that required effort. So instead of finishing this book that I’ve been working on for over three weeks, I listened to about 15 episodes of a podcast that I’d been meaning to start. Which was nice, but not…productive.

But now I have my new glasses (same as the old glasses, but with a better prescription). When I put them on at the optometrist, I must have been blinking rather foolishly, because the gentleman assisting me asked “Is everything okay?” and I answered. “Yes, I’m not just not used to being able to see when I wear my glasses.” The absurdity of that remark dawned on me only after I said it. What I meant was that I was not used to being able to see with my glasses as well as I could with my contacts. This is strangely disconcerting when I’m on the computer because the clarity is contact-lens-like and then I look up and see that border of fuzziness in my peripheral vision and am reminded that I’m wearing my glasses, not my contacts.

So, yes, I am pleased with the new lenses. I have valiantly decided to wear them for the rest of the day and give my eyes a break, which will undoubtedly shock a few people who have never seen me in them.

So, in closing, I will do that thing that I do every week and let you know what I’m writing about on my academic blog. This week, I ponder the purpose of blogging within an academic context. Go forth and read.

I Blog Therefore I Am…Doing Something

I Went to the Library to Get a Book

And I left with six. This was after I went to the University library the day before to get a book and left with three. What constantly baffles me, though, is not that this happens all the time, but that it doesn’t. Sometimes I walk into the library and leave without any books at all. Those are sad days. Sometimes I only walk out with the thing I went in for. And sometimes the book monsters sneak into my bag and insist that I take them home with me. It’s not that I object per se. I just want some warning so that I can bring a spare bag for them.

Anyway, one of the books I picked up is Avivah Gottleib Zornberg’s Genesis: The Beginning of Desire. It was sitting near another book about Genesis by an author whose last name starts with Z (the one I had actually gone in for) and the name sounded vaguely familiar so I checked her bio. Hmm, Ph.D. from Cambridge, taught at a place I’ve never heard of, taught at Midreshet Lindenbaum–at which point I stopped reading and just grabbed the book because I had heard enough to know how I knew her name and why I wanted to read the book. Also, while I don’t have any serious objections to trying to finish at least one novel every weekend, having this around would hopefully provide some incentive to read something religiously valuable as well. And, since it’s conveniently about Genesis and we were about to read Lech L’cha when I picked up the book, it was perfect.

What I didn’t check was what the book was actually about. (This is  the second time this has happened to me this quarter. The first time was when I picked up the real life version of the Monster Book of Monsters. It’s a book about historical methods of managing too much data that is, in itself, an attempt to manage too much data and entitled “Too Much to Know.” No kidding.) Zornberg is writing as an academic–which I had guessed–so I was hoping for Biblical exegesis in the style of literary criticism. Which her book is, in a way, but Zornberg’s readings don’t draw primarily from the Biblical text itself, but from the Midrashim that have grown up around it. Rather than using her academic training to understand Torah, she uses it to read Midrashim as literature.

Once I figured out what was going on, I got really excited. Why hadn’t anyone thought about doing this before? Because Zornberg breaks the literal/metaphorical dichotomy that dominates any conversation about Midrash–the tension between the idea that Midrash was (and, in some cases, is) understood as what really happened versus the approach that all Midrashim are parables meant to teach a particular lesson and cannot be understood literally. By moving it into the realm of literary criticism, Zornberg successfully borrows all the unspoken rules of literary interpretation along with it, most importantly that weird kind of bracketing of what-the-book-REALLY-means that is necessary to making literary claims.* Which is just to say that literary criticism doesn’t rise or fall based on whether you accurately decode the author’s intention, but on whether you find something interesting to say about the text. Which, realistically, puts Zornberg closer to the “metaphorical” end of the spectrum (if we’re still on it), but without the pressure to decode the Midrashim accurately. As with literature, the emphasis is less on what the Midrash was originally written to do and more on what it does for her and, hopefully, for her readers.

Or, as one of my teachers in Lindenbaum was wont to say “This is true, regardless of whether or not it actually happened.”

The problem with Zornberg, though, is that she’s writing as an academic and in academicese. She speaks it well, to be sure, but…well, if you enjoy reading the Rav, you will find her a breeze. But I find myself wondering what the impetus is behind Zornberg’s situating of her critique within this discourse.** (For one thing, it’s contagious.) Do you need to put on the trappings of academic criticism in order to discuss the parallel texts of Torah and Midrash without addressing things like “truth-claims” or “reality” (though she comes down pretty solidly on the side of creation not being a factual account. Then again, so do most of the Medieval commentaries)?

There are two sides to that question and I will leave you with both of them.

1. What’s at stake in this conversation? When we skip automatically into the realm of the academic, we are spared any real dialogue about which things we believe are true (in the actually happened sense) and which are meant to be interpreted. The lit-crit approach allows us not to talk about it – to put everything in the category of interpretable without undermining its claims to truth, merely bracketing it. And, with fiction–which is fictional by definition–this is fine. But is there anything keeping us from beginning a discussion about Biblical and Mirashic text with an explicit statement that “For now, it doesn’t matter whether this happened”?  What do we save by refraining from having that conversation? And, just as importantly, what do we lose?
2. There’s also the very literal interpretation of my question. Can we have this conversation without scholarly language? Do we have the words and means to discuss these ideas without drifting into academicese? And, if we don’t, should we?

If you have no interest in any of that, may I direct you to my other blog, which, despite technically being my academic blog, is way more comprehensible this week. If you’re interested in 19th Century Literature, Topic Modeling, what Digital Humanities can do for you or, like Gaston, you prefer reading things with pictures, it’s the way to go. And, yes, I will probably continue to link to that blog at the end of all my posts because this is the cool stuff! (And, um, watching the number of views increase is nice.)

MALLET Redux.

(Also, there’s a JAWS reference in that post).

~~~

*Husserl uses the term epoché to describe the phenomenological act of setting aside what you know “is” in order to accurately describe what you see. Literary criticism is kinda like that: you put aside what the book “is” in order to describe certain effects it can have.

**Because this is published by an academic press as an academic text, so writing it in academic language is necessary? But let’s bracket that proximate cause because, like most practical answers, it’s not very interesting.

A Link to the Present

A new year, a new set of responsibilities, a new feeling of guilt for ignoring the blog…

Though last year’s problems with regular posting have mostly disappeared (Exams are over and I am no longer logging in to my other WordPress account for my course blogs), I am not yet sure about this year. Interesting things that other people would like to read about need to happen first. More than anything else, this is  the “The Blog Lives!” post and an invitation.

See, I have another blog. Well, I share another blog. I’ve cross-posted from in before and will continue to do so (with impunity I might add). So a fair number of this year’s posts, I warn you in advance, will be short snippets like this and a link to Ludic Analytics where I’m documenting my ongoing forays into different kinds of digital work. If you’re interested in what I’m doing academically (OR what I think I’m doing OR what I’m doing wrong OR the book that I’m doing it to), feel free to drop in.

This week, we’re going to back to Daniel Deronda and experimenting with a tool called MALLET.* Yes, everyone else in DH got to the hammer jokes before I did. No that didn’t stop me either. So if you want to see what I did to Daniel this time or just want to find out why I was asking about turning large text files into smaller text files (for fun and profit), the link is below.

http://ludicanalytics.wordpress.com/2013/10/03/hammering-at-daniel-deronda/

The puns continue next week (I hope) with a pirate’s favorite statistical programming language. R!!!!

—

*”I’ll turn it into a .txt. A harmless little .txt. And then I’ll turn that .txt into smaller files. And then I’ll turn those files into smaller files and then I’ll email those files to me and I’LL SMASH IT WITH A MALLET! It’s brilliant, brilliant, brilliant I tell you, genius I say!”

In entirely unrelated news, The Emperor’s New Groove is now on Netflix and my sister and I have already rewatched it.

This Is Your Mission

Should you choose to accept it…

Most of you are absolved from reading this post. But some of you may be wondering what the social network graph of a William Faulkner novel looks like and some others of you might just be interested in what I am up to.

If you find yourself intrigued, feel free to look at the entire post. I needed to think through the results from my experimental graphing and I liked the idea of keeping a blog-record of my visualizations, so I revived our mostly defunct blog from last spring and posted some of my more interesting visualizations there, along with my thoughts on them. I’ve copied the majority of that post to this blog, so you can either read about the social network graph of William Faulkner’s Light in August  there or here.

Enjoy!

Stream of Consciousness

This weekend marks the end of week 8 of the quarter, which means several things.

1. If I finish both The Portrait of Dorian Gray and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde before I go to sleep tomorrow, I will be on track for two of my three reading lists. (I’m halfway through the former and relishing the opportunity to reread Wilde.)
2. Which is really a corollary to 1, I am going to spend most of Passover/Spring Break catching up on my literature and the mind list, which I cannot seem to get through at a reasonable speed. I’m suffering from a surfeit of incomprehensible French philosophers.
3. My students’ papers are due in 10 days. I’m looking forward to quite a few of them.
4. My final paper is due in two weeks and I just started working on it. The nice thing about a fair amount of digital work is that there isn’t much research that needs to be done because you’re interested in developing new techniques for analysis and then, maybe, comparing it with old results. The downside is that you begin with several hours of work in Excel spreadsheets. I suppose I could have chosen something a little less busy-work intensive, but  I just…really like social network graphs. So I’m making one for William Faulkner’s Light in August. I’ve already needed to think up rules for people talking about conversations they overheard from other people, which might actually be a stylistic choice to look into. How much of this novel is told from these embedded perspectives?

On a mostly unrelated note, I just finished reading Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton and really enjoyed it. It was not, in my oh so humble opinion, as good as North and South, which is her masterpiece, but it was good. It’s Gaskell’s first book and it shows especially in her inability, as narrator, not to interrupt the story and defend her poor characters (who she sets in opposition to her presumed-rich readers). And, having read both North and South and Wives and Daughters, I can’t help but notice that Gaskell has this thing for jealous mothers of men. Many of her parents resent marriage and losing their children, but the mothers of men in particular are loathe to let their sons go and, though they often couch it in terms of their belief that the man’s intended is not good enough, the occasional insight in the characters’ minds makes it seem deeper than that.

I have no idea where I was going with this, it just struck me as something interesting about Gaskell. If you’ve read her work (or not), feel free to chime in. Now I’m going to go back to recording character interactions in Light in August while watching the BBC adaptation of North and South starring Thorin Dreamboatshield.

Somebody Underlined My Library Book

If this blog was actually about my life, then this post would address the reasons why I should not be allowed to travel while exhausted. But since it’s not, we’re not going to discuss that and just hope that the nice Lost and Found people at either JFK or LAX find my glasses.

No, this post is about books.

Copy Of ‘The Scarlet Letter’ Can’t Believe The Notes High Schooler Writing In Margins brought to you by the Onion.

And then there was this, which, I should note, I don’t expect you to read because it’s an open access book-length book: Debates in the Digital Humanities

But the latter’s approach towards marking readerly interest, in conjunction with the former and a burgeoning interest in marginal notes (especially after I, umm, wrote rather extensive ones in the library’s copy of Discourse Networks because that book was unfollow-able otherwise), got me thinking about one of the big lies of omission we tell in DH.

The digital turn and the ebook have given us unprecedented access to collaborative authorship. We can write books together in wikis and Google Docs, we can comment on works-in-progress and have our thoughts incorporated into the text, we can be a part of books in a way that was never possible before.

And all this is true. But the other thing that the digital book, especially the professionally produced book app, affords is the ability to systematically erase the presence of other people from the book. Or, to put it another way, the real innovation in Amazon’s annotation app is not that you can turn on most commonly highlighted phrases, but that you can turn them off.

For example, I bought a used copy of the Norton Guide to English Literature (the 6th edition, in case enquiring minds want to know) and it belonged to someone named Lauren who had apparently done some of the romantic poets and didn’t like underlining the actual poem, but would write the occasional observation in the margins about symbolism. Which is convenient, because I underline like crazy and only really take marginal notes on things when I’m teaching them. Or when I feel a sudden onset of sarcasm. There’s nothing like taking out your anger on a man who has been dead for nearly two-hundred years by calling him a hack in the margins of his own poems. (Don’t be too sympathetic, it’s not like Lord woe-is-me Byron needs more pity)

And yes, to a certain degree these marginal notes are more private; I’m certainly not reselling my copy of the Norton. But my notes are materially bonded to the text. You can see not-so-faint pink lines on the reverse of certain pages when I forget to use a ball-point pen. Whatever ends up happening to this particular book–this particular paper and ink and glue version of the text–my notes will be happening with it.

On the other hand, there’s the Kindle. Most of the time, I turn off popular highlights, because it disconcerts me. Even before I read the passage, I can see that other people had highlighted it and I find myself wondering whether it’s really that important. Even before I look at the actual words, I’m treating the sentence differently. And, if I decide it’s important, am I highlighting out of peer pressure or because I’m relying on the wisdom of crowds. Or would I have highlighted it anyway? I mean, the second most-highlighted passage of all (kindle) time is…

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

If you don’t know where that’s from you should go and look it up right now (especially if it’s still January 28th for you).*

But my point, wherever it went, is that unless I have a very good reason to do so, I will not look at the Kindle highlights.** And, if you think about it, that’s really weird. I can actually erase the presence of every other reader of the book with the push of a button. It’s like every book is a brand new hardcover whose covers have never been opened and whose spine has never been disturbed, much less made that satisfying crack that new hardcovers make (Half of you will agree with me about the crack, the other half will cringe). Except it lacks the tactile feeling of “new book,” the sense of anticipation that comes from being the first. Actual newness has a presence of its own, but this…this is just absence. Neither material newness nor the tracks of previous readers.

And the Kindle/iBook apps are actually the best of the proprietary/professional bunch. You can at least highlight and take personal notes in the book. Some of the book apps currently out don’t even allow you to do that. Oh, they invite engagement on social media and let you post what page you’re reading to your Facebook status or tweet your reaction to a line, but the book itself remains intangible. You cannot write in your book. You’d have better luck with a sharpie on the iPad screen.***

Take the Artscroll iPad app, for example. They’ve finally invented a version of the Gemara where you can’t write in the margins. The history of the Talmud is the history of marginal notations and taking advantage of every little space on the page, of trying to cram translations in between the lines of the text and writing out the arguments of the Tosafists because you know there’s no way you’ll be able to decipher it a second time. Given what digital technology is capable of, Artscroll could have allowed their users to completely personalize their Talmuds so that the text reflected not only what they learned, but how they learned. Instead, they lock it down entirely. You can’t even highlight the text. What you can do is turn on colors, so Artscroll highlights the different topics in the text for you.

This isn’t a full-fledged idea yet, but it’s something that’s been kicking around in my thoughts and that I will, hopefully, continue to poke at. What happens when we can no longer deface our books?

~~~

*For those of you wondering, the most highlighted passage is “Because sometimes things happen to people and they’re not equipped to deal with them.” It’s from Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins. 13 of the 15 top highlights are from the Hunger Games trilogy. The other two are from Pride and Prejudice. Make of that what you will. (First conclusion: I’m not sure if this data is a representative sample…unless its a representative sample of Kindle readers who highlight things.)

**I have been known to turn them back on to crowdsource important sentences from critical texts because trying to remember which paragraph best encapsulates X’s theory and where it is in the book is an exercise in futility.

***The management takes no responsibility for anyone empty-headed enough to do this. Unless you do it as a work of new media art, in which case I want 10% of the profits.

Brief Moments of Excitement

For the first time today, I taught a section dealing with texts that could actually be construed as belonging to one of my fields!

We had read six poems by John Keats for this week and, as the class jumped straight from Robinson Crusoe to Keats’s poetry, I wanted to provide my students with a bit more background regarding the literary developments of the Long 18th Century…otherwise the sudden jump from one to the other seems very weird.

Conveniently, I am smack in the middle of reading the Romantic poets for my qualifying exams, so most of the reference works I was reading served the double purpose of refreshing my memory in order to talk about Romanticism in class and bolstering my background knowledge for the exam. (This has the unfortunate side effect of convincing me that I was far more productive today than I had actually been. Two hours of section reading and two hours of Quals reading does not add up to four hours if they were, in fact, the same two hours. Which, in turn, explains why I’m blogging instead of reading about the history of law and media technology…)

But one of the things I noticed was that I did not need to research all that much about either the Romantics or about the Rise of the Novel (yes, it’s an imposing thing and therefore will be capitalized) because I already knew it. Granted, this was a quick overview rather than an in depth seminar (and the latter would certainly have required far more preparation), but still. This is stuff I actually care about. It’s part of the lead-up to my interest in the novel as the 19th century art form. It’s legitimately interesting in its own right. (Everything I am interested in is.)*

I enjoyed teaching detective fiction last quarter and I thought the books were great fun to read. But I had not realized how much more I enjoy teaching when its within my field of interest and dealing with texts or ideas that matter to me.

Next week, then, should be amazing. We’re reading Jane Eyre.

~~~

I just noticed how many parenthetical remarks I made in this post. I wonder if there’s a correlation between how tired I am and my use of parentheses. I’m just grateful I haven’t started with nested parentheses yet. Those are always tricky to keep track of.