Ottoman affairs

I really enjoyed doing this interview with Danny O'Quinn about his remarkable new book Engaging the Ottoman Empire: Vexed Mediations, 1690-1815.

Small teaser:

I’m pretty committed to this violent non-traditional archive and to this unfamiliar repertoire: once one sees these things, they can’t be unseen. But violence poses extremely challenging theoretical questions for what we do: questions pertaining to the limits of form and representation, to matters of historical complicity, to the affective dynamics of economic and political domination and subjugation. Much of my work has revolved around matters of wartime affect; Engaging the Ottoman Empire feels like my most sustained attempt to understand the precarity of life as it permeates the mediascape.

You can find older installments of this interview series at Medium and also at the Rambling.

For me, this format is perfect. I like choosing and reading the book and thinking up the questions - and at that point, my work is pretty much done! The annoying conventions that have to be followed when you write a formal review for publication are a small bane of my existence. In general I prefer to write comments on manuscripts rather than weigh in once something's already been published (and I also place a higher priority on tenure and promotion letters than on published reviews), but I like getting to pose a few questions about things that struck me.

(Note to self: just said yes to promotion/tenure letter #6 for the summer, that is large workload, HARD NO TO ANYONE ELSE WHO ASKS! But then again if it's someone you know, it's very difficult to turn down. At Columbia, declines to write tend to be counted against the candidate, even when the refusal comes with a reasonable explanation that doesn't have to do with the candidate's work.)

Closing tabs

Ah, I am long overdue some tab-closing and a light reading update, but life is complicated and Facebook continues to leach the energy out of blogging! I'm in Cayman for a couple more days, but my term isn't really over - flying back to New York Thursday for a couple more Friday tenure meetings and some end-of-semester teaching stuff. Can get through a couple more weeks without disaster I think....

Anyway, links first (I have upgraded to a new Kindle and will need to consult 2 different devices to get the full log):

How many eggs does a chicken lay in its lifetime?

On the subject of recreational zoology, read Jane Yeh's rhino poem in the NYRB!

At the New Yorker, Adelle Waldman on loving and loathing Samuel Richardson.

The new era of drone vandalism.

Should brand protection extend to paper offerings to the dead?

Top ten things junior faculty should know in order to get tenure. (There was a feminist rebuttal to this somewhere, but I have misplaced the link, and besides, it didn't invalidate the original points, just complemented them!)

What do Enid Blyton's school stories teach a reader about ethics?

Who will come with me to try this sour-cherry-pie sundae?

Finally, on a sadder note, Frederic Tuten interviewed Jenny Diski in 1999 and it's well worth a reread. I won't write more about Diski here, as I am attempting to write a proper piece about her for an online publication I admire, but I have been thinking very much of one of my favorite passages of hers, from On Trying to Keep Still (I think of it all the time and have certainly never read such an uncannily accurate description of why I have such a strong aversion to making plans to see even my favorite people!):

Being really alone means being free from anticipation. Even to know that something is going to happen, that I am required to do something is an intrusion on the emptiness I am after. What I love to see is an empty diary, pages and pages of nothing planned. A date, an arrangement, is a point in the future when something is required of me. I begin to worry about it days, sometimes weeks ahead. Just a haircut, a hospital visit, a dinner party. Going out. The weight of the thing-that-is-going-to-happen sits on my heart and crushes the present into non-existence. My ability to live in the here and now depends on not having any plans, on there being no expected interruption. I have no other way to do it. How can you be alone, properly alone, if you know someone is going to knock at the door in five hours, or tomorrow morning, or you have to get ready and go out in three days' time? I can't abide the fracturing of the present by the intrusion of a planned future.

Dirty laundry

Via Jordan, a horrifyingly fascinating tale of scandal at the Stanford Business School. The best (worst) bit is the negotiating advice in the emails from the dean to his new partner about how to negotiate with her estranged husband:

Phills had also come to believe that, with Saloner, the co-author of a textbook on strategy, now egging her on, the normally diffident and indecisive Gruenfeld had suddenly grown more aggressive, even ruthless, in their ongoing divorce and custody disputes.

“You are being too rational and generous,” Saloner—sometimes posing as “Jeni Gee” on Facebook—had counseled her at one point. “Spewing the anger that you feel, even if it is unrelated to what you want, would make you a less predictable and rational adversary.” Telling Phills what she really thought of him, he advised, would “push him back like a right to the jaw.” At regular intervals, he bucked her up. “You are awesome,” he told her. “You are the victim here. Roar!” Or “You’re a star! Way to totally act w power.... Can you drive this process home now while you have momentum?”

Everyone seems to have behaved with implausible degrees of recklessness (I am especially horrified by the details about electronic passwords and shared accounts); there is a cautionary tale here, too, about how to think about the generous housing benefits that universities dole out to their most valued faculty....

Minute particulars

Someone was recently asking me to write a post about time management and writing, it is something I should weigh in on: but I am not always a good role model, to say the least. I like the part where I read and think and get a first draft down on paper as a speaking script, but it is not as enjoyable to turn it into something publishable: I am pleased with this essay, but also full of self-reproach that I did not turn it into an article shortly after I first wrote up the basic material in 2006!....

(This essay may also be the first publication in which I have cited Facebook crowdsourcing as a scholarly source.)

Available through JSTOR now, anyway: "The Minute Particular in Life-Writing and the Novel."

Missing chapters

At the Chronicle, Marc Parry tells a story about the past resurfacing. (Via Corey Robin.)

Logophilia

At the LRB, Colin Burrow reviews a new book about the history of philology. Of interest to me in a general sense as well, for obvious reasons, but I particularly enjoyed this bit at the end:

This layer of general interest in knowing about humanity – call it culture – can all sometimes go wrong when academic specialisms waltz into the room. My mother, who was the children’s writer Diana Wynne Jones (and whose eightieth birthday recently prompted what must be the ultimate public recognition in the form of a Google doodle: the techies in California clearly like reading fantasy), once said at a dinner with a group of American academics that she loved The Faerie Queene. ‘Oh, are you a Spenserian?’ came the eager reply. When my mother said, no, she just liked reading Spenser and liked his fantastical imagination, the light went out in her dining companions’ eyes. Yes, academic disciplines are a wet sock to the imagination, but not everything we do is contained within their soggy outlines.

Cole unfiltered

Emma Brockes interviews Teju Cole for the Guardian:

Art history is a passion, but some way into the course, he started to find academic writing frustrating."While doing the dissertation, I wrote two books – so both of these books are acts of procrastination. They also became acts of understanding a form of address that satisfied me, or that I found more fulfilling. I guess you're never satisfied, really. But as a writer, as a creative person, the very stringent, offensively foot-noted writing that was required to be an academic art historian lost its shine for me."

Big bucks

Two royalty checks this week: $29.41 from Cambridge; $76.82 from Columbia. I always remember my friend Heather describing how at her first university press editing job, writers with freshly inked contracts would occasionally write and ask how soon they would be able to quit their jobs....

?

Peter Aspden lunches with Mary Midgley for the FT (site registration required):

Midgley went to Oxford during the war, and she has fond memories of a time, she says, when there was a spirit of genuine inquiry in the air. “When I was at Oxford, I suppose some people thought about their careers but not the sort I talked to.” Her “sort” included Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foot, Elizabeth Anscombe. “There has been a surge in interest in us today because here we were, four women philosophers [who became prominent], and that hasn’t happened since! The important thing was that we were not put under this kind of cheese grater, with a lot of people from Harvard shouting at us. The men who were there were conscientious objectors, disabled, or ordinants, they weren’t so keen on putting everybody down all the time. I really think it is a vice in professional philosophy, a real crime.”

There was a certain kind of machismo about the winning of arguments, I say. “It’s quite interesting isn’t it? Plato gives this very good explanation of why we shouldn’t just be trying to win arguments all the time, and then look at what Socrates does – he utterly and single-mindedly does precisely that! I think the Athenian law courts have a lot to answer for. All right, it is an important part of our reasoning, but it is not everything. It has to be balanced.”

"This is what God put me on earth to do, to bring Benjamin to America"

At the Chronicle, Eric Banks on the life and afterlife of Walter Benjamin. A great piece to read (Lindsay Waters is an intellectual hero!) - a reminder of how contingent the survival and dissemination of someone's work may be.

Have been thinking a lot recently about what it means to be an academic insider/gatekeeper (this has been much on my mind over the past week - also reported here). And from another standpoint, the lack of clear correlation between brilliance and success in a fairly remorseless pipeline....

Signal boost

The middle of my day was brightened by an extremely interesting discussion by Bruce Holsinger of his medieval thriller A Burnable Book. He will be speaking this evening at 7pm at Book Culture (details here) - go and see him speak if you can!

(I only know Bruce slightly in person, but I always think of him as a kindred spirit, insofar as we share a love for literary scholarship, reading and writing fiction and endurance sport....)

Mind games

Great letter by Mary Midgley on women and philosophy. (Via Matt Hart.)

Balancing

Via Kirsten Anderson, a very good piece by Radhika Nagpal about how to balance family and life in general with the obligations of a tenure-track job at a research university.

Closing tabs

I have been remiss in documenting theatergoing! A Picture of Autumn was perhaps overly long but highly watchable (very good dinner afterwards at Esca); to my surprise, since it is a play I've never really seen the point of, the Shakespeare in the Park Comedy of Errors was wonderfully good! Everything about the production is inspired: the costumes, the music, the fact that the actors sound as though they genuinely understand the words they are saying (not always the case); the performance of Jesse Tyler Ferguson as Dromio is particularly good.

Finishing revisions on the style book this week and next before I go to Cayman at the end of next week. (Also final tinkering with two essays, one on Restoration drama and the eighteenth-century novel and the other on conditions of knowledge in Austen's fiction.) Week two of Ironman training went well and I am racing this coming weekend in Syracuse.

Linkage:

Research on holes in cheese. (Via GeekPress.)

Medieval leprosy bacterium sequenced.

Malcolm Gladwell on A. O. Hirschman (I must read that biography - this is a particular favorite of mine).

Miscellaneous light reading around the edges of far too much internet time-wasting: Gene Kerrigan, Little Criminals (this guy's books are amazing, only I am afraid I have now read them all!); Joanna Hershon, A Dual Inheritance; Karin Slaughter, Busted (a teaser for the full-length book, which I am eagerly awaiting); Ake Edwardson, Room No. 10 (annoyingly poetic, and definitely not his best); and M. E. Thomas, Confessions of a Sociopath (luridly enjoyable, and rings true to my personal experience of this type - realized I had to read the book after reading this endorsement). I would like to read a long essay or a book-length discussion of quasi-truthful first-person narratives, from Robinson Crusoe through things like this - especially it seems to me an interesting topic in American Studies (someone should write a dissertation!).

The five-year plan

It's been a bit quiet round here: lots of triathlon training, and I'm trying (with only partial success) not to spend so much time online. Thought I would share this prospectus of sorts: it has served various practical purposes recently, in slightly different variations, and I think I am ready to go on the record with it.

--

My goal for the next three to five years is an ambitious book project whose working title is The ABCs of the Novel. (My initial title was the more evocative Bread and Butter of the Novel, but one too many people asked me whether I was writing about food in literature, and I realized that rather than the British “bread-and-butter,” meaning elementary or basic, the American “ABCs” would better convey the breaking-down-to-fundamentals aspect of the work I hoped to do.) My first two scholarly books are histories more than anything else, and my own critical imagination remains strongly historical in its procedures and materials. I have found myself wondering, though, what might be done in a non- or even anti-historicist mode: not so much the ‘new formalism’ as a willfully timeless and non-chronologically governed development of the insights of narrative theorists as various as Wayne Booth and Gérard Genette. I have decided to experiment with an abecedarian form something like that of Milosz’s ABCs, Raymond Williams’ Keywords or Barthes’s looser variations on that theme, with the goal of exploring the genre of the novel as widely and deeply as possible and attempting to sum up the results of what now represents about twenty-five years of serious reading on my part in the novel and narrative theory.

As the book is not yet written, it still has a near-magical luster for me (see Samuel Johnson’s lament for “the dreams of a poet doomed at last to wake a lexicographer”): it will be composed of entries that range from 250 words at the shortest to about 6,000 words for more substantive essays. Sample topics include fundamentals about first- and third-person narration, epistolarity, the Pamela-Shamela controversy and narrative epistemologies, the problem of authorial revision, the whys and wherefores of an ongoing communal failure in eighteenth-century studies to supersede or replace the narrative of the ‘rise of the novel’ offered by Ian Watt some fifty years ago, and the emergence of a set of conventions for the notation of human gesture in prose (Sterne and Diderot both loom large in that story). The book will also include brief and highly selective accounts of such topics as the prose fictions of the ancient world and of Japan c. 1000 C.E., romance, fiction and the counterfactual mode, Dostoevsky’s doubles, Tolstoy’s style, theories and histories of the novel by Lukacs, Henry James, E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence, Fredric Jameson et al., and a host of other topics.

Alongside this perhaps hubristically ambitious book, I hope to assemble a couple of associated smaller-scale projects: a collection of essays more tightly focused on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British fiction (this will include pieces I’ve already published as well as some new writing composed especially for that volume); and a short book on Richardson’s Clarissa, directed towards teachers, students and others who would like to read this dauntingly long novel and are not sure how to embark on that project. My other associated dream project is to write the introduction for a new trade edition of Clarissa, preferably published in an attractive three-volume format something like 1Q84; there are few things I would like more in life than to get that novel into the hands of a wider audience of readers.

As far as the essay collection goes, I envisage a volume that would reprint these four already published pieces along with four or five new ones composed specifically for the book and with a view to providing a good range of coverage (possibilities might include essays on Haywood, Fielding, Richardson, Smollett, Burney). These are the essays I’ve already written: (1) “Austen’s Voices,” included in Swift’s Travels: Essays in Honor of Claude Rawson (Cambridge, 2008), considers some fundamental points about the first- and third-person forms of narration that Austen inherits from her eighteenth-century predecessors, especially the prose satirists, and modifies radically according to her own vision and priorities. (2) “Restoration Theatre and the Eighteenth-Century Novel,” forthcoming in Tom Keymer’s Oxford History of the Novel in English, Vol. 1: Origins of Print to 1775, sets forth a simple-minded but provocative hypothesis about what eighteenth-century prose fiction might owe to the forms of notation for bodily action that were developed in the dialogue and stage directions of Restoration comedy. (3) “Reflections on the ‘minute particular’ in life-writing and the novel” (under revision) asks some similar questions about particular detail as it functions in realist fiction and eighteenth-century life-writing, (4) The chapter on Austen for the forthcoming Blackwell Companion to British Literature, edited by Robert DeMaria, Jr. and colleagues.

Media diets

In May I answered interview questions for the Chronicle of Higher Education's "My Daily Read" feature, and the piece is up now at their website.

Of book readers and book writers

My friend Rebecca Steinitz has written an interesting and moving column on what it feels like to go from being a lifelong reader to becoming the author of a published book, and how an academic career left behind may be more continuous with subsequent choices and experiences than it seems at the time.

Just so stories

When I think of candidates who are having great success on the academic job market, I have a considerable amount of empathy: it is not something that they can complain about to their less fortunate peers, but they potentially find themselves in a position somewhat like that of Kangaroo in Kipling's story (in the sense that it is not always as enjoyable as one might think to be "very truly sought after"...).

School year tidbits

The beginning of the spring semester always kills me; I don't think I'm really breaking any confidences when I say that we've had three candidates for each of two different junior faculty positions come to give talks in the last two weeks (the final candidate of the group is coming on Tuesday), and of course they must also be lunched and dined and so forth (I am drawing the line at dining this year, lunching is less overwhelming to my schedule!), and their talks subsequently chewed over with colleagues in offices and corridors; it is most tiring for them, and I do not mean to make light of their plight, but it is ultimately rather tiring for the visited as well as for the visitor!

There are a lot of regular talks at this time of year, too: good ones I've heard in the past week include Columbia instantiations of this and this. I wanted to go to this one this evening, but I was so tired that I instead took to my bed!

(Yesterday started very early, with 7am boot camp at Chelsea Piers, and ended late, sitting down around 11:15pm for a very pleasant and satisfying if nutritionally unsound dinner at the Penny Farthing; I had - I am slightly ashamed even to name it - buffalo chicken macaroni and cheese, and G. had fried chicken of evident deliciousness. We had come from the highly satisfactory though perhaps not absolutely stellar - it is such a good play, though! - production of Three Sisters at the Classic; the only thing I didn't care for was the translation, which struck me as obtrusively colloquial in a rather dated way, but many of the performances are very good, and Juliet Rylance was superb as Irina.)

My classes are both well underway, I think; I'm really enjoying being back in the classroom. Yesterday: the last half of The Country Wife, a play which continues to perplex and intrigue me ("Write as I bid you, or I will write whore with this penknife in your face").

Some bits of light reading around the edges: Dinaw Mengestu's How to Read the Air (superb in parts, less compelling in others, but the voice is at its best spectacular); Roger Smith's Wake Up Dead, which I loved. It was a recommendation via The Big Dime, a list that also sent me to Stuart Neville's Belfast thrillers; near the end of the first one now, and finding it very good, though perhaps a bit more conventional/not as much to my taste as Roger Smith's Cape Town thriller.

My only plans for tomorrow are to reread Robinson Crusoe and do a great deal of exercise.

Miscellanous linkage

Michael Jackson bits from Ta-Nehisi Coates (via The Dizzies), Annalee Newitz, Ed Champion and Phil Nugent. (Also: Martha Southgate's 2006 review of Margo Jefferson's book on Jackson and an interesting interview with Jefferson about the book and its subject.)

Thoroughly unrelated: Reassigned Time explains why it's worth taking longer to write a dissertation if it means laying the foundation for a productive life on the tenure track.