“What if we asked how we want to read and write?”

Blogs are a received digital format that’s not necessarily well-suited to the rapid exchange of complex intellectual ideas.... They are the accidents of a handful of simple software infrastructures built to allow individuals to update webpages in a diary-like format, but one with no logical end....

I wonder what a writing and discussion system would look like if it were designed more deliberately for the sorts of complex, ongoing, often heated conversation that now takes place poorly on blogs. This is a question that might apply to subjects far beyond philosophy, of course, but perhaps the philosopher’s native tools would have special properties, features of particular use and native purpose. What if we asked how we want to read and write rather than just making the best of the media we randomly inherit, whether from the nineteenth century or the twenty-first?

I wish these were the sorts of questions so-called digital humanists considered, rather than figuring out how to pay homage to the latest received web app or to build new tools to do the same old work. But as I recently argued, a real digital humanism isn’t one that’s digital, but one that’s concerned with the present and the future. A part of that concern involves considering the way we want to interact with one another and the world as scholars, and to intervene in that process by making it happen. Such a question is far more interesting and productive than debating the relative merits of blogs or online journals, acts that amount to celebrations of how little has really changed.

— Ian Bogost, from his post “Beyond Blogs: How do scholars want to read and write?”.

Oops

I collapse on a settee and accidentally write three erotic short stories that will be falsely attributed to Michel Houellebecq by Le Monde.

— Perhaps my favourite sentence this week, from David Orr’s “Not At All Unusual Day in Culture”.

“I was asked to address wedding invitations”

When I was in high school, I chanted Thomas Wolfe and burned as I thought Pater demanded and threatened the world as a good Nietzschean should. Then, at college, in a single day I decided to change my handwriting . . . which meant, I realized later, a change in the making of the words which even then were all of me I cared to have admired. It was a really odd decision. Funny. Strange. I sat down with the greatest deliberation and thought how I would make each letter of the alphabet from that moment on. A strange thing to do. Really strange. And for years I carefully wrote in this new hand; I wrote everything — marginal notes, reminders, messages — in a hand that was very Germanic and stiff. It had a certain artificial elegance, and from time to time I was asked to address wedding invitations, but when I look at that hand now I am dismayed, if not a little frightened, it is so much like strands of barbed wire. Well, that change of script was a response to my family situation and in particular to my parents. I fled an emotional problem and hid myself behind a wall of arbitrary formality. Nevertheless, I think that if I eventually write anything which has any enduring merit, it will be in part because of that odd alteration.

— William Gass, interviewed by Thomas LeClair in The Paris Review, 1977.

Another brief definition of the novel

Things tend to go wrong.

Dozens? hundreds?

The research suggests that 93% of all humanities articles go uncited. Though it is likely impossible to measure, this statistic leads me to wonder how often the typical humanities article is even read. Obviously all articles are read by someone: editors, reviewers, etc. Does the typical humanities article have a readership in the dozens? the hundreds? Certainly not more than that....

It would seem to me that the average academic (or academic journal) seeks to avoid exposure. Publishing an article in the "Journal of narrowly-focused humanities studies" is a good way to hide. Those who do manage to find you will probably be sympathetic. Plus you always have the shield of peer-review: clearly someone thought what you said was ok. Even if someone disagrees with you, the differences will likely be on details that very few people will know or care about. Besides, by the time that person manages to write and publish a response, your article is in the distant past. In any case, this almost never happens. Since 93% of humanities articles are never cited you can safely publish with the assumption that no one will ever mention your article again. Phew!...

To think about such matters from the perspective of assemblage theory, we should be able to see that the material and expressive segments of a journal serve a strong, territorializing function, reaffirming the boundaries of discipline and the identities of participants. Sitting behind a paywall, available primarily through academic libraries, one can be fairly certain that no one will even accidentally encounter the text (and even if they did, the discourse would likely turn them away). There are good reasons for doing this kind of writing, but I would suggest that it is not the only kind of writing humanists should do. On the other hand, the functionality of the blog has a strong, deterritorializing function. It is designed to carry the media away via RSS feeds, to go viral via Twitter and Facebook, and so on. It is public and available via Google. And while its discourse can be variable, and potentially as esoteric as any journal article, the culture of blogging in general invites participation and sharing.

— Alex Reid, “On the value of academic blogging”.

No excuse

I simply don’t understand why anyone engaged in intellectual work should choose to restrict access to their ideas to a privileged audience. Perhaps I feel so strongly about this because I am myself situated outside the academy. I’m not naive — of course I understand that intellectual and indeed creative economies depend in part on people paying for books, journal subscriptions, and so on. But I believe that any scholar whose work is directly or indirectly supported by public funding should feel an ethical obligation to make the products of that work broadly accessible. The obligation is particularly acute in the Caribbean, where excellent libraries and bookshops are few. In the year 2011, anyone who can use a basic word processor can set up a simple website. There’s no excuse for not using the medium to advance the democracy of ideas.

— That’s me, singing an old song, in a conversation with Kelly Baker Josephs (“The Democracy of Ideas”) published in the February 2011 sx salon.

It appears in a special discussion section on “Caribbean Arts and Culture Online”, which also includes contributions by Geoffrey Philp, Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert and Ivette Romero-Cesareo, Frederic Marc, and Edwin STATS Houghton and Rishi Bonneville.

Small / champions

Les maîtres

Who established the Truths governing Art? Who?
The Masters. They had no right to do so and it is dishonest to concede this power to them.

— Erik Satie, from a text written on the cover of the manuscript notebook for Mort de Socrate.

Tomorrow and the world

Some further thoughts on reading Martin Carter and watching recent events in Egypt, published this week in the CRB.

Notes on Egypt

I switched off Al Jazeera and ignored Twitter for fifteen minutes, trying to get something written, and I missed it. By the time I plugged back in, people were already celebrating in the streets of Cairo.

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As I type this, it’s more than three hours since Hosni Mubarak’s resignation-by-proxy. Right now I’m watching and hearing hundreds of thousands of people — millions, for all I know — singing and dancing, waving flags, setting off fireworks and aerosol torches. I am six thousand miles away, and finding it hard to get back to work.

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The Wall Street Journal reporter Tamer El-Ghobashy, via Twitter:

soldier, away from crowds, on cell phone, crying: "mom, i want to celebrate with the people"

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Martin Carter: “Mankind is breeding heroes every day.”

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The Jamaican writer Marlon James, via Facebook:

“I never thought in my lifetime that these words would mean anything to me, but goddamn it, Power To The People.”

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Al Jazeera reporter Jamal Elshayyal, on the celebrations in Alexandria:

“... every meaning of the word hope.”

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I find myself thinking that the nearest equivalent to this mass euphoria that I’ve ever seen in my own country was when Trinidad and Tobago qualified for the 2006 FIFA World Cup. I ponder this. I think about all the ways that my country is nothing like Egypt. I think about why I’ve been so anxiously, obsessively following events six thousand miles away over the past eighteen days. I think about my own jadedness and alienation from the political realities of my here and now.

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I think about Martin Carter’s phrase, “a free community of valid persons,” and its four difficult words. Free. Community. Valid. Persons.

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Freedom, community, validity, and personhood are all hard work.

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Six thousand miles away, it is hard to get back to work.

The right to the unknown

don't know what will happen. pre #Jan25 I could predict tomorrow will be like today and yesterday, we revolt to gain the right to unkown

— Alaa Abd El Fattah, @alaa

Da, chital

There’s a way in Russian of saying that you’ve read something without specifying that you've completed it. Think about how nice a distinction that would be to have at one’s fingertips! Did you read that book? Yes, I did. (Da, chital, which, I suppose, if you want to get technical, would mean something like, “Yes, I engaged in the activity of reading,” without particular reference to one stage of it or another, especially its completion.)

— Russell Scott Valentino, at the Iowa Review blog.

Domesticate the demon

Virginia Woolf has that great line in The Common Reader, that try as we might to read impartially, “there is always a demon in us who whispers, ‘I hate, I love.’” I’ve always hoped that it might be possible to domesticate the demon, and that if we can understand what in us quickens or recoils and why, some larger truth can be extracted — even if it’s just about our own tastes. How do I know if I have accomplished this? I don‘t.

— Parul Sehgal, interviewed by Scott McLemee.

Why

Only because I am a bad swimmer.

Only because I cannot draw.

Only because I cannot walk a tightrope.

A brief definition of the novel

Some things can be helped, other things can’t be helped.

In other words

All my best lines are mistakes.

At the turn of the year

To: communications@foreign.gov.tt

Re: trinidad and tobago abstention in UN human rights vote

Sent: Wednesday 22 December, 2010, 1.08 pm


Hon. Minister of Foreign Affairs
Dr. Surujrattan Rambachan

Dear Minister Rambachan,

I am writing to register my profound disappointment and indeed anger at Trinidad and Tobago's abstention in an important human rights vote in the United Nations General Assembly yesterday.

As you must be aware, on 21 December, 2010, the UN General Assembly voted on an important amendment to a resolution condemning extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions. This amendment, as described in UN document A/65/L.53, restores a reference to sexual orientation in the list of groups of people particularly targeted in extrajudicial killings. It recognises that in many parts of the world people are under extraordinary threat of violence because of their sexual orientation, and urges UN members to take necessary legal and judicial measures to protect all citizens.

The amendment was passed by the General Assembly by a vote of 93 to 55, with 27 abstentions. Trinidad and Tobago was one of the abstaining nations.

As a citizen of Trinidad and Tobago, I am deeply disturbed that my country failed in its responsibility to take a stand on this very basic question of human rights.

I would like to believe that the government of Trinidad and Tobago is committed to creating a safer and more just and tolerant society for all citizens. Yesterday's abstention forces me to question that commitment. I hope you will take the time to respond to this email and explain this very disappointing decision.

Yours faithfully,

Nicholas Laughlin
Diego Martin

The perils of foreign travel

He goes to a Russian tragedy in five acts by mistake....

— Lydia Davis, “Lord Royston’s Tour”.

It took me so long to realise

There are too many poems in the world, and not enough poetry.