Books

Every once in a while, I will read something that seems uniquely precise in describing aspects of my own condition. A piece from early last fall by Jerome Weeks — at that point book critic for the Dallas Morning News — was very much a case of that happening:

As Mark Twain observed, anything you’re not obliged to do is play. Anything else is work. And as a book journalist, one is obliged to race after the Media Now-Now-Now – what critic David Denby once called “information without knowledge, opinions without principles, instincts without beliefs.”

What’s more, book culture may seem a dwindling, quaint endeavor to advertisers in mad pursuit of illiterate teens and at a time when arts coverage in general is getting dumped or fragmented into a million Web sites. But there are hundreds of thousands more new books released per year than TV shows, sports programs, movies or CDs. For all the talk of the death of print, more people have access to more books now than at any time in history.

That’s amazing but it means keeping up is a full-time sprint. A book columnist must read in gross tonnage, read hastily in trains, planes and lunch lines and read books no one should bother with. One can endure a film or a concert for two hours; reading a pointless book can take days. Recall those dreaded high school assignments: A bad book can seem like a prison sentence.

I know, I know. You spend your time heroically putting out fires and saving lives in the ER. All of this reading doesn’t really sound like work to you. But it is. Otherwise, we wouldn’t pay researchers, law clerks, teachers or librarians.

OK, so we don’t pay them much….

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This is just too funny. John Lott, having had his lawsuit against Steven Levitt and _Freakonomics_ thrown out, has gone and written a knock-off called — I’m not making this up — Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works and Freaky Theories Don’t. The jacket design is right out of the David Horowitz playbook, too.

Presumably it’s blurbed by Mary Rosh. Now if you’ll excuse me I have to get back to the final chapters of my two forthcoming books, Greedonomics: A rogue trader shoots first and Fritonomics: Exploring the hidden side of snack foods.

Scott has a new article over at _Inside Higher Ed_ talking about Borders, and reviewing the Indies Under Fire movie that I mentioned a few weeks ago. It sounds like a more complex and interesting movie than I expected from watching the trailer. Which reminds me – Jim Johnson suggested a while back that I should do a post on good bookshops, and consider linking to them in addition to/instead of Powells and Amazon when I review books. I have mixed feelings about linking to Amazon, which is a vociferously non-union operation, but get the impression that many or most CT users buy stuff there. So what good, alternative bookstores are out there? I’ll start by singing the praises of Prairie Lights in Iowa City which I visited this weekend, and which was teh awesome. Fabulous selection of small press books, and a book buyer who, after a brief conversation about Rick Perlstein’s forthcoming, came over to snoop shamelessly through the pile of novels that I was buying at the cash register (the kind of customer profiling I can live with happily). Other recommendations?

I blogged a while back about Paul Park’s “A Princess of Roumania,” which was the first in a series of four fantasy novels. I recently finished the third in the series, The White Tyger (Powells, Amazon) which is just as wonderful. The novels are profoundly character driven in a way that few genre novels are; they deliberately and specifically refuse to conform to a conventional quest narrative. No-one knows exactly what they’re supposed to do; they’re making it up as they go along. All of the main protagonists (and some of the minor ones) are in some sense or another _doubled_; their selves are split in two so that they have difficulty in explaining their motivations to themselves. The book is less a conventional fantasy story in which the story is external to the characters, determining who they are and what they do, than a working through of the ways that individuals make up their own fantasies, spinning out _ex post_ narratives to explain their actions to themselves and others. The main protagonists don’t know themselves.

This is most obvious in the character of Baroness Ceaucescu, who sees herself as the heroine of an opera, smoothing away the grubby and selfish motivations for her actions and reconfiguring them as the essential elements of a grand and inexorable tragedy, where she has no personal responsibility for what she does. She steals every scene that she’s in. The three novels are vertiginous, and a little jarring. They don’t have the feeling of safeness and stability that most fantasy novels do. All that is solid melts into air. Yet nor are they self-consciously or coyly reflexive (their contingency doesn’t seem playful to me; rather it appears like a very serious attempt to talk about how the world is). I don’t want to say more about _The White Tyger_ for fear of ruining surprises; I do want to recommend it (and I can’t wait to see what the fourth and final novel does).

Greetings, O Timberites! Welcome to “spring,” unless it’s now “autumn” for you. (I hate these fashionable nods to “global relativism,” but I’m informed that some CT readers and contributors are adherents of some kind of Southern Hemisphere Standpoint Epistemology.) I fear that my nasty reputation has preceded me to this prestigious blog, but just for those of you who might be wondering who I am and why I’m here, my name is Michael Bérubé. I teach literature and cultural studies at Penn State University, where I also co-direct (with my wife, Janet Lyon) Penn State’s Disability Studies Program. In future posts, I will be more than happy to remedy this blog’s inexplicable inattention to (a) disability studies and (b) professional hockey in North America, but first, I should probably mention by way of introduction that I published two books last fall, one of which features my <a href=”http://www.michaelberube.com/images/uploads/berube_rhetorical.jpg”> ginormous looming ghostly head</a> and the other of which has been widely lauded for its innovative jacket design:

Hey, hold the phone!

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Blackwell has just published the latest of the Blackwell Philosophy Anthologies: Philosophy of Education: An Anthology (UK) edited by (almost full disclosure) my friend and collaborator Randall Curren. I was approached about editing an anthology myself a few years ago, and thought about it but, mainly out of laziness, never got around to it. Curren’s anthology is so good that it makes me cringe at the thought of how any volume I might have edited would have compared with it. I suppose that from outside the field it just looks like a good anthology, but from inside it reveals a wonderfully broad conception of the field, and it’s clear that an enormous amount of work must have gone into constructing it.

Philosophy of education suffers from being somewhat marginal within Education, and not well respected within Philosophy (for example, I’ve never seen an advertisement in Jobs for Philosophers with Philosophy of Education as an AOS, nor do I know of a Philosophy PhD program in the US which regularly, if ever, offers Philosophy of Education graduate seminars. I don’t offer them, and nor do the other philosophers of education I know within philosophy departments).I doubt many philosophers know much of the field beyond Plato’s, Aristotle’s and Rousseau’s contributions, and knowledge that Locke said something relevant but no idea what it was. (Anyone who does know that much knows more than I did when I started working in the field).

If you wanted to know more, Curren’s Anthology would be the perfect place to start.

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I’m thinking of getting an electronic reader, now that display technologies are finally catching up, but have been unimpressed with reviews of the Sony Reader, which seems to be the market leader in the US. The iRex Iliad looks to have better specs, but I haven’t seen any proper reviews of it. It doesn’t handle proprietary DRM stuff, but that’s not what I’m interested in reading – I want it more to reduce the load of book and article manuscripts that I always seem to lug with me when I am going from place to place. Anyone out there who has this machine (or another competitor), and is prepared to offer advice/opinions?

What do you get when you sort approximately 800,000 published papers into 776 scientific paradigms? If you have an interesting visualization expert working with you on the project then you get this map (or click here for an even larger version). Seed Magazine has more on the details and Brad Paley’s Information Esthetics Web site tells you how you can get your own copy just for paying shipping and handling charges.

This map is just one project of Katy Börner’s cool Places and Spaces: Mapping Science initiative at Indiana University. Check out that site for more goodies.

Brad also has some other intriguing projects, like this calendar (an alternative to what we usually use). One of my favorites, however, remains his TextArc work for alternative ways of visualizing text. For example, check out his representation of Alice in Wonderland.

UPDATE: I’ve been meaning to blog about Jim Moody’s related work as well so I should’ve remembered to include a link to his visualizations, too: co-citation of physical and bio sciences, dynamic visualization of sociology co-authorship network.

Pierre Assouline’s excellent blog at Le Monde has some figures for the provenance of novels published in French translation:

bq. in 2006, 41.4% of novels published in France were translated from a foreign language…. English is, naturally, in first place with 2503 titles but the extent of English domination is surprising: 75.5 per cent of the total! In the runners-up spot are German and Spanish with 134 titles (4%), followed by Italian (108 titles or 3.3%). Juste après, on trouve l’allemand et l’espagnol avec 134 titres (soit 4%) suivis par l’italien (108 titres soit 3,3%). …. Russian (which is in decline) and the languages of the East [meaning? CB] are neck and neck (with 44 titles translated in the year), then come the Scandinavian languages and Japanese. The only notable breakthrough is the Chinese novel, with 37 titles translated.

And I got this cool present:

These are Penguin 60s, the original (orange) series and the Classics, which Penguin brought out in 1995 for their 60th anniversary. (They recently issued a similar series for their 70th, though not in the United States.) When they came out I really wanted the Classics collection, but had no money. I remember there was a certain amount of snotty declensionist commentary on the sort of people who would only spend 60p for excerpts of Civilization rather than reading the originals entire. Well, you can always have The Complete Penguin Classics delivered to your house for a mere $7,989.50 (don’t worry, shipping is free). About 750lbs worth and 77 linear feet of shelving, apparently — according to an Amazon reviewer who actually bought it. If you’re not up to that, just take The American Collection or the 19th Century British Collection instead, which are a bit cheaper.

A bemused follow-up to my Frankenstein post. Here’s what you get tangled in, trying to edit this stuff into shape (plus YouTube goodies!). [click to continue…]

I’ve just spotted that Benedict Anderson has produced a revised version of Imagined Communities, his influential 1983 book about nationalism. Is it worth buying if you own the original? [click to continue…]

So it happened like this. I noticed that the Gutenberg Project version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein didn’t indicate which edition – 1818 or 1831. The two are rather different, as the author rewrote whole passages. Example: I just read a piece by Brian Aldiss in which he asserts, in passing, that H.G. Wells must have been misremembering when he wrote that “Frankenstein, even, used some jiggery-pokery magic to animate his artificial monster.” But: this would only be clearly wrong concerning the 1818 version, which is actually more ‘scientific’. An appendix to a recent edition of the 1818 edition notes: “the 1831 reader is allowed to think that the faculty at Ingolstadt [where young Victor gets his schooling] in the 1790s, even the previously sympathetic Waldman … were indeed teaching arcane magic under the name of natural science.” That’s sort of debatable, as a reading of the 1831 edition, seems to me. But it probably explains Wells’ impression.

Anyhoo. The Gutenberg version is definitely 1831. But, since Gutenberg editions are – Frankenstein-fashion – cobbled from the corpses of works passed into the public domain – it seemed possible that it was maybe a bit of both. Also, there are lots of typos (you get what you pay for.) Mostly just misplaced commas, colons and semicolons, but hundreds of those. (I’m convinced that the main export of Victorian England was the overused semicolon. Seriously, Shelley’s punctuation is bizarre. What’s with all the colons followed by dashes? Is that really necessary? Oh well.) So for the last few weeks I’ve been working through it, a chapter a night, with a public domain (1912 Everyman) edition of the 1831 edition in hand. I’m up to chapter 18. When I’m done I’m going to make a nice public domain edition. (Maybe do a book event.)

So here’s my question. When I’m done, I’d like to double-check it against an appendix to a still-in-copyright 1818 edition, which gives all the differences between the 1818 and 1831 editions. On the one hand, I really ought to be working from public domain material. On the other hand, I’m not exactly copying this appendix; merely verifying the correctness of text I’ve independently produced. Suppose I end up adding, subtracting or shifting 100 characters worth of punctuation, thanks to consultation of this appendix? Would that be a violation of copyright? Seems a bit weird if it is. 100 character total ought to be fair use, right? There must be copyright traditions concerning editorial questions like this, yes? Am I allowed to treat the appendix as containing information I am allowed to use freely?

UPDATE: Ben Wolfson has related, deep thoughts: “Punctuation marks can be very expressive, especially em dashes (my favorites!—maybe tied with semicola), so why ought one restrict their use to single isolated occurences? Surely in combination they can achieve heretofore undreamt-of degrees of subtlety in expression. (My gloss on the comash was that it implies a degree of reticence or hesitancy, and then:—suddenly elsewhere, or the dam is burst.)”

From Avner Offer’s The Challenge of Affluence, perhaps the best first paragraph of an academic book:

Affluence breeds impatience and impatience undermines well-being. This is the core of my argument. For detail and evidence, go directly to the chapters; for implications, to the conclusion, which also has chapter summaries.

I’ve been longing to read this book since I first heard about it (several years ago) but, on reading the first paragraph, felt obliged to lend it to someone else for several weeks. I’ll tell you all about it when I’m finished with it. Be patient.

Other great academic first paragraphs?