11D

Alcove No. 1 in the City College Lunchroom

Tony Grafton in TNR:

Morning, nowadays, means coffee and the Times, as it did for my parents. But it also means something they never experienced: a trip across the Web. Slipping from link to link, occasionally falling in and spending a few minutes in one place, I pass from TNR to NYRB to Bookforum, from Atrios to Steve Benen, from Easily Distracted to University Diaries to Tenured Radical to TigerHawk, from Historiann and Arts & Letters Daily to Cliopatria and Athens & Jerusalem, from Andrew Sullivan to Megan McArdle to Ta-Nehisi Coates—and, for perspective, to the obituaries in the Telegraph.

Two very different pots of gold wait at the end of the rainbow. The main posts in these blogs, for all their differences, are sharp and often full of information, and they swarm with links to further blogs and reviews. At many sites, moreover, communities of commentators have taken shape. Scroll down from a post into the comment thread, and you find yourself in a virtual counterpart to Alcove No. 1 in the City College lunchroom, as it was many years ago—a place that buzzes with everything from critical intellects at play to bug-eyed ideologues who pout and shout. Running conversations, polyphonic and sometimes polymathic, enlarge on or contend with the main post. In the academic blogs that I like best, these illuminate the strange world in which I work.

Grafton and I have exactly the same blog reading habits. However, for some reason, I was out of the loop on A Don's LIfe. How did my husband the historian not know about this one? Well, that problem has been rectified in Google Reader.

Grafton makes the great comparison between the smart blog world and Alcove No. 1 in the City College lunchroom. My dad started teaching at City College in the mid-1960s, back when he had to furiously study before class to be prepared for hyper-intellectual students. I forwarded this link to him, because he isn't allowed to read this blog.

In general, bloggers have turned into very bad book writers. They have not been able to translate their power to book form. However, Grafton writes that Mary Beard has succeeded where others have failed.

Blogs move quickly, and sometimes shut down just as quickly. Even the Wayback Machine does not provide easy access to all of the blogosphere’s past riches. That is one reason why it is wonderful to have a selection from A Don’s Life in book form: we aging Luddites like to reread things we enjoyed, and blogs can be hard to track back (especially if you’re reading in bed). Another is the perspective that the book form gives. Blogs strew the electronic landscape like autumn leaves in Vallombrosa. But A Don’s Life has special qualities that set it—and other blogs like it—apart from the mass, and this anthology helps to make them visible in a new way.

Grafton points to great blogs from the past that have shut down shop and cites the Invisible Adjunct as an example. [Someone is getting a nudge, right now.]

There are some fabulous conversations happening the blogosphere. It's good to see that people are paying attention.

Leaving the Party Early

Every night before bed, Steve and Ian read Calvin and Hobbes. It's Steve's old edition from when he was a kid.

Watterson, who is apparently a big recluse, just gave an interview. When asked why he chose to end the strip when it was still really popular, he said,

By the end of 10 years, I'd said pretty much everything I had come there to say.

It's always better to leave the party early. If I had rolled along with the strip's popularity and repeated myself for another five, 10 or 20 years, the people now "grieving" for "Calvin and Hobbes" would be wishing me dead and cursing newspapers for running tedious, ancient strips like mine instead of acquiring fresher, livelier talent. And I'd be agreeing with them.

I think some of the reason "Calvin and Hobbes" still finds an audience today is because I chose not to run the wheels off it.

I've never regretted stopping when I did.

Book Purging

Book purging is an occupation hazard around here.

Tomes pile up in corners of the office and in hidden bookshelves in the attic. What if I need a footnote in the future? Steve blows through a 500 page biography of Hilter or Marcus Aurelius every month or so. The shelves of Hilter biographies in the dining room frequently freak out new dinner guests, but it could be so much worse. Without editing, there would be no room to eat in our dining room. We need to regularly purge the shelves in order to avoid an untimely death.

Here's some expert advice on books that can you live without.

Best Book Lists

I'm collecting "Best Book of the Year" lists and Holiday Gift Guide lists. Here's what I've found:

• Atlantic Monthly's list. With an audio explanation.
• Megan McArdle's Book List
• Eliot Spitzer discusses three books that help explain the economic crisis. (I saw him on MSNBC a few weeks ago shining up his image. Take notes, Tiger.)
• The New York Times's 10 Best Books of 2009.
• more to come.

Asking Questions

Ian has been taking social skills classes this fall. Unlike some of the kids in the class, Ian's main problem isn't saying inappropriate things. He just doesn't talk enough. We're using the class as an advanced speech class. It's been great. He comes running out of the class with a Pokemon reward card and a big smile. The teacher then tells the parents what they worked on during the session and how we can do similar activities at home.

The lessons are usually about how to keep a conversation going. Or how to talk about Topic A, which you really don't care about, and not to talk about Topic B, which you have a deep and abiding passion. Or how to ask questions of a potential friend.

Now, if the health insurance company pays us even a portion of the $1,400 bucks that we've laid out for this necessary therapy this fall, that would be a good thing. And no, I'm not going to stop talking about health care reform.

Penelope Trunk has written several posts for people with Asperger Syndrome to help them better navigate the business place. Her advice is really good for everybody. I've been to so many parties with people with bad social skills.

People, you have to assume that the stranger standing next to you has something that makes them interesting. Everybody is weird in some way. Your job is ask them enough questions to find out what makes them fascinating. If you just talk about yourself, you're never going to figure it out, and you'll just have bored everyone. 

Trunk also refers to a book by Tyler Cowen, Create Your Own Economy: The Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World, that I've been meaning to check out. It's about how people with autism fit in so well in the Information Age.

Gift Guide 4 - History Books

These are Steve's history book picks for the year. His reviews are here.

1. Fred Anderson's Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766
2. David Hackett Fischer's Champlain's Dream
3. Eric W. Sanderson's Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City
4. Barry Cunliffe's The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek
5. David Howarth's 1066: The Year of the Conquest

Cornel West At the Crossroads

The best review is a bad review. Example A - Scott McLemee's review of Cornel West's Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud, A Memoir.

Legend has it that the blues guitarist Robert Johnson acquired his haunting style by selling his soul to the devil at a crossroads. West, as a “bluesman of the life of the mind,” has clearly also been to the crossroads. The devil gave him a team of publicists. I don't think this was a good bargain on West's part. It left him unable to recognize that self-respect is often the enemy of self-esteem.

[Snickering sounds.]

Political Theory 101

In an article about child psychology for the New York Times, Nicholas Wade writes,

What is the essence of human nature? Flawed, say many theologians. Vicious and addicted to warfare, wrote Hobbes. Selfish and in need of considerable improvement, think many parents.

But biologists are beginning to form a generally sunnier view of humankind.

Hobbes did not think that people were vicious and addicted to warfare. We are in dire need of a quick political theory lesson, Mr. Wade.

Farm Life

As I drove along Route 17 doing errands this afternoon, I came across two very different views of life on the farm. None of those views were visible outside the car window. Route 17 in Paramus, New Jersey is mall heaven -- Nordstrom's, Macy's, Saks, Century 21, Target, 500 different GAP stores. Sure, the old timers still talk about the celery farms that used to cover Paramus before the highway and the malls, but that was ages ago.

I ran into Barnes and Noble to see if I could unload some old textbooks and stopped to check out a nice display of new cookbooks. Cookbooks have morphed from books with recipes for cooking stuff into lifestyle books. You buy them because you like the person who makes the food, not because you really want to cook any of their food.

Prominent on display was The Pioneer Woman cookbook. I've been reading about her book tour on her blog, so I was curious to see what the book was like. There were some very serviceable recipes for meatloaf and stuffed potato skins, but the book was mostly awesome pictures of her family and stories about how she met her husband. 

Her story is compelling. She rejects city life and builds a life on a farm with a dreamy man who wears chaps and not in an ironic way. After flipping through the pages for a few minutes, I was ready to homeschool and make meatloaf. No, really. I've been antsy to move further North for a while now. 

The nerdy clerk Barnes and Noble took one sniff at my outdated textbooks and refused to take them. Later, I did a drive-by at the town library. I left them outside the door in some shopping bags and ran away.

Next on the chore list was some shopping for the Thanksgiving pies. On the way to the supermarket, I listened to Patrick Carr on NPR discuss his new book, Hollowing Out the Middle: The Rural Brain Drain and What It Means for America. It's a new sociology book about the emptying out of the farms. The young people are leaving in droves and in many towns, Carr said, it's just 70 year olds driving around 90 year olds. The plight of entire states like North Dakota and Montana was a big topic in my State and Local class. NPR doesn't have up the audio yet, but here's a video of him giving a talk elsewhere.

So, these very different stories have me very confused. I'm going to deal with this confusion by doing some intense shoe therapy at Nordstrom's this weekend.

Book Review: Mennonite In a Little Black Dress

I only started reading Mennonite in a Little Black Dress: A Memoir of Going Home, because it was free; an editor sent it to me to review. First impressions weren't good. The book screamed Chick Lit. The cover had a picture of legs and black pumps. The first chapter was unreasonably chipper. I hate Chick Lit.

Chick Lit has a predictable formula. Girl has a lumpy butt, falls for the wrong guy, but ends up in a passionate embrace with the right guy, who loves her lumpy butt and all.

Rhoda Janzen starts off writing a Chick Lit book. She makes jokes about a series of tragedies that befall her. She gets cancer and has to have her uterus removed. During the operation, the surgeon accidentally cuts open her bladder and she needs a pee bag for a few months. Then her husband of fifteen years leaves her for a guy that he met on Gay.com. As she's emotionally recovering from that shocker, a drunk teenager plows into her car and breaks a bunch of her bones.

Those events are not funny and her efforts to turn them into a joke are a little off putting. I mean, I also had a surgeon accidentally puncture my bladder, and I can tell you that there's nothing funny about a pee bag, even if you call it a pee-bag.

Yet I kept reading, because of the pee-bag. The author and I had many things in common in addition to the pee-bag. We're both academics in our mid-40s. Her husband had mental health issues and switched teams; in my case, it was a boyfriend. She says that she was attracted to men who were smart rather than nice; I broke that nasty habit when I was thirty. She follows her husband to the University of Chicago where he was studying Political Theory; I must have missed him by a year or two.

I'm glad that I muscled past the first chapter, because this book is so much more than Chick Lit. It's actually a really, good book about going home after tragedy. After the car crash, she takes a sabbatical year and goes back home to her family to lick her wounds and write a book. 

Janzen writes about growing up Mennonite. Surprisingly, many of her experiences aren't that different from growing up Catholic. In some ways, conservative Catholics are Mennonites, but with booze and a pope. The humiliations of wearing the wrong clothes to school and enduring sadistic elementary school teachers are universal growing pains that everyone can relate to. 

During her trip back home, Janzen comes to terms with her upbringing. She recognizes that her mother, although eccentric and embarrassing, is a truly good person. She gradually admits to the readers, and maybe to herself, that her ex-husband had been slowly torturing her over the years, even before he ran off with Bob. She finds beauty in what she rejected. 

There is very little about academic life in this book, but she throw out some real puzzlers for those who have lived that life. She name drops some shoe brands a couple of times in the book, a prerequisite of all Chick Lit books, but how the hell does an academic afford Manolos or Prada? Maybe she chose shoes over food, a respectable choice, but she doesn't explain.

The writing is fabulous. Each chapter could be a stand-alone essay about virtue, acceptance, or family love.

Janzen's book is most certainly not Chick Lit. Janzen doesn't end up in the arms of Mr. Right, but she does end up loving the Right Family.

She discusses her book in this video.