June Post

coming soon?

Pursuing the Life of the Mind

I’ve been taking an Information Studies seminar on “The University Professor and its Critics,” which is basically an easy way for me to do some job market research. We read about and discuss topics like peer review, tenure, and academic freedom. While I am getting a clearer sense of what I’m getting myself into with graduate school looming ahead, I am finding a lot of what we’re learning pretty depressing. 

The state of our current education system and people’s perceptions of the “ivory tower” threaten the viability of the professoriat as it is today. Adjunct professors, who are typically employed part-time on a year-to-year basis without the job security (and academic freedom) provided by tenure, now make up almost 70% of university faculty (see Chronicle of Higher Education article). The advent of the for-profit university has triggered a move towards the university as corporation, where what we learn and teach is left in the hands of the market (look how well that turned out for Wall Street). Most tragic is the lack of respect for the life of the mind as a profession. Academics engage in the production and dissemination of knowledge; they preserve our cultural history and advance human intellect. It baffles me how such a noble pursuit has become so stigmatized in the anti-intellectual culture of modern society. 

As much as I am in love with academia, it is obvious that the obstacles that stand in my way are very real. The treatment of academics, especially in the humanities, from adjunct-status to research funding cuts to teaching lower division remedial courses, inevitably affects my chances of pursuing the career path that I have chosen. 

I was reading John Guillory’s article “The System of Graduate Education” today (as a way of procrastinating on homework) and was struck by this observation about students aspiring to become professors: 

their chances of success in situations where the

odds are stacked heavily against them. (State lotteries

depend on this fact.) Those who labor intellectually

may be even more susceptible to

such hope, because they already possess some

measure of faith in their own abilities. These

persons are the least inclined to accept that mere

chance can determine their fate. We all know

this, because our students persist in pursuing an

academic career even after they have heard the

worst from us. In fact, they are often right about

their abilities, even if they are wrong about the

probability of success. Intellectual labor markets

can draw large numbers of very talented people

into what is essentially a kind of lottery, where

minimal differences in abilities will determine

very large differences in career outcomes.

“Human beings in general overestimate their chances of success in situations where the odds are stacked heavily against them. (State lotteries depend on this fact.) Those who labor intellectually may be even more susceptible to such hope, because they already possess some measure of faith in their own abilities. These persons are the least inclined to accept that mere chance can determine their fate. We all know this, because our students persist in pursuing an academic career even after they have heard the worst from us. In fact, they are often right about their abilities, even if they are wrong about the probability of success. Intellectual labor markets can draw large numbers of very talented people into what is essentially a kind of lottery, where minimal differences in abilities will determine very large differences in career outcomes.”

Like I said, depressing, right? But alas, it turns out that I am an optimist, hopeless romantic, naive undergrad, whatever. Maybe I should be running for the hills (i.e. law school). Maybe I should be changing my major to something more “practical” or participating in activities that will give me “real world experience.” Maybe I should just admit that I’m crazy and in way over my head. But my favorite Jack Kerouac quote always comes to mind:

“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a common place thing, but burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars…”

I’d rather explode across the stars than never have made it up to space at all. Besides, if we don’t risk while we’re young, when are we ever going to?

Burn the House Down

On Wednesday, I ushered for a talk given by David Sedaris (author of Naked, Me Talk Pretty One Day, and most recently When You are Engulfed in Flames) in which he detailed his hilarious personal experiences, primarily in France and Australia. Unfortunately I missed quite a bit of the show because it was a full house (the ushers were dismissed later than usual and my friend and I had to leave the show early in order to get a good spot in line for the book signing afterwards). However, Sedaris was outrageously funny yet also insightful during the part of the talk that I was able to see.

A memorable moment for me was when Sedaris talked about stove tops as a metaphor for life. He recalled a conversation with a friend in which the friend tells him that each person has four burners on their stove top: Family, Friends, Work, and Health. In order to be successful, a person will usually have to turn off one burner. The really successful turn off two. For Sedaris, those two burners were Health and Family. 

Since that night, I have been thinking a lot about my stove burners. What will I have to give up in order to achieve my goals? Although I continue to hope, I don’t really believe in having it all. There are too many examples to the contrary. So I guess the question becomes an impossible one: “What can I learn to live without?” Maybe the smartest people are the ones who answer, “Success,” but I don’t know many people who would actually go through with cutting that ambition out of their lives. I know that I tend to ignore Health until I get sick. Friends and Family also flicker occasionally when life gets too hectic. I worry that one day I’ll turn around and realise that I have nothing but Work to keep me warm at night.

The best humor tells us something true about ourselves. Even through the laughter, we learn to ask questions previously unthought of and start to think about our lives in more meaningful ways.

 Which stove burner have you neglected lately?

Bookaholics Anonymous

I have a confession to make. I am inexplicably obsessed with the musty smell of old papers bound up in leather covers. I love holding a book in my hand, flipping through its creamy pages, and feeling history beneath my fingertips. However environmentally unfriendly it is, the physicality of owning a book is an experience that cannot be replaced by e-books or the Kindle.

But then again, I am a bookaholic. My desk in my dorm room is covered with tall stacks of books and my book shelf is completely filled with anthologies, reference texts, poetry, plays, and fiction (and a DVD collection). I also have two bookcases at home that contain the rest of my growing book collection. And yet I keep buying more and more books like an addiction. 

This weekend, I went to the LA Times Festival of Books and bought The World According to Garp (John Irving), The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (Mark Haddon), About a Boy (Nick Hornby), and I’m a Stranger Here Myself (Bill Bryson). 

I also bought a very nice copy of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court from a booth that sold rare and fine books. It’s really nicely bound with gold lettering and beautiful script on each page. I was also looking at a leatherbound copy of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, but it was unfortunately out of my price range. 

(Perhaps even more exciting though was the fact that I got to see Kristin Chenoweth from Wicked in person!)

Inspired by Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, as a child I dreamed of having an enormous grand library with the books piled up to the ceiling. I will probably never own a house big enough to house such an ambitious library, but I still dream of having bookshelves line every wall of my future home (which I imagine to be cottage-like and cosy with the rooms painted gold like in Bridge to Terabithia). To this dream, I have added the desire to own tasteful artwork and fine wine. 

My research (and thesis) advisor is a fellow bookaholic. He has five or six book shelves in his (tiny) office filled with books about Shakespeare, Renaissance culture, and other topics related to his research. One meeting while we were talking about purchasing books out of print, he told me that whenever he goes to England, he would peruse the bookshops there and sometimes he would find really rare books for only £20 or so. He is currently registered at the British Museum as the owner of the earliest edition of this one 16th century book and owns some very nice editions of rarely printed plays such as John Fletcher’s The Woman’s Prize. My professor has so many books that he can’t put them all in bookshelves at his house (his American literature collection lies in sad little stacks in his garage – sorry AmLit majors ). Shelves and shelves of books, rare book collections, books categorized by genre and author (I’m an organization freak). This could be me in thirty years!

In addition to my new Mark Twain acquisition, my fledgling special books collection includes autographed copies of Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine, Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and most recently Oliver Sacks’s Musicophilia. Next week, I plan to get another book autographed by David Sedaris. 

I have caught the book bug (worm?) and I’m loving it. 

It's nice to see that reading isn't dead at all.

Also, happy belated 445th birthday (April 23) to Mr. William Shakespeare! Even though that might not be your real birthday… But I’m sure you don’t mind that we think of you as the literary St. George.

A Five-Star Diatribe

“Such-and-such movie got 57% on Rotten Tomatoes!“

“Really? It got a 7.1 on Metacritic.“ 

One of my biggest pet peeves about reading entertainment reviews is the employment of the five-star rating system (and its many cousins such as the score out of 100, and A-B-C grade). Some argue that such a system allows readers to quickly gauge if a movie is worth their time without having to read through the entire article. Other times, the individual opinions by critics are averaged so that the reader can get an idea of the general consensus. 

Unfortunately, the fact that a movie is rated 23% or 2.3 or C- tells the potential movie-goer absolutely nothing about whether or not they will like the movie. (Thus producing a crowd of angry consumers commenting that the critics must be crazy or stupid because such-and-such movie was completely awesome/horrible). 

In exchange for its simplified convenience, the number scale sacrifices meaning by obscuring the subjectivity of the ratings. Movie reviews are completely useless unless you know the theoretical stance of the critic (Do they care about… the acting? how realistic it is? representations of women? What is their own social/religious/political background?). No writer or critic is objective or innocent in this respect. If the critic is judging the movie with standards that are not in line with your own, then their numeric rating says nothing about how much you will appreciate said film. By turning an expression of taste into numbers, language is undermined and meaning subverted. 

The five-star rating system makes the faulty assumption that a person’s perspectives on a book or movie can be characterized as  an objective degree of excellence. Most importantly, it assumes that taste is the same for any audience. It fails to consider either sociohistorical context or individual response. 

But numeric rating systems are only the tip of the problematic iceberg of reviews. The truth is our society places too much value on emotional appreciation, reader response, the pleasure principle, or whatever else you want to call it. People assume that their emotional reaction to a literary work is equivalent to how “good” the work is (i.e. its literary value). Too often I hear students talk about how much they dislike the novels they read in lit class, wondering “Why are we reading this? It’s so boring/bad/lame/hard.” Unfortunately, their aesthetic “judgment” of a text is based on a visceral reaction rather than intellectual analysis.

Perhaps my beef with those silly stars is that they are a gauge of society’s Id-driven pleasure principle rather than an actual examination of aesthetics. Anyone and everyone can write an amateur review and talk about what they liked or disliked, but I am wholly uninterested in that kind of instinctual subjectivity. Reviews push prescriptive agendas of taste; criticism, on the other hand, speaks of technique and device, interpretation and meaning. 

(This is not to say that I hate all reviewers. Some are actually able to get past individual response (or assumed audience response) and I’m quite fond of New Yorker reviews – which happen to be sans stars. )

Permission to Go Insane? Granted.

The smell of brand-new books waiting to be opened and annotated. The fresh pages of notebook paper. The bright-eyed students eager to bury their heads in books, neglecting the beautiful sunny day outside. Spring quarter has arrived! After a difficult but rewarding winter quarter, Sophia Literaria is ready to… go through the torture all over again. With the GRE out of the way, I decided to take on extra (22) units this quarter, resulting in the following reading list:

• Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
• Shakespeare, As You Like It
• Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing
• Shakespeare, Sonnets
• Shakespeare, Richard II
• Shakespeare, Henry IV, part I
• Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus
• Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
• Shakespeare, Hamlet
• Dryden, All for Love
• Inchbald, The Mogul Tale
• Colman the Younger, Blue-Beard
• Southerne, Oroonoko
• Bickerstaff, The Padlock
• Rowson, Slaves in Algiers
• Gay, Polly
• Colman the Younger, Inkle and Yarico
• Sheridan, Pizarro
• Steele, Conscious Lovers
• Lillo, London Merchant
• Williams, Craft of Argument
• Booth, Craft of Research
• Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction

Not to mention secondary works, the books I’m reading for my independent research project, submissions for Aleph, and articles for my Information Studies seminar. Lovely. No wonder I indulge in television and comic books/manga in my spare time (the less words the better!).

But the truth is I love being crazy busy. I love the challenge of making sense of a hard passage, the adrenaline of filling up a bluebook during a midterm, the sense of achievement when all those late nights pay off, and the satisfaction of turning in a paper that you’re actually proud of. Maybe I drive myself crazy with work because I like the affirmation at the end of the quarter that, despite all the pain and frustration, I still adore English. Even after struggling (and complaining) through The Faerie Queene all winter quarter, I can still say that there’s nothing else I’d rather be studying. Literature is my soulmate.

Brownie points if anyone can guess what three classes I’m taking based on this list (One of them is really easy, but let’s see how specific you can get)! AND extra brownie points if you know where the last picture is from!

It’s the Hard Knock Life for Us!

This is why  I am up at 5 am, poring over Alfred Harbage’s Annals of English Drama, 975-1700: An Analytical Record of All Plays, Extant or Lost, Chronologically Arranged and Indexed by Authors, Titles, Dramatic Companies, &c. (among the 21 other texts stacked on my desk). 

I love research, I really do. I love wandering into deserted sections of the library and cracking open dusty books that probably haven’t been checked out for decades (or at least years). Sometimes I even like just reading off different titles and visualizing how much knowledge and insight exists in just that one library.  I find it really exciting that I get to learn so much stuff that we never even touch in class.

But no matter how you spin it, deadlines suck. Especially deadlines imposed by arbitrary school schedules. *Brain explodes.*

For One Night Only

Wow, so I haven’t posted for awhile… What with GREs, research (and research fellowship applications), and three upper divs, this quarter has turned out to be my busiest. However, I’ve also been able to have a lot of fun.

Since the last time I posted, I’ve been able to attend the UCLA Vietnamese Student Union (VSU) Cultural Night, Guillermina Quiroga Dance Company’s Tango, Historias Breves, a talk with Edward Albee (got a signed copy of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? ), a film concert discussion with Werner Herzog, and a concert for the Munich Symphony Orchestra (amazing). Off the stage, I explored the LA Farmer’s Market and saw Slumdog Millionaire TWICE (that’s how much I loved it) before the Oscars. 

Unfortunately, all this activity hasn’t given me much spare time to do reviews or post on this blog, but I shall attempt to briefly make it up to you.

Everytime I step into Royce Hall, I experience the same nervous giddiness the first time I saw a show there. There’s a sort of gasping anticipation suspended in the air as you impatiently wait for the lights to dim and the curtains to draw. 

The extraordinary thing about live performance is that no matter how many times you return, everytime you see the show, it will be the first time that you have experienced it. Not only does the performance change, but so does the audience, the environment, and even yourself – all of which affect how you perceive what happens on the stage. 

Very often the modern audience forgets the magic of live performance and the need to be in the playhouse or symphony hall in order to experience it. With our iPods, DVDs, and (let’s face it) pirated downloads, we become used to seeing/hearing the same act over and over again. Because we are so used to recorded sound and film, we tend to forget that they  are simply one version of all the possibilities that could exist with that particular score or script.

And so, I urge you to go to the theatre. Yes, it does tend to be expensive (be a volunteer usher like me!), but there’s something immediate, irreplacable, and sublime about the stage that makes you feel oh so alive.

An Unforgiving Art

First entry of the new year! My schedule this quarter is pretty packed – I’m taking three English classes, continuing my work with Aleph, and embarking on an independent research project on early modern authorship. My GRE prep course also starts in less than two weeks so things are going to get hectic in Sophialand. 

One of the classes I’m taking is on the history of literary theory and criticism, which has been really interesting so far because it discusses the types of ideas that got me interested in literature in the first place.  I love literary criticism and the debates it has over genre, language, and the nature/purpose of fiction and poetry. 

Anyways, I was reading Horace’s Ars Poetica last week and this section really caught my attention:

“In some things, a tolerable mediocrity is properly allowed. A mediocre lawyer or advocate is a long way from the distinction of learned Messalla and doesn’t know as much as Aulus Cascellius, but he has his value. But neither men nor gods nor shop-fronts allow a poet to be mediocre. Just as music out of tune or thick ointment or Sardinian honey with your poppy gives offence at a nice dinner, because the meal could go on without them, so poetry, which was created and discovered for the pleasure of the mind, sinks right to the bottom the moment it declines a little from the top.” 

Horace’s opinions of his own profession strongly reflect my own views about studying literature and working in academia. There is no room for mediocrity in my career plans… which I think is just a little scary.

(P.S. Ushered for the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra this past weekend. Simply phenomenal. If you ever get a chance to see the “Cellist Twins” Pei-Jee Ng and Pei-Sian Ng in concert, do it! They’re mindblowingly awesome. )

A Long December

December has not been very kind to bloggers, or at least not to this particular blogger. With term papers to write and finals to take, I have unwittingly neglected my blogging duties this month. Unfortunately, I’m about to board a plane in T-minus 4 hours for southern China where I shall be traveling (namely in Hong Kong, Guilin, Beihai, Sanya, and Shanghai) for the next three weeks, so I probably won’t be able to get any decent blogging in before New Years.

There are still two weeks before Christmas, so I’ve decided to compile a quick list of things to give your fellow bookworm for the holidays:

1. For the poetically inclined – A rhyming dictionary. A gift that is both practical and entertaining, a rhyming dictionary is a must-have for anyone dabbling in poetry or song writing. You can use it to find that elusive phrase that will complete your couplet or it can be really fun just flipping through it and finding words that you never knew could be used in a rhyme. This is the ideal gift for anyone who loves words (especially phonetics). I would recommend the Penguin Rhyming Dictionary, or if you have a little more money, the Oxford Rhyming Dictionary (warning: some words will only rhyme if you put on a British accent).

2. For the ambitious bookworm – War and Peace, newly translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. First published in hardcover last year, this book just arrived in paperback form on December 2nd, in time for the holidays. I actually haven’t gotten a chance to read this translation yet (sadly, my first experience with Tolstoy was with the inferior Constance Garnett version), but I would vouch for any Pevear/Volokhonsky translation. They have previously translated several works of Dostoevsky (including The Brothers Karamozov and Notes from Underground), Dead Souls by Gogol, a number of short stories by Chekhov, and Anna Karenina. The couple have a knack for maintaining the original linguistic style of the work, a feat difficult in translation because translators often impose their own mannerisms or cultural language onto the original. Translation is never as good as the original, but since not all of us have time to learn Russian, this is probably going to be as close as you can get to a true Tolstoyan experience.

3. For the intelligent dreamer - The Sandman (Vol. 1-10) by Neil Gaiman. I was first introduced to this comic book series in my sophomore year of high school and four years later, I still find myself fascinated by the questions that the series raises. The Sandman, “a comic book for intellectuals” as Norman Mailer has described it, has this wonderful dichotomy of past and present, reality and fantasy that manifests itself in its artwork (which varies stylistically from story to story) as well as in its melding of classical mythology with modern life. Although I would probably criticize certain segments of the series, I found the conclusion extremely powerful and thoughtprovoking. The spinoffs, however, I would not recommend except for Endless Nights, which I think is closest in tone to the original series.

4. For the general reader – The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages by Harold Bloom. There are many people against the idea of a canon as well as people who simply cannot stand Harold Bloom. However, regardless of how you might feel about his critical theory, his enthusiasm for great literature is always palpable and that love for good books is especially contagious for the general reader. This book acts as a reading list and a guide for some of the greatest works in the Western tradition and will definitely whet your appetite for the likes of Shakespeare, Dante, and Chaucer.

5. For the nontraditional gent or gal - Write a short story featuring the recipient as the main character. If you plan on traveling, do a little literary tourism and explore the haunts of fictional characters (i.e. Sherlock Holmes’s digs in London) or the abodes of famed authors (i.e. Ernest Hemingway’s home in Key West). Invite your friends to a reenactment of a scene in a beloved book (such as the Mad Hatter’s tea party or the Neverfield ball). Buy tickets to an author’s talk or poetry reading or even a play. If you’ve given your literary friend a book year after year, this is the year to change it up and form some lasting memories.

Let me know if any of these literary gift ideas helped!

As for my winter break reading, I shall be catching up with my Kafka (short stories only) while I am in the Orient so I shall let you know my thoughts upon my return. Also, I’m contemplating adding a travel category, but I think I’ll probably keep it oriented towards literary tourism or maybe places of historical or artistic value. I shall ruminate upon this some more…

Until the next time I have internet access, adieu. Happy Holidays!