west of the moon

africa reading challenge.

I've decided to join the Africa Reading Challenge, which I first learned about from Matt Cheney.   It's  pretty straightforward: read six books this year that are either about Africa or by African authors.  Ever since I first put together the unit on African science for my survey course on science in the ancient world, I've been deeply aware of how little I know about African history, so this is a great excuse for me to read up.  (On the long list of weblog posts I keep not getting around to writing: how trying to teach a unit on the history of science in Africa changed the way I think about teaching the history of science.)

The reading list may change as the year progresses, but this is my preliminary set of six books:

• Africa, A Biography of the Continent, by John Reader
• Half of a Yellow Sun, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
• Citizen and Subject, by Mamood Mamdani
• The Pygmies Were Our Compass: Bantu and Batwa in the history of West Central Africa, by Kairn Klieman.
• King Leopold's Ghost, by Adam Hochschild
• Nervous Conditions, by  Tsitsi Dangarembga

This is list is haphazard at best.  The novels were selected based on recommendations, and mostly because I didn't want to limit myself to nonfiction, although I think nonfiction is where my interests are focused.  The point of the challenge is to read broadly, and reading broadly on a topic that's already as broad as "Africa" is obviously only going to be the first step towards understanding.  But it's a start.  (It's also cheating, a little--I bought the John Reader book last week, before I'd even heard of the reading challenge.  It was my vacation reading, and I'm still working my way through it.) 

What I'd love, though, are pointers to more readings on pre-colonial history.  Are there any good histories of the pre-colonial societies along the Niger, for instance?  My teaching on this has been cobbled together from articles and references in other texts, but I'd really love a good thorough history that covers the Kingdom of Ghana, and Gao, and Kanem.  Mali in the time of Mansa Musa, or even before.  I'm sure these books must be out there, I just haven't had a lot of luck locating them so far.  (I'm hoping that the Klieman book on my list might be a start in that direction, although not quite what I'm looking for.) 

So that's the Africa Reading Challenge.  I'll be posting about the books as I read them.  If anyone else wants to join in, just sign up at the original post.   (And if you don't have any idea where to start finding books for your list, there are suggestions both on that page and on Matt Cheney's post.) 

a personal history of the magnetic fields.

I saw the Magnetic Fields last night, at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco.  It was a great show, a good mix of old and new material, and I always love the differences between the live and recorded versions.  Every time I see them live, the older material gets slower and sadder, I think--it's not as though "Lovers From the Moon" was ever a peppy song, but it was outright mournful last night.  (And, as so often happens to me, watching Sam Davol made me wish I knew how to play the cello, but that's neither here nor there.)  Throughout the show, though, I kept thinking about my own history with this music.   It's not that I think I have any kind of indie-pop cool-kid cred here--kind of the opposite, actually.  But I ran into one of my students in the lobby, before the show, and that somehow got me thinking about how long I've been listening to this band, how many other memories and stories are all tied up in that history. 

My first exposure to the Magnetic Fields didn't take, actually.  It was freshman year in college, when I made an unsuccessful attempt at being a college radio DJ.  "All the Umbrellas in London" was in the "heavy rotation / new singles" bin at the station, but I only listened to it once or twice, and never played it on air.  Our college radio station, WHRB, had (probably still has?) a very competitive selection and training process (called "comp"), and the year I went through it, our comp directors were two guys with, er, prickly personalities.  They were very self-assured, very aggressive about their opinions, and absolutely scornful of any music that wasn't sufficiently hardcore.  I learned a lot during that comp--I learned about the history of punk and hardcore, I learned a lot of gossip about the Lemonheads, I learned how to operate studio equipment, I learned that you couldn't count on the jazz DJs to show up for their 5am shifts, and I learned that the comp directors would shout you into the ground if you expressed a serious interest in indie pop. 

I'm pretty sure that it was "100,000 Fireflies," on a mix-tape from a friend, that made me a fan.  Everything accelerated from there.  Music is such a social experience, and most of my college friends liked the Magnetic Fields; I owned a few CDs, but even if I hadn't, the music was somehow just always there. 

At some point, and I'm trying to pin down when, a group of us went to see them play at Smith.  Eight or nine people in two cars, driving out from Cambridge to Northampton.  This was close to ten years ago, and I remember it in a series of vivid fragments.  The show itself was in a ballroom or gym space, upstairs at the student center, I think?  We all sat on the floor, and the stage was only a foot or two raised off the ground.  The opening acts were all student bands, and one of them kept shorting out their lighting setup, all bright flashes and popping noises before everything went dark.  There was a band whose entire set consisted of electric guitar feedback and a woman screaming near a microphone.  The show itself felt perfect, not because it was smooth and polished but because it was immediate and idiosyncratic.  Stephin agreed to a request from the audience for a song that Claudia had forgotten how to play.  Claudia made a few hesitant jokes about Smith College, something about whether they were more likely to find copies of On Our Backs or Off Our Backs in the green room.  Stephin went out into the audience and sang "Josephine" as a serenade to someone.  This was a few months before 69 Love Songs came out, so when they played "Come Back from San Francisco", I'd never heard it before, but it stayed with me for days.  (It wouldn't be until months later, listening to the new album over and over again at work, that I caught the double edge to the lyrics--"you need me like the wind needs the trees ... like the moon needs poetry, you need me.")  I remember the drive home, too, watching the Massachusetts Turnpike speed past the window in the darkness, before drifting off to sleep in the backseat. 

69 Love Songs was an -event-.  No matter how many times I listened to it, I found something new, something particularly lovely or clever or funny or sad.  We all sent email back and forth for days, making lists of our favorites.  (I mentioned this in my online journal at the time, which led to my being interviewed by a reporter for the London Sunday Times Magazine.  I've still got a copy of the article, I was so excited.)  A while later--a few months? a year? the chronology is fuzzy--the whole group of us saw them at the Middle East in Cambridge, maybe a Valentine's Day show?  All the singers from 69 Love Songs were there, too, and the stage was so crowded, all the people and the instruments and equipment all jammed up together, the singers perched on little stools.  We were all up in front, right near the stage.  During the encore, Stephin brought his dog out on stage with him, a little chihuahua named Irving.  He asked us all to be very quiet, because Irving was afraid of crowds.  I don't remember the song, but it was something Stephin sang all by himself, just him and Irving at a microphone in the middle of the stage.  No matter how quiet we were, Irving still got scared, and he started shaking and whimpering.  Stephin, without even a tiny hitch in the song, turned the dog around so that he couldn't see us, and then slowly tucked the dog under his shirt until the song was over.

Last night, Stephin Merritt explained his current theory on audience interaction.  "The audience doesn't... speak... [long pause] ... English.  There are some cognates, it might sound like they understand you, but they don't.  That's why you don't answer them when they talk to you."  Daniel Handler, filling in on accordion for a few songs, engaged us all in some audience participation during one of the songs from the Series of Unfortunate Events soundtrack. He asked us all to make pounding noises with our feet when the song tells us to run away, and to slump over in our seats when the song warns us we might die.  The people sitting in front of me, a group of highly stylized twentysomething hipsters, were the most enthusiastic pounders and slumpers in our section.  Before the show, watching this group file into their seats, I couldn't help smiling.  They looked so familiar, cats-eye glasses, an army jacket with a patch of the East German flag, aggressively cultivated sideburns, corduroy skirts and retro blouses.  They looked like people I used to know.  "I feel old," was what I said to the friend I was there with, but I'm not sure it's what I meant.  The sound on the new album is full of production and echo (there's a reason it's called Distortion), but when they played those songs onstage, just piano, cello, ukelele, and guitar, they didn't sound that different from the older songs.  Years go by, and everything changes, but it's all just pieces of the same whole.  That's what it felt like, pieces of the same whole.

so, about those books.

So, as promised, what I thought about some of the books on the big 2007 list.  I want to start with a little disclaimer, though--these aren't really book reviews proper.  I think a good book review should probably have some critical infrastructure, and should certainly have more thought put into it.  This book list was the leisure-reading list.  I didn't include the books I read for course prep, or for academic use.  When I read something for academic purposes, I think about it differently, with a whole critical infrastructure; I don't generally bring all that mental machinery to bear on books that I'm reading just for pleasure.  So I'm thinking of this more as my reader reactions to the books, not as actual reviews.  (If that distinction even makes sense outside of my head.)

• David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas.  I loved everything about this book, and it's one of the rare books in my life that I wish I could read again for the first time.  It was beautiful, and weird, and surprising, and I didn't want it to ever end.
• Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai.  I also loved everything about this one--it's one of the best books I've ever read, although I felt constantly off-balance while I was reading it.  It only took me a page or two to figure out that it has nothing at all to do with that Tom Cruise movie of the same name, thankfully.  It took me much longer to figure out what it -was- about, but that was okay. 
• David Mitchell, Black Swan Green.  So, Jenn said in the comments on the earlier post that she has trouble sorting out her reaction to The Last Samurai from her reaction to The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, because she read them at around the same time.  I read The Curious Incident a couple of years ago, right after I read The Speed of Dark; it was an unplanned sequence, and an unfortunate one, because both books feature autistic narrators, and The Speed of Dark was so goddamned brilliant that The Curious Incident couldn't help but look sad and gimmicky in comparison.  And then when Black Swan Green came out, I saw people comparing it to The Curious Incident, and as a result I had no interest at all in reading it.  But everyone kept saying how good it was, and I had loved Cloud Atlas so much, so I finally gave it a try, and I liked it quite a bit.  It didn't have that light shimmery kind of brilliance that Cloud Atlas had, but it was really good, entertaining and weird and smart.
  
• Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild.  I confess, I only read this because I saw the movie.  I like Jon Krakauer quite a bit--Under the Banner of Heaven is a fabulous book, and one that I couldn't stop talking about for weeks after I read it--but the book just didn't sound that interesting.  I only saw the movie because I was in the mood for a movie and it was playing at a convenient time, and I liked the movie, I think.  I think.  I feel a little bit like the movie I saw was not the same one Sean Penn thought he was making, like I was seeing something in it that wasn't quite there, or wasn't intended to be there.  Mostly, though, I came out of the movie desperately curious to know how Jon Krakauer had put the story together, and I was hoping that the book would give me that story.  It didn't, but it was a good read anyway. 
• Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels and What's Bred in the Bone.  These were fabulous.  I have no idea how to talk about them--they're so different from most of the things I read.  For that matter, they're so different from each other!  But such good books.  (I'm not thrilled with the change in Maria from the first to the second book, but I'm hoping that when I finally get a copy of the third in the trilogy, she'll make more sense.  She's only a cameo in the second book, after all.)  But so strange.  Davies has this talent for weaving together a string of weird coincidences that, when they finally come together, look less like gimmicky coincidence and more like the pieces of some larger puzzle falling naturally into place.
• Allegra Goodman, Intuition.  This was completely a comedy of manners in the academic world--no, wait, when I write that sentence it sounds like Jane Smiley's Moo or something, and this book is nothing like that one.  And I actually had a little trouble while reading it, because my brain kept trying to map it more directly onto the David Baltimore / Thereza Imanishi-Kari incident.  (It maps pretty directly on its own, there's no need to force an even closer correspondence.  But somehow I kept trying.)  But the characters all made sense, and all seemed like people I know--not that anyone in the book reminded me of anyone particular, just that each one of them felt a little familiar.  Slightly melodramatic, but in an entertaining and fairly realistic way.
• Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina.  True story: when I graduated from college, I had two weeks before I had to start at my new job, and I told myself that I would use part of that time to read some huge epic classic that I'd previously neglected.  I settled on Anna Karenina, checked it out of the library, and over a period of a few days I read nearly a third of the book and just adored it. But then I put it down for a few days, and when I went back, I couldn't remember who anyone was or how they were related to each other, and I was too demoralized to start over.  I finally got around to trying again, and I still adored it.  The big secret about this book is that it's a soap opera dressed up as high art.
• James Halperin, The First Immortal.  This book was absolutely horrible--it's practically a caricature of itself, and just kept getting stupider and more awful.  I don't think I finished it, actually--I gave up somewhere around the time when Our Hero, having attained immortality, adopts the eight-year-old clone of his dead wife, who he raises expecting that she'll be his new wife once she's, y'know, past puberty.  One hopes. 

More later, but that's a start.

bibliophile.

I have just been informed that the Bay Area is either having or about to have a Massive Winter Rainstorm of Epic Proportions.  (I can hear it raining outside, so we may already be in the midst of it, but it doesn't sound like it's raining all that hard yet?  I don't know.)  I don't mean to diminish the importance of the Massive Winter Rainstorm, if only because I live in a part of the country where people build their houses on the sides of steep hills, and bad rainstorms can wash those houses right off.  In my life, though, the rain mostly only means that the mail in my mailbox gets wet and I have to juggle my umbrella and my coffee when I walk to my campus office. 

I know that we're a few days into 2008, but I have one last 2007 wrap-up to do, and that's a book list.  2007 was, among other things, the year that I started reading again.  I've always been a compulsive reader, but I got so worn down at the end of the dissertation process that I wasn't able to process anything more complicated than trashy romance novels and well-worn half-memorized favorites.  I stopped reading new books entirely, it seemed like, and that felt wrong.  About a year and a half ago, I emailed a lot of my friends and asked them for reading suggestions, old books, new books, fiction, nonfiction, genre, literary, whatever.  Tell me the names of some books you like, and I'll try to read them, I said. 

And that's what I've been doing.  I've been reading a lot of books that I hadn't read before, and it's such a good thing for me.  I haven't liked all of them, but I've liked most of them, and I've loved a few.  I tried to reconstruct the list of books I've read in the last year or so, and it's hard, because I don't really keep lists or records.  The list that follows is a reconstruction based on a few sketchy documentary sources and a quick scan of the bookshelves.  (I've gotten most of these from either BookMooch or the library, so it's been a pretty cost-effective reading surge.)  Almost every book on this list I've meant to blog about, even just a brief reaction, and kept not getting around to.  I may still try and do that, at least brief reactions, but for now I'm just going to list them.  If anyone's particularly curious about what I thought of any of these, though, let me know, and I'll try to get to those first.

• Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai.
• Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next books. (I may not have read all of them, but I think I got most of them.)
• David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas.
• David Mitchell, Black Swan Green.
• Robertson Davies, Rebel Angels and What's Bred in the Bone.  (still trying to track down a copy of The Lyre of Orpheus, the third book in the trilogy.)
• John McPhee, Annals of the Former World.  I don't think I've actually finished this yet, though.  It's just so hard to carry around.
• John McPhee Coming Into the Country. 
• Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild.  Particularly interesting read as a set with Coming Into the Country.
• Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina.
• Julie Phillips's Tiptree biography.
• Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep.
• Kate Chopin, "Pale Horse Pale Rider" and "The Awakening"
• Mary McCarthy, The Group.
• Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
• Mary Stewart, The Crystal Cave and a few of the sequels
• Joan Vinge, Snow Queen (and World's End, and Summer Queen, which I haven't finished yet)
• Naomi Novik's Temeraire books.
• All of Kate Wilhelm's Barbara Holloway books (except I think the most recent one, which I haven't found a copy of yet)
• Michael Chabon, Summerland.
• Walter Mosely, Devil in a Blue Dress
• Bill Buford, Heat
• Janet Kagan, Uhura's Song
• Pat Frank, Alas, Babylon
• Augusten Burroughs, Running with Scissors and Dry, A Memoir
• James Halperin, The First Immortal
• Stephen Carter, The Emperor of Ocean Park
• Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
• David Halberstam, The Teammates
• Ben Mezrich, Bringing Down the House
• Leon Lederman, The God Particle
• Allegra Goodman, Intuition
• Jane Smiley, Duplicate Keys
• Alexandra Ripley, On Leaving Charleston
• Barbara Taylor Bradford, A Woman of Substance
• Willo Davis Roberts, The Girl with the Silver Eyes
• Caleb Carr, The Alienist
• Colson Whitehead, The Intuitionist
• Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History
• Garth Nix's Abhorsen trilogy
• Kate Wilhelm, Juniper Time
• Charles Stross, The Clan Corporate
• David Halberstam, The Summer of '49
• J.D.Robb, Innocent in Death
• Tess Gerristen, Bloodstream
• Nora Roberts, Angel's Fall
• John Scalzi, Old Man's War
• John Scalzi, The Ghost Brigades
• Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy

I may have forgotten a couple, but I did resist the urge to not list the books that I think will make me look less smart.  There's no shame in reading mass-market thrillers and romance novels.  Also, some of these are books I've read  before, but long enough ago that I didn't really remember them that well.

And that's 2007 in books.

Bryant Park and Sigur Ros

For a few months now, I've been listening to the podcasts of The Bryant Park Project, a new NPR morning news show.  I have mixed reactions to it--it's a fun radio show, and interesting, but it's not what I want from NPR in terms of a news show, and I'm extremely wary of the idea that it's supposed to somehow replace Morning Edition.  Basically, I love the feel of the show, and enjoy listening to it, but it absolutely lacks the type of insight and analysis that I depend on NPR for.  I can get fun banter anywhere; there are very few places I can get the type of good solid news coverage I get with Morning Edition.

I may not be able to accept BPP as a news show, but I do think they're doing some really great things.  In particular, they're using their blog as major supplement to the show, in some interesting ways.  One great example of this is the saga of Luke Burbank (co-host of the Bryant Park Project) and Sigur Ros (offbeat Icelandic band).

Our story starts with the members of Sigur Ros coming to the BPP studios for an interview, and the interview going badly.  Really badly.  So badly that (as far as I can tell) none of it made it into the actual radio broadcast, but video of the whole experience was posted on the BPP blog.  In the comments for that post, there's, er, a healthy debate on the question of whether Luke or the band was to blame for the awfulness of the interview.  The BPP crew encouraged this discussion, and later linked to another site conducting a poll on whether the real problem was that Luke Burbank was an idiot.   (Their words, not mine!) 

What really impressed me, though, was the most recent turn in the story.  Today they posted a fifteen-minute video in which music journalist Jancee Dunn sits down with Luke to review the interview video and comment on what went wrong.   Jancee's conclusion seems to be that both Luke and the band were at fault, but Luke was probably a bigger part of the problem--he's not doing the right things to draw them out, he's too self-conscious and apologetic about asking questions, he's trying too hard to be offbeat and not successfully managing the conversation.  It's a great mini-seminar on good interviewing practices, and it's also kind of fun to watch, just to see Jancee wincing at particularly bad questions. 

This is a beautiful example of integrated media--the blog has some life and function of its own outside of the radio show, and is used to extend the scope of the radio show into the blog community.  I think this kind of thing is why I'm sticking with the Bryant Park Project despite my deep skepticism about their value as a news show. 

(Unrelatedly, but while I'm posting: does anyone have any more information on this whole James Watson thing? I'd love to see a full text of what he said, to see if it's any less bizarre and offensive when it's in a full context.) 

great fortune.

The great fortune is mine, in that I've been practically drowning in wonderful media lately. 

Some of it has been happenstance.  Yesterday afternoon, for instance, I went to see The Lookout.  Based on the ads I'd seen, my impression of this movie was something like "fast and flashy action movie, starring that kid from 10 Things I Hate About You," and that sounded about right for my mood.  My impression of the movie was wrong, but in a good way.  This movie was stunning.  It could have been awful--the basic premise could have been gimmicky, any number of plot elements could have felt arbitrary and contrived--but instead it all pulled together in a really compelling and intense way.  I don't want to talk it to death, but seriously, this was a great movie. 

It seems unfair to talk about my great reading experience this weekend, because you can't share it.  (Tim sent me a draft of the second Marla Mason book, theoretically so that I could give revision suggestions, but I didn't have any suggestions, the book was just so good.)    But following on the "happenstance" comment above, I've had some great reading lately that was mostly accidental. 

For years now, I've been having people recommend The Alienist, by Caleb Carr, because it apparently has some thematic or topical connection to my dissertation research.  I finally decided to track it down, but had a moment of extreme confusion and ended up with The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead instead.   This was one of the best mistakes I've ever made.  I did eventually get my hands on a copy of The Alienist, and it was extremely disappointing.  I see the why people recommended it to me--it deals with late-nineteenth-century psychiatry, which isn't the same thing as late-nineteenth-century psychology, but is close enough that I understand the confusion.  And they talk about William James a little, which should have endeared it to me, but instead was only irritating.  I'm not sure what I expected from this book, but it felt like a generic mystery novel dressed up in period clothes.  That might have been fine, mystery novels aren't themselves a problem, but it was just -dripping- with a self-satisfied sense of its own cleverness.  Historical actors like Jacob Riis, John Pierpont Morgan, and Franz Boas were paraded through the narrative for no apparent purpose other than to demonstrate that the author had done some historical research. 

I hate being so snide.  I really do.  I don't -like- disliking books, and I like even less being critical of them.  It's just that the book irritated me, constantly, and I kept reading it because I kept wanting it to do something really good, to really pull it out, and it kept not happening, it just kept being more and more irritating.  "Ho ho, good chap!  Let us now invent criminal profiling, with our crack team of misfit geniuses, including the science nerds, the plucky career woman with extraordinary empathetic insights, and the man who brings nothing to the team save his ability to act as the book's narrator." 

The point was not to talk about a book I didn't like, though.  It was to talk about a book I did like, specifically, The Intuitionist.  (I'm not destined to be a book reviewer, by the way, because I've never really figured out how to explain why I like a book.  I've done academic book reviews, and those are easier, because the criteria on which a book succeeds or fails are much easier to evaluate.  Fiction is so subjective.)  It's about a woman named Lila Mae Watson, who inspects elevators, but it's also about a world that isn't quite our own, and it's about modernity and verticality, and it's about the city and about isolation and about race and division; more than any of this, it's a beautiful book, one of those novels where everything else is overwhelmed by the beauty and the construction of the language. I read this in fits and spurts, waiting for the bus, eating breakfast, fitting it in around other things, and every time I had to put the book down, I felt like I was pulling myself up out of a dream.

My current interstitial reading (bus-stops and breakfast and brushing teeth) is 1491 by Charles C Mann.  I read an article by Mann in the Atlantic Monthly, four or five years ago, on this same topic, and it was one of the most fascinating things I've ever read, so I was thrilled to see that he'd written a whole book.  It's an exploration of new work in anthropology, re-examining the standard story about what life was like for the inhabitants of North and South America prior to European contact.  What I remember from the Atlantic article is that archaeologists and anthropolgists had found evidence suggesting that those societies were larger, more widespread, and -far- more technologically and culturally sophisticated than had previously been assumed.  At the time the article was published, it looked as though this was an intriguing fringe theory, but the book (so far--I'm only about thirty pages in) seems to be saying that just in the last few years it's gained a lot more credibility and currency.  It's a really engaging read, and it plays into a lot of the same issues I was wrestling with in my lecture course last semester.  I'm not very far along in the book yet, but I'm really thoroughly enjoying it.

mimsy.

Things that I think I should have known about sooner: they've made a movie out of "Mimsy Were the Borogoves". 

The original story, by Lewis Padgett (a pseudonym for Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore), was published in Astounding in 1943, and it's one of the few Golden Age stories that I think is actually brilliant, both in concept and execution.  I feel like I almost have to assume that the movie is going to be disappointing--getting a movie's worth of plot out of a short story pretty much necessitates changing the story in significant ways, and this is one of my all-time favorite pieces of short fiction, so it's going to be hard for me to just enjoy the movie even if it's good.  But I have hope, or at least guarded optimism. 

They've got a website with the trailer: The Last Mimzy.  (And yes, the Mimsy/Mimzy shift makes it difficult to sustain that guarded optimism.)  That site generated some popup ads, and I think the trailer starts playing automatically, so be prepared.  Based on the trailer, there's at least a chance that it's going to be okay. 

I -want- to like this.  I mean, my god, someone took a story that I love and made a movie out of it!  Of course I want to like it, and I want it to be good, and I want it to do well.  It's just that there are so many ways it could go wrong.  The basic premise behind the story is that a brother and sister find a toybox that contains a bunch of weird and inexplicable toys; the reader knows that the toys come from the distant future, and that they were sent back in time accidentally.  They're educational toys, though, and as the children play with them, they learn the things that the toys were meant to teach, mainly ways of manipulating the physical world that seem impossible to present-day humans.  (There's a part at the end that I think actually prefigures posthumanist science fiction, and that's also part of the charm, even if it's a little clumsier and less well-developed than the rest of the story.)  The idea that our interactions with the world around us are completely dictated by our expectations, that's a pretty common and even cliche one in genre writing by this point, but it's something I associate more with modern or urban fantasy.  People can't do magic because they think it isn't real, people forget or ignore spooky or supernatural events because they're not capable of processing what they've just seen, etc.  It's a compelling idea, but it's almost too easy as a fantasy concept; this story is one of the few treatments of it that I've ever seen from a more science-fiction base--physics works for us the way that it does because we understand it in a particular way.  (Other takes on similar ideas include "The Story of Your Life", and while I can't remember specifics, I know I've seen at least one or two more.) 

In any event, I wasn't trying to do any serious critical analysis, I was just noting that this movie exists.

pod people.

I suppose that I'll eventually start to take podcasts for granted, but I'm not there yet.  Having radio programs come straight to my computer, so that I can listen to them whenever I feel like it, still feels a little bit like magic.  I've subscribed to so many NPR and BBC shows that I don't usually even manage to keep current with the news ones, and I've got three weeks' worth of Science Friday shows still queued up.  I'm okay with this--I find the overabundance of informationg to be a little comforting. 

One of my favorites (and the one that prompted me to post about my podcast habit) is from the BBC.  The show is called From Our Own Correspondent, and it delivers exactly what it promises: personal reflections from BBC news correspondents.  Usually it gives a behind-the-scenes perspective on major news stories, but sometimes it's just a personal story.  (Those of you who are actually within BBC broadcasting territory probably think I'm being quaint by treating this program like some kind of exciting new find, because I gather it's an old and fairly popular one, but hey, it's new to me.)  There's a similar kind of behind-the-scenes thing going on a Mixed Signals, the NPR weblog, which features everything from daily notes on the news editor meetings to a debate between Joanne Silburner and Andrea Seabrook as to who has the cutest dog.  (At the other end of the personal-touch spectrum, there's the oddly compelling Front Page podcast from the New York Times, in which a reporter summarizes the top headlines in each section of the paper.)

"But the kiss in Colin's eyes..."

I'm starting to consider making up a cardboard sign and carrying it around with me.  The sign would read "GET OFF THE PHONE", and I imagine myself brandishing it at cars whose drivers are talking on cell phones.  I've been known to actually shout this at passing cars when I'm out walking, but I know they can't hear me.  I realize that I'm fighting a losing battle here, but I counted six drive-talkers on my walk up to campus this morning, and I wasn't even looking that actively. 

Matt and I signed up for Netflix a week or two ago, which I imagine is going to seriously boost my entertainment-media consumption.  This is a good thing--I've seen so few movies in the last few years.  I used to go to the movies all the time, especially in my first year of two of grad school, where I'd take off to a matinee on a slow weekday.  It's been a long time since I felt that I had the time to spare on weekday afternoons, though, and now I have a lot of movies to catch up on.

Such as: Shopgirl, which I was curious about when it was in theatrical release but never managed to make time to see.  And now that I've seen it... I don't know.  It had a lot of gorgeous visuals, and I thought all of the actors did just about perfect jobs with their characters, but something just felt empty about the whole thing.  (Oh, and the voiceovers were horrible, but they were also infrequent, so that's not itself a fatal flaw.)   Thirty or forty minutes in, I commented to Matt that I just kind of didn't understand it--not that I couldn't follow the plot, just that it all seemed kind of arbitrary.  Nothing that anyone was doing really made any sense.  Matt's theory was that it was more like a portrait of desperate loneliness than a story about these particular characters, and that helped put the movie into focus, but it still felt hollow at the end. 

I also had problems with the ending.  (Skip the rest of this paragraph if you don't want to know about the ending.)  For one thing, Ray saying that he really had loved her?  That one moment undermined everything else I thought I understood about their relationship and its end.  I also didn't like that Jason Schwartzman's character was redeemed as much through money as he was through personal change--I liked the contrast they set up in the beginning, where Jeremy was just a clueless jerk while Ray was thoughtful and considerate.  Maybe that's part of my problem with the movie, though.  I want to think that Mirabelle was seduced by Ray's charm and the allure of stylish living, both of which are certainly mediated by money but don't have to be entirely dependent on it. She's got a decent amount of stylish living going on without having any money, after all.  I don't want to think that Mirabelle is actually seduced by the higher income.  So in my conception of the movie, the change that makes Jeremy an acceptable choice for her is that he's gone through a personal transformation, he's learned to be interested in her and not just in himself, he's come out of that self-absorbed cocoon.  In the reality of the movie, though, that's only part of it.  He also drives a nicer car, wears nicer clothes, and buys her stuff.  The personal transformation is explicitly discussed by the characters, and the financial one isn't, and that actually makes me more uncomfortable about it.

I do need to point out, though, that at the time I watched the movie, I did mostly like it.  I had problems with the ending, I felt that the movie as a whole was a little empty, but overall I thought it was pretty good.  The thing is, when you add a movie to your Netflix queue, it suggests other movies, and I'm a very suggestible person.  The movie we were sent right after Shopgirl was Lost in Translation.  Watching those two in quick succession made me retroactively even more disappointed with Shopgirl, because they're so similar (SO similar--compare the Rebecca Pidgeon incident in the former with the lounge singer incident in the latter), and Lost in Translation is so clearly a better movie.

(post title taken from "The Look" by Sara Teasdale.)

outsourcing the household.

The consequence of all the endings this spring (grad school, dissertation, etc) is that I have a lot of beginnings to put together, and it's kind of scattershot and distracting work.  Preparing course outlines for two classes, preparing lectures for one of those classes, putting together updated job application materials, extracting journal articles from my dissertation manuscript, planning the early research phases for my next project, so on and so forth.  Oh, and dealing with paperwork.  When I worked in computer services at Harvard, lo these many years ago, I couldn't help noticing that the post-docs and short-term lecturers were the ones who were most likely to have things go horribly wrong with their paperwork (often resulting in their ending up at the help desk, venting their frustrations at our student workers).  Now that I am myself a short-term lecturer, I'm seeing the same situation from the other side.  I'll spare everyone the endless tedious details, but I do want to point out that I still haven't managed to restore my library access, which is creating a non-trivial amount of hassle in my life.

One thing I'm also trying to do is catch up on my backlog of unread issues of the New Yorker and the Atlantic Monthly.  Mostly this is an enjoyable process, but one does encounter the occasional snag.  The June Atlantic, for instance, has another Caitlin Flanagan essay.  I'm mostly over my whole Flanagan problem; it's hard to generate fresh annoyance over an author who just keeps rehashing the same small set of talking points while generally failing to make any coherent argument.  The June piece, ostensibly a review of some Hollywood nanny tell-all, hits all the notes in her small repertoire:  valorizing a golden age where people knew their social roles, airing out her own (apparently ongoing) personal insecurities about motherhood, something something liberal guilt, something something paying strangers to love your children.  This one was surprising only in that I hadn't realized it was possible to get paid for an essay in which fully half the material is recycled almost verbatim from your own previous published works. 

One thing that is interesting about reading it, though, was realizing just how far the definition of "middle class" stretches in this country.  Flanagan believes herself to have had a middle-class upbringing, and I similarly believe myself to have had a middle-class upbringing, and yet I can't read her personal reminiscences without being nearly overwhelmed by the moneyed privilege oozing out of her stories.  She opens with an anecdote about being fired from a babysitting job she took in college, and notes that she had only taken the job because she liked children, not because she needed the money.  "At the time," she writes, "I received a generous allowance from my parents, which arrived in my campus mailbox each month in the form of a check, cut and signed by their accountant."  I'm not going to say that the generous allowance and the accountant are signs that she wasn't middle-class, I'm only going to say that her experience of being middle-class is very different from my own. 

What keeps tripping me up about her whole nanny-angst routine is the insistence that mothers who hire nannies (I want to say "parents" here, but fathers are always so absent from her analysis of child-rearing among the professional classes) are looking to pay someone to love their children.

Well, in a big-picture sense, that's what trips me up.  In this particular piece, I got much more seriously hung up on the phrasing "every housewife I knew had a once-a-week 'cleaning lady', the title itself an oxymoron that revealed perfectly the ambivalence the employers had about hiring help."  I read that sentence over and over again, trying to figure out what was oxymoronic about the phrase "cleaning lady".  My eventual best guess is that this is some kind of affected archaism about the use of the word "lady" to mean "social superior," but even that doesn't really make sense to me. 

I can't help but wonder if what's really going on here is some deep-seated ambivalence about paying other people to do things that were traditionally classed as unpaid female labor.  I've always felt that the most enduringly radical vision in feminist utopian fiction was the recognition that any meaningful social equality had to start with breaking the gendered expectations of household work.  Women and men can both have fulfilling professional lives, but clothes still need to be washed, groceries need to be bought, floors need to be vacuumed, bills need to be paid, bathtubs need to be scrubbed, bookshelves need to be dusted, empty toilet rolls need to be replaced, lightbulbs need to be changed, so on and so forth.  And, like it or not, one's time allocation is ultimately a zero-sum game.  Every ten minutes I spend washing dishes is ten minutes that I'm not spending on writing the next landmark work of modern historical analysis. 

I do, in fact, realize that I'm not saying anything groundbreaking or original here.  But I just don't see why there has to be shame or guilt associated with paying someone to do some of the routine drudgework for you.  Provided you pay them a fair wage and treat them with professional respect, of course, which I gather is where the real drama usually enters the equation.  Is there similarly supposed to be a sense of shame or guilt associated with being the person paid to do that work?  (Is this why "cleaning lady" is an oxymoron?)   If not, where does the shame-and-guilt factor get introduced?  I'm starting to wonder if it's an internalized belief that a woman's real value as a person derives largely from her role as a housekeeper and a caretaker.  (Is that why the fathers are so consistently absent in these articles?) 

There's a lot of value in being able to do things for yourself.  I always feel a little sorry for people who just plain don't know how to cook themselves a simple dinner, or keep their finances in order, or do their own laundry.  And of -course- you want to avoid the extreme Nanny Diaries kind of situation with child care providers, where parents have only perfunctory and affectionless contact with their children.  But having a competent and kind professional (whether a nanny, or a babysittier, or a day-care worker) take care of your child for part of each day?  I just don't see how that makes you a bad person, or a bad parent.  And I am so tired of Caitlin Flanagan.