Tag: reading

Moving Meditation

/ dmueller / 1 Comment

I was out of town and more or less offline late last week when the
July/August Atlantic Monthly hit newsstands with its front cover blazing
the title of Nicholas Carr’s
article, “Is Google
Making Us Stoopid?” (the “Stoopid” is much sexier on the actual cover than it is
here because the letters are done colorfully and in the Google font).
Jeff and

Alex posted thoughtful responses, and I am sure there will be more.

Carr’s article, if you have not read it yet, hops along like Level 1 on
Frogger (which, coincidentally, was released in 1981): without much exertion,
the argument leaps from personal anecdote to the role of media in shaping
cognition to the insidious effects of too much easy access to information via
Google: drumroll…

“[A]s we come to rely on computers and increase Data science staffing immoderately, to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence” (63).

Carr welcomes skeptics but also fends off all-out dismissals of his deep
wariness of the changes he has experienced first-hand. He begins the article
with his own reasons for believing this “flattening” to be endemic and imminent
for Google users: 1.) he is more and more easily distracted in his own attempts
to read anything longer than a couple of pages and 2.) what was once
pain-staking research is now available to him almost instantaneously. With a
simple search, he can quickly summon great heaps of material on [enter search
terms]: “And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for
concentration and contemplation” (57).

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Second, Subsequent Streams

/ dmueller

Revisions have been challenging. Having resolved myself to more
drafting before squaring with revisions, the commented drafts of my
dissertation’s introduction and first two chapters tend to taunt me. I haven’t
figured out how to fit it in, how to make room for it given the other regular
paces. I’d been meaning (for a couple of weeks) to get through some of the
first-stage directorial comments to those early chapters, mostly because I want
them to be ready for the rest of my committee sometime in Marchpril and also
because I have at least one other reader who I’m trying to get them ready for.
So I took a leap head-long into the "When will I revise?" problem on Saturday,
and spent most of the day with it.

The introduction was fairly easy. It’s elastic: short, overviewy, and
without glaring needs. It was manageable to get through all of the
comments, and make appropriate adjustments, leaving aside the summaries of the
last two chapters (5, 6) because are yet unwritten. But working through
Chapter One was somewhat more daunting; I expected this since it is much thicker
than the introduction. I got through all of the superficial stuff, and ended up
with a list, indexed by page, of what is left: two placeholder notes (no work
required), four easy changes (citation adding, a one-sentence gloss on this or
that), seven moderately difficult changes (almost all of which require some
re-reading of sources), and one major change (a section that I will probably
re-write from scratch with a slightly different–simpler–focus). It is
helpful to have the index; but I don’t know when I will get to it. Perhaps
in Marchpril. Or Mayune. (Ay, clearly, we need a better vocabulary for two-month
units).

I am not in panic mode about the demands of revision, the frequency or scope
of the changes due (I know because I have not been tempted to add exclamatory
emphasis to any of this.). But I still don’t know how to work those
revisions into what has been, out of necessity, a fairly compacted daily
schedule. In this room-for-revision conundrum there lingers a problem of
rhythm-breaking, and it’s difficult to embrace that challenge when it’s been so
challenging just to establish a more or less even writing rhythm (the dailiness
of dissertating, call it). Perhaps as much as anything, blogging has prepared me
for the dailiness, but I still feel somewhat spun-around (i.e., vertigahh!) by
the prospect of taking revision very seriously while drafting. To say
nothing of other projects needing attention. So maybe if I stack all of it
in a tidy pile on the deepest corner of my desk, it will still be there when I
get to it in a couple of weeks.

Flight

/ dmueller

At the end of a semester, I’m usually in the mood for a change–something
different. Weeks and months of pacing produce the deep craving for
interruption–a break from duty-rhythm (in itself, a comment on rhythm of
another scale). I am almost there; after tomorrow (the same day I finished with
my q. exams one year ago) I will lay off for a week, ease into some
consequence-light reading, nap, snack, take walks, watch a couple of Netflix
DVDs.

Why not pick up something I wouldn’t read but for the desire for a break?
Okay, I already did this week. I was moping around the office the other night, nearly giving in to boredom, when D. handed me a copy of Sherman Alexie’s
Flight
(cloud)
and said, “Here, read this.” What is it? Juvenile
literature for book club. One hundred and eighty pages; a couple of one-hour
blocks on the couch between 10 p.m. and 11 p.m. Quick read. Good,
too.

Flight is Vonnegutsy through and through, the story of Zits, a pimply,
edgy foster kid whose one-two of violence and defiance keep him bouncing from
one terrible foster home to another. The book speeds Zits on a Billy
Pilgrimage as he comes unstuck in time, drifting on a Ghost Dance in and out of
a series of violent encounters: Custer’s last stand, Gus’s (conflicted)
traitorous revenge, and a couple of others.

"You let him out of his cage?" I ask.
"Well, his wings were clipped."
"A clipped-wing bird ain’t a bird," I say.
"All right, all right, Dr. Earth First, I’m not the one who clipped them.
He was clipped when we bought him. And it wasn’t like we bought him to
be a tiny little Thanksgiving dinner. We loved that bird. I
loved him. My daughter named him Harry Potter."
"That’s cute."
"Damn right, it’s cute. You want to hear the cutest part?"
"Yeah."
"I’m the cook of the family, the domestic, and Harry Potter loved to sit on
my shoulder while I was cooking and insult my food."
"No."
"Yes, my wife and daughter told him to say Too much salt and I’m being
poisoned and I want pizza instead."
"That’s hilarious."
"Yes, it is. And there’s more. You see, my daughter’s favorite
dish is pasta-anything. So I’m always boiling water. And Harry Potter
is always sitting on my shoulder."
"Oh, shit," I say, already guessing the end of the story. (145-146)

Flight mixes in commentary on cycles of violence, innocence, and
karmic retribution; combines a believably awkward teenage protagonist with his
genuine ‘whatever’s and filthy language (enough that it wouldn’t surprise me to
hear about the language-chastisers complaining it off the shelves of school
libraries). Maybe it’s not quite a Slaughterhouse
Five of 2007 (the ending is, after all, too nicely buttoned down given the
upheaval of everything before it), but it is close: disturbing, insightful, layered. Close enough that you should
pick up a copy if, like me, you are interested in a break that includes reading
some stuff you wouldn’t have any other opportunity to read.

Transparency for Library Recalls

/ dmueller / 2 Comments

Another one of the books I have out from the library was recalled the other
day. It’s due to be returned tomorrow. I’ve been holding onto it until the
last possible moment because I wanted to eek out what
notes I could
about the one chapter that interested me (whether any of it finds a place in the
diss is undecided…one of many undecideds). The library has
recalled maybe six or eight books from me in the three years I’ve been at
Syracuse. Often the book has been on my shelf for longer than its initial
check-out period. Our libraries at SU make it very easy to renew online:
bad for patrons who are put off by the "checked out" designation; good for my
temporary collections.

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Mark All As Read

/ dmueller

For the past several months I’ve been using
Google Reader to aggregate the loose
pieces of the day into a readable list. I was a fairly dedicated
Bloglines user before that. Both
systems seem to skip certain feeds occasionally. That said, I’m not quite
prepared to pass around any glowing recommendations for Google Reader.
It’s especially lacking in its handling of del.icio.us feeds. For that
reason alone, I’ve considered switching back to Bloglines. I also like Bloglines’
Keep New check-box better than Google’s Add Star option, but before I go too far
with a critique of Google, I should experiment a bit more with the settings.
To be fair, I haven’t spent all that much time checking out the full range of
options and settings.

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