Long Pauses

Tag: Blogging

  • Version 13

    Version 13

    Or, A Study in Parenthetical Asides

    I was in my twenties when I built the first version of Long Pauses. In a move that still gives me occasional pangs of regret, I’d decided a few months earlier to give up my graduate research fellowship and take a full-time job as a multimedia developer and instructional designer, figuring that a steady paycheck and a boring day job would bring some stability to our lives while also keeping me motivated to study for my comprehensive exams. I must have been under the spell of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who managed, miraculously, to write quite a few good stories after tolling away all day at the Custom House.

    Long Pauses was intended to be a workspace for testing out ideas, both as a writer and a web developer. Looking back over the hundreds of posts contained within it today, as I’ve done in recent months preparing for this relaunch, I think it’s met that goal. A quick scroll through the various design iterations is a useful snapshot of web design trends over the past decade – from table layouts and FONT tags to javascript, cascading stylesheets, and database-driven content management. (I’ll always remember 2002-2006 as the days of 11px Verdana.) Technically, the word “blog” predates Long Pauses by a year, but I’d certainly never heard it when I was poring over my copy of The Quickstart Guide to HTML. (I didn’t move to Blogger until Version 5 and didn’t add commenting until Version 7.) My writing has evolved, too, though not as impressively as I would’ve liked. It’s still too precious, too littered with em-dashes, and too reliant on pseudo-intellectual space-fillers. (I hereby promise to retire the word “defamiliarize” and, instead, make a greater effort to describe, specifically, how a particular work of art defamiliarizes the world.)

    I shelved Long Pauses in 2010, soon after my daughter was born, because, frankly, the web had become boring. Like everyone else, I’d made the move to Facebook and Twitter, both of which facilitate the kind of small talk I hate so much (and am so very, very bad at) in real life. This relaunch is an effort to steal back those hours of my life, to rediscover silence and the hard work of writing, and to stop giving a shit whether that person I haven’t spoken to in twenty years likes my latest photo of Rory. On a more practical level, I also want to reclaim ownership of my content and to file it away in a searchable, logical, movable archive.

    Launching a blog in 2012 is nothing like I experienced eleven years ago. I remember sitting at my little cubicle at work back then, exchanging emails with Pascual Espiritu, whose website, Strictly Film School, was one of the very few places outside of usenet groups and discussion forums where I could read about contemporary foreign cinema on the Internet. I ate up her advice and mimicked as best as I could her design aesthetic for Version 1 of Long Pauses. I discovered just a few days ago, even, that longpauses.com was still associated with the antiquated domain registration service she recommended to me then.

    Over the next few years, the film blogosphere slowly evolved, thanks in large part to free, user-friendly services like LiveJournal, TypePad, and Blogger, and along with it came a new community of writers, many of whom have since become friends. Revisiting those days has made me all kinds of nostalgic. For good and bad, the early bloggers were creating a new and vital communications medium. (I was notified a year or two ago by a graduate researcher that I’ve been credited officially with coining the term “blogathon.” My name and Showgirls are forever linked, apparently – and in the most wonderfully esoteric way!) When I mentioned on Twitter that I was rebuilding Long Pauses, one friend wondered how we had ever found the time to write so much, and my off-hand answer was that we blogged instead of pissing our efforts into the social networking ether. That’s at least partly true, I suspect. Just as likely a culprit is the exponential growth – the goddam deluge – of content that now threatens to drown us all. There’s too much to digest and reflect upon, so we skim it all and retain little more than trivia. (Cue the Portlandia “Did you read?” sketch.)

    Generally speaking, what remains of the original filmblog dialogue has relocated to Twitter and to sites that grew out of the blogosphere but now more closely resemble traditional publications with editors and teams of contributors – places like Indiewire, Mubi, Slant, the AV Club, and Fandor. Don’t get me wrong: film blogs still exist in large numbers, but the discussion has moved (or evolved, or in some cases atrophied). Girish’s site is one of the few living monuments to a kind of conversation that was once more common and that I now miss. (I love that Girish still uses his original Blogger template. He told me once that he briefly considered changing it but decided that it’s become too essential to the voice of his blog.)

    None of that is news, really. But what surprised me as I combed through the Long Pauses archive is that vast swaths of the original blogosphere are gone. Many of the sites I once included on my blogroll of “daily reads” have been deleted entirely, and the authors have vanished right along with them. Presumably, they’ve settled into new phases of their lives – like me, they’re now raising children or managing greater responsibilities in their professional lives; like me, they’re in their forties – while others simply lost interest after a short-lived burst of blogging enthusiasm. The Wayback Machine salvages bits and pieces of the wreckage, but the Internet, it turns out, is an ephemeral place. Moreso than I’d imagined. (I was disappointed to discover a few days ago that someone has beaten me to the punch: Internet Archaeology is already a thing.) Our virtual world is indeed a palimpsest.

    This gone-tomorrow-ness of the Internet is another of my motivations for relaunching Long Pauses. For archival purposes (and at the risk of offending friends and editors) I’ve added essays and interviews to this site that were originally published elsewhere, and I’ve noted them as such. I can control my database; others are a fickle business. I’ve also made the move to WordPress and have tagged and categorized every single post, giving Long Pauses its first-ever relational structure, along with a slightly more usable main menu. (The term “Debris” comes from my long-standing habit of creating hodgepodge posts called “Miscellaneous Debris.” “Debris” includes all posts not categorized as “film,” “music,” or “words.” Two other recurring themes from the archive — Songs of the Moment and Mix Tapes — have also found their way into the navigation.)

    And one final word on Version 13: This is the first iteration of Long Pauses that I didn’t design by hand. It’s a modded version of Slate from Okay Themes. Why did I buy a template? I’m not a web designer. Not really. I was supposed to be a professor, after all. I stumbled backwards into this career and have only in recent months worked my way, finally, into a job title that more accurately describes what I’m good at: communications director. I plan to build my first responsive design this fall, and I’m beginning to know my way around the WordPress functions.php file. But for the time being I’m content to benefit from others’ talent and devote my efforts, instead, to learning how to be a writer again.

    As always, thanks for reading.

  • Recent Developments

    Today is August 16th, which means an entire month has passed since my last post here. I believe that’s a first in the six-year history of Long Pauses. My blogging time has, instead, been spent over at my other site, 1st Thursday, where are a bunch of us are breathlessly anticipating what is shaping up to be a ridiculous film festival. Despite the fact that I’ll be in Toronto for 11 days with a Festival Pass that allows me to see as many as 50 films, I’m slowly coming to realize that I’ll still have to pass on a lot of great movies. It’s an embarrassment of riches, really.

    In other news:

    I’ve finally joined the 20th century and gotten a cell phone. Because I’m a whore to Steve Jobs I bought an iPhone, and it is, indeed, awesome. I can’t stop touching it. Here’s my first custom wallpaper.

    I’ve almost completely stopped buying DVDs, but after watching Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People and Leopard Man recently, I happily sent $39.71 to Deep Discount for the Val Lewton Horror Collection. It’s quickly proving to be my favorite film experience of the year.

    A word of advice: Think twice before buying a 30-year-old home. 30 years seems to be the exact timespan required to exhaust a home’s infrastructure — things like, say, air conditioning units. Ours died on a day when the heat index here hit 105. Good times. Another word of advice: When the contractor says it’ll take 2-3 weeks to relandscape and get the pool working again, he really means, “You might see me and my ‘crew’ a couple times over the next two months, but don’t worry, we’ll stop by often enough to totally destroy your yard. Oh, and I hope you weren’t planning to swim at all this year. Because you won’t.”

    Because I spend 9-10 hours a day hunched over a computer in a windowless office, I’m always on the lookout for things to keep my mind occupied, and my latest obsession is the Charlie Rose archive. Granted, Rose is a bit of a tool, and he frequently commits the Great Sins of Interviewing — not listening to guests and interrupting them — but his archive is really deep. And his site allows the sharing of videos. Let’s see if this works:

  • P. Adams Sitney on Film Bloggers

    The other day I was talking to a group of younger filmmakers about a current situation I simply cannot understand. There seems to be a tremendous revitalization of avant-garde filmmaking now, but there’s absolutely no one publishing anything about it, anything. . . .

    The universities have completely imploded. They’re the places to go if you believe that the media discourse of French philosophers is the only viable approach to film, and that the empirical relationship of the viewer to the work of art is utterly passe. . . .

    I can only fantasize about young independent people who love these new films and want to write about them.

    — in an interview with Scott MacDonald, A Critical Cinema, Vol. 4, May 2000

    Okay, so technically he wasn’t talking about film bloggers. Or, at least he didn’t know he was talking about film bloggers.

  • YouTube (Instead of) Memory

    I hope to have a real post up in the next day or two, but until then here’s an odd clip I just stumbled upon. I witnessed that exact event after stepping out of a film at TIFF this year. It was in the Paramount Theater, at the top of the long escalators. And now I no longer need to remember it. My memory has been captured, uploaded, tagged with metadata, and stored safely away, where it can be retrieved immediately — by anyone. And I played no part in the process.

  • Version 9.0

    Welcome to Long Pauses 9.0. I’ve always added .0 to my version numbers out of some odd devotion to conventional, software-related naming conventions, but I suspect that this version might actually experience the occasional upgrade before the next full-blown redesign. Be on the lookout for 9.1.

    I had two main goals this time out. First, I wanted to return to the conventional blog format. As I said in my announcement of the last redesign, the widescreen format was an experiment — a usability study, really. And what I discovered was . . . it wasn’t as usable. I did like having my links grouped together, and it all worked perfectly well on large, widescreen displays, but the scrolling-right got old. Also, I got tired of having the main content pressed to the left side of the screen. One reason I haven’t posted much lately is because, for the first time in nearly five years, I got tired of looking at Long Pauses.

    Second, and more importantly, I wanted to stretch my CSS skills a bit. It’s not perfect yet, but I’m fairly proud of the coding here. The buttons and the rollovers (including the Song of the Moment) are all controlled by CSS. And it all works perfectly in Explorer for Windows, even when the browser’s text size is set to “largest.” The only design element that is negatively affected by IE is the transparency of the Song of the Moment image.

  • I’ve Been Meme’d

    Girish tagged me:

    • I am, right now, enjoying my first quiet moment at this new job. Thirty-five minutes until my next meeting, so I better make the most of it.
    • I want to travel as much as possible. I want to wear out my passport and to ride trains and subways and buses and taxis in all of the great cities. I want to walk casually through museums and eat fantastic meals. And I want to do it all with good friends.
    • I wish I had more close friends in Knoxville.
    • I hate George W. Bush. I’m not just trying to be snarky here. Before his presidency I was a mostly unpolitical person. But after watching the Republicans run the Executive, Legislative, and a good chunk of the Judicial branches of the government for the last few years — in other words, after watching the Right recreate our government in its own grotesque image — I can barely choke down the bile.
    • I love hearing Joanna laugh, especially when we’re in different parts of the house.
    • I miss playing golf with my father-in-law. Like most guys on a golf course, we rarely talked about much other than the sad state of our game, but it meant a lot to me.
    • I fear late-night trips to the emergency room.
    • I hear Aretha Franklin. She’s singing “Dr. Feelgood” live at the Fillmore West.
    • I wonder what Long Pauses will look like five years from now. Twenty years? Sixty?
    • I regret never having had the opportunity to teach an upper-level film or literature course. I’d be good at it, I think. So far, this is my only regret about leaving academia.
    • I am not myself at large social gatherings. I’m never more awkward, unsocialized, and alone as when in a packed room, especially when it’s my responsibility to provoke small talk.
    • I dance badly, alone, in the basement, accompanied by really loud music. It’s one of my favorite stress-relievers. By the end of the summer, there’s a good chance I’ll also know how to waltz, cha-cha, and do a few other steps of “ballroom” dance. Consider this fair warning.
    • I sing badly, alone, in the basement, accompanied by really loud music. Also, I ocassionally sing at the piano or when strumming an acoustic guitar. I prefer that no one hears me doing any of this.
    • I cry quite often, actually. More than I used to, at least. And I think that’s a good thing.
    • I am not always listening to what you’re saying, even when I’m looking you directly in the eye and nodding my head in agreement. My mind tends to wander. Don’t take it personally.
    • I make with my hands, um, this is a tough one. I’m pretty good at replacing toilets and doing other minor plumbing projects. And I enjoy patching and painting walls. And I like to install light fixtures. Basic home repair — that’s what I make with my hands.
    • I write too seldom these days. It’s been nearly a year since I last wrote anything longer than 1,500 words or so, and I’m beginning to worry that the muscles have atrophied.
    • I confuse affect and effect. I’ve been taught the rules more times that I can count, but when I sit down to write I inevitably end up reaching for my dictionary. Or, as is more often the case, I bend over backwards to avoid using the damn words altogether.
    • I need to spend less time alone. Great books, films, music, and websites are no excuse for ignoring relationships.
    • I should eat better. Joanna and I eat out too much. And we’re lazy cooks. Also, I really like chips and dips and salsas and other salty, fatty snack foods. If I didn’t spend so much time on the treadmill I’d already be on cholesterol medicine. Damn you, genetics.
    • I start four times as many books as I finish.
    • I finish almost everything I begin. (Well, except books.) It’s one of my better qualities, I think.
    • I tag no one in particular.

  • Now in Widescreen

    Screen capture of Long Pauses Version 8

    Welcome to Long Pauses (version 8.0). Consider this redesign a usability study. The centered, two-column blog format has become the industry standard, so to speak, but I’m not sure if it best mirrors how I actually interact with this and other sites. I seldom click through the long list of links (scroll, scroll, scroll) on other blogs, for example, but I click through my own collection of “daily reads,” um, daily, and so I wonder if having them collected in one spot, out of the way of the main blog content, will positively affect the user experience.

    I’ve also decided to publish only the most recent post on my front page. I like the idea of having a single white page to write on. It better reflects my own conception of Long Pauses, which should be considered a journal or a diary, a workspace for immediate reflection and experimentation. (Each time I redesign Long Pauses, I spend the first two hours convincing myself that graphics, colors, and columns aren’t just distractions from what really matters — the words. But then the wannabe-designer in me takes over.) To aid navigation, I’ve created a drop-down menu in the content area that will direct you to any of the ten preceding posts.

    I suspect that one downside of the redesign will be a slight reduction in the number of reader comments. Once a post drops from the front page, readers will be less likely, I assume, to continue old conversations. Or maybe not. I’m eager to find out how/if the interactions change. For what it’s worth, I’ve turned on email notifications for the first time, so I’ll always know when someone has posted in the archives. I promise to do my best to respond.

    One thing that bothers me about the redesign, though, is that it includes a simple, three-column table, a major no-no in CSS design. It’s there for one reason: Internet Explorer for Windows, which is still the browser of choice for most Long Pauses readers and which can’t seem to solve its floating div problem. I tried every trick in the book, but couldn’t make it work to my satisfaction. Any CSS guru who wants to tweak my code will forever have my gratitude.

    I just looked at the redesign for the first time on our office G5 with a 30-inch Cinema Display. I like it. Feedback, as always, is greatly appreciated.

  • A Girl and a Gun

    It is, I concede, time to pull myself out of my post-election funk and face up to the fact that I harbor the richest contempt for something like sixty million of my fellow citizens. (How’s that for healing?)

    That is how George Fasel began his first post at A Girl and a Gun. He became one of my Daily Reads a month or two later. Like I wrote in the comments there, as saddened as I am to hear of George’s passing, I’m also feeling strangely inspired and encouraged by his example. He and I exchanged a few notes over the past few months, and I always enjoyed his curiosity, humor, and generosity of spirit. I had no idea he’d been a writer, historian, professor, film critic, and PR executive. I didn’t know he was 67 years old (in my imagination, every Blogger is my age, give or take), and I certainly didn’t know he was fighting cancer. What a loss.

  • Selling My Soul to Blogger

    Welcome to Long Pauses version 7.0. For those of you who were kind enough to critique a rough draft of this redesign and are wondering why the hell it doesn’t look like what you saw, well, that was version 6.0, which I decided, after a two week break, that I hated. It was kind of you to not crush my spirit by saying that you hated it as well.

    Warning: The rest of this post will be filled with dork-speak. People who blog are, by their nature, archivists, and posts like this serve to capture a significant (relatively speaking, of course) moment of development. I found several such pages while digging through the archives and enjoyed revisiting them.

    The Outside

    The large image at the top of the page is a still from Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror, my favorite film and the film from which I also grabbed the running woman that has, in some sense, served as a logo for the site. I’ll be changing the image frequently, using stills from whatever I’m watching to extend the long pauses metaphor. I got the idea after staring and staring and staring at that image of Lynn Carlin’s face.

    How do you like that image link? It is a hard-won compromise, and I’m really pleased with it. I wanted to remove as much of the clutter as possible from the main content area, while also keeping screen captures that reinforce subject matter. As time allows, I will go back to my old film responses—those that used to be supplemented by small stills—and add context-sensitive pop-ups.

    The images link is controlled by my Cascading Style Sheet, which is a thing of beauty. The entire site is now built from CSS—no more nested tables, no more Dreamweaver templates, just a single Blogger file and a single styles page. I would guess that, in the process, I have eliminated 10,000 lines of code, and the entire site validates, so no more worrying about cross-platform compatibility.

    I’ve also customized Google’s search tool, which is a pretty efficient way to search Long Pauses. I’ll use it even if no one else does.

    The Inside

    Redesigning the interface took less than a day. The hard part was feeding hundreds of pages of old content into Blogger. But now that the work is done, there are several benefits. Site management is the big one. Commenting is the other. Except for the front index, every single page in Long Pauses now allows commenting. Been looking for an opportunity to mock the horrible writing in some of my earliest film responses? Now’s your chance.

    I toyed with Moveable Type for a while and also considered switching over to Blogger’s internal commenting tool, but I decided to stick it out with the Blogger and HaloScan combo. Mostly I just didn’t want to sacrifice the old comments, which are as essential to the spirit of this site as anything I’ve written.

    Please let me know if you run into anything that looks broken. Thanks.

  • Popular Frontiers

    If we’re thinking in terms of travel metaphors, podcasting is like teleportation. Here, then there. Nothing in the middle, no journey, nothing to see along the way–just the destination. The radio is like taking a walk through a city or across a country. Static is the place where there isn’t much–abandoned buildings, fog, cotton fields forever–but the absence has a presence. There’s sound in the silence, like the wheel grind and tape hiss in a Mountain Goats song. You might stumble across something mysterious or horrifying or unknowable along the way: a murder, a circus, a stabbin’ hobo, a funeral, a church service, a demagogue: something that has the possibility of taking you out of yourself and making you experience the world in a new way rather than something that simply validates and affirms the perspective you already have. There is no danger that you’d ever have a confrontation with something as weird and alien as The Conet Project in a podcast.

    I’d love to think I’m at least partly to blame for one of my new daily reads, Popular Frontiers.

  • Preach On

    If cinema is merely an imposition of ideology, then, as a field of study, it is both a bore and a chore. There was a brief moment in my life when I viewed cinema solely through the lens of post-structuralism, but I realized that it was jeopardizing my love for the art. Call me naive, but I believe cinema, like other artforms, can still offer aesthetic experiences worthy of the search.

    From EJ’s fantastic blog, Parkesque.

  • The New Cine

    From Jonathan Rosenbaum’s latest:

    All of this stuff is available to anyone with access to the Internet, which is as much a part of this adventure as DVD technology itself. Film buffs around the world, many of them still in their 20s, are swapping information and educating one another about this unprecedented bounty via blogs and chat groups. All this is amplifying and intensifying grassroots, word-of-mouth communication in a way that threatens to forever alter the power bases that influence cultural matters. Because you no longer have to live in Paris, New York, or Chicago in order to find out who Feuillade was or why he’s so great — and because a “movie” like Outfoxed no longer has to open at a theater or even exist on celluloid in order to have a sizable social impact.

    And along those lines, I’m pleased to announce Cine Club, a new group blog that I hope will evolve in interesting ways. In the spirit of Andre Bazin and Francois Truffaut, I recently began hosting weekly film viewings with a small group of friends. As much as I enjoy watching films alone, something of the cinema’s communal experience is lost when we do that. Our cine club and the blog are an experiment of sorts — an attempt to use technology (projectors, DVDs, online publishing) to discover great films and to recapture that community.

    For now, only a few of us are participating in the blog. Keep an eye on it for further developments.

  • Reading

    Perhaps the best lesson of books is not to venerate them — or at least never to hold them in higher esteem than our own faculties, our own experience, our own peers, our own dialogues.

    So declares Cristina Nehring in “Books Make You a Boring Person.” I’m afraid that, in doing so, she has dramatically overestimated the quality of my faculties, my experience, my peers (no offense), and my dialogues. Daniel Green at The Reading Experience has already posted a wonderful response, in which he points out the obvious: that Nehring apparently makes no distinction between books and good books:

    Reading good books, however, books conveying knowledge or providing an engaged experience that cannot be duplicated in other ways, is an invaluable activity–even if reverse snobs writing for the New York Times think it’s boring.

    Green also does us the service of contextualizing the snippets of Emerson’s “The American Scholar” that Nehring misreads in order to prop up her straw man.

  • Get Mortified

    The most recent episode of This American Life (which is worth listening to in its entirety) ends with an eight-minute reading by Sascha Rothchild. And by “reading” I mean “really funny, really frightening performance of several pages from her teenage diary.” Sascha originally read the piece at Mortified:

    a showcase of people like you sharing their most embarrassing, pathetic and private teenage diary entries, poems, love letters, lyrics and locker notes… in front of total strangers.

    According to their site, a Mortified TV Pilot is in development at Comedy Central. I’d love to see it, especially the Mo Collins bit. Also, be sure to visit their Hall of Lame. The thought of even acknowledging one’s teenage years, let alone airing them in public, is too horrifying to imagine.

  • Moral Equivalence

    A nice post yesterday from slacktivist:

    The rationalization of evil in opposition to a greater evil (real or imagined) seems like the only way for many Americans to retain their necessary self-image as “the good guys.” That path is sloped, and the slope is slippery.

    The alternative, I believe, is to remind Americans of, and to recommit America to, an idea of the good that involves more than simply being slightly better than the worst people we can think of.

     

  • Liberalism and Literature

    A comment left here on Wednesday by Daniel Green led me to his blog, which in turn led me to his wonderful article, “Liberalism and Literature.” A critique of the “academic left” and of ideological criticism, in general, Green’s piece is refreshingly articulate, well-informed, and even-handed. It echoes what I see as a growing dissatisfaction with contemporary, theory-centric literary studies — both within academia and outside of it — a dissatisfaction (political, professional, and aesthetic) that I hope to address in my dissertation (assuming, of course, that I ever get around to finishing the damn thing).

    I’m most sympathetic to Green’s argument when he points to the vast divide that separates traditional liberal ideals and the messy details of practical politics from the radical and Utopian ideologies that dominate certain sectors of literary criticism.

    This reductive approach, whereby all subjects are political, either inherently so or made to be so, is detrimental to real politics, which can be safely disregarded in favor of the more tidy rhetorical kind.

    Green supports his case with a spot-on analysis of America’s current political condition, which, as he points out, is itself a chorus of competing fictions. The “radical worldview” he likens to escapist genre fiction:

    an opportunity to leave behind the muddle of ordinary life in exchange for the narrative clarity and enhanced drama stories make available.

    Modern conservatism — steeped in its legends of “gun-toting colonials,” “bread-earning” husbands, and “a group of white founding fathers whose supreme wisdom literally cannot be challenged” — is founded, first and foremost, Green argues convincingly, on a belief in free market capitalism, itself a dominant force of liberal progress.

    It is impossible any longer to think of the “conservative” — at least in the United States — as one who simply resists impulsive change; instead, the postwar American conservative comes fully possessed of a complete collection of well-made fictions, chief among them the unequivocal faith in the “free market” (taken over, to be sure, from 19th century liberals), a fiction so powerful in its influence that conservatives have almost managed to conflate it with democracy itself.

    So what does any of this have to do with “Liberalism and Literature”? Green’s immediate concern here is reminding us that great literature — with its delight in ambiguity, the “universal uncertainty of human life and the agelessly unresolved conflicts stirred up by human aspirations” — is itself a primer for liberal ideals, including, in Tony Kushner’s words, the inevitability of “painful progress.” “I would again maintain,” Green writes:

    that my primary interest in literature — my belief in its capacity to sharpen the mind’s apprehension of the shaping patterns at work both in the imaginative creations of poets and novelists and in the imaginary creations many of us attempt to make of the social, political, and cultural arrangements we must unfortunately settle for in lieu of the more vivid if less tangible worlds evoked by the poets — has made me more alert to the many different forms the aestheticizing of mundane reality can take.

    That’s a tricky leap he has made there, but one with which I am growing increasingly sympathetic. His critics on the left would likely denounce Green’s argument as fundamentally conservative, claiming that by reducing the value of Art to its “universal” nature, he is ignoring the particular economic and “real” political forces that have shaped the making of the Art and our reception of it, and that he is therefore, by default, supporting those very forces. (I’ve made the same claim against Philip Roth’s recent fiction, actually.) But that critique is too easy, and, as a personal aside, it contradicts my own experience of literature. The years I’ve spent studying literature and film have had one great effect on me: They turned what was once a black and white world into a vast mosaic. And that process does, in fact, make a tremendous impact on “real” politics.

    One more note on this article:

    Much has been made — especially in recent years and in conservative regions like the American South — of the dominance of leftist or liberal thought in academia. Green offers, I think, the most obvious explanation for that dominance. I’ve thought the same thing for years, but never took the time to write it down:

    Considering a whole constellation of facts about contemporary America — among them its now unchallenged position as supreme economic, cultural, and military power, its exaltation of business and commerce as indicators of status and accomplishment, its thoroughgoing utilitarian approach to education and manifest impatience with the cultivation of intellect and sensibility for their own sakes — it is not at all surprising that those who choose what was once called the “life of the mind” at its universities would feel estranged from the official values that seem to animate the political and commercial life of American society. Whether such people would identify themselves as “liberals,” “radicals,” “progressives,” or just as independent thinkers, surely it is at the least unlikely that as a whole they would incline much toward the established conservative view of the way things ought to be.

    Good stuff.

  • Feelin’ Crispy

    I’m sympathizing right now with Clancy, who, a year-and-a-half into her doctoral work, asks, “Is this what burnout feels like? I have so much to do and no desire to engage any of it.” Another friend, a graduate student in psychology and counseling, wrote to tell me that four of the five students who entered her program married have since gotten divorced (which couldn’t bode well for their future as counselors, I would think). Invisible Adjunct is hosting a discussion along similar lines, inspired by Scott Smallwood’s article, “Doctor Dropout.” Smallwood writes:

    On the first day of graduate school, everyone is still a success. All of the students gunning for Ph.D.’s have lived an academic life of achievement: honor roll, summa cum laude, certificates, scholarships, and parents who praise their intellectual prowess. Yet as many as half of those bright students — many of whom have never tasted failure — will drop out before they can claim their prize.

    In some humanities programs, only one of every three entering students goes on to earn a doctorate. No comprehensive national statistics are available, but studies suggest that the attrition rate for Ph.D. programs is 40 percent to 50 percent.

    Of the eight candidates who entered my program in August ’98, only two have completed their degrees, two of us are still dissertating, and the remaining four have moved on to other jobs, families, and places unknown. Four out of eight — that makes us statistically average, I guess.

    I’m feeling a bit burned out myself at the moment. After finishing my second big writing project Saturday evening, I retreated to the couch, where I spent a day-and-a-half napping and watching the first season of The Office on DVD. The writing itself isn’t what’s so exhausting. Hell, the writing is fun most of the time. It’s the other stuff — the messiness of life stuff — that gets in the way and wears a body down. Things like broken washers and dryers, and day jobs, and accidents at the vet that almost kill the tiny orange cat that you bottle-fed for a month because its mother abandoned it when it was a week old. It’s all a high-wire juggling act.

    I’m so tired right now that I can’t even enjoy Kenneth Pollack’s change of heart, or the latest news out of the War College, or the Paul O’Neill and Colin Powell brouhahas. (Okay, so maybe I’m enjoying those a little.) I’m too tired to write up responses to Atom Egoyan’s Ararat (a fascinating train wreck of a film) or Kirby Dick’s and Amy Ziering Kofman’s wonderful documentary, Derrida (which is, of all things, quite charming and funny). I can’t even find the energy to finish up my “2003 Year in Film” post, which I’d hoped to send to Senses of Cinema and which now, two weeks into January, already feels irrelevant.

    But I do hope to get back to this blog every once and while. If anyone’s still reading.

  • Saints and Artists

    Paul Ford posted a great piece on the death of Elliott Smith that is all the more timely given the impending release of that Sylvia Plath film. If I ever teach Plath — not likely, but she’s all over the 20th century American lit anthologies — I might teach Ford’s essay alongside her. Talking about that mysterious relationship between the artist and her audience is tough; it’s even tougher when that connection is forged, at least in part, by some recognition of shared misery. I don’t deny the power of Plath’s or Smith’s poetry, but I worry when they (or others like them) are transformed into romantic heroes because of suicide. Ford goes a long way in confronting the dynamics of this experience:

    No story can reconnect the artist to what the artist created. But we believe one can and write biographies accordingly. Thus, the title of the Elliott Smith biography will be “Figure 8,” or “Miss Misery’s Groom,” and it will detail drug abuse, terrible acts, violences, punctuated by in-studio redemption. Everything about Smith, including anecdotes from his friends, indicated that he lived hard and left a trail of pain and shit along with his songs. So his life will become a tale full of cautions and insight about the tragedy of genius, and become the beatification of a rock saint. . . .

    For the audience, is it that our heroes are monstrish with their skin peeled away, their flaws shown, and their work is thus tainted, our pleasure diminished? Or maybe worse, that they are great in spite of their normalcy, in spite of their mundane, selfish, uglinesses, and when we witness their weakness we, also weak, are put on the hook ourselves, and must acknowledge that these flawed, wife-beating drunks, these lunatic head-in-the-oven suicides, these otherwise useless men and women, were capable of greatness, of dipping their hands into history and altering the flow, while we mill about our cubicles and curse our boredom?

    Grieving does nothing for the dead. We grieve for ourselves, for what we can no longer have. Elliott Smith got exactly what he wanted, and we can give and take nothing else from the man. Because it provided a sense of approval and connection, Smith’s old concerts can now be remembered as sacred events. But what a failure of the imagination: all moments are equally rare, whether someone is playing a guitar or not, whether Smith is alive or dead. Those on the message boards who are grateful they saw him perform live are fully vested in the lie that somehow the story, the man, and the experience of the music are all bound together, that the aggregate pleasure of thousands can be summed up into one living soul, one ex-addict with a beating heart, and now his entirely solitary act—seppuku without the second—can be seen as some kind of communion, a concluding act to his oeuvre of bitter depression. A pair of round cracked eyeglasses on an album cover, and a ticket stub from 1998. A bit of cloth dipped in his blood, a fragment of the true cross. It’s all about
    taking
    the easy way out
    for you,
    I suppose.

  • Thanks for the Links

    My host recently adjusted their Webstats software, so I’m now able to get better data about Long Pauses readers. A few more sites that have been kind enough to link to me:

  • Academic Blogs

    I chased a link and ended up discovering a fascinating community of academic bloggers, most of whom are like me — insiders with an outsider’s (slightly disgruntled) perspective. If you’re considering graduate school, read the links on the right side of Invisible Adjunct before making any rash decision. A few other blogs of interest:

     

  • God and the Machine

    Today’s issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education features an interview with Alan Lightman, a professor of physics and the humanities at M.I.T. Lightman recently edited a collection of essays, Living With the Genie, in which various authors examine the effects of technology (both good and bad) on our lives. Because it’s only available by subscription, I’ve excerpted a sizeable chunk of the interview.

    Q. You remark early in the essay that technology is making life faster and pushing out opportunities for quiet contemplation. What’s the effect of this on our culture?

    A. We have our spiritual lives compromised. We have become a nation without values and without a centeredness, without a belief system. If we have a belief system, it’s money and power. I think the lack of that centeredness is one of the consequences. It is part of our poor relationship with other nations in the world. Other countries sense our lack of values. Before you can understand other countries, you need to understand yourself. We don’t have such a foundation. We just have a blind pursuit of money.

    Q. And technology pushes that?

    A. The blame is on human beings, but technology has pushed that.

    Q. Some of the things you talk about in this essay have been felt in the arts for some time — everything from Brave New World to The Matrix. Do you think that your involvement with literature has given you a sensitivity to these things?

    A. Yes. It’s good that you mention those other media, because certainly there are other people who are saying the same thing. The more of us who say this, the better chance we have of being heard.

    I think a lot of these ideas are old. In my essay, I refer to Henry David Thoreau’s comments in Walden. In those days, the high technology was the railroad, and that was changing American thinking. Thoreau made this witty comment: “We don’t ride on the railroad; the railroad rides upon us.” Of course, I like that, but I would amend that by saying that technology is just a tool, and we created the railroad, after all.

    These ideas have been around for a while, but the pace of the world has accelerated. All of the problems that Thoreau saw 150 years ago are much more acute and have much more devastating consequences.

    I would love to push Dr. Lightman on some of these comments, particularly the first one. That relationship between technology and our spiritual lives is tricky and under-theorized, I think. Tools like blogging can actually encourage the sort of contemplation that he is lamenting, but they too seldom do. He’s right. The blame is on human beings, who seem to be sacrificing something of their humanity to these machines. Interesting stuff.

  • Speaking of Blogs

    I spent Thursday afternoon with UT law professor, Glenn Reynolds (a.k.a. Instapundit), and thirty or so other faculty and staff in a discussion of blogging and its potential impact on academic life. Reynolds’s talk was informal but familiar, leading me to assume that, during his two-year climb to the top of the blogging heap, he has participated in countless such presentations. The biggest surprises to me were learning that his daily audience outnumbers that of Phil Donahue’s failed return to television (and for less than $40/month in overhead) and that UT’s administration is downright supportive of his efforts. I figured that someone would be troubled by his partisan editorializing on university time. Apparently not.

    We reached little consensus during our post-presentation discussions. There was much interest in the potential of blogging — particularly as a tool to foster critical thinking and cognitive development in our students — but finding a real-world application is tricky. In practical terms, there is little that can be done on a blog that can’t be done using, say, a class discussion forum or an email list. The big perk, it seemed to most of us there, was the very public nature of the blog. Glenn recounted the thrill of receiving his first emails from readers in Thailand, for instance, a thrill to which I can testify from personal experience. Feedback validates the blogger’s efforts, while also raising the bar. Or, in a nutshell: This thing has made me a better writer and a better thinker; I’m sure that some students would undergo a similar process.

    If I were teaching right now, I think I would set up free Blogger accounts for all of my students, host them (again, for free) on Blogspot, then require each student to “journal” on the Web. For some in the class, it would, of course, be busy work. (But, for those particular students, everything is busy work, so who cares?) I bet a certain percentage of the class would really get into it, though, and would continue blogging even after getting a final grade. Imagine that: students coming out of a class with a desire to continue that critical thought process.

    Anyway, here are some notes from the colloquy and our student paper’s write-up.