Reb's 2016 Academic Reading Challenge

Hello reading friends.  If you're arriving here from my Facebook page, you may have already done one or more of my academic reading challenges last year, and you may have even voted on categories for this year. If you found this challenge through some other path, here's a bit of an explanation.

I created these reading challenges for academics after I did someone else's online reading challenge for fiction in summer 2014. While I enjoy and still participate in an  online challenge for general readers, I thought that I, and perhaps my friends, would enjoy a challenge with academic books even more.  Being a professor with significant administrative responsibilities has made my reading life increasingly stressful, as I am tormented by the knowledge of the number of books I ought to - but don't really have time - to read, whether as part of my ongoing research project, or just to keep up with my field. 

That means that until 2 years ago, I rarely gave myself the time to read anything I just wanted to read, with the logic that if I had time to read a fat novel, I had time to read a 400 page book about my research subject. I worried quite a bit over the last year that doing these reading challenges was dangerously distracting me from that reading for work, but it turns out that it's just made me a happier person and a faster reader, since the number of books I've read has increased in general, and the number I've read for  work has gone up significantly during the time I've done reading challenges, despite my adding so many not-obviously-related-to-work things to my reading each year. 

   
 This challenge is for any academic who feels that his/her reading has become over-specialized and possibly joyless, who wants to read more literature for pleasure, who wants to keep up with the field, who likes to talk about reading with other academics on social media, who is interested in interdisciplinary reading, and who wants to support friends and colleagues by reading their books. It could also work for non-academics who miss reading academic books now that school is over. If you are not sure what counts as an "academic book" the most likely sign is its publication by a university press. Feel free to ask if you are not sure. I think there are quite a few books written by professional scholars that are accessible enough to be read by general audiences, and I would also like to promote the idea of reading these kinds of books outside the university.

The challenge starts on January 1^st and goes till Dec. 31, 2016. There are a total of 14 regular categories in the challenge with two “extra credit” categories for over-achievers.  

Rules:

The academic books must be at least 175 pages long (not including footnotes).

Novels must be at least 200 pages long

Books of poetry or special issues of journals must be at least 100 pp. long

Any book on the list, except where specified by category, can be a novel or a complete journal issue as long as it fits the general category

Books can only count for one category, but you can switch them from one category to the other before you’re done if you like.

Only one book can be something you’ve read before

Audiobooks are fine as long as they are unabridged and the print edition is at least 200 pages long.

Books must be started no earlier than midnight 1/1/16 and finished no later midnight 12/31/2016.

POINTS and the Point: There are a total of 200 possible points if you do 1-14.  If you do double-points for books bought at conferences and read both “extra credit” categories,  you can get up to 250 points.  I'm not really keeping score, but it can be a motivator.  If you're joining in, say hello in the comments and say something about what you're planning to read.  

Category	Author	Title	pages	Dates started- finished	points
1. Book by a friend or colleague					20
2. A Book of theory					20
3. Classic in your field or book that you see cited but haven’t read					20
4. A novel or book of poetry related to a subject you study					10
5. An academic book that’s been on your to-read shelf for a year or more (double points if you bought it at a book exhibit)					10 (20)
6. An academic book that you acquired within the last six months(double points if bought at a book exhibit)					10 (20)
7. A graphic novel /or memoir					10
8. A book about a country outside the U.S. which has featured in US foreign policy discussions					20
9. A book about an indigenous culture / A book in indigenous studies (worldwide)					20
10. A book that won an academic book award during the last ten years					10
11, A historical or biographical study about music, sports, or a single town/city.					10
12. An ethnographic study of the same general topic as #11 (music, sports or in the same city or town)					10
13. A book you chose because of the cover design					20
14. A novel published before the 20th century					10
15.  Extra Credit:  A book recommended or received as a gift from a family member					20
16. Extra, EXTRA credit : a book of fiction related to the same general subject as 11 and 12. (music, sports or the same single town/city).					10

Cooking, Reading and Listening: Foodie Music for the Holidays

I got up  early this morning to make cookies for Christmas with my in-laws.  While I was cooking away, using Maida Heatter's excellent and reliable, Cookies I was listening to my MP3 player on shuffle, which led me to a delicious blend of Lupe Fiasco, Miguel and Julian Casablancas. 6am was never so funky.

   I tried to think about some great books that make me want to eat, and the first things that came to mind were childhood favorites: Paddington Bear's obsessive love for marmalade sandwiches and the Narnia series with that infernal Turkish Delight.  These food descriptions were so deeply ingrained in me from childhood reading that I finally bought some Turkish delight a few years ago when I lived in Brooklyn and found it ...disgusting. 

 As an adult, I have developed a taste for more complexity in both my food and books.  And while I've experienced some great books with descriptions of food over the years (Chris Abani's Graceland ; Jorge Amado's Gabriela , Clove and Cinnamon; Laura Esquivel's popular Like Water for Chocolate) I wanted to get past the obvious foodie novels. Much more so than the novel, cookbooks have been challenged significantly by the internet. It's easy to look up a recipe online, so why get a cookbook?  Some cookbooks are just catalogs, but good ones do more than list recipes. They teach cooking techniques, impart a philosophy of food and eating, or introduce you to a different culture or.. in the case of two books linked below, a deeply personal story.

 And since this is a blog about music and food, here are some tasty music and cookbook pairings for you as you enjoy your holiday cooking and eating season.

Carole Darden's Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine is the first cookbook I used to make collard greens, which are now a regular staple for me.  I don't always follow the recipes to the letter, but I love this cookbook. It's more than a cookbook; it's the Darden family history with food and photos, starting with Charles Henry "Papa" Darden at age 16 in North Carolina, 1868. 

Another of my all-time favorite cookbooks is Crescent Dragonwagon's Passionate Vegetarian. If I could have only one cookbook, this would be the one.  It's massive and includes some really unusual and counter-intuitive recipes that are surprisingly delicious, like savory oatmeal with jalapenos. I once made her seitan brisket and potato pancakes for Christmas dinner and my sister-in-law pronounced them better than my father's prime rib.  It also feels good to be in the presence of Dragonwagon as an author. She's  very "present" in the book which is dedicated to her late husband; writing it was part of her grieving process after his death. It's soulful beyond the recipes.

 And there's that "New Classic" - Julee Russo & Sheila Lukins, The New Basics, Everyone who cooks or wants to try cooking should have this cookbook. It's creative, easy for untrained cooks, and well-organized. Some of the recipes have a bit of an 80s feel: lots of sun-dried tomatoes and a whole section on polenta, but it's still very, very good, a classic for a reason. Kind of like these guys:

The best new cookbook I've acquired is Sheri Castle's New Southern Garden Cookbook. I come back to it again and again.  If you live in the US south and use a CSA or shop at farmer's markets, this book is organized around major vegetables that you commonly get in your CSA box, with two sections on squash (summer and winter) and chapters on eggplant, beets, okra, etc..The book is not vegetarian, but substitutions are suggested for many recipes,  and it includes a recipe for smoked vegetable stock.

and before I go, I have to mention the landmark punk-rock vegetarian cookbooks, Soy, Not Oi! compiled by the Hippycore crew. I admit to having never prepared a meal from either of these cookbooks, but it just reminds me that I should try one. I have eaten food prepared by one of the authors, the late Joel Olson, who was a friend of mine. In his honor, here's the Beatnigs' LP, which he gives as the music you should listen to while producing his "Punk-wok Stirfry."

A Year in Reading: Totting Up, Counting Down.

Now that we have websites like Goodreads to track everything we read, it's become easier to see patterns in reading. Putting aside my trepidation about how all this will some day be used to market to me even more than it already is, I've tabulated my year's reading in a number of categories.
I discovered that I read many fewer books for research than I expected. I'm speculating that it feels like I do more reading for research than I actually do because reading for work takes so much attention. I take detailed notes as I read for work, so it takes me much longer;  I might be reading the same book for a week or even longer.
   In late 2014 I started participating in online reading challenges, and created an academic reading challenge of my own for my academic friends. The reason I did this was that I was getting bored with myself,  and felt over-specialized in academic reading to the point that I was not aware of books not directly related to my research topic. At the same time, I regularly teach a class in current scholarship in my field, and that makes me want to keep up-to-date on ongoing scholarship regardless of its relevance to my own research.
   For me, as for many academics I know, time spent reading stuff not-for-work feels like an incredible luxury, since if you're reading something, it should be for that book you're working on that still isn't finished. BUT - I've also missed reading serious fiction, which I did at a much greater rate before I went to graduate school. So I had a couple of goals: to read more literary fiction and fewer murder mysteries in my "pleasure reading" time, and to read more academic work not related to my research or teaching, particularly books written by my friends. As I hoped, my not-for-research reading allowed me to find ideas related to my research project despite their not being obviously connected to it,  for example in Jodi Melamed's Represent and Destroy which is about neoliberal ideology and multiculturalism.
 The question that might be generally applicable is this one: Does participating in reading challenges or book groups, or expanding serious but "not for work" reading result in doing less academic reading for work than you otherwise would?  It turns out, surprisingly, that at least this year, and for me,  the answer was no.
I may be a particularly unproductive person, but I compared this year's numbers with my reading choices from a year when I did not do any reading challenges (2012) and found that I did more serious for-work reading during the reading challenge year AND I read more serious fiction in my downtime.



If I count the books I believe I'll finish by 12/31, I'll have read 93 books by the year's end. The counts below are overlapping, so don't be confused if the numbers don't add up.

In 2015, I read 36 books related to one or another research project, including novels, so I read far more books for pleasure, general edification, and for teaching than for research.  However, it wasn't because of the reading challenge. I read 31 books for research in 2012, including 25 academic books and 6 memoirs, journalistic books, and novels related to my topic. I will note that in 2012, I was in the process of doing archival research, which meant that I spent considerable time reading stuff that was not books at all.

Not counting books I re-read for teaching, I read a total of 40 academic books this year, whether for future teaching, research, or as part of a reading challenge; 6 of these academic books were read only because of the reading challenge I did in the spring...though I might devise ways to teach them in the future. In 2012, I read 31 academic books in total (6 for teaching, 25 for research)

In 2015,  listened to 12 audiobooks, mostly while driving to and from work, working out, and doing chores.I read 11 mysteries and 12 works of literary fiction,  I read 4 books by friends and acquaintances, 4 general non-fiction books and 4 memoirs.

In 2012, I read 23 mysteries, a few works of SF and fantasy,  and 9 works of literary fiction. So I see where the biggest change happened.  I listened to 8 audiobooks that year. I attribute greater audiobook numbers in 2015 to the fact that I was driving in 2015 and not in 2012. I also read a grisly book about bear attacks - which I just could not put down. yes, sorry, pun intended.

Sadly, the vast majority of books I read in both 2012 and 2015 were by white people.  The split between men (55-56) and women (37-38) in 2015 was more out of whack than in 2012 (48/38). In 2015, I noticed that in 2015, I read more men for research and more women for teaching and for non-work reading.

Numbers aside, the most memorable things I read this year were...

Work Related/Academic:  
Siegfried Kracauer, The Salaried Masses .A brilliant analysis of German white-collar employees in the 1920s
In a similar vein, Daniel Guerin, The Brown Plague a French socialist's news reports and journals of his travels in Germany in 1932-33
Priscilla Wald, Contagious: Cultures, Carriers and the Outbreak Narrative . I taught a chapter from it in my research methods course as an example of interdisciplinarity. Really, really good and the students loved it too
Franz Neumann, Behemoth, Very long and detailed, and totally transformed my book project this year.
Hans Fallada, Little Man, What Now read for research, partly while in Berlin.
The aforementioned Represent and Destroy.
Lynnell Thomas, Desire and Disaster in New Orleans A history of race and the New Orleans tourism industry. This is absolutely a must-read for anyone who plans to go there.
Carol Mason, Oklahomo  Examines conservative anti-Gay politics through several case studies in Oklahoma.

Not-Academic, Not Read for Work:
Paul Murray Skippy Dies as a beautifully performed audiobook
Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues, which I can't believe I didn't read sooner.
Hector Tobar, Deep Down Dark  This book is the story of the 33 Chilean miners trapped in a mine for over two months.
Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky, Sex Criminals (v.1 and 2). funny, smart, sexy and very much of our time.
Paula Fox, Borrowed Finery The most unsentimental treatment of terrible childhood experiences that I have ever encountered.
Miranda July, The First Bad Man  hilarious, almost embarrassing, moving, thanks to my friend LT for recommending
David Treuer, The Hiawatha. The secret history of building Minneapolis skyscrapers, heartbreaking.
Junot Diaz, The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao The combination of a geek-culture-reference drenched narrative and the use of footnotes was really excellent as a pedagogical project.
Ernest Cline, Ready Player One, Listened to the audiobook as read by Will Wheaton.
Chris Abani, Graceland, Nigerian politics from the point-of-view of a teenager in Lagos
Also, re-reading Pride and Prejudice for the first time since I was 13 and talking with my husband about it while he read it for the first time was a great experience.

And counting down....

I am in the midst of: 

Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong (for teaching & in the self-improvement category from Book Riot challenge)
Henry Jenkins, Fans, Bloggers and Gamers (for research)
George Orwell, 1984 - re-reading for research
Barry Maitland, The Marx Sisters which I have been reading while falling asleep, and thus not getting far in...
and just started Anne Charnock's A Calculated Life on audiobook last night while doing chores.

Will I finish any of these other books I started and then set aside this year?
 Slavoj Zizek, Organs Without Bodies
 Peter Longerich, Heinrich Himmler
Peter Weiss, The Aesthetics of Resistance v.1
Matt Fraction, David Aja and David Pullido, Hawkeye v.1

Being Wrong and White Privilege

I'm about half-way through Kathryn Schulz's witty and informative book Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error and I'm thinking about how some of what she says relates to other discussions I often have with people about white privilege or whiteness. In the book, Schulz identifies 3 problematic notions of what is going on with other people when they disagree with us. Whether they're actually wrong, or just disagreeing with us which makes us think they're wrong, we believe that they are either 1) ignorant, 2) idiots, or 3) wicked.
  The first solution many of us reach for is #1. We try to persuade people by informing them of the facts. However, because of the way people's beliefs frame the way they interpret evidence or facts, this technique rarely works. If people (including ourselves) who were wrong were just misinformed and could be easily corrected life would be so easy!
 Today, I saw an example of evidence avoidance in a post from one of my friends on Facebook about how white people, when shown evidence of white privilege, respond defensively with stories of their own personal hardships.

This has long been true: whether it was poor white industrial workers claiming to be worse off than slaves in the 19th century (about which see David Roediger's Wages of Whiteness), or of the average white person denying the existence of racism or put-upon men's rights activist angry at the rule by the matriarchy) today.
   The researchers who did this study found that whites would actually claim personal hardships MORE when confronted with evidence of their privilege. They speculated, as I did recently, that part of what is going on may be that such information is experienced as threatening to white people's sense of self because of their framing beliefs in meritocracy. They write:

Our work suggests that privilege reduction efforts might need to focus not only on convincing or educating advantaged group members about privilege, but also on reducing the feelings of self-threat this information induces,” Phillips and Lowery explained. “The existence of hardships does not reduce racial privilege, since racial privilege entails comparison to someone of a different race with equivalent hardships. People may erroneously think privilege entails complete ease in life and that the presence of any hardships denotes an absence of privilege.

This erroneous belief that privilege and hardship are mutually exclusive categories is deeply ingrained in our society and is a framing belief that gets in the way of people being able to just look at reality: that we live in a deeply racist society and that all white people get both immediate benefits  (such as the presumption of innocence) and experience long term negative effects (see James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time)  as a result.

Tuesday Morning Reading and Listening

Reading about why Switzerland took so long to allow women to vote (until 1971) in Kathryn Schulz's book Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error and I hear Julia Holter sing "The time change worked well/ I had a good excuse for being late/ but I pushed open the door...."

Books to help you decide whether Donald Trump is a Fascist, or Right Wing Nationalist Populism in the USA part one

 I've been writing a book about anti-fascism in American politics and culture for the last couple of years. That means I've been reading a pile of books about fascism as I've tried to unpack the history of how the term has been defined by people across the political spectrum. I also pay attention when I see the word being used in contemporary political conversation. What I'd noticed until this year was that the most common uses of the F-word have been applied by right-wing activists who apply it to Obama, or by U.S. presidents to describe international leaders whom they are proposing as targets of military force.  The mainstream and center left has been more cautious with the word, particularly after MoveOn was attacked in the media in 2004 for an individual's entry of an anti-G.W. Bush ad that compared him to Hitler.

   Thus I'm struck by the references to Donald Trump as a fascist that have appeared not only in left quarters, but in comments and analyses by centrists.. An actual democratic party candidate tweeted that Trump was running for president as a Fascist Demagogue. Vox interviewed five major scholars on generic fascism (which seeks to define fascism by identifying similarities across multiple countries and political parties) and they seem to agree that Trump is not a fascist. But the question of whether Trump is a fascist or a right-wing nationalist, or a Bonapartist, all relate to questions not just about fascism, but about the history of far-right politics in the U.S. more generally. So, today's reading recommendations are for anyone looking for a quick primer on right-wing nationalism, the Christian ultra-right, and fascism.

Robert Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism. This book is an ideal introduction to the subject of generic fascism. It is short, comprehensive and extremely well-written. It also has copious, helpful footnotes and a good bibliography.

Chip Berlet and Matthew Lyons, Right Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort. This is an older book that was the culmination of years of work by an activist-research team dedicated to explaining and combating US right-wing nationalists and fascists. Berlet has been an active anti-fascist researcher since the mid-1970s whe began doing research on Lyndon LaRouche.

Are you concerned about Christian evangelical activists and whether they are fascists? Check out Sara Diamond, Roads to Dominion. It traces the history of the religious right back to the McCarthy era.

If you have a strong stomach, Leonard Zeskind's massive tome, Blood and Politics covers U.S. neo-Nazis and militia activists from the 1960s to close to the present in scrupulous detail. Zeskind, like Berlet, is a longtime independent activist researcher who follows the contemporary militant far-right.

Fiction:   

The classic book by Sinclair Lewis,  It Can't Happen Here was published in 1935 at a time when many in America were concerned about the threat of fascism not only because of events in Italy and Germany, but because of demagogues on the domestic right who endorsed and supported Hitler. Lewis was friends with Leon M. Birkhead, a leading opponent of Gerarld Winrod, known in his time as the Jayhawk Nazi and was married to Dorothy Thompson, an American journalist who was an  outspoken critic of Nazi Germany.

Frederic C. Rich's recent Christian Nation is an homage to Lewis; a speculative counter-history that imagines what would happen under a Palin presidency. Some of the characterization is a bit wooden, but this is probably the most thoroughly imagined fictional scenario of a dystopia in the U.S. based on research on the contemporary Christian Right.

 Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale also concerns right wing religious radicalism, and is a modern classic for a good reason. The link above goes to an audiobook read by Claire Danes. How marvelous!

Reading about the Prison Industrial Complex

 It was twenty years ago that Mike Davis first used the phrase "Prison Industrial Complex" to describe the growth of prisons and prison populations in rural California. Since then, the national prison population has more than doubled from what was then a scandalous number to reach 2.4 million.  More than ten years ago, it was again a scandal that part of the U.S.'s project of bringing "Freedom"to Iraq and Afghanistan meant torturing prisoners of war in remote sites hidden from legal scrutiny. For more than twenty years, incarceration has been part of every day life for a significant portion of Americans, as the incarceration of one individual has a lasting, negative impact on families and communities.

A movement to abolish (not reform) prisons has emerged for the second time in the United States, and in the last few years, that movement has been followed by a significant number of academic and popular books concerning the PIC, mass incarceration, and policing.  I'm one of the people who write about prisons and policing, and I have a lot of friends and colleagues who I count among the most important authors on this subject.  This makes it hard for me to recommend a small number of books, but I'm going to pick according to the following general criteria: Does the book make an intervention that challenges popular mythologies about prison?  Is the book accessible to a non-academic audience? Does the book come from an abolitionist rather than a "reform" perspective?  I'm going to include some less-accessible titles in the list because they are really essential.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis and Opposition in Globalizing California (2007). This book is really important, explaining the economics of prison - which are much different than you might think (hint: not privatization.)  If you are an academic, and you are wondering what the most important book on the PIC or mass incarceration is, look no further. The opening chapters are grounded in Marxist political economy and, as the title suggests, explain the role of surpluses (finance capital, land, labor, state capacity) in producing the contemporary prison archipelago in the U.S. If you are not familiar with Marxist terminology, it might be good to peruse the introduction to Capital I mentioned in a post earlier  this month before reading this book. If you are waffling, check out this video of Gilmore doing an interview with Laura Flanders.

James Kilgore, Understanding Mass Incarceration (2015). This book was written with the explicit goals of translating some of the central ideas to be found in academic writing about prison for general readers, explaining what is happening right now in contemporary prisons, and suggesting strategies for how to oppose them. Kilgore is also a former prisoner who draws on his experiences inside.

Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?  (2011) A to-the-point argument for abolishing prisons placed in long-term historical context.

CR-10 Collective  Abolition Now! Ten Years of Strategy and Struggle Against the Prison Industrial Complex (2008),  As the title and author suggest, this is a publication by the Critical Resistance 10th anniversary organization compiling short pieces including practical strategies for abolishing prisons in the United States.


Musical break and then Three MORE book recommendations!

One of the most frequently discussed issues in contemporary media coverage of prison is the massive growth of the women's prison population. The TV show, Orange is the New Black which is based on the memoir of Piper Kerman a white woman who spent a year and half in federal prison after getting busted for drug-trafficking, has increased interest in this subject. The best book that I have read on women and mass incarceration is:  Beth Richie, Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence and America's Prison Nation. (2012) This book covers a range of important issues surrounding the incarceration of women. She seeks to encourage activism at the intersection between feminism and anti-prison organizing.

Another growing area in the prison regime is federal detention of immigrants. Jenna Lloyd, Matthew Mitchelson, and Andrew Burridge's Beyond Walls and Cages: Prisons, Borders and Global Crisis is an edited collection combining academic and activist pieces (these are not mutually exclusive categories) on how immigrant detention and deportation politics relate to the larger economy and landscape of the U.S  carceral state.

For the outro, I've got to recommend, Dan Berger's , Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era. It just came out in 2014, and was the winner of the Organization of American Historians' James Rawley prize for 2015. I haven't read this book yet, but I did read an earlier version of it, and based on that and the Google Books sample, it's eminently readable. It's really important to learn about the history of the 1960s-1970s radical prisoner movements if you want to understand the current conditions inside U.S. prisons.

Reading and Listening Posts 2013-2014 ... for all you Saturday morning readers

Sometimes I read with music, especially if I'm reading in a public place, like a train, a coffee shop, or in the gym. Most of the time the music has to be all instrumental or the lyrics have to be in a language I don't know. However, with certain pop music, I've listened to it so much that it ceases to be a distraction and becomes like a sound blanket that keeps more distracting noise at bay. While most of the time, the music fades into the background, now and then there's a moment when a lyric surfaces in my consciousness in a synchronicity with what I'm reading. This will make the music into a kind of commentary on the book, at least in my brain's private meaning system. I started sharing these little moments on Facebook about two years ago. One of my friends has always enjoyed them and suggested that I pull them together somewhere. So here we go. Part one.

This first post is kind of a cheat. The quote from Jameson and the comment on music were not originally in the same post, but for the uninitiated, it helps to give an actual quote from Jameson to see why this reading/listening mix struck me.

From October, 2013...
Like a meal that goes better with a good wine, sometimes a good book needs to be paired with music, especially if you tend to read in a loud public place. I've found recently that Fred Jameson's Archaeologies of the Future is enhanced by listening to Animal Collective's Centipede Hz & Merriweather Post Pavilion.

"The more successful the historiographic construction - the conviction that everything is of a piece...the stronger this case is made intellectually, the more inevitable is our entry into a Parmenidean realm in which some eternal system reigns around us like a noon beyond time only faintly perfumed with the odor of heated plants and informed by the echo of cicadas and the distant an incomprehensible memory of death" ...Fred Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future

From January 2014: 
Monday morning re-reading....getting ready to teach the 2nd half of Ruthie Wilson Gilmore's Golden Gulag tomorrow night. I've asked students to bring in pop culture sources related to issues covered in the readings each week and do presentations about their connections (and disconnections) from what they read. Hmm...no students volunteered this week. What if I go first and bring this one in?

Saturday afternoon reading..a surprise synchronicity. Just as I read from excerpt of 1932 German anarchist pamphlet : "Calling the police against National Socialist terror misses the mark, because the police force is riddled itself with swastika bearers," Killer Mike's "DDFH" rolled out of the speaker with that first line "Cops in the Ghetto they move like the Gestapo".

February 2014:
another unexpected reading/music synchronicity. While reading Steve Macek's chapter from his excellent book, Urban Nightmares on how television news represents urban "pathology" to "Middle-American" suburban audiences, I hear Arcade Fire wonder, "Is anyone as cruel as a normal person?"

Later that month....

I can't post any surprising musical/reading juxtaposition today because I don't believe that any music really captures the experience of reading a set of departmental by-laws for the 15th time or so in an effort to imagine every possible abuse of power that might be inadvertently enabled. Perhaps I spoke too soon. The Fleet Foxes just said "Ah...."

March 2014:
honest, totally random. Wilhelm Reich gives a whole new level of political significance to this song (Sat reading/music coincidences):

Music/Theory pairing : Willhelm Reich "What is Class Consciousness?" On the revolutionary/reactionary potential of youth's desire for dancehalls & Kurt Vile "Too Hard" : i will promise to do my very best for my God and My country...i'm only human...I will promise not to party ....too hard.

April 2014: 
Saturday morning reading/ music coincidence. I was reading a description of memorial for teenagers who died of drug overdoses or were murdered in South Boston in Michael Patrick McDonald's All Souls when Michael Stipe's voice came from the cafe speakers singing "Everybody Hurts". Tell me about it. <Tears.>

May 2014:
Accidental Pop music + Cultural Studies reading part whatever. Kaganovsky, "Maidenform: Masculinity as Masquerade" in Mad Men, Mad World: "we watch Betty, Joan and Peggy get ready for their day....Betty and Joan both dress in front of the mirror, focusing our attention not only on their double enframing but also on their relationship to the spectacular image. Each in her own way, Betty and Joan perform ideal femininity for the gaze of the other, and their relationship to their image is mediated through the mirror, in which like Jacques Lacan's infans (or infanta) they see an ideal I reflected back at them." Soundtrack: Arcade Fire, Reflektor. chorus: Just a reflection, of a reflection Of a reflection, of a reflection, of a reflection Will I see you on the other side? (Just a reflektor) We all got things to hide (Just a reflektor)

Foals, "Providence" first heard yesterday at Shaky Knees music festival, goes perfectly with all that Animal Studies reading I'm catching up in preparation for next year's American Studies scholarship class.

later that month: 
Ian Kershaw's biography of Hitler  is really well accompanied by the collection "Greatest Songs of the American Yiddish Theater". Guess who's still here? HA! ( I couldn't find a video version, but here is a good live performance of a Yiddish theatrical song)

June 2014
Saturday morning reading and listening....vacation! Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch with its NYC high culture landscape - film forum, crooked art thieves and antiques dealers, private school dope addicts,etc. + this

and back to work with 
Saturday afternoon reading and soundtrack. Erich Fromm,Escape From Freedom and the song "Weak and the Strong" with apologies to any fans of Kidd Kidd, the lyric fits: "All the weak shall perish/And may the strong go hard"

Reading the news about the World Cup in Brazil with

October 2014:
Sunday afternoon reading and music: Lucinda Williams sings "you can talk all the trash you want/ I know the truth even if you don't" accompanying Avery Gordon's comments about Sabina Spielrein and psychoanalytic transference.from Ghostly Matters

November 2014:
music/reading synchronicity late edition. : On an elliptical machine in a hotel gym a couple of weeks ago, I was reading Wharton's The House of Mirth, that section when Lily Bart shows up at her friend Gerty's apartment late at night. There was Karen O in my ear singing ." You're a zero/ what's your name? No one's gonna ask you/ better find out where they want you go to go/ try to hit the spot/ get to know it in the dark/ get to know Whether you're crying, crying, crying - oh! / Can you climb, climb, climb.... higher?"

December 2014: (This one's no accident)

Maria Damon....Thursday morning reading and listening,"Imp/penetrable Archive" in your Postliterary America , and this photo-montage to out-takes and final recording of "Be My Baby" with possible best line "Shut Up It's Christmas"

and, Maria Damon second note, because it's the one you said readers needed to listen to, "River Deep, Mountain High" with your line "The Wall of Sound is an instance of diasporic excess, an instance in which the creator cannot bear to leave anything out, cannot let anything that has ever happened be lost for history, which in this case is acknowledged through the sonorous temporality that is part cacophany, part melodious unification of effect..."



Later than month..
I don't know who, but I think someone can make a connection between Jose David Saldivar's Trans-Americanity and the Beatles' "Magical Mystery Tour",
Comments:

well, now the "The Fool on the Hill" takes an oppositional position to western rationality.

 just as I'm reading about the "displaced situation of the writer in the capitalist city" George Harrison is lamenting the fact that his friends have "lost their way"...

I think that "I am the Walrus" has many heretofore unheeded connections with theoretical works that attempt to complicate the way we understand the modern subject. ( I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together)

I can't tell if this is the Beatles according to Donna Haraway, Donna Haraway according to the Beatles. Either way: I love it.

I don't know about Haraway, but perhaps Saldivar will see the connetion I am finding between a couple of sentences on the "contradictory implications" of "uneven development" (34-35) and "Hello, Goodbye"

See also Carol Gilligan's monograph on Your Mother's Ways of Knowing.

 While not a Beatles fan (I know, I know), this is my fave critical theory book inspired by/about them , by the great historical of German fascism...turns out it's all about birth order  (it's the book Object Choice by Klaus Theleweit.)

Dec. 25th. still reading Jose David Saldivar, and inspired to celebrate Xmas morning with El Vez and Thee Midniters.


Dec. 31, 2014
End of the year reading and listening. Ethan Blue, Doing Time in the Depression and Ace Johnson "Rabbit in the Garden"