On Sunday, the last day of Bout of Books, I finally managed to do my usual daily reading minimum - 40 pages of a book that I am not teaching this semester. I read more about police violence in Sao Paolo, along with people's justifications for it in Teresa Caldeira's excellent City of Walls. The problem of citizen-endorsement of police violence is global.
As far as the week's wrap-up goes, I was defeated by the hectic nature of the first weeks of a new school year. In the summer, I was easily reading close to 100 pages a day. Last week, our second week of classes, despite my best efforts, I read less than 40 pages most days - with the exception of things I had assigned and was teaching. The immediate need to prepare for a class full of students will always drive every other goal to the margins, or, for me, to 5:00 am - and sometimes, I will have to get up that early just to be ready for a 6:30 pm seminar. I'm hoping that I'll get used to the weekly routine and will be back to my serene morning reading soon.
Yesterday was a writing day for me, so I didn't read very much, unless you count re-reading. I'm working on an academic essay that includes a discussion of Weapons of Democracy by Jonathan Auerbach. Weapons is an intellectual history of how early 20th century US reformers and politicians understood the field of "public opinion", the mass media, and how they interacted with the newly created field of public relations. While many of us have heard of Edward Bernays and George Creel, this slim book could serve both as a new introductory text for people unfamiliar with this field, as well as being an original contribution to an ongoing discussion about the history of American media and the Progressive movement. Auerbach is also the editor of a recent Handbook of Propaganda Studies, and his work seems especially relevant now, given the attention we are currently giving to the problem of "fake news" and the president's attacks on the press. I was surprised to read, for example, that Theodore Roosevelt had attacked investigative journalists of his time, inventing the term "muck-raker" to describe them in a speech to the Gridiron Club, where he" worked himself into a fever pitch over 'hysterical sensationalism' and against those 'wild preachers of unrest and discontent, the wild agitators against the entire existing order.' "
Just caught myself dancing at the standing desk while doing some long postponed reading for peer review. This might make me a more generous reader. Let's see.
As much as I wanted to continue reading today, my main reading that wasn't for teaching happened between 4:30 and 5:30 am, when I was reading the Russian Debutante's Handbook, before I could finally fall asleep again, and between 11 and midnight when I got back to it before bed. In this section of the book, our hero, Vladimir is organizing a literary magazine/Ponzi scheme in the ex-pat community of "Prava" - the hipster scene in Prague of the 1990s.
I can't believe it took me so long to read Shteyngart. For years, I bypassed paperback copies of this book on the shelves of my favorite Brooklyn used bookstores, never believing I had time to read it. It was then, as a brand-new college professor that I most ascetically only read things that were related to work, whether for my own book-in-progress, or in order to teach classes in unfamiliar subjects that I was scheduled to teach with only weeks to go before the opening of a semester. Now that I'm reading it, I would say it's both exactly the kind of book I like, and that it is in many ways close to my own personal history. Shteyngart's only a little bit younger than I am, so many of the cultural references of the 1990s are familiar. I knew some people who went to Prague and traveled to Eastern Europe during this era - the band I sang for in college played a song written by one of these folks, with the title "the Bucharest Blues." (chorus: "I got the Bucharest Blues/ I gotta get outta this place") During my assistant professor years, I briefly dated a scientist from Azerbaijan who'd moved to LA with his family shortly after the fall of the USSR When he talked about his childhood, he told me he'd once aspired to be a "Soviet Man," passionately memorizing and reciting passages from Mayakovsky. The way he described it made it sound like an adolescent rite of passage, in the way that many in the US describe feverish teen-aged reading of another all-too-American Russian emigré, Ayn Rand. And, of course, as a CUNY professor, I had so many students from the former USSR. In my first two years living in Brooklyn, I taught developmental English classes in Brighton Beach, often called "Little Odessa" Finally, it was after seeing them open for Manu Chao on Central Park's Summerstage in 2001, that I became a devotee of the "gypsy punk" Ukrainian band, Gogol Bordello, although despite years of hearing about it, I never made it to see Hutz DJ at the Bulgarian Bar.
I finally gave myself the pleasure of reading the Russian Debutante's Handbook by making it part of work. That is, incorporated a section on US- Eastern European connections into my syllabus for American Studies this year, as part of my syllabus is meant to introduce students to theories of transnational American Studies through fiction. It seemed worthwhile to spend some time on the former USSR, given the current keen interest in our President's relationship with Russia. We'll be reading a short story by Molly Antopol, a chapter set in Shteyngart's Prava, and watching the movie made by a CUNY grad, Darko Lungulov called Here and There, which I saw at the Tribeca Film Festival years ago. I imagine that this urban cosmopolitanism will be as foreign to my current students in the suburban US South as Garrison Keillor once was to my immigrant students in New York City, one of whom once asked if "born-again" Christians believed in reincarnation.
I did get some other scattered reading done. While cooking dinner, I listened to Crosbie Wells' letters to Alistair Lauderback in The Luminaries. My official (non-teaching) reading of the day was Caldeira's City of Walls. I woke up late and got about ten pages in before I realized I had to do a ton of things on the computer because I was working from home. Among the things I had to do were read a couple of journal articles that I've assigned my students for next week, both about broader effects on communities created by policing and incarceration. I wish I had found a place on the syllabus this semester for City of Walls - there are so many connections with this week's assignments in particular. One of these days, I'll teach this class again, I hope, and then I can find a place for Caldeira in a section on policing/incarceration in the Americas beyond the U.S. That way, I could also include some of the great work being done in surveillance studies in Canada. It may be slow progress, however, as it seems the semester is going like this:
For Thursday, I again had too much going on to read as much as I have been during the summer. After spending some time doing administrative tasks and reading about 20 pages of Caldeira's City of Walls, I took my husband to have a surgery that he had to schedule for this week. I thought I would be reading in the waiting room, but it turns out that his surgery was a very fast one! That was good news for both of us, but it meant that I didn't get my reading done.
At the end of the day, we decided to re-watch some of Deadwood. I have been thinking about the show since I've been listening to Eleanor Catton'sThe Luminaries as an audiobook.Despite her setting in Hokitika,New Zealand and Deadwood's 1876 South Dakota, there are many similarities. The time periods are close, the stories center around the brutal capitalist competition over gold mines, expressed as complicated intrigue unfolding in a small prospecting town, filled with smart schemers, city-slicker marks, and a whole range of assistants and opportunists involved in every detail of organizing daily life. In both stories, a seemingly tragic white woman is an opium addict, and in both cases, this woman is generally underestimated by most of the men in the story. The Luminaries develops more non-white characters. Catton's story includes a Maori character named Tea Rau Tawhare, who has some kind of relationship with Crosbie Wells, whose dead body is discovered at the outset of the novel. There are also two Chinese characters, Sook Yoonsheng and Qui Long, who are fully described and involved in the center of the plot. This is a contrast with the one Chinese character in Deadwood.
I'd say that fiction about gold mining towns is a good place to look at similarities in the dynamics, both historical and mythic, of settler-colonial societies across the globe. As I was just discussing with my students the other day, we can call music from Australia and New Zealand country music, even if it's not produced in Nashville.
Tuesday night was rough, which meant Wednesday was rough too. I got done teaching my evening class at 9:30, then drove for about 10 minutes of my hour-long trip home while thinking I heard some kind of bug rustling around. I pulled into a gas station, and lo and behold, found a cockroach on the floor of my car behind the driver's seat!
I completely freaked out and spent an hour rooting around my car with a car vac until I got to the point where I just had to go home. Then, when I got home at nearly midnight, there was a TV news meltdown happening over the idiot president's most recent speech.
So, on Wednesday, instead of meeting my usual 80 page goal, I read only about 30 pages. I started in the morning with Teresa Caldeira'sCity of Walls: Crime, Segregation and Citizenship in Sao Paolo. This is really a wonderfully thoughtful and well-researched enthography about the impact of neoliberal transformation in Brazil on the lives of individuals, with an emphasis on walled-in housing and people's constant "talk of crime." It's a very empathic and yet critical study of every-day dynamics that contribute to segregation and criminalization. I'm reading this both as general support for my teaching this semester, and for my 2017 academic reading challenge, in the category, "read about a subject you study, but in a different country from the one that you usually study." Later in the day, I read another 20 pages or so of The Russian Debutante's Handbook.
Tuesday was a frantic day, reminding me of why summer break, even when you're on the clock is different from the school year, especially the first weeks of a new school year. I had several meetings in the morning and early afternoon, taught a class, and then was swamped with "emergency" emails and phone-calls.
I managed only to read things I had to read for the classes I was teaching. From books, this meant another two chapters of Ruth Wilson Gilmore's Golden Gulag, along with three different interviews with activists against broken windows policing from Jordan Camp and Christina Heatherton's timely and wonderful collection of essays by scholars and activists, Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter. I did drive for an hour and listened to the 20th chapter of The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton. After I got home from my long drive, I was too obsessed with watching CNN to read very much before bed. I'm hoping that tomorrow will be different, but then of course, there's preparing for next week's classes.
On Monday, I spent most of the day in Tennessee waiting on or watching the eclipse. Since we got there early to make sure we could park and had a good spot, I had plenty of time to read before anything got started. I was reading, for the third time, Ruth Wilson Gilmore's amazing book, The Golden Gulag. I'm teaching this book tonight in a seminar on the spatial arrangement of prisons and policing in the U.S. Tonight, we'll be discussing the notion of how surpluses of investment capital, labor, land and state capacity contributed to what Gilmore calls "the Prison fix" in California.
Later in the day, I read about 20 pages of Gary Shteyngart's The Russian Debutante's Handbook. I'm planning to use a chapter of this book in a course I'm teaching to undergrads this semester, but I haven't decided on which chapter yet - but I'm thinking of the one about his return to the former USSR.
I'm in the midst of writing a piece about how academics can use reading challenges to broaden their professional reading and enhance their quality of life, and, just as I finished the first draft of my piece, I saw that the 24in48 reading challenge was starting the next day. Of course, I had to join it, ready or not.
What I found most challenging about this challenge was using technology to prove/record my reading, and also the social media aspect. Since I kept the timer on only when I was actually reading and pressed "stop" if I was doing something else (refilling my coffee, talking to my husband), I don't know how people also did this challenge while posting their updates on social media. What I probably enjoyed most about the challenge was finding another way to get away from distraction that isn't the Pomodoro technique, because of the practice of keeping a stop-watch going without requiring yourself to go 25 minutes without a break. This allows you to monitor how much of your reading time is really spent reading, if you are good about stopping the clock as soon as your eyes leave the page. However, the downside of the stopwatch method is that I accidentally turned it off while I was reading for 15 minutes on the first day, and more disastrously accidentally reset the stop-watch after 6 hours and 15 minutes (+the unclocked 15).
Anyway, I mostly used it to finish books I was half-way through, so I didn't read a single book from start-to-finish, which was a little unsatisfying. Since I was doing primarily academic reading, I also took longhand notes as I was going, which made my pace pretty slow. Despite that, I read a total of 664 pages and listened to 6 hours and 12 minutes of Sarah Pinborough's Behind Her Eyes. In hard copies, I finished Marjorie Spruill's Divided We Stand; the Battle Over Women's Rights and Family Values that Polarized American Politics , James Forman's Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America; and Omar El Akkad's American War. I started, but didn't quite finish George Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses and at the very end of the challenge, when I decided I was too tired to effectively read Mosse, I got 65 pages into Billy Wayne Sinclair and Jodi Sinclair, A Life in the Balance: The Billy Wayne Sinclair Story, which I've had on my shelf for a long time because it was cited in some other book I read. It turns out to be not at all what I had expected.
I haven't posted here in a long time. I've been reading a ton lately, and also participating a new kind of online reading challenge: the readathon. Towards the end of July I participated in the 24 in 48 readathon and barely made it to the end on time.
Next week, I'll be joining the Bout of Books, a week-long reading challenge with origins in a blog run by fans of paranormal fiction, but which I think you can participate in while reading anything you like. Here's how the organizers describe the project :
The Bout of Books read-a-thon is organized by Amanda Shofner and Kelly @ Reading the Paranormal. It is a week long read-a-thon that begins 12:01am Monday, August 21st and runs through Sunday, August 27th in whatever time zone you are in. Bout of Books is low-pressure. There are challenges, giveaways, and a grand prize, but all of these are completely optional. For all Bout of Books 20 information and updates, be sure to visit the Bout of Books blog. - From the Bout of Books team
It's not clear to me what the goals are for this challenge, but I'll participate by posting updates about what I'm reading next week, along with my usual music match-ups. I'll also post my responses to their social media challenges here as the week goes along. Right now, I've just started a new semester, and I always revise my courses, so a fair portion of my "bout" is going to be reading around the edges of my own syllabuses.
