I'm still working on finishing the 2020 Academic Reading challenge before 2020 is over. I just have a few categories to go and am hoping to squeeze them in around some other "for work" reading that I also want to do before the year is up. This morning I started what seems like it will be a fascinating account of field work in the Hare Krishnas in the 1970s from sociologist E. Burke Rochford Jr., Hare Krishna in America.
According to his introduction, he began doing research as a graduate student in the mid-1970s, but was unable to get the group to treat him as a researcher:
Instead of accepting my repeated assertions that I was a researcher, the devotees invariably refused to accept my explanation, seeing me instead as a 'spirit-soul' who had been sent by Krishna. I saw myself as being there to conduct research, that was my problem, and was of little or no concern to them.
What is a better pairing for this spiritual enthusiasm that the author experienced that George Harrison's Hare Krishna paean, "My Sweet Lord". By the time I get to the end, "I Am the Walrus" may be the best pairing, but I guess I'll find out.
The dreadful year 2020 is almost over, which means it's time to start planning our academic reading challenge for 2021.
I hope you'll join us for this fun experiment in resisting the push to academic over-work, over-specialization, and time-rationing and give yourself permission to read academic books that aren't immediately obviously instrumental for your next project. Those books you bought at a book exhibit two years ago? time to open them up and start reading! That book your colleague wrote that you bought but didn't get around to yet? It's category #1.
The Covid-19 pandemic has created burdens and opportunities for readers, so this year instead of matching a song about books and reading with the challenge, I'm pairing Randy Newman's Corona-virus song from April "Stay Away From Me" with the official Reading & Listening post for the 2021 challenge. The vaccines may be here, but we're not done with this yet, so please follow Randy's advice. If you watch the video and listen to the words of the song, you may also find you agree with me that Newman is prescient about the things that would come to define the social-distancing experience for many of us. Finally, he's got a bookcase behind him and books piled by the piano (is that Borges or Berg in the title face up on the bench?) making this video a great way to start thinking about your next year of reading. Glad to see he - or the Venus in Sweatpants mentioned in the song - is a fan of Elena Ferrante, or at least Europa Editions.
Who and What the Academic Reading Challenge is for:
This is a challenge for academics who feel that their reading has become over-specialized and possibly joyless, who want to read more literature for pleasure, who want to broaden the way they approach their own research and teaching, who like to talk about reading with each other, who are interested in interdisciplinary reading, and who want to support their friends and colleagues by reading their books. You don’t have to be a professor to do the challenge. Maybe you graduated from school but you miss reading academic books. The challenge runs for a year and emphasizes reading across academic disciplines. If you are a professional academic or public intellectual outside the university, this challenge is meant to give you a structure for reading outside your area of specialization - including reading literature - and to provide a space to talk with others about the experience. If you are a general reader who likes reading serious works of non-fiction, this challenge is also for you. It's a structure that you can use to read works of the type that you might not have encountered since you were a student.
We have a Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/160467571369051/ In this group we talk about the challenge categories for the year and occasionally discuss what we've read and plan to read
The challenge starts on January 1, 2021 at midnight and goes till Dec. 31, 2021. There are a total of 15 regular categories in the challenge, and FOUR “extra credit” categories for over-achievers.
The academic books must be at least 175 pages long
Novels must be at least 200 pages long
Books of poetry or special issues of journals must be at least 100 pp. long
One book can be a children's or YA book.
To decide whether a book is academic, look for something published by a university press, or check the acknowledgments for references to scholarly mentors and anonymous readers.
Any book on the list, except where specified otherwise, 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. (In other words, you can't count a book by your friend who wrote a memoir of a coup for both the memoir about a coup and the "by a friend" categories.)
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 1/1/21 and finished no later midnight 12/31/2021
Points: This isn't a competition, but if you're counting…
Total possible points for 1-15: 200
Total possible points for all extra-credit: 250
1. A book by a friend,
colleague, former teacher or former student 10
2. Classic in your
field that you’ve never read or book you see cited often but have never read 10
3. Book about the
place you grew up 10
4. Book about place
you want to travel to when this mess is over 10
5. History of medicine
or illness 20
6. Book about
isolation, quarantine or lockdown 20
7. Book about LGBTQ+
politics or culture outside the U.S.A. 20
8. A book recently
translated into English 20
9. A book about visual
arts or the biography of an artist 10
10. A book about a
place, time, concept, or topic adjacent to what you study 20
11. Book Published
before 1900 10
12. A memoir about
politics, revolution, counter-revolution, or coup 10
13. Book about
pre-modern trade routes 20
14. Graphic novel,
graphic non-fiction, or collection of comics 10
15. Nonfiction book
about animals and/or animal psychology 20
EXTRA CREDIT:
Extra Credit: Award
nominee that didn’t win the award 10
Extra-Extra-Credit:
Award winner or nominee that won an award that you’d never heard of 20
Extra-Extra-Extra
Credit: Book about a commodity 10
I was just listening to an old "best of 2014" mix I made for friends back then while reading Qiana Whitted's excellent Eisner-award winning book, EC Comics: Race, Shock, & Social Protest and this old song by Alvvays came on, and I noticed this verse:"And when the wheels come off / I'll be an astronaut/ But I won't be lost in space / I will be skipping rocks"
Bridging the distances between 2020, 2014 and 1953 when EC did the original comic "Judgment Day!" in Weird Fantasy, I'll call this a good reading/listening moment.
Reading Annalee Newitz, The Future of Another Timeline and listening to Mise en Scene "Dance My Life Away" 'cause I needed to use some emusic credits. They're a good match even if their "About Love" which doesn't seem to be on Youtube had a more close match on the lytics. The sound of Mise en Scene reminds me a bit of the Muffs: melodic, poppy, sort of retro of 1960s "girl groups" mixed with grunge. And since thisn novel is about time-travel and features a lot of nostalgic representations of the riot grrl scene of the 1990s, I'd say contemporary bands with a retro feel make sense. And Mise en Scene are kind of double retro.
Of course Newitz helped create a band named after the fictional band that she created, Grape Ape, so here's a video of them singing the song "What I Like to See" featured multiple times in the 1992-1993 sections of the book. It's nice to see Charlie Jane Anders behind the bar in this video too.
It's the first week of classes at Kennesaw State, and as has been the case for a couple of years this coincides with the August Bout-of-Books readathon. Since I will be reading anyway, even if it's less than I really want to, I'm signing up again. Some goals for this week: finish the book I'm currently reading by Kate Aronoff, et. al: A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal and get enough of Samuel Delany's Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand to not embarass myself in the SF bookclub meeting tomorrow night. After that, it will be time to see how much headway I can make in Pierre Broue's massive tome on the German Revolution of 1917-1923.
What is Bout of Books? From the organizers:
The Bout of Books readathon is organized by Amanda Shofner and Kelly Rubidoux Apple. It’s a weeklong readathon that begins 12:01am Monday, August 17th and runs through Sunday, August 23rd in YOUR time zone. Bout of Books is low-pressure. There are daily challenges, Twitter chats, and exclusive Instagram challenges, but they’re all completely optional. For Bout of Books 29 information and updates, visit the Bout of Books blog. - From the Bout of Books team
It seems like I'm sort of meeting goals for the week. I've read a little bit every day, despite working from home and also being super distracted by the ongoing Corona virus disaster. I did finish Pale Rider, finished one book I was reading for a review essay and have started the second one. I am 1/3 of the way through A Memory Called Empire and hope to finish it by the end of the weekend, and have 40 minutes to go in American Wolf, which I'm about to go listen to while out in the garden. I did not get back into Adam Tooze's book on the economics of the 3rd Reich, because of the focus on getting the book review reading done, but there's still a little time. Once I'm done with this book review, I'll have cleared my mind a little more to get back to researching and writing pieces of my own book - it's a been too long since I had real undivided time.
Yesterday I finished Pale Rider and made some headway in an edited collection I'm reviewing for an academic journal. In my anxious insomnia, I also read another couple of chapters in Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire in my hopes to read all the Hugo-nominated novels for the year before it's time to vote. I'm enjoying this one a lot so far. This morning, I got back to the 1/2 finished book I'd been reading on writing local history by Joseph Amato,Rethinking Home. I had initially bought it for the purpose of figuing out how to teach students how to write local history, and it's going to be helpful for that, but it's also just turned out to be an unusually well-written and fascinating book.
Now it's time for me to go back to work. Today's challenge is to ask for recommendations and respond to other people's recommendations, which I guess I'll do on instagram or Twitter before the day is up.
Today's musical accompaniment, on the theme of local history, since Amato's work is mostly done in Minnesota comes from one of Minnesota's famous musicians, so much of whose music is about specific places in and aroud Minneapolis.
Yesterday, I wound up being busy with work for a lot of the day, and only got my usual morning reading done: about 40 pages of Spinney's Pale Rider about the 1918 influenza. Today, I read another 40 pages in the morning, and am now about 40 pages from the end. I wanted to keep reading, but had to work, so I didn't get to the chapter on the influence of Spanish flu on Europeans adopting national healthcare. For a brief moment, it seemed as if covid-19 would lead to real change in health care policy in the U.S., but now it seems like we are just going to pretend it's not happening as thousands of people die. It's a grim start to the readathon, sorry. Last fall, not knowing what it was about, I read Katherine Anne Porter's novella Pale Horse, Pale Rider, from which Spinney's book takes its name. That book captures the experience of delirium that has been common to the 1918 and 2020 pandemics, as this bit quoted in a recent piece on it in Texas Monthly shows
Silenced she sank easily through deeps under deeps of darkness until she lay like a stone at the farthest bottom of life, knowing herself to be blind, deaf, speechless, no longer aware of the members of her own body, entirely withdrawn from all human concerns, yet alive with a peculiar lucidity and coherence; all notions of the mind, the reasonable inquiries of doubt, all ties of blood and the desires of the heart, dissolved and fell away from her, and there remained of her only a minute fiercely burning particle of being that knew itself alone, that relied upon nothing beyond itself for its strength; not susceptible to any appeal or inducement, being itself composed entirely of one single motive, the stubborn will to live. This fiery motionless particle set itself unaided to resist destruction, to survive and to be in its own madness of being, motiveless and planless beyond that one essential end. Trust me, the hard unwinking angry point of light said. Trust me. I stay.
To make an abrupt transition to today's challenge, if you like Katherine Anne Porter, then maybe you would also like Virginia Woolf.
I was so busy for most of this academic year, and so dismayed by the ongoing horror of American politics, that I didn't have the energy to keep up even a little reading blog, but since I turned my grades in and I'm working from home, it seems like I should join Bout of Books 28. For the next week, I'll be posting updates on what I've read, and maybe doing some of their mini-challenges, and hopefully, pairing some books and music. I'm currently reading multiple books at once, as usual. I'm in the middle of Laura Spinney's book about the 1918 global influenza pandemic, Pale Rider, am almost done with the audiobook of American Wolf, as well as two books I decided to start reading in my goal of actually reading all the nominees for the Hugo Awards before the voting deadline. This week, that's Seanan McGuire's Middlegame and Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire. I'm also reading a couple of different things for work, including two edited collections on prisons and policing. For my own research, my goal for this week is to re-start and finally finish Adam Tooze's book on the economics of the Third Reich, The Wages of Destruction which I had started at least two years ago and got side-tracked from. I've got some other stuff to do for work this week too, so I doubt I'll finish all of these, but it's good to have an ambitious goal to start with, right?
What is Bout of Books? From the organizers:
The Bout of Books readathon is organized by Amanda Shofner and Kelly Rubidoux Apple. It’s a weeklong readathon that begins 12:01am Monday, May 11th and runs through Sunday, May 17th in YOUR time zone. Bout of Books is low-pressure. There are daily challenges, Twitter chats, and exclusive Instagram challenges, but they’re all completely optional. For Bout of Books 28 information and updates, visit the Bout of Books blog. - From the Bout of Books team
It looks as if both Audible and Amazon have pulled the book from their site. They did not issue any public statement about how the book came to be recommended in a featured sale selection over the holidays. I'm not sure what the process is, or how they plan to avoid promoting similar books in the future. Are they going to have human beings check algorithmic recommendations? That seems like the best bet, but who knows?
Since Audible.com was bought by Amazon twelve years ago, it's probably been futile to expect that they would refuse to carry Nazi content. After all, their parent company still sells the Turner Diaries despite organized efforts to get them to stop. I've been a member of Audible since 2002, and I really enjoy audiobooks, which I listen to when travelling and doing chores. I usually listen to about 12 each year, which is why I have one of those memberships that includes an audiobook each month.
I was curious to read that the Audible CEO, Don Katz, was a student of Ralph Ellison's at NYU, and attributes much of his thinking to Ellison's mentorship. In 2018, he proudly posted a link to Philip Roth's visit to the Audible studio in Newark. One wonders what Ellison and Roth would think today, if they saw the book Day of the Rope a fan-fiction fantasy based on the vision of the Turner Diaries, not just being sold on Audible, but being featured as part of a year-end "Holiday Relief" 2-for-1 sale. The sale is over now, but you can see the screen-shot from the promotion below. I included the first review "pure trash" in the picture because that reader is correct about this book, which should not be featured in a sale.
My best guess is that this promotion happened because of an algorithm. After all, Youtube's algorithm has become a notorious ingredient in online radicalization. What it looks like is that this book got a large number of positive reviews from Nazis who organized to build it up through the algorithms. Some of these reviews refer to it as a "guide" for the boogaloo - the current white supremacist plan for a 2nd Civil War inside the United States. which makes the inclusion of the book in the sale even more concerning. One would expect that a company based on the values of literacy and human understanding would seek to find out what happened and would have already taken action to remedy it quickly. It should not take a large social media or letter writing campaign to get them to do so. There are a lot of other worse things happening in the world right now than this one small thing, but it's troubling to me that Audible.com's reaction hasn't been to swiftly, clearly - and publicly repudiate this piece of pure racist trash. Instead, the first response to my complaint has been to say that "we try to be neutral." But promoting a book like this one isn't neutral, it's incendiary. On the good side, the email I got from customer service said that a "team" was handling this with utmost priority. I hope to find out soon what that means, as Audible has remained entirely silent about this on their social media accounts, despite the fact that several people have liked or retweeted and tagged them in posts related to this promotion, with a number of people saying that they are cancelling subscriptions as a result.
Lesson number one in new media literacy ought to be not to let algorithms do all your thinking. Lessons from Ellison and Roth would likely be that sometimes even business people ought to maintain some principles. If you can't see the problem with a promotion of a white supremacist terrorist manual, what problem can you see with anything?
