Reading, Thinking, Reacting
Warning for unedited and unpolished word vomit.
Last week I started reading Janine Barchas's The Lost Books of Jane Austen, a study on popular editions of Austen that are largely "lost" because they were read to bits with few survivors. Eg. there was an edition in the late 1800s that was printed as a promotional by a soap company, and if you sent in x number of soap wrappers they would send you a book as a reward. Fascinating stuff, but early on Barchas describes her study as "bibliographical slumming" because she's studying popular works (never mind that Jane Austen is part of the canon; if this was a study of popular Shakespeare editions this same method of analysis would no longer be slumming and we all no way). A colleague scolded me for repeating the phrase, however, because "slumming" is such an ethnically and class-coded term, which is fair.
But I also contemplate the problematic ways that I as a human am read because of who I am now, which is as a tenured professor at a top university. It's assumed (and not just by this one person; it's happened with other people in other incidents too) that I don't know anything about working class life and so on, despite the fact that, you know, I grew up backwoods and blue-collar and so on. Frankly I know WAY the fuck more than a number of colleagues about problems of class and abuse in the US because I have fucking lived through it. And I have gotten to a point where I need to figure out how to much more openly address these issues in a useful way.
This weekend I picked up several books from the library. I got two volumes of Milosz's prose after talking to Todd last week; apparently the reaction of both of us in the wake of political goings-on was a desire to read/reread the work of a poet about how to intellectually survive in a totalitarian regime. I had also requested the new biography Becoming Beauvoir a while back and it finally came. It is very good and imminently readable, and it was very surprising to me to hear that most of the WW2 experiences of Beauvoir and Sartre are recounted as explicating varied love affairs (which honestly needs a chart to track) than anything else. So I suppose that survival is also about reading and fucking and loving, which I guess is helpful in its own peculiar way too.
Last week I started reading Janine Barchas's The Lost Books of Jane Austen, a study on popular editions of Austen that are largely "lost" because they were read to bits with few survivors. Eg. there was an edition in the late 1800s that was printed as a promotional by a soap company, and if you sent in x number of soap wrappers they would send you a book as a reward. Fascinating stuff, but early on Barchas describes her study as "bibliographical slumming" because she's studying popular works (never mind that Jane Austen is part of the canon; if this was a study of popular Shakespeare editions this same method of analysis would no longer be slumming and we all no way). A colleague scolded me for repeating the phrase, however, because "slumming" is such an ethnically and class-coded term, which is fair.
But I also contemplate the problematic ways that I as a human am read because of who I am now, which is as a tenured professor at a top university. It's assumed (and not just by this one person; it's happened with other people in other incidents too) that I don't know anything about working class life and so on, despite the fact that, you know, I grew up backwoods and blue-collar and so on. Frankly I know WAY the fuck more than a number of colleagues about problems of class and abuse in the US because I have fucking lived through it. And I have gotten to a point where I need to figure out how to much more openly address these issues in a useful way.
This weekend I picked up several books from the library. I got two volumes of Milosz's prose after talking to Todd last week; apparently the reaction of both of us in the wake of political goings-on was a desire to read/reread the work of a poet about how to intellectually survive in a totalitarian regime. I had also requested the new biography Becoming Beauvoir a while back and it finally came. It is very good and imminently readable, and it was very surprising to me to hear that most of the WW2 experiences of Beauvoir and Sartre are recounted as explicating varied love affairs (which honestly needs a chart to track) than anything else. So I suppose that survival is also about reading and fucking and loving, which I guess is helpful in its own peculiar way too.