Category: Books and literature

Discussion of books and other literature

Writing for academics

Most of what academics write is intended to persuade other academics of something. That’s true for essayists, too. James Baldwin, when asked if writing an essay was easier than writing a novel, replied, “An essay is essentially an argument. The writer’s point of view in an essay is always absolutely clear. The writer is trying to make the readers see something, trying to convince them of something.” Essays, articles, monographs—the bread and butter of an academic writing life—are about persuasion. Those academic audiences are learned and demanding, and their curiosity is a learned, demanding curiosity. They’re trained to engage complexity (not just positions and speculations but also footnotes, endnotes, appendices, and bibliographic tails of all stripes). They live in expectation of argument and counterargument, of ideas in interesting shapes, laid out to pursue truths in new forms. They may read with their boxing gloves on.

Germano, William. On Revision: The Only Writing That Counts. University of Chicago Press, 2021. p. 29

Revision tools

Identifiable skills, practical techniques, working notes, instinct, gut feeling, hunches. Though they may sound like an unlikely troupe of players, when you write and revise you call on all of them. But no tool for working your way into a draft is more important than just reading it as carefully as your ears will let you and staying focused on what you intended to say. Say, not just describe or explain, even if your project requires that some things are described and some other things are explained. Revision is less a matter of fixing errors than of saying more clearly, thinking your writing through from the ground up so that you know why you’re doing something, why you’re going somewhere, why you’re taking the reader somewhere with you.

Germano, William. On Revision: The Only Writing That Counts. University of Chicago Press, 2021. p. 7 (italics in original)

The marriage of journalism and intelligence

“One profession that is particularly close to my heart, a profession that can get away with nearly anything,” Wagenbreth told his colleagues, “and this group are our dear journalists.” Journalists with a good reputation, he said, had excellent access to officials with security clearances and business executives, and could even travel through the Iron Curtain without a cover. Intelligence and journalism, in Wagenbreth’s view, had “entered a kind of marriage,” he said. “They complement each other and can’t let go of each other.” The Stasi knew that the press was addicted to leaks, and that scoop-hungry reporters would even publish anonymous leaks; they also knew that it was extremely difficult for journalists to tell whether a source was genuine or fake, and ever harder to tell if the content of a leak was accurate or forged. And it was another notch harder still to tell whether an anonymous leak contained some shrewd mix of both, handcrafted for maximum impact. The symbiotic relationship found its fullest expression in the active measures field. “What would active measures be without the journalist?” Wagenbreth asked the Stasi leaders. “Revelations are their métier.” The X, of course, had the same métier.

For Wagenbreth, more competitive and polarized media outlets presented a major opportunity. “For the man on the street it is getting harder to assess and judge the written word,” Wagenbreth explained. “He is ever more helpless in the face of the monsters that are opinion factories. This is where we come in as an intelligence agency.”

Rid, Thomas. Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020.

Mishra on Rousseau

What makes Rousseau and his self-described ‘history of the human heart,’ so astonishingly germane and eerily resonant is that, unlike his fellow eighteenth-century writers, he described the quintessential inner experience of modernity for most people: the uprooted outsider in the commercial metropolis, aspiring for a place in it, and struggling with complex feelings of envy, fascination, revulsion and rejection.

He never ceased to speak out of his own intensely personal experience of fear, confusion, loneliness and loss — spiritual ordeals today experienced millions of times over around the world. Holderlin, one of Rousseau’s many distinguished German devotees, wrote in his ode to the Genovan, ‘You’ve heard and understood the strangers’ voice / Interpreted their soul.’ Rousseau connects easily with the strangers to modernity, who feel scorned and despised by its brilliant but apparently exclusive realm. His books were the biggest best-sellers of the eighteenth century, and we still return to them today because they explore dark emotions stirring in the hearts of strangers rather than the workings of abstract reason. They reveal human beings as subject to conflicting impulses rather than as rational individuals pursuing their self-interest.

Take for instance his epistolary novel Julie, ou La Nouvelle Heloise (1761), whose socially outcast protagonist Saint-Preux is exactly the author’s own age. He arrives in glittering Paris to find in it ‘many masks but no human faces.’ Everyone is tyrannized by the fear of other people’s opinion. The airs of politeness conceal a lack of fidelity and trust. Survival in the crowd seems guaranteed by conformity to the views and opinions of whichever sectarian group one belongs to. The elites engage meanwhile in their own factional battles and presume to think on behalf of everyone else. The general moral law is one of obedience and conformity to the rules of the rich and powerful. Such a society where social bonds are defined by a dependence on other people’s opinion and competitive private ambition is a place devoid of any possibility of individual freedom. It is a city of valets, ‘the most degraded of men’ whose sense of impotence breeds wickedness — in children, in servants, in writers and the nobility.

Mishra, Pankaj. Age of Anger: A History of the Present. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017. p. 90-1

Remembering as a process in the present

I want to persuade you that when you have a memory, you don’t retrieve something that already exists, fully formed—you create something new. Memory is about the present as much as it is about the past. A memory is made in the moment, and collapses back into its constituent elements as soon as it is no longer required. Remembering happens in the present tense. It requires the precise coordination of a suite of cognitive processes, shared among many other mental functions and distributed across different regions of the brain. This is how Schacter, one of the pioneers of the approach, sums it up:

We now know that we do not record our experiences the way a camera records them. Our memories work differently. We extract key elements from our experiences and store them. We then re-create or reconstruct our experiences rather than retrieve copies of them. Sometimes, in the process of reconstructing we add on feelings, beliefs, or even knowledge we obtained after the experience. In other words, we bias our memories of the past by attributing them emotions or knowledge we acquired after the event.

Fernyhough, Charles. Pieces of Light. HarperCollins, 2012. p. 7

Memory and consiousness

Without our memories, we would be lost to ourselves, amnesiacs flailing around in a constant, unrelenting present. It is hard to imagine being able to hang on to your personal identity without a store of autobiographical memories. To attain the kind of consciousness we all enjoy, we probably rely on a capacity to make links between our past, present, and future selves. Memory shapes everything that our minds do. Our perceptions are funneled by information that we laid down in the past. Our thinking relies on short-term and long-term storage of information. Creating new artistic and intellectual works depends critically on reshaping what has gone before.

Fernyhough, Charles. Pieces of Light. HarperCollins, 2012. p. 4–5

Wooster’s greatest perils: the eligibly unwed

Jeeves: And if, in consequence, Mr. Winship should lose the election…

Wooster: I imagine democracy would survive the blow Jeeves.

J: The talk in the servants’ hall Sir is that Lady Florence has informed Mr. Winship that if he does not win the electon their engagement will be at an end.

W: Good God! You mean, Florence will once again be roaming the land thirsting for confetti and a three-tiered cake.

J: Indeed Sir.

W: And she may once more turn her attention to faithful old Wooster.

From Jeeves and Wooster season 4 episode 6 “The Ties that Bind” starring Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry.

Michael Bliss on writing books

Students who weren’t too overawed by the reputations and accomplishments of the college’s senior members could find them useful in more practical ways. At one High Table, Jane Freeman, who was just beginning to write her thesis and feeling daunted at the prospect of tackling what was essentially the writing of her first book, found herself sitting next to the historian Michael Bliss. Knowing that he had by then (1994–5) published eight full-length books, she thought, “Somebody who has written this much really must have a method. He must know how to do it.” So she asked him “whether he had a structure when he was writing a book, whether there was any particular way he went about it.” What he said in reply was “a revelation” to her. He said, “Well, when you’re writing professionally, which you have to do as an academic, it’s your job. And so I sit down a 9 o’clock and I finish at 5, and I write every day.” And he went on, “If you’re cramming as you do for an undergraduate course paper, you can’t maintain that over time. If you’re going to be writing every day for months and years, if you’re going to stay at it and do other books, you have to find a rhythm you can maintain.” That advice helped her, she said, “to have a paradigm shift between the cramming student who stays up half the night and tries to meet a deadline and someone who sees writing as her profession.”

Grant, Judith Skelton. A Meeting of Minds: The Massey College Story. University of Toronto Press, 2015. p. 406–7

Related:

Podcasts and audiobooks

Because the spoken word content on Spotify is so-so most of the time (aside from podcasts like Ologies and the Spycast), I have been trying Audible to provide better quality listening material during walks.

So far I have finished James Donovan’s book “Strangers on a Bridge: The Case of Colonel Abel” about the espionage trials and eventual prisoner exchange of a KGB colonel living as an illegal in New York (also depicted in the excellent film Bridge of Spies) and Lyndsay Faye’s “Dust and Shadow: An Account of the Ripper Killings by Dr. John H. Watson” which I learned about from an interview with the author on the I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere podcast and then finished in two days.

Donovan’s book was quite interesting, if read a bit mechanically. Faye’s book is a great pastiche, interestingly written with both deep knowledge of the canon and a willingness to innovate, and very well read in this edition.

Over several weeks I have listened to the first half of “Anna Karenina” read by Maggie Gyllenhaal, which is superb. She brings a great saucy enthusiasm to the text and language, and it’s easy to imagine that one is being read to by her character from the film Secretary.

Finally, in the hope of better understanding American conservatism in order to better strategize about climate change, I have been listening to Geoffrey Kabaservice’s “Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, from Eisenhower to the Tea Party.” I’m still working through the 1960s, which is still fairly little-known history to me. The book is a bit challenging both because a lot of the names and events are unfamiliar and because the narrator is a bit monotone in a way that tends to enhance the difficulty of paying attention.

I found that such narration was commonplace in the books and spoken word content on Spotify, so generally I have been very happy about how Audible has shifted my listening toward fully accomplished published works with enduring social importance, rather than just the (sometimes excellent) present-focused podcast and news content.

Reading about the resistance dilemma

Today I received and began reading George Hoberg’s new book: The Resistance Dilemma: Place-Based Movements and the Climate Crisis.

The usefulness is threefold. It speaks directly to my concern about how the environmentalist focus on resistance isn’t a great match with building a global energy system that will control climate change. It references much of the same literature as my dissertation, so it provides a useful opportunity to check that I haven’t missed anything major. Finally, it’s an example of a complete, recent, and successful piece of Canadian academic writing on the environment and thus a model for the thesis. It’s even about 300 pages, though a lot more fits on a published book page than a 1.5-spaced Microsoft Word page in the U of T dissertation template.