Trying to make sitting in this chair after dinner a habit. Hack your environment!
Well hello and welcome back to slowscholarship.com, where we do things slowly (obviously) and pedantically (of course). I’d like to share the results of my self-imposed 12 Books a Year Challenge, as I have recently posted the last book-review(-ish) blog for that Challenge. I am going to read 12 Books again this year, it’s going to be my thing. I find I need this much time not only to read worthwhile books, but also to absorb them.
[Middlemarch] ————————————>The Unbearable Lightness of Being
April – Night and Day, V. Woolf
May – Wolf Hall, H. Mantel
June [The Blazing World] ———————–>The Idiot E. Batuman
July A Clergyman’s Daughter
August [Ich, Helena von Troja]——————>Alice in Wonderland
Sept – The Wasteland T.S. Eliot
Oct – The Persians, Aeschylus
Nov – Cold Comfort Farm
Dec – De Rerum Natura, Lucretius————–>Schadenfreude, R. Schuman
Therefore, for the most part, I stuck to my plan. I am quite proud of myself for seeing it through, and writing a bit about each book on this blog, even though I went overtime and into 2019. It’s not a problem. There were about 4 months scattered throughout 2019 where I read nothing or did not write anything, I think I am a bit more hooked and can stay on top of it this year, because now I do see that there is a world of books that I can relax with. At the end of the year I really did go for shorter books, as I realized in late December I still has four books to read. Hopefully this won’t happen in 2020, but I make no promises.
I had one DNF, Villette by Charlotte Bronte, which I have heard great things about, but nevertheless I will probably never attempt it again. I just could NOT get on with the narrator Lucy Snow although the language, the writine was absolutely beautiful. When Lucy criticises her colleague into the ground for liking pleasurable things, like nice clothes and fun books (when life should just be a misery) I began to take against her (although now I do think she is meant to be a bit mentally ill). By the time Lucy has a tirade about how she would rather see a flower growing wild then ever see it picked (and I think she was being offered flowers at the time!) her not-like-other-girls pose had grated to the point of unendurability for me.
There are some books which I suppose are not read for pleasure, and really are meant to teach you about the (fairly gross) headspace of someone who is difficult to like, but even learning something was not worth it to me. Blech!! Imagine the complete opposite of sunny Anne Shirley and you’ve got Lucy Snow who rather hopes for the worst. And she can’t get what she wants in love, because she’s too homely, and she starts a horrid romance with an annoying guy just like her (match made in heaven indeed) where all they do is snark meanly at each other—that’s when I had to bow out. No regrets.
My Rating System:
DNF – Did not finish and chose a new book
1 Star – It was an okay experience to have read this book.
2 Star – This book was really enjoyable.
3 Star – This is a great book I really loved and I will need to have a copy accompanying me my whole life. Deserves at least a re-read.
The 12 Books, Rated:
DNF: Villette
1 Star
The Canterbury Tales, Diary of a Nobody, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Night and Day, The Clergyman’s Daughter, Alice in Wonderland
2 Stars
Wolf Hall, The Idiot, The Wasteland (and Paris: a Poem), The Persians, Schadenfreude.
3 Stars
Cold Comfort Farm
There were other books too, you see, ones that were not planned but snuck in. Of these there were 7 good ones and 2 which I don’t consider high-brow (?) or taxing (?) enough or just which regard appropriate subject matter (they were both a little like the feeling of glimpsing road accidents, so wrong but you can’t look away). I will write about the 7 worthwhile ones in an upcoming blog post, also with ratings.
Things I discovered from this Year of Reading:
Not My Jam:
Chaucer in general, plaintive modern novels, womanizing male leads & sad Theresas (I knew this before, really), P.G. Wodehouse, taking-it-for-granted that socialism must be abused, self-praising one’s own pretty face (shudder), rich people in London (but rich people elsewhere are fine), reading in German (need to fix this!), Nonsense, talking animals, when babies fix everything.
Indeed My Jam:
Gentle supercilious humour, the idea of Virginia Woolf (perhaps more than the reality), Marxist ideals, FFM (forgotten female modernists), Modern poetry in general, satire, ancient Greek Classics (f yeah), books relating to academia (called it, I’m addicted).
It is early January. Does life feel flat, or is it filled with fresh promise, like a juicy filled donut? It really depends on the beholder. I am in the process of reconciling myself to the fact that Big Uni is not calling me back to offer an interview to the Big Scholarship. Sigh. But my proposal was so good! I really think it was. We are back to “I believe in me”, which is a good thing, and I only feel stronger, somehow. Taking 2 weeks to compile that application package and write RIDICULOUSLY POSITIVE things about one’s self has only galvanized me. I will write those articles and books someday, because they need to be written. I need to write them. That’s not the question.
It is wonderful, how it all progressed, this sense of self: when I started my PhD I didn’t think I would really see it through. It was something to do because the job market was so bad. For the next two years, I doubted myself terribly. Then I spoke at a conference, flinging my ideas out there, and it went ok. The whole point anyway, is not to be universally loved but to discuss topics, that’s scholarship. But it felt amazing. And then, I still had setbacks, doubts, impostor syndrome. Perhaps I have just stayed doing it long enough. Over the course of 2019, my fourth year plugging away at my topic (while working) I began to…not relax, because I am often a bundle of nerves, but to accept this: this is my path, whether it works or not. This is my job even if I have to do it alongside another job (although another full-time job would be quite hard to manage). But it must be done. I feel I was born to do these topics. And I’ve grown into this precept so much it seems to be true. Only time will tell, and anything can happen in life, but like the early Canadian pioneer lady who landed on PEI after a rough sea voyage, and refused to continue further inland, Here I Stay.
I do have the idea that “cream will rise”–once you actually start publishing good stuff they cannot ignore you—and they cannot stop you publishing good stuff, if it really is good. But if cream never does rise in my case, and there have been plenty of forgotten thinkers and artists appreciated only after their deaths, I will at least have challenged myself to the end of my abilities, in the process extending them, and reaching, reaching.
So, in December and a bit of January, I read Schadenfreude: A Love Story by Rebecca Schuman. I will not bother to type out the subtitle here. It’s about a woman who tries to be an academic for about 15 years, and then gives it up and has a baby, a blog post of hers goes viral, and then she lands a book deal (those were the days!) so everything is fine.
It IS very much a memoir, and there is a lot about academia in it, which is why I wanted to read it, but there is also a LOT about it about the loves and hookups she has had, filtered through the lens of time of a very specific ocular strength: the one that makes you look a lot cooler than you were. Usually this is because you forgot the embarrassing parts of life (thank god brains edit), although Schuman does make a lot of fun of herself for being weird or uncool, these usually help (though too much self-deprecation never does), but I am sorry to say this, even though I sort of enjoyed reading the book, I found the narrator equal parts annoying and refreshingly honest.
I do apologize, because she is a real person, its just, somehow, the tone of the book. And she says motherf***ing about 200 times. I’m no prude, but it was just like, I GET IT. You’re not meant to be an academic. Because you are so rad and cool and loud and not a prude! She even reports at one point, that she was told after an interview that she “had a personality” which was considered a negative, and the reason she didn’t get the job. I get it. You are cool. But, I digress. I was just listening to a brilliant youtube video of Leena Norms last night where she said “don’t make your thing about hating on other people’s art.” That is good advice. So I am not going to keep describing in what ways this author ticked me off. In the end she decided it was healthiest to stop trying for academic jobs when nothing was happening after 2 years, and it was ruining her relationship (ok, that’s fair) but then it’s just a bit grating that she is able to fall onto the support of a loving husband, produce a child (she did it! she is a Woman and worthy!) and maybe there are a lot of other people for whom it is not wrapped up so neatly. I do think, however, that the author does a good job of never implying to us that it was ‘always supposed to work out this way, ‘ she’s quite honest that it is just what happened.
I’m torn between wanting to say “but she just gave up!” and the fact that really, it is everyone’s right to give up. But in my marrow I can’t avoid saying “she must not have wanted it badly enough” which is a terrible thing to say, and unfair . By the end of the he job search, the author was quite honest about the fact she wanted the affirmation of getting a job. She said (I’m paraphrasing) that “by the end of several years of turning of her PhD into a book and travelling all over for interviews, she wasn’t sure what she wanted any more. She wanted to be told that she was good enough for a job by getting it,” but the point of this path beyond getting the job had become more murky. I can understand.
I personally have never been about landing the job, and that may account for some of the struggles I have had. I know jobs are necessary (how will those student loans pay themselves?) but I am just concentrating on the PhD, and seeing what comes of it, not what it leads to. In my tiny niche subject, jobs are quite rare, and sometimes I think: why would it be me? But I also don’t think that it couldn’t be me. In terms of the really plum roles, you just have to catch one. And you never know.
Schuman captures perfectly something that I hope is never part of my own life, the struggle to think of something to write about from a new angle, suitably buzz-worthy angle, with lots of jargon in the title. That definitely does exist in academia, as it becomes ever more like a factory, in many places academics must produce a particular quota of papers and books within a particular time frame, just in order to keep their jobs. Not that academics need to live totally unrestricted, but when we try and quantify scholarship in terms of page count, we are going to get worse quality works in the long run.
This book was good. Definitely worth the read, and well-paced, for the story it told. I take issue with the fact that somehow her “great love of Kafka” is wound up in her highschool crush—-that does kind of make women look like idiots—and the highschool chapters were a bit hard to get through for me. That is going way back—too far back for my taste. Also—and this is just personal, there were like 3 times the author praised herself for her physical beauty—it seemed a bit…pointless…and Schuman writes with what some might call an outrageous zest for life—which I felt was rather “look how much craaaazy sh*t I did, I was so cool and carefree”—and that’s a choice, personally I would draw a veil over those parts of the past for my sake and that of others. In general I hope to forget stupid stuff, not drudge it up again.
But of course that desire is antithetical to memoir….and memoir must also be an art form. Because there is no way that she could remember that when she left the Prague railway station in 1996 that there was a loud American in a cordoroy skirt telling the train service personnel off. Not after all the things you do in life can your remember an ugly skirt from 25 years ago. And therefore, a lot of this stuff has to be invented. Not the larger events, but the details, which are what made the book come alive. This isn’t really a criticism, it’s more me realizing what is going on here. I have a few comments, for one thing, the author did land several teaching jobs and a fellowship, whereas some people who finish PhDs never actually use them; I think she was already pretty successful. Also, she often implies she was “poor” but…her parents were both professors (not super well paid, but more so than many other jobs) and at one time she is living in New York city with no discernible job… she’s “volunteering” staging a Broadway play….anyway. Unless my kindle-app skipped, she covered the period of her Master’s in about 2 pages. But the Germany parts were ok. She was too hard on her first host family but she admits she was an awful guest for them. I did feel for her in various exchanges she had with Germans, especially on the way to fluency.
I did not come away from this book with a profound interest in German literature as I had hoped (it seems nothing can impart that to me, except for maybe actually trying to read it) but the ways in which snippets from literature were worked in to this book were very interesting, and I liked the practice of captioning the chapters with various German words, of the type that seem to contain a world in a word. All the romantic relationships could have been cut in my eyes, or summarized, except for the last one (what a prude I’ve become! But nothing IS less interesting than other people’s relationships!) because it shows how TWO people pursuing academic careers interact. Apparently the men have infinite patience and achieve early success (i.e., they land a job) and pay all the bills (this is also the way I currently have it so I REALLY need to get off my judgy-train).
Obviously I have had a lot of conflicting feelings while reading this book, as it describes a clever woman giving up and letting a man save her…when I am currently being supported and will never reach my goals without this period of support…that’s dissonance for you. Pursuing your dreams can be peinlich.
There is something to be said about the effects of restriction plus time, in that it helps you think more and more clearly about what you want. This is true in so many small cases in my life…in restricting myself to trying a PhD, and only that, for several years I did in fact, hit upon the time period I would like to make my life’s work, in having put on weight so that few things fit and even fewer look good, I have gotten very clear on what I like and don’t like garment-wise, and having very little money (as a result of the PhD) I can buy so little that I must be very, very clear on what is absolutely necessary. And it is a good way to be.
In Germany, I can’t get many of the English books I want, so I need to really THINK about what is worth reading, for my education or my enjoyment, keep lists, and buy rarely and incredibly selectively. For the most part, once I have established a list, I need to see it through. Because my options are not infinite. I need to keep writing until I finish the PhD, I need to wear my winter boots until they have holes in them. Both of these ‘processes of patience’ grow me, I think. Things are getting clearer.
Anyway, before I was even a couple chapters into this book, it wasn’t grabbing me in the way I expected, and I wanted to put it down. But having so few options made me pick it up again and try again, and I am so, so glad I did. But the mid-point I was ‘rationing’ the book, letting myself read it as a treat when all the work was done, and I didn’t want it to end. It just got better and better and better. It was hilarious.
Isn’t it also funny, that earlier in the year, I didn’t have much good to say about many books? I was only tolerating some of them. So did I change? Has everything just lightened up for me? (In the final year of the PhD? Somehow I don’t think so). Or, did I randomly hit upon 4 really great books to end my year with? Well, I don’t think it was random, it was a result of having stuck to the plan, the overall plan of reading 12 books a year, and altering this plan in minor ways, because, over the course of the year, I did learn more about what I like. This whole process was very interesting. It means, don’t wait until you have the perfect list, or perfect plan, just start. Things can be changed, moved around. But certainly, we get better at doing things by doing them.
I loved Cold Comfort Farm. I hope you read it. Someday, for cozy fun, in the future, I will read more Stella Gibbons, especially the other two Cold Comfort Farm books, Christmas at CC and Conference at CC, which are much less well known, and perhaps not in print any more. When I started to read this book it was because I’d liked the cover with the cow on it when I had worked in a bookshop in 2008, and I knew it was supposed to be funny. I didn’t know that it had taken the (English) world by storm in about 1933. Some people didn’t appreciate that it parodied super-dramatic rural dramas—and those people take things too seriously!
Happy New Year! Yes, we are a few days into the New Year now, and I am just doing a bit of catch-up on my blog, tying up loose ends. I finished reading The Persians today, it took about an hour and a half to read all together, so it was rather short, although I do think it was complete. The ending made sense, but it didn’t really seem to tell an entire story. The play depicts how the Persian Queen, Atossa (the widow of the Persian king Darius) learns of her son Xerxes’ defeat at the hands of the Greeks at the sea-battle of Plataea. And then something cool happens, and then it ends. That’s it.
This play is something which probably requires a lot of context, and I didn’t read the Commentary yet, but I will. The gist of the historical situation of this play is that the Greeks were justifiably proud of their second repelling of a much larger force than their own (which probably was true), in 480 BC. The first attack on mainland Greece took place 10 years before, at Marathon, and also ended in disgrace for the Persians. After the second defeat Aeshchylus wrote this play, although Persians had likely been depicted in Greek dramas previously, but none of these other plays survive.
It’s very interesting, because obviously this play is meant to make Athenians feel justly proud of their achievements, and their democracy, and rip on the Persians’ autocracy and for not being able to beat them, despite being the great power of the world at the time. (The Persians make use of Egyptian soldiers and Babylonian troops, so this is after the time that Persia controlled both those territories as well). As a counterpoint: once in a Greek History class a professor told us laughingly something that seemed shocking at the time, as we were all there as devotees of “Classical civilization”: “Can you imagine how it was from the point of view of the Persians? They owned the world, all its goods and all its people. And they come to some place on the very edge of everything, with tiny towns and no written culture and in their minds, these people are so incredibly unimportant. What the Greeks remember as the glorious wars that formed their nation and identity, likely appeared to the Persians as meaningless scuffles with unwashed barbarians that it was unnecessary even to record.”
I’m paraphrasing, as it was more than 15 years ago, but suffice it to say, it was rather shocking to realize that in the lead-up to their own glorious “Classical” period, the Greeks really were, in the grand scheme of things, no big deal.
But, now. Now their records are what Western civilization very often has chosen to model itself on. When there were so many other enormous and older civilizations around, that few people today know much about. The Persians after all, were only inheriting territories conquered by the incredibly mighty and organized Assyrian empire. (Yes, those Bible guys).
The fact that the past as we know it, is almost totally an accident of preservation, is just boggling, especially in the case of those other Bible guys: the Biblical patriarchs who, although they set (some of) the trends that were followed by Western civilization for the next 2,000 plus years, in their heyday they were quite an isolated, fringe group of pastoralists, on the edge of much bigger happenings, outside of the much more advanced civilizations of their time. For some reason, Western history seems to have been put on its trajectory not by the losers, but by the nonentities (of their times).
It’s just interesting.
What is also interesting in this play comes during its final act: King Darius, Xerxes’ father, lately dead, is necromantically raised up to earth again for a chat. It’s very intriguing, and Aeschylus paints Darius as civilized and wise. Also, with all that is said in the play about Persia lamenting its dead, and the vivid refrains about wives mourning their husbands and families grieving their sons, this play is very sympathetic to those who lost loved ones, for a propaganda piece, if that is what it was meant to be. It’s possible that Aeschylus was diving deep into the emotions that make us all human, regardless of native culture…I need to study what has been written about this play more.
The Persians is just a very, very cool document to have, and I am sure that it has itself been influential, I would be that many of our perceptions about an East-West Europe/Asia divide were spawned by people thinking about this play. I definitely want to know more about this time period, and Archaic Greek literature in general after reading this. I am sure it’s just the tip of the iceberg of a whole history of thought.
