A Defense of Poetry and Philosophy and History and Art History and Language Studies and Cultural Studies....and Knowledge

Dear gentle readers,

Sorry for my long absence. I do hope that I can post more regularly. Over the past few weeks, I have been coming up with all kinds of cool things that I should post about, and now, when I have a bit of free time to post, I cannot think of a single topic....mer.

So what to discuss? What topics are most relevant right now? Well naturally I could talk about that huge elephant in the room....the fact that America is officially under new leadership. But many have already taken this on many times and have done a better job than myself. I would throw in a word of caution. Listen to that inaugration speech again, and pick up on some of the more problematic phrases. The most troubling, "We will harness the sun"....yes, I like a green America, but this rhetoric is scary. Also, refiguring education is good, but perhaps we should think about more than the sciences, yes?

Which finally gets to the topic of choice...the role of the humanities. Stanley Fish recently wrote about this topic - here. I suggest that you read his article. And I hope that you get as angry as I have. Sadly, I fear he is right, and I am not certain what to do about it. Many people have complained to me that academia is just not functional, that it is a waste of time, space, and money. My response has always been that academia provides society something useful. Personally, I have always believed knowledge for knowledge sake, but I have come to realize that this trope is no longer satisfying. So what is the relevance, the importance of humanities? What is the functionality of the academy?

My response is a simple one: nothing. Ok, not that simple. If the humanities does anything, it serves to continually question and refigure cultural and social narratives. In light of the current economical arguments against high ed, it seems that academia's real ability is in questioning the need for functionality. What does it mean for something to be functional? How do we draw these lines? What gets cut when we draw these lines? The humanities provides these questions, and helps to underscore that current calls for functionality are constructed and cultural, not intrinsic. Naturally, then, of course, the inquisitiviness of the humanities can be used in more areas, more functionalities.

Intellectually and socially, I think that all academic work serves a crucial role in help us to understand our cultural moment. Yes, boring and often funded academic projects happen, and they seem a total waste of time. Even some academics seem a complete waste of time. But my fear comes in when we try to decide which knowledge is functional, and which is not. We cannot know what future generations will need, what is important to them. And I have always been a supportor of creating more space for knowledge rather than foreclosing. For instance, a great example comes from my interest in materiality of objects.

When digitization efforts first starting happening, some libraries decided to throw out the material artifact once it had been scanned. As a result, many original copies of newspapers have been destroyed, material newspapers that are now important to how we understand the development of printing. The same can be said of many books that have gone the same route. My point here is that we can never know what is need for the future, and we should try our best to preserve as much information as is physically possible. Occasionally, you have to throw out the newspapers, it is just unavoidable, but if you do, do so knowing the consequences.

So yes now the humanities seems "useless" but I rather not live in a society that can't see beyond its own time.

Then again, I am one of those useless academics fighting for my spot in the world. Perhaps I am just an old relic.

Your Humble Author

Finally an Update

Dear Gentle Readers,

Well the Blogger Symposium is over (well as much as these things can ever truly be over), and so now for an update in my life.  I promise that we shall return to our regularly scheduled rants about material girls living in this material world tomorrow.  But for now, let's talk about me....

I just finished the Fall term.  I know, it seemed like I would never end, and to be honest, near the end there, I just was not sure it would.  But it is over, and all in all, I was happy with all but the end bits.  The courses were in many ways spot on.  I learned tons.  I got my ass kicked.  And in general, I felt like a proper grad student (poor, sleepy, and prone to randomly get really excited about John Donne).

But even the sweetest academic moments come with the bitter.  I am tired of paying library fees...urgg.  I am tired of walking 30min to campus everday (I know, I really have no complaint here).  More importantly, I am tired of feeling inadequate.  In undergrad, if you actually cared, you were a rock star.  Here I feel if I have not spent half my life reading the big names in every field of thought then I am just a loser.  I realize this is a common feeling, but it is the one part of grad school that I hate.  That being said it is also the part of grad school that has made me work my ass off, so I am sure it is beneficial.  I just wish for a happy medium.

As for everything else, Toronto is still nice.  Freakin' cold though.  Seriously.  And they don't scrap sidewalks in this city...grrr.  But I have not fallen yet thanks to my mad hott ice walking skills that I developed at a young age (because I spent half of second grade falling on my bum everytime it snowed).

Well folks, That's about all I have the energy for today.  Tomorrow, I think I might do a post on skin.  And sometime this week, we shall be talking about sex as promised last year.

Your Humble Author

With the NYTM in physical form next to me..

I have to thank our lovely host for the blog symposium for really bringing our posts all together with his response. I've had a lot of fun taking an open-ended perspective, and seeing how it all converged. Actually, I think I might have to re-read Barthes. My (personal) author is not so much dead, but physically disassociated from the text that ends up in the world at large.

For my own part, I want to thank Preppy for pointing out the angle that was simmering a bit below the surface. I think it even speaks to my slight alienation from equating the taste of food with the physicality of family. Even as I aspire to enter the journalistic ranks, I know that I focus on style first - and Aslam's fiction is weighed heavily on sounding excellent, even if doesn't take account all of the ramifications of language choice. Lives is one of my oldest and dearest reading staples, but I think the more we can talk about the subtext of a column that is the anecdotal version of "This I Believe", the more we can take away from such a regular feature.

You Can Tell Which One of Us is the Professional Newshound

Thanks to Colin Clout for his critique of our critiques of Nadeem Aslam's essay about...hmm, well, it's still unclear to me what it's about, because, as I argued before, Aslam never comes out and says it.

As you can see, we're going in circles of meta-critique already, so I'm going to try to keep this short and focus mostly on what Colin said. Two things:

1. I complained that Aslam embeds all kinds of political ideas in this text and doesn't say explicitly whether he accepts or rejects those values. All of us here at FWFL made a similar mistake in referring to those "problematic" ideas so let me take my own advice about nonfiction writing and just come out and say it. The core question of whether a woman's cooking really IS an extension of her body is predicated on a social system in which the female homemaker silently cooks and cleans for others, often does not partake in the eating, and certainly doesn't speak up at the table. In that system, women don't have the opportunity or the right to make alternative choices or claim independent identities. No place, even Pakistan, is uniformly like that anymore, and Aslam doesn't live there anymore, so to express nostalgia for this model reflects, to my mind, a certain flippancy about feminist issues that is pervasive these days, a sense that somehow the big war is over and it's now innocuous to dabble in these stereotypes. If the '08 election taught me anything, it's that the battle is so not over.

2. Why did I go through all the trouble to rant about some questions Aslam dismisses? Not just because I take issue with the political position I read between the lines of his text but because, unlike Colin Clout, I DO think Aslam had an obligation to take a more explicit stance himself. Fiction and nonfiction are not the same and even if Aslam is usually a fiction writer, he has chosen explicitly to write a nonfiction essay, and publish it on a page--the Lives page of the NYTM--usually devoted to pieces by authors who are not professional writers. The POINT of that page is not the stylistic merit of the prose but the expression of an idea; it's the magazine's equivalent of an Op-Ed column. Also, note that the NYTM doesn't publish literary fiction, though it does publish the occasional humor sketch. So it's code is the same as the main New York Times: in fact, they share a submission guidelines page, meaning that the credentials of appropriate content are the same for both: news-hooked, fact-based and with an explicit take-away point. If Aslam does not want to write such op-eds, if he doesn't want this essay to appear as literary journalism [because it doesn't meet those standards], fine, but then really shouldn't be writing in this venue at all.

Not only because it makes for what I consider bad writing [Colin: I found the fork thing cliche]. His essay is just a short story that is autobiographically based. Even if all the events are true [and I'm not convinced they are] it's fiction masquerading as nonfiction, by virtue of the fact that Aslam rejects the codes of journalistic practice. The more fiction writers and critics do this [and Colin, you're doing it when you lump non-fiction as a parenthetical after fiction], the more license there is for journalists to disregard the facts and be wishy-washy about the main thrusts of their arguments. As a journalist who, narcissistically enough, considers journalism to be a public good, I worry about essays like Aslam's as leeches on a social institution.

And He's Back

Dear Gentle Readers,

I do so apologize for my extended hiatus from FWFL. With the start of the New Year, the family gatherings, and most importantly, the unending papers - which just got turned in today (urgg), I have been busy. Much too busy to even eat properly and see the light of day, much less blog. In fact, minus occasional facebook checking, I have nearly been internetless. It has been a sad few weeks in Colin Clout's life.

That being said...I am back! And I promise that 2009 (Happy New Year, ps) will be quite bloggerific. To that ends, I have a response that is very, very late. So here it is.........

First, I would like to thank Preppy McPreperson, TKB, and KT for what was a wonderful bit of blogging. I would also like to apologize to them for not responding sooner...I have read your posts many times, though, throughout my vacation from the internet. When I first proposed to you three that we do this, I never realized just how awesome the Symposium would turn out.

As for my response, I shall try to draw some lines of connectivity through the posts and then try to respond to each writer with my own thoughts. This is less of a response to the story as it is to their posts.

When I first read Nadeem Aslam's story I was, perhaps expectedly, drawn to overt materiality of it all. Memories become lived through objects, in this case food and smells. Objects become a means of identification and process. I think it is in this that perhaps we can link together what seem somewhat disparate posts. KT perhaps most found Aslam's prose resting in objects. She, reminiscent of ideas I have stated here before, said, "Home is in our experiences. It’s not a physical place, but in the smells and tastes and sounds of our comfortable environments. It’s in the things that remind us of love and happy times." The notion that home is experiential seems to me spot on. Home is hardly a building. If I were to return to staircase 12 in Oxford (a place I very much considered home), I would find no traces of that place, but hand me a jar of Cadbury Hot Chocolate mix and the memories rush back.

Of course, I think that TKB helped to explain that perhaps KT and my own associative links between experiences and objects is not that straight-forward. She writes, "This is beyond my understanding. Food is delicious, satisfying, and yes, sometimes even related to my family history - but not in the way Aslam writes about how the very body of the cook - the shape of the hands, the smells - imprints on meal. It's a lovely written passage, but it makes me confused - how literal is this supposed to be? Am I at a cultural dirth that I cannot connect this with my food?" I absolutely loved this conclusion. TKB does a wonderful job of expressing a moment in which I think the text is problematic, is alienating. Nadeem takes the link between the self and its experience a bit far. Let me requote the passage that TKB is talking about:

"Each Pakistani woman spices her curries in her own way; each pan has a different aroma, the way each human body smells slightly different. The thickness, texture and the width of each woman’s chapati is also unique to her, depending on the size of her hands, the shape of her fingers and the strength with which she kneads the dough. And that evening all three of us were overcome very soon after we began the meal: the food — the flavor of the mutton, of the samosas — was the best we had tasted since our visits to our eldest aunt’s home in Lahore... We reminisced as we ate, each new mouthful sending us deeper into our memories."

Aslam is not just finding memories in objects, but rather bodies. People, specifically women in this case, become known through the objects that they produce, more so, they are nearly equated in his syntax. The size of the bread is the size of the woman, the two are nearly indivisible. I think that TKB's confusion then maybe stems from this. As much as my mother's apple pie reminds me of her, I would never equate her to it.

From here, of course, I think we can lead nice into Preppy's critique of this piece. She argues, "Part of the Pakistani food culture he's describing is the fact that the nieces and nephews would have little sense of the aunt's worth as a person outside her role in serving them food. If the author is expressing nostalgia or warmth about such a society while visibly benefitting from life in a very different social milieu, he has to deal with the politics of that." Preppy said it better than I ever good. There are importantly and problematic issues that arise in Aslam's story that are not effectively handled. I would like to extrapolate this though to the idea I started with, objects as memories.

While I claimed that I would never equate my mother with an apple pie, perhaps in a sense, because I understand my relationship with her through this pie (no matter how superficially), I do perform a cognitive move that is not to different from Aslam's. What I ultimately want to underscore here is the ethics implicit in my materialist approach to texts, which is ultimately what this symposium helped me to expose. If I link selves and experiences to objects, there is an inherent risk that I might become to reductionist; I might equate instead of link.

To further this, I would like to respond to each of our guests. First, KT expressed that she has had negative experiences with Aslam's fiction, and I would like to argue that perhaps this is because of the pitfall that TKB exposed and Preppy detailed. When Aslam gets ethereal and loses the plot, it is because he is talking about objects, about things. Oddly, in his writing (and maybe this is why I like him), objects break the narrative flow, they become the narrative. For him, things not people, not events, tell the stories (And to answer your question, KT, no I do not think you will like his new book).

As for TKB's post, I too was in that course with her. I too have met Mr. Aslam myself. And all I can say is she is perfectly correct. For me, his stories mean differently because I have met him. I have heard him read his stuff; I know his inflections, and more so, I know how he approaches fiction. I am reading his new book right now, Wasted Vigil, and I honestly have not like the first bits. But I know that my disliking it stems from the fact that I cannot recreate his reading of the first chapter, which I heard twice. All I hear is my own voice, not his when I read it. That being said, TKB, I come from the school of dead authors. For me, Barthes makes a great point, and I think your own experience with this story highlighted that. Your inability to comprehend the equating of the body and food, more so your alienation from the text, in my opinion is part of the reason the author is dead. You, like myself, cannot conjure up Nadeem to explain the text to you, and to be honest, even if you could, I am not sure it would help. Even if I could get Nadeem to read Wasted Vigil right now I am certain it would not make me feel closer to the text, in fact, because his reading cannot be mine. No, it is through working through the alienation the the text becomes significant and important.

Finally to Preppy, I found most of your critique helpful and good. However, I would like to perhaps throw back the issue of genre that you bring up. Yes this is non-fiction. But I would argue that as a fiction writer, Aslam, and thus his work, is a bit more nuanced. His piece is not literary journalism, it does not have to have a point. That being said, I feel that I did not give you the correct context for the piece, which is partially my fault and the internet's. I was sent a link to this article, I never saw it in its material form, and as such, I assumed it was the NYT, not the NYTM (thanks, TKB for correcting me!). These are very different publications with very different ends. Although, even with a bit more context, I think that Preppy's critique is still valid. Fiction (and non-fiction) today has a responsibility to know the narratives, rhetorics, and tropes it is using. It may not have to do anything about them, but it should have a sense of self-knowledge about it. I think that most contemporary fiction does this (Sometimes too much, hence my frustration with some postmodern novels).

To end, I would just like to give a quick response to the piece myself, and as no one else really did it, mine will be somewhat about form. Aslam's piece if anything is a wonderfully executed piece of prose. It is maybe two printed pages long (an awkward measurement since I never printed it), and yet it packs in a lot. How does Aslam do this? It is in his descriptions, his ability to quickly and succinctly imbue an object and adjective with meaning. Take this passage: "My sister put down her fork and rose from her chair without a word. She went into the kitchen with the waiter, and then my brother and I heard her give a small shout. We rushed to the kitchen and found her in the arms of our cousin — the eldest daughter of our dead aunt." This is right after they learn the cook is not a man. That first sentence, the sister putting down her folk, is not flashy, not overdone, and yet we get a feeling that there is a sense of urgency, curiosity, and impetuousness in her action. She does not even stop to tell them where she is going. The shout, the running to the kitchen, the hugging all express a since of importance, longing, and loss. In a few lines, he is able to pull out so many emotions, so many thoughts. This to me is the mark of a good writer.

Your Humblest Author.