One of the great pleasures of working in the Writing Center is having the opportunity to experience how students approach academic writing for the first time. Watching talented students stumble over comparatively easy rules—et al for et al., “Quotatation”. for “Quotation.”—reminds me every day how arbitrarily academics have settled questions of style.

Incidentally, why do we continue to write et al. in Latin? Is and others somehow demeaning—do collaborators feel fancier in an abbreviation from a dead language? Why not reduce the Latin to its typographic equivalent—(Jones& 2004)—or simply to a +?

In a perverse way, these students’ struggles have convinced me to write my current chapter not in my usual belletristic prose (in my advisor’s generous characterization), but in a prose accessible to any slob unlucky enough to pick it up.

There is a feeling of risk to this exercise.

From what I have been able to discern, the rule is that you should be tenured at Harvard or Columbia before you dare write for an audience outside your field. There is clearly a sense of pretention here: some journeyman grad student at UW–Madison should not write under the delusion that he has anything to say that would interest a general reader, and so should write in the language of his profession.

This would make sense to me were I convinced that our profession had an efficient language. An accountant can explain to another accountant in 200 words something it might take her 1,000 words to explain to a lay reader—something else I have learned in the Writing Center—but since our field has none of the lingual standardization of other fields I am not persuaded that the jargon of literary analysis contributes much to my writing other than a general sense that I am out of my depth.

I’m sure it has been noted before, but Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid (2007) makes a persuasive defense of literary instruction. The goal, she writes, is to transform fluent readers into expert readers:

If a common letter pattern or a word like “bear” appears to an expert reader, it will trigger its own network, rather than individually activating the large number of unrelated individual cells responsible for the lines, diagonals, and circles within its letters. This operating principle is the working example of the biological maxim “Cells that fire together stay together,” and is the brain’s basic tool for creating ever larger circuits that connect cell assemblies into a system of networks distributed across the entire brain. (146.)

The more networks the reader has, the more quickly s/he can read a text. More importantly, synaptic networks make the reading process more efficient, saving brain space for higher-order intellectual work—inference, analysis, critical evaluation, and the other skills we are desperate to teach our students and to practice ourselves.

If the goal is to make expert readers, literature has two advantages over other sources—online or professional, say. First, literary writing is with few exceptions richer in analytical and inferential material than other kinds of writing. Second, literary writing promotes sympathetic reading in a way that other kinds of writing often cannot.

Those two advantages are topics Wolf discusses, but there is a third that I think her review implies: literary writing rewards and often requires rereading, which I would assume would make a reader more expert.

I can’t help but wonder if we should use some of those valuable hours at the beginning of an intro lit course reviewing the science of reading. If that class is the last literature course a student ever takes, oughtn’t it make a strong case for the medical and ethical value of reading?

We found a mossy staircase leading to a short quay on Orcas Island, and I couldn’t resist. Sadly, I had neither my leather bomber jacket nor my pipe at the time.

From “Sainte-Beuve and Balzac”:

Besides, I must point out that Balzac [ . . . ] conferred privileges on dukes that Saint-Simon, for all his high opinion of dukedoms, would have been quite dumbfounded to see bestowed on them. “The Duke gave Mme. Camusot one of those swift glances by which the lords of the land can analyse a whole lifetime, and often a soul itself. Oh, if the judge’s wife could have known about this ducal gift!” If the dukes of Balzac’s day indeed possessed this gift, it must be admitted things have, as one says, somehow changed.

Proust on Art and Literature, 174–5.

If you’re sick of Proust, this blog will return to its regularly-scheduled disquisition on Rushdie in about a week.

Here’s what the sixth MLA Handbook for Writers of Whatnot (2003) says about blocking quotes:

If a quotation runs to more than four lines in your paper, set it off from your text by beginning a new line, indenting on inch (or ten spaces if you are using a typewriter) [ . . . ] (3.7.2, p. 110)

A typewriter! In 2003!

Chicago is more generous:

A hundred words or more—or at least eight lines—are set off as a block quotation. (11.12.)

For institutional reasons, grad students in English tend to be slaves to MLA—its handbook it certainly a hell of a lot shorter, even if it was last updated in 1965 and has nothing useful to say about citing “electronic” sources.

The very fact they are called “electronic”—what if you want to cite your Roomba?—tells you everything you need to know about MLA-la-land.

The rules are for close readers. You don’t need to quote more than four lines of text if it takes you a page of analysis to explain why Blake’s symmetry is all “fearful”—hell, it took Northrup Frye an entire book. MLA wants analysis so close it’s practically microscopic, and microscopes make it science, right?

Here’s the thing. I’m writing about Proust right now, or should be, and Proust can’t write a prepositional phrase shorter than four lines—even eight lines is pushing it. So I end up doing one of two things.

1. I perforate my essay with block quotes, leaving great gaping gobs of white space that shout “look at me! I’m not offering useful analysis on this page!”

2. I break a 189-word sentence in 4-word chunks and pretend I can hang my argument on those chunks.

Over to you, dear commenter: do I give up the façade of close reading and quote the occasional word to prove the book I’m writing about is the book Proust wrote? Or do I surrender close reading altogether and talk about books wholly in theoretical terms?

A colleague kindly pointed out that my attack on Rushdie’s realist critique of Slumdog Millionaire came across as praise of Slumdog rather than critique of Rushdie.

Here, then, is a critique of both, with a special Sunday bonus critique of the New Yorker.

One of the more remarkable scenes in Slumdog Millionaire is the visit of a milquetoast American couple to “real India”—they have paid our protagonist several hundred dollars for a poverty tour. Meanwhile, their driver’s car is stripped practically to its frame.

The movie seems to cast the slum tour as naïve and probably offensive thing—a slum is not a zoo—but isn’t the movie itself something of a slum tour? How is its unabashed surveillance of Mumbai slumdwellers any different than those naïve tourists’?

Here is a trip to the Bombay slums in Midnight’s Children (1981):

Clutching at her handbag, my mother [ . . . ] enters these causeways where poverty eats away at the tarmac like a drought, where people lead their invisible lives [ . . . ]. Under the pressure of these streets, which are growing narrower by the minute, more crowded by the inch, she has lost her “city eyes”. When you have city eyes you cannot see the invisible people, the men with elephantiasis of the balls and the beggars in boxcars don’t impinge on you, and the concrete sections of future drainpipes don’t look like dormitories. My mother lost her city eyes and the newness of what she was seeing made her flush, newness like a hailstorm pricking her cheeks. Look, my God, those beautiful children have black teeth! Would you believe . . . girl children baring their nipples! How terrible, truly! And, Allah-tobah, heaven forfend, sweeper women with—no!—how dreadful!—collapsed spines, and bunches of twigs, and no caste marks; untouchables, sweet Allah! (Penguin 91–2.)

Like Slumdog, Rushdie approaches Indian poverty from the touristic perspective of the wealthy. His goal might be mockery of the privileged position, but this just means that the slums serve him as a mirror in which we see the moral poverty of westernized India’s middle class.

You could argue that a more serious engagement with poverty in urban India comes in the guise of the narrator’s foil Shiva. (The narrator and Shiva are born at the same second in the same hospital, one into a wealthy family and one into a poor family. They are switched.) Shiva uses his deadly knees to become something of a crime lord and class avenger—a Dharavi Robin Hood, perhaps.

There are meaningful ways the switched-at-birth story of Midnight’s Children varies, in its impossibility, from the fairy tale of Slumdog. For one, Rushdie is a better storyteller than Boyle, and is clearly more thoughtful about the history of wealth in India. Midnight is more of a riches-to-rags story, a critique of the extremist, separatist impulse driving the political tectonics of India.

Nonetheless, Rushdie’s slums are no more possible than Boyle’s: they are almost a caricature, a convenient contrast by which we can understand the middle classes who are at the center of his story.

Now here’s your bonus critique.

Katherine Boo’s “Letter from Mumbai: Opening Night” in February 23’s New Yorker tells the story of what one orphan resident of Gautam Nagar did on the evening of the Mumbai premiere of Slumdog Millionaire. This is another bit of poverty tourism.

The New Yorker enjoys this trick, sending someone to a place no New Yorker reader would voluntarily go, and sending back a “Letter from Mumbai” or a “Letter from China” or from wherever else its intrepid reporters go to observe something that will edify its fascinated middle class readership.

And, yes, I’m among the fascinated: I read the New Yorker’s Letters, I watched Slumdog Millionaire, and I have read all but one of Rushdie’s novels. That uncomfortable voyeuristic curiosity that turns human beings into caged animals is nevertheless central to the action of literature, though I have yet to find text that can address the reader’s curiosity without exploiting the subjects of that curiosity.

In a conversation with a friend about Lolita, an interesting problem arose. This is the cover of the second Vintage International edition of the book:

In the upper left corner is the blurb “The only convincing love story of our Century” —Vanity Fair. You can imagine why this characterization could be a problem. I have never had the great luck to teach Lolita in a course, but just by looking at this cover I can imagine conversations in intro lit classrooms across the country centering on this practically anonymous quotation.

So I decided to track the source down.

Lolita was first published in Paris in 1955. It was never banned in America, but it took American publishers a few years to come around to the idea that social mores were changing and that a book like Lolita could be a bestseller—which, in fact, it was when it was finally published here in 1958.

(I notice that his current publisher—Random House—whitewash this history somewhat in their centennial timeline of Nabokov’s career, observing only that Lolita was published in 1955 and that, in 1959, the book had made him sufficiently wealthy that he could retire to Switzerland.)

Vanity Fair didn’t review Lolita in the 1950s for the very simple reason that there was no Vanity Fair in the ’50s. The magazine was folded into Vogue in 1936, and didn’t reemerge until 1983.

So when did Vanity Fair have a chance to write about Lolita? July 1986. If you’re my age, you might remember this issue as the one in which Annie Leibovitz photographs Ron Reagan prancing about in his underwear. Folks noticed at the time, though these pre-internet controversies can be hard to substantiate.

“In Pursuit of Lolita” is a smart essay. A photographer—Wim Wenders—and author/translator Gregor von Rezzori follow Lolita and H.H.’s trans-American odyssey, photographing and describing the cities and motels the literary pair visited.

Von Rezzori first became involved in the Nabokov industry, by his report, when a German publisher asked for his help translating Lolita. Here is the paragraph from which the cover blurb comes:

At one point a heated discussion arose over the possible interpretation of Lolita as a grandiose metaphor of the classic European’s hopeless love for a young, seductive, barbaric America. In his afterword to the novel Nabokov himself mentions this as the naïve theory of one of the publishers who turned the book down. And although there can’t be the slightest doubt that Nabokov did not mean to limit Lolita to that interpretation, there is no reason to exclude it as one of the novel’s many dimensions. The point, I felt, became obvious when one drew the line between Lolita as a delightfully frivolous story on the verge of pornography and Lolita as a literary masterpiece, the only convincing love story of our century. If one accepted it as the latter, there was no longer a question of whether to read it as “old Europe debauching young America” or as “young America debauching old Europe.” It simply stood as one of the great examples of passion in literature, a deeply touching story of unfulfillable longing, of suffering through love, love of such ardor that though it concentrated on its subject monomaniacally, it actually aimed beyond it, until it flowed back into the great Eros that had called it into being. Every passionate love can find its image in Humbert Humbert’s boundless love for Lolita, I said; why should it not also reflect the longing of us Europeans for the fulfillment of our childhood dreams about America? As for myself, that longing had become irresistible from the moment, in our translation, when we arrived at Lolita and Humbert’s crisscrossing of the United States. I vowed then that someday humble humble me would follow in their tracks. (80.)

So there is your source: Gregor von Rezzori, “In Pursuit of Lolita,” Vanity Fair 49.7 (July 1986) 78–87, 116–119. Interpret him as you will. I know how I will.

There are a number of fair critiques one could level against Slumdog Millionaire, but Salman Rushdie chooses to attack its unrealistic plot?

Lecture at Emory, 2009, as reported by the Guardian:

“The movie piles impossibility on impossibility,” he said in a lecture at Emory University in Atlanta, raising questions over how the characters end up at the Taj Mahal, 1,000 miles from where they were in the previous scene, and how they manage to get their hands on a gun in India.

“Imaginary Homelands,” 1982:

The broken mirror may actually be as valuable as the one which is supposedly unflawed. Let me again try and explain this from my own experience. Before beginning Midnight’s Children, I spent many months trying simply to recall as much of the Bombay of the 1950s and 1960s as I could; and not only Bombay—Kashmir, too, and Delhi and Aligarh, which, in my book, I’ve moved to Agra to heighten a certain joke about the Taj Mahal.

If the broken mirror offers a valuable reflection of the world for Rushdie, why not for Boyle?

The more interesting question here, though, is how Boyle’s depiction of the Mumbai slums differ from Rushdie’s in, say, The Moor’s Last Sigh.

If you’re reading my blog, I trust you feel insecure about something. Blogs exist in this ironic space whereby they can somehow shore up your insecurities and mine at the same time: yours because you see how much worse off I am; mine because I know you rely on my abjection to feel (momentarily) secure.

But there’s got to be a healthier way to do this.

There’s a trend in the webcomics/webart community of publishing a sped-up screencast of the process of making an artwork. (Here’s a recent speed draw from vid games webcomic Penny Arcade.)

Speed draws situate product as part of practice and illustrate something I have said a dozen times in the front of the classroom: a paper is not the instantaneous result of a moment of genius, but is a kind of freeze frame taken from an ongoing and potentially endless act of writing and revision.

One of the more intimidating characteristics of MSA X is that you only get these end results. I heard maybe 24 papers in a three-day period, and although some of them showed signs of years of labor, many sounded so effortless as to have been imagined into existence over a vodka martini the night before.

Speed writes would have to be orchestrated differently—one model: Jon Udell’s tour of the Wikipedia entry for Umlaut—but it would be comforting to see that Douglas Mao’s exceptionally lucid and nigh-conversational talk on Stevens in fact took so many days to compose, so many analytical revisions, and so on.

In his Goals of a Liberal Education (PDF), William Cronon argues that a liberal education seeks to teach a certain worldview—a preference for curiosity, for empathy, for clarity of language, and so on. An illiberal education, by implication, teaches professional skills but leaves students’ worldviews untouched.

Cronon also has a thorough study of the purpose of a dissertation (PDF), in which he argues that the act of writing a dissertation in the humanities is analogous to apprenticeship: a seven-year exercise in skill development.

It would be going too far to suggest that dissertation-writing is inherently illiberal, but there is a suggestion here that somehow the work we do in the dark of the morning—staring at a 13-inch screen, unsure which of the 20 books on the desk have that interesting footnote about Ruskin—is a simple sort of craftwork.

I’m not sure about this. There must be students so attuned to academic work they enter the dissertation stage working to craft a salable product, but in my case the act of dissertation-writing has been a slow stumbling toward a more professorial worldview. When I first drafted my proposal in the winter of 2005–06 I was deeply unsure what the standard of argumentative proof in a dissertation could be, and for all my committee’s generous advice this standard remained stubbornly unteachable. It was only in the quiet worldview-shifting process of digging at that first chapter that I began to understand how to ask questions and how to answer them, and I am sure that I will keep happily learning how to write until the day they take my keyboard away.

Cronon argues that dissertation work is essential to producing strong instructors for the reason we would expect: it forces us to execute in depth the mechanisms of data collection and analysis we hope to spend our lives teaching. But commensurate with this, the act of writing a dissertation gives students a depth of relation to their world, a sense of meaningful participation in the slow exposition of history, or art, or what have you.