Reading while waiting

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Just at the moment, I find myself reading the following:

– Evan Connell’s Mrs. Bridge, the film adaptation of which I watched long ago, and which includes a scene that has always stuck in my mind, between Joanne Woodward and her ‘son’, not quite connecting. The novel is now a Penguin Classic, and was trailed in The Guardian a week or so ago, and something made me think now was a good time to read this. The only other thing by Connell I have read is the very wonderful Son of the Morning Star, his reconstruction of the stories surrounding Custer’s Last Stand – I read this inadvertently during a visit home long ago, scouring my father’s bookshelves for something readable. The first page and a half of this are worth reading all on their own.

– A blogpost by Lauren Berlant, on the death of her mother earlier this year, where she takes the risk of ‘theorising’ about something deeply personal. The theme is the idea that her mother ‘died of femininity’, as expressed in various acquired habits of body and mind; and of how relationships like this are mediated by mundane objects of all sorts….

– … which is also a theme of Roland Barthes’ Mourning Diary, notes made over a two year period following the death of his mother. Extracts from this were published in The New Yorker a couple of years ago, but I didn’t take much notice back then. It reads as an episodic critique of a psychoanalytic model of mourning as working through, as temporalising the suffering of loss – the suffering did not dwindle for Barthes, clearly. It’s also a kind of background text to Camera Lucida – the diary exposes the personal feelings behind the analysis of the subjective dimensions of photography presented in that book.

John Gray on Zizek

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I’m not much of a fan of John Gray, but there are two things in his NYRB review of Zizek’s latest offerings that I really liked, one a general point not made often enough, one a specific  skewering of a certain style of political trumping perfected by Zizek:

1). Gray reminds us that Marx theorised empirically, an obvious point perhaps, but an important one in the context of the contemporary reassertion of Philosophical philosophising in post-Theory ‘Continental Philosophy’ especially. Far more important than internal divides, or not, between continental and analytical philosophy is the fundamental break in modern thinking associated with Marx, Weber, Freud, and the like towards what I guess we might still call social theory, or, to put it another way, not completely making stuff up, or even, thinking socially in the fullest sense. Foucault, who belongs to this break too no doubt, once wondered about why modern thought was associated with the ism-ization of proper names (that’s my gloss). But the relation to proper names, and real biographical figures, might actually be different between social theory and philosophy – its one way of telling the difference. And somewhere, the distinction has to do with the difference between investing in the pure thought of an individual, compared to learning from the interesting things someone had to say about the world in which they lived.

2). Just by quoting Zizek saying it a lot, Gray draws out how much of this style of left thinking depends on constantly claiming not only that some actual political movement was not quite faithful enough to a canonical thinker, but in particular constantly shocking us by saying that this or that extreme position is not radical enough. Gray quotes Zizek saying this about just about anyone and everything, and by so doing, reveals the silliness of the claim.

Regulating nothing?

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For anyone interested in such things (and you should be), here is the full 193 page U.S. Supreme Court ruling, including dissents, in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius – upholding the constitutionality of Obamacare, mostly. When is a tax not a tax, when is a penalty a tax, can you regulate people because they are not acting?

Already an interesting subtext to the story is developing, about the twitter-sphere, and CNN, calling the result too early, evidently having only listened to John Roberts for a couple of minutes. High drama, it seems.

Used maps

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In my house, the scrap paper on which a five-year old practices writing out lists of the names of all her school friends and the toddler practices scribbling is, inevitably, a pile of discarded academic articles, drafts of OU courses, or research policy papers. Turn over a carefully coloured-in doodle of a princess, and there is a random page about the uses of ‘social science’ or an agenda of a meeting of some sort.

When I was growing up, the available scrap paper in our house was, oddly, a never-ending pile of what we refered to as ‘map paper’ – sheets of A3 paper, the blank undersides of detailed contour maps of all sorts of places, bits of the world I cannot even remember now. My father was a navigator in the RAF, and this was the paper he worked with, and then bought home for us to scribble, doodle, draw and take notes on (this might be a screen memory of some sort – the supply of map paper seems to have survived long after he actually left the RAF).

I’d like to be able to say that this inspired a life long interest in maps, and set me off on the course of becoming a geographer. I do really like maps. But I don’t remember the maps which were the underside of these piles of ‘map paper’. Other than a vague sense that they were either very green, or very beige in a sandy-desert kind of way.

If I could remember more of the Derrida that I must have read, I’m sure writing on the blank back pages of maps as a child would be indicative of some important symbolic moment in ‘becoming geograhical’.

Now, I find myself with a large map of Southern Rhodesia, a proper map, folded in an attic for about 40 years at least, now framed, not paper per se, it has a thick woven texture. It dates from the early 1960s, from a weird moment of British post-imperial reconfiguration, from the days of the short-lived, cynical experiment that was the Central African Federation, or, if you prefer, the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. There is a whole history unwrapped by this map – fantasies of air power as a vehicle of racist settler postcolonial ‘independence’; of British military connivance with this fantasy; of the last generation of ordinary white British people to have experienced the privileges of settler colonialism; and of histories prefigured – of UDI, bush wars, or, personal histories of disappointment and resentment and return.

This is a working map – the straight lines which are visible on it are plotted by my old man, tracking routes from Livingstone to Salisbury, Livingstone to Gwelo (this is a map of a disappeared nation, mostly full of lost place names). In the margins of the map, there are calculations which he has made – I don’t understand these I should say; distance, wind-speed,weight, who knows? That these routes all emanate from Livingstone dates the map, I think, or it’s use a least, to a late moment of the Federation, 1962 or 1963, to that brief period when my family were kind-of-Zambian; before I arrived.

I like this map not only because of various family associations and their post-colonial ironies and tragedies, but because these marks left by my father are indicators of the basic point, often forgotten perhaps, that maps are primarily used as devices to help people get around.

Three uses of maps, then: as devices for navigation; as repositories of fragments of memory; or, just as spare paper.

Only problem is, where to put the framed map? It’s huge. What will visitors think, on wandering into our front room and finding this bloody great map of Southern Rhodesia on the wall? Likely to give the wrong impression, I fear. It seems destined for the ‘puter room, as my daughter calls it, the one she goes into to gather scrap paper, the discarded drafts of book chapters and agenda papers. I bet she won’t be getting any of those framed in the far distant future.

Favourite Thinkers VI: Michael Chabon

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Is a blog, which this is, by an academic, which I am, necessarily an ‘academic blog’? I’m not sure, and I kind of hope not.

Anyway, I came across this little essay by Michael Chabon, on why dreams are over-rated. It’s typical of how he writes about grand things by locating them in the mundane stream of ordinary living. Chabon has accidentally become one my favourite thinkers recently, even though I have only ever read one of his books – The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, obviously, almost a quarter of a century ago (I keep trying to read Wonderboys, and we have a couple of his other novels kicking around the house, but they are so thick it’s off-putting).

But his non-fiction is great. He has a collection of ‘criticism’, Maps and Legends, which is  all about being a fan of genre fiction, and how all literature is really genre fiction, that I picked up in a wonderful book shop in Greenwich village a couple of years ago. This was shortly after the film adaptation of The Road had been released, and lots of the discussion about it presumed it was an allegory for environmental catastrophe. Chabon’s essay, written before the film, puts the novel into the perspective of the whole sweep of Cormac McCarthy’s work, and specifically, presents it as working the line between two genres, those of epic and horror.

The horror, for Chabon, derives from the way in which The Road works as “a testament to the abyss of a parent’s greatest fears”:

“The fear of leaving your child alone, of dying before your child has reached adulthood and learned to work the mechanisms and face the dangers of the world, or found a new partner to face them with”.

And some other fears too. I liked this account not least because it captured something of my own experience of reading the novel (I haven’t been able to find time, or face up, to watching the film) – it really did interpellate me as a parent, provoked a series of anxieties that I don’t think it would have done before then.

More lightheartedly, the other collection of Chabon’s that I have read, more recently, is Manhood for Amateurs, a book about being a dad, husband, boyfriend, son, and other assorted manly roles. It sounds like one of those ‘guides to being a dad’ books, I know, but it really isn’t. I bought it for 1.99 at The Works in Swindon’s Outlet Village (second best bookshop in town, in the best public space). It contains a series of little pieces on all sorts of topics, some of which don’t quite translate for an American context, some of which do – a wonderful account of the guilt inducing struggle to manage the mountain of pictures and drawings that one’s children bring home every day from nursery or school without succumbing to the sense that you are destroying the archive of your, and their, future memories; why the introduction of human mini-figures by Lego was indicative of a larger shift in contemporary toy culture that shrinks the scope of the imagination (it’s more fun than that makes it sound); the importance of pockets in men’s lives, and the difficulties of finding appropriate bags-which-are-not-purses – and the search for the perfect “murse”.

Chabon also writes abuot how he suffers from the ‘delusion’  that, despite knowing he’ll never see grandparents again, or dead dogs, or 1976, that he will return to these times and places and people sometime in the future:

“always lurking somewhere in the back of my mind is the unshakeable, even foundational knowledge – for which certainty is too conscious a term – that at some unspecified future date, by unspecified means, I will return to those people and to those locales. That I am going back”.

Again, this strikes a chord with me, it’s a constant feature of how I process memories. So does Chabon’s wider point about the delusion of yearning for the return of ‘normal time’ – a time in life when it seems that the rhythm of everyday life is not interrupted or imperilled by rain pouring through the bedroom ceiling, cats with urinary tract infections, children with conjunctivitis, having to look after the neighbours chickens.

Anyway, I have nothing profound to say about any of this, other than to recommend Chabon’s writing on the ordinary aspects of growing up and growing old.

Elinor Ostrom 1933-2012

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The Monkey Cage has various (un)timely links to comments and appreciations of Elinor Ostrom, whose death was announced yesterday, and Jim Johnson promises to update similar links as they appear. Here is a list of her major publications, reduced to one paragraph summaries; and here is an interview from earlier this year on climate change. The New York Times has an obituary here.

Mobile Learning I: Sent from someone else’s iPad

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I have a new iPad – well, it is not mine, it’s from my department, part of a deal whereby three of us get to play with them in return for trying to find ways of sharing with colleagues what we have learnt about how these devices transform the conditions of student learning. ‘Mobile learning’ is a strong emphasis in distance education at the moment, certainly at the OU.

I already have an iPhone – an important stimulus to starting this blog was getting it, back in August 2010, and wondering what new worlds it opened up – I signed up for twitter, friended people on Facebook, and then decided to start a blog, after conversations with bright young techie things like Scott Rodgers and Kellie Payne. A way of getting inside the medium, that’s my excuse.

And we also have an iPad already in the house – shortly before the birth of Baby 2 in early 2011, the expectant mum decided to buy one, brooking no argument against the idea (I bought a car; like the iPad, justified on the grounds that this was all for the good of the family). So now we have two in the house (iPads).

I have a worry that these new arrivals are leading us to neglect the paper based media that still litters the house – the daily paper, weekly or monthly magazines, the fiction and non-fiction books. But it is not a controlled environment, I keep reminding myself – the reason these might all be unread these days might have something to do with the disruption caused by the other mobile device that did finally arrive at the end of January last year, the one which turns out to be much more interactive and increasingly mobile than an iPad.

Anyway, I’ve had this one, ‘mine’, about 10 days, and I’m trying to take seriously the task of using it to learn about mobile learning (I have also been reminded of just how wonderful the B52s’ Private Idaho is, accidentally, on YouTube). Using it seriously, mainly, immediately makes clear how far this sort of device is primarily a reading medium – you can of course write on them, emails, even blog entries, but there is something for me at least rather constraining about them in that respect (and I know you can get widgets to annotate online documents, but it’s still not the same as writing in your own books, or as naughty).

We lucky three are meant to report to the department on our i-Experiences, sometime, so I thought I might try to record first impression ideas about just what I am learning, on the move, sitting down, with a device you have to plug into the wall every night, and sync occasionally with your PC, and that’s so expensive you can’t leave it on its own ever, about the wonders of not-so-mobile learning. So, this stream might be become a regular feature.

Like much of the hype about blogging being a terribly important new medium of academic communication (hasn’t anyone noticed that blogging is a bit old, a bit 2000s?), I actually find the concept of mobile learning terribly muddled, not least in terms of the amount of thinking that might still be required about what the implications are (and aren’t) of new technologies for designing quality distance education curricula that enhance student learning and don’t just assume that good teaching is now all about sending students off to, well, YouTube to surf for 35-year-old footage of the B52s.

My hunch is that we are living through a moment when what ‘new technologies’ are doing is making much more clearly visible, and making practically possible, the distinction between quite abstract or ‘dispersed’ practices of literacy – reading, writing, watching, listening, chatting, presenting, taking notes, reflecting – and the specific material mediums with which, until very recently these practices have been most closely associated with. Thinking of this iPad as a learning device immediately brings into view the questions of how we learn from reading text (and from reading different genres), how and what we learn from watching TV, film, video in general, or what we learn from listening to other people talking, or, singing. Which are not, of course, new questions, or shouldn’t be, they just might now have been made much more explicit as pedagogical problems rather than assumptions.

And my second first thought about all of this: the ‘mobile’ bit in mobile learning might be misleading to the point of distracting from the more relevant aspect of ‘mobile learning’, which is so obvious but seems to get covered over by the mobility theme: the really dramatic thing about mobile communication is all about the temporalities of communication they open up, and close down,, in terms obviously of allowing real-time collaborative learning, storage and retrieval on the go, that sort of thing, but also more generally, and mundanely, it is to do with how ‘mobile’ devices actually function as mediums for allowing us to fill in all sorts of previously quiet times, off-line times, with very active communicative engagement with our favourite authors, journalists, or friends. Another obvious thought, bought into focus by the new arrival in our home.