Books: January 2004 Archive Page

Like all men of the Library, I have traveled in my youth; I have wandered in search of a book, perhaps the catalogue of catalogues; now that my eyes can hardly decipher what I write, I am preparing to die just a few leagues from the hexagon in which I was born. Once I am dead, there will be no lack of pious hands to throw me over the railing; my grave will be the fathomless air; my body will sink endlessly and decay and dissolve in the wind generated by the fall, which is infinite. I say that the Library is unending. The idealists argue that the hexagonal rooms are a necessary form of absolute space or, at least, of our intuition of space. They reason that a triangular or pentagonal room is inconceivable. (The mystics claim that their ecstasy reveals to them a circular chamber containing a great circular book, whose spine is continuous and which follows the complete circle of the walls; but their testimony is suspect; their words, obscure. This cyclical book is God.) Let it suffice now for me to repeat the classic dictum: The Library is a sphere whose exact center is any one of its hexagons and whose circumference is inaccessible. -- Jorge Luis Borges --The Library of Babel

Julie Young's blog entry about libraries made me think of this short story, which I have occasionally used in my "Writing Electronic Text" course.

A Selection from the Posthumously Published Ernest Hemingway Choose-Your-Own-Adventure, A Very Short Death, c.1959

It was late summer and you were alone in the café. You were sipping vermouth and reading about the war. You liked the way the vermouth tasted good when you drank it with your mouth. The war was going badly.

You tapped your tired fingers on the arm of the wooden chair where you were sitting in the café when it was dark and late. You liked how the chair was made of wood.

"Oh darling, you mustn't talk such rot," she had said. "I'll kill him."

You felt broken and drunk in the cool night and remembered the white boat on the river.

DID YOU?

a. Grit teeth and think about the war.
b. Order a brandy that overflowed and ran down the stem of the glass and think about the war.
c. Notice the electric light hanging over the empty terrace and think about the war.

--The American Canon of the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure (McSeeeney's)

What's extremely funny about this format is that it's not too different from the reading quizzes I give. Since it's so easy nowadays for students to download plot summaries from the Internet, in order to motivate students to keep up on their literary readings, I will make a multiple-choice test, with questions that list four things that did happen in the reading, and one other event that will sound plausible to someone who has only a basic understanding of the plot, but that didn't really happen.

Technology in American Drama NewsE-Mail)

I recently received this announcement from my publisher: "I'm pleased to let you know that your book, Technology in American Drama, 1920-1950, has been named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title."

A little googling reveals that this award is given to about 3% of the 20,000 or so academic works submitted each year to Choice (a library selection journal).

In a related development, my Amazon.com ranking for this book has now rocketed to 1,679,643 -- I'm rapidly gaining on
Distributional ecology and abundance of dung and carrion-feeding beetles (Scarabaeidae) in tropical rain forests in Sarawak, Borneo (1,652,252).

One of the great gifts of the book is the entrée it affords into the contemporary IF scene. Graham Nelson, Adam Cadre, Emily Short, and Andrew Plotkin were all authors who were new to me, but no sooner had I worked through Plotkin’s remarkable “Shade” than I added it to my spring syllabus (which I’ll post soon, btw); and I suspect others will follow suit. In fact I wouldn’t be surprised to find this text canonized amongst a new academic audience because of Montfort’s account of it here. --Matt Kirschenbaum reviews Nick Montfort's Twisty Little Passages --Wor(l)d Games (MGK)

As George wrote in a comment to the above entry, "Stuff like this is why I like reading blogs."

I don't know what it is about interactive fiction, but it prompts a lot of autobiographical essays like this one. (See also SPAG newsletter editor Paul O'Brian's review.)

And homestarrunner.com features a text game this week.

I oughta add a new category: geekiness.

My first scholarly monograph, The Age of Elizabeth in the Age of Johnson, has rocketed to the 1.6 millionth bestseller (up from 1.8 millionth a few weeks ago) on Amazon.com. (Stop presses! -- now it's zoomed up to the 1.49 millionth! Take that, Distributional Ecology and Abundance of Dung and Carrion-Feeding Beetles (Scarabaeidae) in Tropical Rain Forests in Sarawak, Borneo, still mired at a pitiful number 1.596 million.) A big movie deal now seems inevitable. Buy it now and you can say you knew me before I was rich and famous. --Jack Lynch --Jack Lynch's Home Page (Rutgers)

Lynch is the author of one of the great free online writing resources, the "Guide to Grammar and Style and the "Glossary of Literary and Rhetorical Terms."

The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts is the title of this book. To have called it the survival and transmission of ancient literature would have been pretentious, but not wholly untruthful. Manuscripts, we all know, are the chief means by which the records and imaginings of twenty centuries have been preserved. It is my purpose to tell where manuscripts were made, and how and in what centres they have been collected, and, incidentally, to suggest some helps for tracing out their history. Naturally the few pages into which the story has to be packed will not give room for any one episode to be treated exhaustively. Enough if I succeed in rousing curiosity and setting some student to work in a field in which and immense amount still remains to be discovered. --M. R. James (1919) --The Wandering and Homes of Manuscripts (Tertullian)

Great Scott, this is exactly the kind of article I spent about an hour or so looking for yesterday. Thanks for posting it, Eric.

Over the last two decades, academic [book] titles have become increasingly cumbersome, and it is rare to find an academic book title that is not lashed together with a subtitle and its colon. Some books even boast two subtitles, glued tenuously to the title with two colons. --Jennifer Jabson --No Mark of Distinction (Chronicle)

The title of my dissertation is "Soul and Society in a Technological Age: American Drama, 1920-1950." When it was accepted for publication, I was told that it would be retitled "Technology in American Drama 1920-1950: Soul and Society in the Age of the Machine." I was momentarily miffed that nobody had asked my opinion, but they were absolutely right. My father, who for years was a technical editor for the government, spent much of his career prying semicolons out of dense academic reports. He finds the sentences in my book generally too long, but he only found a very small number of mistakes -- apparently I left a "the the" in the text somewhere, and there are a few subject-verb disagreements (hidden in strings of semicolons, which is why I and my copyeditor didn't catch it). So I think I did pretty well.

Oddly enough, one of the handful of general style notes my advisor gave me was: although the writing is clear, the sentences are so short that in places it reads like a newspaper story; I took that as a compliment -- nevertheless, I gave my semicolon key and hyphen keys (not to mention the parentheses keys) a quick workout: I wanted to match the diction that my adviser requested.

"It was the Critic, in the New Yorker, with the essay." --Eric Mayer --Who Killed the Detective Novel? (Eric Mayer)

Not, says Eric.

Jerz Course Books -- Spring 2004Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

For those who are interested, here are links to the required purchase books for my classes; in a few days I'll post the full syllabi:

• Seminar in Thinking and Writing II (no new books)
• EL 150: Introduction to Literary Study
  
• EL 267: American Literature 1915-Present
  
• EL 309: Advanced Study in Literature -- Media Aesthetics

Update: Whoops, I posted those links hastily and got called away before I could check them. They should all work now.