Literature: September 2008 Archive Page

My provost sent this link to the English faculty, inviting us to share our responses.

My father succinctly summarized his feelings about my choice to dedicate my 20s to writing fiction. "You're not living in the real world," he said. I reacted with a young man's defensiveness, but in retrospect his assessment seems less critical than a matter of fact.

Which is where teaching comes in. It provides all the practical things that can help prop us up above the morass of our insane callings, not to mention something we can wave at the world like a badge. And don't forget this bonus: other people. How delightful to work on this thing called a hallway, populated not just by colleagues but by students, all committed to, or at the very least interested in, writing. And this is all without even mentioning the teaching itself. I love teaching. There is a deep pleasure in sharing the things that you have labored to learn in solitude. It's inspiring work -- rewarding, interactive, human work so different from what we do at our desks -- and it turns out that writers, many of us natural entertainers, often do it quite well. (David Gessner, New York Times)

Coming from a school where the teaching load is 4/4, his 2/2 load seems like luxury, though of course I'm aware that the reduced teaching load carries with it an increased expectation of publication.  After almost 10 years as a full-time faculty member, I'm still adjusting to the feeling of watching conference deadlines, opportunities to contribute to anthologies, and the ghosts of book proposals go whizzing past me as I patiently explain to yet another class of freshmen how to download an e-mail attachment or how to do the pagination in an MLA style paper. As a grad student, I feared that I wouldn't have enough to say; my reality is that I have plenty to say -- both to my students and my colleagues, but never enough time.

Or, to be more precise, the conventions of the student-centered classroom mean I have to make my points in parallel to or as part of the substructure for the student conversation. I don't have 45 unbroken minutes to speak (saving 5 minutes at the end for questions), so I never quite get to drop the kinds of pearls of wisdom that I recall and treasure from my own undergraduate experience.  And at this phase in my life, I never have the 8 or 12 hours of uninterrupted time that I found were necessary to churn out the chapters of my dissertation -- and even the once or twice a week that I can get to the office during the summer are often only useful to dig myself out from under the backlog.

Nevertheless, I will never find myself in the soul-sucking position of working on  writing project because I *have to* -- everything I've written, I wrote because I wanted to, and it just happens to be a benefit that I get to list it as an accomplishment on an annual report.

An informative review of Crystal's Txtng: The Gr8 Db8, a book I need to put on my reading list.  I've said many times that I've *never* encountered a student who absolutely cannot switch between txtspk and standard English.  Thus, to unpack that double-negative, I think students can and do regularly make the shift between social texting and more formal writing  -- though I do think I'm seeing more instances of the lowercase "I" than when I first started teaching.

Crystal does an excellent job exposing these illusions in Txtng, even if he doesn't designate them as such. And people seem to be listening. On his blog, Crystal notes that British media coverage has fairly addressed the book's six main points. The first three map precisely to the Zwickyan trifecta of illusions:

• Text messages aren't full of abbreviations - typically less than ten percent of the words use them. [Frequency Illusion]
• These abbreviations aren't a new language - they've been around for decades. [Recency Illusion]
• They aren't just used by kids - adults of all ages and institutions are the leading texters these days. [Adolescent Illusion]

For completeness, here are Crystal's other main points about texting:

• Pupils don't routinely put them into their school-work or examinations.
• It isn't a cause of bad spelling: you have to know how to spell before you can text.
• Texting actually improves your literacy, as it gives you more practice in reading and writing.

It remains to be seen if American media outlets will be as responsive to Crystal's arguments. (The book was released in the UK in the beginning of July and in the US in the beginning of September.) Here's hoping they get the (text) message.

In many ways, things have never been better for book readers. Amazon puts reviews at your fingertips, we have easy access to out-of-print titles through eBay and efficient inter-library loan services, and tons of out-of-copyright classics are only a click away. But as this NYMag article ("The End") spells it out, the publishing industry is reeling from the changes.

The demise of publishing has been predicted since the days of Gutenberg. But for most of the past century--through wars and depressions--the business of books has jogged along at a steady pace. It's one of the main (some would say only) advantages of working in a "mature" industry: no unsustainable highs, no devastating lows. A stoic calm, peppered with a bit of gallows humor, prevailed in the industry.

Survey New York's oldest culture industry this season, however, and you won't find many stoics. What you will find are prophets of doom, Cassandras in blazers and black dresses arguing at elegant lunches over What Is to Be Done. Even best-selling publishers and agents fresh from seven-figure deals worry about what's coming next. Two, five years from now--who knows? Life moves fast in the waning era of print; publishing doesn't.