What We Talk About When We Talk About Reading

Khalil Huffman's blog, Every Book Since January, on which he's been listing every book he's read since July 2006 has gotten me thinking about how many books I read a year. It's one thing to be a voracious reader, but it's another thing to document what your reading–it creates an interesting window into a person's intellectual life. It's made me start to document (in my journal), what I've been reading and the different ways that I read.

I realize that sometimes I will read the first ten to twenty pages of several books in what I call the "trial period" before I decide on any one book to invest my time in or that I very often read almost all the way to the end of a book then put it down and never finish it–Jose Donoso's The Obscene Bird of Night–why did I read you to your 570th page only to not finish you? And lately, several books have been sharing my attention equally, a book for every situation: William Gaddis' The Recognitions for home (because it's big and heavy), The Collected Books of Jack Spicer (poetry for home), Jane Jacob's The Life and Death of Great American Cities (for commuting), and Jean Day's Odes and Otium for my lunch break (although I have to admit that mostly I end up carrying the book around in my purse rather than reading it, which has more to do with my shortish attention span than the quality of the book). Sometimes I am able to get a fair amount of reading done through this method of book-to-match-situation and sometimes not so much. One thing this method robs me of is the grand sense of accomplishment derived from long stretches of complete attention to one text. At the end of the day, my reading habits don't necessarily match up to my idea of myself as Serious Reader. In some ways, I am a serious reader, an immersive one. If I'm really into a book, I can spend a whole Saturday in bed reading, only getting up to do absolutely necessary things. But the whole apparatus of work and routine and social life interfere with the quiet and stillness demanded of that kind of intensive reading.

Yet somehow through this chaos, I've managed to read a few whole books this year:

Fredrick Nyberg's A Different Practice
Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72
Bhanu Kapil's Incubation: A Space for Monsters
Roberto Bolaño's Distant Star
Chip Delany's Dhalgren
Julio Cortazar's The Diary of Andres Fava
Javier Cercas' The Soldiers of Salamis
Raymond Carver's What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
Jack Spicer's The Collected Books


'Every Book Since January' has also made me wonder what other people have been reading since January. So, what have you read?

Check it

Ms. Dumont's new blog A Vernacular Architecture is awesome.

Finally!

Mark Penn has been fired.

Obviously too little too late, but at least it's something.

Collusion or Conflict of Interests?

Mark Penn, Hillary's chief strategist met with Colombian officials to discuss a Colombian free-trade pact that Hillary opposes. Penn met the officials as part of his lobbying firm, Burton-Marsteller, not as a Clinton representative. I love how they're so cynical in the Clinton camp that they can claim with a straight face that a lobbyist working as an independent contractor for a campaign, can lobby against the interest of that campaign and that it's not a conflict of interest. What's more ridiculous is that Penn didn't even try to hide it; he just went and met with Colombian ambassador publicly. Above board is the new under the table.

This kind of situation begs one to wonder whether this is even a conflict of interest for Hillary or ultimately beneficial. Free-trade pacts are hugely economically beneficial (in the short- term to the U.S.), but lefty democrats and labor unions hate them because they promote human rights abuses in the countries where they go through and they ship even more American jobs overseas (witness NAFTA, everybody's favorite Clintonian Republicrat legislation from the 90's!). In order to bolster intra-party support, Clinton can't openly support the Colombian free trade pact, but she can keep the door open through her greasy, lobbyist director of PR, Mark Penn.

This free-trade pact, which Bush is pushing to go to Congress next week despite opposition from congressional democrats and labor unions, would ensure that that war-on-drugs money keeps rolling in and would expand the power that multi-national corporations like Coca-Cola (which has already racked up a tidy number of human rights abuses) have in the Colombia.

What Is Your Work Worth, Really?

I am no economist, but a question which obsesses me is why the pay scale of American jobs is structured so that any worker who is involved in cultural work gets payed lower than any other kind of worker. I am completely at a loss as to why the more specialized reading, writing, editing, or teaching skills a job requires, the less you are likely to get paid. The fact that writing-related skills are so poorly remunerated strikes me as counter-intuitive, since at the high school and college level, most students struggle with writing skills, the economic logic of supply and demand would seem to dictate that people with good writing skills entering the workforce would be fewer, thus more valuable, thus well-paid. But in fact, the opposite is true: barely literate stockbrokers rule the world! The aformentioned fact is not terribly surprising to me because people who get paid to move money around have always been paid better than people who don't move money around; what's shocking and revealing to me is the difference in pay between the people who move money around in the humanities and the people who actually teach and write and do the actual cultural work of cultural institutions.

The presidents and directors of these various cultural institutions would argue that there's a simple economic answer: that jobs in sectors that employ people coming out of school with degrees in the arts/humanities are not the kinds of places that have all that much money to throw around in the first place: museums, libraries, schools, publishing houses, universities, etc. compared to a bank or General Motors or Enron. And while I see that yes obviously, most of these places can't afford to pay all of their employees six figures and stay in business, this explanation does not account for why a bureaucrat's starting salary at a large public university would be 50,000 dollars a year with full health benefits while an adjunct at that same university would be getting 2,500 per back-breaking section (that means you have to teach eight sections a year to make 20k before taxes, and that's without health benefits). It doesn't explain why an editorial assistant at a corporate publishing house makes a starting salary of 25,ooo dollars (living in New York City, no less!) while an entry-level job in the marketing department of that same corporation starts at 50-60k. These institutions with humanistic values would have you forgo health insurance and pay its board members 200k (and that's a low ball figure) for the most minor functions of being a board member. It's insulting. These situations are really instructive in showing us what our values are as a culture. Do we value culture, even in its most utilitarian form–education? No, we do not.

The utter monetary devaluation of cultural work is happening concurrently with changes in American class structure. A defining characteristic of American society, one which is deeply ingrained in the American psyche, is the idea that with hard work anyone can be upwardly mobile. But wages have actually stagnated since the 1970's. You're more likely now than at any time during the 20th century to be born and die in the same class, which additionally sucks because the underclass is growing and getting poorer. A college degree used to be the gateway to being economically middle-class but more and more, a college degree is a gateway to being culturally middle-class, but not economically middle-class because students graduate with such enormous amounts of student loan and credit card debt and go into careers which often don't offer much to help relieve this debt. This kind of semi-poverty is a terrible irony.

Too Objectivist for the Feminists, Too Feminist for the Objectivists

RBDP always knows what the fuck she's talking about. Even if you (or I sometimes) disagree.

Laughing at Bad Art, the Critical Introduction

When I posted my previous rant, a friend asked me why contemporary art was not on the list of irrelevant art forms. The reasons why visual are was not included in my original post and why it truly deserves its own post is that: visual art is still widely considered a powerful medium for communication, even by people who happen to not be artists (as opposed to say poetry, which no one besides other poets reads or cares about). But let's not confuse relevancy here with quality (because although, no one besides poets reads poetry, some of this writing is good, some astoundingly good, even). The gap between the amount of contemporary art being produced in the world and the quality of this art is quite large. Sometimes when you walk into a gallery, you have to get all Clement Greenberg on a bitch and ask, "Is this piece giving me any aesthetic pleasure?" Most of the time the answer will be "No, this piece is feebly attempting to incite some thought in me which its own maker doesn't even seem to grasp; this piece is brimming with historical references yet oddly ahistorical; this piece is collapsing under the weight of ideology; this piece is histrionic yet emotionally vacant." What's worse, the critical apparatus of art history and art criticism has been so absorbed and integrated into the art-making process that traditional critique is rendered moot. Today's bad art is like anti-biotic resistant staph infections–it knows the medicine you will level against it all too well. So what modes of criticism are left to de-fang this thing that passes for official visual culture in our galleries and museums? Laughter. Go forth and laugh at Bad Art. From your gut.