Old Printed Things

Went to the Boston Antiquarian Book Fair this afternoon. A glorious collection of old books, old prints, old maps, first editions of books from Dickens to Harry Potter, really old editions of Ovid, and not-that-old art book editions of Edward Lear.

Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Allan Poe had a great showing. Everywhere you turned were books by or about them. Is this a fad, or are there just more books by them out there? Pop or cult fiction meets Legitimate Literature? Catch-22 was also fairly ubiquitous. Other notables were a first edition of the single-volume Dombey and Son, and a first edition of Charlotte's Web which White had inscribed to Nabokov.

And then there were maps. So many, many maps.

When poking through dusty old print shops, I usually look for maps of England or Maine or Boston or other places I know. There's something so wonderful about looking at an old map or reading an old description of a place you know well: some things will be very much the same, and others will be delightfully different. But so many of the maps today were of Boston and New England that I became numbed to them and began watching for something quite different: a differentiation of aesthetic pattern.

Maps of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries are usually as crammed full of information as possible. Hill-signs indicate mountains, mounds, and inclines; rivers, as alleyways of knowledge, are drawn in particular detail. Toponyms proliferate, filling blank areas with grey when viewed from a distance, and with a complex web of names when viewed close up. Where no information is available, cartographers fill empty spaces with sea dragons and tall ships, fierce, befeathered native peoples and cute little bunny rabbits. The result is a kind of fractal aesthetic: the image can be viewed at varying "zoom levels." At the lowest level--"zoomed out"--there is a uniform buzz or fuzziness to the image. You can't really appreciate more than a few of these at one sitting unless you're really looking for something specific, which I wasn't.

So instead, the maps that caught my eye today were entirely different from these. One is an early chart of the Carolina coast and a few nearby islands. Most of it is ocean and unexplored territory. There are maybe three toponyms on the whole map. Instead rhumb-lines (lines indicating the winds and compass directions) dominate the image, giving a sense of a perfectly clean geometry. The cartographer has made no attempt to embellish. There are just straight, intersecting lines, and one ragged coastline running across a third of the page. Clean and simple, if ripped haphazardly in two.

Another map was of the Philippines. It too eschewed with most toponyms. Each cluster of islands had its own color shading, and that was the only decoration.

These maps are best viewed from a distance; they just don't have zoomability. But today their simpler, larger spatial gestures offered me an alternative to squinting through familiar and unfamiliar placenames, bringing to mind Mondrian and a squigglier kind of Barnett Newman. These maps seemed postmodern in the face of the rest of the modern hubbub, and, in the face of a zooish conference hall, bespoke a different kind of calm, fresh, basic form and function.

Goals and Motivations

The other day a friend and I were bemoaning our regular office smorgasbord and the effort it requires to go to the gym every day. She said, hesitantly, that at the moment she was focused in on one goal that sounded--she knew--kind of silly: to fit into a particular shirt by New Year's. It was silly, she reiterated, but it did keep her going to the gym day in and day out.

I don't think this sounds silly at all. I do it too: I motivate myself to exercise by setting concrete, short-term goals, like being able to wear a favorite skirt without feeling all squished in the middle.

The reason we think this might sound silly is that we feel that we really should be motivated to go the gym because of some grand, bigger reason, like staving off heart disease so we can live to see our grandkids. But thinking of that while in my twentieth minute on the elliptical just doesn't keep my pace up. Trying to figure out what to wear later that day will. This says less about the relative importance of these goals (grandkids vs. clothes), I think, than about the immediacy of the question.

So are things like Health and Grandkids useless as motivation? I don't think so. But because they're more abstract, more intangible, more far off, they motivate us in a different way. We encourage ourselves to make those "silly" mini-goals precisely because we know that they're a way of heading us in the direction of the major goal in smaller, more digestable chunks. If it weren't for this major motivation behind it all, we'd call our mini-goals "excuses" and not "goals."

When we were talking this over at lunch today, Tim asked me whether I thought gym-related mini-goaling differed by gender. Did men do the same thing? Yes, we concluded, and their mini-goals might be strinkingly similar: fitting into clothes, impressing the opposite sex at a particular event, and so forth. They might speak about them differently, however, making more public their goal to impress a girl with their biceps than their worry about how their waistband was getting tighter.

Enosh

In the days after September 11, 2001, we went through it. The checking up on friends--have you heard from...? oh he's ok...? but have you heard from...? One name kept coming up, after everyone else had been heard from, accounted for, checked off. We never heard from Maurita Tam. Concert choir was devastated. We had been on tour with her the year before, with her quick smile and her kind words and unexpected laugh. On Thursday it rained, and there was a memorial service. We sang one of the tour songs for Maurita, and for everyone else who died on that shaken day, and then we retired the song from our repertoire. It has been running through my head since events at Virginia Tech began to unfold yesterday, when students were asking those same questions, and there were those eerily familiar scenes of university students boldly showing emotion and coming together to share a pain so utterly unassociated with bright college days. The song has been running through my head, all day. It helps, somehow.

"Enosh kekhatsir yamav..."
(As for man, his days are like grass...)
(Psalm 103:15-18)

Happy Self-Denial-Ritual Season!

It's an odd year.

As always, Passover and Easter are close on each others' heels, and conversations about keeping Kosher and fasting on Good Friday have hit the blogosphere right on schedule. Yet it seems this year nobody's actually doing any observing. It's a killer week in the semester--midterms to take, midterms to grade, degree qualifying exams, theses all but due. I have a friend who's intensely dieting and can't afford to cut anything more out of her daily caloric intake. Myself, I'm coming down with something and, while I'm abstaining from the chicken soup, I'm still going to stuff myself with everything else my body needs to fight off the ick.

My first reaction to all this would be to observe that fasting and keeping Kosher are ways of making us very aware of what we eat and grateful for it, and making us slow down and reflect on, to put it the clichéd way, the important things in life, putting everything else into perspective. What are we missing by saying that our diet, our schoolwork, our common colds, are excuses not to do these things? Aren't they those less-important-things-in-life that a day of fasting is supposed to remind us are less important to begin with? The ritual of fasting, like any other ritual (see sociologists Victor Turner and Mary Douglas), is supposed to change the state of our being in some way. We're refusing to be changed this year.

But on the other hand, the number of reflective conversations I've had with (myself and) other non-observers might indicate the contrary. We're all clearly thinking about fasting, food, tradition, reflection, and what's important in our lives. The awareness is still there, precisely because of the fact that we're making the decision to still eat leavened bread or food on Friday. Maybe in some way not participating in a ritual that we know exists is a ritual in itself.

Mmmmm

A warm early-southern-spring day. You can smell the green.

It just might be a porch-sitting (and porch-thesis-writing) kind of day.

Woah, meta.

I am using the Longman handbook, which I am reviewing (as part of the job hunt), to look up the MLA citation style of a review published by Longman (as part of my thesis).

Why Literature?

So after a conversation with my sister and brother-in-law last weekend, I've been thinking about one of those questions that literature students always get and never, I think, know exactly how to answer. Basically it asks why literature is so elliptical, and therefore elitist.

Let me qualify. My sister and brother-in-law are both well-educated, especially in their fields of IT communications and geology, respectively. They're smart, well off, and entirely satisfied with where their education has gotten them in life.

My brother-in-law likes to maintain that, other than being kind of nice, literature is pretty useless, and literature professors are doing everything they can to dupe universities into thinking the opposite. My sister just says she doesn't "get it."

We were arguing about religion the other night, which we do frequently, and which really gets all of us thinking on all cylinders. I brought up Tess of the D'Urbervilles, one of my favorite novels, to talk about agnosticism and the feeling of being abandoned by an imperceivable God who, in Hardy's words, "must be either limited in power, unknowing, or cruel." The allusion seemed to catch my brother-in-law's attention (I think he thinks that all of nineteenth-century literature assumes the omnipotence, omniscience, and goodness of God without question), and as he was intrigued by the psychology of agnosticism, we kept talking about it.

Within a few minutes, though, the conversation turned to literature. Why did Hardy need to write the novel, my brother-in-law asked, if that's what he was saying in it? Why didn't he just come out and say it? Putting it in novel form seemed like just another conspiracy to keep the wrong people from "getting it" and thus maintaining that they had something to teach.

One answer, I suppose, is that this is my interpretation of the novel; whether or not it's what Hardy meant to write is another story. We can get into these is-the-author-dead conversations, but it doesn't help with my brother-in-law's primary, rather Marxist, question: why is what's said through literature impossible to convey directly in a manner that a "layperson"--that is, one without a strong education in literature, or a strong background in reading it--would understand? These are people for whom irony has little resonance; of "he was not the least of men" and "he was the greatest man" they would see the latter as more laudatory (the author of Beowulf would argue with that, I fear); and you can't tell them that they are supposed to feel the opposite because that's just not how literature actually works. If I can say "being an agnostic makes you mad at God," and a list of other statements about what the novel is "saying," why bother writing the novel and then having to teach people how to make those interpretations?

I know all of the arguments for how literature evokes emotion rather than telling you about it (though again, it just doesn't seem to evoke those emptions in precisely those people who are questioning its value); I know that we all have different interpretations, new ones every day; I know that when kids analyze literature they learn critical thinking skills. But in my brother-in-law's ideal, practical world, all those things could be done away with (though it would be rather like 1984, perhaps). Maybe all we're left with at the end of the day is literature's beauty: that's the reason that it has triumphed over Newspeak as a better way of communicating. Maybe they believe there's a version of 1984 that actually works and doesn't degrade the subject? But Orwell denies that possibility. But I can't use that argument: they don't want literature to justify its own existence; they need outside proof.

My great worry here is that as education becomes more specialized, especially at the big state schools, a whole segment of the population will be skeptical of literature to the point of thinking about conspiracies and such. Which isn't to say that there haven't been large portions of the population who were not exposed to a literary education before this time. Especially after the institution of public education in the nineteenth century, there was a growing divide between those educated persons who were given a liberal, classical education (upper classes), and those given a much more practical education in the sciences (middle classes). And part of the reason that public education was even begun was that upper-class voters feared that the newly enfranchised middle classes would "vote wrong." But the fear of those upper-crusters then looks like it might be coming to pass now: practical education is overtaking an education in the humanities that I believe still has immense value. I don't like that such thinking places me with the upper-crusters, but there it is.

This is turning into a class debate, but I want to keep literature itself in the picture: how can literature and the study of literature continue to justify its existence if the growing majority of people cannot understand it, or choose not to bother? What makes literature so great? Why literature?