Food for Thought

The long view of history highlights some compression towards the present.

Who Reads Books?

We do. Moreover, we plan to read more in 2009 than we did in 2008. I noted in "Twilight of the Books" last January that my wife and I had resolved to log our reading in 2008, at least our reading of those books that we devoured cover-to-cover. We did not count the daily newspaper (her), dozens of news blogs and websites (me), or more than a hundred articles in professional journals (both).

We are continuing this year with the goal of averaging twenty-five pages per day. Last year's average was a tad over twenty if we count the forty-three books we completed and the portions of nine others in which we've made significant progress. For example, I started Selected Non-Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges in January, and read a bit almost every day--often rereading a portion from the previous day because I forget where exactly I'd gotten on the bookmarked page, or failed to recall or comprehend the passage. On December 31, I was mid-way through the essay, "Dante and the Anglo-Saxon Visionaries," that begins on page 287. In the supplemental log, I noted 286 pages in this book. The book begins on page 3, but prefaces are not counted and are numbered separately in most books, so the actual number of pages read differs slightly from the official count.

To the extent that our Reading Challenge was a contest, my wife won. Her twenty-one completed books totaled over 7000 pages, while my twenty-two were significantly under 6500. But, when we add in the unfinished books, we both read more than 7500 pages. I'm about four dozen pages ahead in this count. In other words, I could have won (even though it was a challenge, not a contest).

Twenty-five pages per day works out to 9125 pages each. My first effort will be to finish several excellent books that I set aside for reasons I won't go into. I've mentioned Borges; other good books are:

Claude McKay, Home to Harlem (1928)
Barton Gellman, Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency (2008)
Plato, The Laws

I also plan to finish two books that are disappointing. One is poorly written; the other superficial.

John McCain, Faith of My Fathers (1999)
John Talbott, Obamanomics (2008)

My wife's unfinished list includes a memoir that I read in April: Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father (1995). She's also reading Building Suburbia (2003) by Delores Hayden, which I started while waiting in her office one afternoon. I might pick it up again. It's one of several in our home library purchased for her work in economic development, but also drawing from and contributing to academic work in my field of American studies.


Modernism and Postmodernism

My wife also read a chunk of Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon (1997), while I continue to be tempted to make another effort at getting through Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1973). But every time I pull it off the shelf, I remember the value of first laboring through James Joyce, Ulysses, and starting that without first reading all of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey seems senseless.

Among the six novels I read in 2008, Dom Casmurro by Machado de Assis, translated by Helen Caldwell (1953) was exceptional; also worthy of rereading is Don DeLillo, Falling Man (2007). It horrifies me to report six novels in one year because not many years ago that was a common monthly total. Alas, our world is less and less one of books, and the ramifications could be disastrous. Consider the benefits of reading as Maryanne Wolf expresses it near the end of Proust and the Squid (2007).

Socrates never knew the secret at the heart of reading: the time it frees for the brain to have thoughts deeper than those that came before. Proust knew this secret, and we do. The mysterious, invisible gift of time to think beyond is the reading brain's greatest achievement; these built-in milliseconds form the basis of our ability to propel knowledge, to ponder virtue, and to articulate what was once inexpressible--which, when expressed, builds the next platform from which we dive below or soar above.
Wolf, Proust and the Squid, 229.

Reading enables the complexity of thought that our challenges require. Books offer the best prospects for extended reading, and hence the richest thoughts. Let us not forget President Theodore Roosevelt who reportedly read a book every night, and who expressed a strong preference for thick texts. It should be no surprise that John McCain chose that Republican leader to praise in his concession speech--one of the brightest moments in 2008.

Meme Chain

Matthew K. Tabor said some kind words about Patriots and Peoples when he tagged me with this meme.

The rules:

1. The rules of the game get posted at the beginning.
2. Each player answers the questions about themselves.
3. At the end of the post, the player then tags 5-6 people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know they’ve been tagged and asking them to read your blog.
4. Let the person who tagged you know when you’ve posted your answer.

Got it.

1) What was I doing 10 years ago?

Ten years ago I resumed fly fishing after having given it up in my youth. I knew, when I resumed fishing after graduate school, that bait chucking would lead to fly casting, and that casting a long rod would lead to fly tying. John Gierach puts it well: “Tying our own flies is where many of us go off the deep end with fly fishing. … I was sort of looking for the deep end” (Good Flies, 1). Ten years ago I sentenced myself to a life of obsessive idleness.

2) What are 5 things on my to-do list for today (not in any particular order):

1. grade papers
2. review lecture notes for evening class
3. set-up meeting of executive team for 2009 Washington State Elementary Chess Championship
4. work on preliminary budget for 2009 WSECC
5. blog

3) Snacks I enjoy:

Italian salame, Dublin cheddar, Kentucky bourbon

4) Things I would do if I were a billionaire:

1. Cast flies for trout in Patagonia
2. Drink mojitos in Havana
3. Play golf with Bill Gates

5) Three of my bad habits:

1. speed chess
2. watching television
3. driving fast to get somewhere
4. letting an occasional week go by without writing
   

6) 5 places I have lived:

1. Baudette, Minnesota
2. Klamath Falls, Oregon
3. Clovis, New Mexico
4. Moscow, Idaho
5. Lenoir City, Tennessee

7) 5 jobs I have had:

1. Pizza delivery driver, Dominos
2. Convenience store clerk, graveyard shift
3. Janitor, Northtown Mall
4. Adjunct professor at alma mater
5. Private chess tutor

8) 6 peeps I wanna know more about:

1. Ed Darrell at Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub looks for truth (and finds errors) in history, science, and education.
2. Ortho’s Baudrillard’s Bastard always offers something to think about.
3. Miguel Antonio Guzmán does not appear focused upon Frank Zappa at Jazz from Hell.
4. Historian Larry Cebula intimidates me with his content rich Northwest History. I’m using his Plateau Indians and the Quest for Spiritual Power as a text in my Pacific Northwest history course this summer.
5. Historiann keeps readers engaged with issues affecting higher education, contemporary politics, and gender history.
6. Brian Tubbs shares his passion for the American Revolution & Founding Era.

Notebook Artifact: Summer 1995

Written in a spiral notebook 28 June 1995, Fort Loudon Lake, Tennessee.

What we call history and what we call the novel are more recent than what we call the Columbian encounter. When Natives embrace writing and written genres, we cannot affirm that what they embrace is wholly Western because these forms emerged in a world deeply infused with economies and ideologies formed in contact with multiple non-European worlds. (Even the Renaissance and subsequent Reformation owe much to the deepening interchange between Christian and Muslim words that characterized the late-Middle Ages.) However, we might examine how “history” and the “novel” were formed as Western constructs during an imperial age, and how they must be reformed in our own and future ages. While American Indians were always present as the Other in history and the novel as we have received them, they now speak as agents who employ and transform these genres. Still, the Natives of today do no share the same world as their ancestors any more than Europeans and Americans share the same world as Europeans of the sixteenth century. Still yet, there is enough continuity with the past in present-day native communities that many writing as Natives offer perspectives that must be distinguished from the perspectives of European Americans.

American Indian fiction and American Indian history are deeply European American discourses. These discourses must be transformed by Natives, as well as by non-Natives writing about Natives, in order to more accurately render the worlds of the indigenes of North America—past and present. One location of transformation may be the construct that distinguishes “history” from “fiction”.

This is not to say that we must lose our ability to distinguish what is true or accurate from what is not. Rather, truth must be seen from other points-of-view. Truth may be situational, rather than empirical. It may be experiential, rather than objective.

I am not advocating that we abandon the practice of history, especially not ethnohistory and the new Indian history. I am advocating that the truth-claims of these genres of writing do not necessarily have priority over the truth-claims of fiction. In fact, certain so-called novels by contemporary American Indian writers, if not more truthful and more accurate than what we call history, at least offer necessary truths that cannot be accommodated within the constrictions of history as it is currently understood. It is possible, therefore, that some of the best work in American Indian history in our day is packaged as fiction, and is thus too much ignored by historians.

Literary critics, on the other hand, who often believe they already understand these truths of fiction, too easily posit themselves as more enlightened than historians. Yet, without the groundings in material realities and the ability to step back from their subject matter that are second nature to the historian, they are equally restricted by their conventions of analysis. Despite a strong movement toward several forms of interdisciplinary multiculturalism in literary studies, the offerings of historians have been too much ignored. In taking fiction seriously as history, it is imperative that we remember the conventions of history as they have been received.

There remains a crucial difference between the food obtained by such human constructs as the atlatl, bow and arrow, gun, and slaughterhouse, and the food consumed by Peter Pan and the Lost Boys in one of their imaginary meals. Too often, in extolling the truth-value of fiction, it is easy to forget the difference between the death of the Jim Loney of fiction and the many real persons who have died similar deaths.