Hello, hello -
Some interdisciplinary flavor, here, but I sometimes wonder if I wouldn't be better off in an English department. If this is a blog about reading, I hope you'll forgive me for lacking the critical vocabulary to talk about reading-in-itself, but maybe I'll be able to talk about readings. I'm not sure what everyone is reading this summer, or if there will be a lot of overlap - my experience in the last year is that the overlaps are surprising and generative; I hope when it happens that it will be both...and if not, I'll either write notes on this blog to nobody, or write in my own blog..to nobody.
Left Berkeley two weeks ago, been at home in LA, reading less than I thought I would, and finally shipping out tomorrow night to New York, then to meet Irene in Paris, and then the rest of the summer in Beijing, with a stint in Shanghai at the end of it all. I'm in the ridiculous situation, proper to the graduate student, of packing and having more books than clothes by weight, and trying to make decisions about what to carry with me. There are three stacks of books on my nightstand at home, hastily thrown together from the books on my shelf at school.
My bedtime reading has been Tristes Tropiques by Levi-Strauss - just started it, but now kicking myself for buying the large, pretty version rather than the compact travel version. I wonder if it'll make its way into my bag.
But if anyone is down, in the last few weeks, I've been not-finishing a lot of books, jumping back and forth, reading a chapter here and there. Some ethnography, some theory, all the good stuff...
Off the top of my head:
Cori Hayden's When Nature Goes Public: The Making and Unmaking of Bioprospecting in Mexico - this one is marked for the Literature and Environment group that Juliana et. al are putting together for 09-10.
Kojin Karatani's Transcritique - a reading-together of Marx and Kant. More into the Marx than the Kant
Confucius's Analects - I've been skimming it this time, trying to read it with and against Foucault's Hermeneutics of the Subject, but I'm not sure if it's working. This is part of a broader effort to try to mount a better orientalist critique of Foucault, in general...
Foucault's Security, Territory, Population.
Liberation Ecologies, which is this edited volume that's supposed to be the Bible of political ecology...which is apparently what I work on?
Derrida's Spectres of Marx and The Animal that Therefore I am. Etc.
And I picked up the Paul Virilio reader - he writes about architecture, speed, time-space, etc. Pretty fun to read.
ANYWAY, maybe some of this strikes a cord with someone. I'm scared now that I don't have enough to read for the summer...there are more books here I'm re-reading or haven't started yet...will keep them updated. But let's read together...
is this how this is to work?
jerry
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Reading 101 in the car
Dears,
It's been a hectic week since I left Berkeley. Seven hours on the road, twelve hours in flight, and more than seven thousand miles later, I'm desperately sleepless but writing from a lovely, little flower box of a hotel room in the 17th arrondissement of Paris. But you and this blog, unformed as it yet is, have been in my mind since the day I left Berkeley-- really.
I guess I'll kick off these readings in (of, through, [insert applicable preposition of choice here?]) various locations with a semi-delirious small confession: every word I've read in the last seven days has been on either a road sign, street map, or guide book page. And menus. So many menus. Yum... Anyway, in embarking on a summer of travel reading with you all, I didn't think I'd take to the task quite so literally. But as I sat bleary-eyed and alone in my car Sunday morning, watching vast swaths of looming greens shrink to bristling yellows (and grow back again), yellows rolling out into dimpled blues (and back again), until the blues get shut out by walls of shopping development stucco-peach, I found myself obsessively taking in any bit of text along the way. After a while, the green mile markers and exit names, yellow driving instructions, blue call box postings didn't simply mar or echo the surrounding landscape in its various forms-- they named, characterized, and bound it. They began to narrate the 101.
A boring stretch of drought-stricken grass was thrown into relief by an even uglier call box, a handmade billboard for fresh raspberries at the next exit, and a 297-mile count from San Luis Obispo. Without getting out of my car or even getting off the highway, I glimpsed the red paint-stained hands of the earnest fruit seller, the obsessive grandeur of Hearst Castle, the cookies and clogs of Solvang, the death of a memorialized officer on that stretch of road-- all through mundane words on mundane signs that don't usually even form mundane sentences.
And somehow, for the first time, I found it all incredibly reassuring and exciting. Besides my state of exhausted loneliness-- why? The signs made my transit feel knowable while actually only ever offering partial information. And then traveling down the road from sign to sign, driving provided my own narrative links...
Heading down the California coast perhaps isn't novel to most of us anymore, but a day into wandering the streets of Paris with my Lonely Planet in hand, it's become all that much clearer to me how reading on the road-- or failing to-- how the simplest sign posts-- can change an experience of a place entirely. But now to read things longer than a guidebook paragraph this summer...
From Paris with sleepy love,
Irene
It's been a hectic week since I left Berkeley. Seven hours on the road, twelve hours in flight, and more than seven thousand miles later, I'm desperately sleepless but writing from a lovely, little flower box of a hotel room in the 17th arrondissement of Paris. But you and this blog, unformed as it yet is, have been in my mind since the day I left Berkeley-- really.
I guess I'll kick off these readings in (of, through, [insert applicable preposition of choice here?]) various locations with a semi-delirious small confession: every word I've read in the last seven days has been on either a road sign, street map, or guide book page. And menus. So many menus. Yum... Anyway, in embarking on a summer of travel reading with you all, I didn't think I'd take to the task quite so literally. But as I sat bleary-eyed and alone in my car Sunday morning, watching vast swaths of looming greens shrink to bristling yellows (and grow back again), yellows rolling out into dimpled blues (and back again), until the blues get shut out by walls of shopping development stucco-peach, I found myself obsessively taking in any bit of text along the way. After a while, the green mile markers and exit names, yellow driving instructions, blue call box postings didn't simply mar or echo the surrounding landscape in its various forms-- they named, characterized, and bound it. They began to narrate the 101.
A boring stretch of drought-stricken grass was thrown into relief by an even uglier call box, a handmade billboard for fresh raspberries at the next exit, and a 297-mile count from San Luis Obispo. Without getting out of my car or even getting off the highway, I glimpsed the red paint-stained hands of the earnest fruit seller, the obsessive grandeur of Hearst Castle, the cookies and clogs of Solvang, the death of a memorialized officer on that stretch of road-- all through mundane words on mundane signs that don't usually even form mundane sentences.
And somehow, for the first time, I found it all incredibly reassuring and exciting. Besides my state of exhausted loneliness-- why? The signs made my transit feel knowable while actually only ever offering partial information. And then traveling down the road from sign to sign, driving provided my own narrative links...
Heading down the California coast perhaps isn't novel to most of us anymore, but a day into wandering the streets of Paris with my Lonely Planet in hand, it's become all that much clearer to me how reading on the road-- or failing to-- how the simplest sign posts-- can change an experience of a place entirely. But now to read things longer than a guidebook paragraph this summer...
From Paris with sleepy love,
Irene
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