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what I really meant to say was this.
Mar. 1st, 2008 11:10 amI’ve hit the wall, temporarily, on several fronts.
For one thing, I need to find a way to mend the disconnect between the actual readership of joculum and the blog’s gradually developing interests. The readers have background information I need and want, but I have to find a way of explaining why I want it and what it has to do with them. I need to connect with their particular worldviews and the personal stories implied by their background and interests.
Bridging the gap with jokes isn’t working any longer in terms of communication.
And my ignorance of some of the key disciplines may also be unbridgeable.
Basically, the relative weight and proportion of a couple of main topics has shifted.
One unfortunately elusive topic has to do with statistically improbable levels of occurrence, and the mechanics of consciousness and perception, and how we live by making things up, which means that we are also at any given moment screening off different percentages of the world by the fictions through which we choose to interpret it.
We do this regardless of our level of perceived rationality versus raw emotion, or any other sets of loaded cuss words you care to use to describe the situation. We always get some of it right and some of it wrong. All we can do is look at the evidence that we’ve got more of it wrong than we think we have.
But we can forget all that, bracket that whole topic, and look instead at the few multidisciplinary scholars who are getting beyond some of the more perverse blind spots of separate academic departments. (That's a topic that it is easier to get people to understand, because it attracts smaller numbers of crackpots, though obviously it has attracted at least one.)
These scholars need to be made to talk to one another, at least in a metaphoric sense.
In other words, someone needs to read the books that take risks, and to be able to evaluate them and explain what they really mean, because their embedded implications, if their scholarship is systematic, is more than the superficial reader thinks.
The books are usually written to be clear and often entertaining. The writers think people need to read them, plus they will make more money if a few more people are enticed to buy the books.
This means that the only people who can tell the difference between these books and the fluff that they superficially resemble are those who have worked their way through the academic theories that these guys are contesting, overturning, or modifying.
They don’t load up their books with the scholarly apparatus, except in the bibliography. They just give the results, and they include hints to insiders that they know what they’re talking about.
Sometimes they don’t.
I started out, eighteen months ago, looking at a bunch of ambitious thinkers from my youth and figuring out why they might have been asking the right questions and coming up with the wrong answers.
Some of them, like George Steiner, have actually been obliquely telling us why they came up with the wrong answers, and what we might do to fix things for the next generation. But Steiner still hasn’t quite got his head round the problem, and all that the reviewers of My Unwritten Books care about is the book he didn’t write regarding his sex life. None of them show any sign of comprehending the chapter on Joseph Needham's Science and Civilization in China, and the reviewer remarking on Steiner's proposed universal core curriculum seemed to think it was impossibly daunting, rather than being the basic knowledge that an informed human being needs to navigate through the 21st century. (Hint: I don't have some of it, and I don't think Steiner does either.)
My blog has, lately, been going down side trails and asking seemingly frivolous and irrelevant questions that, nevertheless, feed back into the main problem: what the right questions are about the human endeavor and how to make people understand what the questions are. If they can get you to ask the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers, as has been sometimes said.
And understandably, none of my readers get what the hell I am getting at.
So I need to figure out how to turn potentially long and tedious posts about this issue into posts that are merely short and tedious.
I promise to TRY to avoid writing ones that merely baffle, though I may not succeed.
Although I sometimes cite books just because I know some of my readers will like them, I don’t expect them to read them the same way I do. No two people read the same book. As I expect to find when I read Ron Drummond’s sumptuously re-imagined anniversary edition of John Crowley’s novel Little, Big, no one person reads the same book, sometimes even in the course of reading it for the first time. (There are books that change the perceptions and mindsets of their readers just in the course of reading them.)
It would be hard to explain, to take one example of why I puzzle my readers, why the offhand summaries of scholarly controversies that you can find in Ronald Hutton’s book Shamans shed light not just on shamans but on the habitual misperceptions of scholars: on the typical errors of specialists in far less controversial and exotic fields of study than what the Siberians are or were up to with their folks who systematically derange all the senses.
Wisecracks like that last one, incidentally, are one strategy that works for keeping people’s attention; far more of my readers are likely to know Arthur Rimbaud and the French symbolists and surrealists, and le dereglement systématique de tous les sens, than are likely to have read recent anthropology versus the old-fashioned style of it.
However, some of my readers don’t know shit about Rimbaud, but are into sci-fi and computer programming and mathematics and all kinds of stuff like that. And I bet almost none of the readership really follows the debates in postcolonial theory, or even tries to avoid them when possible.
Never mind whether or not "relational aesthetics" has any relationship to good old-fashioned reader response theory and hermeneutics and Frankfurt School theories of society and Antonio Gramsci’s models of hegemony.
Someone ought to write a paper called “Neil Gaiman and Antonio Gramsci,” just because I think it would get people’s attention and there actually would be a lot to be said about a Gaiman-Gramsci mash-up.
So I really do have to shut up until I have figured out some of these methodological bemuddlements. (I meant to type “befuddlements” but as always the Freudian-slippage fingers are wiser than I am. Except when they transcribe the alliterative “divergences” in quotations where “convergences” was clearly the correct word.)
I have thrown in a few jokey asides in spite of myself.
This post has gone on so long that I have decided to paste in as a separate post an interview with Drew Westen in this morning’s Atlanta Journal Constitution that speaks to the general topic of comprehending the human endeavor, and incidentally to the survival of the United States of America and possibly also that of the entire human species. Concern for such huge issues is part of what lies behind my wish to see the academicians get the answers right, and to see that the separate answers fit together both to shed light on some larger questions and to pose still larger ones.
I had no idea that Drew Westen was a professor at Emory. My impression from other newspaper stories was that he had it right regarding what is really motivating American voters, for reasons I have stated on numerous occasions in this blog (though never using the dreaded words “elections” or “politics” but rather “the narrative quality of experience” and such like). I have been wondering for months why no one who writes about politics could see what seems as clear as day, just as anyone who read the newspaper could see the global dimensions of the subprime mortgage crisis looming for the past several years.
And now I shall try hard not to post again until I have something comprehensible and useful to say. Though that may be never.
For one thing, I need to find a way to mend the disconnect between the actual readership of joculum and the blog’s gradually developing interests. The readers have background information I need and want, but I have to find a way of explaining why I want it and what it has to do with them. I need to connect with their particular worldviews and the personal stories implied by their background and interests.
Bridging the gap with jokes isn’t working any longer in terms of communication.
And my ignorance of some of the key disciplines may also be unbridgeable.
Basically, the relative weight and proportion of a couple of main topics has shifted.
One unfortunately elusive topic has to do with statistically improbable levels of occurrence, and the mechanics of consciousness and perception, and how we live by making things up, which means that we are also at any given moment screening off different percentages of the world by the fictions through which we choose to interpret it.
We do this regardless of our level of perceived rationality versus raw emotion, or any other sets of loaded cuss words you care to use to describe the situation. We always get some of it right and some of it wrong. All we can do is look at the evidence that we’ve got more of it wrong than we think we have.
But we can forget all that, bracket that whole topic, and look instead at the few multidisciplinary scholars who are getting beyond some of the more perverse blind spots of separate academic departments. (That's a topic that it is easier to get people to understand, because it attracts smaller numbers of crackpots, though obviously it has attracted at least one.)
These scholars need to be made to talk to one another, at least in a metaphoric sense.
In other words, someone needs to read the books that take risks, and to be able to evaluate them and explain what they really mean, because their embedded implications, if their scholarship is systematic, is more than the superficial reader thinks.
The books are usually written to be clear and often entertaining. The writers think people need to read them, plus they will make more money if a few more people are enticed to buy the books.
This means that the only people who can tell the difference between these books and the fluff that they superficially resemble are those who have worked their way through the academic theories that these guys are contesting, overturning, or modifying.
They don’t load up their books with the scholarly apparatus, except in the bibliography. They just give the results, and they include hints to insiders that they know what they’re talking about.
Sometimes they don’t.
I started out, eighteen months ago, looking at a bunch of ambitious thinkers from my youth and figuring out why they might have been asking the right questions and coming up with the wrong answers.
Some of them, like George Steiner, have actually been obliquely telling us why they came up with the wrong answers, and what we might do to fix things for the next generation. But Steiner still hasn’t quite got his head round the problem, and all that the reviewers of My Unwritten Books care about is the book he didn’t write regarding his sex life. None of them show any sign of comprehending the chapter on Joseph Needham's Science and Civilization in China, and the reviewer remarking on Steiner's proposed universal core curriculum seemed to think it was impossibly daunting, rather than being the basic knowledge that an informed human being needs to navigate through the 21st century. (Hint: I don't have some of it, and I don't think Steiner does either.)
My blog has, lately, been going down side trails and asking seemingly frivolous and irrelevant questions that, nevertheless, feed back into the main problem: what the right questions are about the human endeavor and how to make people understand what the questions are. If they can get you to ask the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers, as has been sometimes said.
And understandably, none of my readers get what the hell I am getting at.
So I need to figure out how to turn potentially long and tedious posts about this issue into posts that are merely short and tedious.
I promise to TRY to avoid writing ones that merely baffle, though I may not succeed.
Although I sometimes cite books just because I know some of my readers will like them, I don’t expect them to read them the same way I do. No two people read the same book. As I expect to find when I read Ron Drummond’s sumptuously re-imagined anniversary edition of John Crowley’s novel Little, Big, no one person reads the same book, sometimes even in the course of reading it for the first time. (There are books that change the perceptions and mindsets of their readers just in the course of reading them.)
It would be hard to explain, to take one example of why I puzzle my readers, why the offhand summaries of scholarly controversies that you can find in Ronald Hutton’s book Shamans shed light not just on shamans but on the habitual misperceptions of scholars: on the typical errors of specialists in far less controversial and exotic fields of study than what the Siberians are or were up to with their folks who systematically derange all the senses.
Wisecracks like that last one, incidentally, are one strategy that works for keeping people’s attention; far more of my readers are likely to know Arthur Rimbaud and the French symbolists and surrealists, and le dereglement systématique de tous les sens, than are likely to have read recent anthropology versus the old-fashioned style of it.
However, some of my readers don’t know shit about Rimbaud, but are into sci-fi and computer programming and mathematics and all kinds of stuff like that. And I bet almost none of the readership really follows the debates in postcolonial theory, or even tries to avoid them when possible.
Never mind whether or not "relational aesthetics" has any relationship to good old-fashioned reader response theory and hermeneutics and Frankfurt School theories of society and Antonio Gramsci’s models of hegemony.
Someone ought to write a paper called “Neil Gaiman and Antonio Gramsci,” just because I think it would get people’s attention and there actually would be a lot to be said about a Gaiman-Gramsci mash-up.
So I really do have to shut up until I have figured out some of these methodological bemuddlements. (I meant to type “befuddlements” but as always the Freudian-slippage fingers are wiser than I am. Except when they transcribe the alliterative “divergences” in quotations where “convergences” was clearly the correct word.)
I have thrown in a few jokey asides in spite of myself.
This post has gone on so long that I have decided to paste in as a separate post an interview with Drew Westen in this morning’s Atlanta Journal Constitution that speaks to the general topic of comprehending the human endeavor, and incidentally to the survival of the United States of America and possibly also that of the entire human species. Concern for such huge issues is part of what lies behind my wish to see the academicians get the answers right, and to see that the separate answers fit together both to shed light on some larger questions and to pose still larger ones.
I had no idea that Drew Westen was a professor at Emory. My impression from other newspaper stories was that he had it right regarding what is really motivating American voters, for reasons I have stated on numerous occasions in this blog (though never using the dreaded words “elections” or “politics” but rather “the narrative quality of experience” and such like). I have been wondering for months why no one who writes about politics could see what seems as clear as day, just as anyone who read the newspaper could see the global dimensions of the subprime mortgage crisis looming for the past several years.
And now I shall try hard not to post again until I have something comprehensible and useful to say. Though that may be never.
