{"id":10122,"date":"2006-01-18T16:05:42","date_gmt":"2006-01-18T21:05:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2006\/01\/18\/10122.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:53:49","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:53:49","slug":"bookish","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2006\/01\/18\/bookish\/","title":{"rendered":"Book-ish"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Intellectually, I’ve been lucky. Well, and I’ve been lucky in umpty-’leven other ways, as well, and I know that, but at the moment, I’m talking about one specific aspect of my good fortune. When I started being intellectually curious, or at least when my intellectual curiosity overcame my indolence, or at any rate, when I hit my intellectual stride in my late twenties, I had access to one of the world’s great libraries. Borrowing and<\/I> browsing access. Convenient access. There were very few books I could not get of a lunchtime.\n

The timing was also magnificent as the great on-line collections had begun. As with the book library, I had access to many of these collections through the late eighties. As my work was not unconnected to those collections, I had some leisure to drift through them, looking at whatever interested me, in addition to the pleasure of noting what was juxtaposed to the thing I was being paid to look for. In the last few years, as those collections have grown, I have retained some (more limited) access to them. As a result, I can read my choice of some millions of articles in scholarly journals and mainstream periodicals.\n

So when Kwama Anthony Appiah’s new book on Cosmopolitanism<\/a> came to my attention, in addition to noting it as a book to perhaps borrow from some library and read carefully, Your Humble Blogger thought that much of Prof. Appiah’s work must be available in journals here and there, and that perhaps I didn’t need to wait for the book to turn up to get a sense of what he was on about. And, in fact, the text of Ethics in a World of Strangers<\/a>, a talk he gave this past summer on W.E.B. Du Bois is on his web site, and I was able to read a few old articles. The essays from the New York Review of Books<\/I> aren’t accessible to me, alas. And it turns out that really, there isn’t very much there, at least not recently.\n

Now, the next thing: An article in a recent Chronicle of Higher Education called Radical Change for Tenure<\/a> reported on a special panel at the MLA conference that aims, among other things, to end ‘the fetishization of the monograph’ as a tenure requirement, or indeed as the sine qua non<\/I> of academic achievement. I’ve had a couple of conversations about the article (and several on the general subject), and on the whole I think it would be a very good thing if academic departments and administrations got off the monograph kick.\n

What struck me, though, is that I have read two reviews of Mr. Appiah’s new book this week, one in the Nation<\/I> and one, if memory serves, in the New York Times<\/I>. Those periodicals have regular book reviews. The reviews in the Nation<\/I> and the Times<\/I> (and in the New York Review of Books<\/I>, of course, and the London Times<\/I>, and the Guardian<\/I>, and a few score other general mainstream newspapers and magazine) are substantial essays, often combining reviews of several books into a coherent statement of the state of discussion on a broad topic. You don’t need to read the book in question to get a good deal of value out of the review, nor is the review viewed primarily as an answer to the question what’s this book like?<\/i> Not every book gets reviewed like that, of course, but there are a large number of serious books seriously reviewed in that manner, and because Mr. Appiah’s book was one of them, I started looking into his work.\n

Now, the New York Times did not review Mr. Appiah’s twenty-three page article in Critical Thinking<\/I> in 1997. That article held most, if not all, of the ideas to which the reviewers I read responded. I’m sure the book goes into more detail, is more rigorous, provides more, clearer and better examples ... no, wait, I’m not sure of that at all. What I am sure of is that by virtue of expanding his essays into a book<\/I>, Mr. Appiah brought the ideas into the public conversation. Because there was a book<\/I>, the argument was admitted to be of public interest and worthy of public scrutiny.\n

Oh, now and then a nice long magazine article in the New Yorker<\/I> or the Atlantic<\/I> will spark a conversation, but usually that conversation acknowledges that it is treading water until the book comes out. Malcolm Gladwell’s essays are ever so much better than his books, but who read them? Harry Frankfurt’s essay On Bullshit<\/I> became a nine-day wonder and, of all things, was on Entertainment Weekly<\/I>’s list of 2005’s best books, but it was a book in 2005 because some people decided, essentially, that it was too good to be an article. Then, when it was a book, it got reviewed as a book, got discussed as a book, entered the public sphere as a matter of weighty import. Sure, there was nothing in it that wasn’t in it thirty years ago, but who read the article? Of course, who reads books, too, but that’s not important. The public conversation about serious matters has to close its eyes to its insularity or it will never happen at all.\n

All of which is to say, I think the MLA gang are up against something more intractable than even a dean or an Old Guard prof. They are up against cultural expectations, a sense in which a book signifies substance, where a not-book signifies, well, lesser substance. Sure, there can be and there are arguments held over years in the pages of academic journals. Bitter and hard-fought arguments. Sure. But they are assumed to be of interest only to specialists, like the rest of the stuff in there, and are only brought out for public gnawing if one or another gets a book out. Or if, a generation or two later, somebody writes a book about the whole thing. There has to be a book, between covers.\n

I’m not saying that this has to be the case forever, or that it isn’t already changing. In fact, it seems to me that the book, as a symbol or signifier of some level of cultural importance, is probably very recent and probably not going to last much longer. Already I am perplexed by novellas coming out between hard covers, as I’ve mentioned here before, and unable to come up with any reason why that seems wrong. I suspect, now, that it seems wrong just because I have a cultural sense of what constitutes book<\/I>dom, and a hundred pages isn’t in it. Still, if I read a novella between covers, I do a Book Report on the novella; if I read a novella in a collection, I do a book report on the collection. If I read a collection of Studs Terkel interviews between covers, I do a Book Report; if I read an interesting interview on-line somewhere, I may blog it, but I won’t Report on it.\n

Will people born after 1990 have that same cultural sense? Dunno. I suspect not, but I also suspect that those of us born before than will never shake it. I think that even if somehow academia explicitly codifies tenure in some way that de-emphasizes the monograph, committees will still, for another generation, venerate it whether they want to or not. Which is strange, but there it is.\n

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Intellectually, I\u2019ve been lucky. Well, and I\u2019ve been lucky in umpty-\u2019leven other ways, as well, and I know that, but at the moment, I\u2019m talking about one specific aspect of my good fortune. When I started being intellectually curious, or…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10122","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10122","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10122"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10122\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17664,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10122\/revisions\/17664"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}