Commentary: Damned if you do. . .

I recently read two books, one silly, one serious. I don't recommend Jerramy Fine's Somedaw My Prince Will Come. It's a silly, silly book. Its subtitle, True Adventures of a Wannabe Princess is, quite frankly, nauseating. This would be a fine entry in the weaker sort of chick lit category, but is frightening when contemplated as a memoir. Bascially, Fine decides at a tender age that she's meant to be a princess of the English Royal Family (first her parents and later she decide that the strength of her resolution is because she was a princess, or at least nobility, in a previous life). At the age of six, she decides that her future spouse would be Peter, son of Princess Anne. The rest of the book chronicles her attempts to remake herself into a "proper" upper-class Englishwoman and meet her future prince. One of the book's strengths is its voice; although Fine is over thirty, she sounds quite convincingly like the teenager and young twenty-something her book covers.

On the other hand, I can recommend Kate Clifford Larson's book on Mary Surratt, The Assassin's Accomplice: Mary Surratt and the Plot to Kill Abraham Lincoln. Larson has done her homework on the scholarship surrounding Lincoln's assassination as well as the conspirators' trials. Larson does a nice job balancing clear writing with an eye for larger detail such as the role border states played in the Civil War, and the truly divided feelings of border states' residents without getting bogged down in the scholarship.

These books have no apparent connection on the surface. What I found striking about them is the ways both books undercut the messages of femininity they apparently espouse. Lawson's Mary Surratt and Fine's self-portrait wind up defying the assumptions that go with wife/mother and would-be princess.

Surratt was the first woman executed by the US Government. Her crime was conspiring with John Wilkes Booth in the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. Larson's book is an exploration of Surratt's role in the plot, her trial, and the evidence against her. In the Introduction, Larson admits that she thought Surratt was "more innocent" (xiv) when she began her research, although she later changed her mind. A crucial point to Larson's exploration is the conflict between Surratt's real-life and Victorian values. Larson suggests that although Surratt was part of "a new breed of troublesome woman" (xviii), one that included woman soldiers and spies during the war, the gender norms of the day resisted the idea that a woman could be involved in such a horrific crime. Added to this was her age and the fact that she was a mother. Post-trial appeals that asked for commutation of her sentence gave her age and her gender as the reason.

I have a hard time seeing Surratt as a "troublesome wwoman," if that term is defined as a "woman doing things atypical to our expectations." Although Surratt's son, John, was a spy for Confederate forces, and a young woman who was a spy, Sarah Slater, stayed at the Surratt boardinghouse occasionally, what I find interesting is that while Mary Surratt could be called a "troublesome woman" by conspiring to kill the president, her participation appears to have fallen largely along mid-Victorian notions of women's participation in society. Surratt did not shoot Lincoln herself, nor did she attack any of the other men whom Booth targeted. Instead, she offered both her Washington boarding house and her Surrattsville tavern in southern Maryland as a refuge for conspirators and a hiding place for weapons. Despite her travels back and forth between her two properties, she did not hide guns herself in her tavern; instead she sent one of the male conspirators to do so instead. Larson echoes Andrew Johnson's comment that Surratt "kept the nest which hatched the egg" (xix), itself a very maternal image. Surratt appears to have been a kind of conspirators' Angel in the House. As Larson herself concludes, "In providing a warm home, private encouragement, and material support to Abraham Lincoln's murderer, she offered more than most of Booth's supporters" (230). Ironically, the woman executed for assassination, one of the most notorious characters of the day, participated in one of the most traditionally feminine ways.

Fine, on the other hand, appears to be caught in the most traditional narrative of all: the faithful girl, waiting for her prince. Fine does anything but wait, however. She moves to London, enrolls in the LSE, finds a job, makes the "right" friends, lives in the "right" places, and learns how to fit in with her new upper-class crowd. While wrapped up in finding Mr. Royal Right (with lots of Mr. Slightly-Less-Exalted Wrongs) and meditations on why Fine can't seem to leave her dream world behind and grow up, at its heart, this narrative is the quintessential American tale of how to recreate yourself. Fine is Jay Gatsby without the tragic ending. For all its fluff and silliness, Fine is an example of grit, determination, and the desire to be somewhere and someone else. If her choice seems narrow and deplorable, Fine does achieve, in the end, a meeting with her fantasy spouse, a long-term job in London, a boyfriend, and, eventually, some perspective.

Both Jerramy Fine, or really "Jerramy Fine," and Mary Surratt show both how pervasive our narratives of women as princesses in waiting, wives, and nurterers are. And yet, both books hint at how complicated they can be.

Review: "Farewell My Subaru," by Doug Fine

A Fine Green Life

Doug Fine's book is subtitled "An Epic Adventure in Local Living," and there are some epic-worthy moments in the book: Fine fording the flooding Mimbres river in his Subaru, named the LOVEsubee, with two kid goats to get back to his ranch; his subsequent fordings of the river to fetch hay for the goats; being caught out in a epic thunderstorm during a run. But these moments are leavened by humor that does much to undo the "epicness" of his achievement. Consider this description of Fine fording the Mimbres, against all advice, with the two baby goats in the car:

Mulling my choices from the driver's seat, I opted for the "going as fast as I can will get me across faster" method. This meant that I left foot-deep tire tracks in the moments before the LOVEsubee hit the river and went briefly vertical as the goats loudly wondered, "Do we not have any say in who adopts us?"

A scene where a chicken is snatched by a coyote in Fine's horrified sight is, despite the trauma, rendered equally funny. Fine has a talent for making the very hard work of growing one's own food, protecting rosebushes from goats, protecting livestock (chickens, goats) from predators, and installing and maintaining solar panels and related equipment seem easy. Bill McKibben, one of the authors quoted on the book's jacket, concluded that "It'll make you want to move!"

Moving, or at least, changing his lifestyle to become more green, more sustainable, is part of Fine's motive. He was determined not to jettison such trappings of modern life as his Netflix subscription, subwoofers, and ice cream, and, by and large, he appears to have been successful; one casualty, however, was his Subaru, traded in for a diesel Ford F-250 (christened the Ridiculous Oversized American Truck, ROAT for short) so that Fine could drive on recycled restaurant grease rather than gasoline. Fine includes little snippets of information throughout the book such as this one: "Organic farming can produce enough food to sustain even a larger population than the current worldwide one, without increasing the amount of agricultural land needed." Presumably, these tidbits will help the reader be motivated to make some lifestyle changes. In his afterword, Fine offers more advice for living sustainably and detaching from the grid.

Still, after reading Fine's book, I can't agree with Bill McKibben's encomium. I didn't want to move to a remote valley in another state to give over my life to food and livestock raising. Having grown up with various animals large and small (dogs, cats, rabbits, horses, donkeys), I know how much work they can take. And my 8-5 job is neither portable nor does it allow me to spend the primary part of my day on growing my food. Presumably, Fine's occupations provide him more flexibility. On his website, he describes himself as "Author, Journalist, Adventurer, Goat-Herder." "Where's the book for people like me?" I found myself grumbling at the end of the book.

Despite its idealism and realistic struggles with living locally (Fine swears off Wal-Mart in New Mexico but can't resist visiting Whole Foods and Trader Joe's on a trip to Arizona), Farewell My Subaru is not a how-to manual in sustainable living. Fine's life at Funky Butte Ranch may simply be too unrealistic for many people to achieve. However, it might inspire you to make some small changes. Realistically, there are many things people with 8-5 jobs can do to live more green. As Fine points out, we can buy the environmentally friendly toilet paper to send a message to CEO's among other things.

So, even if you can't quit your job and move to a remote place like Fine, or Thoreau for that matter, to change your life, read Fine's book for its humor and its attempts to make real change. And next time you're at the store, buy that Seventh Generation Dish Detergent.

Reading Hand-Wringing: Warner's "Domestic Disturbances

Last week, the New York Times published a story on expensive sleep-away camps and the lengths the staff go to to accomodate the questions, demands, and complaints of parents. One camp employs a full-time staff member to do nothing but handle parents' calls and to attempt to help parents overcome the need to be connected 24/7 to their children (some parents flaut the "no cell phone" rule at one camp by sending their children to camp with two cell phones so that when one is confiscated, they can still call their children).

Judith Warner responded recently in her weekly column in the Times, Domestic Disturbances, to this story. Warner analyzes the cause for such behaviors in the course of her column. But it's her conclusion at the end of the article that frustrates me. Warner ultimately advises that it's up to the institutions to rein in this behavior:

The buck has to stop somewhere. It's clearly not going to be stopped by this generation of befuddled parents. It's time that the professionals we entrust with our children stopped catering to their "clients" and started treating them like grown-ups.

I find Warner's shift in the last sentence (which is the last sentence of the column) interesting. Up to this point, she has written as a detached observer. However, in the last sentence, she lets herself, as much as the obsessive parents she's observing, off the hook. I conclude that, while Warner doesn't go so far as to consider herself "befuddled," she too, is incapable of "acting like a grownup," and must look to those professionals to do it for her. I have found this stance, alterntively obsessed and dismissive, typical of Warner's column. In the first column of Domestic Disturbances I read, Warner mulled over the problems of "supersized" birthday parties while making petits fours for her own daughter's party. In Warner's cloumn, you're likely to hear what the other obsessed parents think, her children think, and what outrageous thing the sadistic PTA requires now. There are sporadic forays into policy such as the occasional columns on birth control, behavioral drugs such as Ritalin, and parental leave. What's frustrating about reading Warner is that she's clearly a very intelligent woman unable to separate herself from her own neurotic, obsessive parental lens.

While Warner is quite good at pointing out the foibles of the helicopter parent set, she's less adept at confronting the consequences in ways that might lead to change at either a policy or individual level. Demanding that it's up to the professionals to set boundaries with parents ignores the negative results already taking place from this mindset. A brief from the Alliance for Excellent Education on teacher attrition quoted the 2005 Met-Life "Survey of the American Teacher" which stated that, among other things, new teachers were stressed by their ". . .relationships (or lack thereof) with parents." So much for the professionals being able to change the parents' behavior. Read some of the comments after Warner's columns and you'll find the same dreary arguments that surround modern parenting, especially the so-called "Mommy Wars," repeated ad infinitum. The sad thing is that some readers see only their own fears confirmed, rather than anything to challenge their assumptions. One respondent to the camp column admitted that she, as the parent of young children, would be a "neurotic overworried micromanaging mother" if that would get her children "a spot in a winner take all society." Her final comment is indicative of the problem Warner brings up but doesn't confront:

But regardless of how society is going, I will teach them human kindness and ethics and hope that these things will serve them well and don't backfire and place them somewhere on the loser heap.

So our choices are either to be demanding, difficult and successful or kind, ethical losers? Perfect Madness, indeed.

The great reading debate continues

I'm spending some time in a cafe, drinking tea. There's a little girl waiting for her parents to fetch her her juice and bagel. While she waits, she's reading the paper. Or maybe just looking at the pictures and ads. Whatever she's doing, she's doing it with total concentration, poring over the page gripped in both hands. According to the New York Times, this child's act may be revolutionary precisely because she's reading a printed page.

It's interesting to see this issue of internet reading come up again. The Times just published the first article in a series on digital versus print reading. It's quite lengthy at four online "pages." And just in case you weren't aware of the high stakes here, the series title gives you a clue: "The Future of Reading." Currently, it's the second most emailed story on the Times site. The article offers some sobering statistics from a report issued by the National Endowment of the Arts, using Department of Education data. The findings cited by the Times article include:

just over a fifth of 17-year-olds said they read almost every day for fun in 2004, down from nearly a third in 1984.

Nineteen percent of 17-year-olds said they never or hardly ever read for fun in 2004, up from 9 percent in 1984. (It was unclear whether they thought of what they did on the Internet as “reading.”)

The Times author, Motoko Rich, at least points out that we read for a variety of reasons (although calling reading a mortgage contract the sort of minimal, informational level of reading is a bit of stretch). Where people seem most passionate about the issue is the idea of reading for learning, enrichment, or pleasure. Rich quotes David McCullough: "Learning is not to be found on a printout [. . .] It’s not on call at the touch of the finger. Learning is acquired mainly from books, and most readily from great books.”

Take that, Perez Hilton readers! But a sticky question,which I think we ultimately will shy away from answering, at the heart of this debate is: can online reading make us better people, in the same way, that reading a "great book" can?

Whether or not the internet can make us "better" (read better educated, more literate, more sophiticated) is a question that's thornt to answer. This is why the dichotomy of online reading for information versus print reading for pleasure is preferable to contemplate. But this dichotomy is a problem if we don't confront its underlying assumptions. Take Ann Althouse's response to Rich's article. The title of Althouse's response is "Does reading on the internet count as reading." Althouse's answer is yes. But at the end of her article, she reaffirms this central dichotomy:

I definitely think that reading on-line restructures your brain. That may be bad in some ways, but it's got to be good in others. In any case, it's where I am now. I still read books, but I read them differently, for example, I cut to the essence quickly and spring into alert when I detect bullshit. I'm offended by padding, pedantry, and humorlessness. This may cut off some paths to enlightenment for me, but it also saves me a lot of time, and I find some other path.

Althouse's assertion is dependent on the assumption that we're all reading for information, for research, for argument. It might work for a book with an argument that's established over the course of several chapters. But how does this style of reading work with a novel, a memoir, a biography?

The Times article also focuses on the internet's research potential, citing the internet's potential to help students with disabilities, such as dyslexia, read. Once again, the example cited was how the internet helped one such student do research. Well, the internet has made research easier--if you've developed the skills, of course. Understanding how a web page is organized, where the information you want is located (is it in "about us?" for example), what websites among the millions turned up by a Google search are going to be the most helpful takes time and practice. I don't think they're developed just because someone does a lot of online reading. This is true for print research as well. As an undergraduate and master's student, when I photocopied an article from a journal, I never bothered to photocopy the notes. Why should I? It was the article I was interested in. It took writing a master's thesis before I understood that the article was only one part of a larger picture, and that I might want to look at those other things quoted and cited by the author whose article I was reading.

Until we accept that reading, whether done for research or pleasure, in print or online, is part of a complex way in which we take in and evaluate information, entertain ourselves, create and pass on our stories and our histories, this debate isn't going to go very far.

Summer Reading: Airports

This post came about for two reasons: I went to Sacramento, and I read Sarah Vowell. I didn't do those things at the same time. I read Vowell's The Partly Cloudy Patriot a few years ago, and something she said about airport reading stuck in my head: "My airport reading material--a novelization of Gettysburg here, a Lyndon Johnson biography there--always receives an approving glance from whatever middle-aged man on my flight is perusing the new Stephen Ambrose book, because every domestic flight requires a middle-aged man with a Stephen Ambrose book in his carry-on luggage--it's an FAA regulation." The lesson I took from this comment? Not to read more Stephen Ambrose but that people notice what you read. Lest you think this is a paranoic tendency, Wired magazine published this article which says that what you read is one of the things airline screeners notice last year.

I had this notion, a sort of "you are what you read" aphorism, in mind when I packed for my trip. I was connecting through the San Francisco airport where I knew I could find a good bookstore, Compass Books. I planned on buying a book in SFO. But I needed to have something else to read in the airport and on the plane before SFO. I tried to be reasonable. Usually, I weigh down my carry-on with 2-3 books because, let's face it, these days, I might be stranded in the airport for decades. However, my flights were short and my trip was relatively short and busy. One good book, purchased in San Francisco, would suffice.

In my local airport's small shop, I was faced with a wide selection of glossy magazines and a few shelves of mostly romance/thriller paperbacks. I bought a magazine (No, not US, the Atlantic). So far so good, but what about a book? The hardbacks looked interesting, but they were hardback, and I was trying to avoid buying anything weighty until Compass Books in San Francisco. Based on that criteria, I wound up purchasing Tina Brown's Diana Chronicles.


I have to admit that I spent the rest of my journey holding the poor book open as wide as possible, so as to obscure the spine and cover. I have no idea what Homeland Security and middle-aged Ambrose readers think of me. But I have to admit, Tina Brown is a good writer: she knows her subject, and she has a wicked, pointed turn of phrase at times that cuts through all of the clutter surrounding her subject. I also have to admit that I didn't buy a hardback after all. With my layover cut short, I grabbed Elizabeth Hind's Generation Loss in paperback. You can read Bookslut's review, which is an excellent summary of the novel's achievments and flaws, here.

Happy Reading!

Summer Reading Series

Summer's the best time for reading right? Unless you have to mow the lawn, weed, and spray the roses like we do at the Domicile of Rabid Readers (bonus points if you can name the Latin noun which is the root for "domicile" AND the declension) all the while ignoring the dreaded dust bunny buildup. Still, we get our summer reading in at the DRR, even if it means a tad bit of sleep deprivation. I'm sure you, faithful readers, do the same.

The next few posts will meditate on what we read during the summer and how we do that. Do people read different books on the beach than on the airplane? Look for a review or two of what I've been reading lately. I'd welcome your ideas of what you'd like to see discussed, so please post comments below.

Tolle lege ("Pick up and read") from St. Augustine's Confessions

The art of reading

Nicholas Carr thinks we might be in trouble. In an article published in the latest issue of the The Atlantic, provocatively titled "Is Google Making Us Stupid?", Carr describes how his decade-plus of internet use has changed the way he reads and thinks. He laments the fact that he no longer has the attention span to read lengthy articles and books. He blames this loss on using the internet for a certain kind of reading: skimming. Carr suggests that although we're might be reading more than we did in the 1970's or 1980's, the kind of reading we're doing is skimming. Ultimately, Carr shares his fears that this trend has negative consequences for us culturally, making us, intellectually, less complex.

Carr's article is not the only one on this subject to appear recently. Michael Agger wrote about the skimming phenomenon in June. In "How We Read Online," Agger sums up the research about online skimming. According to Jakob Nielsen, whom Agger quotes several times, our online reading habits aren't pretty: "[U]sers are selfish, lazy, and ruthless." Agger's key distinction in the piece is between reading for information and reading for pleasure. Pleasure readers can still read online, although it's not the best environment. And screens will never replace paper. In fact, paper is a new salve for the travails of the glowing screen: "Rather, paper seems to be the new Prozac. A balm for the distracted mind."

Complaining about or observing the differences between reading online and reading say, a book, isn't a new phenomenon. James W. Earl, a professor of English at the University of Oregon, wrote about the problems of online reading in an article that appeared in the April 14, 2000 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education ("Reading for Sheer Pleasure--Remember That?"). Earl's issue with technology wasn't so much how it changed reading as much as the act of being online took people away from reading: "there's an information highway running right through the green campus, with an on-ramp on every desk where people used to sit and read." Earl's distinction is between that idea of going online and reading, a distinction that is much less meaningful today when so many things are available to read online. How things have changed since Earl's article in 2000 was brought home to me yesterday when I met with someone who holds a master's degree in French Literature. He had a print copy of the New York Times. "I always read it in print," he responded when I confessed to reading the online version. Looking at his print copy, with its rows of columns and small print, was, I admit, intimidating. Perhaps I've become a lazy reader using the Times' website. Looking at the "Most Emailed" list is always a quick way to navigate through the site. Yet, on the weekends, one of my favorite things to do is to read the local newspaper thoroughly at breakfast. And I don't have any fancy navigational aids then, unless you count the brief index that's smooshed on the bottom of the first page. Like perhaps many people, I find myself reading in both worlds: in print and online.

The arguments of Carr, Agger, and Earl are all based on assumptions about how we read in different situations. For Carr, online skimming destroys one's ability to read attentively and in-depth. Agger admits the necessity for skimming online; yet his assumption is that pleasure reading will be a panacea to the skimming necessary when we read online. Earl's assumption, made in 2000, is that online activities are antithetical to the reading process. The debate about online versus print reading, skimming versus reading in depth, is something of a false dichotomy. We have a variety of reasons to read and ways to read both in print and online. I may read an Op-Ed piece online in the New York Times and then book a flight; chances are, I'm probably not doing those things simultaneously if I'm interested in what I'm reading. But a variety of other circumstances influence if I multitask when reading or step away. The piece may not be well-written. It might be well-written, but I may have read enough to understand the argument without reading all the way through. This isn't limited to the online world of text. I've had this problem with Jared Diamond's books. I've read most of both Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse. Diamond's thesis and insights are so clear that by the time I'm three-quarters of the way through, I feel that I've grasped his arguments and insights completely. (Sorry, Jared)

There's also the time/place issue. A colleague asked if I'd read a lengthy online article. I had. "I started to," she said. Then she shrugged, "But I was at work, so. . ." We all know that work is one of the primary reasons we don't get to read enough. My husband has a rule: no novels at breakfast. The reason? They're potentially too absorbing to put down for him to leave in time for work. The same can be true for online materials. My husband, the no-novels-at-breakfast-guy can also spend hours reading various blogs.

Also, we shouldn't necessarily lump reading for pleasure and reading to be informed or to understand an argument together. I don't necessarily feel the same thrill reading Thomas Freidman as I do a good novel. However, we shouldn't push too hard on the distinction either, as Agger does. Reading a novel in print is not necessarily the antidote for our online overindulgences. For both reading for pleasure and reading for information some of the same issues which can distract us or limit our reading to a quick skim which I discussed above apply. Let's face it: reading takes time, patience, and a willingness to engage with the printed word be it online or on the page. Some people just don't like to read, as the plethora of summer book reading programs in public libraries with slogans like "Catch the Reading Bug" (Eugene OR Public Library), attest. Sometimes we just don't have a lot of time or inclination to read. How many times have you put a book down because you "just couldn't get into it" or didn't have the time to read it as carefully as you would like? The internet perhaps facilitates this notion of not finishing what we start by making it so easy to leave our materials behind. There's no pile of books or magazines on our nightstands to make us feel guilty. I'm not convinced internet skimming is shrinking our attention spans or radically changing how we read. Texting is doing that, but that's a subject for another blog post.


So welcome, fair readers, to the launch of this blog. As this post's title suggests, this blog will be a meditation on reading of all sorts. Expect to see some book reviews and also some essay-like thoughts. I've spent the past nine years training to be a professional reader (read: scholar) and reading has been a lifelong love. Although my career has taken a different direction, I look forward to sharing ideas with other readers. You might see some scholarly tendencies, but nothing like this, I promise.

Thanks for reading. Did you skim, or read? Let me know!