On Technocratic Style

Apparently Louis Menand of The New Yorker has already written a review-cum-farce about the issues of writing with Microsoft Word that I've taken up here and here. "The End Matter" deserves a complete reading, but here are some highlights:

On Word:

First of all, it is time to speak some truth to power in this country: Microsoft Word is a terrible program. Its terribleness is of a piece with the terribleness of Windows generally, a system so overloaded with icons, menus, buttons, and incomprehensible Help windows that performing almost any function means entering a treacherous wilderness of pop-ups posing alternatives of terrifying starkness: Accept/Decline/Cancel; Logoff/Shut Down/Restart; and the mysterious Do Not Show This Warning Again. You often feel that you’re not ready to make a decision so unalterable; but when you try to make the window go away your machine emits an angry beep. You double-click. You triple-click. Beep beep beep beep beep. You are being held for a fool by a chip.

On Clippy, Word's late Help icon, an eyeballed paper clip:

[I]f, God forbid, you ever begin a note or a bibliography entry with the letter “A.,” when you hit Enter, Word automatically types “B.” on the next line. Never, btw (which, unlike “poststructuralism,” is a word in Word spellcheck), ask that androgynous paper clip anything. S/he is just a stooge for management, leading you down more rabbit holes of options for things called Wizards, Macros, Templates, and Cascading Style Sheets.

On the Chicago Manual of Style's somewhat curious advice about punctuation:

Some of the advice is frankly a matter of taste. “An exclamation point added in brackets to quoted material to indicate editorial protest or amusement is strongly discouraged, since it appears contemptuous,” the authors counsel. “The Latin expression sic (thus) is preferred.” First of all, the reason the bracketed exclamation point appears contemptuous is that you use it when you wish to express contempt. There is nothing wrong with contempt. Second (which Chicago insists on, although generations of pedants have believed “secondly” to be the proper usage), sic is a far more damning interpolation, combining ordinary, garden-variety contempt with pedantic condescension. Elsewhere in Punctuation, the instructions are sometimes the reverse of enlightened. What could the authors possibly have been thinking when they committed the following sentence to print: “The semicolon, stronger than a comma but weaker than a period, can assume either role [!]” ?

Does AutoCorrect Correct AutoCorrect?

The answer to the question posed in my title is, Yes, it does. Which is to say, the word "AutoCorrect" is included in Microsoft Word's database of words that are deemed legitimate words in the English language, and therefore not in need of squiggly-red-line correction as you type it in a document. Try it for yourself: compare AutoCorrect with LoobyBooby or HarlemGlobetrotters. AutoCorrect is given the green light, while the other two are stopped in their tracks with the iconic red line. HarperCollins -- the publisher -- is, like AutoCorrect, deemed to be legitimate.

I've written elsewhere on this blog about Jacques Derrida's efforts to figure out AutoCorrect on his word-processing program (whether Derrida was using Word or not is debatable -- but it's highly likely that he was). More recently, Chris Wilson has written an article about Word's sluggish updating of its word database. Because Microsoft employs human-supervised editorship of the database, the process of including new words in it is slow and uneven. Wilson suggests that Word adopt a Google way of analyzing the correct spelling of words algorithmically, based largely on the recognition of frequently used words (and their [mostly] correct spellings) online.

We aren't there yet, of course. Which leaves open the possibility to experiment with words (mostly proper nouns) that you think may or may not appear in the Word word database. If you come across a "legitimate" word (using your own defintion of "legitimate" -- it can come from academese or it may be something more befitting of the Urban Dictionary) that has yet to be registered in the database, accept it into your own Word program for Microsoft to consider whenever it uploads user information.

Here are a few approved (+) and unapproved (-), or yet-to-be approved, word combinations that I came up with:

Jacques Derrida (+) vs. Alain Badiou (-)
Frantz Fanon (+) vs. Gayatri Spivak (-) (most South Asian names were rejected)
Blackburn Rovers (+) vs. Wigan Athletic (-)
Radiohead (+) vs. Wilco (-)
Ryan Vu (+) vs. Gerry Canavan (-)
Motherfucker (+) vs. Mofo (-)

Derrida Tarries with AutoCorrect

In reading the essays and interviews that comprise Jacques Derrida's Paper Machine (2005), I came across a delightful anecdote about the confrontation between philosophical writing and new technologies of writing and inscription. This from "The Word Processor":

In Circumfession I also gave myself the somewhat random constraint of a software program that, when I got to the end of a paragraph of such and such a length, roughly twenty-five lines, told me: "The paragraph is going to be too long; you should press the Return button." Like an order coming from I know not whom, from the depths of what time or what abyss, this slightly threatening warning would appear on the screen, and I decided to come quietly to the end of this long sequence, after the breathing space of a rhythmic sentence, which did have punctuation, as if rippling with commas, but was uninterrupted, punctuated without a period, if you like -- so submitting the fifty-nine long sentences to an arbitrary rule made by a program I hadn't chosen: to a slightly idiotic destiny... As you know, the computer maintains the hallucination of an interlocutor (anonymous or otherwise), of another "subject" (spontaneous and autonomous, automatic) who can occupy more than one place and play plenty of roles: face to face for one, but also withdrawn; in front of us, for another, but also invisible and faceless behind its screen. Like a hidden god who's half asleep, clever at hiding himself even when right opposite you. (22)

Derrida elaborates on his anecdote by considering how the computer -- this medium of "word processing" -- becomes an Other to our consciousness. In contrast to writing with a stylus or on a typewriter, writing on a computer entails addressing an Other who knows what you are going to say in advance: "you have the feeling that you are dealing with the soul -- will, desire, plan -- of a Demiurge-Other, as if already, good or evil genius, an invisible addressee, an omnipresent witness were listening to us in advance, capturing and sending us back the image of our speech without delay, face to face -- with the image rendered objective and immediately stabilized and translated into the speech of the Other, a speech already appropriated by the other or coming from the other, a speech of the unconscious as well. Truth itself" (23).

Word processing's immediacy, its seamless ability to add or erase data with a stroke of the keypad, its virtuality -- all these give Derrida the impression that there's a "demon" (23) at work in the computer apparatus, some unknown entity which exerts its magic on us, making us think the words we type on the screen are really, truly our "own." In fact, the demon's trickery makes our writing seem less familiar, more fixed in time (immediate) and space (there, on the screen, "in" the machine). Writing on the computer alters the texture of textuality itself:

The text is as if presented to us as a show, with no waiting. You see it coming up on the screen in a form that is more objective and anonymous than on a handwritten page, a page which we ourselves moved down. So from bottom to top is how things go: this show happens almost above us, we see it seeing us, surveying us like the eye of the Other, or rather, simultaneously, it also happens under the eye of the nameless stranger, immediately calling forth vigilance and his specter. It sends us back the objectivity of the text much faster, and so changes our experience of time and of the body, the arms and the hands, our embracing of the written thing at a distance... That doesn't mean that it perverts or degrades the sign, but it renders other our old sorting out, our familiar altercation, our family scene, if I may call it that, when the written thing first appeared. (24-25)

The Demiurge-Other: a demon that, at least to my mind, would mimic what we say as we write on the computer. Yet, in a strange way, his act of mimicry would precede the act of writing; that is, the text which appears on screen would seem as though it should've always been there, with or without our conscious writerly attention. So it's mimicry with a difference: fidelity to language that has already been worked over by the word-processing apparatus.

Between 1997 and 2007, successive versions of Microsoft Office gave a face and a name to the "internal demon" of word processing. Derrida's comments appeared before the arrival of Clippit, or Clippy, but, just as with his sentence's truncation by AutoCorrect, it wouldn't be unfair to speculate that he would've engaged the much-maligned Help icon by simply shrugging off its "slightly idiotic destiny." Clippit, after all, was only the goofy, literal expression of the processes of technological inscription that had already taken root in our writerly beings.

Death of a Pugilist

Of the several amusing stories about the life of Norman Mailer, the confrontational don of postwar American letters, in the BBC's obituary for him, I found these to be notable:

Mailer's obsession with masculinity and violence often got him into trouble. He once beat up a sailor on a Manhattan street because he believed that the man had questioned the sexuality of his dog.

In 1971, he head-butted his fellow writer Gore Vidal before a television chat-show after Vidal had written that "there has been from Henry Miller to Norman Mailer to Charles Manson a logical progression".

In addition to being a respected novelist and biographer, Mailer was a boxer, womanizer, social commentator, and newspaper man (he co-founded The Village Voice). His was the voice of the insurgent American male who saw his "status" as a man socially and culturally diminished in the years following the war.

Critics usually point to his influence on literary contemporaries such as Philip Roth and John Updike. But it seems to me Mailer's shadow is also cast over the work of filmmakers Woody Allen and Terence Malick (notably The Thin Red Line), as well as the "ethnic" writers Ishmael Reed and Frank Chin (in his public dispute with Maxine Hong Kingston). There's also Mailer's contribution to hipster culture, "The White Negro" (1956; reprinted in Advertisements for Myself in 1959). From the beatniks to the Beastie Boys, Mailer influenced generations of disaffected white youth who found soulful expression in cool "black" pose.

Norman Mailer was a figure who, although his books may have fallen out of favor in recent decades, embodied the voice of the modern American man in all his contradictions: bullish yet victimized (by women), brash yet fundamentally insecure.

The Task of the Reviewer

I began posting book reviews on Amazon.com about a year ago to kick-start the process of writing on a daily basis. My dissertation had suffered long periods of dormancy, and posting book reviews was just one of the ways I thought I could teach myself how to enjoy writing -- any form of writing -- in view of schedules and deadlines.

I was also spurred to enter that virtual universe of Amazon.com reviewing after reading Michael Eric Dyson's contribution to the New York Public Library's series on the seven deadly sins: Pride. I maintain that this is a dreadful piece of writing. I found Dyson's book to be at once self-indulgent and hollow: brash and condescending without any hint of self-reflexive criticism. A good third of the book is devoted to Dyson's own career, and he betrays not an iota of irony when he takes two former students to task (he basically insults them in prose) for supposedly being disruptive in one of his classes. As you can see for yourself, my review reflects my very low opinion of this book.

But having had some familiarity with the defensive nature of people's responses to Amazon.com reviews (especially when it comes to political and social commentary), I added a closing paragraph to my review that revealed my stakes in critiquing Dyson: a progressive myself, I believe public-intellectual showmanship by the likes of Dyson does a disservice to progressive critical thinking. It brings our discourse down to the level of a polemical shouting match, and it touches on only the most superficial layer of social and political understanding (e.g., Dyson hails Halle Berry's and Denzel Washington's winning Oscars as being "good" forms of pride, over and against the KKK's "bad" form of pride).

The very next review I wrote, on Herman Grey's Cultural Moves, was just as critical, but this time I approached my argument from a more "academic" perspective. I again revealed my stakes in this act of criticism: as someone thoroughly invested in black cultural studies and African American cultural production more generally, I think Grey's sociological determinism seeks not to understand black arts on its own terms but to regurgitate the theoretical point that black arts is always "different" from presumably "white" hegemonic cultural production. Cultural Moves, for me, is a book of academic navel-gazing and not a sincere effort to think about what black arts might mean for its actual practitioners and receivers.

So you can see I've been very careful with how I approach reviewing on Amazon.com. I'm keen on making critical points, but I'm also aware of the various audiences I'm addressing -- I try to inaugurate a conversation between me and them that makes clear my position (with which they may or may not agree) and my investment in making that position. To be sure, I apply such a degree of care to books that are explicitly "about" social and cultural affairs: Barack Obama's The Audacity of Hope, to take the most recent example.

Having explained all that, you can imagine my surprise when someone took the time to send me a message, via Amazon.com, to let me know she finds my reviews heinous:

"Hi,
You gave Fukuyama's (!) book 5 stars essentially saying, 'hey please, come line this reactionary's pockets with money' - and Rachel Roy etc. - and you gave Herman Gray's book ONE star? Ugh! Must you review? - can't you go join some neocon think tank or something and stop ruining people's ratings with your lame criticisms? Better yet - write your own book for critique. Thank you."

Well, there goes "writing for an audience"!

First, I'm not sure exactly what this person meant by adding "Rachel Roy etc." (i.e., Rachael Ray) to the mix in such an offhand manner. Is Rachael Ray a political "reactionary"? Or does this person take issue with Ray's admittedly populist (heaven forbid "mainstream"!) approach to home cooking? (There are longstanding debates on Amazon.com about Rachael Ray's "dumbed-down" approach to cooking, with elitist "foodies" taking the masses to task for their lack of "taste," in both senses of that term.) Whatever the case may be, I can only imagine this person was attempting to flash her liberal, hipster, and/or anti-mainstream credentials by denouncing my positive reviews of Rachael Ray's cookbooks.

More important, however, is her claim that I'm somehow a political reactionary myself for giving Francis Fukuyama's America at the Crossroads a positive review. Now the full text of my review clearly states that what I appreciate about this book is the candor and intelligence with which Fukuyama critiques the problem of George W. Bush's war-mongering and interventionist attempt to "spread democracy" the world over. It's Fukuyama's contention that the philosophical roots of neoconservative thinking insist strongly against such interventionism. (And so unlike other Amazon.com reviewers who seem to think Fukuyama is defecting from neoconservative principles, I actually point out that he's lambasting Bush for not holding true to them.) My review clearly states that I disagree with philosophical neoconservativism but that I appreciate the critique of Bush Fukuyama is able to mount in its name. Fukuyama's is a well-reasoned argument, in my estimation, and one way, out of many, of trying to work through the implications of Bush's disastrous, pig-headed foreign policy.

If there's anything I'm guilty of, at least based on my review, it's the belief that the project of democratic reform must first take root in the actual communities supposedly in need of democratic reform. This is the belief, over and against interventionism, of the need to buffer civil society with strong institutions and shared power structures. It's a belief shared by conservative realists, liberal socialists, and NGOs alike. Now it may not be the "utopian" post-power structure that many of my colleagues in graduate school advocate for, but it is, in my opinion, a real, viable alternative to the pressing issue of U.S. imperialism acting under the guise of "spreading democracy." Where I differ radically from Fukuyama, then, is in how "institution-building" as such is conceived: I reject neoconservative principles and support Western European-style socialism, where civil society is strengthened by the state not letting market capitalism run roughshod over the interests of the people, especially the poor and working classes.

Of course I doubt my critic actually read my review: it seems she only compared my star ratings among books (especially Herman Grey's, for whatever reason) and made up her mind that I belonged in a "neocon think tank." As for her claim that my review "line[s] [Fukuyama's] pockets with money," I would simply point out to her that if one were to live life divesting from supposedly reactionary causes and businesses, we'd have to give up most, if not all, of the commodities and amenities that infuse modern society. It's not just Fox News and Wendy's I'm talking about here. I also hear the Coors family is rather conservative (that's an understatement, by the way), and who really knows what Whole Foods is up to these days (for the record, I like Whole Foods)? (On Whole Foods and this ideology of "organicism" in our supermarkets, see Michael Pollan's widely celebrated The Omnivore's Dilemma.)

In the end, I'm quite happy to have provoked a response from my critic. I doubt she'll ever want to hear what I have to say here, but then again critical debate in general is somewhat lacking on the Internet, owing to the medium's immediacy and tendency to evoke knee-jerk, defensive responses. Perhaps we'd do better speaking in person.

As for my future as an Amazon.com reviewer, I'll carry on just as I have carried on: making critical points, saying what I liked and disliked, reviewing books both popular and obscure, "academic" and mainstream, and always being wary that I'm writing for an audience.

The one thing I will refuse is heeding to some sort of ideological litmus test, of which my critic and many of my professional colleagues are equally guilty. For my critic, I'm not liberal or progressive enough. For some of my colleagues, I'm not radical or "utopian" enough. My task as a reviewer is not to meet any ideological standard that demands an "enough." It is simply to be this: insistently and self-reflexively critical.

To Have and Have Not

Three passages from Ernest Hemingway's 1937 novel To Have and Have Not: potent examples of how literature can appeal to visceral experience, to the body's being-in-the-world, and of how language, crafted just so, can move us in powerful ways.

1. Hemingway describes Harry Morgan leaving his wife, and her bed, for the last time:

She watched him go out of the house, tall, wide-shouldered, flat-backed, his hips narrow, moving, still, she thought, like some kind of animal, easy and swift and not old yet, he moves so light and smooth-like, she thought, and when he got in the car she saw him blonde, with the sunburned hair, his face with the broad mongol cheek bones, and the narrow eyes, the nose broken at the bridge, the wide mouth and the round jaw, and getting in the car he grinned at her and she began to cry. "His goddamn face," she thought. "Everytime I see his goddamn face it makes me want to cry." (128)

The cadence of Harry's footsteps is matched by the cadence of Hemingway's prose, ambling, patient, "moving, still..." When Harry grins, and his eyes meet hers, the sentence stops to devastating effect: still, now, Marie is brought to tears by his quiet strength.

2. Helen Gordon gives her husband Richard a tongue-lashing during a lover's spat:

Everything I believed in and everything I cared about I left for you because you were so wonderful and you loved me so much that love was all that mattered. Love was the greatest thing, wasn't it? Love was what we had that no one else had or could ever have. And you were a genius and I was your whole life. I was your partner and your little black flower. Slop. Love is just another dirty lie. Love is ergoapiol pills to make me come around because you were afraid to have a baby. Love is quinine and quinine and quinine until I'm deaf with it. Love is that dirty aborting horror that you took me to. Love is my insides all messed up. It's half catheters and half whirling douches. I know about love. Love always hangs up behind the bathroom door. It smells like Lysol. To hell with love. Love is you making me happy and then going off to sleep with your mouth open while I lie awake all night afraid to say my prayers even because I know I have no right to any more. Love is all the dirty little tricks you taught me that you probably got out of some book. All right. I'm through with you and I'm through with love. Your kind of picknose love. You writer. (185-86)

Repetition and description, to have and have not, a game of adding detail and subtracting sentiment. With that devastating final insult: "You writer."

3. An anonymous "sixty-year-old grain broker" endures a sleepless night worrying that his tax-evading past has finally caught up with him. During the Great Depression, he was thankfully not one of those "have-nots"; their fate he imagines like so:

Some made the long drop from the apartment or the office window; some took it quietly in two-car garages with the motor running; some used the native tradition of the Colt or Smith and Wesson; those well-constructed implements that end insomnia, terminate remorse, cure cancer, avoid bankruptcy, and blast an exit from intolerable positions by the pressure of a finger; those admirable American instruments so easily carried, so sure of effect, so well designed to end the American dream when it becomes a nightmare, their only drawback the mess they leave for relatives to clean up. (237-38)

Damning irony, again pointed up by way of Hemingway's style: the measured repetition of "some" in the first three clauses giving way to a prolonged, wandering discourse on "those" (repeated twice) quintessentially American instruments of dream-brokering. To have and have not.

Hemingway wants you to feel his writing in your bones. He wants you to experience his words.

Special thanks to Ursula Grisham, fellow CSI enthusiast and Dartmouth (soon-to-be) grad, for letting me borrow her copy during the two months we lived together in Lima.

The Midwich Cuckoos, or, A Confusion of Thoughts on Reproduction, Evolution, and Reading

I just finished reading a great science fiction book, John Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos. Originally published in 1957, the novel was later adapted into the movie Village of the Damned (1960). It tells the story of how a small, sleepy village in England is "invaded" by unwanted "Children," beings who have an enormous capacity for learning and who are intent on dominating their bewildered hosts.

The Children are, we might say, forcibly born to the village's women -- the story begins with a mysterious "Dayout" in which the lives of Midwich's inhabitants are brought to a halt, an invisible forcefield is set up around the village, and the women become pregnant overnight. Wyndham was no feminist, but there are kernels of a radical critique of reproduction (heterosexual or otherwise) in the way he explores the community's reaction to the mass insemination. Mrs. Zellaby notes to her husband, "It's all very well for a man. He doesn't have to go through this sort of thing, and he knows he never will have to. How can he understand? He may mean as well as a saint, but he's always on the outside. He can never know what it's like, even in a normal way -- so what sort of an idea can he have of this? -- Of how it feels to lie awake at night with the humiliating knowledge that one is simply being used? -- As if one were not a person at all, but just a kind of mechanism, a sort of incubator..." (71-72). Mrs. Zellaby's pregnancy was forced upon her, to be sure, and yet the language here is slippery enough, I think, to suggest that she's touching on a more common sentiment, or malaise, or dread, that might be characteristic of "carrying child."

Once the Children are born, the villagers soon realize that they can't escape them -- that these beings exert a pull on them that doesn't allow them to leave Midwich. When people try to leave town by car or foot, there's a point at which they are compelled to turn around and come back to the Children. Even more sinister is the fact that any harm done to the Children, whether intentional or not, is redoubled and thrown back at those who committed the harm. Early in the story, one Mrs. Welt accidentally pricks her baby with a pin. Soon after, "the baby had just looked steadily at her with its golden eyes, and made her start jabbing the pin into herself" (83).

This deliciously sadistic pulsion defines the novel's narrative arc. It also helps explain Wyndham's choice of titles. In one of Mr. Zellaby's many discourses on the Children, he claims that they bear some resemblance to the apparently vicious nature of newly hatched cuckoo birds: "Now, the important thing about the cuckoo is not how the egg got into the nest, nor why that nest was chosen; the real matter for concern comes after it has been hatched -- what, in fact, it will attempt to do next. And that, whatever it may be, will be motivated by its instinct for survival, an instinct characterized chiefly by utter ruthlessness" (89). And indeed once the villagers accept their lot as trapped hosts for these Children, the question becomes, How to get rid of them? This question allows Wyndham to delve into matters of evolutionary theory: he's interested in imagining what humans might resort to when confronted with beings that are paradoxically more advanced (they are highly intelligent creatures) and less mature (they are nonetheless "children") than they are.



I picked up this book from my hostel in Huaráz. I began reading it there and finished it here, a month later, in Lima. I'm writing about it in this blog to register some of the themes (reproduction, evolution) that piqued my interest as a reader. But just what kind of reader am I? Under what circumstances do I read? Why this book, in Peru, over the Easter weekend, and not another? Are the comments above of an academic nature, or are they things someone who reads The Midwich Cuckoos for "fun," while backpacking, might reflect on as well? Who "owned" this British edition of the book (a handsome trade paperback whose cover features the haunting stare of a baby set above the gray bar that signals it to be part of the Penguin Classics series) before leaving it at the Benkiwasi hostel? Did he or she retrieve it from some other traveler, from some other hostel or book exchange, in South America? Is English even the first language of this imaginary traveler? And what will happen to this book now? Who will read it next as I leave it somewhere in Lima, sometime next week, when I pack up my things and return to my "grad student" life back in the States?

Reading and experience, reproduction and evolution, dry British humor and quiet British terror. The other day, a fellow traveler from Seattle, Emily Jump, and I had a wonderful conversation over Mediterranean food about reading both within and outside academic contexts. We talked about the pleasures of reading for "fun" -- that is, reading for experience, reading as an exercise of the imagination, and not reading as a means of reducing literature to hyper-specialized academic prose. But Emily also took care to recognize that we possess the education and wherewithal ($) to "enjoy" literature of a certain type. Which is to say that even our leisurely enjoyment of literature is always already conditioned by a certain educational background and a certain privileged interest in reading as a practice. And so ultimately we, Emily and I, move between the desire to read beyond what we already know and the acknowledgment that our reading practices will always bear the trace of a certain privileged "appreciation" of what literature can do -- how reading books can take us beyond what we already know.

A classic double-bind? Not necessarily so. I, for one, have come to appreciate deeply the possibility of reading with an eye toward experience and understanding rather than as a means of confirming what I think I already know. Yes, Emily and I are both highly educated people. We enjoy good books. We read some books that academics read. But we resist (and here she's got a head start on me) processing what we read through a self-defined "intellectual" lens -- reducing what we read to a preconstituted "theory." We don't (like to) read as professionals, in other words. Or, at least in my case, being an academic isn't mutually exclusive (I hope!) with one's appreciation for experiential reading. The issue I have with the academy is that most professional literary critics will never admit to the inherent hermeticism of their profession (though they like to claim that all other professions are hyper-specialized).

So there's a profound difference, a valuable difference, between ways of reading among highly educated subjects. Where acknowledging one's position of privilege becomes important is precisely at the point where it's most tempting to judge the way "other people" read. These "others" could include educated people who critique academic professionalism, but they more often encompass the wide swath of readers who don't read books, or who read romances and crime fiction exclusively, or who (worst of all, in some circles) read "middlebrow" books usually associated with sentimental femininity and (therefore?) a complete lack of "taste." While attesting to her own tastes (for good books that a college graduate like her can appreciate), Emily took care to point out that her preferences didn't at all imply judgment of what other people read. People read for different reasons, and these reasons are conditioned by factors such as educational background, disposible income, access to literary resources, and so forth. Thus, to dismiss or even condemn (see certain critics' shrill responses to Oprah's Book Club) certain forms of reading on the grounds of taste confuses a personal "choice" for the divergent and variable social conditions of reading.

Small wonder that Emily has been my best dissertation-interlocutor (even considering the brevity of our conversation over late-lunch!) during my time in Peru. After giving her a layman's rundown of my topic, Emily basically said, "So you're arguing that black pulp fiction made (the practice of) reading a book interesting, worthwhile, and affordable for a community of traditionally overlooked readers." The ethical and political implication of which is: we bracket judging the content of these books in order to understand that their popularity suggests profound truths about racial and economic inequality in the United States.

Emily stated her interpretation of my "point" in such a clear and efficient way that I felt embarrassed revealing how long it's been taking me to finish writing my dissertation. What good reason did I have for taking so much time when the elements of my thinking were so easily communicated over kebabs that afternoon in Parque Kennedy? Was my block a matter of laziness, confusion, needing to read more, needing to research more, or simply being unable to write "academically" about books, people, and themes of the "street," those arguably at the furthest remove from the ivory tower?

One thing I do know is that my craving for new experiences, experiences beyond what I think I already know, is incentive enough for me to commit to finishing my doctoral degree by March of next year. The question remains whether and how I will manage to write the Experience of black pulp fiction in an academic dissertation.