Programming Note

Sorry to report that blogging here will get sparser and lazier for the rest of the month and into August. Although my last class meets in a few minutes, I'll be busy grading and meeting with personal and family friends for farewells during our last two weeks here in Fukuoka. We're cramming a trip to Kagoshima into the second half of this week, as well (here's hoping the forecasts for another early typhoon in southern Kyushu turn out to be wrong this time). And let's not forget boxing, shipping, packing, and giving away our stuff. Fortunately we can leave some things with the tsuma's family in Chiba, where we'll be from July 31 through August 14th, but while there I'll be hanging with onechan and imoto's cousins for the first week and then grading the last set of papers during the second week. So I guess what I'm saying is that Citizen of Somewhere Else will be a bit of a lower priority than it's been even in the past two months. I'll try to make up for the lack of quantity here with quality when I do post. But my five regular readers know how rare that is even when the law of averages is working in my favor! But it's entirely possible the next time you "hear" from me here, this blog will be back on Eastern Standard Time. Or is that Daylight Savings?

Pointless Plug

As if linking here to Mostly Harmless's Take Your Blog to the Course: U.S. Women's Open event will help encourage non-golf bloggers to give in to the carnival's spirit.... At least doing so might help explain to CitizenSE's few readers why I have been abusing your sites with comment spam and LPGA concern trolling this week. Despite the fact that so far as I can recall, Hawthorne devoted exactly zero words to golf. He mentioned Utica, NY, more often than golf, that's for sure--which is where my friend Moira Dunn is from, although not where she's at (Pine Needles, in fact).

To Delight and Instruct: Required Reading for Grad Students (and Others)

Click here. Read and click as directed, until done. End public service announcement. Back to bad bad bad bad bad ok bad bad bad bad bad decent bad bad bad bad [good coming anytime soon?] writing.

Perhaps It's Better to Be the Obscurest Blog on teh Internets

Heading off in a few hours to Hiroshima to meet some old friends now living in Oklahoma (that is, when they're not enjoying the best two-week-tour-of-Japan itinerary I've ever seen in my life--and I'm not just saying that b/c it's the only one). So of course I woke up way too early and I thought, "why not catch up on some bloggy doings?" Let's just say I should have stayed in bed. Stay strong, Scott, Chris, Ilyka, Kevin.... This, too, will pass.

Taking Off the Training Wheels

What a crazy week! From a feverish day and night before I started teaching to almost losing my voice while teaching, I am sad to report that my health has been at its worst since January. The measles epidemic sweeping Japan has reached Fukuoka, which shouldn't affect my family, since we've all been vaccinated (even imoto, although hers may not kick in fully until next week), but since the strain here may be different than what onechan and I have been inoculated against, and since it is rampaging among the college-age population in Japan (most of whom never got vaccinated as children), I'm not going to be taking any chances. So that means more sleep and fewer late nights/early mornings. On top of that, I have four lectures to give in June and July, which is a lot for me, and I'm getting drawn deeper into the rhythm of the book manuscript's revision and addition process. Plus, the second week of June I'll be spending almost a week in the Tokyo/Chiba area with limited internet access and the week after that I'll be taking off a couple of days to meet up with friends visiting Japan in the Kyoto area. After that, I can foresee lots of meetings with students as they work on their final projects, grading, preparing my American classes, and getting ready to return to the States.

The upshot for CitizenSE is not that I'll be going on a leave or anything as drastic as that. But, from June through August, I will be ending the programming schedule that's sustained and structured my blogging here since December 2006. (Look for a new one in September, once I've figured out the rhythm of my semester back home.) For the next three months I won't be putting pressure on myself to maintain the 7 days/week schedule I've done a pretty decent job of sticking to, all things considered. And I won't be visiting my blogroll nearly as often as I've done this spring. I'll still be labelling posts that fit the old programming schedule's categories as appropriate, disregarding what day they happen to fall on. And I may be trying out some new labels/categories. But I'll be following a more organic flow from post to post, developing some ongoing series, and weaving the many loose ends I've left hanging for a while back into the mix.

Hope you like it!

Perhaps Google Needs to Work on Its Ranking Algorithms

Don't get me wrong--I'm flattered that this "multicellular microorganism" in the vasty blogular ecosystem of TTLB shows up second on google searches for "gothic and Enlightenment" just because of yesterday's unfinished post. I'm rather fond of it, to tell you the truth, but does it really deserve to come before Douglass Thomson's review of A Companion to the Gothic (2000) or Ruth Bienstock Anolik's review of William Brown's The Gothic Text (2004) or the Robert Miles-edited "Gothic Technologies: Visuality in the Romantic Era" issue of the Romantic Circles Praxis Series (2005)? Even on google blog search, is it right that my almost-post is listed ahead of John Holbo's call for papers and Miriam Burstein's musings on historical ghosts? I think not.

Now, I'm not saying that google's web and blog searches should imitate google scholar completely. Just that some measure of the quality, depth, and interest of a site/post should be incorporated into google search and ranking algorithms. Since that seems pretty difficult for them to do, let me propose instead that all five people reading this go now and link to the above pages and posts to drive that particular CitizenSE post down to the bottom of the first page where it belongs!

That said, I am perversely pleased that my plug for my friend Mike Davis's Reading the Text That Isn't There: Paranoia in the Nineteenth-Century American Novel in a comment over at Hug the Shoggoth (where the race and decay blogging is doing quite well, thank you) is ranked third on this google search. (Little-known and less-cared-about fact: the Davis duo will be visiting Japan in June!)

This public service announcement brought to you by The Hey, It's in the Mid-70s on a Friday in May, for Crying Out Loud, Subcommittee of the Celebrate the Weekend Early Committee.

This, Too, Will Not Have Been a Post

It's really just an update on Scott Eric Kaufman's blogwide strike action and a link to my contribution to Cliopatria's Jamestown 2007 symposium, which, as it turns out, is comment #301 out of the 500 needed to bring Acephalous back. If this is somehow accepted into the symposium, I implore any new visitors to CitizenSE to reply to my ideas on Scott's comment thread, at least until we get him blogging again. Thanks!

[Update 5/8/07: Professor Ahmed has graciously given us all an extension. I pledge, however, that even if that Acephalous thread were to reach 500 approved comments before noon May 10 (my time), I will continue to insist that my submission is on that thread.]

This Is Not a Post

It's just a number: 155. Or rather, more than 345 to go.

My latest crazy idea is that anyone reading this non-post click on the link above and get Scott Eric Kaufman blogging again. He's writing on Wharton and listening to Asia, people. We need to stage a blogoramawide intervention. Asia!

This is a crisis that makes CitizenSE's first troll being a white supremacist insignificant (check out the comments on yesterday's post if you wish--I pledged not to delete his there so long as he doesn't delete mine on his).

End non-post. Back to bloggy solidarity.

Why, Oh Why?

No chance for serious blogging the last few days--imoto had a high fever last night after running her nose since Friday and I stayed home from work today because the tsuma wasn't feeling any too hot in the morning, either. The day turned out just fine, though. Imoto's fever broke in the early morning (not that I knew, I was sound asleep--now you understand the tsuma's condition when I woke up!) and after a long late morning/early afternoon nap with mama she was feeling fine. Meanwhile I got to take onechan to her yochien and play with her and a couple of her tomodachi when I picked her up to allow said nap to go on for as long as possible. Found out onechan can climb to the top of the jungle gym and that most of the girls at the yochien have some kind of Pretty Cure gear or other. By the early afternoon imoto was trying to kick a soft little ball and a half-deflated balloon around the play room and onechan was practicing her golf swing with a rolled-up plastic poster-sized mat and whatever imoto wasn't kicking. Too bad the video camera was out of juice.

All of which means part 2 of my Adventures of Huckleberry Finn response to Scott's recent post at The Valve will just have to wait a while longer. Somehow a day like today takes the urgency out of blogging. In a good way.

Quite unlike what's been leading Joseph Kugelmass to cancel the rest of The Kugelmass Episodes. I find it interesting that he's planning to head (back) into the groves of pseudonymity the same month that Tenured Radical outed herself, and, as noted a few days ago, The Hobgoblin of Little Minds took up his mask again.

Ah, but it's time for onechan to join imoto in dreamland, so this line of thought will have to be--

What Would Hawthorne Say About The Blogocalypse Carnival?

Why, "read it," of course!

[Update: Oh, and "You're an idiot for not linking to this gem in it." My only excuse is I'm behind on my bloggy visiting and too caught up in not-quite-live-blogging the LPGA's first major to take time to figure out how to fit it in my Douglas Adams meta-epic simile there.]

[Update 4/3/07: Plus, "You should just give up blogging and leave it to those who are incapable of writing a bad post."]

And Now, By (an Absolute Lack of) Popular Demand...

...here's some more Mooninite blogging!

Shorter "The Devil in Manuscript": Artist's work blows up Boston. Who'da thunk it?

Shorter "A Virtuoso's Collection": E-Bay enthusiast shows off Lite Brite Mooninite he bought for a mere $2,147.69, among other detritus of American pop culture he's accumulated over his suspiciously long life. Just who is this guy?

Shorter "A Rill from the Town-Pump": Unconsciously self-parodying monologue from a 21st-C reformer who wants to ban guerrilla marketing. Because it's all about the temperance, baby!

Shorter "The Birth-mark": In attempting to remove the Mooninite Lite Brite arrays marring the fair face of Boston, and purge the nation of the trash culture that produced and enabled Aqua Teen Hunger Force, liberal homeland security hawks, the anti-corporate left, and wingnuts-in-training band together to purify American culture, which dies and goes to heaven thanking them for their efforts. "Was it all worth it?" those left behind are compelled to wonder.

Shorter "The May-pole of Merry Mount": In which the narrator appends a prefatory note stating that "the grave pages of our New England annalists the great pages of Blogoramaville have wrought themselves, almost spontaneously, into a sort of allegory," suggests in the tale's opening that "Jollity and gloom were contending for an empire," and proceeds to tell a satirical version of Paradise Lost and Comus that turns into a parody of the Mooninite blogspat and the larger culture wars of which it is a part. Features passages like this:

In due time, a feud arose, stern and bitter on one side, and as serious on the other as any thing could be among such light spirits as had sworn allegiance to the May-pole. The future complexion of New England was involved in this important quarrel. Should the grisly saints establish their jurisdiction over the gay sinners, then would their spirits darken all the clime, and make it a land of clouded visages, of hard toil, of sermon and psalm forever. But should the banner-staff of Merry Mount be fortunate, sunshine would break upon the hills, and flowers would beautify the forest, and late posterity do homage to the May-pole.

A mock on both your houses? Or a subtle questioning of the terms of the framing of the event? You make the call!

Shorter "Main-street": A blogger trying to produce an amusing yet significant history of L'Affaire Mooninite is forced to give up the effort when inundated by commenters questioning his methods and motives so voluminously that his site crashes.

Add the first on this list to your own list of Dan McCall's thought crimes, for his mention of "The Devil in Manuscript" in Citizens of Somewhere Else sparked it, so to speak. The rest are entirely my own responsibility, I'm sorry to say. And I can't guarantee that I'm done with this....

BTW, if you think you're going to get a Close Reading Tuesday post after this unprecedented two-a-day, well, just keep hoping!

What Would Hawthorne Say About the Mooninite Invasion of Boston?

Besides my AP Chemistry final project--a science fiction/detective story set on one of the moons of Jupiter--and a brief Far Side-induced cartooning stint in high school and college that went by the name of The Gray Area, I have little to show in the area of creative endeavors and less potential. So rather than risk Seiglering any of Hawthorne's tales, I'm offering "shorter" versions here for your reading pleasure, because, as you know, CitizenSE is nothing if not a small finger taking the pulse of the American Dream. And, no, it's not the same finger that Ignignokt uses.

Shorter "My Kinsman, Major Molineux": One of Ted Turner's younger relatives comes to Boston and, after some enigmatic encounters with various natives, witnesses him being paraded through town "in tar-and-feathery dignity"; a "shrewd youth," he eventually follows an onlooker's advice to "rise in the world, without the help of your kinsman."

Shorter "Little Annie's Ramble": Young girl wanders through the streets of Boston oblivious to the panic and gridlock caused by authorities' overreaction to a guerrilla marketing campaign for an animated movie, is announced as kidnapped by a terrorist cell on Fox News, but soon returns home unharmed.

Shorter "The Gray Champion": A mysterious old man rescues the city of Boston from Mooninite invaders ("With this night, thy power is ended--to-morrow, the prison!--back, lest I foretell the scaffold!"), for "whenever the descendants of the Puritans are to show the spirit of their sires, the old man appears again."

Shorter "Fancy's Show Box": Hawthorne's inquiry into the nature of guilt and guilty thoughts, now applied to the case of those who authorized the Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie guerrilla marketing campaign, and, indeed, created the Mooninites in the first place.

Shorter "Endicott and the Red Cross": Boston Mayor Thomas Menino personally rips Mooninite Lite Brite displays from various public places and pledges to extraordinarily render Err and Ignognikt.

Shorter "Young Goodman Brown": Boston Mayor Thomas Menino is tempted to believe the spectral images Ted Turner shows him of his city subjugated to the depradations of Mooninite invaders, decides to trust no one, and calls on Homeland Security.

[Gong sounds; big hook drags me offstage. Boston Chief of Police appears and says, "Move it along, people. Nothing to see here."]

Why I Do This and Whom I'm Doing It For

So a few days ago undine at Not of General Interest asked:

How much information is too much information? What kind of information wouldn't you post on a blog?

Does an academic blog have a natural starting and ending point?

[A]re "academic bloggers" (often those who perform as, or are, male and write under their own names) all about the display--scholarship by another means, as another way to impress the masses and climb the academic ladder--and "academics who blog" (often those who perform as, or are, female) all about continuing community and supporting each other in all those trivial, TMI details?

I'll use these questions to help focus my thus far rather disparate set of musings on Why CitizenSE? and what Hawthorne might say about Blogging While Academic.

Second question first: This blog has a natural end point. Since I started it to kick-start my writing process on my book manuscript, American Studies and the Race for Hawthorne, I'll end it when the book is out and the first run of reviews seems to have run its course. Unless at some point during that period of time other folks want to join in and turn it into a "chiefly about Hawthorne matters" group blog, in which case it will become something very different than it is now. But as long as CitizenSE stays mine alone, by its end its categories and archives will provide various points of entry into the virtual version of my book for anyone who happens to drop by.

I'm definitely with Berube, Kaufman, and others who argue that blogs can be a way of making academic work both more visible and more accessible to a wider variety of people, and perhaps even of changing the nature as well as the image of academic work and institutions themselves. The kind of academic work I want to make more visible and accessible on this blog is the work of turning a dissertation into a book manuscript, something I've obviously struggled with for a long time (I started the race and Hawthorne project about 14 years ago and finished the dissertation, The Race for Hawthorne, 8 and a half years ago!), given the other kinds of work I've prioritized in my career thus far (check out the teaching and service parts of my c.v. if you don't believe me).

Since I was fortunate enough to get hired at one of the majority of universities in the U.S. that don't require a book for tenure, I am in my second academic year of actually being a tenured radical. So this blog is really just for me (establishing a daily writing schedule for myself and trying to stick to it; brainstorming, developing, and refining arguments; working with quotations and intertextualities that I might use in the new chapters, which build on stuff that never made it into the dissertation as well as incorporate brand new material; pursuing tangents that don't fit my manuscript chapter breakdown as it stands today but which might end up not being tangential at all; connecting Hawthorne matters to the present; building an audience who might actually decide to buy the book when it comes out; learning to write for specialists in multiple specialties and non-specialists at the same time; etc.) and my readers (whose view of Hawthorne and his works I hope to change; to whom I want to introduce his less-often-read works, debates among Hawthorne scholars, ways of seeing his works in multiple contexts, fields, and literary and cultural dialogues; to whom I want to provide ideas for research and teaching that they can run with on their own, and hopefully report back to me with their results; etc.). I don't foresee building a regular readership with this blog--what could be more boring than checking in every day to see how much closer my dissertation is to a book? But even if all I get are random hits from search engines and the occasional visit from friends, family, and colleagues, it'll still be worth doing.

Now on to the first question. Some things you won't see on this blog: anything to do with my wife or my current students or internal politics at my university; responses to memes or headlines; stuff that can't easily be related to Hawthorne in some way that I really really want to blog on (I created Mostly Harmless, which all of a sudden has become a group blog, for that purpose). I'll continue to blog about my kids when I feel like it here, at least until they're old enough to read about themselves on-line, at which point I'll bow to their wishes--no, check that, the damn manuscript better be done before that happens!

Which leads me to the third question: I'm male and tenured but I'm writing what I've called a "professional/personal blog" under a pseudonym so thin one search or two clicks can blow it away; I limit my links to literary/cultural studies bloggers and group blogs I enjoy reading and whom I'd be flattered to find out are reading this; I've already set up a summer book event with a fellow antebellum lit-alluder, so I'm all about the virtual community building (in fact, my latest analogy for blogoramaville is the now-outdated practice of "calling on" one's friends, acquaintances, allies, and enemies and either leaving a visiting card [sitemeter does it for us] or dropping in for a spot of tea and conversation [leaving a comment]); I'm making public my writing process in hopes of providing support to those trying to finish papers, theses, dissertations, or books (my annoying comments on other people's blogs are aimed at the same target, perhaps); I'm at a stage in my life and career where my "actual" research productivity is going to determine whether another institution would want to try to hire me away from a department I'm very happy to be an active part of and which from the start has welcomed the "new" faculty as equal members of the community (a tradition I look forward to continuing when I return from my Fulbright leave, particularly because we're hiring another pre-20th C Americanist for the first time since my colleagues George Sebouhian and Jim Huffman retired!), so CitizenSE in itself is not going to do much if anything to help me climb any academic ladders (and given the reception of my political blog in its first months, where I played the ineffectual reasonable liberal to my conservative libertarian bomb-throwing friend and co-blogger, may do more harm than good); I'm writing "teh obscurest blog on the intertubes," so to the extent that masses of people are impressed by anything I might write here, all power to them.

Let's see, did I leave anything out? Have I procrastinated long enough?

Yes, and yes. Too long, in fact--my older daughter's been home three hours now from her second day at "school" (a hoikuen is a school-like day care establishment; although no one in our family is a Christian, she's going to a Baptist one b/c the people seemed nice and they're one of the few around that take children before the academic year officially begins in Japan, in April), and I have about 45 emails to get out to my students before the end of the day tomorrow. Tomorrow's close reading will have to be particularly bad!

What Would Hawthorne Say About Gender and BWA?

Well, as someone infamous for his "damned mob of scribbling women" jab, Hawthorne might not be the best person to ask about the gender politics of Blogging While Academic (a kind of "old is the new new" blogologue, as I discovered when I googled "academic blogging"). But this is too easy an out, as the decades of debates over Hawthorne and women, gender, and sex might be deployed to show.

Perhaps, going off my earlier Hawthorne and blogging post, he would have been a low-traffic male blogger using the pen name Oberon, somewhat bitter at the popularity of high-traffic blogs by Lydia Maria Child, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, among others, yet constantly experimenting with various methods of reaching their audiences (might he even have posted some of his love letters to Sophia or thoughts on parenting under the cover of his pseudonym?). Or maybe he would have joined a group blog for a time and then started an individual blog satirizing it. Who knows?

What we do know is that at the very least, Hawthorne created a narrator in "Old News" who opened the sketch with the observation:

Here is a volume of what were once newspapers--each on a small half-sheet, yellow and time-stained, of a coarse fabric, and imprinted with a rude old type. Their aspect conveys a singular impression of antiquity, in a species of literature which we are accustomed to consider as connected only with the present moment. Ephemeral as they were intended and supposed to be, they have long outlived the printer and his whole subscription list, and have proved more durable, as to their physical existence, than most of the timber, bricks, and stone, of the town where they were issued. These are but the least of their triumphs. The government, the interests, the opinions--in short, all the moral circumstances that were contemporary with their publication, have passed away, and left no better record of what they were, than may be found in these frail leaves. Happy are the editors of newspapers! Their productions excel all others in immediate popularity, and are certain to acquire another sort of value with the lapse of time. They scatter their leaves to the wind, as the sibyl did, and posterity collects them, to be treasured up among the best materials of its wisdom. With hasty pens, they write for immortality.

and who ended it with the lament:

the old newspapers had an indescribable picturesqueness, not to be found in the later ones. Whether it be something in the literary execution, or the ancient print and paper, and the idea, that those same musty pages have been handled by people--once alive and bustling amid the scenes there recorded, yet now in their graves beyond the memory of man--so it is, that in those elder volumes, we seem to find the life of a past age preserved between the leaves, like a dry specimen of foliage. It is so difficult to discover what touches are really picturesque, that we doubt whether our attempts have produced any similar effect.

Change newspapers to academic blogs, and the survey of 18th-century Anglo-American new media to a survey of, say, the course of 21st-century academic blogging, and Hawthorne's narrator's observations and laments seem quite current. Given that much 18th-century new media was pseudonymously written, those who diss pseudonymous academic bloggers today may not be being Hawthornesque enough. (If you don't believe me, check out New Media, Old Media, edited by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas Keenan: it doesn't specifically address blogging, much less Blogging While Academic, but it does put our latest new media revolution/bubble in historical context and think through the implications.)

And yet those who diss female bloggers in particular seem to be repeating the sentiments of the narrator of "Mrs. Hutchinson," with his dismissive comments about "public women" and "ink-stained Amazons"--or at least enacting his observation:

Fame does not increase the peculiar respect which men pay to female excellence, and there is a delicacy, (even in rude bosoms, where few would think to find it) that perceives, or fancies, a sort of impropriety in the display of woman's naked mind to the gaze of the world, with indications by which its inmost secrets may be searched out.

We sure have come a long way, baby! (Just look at the comments on McLemee's IHE piece....)

But enough history (repeating itself). Here are some predictions: as more Blogging While Academic happens, as more young female bloggers get academic jobs and tenure, and as more untenured radicals start families, Berube's "raw/cooked" or Kaufman's "academic blogging/academics who blog" binaries will become less identifiably gendered; we'll start seeing more full-blown structuralist analyses of Blogging While Academic and stop relying so much on such binaries; and Blogging While Academic will become as normal (in the sense of unremarkable yet not as prevalent as you might expect) as putting your syllabi online.

This is as good a place as any to stop--to be continued Monday, on a more personal tangent.

And Now for Something Completely Different

The next paragraph's "Faulknerian feat[] of subordination" should not be read by anyone not named Scott Eric Kaufman. If you want to find out what I think about Marshall, Devi, trauma, and mourning, I recommend skipping to the third paragraph. But if you're wondering what a Hawthorne blogger is doing blogging on something and some, uh, two other than Hawthorne, the next paragraph may do. And if you're interested in how not to write when writing a conference paper, the next paragraph will most certainly do. Oh, and if you love it when the author of a blog nobody reads tells inside jokes to himself, the next paragraph is a must-read. (Must fight temptation to tell anecdote about the SF story I wrote for my AP Chemistry class and how easily amused I am. Aaaargh. OK, done. Yes.)

"Old School" readers of this blog (that empty set) will no doubt recall it used to be "mostly about Hawthorne" (and still is, in its technorati profile--I'm that lazy!). New readers (and how do you afford your rock and roll lifestyle, may I ask?)--coming here from such generous linkers (and good titlers) as The Hobgoblin of Little Minds (I'd thank BikeProf in a comments on his post, but one of the annoying features of the new Blogger, one which makes you wonder why they put it in there, is its tendency to freeze when you try to post a comment--or wait, is that just a feature of the ancient computer I'm using here in Chiba?), Old Is the New New, and Quod She--will have already noted that it now is "chiefly about Hawthorne matters" (for reasons I'm sure I'll devote a boring post to when I run out of material for Monday blogging [yes, the obscurest blog in blogoramaville has a programming schedule]). The point is, I'm delivering a paper in Hawaii on traumatic displacements and militant mourning in Paule Marshall's 1969 novel, The Chosen Place, The Timeless People and Mahasweta Devi's "Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha," a short story translated into English by Gayatri Spivak in 1995 for Imaginary Maps in T-minus, oh, less than 8 days, so the Hawthorne blogging is going to be kept to a minimum the next few days as I try to tame the formless monster that began as a paper at the 1996 American Studies Association convention on trauma and diaspora in CPTP, evolved into a submission to a collection of essays that to my knowledge was never published, morphed into a paper I was planning to insert into one of the collections of essays that I'm supposed to be co-editing, and then refused to copy itself onto the memory stick that I brought to Japan last August, forcing me to start from scratch this semester as I bring in a new topic and new writer to an already-far-too-complex (and possibly lost) old essay. So good ol' Intertextual Thursday is going to begin the project of helping me not embarrass myself more than I normally do at academic conferences, even if the main purpose of this one is to see my parents and let them see their grandkids for the only time between the Augusts of 2006 and 2007. Oh, and to make up for my most humiliating job interview ever, during which I established personal records, hopefully never to be challenged again, in the categories of inability to think on one's feet, inability to hide how flustered one is, and rapidity with which one gives up on oneself in an interview. That's all.

Anyway, my third attempt to begin this post will begin, as I tend to do here, with a quotation. It's from my conference proposal that got accepted (with a close-to-$400 registration fee, I suspect most proposals get accepted--not that that's a bad thing--so judge for yourself whether mine is any good):

Although intellectuals and activists working to define and contest the boundaries and methodologies of postcolonial studies have since its inception emphasized the comparative, transnational, and indeed global nature of the field, they have so far failed to analyze together two works of literature that offer profound meditations on the meaning, significance, and stakes of colonial/racialized trauma/testimony and mourning/melancholia in their respective times and places: Paule Marshall's novel The Chosen Place, The Timeless People for the post-independence Anglophone Caribbean and Mahasweta Devi's "Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha" for post-independence India. This failure represents a missed opportunity to bring together not only two quite different colonial/post-colonial histories and regions but also two vibrant fields of study with quite relateable trajectories.

This paper proposes to show how Marshall's and Devi's texts both represent and enact the best kinds of literary, historical, ethical, and political connections and relations postcolonial theorists, critics and scholars have been calling for, marking out, and arguing over for the past two decades. In so doing, I will suggest a certain exemplarity in the intertextual dialogue between The Chosen Place, The Timeless People and "Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha," one that has serious implications for future developments specifically in postcolonial studies and more generally in the humanities. Attending to the formal, structural, and indeed theoretical similarities between the two works will allow me to address such pressing debates within postcolonial studies as how to recognize colonialisms' impact on differently colonized groups along with the deep structures of resistance practiced by such groups, how to assess nationalist, internationalist, and transnationalist forms of resistance, and how to respond to the difficult divisions between activists from the metropole and subjects in the periphery. But it will also allow me to address such pressing debates over postcolonial studies as its intellectual and political origins, geographical and historical scope, relation to other fields, and potential for transforming both academic practices and institutions and their publics.

It may seem that I am asking a medium-length novel and a long short story to carry an inordinate amount of weight in my argument. But a quick glance at their quite similar plots and themes alone should dispel this view. Marshall's and Devi's works, although produced in different decades and regions, in response to two quite different forms of colonialism and two ambiguously (post)colonial temporalities, tell basically the same story: a well-informed and well-intentioned activist from the metropole (in the former, a radical Philadelphia anthropologist who leverages the desperation of his philanthropist funders for a success story, not to mention a tax break, into control over an alternative-to-modernization development project in the Bournehills region of a Caribbean island suspiciously like 1960s Barbados that aims to build from local knowledge and practices, empower the poorest of the poor agricultural workers in the region, and model ecological, economic, and political sustainability; in the latter, a radical urban journalist who leverages his activist and government connections to travel to and report on the failure of public and private aid efforts in a famine-stricken tribal region suspiciously like 1980s India) slowly comes to realize the profundity of the limitations of his original project (due to local, national, regional, and international politics in the Cold War era), suffers a crisis with a female lover (the former on-island; the latter long-distance), experiences reality-bending events (the former a metaphorical 'road to Damascus' conversion experience; the latter a quite magically real encounter with the 'last of the pterodactyls'), and most importantly bears witness to the historical and contemporary trauma of the rural people of the region, yet finds himself unable to offer any kind of testimony to the world outside the region. The most both sympathetically-portrayed metropolitan intellectuals can offer to the people of the region is a kind of barely articulate recognition of what they have come to dimly understand as a massive mourning project by those people for centuries-old failed rebellions against enslaving/colonizing forces.

Even this bare structuralist analysis gestures toward the deeply entangled meanings, significances, and stakes of this common Marshall-Devi story of colonial/racialized trauma/testimony and mourning/melancholia. Teasing them out and using them to take positions on crucial issues within and over the past, present, and future of postcolonial studies--and their implications for both research and teaching in and curricula and institutions of the humanities--is the project of this paper.

OK, so, sound interesting? Anyone read either or both of these works? Or heard of these authors? Thought to analyze them together? Done so? I'm under the no-doubt-mistaken impression that I am actually the first to do this. I'm happy to find out I'm wrong b/c it'll save me loads of time and space in the article that will someday follow from this....

Oh, and before I start, let me note that I've already criticized my earlier Intertextual Thursday postings as not living up to their billing--not "really" being intertextual. I've failed to do more than identify links between two works (here, The Scarlet Letter and Beloved, a much-travelled path, but one on which there is always something new to notice)--failed, that is, to explore what follows from them. As you can see from my conference proposal, years of commenting on failed comparison-contrast papers from students have vaccinated me, if you will, against falling into this trap in the genre of proposal-writing. But following through on the promises made in proposals like this one, in a way that will be satisfying both to me and my audience (assuming I have one--my 1996 Marshall paper, for instance, featured a smaller audience than panel, and two-thirds of the audience was made up of friends of mine), is the challenge facing me this week. It's not just an issue of making my balky (and nebulous and missing--cf. 2nd para if you were foolish enough to actually skip it!) prose "talky" or of concisely introducing my audience to two authors and works, two regions and traditions of social/cultural analysis of them, two theoretical concepts and two intellectual/activist projects concisely enough to leave me enough time to develop and support my claims convincingly. It's the challenge of balancing enumeration of similarities and differences with tallying of meanings, significances, and stakes with the taking and defending of positions in academic and more-than-academic wars of position.

So I'll let you "all" see the "draft" this Saturday (even if it doesn't deserve the name), in a slightly revised version of CitizenSE's Latest Crazy Hawthorne Idea. Hopefully I'll be able to actually come up with a decent ending to one of my posts on this blog that day. I may actually have to hold myself to some standards if people are actually reading this blog!

What Would Hawthorne Say About Blogging?

From the opening of "The Custom-House":

It is a little remarkable, that--though disinclined to talk overmuch of myself and my affairs at the fireside, and to my personal friends--an autobiographical impulse should twice in my life have taken possession of me. The first time was three or four years since, when I favored the reader--inexcusably, and for no earthly reason, that either the indulgent reader or the intrusive author could imagine--with a description of my way of life in the deep quietude of the Old Manse. And now--because, beyond my deserts, I was happy enough to find a listener or two on the former occasion--I again seize the public by the button, and talk of my three years' experience in a Custom-House. The example of the famous "P.P., Clerk of this Parish," was never more faithfully followed. The truth seems to be, however, that, when he casts his leaves upon the wind, the author addresses, not the many who will fling aside his volume, or never take it up, but the few who will understand him, better than most of his schoolmates and lifemates. Some authors, indeed, do far more than this, and indulge themselves in such confidential depths of revelation as could fittingly be addressed, only and exclusively, to the one heart and mind of perfect sympathy; as if the printed book, thrown at large on the wide world, were certain to find out the divided segment of the writer's own nature, and complete his circle of existence by bringing him into communion with it. It is scarcely decorous, however, to speak all, even where we speak impersonally. But--as thoughts are frozen and utterance benumbed, unless the speaker stand in some true relation with his audience--it may be pardonable to imagine that a friend, a kind and apprehensive, though not the closest friend, is listening to our talk; and then, a native reserve being thawed by this genial consciousness, we may prate of the circumstances that lie around us, and even of ourself, but still keep the inmost Me behind the veil. To this extent, methinks, an author may be autobiographical, without violating either the reader's rights or his own.

So what do you think? How would Hawthorne have reacted to the predominance of personal blogs in blogoramaville circa 2006? What about the controversies over pseudonymous bloggers? And over outing them? Over sprezzatura-like sock puppetry?

You could make an argument Hawthorne was doing the equivalent of blogging in his time when he published the range of his tales and sketches in the relatively established and newer American magazines and gift books of the 1830s and 1840s, that his editing of the American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge in the 1830s was the equivalent of our blog portaling or link-heavy blogging, that his overtly political writing and editing (such as his editing of his friend Horatio Bridge's Journals of an African Cruiser, his infamous "Custom-House" sketch, his presidential campaign biography for his friend Franklin Pierce, his essay "Chiefly About War Matters," as well as his political correspondence, both official from Boston, Salem, and Liverpool, and personal with Democratic Party friends and allies) was the political blogging of his day, and that his experiments with narratorial perspective in his short stories and with authorial personae in his prefaces to his books prefigure various pseudonymous bloggers' experiments with voice and style today. And you'd probably have a pretty good argument.

When I think of a sketch like "Old News," in which he praises old newspapers for their ability to convey a vivid sense of the past (I'll spare you the quotation for now, only b/c I left my Tales and Sketches Library of America edition in Fukuoka, not out of any abandonment of the value of heavy quotation on my part!), and when you consider newspapers were the new media of his time, I think we'd end up agreeing that despite Hawthorne's critiques of reformers, his skepticism toward Enlightenment notions of progress, and his portraits of new technologies doing more harm than good (in "Fire-Worship" and "The Celestial Rail-road" as much as in the better-known "Rappaccini's Daughter" and "The Birth-mark"), he wouldn't be against blogging simply b/c of its newness, its politicization, or its reliance on technology.

So those of you who blog, whom do you imagine as your audience? What do you hope to accomplish by blogging? What's at stake in blogging for you? What is your sense of your rights as an author, and of your readers' rights? How autobiographical do you get in your blogging, and why? How much do you experiment with voice and style? Are you more confessional or more veiled? What does the opening of "The Custom-House" make you think and ask?

[Update: Turns out John Updike would probably disagree with my take on Hawthorne (h/t: Amardeep Singh).]

What Would Hawthorne Say About Mold...and the CCST?

Why mold? Well, regular readers of this now "multicellular microorganism" of the meme chain that is blogoramaville will no doubt recall that in the few previous autobiographical moments here, I was complaining--stoically, mind you--about (the process of) having gotten sick. Why did I get sick? Because the humidifier we ordered to resolve our seemingly intractable dispute over freezing-but-moist or warm-but-parched (itself caused by a lack of central heating or insulation in a concrete-block style apartment in a city whose average low never dips below freezing and whose lowest average high is higher than something like half the average highs where our house is located) came late. Seems like the shipping company had trouble finding our place. In a vain attempt to make up for the lateness and head off the rare (for this family) quadfecta (imoto-->onechan-->mama-->dada before anyone in the transmission chain got better), we ran said humidifier almost non-stop, even on rainy days, for a week, only thinking to mop up the condensation on the three huge sliding-door-style-windows-to-balconies-we-don't-even-use a few days ago. Hence the mold around the bases of said windows and probably other places we don't yet know about.

Which means we have to pay some cleaning ladies our landlady knows a hundred bucks to remove the mold and leave the apartment on the day they do so--onechan's birthday--for the health of our still-not-better-musume. Then we have to seriously consider whether we should abjure the wall-mounted space heaters entirely and get a ground-based space heater or heated carpet; run the wall-mounted space heaters as usual (that is, along with the humidifier) and get a dehumidifier and an air purifier; or run the wall-mounted space heaters hardly at all, open all our picture windows for at least two hours per day (whether or not we all have to leave the house that day), and maybe still get an air purifier. Intrepid readers will no doubt be racing each other to become the first to leave a comment on this blog with suggestions for dealing with this situation.

Anyway, my point is that Hawthorne would no doubt have found in said situation materal for a notebook entry or letter at least. But how would it read? Hence our first-ever CitizenSE reader contest: for best parody of a Hawthorne notebook entry or letter on our mold situation. The contest closes at midnight on 11 December 2007 and the winner will get not only "publication" on this blog but also a "prize" to be named later.

As you can see, I'm planning ahead for blog sweeps week, because I'm going to need to compete with this year's (apparent) winner, Michael Berube and the show trials and intellectual death match steel cage bouts of his We Are All Giant Nuclear Fireball Now Party--not to mention everyone else on my own nominations for "best educatacalistic (vaguely literary or cultural)" in my own ever-expanding "of interest" list in the right margin.

Which leads me to my second-evah CitizenSE reader contest: for cleverest Hawthorne allusion in the areas of a) accusations, b) verdicts, c) confessions, d) sentences, and e) overall commentary for, from, and on The Chris Clarke Show Trial. (I've used-up all the ham-handed/-fisted ones in far too many of Berube's comments areas.) The contest closes at midnight on 12 December 2007 and the winner will get not only "publication" on this blog but also a "prize" to be named later.

OK, time to stop. My tsuma is up and about and we can't wait to watch what looks to be a movie from the people who have been bringing the world the brilliant Ghost in the Shell-spinoff Stand Alone Complex. We have definitely had enough of only watching kids' anime in Japan--like onechan's latest obsession, PreCure Splash Star--which thankfully hasn't made it to the US yet to continue displacing Dora the Explorer and PowerPuff Girls in her affections, obsessions, and imagination. Next Sunday maybe I'll share with you the many different names she's come up with for herself and fellow family members in the past year. Pearl is the obvious Hawthorne link there.... We'll see.

CitizenSE Metablogs

Still not well enough to get back to serious Hawthorne blogging. But why should I refrain from all Hawthorne blogging when I don't have time or energy to continue my episodic reading of "The Custom-House" that itself is a stepping-stone toward explaining what this blog is and why it exists? There's no good reason!

So, without further ado, here's a programming schedule I'm going to try to stick to way more closely than my "Hawthorne a day" pledge. [Note: the following has been updated to reflect my latest thinking.]

Mondays: Why CitizenSE? (blog ontology, metaphysics, and epistemology--and maybe someday a turn to the personal)

Tuesdays: Close Reading Tuesday (something for or from the Kyushu University Postcolonial Hawthorne class that's wrapping up soon this semester, which, by the way, I will likely get to revise for both Seinan Gakuin University undergraduates and Fukuoka University graduate students next semester)

Wednesdays: Unexpected Hawthorne Wednesday (Hawthorne lists, quotes, trivia, and other things that may surprise you--cheap, yes, but this is my busiest teaching day, where I commute to three different campuses. I hope to replace it with Historicizing Hawthorne after the fall semester ends or when I run out of material)

Thursdays: Intertextual Thursday

Fridays: Weirdest Hawthorne Link CitizenSE Can Find in 15 Minutes [Update: name changed (see categories) due to shortage of weird Hawthorne posts findable in 15 minutes.]

Saturdays: CitizenSE's Latest Crazy Hawthorne Idea (sneak previews of Ideas from the Manuscript)

Sundays: What Would Hawthorne Say? (jeremiads, allegories, current events, bloggy intertextuality, etc.) or Daddy Blogging (kawaii-itude) or Reader "Mailbag" (should anyone ever read this blog)

This schedule is subject to change without notice. The fall semester (and academic year) ends in late January 2007 in this part of Japan. So this schedule will change with notice in February 2007.

As today is Friday, but I posted a Weird Hawthorne Link on Wednesday, this schedule has already begun, prematurely (or even proleptically). Look for my Latest Crazy Hawthorne Idea tomorrow. I promise it's a doozy.

CitizenSE Refuses to Offer Excuses

So, I already missed a day of Hawthorne blogging. I could invent a retroactive policy of no Sunday blogging, even though no one in the household is Christian. Or I could make a case that an early morning post should count towards the night before. Or I could explain in interminable detail how our successful shopping trip to Kashii to buy some of the winter gear we decided not to ship over to Fukuoka and even more successful "get the girls to bed early" operation failed to lead to a free evening together for the parents, much less a blogging opportunity for the dad. Or I could change the subject by complaining at length about the double jeopardy brought about by a lack of insulation in concrete-block-style Japanese apartments and a lack of central heating (either you turn on the space heater and slowly have all the moisture sucked out of your body or you freeze, even though the lows here would be nice highs back in Dunkirk this time of year).

But, not quite heroically, I will do none of that. I'll just point out that the "citizen of somewhere else" line was, like a purloined letter, mockingly staring me in the face while I looked all over "The Custom-House" for it, until I came across it earlier this morning (in the middle of tsuma's and my romantic date, after we woke up in the middle of the morning after spending most of the night repeatedly helping clingy and maybe-getting-sick girls get back to sleep)--right there on the last page. On the bright side, I'm teaching The Scarlet Letter and Beloved the rest of the semester in my Postcolonial Hawthorne course, so I'll be able to explain the blog title and prep for class at the same time, hopefully later this afternoon, after we visit a potential day care for onechan and take my wife to the doctor (it is nice to live in a place with a national health insurance system, especially given how tough the microorganisms seem to be in this corner of the world).

So Why a Hawthorne Blog?

Shall we count the reasons?

10. No matter how you define "American" or "literature," or choose or refuse to connect them, something Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote is going to end up being important in some way to you. (Now I'll lie in wait for Eric Cheyfitz or Jay Grossman or Gregory Jay or Jane Tompkins to comment.... There are probably a dozen post ideas buried in this mega-qualified claim alone.)

9. Don't believe me? Then why do so many other writers engage his works in their fiction, drama, and criticism? And I'm not just talking about the usual suspects, from Melville to Twain to James to Faulkner to Warren to Lowell to Updike. I'm talking Chesnutt, Du Bois, Wharton, Borges, Ellison, Baldwin, Acker, Morrison, Kingston, Conde, Mukherjee, and Parks, among others. (For a start, see Brodhead's The School of Hawthorne, Budick's Engendering Romance, Coale's In Hawthorne's Shadow, Idol and Ponder's edited collection of essays, Hawthorne and Women, McCall's Citizens of Somewhere Else...and of course future posts here.)

8. The Eldritch Press and Donna Campbell Hawthorne sites are pretty darn good, but not blogs. Same goes for the Nathaniel Hawthorne Society and the Hawthorne in Salem sites.

7. The debate over academic blogging is over. (If you haven't been following it, it's no big loss.) [Update 1/22/07: Well, not literally over. In fact, when I originally wrote this, I wasn't even aware there was a controversy over the term "academic blogging" or who was known for using it. So maybe this should be revised to read, "For me, the debate over Blogging While Academic is over, to the extent that I've decided to start this blog, that is." Not quite as punchy, eh?]

6. The debate over the dangerosity of American university faculties in general and literature departments in particular is, sadly, far from over. Seems I can't help but be in the middle of it, whether I want to or not. And actually, having chosen to enter grad school around the time everyone seemed to be up in arms over the "culture wars" and "political correctness" and "the closing of the American mind" and "tenured radicals," I kind of brought it on myself.

5. Which is not to say I want to embrace Hawthorne's rhetorical pose of being an apolitical observer barely in touch with his times while actually being closely aligned personally, professionally, and politically with certain tendencies in the Democratic Party of those times. Far from it.

4. After all, I got hooked on this blogging thing when I started writing a dueling-banjos-style column for the local newspaper with a philosopher friend of mine not so long ago and created a blog to give us a potentally wider audience. (With less than a thousand visits a month, "wider" should be given far less weight than "potentially," although various search engines do bring us hits from all over the world.)

3. Even though I got a sabbatical and a Fulbright and have been teaching in Japan for several months, all of which gave me a graceful way to take a hiatus from our ongoing intellectual death match, I found that I missed blogging and began commenting all too regularly at my favorite blogs. I needed to find a way to focus my writing on my actual research so as to finally finish turning that ol' dissertation into a real book manuscript.

2. Or maybe I just needed a way to procrastinate more "productively." We'll see. (Although in point of fact, it was only through a host of distraction techniques that I was able to finish the dissertation--"The Race for Hawthorne," 1998--itself. More on them, and "the writing process," someday.)

1. So already you can see why a writer like Hawthorne appeals to me personally. Take his long post-college period of research and writing, resulting in lots of short pieces of varying quality, and finally, the books--what is that but a somewhat hopeful publication model for me? Not to mention his self-deprecations and indecisions and subtleties, his historical sense, his attention to form, structure, and craft, and his variety of modes, moods, and narrative strategies. Or that so many interesting and important scholars and critics spanning so many decades have written on him in so many interesting and important ways.

0. But Hawthorne also appeals to me politically--and precisely because his politics are so disappointing to me in so many ways. After all, his evasions, ambiguities, ambivalences, affiliations, blind spots, and prejudices are just as important to understand and assess as his achievements and influence. They may tell us as much about ourselves and our own times as him and his, if not more. And they will, if I have anything to say about it.

-1. Probably next I better explain and justify the blog title. But the girls (san-sai, almost, and nana-kagetsu) are going to wake up soon, I have to do some serious memorizing for the last Japanese language class of the week, and I have a talk to outline and quotes to compile for the Kyushu American Literature Society meeting at Fukuoka University this Saturday. It's called "American Studies and the Race for Hawthorne," so of course it will be the subject of another few posts someday.