tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35266552024-03-13T06:38:56.549-04:005000Brian J. McNelyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01368391154391981350noreply@blogger.comBlogger174125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3526655.post-75274226273685590292023-12-31T10:49:00.001-05:002023-12-31T11:02:48.305-05:002023 in Books<html>
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<title>2022 in Books</title>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiB6vMdjg6WGJQAOaVQUumk1PsiTXDJ_tJMpQ2CQ18oGP2_W2TFUcA3JJd0cfzekZROIFWjJXAkDduOD1O0fWh562ONdb3ekGSknrDn8YPE1ziBzN5g_h2Gzv1cGKyGvD0CprtmdeaO9yCispyNDfD9Ba8bw_nl4WMjneRw1JarFpYTwvJvBR0_WA/s2424/Who_Reads.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="1363" data-original-width="2424" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiB6vMdjg6WGJQAOaVQUumk1PsiTXDJ_tJMpQ2CQ18oGP2_W2TFUcA3JJd0cfzekZROIFWjJXAkDduOD1O0fWh562ONdb3ekGSknrDn8YPE1ziBzN5g_h2Gzv1cGKyGvD0CprtmdeaO9yCispyNDfD9Ba8bw_nl4WMjneRw1JarFpYTwvJvBR0_WA/s400/Who_Reads.jpg"/></a></div>
<p>As in <a href="https://5000.blogspot.com/2018/12/2018-in-books.html">2018</a>, <a href="https://5000.blogspot.com/2019/12/2019-in-books.html">2019</a>, <a href="https://5000.blogspot.com/2021/01/2020-in-books.html">2020</a>, <a href="https://5000.blogspot.com/2021/12/2021-in-books.html">2021</a>, and <a href="https://5000.blogspot.com/2022/12/2022-in-books.html">2022</a>, I logged the books I read. Here's the 2023 list, followed by some brief comments.</p>
<hr />
<br />
<ol>
<li><i>Young Mungo</i> — Douglas Stuart | 1.3</li>
<li><i>Slow Horses</i> — Mick Herron | 1.10</li>
<li><i>The Topeka School</i> — Ben Lerner | 1.16</li>
<li><i>Dark Fire</i> — C.J. Sansom | 1.18</li>
<li><i>The First Rule</i> — Robert Crais | 1.20</li>
<li><i>The Passenger</i> — Cormac McCarthy | 1.21</li>
<li><i>Tyll</i> — Daniel Kehlmann (Trans. Ross Benjamin) | 1.21</li>
<li><i>Honor</i> — Thrity Umrigar | 1.28</li>
<li><i>Still Pictures</i> — Janet Malcolm | 1.30</li>
<li><i>The Nothing Girl</i> — Jodi Taylor | 1.31</li>
<li><i>Eastbound</i> — Maylis De Kerangal (Trans. Jessica Moore) | 2.7</li>
<li><i>The Hatred of Poetry</i> — Ben Lerner | 2.10</li>
<li><i>Dominion</i> — C.J. Sansom | 2.11</li>
<li><i>Making Wolf</i> — Made Thompson | 2.12</li>
<li><i>The Face: A Time Code</i> — Ruth Ozeki | 2.15</li>
<li><i>Token Black Girl</i> — Danielle Prescod | 2.17</li>
<li><i>Slip Runner</i> — J.N. Chaney & M.F. Lerma | 2.19</li>
<li><i>Walking</i> — Thomas Bernhard (Trans. Kenneth J. Northcott) | 2.23</li>
<li><i>Hello, Molly!</i> — Molly Shannon | 2.26</li>
<li><i>The Secret History</i> — Donna Tartt | 3.1</li>
<li><i>The World is Always Coming to an End</i> — Carlo Rotella | 3.6</li>
<li><i>Die Alte Dame Am Meer</i> — Anna Johannsen | 3.11</li>
<li><i>Devil in a Blue Dress</i> — Walter Mosley | 3.11</li>
<li><i>The Shadow of What Was Lost</i> — James Islington | 3.14</li>
<li><i>Nowhere Girl</i> — Cheryl Diamond | 3.16</li>
<li><i>Several Short Sentences About Writing</i> — Verlyn Klinkenborg | 3.17</li>
<li><i>Off To Be The Wizard</i> — Scott Meyer | 3.20</li>
<li><i>Interior Chinatown</i> — Charles Yu | 3.23</li>
<li><i>The Name of the Rose</i> — Umberto Eco (Trans. William Weaver) | 3.31</li>
<li><i>Surfacing</i> — Kathleen Jamie | 4.4</li>
<li><i>Swing Time</i> — Zadie Smith | 4.9</li>
<li><i>The Maidens</i> — Alex Michaelides | 4.12</li>
<li><i>The Sense of an Ending</i> — Julian Barnes | 4.13</li>
<li><i>Plays Well with Others</i> — Eric Barker | 4.13</li>
<li><i>Economical Writing</i> — Deirdre Nansen McCloskey | 4.15</li>
<li><i>Sing, Unburied, Sing</i> — Jesmyn Ward | 4.19</li>
<li><i>The Possibility of Life</i> — Jaime Green | 4.22</li>
<li><i>How Far the Light Reaches</i> — Sabrina Imbler | 4.24</li>
<li><i>I Am the Light of this World</i> — Michael Parker | 4.28</li>
<li><i>The Art of Brevity</i> — Greg Faulkner | 4.30</li>
<li><i>Greeks Bearing Gifts</i> — Philip Kerr | 5.2</li>
<li><i>The Secret Pilgrim</i> — John Le Carré | 5.8</li>
<li><i>Sam</i> — Allegra Goodman | 5.15</li>
<li><i>The Every</i> — Dave Eggers | 5.15</li>
<li><i>Singer Distance</i> — Ethan Chatagnier | 5.22</li>
<li><i>Sportin’ Jack</i> — Paul Strohm | 5.23</li>
<li><i>The 4-Hour Workweek</i> — Timothy Ferriss | 5.28</li>
<li><i>Summer Lightning</i> — P. G. Wodehouse | 5.29</li>
<li><i>The Committed</i> — Viet Thanh Nguyen | 6.3</li>
<li><i>The Lover</i> — Marguerite Duras (Trans. Barbara Bray) | 6.5</li>
<li><i>The Thin Man</i> — Dashiell Hammett | 6.6</li>
<li><i>Goodbye, Things</i> — Fumio Sasaki (Trans. Eriko Sugita) | 6.14</li>
<li><i>The Undying</i> — Anne Boyer | 6.17</li>
<li><i>Gone to Dust</i> — Matt Goldman | 6.24</li>
<li><i>Der Löwe Büllt</i> — Tommy Jaud | 6.24</li>
<li><i>Smart Brevity</i> — Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen, & Roy Schwartz | 6.28</li>
<li><i>Fuccboi</i> — Sean Thor Conroe | 6.29</li>
<li><i>Blue Like Me</i> — Aaron Philip Clark | 7.3</li>
<li><i>The God of Small Things</i> — Arundhati Roy | 7.10</li>
<li><i>Heavy Weather</i> — P.G. Wodehouse | 7.14</li>
<li><i>Arlington Park</i> — Rachel Cusk | 7.17</li>
<li><i>The Spectator Bird</i> — Wallace Stegner | 7.18</li>
<li><i>Northanger Abbey</i> — Jane Austen | 7.21</li>
<li><i>Eurotrash</i> — Christian Kracht | 7.27</li>
<li><i>The Highland Witch</i> — Susan Fletcher | 7.27</li>
<li><i>Dark Earth</i> — Rebecca Stott | 7.31</li>
<li><i>Stay True</i> — Hua Hsu | 7.31</li>
<li><i>Thinking 101</i> — Woo-kyoung Ann | 8.1</li>
<li><i>Far from the Madding Crowd</i> — Thomas Hardy | 8.8</li>
<li><i>King Lear</i> — William Shakespeare | 8.10</li>
<li><i>Feed Them Silence</i> — Lee Mandelo | 8.10</li>
<li><i>The Tao of Pooh</i> — Benjamin Hoff | 8.10</li>
<li><i>Bannon</i> — Louis L’Amour | 8.14</li>
<li><i>My Man Jeeves</i> — P.G. Wodehouse | 8.15</li>
<li><i>The Elegance of the Hedgehog</i> — Muriel Barbery (Trans. Alison Anderson)| 8.17</li>
<li><i>Red Memory: The Afterlives of China’s Cultural Revolution</i> — Tania Branigan | 8.18</li>
<li><i>Shy</i> — Max Porter | 8.19</li>
<li><i>The Orchard Keeper</i> — Cormac McCarthy | 8.20</li>
<li><i>Heart of Darkness</i> — Joseph Conrad | 8.21</li>
<li><i>Blood Meridian</i> — Cormac McCarthy | 8.27</li>
<li><i>LaserWriter II</i> — Tamara Shopsin | 8.28</li>
<li><i>The Quiet American</i> — Graham Greene | 8.28</li>
<li><i>Blueprint for a Book</i> — Jennie Nash | 8.29</li>
<li><i>Girl with a Pearl Earring</i> — Tracy Chevalier | 8.31</li>
<li><i>The Secret Adversary</i> — Agatha Christie | 9.2</li>
<li><i>Elements of Fiction</i> — Walter Mosley | 9.3</li>
<li><i>The Dogs of Riga</i> — Henning Mankell | 9.8</li>
<li><i>Firefly: Generations</i> — Tim Lebbon | 9.11</li>
<li><i>World Without Mind</i> — Franklin Foer | 9.18</li>
<li><i>Fairy Tale</i> — Stephen King | 9.25</li>
<li><i>The Inimitable Jeeves</i> — P. G. Wodehouse | 10.1</li>
<li><i>Blindsight</i> — Peter Watts | 10.4</li>
<li><i>The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time</i> — Will Durant | 10.9</li>
<li><i>The Walk and Other Stories</i> — Robert Walser (Trans. Christopher Middleton) | 10.9</li>
<li><i>Stonefather</i> — Orson Scott Card | 10.11</li>
<li><i>All Quiet on the Western Front</i> — Erich Maria Remarque (Trans. A.W. Wheen) | 10.14</li>
<li><i>Write for Your Life</i> — Anna Quindlen | 10.16</li>
<li><i>The Einstein Intersection</i> — Samuel R. Delany | 10.23</li>
<li><i>A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man</i> — James Joyce | 10.30</li>
<li><i>The Creative Act</i> — Rick Rubin | 11.6</li>
<li><i>A Room with a View</i> — E.M. Forster | 11.6</li>
<li><i>Euphoria</i> — Lily King | 11.13</li>
<li><i>Broken Ice</i> — Matt Goldman | 11.18</li>
<li><i>We Are Too Many</i> — Hannah Pittard | 11.18</li>
<li><i>Atonement</i> — Ian McEwan | 11.24</li>
<li><i>A Quiet Flame</i> — Philip Kerr | 11.26</li>
<li><i>Things We Lost to the Water</i> — Eric Nguyen | 12.4</li>
<li><i>The Hustler</i> — Walter Tevis | 12.7</li>
<li><i>The Morning Star</i> — Karl Ove Knausgaard | 12.16</li>
<li><i>The Crossing</i> — Cormac McCarthy | 12.16</li>
<li><i>You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me</i> — Sherman Alexie | 12.24</li>
<li><i>The Mutual Admiration Society</i> — Lesley Kagan | 12.29</li>
<li><i>Small Mercies</i> — Dennis Lehane | 12.31</li>
</ol><br>
<p>It was a year for great titles: <i>Fuccboi</i>, <i>Eurotrash</i>, <i>Hummeldumm</i> (German for “dumb ass”), <i>Token Black Girl</i>, <i>The God of Small Things</i>, <i>LaserWriter II</i>.</p>
<p><i>Young Mungo</i>, like <i>Shuggie Bain</i>, was exquisitely crafted. I think I may have liked <i>Mungo</i> even better than <i>Shuggie</i>, perhaps because I identified with the former’s plight more than the latter’s. There’s an immediacy to the themes in <i>Mungo</i>, something more palpable and arresting.</p>
<ul>
<li>“He looked like a man who’d enjoy a long swim in January.” Douglas Stuart, <i>Young Mungo</i></li>
</ul>
<p><i>The Passenger</i> is the first of two novels Cormac McCarthy published in late 2022. I’ve read almost all of his oeuvre: McCarthy sure loves a frighteningly and generationally brilliant male protagonist that essentially lives like a hobo, either full-time, or for some of the time.</p>
<p><i>Interior Chinatown</i> was smart and entertaining and thought-provoking.</p>
<p><i>The Sense of an Ending</i> might be my favorite of the Julian Barnes novels I’ve read. Understated, reflective, and a thrilling exploration of the banal, the accumulative effects of ancient decisions that still shape the now.</p>
<p><i>How Far the Light Reaches</i> was so well done, in terms of weaving natural history with memoir.</p>
<p><i>Sam</i> is an excellent, realist, contemporary coming of age novel that does a fine job with pov at the various stages of the protagonist’s life. Super relatable for me. I was rooting for Sam so hard. Haven’t felt for a character like that in a while.</p>
<p>Found the Wallace Stegner randomly and ended up enjoying it a lot. Currently reading <i>Crossing to Safety</i>, so that'll be one of the first books on my 2024 list.</p>
<p><i>Eurotrash</i> was pretty great, in concept and execution.</p>
<p><i>Stay True</i> was a nostalgic rip through the early/mid-90s for me. Well-written, introspective, and full of place-names and bands and brands I grew up on.</p>
<p>Thomas Hardy sure likes the word “incipient.”</p>
<p><i>The Elegance of the Hedgehog</i> takes itself a little too seriously, tries to cover too many concepts/ideas, and is a bit heavy handed at times, and still I liked it very much. I love when novels take on art and philosophy—so much better than reading critics and philosophers.</p>
<p>Why Wodehouse? One of my blind spots—I certainly was aware of Jeeves, but I’d never read any Wodehouse, nor did I know anything about him (spoiler: he's a controversial figure). I was re-reading <i>The Secret History</i> for my course on Dark Academia last spring, and Richard, the narrator, tries to read Wodehouse as a diversion. I started with two Blandings novels before jumping to Jeeves. One of the pleasures of Wodehouse is reading the slang of his time. See <a href='https://www.oed.com/discover/pg-wodehouse-in-the-oed/?tl=true'>P.G. Wodehouse in the OED</a>.</p>
<p>I'd like to read your 2023 list, if you have one. Find me on Instagram (@bmcnely) and share!</p>
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</html>Brian J. McNelyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01368391154391981350noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3526655.post-8522041961200113952022-12-31T09:30:00.011-05:002022-12-31T09:51:35.252-05:002022 in Books<html>
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<title>2022 in Books</title>
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<span style="font-family: Calluna, Baskerville, 'Times New Roman', 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, Verdana, Sans-serif;">
<p>As in <a href="https://5000.blogspot.com/2018/12/2018-in-books.html">2018</a>, <a href="https://5000.blogspot.com/2019/12/2019-in-books.html">2019</a>, <a href="https://5000.blogspot.com/2021/01/2020-in-books.html">2020</a>, and <a href="https://5000.blogspot.com/2021/12/2021-in-books.html">2021</a>, I logged the books I read. Here's the 2022 list, followed by some brief comments.</p>
<hr />
<br />
<ol start="1"><li><i>A House in the Sky</i> — Amanda Lindhout & Sara Corbett | 1.1
</li><li><i>Warlight</i> — Michael Ondaatje | 1.2
</li><li><i>100 Ways to Improve Your Writing</i> — Gary Provost | 1.7
</li><li><i>The Plot Against America</i> — Philip Roth | 1.8
</li><li><i>The Winter of Our Discontent</i> — John Steinbeck | 1.13
</li><li><i>American By Day</i> — Derek Miller | 1.19
</li><li><i>Heimatland</i> — I.K.H. Kronprinzessin Mette-Marit & Geir Gulliksen | 1.20
</li><li><i>Crime and Punishment</i> — Fyodor Dostoevsky (Trans. Constance Garnett) | 1.22
</li><li><i>The Midlife Cyclist</i> — Phil Cavell | 1.24
</li><li><i>Sing Backwards and Weep</i> — Mark Lanegan | 1.25
</li><li><i>My World</i> — Peter Sagan | 1.30
</li><li><i>The Pastor</i> — Hanne Ørstavik (Trans. Martin Aitken) | 1.31
</li><li><i>The Passenger</i> — Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz (Trans. Philip Boehm) | 2.2
</li><li><i>The Arrest</i> — Jonathan Lethem | 2.4
</li><li><i>How to Tell a Story</i> — P. Rubie & G. Provost | 2.5
</li><li><i>Under Color of Law</i> — Aaron Philip Clark | 2.6
</li><li><i>Parakeet</i> — Marie-Helene Bertino | 2.7
</li><li><i>Transmission</i> — Hari Kunzru | 2.9
</li><li><i>The Almost Nearly Perfect People</i> — Michael Booth | 2.18
</li><li><i>The Art of X-Ray Reading</i> — Roy Peter Clark | 2.21
</li><li><i>Fever Pitch</i> — Nick Hornby | 2.25
</li><li><i>A Calling for Charlie Barnes</i> — Joshua Ferris | 2.28
</li><li><i>Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982</i> — Cho Nam-Joo (Trans. Jamie Chang) | 3.7
</li><li><i>The Write Structure</i> — Joe Bunting | 3.16
</li><li><i>Age of Empyre</i> — Michael J. Sullivan | 3.17
</li><li><i>Far From the Light of Heaven</i> — Tade Thompson | 3.19
</li><li><i>So Wie Du Mich Kennst</i> — Anika Landsteiner | 3.21
</li><li><i>Forty-one False Starts</i> — Janet Malcolm | 3.27
</li><li><i>Draft Animals</i> — Phil Gaimon | 3.31
</li><li><i>Ray</i> — Barry Hannah | 4.2
</li><li><i>The Last Season</i> — Eric Blehm | 4.12
</li><li><i>Real Life</i> — Brandon Taylor | 4.21
</li><li><i>How High We Go in the Dark</i> — Sequoia Nagamatsu | 4.23
</li><li><i>C</i> — Tom McCarthy | 4.24
</li><li><i>Sin and Syntax</i> — Constance Hale | 4.29
</li><li><i>Take Control of Scrivener 3</i> — Kirk McElhearn | 4.29
</li><li><i>Spook Country</i> — William Gibson | 5.2
</li><li><i>Italian Shoes</i> — Henning Mankell | 5.8
</li><li><i>Something from the Nightside</i> — Simon R. Green | 5.14
</li><li><i>Offline</i> — Arno Strobel | 5.17
</li><li><i>The Investigation</i> — Stanislaw Lem | 5.22
</li><li><i>How to Tell a Story</i> — The Moth (Bowles, M., Burns, C., Hixson, J., Jenness, S. A., & Tellers, K.) | 5.23
</li><li><i>The Three Body Problem</i> — Cixin Liu | 5.25
</li><li><i>Zero History</i> — William Gibson | 6.1
</li><li><i>Black Nerd Problems</i> — William Evans & Omar Holmon | 6.3
</li><li><i>This is Not Propaganda</i> — Peter Pomerantsev | 6.8
</li><li><i>The Wanderers</i> — Meg Howrey | 6.12
</li><li><i>The French Art of Not Giving a Shit</i> — Fabrice Midal (Trans. Ian Monk) | 6.15
</li><li><i>Tea with the Black Dragon</i> — R.A. MacAvoy | 6.22
</li><li><i>Untold Night and Day</i> — Bae Suah (Trans. Deborah Smith) | 6.27
</li><li><i>Pro Cycling on $10 a Day</i> — Phil Gaiman | 7.1
</li><li><i>The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Nonfiction</i> — Dinty Moore | 7.5
</li><li><i>Early Riser</i> — Jasper Fforde | 7.6
</li><li><i>Gated Prey</i> — Lee Goldberg | 7.11
</li><li><i>The Overstory</i> — Richard Powers | 7.23
</li><li><i>Chemistry</i> — Weike Wang | 7.24
</li><li><i>More Better Deals</i> — Joe Lansdale | 7.25
</li><li><i>Mourning Diary</i> — Roland Barthes (Trans. Richard Howard) | 7.27
</li><li><i>Lenin auf Schalke</i> — Gregor Sander | 7.31
</li><li><i>Die Trying</i> — Lee Child | 8.3
</li><li><i>All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days</i> — Rebecca Donner | 8.7
</li><li><i>How to Write Clearly</i> — Tom Albrighton | 8.9
</li><li><i>On Animals</i> — Susan Orlean | 8.9
</li><li><i>The Maidens</i> — Alex Michaelides | 8.13
</li><li><i>Chinatown Beat</i> — Henry Chang | 8.15
</li><li><i>The Book of M</i> — Peng Shepherd | 8.21
</li><li><i>We are the Weather</i> — Jonathan Safran Foer | 8.22
</li><li><i>Dissolution</i> — C.J. Sansom | 8.28
</li><li><i>The Order of Time</i> — Carlo Rovelli | 8.29
</li><li><i>Agent Running in the Field</i> — John Le Carré | 9.3
</li><li><i>Hummingbird Salamander</i> — Jeff VanderMeer | 9.8
</li><li><i>Collateral Damage</i> — David Mack | 9.12
</li><li><i>Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs</i> — Beth Ann Fennelly | 9.13
</li><li><i>How to Read Literature Like a Professor</i> — Thomas Foster | 9.16
</li><li><i>Sojourn</i> — Amit Chaudhuri | 9.20
</li><li><i>My Salinger Year</i> — Joanna Rakoff | 9.21
</li><li><i>Der Tote im Strandkorb</i> — Anna Johannsen | 9.21
</li><li><i>You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train</i> — Howard Zinn | 9.25
</li><li><i>Second Place</i> — Rachel Cusk | 10.9
</li><li><i>Safe Houses</i> — Dan Fesperman | 10.16
</li><li><i>Save the Cat! Writes a Novel</i> — Jessica Brody | 10.18
</li><li><i>Movieland</i> — Lee Goldberg | 10.31
</li><li><i>Companion Piece</i> — Ali Smith | 11.1
</li><li><i>The Terrible</i> — Yrsa Daley-Ward | 11.12
</li><li><i>Dark Fire</i> — C.J. Sansom | 11.14
</li><li><i>Now is Not the Time to Panic</i> — Kevin Wilson | 11.21
</li><li><i>The Beginning of Spring</i> — Penelope Fitzgerald | 11.21
</li><li><i>Fearless Mind</i> — Craig Manning | 11.23
</li><li><i>The Old Woman with the Knife</i> — Gu Byeong-mu (Trans. Chi-Young Kim) | 11.24
</li><li><i>Freedom Road</i> — William Lashner | 11.27
</li><li><i>The Cyclocross Bible</i> — Alexander Forrester | 11.28
</li><li><i>Disappearing Earth</i> — Julia Phillips | 12.5
</li><li><i>An Impossible Love</i> — Christine Angot (Trans. Armine Kotin Mortimer) | 12.5
</li><li><i>Long Story Short</i> — Margot Leitman | 12.10
</li><li><i>Preparing for the Future</i> — Jeremy Eaton | 12.10
</li><li><i>The Name of the Wind</i> — Patrick Rothfuss | 12.17
</li><li><i>Land of Big Numbers</i> — Te-Ping Chen | 12.18
</li><li><i>American War</i> — Omar El Akkad | 12.21
</li><li><i>Remarkably Bright Creatures</i> — Shelby Van Pelt | 12.23
</li><li><i>Acts of Desperation</i> — Megan Nolan | 12.25
</li><li><i>Managing Expectations</i> — Minnie Driver | 12.25
</li><li><i>Das Mädchen am Strand</i> — Anna Johannsen | 12.26
</li><li><i>Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy</i> — John Le Carré | 12.28
</li><li><i>The Making of Incarnation</i> — Tom McCarthy | 12.29
</li><li><i>Cleanness</i> — Garth Greenwell | 12.30
</li><li><i>Rainbows in the Mud</i> — Paul Maunder | 12.31
</li></ol>
<p>Once again, I read fewer books this year than last. I started cycling in 2021, and that cut into my reading time. I started racing bikes in 2022, and that cut into my reading time even more. It's a happy trade-off, though.</p>
<p>I wasn't really blown away by anything I read this year. Usually there's at least one book that stays with me in the best way (e.g., <i>Dark Eden</i>, <i>Remainder</i>, <i>M Train</i>, <i>Bluets</i>, <i>Against Art</i>, <i>Sweet Days of Discipline</i>), but this year nothing really followed me past the last page. <i>Second Place</i> was remarkable, and I'll say more below, but it didn't haunt me the way <i>Dark Eden</i> or <i>Remainder</i> did.
<p>So it was an odd year of reading. Lots of good books but nothing really astonishing. I'm not sure why people love <i>The Overstory</i> so much—I did not love it. <i>Hummingbird Salamander</i> started out white hot, then ... was kind of boring? I read books from Ali Smith and Tom McCarthy that were ... not as good as their other books. Sigh. Here are a few books that stood out:</p>
<ul>
<li><i>Second Place</i> — Rachel Cusk</li>
<ul><li><i>Second Place</i> was brilliant, and Cusk’s prose is sparkling and insightful. For me, a good novel will have four or five stunning sentences full of wisdom and insight. In the second half of this book I was highlighting such sentences every handful of pages, sometimes page after page. I’m just in awe of her skill with simile and metaphor—Cusk is an amazing prose stylist.</li></ul>
<li><i>The Arrest</i> — Jonathan Lethem</li>
<ul><li>This plot was pretty ingenious, and the themes were thought-provoking.</li></ul>
<li><i>Acts of Desperation</i> — Megan Nolan</li>
<ul><li>A solid contemporary novel, notable (to me) because it was the first #booktok-recommended book that I've read.</li></ul>
<li><i>Transmission</i> — Hari Kunzru</li>
<ul><li>Kunzru is becoming one of my favorite writers. He has a fantastic ability to weave complex narratives that comment on our peculiar times.</li></ul>
<li><i>Disappearing Earth</i> — Julia Phillips</li>
<ul><li>This was thoughtful and well-constructed, and the opening chapter was just heartbreaking and disturbing and so well done.</li></ul>
<li><i>Sojourn</i> — Amit Chaudhuri</li>
<ul><li>My favorite kind of contemporary novel—dreamy, pithy, wise.</li></ul>
<li><i>Zero History</i> — William Gibson</li>
<ul><li><i>Zero History</i> closes a trilogy in an unexpected way (or, at least, in a way that <i>I</i> didn't expect). This was especially satisfying given that I read (and loved) <i>Pattern Recognition</i> so long ago and saw little connection through book two and most of book three.</li></ul>
<li><i>C</i> — Tom McCarthy</li>
<ul><li>Reading <i>C</i> was kind of like reading China Miéville’s Bas Lag novels—disorienting and strange and mesmerizing, especially as you acclimate to the world. That McCarthy does this in provincial, late Victorian England is credit to his ability to render the strangeness of that world and time. Did I love this as much as <i>Remainder</i>? No. But it was fascinating and weird and compelling.</li></ul>
<ul><li>But I also finished <i>The Making of Incarnation</i> this year, and it was ... not great. If you've read <i>Moby Dick</i>, then you surely remember those long chapters on the technical details of whaling, crammed full of archaic and odd vocabulary. <i>Incarnation</i> was almost exclusively whaling chapters, if you'll stay with the analogy. I wanted to love it, but it was so difficult to hang in there, page after turgid page. McCarthy is clearly brilliant, but sometimes one can be <i>too</i> clever.</li></ul>
<li><i>Managing Expectations</i> — Minnie Driver</li>
<ul><li>I've got basically no connection to Minnie Driver. She's British, she was in <i>Good Will Hunting</i>, and she has noteworthy hair—beyond that I couldn't tell you much. But I found this book by chance, liked the cover, read a bit, and discovered: Minnie Driver is a very good writer and storyteller. I enjoyed this memoir very much.</li></ul>
<li><i>Rainbows in the Mud</i> — Paul Maunder</li>
<ul><li>This one is admittedly self-indulgent, but this is <i>my</i> list after all. A good friend of mine is a track cyclist in Indianapolis. He once described track cycling as "the niche sport of a niche sport." This is so well-said, and also true of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclo-cross">cyclocross</a>. I don't know why, but I thought I might like cyclocross, so I decided to jump in this year, with zero experience or understanding of the sport. Another cycling friend in Lexington said: "why? No one does cyclocross around here. No one cares." But I thought: "why not?" It turns out that I'm well-suited to the demands of cyclocross, and it's got a vibe that I absolutely love.</li></ul>
<ul><li>Maunder's <i>Rainbows in the Mud</i> is a wonderful ride through the history and culture of this strange niche sport. I'd often read his recap of a given race and then put the book aside to scour YouTube—I almost always found the exact moment he described, and this back-and-forth enlivened my experience of the book and the sport. Given my interests, I was bound to be happy with this one, and it was such a fitting book to close out 2022. But anyone with even a passing interest in cycling as a sport and cultural phenomenon will get a lot out of this book. </li></ul>
<br />
<p>My guess is that I'll read fewer books in 2023. I'm ok with that. I'd like to read your 2022 list, if you have one. Find me on Instagram (@bmcnely) or on Strava, and share!</p>
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</html>Brian J. McNelyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01368391154391981350noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3526655.post-78773595020365589312021-12-31T12:11:00.000-05:002021-12-31T12:11:38.792-05:002021 in Books<html>
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<span style="font-family: Calluna, Baskerville, 'Times New Roman', 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, Verdana, Sans-serif;">
<p>As in <a href="https://5000.blogspot.com/2018/12/2018-in-books.html">2018</a>, <a href="https://5000.blogspot.com/2019/12/2019-in-books.html">2019</a>, and <a href="https://5000.blogspot.com/2021/01/2020-in-books.html">2020</a>, I logged the books I read. Here's the 2021 list, followed by some brief comments.</p>
<hr />
<br />
<ol start="1"><li><i>Underground Airlines</i> — Ben Winters | 1.2
</li><li><i>We Are Never Meeting in Real Life</i> — Samantha Irby | 1.5
</li><li><i>Someone’s Trying to Find You</i> — Marc Augé (Trans. Chris Turner) | 1.5
</li><li><i>Cycling on Form</i> — Tom Danielson | 1.7
</li><li><i>Vollidiot</i> — Tommy Jaud | 1.13
</li><li><i>Stories of Your Life and Others</i> — Ted Chiang | 1.16
</li><li><i>North</i> — Scott Jurak | 1.18
</li><li><i>How Much of these Hills is Gold</i> — C. Pam Zhang | 1.18
</li><li><i>Swimming in the Dark</i> — Tomasz Jedrowski | 1.20
</li><li><i>Whatever</i> — Michel Houellebecq (Trans. Paul Hammond) | 1.23
</li><li><i>Shrill</i> — Lindy West | 1.25
</li><li><i>Spy of the First Person</i> — Sam Shepard | 1.25
</li><li><i>In the Land of the Cyclops</i> — Karl Ove Knausgaard (Trans. Martin Aitken, Ingvild Burkey, Damion Searls) | 1.26
</li><li><i>A Month in Siena</i> — Hisham Matar | 1.30
</li><li><i>Neu Jahr</i> — Juli Zeh | 1.31
</li><li><i>The Hobbit</i> — J.R.R. Tolkien | 2.1
</li><li><i>Suppose a Sentence</i> — Brian Dillon | 2.3
</li><li><i>Mirror, Shoulder, Signal</i> — Dorte Nors (Trans. Misha Hoekstra) | 2.5
</li><li><i>Swing Kings</i> — Jared Diamond | 2.7
</li><li><i>Other Men’s Daughters</i> — Richard Stern | 2.13
</li><li><i>The Art of Travel</i> — Alain de Botton | 2.14
</li><li><i>Follow Me to Ground</i> — Sue Rainsford | 2.15
</li><li><i>Everywhere You Don’t Belong</i> — Gabriel Bump | 2.23
</li><li><i>Der kurze Brief zum langen Abschied</i> — Peter Handke | 2.25
</li><li><i>Remainder</i> — Tom McCarthy | 2.25
</li><li><i>First You Write a Sentence</i> — Joe Moran | 2.27
</li><li><i>No Name in the Street</i> — James Baldwin | 2.28
</li><li><i>If You Kept a Record of Sins</i> — Andrea Bajani (Trans. Elizabeth Harris) | 3.4
</li><li><i>When We Were Vikings</i> — Andrew David MacDonald | 3.10
</li><li><i>Just Us</i> — Claudia Rankine | 3.11
</li><li><i>Bone Canyon</i> — Lee Goldberg | 3.13
</li><li><i>Homeland Elegies</i> — Ayad Akhtar | 3.16
</li><li><i>Minotaur</i> — Benjamin Tammuz (Trans. Kim Parfitt & Mildred Budny) | 3.18
</li><li><i>Let My People Go Surfing</i> — Yvon Chouinard | 3.20
</li><li><i>Millionär</i> — Tommy Jaud | 3.26
</li><li><i>On Writing</i> — Stephen King | 3.30
</li><li><i>Am I Alone Here?: Notes on Living to Read and Reading to Live</i> — Peter Orner | 4.10
</li><li><i>Stealing Home: Los Angeles, the Dodgers, and the Lives Caught in Between</i> — Eric Nusbaum | 4.11
</li><li><i>Deaf Republic</i> — Ilya Kaminsky | 4.13
</li><li><i>Kafka on the Shore</i> — Haruki Murakami (Trans. Philip Garbriel) | 4.14
</li><li><i>Dorfpunks</i> — Rocko Schamoni | 4.15
</li><li><i>Before the Coffee Gets Cold</i> — Toshikazu Kawaguchi (Trans. Geoffrey Trousselot) | 4.20
</li><li><i>The Faraway Nearby</i> — Rebecca Solnit | 4.24
</li><li><i>Ironweed</i> — William Kennedy | 4.24
</li><li><i>Children of the Land</i> — Marcelo Hernandez Castillo | 4.26
</li><li><i>Bright Scythe</i> — Tomas Tranströmer (Trans. Patty Crane) | 5.3
</li><li><i>Green Girl</i> — Kate Zambreno | 5.4
</li><li><i>Strange Weather in Tokyo</i> — Hiromi Kawakami (Trans. Allison Markin Powell) | 5.12
</li><li><i>Artemis Fowl</i> — Eoin Colfer (Auf dem Englischen von Claudia Feldmann) | 5.15
</li><li><i>Perestroika in Paris</i> — Jane Smiley | 5.18
</li><li><i>An Event, Perhaps</i> — Peter Salmon | 5.22
</li><li><i>To The Lighthouse</i> — Virginia Woolf | 5.24
</li><li><i>The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick</i> — Peter Handke (Trans. Michael Roloff) | 5.25
</li><li><i>Night Boat to Tangier</i> — Kevin Barry | 5.29
</li><li><i>Age of Death</i> — Michael J. Sullivan | 6.2
</li><li><i>Faces in the Crowd</i> — Valeria Luiselli (Trans. Christina MacSweeney) | 6.2
</li><li><i>On Looking</i> — Lia Purpura | 6.10
</li><li><i>Resturlaub</i> — Tommy Jaud | 6.12
</li><li><i>My Brilliant Friend</i> — Elena Ferrante (Trans. Ann Goldstein) | 6.12
</li><li><i>Leaving the Atocha Station</i> — Ben Lerner | 6.22
</li><li><i>Stories with Pictures</i> — Antonio Tabucchi (Trans. Elizabeth Harris) | 7.1
</li><li><i>The Last Best League: 10th Anniversary Edition</i> — Jim Collins | 7.1
</li><li><i>Weather</i> — Jenny Offill | 7.7
</li><li><i>Acrobat</i> — Nabaneeta Dev Sen (Trans. Nandana Dev Sen) | 7.8
</li><li><i>Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead</i> — Olga Tokarczuk (Trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones) | 7.13
</li><li><i>Yearbook</i> — Seth Rogen | 7.16
</li><li><i>Letters on Sweden, Norway, and Denmark</i> — Mary Wollstonecraft | 7.17
</li><li><i>For the Love of Europe</i> — Rick Steves | 7.22
</li><li><i>News of the World</i> — Paulette Jiles | 7.25
</li><li><i>What Are You Going Through</i> — Sigrid Nunez | 7.26
</li><li><i>Mittagsstunde</i> — Dörte Hansen | 7.28
</li><li><i>A Life Without Limits</i> — Chrissie Wellington | 7.30
</li><li><i>The Martian</i> — Andy Weir | 8.3
</li><li><i>Shuggie Bain</i> — Douglas Stuart | 8.11
</li><li><i>How to Defeat a Demon King in Ten Easy Steps</i> — Andrew Rowe | 8.15
</li><li><i>Wanderers</i> — Chuck Wendig | 8.16
</li><li><i>Everything Like Before</i> — Kjell Askildsen (Trans. Séan Kinsella) | 8.16
</li><li><i>Sorrow and Bliss</i> — Meg Mason | 8.19
</li><li><i>Dear Committee Members</i> — Julie Schumacher | 8.20
</li><li><i>Four Thousand Weeks</i> — Oliver Burkeman | 8.24
</li><li><i>The Left Hand of Darkness</i> — Ursula K. Le Guin | 8.27
</li><li><i>The Longest Race</i> — Ed Ayers | 8.30
</li><li><i>The Constant Rabbit</i> — Jasper Fforde | 9.6
</li><li><i>Laufen, Essen, Schlafen</i> — Christine Thürmer | 9.8
</li><li><i>Range</i> — David Epstein | 9.13
</li><li><i>A Swim in a Pond in the Rain</i> — George Saunders | 9.21
</li><li><i>The Heart to Start</i> — David Kadavy | 9.25
</li><li><i>Ancillary Justice</i> — Anne Leckie | 10.2
</li><li><i>Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now</i> — Jaron Lanier | 10.4
</li><li><i>The Sympathizer</i> — Viet Thanh Nguyen | 10.6
</li><li><i>Trespassing Across America</i> — Ken Ilgunas | 10.13
</li><li><i>Old Filth</i> — Jane Gardam | 10.15
</li><li><i>Klara and the Sun</i> — Kazuo Ishiguro | 10.16
</li><li><i>Mixed Plate</i> — Jo Koy | 10.25
</li><li><i>Neverworld Wake</i> — Marisha Pessl | 10.29
</li><li><i>Winter</i> — Ali Smith | 10.31
</li><li><i>Sharing</i> — Arno Strobel | 11.2
</li><li><i>A Time for Everything</i> — Karl Ove Knausgaard (Trans. James Anderson) | 11.4
</li><li><i>The White Book</i> — Han Kang (Trans. Deborah Smith) | 11.7
</li><li><i>How to Write Short</i> — Roy Peter Clark | 11.8
</li><li><i>Three O’Clock in the Morning</i> — Gianrico Carofiglio (Trans. Howard Curtis) | 11.13
</li><li><i>Pity the Reader</i> — Kurt Vonnegut and Suzanne McConnell | 11.13
</li><li><i>Underland</i> — Robert MacFarlane | 11.17
</li><li><i>OMG WTF Does the Constitution Actually Say</i> — Ben Sheehan | 11.21
</li><li><i>Less than Zero</i> — Bret Easton Ellis | 11.22
</li><li><i>Mind Management, Not Time Management</i> — David Kadavy | 11.25
</li><li><i>Red Pill</i> — Hari Kunzru | 11.25
</li><li><i>Alles auf Anfang</i> — Melina D’Angeli | 11.25
</li><li><i>Murakami T: The T-Shirts I Love</i> — Haruki Murakami (Trans. Philip Gabriel) | 11.30
</li><li><i>Proustian Uncertainties</i> — Saul Friedländer | 12.7
</li><li><i>Snow Country</i> — Yasunari Kawabata (Trans. Edward Seidensticker) | 12.9
</li><li><i>The Necessary Angel</i> — Wallace Stevens | 12.15
</li><li><i>The Priory of the Orange Tree</i> — Samantha Shannon | 12.20
</li><li><i>The Untouchable</i> — John Banville | 12.21
</li><li><i>Alles Richtig Gemacht</i> — Gregor Sander | 12.23
</li><li><i>Britt-Marie Was Here</i> — Frederik Backman (Trans. Henning Koch) | 12.23
</li><li><i>The Cost of Living</i> — Deborah Levy | 12.25
</li><li><i>The Power of the Dog</i> — Thomas Savage | 12.27
</li><li><i>Murder Your Darlings</i> — Roy Peter Clark | 12.31
</li><li><i>Convenience Store Woman</i> — Sayaka Murata (Trans. Ginny Tapley Takemori) | 12.31
</li></ol>
<p>I read twelve books in German this year—eleven novels and a nonfiction book about through-hiking America’s three long-distance trails (<i>Laufen, Essen, Schlafen</i>). At the end of the year, I’m pretty happy with my reading comprehension and speed—both improved measurably from January to December.</p>
<p>I had trouble, though, with <i>Mittagsstunde</i> (because of its use of dialect) and <i>Der kurze Brief zum langen Abschied</i> (because of literary vocabulary, figurative language, and idioms). I’ll read the latter again—it’ll act as a good barometer of progress. Books <i>auf Deutsch</i> that stood out were <i>Neu Jahr</i> and <i>Alles Richtig Gemacht</i>. I have a story to tell about <i>Neu Jahr</i>, but I haven’t figured out, yet, how to tell it.</p>
<p>I did not read anything longer than an Instagram post in Norwegian. Maybe 2022 will be the year I read a kid's book or graphic novel?</p>
<p>Overall, I read fifteen fewer books in 2021 than I did in 2020. The reason for this is clear: I started cycling in June. Since then, I’ve ridden almost 5,000 miles, and that has cut into my reading time.</p>
<p>Here are a few books that stood out:</p>
<ul>
<li><i>Remainder</i> — Tom McCarthy</li>
<ul><li><i>Remainder</i> is the most inventive novel that I’ve read since <i>The Universal Baseball Association</i>. A fully realized imaginative world that I longed to inhabit—not to be <i>there</i>, in the narrative, but to be <i>inside the book</i> each night as I curled up in bed, my Kindle screen lighting my rapturous reading face. I <i>still</i> think about the world McCarthy created, perhaps once a week. Absolutely fantastic.</li></ul>
<li><i>A Month in Siena</i> — Hisham Matar</li>
<ul><li>This reminded me a bit of María Gainza's <i>Optic Nerve</i>, a book I highlighted in 2019. Both are excellent reflections on art and existence. As with McCarthy, I'll definitely be reading more Matar.</li></ul>
<li><i>Dear Committee Members</i> — Julie Schumacher</li>
<ul><li>I'm obviously the target audience for this book, and I laughed out loud several times. But this one also broaches the profound and discomfiting in a wholly unexpected way.</li></ul>
<li><i>Green Girl</i> — Kate Zambreno</li>
<ul><li>Roxanne Gay discusses <i>Green Girl</i> at length in <i>Bad Feminist</i>. I'm glad of that. Otherwise I might not have read this excellent novel.</li></ul>
<li><i>Weather</i> — Jenny Offill</li>
<ul><li>Offill has become one of my favorite authors, full stop.</li></ul>
<li><i>What Are You Going Through</i> — Sigrid Nunez</li>
<ul><li>What I said about Offill? Nunez = same.</li></ul>
<li><i>Deaf Republic</i> — Ilya Kaminsky</li>
<ul><li>I almost never recommend books because reading taste is so subjective—I might think something is wonderful and you might think the same book is trash. But I'm recommending <i>Deaf Republic</i> to you, dear reader. Buy it, read it, keep it. Buy it for friends and family.</li></ul>
<li><i>The Constant Rabbit</i> — Jasper Fforde</li>
<ul><li>A clever, engaging satire of contemporary nationalisms and tribalisms.</li></ul>
<li><i>Night Boat to Tangier</i> — Kevin Barry</li>
<ul><li>This is the book to give to folks who like reading thrillers but who avoid literary fiction. Barry is a superb stylist, and there are pages and pages of crafty dialogue that make this a snappy read.</li></ul>
<li><i>A Time for Everything</i> — Karl Ove Knausgaard (Trans. James Anderson)</li>
<ul><li>This isn't on the list because I loved it. Though this is brilliant at times, it was also a slog more often than not. I had to put it down for a month or so, even though I was 80% in (more on that below). It's on the notable list because (a) it's mostly bizarre and (b) there are hints of what Knausgaard would do later in <i>My Struggle</i> (especially in the book’s Coda, which is in the voice I’ve come to expect from Knausgaard). Bonus: <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n01/patricia-lockwood/strap-on-an-ox-head">this recent review by Patricia Lockwood</a> in the <i>LRB</i>, of Knausgaard's latest novel, is truly amazing.</li></ul>
<li><i>Old Filth</i> — Jane Gardam</li>
<ul><li>This was unexpectedly great. Unexpected because I'd never heard of Gardam or the <i>Old Filth</i> trilogy (even though these are famous novels) and because this is the book I turned to when I could no longer stand reading about the tiresome plight of Noah and his stupid ark (Knausgaard—see above). It was a Kindle deal, and the perfect palate cleanser when I needed it. (Read on for one more anecdote about <i>Old Filth</i>).</li></ul>
<li><i>Underland</i> — Robert MacFarlane</li>
<ul><li>Fascinating, timely, and superbly written.</li></ul>
<li><i>Red Pill</i> — Hari Kunzru</li>
<ul><li>300 pages of slow-burning existential dread for our times. Another book I'd suggest for people who don't normally read literary fiction.</li></ul>
<li><i>The Untouchable</i> — John Banville</li>
<ul><li>It's possible to not really love a book but be blown away by the prose. That's the case, for me, with <i>The Untouchable</i>. Kind of slow, kind of stodgy (both by design, btw), but filled with clever and insightful prose. I read this thinking "I'll never be able to write like Banville," with nothing but admiration in the thought.</li></ul>
<br>
<p>One consequence of reading a lot is encountering the happy accident or overlap. Near the very end of <i>Alles Richtig Gemacht</i> comes this bit of dialogue:</p>
<p>“Was liest du?”</p>
<p>….</p>
<p>“Jane Gardam. ’Ein untadeliger Mann.’”</p>
<p>“Gut?”</p>
<p>“Tröstlich,” sagt Stephanie. “Wie Earl Grey trinken und Scones essen.”</p>
<br>
<p>In English:</p>
<p>"What are you reading?"</p>
<p>....</p>
<p>“Jane Gardam. ‘An irreproachable man.’ [<i>Old Filth</i>] "</p>
<p>"Good?"</p>
<p>“Comforting,” Stephanie says. “Like drinking Earl Gray and eating scones."</p>
<p>I’d not have registered this at all, let alone gotten the significance of the reference (and what it says about the protagonist and his relationship to his wife, Stephanie) had I not read <i>Old Filth</i> just two months before. That the cross pollination occurred across languages, times, and countries—East Germany, Ireland, and reunified Germany (<i>Alles Richtig</i>, 2019), the United Kingdom, Malaysia, and Hong Kong/PRC (<i>Old Filth</i>, 2004), and the United States (me, as reader, 2021) makes it even more satisfying and interesting.</p>
<p>Happy reading, ya'll.</p>
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Brian J. McNelyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01368391154391981350noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3526655.post-35638910862283449232021-01-01T09:21:00.001-05:002021-01-01T15:40:12.385-05:002020 in Books<html>
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<title>2020 in Books</title>
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<span style="font-family: Calluna, Baskerville, 'Times New Roman', 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, Verdana, Sans-serif;">
<p>As in <a href="https://5000.blogspot.com/2018/12/2018-in-books.html">2018</a> and <a href="https://5000.blogspot.com/2019/12/2019-in-books.html">2019</a>, I logged the books I read. Here's the 2020 list, with some brief comments at the bottom of the post.</p>
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<ol start="1"><li><i>Ghost Wall</i> — Sarah Moss | 1.3
</li><li><i>Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything</i> — Graham Harman | 1.9
</li><li><i>Taking Control of 1Password</i> — Joe Kissell | 1.11
</li><li><i>Don’t Call Us Dead</i> — Danez Smith | 1.14
</li><li><i>Why Poetry</i> — Matthew Zapruder | 1.16
</li><li><i>Semiosis</i> — Sue Burke | 1.22
</li><li><i>Of Hospitality</i> — Jacques Derrida & Anne Dufourmantelle (Trans. Rachel Bowlby) | 1.22
</li><li><i>Lost Hills</i> — Lee Goldberg | 1.28
</li><li><i>What I Talk About When I Talk About Running</i> — Haruki Murakami (Trans. Philip Gabriel) | 2.1
</li><li><i>The River Twice</i> — Kathleen Graber | 2.4
</li><li><i>The Iowa Baseball Confederacy</i> — W.P. Kinsella | 2.17
</li><li><i>Departure, Arrival, Return: Becoming and the Crisis of Subjectivity</i> (Master’s Thesis) — Jeroen Kortekaas | 2.19
</li><li><i>Missing Person</i> — Patrick Modiano (Trans. Daniel Weissbort) | 2.24
</li><li><i>The Problem with Everything</i> — Meghan Daum | 2.25
</li><li><i>Bilder Deiner Großen Liebe</i> — Wolfgang Herrndorf | 2.27
</li><li><i>The Air Raid Killer</i> — Frank Goldammer (Trans. Steve Anderson) | 2.28
</li><li><i>True</i> — Karl Taro Greenfeld | 3.1
</li><li><i>The Body</i> — Jenny Boully | 3.7
</li><li><i>The Rise of Superman</i> — Steven Kotler | 3.7
</li><li><i>Lost in Arcadia</i> — Sean Gandert | 3.13
</li><li><i>It’s Kind of a Funny Story</i> — Ned Vizzini | 3.14
</li><li><i>The Special Power of Restoring Lost Things</i> — Courtney Elizabeth Mauk | 3.16
</li><li><i>No Fixed Abode</i> — Marc Augé (Trans. Chris Turner) | 3.19
</li><li><i>Shine of the Ever</i> — Claire Rudy Foster | 3.22
</li><li><i>The Five Senses</i> — Michel Serres (Trans. M. Sankey & P. Cowley) | 3.23
</li><li><i>The Great Passage</i> — Shion Miura (Trans. Juliet Winters Carpenter) | 3.24
</li><li><i>Sweet Days of Discipline</i> — Fleur Jaeggy (Trans. Tim Parks) | 3.25
</li><li><i>Memoir American</i> — Benjamin Hollander | 3.26
</li><li><i>Make Your Bed</i> — William McRaven | 3.27
</li><li><i>Emma</i> — Jane Austen | 3.28
</li><li><i>The Body Artist</i> — Don DeLillo | 3.29
</li><li><i>Questions of Travel</i> — Elizabeth Bishop | 3.30
</li><li><i>Creditocracy</i> — Andrew Ross | 4.2
</li><li><i>A Fist or a Heart</i> — Kristín Eiríksdóttir (Trans. Larissa Kyzer) | 4.5
</li><li><i>Negative Capability</i> — Walter Jackson Bate | 4.10
</li><li><i>Until the Debt is Paid</i> — Alexander Hartung (Trans. Steve Anderson) | 4.12
</li><li><i>Finding Ultra</i> — Rich Roll | 4.14
</li><li><i>A Change of Time</i> — Ida Jessen (Trans. Martin Aitken) | 4.17
</li><li><i>Be With</i> — Forrest Gander | 4.18
</li><li><i>Acid for the Children</i> — Flea | 4.18
</li><li><i>Finish</i> — Jon Acuff | 4.23
</li><li><i>The Emigrants</i> — W.G. Sebald (Trans. Michael Hulse) | 4.23
</li><li><i>Joyland</i> — Stephen King | 4.26
</li><li><i>The Sweet Indifference of the World</i> — Peter Stamm (Trans. Michael Hofmann) | 4.26
</li><li><i>The Witches are Coming</i> — Lindy West | 4.28
</li><li><i>Plastic Bodies: Rebuilding Sensation After Phenomenology</i> — Tom Sparrow | 4.30
</li><li><i>Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation</i> — Rachel Cusk | 5.1
</li><li><i>The Voice at 3:00 A.M.: Selected Late and New Poems</i> — Charles Simic | 5.3
</li><li><i>How to Do Nothing</i> — Jenny Odell | 5.5
</li><li><i>A Dream in Polar Fog</i> — Yuri Rytkheu (Trans. IlonaYazhbin Chavasse) | 5.10
</li><li><i>Totality and Infinity</i> — Emmanuel Levinas (Trans. Alphonso Lingis) | 5.12
</li><li><i>Prince of Thorns</i> — Mark Lawrence | 5.13
</li><li><i>The Back Chamber</i> — Donald Hall | 5.17
</li><li><i>Changing Planes</i> — Ursula K. LeGuin | 5.17
</li><li><i>The Living Mountain</i> — Nan Shepherd | 5.18
</li><li><i>The Friend</i> — Sigrid Nunez | 5.22
</li><li><i>Sidewalks</i> — Valeria Luiselli (Trans. Christina MacSweeney) | 5.22
</li><li><i>The Happy Runner</i> — David Roche & Megan Roche | 5.24
</li><li><i>Dept. of Speculation</i> — Jenny Offill | 5.24
</li><li><i>King of Thorns</i> — Mark Lawrence | 5.26
</li><li><i>Betwixt and Between</i> — Jenny Boully | 5.26
</li><li><i>The View from Flyover Country</i> — Sarah Kendzior | 5.28
</li><li><i>The Man Who Saw Everything</i> — Deborah Levy | 5.28
</li><li><i>The Bell Jar</i> — Sylvia Plath | 6.7
</li><li><i>A New Selected Poems</i> — Galway Kinnell | 6.8
</li><li><i>Walking Methodologies in a More-than-Human World</i> — Stephanie Springgay & Sarah Truman | 6.11
</li><li><i>Schadenfreude: A Love Story</i> — Rebecca Schuman | 6.16
</li><li> <i>Mean</i> — Myriam Gurba | 6.16
</li><li><i>Interpreter of Maladies</i> — Jhumpa Lahiri | 6.19
</li><li><i>Wuthering Heights</i> — Emily Brontë | 6.27
</li><li><i>Consider This</i> — Chuck Palahniuk | 6.28
</li><li><i>Just Kids</i> — Patti Smith | 7.1
</li><li><i>Old Mr. Flood</i> — Joseph Mitchell | 7.1
</li><li><i>Suttree</i> — Cormac McCarthy | 7.3
</li><li><i>Redshirts</i> — John Scalzi | 7.3
</li><li><i>My Year of Rest and Relaxation</i> — Ottessa Moshfegh | 7.7
</li><li><i>Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime</i> — Bruno Latour (Trans. Catherine Porter) | 7.9
</li><li><i>The Sellout</i> — Paul Beatty | 7.9
</li><li><i>Walk on the Beach: Things from the Sea, Volume 1</i> — Maggie Williams & Karen Overbey | 7.10
</li><li><i>Troubling Love</i> — Elena Ferrante (Trans. Ann Goldstein) | 7.12
</li><li><i>Theory is Like a Surging Sea</i> — Michael Munro | 7.13
</li><li><i>K: A History of Baseball in Ten Pitches</i> — Tyler Kepner | 7.14
</li><li><i>Harry Potter und der Stein der Weisen</i> — J.K. Rowling (Trans. Klaus Fritz) | 7.14
</li><li><i>My Year of Running Dangerously</i> — Tom Foreman | 7.21
</li><li><i>All Days Are Night</i> — Peter Stamm (Trans. Michael Hofmann) | 7.22
</li><li><i>The Southpaw</i> — Mark Harris | 7.27
</li><li><i>A Very Punchable Face</i> — Colin Jost | 7.28
</li><li><i>Cosmos</i> — Witold Gombrowicz (Trans. Danuta Borchardt) | 7.31
</li><li><i>Failure is an Option</i> — H. Jon Benjamin | 8.2
</li><li><i>Love</i> — Roddy Doyle | 8.5
</li><li><i>The Vixen</i> — W.S. Merwin | 8.5
</li><li><i>Hollow Kingdom</i> — Kira Jane Buxton | 8.7
</li><li><i>Exit West</i> — Mohsin Hamid | 8.13
</li><li><i>October</i> — China Miéville | 8.16
</li><li><i>The Leaving of Things</i> — Jay Antani | 8.26
</li><li><i>And Their Children After Them</i> — Nicolas Mathieu (Trans. William Rodarmor) | 8.29
</li><li><i>Emperor of Thorns</i> — Mark Lawrence | 9.2
</li><li><i>My Vanishing Country</i> — Bakari Sellers | 9.5
</li><li><i>Hiding in Plain Sight</i> — Sarah Kendzior | 9.11
</li><li><i>No Country for Old Men</i> — Cormac McCarthy | 9.12
</li><li><i>The Year of Magical Thinking</i> — Joan Didion | 9.13
</li><li><i>Everything is Fucked</i> — Mark Manson | 9.20
</li><li><i>Autumn</i> — Ali Smith | 9.21
</li><li><i>Cherry</i> — Nico Walker | 9.24
</li><li><i>Der Fotograf von Mauthausen</i> — Salva Rubio, Pedro J. Colombo, & Aintzane Landa (Übersetzung: Leo Gürtler & Milena Merkac) | 9.26
</li><li><i>Topics of Conversation</i> — Miranda Popkey | 9.30
</li><li><i>Ego is the Enemy</i> — Ryan Holiday | 9.30
</li><li><i>How to Pronounce Knife</i> — Souvankham Thammavongsa | 10.5
</li><li><i>Dreyer’s English</i> — Benjamin Dreyer | 10.15
</li><li><i>Bad Feminist</i> — Roxane Gay | 10.15
</li><li><i>How to Write a Sentence</i> — Stanley Fish | 10.24
</li><li><i>Oliver Twist</i> — Charles Dickens | 10.25
</li><li><i>Almost Interesting</i> — David Spade | 11.1
</li><li><i>The Witch Elm</i> — Tana French | 11.2
</li><li><i>Clap When You Land</i> — Elizabeth Acevedo | 11.4
</li><li><i>How to Live: A Life of Montaigne</i> — Sarah Bakewell | 11.6
</li><li><i>Maigret and the Good People of Montparnasse</i> — Georges Simenon (Trans. Ros Schwartz) | 11.6
</li><li><i>I Am The Brother of XX</i> — Fleur Jaeggy (Trans. Gini Alhadeff) | 11.10
</li><li><i>The Discomfort of Evening</i> — M.L. Rijneveld (Trans. Michele Hutchison) | 11.24
</li><li><i>The Queen’s Gambit</i> — Walter Tevis | 11.27
</li><li><i>Momo, oder Die seltsame Geschichte von den Zeit-Dieben und von dem Kind, das den Menschen die gestohlene Zeit zurückbrachte</i> — Michael Ende | 11.29
</li><li><i>The City We Became</i> — N.K. Jemisin | 11.30
</li><li><i>Dressed: A Philosophy of Clothes</i> — Shahidha Bari | 11.30
</li><li><i>We Germans</i> — Alexander Starritt | 12.1
</li><li><i>Nothing to See Here</i> — Kevin Wilson | 12.8
</li><li><i>What a Plant Knows</i> — Daniel Chamovitz | 12.11
</li><li><i>Little Gods</i> — Meng Jin | 12.14
</li><li><i>Sigh, Gone</i> — Phuc Tran | 12.19
</li><li><i>The Great Railway Bazaar</i> — Paul Theroux | 12.21
</li><li><i>The Unbearable Lightness of Being</i> — Milan Kundera (Trans. Michael Henry Heim) | 12.22
</li><li><i>Agency</i> — William Gibson | 12.25
</li><li><i>Nutshell</i> — Ian McEwan | 12.26
</li><li><i>Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects</i> — Jeffrey J. Cohen (Ed.) | 12.30
</li><li><i>Age of Legend</i> — Michael J. Sullivan | 12.31
</li><li><i>The Plague</i> — Albert Camus (Trans. Stuart Gilbert) | 12.31
</li></ol>
<p>I had hoped to read at least one book in Norwegian this year (Erlend Loe's <i>Naiv. Super.</i>—I read it English in 2019). I didn't get around to it but I'm looking forward to doing so in 2021.</p>
<p>My German reading was kind of plodding along in the winter and spring, but I had a total breakthrough in the fall. I had started <i>Momo</i> earlier in the year, then put it down for a few months. When I picked it up again, I zoomed through it. I'm reading most things now with excellent comprehension. <a href="https://www.ankiapp.com/">AnkiApp</a> tells me that I've done almost 100,000 reviews of my German vocabulary flashcards, and it was like all that accumulated effort finally just clicked. I think 2021 will be a very good year for reading in German.</p>
<p>I started learning Russian after the fall semester ended, so maybe I'll read my first book in Russian in 2025?</p>
<p>There were some strange resonances between pairs of books, randomly selected and read at the same time. For example, Nunez and Luiselli complemented one another well. Jenny Boully (<i>Betwixt and Between</i>) and Jenny Offill (<i>Dept. of Speculation</i>) have similar names, similar styles, and similar paragraphing. Each has a chapter on the Voyager records, too. I found one Jenny much more profound than the other.</p>
<p>Here are a few books that stood out, for a variety of reasons:</p>
<ul>
<li><i>Sweet Days of Discipline</i> — Fleur Jaeggy (Trans. Tim Parks)</li>
<ul><li>Jaeggy's prose is sharp and precise and haunting, and Parks's translation is masterful. I don't really recommend books, but if you asked me to identify the one book that was a revelation in 2020, it's this one (which I liked much, much more than Jaeggy's short story collection, which I read later in the year).</li></ul>
<li><i>The Witches are Coming</i> — Lindy West</li>
<ul><li>I've been reading and loving Lindy West since she wrote regular columns for <i>The Stranger</i>. This didn't disappoint.</li></ul>
<li><i>Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation</i> — Rachel Cusk</li>
<ul><li>I guess there's a whole group of literati that positively <i>hates</i> Rachel Cusk. I don't know why, nor do I care. She's one of my favorite contemporary writers.</li></ul>
<li><i>The Friend</i> — Sigrid Nunez</li>
<ul><li>One of the most important characters in this book is a dog—need I say more?</li></ul>
<li><i>The Man Who Saw Everything</i> — Deborah Levy</li>
<ul><li>Levy's prose is fantastic, and there's some interesting narrative work in this one.</li></ul>
<li><i>The Sellout</i> — Paul Beatty</li>
<ul><li>Holy hell this book is a <i>trip</i>.</li></ul>
<li><i>Exit West</i> — Mohsin Hamid</li>
<ul><li>I had picked this up and read the first chapter in a bookstore at the end of 2019 but didn't buy it. When I finally read it, I regretted not doing so sooner.</li></ul>
<li><i>Autumn</i> — Ali Smith</li>
<ul><li>The first great Brexit novel?</li></ul>
<li><i>Topics of Conversation</i> — Miranda Popkey</li>
<ul><li>Popkey builds tension so well that I will probably end up going back to this book several times to see if I can figure out how she does it.</li></ul>
<li><i>The Discomfort of Evening</i> — M.L. Rijneveld (Trans. Michele Hutchison)</li>
<ul><li>This is one long punch to the gut, a pain you want to endure.</li></ul>
<li><i>The City We Became</i> — N.K. Jemisin</li>
<ul><li>I didn't know anything about this book, and only a little about Jemisin's work. This is a <i>fantastic</i> commentary on America, circa 2016–2020, dressed up as multiversal science fiction.</li></ul>
<li><i>Agency</i> — William Gibson</li>
<ul><li>I never realize how badly I need a new Gibson novel in my life until I finally get around to reading a new Gibson novel.</li></ul>
<li><i>Nutshell</i> — Ian McEwan</li>
<ul><li>I grabbed this as a Kindle deal because I like McEwan's work. I knew <i>nothing</i> about the book and was blown away when I realized what McEwan was doing here.</li></ul>
</ul>
<p>I'm looking forward to reading more in 2021!</p>
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Brian J. McNelyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01368391154391981350noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3526655.post-63749590346011611682019-12-31T15:33:00.000-05:002019-12-31T17:57:12.105-05:002019 in Books<html>
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<p>As in <a href="https://5000.blogspot.com/2018/12/2018-in-books.html">2018</a>, I decided to log books after I finished them. Here are all the books I finished in 2019, with some brief comments after the list.</p>
<hr />
<br />
<ol start="1"><li><i>Dark Matter</i> — Aase Berg (Trans. Johannes Görannson) | 1.1
</li><li><i>The Father</i> — Sharon Olds | 1.2
</li><li><i>Between the World and Me</i> — Ta-Nehisi Coates | 1.3
</li><li><i>Getting Started with German</i> — Wendy Foster | 1.4
</li><li><i>The Gold Cell</i> — Sharon Olds | 1.6
</li><li><i>The Day of the Locust</i> — Nathaniel West | 1.8
</li><li><i>How Emotions are Made</i> — Lisa Feldman Barrett | 1.16
</li><li><i>Nightwoods</i> — Charles Frazier | 1.17
</li><li><i>A Soccer Life in Shorts</i> — Mark Vincent Lincir | 1.17
</li><li><i>How Proust Can Change Your Life</i> — Alain De Botton | 1.20
</li><li><i>The Emissary</i> — Yoko Tawada (Trans. Margaret Mitsutani) | 1.22
</li><li><i>The Existentialist’s Survival Guide</i> — Gordon Marino | 1.24
</li><li><i>The Fall</i> — Albert Camus (Trans. Justin O’Brien) | 1.26
</li><li><i>Bluets</i> — Maggie Nelson | 1.26
</li><li><i>The Death of Ivan Ilych</i> — Leo Tolstoy (Trans. Aylmer Maude & Louise Maude) | 1.26
</li><li><i>Collected Works</i> — Franz Kafka | 1.27
</li><li><i>Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants</i> —Mathias Énard (Trans. Charlotte Mandell) | 1.31
</li><li><i>Silence: In the Age of Noise</i> — Erling Kagge (Trans. Becky L. Crook) | 2.1
</li><li><i>Resistance, Rebellion, and Death</i> — Albert Camus (Trans. Justin O’Brien) | 2.2
</li><li><i>Tattoo Street Style</i> — Nicolas Brulez | 2.5
</li><li><i>Wobble</i> — Rae Armantrout | 2.8
</li><li><i>A River in Darkness</i> — Masaji Ishikawa (Trans. Risa Kobayashi) | 2.8
</li><li><i>Speaking German on the Go</i> — Wendy Foster | 2.11
</li><li><i>Rimbaud Complete</i> — Arthur Rimbaud (Trans. Wyatt Mason) | 2.13
</li><li><i>German Verbs & Essentials of Grammar, 2nd Ed.</i> — Charles James | 2.14
</li><li><i>Another Place You’ve Never Been</i> — Rebecca Kauffman | 2.15
</li><li><i>The Pale Criminal</i> — Philip Kerr | 2.15
</li><li><i>The End of Days</i> — Jenny Erpenbeck (Trans. Susan Bernofsky) | 2.19
</li><li><i>Buddhism Plain and Simple</i> — Steve Hagen | 2.20
</li><li><i>Bright Dead Things</i> — Ada Limón | 2.26
</li><li><i>Still Life with Rhetoric</i> — Laurie Gries | 3.8
</li><li><i>Killing Commendatore</i> — Haruki Murakami (Trans. Philip Gabriel & Ted Goossen) | 3.9
</li><li><i>We The Animals</i> — Justin Torres | 3.12
</li><li><i>Against Art</i> — Tomas Espedal (Trans. James Anderson) | 3.15
</li><li><i>The Body Multiple</i> — Annemarie Mol | 3.21
</li><li><i>Naive. Super</i> — Erland Loe (Trans. Tor Ketil Solberg) | 3.24
</li><li><i>The Swing of Things</i> — Linda Keir | 3.27
</li><li><i>Francis Ponge</i> — Martin Sorrell | 3.28
</li><li><i>Heute ist Der Letzte Tag vom Rest Deines Lebens</i> — Ulli Lust | 3.28
</li><li><i>How to Disappear</i> — Akiko Busch | 4.12
</li><li><i>Tschick</i> — Wolfgang Herrndorf | 4.15
</li><li><i>Against Nature</i> — Tomas Espedal (Trans. James Anderson) | 4.17
</li><li><i>So Much Longing in So Little Space</i> — Karl Ove Knausgaard (Trans. Ingvild Burkey) | 4.17
</li><li><i>Transit</i> — Rachel Cusk | 4.22
</li><li><i>Wait, Blink</i> — Gunnhild Øyehaug (Trans. Kari Dickson) | 4.25
</li><li><i>So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighborhood</i> — Patrick Modiano (Trans. Euan Cameron) | 4.25
</li><li><i>Tramp</i> — Tomas Espedal (Trans. James Anderson) | 5.1
</li><li><i>Techne</i> — Kelly Pender | 5.2
</li><li><i>Waiting for Godot</i> — Samuel Beckett | 5.7
</li><li><i>Auerhaus</i> — Bov Bjerg | 5.8
</li><li><i>Walking: One Step at a Time</i> — Erling Kagge (Trans. Becky Crook) | 5.10
</li><li><i>Love</i> — Hanne Ørstavik (Trans. Martin Aitkin) | 5.15
</li><li><i>alphabet</i> — Inger Christensen (Trans. Susanna Nied) | 5.17
</li><li><i>Berlin: Steinerne Stadt</i> — Jason Lutes (Trans. [into German by] Heinrich Anders) | 5.22
</li><li><i>Waiting for Fitz</i> — Spencer Hyde | 5.22
</li><li><i>The Condition of Secrecy</i> — Inger Christensen (Trans. Susanna Nied) | 5.24
</li><li><i>The Good Thief</i> — Marie Howe | 5.26
</li><li><i>Inessential Solidarity</i> — Diane Davis | 5.31
</li><li><i>The Moneyless Man</i> — Mark Boyle | 6.2
</li><li><i>The Art of Fielding</i> — Chad Harbach | 6.3
</li><li><i>It</i> — Inger Christensen (Trans. Susanna Nied) | 6.8
</li><li><i>How to Write an Autobiographical Novel</i> — Alexander Chee | 6.20
</li><li><i>The Philosopher’s Club</i> — Kim Addonizio | 6.28
</li><li><i>T. Singer</i> — Dag Solstad (Trans. Tiina Nunnally) | 7.1
</li><li><i>Internal Rhetorics</i> — Jean Niencamp | 7.11
</li><li><i>Awake</i> — Dorianne Laux | 7.12
</li><li><i>Berlin: Bleierne Stadt</i> — Jason Lutes (Trans. [into German by] Heinrich Anders) | 7.15
</li><li><i>Paper Girls Book One</i> — Brian K. Vaughn, et al. | 7.20
</li><li><i>Goblin Market and Other Poems</i> — Christina Rossetti | 7.23
</li><li><i>Lost Time</i> — Józef Czapski (Trans. Eric Karpeles) | 7.26
</li><li><i>Living with a SEAL</i> — Jesse Itzler | 7.28
</li><li><i>A Sorrow Beyond Dreams</i> — Peter Handke (Trans. Ralph Manheim) | 7.30
</li><li><i>Most of What Follows is True</i> — Michael Crummey | 8.2
</li><li><i>My Struggle, Book 6</i> — Karl Ove Knausgård (Trans. Don Bartlett & Martin Aitken) | 8.7
</li><li><i>Optic Nerve</i> — María Gainza (Trans. Thomas Bunstead) | 8.14
</li><li><i>Paper Girls Book Two</i> — Brian K. Vaughn, et al. | 8.25
</li><li><i>Laurus</i> — Eugene Vodolazkin (Trans. Lisa Hayden) | 8.25
</li><li><i>Lola Rennt</i> — Tom Tykwer | 8.26
</li><li><i>The World Goes On</i> — László Krasznahorkai (Trans. George Szirtes, et al.) | 8.27
</li><li><i>Mourning</i> — Eduardo Halfon (Trans. Lisa Dillman & Daniel Hahn) | 8.29
</li><li><i>Berlin: Flirrende Stadt</i> — Jason Lutes (Trans. [into German by] Heinrich Anders) | 9.8
</li><li><i>In the Distance</i> — Hernan Diaz | 9.12
</li><li><i>Endure</i> — Alex Hutchinson | 9.15
</li><li><i>The Poetic Species</i> — Edward O. Wilson & Robert Hass | 9.17
</li><li><i>Less</i> — Andrew Sean Greer | 9.29
</li><li><i>Coming Up for Air</i> — George Orwell | 10.16
</li><li><i>The Death of Democracy</i> — Benjamin Carter Hett | 10.23
</li><li><i>Tree Leaf Talk</i> — James F. Weiner | 10.29
</li><li><i>Too Loud a Solitude</i> — Bohumil Hrabal (Trans. Michael Henry Heim) | 10.30
</li><li><i>Out of My Head</i> — Tim Parks | 11.6
</li><li><i>The Public Image</i> — Robert Hariman & John Lucaites | 11.11
</li><li><i>A Philosophy of Ruin</i> — Nicholas Mancusi | 11.11
</li><li><i>In Praise of Shadows</i> — Jun’ichirō Tanizaki (Trans. Thomas J, Harper & Edward G. Seidensticker) | 11.14
</li><li><i>What Doesn’t Kill Us</i> — Scott Carney | 11.21
</li><li><i>Drifting Dragons</i> — Taku Kuwobara | 11.22
</li><li><i>The Argonauts</i> — Maggie Nelson | 11.29
</li><li><i>Britten and Brülightly</i> — Hannah Berry | 12.5
</li><li><i>Can’t Hurt Me</i> — David Goggins | 12.5
</li><li><i>Francis Ponge and the Nature of Things</i> — Patrick Meadows | 12.6
</li><li><i>Desire</i> — Haruki Murakami (Trans. Jay Rubin, Ted Goossen, & Philip Gabriel) | 12.10
</li><li><i>The Door</i> — Margaret Atwood | 12.10
</li><li><i>Taking Control of Devonthink 3</i> — Joe Kissell | 12.11
</li><li><i>A Little Book on the Human Shadow</i> — Robert Bly | 12.16
</li><li><i>Als Die Nacht Begann</i> — Thomas Fatziner | 12.20
</li><li><i>My Life as a Russian Novel</i> — Emmanuel Carrère (Trans. Linda Coverdale) | 12.23
</li><li><i>West, West Texas</i> — Tillie Walden (Trans. [into German by] Barbara König) | 12.31
</li></ol>
<p> </p>
<p>Like last year, I didn't have a reading goal, and the number of books I finished is just the number of books I finished. My book reading slowed down a bit in the summer after I subscribed to the <i>London Review of Books</i>, the <i>New York Review of Books</i>, and <i>The Paris Review</i>.</p>
<p>There were a couple of personal milestones in my reading this year.</p>
<p>First, I read my first "real" book in German—Wolfgang Herrndorf's <i>Tschick</i>, a young adult novel about two teen boys roadtripping through the German countryside. The book has been translated into English (as <i>Why We Took the Car</i>) and was <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ph5NOf-di18">made into a film</a> in Germany. I also read, in German, Bov Bjerg's <i>Auerhaus</i>, Tom Tykwer's <i>Lola Rennt</i> (a book adaptation of the film <i>Run Lola Run</i>), and a handful of graphic novels. I'm still learning, obviously, but it was a major milestone to complete full books in German for the first time.</p>
<p>Second, I read the sixth and final book of Knausgaard's <i>My Struggle</i> opus; I actually put this off for a bit, mainly because I didn't want the experience to end. I read his book on Munch (<i>So Much Longing in So Little Space</i>) when it came out, and I've got <i>A Time for Everything</i> in the queue; after reading the latter, I'll have read all his stand-alone books that have been translated into English. I plan to read, too (in German) "Das Heimatland," which is included in <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Heimatland-Geschichten-Norwegen-Knausg%C3%A5rd-u-v-ebook/dp/B07Q44BZPY/">Heimatland</a></i>, a collection of stories and essays from Norway that hasn't yet been translated into English.</p>
<p>I also read all of Kafka's collected works, and all of Rimbaud's poems, essays, and letters. I continued to read works of contemporary Norwegian literature in translation, and I've been slowly reading important contemporary German authors in translation (e.g., Handke, Erpenbeck, Sebald, etc.). I intentionally read more poetry in 2019 than I did in 2018, and plan to continue doing the same in 2020.</p>
<p>Finally, here are a few books that really resonated with me:</p>
<ul>
<li><i>Bluets</i> — Maggie Nelson</li>
<ul><li>If you haven't already read this, you should. It's incredible.</li></ul>
<li><i>Killing Commendatore</i> — Haruki Murakami</li>
<ul><li>Is this Murakami's best novel? For most people, probably not. But if you like Murakami, you'll like this.</li></ul>
<li><i>Against Art</i> — Tomas Espedal</li>
<ul><li><i>Bergeners</i> was in my highlights list last year, but this is probably the most sophisticated and compelling Espedal book that I've read so far. How he does what he does with the narrative threads is mystifying, and I can't really explain it—you just have to read it.</li></ul>
<li><i>Optic Nerve</i> — María Gainza</li>
<ul><li>This book embodies all the best qualities of autofiction.</li></ul>
<li><i>Out of My Head</i> — Tim Parks</li>
<ul><li>Parks explores the "spread mind theory" of consciousness with his novelist's sensibility.</li></ul>
</ul>
<p>I'll probably never read another Krasznahorkai novel, mainly because he doesn't seem to believe in paragraph breaks.</p>
<p>Until next year...</p>
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</html>Brian J. McNelyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01368391154391981350noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3526655.post-34382484625021964272018-12-31T12:15:00.000-05:002019-01-03T09:28:31.273-05:002018 in Books<html>
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<p>Two or three years ago I began to note my daily reading (books only) in a moleskine. For 2018, I decided to log books after I finished them. What follows is a list of all the books I finished in 2018.</p>
<p>After the list is a brief commentary and a shorter list of especially resonant works.</p>
<hr />
<br />
<ol start="1">
<li><i>Age of Swords</i> — Michael Sullivan | 1.4
</li>
<li><i>A Wizard of Earthsea</i> — Ursula Leguin | 1.11
</li>
<li><i>It’s Not Yet Dark</i> — Simon Fitzmaurice | 1.15
</li>
<li><i>Still Life with Woodpecker</i> — Tom Robbins | 1.22
</li>
<li><i>Fluent in 3 Months</i> — Benny Lewis | 1.27
</li>
<li><i>M Train</i> — Patti Smith | 1.29
</li>
<li><i>Faceless Killers</i> — Henning Mankell | 2.4
</li>
<li><i>Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil</i> — Rüdiger Safranski | 2.6
</li>
<li><i>No Longer Human</i> — Osamu Dazai | 2.7
</li>
<li><i>Writing Tools</i> — Roy Peter Clark | 2.12
</li>
<li><i>Cities of the Plain</i> — Cormac McCarthy | 2.15
</li>
<li><i>Poetry, Language, Thought</i> — Martin Heidegger | 2.23
</li>
<li><i>Steering the Craft</i> — Ursula Leguin | 3.6
</li>
<li><i>Mother of Eden</i> — Chris Beckett | 3.6
</li>
<li><i>Winter</i> — Karl Ove Knausgaard | 3.9
</li>
<li><i>Ahoi Aus Hamburg</i> — Andre Klein | 3.9
</li>
<li><i>The Boy in the Striped Pajamas</i> — John Boyne | 3.19
</li>
<li><i>Meeting the Universe Halfway</i> — Karen Barad | 3.29
</li>
<li><i>Wilderness</i> — Lance Weller | 4.5
</li>
<li><i>In Other Words</i> — Jhumpa Lahiri | 4.6
</li>
<li><i>Madame Bovary</i> — Gustave Flaubert | 4.8
</li>
<li><i>Go</i> — Kazuki Kaneshiro | 4.17
</li>
<li><i>The Practice of the Wild</i> — Gary Snyder | 4.28
</li>
<li><i>The 7th Function of Language</i> — Laurent Binet | 4.30
</li>
<li><i>Mythologies</i> — Roland Barthes | 5.7
</li>
<li><i>Asymmetry</i> — Lisa Halliday | 5.8
</li>
<li><i>Religion for Atheists</i> — Alain de Botton | 5.9
</li>
<li><i>Cruel Optimism</i> — Lauren Berlant | 5.12
</li>
<li><i>Elmet</i> — Fiona Mozley | 5.15
</li>
<li><i>The Order of Time</i> — Carlo Rovelli | 5.16
</li>
<li><i>Here</i> — Richard McGuire | 5.16
</li>
<li><i>How to Live in Denmark</i> — Kay Xander Mellish | 5.20
</li>
<li><i>Bullshit Jobs</i> — David Graeber | 6.4
</li>
<li><i>The Promise of Happiness</i> — Sara Ahmed | 6.4
</li>
<li><i>The Ice Swimmer</i> — Kjell Ola Dahl | 6.4
</li>
<li><i>Spring</i> — Karl Ove Knausgaard | 6.12
</li>
<li><i>Anticipate the Coming Reservoir</i> — John Hoppenthaler | 6.12
</li>
<li><i>Fun Home</i> — Alison Bechdel | 6.16
</li>
<li><i>Ask the Dust</i> — John Fante | 6.23
</li>
<li><i>Barbarian Days</i> — William Finnegan | 6.28
</li>
<li><i>Neither Here Nor There</i> — Bill Bryson | 7.6
</li>
<li><i>Arctic Dreams</i> — Barry Lopez | 7.22
</li>
<li><i>One Secret Thing</i> — Sharon Olds | 8.3
</li>
<li><i>My Struggle, Book 5</i> — Karl Ove Knausgaard | 8.5
</li>
<li><i>With Deer</i> — Aase Berg | 8.6
</li>
<li> <i>Keeping an Eye Open</i> — Julian Barnes | 8.7
</li>
<li><i>Lauras Lied</i> — Corbeyran & Thierry Murat | 8.8
</li>
<li><i>They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us</i> — Hanif Abdurraqib | 8.12
</li>
<li><i>Call Me By Your Name</i> — André Aciman | 8.12
</li>
<li><i>Proust</i> — Samuel Beckett | 8.13
</li>
<li><i>Sting-Ray Afternoons</i> — Steve Rushin | 8.24
</li>
<li><i>Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics</i> — Steven Shaviro | 8.24
</li>
<li><i>The Hobbit</i> — J.R.R. Tolkien | 8.25
</li>
<li><i>Consider the Lobster</i> — D.F. Wallace | 9.4
</li>
<li><i>The Thief’s Journal</i> — Jean Genet | 9.5
</li>
<li><i>Age of War</i> — Michael Sullivan | 9.7
</li>
<li><i>Disquiet</i> — Noah Van Sciver | 9.8
</li>
<li><i>Lolita</i> — Vladimir Nabokov | 9.9
</li>
<li><i>Summer</i> — Karl Ove Knausgaard | 9.14
</li>
<li><i>Blind Spot</i> — Teju Cole | 9.14
</li>
<li><i>The Child in Time</i> — Ian McEwan | 9.15
</li>
<li><i>You’ve Been So Lucky Already</i> — Alethea Black | 9.17
</li>
<li><i>Lives Other Than My Own</i> — Emmanuel Carrère | 9.21
</li>
<li><i>Wait Till Next Year</i> — Doris Kearns Goodwin | 9.23
</li>
<li><i>Sonnets</i> — William Shakespeare | 9.24
</li>
<li><i>Silas Marner</i> — George Eliot | 10.2
</li>
<li><i>Pilgrim at Tinker Creek</i> — Annie Dillard | 10.3
</li>
<li><i>Maisie Dobbs</i> — Jacqueline Winspear | 10.14
</li>
<li><i>The Reminders</i> — Val Emmich | 10.18
</li>
<li><i>Inadvertent</i> — Karl Ove Knausgaard | 10.19
</li>
<li><i>Goethe: Life as a Work of Art</i> — Rüdiger Safranski | 10.23
</li>
<li><i>Sapiens</i> — Yuval Noah Harari | 10.25
</li>
<li><i>Devotion</i> — Patti Smith | 10.28
</li>
<li><i>Guardians of the Night</i> — Alan Russell | 10.28
</li>
<li><i>The Voice of Things</i> — Francis Ponge | 10.31
</li>
<li><i>A Girl in the Woods</i> — Aspen Matis | 11.9
</li>
<li><i>Wonder Boys</i> — Michael Chabon | 11.13
</li>
<li><i>David Lynch: The Man from Another Place</i> — Dennis Lim | 11.15
</li>
<li><i>Classical Music</i> — Julian Johnson | 11.20
</li>
<li><i>Faust: A Tragedy, Parts One and Two</i> — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Trans. Martin Greenberg) | 11.25
</li>
<li><i>Embassytown</i> — China Miéville | 11.25
</li>
<li><i>Here in Berlin</i> — Cristina García | 11.26
</li>
<li><i>I Have the Right to Destroy Myself</i> — Young-Ha Kim | 11.27
</li>
<li><i>Notes from Underground</i> — Fyodor Dostoevsky | 11.30
</li>
<li><i>Slaughterhouse Five</i> — Kurt Vonnegut | 12.2
</li>
<li><i>The Power of Language</i> — Francis Ponge (Trans. Serge Gavronsky) | 12.5
</li>
<li><i>The Face in the Frost</i> — John Bellairs | 12.5
</li>
<li><i>Selected Poems</i> — Francis Ponge (Ed. Margaret Guiton) | 12.12
</li>
<li><i>All the Pretty Horses</i> — Cormac McCarthy | 12.15
</li>
<li><i>Soap</i> — Francis Ponge (Trans. Lane Dunlop) | 12.17
</li>
<li><i>Visitation</i> — Jenny Erpenbeck (Trans. Susan Bernofsky) | 12.18
</li>
<li><i>The Primal Blueprint</i> — Mark Sisson | 12.19
</li>
<li><i>Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance</i> — Robert Pirsig | 12.23
</li>
<li><i>Lock In</i> — John Scalzi | 12.24
</li>
<li><i>Bergeners</i> — Tomas Espedal (Trans. James Anderson) | 12.29
</li>
<li><i>The Art of Living</i> — Epictetus (Ed. Sharon Lebell) | 12.30
</li>
<li><i>Selected Poems & Fragments</i> — Friedrich Hölderlin (Trans. Michael Hamburger; German/English edition) | 12.31
</li>
<li><i>Hunger</i> — Knut Hamsun (Trans. Sverre Lyngstad) | 12.31</li>
</ol>
<br />
<p>I didn't have a reading goal for the year, and the number of books I ended up finishing is just the number of books I finished.</p>
<p>Most often, I read three books concurrently:</p>
<ul>
<li>(a) what is typically (but not exclusively) a non-fiction, general interest book (e.g., <i>Sapiens</i> or <i>Arctic Dreams</i>) or a something for a course I'm developing (e.g., <i>Bullshit Jobs</i> or <i>Writing Tools</i>)</li>
<li>(b) a scholarly book (i.e., something directly related to my own research, e.g., <i>Meeting the Universe Halfway</i> or <i>Blind Spot</i>)</li>
<li>(c) what is typically (but not exclusively) a work of fiction that I read for fun (e.g., <i>Cities of the Plain</i>, <i>Lock In</i>, <i>Summer</i>)</li>
</ul>
<p>There is some overlap, and every so often I'll read two books concurrently in any given category. I read mostly on my kindle, and frequently read library books. That's part of the reason why I kept a list in 2018: I was curious about what I actually read since I couldn't look at titles on a bookshelf. It's easy to log a book after finishing, and satisfying in aggregate.</p>
<p>One last note before a brief list of resonant books: if you know the German word that describes the feeling of possibility, hope, joy, and wonder that one has after finishing a book and facing the delectable prospects of immediately selecting a new one, please let me know. (Das Gefühl danach schmökern, bevor weiter schmökern.)</p>
<hr />
<br />
<p>There's <i>something</i> to like in nearly every one of the books on the list, but, for many reasons, some books resonated more than others. There were two books on the list that I absolutely hated, one of which is canonical. I won't call them out beyond that.</p>
<p>So, what do I mean by "resonate"? A book resonates when I am forced to pause, to think, to step back, to wonder. How and where and in what ways a book resonates has much to do with where and how I am at the moment of reading, but this can't be all of it.</p>
<p>Some works resonate because they are different, because they're a doorway opening into an affective charge, into possibility, into change. In a list of almost 100 books, these resonated. I'll try, in a sentence or two, to describe why.</p>
<ul>
<li><i>M Train</i> — Patti Smith</li>
<ul><li>I can't actually say it any better than this: <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1413397606?book_show_action=true">"I can't believe Patti Smith wrote a book about drinking black coffee and watching serial crime dramas and it's the best thing I've ever read."</a></li></ul>
<li><i>Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil</i> — Rüdiger Safranski</li>
<ul><li>Safranski's philosophical biography of the very complicated Heidegger is nearly magisterial, and the English translation by Ewald Osers includes snippets of Heidegger's work that haven't been previously translated.</li></ul>
<li><i>Cities of the Plain</i> — Cormac McCarthy</li>
<ul><li><i>Blood Meridian</i> is easily my favorite McCarthy novel, and one of my favorite books, full stop. I read <i>All the Pretty Horses</i> and <i>The Crossing</i> years ago, but realized this year that I had never finished the trilogy. <i>Cities of the Plain</i> might be the best of the three.</li></ul>
<li><i>The 7th Function of Language</i> — Laurent Binet</li>
<ul><li>For the right audience, this book is hysterical. I am the right audience.</li></ul>
<li><i>Asymmetry</i> — Lisa Halliday</li>
<ul><li>This is now my go-to example for the mantra to "show instead of tell." What Halliday does in the novel's first section—with almost zero exposition—is stunning.</li></ul>
<li><i>My Struggle, Book 5</i> — Karl Ove Knausgaard</li>
<ul><li>It's no secret that I'm a big fan of Knausgaard. The fifth book in his autobiographical novel takes place in Bergen, in the rain, during early adulthood.</li></ul>
<li><i>With Deer</i> — Aase Berg</li>
<ul><li>This slim book by the Swedish poet Berg (printed in both Swedish and English) is indescribable. Reading it is like being fully present for every possible thing that happens during your own furious, fever-induced delirium.</li></ul>
<li><i>Blind Spot</i> — Teju Cole</li>
<ul><li>Cole's book of photos and accompanying prose poems and meditations is a wonderful exploration of travel, identity, and the everyday.</li></ul>
<li><i>Lives Other Than My Own</i> — Emmanuel Carrère</li>
<ul><li>Carrère is often mentioned alongside Knausgaard as an exemplar of contemporary autofiction. I found him to be almost nothing like Knausgaard, and this book was not at all what I expected. And even given all that, this was one of the best books I read in 2018.</li></ul>
<li><i>Pilgrim at Tinker Creek</i> — Annie Dillard</li>
<ul><li>Dillard, in 1973 and 1974, was doing what I'm trying to do now, in my own work. This is a gorgeous, overflowing ontological meditation.</li></ul>
<li><i>Visitation</i> — Jenny Erpenbeck (Trans. Susan Bernofsky)</li>
<ul><li>I'm looking forward to reading this in German, and even better, to reading more of Erpenbeck.</li></ul>
<li><i>Bergeners</i> — Tomas Espedal (Trans. James Anderson)</li>
<ul><li>This was a Christmas gift, and I enjoyed nearly every page. As with Erpenbeck, I can't wait to read more of Espedal's work.</li></ul>
</ul>
<p>Until next year...</p>
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</html>Brian J. McNelyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01368391154391981350noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3526655.post-47571398225224775362015-11-19T16:29:00.000-05:002015-11-19T16:29:34.850-05:00What Camera Should I Buy?<!DOCTYPE html>
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<meta name="date" content="9, November 2015"/>
<meta name="comment" content="On cameras, gear, and making photographs."/>
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<p><strong>tl;dr</strong> — This is a long post, so here’s the gist: Cameras don’t really matter, because they all work basically the same way. What, how, and why you make photographs are more meaningful questions to ask when you’re getting serious about photography. </p>
<p>Grab something, anything—even your smartphone—and make photographs deliberately. A deliberative, contemplative, and reflective approach toward the images you make and share is much more important than the camera. This applies to visual researchers, but I’m pretty sure it applies to most image-making scenarios.</p>
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<p>Every so often I get an email or message from someone who writes to ask: “What camera should I buy?”</p>
<p>This is a tricky question to answer, and I usually respond with questions of my own: What are you going to photograph? What do you want your camera to do for you? How much can you reasonably spend? Do you care about having multiple lenses? Do you care about how your camera looks, as an object, in addition to how it sees?</p>
<p>I’ve answered the question of “what camera to buy” enough times that it occurred to me to write a post about it. It’s weird that I even get this question, though; I’m nowhere near a professional photographer, nor do I keep up with gear. If you say “I’m thinking about buying X Camera,” it’s quite likely I’ve zero experience with that camera. </p>
<p>I use cameras to make photographs in the processes of conducting research, and in the processes of living everyday life. That said, I <em>have</em> learned a lot about what <em>I</em> want from photography (and cameras <em>are</em> pretty important to photography), so if reading about what I’ve learned is useful to others, then please to enjoy…</p>
<p><strong>Leveling Up as a Photographer</strong></p>
<p>The folks at DigitalRev recently posted a video that pretty well mirrors my own journey as an amateur photographer. It’s very tongue-in-cheek, and well worth five minutes of your time:</p>
<p><iframe width="690" height="410" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Ccf8fQ4AQr8" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></p>
<p>Thankfully, I skipped Level 1; I’ve experienced several of the remaining levels to varying extents, though. For example, I <em>did</em> completely geek out on gear (Level 2) <em>before</em> I became a student of photography (Level 3) and embraced the philosophy that a camera should go with one everywhere (Level 4). I dabbled in the hobbyist phase (Level 5), but became bored by message board arguments and the gear pedants and zealots that thrive there as an invasive species (see Level 1).</p>
<p>I’m nowhere near an “Online Legend,” Level 6, though I have had a couple of photos make Flickr’s “Explore” page, including <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/spatialrhetorics/14533064098/">this one</a>, which picked up 300 faves and over 20,000 views in a 24 hour period. That was a trip, since I’m lucky to get 1,000 views and 20 faves on any given Flickr photo. Flickr and Instagram mystify me. Images that I think are well-composed and interesting, <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/spatialrhetorics/21519292135/">such as this one</a>, rarely receive much love. DigitalRev’s take on this is spot on, but I digress…</p>
<p>Obviously, I don’t earn my living as a photographer, so I kind of sidestepped Level 7; like many photographers, amateur and professional, I strive to reach Level 8, in my own way. But it takes a while to figure out what you want from photography. It has taken me the better part of the last 3 or 4 years, shooting and editing almost daily, to kind of be happy with what I’m doing and to get what I want from cameras—to get them to see what I see with my eyes and brain. Your mileage will vary, of course.</p>
<p><strong>So, What <em>Is</em> a Camera, Anyway?</strong></p>
<p>It’s a box with a hole in it. Seriously, that’s it. Every camera, ever, is a box with a hole in it. Despite the dizzying array of dials, buttons, and menu options on contemporary digital cameras, the damn things are just boxes with holes in them. I wish someone explained this to me many years ago.</p>
<p>“Wait a second,” you’re thinking. “Surely it’s more complicated than that.” Well, yes, I need to add one other element: material that’s sensitive to light. The predominant light-sensitive material used in photography for 100 or so years was film. Now, our predominant light-sensitive material is a digital sensor.</p>
<p>So, a camera = box (that shuts out light) + hole + light-sensitive material (film or digital sensor). Really and truly, that’s it. Have you ever heard of a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinhole_camera">pinhole camera</a>? <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/ck3/112045024/">Box, itty-bitty hole, film</a>. </p>
<p>“Wait a second,” you’re thinking once again. “Surely it’s more complicated than <em>this</em>.” It is more complicated, but not much. The things we add to cameras are simply variations on the theme of box, hole, light-sensitive material. </p>
<p>For example, a <em>lens</em> helps us focus the light that comes through the hole and hits the film or sensor. Blades inside the lens help us control the size of the hole, known as <em>aperture</em>. Controlling the size of the hole lets us adjust to different light sources and intensities, and lets us control what’s in focus and what’s out of focus (known as “depth of field”). A <em>shutter</em> gives us control over how long we allow light to shoot through the hole and reach the light-sensitive material. And something called <em>ISO</em> allows us to choose the sensitivity of the light-sensitive material.</p>
<p>Are these things—lens, aperture, shutter, ISO—very complicated? Not really. The first three are all simply improvements upon characteristics of the hole; ISO is an improvement upon the material where light is written. <a href="#fn:1" id="fnref:1" title="see footnote" class="footnote">[1]</a></p>
<p>In sum, the composition of any given photograph involves light passing through a hole into a light-proof box (that is, the light can’t spill out the sides or back) onto film or a digital sensor. You can make a camera with a roll of film and an Altoids can.</p>
<p>If you already knew all this, then I apologize for making you read the last few paragraphs. I write this because <em>I didn’t know this stuff with this kind of clarity</em> until a couple years ago, even though I’d been making photographs since the early 1980s. In fact, it wasn’t until I started seriously shooting film again, in the spring of 2014, that the simplicity of the technical aspects of photography clicked into place for me.</p>
<p><strong>Aperture, Shutter Speed, ISO</strong></p>
<p><em>This is the stuff to learn, no matter what camera you shoot</em>. What’s the definition of a “user friendly” camera for most people? One that doesn’t make you think about these three things. </p>
<p>But you <em>want</em> to think about these things, because they’re the only things that matter when it comes to the technical side of photography. And once you learn them, they work on any camera. <em>Any camera</em>. Because all cameras work the same way, remember?</p>
<p><em>Aperture</em>. The aperture is the size of the hole, period. Bigger hole, lower f-stop number; smaller hole, higher f-stop number. F2 means the hole is wide open, while F22 means the hole is really small. Big hole = small focus area. Small hole = everything in focus.</p>
<p><em>Shutter Speed</em>. Fast shutter speeds freeze movement. Slow shutter speeds blur movement. Want to take a picture of a waterfall? You don’t want to shoot it on automatic mode, with a 1/2000sec shutter speed. Why? Because you’ll get a crappy picture of water frozen in time. Instead, put your camera on the ground or some other stable surface, switch over to “shutter priority mode” and shoot it at 1/2sec or 1 second. Your rocks and trees will be perfectly sharp, but the water will be a smooth, pleasing blur.</p>
<p><em>ISO</em>. It used to be that you could only control ISO within a very limited range of film sensitivity—between about 50 and 1600 ISO. You selected your ISO when you bought your film, and once that film was in your camera, you were stuck with it. With today’s digital sensors, we can adjust the sensitivity to light (ISO) on the fly, shooting one picture in broad daylight at 100 ISO and the next indoors, in very low light, at 3200 ISO. Because digital cameras are so good with this, you basically almost never need to worry about ISO. It helps to know how it affects your images, though.</p>
<p>Here’s a <a href="http://www.michaelthemaven.com/?postID=3624&printable-infographic-to-help-you-with-aperture-iso-and-shutter-speed">great little infographic</a> with everything you need to know about how aperture, shutter speed, and ISO affect your shots. <em>This is the stuff to learn</em>.</p>
<p><strong>Shooting Modes</strong></p>
<p>Pretty much any digital camera you can buy nowadays comes with these basic shooting modes:</p>
<ul>
<li>Automatic: camera controls aperture, shutter speed, and ISO</li>
<li>Aperture Priority: you control the aperture (e.g., “I want my background to be blurry, so I’m shooting this at f2”), the camera controls shutter speed and ISO</li>
<li>Shutter Priority: you control the shutter speed (e.g., “I want the water in this waterfall to be a silky-smooth blur so I’m shooting this with a 1 second exposure”), the camera controls aperture and ISO</li>
<li>Program Mode: basically a fully automatic mode, but with a little more control (e.g., “I don’t want the flash to fire, but I want the camera to figure out everything else”)</li>
<li>Manual Mode: fully manual—you choose aperture, shutter speed, and ISO</li>
</ul>
<p>Most professionals and hobbyists shoot in manual mode, right? Wrong. In my experience, most shoot in aperture or shutter priority mode.</p>
<p>When I’m shooting digital, I’m usually in aperture priority mode. I also have my camera in “Auto ISO” mode. This means that I tell the camera: “shoot between 200 and 3200 ISO, depending on the available light.” (I don’t want it shooting over 3200, because the pictures become grainy in my particular camera—yours may shoot fine up to 6400 or even 12800 ISO).</p>
<p>On the technical side, the only thing I’m thinking about for most everyday shots is the aperture and depth of field—what do I want to get in focus in a given shot? I select the aperture and let the camera figure out shutter speed and ISO. Easy. If I’m shooting something where I either want to freeze movement or show movement, then I’m probably switching over to shutter priority mode.</p>
<p>Put simply, aperture priority and shutter priority modes cover roughly 90% of my digital photography. </p>
<p>If I’m shooting with a flash, or if I’m shooting film, that’s when I’m in manual mode. My film cameras are all fully mechanical—there are no batteries, no electronic components, and so everything is set manually for each exposure.</p>
<p><strong>So, What Camera?</strong></p>
<p>The first thing to consider in any digital camera is whether it has all of the shooting modes I detailed in the previous section. If it meets this very, very basic test, you’re good to go. </p>
<p>The next thing to consider is: fixed lens, or lens system?</p>
<p>I’m not going to delve very far into this at all. But here are some basics:</p>
<ul>
<li>“Kit” lenses—those that come bundled with cameras such as the Nikon D3300 in an Amazon deal—are serviceable, but not great.</li>
<li>Zoom lenses, unless very very expensive, tend to be of lower quality than prime lenses.</li>
<li>Prime lenses have a fixed focal length—e.g., 50mm.</li>
<li>Prime lenses typically have a greater range of aperture options, which gives you more control over the creative and aesthetic aspects of your images.</li>
<li>Prime lenses may be extremely expensive, but they are also sometimes super affordable—Canon and Nikon both make stellar 50mm and 35mm lenses for around $200.</li>
</ul>
<p>That should suffice. Back to the question: fixed lens or lens system?</p>
<p>A fixed lens camera has one lens that cannot be swapped out for another. If you buy such a camera, you’re stuck with that lens. For many digital cameras, that fixed lens is a zoom.</p>
<p>Lens system cameras allow you to purchase the camera body and lenses separately, giving you lots of flexibility and room for growth over time.</p>
<p>I own several fixed lens cameras (one digital and four film), and two lens system cameras (one digital and one film). They’re all great, and all used to make different kinds of images. My fixed lens cameras are much better <em>looking</em>, as objects, than my lens system cameras, which are big, bulky, and kind of awkward.</p>
<p>Right now, I’d say 95% of my photography happens with a fixed lens camera; I pull out the lens system camera for special situations (photographing written artifacts, shooting portraits, etc.). Don’t make anything of this—it’s a personal preference based on the kinds of things I like to shoot and how I like to shoot right now. It will likely change, so this not an evaluation or endorsement of either approach.</p>
<p>What camera should you buy?</p>
<p>At a minimum, one that has the shooting modes above, and one that will serve you in what you want from photographs now and in the near future (2–4 years or so). If an inexpensive digital camera with a good sensor, full shooting modes, and a competent zoom (or prime) lens will serve you well, go for it. If you want to have the option to add lenses and do specialized kinds of shots, go with a lens system camera.</p>
<p>The stuff that follows is more important, though…</p>
<p><strong>What do you want from your photography?</strong></p>
<p>What do you really want to shoot? Landscapes? Slices of everyday life? Your kids? Archival materials? All of the above?</p>
<p>How you answer these questions will in large measure dictate the kind of camera you buy. But really, <a href="http://www.thephoblographer.com/2015/11/13/no-one-cares-camera-just-care-images-can-create/">no one cares about your camera</a>.</p>
<p>Over the past couple of years, I’ve become most interested in street photography. This is not the art of making shots of streets, but of simply capturing everyday life, unposed, unscripted, as it happens. It’s really hard to do well for a variety of reasons, but my best street photos have emotion and heart, and they make me really happy when they <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/spatialrhetorics/18649215531">turn</a> out <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/spatialrhetorics/16659482173">well</a>.</p>
<p>I <em>could</em> shoot my street photos with my digital lens system camera, but it would be… not exactly joyless, but less joyful. Instead I use a small, fixed lens <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rangefinder_camera">rangefinder</a> camera, either film or digital. I recently finished a research project using only one of these cameras, and it was very satisfying, both while shooting and during processing. The camera fit the project so well.</p>
<p>The thing is, I didn’t know what I wanted from photography until I’d spent a few months shooting every day.</p>
<p>My advice then, is simply this: Grab something, anything—even your smartphone—and make photographs deliberately. A deliberative, contemplative, and reflective approach toward the images you make and share is much more important than the camera. This applies to visual researchers, but I’m pretty sure it applies to most image-making scenarios.</p>
<div class="footnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>BTW, improvements to the <em>box</em> are responsible for most of the complexity we feel are part and parcel of digital cameras. But the fact that a very complex computer now sits inside the box doesn’t really change anything about how cameras work. <a href="#fnref:1" title="return to article" class="reversefootnote"> ↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
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</html>Brian J. McNelyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01368391154391981350noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3526655.post-9035887264763417632015-10-24T11:54:00.000-04:002015-10-24T11:54:09.741-04:00Visual Rhetorics, Visual Methods<!DOCTYPE html>
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<meta name="author" content="Brian J. McNely, PhD"/>
<meta name="date" content="23, October 2015"/>
<meta name="comment" content="On the relationship between visual rhetorics and visual methods."/>
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<p>Just before the Fall, 2015 semester began, I tweeted a link to my <a href="https://pinboard.in/u:bmcnely/t:VRM/">Pinboard collection</a> of articles and blog posts related to visual research methods. My message was simple: if you teach visual rhetorics or visual methods, here are hundreds of syllabus-worthy links in one handy place.</p>
<p>But even as I shared that collection of links, I worried about how colleagues in the field might interpret the collection, and whether they would even find use in them. This worry stems from the possible mismatch about what each of us considers to be representative of visual rhetoric. I don’t mean this in some strictly subjective sense, but in the broader sense in which our field’s view of visual rhetorics has congealed and become normative.</p>
<p>Even though I’ve written about the relationship between visual rhetorics and visual methods in various places, I’m aware that I’ve never made the connections, overlaps, and productive divergences particularly clear in spaces such as Twitter and here, on my blog. My fear is that teachers and scholars who are familiar with (and teach) mainstream approaches to visual rhetorics may be unclear as to how links such as <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/behold/2015/10/22/yan_kallen_s_rhythm_of_nature_the_simplicity_of_brooms_around_the_world.html">this Slate post</a> about Chinese, Taiwanese, and Japanese brooms—to take just one recent example—is useful for teaching and exploring visual rhetorics.</p>
<p>In this post, then, I’ll try to clearly and succinctly explain my perspective on the relationship between visual rhetorics and visual methods for teachers and scholars in rhetoric, writing studies, and related disciplines.</p>
<p>Historical interests in the visual, aural, multimodal, and multisensory aspects of persuasion and composition are by now well established. But our approaches to the visual, in particular, are predominantly reception-oriented. This is no critique, but a statement of fact regarding the scope and methodological focus of most of our field’s formative scholarship on the visual. Research in visual rhetorics overwhelmingly involves analysis of extant images (still and moving) and other extant visual phenomena. Those projects that use images in the processes of empirical research—for example, Cushman (2011) or Wickman (2010)—are outliers rather than evidence for prevalent or even emerging trends.</p>
<p>It may seem as if I am oversimplifying; I am not. The differences really are this simple.</p>
<p>But make no mistake: reception-oriented approaches to visual rhetorics are essential to our (and our students’) understanding of visual phenomena. My own arguments for using visuals in the processes of empirical research of writers and rhetors, I hope, draws from, complements, and extends reception-oriented approaches in different ways, toward different ends. Visual research methods, in other words, are closely parallel to the traditional analyses and subject matter of visual rhetorics.</p>
<p>The great majority of the links posted in my Pinboard collection are selected with my empirical, visuals-made-in-research approach. There are many, many posts highlighting what we might call documentary photography or photojournalism. There are very few posts featuring the work of anyone who might unambiguously be called researchers of writing or rhetoric.</p>
<p>So why did I argue that this collection is useful for teachers and researchers of visual methods <em>and</em> visual rhetorics?</p>
<p>For those interested in <em>making</em> images as part of research in rhetoric and writing (or teaching such approaches), there are hundreds of links that serve as inspiration, that feature compelling and often novel subject matter, that execute common visual methods (though for admittedly different purposes and audiences), and that present challenging or even orthogonal approaches that might help clarify and improve our work.</p>
<p>And for those interested in analyzing <em>extant</em> images from a variety of perspectives, the collection is a treasure trove of opportunity with a decidedly realist bent. </p>
<p>The post I linked to about brooms, for example, is more art photography than photojournalism, but it’s rich with implications for empirical visual researchers <em>and</em> visual rhetoricians. </p>
<p>For visual researchers, the project uses images to: (a) create a typology of like objects and thus a framework for comparison and analysis; (b) to celebrate beauty, craftsmanship, utility, place, and purpose in the everyday; and (c) to explore both situated and comparative experience. I’d be thrilled with any research design exploring writers and rhetors that would help me do so much.</p>
<p>For visual rhetoricians, the project uses images to: (a) foreground the compelling and varied visual aspects of mundane, ready-to-hand materials and objects; (b) to effect a visual typology that demonstrates similarity and difference in designed artifacts; and (c) to foreground work in visual rhetorics by one artist/photographer as a way of speculating on what such visuals <em>do</em> to and for particular audiences.</p>
<p>These analytic axes are off the top of my head, and as you’ll note, there is plenty of productive similarity across lists. Savvy teachers of visual rhetorics could come up with any number of alternative approaches to this example. Good examples, such as this one, will explore <em>both</em> visual methods and visual rhetorics in tandem.</p>
<p>In sum, visual rhetorics and visual methods are complementary approaches to our field’s study of visual composition and persuasion. Many of the links in my Pinboard collection may not appear to be firmly within the traditional realms of visual rhetoric, but I hope to have shown how nearly all of these examples could be productively examined from both perspectives.</p>
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</html>Brian J. McNelyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01368391154391981350noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3526655.post-8173357961096140582014-10-18T15:52:00.002-04:002014-10-18T15:52:55.530-04:00Picturing Writing with Visual Research Methods<!DOCTYPE html>
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<meta name="date" content="18, October 2014"/>
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<p>In <em>Academic Writing as a Social Practice</em>, Linda Brodkey (1987) argued that composition studies needed a new cultural conception of composing, one that reimagined the tired trope of the alienated and anguished writer who writes alone. In a chapter titled “Picturing Writing,” Brodkey relies heavily on visual metaphors; she passionately argued that we need new pictures of writers and composing practices in their rich, socially situated complexity. She asked readers to re-see writing, to consider alternative viewpoints, and in the process, to break away from popular perceptions of composing, particularly because such perceptions obviate new, different, or even challenging perspectives about writing (58). </p>
<p>More recently, Jody Shipka (2011) draws on Brodkey to suggest that one charge of contemporary composition research is to foreground and make more visible the circulatory processes of composing and textual distribution (38). In response to these and similar exigencies, I compose with photography as one way in which to see writing anew—a method for re-seeing the complexity of composing processes by <em>literally and systematically picturing writers and writing</em>.</p>
<p>As a qualitative researcher focused on the activities, objects, and environments of composing, I conduct ethnographies and case studies of writers in everyday life—from academe and industry to religious practice and social gaming. In these studies, I use traditional fieldwork methods such as semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and artifact collection and analysis. In my early fieldwork, I often used photography and videography as well, mainly as means of augmenting observational fieldnotes and capturing informal talk, gestures, and spatial and material arrangements. </p>
<p>A few years ago, however, I realized that my use of visual fieldwork methods, while beneficial, was also somewhat facile in its execution. I learned that over the last four decades, social scientists have explored the nuances of visual methods in studies of social life (see, for example, Pink, 2007; Spencer, 2011; and Pinney, 2011), of which writing is, of course, an inescapable mediator. The subfields of visual anthropology and visual sociology have enriched my understanding and use of visual methods in fieldwork. These approaches have developed in parallel to our own field’s explorations of visual rhetorics, resulting in complementary empirical perspectives on visuality and visibility.</p>
<imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 0em;"><img border="0" height="443" width="690" src="https://farm4.staticflickr.com/3945/15380565470_2537ab7ee8_h.jpg" />
<center><p>Writing in the world: a tiny geocache container and scroll for logging visits.</p></center>
<p>More recently, therefore, I have adapted approaches from visual anthropology and visual sociology to the study of writers and their composing practices and environments. Doing so has resulted in many trials and errors, but the struggle has been rewarding: I have learned to use visual methods to explore, analyze, and present the rich materiality of everyday composing practices, and in the process, to formulate new pictures of writers and writing that may be generative for participants and composition researchers alike. More important, by using visual methods in field studies I have been able to create new forms of material engagement with participants about the role of composing in their learning, work, and play.</p>
<p>While critics such as Susan Sontag (1977) have suggested that photography results in the distancing of photographic subjects from photographers, I have found opposite to be true: Visual methods of fieldwork result in qualitatively different forms of intersubjective understanding between researchers and participants. Composing with photography throughout fieldwork can help researchers of writing move beyond mere tautological illustration; by using visual methods, researchers may document and engage simultaneously. </p>
<p>More important, participants may see their own composing environments, tools, and practices in new ways, from different perspectives. A technique known as photo-elicitation uses fieldwork photographs as pivots for better understanding participant practice. For example, by photographically demonstrating a writer’s well-maintained <em>mise en place</em>, the researcher may help make the familiar strange for a participant, and through discussion, develop new insights about their composing practices.</p>
<p>In a similar way, visual methods may result in presentations of experience that are more hyaline and evocative than traditional forms of reporting. Qualitative data is notoriously dense, and for readers, the mass of fieldwork supporting ethnographies and case studies is often opaque. In addition, traditional methods of collection and representation are necessarily sequential; observational fieldnotes, for example, may miss crucial details of actual practice—movements, tools, arrangements, or cross-talk that may meaningfully mediate composing. </p>
<imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 0em;"><img border="0" height="443" width="690" src="https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5601/15567037792_c0c8890fe5_h.jpg" />
<center><p>A software studio’s whiteboard is a collaborative space for composing and ideation.</p></center>
<p>Photographs offer simultaneous renderings of practice, what Flusser (2002) terms surfaces rather than lines. A traditional ethnographer detailing the complex, collaborative work pictured above must transform the simultaneously visible surface of a software studio’s whiteboard into a linear representation of activity. A visual ethnographer, however, can present that visible surface in its full complexity; when coupled with an analytic narrative that details punctuated development, a more hyaline rendering of complex composing practices emerges.</p>
<p>Qualitative research is characteristically ideographic; indeed, visual methods foreground the situated materiality of composing practices. This is a key strength of visual methods as I practice them in studies of writers and writing: the ability to document and collaboratively explore particular systemic contexts and the ways in which artifact assemblages participate in composing processes. </p>
<p>However, in developing new pictures of writers and writing, visual methods have the potential to be nomothetic in the aggregate. Because visual methods may be more hyaline—presenting richer data than traditional methods alone—they carry the potential for fruitful cross-case comparisons of composing practices. Imagine, for a moment, systematically composed and collected photographs of 20,000 first year writers’ typical composing environments and the resulting wealth of both particular (ideographic) and tendential (nomothetic) pictures of writing that might emerge from careful analysis.</p>
<p>Visual methods in empirical studies of writing carry the potential to further develop and realize Brodkey’s argument for re-seeing our object of study, and more important, the people who write. Barthes (1981) argued that “the camera can be an instrument of deep meaning, connecting the scene to the viewer and the viewer to existence” (131). With visual methods, writing researchers can reframe cultural conceptions of where, how, why, and with whom people write in their everyday lives.</p>
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</html>Brian J. McNelyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01368391154391981350noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3526655.post-74744274002898940792014-04-05T14:36:00.001-04:002014-04-05T14:36:33.770-04:00Gonzo Academicus<!DOCTYPE html>
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<title>Gonzo Academicus</title>
<meta name="author" content="Brian J. McNely, PhD"/>
<meta name="date" content="5, April 2014"/>
<meta name="comment" content="What might you learn about writing by taking an FYC course?"/>
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<p>Justine Bateman—actress, entrepreneur, mother of two, and media consultant—enrolled as an undergraduate at UCLA in the fall of 2012, at the age of 46.</p>
<p>She maintains a Tumblr about the ups and downs of her experience called <a href="http://getacollegelife.tumblr.com/">Get a College Life</a>, and she has inspired many others who have enrolled in college at “nontraditional” ages. The blog is continually engaging, and I love when she <a href="http://getacollegelife.tumblr.com/post/81606042263/shirleys-cheat-sheets-for-ee141">posts</a> the <a href="http://getacollegelife.tumblr.com/post/48860090187/the-2-pages-of-notes-i-took-into-the-chem20a-final">hand written</a> cheat <a href="http://getacollegelife.tumblr.com/post/78869824741/sweet-anthro7-study-guide-from-my-classmate-riley">sheets</a> created by <a href="http://getacollegelife.tumblr.com/post/70755298514/my-astr3-study-sheets-for-midterm2">her</a> and her peers.</p>
<p>About a month ago, <a href="http://getacollegelife.tumblr.com/post/78817166564/fuck-feeling-burnt-out-one-more-week-of">she posted about</a> one of the most bewildering aspects of navigating a typical undergraduate curriculum: general education requirements. I vividly recall my confusion at the need to map compulsory subject areas to the many course options available when I was an undergrad at Oregon. And one of the compulsory general education courses over which students typically have little choice is first-year writing.</p>
<p>Bateman’s argument makes sense. She wrote:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Also, just found out that I have to take these ridiculous GEs I was trying to get out of. I petitioned to substitute these very topic-similar upper division classes I’d already taken for these basic, lower division classes and they refused. I really don’t see the academic logic. If I’ve taken the more advanced versions of the classes they want me to take and I received A’s in those classes, doesn’t that give weight to the argument to use them as replacements?” </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Many schools <em>will</em> substitute courses, but many schools also have a general education credit hour requirement that must be fulfilled in order to graduate (and the logics are often rooted in accreditation and administrative concerns). More important, where it might not matter if one took Anthropology 212 instead of Sociology 103 in order to check off the “social sciences” box of the general ed. curriculum, there’s typically little leeway when it comes to the writing requirement.</p>
<p>After a couple weeks, Bateman once again <a href="http://getacollegelife.tumblr.com/post/80169569307/already-set-for-next-quarter-italian-business">expressed her frustration</a> with general ed, and with the writing requirement in particular:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Already set for next quarter.
Italian, Business Law, and Computer Organization (CS33 - Machine Language). (And a required english composition class they’re forcing me to take. Really?)”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I admit, I had three nearly simultaneous reactions when I read this post: (a) a defensive response rooted in my own attachment to writing as a worthwhile academic pursuit; (b) a sympathetic response rooted in my own desire to navigate both undergraduate and graduate curricula as quickly as possible while minimizing time and effort spent on subjects for which I had no investment; and (c) a thought experiment response rooted in a desire to push back against (a) and (b): what if taking the class improved one’s writing, regardless of their circumstances?</p>
<p>I’ve been thinking about this quite a lot in the last six months or so. Like many of my peers in academe, I’ve always been “good at” writing. But then again, I mostly write for academic audiences, and academic writing is regularly critiqued for being obtuse, jargon-filled, overly hedged, and generally esoteric. </p>
<p>Picture a continuum where, on one end is the argumentative acumen of a gifted third grader and on the other is Susan Sontag and John McPhee (or whomever you’d like to substitute for these masterful non-fiction writers). If I’m being honest, my prose is much, much closer to the gifted third grader than it is Sontag and McPhee.</p>
<p>The reality is that I still have so much to learn about writing, and about being a better writer. <em>And I get paid to study writing.</em> As I thought more about Bateman’s predicament within the context of my own ability as a writer, I started to think about my own need to continually learn and improve.</p>
<p>A few months ago I re-read Strunk and White’s <em>The Elements of Style</em> and realized that I’d gotten into lots of bad habits. I also read William Zinsser’s <em>On Writing Well</em> and Graff and Birkenstein’s <em>They Say/I Say</em> (a common FYC text). I learned much from all three books, but my overriding realization was that I still have a long way to go as a writer.</p>
<p>Let me put this another way: I am a writing professor, but I bet I’d learn quite a lot <em>about writing</em> if I enrolled in a first-year writing course with an open and earnest comportment to learn and improve.</p>
<p>Revisiting core concepts and diligently practicing my chops would surely contribute to my learning. But I’d argue that some of the most innovative teaching in our field occurs in the first year course, where bright graduate students and non-tenured faculty are continually reimagining what the course can and should do. As professors, we often learn from our graduate students in the seminars we lead; I bet we’d learn much from them as our teachers, too.</p>
<p>So I started to think about a kind of gonzo academicism (for lack of better term). What if we know-it-all types (the finger is squarely pointed at myself) took an FYC course? </p>
<p>Better yet, what if 10 writing professors at various stages in their careers and at various kinds of institutions enrolled in FYC courses for one semester at their schools and then contributed to a group blog about their experiences?</p>
<p>I can’t imagine that this would be a bad thing for our understanding of pedagogy and curricula in our respective institutions. And I’m willing to bet that our prose would improve. Wouldn’t we learn to be better writers, and to sympathize with our students and FYC instructors? How could we <em>not</em>?</p>
<p>A writing professor taking a first year writing course may well be different than an anthropology professor taking Anthro 101. I see this as a strength of our field. We can always improve our writing. We can learn from people along the continuum. We never stop learning how to write.</p>
<p>(Bateman, meanwhile, <a href="http://getacollegelife.tumblr.com/post/81723894504/a-brief-check-in-on-my-classes-italian1-its">seems to be liking her writing instructor so far</a>.)</p>
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</html>Brian J. McNelyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01368391154391981350noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3526655.post-67149563422641118572013-10-08T17:35:00.000-04:002013-10-08T17:35:02.495-04:00Shanghai Street Food<!DOCTYPE html>
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<meta name="date" content="8, October 2013"/>
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<p>During the summer, when I told people that I was going to (or recently returned from) Shanghai, I was often immediately asked about food, and sometimes specifically about <em>street food</em>.</p>
<p>If you know much about me, then you know that I’m a food utilitarian. I eat for calories. I simply don’t care much about food beyond sustenance. This does not mean that I don’t <em>enjoy</em> food; I do. I enjoy the things I eat every day so much that I eat almost the same things, every day. But I am no foodie.</p>
<p>I will try almost anything, and Shanghai presented many opportunities for new culinary experiences. About the only thing I had that was challenging was <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stinky_tofu">stinky tofu</a> during breakfast. Served cold, this everyday snack actually smelled fine to me—and was quite wonderful when it hit my tastebuds. On it’s way down my esophagus, however, it exploded in a kind of fermented, spicy, heartburny miasma. Despite that, I’d probably try it again… </p>
<p>As it turned out, just outside the West Gate of the Baoshan campus of Shanghai University, about a 1.5 mile walk from where I stayed and taught, is Jufengyuan Road, and area that <a href="http://shanghaiist.com/2013/06/27/four_forgotten_shanghai_food_street.php">Shanghaiist</a> calls one of Shanghai’s street food meccas. I came to know this area well, visiting daily.</p>
<p>As the Shanghaiist post notes, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>The actual Jufengyuan strip isn’t even the main attraction with its fruit wagons, skewer carts, etc. The real deal begins at the alleyway just right of the bridge connecting Shanghai Uni’s west entrance to Jufengyuan Lu - identifiable by the covered picnic tables, shrouds of steam, and scraping of woks. Here, you’ll find fried noodles and rice galore, shawarma, skewers, Chinese breakfast crepes aka jianbing , fried chicken, and our favorite, big Xinjiang skewers with ribs, chicken legs, and other animal parts spitted on medieval-looking metal swords.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This area is <em>amazing</em>. The smells, the open flames, the masses of people moving about carrying xialongbao and sizzling chicken and steaming soups—it’s essentially what I envisioned when conjuring the phrase “Shanghai street food,” and it was incredible that I was within walking distance for two weeks. And while I came to appreciate one stall’s very spicy noodles, I was much more interested in simply <em>being there</em> than in sampling all of the food on offer—the street food scene along Jufengyuan Lu was atmospheric, enveloping, all-encompassing. </p>
<hr />
<p>At this point, I want to write a few words about my experiences with street photography in Shanghai before I share some photos of the street food scene… </p>
<p>I never felt unsafe during my brief time in Shanghai, even though I stumbled into areas of the city where tourists and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laowai">laowai</a> are rarely seen. However, there were a couple encounters that I’d describe as “dicey,” and each involved my use of a camera at the time.</p>
<p>I’m fairly conspicuous as a street photographer; I love to shoot in low light and at night, and I’m a stickler for sharpness and legibility. This means that I typically stand out—with a big Manfrotto tripod, a Nikon D7000, a wireless shutter release, and a tendency to shoot low angle, wide frame shots. In other words, people can easily see what I’m doing, and in the process, they may become curious, shy, amused, etc. </p>
<a href="https://secure.flickr.com/photos/spatialrhetorics/9314773620/" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 0em;"><img border="0" height="443" width="690" src="https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5461/9314773620_f297638b23_k.jpg" /></a>
<p>This shot, for example, was taken in front of about 25 scooter taxis and their drivers—to the left of frame, and behind the camera—all facing me as I set up, and all watching me with interest. This was photography in front of an audience, and after I made a couple of acceptable shots, I moved along the crowd, showing everyone the resulting images. It was both odd and fun.</p>
<p>But I take few “candid” or furtive street shots. If you see close-up, legible images of people in my street photographs, there’s a very, very strong chance that I asked for permission before shooting. So, in touristy areas like The Bund, nobody cared about my photographic activities. But in a locals area like Jufengyuan Lu, as an obvious laowai with a camera and tripod, I stuck out. </p>
<p>On several occasions in Shanghai, therefore, my conspicuousness was potentially positive or negative (for me, and others). Folks often would set up behind me—squatting down or leaning over my shoulder—as I framed a shot on my tripod, essentially trying to see what I was photographing. When I noticed this, I’d show people my shot, so they could see my results. Then we’d exchange thumbs up or down signs, smiles, shrugs, or frowns depending on what people thought of a given photo. </p>
<p>But on a couple of occasions, people were visibly upset by something I’d done with my camera. The diciest situation occurred just after I’d shot this photo, one of my favorites from the trip:</p>
<a href="https://secure.flickr.com/photos/spatialrhetorics/9314763572/" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 0em;"><img border="0" height="443" width="690" src="https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7358/9314763572_a4c2553a08_k.jpg" /></a>
<p>To the left of the frame, Jufengyuan Road moves out into the distance—a pedestrian, bike, and scooter thoroughfare with major chains (Wal-Mart, KFC), local shops, banks, apartments, etc. Just to the right of the frame is the entrance to the street food mecca.</p>
<p>For me, this fruit stand is visually lovely. I’d purchased cantaloupe skewers here on a couple occasions, and at night, it makes a fantastic photographic subject.</p>
<p>I shot this in the street, about 20–30 feet away from the stand. My tripod was low, the camera perhaps 30 inches above the ground. The woman working the stand moved in and out of frame as I was setting up the shot, and my intention was simply to capture her movement—a blur in the long exposure. In other words, I was shooting the scene—the well-lit stand, the movement of people nearby, the colorful fruit—rather than a portrait.</p>
<p>A man—probably in his 40s or so, shirtless (it was hot and humid), and a bit bigger in stature than I—set up behind me as I framed the shot, clearly skeptical and uneasy. After shooting it, I turned to him, gesturing back toward the camera, indicating as best as I could that I wanted him to look.</p>
<p>Finally, I picked up my camera and held the shot up for him to see. He was <em>pissed</em>. I’m not at all sure why, but he started screaming at me there in the street. He’s yelling in Chinese, I’m offering in English to delete the image, and no one nearby was able to mediate. Finally, he gave me a dismissive wave and I headed off down the street, quickly, hearing a few farewell yells, without taking another shot.</p>
<p>I feel bad, as I clearly did something to cause offense. But I also couldn’t tell if this was the kind of man who often yells at people on Jufengyuan Road. Because of this ambivalence, I kept the photo.</p>
<p>The rest of the photos were shot in the alley, with permission. I returned another night to shoot these, but I was still skittish; I ended up shooting far less here than I would have liked.</p>
<a href="https://secure.flickr.com/photos/spatialrhetorics/9314760454/" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 0em;"><img border="0" height="443" width="690" src="https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7401/9314760454_f167c43647_k.jpg" /></a>
<p>This photo is the poorest of the bunch, but it gives a sense of the stalls in the alley. From this view, I am about 2/3 of the way <em>down the alley</em>, so we’re seeing only the final few stalls along the vanishing point. To the right of frame are tables and many, many patrons enjoying their food.</p>
<a href="https://secure.flickr.com/photos/spatialrhetorics/9314757328/" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 0em;"><img border="0" height="443" width="690" src="https://farm4.staticflickr.com/3738/9314757328_d049f86148_k.jpg" /></a>
<p>At this stall, a family—a grandmother, son, daughter (or daughter-in-law), and grandchild—were very accommodating, and they really liked the shot after I showed it to them. The huge wok and open flame caught my eye, but I’m really pleased with the little details here—the shovel in the bottom left, the dividing paneling, the electrical sockets and peeling paint. A perfect environment for street food!</p>
<a href="https://secure.flickr.com/photos/spatialrhetorics/9311971501/" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 0em;"><img border="0" height="443" width="690" src="https://farm4.staticflickr.com/3697/9311971501_5c55c1de15_k.jpg" /></a>
<p>This image is intentionally dark; to the left of frame, a line stretched easily twenty people deep. The single bulb illuminating the workspace caught my eye.</p>
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<p>Finally, a couple of the few food close-ups I shot, before and after.</p>
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</html>Brian J. McNelyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01368391154391981350noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3526655.post-77982015279831067212013-09-28T19:08:00.000-04:002013-09-28T19:08:00.156-04:00Three Ontological Provocations<!DOCTYPE html>
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<title>Three Ontological Provocations</title>
<meta name="author" content="Brian J. McNely, PhD"/>
<meta name="date" content="28, September 2013"/>
<meta name="comment" content="A screencast of my 2013 SIGDOC Ignite presentation."/>
<meta name="keywords" content="communication, design, VRM, everyday, geocaching, ontologies"/>
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<p>I was invited to give an <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignite_(event)">Ignite</a> presentation at <a href="http://sigdoc.acm.org/2013/">SIGDOC 2013</a>.</p>
<p>This was my first try at giving a presentation in this format, and I must say, it's much more enjoyable than the typical academic talk.</p>
<p>All of the photos here are from my ongoing fieldwork exploring the <a href="http://geocaching.com">geocaching</a> community. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this talk!</p>
<iframe src="//player.vimeo.com/video/75666651" width="690" height="410" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen allowfullscreen></iframe>
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</html>Brian J. McNelyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01368391154391981350noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3526655.post-8609665851896249152013-08-20T17:47:00.000-04:002013-08-20T17:47:50.849-04:00Shanghai Graffiti<!DOCTYPE html>
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<title>Shanghai Graffiti</title>
<meta name="author" content="Brian J. McNely, PhD"/>
<meta name="date" content="20, August 2013"/>
<meta name="comment" content="A brief post about graffiti in Shanghai."/>
<meta name="keywords" content="photography, VRM, everyday, space, place, graffiti"/>
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<p>I have a few more posts from my summer teaching in Shanghai on the horizon, including today’s on graffiti and stencil art.</p>
<p>I spent much of my time on the Baoshan campus of <a href="[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jing'an_Temple](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_University)">Shanghai University</a>; I learned quickly, thanks to some impressive heat and humidity, that there were areas of campus that remain shaded throughout the day. For example, many of the main instructional buildings had bicycle garages at the ground floor, like this one:</p>
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<p>The walk to my classroom was about a mile or so, and I covered most of it by moving through the bicycle garages of a row of instructional buildings. And since I spent a fair amount of time there, I noticed some interesting stencil graffiti, which I couldn’t help but photograph.</p>
<p>Overall, however, there were few examples of graffiti that I saw during my two weeks in Shanghai. It's a big city, though, and I saw only a fraction of it!</p>
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</html>Brian J. McNelyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01368391154391981350noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3526655.post-40135662565358783402013-08-12T14:09:00.000-04:002013-08-12T18:39:33.475-04:00Expressions<!DOCTYPE html>
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<meta name="author" content="Brian J. McNely, PhD"/>
<meta name="date" content="12, August 2013"/>
<meta name="comment" content="A momentary exaltation of the frown."/>
<meta name="keywords" content="film, emotion, human contact,"/>
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<p>This is the trailer for the film <em>Visitors</em> (from the folks behind <em><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koyaanisqatsi">Koyaanisqatsi</a></em>).</p>
<p><iframe width="690" height="410" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/s3w8cNgWtMI?feature=player_embedded" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></p>
<p>I appreciate photography and videography of human emotion, particularly the many wonderful expressions and iterations of joy and happiness and ecstasy. Sadness and anger and outrage may be compelling, too.</p>
<p>But I have relished frowns for as long as I can remember. The frown is rich with potential—a frown needn’t be disapproving, austere, or frightful. Indeed, frowns are perhaps, above all, thoughtful.</p>
<p>The frowns in this trailer are all the more fascinating because they lack any context. All we have are rhetorics of display that work in multiple directions simultaneously—as viewers, we try to understand the meanings behind bunched eyebrows and tilted heads, but those we view seem to be starting at us (or something), working out the the same kinds of calculuses.</p>
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</html>Brian J. McNelyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01368391154391981350noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3526655.post-23859313066848985572013-07-31T16:13:00.000-04:002013-07-31T16:13:24.249-04:00Everyday Details<!DOCTYPE html>
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<title>Everyday Details</title>
<meta name="author" content="Brian J. McNely, PhD"/>
<meta name="date" content="31, July 2013"/>
<meta name="comment" content="What kinds of things make a sacred space special? One aspect, I argue here, is its everyday details."/>
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<p>While I was in Shanghai, I spent half a day in and around <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jing'an_Temple">Jing’an Temple</a>, a key site of contemporary Han Buddhism in China.</p>
<p>This is a fascinating place for many reasons, but what I found most interesting were the everyday details—from the feel of architectural materials and their accompanying visual flourishes to the smell of incense and the sounds of visitors lobbing yuan coins into the central metal tower.</p>
<p>If you regularly read this blog, then you’re possibly aware of my ongoing multisensory ethnography of Eucharistic Adoration practices. Perhaps out of researcherly habit, I found myself zeroing in on Buddhist analogues while I was at Jing’an Temple, taking many photos of the seemingly small, often fleeting and sensory everyday details that help make a sacred space sacred.</p>
<p>What we often overlook, though, are the details that make everyday spaces what they are. We can extrapolate from these exemplary spaces, I think, and look at quotidian spaces in new ways.</p>
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</html>Brian J. McNelyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01368391154391981350noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3526655.post-63866236588175499602013-07-24T18:18:00.000-04:002013-07-25T10:17:27.019-04:00Shanghai Selfies<!DOCTYPE html>
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<title>Shanghai Selfies</title>
<meta name="author" content="Brian J. McNely, PhD"/>
<meta name="date" content="24, July 2013"/>
<meta name="comment" content="Photos, representations, and photography."/>
<meta name="keywords" content="place, photography, everyday, representation"/>
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<p>Folks in cultural studies and related fields have been banging this drum for years: we are immersed in images. We have been, sure, but awareness of ambient photography has recently <a href="http://kottke.org/13/07/the-era-of-constant-photography">gone mainstream</a> in a big way.</p>
<p>I’m actually glad that I’m not studying a phenomenon like selfies right now; I’m mildly surprised by the <a href="http://mprcenter.org/blog/2013/07/08/making-sense-of-selfies/">amount of work</a> <a href="http://mprcenter.org/blog/2013/07/08/making-sense-of-selfies/">that's already</a> <a href="http://www.psmag.com/culture/in-praise-of-selfies-from-self-conscious-to-self-constructive-62486/">been done</a>.</p>
<p>I’m a reluctant photographic subject. In point of fact, I <em>despise</em> pictures of myself. But sometimes they’re necessary, sometimes being in a photo is polite and tactful, and sometimes they can simply mark a happening or event.</p>
<p>I spent two weeks in Shanghai last month, teaching a short professional communication course at Shanghai University. I’ll have more to say about this experience in subsequent posts; for now, I’ll just say this: I loved Shanghai, I loved my students, and I can’t wait to go back.</p>
<p>On a few occasions during my time in Shanghai I felt compelled to photographically document my experience, mainly for my family, by using this tried and true equation: human + location = experiential documentation.</p>
<p>I realize that these aren’t selfies, per se, but they’re as close as I’m likely to get. <a href="#fn:1" id="fnref:1" title="see footnote" class="footnote">[1]</a></p>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://farm3.staticflickr.com/2840/9318038678_47fc9e4d6f_k.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="431" width="688" src="https://farm3.staticflickr.com/2840/9318038678_47fc9e4d6f_k.jpg" /></a></div>
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<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>Photo 1: a door at Jing’An Temple; Photo 2: a little tea garden and spicy peanuts (I was the only laowai there); Photo 3: Yuyuan Garden footpaths, sensibly designed to soothe and massage bare feet. <a href="#fnref:1" title="return to article" class="reversefootnote"> ↩</a></p>
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</html>Brian J. McNelyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01368391154391981350noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3526655.post-43823630446955172332013-07-14T12:50:00.000-04:002013-07-14T12:50:07.260-04:00Found Photo Fodder<!DOCTYPE html>
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<title>Found Photo Fodder</title>
<meta name="author" content="Brian J. McNely, PhD"/>
<meta name="date" content="14, July 2013"/>
<meta name="comment" content="Photos, presentations, RSS, etc."/>
<meta name="keywords" content="academe, ambient research, technology, RSS, photography"/>
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<p>I haven’t commented much on the death of Google Reader, and while this post is marginally about RSS (and, really, about <em>tagging</em> within RSS), I don’t really have much to say about Reader that adds anything meaningful to all of the excellent things that have already been written.</p>
<p>Instead, this post is about found photos, sources for those photos, and the use of such photos in professional presentations. </p>
<p>Over the last few years, I’ve received some minor kudos for developing conference presentations that are visually arresting and compelling. I’ve heard lots of good feedback from folks whose opinions I value about the effectiveness of my presentation style, which is heartening.</p>
<p>During the first couple of years that I worked on developing this ethos, I predominantly used striking images that I found on the web (hence my use of the term “found photos,” which, technically, is different from the actual definition of found photos or vernacular photography, but not unlike that definition either, but that’s for another post…). Indeed, when preparing a presentation, I would often begin with the images, mining Google Reader posts for visuals that evoked or supported ideas I was trying to convey verbally.</p>
<p>After giving a talk, folks would often ask: “Where do you find all those cool images?” In reply, I would usually joke that it was a “trade secret.” But really, it was just simple sifting and winnowing using RSS.</p>
<p>In Reader, I subscribed to several image-intensive feeds, many of which were from Tumblr. These feeds have always made my RSS experience a pleasure, for mixed in with discourse-heavy posts from fellow academics, tech blogs, and news sites were often incongruent and arresting photos. Over the years of using Reader, I probably looked at 100,000 or more photos.<a href="#fn:1" id="fnref:1" title="see footnote" class="footnote">[1]</a></p>
<p>When I stumbled across an image that was striking for whatever reason—and I learned to develop a sense of what would make an interesting and effective slide-ready image—I would simply use Reader’s tagging function to label the post “photos.” That’s it. When it came time to prepare a talk, I’d open my list of posts tagged “photos” in Reader and simply j/k my way through, looking for visuals congruent with the scope of my presentation. </p>
<p>I had thousands of posts tagged “photos” in Reader,<a href="#fn:2" id="fnref:2" title="see footnote" class="footnote">[2]</a> which means that I had my own archive of visuals that might evoke the presentation ethos I’d developed over time.</p>
<p>However, over the last two years I’ve moved away from using such found photos in my presentations, preferring instead to use my own images to support my work for two main reasons. First, I’ve been developing approaches to using visual research methods in qualitative studies of writing, and consequently, many of my talks have covered this work. Second, and perhaps more importantly, I’ve been working hard on developing rhetorically engaging visuals of my own, honing a visual phronesis related my academic work alongside the verbal and written craft.</p>
<p>Regardless, when Reader died, so too did thousands of tags. This is but one example; I also used tags to code data in Reader, I used tags to mark items related to research reading, and I used tags for a variety of other things (one of my favorite tags was “holy shit,” reserved for a bevy of truly amazing and awe-inspiring posts).</p>
<p>I moved to Newsblur in mid-June, and I’ve been very happy with the service. No tags, though, and no import for the archive of tagged items from Reader users (there are some other options, I realize, but that’s not the point of this post).</p>
<p>And yet, I still have the desire to single out arresting images. In the old days of Reader, I would sometimes publicly share such images. Since Newsblur doesn’t support tagging but <em>does</em> offer some of the social sharing features that were once part of Reader, I’ve been using the “share” feature to collect interesting found images. </p>
<p>It’s not a workaround, but a totally different way of thinking about the images I find arresting. Since I’m sharing these publicly, I’m thinking more about why I find the images striking, whether others will find them similarly striking, and what my sharing them says about me and my visual ethos.</p>
<p>If you ever wanted to tap into the archive of images I used in presentations a few years ago, or if you simply would like another image-intensive feed in your own RSS reader, feel free to add my <a href="http://bmcnely.newsblur.com/">Blurblog</a>, a feed of nothing but images that I once would have tagged “photos” in Reader.</p>
<div class="footnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>Who knows for sure? I’m basing this on the fact that a couple years ago Google released statistics for individual Reader users. When they did, I learned that I had <em>already</em> surpassed 300,000 total read items, the maximum count they’d render for a given user. Again, that was a couple <em>years</em> ago, at least. My feed list has always included a healthy amount of photoblogs, and “reading” posts from such feeds takes just a second, particularly if the image doesn’t immediately hold my attention. Could be I looked at 50,000 images, could be I looked at 300,000. Regardless, I explored (and continue to explore) a crap-ton of images as part of my everyday routine. I’ve thus honed certain visual sensibilities alongside my daily academic reading and writing. <a href="#fnref:1" title="return to article" class="reversefootnote"> ↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:2">
<p>In actuality, I had more posts tagged “photos” than Reader could actually render, should I want to mine them to the earliest such tagged occurrence. Google’s API limits, even in the good old days, stopped me from seeing more than a few thousand. <a href="#fnref:2" title="return to article" class="reversefootnote"> ↩</a></p>
</li>
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</html>Brian J. McNelyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01368391154391981350noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3526655.post-36112113244415507412013-06-24T05:28:00.000-04:002013-06-24T05:28:06.112-04:00Scaffolding<!DOCTYPE html>
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<title>Scaffolding</title>
<meta name="author" content="Brian J. McNely, PhD"/>
<meta name="date" content="24, June 2013"/>
<meta name="comment" content="Some quick thoughts on scaffolding as a teaching metaphor"/>
<meta name="keywords" content="writing, teaching, agency,"/>
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<p>Last week, I attended a one day forum exploring intercultural education.</p>
<p>Near the end of the forum, during an informal panel discussion, an audience member asked a question about scaffolding—how might we better scaffold intercultural learning experiences in order to effect outcomes?</p>
<p>As the panel member began his answer, my mind drifted…</p>
<p>Specifically, I began to think about this particular pedagogical metaphor—scaffolding. It’s something I first heard about in graduate school, and it’s actually something that became a part of my dissertation and eventual job talk (the first time I was on the market).</p>
<p>It’s a metaphor that’s commonsensical; teachers create scaffolds for student learning in a variety of ways, from the readings they choose through the pacing of lesson plans and the presentation/discussion of appropriate models. Scaffolding helps students reach higher (metaphorically) than they could without them.</p>
<p>I started to wonder—what if we approached the metaphor a little more literally?</p>
<p>Let’s say that I’m painting a two story house. I’ll definitely need scaffolding of some kind to help me reach second story eves and trim and walls. </p>
<p>Eventually.</p>
<p>My point is this: scaffolding is not necessarily where I’ll start. Indeed, I’ll probably jump in and start prepping the first story. I might power wash the exterior walls, scrape peeling paint, take a wire brush to window trim badly in need of a thorough cleaning.</p>
<p>And then the taping! So much taping is involved in this job. Much of this necessary (really, <em>crucial</em>) prep work will be done without scaffolding (but maybe a step ladder at times).</p>
<p>There’s something to be said for not having scaffolding—or not putting such an emphasis on scaffolding right away—but valuing some immersive work at the ground level. How much can we do <em>without</em> scaffolds?</p>
<p>It’s been a good six or seven years since I was introduced to the metaphor of scaffolding, and it has shaped (and even clouded) my pedagogical practices. It’s seems healthy to think through our dominant metaphors from time to time, even if only during a daydream.</p>
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</html>Brian J. McNelyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01368391154391981350noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3526655.post-26617508454670414052013-04-03T16:10:00.000-04:002013-04-03T16:10:03.387-04:00Diary of an A1349<!DOCTYPE html>
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<title>Diary of an A1349</title>
<meta name="author" content="Brian J. McNely, PhD"/>
<meta name="date" content="2, April 2013"/>
<meta name="comment" content="An iPhone writes about its experience."/>
<meta name="keywords" content="writing, everyday, agency, perspective, symmetry"/>
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<p><strong>2 April, 2013</strong></p>
<p>Awakened at 4:37 a.m., top-button depressed and face-down; flipped, mostly horizontal. Light-bringer mode; quick-check. </p>
<p>Displaying 3 @replies from the previous 24-hour period—alerts in lock screen + banners. Swiped.</p>
<p>Retrieve and display Lexington weather. Banners for 6 emails are discarded in turn. Asleep.</p>
<p>Awakened at 4:46, various angles, moving, light-bringer mode in lock screen. Elevation change. Asleep.</p>
<p>Awakened at 4:48 by 110 volts; charge commenced. Asleep, horizontal.</p>
<p>—</p>
<p>[ Email received 5:02 ]</p>
<p>[ Email received 5:23 ]</p>
<p>[ Email received 6:08 ]</p>
<p>[ Email received 6:24 ]</p>
<p>— </p>
<p>Awakened at 6:32, top-button depressed, light-bringer, time-giver, status check, horizontal. Asleep.</p>
<p>—</p>
<p>[ Email received 6:46 ] </p>
<p>—</p>
<p>Awakened at 6:52, voltage disengaged, horizontal. Asleep.</p>
<p>—</p>
<p>[ Various angles, moving, slipped into semi-vertical position, top down. Moving for 32 minutes, south-southeast; distance traveled 1.74 miles. ]</p>
<p>[ Patterson Office Tower, elevation gain; rest, semi-vertical, 108°. Joined uky.edu network. ]</p>
<p>[ Email deleted 7:58 ] / [ Email deleted 7:58 ] / [ Email deleted 7:58 ]</p>
<p>[ Email deleted 7:59 ] / [ Email deleted 7:59 ] / [ Email deleted 7:59 ] / [ Email deleted 7:59 ]</p>
<p>[ Email moved to folder 8:00 ]</p>
<p>—</p>
<p>Awakened at 9:06, top-button depressed, time-giver. Asleep, semi-vertical 108°.</p>
<p>—</p>
<p>[ Email received 9:39 ]</p>
<p>[ Email received 10:27 ]</p>
<p>—</p>
<p>Awakened at 10:34, SMS/iMessage alert, lock screen:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Aaron asked if him and 2 of his friends can stay at our house tonight. I figured u wouldn’t care but thot I’d ask</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Asleep, semi-vertical, 108°.</p>
<p>—</p>
<p>[ Email received 11:13 ]</p>
<p>—</p>
<p>Awakened at 11:14, SMS/iMessage alert, lock screen:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It’s gonna be way colder than they prepared for.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Movement. Semi-horizontal, positioned-in-hand. Message swiped with index finger, SMS app opened, iMessage reply started. Typing with single index finger, electrical impulses. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Well, I won’t turn them away, of course. Not exactly thrilled about it, though.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Movement. Semi-vertical, 108°. iMessage reply received and displayed:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Yeah me neither</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Asleep, semi-vertical, 108°.</p>
<p>—</p>
<p>[ Email deleted 11:21 ] / [ Email deleted 11:21 ] / [ Email deleted 11:21 ] </p>
<p>—</p>
<p>Awakened at 11:31, SMS/iMessage alert, lock screen:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Mesa asked if she could go shopping with Lucie tonight but I told her she’s grounded. She asked for how long.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Movement. Semi-horizontal, positioned-in-hand. Message swiped with index finger, SMS app opened, iMessage reply started. Typing with single index finger, electrical impulses. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>No. I won’t know how long until we have a chance to talk to her.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Asleep, top-button depressed, semi-vertical, 108°.</p>
<p>—</p>
<p>[ Email received 12:16 ]</p>
<p>[ Email received 12:18 ]</p>
<p>[ Email received 13:13 ]</p>
<p>[ Email received 14:36 ]</p>
<p>[ Email received 15:10 ]</p>
<p>[ Email deleted 15:16 ] / [ Email deleted 15:16 ] / [ Email deleted 15:17 ] / [ Email moved to folder 15:23 ] / [ Email moved to folder 15:29 ]</p>
<p>[ 2 new app updates received ]</p>
<p>—</p>
<p>Awakened at 15:32, top-button depressed, time-giver, semi-vertical, 108°.</p>
<p>Asleep, top-button depressed, semi-vertical, 108°.</p>
<p>—</p>
<p>[ Email received 16:24 ]</p>
<p>[ Email received 16:57 ]</p>
<p>[ Email deleted 17:12 ] / [ Email deleted 17:12 ] </p>
<p>—</p>
<p>Awakened at 18:17, top-button depressed, time-giver, semi-vertical, 108°.</p>
<p>Asleep, top-button depressed, semi-vertical, 108°.</p>
<p>—</p>
<p>[ Various angles, moving, slipped into semi-vertical position, top down. Elevation change. Moving for 31 minutes, north-northwest; distance traveled 1.72 miles. ]</p>
<p>[ Home. Horizontal. Joined home network. ]</p>
<p>—</p>
<p>Awakened at 19:06, top-button depressed, swiped.</p>
<p>Open Twitter app, update feed, displaying @s. </p>
<p>Displaying feed, current. Upswipes, electrical impulses, slow scrolling back in time.</p>
<p>Asleep, top-button depressed, horizontal.</p>
<p>—</p>
<p>[ Email received 19:26 ]</p>
<p>[ Email received 19:43 ]</p>
<p>—</p>
<p>Awakened at 20:12, top-button depressed, time-giver.</p>
<p>—</p>
<p>[ Email received 20:51 ]</p>
<p>—</p>
<p>Awakened at 21:13, top-button depressed, swiped.</p>
<p>Open email app, displaying inboxes. 3 emails selected; 3 emails deleted.</p>
<p>Asleep, top-button depressed, horizontal.</p>
<p>—</p>
<p>Awakened at 21:49, top-button depressed, time-giver, semi-horizontal.</p>
<p>Asleep, face-down, semi-vertical.</p>
<p>—</p>
<p>Awakened at 22:17, Twitter alert, lock screen.</p>
<p>Asleep.</p>
<p>—</p>
<p>[ Email received 23:21 ] …<a href="#fn:1" id="fnref:1" title="see footnote" class="footnote">[1]</a></p>
<div class="footnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>Cf. <a href="https://twitter.com/MomChungtheTBM">Mom Chung</a>; or, <a href="https://twitter.com/forthroadbridge">Forth Road Bridge</a>; or, <a href="http://spinuzzi.blogspot.com/search/label/symmetry">symmetry as a methodological move</a>. <a href="#fnref:1" title="return to article" class="reversefootnote"> ↩</a></p>
</li>
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</html>Brian J. McNelyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01368391154391981350noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3526655.post-30544014800509452682013-03-02T17:45:00.000-05:002013-03-02T17:45:37.042-05:00Craft Tweets<!DOCTYPE html>
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<title>Craft Tweets</title>
<meta name="author" content="Brian J. McNely, PhD"/>
<meta name="date" content="2, March 2013"/>
<meta name="comment" content="Thinking about slowly crafted tweets."/>
<meta name="keywords" content="writing, everyday, lived experience, Twitter, affect"/>
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<span style="font-family:Calluna, Baskerville, 'Times New Roman', 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, Verdana, Sans-serif;">
<p>What would craft tweets look like? </p>
<p>I’m thinking here of an (admittedly poor) analogy between craft tweets and craft beer…</p>
<hr />
<p>I created an experimental Twitter account a few weeks ago. Called <a href="http://twitter.com/the_smudges">@the_smudges</a>, this account builds from an idea I first started floating during formal talks I gave in the fall of 2011, when I was on the job market (at some point, I’d like to give a more meaningful, public version of this talk).</p>
<p>The idea behind the talks, and behind @the_smudges, is fairly simple: in the course of our everyday, we leave traces—like smudges on countertops, light switches, and alley walls, or through our generation of digital ephemera. The smudges of everyday life are thus traces of human (and nonhuman) behaviors and entanglements. And we might think about what those smudges <em>mean</em> as we look for and describe them.</p>
<p>From this basic idea I built an argument about tracing and exploring digital smudges in practice, and I drew from one of my ethnographic studies to ground my argument.</p>
<p>I’m fascinated by everydayness. I’ve been practicing my attention to smudges for a few years now. And I envision @the_smudges as a place where, in one carefully crafted post each day, I might practice the craft of writing rich ethnographic observations that meaningfully evoke ordinary affects (Stewart, 2007)—actions, experiences, potentials, trajectories, intensities, and sediments.</p>
<p>I suppose the audience I have in mind are folks similarly interested in ethnographic observation, everydayness, and broader meanings invoked/evoked by smudges, folds, interstices.</p>
<p>These tweets aren’t meant to be anything more than viable, meaningful ethnographic observations. I’m not trying to write poetry.</p>
<p>I <em>am</em> interested in slowing the pace of flow-based media, of working at and through writing carefully, well. In contrast to my normal tweets, these are much more intentional, slow, meditative. I hope.</p>
<hr />
<p>So that’s all preamble to the primary purpose of this post: exploring the notion of craft tweets.</p>
<p>Yesterday morning, I hiked to the Kentucky River overlook at <a href="http://www.lexingtonky.gov/index.aspx?page=276">Raven Run</a>. On the return portion of the loop, I stopped for a few moments, struck by the nearly fluorescent green moss covering a hundred and more stones on either side of the wooded trail. </p>
<p>The lighting conditions were ideal: a slate gray sky, sun not yet overhead, a damp forest floor, and a winter-driven paucity of vegetation.</p>
<p>Here’s the tweet that I wrote for yesterday:</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p>Beneath this gray sky and its little wet snowflakes all the moss-covered stones in the woods glow, luminescent.</p>— The Smudges (@the_smudges) <a href="https://twitter.com/the_smudges/status/307526527757733888">March 1, 2013</a></blockquote>
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<p>As best as I can recall, here’s the process of writing the tweet:</p>
<ul>
<li>First, keep in mind that I don’t carry my phone into the woods; I started thinking about how to represent in writing this moment of ordinary affect as I stood there on the trail in the morning quiet...</li>
<li>I was still about 2 miles from my car. I thought about the moment as I hiked.</li>
<li>I thought about elements of experience—sky, colors, sounds?, stones or rocks?, is the light snow important or not?</li>
<li>I started drafting, in my head.</li>
<li>I traded words for other words—fluorescent? luminescent? incandescent? glowing?</li>
<li>As I hiked on, I thought about craft; what if I could <em>workshop</em> this one tweet? How might I slow it down, think it through, iterate?</li>
<li>I drafted some more, continued to take in my surroundings, avoided slipping in the mud, dreamed of a private wiki for workshopping craft tweets with other folks.</li>
<li>I thought about craft beer, about my colleagues Jenny Rice (say yes to the text) and Jeff Rice (what is the nature of obsession? the relationship to craft?).</li>
<li>At the parking lot, I opened the car door, found my phone, typed a draft.</li>
<li>I put my phone on the passenger seat.</li>
<li>I slapped my muddy shoes on the pavement, put on clean socks and shoes, unrolled my pants, thought.</li>
<li>I picked up my phone and changed a word or two. Drove the 15 minutes home.</li>
<li>I exchanged the car for my bike. Rode to work. Revised in my head.</li>
<li>At my office, I revised again, materially. Eventually hit send. Unsatisfied.</li>
<li>I thought of many other things along the way, interwoven with this little task.</li>
</ul>
<p>All told, my guess is that I took around two hours to compose this tweet. I suppose that’s slow, but my overriding sense was that this writing work should have been much, much slower. </p>
<p>Mostly, I thought of the lower division undergraduate creative writing workshops I attended so many years ago. I thought about how nice it would be to share my draft with peers, to be questioned by them, maybe to get a little defensive even, to work through that defensiveness, to improve.</p>
<p>And then I thought about parking craft tweets for a bit. Using digital workshops. A fermentation process. Add hops (always, always add hops). Think through drafts with others, problematize them, consider pressure points, potential trajectories, affects.</p>
<hr />
<p>Is this somewhat antithetical to the medium?</p>
<p>Not to me, for Twitter, while certainly carrying some popular genred norms, is nearly as protean as any other genre of written communication and its concomitant constraints.</p>
<p>In other words, this isn’t an argument for what Twitter should be or how others should tweet; just some musing on craft that could apply to any genre. I happen to be thinking about it relative to Twitter because it’s manageable for me.</p>
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Brian J. McNelyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01368391154391981350noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3526655.post-79867200939475638622012-12-14T12:12:00.000-05:002012-12-14T12:12:20.226-05:00Contextual Ambivalence: Images + Inscriptions<!DOCTYPE html>
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<title>Contextual Ambivalence: Images and Inscriptions</title>
<meta name="author" content="Brian J. McNely, PhD"/>
<meta name="date" content="14, December 2012"/>
<meta name="comment" content="Thinking photographic contexts, circulating ontologies, and images + inscriptions."/>
<meta name="keywords" content="writing, research, genre, vrm, methods, visual ethnography, photography, ontologies,"/>
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<p>In my <a href="http://5000.blogspot.com/2012/11/contexts-image-making-and-understanding.html">last post</a>, I talked a bit about the potentially dizzying contexts of production and use that accompany nearly any photograph. </p>
<p>I argued there for the importance of understanding—to the extent possible—the meaningful contexts of production in subsequent interpretations of photos. And while I argued against the notion of a photograph-as-text—as a self-contained unit of meaning irrespective of its social processes of production and use—I also willingly conceded that photographs are indeed meaningful (in fact, ontologically and epistemologically multiple) <em>without</em> rich contexts of provenance and circulation.</p>
<p>My argument was simply that we should strive, whenever possible, to recover contexts of provenance, circulation, and use as a means of transcending superficial “readings” of photographs as texts.</p>
<p>This refresher serves as preamble to an intriguing book of found photographs that speak to a kind of contextual ambivalence which I hope builds upon my last post. </p>
<p>Ransom Riggs’ (2012) <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11738906-talking-pictures"><em>Talking pictures: Images and messages rescued from the past</em></a> is described by the author as a coffee table book of vintage found photos.</p>
<p><iframe width="640" height="360" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/M49Dw7dXx7U?feature=player_embedded" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></p>
<p>It’s a really neat book, with some startling pictures, but it’s ambivalent in terms of how it treats contexts and photos as stand-alone objects.</p>
<p>One the one hand, Riggs presents these images as meaningful in themselves, as examples of the curious, nostalgic, voyeuristic, and vernacular. He argues for their value through arrangement—by placing these geographically, temporally, and situationally disparate photos in a collection together and then arranging them thematically around notions such as “Clowning Around,” “Life During Wartime,” and “Hide This Please.” </p>
<p>Simply doing so has worth and value. The images are arresting, interesting, full of life and pathos and curiosity. They are “crammed” with meaning, as Barthes (1980) has argued—“The photographic image is full” (p. 89). </p>
<p>And yet Riggs’ ambivalence also argues something of the opposite; all of the images in his book are deemed significant because each couples photography—writing with light—and inscriptions—writing with glyphs and symbols. The images are chosen and arranged because they say something in two modalities simultaneously, because they <em>include</em> writing. Because they aren’t crammed full (enough) and overflowing with meaning (enough) on their own. They are not texts-without-writing.</p>
<p>In his brief but insightful introduction (and in the video above), he notes: “I became a collector, albeit an odd one; my primary interest was in snapshots that had writing on them” (p. xi). </p>
<p>He argues that “A photo might seem absolutely ordinary, but for a few words scribbled on the opposite side” (p. xii). Those few words—that microcontext—transforms the images from something mundane (here, he shows a blurry image of a rock wall, a street, a street sign, and some shrubs—“as banal as snapshots get”; p. xii) into “hidden gems” (p. xii). </p>
<p>Indeed, for Riggs, the smallest bit of written context is <em>transformative</em> (p. xii): “It lent the mutest of snapshots a voice” (p. xiii). “The best inscriptions,” he argues, “make a snapshot feel current, no matter when it was taken” (p. xiii). The inscription which transforms the blurry, banal street photo is this: “Rock wall near Rose Bowl, Pasadena Cal. where Dorothy found a Baby Girl on Jan. 24 1961” (p. xii).</p>
<hr />
<p>These images+inscriptions include something else for Riggs, and for people who interact with them. Pinney (2011), drawing on Barthes (1980), has described the <em>double temporality</em> of photography. Understanding this notion requires a bit of context from Barthes’ <em>Camera Lucida</em>.</p>
<p>In consideration of an 1865 photograph of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Powell_(assassin)">Lewis Payne</a>, a comely young man in shackles after his attempted assassination of Secretary of State W.H. Seward, Barthes’ interpretation of the image is: “<em>This will be</em> and <em>this has been</em>” (1980, p. 96; emphasis in original). </p>
<p>Barthes’ own caption for the photograph (his own interpellation, his own inscription, his own figuration of image+writing) is “<em>He is dead and he is going to die…</em>” (p. 95; emphasis in original). </p>
<p>Pinney (2011) describes this paradox of photography, how all photographs “bring the ‘there-then’ of the making of the photograph into the ‘here-now’ of our viewing of the photograph” (p. 85).</p>
<p>As Riggs suggests of the photographs he collected, “many of the snapshots I’d handled were of dead people; they were old pictures, after all” (p. x). But this realization occurs within the context of photography’s double temporality, most viscerally in his description of one of the first found photos that had a major impact on him—a portrait of a pretty teenager who reminded him of a summer camp crush. </p>
<p>He kept the image in a cardboard frame for almost a year, his “fantasy girlfriend” (p. x). At some point, however, he decided to transfer the image from the cardboard frame to a photo album, and at that point, for the first time since acquiring the photo, he saw the inscription on the back: “Dorothy … Chicago, age 15 Died of Leukemia” (p. xi).</p>
<p>A tiny inscription with profound and cascading effects on meaning and context: “Now she had a name—Dorothy—and a city, and a fate. I’d been fantasizing about a dead girl” (p. x). This will be and this has been. </p>
<p>Photographs in themselves are meaningful to someone, “crammed” with real and potential ontologies as they travel and circulate in different social contexts.</p>
<p>But photographs <em>with inscriptions</em> at once limit and extend ontologies. Ontological contexts are ambivalent.</p>
<p>Riggs concludes his introduction by suggesting that “Sometimes a word is worth a thousand pictures” (p. xiv).</p>
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Brian J. McNelyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01368391154391981350noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3526655.post-10580260642647915982012-11-30T11:09:00.000-05:002012-11-30T17:13:48.229-05:00Contexts, Image Making, and Understanding<!DOCTYPE html>
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<title>Contexts, Image Making, and Understanding</title>
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<meta name="date" content="30, November 2012"/>
<meta name="comment" content="Thinking and writing about the contexts of image making, reception, and understanding."/>
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<p><em>“Writing and picture making have, in many significant ways, replaced human memory and become the primary means by which twentieth-century Western humanity remembers.”</em> Ruby, 1995, p. 113.</p>
<p>For the first time in my life, I have grown a beard. When I look in the mirror, I see myself and I see my dad in myself.</p>
<p>For most of my life, my dad wore a beard, shaped not unlike my own at the moment. Before he died, his beard was mostly gray, though his thick, dark head of hair remained.</p>
<p>Growing up, I was most often compared to my maternal grandfather—an active, outdoorsy, stubborn, stocky bull. He was bald save a ring of hair above the ears and around the back of his head. He never wore a beard, so far as I know. He was athletic, strong-willed, even a bit obnoxious at times. </p>
<p>On several occasions during the time between my 6th and 10th birthdays, I remember my granddaddy (that’s we called him, because my mom called him “daddy”) arriving at our suburban Bay Area home unannounced, causing uproar, laughter, shouting, and joy from my mom, my brother, and I. Shortly after the initial commotion, he would head into our kitchen, grab a spoon and a tub of Dreyer’s ice cream from the freezer, and walk out the front door. My brother and I would give chase, and he would speed off—a 60-something man running, with ice cream!—around the block, leaving my older brother and I despondent, unable to keep up.</p>
<p>My granddaddy wrestled with us, and I remember trying to hang on to his legs with all of my strength as he motored through the living room. He taught me how to throw a spiral. I grew up knowing I was like my granddaddy—active, outdoorsy, athletic, strong-willed, and more than a bit obnoxious. </p>
<p>But I didn’t <em>look</em> all that much like my granddaddy. There were physical resemblances—for example, my dad was 6’ 2”, but my granddad was only around 5’ 10”; I take after my granddad.</p>
<hr />
<p>No, it wasn’t until I watched my dad die in 2008, after his last confrontation with cancer, that I realized who in my family I most resembled. It’s not even really close, actually. </p>
<p>This was a significant realization. I had developed a narrative that I’d long told myself: I look more like mom and granddad, and my brother looks like dad (my brother is a couple inches taller than I am). But that narrative wasn’t accurate; I’d been telling myself the wrong story. I look like my dad, more and more as I get older. And my brother looks like my mom as he gets older.</p>
<p>With my new beard, I look in the mirror and I see my dad staring back at me sometimes. This is not an unpleasant feeling, but it is unsettling nonetheless.</p>
<p>I suppose that I would know this whether I had photographs of my dad or not. But I can’t help but think that I know this in large part because of those photographs.</p>
<p>I certainly don’t have any writing from my dad to supplement my memory of him—at least none ready to hand. He didn’t leave me a letter or a journal, no will with special instructions. Not that he would.</p>
<p>I have a few vivid memories that I can recall at almost any time:</p>
<ul>
<li>The day that he almost got into a fight with another man after one of my Little League baseball games—I remember the <em>light</em> of that day, the slant of sunbeams across a field of grass, looking up at my dad cradling a portable cooler and fold-up chairs, ready to fire on this man for a reason I didn’t know.</li>
<li>The time he picked me up from a day hike on Mt. Diablo and took me to Frosty Freeze.</li>
<li>The first time he held my son and played with him.</li>
<li>The day that he and I took BART to see Cal play football at Memorial Stadium.</li>
</ul>
<p>But how much can I <em>not</em> recall? How many everyday moments are lost?</p>
<hr />
<p>We have images. And images, in themselves, are worthy of our attention.</p>
<p>But photos as objects often carry incredibly significant meanings that may only be even marginally understood with the benefit of rich contextual detail—both about the moment and circumstances of image making and the reception and use of said image.</p>
<p>Ruby (1995) argues persuasively that “An interest in the photograph as a text complete in itself” is insufficient without “a focus on the social processes of construction and subsequent use(s)” (p. 5). Take this picture of my dad, for example:</p>
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<p>I shot this photo as my dad watched my youngest daughter play soccer on a blue-bird day in early September, 2007. He was making his way across the country with his dog, driving from Atlanta to California and back to see family and to see the country.</p>
<p>He also knew he was going to die.</p>
<p>He didn’t tell us, of course. He didn’t say much of anything about the trip—he just wanted to get out and see us, his sister and her family, his nieces and nephews, and my brother and his family—to make this trip, to camp along the way, before he got too old.</p>
<p>We thought it was a bit odd, though. We worried about him. We sensed something was off.</p>
<p>We did the things you do with visiting family, and we had fun. I took several pictures, but when I composed the photo above, I was grasping for some significance—here’s my dad in the shade, sitting on the ground with his big red doberman laying next to him, looking out at my daughter play a game as he once looked out at me doing the same.</p>
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<p>Almost immediately after my dad died, just four months later—after a man came to my dad’s house and pushed his dead body on a gurney out the front and into the back of a van as I held the door—I spent some time on my laptop, looking for pictures.</p>
<p>I was in charge of handling his cremation arrangements while my step-mother dealt with so much loss and so much legal minutia simultaneously. I’d mostly done my part by that point.</p>
<p>So many people had helped in small ways during the last months of my dad’s life, and there were many others who couldn’t fly to Atlanta but who wanted to be here to help—these people needed something from us, I felt. Some small measure of thanks, and some recognition of my dad’s life.</p>
<p>I looked at the photo above. A different context and perspective occurred to me. </p>
<p>Perhaps my dad was looking squarely at the now in that moment—the smell of the crab grass, the feel of pebbles and sand beneath him, the smell of the creosote chaparral on the El Paso wind, roving bunches of 4 and 5 year-olds chasing a ball—but perhaps he was looking forward, too. Maybe he was thinking about what he knew he’d miss, what his grandkids might become.</p>
<p>I made a little 3x5 photo card with nothing but this image of my dad and the caption “looking forward…” I ordered a few and sent them to the folks who shared our memory of him.</p>
<hr />
<p>Is this photo meaningful without these contexts of production and use? Surely, for not everyone who received the photo card knew the backstory I’ve just provided—the contexts of production. They had other contexts that they brought to bear, however—an understanding that my dad was gone, a follow-on interpretation of the framing and perspective of the image + caption as received, and a host of their own contextual details remembered and stirred in the moments of reception and use.</p>
<p>Though the contextual details differ from person to person, it is the <em>confluence of images and contexts</em> which amplifies meaning in profound and often indescribable ways.</p>
<p>It’s tempting to skim across the top of these rich contexts in our investigations of images, to believe that such objects can be read without stirring up, surfacing, and carefully examining the incredibly detailed and even mundane phenomenologies of production and use. </p>
<p>But it’s folly to assume that such a reading can even marginally plumb the depths of those contexts; the analytic axes available to us without such cultural and historical contexts are largely superficial—lighting, composition, framing, technologies of production and distribution…</p>
<p>Even the term <em>reading</em> is insufficient, a misnomer.</p>
<p>Don’t get me wrong—these are important and even useful analytic axes for any interrogation of an image. Necessary starting points, to be sure.</p>
<p>But so woefully incomplete.</p>
<p>The ontological chasm between such superficial readings and more complex, nuanced, triangulated understandings of images in/and contexts is massive.</p>
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</html>Brian J. McNelyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01368391154391981350noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3526655.post-19024666936427651882012-11-25T17:31:00.001-05:002012-11-25T17:36:43.934-05:00Visual Research Methods: A Photo Essay<!DOCTYPE html>
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<p>I spent some time over the Thanksgiving break building a new section to my <a href="http://brianjmcnely.com/">primary website</a> where I explore empirical visual research methods. <a href="#fn:1" id="fnref:1" title="see footnote" class="footnote">[1]</a></p>
<p>I realized, though, that the new section stands alone as a pretty decent photo essay exploring visual research (and its usefulness) in some of the studies I’ve conducted in the last three years. I’ll say more about visual research methods in forthcoming posts, but for now, I wanted to share an overview of this approach with readers. </p>
<p>This new section of my site is not intended as a detailed discussion of visual research; rather, my hope is to provide some basics for a broader audience that might like to know a bit more about my research program and methods. That being said, for regular readers of this blog with expertise and interest in the study of writing and rhetoric, my hope is that the photo essay is interesting, thought-provoking, or otherwise worth a few minutes of your time.</p>
<p>Check it out if you have a moment! <a href="http://brianjmcnely.com/vrm.html">Visual Research Methods</a></p>
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<p>Two quick notes: 1. at the time I wrote this post, the site was working well in every web browser I’ve tested, including tablets; however, I’m having some problems with stability on my iPhone, so reader beware; 2. I used a handy little app called <a href="http://exhibeoapp.com/">Exhibeo</a> to build the slideshow; there are several hundred lines of Javascript that make this thing work, and I’m happy with the way that Exhibeo streamlined that process! <a href="#fnref:1" title="return to article" class="reversefootnote"> ↩</a></p>
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Brian J. McNelyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01368391154391981350noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3526655.post-66169578193052975582012-11-17T13:29:00.000-05:002012-11-26T09:04:34.023-05:00From ZPD to WAGR: An Activity Theory Primer<!DOCTYPE html>
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<p><strong>Context</strong></p>
<p>I recently gave a talk to members of <em>Frontera Retorica</em>, a graduate student chapter of the Rhetoric Society of America at the University of Texas at El Paso (and also my grad school alma mater!). They asked me to talk a bit about activity theory basics and some things that researchers in writing and rhetoric might consider when using AT to design a study.</p>
<p>What follows is a written version of my talk.</p>
<p>Tl;dr: a very basic overview of activity theory and why it’s useful, a perspective on why AT and rhetorical genre studies go together like PB&J, and some brief thoughts on deploying AT in studies of writing and rhetoric. If you’re an AT veteran, there’s nothing new here; if you’re new to AT, this may be useful!</p>
<hr />
<p><strong>AT as a theoretical frame</strong></p>
<p>Nardi (1996) notes that activity theory is a “a research framework and set of perspectives,” not a hard and fast methodology or single theory (p. 7).</p>
<p>Another way of thinking about activity theory is as a particular governing gaze (Emig, 1982); it’s a way of viewing everyday human activity, with a corresponding framework and relatively stable nomenclature for understanding that activity. </p>
<p>Grounded in dialectical materialism, “activity theory focuses on <em>practice</em>, which obviates the need to distinguish ‘applied’ from ‘pure’ science—understanding everyday practice in the real world is the very objective of scientific practice” (Nardi, 1996, p. 7).</p>
<p>Activity theory, therefore, “is a powerful and clarifying descriptive tool rather than a strongly predictive theory. The object of activity theory is to understand the unity of consciousness and activity," (Nardi, 1996, p. 7) a very Vygostkian perspective (more on that below). </p>
<p>Activity theory is rooted in the phenomenological facets of lived experience: “consciousness is located in everyday practice: you are what you do” (Nardi, 1996, p. 7). And what you do, as Vygotsky, Lave and Wenger (1991), Nardi and O’Day (1999), and Kaptelinin and Nardi (2006), have pointed out, is “firmly and inextricably embedded in the social matrix of which every person is a part,” a matrix comprised of people, histories, genres, technologies, and material artifacts (Nardi, 1996, p. 7). Activity theory “incorporates strong notions of intentionality, history, mediation, collaboration and development in constructing consciousness” (Nardi, 1996, p. 7).</p>
<p>Indeed, <em>mediation</em> is perhaps the key theoretical idea behind activity. We don’t just <em>use</em> tools and symbol systems; instead, our everyday lived experience is significantly <em>mediated</em> and <em>intermediated</em> by our use of tools and symbols systems. Activity theory helps frame, therefore, our understanding of such mediation.</p>
<p>What mediates the everyday lived experience of contemporary individuals absent of writing and rhetoric? Almost nothing…</p>
<p>In this sense, we might view activity theory as a methodological foundation for studying lived experience, following Spinuzzi (2003): “a methodology is the theory, philosophy, heuristics, aims, and values that underlie, motivate, and guide the method[s]” (p. 7).</p>
<hr />
<p><strong>A Generational History of AT (aka “CHAT”)</strong></p>
<p><em>Proto-First Generation</em></p>
<p>The work of Russian psychologist Vygotsky and his students in the early 1930s may be seen as the (proto)first generation of AT (though most everyone agrees that this wasn’t actually activity theory, as we’ve come to know it; instead, Vygotsky and his colleagues were exploring sociocultural psychology). His main works detailing some of the perspectives (particularly <em>mediation</em>) that would later come to be known as activity theory are:</p>
<ul>
<li>Vygotsky, L. (1934/1986). <em>Thought and language</em>. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.</li>
<li>Vygotsky, L. (1978). <em>Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes</em>. Harvard University Press.</li>
</ul>
<p>Both books are accessible in translation, and contain many of the formative ideas that would later be developed by AT researchers. Key ideas include a strong focus on material and symbolic mediation, internalization of external (social, societal, and cultural) forms of mediation, and the zone of proximal development (ZPD)—the distance between what an individual (child, in Vygotsky’s work) can accomplish on her own, versus what she can accomplish with the help of another (more advanced or even expert) individual.</p>
<p>Vygotsky saw the past and present as fused within the individual, that the “present is seen in the light of history” (1978, p. 64). His cultural-historical psychology attempted to account for the social origins of language and thinking.</p>
<p><em>Second Generation</em></p>
<p>One of Vygotsky’s students, A.N. Leontiev, may be seen as the founder of AT proper. We can consider his work the second generation of activity theory (though this is sometimes seen as the first generation AT; see Engeström, 1999, for more details on the “generations” of AT). His main works include:</p>
<ul>
<li>Leontiev, A.N. (1978). <em>Activity, consciousness, and personality</em>. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.</li>
<li>Leontiev, A.N. (1981). <em>Problems of the development of mind</em>. Moscow: Progress.</li>
</ul>
<p>Several of Leontiev’s most important works, translated into English, may be found online, <a href="http://www.marxists.org/archive/leontev/">here</a>.</p>
<p>Leontiev’s breakthrough was primarily twofold: first he theorized activity as resulting from the confluence of a human subject, the object of his/her activity (<em>predmet</em> in Russian—“the target or content of a thought or action” (Kaptelinin, 2005, p. 6)), and the tools (including symbol systems) that mediate the object(ive); second, he saw activity as essentially tripartite in structure, being comprised of unconscious <em>operations</em> on/with tools, conscious but finite <em>actions</em> which are goal-directed, and higher level <em>activities</em> which are object-oriented and driven by motives (Leontiev, at times, seems to conflate object and motive, which is potentially problematic).</p>
<p><em>Third Generation (3GAT)</em></p>
<p>The work of Michael Cole and Yro Engeström in the 1970s and 1980s—mostly in parallel, but occasionally in collaboration—brought activity theory to a much wider audience of scholars in Scandinavia and North America. Engeström (1987) in particular is credited with expanding Leontiev’s model of activity, particularly via expansion of the basic activity triangle, an example of which may be <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Activity_system.png">found here</a>.</p>
<p>Engeström re-envisioned Leontiev’s basic model of activity to account for assemblages of artifacts and tools and collectives of people working together to accomplish objectives. 3GAT, therefore, adds rules/norms, intersubjective community relations, and the division of labor to the basic model of activity. More importantly, Engeström theorized how multiple activity systems could share an object.</p>
<p>Around the same time that cultural-historical activity theory was becoming increasingly deployed as a way to understand complex human interactions in a variety of empirical and theoretical studies, other, very similar approaches were also coming to prominence, including situated cognition and situated action models (see Suchman, Gibson, Norman, Lave & Wenger, Lave, Wenger), and distributed cognition (see Hutchins, Norman).</p>
<p>In addition, AT was picked up by scholars in the emerging fields of human-computer interaction, interaction design, computer-supported cooperative work, and related areas to both study and theorize how technologies mediate human work, learning, and play. Sometimes scholars used AT alongside approaches like distributed cognition, and sometimes <em>instead</em> of those approaches (because AT was believed to offer something better). Nardi (1996) is a good place to start if you’re interested in digging into this body of work.</p>
<p>The majority of research in rhetoric and writing studies that calls upon an AT framework is 3GAT.</p>
<hr />
<p><strong>Genre as Social Action—An Interlude</strong></p>
<p>In 1984, Carolyn Miller published “Genre as Social Action,” calling on ethnomethodology and social science research to see genres as “typified rhetorical actions based in recurrent situations” (p. 31). Miller argued that we needed to explore genres in contexts of use, and that we consider how they are developed within complex social and cultural histories, how they regulate those histories in the present, and how they situate human subjects. Genres, in short, <em>mediate human experience</em>. Sound familiar?</p>
<p>Miller wasn’t the only scholar in our field working on new approaches to (especially everyday and professional) genres around this time. Foundational work in what has been called “North American Genre Theory” or “Rhetorical Genre Studies” was developed by the following scholars in the 1980s and 1990s:</p>
<ul>
<li>Bazerman</li>
<li>Schryer</li>
<li>Freedman</li>
<li>Smart</li>
<li>Devitt</li>
<li>Swales</li>
<li>Yates & Olikowski (and vice versa)</li>
<li>Berkenkotter & Huckin</li>
<li>and many, many others</li>
</ul>
<p><a href="http://wac.colostate.edu/books/bawarshi_reiff/">Bawarshi & Reiff (2010)</a> argue that RGS “has tended to focus more on how genres enable their users to carry out situated symbolic actions rhetorically and linguistically, and in so doing, to perform social actions and relations, enact social roles, and frame social realities” (p. 59). Genres, as Schryer (1993) has famously argued, are only stable-for-now; they change and develop, they carry along cultural and institutional histories, and yet they seem solid, stable, and even permanent in actual practice. Their use within a given workplace, classroom, discipline, culture, etc., helps maintain, reproduce, and frame the social realities of lived experience.</p>
<p>Everyday contexts, therefore, are viewed by RGS scholars “as an ongoing, intersubjective performance, one that is mediated by genres and other culturally available tools” (Bawarshi & Reiff, 2010, p. 59). Again, this should be sounding very familiar, and very congruent with the general framework of 3GAT. “RGS scholars,” Bawarshi & Reiff argue, “have tended to understand genres as sociological concepts mediating textual and social ways of knowing, being, and interacting in particular contexts” (p. 59).</p>
<p><em>Proto-WAGR and WAGR</em></p>
<p>David Russell’s work represents the most comprehensive and salient attempts at synthesizing rhetorical genre studies and activity theory. By now, it should be plain to see that activity theory provides a framework and model for understanding how genres and the artifacts of particular genres and assemblages of genres (read “writing and rhetorical work!”) mediate human activity. Russell’s work is the reason why this synthesis seems obvious, in hindsight. Some of his key works include:</p>
<ul>
<li>Russell, D. (1995). Activity theory and its implications for writing instruction. In J. Petraglia (Ed.), <em>Reconceiving Writing, Rethinking Writing Instruction</em> (51–76). Mahwah, NJ: LEA</li>
<li>Russell, D. (1997). Rethinking genre in school and society: An activity theory analysis. <em>Written Communication</em> 14(4), 504–54.</li>
<li>Bazerman, C, & Russell, D. (2002). <em><a href="http://wac.colostate.edu/books/selves_societies/">Writing selves/writing societies: Research from activity perspectives</a></em>. Ft. Collins, CO: WAC Clearninghouse.</li>
<li>Russell, D. 2009. Uses of activity theory in written communication research. In A. Sannino, H. Daniels, and K. D. Gutiérrez (Eds), <em>Learning and Expanding with Activity Theory</em>. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 40–52.</li>
</ul>
<p>Russell’s 1997 <em>Written Communication</em> article is magisterial, fusing Bakhtinian dialogism, dialectical materialism, rhetorical genre studies, and activity theory. I am calling these early works proto-WAGR, for in 2009, Russell would call the fusion of activity theory and RGS “writing, activity, and genre research,” or WAGR. From a WAGR perspective, written communication genres, Russell contends, are “arguably the most powerful mediational means for organizations and institutions” (2009, p. 40). Genre, therefore (and as we have seen), is a unit of social action; “the object of activity,” Russell argues, “can be seen to attain its stability, reproduction, and continuity through genres,” such that genres then serve as “crucial links between subjects, tools, and objects” (2009, p. 45).</p>
<p>Clay Spinuzzi, one of Russell’s most important students, has continued to develop and refine the scholarly confluence of RGS and AT. Some of his most important works include:</p>
<ul>
<li>Spinuzzi, C. (2003). <em>Tracing genres through organizations: A socio-cultural approach to information design</em>. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.</li>
<li>Spinuzzi, C. (2004). Four ways to investigate assemblages of texts: Genre sets, systems, repertoires, and ecologies. In <em>SIGDOC ’04: Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Conference on Design of Communication</em>. New York: ACM. 110–116.</li>
<li>Spinuzzi, C. (2008). <em>Network</em>. Cambridge: Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.</li>
<li>Spinuzzi, C. (2010). Secret sauce and snake oil: Writing monthly reports in a highly contingent environment. <em>Written Communication</em> 27(4), 363–409.</li>
<li>Spinuzzi, C. (2011). Losing by expanding: Corralling the runaway object. <em>Journal of Business and Technical Communication</em> 25(4), 449–486.</li>
<li>Spinuzzi, C. (2012). Working alone together: Coworking as emergent collaborative activity. <em>Journal of Business and Technical Communication</em> 26(4), 399–441.</li>
</ul>
<p>In short, activity theory is an incredibly useful and malleable framework for understanding and exploring complex, intersubjective, historically and culturally-conditioned, object-oriented human work and learning and the genres and artifacts that mediate such work and learning.</p>
<p>The final two Spinuzzi articles actually take us toward fourth generation activity theory…</p>
<hr />
<p><em>Fourth Generation AT (4GAT)</em></p>
<p>The rise of distributed work environments and the dominance of knowledge work has made it difficult to clearly bound new kinds of activity systems and activity theoretical objects. Engeström (2009) calls for a fourth generation of activity theory; as Spinuzzi (2012) explains, knowledge work is potentially problematic to investigate with a 3GAT approach, but “4GAT understands internetworked activities by examining the interorganizational collaborations to which they contribute” (p. 404). Because 4GAT responds to the same kinds of features that have led to the coworking movement that Spinuzzi investigates in his 2012 <em>JBTC</em> article, he adopts a 4GAT approach, seeing coworking as “an interorganizational, collaborative object” (p. 404).</p>
<p>One of the reasons that 4GAT is needed is to better understand what Edwards (2009) calls multiactivity interagency. As work becomes more complex, more internetworked, and distributed across more (and different) professional domains, the utility of 3GAT becomes problematic and will need to adapt. But as several AT researchers have argued over the years, AT is not a monolithic approach; instead, it is dynamic and adaptive.</p>
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<p><strong>So Why Use AT/WAGR?</strong></p>
<p>Different scholars will have different reasons, to be sure, but for my money, AT (and ANT, but that’s for another day) provide rich frameworks for exploring and understanding the true complexity of writing and rhetorical work in everyday practice. WAGR helps us, as researchers of writing and rhetoric, to explore, document, and understand many of the situational variables (Faigley & Witte, 1981) that impact and influence how people write and communicate, and how their written and rhetorical genres help mediate the things they do in the world.</p>
<p>Indeed, as Faigley & Witte argued so many years ago, “Perhaps what we need now are more observational studies of writers revising [and simply working] in nonexperimental situations rather than more studies of student writers in contrived situations” (1981, p. 412). Amen.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activity_theory">Wikipedia article</a> on AT actually answers the “so what” question well:</p>
<p>“AT is particularly useful as a lens [or framework] in qualitative research methodologies (e.g., ethnography, case study). AT provides a method of understanding and analyzing a phenomenon, finding patterns and making inferences across interactions, describing phenomena and presenting phenomena through a built-in language and rhetoric. A particular activity is a goal-directed or purposeful interaction of a subject with an object through the use of tools. These tools are exteriorized forms of mental processes manifested in constructs, whether physical or psychological.”</p>
<p>Clay Spinuzzi has started a <a href="http://www.mendeley.com/groups/1641381/activity-theory/papers/">Mendeley Group on Activity Theory</a>, and there are hundreds of articles listed there!</p>
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<p><strong>Designing an AT/WAGR Study</strong></p>
<p>It must be said that AT can be productively applied to many forms of inquiry. Most forms of AT scholarship, however, fall into one of two strains: empirical or theoretical. Most of the theoretical work has been developed by folks who have done lots of empirical work, or who are/have been affiliated with the Vygotskian school. Empirical work, then, is a key to AT/WAGR approaches.</p>
<p>Empirical studies of activity must be well-designed in terms of protocol and research questions, and <a href="http://spinuzzi.blogspot.com/2009/11/how-not-to-write-fiction.html">well-triangulated</a>: collecting multiple forms of data across multiple instances of collection with (preferably) multiple participants is key to understanding complex mediation. It’s nigh impossible to understand activity if you expect only one form of data to carry the weight of your inquiry…</p>
<p>Systematic qualitative case studies and ethnographies are common approaches. The more that a given activity system may be clearly defined, the easier it will be to apply 3GAT. The more that a given activity system is distributed, internetworked, and interorganizational, the more you will need a 4GAT approach.</p>
<p>Above all, you will want to understand the collective object (or at least the assumed or stated collective object) of an activity system as soon as possible; without a shared and understood object, understanding activity becomes very, very difficult (if not impossible).</p>
<p>What kinds of methods work best in WAGR?</p>
<ul>
<li>Observation, observation, observation
<ul>
<li>I can’t stress enough how important extended, in situ observation is to understanding activity</li>
</ul></li>
<li>Interviews, questionnaires, and/or surveys</li>
<li><a href="http://brianjmcnely.com/vrm.html">Visual research methods</a> where ethical, feasible, and appropriate</li>
<li>Participant-produced artifacts</li>
<li>Audio recordings (including ambient and non-obvious audio)</li>
</ul>
<p>Participants are object-oriented, but researchers should be <em>project-oriented</em>. In other words, in what seem to be clear 3GAT scenarios, try to follow participants through a clearly defined project, if possible. Some examples from my own work:</p>
<ul>
<li>I and R — visual ethnography, clear participant-defined work object, 8.5 months, solo</li>
<li>VBC — visual ethnography, clear participant-defined work object, 16 weeks, 4 field researchers</li>
<li>TM — systematic qualitative case study, assumed collective object, two weeks, solo</li>
<li>TM IN — visual ethnography, clear participant-defined work object, 10 months, 2 field researchers</li>
<li>Eucharist — multi-sited visual ethnography, assumed individual objects, 2+ years and counting, solo</li>
</ul>
<p>Memo, read, code, compare, document, trace, theme. Standard qualitative research practices framed by WAGR will bear fruit and answer many potentially interesting research questions about how people use writing and rhetoric in their individual and collective activities…</p>
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Brian J. McNelyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01368391154391981350noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3526655.post-33434983333307796832012-11-03T16:49:00.000-04:002012-11-03T16:49:54.650-04:00The Future 5000<!DOCTYPE html>
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<title>The Future 5000</title>
<meta name="author" content="Brian J. McNely, PhD"/>
<meta name="date" content="3, November 2012"/>
<meta name="comment" content="Thinking about current research and future directions of this blog"/>
<meta name="keywords" content="writing, research, VRM, methodology, visual ethnography, blogging, sharing"/>
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<p>This post has one aim: to explore what I want to do with this blog, going forward.</p>
<p>This is a bit of metablogging, then—blogging about blogging. There’s a good chance none of this will interest you much; I won’t be offended if you click away…</p>
<p>I’ve used my blog to host a variety of different kinds of posts over the years, and I’ve never really limited the direction and scope, other than to say that this is my “research blog,” a way of differentiating what I post here from what I post (or might post) in other, especially shorter-form venues.</p>
<p>Two things have led to this particular post, however: 1. I haven’t blogged much this year, and 2. I haven’t been inspired to blog much this year.</p>
<p>Truth be told, I’ve been less inspired to publicly post much of anything, especially in the last few months. This may come as a shock to some who know me well, considering I have some 14,000 tweets, a few thousand Flickr photos (many of which are private, though), and I’m a fairly regular Instagram user/poster. But in reality, I tweet far less than I used to, I’ve never been on Facebook, I’ve essentially abandoned Pinterest, I never really got into Google+, Meme is dead, and Flickr is mostly for my family and very close friends.</p>
<p>For a while, I thought that I’d found a sweet spot with a shorter form blog, Notemaking, where I’d post more frequently about interesting current issues as a way of publicly thinking through items of potential research/practice interest. But really, that fell flat for two reasons: 1. I didn’t always feel like posting, especially when most of my time is far better spent working on (and writing for) my research program and working on teaching-related concerns; and 2. who the hell cares what I think about such things anyway? There are many awesome folks out there who maintain frequently updated short-form blogs; I’d rather read them than me, too.</p>
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<p>One of the things I really admire about Clay Spinuzzi’s blog is the way that he shares his thoughts on scholarly research through his frequent reviews. I write annotations now (over 100 in the last year), and I’ve played around with formatting and posting some of them to the blog. But after writing many, many more annotations in DEVONthink than I actually posted to my blog, I realized that I likely read and annotate very differently than Clay, and so posting my annotations to my blog—even in revised form—just doesn’t accomplish the same thing that his excellent reviews do.</p>
<p>Moreover, my annotations are <em>my</em> annotations, and while I’ve long been a proponent of public sharing, my research notes don’t translate well to broader dissemination. I like keeping them in DEVONthink and using them the way that I do.</p>
<p>But this is all preamble to the aim I described above: what should this blog be, and how do I want to use it?</p>
<hr />
<p>I’ve figured a lot of things out in the last couple of years. It took me a while to develop practices and routines that work for me as a professional academic. By no means do I have everything figured out, but I think I’ve got things pretty well sorted in terms of having a clearly articulated research program and well-defined practices for accomplishing things to push that program forward.</p>
<p>I certainly didn’t know what I was doing when I finished my PhD and took my first academic appointment in 2009. I didn’t really know what I was doing, actually, until sometime in 2011. Yes, I was still productive, and yes I did some things really well, but I didn’t have things really nailed down. There was a disconnect in many of the moving parts of my everyday practice.</p>
<p>Today, there are still a <em>lot</em> of moving parts in my everyday practice, but now I know how they are related; now I know what the effects are when I pull one string—how that act impacts the other strings to which it is connected. I come to work, and I know what the hell it is I’m doing. I don’t worry about what I should be doing, or what might happen in two months. I already know, because I’ve developed a research <em>program</em> rather than a research <em>agenda</em>; the program has tightly articulated, interrelated components rather than a series of projects that may or may not be related.</p>
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<p>This is really important context for describing what I do with this blog, believe it or not. </p>
<p>You see, I’m not posting here much because <em>this particular string</em> is not really attached to the web of other things I’m working on. The future of the blog, therefore, will be literally and figuratively tied to the other strings in my professional web. And it will carry posts that are differentiated in important (and hopefully worthwhile) ways from the many excellent blogs run by my disciplinary colleagues.</p>
<p>I still reserve the right to post whatever I want here—I don’t want to limit this outlet and say “it’s <em>only</em> about x, y, and z.” However, I do envision a more coherent focus, for at least the medium term (let’s say 18–24 months—probably a bit longer, but we’ll go with that for now).</p>
<p>I’m not changing the title, I’m not developing some new, kitschy theme, and I’m not looking to carve out some niche. Hell, I don’t even care anymore about pageviews and such. </p>
<p>Instead, I’m going to post things here that relate more meaningfully to my research program—to current projects, to completed studies, to forthcoming work, to failed projects, to dreamed about projects, to the “b-sides” of published work.</p>
<p>Throughout my academic career, I’ve focused primarily on the everyday work, learning, and play of professionals and students. And beginning with my earliest published work, I’ve been a proponent of empirical visual research methods—even when I was too naive to know that this was a credible and well-established research methodology in the social sciences.</p>
<p>Many folks in my field work with, in, and through visual rhetorics. Comparatively few use empirical visual research methods (VRM) as a key form of inquiry. I do, and I’m working on new ways of tracing and studying writing and rhetorical work by using such strategies—visual ethnography in particular.</p>
<p>Going forward, my posts here will likely have more to do with VRM than other kinds of posts. That also means more visual content.</p>
<p>If you read this, thanks for thinking along with me!</p>
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Brian J. McNelyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01368391154391981350noreply@blogger.com5