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Tuesday, May 24, 2011

For the Love of Books

I love books.

This is a fundamental fact of my existence, and I've known it for as long as I can remember. Literally. Some of my first memories are of being read to, and learning to read. I still own the first book I read on my own (The Berenstein Bears and the Spooky Old Tree), and unless I seriously dislike a book, I am loathe to actually give it up. Even if I don't necessarily plan on re-reading it, there has always been something special about having it.

At least, until now. Even though college has kept me separated from the majority of my book collection for the past four years (excepting vacations), it's not until now that I've realized how many of these books I am actually capable of doing without.

It's been a difficult realization, but part of me thinks it's about time. A book, if it isn't being read, is really just a thing -- and we all know, I hope, that books when they are being read are so much more than that. By keeping my shelves full of books that I may have read once or twice, but don't see myself reading again, I'm preventing those books from finding other readers more suited to them. I never forget a book I've read, so if I really want to go back and read one of them once they're gone, I can head over to a library; if I come to a point in my life where I need a book again, and I can make it live, then I can always buy it again and support an independent bookstore.

There is nothing wrong with giving books a new life outside of my sagging white bookshelves. I'm in the process of boxing up the books I don't read anymore, and when I'm done they'll get donated to my local library, and when they're there who knows who will find them, and read them?

Saturday, May 21, 2011

What I Do With English

Today, I received my BA in English from UC Berkeley. I was selected to speak at the English Department's commencement; this is the speech that I gave.

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When I tell people I’m an English major, the most common response is, “What are you going to do with that?” It’s one of my least favorite questions, but I’ve come to realize that it’s an important one. What are we going to do with English? What have we been doing with it, or in the name of it, in the years we’ve spent as part of Berkeley’s English department?

To most people, all that English majors do is read books, talk about books, and write papers about books. As a result, we don’t seem to be doing very much. But I, for one, value English precisely for its focus on the process of literary analysis. We rarely ask questions that have concrete answers, so our field of study is not defined by the results it produces, but by the practices that help us arrive at our conclusions. No matter what you’re going on to “do” with English, I believe there is value in having learned how to read, how to talk, and how to write like an English major.

English majors read differently from almost every other person I know: we re-read, partly out of necessity, but almost equally out of desire. The second reading is when the words that captivated at the level of story-telling begin to connect to each other across the lines of a poem, or the pages of a novel. Things begin to stand out: a phrase repeated, or not; a pattern, a symbol, a sign. Slowly, something like meaning begins to emerge, simply because we have taken the time to look for it. The pleasure and the danger of this sort of reading is that there is no limit to the number of times that a text can be read. For an English major, reading is never actually finished, only temporarily abandoned, to be reassumed whenever the book is opened again. I think there’s something deeply admirable about this kind of re-reading. After all, a willingness to re-read is also always a willingness to question—and perhaps even counter—first impressions. If English is about the process of re-reading, then it’s also about being continually open to new information, even if that information forces you to change your mind.

The same process of self-questioning is at work when we talk as English majors about the things we read. Looking back on my time spent at Berkeley, it strikes me that so much of my education has been accomplished through informed conversation with professors and with peers, working in tandem to explain, defend, and question our differing perspectives. The purpose of these conversations is not to argue until a single perspective emerges victorious, but rather to strengthen and sharpen all perspectives. In a world increasingly rife with violence that stems from the failure to consider alternate points of view, I believe we need more people who think—and who talk—like English majors. We need more people who are willing to have their opinions swayed by a reasoned discussion, just as we need more communities willing to support this kind of conversation.

As students of English, we’ve learned more than just a specialized vocabulary for talking about the things we read. We’ve learned the importance of continually interrogating our own practices and those of others with the aim of making them better. In the process, we’ve developed the kind of mental flexibility that allows us to think with others, even if we don’t always arrive at an agreement.

So, what are we going to do with that? If you ask me, we’re going to do a lot. Whatever professions we find ourselves pursuing—wherever we live and work, whatever we come to love—we will bring with us a willingness to revise our own assumptions and an openness to the ideas of others. We will model a way of thinking, and ultimately a way of living, that values process over products and individuality over conformity. And we will become integral members of multiple communities, including those that our unique outlook has allowed us to create.

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I might not actually belong to multiple communities yet. But I sure as hell belong to this one:

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Alien Appreciation: The Doctor of Doctor Who

There has been an awful lot of Austen on this blog lately, and a regrettable absence of aliens. This post is an attempt to change that.

When I started racking my brain for the last science fiction book I'd read, I realized that it was Jenna Starborn, which sort of doesn't count, since it's also Jane Eyre. But then, before I allowed myself to fall into complete and utter despair, I realized that that might have been the last truly sci-fi book that I read, but it's certainly not my most recent sci-fi media encounter. That title would belong to the absolutely marvelous British television series Doctor Who. Consider this post an appreciation of my current favorite alien, and a not-so-subtle argument about why you should go watch this show as soon as you possibly can.

A lot of people have heard of Doctor Who, but if you're not British (and I'm not), it can't possibly hold the same place in your collective national psyche. The original Doctor Who started running in the sixties, in black and white, and that run didn't end until the mid-eighties. Reruns showed throughout the time when it was off the air, keeping the show as a presence and influencing the lives of generations who might not have been sentient when the show was actually on air. Then, in 2005, the whole thing was rebooted, and the craze kicked off again.

When living in London, I heard a lot about Doctor Who. My friends obsessed over who would be cast as the new Doctor; even my teachers made references to characters from the series, or specific lines and episodes! It was so pervasively cultural that by the time I'd been living there for a couple of months, hanging out with British people and trying to understand what the heck they were saying, I understood a lot about the show without even having watched it.

And then, I watched it. And seriously, wow. Maybe it's because I ran through all of the available episodes of the rebooted series in the course of a month, but that show hit me like a sledgehammer, and a lot of that has to do with the feeling it has, the ambience it creates and how different that is from what I find in so much science fiction--and how much that has to do with the character of the Doctor.

Hard science fiction fans are probably not too satisfied with Doctor Who. The science--which involves a lot of "because we can!" time-and-space travel that isn't even always used consistently within the show's universe (although I'm always far too engrossed to realize this until much later)--isn't really the show's point. The point, as the title might suggest, would be the Doctor. (Tip: his name isn't actually "Doctor Who," and if that phrase is heard, it's usually in response to him introducing himself simply as "the Doctor," which is the only proper name we ever get for him.)

The thing about Doctor Who is that it approaches space, the future, and all of the things you would expect from a science fiction series, with a lot of faith in humanity, even if it is also capable of showing that humanity often doesn't deserve it. The Doctor himself, despite belonging to an alien race called the Time Lords, looks exactly like a human being (although when humans have questioned him about this more than once his answer has been that he doesn't look human, they look Time Lord). But it's more than that. He spends a lot of time on Earth, simply because it seems that he's taken a liking to us--when he says "I'll never stop having to save you," it's equal parts frustration and affection. He believes in the kinds of days when problems are solved without violence--when everybody lives--and he's not the sci-fi hero who goes in with guns blazing. His "weapon" of choice is a sonic screwdriver, and while its powers seems to expand with each new season, most of what it does is open doors! I wholeheartedly agree with Craig Ferguson's sentiment (delivered in song!) that the show represents "the triumph of intellect and romance over brute force and cynicism," and most of that is down to the continued presence of the Doctor, doing his best to save the worlds one step at a time.

I could go on and on about the Doctor, but nothing that I say about this show will take the place of watching it. So, what are you waiting for -- go watch it! If I haven't quite convinced you, or if you're looking for a little more background before jumping in, you should check out this article, or this excellent infographic. But really, just go and watch it, so that I can dissect future episodes to an audience who knows what I'm talking about!

Monday, May 9, 2011

The Gravity of Haunted Places

When I was studying in London, doing my reading for a course about the representation of London in the eighteenth century, I came across a quote that so perfectly summed up the reason I felt (and continue to feel) drawn to that great city:
There is no place that is not haunted by many different spirits hidden there in silence, spirits one can "invoke" or not. Haunted places are the only ones people can live in…

--Michel de Certeau
It became apparent to me in the moment of reading this that it was exactly my sense of London as a place "haunted" by its social, political, and literary history that made me want to be a part of it. Before I had ever even visited, I had expectations about London gleaned from the pages of the books I'd read and loved -- everything from William Blake to Neil Gaiman -- and rather than being disappointed upon arrival that the London I actually saw was none of the Londons I'd read about, I felt even more at home there. It wasn't any of them, so it could be all of them, from Blake's grave at Bunhill Fields to all the names of tube stations cleverly reworked in Gaiman's Neverwhere. I didn't even have to go out of my way to find these associations; I was so steeped in the books that it just happened, I saw them everywhere (perhaps even where they weren't), and they made me feel like I belonged.


At the end of my year there, a friend and I ended up doing one of our projects about how our experience of "texts" -- defined loosely to include books, movies, television shows, songs, works of art, you name it -- had shaped our experience of London. It was a fascinating experience, deconstructing our own expectations and trying to trace them back to the source (my friend, for example, is pretty sure that his love of London began with movies like The Great Mouse Detective and Peter Pan; I, in a slightly more chagrined way, can probably attribute mine to my first encounter with Harry Potter).

It's almost a year since we finished that project -- almost a year since I left London -- and now that I'm leaving Berkeley, I'm beginning to realize that even though I never read anything significant involving Berkeley, the city was haunted for me in a different way. My father came to college here, and while I spent the better part of eighteen years being sure I didn't want to come to college here (long story short: I was stupid), I grew up with his stories about the place, and I always loved the way that they made me feel like I knew it. In the three years I've lived here, I've created a Berkeley of my own, separate from my father's, but still connected. Whenever I study in the North Reading Room of Doe Library, shifting in the the wooden chairs, I think of how he used to sit and study here. The other week, I celebrated the end of classes by getting lunch at the pizza place which used to be my dad's college hangout and which has survived the intervening years in style.

In the past few months, I've been thinking more about this concept of "haunting" in the face of my impending relocation to New York. I had a sense, before I ever visited, that New York would be like the London of the US -- not because it's a big city, or a central one, but because such a wealth of text surrounds it, and was bound to weigh upon my experience of it.

I've only spent five days there, but I'm inclined to think I was right. London and the British Isles still figure more prominently in my reading, but around the same time I ran into Harry Potter and kicked off that particular fascination, I discovered some other young wizards who began to haunt my idea of New York. Diane Duane's Young Wizards series -- beginning with So You Want to Be a Wizard -- follows a couple of teenage wizards living in the New York suburbs, making occasional trips into the city and usually getting caught up in some kind of adventure when they do. I had never been to New York City before March, but at that point Nita and Kit's New York had been a part of my imagination for about ten years, and at times I found their world suddenly superimposed over the one I saw before me: Grand Central played host to intergalactic travel, magical creatures lived in abandoned subway tunnels, and the statues in Central Park could be awakened to aid the virtuous in their time of need.

It's not quite the New York I'm moving to. But it's a pretty fabulous one in its own right -- and if it makes me feel somehow like I belong in this one, I can't complain.