"This great and trivial story": a love-affair with print

At the time when this story begins, the Stanhope press and inking-rollers were not yet in use in small provincial printing-offices. Angoulême, although its paper-making industry kept it in contact with Parisian printing, was still using those wooden presses from which the now obsolete metaphor 'making the presses groan' originated. Printing there was so much behind the times that the pressmen still used leather balls spread with ink to dab on the characters. The bed of the press holding the letter-filled 'forme' to which the paper is applied was still made of stone and so justified its name 'marble'. The ravenous machines of our time have so completely superseded this mechanism--to which, despite its imperfections, we owe the fine books produced by the Elzevirs, the Plantins, the Aldi and the Didots--that it is necessary to mention this antiquated equipment which Jérôme-Nicolas Séchard held in superstitious affection; it has its part to play in this great and trivial story.

--Lost Illusions by Honoré de Balzac, trans. by Herbert J. Hunt

I am fascinated with late-18th-century/early-19th-century French and British printing and bookselling. It started as a fluke. I was introduced to the Albion press owned by my university's rare books library at around the same time that I was brainstorming the NaNoWriMo project that became The Printer's Tale, and I decided on a whim that my main character and her father should be printers. I already knew that they lived in provincial pre-revolutionary France, I already knew the thrust of my main character's story, I just needed to know what she did for a living before the novel got started.

I thought this would perhaps be a minor detail, but as the present working title would suggest, printing quickly came to take up a great deal of space in the novel. I talked with librarians, checked out musty old books, and researched the history and the art of printing. I parlayed this information into a final project for one of my first-semester courses, in addition to insinuating it piecemeal into my November novel, but even after the semester was over, this new-found fascination wouldn't leave me alone. I examined the bindings of old books in the local used bookstores; I sought out laid paper and fell in love with the way it felt beneath my fingers. I enrolled in a research seminar taught at the rare books library. When I had the opportunity, I took a graduate history course entitled The Hand-Printed Book in Its Historical Context, where I spent six weeks learning the history of hand-printing via a series of example books culled from the library's extensive catalogue, and six weeks using that same Albion press that had sparked the obsession a few years earlier to typeset and print a short manuscript of my own.

In some academic circles it's considered a bit gauche to pay too much attention to the materiality of the text. Yes, changing conventions in printing, editing, and publishing do affect the way texts are received and read, but--so the assumption seems to run--not the way texts are written, which is what should matter. It's the job of a literary scholar to work with the text at hand, not to fuss with the fact that the books we read now are things as well as texts.

But while the things I've learned about printing and bookselling may not be central to most of the work that I do, I nonetheless feel a frisson of excitement every time a literary text references the mode of its own production. When I opened up my copy of Lost Illusions and read this first paragraph, I was transported back to the Printing Room in the second story of the Bancroft Library, sunlight streaming in through the huge windows, myself standing poised with hands near the press bar as a classmate ran the roller over the ink which made its snicker-snack reverse-suction sound, waiting for the forme to be inked and the paper to be positioned before pulling the press down, thud-click, and releasing it again to reveal a perfectly-printed page.

When The Printer's Tale begins, provincial printing is already dying out. The catalyst for a great deal of the story is the reluctant necessity of my main character giving up her life as a printer in order to find work that pays. But the magic of the novel--and it's me we're talking about, so at times this magic is literal--is so tied up in printing, in the idea of work done with one's hands. The groaning of the wooden press, the sickly-sweet turpentine smell of the ink, the cool lead of the type sorts, these things matter. And part of what I love about working in the eighteenth century is that sometimes I can feel them there, behind every book I read, reminding me of the number of hands that these words have passed through and worked their magic upon.

It's not a particularly academic pleasure. It won't make itself heard in my seminar papers, or future conference papers or articles or dissertation chapters. But it is a pleasure that, for me at least, gives my academic work weight and heft, that makes it more material and that makes it matter.

Musings of a 21st-century researcher

I've been using Goodreads for a while now to keep track of the books that I read, and one of its features I find most useful is the new one that recommends books you might like based on ones you've already read/reviewed. I always get the best recs from friends who know my tastes, but Goodreads' system is still helpful when I'm not sure where to start.

I'm in the process of pulling together a bibliography for my MA essay (about the truly zany gothic novel Zofloya -- more on this later!) and finding myself wishing that there were a similar feature specific to the scholarly community. So often I scour books of literary criticism for their footnotes/works cited, looking to see who's quoting what and using that research to get a sense for the other books I should be reading on the topic. I've been using citation management software to keep track of the books I've read and cited on this project so far, but I wish there was a way to link that bibliography-in-progress to a database containing other scholars' bibliographies, past and present -- a database that would analyze everyone's input, look at the kinds of books/articles/authors that are often cited together, and provide me with recommendations for other works I might want to check out based on the ones that I'm currently reading.

Of course, there are drawbacks to this kind of recommendation system. Sometimes the best research projects result from pairing texts or fields of inquiry that haven't been previously considered in tandem. Sometimes I go to the library looking for a single specific book, only to find several others shelved nearby that are just as relevant to my project, but which I never would have known to look for in the library catalogue. But I can't help thinking that specialized database like this would still be helpful -- so helpful, in fact, that I have a niggling feeling it may already exist and I just haven't heard about it yet.

"Makdom and Fairnesse"

Maybe it's because I'm still in the honeymoon period, and I will shortly metamorphose into the expected image of the graduate student, deeply dissatisfied with academic life, but right now, despite the fifty pages of academic writing that I have to complete over the next fifteen days, I don't feel distressed. I'm frustrated that I'll spend my favorite time of the year writing papers instead of window-shopping on Fifth Avenue and ice-skating in Central Park, and I'm not looking forward to the long days spent in libraries, the late nights spent with eyes glued to the computer screen. But whenever I turn my gaze to the big picture, I can't help but grin a little bit. Being a grad student is hard -- but it's something I care about, deeply, something in which I'm still incredibly invested, and right now this makes all the difference.

Fifteen to twenty of those fifty pages will be spent writing about George Eliot's Middlemarch, which I finally finished reading earlier this semester, and which is one of the most intricate, thoughtful, complex, and beautiful novels I've ever read. It's not light reading, but it's been incredibly worth it for me, and I suspect part of this is because of the way some of its characters attempt to define work: not just as a job, not just something that pays the bills, but as a vocation, a calling, something you are instead of just something you do. Early in the novel, Eliot describes in detail the moment when one character, Lydgate, decides to become a doctor. On a rainy day, he wanders into the library, pulls an encyclopedia off of the shelf, and opens it to a random page to begin reading:

The page he opened on was under the head of Anatomy, and the first passage that drew his eyes was on the valves of the heart. He was not much acquainted with valves of any sort, but he knew that valvae were folding-doors, and through this crevice came a sudden light startling him with his first vivid notion of finely adjusted mechanism in the human frame. [...] the moment of vocation had come, and before he got down from his chair, the world was made new to him by a presentiment of endless processes filling the vast spaces blanked out of his sight by that wordy ignorance which he had supposed to be knowledge. From that hour Lydgate felt the growth of an intellectual passion.

We are not afraid of telling over and over again how a man comes to fall in love with a woman and be wedded to her, or else be fatally parted from her. Is it due to excess of poetry or of stupidity that we are never weary of describing what King James called a woman's "makdom and her fairnesse," never weary of listening to the twanging of the old Troubadour strings, and are comparatively uninterested in that other kind of "makdom and fairnesse" which must be wooed with industrious thought and patient renunciation of small desires?

Or to put Eliot's question another way: why is it that no one writes novels about how men and women come to fall in love with their jobs?

When my professor asked this question to the class of mixed undergrads and grad students, there was a kind of silence, punctuated by a few suppressed giggles and blank stares. How could you fall in love with your job? That's not what jobs are about. They're things you do because you need to pay bills and put food on the table, and even if they start out in love with your job that's not a sustainable attitude, sooner or later the system will grind it out of you, and then you'll come home after work and on weekends and do your best to forget your job ever happened.

It's a response that I've gotten before after guiltily admitting that I really do love my work. I think it's an understandable response in our cultural context. But it's one that I hope I'll never come to share.

I'll still complain, I'll still be upset and frustrated, and there will still be days when I just don't want to do all the work that needs to be done -- but I will never think it isn't somehow worth it. The study of literature and all that it entails is my vocation: for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer (let's be honest, it's for poorer), in sickness and in health.

Yes, I have fifty pages to write in the next fifteen days. But I also get paid to read books and talk about them with other interesting and interested people, and I can't imagine any career more worth wooing.

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.

*

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.

*

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

Why Math Matters to English Majors

For today's meeting of my English Senior Honors Thesis course, one of our assigned readings was by Ezra Pound, founder of a poetic school known as Imagism, and (in my opinion) a little crazy. T. S. Eliot famously dedicated The Waste Land to him and called him "the better craftsman" in the process, but my tastes have always leaned decidedly toward Eliot. However, this thesis course is really forcing me to think things through, and giving me a new appreciation for writers I might otherwise have dismissed, so I set out with at least some kind of willingness to give Pound a chance.

But that's not the point of this post. The point is that my professor -- affable, brilliant, possessing a PhD in English literature and a professorship at UC Berkeley -- wasn't initially able to decode one of Pound's arguments because he made it using a mathematical analogy.

Pound says:

…When one studies Euclid one finds that the relation of a²+b²=c² applies to the ratio between the squares on the two sides of a right-angled triangle and the square on the hypotenuse. One still writes it a²+b²=c², but one has begun to talk about form. Another property or quality of life has crept into one’s matter. Until then one had dealt only with number. But even this statement does not create form. The picture is given you in the proposition about the square on the hypotenuse of the right-angled triangle being equal to the sum of the squares on the two other sides. Statements in plane or descriptive geometry are like talk about art. They are a criticism of the form. The form is not created by them.

We come to Descartestian or “analytical geometry.” Space is conceived as separated by two or by three axes (depending on whether one is treating form in one or more planes). One refers to these axes by a series of co-ordinates. Given the idiom, one is able actually to create.

Thus we learn that the equation (x-a)²+(y-b)²=r² governs the circle. It is the circle. It is not a particular circle, it is any circle and all circles. It is nothing that is not a circle. It is the circle free of space and time limits. It is the universal, existing in perfection, in freedom from space and time. Mathematics is dull ditchwater until one reaches analytics. But in analytics we come upon a new way of dealing with form. It is in this way that art handles life. The difference between art and analytical geometry is the difference of subject matter only. Art is more interesting in proportion as life and the human consciousness are more complex and more interesting than forms and numbers.

Now, when I was doing my reading, the last sentences of this quote thoroughly impressed me. Coming into this with no expectation of liking Pound, I actually found myself agreeing with his metaphor, and wishing I could talk it over with my old junior high math teacher!

But this section, which made the most sense to me, was the one that made the least sense to my professor, who claimed to have failed math the last time she took it. I and some other students in the class ended up explaining to her exactly how Pound's mathematical references supported his argument -- how "a²+b²=c²" describes a particular set of properties of a particular type of triangle, but "(x-a)²+(y-b)²=r²" actually defines the points on a coordinate plane that create the figure of a circle. If I were rewriting Pound, I might suggest that this is the difference between the terms "equation" (i.e. anything that has an equals sign in it, that expresses an equivalence) and "formula" (which I think of as a particularly significant equation, general enough to define or create the type it describes).

I felt a strange pride in the moment when my affable, brilliant English professor, after internalizing all the math, burst out with, "It's like a recipe for a circle! But the triangle one isn't a recipe! Oh, that's brilliant!"

I may have chosen to exist in a sphere upon which mathematics doesn't impinge very often, but that doesn't mean I'm mathematically illiterate. And it certainly doesn't mean that I think mathematics is inherently any more or less meaningful (or entertaining) than any other academic pursuits. I can be proud of the fact that I took two years of Calculus in high school, even if at the time I did it ostensibly because I wanted to avoid math in college, because the math that I've learned has genuinely changed the way I look at the world.

Sometimes, being at Berkeley and seeing the kinds of math that my friends are doing makes me feel like I'm never going to get past the tip of the iceberg as far as mathematics is concerned, and that therefore my math doesn't matter. Today helped me see otherwise. While I don't believe that I'll ever learn more math than I know now, and I certainly don't believe that my present math knowledge amounts to much, I do think there's something to be said for having taken the time to learn and internalize the math that I have encountered so far. Today, in what I am sure counts as an incredibly rare circumstance, it helped me understand a literary critic. Tomorrow it probably won't show up in any tangibly useful way -- but the more I learn, the more I come to believe in the importance of transgressing boundaries between subjects and disciplines in order to rejuvenate ideas, concepts, or formulations that seem to be growing stale. Today, math made English matter more than English could on its own, at least for me.

And so here I am doing the unthinkable and offering thanks to Ezra Pound, for answering the unspoken question of why I need math, and why it really was all worthwhile.