• canon
• reading

It's summer, and I am hoping to catch up on reading and writing. Today, I picked up the book that I haven't read that I should have read long ago: Lev Manovich's The Language of New Media. I'm coming clean on this one, and I'd love to hear some other confessions from Blogora readers.

It's a funny thing: Academics rarely talk about the books they haven't read. This is especially true of graduate students. I remember a conversation my second year in graduate school in which everyone was admitting that they were pretty sure everyone else had read more than they had. We all think we're frauds.

Well, here is is...my big confession. I haven't read Manovich. But I promise to start in on it next week. Don't judge.

• Jim Brown's blog
• 6 comments

• reading

Having finally reached page 1085 this morning, after a month of reading, I wish it would go on for another 1000 pages. Anyone else read it?

• Jim Aune's blog
• 3 comments

• composition
• pedagogy
• reading

Since I'm in the midst of moving, I'm a little late on this. But Derek Mueller is hosting a "CCCarnival" for Karen Kopelson's article in the latest issue of CCC: "Sp(l)itting Images; or, Back to the Future of (Rhetoric and?) Composition."

I'm going to jump in to the discussion either today or tomorrow, but head over to earth wide moth for more details.

• Jim Brown's blog
• Login or register to post comments

• reading

I'm reading two scholarly books this week, Georg Simmel's classic The Philosophy of Money (highly useful as one watches the second biggest bank collapse in US history and the impending bailout of Sallie Mae/Freddie Mac) and Alan Blum's neglected classic Theorizing (which has some remarkable thoughts on rhetoric which I may blog about later). For recreation, I'm working my way through John Updike, who had a huge influence on me in my adolescence (especially Pigeon Feathers and The Centaur) but whom I haven't read in years.

• Jim Aune's blog
• 2 comments
• Read more

• reading

Over at my home blog, I started to think about the kinds of readers I have been (and readers I have known). I began to notice a change in myself as a reader while writing my dissertation, and I hope that I continue to reflect on my reading practices. Many of the folks I've talked to seem to mark graduate school as a time of radical change in the reading process. The reader at the beginning of grad school is not the same reader who eventually takes a job. The kinds of readers we *have* been are often not the kinds of readers we ultimately become. Maturity and time change us all. Not to mention the knocks you start to get once you are read. I think my reading changes came once I gained an ability to just shut up, listen, and stop the lips flapping for a few minutes.

I started a taxonomy of the readers I have known, loved, and been. I would love to keep adding to the list, if only as a reflexive exercise:

- There is the reader who reads for “utility,” or for what you can get out of it. This is the selfish reader, the one who only wants to get the goods that will extend the sounds of her own voice.

- There is the ‘Roid Rage Reader, or the one who reads only to attack and smash the arguments of the “puny” writer before her. This is the reader who thinks her job is to be always critical, but it actually turns her into a bully who never connects with anything but “dead meat.”

- There is the immobile reader, or the one who is not willing to move one inch off her own comfortable positions. She’s the saddest reader because she doesn’t realize how her muscles are slowly eroding through the lack of resistance against her own position. This reader is like dead wood, rotten and hollow inside.

• jenny's blog
• Login or register to post comments