Over at the Atlantic, James Somers reports on software called Etherpad that adds a temporal dimension to writing, tracking every keystroke and allowing users to "play back" the entire writing process. As Somers points out, that functionality--despite the fact that the Etherpad software is more or less defunct--holds a lot of promise for academia, both as a way to track writers' revisions over time and as a way to make sure that students are doing their own work.
I'm sort of partial to the idea that the reason we have rough drafts is so that no one has to see them, not so that everyone will have access to them forever--so I also have my doubts about this catching on among literary types. But it would definitely be useful for academic integrity, for tutoring, and--if actual literary writers used it--as a tool for understanding the cognitive process of writing at a level of granularity that prior technologies never allowed us to. After all, with pen and ink, typewriters, and computer files, we could only see drafts that the writers officially considered finished drafts, not the writing as it was constructed at a word-by-word level.
I, for one, was shocked to see the sketchy, outlinish way that Somers himself writes, which he shares here via the open-source descendant of the original product. I don't write my posts that way--they just come out in the first draft the way that they come out, and then I cut/paste/delete as necessary--but that is, actually, how I write research papers, which makes me wonder if we approach writing differently based on how we generically categorize it: "professional/research" vs. "casual/interpersonal".
Anyway, check it out.
Writing As a Spectator Sport
The New Republic: Dickens's Writing "Difficult, Obscure"
Over at The New Republic, Hillary Kelly lashes out at Oprah for choosing Dickens as her next book club reading. While obviously I share some of the shock and awe at Oprah's power, Kelly lets it cloud her judgment, ranting that the average reader will have trouble unpacking "Dickens’s obscure dialectical styling and his long-lost euphemisms." Huh? Dickens's euphemisms and ironies are often painfully straightforward, and "dialectical stylings" is a phrase that confuses me, even though I just came back from a lunch spent reading Fredric Jameson. My best guess at what she's referencing here is the doubleness of "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times," but honestly, it's Kelly's thoughts on Dickens, not Dickens's own writings, that are difficult to understand.
It's sad, because Kelly's sense of Oprah's ridiculousness is right, but her reasoning is actually backwards. In her fervor to protect the classics from Oprah's rapacious grasp, she perversely bashes Winfrey for "her sentimentalized view of Dickens," who was, in case anyone forgot, an author of sentimental fiction. His books are chock full of dying orphans, for Pete's--or should I say Little Nell's?--sake. Then Kelly worries about Winfrey's "ignorance of Dickens’s authorial intentions," as though those should be the cornerstone of any reading experience.
Weirdest of all, though, is when Kelly says that Dickens wrote "some of the more difficult prose to come out of the nineteenth century." In addition to being false by any standard, this claim contributes to the sense that these old books can't be read without some kind of literary guide. On this point, at least, Kelly and Oprah seem to be united: Oprah offers extensive character guides and other paraphernalia for the reading through her website, as though the literature itself is so alien that it can only be approached through some kind of spacesuit-like extra-textual apparatus. In one of the funnier parts of Kelly's piece, she quotes from the Dickens conversation going on at O's website:
A glance at the discussion boards on Oprah’s website confirms my worst fears. “I have read all the print-outs and character materials and the first two pages,” said one reader, referring to supplementary reading guides produced by the Book Club. “The first two pages are laden with political snips and I am trying to grasp what it is saying. I was able to look up cock-lane and figure that out, but where do I go to figure out the innuendos?”If only this person would read the novel, rather than spending time trying to diagram the meaning of its every word. In a weird way, the problem with Oprah's selection is not her decision to approach a canonical classic from a popular standpoint, but her decision to approach a canonical classic as A Canonical Classic. Sentimentalizing Dickens is only appropriate, and finding your "self" in a Victorian novel, while sort of silly, isn't really at odds with what many critics claim (rightly or wrongly) was one of the functions of the novel in the first place--the creation of the reader as a "unique" "individual" subject, etc., etc.
Book clubs, whether Oprah's or not, often plunge into books with minimal context, and that's fine. It's the idea that readers need to tiptoe around the big boys, and approach them with a semblance of historical or scholarly understanding that they can't possibly attain in the time allotted, that makes this whole thing so painful. Oprah and her followers are foreigners to this particular cultural soil, but they have an embarrassingly sincere desire to show that they know how lucky they are to tread on sacred ground, so they work too hard to behave with what they conceive of as humility and cultural respect, nodding knowingly to show that they understand why This Stuff Is Important. A more candidly naive approach, one less fraught with the sense that there's some mystery Oprah & co. need to show they understand, would make the whole affair a lot less ridiculous.
Oprah loves the Dickensian aspect
Victorians have been making lots of headlines recently. Last week, the NYT reported on the application of search software to Victorian titles as an aid to scholarship, even as Oprah announced that her next book club picks will be two works by Charles Dickens: A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations. Members of the audience appear to be filled with nearly childlike delight at the announcement.
Of course, when Oprah preceded her announcement with the hint that she was going with a selection that was "old, OLD school, people!", I immediately began chanting to myself, "Please let it be Pliny, please let it be Pliny." But, in a stunning confirmation of the fact that different people perceive time differently, Oprah unveiled a new Oprah edition of the two classics, nicely packaged together by Penguin for just this purpose.
As Omnivoracious at Amazon points out, the rationale behind the duplex edition might have something to do with the difficulty of capitalizing on an Oprah selection that is entirely in the public domain. Jimmy Fallon put it a little bit more ironically the other night when he noted, with a tinge of jealousy, that Dickens is "gonna get rich."
It's not clear why Oprah picked these two works, but she did admit that she'd never read Dickens, and breathlessly panted to Jonathan Franzen: "Is A Tale of Two Cities what everyone says it is?" (After claiming to have read all of Dickens, Franzen acknowledged that it's "a real page-turner.") As for my guess about why she picked the novels she picked, two words: high. school. I read AToTC in high school, but other sections of our ninth-grade English class read Great Expectations, which seems to be the most widely read Dickens in the U.S., so far as I can tell. (It inspired Pip on South Park, didn't it?)
I kind of wish she'd done something more adventurous, picking a longer work that doesn't get assigned to 7/10 high schoolers in America, but oh well. One upside of this, hopefully, will be renewed interest in Great Expectations in time for the Dickens Universe conference at Santa Cruz next summer, which is spotlighting GE as it kicks off an early celebration of the Dickens bicentennial.
It made me think about Oprah a lot, though, and what she could do with her publishing power--not so much in terms of championing new authors, but in actually shifting conceptions of the canon, or affecting what titles are kept in print. (Of course, if you look at the back pages of a Penguin edition of a book from the 1980s, you realize just how arbitrary the choices of what's in print at any given time seem to be.) Could Oprah return to George Meredith the stature he had at the end of the nineteenth century? Could she bring Marius the Epicurean back into print for the next 25 years?
But perhaps it's better not to ask such questions. It leaves one desperately craving her power...