Fingers above keys. Well, two fingers, the middle ones. . .in my high school back in the day, only those NOT going to college were taught to type. Somehow I missed the part where going to college was going to get me a secretary. Though I am reasonably fast and accurate all things considered, this fact seems worth mentioning as I begin a blog that will, in part, reflect on changing technologies and their relationship to reading, research, writing.
Hesitance to commit words to a medium that carries those words to others is something I have been thinking about (struggling with) this week. This blog is rooted in my sabbatical project for Spring 2014 (thank you, UMW). The project has a rather brave abstract:
This project focuses on four of my primary areas of research and teaching: poetry, women’s writing, literary Modernism, and digital humanities. It centers on the digital archive of periodicals called the Modernist Journals Project. I anticipate producing a scholarly article on the presence of “the poetesses” in these journals; maintaining a professional blog on my reading/research; designing a new course for the English major called Modernism in the Magazines; and contributing pedagogical materials to the MJP site.
More specifically, my proposal said:
I understand the last major element of my proposal as a hybrid of process and product. My past and proposed work in the MJP archive grows directly out of my vibrant interest in digital humanities. I do find, however, that the work in literary studies on digital scholarship and teaching lags well behind that in, say, history. The research I do in the MJP archive will obviously make use of the primary resources available only through digitalization, but I propose to use meaningful technologies also in disseminating that research. Specifically, I plan to use an active, specialized blog to record, cultivate, and share my ongoing pedagogical and professional work in the archive. The “Looking for Whitman” project vaulted me from being a blog facilitator to a literary blogger, but with a voice largely distributed across my teaching blogs on UMWBlogs, so it is a job (identity?) that I hope to refine more intentionally in the next few years.
My reading thus far has focused on the field of periodical studies, especially in the Modernist period. Some of the lead writers and editors of the little magazines churned out thousands of words of copy a week–reviews, manifestos, retorts, editorials, poems, stories. Without the benefit of hyperlinks, periodicals engaged in elaborate cross-reference and dialogue. Was it less anxiety-producing to write for those modernist periodical writers, producing language and ideas at such a tremendous rate that, even when undistracted by tweets, kiks, messages, alerts, vines, snapchats, it must have been nearly impossible to refine them, to feel secure about and committed to them? (Okay, at least for everyone but Ezra, the Evil Godfather of Modernism.)
By nature the periodical challenges the sense of permanence that characterizes our widespread understanding of literature; it’s not just the bunk about timeless universality, but also the physicality of books. (Remember them? That thing made of paper that the e-book is supposed to make extinct? As one who festishes my books and also owns an e-reader, I frequently find that I download the books I don’t care if I “have forever”–see what I mean?) Periodicals are to be read and recycled, replaced in quick succession by the next issue. They are in waiting rooms, newsstands, mail boxes, art classes where they get cut up for collages. Even literary periodicals like Poetry, begun by the bad ass Harriet Monroe, are focused on the contents of one issue and maybe give a tease about what to expect in the next issue. The periodical is also a forward-looking genre, then, pitching itself through weeks or months, trying to keep its subscribers hooked for the next round.
Even those with the funds to produce on thick paper or with stronger covers couldn’t have imagined that, a century later, the issues would be digitized cover to cover and made available to millions of potential readers– and furthermore, that the genre defined by impermanence and expectancy would be thereby transformed into an artifact, impervious to rot, ripe for study. Permanent.
Like the little magazine, a blog follows a logic of periodicity and therefore of replacement. People subscribe to blogs in anticipation of what is still to come. Although blogs have archives, it is timeliness rather than timelessness that characterizes the genre. And yet one never knows how the copy produced, how the language and ideas thus published and disseminated, will travel and live. But the journey begins.
