New vistas ahead

I sometimes self-edit when writing about work in this venue. The truth is, I try not to talk too much about the things that go well in my life. Why?, you might wonder. Well, if I took my cues for what to talk about and how to talk from the way people around me talk about their lives then I would do one of two things: either complain about my work/life in general by stating repeatedly, supported by ample evidence, that it all sorta sucks; or moan about how much I have to work and how little time I have for other things in life. Sleep deprivation, burnt-out syndrome, all kinds of stress- and anxiety-related problems…all very en vogue. Too much so, if you ask me. I have problems just like everyone else of course and I moan and complain, too, but I don’t want to foreground my problems so much by talking about them more than I absolutely have to. If I did that, or so my thinking on the topic goes anyway, I would probably feel quite powerless. Plus, I don’t like talk that isn’t followed by action, so if I can’t fix a problem (because I’m unwilling or because it’s impossible) then I would often simply not talk about it at all. This is one of the ways in which I self-edit when I write on this blog, and I am prefacing what I actually want to say today with these words because I am going to break with my own rules.

Because today I want to express my happiness about how the academic life is developing for me.

But let me cushion that tough statement a bit more before I really delve into the good bad news.

Life isn’t kinder to me than it is to anyone else but I do try to be kind to myself occasionally. For instance, I would never skip sleep for work – what a ludicrous idea! I don’t work more than I have to and I keep up my hobbies so that I can remain high happiness levels. When it comes to complaining, I usually at least try to stand by my decisions, and part of that is to keep complaining about what I did wrong/too late/not at all to the absolute minimum. Some of my decisions are shitty, some of them aren’t; but they are all mine, not external to me, nor am I usually forced to decide one way or another (I have been lucky so far), so why would I complain about what happened? I also often think if I did that I’d bore my audience to death.

On the surface these little rules and maxism grant me a somewhat sunny attitude to working life. This relatively positive disposition towards things that are by many, including me, rightly perceived as challenges such as doing PhDs or writing research articles etc. is something I had to fight for very hard. Because I come from a family of pessimists. My mother grew up in post-war Germany and like many of her generation shows all the dysfunctional behaviours associated with secondary trauma. She lives her life through fear and has taught my sis and me to do the same. Dad doesn’t get much talking time in and usually exudes his friendly demeanour in the solitude of his office. (Bit of a shame that.) My sis and I have battled through our individual dark valleys and have come out well at the other end, I think. (Though sis has come out ‘better’: she is a remote healer now.) The last few years were still tough for me as, travelling around the world to obtain my academic qualifications, I experienced multiple dislocations. Hardest of that was that I basically lived without close friends around me for quite a number of years. I didn’t manage to make close friends at uni at all during the 3.5 years I worked on my PhD, or at least none that I am still in contact with. So it’s not like things have gone great for me in all respects.

But things are going really well for me now at work and I just want to say it for once: I am really happy about that! Never mind I am supposed to only bitch about work or comment on how it is all one big struggle. I won’t and it isn’t! I am working on two fascinating research projects, and although the work is time-consuming and none of the projects is completely up my alley, both are very interesting indeed. Work feels easy, if not effortless that way. My one colleague is a bit of a difficult person…but so am I, and I am glad that I seem to be able to be to my colleague the quiet counterpart and support that she appears to be needing. In a way I feel like I am making up for what others didn’t do for me back when I needed support during my doctoral dissertation. Strange logic perhaps but it feels balanced out.

Being the bookling that I am I have also begun thinking about writing a book. Exciting! This is also where the true cause for my current happiness lies. In Germany doctoral students have to publish their theses before they can claim the title of ‘Dr.’, in Britain we don’t, and so technically I wouldn’t really have to publish my doctoral work at all. But I really want to and I think I can do it, too. It’s the one thing I am really good at, to be honest. Always has been. That’s why I am Miss Bookling. During my PhD, the one thing that I think was different for me in comparison to a lot of my peers was that I always felt like a fish in water in the academic environment. I love the world of ideas, and I love it best when a sexy idea relates to an important real-world problem or issue. I strangely have no sense of deficiency or inferiority about my academic work at all. It usually serves a purpose and it usually meets that purpose, too. Some of my work is better than would be expected, and sometimes even my 20th draft is worse than one would want it to be. Still: Give me a stack of books on a given topic and tell me to write a paper on it within a week’s time and I’ll be happy; lock me up in a room full of academics many of whom will be my age and I will freak…So each to their own!

Anyway, last week I composed a book proposal for my first academic book. What a great exercise in world making that was! I truly created something out of nothing! (Erm… since it’s all still at the conceptual stage I have really created nothing, and out of nothing too… but nevermind.) All of a sudden there is a new book of whose existence I now know, and better than anyone else too! Hehe. I know what the first chapter says, how much of that is taken up in which way in the second chapter and how I lead into the empirical parts. I know how the book will relate to other books of the same character.* I can see the book before my inner eye. I could actually talk about the contents of the book I have not written for hours on end! I won’t, of course, partly because that might jinx the writing itself, partly because it spoils the quiet pleasure that was involved in producing the book proposal.There’s also the consideration for the audience again…;)

Oh how wonderful writing the book proposal was! I took the week off from work so that I could devote myself entirely to the world-making project at hand. I didn’t get up too early, nor did I get up very late – I had a full schedule every day after all! After two full days of reading, interrupted with shortish bike-rides under a blue sunny March sky, I started working on the proposal proper. On the third day around 10 p.m. the draft was done. Then I sent it on to my sweetheart to read it. His reaction was: ‘This reads like a proper book!’ Yay!

The entire undertaking is still almost a size too large for me, so at times I am apprehensive and doubtful. That’s entirely normal, I tell myself. After all, I will approach an international academic publisher with the proposal. I already know the name of the commissioning editor, yikes! Wonderful times ahead! I know that I will grow into these shoes that seem too large now. I know that I can write a book because I have essentially written two already – in the form of theses, true, but still. Composing a longer manuscript again will be easier now, I think, and it will be more fun because I will be my own boss entirely in the process. That is something I am truly looking forward to!

This is the shifting of the tides. Right now. Six years ago I could not have lived through this moment calmly. Back then I bumbled along and hardly knew what was going on. There was emotional chaos everywhere (yes, in academia). Three years ago I had a bit of a clue but felt unsupported and didn’t fully believe in myself. I can see how far I have come and I am grateful and happy for it.

And it is important to share happy feelings and thoughts! Thanks for sharing with me

____

* In fact, the book that I propose to write or rather the imagined book that I will have written one day is a superb example for ‘invented books’ as discussed by Pierre Bayard in his excellent academic advice pamphlet How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read. Very amusing read, the skills one can pick up in reading it come in handy at dinner parties and academic conferences.

 

 

Why I love books

A few weeks ago I happened to read one of these really great books, you know, the ones that give you that eerie feeling of being connected with the writer and that the two of you are made of the same wood. Packing my bag to return books to the library just now I was wondering if I should return it together with the other books and so I remembered that special feeling. One thing led to another and I am now at the point where I’m thinking: Honestly, it’s not self-evident at all why this one books was so great. And why would one love reading books anyway? What is it about this activity that is so special?

Not that all reading is awesome, of course. Most reading probably isn’t. The book that made me feel warm inside was an edited volume discussing power relations in academia and I read two essays in it discussing the PhD student-PhD supervisor relationship. So there I was, sitting at my kitchen table months and months after I stopped caring about this topic, and someone far away was describing precisely the troubles I had had and discussed them insightfully, without moaning and without accusing anyone. I was touched both how personal the writing was and also how fair and balanaced the difficulties in the PhD student-PhD supervisor relationship were addressed. So on the one hand I felt connected and understood, and I also learned something about fairness.

And that’s what a great book can do for you, I think, and why great books are so utterly invaluable: they connect you to the world and they help you extend your horizon, too. (People can do both as well, of course.) It doesn’t matter whether it’s a fictional or non-fictional book; in this case, it was non-fiction. One of the greatest works of fiction that I have ever come across and that also made me feel connected while teaching me valuable lessons about life was Jane Eyre. It’s truly oOne of the greatest books of all times, for women especially.

Feeling connected is obviously important for the reader as reading is per definition is solitary occupation. Even in a globalised world I consider it a miracle to feel connected to a writer who wrote what I am reading now in another country and perhaps even a different time, and yet we both had similar experiences and subsequent thoughts! This discovery always makes me feel connected, not to the writer as another person so much (though that too, but that’s not so super important) but to the world of ideas. When I see that someone else experienced what I did and reflected about it in a similar way, then I know that there is something to my ideas, enough anyway for some publisher to accept them in an article or book. This in turn encourages me to think and to take thinking seriously. And that’s what a good book can do for you and, accidentally, that’s also why it is so important for children to start to read early ( how else are they going to turn into proper little booklings, hm?).

So I love books because I gain courage from reading and because I know that others feel the same way. I also love books because I learn so much from them all the time. Even a badly edited book or one with semi-poor contents can still impart a lesson. Books in general widen my understanding of what the world is like and they help those of us who can’t travel places and talk to people all the time to widen our knowledge of the world. They teach us about the ‘possible possibilities’ (love this phrase by Steve Hitlin!) in terms of human thought and action so that we know what could reasonably be expected from a person or a group in situation x.

Most reading only makes sense when you are also living in the world at the same time, for how else can you relate to what you are reading? In that sense I think saying that I love books means that I love life and living, too. Books are only good in so far as they are commenting on life.

And that’s why it is so easy to say it: I love books! Reading is only not commendable when it’s all you have. It can’t substitute real social contact and it can’t stand in for the imperceptible learning that occurs all the time as we interact with others. It can only complement these processes, which is why avid readers, whilst sitting in the bar talking, will draw connections between what’s going on right now and some book that they have read or are reading, or why they will interrupt their reading to reflect on a personal experience. Reading is really just another form of living. It’s the reflective life, and such is the life of a bookling. That’s why I love books.

Baby steps for the sociologist

This is me fumbling around with party political theories right after a conference in the Study of Party Politics last November. I guess I worked with the old trick of starting with what you know already and then working from there towards the new stuff.

Pretty bookish eh.

 

 

I like the way I read

…sometimes abusive:

…sometimes reflective, stroking my imaginary beard:

…sometimes full of the joy of life, aka ridicule:

I generally like the way I am telling my later self how I initially felt as I read this material. Way to go, girl.

Bookling’s World must change

A more dramatic title would have been ‘Bookling’s World in Peril’ but that would suggest that all change is always dangerous, which is a useless position to hold (and not even conservatives proper would embrace it). Change is inevitable and wholesome, and change is at hand here on Bookling’s World.

The truth is that I am going nowhere with my blog. I had set out wanting to write about the books that I come across. Back then I had this hobby of writing book reviews in my spare time, just for myself. (I also had a FB group called ‘Geeky Love’ then which gives you a pretty good idea of the mindspace I was in.) On the one hand, I wanted to be able to remember the books that I had read; at the same time I had a strong urge to write down my thoughts back then. The reason for all that desire to write was that I sort of wanted to keep my options open. ‘Maybe I become a journalist after all’, I thought back then, ‘ergo I better get some writing practice’.  I don’t want to become a journalist, I’m pretty sure about that now, and I have never really considered this venue as an apprenticeship of any kind anyway.

There are three reasons why Bookling’s Word must change: The first is that I have a love-hate relationship with blogging. It’s easy and convenient and fun but it’s also inherently mediocre, and I struggle with that a bit. I don’t want to be mediocre and I’m not good enough to be good in the blogosphere. So I feel I should refrain and regroup. The second reason follows from that: If I’m not longer totally convinced of the benefit of blogging then I have no raison d’être for it any more. Thirdly and most importantly, I am running out of time to write blog posts. Thesis writing isn’t for the faint-hearted and really challenges me in my totality as a person. I just don’t have the energy for anything over and above reading, thinking and writing any more, and this isn’t going to change when I am finished with the PhD either.

Unless I don’t get a job, of course, in which case I might write a serialised novel right here in this venue.

Booklings, in their original conception by Walter Moers, are friendly, loveable and warm creatures. They’re knowledgeable too seeing as the read (eat) so many books. Right now I have no idea how to get from the reading of books to the talking about them, or anything, in a manner that feels good to me. But once I’ve figured it out, Bookling’s World will be full of merry book reading comments and discussion again.

Bookling walks

I have been out in the hills a lot lately and walking is increasingly developing into an obsession. But what about my first love, i.e. books? Can love of books be combined with love of hill-walking? Sure it can.

For a start, there are marvellous books about hill-walking. Famous mountaineer Cameron McNeish’s books are beautiful to flick through but some of his route descriptions are a bit odd. His approach is to ‘spread the load’ of walkers across the mountains and he therefore recommends routes that no one would ever walk – for good reasons. So his books are good if you’re out in for an adventure.

The Scottish Mountaineering Club’s (SMC) books are generally to be preferred. The SMC also has a range of other books about mountain weather and flora & fauna. My personal favourite is Hostile Habitats which gives comprehensive information about the Scottish Highland environment. Probably more a book for mountain geeks.

There are too many novels about mountains to list, and I have only read a very few of them. The Testament of Gideon Mack by James Robertson comes to mind straight away, for me at least; it’s set in the Dalwhinnie/Ben Alder area which, as I have heard (but not seen), is one of the most enchanting mountain areas in Scotland. Ben Alder is renowned for it’s remoteness. I’d love to walk there.

So this is the obvious way to combine books and walking. Then there are the people that one is walking with: I have had many a wonderful discussion about books whilst out walking. One of the nicest moments of this kind was probably when I discovered that the Latina chick that I had been walking with all day was a Jane Austen fan just like me. We discussed many aspects of the books as well as films which made the climb of Stuchd an Lochain a memorable day.

The first thing I do usually when I come back from a walk is take up one of my navigation books and read a few pages in it. So booklings and hill-walking go together well (no pun intended).

Looking at my Amazon bills these days I would say that my first love is still firmly with books though. Books are always there and always accessible, no matter how windy it is, and books can take you places if you have some imagination. At the end of the day, it’s not a question of ‘do you choose books or life’ (a la ‘cake or death‘).

How not to be boring

Being a geek is ok but being boring is not. There is nothing worse than being a boring old twat and a scholar. So here is my take on how to avoid being boring.

1. Watch block-busters. (Avatar, yay!!)
2. Keep up to date with what’s hot in terms of music – but do listen to the stuff you like at the same time. If you hate pop, then don’t listen to it. (And a wise decision that would be, too.)
3. Stay well-groomed. Just because you’re around books more than people doesn’t mean you don’t need to look presentable. Do not ever neglect your appearance. If this means going to the hairdresser, getting a manicure or pedicure, and going shopping every now and then (I hate that though), then so be it.
4. Read middle-of-the road magazines, i.e. fashion/women’s/men’s magazines.
5. Do some physical exercise; not for appearance but to keep fit and alert. Going to a gym, for instance, will also help with the music bit; if it’s a good gym, they’ll play decent tunes. I’m not suggesting though that quality of music is the arbiter for how good a gym is.
6. When talking to people, try to listen and give feedback comments. Don’t just respond with a monologue of your own. Try to engage with people. Social interaction is not about showing everyone what you know, it’s about establishing something that has little bits of you and little bits of the other person in it. It’s ok therefore to talk about a topic superficially.
7. Hang out with friends every now and then. Go dancing, or play games, or have a snowball fight.

This is not an exhaustive list, just a few things that come to mind. You can see that 1.-4. is basically about being in the pop-culture loop. I think that’s where academics often go wrong – they think they don’t need to take an interest in ordinary stuff like that, or that they don’t have the time. In a lot of fields of inquiry this kind of attitude isn’t exactly helpful. Sociologists, for one, must know what matters to the people, I think. (But this doesn’t mean that all sociologists are cool as – they’re not.)

Without anything to read…

…the world is a dreary place, or so I thought as I set out on my weekend away in the mountains last Friday. (A bit of a ridiculous notion, I know, but hey, this is ‘Bookling’s World’!) I had made a conscious decision not to take The Testament of Gideon Mack along, simply because I thought I wouldn’t have time to read anyway. ‘This is not going to be another one of these weekends away where you carry a lot of books and don’t read any of them, and then you feel guilty for that’, I said to myself.

‘Plus, what’s the point of taking along a book when you can just as well buy a newspaper at the petrol station along the way?’ This had been my wicked plan: ‘Don’t take a book, buy the Independent on Friday instead (Arts and Books Review!!!) and toss it in the bin when you’re finished’. I had to stop at a petrol station anyway.

In the end I found myself sitting in the car halfway to the mountains and suddenly realising that I had forgotten to buy the Independent. So there I was with nothing to read at all. For two days. And you know what: It felt really weird. Which then made me feel a bit self-conscious. Am I addicted to printed material? Am I weird or what?

I still had a great weekend away (‘still’ as if that had been put in question by the absence of books, phh. If I really was a bookling though this would have been a deadly situation; ‘no books’ equals ‘no food’ for booklings.). I didn’t read a single line even though I could have read lots since there were tons of mountaineering books at the hut where we staid. I looked at them which was already really nice; I took a few of them onto my lap whilst sitting at the fireplace after a long day’s walk in snow and ice, I flicked through them and looked at pictures. (I knew these books would be boring as to read; I’m talking about a local mountaineering club’s yearbooks.)

That was enough; fondling books was a good enough compromise. That way, I was still connected to the world of ideas – which is a little bit of a depressing thought really (for who wants to be dependent in that way?). But it’s true.

Somehow, though, the world still isn’t a dreary place without books.

Books that mattered in 2009

I spent New Years in a remote mountain location without mobile phone reception or any other postmodern gimmickery. There was us fifteen mountaineers, and there were the mountains. So we hiked. Through knee-deep snow.

Trudging along gave me ample time to think about the year that had just passed. 2009 for me was definitely the Year of the Book for me. It all started off with Walter Moers’ City of Dreaming Books which I read over the Christmas holidays last year; I remember sitting at the airport on my way back home thinking ‘so it is possible to be very geeky, imaginative and super-realistic at the same time’. It was a miraculous realisation and it felt very profound to me. Moers creates beautiful worlds that are inhabited by wondrous creatures, some with big hearts but of hideous appearance, others witty and sly and foul, and with heroes and heroines that toe a tight line between wisdom and folly. There are too many characters to name really, and I have forgotten the names anyway. But the idea of, or the creature that is called bookling, has stuck with me.

Booklings live on books. Books are their main diet. A binge-eating bookling is one that reads too much rich literature. Shakespeare, for instance, makes for a rich meal and must be consumed in small portions only. A starving bookling, on the other hand, is one that hardly reads and maybe only has access to phone books or trashy romances which aren’t very filling. The more depth, the higher the degree of narrativity of a given book, the richer a nourishment it represents for booklings. In terms of looks, booklings are stocky in an E.T. sort of way, with a long skinny neck from which protrudes one big eye. Their caves are stacked full of books.

When I started this blog I lay claim to being a bookling myself. This is because, just like an extraordinary meal, a good book can make a huge difference. Books have the capacity, if not power, to change worlds, to create a feeling of belonging to the lonesome reader, to subtly challenge the complacent, to bridge the chasm of despair for those who struggle, and to give pure joy and happiness (in a way actually that I don’t think a meal can but each to their own). Books open new worlds. Think of the great books of our time, like The Lord of the Rings, or the Narnia series: they have accompanied generations of readers all over the world for many decades (and, by the by, have given Christianity an interesting pop-cultural spin).

The City of Dreaming Books technically belongs in the year 2008 (which also has Tolkien’s Children of Hurin – a great book that was, if very dark); the best leisure time reads I came across in 2009 were:

• Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader – better late than never. Fully enjoyed it and learned a lot about representation of the past.
• Michael Pollan’s A Place of My Own. This book has me talking of my own writing shed for many weeks. Pollan is a professional writer who one day realised that his profession places him at quite a distance from the material reality, the nitty-gritty most people live in every day. So he decided to build a shed, to do something rather hands-on as it were. Being a writer, however, he couldn’t help but write this brilliant book about the experience afterwards.
• A.S. Byatt’s Angels and Insects (which has been adapted for the screen; as per usual when it comes to Byatt I wondered why she places her plots in the Victorian era – whence that desire for cultural and temporal distance?)
• Umberto Eco’s The Island of the Day Before. The enormous significance of this book lies in that it seemed directly relevant to my research. Being a semiotician Eco’s books have huge potential to contribute to discussions of how people make meaning, and I hope to be able to use his books for that.
• Ross Raisin’s God’s Own Country. This guy is young and brilliant. Never seemed the Yorkshire dales and moors bleaker than in this little novel (though far be it from me to say anything like ‘forget about the Brontes’ – for one must never forget about them!). A bitter tale on human character.
• George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin: A Scottish fairy tale (that comes along very English) written for young readers but surely appealing to older folk as well.

I feasted on these books as well as on others that I have forgotten and that we can therefore assume were not very nourishing. I talked about books more than I ever did before, as well, and I thus became, publicly and openly, a bookling.

About booklings

Booklings are a creation of the German novelist Walter Moers and have made their first appearance in 2004 in Germany and in 2007 in the English-speaking world, in The City of Dreaming Books. Booklings live in the catacombs underneath Bookholm which is a city any geek alive today would die to visit because Bookholm is all about books. As are booklings. They are rather smallish creatures who live on books. They eat them not in that they literally devour the paper – no no, they READ books, and depending on the quality of the literature a meal is more or less wholesome. William Shakespeare (or Aliesha Wimperslake in Moers’ lingo) must thus be read with care as it is such rich nourishment whereas any bookling could graze on Dan Brown 24/7 and not put on the tiniest bit of weight.

The bookling’s universe is pretty much organised around qualities of books. Like a divinely prepared meal, a good book stands out for a long, long time and probably changes the bookling who read it forever.