In our last episode, we beat up a bit on the notion of “learning object repositories” (LORs), wondering whether the well-meaning assemblage of modular bits and pieces of educational materials was actually a frustration of coherent teaching. Educational practices, after all, are still grounded in settings and customs that predate the digital on-demand world. We speak of courses, of curricula, of graduation; we cling on to learning as an unfolding, progressive narrative. And progressive narratives seem to be exactly what free-floating clusters of learning objects lack.

Haunted as I am by S.T. Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner and that ghostly character’s pseudo-progressive travails, I can’t help thinking of decontextualized learning objects as similar to the unearthly sounds that rise out of the mouths of his dead crew and swirl unfixedly about:

Around, around, flew each sweet sound,
Then darted to the Sun;
Slowly the sounds came back again,
Now mix’d, now one by one.

Sometimes a-dropping from the sky
I heard the skylark sing;
Sometimes all little birds that are,
How they seem’d to fill the sea and air
With their sweet jargoning!

And now ’twas like all instruments,
Now like a lonely flute;
And now it is an angel’s song,
That makes the Heavens be mute.

It ceased…

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is heuristic to the core; it teaches us to teach through many spectacularly negative examples. Disconnection from community, the poem suggests, leads to a horror-mirror world of isolation: a world teeming with elements snapped off from the teleology of cause & effect. The Mariner butchers the bird, obeying some unexplained private impulse, and dooms himself to a world where wind is heard but not felt, or felt but not heard — and the same goes for companionship, morality, religion, expiation. Very dissatisfying. Those free-floating supernatural sounds — all that “sweet jargoning” — are momentarily marvelous, even Heavens-eclipsing — and yet they’re unreliable and of dubious value, to say the least. They don’t advance the plot; they just cease.

The Mariner’s original sin: ignoring community (which was, after all, so strongly fostered by that unlucky albatross). It’s a pretty trenchant sin; even after any amount of penance, he seems doomed to repeat it. He poaches the Wedding Guest, blocking this unwilling auditor from entering a communal wedding celebration (the poor Guest protests, to no effect, “The guests are met, the feast is set: / May’st hear the merry din….’”), and forcing the Guest, instead, to listen to a hard-luck story having little to do with its auditor, superficial appearances notwithstanding (”That moment that his face I see, / I know the man who must hear me…”).

And what in mute Heaven’s name does any of this have to do with learning object repositories? It seems that we’re learning the Mariner’s lesson all over again. The most thoughtful study that I’ve read about the uptake and implementation of LORs is the recent study “Community Dimensions of Learning Object Repositories,” funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). The gist of this report is evident directly from its title: however energetically you go about building a constellation of durable, interoperable, reusable, and sharable chunks of teaching & learning materials, it won’t mean a thing unless you tailor it to the cultural norms and expectations of a user community. As the report observes in its rather British way, “pedadogical, social, and organisational factors have not been at the forefront in LOR development to date.”

A community shares goals, interests, practices; it draws on commonly available tools; it shares understanding of processes and concepts. The JISC study lines up and sets marching some hard questions bound to make any repository-builder squirm: What is the purpose of the LOR — ie, how does it serve its community? Who are key stakeholders in that community? In what broader context does that community operate? A LOR project that starts by grappling with such large questions stands a better chance of being organized by pedagogical goals and activities, rather than all the content it can cram into its great maw just because — like the Mariner knocking an albatross down out of the sky — it can.

Treating teachers as one big community is in many ways an absurdity, of course — we operate within a dizzying array of conditions and expectations, and with a variety of allegiance to vastly different sponsoring institutions. Nevertheless, it is at least a good step to consider how a LOR addresses whatever generalizations you may wish to venture about teachers as a community. This borders on a truism, but then again how many LORs truly meet an actual teacher half way? The JISC report hazards a few claims about teachers and the way they behave:

• They have a very problematic relationship with metadata. Descriptive metadata can fail them when they’re hunting in the dark for objects. When submitting an object to an LOR, they’re not trained & often not helped in the fine art of quality metadata appendage. More on this issue here, btw
• They often prefer to create their own learning objects, rather than patch someone else’s in. On the scale of teacherly chores — grading, planning, meeting, exhorting, reviewing — creation of new materials for one’s class is actually on the fun side, one of the best ways to stand out and inspire, to make your class into a unique event. Even if you’re not so handy with making new things, by dipping into the well of pre-made pieces you risk “loss of educational narrative,” as the JISC report puts it (and how many teachers got into the business because of their assemblage skills anyway?). Educational narrative may be more important to individual-obsessed humanists than object-oriented scientists, the report notes in passing.
• Teachers like incentives just like anyone else, and an LOR would do well to supply some. They could be in the form of recognition or perhaps an even more tangible reward for contribution, or proof that use of material from the LOR will make a teacher more effective. If the LOR is keyed to the goals of the institution that pays said teacher, that’s a fine reason to use it.
• Despite all impediments, teachers, bless ‘em, are a persistently open-minded lot, at least according to the JISC report: “In general the interviewees have a positive attitude to reuse, and most have stated that they are willing to keep trying to reuse material, despite the difficulties they have faced.” This is a suggestion that LORs have some time to wake up to the willing worlds around them in all their glorious particularity.

And let’s close, on that brighter note, by nodding towards LORs that do seem engaged with the communities that use them, on some level at least.

The granddaddy of LORs, LC’s American Memory Project, set an early standard by layering its gigantic offerings with a “Learning Page… especially for teachers” : a collection of “teacher created, classroom tested lesson plans… [to] jumpstart your use of primary sources,” a rundown of curricular themes, various strategies to promote critical thinking, and professional development materials.

The National Science Digital Library corrals its resources for various imagined players: K12 Teachers, Librarians, NSDL Community Members (you know who you are), University Faculty, and First Time Users. Each of these groups has customized “pathways” through the library, as well as a fistful of fairly active blogs grouped by audience category.

Finally, the December issue of D-Lib describes a geoscience LOR named “Teach the Earth” built by the Science Education Resource Center at Carleton College; the article is encouragingly titled, “Digital Library as Network and Community Center: A Successful Model for Contribution and Use.”. The authors state, flat out:

A successful educational digital library is as much a social process as a technical problem. It requires creation of a culture that fosters contribution to and use of the library. We have addressed creation of this culture by working with NSF-funded projects focused on the professional development of geoscience faculty as teachers. Each of these projects partnered with SERC to create its project website. They seek two primary services in this partnership: 1) tools, resources and experts that assist them in creating high quality project websites and 2) placement of their resources in a network that enhances dissemination and use of their work. We created a win-win situation that yields rapid production of content for the library and facilitates use, by allowing our partners the flexibility to meet their own project goals while contributing to the overarching digital library.

Let’s see: professional development, support of individual projects with an eye towards incorporation, maintenance of a consistent level of quality, enhancement of dissemination and recognition of work — sounds like a happy LOR to me, one that engages its users, rather than stunning them.

The SERC authors claim that a full 25% of all geoscience faculty in the US (the audience it bothered to target) now use Teach the Earth: now that’s uptake!

“Vices” may be “glaring as the noon-day sun,” but poems can go mighty dark. Hidden since 1811, Poetical Essay by a young Percy Bysshe Shelley appears in 2006.

Millions to fight compell’d, to fight or die
In mangled heaps on War’s red altar lie . . .
When legal murders swell the lists of pride;
When glory’s views the titled idiot guide.

Reading Roy Rosenzweig’s thoughtful appraisal of Wikipedia in the current Journal of American History (“Can History Be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past”), I was particularly struck by this passage:

If Wikipedia is becoming the family encyclopedia for the twenty-first century, historians probably have a professional obligation to make it as good as possible. And if every member of the Organization of American Historians devoted just one day to improving the entries in her or his areas of expertise, it would not only significantly raise the quality of Wikipedia, it would also enhance popular historical literacy.

Let’s step back and marvel at another indication of the power and sudden inexorability of Wikipedia — can you imagine a distinguished historian feeling that he owed it to the world to improve the Encyclopedia Britannica, and urging colleagues to do their part too? For no credit and no money?

If historians and other academic experts should really be raising the quality of Wikipedia, this begs the question of who their exertions would be for. An initial answer, I suspect, would be: not for each other, and not for their students. As Rosenzweig writes (in a peer-reviewed journal, of course, and not an encyclopedia),

Most readers of this journal have not relied heavily on encyclopedias since junior high school days. And most readers of this journal do not want their students to rely heavily on encyclopedias — digital or print, free or subscription, professionally written or amateur and collaborative — for research papers.

And so an obligation to Wikipedia seems outwardly directed, keyed to a general public’s understanding (that Cleaveresque ‘family’ using a family encyclopedia). This raises further questions. Are we seeing a technologically-enabled resurgence of the public intellectual? If so, what would it mean to take on this role in a communally edited space impervious to individual identity and, as Rosenzweig notes, suspicious of expertise?

Since an edifying or even identifiable relationship with Wikipedia users seems impossible, let’s posit that obligation to it is not primarily to a public, but really to a field of knowledge as it is represented in public. In other words, if the Wikipedia page on the American Revolution is becoming the de facto online summation of this event, and if historians don’t weigh in, their knowledge fails to apply where it’s most needed.

But I wonder about how good academics generally are at writing encyclopedia articles. In many cases, it’s not at all the kind of work they do when researching or teaching — it’s not what their intellectual life is about. In general encyclopedias have settled into tended repositories of knowledge, not the active sites of inquiry that universities strive to be.

As Rosenzweig says, “Wikipedia (like encyclopedias in general) summarizes and reports the conventional and accepted wisdom on a topic but does not break new ground.” To get a sense of the progressive quiescence of encyclopedias, you could look at Wikipedia’s entry on Diderot’s Encyclopédie:

The Encyclopédie played an important role in the intellectual ferment leading to the French Revolution. “No encyclopaedia perhaps has been of such political importance, or has occupied so conspicuous a place in the civil and literary history of its century. It sought not only to give information, but to guide opinion,” wrote the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica.

This reliance on a hundred year old hedged claim in another encyclopedia about the political impact of a 200+-year-old encyclopedia may seem abundantly timid, but it exists — at least today — in an Wikipedia article whose neutrality is nonetheless flagged as disputed. Wikipedia strives to resolve dispute, to traffic in the indisputable — while a university that lived by that principle would be a zombie campus, at best.

Whether or not you believe in the power of online collectivism, and whether or not you think that Wikipedia represents that collectivism, you have to hand it to it (them?): Wikipedia knows what it is and what it is not. It couldn’t be more explicit about its limitations: it accepts no original research, no original ideas. And it does not pretend to satisfy research; its founder, Jimbo Wales, reportedly offers this advice to students: “For God sake, you’re in college; don’t cite the encyclopedia.”

So, again, why might thoughtful and original academics pay particular attention to an environment that is in many ways alien to them — and even entertain notions of obligation to it? I have a few guesses, all of them broad, none of them substantiated:

Academic publishing is sluggish — Is there any write-up about Wikipedia that does not refer to its vast coverage, its low barrier of entry, and what Rosenzweig calls its “open-source mode of production and distribution”? Academics yearn to see their work actually get distributed in the world, and they are caught in increasingly sluggish and narrow channels of communication. Wikipedia actually publishes effort, instantly and in retrievable form, to an audience that can respond to it.

No doubt about it, academic publishing constricts the discourse it should support, but the invigoration of it in a digital environment will probably be quite different from the structure and dynamics of a wildly popular collaborative encyclopedia. Wikipedia may have the most to teach us through its stubborn emphasis of what it is not: are we listening? This is a world in which, as the entry on ‘expert’ tells us (today, at least), “an intellectual elite may or may not be correct about a particular issue in their field of expertise.” The “may or may not” ambivalence about expertise, the faith in correctness at all cost… not exactly the environment for nuance, originality, or intellectual leadership.

The academic star system is stifling — This is a corollary to the above point, because recognized stars get into print more often, or at least can lean on the rusty gears of publication. And stars are stars — let’s face it — they energize events, they get the grants, they make things happen. But I suspect many academics — even stars — are titillated by Wikipedia’s oft-noted indifference to expertise. By depersonalizing and flattening and opening the field of contribution, Wikipedia seductively suggests that truth will prevail on its own — no lollygagging on laurels here.

Whatever we think of laurels, it is indisputable that peer-review, the basic engine of academic appraisal, depends on identification and reputation. Escaping the burdens of apprenticeship, labor-validation, review, and professional development may seem liberating, but a specified affiliation and whatever responsibility (or lack thereof) that implies are enabling conditions of academic discourse. A university can’t function without overt hierarchies–campus rituals are almost entirely organized around the individual’s passage through sanctified levels. Anonymity may prove surprisingly difficult for those whose sense of work is so deeply rooted in acknowledged position.

Neutrality is only fair — Wikipedia’s sternly enforced Neutral Point of View policy seems to offer respite from a world riddled with clashing theoretical frameworks. Humanists and scientists alike may feel that it’s exhausting to interpret morning noon and night — all the while moving practically through the world, negotiating its incoherencies. Wikipedia’s banishment of originality lightens the burden of this reconciliation; it sings the siren song of the incontestably evident.

The ban on spin attempts to keep things calm and cordial, but to what end? Wikipedia’s NPOV might seem related to the disinterested analysis beloved of academicians, but, as Rosenzweig points out, Wikipedian neutrality leads to a great deal of waffling and prim skirting of controversy. When it comes to the pursuit of knowledge, a polite series of self-cancelling on-the-other-hands proves a poor substitute for interpretive power and conviction. Poor and censorious. For a surprising little totalitarian chill, I recommend Wikipedia’s page about NPOV disputes : “there is a strong inductive argument that, if a page is in an NPOV dispute, it very probably is not neutral.”

Facts are simple, fact are good — A corollary, again, to the above point. Wikipedia leads us into a world of passive construction, where things have been proven, have been shown, have been accepted. Once all that messy agency is wiped out, we are left with qualified data in its proper place. Enjoy a small chuckle that the “Fact” entry in Wikipedia is today double-flagged as containing “disputed factual accuracy” and “original or unverified claims” . The fact remains that in Wikipedia, things are either proven or not, accepted or not, controversial or not — it’s an organized and binary landscape.

The pursuit of just the facts ma’m orients Wikipedia towards what’s been commonly agreed, but it can also lull thought to sleep. As a historian, Rosenzweig knows very well that “good historical writing requires not just factual accuracy but also a command of the scholarly literature, persuasive analysis and interpretations, and clear and engaging prose.” Let’s go back to that “Fact” entry in Wikipedia and partake of its droning tautology: “A fact that was once a fact and hence becomes disproven may once again become a fact if the factual evidence supporting its validity become increasingly factual in light of new and, ultimately, factual evidence.” ‘Nuff said.

Data is (are) cool — Though Rosenzweig gives props to the factual accuracy of Wikipedia — finding it to clock in somewhere in-between the Encyclopedia Britannica and the prohibitively expensive American National Biography Online — you can sense in his article a purer enthusiasm for Wikipedia as object. Its open content can be exported for research — “downloaded, manipulated, and ‘data mined’… Wikipedia can therefore be used for other purposes.” One of these purposes might start to feel like research: measuring activity in a somewhat transparent online environment. As faddish tracking of Wikipedia contrails suggests, passage through it becomes an enticing reflection of its users — you can trace patterns and behaviors to your heart’s content.

But what is all this data telling you? Who do Wikipedia’s users represent? How much should we take Wikipedia’s ground rules as exemplary? Tautology looms: we’re studying Wikipedia to learn how Wikipedia works. Take a research paper like “Ambiguity and conflict in the Wikipedian knowledge production system” — here’s how its it resolves: “Wikipedia is a fascinating topic of study and requires careful examination of its underlying social and cultural processes…. One of the most urgent items on the research agenda is to describe and explain the concrete processes by which knowledge and truth is produced and adjudicated.” What’s behind this compulsion — the requirement of examination, the urgency of such a research agenda? Could it be mirroring of Wikipedia’s own faith in neutral truth-production?

Again this feeling of compulsion attending Wikipedia. Maybe you feel it too. If so, it’s probably too late to suggest that another wiki, another platform, another construct might better deliver your truth.

…the trumpet that once announced from afar the laurelled mail, heart-shaking when heard screaming on the wind and proclaiming itself through the darkness to every village or solitary house on its route, has now given way for ever to the pot-wallopings of the boiler.

That’s Thomas DeQuincey, mourning the shift of nineteenth century mail delivery from horse to locomotive. The definitive social history of mail — which has yet to be written, as far as I can tell — will doubtless ride DeQuincey’s essay The English Mail-Coach, or, The Glory of Motion. It’s an incredible and reckless piece, connecting war, class, nostalgia, sublimity, and disaster into an ever-quickening system of transmission.

I’ve never read anything quite like the passage in section II when, riding on a night mail coach that is being driven by a one-eyed coachman who has nodded off — and whacked out on laudanum himself — DeQuincey trips out helplessly as the mail coach drifts into the wrong lane, bears down onto a little carriage carrying two lovers, smashes into it, *and keeps going.*

Though DeQuincey is enthralled by the inexorable post horses, and seems to deplore the trains that replaced them, in truth his horses are mechanistic in the first place–prosthetic beyond control–representative of human will that can’t be reigned in. And if steel rails prevent loverslane smashups, they facilitate all the more the inhuman speed that makes delivery a sublime business.

So transmission keeps quickening. Now it’s so fast, the very notion of delivery is starting to creak. Trains supplanted horses. Planes outpaced the trains. Email outmoded mail. Now, at least for the hungry generation treading us down, instant messaging is nudging out email. Ever notice that it’s not ‘instant mailing?’ When delivery time is whittled down to instantaneous, we seem beyond mail altogether, and we’re even more and even less in control.

Whenever I used to hear a graybeard greet the idea of email with bafflement or hostility, I would be baffled in turn: who wouldn’t want to cut out the stamps, the delays, the deferred gratification of snailmail? Email is free (ok, free with an internet connection and the time it took to set up an account), archivable, portable — email is good.

But now, confronted with instant messaging, I feel like a graybeard. I don’t want to be that accessible. I want windows of privacy, I want time to react, I want to consider considered replies. Combining IM with work has always made me feel rather like an outsourced customer service drone, forced to click a screen within 15 seconds to prove I’m paying attention. Combining IM with friends has always felt wasteful — too many snappy words whose wit wilts as fast as they’re replaced.

And yet, truth be told, just as DeQuincey’s horses and trains were stages of the same rush, so are email and instant messaging. Now that my mail swims a networked world, it made eminent sense to move my email to Gmail’s excellent platform (privacy qualms and data hostage threats notwithstanding). Exporting email that was hitherto locked up on my Mac was a chore, but doable, and now I can call up most anything that was ever sent to me, no matter where I am. Whenever I’m online a gentle Growl notification flashes a snippet of incoming mail, and Google has added chat right into their Gmail page.

So… I’m directly patched into a live network whenever I’m online. Yes, IM directly patched. Everything is imminently available. Growl: response. All this mechanized speed — Gmail is my latest surprise machine — and if I’m not careful… if I reply rashly… if I bungle an address…. Or if Google vaporizes my account… or if Gmail should crash altogether ….

The perilous instantaneous — I leave you with a bit from Jeffrey T. Schnapp’s fine essay “Crash (Speed as Engine of Individuation)” (Modernism/Modernity 6.1 (1999) 1-49):

Whether in the logic of amusement parks, modern transportation cultures, revolutionary movements, news media, or the cultural-political avant-gardes, thrill must follow thrill. Which means that accident must follow accident. De Quincey moves from mail-coaches to opiates; Marinetti from cars to airplanes to war; the thrill rider from attraction to attraction; the revolutionary dreams of permanent revolution.

Nothing odd will do long. ‘Tristram Shandy’ did not last.
- Samuel Johnson

Wrong! — I gleefully thought, way back when I was slogging through an eighteenth century literature class in college — bored silly by Johnson’s lumbering, moralizing, psuedo-Oriental Rasselas, and, in contrast, completely delighted by Lawrence Sterne’s goofy carnival of the mind, Tristram Shandy. Wrong, you fat old authoritative Dr. Johnson, because here I am 220 years later savoring every Rabelaisian joke, every self-conscious pratfall, every typographic stunt of Tristram Shandy.

I had to admire the concision of the put-down, though. A quick slam of the sprawling, irresolute Shandy.

With the wisdom of age, I now am ready to concede that Johnson was half-right: nothing odd does “do” for long. Especially online. I’ll circle back to that emphasis in a moment — but first, let me submit that Tristram Shandy is far from odd, considered rightly. Part of the thrill of reading it in 1980-something *cough* was seeing evidence of postmodern friskiness that actually pre-dated the United States. Tristram’s obsessions stretched reflexivity back into exotically distant realms of bygone minutia (unlike the broad cardboard exoticism of Johnson’s Happy Valley). It seems that then, as well as now(-ish), conceptions were improbable, resolutions impossible; the world teemed with distraction, neurosis, and disordered influence; and authors invited readers to play games.

In fact, if we glance back at a couple of Tristram’s more infamous tricks, we might feel that Sterne’s techniques are getting less odd by the day. When our author despairs at describing the concupiscible Widow Wadman, and throws open his pages to the reader (here’s paper ready to your hand. — Sit down, Sir, paint her to your own mind—as like your mistress as you can—and unlike your wife as your conscience will let you…) — is this not collaborative authoring space?

And when the narrator, picking up momentum by way of a vegitable [sic] diet, sits down and charts out the loopy plot lines of the novel as it’s progressed so far, even dropping in anchor points so we can check his graph against designated passages — is this not, however tongue-in-cheek, metadata visualization, or a mapping of information flow?

L–d! said my mother, what is all this story about? —-
A COCK and a BULL , said Yorick —- And one of the best of its kind, I ever heard.

Indeed, and though I haven’t read it (which is to hear it) for, well, many years, Tristram sticks with me–probably because I prefer open concoction to moralistic bullying, especially when it comes to narration. And this preference has had currency for a long time; Tristram Shandy has lasted just fine.

Yet Johnson’s other snap judgment — nothing odd will do long — seems to me all the more true in the virtual places we increasingly come crowding for intelligence. Which is not to say that there aren’t odd things online — far from it — surf randomly, and the web seems a veritable cacophony of twaddle diddle, tweddle diddle, –twiddle diddle, —- twoddle diddle, –twuddle diddle, —- prut-trut — krish –krash — krush. Not to mention diddle diddle, diddle diddle, diddle diddle — hum — dum — drum.

But nothing odd does much online: you can park the most esoteric idiosyncratic wonderfully strange material on the web, but if you want it to get discovered, if you want it to work, if you want it to have an effect — if you want others to conceive of it (a favorite Shandyword) — then you must enter into common language and assumptions. This is so obvious it’s practically a truism — and yet see how many times we learn the lesson, how difficult it is to get out of our own heads.

Two quick, fairly pedestrian examples: John Kupersmith’s wonderful Library Terms that Users Understand shows how befuddled users can be by the simplest failure of librarians to realize that words like “Index” or “Database” or “Serial” can mean next to nothing to my Uncle Toby, just wanting to know where to find that Popular Mechanics article. Or let’s say you’ve given an OPAC a cute acronym and now you invite my Uncle Toby to “search EUNICE!” My poor uncle Toby blush’d.

Or have a look at Dan Cohen’s equally simple but solid advice about climbing up in Google ranks. Search engine optimization has its share of murk to it, but the basic path to visibility is: don’t be odd. Use a domain name that describes your resource (”chinook” or “aeoleus” sound great — but what are you airing?), use keywords in file names (with mod_rewrites, if necessary), get linked by highly linked sites (meaning, be understandable, and get understood by a widely understood site).

If this all sounds like it leads to a world as flat and predictable as, well, Johnson’s Rasselas, that’s not what I meant, not at all. It’s just that you can’t be *merely* odd or unique if you want to *do*: you need the sophistication to hook into conventional terms, general assumptions, broadly shared expectations. This involves a double-motion that might as well be called self-consciousness. Tristram’s greatness is showing us how fun such contrivance can be. Sterne earns his pleasure (and ours too, he’s brought us jolting right along with him) when he sits back to marvel at himself, his magnificently clashing agendas: By this contrivance the machinery of my work is of a species by itself; two contrary motions are introduced into it, and reconciled, which were thought to be at variance with each other. In a word, my work is digressive, and it is progressive too, — and at the same time.

If it were all digression, Johnson would have been completely right about Tristram Shandy. But it is progressive too, which means that it sobers up just enough to realize, despite its irrepressible uniqueness, that above all things in the world, ’tis one of the silliest things in one of them, to darken your hypothesis by placing a number of tall, opake words, one before another, in a right line, betwixt your own and your readers conception.

Something about the enormous endless novel … I can’t quite figure out its spell. There’s the comfort of inhabiting (or being inhabited) across seasons and locations. There’s the marvel at Sisyphean endeavor. There’s the irrational exuberance of pushing through to four-digit pages. Whatever the causes, I rarely get through a short story, but give me a Clarissa, a J.R., a Ulysses, a Golden Bowl, a Tristram Shandy, a Remembrance of Times Past, a Dead Souls, even a Ship of Fools … and I’m caught.

A passage from my most recent ensnarement, The Magic Mountain:

A story whose contents involved a time span of five minutes… could, by means of an extraordinary scrupulosity in filling up those five minutes, last a thousand times as long — and still remain short on boredom, although in relationship to its imaginary time it would be very long in the telling. On the other hand, it is possible for a narrative’s content-time to exceed its own duration immeasurably. This is accomplished by diminishment — and we use this term to describe an illusory, or to be quite explicit, diseased element, that is obviously pertinent here: diminishment occurs to some extent whenever a narrative makes use of hermetic magic and a temporal hyper-perspective reminiscent of certain anomalous experiences of reality that imply that the senses have been transcended.

And so MM, an epic of disintegration, pursues a push-pull with time — inflating into vast meditations and then pondering its own rot. It’s a hypochondriac’s nightmare. It’s intoxicating, and of course that’s often different from comfortable. It’s also very funny. Towards the end of its degeneration (and we can only think of the book as an inexorably metastasizing disease — even its author can’t seem to wrest free of it), MM holds up a fun-house mirror to itself. This mirror is a drunken Dutchman named Mynheer Peeperkorn, of all things: a shambling “personality” who holds mysterious sway, deploying

a series of exquisite gestures that riveted his listeners’ interst — the subly nuanced, well-chosan, precise, tidy, cultured gestures of an orchestra conductor — a forefinger bent to form a circle with a thumb or a palm held out wide, but with tapering nails, to caution, to subdue, to demand attention, only to disappoint his now smiling, attentive listeners with one of his very robustly prepared, but incomprehensible phrases; or rather, he did not so much disappoint people as transform smiles into looks of delighted amazement, because the robustness, subtlety, and significance of the preparation largely compensated, even after the fact, for what he failed to say and produced a satisfying, amusing, and enriching effect all its own.

We’re getting very close here to defining the spell of these monster books. As I was reading a recent rueful meditation on David Foster Wallace in Poets & Writers, and thinking back on Infinite Jest — that great & purposeless three-tent circus of tennis, addiction, and popped U.S. culture — Mynheer Peeperkorn kept coming to my mind. He is, indeed, a riviting personality, even if his words trail off into nothing. You have to keep attending such a force, and wondering at its monumental incapacities.  You have to keep biding its time.

My New Year resolution is to proselytize here for good reading. We’ll start with a short piece on America’s misadventures in Iraq running in the current New York Review of Books: “The Mirage of Empire” by John Gray, a professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics.

I know — you’re sick of thinking about the war, it’s hopeless, it’s the same grinding disaster month after month. But Gray’s takedown of two obnoxious claims (Iraq is our new frontier, the world depends on America’s success) leads to a sharp portrait of a superpower too isolationist to really colonize, but too voracious to stay home.

The difficulties faced by US forces in Iraq do not come from any lack of prowess or firepower. They come from the deep mistrust of much of the population and the condition of near anarchy that prevails in most of the country. Overcoming these obstacles —assuming such a thing to be feasible and necessary—requires a labor that extends over decades or generations. There are few countries today with the capacity to sustain such a commitment, and it is manifestly lacking in the United States where impatience with “nation-building” runs deep. Yet without some such continuing engagement there cannot be any kind of American Empire. How can there be imperialism, when there are no imperialists?

It may be the ultimate British putdown: Americans are too self-involved, too timid, too fidgety to properly colonize. Not only are we violent and arrogant — we’re ineffective: unable to even loot, let alone dominate.

Because of the anarchy that prevails in much of the country, multinational companies are unable to operate in Iraq. Oil production has failed to reach the levels it achieved under Saddam, and if oil facilities elsewhere in the Gulf come under persistent attack it may not be possible to ensure their security. The underlying political reality in the region is pervasive hostility to American power. As a result of its oil dependency America has committed itself to a neoimperial strategy of military intervention that can only aggravate that enmity. It is doubtful whether the US has the capacity to sustain the indefinite period of war that could result, and more than doubtful that the task is worth attempting.

And so we burn on in Iraq, unable to see anything but ourselves, hastening the demise of our power “perhaps by a generation,” Gray tartly concludes. Read it & weep.