Communication and Technology: A Smattering

1. At a work event last week, I added a short PowerPoint slide show to a presentation that I regularly deliver to students. There were like eight slides. The information I conveyed was exactly the same as my regular verbal presentation, but the students were way more impressed. They kept saying things like, "I don't have any questions! That was sooooo informative!" I don't know if it helped them to have the visual representation in front of them, or whether they were just impressed that I had my stuff together enough to have real life slides with the real live University logo on them. Either way, for 15 minutes of work, it was a pretty major WIN!

2. I've ordered myself the new iPhone 4S for my birthday. It's completely unnecessary and expensive and a little bit pretentious, but I'm soooooo excited for it to arrive! Siri looks downright amazing; I imagine that talking into my tiny handheld computer and having it talk back to me is going to be one of those things that makes me go, Holy crap, it's the future and we're living in it! It's funny to think that only 10 years ago I had just started using the Internet, I had just gotten my first (brick-like, green-screened, hideous, non-texting) cell phone along with my first car, and I didn't know how to search for things on Yahoo or AskJeeves or whatever was popular then. What a crazy and awesome time it is we live in.

3. I've been watching Occupy Wall Street in the news, and I'm absolutely fascinated by the protesters' use of hand gestures and "the human microphone" to communicate (you can read about the history of the method at New York Magazine). By using simple gestures and group repetition, the protesters can communicate a single speaker's information and respond to his/her ideas without relying on megaphones and amplifiers (which are often prohibited in the occupied spaces). The process is so simple and old fashioned, yet it's still marvelously effective. Not to mention the fact that it's pointedly democratic and, in my opinion, downright inspiring. You can watch a protester teaching the method to the Occupy Boston protesters here: 

The Bostonians by Henry James

After a long and happy lifetime of never reading any Henry James ever except for "Daisy Miller" in a sophomore year English class, I finally tackled The Bostonians. 

The Bostonians

In the past, James had always struck me as unbearably stuffy: his sentences had more clauses than a mall at Christmastime (ha!), and his paragraphs went on for pages and pages, and everyone was always making themselves so unbearably happy because of their tight, tight Victorian corsets. Basically, he seemed like a chore. But I had started The Bostonians in grad school, and I hate leaving a book half done, especially when I was enjoying it in the first place.


The Bostonians, despite being one of James's lesser-known novels, does not disappoint. I suspect that it's rarely read these days because it's so topical: it deals primarily with women's suffrage, or, as it was known in 1885, "The Woman Question." The novel centers around Verena Tarrant, a beautiful, red-headed young woman who just happens to be an electrifying public speaker interested in equal rights for women. Her family is poor, and her father is a disreputable mesmeric healer, which means that Verena is not only talented and on the rise in society, she is also dismally unprotected and without means of her own.

Woman with Red Hair, Albert Herter, 1894.

At her first speaking engagement in Boston, Verena meets Olive Chancellor and Basil Ransom (do I even need to mention those uber-obvious thematic names? oy!), two cousins who both begin, in their own ways, to woo Verena.

Olive wants Verena to stay unmarried, to live in Olive's home, and to travel the world, bringing a message of equality to the world. Basil Ransom, on the other hand, wants Verena to marry him and leave the public eye for good so she can spend the rest of her life entertaining and tending him (I'm not kidding--he actually says this). As the book builds toward its agonizing climax, Verena is forced to choose between a life on the world stage and a life that can be contained in a single sitting room.

What fascinated me about this book isn't its subject or even its plot, it's the fact that it's a novel without heroes. Verena is lovely and innocent and very sweet, but she also bends happily to the will of whomever's in the room at the time. She's a pushover by nature and by station. Olive Chancellor is zealous, brittle, tyrannical, and manipulative. Ironically, for all her passion for women's rights, she allows Verena no freedom of her own. Basil Ransom is handsome and charming but skin-crawlingly insidious: his love for Verena is a passion for possession and control. He wants to marry her, but primarily as a means of keeping her from "parroting" feminist beliefs that he doesn't believe she could possibly understand.

Verena is only given two extreme choices in the novel and no chance of winning, and that, I think, is the entire point. James refuses to espouse either ideology in this novel: he seems disgusted with the rhetoric of the women's rights movement (which he portrays as extremist and heartless), and yet he portrays their detractors (traditionalist Victorian males like Ransom) as pirates and captors.

Boston, 1880s.

Once she emerges into the upper classes of Victorian America, Verena cannot escape. In a world where she was truly free to build her own life, Verena Tarrant wouldn't have had to pledge herself to the rich yet spartan Olive Chancellor as her patron, ruler, and near lover, nor would she have to succumb to the seduction of the romantic but appallingly misogynistic Basil Ransom. If she were free, she wouldn't have to choose between being a feminist zealot or an obedient wife, a Northerner or a Southerner, a thinker or a feeler. She could be a little bit of all of these things and, most importantly, her own self.

But Verena is not free, which makes James's novel incredibly suspenseful and sad. If you're going to give James a try, I strongly recommend The Bostonians.

Albert Camus's The Plague (A Review)

My excessively ugly cover of The Plague.

Look at this cover. I mean, look at it: it's terrifying. A bleary, blackened eye set in a glaring blood-red cover doesn't really make one think of light-hearted, cheering, summer reading material, does it? Who could blame me for putting off Albert Camus's The Plague for several years after buying it at a used book shop in State College? And let's not even talk about Camus's reputation as a snooty, fancy-pants existential French (French!) philosopher. I expected this book to be dark, miserable, and brutal in the style of The Seventh Seal (which is an absolutely beautiful movie about the plague that makes me break out in hives of morbid claustrophobia).

So this is why I saved The Plague for the sunny, broiling days of August. As I rode my bus back and forth down sleepy, sunshiny highways, I was transported to a fictional 1940s Oran (located in northwestern Algeria, where Camus grew up) during a bubonic plague outbreak. The book follows Dr. Rieux, one of first physicians in Oran to diagnose and fight the plague, and a small group of his friends and acquaintances. Rieux first starts to suspect that something is seriously wrong when he walks out of his flat one morning to find a dead rat on his front porch with a spurt of blood trailing from its muzzle. Things only go downhill from there: thousands of rats die in the streets, the cats and dogs disappear from the city, people start to sicken die, and the government quarantines the whole town for nearly a year.

I expected Camus's novel to be about death, but it was, in fact, about the living. His descriptions of death by plague are haunting, to be sure, but he focuses far more on who's left: the lovers yearning for each other across city gates and stone walls, the doctors and sanitation crews working through exhaustion and unbelievable danger to care for others, the priests and atheists alike who come to understand the plague not through dogma or religion but through sympathy. Camus focuses continuously on how the townspeople deal with "exile," or separation from each other, from their deceased loved ones, and from their regular lives.

"Thus the first thing that plague brought to our town was exile."

In his portrayal, the narrator (unnamed until the book's last chapters) chooses not to catastrophize or sentimentalize the plague, but to portray it objectively, accurately, and, above all else, kindly: he chooses to focus on how people continue to live and love in the face of death, not the death itself.

"The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant [. . .] The soul of the murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness."

Albert Camus, damn fine writer and shockingly handsome devil.

As the novel nears its end, the narrator returns again and again to the idea that Oran's literal plague is just another extension of a larger plague that everyone suffers from, the plague that is inherent in life itself. I'm not sure that I ever quite followed what Camus meant, but I take it to mean that life is not just subject to trouble and illness, it is trouble and illness. It's a game that everyone always loses, no matter how hard or how skillfully you play. (As Mrs. E says over at Easy Street, "Never take life to seriously. Nobody gets out alive anyway!") But it's the fact that everyone keeps playing the game that Camus focuses on, that the people of Oran keep getting out of bed every day and going to the cafes or movies or church or work no matter who is disappearing around them, that Dr. Rieux and his sanitation crews keep giving serums and sanitizing houses, no matter how few people they are able to save.

For all its gore and darkness, The Plague is a beautiful book: generous and warm, thoughtful and leisurely, discomfiting and uplifting at the same time. It's a book that makes a reader think not of death, but of why it's worth it to keep on living.