Posts in category: Totally Not Trolling

Shamelessly borrowing a webpage from Cosma Shalizi’s books, here is an aggregate of my casual notes on some books casually read over the summer. I have been posting these on the federated book-reading site bookwyrm: you can fedi-follow me there from any-fediwhere as agoldst@bookwyrm.social, if that’s something you like to do (sickos).

Robert P. Goldman, ed., Ramayana of Valmiki: An Epic of Ancient India

Over the last couple of years, I have been irregularly reading my way through the Princeton Library of Asian Translations edition of the Rāmāyaṇa. I just finished this seventh and final volume. I love a good philological extravaganza, and my one year of Sanskrit in college made me particularly enthusiastic about the ins and outs of that beautiful language. So this gigantic mega-edition, with tons and tons of paratext bulking out the 24,000-odd ślokas of the epic, had lots of appeal for me. I didn’t know much at all about the poem when I started. My single college course on Indian culture (beyond the Sanskrit) spent some time on the Mahābhārata but not on the Rāmāyaṇa. I had the vague idea that the latter is, Eurocentrically speaking, the Sanskrit Odyssey, which sounds cool, and I’d read A.K. Ramanujan’s “Three Hundred Rāmāyaṇas” because I admire Ramanujan and because it was, sigh, in the news for a while. Ramanujan also makes it sound cool and supplies a stretch of quite beautiful translation (in collaboration with David Shulman) from Vālmīki’s version (alongside his renderings of other versions).

“No Kings” was huge in New York, even bigger than “Hands Off” was, and the national turnout was likewise gigantic, not only in the flashpoint cities like LA and NYC but all over the map. In NYC I didn’t hear any speakers. Nationally, there was no single leading organization, though Indivisible is among the prime movers, with the ACLU and labor unions—including mine—getting on the bandwagon and swelling the numbers. What does this rallying crowd want?

I’m giving a talk at the Literary and Cultural Studies Colloquium at Carnegie Mellon this Thursday, October 2:

Is it our job to be the best readers?

The emergence of quantitative methods for literary study allows us reassess the relationship between literary scholarship and the practice of expert critical reading. Though reading has the status of doxa in literary studies, it may obscure more than it clarifies about the problems posed by quantification. I exemplify the challenges in a quantitative analysis of scholarship itself, using a probabilistic topic model to explore discursive patterns in twenty-one thousand journal articles from the 1880s to the present. The model reveals, among other things, the surprisingly recent emergence of the theme of reading and the scope of literary studies’ turn toward the terrain of the social sciences since the 1970s. It is, in fact, the social sciences that might help us toward methodological alternatives to “reading” that allow us to make sense of the aggregate patterns in literary practice revealed by techniques like topic modeling.

If you’re in Pittsburgh: it’s at 4:30 p.m. in 255B Baker Hall.