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Fall 2021 Panel:
Hosted by the Social Media Narratives Class
In his words at a Princeton-situated panel: ".....I'm trying to capture the heart of the essay, the spirit of the essay form...[the essay] was supposed to be social....the reason I went into Facebook in the first place is because all my students were on it ..what interests me is speaking to them.." "The result", Princeton University Press observes "is a new kind of literary work for the age of digital and social media, one that reimagines the essay’s efforts, at least since Montaigne, to understand our common condition by trying to understand ourselves." "Facebook was the cool thing, Nunokawa observes. " Now it’s become the uncool thing...like setting up in a food court." Currently, he is confronting the Facebook environment with Parentbook. "While Facebook isn't the subject of my book...it was the venue upon which much of the book was written, rather like a late and virtual reactive formation of the neighborhood where I and many others were raised." A book which I'm calling "Parentbook" I am writing a book now which I'm calling "Parentbook". Like my last book, (Note Book, Princeton University Press, 2015) what I am writing now assumes the context of Facebook, in its most G-rated (maybe P-G), anodyne and banal form. If Facebook is "your grandparents' platform", that is at least partly because it is the platform for bland memes and other messages, which are concerned with blocking out the infinite disaggregating partisanship that has taken our society and indeed much of Facebook and other digital venues by storm. Thus, I think of Facebook at its most shallow and happy faced as a kind of reaction formation to its far more familiar unhappy face, the one clouded by face by the infamous ferocities of angry, indeed toxic partisanship generated and accommodated by social media and F-Book in particular. My book is about and for people like my mother, people who may have strong views about politics (my mother did -- an old fashioned melting pot liberal, the daughter of a farmer from the reddest part of Washington State who married a Hawaiian-Japanese guy five years after Hiroshima and ten years after Pearl Harbor, she lacked the imagination to abandon her Old School, New Deal Principles), but who value above all comity and civility, a comity and civility they sought and sought to imitate on Facebook. The book is a kind of memoir of what it was like to be raised by the likes of her and my father -- middle class, middle brow "e pluribus Unum" types. While Facebook isn't the explicit subject of my book posts over the last ten to fifteen years. The Facebook community I assume and address here is rather like a late and virtual emanation, a kind of after aura of the neighborhood that people like me were more or less raised. (More or less, since the neighborhood I have in mind was as much a matter of regulative principle as palpable practice even during its ascendancy.) The hope of this book is that it will provide a kind of guide for readers and writers of the most debased social media I know (i.e. Facebook) to imagine how even from the belly of the Beast we can remember, imagine and construct collectivities can get us the hell out of here (i.e. our current hell-scape), or at least buy us a little relief from the worst of it. Here is the beginning of the book. As I say, for the moment, I’m calling it "Parentbook", though I’ve toyed with calling it "Good Enough Liberals", or "Melting Pot Liberals": First of all, I can't tell you too much about them. Our mother would find a way to come back from the dead to kill me if I did, and the thought of what our dad would have to say about what I say about him in these pages almost stops me in my tracks even now (almost—sorry dad). Before she died, our mother gave me permission to write about her as long "as it’s in half-way decent taste" and I don’t tell you "too much". If you’re wondering what "too much" is, well, I guess it’s like what the Supreme Court Justice said about obscenity: you know it when you see it. It’s hard to believe that they're gone. Moms and dads like ours were more (and/or less) than mere individuals. They were also the voice of every motto promoting good housekeeping, public and private: clear your plate, do your homework, get your taxes in, don't forget to vote, put on something nice. The thought of a world without our mom and dad in it is a little like the thought of a world without the U.N. or NATO or SEATO or the SEC or the FCC or the FDA or the FAA or the CDC or Time or Life Magazine, or the Book of the Month Club, or a reliable two-party system, or cornflake crusted fried chicken (the recipe was right there on the back of the box), or the Good Housekeeping seal of approval. I guess you could say we’ve gotten used to a world where these fixtures are broken, rusted out of recognition or removed, but moms and dads like ours in whom the spirit of those appliances are conveyed: do they ever really go away? Our dad has never had more of a say at our table since he officially died and fell silent. Half the time, he still seems to get the last word. He was one of those dads who never said he was sorry about anything, not in so many words anyway, and sometimes that means he still seems to get the last one. All those stumbled sorry’s have a way of hanging around right where they fell, even after the person who said them has walked off the sound stage for good. Growing up, it felt like the slogan from Love Story was made for him. Being dad meant never having to say you’re sorry, or maybe just never being able to. I don’t remember if he saw the movie himself. He would've wanted to -- he had a "thing" for Ali McGraw -- but I’m pretty sure our mom would have plain refused to see a movie so silly, and I can’t imagine how he would've gone with anyone else. Our father wasn’t the type you’d find confessing faults, or asking to be forgiven for them, in or out of a booth officially designated for such purposes. I was surprised when my sister told me that he’d wanted to confess to a Priest before he died, and surprised to be sorry that he couldn't. He told her that he'd clocked enough time with the Church to have earned its last rites. I guess he thought of them the way he did his social security and other retirement benefits. After all, he’d been a Catholic even before he was a taxpayer, even before he was a Democrat, and I guess old habits and hopes die hard, or go into hiding, and come back to life near death. It was just a fact about our father that he never admitted that he was wrong -- except for some mutterings here and there to our mother, after some truly terrible thing he’d said to her; or some shrug of the shoulder's admission that an investment he made was based on false hopes or someone too close; or some vague apology to his sons, years after his murderous rages, one of which actually nearly killed my brother. It doesn’t sound like much, I know, by way of expiation. But it cleared the air enough to make me believe that telling you about his better parts (his civic mindedness, his faith in the future, his work as a teacher) is part of my point in being here. |
Panelists
Meredith D. Clark
Shaohua Guo
Mark Marino
Jeff Nunokawa
Élika Ortega
Abraham Richie
Katrin Tiidenberg
SAIC ATS Class in Social Media Narrative Host: SAIC ATS Part-time Faculty: Judy Malloy |
Jeff Nunokawa is Professor of English literature at Princeton University, where his work focuses on literature from circa 1830 until about 1900. His books include The Afterlife of Property; Tame Passions of Wilde: Styles of Manageable of Desire; and a current book project with the working title Eros and Isolation: Getting Away from Others in Nineteenth Century Literature. Jeff is also the writer of Note Book (Princeton University Press), composed of selections from a project, in which every morning on Facebook Notes, he wrote essays that explored 19th century literature and contemporary life.