Two Book Thursday

I’ve been very anxious about how little reading I’ve done lately. For whatever reason, I tend to think of my reading/writing life as a balance. When I find myself reading too much and writing too little, I start to feel like a dilettante. Lately, however, I’ve found myself writing too much and reading too little. Not only is my “books to read” looming ominously, but I also feel like I’m talking out of my neck much more than I’m comfortable with. 

This past weekend, I started to try to rebalance my reading/writing life and I decided to get back into reading with a couple short books.

Book the First

I can rarely resist a free book and I was intrigued by Catherine J. Frieman’s new title in the Cambridge Elements series: Archaeology as History: Telling Stories from a Fragmented Past. It is still available as a free download.

The book is good and emphasizes the important role that method and process (both technical and more theoretical, but with a decided emphasis on the technical side of archaeology) play in allowing archaeologists to produce knowledge about the past. Many of Frieman’s most important arguments are implicit in the book. For example, she doesn’t necessary see the stories that we tell about the fragmented past produced by archaeology as a way to resolve its fragmented or even contradictory nature. Instead she foregrounds that tools and approaches that archaeologists us to describe the past and acknowledged that these tools and approaches need not reconcile contradictions or create a kind of compelling “whole” from the fragments. Stories, for Frieman need not adhere to the modern rules of story telling as described by Hayden White or even the modern penchant for “ironic” modes of emplotment where truth lurks somewhere below the surface.

Instead, Frieman cleverly shows that fragments can remain fragments and still tell stories about the past. This approach echoes certain strains of post-modern practice which embraces not only the ambiguity of the past, but also new practices in story telling where methods, practices, and techniques create narratives that resist efforts to reduce them to modern forms of emplotment.

Book the Second

The second book that I read over the weekend was Jill Magi’s book length poem Speech. If Frieman’s work tacitly connects archaeological practice to the post-modern story telling and narrative forms, Magi’s work demonstrates how the experience of the contemporary world demands new forms of expression. Magi’s work sketches a world with discontinuous (fragmentary?) lines where time and space appear as juxtapositions that present stories replete with emotional meaning despite (or maybe because?) of their disregard for conventional narrative form.

Magi’s poem considers the tension between the experiences of individuals and the complexity of world. By presenting the experiences of migrants, laborers, city dwellers, travelers, and suburbanites as fragments suspended in relation to global media events, historic speeches, and topographies unmoored from their geography. It’s a powerful read that reminded me that our impulse to narrate and to present arguments need not overwhelm (or resolve) the fragmented potency of our contemporary experience.

Needless to say, Magi’s work (especially those sections where her experiences in the contemporary Middle East peaked through) nudged me think again about my effort to explore the relationship between the Bakken and Babylon (which you can read here).