"On the Shelf" will hopefully be a somewhat regular segment of the Corner (one post and I think I have a right to "segments." Some people's kids...).  You can see, dear reader (which pales in comparison to Austen's "Reader, I married him" but if I ever said that, something has gone horribly awry), what I'm currently reading (which more often than not will bore a significant segment of the population), teaching, or want to read (this might be the most exciting bit).  You can find me on GoodReads to see what's on that virtual bookshelf, but, fair warning, it pales in comparison to the bookshelves in my office at work.

On the academic side, I'm reading The Book of Margery Kempe for what I think is the 7th time in two years. After all those times, yes, it's still annoying to have Kempe cry so much and I stand by earlier sentiments that if I had been in a boat with Margery, I would have wished to throw her overboard, too. Similarly, I'm reading Clarissa Atkinson's Margery Kempe and her World, which I've referred to jokingly as the "Idiot's Guide to Margery Kempe," it's true.  If you're new to both Kempe and, well, her world, it's the perfect book with which to start your study.  Atkinson writes for everyone, but the book is probably most accessible to those not in medieval studies; for those that are, it's a great refresher for concepts associated with mysticism and the mystical tradition, as well as the history of the early 15th-century. But, what do I know-I'm a medievalist by the skin of my teeth at the moment, and sometimes border on the miraculous. Or so I'm told.

On the teaching side, I'm reading the only desk copy I currently have. It's Alan Weisman's The World Without Us (2007, Picador) with my friend Kira's holiday photo (which is fantastic, by the way) as my bookmark. The book, according Salon, is "An audacious intellectual adventure" and I can honestly say I don't think I've ever read a book that's ever been described as such. Its premise is based on the thought-provoking question "What happens to the earth when human beings disappear?" I guess we'll find out.

There's much on the "I should be reading books for my dissertation, but I'd rather read this" side, I'm finishing up Jonathan Kozol's Savage Ineqaulities: Children in America's Schools (1991, Harper Perennial), a fascinating and heart-wrenching book for anyone interested in public education, particularly in urban environments.  The bookmark for this book is a note I received along with a package a week before my birthday this past August.  Incidentally, the book, because of the bookmark, is never far from me.  Reading this book has made me seriously consider teaching in an urban public school system, something I thought I would never say six years ago. More on that idea later.  I've also just finished Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, a book I can say that I've finally read and no longer must I endure incredulous looks from Writing Center tutees when I confess I know nothing about Lennie and George and their wandering troubles other than the contents of their composition essay.  And, finally, I'm only 25 pages or so into Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth, also something I've never read before.

On the "I really want to read this when I have time" shelf is the latest book by Norah Vincent, Voluntary Madness: A Year Lost and Found in the Loony Bin (2008, Viking). I read about it last night on Jezebel and then on Vincent's own webpage (where, by the way, I think the UK press questions, especially the penultimate one, are much more interesting than the US ones).  I first encountered Vincent a couple years ago with her first book, Self-Made Man, where Vincent explores the world of men through an extended experience in drag.  Transvestitism isn't entirely new, or necessarily a modern (or post-modern, depending on your terminology persuasions) invention, and while at times humorous, I didn't find Vincent's conclusions from her social immersion terribly complex.  At times, I did find it remarkably classist and a bit sexist.  My students, when I dared include the book on my syllabus one Spring semester, were horrified by the mere thought that a woman would do "this".  To say they had trouble imagining why a woman would want to date another woman is a tremendous understatement, and while I found their discomfort (because I do think it's part of my job to make them uncomfortable-more on that later as well) amusing, I declined to list reasons numerically, alphabetically, or in any random order why a woman dating a woman is a perfectly wonderful thing to do, in my humble opinion. In spite of my bit of criticism above, Self-Made Man is an interesting read for anyone interested in gender studies or for anyone wondering how to start a converation about gender studies.  You can find an amusing, and slightly catty, review of it here courtesy of Time. There is also a great interview on NPR's Talk of the Nation, archived here.

Voluntary Madness to an extent picks up where Vincent was unable to finish Self-Made Man.  As she writes in VM's introduction, "In November 2004, just as I was finishing the research for my book Self-Made Man, I checked myself into a locked psychiatric ward in the hospital" (3). Vincent continues, "It may sound unduly dramatic to suggest that writing a book would drive a person into the bin (though I'm sure there are at least a few hundred thousand Ph.D. candidates and other wee-hour scribblers out there who would beg to differ on this score), but in my case, it was quite literally true. I lost it, in medias research, so to speak, and for good reason" (3).  The reason, she offers moments later, is that in writing and research Self-Made Man, Vincent "...became a man, yet remained a woman" and the "psycho-emotional contradiction" was overwhelming.

I admit my bias in appreciating the reference to Ph.D. candidates, although am slightly concerned about its correlation to the bin, and even though I think it's a bit weak and classicists everywhere are cringing, I can appreciate the pun of ‘in medias research'.  What interests me about this book is how Vincent came to see her subject, and consequently her goals as an "immersion journalist" (4).  While her first stay in the bin that she describes in her first sentence lasts only four days, those days left an indelible imprint on the subject of her next book.  On the need to return to the subject of institutionalization and mental illness, she writes, "And yet there was the lure, the powerful lure of the spectacle, and the human drama, and what I saw as the outright wrongs of the insanitarium, wrongs that I so longed to expose and ridicule, and hold up to public scrutiny. I felt centripetally attracted to the subject matter, to what I couldn't help seeing as the thematic cornucopia of the bin" (5).

Word choice, and I'm not talking about the phrase "the thematic cornucopia of the bin" which I feel is a bit over the top, is what interests me.  The fact that she considers an asylum and those in it a "spectacle" and later "characters" and herself as once a part of that spectacle is fascinating to me, and, I think, begs the question of how far this book attempts to desensitize the notion of mental illness.  Words matter, I think, and her choice of "spectacle," "the bin" or even the subtitle's choice of "the loony bin" is striking to me.  Is this a nod to a way of demedicalizing, deinstitutionalizing sensitive language?  Is it offensive?  Or is it a way of bringing humor, a la a kind of Patch Adams, if you will, to the field of mental health?  Perspective matters as well: as a self-described immersion journalist who suffers from mental illness, and consequently has a vested interest in mental health care, how "real" can we accept this book to be?  While not written from the academic Foucauldian History of Madness and Civilization, Vincent's account is obviously more personal but one must consider how much the personal becomes subsumed in the journalistic.  What kind of book, then, do we have: is it nonfiction or memoir?

Having not read the book, I can't answer my own questions, nor, after I've read the book, would I ever claim to have "the" answer.  Literature has taught me that, with very few exception, there is never one answer, let alone a "right" one, and that is one of the many reasons why I love it so. I look forward to Vincent's book coming off the shelf of "would like to read, one day".