A Movement?

Left: Jack Kerouac Right: Kenneth Rexroth

These two writers openly disliked each other. This fact is well documented, at least by Rexroth himself. Nonetheless, they both occupied, or are generally conceived of as having both occupied, a movement popularly known as "The Beat Movement." How can two writers with diametrically opposed aesthetics and conflicting social, moral, and political viewpoints occupy the same movement?

This might be a pivotal question in contemporary analysis of those we label "Beats." In order to best pose the question an amount of spacial and temporal layering might be necessary. To layer these two writers, along with others who occupy this same enclave, which is often and erroneously imagined as homogeneous, some new media tools might prove useful.

For my purposes a glog might be the best "venue" to present these layers, though it would prove to be only a gathering point. In this gathering point I would compile links and images that might suggest the particular social histories and literary influences each writer of the movement is drawing from. This would be done as a sort of amalgamation in order to show where each writer converges and diverges and how they interact in ways that suggest a movement, and in ways that don't.

Glogging In Quicksand

Now that we have read Nella Larsen's novel Quicksand, let's take a look at some multimedia sources in order to delve a little deeper into some of the social and cultural enclaves Larsen renders in her novel. For the purposes of this assignment let's focus on Helga Crane's time in Copenhagen.

Copenhagen presents both new opportunities as well as new limits for Helga Crane. Take a look at the glog we have created: Exoticism in Quicksand. What opportunities do you see for the black feminine character implicit in these images and videos? For example, what was Josephine Baker able to achieve and what were the limits to these achievements? In what ways does Baker's femininity and race play into her performances? What might Helga think of these performances? Would she approve? Could we consider her costumed exhibitionism, though superimposed by her aunt and uncle, a similar type of performance?

Before Josephine Baker there is a history of artistic preoccupation with the exotic of the primitive. Take a look at some of the artwork on the glog, and don't forget to check all the links. How does Helga's portrait, painted by Axel Olsen, fit into this history? What are the limits of black femininity as presented visually in these paintings?

Along with this visual history presented in paintings and sketches there is an ongoing literary history of exoticising and primitivising the racial other. Look at the books and plays exhibited on my glog here. Where does Quicksand fall in this (incomplete) history? What does it add? What does it question? What might be missing from the history presented on the glog that you might consider a necessary link to including Quicksand in this history? For example, would we need to include the trope of the sojourn in Europe that is often present in American slave narratives?

Finally, what can you infer from this glog and how does it inform your reading of Quicksand?

Take some time to think about these questions and to consider the glog in relation to the novel. On your blog, answer any or all of the questions that might help further your understanding of the novel. Also, include a brief "reading" of the glog and its relationship to the novel.

The Exotic Other in English Literature

Presented here are a few images suggesting the "primitive" and "exotic" presence of the Other in English Literature.

Whitman Assignment

Objective: to condense, clarify, and structure an assignment centered on the interpretation and attempted understanding of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass.

Step One: We will begin under the auspice that the swallowing of the poem in its entirety may cause disastrous effects, including, but not limited to, acute feelings of despair (possibly leading to insomnia, depression, hopelessness), anxiety, sensations of being suddenly overwhelmed, sweating extremities, nausea, and possible death by asphyxiation. That being the case we will break our engagement with the poem into munchable steps.

Step Two: We will begin, after having begun as stated above, by looking at the assertion made in the last line of the first stanza--"every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you"--as a sort of thesis statement that might guide us through the poem. If this is a thesis of sorts (and one needn't necessarily agree that it is), how does the poet support, reconcile, or engage with this thesis throughout the poem?

Step Three: In order to answer, or begin to attempt to answer the question posited at the end of step two, we will look closely at the following section of the poem:

"The opium eater reclines with rigid head and just-opened lips, / The prostitute draggles her shawl, her bonnet bobs on her tipsy and pimpled neck, / The crowd laugh at her blackguard oaths, the men jeer and wink to each other, / (Miserable! I do not laugh at your oaths nor jeer you,) / The President holds a cabinet council, he is surrounded by the great secretaries."

In this section we see an interesting juxtaposition of characters. Indeed, in the same breath, we are introduced to an opium eater, a prostitute, and the President, and reintroduced, as is the case throughout the poem, to poet in his relationship to these particular characters. Can any of these characters tell us anything about the context of the poem?

Step Four: Let's start with the opium eater. Do a little research on opium and opium culture in the 19th century. For some preliminary research feel free to refer to my earlier blog post "The Opium Eater Reclines..." and gather from there what you can. Don't forget to check the links and explore those as well. While exploring 19th century opium culture don't forget about the other characters surrounding the opium eater. What do these characters have in common, if anything? How does the opium eater and the opium culture that implicitly surrounds him inform your understanding of the poem? Does this glance at the opium eater support or undermine Whitman's "thesis" or, if thesis is too abrasive, his preoccupation or theme of reconciling the individual self with the societal whole that makes up his surroundings? Is Whitman able to clearly establish the binary oppositions of self/whole, individual/community, while simultaneously dissolving these boundaries? Is he able to show the every atom belonging to him belongs as good to what is not him? Use the opium eater, including some cultural or historical context that surrounds opium culture and consumption in the 19th century, as a way into the immense population that inhabits the poem.

Step Five: Write a blog entry that engages with the questions given in step four. Please note that my interest in the opium eater is more or less arbitrary, or subjective if you like, and functioned for me as a starting point to inquiry. If there is a character or object present that you feel better articulates the preoccupations of the poem feel free to share that in your blog as well, though a brief explanation of your engagement with the opium eater and why you found him unimportant to your exploration of the poem might be an interesting addition to your study.

Keep it Classy Walt Whitman

My cultural object has turned up to be more of an objectification of a repetitious character in history: the destitute, the forlorn, the addict, the prostitute. The question then is how does Whitman sympathize, or, in other words, communicate with these objectified subjects to make the both individual and part of a whole?

Read Leaves Of Grass. Write about the poem in a sort of free response. What compels you, if anything? What turns you off? What characters caught your eye? What objects caught your eye? What do you feel you need to know to further engage in the poem?

In the first stanza of the poem, Whitman asserts that "every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you." In class, after the reading and the free-write of the poem, we will think about this powerful assertion and if he accomplishes it through the rhetoric that makes up his poem.

I will then give a brief lecture on how I came to attempt to answer a preoccupation I had with the poem. I am concerned, that is, with the reconciliation of the self and the whole. How can they be unique and at the same moment connected a an "atotomic" level? I found my inquiry directed toward the interplay between cultural objects and the subjects that populate that culture. That is, I am interested in the humanizing of the opium eater and the prostitute and the President. But those "characters" are also operating as cultural objects that might lead to other inquiry.

The paper assignment might be something that asks the students to pick out a character who has been objectified or an object that has been characterized. What was the cultural significance of these objects or these characters at the time Leaves of Grass was published? How does the interplay between object and subject lead us to an understanding of Whitman's larger preoccupations? Does it?

After students had written papers we would take as many classes as necessary to talk about the images, characters, and objects they had explored and what they found therein and if they felt they had gained a greater understanding of the poem. If engagement is sincere and ongoing the turning in of the paper will be optional.

The Opium Eater Reclines...

"The opium eater reclines with rigid head and just-opened lips,
The prostitute draggles her shawl, her bonnet bobs on her tipsy and pimpled neck,
The crowd laugh at her blackguard oaths, the men jeer and wink to each other,
(Miserable! I do not laugh at your oaths nor jeer you,)"

And so it is that Whitman at once acknowledges, takes part in, is one with, and sympathizes with what might be considered the lower rungs of society. I think the word sympathy is important:

"I am he attesting sympathy;
Shall I make my list of things in the house and skip the house that supports them?
I am the poet of commonsense and of the demonstrable and of immortality;
Am not the poet of goodness only. . . . I do not decline to be the poet of wick-edness also."

for as Websters dictionary tells us, sympathy, amongst other things, is the "correlation existing between bodies capable of communicating their vibrational motion to one another through some medium." Whitman's exploration, I think, is an attempt at unearthing these mediums in order to communicate with all that surrounds him, and thereby with himself.

What does he unearth in his embrace of communication by sympathy?

Whitman gives the opium eater only a glance, but in that glance he takes in the entire intricate and interconnected network of his community and country. Take the New York opium dens, for instance, that are implied in this glance. What was happening there? Who was present? As it turns out the opium den was a sort of melting pot, where people of all races would "indiscriminately mix." The drug itself, much like the prostitute, compelled people from all strata of society from the destitute wanderer to the aristocrat or politician. Perhaps that partially explains Whitman's juxtaposition of the prostitute and the president: (Miserable! I do not laugh at your oaths nor jeer you,) / The President holds a cabinet council, he is surrounded by the great secretaries."

But opium itself also suggests some other interesting cultural complexities. The drug was largely distributed by an new influx of Chinese immigrant workers. Though Chinese immigrants were not employed until 1865 to work on the Transcontinental Railroad, the influx of Chinese immigrants began early in the 19th century. The opium trade was inextricably bound to this immigration and so bound to culture of its bearers.

Opium also had its ties with writers of the time, though primarily English, and so the nod to the opium eater brings to mind Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his poem Kubla Khan, or Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater.

More applicable to Leaves of Grass though is the rich and diverse, if at times dangerous and seedy, culture that opium in the 19th century came to represent. In later years wars would be fought over the drug and countless acts of destitution would result from its abuse. Nonetheless, in New York, in 1855, opium culture came to embody a sort of uncouth but undeniable leisure that a poet of wickedness and goodness might find sympathy for.

Defamiliarizing Whitman

There is a total of 5084 non-word occurrences in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, that is, the poet punctuates himself in one way or another 5084 times. This is not research I have conducted as painstakingly as one might think. In this same edition the poet exclamates by use of various manifestations of the almighty exclamation point 218 time, and he questions, by use of the enigmatic and compelling question mark, 345 times, suggesting that the poem posits more questions than it exclamates assertions.

In this same edition the poet uses the noun "grass" 24 times, the pronoun "I" 747 times, refers to his country "America" but 5 times; the poet employs (deploys?) the pronoun "you" 397 times, the pronoun "they" 231 time, the pronoun "us" 24 times (putting it right there with grass), and that powerful verb loafe but 4 times (could he use it more without diluting its potency, without suggesting some labor in the act?). Again this is not research I have conducted as painstakingly as one might think. Rather, I owe these statistics to TokenX, a tool used on the Whitman archive, and am putting my utmost faith in the tool's ability to perform these ancient mysteries of arithmetic.

But what is the point of offering these staggering statistics? Why do I so flamboyantly flash these impressive numbers around? To affect wisdom? To suggests knowledge? To help myself and those around me familiarize themselves with the poem? Let's take the latter as a point of departure...

I take the question of familiarization as an important one because only in understanding what it means to be familiar with a work of art can one begin to comprehend the inverse of that action. In other words, familiarization is a prerequisite of sorts to defamiliarization. The Whitman archive is a testament to the immensity of the familiarization process. How many hours have been put in to compiling the archive? How many minds hard at work researching, digging, scanning and posting? How much thought and artistry in the construction of the poems themselves? TokenX has no answers, but one can begin to speculate by taking on the prospect of familiarizing themselves with the vast body of work the archive exhibits. One can read every line, scrutinize every manuscript, attempt to decipher every note, analyze every image, evaluate aesthetic congruities and incongruities in cover design, typeface, contemplate the aesthetics of the text as a product of not only a poet but a printer (an art in and of itself). In short the familiarization process is a lifetime endeavor. The Whitman archive, it seems, is one way to begin engaging this endeavor.

On the other hand, the Whitman archive also provides a few tools that might allow for outside manipulation of what otherwise might seem to be an untouchable work of art. This is not a new idea, nor does in reside solely in digital and virtual realities. The urban and graffiti artist Banksy has taken it upon himself to remix, so to speak, formerly untouchable works of art. For example he has taken the image of the Mona Lisa here: and added some flair. He has also taken canonical works of art and pop-culturized them with things like ipods:. In effect, though, what Banksy has done is not so much defamiliarize a particular idea or work of art but rather taken a familiar work of art and employed (deployed?) it in an unfamiliar way. Some might call it a misappropriation of the artist's intentions, and some might call it brilliant. Either way, familiarity seems to be a requisite to reinterpretation.

Obviously the Whitman archive does not allow such creative reinterpretation to take place within its pages. What it does offer, however, is a place to gain familiarity with the poet's work and unbiased access to the information that might engender familiarity. What we might do once that familiarity is gained is indeed limitless.

Backdoor to Vonnegut

If this isn't too much information already you can check out an archive of Vonnegut's out of print and online publications here. The site isn't particularly exciting but it does provide links to seemingly obscure articles Vonnegut published in Rolling Stone, Playboy, and The Nation, just to name a few.

SDSU Englush Department? An Archive?

When one visits the SDSU English department website what does one expect? Think about that for one moment, conceptualize and visualize what sort of site the university might have, keep something concrete in mind. Then, if you have the time, take a peep at the sight: http://literature.sdsu.edu/englmain.html. Does it live up to your expectations? Is it more than what you had hoped for? It is less? Could it be considered a type of archive?

Taking a moment to search the site will reveal links to authors such as Silverstein, Sontag, Twain, and Murakami, just to name a few. In the site you will also find essays by Vonnegut and Derrida. There is a link to other English departments world wide. There are lengthy, though not pretentiously lengthy, faculty bios complete with photos, art, and sometimes notable quotes or theoretical synopsis. And there is a link (and some might call this meta-archival) to past manifestations of the English department website.

Is this an archive? Well if it's not it sure is a lot closer to something of the sort than say SFSU's English department website, and it's certainly something of a joy to look around.

The Mark Twain Project

Mark Twain on Humor: "The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven."

Mark Twain on Existentialism: "Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought--a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!"

Mark Twain on Jane Austin: "Jane is entirely impossible. It seems a great pity that they allowed her to die a natural death."

Mark Twain on Pragmatism: "Put all your eggs in one basket and--WATCH THAT BASKET."

Marl Twain online: http://www.marktwainproject.org/

backward design

Backward design implies that teaching and learning are both a means to an end. In rhetoric that would appeal to backward design theorists, this end ought to be the generation of inquiry (broadly) and the generation of inquiry based on the preoccupations of a particular field or area of study (more specifically). I can't say I disagree, but I have some fundamental, or you could say philosophical, issues with anything functioning as a means to an end. Cannot learning be an end in itself? Cannot teaching, too, be and end in itself? That is not to say that the act of teaching and learning can be a one time engagement with the end resolving within that engagement, but rather cannot learning and teaching result in their own fruitful ends? More importantly, can teaching and learning be both and simultaneously a means to an end and an end in themselves?

Backward design is difficult because it forces a consideration of results. If we think of a teacher as say an artist working from backward design, we end up with an artist who necessarily places the implications of his completed work, and the effects of those implications upon the beholder, before the form. Is there anything at stake in this way of thinking? It is obvious that something is to be gained, but is anything lost? Is what is lost justified in the end result? Maybe so and maybe not, but it must be considered that classroom time belongs not to the teacher, nor to the student, but to the collective of those present. It is not your time, nor my time, but rather, in the words of that great philosopher Jeff Spicoli, "our time." Should our time be spent as a means to an end, or as an end in itself? Can it be spent as both? And is there anything wrong with a little snack on our time?

The (New)Americans

In 1958 Robert Frank, a Swiss photographer, published a book of photos that he called The Americans. The book offered snapshots, often gritty and at times subversive and racially charged, of his 18 month journey through the U.S. In the world of fine art photography the book is a landmark piece (indeed a friend of mine called it the Grapes of Wrath of photography), and for a country with an ongoing identity crisis the book represents a seminal glimpse of an ongoing attempt to define, or at least suggest, what these people are, these Americans. Jack Kerouac, suffering from a similar identity crisis, and therefore a similar preoccupation, offered to write the introduction to the book, sealing the deal with an unassuming "Sure, I can write something about these pictures."

Fifty years later the identity crisis persists and the fiscal state of affairs that was bludgeoning The Americans seems to be taking a second swing in a new, twisted manifestation at The New Americans. The New Americans is a project that Edurne Diaz, a Spanish photographer, has undertaken as both a tribute to Robert Frank and as a quest to attempt to articulate these peculiar people, these Americans.

Together with the young writer Blair Mardian, sometimes passing as legendary icon Claude Winters, Edurne Diaz has embarked on a peculiar but important project. An ongoing blog of this concerted effort can be followed here:http://claudewinters.blogspot.com/2009/08/made-up-dreams.html

But the question to ask in this world of digital immediacy is, why publish the book at all? Why wait for the culmination of the 18 month project when one can simply blog along, archive digitally, create the artifact of art virtually? Of course the answer is both obviously implicit and impossible to articulate. Perhaps The New Americans will present an argument of its own if we still have the patience to let it state its case.

Amen

I had originally posted this youtube clip to the class ning site, but decided to take it down and put it here so as not to impose on prof. Hanley's e-space.

The video, I think, responds via a real world scenario to some of the issues that The Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0 addresses.

The clip essential deals with a six second drum break that has become a "ubiquitous piece of the pop-culture sound-scape." My initial inclination to post this clip came from the notion in Digital Humanities that "intellectual property must open up, not close down the intellect and proprius."

As the digital world opens up what might be called digital venues, cultural landscapes, sound-scapes, and intellectual niches, have become available to such a large audience that appropriation of certain clips of those scapes is inevitable. This leads, of course, to a great deal of interaction between art, ideas, and culture, and the consumers of those things. As the video suggests, this sort of interaction and appropriation is an essential part of the creative process, and, one could argue an integral part of the intellectual process as well.

Indeed, one could even suggests that this type of appropriation is the precise type of "curation" Humanities 2.0 is advocating. In the case of the Amen Break, a piece of music history from 1969 was taken, sampled, interacted with, presented to people and made new. The prolific remix of the break into hiphop and other electronic music forms was in fact a sort of interactive curation, with producers acting as both curators and artists. Nate Harrison's video is another type of interactive curation, one that considers the break being curated from social, fiscal, political, and historical points of view, and this interaction was written down, videoed, pressed onto a dub-plate, and so on. One could even say I am actively curating all of the above information by posting it on this blog, by writing and thinking about it, and by sharing it with you.

I suppose an interesting question might be: Who, in terms of the rhetoric of Humanities 2.0, was the initial curator of the break? Was it the Winstons, who, by their initial creating of the song Amen Brother, initiated the curation project that would not interactively be taken up again until the sampling culture of hip hop and electronic music hit the scene? Was it the first hip hop producer the actively sample the break? Was it Nate Harrison who put all the pieces together?

And what does this mean for intellectual landscapes? Does this appropriation of received ideas really lead to something new, or is it mere exploitation? Is the type of curation done by Nate Harrison, in which he acknowledges the Amen Break as part of the "cannon" of the pop-culture sound-scape, any different from a university that acknowledges say Pamela as an integral and essential part of what we now call the novel? Is Humanities 2.0 anything more that a rhetorical slight of hand which is merely sampling tradition Humanities ideologies? Is it something more?