My name is Acutifolius: having sharp edges. Underside of each frond like a powdery line of Braille. (19)

—Hillary Gravendyk, "Botanica" (I), Harm

MSA 12: notes

There's still no time to post about MSA. Turns out that when you get back from a conference, there's stuff to do. But I have a suspicion I'll never actually have time to post notes before I forget, so here's a quick and dirty version.

1. Friday 11/12. Went to a really excellent panel on "Networks of the Nonhuman." T. Hugh Crawford, whose book on Williams and medicine is great, gave an interesting and pleasantly informal talk on object-oriented ontology, something on which Tim Morton has lately been posting incessantly (in a good way). I can't say I'm on board, but I'm interested.

Met my distant Twitter-friend Scott Selisker and found out that his research on automatism in geopolitical others (such as Communists) is directly relevant to my own. Am now a certified fan.

Lunched with Andrew Goldstone, whom I owed an ACLA proposal. (Yes, I did submit it on time. System: beaten.)

In the afternoon, attended the panel on "Modernism and the Machine" (it was machine day at MSA, I guess). Excellent papers by Amy Woodbury Tease, Michael North (on newness and Norbert Wiener...who, it turns out, had a lot in common with T.S. Eliot), and Mark Goble (with amazing film clips, per usual).

My own panel, with Margaret Ronda and Hillary Gravendyk and chaired by the wonderful Julia Bloch, was also that afternoon. Margaret's paper on Rukeyser and Hillary's paper on Niedecker spoke to one another particularly well. We got excellent questions in that panel and were generally very happy with it.

2. Saturday, 11/13 Attended a packed 8:30 session called "Beyond the Flâneuse: Women in the Modernist City." I particularly enjoyed Anne Fernald's paper on the taxicab as a heterotopia, but all three papers were great.

I attended a panel intriguingly titled "Modernist Failure" with Joshua Schuster, Benjamin Kahan, and Melanie Micir. I could tell there was a bit of a Penn conspiracy going on, but it was a very good panel. I was particularly interested in Benjy Kahan's paper, "The Walk-in Closet," on situational homosexuality.

Being an inveterate institutional gawker, I went to the MSA business lunch, where people were thanked. The book prize was awarded jointly to Enda Duffy and Eric Hayot for, respectively, The Speed Handbook and The Hypothetical Mandarin.

Next year's conference in Buffalo was discussed. The theme is "Structures of Innovation." "Innovation" is of course one of those terms that always sets off my "uncritical thinking!!" radar (DANGER WILL ROBINSON), so I'm contemplating organizing a panel titled "Against Innovation." Email me if interested. Or amused.

Continuing the Penn conspiracy theme, I attended Julia's panel on the "after-affects" of modernism in the afternoon. Julia's paper on Alice Notley and William Carlos Williams was absolutely great. Kaplan Harris's paper introduced me to "new narrative," with which I was relatively (and a little embarrassingly) unfamiliar.

Hillary and I may or may not have availed ourselves of the Fairmont Empress's extreme tea at the end of that panel. If we did, I highly recommend the house blend and the hotel's ability to accommodate food allergies.

All in all, it was a great conference. In addition to the unusual opportunity to hang out with old friends in a lovely city, I had a chance to meet wonderful folks and hear about their exciting research. It was particularly great to meet people whom I knew from their research or online, but had never met in person. Many thanks to Stephen Ross and all the other organizers for putting it together.

UC Budget Cuts

The Coalition of English Graduate Students, University of California,
Berkeley
For Immediate Release: May 14, 2008
Contact: Snehal Shingavi
sshingav@berkeley.edu
510-484-5242


UC Berkeley Hamstrung By Budget Cuts:
Ability to Provide Required Courses to Undergraduates Severely Affected


(Berkeley, CA) -- Statewide cuts to the budget of the University of California will have an immediate impact upon UC Berkeley undergraduate and graduate students. After a decade of incremental budget cuts, the university has very little ‘fat’ left to trim. As a result, vital areas of the university will now be affected, depleting the ability of core departments to provide basic instruction.

The impact of the cuts will be felt as early as this coming spring, when the English department alone may be forced to deny entry into required Reading & Composition classes, known as R&Cs, to as many as 300 undergraduates. R&C classes are already difficult to get into.

“The classes fill up lightning-fast because almost every student needs to complete the R&C requirement,” Ahmed Owainati, a Computer Science undergraduate, commented. “The only solution is to dedicate your Phase One enrollment to getting that coveted slot, despite the many other lower division requirements one might have, and even then nothing is guaranteed. I completed my first class in Fall '06, and did not get into the second until three semesters later in Spring '08, despite spending each Phase One in between trying to get into some R1B class.”

Although no clear information is available yet as to the total reduction in the number of R&C classes across the university, it is likely that some Class of 2009 seniors will be unable to graduate from the university as a result.

Christine Chang, a third year double major in Molecular & Cell Biology and Public Health, recounted her difficulties in completing the R&C requirement:

“Trying to enroll in a Reading & Composition course was a struggle,” she said. “After failing to receive a spot in an R1A class in the first semester I attempted to sign up, I was able to secure one in my second round, at the cost of a class I needed for my major. This semester I finally took my R1B. In the first few weeks, 40 students were crowded into a small classroom in hopes of getting a spot; many had to sit on the
floor. Approving the proposed budget cuts would mean that the UC will be requiring a class and simultaneously further hindering students from taking it.”

The impact of these cuts upon UC Berkeley’s English department is severe. The university has been forced to deny teaching appointments to graduate students and lecturers, which it relies upon to teach lower level English and foreign language classes. Now tied as the top graduate program in the country with Harvard and Yale, according to US News and World Report, the department may be forced to reduce support to its graduate students.

Students who rely upon teaching appointments for fee remission, health insurance, child-care, and access to research facilities will lose these basic services. Students who have already passed their qualifying exams may be forced to withdraw from the program.

Hillary Gravendyk, the recent recipient of the UC Berkeley Teaching Effectiveness Award and an English Department Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor award, said, “While I’m honored to have the University acknowledge me for my commitment to teaching, I’m frustrated and saddened that the proposed budget cuts would remove the opportunity for me to continue teaching at Berkeley for even one more semester. I rely on teaching for fee remissions and financial support; without that support my
ability to even complete the PhD could be compromised. It is ironic to be congratulated for teaching excellence by the same administration that is making it impossible for me to continue teaching.”

The University of California, responding to Governor Schwarzenegger’s statewide budget cuts, has mandated a 10% reduction to the Temporary Academic Salaries budget, used to pay for Graduate Student instruction and assistant lecturer positions. Across UC Berkeley’s campus, the same fiscal crisis will result in the widespread dismissal of lecturers. Departments that are particularly hard-hit include the prestigious English department, East Asian Languages and Cultures, French, German, and others.

Ian Duncan, Chair of the English Department at UC Berkeley, summed up the implications of the situation. “The projected cuts to the TAS budget pose a serious threat to our ability to sustain our PhD program in the long run. Most of our graduate students enter the program with the expectation that they will be able to support themselves with at least four years of teaching, since we are not able to provide the five-year fellowship packages offered by our peer-institution competitors (all of them wealthy private universities, such as Yale, Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford). At risk, in short, is nothing less than the core mission of the top-ranked English Department at the top-ranked public university in the country.”

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Links:
Jasper Bernes

4LAKids: Blaming Clark Kerr

Remaking the University

The Naturalist

I only just got my copy of Hillary Gravendyk's new chapbook The Naturalist, from Achiote Press. Every time I turn around, it seems like Hillary's gotten some large thing accomplished, like winning a prize or getting a fellowship or completing a manuscript or, say, publishing a chapbook.

The Naturalist, like the nineteenth century naturalism that I've been obsessively pondering of late, contemplates the relations of bodies to environments, and the relation of perception to those bodies. Several poems titled "Diorama," a "Shadow Box," and an "Arboretum" consider environments as framed things, environments estranged by miniaturization, as if placed in a museum exhibit by a naturalist.

But if the voices of The Naturalist belong to a distant curator, it is a curator who lives and is embodied inside the exhibit; the exhibit is the world, and the world itself is framed. "At some points, it's quite pretty," Hillary writes in the first "Diorama," posing the aestheticization of nature as both an inescapable affect of observation and a hopelessly meager substitute for a wider angle of perception.

It's not that Hillary wants to do away with the limits of perception, the framing of the diorama -- it's that she wants to investigate the frustration, and the embodiment, that it entails. Living in a small world, a "safely kept scene strangely bound" produces distortion, and that distortion has a poetics and a place.

inside, things are sizably arranged, each
to a season. They may appear quietly and more
elaborate than they are, but sheltered against
the elements, how could they appear otherwise?

"Here" is distant; "we" are a naturalist; "we" are placed by our bodies inside dioramas, making miniatures of our environments with the only perceptual apparatuses we have, and thus making presence far and embodiment strange. "Both are a strange border: our own/ hands and our own faces."

Benjamin Burrill's photographs of inert bodies -- mannequins, severed bird-wings -- play a counterpoint to Hillary's poems. The poems, so cautious of boundaries, nestle these photographed objects inside the bounds of the photographer's composition.

In the centerfold photograph (which can be found at graybirdimages.com), mannequins strangely hung, and with no pretense of lifelike positioning, are lit from behind and from overhead, appearing as little more than shadows. The top third of the photograph is entirely black except for the overhead light fixture, which is so feeble in comparison to the backlighting that it appears simply as a lit object in itself, a relieving something in the blackness, rather than a source of light. The overhead lamp, in fact, is the only lit object in the photograph, apparently shedding light only on itself.

The two strata of the photograph therefore appear as inverse or negative modes; whereas the mannequins below are negatively outlined against the lit windows, the overhead lamp above them is the more traditional lit object against a dark background. It is therefore impossible to say which is more centrally the subject of the photograph: the mannequins, appearing in negative, details effaced by shadow, or the overhead lamp, positively visible in contour and in detail, that is purportedly there only to light the mannequins below.

Bodies and potential scenarios are bounded by grid lines -- the window panes, the two strata imposed by the photograph's composition -- and interpenetration and motion seem foreclosed -- even though in the very center of the photograph, just below the overhead lamp, a pair of mannequin feet (usefully tilted downward to accommodate the high heeled shoes that are the fashion among mannequins) hangs downward from the ceiling, revealing that at least part of a mannequin must be somewhere up there in the blackness. Positioned by light, positioned by position, the viewer can only regard those dangling feet (or are they resting on that beam of blackness formed by the windowpane?) inside the limited frame in which they appear. "But," as Hillary writes, "who names one frame merely eye-straight, one frame true?"