Once upon a time I would have blogged not only THATCamp Theory but also MSA. As it is, however, all I seem to have in me is an acknowledgment that the Las Vegas airport has free wifi. Which is, I suppose, something.

MSA 13

It seems that the era of liveblogging is over, at least for me. In fact I barely tweeted, thanks to my janky phone. But I had a blast at MSA, as usual; I particularly enjoyed a talk by Karen Leick on Gertrude Stein's reception in the 1960s (the whole panel was great, in fact) and Benjy Kahan's provocative talk on climate and temporary homosexuality.

I felt that my own panel, "Against Innovation," went very well, despite a minor a/v fail; Stephen Ross and Joel Burges gave rich and interesting talks—Stephen's a metacritical meditation on haunting in modernist studies in several registers, and Joel's a clever look at the formalization of obsolescence in Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox. Ted Martin was our panel chair and kept things moving along admirably, and the people who showed up to the panel asked smart and difficult questions.

Beyond all the talks, of course, it was wonderful to see old friends and meet new people. MSA always wisely supplies ample breaks between panels and free-flowing coffee, which make for great conversations. I'm coming away from this MSA with lots of energy for my book, new readers for some unbearably delayed work in progress, and the general excitement of being reminded that I'm not the only one interested in these things.

I also came to the decision over the weekend that I should make a habit of posting my conference talks to the web, which is something that lots of people already do. I haven't done it in the past for a variety of familiar reasons—not feeling as though the idea were well enough developed or the talk well enough written; or the thought that I might develop the talk into an article one day.

Well, I'm starting to think better of these fears (let's call a spade a spade). It's not going to shock anyone that twenty-minute conference talks tend to be a little undercooked, for one thing. It's true, my conference talks aren't always well wrought urns. I think I can live with this revelation about my scholarly practice being made public. (By the way, my conference talks are also intentionally informal in tone—I believe I use the phrase "random garbage" in this one, for instance. I consider this a feature, not a bug.)

And as for thinking I might develop an idea—sometimes I do and sometimes I don't—but mostly I don't. And in this particular case, I'm pretty sure I won't. I have an article in the works that's related to the talk I gave at this year's MSA, but quite different in focus.

So, in short, here's my MSA 13 talk: "The Time-Sense: On Stein's Repetition."

Literary history is not really about priority, but about agency; not who did it first, but who coordinated doing with knowing, poetry with poetics. (210)

    —Jed Rasula, Syncopations

It is understood by this time that everything is the same except composition and time, composition and the time of the composition and the time in the composition. (526)

    —Gertrude Stein, "Composition as Explanation"

Beddini (reading a telegram): 'Come ahead stop stop being a sap stop you can even bring Alberto stop my husband is stopping at your hotel stop when do you start stop.' I cannot understand who wrote this.


Dale: Sounds like Gertrude Stein.


    —Top Hat (1935)

Etta Cone offered to typewrite Three Lives and she began. Baltimore is famous for the delicate sensibilities and conscientiousness of its inhabitants. It suddenly occurred to Gertrude Stein that she had not told Etta Cone to read the manuscript before beginning to typewrite it. She went to see her and there indeed was Etta Cone faithfully copying the manuscript letter by letter so that she might not by any indiscretion become conscious of the meaning. (713)
    —The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

All you need to know, really.

Against Innovation

File it under "things that started out as a joke and became increasingly awesome." My panel "Against Innovation," with Stephen Ross and Joel Burges, was accepted for MSA 13. Hurray!

Modernist studies continues to place stress on “making it new,” borrowing from modernism’s own rhetorics, as MSA 13’s theme, “Structures of Innovation,” suggests. The idea of innovation, like that of “modernism” itself, is inherently complex, always implying a temporal forward motion often freighted with underexamined ethical and epistemological implications. Indeed, as Jed Rasula has recently shown in the pages of Modernism/modernity, the notion of newness in modernism was as multifarious as it was pervasive, standing in as a term of aesthetic approval or as a formal description as often as it made a historical claim. This panel therefore seeks to illuminate the temporal structures of modernism and its afterlives that operate “against innovation”: repetition, queer time, haunting, and obsolescence.

Natalia Cecire’s paper, “Repeating Stein,” considers the ways in which repetition troubles the very notion of “formal innovation.” Via Gertrude Stein’s “continuous present,” Cecire examines repetition’s dual role as a marker of the Freudian death drive and a hallmark of the “formal innovation” of the avant-garde. Jennifer Fleissner and Lee Edelman read repetition as figuring, respectively, the compulsive futurity of a female modernism (suggested by the typist’s “automatic hand”) and a queer refusal of “reproductive futurism”—that which propels modernity forward and that which refuses futurity altogether. Questioning the professional reproductive futurism of modernist studies, Cecire models a reading “against innovation” that seeks to illuminate the ethical and epistemological investments in temporality that continue to shape our understanding of modernism.

Stephen Ross takes up the structure of return by way of a metacritical consideration of historical studies of spiritualism and the occult in his talk “The Haunting of Modernist Studies.” For modernism and its critics alike, he argues, what is proclaimed as new not only encodes key dimensions of the immediate past, but indeed does so in precisely those terms most clearly identified with the dynamics of haunting. Taking studies of spiritualism and the occult as his case study, Ross argues that the historical-materialist turn in modernist studies has powerfully revived the field of modernist studies—but in doing so continually also raises the ghost of the old “high” modernist studies with which, like a mourner, the field cannot bear to part. The result, he suggests, is a melancholic modernism with which the field must engage if it is to sustain its resurgent impetus.

In “The Old-Fashioned Mr. Anderson,” Joel Burges examines a modernist aesthetic that, when dislodged from the historical time of modernism, turns “making it new” into making it obsolete. Wes Anderson’s stop-motion animated film Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009), Burges argues, pits itself against innovation by embracing technological obsolescence as an aesthetic horizon for cinema, wagering on an analog modernity in a media moment in which the “digital revolution” is the presumed future of film. In doing so, Anderson pays homage to two self-consciously innovative films from the modernist era, one the product of Hollywood, the other of the international cinematic avant-garde: King Kong (1933) and Le Roman de Renard (1929-1931; 1941). Fantastic Mr. Fox thus insists that that the obsolete rather than the innovative, is now the privileged temporal and historical horizon of art in the present.

See you in Buffalo!

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.

Upcoming events: Larry Eigner, Indivisible anthology, Leslie Scalapino, Curious George

Just a quick post on some upcoming events. Reflections on MSA to follow shortly, I hope.

First of all, a number of events associated with the Holloway Series in Poetry:

1.Friday, November 19, 6:30-8pm in the Maude Fife Room (315 Wheeler):
HONORING THE LIFE AND WORK OF LARRY EIGNER (August 7, 1927 – February 3, 1996)

When Larry Eigner arrived in this world “palsied from a hard birth” the accepted view was that the severity of his injury made him uneducable. An inspired bar-mitzvah gift of a 1940 Royal portable typewriter opened a pathway to his becoming a poet.

This event celebrates the publication in four folio volumes of the Collected Poems of Larry Eigner.

Featured speakers include:

Robert Grenier, poet and co-editor of The Collected Poems of Larry Eigner
Lyn Hejinian, poet and professor, Department of English, UC Berkeley
Richard Eigner, brother of Larry Eigner
Rebecca Gaydos, grad student and scholar of the poetry of Larry Eigner
Kit Robinson, poet and longtime friend of Larry Eigner
Michael Davidson, poet and professor, UC San Diego
George Hart, scholar of the poetry of Larry Eigner
Albert Gelpi, professor of English, emeritus, Stanford University
Hillary Gravendyk, assistant professor, Pomona College
Jack and Adelle Foley, poets
Norma Cole, poet
Stephen Ratcliffe, poet and professor, Department of English, Mills College
Robert Hass, former Poet Laureate of the United States, professor, UC Berkeley

This will definitely be worth attending.

2. Tuesday, November 30: Celebrating the first anthology of its kind:
Indivisible: Contemporary South Asian American Poetry

Indivisible: Contemporary South Asian American Poetry (University of Arkansas Press, 2010) is the first anthology to bring together American poets with roots in Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka.

Since Ralph Waldo Emerson first drew inspiration from the Sanskrit epic poem Bhagvad Gita, the poetic traditions of South Asia and the United States have been intertwined from Eliot to the Beats. A seminal anthology, Indivisible brings us up to date, presenting the work of contemporary American poets who trace their roots back to Pakistan, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and who are rewriting the cultural and literary landscape of America today.

POETS/EDITORS. Ravi Chandra, Summi Kaipa, Tanuja Mehrotra, Pireeni
Sundaralingam, and graduate student poet, Swati Rana.

3. Friday, December 3: A MEMORIAL CELEBRATION OF THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF LESLIE SCALAPINO

LESLIE SCALAPINO (July 25, 1944 - May 28, 2010) was a ground-breaking, genre-stretching author of 40 books of poetry, poem-plays, essays and fiction. Her books include; Selected Poems 1974-2006; Floats Horse-Floats or Horse Flows; Dihedrons-Gazelle, Dihedrals-Zoom; Flow-Winged Crocodile, A Pair / Actions Are Erased / Appear; and the novel Defoe. A longtime resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, she was also the founder and publisher of O Books.

POETS/SPEAKERS. Lyn Hejinian, Simone Fattal, Michael McClure, Norma Cole, Laura Moriarty, Jocelyn Saidenberg, Judith Goldman, Konrad Steiner, Tracy Grinnell, Joanne Kyger, Norman Fischer, Alicia Cohen, Rae Armantrout, Stephen Ratcliffe, Michael Cross, M. Mara Ann, and Bob Grenier.

And now for something completely different:

The Contemporary Jewish Museum in SF has a new exhibit on Margret and H.A. Rey, the authors/artists of Curious George. It looks amazing. From the website:

Curious George, the impish monkey protagonist of many adventures, may never have seen the light of day if it were not for the determination and courage of his creators, the illustrator H. A. Rey (1898–1977) and his wife, author and artist Margret Rey (1906–1996).

Born in Hamburg to Jewish families, they lived together in Paris from 1936 to 1940. Hours before the Nazis marched into Paris in June 1940, the Reys fled on bicycles, carrying drawings for their children’s stories including one about a mischievous monkey, then named Fifi. Not only were they able to save the characters, but the Reys themselves were saved by their illustrations when authorities found them in their belongings, which may explain why saving the day after a narrow escape became the premise of most Curious George stories.

After their fateful escape from Paris and a four-month journey across France, Spain, Portugal, and Brazil, the couple reached New York in the fall of 1940. In all, the Reys authored and illustrated over 30 books, most of them for children, seven starring Curious George.

The exhibition features nearly 80 original drawings of the beloved monkey and other characters, preparatory dummy books, vintage photographs, and documentation related to the Reys’ escape from Nazi Europe, as well as a specially designed reading room for visitors of all ages.

I am now very strongly considering taking next semester's class on a field trip. The exhibit runs through March 13, 2011.

MSA 12

There are many ways to get to Victoria, British Columbia, of which I took the least interesting and the most efficient, a direct United flight from SFO to YYJ. I'm pretty sure at least 80 percent of the people on that flight were headed to MSA--two were from my department alone.

It's been lovely seeing friends and colleagues here, and I'm looking forward to tomorrow's panels. Notes to follow, probably.

More MSA

My partner in crime Jill and I were both pumped about the same panel this morning, the "Trans-Temporality" panel with Claire Colebrook, Rita Felski, Wai-Chee Dimock (she was unable to attend, but the panel moderator, Sara Blair, read the paper), and Jennifer Fleissner. I've long been a huge fan of Felski's and Fleissner's work in particular, so I was eager to go, and was not disappointed. Interestingly, Felski took the opportunity to talk mainly about Actor-Network Theory. I'd have liked to hear a little more about how ANT might alter or intersect with her previous work.

I also went to a roundtable on modernism and digital humanities that was very interesting. Jon Orwant from Google provoked a heated question about the proper treatment of books, one with which I was wholly sympathetic. (I mean, something terrible happened to a book. I would have been ticked myself.) I know it wouldn't have been appropriate to start airing my grievances about Google Books, but do they know that their scan of Geography and Plays is missing most of "Susie Asado"? (SKG, who is eerily omniscient, found me a better scan at archive.org.) Shana Kimball from the University of Michigan Library gave an interesting talk about collaboration between the university library and the Press, which is moving entirely to e-book/POD format. Mark Wollaeger's talk did not move me to want to use wikis in my classroom (why is it that I still mostly hate wikis?), but it did make me reconsider some of my strategies for next semester. I wonder how legal it would be to have my students put their critical editions of texts online. Kathleen Fitzpatrick's talk was mostly drawn from her book, which I've plugged before on this blog. I was able to meet her at the end of the panel, and amazingly, she recognized me from my tiny thumbnail Twitter photo.

At the panel I asked a question that I think was never fully answered, in part because I didn't really articulate the whole of my concern. It seems to me that online projects and/or infrastructures are often seen as a cheap (or even free) alternative to analog apparatuses, because the labor, because it is often diffused across a community, is rendered invisible (and unpaid). I wonder to what extent that impulse can be resisted by digital initiatives at university presses and online peer review projects, which actually do require a huge amount of labor (intellectual labor, I should say) both in starting up and in maintaining them. It seems to me that the conversion to online modes of communication obviously requires a re-valuing of that kind of work for tenure, etc. But it also requires valuing it, maybe for the first time for some people, in economic terms -- with the understanding that truly useful, coherent, and durable online projects and infrastructures require levels of funding that are perhaps not significantly lower than those of traditional formats. The real cost of publishing a book, that is, was never in the paper it's made of.

Relatedly, I spoke with Sam Alexander and Pericles Lewis about the Yale Modernism Lab, also recently plugged on this blog. Seriously, it is a cracking good idea. I think there must be some way that it could get hooked up to Zotero that would be useful, although I don't yet know enough about it to know how that would work exactly.


All in all, it was a productive conference (even if I was stuck in the ugly section of Montréal the entire time). I leave for home tomorrow. Once more into the breach -- I get a new stack of papers to grade on Monday.

MSA 11

Some quick notes from today.

I went to a very interesting seminar on science studies and modernism this morning. The seminar was run by Anne Raine and Craig Gordon. I met some smart people, learned some new things, and wrote down the titles of some interesting-sounding books.

The thing that most struck me on reading all the papers was the diversity of possible meanings of "science studies," as manifested in people's various approaches. Most of the papers discussed a specific science in relation to modernism, e.g. environmental studies or astrophysics. Mine was one of the few papers that tried to deal with scientificity as a category (though I'm not sure to what extent I succeeded). For me, the most interesting sciences with which to deal in the modernist period are the biological and social sciences, precisely because of the way that they challenge existing notions of scientificity and/or experimentalism.

Unfortunately for my jetlagged, uncaffeinated body, the seminar was at 8am, but on the up side, the Montréal metro was a breeze.

I went to three panels today. One called "Border Conditions: Poetry at the Edge of Modernist Discourse" was chaired by Oren Izenberg and featured papers on Duncan's oracular impulse; Oppen's notion of poetry as a kind of testing of the truth, and translation and Mallarmé's refusal of voice.

A panel called "Circling, Singing, Scoring" included papers on Oppen and Stevens, Moore, and letter frequency -- what the speaker, Roger Gilbert, called "scrabbliness" (scrabbliness, roughly, is what happens when words are dense with letters that win a lot of points in Scrabble). The last paper was both interesting and comical, and this spoke to something I've been thinking about in relation to Christian Bök lately: why the act of accumulation is comical. I was most interested in Heather Cass White's paper on Marianne Moore, though (of course). She drew on the evidence of drafts to reveal a "romantic" Moore. Though I have a few reservations about how this was framed, it was an interesting and convincing talk.

In the afternoon there was a roundtable on "The Future of Women's Literature in Modernist Studies," chaired by Suzette Henke and featuring many important feminist modernists. It was very smart and illuminating. I was interested to learn, in Clare Hanson's talk, of Angela McRobbie's Aftermath of Feminism, which examines the sense of loss at the heart of postfeminism -- first, the loss of the mother as love-object, and second, the loss of a feminist ideal of liberation upon being handed a "feminism" that has been completely co-opted by patriarchal capitalism (i.e. "empowerfulness"). I'd love to read this book.

I did go to Susan Stanford Friedman's plenary talk, "Planetarity: Global Epistemologies in Modernist Studies," but it'll have to wait.

It's about 10:30 pm, and somebody in this B&B is playing very loud dance music. I really wish this were not the case.

Some miscellany

I'm in the midst of a bunch of things right now. Here are a few of them:

1. I just heard about Yale's Modernism Lab. Very cool -- looks like a great teaching tool, and I love how well it cross-references.

Also, hopefully it will become a quick reference for undergraduates. I was dismayed recently to find some students citing Wikipedia chapter and verse on modernism -- dismayed because they seemed to have failed to note the big disclaimer that the Wikipedia nerds had very responsibly put at the top of the page:

"This article is in need of attention from an expert on the subject."

So true.

2. Even cooler is Kathleen Fitzpatrick's new book Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy, which, as you might expect, is about the prospects of academic writing in the information age. Refreshingly, it's not a mournful elegy for a lost golden age of print, nor a hopped-up celebration of all things internetz, but rather a smart and critical look at the current state of print and online publishing.

Particularly intriguing are Fitzpatrick's thoughts about how to implement meaningful open peer review and open access academic publishing. Although the book is forthcoming, in print, from NYU Press, Fitzpatrick is also trying out open commenting using CommentPress and as part of her ongoing open access/open peer review project Media Commons. I highly recommend checking the book out, and commenting.

3. I'm also reading seminar papers for the upcoming MSA.

4. I'm reading some work by Moon Duchin on the role of repugnance in analytic philosophy. Very interesting stuff.

5. As usual, I'll keep mum about my ongoing research, but let me just say that Margaret Mead is fascinating.