Am I the meanest teacher? Maybe. I think I'm about to get a really terrible song stuck in my students' heads. But it's for Learning!

The timbre of sincerity

Just to be clear: Lady Gaga is about (primarily visual) spectacle, not about music per se. That's not to say that her spectacle is necessarily immersive in the sense in which we classically think about spectacle. (By "we" I mean people who sit around thinking about panoramas and wax museums and are very fond of the work of Alison Griffiths and Vanessa Schwartz and spend rainy weekend afternoons leafing through The Arcades Project, which is to say all of us.) Her videos are not made for IMAX; they're made for YouTube. They are miniatures in their bigness.

To me the canonical Lady Gaga video remains "Bad Romance." I haven't even heard her new single; there's no video yet, so what's the point?



Notwithstanding the primacy of the visual in Lady Gaga, there's something that continues to fascinate me about the sound of "Bad Romance." I'm sure the observation has been made better elsewhere, but I'm still trying to figure it out. There is something about Gaga's vocal timbre that sometimes conveys irony, sometimes sincerity. Compare "love, love, love" at 0:55, 1:12, 2:16, and especially 2:32 to "I don't want to be friends" at 3:50 and especially at 4:05.

"Love, love, love" is gritty, a little nasal. It doesn't care. The air is contained; it's high in the throat; it's whatever air Gaga happens to have sitting around in her upper respiratory system. Nothing's being pushed. The quality of the sound tells us that "love, love, love" means something like a casual if ruthless desire.

In contrast, "I don't want to be friends" is open-throated. There is diaphragm involved, projection, technique. It is what they call "belting." It's a little Broadway, a stylized sincerity augmented by the reintroduction of the "unadorned" Gaga close-up.

"I don't want to be friends" is the video's emotional climax, the sticky moment of investment and utter, fixed attention in an otherwise brittle, aggressive performance. Compare. The video starts with Gaga covered in a metal façade, and ends with her character, accessorized by matching flamethrower and cigarette, absently reclining next to a charred corpse. Most of the time the Lady Gaga character isn't "all there," whether her eyes are hidden behind a variety of shades or masks or popping wide open in a head-lolling stupor.

In contrast, "I don't want to be friends"--that belting of air from the bottom of the lungs--physically performs focused, self-possessed, fully conscious desire. It constitutes a break, and it's a break that you hear. The thorough integration of vocal texture with narrative is part of what makes this video brilliant.

It took a highly creative extended reading by Jack Halberstam to get me at all interested in the "Telephone" video. But "Bad Romance" belts its artful construction very loudly.


Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Trans. Howard Eiland, and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999. Print.

Griffiths, Alison. Shivers down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. Print.

---. Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology & Turn-of-the-Century Visual Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Print.

Schwartz, Vanessa R. Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-De-Siècle Paris. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Print.

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.

THATCamp SF

I went to THATCamp Bay Area this past weekend. Roy Tennant from OCLC blogged about it briefly. I learned some new things, met some cool people. I'm exhausted, though, I have to admit!

I'm still puzzling over why digital humanities folks are so obsessed with space. I'd say at least 40% of the sessions were about space and place. But surely the temporalities of digital media are at least as interesting--more, in my opinion. I suspect much of the interest has to do with the availability of existing digital tools (Google Maps, etc.) for making stuff, often pretty pictures. Time is almost necessarily distorted as soon as it's visualized, and in any case, I'm not sure that there's anything we're really want to make with time data. This blog post is going to have a time stamp -- a marker, to the minute, of when this post appeared on the public web. It won't tell you when I wrote it (Sunday afternoon, right after the last session? this morning, after mulling it over?), or how long it took me, or whether or how much I revised. Nearly everything on the web is time-stamped, usually to the minute, quite often in GMT. The web's apparent homogenization--and punctualization--of time belies the multiple synchronous, asynchronous, proleptic (how far in advance to queue a post?), stream-of-not-exactly-consciousness modes that operate in and around it. We've never had many good ways of talking about time, but somehow this philosophical difficulty is exaggerated when it comes to digital humanities.

I often find digital humanities as frustrating as it is productive; "narrative" means different things to a programmer and to me. I keep having those "you keep using that word" moments. It's not a bad thing. It's a good reminder that we need to return to basics sometimes and let people outside our fields know about our basic concepts and vocabulary. In one conversation that turned rather freewheeling, the issue of attention on the internet came up, and no one else at the table was aware of the discourses of attention that pervaded my own period of specialty (according to Jonathan Crary, the obsession with attention starts around 1870, and you can see it running through Benjamin, among others). It's absolutely relevant to DH discussions, but it hadn't occurred to me before to talk about it at THATCamp.

It strikes me that all of the "bootcamp" sessions (where someone instructs the group in "real skills") were tech-oriented. If I go to another THATCamp, I will definitely propose a humanistic bootcamp involving some philosophy of history and an intro to some relevant literary and historical concepts, or maybe a Foucault or a Bakhtin bootcamp. Programmers can be taught these things, after all!

Update: notes by
Phillip Barron
Casey Bisson
Candace Nast
Jana Remy
Katherine Harris

The Lantern Lecture

Well, I got hold of W. R. Butterfield (thanks, Southern Regional Library Facility!), and was amused by the bit of the succeeding article that made its way into the scan. Museums Journal reports that a Dr. C. H. Townsend has complained of the widespread use of lantern slides at conferences:



People were annoyed by Powerpoint before it was even Powerpoint, it seems.

"The Lantern Lecture." Museums Journal 11 (1912): 346.

Museum of Ideas

In searching around for more on W.R. Butterfield's "museum of ideas" (1912), I ran across this piece of current legislation:

H.R. 202: Museum of Ideas Act

1/6/2009--Introduced.

Museum of Ideas Act of 2009 - Establishes the Museum of Ideas Commission to develop a plan for establishing in Washington, D.C., a museum that presents the history and evolution of human ideas.

Hmm.

By the way, Google Books is a cataloguing nightmare. Who made up their categories, Jorge Luís Borges?

A simian nativity

I go into the Valley Life Sciences Building quite often to use the biology library, which is filled with treasures. Outside the library is an exhibit space, where I once heard a couple of eight-year-olds disdainfully denying the aura of a mere cast of a Tyrannosaurus rex skull. I quote: "That's fake." (It was excellent.)

Owing to the Darwin bicentennial, I think, there is currently an exhibit on evolution in that space. As the photograph above indicates, it is a rather odd arrangement. Various primate skeletons (one of them human) crowd around a grave-manger where lie casts of Australopithicus afarensis bones, as if to pay tribute to the newborn/long dead missing link. The chimpanzee skeleton crouches like a sheep; a gracile ape (I don't remember the name) hovers overhead like an angel -- or like a crucified, er, ape.

Mechanicity and gendered muppets

Because I live under a rock, I saw this video for the first time only recently.


First of all, gendered muppets. Physically, Mahna Mahna is gendered masculine, with a low, gravelly voice and masculine dress. The Snowths are gendered feminine; they're pink and have exaggerated eyelashes. Let's just pause for a moment to register how odd and not-odd it is to gender muppets. Insofar as they are anthropomorphized and people are preceded by gender, it is not surprising that muppets are gendered. But given how far the producers go out of their way to make them nonhuman, the degree to which they are gendered is surprising.

Even more surprising is how well the muppets' physical gendering harmonizes with the gendering of the actions that they are made to undertake in this video. Supposedly the muppets are just singing a song, but in the process they stage a drama of creativity and regulation that echoes Victorian gender stereotypes.

Muppets are by definition mechanical; they're puppets manipulated by artists from below, and this song is more mechanical than most; syllables, "words," and phrases are repeated over and over. But within the framework of that mechanicity, Mahna Mahna keeps attempting to improvise solos or otherwise depart from the repeated chorus. The Snowths -- two entities acting not as individuals but as a (female) class -- seem to have stepped out of Desire and Domestic Fiction; they survey Mahna Mahna and, with their gaze -- first wondering, then disapproving -- constrain him within the bounds of the repetitive, mechanical chorus. They are not violent; they are not coercive; they simply shake their heads. Influence is all.

Shrinking before them, Mahna Mahna curbs his desire to deviate from the mechanical pattern in which the Snowths, moving synchronously, seem to delight. Like the Widow Douglas trying to "sivilize" Huck Finn, the Snowths set and enforce rules, unable to understand Mahna Mahna's masculine creativity and his capacity for play. The Snowths are didactic Maria Edgeworths to Mahna Mahna's fantasizing George Macdonald; they are petticoat government to a fun-loving Rip van Winkle.

Repressed, Mahna Mahna attempts to escape into the background, turning his back on the Snowths in order to engage in his play. He cannot escape the feminine gaze of social order, however. Even with his back turned, he is aware of the Snowths' disapproval and rushes back to do his manly duty, planting a firm "mahna mahna" between the two bopping Snowths, who continue the chorus in an ecstasy of repetition, as enthusiastic as ever.

Ultimately, Mahna Mahna lights out for the territories -- but he does not forget to call home.

Thus the Snowths' ecstatic repetition of the mechanical chorus, performing the female mechanicity of the "typewriter," the telephone operator, and other modern female cyborgs, returns as technology, only to be shut down thereby. This final utterance of "mahna mahna" puts an end to the repetition that it has so far enabled. Even if Mahna Mahna remains constrained to play house with the Snowths, he can now do it remotely, away from their surveying gaze.

(Far more information than you could possibly want about this song is located here.)

The curious phenomenon of your occipital horn

The American Museum of Natural History has a vast collection of mollusk specimens, both "dry" (shells) and preserved in fluid. We learn of these collections on a section of the web site dubbed "research"; naturalists who study mollusks might wish to consult the specimens at the museum and compare them to specimens that they themselves have observed. The pages there are practical and text-based. It is the land of the serious.



On the front page of the museum web site, on the other hand, we get something else:



That's right. Extreme mammals!

I like the link in the sidebar: "Extreme Extinction." Indeed.

Nineteenth-century scientist of the week: Elliott Coues

Elliott Coues, 1842-1899

Coues was an ornithologist, naturalist, and (according to Wikipedia) army surgeon. I first ran across him in Frederic A. Lucas's The Story of Museum Groups, a guide leaflet from the American Museum of Natural History.



Museum groups, or "habitat groups," are free-standing groups of stuffed animals, usually dioramas in which specimens are placed in a more or less naturalistic position, with an artificial background that simulates the animal's habitat. Here is one currently on display at the AMNH:


(You can read all about this diorama here.)

Coues is quoted in the leaflet as a representative of the anti-museum group old guard, saying "as late as 1874" that

'Spread eagle' styles of mounting, artificial rocks and flowers, etc., are entirely out of place in a collection of any scientific pretensions, or designed for popular instruction. Besides, they take up too much room. Artistic grouping of an extensive collection is usually out of the question; and when this is unattainable, halfway efforts in that direction should be abandoned in favor of severe simplicity. Birds look best, on the whole, in uniform rows, assorted according to size, as far as natural classification allows. (Lucas 5)

For Coues, there was something anti-scientific about the habitat group; he felt that specimens should be displayed according to their taxonomy rather than their ecological contexts. So, for instance, an ostrich would be displayed next to an emu, not next to warthogs (as they actually were at the AMNH in the 1940s). If I recall correctly, the Musée d'Histoire Naturelle at the Jardin des Plantes is in large part arranged taxonomically even today, for instance. (But then, they also had a quite goofy exhibit on dragons in the basement when I visited.)

Coues isn't particularly best known for his views on museum groups; they were common enough views in the nineteenth century. He's better known for his commitment to classification and his interest in westward exploration (he edited Lewis and Clark's journals, for example), and of course his extensive studies of birds.

Like many other scientists of the period, Coues was interested in spiritualism, and he was also a member of the American Society for Psychical Research. He was for many years committed to the notion of "biogen," a "substance of mind," or "soul-stuff," in which, according to Coues, the vital principle resided (Coues 14-5). As best I can gloss it, it was vitalism with a spiritualist twist. The idea was not welcomed by the scientific community at large, but in 1885 Coues wrote,

I know that I have made a great discovery which conservative science will properly be slow to acknowledge. I also know that I can demonstrate the thing. Meanwhile, people may call me what they please, and I say proudly, with Galvani, 'they may call me the frog's dancing-master -- but I know that I have discovered one of the great forces of nature.' Galvinism [sic] is an accepted scientific fact: so will Biogen be in due time, and sooner perhaps than even I suppose. (qtd. in Cutright and Brodhead 304)

Famous last words. This is yet another example of the way that science and its protocols fluctuate and are subject to dispute.

Here's his obituary in The Nation.

Coues, Elliott. Biogen: A Speculation on the Origin and Nature of Life. 3rd ed. Boston: Estes and Lauriat, 1884.

Cutright, Paul Russell, and Michael J. Brodhead. Elliott Coues: Naturalist and Frontier Historian. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2001.

Lucas, Frederic A. The Story of Museum Groups. 4th ed. Guide Leaflet Series, No. 53. New York: American Museum of Natural History, 1926.

ETA: Apparently students who are given chocolate give more positive teaching evaluations. Oh, for crying out loud.

ETA (again): I appear to have been linked by "Your Unique Portal to the Conservative Blogosphere." It must be very unique, because last I checked, nineteenth-century spiritualist ornithologists were not a conservative issue, or a political issue at all, for that matter. In fact, this blog is in no way a part of the "conservative blogosphere," unless we are talking about conserve in the jam/jelly sense, in which case, well, maybe.

Adventures in reading in French aided solely by a crummy concise dictionary

The first chapter of Émile Zola's Nana (1879) is set in a theater. I was engrossed at once, but ... what was this about twins? Hey, twins again! Why are there so many twins in this theater? And showing up in the oddest places, seriously!

For instance, "Fauchery, qui avait pris sa jumelle, regardait la comtesse ..."

He... looked at the countess, having taken her twin sister to the theater? I thought he came in with la Faloise!

This was the last straw. The last twin, as it were.

But alas, Harper-Collins only confirmed my confusion: jumelle was indeed the feminine of jumeau, and it did indeed mean "twin."

And then my eye wandered down from jumeau and saw jumelles (npl): binoculars.

...Oh.

Well, that makes more sense.

On encountering your fifth grade class trip in the Moore archive

I don't know whether it is still the case that fifth-graders in Newport News routinely visit the Mariners' Museum. I admit that when I was a fifth-grader I was bored to tears by most of the exhibits, coming as I did from a family that was emphatically not the boat-owning type. I was interested in the exhibits of figureheads and in the rooms full of miniatures -- the handcrafts -- but found the large room full of watercrafts merely dull.

I'm reading a fascinating book on early twentieth century museums, Catherine Paul's Poetry in the Museums of Modernism (U of Michigan P, 2002). Theoretically, it's not overwhelming, but it's full of great archival finds, including an account of an unpublished review that Marianne Moore wrote about a 1937 exhibit on surrealism at the Museum of Modern Art, titled "Concerning the Marvelous."

In an early draft of this essay, according to Paul, Moore compares the exhibit to the Mariners' Museum, using what my fifth-grade self considered essentially a big building full of boring crap to explain the curatorial rage for order.

"The objects that Moore finds together in the Mariner's Museum talk to each other, creating an impression of sea-faring life: collected shells combine with tattooers' apparatus; painted Portuguese boats, mastheads, whale skeletons, and walking sticks show what sailors brought with them on voyages as well as what they found. From these objects visitors are expected to piece together the big picture to which each object -- marvelous in its own right -- contributes; both the exhibitor's processes of selection and display and the visitor's interpretive ability shape that big picture." (146).

I must say that it's pretty much 100% certain that in fifth grade, I would have liked to see surrealism at the MoMA much better than the collection of small watercraft at the obligatory local maritime museum. But then, it's probably the podunk nature of that particular museum that suits it to Moore's purpose.