I think I hurt my MATX

Writing a Dissertation = Economy of Suffering

2011-02-15T17:58:00.000-08:00

My gracious, it's been a hot minute. I'm still here! I've been busy, teaching full time and also trying to find random bits of time to write this dissertation. Lest you ever think otherwise, let me tell you now: Writing your dissertation is HARD. No way around it, turns out.

But, on the other hand, there is some belief that the typical "culture of suffering" that permeates graduate work doesn't really work all that well. And I quote:

The dissertation will not be better because you suffered through it. If you have been suffering, it’s time to explore some different ways of relating to the dissertation, because something is wrong when there is a whole lot of pain.

I think that there may be an "economy of suffering." How much suffering is enough? Well, you want to suffer just enough to be uncomfortable whenever anyone asks you "How's your dissertation coming?," but not so much so that you actually act on the malicious thoughts that immediately pop into your head.

When asked "How much money is enough?" Rockefeller famously replied, "Just a little bit more." Reading through my facebook feed proves that there is a competition among graduate students to suffer THE MOST of anyone in the world. Ever. Plus, just a little bit more. Woe is us.

Read more about the culture of suffering, and then go cry yourself to sleep.

ELO Update, Super Late

2010-06-28T18:54:00.001-07:00

Hello Everyone,
I went to the ELO conference in Rhode Island at the beginning of June. In my session, I had a really great presentation and got to listen to a great presentation as well. What more could a girl ask for? I've uploaded my presentation PowerPoint below.

Elo2010 powerpoint

View more presentations from jensmith826.

A Thousand Words

2010-05-12T12:42:00.000-07:00

Prepping for summer semester, I came across Jeremy Freese's IF Violet.

Of course, I've looked at it before, but for some reason it takes on a whole new meaning once you've started to write your own dissertation:

Calm down. All you have to do is write a thousand words and everything will be fine. And you have all day, except it's already noon.
[blurb from IF Comp 2008]

ISSN Conference Results

2010-04-12T08:44:00.000-07:00

I'm back from my first trip to Ohio for my first time attending the International Society for the Study of Narrative Conference. I'm exhausted, and haven't really been able to sit down and digest all that I've heard and learned this past weekend, but I can say that the event was a resounding success, at least to me.

The Narrative Society conference in Cleveland was very nice. I got to see a ton of great panels and listen to some really interesting plenaries. Nearly every minute of the day was planned out and scheduled, which was the only way to get in all the material that people had to present on, but which also made for some very long days. I will say kudos to the event organizers, though, because they really took the time to plan out the major details and the seemingly minor ones, like how to get from one part of town to the other, which restaurants to recommend and what to do for pleasure, and how to ensure that new attendees get to meet other attendees at the start of the program. To be honest, it was one of the largest, yet most successfully executed, conferences I have been to in a while.

One thing that the conference helped me to think about was how to use narratology in a much more practical sense than I had been previously thinking about. Many of the panels were focused on a particular literary text, and used narrative devices to unpack this text or set of texts in some surprisingly meaningful ways. I say surprisingly, because it seems that mentioning my interest in narrative theory brings to mind images of boring, pedantic sermons with few real revelations that go beyond simple mapping of texts. In actuality, though, and one thing that this conference really helped me to understand and be able to talk about with others, is the usefulness of these methods in getting to greater meanings in these texts, how authors construct them, and how we respond to them based off of our inherent understandings of narrative principles. I'm really thankful that I am starting to understand some of what I perceive to be the more interesting uses of narrative theory and useful ways that they might work for my larger dissertation work. In truth, I was often overwhelmed by what other people were saying and my own relative lack of knowledge. I also got some really great foundational ideas cleared up, though, and was very happy with the way that my session turned out. My technology all worked with just a few minor hiccups, and the Q & A session was stimulating to my thinking about the topic.

Shout out to Matt’s parents, who gave me their frequent flyer miles to get me to Ohio (and back – even better!).

Conference Season is Open

2010-03-27T10:39:00.000-07:00

Hello Everyone! I've been busy, prepping myself for conference season and attempting to start writing that pesky little book-length work called a dissertation. The good news is that I'm presenting at three conferences this semester, and am quite excited about all of them. The bad news is that I'm presenting at three conferences this semester, and I'm not one of those "brilliant on the fly" kind of people, which means that I work hard to try to get something together that doesn't sound like pure drivel coming out.

Yesterday, I made my 2010 conference debut at the Virginia Humanities Conference. The conference was great, and it was really nice to be on a panel on Women in Poetry with my fellow MATXer Lee Bloxom. All of our presentations were quite interesting yet different, and all spoke to the issue of giving 'voice' to women often unable to speak for themselves. I talked about Barbie, one of my favorite subjects, and some of my favorite poems about one of my favorite subjects.

Vhc2010 Presentation

View more presentations from jensmith826.

Next up: ISSN in Cleveland, Ohio - see a draft of the conference program.
And then?: ELO at Brown. I'll try to post updates soon!

ISSN Conference Presentation

2010-02-20T15:51:00.000-08:00

I’m still here! I survived my semester of exams and defending and general evaluation. Now I just need to survive the dissertation-writing process for, oh, say the next two years or so. In order to nudge me in that direction, I proposed a short paper to the International Society for the Study of Narrative conference this year, and, much to my delight and healthy sense of public-speaking terror, I was accepted. I’m planning to use this paper as a jumpstart to chapter five of my dissertation, focusing on visual, Flash-based narratives like Donna Leishman’s Deviant: The Possession of Christian Shaw.

If you will be in Cleveland April 8-11, please stop by my session and say hi. I’m nervous and excited to be presenting with all these big-name narratologists, so my palms might be a little sweaty (fair warning, I say). But that also means that I’ll be nerding out, all googly-eye star struck, and certainly ready to share a few drinks with friends afterwards.

"When you can't write your dissertation, just write."

2010-02-20T15:32:00.000-08:00

You find yourself wandering the halls in your house, afraid the draw the blinds. The sun is shining, and, after three solid weeks of snow, it is hard to believe that you’ll be able to turn away from the day. So you don’t risk it. Instead, at eye-level, there is a small crack in the continuity of the slats, marking the place where you slide in your finger to peer out and check on the world of the living. This crack runs across the living room, into the bedroom, the kitchen. Even the bathroom window suffers this disfigurement. So goes the life of a PhD candidate, unable to write the first sentence of her book-length work.

“I’m too stupid to write a dissertation. I’m too stupid to write a ten-page conference paper. I’m even too stupid to write a coherent sentence.” These are the thoughts that will come to the front of your mind, every day, as you sit in front of the flickering white screen and try to find your brilliance. It will take a while. You won’t find your genius, not just yet. Instead, you’ll find an extra glass of wine, all the buttons that need darning in your closet, and the secret corner of your home in which a village of dust bunnies long-ago moved in, back in the year when you were living a real(ish) life, going to class and work and social events like a real(ish) person. But now you wander the halls, avoiding your computer and your dissertation advisor (Hi LH!) and your boyfriend’s well-meant but ill-received questions about how much progress you made in the day. You’ll languish in this in-between period, wondering what happened to the grand ideas you had about your prospectus-completing party and your academic motivation. Both will be specters, now.

Eventually, though, you’ll re-emerge. You’ll talk to faculty, those who have come before you, and realize that they’ve said these same things to themselves, they too were once too stupid to write (at least in their own minds), and then they recovered! They wrote! They graduated!

So you’ll return to the flickering screen, again, not quite as desolate but pretty much in the same position. You’ll realize that it might not be overnight that you find your genius, or your ability to write. But it will be okay, you think. Others tell you it will, and that is all that you have. So you have to believe them.

MATX Gallery Show

2009-11-13T10:14:00.000-08:00

If you happen to be in Richmond and want to see work from me and my Ph.D. colleagues, stop by the MATX Gallery opening Monday afternoon. For some reason, the only image I can find of the announcement flyer is tiny, but the details are reposted below:

The Media Art and Text Inaugural Exhibition
November 16, 2009
4:00-6:00PM
MATX Studios & Gallery, 109 N. Harrison Street, Richmond, Virginia

Nathan Atlice
Basar Buyukkusoglu
Amy Colombo
Jennie Fleming
Norberto Gomez
Leejin Kim
Jennifer Smith
Sean Stewart
Melinda White

Selected by Rhys Himsworth
To celebrate the opening of the Media Art and Text (MATX) Gallery the program hosts an exhibition to introduce viewers to the breadth and variety of work being made within it.

ELO Call Up

2009-11-01T06:45:00.000-08:00

I know that it has been a long time since we last met, Internet. But today I come to you bearing good news - the ELO has posted their new conference call! My friend Melinda just passed the link along to me.

The conference is going to be held June 3-6 (2010) at Brown University. I very much recommend you submitting a proposal if this sort of thing is up your ally, because the ELO people in general have been quite nice to me in the past and are very friendly to everyone, but especially so to young scholars and non-academics interested in the field. I attended and presented at the 2008 conference and had a great time where I met many elit artists and learned a ton from the other scholars and presentations. If you are new to the field, this is a great place to start learning. If you've already dabbled a bit in the topic, this is a great place to get your inner-geek paparazzi on, because I'll guarantee you that there will be a plethora of names you know milling about at the treat tables between presentations.

The web's area-code should be 404

2009-09-17T08:36:00.001-07:00

Issues of permanence come up again and again for even the casual user of web spaces. Today, though, I ran across an illustrative instance in which the problem (and its seriousness) seems aptly demonstrated.

Earlier, while checking in with the ELO and reading some of N. Katherine Hayles' work, I decided to go visit her webpage that accompanies her most recent publication, Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. I clicked through to the site that is linked from the ELO homepage, and double-checked the site address with the one published in the hard-copy text.

Sadly, this is what I got:
The "Site Temporarily Unavailable" page.

This is, probably, just a fluke. I visited Hayles' page a couple of weeks ago without any problems. But the fact that the ubiquitous "try again" page shows up even among the work of the most diligent digital scholars is disconcerting to say the least. There are problems with digital scholarship, as we all know. I think that sometimes it is easy to get into a hopeful mindset about these problems, thinking that they will "be fixed" soon enough. But I don't know that that is the case with this particular problem of location and fixability. There are tons of people out there writing on the issue now, so I'll leave it up to you to go seek them out. I certainly don't have a solution.

New Media and Narrative

2009-09-10T08:31:00.000-07:00

Looking back over the posts I've made in the last couple of months, I realized that I never linked to the my New Media and Narrative website I'm submitting as part of an ongoing process to legitimate myself as a Ph.D. scholar.

I created the site as a resource for people who are looking to begin investigation into the field of narratology (with a leaning towards new media)- here they can learn a wee bit about a smorgasbord of narrative concepts and see them in action as they apply to digital and electronic narratives. The print work I investigate here, "Roman Fever" is a classic short story by Edith Wharton (but don't read my analysis until you've read to the end of her text). The second short story I look into, "My Body: A Wunderkammer" is also a great piece to read if you are looking for a way to fill about an hour of free time or if you are interested in the role of bodies in narratives, and comes from the enormously talented Shelley Jackson. While the third piece, Afternoon, isn't a freely-accesbile work, I also highly recommend people who are interesting in postmodern or non-linear narratives to consider ponying up the $25 for the Eastgate work - it is a foundational piece in electronic literature and can open up some interesting theoretical doors for scholars. Plus, about 99% of people writing in the field will make more than a passing reference to Joyce's work, so it can be helpful to have some first-hand knowledge of it.

Planting a Tree

2009-09-10T08:23:00.000-07:00

I found this link to the short history of Twitter (so far) today while browsing through a bunch of saved links I'd been meaning to get to. It is a visually beautiful piece and it gets brownie points for making a reference to Britney Spears' lady-parts. Err... that's twitter for you.

Google Maps + Monopoly

2009-09-08T17:59:00.001-07:00

For those of you looking to play the world's biggest game of Monopoly, wait no longer. Google Maps and Monopoly have teamed up to offer you the geekiest version of one of the longest childhood games ever. I've never been a huge Monopolizer before, because the game takes way too long and involves too much strategy, but just in case your employer is forcing you to take an unpaid day off, here is one more way to fill the empty void.

Internships and the Law

2009-08-27T19:18:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago, a professor kept urging me to go find myself an unpaid internship so that I could get more real-world experience. Despite the fact that my work schedule and my finances allow me to do very few things that include extra work and no pay, I got to thinking about the possibility. Today I was pointed to this article, which talks about the very common, but apparently illegal practice of offering unpaid internships. Who knew?

"In order to qualify as an unpaid internship, the requirement is simple: no
work can be performed that is of any benefit at all to the company. That
is, you can not deliver mail, sort files, file papers, organize a person’s
calendar, conduct market research, write reports, watch television shows and
report on them, read scripts, schedule interviews, or any other job that assists
the employer in any way in running their business."

True, the article is from 2007, but I don't know that much has changed in this regard since then. I also wonder what the rules are regarding "volunteers" - and who decides the differences between the two types of work?

And they said the internets weren't addictive...

2009-08-12T21:14:00.000-07:00

Today I stumbled upon Google's wonder wheel feature. I like it. Because the internet isn't already cracked out enough for me, now I can see the links between my searches and the rest of the universe.

This is a screenshot from a search I initially did for a desktop scanner. To get to the wonder wheel page, I looked under the options tag beside my original google search. Not only can you watch your search moving along towards some unforeseen end, there are cool dynamic graphics that catch your eye as the screen changes. Figures that google would find another shiny thing to get my attention.

Proceed With Caution

2009-08-11T12:12:00.000-07:00

From boingboing, a link to Michael Niggel's visual map of the possible outcomes of the choose-your-own-adventure book Journey Under the Sea.

For more details and a larger image, the original posting is http://flowingdata.com/2009/08/11/choose-your-own-adventure-most-likely-youll-die/

Oh yeah. Most likely you'll die.

On the Human post

2009-07-22T19:49:00.000-07:00

ELO President Joseph Tabbi writes about his experiences reading electronic literature in his most recent post to the On the Human forum. This post raises several good points that I've been articulating, poorly, to myself over the past year or so.

Point 1: Rereading is critical to understanding electronic literature. I add to this thought that sporadic or selective"rereading," in the sense that we engage in with print literature, is often nearly impossible with many new media works that offer no way to "mark" a page, to return to a specific section of the piece, or even to find the same lexia within a piece that one may have luckily stumbled upon in a prior reading.

Point 2: Tabbi writes, "What is hard is finding the works worth preserving, defining their literary qualities, and establishing incentives for readers to go back, for more." I couldn't agree more. Electronic literature, many would say, is not exactly a huge field in the grand scheme of things. But consider that within that field there is little referring; any work that can be posted to a website is fair game. The field becomes overwhelming quickly. Add to that the distinction between openly accessible work and for-profit ones, and the dynamics of sifting through these pieces, with little aid from those who might establish a "new media cannon," and it is no surprise that the casual reader might become quickly discouraged.

Point 3: Tabbi also comments, "Only rarely have I applied the keywords, “Postmodern,” “Experimental,” “Fiction,” “Poem,” and even “Narrative” to electronic literature post-Web 1.0." At the close of his post, Tabbi raises the point that I run into again and again in my dissertation research: how to categorize these different works. Keywords are helpful, yes. But the categories that exist are often more exclusionary than these multi-modal pieces can usefully allow. To even find "narrative" pieces one must consistently define and redefine what narrative means, or how it can be usefully applied.

I think that Tabbi's piece is a useful (and relatively short) read. You should head over if you get some free time in the midst of your summer shenanigans.

Grad Student Symposium

2009-04-15T19:14:00.000-07:00

If you don't have any buddies to eat lunch with on Tuesday, that's sad. But, on the other hand, it means that you are free to come visit me at the VCU Graduate Student Symposium. I will be there, of course, set up with a couple of laptops to allow exploration of some of my digital work (don't tell these people that the internet allows you to look at them for free in the privacy of your own home), and handing out pamphlets about my research. But more than that, students from every division of VCU's graduate school will be there to present posters on their own research and scholarship, some of which looks pretty cool and exciting to me already. And, to top it all off, I believe that there will be light refreshments served.

I hope I get a table next to someone with some gross, maggot-related genetics project who decides to bring live examples.

Details:
12th annual Graduate Student Research Symposium and Exhibit
Tuesday, April 21, 2009 11 a.m. – 1 p.m.
University Student Commons Commonwealth Ballroom

'I pass so poorly with paper and types' – The Making and Remaking of Walt Whitman in a Digital Age"

2009-04-15T19:01:00.000-07:00

I found this lecture online (the news items for 4/9/2009 gives links to the movie of the talk) over at the University of Nebraska's Center for Digital Research in the Humanities. In the Quicktime movie, Professor Kenneth Price talks about the democratic ideals of Walt Whitman, and how new and electronic media allow greater democratization of his work - particularly via the Walt Whitman Archive, a digital scholarship program that Price and Ed. Folsom direct.
Interesting talk that raises some equally interesting points about the existence and future potential for the phrase "digital humanities" to be more than just a trendy neologism.

Narrative Fiction and The Rhetoric of Fiction

2009-03-16T10:22:00.000-07:00

Today I'm responding to Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith), and also taking a less-comprehensive look at The Rhetoric of Fiction (Booth, Wayne C.)

In the second edition of her text Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan answers some of the most basic questions surrounding narratology, such as what narrative is, what fiction is, and how we should understand our approaches and techniques for dealing with narrative. Early in the text, Rimmon-Kenan makes clear her desire to focus her study on narrative fiction that follows two guiding principles: a communication process must occur, and the narrative must be a verbal one, as distinct from other narrative media. After introducing these basic principles, Rimmon-Kenan undertakes a thematic approach to narratology, asking questions of narrative elements such as events, characters, focalization, time, characterization, and speech representation. Rather than offering a broad overview of the major narratological players, Rimmon-Kenan approaches an understanding of narratology guided by subject, and uses these subjects to revisit some of the foundational ideas proposed by scholars like Genette, Chatman, and Bremond.

Rimmon-Kenan begins her investigation by focusing on two elements of story: events and characters. She offers an overview of the notion of story, and asserts that most narratologists concur that there exists the possibility for an immanent story structure within every story. Story, according to Rimmon-Kenan, is an abstraction from the style of the text in question (i.e. Victorian dialect), the language in which the text is written (i.e. English), and the medium or sign system (i.e. Cinema, words, gestures), and is therefore transferable within each of these three subsets (from medium to medium, language to language, and within the same language) (8). Story also includes two levels of structure: deep and surface. The deep structure of the story can only be retrieved through a backward retracing of the transformation process, and deep structures are not in themselves narratives. Surface structure, however, is comprised of events combined according to temporal succession and causality. While Gerard Prince argues that the minimal story must have three conjoined events (with the first and third stative, while the second one is active), Rimmon-Kenan suggests that the only thing necessary for a minimal story is the presence of temporality. Rimmon-Kenan then introduces Propp’s Morphology (in a succinct, though refreshingly clear, analysis), and discusses Claude Bremond’s logically ordered model of story sequences. Within her analysis of contemporary thoughts on the development of character, some ways that Rimmon-Kenan diverges from other narratologists is her suggestion that characters need not be either just text or just personas, but instead can be an amalgam of both elements. In contemplating E.M. Forester’s distinction between flat and round characters, Rimmon-Kenan implies that these divisions are acceptable, but perhaps overly reductive and not appropriate for accounting for subtlety within or among characters.

The book then moves to a discussion of text in terms of time, characterization, and focalization. Rimmon-Kenan suggests that time is a necessity of narrative fiction, and, while she discusses the concepts first proposed by Genette such as duration, frequency, and order, she also suggests that to eliminate a notion of time would be to eliminate all narrative fiction. This chapter, while one the one hand making some seemingly surface-levels statements, was also one of the most compelling areas of the text for me, as it nearly begs the reader to consider a narrative text that does not correspond to these ideas of temporality. Characterization occurs within the text via two basic types, direct and indirect characterization, as well as though the reinforcement of character by analogy. Regarding focalization, Rimmon-Kenan discusses her view of the term as more appropriate than more common ones such as point-of-view, citing the fact that focalization has a degree of abstractness that separates it from concrete notions of point-of-view. Focalization, distinct from narration, has both a subject and an object and can be either external or internal to the story.

Moving on towards a discussion of narration, the text investigates notions of real and implied authors, and Rimmon-Kenan asserts that only four of Chatman’s six narratological participants are necessary to the conception of narrative: the real author, the real reader, the narrator, and the narratee. Speech representation can be either diegetic (the poet himself is the speaker and does not attempt to suggest otherwise) or mimetic (in which the poet tries to create the illusion that it is not he who speaks). Compellingly, Rimmon-Kenan asserts that “all that narrative can do is create an illusion, an effect, a semblance of mimesis, but it does so through diegesis (in the Platonic sense)” (109). For Rimmon-Kenan, the text also maintains a careful balance between delay and revelation, tempting the reader to know more while still allowing dropping enough breadcrumbs to keep the reader satisfied throughout.

Rimmon-Kenan concludes her book with a discussion of deconstruction, a trend which seems to undermine her goal of attaching specificity to the form of verbal, narrative fiction. Deconstruction hopes to find similarities across media, a concept that does not necessarily fit with the original premise of this text. In her afterward, however, written to accompany the 2002 second edition of the text, Rimmon-Kenan addresses some of these same issues. She concedes, I believe, that narrative may very well extend across mediums, and that further study of the field may well benefit from some revision of her initial thoughts on the process.

In his related text The Rhetoric of Fiction, Wayne C. Booth provides further explication on some related ideas. Jumping into the notions of showing vs. telling, Booth offers some ideas on the voice of the author in the text, and ultimately asserts that the line between showing and telling is “always, to some degree, an arbitrary one” (20). In subsequent chapters, Booth undertakes the task of seriously investigating common literary tropes, such as “novels must be realistic, “art ignores the audience,” and “all authors should be objective.” In all of these sections, Booth generally exposes the inherent truth to a modified version of these statements, while also revealing the ways in which the statement will not apply to every situation. While I haven’t yet had a chance to read Booth’s text cover to cover, I like the way that he provides some in-depth models on understanding the application of these principles to literary texts, such as when in chapter 11, “The Price of Impersonal Narration, I: Confusion of Distance” Booth explicates a detailed analysis of the ways in which distance affect comprehension in such texts as Gulliver’s Travels and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Current Questions Regarding Narratology:
Understanding deep structure seems important to understanding the foundational aspects of narrative, though Rimmon-Kenan spends little time on the topic, favoring the surface structure instead. I’d like to get a better grasp on the models for understanding deep structure from Levi-Strauss and Greimas, which Rimmon-Kenan points to but doesn’t dwell on (11-13).

Claude Bremond’s model of story sequence is compelling, and highly detailed. I’d like to spend some more time understanding his approach to sequencing stories, particularly in relation to the chart mapping the plot of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex (24-26).

I’m wondering if people have frequently questioned Rimmon-Kenan’s assertions about time as necessary to narrative. It seems that postmodernists are certainly playing with notions of time, but has anyone truly refuted the fact that we read or understand events in temporal order? Maybe Raymond Federman’s Double or Nothing (which I haven’t ever read, but understand to be so broken down as to be nearly incoherent)?

From Rimon-Kenan’s postscript, it seems as though many of her original statements have come under attack by scholars in the recent past. While she highlights the need to “emphasize the differences” between classical and postclassical narratology (148), she doesn’t seem to suggest that one form eclipses the other. What is the most controversial point that she makes, and have any new forms of narrative or narrative theories significantly undermined her original work?

Any thoughts on what might be the best way to organize an intro-level, cross-referenced understanding of narrratology to an online audience? How do you organize these sometime contradictory terms and understandings of texts in a meaningful, but not overwhelming, way?

Come See me!

2009-02-19T19:42:00.000-08:00

It looks like things are going to start to get a little busier for me for a couple of weekends.

The weekend of March 28th, I'll be in Rhode Island, presenting a paper on Camille Utterback's Text Rain at URI's "Bodies in Motion" Interdisciplinary Grad Student conference. I'm really excited to take the trip and hear some new work there.

Then the following weekend, I'll be back in Virginia, here at my own stomping grounds at VCU. I'll be attending and presenting a paper at the Virginia Humanities Conference on Poe's take on humanity and embodiment in some of his short stories. I was a presenter back in 2007 and had a great experience at Christopher Newport University, so I'm glad to be invited back to this conference to see some familiar faces and hear some great talks. I also think that some of my MATX peers are going to be participating, so I'm excited to see some of them whom I haven't had any classes with lately.

Come see me and my comrades if you get the chance!

Story, Discourse, and a Little Bit of History

2009-02-15T13:40:00.000-08:00

This week, I'm going to post one longer write-up on Seymour Chatman's Story and Discourse, and a shorter summary of the history of narratology, cribbed from the first few essays in Phelan and Rabinowitz's A Companion to Narrative Theory.

Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film, Seymour Chatman

Seymour Chatman’s Story and Discourse, first published in 1978, reads like a primer to the macro and micro elements of, surprisingly enough, story and discourse. This is a great text, for both the insights that Chatman provides and the clear and deft way that he introduces and explicates information that can, in lesser hands, get somewhat messy. Chatman outlines some of the major contributions of thinkers from Aristotle to Propp, Bakhtin to Genette, and then embarks on his own analysis of these ideas, application of the theories, and, when necessary, revision and critique of the preceding thought patterns.

Breaking the text into five sections, Chatman first outlines a general introduction to the field and a structuralist approach to it. He then moves to outlining notions relevant to story (events and existents), and discourse (nonnarrated stories and covert versus overt narrators). What follows is a brief summary of some of the more salient points Chatman makes.

1. Introduction
Here Chatman outlines his basic approach to literary theory, in which he hopes to study the nature of literature, not the specific literary works. He outlines his reasoning behind a formulaic (though not unyielding) approach to studying literature, and distinguishes the two major elements of any narrative: the story/ fabula (i.e. – what happens in the story), and the discourse/ sjuzet (how the story is related to an audience, the medium that the narrative takes). Outlining his rationale behind advocating narrative as a structure, Chatman utilizes three essential elements of a structured group of objects common to other fields like math, social anthropology, philosophy, linguistics, and physics: wholeness, transformation, and self-regulation, and applies these functions to narrative works. Chatman also pushes for an idea of narrative as semiotic, meaningful structure in its own right, suggesting that “narrative structure imparts meanings […] precisely because it can endow an otherwise meaningless ur-text with eventhood, characterhood, and settinghood, in a normal one-to-one standing-for relationship” (25). Chatman continues to outline Roman Ingarden’s distinction between the “real” object and the aesthetic object, a useful way to think of story and discourse.

2. Story: Events
Events occur as either actions (nonverbal physical acts, speeches, thoughts, and feelings, perceptions, or sensations) or happenings (a predication of which the character or other focused existent is a narrative object). Events are correlative and causative, and Chatman distinguishes between kernels (necessary to the “storyness” of the story) and satellites (auxiliary, can be removed without altering the foundational story). Some notions salient to the microstructure of story are order (normal sequence vs. anachronous sequence), duration (relationship between time it takes to read narrative to time the story events lasted), and frequency of events. Relevant to the macrostructure of story are such concepts as types of plots (such as the six proposed by Aristotle, the two types proposed by Frye, or the three types proposed by Crane).

3. Story: Existents
Chatman discusses the notion of space within narratives, distinguishing between the salient features of film (visual narrative) space and written (verbal narrative) space. This space, of course, is filled by characters (existents) fulfilling actions or thinking. Chatman argues for a conception of character as open – allowing compelling questions to be asked and answered about his nature and behaviors. Here Chatman also outlines the contribution of setting to narrative.

4. Discourse: Nonnarrated Stories
Narrative statements exist in two realms, process and stasis. The narrative style of a story highlights its nature as either mimetic or diegetic (showing vs. telling). The distinction between the author and narrator is important to understanding the discourse, as well as a grasp of the point of view that the story is told in. All stories are mediated to become narrative; the “least” mediated ones are diaries or epistolary novels, which presume immediacy (though they do not actually attain perfect synchronism with writing about life exactly as it happens). It is important to be able and willing to recognize distinctions in narrative voice in order to make educated conclusions about the work as a whole.

5. Discourse: Covert versus Overt Narrators
The role of the narrator shifts depending on how the audience identifies him or her; as his he attains more attributes in the story we get a stronger sense of his presence in the discourse. While covert narrators can’t easily express judgments on the story (thus blowing their cover), overt narrators can and will color our perception of the story. As we come to recognize a narrator as distinct from a character, we see that Ethos can apply in fiction to the narrator only. In the final pages Chatman discusses the role of the narratee within narrative. A scan of the final diagram of narrative structure is reproduced below.

This work was exciting for me in several ways. I felt that Chatman opened up doors: establishing a need for a systematic, formulaic approach to narrative theory and setting a great example. His critical analysis was well-formed and illuminating, and his writing about both macro and micro elements of narrative theory was lucid yet compelling in its own right. While still acknowledging the theoretical nature of this book, Chatman has written a text that gives space to intellectual consumption and criticism and provides numerous examples of the theory in practice.

Some thoughts on the text:

Chatman pushes for an idea of narrative as structured, and in doing so asserts its “wholeness,” suggesting that an element is whole because it is constituted of elements that differ from what they constitute (21). I wonder about this claim. Are open-ended narratives “whole” in this sense? What about new narrative techniques – i.e. collaborative, dynamic works, auto-generated narratives, etc. Are these narratives whole? Are these works narrative at all, if we subscribe to Chatman’s definition? I’m not disagreeing with Chatman; I’m just questioning the logic. Perhaps the distinction between closure and resolution may be a helpful notion to consider in terms of wholeness, though Chatman considers closure more in the domain of self-regulation of narrative. Does Chatman undo his own logic when he discusses the self-selecting, incomplete nature of narratives (28-29)?

My Bakhtin foundations are a little shaky, so when Chatman writes that Bakhtin argues for a duplex notion of quotation, as being both signs and markers or characters (107), I’d like to delve a little deeper into this idea. How can they be both? Does indirect discourse also act in this doubled way?

I feel like much of Chatman arguments stems from a nearly grammatical approach to narrative; parsing out the individual elements to arrive at the greater whole. I’m intrigued by this structuralist approach and wonder if greater, more exhaustive critical works have yielded success across a battery of narrative texts?

Speaking of multi-faceted narratives, Chatman suggests that “work should proceed genre by genre” (95). Doesn’t this have some telling implications for Chatman’s own theories: namely that there are either few or no universals about narrative, or that the differences between narratives of different genres exceed their similarities, and thus perhaps the notion of a general field of “narrative discourse” is not as useful as we might like to think?

Finally, Chatman goes to great depths to outline the significant differences between indirect and direct discourse, tagged vs. free, etc. I’ve always been shaky on these concepts, having attended public school, and would like to spend a little more time applying these notions to texts. While Chatman uses many examples that make it easy to recognize these different types (when they are being pointed out to the reader), I’ve found that I stumble when trying to pinpoint the types myself, without Chatman’s aid.

Historical Essays in A Companion to Narrative Theory, James Phelan and Peter Rabinowitz, Ed.

In this text, several essays outline the (sometimes) contentious history of narratology as a field. In his essay on the “A Genealogy of Early Developments,” David Herman describes narratology as originating from a morphological approach to narrative structure, expanding its scope to include as foundational three interconnected aspects of novel theory: characterization of fictions as organic wholes, adoption of a descriptive rather than prescriptive approach to narrative analysis, and skeptical attitude toward exact recipes or protocols for the production of fictional texts (James, “The Art of Fiction,” 1884). After Russian Formalism narratology adopts a semiotic/linguistic approach to narrative, borrowing the same structure and many of the same terminology from this related (though, importantly flawed in some ways) field. A survey of the history of narratology reveals that Narrative theory materializes as “fields of forces emerging at different rates of progression and impinging on one another through more or less diffuse causal networks” (31).

In her essay “From Structuralism to the Present,” Monika Fludernik picks up where Herman leaves off, outlining the more recent history of narratology. Structuralism is marked by its aspirations to scientificity and descriptive aims, yet runs into problems with its difficult relation between theory and practice. As the field moves into the 70s and 80s, most narratologists are concerned with discourse and narration rather than plot. Greater specificity is then incorporated into the field, as contextual, conversational, gender-oriented, and post-colonial narratology develop. Finally, Fludernik suggests that the cognitive turn of narratology may be one way in which the field could more closely reach its scientific goals.

With this historical background, one can better see how the elements of narratology, and the major players, converse and question each other. Foundations have been set for the revision and adaptation of narratological principles, and a history of narratology shows the important ways that thinking has shifted as the field had developed.

The F-Bomb (on repeat)

2009-02-05T05:57:00.000-08:00

You've heard of the Christian Bale incident, in which he lost his mind and engaged in a profanity-laced tirade against one of the crewmen on set last summer. I think that the news broke Monday. In the tradition of great 21st-century procrastinators everywhere, I offer you this (likewise profanity-laced) remix of the outburst, by L.A. artist RevoLucian.

In case I need to say it, this is Not Safe for Work, or Children, or your mother. But RevoLucian has done a great job pouncing on the piece, and the whole scenario is rather funny.

Narrative/Theory, David Ricther, ed.

2009-01-25T09:53:00.000-08:00

This semester, I'm embarking on a directed study in Principles of Narratology. I'm attempting to read as much as I can about the work, and then apply some of these foundational principles to some new media and electronic works. I thought that I might periodically post my responses and reviews of some of the texts I am reading here on my blog.

Today's Text: Narrative/Theory by David H. Richter, ed.

In reading through David Richter’s Narrative/Discourse I have found an especially rich source that works as an introduction to several different aspects of narrative, including its history, its methodology, and some ideologies surrounding narrative. Richter begins his text with a general introduction to the field as it applies to literature across decades. I find Richter’s extension of Iser’s “gaps” theory illuminating, as he points out that gaps do not just exist in a narrative but indeed exist in that narrative to encourage us to continue engaging with that narrative, as they give rise to either curiosity or desire (3). This notion of desire seems to crop up several times in the remainder of the text, as it seems to be one of the key elements in driving forward the plot, characters, and audiences of any work. Interestingly, in discussing the “truth” inherent to narrative, Richter refers to Aristotle’s assertion that fictional literature is indeed more likely to conform to the “law of the necessary and probable” than real life because it represents what would happen in a life devoid and accidents and incidents. Narrative writers, then, most usually pander to the readers’ inherent conservatism in order to avoid the need for extreme naturalization in order to make sense of the text (4).

Compellingly, Richter highlights the struggle that the novel underwent before being included as true “literature,” a struggle synonymous with the one that is taking place today with newly emerging forms of belletristic discourse such as electronic and narrative discourse. As Henry James discusses in his writing on “The Art of Fiction,” the struggle to define the rigor and form of proper fiction was frequently derided in its early years. This history mimics the recent struggle to make legitimate electronic literature and new media work; a field that is often interpreted to be an unnecessary redundancy of print-media work. John Barth also hits on some interesting ideas that seem to apply strongly to new media work, in his discussion of non-traditional artistic works that bear witness to a rebellion against the traditions that have come before. Barth extends this idea to suggest that this trend to eliminate the traditional ideas of audience and author is best illuminated by Beckett and Borges, writers who have mastered both the form and function of their work. I think that this sentiment seems particularly salient in terms of electronic and new-media works, as the most common insult hurled against this field (indeed, I’ve hurled it myself many times), is that of substance over style. In Barth’s words, too many “technically up-to-date civilians” essentially become hacks delighting in the possibilities of the new medium without considering the art or substance inherent to these new possibilities, and just a few “technically up-to-date artists” exist who can use these new forms and new subjects to make meaningful work.

In Part II of his text, Richter highlights some of the key elements of narrative and narratology, outlining the two major tracks of formal analysis as structuralist-semiotic (exemplified by Ball, Banfield, Barthes, Cohn, Genette, and Prince), and Rhetorical Poetics (exemplified by Crane, Booth, Phelan, Friedman, and Rabinowitz). Essentially, the former group is most interested in what narrative is, while the latter group is most invested in how narrative works. Moving through an introduction to the terms and key concepts of narrative, Richter outlines the key differences between story (which includes plot, character, pattern, and rhythm) and discourse (which includes order, duration, frequency, point-of-view, focalization, voice, language, and audience). The text then continues to include exemplary excerpts from many of the key narratologists applying these different elements to a given text. Many of these critical essays not only demonstrate the application of these principles but also question these applications, such as in James Phelan’s analysis most centrally focused on Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess.” While outlining the role character plays in this and other narratives, Phelan points out that such analysis raises problematic questions about the role of characters in a text, implying that the presence of literary characters requires that we assume we can define personhood, that we balance jumping to conclusions with making conclusions, and that we allow for more thematizing of characters than occurs in real life. This essay and several others in this section of the text provide excellent introductions to the methodological aspects of the field. In part III of his text, Richter concludes by incorporating the ideological responses to the literary cannon and narratology, questioning the representation of possibility of representation for minority groups within narratives. Overall, this work raises some excellent questions and concepts related to narratology, and provides a nicely broad yet digestible introduction to the field of narrative.

Some questions that this text raises for me:

What is the distinction in Richter’s argument about hypothetical stories and narratives as meaningfully different in terms of their claims to truth (5)?

How does the audience function in terms of narrative? Specifically, I understand that the authorial audience has double-consciousness of mimetic and synthetic, and that the narrative audience has a single consciousness of characters as real, but how does one read the chart on page 103 meaningfully?

James Phelan writes of the elements of dimension and function in a work. Dimension is defined as any attribute a character may be said to posses in isolation from the work, while function is an application of that attribute made through the text’s developing structure (116). This seems to be an important distinction but Phelan’s examples are not entirely illuminating to me on how to apply the two concepts to narrative.

In Gérard Genette’s essay, he outlines three “problems” for narrative discourse: time, mode, and voice (132). Genette then goes on to outline the specifics of the problem of time. I am not entirely convinced as to how Genette is using the term “problem” here; does he mean that these elements complicate narrative analysis or invalidate narrative possibility? Furthermore, given the focus only on the problem of time, I am wondering if there can be some discussion of the concepts of mode and voice, as Genette may see them.

I have always been somewhat sketchy on the concept of the “implied author.” Booth suggests that the implied author is the author’s “second self” (143). How does this “second self” show up in narrative most usually?

How central is ideology to the study of narratology? Is it foundational to the field, tangential, or in flux because of the increasing concerns with representativeness in the current era?

Internet, welcome me back into your bosomy folds…

2009-01-12T12:06:00.000-08:00

It has been forever. I know that my adoring public waits for me with baited breath. Or, not so much.

Recently, I have been tasked with doing some research into podcasting and best practices. For those of you who might also be interested in this field, I’ve posted some of the most helpful pages that I found to my delicious account here.

For those of you looking for a pretty short, simple way to explain podcasting, you might be interested in this video by Lee LeFever on "Podcasting in Plain English."

If anyone else has some great resources to share, I’d love to hear from you. I’m also looking to find some good, creative video essays out there, so feel free to point me to ones that you love (or hate) and let me know why.

Graduate Students in Real Life...

2008-11-22T09:29:00.001-08:00

Okay, so I was forwarded these posts by one of my professors. I'm pretty sure that this might be a good way to spend Saturday night with some of my fellow students out there:

Dancing my way through a Ph.D.
(must have been in a science-related field - if only I had gone to medical school like my mother wanted!)
and
Starring in my own graduate-student action game.

And I thought I had trouble just trying to get a dissertation committee down on paper...

:)-<

2008-11-22T09:08:00.000-08:00

A guy, a girl, her ponytail, and some Def poetry, emoticon style. In this TED talk, Rives shares a little tale about love and loss, illustrated by emoticons. Much cooler than whatever you texted your mom this morning.

(For some reason the movie won't embed , so I don't have any pretty picture for you to click and watch. Sorry)

Document this Life

2008-11-04T04:12:00.000-08:00

In a post-Panopticon world, many of us are heading out today to vote with questions lingering about our right to wear campaign buttons or drink free coffee.

What about questions surrounding our vote? How do we document our tiny struggle against "the man"? Some people are suggesting the need now to "Video the Vote:"

Video the Vote is a national network of citizen journalists, independent filmmakers, and media professionals working together to document voter suppression and disenfranchisement.

The effort to mediate our lives continues. Is this a necessary endeavour to assure that we remain (or finally become) enfranchised? Does suspicion run amuck unfairly? Or has blind faith prevailed too much already? Sadly, I'm leaning towards the side that feels the need to preserve my experience, both for posterity and the assurance that my experience will, in some way, "count."

I don't know how to deal with these issues. But I wonder how far the documentary urge will continue to stretch. Have you checked your harddrive lately? How many pictures are on it? Do you save your emails? If you really, really needed to, could you find out, in one way or another, what you were doing the week of November 1, 2006?

Eternal Sunshine is Today

2008-11-03T04:22:00.000-08:00

It is Monday morning, and I woke up before the sun to get started on this week. That's never a great sign.

Other than that, though, I wanted to share this with you - the advent of Eternal Sunshine. A quote from the article summary, published in the journal Neuron:

"Inducible and Selective Erasure of Memories in the Mouse Brain via Chemical-Genetic Manipulation"

"Rapid and selective erasures of certain types of memories in the brain would be desirable under certain clinical circumstances. By employing an inducible and reversible chemical-genetic technique, we find that transient αCaMKII overexpression at the time of recall impairs the retrieval of both newly formed one-hour object recognition memory and fear memories, as well as 1-month-old fear memories. "

You don't have to read the whole thing, but it is pretty interesting if you have a few extra minutes.

Deleting memories like old files on your hardrive...
The title of my first book?
When We Became PostCyborg??

Alchemy, Ennui, Cupcakes

2008-10-24T15:12:00.001-07:00

Last week, in my Poe class, I reviewed a book which talked about Poe's hoaxing of the American public. In one of these hoaxes, a man reveals that he has succesfully turned lead into gold. In another project for the class, we need to review a cultural appropriation of Poe. Many of these appropriations render Poe as the dismal, depressed man that he sometimes was.

This link has nothing to do with Poe. Officially, that is. It represents instead Swedish playwright August Strindberg and his chipper friend, Helium. But the convergence of ideas is certainly present. Alchemy? Dark Figure of Ennui? Cupcakes? (Maybe the last one isn't so relevant to Poe, but to me...)
And besides, it is Friday. Enjoy.

Twitter saves the Day

2008-10-24T08:25:00.000-07:00

I've been searching around for stories on or in Twitter recently, and I ran across this CNN article: "Student 'Twitters' His Way Out of Egyptian Jail." The story may over-emphasize the role of the "twitter" on getting the kid out of jail, but it also points some interesting applications of the tool. Using Twitter to get out the word, update your status, inspire political change. Not that this is all that different from sending a clandestine written message back in the pre-cellphone dark ages. Yet the (illusion of) the "culture of the immediate" is certainly appealing. Consider the bandwagon of text-messaging emergency alerts to students that many schools jumped on in the past couple of years.
Maybe I should have a GPS Device embedded in my skin for my own protection.

Please Mum, I'd like some more red blood cells on my half!

2008-09-24T18:00:00.000-07:00

'Nuff said. Go here to get your fix.

Moving Forward

2008-09-18T12:15:00.000-07:00

I might be moving this blog towards a digital repository for my dissertation research and progress shortly. For those of you who have been delighting in my posted “go see this!” links, I apologize, but assure you that much of my content will still be me deferring to others' ideas. After all, it was Anatole France who said, “When a thing has been said and said well, have no scruple. Take it and copy it.”
That said, my dissertation research is, well, just beginning. Or, more specifically, just beginning to begin. I’m worried, and tired already.
So goes life, yes?
Oh yeah, go read this: How to make an Origami Burger (for my friends on the low-cal, high fiber diet).
Does it relate to my dissertation? No, of course not. But it is still entertaining, is it not?

Proust Was a Neuroscientist

2008-09-04T18:50:00.000-07:00

I was perusing Amazon tonight and came across Jonah Lehrer's Proust Was a Neuroscientist.

I was intrigued by the title, and am hoping to order it (as soon as I get paid). Lehrer's book is doing double-duty, talking about science and art in the same textual breath, pointing us to several artistic big shots who were preempting scientific progeny of later decades in their own, early, artistic works.

One of my favorite sentences out of the reviews?

"...this collection comes close to exemplifying Lehrer's stated goal of creating a unified third culture in which science and literature can co-exist as peaceful, complementary equals."

Imagine that.

Elit 2.0

2008-08-24T11:41:00.000-07:00

I was looking on the internet the other day for electronic literature material, and came across Mark Marino's helpful posting "Guide to Elit 2.0." Marino lists a number of web 2.0 tools, and then points us to compelling works that might be considered "elit" using these tools.
Facebook doesn't just have to be for stalking our friends, after all.

Electronic Bookshelf

2008-07-07T09:03:00.000-07:00

Perusing the internet, I ran across Deena Larson's "Virtual Bookshelf," which lists several e-lit pieces according to the time they take to read. Lo and behold, the new media piece that I published with Caren Beilin is on the bookshelf.
Very cool find.
Also a very nice intro to some electronic literature that doesn't (necessarily) take a lifetime to read.

Typopoetry

2008-07-04T08:43:00.000-07:00

My friend and comrade, Guido Alvarez, has just self-published his first book, Breakthrough_typopoetry.
You should all go check it out.
Then you can go to Lulu.com to buy it here.
Guido describes this project:

Breakthrough is my first experimental book of "typoetry": A hybrid product of typography, photography, and poetry. The ultimate goal of this product is to finance the completion of my Ph.D. studies in Media, Arts and Text at VCU and to start a career in media production using self-publishing technology to achieve it.

It is certainly not your average beach read, though I suppose you could call it a bathroom book.

Pipe Cleaning Fun.

2008-06-27T08:58:00.000-07:00

Pipe cleaner + typewriter keys + shake-your-booty music.
A match made in heaven.
Visit David Bressler's creation here.

"Animals Are Placebos" is Up and Running

2008-05-02T17:38:00.000-07:00

Good News! My digital rendering of Caren Beilin's "Animals Are Placebos" just got published over at the New River Journal of Digital Writing and Art. The New River Journal is currently being hosted by Virgina Tech's Center for Digital Discourse and Art, and is promoted as being one of the first journals devoted exclusively to digital discourse and art.

My piece is a Flash rendering of Caren's text. Caren and I have never met, but I took on the task of giving visual life to her awesome text and am pretty pleased with the result. The editors write of their call for artists and writers:

"When we started this issue, we thought: let’s talk with some writers we enjoy and see if they’d be willing to offer work that’d get re-imagined and digitized by digital artists. It was, we thought, a great idea. What we realized, however, is that to think of digital writing as two interlocking pieces—writing on the one hand, digital magic on the other—is, well, off. Finding writers willing to have their work reimagined was relatively easy: finding digital artists with the time and energy and ability to take good writing and find new ways to present it was much, much more difficult.
The only piece that made it is Jennifer Smith’s presentation of Caren Beilin’s Animals Are Placebos. Both Jennifer and Caren are students—at VCU and the University of Montana, Missoula, respectively—and though they don’t know each other, Jennifer’s original and clever digitizing of Caren’s spare, strange language seems well-matched. In an Alice In Wonderland sort of move, the reader chooses his or her pill and the story moves according to the reader’s decisions."

A Motley Crew

2008-04-29T10:10:00.000-07:00

Any news article that sites Marshall McLuhan, Hannah Montana, and superdelegates catches my attention. So, for you reading pleasure, I offer you Andrew Foster Altschul's "Of Sharks in the Water, Superdelegates, and Hannah Montana's Breasts."

Intentional Fallacy

2008-04-27T11:19:00.000-07:00

Here's our completed video, Intentional Fallacy. It was a collaborative piece that Melinda, Sean, Kristine, Jenn Figg and myself all worked on together. I think that, for being the first film most of us had worked on, it turned out pretty nicely. We shot it completely in still images, and then animated them together to get the final product. It was a great learning process.

Here's a brief summary of the film:

Intentional Fallacy is a film that questions the notions of authorial intent. Created with more than 2,500 still images and hand-drawn animation, the film follows a young man experiencing an existential crisis. Mistakenly assuming his sketch pad is a reliable guide, the young man loops through time to find his true reality.

Photoshop Disasters

2008-04-22T22:27:00.000-07:00

You've probably already seen this, but I've spent a good hour or so perusing the site when I should be working on papers instead. So goes life, right? I call it research on what not to do. Like make mutant third hands. Or fourth or fifth ones.
Photoshop Disasters

What do Pictures Want? What do People Want?

2008-04-17T09:27:00.000-07:00

What do pictures want is a question we've all been asking (and reading about) in our coursework here. How does the question change, however, when we are asking it about pictures of military indencency: photos of others being mentally and phsycialy abused and humilated. You've all seen the pictures. Now Errol Morris is coming out with a movie that looks like it is going to take an approach that is thoughtful and, dare I say it, illuminating, on a topic that's already been covered in numerous other mediums, some good, some bad, and some just sort of inbetween.
If you want to check out the website for the movie Standing Operating Procedure, click here.
From the apple trailer website:

Is it possible for a photograph to change the world? Photographs taken by soldiers in Abu Ghraib prison changed the war in Iraq and changed America’s image of itself. Yet, a central mystery remains. Did the notorious Abu Ghraib photographs constitute evidence of systematic abuse by the American military, or were they documenting the aberrant behavior of a few “bad apples”? We set out to examine the context of these photographs. Why were they taken? What was happening outside the frame? We talked directly to the soldiers who took the photographs and who were in the photographs. Who are these people? What were they thinking? Over two years of investigation, we amassed a million and a half words of interview transcript, thousands of pages of unredacted reports, and hundreds of photographs. The story of Abu Ghraib is still shrouded in moral ambiguity, but it is clear what happened there. The Abu Ghraib photographs serve as both an expose and a coverup. An expose, because the photographs offer us a glimpse of the horror of Abu Ghraib; and a coverup because they convinced journalists and readers they had seen everything, that there was no need to look further. In recent news reports, we have learned about the destruction of the Abu Zubaydah interrogation tapes. A coverup. It has been front page news. But the coverup at Abu Ghraib involved thousands of prisoners and hundreds of soldiers. We are still learning about the extent of it. Many journalists have asked about “the smoking gun” of Abu Ghraib. It is the wrong question. As Philip Gourevitch has commented, Abu Ghraib is the smoking gun. The underlying question that we still have not resolved, four years after the scandal: how could American values become so compromised that Abu Ghraib—and the subsequent coverup—could happen?

Sometimes, even I don't know what to say.

Chopstick Canoe

2008-04-07T14:05:00.000-07:00

Here's a man who saw a problem and said, "Hey, I gotta fix that problem." He saw that lots of chopsticks were being thrown out, and, like any normal person would, decided to make a canoe out of them.

You can't see what you are not looking for

2008-03-27T09:04:00.000-07:00

A test of your powers of observation. You'll probably have to watch it twice.

2008-03-20T12:43:00.000-07:00

Super cool video.

Food Fight

2008-03-16T13:37:00.000-07:00

For those of you looking to catch up on your warfare history, I offer this video.

Swastikas and Rape

2008-03-10T11:28:00.001-07:00

Last semester, there was a conversation in one of my classes about the use of the term "rape" and the connotations of the word. Then one of my students wrote a paper about the possibility of the swastika ever being a neutral graphic design.
With all this talk about context and content, the new book We Have Ways of Making You Laugh: 120 Funny Swastika Cartoons, by Sam Gross, provides some food for thought.

The Amazon.com page reads:

Swastikas?" you ask. "Funny?"
Well, sometimes funny. Gathered together in this outrageous, rueful, and often poignant collection of cartoons are one artist's extraordinary observations on the range of emotion that the controversial symbol has elicited for more than half a century. These witty, beautifully rendered images gleefully stomp through the darkest moments in history and remind us that humor can diffuse our unspoken fears and deflate an overwrought icon.

You can check the book out here.

Life is Goo.

2008-02-17T16:51:00.000-08:00

Life is Goo.

Enjoy.

Found

2008-02-15T08:25:00.000-08:00

Found (but not by me)

Six-Word Memoirs

2008-02-13T08:19:00.000-08:00

Have you just been itching to get published? Well here is your chance. Use six words to write your memoirs. But only six.

Wal-Mart or High-Art?

2008-02-07T09:27:00.000-08:00

In the world of academia, everything is a show. Here's a quiz to let you know if you can fool others into thinking that you know something. Take a moment to figure out if you can spot the pieces that are priceless art in comparasion to the pieces that are cheap Wal-Mart bargain buys.
I'll admit it, I failed.

2008-02-06T13:01:00.000-08:00

A new look at marketing. Of course, this site is not in English, but it is still a really cool way to waste time. You can also actually buy the things from this site if you so desire.
http://producten.hema.nl/

Super Tuesday

2008-02-05T09:30:00.000-08:00

In honor of Super Tuesday, I send you this: photos of polling places.

You can go here to peruse photos of various polling places around the nation. This site is "a nationwide experiment in citizen journalism" in which everyday people can send in pictures of their polling place. The site hopes to get a photo of every polling place in America. The New York Times is hosting the site, and seems to want to inspire us to keep "a visual record of how voting happens in America: where it occurs, what the process looks like, how people act, and, ultimately, how the voting experience can be designed to be easier, less confusing and more rewarding."

Happy Voting!

The King of Kong!

2008-01-28T13:21:00.000-08:00

You can watch documentaries on South African villages, the making of microwave popcorn, and 30-minutes specials on "True Life: I Have Embarrassing Parents" (first aired 11/07/2002, according to Wikipedia). Because so many people out there just can't fathom what it is like to have parents who mortify you. But now you can see a different kind of documentary. In Seth Gordon's film The King of Kong: Fistful of Quarters, you'll be able to check out the life of gamers in all of its glory. From all accounts, it looks like the film really doesn't suck, and is actually a refreshing look at people who actually care about something other than money and sex. Shocking! I know. I don't game, but I'm probably going to check this movie out anyhow. You can check out the pretty awesome website here, and pre-order a DVD for yourself.

Along those lines, might I also recommend Word Wars, a film about competitive Scrabble players and their loves and losses. This film I have seen, and think that its pretty enjoyable. But everyone knows that I'm a nerd already.

Spying on your neighbors just got easier.

2008-01-17T09:33:00.000-08:00

Here's an interesting site to peruse. If you type in your zip, or any other zip in the United States, you can find out all the interesting information that the U.S Government collected on us in 2000. Mark Nash, some guy who likes statistics, launched this website, which gives you a easily-accessible version of all the pertinent stats. In my zip, 0% of people are in the farm/fishing/forestry field, while 39.8% are in the management/professional line of work. Oh, there go my hopes of becoming a sun-loving farm hand.

The neverending story of copyright

2008-01-13T10:59:00.000-08:00

Wizards, and elves, and copyright law...
J.K. Rowling and Warner Brothers are now suing a fan site about Harry Potter because of the site's plan to put out a book, citing copyright infringement. Tim Wu writes about the specatacle on Slate.com, and does a pretty good job of putting it in perspective. I didn't see any reference to lightening scars, though, so I'm only going to give it a 7 out of 10 points.

Millhouse!

2007-12-20T10:05:00.000-08:00

TeeHee!
The Lewiston Tribune ran a front page last Thursday that had two very lovely pictures in it. The first one was of a burly man in a flannel coat decorating for the holidays. The man was identitified as Michael Millhouse. The second photo was from video survalenance of a local conviencnce store, and showed a burly man in a flannel coat stealing a woman's wallet. The newspaper reported that the man was unknown.
Police finally caught on. They arrested poor Michael Millhouse, most likely still in his blue flannel coat, for felonly second-degree theft.
TeeHee!

No One Really Cares

2007-12-16T09:22:00.001-08:00

For those of you who forgot...

...Courtesy of PostSecret.com

Media, Art, and Text Student Patrick Scott Vickers

2007-12-14T18:56:00.000-08:00

This is Patrick Scott Vickers and his great-grandmother. At the time of this photo, she was really old and Patrick still looked fresh and innocent.
Things change.
You can find Patrick's Blog here.

Ammendment:
Patrick Scott Vickers may or may not be an innocent soul today. I have no first-hand knowledge either way.

Screen Ties

2007-12-06T17:31:00.000-08:00

Sometimes, you just need to have an OLED screen in your tie. Or any other piece of clothing, for that matter. When that's the case, check this out.
You'll be the hit of your next funeral or wedding reception.

Bizarre Scientific Papers

2007-12-06T10:18:00.001-08:00

In this time of increasing academic pressures, I'll lead you to the 10 most bizarre scientific papers, as accumulated by Oddee, a blog on the oddities of the world.
If you need a little break from the normal, everyday world, check out these facts on the not-so-normal, non-everyday world. The site is a great one for perusing on rainy weekend days, but only when you have someone sitting on the couch to bother with all the useless information that you find.

Eternal Sunset

2007-11-20T10:31:00.000-08:00

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is one of my favorite movies. With that in mind, I offer you Eternal Sunsets. This site shows you the sunset from a bunch of different locations, wherever the sun happens to be setting at the time that you happen to check the site.
Its real pretty.

Batman and Punishment

2007-11-14T09:00:00.000-08:00

In case you haven't gotten around to reading Crime and Punishment yet, here's a shorter, more Batman friendly version. Because who doesn't like Batman? Or Dostoyevsky?

Bird's-Eye View

2007-11-13T09:53:00.000-08:00

I found this animal planet video that shows a real "bird's-eye view" of what it is like to fly. I thought that this was particularly interesting because it seems like one of the closest things that we can get to virtual reality these days, and it is just cool video in general. It beats those mini cams that they put on the front of Nascar drivers' helmets, anyway.

News of Note

2007-11-12T09:08:00.000-08:00

CNN is entering Second Life, to report on the news of import there and find out what matters to the residents.

"The thing we most hope to gain by having a CNN presence in Second Life is to learn about virtual worlds and understand what news is most interesting and valuable to their residents," said Susan Grant, executive vice president of CNN News Services.

When Second Life residents observe an in-world event they deem newsworthy, they can take snapshots, shoot video, or write a report about the event and submit to CNN.

You can read the rest of the article here.

I wonder if their news is going to be full of murders, robberies, and traffic reports like the news here is.

Da Vinci in My Underwear

2007-11-06T07:08:00.000-08:00

A note I put on a class discussion board, that I am posting here for the benefit of those not in my class. Because I know you are oh-so-interested...

Talk about breaking down the boundaries between visual and digital space. Now I can finally view the great works of Da Vinci, in detail, while I'm sitting at home in my underwear eating chocolate ice cream. The link I've posted here shows how, "thanks to yet another happy by-product of the Internet age, Leonardo Da Vinci's "The Last Supper" is available as a special digital image that lets you get (virtually) closer to its surface than you ever could in real life." (Real life in this instance being a church in Milan where reservations sell out months in advance.)
http://www.haltadefinizione.com/en/

The detail here is incredible. I wonder how this trend towards rendering will break down the boundaries between face-to-face images and those virtual ones; will we begin to devalue the real in favor of the virtual? Mitchell claims that pictures want to be looked at, and nothing at all. I think that some pictures, namely, ones hanging in an art gallery famous around the world, want to be looked at in person or not at all. We claim a badge of honor when we have seen The Last Supper "in real life," and then we take a picture with our Kodak digital camera to prove that we were there. Well how does this new rendering shape our beliefs about art? I propose that trends such as this will continue to de-idologize "high" art and make it more accessible to the "common" man (or woman). Yet will this change the art world? Will we no longer revere certain pieces because they have moved from the unattainable to the everyday? Can Da Vinci ever really be "everyday"?

Containers and Containment

2007-10-23T09:44:00.000-07:00

This video brings to light some of the issues I've been thinking about regarding the container and the thing contained. Fionn Regan, an Irish singer-songwriter, performs his song in various arenas, and the camera jump cuts to him at each different juncture. He doesn't just lip-sync, though, so you can hear the ambient noise (or lack thereof) in the different arenas. I think it is a great illustration of how the environment (or the container) shapes the thing contained. The music takes on different meaning and tones depending on location. Think of that the next time you pick up an old tattered book and begin to read...

2007-10-17T13:51:00.001-07:00

I've found the perfect website for those of us who can't afford to travel but still want all the travel junk anyhow. KIOSK - Interesting Things From Interesting Countries is the place to be if you are interested in design and items from other countries. I think that my favorite is the tar-candy, the commentary on which is excerpted below:

To some people, summer is defined by the perfumed odor you have walking by warm train tracks. To others, summer is just a great time for candy. Well, some smart Finn said, “Let's combine the two!” Yes, this is tar-candy! Very diluted wood-tar-water is used to make these licorice pastilles have a distinct taste of tar. Tar was long considered a multi-cure that healed all illnesses and wounds, together with sauna and vodka the three were the cornerstones of Finnish healthcare. Today, most would agree that too much tar gives you a stomachache, too much sauna gives you headache and too much vodka will give you both. Nevertheless, in smaller quantities they are quite divine. Tar-candy, much like sauna and vodka, does have a threshold before you start liking it. The first few pastilles will taste strange and unfamiliar, but soon all you want to do is to walk along those train tracks with a tar-pastille in your mouth!

Awesomely Messy

2007-10-01T17:11:00.000-07:00

Here's a link to an awesomely messy commercial for Sony Bravia televisions. I love this commercial, but the best part is that all of this is real! Here are some stats:

70,000 litres of paint
358 single bottle bombs
33 sextuple air cluster bombs
22 Triple hung cluster bombs
268 mortars
33 Triple Mortars
22 Double mortars
358 meters of weld
330 meters of steel pipe
57 km of copper wire

And quoted from the website:

TV ad - featured massive paint explosions - took 10 days and 250 people to film. Huge quantities of paint were needed to accomplish this, which had to be delivered in 1 tonne trucks and mixed on-site by 20 people.
The cleaning took 5 days and 60 people. Thankfully, the use of a special water-based paint made it easy to scrape-up once the water had evaporated.
Keeping everyone safe was also an important factor. A special kind of non-toxic paint was used that is safe enough to drink (it contains the same thickeners that are sometimes used in soups). It was also completely harmless to the skin.

They also have some really great links to other commercials, like the one where they send 250,000 Superballs down the hills of San Francisco.

And, because I'm an idiot, and I forgot to post it earlier, here is the link.

The Wall: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain

2007-09-21T08:31:00.000-07:00

I'm pretty excited about a new graphic novel by Peter Sis, The Wall: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain. Sis tells his tale of being born Czechoslovakia during the cold war, growing up relatively happy, the tensions rising, and then "news from the West slowly filters into the country. Peter and his friends hear about blue jeans, Coca-Cola, beat poetry, rock 'n' roll,...and the Beatles!" (book flap). His world changed because of the media flowing into it, the messages that it contained, and the struggle to resist totalitarian control a second time. Much like Maus, this text uses the meduim to deliver a different message. Just like we've been talking about in class. How does that message change? Does it change?

Images from the book reproduced below. They are copyrighted, of course, and not to me. You can buy the book here.

MySpace/Facebook = Classist?

2007-09-18T12:47:00.000-07:00

(a photo of dinah boyd "speaking le web," taken from her website)

dinah boyd (yes, the lowercase is intentional), a Ph.D. candidate at UC Berkeley, writes about her sociology work involving social-networking sites. dinah's work notes the origins of and differences between MySpace and Facebook and the users they attract. The main dividing line? Socio-economic class. According to boyd, MySpace tends to attract what she calls the "subaltern" while Facebook draws the "hememonic." Or, to put it in blunt Mean Girls clique-speak, Facebook is the domain of choice for college-bound jocks, preps, and queen bees, MySpace the one for immigrants, alternakids, and wannabes. Facebook is more like Target; MySpace, more like Wal-Mart.

boyd's fieldwork consisted mainly of talking to teenagers around the country. Her website can be viewed here, and the essay that talks specifically about the Myspace/Facebook research can be viewed here.

Confessions of a TV Junkie

2007-09-11T11:34:00.000-07:00

I can admit that I'm not Britney Spear's biggest fan. I've seen her make mistakes and chronicled some of those mistakes in this blog. But I'm also more hesitant to admit that I watch what she does, who else is watching what she does, and what those other people think of what she does. And the VMAs was no different.

I didn't actually watch the awards show. I knew I wouldn't need to. Because the next morning when I woke up, the most important parts were being shown again and again on television stations, blogs, and youtube. And what were the most important parts? The parts that didn't belong. Specifically, only one part was being shown world-round again and again. That part? Britney's wastline.

The New York Post headline proclaims "Lard and Clear." Oh, there were plenty of other clever little sayings too. I bet you have one in your head right now. The entire show, it seems, was eclipsed by Britney's bulge in her belly and her somewhat off dance moves. I'm constantly amazed by our obssesion with Britney Spears, and the glee with we we push her off of her high horse and watch in amazement as the horse stomps her to death.

Let me add, here, that I am not above the fray. I saw this headline pasted on E! while I was at the gym on the treadmill. I watched as some twenty-odd college students stopped, mid-stride, to gape at the same video that they had already seen ten times before earlier in the day. I tried to figure out if she was fatter too.

But the question shouldn't be centered around Britney's center. As a society, why do we get our giggles from watching other people fail? I've got my own reasons for it. I think this has to do with our insanely competitive world, in which we covet what others have and hate we we've found ourselves stuck with. I do it too. But I don't know how to get past it. How can we stop salivating when we see someone who has it all go off the deep-end? I don't know if we can. Is it the media's fault? Is it our parent's fault? Is it just the way the world is now, with no one to blame (and, with nothing to blame, nothing to look to fixing)? Is it Britney's fault for getting up on stage in that tiny outfit when she knew that we'd be watching, and waiting, like wolves in the field? Can we stop the massacre on each other that we've been plotting all along? Do we even want to?

Who knows.

As an aside, Kanye West spoke out for Britney Spears, criticizing MTV's "explotation" of her at the VMAs. Then he went on to talk about how MTV robbed him of the center stage and made him play to a small room of fans instead of the mob out front. So Kanye hates MTV, loves Britney Spears, likes to rap about the way "he need Jesus," and hates to give up the spotlight. Oh Kanye, you must be my doppelganger in the hip-hop world.

Exploring the Medium

2007-09-08T11:23:00.000-07:00

Here's an awesome Flickr page, "Exploring the Medium."

From the page:

Experiments, Studies, and Explorations. Seeing binary — but importantly; what befalls the heroic exploits of our central character when he takes controls and rains up colour and light to this vacuous shallow pond of digital artistry.

Majority of works here were generated with the use of Flash. Enlisting the logic of code and a playful mind to create works that explore colour and compostion.[sic]

That's all just fancy speak to say that these pics are pretty mind-blowing.

From the page:

2007-09-01T19:29:00.000-07:00

So, the question seems too almost too basic to ask. But, I'm willing to ask it. Did Al Gore invent the internet?

...Seems like not so much. But, there are plenty or sites out there that might tell you otherwise.
Here's a site that seems to have a somewhat non-biased opinion on the internet; and doesn't base the crux of it's arguement on making fun of Gore.
Well...not much, at least.

2007-08-31T19:52:00.000-07:00

I've found this map of Web Trends, developed in a style reminiscent of Subway Transit Maps, on Geekologie.com. Follow this link and you can access an ineractive version.

2007-08-27T18:57:00.001-07:00

I think that my fears my finally be self-actualized. Having never taken the time to learn CSS, or even what it means, I now have to turn in a CSS-based website on Friday. I've yet to figure out the specifics behind websites and the CSS aspects of them, or how one goes about producing this CSS element.
Instead of showing off my website with movies and various elements of surprise and intellectual adacity, I'll continue to be the only one in the room eating paste and looking at picture books. I think that my fellow students are going to soon take pity on me, and perhaps slip me a spare cracker every now and then, as though I am the monkey at the zoo. Monkeys, I've heard, are also not well versed in Internet tools.