viz.

(Image credit: TILTS)

The Texas Institute for Literary and Textual Studies (TILTS) kicks off the 2012-2013 season tomorrow night with a lecture by Nicholson Baker, to be held in Blanton Auditorium at 5:30 PM. It’s open to the public, and all within the Austin area are encouraged to attend. TILTS is an initiative supported by the Office of the President, the Vice-Provost, the College of Liberal Arts, and the Department of English of The University of Texas at Austin. Each year the symposium brings a group of scholars to campus with the goal of enriching intellectual life in the community, and I can’t say how much I appreciate the program and the extent to which I think it’s an absolute success. Each year the symposium takes on a different theme (“The Digital Human[ities]”, 2010-2011; “Poets & Scholars”, 2011-2012), and this academic year we’ll be hearing about “The Fate of the Book”. Auspiciously titled, no doubt, but certainly relevant. And though advance copy of Nicholson Baker’s speech isn’t circulating (surely this is as important as major politicians’ speeches?), my familiarity with his books suggests that he’s going to be rather optimistic about the fate of print.

(Image credit: The New York Times)

With last week’s tempestuous events in the middle east, the subsequent chaos on the U.S. presidential campaign trail, and news of a professional peeping Tom in the south of France, much was lost on the American public concerning the strange and unexplained absence of Xi Jinping, the man in line to be the next president of China. Mr. Xi disappeared completely from public view on September 1^st, leaving only wanting pundits to explain what they thought might be reality. Think about it. Imagine if we lived in an ascendant country and our leader-in-waiting suddenly vanished from the public eye for longer than two weeks. Furthermore, imagine if we lived under a government that lacked any sense of transparency, and under which a freethinking blog post such as this one might warrant imprisonment, all the while the ruling elite might not proffer any explanation concerning our presumptive leader’s whereabouts. We’d be anxious, and the Chinese were last week. Anyways, the reason I bring this event up isn’t to inform the average American about global events (that’s their own responsibility and their newspaper’s job), but rather, I think the whole circus surrounding Xi’s absence provides a unique insight into the ways that China’s ruling elite attempt to visualize their control.

Image credit: Screenshot, "Who's Afraid of Ai Weiwei?" Frontline

After last week's posts examining representations of the aftermath of the events in Japan, I was especially taken by moving and controversial images from last night's Frontline piece tonight on Chinese artist Ai Weiwei dealing with the aftermath of the 2008 earthquake that devastated the Sichuan province.

Stefen Chow, The Poverty Line

Earlier this week, I tweeted about Stefen Chow's The Poverty Line, a collection of photographs that documents what an individual can buy with a daily wage of 3.28 yuan (49 cents), and here I want to draw more attention to this project and another like it. In documenting the choices one might face with this daily wage (significantly below the World Bank's poverty line, $1.25/day), Chow dramatizes the plight of the poor while staying within the language of economics and exchange.