viz.

Image credit: buzzinemusic.com, amazon.com, and Marjorie Foley

[In honor of the David Foster Wallace Symposium being hosted at the Harry Ransom Center this week (and in honor of how much we at viz. love David Foster Wallace), this week's posts will be dedicated to all things DFW. Look out for guest posts from outside writers and lots of excitement from the viz. staff.]

Two summers ago, I spent ten hours a day for ten days reading David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. At 1,000 pages, this means that I was spending an insanely long six minutes on each page, reading and rereading sentences in order to first understand the grammatical structure, then to understand the basic meaning of the sentence, then to understand that sentence's relationship to the paragraph, the chapter, the book, and so on. While at times I felt like I was working, and suffering while I worked, Infinite Jest was also one of the most rewarding reading experiences of my life--while DFW is often criticized for his overblown prose, his writing is also full of batcrap crazy fun. The Decemberists, in the video for their "Calamity Song," capture the fun, the hilarity, the chaos, and the pain that is always present in David Foster Wallace's work.

Image Credit: Marc Chagall via Spaightwood Galleries

It's a bit surprising to walk into the Harry Ransom Center's current exhibition on the King James Bible and see Marc Chagall's Exodus series on display, but, considering his origins in a Hasidic family, the Jewish artist's works are a surprising addition to any gallery. Chagall's work was an uncomfortable subject for his parents and, later, his in-laws--telling your Hasidic parents that you're going to grow up to be a painter is a bit like telling religious Christian parents that you're going to be a stripper. Despite shocking his parents by painting nudes, Chagall would continue his work to become the foremost Jewish artist of the 20th century, earning respect from his contemporaries for his understanding of color and his ability to use a limited palette with eye-popping results.

Image Credit: Wikipedia

If you didn't see this image last week, you may have been hiding under a rock. Wikipedia reports that 162 million people viewed this image on January 18 as a result of their protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act, which involved blocking all English-language content on the website. As a result of the blackout, 8 million people looked up their representatives in Congress, and a unknown number of people tweeted amusing and seeemingly illiterate things. (Mildly NSFW content in full post.)

Image Credit: premiumblend.net

The side of the Charlie Chaplin mask on the left is convex; the one on the right is concave. If you can see the concavity on the right, 2009 research suggests that you may be schizophrenic. Luckily for me, I can't see the concavity, but watching videos of the hollow face illusion all day has been disturbing nonetheless.

Image Credit: husbandstheseries.com and Marjorie Foley

This Sunday evening (the day I usually sit down to write for viz.), I was a little at a loss for what to write about, and, I confess, I was a little jealous of Rachel Schneider's post this week, "Calendar Boys, Beefcake Girls." So, I pulled out the big guns and asked Facebook what I should write about. With lots of good suggestions (an honorable mention goes to Lauren Gantz for suggesting that I write about Ron Paul's collapsing eyebrow), the winner is Husbands, recommended by feminist scholar extraordinaire, Sarah Ruth Orem. Husbands is a recent web series following the zany lives of Brady and Cheeks, two gay men who get married after having too much to drink one night in Vegas.

Image Credit: Marjorie Foley

Last Thursday afternoon, I borrowed a video camera from the Digital Writing and Research Lab and headed down to Occupy Austin, a gathering intended to stand in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street. If you've been following the media coverage of Occupy Wall Street, then you know that people are confused about what exactly it is the protesters in New York want, and in Austin it doesn't seem to be much different.

Duncan with the Sheikh of Huzayel in 1946. Photo by Welles Stabler (via Harry Ransom Center)

In 1996, former Life Magazine photographer David Douglas Duncan donated his archive to the Harry Ransom Center, the premier humanities research center located at The University of Texas at Austin. viz. is proud to be partnering with the Ransom Center this year, and we're extra excited about the Ransom Center's web exhibitions, which include fabulous shots from Duncan's time in the Middle East.

Image Credit: businessinsider.com and The New Yorker

Lacking a television and the will to listen to news reports about the September 11 attacks during the past week, my only information about the 9/11 anniversary came from The Onion's satirical headline "Responsible Cable News Outlets To Devote Sensible Amount Of Airtime To 10th Anniversary Of 9/11." Though I haven't yet turned on a TV to see the media coverage, it seems from my brief perusal of the internet over the weekend that The Onion was, as usual, a little too close to the truth--some news outlets haven't been as sensible as they could have been. Yesterday, businessinsider.com published a series of sixteen magazine covers commemorating 9/11 that demonstrate a variety of media reactions to the 9/11 anniversary. From this classy New Yorker classy cover to pictures of the dead and dying, these images are stunning and range from sensible to alarming. 

As the Northeast prepared for Hurricane Irene last week, southerners who had weathered dozens of hurricanes sent both insults and helpful advice to their less-experienced neighbors in the north. The internet was abuzz with people wondering why New Yorkers were incapable of understanding what to do in a hurricane, and snarky retorts concerning Texans' inability to manage mild ice storms abounded. On reddit.com, the Australian redditor Xsophos posted this infographic comparing Irene and Hurricane Katrina with Tropical Cyclone Yasi, which hit Queensland, Australia this year. 

Image credit:  ABC News

Some American redditors promptly took offense, thinking that the post was intended as an insult to Americans' preparedness or fright, even though Xsophos offered no commentary about Australian superiority or the danger involved in any of these storms. One user sarcastically calls Australians "lucky" and another thread devolves into Australians insulting American sexuality and Americans making snide remarks about Australian censorship, as well as comparisons of flora and fauna.

At the Blanton Museum of Art, one side of the Greek and Roman sculpture room looks like this:

Image Credit: Marjorie Foley at Blanton

A beginning student's analysis of this room might argue that Romans like Cicero (top left of image) were austere, honorable, and very different from people today. Or the analysis might argue that the curator, at least, wanted the viewer to believe those things. And while it's true that this room may have been set up to suggest such Greek and Roman qualities to the average museum-goer, outside knowledge, like the fact that these ancient sculptures were often painted, can complicate analyses of rhetoric at the museum.