Jenn Shapland's blog

In Your (Type)Face: Part I

Jenn Shapland — Wed, 09 Apr 2014 19:16:23 +0000

I'm in the midst of the (long) process of building a digital magazine called Covered with Fur for Austin small press A Strange Object. This week I'm choosing typefaces, which, as one editor puts it, is a "vertigo-inducing" prospect, especially on the web. As I research and test various webfonts, I'm struck by a) how many exist, b) how many ugly and/or illegible fonts there are, and c) how little I know about type design and type designers in the digital age. I mean, I watched Helvetica, just like everyone else, but I don't put nearly enough thought into the people who design the typefaces I use regularly (which include, of late, Times, Helvetica Neue, occationally Didot, if I'm feeling fancy; I used to be strictly Garamond, but I grew out of that, thank God).

My first question: what typefaces, if any—old or new—are designed by women?

Image via Wikimedia Commons

Here's what I've found out. Several of the fonts in your word processor were likely designed in the 1990s by Carol Twombly, who created Trajan, Myriad, and Adobe Calson while working for Adobe Systems. The omnipresent Mrs Eaves, a "sensitive revival" of Baskerville for the screen, and Filosofia, a web version of Bodoni, were designed by Zuzana Licko in 1996. And perhaps most recognizably, Kris Holmes co-designed the Lucida system with Charles Bigelow. Today there are some extremely awesome lady type designers working on new fonts that often have a vintage appeal, like Veronika Burian and Laura Meseguer (whose kickass Magasin is pictured below).

If you're interested, you can read a great interview in which Yale School of Art's Director of Graphic Design (and first tenured female professor o_0) offers an answer to the question at the heart of my inquiry: "What does it mean to be a female designer in a mostly male institutional history and culture?" This question (plus my follow-up: "What does it mean that most typefaces, print and digital, that we read and type have been created by male type designers?") will guide my viz. series on contemporary typography.

Image via Laura Meseguer's artist portfolio

Though typography might seem fairly innocuous, the overlap between the age of advertising and the rise of digital media—plus the increasing amount of time spent in front of screens covered in type—means that how words and numbers look has huge implications. As Walter Ong has it, "Typography...made the word into a commodity." Making language visual and standardized (for most of print history, this process involved casting the letters themselves in lead, i.e. movable type, though today it means drawing them on graphic design software) makes it concrete—or concrete-seeming—and makes it harder to think of language as a fluid, dynamic, creative process wrought by use.

By removing words from the world of sound where they had first had their origin in active human interchange and relegating them definitively to visual surface, and by otherwise exploiting visual space for the management of knowledge, print encouraged human beings to think of their own interior conscious and unconscious resources as more and more thing-like, impersonal and religiously neutral. Print encouraged the mind to sense that its possessions were held in some sort of inert mental space.

If you're like me and you're just diving into the wide world of typeface design, here's an animated video primer that may be of use.

*Shoutout to Jake Cowan for having Ong ready to hand.

Great Minds Leave Academia

Jenn Shapland — Thu, 27 Mar 2014 02:39:40 +0000

This post has been removed by the DWRL because of concerns over rhetorical jurisdiction. In the event that it is revised for another DWRL venue, we will publish the link here.

Militant (Feminist) Grammarians

Jenn Shapland — Wed, 05 Mar 2014 20:49:35 +0000

Cropped from image below

You know you’re a huge nerd when multiple people from various corners of your life all forward you the same link, and that link is a bunch of diagrammed sentences.

This snazzy, minimalist new print from "renowned" infographic artists Pop Chart Lab satisfies the demands of everyone's favorite niche demographic (all those grammar-fiends/”classic-literature”-snobs/data-visualization-enthusiasts/fans-of-quality-design in your life) to a T. But before you place your order, let’s take a closer look at what this “Diagrammatical Dissertation” actually visualizes.

Image via Esquire

Apart from the anti-feminist overtones of the Reed-Kellogg diagram schemata itself—which just reflect the gendered taxonomization of the English language (from whence do we derive concepts like objectification and subordination, exactly, if not from the rules that structure everything we say?)—this poster perpetuates all the standard inequalities we’ve come to expect from lists of “Notable Novels.” Of the 25 opening sentences the poster presents, four were written by female authors (a whopping 16%). One black author makes the cut, Toni Morrison. 13 have male subjects or refer to male characters; only 4 of the sentences contain female characters or narrators (and in one of these the female appears as “fire of my loins” w/r/t the male narrator, so that probably shouldn't even count). Only two women are their sentence's subjects; seven male subjects voice their own sentences. It barely needs to be said that none of these sentences come from openly queer writers.

Cropped from image above

I know what you’re thinking. "This isn’t news, yo! It’s just a reflection of literary history. More men historically wrote and published novels, and more novels have been published about men, therefore any chart would demonstrate this inequity! And besides, they're talking about classics. When reading or penning a classic, race and gender magically disappear. Right?!"

Wrong. Here's (one of) the (many) problem(s), provided for us in the poster maker's own humble description of his or her (but in all likelihood his) product:

This chart diagrams 25 famous opening lines from revered works of fiction according to the dictates of the classic Reed-Kellogg system. From Cervantes to Faulkner to Pynchon, each sentence has been painstakingly curated and diagrammed by PCL's research team, parsing classical prose by parts of speech and offering a partitioned, color-coded picto-grammatical representation of some of the most famous first words in literary history. Whether you’re a book buff, an English teacher, or a hard-line grammarian, this diagrammatical dissertation has something for the aesthete in all of us.

Gross. This chart offers its list as a set of “famous,” “revered,” “curated,” “most famous in literary history” works for “the aesthete in all of us.” All of whom, might I ask? And talk about range! It covers "Cervantes to Faulkner to Pynchon"—and all the straight euro/anglo male novelists in between. The problem with using words like "notable" and "classic" to describe a set of authors that is 96% male and/or European by origin in 2014 is (duh) that it simply perpetuates the idea that some literature is more important than other kinds; and that most of the "important" books EVER have been written by or about (straight) men. To which I say, uh, nope.

Like the Buzzfeed quizzes I mentioned a few weeks back, curation has ossifying powers. Every time I see a new list of “best books,” which is what this actually amounts to, the same ugly old narrative about who sets the cultural bar rears its representational head. And it isn’t any surprise, is it? Just take a look at the latest VIDA statistics: we’re STILL publishing an average of 75% male authors in the most read magazines in the US for nonfiction and fiction ("Drumroll for the 75%ers: The Atlantic, London Review of Books, New Republic, The Nation, New York Review of Books (actually holding steady at 80% men for four years) and New Yorker"). Mainstream book reviews have always skewed overwhelmingly toward books written by men. In words from Cate Blanchett's controversial acceptance speech at last week’s Oscars, “The world is round, people.”

Image via VIDA count 2013

And maybe, just maybe, if this much-tweeted-and-"liked" and temporarily back-ordered diagram had included a more varied group of authors and texts, it wouldn’t be basically all direct objects and strings of subordinate clauses—that one was for you, feminist grammar nerds. Is it any surprise that the only sentence on the chart that neither takes an object nor subordinates a clause is the opening to Beloved, “124 was spiteful”? Subject noun + copula + subject complement = simply exquisite.

Pictures from Sochi

Jenn Shapland — Thu, 20 Feb 2014 00:23:19 +0000

Photo credit: Morry Gash/AP via The Guardian

Earlier today, members of the band Pussy Riot were attacked while performing in Sochi in front of an Olympic banner. According to The Guardian, none were arrested, one was left bloody, and we, U.S. viewers, were given the image above to process. Women in bright colors, women without faces, one woman with a defiant arm raised, one woman holding a microphone and then a man, in an overstated paramilitary uniform, taking a black horsewhip to them. So far, the New York Times is sticking with their skeptical headline “Protest Group Says Cossacks Attacked Them”—uh, says?—despite the volume at which this photo speaks otherwise. In a video that I don’t recommend you watch, more men in uniform arrive to rip the performer’s balaclava masks off, throw them by the elbows to the pavement, beat them with nightsticks on the ground, and attempt to break their guitars.

The olympics are boring. Especially the winter olympics. My interest in them this year is at its nadir. But it’s undeniably addicting to watch the controversy, conversation, and photos unfold all over U.S. news media platforms (and subsequently across the social media verse), eclipsing the stream of non-news that usually takes precedence over international headlines about acts of terrorism, political unrest, and general environmental and economic decline. (Side-note: did anyone else read this main page headline on nytimes.com yesterday and think something serious was happening in the world?).

This is by no means Pussy Riot’s first or last encounter with Russian police, and by now I assume most readers have been keeping track of the band’s headline-making protests against anti-feminist and anti-LGBT policies in Russia. But I can’t help but notice that their version of expression at theses Olympic games, which earlier this week got them detained by police, makes for a stark contrast with that of vocal Americans getting press in Sochi. Specifically, I’m thinking of the flamboyant persona cultivated by figure skating commentator Johnny Weir.

Perhaps because he’s a former athlete, an American, and likely because he’s male, Weir’s sartorial pushback against the confines of Russian mandates for appropriate gender and sexual expression garner him the attention and clumsy praise of style blogs and newspapers, giving interviewers and fellow commentators license to say incredibly stupid, pejorative, but apparently kind-hearted things about him all while hoisting him on a somewhat demeaning pedestal. He earns headlines like “Johnny Weir confirms he coordinates outfits with Tara Lipinski.” But no one comes after him with a whip. Regarding others’ celebration of him, Weir says, "I am not protesting. I am not making a statement. I'm just being myself." He’s not protesting; he’s becoming a celebrity instead.

Image credit: Robert Deutsch-USA TODAY Sports

Fashion is one of the only reasons I watch the olympics. When else do you get to see nations compete on the world stage for best patriotic track suit?! (Russia, the worst by far, dressed all their female athletes as Mrs. Claus.) Scandal is the second reason to pay attention. In the lab, we’re still reminiscing about Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan’s infamous shoelace showdown at the 1994 games. Figure skating is always fun to watch—so many spectacular falls, so little mercy from judges and commentators—but Tonya and her 80s leotards brought it to a new level. Still, treating the outbursts and ugliness at Sochi as more tabloid fodder is a scary proposition, as the photo at the top demonstrates. As Pussy Riot member Nadezhda Tolokonnikova put it in an interview posted earlier today, prior to the attack,

Unfortunately, I must say that it is virtually impossible for an opposition activist to be in Sochi. They simply prevent us from moving around the city. Our cars kept being stopped by traffic police. Once we decided to switch to public transport they came up with a new excuse [to stop us], which is to bring criminal charges against us. Thus voicing any dissent against the policies of [Russian] President [Vladimir] Putin is completely ruled out in this city.

You Are What You Like: Buzzfeed vs. Joan Didion

Jenn Shapland — Wed, 05 Feb 2014 20:15:50 +0000

Via Buzzfeed.

A particularly egregious fad has taken over my Facebook feed in the past month, and it’s one that many friends and loved ones have chosen to participate in. It’s the Buzzfeed quiz, and it’s actually not all that unlike any other internet personality quiz, versions of which have made the rounds since the early days of LiveJournal. Taking a Buzzfeed quiz and posting your results is similar to posting your Briggs-Meyers letters (INFJ), which tends to result in a steady stream of comments from friends who now realize to what extent they are (or aren’t at all) like you.

Only the quizzes from Buzzfeed, which I consider the Comic Sans of websites, are different, in a few important—and highly visual—ways. First, they are absurd. (What Sandwich Are You? What Muppet Are You? What “Mean Girls” Character Are You? What Arbitrary Thing Are You? (tagline: “Wanna be a thing? Come on, you know you do. Take this quiz!”) Slate even has a spin-off version of their own: What Buzzfeed Quiz Are You? All of which to say, I find it very hard not to comment on the post that says, “I am a PB&J Sandwich”: “First of all, no, you are not.”

Second, the questions that comprise these quizzes are each lists of objects (or people, characters, &c. that have been converted into objects by virtue of being listed as quiz answers): commercial websites, types of donuts, old TV shows, colors, consumer products, menu items from the Olive Garden, various other pop-cultural phenomena. Each of these lists is depicted as a grid of heinously colorful images, such that the categories the author has created can ossify into classifications. It follows the usual pattern of internet humor—author makes a generalization or assumption based on a combination of observable behavior and preferences, personal taste, and random brainstorming, then posits it as ascertainable and widely known and agreed-upon fact, so that the quiz-taker can easily navigate using nothing but his or her readiness to accept and be amused by this newly named and tacitly confirmed truism. If a reader disagrees with the categories or their components, he or she is simply not “getting” the joke. Because these quizzes are meant to be jokes, yes? They’re lighthearted, I hear you saying. Get a grip, Jenn!

Photo by Brigitte Lacombe, via New York Magazine

But there’s something else about them that bugs me, something that bugs me about every aspect of social media that comes to mind. When did what a person “is” turn into what a person “likes”? Clearly I’m not the first to say this (where is the Marx emoji when you need it?), but it bears consideration in the context of these quizzes. Somewhere along the way, internet and social media users became extremely comfortable categorizing their own personality according to their consumer preferences. It started with the profile that consisted of nothing more than your favorites: books, movies, TV shows. In the early days of Facebook, you could at least type in your own list; now, you’re pretty much required, by way of autofill, to choose from a given set of things. They make the standardization of these lists hard to work around. (Issues of gender and relationship status that arise from this fixity have been documented, widely.)

I read a fantastic piece of Joan Didion’s this week, a review of Woody Allen's movies that came out in 1979 (thanks, Chris Kaiser!). For me, reading it was a welcome deliverance from the endless stream of Woody Allen/Dylan Farrow analysis flooding the internet right now. (An important conversation to have, but there are very few opinions on it I actually want to hear.) Here’s what Didion observed, 35 years ago. In regards to Allen’s infamous list of things that make him want to stay alive, (“Groucho Marx,” “Willie Mays,” Mozart’s “Jupiter” symphony, Flaubert’s A Sentimental Education), she writes, “This list of Woody Allen’s is the ultimate consumer report, and the extent to which it has been quoted approvingly suggests a new class in America, a subworld of people rigid with apprehension that they will die wearing the wrong sneaker, naming the wrong symphony, preferring Madame Bovary.” I can’t help but hear echoes of this all over the social media-verse. I guess all we’re waiting on now is “Which Woody Allen character are you?”

Fashion Misfires: The Hunger Games II.

Jenn Shapland — Thu, 05 Dec 2013 20:17:11 +0000

Image: author's own, photo of December 2013 cover of Vogue

To round out the fall 2013 season of viz, I follow up on Suss’s latest post re: the Hunger Games and the rhetoric of fashion. As Suss makes clear, the new film Catching Fire portrays style in the districts as Depression-drab-chic (to put it generously). Which is all kinds of problematic. In the continuing buzz surrounding the movie's release, however, I've noticed that it's the outrageous outfits of the Capitol dwellers that capture the most media and corporate attention.

Take, for instance, CoverGirl’s Catching Fire makeup line. The twelve “looks” in the Capitol Beauty Studio (no joke) are inspired by the ridiculous costumes every district’s tributes wear to garner the favor of the wealthy Capitol patrons. Internet hounds have been all over this, critiquing the makeup line especially harshly in relation to the book series’ anti-capitalist message; selling makeup like this misses all the irony of the book's portrayal of wealthy Capitol style, in which makeup is used as kind of a big practical joke on poor people. On the lighter side, you can see the line in action on the Hairpin's a-mazing video series "Just the Tips." [If you have some time to kill this time of year, you can also watch them attempt to wear sweatshirts under dresses (spoiler alert: doesn’t work).]

Or take a gander at the latest issue of Vogue, like I did while walking through the airport over Thanksgiving. One of the headlines on the cover reads "Hunger Games: Does Intermittent Fasting Really Work?" I didn't have the stomach to turn to the article and find out what it is they mean by "work." (Make you intermittently hungry, I presume?) Instead, let me provide you with Hunger Games star Jennifer Lawrence's response to a fan’s question about body image. When asked, “What is your response to people who judge others based on their appearance?” JLaw replies, “Well screw them…What are you going to do, be hungry everyday just to make people happy?”

If we listen to Vogue, it seems the answer might be a resounding “yes.”

Via http://www.botoxchronicmigraine.com/

And finally, while we’re at it, can we talk about how frequently and inappropriately the Capitol catchphrase “odds [ever] in your favor” has appeared in ads lately? Have you seen this Botox commercial? Are you as freaked out as I am? Botox people, why are you threatening us?! Perhaps they think repeating the refrain of a fictional community that forces kill to other kids for fun is, in fact, the best way to sell migraine medication. But also: since when is Botox a cure for migraines?

There you have it, viz readers. When we put all the facts together, one thing becomes clear. The only truly fabulous style to emerge from The Hunger Games is Jennifer Lawrence's ALH.*

Via Autostraddle, via Jennifer Lawrence’s Facebook

*that's alternative lifestyle haircut, y'all

Vizualize Your Health!*

Jenn Shapland — Thu, 21 Nov 2013 19:28:02 +0000

Image from "Apple Cores Are a Myth" on www.theatlantic.com

One of my favorite things about yoga class is when the instructor, Iva, talks about how the various poses transform the inside of the body. In butterfly pose, she tells you about the rejuvenation of your spleen, kidney, and stomach meridians (i.e. channels of energy that run through the body according to Ayurveda). When you find yourself in a handstand, and it feels for a few seconds like floating, it’s probably because it’s one of the only times your organs get to hang upside down and all the blood in your body can recirculate. Twisting, as many a hungover yogi will know, detoxifies your body and wrings out your organs. Yoga instructors say these same things over and over, and after practicing for awhile, it’s hard not to believe them.

Whether or not any of these phenomena are true matters little. By moving in a certain way, and focusing your attention on imagining vitality and energy infiltrating your insides, you transform the way you feel; coming out of the posture is all the proof you need. You feel rejuvenated, refreshed. You notice that everything seems to work better. It could be due to the exercise, the endorphins, the accelerated heartrate. Or, as I opine, it could be the simple fact that you pictured the inside of your body growing more vital, more energized. And that mental visual is all it takes.

Image from The Association for Meridian & Energy Therapies

I learned something new this week and I’d like to share it with you all. You. Can. Eat. The. Whole. Apple. Core, seeds, and all. Thanks to the new Lowest-Common-Denominator appeal of The Atlantic, this is is a major discovery that will help you feel less wasteful, more satisfied, and really smart around your friends. Not only that, if you eat an apple this way—from the bottom up—you’ll also see that the core itself isn’t the chewed on stub you’re usually left without a garbage can for. Actually, it’s a lovely little green star.

Back in the time when people were still trying to figure out what to eat and why (which is eerily exactly like, uh, today), some Euro-Christian thinkers determined that foods often resemble the part of the body they serve. They called it the Doctrine of Signatures and blames it on their god’s (annoying) perfectionism. So, walnuts look like brains. And because of their omega-3 fatty acids, they’re brain boosters (plus, did you know they’re natural antidepressants?). Celery and rhubarb look like bones and help to strengthen your skeletal system. Have I blown your mind yet? How about sweet potatoes and the pancreas, tomatoes and the heart, mushrooms and ears, and of course, the eye that appears when you cut into a carrot? Grapefruits and oranges are supposed to look like breasts. Just check this handy chart (published in Time magazine in 2003, so take that with a grain of salt). The apple star is a bit more mysterious. But everyone knows that apples are all-around good for you, right?

Image via www.quora.com

To tie these several ramblings together: cultures as disparate as Eastern medicine and Christian theology suggest that visualizing how the foods we eat and the way we move benefits our interior body can actually benefit the body. Whoa! You’re welcome for the apple thing. You’re gonna be the queen of the lunch room.

*None of this is based on actual science, at least not in my version (in fact, most scientists say the Doctrine of Signatures is best used as a mnemonic device), but I say who needs science when you have your imagination?

Overexposed to Natural Disaster?

Jenn Shapland — Fri, 15 Nov 2013 16:23:31 +0000

"Ravaged by Typhoon, Philippines Faces Threat of Serious Diseases" on nytimes.com 11.14.2013

I've struggled this week to come up with a topic for viz. It isn't easy to generate new, engaging content week after week. But I was scrolling through various social media platforms this morning, and checking the news, and it was all business as usual until I came across the image above of the first mass grave dug this week in the Philippines for victims of Typhoon Haiyana.

In a time when it's easier and faster than ever to be informed about events across the globe, and when we confront images daily of places we will never visit or perhaps imagine on our own, I'm struck by how little I've seen from the Philippines this week. It's been a busy week, certainly, and a variety of local news stories (plus that "what-would-I-say" bot) have taken clear precedence on my Facebook feed. Still, I can't help but wonder if my limited encounter with images from this most recent weather disaster is a sign of something other than info glut.

As climate change continues and weather events grow more frequent and extreme, is it possible that we've started to become immune to even monumental, city-destroying catastrophes? Are we overexposed to the destruction of entire cities and populations? Ordinarily I'd want to critique these images and the way they're presented in Western news media, perhaps talk about aestheticization of ruin and disaster victims. However, we have to actually look at the images first, yes? And I don't want to preach, here, because I'm holding myself responsible for not paying close enough attention. Perhaps you've all been far more tuned in. But, on the off chance you haven't, I'd like to stop talking for a second and provide a few images, linked to their news stories, of a devastating, ongoing loss overseas that deserves our awareness and consideration.

"Logistical Hurdles Paralyze Relief Effort at Center of Tyhpoon's Fury" on nytimes.com 11.13.2013

"Typhoon Haiyan: Everything You Need to Know" on theguardian.com 11.14.2013

"Typhoon Haiyan highlights global cost of climate change" on america.aljazeera.com 11.14.2013

"Tacloban: City at the Center of the Storm" on bbc.com 11.12.2013

Laura Palmer, wrapped in plastic

Jenn Shapland — Thu, 07 Nov 2013 20:10:32 +0000

Image still from Twin Peaks episode two.

Inspired by Casey's Halloween post on gender in the horror genre, I'm continuing to riff on the same theme; I'll talk about boredom and violence, truck stop killers, and, of course, Laura Palmer.

So I just finished watching Twin Peaks. I'm behind the times in tackling this one, but now the show is up there on my list of favorites. That said, while watching over the past few months, I couldn’t help but notice that the underlying message seems to be: Young Women who display independence and/or sexual curiosity will probably be murdered by a deep woods demon. Laura Palmer is only the first casualty. By the series’ end—no serious spoilers here—we have to wonder what will become of our various other heroines. Audrey Horne, Donna Hayward, Shelly Johnson. And of course there remains the question of questions: How’s Annie?

Twin Peaks is a slow, small town with a toxic heart; like most small towns, you might say. In depicting this fictional Washington community, the show flips back and forth between scenes of boredom and scenes of violence. Sometimes everyone is sitting around talking about how great the pie is, or they’re eating donuts from perfectly organized stacks. And then sometimes they’re beating one another with bars of soap, trying to garrote one another in bed, or shooting each other point plank. And isn’t this the way with any good horror scenario or urban legend? Things have to start out a bit too quiet, and that’s when terror comes to roost.

Plenty has been written about Twin Peaks, specifically about the use of the mutilated female body in the show. Why is Laura Palmer’s plastic-wrapped body in the pilot episode so chilling and so beguiling? (Remember that Lynch found a local girl to play Laura, claiming he hired her "just to play a dead girl"; "But no one—not Mark, me, anyone—had any idea that she could act, or that she was going to be so powerful just being dead.") The fact that this wholesome-seeming, community fixture from a wealthy family, who happened to be played by a beautiful young woman, presents a haunting image once murdered and thrown in the lake? Not all that surprising.

Image still from Twin Peaks pilot episode.

But I’m thinking now of other kinds of violence toward women that tend to go unseen, unnoticed, or unremembered. Vanessa Veselka’s "The Highway of Lost Girls," published in GQ and collected in the 2013 Best American Essays, describes hitchhiking as a teenaged female runaway in the 1980s, taking rides from commercial drivers from truck stop to truck stop. Veselka has a run-in with a truck driver she will suspect, years later, is famous serial killer Robert Ben Rhoades, whose “trucking logs place him in the area of fifty unsolved murders in the three years prior to his arrest alone.” Veselka argues that Rhoades was able to get away with these murders—“at his peak he was killing one to three women a month”—because the victims he chose weren’t a part of any group that the community valued. As Veselka continues to search for evidence of other women Rhoades likely killed, everyone she asks, from local law enforcement to truck stop owners, denies ever having heard of the dead women. Despite the fact that the body was found in their dumpster, for example.

Veselka writes, “our profound fascination with serial killers is matched by an equally profound lack of interest in their victims.” This is the case when the victims are drifters, women who don’t belong to any clear family or community, or women who have removed themselves from such communities, especially through engagement in the sex industry. Or, as the FBI's Highway Serial Killings Initiative describes them, "The victims in these cases are primarily women who are living high-risk, transient lifestyles, often involving substance abuse and prostitution." While the fictional Laura Palmer’s death brings in a full-on FBI investigation (conducted by an all-male team of investigators and local law enforcement officers), hundreds of real women meet the same fate along the interstate daily and, as Veselka’s piece illustrates, can never even be properly identified (The Highway Serial Killings Initiative, started in 2009, took an initial count of over five hundred bodies around truck stops and rest areas alone.)

To bring this back to the context of fictional Twin Peaks, here's the question on my mind: does anybody really care about Ronette Pulaski?

Carson McCullers, Style Icon

Jenn Shapland — Thu, 31 Oct 2013 18:53:14 +0000

This post was originally published, in slightly different form, on the Harry Ransom Center's blog, Cultural Compass.

Photo of Carson McCullers by Cecil Beaton, via Cultural Compass

It might seem funny that an author’s fashion sense would even be a topic of discussion. What does it matter what a writer wears, so long as she writes? And yet, clothes, accessories, and everyday objects give us tangible, direct links to the past and to the people who wore them, used them, and kept them in their homes.

Personal style marks writers in revealing ways: it can be suggestive of time period, class, habits, or aesthetics. I think, perhaps, it distinguishes writers more than we realize. Consider Leo Tolstoy’s tunic and beard, Gertrude Stein’s long vests and cropped hair, David Foster Wallace’s bandana, Flannery O’Connor’s cat-eye glasses. Blame it on the cult of image that surrounds all contemporary celebrities, but these visual details help bring authors to life for readers. And personal style doesn’t just bring the writing to life. It makes the writer more human and more of a character all her own.

Images via (clockwise from top left):The Guardian, The Bluegrass Special, Poetry Foundation, Fowling Hantods

Carson McCullers is one writer whose personal style has had an unexpected influence on me. If you perform an image search for Carson McCullers or consult one the biographies of her that houses a set of glossy photo pages in the center, you’ll see that the woman had a unique sense of style. Often it looks like she cut her own hair, in renegade fashion. Possibly with pruning shears. She wore starched white shirts with enormous collars and cufflinks. She wore so many embroidered vests. She had a face, and a stare, and a pout to end all pouts.

Many readers know McCullers for her investment in the American South, but she doesn’t write about a South that might strike you as familiar. Instead, she represents the outsiders, the misfits, the kids who don’t belong. Her writing invites you into a realm where children can befriend adults but never seem to have parents—at least not parents who are paying attention. She introduces you to adolescents who find themselves at the center of complex legacies of racial and class conflict, which they navigate with remarkable insight and open-mindedness. Their world comes alive in the heat of never-ending Augusts, while McCullers’s characters swelter in endless boredom and daydream about Alaska or snowy Cincinnati. They rarely get to leave home, but they dream constantly of a life beyond or outside the small community that is all they know.

The personal effects formerly belonging to Carson McCullers at the Ransom Center are a curious array of objects and clothing. The objects, I like to imagine, were swept straight off her desk and into a box to be mailed to the Ransom Center’s door. They feel just as random—and just as talismanic—as that. Two cigarette lighters—one gold Zippo (engraved for Terrence McNally) and one mother-of-pearl desktop lighter that weighs at least three pounds; a curious statuette of a llama (a paperweight?); a handkerchief printed with a recipe for Irish Coffee; a torn straw hat; a pair of cream wool socks, worn on the soles.

Photo of Carson McCullers' engraved Zippo, via Cultural Compass

It’s hard to account for these items. When I’m cataloging artifacts of everyday existence, it’s often unlikely that I’ll find any record to confirm the role these belongings played in the author’s life. Nonetheless, the objects spark my imagination. They provide a portrait of the writer that exists nowhere else. These are the things McCullers saw, perhaps daily, the things she touched, carried in her pockets. These are Carson McCullers’s pen refills. The packaging and labeling of consumer goods also tells us something about a historical moment through design, font choices, and pricing. And the objects of everyday life ground writers in the real, tangible world; these objects help stave off the common impulse to idolize authors.

McCullers’s clothes evoke the 1940s and 1950s more than anything else in the collection. Rich tweeds in teal and lime green; a deep burgundy shawl coat that looks Russian; unfathomable long-sleeved, collared nightgowns; elaborately embroidered jackets. There’s one piece that seems especially out of place: a gold lamé jacket with magenta lining that still has the price tags on it, from all those years ago. It looks like a gift never worn; or perhaps it belonged to McCullers’s mother, Marguerite Waters Smith. Marguerite’s passport is also part of the collection; it lists her profession as “housewife” and has no stamps in it.

Photo of Carson McCullers' magenta-lined lamé jacket, via Cultural Compass

McCullers’s fiction comes alive through objects and through clothing, which makes her collection of personal effects that much more telling. When I think of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940), I think of Mick’s refusal to wear anything but shorts, even when she is expected to wear dresses. I think of Frankie in The Member of the Wedding (1946) and her adamant bowl cut. I picture the strange motor that she keeps on her dresser and switches on when she’s bored. Or the heinous-sounding bright orange dress she picks out for her brother’s fateful wedding. Details of objects, fashions, clothing, and garments ground McCullers’s fiction in a richer, more vibrant imaginary world, one replete with the textures of our own. McCullers brought the aesthetic of her work into her daily life with clothing and objects, and vice versa. Everyday things are an enormous part of a person’s identity; in many ways, if you think about it, they assemble who we are and what we do.

Sifting through the "Spaceship Junkyard"

Jenn Shapland — Thu, 24 Oct 2013 22:02:44 +0000

Jonas Bendikson RUSSIA. Altai Territory. 2000. Image via Harry Ransom Center Exhibitions page.

Jonas Bendikson's photo, used in many of the Harry Ransom Center's promotional materials for their current exhibit "Radical Transformation: Magnum Photos in the Digital Age," caught my attention even before visiting the galleries. Before seeing it in person, the image reminded me, strange as it is to say, of the 1939 Technicolor version of The Wizard of Oz.

Seen at a distance or in thumbnail, the photo's most noticeable features are color and contrast. The lush, green rural setting, the surreal, playful placement of figures, and the clash between the built and natural worlds in Bendikson’s photo remind me of the visual presentation of Oz. And Bendikson is known as a photographer who, according to Bruno Bailey, who interviewed him for Vice, “takes photos in countries that don’t exist." He finds places on the edges of a viewer's imagination. Further, the floating swirl of white objects (which the identification card informs the viewer are butterflies, but which, without the card, could easily be snow or many other unexpected things) gives the photo a sense of the magical and the mysterious. And, in a way, the image represents both.

Still from The Wizard of Oz (1939)

I’ve been thinking lately about the concepts of reuse and repurposing. My hypothesis is that a deindustrialized/-izing world requires or demands a certain facility with finding new uses for that which has been discarded, destroyed, or denuded by those very industrial or developmental processes that once made it useful. In the Bendiksen photo, cast-offs from a crashed spacecraft find a new purpose, first as discoveries, as structures to climb, then as scrap material, and finally as artwork. The photo’s promotional use for the exhibit capitalizes on the generative delight and the comforting economy of reuse.

Jonas Bendiksen. RUSSIA. Altai Territory. Dead cows lying on a cliff. The local population claim whole herds of cattle and sheep regularly die as a result of rocket fuel poisened soil. Image author's own.

However, if you visit the Magnum exhibit, a quick glimpse at the photo to the right of this one, by the same photographer and from the same series, changes the story. Now, it becomes clear that the space junk in this new environment has toxic consequences, poisoning the soil with rocket fuel and degrading the habitability of the space, in this case for cattle. The joy of repurposing wasted materials can be a useful human intervention, but, as Bendiksen's larger project illustrates, it's a process accompanied by risks and costs to the surrounding environment. Unlike many Magnum photographers, Bendiksen doesn't choose dramatic scenes or battlefields as his subjects. Rather, his photos convey the daily dramas and discoveries afar that might otherwise go unseen.

"Boy" Cuts: Part II

Jenn Shapland — Thu, 17 Oct 2013 21:27:29 +0000

Images via www.americanapparel.net

In my last post, I asked a pretty basic question: “why is it that most women’s clothing is designed to either a) show off or b) hide the body, while most men’s clothing is designed to comfortably fit the body?” When I say designed, I want to emphasize that I’m looking at the shape and cut of the fabric, first and foremost, which determine how a garment fits. Let me give a few examples.

Some days, you wake up and all you want is to wear a goddamn white t-shirt. For me, it’s barely a step up from just-not-even-gonna-get-dressed-today,-hope-that’s-cool. It’s also a fairly classic, chic, minimalist choice if you can pull it off. But I think it’s particularly hard to find that just right white t-shirt. My current option isn’t exactly cutting it. It’s a v-neck from (no surprise here) American Apparel, a brand notorious for it’s staunch policies on labor justice and equally staunch ad strategy of degrading women. You know this shirt was designed for a woman because:

1. the sleeves are extremely small and rounded and expose the armpit when I raise my arms;

2. the side seams curve in and back out again at the ideal, agreed-upon “waist” line, in which all women’s clothes wearers are identical (clearly); and

3. the v-neck is designed to highlight a certain part—well, two—of the body.

All of which choices were made, primarily, to show off the so-called female form. It’s something that I find pretty counter-intuitive, given the original motivation behind deciding to wear a white t-shirt. Of course, American Apparel also offers a line of Unisex items. These are cut and sized according to the Men’s styles, like, well, all things considered universal, no?

So. True story. I hit up a Labor Day sale this year looking for classy button-down shirts I could wear to teach. Changing jobs is always a great excuse for shopping. On the advice of some of my closest well-dressed dude friends, I headed to J. Crew’s outlet store in Round Rock, Texas. After meandering around awhile, I picked up a few patterned women’s shirts that weren’t heinous or any shade of Easter egg. The thing is, I’m pretty picky about colors. I like to wear neutrals and primary colors, and in the ladies’ section I couldn’t help but mutter to myself, “Who in hell needs so many kinds of pink?”

That’s when I saw the entire back wall of the store stacked floor to ceiling with gorgeous, primary-colored prints and solids, all folded perfectly, all buttoned to the top. Men’s shirts. Duh.

Image from Fall 2013 Style Guide via www.jcrew.com

I picked up a huge pile, (after spending considerable time just petting the things. Have you noticed how soft they are? Before you even wash them? I always assumed dudes just broke theirs in better. Nope. And don’t even get me started on the price difference.), and headed with my arms full back to the dressing room. Stopped by a middle-aged sales woman, I was asked if I intended to put my glorious stash of men’s shirts up at the front to be gift wrapped. For a second, I was legit confused. And then I explained, in a vaguely insulted manner, that no, I was going to try these on myself, thanks. She looked me up and down, and then took me back to the fitting room.

Because I suddenly felt a need to defend my non-normative selections, and because clothing salespeople make me nervous in general, I began to explain how I like the colors, how maybe they’ll fit better. To which she admitted, not shamelessly, that she owns several of the men’s shirts herself. “Have you felt how soft they are?” she swooned.

The fact is, the men’s shirts are not just made from better fabric, but are sewn better than the women’s and fit me way better and way more comfortably. Because women’s shirts are cut with a curved waistline that has been standardized so that it fits some idealized woman’s body, I always walk away with the feeling that my waist is clearly in the wrong place. It’s not the clothes that are the problem, must just be me. And I’m not the only one: J. Crew’s creative director Jenna Lyons has her own button-downs custom made.

Image via www.businessinsider.com; Jamie McCarthy / Getty Images

There’s definitely something fishy about the recent turn to menswear styles among women’s clothing designers that coincides with a consistent blindness to ways to cut clothes that would fit, rather than objectify the body. Even if they follow more neutral silhouettes, boy/tomboy cuts are still about the viewer more than the wearer. Amelia Diamond has a theory of her own about this contradictory trend. She writes, “I’d argue that the lean towards masculinity is, in part, our wanting to divorce ourselves from the oversexed pop media coverage on musicians...so consistently almost-naked that they’ve erased the mystery and allure that the female body used to hold.”* It’s not a bad theory, but off the runway I think the pull for customers is more about comfort than it is about appearance. Even if it's the appearence of comfort that's being advertised. More on that next time.

*Kudos yet again to Rhiannon Goad for the lead.

"Boy" Cuts: Part I

Jenn Shapland — Mon, 14 Oct 2013 15:00:00 +0000

Compiled from www.madewell.com

Fall clothing lines are out, which means the online window-shopper in me is happy as a clam. I’ve been scrolling around, looking for new sweaters or jeans or blazers that would be appropriate for the drastic change in seasons we collectively imagine here in central Texas.

And here’s what I’ve noticed: all the things I like right now have names with the word “boy” in them. Tomboy jackets, boyjeans, boyfriend shirts. Perhaps this is just indicative of a (never-ending) androgynous trend at the places I shop; as the image above shows, just one store—in this case, Madewell— capitalizes on the boyish qualities of their women’s clothes four times in their fall lookbook. Menswear-inspired women’s clothes are nothing new, but they’re definitely on trend in the retail world this fall, in a very self-aware way. Dressing across gender lines can be cool and even a means of subverting traditional gender roles or images. But labeling these styles “boy ____” has, I think, the opposite function.

It got me thinking about some of the strange, patriarchal, normative, and bizarrely long-lasting differences between men’s and women’s clothing design. In particular, one of the most basic differences: how they’re cut.

I’ve recently started designing and making my own clothes, largely inspired by a Japanese designer whose company, Arts & Science, has produced a line of “Genderless Clothes” and consistently produces exquisite, minimalist pieces that anyone could wear.

Image from www.designsponge.com

As I began to experiment with sewing from a pattern, I learned quickly that one of the reasons I love Arts & Science is that their cuts are straight and simple. (Which is great for someone who’s still figuring out her sewing machine. Curves are tricky, y’all.) Patterns for women’s clothes (many of which haven’t changed since, oh, the 1950s) are more often about contouring, curving, and accenting or hugging the woman’s “form.” And this, I think, is where the problems arise.

The answer is obvious, but why is it that most women’s clothing is designed to either a) show off or b) hide the body, while most men’s clothing is designed to comfortably fit the body? The objectifying gaze of patriarchy is right up against you at this moment, fellow wearers of women’s clothes! It’s sewn into your very seams! Even if you’re wearing (like I am right now) a basic white T-shirt. More on that in the next installment.

Last thoughts for today: I saw Savages perform Friday night and just want to commend them and call attention to their bravely stark, minimalist, stage attire. Their all black, clean, un-contoured cuts, combined with dark hair and white lights for a pristinely simple, powerful visual. For a band that’s all about minimizing distraction to maximize immersion, I was thrilled to see such attention to detail (or lack of detail) in their clothing styles.

Image from "The Key"

Stay tuned: in the next installment, I tell a harrowing tale of the time I took men’s clothes to the Round Rock, TX J. Crew outlet women’s fitting room (gasp!), and share a critique of (many twenty-something’s beloved) American Apparel.

Graffiti that Annotates

Jenn Shapland — Thu, 03 Oct 2013 14:55:39 +0000

My favorite genre of graffiti is work that comments on its immediate surroundings. In east Austin, this type of graffiti tends to refer to the seemingly unending gentrification of neighborhoods further and further out. Remember the fancy convenience stores I mentioned last time? Ones where you can buy $6 ice cream sandwiches? The image above is a defunct gas station that appears to have been purchased recently, so I think we can all imagine what's coming next. This graffiti artist—in their own, special, nostalgia-soaked way—wants to encourage visitors to the area to be critical of this expansion. See also: the time Hillside Farmacy's sign was edited to read "Hipster Farmacy."

As effective and important as it is to point out the community-destroying tendencies of new developments, it can get a little old: it's certainly a lament we hear often enough in this town. So I'm also drawn to graffiti that points out something unexpected or unnoticed in its particular locale. Take, for example, the gem above from the alley at 21st and Guad. I pass by this most days, and it makes me laugh pretty much every time. It refers to something a) palpable, b) not usually mentioned, c) gross, and d) ubiquitous in this central Texas roaming feline-palooza. It's also a comment on the ephemerality and dynamic quality of urban environments that graffiti is conscious of and participates in. Of course, like most things, it could also refer to a strain of weed. But I say the arrow suggests otherwise.

Image courtesy of Rhiannon Goad

Here, finally, is an image that appeared on my Instagram feed last week. It's another version of annotative graffiti, but one with a bit more depth than "Cat piss." "Dont open / dead inside" is cryptic, poetic, and kind of hilarious. It's also (as a friend had to point out to me) taken from The Walking Dead, which makes it all the more referential, but slightly less creative.

The Hidden Perils of Q&As.

Jenn Shapland — Thu, 26 Sep 2013 18:45:00 +0000

Image from TILTS.

If you attend enough talks and readings, you start to get pretty familiar with the basic elements of the Q&A session: the rambling question; the non question; the irrelevant question; the already-answered question; the indecipherable question; the adoring fan question; the tiny soapbox disguised as a question. If you’re cynical like me, you’ve realized by now that most questions are asking something very different from what they claim to ask. Q&As with contemporary writers always contain at least one version of the following: What’s your writing process like?/How often do you write?/Where do you write?/What do you wear whilst writing?/What snacks do you eat?/How productive are you?/Do you wear socks? You get the picture.

This type of question amounts to one thing, in my mind: a budding writer is desperate for the secret key to writing success. “Tell me, how do you do it?” It tends to come off, in my experience, as either a) amateurish, b) flirtatious, c) stalkeresque, or d) some hideous combination of the three. Why is it so much more pressing to find out how a writer writes than it is to hear about what or why she writes?

I think, in part, this stems from a desire to visualize the writer as he or she creates content that speaks to us. Perhaps it’s as innocent as seeking a material connection with a person to whom you feel connected on the page. Fielding an unwieldy question about universality during his TILTS Q&A on race Tuesday morning, Junot Díaz hit upon the following: when a person talks about a writer’s universality or universal reach, what he really means is not that a writer is able to speak for all of human experience, but rather that he speaks to the particular experiences of "at least two people," the writer and the reader.

Which means that the person in the back with her hand raised is really just shopping for images. She wants to get a better image in her mind of how the writer looks when he’s crafting language that speaks to her; she wants to know how she might (at best) offer the same kind of connection to others, (at worst) look like she’s doing so. Do you use a pen or a computer? Does it make a difference what time of day you write? Where'd you get those shoes? How many drafts? What price bananas?

Díaz, who described writers and scholars who work explicitly on race and white supremacy in the contemporary moment as “salmon in a fuckin’ desert” (i.e. they can’t even find the stream to swim up), referred to novelist Jonathan Franzen’s prominence as an example of the continuing marginalization of race in contemporary culture. The writerly image maintains its hold over the imagination, but the conversation has yet again stalled in an unending debate around the “Great American Novel,” a category that implies some kind of universal (read: white, male, heteronormative) American experience while denying the plural particulars of any actual experience. References to the GAN perpetuate the same image of the writer that a person who asks about writing process is looking to buy. At the root of this question is the assumption that writing, like many other so-called American dreams, is for sale not to the most talented or to the hardest worker or to the person with something to say, but to the one who has the secret password, the right look, or the right technique.

Images from Time Magazine covers archive.

I find the consumerization of creative practice to be an extremely sad thing. And Díaz really impressed me with his answer to this question, and the answers he gave to the follow-up chorus of questions around the room that amounted to how can we write (or teach) like you for the audience that matters to us—that is, how can we speak to the particularities of black or female or gay or transgender experience in a meaningful way—when the most recent writer on the cover of Time isn’t Toni Morrison, like it was in 1998, but is instead none other than J. Franzen himself (who, I should mention, I’ve never read, which makes it a lot easier to speak not to his work but to the cult of image he represents in literary culture) with the words “Great American Novel” plastered under his face, claiming that his furrowed brow speaks for “the way we live now”?

See what I mean about the question that disguises its intentions? The implications of Díaz's answer would take awhile for me to get into, but, basically, he suggested that therapy, self-care, and taking the time to process your own experiences are the most important means for channelling what you care about into writing. Which is a great answer, and one of the best I’ve heard, and certainly one that requires more work than having a rigorous writing schedule, say, or using a particular brand of notebook. It suggests that the way to write or teach the things that matter most to you isn't a matter of time or talent or equipment. Rather, his answer implies that by delving into the personal and analyzing the things that have affected you, you will find the best way to communicate your experience.

Graffiti as Advertisement

Jenn Shapland — Thu, 19 Sep 2013 15:00:00 +0000

Photo credit: Flickr user elizaO

It’s nice to think about graffiti as a free, democratic art form. Anyone can participate—all you risk is a fine or possibly jail time! But in Austin, lately, graffiti has been taken over by the big green capitalist monster (a monster, some might say, who’s slowly but surely encroaching on the town with heinous condos and hip, remodeled convenience stores that stock only local beer and kombucha).

A lot of Austin graffiti and mural painting has an explicitly commercial focus. Take, for example, the newest addition to my visual neighborhood at Tyson’s Tacos on Airport. On one side of the building’s facade you find the saccharine maxim, “A kiss blown is a kiss wasted.” Heading south, you get a view of their knit-bombed fence that asks in six-foot neon pink letters, “IF NOT NOW, WHEN?” Well, that's one question. Here are my questions: why has this business taken it upon itself to cheese up the gentrifying neighborhood? What is the point of ads like this? What do they have to do with tacos? Bonus question: is knit bombing graffiti?

Photos from Yelp, modified by author using DipTic

They aren’t the only place in town using the sweet, the inspirational, and the irrelevant as guiding principles for their street art. Over at the United Way Austin building on MLK, a mural went up this spring with a piece of bread, a melty yellow pat, and the sappy tag line, “You’re My Butter Half.” While this is a mural for a non-profit, there’s no question that it went up as an effort to rebrand the organization’s Austin branch. And, just like Liz Lambert’s “I love you so much” at Jo’s on South Congress, this graffiti is ripe for engagement photos. In a word: barf. A quick internet search led me to a post on a site called Hipstercrite titled "MOST ROMANTIC PLACES IN AUSTIN TO INSTAGRAM ON VALENTINE’S DAY." Double barf, y’all.

Photo credit: Hipstercrite

Not all advertising graffiti is lame or nausea-inducing, though. In fact, some of my favorite Austin street art can be found in faded advertisements on the exposed brick of remaining early Austin buildings downtown, like the Wrigley’s Spearmint Gum facade (though I suspect the new Marriott building has covered it up by now). Graffiti ads like these provide some of the few visuals that remain of a prior Austin; they give a mostly new city some visual history. So, is graffiti advertising all that bad?

Austin’s Ian Dille would say yes.* His wife’s framing studio was recently graffiti bombed by the Arcade Fire’s guerilla marketing strategy for their new album. Graffiti versions of the album cover for Reflektor appeared overnight.

Photo credit: Ian Dille

In an op-ed on Slate’s “Browbeat” blog, Dille writes,

If you’re a talented young artist who considers the urban environment your canvas, by all means, spray-paint a building. If you’ve got a radical social agenda and you think spray-painting property is the best way to convey your message? Go ahead...But if you’re an internationally renowned band that’s defacing public and private property for promotional purposes, maybe go back to the drawing board, and think some more about how you want to let people know about your music.

If you haven’t read about it yet, it’s worth a mull. Especially because Win Butler replied to Dille in a handwritten note, now published below the article. Cute handwriting, Win, but lame excuses.

*Shoutout to Rhiannon Goad, who pointed me to this mini scandal.

For more on graffiti, see this week's other contributions:

What is graffiti and who does it belong to?

Graffiti? I'll know it when I see it. Or not.

Jeremiah the Innocent Icon

Imagined Places in Decline

Jenn Shapland — Thu, 12 Sep 2013 18:37:33 +0000

From theguardian.com, "Arctic Sea Ice Delusions" 9.9.2013

I thought I’d pick up this week where I left off in my last post on place and contemporary literature. I was catching up on the news this morning on The Guardian and, several clicks later, I found myself on their Environment page. Two large photos of bright blue ice met me there, one with the headline “Arctic sea ice delusions.” Images of the arctic, especially the dwindling arctic, confront me constantly. I’ve never been above the tree line, though I did live in Vermont for a few lengthy winters, and yet I have a detailed visual construct of its terrain in my head.

Because, like me, most people will never visit the arctic, the imagined version is our only access to it, making representations of it in media and literature that much more powerful. At times I wonder how this visual emphasis on the arctic landscape—ice melt being a key factor in global climate change—affects a person’s understanding of the environment and relationship to place. When a picture like this comes up on one’s news feed, does anyone else have the same, problematic gut reaction that I have? That arctic sea melt is really kind of beautiful? What does it mean to aestheticize environmental degradation? Perhaps it’s something akin to ruin porn, like the photos that have come out of Detroit in recent years.

In Arctric Dreams, the 2001 National Book Award winner, Barry Lopez writes, “As temperate-zone people, we have long been ill-disposed toward deserts and expanses of tundra and ice. They have been wastelands for us; historically we have not cared at all what happened in them or to them.” Lopez writes extensively about the pattern of light and the totally different conception of time that exists in this region; the basic measurement of a single day has no purchase here. Using this extreme example, Lopez makes it apparent that the basic facts of location (longitude and latitude, altitude, weather patterns) have incredible effects on human language and perception. This radical difference might be what attracts the eye and the mind to the arctic vista.

From www.libraryofwater.is

Many writers and artists have been captivated by images of the arctic. I have a distinct memory of the scene early on in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein that shows the creature fleeing into an abyss of ice and snow. Since 2007, contemporary writers have had the chance to live in residence in the arctic at the Vatnasafn/Library of Water, Roni Horn’s Icelandic art installation. The writers, chosen by nomination, live in the converted library that contains columns of water collected from glacial melt around Iceland. Past residents include Anne Carson and Rebecca Solnit. Place attachment often has much to do with imagined places and doesn’t require that a person even have been there. The arctic is a huge store of this kind of imaginary attachment, and its significance increases as its size diminishes. If the arctic is headed toward an iceless future, what will happen to its illusory conceptual presence?

"That the science of cartography is limited": mapping contemporary literature

Jenn Shapland — Thu, 05 Sep 2013 18:03:34 +0000

View field list: contemporary lit of place & environment in a larger map

Oh hi, viz. readers. I’m Jenn Shapland, a new contributor to the blog. I thought I'd introduce myself by showing you a Google map I made this summer.

It’s a visualization of my field exam reading list. For the last year, I’ve been compiling a list of fiction and nonfiction titles on Contemporary Literature of Place and Environment. My process for developing the list was pretty haphazard at first—I asked just about everyone I knew for suggestions, I Googled like a madwoman, I stood for hours in front of my own bookshelves and BookPeople's, making stacks of possible titles. I started to shelve the books around my house according to geographic region. But, for obvious reasons, it wasn’t long before I realized that I needed a way to see the list in front of me without tripping over it.

To get things a little more organized, I began making maps. Since I started out imagining the list geographically, and since I already had a world map tacked on the wall at home (due to the measliness of my art collection), I grabbed some pins and started labeling. But several authors proved difficult to, uh, pin down. Take, for instance, Jack Kerouac. He’s a pretty important postwar writer of place, but where does he go? He trekked all over the country in his fiction. (As you can see, I ended up stranding him in the Pacific Ocean for the time being. Later on, due to the precision Google mapping requires, I placed him in Washington, atop Desolation Peak.)

Personal photo.

Another challenge of mapping fiction authors? Their penchant for creating fictional towns, cities, or even worlds. Does Colson Whitehead’s Intuitionist take place in New York, even if the city is never named as such? Is it safe to assume that Carson McCullers was writing about a town geographically equivalent to her own home? For these writers, I made my best guess at where their fiction was located. But this wasn’t entirely satisfying. The longer I mapped—and especially as I began to build the map online using Google Maps—the more limited and limiting cartography proved to be.

Place writing fascinates me for this reason. It requires the reader and the writer to move between the external world of their surroundings and the imagined world(s) of their fiction. It makes the conceptual move of the reading process tangible. More on that in my later posts, I’m sure.

As useful as the Google Map was for visually taking in the scope and range of authors on my list, I eventually concluded that topography offered a much better schema for organizing place writing. Literary topography is not exactly a well-known concept—yet—but I aim to make it one. Topography refers to the physical terrain of a given place: its three-dimensional landforms, altitude, and the physical details it encompasses. Topography indicates not only the “natural” elements of a place, but also takes into account the man-made features that exist there. For that reason, even when I enabled the “terrain" feature on Google Maps, I wasn’t seeing what I wanted.

Unlike geographical region, which is often based on old narratives, like the frontier, that no longer apply or tell the whole story; or, environment, which calls for a distinction between what is “natural” and what is “built”; or bioregion, which refers primarily to the natural features present in a given place prior to human interventions and impacts, topography allows a consideration of place as it is, and as people interact with it and experience it. It takes into account the immediate, physical surroundings of a given place. My maps were great, but they didn't give me this kind of depth or nuance.

So, the next step in the process of visualizing my list of place literature is to find a way to capture, to some extent, the aspects of immediate experience. Perhaps photography is the way to go? Or should I build miniature, scale models of these literary terrains? I’m certainly open to suggestions.