Matthew Reilly's blog

Book-Burning is a Wall in the War of Ideas

Matthew Reilly — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 14:20:39 +0000

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"Books are Weapons in the War of Ideas" portrays the book as a concrete opposition against the Nazi campaign to suppress free expression. This poster represents the base of a literary monument hardening into brick, creating a wall against the forces of anti-intellectualism and hatred. On one level, the text and image disagree as to whether books constitute a weapon or a barrier. On another, the vulcanized page promotes the binary of "us" versus "them," which is required to motivate citizens to armed resistance. The essentialism of this binary, unfortunately, needs to be called into question. Courses in modernist poetry prove that not all fascists were anti-literary, just as twentieth-century American history (or even the recent nightly news) shows that "we" also take our turn at book-burning. Far from denying the clear differences between Axis and Allies during World War II, we might consider how the poster's instrumental definition of books gestures toward a paradoxical complicity subtending the opposed acts of creation and destruction. Such an inquiry inverts the more conventional topic of how certain forms of preservation might actually threaten the existence of art and literature. Speculation into the creative capacity of book-burning has surprisingly rich antecedents in Alexander Pope's eighteenth-century poem, The Dunciad, and in Jorge Luis Borges's reflections on that poem in his mid-twentieth century essay, entitled "The Wall and the Books."

http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/exhibitions/2011/banned/

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In book three of Pope's Dunciad, the poem's anti-hero intoxicates himself with the plumes (“Popysmata”) of a burning library. From this pile appears the "Goddess of Dulness," who conjures an allegorical vision of four parallel, interconnected hemispheres of censorship. She shows the anti-hero envisions an emblem of the events in book two, in which a popular printers and ideological hacks transfer their Grub Street mores to the center of power. The allegory also foreshadows the philosophical, pedagogical, and religious satire of book four. In this final book, which Pope added fourteen years after the initial release of the Dunciad, the focus shifts from topical lampoons of individual dunces to a general satire on a culture that is oblivious to the limitations of its self-knowledge and the limitlessness of its capacity for imposition. In book two, literature succumbs to a corrupt Grub Street market. In book three, despots destroy and co-opt it. Book four consists of an abstract performance of culture's demise. In the final couplet, Dulness overtakes London: "Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;/ And Universal Darkness buries all" (1743 iv.656). While most critics view this conclusion as the epitome of Pope's gloomy outlook, others suggest alternative ways of reading the poem. Jorge Luis Borges, for example, has approached the poem from the perspective of the allegory in book three of The Dunciad in his essay, "The Wall and the Books."

Image Credit: RhapsodyinBooks.com

In “The Wall and the Books,” Borges discusses the censorship allegory in Pope's third book. He investigates one of Dulness's four agents of literary destruction—Shih Huang Ti [Qin Shi Huang (259–210 B.C.E)], the purported destroyer of ancient gardening manuals and the builder of the Great Wall of China. Borges curiously errs in placing these lines at the beginning of the second book of the Dunciad, since they introduce the ascent of Dulness in book three. Borges's oversight is noteworthy, since his essay consists of one extended meditation on Shih Huang Ti: “He whose long wall the wand’ring Tartar bounds . . . Dunciad, II, 76” (186). Borges writes, "I read, some days past, that the man who ordered the erection of the almost infinite wall of China was the first Emperor, Shih Huang Ti, who also decreed that all books prior to him be burned. That these two vast operations . . . should originate in one person and be in some way his attributes inexplicably satisfied and, at the same time, disturbed me. To investigate the reasons for that emotion is the purpose of this note" (186).

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Borges wonders what sublime character might embody the juxtaposition of “walling in an empire” and abolishing its learning. His essay pursues the hidden symmetries between burning books and building walls, and considers Shih Huang Ti’s signifance: “Shih Huang Ti, according to the historians, forbade that death be mentioned and sought the elixir of immortality and secluded himself in a figurative palace containing as many rooms as there are days in the year.” The “magic barriers” of this “closed orb” help Shih Huang Ti halt death by projecting himself into futurity. He is reputed to have said, “‘Men love the past and neither I nor my executioners can do anything against that love, but someday there will be a man who feels as I do and he will efface my memory and be my shadow and my mirror and not know it.’”

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After pondering historical, dramatic, and metaphorical explanations for Shih Huang Ti's actions, Borges offers his most intricate interpretation: “Perhaps the burning of the libraries and the erection of the wall are operations which in some secret way cancel each other. . . . [Generalizing] we could infer that all forms have their virtue in themselves and not in any conjectural ‘content.’” The harmonies of creation and destruction, he suggests, might reside in transmigrations of a medium. He claims, “Music, states of happiness, mythology, faces belabored by time, certain twilights and certain places try to tell us something, or have said something we should not have missed, or are about to say something; this imminence of a revelation which does not occur is, perhaps, the aesthetic phenomenon” (188). Might "this immanence of a revelation that does not occur" also imply the framework of a satirical juxtaposition?

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“If the unemployed are hungry, why don’t they eat themselves?”: Thinking Satire in a Tragi-Comic Age

Matthew Reilly — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 20:15:30 +0000

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John Lloyd, producer of Spitting Image (1984–1996), tells a story of how he was asked to validate the "humor" of the title ('If the unemployed are hungry, why don't they eat themselves') to television executives who missed his allusion to Jonathan Swift’s Modest Proposal (8:08 min). He had given these lines to the puppet of conservative MP Norman Tebbit (with bat above). Lloyd’s story gestures to two limitations to satire on the boob tube:

1. The public's general lack of familiarity with the satirical tradition

2. A pervasive demand for our ‘satirists’ to operate as ‘comedians’

A brief explanation through the lens of satires during Jonathan Swift's era (17th–18th c.) might clearly show that the english language/english-speaking population once possessed:

1. a refined and self-conscious conception of satire

2. a definite distinction between comedy and satire

To begin, if we consider Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary—published in the golden age of British satire—we find a striking differentiation between:

Comedy: [comedia, Lat.] A dramatick representation of the lighter faults of mankind

Comical: [comicus, Lat.] (1.) Raising mirth; merry; diverting

Comedian: A player or actor of comic parts

Satire: [satira, anciently satura, Lat. Not from satyrus, as satyr] A poem in which wickedness or folly is censured.

Satirick: (1.) Belonging to satire; employed in writing of invective; (2.) Censorious; severe in language

Satirist: One who writes satires

Image Credit: Eighteenth-Century Collections Online

Writers and artists have formerly recognized several forms of satire. For example, there are several well-defined classical forms. A polite “Horatian” satirist would favor laughter, wit, and amusement, and tend toward conciliatory, quietist, apolitical stances. A “Juvenalian” satirist, conversely, would compose brash, abrasive, indignant, and confrontational works. Juvenalian satirists embraced a tragic sensibility regarding vice, folly, and corruption. They attacked forces that did not fear the law itself. The 'Juvenalian' adopted a persona of unquestionable authority—a pose of moral righteousness. Beyond the prominent Horatian and Juvenalian styles, there is also the learned "Menippean” satirist, who focused on ideas, mental attitudes, and the "humours," and culled subject matter from an obscure and diverse array of sources. In contrast to this rich discourse of satirical possibilities, we now have a narrow idea of satire. Some influential voices in the media don't even understand what satire is. Case and point:

Video Credit: Crooksandliars.com

Wallace's obtuseness to satire (I'll be generous and not call it disingenuity) suggests to me that he and his colleagues need more exposure to it. The following video is one satire I like, because it effects the belly (laughter) and the gut (disgust). Skip the lengthy musical introduction below, but check out Amy Goodman's interview with the "Yes Men" and see their pseudonymous satire in the "private sphere" (courtesy of Haliburton). Our steak-and-potatoes badge of corporate/collective shame:

Video Credit: Youtube.com

So I suggest that we might start thinking about and experimenting with this wider sphere of satirical possibilities. Our society seems to be asking us to.

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Literature on Television?

Matthew Reilly — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 14:00:00 +0000

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I recently encountered Annenberg Media’s program series, entitled “Invitation to World Literature,” and was pleased to find a television show dealing with literary texts. This presentation of the Odyssey (one episode within a series ranging from the Epic of Gilgamesh to the 1,001 Nights) is surprisingly rare on television—a medium relatively resistant to literature (if we discount the tested format for 19^th c. novels and the "mini-series"). While much of the literature studied in colleges never ends up on television, Salman Rushdie has recently explained to the UK Telegraph that the writing in contemporary television far exceeds that in film (where literary themes are currently in vogue). As an instructor and consumer of English literature, I wondered— how might television possibly adapt or introduce a literary 'canon'?

Video Credit: Youtube.com

Annenberg media’s “Invitation to World Literature” summarizes famous texts from the perspective of several commentators, who each represent a different way of approaching the printed book. In the initial clip above, we hear the Odyssey likened to a comic book (“Superman”), a movie (“Wizard of Oz”), and even a script for comedic interpolation (this one is interesting). This “remediation” of literature seems to employ a tactic media theorists refer to as “hypermediation,” in which “the artist (or multimedia programmer or web designer) strives to make the viewer acknowledge the medium as a medium and to delight in that acknowledgment. . . . the logic of hypermediacy expresses the tension between regarding a visual space as mediated and as a ‘real’ space that lies beyond mediation” (Bolter & Grusin 41–42). By employing several different windows for consuming the Odyssey, “Invitation to World Literature” compels a conscious engagement with medium in hopes of rendering content “transparent” to a range of potential “readers.” We are most familiar with hypermediated environments via internet “windows” or television formats of windowed audience/pundit participation. To what extent might hypermediacy enable more complex presentations of literary texts, authors, or contexts in the future? The National Library of Ireland’s interactive online W.B. Yeats exhibit offers such a “hypermediated” format that balances general overview with narrower frames of interest. As television and internet increasingly cross over and share more in common, how might we adapt interactive, finely-tuned presentations of the "literary tradition"?

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The video above is one of my favorite examples of literary history on the small screen. The original run of Richard Curtis and Rowan Atkinson’s Blackadder aired on the BBC between 1983 and 1989. This sitcom differs from the “didactic” shows I have been considering. It expects viewers to have some basic literary and cultural familiarity, but one can understand the jokes even without thorough research. Through comedy and pastiche, Blackadder includes content otherwise unpalatable to television.

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The video above represents an example of the possible limitations to remaking literature on the television. The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb (1993) adapts a story popularized in old English ballads and eighteenth-century stage performances. This 1993 stop-motion animation first aired on BBC as a ten-minute short, before being banned for its dark content. After this controversial prohibition from television, The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb enjoyed acclaim and cult status as a film. Intriguingly, only one year after Secret Adventures was banned from television, Warner Brothers released Thumbelina as a blockbuster animated film cartoon. While this is the context in which most people know of “Tom Thumb,” the Secret Adventures has a good deal more in common with the baroque literary original. Perhaps there are many cases in which literature doesn’t translate well to television because it is actually too controversial—not because it is boring or outdated. Since "respectable" writers are no longer averse to admitting television as a space for literary engagement, we might start thinking about how this changing media environment might bring audiences into contact with the diverse array of texts in the literary tradition.

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Ballad to Billboard: An Audio-Visual Tribute to “Mack the Knife”

Matthew Reilly — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 19:48:36 +0000

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When pop mogul Simon Cowell dubbed “Mack the Knife” the best song ever written, he more than likely based his judgment on the ballad’s phenomenal billboard success during the later half of the twentieth century. As this song was received as a popular standard in England and America, not all of the audiences and performers were aware of its literary origins. Kurt Weill composed the original music and Bertolt Brecht wrote the words for this song, which was featured in his 1928 musical drama, Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera). Brecht and Weill’s artistic and political investments are well known, and no summary is needed here. It is less well known that Brecht borrowed major portions of his plot from the eighteenth-century British playwright, John Gay, whose Beggar’s Opera (1728) features a rogue hero named “Macheath.” In this audio-visual post will position Gay's complexly ironic hero alongside a range of musicians, from Lotte Lenya to Clay Aitken, Louis Armstrong to Liberace, Marianne Faithful to the Muppets.

Video Credit: Youtube.com

3 Groschen Oper, Ernest Busch, “Macky Messer,” film 1931

In John Gay’s wildly successful ballad opera, Macheath eludes a thief-catcher (“Peachum”) and a jailer (“Lockit”), each of whom seeks to profit from his hanging. Peachum and Lockit turn to legal remedy when Macheath’s engagement to their daughters threatens to obtrude upon their benefits from his racket of theft and extortion. William Empson has highlighted the ironic “Double Plot” of implied likenesses between these official authorities and the criminal underworld of Macheath. This “Double Plot” enables Gay to revel in his outlaw hero while embedding a trenchant critique of a corrupt power structure (he targeted the loathed Prime Minister, Robert Walpole). An even lesser known aspect of Gay’s Beggar’s Opera is that it had a sequel, which Walpole and Lord Chamberlain suppressed after its initial rehearsal. Gay’s sequel, Polly, portrays the trials of Macheath’s jilted lover, Polly Peachum, as she ventures to the West Indies in search of her transported fiancé. In this sequel, Macheath re-appears in blackface disguise as “Marano“—the leader of a band of pirates who mirror the colonial planters and slave-traders. By disguising herself as a man, Polly manages to escape the iniquitous pirates and lawless planters. In the process of her escape, she forms a sentimental bond with a captive Indian prince named “Cawwawkee.” The shell of The Beggar’s Opera’s “Double Plot” persists in Gay’s sequel, although Polly and Cawwawkee emerge as heroes of a more vehement and earnest satire on British iniquity. Gay published the text of the sequel in 1729, it did not appear on the stage until 1777. In fact, the Duchess of Queensberry was expelled from Court for helping Gay gather his initial subscriptions for the printed text of Polly. In light of this original “Double-Plot,” in which Macheath functions as both a charming rogue and the harlequin embodiment of unchecked corporate authority, we might look more critically at a barrage of twentieth-century imitators of the ballad “Mack the Knife.”

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The Muppet Show, “Dr. Teeth & Same the Eagle: Mack the Knife,” Television 1978–79

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Lotte Lenya (Weill’s wife), “Macky Messer,” recording c.1928

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Louis Armstrong, “Mack the Knife,” live 1956

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Bobby Darin, “Mack the Knife,” 1967 (his original cover appeared in 1959)

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Ella Fitzgerald, “Mack the Knife,” live [year?]

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Liberace Show, “Mack the Knife,” Television 1969

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September Songs, Nick Cave, “Mack the Knife,” Television 1994

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The Psychedelic Furs, Pretty in Pink, “Mack the Knife,” Recording 1981

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Marianne Faithful, “Mack the Knife,” recording 1996

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Sting, “The Ballad of Mack the Knife,” performance 1989

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Robbie Williams, “Mack the Knife,” Television 2001

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Clay Aitken, “Mack the Knife,” Television 2006

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The Doors, “Mack the Knife,” Live 1968

Tribalization of the Global Village: Marshall McLuhan, Orientalism, and Technocultural Panic

Matthew Reilly — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 13:00:00 +0000

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Media pundits rarely take on the pervasive Orientalist discourse that makes up Marshall McLuhan’s legacy as “prophet of the media.” Orientalist discourses are central to McLuhan’s theory of media, but these are difficult to read for two reasons. First, McLuhan’s Orientalism brazenly adopts metaphors and analogies that most well-educated people today either critique or avoid. In addition to this discomfort, McLuhan’s discourse reinforces his personal ties with radically primitivist (/racist) moderns such as Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis. Second, his Orientalism is difficult because it emerges out of self-consciously esoteric literary contexts (he was hired as an English professor and not a media theorist). In the video above (1968), McLuhan and Mailer describe two versions of cultural contact (see above 15.30–22.00 min) between “East” and “West.” One cannot rule out satire in McLuhan’s “Orientalism,” given that his account of electric “Western” man inhabiting “all points” (19.38–19.50 min.) is also his exact definition of the “auditory” and “tactile” realm of what he calls “oriental field theory.” In The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), he writes: “The modern physicist is at home with oriental field theory.” His famous book Understanding Media (1964) equates this existential field with the “tribal drum” of an electric “West” in an age of the “global village.”

Video Credit: Youtube.com

McLuhan opposes the gestalt of “Oriental,” “non-literate,” “auditory,” and “tribal” awareness to that of a “visual,” “specialized,” “analytical,” and “rational” ideology that emerges in the wake of the Gutenberg Bible. These words each bear subtle meanings. “Oriental” pertains to the mystical field of experience and a tactile flow of information (patterns) that also invisibly structures human life in our electric age. “Tribal” belongs to a repertoire of ethnic stereotypes, by which McLuhan designates a mode of immersive being unstructured by typographic notions of identity and rationality. He also uses “tribal” as an elitist designation for the anaesthetizing collective unconscious of American popular culture. The “non-literate” perhaps frames McLuhan’s Orientalist tropes most precisely, since he is really describing a hypothetical foil for the typographic, individualist, private, and specialist cultures of the “West.” “Non-literate,” furthermore, is also McLuhan’s term for an electric America “re-tribalized” in the “global village.” Make no mistake about it—the “prophet of media” is cut from extremely conservative cloth. McLuhan's Orientalism is central to a complex web of media theory, however. One of the subtitles of his The Gutenberg Galaxy captures the theoretically complex registers of his Orientalism: “The modern physicist is at home with oriental field theory. . . . A modern physicist with his habit of ‘field’ perception, and his sophisticated separation from our conventional habits of Newtonian space, easily finds in the pre-literate world a congenial kind of wisdom” (GG 28–29).

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McLuhan depicts the “typographic man” fostered by the Gutenberg Bible as imprinted with a sensory training, which is later reified as a cultural typology and value-system: “Literate man, once having accepted an analytic technology of fragmentation, is not nearly so accessible to cosmic patterns as tribal man. He prefers separateness and compartmented spaces, rather than the open cosmos. . . . [Indifference to the cosmic] fosters intense concentration on minute segments and specialist tasks, which is the unique strength of Western man. For the specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving toward the grand fallacy” (UM 135). In Annie Hall, we almost miss the fact that McLuhan chastises the professor "You mean my fallacy is wrong" with a nonsensical speech, which is largely overshadowed by his iconic presence.

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McLuhan argues that, after its "explosion" in Renaissance Europe, print fostered ideals of a detached abstracting perspective of an eye and the "I" of the individualist/perspectival tradition. This shift in values relegated the auditory, participatory, and “tribal” ear to the realm of a powerful unconscious. According to McLuhan, the emergence of electric media re-awakens a forgotten “haptic” (nonverbal) interplay between senses—a process he calls “touch.” An aggressively visual culture (trained on “Gutenberg” and empiricism) will be unconsciously susceptible to the tactile (“field theory”) and the auditory (myth). McLuhan warns, “The implosive (compressional) character of the electric technology plays the disk or film of Western man backward, into the heart of tribal darkness, or into what Joseph Conrad called ‘the Africa within.’ . . . By imposing unvisualizable relationships that are the result of instant speed, electric technology dethrones the visual sense and restores us to the dominion of synesthesia, and the close interinvolvement of other senses” (UM 120–21). For McLuhan, electric media is the "tribal drum" of the collective unconscious.

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McLuhan lays out an apocalyptic vision in Understanding Media (1964). Here is how that book begins: “After three thousand years of explosion, by means of fragmentary and mechanical technologies, the Western world is imploding. During the mechanical ages we extended our bodies in space. Today, after nearly a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned” (3). McLuhan specifies the specific privileging of one sense in the “West”: “This explosion of the eye, frequently repeated in ‘backward areas,’ we call Westernization. . . . That is only the East side story, for the electric implosion now brings oral and tribal ear-culture to the literate West. Not only does the visual, specialist, and fragmented Westerner have now to live in daily association with all the ancient oral cultures of the earth [my note: “myth”], but his own electric technology now begins to translate the visual or eye man back into the tribal and oral pattern with its seamless web of kinship and interdependence. We know from our own past the kind of energy that is released, as by fission, when literacy explodes the tribal or family unit. What do we know about the social or psychic energies that develop by electric fusion or implosion when literate individuals are suddenly gripped by an electromagnetic field, such as occurs in the new Common Market pressure in Europe? Make no mistake, the fusion of people who have known individualism and nationalism is not the same process as the fission of ‘backward’ and oral cultures that are just coming to individualism and nationalism. It is the difference between an ‘A’ bomb and the ‘H’ bomb. The latter is more violent, by far” (55).

McLuhan implicitly addresses this scene of technocultural panic to the recent dissolution of the British Empire. His comments on the topic range from the predictable to to bizarrely complex. He applies the term “barbarian” to refer to England’s landed aristocracy before the arrival of the English canon: “The English aristocracy was properly classified as barbarian by Matthew Arnold because its power and status had nothing to do with literacy or with cultural forms of typography. Said the Duke of Gloucester to Edward Gibbon upon the publication of his Decline and Fall: ‘Another damned fat book, eh, Mr. Gibbon? Scribble, scribble, scribble, eh, Mr. Gibbon?” (UM 16). McLuhan’s precedents are often literary authors ill at ease in their mediated environments. For example, consider how he ties the oriental electric age to James Joyce: “Associated with this transformation of the real world into science fiction is the reversal now proceeding apace, by which the Western world is going Eastern, even as the East goes Western. Joyce encoded this reciprocal reverse in his cryptic phrase: ‘The West shall shake the East awake/ While ye have night for morn.’ The title of his Finnegans Wake is a set of multi-leveled puns on the reversal by which Western man enters his tribal, or Finn, cycle once more, following the track of old Finn, but wide awake as we enter the tribal night” (UM 38). As much as McLuhan is describing electric media, he is reflecting on a non-ilterate and tribal Orient that “can no longer be contained” but is “now involved in our lives, thanks to the electric media. . . . The Theater of the Absurd dramatizes this recent dilemma of Western man, the man of action who appears not to be involved in the action” (UM 5).

Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: Univ. of

Toronto Press, 1962).

Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (London: Routledge, 1964).

De Artificiali Perspectiva, or Anamorphosis: Twofold Form and the Enigmas of Sight

Matthew Reilly — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 16:23:29 +0000

Video Credit: Youtube.com

“Anamorphosis thrives on mystery, and its masters rarely give away their secrets.” The Brothers Quay thus introduce the technique of perspectival distortion, which they document in their short film De Artificiali Perspectiva, or Anamorphosis (1991). This film provides viewers with an introduction to a little known post-Renaissance technique, whose etymological origin derives from the Greek ana (again/against), morphe (shape/form). Re-form against form. Anamorphosis submits a classical paradigm of geometrical perspective to systematic spatial manipulations that thwart a conventional “centric” viewer’s apprehension of representational form on a canvas. In order to satisfactorily envision an anamorphic puzzle, the viewer must adopt an off-axis, lateral, or “eccentric” angle of sight. The mechanics of such sight further requires that the viewer assume a monocular, cyclopean, or “keyhole” gaze, which flattens visual depth and paradoxically conjures up an embedded three-dimensional image. The mechanics of this “eccentric” vision offers an apt analogy for the uncanny aesthetic of anamorphosis.

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Daniel Collins explains, “This is not the stuff of mass media. . . . this ‘secret discourse’ is ideally suited for the depiction of difficult or illicit subject matter. . . . [In anamorphic art] the viewer occupies the vantage point of a voyeur who must commit (to) the act of seeing. . . . [this technique lends] the reader/observer a special role, an active function—in a word, an identity” (77–78). Lyle Massey contends that an “anamorphic perspective challenges both the supposedly rational construction of vision associated with perspective and the assumed rationality of the Cartesian subject.” (1148). Maria Scott compares anamorphosis to a topology akin to the labyrinth, suggesting that it performs “a gesture of address rather than . . . a simple representation.” Anamorphosis mobilizes the effects of surprise and fascination, entrapping the viewer in the context of its representation. As the embodied observer’s gaze merges with the hidden form staring back, the anamorphic movement destabilizes the subject/object dichotomy necessary for the office of objective criticism. In Stephen and Timothy Quay’s 2009 appearance at the European Graduate School, they liken the experience of anamorphosis to the surrealists’ notion of the “chance encounter.” There is something unsettling about the realization of an anamorphic perspective, not simply because it engenders a sequence of uncanny affects but also because it places the observer in a difficult position of reconciling an “eccentric” awareness.

Video Credit: Youtube.com

Image Credit: wikipedia.org

As much as De Artificiali Perspectiva features trompe-l‘oeil effects of anamorphosis, the film also emphasizes texture and tactility, whether one considers the pink patch from which the protagonist pulls the thread of sight or the coarse curtains that descend to close one scene and transition into another. The Brothers highlight the importance of texture and tactility in their working process. Stephen, for example, explains how they hand craft miniature sets and homemade puppets from found materials. “We’re firm believers that the hands know more than the brain. . . .We’re great scavengers of flea markets. It’s the old surrealist principle of the chance encounter between an object placed here next to that object that the guy carefully sets out on the stall every morning <[Timothy: unconsciously> he unconsciously will set up a conjugation of images and/or an object. We’ll go around and go ‘there it is—he said something.’ So these are great little found moments that I think are weirdly, very, important for our work. It’s the thing animation studios would find disruptive. . . . We would be fired pretty quickly on a Tim Burton film.” As I watched their lecture, I was struck by the thought of how this process might unfold. Stephen and Timothy Quay dismiss the suggestion that they possess a “telepathic” faculty, although it seems quite clear that they share creative and intellectual duplexity: “[Stephen:] Our focus is very, very, very narrow in the sense of what <[Timothy:] we can give you.>” (see part one, 55 seconds; see also Part 7, 1 min. 39 sec.).

What the Brothers give is a glimpse into the powerfully obscure. In their explanation of what subject matter motivates them, they state, “We’re clearly not interested in masterpieces. To us, anamorphosis is a much more interesting chapter than just straight classical perspective. . . . It’s hard to find a good book on anamorphosis. What we’re talking about are metaphors for further exploration.” Those readers interested in applications of anamorphosis in critical theory might check out Jacques Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1964) or Slavoj Zizek’s Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (1992).

Image Credit: http://users.telenet.be/thomasweynants//anamorphose-anamorphose.html

Daniel Collins has affiliated the technique of anamorphosis with subversive elements of the magical and taboo. The Brothers’ description of their film (perhaps intentionally) reinforces this strange aura. Stephen asks the audience, “[Stephen:] Do you know what the art of anamorphosis is? It’s artifical perspective. It’s distortion. <[Timothy:] Everybody knows the Holbein painting—the skull and the bone. . . . [For] this project, originally we wrote to [Jurgis] Baltrusaitis because he had written a book, which was published in English. We wrote to him directly to say ‘could we have his collaboration?’ His wife wrote back immediately saying that on the day our letter arrived, he died. And so we dedicated the film to him. . . . In the book Baltrusaitis mentions that the original impulse for the painting was that you would actually enter the room and see a life-size painting and you would be immediately shocked because they were life size. As you walked in you saw two men, two ambassadors. And your first sight is an elongated shape. But as you approach, you notice there is a door on the right. So as you move closer towards it, you took in all the magisterial eloquence and lavishness of costume. And so you slowly move toward the door, satisfied that you had seen everything. And at the last minute, this thing at the bottom of the painting continued to nag at you and so you cast the last glance before going through the door, and this skull—this unidentified object—suddenly came into shape. Then you realize that life comes to death (veritas), and that is your last glimpse. We had chosen about six others, but the stipulation was that we had to use that painting.> The Brothers’ ultimate collaborators on their film, Roger Cardinal and Sir Ernst Gombrich, would bring to bear an unparalleled expertise. Below is an excerpt of Gombrich speaking with Charlie Rose in 1995. His remarks on “mystery” early on in the conversation (1 min. 45 sec.—2 min) are intriguing.

Video Credit: Youtube.com

My post has treated anamorphosis in a general way thus far, but it is worth noting that this technique is extremely diverse. Readers interested in the variety of anamorphic techniques should visit Thomas Weynant’s website, “Anamorphoses, The World of Hidden Image” http://www.visual-media.be/visualmedia.html. Anyone interested in making their own anamorphic art, furthermore, can experiment with photo/image programs that allow alterations of the vertical and horizontal grid. Below is an everyday example of anamorphosis and a video of a large-scale anamorphic art project.

Image Credit: http://users.telenet.be/thomasweynants//anamorphose-anamorphose.html

Video Credit: Youtube.com

Works Cited

Daniel L. Collins, "Anamorphosis and the Eccentric Observer: Inverted Perspective and Construction of the Gaze," Leonardo 25.1 (1992): 73–82

Lyle Massey, "Anamorphosis through Descartes or Perspective Gone Awry," Renaissance Quarterly 50.4 (1997): 1148–89.

Maria Scott, "Lacan's 'Of the Gaze as Objet Petit a' as Anamorphic Discourse," Paragraph 31.3 (2008): 327–43.

Friday’s Pedagogy: Robinson Crusoe Teaching in Technicolor

Matthew Reilly — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 13:00:00 +0000

Image Credit: wikipedia.org

I was surprised to discover that Daniel Defoe’s famous eighteenth-century castaway narrative has been filmed several times in the twentieth century, and that at least four of these films can be watched in their entirety on the web. This visual archive will appeal to instructors who want to introduce students to the text, and to viewers already familiar with Robinson Crusoe. The four films are interesting for their modernizations of Defoe’s tale, and their interpretation of particular passages. The most striking discrepancy between the four films pertains to scenes featuring Robinson Crusoe and “Friday”: the native he instructs in English and Christianity. The four twentieth century films adapt these lessons very differently, and reflect an ambivalent tribute to Defoe’s conception of pedagogy and cultural exchange.

Image Credit: Eighteenth-Century Collections Online

In Defoe’s text, Crusoe saves Friday from his enemies and then enlists him in servitude. Once he develops sufficient trust in Friday, Crusoe attempts to teach him English words and Protestant concepts. The transmission is not so easy as Crusoe might hope: “I found it was not so easie to imprint right notions in his mind about the Devil, as it was about the Being of a God. . . . I had been telling him how the Devil was God’s Enemy in the Hearts of Men, and used all his Malice and Skill to defeat the good Designs of Providence, and to ruine the Kingdom of Christ in the World; and the like. Well, says Friday, but you must say, God is so strong, so great, is he not much strong, much might as the Devil? Yes, yes, says I, Friday, God is stronger than the Devil, God is above the Devil, and therefore we pray to God to tread him down under our Feet, and enable us to resist his Temptations and quench his fiery Darts. But, says he again, if God much strong, much might as the Devil, why God no kill the Devil, so make him no more do wicked? I was strangely surpriz’d at his Question . . . at first I could not tell what to say, so I pretended not to hear him, and ask’d him what he said? But he was too earnest for an answer to forget his Question. . . . I recovered my self a little, and I said, God will at last punish him severely. . . . This did not satisfie Friday, but he returns upon me, repeating my Words. . . . Here I was run down again by him to the last Degree, and it was a Testimony to me, how the meer Notions of Nature, though they will guide reasonable Creatures to the Knowledge of a God . . . . yet nothing but divine Revelation can form the Knowledge of Jesus Christ. . . . I mean, the Word of God, and the Spirit of God . . . are the absolute necessary Instructors of the Souls of Men, in the saving Knowledge of God, and the Means of Salvation. I therefore diverted the present Discourse between me and my Man, rising hastily, as upon some sudden Occasion of going out . . . I seriously pray’d to God that he would enable me to instruct savingly this poor Savage, assisting by his Spirit the Heart of the poor ignorant Creature” (217–19).

Of the twentieth-century film remakes, Luis Buñuel’s Robinson Crusoe (1954) is the most faithful to the words of Defoe’s text. Buñuel even reproduces the costuming in Defoe’s frontispiece, and his film captures the protagonist’s personality with subtle irony. He does introduce minor alterations, such as Friday’s desire to smoke pipes like his Master. Although this may seem to be an inconsequential addition, the pipe confers equal gravitas to Friday’s and Crusoe’s metaphysical dialogue. Friday takes up his pipe in the scene equivalent to the passage cited above (above; 1 hr., 10 min.). Although Buñuel's characters recite the key points and phrases in the dialogue, he portrays Crusoe as confused by Friday’s expert interrogation. Meanwhile, Friday almost seems to laugh at his capacity to puzzle Crusoe’s dogmatic assertions.

Ten years after Buñuel’s film, Byron Haskin released his sci-fi Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964). Victor Lundin (the initial "Klingon" in the original Star Trek series) not only plays Friday, but he also composed a song and a music video in tribute to the movie (see below)! Paul Mantee plays Crusoe: an American astronaut shipwrecked on Mars with his pet monkey, Mona. Haskin’s Crusoe is a national hero. He stakes the stars and stripes outside his cave, and remains short-cropped and clean-shaven throughout his ordeal. His exchange with Friday transpires after Mona discovers a much-needed water supply (Part 12, 3 min. 24. Sec.): “[F:] I tell you. Mona. She know. [C: (cackles)] You bet she does. Thank God for water. [F:] God? [C:] Yeah, supreme being. Uh, Father of the Universe. Big Father. Big Father. [F:] Cahechepek. We say, Cahechepek. Order. Cahechepek. Order. God. Good. [C: (cackling again)] Yeah, that’s right. Divine Order. Good.”

Douglas Fairbanks recounts the motives behind his 1932 Mr. Robinson Crusoe: “At first, my idea was to make a literal translation of “Robinson Crusoe” which is a regular mine of Boy Scout activity, but I soon saw that the book is really not adaptable to the screen, because when analyzed it lacks variety, and also it would not offer the opportunity I sought to accent the true value of Scout lore which, when conscientiously undertaken and thoroughly absorbed, gives a boy not only physical and mental training, but also a foundation in character that will stand him in good stead all through life” (297–98). Fairbanks converts Crusoe from a Brazilian planter and slave-trader into a dissatisfied Wall Street banker. Mr. Robinson Crusoe wishes to escape "Park Avenue and 52^nd Street" and immerse himself in nature’s leisure and simplicity. At the beginning of the film, Fairbanks dives overboard from his cruise ship and swims to a Tahitian island resort. There he watches local dances, drinks umbrella drinks, listens to college football games on the radio, and plays copious rounds of golf. He also consorts with a female pupil, “Saturday.” There are hints of moral correction in Mr. Robinson Crusoe when she distracts him from putting: “‘Saturday, you never, never as long as you live speak while a man is putting, you can steal his watch, but never talk . . . You can’t do that! Taboo! Taboo!’” (Part 6, 1 min. 10 sec.). Mr. Crusoe also approaches seriousness in his account of the difference between their cultures: “You see Saturday, we’re savages. You’re a calm, mild, peaceful people. We have football, prize fighting, gangsters, dentists. For example, do you play bridge?’ ‘Yes.’ [He laughs]” (Part 6, 6 min. 12 sec.). If the exploitative subtext is not obviously clear from these exchanges, the film concludes when Saturday returns with Mr. Crusoe to New York and becomes an exotic dancer in the Broadway troupe, “Zeigfeld’s Follies.” Since Youtube does not enable embedding of this video, you can find it there.

The most recent film adaptation of Robinson Crusoe stars Pierce Brosnan in the lead role. Rod Hardy and George Miller’s Miramax version is almost unwatchable. Instead of heading to sea under an ambiguous urge for adventure, Crusoe departs after a duel over a lover. Perhaps Hardy and Miller needed to justify their casting, but this love story brazenly contradicts the conspicuous and strange absence of any women from Defoe’s original. Uncomfortable with Crusoe’s moral pedagogy, Hardy and Miller suppress the reality of the original protagonist's proselytizing motives and prerogatives of mastery: “[F:] I am not slave! [C:] I know Friday! You’re my friend! [F:] I tell you my spirit name. Only spirit, me, and Tonga big men know. [C:] Why are you telling me this? [F:] Crusoe gave life, not say more. [Friday gives Crusoe a necklace] Give power of bird, fly safe to land [they shake hands, it thunders, they laugh]” (Part 7, 45 sec.).

There is so much to say about this awkward exchange. I'll just say that what I find interesting about these four films is their dialectic of fidelity and departure. I find that Luis Buñuel’s film provides the most faithful but also the best critical rendering of Robinson Crusoe. Alternately, Hardy and Miller's erasures of ideology seem to capture the spirit of Defoe's representations and their influence in the literary tradition.

Image Credit: wordpress.com

Daniel Defoe, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, ed. J. Donald Crowley (Oxford: Oxfor Univ. Press, 1998).

Keri Leigh, ed., Douglas Fairbanks: In his Own Words (Lincoln, NE: Douglas Fairbanks Museum, 2006).

Creaturely Rhetoric in Early Nature Films

Matthew Reilly — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 02:00:10 +0000

Video Credit: youtube.com

Percy Smith’s The Acrobatic Fly (1910) offers a time capsule into a genre of nature documentary that may seem unfamiliar to many of us today. In contemporary media, bugs are often mobilized for their visceral shock value. In the early-twentieth century, Smith’s singular flies compelled sentimental and conceptual interest. Upon the initial release of his film, The Strength and Agility of Insects (1911), audiences were repelled by its seeming cruelty toward the blue bottle fly. Thankfully, Smith only secured his protagonist with a thread of silk, and no animals were harmed in the making of his film. Audiences were also struck by the uncanny anthropomorphism of Smith’s portrayal of insects’ performances with wood-chips, lint-balls, and dumbbells. His anthropomorphic irony is even more striking in his Romance in a Pond (1932), a nature film tracing the aristocratic courtships and unhappy marriages of “gentlemen newts.” What is so interesting about Smith’s creatures is that they conform to an older natural history in which curious and exemplary specimens played a role in social thought.

Video Credit: youtube.com

Image Credit: charlesurban.com

Smith’s insect represented a natural capacity for labor and an innate mode of creativity. On one hand, satirical prints from the era adopted his insect as an embodied metaphor for conservative politicians. On the other, Jussi Parikka has suggested links between Smith’s insects and post-Gilded Age discourses that run “parallel to the logic of inventive capitalism and the production of novelty” (31). Parikka argues that the optimized productive labor of insect communities offered an emblem, which fused concepts of intelligent and corporate design. As Giorgio Agamben has suggested in his theoretical reading of Jakob von Uexküll’s “Tick,” scientific reflection on insects during this era generated some of newest paradigms post-humanist and inter-species philosophy.

Video Credit: youtube.com

Smith’s films were part of a larger visual and intellectual culture in the early twentieth-century entomology, which stands out for its incorporation of insect and human worlds. Some of these films explicitly foreground the social and cultural contexts of the insect. For instance, Wladyslaw Starewicz’s The Insect’s Christmas (1913) begins when an ornamental “Father Christmas” falls off of a tree, eludes a sleeping porcelain doll, and escapes into the forest, where he invites the critters to a celebration and introduces a tree. As Christmas visits bugs and frogs, they perform acrobatic tricks in stop-motion time, and engage in quaintly surreal feats of skiing and ice-skating. After his nighttime adventure into the forest, Father Christmas returns home, sneaks past his owner, and reassumes his place on the Christmas tree. As much as this film might suggest pastoral irony or social critique, I am most struck by Starewicz’s sympathetic portrayal of insect forms.

Image Credit: roberthooke.org.uk

From Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665) to Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis (1915), scientists and writers have introduced insects into their speculation on human existence. Conversely, there has been a dearth of interest in the actual preservation of such creatures. Our society has come little closer to appreciating (if not sympathizing) with the existence and importance of insect life. Over the past summer, Channel 4 (UK) ran a fascinating exposé, entitled “Conservation’s Dirty Secrets.” The documentary focused on the tendency for corporate conservation firms to promote large, fluffy, marketable animals, when less aesthetically-pleasing ones offer greater potential for scientific and sustainability benefits. Not only does the documentary critique the visual rhetoric of sentimental and fluffy creatures, but it also investigates the impact of such policies on the human populations who live alongside the animals. The film shifts emphasis away from the large animals themselves, and toward their participation in human ecologies of neoliberal ecological imperialism. While the slogan, “Corporations are people, my friend,” finds few sympathizers, many are susceptible to corporations who employ the sentimental appeal of large animals. “Conservation’s Dirty Secrets” concludes by investigating new models of sustainable conservation, but it does not explore persuasive strategies for attracting interest and sympathy for beings remote from our own existence.

Video Credit: youtube.com

Image Credit: ingenious.org.uk

On BBC Radio 4, one can find a thirty-minute vignette on Percy Smith’s career. The part of this broadcast that I find most compelling is the legend concerning the disappearance of his house. While filming his “Secrets of Nature” series, the newts, moss, mold, and insects proliferated throughout a series of rooms equipped with stop-motion cameras and elaborate set designs. After Smith’s death, the curious creatures are said to have overtaken the house of this innovator of the natural history documentary. While Smith’s unique insect films crossed into spheres of human life and society, they also attracted surprising attention to classes of creatures difficult to promote in persuasive rhetoric.

Video Credit: youtube.com

Works Cited

Jussi Parikka, Insect Media: An Archeology of Animals and Technology (Minneapolis, MN: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2010).

Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, Trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 2004).

Researching in Card Catalogues

Matthew Reilly — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 13:00:00 +0000

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

The following post concerns my recent visits to the Hazel H. Ransom Reading Room at the Harry Ransom Center. The images, such as the one above, were derived from unpublished scholarly notes that I never would have found if I didn't use a card catalogue. Since I have been in the process of writing my dissertation in the Department of English Literature, the resources at the Harry Ransom Center have guided me toward avenues of research I did not initially expect to pursue. I would like to relate a personal narrative and a few thoughts about why I’ve enjoyed accessing the Center’s extensive and rich archive by means of the card catalogues. The views expressed below do not reflect those of the Center, but are entirely my own. I do not write from the point of view of a library scientist, although I might gesture toward their expertise in my personal reflections on old-fashioned metadata. Instead, I hope to reassert what many students at the University of Texas already know, concerning the advantage of our proximity to the Harry Ransom Center. Specifically, I would like to suggest the need to actually visit the Reading Room to realize the full extent of the possibilities for research there.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

Recently, I came across an exciting discovery after browsing the Harry Ransom Center’s website. This pertained to a trove of over 2,500 books, periodicals, and pamphlets, which Reginald Harvey Griffith donated to the University of Texas at Austin just prior to Dr. Harry Ransom’s founding of the “Humanities Research Center” in 1957. I happened to have known that Griffith taught at the University of Texas during the middle of the twentieth century, and that he shared ties with a group of scholars at Harvard who wrote quite extensively on eighteenth-century “Club” literature (my area of specialization). I was not able to find out what was in Griffith’s archive, however, because this was not listed online. When I visited the Reading Room and inquired as to the materials in the collection, I found out that the contents of this archive were only accessible in three separate card catalogues, marked as “Manuscripts File,” “Provenance File,” and “Collections File.” The staff at the Center was extremely helpful in instructing me as to the significance and intricacies of these card catalogues, as well as the appropriate methods for calling books and manuscripts out of special collections.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

In my initial sweep through the three separate shelves of Griffith’s Collections file, I discovered titles of several 18^th centuries texts that I had never before encountered. While sifting through all three separate card catalogues, furthermore, I found cross-listings to other scholars of 18^th century literature, whose books and manuscripts I did not know were part of the Center’s holdings. This search eventually led to individual file cards, which revealed their handwritten letters to famous scholars well outside the field of 18^th century British literature. Although I entered the reading room with a specific objective in mind, the information in card catalogues led to possibilities I could not have predicted. Studying manuscripts is more time-intensive than reading print, but the documents have a mystique and value for being originals. Below, for instance, is an image of G.A. Aitken’s note for his purchase of Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

While the Center’s online finding aids are a great place to explore the collections from a distance, search a transcribed catalogue, or view a digitized archive, there is a good deal contained in the actual card catalogues that is not online. Beyond this specific difference, there are others that deserve recognition. For instance, the direct access of online search terms may have a tendency to limit search results, since it often produces a list of just what you’re looking for. Not to say that I don’t cherish online databases or that I could study happily without them, but I also appreciate card catalogues for their capacity to surprise. If card catalogues are not the vanguard, they still have an experimental edge. Have fun with them! I particularly like choosing a given year in the “Dates” catalogue [which organizes the Center’s collections in chronological order (typically yearly)], and seeing what’s there. Another option (which I haven’t tried it yet) might be to explore the “Publisher’s” catalogue in some similarly open-ended fashion. These games will pass the time while you’re waiting for your books to arrive. My point is that card catalogues aren’t restricted to Luddites only, and the combination of old-fashioned adventurism and the wireless internet can be a powerful one. This argument goes deeper than simply looking at old editions of books, but it involves an entire procedure of seeking them out in the first place. As online research increases in speed, immediacy, and (seeming) transparency, even advanced students may feel the urge to scoff or cringe at the thought of long narrow boxes and rectangular typewritten index cards. Writing from personal experience, I can say that card catalogues have their own charm and usefulness.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

Visual Analysis of Anti-Quakeriana

Matthew Reilly — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 13:00:00 +0000

Image Credit: Haverford College Quaker & Special Collections

Over the past summer, I spent a month as a Gest Fellow at Haverford College’s Quaker & Special Collections, where I was researching an eighteenth-century female preacher. The most entertaining and unexpected find over that month pertained to an image archive classified as “Anti-Quakeriana.” One of the more interesting aspects of Quaker history (in my opinion) is their retention of documents released by rivals and detractors. Hence the origin of the classification, “Anti-Quakeriana.” As a result of such practices, scholars and historians now have an archive rich in cultural contexts and historical negotiations that mark the transitions from a seventeenth-century “schism” to an eighteenth-century “sect.” Below, I briefly discuss a series of paintings and engravings of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century female ministers.

Image Credit: Haverford College Quaker & Special Collections

Above is an oil painting by Egbert Heemskerk—the seventeenth-century Dutch artist who would inspire a veritable genre of anti-Quaker iconography. Notice the female preacher cloaked in the foreground, distinguished by her witchy hat. I am grateful to John Anderies, a librarian at Haverford’s archive, for directing me to Heemskerk’s painting as well as the archive of caricatures of his painting, “A Welsh Prayer Meeting.”

Image Credit: Haverford College Quaker & Special Collections

In his recent book, Italian Opera in the Age of the American Revolution, Pierpaolo Polzonetti situates the following images of female preachers “at the borderline between parody and realism, comedy and mockery, disparagement and admiration” (228). On the other hand, Harry Mount argues that Heemskerk’s paintings themselves are “anything but satirical.” Haverford holds a framed original of Heemskerk’s oil painting, entitled “Quaker Meeting,” which is quite striking (the initial image of this post is a photo of a black and white reproduction). Whether satirical or sincere, Heemskerk’s paintings inspired a surprising number of parodies well into the eighteenth century. I cannot help but thinking these may have inspired Daniel Defoe’s misogynistic pronouncement—that women ought not be depicted singing or speaking, for unless “the other Passions discover it, she may as well be supposed to be swearing, scolding, sick, or any thing else, as well [as] singing.” Despite his numerous connections with members of the Society of Friends, Defoe wrote against their embrace of pacifism and female preaching, their attacks on bibliomancy and baptism, their repugnance to oaths and critiques religious rationalism.

Image Credit: Haverford College Quaker & Special Collections

Each of the images in this post has been reproduced from Haverford’s extensive archive of “Anti-Quakeriana” (a small selection of their much broader Quaker and Special Collections). These images reflect the negative bias Defoe articulates, but they diffuse the content of Quaker female ministry into caricatures of the overall affective and social contexts of religious gatherings. The integration of the preacher (foreground) and meeting (background) suggests that these artists are using female speakers as a paradigmatic representatives of the group. Women had been prominent and active in Quaker communities since the Society of Friends was founded in the mid-seventeenth century. Margaret Fell, the preacher featured above (left), was both a minister and the manager of traveling funds at London’s primary “Bull and Mouth Meeting House” (the scene above). Her husband, George Fox (standing right), is often considered to be the founder of the Quaker Society of Friends. As Haverford’s archive of “Anti-Quakeriana” makes clear, many of the early representations of Quakers stressed the unique role of their female preachers as the most distinctive characteristic of the group.

Image Credit: Haverford College Quaker & Special Collections

Engraved imitations of Heemskerk's paintings tend to emphasize the social nexus of Quaker female ministry. The three images above demonstrate slight shifts in emphasis. Isaac Beckett’s 1681 engraving portrays an intensely subdued preacher, whose quells the audience into a meditative silence. Marcel Lauren’s engraving (middle) turns to caricature by foregrounding the transports of an enthusiastic (almost terrified) man in the audience. In Carolus Allard’s 1706 copper engraving, the female preacher reigns over a dubious scene. Cats snarl in the alcoves, and the group skulks about without sharing a single sightline (other than those who address the viewer). Given such imitations, one might imagine British Quakers as participants in the frenzy of the more widespread “Great Awakenings.” In fact, eighteenth-century Quakers were generally less outspoken and controversial than their seventeenth-century predecessors had been. While these caricatures of Heemskerk may appear anachronistic, they also represent a shifting concern with the Quakers’ progressive (and principled) negotiations of gender norms, and their encouragement of female participation in the public sphere.

Image Credit: Haverford College Special and Quaker Collections

Above is one of my favorite images from the archive of "Anti-Quakeriana"—William Cole's "Sectarian Symptoms."

Top left: "Jumpers"; Bottom left: "Shakers"; Top right: "Quakers"; Bottom right: "Millenarians"

I would like to thank John Anderies (the head of Special Collections), Diana Franzusoff Peterson (Manuscript Librarian & College Archivist), and Anne Upton (Quaker Bibliographer & Special Collections Librarian), and the undergraduate staff for their invaluable help over the summer.

Works Cited

Pierpaolo Polzonetti, Italian Opera in the Age of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2011).

Harry Mount, "Egbert Van Heemskerk's Quaker Meeting Revised," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 56 (1993): 208–28.

Encounters with Concrete and Visual Poetry

Matthew Reilly — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 04:36:36 +0000

Image Credit: Ubu.com

It seems obvious that sight would be a natural starting point for any analysis of the mixed-mode of expression known as “concrete” or “visual” poetry, in which elements such as typography, pattern, word-arrangement, and text-image juxtaposition replace more conventional techniques of rhyme, syntax, and meter. Over the past week, however, two separate encounters have compelled me to think about how the tactility and transience of this form is possibly more fundamental than its appeal to sight. One of these experiences pertains to my discovery of Ubuweb’s fascinating archive of film in the field of concrete and visual poetics. The other has to do with my subsequent meeting with a local artist and concrete poet, who gave me one of his 3x3 trading card compositions. This unplanned, uncanny coincidence has made me consider how concrete poetry might encourage a shift from the scrutiny of the eye (the surface-depth model of close reading) to the gestures of the hand (holding and retaining, offering and receiving).

Image Credit: Getty.edu

Last Thursday I viewed Sara Sackner’s excellent documentary, Concrete! (2006). The film tours Ruth and Marvin Sackner’s private collection of “over sixty thousand objects” of concrete/visual poetry. Since 1979, the Sackners have been gathering books, artifacts, and artworks that render language visible and words material. In the film, they recount their acquisition, aesthetic interest, and personal fondness for pieces contained in their Miami Beach home. At certain moments in the film, it actually becomes difficult to distinguish where the poetry ends and the house begins. Examples of this include the refrigerator photography-poetry that organically overflows onto the walls of her kitchen, or the submerged concrete imitation of Andrew Marvell’s poem, “The Garden,” which is embedded in the color-coded blanket that appears in several scenes.

http://www.ubu.com/film/sackner_concrete.html

Image Credit: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/

While poetry pervades the house, the books in Sackner’s library resist literary apprehension, possibly because their pages consist entirely of scribbles, or because these have been clipped, painted over, or altered. Unlike poetry in anthologies, the Sackner’s archive resists a standardized form of presentation. Not surprisingly, Marvin relates his common fear of neglecting pieces hidden in the packages he receives from artists and poets around the world. He shows one such piece, entitled “Do You Read Your Garbage?”

Image Credit: Surrealismin2012.org

In their narration, the Sackners focus on such topics as the smell and texture of the works, their classifications of in an ever-expanding filing cabinet, and the memories and associations that each work invokes. By immersing poetry in the material objects and images, this poetry emphasizes tactile and transient qualities of things, which one desires to hold and maintain. It is perhaps fitting that Sackner’s Concrete! introduces the genre from the perspective of two collectors. Many of the works draw attention to our embodied, phenomenological, and subjective interactions with poetic language. They challenge the disembodied eye of literary criticism—particularly the one practiced when the first manifestos in concrete and visual poetry appeared.

Image Credit: Ubu.com

Even more sight-centric media in the field of visual/concrete poetry emphasizes the concrete and phenomenology contexts of reading. An example of this is Michael Snow’s film So Is This (1982). Snow’s film presents a sequence of individual white words, which appear at varied intervals onto a black screen that is occasionally backlit or obscured by static. The process dramatizes the scanning of the eye over a line, but exaggerates the tactile quality of grasping and fixing upon individual words in the otherwise automatic scansion of a line. As Snow’s technique of divulging individual words restricts the audience’s bird’s-eye perception of line and page, he manipulates the relative flow and accessibility of text, while also playing upon audience expectation and uncertainty. Sometimes the audience must grasp for words that arise and disappear almost imperceptibly, while other times they are forced to linger on single words. Occasionally, the duration of a word suggests a dramatic aside unmarked by punctuation, or the size of the font suggests shifts in tone. <http://www.ubu.com/film/snow_so.html>

Image Credit: arttorrents.blogspot.com

By about midway through this silent film, one discovers that the short text is actually a prose digression on the hazards, benefits, and affordances of his projected model of group reading. Snow addresses censorship just before flashing a brief (almost imperceptible) string of obscenities that intensify the tension and dangers of each subsequent following word. The film concludes with summary of the text’s general argument: “Flashback:/ Writing/ in/ the/ 4^th/ century/ B.C./ Plato/ has/ Socrates/ say:/ “You/ know/ Phaedrus/ that’s/ the/ strange/ thing/ about/ writing/ which/ makes/ it/ truly/ analogous/ to/ painting./ The/ painters’/ products/ stand/ before/ us/ as/ though/ they/ were/ alive,/ but/ if/ you/ question/ them/ they/ maintain/ a/ most/ majestic/ silence’./ This/ film/ will/ seem/ to/ stop/ T.” The Ars Poetica conclusion is effective, I argue, because of Snow’s prior demonstration of the tangible potency of isolated, unmoored, and even withheld words.

Image Credit: wendtroot.com

Over the past weekend, I met a local concrete/visual poet named Del W. In our brief conversation, he gave me one of the trading card poems he was handing out that night. Del. W states that he has been influenced by the surrealist poetry of Robert Desnos. He also explained he and his wife shared affection for Guillaume Appollinaire (above), and once left flowers for him at Le Pont Mirabeau. I enjoyed my conversation with Del W. and am grateful for his gift of a 3x3 inch thin paper poem. Del W. is past the age of retirement, and continues his work in Austin, Texas. Below is a digital snapshot of the poem:

Image Credit: Digital Snapshot, Del W.

"On A Clear Day You Can See Edith Sitwell": Materialism, Affect, and Irony in Photography

Matthew Reilly — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 13:00:00 +0000

Source: telegraph.co.uk

In 1952, Dame Edith Sitwell (1887–1964) announced intentions to translate her own novel Fanfare for Elizabeth (1946) into a Hollywood script. British and American newspapers ran a common story detailing her extravagant costume and monstrous physiognomy at the event: “The statuesque Miss Sitwell appeared in a black gilded cowl (‘I resemble Henry VII strongly—he was an ugly old man’) and a black bombazine floor-length dress, and sported long gilt fingernails. She also wore a topaz ring some two inches square, and her wrists were two huge gold bangles” (TD 49). Click ‘Read More’ to follow the thread of my post on how irony, affect, and materialism provide possible lenses for interpreting the above photograph, which features an icon of English eccentricity and literary modernity across from Marilyn Monroe.

On November 15, 1952, the Times Daily advertised that the “Acid-tongued poet-historian-lecturer Dr. Edith Sitwell” was making a try at the movies: “She did not say she was a bit worried about Hollywood because George Bernard Shaw once warned her that film people are the greatest wolves. . . . ‘My first scene,’ she wants Hollywood and Columbia pictures to know, ‘will be most appallingly morbid” (TD 49). As much as her theatrical costumes and demeanor may suggest, Edith Sitwell was not cut out for Hollywood. Over the winter of 1952–53, she wrote letters to T.S. Eliot about her discomforts on Sunset Boulevard: “I looked forward immensely to being in Hollywood, but everyone I have met has done their best to terrify me. I was told yesterday that people of my height are frequently drowned walking along the street, by a sudden downpour of rain.” Sitwell was not only tall, but she suffered from a spinal deformation. She was famed to have spent long bouts at home in bed, writing and reading. When she went in public, she almost always wore decadent and extreme costumes. She described her initial struggles with the Hollywood media to Eliot: “My principal entrancements here are the columns of the lady gossip writers, which I read with avidity. . . . Unable to get at me—because I won’t see them—one wrote ‘A little old lady’ (my italics) ‘has come to Hollywood: Edith Sitwell.’ A man reporter asked me on the telephone: ‘Is it true you are 78?’ I replied, ‘No. Eighty-two.’ But I read last week that you are 78.’ Yes, but that was last week. This week I’m 82” (SL 183). She was 66 at the time. Her script would never be completed as a film, and she slighted industry collaborators as being too artistically naïve and (falsely) “naturalistic” for her tastes. Sitwell’s greatest fame in America (a historical irony and disappointment) likely derived from the above image from Life Magazine.

Source: telegraph.co.uk

After the appearance of the Life Magazine photograph (taken during one 30-minute meeting with Marilyn Monroe in February 1954), Sitwell lamented that the image had made her life an “absolute hell. . . . Some tiresome people will not even let me have any peace. They send letters addressed to her. Newspapers all over the world commented about our meeting. An Egyptian paper went so far as to say I was instructing her in philosophy” (VS 62). A year later, she wrote to her friend, Geoffrey Singleton, on a “Coronation Ode” falsely attributed to her: “It is probably part of my famous friendship with Marilyn Monroe—whom I met once . . . and have not seen since” (SL 200). Despite Sitwell’s disparagement of the staged photo-op and contrived connection to Marilyn Monroe, the photograph itself offers more than just a lively caricature. The flow of gazes and postures in the foreground incorporates a vibrant atmospheric background—a continuity of objects, auras, and things (from Sitwell’s open handbag to the table lamp behind Monroe’s head, from the reflection off of the portrait’s glass plate to the inverted sinking of the couch). The surreal image captures the strangeness of Edith Sitwell's arrival in Hollywood.

Source: npgprints.org

The part of the Life Magazine photograph that compels my interest is the open handbag, which is obscured by the LIFE logo in the magazine’s website archive. This handbag makes the scene more touching, human, and potentially ironic (as in the “Egyptian paper,” which suggested Edith was teaching Marilyn philosophy). I wonder, what was in that bag? Sitwell herself was fascinated by the role of the material objects and curiosity in personal biography. In her novel, English Eccentrics: A Gallery of Weird and Wonderful Men and Women, she cherishes and enshrines what she describes as an “eccentricity [that] exists particularly in the English. . . . [It] takes many forms. . . . [and may] indeed be the Ordinary carried to a high degree of pictorial perfection” (EE 16). Her scholarship shares characteristics with her self-presentation, for Sitwell raises obscure objects and traditions to aesthetic, psychological, and cultural significance. From her morbid chapter on a lock of Milton’s hair (“On the Benefits of Posthumous Fame”) to that on Beau Brummel (“Some Amateurs of Fashion”)—a dandy upon whose coat “Lord Byron is said to have remarked, ‘You might almost say the body thought” (EE 15).

Source: npg.org.uk

If we discount Marilyn Monroe, few individuals of the twentieth century have been more accomplished in the realm of “pictorial eccentricity” than Edith Sitwell. Outside of the costume, makeup, and drama so central to her photographic archive, the Tate Collections also hold two intensely private portraits, by Pavel Tchelitchew (below) and Percy Wyndham Lewis (above). Instead of the handbag, it is Sitwell’s hands that are unique in the portraits. Her hands remained unfinished at the center of Lewis’s painting, for she ceased to sit for him after he intimidated her. In the painting of her close friend, two floating right hands sign on a board behind Sitwell. This painting surprised William Carlos Williams so much that Tchelitchew had to assure him, “She is like that . . . A very beautiful woman. She is alone. She is very positive and emotional. She takes herself very seriously and seems as cold as ice. She is not so” (ES 89). Sitwell’s pictorial legacy has lived on in the sympathetic adoption and branding of artists such as Morrissey, however, she is underappreciated in our contemporary culture of images and ideas.

Source: 2.bp.blogstpot.com

Roland Barthes distinguishes the affective tug of photographs as a “punctum” (point, puncture) that disturbs the “studium” of a photographic appeal to “average effect” and the “rational intermediary of an ethical and political culture” (CL 26). In Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Barthes outlines the “punctum”: “A Latin word exists to designate this wound, this prick, this mark made by a pointed instrument: the word suits me all the better in that it also refers to the notion of punctuation, and because the photographs I am speaking of are in effect punctuated, sometimes even speckled with these sensitive points; precisely, these marks, these wounds are so many points” (CL 26–27). It is my opinion that a visual analysis of the photograph from Life Magazine ought to move beyond the aesthetic contrasts of the “studium” to consider the “punctum” of the handbag. Those readers curious of Edith Sitwell’s fascinating collection of letters, notebooks, images, drafts, and novels (I’ve been looking at some of these recently) can find them at the Harry Ransom Center, where her archive is held.

Source: 29.media.tumblr.com

Works Cited:

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Trans. Richard Howard (New York: Farrar, Strouss, and Giroux, 1981)

Lehman, John and Derek Parker, eds., Edith Sitwell: Selected Letters, 1919–1964 (New York: The Vanguard Press, 1970).

Elizabeth Salter, Edith Sitwell (London: Oresko Books, 1979).

Edith Sitwell, English Eccentrics: A gallery of weird and wonderful men and women (New York: Penguin, 1958).

Times Daily “Watch Out Hollywood, Dr. Edith Sitwell is coming from England,” Nov.15, 1952.

The Vancouver Sun “Harried Dame Edith Insists She’s NOT Marilyn’s Friend” June 29, 1955.

Book-Burning is a Wall in the War of Ideas

Matthew Reilly — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 22:52:04 +0000

Image Credit: Brandeis.edu

http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/exhibitions/2011/banned/

Image Credit: Wikipedia.com

In book three of Pope's Dunciad, the poem's anti-hero intoxicates himself with the plumes (“Popysmata”) of a burning library. From this pile appears the "Goddess of Dulness," who conjures an allegorical vision of four parallel, interconnected hemispheres of censorship. She shows the anti-hero envisions an emblem of the events in book two, in which a popular printers and ideological hacks transfer their Grub Street mores to the center of power. The allegory also foreshadows the philosophical, pedagogical, and religious satire of book four. In this final book, which Pope added fourteen years after the initial release of the Dunciad, the focus shifts from topical lampoons of individual dunces to a general satire on a culture that is oblivious to the limitations of its self-knowledge and the limitlessness of its capacity for imposition. In book two, literature succumbs to a corrupt Grub Street market. In book three, despots destroy and co-opt it. Book four consists of an abstract performance of culture's demise. In the final couplet, Dulness overtakes London: "Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;/ And Universal Darkness buries all" (1743 iv.656). While most critics view this conclusion as the epitome of Pope's gloomy outlook, others suggest alternative ways of reading the poem. Jorge Luis Borges, for example, has approached the poem from the perspective of the allegory in book three of The Dunciad in his essay, "The Wall and the Books."

Image Credit: RhapsodyinBooks.com

In “The Wall and the Books,” Borges discusses the censorship allegory in Pope's third book. He investigates one of Dulness's four agents of literary destruction—Shih Huang Ti [Qin Shi Huang (259–210 B.C.E)], the purported destroyer of ancient gardening manuals and the builder of the Great Wall of China. Borges curiously errs in placing these lines at the beginning of the second book of the Dunciad, since they introduce the ascent of Dulness in book three. Borges's oversight is noteworthy, since his essay consists of one extended meditation on Shih Huang Ti: “He whose long wall the wand’ring Tartar bounds . . . Dunciad, II, 76” (186). Borges writes, "I read, some days past, that the man who ordered the erection of the almost infinite wall of China was the first Emperor, Shih Huang Ti, who also decreed that all books prior to him be burned. That these two vast operations . . . should originate in one person and be in some way his attributes inexplicably satisfied and, at the same time, disturbed me. To investigate the reasons for that emotion is the purpose of this note" (186).

Image Credit: Wikipedia.com

Image Credit: Tumblr.com