viz.

Image Credit: salon.com

Today is National Eros Day. If all goes as planned couples everywhere will exchange love tokens, consume chocolate, and passionately express their love for one another. Even if we poke fun at them, these are some of the conventions of Valentine's Day just like grilling and fireworks are conventional for the Fourth of July. But Valentine's Day is a peculiar holiday because many of its conventions--and certainly its iconography--are literary (instead of religious, nationalistic, or folkloric). To my knowledge it's the only widely celebrated holiday that, simply by virtue of its subject matter, has its own well-established poetic tradition and form: the tradition of courtly love poetry and the form of the sonnet.  I ask the reader to accept this slightly shaky premise as I make the claim, just for fun, that Valentine's Day makes us all into poets. 

(Image credit: Business Insider)

Speculation has flared up this week about what Apple might think to include in an “iWatch”. This happened after Nick Bilton revealed in The New York Times blog Monday that the company has been experimenting with a curved form of Gorilla glass. Per usual, Apple has not commented on the product and we shouldn’t expect them to any time soon. But I thought it might be fun here to consider two things: first, a look at some of the many iterations of what an iWatch might look like, and secondly, a meditation on the potential uses of such a “smart watch”. Over the past few years I’ve been seeing ramblings of the coming of the smart watch, and I’m just not sure these things will be of use to twenty-first century humans. Younger people are increasingly less prone to wearing watches because, for the most part, they’ve already got a phone on their person. Are we to expect that we’ll want a smart watch in addition to a smart phone? Doesn’t such excess betray the supposed convenience of technology that made us fall in love with it in the first place?

Image Credit: Screencapture of graph created by the Collusion for Mozilla add-in.

I'd speculate that every instructor is familiar with the feeling that comes with anticipation and apprehension battling each other out before the first day of the semester.  Maybe I'm just too easily flustered, but the prospect of standing up in front of a group of heretofore-unknown students, while pretending to be the infallible instructor of heretofore-unknown material always rattles my cage a bit.

Image Credit: screenshot from Buzzfeed.com

Beyonce's publicist has created quite a media stir about photographs taken of the star's Super Bowl performance.  On Tuesday this person apparently requested that Buzzfeed remove several "unflattering" images from the "33 Fiercest Moments from Beyonce's Halftime Show" gallery.  The request was fruitless, considering the photos are still up; but it may have served a hidden purpose in igniting a flurry of posts, like Huffington's, that deny Beyonce has ever taken an unflattering photo.  As the title suggests, Buzzfeed's controversial story adopts a playful, celebratory tone rather than a critical or parodic one. Its string of increasingly intense photos and enthusiastic captions create a mounting sense of the star's "ferocity," culminating in her mock deification ("Beysus knelt down to bless the audience") and popular coronation ("basically every moment was fierce...Because she's Queen B"). So why would anyone view this as bad publicity?

My hunch is that the publicist does not actually view the photos as damaging, but rather, understands the popular fascination with that which is deemed "unflattering." Labeling the actions or images of a celebrity as unflattering heightens the public's interest in them, and the resulting mediated exchange of criticism and support for the star is what's known as buzz. But in Beyonce's case, the unflattering label has been applied in an unusual way. This blog post explores why that is, and how the special deployment of this label asks us to readjust our idea of what's artificial and what's real.

Image Credit: The Independent

While Caroline Bingley enumerates the accomplishments of elegant females in Pride and Prejudice, Mr. Darcy makes one significant addition: “to all this she must yet add something more substantial, in the improvement of her mind by extensive reading.” This pivotal scene, in which Darcy hints at the attraction to Elizabeth Bennet that blindsides her later, may charm audiences in part because Jane Austen, like her readers, cares about the written word. Austen parodied the sentimental and the gothic novels respectively in Love and Freindship and Northanger Abbey, defended the novel as a genre in Northanger Abbey, and showed her characters equally interested in reading. Fanny Price rhapsodizes as she joins a circulating library and becomes “a chooser of books” in Mansfield Park, Anne Elliot discusses poetry and prose with Captain Benwick in Persuasion, and Sanditon’s proto-villain Sir Edward Denham fancies himself “quite in the line of the Lovelaces.” Yet reading practices today are not the same as they were ten years ago, let alone as they were when Pride and Prejudice was first published on 28 January 1813.

(Image credit: BBC)

It’s only halfway through the week and we’ve already seen new images of King Richard III and Robert Johnson. I can’t wait to see what the rest of the week has in store. These pictures are a big deal. The images help us to reimagine the persona of these figures, and seeing that I thought I’d take a moment in this week’s post to highlight the discoveries. The Tudor kings who came to the English thrown after Richard III perpetrated history that suggested Richard was a grotesque tyrant. Commentators on this week’s discovery are suggesting how traditional renderings, perpetuated by luminaries such as William Shakespeare, might be historically inaccurate. Shakespeare’s Richard III is a complex plotter who we appreciate for his witticisms, but whose disgusting figure personified his vileness. This understanding might be far from the truth, for whatever it’s worth. Richard III did have scoliosis (see the remnants of his spine below), but scholars are revisiting the extent of his supposed vileness. As for Robert Johnson, previously only two images of the guitar player were known to exist, one of them merely being the size of a postage stamp. In this newly authenticated image, we’re treated to another glimpse of someone we hardly know.

Image Credit: Per Erik Strandberg

“Lorem ipsum” has been recognized by publishers and graphic designers throughout the 20^th century as the industry standard text by which to mock up text layout, thanks to a small UK company called Letraset, which mass-manufactured dry transferrable lettering from the 1960s to the 1990s.  With the advent of digital media and desktop publishing, the first two words of the ubiquitous sequence have become recognizable to the population at large.  It appears in markup templates almost universally across publishing platforms.  Templates in word processing, presentation software, and web design all bear the mark of their print forbearers. Thus, lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, a scrambled copy of an excerpt from Cicero’s De finibus bonorum et malorum (“of the ends of good and evil”) has entered into popular discourse as a recognizable placeholder, as Wikipedia says, “used to demonstrate the graphics elements of a document or visual presentation…by removing the distraction of meaningful content.”

This post would like to explore lorem ipsum as an ideological concept in both print and digital media.  In part, this exploration will question what it means to view text itself as visual rhetoric.  How can text draw attention to or defer attention from itself as a visual object?  How can conventions of representation make text, like lorem ipsum, disappear?  Might we view such disappearance as a sort of censorship?  If so, how can we describe the internal logic of such censorship as an ideological trend in the digital age?

Image Credit: Self-Portrait by Scott McCloud, Google +

I realize that looking at the rhetorical aspects of comics (and the implications thereof) is well-trodden ground.  However, I am of the humble opinion that there are still some pretty interesting things to think about in this area, as well as some already-propounded ideas that would seem to demand further (and continued) examination.  Indeed, I believe that there is still much to be gained by looking at the (relatively) early texts examining rhetoric and comics.  In support of this contention, I’d like to offer the musings of Mr. Scott McCloud as Exhibit “A.”

Source: http://youtu.be/8hPrjMQlb6Y

There were several emotional speeches broadcast today from the Senate hearing on the problem of gun violence. Former Representative and shooting victim Gabrielle Giffords opened the session with a brief but urgent call to action, citing the deaths of children as reasons to "be bold." Later the committee heard gun activist Gayle Trotter's testimony which raised concerns for women, especially single mothers, who rely on guns to protect themselves and their families. The National Rifle Association's chief Wayne LaPierre also summoned pathos to his cause. LaPierre pointed to the NRA's model school shield program, an initiative to increase security in public schools as a way to stop tragedies like the horrific school shooting that occured in Newtown, Connecticut last month.

To advocate for placing armed guards in more schools LaPierre employed a peculiar, and what I find to be an alarming, figure of speech.  Punning on the term "security blanket" he proposed, "It’s time to throw an immediate blanket of security around our children" (see clip above).

(Image credit: Wikipedia)

I’ve always been amazed that our ancestors lost copies of gospels we think existed, Ciceronian tracks we know were read, and Shakespeare plays we know to have been performed. How do such valuable things disappear? Who’s accountable for these losses? Who ever commissioned Vasari paint a fresco over da Vinci’s The Battle of Anghiari in the Palazzo Vecchio’s Salone dei Cinquecento? (No one today would dare destroy the Vasari – a masterwork in its own right – to see if the da Vinci lay underneath; though we’re 95% sure the da Vinci lies under it, I’d say.) In truth, the real history of these lost artifacts is much more complex, and it’s kind of hard to hold anyone accountable for the losses. Different cultures in different times appreciate different treasures from our past. There exists a whole bookshelf’s worth of scholarship about Shakespeare’s only moderate popularity in his own day, explaining perhaps how Love’s Labour’s Won or Cardenio could have fallen through the cracks. Nor should Vasari feel bad for taking a da Vinci battle painting from us. Leonardo was experimenting with a new painting technique after a bad experience with variations of the fresco medium in The Last Supper, and in The Battle of Anghiari we think he used a thick undercoat of something (possibly a wax) to help preserve the finished product. But the medium used in The Battle of Anghiari was even more prone to decomposition than that of The Last Supper, and thus the painting remained damaged and unfinished for over 100 years before Vasari picked up his brush. The drawing above is a 1603 copy by Peter Paul Rubens.