viz. - New York

Wallace as Visual Experience

Eric Detweiler — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 13:00:00 +0000

"David Foster Wallace mii Playing Tennis" — Image Credit: Nick Maniatis, via Kottke.org

My first spring in Texas left me nostalgic for my Kentucky roots. This, of course, meant I’ve spent the last few weeks watching entirely too much March Madness. For Kentuckians, without a single professional sports team to call their own—and without Texas-sized performance and investment in college football—college basketball is a powerful source of sports identity. The showdown between the University of Louisville and the University of Kentucky in this year’s Final Four was an epic, almost state-shattering event.

I’m not much interested in halftime banter or commercial breaks, however, so the last few weeks have also included a good deal of channel surfing. As I surfed, I found myself catching glimpses of another sport I’ve always wanted to watch more of but never have: tennis. My potential interest in tennis has nothing to do with fond remembrances of my single season as a high-school tennis player (I was horrible). It’s a theoretical interest that is largely indebted to David Foster Wallace. Tennis figures prominently not only in Wallace’s well-known novel Infinite Jest, but in his essays.

The first piece in Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again sets the tone. The essay, “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley,” comprises a series of personal reflections on Wallace’s tennis-heavy upbringing in central Illinois, but is also a keen look at the visual tableaux and mathematical geography that made up his childhood landscape. Reflecting on his move from IL to Massachusetts, Wallace writes, “I’d grown up inside vectors, lines and lines athwart lines, grids—and, on the scale of horizons, broad curving lines of geographic force, the weird topographical drain-swirl of a whole lot of ice-ironed land that sits and spins atop plates” (3). Consider an aerial view of Philo, Wallace’s hometown:

Image Credit: Google Maps

Lines abound. Wallace’s later description of the town is utterly mathematical—in one sense exhaustively literal, and in another wonderfully metaphorical: “Philo, Illinois, is a cockeyed grid, nine north-south streets against six northeast-southwest, fifty-one gorgeous slanted-cruciform corners (the east and west intersection-angles’ tangents could be evaluated integrally in terms of their secants!) around a three-intersection central town common with a tank whose nozzle pointed northwest … plus a frozen native son, felled on the Salerno beachhead, whose bronze hand pointed true north” (8). Wallace attributes his success as a young tennis player to his intuitive affinity with this environment and its mathematics.

Image Credit: Tennis Help For Beginner to Pro

The mathematical precision of the ideal court lent him some theoretical edge, but it was the vagaries of central Illinois courts and weather that really gave him his advantage: “I’d found a way not just to accommodate but to employ the heavy summer winds in matches” (14). The “wind and bugs and chuckholes” of central Illinois’ unkempt courts were not resented imperfections for Wallace, but “a kind of inner boundary, my own personal set of lines” (15).

Image Credit: Photos Public Domain

When I see the court above, I think of the decay of suburban sprawl. For Wallace, it might be something strangely wonderful, a geometric set of “deformities to play around” (15).

Wallace speculates about the origins of his preternatural symbiosis with his environment: “I’d known, even horizontally and semiconsciously as a baby, something different, the tall hills and serpentine one-ways of upstate NY. I’m pretty sure I kept the amorphous mush of curves and swells as a contrasting backlight somewhere down in the lizardy part of my brain, because the Philo children I fought and played with, kids who knew and had known nothing else, saw nothing stark or new-worldish in the township’s planar layout, prized nothing crisp. (Except why do I think its significant that so many of them wound up in the military, performing smart right-faces in razor-creased dress blues?)” (8-9).

“Wallace’s birthplace, Ithaca, NY, via satellite” — Image Credit: Google Maps

“Ithaca at eye-level” — Image Credit: Budget Travel

Psycho-geographical ruminations aside, Wallace returns to the visual nature of tennis in one of his last published works, “Roger Federer as Religious Experience.” Published in the New York Times in August of 2006, the Federer piece positions Wallace as spectator rather than player. His sharp eye for the game, however, remains. The online iteration of the story is accompanied by such images as

Image Credit: NYTimes.com

The dynamic virtuosity suggested by such an image is powerful, though Wallace might see the image as a poor reflection of Federer’s platonic perfection. He notes, “An athlete’s beauty is next to impossible to describe directly. Or to evoke.” Words fail, in other words. And so does televised tennis, which “is to live tennis pretty much as video porn is to the felt reality of human love”: “[A] TV screen’s image is only 2-D,” squashing the tennis court’s length and thus failing to capture the speed of a professionally-struck tennis ball, which “in person is fearsome to behold.” TV might capture Federer’s intelligence, “since this intelligence often manifests as angle,” but not the sacred beauty of his play. And I might capture Wallace’s intelligence via blog post, but I’d be remiss not to recommend that you encounter his tennis writing for yourself.

Works Cited

Wallace, David Foster. “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley.” A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1997. 3-20. Print.

---. “Federer as Religious Experience.” New York Times. New York Times, 20 Aug. 2006. Web. 30 Mar. 2012.

Visualizing Censorship: Seals, Symbols, and the Visual Rhetoric of Vice

Jake Ptacek — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 13:00:00 +0000

Photo by Jake Ptacek

We here at viz are deeply excited about our new partnership with the Harry Ransom Center, one of the premier research libraries for the humanities in the United States. As part of that partnership, we’ve been given a tour of their current exhibitions and the chance to blog about some of the Center’s amazing holdings. You may have already had a chance to read Matthew Reilly’s meditation on their Banned, Burned, Seized, and Censored exhibit and Jay Voss’s post on The Greenwich Village Bookshop Door exhibition. Continuing that thread, this week I want to look more closely at two artifacts on display in the BBSC exhibit: the official seals for the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and the New England Watch and Ward Society.

Photo by Jake Ptacek

I won’t rehash the history of either institution too much—something the Center exhibit does more thoroughly and forcefully than I can do here—but I am fascinated by the differing visual appeals of each seal. The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (or NYSSV--sorry there’s no less ungainly acronym) seal creates a tiny narrative. In the left portion of the seal, an official-looking jailer pushes a young man through what must be one of the thickest doors in New York, into the darkness beyond. On the other half, a well-dressed gentleman tosses books onto a blazing fire—and it’s hard not to see a self-satisfied smirk on his face. The seal is a brilliant bit of propaganda. By representing the two acts in the same space, it posits a connection. They become two sides of the same coin. Never mind, of course, that the images are discontinuous—there’s no explanation as to what the criminal has to do with the books being tossed into the fire. Once you’ve seen the image, it’s virtually impossible to unsee the connection, to separate out the different narratives on a gut level.

I should add here that the narrative inscribed on the NYSSV’s seal is far from theoretical. Though technically a private endeavor—it originated through founder Anthony Comstock’s contacts in the YMCA—the NYSSV was chartered by the New York state legislature. Its members had the legal power to raid bookstores, seize material, and make arrests. Under Comstock’s successor, John S. Sumner, the NYSSV raided dozens of bookstores, impounded untold numbers of books, and prosecuted (or attempted to prosecute) dozens of novels and magazines, ranging from Ulysses to Real Forbidden Sweets. The seal was no idle threat, but a history: real people went to prison, and real books were burned, in the name of public morality.

There’s one final irony to the NYSSV’s seal. Perhaps it’s unintentional, or perhaps it’s the “lefty” politics in me looking for evidence of some Orwellian dystopia, but I wonder: when it’s read in the standard left-to-right way of to Western readers, the seal begins with an imprisonment before it gets to the “suppression of vice” (i.e the book burning). In other words, you go first, and the books after you. It’s a warning to everyone that what you read might not even be marked out yet as dangerous. A vicious book might be defined, not by its effect on you, but by your effect on it. There's a looking-glass mentality at work here which upsets the traditional narrative of a book's influence ("vicious books make bad citizens"). Instead, the seal seems to suggest that "bad citizens read bad books;" sadly, this would not be the last time that 20th century politics would rewrite cultural narratives.

Photo by Jake Ptacek

The New England Watch and Ward Society’s seal is—let’s face it—cooler. A hand throttles the snake coiled around it beneath the legend, “Manu Fortis”—“With a strong hand.” The symbolism is startling and direct, with all the subtlety of a Mack truck. While the NYSSV felt the need to narrativize and to demonstrate the effects of vice, the Watch and Ward Society—even the name is less linear—creates an iconography of power. The snake, with all its biblical associations intact, has fangs extended, ready to strike. Only a powerful (and, needless to say, masculine) hand can protect all the innocents who undoubtedly crouch just outside the frame of the seal. And it’s worth mentioning again, that hand isn’t just holding the snake, it’s crushing it. The seal makes a brilliantly simple, if disturbingly violent, claim to power.

A kind of sister organization to the NYSSV, the Watch and Ward Society was based out of Boston, where membership was largely composed of the “Brahmin aristocracy” (membership was only available to men). Unlike the NYSSV, the Watch and Ward society had no actual legal authority to impound books or make arrests; they relied on legal protest and challenges to ban books. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that their seal is more cannily metaphorical (and perhaps a slight case of over-compensation for their legal impotence). The Watch and Ward Society was no less effective, though: the phrase “banned in Boston” has entered the lexicon thanks to their efforts.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

As the poster above demonstrates, the visual rhetoric of book censorship had to change dramatically after the Nazi Party began putting into action on a state-implemented level what had previously been only the wildest fantasy of book censors (though I personally deplore the actions of the NYSSV and the Watch and Ward Society, the calibrations of their acts are, of course, far different than those of the Nazi Party). No longer could smiling book burners be depicted on state-supported seals, and the inherent claims of the Watch and Ward Society’s seal needed to be re-evaluated in a society that had witnessed the liquidation of personal freedoms and identity on a previously unimaginable scale. Ironically, this visual image itself comes from Boston, where the Boston Public Library emerged as quiet defenders of freedom of publication.

Both Societies struggled to survive in a post-WWII society. The NYSSV changed its name to the Society to Maintain Public Decency in 1947, and quietly dissolved after the retirement of Sumner, whose charisma had kept the Society afloat through a series of legal defeats. In 1948 the new head of the Watch and Ward Society, Dwight Spaulding, redirected its focus towards gambling and other social issues. Today, after several mergers and filiations, the Society’s endowments are part of the much different Community Resources for Justice group, which works to promote prison reform and ex-convicts’ rights.

Censorship, of course, hasn’t gone away, and new media fields—film, various iterations of popular music, video games—continue, along with books, to be targeted as corrupting influences on America’s youth. The act of censorship itself, though, has largely become a local issue, which tends to hide its prevalence, except in certain high-profile cases. It seems unlikely (though not, of course, impossible) that any American group will so dramatically visualize censorship as iconically and dramatically as these two. Is it possible to feel nostalgia for the obvious?

The thing with feathers

ebfrye — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 05:10:36 +0000

Image Credit : Timothy Schubert

As Cate’s post from last week illustrates, while we continue to be affected by the events of 9/11, we’re also faced with the task of interpreting an expansive and wide-reaching 9/11 memorial culture.

In a recent NYT Op/Ed, when remembering the attacks, Charles M. Blow wrote, “I saw images of small figures that looked liked birds outside the towers. Only they weren’t birds, they were people, forced out by the flames, forced to make an impossible choice under impossible circumstances.” What’s odd is that Blow’s statement came before the memorial events of this year, when two beams of light were blasted into the night sky. The gesture, which oddly recalled the “bat signal,” attracted 10,000 migrating birds, which were subsequently driven into a frenzy and thrown off course.

Having first learned of the incident via a story on NPR’s All Things Considered, my interpretive cues were aural ones. Hearing the recorded flapping of thousands of wings left me only to imagine the scene until I saw the pictures and video posted on gizmodo.

Image Credit: Robert Berjarano

Video Credit: Robert Berjarano

Curiously, the blogger describes the incident and its accompanying images as “spooky.” Indeed, that a stream of “terrorized” birds overtook the celebration is remarkable, especially given Blow’s comments about the way in which those fleeing the towers those years ago took on an avian appearance.

But I’ll go a step further and ask whether such "spookiness" provides an occasion for us to reconsider whether blasting two streams of light can really be the most appropriate form of memorial given such (unintended) consequences and our growing energy concerns.

To illustrate my point, I shift to the work of National Geographic photographer Jim Richardson who documents light pollution and its effects. The image below shows a group of local school children hovering over a display of Toronto's light pollution “victims."

Image Credit: Jim Richardson

Although the image depicts an educational occasion, it also portrays, quite obviously, such a morbid one. Furthermore, I can’t help but think that the shape of the sheet as well as the arrangement of the dead birds visually recalls the appearance of an American flag.

In these cases, to revise Emily Dickinson, hope is not necessarily the thing with feathers.

Do you know where your manholes came from?

LaurenMitchell — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 15:30:18 +0000

Adam Huggins, a free-lance photograph for the New York Times recently made a visual argument that caused a lot of people to pay attention to manholes.

Huggins went to the foundry in India where all manholes used on New York City streets are made and photographed the working conditions there, finding men with little clothing and no shoes handling molten metal of 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit. The slideshow Huggins produced convinced Con Edison, another buyer of the manholes, to rewrite its international contracts to include safely requirements. The attention disturbed the American buyers of the manholes, and worried the Indian factory owners, who were concerned about lost contracts and jobs. Apparently, in addition to worrying about where, and under what conditions our fake Louis Vuitton bags and new Nike’s are made, we need to worry about the manholes. Huggins work is another illustration of how images make a powerful argument.