cac.ophony.org

During the fall of 2009, I took a course at the Graduate Center with Prof. Jean Graham-Jones, “Contemporary Latin American Theatre and Performance.” Going in, I had assumed that much of the archival material we would be referencing would be from the Hemispheric Institute Digital Video Library (HIDVL), a collaboration between New York University Libraries and NYU’s Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. This digital venue brings together videos of performance throughout the Americas that would otherwise be “inaccessible to scholars.”

While it’s true that this is a respected and reliable one-stop reference place to find (and preserve) such materials, given the contemporary focus of the class, YouTube offered hours of browsing enjoyment. The two resources serve very difficult functions—and have very different levels of functionality. (Especially since the Hemispheric Insititute’s archive is frequently restricted to performances that they themselves have had filmed at their own events.)

I don’t know if it counts as procrastination or further research, but I whittled away many evenings that semester watching clips of the dynamic performers we had been studying.

First, here’s a link to a performance by Mexican cabaret performer, Astrid Hadad, from the HIDVL. Her performance, ‘Amores Pelos,’ was filmed in Monterrey, Mexico, in July 2001, as part of the Second Annual Hemispheric Institute Seminar. It’s a long clip, but worth the time to see the costumes changes involved in the “wearable art” of her hair. The site provides a bit of context for those first meeting this artist’s work: “Hadad blends popular songs and ranchero, son and bolero music and political satire with highly theatrical precision to create a genre of music she calls ‘Heavy Nopal’.”

And then, below, is another unique Hadad performance, this time from YouTube (and featuring some well-placed self-flagellation). It brings us into the actual performance space, and is part of a larger documentary about Hadad.

Last summer a student in my public speaking class said that “Cloverfield” was ‘pretty good for an action movie.’ And then he said, ‘I mean it’s a disaster movie, which is a kind of action movie.’  I asked him to tell me what an action movie is as a form or genre, what its properties are. This led to a conversation in which we put the film into context, so rather than just sketch the plot, describe a spectacular scene or two, and name the actors, we talked about the form of a disaster film, its history, and the range of locations and themes it has traversed so far.

When I was an undergrad, my professor Heidi Krueger sent us to look at pointillism paintings at the Moma, then read Gertrude Stein’s attempts to translate pointillism into writing. Stein dispersed units of description throughout a paragraph the way Seurat’s paintings disperse dots of color throughout the frame. After years of reading transparently, without reflecting on the mechanism of the forms of writing, this exercise was a kind of “Matrix” moment for me. I began to see the way forms and genres impose structure, and I began to see representation as a kind of translation of experience or thought which is never complete or direct. In any translation there is adaptation, even distortion, and maybe even loss. I guess translation can be alienating, as well. And I wonder if this is what might be partly what is happening when I hear students mimic the style of the texts they’re assigned in class, or the style of their professor’s lecture.

At the Writing Across the Curriculum Conference last week, two fellows described teaching with different forms. In her class on personality psychology Valerie Futch highlights the way research questions and methodology determine results by assigning personality questionnaires to her students. Doug Singsen taught a class on comics in which he assigned his students to diagram a page, indicating different logics connecting one frame to another: character-to-character, aspect-to-aspect, etc. I was struck by the way both of them seemed to foreground the form, of comic or psychological study, and the way this foregrounding moved their students past a book-report kind of absorption and summarization, to an awareness of the way form works as a kind of structuring logic.

I’ve heard the phrase “writing is thinking” in my experiences with Writing Across the Curriculum, and after the last WAC colloquium I thought about other kinds of work that friends of mine have described: photography, contracting, pattern-making. If these are all forms of thinking, maybe we could say that writing is the academically consecrated form of thinking. Or, that writing is a representation of thinking, one that requires translation into a specific form.

I’ve noticed a tendency among students to parrot or mimic the style of the texts they use in class, and I wonder if this is because for them, unlike grad students and professors, writing is not thinking. Instead, expressing thinking through writing might for some students be an act of extreme translation, from the thinking they already do (in forms other than writing) into the form of writing. After all, academics write and read all the time, we think in it like fish in water. Writing and text is perhaps transparent to us, but more or less opaque others.

The conversation with my student about “Cloverfield” made me want to integrate other forms that we all encounter all the time into academic work, as a way to make the structure opaque to both student and teacher, and allow different levels of competence and levels of analysis into the classroom. I’d like to assign students to write “Cloverfield”  in the form of the first few pages of Pride and Prejudice; or draw the argument of an academic essay as a comic strip; or make a news report of a poem, explaining logical, structural mechanisms across different forms.

In my first year as a WAC fellow, I’ve learned about integrating journals and blogs into academic assignments, and this seems like a great way to connect writing to the thinking that students are already doing outside of college. (If we agree that people generally write emails, and read blogs).

Photo by Shannon Ebner.

I could think of them all these forms as representations of thinking. That’s the way that Derrida and post-structuralism has real world resonance for me. I wonder if by making several forms opaque, we might give students a sense of analytical and expressive competence, which could provide a kind of transition to academic writing. And I wonder if an alienation from popular forms like movies, songs, and news reports might work well with an alienation from academic forms like essays. So we could spread the alienation around, and categorize writing as another form of thinking among many. After all, we arrive at college already schooled in, even experts in, movies, songs, and news reports. And with Blogs@Baruch available here it is possible to integrate many forms into an assignment, or ongoing assignments in a class. (The Baruch blog projects I’ve peeked in on, from classes on food, Chaucer, journalism, etc. are compelling to me, and I imagine they would be to students too.) What if there was a class that didn’t focus on a specific content, but instead was about forms. Is there? I gathered from the WAC colloquium that teachers are assigning writing exercises that highlight the methods and styles of different disciplines, but I’m looking for ways that other teachers might be doing this kind of work. It is my current dream class, working title: “Forms, Forms, Forms!” or maybe, “Post-structuralism and You.”

Last June, Hillary wrote a post on zines that led several of us here at cac.ophony to “come out” as ex-zinesters.  To continue the conversation about zines, I’d like to point out to folks the most recent issue of SIGNS: Journal of Women in Culture and Society.  They’ve devoted a whopping 74 pages to a comparative symposium on feminist zines, featuring both essays and full-page reprints. (Full disclosure here: some of my old zines are cited, including in Barnard Zine Librarian Jenna Freedman’s essay, in which she discusses a zine I edited when I was an angst-ridden teenager. I find this both flattering and terribly embarrassing.)

Over the summer, Jenna invited me and several other people who had donated our zine collections to the Barnard Zine Library for tea (how Seven Sisters!), and we all spent a lot of time in the stacks flipping through the zines that were in circulation. This was certainly a nostalgia trip down memory lane, and a quite physical one at that, as we were literally looking at and holding the very photocopied and stapled pieces of paper that we may have once kept stashed in boxes and bins under our beds and in our closets. Seeing zines in their original form now archived in a college library is quite a different experience from seeing them discussed or reprinted in a fancy academic journal, however. The attention is nice, but one’s interaction with the zines feels at least one step removed. Even if you read the print version of SIGNS rather than online, the reprinted zine excerpts don’t look or feel like the original. (And, in this case, reading this issue of SIGNS online instead of print allows you to see the zine reprints in color).

I am fascinated by the “afterlife” of those objects that were once considered to be—or were created to be—ephemeral. They live on in discussions by critics and historians, and in historical archives, libraries, and museums. These days, they are also being revived digitally, including on Google Books. You know, in the pre-blogging era, when we were sixteen and pouring our angsty hearts out on paper, did any of us have any idea that the words and images we created would still be in circulation? If we did, would that have changed what we produced, how we presented ourselves, or who we considered our audience to be? I wonder.

“Everyone is reading short-form text. Literature has not made that jump.” This is a key line from a recent NYT article “Serving Literature by the Tweet” which concerns a new literary magazine Electric Literature. The name of the magazine startled me at first, as I’m a big believer in the old fashioned way of reading literature precisely as a long-form text printed on a page where I can make notes in the margins. The editors of this new magazine, Andy Hunter and Scott Lindenbaum, make their texts available in multiple mediums: print, Kindle, e-book, iPhone, Twitter, and even audio books. They publish such well-known authors as Michael Cunningham, Colson Whitehead, Lydia Davis, Jim Shepard.

As I continued reading the article, I realized, despite my initial reservations, how promising this project really is. For instance, the authors are asked to select a line from their work to be animated and posted on YouTube. This is a new and very creative form of literary expression that allows for imaginative possibilities and, as Michael Cunningham pointed out, “maintain[s] the integrity of the written word and extend[s] its range.”

I was reminded of a few students in our in-class workshops in the past few weeks whose eyes were constantly on their iPhones. The same happens on the subway, in gym classes, etc. As much as I’m reluctant to accept the pervasive presence of the electronic world, I must admit that it can indeed create what Rick Moody has called “new envelopes for [literature’s] message.”

It’s been ten years since I worked in book publishing, but I still sometimes miss it, and still follow the industry news a bit via daily emails from Publishers Weekly (PW). Today begins the biggest annual book publishing event, the Frankfurt Book Fair, and the show started with a Tools of Change keynote address by Sara Lloyd of Pan Macmillan that revisited the topic of publishing’s future. PW wrote about the event and how in a blog post a year ago Lloyd had chastised her audience for focusing too much on this worry about the future and not on what was happening right now. In the Frankfurt address this week, she talked about the extent to which that future is now and how much has changed in the past year. For example, the Kindle edition of Dan Brown’s latest bestseller, The Lost Symbol, outsold the print version on the book’s release date. That is not to say that she thinks devices will lead the way for digital publishing, as one of her predictions was that it will be platform-led.

I myself read Kindle editions on my iPhone (if only I could afford a Kindle DX!), but I also like those on the eReader platform I had first used on my old Palm Pilot. That one works not only on my iPhone but also on any computer, and allows me to customize the view on my Mac or PC in a way that makes the book very readable. I like being able to read the book either at my desk on my computer or on the move on my iPhone. But the Kindle app has a lot more books (and a more up-to-date selection), so I am plowing through novels on the subway in the Kindle format, too. Both platforms, Kindle and eReader, have a problem that Lloyd didn’t mention: in the rush to get books out, they’re missing some really basic copyediting steps. I’ve bought several books that had major typos and formatting errors, from blocks of text out of place or repeated, to text being spread across the page like an e.e. cummings poem. An author friend notified me that his backlist was now available on Kindle, so I happily bought some of them. I was embarrassed to tell him that they were full of typos, so I hashed it out with Amazon instead.

The Frankfurt speech ended with the following admonition against complacency in the industry (in any industry?):

Lloyd closed with the following quote from Seth Godin, which stands as both cautionary and a call-to-action: “Things you can learn from the music business (as it falls apart): The first rule is so important, it’s rule 0: 0. The new thing is never as good as the old thing, at least right now. Soon, the new thing will be better than the old thing will be. But if you wait until then, it’s going to be too late. Feel free to wax nostalgic about the old thing, but don’t fool yourself into believing it’s going to be here forever. It won’t.”
from PW

Gabriella Coleman, cultural anthropologist and Assistant Professor of Media Culture and Communication at NYU spoke at the Graduate Center about her research on the free and open source software movement and the hacker culture last Thursday. I couldn’t make it to her talk but was able to read her article “Code is Speech.” In this article, she investigates how Free and Open Source Software (F/OSS) developers have contested and rewritten central concepts of modern liberalism, especially freedom of speech, by illustrating the cases of two programmers, Jon Johansen and Dmitry Sklyarov, and the protests provoked by their arrests between 1999 and 2003. Her article touches upon the sensitive issues such as intellectual property, copyright, and the notion of originality, which N. Katherine Hayles also problematizes as the products of the 18C liberal humanism in her book My Mother Was a Computer. Coleman writes:

“This is key to emphasize, for even if we can postulate a relation between a product of creative work—source code—and a democratic ideal—free speech, there is no necessary or fundamental connection between them (Ratto 2005). Many academics and programmers have argued convincingly that the act of programming should be thought of as literary—‘a culture innovative and revisionary close reading’ (Black 2002; see also Chopra and Dexter 2007). As with print culture of the last 200 years (Johns 2000), this literary culture of programming has often been dictated and delineated by a copyright regime whose logic is one of restriction. New free speech sensibilities, which fundamentally challenge the coupling between copyright and literary creation, must therefore be seen as a political act and choice, requiring sustained labor and creativity to stabilize these connections” (449).

Coleman’s words remind me of Mikhail’s recent post in which he weighed in on the question of openness of the VOCAT. I was excited to read that he believed the VOCAT should be free and open wide to other institutions and other developers, to benefit not only many other students and schools but also the tool itself so that it may evolve in ways we’ve never foreseen.

I also think that that’s how William Gibson, who coined the term “cyberspace,” envisions the Net in his cyberpunk classic Neuromancer. With all the futurist horrors of mechanization of humanity imagined by the novel, it implies that the net can still be the brave new world for us as long as it remains open and public.

photo credit: Vanessa Roanhorse

I recently moved from a brownstone to a large multi-story apartment building. One of the casualties of this move was my apparently unrealistic expectation that when you get a newspaper delivered to you daily, you will always have a blue-plastic wrapped paper lovingly waiting for you when you wake up in the morning and put some pants and flip-flops on to retrieve it. After three days in a row of having my paper poached by some unscrupulous new neighbor, I did what any self-respecting thirty-something graduate student would do: I griped about it on Facebook. (Well, after calling the paper for re-delivery, that is).

While many people have expressed sympathy about the paper-poaching, some people I’ve complained to, both virtually and face-to-face, have also expressed surprise that I get the newspaper delivered to me daily. The expense of daily delivery is one aspect of the surprise (to which my reply is: bourgie habits die hard), but some are also amazed that I actually read the paper in print form. “Why don’t you just read it online?” they ask.

So, I’ve been trying to articulate why I prefer to read my paper in 3-D rather than online. Here are just three reasons:

• It’s part of my morning ritual. Every morning, 7 days a week, I like to sit at my kitchen table and read the paper while I eat my breakfast and drink my coffee. If I read it online, I’d have to bring my laptop to the kitchen, or bring my breakfast to my desk, which is a personal boundary I shall not cross. (And don’t even think about suggesting I scroll through the headlines on my iPod in between sips of coffee and bites of granola).
• The sensory experience. Feeling newsprint between your fingers, smelling traces of ink, hearing the scratch of paper as you turn pages: you lose the tactile experience when you read online.  Perhaps it is my history as a former zinester that led me to appreciate the allure of physical paper. Analog rules.
• The reading experience. I read differently when the copy is printed on a page in my hands as opposed to appearing on a screen in front of me. I like being able to visually scan a large page, or easily flip to another page, rather than having to (primarily) scroll vertically and click on links. The content and quantity of my reading also changes depending on format. The printed paper is curated differently from the online version, leading to a different cumulative narrative of headlines and stories. When I read a physical paper, I tend to look at every page, scanning all headlines and reading what appeals to me. When I read the paper online, my eye gravitates to what is on top and in the middle and in large print, rarely scrolling down to read or click on the smaller headlines. My attention span wanders. I veer off to read other sites. I end up reading less, and being less informed.

I know, I know, despite my preference for print, the newspaper industry is dying. But what do other people think about print versus online? Do you read print newspapers, or are you primarily an online reader? What are your reasons either way?

For those of you who can’t resist speculating on the (in)communicative futures of the facebook generation, Mark Bauerlein has an interesting opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal:

Why Gen-Y Johnny Can’t Read Nonverbal Cues: An emphasis on social networking puts younger people at a face-to-face disadvantage.

There’s a Zine Fest at the Brooklyn Lyceum this weekend. When I told my former zine co-creater about it, her response was, “Who knew people still made zines?!” I had the same thought. Turns out, they still do.

Hearing about this upcoming event presented a nice occasion to revisit my zine-making past. The information for the Fest seems to refer to real zines, the cut-and-paste kind, not some sort of newfangled virtual version. Do zine-creators distinguish between the two these days? Are you kind of lame if you make an online zine (but not a blog?), or are you pathetically retro if you bother with the paper kind? Some brief research suggests that they’re existing cozily side-by-side— online resources are archiving the material stuff in searchable ways, interested readers are finding them more easily and a community is sustained and expanded. (Back in 1994, I usually found zines to order through the self-styled ads in the back of other zines, a process both haphazard and mysterious.)

My furious bout of zine Googling also led me to the Barnard Zine Library. Barnard College is the first academic library to circulate zines, and their collection numbers in the thousands, focusing primarily on Riot Grrrl and Third Wave Feminist Zines. (And, if you’re feeling confused right now, their website has a concise FAQ to get you up-to-speed on zines.) Thanks to this Zine Library, you can even search for zines in CLIO– Columbia Library’s Online Catalog– which is where I was surprised to find one of my old zines, Electric Mayhem, listed. That’s either entirely embarrassing or extremely cool.

Turning to legitimately talented zine writers, I’m thrilled that one of my favorite zine grrrls continues to make distinctive creations as a graphic designer, and shares them on her blog, Miss Sequential. I was somehow relieved to discover that the same elements that made me wait by the mail slot for each new issue of /nothing/ and Red-Hooded Sweatshirt were still there for me in her current work.

painting by Marissa Falco

And, giving a little shout-out to the readers and writers whose zines are languishing in childhood bedroom closets around the globe, she occasionally posts her cartoons from the good old days, when we were all into “intense autobiographical chronicles.”

originally printed in RHS #4

Hijab: (Arabic) Veil.

A philosophy that has originated in urban centers.  A transnational movement of modesty and subversiveness.  A response to misconceptions that Muslim women, and especially Muslim women who veil (or who hijab), are submissive, passive, victimized and the worth of two bearded goats (on a good day).  A response to Oprah pulling the burqa off of a brown woman on stage at Madison Square Garden circa 2002.

Burqa: (Pashto) A full-body veil that covers the face.  Seen in Queens during celebrations at Flushing Meadow Park.  Seen lifted up during the post-Taliban years in Afghanistan.  Seen torn off by American women (and in one comic book, by Wonder Woman as well).

Hijab Punk styles… too numerous to count. But some examples are: Hijab combined with green nails, pink sneakers and an affinity with Rainbow Brite; Goth hijab girls who thrive on their mother’s kajal collection; Hijab with safety pins and Sid Vicious references on their t-shirt… the list goes on.

Ultimate Hijab Punk story to read: “Misli Midhib, Punk Rock Hijabi” by Cihan Kaan about a girl named Misli who is dropped down to the earth via a meteor and who covers her cosmic skin with a full hijab and performs Sufi whirls to disrupt the narratives of Muslim women.  One of the stories in the forthcoming short story collection titled: Halal Pork. Here is an excerpt from the story:

A nameless lightning bolt hit a magical Afghan carpet from a distant star,  carrying on it a wandering babushka caught in a world between the skies.  Drifting space rocks, a homeland memory that dropped her through our atmosphere onto the Central Asian steppe of Coney Island, New York. She walked the rustic shores, lived in broken amusement parks and worked silently inside sideshows.

Ultimate Hijab Punk artist to follow: Princess Hijab, a young woman based on the streets of Paris, who interweaves the philosophy of Adbusters and the Hijab.  (See photo above from Princess Hijab website). She describes herself as:

This is the story of a young woman fighting every day for a noble cause: she wants to “hijabize” advertising. Princess Hijab knows that L’Oréal and Dark&Lovely have been killing her little by little… When she was a teen, she heard about movements such as Adbuster; but since 9/11, things have changed… Princess Hijab will go on, veiled and alone, forever asserting her physical and mental integrity. By day, she wears a white veil, symbol of purity. By night, her black veil is the expression of her vengeful fight for a cause (custom ad). With her spray paint and black marker pen, she is out to hijabize advertising. Even Kate Moss is targeted

Cihan Kaan author of Halal Pork (forthcoming, Up-Set Press)

Incorporating this concept of Hijab Punk, or the more popular (and more macho) Muslim Punk (which draws origins from punk garage bands and from the writer Hanif Kureish, the Pakistani/British novelist) into a standard Muslim Diaspora course at a college was the best thing I ever did as an academic. Not only was it “snooze proof” because Punk aesthetics is always so confrontational, brutally honest, and anti-establishment (which is what makes the term Muslim Punk so controversial), but it introduced a discussion of fashion, music, and film in the construction of one’s hybrid and sometimes transnational identity.  Its the fluidity of Hijab Punk or Muslim Punk that appealed to my students and myself.

Students listening to Kaan read.