bookmobility

information in motion

0 notes

Recently in the course I’m teaching, we discussed Greg Downey’s “The Librarian and the Univac: Automation and Labor at the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair.” It’s an excellent piece about the politics of labor and technology at LIBRARY 21, an exhibit organized collaboratively by the American Library Association and—wait for it—the United States Air Force. In addition to more traditional (though often tech-packed) spaces like Children’s World and a teen-focused Learning Resource Center, the exhibit featured a UNIVAC computer programmed to spit out quotations from famous books, reference lists targeted to specific demographic cross-sections, and other (dubiously useful) information. 
While searching for material to teach alongside the article, I came across this story of a scrapbook discovered then deconstructed. The book recorded one family’s road trip through the Pacific Northwest in 1962, including a stop at the World’s Fair. The person who discovered the scrapbook sold some of the material but passed on other bits to various people and institutions. Imagine my delight when it turns out that not only is some of the material from the scrapbook from LIBRARY 21 but that it was donated to the American Library Association Archives, located right here at the University of Illinois. (My students will be using the ALA archives for their research project, so this was an opportunity to discuss not only the sources but questions of their provenance and the ways archives organize and make them available.)
My favorite of the LIBRARY 21 documents—all print-outs from the UNIVAC, the others provide information about specific countries—is the one picture above, which adds even more layers to Downey’s argument about the problem of supposedly labor-saving technologies (hint: they really do no such thing). Titled “THE COMPUTER……..ELECTRONIC SERVANT TO MANKIND,” the print-out reads:

IN THIS EXHIBIT YOU HAVE SEEN HOW A SALE RECORDED ON A CASH REGISTER WILL FLOW THROUGH AN ELECTRONIC SYSTEM IN WHICH MACHINES READ HUMAN-LANGUAGE PRINTING AND IN WHICH MACHINES TALK TO ONE ANOTHER. THESE SAME PRINCIPLES ARE BEING APPLIED TO EVERY LINE OF BUSINESS, SCIENNCE, AND GOVERNMENT TO HANDLE THE WORLDS MOUNTAINS OF PAPERWORK.
THE COMPUTERS OF TODAY ARE OFF-SPRING OF SEVERAL GENERATIONS OF ELECTRONIC-ANCESTORS. BY THE TIME THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY ROLLS AROUND, THEY WILL HAVE CHANGED IN APPEARANCE AND DESIGN TO A POINT WHERE THEY WILL BEAR LITTLE RESEMBLANCE TO THEIR PRESENT DAY COUNTERPARTS.
THIS IS NOT TO SAY THAT TODAY’S COMPUTERS ARE NOT PRACTICAL…NOTHING COULD BE FURTHER FROM THE TRUTH. IF IT WERE NOT FOR THESE MARVELOUS TOOLS, MAN WOULD NOT BE MAKING TODAYS TREMENDOUS ADVANCES IN SCIENCE, MEDICINE, EDUCATION, TRANSPORTATION, PRODUCTION, MARKETING, AND DATA PROCESSING.
OPERATING AT SPEEDS WHICH STAGGER THE IMAGINATION, COMPUTERS SOLVE PROBLEMS THAT WOULD TAKE MANY YEARS TO SOLVE…THEY ENABLE PEOPLE IN MANAGEMENT TO OBTAIN FACTS ABOUT THEIR BUSINESS IN TIME TO BE USED MOST EFFECTIVELY…THEY TAKE THE DRUDGERY OUT OF RECORD-KEEPING…THEY ELEVATE THE ROLES OF PEOPLE IN BUSINESS TO A PLACE WHERE EMPLOYEES CAN CONTRIBUTE MORE OF THEIR TALENTS TO THEIR INDIVIDUAL JOBS…THEY HANDLE THE REAMS OF PAPERWORK THAT FLOW THROUGH THE WORLDS BUSINESS HOUSES…THEY HELP THE SCIENTISTS DESIGN NEW AND BETTER PRODUCTS…THEY SERVE AS VALUABLE TOOLS IN DEFENSE, SPACE, AND MILITARY ENDEAVORS.
IN SHORT, THE COMPUTER IS MORE THAN JUST ANOTHER RECORD-KEEPING MACHINE…IT DOES MORE THAN PROCESS DATA. THE COMPUTER IS AN ELECTRONIC-SERVANT, SERVING MANKIND…MAKING THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE IN WHICH TO WORK…A BETTER PLACE IN WHICH TO LIVE.
THIS REPORT WAS PRINTED IN JUST 4 SECONDS.

I’m particularly fascinated by the way that, in the midst of brave-new-world boosterism (“THESE MARVELOUS TOOLS,” “TREMENDOUS ADVANCES”), the print-out maps new human-computer interactions onto a much older master-servant relationship. Plus ça change, and all that.
[This report was posted in only 4 seconds.]

Recently in the course I’m teaching, we discussed Greg Downey’s “The Librarian and the Univac: Automation and Labor at the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair.” It’s an excellent piece about the politics of labor and technology at LIBRARY 21, an exhibit organized collaboratively by the American Library Association and—wait for it—the United States Air Force. In addition to more traditional (though often tech-packed) spaces like Children’s World and a teen-focused Learning Resource Center, the exhibit featured a UNIVAC computer programmed to spit out quotations from famous books, reference lists targeted to specific demographic cross-sections, and other (dubiously useful) information. 

While searching for material to teach alongside the article, I came across this story of a scrapbook discovered then deconstructed. The book recorded one family’s road trip through the Pacific Northwest in 1962, including a stop at the World’s Fair. The person who discovered the scrapbook sold some of the material but passed on other bits to various people and institutions. Imagine my delight when it turns out that not only is some of the material from the scrapbook from LIBRARY 21 but that it was donated to the American Library Association Archives, located right here at the University of Illinois. (My students will be using the ALA archives for their research project, so this was an opportunity to discuss not only the sources but questions of their provenance and the ways archives organize and make them available.)

My favorite of the LIBRARY 21 documents—all print-outs from the UNIVAC, the others provide information about specific countries—is the one picture above, which adds even more layers to Downey’s argument about the problem of supposedly labor-saving technologies (hint: they really do no such thing). Titled “THE COMPUTER……..ELECTRONIC SERVANT TO MANKIND,” the print-out reads:

IN THIS EXHIBIT YOU HAVE SEEN HOW A SALE RECORDED ON A CASH REGISTER WILL FLOW THROUGH AN ELECTRONIC SYSTEM IN WHICH MACHINES READ HUMAN-LANGUAGE PRINTING AND IN WHICH MACHINES TALK TO ONE ANOTHER. THESE SAME PRINCIPLES ARE BEING APPLIED TO EVERY LINE OF BUSINESS, SCIENNCE, AND GOVERNMENT TO HANDLE THE WORLDS MOUNTAINS OF PAPERWORK.

THE COMPUTERS OF TODAY ARE OFF-SPRING OF SEVERAL GENERATIONS OF ELECTRONIC-ANCESTORS. BY THE TIME THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY ROLLS AROUND, THEY WILL HAVE CHANGED IN APPEARANCE AND DESIGN TO A POINT WHERE THEY WILL BEAR LITTLE RESEMBLANCE TO THEIR PRESENT DAY COUNTERPARTS.

THIS IS NOT TO SAY THAT TODAY’S COMPUTERS ARE NOT PRACTICAL…NOTHING COULD BE FURTHER FROM THE TRUTH. IF IT WERE NOT FOR THESE MARVELOUS TOOLS, MAN WOULD NOT BE MAKING TODAYS TREMENDOUS ADVANCES IN SCIENCE, MEDICINE, EDUCATION, TRANSPORTATION, PRODUCTION, MARKETING, AND DATA PROCESSING.

OPERATING AT SPEEDS WHICH STAGGER THE IMAGINATION, COMPUTERS SOLVE PROBLEMS THAT WOULD TAKE MANY YEARS TO SOLVE…THEY ENABLE PEOPLE IN MANAGEMENT TO OBTAIN FACTS ABOUT THEIR BUSINESS IN TIME TO BE USED MOST EFFECTIVELY…THEY TAKE THE DRUDGERY OUT OF RECORD-KEEPING…THEY ELEVATE THE ROLES OF PEOPLE IN BUSINESS TO A PLACE WHERE EMPLOYEES CAN CONTRIBUTE MORE OF THEIR TALENTS TO THEIR INDIVIDUAL JOBS…THEY HANDLE THE REAMS OF PAPERWORK THAT FLOW THROUGH THE WORLDS BUSINESS HOUSES…THEY HELP THE SCIENTISTS DESIGN NEW AND BETTER PRODUCTS…THEY SERVE AS VALUABLE TOOLS IN DEFENSE, SPACE, AND MILITARY ENDEAVORS.

IN SHORT, THE COMPUTER IS MORE THAN JUST ANOTHER RECORD-KEEPING MACHINE…IT DOES MORE THAN PROCESS DATA. THE COMPUTER IS AN ELECTRONIC-SERVANT, SERVING MANKIND…MAKING THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE IN WHICH TO WORK…A BETTER PLACE IN WHICH TO LIVE.

THIS REPORT WAS PRINTED IN JUST 4 SECONDS.

I’m particularly fascinated by the way that, in the midst of brave-new-world boosterism (“THESE MARVELOUS TOOLS,” “TREMENDOUS ADVANCES”), the print-out maps new human-computer interactions onto a much older master-servant relationship. Plus ça change, and all that.

[This report was posted in only 4 seconds.]

21 notes

Since I keep posting images of and excerpts from Marshall McLuhan’s (and Quentin Fiore’s) The Medium is the Massage, I thought I’d also draw your attention to a new book, the amazing-looking The Electric Information Age Book (2012).
Maria Popova, over at BrainPickings, describes the book:

The Electric Information Age Book: McLuhan / Agel / Fiore and the Experimental Paperback tells the fascinating story of these collaborations and how they  created a new media form “designed to put into popular form, or into  more understandable form, some of the greatest ideas of our time.” … The promise of that story is a deeper understanding of  contemporary visual culture, the convergence of highbrow and lowbrow,  the vernacular of advertising, the dynamics of newspaper and magazine  publishing, the creation of avant-garde mass culture, and a wealth in  between.

I am definitely getting this books as soon as possible.
In particular, I’m excited to read it because teaching Massage raised, appropriately enough, fascinating questions about the relationship of form and content in the book itself.
Popova continues:

McLuhan, Agel, and Fiore embraced “the book’s intrinsic strengths as a  site for synthesis and surprise,” as [Adam] Michaels eloquently puts it, and  forged a visionary model in which the unconventional intertwining of  form and content engaged audiences with new, almost cinematic modes of  delivery.

When we read excerpts of the book for class, I scanned them and provided them as PDFs in addition to having the entire book in the bookstore. This prompted a truly fascinating discussion amongst my students about the differences between reading it as a book and on a screen.
As rapturous as McLuhan can be about the possibilities of television and of electric circuitry, my students generally agreed that the message (or Massage, rather) fared best in print, on paper. They argued that—more than four decades after the book’s publication and in the midst of a digital age—seeing interrelated layers of text and image on a screen is not exactly new and exciting. But their peculiar marriage in a book, and especially the way they are brought together in this book, continues to offer “synthesis and surprise.”
More precisely, some students continued, reading the paper version of Massage means seeing yourself holding it and thus understanding it as a strange, synthetic, but whole object, as yet itself rent by the fragmentation it portended. (This was, of course, something that McLuhan and Fiore played with explicitly if incompletely, as in the two spreads above.)
Next time I teach Massage, I’ll have to assign The Electric Information Age Book. And that’s a very exciting prospect, indeed.

Since I keep posting images of and excerpts from Marshall McLuhan’s (and Quentin Fiore’s) The Medium is the Massage, I thought I’d also draw your attention to a new book, the amazing-looking The Electric Information Age Book (2012).

Maria Popova, over at BrainPickings, describes the book:

The Electric Information Age Book: McLuhan / Agel / Fiore and the Experimental Paperback tells the fascinating story of these collaborations and how they created a new media form “designed to put into popular form, or into more understandable form, some of the greatest ideas of our time.” … The promise of that story is a deeper understanding of contemporary visual culture, the convergence of highbrow and lowbrow, the vernacular of advertising, the dynamics of newspaper and magazine publishing, the creation of avant-garde mass culture, and a wealth in between.

I am definitely getting this books as soon as possible.

In particular, I’m excited to read it because teaching Massage raised, appropriately enough, fascinating questions about the relationship of form and content in the book itself.

Popova continues:

McLuhan, Agel, and Fiore embraced “the book’s intrinsic strengths as a site for synthesis and surprise,” as [Adam] Michaels eloquently puts it, and forged a visionary model in which the unconventional intertwining of form and content engaged audiences with new, almost cinematic modes of delivery.

When we read excerpts of the book for class, I scanned them and provided them as PDFs in addition to having the entire book in the bookstore. This prompted a truly fascinating discussion amongst my students about the differences between reading it as a book and on a screen.

As rapturous as McLuhan can be about the possibilities of television and of electric circuitry, my students generally agreed that the message (or Massage, rather) fared best in print, on paper. They argued that—more than four decades after the book’s publication and in the midst of a digital age—seeing interrelated layers of text and image on a screen is not exactly new and exciting. But their peculiar marriage in a book, and especially the way they are brought together in this book, continues to offer “synthesis and surprise.”

More precisely, some students continued, reading the paper version of Massage means seeing yourself holding it and thus understanding it as a strange, synthetic, but whole object, as yet itself rent by the fragmentation it portended. (This was, of course, something that McLuhan and Fiore played with explicitly if incompletely, as in the two spreads above.)

Next time I teach Massage, I’ll have to assign The Electric Information Age Book. And that’s a very exciting prospect, indeed.

Filed under print culture teaching graphic design

5 notes

Here’s a gorgeous photograph (from the excellent hadarahgeesie) of a favorite bit of obsolete classroom technology: the overhead projector.
I’ve never used one to teach—its neighbors on the timeline (chalkboards on one side, digital projectors on the other) have treated me well—but I find the presence of overheads somehow comforting. Even having to roll them away from the board, awkwardly, trying not to get the wheels caught on the cord or to tumble the whole thing, shatteringly, to the ground, they are an obstinate reminder (stubbornly there) of the persistence of the past in the present.
I have written before on bookmobility about being brought up short, being reminded of how quickly things can change, of how foreign the now-familiar once was. The overhead projector is something different, or perhaps opposite.
It is the glowingly, creakily, even assertively vestigial organ of the classroom. Upward- and outward-reaching, it nonetheless nestles, crouching, waiting.

Here’s a gorgeous photograph (from the excellent hadarahgeesie) of a favorite bit of obsolete classroom technology: the overhead projector.

I’ve never used one to teach—its neighbors on the timeline (chalkboards on one side, digital projectors on the other) have treated me well—but I find the presence of overheads somehow comforting. Even having to roll them away from the board, awkwardly, trying not to get the wheels caught on the cord or to tumble the whole thing, shatteringly, to the ground, they are an obstinate reminder (stubbornly there) of the persistence of the past in the present.

I have written before on bookmobility about being brought up short, being reminded of how quickly things can change, of how foreign the now-familiar once was. The overhead projector is something different, or perhaps opposite.

It is the glowingly, creakily, even assertively vestigial organ of the classroom. Upward- and outward-reaching, it nonetheless nestles, crouching, waiting.

0 notes

This semester, I’m teaching an undergraduate research capstone course called “Information in Motion.” We’re looking at public libraries and at the internet to investigate what happens to information when it travels along networks, as well as how it influences (and is influenced by) the people it passes along the way.

Yesterday, we started talking about methods, with an emphasis on theory and models. (Next week, we’ll be visiting with the lovely and helpful staff at the American Library Association archives and University of Illinois archives, where we’ll start getting into some of the more nitty-gritty aspects of historical method.)

The students read Robert Darnton’s influential 1982 essay, “What is the History of Books?” which established the agenda for book history, especially in the English-language academy. In the course of his essay, Darnton proposes what he calls a “communications circuit,” as a “general model for analyzing the way books come into being and spread through society.” (You can see an illustration for the circuit here.)

After discussing the circuit and thinking about how we might adjust it for application to print—libraries are noticeably absent, for example—I wanted us to think about what it might offer the study of digital information and its “life cycle,” as Darnton puts it.

To give us something to play around with, I showed them the video above, and then we walked through the circuit, talking about how we would need to shift the circuit in order to understand this representation of a flying sloth.

I want to provide some of the highlights of our discussion here:

AUTHOR

My students quickly understood that authorship is pretty complicated in this instance. We have the person who actually did the filming of the event, but then we also have the person (“timah99”) who took the video and added effects and music, producing what we actually watched. Add to that the fact that R. Kelly technically authored a borrowed part of the text, and we had a very productive conversation about how new technologies change who can produce and how they do so. At the same time, one particular student brilliantly noted that this might not be so new at all: quotation and citation are practices that may have shifted but which also have histories that stretch back much further than digital media.

SUPPLIERS AND PRINTERS

Darnton emphasizes the role of printers and of those who supply the raw materials of books (paper, ink, type) and the labor to produce them. My students identified a similarly wide-ranging, and perhaps even more various, group of “suppliers” for this video—from the camera and computer manufacturers to the programmers who developed the editing software to the power company that made running any of those machines or software possible. Additionally, the person who initially made the video available, which “timah99” mixed and edited, also supplied the raw materials for the final product, in a sense. (Delightfully, it was also proposed that the sloth itself be classified as a supplier, specifically of the strangeness/cuteness that makes the video work.)

SHIPPERS

Darnton spends a lot of his essay talking about the wagoners and such who actually took the books from the publisher/printer to the booksellers. In the case of the video, the students identified YouTube as a primary shipper, but also pointed out that Internet Service Providers, satellites/cables, and cross-platform appropriators (Tosh 2.0 or those ridiculous CNN viral video segments) as making the product available to consumers in ways analogous to wagoners. One of the most interesting parts of the whole conversation came here, too, when another student proposed people who share the video on Facebook or via email as shippers. This led a discussion of how shippers and readers might be partially collapsed in the digital environment (but how sharing books after you’ve read them can serve a similar, if more numerically limited, purpose).

READERS

Following from our discussion of the booksellers (which I won’t belabor here, except to note that our main conclusion was that YouTube/Google was essentially serving that role), one student raised an important question about the “reader” of a YouTube video: Is watching a clip like buying a book? Discussing this question, some students raise the issue of effort. Essentially, they wondered, if you don’t have to actually go to a bookstore and pick up a book and buy it—but can rather sit at home and click a button—can we really compare the actions? Some students answered affirmatively, arguing that effort wasn’t an important factor, since the text was still being experienced. And then another student took us to the heart of the “video-watching=book-buying?” problem: advertising. Watching a YouTube video is a commercial activity (like buying a book), the student insisted, but it’s a commercial activity with an extra, complicating intermediary. The money made is not given by the reader to the seller; instead, the reader (or at least the reader’s attention) becomes the commodity being exchanged, with the video merely facilitating the transaction. This got us talking about privacy, as well. If as Marshall McLuhan (who we read last week) argues, the “portable book, which men could read…in isolation” led to the emergence of privacy, what changes when one’s “reading” is tabulated, linked to other activities  like web searches, and commoditized?

—-

Overall, though the conversation moved a bit awkwardly in places (I imagine this was the first time any of us had tried to apply a scholarly model to a sloth video), I think this pedagogical experiment was a success, We developed some great questions to follow through the rest of the semester, and we set up some interesting issues for the students to potentially pick up in their research projects.

Filed under teaching history print culture video

0 notes

The electronic image of a book is still a few gigabytes worth of information, and a gigabyte is a helluva lot of data—several times more than what fits into most of today’s computers or flows conveniently through computer networks.
John Browning, “Libraries Without Walls for Books Without Pages,” WIRED (1993)

0 notes

If architecture communicates (or communication creates architecture), then what does an invisible building say?
Kelly Chan, with The Atlantic Cities, has a post up describing a massive new South Korean tower whose ambition is to disappear:

Now, international practice GDS Architects are setting out to build what will allegedly be the world’s first invisible tower, an observation ‘anti tower’ that will be the first design proposal for a landmark that earns its keep by essentially refusing to be a landmark.

The architects describe their goals, and thus what they want to communicate thusly:

Instead of symbolizing prominence as another of the world’s “tallest and best” towers, it sets itself apart by celebrating the global community rather than focusing on itself. the tower subtly demonstrates Korea’s rising position in the world by establishing its most powerful presence through diminishing its presense. Korea will have a unique position of having the “best” tower by having an “anti tower”.

Like Chan seems to be, I’m both immensely charmed by and rather skeptical about these claims. In particular, the ironic paradox of the bolded section points to the key question: What happens when effacement, or absence, is meant to be both a means of dissolution and a cause for celebration? How, in other words, can the “diminishing” of presence be used to assert a “most powerful presence”?
It appears an invisible building can communicate quite a lot, though what precisely it’s saying keeps, well, fading into the background before I can see it clearly.
I suppose we’ll just have to wait until it’s built and give it another go.
—-
PS: Here’s another (and, to my eye, more beautiful) invisible-tower proposal, this one for Taiwan, by Sou Fujimoto.

If architecture communicates (or communication creates architecture), then what does an invisible building say?

Kelly Chan, with The Atlantic Cities, has a post up describing a massive new South Korean tower whose ambition is to disappear:

Now, international practice GDS Architects are setting out to build what will allegedly be the world’s first invisible tower, an observation ‘anti tower’ that will be the first design proposal for a landmark that earns its keep by essentially refusing to be a landmark.

The architects describe their goals, and thus what they want to communicate thusly:

Instead of symbolizing prominence as another of the world’s “tallest and best” towers, it sets itself apart by celebrating the global community rather than focusing on itself. the tower subtly demonstrates Korea’s rising position in the world by establishing its most powerful presence through diminishing its presense. Korea will have a unique position of having the “best” tower by having an “anti tower”.

Like Chan seems to be, I’m both immensely charmed by and rather skeptical about these claims. In particular, the ironic paradox of the bolded section points to the key question: What happens when effacement, or absence, is meant to be both a means of dissolution and a cause for celebration? How, in other words, can the “diminishing” of presence be used to assert a “most powerful presence”?

It appears an invisible building can communicate quite a lot, though what precisely it’s saying keeps, well, fading into the background before I can see it clearly.

I suppose we’ll just have to wait until it’s built and give it another go.

—-

PS: Here’s another (and, to my eye, more beautiful) invisible-tower proposal, this one for Taiwan, by Sou Fujimoto.

0 notes

Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion, by primordial intuition, by terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog.

The goose quill put an end to talk. It abolished mystery; it gave architecture and towns; it brought roads and armies, bureaucracy. It was the basic metaphor with which the cycle of civilization began, the step from the dark into the light of the mind. The hand that filled the parchment page built a city.

Marshall McLuhan (with Quentin Fiore), The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (1967)

2 notes

This is a photo (taken by yours truly) of the outdoor spiral staircase at the Gropius House.
According to the tour guide, Gropius’s young daughter had two requests when they built their rural Massachusetts home: that her room’s entire ceiling be a skylight, and that her floor be sand like a beach. The skylight was physically untenable (flat-roof construction + glass + snow = crash) and the sand wasn’t a great idea given the cork floors in the rest of the house, so the parents gave her instead a door onto the second-floor deck, the only such door in the house. To allow non-through-the-bedroom access, Gropius incorporated this gorgeous staircase, which not only solved the access problem but balanced out his playful takes on the center-entry colonial and New England clapboard.
A good story plus good design plus a beautiful setting is always a uniquely pleasurable experience. (I’ll post more from the Gropius house sometime soon!)

This is a photo (taken by yours truly) of the outdoor spiral staircase at the Gropius House.

According to the tour guide, Gropius’s young daughter had two requests when they built their rural Massachusetts home: that her room’s entire ceiling be a skylight, and that her floor be sand like a beach. The skylight was physically untenable (flat-roof construction + glass + snow = crash) and the sand wasn’t a great idea given the cork floors in the rest of the house, so the parents gave her instead a door onto the second-floor deck, the only such door in the house. To allow non-through-the-bedroom access, Gropius incorporated this gorgeous staircase, which not only solved the access problem but balanced out his playful takes on the center-entry colonial and New England clapboard.

A good story plus good design plus a beautiful setting is always a uniquely pleasurable experience. (I’ll post more from the Gropius house sometime soon!)

Filed under architecture design photography narrative

0 notes

The former shrink, plague-blind, sat in her requisite lounge chair, feet up on the ottoman, blank attentive face waiting for the patient who was late, ever late, and unpacking the reasons for this would consume a large portion of a session that would never occur. The patient failed to arrive, was quite tardy, was dead, was running through a swamp with a hatchet, pursued by monsters.

Colson Whitehead, Zone One (2011)

[A favorite passage, as it captures in miniature both one of Whitehead’s key cultural critiques as well as the play with temporality, narrative, cadence, and structure that make the novel as a whole so consistently enthralling. The clauses pile on one another, rhythmically, tenses shifting and contradicting—“would consume…would never occur;” “was dead, was running”—until we’re left with not just a pair of sentences but whole worlds, alternate and various and sad, unfolding then unraveling before us.]

Filed under work time narrative death

877 notes

Boulevard du Temple”, taken by Louis Daguerre in 1838 in Paris, was the first photograph of a person. The image shows a street, but because of the over ten minute exposure time the moving traffic does not appear. The exceptions are the man and shoe-shine boy at the bottom left, and (possibly) two people sitting at a table nearby who stood still long enough to have their images captured. 

(via theorias)

13 notes

Here is another delightfully batty object from the archives (though unlike the first two of those links, alas, I haven’t seen this one in person…yet).
It’s a drawing by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, held by the British Museum, commemorating the brief life and death of his second wombat. Below the drawing, he inscribed a parody of Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh in honor of his dear, strange pet:

I never reared a young wombatTo glad me with his pin-hole eye,But when he was most sweet and fatAnd tail-less he was sure to die

What I find most intriguing about the whole thing—aside, perhaps, from the tragically upended, tailless wombat—is that this drawing is, by far, not the weirdest exotic-animal-related part of Rossetti’s life. From his Wikipedia page:

This fascination with exotic animals continued throughout Rossetti’s  life, finally culminating in the purchase of a llama and a Toucan which  Rossetti would dress in a cowboy hat and persuade to ride the llama  round the dining table for his amusement.

A cowboy hat. On a toucan. On a llama. I can die happy now.

Here is another delightfully batty object from the archives (though unlike the first two of those links, alas, I haven’t seen this one in person…yet).

It’s a drawing by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, held by the British Museum, commemorating the brief life and death of his second wombat. Below the drawing, he inscribed a parody of Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh in honor of his dear, strange pet:

I never reared a young wombat
To glad me with his pin-hole eye,
But when he was most sweet and fat
And tail-less he was sure to die

What I find most intriguing about the whole thing—aside, perhaps, from the tragically upended, tailless wombat—is that this drawing is, by far, not the weirdest exotic-animal-related part of Rossetti’s life. From his Wikipedia page:

This fascination with exotic animals continued throughout Rossetti’s life, finally culminating in the purchase of a llama and a Toucan which Rossetti would dress in a cowboy hat and persuade to ride the llama round the dining table for his amusement.

A cowboy hat. On a toucan. On a llama. I can die happy now.

Filed under archives wombats

1 note

People hate these shows, but their hatred smacks of denial. It’s all there, all the old American grotesques, the test-tube babies of Whitman and Poe, a great gauntlet of doubtless eyes, big mouths spewing fantastic catchphrase fountains of impenetrable self-justification, muttering dark prayers, calling on God to strike down those who would fuck with their money, their cash, and always knowing, always preaching. Using weird phrases that nobody uses, except everybody uses them now. Constantly talking about ‘goals.’ Throwing carbonic acid on our castmates because they used our special cup and then calling our mom to say, in a baby voice, ‘People don’t get me here.’ Walking around half-naked with a butcher knife behind our backs…. My God, there have been more tears shed on reality TV than by all the war-widows of the world. Are we so raw? It must be so. There are simply too many of them—too many shows and too many people on the shows—for them not to be revealing something endemic. This is us, a people of savage sentimentality, weeping and lifting weights.

John Jeremiah Sullivan, “Getting Down to What is Really Real,” Pulphead (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 201)

[ht to James Wood’s meditation on the essay, which prompted me to read Sullivan’s excellent collection]

3 notes

I just got my Massachusetts Historical Society newsletter, which contained a poster advertising their fellowship program, which they asked recipients to post. Since school’s out for break, I figured I’d do it, after a fashion, right here.

MHS offers a number of short-term (four-week) and long-term (four-to-twelve-month) fellowships for research in their vast and always fascinating collections.  You can find all of the information about them here.

Two years ago, I received one of the short-term fellowships, the Twentieth Century History Fellowship, and spent June 2010 happily ensconced in Boston, researching the Lend a Hand Society’s Book Mission. (I just finished the dissertation chapter that uses that research, so I’m feeling especially grateful!) It was a fantastic experience, and I truly loved having the chance to dig into piles and piles of papers in such a wonderful setting—both intellectual and aesthetic.

Intellectually, a pivotal chapter of my dissertation, and the intellectual framework that supports the entire thing, wouldn’t be possible without the materials I found at the Society. But the benefits of the fellowship extended beyond subsidized access to an impressive archive. As part of the fellowship program, MHS runs a brown bag series that recipients participate in. Not only was my own presentation a lot of fun, but the others I attended helped me rethink my own work. In particular, being the only fellow that year studying the twentieth century encouraged me to think about deep structures and longer histories in ways that have helped my dissertation immensely.

Aesthetically, well…see for yourself. The photo on the top, above, is one I took of the building that houses the Society. The MHS is actually the lighter-brick structure toward the back of the photograph, with a Berklee College of Music building in the foreground (the presence of which guarantees an intriguing neighborhood). This photo still makes me smile, capturing the view that met me in the morning as I walked from the T stop to the Society. And beyond the building is the Fens, a gorgeous park over which the MHS reading room looks, and which is an excellent place to eat lunch in the summer. And speaking of the reading room, its huge windows, wood paneling, and historical artifacts (see, for example, the angel-on-a-turtle sculpture, above, which greets you when approaching the reading room) make it an excellent place to explore the past.

Additionally, an MHS fellowship makes it possible to explore Boston in the present alongside its past. The last photo is of the North End, where we stayed for the month. The neighborhood was the perfect setting for the project of linking my work to the longer history of the United States, as it is a veritable architectural palimpsest. Our converted nineteenth-century tenement, for example, sat practically alongside Copp’s Hill cemetery (founded in 1659 and eternal home of the Mathers and Prince Hall) and just down the street from Old North Church, the legendary starting point of Paul Revere’s ride. Our path to the T quite literally followed the Freedom Trail. Walking daily through these layers, exploring their history and their 24-hour pastry shops, was a crucial part of the experience offered to me by a Massachusetts Historical Society fellowship.

So, essentially, my message is to explore ABIGAIL and then APPLY!

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For my money, one of the best things about attending the University of Illinois is running across beautifully-designed (and sometimes strange) historical architectural details. More than the buildings themselves, which are rarely surprising even as they are often attractive, the little details—so much products of their own time that have survived strikingly into our own—win me over: a door pull, a bannister, a lamp, a window frame.

Or, in this case, a fantastic font.

Pictured above is the lintel over the main entrance to the Chemistry Annex, designed in 1930 by James White. I walk by it every few weeks, and each time it stops me short. I’ve been nearly run over by bicycles more than three times pausing to admire it. I adore the font, its prairie-deco styling so precisely suited to its time and place. And crowded around the words, filling out the frame, are gorgeous images of the beakers and flasks and tubing one can find inside.

I loathe chemistry on principle (it defeated me several times, in high school and college), but thanks to the lintel, this is one of my favorite buildings on campus.

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