first efforts

Best laid plans

Sometimes trying to work at the kitchen table is just a really bad idea.

Between word and image

The "Between Word and Image" seminar has been meeting for a few weeks now and I thought I'd attempt to synthesize some of the issues that have emerged in our conversations. The questions here aren't ones we have officially generated as a group, just things that I've pulled out of what we've said and done thus far...

How do we construct histories of viewing or reading? Where would you go to begin?

What happens if we stop associating "word" with "text" and "image" with "picture"? What do we gain? What do we lose?

Is there a word and image "canon"?

Do visual studies scholars know any more about the relationships between word and image than the rest of us?

How do our various disciplines (religious studies, philosophy, American studies, history, literature, film, communication, education) "do" image?

What is the role of technology in our shifting understandings of word and image?

If there is such a thing as "new media," then is there also something called "old media"?

In what ways are our experiences of word and image embodied in performance rather than (or in addition to) representation?

When/how do marginalized groups use images?

Why do "we" (humanities scholars) persist in thinking that we know how to "do" texts but not how to "do" images? And what makes us think we're any better at texts anyway?

How does iconoclasm shape our senses of word and image?

What methodological approaches other than discourse analysis (in its broadest sense) offer new or innovative purchase on these questions?

Where does the question of affect fit in?

I have also been thinking a bit about the theme itself: between word and image. There are any number of ways to parse this phrase, especially the sense of "between." The "between" might be interpreted spatially, as in, there is a space between the domain of word and the domain of image and we want to explore what is in that space where they overlap (I'm thinking of a nice Venn diagram here). Another connotation of "between" might be more antagonistic; here, the sense of people who have "bad blood" between them comes to mind, making it images versus text. I think I prefer a third sense of "between" -- the one that emerges when you see two people who insist they are "just friends," but after observing them you can't help but thinking, "I wonder if there's something between those two?" This sense of "between" is much more dynamic than an empty, static sense of space, much more open than a frame of conflict. Instead it is a "between" of motion, energy, kinesis, that spark of something really good, really juicy, and quite possibly a little illicit.

floorasana

When I temporarily relocated to Nashville I gave myself permission to buy two necessary luxuries -- speakers for my iPod and a portable yoga floor. The latter arrived last week, an entire month after I'd ordered it. I assume this is because they were busy "handcrafting" the "imported hardwood" and then buffing it to its "fine gloss finish." In any case, it is now here and I'm pretty excited about it.

At home in the C-U I have a linoleum floor for yoga, but here I'm in a carpeted apartment. Doing yoga on carpet is almost impossible. Doing yoga on a sticky mat placed on a carpet is just annoying. Doing yoga on my very large kitchen floor seemed like it might work, until I whacked my ankle bone on the kitchen counter while doing ardha chandrasana. Hence, the need for the yoga floor.

Despite the well-deserved litany of positive feedback featured on the company web site, I do have one complaint. The "fine gloss finish" that makes the yoga floor so pretty also makes it slippery. I like to do standing poses without a yoga mat sometimes, but that's impossible on the yoga floor because my feet have no grip. I can live with that, but a bigger problem is that regardless of whether I'm using the mat or not, the entire floor slips on the carpet -- which means that jumping and certain inversions are out of the question unless I am very, very careful. Even a shift of the legs in a standing pose can cause the whole apparatus to shift a couple of inches on the carpet.

My beloved suggested what I think is the perfect solution: buy some of the non-skid stuff you put underneath rugs to keep them from slipping and put it underneath the yoga floor. I will test this and I bet it will work great.

The irony of this solution, of course, is that it means that my yoga floor needs its own sticky mat.

Academics and emotion, part two

Memories of art, academics, and emotion, continued...

SCENE TWO: It is a cold December morning in Old Orchard, Maine. I am walking among hundreds of panels of the AIDS Quilt, which have been spread across the floor of an aging middle-school gymnasium. I am a second year master's student and I have come to this regional display of the AIDS Quilt at the behest of my Beloved Advisor, who says that I really should visit a Quilt display if I am going to include a chapter in my thesis about how the Quilt functions as a space of ritual performance. She's right, of course, and I was lucky to find a timely display of the Quilt in Maine. So this morning I drove two and a half hours south to this coastal town to see the Quilt and observe how people engage with it.

As I walk among the colorful panels, which at 3 by 6 feet are intentionally grave-sized, I feel a predictable range of emotions, emotions I have felt throughout my work on this project: sadness, grief, anger, respect. The panels are at once painfully particular and horribly representative. And this is only a sample--by this time, the early 1990s, there is practically no space large enough to contain a display of the entire AIDS Quilt.

As I watch others move around the gym, old people from the community and school employees and mothers with small children, it appears that all of us are doing what we are supposed to be doing; we are performing the rituals that the Quilt invites. All except one: nobody is crying.

How do I know that we are supposed to cry? Because someone has helpfully scattered boxes of Kleenex all over the floor, set them in and among the panels, so many boxes of Kleenex that I am never more than four feet away from a tissue if I need one. Which I don't, because I don't happen to be crying. And neither is anybody else.

Instead, my growing emotion seems to be anger. I am angry, really angry, at the person who put all those boxes of Kleenex there. Angry that somebody else thinks they have to tell me what is appropriate to feel and do. Angry that my experience of the panels is being disrupted by a paper product. And, truth be told, I am angry that the Kleenex is messing up my research by directly contradicting my argument that the Quilt invites open-ended experiences.

Later, after I have made a few photographs and taken a seat on the bleachers to watch how the middle-school kids now streaming in engage the Quilt, I meet the human source of my anger. She and I have actually met before, on the phone, when I was setting up this visit; she organized this display. I re-introduce myself. She is friendly, but condescendingly so. "I hope," she says slowly and quietly, "you had a chance to experience the Quilt yourself before you started watching everybody else." Yes, I assure her, I have. "Oh that's good," she continues, "Because this is something that you shouldn't study with your head, but with your heart."

Obviously, I know where this is going and she certainly doesn't have to say any more. But she does. After all, she's the woman who probably plastered this place with Kleenex; she's not exactly subtle. "I mean, I just don't know how you can research this..." Now she sweeps her hand out over the gym, where the middle school kids are roaming among the panels, whispering and giggling to each other while trying to be reverent. "I just think," she concludes, "that you need to just let yourself feel."

This woman is totally unaware that her obsession with Kleenex has made whatever we might call an "authentic" experience of the Quilt impossible. We chat about other things for a moment, and when she stands up to leave me I think to ask, "Do all Quilt displays have Kleenex?" I can't remember if her answer was yes or no, but I do remember what she said next.

"Oh, I always put out the Kleenex. It's for when people cry. Everybody cries."

Academics and emotion, part one

These days I am reading everything I can about how people respond to visual images. Right now I'm tackling Pictures & Tears by James Elkins, which is about people who cry in front of paintings. (Really). Writing of his experience visiting the Rothko chapel in Houston, where Rothko's giant, dark, seemingly blank canvases have been known to move people to tears, Elkins explains that while he was moved, he didn't cry:

Maybe I didn't cry because I left too soon, before the chapel could undermine the few ideas I had left. Maybe I was thinking about philosophy too much, or trying too hard to be an assiduous scholar. Or perhaps it was because I kept myself busy noting other people's tears: I was a doctor who tries to be sympathetic, but is too professional to really feel anything. So if I hadn't behaved like a doctor or a philosopher (or a doctor of philosophy!) I might have cried . . . perhaps.

This passage hit me like a thunderbolt as two moments from my academic past came rushing back to me:

SCENE ONE: It's Tuesday night, junior year, and I am sitting in a course called "The Documentary Tradition," which is taught by a handsome, intense, slightly famous adjunct professor/documentary filmmaker who looks like Harrison Ford, never smiles, and scares us all to death. We have just finished watching a film (I can't recall the title) about Cambodia. The film ends with a long closeup shot of weeds, rushes, I don't know what exactly to call them, slowly waving back and forth in flickering sunlight. I am inexplicably moved and tears are welling up in my eyes. Professor Scary/Handsome shuts off the film, turns up the lights, looks directly at me, and says, "Well, what do you think?" I freeze, redden, then stammer, "It was so...visual." At this moment that's all I can say. He grimaces and leans toward me threateningly. "The last week of the semester and all you can say is 'it's so visual''? You can't do any better than that?" I'm crushed, embarrassed, and pissed, and in what I can only recall now as a complete out-of-body experience, I angrily and quickly blurt out a point-by-point explication of the film's power, discuss its qualities in relation to theories of documentary, and conclude my rapid-fire rant with something about aesthetics that proves my original point that, yes, the film really was so...visual. When I'm finished you can hear a pin drop and my fellow students are staring at me with a mix of pity and admiration in their eyes: I have just yelled at the professor. And not just any professor, but Professor Scary/Handsome. They know it and I know it: I am so screwed.

Professor Scary/Handsome stares at me blankly for a moment, and then, the man who has not smiled all semester smiles. It's brief, but it's a smile. Then suddenly class is over and he dismisses everyone with reminders about next week's final and other business. I can't get out of there fast enough. I run all the way home to my apartment, collapse at my desk and burst into tears. Because I just got caught feeling in class.

Coming next: Scene two, in which the AIDS Quilt fails to make me cry and I get punished for it.

blurbs

blurb: n., stuff I would blog about if I blogged more frequently

On Sept. 12th, while passing through security in the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport, I saw Tom Ridge. He stood off to the side of the screening area with his back firmly pressed against a wall, grimly watching the shoeless masses struggling to rescue the purses and laptops spewing out of the screening machine. He looked sort of like a cranky supervisor, which I suppose at one time he was. I don't know why he was in town but he was wearing a very expensive-looking suit and sporting well-oiled hair and a tan. I smell consulting.

On the sidewalk just outside of the entrance to the GAC someone has stenciled this on the sidewalk:

LIVE MORE, CON$UME LE$$.

Elvis Costello is making two appearances in Nashville this week. A few nights ago he showed up at an event honoring Emmylou Harris, and tomorrow night he's playing at the Americana Awards. Which means he's probably hanging out in town all week. I wonder where?

Every afternoon when I return to the GAC from campus I run into a grandmother who babysits her toddler grandson; she likes to run off his excess energy by doing laps in the parking lot. When I see them I smile and wave and he always chases me, grinning maniacally as he lurches toward me. Every time he does this I pretend he's oh-so-cute, but actually it kind of freaks me out.

This I believe, or, Cara vs. Methodzilla

Right now I am struggling to complete my "homework" for tomorrow's meeting of the "Between Word and Image" fellows. We decided last week that this week each of us would come prepared to talk about the methodological questions that we address in our work. In other words, what exactly do you do when you "do" word and image, and why?

We are a diverse group from a wide variety of fields, including religious studies, history, English, film, and communication. In addition, we are studying everything from Islamic mysticism to early film to abolitionist visual culture. I can't wait for the discussion -- how different will we be? What common assumptions will we share? What juxtapositions may emerge?

Like any self-respecting scholar I can go on and on (and on) about what I do, why it's important, the questions I tend to ask, and so on. But what I really want to do is come up with a clear, succinct, yet robust explanation of the specific methodological assumptions that ground my work as a communication historian/rhetorician who studies the role of photography in political culture. The kind of thing that will make people think, wow, that's interesting. And distinctive. And compelling. But doing that is hard. Stupidly hard.

I think the giggling I hear off in the distance is my graduate students, enjoying the way that the tables have turned.

No, wait, let me revise that: They are howling with glee.

twirl 'n whirl

Saturday afternoon at the Tennessee State Fair

(press space bar, then double-click image)

Dolly in space

When I tell people that for three years I attended an all-girls' Catholic high school, they are usually surprised. Then I tell them that we wore black jumpers and saddle shoes. And that our team name was the Dollies. At this point there's usually justifiable eye-rolling. But get those Britney Spears video thoughts right out of your heads; I did not, repeat, NOT have pig tails in high school.

My high school education was fabulous, but lately it's seemed even cooler because of one particular Dolly: astronaut Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper, class of 1980, who for the last week has been orbiting the planet on the space shuttle Atlantis.

(from NASA tv)

That's her on this morning's spacewalk; looks like she left the saddle shoes at home.

Moonlight over the GAC

Took this last week from my balcony. No Photoshop -- just a very long exposure and lots of hand-waving. Next time I'll try it with a tripod.