first efforts

Onlookers and bystanders

Marvelous piece on the NYT editorial page this morning about those Lincoln Gettysburg photographs. Verlyn Klinkenborg is captivated by the stereoviews but ultimately more interested in the scene around Lincoln than in Lincoln himself, curious about the "men--including one in a broad white collar and a voluminous top hat -- [who] stare at the lens with a truly American candidness." Again, here's the image...

Klinkenborg's point (and do go and read the piece) is that while photography directs us to the center, it's often the periphery that's the most interesting. With the "discovery" of Lincoln in there somewhere, the photo will now forever be "about" Lincoln. But it's also about the temporality of the historical event, of the photographic moment. That bystander was at Gettysburg too; what about him?

For some reason, I'm tempted to make this visual analogy:

But will it play in Peoria?

On the way home from Thanksgiving in the Q-C, my beloved and I stopped in Peoria for lunch and a drive-by visit to a few of his old Bradley University haunts, including the fraternity house where he and the janitor from "Scrubs" used to hang out. And then we saw this place, which we can only hope is two separate stores with an unfortunate visual overlap of signage.

Signs of the holiday

I'm not completely sure about the "humor" here, but happy Thanksgiving, everyone. And happy birthday, Nephew #4!

Photo by Marion Post Wolcott, South Boston, MA, circa 1940/FSA-OWI Collection, Library of Congress

NCA wrap-up

Intellectually speaking, NCA was great this year. And believe me, I don't always say that. I left feeling energized about lots of things, though exhausted and ready for Thanksgiving Break. In addition to some NCA business obligations, I participated on four panels -- two as a presenter and two as a respondent. The panels I responded to (one featuring several established scholars tackling hard questions about visuality, atrocity, and trauma, and the other grad students wrestling with the intersections between rhetoric and aesthetics) were engaging and well-attended. As far as my own stuff went, I got some good feedback on a side project I'm doing on Hurricane Katrina and the public memory of the FSA. And I got awakened to the broader implications of intellectual property questions during a roundtable featuring visual studies authors, intellectual property scholars, and an editor from NYU Press. In particular, Ted Striphas and John Logie made compelling cases for why associations like NCA need to devise "best practices" statements regarding fair use (here's a sample from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies). As someone who frequently thinks of these issues in narrow terms (read: me and my needs), the panel served as an important reminder of the range of pragmatic, conceptual, and material/economic issues at play for all communication scholars, not just those of us who venture into the wilds of visual studies.

Stovepipe hat in a haystack

Several NCA-goers practically tackled me in the crowded hallways of the Chicago Hilton this past weekend, wanting to know whether I'd seen the story in USA Today about the discovery of "new" photographs of Lincoln at Gettysburg. It is pretty exciting. The images are not really photographs but glass stereoviews -- 3-D images meant to be viewed with a stereoscope, which is the 19th century equivalent of your childhood ViewMaster. A civil war photography historian found them online (!) while searching in the Library of Congress database. He "found" Lincoln (thank god for that stovepipe hat) by using digital imaging software to zoom in. Way, way in. Here are the images as you'll find them in the Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs database (click to enlarge, but I guarantee you won't see Abe):

  L of C, CHP #s 1159-1160

USA Today offers its own interactive view where you can see how they zoomed in and what information the images yielded. And here's information from the Library of Congress about how they digitize stereoviews. You can view them online in all their 3D glory if you have 3D glasses!

I love this story because it reminds us that the archive can yield amazing things, if only somebody comes along and really looks. And, best of all, these stereos are part of the Library of Congress collection, which means nobody can try to buy or sell them for jillions of dollars. They belong to you and me.

Chicago-ing

NCA is really busy for me this week -- somehow I ended up doing two panels and responding to two more, plus I have to go to program planning school so that I can be the person who wrestles with submissions to the Rhetoric and Comm Theory division next spring. Yee haw. Still, I dream of the things I would do in Chicago if I had more time. Maybe I'll at least do this and this.

Extreme makeover, Lincoln Hall edition

Yesterday our faculty got updated on plans to renovate Lincoln Hall, the nearly 100-year-old home to our department (and several others) and one of the busiest buildings on campus. We will have to move out in order for the work to be done, and it could make for an unsettled time. On the up side, we'll return to a state-of-the-art building, and it's hard to argue with that. The very room in which we held our faculty meeting offered up plenty of evidence of the need for renovation: the antiquated heating system blasting even though it wasn't cold out, a window a/c unit far too small for the room attempting to counter the heat with cold, chunks of tile flecking up off the floor at my feet. But perhaps the most surreal evidence of the need for renovation --surreal because it seemed so Lincoln-Hall-normal that initially I didn't notice it at all -- was the student desk/chair combo shoved into the window to prop it open. When desks and chairs need to be employed in this manner, it's time for a makeover.

Despite its largely dilapidated condition, I must confess that I really love Lincoln Hall. Not just my spacious office with its high ceilings and views of flowering trees in the spring, but the whole package: the text of the Gettysburg Address mounted on a wall in the marble foyer of the building, the ancient mail slots in our office doors that you have to tape shut so students don't snap them as they walk by, the images from Lincoln's life and quotations from famous speeches fixed to the exterior of the building. Here's one of those images, a representation of the Lincoln-Douglas debates:

(photo UIUC archives)

How could a rhetorician not love this place?

It strikes me that Lincoln Hall is a lot like Lincoln himself: homely and worn down, yet noble. As Whitman famously said of Lincoln, "He has a face ... so awful ugly it becomes beautiful." I hope when Lincoln Hall gets its much-needed extreme makeover, something of that homeliness remains. It's comforting.

Things that make a really busy week really great

a dissertation defense where fabulous faculty colleagues and I explored a compelling, complex, well-argued scholarly project and celebrated the writer's transition from student to colleague (congrats, Dr. Kang!);

a lively rhetorical studies reading group where three readings on effect/affect got us talking about audience response, the perils of interdisciplinarity, and whether 22 year-olds can really be expected to think like Tom Goodnight;

a doctoral exam for another smart, prepared student where we all got to speak into a microphone in that hunched over, testifying-before-a-congressional-committee style, for the benefit of a committee member being skyped in from Kosovo;

a short but marvelous hour of conversation and creative sanctuary with my writing group, where we got to talk about all the projects we'd be working on if we weren't so busy in our "real" jobs;

getting to hear Big Daddy on the radio, talking about government secrecy and making the world safe for democracy;

three days -- count 'em, three! -- where I actually got in a 40-minute run;

celebrating thirty years as an aunt (happy birthday, Niece #1!), and remembering how cool it was to be the only girl in second grade with her very own niece.

Fall(ing)

I made this photo early yesterday; the tree in my front yard looked spectacular in the morning sun. Good thing I caught it when I did. Last night we had a hard freeze, and the leaves are falling hard now. When I stopped at a red light on the way to work, one tree was dropping leaves so fast it sounded like a steady rain on the roof of my car. 

Recognitions and misrecognitions

I just returned last night from a weekend conference up at Northwestern, where Bob Hariman and Dilip Gaonkar hosted a bunch of folks for a fabulous conference on the theme of "visual democracy." The group was diverse in terms of disciplines, interests, and nationalities, which produced lively Q&A, marvelous conversations over meals, and much notetaking in my little red book. I especially enjoyed getting to meet and hear in person folks whose work I have enjoyed and taken up over the years, including Wendy Kozol, David Lubin, Maren Stange, and Christopher Pinney. It was exciting to meet new people, see great visual "stuff," recognize the multiple areas of overlap shared by the folks gathered, and see how my own pressing questions also press on others. And it was informative, as it always is, to ask a question that seems clear enough but lands with a thud and prompts a puzzled face, performing clearly that some disciplinary assumption is not shared between question asker and question answerer.

I arrived at the conference on Saturday morning, one day late, after having been delayed by illness. When I arrived for the first session, nobody was wearing a nametag. Crap, I thought, they all got to know each other so well yesterday that nobody needs nametags anymore. How was I going to figure out who all these people were? I later learned that there never were nametags; an ingenious and effective, if initially disconcerting, strategy to prompt conversation early on in the game (and, perhaps, subtly shift attention from identities to ideas). The structural absence of nametags, combined with the scheduling of my talk late in the conference (thus delaying my "formal" introduction to the assembled group) produced some amusing moments of misrecognition. The first came when I was chatting over dinner with one attendee, whose identity was known to me because she had already presented (and because she published a (nice) review of my book a few years ago). After chatting for quite a while about her talk I realized I should introduce myself. When I said my name, her eyes widened in recognition and she blurted out, "Oh my god, I've been looking for you here! I can't believe you're you! I thought you were a graduate student!" (GIven that I celebrated a birthday over the weekend, being taken for a grad student doesn't bother me like it used to). The second moment was also funny, though completely embarrassing for me. During happy hour on Saturday night I ended up in pleasant chit-chat with several people, including a man I'd seen at the conference but hadn't yet met. Everyone I was with seemed to know him, though, and eventually somebody told him my name. His eyes widened in total recognition and he seemed so happy to see me that I attempted to respond in kind, with that kind of oh, yes, I know you too response you have when you feel like you've missed something but want to be encouraging. Then he introduced himself to me, which he had to repeat three times in a row, because I just was not getting it. Everyone around me was looking at me like I was an idiot, until finally, my brain moving in a kind of dumb blonde slo-mo, I figured it out: he was Michael Shaw the blogger, who writes BAGnewsNotes. We've never met in person but I do know him, in the virtual sense at least; we've e-mailed occasionally for the past couple of years and I invited him to be on a panel I'm modering at a conference next spring. I had no idea he would be there, and it was so out of context that my brain just did not process his name. Once the misrecognition (or more accurately, lack of recognition) was finally cleared up, we of course did what all virtual friends who have never met in person do: we hugged.

In discussing the no nametag thing with a few other folks at the closing conference lunch, people said they ultimately liked it but also found it initially disconcerting. One anthropologist told me she spent much of the first morning looking around the room performing quick and dirty physiognomic readings of people, musing, "This person looks like he wrote that book," etc. All of which is rather ironic, given the topic of my talk yesterday: the ways that late 19th century Americans used those same quick and dirty tactics to "read" photographs of Lincoln into their narratives about American empire.