first efforts

Obama the Rock Star

On page A21 of yesterday's New York Times readers were greeted with this visual juxtaposition accompanying a story about the Kennedys' endorsement of Obama:

Both candidates, the captions tell us, were speaking to crowds of college students. Apart from the obvious and heavyhanded attempt at juxtaposition (Clinton is alone, separated from the student crowd by a barrier that seems unnecessarily far away; Obama is mobbed by screaming students eager for a glimpse and the mere touch of his hand), the Obama photo also perfectly visually performs one of Obama's key themes: it's not about me, it's about you. The photograph is all about the crowd: the open-mouthed excitement of a diversity of faces, the hands reaching out and being grasped, the cellphones and cameras pointed at the face of a man we can't even see. And the perspectival vanishing point lies well beyond the top frame of the picture, with the effect that the crowd extends as far as the eye can see; it's visually infinite.

Another rock star image, by the same photographer, appeared on the front page of Monday's paper. This time, Obama is encircled by attentive reporters and microphones.

From what I can tell from my admittedly anecdotal tracking, the rock star theme is coming to dominate visual representation of Obama-at least for the NYT photographer following his campaign. There's a danger in this, I suppose, if it starts to come off as style with no substance. But the two rock star images here seem to balance that: the electricity of his mere presence in the top image offset, perhaps, by the apparent interest in the substance of his voice and ideas in the second. At any rate, I'm keeping an eye on it.

images, top to bottom: Obama-Damon Winter, NYT; Clinton-Todd Heisler, NYT; Damon Winter, NYT.

Indexing thoughts

Most authors will tell you they will do anything to avoid having to index their own books. Once you've gotten to the index stage, you are so tired of the thing you don't ever want to see it again. Now you are supposed to work meticulously and carefully through it again to index names, concepts, facts, and ideas? Puh-leeze. Hire somebody -- quick -- and let them have all the fun. 

But let me offer a little counter-argument here. I indexed Picturing Poverty, and I loved it. Partly I did it because I had no money to hire an indexer and didn't want to pay out of pocket. But mostly I did it because a colleague who had done his own index pointed out something really important: the hand that controls the index controls the way the book is used. This is why you'll find index entries like "rhetorical circulation" in a book that was published on an American Studies list and announced in the Chronicle under the history category. I wanted the index to speak not just to the general reader, but to readers who know something about rhetoric. I have no idea if any readers have actually noticed this, but I worked pretty hard at it.

For the visual rhetoric reader I'm co-editing we hired out the index, and just got it back over the weekend. It's very complete, but again, we want it to speak more explicitly to the concepts that teachers and students will use when they discuss visual rhetoric in their classrooms. So we're going to add some concepts to the ones the indexer identified to make sure we give users the full scope of the rhetorical mother lode.

The other thing about indexing is this: once the book has an index, you'll be able to see what the book is *actually* about instead of what you *think* it's about. With Picturing Poverty I did learn some things -- some people I thought were unimportant were actually mentioned frequently, while some concepts I thought I used a lot I hardly used at all. As far as the visual rhetoric reader goes, I'm pleased to say the book is about: appropriation, body rhetoric, circulation, democracy, the gaze, genre, doxa, enthymeme, epideictic, form, icons, ideographs, image politics, juxtaposition, memory, metaphor, metonymy, myth, parody, performance, perspective by incongruity, spectacle, surveillance, synecdoche, visibility/invisibility, visual argument, and voyeurism, among others.

Speech act theory and language acquisition

When it's a dark night in January and it's nearly zero outside, what else is there to do but gather with colleagues to drink hot chocolate and talk about speech? Last night in the rhetoric reading group we tackled a chunk of Austin's How to Do Things with Words, along with Kenneth Burke's 1975 review of the book. Like many rhetoricians, I suspect, I have an awkward relationship with speech act theory (if I have one at all) and find Austin's writing obtuse, to say the least. (Though, as my beloved helpfully reminded me last night, he's not nearly as bad as Dewey).

It was a great discussion and, as usual, I learned something despite my resistance. And these ordinary language philosophers can be downright fun in terms of language acquisition. We mused over such Austinian phraseological curiosities as "cock a snook or hurl a tomato" and were prompted to ponder at length the question of what precise amount would in fact constitute a "whack of ice-cream."

This week in visual politics: visual literacy

This semester in my visual politics class students are keeping online journals. Each week I pose a question for students to respond to, and I encourage them to use a combination of text, images, and links in their responses. This week's question asked students to offer their own definition of visual literacy and assess whether they believe themselves to be visually literate. Their responses included references to a whole range of images, including these:

      

It's gonna be a fun semester.

Dangerous! Thinking while Driving!*

Saturday, 5 am CST-9 am EST; outdoor temperature 1 degree, somewhere along I-74

Thoughts while driving: Man, it's dark. Man, it's cold. Man, I'm tired.

<pleasureable interlude of approx. 8 hrs. in which I participate in the 3rd annual Midwest Winter Workshop at IU, the highlight of which is the small group sessions where we workshop graduate student projects and I get to see what cool things everybody's working on>

Saturday, 6 pm EST-8 pm CST; outdoor temperature 0.5 degrees, somewhere along I-74

Thoughts while driving: Wow that was so great! Those students are so smart! What cool projects! There was so much to say about each of them, I hope they weren't overwhelmed! I hope they felt like we gave them enough guidance! I hope they know they don't have to take our guidance very seriously! I hope I didn't sound too hard on some of them but I really thought they could be pushed! Or maybe I was too easy, or maybe they just thought I was some crazy lady who was completely leading them astray, or...????????. . .

Man, it's dark. Man, it's cold. Man, I'm tired.

*sorry about the weird Al Franken autopost over the weekend. There was supposed to be a YouTube video there. It worked when I previewed it. Typepadders, any help?

Historical flickr

My beloved discovered that the Library of Congress is piloting a flickr site on which to showcase some of its photograph collections. They've started relatively small (by LOC standards, anyway) by putting up two collections. "The 1930s-40s in color" is a collection of about 1600 Farm Security Administration-Office of War Information (FSA-OWI) transparencies that prove the Great Depression actually happened in color! Who knew? There's also "News in the 1910s" with 1500 images from the Bain Collection, a news agency with a particular affection for baseball.

I have haven't yet tried flickr for my own images, but I'm intrigued by how you can tag images in ways that help you search for the content inside photographs. You can assign up to forty different tags per picture.

This image, for example, captioned "Backstage at the Girlie Show," has tags that include: rail car; little boy; girls; hands on hip, and, um, legs. No tag for ennui, though. I guess body part nouns are easier to classify than states of mind.

l to r, above: Germany Schaeffer, Washington [AL] baseball, 1911, Bain News Service; Shepherd with his horse and dog on Gravelly Range, Madison Cty, Montana (photograph by Russell Lee, 1942, FSA-OWI Collection, Library of Congress)

bottom: "Backstage" at the "Girlie Show" at the Vermont State Fair, Rutland, VT (photograph by Jack Delano, 1941, FSA-OWI Collection, Library of Congress).

A congeries of Caras

In the fifteen years I have been teaching, I have never had a student named Cara. This semester I have two in one class (okay, one of the Caras is actually Kara, but  she pronounces it the same way so that's close enough). Apart from teaching, I have met very few Caras. There just aren't that many of us out there.

Despite suffering a lifetime of mispronunciations and mistakes (Carol, Karen, Carla, Clara, Tara), I've always liked my name. It's different enough to be memorable (especially when compared to the dozens of Jennifers, Amys, and Heathers I went to school with in the seventies). One Cara I met a few years ago when I gave a talk at the FDR Library told me she was named after a minor character in the novel Brideshead Revisited. I read the book years ago, but have no memory of that Cara; my mother claims no knowledge of her, either. The standard finnfam story has it that there were two name options for me if I was a girl and my brothers argued that the other option was too girly. So Cara it was. Still doesn't explain how they came up with Cara in the first place, but that keeps it mysterious. And anyone who knows me knows I love being mysterious.

Tired, wired, and fired - up, that is

Busy weekend here at the little yellow house on Green Street. Realized yet again that I find shopping utterly exhausting; fortunately, G. joined me on my trip to the famed Tuscola Outlet Mall (a.k.a. the Middle-Aged, Midwestern Woman Fun Place, judging from the demographics). G. is the only person I know who hates shopping as much as I do, so the hard work of shopping was as easy as it could be. Combine Saturday's shopping workout with Sunday morning's long run with Sara, the longest I've done in quite a while, and that equals tired.

As for wired, well, yesterday I set up a wireless network in the little yellow house -- all on my own. Me! Not only that but it worked correctly *the first time*. I know I'm two years behind everybody else and their mother with this, but still. Did I mention I did it all by myself? Damn.

Finally, who couldn't be fired up right now? Political rhetoric is as lively and interesting as it ever gets, PBS has just launched a four-month-long Jane Austen Costume Drama Orgy, and this week we start a new semester where I get to teach not one, but two of my favorite topics: Gender and Rhetoric, and Visual Politics.

Yee haw.

Total gym class

I started my new gym class this week, or at least what I'm calling gym class. Officially, it's called "Total Runner," an 8-week class emphasizing running-specific training techniques. Our first session was Tuesday, and I loved it! It was just like gym class in school, except the teacher was nice, I was coordinated, and nobody threw anything at my head. We did a mix of core work, circuit training, and I guess what you can only call "calisthenics": lunges, pushups, marching, hopping on one foot. And we did hurdle drills. Hurdles! Brought me back to high school track all over again. Even the 80's music blaring on the Muzak seemed just right: jumping jacks to Toni Basil's "Mickey" at 6:30 in the morning? I'm so there.

I decided to do the class to get me out of a running rut and to turn the thinking over to somebody else for a while. And I hope it will help me get ready for spring events. If I were living closer to the Mother Ship, I would definitely use gym class as a launch pad for training for this new and awesome race. Half marathon? On the Gunflint Trail? In early May when it's not hot and there's no bugs and all the lodges still have preseason rates? The Minnesota runners among my readership would be insane to pass it up. 

[Oh, and happy blogiversary to First Efforts. Two years young today.]

Juxtaposition

So this is what you get when you scroll through election results on Talking Points Memo this morning:

Nice, huh? The morning after the first woman in U.S. history wins the New Hampshire primary and this is what I get to look at. I feel so freaking empowered I can't stand it.

Let's talk about sexism, shall we? Gloria?