Rewriting history.

This Washington Post article is nothing new, but I wanted to document it nonetheless, and possibly disseminate (that’s where you, Reader, come in). Mostly, “White House Web Scrubbing” is about Iraq-related issues; here’s a particularly nauseating non-Iraq excerpt:

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and USAID have removed or revised fact sheets on condoms, excising information about their effectiveness in disease prevention, and promoting abstinence instead. The National Cancer Institute, meanwhile, scrapped claims on its Web site that there was no association between abortion and breast cancer. And the Justice Department recently redacted criticism of the department in a consultant’s report that had been posted on its Web site.

AFA poll

This is the American Family Association’s poll. They are going to present the results to congress to show that Americans don’t favor marriage for homosexuals. Unless, of course, that’s not how the results end up.

Take a minute to fill it out, if you care about such things. And please distribute.

Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Andersen.

Perhaps I should take notes every time it occurs to me to blog about something; I feel as though my brain is currently missing some crucial topics that I’ve thought about putting out there in the past couple of days.

Went to see the Trilogy. That’s right, took my little not-terribly-crazy-about-LOTR-in-the-first-place self and, at a friend’s goading and offer of ticket, rode out into western Massachusetts to sit through roughly twelve hours of Movies. The following offers no spoilers, except for one possible place, where I name the topic of the third movie’s opening scene.

I have to say, I liked the experience. Had seen the first film in an airplane, and thought it a waste of three hours of my life even in an airplane – and now I know why; mostly, the appeal that Fellowship of the Ring holds for me is scenic. My goodness, but I want to go to New Zealand.

The second movie I’d been reasonably fond of before; I mean, Legolas on a medieval snowboard, what else does a girl need? It had seemed a bit fluffy, which was okay for once: I’d gone in expecting that. (Usually, I have little interest in eye candy.) Yesterday’s re-viewing confirmed that: nothing new, and not much that actively held my interest.

Return of the King was okay. The twenty million endings annoyed me a bit, not at all a good editing choice. They were each of them aesthetically appealing enough, but that isn’t justification for lumping all of them one on top of the other, with long fade-out transitions that get old quickly.

One thing I really, really did not appreciate is the Middle Eastern imagery in some of the Evil Guys’ costume choices. It’s a choice, and as costumes the black face veils and turban-like headgear looked wicked cool, but that was the only hint at The Arab World, and it was presented in a negative context, and frankly, I’m tired of the goddamn propaganda. It makes me cranky, doubly so if it’s unconscious.

Elijah Wood also seems to have little acting ability. Sure, he can do agonized okay, but kindness and wisdom are foreign concepts to his acting range. He was saccharine in places, and his relationship with Sam was more patronizing than it needed to be. (Although I liked Sean Astin’s portrayal of Sam’s relative simplemindedness, it would’ve been nice to see Sam’s wisdom and confidence grow, after all of his adventures.)

With the caveat that the furthest I got in the paper trilogy was about fifty pages into The Two Towers, I was disappointed with the turn Gollum’s character took in the third film. For all of his inner conflict, brilliantly presented in the second part of the epic, there was no clear resolution in the third. His good self did not clearly struggle to survive through to the end; and there was no clear triumph of the evil self either. Considering that the movie opens with a flashback to how Smeagol got hold of the ring, I thought they’d actually, you know, do something interesting with the character.

All of this said, though, I liked it. The photography is stunning; the soundtrack is both grand and unobtrusive; and, I admit it, the eye-candy factor is high, when it comes to the actors. I mean, Orlando Bloom. swoon.

Unrelatedly, Sir Ian McKellan is impressive as Gandalf, through and through, including both his transformation in the second film and the change over to a fierce, down-to-business attitude in the third. Cate Blanchett as Galadriel is not bad, though there were a couple of moments where she seemed to try too hard. Both Mortensen and Rhys-Davies did what they could with the roles of Aragorn and Gimli, although the post-cut material they were left to work with was rather pitifully poor (fault of the director &c.). Liv Tyler as Arwen… well, she’s as pretty and vacant as ever. Miranda Otto as Eowyn kicked all kinds of ass. Merry and Pippin were just what they needed to be, no more, no less; although I did find Pippin’s accent and naivety surprisingly endearing and not annoying. And finally, Mr. Weaving was great as Elrond but really shouldn’t have taken on two roles so major at once, both requiring him to use a non-native accent. Every once in a while, I caught glimpses of Agent Smith in his speech, and giggled.

Again to arms, and software Q

The electromyography showed no nerve damage. woot! This means that what I have is painful tendonitis, and not carpal tunnel syndrome. No surgery necessary, etc.

So, I’m checking out voice recognition software. Dragon only seems to be available for Windows, but that same company makes ViaVoice for Mac OS X. Anyone know anything good/bad about it? Or – have you heard of other OS X voice recognition software you can recommend?

link to blogrolling

Okay, so it’s not just me. In case you haven’t noticed yet either, blogrolling.com changed the pinging URL. It is:

http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/

So change the preferences in your software of choice, and you should be all set.

poetry

and february was so long
that it lasted into march
and found us walking a path
alone together
you stopped and pointed
and you said, that’s a crocus
and i said, what’s a crocus
and you said, it’s a flower
i tried to remember
but i said, what’s a flower
you said, i still love you
   -dar williams

Remember spring in the winter, everyone.

More on the varied corpus.

Showed the Genette post to Nick, and was once again reminded how useful it is to get ideas out of your head and into the conversational space between you and another person. He put what I was trying to get at in simple, sharply focused terms: “…distinguish a set (bunch of texts) from a property or set of properties defining that set.”

Well, precisely. It’s important to be aware of whether a text (loosely defined) is a piece of writing or a sculpture or a piece of music. If it’s a piece of writing, there will also be circumstances in which it’s useful to know that it’s rhymed verse, or a novel, or a theatrical script.

But the very fact of this separation, this compartmentalization of artistic works is the problem. We have literature departments, and art history departments, and music departments, and we study one of these to the exclusion of the others, and of course we haven’t seen the Roland corpus as a corpus. Scholars have alluded to it, discussing for example Roland’s reception in Italy or in Spain, but what they’ve concentrated on is literary production, or word-based anyway (oral performance included). The marvelous tradition of chivalric puppet shows in southern Italy and Sicily has never really been brought into the discussion in depth, except by theatre specialists.

Anyway, the important point is: Before being included in the Roland corpus, a work of art must be checked against an eligibility list; but this list has only two criteria. It must be a text produced by humans (or human-produced machines; we’ll get to sentient animals and aliens when we get to them); and it must feature Roland as a character, major or minor. That is all. Its medium of production, form, genre and anything else about it is unimportant with regard to its inclusion (or not) in the corpus. We will not fully see the larger set of texts and the interplay of borrowing and re-imagining among them unless we discard, just for the time being, the notion of homogeneity of form.

(And is specific recording N of musical composition X a different text from the notation of said composition on paper? Depends on what your purpose is; I do not make a distinction here. Multiple recordings and/or editions of the same work are the same text unit. But a 19th-century opera treating the same subject matter as the 11th-century epic poem is a distinct text from that poem.)

EMG

On Monday, my hand doctor says, I am going to get an electromyography. She’d like to see if my forearm muscles are getting damaged enough to worry.

I’ve been trying to take care of my hands and arms, but haven’t been trying hard enough, obviously. Wake up and re-prioritize, again.

(Re-prioritizing doesn’t mean typing less; I don’t think I could cut down enough for it to matter. Working more responsibly, giving myself breaks, icing the tendons, taking Aleve, taking the time for yoga, that I could do.)

I dislike feeling physically limited. Am also deeply thankful that this is my biggest limitation.

tutoring glee.

I didn’t want to tutor today.

I really, really didn’t.

There’s thesis work to do. There’s a lot going on at other-work, too (the stuff I get paid for). I need to clean my apartment I need to iron my shoelaces I want to read the New Yorker and curl up and do nothing and sleep and traipse in the woods and stop overloading my brian and do not want to tutor.

Right. Two successful hours later, I am jumping with glee like a mad squirrel. I was made for teaching, and cannot wait to teach Italian twice a week next semester to brilliant young artists. They will undoubtedly be blasé, and some of them will care nought for homework, but it’ll be good to get some practice on non-Brown students (who are on crack in their own sweet way, hyper-responsible and sometimes more demanding on the teacher than the teacher is on them). Plus, RISD exposure specifically is never a bad thing. And, teaching! I get to create knowledge and get them to speak another language. How good is that?!

grr argh, blogrolling!

I’ve got MovableType pinging blogrolling.com every time I update, and for the last several days that ping has returned an error (the activity log just says “failed”). Anyone else have this problem?

MLA session change

I am pleased to announce an addition to ACH-sponsored session “Electronic Theory and Criticism” at this year’s MLA convention in San Diego. Thom Swiss, of University of Iowa, has graciously agreed to be a respondent to the papers. The full details of the session are below; we hope to see you there!

Please pass this information on to people you think may be interested.

Saturday, 27 December
8. Electronic Theory and Criticism
3:30-4:45 p.m., Cunningham A, Manchester Grand Hyatt

Program arranged by the Association for Computers and the Humanities.
Presiding: Vika Zafrin, Brown Univ.

1. “Show, Not Tell: The Value of New Media Scholarship,” Cheryl E. Ball, Michigan Technological Univ.

2. “The Simultaneous South: An Electronic, Multilinear Approach to Borges’s ‘The South,’” Marjorie Luesebrink, Irvine Valley Coll., CA

Respondent: Thomas Swiss, Univ. of Iowa.

hunger’s effect

I keep having to re-learn this lesson: I am not capable of being efficiently productive with stationary (computer) work, if I am hungry. I’ll get things done, but it will take a lot longer.

Tasks that require me to move – walking from point A to point B, [non-food] shopping – are not affected by this, within reasonable limits. Neither, for the most part, are stationary tasks that happen mostly on autopilot, like driving.

Genette’s Architext

Today’s been good for the thesis. After playing around a bit with XML structures, I decided that, although I am flailing around with XML, XSLT and relateds, it shouldn’t be that hard to actually encode my texts. The trick will be building the interface, complete with the “views” of the corpus that I’d like to present and perhaps even a visualization or two. Not impossible.

Then I went back to Gérard Genette’s The Architext: An Introduction, which I read last winter and liked for its conciseness and fluidity of concept. Slightly sketchy notes below.

The back cover summary has Genette “assert[ing] that the object of poetics is not the text, but the architext—the transcendent categories (literary gentres, modes of enunciation, and types of discourse, among others) to which each individual text belongs.” At my prelims, one of my committee members wondered whether there is an ur-Roland, a superset that can be defined. It seems that yes, such a superset exists – it is what makes Roland a corpus – and, in Genette’s terms, this idea of A Roland which unifies art works into a corpus is the architext which contains individual works.

Genette’s concern with the misattribution of the epic/lyric/dramatic triad to Aristotle is unimportant to me. It doesn’t matter who developed the “system of genres” (8). What matters is that such a system exists. Even its specific details are not hugely important, in this case: classification schemes I have seen deal exclusively with text-based art, whereas the Roland corpus includes visual art and instrumental music, as well.

Important are not separations of each form from the others according to characteristics specific to only that form, but the characteristics themselves, and their interplay within each work of the corpus and between the works as well.

INTERCULTURAL BORROWING. If work A (from culture A’) borrows from work B (from culture B’), how are their characteristics similar? how are they different? what can be extrapolated from that and our knowledge of the relationship between cultures A’ and B’?

INTRACULTURAL BORROWING. If work A (from socio-temporal circumstance A’) borrows from work B (from socio-temporal circumstance B’), how are their characteristics similar? how are they different? what can be extrapolated from that and our knowledge of the relationship between circumstances A’ and B’?

To answer the above questions, the more useful unit of measure is a work, not a genre. Genres have always been superimposed on a much more complex body of artistic production. To wit: “So the tragic can exist apart from tragedy, just as there are doubtless tragedies that lack the tragic or that in any case are less tragic than others.” (Genette 19) So doing away with genres altogether for the moment doesn’t seem disastrous.

To wit #2: “The unrestricted range [of books of chivalry] enables the author to show his powers, epic, lyric, tragic, or comic.” (Cervantes/Don Quixote, quoted in Genette 29). Notice: no attempt to specify a single genre (tragedy, comedy, epic), or a single form (poetry rhymed/unrhymed, novelistic prose, sermon).

Hell, Shakespearean tragedy almost ubiquitously involves some sort of comic relief.

RolandHT is a move from “all-embracing, hierarchical systems” (Genette 49) to recombinant ones. Systems of what? Of inquiry, of cognitive filtering through which to view art, no filter being given more or less value than another.

Jill, and blog aesthetics.

Lucky us! Recently-defended Dr. Jill Walker rewarded herself for her hard work with a trip to the States, and came to talk at Brown yesterday. She’s a brilliant scholar and a wonderfully social person, and has the rare gift of effortlessly keeping your attention when talking about scholarship. In talking with her over the last few days, I realized that the design of one’s own weblog has everything to do with updating frequency. My log had been aesthetically displeasing to me, but I hadn’t [had|taken] the time to modify it. It’s not the world’s most beautiful now, but it’s cleaner, and I can tweak it from here. Immediately, I am more inclined to update it.

The snow just hasn’t stopped. This is the day on which I regret having cancelled ‘net service from home: soon, I will walk through the windy streets for at least half an hour, to get home from the office. It’s odd to be looking forward to facing the elements so late in the evening; the wind is lashing the trees, and the cold is likely to be biting. But it seems like a good thing to do anyway. Clear my head.