wednesday, may 20, 2009
Pieces of jewelry that mimic flowers
Designed to spot colorful fruits and berries from a distance, our primate eyes notice feminine necks decorated with strings of round, pigmented beads which catch eyes and whet a desire to reach out and touch what seems to be “edible.” — “Love Signals I” from The Nonverbal Dictionary.
Etsy’s Poster Sketch feature took up a large chunk of my time by letting me make this arrangement:
Links: Squash Blossom, mille fleurs in peach, Lily of the Valley, Pink Flower, FLEUR, Garden of Joy, Hydrangea, Three snow peas in a pod, Romancing, Thicket, RED TULIPS, Bloom, Bluebell, Roses, Japanese Maple Seed, Jaded.
This set is related to a display I saw in a store window in San Francisco — I’ve also seen a similar display in the gift shop of the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden — and Etsy has more interesting items with choices in a broader price range. It’s not the kind of jewelry I wear (less delicate and cheaper), but I like looking at it. Other nice earrings by a friend of a friend: californiablue.
comments (0)
tuesday, march 31, 2009
Orientalism and The Adventures of Prince Achmed
I wrote the following informal thing for my “Europe’s Vision of the Orient” class in fall quarter, and it might be interesting to people who have watched The Adventures of Prince Achmed by Lotte Reiniger (1926): “a pioneer feature-length animated film…a brilliant feature, a wonderful film full of charming comedy, lyrical romance, vigorous and exciting battles, eerie magic, and truly sinister, frightening evil” (says William Moritz). This is out on DVD with a press kit containing some good articles (PDF).
Update (April 3): There’s a review from 2002 that considers the women and stereotypes in the story.
Most of the existing writing about The Adventures of Prince Achmed just admires the film’s aesthetic and technical achievement, but this work also has an interesting place in the history of interpretations of the Thousand and One Nights. The animation is full of traditional Orientalist (pretty much racist) motifs too, but people still watch it for fun, probably conscious of the illustrated stereotypes but not concerned about them. These motifs seem unsurprising on a screen, partly because “most people today who have an image of the Nights or think that they know about the Nights derive that image and that knowledge from films” (page 225 of Robert Irwin’s great article A Thousand and One Nights at the Movies from 2004; reading it requires your university library’s subscription to Middle Eastern Literatures).
Prince Achmed is appealing because it matches an unusual technique to an exotic subject. The elaborateness of Reiniger’s cutouts produces a sense of the otherworldly, erotic, and extravagant — in other words, making a Thousand and One Nights story was a good opportunity for Reiniger to display her virtuoso skills in ways that didn’t make as much sense for an animation of Jack and the Beanstalk. Talking about Thousand and One Nights movies in general, Irwin refers to a “visual clutter of oriental knick-knacks” that “can be put to any purpose” (225), and Reiniger makes use of them. This styling helps reinforce the idea that the Orient is a place of strangeness and excess, which is part of how European (and European-influenced) popular culture maintains the “other” status of the Thousand and One Nights while its stories have been significant and integrated within European art and literature for hundreds of years.
Like Reiniger, artists in the 19th century reached to the Orient to add variety and interest to their art; they produced lots of paintings of imaginary half-dressed harem girls, which were somehow more suitable for polite company than paintings of half-dressed European girls.
Prince Achmed was also influenced by German Expressionism (see this snippet from a history of animation). In A Thousand and One Nights at the Movies, Irwin says:
Expressionist films…were ostentatiously designed films, which made great play with play of light against dark and the use of landscape and architecture to symbolise or express in a stylised fashion Man’s inner states…preoccupied with Fate and with the monstrous and the supernatural. It is easy to see how well this essentially German subject matter could be married to the stories of the Thousand and One Nights. (226)
Irwin mentions Prince Achmed explicitly when talking about Thousand and One Nights movies as “a showcase for special effects…think of the marvellously animated and delicate silhouettes created by Lotte Reiniger…this sort of film work is, in effect, using magic to create stories that are about magic” (231). In What the Shadow Knows: Race, Image, and Meaning in Shadows (1922), Alice Maurice analyzes a very different movie but has a useful interpretation of silhouettes: “can be distilled into the two categories most at odds in Shadows: elusive or illusory phantasms on the one hand, and immediately legible expressions of hidden truths on the other” (72). Maurice also notes that restaged Chinese shadow plays were popular in the United States in the 1920s (69), which would have reinforced Reiniger’s animation of an Oriental story.
Reiniger based her film’s plot on stories from a sanitized translation of the Thousand and One Nights for children, Andrew Lang’s Blue Fairy Book (according to Wikipedia), but she still included a lot of sexy parts, like the harem scene in the still above, and violence. This follows in the tradition of Thousand and One Nights translators modifying and reinterpreting the stories at will for different audiences. Reiniger’s audience seems to be mostly adults, but the story uses a lot of terrible stereotyped characters, common in children’s literature: the African witch, the Chinese despot, and a couple of delicate and mysterious Arabian beauties. Plus the love story has the princess resisting the prince but very quickly giving in. Irwin has something to say about that too: “Medieval Arab storytellers were always happy to include strong, bold and even violent female protagonists…[In modern Western films] the beautiful girl is at best a sidekick, but essentially she is man’s reward for coming through all those dangerous adventures” (228).
Reiniger maintains the recursive aspect of the narrative, putting a few stories within stories, but that’s not central to her retelling. This version of the Thousand and One Nights provides no outer frame story, so Reiniger acts as a kind of Scheherazade: a talented female storyteller, directing the team that produced the story. She doesn’t tell this story to actually save her life, but her work has kept her memory alive among people who appreciate film and especially animation, and at least somewhat among people who are interested in the history of the Thousand and One Nights.
comments (3)
monday, january 26, 2009
Pieces of lint from my navel
Doug at his uncle’s ranch; there are more pictures on Flickr and here.
Some of what I’ve written in other places in the past few months:
A few posts on the Literature Collaborative blog with notes about recent activities, including a pamphlet that we distributed on paper: The Very Unofficial Collection of Helpful Hints for New Lit Students (PDF).
The state of the Delicious hive mind in 2008 — an end-of-the-year post on the Delicious blog about the usefulness of searching the site (along with browsing tags) for all purposes, especially geeky purposes.
Toy Chest (Online or Downloadable Tools for Building Projects) on the UCSB English Department Knowledge Base wiki — Alan Liu asked me to update this page in preparation for his Literature+ class this quarter, so I did. (I took his class last year; here’s my team’s project.)
Social Computing in 2020: Bluesky Innovation Competition, organized by the UCSB Social Computing Group — I helped make this page, which is about a contest for undergraduate and graduate students from all disciplines (deadline January 30, 2009). I’m part of the graduate-student division of the group, which means I go to meetings and talk about nerdy things with nice smart people. I like it.
Sky notes ➴➶➳ — a Tumblr blog where I post half-baked thoughts and links related to reading interfaces (including stuff about annotation, teaching literature, etc). Some of the items: blogs I’m reading, semi-organized thoughts, and a long list.
Into the Teeth of the Wind is my college’s poetry journal (which accepts submissions from non-students, including you) — I’ve helped select poems for publication for the past few years, but I finally redesigned the website last year and also got to design our 2008 issue. That was labor-intensive but I liked it: the first industrially-printed small book I’ve laid out from cover to cover. You can buy a copy for the low price of $5.50.
Also: more than 1800 replies on the Delicious support forum, an essay titled “Analysis of Discussions of Women’s Prominence in the Blogosphere”, another one titled “Typography and Class”, and notes toward an essay about Orientalism in The Adventures of Prince Achmed. Aieee.
comments (0)
tuesday, december 09, 2008
Notes about digital poetry and the history of copyright
I had a lot of fun attending some of this quarter’s events held by the UCSB English department. Here are my scribbles from a couple lectures — filtered through my brain, so they’re not very accurate representations of what was said — to make them searchable for my future reference and to share them too.
Literature.Culture.Media Center Event:
Gaps, Vexes, and the Digitas, Lisa Samuels, November 20
Our printed handout consisted of a screenshot, three pages of poetry, and five pages of Java. That’s my kind of lecture. Samuels talked about two of her works of electronic poetry: a collection of “gap scans” (poetry she has annotated and broken apart using custom software) and “Vex Increment” (a semi-random animation of an appropriated poem, generated by custom software).
She sees the gap scans as visualizations of the deeper meanings of the appropriated poetry, redacting words and parts of words to reveal nuances and marking them up with bits of criticism that appear in tooltips. Learning to see depth is learning to read. Naive reading is linear while expert reading is conceptual. The visual spectacle of the marked-up text is important. “Archipelago poetics”: reaching across little islands of text, reaching between disciplines, etc.
One of her gap scans has a visual element, “If” with radiating lines of text, that reminds of calligrams [like the one on the right]. She says this was a challenge for the student coding the project — text layout routines aren’t designed to let you do wacky things like that. Maybe typewriters could handle it better. The software you use helps determine the kind of poetry you can write, and the kind of poetry you write helps determine the software that you use, etc.
“Vex Increment” is a text animation that goes along with a slow piece played on treated piano, sounding to me like old clocks ticking and chiming. She is interested in randomness within set structures, and she likes patient, non-frenetic delivery of digital work. This work was partly inspired by a speed reading toy with words displayed one at time, like this one. People talk about randomness and pseudo-randomness; reminds me of Oulipo.
The complexity of the custom code generating and displaying her work is related in some ways to the complexity of the text and the analysis. She talked about looking at the code written by her collaborator, trying to read it as a non-programmer, recognizing words and figuring out patterns of whitespace. Punctuation is a type of code within written human language. Whitespace in poetry and code is meaningful but non-functional. She’d like to make the code a more visible part of the project; this makes me think of quines. Looking at code from a literary point of view is not always silly.
She likes A Humument, of course. Book art has a tradition of physically-enacted criticism. Her work also reminds me of a recent post about Williams poems, including interest in generating them programmatically (which happened).
History of Books and Material Texts Research Focus Group Lecture:
The Public Sphere and the Emergence of Copyright, Mark Rose, November 7
“Texts” vs. “works” (Foucault, Barthes). The history of books became a subject with the appearance of the digital. The prehistory of this kind of study was bibliography and textual study.
Milton’s Areopagitica discusses the “public sphere”: private people coming together in a public. An older form of this was the prince representing the land. Public-ity. (Habermas.) Late 17th century.
Areopagitica turned the world of books into little dramas, like “the piazza of one title page” where he compares a title page to courtly rituals, in opposition to the idea of the public sphere. Looking at Milton’s title page, “speech” is big, his name is big, and there are no licensing symbols. The whole thing was a protest against the indignity of licensing.
At this time, books were seen as embodiments of their authors, and authors were seen as living in their books. Books are vital and generative, like people. The brain was understood to be the womb of ideas. Milton talks about “precious lifeblood”; semen was seen as the distillation of blood; this was a biological space; be fruitful and multiply.
The Stationer’s Company was concerned with social and economic propriety and order — wholesome knowledge. The company had a hierarchical structure, with meticulous ritual displays of decorum, confirming their authority. This was the pre-modern structure of princely public-ity.
After the end of licensing, there was a massive amount of publishing. Then, the Statute of Anne provided a limited copyright (1710), not to maintain good order, but to protect individuals. This gives legal reality to the public sphere: authors have a right to their own work. The Statute’s term limits created the public domain. Since then, there has been tension between property and discourse and controversy over term limits. Eldred vs. Ashcroft established that there is (or could be) conflict between free speech and copyright.
The focus in the 18th century was on labor. Copying was not OK, but adaptation took labor so it was OK. In 1841 in the US, this shifted to market value.
The distinction of private vs. public didn’t quite apply to the Stationer’s Company, and it doesn’t quite apply to conglomerates like Viacom.
Dematerialization is latent in the abstracted process of writing.
Early Modern Center Lecture:
The Gutenberg Parenthesis, Thomas Pettitt, October 16
This lecture has informed a lot of what I’ve learned this quarter. The basic idea: the postmodern has much in common with the early modern, and the modern was just a temporary period between the two. But this was almost two months ago, so instead of notes from memory, here’s part of Pettitt’s handout.
comments (0)
monday, november 17, 2008
“Extra Credit on the Strange Web” for no credit
This quarter I have a bunch of classes and activities but I also wanted to contribute a little to the campus newspaper, The Daily Nexus, by writing a silly web column for its associated blog. I’ve stored thousands of bookmarks in my Delicious account, and this series of blog posts is an attempt to coagulate some of my favorite bookmarks into text-blobs presentable to a general audience.
Here’s what I’ve written so far, about once a week:
- Creativity with bugs, sometimes by force — an introduction to me and the world of insect art.
- Where the rainbow gets complicated — “aspects of color vision that I think are cool.”
- A few reworkings of bits of metal and plastic — “a few ways that people have misused computer hardware for the purposes of entertainment.”
- There’s more to paper than little cranes — complex origami, animation, papercraft, etc.
- Scans of old things people have tried to forget — weird old ephemera as entertaining history lessons.
- Movie-watching for slightly obsessive people — details including easter eggs, typography, and greebles.
New posts appear at the category page, which includes a link to the feed for the whole blog (joined by stories of a student abroad, career advice, and health advice).
