Recent Literary Genres Posts

I. coursekeeping
Thursday's class: our final teach-in -- 5
performances in 80 minutes, so you can
take up to 15 minutes (if you need/want it...)

we'll stop discussion @ 11 today, in order to
complete the end-of-semester evaluations...
(I am the primary--and most immediate-- audience:
please write them as letters of useful advice to me....!)
relevant on-line conversation about "not learning anything...."?
(plus "doing it all"...?)

II. for today, we listened to a October 30, 1938 radio show...
what was the experience like for us?
how does the genre of radio operate on us?
do you listen to the radio? under what conditions?
(leamirella re: this show? froggies315 re: radio shows?)

Would you have fallen for Welles's broadcast?
Do you assume that many other people did? Why?

When you created your radio show on Tuesday, to what
degree did you hope/intend to "hook/hoodwink" your audience?
Why/why not??
In what other ways did your show anticipate/diverge
from the one written and performed by Orson Welles?

Cf. Michael Socolow, "The Hyped Panic Over 'War of the Worlds.'"
The Chronicle Review 55, 9 (October 24, 2008), 16:

Frank Stanton sensed trouble. Sitting in his living room on the night of October 30,
1938, the young CBS executive tuned in to catch Orson Welles's adaptation of H.G.
Wells's War of the Worlds. The program sounded crisp and engaging -- but a bit too
realistic. Stanton grabbed his coat and headed back to CBS' headquarters on Madison
Avenue. Pushing his way through chaotic hallways jammed with reporters, police, and
network employees, he reached his desk and telephoned his friend Paul Lazarsfeld.

Stanton and the sociologist Lazarsfeld set out to measure the panic as quickly and
accurately as possible before it subsided. Their basic results would spur a remarkable
conversation that reverberates 70 years later in social psychology, media theory, federal
regulation, and other fields.

The "War of the Worlds" broadcast remains enshrined in collective memory as
a vivid illustration of the madness of crowds and the deeply invasive nature of
broadcasting. The program seemingly proved that radio could, in the memorable
words of Marshall McLuhan, turn "psyche and society into a single echo chamber."
The audience's reaction clearly illustrated the perils of modernity. At the time, it
cemented a growing suspicion that skillful artists -- or incendiary demagogues --
could use communications technology to capture the consciousness of the nation.
It remains the prime example used by media critics, journalists, and professors to
prove the power of the media.

Yet the media are not as powerful as most think, and the real story behind "The War of
the Worlds" is a bit more complex. The panic was neither as widespread nor as serious
as many have believed at the time or since.

Nobody died of fright or was killed in the panic, nor could any suicides be traced to the
broadcast. Hospital emergency-room visits did not spike, nor, surprisingly, did calls to
the police outside of a select few jurisdictions. The streets were never flooded with a
terrified citizenry. Ben Gross, the radio columnist of the New York Daily News, later
remembered a "lack of turmoil in front of CBS" that contrasted notably with the crowded,
chaotic scene inside the building. Telephone lines in New York City and a few other cities
were jammed, as the primitive infrastructure of the era couldn't handle the load, but it
appears that almost all the panic that evening was as ephemeral as the nationwide
broadcast itself, and not nearly as widespread. That iconic image of the farmer with
a gun, ready to shoot the aliens? It was staged for Life magazine.

So what accounts for the legend? First -- and perhaps most important --
the news media loved the story, and Welles loved the news media. The panic
became a global story literally overnight. Even the Nazis could not resist
commenting, noting the credulity of the American public. Americans certainly
appeared gullible, but they were not alone. The news media, handed a sensational
story of national scope, reported every detail (including fictional ones) about Welles,
the program, and the reaction.

Welles's greatest performance that evening wasn't in the studio; it was in a hallway,
at the improvised news conference, when he feigned a stunned, apologetic demeanor.
In reality, as Paul Heyer notes in The Medium and the Magician, Welles carefully
concealed his satisfaction with the hysteria while expressing concern over the rumors
of deaths attributed to the program. The threats of investigation coming from the
Federal Communications Commission bothered Welles, too, but they were primarily
CBS's problem.

It was the government, and its relationship to CBS, that worried Stanton. While Welles
spoke to reporters a few floors away, he and Lazarsfeld created a brief survey instrument
to gauge the significance of the panic. Without consulting his bosses, who were occupied
at the time, Stanton phoned a trusted survey organization to conduct nationwide interviews
as soon as possible. Data were compiled over the following 24 hours and immediately
forwarded to Stanton's CBS office.

Unfortunately, those data, if they still exist, are unavailable to scholars. CBS, unlike
NBC, severely restricts access to its archives. But Stanton's survey has trickled down
to us through a classic study in the emerging field of social psychology, Hadley Cantril's
The Invasion From Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic (1940). Cantril, a Princeton
social psychologist; Stanton; and Lazarsfeld had created the Office of Radio Research,
a Rockefeller Foundation-supported project based at Princeton that can be considered
the first significant attempt to empirically analyze the effects of mass media.

Cantril's study, which remains the most enduring source for what we know about that night,
combined the CBS data, a second survey conducted six weeks later by the American
Institute of Public Opinion, and a series of detailed interviews with 135 people, of which
"over 100 were known to have been upset by the broadcast." Admitting that his interviews
did not comprise an accurate sample of either the national population or the radio audience
that evening, Cantril nevertheless filled his short volume with narratives of terror and fear.
The interview subjects -- all from New Jersey "for reasons of finance and supervision" --
were found by the "personal inquiry and initiative of the interviewers" hired by Cantril.
They were a self-reporting, self-selected cohort. Cantril did attempt to interview people
identified in newspapers as frightened, but that effort proved almost entirely futile.

Such reliance on qualitative measures, while using an unrepresentative sample, only
begins to hint at Cantril's methodological problems. Cantril's estimates of how many
people actually heard the broadcast, and how many were frightened, are wildly imprecise.
Because CBS's Mercury Theatre on the Air lacked sponsorship, the C.E. Hooper Company,
the commercial ratings service used at the time, did not rate Welles's program. The American
Institute of Public Opinion national survey (taken six weeks after the program, following an
avalanche of publicity) found 12 percent of respondents claiming they had heard the
broadcast. That represents an audience of almost 12 million Americans -- a number that
is certainly far too high. Slightly less than four million Americans had tuned into Welles's
Mercury Theatre on the Air the week before "The War of the Worlds."

From such disparate approximations Cantril offered the "conservative estimate" that six
million Americans heard the broadcast. The public-opinion institute's survey found that 28
percent of the listeners believed the broadcast contained real news bulletins, and of that 28
percent about 70 percent were "frightened or disturbed." These numbers undercut several
of Cantril's assertions about the scope of the panic; they reveal that about three out of four
listeners knew the program was fiction. So Cantril did what many social scientists faced
with disagreeable data do: He spun the numbers. The low numbers, he wrote, represent
the "very minimum of the total number actually frightened" because "many persons were
probably too ashamed of their gullibility to confess it in a cursory interview." He candidly
admitted that "there is the possibility that some people heard so much about the broadcast
that they reported actually hearing it."

In other words, Cantril concluded that many respondents probably lied.

Cantril's assertions about the data are largely forgotten. His book is cited far
more for its tales of panic than for its faulty statistical analysis or sampling
anomalies. His study survives because it supplies what many scholars and
journalists need: academic proof for what they think they already know. It
legitimized the myth of the night of terror as perhaps nothing else could.

Neither Stanton nor Lazarsfeld was satisfied with Cantril's work. On the personal
level, Cantril and Lazarsfeld did not get along. One was a Harvard-trained WASP
with the social connections needed to land a prestigious post at Princeton; the other
was a thickly accented, chain-smoking, Jewish refugee from Vienna trained at the
intersection of economics, mathematics, and applied psychology. Nor did it help
that Lazarsfeld once made a pass at Cantril's wife, a piece of information Stanton
relayed to me in an interview.

A few years after the publication of Cantril's book, Stanton and Lazarsfeld excoriated
their colleague in confidential interviews with Rockefeller Foundation officials. Stanton
told an interviewer that Cantril's original manuscript was "completely unsatisfactory,"
and he admitted he had "no respect for Cantril's scholarly standards." Lazarsfeld was
even more brutal, telling the interviewer that some of Cantril's conclusions were "laughable."
Because Cantril was "pathologically ambitious," according to Lazarsfeld, he was "a highly
dangerous influence in the field." Stanton told the foundation officials that he and Lazarsfeld
essentially rewrote the manuscript and allowed it to be published under Cantril's name.

That explains why some of the book's less-emphasized conclusions foreshadowed
important findings about the power of the media. The hypodermic model of media
effects, which prevailed at the time, posited that the media injected ideas, more or
less directly, into the consciousness of the audience. The book's data seriously
undermined that model, demonstrating empirically that each member of the mass
audience filters the media's messages through a matrix of personal variables
(education, critical ability, class, etc.). Those data complicated media theory
tremendously and intensified the research focus on the complexities of audience
reception.

Lazarsfeld surprised many by concluding in The People's Choice, his classic study of
the 1940 election, that the media's effects are, in general, much more selective
and limited than we assume. Other forms of communication, from those in the
education system to religious communication to interpersonal communication,
were apparently more powerful. The mass media were but one part of a larger
web of influence, and as one factor, their actual influence was mediated by
several other variables. Thus, the media's ability to control us was far less
pronounced than assumed.

That is the ultimate irony behind "The War of the Worlds." The discovery that
the media are not all-powerful, that they cannot dominate our political consciousness
or even our consumer behavior as much as we suppose, was an important one.
It may seem like a counterintuitive discovery (especially considering its provenance),
but ask yourself this: If we really know how to control people through the media,
then why isn't every advertising campaign a success? Why do advertisements
sometimes backfire? If persuasive technique can be scientifically devised, then why
do political campaigns pursue different strategies? Why does the candidate with the
most media access sometimes lose?

The answer is that humans are not automatons. We might scare easily, we might,
at different times and in different places, be susceptible to persuasion, but our
behavior remains structured by a complex and dynamic series of interacting factors.

Later media theory, and empirical research, would complicate and refine those earliest
findings. But the basic problem of audience reception remains stubbornly resistant, and
as long as the mass media exist, we'll have empirical studies with dueling conclusions
concerning effects. Many people, including scholars, will continue to believe
something they intuitively suspect: that the media manipulate the great mass of
the nation, transforming rational individuals into emotional mobs. But notice
how those who believe this never include themselves in the mob. We are, as
the Columbia University sociologist W. Phillips Davison once pointed out, very
susceptible to the notion that others are more persuadable than ourselves.

Would you have fallen for Welles's broadcast?
If not, why do you assume so many other people did?

-----

Hadley Cantril, The Invasion from Mars:
A Study in the Psychology of Panic (1947)
6 million heard broadcast; 1 million upset
4 announcements during broadcast; 4 after; some stations interrupted w/ others
Gallup poll: 28% believed it was a newscast; frantic telephone calls
Why did the frightened listener so readily confused fiction w/ reality?
broadcast fit organized mental construct:
radio accepted vehicle for important announcements: confidence in broadcasting
prestige of speakers (scientists, military men)
specific details (place names)
everyone bewildered
total experience
tuning in late: false (realistic) rather than correct (detached) standard of judgment
w/out proper warning signals: misinterpretation
Panic arose from an error in judgment; what enabled people to choose correctly?
more highly educated/wealthier people recognized broadcast as a play:
capacity to distinguish between fiction and reality: on checking other sources

conditions inhibiting critical ability: personal susceptibility (insecurity, 
phobias, amount of worry, lack of self-confidence, fatalism, religiosity,
frequence of church attendance); listening situation (corroboratory effect
of others’ behavior, contagion of other’s fear, immediacy of danger)

historical setting: instability of important social norms
unsettled economic conditions since 1929; European war scare; thrill of disaster

H.G. Wells: “the forceps of our minds are clumsy forceps and crush the
truth a little in taking hold of it” ("Experiment in Autobiography," 1934)

six comparative individual cases (2 well educated, 2 economically
insecure,  2 religious, each w/ 1 frightened, 1 not)

why the panic? suggestibility: preexisting mental sets made the
story understandable; lacking standards of judgment to make
reliable checks; no existing standards adequate to task; unaware of
alternative interpretations

clearest index of critical ability:
readiness to re-evaluate first interpretations
outstanding index to suggestibility: complete absence of awareness
that things might be otherwise (need to select and seek a standard of judgment)

panic occurs when a highly cherished, commonly accepted value is threatened,
and no certain elimination is in sight; extreme behavior evoked by broadcast
result of complete inability to alleviate/control consequences of invasion

Nov. 2, 1938 column: “I doubt if anything of the sort would have happened
four or five months ago. The course of world history has affected national
psychology. Jitters have come to roost. We have just gone through a
laboratory demonstration of the fact that the peace of Munich hangs
heavy over our heads, like a thundercloud.” [highly disturbed economic
conditions engendered widespread feeling of insecurity; Hitler provided
directed relief to bewildered souls]

Latent anxieties conducive to panic minimized if critical abilities can
be increased; attitude of readiness to question interpretations; need
for sufficient, relevant knowledge to evaluate different interpretations;
extensive educational opportunities, less harassed by emotional insecurity
from underprivileged environments

I. coursekeeping
by 8 p.m. tomorrow: post your third web event on Serendip

for Tuesday, listen to the sound recording of 1938 War of the Worlds;
reproduced Radio Spirits, Inc and Norman Rudman, 1998; available
in seven segments on youtube, or streaming/downloadable as an mp3 file

--and think about the genre of the radio play (how does having only
AURAL input alter what you do while you are hearing the story?
froggies315: helping out w/ this discussion?)

for next Thursday, prepare your portion of the "teach-in":
sign up now so I know what groups we've got/can tell you
how much time each of you will each have (do you need
some time to "mingle" first...?)

after that!....on the course home page,
you'll find links to the checklist/final portfolio of all your course requirements
(taking some time to review these now....)

II. a few afterthoughts re: Tuesday's discussion of Adaptation:
Alicia: I believe that no movie that is based on a book will ever be
faithful to the book in its entirety because the creative team working
on the movie will heighten a particular aspect(s) for the sake of entertainment.

vspaeth: I really didn't like the movie Adaptation.  Not because of the way
it was made or the circular movement of it.  No, I didn't like it because they
represented a very real woman, Susan Orlean, as a drug addicted,
violent, ragged character....I was shocked.  I couldn't wrap my head around
the fact that she had seen this movie and didn't sue everyone involved....
I don't think they represented her at all.

Ayla: I thought our discussion of Adaptation was an important one to have
since we compared the movie to the book and talked about what the movie
was about and it's value etc.  However, I was so disappointed with what was
not said - or rather what there wasn't time for....the example that stands out
to me the most is that Charlie kept saying he wanted to show people that
flowers were pretty.  In the movie, Charlie "writes in" a scene [where] John says
(something along the lines of), "People are always leeching off me.  Get your
own passion!  Stupid bitch."  When Orlean sees the ghost orchid, she says,
"It's just a flower."  She couldn't adopt anyone's passion or fascination with
orchids because it wasn't hers.  This scene parallels Charlie's inability to
make a movie that 'shows people that flowers are pretty.'  This is precisely
because even if he had made a movie that exhibited flowers, he would not
have succeeded.  He would not be able to force his audience adopt an
appreciation for flowers.

what else...?

III. turning to H.G. Well's "scientific romance"....
have you read anything by H.G. Wells before?
describe your experiences of reading this story:
what surprised/intrigued/puzzled/pleased you?
(taking a leaf from Ayla:) what does it accomplish?

multiple adaptations:
Independence Day,
Tim Burton's Mars Attacks!
The X-Files
the xbox video game series Halo
Alan Moore's graphic novel, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume II
the end of the first issue of Marvel Zombies 5....

the one we'll be listening to for Tuesday is a radio performance...
so (thought experiment!): how would you turn
"The War of the Worlds" into a contemporary radio show?
how much of the original cultural setting would you keep?
what dimensions of the story seem to you still important/lasting?
(remember the essay by Gary Bortolotti and Linda Hutcheon,
"On the Origin of Adaptations: Rethinking Fidelity Discourse,"
which I quoted on Tuesday: "think about the broader questions
of why and how certain stories are told and retold....")
why re-tell this story today? and how?

IV. Anne's reading notes/stopping points for discussion

intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes…

before we judge them  too harshly, we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought...Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?

It came to me that I was upon this dark common, helpless, unprotected, and alone. Suddenly, like a thing falling upon me from without, came--fear….The fear I felt was … a panic terror not only of the Martians, but of the dusk and stillness all about me. Such an extraordinary effect in unmanning me it had that I ran weeping silently as a child might do.

…My terror had fallen from me like a garment….A few minutes before, there had only been three real things before me--the immensity of the night and space and nature, my own feebleness and anguish, and the near approach of death. Now it was as if something turned over, and the point of view altered abruptly. There was no sensible transition from one state of mind to the other. I was immediately the self of every day again--a decent, ordinary citizen. The silent common, the impulse of my flight, the starting flames, were as if they had been in a dream. I asked myself had these latter things indeed happened? I could not credit it….

Perhaps I am a man of exceptional moods. I do not know how far my experience is common. At times I suffer from the strangest sense of detachment from myself and the world about me; I seem to watch it all from the outside, from somewhere inconceivably remote, out of time, out of space, out of the stress and tragedy of it all. This feeling was very strong upon me that night. Here was another side to my dream….

my reasoning was dead against the chances of the invaders….In the centre, sticking into the skin of our old planet Earth like a poisoned dart, was this cylinder. But the poison was scarcely working yet. …Beyond was a fringe of excitement, and farther than that fringe the inflammation had not crept as yet. In the rest of the world the stream of life still flowed as it had flowed for immemorial years. The fever of war that would presently clog vein and artery, deaden nerve and destroy brain, had still to develop.

…."It's a pity they make themselves so unapproachable," he said. "It would be curious to know how they live on another planet; we might learn a thing or two."

….I must confess the sight of all this armament, all this preparation, greatly excited me. My imagination became belligerent, and defeated the invaders in a dozen striking ways; something of my schoolboy dreams of battle and heroism came back. It hardly seemed a fair fight to me at that time. They seemed very helpless in that pit of theirs.

…And this was the little world in which I had been living securely for years, this fiery chaos!

[artillery man, curate, and brother, a medical student…]

"What do these things mean?…Why are these things permitted? What sins have we done?….This must be the beginning of the end…The great and terrible day of the Lord!"

"God … is not an insurance agent."

The habit of personal security…is …deeply fixed in the Londoner's mind….

No doubt the thought that was uppermost in a thousand of those vigilant minds, even as it was uppermost in mine, was the riddle--how much they understood of us. Did they grasp that we in our millions were organized, disciplined, working together?

….in the Martians we have beyond dispute the actual accomplishment of such a suppression of the animal side of the organism by the intelligence. To me it is quite credible that the Martians may be descended from beings not unlike ourselves, by a gradual development of brain and hands …at the expense of the rest of the body. Without the body the brain would, of course, become a mere selfish intelligence, without any of the emotional substratum of the human being.

…I found about me the landscape, weird and lurid, of another planet. For that moment I touched an emotion beyond the common range of men, yet one that the poor brutes we dominate know only too well. I felt as a rabbit might feel returning to his burrow and suddenly confronted by the work of a dozen busy navvies digging the foundations of a house. I felt the first inkling of … dethronement, a persuasion that I was no longer a master, but an animal among the animals, under the Martian heel. With us it would be as with them, to lurk and watch, to run and hide; the fear and empire of man had passed away.

…I found myself thinking consecutively--a thing I do not remember to have done since my last argument with the curate. During all the intervening time my mental condition had been a hurrying succession of vague emotional states or a sort of stupid receptivity. But in the night my brain, reinforced, I suppose, by the food I had eaten, grew clear again, and I thought.

….the killing of the curate…gave me no sensation of horror or remorse to recall; I saw it simply as a thing done, a memory infinitely disagreeable but quite without the quality of remorse. I saw myself then as I see myself now, driven step by step towards that hasty blow, the creature of a sequence of accidents leading inevitably to that. I felt no condemnation; yet the memory, static, unprogressive, haunted me. In the silence of the night, with that sense of the nearness of God that sometimes comes into the stillness and the darkness, I stood my trial, my only trial, for that moment of wrath and fear. I retraced every step of our conversation …We had been incapable of co-operation--grim chance had taken no heed of that. Had I foreseen, I should have left him ...But I did not foresee; and crime is to foresee and do. And I set this down as I have set all this story down, as it was. There were no witnesses--all these things I might have concealed. But I set it down, and the reader must form his judgment as he will.

….I had uttered prayers, fetish prayers, had prayed as heathens mutter charms when I was in extremity; but now I prayed indeed, pleading steadfastly and sanely, face to face with the darkness of God. Strange night! Strangest in this, that so soon as dawn had come, I, who had talked with God, crept out of the house like a rat leaving its hiding place--a creature scarcely larger, an inferior animal, a thing that for any passing whim of our masters might be hunted and killed. Perhaps they also prayed confidently to God. Surely, if we have learned nothing else, this war has taught us pity--pity for those witless souls that suffer our dominion.

"…it is up with humanity…We're beat…We're eatable ants."

"it's the man that keeps on thinking comes through….Life is real again, and the useless and cumbersome and mischievous have to die….But saving the race is nothing in itself….that's only being rats. It's saving our knowledge and adding to it is the thing….We must make great safe places down deep, and get all the books we can; not novels and poetry swipes, but ideas, science books….we must leave the Martians alone. ..We must show them we mean no harm. Yes, I know. But they're intelligent things, and they won't hunt us down if they have all they want, and think we're just harmless vermin."

…scattered about …were the Martians--dead!--slain by the putrefactive and disease bacteria against which their systems were unprepared; slain as the red weed was being slain; slain, after all man's devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth….These germs of disease have taken toll of humanity since the beginning of things--taken toll of our prehuman ancestors since life began here. But by virtue of this natural selection of our kind we have developed resisting power; to no germs do we succumb without a struggle, and to many--those that cause putrefaction in dead matter, for instance--our living frames are altogether immune. But there are no bacteria in Mars, and directly these invaders arrived, directly they drank and fed, our microscopic allies began to work their overthrow….they were irrevocably doomed, dying and rotting even as they went to and fro. It was inevitable. By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth, and it is his against all comers; it would still be his were the Martians ten times as mighty as they are. For neither do men live nor die in vain.

….I cannot but regret, now that I am concluding my story, how little I am able to contribute to the discussion of the many debatable questions which are still unsettled….My particular province is speculative philosophy….

whether we expect another invasion or not, our views of the human future must be greatly modified by these events. We have learned now that we cannot regard this planet as being fenced in and a secure abiding place for Man; we can never anticipate the unseen good or evil that may come upon us suddenly out of space. It may be that in the larger design of the universe this invasion from Mars is not without its ultimate benefit for men; it has robbed us of that serene confidence in the future which is the most fruitful source of decadence, the gifts to human science it has brought are enormous, and it has done much to promote the conception of the commonweal of mankind. It may be that across the immensity of space the Martians have watched the fate of these pioneers of theirs and learned their lesson… Be that as it may, for many years yet there will certainly be no relaxation of the eager scrutiny of the Martian disk, and those fiery darts of the sky, the shooting stars, will bring with them as they fall an unavoidable apprehension to all the sons of men.

The broadening of men's views that has resulted can scarcely be exaggerated. Before the cylinder fell there was a general persuasion that through all the deep of space no life existed beyond the petty surface of our minute sphere. Now we see further…

I must confess the stress and danger of the time have left an abiding sense of doubt and insecurity in my mind….I go to London and see the busy multitudes in Fleet Street and the Strand, and it comes across my mind that they are but the ghosts of the past, haunting the streets that I have seen silent and wretched, going to and fro, phantasms in a dead city, the mockery of life in a galvanised body.

I. coursekeeping
for Thursday, read H.G. Wells' 1898 short science
fiction novel, "The War of the Worlds"; web edition 1995.
(leamirella: taking some responsibility for this discussion,
and/or the one after?)

@ the time it was published, this story was actually
categorized as "scientific romance"-- an archaic (?) term
for what we now call science fiction, originating in the 1850s to
describe the combination of fiction with elements of scientific writing

this is one of the earliest stories detailing a conflict between humans and aliens--
in that way a precursor to Slaughterhouse Five --so you might want also
to think about those connections/differences (war? peace?); it also
anticipated the wholesale destruction of cities that occured in WWII

"The War of the Worlds" inspired multiple more explicit spin-offs
(plus Robert Goddard's invention of the first liquid-fueled rocket,
Freeman Dyson's search for extraterrestial life....!);
next week we'll be comparing Wells's text with the most famous
of these, the 1938 sound recording  of the story by Orson Welles,

so we will also repeat the exercise we did last week:
I will ask you to take some time in class to begin sketching a
radio version of the story to be broadcast NOW.

Wells' story has (of course) a particular cultural location:
end-of-century fears of apocalypse; pre-WWI fears of invasion;
height-of-British-empire critique of imperialism, religion, celebration of science...

what are our current cultural fears? how might you put them into aurality?
(more effectively than Independence Day....?)
once the future imagined by science fiction becomes the present of the reader...
what happens next?

II. this weekend some of you were already thinking about this....

froggies315: what are we going to do with all the contradictory
stuff we've learned this semester...What are we going to do that
is useful?  This is sort of a terrifying question.

KT: the questions that we’ve pondered can’t be undone....
life will be tough from here on out, more questions and more
uncertainties, but ...more depth and development too.

kobieta: It is extremely hard and difficult to change opinions...
but whole is to get us thinking... life never makes sense, only fiction
does... in my intro bio labs ...Wil encourages us to "develop questions,
design methods to answer those questions, collect and analyzing
observations and develop evidence based explanations"....
so too has this course.

sterrab: I have learned the distinctions between genres as well
as the thin walls that separate them all...."we need to find originality
within genre" [quote from Adaptation]...It is the writer's goal to bend
the rules that are set within a genre and make something exceptional
and outstanding out of it.

dglasser: Passion suggests more longevity than obsession....passion
also suggests, to me, some sort of completion; a completion of self.
While obsession seems more external...passion is more of something
you take in; my passion is doing; -ing is my passion....can you ever
know your passions? I think you can...

III. last week we imagined some movies;
today we discuss one that actually got made!

froggies315: it seemed like a cautionary tale about the
perils of telling other people’s stories, of what can happen
when someone becomes so obsessed with telling a story
that he becomes part of that story and truth and reality bend
and everything is confusing and unclear.  In this way, I think
this movie fits nicely with a lot of the conversations we’ve had...

leamirella: there is no way of completely translating the book
to a movie that stays true to the "original" writer.

EGrumer: I find Adaptation to be a fascinating film, and one of the
main reasons why is probably the questions of accuracy. It's a movie
about someone earnestly trying to make The Orchid Thief into an
accurate movie, and as such it is one of the least faithful literary
adaptations I've ever known....I feel as if Adaptation is ...about the
difficulty of adapting books to film ...

Ayla: when I read the book, I kept waiting for something to happen
between them - it was killing me.  So my movie was a love story of
a mismatched couple.

What surprised us in Adaptation?
What happened to the book
when it was adapted into a movie?

What do we think of Adaptation?
What were our initial, critical reactions to the film?

IV. Moving from evaluation to explanation, theorizing now: 
how might the film contribute to our ongoing explorations
of both the genre of evolution and the evolution of genres?

Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory, 15-17: theory is endless...
an unbounded corpus of writing which is always being augmented...
a resource for constant upstagings.... unmasterable... open ended...
the condition of life itself... the questioning of presumed results and
the assumptions on which they are based. The nature of theory is to undo...
what you thought you knew, so the effects of theory are not predictable.

(as opposed to critique: measuring what's new against what you already know??)

Three interpretations of the film to get us going:
Lucas Hilderbrand. "Review: Adaptation." Film Quarterly 2004, 58.1 (Fall): 36-43.
Jonze and Kaufman "rooted their film Adaptation's intertextual mental masturbation
in autoerotic fantasy. Legible as a gimmicky self-reflexive exercise, a comedy of
narcissistic neurosis, or a proufound self-portrait of artistic endeavor, Adaptation
productively narrativizes masturbation's myriad associations, pathologies, and possibilities."

Barbara Simerka and Christopher Weimer, "Duplicitous Diegesis:
Don Quijote and Charlie Kaufman's Adapation." Hispania 2005, 88.1: 91-100.
a comparative study centered on "the representation of self-inscriptive narrative
acts and the juxtaposition of disparate generic forms to create parody."

Gary Bortolotti and Linda Hutcheon, "On the Origin of Adaptations:
Rethinking Fidelity Discourse and 'Success'--Biologically."
New Literary History 2007, 38: 443-458.
"As a biologist and a literary theorist... we would like to propose...
a homology between biological and cultural adaptation... a similarity in
structure that is indicative of a common origin: that is, both kinds of
adaptation are understandable as processes of replication ... both evolve
with changing environments... biological thinking may help move us beyond...
'fidelity discourse'.... to think anew about the broader questions of why
and how certain stories are told and retold.... moving out of an evaluative
discourse and into a descriptive one... As Terry Pratchett has reminded us:
'Stories, great flapping ribbons of shaped space-time, have been blowing
and uncoiling around the universe since the beginning of time. And they
have evolved. The weakest have died and the strongest have survived
and they have grown fat on the retelling.'"

Let's think about these generic questions:
what happens when a book is adapted into a film?
Does it grow "fat" or "thin"?

What happens when a written story is
re-told as a sequence of moving pictures?

Remember novelist/filmmaker Marguerite Duras:
"A word contains a 1000 images" (vs. the more
conventional "a picture is worth a 1000 words")

Cf. Virginia Woolf, who deplored the simplification that inevitably occurs
in the transposition of literary work to the visual medium, calling film a "parasite,"
and literature its "prey" and victim." 

Sally Potter said that her adaptation of
Virginia Woolf's Orlando to the screen was a process of

• distillation
• simplification,
• pragmatism,
• propulsion,
• motivation,
• loss (and the celebration of loss?),
• the articulation of a political stance
  against property and privilege, and...
• presentism.
  
  What happened when this particular book, The Orchid Thief,
  was adapted into this particular film, Adaptation?
  What was kept, what was changed?
  What was foregrounded/backgrounded?
  How did the story evolve?
  
  What commentary does Adaptation itself offer on the making of film?

  Charlie Kauffman: No one's ever done a movie about flowers before.
  So there are no guidelines...
  I'd wanna let the movie exist, rather than be artificially plot-driven.
  
  Robert McKee: ...and God help you if you use voice-over in your work, my friends.
  God help you. That's flaccid, sloppy writing. Any idiot can write a voice-over narration
  to explain the thoughts of a character.

What are the (differing?) logics of organization
in Orlean's book and Kauffman's film?

Susan Orlean: There are too many ideas and things and people.
Too many directions to go. I was starting to believe the reason it
matters to care passionately about something is that it whittles
the world down to a more managable size.

Donald Kauffman: Did you know that there hasn't been a new genre
since Fellini invented the mockumentary...? My genre's thriller, what's yours?

Charlie Kauffman: I don't want to cram in sex or guns or car chases or
characters learning profound life lessons or growing or coming to like
each other or overcome obstacles to succeed in the end. The book
isn't like that, and life isn't like that, it just isn't.

V. Is the film he eventually writes (the one we eventually see)
formulaic precisely in the way he doesn't want it to be?

How well does it follow the guidelines advocated by Robert McKee?

Donald Kaufman: Not rules, principles. McKee writes that a rule says
you *must* do it this way. A principle says, this *works* and has through
all remembered time.

Robert McKee: I'll tell you a secret. The last act makes the film. Wow
them in the end, and you've got a hit.... Find an ending, but don't cheat,
and don't you dare bring in a deus ex machina. Your characters must
change, and the change must come from them.

Is there a deus ex machina in Adaptation?

Do the characters change?

Susan Orlean: I want my life back. I want it back before everything got
fucked up. I want to be a baby again. I want to be new. I WANT TO BE NEW.

Charlie Kaufman: "I have no understanding of anything except myself."

VI. To what degree does the self-referentiality of the movie "eat itself"?
To what degree does the "diegesis" (telling) eat/trump/control
the "mimesis" (showing) of the film? (referencing here the Kaufmans'
conversation about "ouroboros").



What role might ouroboros --self-reflexivity
or cyclicality--play in evolution??

John Laroche: You know why I like plants?....Because
they are so mutable. Adaptation is a profound process.
Means you figure out how to thrive in the world.

Susan Orlean: Yeah but it's easier for plants.
I mean they have no memory. They just move on
to whatever's next. With a person though, adapting
is almost shameful. It's like running away.

.... What I came to understand is that change is not
a choice. Not for a species of plant, and not for me.

In an interview included @ the back of The Orchid Thief, Susan Orlean said,
"I try to figure out if there is destiny and fate or if life is just haphazard.
What we search for is a kind of order and logic in what is the chaotic and
illogical experience of being alive. I think you grab on to little footholds that
make you think that there is logic and that there is some sense of order in your life
...I can't believe there isn't a grand design that is always unfolding in front of us...
Or, aren't we all inventions of our own choices and decisions?

VII. How does the experience of watching a film differ from that of reading a novel?
(particularly in terms of perceiving the world "underground," the unconscious??)

What can we say, from the diversity of our experience,
about the difference in genre that making/viewing a movie makes?
how does a film differ as a literary kind from a written narrative?
what can that new form accomplish that a written prose narrative can not?
(and vice versa?)

I. coursekeeping
for Tuesday, watch Adaptation
--and notice how this film differs from the one
you "made" for today (as well as how it departs
from the book....)
--Canaday owns a copy, which I have NOT put on reserve;
Magill also owns a copy, which IS on reserve

a week from tomorrow, by 8 p.m. on Fri,
Apr. 20, your third 4-pp. web event is due
(do what I will do: look over your first two,
and my responses, and try to build from there...)

a week after that will be our last class (!), Thurs, Apr. 26
when I will expect you to have formed small groups
to prepare 10? minute presentations reflecting on your
experiences over the semester. Presentations should encourage,
in a provocative and entertaining way, further story development
on the part of others in the class.

next Thursday (a week from today), I'll need you to tell
me what group you're in (so I can put together a playlist
and tell you how much time you'll have....)

II. a few post-Tuesday postings
ideas vspaeth wanted to get out before she forgot them...
& froggies315 on the joy obsessions and beliefs and facts
and everything we can't prove (which is everything?) --
plus material re: Isabel Allende's Tales of Passion....

III. making your movies:
create a storyboard for the first 5 shots
(or 5 important sequential shots...) of
"The Orchid Thief: The Movie"
(re-titlings also welcome!)

IV. this a way of re-focusing our discussion of the book
--the question of genre: an autobiography?
--the question of tonality: what is the narrative voice? do you trust it/her?
--the question of structure: what happens to Larouche 1/2-way-through?

V. Reading Notes, continued....

p. 29: "I didn't care all that much whether what he said
was true or not; I just found the flow irresistable."

p. 45: "no flower is more guarded against self-pollination
than orchids ....each orchid species has made itself irresistible"

p. 68: "The Victorians...set out to categorize the living diversity...
locating, identifying, and classifying....the Victorians looked for
order in the univese, an outline that could organize their knowledge...
and rationalize the meaning of existence"

p. 100: "as long as I have it, I still sort of have the moment when I got it"

p. 123: "Florida is... as suggestible as someone under hypnosis.
Its essential character can be repeatedly reimagined."

p. 127: "the place had a wierd overfull emptiness...it was full of the
feeling of a million things planned on and never done."

p. 136: "Laroche...had started to seem...like the endpoint in a continuum
....the oddball ultimate of those people who are enthralled by non-human
living things and who pursue them like lovers."

p. 145: [taking credit for a new hybrid that some one else created is] "conceptual
theft....For a Buddhist it would be spiritually incorrect to protest about intellectual
pirating..."

p. 169: "The pioneer-adventurers in south Florida were traveling inward, into a place
as dark and dense as steel wool, a place that already held an overabundance of living
things. The Florida pioneers had to confront what a dark, dense, overabundant place might
have hidden in it. To explore such a place you had to vanish into it....you might disappear."

p. 185: "Things disappear all the time in Florida, but they show up all the time, too.
Florida is powerfully attractive. It is less like a state than a sponge."

p. 201: "I felt that I was meeting people...who didn't at all seem part of this
modern world and this moment in time--because how they lived and what
they lived for was so optimistic. They sincerely loved something, trusted in the
perfectiblity of some living thing, lived for a myth about themselves and the
idea of adventure..believed that they could make their lives into whatever they dreamed."

p. 214: "Laroche believed all human beings... were afflicted with constricted and unsubtle minds...Laroche prided himself on possessing flawless logic and reason...poaching so that he could help the species in the long run....He trusted himself alone to balance out pros and cons, to disregard rules and use real judgment instead...other people had attitudes that were as narrow as ribbon and they had no common sense at all."

p. 226: "I'm going to do something that doesn't involve things that die...I can't stand working with things that die on you all the time."

p. 241: ..."making up stories about what the rain was trying to say."

p. 245: "he managed to find the fullness and satisfaction of life in narrow desires....I suppose that is exactly what I was doing in Florida, figuring out how people found order and contentment and a sense of purpose in the universe by fixing their sights on one single thing or one belief or one desire. Now I was also trying to understand how someone could end such intense desire without leaving a trace...Laroche's finishes were downright and absolute, and...he also shut off any chance of amends."

p. 246: "Look, the main thing is, the Internet is cool," he said."it's not going to die on me, ike some plant..."

pp. 249-250: "there were many times in Flordia when I felt I was in another world....nothing here seemed ordinary. The fruits were alien. Everyone and everthing had an exotic pedigree. Sometimes in Florida you feel that you are on the edge of the world, and that the rest of the world sloshes in as regularly as the tide...."

p. 251: "The marvelous plant world. We are but visitors in it."

"It doesn't have much connection to reality," he said. "But then again, what does?"

p. 252: "It was in the nature of Florida, this kind of abundance, the overrichness of living things--so many of everything that all of it blurs together and you have to decide whether to be part of the blur or to be a distinct and separate being."

pp. 255-256: "If I had ever doubted whether the orchid world was really as much a world, a culture, a family as I imagined it was, this antagonism was perfect proof. The orchid world had the intimacy of a family and the fights of a family...it was some kind of way to scratch out a balance between being an individual and being a part of somehting bigger than yourself....This has always been a puzzlement to me, how to have a community but remain individual....It is the fundamental contradictoriness of the United States of America--the illogical but optimistic notion that you can create a union of individuals ....I envied the orchid people....I envied the Semnole tribe....I even envied people like Laroche...who belonged to the cult of not belonging, which is its own small and crowded circle that gave them a shape for their lives, even if it was in bas-relief."

p. 258: "It was a relief to have no hope because then I had no fear; looking for something you want is a comfort in the clutter of the universe, but knowing you don't have to look means you can't be disappointed."

p. 260: "to win at a show...was a matter of shaping evolution, because plants that win in shows become popular, and other breeders will use them as parents for new hybrids and as a model for the kind of plants they willl try to produce on their own. Winner take all, including the future."

p. 266: "Well, I love computers now...It's really such a relief not having to rely on living things anymore."

p. 267: "Now why do you think a plant would look like this? That's how I'd always get caught up in this stuff. Botany by imagination. I'd put myself in the plant's point of view and try to figure them out. I'm a  plant. Why do I want rough bark...? Why do I want narrow leaves...?"

p. 270: "time spent in a greenhouse had a rare, shapeless quality--a day could go by and they wouldn't even notice it had passed....Being in the shadehouse was restful...and it was vivid...and it was as fantastic as a a dream."

p. 273: "he was only an extreme, not an aberration--most people in some way or another do strive for something exceptional...rather than abide an ordinary life."

p. 276: "In the swamp you feel as if someone had plugged all of your senses into a light socket. A swamp is logy and slow-moving but at the same time highly overstimulating. Even in the dim, sultry places deep within it, it is easy to stay awake."

p. 281: "it was just as well that I never saw a ghost orchid, so that it could never disappoint me, and so it would remain forever something I wanted to see."

From a Conversation with Susan Orlean:
p. 287: "I was peeling an onion...I stumbled on an entire story of Florida land scams....I
loved the idea of taking a single event, something very specific and examining it thoroughly
and deeply...to take a very tight focus and make a book out of it."

"I think there is a discipline in taking true stories and making them
engaging to a reader. You have to deal with what really exists.
That is a greater challenge....this is reality."

p. 288: "John Larouche ...is only its object; Susan Orlean is its subject.
It is about you; it is a form of autobiography....your focus...living off the
desires, aspiraitons, happenings of others. That is how you make your
living. As a common parasite, really."

"We are put on earth, we don't know why and we need to figure out how
to make it feel meaningful, how to find some niche....People go to great
lengths to do this...my passion is to examine and interpret that and convey
it to other people....That's parasitic profiteering: making money off of
people's fantasies."

p. 290: "interesting, strange things happen in Florida. It is a bubbling-stew
of a place..the kinds of stories that interest me...starting new lives, creating
new communities, happened in Florida."

"I try to figure out if there is destiny and fate or if life is just haphazard.
What we search for is a kind of order and logic in what is the chaotic and
illogical experience of being alive. I think you grab on to little footholds that
make you think that there is logic and that there is some sense of order in your life
...I can't believe there isn't a grand design that is always unfolding in front of us...
Or, aren't we all inventions of our own choices and decisions?"

p. 292: "Because the relationship ends when the book ends, is that a betrayal?...
It is hard to imagine any relationship that is similar, except that of a confessor."

I. coursekeeping
for Thursday, finish The Orchid Thief
--and think about how you might make a film out of it:
what is the primary subject? what might the visuals look like?
what would the tonality be? what sort of score would you use?

II. from our (irreducible!) Sunday evening conversation....
froggies315 & Ayla on the questions of The Wicked Child
dglasser: Tralfamadorians = Stoics in an anti-Stoicism novel
Alicia and leamirella on free will and choice
KT on reading the serenity prayer--as ironic or @ face value?
leamirella & Ayla on "the shape" of human knowledge (excluding humanities0
sterrab: "unstuck in time BUT "trapped in the amber of the moment"
kobieta, vspaeth, Ayla & EGrumer on
"what Vonnegut is really saying" --> do something!?

III. Before we turn to the passages in Orleans'
book which you've selected for discussion...

let's begin by describing the title object....
what do you see? what does it suggest to you?
(write for 5 minutes: what does this "look like"?)

[according to Orleans, what the ghost orchid looks like]
p. 39: the face of a man with a Fu Manchu mustache...
an ethereal and beautiful flying white frog...
p. 43: a bandy-legged dancer ... a fairy...
p. 258: snow-white, white as sugar, white as lather, white as teeth...
its shape...the peaked face with the droopy mustache of petals,
the albino toad with its springy legs....

let's read and interpret a few passages together...

Anne's reading notes
subtitle: "A True Story of Beauty and Obsession"

p. 29: "I didn't care all that much whether what he said
was true or not; I just found the flow irresistable."

p. 38: "what...it was about orchids that sedued humans
so completely.... 'Oh, mystery, beauty, unknowability....
the real reason is that life has no meaning...no obvious
meaning....I think everybody's always loking for something
a little unsuual that can preoccupy them...'"

p. 41: "I wanted to want something as much as people
wanted these plants, but...I think people my age are
embarrassed by too much enthusiasm and believe that
too much passion about anything is naive...I want to know
what it feels like to care about something passionately...
strong feelings always make me skeptical..."

p. 45: "no flower is more guarded against self-pollination
than orchids ....each orchid species has made itself irresistible"

p. 68: "The Victorians...set out to categorize the living diversity...
locating, identifying, and classifying....the Victorians looked for
order in the univese, an outline that could organize their knowledge...
and rationalize the meaning of existence"

p. 93: "botany by imagination"

p. 100: "as long as I have it, I still sort of have the moment when I got it"

p. 109: "the reason it matters to care passionately about something is
that it whittles the world down to a man manageable size. It makes the
world seem not huge and empty but full of possibility. If I had been an
orchid hunter I wouldn't have seen this space as sad-making and vacant
--I think I would have seen it as acres of opportunity where the things I
loved were waiting to be found."

p. 123: "Florida is... as suggestible as someone under hypnosis.
Its essential character can be repeatedly reimagined."

p. 127: "the place had a wierd overfull emptiness...it was full of the
feeling of a million things planned on and never done."

p. 136: "Laroche...had started to seem...like the endpoint in a continuum
....the oddball ultimate of those people who are enthralled by non-human
living things and who pursue them like lovers."

p. 145: [taking credit for a new hybrid that some one else created is] "conceptual
theft....For a Buddhist it would be spiritually incorrect to protest about intellectual
pirating..."

I. coursekeeping
for Tuesday, read as much as possible of
Susan Orlean's 2000 text (what genre?),
The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession;
we'll finish our discussion of it on Thursday,
and watch the film based on the book the week after..

come to class on Tuesday, as you did today,
having selected a passage for us to discuss--
(and a  question to prompt that discussion...
what interests/troubles/intriques you here??)

I doubt you'll forget, by Sunday night, to post your
end-of-week reflections on what we have been talking about!

sterrab's posting of a Nova episode about The Illusion of Time:
"much of what we perceive about the universe is wrong"
(for ex, according to the laws of physics,
things can happen in reverse order)
we all experience the passage of time, but
Einstein realized that time can run @ different rates,
can be experienced individually, and is affected by
motion through space ...

see also Alex Juhasz, Media Praxis:
why I don’t whole-heartedly embrace the digital humanities...
The “field” does the amazing potentially radicalizing work of
asking humanities professors (and students) to take account
for their audiences, commitments, forms, and the uses of their work
... However, this turn is occurring, for the most part, as if plenty of fields,
... hadn’t been already been doing this for years (and therefore without
turning to these necessarily radical traditions of political scholars,
theoretical artists, and humanities activists)....

these added digital technologies have merely exposed that scholars were
always making things, in ritualized ways, for particular users, with machines
and for special(ized) uses (and now actually have to be accountable for this).

II. On Tuesday, we began our discussion of Slaughterhouse Five

I had asked you to cf. it--as a "truth-telling"/non-fictional text--to Henrietta Lacks;

to think about it (alternatively) as an example of the genre of satire
[ridicule, that intends shaming into improvement-->
wit w/ the end of constructive social criticism];

as an anti-war manifesto; but also

to consider it as a genre of popular science writing, translating, in
particular, science's understandings about the block universe into
a form that is accessible to those of us who are not theoretical physicists;

it is also of course, a classic example of science fiction

[from Jessy, Hierarchy Among Genres:
there has been a debate about whether scifi is an autonomous,
independent genre or a derivative subgenre of utopia writing,
with utopia writing as being high literature and scifi being 'just'
popular culture....

I'd like to introduce the term 'speculative fiction', that is, fiction
which asks 'what if' ... more specifically, 'what if there were a
society, perhaps of human beings, perhaps not, which had this
difference - what kind of society would that produce? If society
were like that, what kind of people would it produce?' Science
fiction provides a frame for speculative story-telling...

In her commentary on The Left Hand of Darkness, "Is Gender Necessary?"
Ursula LeGuin talks about science fiction as a heuristic device, a
thought-experiment: "The experiment is performed, the question is
asked, in the mind . . . . [Science fiction is] simply a way of thinking.
One of the essential functions of science fiction is question-asking:
a reversal of habitual ways of thinking, metaphors for what our
language has no words for as yet, experiments in imagination."

When Billy Pilgrim and Eliot Rosewater are assigned to beds next
to one another, we learn that "They had both found life meaningless,
partly because of what they had seen in war....So they were trying to
re-invent themselves and their universe. Science fiction was a big help"
(p. 101).

We had also begun to discuss the form of the novel,
what sterrab cited Vonnegut himself describing as
appropriately "jumbled and jangled." I'd like to
talk about that some more (genre as content & form).

III. Let's look for a moment @ the full title:
Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty Dance with Death,
by Kurt Vonnegut, a Fourth-Generation German-American Now Living in
Easy Circumstances on Cape Cod [and Smoking Too Much], Who, as an
American Infantry Scout Hors de Combat, as a Prisoner of War, Witnessed
the Fire Bombing of Dresden, Germany, ‘The Florence of the Elbe,’ a Long
Time Ago, and Survived to Tell the Tale. This Is a Novel Somewhat in the
Telegraphic Schizophrenic Manner of Tales of the Planet Tralfamadore,
Where the Flying Saucers Come From. Peace.

...before turning to the passages you've selected for our shared analysis.

Slaughterhouse Five: Type and Form

I. coursekeeping
finish Slaughterhouse Five for Thursday;
come to class having selected a passage
(or question) for us to discuss

some old business:

anything to say re: Law & Order "Immortal"?

dglasser discovers Women Writers Online Lab!

reporting in from the Re-Humanities Symposium
Alex Juhasz's Feminist Online Spaces:
Building & Linking Principled Sites in Collaboration,
esp. One Feminist Online Media Mantrafesto re:
re-making internet space from the inside
(consider what makes a story "spreadable":
slick quick jokes are the current "nature of virality");
critical voices need to be part of this conversation

leamirella on becoming media literate = asking the
right questions/to produce work that communicates
more than what a paper-bound paper can: consider
Design (relation between content and medium),
Syntax (to reach a wider audience),
What is lost? (what's more accessible in photographs?),
Performance (integrating fellow writers in blog spaces....)

also: recommended citation practices, including
Creating an Archive of Digital Discourse on Social Media, &
Citing born out of discourse through various forms of media
(using initials for last names, to emphasize collaboration,
and highlighting the specific types of discourse being used...)

what about Katherine Harris on "Doing the Risky Thing"?

other Sunday night postings/after-
thoughts ran to the philosophical...

kobieta: our physical self doesn't belong to us....
99% of your DNA is similar to every other human being's...
our DNA, the building block of the self, is ....shared, collective
property that you really don’t have any rights to....your personality
... isn't yours either...."I am not original. I am the combined efforts
of everyone I've ever met"... the self can never be traced, can never
be claimed yours....I acknowledge that this is a very radical way of
thinking. But hey, even this isn’t my own. It’s a combined effort of ...
what we discuss everyday in class. This too, is collective property. (;

froggies315: I’m with you 100% on the DNA thing.  I’m even with you 100%
on the character and personality thing.  I guess where I start to lose your
train of thought is what comes next.... I am derived from an ancient biological
lineage, but I get to take responsibility for my existence because I have
changed what life is on this planet--I have an impact, we all have an impact...
we all must take ownership of how our existence touches other life...

Alicia kicked off quite a (related?) thread w/ her query, Are quotes ... facts?

dglasser: a quotation is a fact when two people agree on it
regardless of the reader....writers, reporters, etc have a mutual
trust between them that whatever is written or recorded is
done so with as much accuracy as possible....

KT: I’ll agree with froggies that it’s a fact that it was said,
but there is so much more that we need to know about
intent in order to form the bigger picture of understanding
(and truth and fact). To merely know that it was said isn’t enough.

Ayla: I am becoming exasperated...facts only really matter
in the context of the world.

EGrumer: it certainly would not be a fact that you could fly,
even if you were sure it was true .... if [historical] facts are wrong,
what “facts” that we believe in now might be erroneous?
Of what grand things could we live in utter ignorance?

Ayla's high school teacher said:
In the context of this course, to the best of your ability,
what has been presented as the latest knowledge? ...this was
a good way to reconcile what we consider to be knowledge now
and the knowledge we will have in the future.  Knowledge is
revisable ...fact ...is revisable...

froggies315: Writing off facts as fiction is easy.  A harder
and more worthwhile task is working to listen for
the truth in all stories.  I think we might be surprised
by how compatible all these ... really are.  

cf. Jonah Lehrer's "The Truth Wears Off":
The test of replicability… is the foundation of modern research…
how the community enforces itself…a safeguard for the creep of subjectivity.
But now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started
to look increasingly uncertain. It's as if our facts were losing their truth....

The most likely explanation for [a decline in data] is an obvious one:
regression to the mean. As the experiment is repeated, that is, an early
statistical fluke gets cancelled out….[or is] the decline effect largely a
product of publication bias, or the tendency of scientists and scientific
journals to prefer positive data over null results [?]…an equally significant
issue [may be] the selective reporting of results …subtle omissions and
unconscious misperceptions... the "shoehorning" process…

…[perhaps] too many researchers engage in ... "significance chasing," or
finding ways to interpret the data so that it passes the statistical test of significance…
The problem of selective reporting is rooted in a fundamental cognitive flaw, which is
that we like proving ourselves right and hate being wrong…The current "obsession"
with replicability distracts from the real problem, which is faulty design....

scientific research will always be shadowed by a force that can't be curbed,
only contained: sheer randomness….a lot of extraordinary scientific data are
nothing but noise….a meaningless outlier, a by-product of invisible variables
we don't understand.... the decline effect is actually a decline of illusion.

…Such anomalies demonstrate the slipperiness of empiricism. Although many
scientific ideas generate conflicting results and suffer from falling effect sizes,
they continue to get cited …Because these ideas seem true. Because they make
sense. Because we can't bear to let them go. And this is why the decline effect is
so troubling. … because it reminds us how difficult it is to prove anything. We like
to pretend that our experiments define the truth for us. But that's often not the case.
Just because an idea is true doesn't mean it can be proved. And just because an
idea can be proved doesn't mean it's true. When the experiments are done, we
still have to choose what to believe.

III. pretty good warm-up/frame for today and Thursday's turn
to Kurt Vonnegut's 1969 novel, Slaughterhouse-Five

I had asked you to reflect on what differentiates it from
Skloot's book (to consider, for example, her relation
to Deborah, in comparison to his to Billy Pilgrim...
what do we know of Vonnegut's own experiences as a prisoner of war?)

thinking about science fiction, in cf. w/
the genre of popular science writing --
Brown Bag Discussion on Science's Audiences:
a "scientific fact" moves from the laboratory into the social world
through multiple levels of filtration, discussion, conversation,
translation, and adaptation to accessible language. Science
legitimized itself by becoming a public activity --a process
of negotiation in which the acquisition of "virtual audiences"
was essential. In this process of virtual witnessing, "not in front
of the air pump," (for example) Boyle had to use descriptions to
convince his audiences of what he had done. But those
audiences were actors with their own agendas, interpretations
and reactions; a feedback process was thereby initiated, and the
explanations changed in reaction to audience response.

how translatable are science's understandings?
in what forms?

IV. Science Fiction
from Jessy, Hierarchy Among Genres:
there has been a debate about whether scifi is an autonomous,
independent genre or a derivative subgenre of utopia writing,
with utopia writing as being high literature and scifi being 'just'
popular culture....

I'd like to introduce the term 'speculative fiction', that is, fiction
which asks 'what if' ... more specifically, 'what if there were a
society, perhaps of human beings, perhaps not, which had this
difference - what kind of society would that produce? If society
were like that, what kind of people would it produce?' Science
fiction provides a frame for speculative story-telling...

In her commentary on The Left Hand of Darkness, "Is Gender Necessary?"
Ursula LeGuin talks about science fiction as a heuristic device, a
thought-experiment: "The experiment is performed, the question is
asked, in the mind . . . . [Science fiction is] simply a way of thinking.
One of the essential functions of science fiction is question-asking:
a reversal of habitual ways of thinking, metaphors for what our
language has no words for as yet, experiments in imagination."

V. Some Science: The Block Universe -- with help from sterrab,
and notes from a symposium on "the philosophy of time"-->
"Physicists prefer to think of time as laid out in its entirety - a timescape,
analogous to a landscape - with all past and future events located there together ...
Completely absent from this description of nature is anything that singles out a
privileged special moment as the present or any process that would systematically
turn future events into the present, then past, events. In short, the time of the
physicist does not pass or flow." --Paul Davies, "That Mysterious Flow"

The debate between the conventional view and the block universe view
is actually the combination of two debates in the philosophy of time:

1) Presentism vs. Eternalism
Presentism: only things in the present exist.
Eternalism: things in the past (e.g., dinosaurs)
and future (e.g., human outposts on Mars) exist too.

2) The A-Theory vs. the B-Theory
A-properties: happening now, happened a week ago, happened in the past,
will happen two years from now, happening in the future
B-properties: being two years after the 2000 Presidential Election,
happening on July 4, 1776

The A-Theory: A-properties are genuine features of the world.
Time passes. The present moment has a special status.

The B-Theory: A-properties are reducible to B-properties.
Time doesn"t pass or flow. No moment in time has any special status.

How fast does time flow?
If it makes sense to say that time passes, then it must also
make sense to ask how fast time passes. Since that question
doesn"t make sense, time doesn"t pass.

Fearing Death
If the block universe view is correct, it is irrational to fear death.
We apparently fear death because we believe that we will no
longer exist after we die. But according to the block universe view,
it"s not true to say that we exist now, but won"t exist any longer
after death. Death is just one of our temporal borders, and should
be no more worrisome than birth!

--this is how-and-why Vonnegut uses the concept...?

VI. What else interests us about this novel?

the form? sterrab: According to Vonnegut himself,
the book is "jumbled and jangled...because there is
nothing intelligent to say about a massacre" (pg.24).
His intentions in the breaks therefore emphasize the
inevitable lack of structure in a novel about a war, against war.

I. coursekeeping

beginning this afternoon @ Swat: The TriCo Re: Humanities Symposium:
along with student presentations, the symposium will
include public lectures by two distinguished scholars:

Alexandra Juhasz will open the symposium with her presentation
on “Teaching and Learning as Making: Repurposing Social Media
Spaces” on Thursday, March 29, at 4:30 p.m., in Kohlberg 116
at Swarthmore. She is a media-studies professor at Pitzer College
and is known for her recently published “video-book,” Learning from
YouTube. Juhasz has a Ph.D. in cinema studies from NYU and
has taught courses at Swarthmore, Bryn Mawr, Claremont
Graduate University, and Pitzer College on YouTube, media
archives, activist media, documentary, and feminist film.

Katherine Harris will present a keynote address about digital
pedagogies called, “Doing the Risky Thing: Playing Around
in Digital Humanities,” on Friday, March 30, at 1:15 p.m., in
Kohlberg 116 at Swarthmore.  She is a professor of English
and comparative literature at San Jose State University and
has been named to the Council on Digital Humanities for the National
Institute of Technology in Liberal Education for her work in chronicling
her teaching adventures in a March 2011 blog called, “A Day in
the Life of Digital Humanities.”

don't forget our Sunday night posting conversation.....
(blogging from the conference would be great....!)

For Tuesday, read all of Kurt Vonnegut's 1969 novel, Slaughterhouse-Five
[or, since we agreed that we can "get these stories different ways,"
some of you may want to watch the movie instead/also...]
with continued attention to questions of genre: fiction/non-fiction....
what differentiates it from Skloot's book (consider, for example, her
relation to Henrietta, or Deborah, in comparison to his to Billy Pilgrim...);
it will be a rich addition to our discussions of truth and fiction....

II. gathering together/pausing on some
of our insights from Tuesday's discussion-->
I left w/ two importantly unanswered questions:
* why talk about genre, if "policing" fact/fiction/truth/lies isn't productive?
(training ourselves to be more careful readers?
watch for the embedded instructions on "how to read"?)
* how important is intentionality (=the goal of telling the truth/
representing the world as it is) if we mostly don't know what our
brains are doing/thinking....if most of our actions are not intentional?

Alica's afterclass musings: I wonder if her desire to tell the
readers about her investigation was genuine...

Cf. Patricia Hampl. "Memory and Imagination. I Could Tell You Stories:
Sojourns in the Land of Memory (New York: Norton, 1999): 21-37.
p. 25: "no memoirist writes for long w/out experiencing an
unsettling disbelief about the reliability of memory"

p. 26: "My desire was to be accurate. I wished to embody
the myth...Yet...memory is not a warehouse of finished
stories, not a gallery of framed pictures."

p. 28: "intentionality is [not] running the show...writing is
...more telegraphic and immediate in its choices than...logic and
rational intention suppose. The heart, the guardian of intuition
with its secret, often fearful intentions, is the boss. Its commands
are what a writer obeys--often without knowing it."

p. 32: "What is remembered is what becomes reality."

p. 36: "There may be no more pressing intellectual need in
our culture than for people to become sophisticated about
the function of memory."

Not a Memoir: The dishonesty inherent in memoir, [Emily Fox Gordon]
argues, is that an entire life cannot be contained in one book, and so
the writer is forced to follow only one story line...“It was no sin against
literature to write as if the story of my life in therapy had been the story
of my life,” she writes. “But I think it may have amounted to a sin against
myself, or a sin against my life, or — more accurately yet — a sin against
the true story of my life, the one I can never tell and never know.”

Cf. also Horst Zander, "Factional Discourse." Fact-Fiction-"Faction": A Study
of Black South African Literature in English (Narr, 1999): 403-407.

p. 403: attempt to create intermediate terms and categories between
the poles of fiction and fact: post-fiction, surfiction, critifiction, transfiction,
fictual: "where the factual is not secure or unequivocal"

p. 404: "bi-referential," "news/novel discourse," "factifiction" --
attempts at disclosing the fictional quality of reality; cf.
political credo of South African faction

p. 405: conscious aim @ abolishing difference between the modes
(cf. evolution of early English "novel")

p. 406: "factional" a concept w/ blurred edges, overlaps with
more extreme fictionalized factual and factualized fictional pieces

conscious attempt to diffuse the differentiation: to annul the
Western aesthetic w/ division of labour between modes

Cf., too, a story from the EnviroHistory course I attended on Tuesday:
a '75 novel of eco-terrorism called The Monkey Wrench Gang,
important in Env'l History (about the "finest fantasy" of
eco-warriers in the west: blowing up the Glen Canyon
Dam in order to "liberate" the Colorado River...) begins,
"It's a true story. It all happened. Precisely one year from today."
i.e. is it possible to tell a true story about the future?
does truth have a temporal dimension? [can it only refer to the past?]

See also, just in from Wil, the amazing New Yorker piece by Jonah Lehrer,
The Truth Wears Off... (linked too in course forum; will lead off w/ this on Tuesday...)

Consider, too, this insight from a Swat sociologist:
"there is no immaculate perception:
all understanding comes to us via systems of meaning"--
either through explicit ideologies, or (more powerfully)
through tacit, taken-for-granted, authoritative, naturalized,
unquestioned paradigms = hegemonies

This may describe the usefulness (and limits)
of disciplinary (generic?) framings,
the difference it makes that you
are reading this text in THIS course...
If all knowledge is context-dependent,
how would you read this book differently, in a different context?

Summing up some of my own [earlier] thoughts on these questions:

***footnote on how a "fact" becomes an "act": it's a recuperation of "fact" from the O.E.D., where (in the first four instances) it means "act" (from L. fact-um, thing done; was adopted as "feat"). It's fact as act that I want to highlight, fact as action which most interests me: fact as praxis, pusher, mover, provocateur....a fact, I'll go so far as to provocatively claim, is that which has the power to cause action. It's not just any one of an infinite number of stories, but only the story with the punch (perhaps it's the punch that fiction lacks?)....a fact is that which moves things along. Until the ball stops rolling, and is replaced by another...

Call out a fact [from ILHL].
Call out a fiction [ditto].
Theorize/generalize the difference/connections:
How much "fact" was embedded in our fictions?
How much "fiction" was used to express our facts?<

notes clearly labeling what was fiction and what wasn't (252)
This book was intensively fact-checked (332)
[and yet]
If you believe the Bible is the literal truth, the immortality
of Henrietta's cells makes perfect sense (296).

III. Today, we're focusing on Part III of Skloot's book,
in cf. to the Law and Order episode, "Immortal"-->
and considering (@ least two types of) "Immortality"

We "should" be sure, first, to have that much-
promised discussion on the ethics of "tissue rights."

How you should feel about this isn't obvious (316-17)
removed tissues = waste (205)
factually incorrect: HeLa cells related to Henrietta/
DNA no longer genetically identical (216)
consent issue overshadowed by a public responsibility
to science: "morally obligated to allow bits and pieces
to be used to advance knowledge to help others" (320-1)

N.B.: a June 2010 report on how Johns Hopkins now
deals with tissue culture and navigates
patient confidentiality while pursuing medical research:
Immortal Cells, Enduring Issues

thinking about the genre of popular science writing
Brown Bag Discussion on Science's Audiences:
a "scientific fact" moves from the laboratory into the social world
through multiple levels of filtration, discussion, conversation,
translation, and adaptation to accessible language. Science
legitimized itself by becoming a public activity --a process
of negotiation in which the acquisition of "virtual audiences"
was essential. In this process of virtual witnessing, "not in front
of the air pump," (for example) Boyle had to use descriptions to
convince his audiences of what he had done. But those
audiences were actors with their own agendas, interpretations
and reactions; a feedback process was thereby initiated, and the
explanations changed in reaction to audience response.

how translatable are science's understandings?

Reading Notes, continued

180: Hopkins had part of Henrietta alive and scientists everywhere
were doing research on her..."part of her was still alive"
184: time of great flux in research oversight..filled with
"widespread confusion about how to assess risk,"
as well as "refusal to cooperate" and "indifference"
187: What constituted "injury" and "risk" was heavily debated
188: if the parts of her mother they were using in
research could actually feel the things scientists were doing to them
189: "we never thought at that time they did not understand"
201: "I was the cell line, like a piece of meat"
Nothing biological was considered patentable until ... 1980

203: Essential Biologicals... many have since turned their bodies
into businesses ....the first person to legally stake a claim to
his own tissue and sue for profits and damages

If tissue samples became patients' property, researchers
taking them without getting consent and property rights
up front would risk being charged with theft.

205: the definitive statement on this issue: When tissues are
removed from your body...any claim you might have had to
owning them vanishes...you abandon them as waste, and
anyone can take your garbage and sell it..."transformed" into
an invention...the product of "human ingenuity" and "inventive effort"

211: "I just thought [the family] might make some interesting color
for the scientific story."
213: Henrietta's family have their own theories... the Lord's
way of punishing Henrietta for leaving home...all disease
was the wrath of the Lord
215: HeLa was no longer human. Cells change while growing
in culture... become a separate species.
216: it's factually incorrect to say that HeLa cells are
related to Henrietta, since their DNA is no longer
genetically identical to hers .... "it's much easier to do
science when you disassociate your materials from
the people they come from."
216-7: normal human cells... can't grow indefinitely... they
divide only a finite number of times.... Only cells that had
been transformed by a virus or a genetic mutation had the
potential to become immortal.
224: many questions and moral and ethical issues
surround the "birth" of HeLa, and the "death" of Mrs. Lacks....
questions of whether or not permission was received
from the "donor"...for the "use" of HeLa
237: the line between sci-fi and reality had blurred years earlier
247: "I think them cells is why I'm so mean .... I had to start
fightin before I was even a person ...I kept them cancer
cells from growin all over me while i was inside"
252: With each packet, I sent notes...clearly labeling
what was fiction and what wasn't
262: "Her cells caused millions of collars in damage.
Seems like a bit of poetic justice"..." my mother was
just getting back at scientists for keepin all them secrets...."
265: "HeLa is all just cancer"
295: "Those cells are Henrietta."
296: If you believe the Bible is the literal truth,
the immortality of Henrietta's cells makes perfect sense.
298: "maybe if I understood some science, then the story
about my mother and sister wouldn't scare me so much"
308: "She's in a better place now...now she's happy."
Afterword
316-7: How you should feel about this isn't obvious.
They're using issue scraps you parted with voluntarily.
Still, that often involves someone taking part of you.
And people often have a strong sense of ownership
when it comes to their bodies .... but a feeling of
ownership doesn't hold up in court. When they're
part of your body, they're clearly yours. Once they're
excised, your rights get murky.
318: tissue-rights activists
320: "conscientious objectors in the DNA draft"
320-1: the consent issue is overshadowed by
a public responsibility to science: "I think
people are morally obligated to allow their
bits and pieces to be used to advance
knowledge to help others."
321: "Science is not the highest value ...
autonomy and personal freedom"
322: most individual cell lines and tissue samples
aren't worth anything on their own. Their value for
science comes from being part of a larger collection.
325: "It's interfered with science... it's changed the spirit."
Now there are patents and proprietary information where
there once was free information flow.
327: "the fundamental problem here... is the notion
that the people these tissues come from don't matter."
Acknowledgements
330: re-creating the life of Henrietta Lacks
332: This book was intensively fact-checked.
333: the importance of communicating science to the general public
336: every good novel... with a disjointed structure...
I devoured while trying to figure out the structure of this book

I. coursekeeping
Thursday: finish the text, and/or watch the
Law and Order episode, Immortal (accessing this?) -->
is VERY LOOSELY based on HeLa story; see Recap and review.

II. Sunday night reflections, going deep and wide:
leamirella (put up her notes): everything is "mediated"--and incomplete
froggies315: such constructions are true, but because individual,
not available for "collective revision"--is there a narrative middle ground,
between "absolutism" (a single correct story) and "relativistic bullshit"?
kobieta: if memory, reality, and dreams are all forms of perception =
constructions, how much overlaps from person to person?
KT (inspired again by kobieta): what’s important about the truth is its potential--
it provides certain expectations about outcomes; we can make decisions
based on predictable facts--so it's important to strive for
dglasser:  FACTS = truths agreed upon by the majority of the relevant subject group,
but (contra Gaiman's dedication) there are multiple individual keys/paths to get there

cf. here History, Memory and the Brain and Part II:
Whence Nostalgia and the Constraints on Stories? -- which
talks about the construction of history as a 'collective revision'

Alicia noticed the way in which the photos "broke" her reading about Henrietta Lacks
EGrumer called that clustering "a genre convention" as well as a "poignant thread"
in the text: instances of remembering and forgetting, photographs lost and rediscovered

sterrab: took inspiration from Frances Kissling's claim there may not
always be common ground; she should have voiced her questions about
dreams as reality, and had "courage in disagreement"
vspaeth: putting pieces together/building a bridge: "you" is the key (to A Game
of You); in ILHL, we are again "looking for a key" (to a cure/understanding)

III. so, let's look! turning to the "biography of both
the cells and the woman they came from" (6).

Initial impressions: how did the book "operate" on you, on which
"structural" level? cellular, biographical, political? (give one telling detail--
Alicia, EGrumer on the photographs; who/what else?)

what about genre? (my angle of interest!)
Skloot, ix: "This is a work of nonfiction. No names have been changed,
no characters invented, no events fabricated....As one of Henrietta's
relatives said to me, 'If you pretty up how people spoke and change
the things they said, that's dishonest. It's taking away their lives,
their experiences, and their selves.'"

"We must not see any person as an abstraction. Instead, we must
see in every person a universe with its own secrets..."
(Elie Wiesel, from The Nazi Doctors and the Nuremberg Code)

"Everybody has a secret world inside of them...." (Neil Gaiman)

biologists teach us that the assemblies of cells that make up
living organisms, and ... the assemblies of living organisms
that make up the panoply of continually evolving life ... have
mechanisms that assure that local components take into
consideration the interests of both other local components
and the well-being of the larger assembly. When these fail,
one gets cancer, warfare, and widespread extinction.

Let's try reading this non-fictional prose work (about cancer)
as systems biologists, focusing on its complex interactions, emergent
properties.... using the (more "collectivist"?) methodology of biology
to read a literary text.

Is the language of the 3 parts of the book--"Life, Death, Immortality"--
individualistic or collectivist? humanistic or scientistic? where is
HeLa located? where is Henrietta's "self"?

I. Life
1: "the world's first immortal cells" (5: "go on dividing indefinitely")
3: "all it takes is one small mistake anywhere in the division process"
4: "any cell culture lab in the world ... we'd find ... billions of
Henrietta's cells... but no one knows anything about her"
7: I'd become a character in her story, and she in mine...
the Lackses challenged everything I thought I knew...
Deborah's voice: "she helpin lots of people...now we don't get a dime."
16: walking into Hopkins was like entering a foreign country
29: used patients from public wards for research without their knowledge
30: Gey "the world's most famous vulture, feeding on human specimens"
40-1: growing with mythological intensity... "spreading like crabgrass!"
48: "it just feels like that blackness be spreadin all inside me"
55: "You got my wife cells? She know you talking?...so let my old
lady cells talk to you and leave me alone"
58: referring to the cells as his "precious babies"
62: Tissue culture was the stuff of racism, creepy science fiction,
Nazis, and snake oil.
63: "benevolent deception"
80-1: "Everything about Henrietta dead except them cells...
Nobody round here never understood how
she dead and that thing still livin."

II. Death
90: her other organs were so covered in small white tumors
it looked as if someone had filled her with pearls.
91: "Oh jeez, she's a real person."
97: that HeLa was malignant just made it more useful.
118: "her cells done lived longer than her memory"
122: slave-owning white Lackses ... buried under their black kin ...
"spending eternity in the same place....They must've worked out
their problems by now!"
129: inmates "considered a vulnerable population unable to give
informed consent"
130: "To withhold emotionally disturbing but medically nonpertinent
details...is in the best tradition of responsible clinical practice"
131: the Nuremberg Code says, "The voluntary consent of the
human subject is absolutely essential." The idea was revolutionary.
132: should informed consent apply in cases ... where scientists
conduct research on tissues no longer attached to a person's body
134: "If the whole profession is doing it,
how can you call it 'unprofessional conduct'?"
154: "drop a turd in the punch bowl"--the HeLa contamination problem
159: "she was really just hospitality"
161: "her cells growin big as the world, cover round the whole earth...
just steady growin and growin, steady fightin off whatever they fightin off"
165: black oral history filled with tales of "night doctors" who
kidnapped black people for research...disturbing truths behind those stories.
168: "If our mother so important to science,
why can't we get health insurance?"
169: "You know what is a myth?...She didn't donate nothing.
They took them and didn't ask."
173: War on Cancer (vs. "War is a Bad Metaphor")