critical creative collaborative

rec room r.i.p.

Do rumpus rooms even exist anymore? Been awhile since I was hanging suburban basements, but I wonder if the once popular rec room (or rumpus room) has gone the way of the dodo, usurped by the home office or studio and a whole new set of expectation about how and why we recreate.

Frequenting online music sites, as I sometimes do, I notice numerous references to the “home studio”—as in for sale: mint condition Les Paul, only ever used in the “home studio.”  Following the links back to YouTube, there is evidence that new hybrid, prosumer (blended consumption and production) spaces are flourishing. The rec rooms of yesteryear seem to be giving way to these “studios”—spare bedrooms and basement living spaces that are fitted out with all the gear (instruments, amps, mics, mixers, recorders, and cameras wired up to a laptop or PC) needed to play along with your favourite performers, and in so doing, to produce DIY audio-video recordings as you do.

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These home office/studio spaces offer haphazard collections of gear and furniture that are reminiscent of older rec rooms; yet, they are designed to function in a categorically different way. These studios are not the spaces of active consumption we grew up with: they do not seem to be well equipped for rowdy TV watching, loud partying, or general rough housing. Instead, these spaces seem to favour relatively passive forms of production: individualized recording rehearsal sessions in which one plays along with a favourite track.

Rock and roll, it seems, has left the garage for the youtube channel.

play along

In this week’s ENGL 100 lecture, I talked about “play along culture.” I lit on the idea as was looking for a way of unpacking Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral,” and thinking about the text in relation a chapter from John Seabrook’s Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing, The Marketing of Culture.

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Surfing the web, I was looking for video clips for Thelonius Monk and Glenn Gould, two artists who exemplify a productive approach to the tension between performance and recording. To me, their very different mystiques rest on an uncanny ability to flout the grid, to produce recordings that seem to fly beyond it. In the process, I stumbled across the video of the young man playing bass along with Third World’s “Reggae Ambassador.”

Initially, I was struck by the uncool way this performer uses his t-shirt or pillow case as a buffer between his naked torso and bass. As I listened, however, I was taken by his ability to more or less insert himself into the groove. He’s not bad, I found myself thinking. I started to enjoy the track, almost in spite of myself. The other aspect of the video that struck me was the number of associated videos linked to it. I have seen hours of instructional videos on youtube, and am aware of numerous amateur players uploading videos. Usually, however, these videos mingle with those of the “real performers”—the amateurs’ DIY recordings intermingle with live footage and music videos from the pros. Next to this, this play-along artist’s offering, there was a full stream of amateur bass player sharing their own interpretations, or rather recreations, of famous reggae bass lines.

In the context of thinking about my lecture and Carver and Seabrook texts, the notion of playing along took on new meaning.

“Cathedral”

Carver’s now canonical  “Cathedral,” the title story of his 1983 collection, offers an exquisite representation of late 20th century life, which culminates in a trenchant critique of the hyper-mediation North American culture. The story revolves around the relationship between an unnamed narrator and a “blind man,” Robert.  Robert is a friend of the narrator’s (also unnamed) wife, and he comes to visit the couple for an evening.

After dinner and copious amounts of alcohol, the narrator and Robert retire to the living room where they watch television and share “some cannabis” (104). The wife joins the two men on the sofa, but soon falls asleep.  When she goes to bed, the men stay up watching TV: “Something about the church and the Middle Ages” (105).

In the silence between voice overs, Robert asks the narrator to describe the documentary and what he sees on screen. It is apparent that the narrator understand little about what he is watching. When asked, he is unable to relate anything more than the information provided in the voice over. He confesses, “I’m not doing so good, am I.” And when Robert encourages him, the narrator relates that “he tried to think of what else to say.’They are really big,’ I said. ‘They’re massive. They’re built of stone. Marble, too, sometimes.’”

The narrator is frustrated that he can’t do much better than this: “‘The Truth is, cathedrals don’t mean anything special to me. Nothing. Catherdrals. They’re something to look at on late-night TV. That’s all they are.’” Robert responds, “I get it, bub. It’s okay. It happens. Don’t worry about it.” And then he asks the narrator to get a heavy piece of paper and a pen and the two work together to draw a cathedral. Getting down onto the carpet the “blind man . . . found my hand, the had with the pen. He closed his had over my hand. ‘Go ahead, bub, draw.”Hand in hand on the carpet the two men work toward a deeper (spiritual?) understanding of their subject matter.

Carver’s narrative ends on a deeply ambivalent note, and yet in so doing, it sets out a paradigm that seems to be increasingly familiar and relevant today. Making the shift from passive consumers to active producers, the narrator and Robert effectively transform the living room. Off the sofa, they play together; sharing the controls, they redraw the catherdral’s sacred seat in the midst of the narrator’s mundane, deeply secular living space.

Deep Ambiguity, Serious Play

Trying to make sense of this play along paradigm and its potentially applicability to Carver “Cathedral,” I came across the work of Kiri Miller, an ethnomusicologist whose research looks at new forms of game play: Guitar Hero and Grand Theft Auto. Miller’s blog playing along and recent Oxford UP publication Playing Along: Digital Games, YouTube, and Virtual Performance trace a link been multi-user games and online music lessons as important forms of embodied learning.

As a gloss on Carver’s wonderfully ironic, erotically charged ending, Miller’s work seems to add an interesting angle on thinking about the transformation of literary studies. If Carver’s narrative encapsulates the demise of literary culture, it does so in a way that foregrounds reading as a physical, material, embodied practice. Superseded by television, and perhaps Robert’s audio books, the printed literary text may have ceased to play a vital roll in the social or personal lives of these characters. Like the cathedral, the printed word has come to take on historical, rather than immediate relevance. And yet, it is as writer and reader that the two men embrace. In the glow of this late night documentary, their awkward connection hangs. Uncertain of the different meanings each character might take from the event, uncertain who will remember what in the morning, Carver’s readers are taken to the un/comfortable edge of voyeurism, to this place between watching and doing.

Seeing their shared pen as a prototypical joy stick (phallic pun intact), I’m tempted to say the story takes us up to the historical beginnings of video gaming. Working together, the efforts of narrator and Robert in someways prefigure the radical transformation of living room or rumpus room into new kind of play space—in which the consumption and production of culture converge.

The trick is to enter this space with a kind of critical openness. To this end, Miller throws herself into her research, playing along with the millions of gamers and performers she seeks to study and learn from. In this way, she finds personal meaning in what might seem on first blush to be fairly lowbrow culture. In  a blog post from her fieldwork as student of the nextlevelguitar.com online program, Miller writes that

the total absence of performance anxiety is one major difference between this learning experience and the private piano and voice lessons of my teenage years: after all, I’m alone in my living room. Except that I’m also not alone, because at any moment I can click over to the NextLevelGuitar forum and seek advice and encouragement from other students, or send David a question, or do a YouTube search to see how other guitarists hold the instrument or the pick. And if I want an audience, I can post a video of my playing to the NextLevelGuitar “Audio/Video Showcase”

At the time she posted this blog, Miller tells us that there are “1,894 posts in that section so far, and a wealth of crowd-sourced feedback.” I could get to like this “real guitar” thing.

Art Institute of Chicago II, Chicago, 1990, Thomas Struth (www.metmuseum.org)

Caveat: the following post is directly concerned with helping my English 101 students prepare for an assignment and may not be particularly valuable for practiced and practicing readers and writers of poetry. That said, I always appreciate feedback, insights or different points of view on this topic.

death of the poet, long live the poet

There are many ways to read a poem, as many readings as there are readers.

This postmodern chestnut has been linked to much unfortunate (anti-pomo, anti-theory) anger about the unbridled “relativism” of contemporary cultural theory. Nevertheless, while the death of the author is not a debate I am interested in returning to, it is perhaps useful to thinking about expectations around the act of close reading.

Because it has helped us to shift of focus away from the desire, wishes, or intentions of an individual creator (poet, artist, architect) and on to the shared acts of meaning making (readers, audience), it constitutes a vital recognition of the fact that knowledge is socially created. It is crucial in helping literary scholars to think about how these processes are undertaken or performed in relation to poetic texts.

Recognizing that the act of performing a close-reading of a given poem—i.e., this week’s in-class assignment for ENGL 101—is a scary proposition for many, I thought I’d try and help ease some of the tension by offering a quick, thumbnail sketch on how I approach close reading.

the artist who reads it

As, Jacqueline Turner suggested in lecture (quoting Octavio Paz)

“The poem demands the demise of the poet who writes it and the birth of the poet who reads it.”

The practice of reading a poem is similar to analyzing an artwork (as Jacqueline also suggested). As such, it shouldn’t be too much of a stretch for artists and designer who are familiar with critiques to develop interesting and engaging readings.

In thinking about it more, I realize that the “reader” in my opening statement actually assumes that not only there are many readers, but perhaps more importantly, that these readers are skilled. The best way to develop one’s skills is to practice doing. When confronted with a text or image that challenges social and aesthetic (linguistic) norms or conventions, we need to approach the work through the eyes of a maker, to think about the writer’s choices, the material she chooses to work with, any references

In the case of reading poetry, learning to do this involves developing skills through reading, re-reading, and analyzing actual poems—ideally as many poems as possible, in variety of forms, and from different perspectives. It means sharing readings.

Like musicians, photographers, dancers etc., readers are defined through their material practice, the doing. Their relative level of skill is tied to their willingness to perform and practice basic and not-so-basic exercises and their participation in a larger group of practitioners.

To this end, I would suggest to students—or anyone who wants to develop their facility reading poetry—that they share their readings with others. In a class situation, this can be done on Moodle or by email.

unpack it

In trying to work closely with a particular poem, one needs to slow things down and to pay careful attention to the language of the poem. As I suggested in lecture, it is good practice to live with the poem, to rewrite key parts of it, and if possible to read it aloud. Try the poetic syntax and diction across your tongue. Try reading it aloud to a friend. This is can be a struggle, and may be slightly awkward, but it helps us to find those moments of “torqued” language. It makes us aware not only of what the poem is trying to say but more importantly how it goes about meaning making.

As I tried to demonstrate in our collective reading of Dorothy Trujillo Lusk’s “SAXOfeigntly,” it is useful to begin by focusing on a key element of the poem—often something that is strange or remarkable. In the case of “SAXOfeigntly,” we started with diction, her odd sounding/looking word choices: “farküntry” and “mercanarische künstelry.”

From here we moved on to other aspect of the poem with an awareness of Lusk’s particular play with the look and sounds of the words. Lusk’s use of words that do and do not quite resemble contemporary English draws attention to questions of linguistic authority or history and the potential fluidity of the written word, or so we argued. (For more on Lusk’s writing, CUE resources.)

There are many aspects of a poem readers tend to focus on when performing a close reading. Personally, I tend to pay attention to the following.

1. It is very often valuable to think about the title, how it is activated in the poem? How is the poet working with or against the conventions of titling work?
2. Think about how the poem works against expectations, how it sets readers up to think we are move in one direction and then moves in another (e.g., Lusk finishes her poem in standard English).
3. What can we tell about the poem’s narrator? Where is she? Where is he going? How does the poem allow us to construct this identity?
4. Look for any allusions (references to other works of art, literature, history, culture). What function do they play? How is the poem positioned relative to these references, how does it provide commentary on them (for or against)?

The more you can work on the poems in Open Text or online, trying out these different approach the better prepared you will be for your in-class.

try out your readings on others

Feel free to share insights questions about particular poems. Use Moodle forums. Meet for coffee to go through a few poems. Talk about them over the telephone.

The most important thing is to keep reading and to try working through a variety of different poetic styles and approaches. So-called “difficult poems,” like abstract or highly conceptual artworks, require that you live with them for awhile, or if possible return to the work again. In the case of the in-class assignment, while you might know the actual poem that will be asked to discuss, there is a good chance that you will recognize it from the anthology.

If you feel that you want to read more about the practice of close reading, here are the two very different approaches— useful guidelines, not rules—I posted on Deqq: http://u.deqq.com/SJ75y  and http://u.deqq.com/Kn9qV

the inevitable question

Last week in lecture, a brave student put up his hand and asked: isn’t all this technology dehumanizing?

For the past week, I’ve been trying to think of how to respond to this question, wondering how I might situate my own interest in new media while keeping the question open. I think the question of “the human”—how this idea or category functions in relation to the key ethical, political, legal (juridical), cultural, and environmental concern—is absolutely fundamental and can not be wished away with short responses. It probably requires a multitudes of tweets and retweets just to get the ball rolling.

The following post goes someway to provide a rough sketch of what I see as some of the important underlying issues in the human/post-human debate. It also provides a few cultural texts/contexts that have helped me to think about the impact of digital media on teaching literature and the arts.

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a bit of background

The question of the (de)human was raised in response to my clumsy introduction of deqq.com, a microblogging application we have implemented to open an extra channel for students and instructors to continue discussions beyond the lecture hall—extra in the sense of being in addition to seminars, regular office hours, and Moodle fora. It is important to note that this concern about the (de)humanizing effect of social media surfaced in the midst of a larger anxiety about a change in the format of the course delivery.

This semester my Emily Carr colleagues and I have been charged with teaching English 101: Intro to Poetry & Drama as a lecture course (with breakout tutorials) rather than as a seminar course. Predictably, the format change has caused significant trepidation among students and faculty, even before the course began. Many saw it as a regressive move—a retreat to the old model of the sage on the stage.

i like change

I should confess that, despite misgivings about the economic impetus for restructuring of first year English, I saw the change as a valuable opportunity:

1. to rethink the curriculum,
2. to radically shift our approach to teaching literature and composition,
3. to work together with a group of seven colleagues (7 sages on the stage) to re-animate the lecture format.

I saw and see this change in the delivery model as a vital point of entry into a much larger set of questions around 21st century cultural literacies, especially these impact Art, Design, and Media education.

Having taught first year English for most of past fifteen years, mainly in seminar classes, I am familiar with the pros and cons of small group learning. Furthermore, I have no interest in returning the massive survey courses—e.g., English 101: Beowolf to Hemingway. Yet, from my teaching, learning, and research on creative and critical collaborations, I’ve become concerned about a kind of complacency (mine own and others) with regard to received knowledge about the role and function of culture. A concern that, for me, goes to the heart of how and what we teach when we teach English.

teaching beyond print-culture

In the context of English, Critical thinking is one of the key learning outcomes. This usually means that students are encouraged to practice textual analysis (close reading, see also this howto from the Harvard Writing Centre) and to participate in in-class discussions (usually modeled on the Socratic method). Critical thinking is important. Given the current anti-intellectualism of our political leaders, I think it is vital. However, what often passes for critical thinking tends to rely on various out-of-date assumptions about communication and the importance of print culture.

What happens when we consider 1/ the nature and transformation of texts as we move from analogue output (objects) to digital texts (an environment) and 2/ the impact of communication technologies on staging and mediating  meaningful dialogue or debate? In a nutshell, I wonder how long English, as an academic discipline, will last after the disappearance of the book. What comes next?

Being able to interpret or unpack literary texts and then to be able to engage in dialogue with one’s peers—these are absolutely fundamental skills. And university English can be (often is) an extraordinary opportunity for many people to learn about influential cultural texts and critical contexts. Having devoted a life to reading, studying, writing about, and publishing literary texts, I am aware of power of Literature and print-based culture.

Nevertheless, we need to be clear that English Studies, as it developed during the twentieth century, came to be dependent on  the availability of print media, which was became affordable with the mechanization of printing processes (movable type), and print-based literacies, which were a major focus of government investments in educations and culture. As consequence, English as we now know it is deeply intertwined with the development both of mass media and the influence of the British Empire.

Since the 1950′s with the advent of television and the emergence of post-colonial resistances throughout the English speaking world, this has begun to slowly change. Across a number of fronts, there has been a dramatic shift in power and a growing mistrust of print-culture, particularly outside dominant cultures. (Perhaps, I need to follow this up on a post about Stuart Hall and legacy of the Birgminham University Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies.)

if you google it, does it not bleed?

The state of literature, the nature and meaning of twenty-first century comminications technologies, a world without printed texts—books and newspapers—these are huge philosophical and sociological concerns. And I can’t begin to answer them here. I’m not even sure, to be candid, that I want to save English by transforming it, or updating it. Still, I have trouble ignoring the impact of new media on how, why and what we teach under the guise of English.

What strikes me about our current situation—in many ways this is crucial to how we might positively transform the Humanities—is that the new modes of communication, which are  irrevocably reorganizing all facets of twentieth century life, have yet to take hold in English class. Granted many of us now rely on Moodle, Blackboard or other Course Management Systems. Most universities I know have committed to “smart classrooms” and trying to provide faculty with computers and lcd projectors in the classroom. And in many institutions, the course packs that replaced books as a less expensive alternative are in turn being replaced by Open Courseware. I imagine too that many instructors are increasingly dependent on Youtube, Flickr, Google and other web-based tools to provide supplementary materials.

In good old Marxist terms, one might have talked about this change in terms of base and superstructure. I might ask how can we discuss about the importance of English Literature, when even the most committed of us have all begun to abadon books? If reading and writing are what matter to us, why are we not shifting our focus on to wiki’s, blog post, email discussions, or even tweets.

Why are more of us teaching courses like UBC Prof. John Beasley Murray’s wiki-based “Murder, Madness, and Mayhem: Latin American Literature in Translation”? Granted this is a Spanish Literature course, but I sure we can develop similar approaches with English texts and contexts.

If it is critical engagement that motivates us, might we not be more inclined to find connections between the growth of English what do we make of Google’s recent struggles with China?

social knowledge / social space

Relative to books, newspapers, and other older forms of mass media, Social media open new possibilities for educators and cultural producers, particularly for artists, educators, and designers.

It used to be that if you wanted to participate in political dialogue you would have to travel to a particular space: Agora, Altingi, Parliament, House of Commons. Likewise for so called “higher learning,” one would have to travel to the University: Bologna, Oxford, Heidelberg, Harvard, or the U of T. The central buildings for these great universities were their libraries. Much like the banks or treasuries at the centre of political capitals, the university library functioned as storehouse for what was most valued: information, debate, knowledge.

The traditional function of libraries has been superseded. Digital Archives such as Project Gutenberg or perhaps more importantly those collected by Google are rendering libraries obsolete. This does not mean that I think librarians and archivists are no longer relevant (as my original draft of this post suggested (see comments bellow). In fact, the opposite is true their knowledge and skills are increasingly important as we struggle make sense of the at times overwhelming flow of information. With the emergence of the web and growing ubiquity of mobile communications, individuals can participate in political dialogue, scholarly research, and various cultural forms of cultural production from almost anywhere. The most powerful institutions will be those who can facilitate access to their massive storehouses—e.g., MIT or the Bodelian library at Oxford.

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The example of  the Back Dorm Boys (wikipedia entry), featured in the above video, is instructive: the original response by the English speaking media to their viral youtube posts was to poke fun and to marvel at the number of “hits” these videos they were getting. Few recognized that these videos were produced by Wei Wei and Huang Yi Xin, two students at the Guangzhou Arts Institute, or that their off-centre mimickry of American culture might be anything but a pale imitation of the real thing, if one is allowed to refer to the Back Street Boys as such.

The a tendency to disparage new forms of communication limits the development of new ideas, and in so doing, it allows for the exclusion of individuals and groups who don’t immediately fit the norms of a dominant culture. Perhaps the ability to normalize or naturalize certian modes of representation to the exclusion of others is, unfortunately, one of the most enduring legacies of the Humanist project.

Arguably some of the most influential and innovative interventions in contemporary culture are happening off or under the radar of West’s major arts/culture institutions, and are often hard for people to recognize or accept as Art or Culture. This idea, as controversial as it is, has been fundamental to the reconfiguration of curatorial practices, particularly in the wake of  curator Okwui Enwezor’s radical (re)programing of the Document for Documenta XI across a series of geographically dispersed platforms (Frieze Article)—to give one famous example.

a conclusion of sorts

This long, a slightly rambling post has touched on a number of complicated issues around the cultural politics of representation, including thinking about the history of English Studies, the Enlightenment, Post-coloniality, contemporary Curatorial practices and more. The points I’ve raised in the post are but the tips of a much larger idea flows, which I will continue to explore in future posts. Nonetheless, I hope they might help situate this prickly question of “the human” or more to the point our assumptions about the dehumanizing nature of these technologies with were are so embroiled.

In my last post, I suggested that I’d share some basic blogging advice, gleaned from the numerous blogging howtos I’ve been reading. The following post discusses a few of the more interesting or provocative examples of this large and growing genre.

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