Mickey D’Addario – ENGLISH 890S-01 Contempory Literature and Digital Media

November 12, 2017

A Universal Language

I was very tempted to write my response in Wingdings font, but I figured that it would only be funny for a little bit and then it would be a pain for everyone to figure out exactly what I was saying—which seems to be the point of Ngai’s article on one level. Gimmick and comedy go hand-in-hand, as do gimmicks and labor. She notes that a gimmick is “both a wonder and a trick…a form we marvel at and distrust, admire and disdain, whose affective intensity for us increases precisely because of this ambivalence” (469). Page 493 of Ngai’s article has a great list of the paradoxes that gimmicks possess (saves labor but intensifies labor, works too hard yet works too little, seems outdated though futuristic, etc.). Based upon this argument, is Book from the Ground a gimmick? Possibly. I think Russ’s post makes a strong point regarding this idea based upon the amount of cultural, digital, and technical knowledge required to make sense of certain icons found in the book. We get the initial impression that labor will be saved because we don’t actually have to read anything. However, if you were to consider all of the time spent accruing knowledge of “contemporary life” to get to the point where one is proficient enough to understand all of the icons in the book, there is no way that it is less labor intensive. Additionally, for me, it took much longer than I anticipated to read the book. Icons didn’t save me any labor on my weekly reading assignment.

Regarding the whole concept of a universal language that Russ points out, I’m really interested in the text’s relationship to music. After all, what is a piece of sheet music aside from an arranged collection of icons on a page that communicates an aural idea from one person to another in a universally applicable format? Just like writing or the iconography used in Book from the Ground, musical notation is a matter of translation, especially for those individuals trained in the discipline of sight singing who do not require an instrument to help formulate the correct notes. I know that there is a fundamental difference between words and music in what they can convey (though that is something we can discuss). Still, if we are talking about a universal icon system, we have one, and Xu Bing points to it by giving us several musical passages on the very first page (see the end of this post for links to each of these songs). By seeing this connection at the very outset, I got the impression that this text is not very different from something that we are used to (i.e. music); the alien aspect is that the iconographic representation is used to replace a different style of signification system.

Translating music from the written to the audible is a simpler process than translating icons or pictographs into their meanings because it requires less cultural knowledge. On page one, Xu Bing gives us the time signature, the key, the rhythm, and the notes of the bird’s song. The only thing he doesn’t give us is the tempo, so that is up to interpretation based upon real-life knowledge of bird songs. The only other point of confusion in translating the bird’s song is that there are little breaks at irregular points, sometimes at the end of a measure and sometimes right in the middle of one. In my “performance,” I interpreted them to be slight breaks in the song, though it is impossible to tell how long those breaks may be.

The most interesting part of this whole enterprise is the alarm clock’s jingle. Bing eliminates the grounding elements of musical notation—the staff, the key, the time signature—and only includes several eighth notes, a few sixteenth notes, and a quarter note.

Using the fact that the bird seems to duet with the alarm clock (which is corroborated in the translation at the end of Book about Book from the Ground), I made the inference that both tunes must be in the same key and took a guess at what pitches the notes might represent based upon the downward facing stems, their relative positions to each other, and the fact that I had definite notes for the harmony, meaning that the alarm clock’s melody shouldn’t clash with the bird’s accompaniment. The result of this little experiment produced something pretty cool. The alarm tone is not just a throwaway line of random notes, but a classical-sounding tune reminiscent, for me at least, of Vivaldi’s “Spring” (though it’s not that exact piece).

The elimination of more familiar, grounding elements along with a motion towards using contextual clues in this duet between bird and alarm clock provides readers a type of guide for the rest of the book’s project: some of the more traditional elements of reading/writing will be absent, leading to a less precise understanding of every aspect of the story, leaving room for interpretation and experimentation.

Yes, digital iconography replacing words is a foreign system to us, but Bing provides us a with the methodology for reading on the very first page using a more familiar universal translation system. Maybe, then, the book isn’t so much of a gimmick after all.

The Songs:

Note that for whatever reason, the songs don’t play for me when I open them on my phone. Everything works correctly when I use my laptop. Also, I’m pretty sure I transcribed everything accurately, but I may have made an error or two somewhere. My apologies to the bird if I did.

Initial bird (according to the translation at the end of Book about Book from the Ground): https://onlinesequencer.net/652824

Long bird passage: https://onlinesequencer.net/652823

Alarm: https://onlinesequencer.net/652334

Alarm/bird duet: https://onlinesequencer.net/652807

Bonus song I made up because I was having way too much fun with this instead of doing actual work: https://onlinesequencer.net/652400

October 22, 2017October 22, 2017

The External and the Internal

I think Abigail makes an interesting point regarding embodiment and Citizen, with a specific focus on the World Cup Situation. I’m drawn to part VI of the text for several reasons, and Abigail addresses the two major components: embodiment and image.

Part VI is strikingly different from the preceding sections because it shifts from the largely internal to the largely external. Sections I through V focus mainly on microaggressions experienced in daily life. Of course, this is not to diminish or trivialize the power of these episodes. In fact, I think part of the reason that they are powerful is because Rankine often sets up seemingly quotidian scenarios only to twist them ever-so-slightly with some sort of remark, action, or thought that gives both the reader and the subject in that scenario pause; then, the accumulation of these instances illuminates the true detrimental effect of such microaggressions. Yes, the section surrounding Serena Williams also appears in these early chapters, but, despite the injustices she experiences, physical violence does not erupt until part VI.

Almost every Situation in part VI deals with a violent, bodily confrontation: Hurricane Katrina, focus given to the violent aspects like “the missing limbs…the bodies lodged in piles of rubble, dangling from rafters, lying facedown, arms outstretched on parlor floors” (84); Trayvon Martin, shot and killed; James Craig Anderson, beaten and run over; Jenna Six, culmination of racial tensions in a fistfight; stop and frisk, self-evident; Mark Duggan, shot and killed; World Cup, the headbutt that Abigail elucidated above. It’s impossible to come to a singular conclusion about this section because each of these engagements plays out differently. We see the African American (or the intentional non-American) as victim, as aggressor, as living, as dead, as accountable, as innocent. Regardless, I believe that this section’s highlighting of the body (without abandoning the internal entirely) compliments the early focus on the mind, creating a fuller picture of what it means to be a Citizen.

Now, to connect to Abigail’s other point, I move to the video clips. As I watched the different Situation videos, I found the World Cup to be particularly powerful because we just get the one slowed down clip—the clip of the individual frames we get in the book. It has a different effect in video form because certain lines that Rankine speaks coincide with specific moments of the video. For example, “I resolved to fight” occurs at the exact moment of the headbutt and “it is the black man who creates” occurs when Materazzi hits the ground, an earth-shaking underscore of this powerful statement. Yes, we get the frames in the actual book, but there is something about hearing these words while watching this connection of head to chest and body to the ground frame by frame that instills a sense of weight to both the words and the images that neither can achieve independently.

With that said, I think another interesting avenue that we can choose to explore is the multimedia aspect of Citizen. Stated plainly, there’s a lot going on. We have the writing itself, which weaves through different forms and styles throughout. We have the images that appear either with the text or as interruptions of the text (plus whatever that thing is on page 19). We have a lot of white space, which I would say is no accident. We have the online Situation videos that are imbedded in a larger website. Then, we have a surprising amount of paratextual matter that comes both before and after the seven sections of the lyric.

Both Love and Reed note the experimental nature of the text, with the former linking this “range of resources” to “the desire to ‘see what’s there’ and to ‘speak all that you see’ [that] is strong in Citizen” (Love 424) and the latter claiming that it “shows what is awry in the present and awakens us to the possibility of another possibility—alternate ways of valuing lives and imagining an inhabitable world together” (Reed 100). While I agree with both of these assessments to a certain extent, I think the intermedial nature of this text is also another instance of the external complimenting the internal. We are compelled to look both in and out when it comes to the book (the lyric, the images, the paratext) as well as the larger Citizen network (the physical book and the website).

September 30, 2017

Updates as Storytelling

The concept of Twitter fiction is interesting to me because there are no real guidelines for what to do or how to do it, but we can still make a value judgment of good or bad use of the medium. Based on Ruth Page’s “Celebrity Practice” chapter, I think there are two distinct avenues authors can take, which is where we can split Cole and Egan. In her analysis, Page describes three different styles of tweets: the addressed message, the retweet, and the update. While the addressed message is “a public tweet that begins with an @username address” and retweets are “tweets that have been forwarded without amendment,” updates are, according to Page, “all other publicly available tweets that appear in a tweeter’s timeline” (93-4). Basically, the update is your average, everyday tweet.

Egan’s “Black Box” operates using the update style of tweet so well that, for the most part, you wouldn’t necessarily know that you are reading a segment of a complete short story unless you knew that you were reading a part of a short story. Most of the tweets that create “Black Box” are quips, observations, adages, and aphorisms that actually sound like tweets you could read if you were to look at your average Twitter feed. For example, “The first thirty seconds in a person’s presence are the most important” (1), “Never look for hidden cameras: the fact that you’re looking will give you away” (12), and “Knowing your latitude and longitude is not the same as knowing where you are” (22) all make complete sense when isolated and removed from the story. And, I can almost guarantee that similar tweets have been composed by “average” Twitter users outside of any storytelling context because they all have the observational quality present in many tweets, Facebook status updates, or Instagram captions—what Page refers to as “tellability” (104).

While reading “Black Box,” I went through the painstaking process of marking tweets that can function independently of the story and still make sense as well as the tweets that only work if you read the larger story. The former category outnumbers the latter. I think this is part of what makes Egan’s story a “successful” piece of Twitter fiction; “Black Box” is able to capture the essence of the social media site and re-channel it into a means for telling a story.

When it comes to looking at individual tweets, Egan’s choice of diction—beauty, Designated Mate, Hotspot, etc.—allows tweets that would normally make sense solely in the storytelling context to function as independent updates as well. Chapter 12 has a solid example of this in the tweet “The concerns of your Designated Mate are your concerns.” I think the most interesting part about this aspect of the text is the duality it creates. In the context of the story, this tweet means one thing—chiefly that the citizen agent must surrender herself so completely to the mission at hand that she must become one with this violent and dangerous man—and it means another thing entirely if taken out of the story context and looked at on an individual basis. In this later case it seems much more heartwarming and loving because “Designated Mate” does not carry an inherent dangerous and violent quality; it only gains those implications from the story.

When Egan uses linked tweets (tweets that cannot be fully understood independently and require knowledge of previous tweets to make sense) she often marks them with repetition, specifically demonstrating their connectedness, such as the repetition of “You will be tempted” in chapter 7 or “Only then” in chapter 9. The significance of these linked tweets, especially those marked with repetition, is that we are given another layer of understanding. On the macro level, we have an entire story unit. On the most micro level, we have individual tweets that are meaningful on their own. By linking certain tweets, there is also a middle ground where several consecutive tweets can be taken out of the larger story as a grouped unit and make sense that way. Therefore, “Black Box” offers several different levels of storytelling depending on how you orient yourself as the reader.

For my money (or lack thereof), I think Egan uses Twitter as a storytelling medium more effectively than Cole. Cole clearly does not use the update style of tweet for his storytelling. Instead, he plays with Twitter’s sense of community and interaction in “Hafiz” and “A Piece of the Wall.” While we do not necessarily need to frame these different approaches as a “who did it better?” throwdown, I do think there is something we can talk about when it comes to making effective use of Twitter as a storytelling medium that actually does something for the text rather than simply being a different way to deliver it.