Author: Hannah Čulík-Baird

Classics professor

Stardew Valley Twitch Stream FAQ

~ Hannah Čulík-Baird

Every evening this week, I live streamed my play of the very soothing, very satisfying game, Stardew Valley, on twitch. Instead of a regular newsletter for this week, let me tell you more about how and why I’m doing this.

During the stream, we talk a lot about books, games, podcasts, and food we like. I’ve been collecting the recommendations here, in a google doc.

Stardew Valley close screen

Why are you live streaming? During this time of social distancing and self-isolation, live streaming presented itself as a sane antidote to anxiety and loneliness. I had started making videos for my now online undergrad humanities class, so I was already beginning to reframe my relationship to an audience that is distant, and thinking about how to create active community when individuals cannot gather together physically. (Certainly, I have a lot of experience with this — twitter has been a place of community building for me for a long while now, and I had a long history with the internet even before that. But these new circumstances do change things: not having the option to meet physically adds a certain urgency to online community.) When we made the collective decision to isolate, I started thinking about the “tend and befriend” stress response phenomenon described by Rebecca Solnit in The Mother of All Questions (2017, pp18-19):

“Words bring us together, and silence separates us, leaves us bereft of the help or solidarity or just communion that speech can solicit or elicit. Some species of trees spread root systems underground that interconnect the individual trunks and weave the individual trees into a more stable whole that can’t so easily be blown down in the wind. Stories and conversations are like those roots. For a century, the human response to stress and danger has been defined as ‘fight or flight.’ A 2000 UCLA study by several psychologists noted that this research was based largely on studies of male rats and male human beings. But studying women* led them to a third, often deployed option: gather for solidarity, support, advice. They noted that ‘behaviorally, females’ responses are more marked by a pattern of “tend and befriend.” Tending involves nurturant activities designed to protect the self and offspring that promote safety and reduce distress; befriending is the creation and maintenance of social networks that may aid in this process.'”

It strikes me that some things which, under normal circumstances, are considered superficial are right now truly vital — and probably always have been vital. Spending time with people — in whatever ways work best for you (I say this because, despite my need to perform, I am otherwise mostly an introvert) — is not a luxury but a necessity. We are all right now focusing on public health. And mental health is health. So we should be making sure to find and make opportunities for socializing not because we want to but because, actually, we need to. I come from the world of academia where there are few models of contentment and happiness — indeed, we default to the image of performative suffering and punitive self-restraint. In that context, unhappiness is virtue. However, I urge you to take this moment of global distress to shed some of the scripts that we have been running even unwillingly. I quote here the wise words of Adrienne Maree Brown in Pleasure Activism (2019, p14): “When I am happy, it is good for the world.” In this stream, I am consciously trying to activate interconnected goods: 1) the social is good; community is good, 2) play is good.

What is Stardew Valley? Will you be playing any other games? Stardew Valley (2016) is hit indie game originally produced by a single developer, Eric Barone (@ConcernedApe), who had at the time never made a commercial game before. To describe it simply: it’s a farming simulator. You wake up every day, plant and tend to your crops, and the seasons pass. There is a town nearby, where you can buy supplies and talk to people. There is a beach. There is a mine. There is a community center (inhabited by forest sprites). But there’s so much more to this game. Barone designed it as a deliberate meditation upon productivity (I recommend the Vulture article by Jesse Singal on this topic), and as a protreptic towards the disruption of notions of productivity (which is why I keep talking about Jenny Odell on the stream, whose work, How to Do Nothing, I have written about in the newsletter several times). And on top of that, it’s an extremely chill game. It both looks and sounds beautiful, and there are many opportunities for a meditative moment. It is the right game for right now. I might play other games in the future, but for now this is it. By the way, if you want something to help you relax right now, you can also play Stardew Valley even if you don’t consider yourself much of a gamer. It’s currently available on a wide range of platforms, including your phone.

When are you live streaming, and why that time? I’ll be streaming for a couple of hours every weekday starting at 8pm EST. I’m streaming in the evening not just because that’s a natural time for both me and you to relax, but because I wanted to make sure I did not torture myself with the news right before heading to bed. As is becoming clear by now, I am doing this as much for myself as for others — streaming this week has been the thing which gives me the greatest sense of relief, and puts a pause on the dread which I — we — naturally feel right now.  I will also sometimes be streaming in the morning during the weekends so that I can hang out with my UK pals: the first morning stream will be Sunday 22nd March at 11am EST/3pm GMT.  Currently things are a bit ad hoc, but I see a regular schedule emerging very quickly.

How do I tune in and take part? All you need to do to tune in is head over to my twitch page at 8pm EST: https://www.twitch.tv/hecvb. If you are fine with simply watching or listening (it’s usual practice to have a twitch stream on in the background, maybe while you yourself are playing video games! rather than the sole point of focus), you don’t need to have an account. If you want to join the chat (which I encourage you to!), then you should make one. The chat is where it’s at. Talk to others and to me, and I’ll respond to all the hijinks going on there.

Will you be talking about Classics? Not really, aside from the incidental reference here or there. There are twitch streamers out there who take a more academic approach, but I am doing this to relax, not to make more work for myself. That said, if there’s some aspect of academic work and life that you want to talk about, you can certainly raise the issue. Mostly we talk about nothing of consequence, and it’s amazing.

Do you have any particular goals in mind with your game play? I am not setting out to make the perfect farm. Indeed, quite the opposite. This is going to be a meandering, explorative play, not a goal-oriented one. This is the chill stream.

I am one of your current or former students, is it okay for me to join in? Yes. I understand if it might be strange for some to see me in a less formal environment, so I get it if you don’t want to take part. But you are certainly welcome.

What tools do you use to stream? Can I do it too? I am playing Stardew Valley through Steam on my Mac, and I’m using OBS (free and open source) to broadcast the feed. It probably took me about half an hour to set up the stream on the night I decided to do it. Honestly, I just googled “twitch stream on Mac” and the rest came together quickly. So yes, you can and you should!

Which other twitch feeds should I be tuning into? Deirdre Donlon is a cast member over at WanderingDM. Professor Steel has been playing Apex Legends and Control. Hamish Cameron started streaming the Classically themed Apotheon last night. Earlier this week, frequencydata was live streaming the composition of ambient music. Daniel Libatique streamed some of Pokemon Shield earlier this week. (Please help me keep this list updated!)

*Note: Solnit (p19) later adds: “Not only women do this, but perhaps women do this more routinely.” Solnit’s emphasis on “tend and befriend” as the behaviour of women comes out of the fact that in this piece she is trying to shine a light on the alternatives to traditional theorization of speech, thereby showing that women have always had their own communicative strategies, even if they have been by necessity operating under the radar. For my purposes here, the gendered aspect is not necessary. All of us can tend and befriend, and benefit from it.

New York visit; “Countryside, The Future”; Will Allen on farming; tempora cum causis (18)

~ Hannah Čulík-Baird

Ancient. This week I was in New York visiting the Classics department at NYU. On Thursday (5th March 2020), I talked about my primary research interest at the moment, Cicero and the Latin poets. Big shoutout to the NYU Classics grad students who invited me and are doing very important work right now to make the field more inclusive. Handout to the talk below:

While in New York, as well as stopping in at ISAW, I headed over to the Guggenheim, which is currently showing a very interesting exhibit, “Countryside, The Future” by AMO/Rem Koolhaas. This is an installation which looks at the earth from a global perspective and underlines the necessity that human beings living right now closely examine our relationship with the ecosystems into which we have inserted ourselves. It’s an ambitious and important project which turns the interior of a major art museum in one of the most monumental and complex cities on the planet into a microcosm of what’s happening outside of cities right now around the world.

A careful observer will find a number of classical referents throughout this exhibit. The invocation of the Roman concept of otium (i.e. time off from duty) in the countryside, paired with the contemporary ancient Chinese idea of xiaoyao (“blissful repose”), represents, for the creators of this exhibit, moments of human history where reverence for the creative and contemplative spaces of the countryside facilitated respect for its rhythms and boundaries. In the modern era, they suggest, these ideas of restful contemplation have developed into intensely rapacious spatial practices, where the natural world is cannibalized under a commodified idea of “wellness.” The inclusion of ancient testimonia in this exhibit does something that Classicists often fail to do — namely, to situate our understanding of antiquity in broader movements of not only textual transmission, but environmental processes. Naturally, there’s a sense of urgency to this exhibit. (And I experienced it through a further layer of complexity — walking around with hundreds of other people while holding within me anxiety surrounding the spread of the coronavirus.)

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Modern. So here’s a question which I find myself struggling to answer. Are academics allowed to “be themselves”? An unspoken aspect of scholarly training is that, in addition to developing the various skills and deepening your research interests, you are also expected to internalize certain social practices and academic ways of being. I have already written about how much I despise the “professor” trope in pop culture — one that, sadly, is consciously reenacted by some flesh and blood professors, who present themselves to the world with horn-rimmed glasses and elbow patches despite the fact that they are 35 years old. Listen. It’s not actually the aesthetic that I have a problem with. It’s the fact that this is a costume which we feel that we have to put on to do our jobs properly, to be taken seriously as scholars, even to be identified as scholars.

The trouble, of course, is that if you don’t look and sound a very particular way, it’s impossible to bridge that gap. I’m a younger woman and even if I put on some elbow patched tweed, it would still never be enough for some people to ascribe intellectual power to me. This happens to women, of course, and it happens if you’re not white, if you deviate in any way from perceived gender norms, etc. etc. (Actually, this brings up an old New York memory. I was walking in Central Park when an English woman, who turned out to be an academic, asked me directions which I, of course, couldn’t give. When she realized I was visiting too, she asked if I was a student. “No,” I said, “I’m a Classics professor. I gave a lecture at Columbia last night.”)

And obviously the academic “costume” goes far beyond dress — it includes what your interests are, how you talk, and, basically, everything about how you interface with the world. Okay, so. Given that there is no physical way that I can present myself in the form which is considered authoritative, my question is this: will people want to hear from me in the way that it is natural for me to communicate? I have come from my own particular circumstances, had my own particular experiences, and all of these things, of course, have an impact on my intellectual powers. So to some extent denying what comes natural to me in order to constrict myself into a very confined space, one which I could never fully occupy anyway, is not just a moral problem but also an intellectual one. Scholarship wants — or it should want — intellectual plurality. This makes the work more interesting, and, frankly, it makes it better. But it’s going to be hard to achieve this if we keep constricting ourselves into these artificial shapes in order to be identified as a scholar in the first place. It’s going to be hard, but we — all of us — have to do some work to widen our field of vision, and put effort into consciously ascribing authority to those whose faces, bodies, and voices do not look or sound like the models of the past.

Internet. 

Excerpt. Will Allen, The Good Food Revolution (p18): “Farming had taught me to have trust in the unseen. You plant for a harvest that you hope will arrive but that is never guaranteed. The opening of Will’s Roadside Farm Market required a similar kind of faith. I hoped it would be rewarded. Yet farming had also taught me to expect the unexpected. Two days of heavy rains could wash away a crop that you had worked on for weeks. A cruel drought could choke your plants, and they would come up stunted or withered. I didn’t know yet what would become of my dream.”

Daily life. A different writing perspective than usual.

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Forms of focus; tempora cum causis (17)

~ Hannah Čulík-Baird

In The Content of the Form (1987), Hayden White discusses the Annals of Saint Gall’s chronicle of events from the 7th-10th centuries CE. White focuses upon entries for the 8th century CE (pp-6-7):

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This year-by-year list of events is interestingly selective. Many years have no entries despite the fact that, presumably, things did happen during that time. But not ones considered necessary to include. The criterion for inclusion also embraces different kinds of event, particularly moments of destruction: bad crops (but also…”great crops”), flood, death of elites, battles. In 732 CE, there was a battle “on Saturday” but no other information is given — not date, not month. The significance of these events is indeed emphasized by such selectivity — the act of omission puts these particular moments in sharper focus. But it’s hard to look at this and not see anything other than a partial record.

In Allusion and Intertext (1998), Stephen Hinds described how focusing upon an aspect of a whole has a “fragmentizing” effect (p103):

“A reading of Virgil which ‘fragments’ the Homeric model into discrete events ‘alluded to’ may reflect nothing more (and nothing less) than a basic interpretative imperative felt by the Virgilian reader to ‘freeze‘ Homer, to hold him still for a moment so that he can be contemplated from a Virgilian point of view.”

Here we have the idea that discussing, or in any way narrativizing, a point of reference is to freeze and hold that referent from a particular point of view, but also to break it off from its original context. An equivalent might be: pressing pause on a video shot from one person’s perspective. So despite the fact that we might be longing for wholeness — indeed, might even be subjected to a kind of wholeness on a daily basis — our perceptive and intellectual faculties create a kind of fragmentation even when we simply try to engage with the reality which surrounds us.

This week, I read (or rather, inhaled) Jenny Offill’s Weather (2020), which has just come out. (A few weeks ago I read about it in the New York Times review by Parul Sehgal.) This novel captures the dread of living in the present moment as an individual facing a future fragmented by climate change. The book itself proceeds in fragmented form, each entry a small paragraph:

These paragraphs might remind you of a number of things. Diary entries. Tweets. Words scribbled on the back on an envelope, or into the notes app. Offill’s novel, proceeding fragmentarily, argues like Hayden White: there is reality, it is happening, but our telling of it is distinct from that reality, and can only ever capture something partial. All narratives, White would argue, have to reckon with this. But Offill’s novel dramatizes this narrative problem, using it as a tool to bring to the foreground the movements of a internal human psychology as it responds to a variety of threats, from the banal of the everyday to the threat of climate destruction.

In my ancient women class this week, we were discussing the fragments of Sappho. Sappho (7th c. BCE) is an interesting figure, of course, because she has loomed so large and for so long in the imaginations of so many, despite the fact that, historically, her readers have only been able to access her work in partial forms. On twitter, there is a bot (@sapphobot) which periodically sends out verses of Sappho as translated by Anne Carson; these tweets are fragments in a number of senses — fragmented by textual transmission (via quotation or shattered papyri), by translation from Greek to English, by twitter’s character limit. In class, the students argued that fragments are more alluring than surviving wholes, and they are right. One student noted that people like “bite-sized” things now, miniatures of culture which can be easily consumed, and easily shared. The combination of ephemerality and immortality is potent. A fragment of Sappho can contain an expression of desire so profoundly human (it can also be a banal list of things). A tweet, an instagram story, captures something real (or something insignificant), and then it’s gone. Text and technology reflect the inherent process of fragmentation via focalization.

 

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A newly made piece of papyrus in the foreground; fragmentary papyrus from the 2nd c. CE (P. Oxy. 2288) containing Sappho poem 1.

Notes on “perfectionism”; tempora cum causis (16)

~ Hannah Čulík-Baird
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Garden fresco in the Villa of Livia. Image: Wikimedia.

In the Brutus (71), Cicero, tracing the trajectory of Latin literature, writes: nihil est enim simul et inuentum et perfectum, “Nothing is fully developed at the moment of its invention.” The Latin verb perficio, from which the English word “perfect” derives, means “to bring to completion” or “to finish.” In a different work, On the Nature of the Gods (2.35), Cicero, speaking from a Stoic perspective, describes this process of completion or finishing in terms of a natural growth which irresistibly strives beyond its current state. Here comes the Latin and the Loeb translation: 

neque enim dici potest in ulla rerum institutione non esse aliquid extremum atque perfectum. ut enim in uite ut in pecude nisi quae uis obstitit uidemus naturam suo quodam itinere ad ultimum peruenire, atque ut pictura et fabrica ceteraeque artes habent quendam absoluti operis effectum, sic in omni natura ac multo etiam magis necesse est absolui aliquid ac perfici. etenim ceteris naturis multa externa quo minus perficiantur possunt obsistere, uniuersam autem naturam nulla res potest impedire, propterea quod omnis naturas ipsa cohibet et continet.

Again, it is undeniable that every organic whole must have an ultimate ideal of perfection. As in vines or in cattle we see that, unless obstructed by some force, nature progresses on a certain path of her own to her goal of full development, and as in painting, architecture and the other arts and crafts there is an ideal of perfect workmanship, even so and far more in the world of nature as a whole there must be a process towards completeness and perfection. The various limited modes of being may encounter many external obstacles to hinder their perfect realization, but there can be nothing that can frustrate nature as a whole, since she embraces and contains within herself all modes of being.

Each of these discussions of “perfection” in Cicero suggests that the thing which is “perfect” is one which has been worked beyond an initial beginning of some kind — the event horizon of “invention” (inuentum), or the young tendril of vine — and imagines the possibility that such a start could be brought forward to its logical conclusion, its completion. Essentially, “perfection”, in these terms, requires a distance between the beginning and the end; an end cannot coexist with its beginning. It requires growth. Yet the fine line between the simplicity of completion, and the politics of “perfection” is blurred by Cicero too. The natural world may follow its own script, leading to the growth of plants and animals, but Cicero includes human artefacts in the same category: painting, architecture, “technology” (ceterae artes…). The idea that the perfect thing is the completed thing is a problem. Because, well. When is anything finished? There is a difference between completion (the point of fullness beyond which further growth is impossible), and a stop (a breaking off point). But what is it?

The English term “perfectionism” — i.e. the refusal to accept any standard short of “perfection” — did not arise until the 1930s (according to the OED), yet there is a shadow of this idea even in Cicero. In certain circumstances, Cicero writes, obstacles may arise which stand in the way of even nature’s “perfect” course. The anxiety of not meeting completion is there. Such anxiety enters at the moment when the concept of an “end” is complexified by judgement. A critical eye complicates the notion of completion, questioning the possibility of wholeness. The social phenomenon of perfectionism inserts a difficulty into the concept of the “perfect” as the completed thing, because perfectionism refuses to see completion.

As an antidote to a social disease which invalidates moments of closure (i.e. what even an “end” might mean for us), we might reconsider what it means to “begin” something. In How Societies Remember (1989), Paul Connerton figures the “beginning” as something more complex than a single moment of inception (p6):

“All beginnings contain an element of recollection. This is particularly so when a social group makes a concerted effort to begin with a wholly new start. There is a measure of complete arbitrariness in the very nature of any such attempted beginning. The beginning has nothing whatsoever to hold on to; it is as if it came out of nowhere…But the absolutely new is inconceivable. It is not just that it is very difficult to begin with a wholly new start, that too many old loyalties and habits inhibit the substitution of a novel enterprise for a new and established one.”

The beginning does not come out of nowhere. To some extent, a “fresh start” is impossible. All beginnings grow from old soil (to extend the horticultural metaphor). If the beginning is a blurred line, so too can the end be — that horizon line of “perfection.” If completion is not a full stop but a lingering note, then perfectionism may lose some of its power. There are, too, lots of moments of fullness along the way towards that blurry wholeness. The full embrace of perfectionism also means accepting the argument of teleology — that what comes next is inherently superior to what preceded it, that human culture is marching towards a pin point of perfection. Teleological thinking blinds us to points of significance outside a narrative of progress. Rejecting such thinking allows us to consider what it is, exactly, that we’re progressing towards.

Nausicaa pyxis; climate change and fragments; N. K. Jemisin; tempora cum causis (15)

~ Hannah Čulík-Baird ~ 1 Comment

Ancient. In the Boston MFA, there is a late 5th c. BCE pyxis which depicts the scene from Odyssey Book 6 where a naked Odysseus encounters Nausicaa. Given that the pyxis was an object used by women (as a make up or jewelry box), it is really interesting to see what kind of scenes are depicted on them; i.e. what kind of media did the Greeks of this period think was fitting for women? I look at this object and imagine a young (affluent) woman holding it in her hands, seeing reflections of her own life in the life of Nausicaa in Phaeacia (as well as the “calculated flirtation”, as Emily Wilson calls it, between herself and Odysseus). Note the care given by the painter to distinguish each of the figures on the vase according to their narrative role, and class: Odysseus, as in Homer’s depiction, is embarrassed by his nakedness; Athena is present as his guide; the women in Nausicaa’s attendance run wildly away when Odysseus appears (as in Homer), except for the one still engaged in the washing; Nausicaa stands tall, and is elaborately dressed. This graphic representation is remarkably faithful to the verses of the Odyssey. Compare the 20th century version by American painter, William McGregor Paxton, in which everyone is naked, not just Odysseus.

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Here is Emily Wilson’s translation of the scene (Odyssey 6.119-146):

“What is this country I have come to now?
Are all the people wild and violent,
or good, hospitable, and god-fearing?
I heard the sound of female voices. Is it
nymphs, who frequent the craggy mountaintops,
and river streams and meadows lush with grass?
Or could this noise I hear be human voices?
I have to try to find out who they are.”

Odysseus jumped up from our the bushes.
Grasping a leafy branch he broke it off
to cover up his manly private parts.
Just as a mountain lion trusts its strength,
and beaten by the rain and wind, its eyes
burn bright as it attacks the cows or sheep,
or wild deer, and hunger drives it on
to try the sturdy pens of sheep — so need
impelled Odysseus to come upon
the girls with pretty hair, though he was naked.
All caked with salt, he looked a dreadful sight.
They ran along the shore quite terrified,
some here, some there. But Nausicaa stayed still.
Athena made her legs stop trembling
and gave her courage in her heart. She stood there.
He wondered, should he touch her knees, or keep
some distance and use charming words, to beg
the pretty girl to show him to the town,
and give him clothes. At last he thought it best
to keep some distance and use words to beg her.

Modern. Earlier this week I was texting with a friend when they mentioned that coffee production may be at risk by the year 2050. The dread of climate change is something that is always with me (I stopped eating meat a few years ago for this reason), but I find myself always pushing it to the back of my mind. The coffee thing brought it forward in an instant. I found myself googling flood projections for Boston, where I live now, as well as my childhood home, Glasgow. I thought about the fear of things to come which washed over me when I saw the flood sequence in Parasite. I asked my husband whether, in light of all of this, we were really doing enough. I asked myself why, given our knowledge of the climate emergency, I don’t give up everything and try to grow vegetables and live off the grid in some sustainable way. Then the next day, I got up and continued to write and worry about my book about Latin fragments.

Last week Parul Sehgal’s review of Jenny Offill’s novel, Weather (2020) appeared in the The New York Times: “How to Write Fiction When the Planet is Falling Apart.” (Thanks, Christian and Michele! Who individually sent me this because they knew I would like it.) Sehgal writes:

‘In her new novel, “Weather,” Offill applies her instruments — the fragment, the odd fact, her deep banks of knowledge on mysticism and natural history — to a broader canvas. The stakes are the survival not of a marriage but of the planet itself. “The question I was thinking about in this book,” she told me, “was, Can you still just tend your own garden once you know about the fire outside its walls?”’

And, further in:

‘These might be familiar stories of family life, but now imagine them told in shards, the plot edging forward in jokes, quotes, Zen koans. The fragment is an old form, perhaps even our native form — don’t we speak to ourselves in curt directives, experience memory as clusters of language? In Offill’s hands, however, the form becomes something new, not a way of communicating estrangement or the scroll of a social media feed but a method of distilling experience into its brightest, most blazing forms — atoms of intense feeling. I read somewhere that clouds could be called floating lakes. That is what these fragments feel like: teeming worlds suspended in white space, entire novels condensed into paragraphs… The domestic and intellectual meet on the same plain in her work; the swirl of hair on the back of a baby’s head is as worthy a subject of contemplation as one of Wittgenstein’s aphorisms.’

The fragment has an essential duality. Whatever it is, it exists in its original context, connected to its surroundings (a baby’s hair swirl to the baby; Wittgenstein’s aphorism to the rest of his work); but it also exists on its own, as an image in a frame. It is both broken off (fragment is from frangere, Latin “to break” — it means “broken thing”) yet simultaneously resistant to breakage. Hence Sehgal’s invocation of the atom, which is, ostensibly, the thing which cannot be broken down any further (atom is from ἄτομος, Greek for “a thing that cannot be cut”). The atom as an idea (leaving aside the physical phenomenon which has been given this name) is a hard core, resistant to the processes of damage and loss which eat away at all the things which once surrounded it.

Sehgal’s analysis of Offill’s work highlights how dread in the face of climate change works upon a human observer of reality. Dread eats away perceptive connectivities, and leaves behind the most intense fragments of experience. Fragmentation plays a role in the micro but also the macro. Contemplation of its process brings up the inevitable question: what will survive? Scholars of antiquity look at this process of fragmentation after it has already occurred: shards of Sappho papyri, torturous manuscript traditions, small parts of once colossal statues. And while destruction (accidental or deliberate) has a role to play and how things do or don’t survive from antiquity, the kind of destruction we observe does not compare to what climate change can do to the face of the earth in the near future.

In the urgency of the present moment the question shifts from what will survive, to who will survive. The idea that coffee, such a mundane but profound part of my life now, may disappear in thirty years jolts me. But there is so much more at stake than this comfort, this little fragment of my life. The richest countries are the most responsible for climate change, but it is the poorest who will be most affected. How we treat each other is reflected in how we treat the earth. A renewed focus on what is lost, what we’re in the process of losing, and what we stand to lose soon is frightening, but it is what we need. In context of all of this, the fragment gains a new significance as a symbol both of our perception of reality, but also our capacity for action. Reconnecting what is fragmented, contextualizing the atomized, reframes the discrete, isolated parts of our lives as part of an urgent, global narrative.

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Internet. 

Excerpt. N. K. Jemisin (The Fifth Season, p150): “A break in the pattern. A snarl in the weft. There are things you should be noticing, here. Things that are missing, and conspicuous by their absence.”

Daily life. We’ve been seeing a lot of films at Coolidge Corner, and it has been wonderful.

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How to Write

~ Hannah Čulík-Baird ~ 1 Comment

This week at BU I gave a proseminar for our PhD students, “How to Write.” Here’s what I told them:

How to Write. 1) Establish a practice. 2) Contextualize your work. 3) Create writing community. 4) Use good tools. 5) Read about writing. 6) Stop thinking.

1) Establish a practice. Haruki Murakami is a writer and an ultra marathoner. In his memoir, What I Talk about When I Talk about Running (2008), Murakami makes an alignment between writing and running — in that each is a practice: 

“Most of what I know about writing I’ve learned through running every day. These are practical, physical lessons. How much can I push myself? How much rest is appropriate — and how much is too much? How far can I take something and still keep it decent and consistent? When does it become narrow-minded and inflexible? How much should I be aware of the world outside, and how much should I focus on my inner world? To what extent should I be confident in my abilities, and when should I start doubting myself? I know that if I hadn’t become a long-distance runner when I became a novelist, my work would have been vastly different.”

When you run, or do any kind of physical activity, it’s about putting your body in the position to do the practice. You don’t say to your muscles, “get stronger!” But rather, you run, you put yourself in the right environment every day, and over time your muscles do get stronger. It’s the same way with writing. As with running, when you sit down to write you don’t know how well it will go (and, indeed, how well it will go is governed by somewhat mysterious forces). But you put yourself in that position nonetheless; and some days you do well, other days you don’t. But you do it consistently, and, by trial and error, you figure out what kind of practice works best for you. I’ve known scholars who like to write for an hour every day first thing in the morning, and that’s it. I prefer to set aside an entire day so that I can devote several hours in a row to write. We all have slightly different ways of doing it and that’s fine — but whatever you do, do it consistently.

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1a) Focus on time writing rather than words written. Given the fact that you don’t  know how many words you’ll be able to write in any given session, using words written as a measure of progress will ultimately become frustrating. Instead, focus on time spent writing. Doing so will allow you to have space to think (and thinking is of course part of writing!) and to develop your ideas. When I was writing my dissertation, I spent 3 to 5 hours a day working on it.

1b) Do it a little every day. Establishing a practice means writing consistently. You may be a morning person, you may be a night owl, but whatever you do — do it every day. (Every day that you’re working, that is. It’s important to take days off, to rest. To extend the running metaphor, you have to rest your muscles for them to grow. And in addition to that, having a robust and dependable writing practice means that you can have a life. Which is important!)

1c) Keep a record of your hours. Keep a journal to note down the hours you write every day. I show an example of mine from summer 2019 below. On Wednesday 5th June, I wrote for 6 hours “with a lot of faffing” (=British slang for “screwing around”), i.e. I put in the hours but there were many distractions. I also noted what I was working on, so that I could pick up from there the next time I wrote. On Wednesday 10th [July??], I struggled. I wrote from 10.49am to 2pm, and then noted: “I need a break!” When I returned, I annotated this with “didn’t **really** take a break but worried from 2-3.15 :).” A nice example of how writing can go well or it can go badly. Nonetheless, you continue your practice!

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I take inspiration here from another writer, Ursula K. Le Guin. In a 1988 interview, she described her written practice. Worth noting what happened in the evenings: “After 8.00pm — I tend to be very stupid and we won’t talk about this.” No one can write all day. There is always a point of fatigue, and once you reach this, you shouldn’t work against yourself. Go and rest.

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2) Contextualize your work. When you begin your research project as a PhD student, you feel an enormous pressure to be original. Indeed, that’s one of the metrics by which we judge successful research — whether it is a new and original contribution to the field. And it’s easy to think that originality means removing yourself from what has been said before. “No one has ever looked at this issue the way I am.” Yet, truly, your writing will be at its best if you go into it acknowledging the fact that you are not alone. In the slides below I show two different perspectives on this. Is your work a lone tree? Or is it a tree that is in a contextual forest, standing alongside other work in an intellectual ecosystem? Create a dialogue between yourself, the ancient evidence, and prior scholarship. Interweave, entangle. Be synthetic.

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In a talk from 2004, “Genre: A Word Only a Frenchman Could Love” (reprinted in Words are My Matter), Ursula K. Le Guin describes what it’s like when a writer does not acknowledge the tradition in which they are working:

“A genre is a genre by having a field and focus of its own, its appropriate and particular tools and rules and techniques for handling the material, its traditions, and its experienced, appreciative readers. Ignorant of all this, our novice is about to reinvent the wheel, the space ship, the space alien, and the mad scientist, with cries of innocent wonder. The cries will not be echoed by the readers. Readers familiar with the genre have met the space ship, the alien, and the mad scientist before. They know much more about them than the writer does.”

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It’s weirdly easier to do this in a research area that you don’t feel as personally invested in. You can practice this deliberately, scholarly interweaving by going through the following steps:

2a) Pick an ancient piece of evidence. It could be anything.
2b) Analyze it. Spend some time just you and it. Tease out points of significance. Take notes. Think about it in the context of other things you know about its period/genre/whatever.
2c) See what other scholars have said; read 3-5 pieces of scholarship. You’ll see that some of the things you noticed have already been published. But, by reading multiple scholars on the same object/text/problem, you’ll ALSO see that the issue is not a closed one — there are multiple interpretations, and they get more interesting if they take into account what has previously been discussed.
2d) Combine b) and c). Synthesize what you have read from various scholars and then add your own analysis in light of what they have said. Now you have written an interesting and rich piece of research!

DON’T BE AFRAID of finding that your ideas have already been published by someone else. A new observer of a problem will always shed new light on the issue. It is ignorance of prior scholarship that will lead you to make unoriginal work. 

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3) Create writing community. Writing is lonely. You have to spend a lot of time on your own, and because you feel vulnerable about the quality of what you’re producing (especially in the beginning), you can feel wary of those around you. But a community of writing is what you need, and it can be very rewarding. There are a number of ways to do this.

3a) Ask a trusted friend or classmate to read your work. The “trusted” part is quite important. Not everyone around you in the intellectual environments which you find yourself in will be a good interlocutor for you. I have a close friend from grad school with whom I still share work, but it had to be this person and not anyone else. It’s personal! Creating relationships where constructive critique can happen takes a lot of work, but it is extremely rewarding.

3b) Agree to swap and critique. Talk to a friend who is perhaps in a similar stage of writing as you (for example, you’re both working on the second chapter of your dissertation), and agree to swap work and meet to discuss it. This can be helpful for a number of reasons. It can help you feel like your work has an audience. And reading what someone at the same or a similar stage as you is writing can help you see your own growth.

3c) Arrange or attend writing meet-ups. It’s a well known thing that dissertation writing is hard. With that in mind, a number of institutions have regular meet ups for PhD students where you turn up, write for a number of hours in a room full of other people who are writing, and then have coffee, socialize, etc. This is a great thing for keeping motivated, creating community, and meeting other grad students outside of your field. BU has a Dissertation Writing Group. You may be like me, however, and need to be at home to write in peace. However, if this is something that you think would be useful, it’s a great thing to try.

4. Use good tools. Part of your writing practice will entail finding the right writing tools for you. I suggest the following:

4a) Scrivener. One of the best word processors out there; one which allows for flexibility and non-linear writing. You can watch their videos and see some egs. It isn’t free — although there is a discount for students. However, it may well be a good investment for you. I bought my copy when I started my dissertation and I’m still using it.

4b) Evernote. I don’t recommend this for writing large projects, but it is good for keeping track of various notes, or pdfs. It’s another place to store your ideas which is not on your computer. There is a free version. No matter what system you use, make sure you a REGULARLY BACKING UP YOUR WORK. Back up your files regularly, and in more than one place! 

4c) Forest app. Set a timer and Forest will block website of your choice for that time. I am addicted to twitter (no surprise there), so I use the chrome extension version. This is a great way to a) keep track of your writing hours; b) be strict about minimizing distractions. I often set the timer for a short amount of time (c. 20 mins), but go well beyond it. It helps to get into the mindset you need for writing.

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5) Read about writing. In addition to readings books by writers on writing (e.g. by Murakami or Le Guin), there are a number of useful resources out there which specifically give advice about academic writing:

6) Stop thinking. Writing and research requires a lot of thinking (naturally). But it also requires a lot of time not thinking. In addition to the fact that you should have a life (i.e. don’t let writing eat up everything), your writing will be better if you spend time not thinking. I end with the immortal words of Don Draper:

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Visit to Bates; digital humanities and the human body; Elizabeth Marlowe; tempora cum causis (14)

~ Hannah Čulík-Baird

Ancient. This week I was up in Maine visiting the Classical and Medieval Studies department at Bates College. On Thursday (30th Jan. 2020), I talked about my primary research interest right now, Cicero and the Latin poets (I’m finishing up a book on this); on Friday (31st Jan. 2021), I talked about digital approaches to teaching. Handouts below: 

Modern. I can understand why “the digital” as category sometimes seems so distinct from the world of humanism or humanistic inquiry. But investigating the digital within the framework of the extensibility of human embodiment immediately complicates this view. Digital humanists (this term, to some, is tautological; to others, self-negating) often emphasize the essential continuity between established forms of intellectual work and the capacities of contemporary digital techniques; as Eileen Gardiner and Ronald Musto (The Digital Humanities; 2015: 2) write:

…everything from the scholar’s desk and shelves, study, studio, rehearsal and performance space, lecture halls, campuses, research institutes and convention halls can also legitimately be considered environments. Yet in many ways these new digital tools carry on, in analogous ways, the same functions of traditional humanities. Is the very computer upon which humanists rely so heavily still a tool, something akin to their medieval writing tablets?

Digital techniques build upon traditional humanistic practices but also develop them; Sarah E. Bond, Hoyt Long, Ted Underwood (“‘Digital’ Is Not the Opposite of ‘Humanities‘”; 2017):

Much of what is now happening under the aegis of digital humanities continues and expands those projects. Scholars are still grappling with familiar human questions; it is just that technology helps them address the questions more effectively and often on a larger scale.

“Digital humanists”, who spend so much time theorizing their own relationship to classical traditions and contemporary technology, are often met with knee-jerk reactions by those who have not taken the time to situate their own intellectual complaint. It all brings to mind Ursula K. Le Guin (I keep coming back to her), who regularly drew attention to the fact that her critics could not get past the genre of her writing to grasp the meaning of its content. At face value digital projects can have an alienating effect on traditional sensibilities, but when we dig deeper we quickly see that the intellectual processes required for such work are just as complex and interesting as the standard products of scholarship. I have written elsewhere about how teaching with digital techniques encourages students to sharpen analytic skills and deepen their intellectual commitment to research.

Anyway, returning to the embodiment part in all this. Technology is absolutely bound to the human body; formed for human use, imagined as an extension of human manipulation (in a literal sense of manus, i.e. ‘hand’) of reality. While contemporary technology sometimes feels so seamless as to be invisible to our own theorization, looking at older artefacts in digital history makes this incredibly clear. Take, e.g., the Philippe Henri’s (1984) “Cadavres Exquis / Exquisite Corpses.” This is a program for a computer generated poem: i.e. Henri wrote the code, but the actual poem was “written” when the program was run on a computer; and indeed rewritten anew each time the program was run. The code was circulated on paper (see the slide below: from Nick Montfort’s [@nickmofo] lecture at BU last year, “Translating Computational Poetry” — watch a video recording of the lecture here); and in order to run the program, a human being had to type it by hand into a specific computer, the TRS 80.

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“Cadavres Exquis”, which is only one e.g. of a whole genre of computational poetry, very clearly demonstrates the entanglement of technology with the essences of humanity, not just the body, but indeed the “soul” (if such a dichotomy is even truly real). The human spark which invents the poetry; the human body which materializes it; the technological body (i.e. the computer) which extends that invention and materialization.

When I found out about this example of entangled text and technology from Nick Manafort’s talk at BU, it immediately made me think of the contemporary emulators used to play old video games on modern computers; i.e. programs which simulate the hardware of the N64 so that you can play Ocarina of Time without having to use the physical tools required in 1998. Such digital reconstructions (if that’s even the right word) have a preservative effect, but they also make me think about the relationship between my own body and the console at the time when the game was originally released. Sitting cross-legged on the floor of the attic, holding a controller (that was physically attached to the console – lol!), blowing the dust out of a Goldeneye cartridge. There are so many structural similarities between our relationship with these modern artefacts, and the historical processes which we study; the reception and reconstruction of ideas from antiquity to modernity. The relationship between text and context. The social and embodied nature of textual production.

Internet.

Excerpt. Elizabeth Marlowe (@ElizMarlowe) Shaky Ground (2013: 9): “Many archaeologists follow the thinking of Paul Kristeller, who suggested that ‘art’ as we know it wasn’t invented until the eighteenth century. According to this view, notions of pure, historically transcendent form slide perilously close to deeply suspect ones of ahistorical universal beauty. Ancient objects should instead be understood as manifestations of ‘visual culture’ or ‘material culture’ — the understanding of which depends heavily on context. In this and in much of the recent literature, the binaries are conspicuous: archaeology vs. art history, academia vs. museums, context vs. form, artifact vs. art, history vs. beauty, resonance vs. wonder.” 

Daily Life. Morning light in Maine. 

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Emotions in intellectual networks (Randall Collins & Fire Emblem); tempora cum causis (13)

~ Hannah Čulík-Baird

Ancient. Classes for the Spring 2020 semester began this week. I’m teaching Women in Antiquity (#womenancient) again, and a grad seminar on Roman Intellectual Life (#romanintellect). Here are the syllabuses for each of them: 

Modern. Intellectual and artistic life is often figured as solitary. And, yes, parts of it often are. There has to be time where you’re working on your craft, reading and studying and developing. There has to be practice. But the idea that there is one genius at work, a unitary soul, one which doesn’t rely on or need the presence of others feels fundamentally wrong. There is a social aspect to all of this. And an emotional one. In The Sociology of Philosophies (1979), Randall Collins consistently pairs thought with emotion in his analysis of how socio-intellectual networks form. There are at least three things which Collins suggests are needed for an intellectual interaction: 1) present individuals physically assembled; 2) shared focus and awareness of that shared focus; 3) shared emotional state, or mood.

We could really push back against the insistence that individuals need to be physically assembled (“face-to-face”); interaction rituals take place on the internet every day, where the embodied nature of human interaction is tested and extended. But an important part to linger on here is the function of emotion in creating intellectual as much as social structure. Awareness and self-awareness play a role, and emotions are a processing tool that allows mutual understanding and self-reflexivity.

Collins suggests that focus and emotion have a role to play in the empowering of actions (and texts/objects used in such action) and individuals alike. Ritual actions are “charged up” via repetitions which are needed to give them meaning; if they aren’t replenished in a timely manner, then they lose their significance (consider: going regularly to a therapist; to yoga; to a place of worship; to Latin class). Engaging in social actions regularly insists on their significance, and on the very significance of social interaction regardless of the activity; i.e. going to yoga is as much about communing with your social network and mutually affirming the significance of that shared focus as it is about the technical or spiritual actions involved.

Just as social actions need to be regularly “charged up” in this way (via repetition), so too, Collins suggests, do individuals need to be “charged up” emotionally. Collins writes (p23) that intellectual “encounters have an emotional aftermath”; an individual whose emotional energy is replenished is thereby empowered with charm and leadership capability, but an individal who is not emotional “charged up” will become demoralized — passive, depressed. The sliding scale of emotionality, Collins suggests, strongly impacts the individual’s ability to engage in the socio-intellectual structure which creates these emotions in the first place; consider: a beginning yoga student who feels alienated in their practice and does not feel adequately supported by their teacher; or a Latin student who is not given the emotional space to make errors by their instructor. Motivation is an extension of emotional state, and emotional state in intellectual networks consists in a relationship to the social structure (and hierarchy): the yoga studio; the Latin classroom. 

Interestingly, the theory of motivation and emotional energy in relation to the creation and development of community is a significant feature in Fire Emblem: Three Houses. In this game, you are a “professor” (of war), tasked with developing the skills of a group of students, each with their own personalities, desires, and talents. While you train your students, you must pay attention to their “motivation level” – the students individually have a bar with four “charges” of motivation, which you spend in distributing skill points. When student motivation is low, you can replenish their energy with a range of activities: share a meal with them, have tea with them, return lost items, answer their questions after class, etc. etc. This is actually a rather sophisticated reflection of a solid pedagogical theory: students will not progress and not level up unless you create an environment in which they become emotionally replenished.

Internet.

Excerpt. Randall Collins (1979/2002: 21): “Intensely focused situations penetrate the individual, forming symbols and emotions which are both the medium and the energy of individual thought and the capital which makes it possible to construct yet further situations in an ongoing chain.” 

Daily Life. Over the last two weeks I’ve been cycling as much as possible. I remembered that I had a copy of Eleanor Davis’ You & a Bike & a Road (Koyama Press 2017) and read it again the other evening. It’s a moving memoir of a solo cross-country bike tour. I remember following along on twitter back in 2016 when Davis posted updates as it was happening. 

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this is me rn
This is me these days.

On ‘self-care’ and ‘mindfulness’; Hayden White; tempora cum causis (12)

~ Hannah Čulík-Baird

Modern. When new terms enter the contemporary lexicon, it’s natural to find them kind of annoying at first. (I remember when ‘selfie’ was new and now I have no shame in using it, or taking them.) I’ve been annoyed with two in particular: 1) ‘self-care’; 2) ‘mindfulness.’* Yes, part of the annoyance is that when new catchwords arise they seem to be everywhere; the combination of their novelty and their ubiquity is probably what really rubs me the wrong way. But also: a new term needs time and repeated use to develop meaning, and that process of negotiation can reveal subtleties which complicate the word’s original intent. And there are some reasons to be distrustful of ‘self-care.’ The whole point, as I understand it, of self-care as an idea is that you disrupt your work habits (which you’ve feverishly developed in order to become, or remain, gainfully employed in the unstable economic landscape of 2020) in order to spend some time doing things that you actually like, which make you feel rejuvenated, and return to you some of your innate creative abilities. Okay! Well, obviously, the first issue is that time to yourself – the time to contemplate, to ‘do nothing’ (see: Jenny Odell), should, by all rights, be a bigger part of our lives in the first place. Secondly, self-care is often pitched not as a rebellion against the commodification and infestation of our private lives, but rather as its tool; i.e. self-care is supposed to rejuvenate us so that we can get back to work. At the “Facing Race” conference (Nov. 2016), Roxane Gay put it well (paraphrase via live-tweet): “I can’t stand the phrase self-care. It’s what women can do, but don’t do. We do it so we can work, but what comes next?”  

Lastly, self-care is regularly figured as a consumerist activity; you should try searching “self-care face mask” in twitter. Self-care as the deliberate derailing of learned habits of overwork is itself a good thing, I think. But it’s hard to practice. And as a result, self-care has entered the zeitgeist as something quite frivolous, a superficial manifestation of something that is mostly invisible; a negotiation with yourself, and your self-perception. Likewise, ‘mindfulness.’ The point of this, again, as I understand it, is to consciously pay attention to what is happening in the very moment; including, if not particularly, your own internal, emotional landscape. To put it oversimplistically, we only really have what we are experiencing right now. Sure: we have indications of the future; and we have records of the past. But we are experiencing the present. Mindfulness as a practice is intended to remind us of this, and to encourage us to engage in the present fully, and to perceive its granularities. And to give us the ability to understand when we are being drawn into behaviours which are not totally within our control.

When it comes down to it, I love twitter. Over the years it has brought me community and a sense of belonging in a field that is often quite severe towards its members. I like its pluralism; I thank it for giving me more perspectives on certain issues. I think it can be empowering. In Classics, it’s where a lot of the social justice work starts. And because my personal life is deeply intertwined with my professional life, it has also been good for my work. I never want to write a screed against its use, and indeed, despite its documented toxicities, I still find myself encouraging people to use it so that they can get their work out into the world. But for all its functionalities, I don’t always like how I feel when I use it. I don’t like mindlessly scrolling; and I don’t like the possibility that at any given moment of casual scrolling, I can be made to feel all sorts of negative emotions that were not there seconds ago (and twitter privileges emotionally volatile content). It’s a turbulance which I volunteer for, but I don’t have to. I don’t have to participate in the parts that are engineering me.

I don’t want to leave twitter. I did a hiatus last summer to work on my book, and I hated it. As much as I want to have time that is my own, I also want to engage with the internet soul. So, here’s what I’ve been thinking. Snail mail (physical letters! some things, they tell me, still exist in “material reality”, whatever that means) only arrives once a day. You check it, and then you know what you’ve got, and there won’t be another thing to check till tomorrow. You get on with your day. But twitter (and email, don’t get me started) can come for you whenever you open that app. Sometimes, I think about social media in terms of the functionality of Stardew Valley. Long story short, this is a very charming, and calming, farm simulator, which operates on a calendar with days and seasons. Every morning when you wake up in game, the fruits and vegetables whose seeds you had planted previously have produced new growth, which you can harvest. But this harvesting should only take up a little part of the day. After which, you can explore the world, talk to the characters, maybe go fishing or mining.

Yes, it’s a farming simulator, but even this game understands there’s more to life than your occupation! I want to treat social media and work emails like this. Harvest (i.e. open, and deal with?) once or twice a day. What I’m doing right now is letting every twitter or email notification take my attention whenever it sends me something, and this is the equivalent of virtually sitting in my field and staring at my crops until they tell me I can harvest them. Actually, the more I think about it, video games in general have a built-in mindfulness which reality sometimes does not. You, the protagonist, receive missions, but you choose in which order, when, or even if you want to do them. You can dissent from tasks given to you, you can (usually) take your sweet time and indulge in as many side quests as you want. We can learn something from this. There’s an intentionality which we often (or at least I do, I’ll speak for myself) willingly give up. But you can always get it back.

* ‘Self-care’ as a term actually appears with the meaning ‘self-interest’ as early as the 16th c., where it was used by the English poet, George Turberville‘s translation of Ovid’s Heroides (specifically: 19.205). ‘Mindfulness’ too has a long history, appearing in English as “the quality or state of being conscious or aware of something; attention” in the 16th c. (see Oxford English Dictionary). These terms are ‘new’ to the extent that they have reappeared in the context of a specific socio-cultural moment, in which the modern human life is structured according to 21st c. philosophies of productivity.

Internet.

Excerpt. Hayden White 2010*: 114: “The kind of understanding we get from following his story is different from the kind of understanding we might get from following his arguments. We can dissent from the argument while assenting, in such a way as to increase our comprehension of the facts, to the story itself.” 

*repr. of “The Structure of Historical Narrative” (1972)

Daily Life. I recently fell in love with cycling again because of Boston’s city bikes. It’s good stuff.