Category: newsletter

The Witcher and Star Wars IX; tempora cum causis (10)

~ Hannah Čulík-Baird ~ 1 Comment

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

With the release on the same day (Dec. 20th 2019) of both the Netflix adaptation of The Witcher and the final installation of the new Star Wars trilogy, The Rise of Skywalker, this week we got an object lesson on how cultural criticism works on a mass scale. Before we dive in to either of these, I want again to invoke Jia Tolentino’s analysis of social media as a commercially driven organ, designed to privilege negative or otherwise emotionally provocative content. In Trick Mirror, Tolentino writes that over time, personal lives transforming into public assets via social media meant that “social incentives — to be liked, to be seen — were becoming economic ones” (2019: 6). She goes on: “Twitter, for all its discursive promise, was where everyone tweeted complaints at airlines and bitched about articles that had been commissioned to make people bitch” (2019: 7-8). Looking at the internet as an exercise of performativity (one that extends and magnifies the natural human performativity of the offline world), Tolentino writes that “the internet is defined by a built-in performance incentive” (2019: 8). In How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell (2019: 18) discusses social media too, drawing in the remarks of Franco Berardi: 

“Berardi, contrasting modern-day Italy with the political agitations of the 1970s, says the regime he inhabits ‘is not founded on the repression of dissent; nor does it rest on the enforcement of silence. On the contrary, it relies on the proliferation of chatter, the irrelevance of opinion and discourse, and on making thought, dissent, and critique banal and ridiculous.’ Instances of censorship, he says, ‘are rather marginal when compared to what is essentially an immense informational overload and an actual siege of attention, combined with the occupation of the sources of information by the head of the company.’ [Berardi 2011: 35] It is this financially incentivized proliferation of chatter, and the utter speed at which waves of hysteria now happen online, that has so deeply horrified me and offended my senses and cognition as a human who dwells in human, bodily time.”

The commercial incentive of online interaction is what particularly disturbs Odell; the communities and networks of social media are one thing, the design of such platforms to fulfill a capitalist purpose is another. Odell continues (2019: 60):

“Our aimless and desperate expressions of these platforms don’t do much for us, but they are hugely lucrative for advertisers and social media companies, since what drives the machine is not the content of information but the rate of engagement. Meanwhile, media companies continue churning out deliberately incendiary takes, and we’re so quicky outraged by their headlines that we can’t even consider the option of not reading and sharing them.”

All of this has a bearing on what happened this week. When Netflix dropped The Witcher last Friday, it was met with some noteworthy and negative reviews. Darren Franich and Kristen Baldwin’s “Netflix’s The Witcher is nakedly terrible: Review” (Entertainment Weekly) gave the series an F grade, with a 0/100 on Metacritic. These reviewers immediately, and justifiably, came under fire themselves given that they admitted that they did not watch the series in its entirety. Reponse to The Witcher has been divided: critics hate it, the public loves it. So is The Witcher any good? One of the barriers here is the general distaste for “genre” pieces. Some might avoid science fiction, fantasy, or romance just because it is labled so. Ursula K. Le Guin took on this problem in her essay, “Genre: a word only a Frenchman could love” (reprinted in Words are My Matter, 2019: 10):

“So we have accepted a hierarchy of fictional types, with ‘literary fiction,’ not defined, but consisting almost exclusively of realism, at the top. All other kinds of fiction, the ‘genres,’ are either listed in rapidly descending order of inferiority or simply tossed into a garbage heap at the bottom. This judgemental system, like all arbitrary hierarchies, promotes ignorance and arrogance. It has seriously deranged the teaching and criticism of fiction for decades, by short-circuiting useful critical description, comparison, and assessment. It condones imbecilities on the order of ‘If it’s science fiction it can’t be good, if it’s good it can’t be science fiction.'” 

In the preface to her (critically acclaimed) The Left Hand of Darkness, Le Guin had already drawn attention to the fact that science fiction, like any literature, is about its present, not the future (1969/1999: xvi):

“All fiction is metaphor. Science fiction is metaphor. What sets it apart from older forms of fiction seems to be its use of new metaphors, drawn from certain great dominants of our contemporary life — science, all the sciences, and technology, and the relativistic and the historical outlook, among them. Space travel is one of those metaphors; so is an alternative society, an alternative biology; the future is another. The future, in fiction, is a metaphor.”

The Witcher is not actually “about” magic and monsters; it’s about the relationship between storytelling and reality (Jaskier’s song vs. Geralt’s action), about the pain of isolation (Yennefer), about trying to live your life despite tempestuous circumstances (Geralt); it’s about assembling strange families, when biological ones fail (Geralt, Yennefer, Ciri). Assigning an F to The Witcher because it successfully engages with its own genre, one which you, the reviewer, do not know or care enough about to situate the object of your critique within, removes the rich layers of cultural entanglement which may make such a show worthwhile to a viewer like me. Le Guin continues (2019: 10): “If you don’t know what kind of book you’re reading and it’s not the kind you’re used to, you probably need to learn how to read it. You need to learn the genre.”

I’m not coming at this from a neutral perspective, since I voraciously played and replayed, and loved Witcher 3. But is Netflix’s The Witcher “objectively bad”? No, it’s not. It has haunting performances from Anya Chalotra (Yennefer) and Henry Cavill (Geralt) is perfection. The fight scenes are incredible. And it’s beautiful to look at. Yes, they say “destiny” too many times. But, look, it’s a romp!

On to Star Wars, then. Since we kept up our tradition of seeing the newest Star Wars on Christmas eve, I was aware of an enormous amount of critical disappointment and fan anger regarding the latest installment before I saw the film itself. You know what? It was fine. Yes, it had a very fast pace, and it wasn’t seamless with the trilogy’s own self-mythologizing. The Star Wars universe is full of holes because of the method of its composition; to some extent the writing, and overwriting (if you think that’s what J.J. is doing) resembles the process of story development in the oral tradition of the Greek epic canon, and in its reception. Consider Odysseus in the Iliad vs. Odysseus in the Odyssey vs. Odysseus in Sophocles’ Ajax. Indeed, the empty spaces projected by Star Wars are part of its charm: it’s a perfect landscape for imaginative rethinking, whether in the form of fan fiction, fan art, or roleplaying games like Edge of The Empire. That Star Wars captures the modern imagination so strongly is somewhat ironically reflected in the strength of the vitriol against it (and in the fan art. Peruse #reylo only if you dare).

All of this might be fine if it really were so simple. The emotional economy of the internet has a role to play here, but in this case we end up in a different place than we did with The Witcher. Anthony Breznican of Vanity Fair recorded J.J. Abrams’ public response to the backlash against TROS :

“After a screening at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences on Friday, I [=Breznican] asked Abrams what he would say to those who are unhappy. Are they not getting something? Is there a problem in the fandom? ‘No, I would say that they’re right,’ he answered quickly. ‘The people who love it more than anything are also right.’ The director had just returned from a global tour with the film, where he also fielded questions about that mixed reaction. ‘I was asked just seven hours ago in another country, ‘So how do you go about pleasing everyone?’ I was like’ What…?’ Not to say that that’s what anyone should try to do anyway, but how would one go about it? Especially with Star Wars.’ With a series like this, spanning more than four decades, nearly a dozen films, several TV shows, and countless novels, comics, and video games, the fanbase is so far-reaching that discord may be inevitable. ‘We knew starting this that any decision we made — a design decision, a musical decision, a narrative decision — would please someone and infuriate someone else,’ Abrams said. ‘And they’re all right.'”

You can see how the viewers’ response to Star Wars might be taken as a reflection of contemporary political and cultural life in the US. In the New York Times, Annalee Newitz affirmed Le Guin’s view that cultural artefacts, sci-fi or not, are reflective of the society which produces and consumes them:

“Star Wars became a new national mythos; it rebooted America’s revolutionary origin story and liberty-or-death values using the tropes of science fiction. Now, however, the movies no longer strike the same chord. Just as America’s political system is falling into disarray again, our cultural mythmaking machine is faltering as well.”

How and why we critique Star Wars may well reflect some deeper truth about the times we live in, but there’s another dark side to all this (get it?). To some extent the divided criticism is irrevelant, given that TROS earned an enormous amount of money. Indeed, the controversy only helped bring in the dollars (not to mention all the baby yodas hiding under the xmas trees this year). We entrusted our storytelling to a capitalist behemoth, and it’s disconcerting that cultural criticism has no impact on its forward march. Some have suggested that the F rating which Entertainment Weekly gave The Witcher was motivated by a desire to get more eyeballs (and more $) by artificially stirring up controversy. Given that the internet runs on divisiveness and ire (these are our social currencies), that might have been an economically shrewd move. But was it good cultural criticism?

Jenny Odell on Cicero, Suzanne McConnell on Kurt Vonnegut Jr.; tempora cum causis (9)

~ Hannah Čulík-Baird ~ 1 Comment

Ancient and Modern. In the De Fato (10-11), Cicero discusses whether it is possible for the individual to overcome their nature. Here comes the Loeb:

Stilponem, Megaricum philosophum, acutum sane hominem et probatum temporibus illis accepimus. Hunc scribunt ipsius familiares et ebriosum et mulierosum fuisse, neque haec scribunt vituperantes sed potius ad laudem, vitiosam enim naturam ab eo sic edomitam et compressam esse doctrina ut nemo umquam vinolentum illum, nemo in eo libidinis vestigium viderit. Quid? Socratem nonne legimus quemadmodum notarit Zopyrus physiognomon, qui se profitebatur hominum mores naturasque ex corpore oculis vultu fronte pernoscere? stupidum esse Socratem dixit et bardum quod iugula concava non haberet—obstructas eas partes et obturatas esse dicebat; addidit etiam mulierosum, in quo Alcibiades cachinnum dicitur sustulisse. [11] Sed haec ex naturalibus causis vitia nasci possunt, exstirpari autem et funditus tolli, ut is ipse qui ad ea propensus fuerit a tantis vitiis avocetur, non est positum in naturalibus causis, sed in voluntate studio disciplina; quae tollentur omnia si vis et natura fati…firmabitur.

“The Megarian philosopher Stilpo, we are informed, was undoubtedly a clever person and highly esteemed in his day. Stilpo is described in the writings of his own associates as having been fond of liquor and of women, and they do not record this as a reproach but rather to add to his reputation, for they say that he had so completely mastered and suppressed his vicious nature by study that no one ever saw him the worse for liquor or observed in him a single trace of licentiousness. Again, do we not read how Socrates was stigmatized by the ‘physiognomist’ Zopyrus, who professed to discover men’s entire characters and natures from their body, eyes, face and brow? He said that Socrates was stupid and thick-witted because he had not got hollows in the neck above the collarbone—he used to say that these portions of his anatomy were blocked and stopped up. He also added that he was addicted to women—at which Alcibiades is said to have given a loud guffaw! [11] But it is possible that these defects may be due to natural causes; but their eradication and entire removal, recalling the man himself from the serious vices to which he was inclined, does not rest with natural causes, but with will, effort, training; and if the potency and the existence of fate is proved…all of these will be done away with.”

In this passage, Cicero describes some of the quote-unquote defects which naturally arise in humans. Stilpo (4th c. BCE) reportedly had a natural proclivity for alcohol and sex with women; he was, according to friends, ebriosus (“addicted to drink”) and mulierosus* (“addicted to women”). But, Cicero says, Stilpo was able to master his nature with philosophical training (doctrina), and was never seen drunk again, and showed no outward sign of lust. Zopyrus (5th c. BCE), applied physiognomy, i.e. the theory that human character can be read in the condition of the body, to Socrates and concluded from the philosopher’s body that he could only be an idiot. Oh, and that he must also be “addicted to women” (mulierosus again). Cicero writes that nature may be responsible for giving us certain tendencies. But, he says, it is human agency that can overcome them: “will” (voluntas), “effort” (studium), and “training” (disciplina). This passage, of course, contains an oversimplistic attitude to addiction as well as an ablest assumption that bodily imperfection is a mirror of morality or intellect. It’s also quite clear that these anecdotes are designed to reflect male power in the context of elite competition: the detail that the notorious party animal, Alcibiades, laughed at Zopyrus calling Socrates names suggests a symposiastic setting (Phaedo’s dialogue, Zopyrus, dramatized a debate between the physiognomist and Socrates). Putting those things aside, what do we make of Cicero’s claim that we can overcome our nature?

In the recent (and superb), How to Do Nothing (2019), Jenny Odell cites this passage of Cicero’s De Fato (pp71-72) in the context of arguing for the creation of a “third space” of attention — one which reframes human interaction with reality as a kind of rejection of market forces and commercially-run social media. The book as a whole is a meditation on and a protreptic towards a modern kind of recusatio, i.e. the technique of saying “I would prefer not to.” Odell asks her reader to refuse to internalize the contemporary narrative of productivity, and to reclaim time and space to “do nothing.” (There are a lot of classical references throughout — Seneca, Epicurus, Diogenes. And Cicero’s cum dignitate otium is clearly a spiritual forebear.) Here’s what Odell says about this passage of Cicero (p72):

“If we believed that everything were merely a product of fate, or disposition, Cicero reasons, no one would be accountable for anything and therefore there could be no justice. In today’s terms, we’d all just be algorithms. Furthermore, we’d have no reason to try to make ourselves better or different from our natural inclinations. VOLUNTATE, STUDIO, DISCIPLINA — it is through these things that we find and inhabit the third space, and more important, how we stay there. In a situation that would have us answer yes or no (on its terms), it takes work, and will, to keep answering something else.”

The possibility of escaping (or mitigating) the frailties of human psychology and embodiment which Cicero suggests relies on the intentional application of the mind (or soul). Odell would have us apply ourselves in this way as an act of resistance against cynical structures of social influence. The concept of “will” (voluntas) invokes the notion of presence — or attention — the ability to be here in the moment, to have an appreciation for the moment in all its granularities. To “focus” (studium). As for the “training” (disciplina), this obviously could take a number of forms. But evidently self-awareness, and awareness of the churning forces around you, is at the core of this idea.

*Mulierosus is quite an unusual Latin word! It only appears in extant classical Latin three times. According to Aulus Gellius (4.9.2), quoting “mulierosus” as discussed by the Pythagorean magician, Nigidius Figulus, the Latin suffix –osus indicates an excess of the characteristic in question.

Internet.

Excerpt. Suzanne McConnell on Kurt Vonnegut Jr., 2019: 134-135: “By its nature, literary fiction ‘teaches’: it shows how people feel, think, respond, vary; how circumstances affect them; how their brains, personalities, surroundings and culture make them tick. How an experiences strikes a particular person a certain way, and another differently. How a person feels inside as opposed to how they act or are perceived. And so on. All writing teaches — communicates something about something. [p135] Even bad writing. So if you’re writing, you’re teaching. You can’t help it. But then there’s intentional teaching through writing.”*

*Austin came into the room to point to a passage written by Vonnegut (on teachers and teaching) which was quoted on this page. So I thank him for the excerpt this week.

Daily Life. Max helped me grade. 

IMG_3441

 

 

Roman time, “Mrs. Maisel”, Ursula K. Le Guin; tempora cum causis (8)

~ Hannah Čulík-Baird ~ 1 Comment

Ancient. This week, BU hosted the annual Classics day for high school and middle school students from the Boston area, with workshops on different aspects of the ancient world. The theme this year was ancient time, and so I did a workshop on time keeping devices in Rome. We talked about the ham sundial from Herculaneum, the so-called ‘Horologium’ of Augustus, and a 4th c. lunar calendar. I had the students recreate these devices in clay and paper to get a sense of how they worked. Afterwards I posted a thread detailing my workshop on twitter, including pdfs of the materials in case anyone wants to use them for a workshop of their own (pdf of the handout | pdf of the printout). Some twitter users tagged it with the unrolling Thread Reader App, so you can read the thread in the resulting blog format if you wish. I wore my “petrify the patriarchy” shirt from wire and honey for Classics day and received lots of compliments! 

Modern. After sleeping on it for way too long, I’m finally watching The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Although I came to Amy Sherman-Palladino’s earlier work, Gilmore Girls, late in life, when I did discover it, I fell deeply in love with it (one time, when we were still living in LA, we saw Keiko Agena outside of iO West, which is closed now). As much as I’m enjoying Mrs. Maisel, I find myself bothered by one of the characters. Midge Maisel’s father, played by Tony Shalhoub, is a professor of mathematics at Columbia. He’s an older man, and he’s “curmudgeonly.” There’s only one student in his maths class that he thinks is any good, and he says so. His students are DESPERATE for his approval. They try out new references to impress him. They follow him around in a pack. When things start to go wrong at the university, the dean tells him: “You’re a brilliant mathematician, but an uncooperative colleague and a very poor teacher.” There are a lot of interesting touches of modernity and anachronism in Mrs. Maisel, set in the late 1950s. The fact that the state of his teaching would be a concern to the scholarly community may number among them.

I found myself being bothered so much by this character, despite Tony Shalhoub’s deep charm (let’s face it, Shalhoub is a national treature), that I had to take a moment to think about why and excavate my emotional response. It’s not the character, really, that I have a problem with, but the trope that it draws upon. Shalhoub’s character, the proud patriarch in crisis, is supposed to be flawed, supposed to be fragile. Depicting professorial grumpiness is a vehicle for this character’s essential nature. But, evidently, I’m bothered by the “professor” stereotype. Sometimes when I’m at academic conferences, I see younger men wearing tweed, bowties, thick-framed or horn-rimmed glasses, as though this were the uniform of the intellectual. This was the contemporary style of dress for the older generation of gentlemen who have now become the senior scholars in our field, but for those men these clothes were just clothes, not a costume. (Well, maybe the elbow patches were an intentional display of identity then too.) The idea that there is a specific scholarly aesthetic implies that there is also a specific scholarly behaviour. Say, curmudgeonliness. Or torturing your students.

Education has changed. What we think education is for, who can receive an education, who can do the educating — all those things have changed. We do so many things today that a professor of the 1950s would never think of doing, may even have been incapable of doing. Scholarship over time has opened itself to new ways of thinking. Scholarly personnel is more varied. We need even more new ways of thinking and we need to open our doors to even more people. The potential to do intellectual work was never limited to one kind of person, but for decades the scholar was basically one kind of person. That’s not the case anymore. Yet the stereotype remains. Scholarship and intellectual life is a practice, not a costume.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Internet.

Excerpt. Ursula K. Le Guin 2019: 5: “All of us have to learn to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. Without them, our lives get made up for us by other people.” 

Daily Life. Snow came to Boston. 

EK4p0o0UEAAaDEW

 

Plato, the shadow book, Samantha Irby; tempora cum causis (7)

~ Hannah Čulík-Baird

Ancient. I wouldn’t say that I am the biggest Plato* fan in the world, but there is one passage of the Protagoras that I do actually find myself coming back to often. Here comes the Loeb of Protagoras 314a–314b:

καὶ γὰρ δὴ καὶ πολὺ μείζων κίνδυνος ἐν τῇ τῶν μαθημάτων ὠνῇ ἢ ἐν τῇ τῶν σιτίων. σιτία μὲν γὰρ καὶ ποτὰ πριάμενον παρὰ τοῦ καπήλου καὶ ἐμπόρου ἔξεστιν ἐν ἄλλοις ἀγγείοις ἀποφέρειν, καὶ πρὶν δέξασθαι αὐτὰ εἰς τὸ σῶμα πιόντα ἢ φαγόντα, καταθέμενον οἴκαδε ἔξεστι συμβουλεύσασθαι, παρακαλέσαντα τὸν ἐπαΐοντα, ὅ τι τε ἐδεστέον ἢ ποτέον καὶ ὅ τι μή, καὶ ὁπόσον καὶ ὁπότε· ὥστε ἐν τῇ ὠνῇ οὐ μέγας ὁ κίνδυνος. μαθήματα δὲ οὐκ ἔστιν ἐν ἄλλῳ ἀγγείῳ ἀπενεγκεῖν, ἀλλ᾿ ἀνάγκη, καταθέντα τὴν τιμήν, τὸ μάθημα ἐν αὐτῇ τῇ ψυχῇ λαβόντα καὶ μαθόντα ἀπιέναι ἢ βεβλαμμένον ἢ ὠφελημένον. 

“For I tell you there is far more serious risk in the purchase of doctrines than in that of eatables. When you buy victuals and liquors you can carry them off from the dealer or merchant in separate vessels, and before you take them into your body by drinking or eating you can lay them by in your house and take the advice of an expert whom you can call in, as to what is fit to eat or drink and what is not, and how much you should take and when; so that in this purchase the risk is not serious. But you cannot carry away doctrines in a separate vessel: you are compelled, when you have handed over the price, to take the doctrine in your very soul by learning it, and so to depart either an injured or a benefited man.”

Food and drink, the things we consume, can be good or bad for us. But we’re not immediately exposed to this benefit or harm. We have a chance to consider whether or not to ingest them. We can consult someone whose opinion is worth knowing. Ideas are different, according to Socrates. Once you hear something, you can’t unhear it. There is no mechanism to mediate ideas – we become infected, by good things and bad alike, via an organic movement of thought which no vessel can contain. Contagion of this kind is discussed in the Protagoras as part of a warning against accepting the teachings of the sophists – individuals who, from Plato’s perspective, can teach you intellectual parlour tricks, but not true wisdom. As James Collins (2015: 158) writes, “In this scenario, there is no gap between things taught and things learned; both are μαθήματα and instantly transmitted…To hear is to learn. Exposure means ingestion.”

As Collins notes, it’s surprisingly to hear Socrates speak this way. The absorption of ideas is figured as instantaneous – stripped of the possibility of a failure, or rejection, of understanding (ib.): “Following his metaphor of ingestion (δέξασθαι αὐτὰ εἰς τὸ σῶμα) to the end, also missing are the vital processes of chewing, swallowing, and digestion, not to mention the possibilities of indigestion and regurgitation.” Yet everyone who has tried to learn something knows that it’s not always easy to internalize new ideas. At the same time, the kind of unwitting contagion which this passage describes is a real phenomenon. In 1994, Elaine Hatfield and her colleagues, John Cacioppo and Richard Rapson, produced a text entitled Emotional Contagion, outlining the impact of one individual’s emotions over another’s. In the introduction to the book, Hatfield describes a scenario in which she and Rapson, working together as therapists, left a session in a state of high-wired anxiety. After some reflection they understood that they were both feeling the emotions of their patient, even though they did not realize this was the case, and indeed, had initially missed the signs of her deliberately cloaked distress.

While we’ve historically been discouraged from thinking so, we learn with our emotions. Plato’s suggestion that we “catch” ideas reflects the mechanism of emotional contagion, which in turn suggests that knowledge is generated and conveyed relationally, socially. Despite the fact that we (academics especially) flagillate and exert ourselves into knowing more, there is something to be said for the fact that a student (and, in my case, a professor, i.e. the eternal student) learns passively from their environment and from their social surroundings. The internet’s role in this epistemology of contagion is an interesting one. On the one hand, the exposure to so much social information means that we are exposed (and ingest) ideas at a higher rate than ever before. This does have benefits. The confessional nature of social media has given me a chance to see into the lives of those who have different experiences from me. Getting to know the voices of the marginalized prepares me better to advocate them for them in my own positions of power (such as they are). On the other hand, the difficulty of resisting this absorption means that malicious ideas are also spread quickly. Ultimately, it is of interest to that, as original as I may think I am, some of my ideas are not coming directly from my interal processes but are developing passively from my interactions with others.

*My problem is not really with Plato, but with the reception of Plato. It bothers me that Plato is so often invoked without placing his ideas in their cultural and intellectual context.

Modern. After hearing Sarah Derbew discuss Kevin Young’s The Grey Album (2012) during her talk at BU last week, I wanted to read it too. The first chapter of this work, “The Shadow Book”,  presents a taxonomy of books which fail to be written. Given the fact that what we research and write about must be reflective of our identities, I’m not exactly sure why I am so interested in fragmentation and lack. At a certain point I moved away from the fullness (some might say over-fullness) of Cicero towards the other voices which his works contain – or at least echo – and from that point on I became attracted to the world of the fragmented, forgotten, or lost. Young’s work confirms something which can be readily felt: no writing contains everything that the writer might wish to say, and all writing reveals a negative imprint of the world which shaped it. There is no fullness. In the case of black culture, fullness is negated not just by the natural negation of existence, but by a deep and long history of violence – slavery, social death, and the social inheritance of their effects. Books, if they are written in the first place, are left unfinished, lost, burned. In the context of violence, black authors speak in code; their words say one thing, but there is also another meaning, a shadow. Donna Zuckerberg used the image of the shadow library to describe how harassment in the academy has made us lose brilliant scholarship that was never produced. Young’s writing invites a reflection on what we really think text can do — certainly, literature and writing gives an index of reality, but it isn’t the totality of what is real. I keep find myself saying to our students, “The ancient sources don’t want to tell you what you want to know.” There is an inherent conservatism to most ancient writing – they are not like William Carlos Williams, whose poetry attempts to include, as Young (2012: 16) writes, “not everything but anything.” Cicero, whose letters often seem so confessional, wasn’t making a documentary for us. He took things for granted in his writing (as we all do); aspects of his life which were so familiar to him that he didn’t write about them are the kind of things which we could now never prove existed.

Internet.

Excerpt. Samantha Irby 2017: 218: “People are boring and terrible. I am boring and terrible. My funny runs out, my cute runs out, my smart sometimes hiccups,* my sexy wakes up with uncontrollable diarrhea. I have an attitude. And a sharp edge! I’m impatient. I like the whole bed.”

*I don’t usually include an editorial note on these excerpts (I like them to speak for themselves), but “my smart sometimes hiccups” is my new mantra.

Daily Life. Last week, thanks to Rhiannon Knol, I got to get up close and personal with some early printed classical texts at the Boston Antiquarian Book Fair. 

Temple of Dendur, Lindy West, Josephine Balmer; tempora cum causis (6)

~ Hannah Čulík-Baird

Ancient. One of the interesting features of studying the past is that you can see patterns of change even in objects which claim to be unchanging. A famous passage of the Greek historian, Thucydides, expresses horror at the fact that political crisis changed the very meaning of words themselves: καὶ τὴν εἰωθυῖαν ἀξίωσιν τῶν ὀνομάτων ἐς τὰ ἔργα ἀντήλλαξαν τῇ δικαιώσει, “Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them” (Histories 3.82). During the reign of Augustus (27 BCE – 14 CE), this phenomenon is perceptible in a number of ways. Augustus, who claimed to restore the republic, changed the course of Roman political life forever, inaugurating a monarchy which did not name itself so. In the Metropolitan Museum in New York there is a famous Egyptian temple honouring the goddess, Isis, as well as Pedesi and Pihor, deified sons of the local Nubian chieftain. This temple is noteworthy in a number of respects, one of which is the fact that the ruler of Egypt depicted making sacrifices to divinities in its reliefs is the Roman princeps, Augustus himself. Augustus is there represented in the traditional regalia of the Egyptian pharaoh. An example of a deep difference consciously hidden underneath traditional forms. 

main-image (4)
The Temple of Dendur, completed by 10 BCE. Metropolitan Museum.
main-image (5)
The Roman princeps, Augustus (left), as Egyptian pharaoh, burning incense before deified figures of Pedesi and Pihor. Metropolitan Museum.

Incidentally, I can’t think about the Temple of Dendur without also thinking about this scene from When Harry Met Sally (1989), filmed right in front of it.

 

Modern. Last Friday, we made the trek to Cambridge (crossing the Charles is no joke) to hear Lindy West speak at an event organized by the Harvard Book Store as part of the book tour for her newly released The Witches are Coming. I heard West at the MFA last summer, giving a version of what would be the book’s first chapter; that lecture was deliberately arranged as a counterpoint to the narratives of sexual conquest on display in the MFA’s special exhibit at the time: “Casanova’s Europe.” West praised the curators of the exhibit for their explicit acknowledgement that, while Casanova’s memoirs provide a rich document of the 18th c., it also described “behaviors toward women that today would be criminal.” A praiseworthy effort to make visitors to the museum consider that the objects on display do not uncomplicatedly manifest beauty and wisdom of the past (there are other indications of this throughout the MFA). That our interaction with these artefacts is not simply one of aesthetic appreciation, but one which creates meaning by contextualizing the object within an understanding of the culture which produced it.

The reading from The Witches are Coming took place in a church, which I thought was somewhat fitting. The audience was 99% women. After her reading, audience members asked her questions which were heartbreakingly moving. Over the week that followed, one which was unusually busy, I found snatches of time here and there to read the book itself. Day-to-day life in modern America is filled with noise and fury and rhetoric, and bad faith arguments. West, with characteristic wit, manages to cut through that noise. 

Internet.

Excerpt. Josephine Balmer, Papyrus Trace (Papyrological Institute, Florence, 1953) in The Paths of Survival (2017): 

“trapped in the scent of lavender, musk;
letters from a lost world, seeping back

to black, etched in breath-blown dust:
…speak out… …dissent… …enough…:

a few precious words of Aeschylus
we’d all believed had gone forever —

the fragment found at Oxyrhynchus
then lost again in an Allied raid

by this second miracle returned to us,
late violets trembling above a grave.”

Daily Life. This week, we had a Greece vs. Rome debate at BU. My colleague, Sasha Nikolaev, made us some ostraka for the vote — I heard him hammering the pot through the wall. It ended in a tie! 

EJNJCkHUEAEtgxq.jpg

Vergil enamels, liking what you like, Adrienne Maree Brown; tempora cum causis (5)

~ Hannah Čulík-Baird

Ancient. Vergil’s Aeneid has inspired no shortage of visual representations in antiquity and modernity. In the 16th century, an unknown enameler made a series of plaques (82 are recorded) illustrating episodes from the Aeneid. These images are based on woodcut illustrations in the complete works of Vergil, edited by Sebastian Brandt, and published by Johann Grüninger in Strasburg in 1502. Here’s a small selection: Aeneas leaves Dido in Book 4 (Met Museum); Aeneas and the Sibyl in the Underworld in Book 6 (Fitzwilliam Museum); Nisus and Euryalus in the enemy camp in Book 9 (Met Museum). 

 

Modern. This week I’ve been thinking about how difficult it can be to be open about what you really like. I was listening to Monday’s episode of What a Cartoon, which is done by the Talking Simpsons hosts, Henry Gilbert and Bob Mackey (I’ve written about them before, and surely will again). This week they were talking about the Pokémon anime (Japan 1997; US 1998). Both of the hosts spoke with their guest, Kat Bailey, about the fact that they felt pressure to hide their interest in it, despite the fact that it was deeply attractive to them and deeply resonant. There are a number of reasons why you might feel the need to hide your interest in something benign. We do want to connect, of course, but openness of this kind is a vulnerable thing. And it’s not just about the popularity contest. When I think back to times when I kept my interests to myself, I can pinpoint a dread which stems from middle class anxiety. For a long time, part of me truly could not embrace pop culture publicly, as much as I wanted to, because I felt that I was supposed to be interested, or appear to be interested, in something else. It’s certainly connected to my profession; in some of the academic environments I’ve found myself in, there has been a performative preference for the high brow. But it didn’t originate there for me. Education more broadly has historically expressed itself as the individual’s ability to make the correct series of references to correct audiences. The peer pressure which arises from a common consciousness can be enough to make you want to hide the parts of your interest that do not fit into the contemporary cultural lexicon.

In this context, I find myself, again, having some praise for the internet, despite its current and growing toxicity. Early on, it gave me an outlet and a community for my (probably bad) creative writing on message boards. The mainstream acceptance of quote unquote nerd culture could be explained by the fact that those who developed secret ways to find their people back in the nascent years of the internet over time set the stage for the embrace of once niche interests by the general public. (The cynical commodification of our desires and childhood nostalgia also has a role to play here.) While my twitter account is primarily geared towards an audience expecting Classics content, these days I tweet almost as much about the “bad” tv I watch, Adam Driver, or video games.

I’m beginning very slowly to operate by the principle that even if I know the thing I like is not actually that good, it’s okay for me to like it, and to admit that that’s the case. I’m beginning to regret not giving some things a chance just because I thought I was supposed not to like them. If some cultural artefact resonates with you, the draw is magnetic. The feeling of being pulled in a certain direction without knowing exactly why is the same divining rod that I use for my scholarly life. I’m drawn to certain texts for my research because something about them resonates with me; I read some ancient authors instead of others because I’m more interested in how they do what they do. Resisting that magnetic pull based on the expectation of imagined rejection is an extra mental block which none of us needs. 

Internet.

Excerpt. Adrienne Maree Brown 2019: 11: “I believe in transformative justice — that rather than punishing people for surface-level behaviour, or restoring conditions to where they were before the harm happened, we need to find the roots of the harm, together, and make the harm impossible in the future. I believe that the roots of most harm are systemic, and we must be willing to disrupt vicious systems that have been normalized. I believe that we are at the beginning of learning how to really practice transformative justice in this iteration of species and society. There is ancient practice, and there will need to be future practices we can’t yet foresee. But I believe that with time it must be an incredible pleasure to be able to be honest, expect to be whole, and to know that we are in a community that will hold us accountable and change with us.”

Daily Life. I received two sets of flowers for the first time in my life!

Meroë Augustus, “Outer Worlds”, Maurice Blanchot; tempora cum causis (4)

~ Hannah Čulík-Baird

Ancient. The Meroë Head of Augustus (British Museum). 

It’s hard for me to say that I have a favourite art object from the ancient world, but one which I come back to somewhat regularly is the head of Augustus (27-25 BCE) from Meroë which is now in the British Museum. This is a striking example of a phenomenon which occurs so much with objects (and texts) from antiquity; an act of ancient destruction ironically preserves the artefact into modernity. Strabo (17.54) tells us that in the Roman period, statues of Augustus were erected in Egyptian towns near the first cataract of the Nile at Aswan and that an invading Kushite army looted many of them when they raided Roman forts and settlements in Upper Egypt in 25 BCE. Most were later returned as a result of negotiations between the Meroitic Candace (Queen) Amanirenas and the Roman general Gaius Petronius. This bronze head from an over-life-sized statue of Augustus was excavated from under the step of a shrine of Victory in the Kushite city of Meroë. It is thought to have been ritualistically placed there after the head was deliberately removed from the rest of the statue, as a symbol of Meroitic victory over Rome. The history of this object documents a history of defiance. And the x-rays are totally creepy. See more images from the British Museum. 

Modern. This week we’ve been playing the newly released Outer Worlds. We’re only a few hours in because, as elder- and middle-aged-millennials, we find ourselves too tired after our day’s work to be able to focus for very long on our beloved video games. As I play, Outer Worlds makes me think about some very dear favourites: the suite of companions and the resulting cross-chatter calls to mind the Bioware games I love (the original Mass Effect trilogy and Dragon Age: Inquisition in particular); the layout of the Unreliable resembles the interior of the Serenity from Firefly (and there are correspondences between the crews: e.g. Parvati/Kaylee; the presence of a priest-figure: Vicar Max/Shepherd Book); and, of course, the visual aesthetic, sound design, game design, and textual components of the Fallout games. (Although, I will say this: while Fallout games felt immeasurably vast, full of adventure, Outer Worlds feels small; deliberately, claustrophobically small.) The moon-headed Spacer’s Choice person reminds me of Futurama’s moon-headed Luna Park person (“Craterface“); which itself recalls the Man in the Moon in Georges Méliès’ Le Voyage dans la Lune (1902).

I’m sure it has been said before that some video games function like literature. In Classics, we regularly talk about literary intertextuality: i.e., when one text draws (usually consciously) on a prior text. Ovid’s Metamorphoses 14.814 is a verbatim verse of Ennius’ Annales 54 (Skutsch; cf. Hinds 1998: 14-15), consciously pointing out the fact of allusion in the act of making it. This is indeed how Stephen Hinds in the famous Allusion and Intertext (1998), introduces textual reflexivity (p1):

“…alluding poets exert themselves to draw attention to the fact that they are alluding and to reflect upon the nature of their allusive activity. Certain allusions are so constructed as to carry a kind of built-in commentary, a kind of reflexive annotation, which underlines or intensifies their demand to be interpreted as allusions.”

It strikes me that this recursively citational mechanism is something that also happens in video games, but we don’t usually name it as a good thing. Too much of a precursor in your game makes you derivative, not a cleverly tongue-in-cheek auteur who knows well what came before and is trying to outdo, or signal respect towards, the past even in the act of alluding to it. What I’m trying to say is that the intertextuality of video games is an inherently interesting thing. Reframing the relationship of games to one another within the context of  literary intertextuality allows us to observe a conscious response to how culture is absorbed and redeployed. Sci-fi has the tropes which belong specifically to itself, and so new artefacts in the science fiction genre will have to deal allusively with that enormous baggage: sifting out which references to forefront, which to reject. The sampling and referential nature of Outer Worlds has invited me to reflect (pleasantly) on how video games build on and subvert one another, as well as the broader traditions which inform them. There’s another dynamic here as well: yes, games take stories from precursors; they also take mechanics. If one game has pleasing and satisfying play, then another might adopt parts of that gameplay not only as an allusion, but an acceptance that the embodied nature of play is moving in one direction over another, based on user experience. Citationality is an operative part of video game design, and when it’s done well it can be very good indeed.

Internet.

Excerpt. Maurice Blanchot 1995: 2 (Ann Smock trans.): “The circle, uncurled along a straight line rigorously prolonged, reforms a circle eternally bereft of a centre.”

Daily Life. I started my little lending library in my office! I will be adding so many more books soon. 

IMG_3155.JPG

Martha Graham, essays on the internet, Sara Ahmed; tempora cum causis (3)

~ Hannah Čulík-Baird

Ancient. This week at BU we had an incredible visit from the Martha Graham Dance company. Artistic director, Janet Eilber, lectured on Martha Graham‘s innovations in dance, showing clips of past productions, as well as bringing on stage two dancers, Charlotte Landreau and Lloyd Mayor, who performed parts of works by Graham which draw from Greek mythology, Night Journey and Errand Into the Maze; Night Journey dramatizes Jocasta in the moment of devastating self-knowledge, Errand Into the Maze has Ariadne encounter the Minotaur. Eilber vividly described the Graham dance technique as one focused on the effortful physicality of contraction and release, coiling; how the body behaves when it experiences intense pleasure or pain. This effortful physicality was brought before our eyes by the dancers themselves in their demonstration. It was an incredible thing to witness. Up close, in an intimate environment. 

This week I also took a trip to the University of Toronto Mississauga to speak in the UTM-JHI annual seminar series, this year on Fragments. I spoke about the fragments of Latin verse in the Ciceronian corpus (the topic of my book), as well as on the theory of the “fragment” more abstractly; here’s the handout and the slides.

 

Modern. I find myself with a large appetite for personal essays about the internet. A lot of them are ultimately negative. Famously, there’s Lindy West’s account of the troll who pretended to be her dead father to harass her online; also told in Shrill (2016) and on This American Life. West eventually quit twitter, though not because of that; plus, she has a happy life on instagram. Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror (2019) starts with an essay — “The I in the Internet” — describing how the performative construction of the self is pushed to the limits when faced with an ever present, internalized, and usually hostile audience. Not to mention, as Tolentino notes, the fact that internet hostility is deliberately manufactured to make money; we seem not to be drawn so much “to the puddles and blossoms of other people’s curiosity and expertise” (pp4-5) but choose instead to engage in an economy designed to thrive on the heightened emotional state of its users.

Maeve Higgins is more optimistic. In the final essay — “The Golden Record” — of her most recent book, Maeve in America (2018), she describes the phonograph records carried by the Voyager spacecrafts launched in 1977. These 12-inch gold-plated copper disks hold sights and sounds carefully chosen to represent life on earth at that moment by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan. Voyager 1 and 2 have reached interstellar space; the images and sounds on the Golden Record can be played, as Sagan said, “only if there are advanced spacefaring civilizations in interstellar space.” For Higgens, instagram stories, which show videos and images on a feed that disappears after 24h, have something in common with the golden record. Hope, for one thing. Hope that someone will encounter the message and understand it: the golden records are inscribed with instructions on how to play the media contained within. Higgens writes (p239): “Today, with these images I get to share with anyone who cares to look, I am asking the question: Do you understand me now? Here is what I’m trying to tell you.”

An optimistic view of the internet is hard for many reasons. In classics, we have to reckon with the ways toxic online communities use ancient material for malicious ends, as Donna Zuckerberg’s Not All Dead White Men (2018) so vividly describes. We also seem unable to escape the idea so often repeated that social media is inherently superficial, vain, vapid; and that it is these qualities in particular which harm us. The first episode of Broad City season 5 (“Stories”) presents itself as an instagram story, documenting a day in the life of Abbi and Ilana, coopting the forms of the medium to undercut and satirize it. In the last scene, Abbi says: “because we were filming it, it’s not even our ‘story’ anymore.” With these final words (of the premier of the final season), Abbi and Ilana ask their audience to contemplate how a comedy act between two friends, developed out of the sparkling chemistry of their private intimacy, has grown beyond itself into a stage play for a massive audience. Real life performativity is amplified when we make ourselves public: via “publication,” art no longer belongs just to you, and on the internet your image takes part in more than just your own selfhood. 

Internet.

Excerpt. Sara Ahmed 2017: 15-16: “My citation policy has given me more room to attend to those feminists who came before me. Citation is feminist memory. Citation is how we acknowledge our debt to those who came before; those who helped us find our [p16] way when the way was obscured because we deviated from the paths we were told to follow.”

Daily Life. In Toronto the autumn leaves were just nuts! 

IMG_8845.JPG

Horace, “Steven Universe”, Jia Tolentino; tempora cum causis (2)

~ Hannah Čulík-Baird ~ 1 Comment

Ancient. In the Greco-Roman world there is a persistent idea that the people of the past were better than those who are alive today and that, as time passes, humanity only continues to degrade more and more. Hesiod’s metallic ages of mankind is an early (and very famous) example of this. A passage of Horace which expresses this idea nicely and particularly cynically is Odes 3.6.45-58 (here comes the Loeb):

damnosa quid non imminuit dies?
aetas parentum peior auis tulit
nos nequiores, mox daturos
progeniem vitiosiorem.

“Iniquitous time! What does it not impair? Our fathers’ age, worse than our grandfathers’, gave birth to us, an inferior breed, who will in due course produce still more degenerate offspring.”

The Romans were deeply invested in the idea that an individual was a living reinstantiation of his forebears (a classic example of this is the Barberini Togatus statue). Yet, no one, no matter how hard they try, can be an exact “copy” of a precursor. Simply by being a distinct iteration, we introduce differences, breaking points. Such breakages with a recursive path are, in the Roman formulation, an opportunity for corruption to take place. Like so many who are alive today, I find these cracks in the iterative veneer to be the space where creativity and originality live. And I’m wondering, too, whether it is the case that in 2019 the youngest generation is, in reality, worse than those who have come before.

Modern. Steven Universe is so beautifully written and touching that there is a good chance I’ll get misty-eyed as I watch. The training montage between Connie and Pearl and the song Do It for Her always makes me cry, for some reason. There is so much to love about Steven Universe: the concerted recuperation of the colour pink, the secret behind Garnet (no spoilers), Sadie’s journey to self-acceptance, and, of course, Stevonnie — an experience. When the Steven Universe movie came out, I held off on watching it at first because I knew I had to be in the right frame of mind, emotionally speaking. Animation has always held the power to elicit deep emotions from its audience, even if at times there has been a perception that it is childish or superficial (“it’s just a cartoon” — same thing goes for video games). But especially now, with so many examples of emotionally complex and affecting animation flooding the market, we can break with that perception. Recently, I did watch the Steven Universe movie (The Tale of Steven). One of the standout moments for me was the reappearance of Opal and her duet with the Steven-Greg fusion (Steg), included below. I hadn’t realized that Opal was voiced by Aimee Mann! And Steg in the movie is voiced by her bandmate, Ted Leo. The creator of Steven Universe, Rebecca Sugar, has said that Aimee Mann’s It’s Not (from the album Lost in Space) is her favourite song of all time; there’s a video (I also include it below) of her covering It’s Not, and introducing her performance with: “it’s probably the reason I like to do comics and stories about space, and also it keeps having new meaning for me now; it starts to feel like it’s about television animation.”

Internet.

Excerpt. Jia Tolentino 2019: 14: “The self is not a fixed, organic thing, but a dramatic effect that emerges from a performance. This effect can be believed or disbelieved at will. Online — assuming you buy this framework — the system metastasizes into a wreck. The presentation of self in everyday internet still corresponds to Goffman’s playacting metaphor: there are stages, there is an audience. But the internet adds a host of other, nightmarish metaphorical structures: the mirror, the echo, the panopticon.”

+ Jia Tolentino illustrated by Joanna Neborsky, from Jacqueline Rose’s review of Trick Mirror.

Jia Tolentino; illustration by Joanna Neborsky

Daily life. Austin started painting again, and now our shed is an art studio!

IMG_8289

Cicero, “Disenchantment”, Anthony Grafton; tempora cum causis (1)

~ Hannah Čulík-Baird ~ 3 Comments

Ancient. De Senectute 24-25 is one of my favourite passages of Cicero (here’s the Loeb): 

nemo enim est tam senex qui se annum non putet posse uiuere; sed idem in eis elaborant, quae sciunt nihil ad se omnino pertinere: serit arbores, quae alteri saeclo prosint, [25] ut ait Statius noster in Synephebis. nec uero dubitat agricola, quamuis sit senex, quaerenti cui serat respondere: dis immortalibus, qui me non accipere modo haec a maioribus uoluerunt, sed etiam posteris prodere.

“No one is so old as to think that he cannot live one more year—yet these same men labour at things which they know will not profit them in the least. ‘He plants the trees to serve another age,’ as our Caecilius Statius says in his Young Comrades. And if you ask a farmer, however old, for whom he is planting, he will unhesitatingly reply: for the immortal gods, who have willed not only that I should receive these blessings from my ancestors, but also that I should hand them on to posterity.”

Not just because the passage contains a lovely and proverbial fragment of the 2nd century BCE comic playwright, Caecilius Statius. I want to hold on to this idea that what we do here during our lifetime will not only be for ourselves. And I like the idea that preserving and building resources for people yet to come can be something we value and take pride in. 

Modern. For the last year or so I’ve been listening to the Talking Simpsons podcast network with Bob Mackey and Henry Gilbert. This week they discussed the new episodes of Disenchantment that dropped on Netflix. I’ve been enjoying this show a lot. Futurama is one of my all time favourites, and it’s exciting to me to feel like I’m observing another potential Futurama happen right before my eyes. Bob and Henry discuss an interesting problem, though, which is this: if you watched the Simpsons as it aired in the 90s, you probably saw some episodes a number of times in reruns (or by choice). I had a box set with seasons 1-4 of Futurama that I rewatched a lot when I was young, way before streaming media. But now the same creators of the Simpsons are making a show which most people will watch in more or less one sitting (or, say, over a weekend). And you might not rewatch it, given that there is such an overabundance of content right now. It’s interesting to think about: you’re a seasoned tv writer for one of the most famous and long lasting franchises of the modern era, and you have a certain way of doing things. But tv is now consumed in a profoundly different way. Trained by this institution, this creative machine, you now face an audience with different expectations. There is enormous competition for the attention space, and there is no guarantee of securing a captive audience via the power of syndication or otherwise. Watching and rewatching, reading and rereading — this is something that is built in to our experience of culture, especially the things we really love. Our favourite book. Our favourite film. I have basically been listening to the same music since about 2007. Recursiveness is part of cultural work. But we might not return to Disenchantment much. (Btw I do enjoy this new role for Abbi Jacobson, and all The Mighty Boosh alumni are *chef’s kiss*) 

Internet. 

Excerpt. Anthony Grafton 1997: 124: “In the modern world, fragments and revolutions have gone together. From 1789 to 1989, the politics of the street have always involved iconoclasm. Symbols of previous authorities have been smashed, the colossal heads of dictators separated from their even more outsized torsos, stately lines of busts and statues transformed into politically charged rubble. Tsar and Stalin in turn become Ozymandias.” 

Daily life. Speaking of trees, Max found one which is without a doubt a portal to another dimension.