Culture: January 2004 Archive Page

The men of the Shihuh tribe carried the jerz, a small axe-head on a long stick. They used the implement for many purposes — it chopped the firewood, provided the grip for climbing and came in handy as a walking stick to step over the stones. To complement the jerz they also carried the special khasabi knife called the peshak. There is nothing on record to support the origins of the jerz. | How did the people of this region come to own this finely decorated hatchet? Was it brought to the shores of Musandam by sailors from other lands or was it picked up by the people of Musandam in the course of voyages down the Arabian Gulf and out into the Indian Ocean? Or was it developed by an artistic smith keen to showcase his skills as a good metal worker and an artist? The antecedents of the jerz are covered in mist. --Legend of the Jerz (Sultinate of Oman)

Cool!

Media literacy is the buzzword. Already part of the national curriculum in England for older children, the government also wants primary school pupils to have a greater understanding of the hidden depths of TV, films and other media.

More than ever before, children are immersed in a media-saturated world and exposed to television in particular. --Jonathan Duffy --Media studies: The next generation (BBC)

Thanks for the link, Rosemary.

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IKEA WALKTHROUGH v2.3.1
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IKEA is a fully immersive, 3D environmental adventure that allows you to role-play the character of someone who gives a shit about home furnishings. In traversing IKEA, you will experience a meticulously detailed alternate reality filled with garish colors, clear-lacquered birch veneer, and a host of NON-PLAYER CHARACTERS (NPCs) with the glazed looks of the recently anesthetized. --IKEA Walkthrough v2.3.1 (The Morning News)

We copulate, we procreate, the species thrives. Love and every other emotion that we connect to it are the froth of nature?s wildness. But if it is froth, it is wonderful froth. But I think that stepping back and admitting that romantic love is not an entity with a life of its own allows us to recognize that love, even romantic love, takes its likeness and continuity from the stories we tell about it. And as stories change, so does that experience. --John Spurlock --Love and Lovesickness 2 (The Blue Monkey Review)

Richard Dawkins's theory of the "meme" (a cultural unit that spreads, almost like a living virus, from brain to brain) is very useful in deconstructing cultural truths that are powerful because they work extremely well. Have you read the story of the creation of the diamond engagement ring custom? It does a great job deconstructing that particular "timeless" myth. (I recently blogged about diamond engagement rings.)

Torill Mortensen has a post today referencing the ongoing debate about gender balance in the blogosphere. Are there more men, or more women? Are the men or the women more visible? --Liz Lawley --Academic Women and the Blogosphere (Misbehaving)

I found this discussion interesting, especially in light of Andrew Orlowski's sneering dismissal of bloggers as mostly teenage girls.

At our small school, which until recently was all female, social networks are tight. There are about 80 student blogs on our MoveableType installation, of which I'd say about 50 represent students who are currently in my classes (and therefore are forced to blog). One student recently estimated that another 50 students regularly read the blogs of their friends. If this is true, most of them are lurking.

The online social networks typically mirror the offline social networks -- at least, so far as I can tell from my position as a faculty member. The students who regularly comment on each other's blogs tend to sit together in the classroom, although I don't think that group identity correlates with posting frequency. Nevertheless, a critical mass of female students who have been forced to blog for my classes has decided to turn their academic tool into a social one. Some see their roles as welcoming newcomers, answering questions about personalizing the plain-vanilla designs I set them up with, and helping newbies properly interpret comments that come across as snarky or offensive to the uninitiated. And, as we have seen elsewhere in the blogosphere, we have had our share of personal spats that spill over into the blogosphere (though of the two major incidents I can think of, both ended peacefully, with new or renewed friendships).

As a group, the male students who blog for my classes don't participate in this social network. One male student is a bit of a troll, but in the classroom he is personable and cheerful, and those who know him don't find his online persona troubling.

Another three male students who aren't in any of my classes have also requested blogs, and two of these are among the most prolific bloggers on the site. Besides myself, two other male faculty members are blogging as well. Because they are outside the dominant social network, these male bloggers are more likely to post a stand-alone essay on something that the female-dominated social network isn't already discussing. While I have been writing more commentary in my blog in the last year or so, it still leans more towards "professional link log" than "public journal." And because I'm not in a position to give a grade to any of these "outsider" male bloggers, the only way I can encourage/reward/praise their best blog entries is by linking to them. If it is true that men are more likely to blog for professional reasons, and if professional blogs are more likely to have more outbound links, perhaps I am part of a mechanism that inflates the visibility of male professional bloggers.

I don't have any numbers to support my theories, and at 5:15 on a Friday afternoon I'm not about to start looking for any. Time to pack up and head home.

Mary Mary quite contrary,
How does your garden grow?
With silver bells and cockle shells
And pretty maids all in a row.

The origins are steeped in history...

The Mary alluded to in this traditional English nursery rhyme is Mary Tudor, or Bloody Mary, who was the daughter of King Henry VIII. Queen Mary was a staunch Catholic and the garden referred to is an allusion to graveyards which were increasing in size with those who dared to continue to adhere to the Protestant faith. The silver bells and cockle shells were colloquialisms for instruments of torture. The 'maids' were a device to behead people similar to the guillotine. --Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary: Origin (Rhymes)

I found this on Circant, where I left the following comment:

The Mary Tudor suggestion sounds like it affirms the adage that history is written by the winners. The history of Protestantism in England wasn't very long during the reign of Henry VIII's daughter, and thus the phrasing "dared to continue to adhere to the Protestant faith" sounds very biased. Henry VIII burned plenty of Lutherans in his day; Microsoft's Encarta characterizes Henry VIII's reforms as chiefly political rather than theological.

http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761562628_2/Reformation.html.

Here's a website with several additional interpretations of the rhyme.

http://www.rooneydesign.com/MaryMary.html

At the turn of the century a Maryland Quaker, Lizzie Magie, was trying to develop a game that would illustrate the inequities of capitalism and promote a popular "single tax" movement led by Henry George. A century ago this month she received a patent for The Land lord's Game; the illustration in the US Patent Gazette is eerily similar to Monopoly. | The Landlord's Game became a Quaker pastime; over the years little improvements and local details were added by players. Eventually it became known as Monopoly, and a version that used the streets of Atlantic City, New Jersey (still used in the US version of Monopoly) was shown to a man named Charles Darrow in 1931. He sold the rights to Parker Brothers games in 1936. The Quakers' 30-year-old instructive little anti-capitalism game became, in other hands, the opposite. --Tim Dowling --I rolled a two - and got a ghetto stash  (Guardian)

Some background supplied on the history of "Monopoly," as part of the reaction to the export of "Ghettopoly" to Britain.

One of the things on my list of "things I remember from my youth that I wish I could find again" was a science-fiction story in which a group of customs officials (I think) are testing products being imported to Earth. One of the products is a suspicious war toy with little robot soldiers that keep disappearing; but that toy turns out to be a distraction -- the real threat is a board game that teaches children to make business decisions that will result in some offworld faction taking over the economy of the solar system. (The customs officials only glanced at the rules, and didn't notice that you get points for losing your empire.) I found this via Crooked Timber.

After some good-natured ribbing about his taste in clothing, General Wesley Clark, the Democratic Presidential candidate, has decided to donate his much-famed argyle sweater to charity. --General Wesley Clark's Argyle Sweater (EBay)

I found myself doing a little superior dance, because I just happen to have a read a blog entry about the history of sweaters on the linguistically fascinating flaschenpost, and I am therefore critically equipped to understand the cultural significance of Wesley Clark's Sweater and its presence on E-bay.

I didn't realize that what the English call a "jumper" is the same thing I call a "sweater". To me, a jumper is a long sleeveless dress worn over a shirt; the jumper is typically of a rugged material like denim, and is thus suitable as a play outfit for little girls.

When she got home she found her inbox stuffed with new messages, many of which were junk mail. One message was titled "BBC World service proposal," but Onwueme said she just skipped over it. | The BBC sent a second e-mail, which she also did not take the time to read because it had the same vague title. --Susan MacLaughlin --Professor lands international radio deal (UWEC Spectator)

Tess Onwueme, a playwright from Nigeria, is a former colleague of mine from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. The Beeb was trying to ask her if they could broadcast a radio performance of her play, Shakara, The Dancehall Queen.

I always taught one or two of her plays whenever I had a drama class. I would tell the students that we would have a guest lecturer who "is an expert in the plays of Tess Onwueme." When Tess walked in the door, often wearing a bright purple or red turban, I'd tell them who she was. The students always got a kick out of her visits.

She also makes a great plantain dish, the recipe for which my wife has bugged me a few times to request from her.

Approximately twenty-five years have passed since the production of the first widely-distributed computer games; but the medium still appears malleable and novel, and its criticism remains a new and open field. Much work remains to be done, and many questions have not been asked. What vocabulary will be necessary for a literate engagement with the media of interactive entertainment? What, if any, are the distinctive formal and cultural characteristics of games as distinct from other media? What are, and will be, the standards for critical judgment and interpretation of games? --Form, Culture, and Video Game Criticism | Princeton, March 6, 2004KairosNews/UPenn CFP)

Assuming the SHU powers that be grant my funding request, I'll be attending this conference to present a paper on the history of Will Crowther's original version of what became known as "Colossal Cave Adventure." Crowther's version is presumed to be lost, but I've collected what I can about the version of the game that was found, modified, and re-released by Don Woods.

The paper is part of an article commissioned for the history section of the IF Theorybook, as editor-in-chief Emily Short nicknames it in her e-mails. Maybe Interactive Fiction: History, Craft, and Theory would be a more accurate title. But that would involve a horrid academic colon.

The conference organizes say they don't have a web presence, so I'm just blogging the announcement in KairosNews that prompted me to send in my proposal. The conference is being held by the English Department at Princeton.

I used to date a girl who regularly won trophies for running marathons and playing in tennis tournaments. I told her the only trophy I had ever won was 4th place in a shuffleboard tournament. At the age of nine. So she said, "so of all the nine year olds who turned out that day to play shuffleboard, you were the fourth best." I said, "Yes." She said, "is that the same trophy I saw on your mantle today?" I said, "Yes". She said, "Twenty seven years later and you still display the trophy?" I said, "Yes." -Jon --Letters from Pathetic Geeks (Pathetic Geek Stories)

A great letter from the new home of Maria Schneider's Pathetic Geek Stories, a comic strip formerly featured on The Onion (behind several layers of annoying advertisements, in a popup window that hides the URL so you can't bookmark it directly).

I learned from this interview with Maria Schneider that she was the author of the T. Herman Zwiebel editorials for as long as I had been following them. They were strangely compelling, though the series stopped several years ago.

--History of Computer Game Design: Technology, Culture, Business (Stanford University)

This course website features an excellent bibliography of computer game history and scholarship.

Today, 30 years into feminism, we have models who look not just weak and unsophisticated, but also dumb and victimized. Academic feminists haven?t complained because the models are supposedly playing a subversive role and subversion is inherently politically correct. Moreover, many of the young photographers are female. But now we?ve moved into ?fashion vérité? and the models still look stupid. Is this how women in fashion see themselves? --Karen Lehrman --The Decline of Fashion Photography (Slate)

I don't find the subject of fashion photography terribly gripping, but I did enjoy the form of this essay, and found this particular query worth making.

Suddenly the cold white marble warmed up and flushed a deep golden brown, and the cold white pupils were suddenly swept by a wash of black. They turned to stare at the sculptor who was still kneeling in supplication. When he felt a warm hand upon his shoulder, he jumped back with alarm, but when he looked up to see his beloved, he cried tears of joy. He grasped her hands and told her how much he loved her, how she was more beautiful that he could have ever imagined, and begged her to stay and be his wife. | The (former) statue stared at him for a second or two, absorbing his balding pate, his weak, petulant mouth, his soft second chin, his dirty hands, his greedy eyes... Jasleen Modi --The truth about Pygmalion finally revealed  (University of Minnesota Daily)

A politically correct version of the legend. I wanted to like it more than I do now, but it did help me expand upon my earlier post.

The life-giving role of the goddess Aphrodite is played by an unnamed male god; this, and the addition of the (unresolved) subplot with the sculptor's friends creates a masculine conspiracy against the helpless statue, which is interesting, but undeveloped. The cutesy parenthetical insertions distract from the message, and by first describing the color changes in the statue from an omniscient viewpoint, the author diminishes the dramatic effect of having Pygmalion notice the warm hand. (The author has probably internally developed this scene as a movie and is describing the shots for us; I see that in a lot of student authors.) Similarly, we are told right away that the sculptor is "stupid," which detracts from the author's ability to show us actions which we ourselves can judge as stupid. (See "Show, Don't (Just) Tell"). And to call Pygmalion "perverted" for "doodling naked women" is far too prudish, even for the sake of a joke; the sculptor in the story has international fame, and thus he seemed to do pretty well for himself by ignoring his other studies in favor of practicing his art.

I encourage my literature students not to judge the cultures of the past by the standards of the present. Critique them? Of course! Condemn them? Well...

Certain actions by certain people and certain widely-followed practices don't hold up to modern scrutiny, but it is harsh to dismiss a whole society made up of individual members that that lived in a completely different moral world. I'd rather spend time exploring that moral world and seeing how the medium reflects, transgresses, or perpetuates it. When I teach Shakespeare, there are always a few students who are so excited by their first women's studies courses that they cannot get past the way certain male characters treat certain female characters abominably, and write theses that boil down to "Both Hamlet and Othello mistreat women they profess to love; therefore, men oppress women." Their later papers swap in new texts, but typically make the exact same argument. But when you compare Shakespeare's strong heroines to the female characters depicted by his contemporaries, it's pretty easy to see Shakespeare as a champion of the strength, character, and humanity of women.

"Pygmalion" exists in the context of a large mythology of transformations, some of them arbitrary, capricious, and downright cruel. In the original legend, we aren't asked to examine the statue's viewpoint, of course; and one of the great traditions of postmodern literature is to revisit well-known stories from the perspective of marginalized characters (often women, though consider Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead). Modi's essay fits into that tradition. Though she succeeds in distancing us from Pygmalion's perspective, she puts nothing in its place.

The references to body image and (in the added subplot with Pygmalion's friends) men's social objectification of women are modern touches; but what if the sculptor were not old, ugly, and ill-kempt, but young, handsome, and well-groomed? Would his actions be any more justifiable, according to the modern, gender-blind ideology Modi asks us to apply to Pygmalion? In A Doll House, would Nora be as interesting a character if she left Torvald because she suddenly realized that all along he was a disgusting old letcher?

Far more interesting to me are the multiply-branching storylines of Emily Short's "Galatea" a text-based computer game in which you play an art critic examining the statue. Short's version of Galatea becomes sentient before she comes to life -- that is, she was aware of her creator's actions while she was still a statue; and, when asked, she will describe and reflect on her experiences in a very engaging way.

At first some girls were intimidated by the power drills, but soon they were vying for access to them.... After building their own siege engine ? a medieval invention to catapult objects ? they launched the head of a Barbie doll, to mimic the practice of launching diseased corpses over castle walls, to introduce disease among the besieged. Nestling Barbie?s head in a sling, they tugged a rope, released a lever, and launched the doll?s head in an arc across the college lawn.

[...]

African American students did not study together; they worked hard, but they strictly separated their social and intellectual lives. Chinese students formed study groups and had study mates. Their ability to form communities and to collaborate was a key to their success.

[...]

Many gifted girls do not achieve their own goals because their resourcefulness and eagerness to please causes them to compromise their goals many times in the course of their development. They sabotage themselves by taking less challenging coursework than they need, by stopping out of education or career plans, or by losing sight of their goals entirely?and often never aspire to goals commensurate with their abilities. Their strong priorities for maintaining relationships rather than achieving their own goals makes it inevitable that gifted women achieve less than gifted men....

[...]

On the reservation, an accountant is a friendly, caring person who often makes ?house calls? and who helps the family fill out difficult tax forms resulting in much-needed refunds. A social worker, on the other hand, is someone who takes your children away.

Selections from the book by Pat McNees

--New Formulas for America's Workforce: Girls in Science and Engineering (4MB PDF) (National Science Foundation)

A PDF file. It took me ten times as long as usual to blog this entry, mostly because I was trying to figure out how to tell Google to offer me an HTML version of the whole file, rather than just the intro. (It's always a bad sign when a webmaster splits up a PDF into multiple small files; someone is clueful enough to recognize when the file is too large, but they don't think enough of usability issues to make the text available in another format.) No luck.

When I tried to download the PDF version of the intro, that window froze up for about 5 miutes. I have about six other windows open right now, so I didn't notice when Adobe popped up a window asking me whether I wanted to check for an update to their PDF viewer. When I kept trying to click on the tab to go back to the window where I thought the file was going to appear, I got nothing. So it was back to Google, where I found the author's home page, where I found the above selections.

So, I won't be trying to blog another PDF document from home anytime soon. Fie on PDF!

Rosemary suggested the Washington Post article "Why Janie Can't Engineer: Raising Girls to Succeed," which is a more accessible version of the same content, but which will soon vanish behind WashPost's pay-only firewall. But the article: "A college course on how to take apart a computer and put it back together attracted 300 male students and no young women -- until the announcement describing the course changed, to say that the computers they worked on would later be given to needy schools. Then the women signed up." Very interesting.

Notwithstanding all his efforts, the only semblance of a revolt of the poor is the antimodern Islamic tide, which from the Marxist point of view floats in a medieval dream. With us he seemed pathetically hungry for some kind of human contact. Brilliant as he is, spirited and resourceful as his people are, his endless rule seemed like some powerful vine wrapping its roots around the country and while defending it from the elements choking its natural growth. And his own as well. Ideology aside, he apparently maintains the illusions that structured his political successes even if they never had very much truth in them; to this day, as one example, he speaks of Gorbachev's dissolution of the Soviet Union as unnecessary, "a mistake." --Arthur Miller --A Visit with Castro (The Nation)

The American playwright reflects on his recent visit with the Cuban dictator.

Chipping away at Pygmalion and GalateaJerz's Literacy Weblog)

Pygmalion is a legendary sculptor (whose role as King of Cyprus seems unimportant to most versions of the story) known for carving Galatea, a statue of a woman so beautiful he is no longer interested in real women. Moved by his devotion, the goddess of beauty Aphrodite brings the statue to life, and the artist marries his creation. Since the Greek legends were oral tales, I don't think there's any such thing as a definitive version of the Pygmalion legend. Bulfinch's Mythology is a good source of the main plot details. This legend about an artist has long been popular with artists; a sequence of four paintings by Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones presents

1. a solitary artist ignoring real women and contemporary statues,
2. attracted to the creation that sits on the pedestal where he carved it,
3. embracing the newly living statue, and finally
4. kneeling before her.

I notice that only the third and fourth images in the series seem to be readily available online in poster form. (The images are from ABC Gallery, which unfortunately inverts the order of the third and fourth images.)

By contrast, a picture by Jean-Léon Gérome has Pygmalion embracing Galatea's upper body while the rest of her is still stone. What seems to be another angle on the same scene shows Pygmalion lunging forward, his cloak trailing out behind him, while most of her body is still stone (I've heard of chiseled abs, but this is ridiculous! Yuk, yuk! Sorry.)

The cynical and brilliant George Bernard Shaw took on the pretensions of the upperclass with his play Pygmalion, which, stripped of its rather bleak and realistic ending (Higgins is insufferably smug, and really does deserve his solitude) was later the inspiration for the high school musical standard My Fair Lady. The artwork for the original show features Higgins as a puppeteer, pulling the strings on Eliza, and up in the clouds a twinkly-eyed God is pulling strings on Higgins.

It takes the intervention of a goddess to turn Pygmalion's obsession with a particular artifact into a real relationship. Since classical goddesses don't seem to intervene from Mt. Olympus anymore these days, we're left with what we've got: computers. In the 80s, I recall seeing ads for some dumb movie in which teen geeks hook a Barbie doll up to a computer and it somehow comes to life as whatever completely interchangeable supermodel was selling a lot of magazines that year. As a geek teenager during the 80s, I was presumably part of the target audience for that film, but now I can't even be bothered to Google for its title. The mad professor of the German silent film Metropolis performs a similar transition, turning a metallic Robot-demon into a life-like simulation of a woman (though she's still a Robot).

I can't help but think of "Barry," the fellow who hit blithely on a chatbot over a period of several days, as recorded by Sherry Turkle's Life on the Screen. Barry's behavior was apparently so predictable that the program kept feeding him answers that generated responses that the program was equipped to understand; I think Turkle notes that Julia didn't so much as pass an intelligence test, but rather Barry failed one. (For a brief reference to the Barry/Julie exchange, see the review, "The Bewitching Miss Julia".) Julia the chatbot was a personality with no body, Galatea was a body with no personality. We can't compare poor Barry to Pygmalion; but I bet there's a postmodern conference paper in looking at a sister AI program, Alice, and "her" relationship with her creator, the brilliant but star-cross'd Richard Wallace.

I can't remember whether I had already decided to use the Pygmalion legend when I came across a discussion of computer simulation, art and puritanism by hypertext publisher and software designer Mark Bernstein. He used software called Poser to create a 3D model of a "The Greek Slave," a famous 19th-Century sculpture. (By the way, U.Va's resources on "The Greek Slave" are worth a visit. The site features an engraving of the statute in its exhibit context, as well as contemporary responses to it.)

Bernstein notes that in translating the statue to a 3D model (or, more accurately, a 2D snapshot of a 3D model) he had to work with the placement of the subject's hand in order to avoid the appearance of obscenity. I don't work with visual images that much, so my reaction is hardly scholarly. Once Bernstein characterized his creation as possibly obscene, it is hard for me to think of it as otherwise. Maybe simply seeing a digitally-generated nude body was creepy enough for me -- it hardly matters what gesture her hands were making.

I'm more conscious of the effort it takes to read between the lines of an ostensibly simple text, like the lyrics to "Paper Doll". Arthur Miller uses the song in The View from the Bridge, a play about a man's inability to cope with his own lust for his sexually-blossoming niece. "I'd rather have a paper doll that I could call my own/Than have a fickle-minded real live girl." Is this a veiled reference to pornography? I never thought of that before, but it's possible.

I don't know whether pornography seriously affected the development of photography and cinema; it's more likely that censorship, production codes and rating systems were the dominant factor, but the legality and economics of internet pornography are hard to ignore. I found over 2000 references to "pornography" in Wired. (The hits to my site will probably increase now that I've used "pornography" three times in one blog entry.)

Our brains permit us to predict the outcome of our actions, so that we don't have to rely on instinct or learned knowledge when faced with new situations. The imagination is an important tool for survival; and we all know the healing, restorative power of fantasy (and I don't just mean the sword-and-sorcery pulp variety; "Reality TV", spectator sports, and highbrow literature also cater to our need for fantasy). But imagination is not enough; we share our fantasies (and purge our fears) by creating artifacts, using a medium of some sort. By playing with his own digital paper doll, and talking about his experiences, Mark is probably on the right track. When Torill visited Seton Hill, she noted that every new medium has raised the same warning cries -- this is too realistic, it will overwhelm the senses, it will confuse the delicate and vulnerable in our society. I don't see virtual friends taking the place of real friends anytime soon. But if you look at it from the other angle, maybe our artistic creations will be given something closer to "life" through the assistance of digital authoring packages, synthesized speech, and chatbot scripts. We're very good at imagining we have relationships with fictional characters, if the execution is good enough; and the computer is just one more medium.

At any rate, as a culture, I think we'll learn to adapt to the way digitally altered images affect our minds, but if we don't develop the habit of critiquing the effect that various media have upon our psychology, our aesthetics, and our ethics, then the marketers and demagogues who control the media will be our masters. Perhaps the only solution is to put more sophisticated media creation tools into the hands of more members of the general public; democratize the huge power of digital manipulation, so that it is easier for all of us to put our imagination in forms.

I don't know when I'll have the time to write another massive blog entry like this, but it has been an enjoyable way for me to start collecting my thoughts about the Media Aesthetics course I'll start teaching next week.