the chutry experiment

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September 30, 2003

Could we ever be Time Lords?

Via Crooked Timber, a link to an article in The Age on the physics of time travel. Most interesting for my purposes are the references to the Gwyneth Paltrow film, Sliding Doors, as an illustration of the "many universes" hypothesis, and to Stephen Hawking's "Chronology Protection Conjecture," which, according to Leo Brewin, basically implies that time travel paradoxes won't happen because we can't make sense of them.

Game Update: Alas, it looks like I bragged about my the Braves a little too quickly. They've come back a little (it's 4-2 as I write), but they are almost out of chances. Maybe I could build a time machine and get the Cubs' bus lost in Atlanta traffic....

Posted by chuck at 11:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Television and Duration

I'm still reading Margaret Morse and thinking about the blogging and the everyday paper. In her discussion of nonplaces, Morse discusses television, specifically Raymond Williams' understanding of television as "flow" (although she articulates her understanding of "flow" against his) as "the pure juxtaposition of unrelated segments" (229). As Morse explains flow, it seems like there is a similar process going on within blogs (or blogspace). There are two major similarities that I can recognize:

1. The relationship of unrelated elements within blogs: Even though I have been using this blog primarily for research, I also write movie reviews, discuss my teaching, and dabble in politics, but I'm guessing that most blog readers don't read my blog from beginning to end.


2. The relationship of unrelated elements between blogs: Like a television remote control, blogrolls, almost invariably navigated by clicking (a mouse instead of a remote), allow a viewer to bring together disparate elements.

I'm not sure how this connects to my notion of the everyday, but I think there is a relationship between blogging and television that can be triangulated through how the two mediums construct time. I'm also trying to wrap my head around the connection to "nonplaces" and the suggestion that television offers a "derealized" space, in part because it depends on a notion of "real" space that I find difficult to define.

I'm still thinking about the "media and democracy" points, too, especially in light of the ways in which blogging has functioned as an "alternative" media during the war and the recent allegations regarding the "outed" CIA agent.

More on that later, but now I'm going to take a break and watch my beloved Braves beat the Cubs.

Posted by chuck at 9:24 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

September 29, 2003

Media and Democracy

I've been reading Margaret Morse's book, Virtualities: Television, Media Art, and Cyberculture, in order to refocus my energies on the "Blogging and the Everyday" paper (more details on the paper here), and I've been intrigued by her discussion of "television democracy" and her reflection on television and temporality.

I'm not quite ready to work through her discussion of American TV news as antithesis of duration (55), but her reflection on "television democaracy" (the term was used by Ted Koppel in a Nightline analysis of the popularization of camcorders, VCRs, and home computers). The suggestion that these technologies "democratize" the media seems to me a somewhat generous fiction, and not just because of the economics of access. In part, it is the "policing" that Koppel himself performs in this report, recasting the video footage of the Romanian revolution (the event that prompted Koppel's report) as only tenuously reliable, leading Morse to ask

Why is such amateur footage of disasters, uprisings, riots, and hostage situations used as the sign of the real so often discussed as potential fraud?

This might seem like a rather long detour for my paper about blogging (and quite frankly, it might be off topic), but I think blogging enacts a similar dynamic albeit within a specifically digital space.

Blogging speaks in part to the desire for reciprocity in an increasingly homogeneous media landscape. The media filter function of blogging represents a kind of public sphere, and one can easily imagine Ted Koppel doing an episode of Nightline on blogging (maybe he has?) and making similar comments about democratizing the media. In many ways, blogging (especially in this media filter function) represent a response to the erosion of faith in traditional media.

Blogs also face similar policing techniques (to camcorders, VCRs) when readers, from various positions, question the reliability of certain blogs. in my old blog (scroll down, no permalinks on Blogger), I speculated on Salam's Pax's "real" identity, for example, but the more explicit policing comes during the supposed conflicts raised by reporters keeping blogs (I'm thinking of the Kevin Sites controversy, can't find a link). More specifically, these major media outlets cannot control how what they say will be used; their writing is set adrift, beyond the control of the original author. Of course, the mainstream media doesn't really suffer: all those political bloggers bring traffic to their website.

I don't have an explicit conclusion. These observations, I'm hoping, are closer to a starting point. I do think my questions about temporality are explicitly connected to these points about the public sphere, especially through the polyvalence of "immediacy" (as "realism," as "here-and-now") within the blogosphere.

Posted by chuck at 12:57 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

September 28, 2003

Frog-Marching

I'm not sure what "frog-marching" is, but Joseph Wilson, the former US ambassador who publicly challenged Bush's "Niger-yellowcake" allegations, is ready to see Karl Rove "frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs." Apparently, a senior White House official is responsible for the leak to six reporters (including Robert Novak who went public with the information) that revealed that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was an undercover CIA agent investigating weapons of mass desctruction. CalPundit has an excellent summary of the situation to-date, and his frustration at the apparent cynicism of the Bush administration pretty much sums up my feelings, too. It's important to note that Bush himself isn't implicated in in the scandal, but an administration that is willing to reveal the identities of high-level agents for political purposes is playing a dirty and illegal game.

Kind of makes Whitewater look a little less significant now. Well deserved credit to Nation reporter David Corn (as well as the Washington Post reporters cited above) for blowing the cover off this story. Looks like Ashcroft won't be able to hide from this one.

Posted by chuck at 12:40 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

September 27, 2003

Myopia, or Writing and Everyday Life

One of my favorite things about blogging is that whenever my thinking feels stalled or when I become too caught up in the frustrations of everyday life, I know that I can rely on one of my fellow bloggers to provide the spark that re-energizes my thinking. One of the blogs I visit regularly to get my focus back is weezBlog, and her most recent entry on blogs as first-person narratives articulates something that had been eluding me. She writes:

The sad thing about a real time narrative is that one cannot skip the boring bits, or jump to the denouement...at least the unfortunate protagonist can't.

Someone else may pick up the thread after the fact and sagely nod their head and say, "Yup. Saw that coming in post number 58. C'mon, you couldn't figure it out by 107?"

We're kind of myopic here, us real-time characters. Doing the sling and arrows thing. Sponges of outrageous fortune. (I do wish the omniscient one could give a clue sometimes, tell me that the outcome will be just fine...just wait a few turns, and all the disparate threads will resolve themselves).

I like the idea of connecting myopia to the everyday--that we can't see far enough ahead to know where our stories will go. Last week, when I was in the middle of my grading marathon, I could barely see beyond the stack of papers in front of me; grading (especially when you have 75 students who all deserve for their papers to receive careful attention) requires a tremendous amount of energy and leaves me with little time for reflection. I couldn't fast-forward to the "more interesting" stuff, whatever that will be, even if I wanted to.

Now I'm in the process of putting together applications for tenure-track jobs (revising my job letter and dissertation abstract, that sort of thing), and that feels like a different kind of vision. I still can't see too far ahead (who knows where my current road will take me?), but I'm having a difficult time concentrating on anything nearby, too. To extend the vision metaphor, maybe it's a bit like hyperopia (seeing things far away, but not up close) in that I'm barely able to absorb what is taking place around me, leaving me to feel my way through a day's events. Or maybe things are moving so fast right now that my vision is blurred a little.

Or maybe I'm concentrating on all the wrong narratives....S and I watched Lost in Translation (IMDB) last night, and we both really liked it. The film focuses on Bob (Bill Murray), a washed up actor filming commercials in Japan, and Charlotte (Scarlet Johansson), a recent philosophy graduate traveling in Japan with her photographer husband. Because they are both facing some uncertainties about their direction in lfe, the two of them develop an interesting friendship. In ways, it really captures this sense of boredom and frustration, the feeling of not knowing where your story is going to go. I'm still sorting through the film, and I may be too scattered to write a full blown entry about it, but it's definitely well worth seeing.

Posted by chuck at 9:49 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

I Never Thought I'd Link to Someone Else's Baby Pictures...

...but this is an exception. During my years as an MA student at Georgia State, Jim was my roommate. I'd known him since high school, but our friendship really grew (scroll way down) when we were studying at GSU and growing out of our shared past.

Now he's a father, which still seems completely weird to me (I still don't feel like a grown-up and now Jim's a dad). Rowan Elizabeth was born September 24th, weighing in at 9lbs, 3ozs.

Posted by chuck at 12:54 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

September 22, 2003

The Unbearable Impermanence of Blogging

My title comes from Liz's entry on the way that discussions fade away so quickly and silently from the blogosphere once the topic has scrolled off of the author's main page, creating what she calls a "topic du jour" approach to discussions. I think she's pretty much right; in fact, the only reason I'm writing this entry now is because I realize that if the entry falls into her archives, I'm likely to never respond to it. I've been puzzling over my response to this entry for too long. Perhaps this entry exists only to store Liz's observation in my external memory, hopefully to return to it later when I've had a little sleep and I've built up some momentum on the paper I'm writing.

I'd also point out that Jason's entry on the topic nicely addresses some of the questions on blogging and thinking that Liz raises in her post.

Posted by chuck at 1:28 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

September 21, 2003

Hell House

Hell House (IMDB) is a documentary about an annual haunted house sponsored by Trinity Assembly of God Church near Dallas, Texas, designed quite literally "to scare the hell out of you." At the time of filming, the church was working on its tenth annual Hell House and an estimated 75,000 people had passed through the gates. As someone who grew up in a Pentecostal church (and attended an evangelical college), I've been curious to see this film for some time.

The film documents, in verite style, the entire process of conducting a Hell House, from the initial planning stages to the main event. Also included are brief interviews, against a pure white backdrop, with several of the actors or participants in Hell House who reflect on what they imagine hell to be like or relate their observations that we are living in the end times (another set of interviews on the existence of demons was deleted). These scenes are particularly jarring, especially when middle-class teenagers describe hell as a place of "everlasting torment" or point to symptoms such as abortion as a sign that the world is in the worst state it has ever been.

The hell houses themselves are divided into various rooms that portray various crises such as an abortion that goes wrong, a homosexual man dying of AIDS, a teenager who commits suicide after being date-raped at a rave (apparently the contemporary equivalent of a den of iniquity), and an abusive husband who assaults his wife after discovering her Internet affair. These segments play more like stereotypical self-help concepts than actual life horrors. As J. Hoberman reminded me, one volunteer cautions that he wishes we "didn't have to see" what he's about to show us. And yet the people who are participating seem to enjoy it so much--the teenage girls compete for the opportunity to play "suicide girl" and others look forward to playing in the rave scene because they like to dance. The characters seem to enjoy the roleplaying deeply. Hoberman's comparison to a Judy Garland musical captures the mood in these scenes quite nicely, and it struck me that their performance, rather than identifying the fundamental rift between God and Satan, seemed to more powerfully underline their complicity, the conspiarcy bewteen good and evil in which good needs evil in order to exist in the first place.

There is a significant moment of criticism when a few locals criticize Hell House for perpetuating "Christian faggot shit," contentiously asking on what authority the Hell House crew determines what's a sin, but the filmmaker treats his subjects with some compassion and avoids overtly making fun of them, although their lack of awareness comes through on a couple of occasions, especially when they can't remember the name of "the date rape drug."

I have to admit it was strange to revisit that part of my past, but there was also a strange distance, like hearing a language I once knew and sopke fluently but have long forgotten, and while the film has its nuances, I'm not sure that it completely captures all of the tensions and contradictions that I encountered during that time of my lfe (or if that's even possible). The film's comic detachment seems to preclude that kind of analysis, but on second thought, the filmmaker's coyness may be just the right touch. And now it's time for me to get some sleep: grading marathon tomorrow.

Posted by chuck at 1:42 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

September 19, 2003

Long Day, Long Week

Expect light blogging for the next few days--the MLA job list came out today, which should make things a little busier than usual for me. My initial observations are that it's going to be a very tight market (not surprising given current state budgets), so I'm feeling a little stressed. I can't complain too much because I do have guaranteed employment for one more year, but I'd certainly enjoy having a tenure-track gig.

I've been trying to get back into the habit of jogging this week, and that has helped a little. I'd forgotten how much I enjoy running, and I really can forget about the rest of the world for a few minutes at least.

This weekend, I'll concentrate on grading my students' papers (a useful distraction from the market) and then the job search begins in earnest. Good luck to all other job seekers out there.

Posted by chuck at 12:39 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 17, 2003

Nobody Died

I found this quirky little protest site, "Nobody Died When Cinton Lied," on Blogdex this morning. Apparently, this slogan has been spotted lately along the freeways in Orange County, California. The site collects descriptions and photographs of signs protesting the war in Iraq and Bush's use of deceptive language to stir support for the war. It's an interesting form of protest and the signs themsleves are quite compelling, as the author suggests.

Still, I wonder how these protests work as anti-war rhetoric; given the divisiveness that Clinton's name inspires, and the fact that viewers of these signs are stuck in Los Angeles gridlock traffic, I'm not sure that they're going to change a lot of minds. Then again, maybe that's not the point.

Posted by chuck at 10:06 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Identity

I just watched James Mangold's Identity (IMDB), a psychological thriller starring John Cusack in full "dark and stormy night" mode (has there ever been a film where he hasn't gotten caught in the rain?).

The film starts quickly: After a shot of a tape recording of a psychological session between a psychiatrist and a mass murderer, we get a shot of a man carrying his badly injured wife into a lonely flea-bag motel. The clerk, mysterious and slightly effeminate (channeling his inner Norman Bates) tries to call an ambulance, but the phone lines are down. The film freezes briefly, and we get a brief flashback. A prostitute (with mandatory heart of gold) on the run from her past life has knocked out the line when she backs her car into a telephone pole. The film freezes again, and we get another flashback, and I'm hooked--the use of freeze frames to play with chronological time (and psychological time) is intriguing; the atmosphere is set beautifully.

Eventually ten people are trapped at the hotel. All the roads are closed; the one cell phone can't get a signal; a police radio belonging to an officer transporting a criminal is also out. Very quickly, several of the guests begin dying sometimes mysteriously, sometimes quite violently. The enclosed space inspires paranoia among the group, and we are led to suspect several people: The creepy hotel clerk? The diligent cop? The benevolent limo driver (who happens to be reading Sartre)? Spirits from a Native American burial ground (thankfully the film doesn't really go there)? We also discover, through a series of coincidences, that the guests have a few things in common. Meanwhile, the film occasionally crosscuts to a last minute appeal of the death sentence of the mass murderer.

I won't give away what happens (although unlike the Salon reviewer, I had a pretty good guess), but for readers who have seen the film, I found the final turn rather dissatisfying, especially given the stylized visuals and the paranoid atmosphere that Mangold works so hard to create. It is sufficient to say that the resolution explains this paranoia and the intentionally cliched characters that meet in this desolate space, but once this violence was contained (metaphorically if not physically), the film ceased to be nearly as interesting. And unlike Roger Ebert, I felt cheated by the third act rather than impressed by its explanation. It felt cheap, like the screenplay was trying to trump other meta-thrillers such as Memento and Usual Suspects. Still, I enjoyed the film even though it felt more like an exercise in style: smooth and flawless, but relatively empty.

Posted by chuck at 1:04 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 16, 2003

From Little Rock to the White House

Word on the street in Little Rock is that Wesley Clark has decided to run for President. This decision should shake up the race for the Democratic nomination considerably. My guess is that Clark's candidacy will probably affect Dean the most, and not just because Dean (who leads some polls) has the most to lose. Because Clark has expressed opposition to the war, he will likely tap into the base of Dean supporters who opposed the invasion of Iraq. Clark also conveys a keen sense of intelligence; he was a Rhodes Scholar and first in his class at West Point. Perhaps more significantly, Clark has enlisted some of Clinton's campaign strategists, which can't hurt his candidacy. Because he's entering the race somewhat late, people are calling him a longshot, but given the accelerated pace at which media stories in this country can live and die, I wouldn't bet against him. More than anything, I'm hoping that his campaign will at least spark more productive discussions about the international role of the United States.

Given the currently "shifting tides" of American politics, this could be an interesting election.

Update 9/22: I've decided to discontinue comments on this particular entry simply because I don't consider copied articles from other sources to be comments. Instead, it's an annoying rhetorical device that does little to support your argument. Comments that refer to other sources are perfectly legitimate, but I can't engage with someone who doesn't provide a context for the articles they are linking. Because there have been several different IP addresses, I've decided not to ban anyone. I've also decided not to delete the comments for now. As I mentioned in my final comment, I believe blogs to be a useful space for political discussion, but merely pasting other people's writing into a comment does not merit a serious response. I've hesitated all weekend about whether or not I would take this measure, and it now appears inevitable. This type of comment spam is making me rethink what I'll discuss here in the future.

Posted by chuck at 11:26 AM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

September 14, 2003

Localfeeds

During a quick narcissistic Google search, I came across Localfeeds: Atlanta, which tracks and publishes any blogs located in Atlanta that publish an RSS feed and connect with GeoURL. So far, it looks like they've created "Localfeeds" for about twenty-five or thirty cities across the US, in Canada, and the UK. I have to admit it was a little strange to see material from my blog in this other space, but it's interesting to see yet another mechanism for connecting blogs associated with a specific geographic space (such as AtlantaBlogs). I know there's an intriguing connection between the somewhat abstract space of the blog and this tendency to identify with a specific place in one's blog, but that connection is escaping me right now, just beyond my reach. I'll have to put that on the list of things to think about when I have time (with student papers coming in tomorrow, no promises).

Meanwhile, when I was checking out LocalFeeds, I also had the good luck of coming across a blog authored by a member of Magnapop, a band I really like that has local ties.

Posted by chuck at 9:47 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Gender Genie Revisited

They've tweaked the Gender Genie and so far it has been correct on every entry I've entered (including some entries that were incorrectly labelled earlier as female). The algorithm has changed quite a bit, but still seems to emphasize that women write and speak more "relationally" than men. They have also started asking people to categorize the writing they submit (not sure if this changes the algorithm). I was skeptical when I wrote my original entry, and I still have some doubts. I may return to this point later, but I need to get some reading done for my "Blogosphere" paper.

Posted by chuck at 11:22 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

American Splendor

I had a lovely brunch with S at The Flying Biscuit, one of the coolest restaurants in town, this morning, and tonight we went to see American Splendor (IMDB), the film based on Harvey Pekar's autobiographical comic. Pekar, who also co-authored Our Cancer Year, with his wife, Joyce Brabner, appears to be an interesting figure, but I have to admit I knew little about him before watching this film (I'll definitely read his stuff now).

What struck me as most interesting about the film was the way it treated the conversion from his comic books to the film. The film effectively mixed interviews and voice-over narratives (by Pekar himself) with performances by Paul Giamatti, Hope Davis, and James Urbaniak (as friend and frequent illustrator, Robert Crumb). Because much of Pekar's work is autobiographical, this narrative technique called attention to how Pekar himself used narrative to frame his experiences (in part in order to sell comic books). Many shot sequences used a static camera and framing that recalled the artwork typically associated with comic books. I also very much enjoyed the film's treatment of Pekar's appearances on David Letterman (during his NBC days), mixing actual footage of the show with Paul Giamatti's performance as Pekar and shots of Giamatti watching himself on Letterman's show, which has always been self-conscious about its own staginess. Pekar was a regular on the show until he eventually broke down, angrily airing his resentments about having to sell himself on Letterman's show. I'll also say that the sequence in which Pekar has a nervous breakdown on the show (just before he is diagnosed with cancer, according to the film's narrative) is smartly filmed, using stage lights and cameras to block our access to Pekar's face during this emotional scene, with Letterman confiding quietly to Pekar that he's blown a good thing.

The film deals with Pekar's tensions about his celebrity very carefully (Pekar continued to hold his job as a file clerk years after achieving commercial success as a comic book writer), and Pekar's ability to capture the subtleties of his friends and colleagues is effectively captured by the graphic matches between the comic books and the film itself. Good stuff. The Village Voice review, which references Marshall Berman's appreciation of Pekar's comics is worth checking out.

Posted by chuck at 1:14 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

September 13, 2003

Who is Salam Pax?

In his most recent entry, "Salam Pax" writes about the experience of being/becoming a celebrity: conducting interviews, seeing his book promoted on the web, reading articles....The result is that the blog's author now feels a sense of disconnection from "Salam Pax:"

Salam Pax has developed a life of his own, he is not me anymore. and I miss baghdad like hell.

This sense of unreality is obviously much more powerful than the disconnection associated with blogging under a pseudonym, but it does point to the liveliness of these fictional selves, the potential for them to outgrow their RL counterparts, or perhaps it's a way of distancing from the overwhelming aspects of RL. Not sure I have anything that profound here; I'm mostly just trying to store this bit of information in my "external memory," if or when it fits into the paper I'm writing.

Posted by chuck at 3:35 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

September 12, 2003

The Man in Black

I just found out that Johnny Cash (1932-2003) has died of complications due to diabetes, which led to respiratory failure. I've always appreciated his music, but my admiration of him grew over the last few years with his American Recordings releases with producer Rick Rubin. Hearing those songs allowed me to go back and rediscover Cash's classic songs such as "Folsom Prison Blues," "Ring of Fire," "Jackson," and most significantly, for me, "Man in Black." I can think of no tribute to this man whose music and spirit I admire so much, but I think his words speak for themselves:

I wear it for the sick and lonely old

For the reckless ones whose bad trip left them cold

I wear the black in morning for the lives that could have been

Each week we lose a hundred fine young men

And I wear it for the thousands who have died

Believin' that the Lord was on their side

I wear it for another hundred thousand who have died

Believin' that we all were on their side

Well there's things that never will be right I know

And things need changin' everywhere you go

But till we start to make a move to make a few things right

You'll never see me wear a suit of white

Oh I'd love to wear a rainbow every day and tell the world that everything's okay

But I'll try to carry off a little darkness on my back

Till things're brighter I'm the man in black

Posted by chuck at 9:59 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

September 11, 2003

gangstories

One of my students alerted me to an incredibly fascinating blog, gangstories, which presents brief narratives describing life in a ghetto. The narratives are all fictionalized accounts based on the author's experiences as a youth. According to his biography, the author has left that life and is now a college educated professional. The blog is designed to demystify some of the myths associated with urban experience:

The goal here is to tell some stories of what goes on behind the guns, drugs and crime in the headlines. This is the oral history of my old neighborhood. Figured it might do some good to write it.

It's an interesting framing narrative in that the author includes a legal disclaimer asserting that the events and characters he presents are fictional. As with many anonymous blogs, one immediate reaction is to question its validity, but there's something incredibly powerful in these brief narratives with their direct description and the sense of immediacy that the medium itself reinforces. In many ways, they remind me of Tim O'Brien's short story collection about the Vietnam War, The Things They Carried, with the brief, fragmentary references to the characters the author describes. Particularly compelling is "Cruel and Unusual Punishment," a discussion of how easily someone can become complicit in an act of violence.

Update: That should be "Cruel and Usual Punishment," the sly play on language slipped past my somewhat sleepy eyes.

Posted by chuck at 10:28 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

The Time Traveler's Wife

Just because my last entry was a bit melancholic, I wanted to quickly add that I came across this new novel, The Time Traveler's Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger, the other day. Instead of focusing on the first-person account of a time traveler, we get the observations of his wife. In this scenario, the Traveler has no control over his movements in time, while his eventual wife moves in "normal" chronological, linear time (which of course implies that she doesn't really control her temporal movements either). It sounds like an interesting experiment, one that I often thought would be interesting to read when I was writing my dissertation. Too bad I never thought to actually write it. Word on the street (or at least in Entertainment Weekly) is that the book will soon be made into a film, with Brad Pitt slated to produce and star.

Posted by chuck at 12:51 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Redefining my Blog?

Lately I've been finding my blog slowly redefining itself (note how I release some of my agency from this redefinition, this transformation). During the summer, when I first began keeping a blog (especially in the previous generation of this blog), I tended to be more overtly political, more focused on the ephemeral, the everyday. I frequently wrote about my suspicions about evidence of WMD in Iraq, for example, or about coverage of the war by "embedded reporters." More recently, I've found myself writing more about my research and teaching, especially now that I'm working on my paper on the temporality of blogging.

I think I feel like something has been lost in this shift in focus. I don't know if this is simply the fall semester rush of activity, an awareness of new audiences, or an understanding my blog as a part of my research rather than a self-indulgent activity. I'm feeling a little ambivalent about this shift today. Do I really want comments in my blog to feel like peer review (or have I already internalized that logic)? I certainly enjoy the feedback that I have received from all my readers, and, like KF, I feel like the work I do on/in the chutry experiment deserves to be "taken seriously." As she points out, blogs are both sites of research where we can investigate a new form of writing and a location where we can get feedback from colleagues on a consistent basis:

The blog seems both virtual laboratory and ongoing conference, and needs to be taken seriously by one's peers.

I'm somwhat resistant, though, to formalize blogging as a research tool, precisely because of that sense of uncertainty that I'm feeling right now.

I'm not sure what my answer is to any of these questions right now. I could simply be feeling tired and cranky today, especially given my memories of the events of two years ago. Maybe I haven't had enough coffee. I originally planned this entry to be a quick comment on a couple of recent articles on the Demoratic debate in Baltimore and Wesley Clark's recent meetings with Howard Dean, but obviously I've taken a much different direction. I will say that a Dean-Clark ticket sounds awfully interesting to me, although it's far from a done deal.

Now that I've reviewed this entry, I'm feeling a little more comfortable with the new relationship between my blog and my research. Maybe it was that third cup of coffee. Perhaps I simply needed to review what I've written, to think through it one last time. I'm having a hard time letting this entry go, publishing it for public viewing, but I see these reflections as part of a larger thought process for me, about blogging as a medium, about my blog in particular, and about my professional and personal identity.

Plus, I'm more conscious than ever before how difficult it is for me to end blog entries, especially when I'm not sure that my thoughts are fully resolved.

Posted by chuck at 11:41 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

September 9, 2003

The Secret Lives of Bloggers

No more than a quickie link-and-comment, but Salam Pax's recent Guardian article about how he was able to publish a blog for several months within the police state of Iraq is pretty powerful--creative Google searches, deleting archives, changing URLs--all to keep his blog and his addiction to others' blogs going. I can't wait to read the book (requires Macromedia Flash).

Posted by chuck at 11:45 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Academic Blogging

Brian at Crooked Timber has an interesting discussion of blogging as a tool for academics developing ideas for their research. As he notes, blog entries tend to be "short and topical" (focused on the present) while academic papers are more developed and "long-term," which might seem to make them incompatible. Brian has, however, been able to use his blog to benefit from a regular audience who can respond to his ideas and quickly provide him feedback.

This is similar to my experience (one reader even read a complete draft of a paper I'm submitting ASAP for publication). I've also arranged conference panels using my blog, and I'm curently working on the blogging article (too lazy to link to those entries). I've also had the chance to reflect more carefully on the profession itself, and it has permitted me the opportunity to take more chances with my writing (you might've guessed by now that I'm a bit cautious) and to indulge my tendency to explore an idea from many different directions, from many perspectives (Side note: I've been wanting to write an entry about blogs as "travel narratives," allowing bloggers to explore things for some time now). All of these experiences have been incredibly positive.

I'm not very good at being critical of blogging as a "writing machine", but I think Jason's right to be just a little suspicious here. I'd like to believe that comments and trackbacks actually diminish the egocentrism he describes among "high-profile" bloggers, but I'm not sure they do. I'm not sure that I have any real conclusions here--I'm just posing the question, in part as a means of preserving it in my "external memory." Then again, I'm not sure that a few bad bloggers spoil the lot.

I have found it to be a useful tool in improving my writing, and I think my experiences as a blogger actually provided me with a slightly clearer understanding of Benjamin's "The Storyteller," which I discussed with my students today (they did a bang-up job in class discussion, by the way).

I introduce Benjamin here at the end of the entry because I find that, rather than isolating us as Benjamin feared print culture might (novels and newspapers, especially), blogs have the potential to create connections. I realize that this isn't the face-to-face conversation that Benjamin privileges, but I feel connected to many of the bloggers I read. George has even met a few bloggers in his many travels (makes me want to travel just so I can meet another blogger--of course now I'm privileging f2f).

Now I've wandered a bit too far. Perhaps I'll camp here for the night and return to this thread tomorrow.

Posted by chuck at 12:08 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

September 7, 2003

Memes, Time, and Thought

Be sure to read the previous entry first.... I'm still not sure I'll structure my argument around the identity (or immediacy) meme, but I like the idea of thinking about memes in terms of time, how they unfold, often unexpectedly, always between multiple blogs. Blogging has allowed me to track those changes more carefully in my own work, to recognize how readers (who themselves become writers) co-produce the "meaning" of my blog (if one can even say that meaning is produced in a single blog).

The process of ideas developing over time is nothing new, of course, but the tools available to bloggers ("immdiate" response, hyperlinks, blogrolls, trackback, etc) all seem to augment this process in an intriguing way. My hesitation about this line of thinking is probably pretty evident, with my overuse of parentheses and scare quotes. I also recognize that other bloggers see their blogs as completely discrete, single-authored texts, a perception they reinforce by not allowing comments or trackbacks, or in some cases, permalinks to individual entries. Still thinking out loud...

Posted by chuck at 6:46 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

"Blogging and the Everyday" Paper Notes

A few disorganized thoughts: Like mcb, I'm working on my article for Into the Blogosphere. Because of my research on cinematic time, I became intrigued by the relationship between blogging and time, especially the ways in which blogs are used to assimilate our experiences. I'm still struggling with a number of difficulties, including the very pertinent question of determining which blogs will be the object of my study. Right now, my tendency is not to focus on a single blog (which seems reductive), but to perhaps focus instead on what I might call the "immediacy meme" that has been floating among the Wordherders and friends for some time. By focusing on a "meme" rather than a single blog, I think I will better illustrate the importance of hyperlinking to the development of concepts within blogging communities (but I'm not sure about that).

When I borrowed (stole?) George's description of blogs as "writing to the moment," I was intrigued by the complicated temporal relationship he was describing between immediate experience and assimilated experience. George is, of course, writing about blogs that have a biographical quality to them and asks,

In what narrative do we imagine we're participating? How does the importance of previous events change as later events occur?

Bloggers don't know how their narratives will turn out; therefore, when I write about this article, about my teaching, I do so without knowing how those narratives will resolve themselves. A second complication: from which point can the author/the reader make that determination? Now that I have written about my course blog's unexpected publicity, at what point does that narrative end? At the end of the semester? After I've (hopefully) earned a tenure-track teaching job? At the end of my career? Even later than that? I know these questions about deferred meanings have been around for a long time, but I think blogs raise the stakes in an intriguing way.

Of course as Dave reminds us, this concept of immediacy is itself something of an illusion, in part because these representations of experience are always mediated, in part by the technology itself, and Dave's discussion of blogs as a form of life-writing are far more developed than my own.

There is something about this illusion of immediacy that seems to speak to the social role that blogs seem to have served, especially here in the US. It's my understanding (and maybe others can back me up on this) that blogs gained a boost of popularity in the aftermath of September 11, with the traumatic experiences of that day finding their articulation in part through a medium that lends itself to very immediate personal reflections.

Certainly my interest in blogging as a medium was piqued by their use in articulating first-person accounts of the war in Iraq. The first person narratives of the war, particularly the observations of Salam Pax, were more powerful because of the appearance of immediacy that blogging provides. In fact, the treatment of Salam's blog in the press and in other blogs points to this desire for more authentic representations. But now I'm beginning to feel my definition of "immediacy" slipping away....Against what inauthentic representation am I now defining immediacy? Against mainstream media representations? Against all other mediation? How does one define "immediacy" in the first place when there are so many registers available? Can "immediacy" be defined without some opposite ("culture" to Derrida's "nature") to make it visible?

Final aside: Why not write on weblog narratives about the war?

Posted by chuck at 2:35 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 6, 2003

This is Kind of Cool

I mentioned This is Not a Love Song briefly on my course blog yesterday, and now I want to treat what is being billed as "the world's first simultaneous online and cinema e-premiere." Love Song was written by The Full Monty screenwriter Simon Beaufoy and claims to use digital video (DV) "not as a cheap substitute to film" but as a unique art form. I haven't had a chance to see the film yet, and my modem is rather slow (and I'm also not based in the UK), so I'm not sure when I'll get that opportunity, but I'm certainly intrigued by the experiment.

The description of the filmmaking process suggests that their use of DV is consistent with many experimental filmmakers who see the medium as more spontaneous and better suited to presenting immediate, real-time experiences, such as Mike Figgis' Time Code, which featured a split-screen showing images captured by four cameras filming simultaneously for ninety minutes without cutting (thus dispensing with typical film editing structures as shot-reverse shot, etc).

In part, the filmmakers have pitched their premier as a way of showing independent filmmakers a new means of distributing their work:

We just wanted to show it could be done to give opportunity to independent film producers, and maybe food for though for the film industry at large.

I do think there is some potential here for alternative means of distribution that dodge the major studios, especially for young filmmakers who are trying to call attention to their work, and their privileging of cheap production and distribution techniques reminds me of past artistic movements such as Dogma 95 (but without the pretensions of manifestoes and vows of chastity). I'm not quite persuaded that the project is as revolutionary as its advertisers claim, especially given the expense of maintaining a site capable of storing a DV film and handling so many download requests. The flashy website, with its use of Barbara Kruger-style lettering also hints that they see their project as subverting the Hollywood system.

But, in general, I'll be very curious to see the film, in part to see how it uses DV, if it allows DV to become a "new art form" as the filmmakers advertise. Is there anyone reading my blog who had a chance to see the film?

Posted by chuck at 6:07 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 5, 2003

And Now a Word From Our Sponsor

I forgot to mention that I'm going to be Georgia Tech's faculty sponsor for the Society for Creative Anachronism. It seems to be an apt position for someone who writes about time travel films. I'm flattered that Patrick invited me, and my only hesitation was whether or not "temporary" faculty could sponsor organizations (it turns out they can).

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September 4, 2003

Good News on Deregulation

Good news (NYTimes, free subscription required) about the FCC proposal for further deregulation of media ownership. A federal appeals court issued an order blocking the new rules that would have allowed further media consolidation. This proposal faced massive bipartisan criticism over the summer, and I'm happy to see that the appeals court stepped up to the plate (in a unanimous decision) to block the rules, one of which would have allowed companies "to buy enough stations to reach 45 percent of the nation's viewers" (NYT). This relaxation of media ownership likely would have damaged local ownership--and control--of media outlets beyond repair. I'm kind of sleepy this morning (hence the disjointed thoughts), but this news is very encouraging to me. Not only does it prevent Fox, ClearChannel, and Viacom from extending their reach even further, it also illustrates how grass-roots political efforts can succeed. The massive expression of public disapproval certainly helped prevent further media concentration. Cool news.

Update: Check out this article by John Nichols on the court's ruling in The Nation Online.

Posted by chuck at 11:12 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 2, 2003

Tully

Tully (IMDB) is a rambling, lyrical independent film in the tradition of All the Real Girls, which I reviewed in a previous incarnation of this blog. Like Girls, Tully is a reflective film that carefully traces out its characters, allowing them the time to have real conversations.

Tully focuses on the Coates family, specifically on Tully Jr, the local heartthrob who has dated and rejected most of his small town's women. Tully's father is a taciturn, slightly morose man, who seems to have faced more than his share of tragedy (he provides locals with a broken narrative about his wife dying fifteen years earlier), and we get a sense of Tully Jr's anger when he acts rough toward his younger brother Earl. Tully eventually develops a friendship with Ella, a local girl who has returned from college where she is studying to become a veterinarian.

Like Girls, which made extensive use of its North Carolina setting, Tully drwas heavily from Nebraska's small independent farms, tiny general stores, noisy bars, and placid creeks. The rundown spaces--a junkyard, a bar restroom, all beautifully filmed by John Foster--offer a subtle suggestion of nostalgia, which I read as an attempt to sustain a sense of regionalism that is in danger of being lost.

But while one of the film's key plot points centers on a threat to foreclose the family farm, Tully avoids simple moralizing about the plight of the independent farmer. Instead, Tully focuses on the emotional distance between various members of the Coates family, which is visually conveyed through the spatial distances of the farm itself; the brothers have to drive--Tully's car, a pick-up truck, a four-wheeler--just to have a conversation. At the same time, the use of cars and pick-up trucks suggets a certain kind of restlessness. Tully never expresses a desire to leave his small town, but he is frequently in motion--going to stores, running errands, often just for the sake of movement.

I think Tully has much to recommend it: a terrific screenplay nicely directed by Hilary Birmingham; solid performances especially by lead actor Anson Mount (although his Tennesee accent crept in occasionally); and a terrific understanding of the farmland that gives the film its "atmosphere."

The DVD release has the additional bonus of the short film, The Third Date, directed by Amy Barrett (who is based in Atlanta, if I'm not mistaken).

Posted by chuck at 1:23 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

September 1, 2003

Small World

Just wanted to note that a graduate student in Georgia Tech's IDT (Information Design & Technology) program came across my teaching blog. I'm always fascinated by these accidental connections, as my reflections on the theory of "six degrees of separation" suggest. He also seems interested in blogs as a storytelling technology, a question that I'm trying to work through in my own research and writing.

Posted by chuck at 3:03 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Cabbagetown

Inspired by George, I've been writing a lot about preserving the past in Atlanta lately, and the connections between memory and place present an important dilemma for urban planners who wish to revitalize a community without destroying its character. This challenge is addressed in the brief independent documentary, Cabbagetown, made in the early 1990s.

Cabbagetown (childhood home of musicians Kelly Hogan and Benjamin Smoke) was a small Atlanta mill community near Oakland Cemetary and Reynoldstown, where Jacob Elsas, a German immigrant, started the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill in the 1880s, and the mill continued to operate until 1970, largely based on the labor of people from the Southern Appalachins. The mill operated paternalistically, claiming to provide all of its workers' needs, and like many southern mills, aggressively fought against unionization. After the mill closed, the Cabbagetown community faced deep poverty, with many residents turning to crime. Cabbagetown presents the community at a point of crisis, with the narrator lamenting the potential gentrification that will destroy the community's history. Oddly, the documentary doesn't really provide us with much access to this history--no Cabbagetown residents were interviewed, and the people and houses are shown with a strange clinical distance, often in photographs.

Since the movie was made, Cabbagetown has seen renovations of many of the community's houses and the older residents are being pushed out (Home Depot founder Arthur Blank's foundation has been a significant contributor to renovation efforts). And, in a strange turn of events, a significant portion of the old mill was destroyed by fire while construction workers were transforming it into loft apartments. I'm not sure that I have anything particualrly new to say about renovation here, but the desire articulated by the film to preserve the past as the filmmakers understand it seems like a false hope to me; there's also the additional complication of social class, in that Cabbagetown was predominantly working class, which this particular documentary seemed to treat with an odd degree of nostalgia. I guess I'm not quite sure how to read something that seems to want to preserve something so heavily marked by poverty and exploitation, but I recognize the desire to preserve these narratives. I just wish the documentary had preserved some of those voices rather than speaking for them.

Some other interesting information about Cabbagetown: a collaborative project from Georgia State University, and a much different reflection on Cabbagetown's artistic cred.

Posted by chuck at 12:42 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack