1001 Nights

From late 1989 until early 1995, now that I consider things—I photographed in bars at least 1001 nights. Some time ago, I figured out that between 1992 to 1994 I photographed around 1,000 bands. Of course, on many nights I raced around town seeing at least three or four per night, so the band count doesn’t match-up with nights out. There are a lot of tales, but memory is a funny thing.

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been sifting through the mess of prints I hauled here from California. Most of them were low quality— just leftovers. I gave most of the good ones away. I had a weird sort of gift-culture thing going; I gave plenty to the bar owners who never charged me a cover and almost never charged me for drinks. I gave the rest to the people who were my “subjects”— but I never thought of them that way. Some became friends; most didn’t. They were just people I had fun drinking with. The bands for me were primarily an excuse to photograph. When the music is playing, people don’t think too much about why you have a camera. I never photographed at bars without live music—partly because I find bars without live bands to be depressing and partly because I felt like making photographs revolved around some sort of shared experience. I couldn’t just “cold-call” people and ask to take their photograph. You get to know the “regulars” and people get comfortable fairly quickly when you give them things.

Most of these prints are now ruined. Repeated floods in my previous apartment have reduced the pile, which started out as a stack of 8x10s around three feet square and three feet tall, to five hanging file crates of rescued (though sometimes glued together) junk prints. I’ve been peeling and scanning and tossing. Each time I think about putting together some online galleries of the ones I’ve been trying to rescue, I discover another heap of the same subject. I don’t have many more days to work on this before I have to move, but I just don’t want to drag what’s left along with me.

It bothers me that I can’t remember the names the people I spent so much time with. Memory is a funny thing, and often when I look at the same face a few days later names roll off my tongue as if it were yesterday. With the names, the stories return. Perhaps someday there will be time to write them. That is probably wishful thinking. There are so many other things I need to do. Besides, it’s not good to live in the past. But sometimes it is fun to remember. For every great story, there are darker ones that probably shouldn’t be told, though.

Boxing

Progress weeding my photographs is slow. The thing that bothers me is that every few images, I stumble into someone who is dead or dying. I never really bought into Susan Sontag or Roland Barthes’ idea that photography is about death. Photographs were always about being alive to me. To break the introspection, I’ve been boxing books. I suppose I’m about halfway done with that. The tally thus far, in standard file-storage boxes:

• 3 boxes of books on art

• 9 boxes of books on photography

• 3 boxes of books on William Blake

• 5 boxes of books on British literature

• 1 box of books on American literature

• 1 box of books on classical literature

• 1 box of books on foreign literatures

• 1 box of dictionaries and atlases

• 1 box of general history books

• 1 box of books on the history of journalism

I haven’t got to most of the twentieth century American lit yet, nor the books on theory. But I am happy to see that I actually own more books of literature than I do theory. I’m not that big of a geek yet.

Aural History

I took my Mac to the laundromat yesterday, and sat out front enjoying some of the mp3s I’ve loaded on it. I’ve got tons of them around here, scattered on cds with no labels—leftovers from a subscription to emusic, way back when they offered unlimited downloads for $10 a month. I’m pretty much boycotting the apple store for music; I’d rather have the tangible artifact than the bits and bytes—especially at those prices. However, what seems to be happening is a return to “singles culture”—something that really is a throwback to the early sixties/ late fifties.

I was thinking I really would have loved this culture when I was a kid—thousands of songs at your fingertips, delivered to you in a nicely insulated headphone/headdrum kind of way. Now, I’m not so sure about many aspects of it—especially the commercial limits of proprietary formats. It’s interesting to compare that to the philosophy of Freeplay:

The Freeplay Foundation is committed to providing innovative and practical energy solutions to ensure sustained access to information via radio. Our on-going search for new applications for Freeplay’s patented wind-up and solar powered technology resulted in the creation of the unique Lifeline radio, for example. After extensive fieldwork, the Freeplay Foundation recognised the need for a radio built specifically for the humanitarian sector. The idea for the Lifeline radio was born – a robust radio that could be operated easily by adults and children alike, heard by groups of up to 40 and powered by either wind-up or solar-powered energy. Just 24 months after the concept paper for the Lifeline radio was written the first radios were distributed to Burundian youth living in refugee camps in Tanzania

I was reminded of Freeplay by an MSNBC story. Like “singles culture,” this approach to aural culture is noticeably anachronistic: designing the technology for small groups of up to 40 people, who could warm themselves with news, information, and music. This is a stark contrast to the streets of America, where people roam around with their “personal” devices like cell-phones and iPods, dividing themselves from their neighbors. But the schism goes back further than that.

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Twelve Hours of Sunset

As more people get broadband connections, the temptation to share some things has crept up on me. I like seeing music on other people’s sites. I hate it when they force me to automatically download it, though. Surfing is, for most people I think, a silent activity. But one of the weird things I’ve been doing while I pack and sort to move to Minnesota is rediscovering a lot of the odd unlabeled disks of music I have around here—many of these things could be shared without too much of a moral quandary, because they are recordings which the artist has either implicitly or explicitly voiced the opinion that sharing of non-commercial material is a good thing.

I was looking through some things and found a copy of a Roy Harper recording from 1970 that includes one of my favorite songs, Twelve Hours of Sunset. The song was written while on a flight from India to the UK and it muses about the relationship between movement and time. Earlier in the week, I was reading and thinking about St. Augustine. Augustine dismisses the possibility of defining time through movement:

I shall confine myself to asking what time is, for it is by time that we measure the course of the sun. If it traveled around the earth in a space of time equal to twelve hours, we should say that it had completed its course in half the usual time. By comparing the two times we should say that, if twelve hours were taken as a single period, twenty-four hours was a double period. And this calculation would hold good whether the sun completed its circuit from the east round to the east again in the single or the double period on different occasions.

I cannot therefore accept the suggestion that time is constituted by the movement of heavenly bodies, because although the sun has stood still in answer to a man’s prayer, so he could fight on until victory was his, the sun indeed stood still but time continued to pass. The battle went on as long as necessary and was over. I see time, therefore, as an extension of some sort. But do I really see this or only seem to see it? (272)

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Death and Duration

When we measure silences and say that a given period of silence has lasted as long as a given period of sound, we measure the sound mentally, as if we could actually hear it, and this enables us to estimate the duration of the periods of silence. Even without opening our mouths or speaking at all we can go over poems and verses and speech of any sort in our minds, and we can do the same with measurable movement of any kind. We can estimate that one poem takes proportionately more, or less, time than another one, just as if we were reciting them both aloud. (Augustine, Confessions XI:27, 277)

Towards the end of writing my thesis, I began to be increasingly obsessed with time. It’s hard to phrase exactly what was happening, but it had something to do with the constant pressure to be done, when all I really wanted to do is continue to explore. Each day I spent researching opened up new ideas which reassembled the past in interesting ways; one can only look at these things with a certain anticipation of what might be found, though, and that means that we are usually destined to find exactly what we are looking for. That’s why I hate the concept of being done; it’s a lot like being dead. When you close off the potential for expanding interpretations, you cease anticipating. Open books are alive. Closed books are dead.

A friend told me once that Bob Dylan said “Nostalgia is death.” I never verified the quote, but I’ve always wanted to believe it. However, it seems as if in the process of saying anything at all we are trapped by the paradox of anticipating its passing as much as we are reveling in its creation. Dealing with the idea that “all things must pass” happens even before we begin to speak:

If a man wishes to utter a prolonged sound and decides beforehand how long he wants it to be, he allows this space of time to elapse in silence, commits it to memory, and then begins to utter the sound. It sounds until he reaches the limit set for it, or rather, I should not use the present tense and say that it sounds, but the past and the future, saying both has sounded and will sound. For much of it as has been completed at any given moment has sounded, and the rest will sound. In this way the process continues to the end. All the while, man’s attentive mind, which is present, is relegating the future to the past. The past increases in proportion as the future diminishes, until the future is entirely absorbed and the whole becomes past.

But how can the future be diminished or absorbed when it does not yet exist? And how can the past increase when it no longer exists? It can only be that the mind, which regulates this process, performs three functions, those of expectation, attention, and memory. The future, which it expects, passes through the present, to which it attends, into the past, which it remembers. No one would deny that the future does not yet exist or that the past no longer exists. Yet in the mind there is both expectation of the future and remembrance. (ibid.)

Augustine concludes that it is not the future which is long, but our anticipation of it; and as for the past, it is not long, but rather our remembrance of it which is long. It seems to me that we search for a usable past that does not foreshorten the future— that does not doom it to endless repetitions of the past. However, the desire to embrace an “open” future is also marked by a desire to “close” the past, to make it tidy and usable.

I tell myself: “you have to finish,” and yet I shudder, with a chill, anticipating the death of the past.

Big and Little Stories

It was very hard to print out the finished draft of my thesis and drop it off with people several days ago. It’s been even harder to think about what I wanted to write here. Mostly, I think, because my thesis doesn’t feel done. But I know I have to move on with life, and I can’t keep thinking about it much longer.

It wasn’t what I wanted to write. I wanted to write about the little stories that have escaped most of the big histories—the things that have seemed so tangential that they barely represent a footnote in most accounts of what happened in the formative years of documentary photography. I look ahead and I wonder how long it will be before I can write about that. The whole process seems very strange.

I think I shifted from literature to rhetoric because I care more about the little stories. I love teaching writing, and I love it when people can take possession of their own stories, and tell them in their own voice. Most of the academic publishing I’ve read in the field doesn’t really deal with that topic much. It’s more about how to build communities, and how to open people’s eyes politically. That seems strange, because what most people care about most when they write is little stories. Unfortunately, in order to write effectively a person first has to learn to read, and most students aren’t very well equipped in that department. That means teaching them how to spot the trashy, poorly put-together political rhetoric that surrounds them every day. The little stories get lost in the bigger picture. People often try so hard to sound like what they’ve read/heard/seen that they lose sight of themselves too.

I feel like I got lost in the big picture of theory while writing my thesis. It takes forever to explain, clearly at least, how I feel that meaning gets made. Meaning is such a big and complicated word. But I think it starts when someone tries to tell something to someone else. That is the level that interests me most. Not the big Marxist/Feminist cultural implications of it all, but just the simple fact of telling some one something. That’s what is most important to me. That’s why I ended up in discourse analysis and language philosophy, I guess. That’s why I’ve been swimming in it so long.

But sometimes I feel really swallowed up by it all. If you think about just how complicated it is to say anything at all, sometimes it seems like the best thing to do is just shut up. There are always those aesthetes in the crowd who figure the world would be a better place if you did. I can never seem to see it that way. I think its better when people tell their little stories. They are far more interesting in the long haul. Big stories always seem to have either uncomfortable endings, or endings so tidy that you can’t believe them.

I don’t know why I feel compelled to apologize for the lack of interesting content around here lately, but I do. Editing isn’t really fun at all, for me at least. I can’t seem to touch my thesis without adding more pages. Even still, it feels like a rock skipping across a very large pond. It’s nearing 100 pages, and I just haven’t accomplished anything that I really wanted to with it. It’s mostly a big book report—only a small part of it is analysis.

But the race is on. I’ve got to close this stupid thing and move on to the next part—moving.

The hardest thought for me is the idea of just putting my “project” down for even a little while. However, what I’d really like to do is show off more of the actual content I’ve been looking at (instead of theory) on this blog. I’m amazed by the richness and experimental feel of the “vernacular” photo-texts of the early twentieth century.

Academic

I recently received the most scathing criticism I’ve ever heard of my writing—a professor told me I sounded too “academic.” The piece in question was a draft of a letter of inquiry that I dashed off just prior to the class. When I mentioned the criticism to my girlfriend, she said “isn’t that what we’re supposedly being trained to be?” And then it hit me—the wonderful equivalence between bad writing and academic writing.

I don’t recall which article it was, but I read something on the net a while ago about the way which universities transform otherwise talented writers into really bad writers. Could this be happening to me? I thought about the critique a lot, and justified the assessment by remembering that in my haste, I had failed to “translate” a mission statement written by one of the project’s founders (an academic) into real language. Perhaps that was it, I thought. I inquired further at the next class meeting.

No, what the professor thought sounded academic about the letter was the way that it took forever to get to the point. The main cause for this was I had followed the RFP to the letter, providing the information requested in the order designated in the foundation’s guidelines. They asked for the most significant data last. Following the form suggested by the institution was strongly suggested in the class. Was it my fault that they asked for it in an “academic” fashion?

I’ve been thinking about this for a week now. Am I becoming one of them? The situation was aggravated after reading Community Literacy Programs and the Politics of Change by Jeff Grabill. It’s a good book, but it’s academic. In the survey of literacy theory (an excellent one with lots of visual aids), Grabill is forced to declare up front that he will only survey the theories that originate in Rhet/Comp. It’s a matter of discipline.

It doesn’t matter how good theories are outside the field—if you introduce them you might fall prey to accusations of importing something from a more “prestigious” discipline to prop up half-baked ideas. Academic writing seems horribly bound to a sort of inbred discourse, where you can only consider things brought into play by the institutional figures with power. As a powerless junior academic, any attempt to refocus the topic is suspect unless it is supported by situated references within the discipline. Part of the price of admission seems to be strapping on a set of blinders. It’s just how the game is played—however, this can also be cast in a more positive light by suggesting that academic discourse is a conversation, and unless you know the participants within the discipline, you’re only talking to yourself.

But these issues are completely secondary my professor’s critique. I’ve always been known for my somewhat Shandyesque discursive style. I never thought of it as a feature of “academic” writing before. I suppose it is, given the necessity of endless qualifiers and tentative conclusions which make up academic discourse. In my case, however, I think it is more related to the nature of how writing works for me.

When I start writing, I don’t know I’m thinking. I sort of write myself into it. Thus, if you’re looking for the pithy thought or “soundbyte” I suppose the best place to look is in the last paragraph. Lectures and presentations are different, as are instrumental letters. I suspect it’s not that I’m being “academized” as much as it is my tendency to rely on writing to figure out what I think.

I never start out with a “great idea” but sometimes, if I’m lucky, I end up with one. But still, it’s the twists and turns along the way that make it fun for me. I like a good story; occasionally, I try to tell one. But it is seldom “academic.” I take things far more personally than that.

small voices

When I was driving to San Antonio, I thought about a photograph that hadn’t come into my head in a long time. When I was first learning to make photographs, I found myself drawn to certain arrangements of things—commonplace objects, really. My parents never “got” it. When I showed this one to my brother David, he immediately launched into an allegorical explanation:

“Oh, this is a good one. It really shows what happens when somebody steps up front to be a leader!”

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Blow Out

It took about ten hours to drive to San Antonio. It took thirteen to drive back. The problem started in Tyler, Texas. We decided that we both hated Dallas, and preferred to mess around on the little highways in East Texas instead. It was really fun for the first seven or eight hours of driving, but somewhere around Tyler, the pavement got really noisy. It seemed like a change in the pavement style (the roads in Oklahoma sometimes whine too), but it was loud so I pulled off around the corner from this building (as we were wandering, momentarily lost). The tires looked fine. However, somewhere between Tyler and Kilgore a front tire blew while I was driving around 70 mph.

Somehow, the romance left the experience. There was no real problem, just some logistical issues. Once that was sorted out, I finally reached a sort of overload point. There are many topics/ideas from the conference that I want to sort out. There are a lot of people I need to search for. There is just too much to do, and too little time. The wandering has to cease for a little while.

What is most interesting to me at the moment is the lack of coherence among compositionists regarding “social software.” Lots of people are talking, just not to each other. I met a lot of bloggers that were invisible to me prior to the conference. It was also amazing to see so many projects relating to electronic discourse and/or visual rhetoric presented with paper handouts, and/or overhead transparencies. When computers were involved, there were always technical problems. The conservative traditional strategies actually worked best. I think Steve’s piece on social software pretty much hits the nail on the head.

I really can’t see how people manage to blog conferences in real time. I can’t listen, talk, or type at the same time. Most of all, I find it hard to do any thinking while participating. I think it was a richer experience because I did not blog it in real time, though I do plan to write after the fact. There were two types of blow out occurring at the same time, both metonymic and metaphoric, on Saturday.