Good News: Travel!

Well, after all my fellowship applications, complaints, and woe is me rejections, I am the very happy recipient of an SBU award, which will enable me to engage in archival research this summer. I plan to go to the Smithsonian to view the lovely magazines I have been posting about and to London/The British Museum to view the Brit versions.

The brevity of this post can be understood as inversely related to the excitement I feel!

The Disappearing Female Artist

One thing I've noticed in my reading is that female artists tend to disappear. If they are lucky enough to be recognized during their lives, something happens; they fall out of favor, their books go out of print, they lose contact with the literary intelligentsia. For example, Jean Rhys was believed to be dead before somebody wanted to do a radio version of Voyage in the Dark and put an ad in the paper in order to search for her heirs. Nella Larsen also disappeared, she left Harlem and moved to the East Village, dramatically removing herself from her Harlem Renaissance friends and, and worked as a nurse in a hospital.

Because women writers like Rhys and Larsen keep disappearing, it becomes up to us, the scholar, to locate and give voice to them. This bothers me because, for one, it seems to disempower the woman writer. Larsen, after all, chose to disappear. Two, these writers never actually went anywhere, it was the readers who lost them even though they were easy to find (Larsen's books never went out of print for any extended period of time).

This idea of disappearance is one of the many ideas I am working through for my Larsen chapter. Initially, I was interested in the actual idea of ghosts, particular as this was an interest in early photography; people attempted to catch evidence of the spiritual world with the camera. I love this idea but I have put it aside for now.

Instead, I am looking at photographs printed in some of the major magazines of the Harlem Renaissance. These publications often featured photographs of the African American elite in society pages along with photographs of houses, cars and other material evidence of financial success. One of the major themes in Larsen's novels is material items and many of the characters are drawn to commodities, perhaps as a means to avoid commodification themselves. And going back to my earlier idea, commodities prevent these characters from the the threat of disappearance. One can't go anywhere if one has a house full of stuff to take care of.

I am also thinking of these commodities as displacing the woman writer as the subject, or object, of the photograph. Focusing on material items makes these items take on the object role in photographic reproduction.

Lastly, and thanks to a talk that Kristeva gave at Stony Brook earlier this week, I am considering the idea of renewal in my chapter. I really want to give Larsen and her characters a chance rather than focusing on the inevitable tragic ending of their lives. Larsen's character, Helga Crane, for example, runs away from various situations she finds distasteful. I plan to argue that rather than escaping, or disappearing, each new experience is part of a process of renewal, a means to find herself anew.


Well, this for me has been a very successful blog post. I think somehow I have managed to outline my chapter! Thanks, Mr. Blog!

Belated Post

Thank you to all of those who report that you've been reading!

So here is what is going on:

1. I received my first chapter back from my director and made most of the changes she requested. I also made changes suggested by a fellow dissertation writer with whom I exchanged work. I still need to add some quotes from writer/theorist Irigaray but first I have to figure out what she is saying, so this might take some time. I dropped off the revised chapter to my second and third readers.

2. I was not chosen for a number of the fellowships for which I applied. I am, obviously, extremely disappointed. This is a difficult situation. Intellectually, I know that these awards are highly competitive, especially right now, and that the reasons that I was not chosen might not have any thing to do with the quality of my project but often due to arbitrary personal interests of the selection committee. However, considering I am working alone these days with very little day-to-day feedback, it's hard not to get caught up in a crisis of confidence. It takes discipline to keep myself focused on my work sometimes when I don't feel supported by the outside world, no matter how arbitrary the outside world is.

3. However, I attended a conference and while there I was able to regain a lot of this confidence back. For one, this conference seemed less like work and more like fun. It was smaller and I was able to make some personal connections. Second, the papers were given by a mixture of grad students and PhDs and I felt like I got a good idea of how my own expertise fits in. Lastly, the panel I participated in was exciting and the people who I met wonderful. They also seemed extremely interested in the work I am doing.

After the panel, I resolved not to waste time feeling insecure about my work.It's a little challenging to put this resolution into action though I am working on it.

Stay tuned for my next post: Nella Larsen and Ghosts of the Harlem Renaissaince. I know, you are on the edge of your seet!

"Very Greatly Improved"

Well, the words from my dissertation director are....
"Very Greatly Improved"!!!!!*

This is excellent news, as my fear was that it would be more like, "What is this garbage?" or "How did you find a two-year-old to write this for you?"

Of course, "My God, your genius has brought me to tears" or simply "Best. Dissertation. Ever." would have been nice.

But her comments were sent only in a quick email to temper my anticipation. Of her changes, two are minor, and the third I knew I was a problem and needed some time to figure it out.

This is excellent news and for sure an inspiration to keep myself going!

Yippee! It's so great to learn that I don't suck!

*She was referring to the previous chapter draft she had seen.

Moving on

Nella Larsen in a photo
shot by Carl Van Vechton

My original intention upon finishing my last chapter was to immediately catch up on some background reading. That is, reading that is generally related to my subject - mass media, photography, etc - but not specifically related to the chapter - Nella Larsen.

Although this background reading is essential, after only one week of it, it makes me feel directionless and floundering. I need to balance this general work with specific research on my topic. I don't want to take as long with this chapter as I did with my last one. My goal is really to have it done by May or June, which is not too far away!!!!

Also, after getting some feedback from a friend on my first chapter, I feel that I want to make the link between photography and Larsen much more specific. In other words, I really want to demonstrate that Larsen was aware of the role photography played in her writing. There were a number of photographs taken of her by Carl Van Vechten, a publisher, and I need to look into the publication history of them. There is little mention of photography in either of the books I plan to write about, though there is a painted portrait that plays an important role in Quicksand.

I might need to start some of the archival work I want to do at the Smithsonian. In order to do this archival work, however, I need to understand the role the mass media magazines played in the lives of African Americans. I am just starting this process and there might be a whole new slew of magazines I need to research. Was there a Vogue equivalent for the African American female audience of the Harlem Renaissance? Certainly, it must have been commercially viable. And there is no doubt that these women are absent from the "mass" media publications of the time I have seen. Did this absence mean that Larsen avoided these publications or were they all the more compelling to her? Where were images of African American writers and artists published? I know they are out there!

Lots of questions. Stay tuned to what I hope will be the answers.

Marching Band

It's a troubling fact of academia that hard-sought successes are met with very little fanfare.

There are no medal ceremonies, no awards speeches, no product sponsorships. One must be responsible for patting oneself on one's back and, as you might imagine, it can be hard to reach.

I would like to thank my friend then for sending me this marching band as a form of congrats. Check out the twirler who almost goes the wrong way in the beginning. Adorable and a great metaphor for life's little tumbles.

I am not sure why all the twirlers are white girls and the drummer black boys, though. That's a little disturbing. Or why they look like they are in pain.

Oh now, look at me overanalyzing my marching band!

I hope you enjoy it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emGjaad-elQ

Finit - For Now

In my enthusiasm for FINISHING MY FIRST CHAPTER!!!!! I forgot to post last week! How silly of me. Yes, chapter one is complete and handed off to my dissertation committee chair. I am a little anxious to hear what she has to say. What if she wants me to trash the whole thing and start all over? That's my worst fear. That is probably unlikely given that she has seen a previous draft, but still, I have become expert at creating major suckage dissertation-related scenarios. It takes discipline not to fall into that trap.

I was at first concerned that the push to finish chapter one would leave me too exhausted to pursue chapter two. This has not happened so far. I am excited to finally be able to start moving through a pile of books I have not been able to get to since my emphasis has been on writing these past few weeks.

My dissertation is also evolving in ways that I find exciting. I find that I am steering clear from some of my original ideas related to celebrity culture. One of the reasons for this is that recent research has demonstrated that there is a lot of work already being done in this area. Secondly, I am still primarily interested in how photographic form and structure overlaps with literary form and structure.

My next chapter is on Nella Larsen. One thing I have noticed so far is that there is actually very little work at all on photograph and African-American writers. I look forward to learning more.

For anyone who has not heard of Larsen, she is a Harlem Renaissance writer mostly known for two novels, Quicksand and Passing. Both are exceptional and worthwhile to read. There are a few good bios online if you google her. She, like Rhys, was rediscovered after years absent from the public eye. Larsen fell out of favor as a consequence of false accusations of plagiarism.

Larsen got published with the help of Carl Van Vechton, who was also and photographer and a close friend of Gertrude Stein's. It's six degrees of modernism.

And the argument is...(drum roll, please).

Please read the previous post about Page Count before reading this.)

Here is what I pulled together this week. I am sure it will change. For the mean time, it gives me something to continue to work towards.



In Voyage in the Dark, Rhys stylistically responds to the mechanism that captures performance, that of the camera. In Quartet, Rhys focuses her attention to the subjects in front of the camera. I argue that the photographic presence is implicitly embedded in the narrative of Quartet and that its influence can be perceived in the characters persistent, albeit unspoken, attention to it. In this novel, Rhys relinquishes her role of being behind the camera in favor of demonstrating that mechanical reproduction is enmeshed in day-to-day experience.

Page Count, Revisited

For all my struggles with that bastard, the Page Count, and his cruel mockery of my attempts at productivity, I have come to a few realizations about my writing habits.

In order to motivate myself to write, I am willing to write just about anything, in any order. I don't control or attempt to meaningfully participate in the outlet. My focus in merely to get words on the page. Words on the page just feel good, no matter what the words are, what order they come in or what they say.

However, I reached a point this week were I was beyond words on the page. I had many words on quite a few pages. And it was time to look at what was out there and have them actually say something rather than just appear in a random yet picturesque fashion.

I wound up doing a LOT of re-writing, cutting and pasting, and thinking, thinking, THINKING: What do I mean by this? How does this paragraph connect to the previous one?

Ultimately, I came across the crux of the problem: The section I was working on did not have a cohesive argument or direction. Without that, writing becomes a little like walking place. There were endless steps and no destination.

I am happy to write that, after my week of seemingly non-productivity, I have finally hashed together an argument for this latter portion of the chapter. This process has been difficult, humbling, frustrating and a little feverish (due to a problematic heating system, I shift between extreme feelings of hot and cold).

I will probably end the week where I started up, somewhere around pesky 34 (coincidentally, perhaps, also my age). But I have no regrets and I don't expect to change my process. In the future, I will try to be more patient with myself, however, and try to anticipate that writing is more about RE-writing (I think I might have read that somewhere actually).

I like writing. I like getting my ideas out - I learn a lot from it. I think this week I also learned that rewriting can even be more pleasurable.

Here's a metaphor: I like to cook. But I LOVE to eat what I made.

I hope any struggling writers out there use this to embrace their own process.

HERE'S AN IDEA FOR SOME BLOGGERSPHERE INTERACATION: Any writers, non-writers or simply anyone whose put a word to a page, what is your process? What have you learned about it that might help others? Post a comment and maybe we can start our own little writing community!

In the end, Page Count IS Dick Cheney, heartless, cruel and self-serving. But he is wheel-chair bound (locked in my computer, of course), forced to sit and stew in his ultimate failures and ineffectiveness. I am too humble to consider myself Obama in this scenario, so let's just say I represent the hoards of people, more powerful in their numbers than in what a bald man with a bad heart can yield.

A few thoughts on "Page Count"

Apologies for those on Facebook - some of this might be repetitive. But I am currently and endlessly stuck on 34 and it's driving me crazy.

The page count is cruel and heartless.

Page Count is not a "Count" in the royal title sense. Nor is it a "Page" in the job title sense.

Page Count might have been created by Dick Cheney. Or Rumsfield. And no doubt it would be considered cruel and unusual punishment by the rules of the Geneva Convention.

I would like to be released from page count jail with the other prisoners of Guantanamo Bay.

My four year old nephew can count better than the page count.

I should have been writing rather than coming up with page count witticisms.

Anybody else have any?

The Living Mannequin

Between the years 1920 and 1940, designers used living mannequins to sell their clothes, somewhat like the models in runway fashion shows we see today, but in the stores and on the floor, changing their clothes and altering their appearance to best sell the fashions. The practice of living mannequins came between when designers stopped using wax forms (not very stable in a hot studio) and before mass production could create reliable (and cheap) plastic forms, the ones we see in retails shops today.
Jean Rhys worked for a brief time as a living mannequin and wrote about it in a short story aptly named "Mannequin." In Quartet, Marya considers finding a job as one as well. I am interested in this idea of mannequins for a few reasons. First, it brings up the question of authenticity. The plastic mannequin "wore" makeup - to appear more "real" and the "real" woman was reduced to a type, an idealized slim and white woman who had endless purchasing power. It is arguable as to which succeeds at being more real - at the very least, plastic mannequins have been more successful at their craft (when was the last time a salesperson at the Gap offered to bring out a model to show off that new long sleeve tee?) Second, both the living and plastic mannequin came about as the result of mechanized production - the ability to produce a large number of items that are exactly the same (like photographs, of course). As clothes began to be made by machines and ready-to-wear products the norm, shop owners needed more ways to show off the many options they could now offer. Did women feel that they too needed to perform as if they were mass produced, to act as reproductions in function and form?

Can we ever be individuals again considering how we are inundated with examples of what it means to be woman before we can perceive ourselves distinctly in the mirror?

Random Post: The DSM

If there can be a book that defines mental disorders, shouldn't there be a book the acts as a guide to normal behavior? Otherwise, it occurs to me that all human behavior might eventually wind up in the DSM.

So, how is the dissertation going?

I am still at work on Chapter 1, Jean Rhys. The first part of the chapter on Voyage in the Dark is essentially done, until I get some feedback. I am now working the second half of the chapter on Quartet. I think this novel is a favorite and might be the one I recommend to readers who have never encountered Rhys's work before. For Voyage, I argue that Rhys uses the photographic form as a way to implicitly criticizes the ability of a photograph to capture a subject. For example, Rhys points that the characters are oppressed by what I call a tyranny of sameness - all the places and all the people seem exactly the same, like photographic reproductions where there is no original, only copies of copies.




In the part of the chapter about Quartet, I refer to a concept called "appearing" that I read about in a fascinating book, The Spectacular Modern Woman by Liz Conor. This concept is influenced by photography but not reliant on the mechanized reproduction of an image. Conor explains that “‘appearing’ describes how the changed conditions of feminine visibility in modernity invited a practice of the self which was centered on one’s visual status.” Conor additionally argues that modern experience in the 1920s was based on an “alteration in human perception through visual technologies…the visual realm…became a primary site for contesting…identity” and that, as a result, “for women…the performance of their gendered identity had to take place within the modern spectacularization of everyday life.” In other words, for Rhys and her modern female counterparts, everyday life is a performance where a woman must be aware that she is being seen, even if the medium that records such a performance is absent.

I will also be discussing the mannequin in relation to this concept of appearing but you will have to wait until next time to learn more about that.

Adages of the Day

Hello all! Is there anyone out there? Apologies for the extended break. The holidays and other stuff going on was a little distracting. But I am back and so is the diss.
I few adages I learned this week that are helping me motivate:

"Most people would prefer to clean bathrooms than write."

and

"There are two types of dissertations, Done and Not Done."

The first I like because it reminds me that the ickiness I feel when I sit down to write does NOT mean that I don't like my project or that I am not a "real" writer, but rather that writing is hard and everybody struggles. The second is helpful with the inner critic, that bitch, who likes to undermine me by questioning the quality of my work. The point is that I need to birth this baby; not birth it, raise it AND send it to college.