Margery Spring Rice: Pioneer of Women’s Health in the Early Twentieth Century
As a first-time biographer, I thought a lot during my research about the relationship between the biographer and her/his subject. There must be many issues that other biographers have reflected on before me, but perhaps the one that exercised me most is not so common: my subject, Margery Spring Rice, played a large part in my personal life in my childhood and youth. I am one of her grandchildren, and as a child I had a huge admiration for her, although as I grew up I realised that her high-handedness could also be a cause of embarrassment. She had a fund of stories about her life with which she regaled us, so when I came to write about her there were some pieces of the jigsaw that were very familiar: I knew about her commitment, and that of her family, particularly her aunts Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and Millicent Fawcett, to women’s rights, and I had learnt from a very early age that suffragists and suffragettes were not the same. I also knew something about the tragedies that had marked Spring Rice’s personal life: born in 1887, she was of a generation that lost people they loved in both world wars, in her case a husband and a brother in the first, and a son in the second. As I got older, I learnt something too about her colourful love life. I began to understand that the people she encountered tended to fall into two categories, those who adored her and those who loathed her. I recognised that my mother, her daughter, had had a miserable childhood, something that had a huge effect on the way she brought up her own children.
I was lucky enough to find that several members of the family had kept extensive hoards of letters and other papers, so that with the addition of the material in public archives the resources for a biography were not lacking. But as I worked my way through it all, I found myself facing up to Spring Rice’s faults – her selfishness, her inability to enter into the interior world of her children in particular – in a way that I had not quite expected. Though I still loved her dearly, I found myself liking her less. At the same time, I came to enormously admire her public achievements, in particular the founding of, and unstinting thirty-year support for, one of the earliest women’s health and contraceptive clinics in London, the North Kensington Women’s Welfare Centre (not far from where the devastated Grenfell Tower is now). When Spring Rice decided that something needed doing, she would worry at it like a terrier, absolutely refusing to let it go. Had her personal life been smoother or less eventful, I suspect her public life would have been less impressive.
Like every one of us, Spring Rice was a complex character: in my book I aspired to dispassionately convey that complexity at the same time as telling a good story.
Lucy Pollard is the writer of Margery Spring Rice: Pioneer of Women’s Health in the Early Twentieth Century. You can now read & download this title for free here.
The Death of Tomie dePaola and the Juggler of Notre Dame
By Jan M. Ziolkowski
On March 30, 2020 the American author and illustrator Tomie dePaola passed away at the age of 85 in New Hampshire. After a bad spill in the barn that served as his studio, he suffered complications that led soon to death. Losing him in these dark days of pandemic brought back two consolingly bright memories, both connected with a legend that seized both of our imaginations.
First, roll the clock back a year and a half. On November 10, 2019, Tomie did me the honor of appearing at Dumbarton Oaks, the outpost of Harvard University that I head in Washington, DC. The occasion was a show in our museum called “Juggling the Middle Ages,” which examined a medieval miracle tale about an entertainer who performed for the Virgin Mary.
Like a late-career sports star who digs deep and summons up his best for one last championship win, Tomie stood up and delivered a rousing reading that held the audience rapt.
The text was his 1978 The Clown of God, which after the ten award-winning Strega Nona volumes may be his most beloved children’s book. It recounts, in distinctively dePaola-ized fashion, a version of the story that motivated the exhibition. Afterward he participated in a Q&A session. Finally he devoted more than an hour to exchanging pleasantries with admirers as he personalized their copies of his book.
The event took place in the Music Room, a splendidly formal setting better known for formal academic lectures and chamber music concerts. Since being built in the 1920s, the space never accommodated as many children as on this occasion. As Tomie read, they sat in their seats—no fidgeting to be seen.
Later they formed a neat queue that coiled around the hall. Time rolled by, but the line gave no sign of shortening. For every happy person who walked off with a dedication, another wanting a signature appeared at the back with a fresh copy from the gift shop. With a stamina that left me (a quarter century his junior) marveling, Tomie, rockstar of the booksigning, responded generously and kindly to all his fans, both young and not so young.
The juggler of Notre Dame, as the narrative has often been called, has attracted a wide range of artists and scholars, from the anonymous French poet of the early thirteenth century who left us the earliest version through the short-story writer Anatole France and the opera composer Jules Massenet down through a troop of distinguished children’s book authors.
At the outset I mentioned two memories. My second dates to a half decade earlier. In January of 2014, Tomie dePaola did me the great favor of granting a telephone interview in which he walked me through the backstory to The Clown of God in his own biography. Tomie, thank heaven, was not a scholar intent on tracking down every last reference to the story. But like many notable artists he possessed both an exhaustive grasp of his own lived experiences and a passion for exploring the contexts of themes that inspired him. He encountered our tale first as a child during the golden age of radio in the 1940s, when it was often dramatized on air. As a young student at the Pratt Institute in New York in the 1950s he came across Blechman’s masterpiece, which encouraged him to choreograph his own dance piece with music. Although the appearance of Barbara Cooney’s The Little Juggler in 1961 blocked him from publishing his own take on the story in the late 1960s and early 1970s, he went ahead after a while with his own distinctive adaptation in 1978.
One appeal of Tomie’s The Clown of God is that the protagonist is a small orphan boy with whom young listeners can identify. Yet nearly half of the book depicts the performer as an old man who loses his ability to juggle and must retire. In the closing episode, the clown achieves a final outpouring of his talent that prompts a wondrous response. After he drops dead, the Madonna and Child come to life. The story told here portrays two miracles, the human one of the juggler’s last hurrah and the divine one of the animated statue. Tomie dePaola has died, but his art juggles on—as does the story that spurred him.
The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity. Volume 5: Tumbling into the Twentieth Century (2018) by Jan M. Ziolkowski is freely available to read and download. The other five volumes are likewise freely available.
China and open access: Sciencepaper Online
Abstract
During the lockdown of the entire country, China is bravely fighting against COVID-19. Many database vendors, publishers, and Internet companies announced to offer free access to academic resources to help students and researchers get the resources they need from home. Most of the publishers offered free access to everyone for a limited time and to decide whether to extend the period or not depend on the COVID-19 situation while some publishers announced open access from the announcement date indefinitely. At the same time, they are using technology to provide a convenient communication platform for researchers and provide an effective channel for up-to-date publication of results and new ideas of COVID-19 for the public.
Here we use the open-access platform ‘Sciencepaper Online’ [http://www.paper.edu.cn/] as a case study. The review and release period of papers online related to COVID-19 has been significantly reduced to 3 working days and all documents have been open for free in full text indefinitely from the start of February. Meanwhile, it works with other publishers and opens a separate area for Novel coronavirus pneumonia (NCP), providing preprinted copies of relevant research results for free submission, publishing, browsing, downloading.
Detail
The outbreak of pandemic caused by COVID-19 has already affected people’s daily life worldwide. On January 27th, 2020, the Chinese Ministry of Education decided to delay the start of the spring semester in 2020. Due to the lockdown, all the universities and schools in China have closed. However, all the classes and teaching still need to continue at home. Classes from primary schools to Universities are all changed to online teaching. Limited resources and communication channels put great pressure on students, teachers, and researchers. According to the guidance and organization of the Ministry of education, lots of databases, publishers, and internet firms were offering free access to their website or launching a mobile application to giving academic resources for a limited time. However, open access has been going on in China for a long time. As a leading provider of open access in China, Sciencepaper Online is playing an important academic intermediary in this incident.
Brief introduction
According to the Sciencepaper online website, Sciencepaper Online is an academic institutional repository established in 2003 initiated by the Ministry of Education and hosted by the Science and Technology Development Center of the Ministry of Education. This platform is dedicated to providing scientific researchers with rapid paper publication and free access services. It is the first online academic open-access (OA) journals platform in China and the leading international peer-reviewed platform for online preprinted papers. (English translation by the author)
Since its publication in August 2006, Sciencepaper Online opened its Weibo account to give more up-to-date information about the platform for more people in 2011. Weibo is a popular social media platform in China similar to Twitter. According to the ASKCI Consulting company report, Weibo has more than 330 million users by the end of 2018. In 2016, Sciencepaper Online launched a mobile application to help scholars have more flexible access to open access resources the platform offers. On March 27th, 2019, Sciencepaper Online formally signed ‘Expression of Interest in the Large-scale Implementation of Open Access to Scholarly Journals’ The signing of OA 2020 initiative is not only an affirmation of the open-access concept but also a mark that China Sciencepaper Online will contribute to the open-access of global academic scholarly journals.
According to the Sciencepaper online webpage—introduction, the four main purposes of Sciencepaper Online are elaborating Academic Views, Exchanging Innovative Ideas, Protecting Intellectual Properties, and Fast Sharing Science Papers. After several years of development, it became a one-stop scientific research service platform with papers, journals, scholars, and communities as the four core sections, and rapid positioning of resources through disciplines, institutions, full-text search, and other methods. The submitted papers are reviewed and released on the site after 7 business days (start from the date of the last submission) if the paper is within the scope of Sciencepaper Online’s subject categories, in-line with the national laws/regulations and meeting our formatting requirements. No Service Fee Is Charged for releasing on this site. Today the website hosts 39 specialized fields according to the Classification and code of disciplines. According to standards press of China, Classification and code of disciplines specify the principles, basis, and coding methods of subject classification. The classification objects of this standard are disciplines, which are different from professions and industries. It also specifies that this standard cannot replace various viewpoints in literature, information, book classification, and academics. (English translation by the author) [http://openstd.samr.gov.cn/bzgk/gb/newGbInfo?hcno=4C13F521FD6ECB6E5EC026FCD779986E]
Contribution
In the view of the difficulty in publishing papers in general, the communication among scholars of different languages is narrow, Sciencepaper Online creates a fast, convenient communication platform to promote the latest study results and communication between scholars without delay. After the outbreak of COVID-19 in China, the Sciencepaper Online platform promises to significantly shorten the review and publication time from 7 business days to 3 days for papers related to the COVID-19 epidemic for basic medicine, clinical medicine, biology, pharmacy, Chinese medicine, and traditional Chinese medicine, preventive medicine, hygiene, and other disciplines. Sciencepaper Online releases relevant research and shares the research results as quickly as possible. Together with other publishers, a special website releases to the public providing relevant study results about COVID-19 [http://cajn.cnki.net/gzbd/brief/Default.aspx]. The site offers three versions which are simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese, and English. Considered some people may have no access to computers during the self-quarantine time, it launched the mobile application simultaneously. Meanwhile, as the first preprinted scientific paper and open access website in China, the platform has over 100,000 preprinted papers and a total of 1.2 million-plus scientific papers in the library. All documents are open for free in full text indefinitely from the start of February 2020.
Challenges
It is a good strategy to open full-text access during the urgent worldwide pandemic time. However, open access (OA) as a long-time movement needs more detailed consideration. Although the site has both the Chinese and the English versions, the English version contains around 5,900 English papers (5,992 papers) which are quite small compared to the 1.2 million-plus scientific papers in the Chinese version. Another challenge is that much of China’s scientific output is still locked behind paywalls.
” The Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) funds about 70% of Chinese research articles published in international journals, but China has to buy these back with full and high prices,”
Schiermeier, Q. (2018). China backs bold plan to tear down journal paywalls. Nature, 564(7735), 171+. Retrieved from https://link-gale-com.proxy.bib.uottawa.ca/apps/doc/A573293271/AONE?u=otta77973&sid=AONE&xid=e7ceabd1
Zhang said at the Open Access 2020 conference (Harnack House, Berlin, 3–4 December 2018). It would take a lot of effort to deal with the copyright issues both nationally and internationally.
Conclusion
During the COVID-19 epidemic, more and more scientific research workers joined the epidemic prevention and control actions, with a rigorous academic attitude to study prevention and control strategies and measures, hoping to use the “Sciencepapers Online” platform for fast and free publication. Making the latest research results publicly available and sharing them with relevant people who are concerned about the epidemic nationwide and even worldwide. Through the efforts of each of us and each department, we will accelerate the study of effective methods to contain the epidemic, improve the knowledge level of virus awareness, reduce panic among the people and contribute meager to epidemic prevention and control.
References
Sciencepaper online: http://www.paper.edu.cn/ (Chinese version) http://en.paper.edu.cn/ (English version)
Description of Science paper online: http://en.paper.edu.cn/en_about_us
OA2020. “Expression of interest in the large-scale implementation of open access to scholarly journals.” https://oa2020.org/mission/. Accessed 16 Apr. 2020.
Ministry of education guidance of organization and management of online teaching during the pandemic: http://www.gov.cn/zhengce/zhengceku/2020-02/05/content_5474733.htm
Announcement of free access during COVID-19 pandemic: http://www.paper.edu.cn/community/wesciDetail/NQj2Y9wNMbDVgV0u
Schiermeier, Q. (2018). China backs bold plan to tear down journal paywalls. Nature, 564(7735), 171+. Retrieved from https://link-gale-com.proxy.bib.uottawa.ca/apps/doc/A573293271/AONE?u=otta77973&sid=AONE&xid=e7ceabd1
Cite as: Shi, A. (2020). [China and open access: Sciencepaper Online]. Sustaining the Knowledge Commons. [https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2020/04/23/china-and-open-access-sciencepaper-online/].
Selfies Under Quarantine: Students Report Back to Rome (Episode 3)
Episode 1 with introduction: https://networkcultures.org/blog/2020/04/09/selfies-under-quarantine/
Episode 2: https://networkcultures.org/blog/2020/04/16/selfies-under-quarantine-episode-2/
Episode 3: LOVE AND SEX AT THE TIME OF COVID-19
In collaboration with Danielle, Shaina, Briana, Jackie, Marta, Gabriella, Sydney, Elena, Sophia and Natalia
This week’s readings:
Excerpts from Eva Illouz’s ‘Cold Intimacies. The Making of Emotional Capitalism’
Excerpts from Melissa Broder’s ‘So Sad Today’
Day 44 since the lockdown started in Italy.
My Facebook wall is populated by these little ads
‘Boring at home? Have fun online!”
I think about my day online.
A colleague from the other side of the Ocean has just tweeted
Got on Zoom at 8:40 am. Finished on Zoom at 7:30 pm. Didn’t get a shower until 8 pm. Didn’t get dinner till after 9. See ya tomorrow.
I retweet and comment: ‘so fucking true’. Not academically correct, yet so fucking true.
Online is a nightmare. Online is you, the screen, and then you and the screen again. And your friends and colleagues imprisoned in little small cells inside it, as if they were kids’ puppets popping out of the puppet theatre.
You teach about tech dystopias, apply ideology critique to digital media, criticize platform capitalism, show your students how to protect their privacy and avoid surveillance, you do all that while being online.
And then, in the middle of this schizophrenia of yours, you see the little ads popping up from Facebook
suggesting that you use the latest dating app which is of course ‘social-distancing’ friendly.
Dating at the time of Covid-19 is dating the same goddam screen you use for working, calling your family and having a Spritz with friends while watching a film together.
Sydney has given it a try.
She writes: ‘Hinge ‘at home’ feature is something I have used. During quarantine, I have matched with and now spend a good amount of time talking to someone I met on Hinge. We have played Minecraft together, discussed shows and our lives, and it’s probably the furthest I have gotten in terms of online dating despite me being present on it for multiple years. I actually consider the connection more powerful than others – and I have even met up with a few men that I have matched with. Perhaps this is because my body is ‘detached’ and ‘annulled’ as Illouz would put it, but I think it’s because I suddenly have time to sit down and really get to know someone before the possibility of being able to meet up is presented to us’.
While Natalia sits in awe reading Paul B Preciado’s “The Losers Conspiracy”. She proposes the class two quotes from the piece to reflect upon:
“But if things could no longer change, if those who were far apart could never touch each other again, what was the significance of being ridiculous in this way? What was the significance of now telling the person you love that you loved them, all while knowing that in all likelihood she had already forgotten you or replaced you, if you would never be able to see her again in any case? The new state of things, in its sculptural immobility, conferred a new degree of what the fuck, even in its own ridiculousness.”
“Everything will forever retain the new shape that things had taken. From now on, we would have access to ever more excessive forms of digital consumption, but our bodies, our physical organisms, would be deprived of all contact and of all vitality. The mutation would manifest as a crystallization of organic life, as digitization of work and consumption and as dematerialization of desire.”
‘(But I still don’t believe it. I just can’t believe it)’, she adds.
(black mirror in black&white color scheme -Natalia, April 2020)
‘8:35 p.m. Your spirit comes through the window and darkens the room. I turn on all the lights. Put a blank cassette in the video camera and screw the camera to the tripod. I check the framing. The image is smooth and symmetrical; the black leather couch forms a horizontal line at the bot- tom of the frame. The white wall easily follows that line, but without creating any feeling of volume or relief. Play. I move to the sofa. Off camera, on the coffee table, I’ve left electric clippers, a small mirror, a sheet of white paper, a plastic bag, a bottle of hypoallergenic glue for use on the face, a dose of fifty milligrams of testosterone in gel form, a tube of lubricant, anal-dilator gel, a harness with a realistic rubber dildo (91⁄2 x 11⁄2 in.), a realistic black silicone dildo (93⁄4 x 21⁄2 in.), a black ergonomic one (51⁄2 x 3⁄4 in.), a razor and shaving cream, a plastic basin filled with water, a white towel, and one of your books, the first, the sublime one, the beginning and end of everything. I walk into the frame. Get undressed, but not completely. Keep my black tank top on (…)
I slide the dildos into the openings at the lower part of my body. First, the realistic-looking one, then the ergonomic one, which goes into my anus. It’s always easier for me to put something into my anus, which is a multidi- mensional space without any bony edges. This time, it’s the same. On my knees, I turn my back to the camera, the tips of my feet and my head pressing against the floor, and hold my arms behind me so that they can manage the two dildos in my orifices. You’re the only one who could read this book. In front of this camera, “for the first time I’m tempted to make a self-portrait for you.” Design an image of myself as if I were you’.
(me and Paul B Preciado @John Cabot University, October 2019)
In ‘Testo Junkie’ Preciado writes these words for his friend and HIV-positive writer Guillaume Dustan. Dustan and the AIDS crisis in the Europe of the 80s-90s, queer identities and HIV, politics and sex, the politics of sex.
Are we back to square one, are we putting our bodies on trial again? Saliva, sneeze, spit, tears. Off limits. There is no condom that can protect us from these liquids, no condom can save us from the infections contaminating our souls.
How will love look like in the absence of tears, in abstinence from salivation?
A season of drought.
….
Preciado is the only one who can write about having sex with a screen and make it arousing.
Meanwhile, Jackie receives the visit of transhuman love. Oh wow.
She writes:‘not to brag but i just got an evite from a sex bot. These algorithms sure are getting creative with all this time on their hands’.
ME, MYSELF AND (MY BETTER) I
Questions resonating in the ‘class’ after reading Illouz’s analysis of dating sites. Who is the ‘better’ I? My online self? My physical self? Are they two distinct ‘things’? And are they just two? Really?!?
Briana connects Illouz with her Instagram experience. ‘In ‘Cold Intimacies’ Illouz writes that “the self became something to be assembled and manipulated for the sake of impression-making and impression management.” Put into more basic terms, on social media, we display ourselves as if we were a brand: we need to persuade others to “consume” what we are displaying. Funny enough, for a class of mine I had to analyze my instagram profile and define what my “brand” was. This was the result:
Also, this is my instagram account @brianadisisto, if you want to check out if I am actually realistic about my “brand” .
Why do we try to display our “best” self online? In my case, it’s not because I believe that my body is a “dead flesh that surrounds the active mind which constitutes the ‘authentic’ self” (Eva Illouz). I love my “in real life” self, I don’t have problems with my physical body, and I’m fine with people seeing me in person even if I, for instance, have a huge pimple on my forehead. But if I have that same pimple in a picyure of mine I want to post online, I will 100% edit the pimple out. My online self does not necessarily have to be my “better” self, but it definitely has to be my “perfect” self. Why?
Because my online self – and whoever’s online self – is always object of criticism, because it can be revisited whenever one wants to. It is “eternal”, because what is put online endures in time and can travel through space; the pimple in IRL does not bother me because it is “incidental”, it is something that is not always like that, and people know it. An “online” pimple is almost crystallized on your face, it becomes part of how your identity is perceived. So am I “lying” when I edit out my pimple? Am I showing my ideal self or my real self – since I don’t always have pimples? I always respond to myself saying that what I “tell” the online community is nothing more that a white lie.
I am conscious that I am manipulating my online self, and of course I do it to get more attention. But with my bio (which I already spoke about) and my “product description” (an option which is given if you switch to a business profile, and that says a lot about the capitalistic influence behind the platform) which is “art gallery”, I want to make it clear that my online self is fictitious. I put “art gallery” as a product description because nothing in my profile is casual. Like an art gallery, I display my posts based on colors and meaning, and like paintings, my posts require a lot of work: poses, selection between 100+ pictures, editing, filters, lighting’.
Maybe the online self is just a glossy escape route, a runaway from the vexations of the flesh?
Natalia thinks so. ‘Are we seeing the online self as a way to escape our bodily anxieties and insecurities? Yes. I think of my very good friend who would almost never talk in class, who would be the embodiment of shyness, yet in online gaming, he would become a perfect leader, unremorseful of being mean to others online or just to troll. Why do we associate the negative with the body? I guess that there are several different reasons. There’s an age issue, fueled by Hollywood commercialization of “young and beautiful,” there’s the difference between acting-in-thoughts and acting-in-body, one often does things differently in physical life than one would imagine body to behave. Body is not always in form, body is what might bother us when we are psychologically well and bright. There’s the long-standing, mostly Wester tradition of duality, of body-soul distinction where body is considered as worse, as dirty, as not-desired.
Online, one does not need to worry about body at all.
When I am to post a picture on Instagram, I go through a whole set of re-evaluation and checklist as to what this picture says about the profile, what image of myself am I curating, what this picture adds, does this picture fit to the narrative of myself I go for. We all do it’.
(from Natalia’s blog)
Gabriella does not trust online dating : ‘Also, how can you be yourself when all you read from the other person is what they are looking for and who they are, sometimes you might feel unconformable and try to fit within the other person standards.’.
(Gabriella and her boyfriend -not ‘found’ via apps)
And yet perhaps it’s not even a matter of escaping or wearing a mask, but of playing with identities and wearing multiple masks: a digital masquerade for the sake of enjoyment, fun, maybe some lightness.
Elena questions the real vs fake binary opposition: ‘Am I less authentic on the internet? Am I less authentic if I wear make up? What if I gain weight? What if I put a filter on my photo? I think that at the end of the story, I am always Elena. A photoshopped Elena, a dressed up Elena, a digital Elena, a…we don’t have a fixed singular identity but a multi-faceted nature. Pirandello, in his book “Naked Masks” states that “self” and “identity” are concepts which are lost and unachievable in human beings. According to him, everyone wears different masks, each one of them representing our many social roles. This is to say that asking ourselves if we are authentic would, in a sense, limit our nature. We are ALWAYS authentic, it’s not a matter of “more” or “less” authenticity. My emojis are authentic. When I send a laughing emoji when I am angry, I might do it because I don’t want to fight with that person. Does that mean that I am less authentic? No. In fact, lies are authentic. The fact that it’s harder to hide our facial expression in our physical life doesn’t mean anything. I am always authentic, my digital life just gives me the opportunity to lie more easily’.
Which resonates with Shaina’s words: ‘We have been brought up to always be conscious of our digital footprint. Don’t post alcohol, don’t post drugs, don’t show too much skin online, if you do, colleges won’t accept you, employers won’t hire you…. These are ideas that have been drilled in our heads from the moment our parents finally let us make a Facebook account in the 7th grade. We have been coached to be cautious of what we share about our lives, so it makes sense that we only advertise the best versions of ourselves online. I do not believe that the digital world is unauthentic, it is respectively authentic. We get to pick and choose what we want to highlight and share with others on the internet, but all content is created somewhere which makes it authentic in some respect. If I photoshop all my pictures, does it make them unauthentic? Is photoshop not authentic? I would say that it is an authentically photoshopped picture. I have seen many people use the hashtag ‘#instagramvsreality’ which is usually linked to a picture of them looking really good (“instagram worthy”) and then one which is not so flattering, which we as a society have deemed unworthy of posting. Whether I post a picture of me sucking in my gut to look skinny or me letting it all hang out, that is me regardless. No filter, edit, pose, caption, has the power to make me unauthentic, I am who I am, even with a dog filter on my face. Scrolling through Instagram, it would be naive to assume that this is all there is to life. We are all human, we all go through hardships and troubles. We don’t always look perfect, we don’t always have fun…but a picture of me in my pjs, crying, eating chips at 3 am is not likely to gain a lot of positive attention, therefore I decide not to share that part of myself with the internet. It does not mean it doesn’t happen nor that I am unauthentic. I have no pictures of myself crying posted online, but if you ask me if I ever cried, I would of course say yes. The online self is a limited version of an individual. We have the choice to showcase what we want people to see about us, we have the power to sway their opinion of us, but when push comes to shove, we are who we are and there is no hiding that. My online self is part of me’.
Sophia edits her Tik Tok Quarantine Diaries here reflecting on the process of her selection:
‘no part of my quarantine has been particularly interesting, but placing these snaps into a single video has done a few things for me: 1. Shown my ups and downs emotionally during this time 2. really underlined the fact that this could go on for another few months… I can’t help thinking back to the beginning when I thought that I would do my own 14 days and then be free.
I do my best to represent the good and bad sides of myself to the internet. It is not because I feel that I owe anything to the internet, but I like the idea that in the sea of users who are plastic and fake, that there could be an ounce of reality on social media and if that reality is me then I am proud to show it off. — and not on an instagram which is dedicated to posting the embarrassing aspects of my life, but on my insta, the “real one.” I am the same way on my snapchat, I use it as a form of a diary of my emotions through day to day life I guess you could say.
There is a hashtag #MakeInstagramCasualAgain. This hashtag references the seriousness some people take when it comes to their feed and what they post. Some people take their instagram as serious as their school work and will plan out posts which match just so their feed stays up to their standards. I, on the other hand, whether it annoys my followers or not, will post what I want, when I want. I don’t take myself too seriously online because I don’t do that in the real world.
I am not sure what it says about me that my instagram has always been casual and that I like it that way. Does that make me authentic? or does that make me superficial because I am aiming to be authentic?’.
LET’S PUT THE MYTH OF AUTHENTICITY IN QUARANTINE
Worshipping the authentic self is a direct legacy of the Californian ideology. Since the age of the New Age, the Esalen Institute and the Human Potential Movement preaching about unleashing the individual’s full potential, discourses on the (allegedly) inherent authenticity and genuineness of the ‘inner-self’ have been thriving in the Bay area. No wonder that the Internet in which we live is permeated with the myth of authenticity.
Danielle talks about her boyfriend asking her: “why do you care so much about what others think of you,” and I guess it’s a disease to care. It’s a disease to be unauthentic. It is addiction and a job to fit a mold. I look at my boyfriend and wonder how he does what he wants and doesn’t feel guilty. He is authentic, and when I first met him I never thought of him as that because when you meet individuals you take all the collective interactions and use them as definitions of what they truly are. But if I study all of the first couple of interactions we had, he may have fell in love with someone who isn’t me at all…rather a projection of who I want to be. But you can only keep up an act for so long, and I wanted to know if I was unauthentic with him. So i did an experiment.
Danielle: Flashback to the beginning of our relationship and before we started dating. Based on your first impressions and interactions with me how would you describe my personality and character versus how I actually am?
Nick: “You were less obnoxious. *laughs* No, don’t use that word. You were who you are. You didn’t try to hide that, you were a normal amount of shyness. You may have dimmed things down, but I think the person I met is the same person I am with today. You were going to therapy when we first met, and you were feeling really confident in talking about yourself and expressing your inner thoughts and emotions. I think I may have met you during a really pivotal time in your self growth where you were fed up with saying the conventional so you felt liberated in saying and being authentic.”
I thought to myself “I really thought I was being more conservative and put together than I was putting off”, this experiment didn’t prove my point. But maybe it proved another one. Being authentic in person is unavoidable. There are too many give aways to try to be unauthentic. Your facial expressions, your inability to lie, your tone and attitude, underlying thoughts and opinions, and the inability to craft a thoughtful response because you are on the spot. Therefore it takes less thinking, energy and time to be authentic. Maybe I am just a bad liar, maybe I am not clever enough to be inauthentic in person. But I think that it is much easier to be inauthentic online. Online where you can create any storyline, refer to past texts, and decorate your lengthy paragraphs with emojis, it has never been easier to be someone else’.
(Danielle and her boyfriend Nick -he gave consent)
Truth is, in the end that ‘in this quarantine I find myself being the least authentic version of myself. I have this enormous guilt of having to wake up at a certain time, to prove to my friends, family, and myself that I am not being lazy. Because society has taught me that laziness is bad. To exercise and diet, to make sure I don’t gain weight. Because being fat is unhealthy. To get a certain amount of work done a day. To prove that I am being productive.
But is that being authentic… no the truth is I want to sleep till 1pm, order McDonalds and not feel guilty about it. I would be authentic if I did just that…but I never do. Being authentic is hard. In my opinion the online world only makes it easier to fake the hard thing.
So yes I lie about what time I wake up, how many assignments I finished, and if I worked out or not… not too authentic huh’.
Marta might have found a better, less ideological word to replace authenticity: vulnerability.
‘in my opinion we are not more authentic in the virtual world..I think we are less vulnerable because we hide behind a screen’.
TRANSPARENT BODIES AND YUMMY (ITALIAN?) MEALS
Jackie reflects on Illouz, Melissa Broder’s ‘So Sad Today’, and some Italian gourmet food you can find (only) in the States.
‘In Melissa Broder’s discussion on her online relationship full of passionate sex(ts) there is a transparency in her affair even before they manage to meet in person, and though they shared more details about their lives, childhoods, and aspirations, this extension of genuine emotion parallel to her own is what allowed Broder to say “You see me. I am finally seen” (Broder, 43)*. Without physical bodies to respond to attraction we are instead left to be aroused by truth, and though the internet is a questionable platform for honesty finding such can mean a connection that can withstand technological boundaries.
The initial formation of this internet self, from handles to bios and even the choice of posts, is a strategic form of packaging meant to be sold for romantic entanglement. Similarly, the use of choice on dating sites and even swiping on apps turns a chemical process into a mechanical one similar to pointing at your selection of meats at a butcher. While connections may (evenutally) be real the process to get there is the same as the rebranding for Chef Boyardee, only the board rooms and focus testings go through one group: you.
The internet ultimately rationalizes the spontaneity of love, according to Illouz. While there is truth to this and the evidence that capitalism has completely restructured our lives, I politely disagree. While, yes, every friend I have made on the internet included a months worth of prep before actually talking with them because I had to “set myself up” to seem like a worth while interaction, the genuine connections stood out from the garbage providing me with lasting relationships I have watched evolve over the past decade. And even if choosing a mate on an app is no different than liking the label of Chef Boyardee, nothing beats the taste that reminds you of a diabetic childhood and will clog your arteries forever’.
(Jackie’s ‘last supper’ in Rome – featuring Sydney)
PS Before Jackie wrote this piece I was not aware that Americans trust a chef who cooks ‘delicious Italian flavours’ and yet has a name that does not sound Italian at all (to me). Nomen omen.
(yeah, I know Jackie)
GORGIAS, LEOPARDI AND THE ART OF SEXTING
Briana proudly posts about her sexting:
‘And I’ve been definitely practicing all of these lately. The first one to avoid complete isolation, the second one to fake emotions, the third one in memory of the good old days, the fourth one while writing this post, the fifth is my mother tongue, no need to practice.
This screenshot is taken from the chat with my ex boyfriend, right after having finished sexting.
Real sexting requires intimacy, desire to make the other feel good from a distance and knowledge on how to pursue this. I can state with extreme certainty that I have never sexted with someone I haven’t slept with before. In order to be “effective” in sexting, you have to create a context and act in it (this is why I find it helpful to relate to previous IRL experiences); you have to make the other sense your tone of voice, your look, your smell, your touching them… all through words. Essentially, you have to condense all five senses in one: sight. And not necessarily sight of your naked body through nudes, but sight of pixels that compose words on a screen. When I am able to engage in good sexting, and when I tell that I am making someone excited just by using my words, I feel extremely empowered, and almost proud of myself: being able to sext well means I am a careful observer of what people like and desire, and that I am able to create images, fantasies in others’ minds using merely my words. And let me tell you, these fantasies don’t always mirror “reality”, or at least my physical self in that precise moment. Actually, they hardly ever do.
This is what I mean. I created this meme with my best friend, Elena Santoro @iamyourhappyaccident. We are very intimate and we will, without any problem, share our sexts and talk about them openly. We always joke about how guys might have expectations of us laying in bed, in a very sexy outfit or naked, in a submissive position… all because of how good we are in creating this fantasy in their heads. Instead, we are literally looking like sh*t.
Citing Gorgias, “A single speech charms and convinces a crowd when skillfully composed, rather than when truthfully spoken” (Helen 13). To make it more relatable, I will change it into “A single sext charms and convinces the receiver when skillfully composed, rather than when truthfully spoken”.
Elena responds with Italian writer Leopardi to her best friend’s quoting from Greek philosopher Gorgias:
‘I am a Leopardian person: for me, “to await a pleasure, is itself a pleasure”. Sexting is more exciting than a sexual encounter because it contains the magic of the “not yet”. The “not yet” for me is more exciting than the “already”….once you had sex…well, you had sex and that’s it. What about the overwhelming feeling of desire before the sexual encounter? The adrenaline, the energy, the excitement…those feelings are more vivid before the very act. The act itself is no doubt beautiful but less beautiful than before. Just like a Sunday morning is less beautiful than a Friday night. There is beauty in the journey. There is beauty in the digital. Also, when I sext with someone, I don’t think about my stretch marks, or my small chest. I am the disembodied version of me. I am as invisible as perfect. My sexiness is determined by my ability to write, my brain becomes the new vagina’.
TO MATCH OR NOT TO MATCH, THAT IS THE QUESTION
As an ending note, Sydney
tells a story of ordinary algorithmic madness from her neighborhood.
‘We are placed under a heavy pressure of self-observation, self-labeling, and abstraction in order to achieve the statistics of who is the most compatible with us. It made me think of my neighbor, lynn freda. lynn is one of the sweetest women out there, constantly baking us cookies. she’s like a neighbor in a sitcom. before she became our neighbor, though, she went through a nasty divorce. my family and other neighbors basically pressured her into trying match.com. she had to fill out the extensive questionnaire. we were waiting with baited breath to see who lynn would get. we so desperately wanted her to find love. and she was actually excited! finally, she got her number one potential match: her ex-husband.’
The Classic Short Story, 1870-1925: Theory of a Genre
By Florence Goyet
In the Anglophone world, two major works gave birth and shape to a revival of short story criticism in the late 1960s and 1970s. Mary Rohrberger’s book on Nathaniel Hawthorne defined the short story as an epiphany, revealing to the reader that “there is more to the world than which can be discovered through the senses”.[1] Ten years later, Charles E. May put together a collection of essays that made him a powerful advocate of a genre that he described as “mythic and spiritual […] intuitive and lyrical”.[2] In these works, critics of the contemporary story found a description of what they saw and appreciated in late twentieth century stories. The scholars had what seemed to be a complete view of the form: stretching back from Frederick Barthelme and Alice Munro to Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Sherwood Anderson and Anton Chekhov, and rooted in Hawthorne’s “invention” of the genre at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
This apparently comprehensive view of the genre, however, left a crucial missing link: critics tend to ignore the end of nineteenth century, despite the fact that this period has a strong claim as a major stage — if not the major stage — of the form. There is of course nothing ground-breaking in such an assertion: it is well documented that the short story was enormously popular at this time, and that innumerable periodicals were publishing countless stories. It was also the time when more masters of the form were active than perhaps at any other time: Chekhov, Guy de Maupassant, Luigi Pirandello, Henry James, Mori Ōgai and Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, to name just a few. The particular form of the genre has also been recognised. In 1985, Clare Hanson reminded us with force that not only was the short story of that time important, but also that it had initiated a whole tradition in itself: the “short story”, as opposed to “short fiction”.[3]
Yet compared to the wealth and importance of these stories in their time, critical appraisals of this form have been very few. The classic short story tradition is often dismissed, in one word, as pertaining only to the “naturalistic” story — or as being, in Rohrberger’s words, only “simple narrative”.[4] Only a few writers have had their stories studied in any detail, while the short stories of Naturalists like Émile Zola, Gerhart Hauptmann and Giovanni Verga — so influential across Europe — have been largely ignored, as have Leonid Andreyev, Nikolai Leskov and Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin. Even Pirandello and Maupassant’s short stories have been paid only cursory glances. And even for the authors that are the focus of short story studies, only a handful of their stories are analysed. To take Chekhov as an example, only a few of his stories, especially from the later period of his career, from Dama s sobachkoi (Lady with Lapdog, 1899) to Nevesta (The Bride, 1903, his last story), are widely cited, even though he wrote a hundred or so stories in his “major” period alone — these “epiphanic” stories have become the focus of analysis rather than his “classic” stories.
As a global study of the classic form was still missing, I undertook to concentrate on the short story at this time of its greatest efflorescence, across a number of different countries and languages, working with a corpus of more than a thousand stories. This research led me to see that this “classic” short story, albeit with infinitely various surface features, was built on a constant structure, had a characteristic relationship with its readers, and a generic outlook on its subject. This was nearly universal. It was not a question of giving a definition of the short story: many critics have stressed that this would not be very interesting, even if it were possible. It was a question of describing the tools of brevity in this particular form, and the relationship between the reader, the author, and the spectacle that one puts before the other. This survey showed that Chekhov and James, even in their greatest stories, used the same tools as Maupassant or Verga. Chekhov’s Lady with Lapdog is making a particularly powerful use of the antithetic structure common to classic short stories; James’s The Figure in the Carpet is particularly representative of the paroxystic representation of short story characters.
To test my hypothesis, and disengage the in-depth characteristics of this form, the first requirement seemed to me to survey in detail an international selection of the “greatest” short story authors. I chose to look at the entire body of stories of five major authors, one in each of the languages with which I was familiar (French, Russian, Italian, English and Japanese): Maupassant, Chekhov, Verga, James and Akutagawa. Maupassant was an obvious choice as he has largely been figured by critics as the master of the “classic” short story, as well as Chekhov, who is seen to embody “short fiction” (or the “modern” short story as I call it).[5] Verga was also an obvious choice, because he is such a popular author in his home country and because, unlike many classic short story writers, his work has been analysed by great critics from Luigi Russo to Leo Spitzer and the progressive Marxists. James was not only central to the discussion of the form by Anglophone critics, but also made what is maybe the most exquisite use of the form. In Japan, Mori Ōgai was my first choice, since he was one of the greatest authors of the time; but instead I decided to focus on Akutagawa because, like Maupassant and Chekhov, he wrote both “classic” stories and “short fiction”.[6]
The second step was to place these great authors in the context of their time: to read Maupassant along with Alphonse Daudet, and James along with Rudyard Kipling. More importantly, I decided to read them in the same place as the audience of the time: in the newspapers and the intellectual journals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This was more fruitful than I could have imagined. First, it allowed me to see these stories in the vicinity of the other genres of the newspapers (chronicles, reports, anecdotes, etc), with which they have interesting resemblances and differences. Secondly, it explained what is maybe the essential feature of the “classic” short story: its exoticism. Most of these stories deal with characters that are in some ways removed from the reader (either by place, time, race or class).
“Modern” short stories that follow less generic conventions may very well be more satisfying for twenty-first-century readers than the classic form. Throughout this book, I do not shy away from acknowledging the classic short story’s limitations: these stories can be extraordinarily powerful, but the form is also somewhat stifling. However, the very fact that the greatest authors of the time abundantly and continuously produced classic short stories should draw our attention to the possibilities of the form. They did great things with potentially restrictive structural “laws”. In doing so, they were part of a democratisation of literature: this was a form that could be read, like the serial, by a large number of readers — but which could also give quick, swift pleasure to readers accustomed to more demanding writing.
The authors that I focus on in this book participated in the Naturalist period’s criticism of what they perceived to be the backward state of their countries. Verga and Chekhov published throughout their lives in intellectual journals (tolstye zhurnaly or “thick journals” as they were called in Russia) where their stories were side-by-side with austere articles about science and statistics, and their possible application to ease the nation’s poverty. Maupassant and the French Naturalists, from Paul Alexis to Zola, published in newspapers that sometimes bore the very title of Le Progrès (The Progress), and the transformation of the nation was paramount in their minds. The short story gave them a powerful tool for denunciation of a state of society they felt was unbearable.
Yet paradoxically these stories often played the role of reinforcing the social — and sometimes racial — prejudices of the reader. It was precisely this drawback that led to the form’s deconstruction in the twentieth century. The greatness of the authors studied in this book lies in their having become sensible to this stifling effect of the classic form, and having opened new avenues to the genre. Maupassant, for example, experimented with the form in his tales of madness and Chekhov wrote stories based on a dilemma, thus putting into question the very idea of a stable, affirmative self and the superiority of one “voice” over the others. But this should not lead us to forget that this was only one part of their work, and that they also led long and admirable careers as “classic” short story writers.
The Classic Short Story, 1870-1925: Theory of a Genre (2014) by Florence Goyet is freely available to read and download.
[1] Mary Rohrberger, Hawthorne and the Modern Short Story: A Study in Genre (The Hague: Mouton, 1966), p. 11.
[2] Charles E. May (ed.), Short Story Theories (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1976). The quote is from Charles E. May, “The Nature of Knowledge in Short Fiction”, in The New Short Story Theories, ed. by Charles E. May (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1994), pp. 131-43 (p. 133).
[3] Clare Hanson, Short Stories and Short Fictions, 1880-1980 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985).
[4] Mary Rohrberger, “Origins, Development, Substance, and Design of the Short Story: How I Got Hooked on the Short Story and Where It Led Me”, in The Art of Brevity (2004), pp. 1-13 (p. 5).
[5] It is difficult in English to find a word to specify this type of short story without entering into the debate on “modernism/postmodernism”. What I mean by “modern” is a story that renounces the anecdote, and thus, the “classic” format. I discuss this in detail in the book’s epilogue.
[6] Akutagawa’s career began a little later than the others: his first texts date from 1914.
Tony Curtis, “The Young Juggler”
By Jan M. Ziolkowski
What a difference the passage of six decades can make! On March 29, 1960 “The Young Juggler” was broadcast, in the heyday of national television, for the first and only occasion in the United States. The only later screening of the 49-minute installment took place in the museum of Dumbarton Oaks on January 23, 2019, in tandem with the exhibition “Juggling the Middle Ages”.
The lead, the movie idol Tony Curtis, was born on June 3, 1925 and died on September 29, 2010. If alive today in 2020, Curtis would be nearing 95. The story of his involvement with the jongleur de Notre Dame—of a very secular Jew caught up in a legend of Christian devotion to the Virgin Mary, of a film star who at that point had his pick of roles in the biggest motion pictures but who chose to self-fund the reenactment of a tale that is now nearly forgotten—merits attention before the facts have vanished into the mists of oblivion. In his last memoir, the production had disappeared from his filmography.[1]
New-York-born, the future actor spoke Hungarian for his first six years. In all his movies, his pronunciation immediately betrays, often with unintentional and anachronistic humor, the indelible accent that he picked up from living on the East Side of the City. This trait led to his being teasingly nicknamed “Boinie” for his pronunciation of his own first name: before taking on his consummately WASP nom de théâtre, he went by the un-Hollywood-ish birth name of Bernard Schwartz.
In popular culture Curtis’s fame may be waning, but he remains known for the standouts in his oeuvre, for being the father of the actress Jamie Lee Curtis, and for the tabloid-worthiness of his private life, starting with the fact that he was married six times and finishing with a very public dispute about alleged golddigging in the handling of his estate between his final wife and surviving children.
But let’s put aside this century’s gossip and travel back sixty years or so to the 1950s, Tony Curtis’s heyday as a heart throb. With his thick black hair and oft-bared chest, he made his reputation in costume dramas of Hollywood’s so-called Israeli period, especially the sword-and-sandal blockbuster from 1960, “Spartacus.” A personal favorite of mine among such historical fictions, requiring slightly warmer footgear, was the swashbuckler of historical fiction, “The Vikings.” In this cinematic sizzler from 1958, the leading roles belonged (as those in “Spartacus” would again two years later) to Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis. In response, the stand-up comedian Lenny Bruce (1925–1966) commented “Even the Vikings are Jewish.”[2] Beyond these peplum movies, Curtis’s most memorable role was his comedic turn as co-star with the consummate “blonde bombshell” Marilyn Monroe in “Some Like It Hot,” from 1959.
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How does Tony Curtis tie in with the jongleur de Notre Dame? On that fateful date in 1960, NBC-TV ran, in a program called Startime, his production. The telefilm was originally to be billed simply as “The Juggler,” but the title picked up the adjective “Young” to avoid confusion and copyright quibbles with a feature-length picture from 1953 with Kirk Douglas.[3] When the network segment screened, Tony Curtis was thirty-four years old. As the chronology of all the preceding films suggests, his career stood at its height. Though his marquee value declined steeply from then on, he starred later in the decade as serial killer Albert DeSalvo in the 1968 thriller of “The Boston Strangler.”
“The Young Juggler” is based loosely on the short story by Anatole France.[4] This version steers the tale in a weird direction. The performer is set upon by a mob of husbands because of his womanizing with their wives. The cuckolds, although they do not employ the word explicitly, want to castrate him. Before being cut short in this way, the entertainer escapes, but only by betraying his best friend who dies after suffering near-crucifixion. In connection with the last motif, it is worth relating that the showtime episode was televised not in May, which in Catholicism is labeled the month of Mary, or December, when Christmas would make Marianism more plausible, but in Lent: in 1960, Easter Sunday, fell on April 17.
To wrap up this quick recapitulation of the plot, the wounded juggler seeks refuge from his enemies inside an unidentified European monastery. Nursed back to health, he realizes that he has lost use of one arm and can no longer practice his profession. In despair, he goes so far as to ask why God did not end his life instead of his juggling. Through therapy and faith, the injured man experiences an unexpected recovery. In return, he offers the Madonna—the statue of the Virgin Mary—the only gift he has: his juggling act. He is rewarded with a miracle.
Curtis claimed to be conflicted about the pluses and minuses of television. At one stage he professed to be happy to make money while gaining acting experience. But on other instances he criticized the crass commercialism of the medium. The weekly TV Guide headlined “The Short TV Career of Tony Curtis.”[5] In the article, he indicated that “the Young Juggler” would likely be his last appearance on the small screen. That prediction proved to be anything but true.[6]
In one of his autobiographies, Curtis ascribed credit for “The Young Juggler” to two factors, the influence of actor Cary Grant and his own interest in circus skills.[7] He described the film as dramatizing “the story of St. Barnaby, the patron saint of variety acts.”[8] No such holy man will be found in serious works on hagiography, but he has been included in popular works on saints. Why? Because Anatole France gave the name to the central figure of his short story about “Le jongleur de Notre Dame,” or “The Juggler of Our Lady.” On the same basis, Barnaby has been used as a stage name by professional jugglers.[9] From this the protagonist achieved, if only popularly, sanctification.
When invited to take a crack at producing a Startime feature, Curtleigh Productions came up with the idea of “The Young Juggler.”[10] Curtis was adamant that the episode was not a television program, but a film shown first on television. He judged it “a good picture.” In his much later autobiography, he indicated that he had intended to add footage and to release the telefilm as a conventional feature-length movie.[11]
His understanding of the story was idiosyncratic, to put it mildly. In an interview he characterized the show as being a period piece, set in 16th-century France, an adaptation of the legend of St. Barnaby. St. Barnaby was a bumbler who became crippled and got back his talents through a miracle while tumbling to entertain a statue of the Virgin.
He regarded “The Young Juggler” as “therapy,” one among other “miracles happening from within.” To him, the preeeminent theme was of “a man’s conquering his fears.” He summed up: “I’m a firm believer in the old saying, God helps those who help themselves.”
The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity. Volume 6: War and Peace, Sex and Violence (2018), written by Jan M. Ziolkowski, is freely available to read and download. The first five volumes are also freely available.
[1] Tony Curtis, with Peter Golenbock, American Prince: A Memoir (New York: Harmony Books, 2008), 340–341.
[2] Nathan Abrams, Stanley Kubrick: New York Jewish Intellectual (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018).
[3] More recently had come the animated short “The Juggler of Our Lady” from 1958.
[4] The narrative had been treated already in “The Greatest Gift,” a short that premiered in 1941.
[5] Bob Johnson, “The Short TV Career of Tony Curtis,” TV Guide Vol. 8, no. 13, issue 365 (March 26), 17–19.
[6] He played in the action-comedy series “The Persuaders” with Roger Moore (1927–2017) that aired in 1971. Later he returned in “McCoy” in 1975 and “Vegas” in the late 1970s, as well as a frequent guest star on other programs. He did a voiceover as a character named Stony Curtis once in the animated sitcom “The Flintstones” (1960–1966).
[7] Tony Curtis and Barry Paris, Tony Curtis: The Autobiography (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1993), 178.
[8] Curtis and Paris, Tony Curtis, 178, 341.
[9] Thus a man born Dan Jeffery called himself Barnaby after he abandoned college English teaching to become a juggler: https://www.juggle.org/obituary-barnaby-dan-jeffery/
[10] The name of the production company fused the first syllable of Curtis’s last name with that of his then wife Janet Leigh (1927–2004).
[11] Curtis and Paris, Tony Curtis, 178.
From Darkness to Light: Writers in Museums 1798-1898
By Rosella Mamoli Zorzi
From Darkness to Light, Writers in Museums 1798-1898 (2019) presents essays that explore, for the first time, the reaction of writers and artists to museums and galleries that were not yet lit by electric light.
It is well-known that most visitors in the Venice Scuola Grande di San Rocco – including John Ruskin and, later, Henry James – complained because there was not enough light for them to see the great Tintoretto teleri. But is darkness a way to allow a special reading of paintings? Is the LED-bright lighting, which we find in most museums and galleries today, the way in which painters wanted their works to be seen? Why did museums not use gaslight, as was done in theatres and in the streets? Why did museums use electric light much later than homes, not until well into the 1920s and 1930s?
This volume aims to explain the answers to these and many more questions, through the contributions of writers, scholars, and artists. One of the great experts on artificial light, David E. Nye, describes the time it takes before discoveries in electric lighting are actually part of everyday life; the great Italan writer, Melania G. Mazzucco, analyzes the inner or transcendental light of Tintoretto’s work; Burton K. Kummerow shows how gaslight was used in the Peale Museum in the USA, much earlier than in the Victoria and Albert Museum, which claimed to be the first to have used it. Cristina Acidini discusses the excess of light in the Florence Uffizi, a situation that was quite different from most museums and presented a whole new set of challenges.
Read this book – freely available to read and download online – and you’ll find these and many other responses to the gradual introduction of electric light in museums and galleries.
From Darkness to Light, Writers in Museums 1798-1898 (2019) edited by Rosella Mamoli Zorzi and Katherine Manthorne, is an Open Access book.
A thank-you note to my publisher and readers
Three days ago, with so much going on—and not going on—in my own country and around the world, a small anniversary slipped by: the one-year mark since Open Book Publishers issued my third book and first open-access title, Tennyson’s Poems: New Textual Parallels.
Two months ago, I wrote to OBP Marketing and Library Relations Officer Laura Rodriguez—whose enthusiasm for her titles is benignly contagious—that the book had ‘just blasted past 2,000’. As of this morning, online readership stands at 1,800 and free downloads at 883, for a total of just under 2,700. The three-thousand mark can’t be too far away.
Of course, the spike in ‘sales’ is partly based on tragedy. Tennyson scholars in the US, the UK, and around the world—like me and like millions of other scholars literary and otherwise, academic and independent—are holed up at home waiting for the current plague to pass, hoping it will spare them and their loved ones, hoping—and trying—to get on with their lives.
So the seven-hundred jump in readers of my book over the past two months is at least partly attributable to a lot of folks suddenly having, against their wishes and through no fault of their own, a lot of time on their hands.
Be that as it may, a reader is a reader, and is very welcome. It is heartening that so many scholars and students of literature are, like me, doing their best to put their captivity to good use, to read something new, learn something new, perhaps write something new. We may never become modern-day prisoners of Chillon, learning to love our chains. But our unexpected and unwelcome abundance of free time need not also be unproductive.
After publishing my Tennyson book last year, I turned to the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, found much of it (to be perfectly frank) forgettable, but fell in love with Aurora Leigh. A half-dozen readings of that verse-novel and related criticism later, I wrote an article-length study of the unidentified and misidentified textual parallels—allusions and echoes—it contains, submitted it to a leading literary journal which sent it out for review, and am now waiting to hear back. All that before the new coronavirus hit.
Since it hit, I’ve returned to the study of Emily Dickinson, who in the 1860s also fell in love with Aurora Leigh, and whose letters, I’ve been finding, are also filled with undocumented textual parallels. Her poetry as well? That remains to be seen, but I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.
One of the miracles of modern technology is, I’ve discovered, how much literary research one can do at home. Without password and without charge, one can access virtually all of pre-twentieth century world literature and criticism, and much of more recent origin.
One can search for words, phrases, lines, and passages in the works of one or more poets, novelists, dramatists and others authors, as well as in scripture, that recognizably recur, for a variety of thematic and other valid reasons, in the works of other, later writers.
One can do meaningful scholarship without having already read everything there is to read and remembered verbatim everything one has read.
Open Book Publishers and other enterprises like it (if any such exist) are also miracles of modern technology, making peer-reviewed, well-edited, well-produced scholarly works widely and immediately available without charge to any and all would-be readers.
By helping scholars and students get through these difficult times and learn something of value along the way, they are performing a valuable public service, deserving and earning the gratitude of authors and readers alike.
R. H. Winnick is the author of Tennyson's Poems: New Textual Parallels. You can read & download this book for free or get your own hard copy here. You can also read Winnick's previous blog post Allusion/Echo and Plagiarism: Walking the Fine Line here and follow him at @rhwinnick.
The World Dislocated
By Ellyn Toscano
We are living through a moment of profound disorientation, dispossession, dislocation. How the pandemic will end – and it will – and how we return to social, political and commercial life is uncertain and almost too difficult to anticipate. With no direct experience on which to call for guidance, most of us find it hard to anticipate or plan our future.
Millions of people are sheltering in their homes, isolated from each other and incited by fear to suspect others of bringing this threat into their world. Those nationalist movements that have been slowly gaining adherents to the view that globalization represents an incursion on safe, secure and homogeneous cultures are triumphant in the work that the pandemic is doing to close borders, incite xenophobia and restrict liberty. With so many ill and vulnerable, the attention of the paralyzed public to the plight of migrants huddled perilously closely in detention centers or migrant camps or prisons is diverted.
Not everybody has a safe home into which to retreat and resources on which to rely when work is lost. What will happen to people already displaced by war, famine, globalized climate change and nationalist governments? The world’s 25.9 million refugees already are in situations of conflict, often with no or rudimentary health care. In the US, 37,000 people were detained, unsafely, in government facilities; 6,300 migrants on its Mexico border were expelled using emergency powers to curb coronavirus spread. In one of Greece’s 30 migrant centers on the mainland, 23 migrants tested positive for coronavirus and residents, including 252 unaccompanied children, were advised to remain in their rudimentary temporary dwellings. Migrant workers, who travel long distances for work, including across borders, already precarious and marginal, are losing jobs. With borders slamming shut, people can neither stay put, nor return to the places from which they have fled.
The numbers by which we define this pandemic are staggering and hard to comprehend. Hundreds of thousands of people are sick and dying from COVID-19. Millions have lost their livelihood. Billions of dollars are lost and billions are appropriated to save the economy.
As always, the numbers have unstable meaning and elide the lived experiences of people. It is not that the statistics are unimportant: they tell us one truth. But, as always, truth is ambiguous. And ambiguity is the space of artists.
The work in Women and Migration: Responses in Art and History reminds us of the beauty and complexity of the lived experience. Art holds a space for the human story. These essays are an historical offering, helping us to think about home and loss, family and belonging, isolation, borders and identity – issues salient both in experiences of migration and in the epochal times in which we find ourselves today.
Women and Migration contains stories of trauma and fear, to be sure, but also the strength, perseverance, hope and even joy of women surviving their own moments of disorientation and dislocation.
Ellyn Toscano is co-editor of Women and Migration: Responses in Art and History (2019). The book is Open Access (free to read and download).