McKee Response Questions

1. McKee opens her essay by recognizing all the ambiance noises that we seldom take note of. Stop now and listen. Type out what you hear. How do these sounds shape what you write (other than being the answer to the question, you card you)?

2. Name several examples of your lifestyle that hinge upon sound to imbue them with meaning. What is the nature of these sounds? How does it fit in the context of the related "event"? What meaning do these sounds achieve? How would changing the sounds distort or change meaning?

3. McKee cites a pretty jarring quote: In 1762, Thomas Sheridan (1968) pronounced in A Course of Lectures on Elocution that “some of our greatest men have been trying to do that with the pen, which can only be performed by the tongue; to produce effects by the dead letter, which can never be produced but by the living
voice, with its accompaniments” (p. xii). What does Sheridan mean? Can you think of any examples that prove his point or disprove his point? What benefits does an aural delivery claim over "silent" text?

Splotches: Photoshop Project Creating a Visual Poem

Splotches

By: Eric Anderson

Townhouses gnash together

like shrapnel-studded teeth—

cloned assemblages of

bleached sentinels that jut

crookedly from the old dust.

They guard the rusted railroad

tracks on which,

lifetimes ago, I almost killed myself

during a game of chicken.

My limp resolve drags

me to this muzzle flash

In the mud of my memory.

The dust is gone but

the haze remains.

The old ice-cream shop’s

ripped booths have evolved

into glaring brass tables,

so children can sip

milkshakes in a bullet shell.

Condos have sprouted

from the ragball field

like pale weeds.

Here, my Bronze Star is

nothing

but a penny

flattened on the tracks.

The witch grass and

alfalfa that tickled our

hairless calves—

withered.

The sweet sweat glistening

on our budding stubble,

burning our blind eyes—

frozen.

When we had sufficiently

smeared the queer,

we brought out our sling-shots,

sipped coca-colas,

and blew smoke rings

beneath the lone eucalypt

in the world of dust.

We waited for the fireflies

to crawl out

from the witch grass

and illuminate splotches of night.

I remember catching

lightning bugs in

strawberry jam jars,

watching their silly bug brains

crash into the glass

walls of their death chamber.

We drew straws for the right

to empty their beady bodies

on the oily parking lot.

It was a thrilling honor to squish

them into the black concrete,

as the neighborhood boys crowded

around the fading streak

of iridescent yellow

smearing the earth.

The shiny medals pinned

on my chest reflect the streetlights’

bright white blaze bombarding the dusk.

Each blinding bulb spreads

the light of the world

across the dark face

of the earth.

With so much light

it is hard to see.

But eventually,

I place my jar on the rusty

railroad track,

then walk away

with a yellowy splotch

on the toe of my boot.

I wrote "Splotches" my freshman year. Unlike other old poems that cause me to cringe upon rereading, I still like this one. It's about a soldier returning to his hometown to rescue his younger self. He relishes the boyhood, those days secured in the innocence of jaded memory when spreading the light of the world on a sweaty summer evening was as simple as smearing lightning bugs. Now, the poem implies, he has returned from some battle where the violence of his mission -- just like the violence of smearing lightning bugs on the ground for some temporary pleasure -- has destroyed his direction. And now the images of warfare and boyhood inhabit the same environment. He has gone across the world to fight some war, for some "illuminating" cause, only to find that the lantern of civilization that he wields is only burning people -- including himself.

I was hesitant to use my own writing as a springboard into the visual realm. Just as, while editing, we overlook certain flaws or errors because we see what should be there rather than what is there, so too did I fear that my proximity to both creations would cause me to read clarity into the image. What is readily apparent to the creator is often baffling to the viewer. Sure, sometimes the very piece of art or poem or image that causes us to scratch our heads also causes us to grin in awe. But as brevity is the soul of wit, so too do I believe that clarity is a higher virtue than muddled complexity. We as humans seek to understand. As a general rule of thumb, I find it more courageous to represent a complex thing simply than a simple thing with complexity. Doing the latter will make you a genius sometimes and a pompous asshole often. And I, with five frustrated hours of photoshop fiddling notched into my belt, had rookie-blues lined up against me. Kind of like kissing a girl. Go in all the way if your name isn't Pitt and you're a psychotic-creepazoid. Remain completely aloof and you're headed for Lonesomeville, Population: You.

Mostly, however, I was curious to see how closely the visual related to the written word. How closely could I sew together the written poem and the visual poem without doing a disservice to or, worse, suffocating one or the other? I erected another barrier to prevent cross-pollination of meanings and representation (an event that, should I allow it to happen, would surely father some ugly ducklings): I decided to use my poem as inspiration for the image rather than a strict map of the visual. Regurgitating the words of the poem into an image promised to be uncreative, difficult, imprecise, and ultimately stale. A visual poem and a traditional poem should synergize, combine like gunpowder and sparks to burst with meaning, not bash the viewer/reader over the head with monotony.

So I decided to make the photoshop image the literary equivalent of what movies call "based on a true story." The poem served as an impetus to bottle some lightning from brainstorming sessions. It is not a strict visual representation of the poem because striving for such would betray the project instructions, the visual poem, the traditional poem and an achy-breaky heart. Plus, I wanted the image to stand alone, without needing the crutch of "Splotches" to give whatever meaning it may, if any. I'll toss that 12 oz. topic of debate into the hyena's den of literary criticism.

Ultimately, I felt thrust into gray area, that Somewhere Out There where I tried to hobnob a playpen for the two forms of representation that both attract and repel each other as if they encompassed both the positive and negative charges of a magnet. But just as kids can only play nicely in the sandbox for sometime before it becomes Sand Wars, so too were my creations biting and fighting. Didn't help that I hit myself with my hammer (i.e. photoshop) as much as I used it to constrain them.

Photoshop did have some nice features that allowed me to clarify the visual poem's message. One challenge I anticipated was that of getting inside the soldier's head. How the hell can I represent "thoughts" or "memories" -- such a huge staple of the traditional poem and the message I wanted to convey -- when my only tools were tangible, visible? This turned out not to be a challenge at all. The "ghostly" representation of all figures except the soldier allows the viewer to realize that the objects are not "physically" there. The viewer can logically assume that they are memories, ghosts, celestial bodies, or high-tech camouflage. I hope the overall vibe of the visual poem and the good taste of the viewer leads him/her to the "memory" reading. Ghost tanks in the middle of nowhere? Interesting, but implausible.

The head the soldier is holding might be confusing. But the lack of blood, the vitality and youthfulness of the visage, and the ghostly appearance should clearly clue the viewer to a variety of interesting and fairly accurate interpretations. I intended to illustrate that the soldier went back to find his youth, and there it is in the form of his boyhood head. The violence of the image is fitting. Trying to bridge back to memories and liberate a version of self long gone is a dire task, one that only drastic measures would force to endeavor.

At times this project frustrated me, worried me, angered me both in an aesthetic and technical sense. But I came to an important conclusion. Clarity, I realized, is not about portraying a unilaterally and universally accepted message. Nor is it about simplifying something to such a degree that any dimwit can say two sentences about it. Clarity is about providing the tools, whether through image or word, for the viewer or reader to formulate an argument or -- better yet -- a story about just what's going on. That's the fun and frustration of creation and interpretation. Because if you can't throw your two cents in and take some sort of ownership of what I the creator have made, then what's the point in looking or reading at all?

Response to Ashali's Question

3. Why would one want to design/view a stamp as a metaphor? Why is meaning needed behind sending something from one place to another?

Good question, and one that I think is harder to understand in our current communicative society, which values speed (in the form of email) over any sort of "art" or "metaphor." Snail mail is a secondary form of communication, except for boring things such as bills or political candidates searching for a vote.

A stamp is a form of advertisement. When they were designed, artists used them to glorify certain figures. Elkins uses the example of the queen.

Otherwise, I've used stamps to convey a certain tone. For example, when sending hand-written notes to professors who wrote scholarship applications for me, I put X-Men stamps on them. That's me: fun-loving, the spirit of a child, and thanking those profs for being "supernaturally" good at writing for me.

People can convey partiality to a cause, important historical figure, or nationalism through stamps. At my house we use "USA" stamps or "Liberty Bell" stamps. Figure that as long as we're sending it to someone in the US, most won't be offended or disagree with our choice of stamp.

Ultimately, it's better to convey something interesting and artsy than nothing. Stamps provide color for mail; I'm not sure we need to look too much beyond that except on a specific case-by-case basis.

Contemporary Depiction of Male/Female in Movie Posters

Berger says women in traditional European oil painting direct their glances towards the "one who considers himself her true lover -- the spectator-owner" (p.56). I was curious whether this standard holds true today. So I decided to conduct an experiment. I would look at one form of widely posted "modern oil painting," the movie poster.

My gut reaction was that movie posters would uphold this "flatter the male" standard. But I was hesitant to pronounce such a hypothesis as fact. Social standards have changed. Womens' rights movements have changed our perception of the female. And in Michael Crichton's travel memoir, Travels, he writes in a chapter titled "Them" how traditional male / female roles (a tradition established no clearer than in European oil paintings) have not only changed, but have been inverted. Males, Crichton argues, are the soft and sentimental ones. We're the ones who want flowers, want to cuddle, want foreplay consisting of conversation and "get-to-know-you" ice-breakers. Women don't, Crichton continues. Women treat men as sexual objects. Not the "centuries-old" other way around.

But, at risk of devolving into a nature/nurture debate, I think Berger touches on something fundamental to human psychology when he discusses why European oil paintings depicted women as the viewed. Something impervious to time and shifting cultural norms.


Now, here's a perfect example that runs contrary to the European oil painting model. The guy is looking at the viewer; Angelina Jolie is not. Angelina is, however, the bigger figure. She's in the foreground. Might this poster be trying to satisfy both male and female viewers? If we consider Berger's commerce-determines-what's-painted argument, I think it is clear that a dual-sex satisfaction is in order.


Hmm...same deal. The Titanic poster shows a fair representation of both sexes. Because of her open eyes, Kate acknowledges the spectator a tad more than Leo, who is immersed in his passion for her. But still, this poster is for a more egalitarian audience than the European oil paintings.


And one more. Both the guy and girl are completely captivated with one another. Never mind the audience.

Conclusion: Visual representation of the sexes certainly has changed. There are, however, compounding factors to consider. For one, movie posters are not European oil paintings, so any comparison is necesarily skewed. Movie posters are signifiers for a two-hour show. Clearly, they want to leave some mystery, otherwise, why pay a dime if the poster did it all? And posters would want to appeal to the largest possible viewership to maximize their viewing potential. So slighting a woman as the "visual apple" of a male is dangerous.

Berger and movie posters can agree on one thing: image depiction is dictated by commerce.

Unigo

This site, Unigo, is so spanking new that it's a glitchy wonderland of simple genius.

Just launched last week. But already it's changing the way high school seniors choose a school and how we perceive our own school.

Check out the New York Times article covering an absolutely fascinating article about young college grads harnessing the power of the internet to yet again change our access to information and, I would argue, our ways of seeing.

Unigo provides primary source college info -- typos and all. Once again the means of production are thrust into our hands. Let's crank the gears.

Discussion Questions for Berger

1. Berger distinguishes between the "naked" and the "nude." "Naked" is to be without clothes. "Nude" is a form of art (p. 53). Based upon these definitions and the larger discussion of the terms, are photographs in Playboy "naked" women or "nude" women? Why do you think Playboy photographs its models to achieve "nakedness" or "nudity?"

2. Berger maintains that "the nude in European oil painting is usually presented as an admirable expression of the European humanist spirit" (p. 62). He goes on to say how men conducted business beneath oil paintings of nudes to remind them of their masculinity. How have our cultural associations with nakedness changed in the digital age, where the internet thrives on pervasive palaces of pornography and advertisements follow the mantra: sex sells?

3. What separates great art from the merely mediocre? Rate the following factors on their importance in establishing great art, and offer an explanation if applicable.

- How widely produced or commdified the art is
- How malleable it is in lending itself to other form, content, spoof, tweaked reproduction
- How many people see and recognize it
- The sheer level of detail / complexity
- The originality of its content
- The originality of its idea
- The importance of the physical things it depicts
- The importance of the symbolic things it depicts
- The reputation of its creator

(Any other categories that determine "greatness")

Response to Ashali's Question

2. Why can't "realistic art" amplify the meaning of something like a simple cartoon can?

This question touches on one of McCloud's fundamental arguments. The simple answer is that we can see ourselves in a simple cartoon. He repeatedly gives the example of a circle with two dots and a line as a face. Even a face with emotion depending on how the dots are slanted and the line is positioned/curved. In fact, this image is so ingrained in our recognition that we cannot see it as anything else. I think a simple cartoon also frees up the artist to twist reality in a way that "realistic art" doe not allow. A simple cartoon thus champions symbolic descriptions through images rather than precise recreations of reality. A symbol, of course, is not sutured as closely to the signifier as reality aspires to be. So we as readers or watchers can bring the signifier (cartoonish symbol) back to the signified (what the cartoonish symbol represents or signals) by implanting our own meaning into the symbol -- a far easier task when the cartoon is simple.