Malax, a friend back in Silliman University undergraduate days visited New York and met up with me at Union Square. We were able to keep in touch through Facebook. So when she told me she was coming to New York, I was happy to set a meeting with her because well, I haven’t had friends visit me her recently. And I could use some company. I’ve been so busy with schoolwork, I don’t remember the last time I went out to have fun. Not even on Halloween. Anyway, Malax and I had lunch at Saigon Grill at 13th University Place. The food was divine. I love the vermicelli with bean sprouts and grilled chicken I had. Even the spring rolls were amazingly delicious. Or maybe I was just too hungry. But yes, lunch was fun since we got to talk about so many things and shared so many stories about our life here in the US.
Then we decided to brave the cold autumn weather (unfortunately the temperature dropped today to 42-45 F) to visit Central Park because I haven’t been there yet. We got to ride the carriage that takes us on a tour around the park. I was freezing because I forgot to bring my gloves. But when it was time to take pictures I had to summon all the strength to smile through chattering teeth.
It was a fun afternoon. Too bad I had to go home early to work on a report on Tuesday. Looking forward to a break so I could do more tourist stuff in the coming weeks. 
image from wikimedia
He lived til the age of 100. Amazing how that sounds for our generation who has a short lifespan. And yet, he will still live longer than that, I mean his name will and his ideas will for 100 years or more. One of the great thinkers of our time this man. Despite that I am at odds with some of his ideas now, there was a time when I had to really study structuralism and understand how it works in terms of language. And yes, it made sense. So I salute you Mr. Claude Levi Strauss for living up to 100 and for making an indelible mark in our quest to understand how we as human beings experience this world.
Here’s the excerpt from the LA Times Obituary:
Claude Levi-Strauss dies at 100; French philosopher’s ideas transformed anthropology
He was known as the father of modern anthropology because of his then-revolutionary conclusion that so-called primitive societies did not differ greatly intellectually from modern ones.
Claude Levi-Strauss, the French philosopher widely considered the father of modern anthropology because of his then-revolutionary conclusion that so-called primitive societies did not differ greatly intellectually from modern ones, died Friday at his home in Paris from natural causes. He was 100.
Part philosopher, part sociologist and entirely humanist, he studied tribes in Brazil and North America, concluding that virtually all societies shared powerful commonalities of behavior and thought, often expressing them in myths. Towering over the French intellectual scene in the 1960s and 1970s, he founded the school of thought known as structuralism, which holds that common features exist within the enormous varieties of human experience. Those commonalities are rooted partly in nature and partly in the human brain itself. READ MORE
photo taken outside my apartment by John Bengan
John and I met up this Tuesday early afternoon for a short excursion/photo shoot for my project in school. We ate brunch at our favorite pizza place and talked about school, the deadlines we have to deal with, classmates and other concerns. It was fun hanging out for a few hours with him.
The day started warm and sunny than usual so I decided to wear color. I mean, those were the only colors I have so far in my closet. Most of my outfit these days consist of basic blacks, grays and whites. But this day was different, I wanted to feel vibrant like the weather. John thought it was cool to take a picture of moi in this state of orange madness. The picture turned out beautiful than I expected.
Unfortunately, an hour after this, the temperature suddenly dropped, and so we had to cover ourselves up with our black woolen coats, and walk the streets along the sea of black to the subway station. It was such a bummer.
But surprisingly though, the colors I wore that day made me a lot chirpier than usual.
photo by Jean Claire Dy 2009/NYC
every night i return from school into one of the doors of this row of houses leading to my temporary home, my room, my sanctuary.
click on image for larger view.
so this afternoon i asked john’s help for my sound art project by asking him to record his voice while reading some document. it was fun as we did it at p’s place. i had to go there to water the plants for the last time this month because p is coming back on friday. anyway, we went out around dusk into the autumn bleakness of a rain-wet harlem. i had my camera with me as i had attempted to take pictures during the shower earlier that afternoon. john thought it was good to take a picture of me wearing my sweater with the hoodie over my head. and so i posed gamely. i realized later that the common color of the pictures was reddish auburn. i went home, which was two blocks away from p’s right after while john had to go to school. it was a cold cold rainy night here but i guess it felt less lonely. something tells me there are so many bright news waiting for us at the end of this semester. i just hope everything just goes well as planned.
photos taken by johnnypanic
when i was a kid studying in an elementary school established by american missionaries, halloween was a big deal even though my country doesn’t celebrate it because at school, in art class, our art teacher would asked us to look for large pumpkins that we could carve into jack-o-lanterns. picking big pumpkins was always difficult because pumpkins were rarely grown in the city and so my sister and i would rely on a small squash to make a really small jack-o-lantern. and if we really fail to find a squash, the teacher would come up with an ingenious plan of gathering materials for us to shape a jack-o-lantern out of paper mache, which would not be able to light with a candle but instead with a small flashlight.
but there was always something missing about our halloween. there was a huge cultural divide that we could never grasp, and so halloween for us was a concept we see in movies and read in books. for my part, i never really understood the practice. it contradicted everything that i was taught to do. november 1 is the day of the dead in my country, and so usually, we were told to go to the cemeteries and visit our dead loved ones and commemorate their lives. it wasn’t about dressing up in halloween costumes and trick or treating.
but we did go trick or treating, as how we imagined it, in our school where our teachers would explain to us the purpose of the whole thing. we liked candies and receiving presents anyway.
so it was such a wonderful experience for me to go home tonight to find myself staring at a jack-o-lantern right near the apartment’s front door. what a way to remind me that i am in place where halloween is really a big deal, a place of my childhood imaginings, a place where people really buy costumes to prepare for a halloween parade, where visiting cemeteries to hold parties and stage drunken pursuits is out of the question.
i am so looking forward to this halloween. i have a jack-o-lantern to prove it.
photo by Jean Claire Dy (2009)
Yesterday was the second best lecture I’ve ever attended in my Understanding Media Studies class. The first one was of Douglas Rushkoff who is such an engaging speaker and thinker, I didn’t catch my mind trailing off to other places like it always does in a 2-hour lecture. His ideas deserve another blog entry.
But yesterday was different. Yesterday we had Prof. Kit Laybourne, author of the book Mediapedia, which is required reading in my concepts class and which I have thoroughly read and loved. Laybourne teaches at the New School too in subjects like the Producer’s Chops and Producing and Directing the Short. What made me interested in him was that aside from being an educator, he is also an accomplished media practitioner. When he mentioned that he was one of the pioneering team for Nickelodeon (his wife created it), and that he worked making IDs for MTV, I knew I had to listen to the man.
His lecture was very practical, and yes, informed by media design. Even his powerpoint presentation was well done. And over-all his lecture was interactive so that he made us read, do, and ponder on long after it was done.
One of the things that struck from his lecture was his story about Marshall McLuhan and his “think bombs.” Prof. Laybourne mentioned that what was interesting and good about McLuhan’s thinking is that it is focused on “probes, not truisms and aphorisms,” his thoughts are “open-ended” and relies on “wordplay.” These are somewhat required characteristics of a good media thinker.
And he showed us what he meant by displaying some of McLuhan’s “think bombs,” and made us write down one that has caught our attention.
I wrote: “News, far more than art, is artifact. “
And true enough, last night, I couldn’t stop but think about this idea over and over.
There were so many good stuff that Prof. Laybourne shared to us yesterday. Each part of his three-part lecture is a take-home learning experience, something you can’t shove away for next season’s examination, because each learning confronts you like never before not because the ideas are novel, but because they are familiar and taken for granted.
If I have to summarize my emotions and realizations after the lecture, I would say that I look forward to probing some more of the media minefield in the coming days. It’s scary yes, because it might involve veering away from a study plan that took me a year to do with IFP’s assistance, but at the same time, it is exciting in that it involves me treading in unknown waters and watching how the fish learned to swim.
Fear of the Carnality of the Hypertext: The Need for Interrogating Electronic Literary Forms
*a reaction paper I wrote as an exercise for class*
Jean Claire A. Dy
Soong Chun Park
Understanding Media Studies
October 19, 2009
Fear of the Carnality of the Hypertext:
The Need for Interrogating Electronic Literary Forms
During the panel discussion “The End of Print” in the “Taboan: The Philippine International Writers Festival 2009” last February, where I was a panelist, questions were raised about how to differentiate what is “literary” from what is not among works pervading cyberspace, from blogs to self-published poetry websites to established literary journals. Clearly, there was a strong divide between those writers who see web-publishing unquestionable and those who do because they believe that online/web-publishing is inauthentic and less rigorous compared to print publishing. The very title of the panel is an example of this growing fear of the carnality of the hypertext based on the assumption that web-publishing signals a kind of erasure of books thereby also an erasure of the creative writer as we know him/her—someone who publishes works in printed copies of books.
Also, there was no discussion of other electronic literary forms such as, e-poetry or the interactive fictional story, because most of the writers/literary scholars in the discussion relegated these forms as more “art” than literary for these forms used other media to tell the story or make the poem happen.
I realized then the need for literary scholars to explore the definitions of what can be considered literary in the light of the growing technological and media changes that confront the creative writer. Exploratory academic papers, such as that written by Jan Betens and Jan Van Looy entitled E-Poetry between Image and Performance: A Cultural Analysis are useful to bring attention to and further the discussion of the perceived evolution of other genres in literary studies and how they intersect with e-media studies. The paper does not provide readymade answers to the questions on literary merit however, instead it raises more questions and somehow provides some groundwork for additional explorations from different academic perspectives into what Betens and Van Looy considered a marginal field of study.
Using a cultural studies perspective, Betens and Van Looy assert the importance of studying e-poetry as a new form in the field of contemporary poetry because there is “relative ignorance toward e-poetry as a form. Indeed, compared to similar evolutions in other media, e-poetry is not only in quantitative terms small business – there has been no global shift from poetry in print to e-poetry as there has been, for instance, in photography or music – it is also in critical terms marginal and hardly researched, let alone thoroughly analyzed and described” (Betens and Van Looy, “E-Poetry between Image and Performance: A Cultural Analysis”).
Further, Betens and Van Looy attempt to define and differentiate the two stances—patrimonial and cultural—from which e-poetry can be regarded by scholars. By examining e-poetry first through a patrimonial stance, Beten and Van Looy were able to illustrate how e-poetry and its characteristics, that it “is interactive, a form of multimedia writing, and that it is mobile and dynamic,” are not new since “older forms of poetry have also been interactive and non-linear.” They argued that by limiting the approach within the patrimonial stance however, it is likely that scholars will fall for the tendency to “look at the new in the light of the old” (Betens and Van Looy, “E-Poetry between Image and Performance: A Cultural Analysis”).
What makes this argument valid and beneficial to literary writers, like those who attended the panel discussion in Taboan, is that it might quell fears of the end of print, which correlates with their fear of new forms of web writing viewed as threats to traditional forms. As Henry Jenkins opines “old media never die…they don’t even necessarily fade away. What dies are simply tools we use to access media content….(called) delivery technologies” (Jenkins 13). The creative writer won’t face erasure but will have to deal with new delivery technologies in the long run.
It is in relation to questions about the possibility of the death of the book or print publishing of poetry that Beten and Van Looy may have unwittingly attempted to answer. Asserting that e-poetry is a cultural form, the authors, proposed that it should be approached from a cultural/anthropological perspective, and a shift away from studying e-poetry in an essentialist/formalist manner by also focusing on its performative aspect.
To support their claim that e-poetry is another form yet is inseparable from poetry in print, Betens and Van Looy demonstrated how e-poetry interacts with poetry in print in an intertextual and interactive process—from digital to print and vice versa, through a close reading of Eric Sadin’s Tokyo and Pierre Alferi’s Intime. By showing this process, the authors were able to actually illustrate the impossibility of the demise of poetry in print and perhaps print publishing.
One important question that the paper may have failed to consider is that of intent related to genetic criticism. From the point of view of the creator of e-poetry, how does the new technology change, if it does at all, the genetic processes of the new form? How does the writer interact with the new technology and if this new technology changed “intent” in the light of the redefinition of the page. And generally, are there and will there be more practices of convergence? Or will other writers assert to draw a line between poetry in print and electronic poetry?
The problem with solely reading e-poetry and other forms of electronic literary productions from a cultural studies perspective is that they are often regarded cultural artifacts, and studied outside the realm of art production and the study of artistic/creative processes. What I look forward to is an artistic research study that seeks to explore electronic poetry from the poet’s perspective, illustrating/interrogating the creative processes which his/her product, in this case e-poetry, underwent. Such study might be possible minus the formalist/essentialist trappings of current creative writing or literary studies criticisms.
However, at this point, Betens and Van Looy’s paper suffices in a way that it has opened new ways into interrogating electronic literary forms in general.
Works Cited
Betens, Jan and Van Looy, Jan. “E-Poetry between Image and Performance: A Cultural
Analysis.” Journal of E-Media Studies . 2008. Web. 13 October 2009.
Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York:
New York University Press, 2008. Print.
*wordpress doesn’t allow other functions so the formatting I did for the revision got lost in translation, to view the right MLA format, click DY reaction paper for pdf
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| Make a Smilebox slideshow |
a response to Donna Miranda’s question: Tell Me Why. Start with Because,” which she posted on her FB status for some to answer. I did write back in words starting with because but then a week ago, I somehow stumbled upon this concept that was inspired from some of those answers to her status and so I came up with this too. I know it does look crude and amateurish. I did it for a class assignment. But I just wanted to share this as a way to illustrate how another artist’s questionings can be a springboard for a response that will lead to another’s meaning-making.
