Doing some research on a tangentially-related topic of physiology and narrative, I came across some Victorian material on “automatic writing,” which was a manifestation of mesmeric or psychic influence by which a person unconsciously produced writing – channelled from another person – without consciousness of the act. But among these results popped up this one …
I had a fascinating conversation with another Preparing Future Faculty fellow in the neuroscience & psychology department last week about the kind of visual processing that happens outside explicit awareness. He was talking about perception studies that are able to use brain activity to predict identification of visual stimuli. A few days later, I came …
I’ve always been fascinated by the Great Exhibition (1851) and Victorian technology, so this amazing recording of Handel’s “Israel in Egypt” performed by 4000 voices in the Crystal Palace in 1888 takes my breath away just a little bit. This is the earliest known recorded music in existence, and although it is very scratchy and …
A friend posted a link to this fascinating blog about my current home, Durham, NC, which included this post about a late-1950s/early-1960s newspaper article (click on image for larger view): The strange but rather wonderful photo caption is what captured my attention: IT’S A DURHAM CUSTOM – Pedestrian crossing of busy downtown streets without guidance …
I’ve spent the morning playing with Google’s Ngram tool, a fascinating (and addictive) way of visualizing cultural trends. It can search through up to 500 years of published material (Google claims to have over 10% of the books ever published) and “count” the use of words. It yields some pretty interesting results (click on the …
A couple of extracts from The Practice of Everyday Life that rethink passive consumption as creative appropriation: On reading: Reading (an image or a text)… seems to constitute the maximal development of the passivity assumed to characterize the consumer, who is conceived as a voyeur… in a ‘show biz society.’ In reality, the activity of …
In her 11-year career as a photographer (1864-1875) — she was given a camera as a gift when she was 48 — Julia Margaret Cameron photographed Darwin, Browning, Millais, W.M. Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Ellen Terry, and George Frederic Watts. I love her photograph of her daughter: Julia Margaret Cameron: “Annie, my first success” (Annie Wilhelmina Philpot), …
Writing is a corporeal activity. We work ideas through our bodies; we write through our bodies, hoping to get into the bodies of our readers. We study and write about society not as an abstraction but as composed of actual bodies in proximity to other bodies. – Elspeth Probyn – “Writing Shame”
The beginning of a new semester, and the beginning of a new project — I’m excited to integrate a blog into my fall English 26 class. The class is an exploration of the limits of the human — primarily the space occupied by the vampiric, monstrous “other” who is not one of us and yet …