On Onus of Ownership

I've enrolled in Fiona Somerset's "Radical Textualities" at Duke this spring, and I'm thrilled to have an opportunity to get some real manuscript experience!  This week we are reading about variance, censorship, and the "great editions" of multi-layered medieval texts.  In an article resisting the bibliographic obsession of previous Wycliffite scholarship, Somerset writes: "In lollard textual culture's mood of radical variance, every version of a text interpolates, excises, or modifies the content they have in common, or else lifts part of it into a different setting.  Often it is impossible to trace how the work developed, in its remaining copies." She focuses on different kinds of books than others working in lollardy usually have; she therefore appropriately hones in on different modes of book production, "that began in the earliest phase of the [lollard] movement, but persisted when the more organized activity that produced large-scale collaborations in England had come to an end"whose "products are more idiosyncratic and decentralized... [and whose] most common venue of assembly is the personal or household anthology..." which was truly piecemeal.
As most of you know, I've had a hard time pinning down a dissertation topic/genre/century, but I do keep returning to manuscript work.  As most of you can imagine, this presents any scholar with the genuine issue of accessibility.  Although Duke and UNC have great collections, getting to them can be more difficult than first supposed.  I'll come back to the accessibility problem soon.

We spent the first couple of classes hashing out ideas about cutting and pasting, remixing, refiguring, re-apropriating (and no, that's not redundant here) manuscripts, printed books, and digital media.  Where do processes overlap?  What do reworking poetry or biblical exegesis, say, have to do with remixing music or other media?  And how does any of this matter now, and to whom?
A visual break from coolest-gadgets.com, to prevent any rabbit-hole vortex of crushingly deep ponderings on this topic:

Of course, central to these questions of remixing is ownership, which I like to distinguish from authorship.  Somerset articulates resistance to a bibliographic impulse in literary studies that coincides with a lesson I taught last week.  I assigned Hegel to my freshmen (muah-ha-ha) to get them into an appropriate mindset about the nature of the course.  I intentionally left off the title and the author so they wouldn't just say "hey, this is boring/difficult/whatever-- I'll just Google it."  Some of them, I found, had pasted in parts of the passage in order to identify the author, and we had an open conversation about this urge to know about the author in order to feel equipped to read the work.  Incidentally, this was the same day as the Wikipedia blackout-- a coincidence whose coolness was sadly lost on some of them.  

Nevertheless, it seems that authorship is visiting some sort of vengeance upon me for all those papers I wrote that "killed the author."  In a time when so much information is free, freely edited, and freely exchanged across different media, what does it mean to be an author, a commentator, a cut-and-paster, a plagiarist?  Authorship isn't always ownership, and that could create great demands on all the other stewards of texts.  What do we owe to audience?  To the text's author? And how much do economic elements of textual production affect its "authenticity" or reliability?  What does the author owe the rest of us?  How influential is money-making to text-making, and why?

Moreover, what are we to make of our transition from this:

No CTRL + C here.

to this?

Inquisitr.com

Is free and full access even conceivable?  At what cost? 

How do we move between prosperity of resources nearly impossible to find (or even to know exist) in our world's best libraries and responsible, equitable accessibility?

Bodleian curator, looking far too cool to let us see this book from the Mary Shelley exhibit.   

Could it be that those Stanford professors have it right after all?

A short geology lesson and an epic tortoise tale

Happy New Year, and welcome back!
Last semester I researched Drayton's use of the sea in Polyolbion and became increasingly interested in,  as my professor best summarized, "how England imagined itself in relationship to the world via the ocean."  What does being an island mean?  How does being surrounded by water influence (especially national) identity?  I'm also wondering about the development of sailors in literature-- certainly, they are not always stalwart navy men, fearless adventurers, or founders of great nations.  How do their identities mesh with those back on land?
One way to address these issues is to read about them; a less academic approach is to visit some islands and see for yourself.
Enter family trip to the Galapagos, an archipelago nearly 1000 km off the coast of Ecuador.  The people, tortoises, iguanas, sharks, and sea lions were all amazing.  Below is the view from our tented camp:

The Pacific is gorgeous, powerful, daunting.  Currents coming from three different directions are particularly strong and responsible for bringing the eclectic group of creatures (from Penguins to lizards) to these wildly isolated islands.  The wave in this photo is well over a meter high.

The archipelago emerged, island by island, over a hotspot on the Nazca-Cocos plate.  Over millions of years, an underwater volcano has erupted to form these islands, which sink and move away from their point of generation at a speed of around 7cm per year.  The plate that carries them is the very plate that goes under the mainland, causing the Andes to rise at a matching rate.  Recently, geologists have discovered the older Galapagos islands under the sea, now submerged after their turn in the sun.  Two of the islands are still active, but have not erupted as recently as Etna.

Speaking of Mt Etna, I chose Aeneid to read on the trip. Although we didn't sail anywhere, reading about sailors tossed about the sea by Fate and the gods fit surprisingly well-- not with our experiences, thankfully, but with the experiences of the animals 'endemic' to the islands.  It is theorized, for instance, that the tortoises floated here on driftwood.  How extraordinarily marked this species is--to bob around in the Pacific, arrive in numbers large enough to continue the species for millennia, and grow in global fame despite (and because) of its isolation.

It's strange to consider all the other creatures-- human and otherwise-- who couldn't land, but the sea is as creative as it is destructive. A recent expedition to a hotspot near Antarctica revealed a surprising number of newly discovered species well over a mile below the surface (article here).

I'm reminded of how often the ocean has been employed to imagine great strife and sometimes even greater triumph in literature. Yet the sea can defy metaphors it so easily creates: it is more than a representation of life v death; there actually is a vast expanse between civilizations; crossing it, on any vessel, is still a heroic feat.

If anything, this trip showed me that no better testament of the ocean's power exists than its survivors, be they tortoises or kings.

PIZZA!!!

Hooray!  Sodium Girl, introduced to me by the great Emily Nolan, has posted a super low sodium pizza.  YUM.

Sodium Gir's Pizza:  GalloLea Organics. (Photo sodiumgirl.com)

Here is the recipe.  I will be able to add a little cheese instead of the carrots, and am way, way excited.
Eat on, my friends.

Miscellany, wishful thinking, and a teaser or two

Hello again, and sorry for the hiatus.  I should be back in full once-weekly-post swing in a week or so.
My next post will likely be about historiography, insularity, and dinosaurs; I hope to follow it with reflections on attending the UNC-UT basketball game with my parents, hosting my in-laws for Christmas, and taking a New Year's trip to Galapagos.

While working through my last week of this semester, I've increasingly missed blogging.  Instead of putting it off until I could write a longer piece with in-text citations and everything, I thought I'd take advantage of the urge to write and shoot for  a shorter post.  Several topics have come to mind-- the background of Christmas traditions, the Jesus v. Santa dialogues, the UN climate talks, and various, public moments of extraordinary bravery, but I don't have as much time to spend on them as I'd like.

So, I'll spend what little time I have on myself-- and you, hopefully-- by sharing some Christmas wishes:

1. (you knew this was coming) That at least one of my friends sponsors, fosters, or adopts a shelter pet. Read common misconceptions about shelter pets here, but know one thing: I am pro-adoption, not particularly anti-breeder.
2. That some trees are spared by people wrapping amazing gifts are in even more amazing gift-wrap scarves, like this (there are totally awesome, less expensive alternatives as well).
3. That Santa, whoever he may be, drops the keys to my #1 gift of all time down the chimney.

I've provided some scholarly links, some news articles, and a bit about dogs.  It seems, then, that I've got no excuse for not returning to my schoolwork.

Until soon,  friends.

PS: Today is the last feast day of Our Lady of Guadalupe-- a tradition I hope my grade / middle school in Austin keeps up.  Vive la virgen!  (google for more info on a great story; NPR had a very cool interview with a Franciscan friar on the topic, as well)

Values of the Hidden

You might have heard about the Carrier IQ app that "logs text messages, dialed calls, URL searches and more -- all without the user's knowledge" (Gilbert).  If you haven't, you can read about the online exposure and the response in this article.  In strikingly similar news, Ally Bank is tracking users' locations as well, because "[i]n these economic times, financial institutions like banks are looking for extra revenue sources" (Yoo, in Kavoussi of HuffingtonPost).  Both phone carriers and the bank, though, failed to tell clients that they were being tracked.  I know, I know. We're all appalled.  But are we surprised?
There's been a lot of political talk about the rights of corporations lately, and given what we know about Google and Facebook privacy, we might not be as shocked as we'd wish.  
"Outrageous!" I find myself thinking.  "They've got no business tracking my whereabouts, purchases, texts, and searches."  And yet, it is just that-- business. So what does this mean for the -- dare I use scare quotes-- "individual"?  
It means that we've become commodities; it means our secrets have become commodities.  What we do with our time, in our homes, on our phones and computers, has become valuable to others, to strangers, to anonymous and autonomous corporations.  How did this happen?  Whose fault is this? What can we do?  And importantly, on what do we base our assumption that we can, and indeed should, hide what we've been doing from these faceless, nameless, number-crunchers?  What is the value of a secret?

Lelio Orsi, 1555

I recently turned in a paper about what I call the "Economy of Secrets" in two of the Canterbury Tales.  I spent most of my time on what editors usually call "The Second Nun's Tale," which is based on the legend of Saint Cecilia, who seems to come from the 5th or 6th century.  Like so many saints' legends, hers is the story of her virgin martyrdom at the hands of persecuting Romans.  
On her wedding night, she tells her husband that she has a secret.  He's fine with that, and promises his discretion in exchange for her revelation.  "I have an angel who protects me from anyone who would love me uncleanly (physically)," she responds.  Rightfully skeptical, her husband Valerian tells her that he can't see an angel, but if she will show him the creature, he will do as she wishes.   Cecilia replies that he must be confessed and baptised in order to see the angel, and his conversion sparks a series of events that allows her to convert the hearts of countless others until her martyrdom.
Although I began my research looking for ways in which the body was valued, and how that value might have related to the narrative strategy of the original legend and Chaucer, I ended up discovering something else: the secret has extraordinary purchasing power.  In a way, the whole story is set in motion when she trades her secret for his confidence.  After converting her husband and his brother (who are martyred for their belief in the middle of the story), she is also brought into the authorities for practicing Christianity. Although her faith has been revealed, the public interrogation provides her with a last (and her largest) audience to convert.  Ultimately she gives her life-- her bodily life, anyway-- to turn pagans  into Christians, and Pope Urban takes her body away in the night to bury it in secret.  On the hallowed ground of her hidden body he builds a church, which according to the legend still inspires worshipers.  
Her body becomes the secret-- the object valued as something once hidden, now revealed.
It seems, then, that we've had a preoccupation with the powers of secrets for quite some time.  Although the situations are quite different, both my newsfeed and this saint's life demonstrate the inherent value of secrets to outsiders and the power of disclosure.  And yet, when Cecilia's story narrates a series of exchanging secrets, our current story tells a far different tale.  What do we receive in exchange for our browser history, or GPS use, or MMS? Is ours the narrative of a zero-sum game rather than trade? Whether for profit, salvation, or persecution, we endow great value in secrets.  But given the current stakes, will we ever see a return on this investment?