“While we may be reticent to tell our classes that everyone will get an “A” and that the syllabus work is optional, this gesture encourages us to cultivate intrinsic motivation to engage with the course materials. We have a historic opportunity to grow beyond familiar canons to focus on how this social pandemic offers a pedagogical moment with an explosion of new primary sources to reflect upon. Countless emerging scientific studies, sociological surveys, poetry, and personal testimonies can become our collective COVID-19 curricula.” –Jesse Goldberg, Jane Guskin, Vani Kannan, Marianne Madoré, Conor Tomás Reed, and Dhipinder Walia

On the eve of our final class meeting, bringing the end to a derailed semester in which institutions failed to provide students with the “product” promised to them, I encourage all of us to read this article, written by several adjuncts working within the CUNY system: https://medium.com/@conortomasreed/a-for-all-yes-all-transforming-grading-during-covid-19-a3a24de4e249

At the inception of distance-learning, I wanted nothing to do with school. All I could focus on was reading every bit of news coming in through The Guardian and The New York Times. I read, and read, and read, keeping myself up to date on global infections and deaths, even learning several basic epidemiological terms, such as R0 (pronounced “R naught”). This time was marked by an immense fear, a fear only worsened by living in the epicenter of the pandemic, as the future had never quite seemed so uncertain. The fear hasn’t gone anywhere, as I can feel it stalking me in all that I do, and while I still find myself glued to the news, my level of obsession isn’t quite as concerning as it was in late-March and early-April. But within that, I’ve still been asked to “attend” class, to complete assignments, to engage with material that has nothing to do with the pandemic or how we can restructure the world (including academia) as we know it. And this is coming from someone whose modus operandi as an undergrad was molding reading material/assignments in his image. Yet, I feel lucky in that I’ve been granted the opportunity to pivot my final assignment in the direction of Covid-19, specifically a pivot towards the lived experiences of several essential workers near and dear to me. Am I sticking close to the assigned topic? Barely. Am I going to put all possible effort into this project considering my subpar technological capabilities and the current state of my mental health? Absolutely. With that being said, I cannot help but think how absurd the notion of punitive grading is during the 2020 spring term. As mentioned in the attached article, “students did not prepare to distance learn during a pandemic.” Enough wasn’t changed within our classes and CUNY as a whole to allow for adaptation. Instead, a lot of us feel left behind, both materially (in regard to access to computers, Wi-Fi, etc.) and emotionally. Just as Covid-19 has exposed social disparities via who it afflicts and ultimately kills, distance learning has proven that not all students can effectively turn their bedrooms into classrooms.
I love school, perhaps more than anything else, but having the stress of getting a “B” my first semester in graduate school added to the stress incurred by not having paid rent the last two months, hastily dwindling funds, and a rising death toll across the country is nonsensical, if not insulting.

In the words of my film studies professor, “No one thinks of the essays they wrote during the Bubonic Plague.”

Even if we were to be judged on our performance before the shutdown, none of us deserve less than A. Considering we’ve even shown up to class once throughout this crisis, while capitalism’s swan song permeates New York’s empty streets, only solidifies that notion.

Friends,

I hope you’ve all had a swell break.

Here’s a link to my zine which, I’d like to stress, was a collaborative effort. Ideally, I’d expand on the themes found within its current scope and have a final project, so any and all feedback is welcome.

Julissa,

As per your zine presentation (which I thoroughly enjoyed), I think this resource would have a welcome spot within your project:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/691761548028851/

Be safe, everyone.

In anticipation of our zine-sharing conference on Tuesday, I’d like to post some of the text found within the zine I collaborated on with the Crown Heights Collective:

Singular.

A friend and I wanted to collaborate on a longform poem, something along the lines of a lesser quality “Desolation Row” or “The Wasteland.” But they said they didn’t want to create any art that was “Covid-related,” seeing as how they believed it’d be in “bad taste.” So, naturally, we didn’t collaborate. Not all are granted the morbid possibility of commenting on history as it is occuring–you and I now shoulder this burden.

The pandemic is all I can think about, and it’s a multi-faceted thought process, including a difficulty in quantifying the thousands of people being hospitalized or dying on a daily basis, a complete unknowing of when this will end (“Nothing ever ends, Adrian,” says the godhead, Dr. Manhattan, to the off-brand Rameses II, Ozymandias, in the latter moments of Alan Moore’s Watchmen), and what the new world will look like, because, let’s face it, the old world, the world we were residents of several months ago, is gone, and it isn’t going to come back.

“It was a matter of time, I suppose.”

What follows are pictures and words from the old world, before the Pause, and some from the In-Between, within the womb of the Pause, compiled with the help of the friends with whom I am confronting history.

As we “wait for Godot” during this surreal epoch worthy of countless adjectives, I decided to explore and review the Samuel Beckett Digital Manuscript Project.

The site: https://www.beckettarchive.org/

For those not familiar with Beckett’s work, in short, he was an Irish-born writer whose works examined the strain the human condition bore on the shoulders of modern society.

Launched in 2011, the SBDMP consists of two parts, a “digital archive of Samuel Beckett’s manuscripts, organized in 26 research modules” and “a series of 26 volumes, analyzing the genesis of the texts contained in the corresponding modules.” The Series Preface is exciting, in that it promises various ways in which to approach the life and work of Samuel Beckett, including the ability to compare the interrelatedness of different manuscripts from different holding libraries. The latter is impressive to think about when compared to making such an attempt even thirty years ago, an attempt which would’ve been undergirded by correspondences via phone or mail. From a structural standpoint, the site is sparse and minimal, bringing to mind an empty stage from which actors and writers can engage in Theatre of the Absurd.

My initial inclination was, of course, to read the project’s stated goal, which is to “…reunite the manuscripts of Samuel Beckett’s work in a digital way, and to facilitate genetic research…” For someone as prolific as Beckett, whose works include plays, poems, prose, radio, and film, the mere undertaking of such a collaborative project is a welcomed undertaking for researchers in the humanities.

Beyond the swath Beckett covered, as a man who lived and worked through most of the 20^th Century, he maintained a wide roster of influences, friends, and contemporaries. The Beckett Digital Library, understanding this, offers a digital reconstruction of Beckett’s library as it appeared in his Paris apartment. The BDL currently offers “762 extant volumes, as well as 247 virtual entries for which no physical copy has been retrieved.” Included within the SMBDP’s “free features” is a sample of the BDL, which contains a selection of 25 of these books (one for every letter of the alphabet except, suspiciously enough, “x”). As we’ve learned throughout much of the semester, especially via the story of Sojourner Truth, the handling of one’s image is crucial. The existence of the BDL allows for researchers and fans of Beckett to construct his milieu via this expansive collection. Not only would one be able to view works he was engaging with (Kant, Isherwood, Molière, Joyce, etc.), but one can also view the inscriptions and annotations living within these books. The ability with which to be able to view inscriptions and annotations would prove a valuable resource to any researcher working on a biographer of a Beckett and students curious as to what Beckett’s analytical process looked like. Of particular enjoyment (for me, at least) were an inscription found within Theodor Adorno’s Noten zur Literatur, in which the famed critical theorist casually writes, “Für Samuel Beckett,” the front copy of Molière’s Théâtre Complet, Vol. 2 missing, and a sole page (395) have been folded down in Dante Alighieri’s La Divine Comédie. The BDL, along with the SBDMP as a whole, is also beneficial in that it preserves the integrity of physical copies by allowing researchers access to digital facsimiles.

While I am not yet familiar with many digital archives and their features, the SMDMP continues to impress by its allowing for a meta-study via a News and Updates page which functions as a timeline of add-ons and awards garnered since its launch nearly a decade ago.

The SMDMP contains a litany of information, but it does not come without issues. Firstly, though several wealthy organizations backed the creation and subsequent sustaining of this digital archive (the European Council for Research and the University of Texas being two of them), it is not free. There are both individual and institutional fees one must pay for full access to the archives. One, like myself, finds this out in an almost rude way, as the page one is scrolling on times out and reverts you back to the homepage. In the past, I may have avoided mentioning the financial obstacles, seeing as how they (seemingly) aren’t too steep and I’m a member of an institution that may grant me access. However, this isn’t the past, as I write within the crisis wrought upon by the rapid spread of Covid-19. Several organizations understand this, as JSTOR has allowed “access to all unlicensed collections at no cost,” “more than 25,000 books available at no charge,” and, most importantly, “26 journal archives in Public Health free through June 30, 2020.” The SMDMP’s News and Updates page does not mention anything related to Covid-19, as the latest press release was in reference to an award (MLA Prize for Bibliography, Archive, or Digital Project) from November 2018. Perhaps the curator in me saw an opportunity to reference our current crisis via the lens of Beckett.

The horrors of editing are hinted at in Williams and Abbott’s An Introduction to Bibliographical and Textual Studies, when the authors describe what occurred to Willard Motley’s novel Knock on Any Door (bolding of text is mine): “…editors at Macmillan and then at Appleton-Century collaborated with Willard Motley to reduce his 600,000-word typescript…to 250,000 words, to eliminate parts of the novel they judged wooden, to soften the depiction of sexuality and political corruption, and to manufacture a book that they could market at three dollars a copy” (74). It is this sort of recounting, in which an artistic work is beheaded for financial gain, which dissects the nature of asking what “needs” an editor has in shaping a text. If we are to follow the logic that “every act is a political act,” espoused by the likes of artist Daniel Buren and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (amongst countless others), then the work of an editor is no exception. There will be those editors, such as the individuals in charge of Motley’s work, whose banal subservience to authority will produce capital, or those whom will edit a work to serve an individual or state ideology. For instance, I am an adherent of the latter group, for one of my ellipses above omitted Motley’s name so as to obscure the fact that Williams and Abbott made it seem as though Motley worked alongside his editors in trying to peddle his book for three dollars. Without the omission, I do not believe I could have easily introduced a critical argument of the financial workings of publishing houses.

In “Who Owns Anne Frank?,” arguably my favorite essay, writer-critic Cynthia Ozick argues that Frank’s autobiography has been “bowdlerized, distorted, transmuted, reduced…infantilized, Americanized…falsified, kistchified, and, in fact, blatantly and arrogantly denied” (77). Part of her blame falls upon the shoulders of Otto Frank, Anne’s father, who sought to magnify “Anne’s idealism” without any regard as to why this idealism was smothered and ultimately obliterated at Bergen-Belsen in 1944. Ozick blames Frank’s meddling with the autobiography on his and Anne’s disparate upbringings. Though Otto too was a victim of the Shoah (the Hebrew term for The Holocaust), his upbringing was defined by petit-bourgeois stability (an especially lasting line: “Otto Frank had breathed the air of the affluent bourgeoisie”), whereas most of Anne’s life was spent in persecution, while her final years were defined by hiding, the backdrop of her existence permeated with sounds of bombs and bullets. Fatherhood does not confer surrogacy. It was the elder Frank’s insistence in Anne’s “optimistical view of life” which allowed the following line to be torn from Anne and “define” her legacy: “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart” (85). Ozick points out that in the same passage, Anne writes: “I see the world being transformed into a wilderness, I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy us too, I feel the suffering of millions…” (85). This is the Anne whose work is a direct result of her historical context, as opposed to the Anne who makes universal and abstract calls to optimism. And what of the Anne who observes: “There’s a destructive urge in people, the urge to rage, murder, and kill”? Ozick argues these lines which do not “give the lie to the pervasive horror of her time.” One might find it difficult to consider Anne an optimist when her autobiography remained unfinished, her life enduring a painful end in the snow at Bergen-Belsen, surrounded by hundreds of others soon-to-be ghosts. Ozick posits Otto Frank as editor, and she responsibly builds a milieu for Otto which provides context for his actions. His upbringing was one of assimilation and avoiding confrontation, which resulted in the “diluting” of Anne’s observations of anti-Semitism, not just in Germany but across Europe, and her pulling the veil on the more monstrous aspects of human nature. The essay is a worthy read, as Ozick also writes about the various cinematic and theatre adaptations of Anne’s work, and how these too have further distorted Anne’s self-portrait. At the end of the essay, Ozick muses, with a pain residing within the margins, whether a more “salvational” act than Miep Gies’ rescuing of Anne’s work would’ve been: “Anne Frank’s diary burned, vanished, lost—saved from a world that made of it all things, some of them true, while floating lightly over the heavier truth of named and inhabited evil” (102).

In Jason Manrique’s Art and War: Republican Propaganda of the Spanish Civil War, the reader is presented with a survey of the media weaponized by the Republicans in their anti-fascist effort to defeat General Francisco Franco and his merry band of Nationalists during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). The introduction lays out the material conditions which led to the war and explains how the various political factions involved related with one another in the lead up to the conflict. Interestingly enough, the introduction functions as a successful exercise in anticipation. The reader knows what lays ahead, for the abstract discusses the writer’s mission, and the table of contents lists the various images to be referenced. So, in reading the introduction, the reader, whether a learned scholar on fascist and anti-fascist propaganda circa the 1930s or not, is filled with their own images of what this may look like. However, this anticipation is quelled, or is forcibly placed in the backburner, when the reader reaches the first chapter, a brief analysis of films made during the Spanish Civil War. While the writing does not disappoint, the form which the thesis hinted at, that of a multi-media historical survey, disappoints in that the reader is not offered clips nor screenshots to concretely conceptualize artistic intent in 1930s. Of course, a niche audience of European film historians, the lack of images does not represent a concern. However, Manrique’s work is brief, and I interpret as a work more inviting to the novice as opposed to the expert. Ironically enough, Manrique refers to my previous point in third chapter when discussing the photojournalism of Robert Capa, whose images magnified the impact of LIFE Magazine’s reports from the frontlines of the Spanish Civil War. While structurally-speaking there is nothing wrong with the chapter, as I’m sure multiple readers of this work sought out the films discussed, the potential of an anticipated meaning finds itself disappointed.

It is not until the latter two chapters of Manrique’s work, that his desire to present the reader with a multi-media overview of propaganda in war-time comes to fruition. In Chapter Three, “Republican Posters,” Manrique not only provides a brief history of propaganda posters used in the Soviet Union and United States, but also details how these posters were made, and how different artists and artistic movements, from Goya to Constructivism, influenced the anti-fascist militants. And we get to see some of the posters! Manrique’s words acquire a new level of meaning when paired with the color images of anti-fascist Spanish propaganda. The images, which one would think the reader would pause to analyze, allow for Manrique’s words to soak within the reader’s mind while they stop and look at the propaganda. The excitement of turning the page and seeing a hammer and sickle layered atop a star long with an explanation as to why defeating Franco’s fascist is inherently a step in the revolution towards communism serves as a modern parallel to someone turning a corner in 1930s Valencia and seeing such an image. The image, an interpretable message regardless of what language one speaks, retains a power sole words do not. This amplification carries Manrique’s work towards the end, as the last chapter focuses on the work of several photojournalists during the Spanish Civil War. In between brief biographies and descriptions of the training grounds and battle conditions in Spain, Manrique formats some of the most iconic war photography of the 20^th Century to become the centerpiece of the stage, highlighting the significance of this conflict and the work that arose from it.

Perhaps Manrique meant to keep the viewer in the dark regarding images from 1930s Spanish films to make a comment on the censorship that would follow General Franco’s victory in the Civil War—I don’t know. But, what I do know, is that this work truly reached (what I consider) its ideal form when its message juxtaposed several mediums.

One must imagine what Dr. Jerry Pournelle, widely acknowledged as the first working writer to utilize a word processor, thought about the process of writing at the end of his life, in 2017. In the late-1970s, Pournelle noted that his computer was “saving him whole ‘months’ of typing and retyping, and that it let him produce prose at ‘double’ the rate” (p. 99). Yet, to the youngish citizen of 2020, some of the limitations Pournelle encountered during his pioneering endeavors seem comedic: the Apple II computer (released in 1977) could not produce lower-case letters, The Electric Pencil, the system Pournelle used, didn’t have the capabilities needed to boldface, underline, or italicize, and was prone to errors, which meant the danger of losing a document was always present (seeing as how autosave was a resident of the distant future).

In regard to my composition process, I disagree with science-fiction writer Frank Herbert claim that computers “amplify creative imagination.” Outside of academia, I am a working film critic and part-time poet. In crafting a film review, I utilize pen and paper to craft notes both at movie theatres and in the comfort of my bed. At times, films elicit reactions from me which result in notes more akin to pictograms than actual letters—I could never utilize a computer for this in the same way I do the notebook I keep in my back pocket. My drafting process also includes a lot of marginal work, such as arrows, variations of underlining (i.e., how many lines an underline contains to signify importance of content), highlighting, and dialogue bubbles (to keep the mood light). However, all that being said, I couldn’t envision a world in which the chaos of my notebook isn’t transposed onto a laptop running the latest version of Microsoft Word. The speed with which I am able to type what I’ve written equates to high-levels of productivity, and the countless features provided by the program, including numerous add-ons such as Grammerly, which functions as a “writing assistant,” make it seem as though we’re creative aristocrats compared to science-fictions writers in the 1970s.

May I never lose my notebook, for without it, I am nothing, and may I never lose my computer, the electric mirror without which my notebook remains an article of obscurity.

In the latter moments of The Machine that Made Us, a BBC documentary briefly detailing how the Gutenberg Press came to be, host Stephen Fry remarks that he can imagine the modern world without airplanes, cars, or telephones, but not the printed word. It’s a statement I couldn’t agree with more. Without the contributions of Gutenberg, the Renaissance and Enlightenment would’ve never occurred, meaning the historical development of capitalism and the liberal democracies it spawned would be the content of fantasies. As noted in “Out of Sorts: Typesetting Meets the Industrial Revolution,” chapter seven of Keith Houston’s The Book, “…the printing press—blew apart the insular world of Europe’s scholars, scribes, and clergy” (128).

While watching Fry’s authentic amazement in the face of Gutenberg Bibles and replica Presses, I began to think of Gutenberg’s invention in relation to the canon of (what I’ve deemed) the Pillars of Decentralization. Within this canon lie the ideas of Copernicus (decentralized our planet’s position in the galaxy), Darwin (decentralized our species’ place in the Animal Kingdom), Nietzsche (decentralized our species’ metaphysical positioning in the universe), and Gutenberg, whose printing press decentralized knowledge, which hitherto had been concentrated in the hands of an elite class, and thus helped to give birth to a civically engaged citizen. Gutenberg’s invention predates the work of these scholars, and it’d be difficult to imagine the masses having a basic understanding of the solar system or Darwinism without the mass production of books.

Philosophically speaking, there have been thinkers who have dwelled on the pitfalls of the democratization of knowledge via the printing press and the changing ways in which we read. In particular, Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard feared that the widespread distribution of newspapers would create a citizen satisfied in simply being aware of the political issues of their day. One might imagine Kierkegaard having strong opinions on the way civically engaged citizens read today, receiving their news from an infinite amount of online publications and social media behemoths such as Facebook and Twitter. The docile holder of opinions aside, the mass distribution of text has also led to inundation of the market with material cultural critic Dwight Macdonald would label “Masscult,” mediocre works of folly meant to do the thinking for the intended audience. These lamentations on the way we read have existed for as long as Gutenberg’s Press. Houston notes that in the early days of printing, Europe’s intelligentsia placed a high moral value in the “patient copying-out of texts” (128). They must’ve viewed the mass dissemination of books as a vulgar activity, just as today’s critic would scoff at the notion that anyone and everyone, within certain capabilities, could publish their own book.

The way in which we read, and the way in which books are disseminated, have simultaneously changed and remained roughly the same since the time of Gutenberg. As mentioned above, several generations have pivoted away from the printed word towards e-books and websites. While a hundred years ago, one might have done their day’s reading in the form of a newspaper or novel, today one receives their “prose” in the form of Tweets and Instagram captions, reading hundreds of “short stories” a day. Censorship remains an issue, as displayed in the book burnings which permeated the Third Reich and other parts of the world in the Twentieth Century (and which continue today), which ties the evolution of political systems with that of the book. We all read what we want today, for the internet provides as much “evidence” for Darwinism as it does for the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the hands of Castro-allied extraterrestrials. It is no surprise that our current socio-political epoch is marred by “fake news” and “alternative facts,” as the way we read, and what we read, is democratizing at an unstoppable rate.  

Author’s note: Forgive my incessant quoting of white male intellectuals, it is these figures who have shaped the way I read. I blame the academy for my Eurocentric inclinations.