In the past two weeks I’ve team-taught a polymers unit for Materials Science Engineering, and I’ve presented a cultural analysis for the Modernist Studies Association. Does this odd convergence make me a schizophrenic academic? No. This makes me STEMpunk.
Allow me to open my portmanteau before I take its picture and take it out.
STEM means science, technology, engineering, and mathematics: a current emphasis in restructuring American higher education. At its basic level, punk is resistance through style, as Dick Hebdige put it. In the late 1970s, punk repurposing transformed everyday objects into subculture style in the U.K. and elsewhere. Safety pins migrated from the nursery to the street, bringing edginess to punk fashion. Coined in the late 1980s, steampunk is writer Kevin Jeter’s term for retro-tech speculative fiction that returns to the age of the steam engine.
STEMpunk resists seeing the humanities as being divorced from science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. A revolution in curriculum, STEMpunk returns to the humanities to invent future technologies of higher education.
TRIPTYCH
Here is STEMpunk’s current passport photo.
STEMpunk
CHANT
In the periodic table of STEMpunk, H is Humanities.
STEMpunk is not a calculation; it is a catalyst.
STEMpunk is not finding X; it is the X-factor.
STEMpunk does not solve the equation; it poses the problem.
STEMpunk is a bonding agent for curriculum repair.
Gallery Talk with Anita Huffington’s bronze Kore (1991) in the foreground. Gift of Dr. and Mrs. David A. Cofrin
The Harn Museum of Art, located here at UF, is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. So I’ve been musing on how the Harn has inspired my recent teaching. Although I offer courses in literary studies rather than art or art history, the museum is now a vital resource for my classroom and community teaching. The Harn makes things happen with art. If you’re in the area, consider creating a Harn happening of your own.
Responding
From Classical temples to modern museums, our encounters with artworks in public spaces can be intimate, intellectual, spiritual, and creative. We may no longer believe that gods and goddesses inhabit their ancient statues, yet we can still succumb to being dazzled by art–as poet Rainer Maria Rilke was by his Archaic Torso of Apollo. At this year’s “Mighty Aphrodites” talk pictured above, Mary Ann Eaverly and I discussed poems about artworks that depict the Greek goddess of love, beauty, and sexuality (Aphrodite was Venus to the Romans). Emma Lazarus’s sonnet “Venus of the Louvre” distills and dramatizes her museum visit in the late 1880s, when she was entering what would be her final illness. In a sense, she acts as a curator exhibiting one of the world’s most famous statues. Breathing life into the Venus de Milo, her poem lays claim to the Classical tradition as a Jewish-American woman who mourns “for vanished Hellas and Hebraic pain.” The poem’s speaker weeps before the marble statue with dazzled eyes, rendering an aesthetic bliss that is also personal and spiritual. This gallery talk coincided with the exhibition Professor Eaverly and I designed with Harn curator Carol McCusker, “Classical Convergences: Traditions & Inventions.”
Curating
Co-curating a small gallery gave me new possibilities for class assignments–and a new understanding of form. Professor Eaverly and I integrated our “Classical Convergences” exhibition with our recent course on women writers and Classical myth. Our first assignment had students compare two artworks and a poem about either Aphrodite or Persephone, assessing which representation proved most successful in reinventing the ancient figure for contemporary audiences. (Demeter’s daughter, Persephone is also called Kore or Proserpina.) Our final assignment invited students to curate their own gallery on women and myth, creating a pinterest board that included one artwork from “Classical Convergences.” Jordan Bernas gave permission to share this link to her virtual gallery of images, which includes Jiri Anderle’s Cassandra (1984) from the Harn (gift of Melvin and Lorna Rubin).
Curating is a flexible means of approaching, organizing, and interpreting. It opens pathways for viewers to encounter artworks without imposing a rigid route down a one-way street. I find myself using more museum metaphors when I talk to students about their writing. Can you walk around your examples and decide the best way to display them? What do you want your readers to walk away with after your analysis? How much space should each example have in your gallery?
MB and soprano Caitlin Pearse
Performing Like most museums, the Harn is a vibrant space for creative performance, including poetry readings, music, and dance. I emceed a gallery revue of musicians to complement the traveling exhibit “Hoppé Portraits: Society, Studio and Street.” A singer and I performed poems by two writers Hoppé photographed (Ezra Pound and Vita Sackville-West), and the musicians performed popular music from the time period Hoppé worked in London. Soprano Caitlin Pearse recreated signature songs by the Queen of London’s music halls, the fabulous Marie Lloyd (with Thomas Royal on keyboard).
T. S. Eliot considered Lloyd an artistic genius and admired her attuned rapport with her audience. Bringing the vernacular rhythms of music hall to the museum’s main gallery complemented Hoppé’s street photography. We also offered jazz songs by London favorites Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong, highlighting the city’s cosmopolitan culture. Baritone Tony Canty performed these pieces with Royal (and Nick Pierce on bass). The gallery’s reverberant space and array of period photographs brought modernist London to life.
Jeff Schweers and Jiri Anderle’s Madchen und Tod (1983). Gift of Melvin and Lorna Rubin
There is always a performative dimension to our museum-going. We create a personal choreography when we walk through museums. We enter the galleries in the order we like, moving in the directions we prefer. We block our own sight lines with each artwork we encounter, experimenting with angle and distance. We pause as we see fit. The postures and expressions we assume may be unconscious or deliberate, momentary or sustained. These individual performances and encounters generate our responses in gallery comment books, class assignments, creative writing, drawings, posts, and artful conversations. –MB
Today is Oscar Wilde’s birthday, and my American tribute marks the occasion by revisiting the high style Wilde brought to the frontiers of the television Western and men’s fashion magazines in the 1950s. (I teach a course on the American 1950s.) Wilde’s 1882 lecture tour of the United States made him an indelible figure in the national imagination, reappearing when and where we least expect him. This Wilde Effect highlights a wider range of American masculinities than the era’s suburban Breadwinner and Organization Man.
Oscar Wilde and Paladin in dandy dress
The Ballad of Oscar Wilde What’s a Dandy like Oscar Wilde doing in an American TV Western in 1958? “The Ballad of Oscar Wilde” was the 12th episode of Have Gun – Will Travel (season 2), starring Richard Boone as the gentlemanly hired gun, Paladin. With the official closing of the American frontier in 1890, Westerns had room to roam across the Atlantic as well as the 19th century. A highly literate chess master who resides in San Francisco’s Hotel Carlton, Paladin dons fancy suits for civilized pursuits and the requisite black attire when he is working. This episode opens with a poster for Wilde’s lecture “The American Barbarian,” which Paladin notices is Sold Out. I won’t spoil the plot, but I’ll say that it involves Oscar Wilde, some crooks, a ransom, the Civic Cultural Society in San Diego, and Paladin’s recitations of Wilde witticisms (you can watch the episode here). In fact, Paladin pre-cites an aphorism the Victorian dandy hasn’t written yet: “The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.”
Wilde Strains and Uncommon Sense
Two years earlier, Gentry(an upscale men’s style magazine) published its 20th issue. A mash-up of literature and luxury, museums and manors, shopping and fashion, “America’s fabulous magazine for men” offered its gentleman readers essential elements of refined living. This particular issue ushers in the Wilde West through two pieces appearing in proximity: an excerpt from Paul Horgan’s Pulitzer prize-winning epic Great River: The Rio Grande in American History (1955), and a cleverly-designed series of excerpts from Wilde himself. The editors promise readers that Horgan’s excerpt (“A Wild Strain”) will be “wilder than Hollywood’s wildest western.” In “An Alphabet of Uncommon Sense,” the editors offer 26 witty Wilde quotations, including delicious digs at American culture and sensibility. Like Paladin, the editors relish Wilde’s language of paradox: “The Soul is born old, but it grows young; that is the comedy of life. The Body is born young and grows old; that is Life’s tragedy.” There is a Wilde Strain in the issue’s feature on Thomas Eakins and his images of young men. Indeed, there is a Wilde Strain in the fashion portfolios that graced each issue, including these sumptuous suitings from the Age of Elegance issue (Fall 1955):
Formal Elegance and At-Home Elegance, 1955
The fashion editor highlights the Host coat’s red velvet fabric with black bengaline lapels and cuffs, luxuriously complementing the black bengaline trousers with red velvet striping. Surely Oscar Wilde would have coveted such splendid attire for hosting his dinner parties.
The Wilde Effect made the American 1950s more fabulous. It brought sartorial splendor to popular culture, eschewing the Western hero’s chaps and denims, embellishing Organization Man’s gray flannels suits. So why not take a walk on the Wilde side to celebrate his 161st birthday? Remember to dress as you will, and to wear it well. –MB
It’s complicated. It’s twisted. In a relationship, but ready to drop it the minute you text me. Engaged to the latest article on spatial relations.
No facebook status or emoticon can quite capture the roller coaster relationship of You and Your Dissertation. It is either the Very Best or Very Worst Dissertation in the World at any given moment. You want to tell everyone all about it, and you can’t tell anyone what it’s about. It consumes your heart and your soul. Now that Fall Semester has begun in earnest, I offer my Destination: Dissertation playlist for those in the throes of this relationship right now. So with apologies to The Who, let’s get started!
Time to put that new book down. Time to don my pensive frown. Time to get some isolation. Talkin’ bout my Dissertation! (Destination: Dissertation)
(1) Find affiliation in your isolation by going on double dates with someone else and their dissertation.But don’t do this too often. Back in the day, I’d meet twice a term with a friend who was working in a very different area. Our late-night talks at our favorite diner allowed us to talk about our dissertations in relaxedly energetic ways.
Song 1:Imagine Dragons, “Destination,” 2013 These are the days of love and life; These are our expectations. We stay up late to live tonight. This is our destination.
(2)Once you have a good idea of where your dissertation is going, find affiliation by presenting chapters at conferences. It’s time to take your dissertation out to the larger academic world. Writing for audiences beyond your mentor and department really energizes your relationship with your dissertation! Bonus: meeting conference deadlines and showing up with your paper means you got some dissertation work done!
Song 2:Nickel Creek, “Destination,” 2014 I’ve gotta make a destination, find where I belong. This time I’ve got no hesitation. I’m movin’ on (where I belong)
(3) Ride out the days that you have no idea why you’re writing what you’re writing, where it’s going, and when you’ll finish.Write out of sequence when you get stuck. After all, too much linearity is boring–and it slows down the writing process.
Song 3:Missing Persons, “Destination Unknown,” 1982 Life is so strange Destination unknown When you don’t know Your destination. Something could change It’s unknown And then you won’t know. Destination unknown.
(4)Don’t be surprised if the home stretch is when you flesh out your introduction. Your finish line is most likely your beginning, so don’t waste valuable time trying to write too much of your introduction too soon. Use your dissertation prospectus (aka abstract) to stay on track, tweaking it every few months so you have a clearer sense of where You and Your Dissertation are going. And when you cross that finish line at your defense, be sure to celebrate the occasion!
Song 4: Destination: Move On Up (Suite), 1979 Move on up towards your destination. You may find from time to time complications.
Despite all the ups and downs, you don’t have to break up with your dissertation. Just break any bad habits that come between you and your destination. –MB
Enter. The seaside Labyrinth Garden was one of my favorite spaces, and so my account of a conference committed to form offers a labyrinth walk through Poetry by the Sea. Like artful poems, labyrinths offer unexpected turns and returns that guide participants through an intricate pattern. We traverse it with our feet.
Turn 1. I entered this labyrinth through knowing its founder and director, Kim Bridgford; we studied modern poetry at the University of Illinois as grad school mates. I wrote my dissertation on W. H. Auden and documentary film. She wrote hers on five American women poets, and now edits the journal Mezzo Cammin (devoted to formalist poetry by women). I did not know then that I’d take another turn, following Kim into the field of women’s poetry studies. She was how I found out about Muriel Rukeyser. This week I read the opening sonnet sequence to Kim’s new volume Doll on the Mercy Center beach. And my co-authored conference talk featured Rukeyser.
Turn 2. My frequent collaborator Mary Ann Eaverly (UF Classics) and I spoke about modern women poets writing ancient Egypt: Rukeyser, H.D., and Ágnes Nemes Nagy (a Hungarian poet). This slide from our talk links Gauley Tunnel, West Virginia (the key site of Rukeyser’s documentary poem The Book of the Dead) with the entrance to the Egyptian Underworld. Rukeyser had contemplated the ancient Book of the Dead, which she saw at the British Museum. At the conference, Mary Ann and I were scholars surrounded by creative writers: we loved the change of pace.
Margaret Walker
Turn 3. In The Life of Poetry, Rukeyser mentions the influence of the British documentary film movement, which incorporated Auden poems in its productions Coal Face and Night Mail. (You can see the latter here.)Two conference events I attended had documentary connections.
Turn 4. In his talk for the Margaret Walker Centenary panel (chaired by Cherise A. Pollard), David A. Taylor mentioned the film based on his book Soul of a People: Writing America’s Story, a chronicle of the Federal Writers’ Project during the Great Depression. Walker worked in the FWP’s Chicago Office before writing For My People (1942), which garnered the Yale Younger Poets Award. She was the first African American to receive it.
Turn 5. I also attended the screening of the film-in-progress Our Little Roses, a documentary based on Spencer Reece’s recent experience leading poetry workshops at an orphanage for girls in Honduras. Reece gave out copies of the January 2015 issue of Poetry magazinethat includes a cluster of the girls’ poems and film stills. (You can watch a teaser for the film here.) Reece appears in the upper image on the left page; he is an Episcopal priest as well as a poet.
Turn 6. TheChildren’s Poetry panel I attended included a senior editor at Highlights magazine, Joëlle Dujardin. Poet and writer Toby Speed (author of Brave Potatoes) offered strategies for writing poems for children. She encouraged us to tap childhood rhythms of nursery rhymes, “loved poems,” jump rope rhymes, and other “chanting games” such as Red Light, Green Light. Revisiting childhood books can unlock these memories. I remember my delight at finding an illustrated Jason and the Argonauts in my elementary school library. It was my first exposure to Greek mythology.
Turn 7. Another book I picked up at the conference is A. E. Stallings’s latest volume Olives, which she dedicates “for my Argonauts.” Its third section is “Three Poems for Psyche,” and one of the new poems she read is about Pandora. Mary Ann and I just taught Stallings’s poems about Eurydice and Penelope in our team-taught course, “Women Writers and Classical Myths.” We had a chance to chat at breakfast on the last day of Poetry by the Sea. Like Reece, Stallings taught a workshop as one of the conference’s faculty.
Exit. Labyrinths are mythic spaces that allow us to elude our minotaurs. Labyrinths are spiritual spaces that allow us to thread our thoughts through form.
“Till by turning, turning we come round right.” (Joseph Brackett, “Simple Gifts”)
“In my end is my beginning.” (T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets)
With the passing of Women’s History Month, I find myself reconsidering the recent passing of Madelyn Lockhart–or Dr. Lockhart, as we knew her here at UF. Academic women of my generation knew who she was by the end of our first week on campus. She was Dean of the Graduate School when I arrived in 1989. In fact, Dr. Lockhart was UF’s first female academic administrator at the University level–and among the first women in the country to hold such a position. A living legend, she made women of my generation believe that we should speak our minds as she did to make the university a better place. After all, we were standing on her shoulders.
Dr. Lockhart always had an eye to the future. Faculty and students at UF would not have vital opportunities without her vision and strategic giving. The Lockhart legacy currently supports the “Classical Convergences” exhibition I co-designed at the Harn Museum of Art. The Madelyn Lockhart Dissertation Fellowship program supports one of my current graduate students.
I attended her campus memorial service, where I learnt that we both entered college as music majors (she stuck with it, double-majoring in Music and Economics). And so in tribute to her, I offer this Five-Finger Exercise on The Lockhart Effect. For keyboard musicians, these devices move the fingers in ways that strengthen the hand. I have chosen five key areas we see Lockhart’s hand in shaping the future of my institution. You may play the keys in any order you like.
A – African Studies. The Dr. Madelyn M. Lockhart Book Fund in African Studies, along with the Dissertation Research Travel Award she established for students traveling to Africa, helped usher in a new discipline and ensure its future.
B – Books. Spanning the disciplines of Humanities and Social Sciences, the Dr. Madelyn M. Lockhart New Books Area in Library West helps students and faculty locate current academic work.
F – Faculty Focus Exhibitions. Through the Dr. Madelyn M. Lockhart Endowment for Faculty Focus Exhibitions, her vision enables UF Faculty to collaborate with the Harn Museum of Art. These exhibitions foster innovative class assignments for UF students and programs for the Gainesville community.
G – Gender Research. As one of the women who launched UF’s Women’s Studies program in 1977, Dr. Lockhart opened new areas of inquiry for students and faculty (she is third from the left in this photo). This legacy continues through UF’s Center for Women’s Studies and Gender Research.
C – UF Clarinet Ensemble. This week I had the pleasure of hearing this group‘s spring concert, which was dedicated to Dr. Lockhart. Her support has helped these talented young musicians perform in Europe. –MB
I teach Modern British Poetry in the Spring, and so W. H. Auden’s early love poems always fall during Valentine’s week. And every year I return to the full humanity of a 1937 poem Auden later titled “Lullaby” (Lay your sleeping head, my love). In yesterday’s class, we entered this startling poem about the ephemeral fullness and “ordinary swoon” of one person’s love for another. It opens with an invitation that is tender and bracing at once:
Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
I and you could be anybody, as the body parts Auden writes into his love poems are rarely restricted to a single gender. The only restriction here is a shared one–the limitations (the faithlessness, the guilt) of being human. We are not divine like Venus; we are not the idealized figures of traditional love poems; we do not live happily ever after like Cinderella. We are “living creature[s]” like the beloved in this poem; we are made “of Eros and of dust,” Auden would write in “September 1, 1939.”
“On the stroke of midnight,” Auden tells us here, “ecstasy” and “certainty” will vanish. Yet in seizing “this night,” the speaker finds the “mortal, guilty” beloved to be “entirely beautiful.” There is a plenitude even in disenchanted love, which jazz musician Tord Gustavsen captures in this lush setting of the opening to Auden’s poem.
In the morning, Auden’s speaker offers a benediction for the lover to leave sustained (“fed”) through this “mortal world” they have created together, so that the lover can survive any “nights of insult” in the future. Just as the poem acknowledges our imperfections, it acknowledges our vulnerability in opening ourselves to another. The I and the you will part at morning, but the you can now “pass / Watched by every human love.” Everykind of love that one person bears for another.
A former student of mine said Auden’s love poems were “the most democratic” he had ever read. Whatever our sexuality may be, we can enter these poems and know they are ours. For they include everyone–if you’re human.
Here’s my lead-in to a piece on Plath parodies for Plath Profiles #7. It’s a collaboration with students from my 2013 course on ‘Plath and Her Cultural Afterlife at 50’ (timed to coincide with the 50th anniversary of her death). In it, you’ll find wonderful parodies of these Plath poems:
“The Burnt-Out Spa”; “The Arrival of the Bee Box”; “Daddy”; “The Jailer”; “Cut” and “Lady Lazarus.”
Enjoy! You can access the full piecehere (click PDF).
I tell my modern and contemporary poetry students that writing a parody is the most intimate form of literary analysis. You inhabit the poem in a different way—like living in an apartment long enough to find your roommate’s habits and quirks as familiar as the furniture. You may not know your roommate’s deep, dark secrets. But you know what she has for breakfast and what kind of deodorant she uses. Writing a parody is like fitting into someone else’s clothes and taking on her style, her flair. It’s better than karaoke because you bring the artist’s signature moves to the song, but get to improvise the words. Successful parodies blend intimacy and performance—the same effects we find so engaging in Sylvia Plath’s best known poems.
What does it mean to parody a writer that many readers find intimate already—and some find overly so? I find that parody pedagogy can spring Plath from her confessional crypt, spiriting her away from the biographical binds of her critical and media reception. Writing Plath parodies gives students an artful understanding of the intensities she brings to her page; they are devices and distillations, not death-drives and Daddy dilemmas. My students relished these aspects of Plath’s signature style: an energetic and flamboyant persona; an eye for detail and texture; embellished diction; rich sound devices; warped romance and domesticity; twisted humor. Parody pedagogy offers Plath’s poetry and prose as material to perform—not objects to interpret or symptoms to diagnose.
My students and I hope our Plath playlist inspires more teachers and students to engage this stylish writer through parody. -MB
I’m just back from the second academic conference I’ve attended in the last four weeks. It was my first venture into a STEM conference, the Materials Research Society (MRS) Fall meeting in Boston. In November I attended my go-to Humanities conference, the Modernist Studies Association (MSA) in Pittsburgh. Experienced in such proximity, these conferences prompted me to reconsider their respective cultures through this year’s MSA theme–Confluence and Division. What synergies might we gain from bridging these communities?
What are they?
Founded in 1998, the MSA is an interdisciplinary, international group focused on cultural productions between 1880-1960: when the aesthetic movement we call modernism shaped literature, art, architecture, design, film, and academe. Founded in 1973, MRS is an interdisciplinary, international group devoted to “advancing materials” and “improving the quality of life.” Many MSA conference attendees come from English departments, history departments, film studies programs, and women’s studies programs. Many MRS conference attendees come from Chemistry departments, Engineering departments, Physics departments, biomedical research units, science museums, laboratories, and industry.
Ethnographic observations
Each organization’s conference behaviors might appear strange to the other. For example:
MSA-goers often read black & white papers to one another.
MRS-goers often present colorful posters to one another.
MSA-goers have interactive “what are you reading” sessions.
MRS-goers have interactive hands-on science activities.
MSA-goers encounter a room full of editors displaying books.
MRS-goers encounter a room full of industry reps handing out swag.
UF and MRS colleagues at the Impact of Materials on Society (IMOS) booth.
From Common Grounds to Common Ground
Both conferences have coffee breaks throughout the day, but there are other ways that MSA and MRS appear to converge.
Poet-pediatrician William Carlos Williams’s mantra “no ideas but in things” could work for both conferences.
MSA and MRS represent materialist disciplines.
MSA and MRS connect to museum studies.
Both organizations promote the arts; MSA had poetry readings and MRS had a “Science as Art” event.
The MSA logo (on the right) and MRS Quick Reference Guide (see above) display the geometric designs of modernist aesthetics.
Sustainability is a key issue for MSA and MRS.
Both conferences offered opportunities for unabashed enjoyment: Camp Modernism: The Seminar (MSA) and Fun Science Stuff (MRS).
What would happen if we mixed things up?
I enjoyed each conference intellectually, socially, and aesthetically. But participating in both makes me wonder…
What if MSA had hands-on activities and poster sessions, and MRS had writing workshops?
What if MSA invited undergraduates to share their research, and MRS invited poets to perform their works inspired by science?
What if MRS had more pedagogy sessions, and MSA had more on-site public outreach?
What a dynamic materials-based synergy that would be! I’ll keep both badges. -MB
If you’re a teacher in these times, you hear early and often that STEM is what education is now all about. It’s STEM to the brim–more science, technology, engineering & math–and a requiem for Arts and Humanities. Indeed there are so many calls for “more STEM!” and its efficiencies that Monty Python’s song for more Spam seems downright deficient. But this narrow way of thinking isn’t good for education–including the STEM disciplines.
STEM shouldn’t be about Us vs. Them. Our colleagues in the Arts and Art Education have countered this thinking head on with their acronym STEAM: adding the Arts to power STEM with creativity. I’m on board with this broad-minded approach to learning. And I’ll add SHTEM to the mix: powering STEM with the historical, cultural, and conceptual thinking of the Humanities. It’s a strategic mode of creative thinking that can power future designers, entrepreneurs, and inventors in the STEM professions. It’s a mode of thinking that draws on aesthetics, rhetoric, gender theory, history, and sociology to show students how to tailor their ideas to particular audiences for specific purposes: whether that audience is a governing board, a manufacturer, or a niche market.
I’m involved in the IMOS initiative here at UF, which brings together faculty in Materials Science Engineering, Anthropology, Classics, English, History, and Sociology in partnership with the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere. We’re reinventing freshman education for engineers with our interdisciplinary perspectives and case studies. Engineering students learn the anthropological concept of entanglement, the Classical uses of concrete to create social spaces, the modernist aesthetics of household plastics, the cyborg effects of semiconductors on social relations. And much more! Soon I’ll be joining colleagues from Team IMOS to give a pedagogy workshop for the Materials Research Society meeting in Boston. (We’re funded by MRS and NSF, and had seed money from a UF Creative Campus Catalyst grant.) We’ll show up with plenty of SHTEM, and we look forward to learning from our colleagues in science and engineering. -MB
