JM E521

travel text presentations

JM — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 13:15:00 +0000

[updated 4/21 to add Emily and Amir]

Amir: While all the detailed economic and diplomatic information is...interesting (ok, long) what interested me the most was the inclusion of letters from (and to? I'm not sure—I only saw one volume) the King of Siam. I know there's an excerpt from Bowring to the King at least typed in the volume if not reprinted in facsimile version (because you quoted from it), but I was interested to see the letter from the King, written in perfect English script (must have had a good scribe?) but with the King's stamp on it. I wonder why he included that particular one? It couldn't have been the only letter from the King. Maybe he wanted to show that at one point they did have a good diplomatic relationship? Before he went off and started a war, that is.

Emily: All the stuff you pointed out about Robbins's descriptions of the "savages" (calling them that/assuming they were going to eat him before he even met them, just looking at them from afar) is quite interesting and your observations spot on. Of course one of the most interesting things about this "journal" is that it was written by a white man enslaved during the height of slavery in his own country. But what is even more interesting is the popularity of this little book, especially since, as you said, the captain produced his own book. Even the MASC copy, which is from 1818 and within the first year it was in print, is a 4th edition. There seem to be at least ten different editions (let alone printings of the editions) in the nineteenth century alone. Intriguing. I wonder what types of people were reading it/making it so popular.

[original from 4/6]

Kellan: From what I recall, this was the first of the travel texts presented that was expressly published under the authority of the East India Company. To that end, I think the things you highlighted in the text were just those things that the text was supposed to show: "the state of agriculture, arts, and commerce; the religion manners and customs; the history natural and civil, and antiquities, in the dominions of the rajah of Mysore, and the countries acquired by the Honourable East India Company." In a text like this, I wouldn't expect a Romantic hero, or any sort of objectivity. Instead, I would expect to catch the subtext "what can we [the EIC] get from this land, these people" and be presented with sheets upon sheets of data. This might be the first of the texts presented that is just what it seems to be/was intended to be.

Hillary: I think there's definitely an article or conference presentation in here regarding the on-board entertainment of the literary variety (the newspaper, the plays). It would be interesting, I think, to look at the themes of what was being written on-board—stuff about what they're seeing/experiencing while being stuck on the ship, or things that they don't see (things they miss from home, for instance).

Toria: In contemporary reviews of other Dicey works, his books are often said to be "gentlemanly." I'm not sure what that means, but it might be something like what you wrote in your handout—that "his style is more humorous than scientifically focused." I'm thinking his narrative is the thing of cocktail parties rather than university classrooms. But that doesn't really explain why this particular text sort of dropped out of the limelight so to speak, while some of his others did not. Although he wrote a lot about the Middle East and Asia, he also wrote about America. His Spectator of America and Six Months in the Federal States were reprinted, at least in America, even as recent as the 1970s. Given he was prolific, it would be interesting to see if the works that did remain at a certain level of popularity were those which were more "gentlemanly" or those that were more scientific or ethnographic (I'm making a distinction that maybe doesn't even need to be made).

Jerry: The ruse that is this story is quite compelling stuff. Knowing that Banks was a subscriber to this text (am I remembering it correctly?) adds to the complexity of the situation—sure, the voyage was real but the story concocted (at least parts of it)...but were there any reports of value for Banks and others? Isn't any observation of a new thing, or at least something not often observed, at least a little valuable? It wasn't as if this story was completely fabricated—unlike Damberger, there wast at least a voyage to some of the places discussed in the text—so even under the cloud of suspicion and conspiracy someone (perhaps Banks) could have found something useful in the text.

Me: What still strikes me about the Burnaby text is the way in which his observations —and they were just observations and not experiments—would go on to become reference materials those writing about life in the colonies (Virginia in particular) throughout the nineteenth century. Additionally, the Burnaby text is one of those reconstructed narratives—he visited in 1759-60 but the text was written/reconstructed from notes and wasn't published until 1775. It was at that time the footnotes were added, and I don't doubt that these additions were in some part to do what Tim noted in his post: "could the footnotes in your narrative be there to help validate the narrative?" I would say so.

crucial quotes for my paper

JM — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 15:29:00 +0000

The bulk of my paper, which is turning out slightly different than I originally discussed, can be summed up as a reaction to these two quotes:

* In her comprehensive work on Thoreau, Seeing New Worlds, Laura Dassow Walls summarizes the commandments of Humboldtian science as: explore, collect, measure, connect.

* In a letter to Jeanne Carr in 1866, John Muir wrote, "How intensely I desire to be a Humboldt!"

In my paper, these two quotes frame my argument of the early Muir as a Humboldtian scientist, continuing a trend that essentially Emerson and Thoreau missed out on due to circumstances of age and/or death rather than fundamental philosophical or scientific disagreements.

conceptual US/my life

JM — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 19:32:00 +0000

You should see a Google Map below. If you don't, just click here.

Even if you do see the map, you'll have to click on it or click here to get the full effect.

Basically, there are some colored areas:
* light pink (Pennsylvania) = "BIRTH"
* light green (the Mid-South) = "GROWTH"
* dark pink (California) = "TOXIC"
* dark green (Yosemite) = "REFUGE"
* blueish (Pullman) = "PEACEFUL"
* all gray strips are labeled "CORRIDOR" and they're the various routes I've driven between the other colored areas.

There's a story, essentially the story of my life from age 15 to 34 (now), in all the individual points.

When you click on the map, you should see a list of points and labels in a chunk on the left. You can click on a point and it should zoom over to that point, and you can read a description. The points are relatively chronological ("My Hometown" is first and "Hello, Pullman" is last) and the descriptions for each point make up the story. Or, the story I'm telling now, which of course is just a little bit of the story. The framework of the story. Something like that.

When I think of the US, I don't think of it as states or cities or even regions like "the midwest" or anything like that. I think of it in terms of where I've been and what I did there. For me, the US is four specific chunks and then a wide swath of "underexplored" territory. Not "unexplored," because I have been to more places than I point out on the map, but "underexplored" because I haven't spent enough time to make the area a part of myself.

seminar paper plans

JM — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 18:46:00 +0000

I plan to write a seminar paper in some way involving Humboldt, Emerson, Thoreau, and Muir. Duh, right?

But seriously. Humboldt was fundamentally influential on many 19thC philosophers, scientists, writers, people who fancied themselves somewhere in-between. By "fundamentally influential" I mean something between "I have studied extensively under him" and "if you look hard enough, you'll see that a lot of principles are similar." Vague, I know.

In one position you have Emerson, who was all about Nature and its uses and how it's emblematic and we must experience it, and yadda yadda yadda—good Transcendentalist/philosopher, not so good scientist. In another position you have Thoreau, who was all about walking around in nature and cataloging and being a good scientist—good conservationist/preservationist philosopher, good scientist, bad Transcendentalist. In a third position you have Muir, who was all about walking around in nature in a big way, not the huckleberry excursions in the local park but in an "I'm going to walk from Wisconsin to Florida and hopefully hop a boat to South America but I got sick so I went to California instead and boy howdy look at these glacial creations and let me give you my theories on glaciation and while I'm at it I'll discover and name a whole passel of plants" sort of way; influenced by Emerson, by Thoreau, by Humboldt. Decent enough Transcendental philosopher, great conservationist/preservationist philosopher, good scientist. More than Thoreau, he met the criteria for what Emerson was looking for in a premier Transcendentalist naturalist.

It's common to place these fellows on a continuum: Emerson! Then Thoreau of course, influenced by Emerson. By the numbers, there's Muir next in line, surely influenced by both. But it's actually trickier than that due to publication and accessibility of texts, which I won't go into here. What I'm getting at is that the better thread that runs through them all is a Humboldtian one. If Humboldtian science can be reduced to this simple definition (which I will use here in this blog post without any more thought given to it)—moving toward an understanding of the interconnectedness of nature through precise and accurate measurement—then anyone who has spent any time with Emerson will realize that thought runs through a great deal of Nature. Same thing for Thoreau and for Muir.

This isn't exactly groundbreaking information. For general, big picture connections between Humboldt and Thoreau, I have Laura Dassow Walls and Seeing New Worlds. Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Natural Science; for Humboldt and Muir there's Aaron Sachs and The Humboldt Current (chapter on Muir).

But what I plan to do is to look at the influence from the inside out—what, specifically did Emerson, Thoreau, and Muir say about Humboldt in their published works or in their journals. How and why did they invoke him, and what sort of cultural import did that bring to their own work? The list of references is rich without being an overwhelming amount of work. I remain hopeful.

touristy?

JM — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 18:50:00 +0000

[Because I am not one for following directions, I did use the Internet when I wrote this. But I knew EXACTLY where the photos were (they're mostly mine) and I swear I didn't venture off into the rest of the Internet until later when I added the one not-mine image. The whole idea came from a picture I had in my head (of a picture I took) so it seemed only right to put them in.]

San Jose fancies itself a cosmopolitan place. In terms of population and land, it's bigger than San Francisco. But it's called the San Francisco Bay Area, not San Jose Bay Area. Ok fine, that's probably because San Francisco has a bay and San Jose doesn't, but really—when someone says "Northern California," you think "San Francisco," don't you? Not San Jose.

So, back to the point—San Jose fancies itself terribly cosmopolitan. The Cinequest film festival is in San Jose, not San Francisco. As you can see (in the kind of crappy cameraphone photo), the downtown movie theatre gets all gussied up for the event—everything is shiny and new! Of course San Jose is the "IT" destination for up-and-coming filmmakers. Who would ever think otherwise? Well, those of us who know the rest of the city has a tendency to look more like this tunnel o'graffiti than the shiny downtown pavilion (which, incidentally, sat empty for five years during the dot-com boom-to-bust—the empty movie theatre reflects more of the true San Jose than the Cinequesty one).

If you're looking for the shiny and new or the ivied and old—the stuff of picture postcards—it's not difficult to find. But the interesting stories are not those made from money. In the shadow of Tower Hall is its antithesis: Peanuts Deluxe Cafe. Don't let the "deluxe" fool you. Just after I took this photo, I flicked a cockroach off the counter and settled in to eat my breakfast. I went there almost every day.

If you click through the photo and look in the background, you'll see a fellow serving up the food. His name is Minh and he's a Korean immigrant. The Korean immigrant owns the American diner and the Chinese place next door, and serves a student population in which Caucasians are barely in the majority, in a city built on Ohlone land by Spaniards.

Then there's the Crepe Lady, whose name I don't even know. On Saturday mornings, this Vietnamese woman—just a few hours after closing up shop at the Chinese restaurant down the block—spends four hours making crepes in the front of a coffeeshop in a relatively tony part of town. She could never afford to live there, and no one she cooks for looks like her. If you pay close enough attention to the financial transactions that go along with the crepe-making, you'll see a lot of white guilt makes its way into the tip jar.

When you visit, what will you see?

[Graffiti picture by Flickr user caracolski, other photos by me.]

a sufficient variety of knowledge

JM — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 02:53:00 +0000

In the grand tradition of blog posts for this class, I'm going to veer slightly from the actual question.

Humboldt is quoted as lamenting the "sufficient variety of knowledge" of the scientists/travelers/collectors who went before him—but not because these scientists/travelers/collectors did a terrible job at science or travelling or collecting. Instead, the rest of the quotation makes it clear that Humboldt was disappointed that this lack of a sufficient variety of knowledge thus disallowed the travellers "to avail themselves of every advantage arising from their position." In other words, perhaps Humboldt is most disappointed in the singular/limited purposes of trips, or the single-minded-ness of collectors? Sort of like that question Amir and Kellan asked in class the other day, about what happens when you're so focused on studying one thing—think of all the stuff you missed out on. Perhaps it's a little of that, but perhaps it's just that Humboldt was so freaking awesome at everything that he wishes he had been part of those early travels and had the opportunity to experience/view the entire context from whence came the first specimens from [insert locale here].

And even if Humboldt was harshing on the scientists/travelers/collectors who went before him, he still got some value from them. In a letter to Carl Ritter, Humboldt says:

If a life prolonged to an advanced period bring with it several inconveniences to the individual, there is a compensation in the delight of being able to compare older states of knowledge with that which now exists, and to see great advances in knowledge develop themselves under our eyes in departments which had long slept in inactivity.

In this quotation, he's talking about himself and his advanced age (he lived to be 89, after all, and Ritter 79), but I could see where he might also be talking about the state of scientific knowledge. The advancements in scientific knowledge that occurred during his lifetime (1769-1859) are pretty spectacular, I would say, and in no small part due to Humboldt himself.

In fact, this quotation was the epigraph to An Abstract of Mr. Emerson's Remarks Made at the Celebration of the Centennial Anniversary of the Birth of Alexander Von Humboldt, September 14, 1869. In those remarks, Emerson referred to Humboldt as "one of those wonders of the world [...] who appear from time to time, as if to show us the possibilities of the human mind." And, Emerson goes on to say, Humboldt's mind was not like the rest of our minds: "As we know, a man's natural powers are often a sort of committee that slowly, one at a time, give their attention and action; but Humboldt's were all united, one electric chain..." But the connection to what I'm trying to say here about the "sufficient variety of knowledge to avail themselves of every advantage arising from their position" comes in this observation by Emerson: "He was properly a man of the world...for at any point on land or sea he found the objects of his researches"—perhaps not because he specifically set out to collect or study a particular object, but because he saw potential for study in everything.

This conception of Humboldt as some sort of superscientist was not solely Emerson's, of course. In an 1866 letter from John Muir to Jeanne Carr [CONTEXT: In 1866 Muir was a few years removed from his study of botany at Univ of Wisconsin; his prof was Jeanne Carr's husband (Ezra Carr) and Muir formed a relationship with the family. Muir then went walking around Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, and Canada—he hadn't made his thousand-mile walk to the Gulf or ever been to California, and had read a little bit of Emerson and Thoreau but wouldn't meet Emerson for another five years.], Muir discusses his dislike for having to focus on only a few things, and none of those things are the big things he really wants to do:

I do not believe that study, especially of the Natural Sciences, is incompatible with ordinary attention to business; still I seem to be able to do but one thing at a time. Since undertaking a month or two ago to invent new machinery for our mill, my mind seems to so bury itself in the work that I am fit for but little else; and then a lifetime is so little a time that we die ere we get ready to live. I would like to go to college, but then I have to say to myself, "You will die ere you can do anything else." I should like to invent useful machinery, but it comes, "You do not wish to spend your lifetime among machines and you will die ere you can do anything else." I should like to study medicine that I might do my part in helping human misery, but again it comes, "You will die ere you are ready or able to do so."

How intensely I desire to be a Humboldt!

where i haven't been

JM — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 18:30:00 +0000

In my first post for this class I wrote (a little bit) about the first time I went to Yosemite and how I just had to go there if I was going to be working on Muir for the rest of my life(ish). But that doesn't mean I've been everywhere. Far from it.

I haven't been to Walden Pond. Or Concord. The horror!

Actually, I haven't been to Massachusetts at all since 1992, and then I wasn't studying the Transcendentalists. I did, however, eat some fine cannoli in Little Italy. But cannoli aren't very Thoreauvian, so back to the point.

The point is, not a day goes by that I don't think about Walden Pond or Concord. It could be that I'm trying to paint a picture in my head while I'm reading some primary text or secondary scholarly article, and I'm always reading one or the other. But it also could be (and most likely is) that I can't consider myself a scholar in my chosen field until I do my best to follow Thoreau's map of the pond, or I wander down the path into town and pop in on someone for dinner and conversation (ok, I wouldn't really do the latter, but I would walk into town just so I can chuckle at how not in the wilderness HDT actually was...the weenie).

And, as morbid as it sounds, I feel like I need to touch all the authors' gravestones on Author's Ridge in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery.

I'm not sure how all this will help me develop as a person or a scholar, except to say that I honestly believe I won't be "complete" until I, uh, complete that task. I have to walk in their footsteps (even to their graves) and see some of the same things they saw (what's 150 years of changes between friends?). If I'm to make historical and/or cultural claims about people and places, I need to have shared the same spot of earth with them.

our month in Smyrna

JM — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 22:30:00 +0000

[While in MASC, Tim and I looked at A journey through Albania and other provinces of Turkey in Europe and Asia to Constantinople during the years 1809 and 1810 (London, 1813) by John Cam Hobhouse, 1st Baron Broughton.

I know this isn't really on prompt (this is a what-we-did rather than a what-we'll-do), but I think it's more interesting than me saying "well, I plan to eat a lot of figs" and I got to use photos. :)]

"I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks,—who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering; which word is beautifully derived 'from idle people who roved about the country, in the middle ages, and asked charity, under pretence of going à la Sainte Terre'—to the holy land, till the children exclaimed, 'There goes a Sainte-Terrer', a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering."—Henry David Thoreau, from "Walking"

After spending considerable time aboard a ship traveling all around the Aegean, my compatriot and I did a little dance when we docked at Smyrna. Not only were we thrilled to touch dry land—any dry land—we had heard tell that Smyrna was one of the most beautiful of all the ancient cities in this part of the world. As we were to stay at the governor's residence for the month, we knew we would be treated to the finest in food, drink, and *ahem* entertainment.

For the first week of our stay, our party indulged in a little Deadly Sinning. The generous amounts of Smyrna's finest figs proved too much for the delicate systems of some of our crew, and their gluttony proved their downfall. Having learned from the fates of these men, we sampled the citrus in moderation. Once adjusted to the fine foods of our host, we proceeded to gorge ourselves on sherbets, yaort, wine, coffee, and plenty of fresh fish.

I was most satisfied with the thick, rich Turkish coffee, while my companion made off with the bulk of the wine; for hours and hours he would smoke and drink with the locals, often placing bets on horse races and matches in which athletes would throw what was known as a "djerid." I feared we would lose him to this life of debauchery, but apparently he was madly in love with a maiden back home and thus was perfectly willing to leave his new-found friends at the end of our stay.

As for me, I spent most of my time sauntering throughout the city. Although part of the city is built on a hill, luckily for me the finest of the ruins are on flat land, near the sea. (For all my love of sauntering, I am not an accomplished climber.) Everywhere I went, history followed. Some of the ruins were once a "Homerium," a temple honoring the great Greek poet, Homer. I sat in those ruins over the course of many days, but I could not conjure an epic poem about our journey. An ode to food, perhaps. An epic, not so much.

[Source for image at top found here; photo by Flickr user Rastoder. Source for image at bottom found here; photo by Flickr user Anna-Qu.]

on (not) collecting

JM — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 14:10:00 +0000

I don't like clutter, so I've never been a big collector of souvenirs-from-gift-shops without other utility—mugs are ok, tshirts are ok, stickers for my car are ok (advertising both of the place and the fact that you're cool enough to have been to the place). But I do have very specific items I have collected over my life. Mostly these things (cards, letters, tattoos) are used to mark events in time, and I suppose "where I've been" and "journeys I've taken" if we're talking about mental or emotional journeys rather than hikes, travels, or other forms of physical journeys.

The first time I went to Yosemite, I was a little militant about not screwing up the land. I had a totally irrational fear that on my first trip to Yosemite I was accidentally going to start a fire, or hit an animal with my car, or otherwise do some sort of damage to nature that would result in being thrown out of all National Parks forever and ever. (I told you it was irrational.) So, no matter that I could have reached into Mirror Lake and pocketed a stone that had been pummeled smooth by years of rushing water, I didn't. I thought that would be Just Plain Wrong.

On the way back down the trail from Mirror Lake, we walked past a Japanese tourist who had ripped up some sort of fern, roots and all, and was happily carrying it down the trail. Out of nowhere, a Park Ranger stopped her and had a "conversation" with her about not taking things out of National Parks. I took that as a sign that my irrational fear of screwing up nature was not so irrational, because clearly Park Rangers hide out behind trees waiting for people to pocket rocks and ferns.

When we left Yosemite Valley the next day, I realized that not only had I not collected any rocks or ferns, but I never set foot in a gift shop and I never used my camera. I was in Yosemite and didn't use my camera. All the pictures I have of the trip are from my friend who was with me. She took all the pictures. So the only collected items of my own that I have from that trip are my memories and the stories I can tell (and if you want to hear a really funny one, told by someone else, that paints me as a total lame-o, go here).

Since I didn't collect anything tangible on that trip, I made a point to collect photos, mugs, t-shirts, and stickers for my car on the next trip. I kind of made it a point to conquer things on this second trip. We weren't just going to see waterfalls and rushing rivers—I was going to purposefully scare the crap out of myself (I have a terrible fear of heights) and stand on the edge of a cliff 7503 feet high, and I was going to take a picture not only of where I was, but where I'd been. That's the photo you see here: Yosemite Valley floor 7503 feet below Taft Point.

In that instance, I collected tangible items, sure, and those I can share and the viewers of that collection can construct their own narratives if so desired. but I also have a set of not-so-tangible emotions that you bet I can recollect in tranquility—I just have to think about standing 7503 feet up and I get all weak in the knees and flash back to the whipping wind and the burning sun and the feeling of immense fear and joy.

reading a collection of a collection of one man's souvenirs

JM — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 05:16:00 +0000

This is a little story about someone else's collection, or at least a small portion of it (4/51 of it, to be exact). In this case, the the collection itself consisted of 51 reels of microfilm representing almost all of John Muir's correspondence, journals, unpublished manuscripts and collected illustrations and photographs found in various repositories (U of the Pacific, Berkeley, the Huntington, the State of Wisconsin, and many others). Actually, then, the "collection" collects other collections of one man's souvenirs (among other things). I sliced off the 4/51 that I needed, and from it I re-constructed an entirely different story than I thought I would, or perhaps was intended.

I should back up and assign some roles to these characters. Using terminology we saw in the excerpt from Stewart's Objects of Desire, the role of "collection" will be played by both the bulk of The John Muir Papers 1858-1957 and the four reels of microfilm that I borrowed. The role of "souvenir" will be played by the individual items Muir himself kept—correspondence to and from various people throughout his working and personal life. Stewart says "the past is at the service of the collection" but that the "souvenir lends authenticity to the past and the collection." I read that to mean, basically, that the collection is representative of the past when the context of origin is erased (it is taken out of it's time and place), and the souvenirs are parts of a collection that can be examined both individually and in this new context. This gets a little tricky when Stewart then goes on to say that the collection is not "constructed by its elements" but that "it comes to exist by means of its principle of organization." Ok, fine—these souvenirs of a time, place, conversation are organized entirely by the date on the document or, in the case of an undated document, an editor's (collector's) reconstruction of events such that the souvenir was put back into its time.

My goal was to extract a story from a subset of a subset of the collection; namely, I was to look at all the correspondence between Muir and one man in particular (Robert Underwood Johnson) over a period of 15 years or so. I had a "guide" to this collection, and it looked something like this excerpt:

1877 Sep 28 I A103101631
Dec 13 I A103101669
1878 Apr 24 I A/O3/01735
1879 Feb 19 I A103101851
1880 May 20 I A/04/02047
1881 May 21 I A104102247
1884 Oct 28 I A105102636
1889 Jun 22 I A/06/03258
Jun 27 1 A106103265
JuI 18 I A106103308
Aug 1 I A106103316
Aug 21 I A/06/03318
Sep 23 I A106103339
Nov 21 I A/06/03350
Dec 19 I A10610336

I had dates and reference numbers, and sat down with microfilm to "read" the collection linearly. My entry into the collection was forced—I couldn't wander in and start at any point I wanted. Instead, I had to start at the beginning of each roll of film and scroll through items not on my list—items to/from other people, following a storyline not applicable to what I wanted to discover.

Or so I thought.

Although I was experiencing a tightly constructed, highly organized collection with a single purpose in mind, the sheer act of stepping linearly (one dimension) through the film in fact reconstructed the context of one year, then another, and then even more (multi-dimensions). Stewart noted that when we "'see' the collection, we cannot possibly 'see' each of its elements," and that certainly is true in my case. I looked at the collection as a means to an end—it housed a set of elements (souvenirs) that I needed, but what it really did was create a series of new beginnings. I am not ashamed to say that I sat in the microfilm area of the library for several days over Thanksgiving Break and laughed and cried over letters marking events unrelated to what I was actually researching. The individual elements produced numerous narrative threads that I just had to follow—some to dead ends (literally: Helen Hunt Jackson asked Muir for advice regarding going to Yosemite from San Francisco for "health purposes" and Muir wrote back with info and then she wrote back, setting up a time to visit, and then she died, so that story ends) and some over years and years (letters from Muir's family in Wisconsin, asking him when he was coming for a visit, which he rarely did, but still they tried) and some which were one-offs (a random, unrelated man also named John Muir writes to the John Muir and says "hello there! we have the same name! are you any good?") and so on. None of those narrative threads were the one I originally intended to follow, but by the time I got a letter in the narrative I was following, so much context had already been created by these other items that I know I had a better understanding of the story I was actually after.

In addition to the sheaf of paper I took away from my time with the microfilm, I also got a new tattoo in the deal. Oh yeah, and new and exciting lines of inquiry. And also a deep desire to own all 51 of those microfilm reels for my very own.

i am a theory whore

JM — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 05:35:00 +0000

One of my classmates calls me a theory whore (apparently she means it lovingly). My committee chair tells me I have a skillful way with both the discussion and creation of theory. I accept it, but believe me, "theory whore" is not a moniker I thought would ever be applied to me. I'm still in the process of coming to terms with it.

You see, I empathize with Geoff Dyer and his experiences with the Longman Critical Reader on Lawrence. I had my love of literature killed by theory during my first experience in graduate school, in the early 90s. As my profs threw reams of structuralist/post-structuralist/deconstructed criticism at my feet, all I wanted to do was kick it to the curb. During classes, profs privileged these works far more than the literary texts themselves. Reading became painful. Discussion was non-existent, as most of us sat there with mouths agape wondering just what the hell it was these people were talking about and, more importantly, why. Talking and talking and talking about the theory, and not the text, seemed at least antithetical to the reasons most of us went to grad school in the first place—many of us coming from undergrad institutions that had little to no formal theory component to our programs, and the only "theory" we got was through the common New Critical lens that we didn't really know had a name—and at the most pure blasphemy.

With my love and understanding of literature promptly squashed, I promptly withdrew from school.

But I went back, eventually, when the Great Theory Wars had subsided enough for literary studies to become somewhat sane again, and lo and behold I found out that some theory was actually useful and fun and—horror of horrors—sometimes elucidating! The difference in these two periods of instruction was simply the point of view of the instructors—not the critical school to which they belong, but their view of theory in general: useful, but potentially overused and definitely dangerous in the wrong hands. Wielded by the wrong hands, theory can kill literature, one's love for it, and the idealism that tends to along with being a graduate student. But in the right hands, when you try on that critical lens and find it doesn't give you a headache, then you'll see that theory doesn't always suck.

Dyer reminds me of the profs who allowed me the opportunity to rediscover my love of literature, because they didn't shove a critical viewpoint down my throat. These profs allowed me the opportunity to find the lens that fit, and thankfully it wasn't one of those crazy supermetaultrapostpostmodern ones. That is to say, I don't think Dyer is anti-theory—he's anti-theory-for-theory's-sake. He advocates several types of criticism in his diatribe against criticism: there's some New Historicism, some genre studies, a little bit of reader-response, and more than a little intertextuality and textual studies in there. So, while I'd love to rail against Dyer for being so anti-theory, he really isn't. Sorry, folks.

writing in the field

JM — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 19:23:00 +0000

My primary scholarly interests revolve around people who wandered out into the wilderness and took in all it had to offer—new plants, a new point of view, a new sense of self. But their place is not my place; my apartment in Pullman or my condo in San Jose is not the top of Mt. Kataadn or the Yosemite Valley. Although true that I could sit in my place and write an acceptable academic essay about Transcendental themes in Select-a-Thoreau-Essay or in Unpublished-Muir-Journal-Entry, I believe that to do so would be somewhat disingenuous. To fully comprehend the place from which and about which "my" authors wrote, I had to go into the field.

Frieda Knobloch writes in Botanical Companions that the field "is an exotic or removed scene"; for my work, not only did I have to go into the field but I had to gather my specimens for later study and inspiration—that's a lot of science for an English major. Of course, I wasn't chipping away rocks or pulling up plants; instead, I had to ensure that in that brief moment in the field I could sear into my brain the images that "my" authors saw, and somehow bottle the emotions for later recollection (in tranquility, of course).

To write successfully about Muir's preservationist rhetoric, I had to experience just what it that moved him to the fiery, reverent tone he used. I needed to go to his place and determine for myself why Muir wrote that "God's glory is over all His works, written upon every field and sky, but here it is in larger letters—magnificent capitals."

I had a hunch that I wouldn't truly understand Muir's statement about "magnificent capitals" until I stood in Yosemite Valley and looked up at El Capitan.

I was right.