Artist: Lori Nix and dioramas of diorama-making

In line with these miniature things, someone in my animal class posted a link to this artist on facebook.

Lori Nix website

This is totally within that realm of really strange, eerie places that seem to be vaguely narrative and magical and mysterious. I love them! Especially the fact that she did this whole series called Unnatural History or something with dioramas of behind-the-scenes natural history museums.

This is really funny. :)

This reminds me of that lovely song by Regina Spektor about a lake and the genius. 

There are deer next to this one!

On The Postmodern Animal, by Steve Baker

DOUBLE TIME! 2x's the Steve Baker!

(I've been reading both "The Postmodern Animal" and "Picturing the Beast" more or less at the same time.)

Here are some notes.

32 - he mentions how, in the "'postmodern' form of the novel (in which lists constantly fracture the narrative, and jokiness is more acceptable than seriousness" (which has something to do with something else he is saying, but is another example of people taking for granted something which I hadn't really noticed or identified for myself yet but which seems deeply true . . . about DWF and Dave Eggers and the like, who must very much be postmodernist novelists. I have much to learn. Also, makes me want to try doing things like that with writing, if only so that I can work through the phases of 15 years ago so that I can make something else now. :) At any rate, even if I never write anything ever, the idea of "fracturing narrative" with lists or breaks in the content would definitely be a useful strategy for me as well. If I made a narrative first, that is.

40 He talks about Csikszentmihalyi and then moves into the idea of the expert, and identifies how, in the postmodern world, its more favorable to the inventor rather than the expert (the continual dilletante? I wonder?) he uses the distinction between philosopher and expert . . . because there is "no creativity" in being the expert. It is not about knowing things, it's about finding out things, it's about creating a temporary break with order, breaking the rules, ignoring the "contract" and "seeing what follows from that." Which is certainly true of the kind of direction that we are encouraged to go in our art-making. Baker says this is the attitude of the postmodern artist. (This whole discussion of course surrounds where the animal fits into this, and I think he points out that the animal is in the position of the philosopher, by not knowing . . .) I think this is interesting in terms of my interest in knowing itself . . . in wanting to know, in wanting there to be experts and people who know, and then trying to resist this desire for things to be decided and to stop having to incessantly question. This un-decision, suspension of conclusion, which is pervasive in my life, doesn't seem to result in quite the kind of thinking that produces postmodern art in this way, but . . . it does seem that the more I learn about this kind of stuff, the more I realize how neatly I fit as a product of my cultural upbringing. Hmmm.

50 - 51 He talks about how the postmodern animal is most productively "thought of as embodied, and that this embodiment is felt in an encounter with them, so that it's most directly felt when the "confrontation" is "staged" in the work and it can actually happen between the person and the animal . . . so he goes on to say that visual arts have an advantage in staging this kind of confrontation over text, and that sculpture, installation, etc. are (3D work) an "edge" over painting, photos, etc. He admits that this sounds too prescriptive and that there are of course very "postmodern" encounters with animals in other work, but this does serve to explain a little why my professor said "I really can't think of any artists doing paintings or drawings of animals" in a significant way, and that "you are going to need to look at installation and sculpture."

This makes me think more about the way space is manipulated, or how to create an encounter (which I suppose happens in a painting, but not really since it's not "embodied" in that way.)

54 He talks about why straightforward, untroubling, pretty images of animals don't fit into the idea of the postmodern animal: "Why? Because the look of the postmodern animal--no surprises here--seems more likely to be that of a fractured, awkward, 'wrong' or wronged thing, which it is hard not to read as a means of addressing what it is to be human now." He says that another author describes the experience of people in the West from the 60's to 90's as "fragmentation" -- I think I am starting to be engaged with this in terms of breaking these images up into other things, and with the kinds of disjointed writing etc. It also seems a little too easy to put things together in a "purposefully" fragmented or unresolved way :) Anyway, "the postmodern animal appears as an image of difference, an images of thinking difficultly, and differently." and he talks about the heavy use of "botched taxidermy" as an example.

73 Later, another quote about botched taxidermy:
". . . as a whole, they might be said neither to be like what viewers do know nor to be like what they do not know about animals. To borrow a term from Derrida (a term he in fact applied to humans), these pieces might be called 'questioning entities.' In a field of many competing forms of knowledge and expertise--zoological, historical, anthropological, taxidermic, and more--these works are perhaps most usefully regarded as improvised knowledges, inexpert knowledges of the animal."

75 Even later, he describes the botched taxidermy as an "attempt to think a new thing" which, even out of context, I really like as a phrase.

93 He brings up Heidegger's discussion about "what is the world" from the 1920's in order to talk about it's attempt to "think non-hierarchically about the relation of humans and animals" . . . which I think sounds hierarchical, but I guess the eventual argument insists that it is not, but anyway, it's the delineation of groups as: "1. The stone is worldless. 2. The animal is poor in the world. 3. Man is world-forming." Anyway, I won't pretend to understand all that these three "theses" signify and the whole world of Derrida and other's use of this idea . . . but I do like these phrases as very poetic ones. And especially the idea that "man is world-forming" because I think this idea of the creative act (and I admit my clear bias in saying this) may be one of the enduring distinctions between humans and animals? And yes, I know, I keep talking about how our need to distinguish ourselves from animals is almost a pathology and probably something we should avoid and I continue to do it myself. Irony noted.

113 He quotes . . I don't even know . . . he might just be using quotes to signify that it's a casual phrase . . . but he says "You don't know . . . so experiment." talking about how the position of the artist or philosopher is allied with the animal in experimentation, trying things out, etc. I was kind of thrilled when I read that, though, because even though its such a simple set of words, it calls up this whole issue of KNOWING and wanting to know, and offers the sort of liberating: You don't know. With a solution for that.

Characteristics of narrative from the perspective of developmental cultural psychology

The third chapter in Jerome Bruner's book "Acts of Meaning" discusses personal narrative and the way it relates to development.

“I have been at great pains to argue (and will argue further later in this chapter) that one of the most ubiquitous and powerful discourse forms in human communication is narrative.” 77

This next part is particularly interesting to me:

“Narrative requires, as mentioned in the preceeding chapter, four crucial grammatical constituents if it is to be effectively carried out. It requires, first, a means for emphasizing human action or “agentivity”—action directioned toward goals controlled by agents. It requires, secondly, that a sequential order be established and maintained—that events and states be “linearized” in a standard way. Narrative, thirdly, also requires a sensitivity to what is canonical and what violates canonicality approximating a narrator’s perspective: it cannot, in the jargon of narratology, be “voiceless.” 77

In this quotation, i think he is referring to language acquisition readiness.

“A second requirement is early readiness to mark the unusual and leave the usual unmarked – to concentrate attention and information processing on the offbeat.” 78.

“Roman Jakobson told us many years ago, the very act of speaking is an act of marking the unusual from the usual.” 79

He argues that we have an “innate” predisposition for narrative structure and that push influences our readiness to learn the basics of narrative before we learn other kinds of logic and structure.

Bruner discusses talking to ourselves on 88 “John Dewey proposed that language provides a way of sorting out our thoughts about the world. . . .” and proceeds to use the example of a little girl named Emily who talked to herself at night, recited books, talks about what she did all day and what she thought she would do tomorrow. I think is fascinating as it relates to childhood, development, storytelling, children’s literature, journal writing, and maybe even prayer.

“But looking closely at the transcripts and listening to the tapes, there were times when we had the irrestible impression that Emily’s leaps forward in speech were fueled by a need to construct meaning, more particularly narrative meaning.”

Finally makes some mention at the end of how in general primatologists and others make too much of an emphasis on how primates (including people) engage in conflict and aggression and fail to note the amazing ways we keep peace, which he doesn’t explicitly say this but it seems that he is getting at narrative as a peace-keeping and conflict-resolving structure (he does say that) and that fact may mean that it has allowed us to evolutionarily select for narrative skills. I’m sure there are other ways to note how narrative is important for maintaining collective society which seems to be a big trait we’ve evolved for. . .

Another text in my mind lately is a chapter from an un-named book by Peggy Miller (the instructor of the cultural developmental psychology class I took my first semester of graduate school) called Narrative Practices: Their role in socialization and self-construction. (I got it in PDF form for class).

This chapter introduces the idea of self-construction which I think is fascinating in relationship to other things I have read and heard about narrative.

“Because both the experience of the self and the events in a story are organized with respect to time, narrative is especially well suited to representing self-continuity.” 160. This of course reminds me of the Radiolab interview with Paul Broks “If you ask me who I am, I’ll tell you a story.” And Robert Krulwich's "my self is the story of what has happened to my body over time." The fact that so often in our psychology readings (these readings included) narrative is tentatively heralded as a cultural universal also lends itself to support of this viewpoint of narrative as a vital way of constructing self.

This particular chapter goes into interesting detail about the ways that cultural values influence how the storyteller casts themselves or another protagonist – for example, the toughness and cleverness valued in the South Baltimore families, the “self-favorability” bias or the tendency to value the kids independence, and how these values then shape the way the narrator creates their own persona in the story.

Finally, there is one more side note that I found to be particularly interesting:

“This brings us to the issue of memory. When approached via personal storytelling, remembering emerges as a process that occurs in the service of something else. Events are not remembered for the sake of remembering, but for the sake of creating tellable stories about the self.” 175.

Ira Glass on narrative

So obviously someone credited with bringing narrative and literary non-fiction to the fore of radio is going to talk a lot about narrative. :) And this means there is a wonderful selection of resources out there regarding narrative and narrative construction.

One of my favorites is that short series that Ira Glass did for current TV that you can watch on youtube.

• Ira Glass on Storytelling #1
• Ira Glass on Storytelling #2
• Ira Glass on Storytelling #3
• Ira Glass on Storytelling #4

Also, in Jesse Thorn's interview with Ira Glass, they discuss narrative a little. Jesse asks him a great question about whether or not he sees the narrative bias in the media is problematic, to which Ira admits that it can be in a news setting (creates this "horse race" story rather than a presentation of more factual information). I always hear so much praise for narrative, its natural and basically universal presence in human thought and conversation, and its benefits in remembering, relating, and learning information, so it hadn't occurred to me that narrative is not always the best or most effective structure.

They also talked about the Improv everywhere story and Jesse mentioned that he was upset by the fact that the story told on This American Life was not accurate or representative of what Improv Everywhere does or even the spirit of Improv Everywhere. Ira responds, "I have no interest in Improv everywhere" not the straight news story that is representative but rather a story that is compelling b/c it has a plot and characters (in this case, the time when they messed up.) It's not "representative" of the group but it is a good story, the time it didn't work, the time something went wrong. This is a good point about narrative too - the conflict is what makes it interesting.

So it seems that narrative can be problematic in the sense that it demands certain qualities in order to be compelling, and sometimes the reality or truth of the situation doesn't offer those qualities. It reminds me of the psychology studies we were reading in my Developmental Cultural Psychology class about didactic narratives in European-American homes vs. Chinese homes. In the American situation, parents downplay children's wrongdoings and instead highlight what is funny or enjoyable about the child's transgression. And they also love to tell "hell-raising" stories about themselves when they were kids. This is puzzling and maybe even appalling to the Chinese parents, who emphasize respect for elders. My thought while reading these articles was a curiosity about the role that our entertainment-heavy culture has in our own interpersonal storytelling. Do Americans feel the need to make humorous, entertaining stories, casting ourselves as interesting characters and manipulating the narrative to be more compelling than it perhaps really is? How does this compare to other cultures general storytelling practices?

Storytelling and "intertexuality" from Barry Glassner

Here is a short piece of commentary from Barry Glassner's book The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things.

163
"Parallel reports from large numbers of ordinary peole do not necessarily add up to truth. People often tell similar stories that are not accurate descriptions of reality, as any anthropologist or police officer can testify. Like novelists or playwrights, regular folks adopt common images, plot lines, and themes--elements of what literary crtics call intertextuality-- in telling stories about themselves."

I think this is interesting because is goes back to this narrative thing. And it might be cool to explore visually what these common narratives (alien abductions sound the same, near death experiences, blah blah blah) or other examples of common narratives. . . what they look like. Also, what this term "intertexuality" means further.

On the X-Files . . .

I continue to return to the X-files as something I admire and am in awe of. I say this not simply because the X-Files was my chosen object for the junior-high obession phase of my life, nor because to this day, if I were to taylor-make the phsyical specifications of an ideal man, he would undoubtedly be either David Duchnovy or Jim Sturgess, but because after retrospective examination and, I hope, a better sense of objective consideration, I think the show actually did a number of things very well. In particular, the dual ability to portray something at this at immediate in its enterainment value - compelling, interesting, and unique, while aslo more subtlely (or perhaps not) addressing much bigger things. The show grapples, of course, with huge, metaphysical issues both literally and more symbolically, but does so in such a way that the audience may not even realize what truly meaningful points are being raised. "I want to Believe" and "Trust no one" are iconic phrases, easily dismissed as part-and-parcel of a show dedicated to paranoia and drama. But for me, the way the show considers these big ideas using the specifc storylines of government cover-ups, alien abductions, and folklore finding real atecedents, allows me to temporarily forget about the biases I have when thinking about belief in my own life. Not to be too revealing or self-indulgent, but as a person who once felt a great presence of faith in my personal life and then progressively lost that sense of faith, the phrase "I want to believe" is incredibly compelling because it is true. What I think mainstream attempts for conversion or even discussion of belief are missing is that sometimes it is best to consider the basis of belief, the desire for it, and its relatioship to who you are in a whole different context.

For another example, listen to this great NPR interview with David Duchovny, who I deem a perfectly legitimate scholarly reference, by the way, since he was on his way to a masters degree in English from Princeton before changing paths in life. As you will hear, for him, the episode where a player in the Negro League turns out to be an alien, while entetaining in its own right, is also playing with the themes of aliens and alientation. fantastic.

To weave these additional layers of meaning into otherwise creative/entertaining projects takes talent. Making direct statements about these topics often falls flat, has no appeal, and no staying power. And making the creative material that is basically the mental equivalent of eating popcorn makes no demands of the intellect at all.

This duality of the xfiles, to be at once entertaining and enjoyable and, upon closer, nerdier inspection, an attempt to explore something much larger and more universal, is something I admire in a number of forms of enterainment. Jonathan Coulton songs, for instance.

It is a perfeclty nerdy thing to do . . . take something well beyond its face value and inscribe great levels of meaning and significance to all its actions. The same fervor with which I applied my interest in knowing episode names and quotes as a 7th grade girl has morphed into an adult interest in the larger structure, the behind-the-scenes creative work which directed these fascinating details into a compelling story. This nerdy tendency is perhaps why shows like the X-Files or music like Jonathan Coulton's is so interesting to those of us who over-analyize a little too much.

Making complex narratives

Also, I was thinking about the Simpsons (thought other shows do this too) where there will be a main storyline but then a sub-story that intersects every once in awhile but mostly just happens on its own, or the show begins with its own little scene, a short set of jokes that really doesn't do anything for the main plot of the show, but is just funny, and I think they talked about that with Fr. Ted too (the authors) how they would conceive of a show by having 2 or 3 funny scenes that were just funny in and of themselves, because of their set-up or situation, and then build around them. Set peices kind of a thing. So that makes me think about how I can repeat characters or jokes in a painting narrative or how I can have a sub-character or literally a background story going on, adding other characters that support or intersect. . . . trying to make the narrative more complex or make more layers to what is going on. I wonder if I can tell a story in a room but not necessarily in order. Not a linear story, but scenes, a moment and maybe not of an event, the way our mind goes back and forth from flashes of long ago to yesterday to whatever. Hmmmm.

"The Evolution of Introspective Consciousness"

Another fascinating tid-bit from the Radiolab episode "Who Am I?"

Then they talked about V.S. Ramachandran's theory about the evolution of introspective consciousness and how there is something uniquely human in our ability to construct narrative or story. . And I wonder to myself about how central this notion of story really is to human beings. Which leads me also to think about how Ira Glass talks about narrative and its importance or familiarity (in structuring This American Life) . . . and then i move to what my paintings can be in terms of narrative qualities. . . what are narrative paintings like. . and how do we strip them of narrative or add narrative. . . I read in maybe a New American paintings about artists who aim to "strip the works of their narrative quality" (I think in that case, it was removing background context for a figure). . . but what does it mean to strip the paintings of narrative quality and does that affect their meaning (like Landau's TMT stuff - abstract and unlikable :)) and the importance of a picture in your head in creating that narrative in our minds. . . they talk about how we "juggle" symbols in our minds - make things that can't exist anywhere in nature - LETS WRITE A THESIS! :)

Self is a story

"The self is the story of what's happened to that body over time." (Paul Broks)
So what you are saying is that we are essentially a narrative? (paraphrased Robert Krulwich)
"if you ask me about msyelf, i'll tell you a story." (Paul Broks)

Exactly.
This is from a Radiolab episode ("Who Am I?"), by the way, and Paul Broks wrote Into the Silent Land: Travels in Neuropsychology which I can't remember if I attempted to read or not.