Genesis 1:1-10
In the beginning, God created the Vietnam War. Now the war was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the violence.
And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.
And God said, “Let there be a vault between the waters to separate water from water.” So God made the vault and separated the water under the vault from the water above it. And it was so. God called the vault “sky.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the second day.
And God said, “Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear.” And it was so. God called the dry ground “land,” and the gathered waters he called “seas.” And God saw that it was good.
‘Do ladies always such a hard time having babies?’ Nick asked.
‘No, that was very, very exceptional.’
‘Why did he kill himself, Daddy?’
‘I don’t know, Nick. He couldn’t stand things, I guess.’
‘Do many men kill themselves, Daddy?’
‘Not very many, Nick.’
‘Do many women?’
‘Hardly ever.’
‘Don’t they ever?’
‘Oh, yes. They do sometimes.’
‘Daddy?’
‘Yes.’
‘Where did Uncle George go?’
‘He’ll turn up all right.’
‘Is dying hard, Daddy?’
‘No, I think it’s pretty easy, Nick. It all depends.’
They were seated in the boat, Nick in the stern, his father rowing. The sun was coming up over the hills. A bass jumped, making a circle in the water. Nick trailed his hand in the water. It felt warm in the sharp chill of the morning.
In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing, he felt quite sure that he would never die.
Nick stood at the end of time, half his head blown away, his right index finger curved gently; his other fingers lazily formed the grip of the gun. Dying was indeed easy, just like Daddy said; living was difficult. He saw his father first, a mirror image. The Indian next the gash across his throat flared luridly. Uncle George seeming unmarked was there too, his suicide a lifetime of booze and cigars. Finally, there were just too many things that they couldn’t stand, they shared that in life and death.
This, of course, was his story and it should have stood on its own. However, as always, others appropriated it to tell their stories, stories of gender, race, oppression and privileged masculinity. At first, it was wives, kids, and friends; later it was strangers telling his story for themselves, their purposes. Deriding the telling because of what it was not and missing what it was, just another kind of violence, and simply too much to stand.
Jackson J. Benson
American Literature
Vol. 61, No. 3 (Oct. 1989), pp. 345-358
Published by: Duke University Press
DOI: 10.2307/2926824
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2926824
Page Count: 14
For one thing, I think we have missed Hemingway’s humor, and for another, we have tended to overlook his expressions of gentleness, as well as his attachment to the natural world. We have missed the sense in his work of the complexity of what it means to live… and with our biographical blinders on, we have missed his deep conviction of life’s essential ambiguities.
Benson, J. (1989). Ernest Hemingway: The Life as Fiction and the Fiction as Life. American Literature,61(3), 345-358. doi:10.2307/2926824
‘How do you like being an interne?’
Nick said, ‘All right’. He was looking away so as not to see what his father was doing.
‘There. That gets it,’ said his father and put something into the basin. Nick didn’t look at it. ‘Now,’ his father said, ‘there’s some stitches to put in. You can watch this or not, Nick, just as you like. I’m going to sew up the incision I made.’
Nick did not watch. His curiosity had been gone for a long time.
‘You see, Nick, babies are supposed to be born head first, but sometimes they’re not. When they’re not they make a lot of trouble for everybody. Maybe I’ll have to operate on this lady. We’ll know in a little while.When he was satisfied with his hands, he went in and went to work.
‘Pull back that quilt, will you, George?’ he said. I’d rather not touch it.’
His father picked the baby up, slapped it to make it breathe, and handed it to the old woman.
* * *
‘Ought to have a look at the proud father. They’re usually the worst sufferers in these little affairs,’ the doctor said. ‘I must say he took it all pretty quietly.’
He pulled back the blanket from the Indian’s head. His hand came away wet. He mounted on the edge of the lower bunk with lamp in one hand and looked in. The Indian lay with his face toward the wall. His throat had been cut from ear to ear. The blood had flowed down into a pool where his body sagged the bunk. His head rested on his left arm. The open razor lay, edge up, in the blankets.
Violent birth and violent self-immolation mirrored, Nick looked away and avoided one and stared into the empty eyes of the other. A coin toss of the universe as to which Nick would glimpse and an unanswerable, unbalanced question torn into his psyche. It is easy to celebrate one over the other, and it is nearly impossible to hold both simultaneously in attention; birth and death. Oh, the words yes, but not the real particulars of a birth, or a death. And certainly not when they are piled up on each other spread across a lifespan perhaps, but violently brought together into simultaneity it rocked Uncle George and the doctor, but it crafted Nick. Birth is sex played in reverse, perhaps? Nick, watched three men hold down a screaming woman a fourth between her legs cutting violently. He struggled to connect emotional and sexual intimacy his entire life. Gentleness was just too much and yet he wanted desperately, starving to give it and to receive it. His children and his role as father an unnatural, calculated, performance of sanity, and goodness and secretly a burden of guilt and fakery. The difference, of gender and race, were impossible, after that night, the power of strangeness, sudden violence, poverty, and helplessness swirled comprehension, human connection away and any otherness only amplified his disconnection.
And, Nick sobbed and sobbed chest wrenching, head aching…
Nick gasped awake heart pounding, the dream, the sobbing, again, he only ever grieved in his dreams. He sat up, scuffed his slippers on, and shuffled to the bathroom and later to the kitchen, the restless night echoing in his head. He made coffee, poured some cereal into a bowl with a splash of milk. Ate. His wife bustled about with her morning, chatting and busy, a peck on the cheek and she headed off to work. He dressed and went to work by the usual route. Statistics indicated that if he lived to sixty-five, his life expectancy was eighty-three another thirty-one years sixteen more years at this job or another like it and then fifteen years of sitting in a recliner and watching reruns.
His wife said he needed a hobby that he needed to rediscover his passions as she swirled out the door with friends to do whatever it was they did it always sounded shrill and condescending when she said it. He mused darkly about becoming a serial killer but knew he did not care enough even to finish the thought.
Work that morning was the usual gray drudgery of paperwork and email punctuated by the hell of other people. At lunch he ate a salad with tuna, his Doctor wanted him to lose fifteen more pounds. He said that managing his blood pressure with lifestyle changes was better than medication. Nick had lost ten pounds, kept it off, and just could not care anymore, fifteen pounds might as well be a hundred. The afternoon was a wreck of personnel issues, and Nick clumped through it like a broken marionette, some evil-trickster of a god pulling his strings.
He ate supper, snuck a couple of drinks while his wife chatted cheerfully on the phone, he binge-watched a silly British car show, and it was time for bed.
You have already grasped that Sisyphus is the absurd hero. He is, as much through his passions as through his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing. This is the price that must be paid for the passions of this earth. Nothing is told us about Sisyphus in the underworld. Myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them. As for this myth, one sees merely the whole effort of a body straining to raise the huge stone, to roll it, and push it up a slope a hundred times over; one sees the face screwed up, the cheek tight against the stone, the shoulder bracing the clay-covered mass, the foot wedging it, the fresh start with arms outstretched, the wholly human security of two earth-clotted hands. At the very end of his long effort measured by skyless space and time without depth, the purpose is achieved. Then Sisyphus watches the stone rush down in a few moments toward lower world whence he will have to push it up again toward the summit. He goes back down to the plain….
I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s, heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
Camus, A. (1955). The myth of Sisyphus, and other essays ([1st American ed.]. ed.). New York: Knopf.
Revelation 6:7-8
When the Lamb opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature say, “Come!” I looked, and there before me was a pale horse! Its rider was named Death, and Hades was following close behind him. They were given power over a fourth of the earth to kill by sword, famine, and plague, and by the wild beasts of the earth.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/rob1501/9302301877/
I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s, heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
Camus, A. (1955). The myth of Sisyphus, and other essays ([1st American ed.]. ed.). New York: Knopf.
Participatory Storytelling
Edit
#onid17 Participatory Storytelling on Twitter
Crowd-sourced fiction appropriated and retold or an hybridized literary criticism.
Read selected Tweets from the #onid17 participatory story
Captures the Tweets that are about the character Kes.- It was Kes’s story that I wanted to hear and develop. Re was well started, and our cohort propelled her along organically. It was an effort to bring Kes along and keep the characters engaged. I am less certain as to why that is? One possibility is that we as writers did not engage in any back-channel, or meta-dialog. We had both the Google+ and a second hashtag where we could have communicated about the story and collaborated on any and all of the elements of fiction writing.
- Above I show such a conversation that Skip and I had at the very beginning of the story. We discuss, gender, character development versus plot in this anarchic storytelling venue.
- On the one hand, I disliked the heavy-handedness of this following Tweet. Nonetheless, I wanted to continue the emphasis on Kes. I also wanted to play with the circular or at least non-linear quality of time that seemed to be developing in the story. It was additionally an attempt to wrestle with my previous comment about character over plot.
- Deus ex machina in classical theatre: Euripides’ Medea, performed in 2009 in Syracuse, Italy
- I also wondered if such a device might subtly signal to the cohort the value of bringing characters along together throughout the story.
- The story thread that arose however anticipated the eventual shape-shifting device that developed later Skip referred to it as “morphing” in our synchronous class session.
- It is interesting to me that the posts that followed Skip’s initial post of Re’s version of that Tweet were relatively figurative. Whereas the Tweets following my recycling of it were quite literal and embodied, something I noticed but probably could not articulate at the time.
- Notice the dates of these two posts about Kes, five days elapsed while this character languished.
- I was happier with this Tweet. I felt like I was able to develop character, set a scene, and advance the plot, all at once. We knew that Re was exploring the house. And this Tweet ensured that the two characters would reconnect there as well. Skip, introduced the mise en abyme very early on with Re’s mention of the “documents.” My mention of Re’s use of a tablet as well plays on this device. As a cohort, we flirted with this throughout the story, but we did not pull those threads together very tightly. Again, probably this is because we did not enter into any meta-dialog, at least that I could find.
Story within a story – WikipediaA story within a story is a literary device in which one character within a narrative narrates.[1] Mise en abyme is the French term for a similar literary device (also referring to the practice in heraldry of placing the image of a small shield on a larger shield).- Again, notice the seven days elapsed without mention of Kes. Keeping this character in the story had become a personal agenda. This Tweet was less satisfying since effectively it only repeated the work of the previous one though with the most emphasis on setting and plot.
- Happily, Valarie propelled Kes along by adding the following Tweet. She also connected the two most important characters and the new third, very vague childlike character; all were within sight of each other at last.
- Text within a text, again I was just riffing on a theme that I thought might have importance and might develop.
- I would have been content with temporal shifting alone, but it was clear that we were also talking about the morphing of embodiments as well. I wondered if it was more Matrix-like or more shape-shifting like lycanthropy. I was not very excited by that twist.
data processing, computer, technology, laser, plastic surgery, cosmetic surgery, skin treatment, innovation, invention, ,blue background, computer screen, laser beam, laser, light, ray, blue, portrait, scan, virtual screen, virtual reality, floating screen, data, future, futuristic, wireless, light, ideas, security, hacker, programmer, internet, cyberspace, cyber, techie, connection, scanning, information, information highway, light beam, modern, control panel, data gathering, innovation, creative, concept, creative concepts, intelligence,- I think both the Science Fiction and the Horror genres give us great traditions of shapeshifting, so it is not the device I am opposed to. Rather, I struggled with it because it felt like one thing too many for us to sustain. Again if we had a meta-conversation about our project, we could have done more. And I want to be clear that while I am repeating this point, it is something I could have affected and did not. So, I bear the blame and do not aim to point fingers.
- There was a definite tension between the need to propel the story forward and the usefulness of crafting backstory. We introduced devices particularly the various texts as tools we could have used both to develop the temporal discontinuities and the shapeshifting. Speaking for myself I struggled with this tension and most of my contributions to the story are aimed at propelling characters and plot elements forward. Even as I longed to do more with our texts, backstory and mise en abyme. We could as well have violated the boundaries of the 140 character tweet by embedding an image, documents, yellowed snapshots, really anything we could imagine. We stuck to the letter of the law and that is not a bad thing just an interesting one.
- Another spontaneous technique that arose was the open ending and beginning post which facilitated other contributors engaging in a kind of baton pass. I think it was a good tactic and yet I wanted to post my own complete elements so a minor tension for me.
- One task of literary criticism is to identify what does not work in a piece of writing. However, criticism can as well celebrate what is accomplished. I think a fascinating social experiment developed out of this stripped down creative environment. For a bunch of folks just winging it, we came up with a surprisingly coherent story. Many elements of the story were at least interesting if not downright good.
- In hindsight, I wish I had been less skeptical and more participative. I felt some dread and ambivalence over the assignment. I wonder if we had linked to other classes stories and saw their success it that would have helped? I suspect this was not encouraged in order to avoid tainting our own little social experiment. I suspect that were this same cohort to engage in a similar storytelling again we would tell a significantly better story because of what we learned, but I suspect that the process would be less fascinating. And that, in turn, leads me to wonder about this as a pedagogic element. We have both process and content to analyze and as we saw in the synchronous class we did have a lot of group comment and debrief in this rich vein. Obviously, this assignment could be recycled in higher education, and perhaps high school. I suspect a very different coaching and pre-posting editing practice would need to be developed to use it in middle school, though if the teacher had the time and the passion it might be very productive for young people that age.
- Turning to this retelling/critical reading of the story I think this too was fascinating. Because it returned ownership of authorship to me. But that is a conceit and fiction itself because I can only claim a tenth or so of the story. And, this sets us up to remember that Roland Barth’s essay “Death of the Author?” is profoundly relevant in this environment of digital storytelling, fan fiction, mashups, re-appropriation (as here) as well the original Tweet thread. The story is produced by our reading.
Augmented Reality
Development
This image represents my starting place in working with Aurasma. I very much wanted the building itself to trigger an overlay. I wasted a bit of time with that and came away disappointed. I tried as well to drop some coordinates in the middle of that concrete in front of the door, alas.
However, working with Aurasma is the assignment. So I turned to what I could get it to do. On the phone app, I noticed a couple featured auras, one for the back of a dollar bill and the other the back of a twenty. Opened my wallet and extracted one of each and fired up the camera in the app. Although, I found the content to be goofy both worked. Lesson learned, the triggers needed to be quickly recognizable by the application so not overly complicated.
Casting about my office, I do a fair bit of marketing here at UAF-BBC, I landed on the tri-fold brochures. I am not a big fan of this promotion format, and I wondered if auras might make them more fun? In part landing on the Sustainable Energy brochures was because I know we have a fair bit of content that works as overlays. Since my initial foray into using Aurasma had been frustrating and ambiguous, I hoped this might give me some success to build on.
Link to Apple Store for Aurasma app download.
Link to Google Play for Android Aurasma app download.
follow rdheath on Aurasma
Sustainable Energy Brochure Aurasma Version
I used my phone camera to capture images from a printed version of the brochure, actually every image because I didn’t know where this was going. My thought was that that camera was going to have to recognize the trigger and perhaps starting with it might streamline things. I cropped and made some minor image adjustments in Adobe Photoshop. I then dropped this picture of the photovoltaic panel installation on the trigger element of Aurasma studio. I grabbed the interview video and compressed it in Camtasia and cut that into the overlay. I felt flummoxed that it worked.
My thought with adding these elements to the print brochures was to enrich them. In my years of making flyers and brochures, I have always encountered the problem of too much content, not enough space. That is compounded now with the lack of interactivity or media one has to read them simply, and nobody reads anymore.
I had no content for the Yup’ik values at least no media. I hit the Alaska Native Knowledge Network website and spent a moderate amount of time spinning my wheels looking for something, anything. In the end, I decided to experiment with a simple image. The first one I made the font is too small, and so I’ll make another with two columns of text so that the values are legible on the phone.
For us, here at UAF-BBC and Dillingham, Alaska, Dr. Marsik’s world record and President Obama’s visit are points of pride, stories that cannot be overlooked. The actual video of the world record blower door test is nearly 11 minutes long and simply too much for this application. So, I had to edit it. In truth were this a real work assignment I would consider crafting something altogether new for this use. But for this assignment, revised version will have to stand as a placeholder. I again dumped the mp4 into Camtasia knowing that I was cropping it and compressing it. What surprised me in testing once the overlay was added, was the strange aspect ratio change that made the house seem weirdly shaped. I will edit out that opening sequence and only start with Tom and Kristen talking for these purposes that is adequate.
And that is a fundamental element of developing auras, I think, it has to be an iterative task with lots of testing. Yes, I could have watched all the Aurasma tutorial videos to learn how to do it. Indeed, I did look at a couple, and unfortunately, I found them too cheerful and free from the struggles I was encountering. So, instead, I just muddled and satisficed through. Seeing the output of fellow students has inspired me to continue experimenting with the studio mostly out of nerdy curiosity not out of any sense that this app has a significant place in our marketing efforts.
I have an iPhone but were I trying to develop even this type of project I would test early and often on different devices. Too situating the trigger and sizing the overlay to fit a phone display even close to optimally takes iteration. It seems that the Aurasma server updates on a quarter or half-hour and that means waiting impatiently after every change. It meant as well limiting the number of changes so that I could isolate variables.
I think locking the overlay so that once it is triggered it runs no matter what a person does with the trigger is a critical step. Handheld brochure and handheld camera made for really annoying user experience because the app would lose track of the trigger, find it, and then restart the overlay, again, and again.
I found myself switching between several different programs, Camtasia, Movie Maker, and Adobe Photoshop for example to do this work. If I was less facile with software, I suspect this project could be challenging. Despite the clunkiness of the Aurasma studio and app, I find myself intrigued with how to make better overlays. I am wondering as well if PowerPoint might have some functions that could simply contribute to overlay development.
Reflection
With this experience, I am struck by what seems the heavy landing on the side of “push marketing” that Aurasma appears to enforce. “Pull marketing” is more about conversation and co-creation of experiences and a product or service. Social media and our topic of digital storytelling have a play in making this definition meaningful. This ambivalence is a concern I was not expecting to surface at the outset of this assignment. The part of me that is paid to tell the UAF-BBC story is reconciled in some ways to the need to push our story.
If I were still working an academic library, I would try to develop this as a self-guided tour of both services and resources in the library. Librarians are fond of making scavenger hunts as training devices. I think I would avoid that conceit and instead simply have point-of-service types of improved interface. While this class is about digital storytelling, I’m afraid we can take that too far particularly when we are approaching customers.
I have been kind of aggressive in my ignoring QR codes; however, the frustrations with Aurasma have inclined me to reset. I wonder if combining QR and Aura’s might be an interesting approach. I showed this work in progress to Dr. Marsik, he recounted giving Dillingham High School students a tour and watching them recognize and use QR codes that he was oblivious to because he didn’t know what they were. I was questioning the payback of this kind of development for a community like Dillingham. However, hearing Dr. Marsik’s observation leads me to wonder if young people might quickly pick up on using the Aruasma app. Nonetheless, I think I would add a statement to the brochure about downloading the app and using the triggers to learn more about our program rather than assuming the customer recognized the logo.
I think this functionality that adds information (to buildings or skylines, cars, whatever real-world objects) is where I want this technology to go. In reading for this assignment the more recent articles identify the linkages between the internet of things and augmented reality as a critical moment. I particularly resonate with this scenario:
This technology could be used by emergency responders. “Moreover, those same first responders might plug certain variables into an incident as it is unfolding to ‘see’ the prediction of what will happen. They could visualize where the crowds will go, how the flood will expand, where the fire might move and which people and/or facilities would be impacted,” DeLoach says. The technology could also enable first responders to practice how they respond to challenging situations such as interacting with hazardous materials. “This would allow them to manage their response much more effectively as a result—likely saving lives,” DeLoach says. (Buntz, 2016)
I can imagine a contact lens, for example, worn by first-responders for heads-up and hands-free application of such simulation and scenario planning. While some of the information would be trended from databases real-time information might be collected from drones. At the end that is all very game-play and moviesque and probably likely and valuable.
Since some of our aim here is to reinvent ourselves as Instructional Designers, I wondered about real uses of Aurasma style augmented reality in schools. A quick search of YouTube, of course, yielded results.
And, I am left feeling like this is a pivotal moment, and both teachers and students contributed to it. And yet I am not fulfilled. I worry that this video shows just more “push education.” And that seems to be the limit of this technology at the moment. I can push a story, you can push a story, but it is a struggle to pull stories, to co-create them, to have them organically branch and build from data, our interactions, and the narrative.
Above, I mention the role of the internet of things for informing augmented reality. The story the first-responders receive is a push story. We see the purposiveness of storytelling in the initial inquiry, “Where will the flood spread? How best to respond?” It is probably a splendid and useful story, rich with information and prioritized and organized by artificial intelligence. And yet I am uncertain where the human agent comes into play as participant and co-creator of the story rather than a cyborg embodiment of the artificial intelligence. I do not feel paranoia or cynicism but rather a disappointment in this conclusion. Alas, at the point of execution the purposiveness of the story seems to have drained away. If our robotics were sufficient, we could do away with the human first responder altogether.
But, I still want to hold my phone up, here in Dillingham, Alaska, (or insert a contact lens) and scan the panorama for hotspots. I want native place names, historical highlights, information about plants and animals as I look at a moose, or spruce. I want it to be Wikipedia-like so that I can participate in content creation as well. The language, other mnemonic devices, and our imaginations have been our augmented reality for eons. Pictured below are carved maps of the Greenland coastline serving as triggers for our Inuit hunters cultural overlay.
Perhaps this technology-heavy augmented reality can mature into a real thing. Certainly, the quality by which it seems to externalize and give body to imagination is fascinating. And yet, what we are exploring now seems thin and raw and underdeveloped.
References
Buntz, B. (2016, July 1) 10 Killer Applications of the IoT and Augmented Reality. Retrieved March 25, 2017 from http://www.ioti.com/iot-trends-and-analysis/10-killer-applications-iot-and-augmented-reality
Charles Cooper [Charles Cooper] (2016, Nov 7). Teaching with Aurasma. [Video File]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/wolsdGbNEC
Inuit Cartography. (2016). [Graph illustration]. The Decolonial Atlas. Retrieved from https://decolonialatlas.wordpress.com/2016/04/12/inuit-cartography/
Ideological Gym Ethos
Edit
Ideological Gym Ethos
I offer CrossFit, as Spartans and BodyTribe, as Athenians opposed to each other but united in their opposition of professional bodybuilding, Persians, perhaps.
- Marx’s Critique of Ideology < DIALECTICAL MARXISM: The Writings ...Marx’s Critique of Ideology Introduction to Essays in Critical Theory: Toward a
Marxist Criticism of Liberal Ideology by Richard Lichtman By Bertell Ollman. 
Ethos – WikipediaEthos is a Greek word meaning “character” that is used to describe the guiding
beliefs or ideals that characterize a community, nation, or ideology. The Greeks …Bodybuilding
- Bodybuilding exploded into the mainstream in the 1970’s, in part, because of Joe Weider’s empire and because of charismatic and iconic stars like Arnold Swarzenegger, and Lou Ferrigno. The movie, Pumping Iron, was the start, the vehicle for their move to mainstream success.
- However, that moment represents the tipping point. It is preceded by years of physical culture sub-culture. Synthetic testosterone was developed in the 1940s, so 30 years (though other versions of the story extend into the 19th century). Venice beach, in Los Angeles perhaps the sacred city, the navel of the universe.
- We see an aesthetic for the shape and form of the male physique writ increasing large by the “good genes” that came in bottles from pharmaceutical companies and available to everyone willing to use them. In the 1970’s Arnold reigned as embodied exemplar of the aesthetic.
Classic Physique Building and Natural Bodybuildingfor everybody who wants to build a good looking physique the natural way- Yet in the spirit of American consumerism and the excess ofthe 1980’s the aesthetic shifted increasingly celebrating, simply more. This era of bodybuilding shows participants of both genders, raising their testosterone to extraordinary levels, and supporting muscle growth by consuming 10,000 calories per day, perhaps more…. Food blended and drunk because sitting to a meals of these proportions takes too much time. Then as the competition approached reversing the training radically dieting to near starvation levels, and weight training to maintain gains but now training to burn calories in order to eliminate even the thinnest layers of subcutaneous fat, this to show veins, and striation in the muscles for fans and judges, and increasingly large purses.
- Yet, muscle and strength developed to what purpose?
- If we circle back to Venice beach, we recall the importance of gymnastics at the roots of this physical culture and displays of amazing feats. Perhaps, carnivalesqe, campy, but still functional showing balance, coordination, skill, strength, and risk. This is altogether unlike, bodybuilding competitions where men and women display their muscular development by posing, extraordinary, and unclothed models parading on the catwalk rather than performing feats of strength.
campy Definition in the Cambridge English Dictionarycampy definition, meaning, what is campy: used to describe an activity, or someone’s behaviour or appearance, that is funny because…. Learn more.Rabelais and His World
This classic work by the Russian philosopher and literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975) examines popular humor and folk culture in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. One of the essential texts of a theorist who is rapidly becoming a major reference in contemporary thought, Rabelais and His World is essential reading for anyone interested in problems of language and text and in cultural interpretation.- A moment ripe for an iconoclast, an irreverent, voice, and enters, Greg Glassman as much an entrepreneur as Joe Weider, but brash, embracing of controversy and hungry for success. CrossFit, a trademarked brand, combines, elements from gymnastics, Olympic lifting, power lifting, and calisthenics into high-intensity short duration workouts, given women’s names, or honoring deceased soldiers, police, firefighters remembering them by name.
- Glassman franchised the concept and gyms swept the country, the world even. The exercise formula appealed to military and first responders this combined with Glassman’s rhetoric has created an aura around a Spartan functional fitness.
- By contrast, Chip Conrad founder of BodyTribe fitness loves both his exercise and his philosophy.
Human Posture
Schumacher has written a provocative work in the philosophy of science. In presenting posture as the most important aspect of life, Schumacher examines how the terms of posture encompass all the major disciplines and provide a means for resolving human dilemmas through a humanistically oriented philosophy of inquiry.- The BodyTribe gym in a Sacramento suburb offers its walls to artists to exhibit their paintings and drawings. The gym has doubled as a concert venue. Cats and dogs are welcome and people exercising yield to the animal’s right of way. Conrad like Glassman draws from Olympic lifting, power lifting, and calisthenics, he as well draws upon gymnastics and yoga. Conrad is deeply committed to functional fitness but he also aims to develop a whole person. He thoughtfully, examines playfulness, sociability, the pleasure, and wonder at beauty. He is concerned with social justice and is willing to speak out. Accordingly, we may liken him to the Athenian values.
- Making America Look Like Idiots. A wall shows fear, not strength. What the hell is @realDonaldTrump so damn scared of?
- Yet his principles seem to hamper his potential impact Conrad is deeply suspicious of fitness credentialing, he tours and speaks nationally, but does not seem interested in branding and franchising accordingly his impact on American exercise culture is limited in comparison with CrossFit and professional bodybuilding. One may join the tribe as a participant but not as a franchise owner/operator.
- Workshops in NC taught by your’s truly.
https://mentalmeatheads.com/event/kinetic-fitness/ … - Conrad searches for an alternative genealogy for his fitness/philosophy. He is an artistic video maker and one of his loves is capturing moments in the lineage of physical culture sub-culture.
The First Peloponnesian War
- Glassman took a next turn, one similar to what Joe Weider did in promoting professional bodybuilding, and that was to create a consumable spectacle. Glassman promoted the “sport of fitness” and introduced the“CrossFit Games.” Contestants compete in several workouts per day over the course of several days a grueling endurance event. Workouts are scored in several ways, most repetitions, and speed to completion, for examples.
- We could look at the movements the practitioners engage in and start to sense something about the values and the ethics of the approaches. For example, bodybuilding prefers isolating muscles and joints, the number of sets and repetitions optimized on hypertrophy. Both Crossfit and BodyTribe celebrate and elevate compound movements seeking to engage many muscles around multiple joints. So the movements themselves convey information about priorities. But we do not have to constrain our inquiry to this alone. The adherents themselves tell us about what they consider a beautiful body. They tell us about their values and priorities.
Society Of The Spectacle
The Das Kapital of the 20th century,Society of the Spectacle is an essential text, and the main theoretical work of the Situationists. Few works of political and cultural theory have been as enduringly provocative.- However, necessarily standardization in movements and routines is required in order to compare performances, and so, for example, there is one “right” way to do a burpee. It is at this moment that CrossFit and Body Tribe absolutely and irreparably divide. Their differing values certainly anticipated this divide, but this is the moment of non-negotiability.
- Conrad's rejoinder… And it is not all about any particular movement, rather about the mentality that surrounds the movement. Conrad, himself competes in Olympic lifting and so it isn't only about competition, rather about the mentality that surrounds the competition. Conrad does not name by brand who he is speaking to nevertheless we know, the breadcrumbs are sufficient.
- Circling back to CrossFit it is interesting to note that the web page of 2017 feels very different from that of 2010. This website today is more polished, more inclusive gone are the images of Pukie the Clown and Uncle Rhabdo.
Why Would Anyone Want to Work Out Until They Puke?As intense exercise programs like CrossFit and P90X gain popularity, a look at the psychology of pushing your limits—and when that can be a bad idea.- Pukie the Clown references exercise induced vomiting, unpleasant, at least. Uncle Rhabdo is a reference to the condition rhabdomyolysis a very serious and life-threatening breakdown of muscle with a consequential flooding of the circulatory system with proteins which in turn overwhelm the kidneys. Not unusual in the early days of CrossFit workouts. Yet, weirdly made light of in the old days.
Why Pukie the Clown Isn’t FunnyI have never been able to get my head around Pukie the Clown – a cartoon depiction of a CrossFitter who has pushed it past the point of no return. And don’t even get me started on Uncle Rhabdo.- Circling back to bodybuilding we see equally disturbing aspects of that activity these include cycles of binge and purge eating, extreme drug use, and other high-risk behaviors and consequences.
Myth: Bodybuilders Are Healthy. | Davey Wavey FitnessWe’ve all seen pictures of tanned, oiled up bodybuilders competing for titles. With their bulging muscles and impossible physiques, one might think that a- How ironic that the most visible and successful training types in America come bound together with extreme health risks if taken to their most competitive levels?
- Circling back to BodyTribe we see that Conrad's rant about "un-stupid" is important and significant. Alas, the very weakness of the most principled is the principled quality itself. For Conrad to achieve the level of impact necessary to challenge bodybuilding or CrossFit would probably require a spectacle rivaling these and a compromise equally monumental. In the end, I think I will give Conrad the last word in this strange tale.
Are You Useful? The Book!This week celebrates the release of the second book to bear my name. The process from concept to print has been an example of what to do only if you’re a bit of a moron. This book was extreme…References
- 1shimashima [1shimashima] (2013, Aug 27) Original Muscle Beach 1950s Santa Monica Vintage Photography, youtu.be/BnRkF4v6no8
- allan97 [allan97] (2016, Oct 22)TOP 5 Freakiest Bodybuilders Ever In Bodybuilding History, youtu.be/qkrxV8g0H6Q
- Anabolic Steroids. Wikipedia. Retrieved February 20, 2017, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anabolic_steroid#Development_of_synthetic_AAS …
- Arnold Swarzenegger.Wikipedia. Retrieved February 20, 2017, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_Schwarzenegger …
- Bodytribe [Bodytribe] (2009, Dec 31) History of Fitness Youtube Series: Pedestrianism, youtu.be/vLsDm0WvXkw
- Bodytribe [Bodytribe] (2013, Mar 12) Bodytribe: Creating the Holistic Athlete Workshop & Training, youtu.be/C3eEpkIgRYk
- Bruno, ( 2010, August 27th). Classic Physique Building and Natural Bodybuilding, Retrieved February 23, 2017,,, http://classicnaturalbodybuilding.blogspot.com/ …
- Crossfit [Crossfit] (2017, Feb 1) Fittest On Earth: A Decade of Fitness — Official Trailers, youtu.be/OJa4HPVAk3A
- Joe Weider. Wikipedia. Retrieved February 20, 2017, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Weider …
- Lou Ferrigno. Wikipedia. Retrieved February 20, 2017, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lou_Ferrigno …
- Rhabdomyolysis. Wikipedia. Retrieved February 23, 2017, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhabdomyolysis …
- Robinson, R. (Producer), Butler, G. and, Fiore, R. (Directors). (1977). Pumping Iron [Motion picture]. USA: White Mountain Pictures.
Theoretical run-up on Elements of Digital Storytelling
Introduction
I came into this game of higher education at a chaotic intellectual moment: postmodernity. Accordingly, I struggle with claims of universality, and this persists as we begin to explore storytelling and digital storytelling.
We are all familiar with the short story, “You make me so angry.” If we take the authors of the Crucial Conversations curriculum seriously, we learn that mastering our stories is a fundamental key to improving our communications (and our internal life) (Patterson, K. Grenny, J., McMillan, R., Switzler, A., 2011, p. 103). Their schema moves from perceptions, for example, “see and hear” to “tell a story” which causes emotions and, in turn, inspires us to “act.” The trainers at Crucial Conversations teach various techniques to slow down, in order to become self-critical and provisional in our storytelling. Obviously, there is a tension between our common-sense meanings of our short stories and this second version. Jacques Derrida’s observations and methods, summarized as “deconstruction,” offer us a tool to explore this tension.
Deconstruction generally tries to demonstrate that any text is not a discrete whole but contains several irreconcilable and contradictory meanings; that any text, therefore has more than one interpretation; that the text itself links these interpretations inextricably; that the incompatibility of these interpretations is irreducible; and thus that an interpretive reading cannot go beyond a certain point. (Wikipedia, Deconstruction retrieved 1/26/2017)
So, if we take clues from Derrida and the Crucial Conversations curriculum we might interpret the short story in this way — “When you speak in that tone, in this context, I tell myself a story about being patronized and denigrated. In turn, I feel angry about that (though I might as well feel sad, or insulted) and in the end, I may lash out, or I may go to silence.” The voice we hear is the storyteller. What is missing here is the listener/reader/interpreter. Sometimes we tell stories solely for our own consumption but, if we analyze our internal dialog, there is very much a persona we create to tell the story to – a version of ourselves, our boss, or a spouse, for examples. Deconstruction shows us that a listener is an aspect of “irreconcilable and contradictory meanings.” That is, we cannot talk about storytelling without talking about interpretation. Returning to our short story, there are several key ambiguities here: the story, the emotion it elicits, and the consequent actions. We can problematize this further by scrutinizing our data itself; if it is composed, at least in part, of interpretations then every aspect of our storytelling/interpretation is ambiguous. So then, if the storytelling side is particular, situated, and relative, is it meaningful to speak of the interpretation side as exempt from this variability and particularity since teller/listener are bound together?
Yet while I love these philosophical musings, an equal part of my participation in this game of higher education derives from business school. Therefore, I am pragmatically intrigued by the claim,“To achieve success on YouTube you have to have a niche” (Edwards, 2014). Perhaps this is further evidence that universal claims about storytelling are problematic, but it is also an eminently useful observation.
Theorizing
Bryan Alexander offers a working definition: “Simply put, it is telling stories with digital technologies. Digital stories are narratives built from the stuff of cyberculture” (Alexander, 2010, Loc 110 of 3318).
So if our topic is actually particular and situated, then it seems wise to develop an aesthetic equally particular and situated. Again, “To achieve success on YouTube you have to have a niche” (Edwards, 2014). Alas, my tolerance for fiction has waned over the years, likewise, in part, as a function of the workplace grind. Rather my aesthetic cuts in a different direction:
Gonzo journalism is a style of journalism that is written without claims of objectivity, often including the reporter as part of the story via a first-person narrative. The word “gonzo” is believed to have been first used in 1970 to describe an article by Hunter S. Thompson, who later popularized the style. It is an energetic first-person participatory writing style in which the author is a protagonist, and it draws its power from a combination of social critique and self-satire.[1] It has since been applied to other subjective artistic endeavors. (Wikipedia, Gonzo Journalism retrieved 1/21/2017)
And, second, Yvon Chouinard says in the movie 180° South, “The word adventure has gotten overused. For me, when everything goes wrong, that’s when adventure starts” (Copeland, 2010). Entailed in both of these is a lived experience, lived in the “real” world. Once we attach the “digital” to our storytelling, we add complexity and nuance to this lived experience that will need to be explored. I found interesting connections between what I was sketching and this video definition of digital storytelling (Iwancio, 2010).
- Point of view
- Dramatic Question
- Emotional Content
- Voice
- Soundtrack
- Pacing
- Economy
- Length
I savor and favor the first person/subjective voice. It is most appropriate for these fraught (certainly sometimes contrived and antagonized) experiences. In addition, the fictive quality of memoir, changing names, or locations, or dates to protect the guilty adds complexity requiring additional development. “Self-aware” this is taking the first person perspective one step further and having that voice reflect on learning, emotions, and the physicality of the experience. Clearly, this is about the point of view and in this case, we hear a subjective first-person accounting hence we can combine this with voice as well.
The urgency and the on-edgy quality of both quotes are important as well. Failure, injury, and death are real possible consequences. Unlike most computer games, where we respawn at a save point, rather this lifestyle/storytelling is pushing the boundaries of our lived experiences, our skills, our preparation, and our knowledge. I would argue that dramatic question, emotional content, and pacing could all be folded together in this element.
Lastly is the social criticism implicit or explicit in these lives/stories. Going to where the risks are takes us beyond the normal. Indeed for many of us living vicariously through those tolerant of risk is part of what fuels the lives/stories. This is actually quite a complicated figure because storytellers need an audience to consume their telling and, as we will see, these consumers underwrite the risks. So social criticism and social norms are complicit in ways requiring further development.
This leaves soundtrack and economy still unaccounted for…. Except, readers of Hunter S. Thompson will remember popular music references to the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane in his writing. “Economy” is a delightful ambiguous figure; we may be speaking of efficient prose or precise illustration, or we may be thinking about the transactions between characters, or writer/reader, or the money-making potential of the story and storytelling itself. Certainly, all these elements are present in gonzo journalism.
Length, Iwanicio’s video offers us a simple formula, and immediately, we hear Tara Hunt speak to a much more complex notion for deciding narrative length based on optimization accounting for YouTube algorithms (2016).
These definitions and this critical theory, alas, are formulated in the abstract. I believe it will make better sense to explore them based on a case study of a particular digital storyteller.
Case Study
Jon B., at Fishing the Midwest is in his early 20’s. He recently dropped out of college in order to work full-time on his YouTube content. He has been creating YouTube content since 2009; he was 12-13 years old at that time. He participates in several additional social media, such as Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. Jon B. is attentive to the details of his camera, audio work, and editing and he seems as passionate about them as his fishing. Recently Jon B. has traveled, fished, and created content with a cohort of YouTube channel hosts. These people might be seen as competitors; however, they are working as collaborators driving traffic to each others’ sites and appearing in each others’ videos.
Jon B. has created a recognizable personal brand, defined a business model, and is executing on his plans.
So returning to my critical theory, the first element is first person/subjective point of view. This is seen clearly in his “vlogging” content. “Vlogging” is a “journalistic documentation of a person’s life, thoughts, opinions, and interests” (ZMD, 2005). It is more complicated because of Jon’s use of multiple cameras, as in this video we see both chest-worn GoPro’s and deck-mounted monopod DSLR or mirrorless cameras. In this particular video, we see Jon B. fishing with friends and we might lose track of the first person narrative, nonetheless, this is his story of that event. In his solo trips, the vocal quality is clearly a first person and subjective point of view.
In this video, the friends have set a fishing challenge for themselves. It is not enough that Jon B. is hundreds of miles from his home near Chicago visiting Texas, during the winter, using borrowed boats on an unfamiliar water. This theatricality speaks to creating urgency, dramatic questions, emotional content, and pacing, all of which aids in having a story, an adventure, from what might otherwise simply be a relaxing fishing trip. This emphasizes both the lived experiences and the gonzo journalistic technique of pouring gasoline on the fire – everything for the sake of a story.
I see a couple places where Jon B. celebrates and advocates for “real” experience. Certainly, his love of fishing and fishing where he is presently, informs all of his video creation. He surrounds himself with friends and fans who love fishing. Yet that is only part of what is required by being a content creator. Jon B. has to film his activities and he, in turn, spends hours editing his videos. Solo camera work, self-filming, requires a split consciousness, as he must engage simultaneously with fishing and with video creation. We know that good framing and camera work can save hours of editing. Jon B. also puts the time into editing on his laptop, at home, or on the road and hence can be said to be sequestered in the virtual world as much as the real. This in part because he has to think like his consumer, in order to produce a product they want, and for many of them the ratio is inverse virtual to real world. We know Jon B. values the real world because of the message from one of his sponsors, Mystery Tackle Box (an interesting consistency between espoused value and paid sponsorship).
In several of his videos, Jon B. talks about his decision to drop out of college. In this one, he comes at it from the direction of quitting fishing and quitting video making, or the price tag that college required him to pay, beyond tuition (view from 7:30).
For me, this links back to the real sense of urgency in his life and his business enterprise. In addition, that connects with the critical theory as well. It also demonstrates the kind of social criticism that Jon B. is engaged in. I suspect that this cohort is speaking together in its’ criticism of schooling, and the “normal” career path. Yet, thinking back to deconstruction, we also see Jon B. clearly seeking corporate sponsorship as one of his revenue streams. Some of these vlogs narrate his attendance at industry trade shows and, while he offers no details, he mentions business meetings as an aspect of those trips. Therefore, this form of social criticism is complicated. Likewise in some videos, we hear Jon B. say or do things unreflective of his middle-class privilege. At other times, he is deeply cognizant of the opportunity and luxury he has in creating this media. Some of this we can attribute to his youth but some of it has to do with the straight up complexity of combining, art, self, and economics and doing it as a performance piece nearly real-time, for a subscriber base of four-hundred-thousand YouTube viewers.
Jon B. is serious about his art; his video editing, camera work, storytelling and selection of soundtrack are all intentional. He is certainly bridging a very interesting divide. He is engaged really in fishing and virtually as a social media marketer and content creator. His circle of friends likewise blur the real/virtual divide and so, yes, in response to Alexander’s definition of digital storytelling this is built, in part, from cyberculture and yet that is not enough either.
Broadening the Application
I believe this case study develops my aesthetic/critical theory and demonstrates its coherence. I likewise believe this theory can be used to examine other niche content creators on YouTube, for example, Adventure Adrift and the Ginger Runner:
These stories are built from both real culture and cyberculture. These creators are certainly engaged in digital storytelling, and yet our definitions struggle to keep up with their innovation.
Circling back to the tension between economics and social criticism in the persona that Adventure Adrift has constructed, their social criticism is more explicit. Their tiny house allows them to travel the oceans and one of their aims is to do good in communities as they travel. Their monetized web presence facilitates their doing well as they do good. I might suggest that Ethan Newberry is most at peace with being an entrepreneur. If his passion for ultra-running has a social criticism it is more subtle, and he knows better than to alienate potential customers with proselytizing. Nonetheless, he is advocating for a more active and healthy lifestyle. As mentioned above, Jon B.’s social criticism is youthful and not fully developed but intensely relevant to higher education.
Circling back to the ambiguity of lived adventures turned to content for consumption of YouTube viewers, it really remains to be seen how impactful this genre is in fostering lifestyle change and increasing risk-taking. I take the Sailing Nervous channel to be one of these fast followers in the live-aboard community. Brendan’s Fabulous World of Fishing is likewise a channel on the rise in the fishing community. At what point will imitation breakdown and the market saturate? However, in truth and speaking from personal experience in the last year, I have taken several big risks in part emboldened by this genre. I too experimented briefly with video making. It, however, is not my passion and struggling with cameras while engaged in an adventure dilutes my fun. Therefore, it will be hard to know the impact of this genre simply because not everyone will become a content creator – even as s/he changes his or her life.
However, I think my theory begins to break down with other kinds of niche content creators. So for example, those that engage in purely cyberculture content creation, such as computer game playthroughs, or those engaged in MMORPG streaming pull on my valuing of real-life activities in a troubling way. Though I am not deeply bothered with that since my opening argument indicated my abiding suspicion of universal definition and theory. The Gamer niche needs a niche aesthetic/theory just like these genres I explore here need a niche theory.
Conclusion
Jon B. left college because it required him to give up his passion and it prevented him from developing his entrepreneurship. To my mind, that is a harsh criticism that higher education needs to take seriously. We need to find a way to stop being an impediment and instead begin to facilitate these young people’s successes. Finally, I believe, as an aspiring Instructional Designer, that this aesthetic/theory allows me room to work with both teachers and learners in developing skills that are relevant to young people and yet allows them to display sustained intellectual engagement and learning. My aesthetic/theory allows me to engage with a teacher familiar with grading an essay but who is out of depth in grading a series of videos, for example. Likewise, by emphasizing a kind of digital storytelling that blurs the boundaries between real and cyberculture, and real and virtual activities, I am treading in an environment that requires a couple different learning curves. Observing how the participant/learner navigates those offers interesting moments and intersections to assess learning. Interestingly, participation in this genre runs the gamut of demographics from Millennial to Boomer and so we see, in a snapshot, a cross-section of lifelong learning perhaps previously impossible to compile so simultaneously. I think my aesthetic is limited, as it is not applicable to all digital storytelling; however, I do believe it crosses niches as well hence expanding its usefulness and credibility.
References
Adventure Adrift [Adventure Adrift] (2016, Nov 7). Our Journey: Sailing with a Purpose. [Video File]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/wolsdGbNECs
Alexander, B. (2011). The new digital storytelling: Creating narratives with new media. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Praeger.
Copeland, L. (Producer), & Mallory, C. (Director). (2010). 180° South [Motion picture]. USA: Magnolia Pictures.
Deconstruction. (2017, Jan. 26). In Wikipedia. Retrieved January 26, 2017, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deconstruction
Edwards, J. (2014, Dec. 31) How to become a YouTube entrepreneur. Retrieved January 26, 2017
from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/the-filter/virals/10765955/How-to-become-a-YouTube-entrepreneur.html
Gonzo Journalism. (2017, Jan. 21). In Wikipedia. Retrieved January 21, 2017, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonzo_journalism
Barzacchini, J. [Jon B.] (2016, Feb. 14). Finesse Fishing Texas Bass — Texas Trip Day 2. [Video File]. Retrieved https://youtu.be/Hj3UuSlzY5c
Barzacchini, J. [Jon B.] (2016, Sept. 11). Why I Quit Fishing and Filming?. [Video File]. Retrieved https://youtu.be/XTTxc0WkFB8?t=7m30s
Hunt, T. [Truly Social with Tara Hunt] ( 2016, Dec. 18). How Long Should YouTube Videos Be? YouTube’s New Algorithm. [Video File]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/O7JbyboijdM
Iwancio, P. [Paul Iwancio] (2010, April 22). 7 Elements for Digital Storytelling (in 4 Minutes!). [Video File]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/NipDAd3_7Do
Newberry, E. [TheGingerRunner] (2011, Jan 25). WELCOME TO GINGERRUNNER.COM!. [Video File]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/WV4aByWNGfY
Patterson, K. Grenny, J., McMillan, R., Switzler, A., (2011). Crucial Conversations Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High, (2nd edition). McGraw-Hill Education.
ZMD, (2005, January 6). Vlogging. In Urban Dictionary. Retrieved September 29, 2016, http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=vlog