San Francisco Renaissance

Digital Scavenger Hunt Assignment:

• The purpose of this assignment is to curate your own interpretation of the San Francisco Renaissance by exploring the places that have been charted on our Google Maps, that are listed below:

Six Gallery
City LIghts Bookstore
San Francisco Poetry Center
Saints Peter and Paul Church
The Embarcadero
Garibaldi Hall
Purple Onion
Fugazi Hall
Longshoreman's Hall
Cafe Trieste
Co-Existence Bagel Shop
The Cellar
The Place
Coffee Gallery
Spec's
Bread and Wine Mission
Vesuvio Cafe
Jazz Workshop
Keystone Korner
Bel Hotel
Hotel Dante
Colombo Hotel
New Rivera Hotel

• Ideally, you will gather images, video, excerpts, and artifacts from each of these physical places, through online research. The curation aspect of this project is to be seen and understood as your interpretation of the San Francisco Renaissance and the Beat Movement. Most, if not all of these places have websites. If not, there is some information concerning the beat movement and the significance of these places. Try to focus on your favorite locations, and the locations associated with your favorite Beat writer. This is important when studying the Beat movement because it is easy to get overwhelmed with texts, poetry, and writing that may, at times, be difficult to understand.

• The mediums available for the presentation of these curations may take the form of Blogger, Glogger, or even a Wikispace page.

Harlem Renaissance Assignment

Josephine Baker is famous for this quote:

"The white imagination is sure something when it comes to blacks"

After viewing this glog, and considering the Copenhagen section of Nella Larsen's Quicksand

what could Josephine Baker mean by this quote? How does Helga Crane and Nella Larsen exemplify this in the novel? How is Larsen and Helga speaking to this idea of the white imagination run wild?

Assignment:

Create your own glog which reflects on the question of the white perspective of the black spectacle during the period in which the novel is set. Use any medium required: film, art, quotes, photographs, or even your own words and visual creations.

Questions to consider:

• What does 'black spectacle' mean?
• How could this be articulated visually?
• Who were prominent figures in entertainment during this period?
• Think of the audience's reactions to Josephine Baker within her films. What does this say about the white imagination?

Glog It?

Um. Test Glog?

Whitman and I Are Going Crazy, Part Deux

Step 1:

After reading Whitman's "Song of Myself" away from the classroom setting, students will return to class armed and ready for action in engaging with the poem. But first they're not even going to look at the poem. Instead, they will be asked to consider and just think about these words out of context:

Insanity
Lunacy
Asylum
Sickness
Mental Illness

If there is either a chalkboard or power-point device involved, then post these words here and allow students to read the words and just look at the words for themselves without any context. Have them think about these words for a few minutes in silence, and while they are still thinking and pondering these words, ask and prompt the students with a few questions like these:

• What thoughts, other words, or feelings spring to mind when considering any of these words?
  
• What image or images do you associate with these words?
  
• How are these words treated and perceived in today's culture and society?
  

Allow students to speak to these feelings and images associated with these words in a discussion format, and then move into...

Step 2:

Present students with three or more images (also known as cultural objects) of asylums from the 19th century, like these:

Or this:

And this:

Set up the context of these images, by giving students basic information on where and when they were taken, and what types of asylums these were. Encourage them to ask questions and speculate ideas about the time period.

If wanted, or is neccessary, have students research information about insanity and the 19th century, to find more about the culture surrounding these images.

Next, have students read the images. Questions to consider might take the form of, but are not limited by any means to:

• Who and what (if anyone, or anything) are represented in these images?
  
• How are people and physical objects framed within their environments?
• Do the structures of the buildings, and the small details of each image indicate or build to a deeper understanding of the overall image?
  
• Do anything in these images particularly stand out, or strike the viewer/reader as odd or strange?
  
• Look at the differences between the three images. How are the engravings different than the photographic image? What might this mean? Are there exaggerations? Falsities?
  
• How do these images represent, misrepresent, speak to, or challenge the notions and ideas of asylums and insanity within the 19th century and today's culture? (i.e. all the words discussed earlier?)
  

Step 3:

References to insanity, asylums, lunacy and mental illness/sickness are continually referenced in Whitman's poem "Song of Myself." For example, focus on the lines:

"I saw the face of the most smeared and slobbering idiot they had at the asylum"

"The lunatic is carried at last to the asylum a confirmed case, He will never sleep any more as he did in the cot in his mother's bedroom;"

Then consider these questions, and discuss in pairs:

• How does Whitman address and perceive the concept of insanity in these lines?

• How do the three previous images connect or disconnect to or with these lines? Why would Whitman care about these images? Are they an accurate representation of Whitman's views on insanity?

• How might the images misrepresent or represent, and/or enhance Whitman's view of insanity and asylums?

• How is Whitman's idea or concept of insanity and lunacy different from what the images represent?
  

• How might Whitman's focus and emphasis on mental health within the poem be speaking to the attitudes, social issues and perspectives of America during this period? Is this shown or expressed through the images in any way?
  

• How would Whitman's audience perceive or interpret this theme of mental illness illustrated in these lines?

• As modern readers of this poem, how do we understand and interpret these sections, excerpts and detours of insanity and sickness throughout the poem? How are the mentally ill perceived today, versus the 19th century? How do the images discussed earlier speak to these differences?
  

• How does this theme of sickness/insanity emerge from the poem? How does this connect to other sections of the poem, or play a part in understanding the rest of the poem?

• What larger themes or ideas might Whitman be creating, by including lunacy and the insane in his poem?

Step 4:

Assignment:

1. After breaking into pairs that have discussed these questions in class, the students will post to their blog a reply or response to any or all of the questions and thoughts I have listed above.
2. Additionally, the student must find at least two other examples of insanity, lunacy, asylums, etc. found within the poem to provide supporting textual evidence to their responses.
   
3. The goal is to generate ideas verbally in class, and expand these through writing in their free form blog posts. Feel free to expand on ideas that were generated through discussion.
   

• Students must use textual evidence found in "Song of Myself" to support their ideas.
• The blog post should be no shorter than 4-5 paragraphs in length.
• Not all of these questions have answers, and many will lead to lingering questions. Many will lead to something entirely else. This is good, for students will be evaluated on their ability to work through these ideas on their blogs, (in whatever form that may take) and their ability to create and form new questions to approach the poem and images with.

one flew east, one flew west, one flew over the cuckoo's nest

Preface:

To invoke the new media muse, I have chosen to frame my assignment for the student/reader around the form of a familiar new media device: a blog post assignment. This seems to be an easy format for everyone to use, plus it provides the textual evidence of an assignment, but it also proves to be a more accessible and simple way for students to voice their opinions and interpretations, without the demanding format of a paper assignment. Plus everybody on the internet gets to read it. And other students can comment. And so can the teacher.

Also, I'm assuming students have already read the poem at least once. And possibly, this assignment would follow a brief introduction into Whitman's 1855 New York, giving a slight cultural context to the assignment. (In addition to the cultural object that is incorporated into the assignment itself).

I also want to say that it's difficult to write an assignment for an assignment.

That being said...

Consider:

The mentally insane, and the sick and the dying within Whitman's world of "Song of Myself" are found lingering in the shadows of his expansive poem. Often, Whitman's sickness chooses to afflict the heart, the mind, the body, and sometimes all three.

Questions to think about:

• After viewing this cultural object, and considering the separation (physically, mentally or ect.) of the mentally insane within New York, circa 1855ish, how might Whitman's focus and emphasis on mental health within the poem be speaking to the attitudes, social issues and perspectives of America during this period?
  

• How would Whitman's audience perceive or interpert this theme of mental illness?

• As modern readers of this poem, how do we understand and interpert these sections, excerpts and detours of insanity and sickness throughout the poem? How are the mentally ill percieved today, versus the 19th century?
  

• How does this theme of sickness/insanity emerge from the poem? How does this connect to other sections of the poem, or play a part in understanding the rest of the poem?

Assignment:

After breaking into pairs that have discussed these questions in class, the student will post to their blog a reply or response to any or all of the questions and thoughts I have listed above. The goal is to generate ideas verbally in class, and expand these through writing in their free form blog posts.

• Students must use textual evidence found in "Song of Myself" to support their ideas.
• The blog post should be 4-5 paragraphs in length, but if you feel like writing more...go ahead.
• Not all of these questions have answers, and many will lead to lingering questions. Many will lead to something entirely else. This is good, for students will be evaluated on their ability to work through these ideas on their blogs, (in whatever form that may take) and their ability to create and form new questions to approach the poem with.
  

Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?

Throughout the poem, Whitman makes it a point to mention multiple times, varying forms of sicknesses that might strike a person. This sickness is sometimes in the mind, in the body, or in the heart. A few textual excerpts to get you in the frame of mind:

*The sickness of one of my folks—or of myself . . . . or ill-doing . . . . or loss or lack
of money . . . . or depressions or exaltations,

They come to me days and nights and go from me again,

But they are not the Me myself.

*The flap of the curtained litter—the sick man inside, borne to the hospital,

*I am he bringing help for the sick as they pant on their backs,

*The wretched features of ennuyees, the white features of corpses, the livid faces of
drunkards, the sick-gray faces of onanists,
The gashed bodies on battlefields, the insane in their strong-doored rooms, the
sacred idiots,

*Ranting and frothing in my insane crisis—waiting dead-like till my spirit arouses me;

* The felon steps forth from the prison . . . . the insane becomes sane . . . . the suffer-
ing of sick persons is relieved,

The sweatings and fevers stop . . the throat that was unsound is sound . . the lungs of the consumptive are resumed . . the poor distressed head is free,

The joints of the rheumatic move as smoothly as ever, and smoother than ever,

Stiflings and passages open . . . . the paralysed become supple,

The swelled and convulsed and congested awake to themselves in condition,

They pass the invigoration of the night and the chemistry of the night and awake.

*The lunatic is carried at last to the asylum a confirmed case, He will never sleep any more as he did in the cot in his mother's bedroom;

*The malformed limbs are tied to the anatomist's table, What is removed drops horribly in a pail;
********************************************************************************

There are a bunch floating in the poem. After re-reading the poem several times, I found a prominent theme with the repetition of health, sanity, insanity, and sickness.
That being said, here's some cultural context:

This is the inebriate asylum on Ward's Island, at Manhattan State Hospital. Also called the New York City Asylum. This object/artifact/drawing is from 1869. I found this at the New York Public Library


Now, Ward's Island is in the East River of New York, and is bridged by a rail to Queens called Hell Gate Bridge. A small population lived on the island starting in the early 17th century, and the first (draw)bridge was built to connect the island in 1807, out of wood. But that got destroyed by a storm in 1821. Around 1840, the island primarily became a dumping-ground-wasteland for everything unwanted in New York. This includes, but is not limited to:

• Thousands of bodies from Madison Square and Bryant Park
• A hospital for sick and dying immigrants, opened in 1847, which then became the largest hospital complex in the world during the 1850s.
• An Asylum for the insane, opened in 1863.
• Immigration station
• Manhattan State Hospital, containing 6,045 patients, making it the largest psychiatric hospital in the world.

This is the Verplank State Immigrant Hospital in 1871-72. You can sort of make out the people in the photograph. I found this on a ship's list website. Neat.



I'd imagine that everyone was pretty aware of these asylums during the time period. Especially Whitman.

Cultural object found. I'm done.

Whip It Whitman

I want everyone to take a moment and stare at the mess I've made. It is located directly above this sentence. If it isn't clear, then you should be able to click on the image itself, and it will pop out into a different window. Here it will be easier to view this impending disaster. You might tell yourself: It looks like a bunch of words puked all over themselves. Or maybe something more like, it hurts my eyes!

Both of these are appropriate responses. I completely agree. And now for an explanation that is neither logical nor sane.

What we have here are layers on top of each other. The layers are the poem in different stages, as it progressed over the years. I have labeled each layer with a date corresponding to the edition, then morphed, altered and grafted the next revision on top of that layer. On the bottom of the pile is the first edition (1855) and the last edition is on top (1891). Everywhere in between, on top of and woven through, are the other editions. All of these images are from the Whitman Archive. I had several ideas for using images and the text from the archive to convey a message or meaning, but I went with this one for the time being to emphasize some sort of coherent point. It also took a while to do this. Perhaps this is because I didn't feel like reading A Hunger Artist again for another class. Anyway, I don't know if this image-thing actually works. The text I have taken are the lines:

The farmer stops by the bars as he walks on a First-day loafe and
looks at the oats and rye,

The lunatic is carried at last to the asylum a confirm'd case,

(He will never sleep any more as he did in the cot in his mother's bed-room;)

The jour printer with gray head and gaunt jaws works at his case,

He turns his quid of tobacco while his eyes blurr with the manu- script;

The malform'd limbs are tied to the surgeon's table,

What is removed drops horribly in a pail;

Our group's big question focused on the (dis?)connect and correlation between the soul and body, while keeping in mind if and how the narrator is or might be attempting to convince the reader of something.
For some reason I was drawn to the (^^above^^) section which focuses primarily on people in action. The really compelling lines were: What is removed drops horribly in a pail

So...where am I going with this? I honestly don't know. But I'll try and make something up that could work.

This line over the course of Whitman's revisions became more pronounced. Instead of being embedded within lines, running from one person's actions (the farmer, the lunatic, the printer) to another, the line began to draw attention. It got moved around. It seemed to visually grow, and make it's way into significance, creating a pronounced identity for itself. By the last revision in 1891, the line has trickled down the page and found a home all the way on the last line. The eye immediately is drawn to it while reading. It is the last thought before turning the page:

What is removed drops horribly in a pail

I dare say that it is so purposefully placed, that it reminds me of something T.S. Eliot would spend years crafting, and Pound bitching about. Okay, BUT WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN! Well. I don't know. But maybe it could mean something. Part of your body is being dumped into a pail. Not just part of your body, but your malformed-limb-part of your body is being chopped off and discarded. At this point it is far too late to apologize for grotesquerie, but think about it: some part of you, perhaps your soul, is vehemently attached to whatever is being lost. And much like the other people in this section who are moving through the actions, this action must be reflected inward, as Whitman says,

And these [people?] tend inward to me and I tend outward to them, / And such as it is to be of these more or less I am, / And of these one and all I weave the song of myself.

I feel like I could push this thought further, but I don't know how, or if I can just yet. It's something that I will have to think about more.

But back to the technology bit. The Whitman archives provided a way to come to this realization (or whatever it is). I kept staring at the book images of that one line, and decided to squash them all together into a clustermuck of Whitman-Big-Ideas. By individually cropping the poem lines on the digital image, I zoomed in on the parts I found important, and contrasted them with the exact same lines over a period of time. In a mad-hatter sort of way I'm pleased with the result, even if it doesn't make sense to anyone else.

But if I take the concept of archiving literature, say about something I'm fascinated with, then this would be fantastic. Really. It might even help me, oh...say...when I'm writing my thesis. Next semester. So here's my dream archive that will never ever exist because J.D. Salinger is a grumpy old man who hasn't even seen a computer; let alone would never approve something this awful and wild.
Por ejemplo, say you were writing a paper about the Glass family. There are dozens of short stories since the late 40s that involve the Glass family, but say you were looking for short stories that involved only Seymour Glass. Again a whole bunch. These have been published in so many magazines it's not even funny. Some of them don't even exist anymore. But with the magical END ALL SALINGER ARCHIVE, you can search his name, and boom. Instantly find the stories you have always wanted to read, but never knew existed. No need for greedy universities in Texas to hold a secret stashes, or walk around pretending they don't exist.
Things in the literature world--and the humanities world for that matter--would be a lot simpler, and could be a point of growth. It could mean an infinite number of possibilities, whether academically, creatively or something entirely other.