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.
http://https://youtu.be/uHIxYpBW7sc
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/