I just want to send a quick thank you to Bryden McGrath and Catherine O’Donnell for chatting with me about things related to technology, teaching, literature, and the AAC&U.

Bryden’s written a piece for the UW’s Daily, and Catherine’s done the same for the Graduate School.

I like that both of the conversations focused primarily on the material histories of technologies, rather than becoming preoccupied with cutting edge digital tools and gadgets.  These experiences make me want to drag my typewriters, rotary phones, cassette tapes, and record players into the classroom.

I’m in a generative constraints phase: narrowing down my life through the use of some productively reductive principles.  François Le Lionnais, in the “Second Manifesto” for Oulipo, writes: “The efficacy of a structure—that is, the extent to which it helps a writer—depends primarily on the degree of difficulty imposed by rules that are more or less constraining” (30).

Admittedly, what I’ve done below didn’t require a high degree of difficulty.  Nevertheless, I’m hoping it generates an interesting two months (April and May), when I will only listen to the 50 records to which I would—in times dire—reduce my music collection.

The question?  Whether I feel the same way come June.

Al Green, Let’s Stay Together

Animal Collective, Feels

Bad Brains, S/T

The Beatles, Abbey Road

Bonnie “Prince” Billy, I See a Darkness

Can, Ege Bamyasi

The Congos, Heart of the Congos

David Bowie, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust

DJ Shadow, Endtroducing…

Fugazi, Red Medicine

Gang of Four, Entertainment!

Gary Numan, The Pleasure Principle

Guided by Voices, Bee Thousand

Howlin’ Wolf, Sun Recordings

J Dilla, Donuts

Jesus Lizard, Goat

Joy Division, Unknown Pleasures

Led Zeppelin, III

Leonard Cohen, Songs from a Room

Man Man, Six Demon Bag

Mazzy Star, She Hangs Brightly

Melvins, Houdini

Missy Elliot, Under Construction

Modern Lovers, S/T

Modest Mouse, The Moon And Antarctica

My Bloody Valentine, Loveless

Nirvana, Bleach

Notwist, Neon Golden

Ornette Coleman, The Shape of Jazz to Come

Otis Redding, Good To Me: Recorded Live At The Whiskey A Go Go

Pavement, Slanted & Enchanted

Pere Ubu, The Modern Dance

PJ Harvey, Rid of Me

Radiohead, OK Computer

Rocket from the Crypt, Circa: Now!

Sebadoh, Harmacy

Shellac, At Action Park

Sonic Youth, Daydream Nation

Soundgarden, Badmotorfinger

Sparklehorse, It’s a Wonderful Life

Spoon, Girls Can Tell

Steely Dan, Royal Scam

Superchunk, Foolish

T. Rex, The Slider

Television, Marquee Moon

Tom Waits, Frank’s Wild Years

Tribe Called Quest, The Low End Theory

The Velvet Underground & Nico, S/T

Wilco, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

Wire, Pink Flag

This fall semester at Cornish College of the Arts, I’ll be teaching “Introduction to the Digital Humanities” through a code-lite approach that focuses on media ecology, print, and digital texts.  The course description is below, and I’m in the process of a working on a course site.  More soon.

Course description:

How do new media and technologies influence perceptions of print, and how does print affect engagements with technologies and media? With these questions as guides, this class explores conversations between print and digital texts, between old media and new. Some conversations are contemporary, while others are reanimated from the 19th and 20th centuries. Regardless of their time, all are curious, and our goal will be to situate them in the “digital humanities,” or the synthesis of technical skills with critical practices in, for example, the study of literature, culture, and history. To this end, meetings will be conducted in a computer-integrated classroom, and the class will be asked to collaboratively compile a book, with each student contributing an essay, short fiction, or experimental text. Course material will likely include work by Shelley Jackson, Gertrude Stein, William Burroughs, Millie Ness, and Martha Deed. No technical skills required. Sideways thinkers most appreciated.

I’m teaching a course at University of Washington, Bothell (in Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences) this coming spring.  I’m quite excited about it. Here’s the description.

BIS 213, Art Techniques: “New Media Production”

New media, but how to make it?

This course’s primary aim is for students to have the time, space, and materials to acquire some basic technical skills in “new media” production. According to Lev Manovich (in The Language of New Media), new media are (1) composed of digital code, (2) modular collections of discrete elements, (3) highly automated, (4) variable, and (5) a blend of a “cultural layer” and a “computer layer.”

With this definition in mind, the course will be concerned less with conceptualizing new media and more with making, manipulating, and circulating it. Our meetings will be conducted in a computer-integrated classroom and will be module-driven. That is, the majority of class time will be spent working hands-on with new media instead of relying heavily on lecture. Since the course meets only once per week, for a little over two hours per meeting, we will narrow new media production to two domains: Adobe Flash (object-based animation software) and Audacity (an open-source sound editor). Given the vast array of possibilities that each domain affords, the course modules focus on animating print texts by taking an excerpt from an existing poem, novel, or short fiction, digitizing it, and making it move.

By the end of the quarter, students should be able to produce their own, text-based Flash work, add sound to that work (using Audacity for sound editing), and assess (in writing) how effectively their work refashions a print text through a digital medium. To this end, students will develop their own Flash projects over the course of the quarter, offer written and verbal feedback on the work of their peers, and circulate their projects for others to modify.

There is no text book for the course. The course modules on new media production will be circulated via a class website and examples of new media (e.g., Flash poetry) will be engaged in class.

Both Flash and Audacity are available on the computers in the classroom and elsewhere on campus, and no technical skills in Flash or Audacity are required for the course. However, those who are curious about the course content, especially Flash poetry, are encouraged to peruse the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume One, as well as the work of Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries.

I’ve been reading up on biographical data as of late, something I never thought I would do in order to write a dissertation chapter.  Dates and numbers galore.

For now, the bio work is on Burroughs. Still, it’s all rather subjective when compared to the graphed-out quanta-time-space I came across when Googling “burroughs joan vollmer” just a few moments ago:

Sometimes it’s just too difficult NOT to jump on the Google praisewagon.  I consumed a good part of my day reading biography and then compiling my own hand-written timeline of Burroughs-related events.   From Word Virus, I even learned about the “high-colonic enema” called “The Cascade” and its Burroughs-coined motto, “Well done!  thou true and faithful servant!” (10).

I was feeling productive.  And even rewarded. A product hand-written, not typed, in ink, not ones and zeroes.  Then I discover these Google timelines and the  “alternative view” project.

Well, before I begin hand-writing and inking away with Virginia Woolf:

I might as well get more personal:

Slowly but surely, it seems as if scrolling the web will become a chore for the average reader.   That said, this entry sure is long…

Translating or executing?

In the last few days, I’ve become incredibly interested in Yevgeny Alexandrovitch Sholpo and the variophone (1930), as well as Daphne Oram and oramics (1959).  Both Sholpo and Oram drew sound onto 35 millimeter movie film.  With a little work, they could then listen to these drawings.  Writing could be played.  It could be animated.

Here’s an example film strip drawing for the variophone, and here’s an image of the oramics machine.  If you prefer movement, then a significant portion of the following video, “Theremin, Variophone et musiques nouvelles russes 1930,” is dedicated to the variophone.  There’s also a lot of theremin action in there, too, so you can’t really resist.

In Protocol, Alexander Galloway writes: “Code is the only language that is executable” (165, emphasis his).  Granted, in the case of the variophone and oramics, we might not have “language,” per se.  For one, unless they were somehow formalized to compose music, I’m not sure what the grammar of either would be.  So call these soundings “noise.”  Fine with me.

What we do have are graphic images that are systemized and written and can actually be heard—they can be executed as audio. Here, the graphic images for the variophone or the oramics machine differ from, say, the grooves of a long play (LP) album in that sound (e.g., of a musical instrument) is not just recorded and stored to be played back later.  Instead, sound (once heard or not) emerges from the act of writing.  While I would imagine (and I am only speculating) that both Oram and Sholpo could read their graphics much like a musical score, a score cannot enact itself.  Scores are not executable, and record grooves can only reproduce.

Whereas Galloway’s notion of code implies both “semantic meaning” and the “enactment of meaning” (166), I’m wondering if a system of executable audio, including Sholpo’s and Oram’s graphic images, could still be an example of code.  Of a system that can actualize a phenomenon—that can actualize a sound—through the graphic image without ever making sense.   Executable audio might be code without denotation or connotation, where a shape, a line, a figure never intends to mean, even if it is put into a sequence.

Yes, yes: Executable audio could not escape the desire for meaning-making.  It will forever be nested or embedded in interpretations, in explanations.  All code is.  Nevertheless, it’s interesting to posit a code without semantics.

Obviously, I need to think through the implications of all this.  In the meantime, here’s an excerpt from Oram’s “Rockets in Ursa Major.”

So, I’ve been working on an abstract for my dissertation project, tentatively titled “Media Ecology and Its Cultural Histories.”  A draft is below.  Here, I’m drawing upon Jonathan Sterne’s The Audible Past and Matthew Fuller’s Media Ecologies, among others.

Enjoy…?

My project, which is a genealogy of the relationships between sound reproduction technologies and Anglo-American literature (1874-2005), historicizes media interaction as a culturally embedded, aesthetic practice.  Engaging media ecology’s oft-cited affiliations with ideologies of humanist environmentalism and technological determinism, the project aims to de-naturalize sense experiences and contextualize them in the emergence of new media.  By mapping media aesthetics onto cultural studies, my method explores how literary production blends with the telegraph, phonograph, magnetic tape, and MP3.  I select these technologies because the environmentalist and determinist tendencies of media ecology are frequently mobilized through sound, which becomes synonymous with the immediate and ephemeral experience.  However, my research demonstrates how sound reproduction technologies exteriorize sound—storing, transmitting, and manipulating it in tangible ways that are not only comparable to print, but also intermediate sound production with literary production.  My project situates these intermediations in particular media ecologies to study the variability of media and historical changes in sense experiences.  Consequently, rather than articulating a history where senses remain constant over time, or where technology determines how people perceive change, my genealogy stresses differences in perception across contextualized media ecologies and argues that media interaction enables creative and critical interpretations of technology.

I’ve been working on a condensed version of my research interests before I flesh out the prospectus for my dissertation. That said, here’s a draft:

As a PhD candidate in English at the University of Washington, my research interests are framed around three primary areas of study: sonic modernity, the digital humanities, and science and technology studies. My dissertation research, in particular, emerges from the argument that most approaches to digital media and humanities computing are subtended by visual paradigms of knowledge-making, which tend to stress, for example, the stable space of the page, the architecture of typography, and the mass reproduction of images. With this premise in mind, I am in the process of writing a critical genealogy of sound technologies in the 19^th and 20^th centuries in order to not only diversify and enrich approaches to literary criticism, but to also augment and make more complex our existing understanding of digital media and their relation to the senses. For this project, my primary artifacts are novels, poetry, and other forms of fiction, including 19^th century telegraphic fiction, Harlem Renaissance novels, and mid-20^th century experiments with magnetic tape conducted by writers. The time periods in which these artifacts materialize are crucial, if nothing else, because they correspond with the rise of specific sound technologies. My investment, however, is in exploring how these technologies—the telegraph, the phonograph, and magnetic tape, in particular—intermediated with new ways of writing, storing, and transmitting experiences, especially those experiences where the interpretive agent is ambiguous or difficult to locate. Indeed, in a post-press, pre-Internet era, new sound technologies did more than allow for the mass reproduction and circulation of sounds. They helped produce new forms of materiality, movement and embodiment. And by unpacking these new forms through a critical genealogy, I hope to conclude my dissertation with a chapter on what that genealogy suggests today for the creative and democratic uses of digital technologies.

I’ve been meaning to write about this for some time now. It’s about the spring course, “Animating 1919,” and, more specifically, a collaborative digital media project that emerged from that course. One of the groups in the class did something really, really smart: They animated the first newsreel from Dos Passos’s The 42nd Parallel using Flash and some serious attention to the physical text itself. Here’s the final video:

What I like about it is that it’s Flash without being flashy. They kept it simple and deliberate, and, what’s more, they were able to frame it around questions about materiality and texture. The texture of the digital. Digital texture, as they called it. I like that. A lot.

Why? Well, for one, it refrains from rendering digital media “flat” or without depth, as if they don’t have a materiality of their own. Also, it lays bare the connections and intermediations that can be made across textual studies and digital humanities research. These are overlaps that I never imagined being interested in; nevertheless, what this video does so well is capture the material richness of language and the printed text and make it move. In so doing, it demands a new type of reading (of the text in multiple materialities), highlighting the simultaneity and noisiness of Dos Passos’s newsreel without even using sound.

To situate the project on the institutional and pedagogical registers, it is, I think, an example of what Alan Liu wonderfully refers to as “Literature+.” Not only did it involve collaboration, the creative use of digital technologies, and the synthesis of technical skills with critical competencies, but it also demands interdisciplinary acts of interpretation and making—of working with, across and through texts, their materiality and cultural embeddedness, and how they make meaning over time, in time.

What I’m getting at is that digital humanities trajectories like this one need not be reduced to fetishizing technologies and all things new and 2.0. They can be, sure. However, where they are truly productive is in their process of making a digital texture that’s about more than interfaces.

I’ve emerged from my exams and am posting the introductions for each of my three responses. Here’s the third, from list one: “Anglo-American Modernism.” All footnotes have been removed. For whatever reason, if you have want the balance, then just email me.

Reading Gramophonically: Noise, Intermediation and Poetic Form

Young Greenberg forgot his gramophone.  True, it was the medium he was after; however, that medium wasn’t the media.  We could put it another way.  He had eyes and ears for the singular and the pure; it was noise he abated.  That required some detachment.  In “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” he argues that, “The nonrepresentational or ‘abstract,’ if it is to have aesthetic validity, cannot be arbitrary and accidental, but must stem from obedience to some worthy constraint or original” (29).  This discipline—this purposeful, abstract character of art and poetry—is precisely where the two earn their autonomy from “common, extroverted experience” (29).  And as Juan Suárez observes in Pop Modernism: Noise and the Reinvention of the Everyday, the site of Greenberg’s modern aesthetics is located in “traditional materials (or media) of artistic expression” (125), including music, painting and literature.  Of course, Greenberg is correct to include these traditional media; nonetheless, per Suárez, what was once new media, such as the gramophone, was also influential in the modernist avant-garde scene.  One of Suárez’s goals, then, is to show how new media, as well as popular culture, played a significant role in how we currently understand cultural production in various modernisms.  From my reading, he succeeds, and he does so through a multimedia archive of Anglo-American modernism.  Given the range of his archive, however, mobilizations of Suárez’s arguments could be more concentrated, particularly in the study of poetry.  To this end, in this essay I further Pop Modernism through a comparative approach to poetic form, with noise as my refrain. First, I replicate what might be called a Greenbergian formalism by reading four avant-garde poems through the lens of the traditional media, specifically music, that Greenberg identifies in “Avant-Garde and Kitsch.”  I then give Greenberg his gramophone by re-reading those same poems through what I refer to as “reading gramophonically.”  While neither of these approaches relies upon the psychobiographical intent of the author, each requires situating poetry in a distinct position.  The former demands that poetry is self-reflexive, self-contained, and harmonious.  It is poetry for the sake of poetry.  The latter articulates poetry as a noisy intermediation that hiccups or pops along the way.  Both are media.  One is a machine.

Works Cited:

Greenberg, Clement.  ”Avant-Garde and Kitsch.”  Art and Culture: Critical Essays. Boston: Beacon Press, 1961. 3-21.

Suárez, Juan Antonio. Pop Modernism: Noise and the Reinvention of the Everyday. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2007.

Dear Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries (hereafter referred to, in the soup fashion, as “YHCHI”):

I’ve been reading your moving words and taking notes on your Flash styles. I also read an interview (conducted by Thom Swiss) in The Iowa Review, which ends with your saying:

There’s a tendency to read quickly on the Internet. Speed is everything, and densely written texts, be they creative or critical, seem to make the reader anxious — maybe because of the phone bill. Then again, maybe another reason for the dearth of critical Web writing is that there’s nothing to criticize — Web writing might not be very good.

Well, I’ll tell you this, YHCHI: your web writing is quite good, particularly in all of its consistency–sticking to language, forgetting about graphic design, and maintaining (unlike some of us) an engaging aesthetic across your work.

And in light of the “Animating 1919″ class, the 2008 SIAH on “Media and the Senses,” and, generally speaking, my growing interest in mapping the digital humanities onto Anglo-American modernism, I’m glad to see that critics are picking up your work and writing about it, namely Jessica Pressman, in “Reading the Code between the Words: The Role of Translation in Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries’s Nippon” (in dichtung-digital nr. 37).

The future of the past, in motion, is looking good.

Tho I need to take my time with these moving words and watch each one again, right now “Beckett’s Bounce”, “The Art of Silence” and “Artist’s Statement No. 45,730,944: The Perfect Artistic Web Site” (ENGLISH, K0REAN, FRANCAIS, or ESPAN0LA) are top on my shelf.

But, to answer your question, at least in regards to my own cyberpractices, I AM! That said, let me stop wasting your time. I know that you–and everyone else–are in quite a hurry.

Yours truly,

The Cyber Selfish

I’m looking for a translation of the prefix to the third section of Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” That prefix reads:

I understand that the quote comes from Aristotle’s De Anima (or On the Soul); however, I have not found consistency in the translations. The most common, it seems, is: “No doubt the mind is something divine and not subject to external impressions.” Anyone else have a translation?  The same?  A different one?

I also just realized that there are some interesting connections with Eliot’s 1919 “halt at the frontier of metaphysics” and the course on animating 1919. Those connections are not quite what I originally had in mind, either, namely the potential associations of animation with the mobilization of an essence and its attendant ideologies (e.g., the essential canon for which Eliot might argue). Of course, a theory of animation does not have to follow that line of inquiry.  Nevertheless, I now realize that particular line is a possible reading of the course.

But the translation? Anyone?

I should add “deferred on the wire.” Related to my recent post on Faulkner, Cohen, and Benjamin, I cannot help but toss the final sentence from Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby into the mix:

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. (182)

Gatsby’s green light, his dream, it seems, is–to mobilize Svetlana Boym’s wonderful The Future of Nostalgia–both a vision of the future and an idealized past.

But let me not get beyond myself. This is just a thought, a short something making me all the more curious about using Twitter. More returns, eternally, to come. Soon.

P.S.: What I really appreciate about the above line, among many things, is that Fitzgerald didn’t make it a simile.

Print text cited:

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. 1925. New York: Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1995.

Let’s get right to it, without a scratch: I want to focus on one particular part of Baldwin’s novel. Predictably, that part involves a gramophone, which might resemble:

Said gramophone makes its appearance in Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) like so: “for it was someone’s gramophone, on a lower floor, filling the air with the slow, high, measured wailing of the blues” (185). John, who is a child in this particular scene, is in his mother Elizabeth’s arms, and when he hears the music from the lower floor, he “respond[s] by wriggling, and moving his hands in the air, and making noises, meant . . . to be taken for a song” (185). Importantly, two paragraphs later, John, for the first time, meets Gabriel, a preacher who ultimately becomes his stepfather. When Elizabeth asks him to shake Gabriel’s hand during their introduction, John is still distracted by the music from the lower floor:

But John was staring at the door that held back the music; toward which, with an insistence at once furious and feeble, his hands were still outstretched. He looked questioningly, reproachfully, at his mother, who laughed, watching him, and said, “Johnny want to hear some more of that music. He like to started dancing when he was coming up the stairs.” (185)

Gabriel, the preacher (and the angel of death?), translates this event into biblical terms: “‘Got a man in the Bible, son, who liked music, too. He used to play on his harp before the king, and he got to dancing one day before the Lord. You reckon you going to dance before the Lord one of these days?’” (186). To the preacher, Johnny, with his hands outstretched, suggests entheos, or having god or the spirits within, and my assumption is that Gabriel refers to David, who plays the harp before Saul, King of Israel and Judah. Saul is tormented by evil spirits, and David arrives to compel them. Of course, David later becomes King, after beheading Goliath, slaying thousands in battle, and the like. Gabriel has comparably “high” hopes for Johnny: “‘With them big eyes he ought to see everything in the Bible’” (186). Here, knowledge-making is associated with vision and depth. The larger the eyes, the better the reader. Fittingly, then, John cannot take his eyes off of Gabriel: “[Gabriel's] eyes were still on John, whose eyes had not left him” (186). The Bible is not the only thing subject to interpretation. John — “with a child’s impenetrable gravity” (186) — appears to make Gabriel a tad uneasy. The scene then loops back to the sonic register, as Gabriel says: “‘[The city]‘s mighty big . . . and looks to me–and sounds to me–like the Devil’s working every day’” (186). This comment becomes Gabriel’s vehicle to simultaneously judge the urban acoustic space of the blues and, from what Elizabeth gathers, something about her actions, too. While the Devil’s music from the floor below can still be heard above, Gabriel gazes at Elizabeth, who, with a vague sense of shame, looks down at her plate.

About a page later, this vague sense of shame seems to switch gears, as Elizabeth finds hope in Gabriel’s presence: “his voice had made her feel that she was not altogether cast down, that God might raise her again in honor; his eyes had made her know that she could be again–this time in honor–a woman” (188). Elizabeth, a single mother at this point in the text, looks and listens to Gabriel as a means of legitimizing her and her son, giving them honor. The preacher comes to the ostensible rescue. And then, in a brilliant paragraph by Baldwin, our main techno-character returns:

The distant gramophone stuck now, suddenly, on a grinding, wailing, sardonic trumpet-note; this blind, ugly crying swelled the moment and filled the room. [Elizabeth] looked down at John. A hand somewhere struck the gramophone arm and sent the silver needle on its way through the whirling, black grooves, like something bobbing, anchorless, in the middle of the sea.

“Johnny’s done fell asleep,” she said. (188)

I understand this stuck-unstuck needle on the record as a key literary moment in sonic modernity. In Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity, Alexander G. Weheliye argues that “DuBois, Ellison, and Benjamin ratify Bhabha‘s ‘time lag’ of Western modernity by reimagining and morselizing the supposed linearity of hegemonic time from the (aural) vantage point of the oppressed” (104). To mobilize his readings, Weheliye refers to “hiccups” in history–hiccups that “provide pathways to the clefts and folds” of temporality (79). The “gramophone stuck” is one of those very hiccups, which doesn’t stop time so much as reproduce an event. It is the unexpected repetition of the trumpet-note and not the continuous bobbing of the needle that catches the ear. No doubt, plenty of intertextualizations with Benjamin’s notion of Messianic time — in a religious context or not — could be unpacked through all the soundings of the trumpets here; nevertheless, what I’m curious about is how, after the hiccup, we find Johnny asleep. What are we to make of this moment? Has the music lured him to slumber? Has he grown tired from the gravity of his own stares? Was he awake until the hand struck the gramophone arm? Or maybe he’s just a tired kid?

With these questions in mind, we might also note that Go Tell It on the Mountain has other hiccups, too, namely narrative refrains. Toward the novel’s end, when John is older and, on his fourteenth birthday, is saved in church, we re-read this moment:

Got a man in the Bible, son, who liked music, too. He used to play on his harp before the king, and he got to dancing one day before the Lord. You reckon you going to dance before the Lord one of these days? (212, italics original)

To understand the earlier instantiation of these lines from Gabriel as merely a foreshadowing of John becoming David is to reduce the hiccup to a rhetorical device. While it is that, it is also reproduced as a belated answer to Gabriel’s question, an unfolding of time from storage in the fashion of: “Remember when you asked me…?” The repetition is the response; no answer is necessary. The re-membering is, it seems, both active and affirmative (as opposed to, say, a “longing memory” or nostalgia). With Johnny saved, perhaps David is claiming Saul’s throne, and Elizabeth still has something (or someone) to sustain her hope. In the final lines of novel we read:

He turned to face his father–he found himself smiling, but his father did not smile.

They looked at each other a moment. His mother stood in the doorway, in the long shadows of the hall.

“I’m ready,” John said, “I’m coming. I’m on my way.” (226)

The record moves in loops and in lines.

Print Works Cited:

Baldwin, James. Go Tell It on the Mountain. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1953.

Weheliye, Alexander G. Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity. Durham: Duke U P, 2005.

A hero who fled from a paint factory. Picture that.

Per Malcolm Cowley’s introduction to Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson once argued that the U.S. needs people, who, “at any physical cost to themselves and others . . . [will] agree to quit working, to loaf, to refuse to be hurried or to try to get on in the world” (Anderson in Cowley 10). Here, we might map Anderson’s comment onto his own polemic in the the Winesburg chapter-story, “Godliness”:

In the last fifty years a vast change has taken place in the lives of our people. A revolution has in fact taken place. The coming of industrialism, attended by all the roar and rattle of affairs, the shrill cries of millions of new voices that have come among us from overseas, the going and coming of trains, the growth of cities, the interurban car lines that weave in and out of towns and past farmhouses, and now in these later days the coming of the automobiles has worked a tremendous change in the lives and in the habits of thought of our people in Mid-America. (70-71)

You might call that Luddism. Or you might recall the music of trains, factories, and industry, a dream series that could only be just that:

“[A] kind of childlike innocence is gone forever” (Anderson 71). But we’ve heard enough of that in modernism and since. So now, let’s quit being dreamy and clear a few things up (or at least attempt to). Clarity is always a peculiar thing.This is a photo of the actual Winesburg, Ohio:

The actual Winesburg is apparently not Anderson’s Winesburg. Perhaps the setting is Clyde. Whatever the inspiration, Anderson’s Winesburg has a telegraph operator. He goes by the name of Williams . . . Wash Williams. “Wash . . . was the ugliest thing in town. His girth was immense, his neck thin, his legs feeble. He was dirty. Everything about him was unclean. Even the whites of his eyes looked soiled” (121). Point made. But the thing is, Wash is rather good at what he does. In fact, he was at one point “called the best telegraph operator in the state” (122). This status makes him proud. Perhaps, then, that pride is somehow connected with his misanthropy. Wash hates everyone — men and women — in Winesburg. Or, to be more accurate, he doesn’t “associate with the men,” and “he hate[s] women” (122). And he pities men for being with women. For someone so connected, then, he isn’t at all. Anderson even calls this emphatic disassociation “the abandon of a poet” (122). A poet and a telegraph operator, too.

As goes things with George Willard, who is a reporter in town and perhaps our protagonist, Wash Williams tells Willard his story, specifically how he came to be so ugly. And much like a bulk of Winesburg’s characters, there’s a strange allure to, “something almost beautiful in the voice of Wash Williams, the hideous, telling his story of hate” (125). This charm of the grotesque is often cited as the draw of Anderson’s writing. For Wash, he was drawn to a woman, who he married, who “managed to acquire three other lovers” (126). Once he discovered this acquisition, says Wash: “‘I just sent her home to her mother and said nothing’” (126). Page 126 is a crucial moment in “Respectability,” Wash’s chapter-story in Winesburg, as it is the penultimate page of that chapter, the approximate space in which almost every Winesburg chapter gets particularly interesting. Almost. Thing is, this form of the novel makes it no less engaging.

In the page that follows, the mother of Wash’s partner sends for him. I reference her vaguely as “partner” here because we never get her name, even if we do get a description: a “tall blonde girl with . . . blue eyes” (125). But let’s return to the story: “Wash Williams’ voice rose to a half scream. ‘I sat in the parlor of that house two hours. Her mother took me in there and left me’” (126). Those two hours allow Wash to grow tender and angry, anxious and ostensibly vulnerable. Eventually, the girl enters the room, and she is naked, according to Wash, coaxed and undressed by her mother. Wash adds: “‘When she had pushed the girl in through the door she stood in the hallway waiting, hoping we would–well, you see–waiting’” (127). We get the impression that Wash’s partner spent life waiting, too. The mother “tests” Wash with her daughter, waiting to see if he is impotent. Of course, from Anderson, we never get the answer outright. But we do get these final four sentences in “Respectability”:

“I didn’t get the mother killed,” said Wash Williams, staring up and down the street. “I struck her once with a chair and then the neighbors came in and took it away. She screamed so loud you see. I won’t ever have a chance to kill her now. She died of a fever a month after that happened.” (127)

A perfectly placed, vague reference “that.” And perhaps Wash’s status in Winesburg was equally vague. Despite his alleged status and his “ability” (125), he was most likely part of a new revolution, a new industry, and, according to Carolyn Marvin, “a new class of managers of machines and techniques” at end of the nineteenth century (9). Marvin elaborates:

Their ranks included scientists, whose attention was directed to increasingly esoteric phenomena requiring ever more specialized intellectual tools and formal training, electrical engineers, and other “electricians” forging their own new identity from an older one of practical tinkerer and craft worker. Servingmaid to both groups were cadres of operatives from machine tenders to telegraph operators, striving to attach themselves as firmly as possible to this new and highly visible priesthood. (9-10, emphasis added)

We might then read Wash Williams as a type of disgruntled public servant, impotent and violent at various registers. Of course, this reading does not explain away the final four sentences of “Respectability,” but we also needn’t be in the business of explaining away. Connections and intertexts will suffice, and here’s one for your eyes and ears: The Great Train Robbery (1903), in which a telegraph operator is beaten in Scene 1:

Print Works Cited:Anderson, Sherwood. Winesburg, Ohio. 1919. New York: Penguin, 1992.Cowley, Malcolm. “Introduction.” Winesburg, Ohio. 1919. By Sherwood Anderson. New York: Penguin, 1992.1-15.

Marvin, Carolyn. When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century. New York: Oxford U P, 1988.