Lilly Project (Blog 13), Clifford Odets' Death Mask

Lilly Archive Project

Justin, Ming, Derek, Natalie

Introduction

We went to the Lilly Library and looked at items from three collections: the puzzle collection, Clifford Odets, and Edgar Allan Poe. In flipping through the papers describing the Odets collection, the words “Death Mask” jumped out at us: just those two words on a single line, no other description or explanation. Naturally we were drawn to this intriguing entry. And when the librarian asked us if we wanted to see it, we all said “yes, please.” We asked, thinking it might be some kind of wooden mask used in a foreign country. Instead, we had found a plaster death mask of the deceased Clifford Odets himself (see Figure 1), which was made at his death in 1963 (he died August 14, of cancer, at age 57). Clifford Odets was famous for plays such as Waiting for Lefty (1935) and the screenplay of Sweet Smell of Success (1957). This post has been written in parts connected only loosely together.

Figure 1. Death Mask of Clifford Odets (1957)
Photograph by Derek DiMatteo.

  

Justin’s thoughts

‘Death Mask’ – these are two words one does not often associate with the archival remains of a little-known playwright housed in a Midwestern university library. Yet they appear, unaccompanied by additional text, in the “Guide to the Clifford Odets Papers in the Lilly Library.” Seeing the words ‘death mask’ immediately conjures visions of ritual performance masks purchased during global travels or perhaps images of spooky disguises used for costuming in a non-realistic play. Thus, it is rather a surprise when a Lilly librarian brings to you a cardboard box graffitied with magic marker that holds voluminous bubble wrap enveloping a stark white plaster cast of a deceased man’s face. As soon as the bright visage is pulled from its cardboard home, romantic visions quickly vanish and one realizes that the term ‘death mask’ refers, quite literally, to a plaster reproduction of a person’s face made shortly after death and just prior to interment. The experience is best described as ‘creepy’ and invites a host of questions in regards to the mask’s creation as well as queries concerning its inclusion in the university archive. 

A death mask is an oddly difficult archival object in which to ‘dance’ academically, especially in the absence of any accompanying data concerning its creation or previous homes. It is solely evidence of the living, breathing corpus that is no longer present to interact or to perform. The death mask functions much like film or photography works for performance: it serves as evidence for what was once present, but is now lost forever – that which can only be faultily re-membered through memory, description, and visual representations. As Peggy Phelan notes, “Without a copy, live performance plunges into visibility –in a maniacally charged present – and disappears into memory, into the realm of invisibility and the unconscious where it eludes regulation and control”(Phelan 148). The human body mirrors performance, as neither remain present ad infinitum, but both are lost to a perpetual present from which they necessarily disappear. 

The death mask is a reminder of the body that once was extant, but how adequately does it ‘ghost’ the person it represents? Andrew Sofer reminds us that “spectators bring associations from previous productions with them to the theater, and that these ‘ghosts’ color their experience of the current performance” (63). ‘Ghosts’ in real, lived experience work in the same way: associations from prior experience are conjured, creating a specter of what preceded. But what prior experience is recalled when an unwitting student stumbles across the ‘death mask’ of Clifford Odets in a search of the Lilly Library? The mask is a representation of a largely unknown man who once lived, but does it provide information beyond the fact that he indeed lived? A ‘ghost’ depends on memory. It is not only important how accurate or faulty a memory may be (as evidenced in Phelan’s discussion of Sophie Calle’s installations), but also that a memory exists. Without memory is there anything to ‘ghost’? If a ghost appears, but there is no memory, is the imagination just playing tricks? Thus, how problematic is imagination?

Ming’s thoughts

So, Odets's death mask.  A plaster mask taken after the mortician spruced Odets up and before he was interred...well, in our language, after death, “he” becomes “his body”, “the body”, or “the corpse”--so, before his body was interred?  Which distinction brings me to one of the themes I've visited before when I discussed literary translation and performance studies: the two disciplines have in common a tendency to use violent metaphors to describe rendering. With his death mask, Odets is rendered here, but how many layers are there to the palimpsest? The man, who after death is no longer, in English, “the man” but “the man’s body”. The body, the mask, the mortician, the loved one who presumably asked that the mask be made. Then outward: every box it's been in, the journey it traveled to the Lilly, everyone who has seen it, which now includes me. To know that this very plaster lay on a dead man's face, to look upon the shape his mourners must have looked upon if he had an open casket...that his face looks calm does little to calm my own nerves. Why was I getting the willies? The mask was made in 1963; not too long ago. But because the process is not a culturally familiar one to me, I felt odd seeing this man's death mask. Mask-layer notwithstanding, there seemed to be a layer missing, a layer of rendering that might have made it acceptable: oil on canvas, rendering his likeness; a needle on a record, rendering his voice. In the absence of as much rendering as I found normative, not enough of it had the effect of inserting sacrilegious me into a sacred space: I felt as I looked at the mask the way I might feel stumbling into a church where someone who thinks herself alone is praying audibly.  And yet, it was something made to be seen, to record how he looked—and look I did, with the willies and also a sense of fascination. Harris brings up the concept of “fetish” early in “Palimpsested Time”, touching on Marx's thought that fetishism is “guilty of 'magical' thought, insofar as it allegedly anthropomorphizes inert objects by lending agency to them” (6). If this "magicking" of objects is a crime, most of the authors we've read recently have committed it. Agency is lent to inanimate objects up the wazoo in our recent readings, not least the ones touching on photography.  I see every photo as a ("polychronic"?) palimpsest with infinite layers, among which linger the time it is taken, and every time it is seen, every person who sees it and touches it, and underneath it all the person who took it and the subject it objectified. Then there are Geertz's “thick descriptions” of the objects involved, the discursive, cultural, and historical lives to which the subject in the photo and the subject of the photo each belong. It goes on and on. Accordingly, our readings of late have nodded again and again to the stories we tell ourselves and each other about heretofore inanimate objects, and the codes of repression and exhibition enforced and reified by our “dance with things”, by our decision to see (or, Wexler would remind us, not see) them as active agents. Harris contends on page 16 that matter need not be “animate” to be necessary to the temporality of supercession or to that of explosion, perhaps suggesting that matter therefore is an undeniable agent in whatever reality there is to a construct of time.  I wonder, was Odets's mask made in order to negate time?  Negate time the way Debord's spectacle is “a negation of life which has invented a visual form for itself”? Why are all these theorists proclaiming that an inert thing can have a suppressive (or, for that matter, an animating) effect on abstractions?  How can an object negate time or life; how can an object invent?  These theorists are looking at a thing and endowing it with agency in the (admit it) fictive textual world they create, the way Brecht endows epic theater with agency when he says it “admits it is a demonstration” or the way Blank and Jensen do the same when they refer to what a play “asks of us”. What does Odets's death mask ask of us? I'm still not sure, but Harris might agree that whatever its scriptive function the mask is a palimpsest in that it is undeniably a “collation of diverse inscriptions that accrue over time”: perhaps inscribed by the man's face, the mortician, even viewers who knew him and the viewers who, like me, experience the visage as an archival item and not a reminder (17).  Harris might also agree that, as a palimpsest, the mask is a “complex, polychronic assemblage of material agents”: plaster, mortician, face, corpse, viewers, graffitied cardboard box.

Derek’s thoughts

Polychronic assemblage, indeed. The Odets Death Mask “both is a material presence and it encodes other material and immaterial presences” (Stallybrass, qtd in Harris, 9). Its material presence is quite literally that of a plaster mask created in 1957. The other material presence it encodes is the physical features of Clifford Odets’ face at the time of his death. The primary immaterial presence (at least for those who knew Odets) is perhaps akin to what Sofer calls the “felt absence” (67), i.e. the memory of a living, corporeal, walking/talking Clifford Odets. As Harris notes, “these other presences are…the memorial marks of the past”, and are emphatically not of the present, and thus the mask is “out of time with itself” or “untimely” (10), inhabiting the present moment but also “alien to and out of step with it” (11). Because of these other presences, because of its untimeliness, the plaster mask connotes “the persistence of the past in the present” (11). The mask does so by encoding the corporeal past, allowing it to persist into the present: Clifford Odets’ facial features have been written into the plaster, an act of supersession. But at the same time the mask resists “absorption into a homogenous present” (11). After all, we are gathered here in the Lilly Library, without having known Odets or having any memory of him. As scriptive objects, masks invite the viewer to put them on, but this perversely scriptive impulse is resisted when we know this is a death mask. Instead, the mask takes on a spiritual or sacred scriptiveness that invites viewers to activate their memories of Clifford Odets. But we who never knew Odets cannot conjure a memory of him as we look at the mask. So for those who see the mask without any memory of Odets, other immaterial presences are encoded: one of imagination (spectator is invited to imagine a living Odets) and one of ghosting (spectator is reminded of other deaths, of the faces of loved ones seen at wakes/funerals past). This explosion of memory and imagination shatters the integrity of the plaster mask as memory “punctures the illusion” of the mask’s material “wholeness or finality” (16). In this way, the juxtaposition of the highly detailed—indeed, the life-like—mask with the irruption of imagination and/or memory of the “dust of the past” allows the material and immaterial presences to “converse” in the “temporality of conjunction” (16). The mask is of 1957, but our gaze works on the plaster text to read the features and bring it to life. 

Natalie’s thoughts

It would seem that this death mask is an excellent example of Phelan’s key claim about performance, that it only becomes itself through disappearance: the mask performs the memory and the absent body of Odets, as others have mentioned, only in the wake of his death, in the disappearance of the life that animates the face captured here. I think the disturbed and unsettled feeling that others have described as accompanying seeing such a thing has very much to do with Phelan’s claim and Ming’s sense that there was a “layer missing.” What the death mask seems to promise is exactly what it cannot give, contact with the material body. The “needle” of a recording of his voice or the “oil” in a painting of him would give concrete elements for us to hold on and attach ourselves to in the representation of this man—we’d know we were only getting a representation, but having other materialities would provide other points of contact. But the death mask DID made contact with the face—it actually touched it, yet it can never allow us that same experience, or even a more mediated form of it like a painting or recording could. I think that it is not simply the loss of the body here, then, but the endlessly impossible desire to do just what the mask would seem to be doing—making contact with the material body—that is being performed by this object. I think it also promises to surrender the substance of death to us but can’t give that over either—not just his death, but any death, the concrete experience of death in general. In doing so it makes us witnesses to a performance that we can never actually see.

If this object is indeed performing, then it matters in what context it takes place. Justin has already pointed out how some responses that might be called forth by the mask can’t be elicited if the viewer doesn’t have certain information. Certainly, the functions death masks used to serve—as physical remainders of the deceased in the absence of photography or genetic profiles to be archived not just by the family but also by the state, and as guides to painting portraits of the deceased—are either outdated or unlikely to be called upon now. I think it’s fair to say that if you don’t know who this person is, then if this mask is prominently displayed in a museum, library, or university building—which is apparently where many of these masks end up—another aspect of its “scriptedness” might concern generating an impulse to create and consult an archive about them. If the mask is just displayed in the glass case of a university library with the person’s name and date of birth and death, it suggests their importance to a certain “we” that the viewer is excluded from without knowing the referent. This might seem obvious, but I think it’s important to consider the ways in which this might be displayed now, and how the contours of the performance would change in other contexts.

Figure 2. Clifford Odets, book photo and death mask
Photographed by Derek DiMatteo.

Course Blog #9: Archiving the Repertoire, Berstein's Scriptive Things

In her essay “Dances with Things: Material Culture and the Performance of Race,” Robin Bernstein argues that there are certain scriptive things which have the potential to “archive the repertoire,” in essence, preserving within themselves a record of their use and/or function by virtue of the fact that “a scholar understands a thing’s script both by locating the gestures it cites in its historical location and by physically interacting with the evidence in the present moment” (90).

Her argument leans heavily on the writings of Martin Heidegger and several more recent scholars of “thing theory“ such as Bill Brown who define a thing (as opposed to an object) as something which “asserts itself within a field of matter,” (69) that is to say a material article which invites or choreographs a particular interaction by virtue of its design which accommodates the “latent presence” of the human body (73). According to Bernstein, a “scriptive thing” not only “invites a person to dance,” but also dictates the array of possible steps that its partner might take (or refuse to take) and, in that act, “initiates or interpellates“ the reader into a specific version of the world that (74) Louis Althusser might call the “ideological state apparatus.” According to Berstein:

“The ontological distinction between things and objects is that things hail. And they do so persistently, constantly, when we are alone and in groups, when we think about them and when we do not, when we respond obediently and when we resist, when we individually or collectively accept the invitation to dance, refuse it, accept but improvise new steps, or renegotiate, deconstruct, or explode roles of leader and follower. A hail demands a bodily response: turning to face the police or turning the page of the book. By answering a hail, by entering the scripted scenario, the individual is interpellated into ideology and thus into subjecthood.” (73)

In her article, Berstein analyzes of a photograph of a light skinned woman named Helen Hernandez posing with the caricature of a black watermelon-eating caricature c. 1930 and “reads” into it a performance of race in America, noting:

“Helen Hernandez was a self-possessed woman who performed blackness and thus constructed whiteness, and who played at being a thing, a potential possession, and thus affirmed that she was not one.” (88-89)

The critical intervention of Berstein’s argument, however, is not the accuracy of her reading of this particular case study, but her assertion that these scriptive things can and should take precedence as evidence of/for performance over written personal narrative in the archive. When “read” by researchers with both performance literacy, that is to say knowledge of performance conventions, as well as performance competence, or a nuanced understanding of genre and historical context of performance, scriptive things can produce a more reliable pool of evidence than unintentially faulty or potentially deceptive memories or accounts.

In essence, by activating these thingly scripts in accepting the things’ invitation to dance, we can get at the ephemerality of performance more accurately than by seeing a representation of that performance, and in the process discover the “why” of a performance that is divorced from mere interiority, but is rather informed by the “how” of the dance itself. “By reading things’ scripts within historically located traditions of performance,” Bernstein writes, “we can make well-supported claims about normative aggregate behavior (74). … Ultimately, historians
must place our living bodies in the stream of performance tradition” (90).

WORKS CITED

 Althusser, Louis. “ Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation).” In Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays. 121-73. London: New Left Books, 1971.

Bernstein, Robin. “Dances with Things: Material Culture and the Performance of Race.” Social Text 27, no. 4 (Winter 2009): 67-94.

Brown, Bill. A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.

Heidegger, Martin. “The Thing.” In Poetry, Language, Thought. 174-82. New York: Harper & Row, 1971.

Course Blog #10: Sara on Cody; or Let there Be Lips

I found Cody’s collection of blog posts to be particularly fascinating in their cohesion as an archive--in spite of a sense of wild eclecticism in terms of genre (theatre, documentary, performance art, sit com, satire, play texts,  and the mothers, fathers, sisters, and cousins of continental philosophy), he seems to return again and again to the insufficiency of language to describe reality or, at the very least, subjectivity.

Beginning with Cody’s multi-film study of Beckett’s Not I, and continuing through the same author’s evocatively titled Texts for Nothing, I was instantly drawn to the performance of proximity engaging the large pull quote in which Beckett describes the “not silence” of an utterance, noting that:

“Somewhere, someone is uttering. Inanities, agreed, but is that enough, is that enough to make sense? … the head and its anus the mouth slobbering its shit and lapping back off the lips like in the days when it fancied itself.” (Beckett, Texts for Nothing)

There is the immediate and visceral interaction between these two posts, the attractive, if somewhat overly-animated mouth of a woman is suddenly recast as an oozing asshole, spewing forth the logorrhea that is now diarrhea, illustrating Cody’s unqualified assertions about his interest in the Kristevan abject that this mouth embodies.

(Can a mouth embody? Can it do anything but(t)?)

With this new view, Julianne Moore’s lips are certainly “Not I,” but also suddenly “of me” in a way that is deeply disturbing. Although Beckett assures his reader that these “utterances” are inane, Cody’s curation of a conversation between these object suggests a Bakhtinian notion of utterance, “an expression in a living context of exchange” that is “formed through a speaker’s relation to Otherness.”Although, in many ways, Beckett’s interventions try again and again to divorce meaning from word/utterance, the scriptive relationships between these “thingly objects”--the videos which invite an interaction with themselves and the sort of “floating” citations--seemed to choreograph my continued reading.

Cody’s staged “obsession” with glossolalia transformed all other posts chain of ongoing cultural and political moments placed in conference to destroy all notions of linguistic discourse.This framework gives a new understanding of the impossibiliy of the “talking head” to communicate the subjectivity of race in Cornered, gender in Salt Mines, or hate/defiance in the “Anti-Muslim Subway Posters” clip.With this over-arching movement, my only moment of confusion is in Cody’s discomfort with Artaud’s No More Masterpieces, for I feel that much of Artaud’s project centered on disrupting the logocentricism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, proffering his Theatre of Cruelty not as a way to take the meaning of words out of context in a way that might compromise the ethic of an author’s intent, but rather to deliver theater to a moment of pre-linguistic subjectivity that doesn’t seem terribly far off from what I sense to be Cody’s whispered yearnings. The theatre historian in me would urge him to read Theatre and its Double, focusing on Artaud’s notion of the plague and considering a new metaphor for the transmission or rather “communicabilty” of meaning that is prior to words and prior to masterpieces.

WORKS CITED

Artaud, Antonin. The Theatre and Its Double. Translated by Victor Corti. Richmond: Oneworld Classics, 2010.

Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Edited and translated by Michael Holquist. University of Texas Press. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.

Beckett, Samuel. "Not I" in The Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett. New York: Grove Press, 2010.

Beckett, Samuel. Stories & Texts for Nothing. New York: Grove Press, 1967.

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. European Perspectives. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.

Course Blog 10: Jennifer to Iris

Iris is using her blog, “Imaginary Circumstances,” as a way to chart her search for information and insight. She catalogues concepts that she’s encountered, words she’s learned, and her reactions to new art forms (opera).

Early on, Iris posted a wonderful response to Debord in which she compared his ideas regarding society and isolation to a Japanese toy flower called a Hanappa. Here, she was indirectly considering the idea of scriptivity, even before we had read about it. She discussed the way in which the Hanappa asked its owner to talk to and interact with it in order for it to “flourish.” (She also has a developing fascination with chairs as things, which I’ll discuss in a moment.)

Similarly, Iris has used this blog as a way to categorize her own responses to our readings. Each reading or performance scripts her reflection on her past experience as an actress, present experience as a student and playwright, and personal reaction as an empathetic human being. She follows this script by recording her reactions, considering them carefully, and noting any changes in her perspective. There is clearly an interaction between Iris’ conceptual development and the readings. For example, here is part of her entry on The Exonerated:

Worthen talked about using the theater to make meaning out of chaos, but I see no meaning here. I just see sadness. I feel that my job as a reader is not to make meaning out of this, but to experience the sadness, the sheer wrongness, of it all. In that way, I feel like "The Exonerated" doesn't really function as a play at all. It's another forum on tragedy.

Note that she first reflects on the ideas from the author (returning to an earlier concept), then uses her personal response to lead her into a consideration of other concepts we’ve discussed (audience responsibility), then to reevaluate her personal response, and she concludes with a considered statement integrating both.

At times, I think Iris knows that there are elements of the reading that are important to her, but she isn’t ready to fully integrate them into her worldview yet, so she copies out a quote, sometimes considers it, and sometimes lets it stand on its own merits. She probably returns to the quotations and considers them in light of the new ideas we uncover (see how she brings Worthen back in the earlier selection). Another example is how she is intrigued by Bernstein’s use of a chair to describe a person’s performance literacy and she also commented on States’ consideration of when chairs were first used on stage.   

I so enjoyed reading Iris’ blog all the way through – her thoughts on the readings, and her definitive reactions to the performances, were refreshing and enlightening. Thanks, Iris! 

Blog 10: Comments on Jenna's blog (Andrea)

One of the most important framing questions of Jenna's blog is the "role that naming plays in personal identity and character creation." She considers the consequences of naming first from a personal perspective, examining why she was given her own name and the ways in which that name has shaped (or been shaped by) her interest in Arthurian myth and Shakespeare. But this discussion of personal naming introduces a larger issue of fictional names and how they affect the identity of the character: "Why is Hamlet named Hamlet? Does he feel any more or less indebted to the ghost because he was named after it? Is there a difference in being named Ophelia rather than Gertrude?" (Hello, my name is...) In another post, she ponders one of the great Shakespearean boating dilemmas of our time: Why would anyone get in a rowboat named Ophelia? This odd photo leads to a discussion of the ways these characters' names are used, and sometimes ignored.

In her post, Election Day, Jenna recalls a visit to the Tower of London and describes the ways in which that space was used to evoke a specific response in the visitor. This involved the use of several different scriptive things, such as a voting booth that was lit so as to favor one of the choices, and an eerie soundtrack of ghostly children's voices that encourages the visitor to think of that specific room in the Tower as the site of a murder. Her response to these stimuli was also reminiscent of Bernstein's transgressive performer--feeling manipulated, she deliberately voted against the highlighted choice. The blog itself is also scripted partly by the plays of Shakespeare. Quotations appear in multiple posts, and many of Jenna's reflections are inspired by or supported by her knowledge of Shakespeare. The plays seem to function for her as scriptive things, both in their physical form as books and as remembered performances, inviting interaction and engagement and shaping her discussions.

As a viewer of the blog, the images in particular invite performance. They seem to be Jenna's own pictures rather than photos taken from elsewhere online, which significantly changes my reaction to the posts. Because the pictures are her own and they are accompanied by fairly detailed and personal descriptions of where and when they were taken, they invite me to see beyond their frame and place myself in the room where the voting booth stands, or the harbor in Stratford where the Ophelia boat floats. The layout and appearance of the blog were simple and appealing, and the blue color and simple design of the background encouraged me to see it as personal and accessible, which it was. I've enjoyed reading a little about Jenna's love of Shakespeare, and I hope to read the continued chronicle of her trip to Stratford, Ontario, which she promises. I especially hope to see and hear more about her interest in Arthurian legend, as it is one that we share.

Blog 10, Comments for Ming (from Derek)

Ming, I enjoyed reading through your blog entries. I found many of them to be really rich with generative possibilities. For some reason, I really liked the quote clarifying the meaning of illusion: “the word illusion does not mean that it does not exist; rather, an illusion is not what is seems”. While that quote does not necessarily set the tone for the blog, it does potentially link into some of the themes you explore therein.

In the beginning entries, Ming, you seem to be wondering about the performance of gender, especially the differences between performing gender in safe versus unsafe spaces, which I found really intriguing. You write about the definition of safe space as one that can encompass “ruptura” (Freire), which I thought was interesting and wanted to read more about. You then mentioned the performance of the First Lady and wives (in general) as occasional athletes, although I wondered what your thoughts were on this. In the two amusing posts on Tina Fey’s observations about acting (one on observing Alec Baldwin and one on Amy Poehler) you display a continued interest in the difference between performing the Self rather than performing what others want you to. These two Fey posts seem to connect to the Theory of Mind post, but you didn’t really comment much on these three posts, and as I read them I was curious to know why these quotes grabbed you; I wanted to read your thoughts and reactions to the quotes. The post about avatars seemed to continue your earlier theme of performing the Self on stage, but I didn’t understand the references to avatars, which ultimately went unexplained (for me). The post on Kaling seems to have connections with both your interest in performance of gender as well as control over self-performance, but you were focusing on criticizing the Vulture article for its lack of depth and for what you seemed to feel was its attempt to frame the female reader in a gendered role. I thought maybe the Vulture article and the Onion piece were communicating in a more complicated way that I wish you had explored further, and maybe could connect to Kaling’s desire to portray herself as someone in the vein of Tina Fey, and therefore go on to explore what Tina Fey might represent, since she seems to be one of the New Girls that everyone is talking about these days (like you, I’ve been out of the country and out of the loop for many years, so I don’t really know what to make of all these folks). You post On Memorials connected back to Performing Citizenship through the theme of performing patriotism and citizenship, but complicating it through protest; again, I wanted to read more about how these intersect for you. I am personally very interested in this area, so perhaps that’s why I wished to read your thoughts and felt disappointed when you didn’t share them. In your post on Mockingbird, I wondered whether you saw any connection between Tina Fey’s comments about “Real Acting” and your impression of Rodden and Macy’s soulfulness.

As a reader, I was also invited to interact with the blog by the elements you chose to include within it. Elements of the blog that stood out to me as scriptive are the photos of women laughing with salad, or just laughing in groups, mouths open; the image of the pipe “this is not a pipe”; and the hyperlinks to the articles. In terms of performances that these objects entail, I felt like the photos asked me to imagine what the women were laughing at. The image of the pipe and its caption demanded that I pause and try to make sense of the statement. The links to the articles invited me to click and follow. I had to engage with the images in order to fully appreciate the text of the post; likewise with some of the links, some of which I had to follow in order to understand what was being written in the post. I also chose to scroll through the blog in chronological order, which is the reverse of how the blog presents itself to the viewer. In this way perhaps I was resisting the scriptive nature of the blog itself…just a little bit.

Ultimately, this tumblr/blog has a lot of really interesting material in it, and it seems like a good way to keep track of what catches your eye—you seem to be using it to maintain a kind of annotated bibliography of things that matter or interest you, things that could be generative, or things that prompt reflection. I enjoyed scrolling through it, and I will return to view more as the course continues.