brady – Digital Whitman

Closest Thing to Pfaff’s?

brady — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 15:39:17 +0000

A New York Times review of a joint in Brooklyn called Henry Public thinks so.

Hubba Hubba

brady — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 18:52:29 +0000

For vinyl fans, I just found this self-consciously erotic record on eBay.

Ah, the ’70s. The eBay seller’s come-on is, “Walt Whitman’s Sex Writings – SEALED!”

You can have a listen here at the Mickle Street Review.

Starting bid only 12.00. Any takers?

Whitman and Van Gogh

brady — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 22:36:40 +0000

On the radio the other day I learned about this huge cache of Vincent Van Gogh’s letters that’s been made available (and searchable) on the Internet.

Immediately searching for Whitman, of course, I came to this passage from an 1888 letter Van Gogh wrote to this sister:

Have you read Whitman’s American poems yet? Theo should have them, and I really urge you to read them, first because they’re really beautiful, and also, English people are talking about them a lot at the moment. He sees in the future, and even in the present, a world of health, of generous, frank carnal love — of friendship — of work, with the great starry firmament, something, in short, that one could only call God and eternity, put back in place above this world. They make you smile at first, they’re so candid, and then they make you think, for the same reason. The prayer of Christopher Columbus is very beautiful.

For an article exploring connections between the two artists, see “WHITMAN AND VAN GOGH: STARRY NIGHTS AND OTHER SIMILARITIES.”

test

brady — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 23:18:16 +0000

memoranda intro

Whitman Leaving

brady — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 18:38:07 +0000

One sad thing I notice in the Longaker is how different Whitman’s view of his own body has become, now that it’s shutting down. Here was the speaker of “Song” in 1855:

The smoke of my own breath,

Echos, ripples, and buzzed whispers . . . . loveroot, silkthread, crotch and vine,

My respiration and inspiration . . . . the beating of my heart . . . . the passing of blood
and air through my lungs,

The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and darkcolored sea-
rocks, and of hay in the barn,

The sound of the belched words of my voice . . . . words loosed to the eddies of
the wind,

A few light kisses . . . . a few embraces . . . . a reaching around of arms,

The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs wag,

The delight alone or in the rush of the streets, or along the fields and hillsides,

The feeling of health . . . . the full-noon trill . . . . the song of me rising from bed
and meeting the sun.

He loves his body, but he’s just barely contained in it; from the way he talks, we’d think ourselves just as likely find him in a ray of sunlight or a duckling. So different from his awful physiological imprisonment in 1891:

My great corpus is like an old wooden log . . . One favorable item at 10, a bowel movement (the first in ten days) . . .

And so forth. He had been accused of such obscene physicality earlier on–but it’s only now that his writing really starts attending to the day-to-day life of his body, now that that body becomes his whole, urgent environment.

Whitman and Hughes

brady — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 18:32:40 +0000

In a few weeks, we’ll be focusing on Whitman’s literary legacy. With that in mind, I couldn’t help being struck by this passage of the interview we read for today, in which he responds to the question “What will be the character of the American literature when it does form?”:

It will be something entirely new, entirely different. As we are a new nation with almost a new geography, and a new spirit, the expression of them will have to be new. In form, in combination we shall take the same old font of type, but what we set up will never have been set up before. It will be the same old font that Homer and Shakespeare used, but our use will be new. (15)

This understanding of the essential connection between literature and the culture that gives birth to it immediately brings to mind “Theme for English B,” a famous poem written, roughly seventy years later, by Langston Hughes. As you probably remember, most of the poem is a response to a professor’s facile assignment, “Go home and write / a page tonight. / And let that page come out of you— / Then, it will be true.” An excerpt:

So will my page be colored that I write?
Being me, it will not be white.
But it will be
a part of you, instructor.
You are white—
yet a part of me, as I am a part of you.
That’s American.

The surface of Hughes’s poem is personal–a white English prof at a mostly-white Ivy-League school is naive if he thinks self-portraiture is a simple subject for a black student. But Whitman’s words encourage us also to take the poem as an analogy for literature itself, which will always be shaped by the social and political circumstances of the particular group that makes it.

When we speak of what makes up African-American literature, we may be referring partly to “the same old font of type”–the same basic English language–out of which our mainstream writers have constructed their works, but in order to have cultural authenticity it will have to be put to a use that mainstream readers may at first find utterly foreign. That, too, is American.

In Advance of Our DC Trip . . .

brady — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 16:35:50 +0000

Kim Roberts, who’ll be our guide on Saturday (http://www.kimroberts.org, http://www.beltwaypoetry.com) has sent these for us: a map of our tour and an image of the haversack Whitman took on his rounds to the hospitals.

Map by Emery Pajer.

We will be seeing work places 8 through 11 on our walking tour, and boarding house location 7.

Gods and Generals

brady — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 22:24:09 +0000

In case you haven’t yet taken a look at this, here’s a nine-minute segment that follows the Union soldiers running up to Marye’s Heights and the Confederates firing down on them from behind the stone wall.

The Rev Interprets Chatham Railing

brady — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 14:22:41 +0000

Tim O’Sullivan’s Gettysburg Photos

brady — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 19:28:41 +0000

Last week I mentioned these. The top one called “Harvest of Death” (!) is supposed to be a group of dead Confederate soldiers; the one with trees in the background Northerners. But if you look closely at the detail (flipped & zoomed) in the third frame, you realize it’s really the same group of soldiers (see esp. the one with crossed legs and a rock behind his head).

O’Sullivan worked with Matthew Brady’s protege Alexander Gardner, whose name also appears on the photos.

O’Sullivan Gettysburg Photos.ppt

What I Don’t Know About Whitman . . .

brady — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 00:48:27 +0000

. . . could fill books. But I’m a little embarrassed to say, one nagging curiosity about his personal life I have is: all the adhesiveness and historical context aside, did he really get as close to other men as he seems to have, and never end up experiencing physical consummation with any of them? I guess that’s voyeuristic and petty, but I can’t get around it.

And You Thought the 1855 Self-Reviews Were Brazen

brady — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 21:59:49 +0000

Remember the passage in Whitman’s anonymous self-review “Walt Whitman, a Brooklyn Boy” that goes “Of pure American breed, of reckless health, his body perfect, free from taint top to toe, free forever from headache and dyspepsia, full-blooded, six feet high, a good feeder . . .”?

Check out this image of page 141 in the 1860 Leaves of Grass, starting at line 12 (he has apparently lost 5 pounds in the interim):

Facsimile of Emerson’s Letter

brady — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 21:35:13 +0000

Also at the LOC is Emerson’s original letter, photos of which are available here. Hope they have it out for us in October! (Lots of other important stuff also shown on this page.)

Whitman Notebooks at the Library of Congress

brady — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 21:06:24 +0000

On October 24 we may be seeing some of the Harned Collection, pdf images of which are available at this site.

The notebooks are especially cool because they record some of the first known writing in Whitman’s mature poetic style:

Another University’s Annotated Whitman

brady — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 20:40:38 +0000

We might have a look at this VCU project (sorry for the weird url–just scroll to the top) to get inspired or to get ideas of what we don’t want to do with our annotations.

Whitman’s Self-Reviews

brady — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 18:11:10 +0000

Once again, these articles just astound me. Not only is he brazen enough to lavish praise on his own book–he does this in a style that makes it obvious that he’s the author, sometimes lifting lines from his own Preface.

The Charvat reading for this week teaches us that it wasn’t so rare for an author or publishing house to self-review in the 1850s. We might say, too, that Whitman isn’t just telling us TO read Leaves of Grass but HOW to read it–in his own eyes, maybe, the reviews are actually educational and not just plugs.

Even beyond that, though, the question I keep coming back to is, why is it so important for the writer who has cast himself in the role of “America’s Poet” to keep emphasizing his own body? Let me leave with this passage from “Walt Whitman, a Brooklyn Boy”:

Of pure American breed, of reckless health, his body perfect, free from taint top to toe, free forever from headache and dyspepsia, full-blooded, six feet high, a good feeder, never once using medicine, drinking water only—a swimmer in the river or bay or by the seashore—of straight attitude and slow movement of foot—an indescribable style evincing indifference and disdain—ample limbed, weight one hundred and eighty-five pounds, age thirty-six years (1855)—never dressed in black, always dressed freely and clean in strong clothes, neck open, shirt-collar flat and broad, countenance of swarthy, transparent red, beard short and well mottled with white hair like hay after it has been mowed in the field . . .

“Song of Myself” Openings

brady — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 19:07:41 +0000

The first page of the poem, from all the major US editions of Leaves of Grass.\"Song\" slideshow

The Trippy 1855 Preface

brady — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 14:37:10 +0000

At first I was annoyed that I had to get a new copy of Whitman’s poetry and prose, but it’s been kind of cool to read through the preface without having to see my old notes. I know it gets long-winded sometimes (”No one ever wished it longer,” as Dr. Johnson said of Paradise Lost), but some lines really jump out:

The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature (5). ["The Americans of all nations"??? What gall!]

What is marvellous? what is unlikely? what is impossible or baseless or vague? after you have once just opened the space of a peachpit . . . (10).

The sea is not surer of the shore or the shore of the sea than [the poet] is of the fruition of his love and of all perfection and beauty (12).

The attitude of great poets is to cheer up slaves and horrify despots. The turn of their necks, the sound of their feet, the motions of their wrists, are full of hazard to the one and hope to the other (17).

As the attributes of the poets of the kosmos concentre in the real body and soul and in the pleasure of things they possess the superiority of genuineness over all fiction and romance (18). [Wait--did you just say "the pleasure of things"??? What's THAT all about?]

Radio Whitman

brady — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 15:54:37 +0000

The interview Mara and I did for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities radio show With Good Reason has been broadcast and is now available at http://www.withgoodreasonradio.org/ . It’s a fairly general overview, largely about Whitman’s life during the Civil War, and clocks in at a friendly 16 minutes. On its heels is an interesting piece by Jerome McGann on E.A. Poe.

Selected Civil War Era Maps of Fredericksburg

brady — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 15:52:44 +0000

Our town around the time Whitman came here to look for his brother George, in late 1862.

“Walt Whitman’s Niece”

brady — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 14:51:19 +0000

From Billy Bragg and Wilco’s Mermaid Avenue, an album of Woody Guthrie lyrics they set to music. I’ve been listening to the song for years but never realized until last week in Camden that Whitman’s last surviving direct descendant was, in fact, some kind of niece.

PBS Documentary: Whitman and the Civil War

brady — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 19:45:31 +0000

nbsp;http://media.pbs.org/asxgen/general/wind…

“The Civil War” (8:20)

http://media.pbs.org/asxgen/general/wind…

“Drum-Taps” (8:40)

Two episodes from a pretty cool series (online and free–the whole thing is at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/whitman/pro…) featuring our own Karen Karbiener as well as other scholars and writers including Ed Folsom, Ken Price, Alan Garganus, and Yusef Komunyakaa.

Draft Syllabus

brady — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 16:45:04 +0000

“Digital Whitman” – draft syllabus

Description: This seminar is a unique opportunity to immerse yourself in the work of one of America’s most brilliant poets and in a collaborative project with students from three other universities. Our class, running simultaneously with others in NYC, Brooklyn, and Camden, will analyze Walt Whitman’s poetic and prose work deeply, focusing most specifically on the writings related to the geographic space in which we study—in our case, Fredericksburg and Washington, DC, where Whitman spent time in the Civil War years. The class, which will include visitation to appropriate local sites and archives (outside of the evening class hours), will situate Whitman historically, geographically, culturally, biographically–AND digitally. In collaboration with the partner classes of other universities, we will build a rich digital network of our thoughts, discoveries, and (critical, informative, interrogative, creative, reflective) writing. Training in all technologies will be provided and no specific prior technological experience is necessary—just a willingness to travel with Whitman on one more open road: that of distributed, collective learning.

Text: Walt Whitman: Complete Poetry and Collected Prose (Library of America).

Secondary (recommended?), to be linked to or scanned for blog: Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “The Poet.” Excerpts from de Tocqueville (?). Excerpt from William Charvat’s The Profession of Authorship in America. Excerpts from David S. Reynolds’s Walt Whitman’s America. Excerpts from The Better Angel (Roy Morris, Jr.). Excerpts from Betsy Erkkila’s The Political Whitman. Excerpts from one or two Civil War history books. Selection of Whitman’s contemporaries’ poems/prose on the Civil War.

On reserve: Whitman biographies (Allen, Kaplan, Erkkila, Reynolds), Civil War histories.

Hospital Days: Reminiscence of a Civil War Nurse (Jane Stuart Woolsey)

Women at the Front: Hospital Workers in Civil War America (Jane E. Schultz) Also on netlibrary.

Links:

Margaret Fuller’s “American Literature”

http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/transcendentalism/authors/fuller/fulleramlit.html

Melville’s “Hawthorne and His Mosses”

http://www.eldritchpress.org/nh/hahm.html

Ted Genoways’s “The Disorder of Drum-Taps”

http://www.uiowa.edu/~wwqr/genoways_fall2007_winter2007.pdf

Ted Genoways, “Memoranda of a year (1863)”: Whitman in Washington, D.C.
http://micklestreet.rutgers.edu/archives/Issue%201718/pages/Scholarship/Genoways.htm

E-text of Memoranda During the War

http://www.premierathome.com/library/Biography/Memoranda%20During%20the%20War.txt

“Civil War Nurses: ‘The Angels of the Battlefield’”

http://www.civilwarhome.com/civilwarnurses.htm

Louisa May Alcott’s Hospital Sketches (see esp. Chapter III)

http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/alcott/sketches/sketches.html

Clara Barton’s poem “The Women Who Went to the Field”

http://www.nps.gov/history/Nr/twhp/wwwlps/lessons/27barton/27facts3.htm

Part 1 of the Battle of Fredericksburg from the movie Gods and Generals:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pw-iF8d9CtQ&feature=related (See “Related Videos” sidebar for following five segments. “Part 3: The Irish Brigade” features the attack on Marye’s Heights.)

Assignments and Grading

Readings

Blogging: One blog post per week, structured on focused short writing task/question (post two days before class) and a weekly minimum of three responses to others’ posts, at least one of these being on a post from another campus (self-report in class?).

Frontispiece: Take and post a picture of yourself in clothes and pose that you consider an apt introduction of yourself to the world and the LFW community. Discuss week one and due week two. Accompany by 6-10 lines of 1855 “Song” that you most identify with. Possibly chart on google map. Personal, familiar contact with WW.

Image gloss: Choose any image in the 1855 “Song” and do annotation or context or gloss (e.g., The Alamo) that includes image, audio, or video. (Artifact more closely related to Camden and with deeper research later–see below.) **** See this as starter project for shared annotation project. Focus on unfamiliar, historical vs. earlier personal assignment. Quicker gloss than more polished and rich discussion of material objects.*** What is its significance or what does it add to our knowledge base?

Cultural contexts/artifacts assignment from March planning post by Matt– choose appropriately for your geographic space. May include historical sense of places WW references. Include image. Use tag digitalmuseum to aggregate into space that will draw across campuses. List generated by instructors. Probably individual student projects. Stagger digital museum artifacts assignment to point that makes sense to individual courses.

Oral reports on historical context readings, possibly handled in teams that will also blog/summarize. (Where do we put these? Up front for those things that fertilize the ground for WW.)

Group annotations of assigned sections. Randomly reviewed by peers/teachers each week to chart progress.

Final project (“My Walt Whitman” research paper or digital equivalent. Possibilities include: video, mp3 reading, online museum entry, essay, deep annotation or scholarly edition, wikipedia entry, cinepoems or mashups like documentary on WW and Camden——> projects that are designed to educate wider public.)

Tentative Course Schedule:

Tuesday, Aug. 25: Introductions. Overview of course and syllabus. Why is Whitman such a big deal? First Assignment (read 1855 “Song of Myself”).

Tuesday, Sept. 1: Meet in computer lab for hands-on intro to Whitman Archive and blog. Discuss video hardware. (Have read for today: 1855 “Song of Myself.” Assignment for next Tuesday: blog on “My Fredericksburg” for students on other campuses. Video or audio blog on a short (10-20 line) passage of “Song of Myself” that you identify with—a reading of the passage accompanied by a reflection—perhaps along the lines of one of the videos at http://www.favoritepoem.org/videos.html. Post these by Sunday?) What relationship does Whitman’s poetry construct with the reader? How is your experience of reading him different from your experience of reading other poets?

Tuesday, Sept. 8: (Discuss blog entries?) Life for American authors in the mid-nineteenth century. Emerson. (Read for this class: Charvat excerpt, Reynolds excerpt on American authorship, “The Poet,” Melville’s “Hawthorne and His Mosses” (?), 1855 Preface, excerpts on “gymnastic reading” from Specimen Days.) (For contemporary equivalent, check out article on pirated e-books: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/12/technology/internet/12digital.html?_r=1&hp ). What did the ideas of American literature and reading represent for Whitman, and how did they enter his own writing? What did he see his poetry doing for America?

Tuesday, Sept. 15: Discussion of biographical criticism. (What is it an alternative to? What are its strengths and possible pitfalls? What kinds of it exist? How is it ideally practiced? How can it enrich our reading? How much in common does the speaker of LG have with Whitman the man?) Biographical overview of Whitman (family, schooling, journalism, early writing, phrenology, belief in equality of body and soul, mystery of mature style). (Read: More Reynolds (on cylinder press, penny press, Whitman as newspaper editor), biographical material on Archive site, “A Song for Occupations.”) Who is the speaker of Leaves of Grass?

Tuesday, Sept. 22: Continue overview. Discuss free verse, contemporary reviews, self-promotion (compare paragraph 4 of Whitman’s “Walt Whitman, a Brooklyn Boy” with section 33 of “Chants Democratic” in the 1860 LG), charges of indecency, gender, editions of LG, sexuality (esp. as synecdoche for national union and in context of what Reynolds calls “the cult of romantic friendship” [391]), slow rise to canonical status; legacy (esp. Carl Sandburg, Hart Crane, Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, international influence). (Read: Reynolds 391-407, “I Sing the Body Electric,” “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” selections from “Calamus”—“I Hear It Was Charged Against Me”) How did Whitman’s vision of comradeship intersect with his dreams of national union?

Tuesday, Sept. 29: Discuss the Civil War (causes, technology and, implications of improved weaponry, hospitals, mid-nineteenth-century medicine . . .). Whitman in Fredericksburg and DC. (Read The Better Angel Ch. 2, “A Sight in Camp” and Reynolds 410-21; Erkkila Ch. 8 (?); “Turn O Libertad,” “Poems of Joy,” “1861,” Drum-Taps,” “Beat! Beat! Drums!” plus some Civil War history.) (Whitman’s vision of military comradeship—esp. between older and younger—may have been informed by his reading of Plato: http://www.uiowa.edu/~wwqr/murray_note_Spring%2008_69554.pdf ) How does Whitman strive to reconcile North and South in his poems? How—if at all—might we reconcile his warmongering with his transcendent love?

Saturday, Oct. 3 - Tours of Fredericksburg Battlefield and Chatham Manor (Take notes on this trip to work into 10/24 blog assignment.)

Tuesday, Oct. 6: Read and be ready to compare “Song of Myself”—in various editions (esp. 1855, 1867, 1891-92). Read Archive description of the 1867 edition (http://www.whitmanarchive.org/criticism/current/encyclopedia/entry_24.html). What makes this Leaves of Grass different from the others? What forces resulted in this? How does it reflect the social/political climate in which it was produced? (Meet in computer room to look at facsimile images?) How does the 1867 edition show—in form or in content—the influence of Whitman’s Civil War experiences?

Tuesday, Oct. 13 (Fall Break)

Tuesday, Oct. 20: Lincoln. Washington, DC. What made Drum-Taps different from conventional war poetry? Whitman himself asked in a poem, “Must I change my triumphant songs?” Taking into account the difference between his Civil War poems and his earlier work, what answer do you find? Do you agree with one 1882 reviewer of Memoranda that “His kindliness of heart and broad humanity are manifested on every page, and one cannot but regret that he did not have the strength, or the inclination, or both, to make a continuous narration of it, instead of the sketchy little notes with which he has furnished us”? (http://www.uiowa.edu/~wwqr/reviews_Summer_Fall%202007.pdf ). (Read: Reynolds 421-47, The Better Angel Ch. 3, “The Great Army of the Sick”; Erkkila Ch. 9 (?); “As I Lay with My Head in Your Lap, Camerado,” “Hush’d Be the Camps Today,” “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” “O Captain, My Captain,” other selections from Drum-Taps, selections from Memoranda (Specimen Days), selections of Civil War poems by Whitman’s contemporaries.) How did Whitman’s interactions with wounded soldiers resemble the relationship he wanted to create with readers of his poetry? (Could we think of one as a metaphor for the other?) How did these, in turn, tie in with his dreams for the U.S. as a nation?

Saturday, Oct. 24 – Field Trip to Washington, DC (Blog reflections on field trips to Fredericksburg Battlefield, Chatham Manor, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. What passages from/aspects of Whitman’s Civil War poetry or prose have been enriched by your visits to these places?)

Tuesday, Oct. 27: Discuss trip. Discuss other campuses’ sense of place and sense of Whitman, in comparison with ours. You might consider in particular his treatments of the themes of nationhood, democracy, literature, the body, and death. (Read: blogs. Meet in computer room again?)

Tuesday, Nov. 3: Discuss final projects. Brainstorm, individually and in small groups. (Possible components: Creative writing—Whitman imitation. Hyperlink selection from 1867 “Song of Myself,” Drum-Taps, or Memoranda. Reflection paper. Class presentation.) How do Whitman’s representations of war answer the challenges he himself sets forth in “The Real War Will Never Get in the Books” and elsewhere?

Tuesday, Nov. 10: Present descriptions and drafts of final projects.

Tuesday, Nov. 17: Present descriptions and drafts of final projects.

Tuesday, Nov. 24: Present descriptions and drafts of final projects.

Tuesday, Dec. 1: Post-mortem.