Serendipities

I couldn’t believe my eyes when I read our librarian’s e-mail message yesterday morning: Dutch universities have acquired Early English Books Online! I knew there was talk of such an initiative, but I never thought it would happen this quickly.

I’m in seventh heaven!

The face I see in the dream is simultaneously that of my friend R. and that of my uncle. It is like one of the composite photographs that Galton made when, studying family resemblances, he photographed a number of faces on the same plate.
(Sigmund Freud, Interpreting Dreams, translated by J. A. Underwood, 152)

The way in which Freud here compares the overlapping faces of his dream to Galton’s composite photography fascinated me. Freud’s general metaphor for the way the psyche functions is the mystic writing pad. Here, his thinking on dreams is cast in terms of another medium, that of photography.

Francis Galton (1822-1911) was a Victorian polymath who contributed to the fields of geography, meteorology, anthropometry, biology, statistics, criminology, heredity, psychology and education [1]. He took his half-cousin Charles Darwin’s ideas in the uncanny direction of eugenics, and experimented with composite photographs. In the image below, for example, the middle right photos are composite photos of criminal types, in which Galton took photos of criminals on the same plate, with very short exposure times. The result is a picture from which one might recognize the characteristics of “2 of the many criminal types.”

Interestingly, the metaphor works both ways, since Galton was also one of the first to conduct research into visual, or photographic memory. He asked people, for example, to describe the breakfast they had this morning, conjuring a picture of the table in their mind’s eye, and measured the vividness of their visual recollections. A journal in Muse reprints one of Galton’s articles on memory, in which he describes how he walks through a street and tries to remember the buildings he passes. The article speaks of “pictures” but does not use any more specific metaphors of photography. Instead, Galton thinks of memory in terms of footsteps, familiar ways — reminiscent of the “common place” in classical thinking on memory:

I conclude from the proved number of faint and barely conscious thoughts, and from the proved iteration of them, that the mind is perpetually traveling over familiar ways without our memory retaining any impression of its excursions. Its footsteps are so light and fleeting that it is only by such experiments as I have described that we can learn anything about them. It is apparently always engaged in mumbling over its old stores, and if any one of these is wholly neglected for a while, it is apt to be forgotten, perhaps irrecoverably. Francis Galton, “Inquiries into Human Faculty” (1879) reprinted in American Imago [Muse] 61:3 (2004): 368-69.

To widen the circle even further, an 1890 Almanac apparently recommended this same chapter by Galton to photographers “for it will show them how it is possible to cultivate the faculty of visual memory, by the aid of which they may at any time call up before their mental vision scenes they have seen [...] before they arrange and photograph them.”

Do similar connections between new media and thinking on the workings of memory exist in early modern culture? In an earlier post, I mentioned Gareth Sullivan’s book on memory and forgetting in renaissance drama, in which he views memory as an historically specific phenomenon. Elizabeth Eisenstein in The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe writes on the relation between the invention of print and memory; she reproduces an image of visual memory that I’ve carried around in my mind’s eye for some time (see below). I’ve ordered Douwe Draaisma’s Metaphors of Memory (Cambridge UP, 2000), and am looking forward to exploring the subject further. Suggestions for further reading (esp. early modern memory/general introductions on history of memory) much appreciated!

See also:

• John Sutton’s extensive bibliography on memory
• Memory Studies Project
• Review of Douwe Draaisma’s Metaphors of Memory at Keeper of the Snails, with a shortlist of metaphors used from Plato to the twentieth century
• After Images: Photography, Archaeology, and Psychoanalysis and the Tradition of Bildung
• Maggie Humm Memory, Photography, and Modernism: The “dead bodies and ruined houses” of Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas

As seen on Culture Cat — a great idea for a meme. My workspace at home is at one end of the living room. I don’t have a separate room to work in, although I would like to, because usually a lot more books and paper lie around on and under the table, which rather spoils the serenity of the window above.

Statistically, there should be a small white cat positioned to the left of my laptop — where warm air comes out of a ventilation hole — or just in front of it, preferably with her head on my arm so that I can hardly type.

The cup-with-Penguin-cover-of-Agatha-Christie’s-The-Body-in-the-Library usually contains strong espresso with hot frothy milk — can’t work without it.

I hope this meme catches on, I’d love to see where you work!

My PhD thesis has been officially approved by the committee! This is a big moment in the Dutch PhD system — I submitted the manuscript to a committee of 5 professors, who decided that my Wild Justice: The Dynamics of Gender and Revenge in Early Modern English Drama is ready to be publicly defended on the 22nd of June.

That means that in five months’ time, I will be standing in this room. Although the picture is not very clear (here’s a 3D-view of the room), there’s three different kinds of lookers-on to be distinghuished. Not only will the dozens of past professors’ portraits on the walls be scrutinizing my performance. More importantly, I will be answering questions from a corona of professors who will be monitoring me from the dais at the top end of the room. The photo is taken from the perspective of the friends, family, and colleagues who will hopefully fill the rest of the room.

See the tiny person standing up on the left hand side of the picture? That would be me, on the 22nd of June. Fortunately, I get to take two friends, my paranymphs Bregtje and Inge, who are allowed to sit right behind me, and may hand me a new pen if mine gives up on me, could quickly look up a page in my thesis is a member of the corona refers to it in a question — or catch me if I faint.

The best part of a Dutch ceremony is the sound of the tinkling bells on the staff of the beadle who enters after 45 minutes to tell you that time’s up: “hora est”!

I saw Freud’s couch this weekend.

One of the highlights of our short break in London was the Freud Museum on 20 Maresfield Gardens, where Freud spent the final year of his life. Emerging from the underground at Finchley Road unto very busy traffic and a KFC, once we had climbed the hill up to Maresfield Gardens we found ourselves surrounded by bird song, stately redbrick homes and nicely kept gardens. The garden, apparently, was one of the reasons why Freud enjoyed the house: according to Anna Freud’s quaint comments to the film fragments shown in the back bedroom on the first floor of the house, her father loved to smell the flowers. My favorite scene was that of a meeting between Freud’s and Marie Bonaparte’s dogs, with Anna Freud’s detailed analysis of the two chow chows’ respective personalities.

Freud’s study on the ground floor remains as he left it, with his desk, library, the couch and the green cup chair he sat in as he listened to his patients. The museum also houses modern art inspired by Freud’s work — it was a bit unsettling to find a colony of glass flamingos nestling among his collection of oriental and classical statues.

Among my acquisitions from London’s alluring bookshops are a new book by Susan Gubar, Rooms of Our Own in which she ruminates on the women’s movement as well as on the state of the humanities today. Her imitation of Virginia Woolf’s style took me some getting used to, but I am enjoying her personal stories on academic life. In the same London Review of Books shop I also bought From Script to Stage in Early Modern England, which contains the text that I was still looking to find for my course on Bodies and Selves: an article on the body of the actor. “E/loco/com/motion” by Bruce Smith analyses the elements of space, bodies, sound and time in early modern performance, with attention to the ways in which the actor’s body interacts with the bodies of the audience. Together with a couple of useful books on modernism and Freud’s Interpreting Dreams (as the new Penguin edition translates Die Traumdeutung), they nearly cost us our flight home, since the security men at Stansted are apparently very strict on their one-bag-of-hand luggage-per-passenger policy.

Just as I am starting preparations for my course on the body in early modern culture, comes this fantastic call for papers from Brett D. Hirsh:

EMBODYING SHAKESPEARE
Australian and New Zealand Shakespeare Association Conference
7-10 February 2008
University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand

Confirmed Speakers:
Bruce Smith, University of Southern California
Gail Kern Paster, Folger Shakespeare Library
Dympna Callaghan, Syracuse University

CALL FOR PAPERS AND PANEL SESSIONS

Papers are invited on any subject related to the central theme of “Embodying Shakespeare.” Possible topics might include, but are not limited to: Shakespeare and histories and theories of the body, representations of the body, the actor’s body, cultural appropriations, Shakespeare and the senses, phenomenology, embodiment and gender.

For more information, see: http://conference.anzsa.org

Over Christmas, I discovered the music of Yaron Herman. I love to listen to Keith Jarrett, and Yaron Herman’s style resembles his. Herman, born in Tel-Aviv, now living in Paris, is 25 years old — and amazingly didn’t start studying the piano until he was 16. Variations is his first solo release.

You can listen to his variation on Gabriel Fauré’s “Libera Me” on his website. The CD is available via iTunes.