Tag: writing for a general audience

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The Work of Art in the Age of Animal Crossing

I’m really into art crime: I have informed, well-considered, capital-T Thoughts about the Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum heist and Hannah Arendt’s report on books and silver that the Nazis appropriated before deporting their rightful owners and other things as well. It’s interesting in all the parts of my brain, but with an edge. In another lifetime, if I hadn’t been an academic, and if my plan B weren’t driving a snowplow for the city and curating the Department of Sanitation’s in-house museum during the months when it’s not snowing, then I think I might have liked to join the FBI’s art crime squad. Highbrow, interesting, multi-sensory, but with an edge and a goal. I have an assignment for my honors students where I ask them to plan a heist in the Islamic Art galleries at the Met. It’s a way to get them to start asking why? without me having to be pedantic about it: an edge and a goal.

Like a lot of other people, I fell into the Zeitgeist and played Animal Crossing every day for over a year at the start of the pandemic. Totally lowbrow. I had to get over my primal fear of raccoons, as they are the characters who are in charge of the construction company that your character works for in the game, building up an island village inhabited by you and a bunch of animal non-player characters. I am so afraid of raccoons that I was perfectly prepared not to play a game features even cute cartoon ones. It helped when someone explained to me that these overlords are really tanooki, a kind of Japanese dog known for their enormous testicles and otherwise looking like long, skinny raccoons. They are dogs but they are called raccoons in the English version of the game, although the Japanese name is why it’s slightly funny that the chief raccoon-dog is called Tom Nook. Tom-Nook-i. Tanooki. Get it? So, there’s Tom Nook and a very enthusiastic Shi-Tzu named Isabelle who makes daily announcements for the residents and is responsible for putting up the Christmas lights all over your island and definitely got turned into a Bernie Sanders meme after Joe Biden’s inauguration  — this is ridiculous. I know. But it’s a game that can be played online and you can “visit” other players’ islands and I needed a way to stay connected to friends during the lockdown.

There’s also a pirate, a fox named Redd, who pilots a smog-belching fishing trawler called the Jolly Redd from which he overcharges for home goods and — and I promise I’m coming to the point — sells works of art priced out in the local currency. Some of the paintings and statues are real and some of them are faked. So Redd might be selling Vermeer’s “Girl with the Pearl Earring” as Vermeer painted it, or he might be selling a similar canvas but the girl’s earring is star-shaped instead of round. It’s up to you to discern the reals from the fakes, buy the reals, and then donate them to the art and natural history museum that’s directed by an owl who loves fossils but is disgusted by bugs, whose sister is into astrology, and who is friends with the pigeon who runs the museum café. There are all kinds of player guides for the game online, including some about the art. It always feels a little like cheating to go straight there than to try to figure out myself what the painting is, then go to the real museum’s web site where the real painting really is, and see if I can spot the differences myself. I absolutely go straight to the player’s guides so I can buy the art and keep playing. What I don’t do is donate my purchases to the museum. Instead, I play as a criminal art dealer who matches Redd in shadiness.My in-game basement is full of Vermeers, Breughels, Seargents, Da Vincis (the fake “Vitruvian Man” has a coffee ring on it, which I find charming), Turners, as well as classical sculpture in monochrome and Japanese block-prints. The whole, full-sized “Las Meninas” is hanging in my in-game kitchen, Velázquez next to Pissarro and Cezanne, next to my digital stove and fridge and table.

I’ve been playing this game (less so now, but I was) and thinking about how it changes the ways we look at art, or at least how those of us who were playing it obsessively during the pandemic look at art. What does it mean to scrutinize the shade of purple of a tree not because the purple itself is interesting but because if it’s redder than it should be, then the work is a fake. What is a fake in this context, when it has been invented for a particular game and has no relationship to a forgery or a reproduction or a souvenir out in the world? It’s a harmless digital fake of a digital reproduction that claims in-game authenticity. You might, inexplicably, get the opportunity to buy multiple copies of the authentic “Girl with the Pearl Earring” (the fox is, don’t forget, a pirate), so how do artistic workshops and the art market function in the world of the game?

And what does all of this do to the possibility of ekphrasis? What happens when there are eight famous poems about “The Hunters in the Snow” but the version we keep encountering has the dogs in the foreground removed to serve the profit interests of a fox made of light? What is the work of art in an age of mechanical reproduction that makes the Mona Lisa look much more surprised than she did when she was spirited out of the Louvre in 1911 — the theft that made the painting famous — or covered with whipped cream last year as part of a labor action? How do you read that first chapter of Les mots et les choses when the guy in Velázquez’s studio doorway is pointing at the king and queen and not just looking at them?  Is there even meaning here, or have I lost my mind after all this pandemic-time inside my own head and become a parody of myself?

I’m fascinated with cartoons and defacements of art meeting in this way and I want to write about it, but I feel like I’d have to read quite a lot of art theory and criticism before doing that and I don’t have the will or brain power for it, at least not right now. I’m burned out from writing prose but all I’m good at is writing prose. I’m burned out from research, but the personal essay is overdone so I’ll never get to explore these ideas except in poetry. Plus, the moment for Animal Crossing has really passed. But every time I sit down and try to write a kind of surrealist prose poem about this, it requires so much setup that it ends up being like flash fiction except I don’t write fiction because I can’t swing a plot. I’m burned out and I have a genre problem and this is all ridiculous anyway.

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Thinking About Audience

What follows are my remarks from today’s webinar, Writing Outside the Academy. I didn’t have time to give the remarks after the second set of three asterisks, reflecting on public writing/public medievalism and yesterday’s events, but referred to them in the discussion. 

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My topic this afternoon is audience and how my role as a teacher shapes how I think about writing for the public and how I envision that public — in other words, how the pedagogical part of my job helps to shape my writing outside the academy.

I am currently working on a book-length project for a general audience on the past and present of the Spanish language, a project that has very much grown out of my teaching. It has been shaped by redesigning a class I had inherited from a retired colleague on the history and dialectology of Spanish, and by the ways in which students come into college and into my class thinking about language in very conservative and limiting ways, often shaped by introductory language pedagogy and popularly available resources about language in general and Spanish in particular. My students often come in to my class as strident prescriptivists, because that is how they have been taught Spanish and taught about Spanish, regardless of whether it is a learned language for them or whether they are heritage or native speakers, and so they end up very judgmental about the language as it changes over time and even about their own Spanish.

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Who Was that Masked Man, Anyway?: Anti-Semitism and the Medieval and Modern Models of Samuel ibn Naghrīla

Earlier this year, I was approached by the editor of a small, specialized publication for a general readership who had read my review here of The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise and  on that basis asked me to write something for his web magazine. I was thrilled, sent him a little abstract, we agreed on the topic, and I was off. It’s a newish publication and the editor not, as far as I can tell, especially experienced; and by the time he asked me to rewrite the entire thing for the third time, contradicting edits he had made in earlier versions, futzing for the sake of futzing, and trying to make my writerly voice sound like his, I withdrew the piece. He deplored my “lack of commitment to the process,” (that sound you hear is me scoffing, indignantly) and the whole experience left a lot of bad feeling all around. I gather, through the grapevine, that I am not the only person to have had such an experience with this publication. Because it was written specially for a specific publication (and because it’s an approach I don’t really want to take in my own work and writing — looking at medieval history through a lens of anti-Semitism) I’m not sure that I’ll have much success in placing it elsewhere; and on top of that, I’m just not in the mood at the moment to sell myself and my work in the way that one has to do to attract the attention of the editors of general publications. And yet, I have this thing sitting on my hard drive and I wouldn’t mind clearing it from my mental plate. So I’ve decided to share it here. What’s the point of having one’s own web publishing platform if not for that? Plus, I’ve been working on a short blog post that’s related and that I will post by the end of the week, so it’s thematically appropriate for this moment in this space. Plus plus, since I’m already sharing some of the materials that will make up my next book, it fits in that way, too. It’s a long piece (it would have appeared in two parts had it run in the publication that commissioned it) and it’s designed for a general audience, so I hope that lay readers will enjoy it and that the academics who float through here on occasion will see some merit in it, too.

“…from the members of the community of Granada, the city of ourteacher Samuel ibn Naghrila and his son Joseph.” T-S 20.26.

Part I

The Hebrew poets of medieval Spain were the rap and hip-hop artists of their day. In the public performances of their verse, often at the fanciest parties with the finest liquor, they declaimed their opinions on social and political issues that affected them, imbuing their work with their victories and sadnesses; they praised themselves and their skills, caught beef with their peers, and did not let those rivalries die; they sampled the beats of the Arab poets working around them; and they irreversibly altered the properties of the Hebrew language in which they composed. They were complete badasses, they knew it, and they rhymed about it. What they perhaps could never have anticipated was the extent to which their poetry would speak so directly to the concerns of readers who would follow them into the world by a thousand years. But reading with a modern eye, it is immediately clear that many of the struggles that medieval Hebrew poets faced over language choice and national identity — over how to belong — were strikingly modern in their character and they poured out in their strikingly modern verse.

One of these poets was Samuel ibn Naghrīla (d. 1055-6) who served as a vizier and general to the Muslim emir of Granada but was also the leader, or nagid, of that city’s Jewish community and the best of its poets. He earned himself the nickname “twice the vizier” for his military and poetic prowess. His poetry covers topics from fatherhood to the battlefield to the value of both healthy and pleasing foods; some of his most significant poems were written to and about his beloved son Yehosef would succeed him as both the nagid and a government official in Granada. Samuel’s own writings and those that survive that tell his story from others’ perspectives demonstrate that he was deeply engaged with both Jewish and Muslim thinkers and cultural leaders of the day and with their ideas. His poetry is secular in nature but written in what medieval Jews considered to be the divine language — Hebrew — and drew often and strongly on biblical and other religious language, all the while using the rhyme and meter schemes of his Arabic-speaking Muslim counterparts.

Continue reading “Who Was that Masked Man, Anyway?: Anti-Semitism and the Medieval and Modern Models of Samuel ibn Naghrīla”

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Writing for a General Audience: An Overthinking in Questions

I had thought about writing the previous post in such a way that I could submit it to the New York Times op-ed page. Obviously, I chickened out. Or, more to the point, I overthought it. I was overcome with questions and doubts that stymied my perception of the piece as something that was editable into a proper op-ed piece for a proper periodical. So these are some of the things I have to think about as I try to move forward with my goal of doing some writing for a general audience now that I no longer have to worry about it all “counting*”:

— How much to balance classroom anecdata with the meat of the matter? In a certain respect, students can figure in a popular piece as the proxy for the audience. But does that make it all too schoolyard-y?

— What makes an anecdote interesting or worthy of publication, and where? This piece was hysterical, all anecdote, and not something that would ever have occurred to me to submit to the Times, even in the service of a  subtly-argued larger point.

— How do we choose a publication that will on the one hand allow for depth in writing but on the other hand reach a wide audience? What publications would put up with our view of the medieval as current? How hard to we have to try? How hard to we force the analogy?

— How far does our expertise go? How does our definition of our own field factor in? I’m not an art historian, I don’t work on central Europe, and I don’t consider my work primarily to be a part of Jewish Studies (regardless of what everyone tells me). But realistically, the history of the six-pointed star in Jewish and Islamic contexts is basically in my wheelhouse. Would I have really had the authority to write this for a proper publication? Would it have been responsible for me to write about something that I wouldn’t consider to be in my immediate area of research? Do our very narrow academic definitions of what we do and where we are experts in limit our writing for a general audience? Should they?

— How much will people in the field be willing to read charitably and understand that one writes differently for a popular audience than for a scholarly audience rather than condemning us for oversimplifying? Why does this still matter to me now that I have tenure?

— *What counts? Why? Why not?

— Trolls? Trolls.

— Ultimately, what is the purpose of popular writing? The question I’m really getting at with this broad one is this: How do we balance arguing an opinion, arguing an academic point, and elucidating the public?