Ten Cool Classes

Your subject matter in TIDES 1175-01

I just posted a TBT on my Facebook page of me getting dropped off at Tulane as a brand new freshman. 15 years later, I can't seem to leave this place, and tomorrow is my first day as Director of Admission! I am pumped to take on this role and work with this great team to lead the Admission Office to some great things. You'll be hearing a lot from me and how I hope to be a different kind of Admission Director. Stay tuned.

#TBT to me on Tulane day 1

Speaking of being a new freshman, move-in day for the class of 2020 is less than two months away! I thought it might be cool to take a look at some of the coolest classes we're offering for freshmen this year. Some are new courses, some are golden oldies. These courses do not have any prerequisites at all and are are open to all Newcomb-Tulane College undergraduates. Thanks to my girl Dayna Gessler from academic advising for getting this great list together!

I got the idea for this blog because I just wrapped up a class for my Master's degree and my professor, Meg Keenan, is teaching a TIDEs course on Game of Thrones. Check out these other neat classes:  


HIST-1910-01 History of Eating and Drinking 
What is the history of chocolate in the Americas? Do you want to know the history of vodka in Russia? How can food be a weapon of war? A religious experience? Come learn about the political, cultural, labor and economic history of eating and drinking across time and cultures.
This is a team-taught class by the History Department Faculty.

HISU-1800-01 Early New Orleans
Course explores the history of New Orleans during the colonial and early national periods, when the city was a crossroads of the Atlantic World that linked Africa, the Americas and Europe. It locates the city’s past in a transnational Atlantic context that reaches back to the fifteenth century and concludes with the emergence of New Orleans as a major American city in the early nineteenth century.



ARST-1170-01 Foundations of Art: Glass (Glass Blowing)
This course focuses on the history and theory of glass art, and also introduces basic techniques with attention given to issues of composition, perception, communication, and expression. Emphasis also will be placed on the relationships between glass art, other art mediums, and the history of art. See my previous blog about the time I sneaked back into the glass studio! Oh and by the way, just a few days after I got dropped off at Tulane, I took glassblowing!

CRDV-1090-01 Majors, Internships and Jobs
CRDV 1090 helps students to clarify their strengths, values and goals in order to maximize student potential. Students connect collegiate academic and extracurricular experiences to professional pursuits. Students create and refine professional documents, evaluate decision making processes and learn to utilize professional social media in order to network more effectively. Students are guided through the career development process through various assignments. See my previous blog on this class!

COLQ-1025-06 Sports Head Injuries & Concussions (Honors course for freshmen only)  
With the recent release of the movie “Concussion,” sport-related concussion (SRC) in professional, college, and youth athletes has received more attention in the media. The field of clinical neuropsychology has been involved in the development, implementation, and evaluation of protocols for managing SRC and determining when an athlete has recovered and is ready to return to play. The goal of this seminar is to introduce students to the study of SRC through reading and discussion of peer-reviewed empirical journal articles published in the last 10 years on this topic.

MCGS 2000 Introduction to Musical Cultures of the Gulf South
An introduction to the culture of the Gulf South region with an emphasis on New Orleans music, history, ritual, dance, and cultural geography. Explores the musical relationship of the Gulf South region to the Caribbean and African diaspora. Introduces critical tools for analysis of the relationship of music and place. Themes of the course include ethnic migrations, social diversity, vernacular architecture, and slavery. Field trips to second-line parades, Mississippi River access points, diverse neighborhoods and historical slave markets.

PHIL 3550 Medical Ethics
A systematic and critical study of ethical problems in medicine concerning the physician-patient relationship, life and death, and social responsibility.

Some happy SciHi kids (bryantarnowski)

SCEN 1010 Communicating Science: Teaching 
As the high schools in New Orleans rebuild, one of their many challenges is the uneven level of preparation among students entering the 9th grade. At the New Orleans Charter High School for Science and Math (SciHi), founded by two Tulane professors, the students are motivated but the disparities in their backgrounds are enormous. In this course, we learn how to help high school students who've fallen behind, both academically and by understanding the origins of their difficulty. Then we apply that knowledge by working with the students and also fulfilling one of the Tulane Center for Public Service requirements. The service, a minimum of 30 hours over the course of a semester, can take the form of teaching, tutoring, assisting with in-class exercises, and always includes acting as a mentor and role model to the SciHi students.


THEA 3311 Scene Shop Practicum
Course is open with credit to all students of the university and is designed to provide the student with practical production experience in the area of set construction and scene painting.

Cool Mayan stuff that Tulane archaeologists discovered. (source: HeritageDaily)

ANTH 2340 Introduction to Archaeology
Introduction to basic principles of archaeological method and theory. Consideration of the history of archaeology, major paradigms in archaeological thought, basic techniques of fieldwork, basic techniques in analyzing archaeological finds, and intellectual frameworks for interpreting patterns in archaeological datasets. Consideration of selected case studies.

TIDE-1175-01 Game of Thrones 
Are you a Game of Thrones fan? Do you hum the show’s theme song without even realizing it? Do you want to get to know other Game of Thrones fans at Tulane? Then the Game of Thrones TIDES is for you. Topics covered include the role of violence and sexuality in the television series as well as the debate over George RR Martin’s obligation to his fans to “write like the wind.” Students should be caught up on Seasons 1-5 of the television series before the course begins. Although it is not necessary to have read the novels in order to register for this course, students who are fans of Martin’s Songs of Fire and Ice Series (Game of Thrones and its sequels) are especially welcome.

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Colluding with Accident: John Berger’s Artful Artlessness

   Francis Bacon: Three Studies of Figures in Beds (1972)

Here’s the opening paragraph of John Berger’s “Francis Bacon and Walt Disney,” an essay originally published in New Society and recently reprinted, sans title, in the new anthology, Portraits: John Berger on Artists (Verso Books, 2015):

A blood-stained figure on a bed. A carcase with splints on it. A man on a chair smoking. One walks past his paintings as if through some gigantic institution. A man on a chair turning. A man holding a razor. A man shitting.

The essay begins abruptly, describing Bacon’s work—the equivalent of a cold open in tv or film. The six staccato noun phrases, punctuated as sentences, suggest that this is raw, unprocessed data. The sole complete sentence falls precisely in the middle of the paragraph, backing off for a moment from specifics to offer a somewhat hazy generalization.

Berger takes what you might call an inductive approach to art criticism, beginning not with orienting facts—names, dates, era, etc—but with direct/uninterpreted observation, and working towards general conclusions. This approach can be very persuasive. I’ve used it on occasion myself. The idea is that by beginning with details that anyone can see, the writer and reader process the work together. The argument, when it finally arrives, is not so much argued as discovered.

This “processing” continues in the second paragraph, which consists of questions and observations, along with more description (now in complete sentences):

What is the meaning of the events we see? The painted figures are all quite indifferent to one another’s presence or plight. Are we, as we walk past them, the same? A photograph of Bacon with his sleeves rolled up shows that his forearms closely resemble those of many of the men he paints. A woman crawls along a rail like a child. In 1971, according to the magazine Connaissance des Arts, Bacon became the first of the top ten most important living artists. A man sits naked with torn newspaper around his feet. A man stares at a blind cord. A man reclines in a vest on a stained red couch. There are many faces which move, and as they move they give an impression of pain. There has never been painting quite like this. It relates to the world we live in. But how?

But what should we make of this jarring sentence, dropped (again) in the middle of the paragraph? “In 1971, according to the magazine Connaissance des Arts, Bacon became the first of the top ten most important living artists.” This is one of those “orienting facts” we expect at the beginning of a newspaper article, but here, in the middle of Berger’s meditation, it feels out of place, almost random. Perhaps that’s the point: the dislocation adds to the sense that Berger is sorting through disparate details about Bacon and trying to assemble them into a cohesive understanding. That the paragraph begins and ends with a question underscores the fact that he’s still figuring things out (or is striving to appear so).

For the most part, the rest of the essay proceeds in this searching mode. Berger lists five (numbered) facts about Bacon. He goes on to ponder Bacon’s focus on the human figure, his use of distortion in portraying it, and how the figures in the paintings seem isolated from one another. He considers the empty, stunned expression on the figures’ faces, as if “the worst has already happened.”

He continues this way for 23 of the essay’s 26 paragraphs (or so, depending on what you count as a paragraph). Then in paragraph 24—less than a page’s worth of text before the end of the essay—we finally come to Berger’s first mention of what caught our attention in his title: Walt Disney:

It is not with Goya or the early Eisenstein that he should be compared, but with Walt Disney. Both make propositions about the alienated behaviour of our societies; and both, in a different way, persuade the viewer to accept what is. . . . The surprising formal similarities of their work—the way limbs are distorted, the overall shapes of bodies, the relation of figures to background and to one another, the use of neat tailor’s clothes, the gesture of hands, the range of colours used—are the result of both men having complementary attitudes to the same crisis.

The accidental/incidental feel of the placement of this paragraph is, of course, not accidental. As readers, we are simply along for the ride, observing and working with Berger towards an understanding of this challenging work. The Bacon/Disney comparison, we’re supposed to think, is just another casual observation, a natural extension of the particulars with which the essay began, and no more controversial than the opening description: “A blood-stained figure on the bed.”

At one point in the essay, Berger discusses Bacon’s interest in “accident” in painting. He explains that the painter seeks accident and “colludes” with it to create his figures’ expressions. Collusion with accident: I cannot think of a better way of describing Berger’s artfully artless way of structuring this essay.

 *

Ty Clever's essays have been published by the Woodmere Museum, the Royal Hibernian Academy Gallery, Littlejohn Contemporary Gallery, Art21 Magazine, and Essay Daily. He blogs about poetics, style, and art at http://hazlitter.tumblr.com 

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Fetish, Anyone?

Fetishes are called kinks or perversions and refer to any deviance from the accepted “normal” sexual practice. But is there not a certain flexibility allowed for them? Homosexuality, for example, has been called a perversion and in certain places still is deemed one, though no longer so in enlightened Western societies.

Then there are practices that opinion is divided about. Take anal intercourse between men and women. Whereas oral sex is no longer considered kinky, anal sex is still judged such in certain quarters, where not much has changed since Annabella Lady Byron was granted a divorce from her husband for requiring anal sex..

Certain perversions are associated with some kind of violence espoused by consenting adults, e.g., sadism and masochism (S&M). Others, however, are more peaceable, as, for instance, foot fetishism. An entire society, the Chinese, went in for foot binding, which had nothing to do with preventing wives from escaping their husbands, but with the latter liking to toy with tiny feet.

Why this impulse? On the one hand (or foot) because smallness itself is appealing—think puppies, kittens, babies, and miniatures of every kind. But also, I think, because for the smaller foot, toes are more proportionate. They can be only so big, and on a large foot they have a way of looking like a puny appendage. On a smaller foot, they have a way of blending in seamlessly into a symmetrical balance.

Still, why a foot fetish, and none on, say, a calf or knee? It would seem to have to do  with feet being usually hidden in shoes, and thus, when exposed, a kind of revelation. Other parts that would be erotic if bared, like breasts, remain mainly concealed. In any case, male attraction to the female bosom, an approved erotic zone, is considered normal.

Because hands are on full display, there seems to be no serious hand fetishism. There is, however, shoe fetishism for high-heeled women’s shoes, a kind of transference from feet, but I would wager offhand not all that frequent.

Much as I respond to a beautiful bare female foot, the stimulus is minimal on a beach full of bikinied women. Partly, this is a matter of excess, of indiscriminate exposure devoid of mystery. More so perhaps because there the exposed foot does not carry a promise of greater things to come. Conversely, a fully clad woman’s bare foot does induce further expectations of disrobing. Then again, a skilled woman can, with a bare foot, induce a fricative male orgasm. In any case, scantily clad ubiquitousness invites detumescence.

Why, all things considered, should it be all right for a man to caress, kiss, suck or nibble a woman’s breast, but not her foot? The answer would appear to be that, in the former, pleasure is shared; in the latter, one-sided. But then why is fellatio approved, when a woman would more likely prefer a lollypop or ice-cream cone to a penis and sperm?

Or is it enough for the woman to simultaneously merely sense the pleasure she is giving?

The eroticism of the foot has quite an outlet in literature. Take, for instance, Sir Thomas Wyatt’s famous poem that begins, “They flee from me, that sometimes did me seek/ With naked foot stalking in my chamber . . .” The epithet naked in preference to bare may be simply due to the need of a bisyllable to make the iambic line scan. But then what of Oscar Wilde’s “Salome,” where the drooling Herod mutters, “Ah, thou art to dance with naked feet! ‘Tis well! ‘Tis well. Thy little feet will be like white doves. They will be like little white flowers that dance upon the trees.” Of course it could be argued that Wilde wrote the play in French, where it had to be “pieds nus” because there is no word for bare. But surely he and his lover “Bosie” Douglas, who translated the play into English, must have been aware of the implications of “naked.”

Both Robert Herrick and Sir John Suckling have written poems celebrating a woman’s foot peeping out from under her skirt while dancing though there the foot remains shod. But what about Shakespeare about Cressida: “Her eye, her cheek, her lip,/ Nay, her foot speaks”?

Still, the apogee of foot fetishism in English is in George du Maurier’s 1894 novel, “Trilby.” Its heroine begins as a teenage Irish beauty in Paris, posing as a model for painters and sculptors, often in the altogether. “’Yes,” she says to her British admirers, “’l’ensemble, you know—head, hands, and feet—everything—especially feet. That’s my foot,’ she said, kicking off her slipper and stretching out her limb. ‘It’s the handsomest foot in all Paris. There is only one in all Paris to match it, and here it is,’ and she laughed heartily (like a merry peal of bells) and stuck out the other.

And in truth they were astonishingly beautiful feet, such as one only sees in pictures and statues—a true inspiration of shape and colour, all made up of delicate lengths and subtly-modified curves and noble straightnesses and happy little dimpled arrangements in innocent young pink and white.

So that Little Billee . . . was quite bewildered to find that a real, bare, live human foot could be such a charming object to look at . . . .

The shape of those lovely slender feet (that were neither large nor small), facsimiled in dusty pale plaster of Paris, survives on the shelves and walls of many a studio throughout the world, and many a sculptor yet unborn has yet to marvel at their strange perfection, in studious despair . . . .

It is a wondrous thing, the human foot—like the human hand; even more so, perhaps; but, unlike the hand, with which we are so familiar, it is seldom a thing of beauty in civilized adults who go about in leather boots or shoes.

So that it is hidden away in disgrace, a thing to be thrust out of sight and forgotten. It can sometimes be very ugly indeed—the ugliest thing there is, even in the fairest and highest and most gifted of her sex, and then it is of an ugliness to chill and kill romance, and scatter love’s young dream, and almost break the heart.

And all for the sake of high heel and a ridiculously pointed toe--mean things at the best!

Conversely, when Mother Nature has taken extra pains in the building of it, and proper care or happy chance has kept it free of lamentable deformations, indurations, and discolorations—all those grewsome [sic] boot-begotten abominations, which have made it generally upopular—the sudden sight of it, uncovered, comes as a very rare and singularly pleasing surprise to the eye that has learned how to see!

Nothing else that Mother Nature has to show, not even the human face divine, has more subtle power to suggest high physical distinction, happy evolution, and supreme development, the lordship of man over beast, the lordship of man over man, the lordship of woman over all . . . .

Trilby had respected Mother Nature’s special gift to herself—had never worn a leather boot or shoe, had always taken as much care of her feet as many a fine lady takes of her hands. . . .

With the point of an old compass, [Little Billie] scratched in white on the dark red wall a three-quarter profile outline of Trilby’s left foot, which was perhaps the more perfect poem of the two.”

Later, the great sculptor Durien comes visiting and, recognizing the foot on the wall, exclaims, “Tiens! Le pied de Trilby! Vous avez fait ca d’apres Nature?” and remarks, “Je voudrais bien avoir fait ca, moi!” The only thing du Maurier does not mention is a high instep, but being as much a visual artist as a writer, he includes among his illustrations for the book two little sketches of Trilby’s foot. There are several references throughout the novel to Trilby’s “beautiful [or alabaster] white feet,” plaster casts of which enriched their vendor and whose mural image was vainly tried to be removed from the studio wall. But let me move on to two incidents that reverberate in my memory.

One long-ago summer, my then girlfriend was driving us in her car. She was barefoot, and I, sitting next to her, pointed out how pretty her foot looked on the gas pedal. She was both surprised and delighted: it had never occurred to her that she had pretty feet. Another time, I went backstage to congratulate a lovely actress on her performance. She was barefoot, and for the first time I really saw her feet. They were large, flat, wide and, not to mince words, ugly. I was appalled, and wondered whether could ever again give her a rave review. Luckily I never saw her again, on or off the stage.

 I truly think I have figured out how I got my (mild enough) foot fetish, even though such a thing, I imagine, rarely has its etiology. Back in my childhood in Belgrade a maid who cleaned floors would attach a special brush by its strap to her bare foot for that purpose and scrub away. This afforded me my first glimpse of female flesh (the leg was bare too) and filled my young soul with erotic excitement.

I still admire a well-turned foot, preferably on the small side. I wonder what Francois Villon meant in his “Ballade des Dames du temps jadis,” in which he celebrates women for their beauty or power. One of them he refers to as “Berte au grant pie.” [Accent aigu on the E.] I recall, by the way, that Eric Partridge designates Bertha as a Teutonic name, meaning bright or shining one. So was this “grand pied,” as we would say now, perhaps also bright and shining, for Villon--an object of admiration or deprecation or merely observation?

Idle but enjoyable speculation. Let us now, however, turn to higher things.

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UkEssays.com Review [70/100]

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read full review  

There are not many legit writing services out there and after some research, it has been proven that Uk Essays is not a scam site. The website design of this company seems to be good and easy to navigate, but we have noticed that the website is a bit overpromising regarding their refunds and the non-plagiarism penalty they pay. Have a look at the detailed research we conducted on whether UkEssays.com is a good site.

Site	Mark
UkEssays.com    - Range of Writing Services Offered    - Pricing, Discounts & Payment Policy    - Quality Evaluation    - Customer Support    - Customer Reviews

Criteria #1: Range of Writing Services Offered (Mark - 16/20)

The types of services UkEssays delivers are presented on the main page of the website and are separated in four categories that include essays, dissertations, reports, reviews, assignments, coursework, thesis, literature reviews and many others.

The forth category comprises of free features, but we have not come across any of the regular freebies other writing companies offer such as free revisions, proofreading, title page or plagiarism check. The free features presented here are the provided resources for essays, dissertations, and also the referencing generators and the finance ratio calculator. The free essays and dissertations cannot really be seen as a free feature since they cannot be really used, but can only serve to help you in writing an essay or a dissertation. Additionally, they take up much time and make the website filled with too many information.

Criteria #2: Pricing, Discounts & Payment Policy (Mark - 9/20)

The prices section is a bit complicated, since it does not clearly indicate what the prices are. Instead, it is a generator that gives you the price of your order after filling some fields.
UkEssays claims to have spent great amount of time in choosing the right writers, so when making an order, the customer is able to choose between the countries of study and the writer assigned is always a native speaker of their language.

The options regarding the level of writing given from the company seem a bit unrealistic. When ordering an essay, one should choose the grade they want to get and the company promises that if the grade is not as the one requested, they offer a full refund to the customer. This is a bit confusing since everyone knows that teachers have different ways of grading a paper.

Speaking of discount and promo codes, we have not found anything like this on the website. There is no first-time ordering discount mentioned, nor is a discount on big projects. If one wants to be informed in this matter, they would have to contact the company.

Criteria #3: Quality Evaluation (Mark - 15/20)

We had a look at the free papers offered by the company and they seemed to be free of plagiarism, proofread and written in academic language. Additionally, there were many texts there with helpful information on how to write an article.

Then, we decided to proceed to ordering from this company in order to evaluate the quality of the product.

There was no plagiarism, as promised, which is what we expected when we read that the company offers money if one finds plagiarism in their texts. However, the text had a couple of mistakes and was pretty similar to the original text in the book we sent, so our evaluators graded the text lower than what we requested. Then we realized that it takes much to qualify for this guarantee and at the end, we didn’t manage to prove that the grade we ordered was not implemented in the product we got.

Criteria #4: Customer Support (Mark - 15/20)

The agents in the customer support were very nice, but it took them a long time to answer our questions. Additionally, the waiting period for an agent to be assigned to us was a bit longer than expected.

Criteria #5: Customers Reviews (Mark - 15/20)

Melissa:

“Don’t order from these people. I asked for the highest grade and did not help me achieve the grade I wanted, but charged me more for it anyway.”

Larry:

“The website promises a lot but fulfills nothing. They were a couple of hours late with my order and only apologized for it instead of refunding me. Also, I find some mistakes in the essay and when I ask for a revision, their agent was very rude.”

Sammy:

“The essay was good, but hadd some grammatical issues.”

Conlcusion: As you can note, the detailed research conducted on this company and its writings have not placed it in the group of great writing content companies online.

Site	Total Mark
UkEssays.com	70

UkEssays.com Review

Written by: Legitimate Writing Services

Service

Date published: 06/24/2016

7 / 10 stars

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CAE June 2016 Essay Sample

Your class has watched a studio discussion about factors which have contributed to the recent increase in international travel. You have made the notes below:

Factors contributing to the increase in international travel:

• methods of transport
• global business
• media

Some opinions expressed in the discussion:

“It’s quicker to fly abroad than to take a train to the north of my country!”

“My company has offices in 12 different countries.”

“People have developed a love of other cultures through TV and film.”

Write an essayfor your tutor discussing twoof the factors in your notes. You should explain which factor has contributed more to the increase in international travel, providing reasonsto support your opinion.

You may, if you wish, use the opinions expressed in the discussion, but you should use your own words as far as possible.

Essay on International Travel

It goes without saying that there has been a recent increase in international travel. More and more people are now grabbing their passports and travelling the world. There are two key factors that have contributed to this phenomenon: New technologies and global business.

The development of aeroplane science has undoubtedly had an enormous effect on people’s view on international travel. Advances in engineering make it now possible for the average citizen to travel around the world safely, while the big demand on flight tickets means there are more airlines in the market and people have the possibility to find fair offers. To the point that spending holidays abroad is now considered normal, not luxurious.

Globalisation has also played a significant role in the increase in international travel. In fact, many companies have decided to build new headquarters and offices in other countries, hoping it will help them deal with international relationships. As a result, many people find themselves commuting by aeroplane or train on a regular basis: they work in London but live in France, for example.

When comparing both of the factors listed above to decide which has contributed more to the increase in interntional travel, I conclude that it is the emergence of new transport techonologies. Globalisation of business has played its role too but not every single person works in a multinational company. It is fast and safe cheap flights abroad which makes people want to travel more and make companies consider the idea of doing business outside their borders.

Submitted by Aitor Erkoreka

#words 250

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#TulaneSummer

We're loving seeing all of your #TulaneSummer shots on Instagram! Keep 'em coming. I thought it might be cool to check in with a few of our students this summer to see how they are spending their vacation. Check these out!

Who: Timmy Demirjian '17
What: Intern, Sony Pictures Entertainment
Where: Los Angeles, CA

This summer I'm working in Los Angeles for Sony Pictures Entertainment. I am a part of their Spectrum Internship Program, and I'm an intern for their Columbia Pictures division. Columbia is a motion picture studio specializing in premium feature film and television content development, production, marketing, and distribution. Part of my job is to source and evaluate material, and to take meetings with talent and internal representatives to work toward building a high-quality slate of product. In addition, I will be reading and covering scripts, working in production and development, arranging screenings and drafting writer/director/actor lists in consideration for projects. It's a long way from the suburbs of Massachusetts, but I couldn't be more excited for this experience.

Who: Maddie Rafkin, '17
What: Teaching Fellow at Breakthrough New Orleans
Where: New Orleans, LA

I have a great job as a teaching fellow at Breakthrough New Orleans. Here, I teach at-risk middle school students. These students are mostly low-SES minorities. We teach them a variety of things, from review from the past year to new material, but we mostly focus on main concepts that they will learn in the following year. I get to write all of my own lesson plans, design my own curriculum, and mentor students. I am also a student, and students in the program can look up to us as somewhere they could be in 5 years (a student in college), which is much closer than their current teachers who are at least 10 years older than them.

Who: Amanda Levinson '18
What: Intern, Fox 4 News
Where: Dallas, TX

This summer, I'm interning at Fox 4 News in Dallas, Texas. I'm a marketing major, and I'm from Philadelphia, PA. For my internship, I go out every day with different reporters and help write the scripts, edit, and help coordinate for the local news.

Who: Maddie McGee '17
What: Intern, Sony Pictures Television
Where: Los Angeles, CA

I am spending this summer in Los Angeles interning for the casting team at Sony Pictures Television. I work on the studio lot assisting the casting executives and going to table reads and tapings for TV shows. I've gotten to go to table reads for Masters of Sex and tapings for One Day at a Time, a new show for Netflix. We're also working on casting three new pilots this summer. A highlight was meeting television legend Norman Lear. And yes, that is the Breaking Bad trailer above!

Who: Emily MacLaren, '18
What: Intern at Results for Development
Where: Washington, DC

This summer I am interning at Results for Development (R4D). R4D is a nonprofit based in Washington, DC that aims to provide sustainable solutions to development problems in low and middle income countries. The projects at R4D have the focus of reducing poverty and improving the lives of people. I am currently working on the innovation team, which entails being a part of the International Development Innovation Alliance (IDIA). Members of this alliance include United States Agency for International Development, UNICEF, Rockefeller Foundation, Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, and more! Our work aims to accomplish Sustainable Development Goal 9 in the UN's 2030 Agenda: "Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation." Currently, I am involved a project that focuses on strengthening innovation ecosystems. With only two weeks of experience thus far, I have already gained a lot of knowledge on the field of development and the work of nonprofits.

Who: Chesley McCarty '17
What: Fellowship at Tulane City Center
Where: New Orleans, LA

This summer I am working with the City Center (Albert Junior and Tina Small City Center), which is a community design studio in New Orleans that is affiliated with the School of Architecture. It’s an interesting opportunity because it is more of a fellowship, so besides just design work, we also have a lot of opportunities to dive into discussions/readings on how the built environment can make the world a better place. I’m also going on a travel fellowship at the end of the summer, to Yosemite National Park, then farming in Washington for two weeks and spending some time in Seattle and Portland. This isn’t a part of the internship, but definitely has some strong associations with the work I am doing here and the work I will be doing in my thesis project.

Who: Tyler Margaretten '19
What: Intern, VMG Health
Where: Dallas, TX

This summer I'm interning in Dallas, Texas, at VMG Health, the nation's first and largest business valuation firm specifically focused on the healthcare industry. Long story short: fair market valuations of surgical centers, hospitals, physician practices, etc., for management purposes, mergers and acquisitions, etc. It's pretty fun; I'm about to wrap up week two and I'm loving it. I also am living just off SMU's campus so it's cool to check out the college scene here as well.

Who: Hannah Hauptman, '17
What: Account Manager, Discovery USA
Where: Philadelphia, PA

This summer, I'm an Account Management Intern with Discovery USA, which is a division of Publicis Health. Essentially, I'll be helping my team (including a recent Tulane business school alum!) create materials that market specific cancer treatments. This past week, I traveled to New York City, where the CEO offered advice on leadership and how to be an effective intern. Afterwards, we got to chat with past interns who now work for the company. I've always known I was interested in advertising and can't wait to learn more about healthcare marketing!

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On Subversive Publishing and "The Tongue-Like Organ of a Bee," An Interview with Lisa Pearson of Siglio Press

Founded in 2008, Siglio is an independent press in Los Angeles “committed to various kinds of subversions” and dedicated to publishing uncommon books and editions that live at the intersection of art and literature.

Sig – li – o, n. 

1. an inverse to a boundary. 

2. a small, unauthorized marvel as opposed to an ecclesiastically recognized miracle. 

3. the tongue-like organ of a bee. 

4. Obs. a perverse taxonomy, e.g. a wunderkammer. 

5. Archaic. The third rung on the Medieval Ladder of Awe;
         a. Delecta b. Canmena c. Siglio d. Mirabilius e. Elatoria f. Inefiblio g. Agis.

"The word 'publisher' comes from the Latin publicare 'to make public' but I quite like the German word better—Herausgäber, or as in my female case, Herausgäberin—which has in its roots the act of giving."

SM: In "On the Small and Contrary," you write about Siglio Press as an act of resistance "to the literal, the authoritarian and the facile, as the result of an undeterred ambition to share a work of art that might otherwise remain unseen and unread...". I too often feel dismayed at the flattening effects of mass publishing. Can you tell us a bit more about what it means for Siglio to respond to this climate "one book at a time"?

LP: Siglio belongs to a very vibrant community of small, independent publishing houses that operate outside the mainstream which gives all of us the ability to be idiosyncratic, eccentric even, in our passions as well as our methodologies. It also demands that we are nimble, resourceful, relentlessly inquisitive about how to do things differently—and to very high standards. (There is no lowest common denominator in this alternate universe.)

For Siglio, there is perhaps an even greater degree of idiosyncracy and nimbleness since I actively seek out uncategorizable and unwieldy works. That means the list is eclectic and thus the press has diverse readerships (readers who are interested, say, in John Cage’s chance-operation determined Diarymay not be interested in Joe Brainard’s scandalous and funny recontextualizations of the comic strip character Nancy—though there is a small tribe of readers who make the leap from one Siglio book to another). This also means that there is no uniformity of design or format, no significant accumulation of titles in a single genre or category, no single marketing strategy to reapply with every title. I’m breaking the most significant rule of mass publishing simply in my lack of desire to repeat a particular success, but also, I should add, in my trust in “the reader,” her voracious curiosity, her sense of adventure, her own desire to lean into the expanse, into the unknown.

That’s why I am empowered to experiment, to take on the risk and the challenge of advocating for writers and artists I believe in, putting work into world—finding the right form and cultivating an audience for it—that might otherwise be invisible or misread or vastly underappreciated.

From Joe Brainard's Nancy 

SM: In another interview with Artbook you write about the way a book can render a visual artist's work in an entirely new form. How a book honors the artwork while also embodying a resistance against other book forms that diminish a work's scale and vision. Can you tell us a little about the process of making a book at Siglio? Do you often partner with artists whose work is entering book form? Or writers who are pairing their texts with design? Are there many makers who produce both their texts and their images?

LP: Most of the artists and writers I publish create hybrid works in which the literary and the visual are absolutely inextricable, but that manifests in extremely different ways. For instance, the artist-poet Robert Seydel created “journal pages” authored by his alter ego Ruth Greisman in A Picture is Always a Book. These are luminescent and startlingly original writings—typed up on paper purloined from old photo albums, adorned with drawings in colored pencils, oil pens, white-out, and ink stamps. If transcribed and typeset (i.e. removed from their physical context), they are still powerful, but their object-ness, the evidence of the “hand” imbues them with further layers of emotional complexity and aesthetic magnetism.

Compare this to the photo-narrative works of French artist Sophie Calle. Her provocative  investigations (calling all the people listed in a stranger’s lost address book in The Address Book, or furtively following a man to Venice in Suite Vénitienne) unfold in linear, classically typeset text paired with photographs that seem to document or surveil but also point to the inscrutable, the oblique, the poetic. Calle’s work is an entirely different species from Dorothy Iannone’s exuberantly sexual and joyfully transgressive autobiographical writings which she weaves into brightly colored, super-graphic, über-embellished ink drawings in You Who Read Me With Passion Now Must Forever Be My Friends. Then there is Karen Green’s Bough Down, an unusual and haunting narrative constructed of crystalline fragments of prose interspersed with her miniature collages. Made not to illustrate the words but as a parallel process of invocation and erasure, each collage—and the creative act of making it—evinces her reassembly of life in the face of devastating loss. The text without the images (and vice-versa) is utterly incomplete.

There are also artists like Joe Brainard, Jess and Richard Kraft who incorporate text, poetic nonsense and narrative suggestion in their collages of appropriated material (particularly comics). Or Ray Johnson, a collage and mail-art artist, who played with language, the form of the letter, and the means of dissemination and distribution. Most recently, I published a collection of artworks by the armless (and legless) 29-inch tall 18^th century artist Matthias Buchinger. His gorgeous portraits, coats of arms and landscapes are composed of texts so tiny as to be almost invisible to the naked eye. In other words the drawings are literally made of language.

These are writers and artists who are working far beyond the boundaries of either the literary or visual arts and instead inhabit the often indescribable space between them, inviting readers to read and to look in very unusual ways. Many are also acutely aware of the particular opportunities the medium of the book affords them—not as a transparent container, but as space that—with precise decisions about materiality, design and reproduction—shapes the reader’s (very intimate) experience of their work. 

Detail from Matthias Buchinger

SM: Siglio books “challenge the reader to engage in multiple, diverse, and perhaps unfamiliar modes of reading.” But most of the experimental texts these days still inhabit objects that work two-dimensionally (though there is clearly an argument for the way that book is always a three-dimensional experience). For me, many of the books from Siglio seem to be leaning towards a three-dimensional reading process. I’m thinking of Amaranth Borsuk's Between Page and Screen, in particular. I wonder what you think about the way a text has to shift in consideration of forms that prompt the viewer to approach the reading process differently, and perhaps more spatially? Do you think text that inhabits a new spatial form necessarily needs to be briefer or fragmented?

LP: Spatial dimensionality is the raison d’etre of Between Page and Screen which is an “augmented reality” reading experience. On each printed page, there is a very simple, elegant geometric design—no words at all. When you open the book in front of your computer screen, your camera reads the code, in effect unlocking words which now appear floating above the pages of the open book in your hands: you see yourself reading a text (a series of love letters between P and S) which is animate, responsive, mutating and—simultaneously—there and not there. There’s no other Siglio title like it.

From Amaranth Borsuk's Between Page and Screen

And yet, every Siglio book asks the reader to read in quite a different way, sometimes approaching the page itself as a field that defies left to right, top to bottom (as in Richard Kraft’s Here Comes Kitty: A Comic Opera or Jess’s collage poems). Sometimes the reader is confronted with empty space, a kind of reverberating silence (as in Nancy Spero’s Torture of Women). Or the reader is asked to turn the book, to read along the edges (as in Ray Johnson’s The Paper Snake). There is stunning variety in the formal choices about how text and image hold the page and accumulate into pages of a book: it all depends on the substance and concerns of each particular work. 

In a kind of antithesis to brevity and fragmentation, Danielle Dutton’s novel S P R A W L is a single, unbroken paragraph over almost 160 pages. Danielle and I collaborated on the design and typography, thinking quite a bit about the white space (wide margins and leading) so that we could infuse the reading experience with a seeming evenness and relentlessness of sprawl itself. It is a very playful, very innovative work that, with different typesetting and layout, would conjure a quite different experience for the reader.

SM: Here’s maybe a longer question. I had a conversation with book artist Julie Chen back in 2013 about the way art books might only be accessed by a select audience. I asked Chen: 

“Where, in an ideal world, would an audience encounter your work? What about the argument that few people encounter an artist's book in their lives? Are the book arts then not a form dedicated to the masses?”
She responded, of course, with a question: 

“Why is a limited edition perceived as being inaccessible when there are a number of copies available for viewing (as opposed to other types of art such as painting and sculpture where there is only one)?” 

And then an answer: 
“While I do want my work to be experienced by as many people as possible, it is intended to be an intimate experience between the reader and the book. The technical complexity of what I am doing, and my belief that the materials, media and structure of the piece all contribute significantly to the experience of the reader, along with the content, means that my production is generally necessarily limited to relatively small editions. But I do feel that they are very accessible by art standards.”

This seems a conversation that is hanging around fine art in general these days, but I wonder how you think it applies to Siglio books and to reaching a modern audience with very few copies? Where, in an ideal world, would an audience get to know Siglio books?

LP: Siglio books are widely available as Siglio’s got fantastic distribution from Artbook/D.A.P. They’re in independent, museum and gallery bookshops, in specialty retailers (like curated design shops and the like), from online retailers (better to go to Powell’s and The Strand than Amazon—don’t get me started), or even better, directly from the source. As an enticement, I give a little gift when anyone purchases a book directly from Siglio—the latest edition of “Siglio Ephemera”—because these sales are critical to the survival of the press.

Julie, as an artist making hand-made books, is challenging the assumption that “the book” as a medium presupposes wide dissemination, but I am publisher publishing books for which dissemination is key. (The word “publisher” comes from the Latin publicare “to make public” but I quite like the German word better—Herausgäber, or as in my female case, Herausgäberin—which has in its roots the act of giving). These are quite different endeavors.

My mission is to cultivate the widest and most diverse audience possible for each title and that requires engaging with all of the mechanisms that make that possible—less expensive offset printing coupled with high production values so that the book is both beautiful and relatively affordable; active distribution and good communication with booksellers so that it’s not only broadly available but also has a small legion of advocates on the front lines; and a marketing strategy based on inspiring substantive reviews so that readers not only know that the book exists but are intrigued by the conversation surrounding it.

In other words, I want to make it as easy as possible for a reader to find out about the book and want to experience it for herself, buy it without looking to hard for it, and be utterly thrilled to have it in hand. 

In an ideal world, I’d just hope for a few more readers.

SM: In tracing the history of books that partner text and images, I often point to illuminated manuscripts, dictionaries and almanacs, concrete poetry, and flux kits. I’ve really enjoyed discovering other book forms like Forrers Reallexicon and My Book House through your work. Are there other lesser-known examples you can bring to our attention?

LP: Well, I love all of the things you love! That gamut from illuminated manuscripts to Fluxus publications has influenced me greatly. On the latter front, Dick Higgins and Something Else Press figures very large, particularly with regards to his ideas about “intermedia” and his way of rethinking the space of the book while using mass production techniques. Hansjörg Mayer publications also have had an impact. And I love Wallace Berman’s Semina which has directly inspired the Siglio Ephemera series, particularly in giving it as a little gift.

Really the entire Siglio list is an attempt to fill in the blanks and extend that lineage. Several books are reclamation projects of sorts—the compendiums of works by Dorothy Iannone, Ray Johnson, Joe Brainard, and Jess, the complete Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)by John Cage, and certainly Nancy Spero’s Torture of Women. Others are about introducing completely unknown writers and artists to a potential readership. I’ve published (and co-published) three books by Robert Seydel whose completely hybrid work in part inspired me to start Siglio. When The Paris Reviewwrote last year that “Book of Ruth is one of the great avant-garde novels of the twenty-first century,” that was a pretty satisfying moment.

Details from It Is Almost That

It Is Almost That: A Collection of Image+Text Work by Women Artists & Writers mirrors the macrocosmic impulses of the press in one book. I started with a deep commitment to Charlotte Salomon’s work which I knew would have to be a cornerstone. A vastly underappreciated and little known artist, Salomon completed her magnum opus Life? Or Theater? A Songplay at the age of twenty-six just a few months before she died in Auschwitz. This is a truly extraordinary work—a multi-layered visual novel composed of almost 800 goauche drawings, some with vellum overlays of text, others with the texts painted in. It tells a multi-generational story (from multiple points of view) about a Jewish family during the Weimar Republic and during the rise of the Nazis. It’s been relegated to “Holocaust” art, dismissed as “illustration,” sometimes compared with Anne Frank’s diary for its autobiographical nature, but it is a mature, wholly innovative, highly complex work of real genius. Both English editions are long out of print, and I basically used my entire rights budget for It Is Almost That to pay for one chapter (and that’s after they gave me a 90% discount!). I think it’s one of the most important works of art and literature of the 20^th century.

I’m planning to start something online (maybe Instagram) about books I love, books I perhaps wish I had published, books I’ll never part with. I can tell you a few of those I’ll include early on: Annette Messager’s Word for Word, Tom Phillips’s A Humument, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee, and of course several books published by Christine Burgin whom I admire tremendously—Robert Walser’s Microscripts, The Gorgeous Nothings: Emily Dickinson’s Envelope Poems, and Zoe Beloff’s The Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society and its Circle.

From A Humument

SM: I've also learned a lot about visual works from exploring the feminist portal that Siglio hosts along with It Is Almost That. Is there a correlation that you have found between feminist art & writing and experimental texts? Can you point us to a few in the portal that are your favorites?

LP: Thanks for noticing (and delving into) the feminist portal which is really the brainchild of a former (and amazing) Siglio intern Googie Karrass. Our intention has been to create a sprawling, inclusive space that promotes heterodoxy, embraces contradiction and repetition, injects a little chaos and points in multiple (and ever-multiplying) directions. It absolutely resists any impulse to be authoritative or definitive. Though It Is Almost That was necessarily curated, it also proceeded from a resistance to certain ways of conceptualizing and categorizing work, particularly by women. Instead, I thought a lot about the ways in which the works conversed with one another, bristled against each other, augmented and refuted each other.

Eileen Myles said in her review of It Is Almost That: “Because the frame is image+text, we’re reminded that all of us generally do more. Female artists don’t just stay in their disciplines; we experience, we forage, we play. Intuitively and practically speaking, It Is Almost That is, in effect, a handbook. It, by presenting female art history, shows us how to bean artist.” I think embedded here is the answer to your question—hybridity, experimentation, process are, if not essentially female, then perhaps essential to a way of working that breaks with traditional (read: male) categories and methodologies.

SM: Thanks very much, Lisa.




Lisa Pearson is the founder and publisher of Siglio press.

Sarah Minor runs the Visual Essayists series here at Essay Daily. 

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