Author Archives: cultureweeklyradboud

by Dennis Kersten

There is more to biography than books, you know – but not much more. Indeed, book-length prose narrative seems the medium of choice in life writing. Not surprisingly perhaps, since it has proven to be a strikingly versatile form. However, for the telling of life stories, it continues to pose serious problems as well. Conventionally linear and chronological, biographical narratives may be seen to artificially create order in fundamentally chaotic lives and so suggest meaning where there
may not be any.

In an effort to overcome the limitations of narrative, the protagonist of Julian Barnes’ famous metabiographical novel Flaubert’s Parrot (1984) decides to present the “facts” of the life of the author of Madame Bovary in,
respectively, a chronology, a bestiary, a “train-spotter’s guide”, a dictionary
and an examination paper. He never learns who the “real” Gustave Flaubert is, but his go at biography does teach him how one life may be told in a seemingly inexhaustible variety of ways, all true to historical fact. If only Flaubert’s biographers could have used digital designer tools and capture the man’s life and work in a series of infographics! Surely, if Flaubert’s Parrot had been written today, it would have included a chapter with visualized biographical data.

Ammonite Press have published a series of short life writing books, titled Biographic, each part of which represents the lives of cultural icons through tables, graphs, pie charts and other impressively designed visuals. So far, the series has spawned instalments about Coco Chanel, Albert Einstein, Jimi Hendrix, Vincent van Gogh and William Shakespeare, amongst 15 others. There is even one about a completely fictional figure: Sherlock Holmes.

The aim is to convey these subjects’ “essence” and “defining facts” by visualizing their “thoughts, habits and achievements” and, thus, create “vivid snapshots” of them. Which is not to say that there is no narrative at all in the Biographic books: the opening pages of many parts in the series, in which the above mentioned objectives are described, are quite “texty”. And in the chapters to come, readers are guided through the infographics by sometimes quite elaborate explanatory notes. In fact, some of the visuals are text illustrations rather than infographics. Still, the combination of word and image in Biographic calls for a reading of its writing of lives from the perspective of intermediality.

Infographics may be used to great effect, especially when they document data in both an efficient and aesthetically pleasing manner – a point emphasized by books like David McCandless’ Information is Beautiful (2009). In some cases, there is no more impactful way to present facts than to visualize them in one single image. A great example would be Pop Chart Lab’s poster of who played what on which song by The Beatles (2018). With each instrument represented by a unique colour, it is immediately obvious that Beatle songs became increasingly complex instrumentation-wise as
the Sixties progressed, and that that process went hand-in-hand with Paul McCartney’s growing dominance as a player. His “Yesterday” suddenly appears a true turning point in this context.

In Biographic Bowie, infographics are used to a similar end. For instance, the track listing of David Bowie’s Hunky Dory (1971) is presented with
colours for the themes dealt with in the songs it contains. Thanks to that, you instantly realize that the songs about “American heroes” such as Warhol and Dylan are grouped together on side B, like a mini-concept album-within-an-album. The faces of Bowie’s many characters (from Major Tom to the Thin White Duke), but also his changing fashion styles: these are, indeed, best visualized. Shown in one spread, the evolution of both is dramatically highlighted.

Okay, so the use of two consecutive pages to illustrate a quote from one of Winston Churchill’s war memoirs with the door of 10 Downing Street may not be the most efficient or aesthetically pleasing way to get information across in the biography of the British former-PM. Does the repetition of cigars, bowler hats and Spitfires across 50 “defining” Churchillian facts not risk his reduction to caricature? The Aladdin Sane lightning bolt almost
becomes a brand in Biographic Bowie. More generally, why is the series focused on the usual suspects amongst “great lives”? Why is it especially interested in artists? And where are the female icons? Only three of its twenty parts are devoted to women: Jane Austen, Chanel and Frida Kahlo.

Life writing is beautiful, but not only because biographical information is. It also shows how biographers try to make sense of the “facts” they bring together by giving shape to stories about lives that are, essentially, shapeless. In that sense, the Biographic books, which must have been challenging to write and design, are fascinating study material for life writing watchers. With their playful and “fun” appearance, they will undoubtedly attract new readers to life stories that have been documented extensively already – an achievement in itself.

They also raise new questions. Can such happily colourful books also represent the darker pages in an historical figure’s life? And would their infographic approach work for the writing of lives that may be iconic, but the opposite of “great” in all other respects? Dictators leave trails of data, too, of course. What about marginalized and largely unknown subjects? Can the “essence” of their legacy be captured in maximally 50 icons? Perhaps future experiments in life writing along the lines of Biographic will answer these questions. Oscar Wilde once almost said, “Everybody is clever with infographics nowadays,” which may be true for a time in which everybody with a personal computer can be a graphic designer. The Biographic
books stand out, though. A fan of their intermedial life writing, c’est moi.

By Frederik van Dam

As 2018 drew to a close, the Irish College in Belgium hosted a
conference on innovation and experiment in contemporary Irish fiction.
It was a lively gathering, with many inspiring speakers; the interest in and
relevance of global climate change was striking and, of course, apposite. The animating force behind this gathering was Hedwig Schwall, for whom the conference was also the celebration of her retirement. Instead of briefly
recapitulating my own modest contribution to this conference, I thought I’d pay homage to Hedwig by providing a short reading that takes its cue from her work.

This is a belated reading. Years ago, when I was scanning the field for a possible research topic for my BA dissertation, I mentioned to my tutor that I was fascinated by the poetry of W. B. Yeats. To pursue that interest, he replied, I should seek out our in-house expert on the subject. I did not heed his advice. Instead of writing on Yeats, I soon found myself working on the novels of Anthony Trollope. But this decision was only a delay. Among many other things, Trollope’s early novels, which are set in Ireland, made me more attentive to the tangled tale of Irish literature in the Victorian age. As a result, I was brought – inevitably – into Hedwig’s ken. What would I have approached her with, though, had I listened more attentively to Yeats’s fanciful poems and not been lured away by Trollope’s earth-bound prose?

I might have tried to impress Hedwig with some reflections about Yeats’s ‘The Cat and the Moon’ (first published in The Wild Swans at Coole, 1919). The poem’s title signals that it will revolve around a psychological duality that Hedwig has so often tackled in her literary criticism; a Schwallian duality, as it were. Incorrigibly and incurably self-willed, cats are conventionally seen as conscious creatures, while the moon, at once dark and faintly illuminated, is a traditional trope for the unconscious. The poem itself, however, dissolves the opposition between the conscious and the unconscious even before it has been created, and instead emphasizes similarity more than difference. The first stanza presents the comparison between the feline and Selene in the lucid terms of a family resemblance:

The cat
went here and there
And the
moon spun round like a top,
And the
nearest kin of the moon,
The creeping
cat, looked up.

(Yeats,
p. 167, ll. 1-4)

Initially, Yeats’s cat is ‘creeping’, which suggests that without the moon it is a mere beast of the earth. As the poem continues, however, the bond between the animal and the moon is moved into the register of the aesthetic. ‘When two close kindred meet’, the poet asks, ‘What better than
call a dance’ (p. 167, ll. 12-13)? A creature whose pupils range ‘from round to
crescent, / From crescent to round’ (p. 168, ll. 23-24), Minnaloushe is
‘[a]lone, important, and wise’ (p. 168, l. 26). By staring at the moon, in
other words, the cat’s spirit is raised, elevated. Significantly, the speaker
is excluded from the dance that he observes. The poet is the passive witness of an aesthetic spectacle that seems to take place on the other side of knowledge, a spectacle from which he, as a thinking being, is excluded. The sentiment is not unlike that found in many of Matsuo Basho’s haiku, such as the following:

Though the
moon is full
There seems
an absence –
Suma in summer.

(Aitken
31)

This particular haiku expresses a sense of unfulfillment in the presence the moon, a kind of yearning for self-forgetfulness. Yeats adds a second layer to this experience by introducing a creature into the scene. It is not the moon itself but a creature staring at the moon that makes the poet (and, at a remove, the reader) feel that sense of unfulfillment, that absence, which suggests a possible cause: by virtue of the presence of the cat, the poet
is made aware, if nothing more than that, of the animalistic part of his being from which he has been separated. Without wanting to suggest that this proto-existentialist sentiment is characteristically Irish, it is a testimony to Yeats’s influence that it can be found in the many contemporary works of Irish literature of which Hedwig has been active promotor and studious scholar. Sara Baume’s A Line Made by Walking (2017) provides one of the most recent articulations of this experience.

I look up
to the turbine, which doesn’t appear to go to sleep as the flower-heads do. It
stays up at night, continues to spin. Two white lights glow from the generator
at its axis, a set of cat’s eyes, but each of the blades remains unlit. […]
It
feels as if the cat’s eyes are looking down, looking back at me. Watching over
the garden, the bungalow. But I’ve never been good at judging the distance or
size or position of objects in the sky. I remember riding in the back of my
mother’s Ford Estate: I was four, it was night-time, and the moon was full. I
was gazing out the window, and I couldn’t understand why it moved through the
sky at the same pace as the car along the road, why we never managed to leave
it behind. ‘Drive faster!’ I commanded my mother, but refused to tell her why,
and so, she didn’t.
I
turn my attention back to the tuck-up petals.
How
do the flowers know it’s night-time? Why is the moon everywhere?

(Baume 171)

As in Yeats’s poem, two instantly recognizable images – the eyes of the cat and the light of the moon – mutually reinforce one another in order to power a reflection on the strange and alien quality of the world that surrounds us. I like to imagine that a research proposal on the reception of Yeatsian tropes, as found Baume’s novel, would have appealed to
Hedwig’s heretic side. After such knowledge, she would have said (channelling Herman Servotte, channelling T. S. Eliot), what forgiveness?

---

Aitken,
Robert. A Zen Wave: Basho’s Haiku and Zen, 2003. Washington: Shoemaker & Hoard,

Baume, Sara. A Line Made by Walking. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017.

Yeats, William Butler. The Collected Poems. Ed. Richard J. Finneran. Second edition. New York: Scribner, 1996.

by Marcel van den Haak

A few weeks ago, the acclaimed film director Bernardo Bertolucci died. He not only wrote and directed such grand epic films as Novecento (1976) and The Last Emperor (1987) and the stylistically innovative Il conformista (1970), but also the highly erotic Last Tango in Paris. In this 1972 film, a 45-year-old recently turned widower played by Marlon Brando and a 19-year-old engaged woman, Maria Schneider, have a series of sexual encounters in an empty apartment that they both wish to rent, without exchanging personal information. It was very controversial at the time – and it still is, yet for different reasons. This shift in moral concerns marks a broader turn in discussions on art that I will explore.

The film’s graphic sex scenes, the anonymity of the encounters and even the overt bisexuality of the young lead actress led to much moral condemnation at the time. Wikipedia gives an astonishing overview. Some critics called it “pornography disguised as art”; British censors gave it an X rating, which was still too light for some conservatives; New York moviegoers were threatened by bystanders calling them ‘perverts’ and ‘homos’; several countries such as Spain banned the film completely; and in Italy the main actors involved (including Bertolucci and Brando) were even given suspended prison sentences.[1]

At the same time, the movie was hailed by critics and audiences as a ground-breaking masterpiece. One of the most famous film critics ever, Pauline Kael, wrote one of her most famous reviews on precisely this film. She gave an in-depth interpretation of the story, particularly of the innovative look at sex in film – not portraying it as merely a mechanical act but as the expression of the characters’ drives – as well as the powerful debunking of American masculinity. She discussed the gliding camera style and the “sequences that are like arias,” and she reasonably compared Bertolucci to many great filmmakers of the past: Renoir, Vigo, Carné, Von Sternberg, Ophüls.[2] Other reviewers, such as Roger Ebert, later added the realness of the acting, including coughs and disconnected sentences.[3] In
other words, the reviewers touched upon all those elements of a piece of art that make it just that, art.

Last Tango in Paris is a fine example of an artwork in which aesthetics and ethics collide. In the art world, it is common practice that art is judged solely with aesthetic criteria, such as the innovativeness in form and style, the complexity or depth of the content, and perhaps the authenticity of what is portrayed. Moral judgements, that others in society might have, should be put aside. This idea originated in the nineteenth century. It stems from a misconception of Kant’s and Schiller’s ideas on the distinction between the Beautiful (aesthetics) and the Good (ethics). These great, eighteenth-century German thinkers analytically separated these two concepts, yet without disconnecting them entirely: the Beautiful should be at the benefit of the Good, art is meant to improve human beings. Thinkers in post-revolutionary France adopted this distinction between domains, but interpreted it as a full autonomy of the arts, regardless of possible moral benefits or objections. Art should be for art’s sake, not for morality’s (or money’s) sake.[4] This idea lies at the core of modernism, which reached its height in the early twentieth century, such as in literature (Woolf), visual arts (Kandinsky) and music (Stravinsky). It is still strong today, although societal benefits of the arts are often deemed important, too. Strikingly, Pauline Kael compared both the shocked and the astonished reactions at the first US screening of Last Tango in Paris in 1972 with the riot at the premiere of Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps in 1913, often exemplified
as the ultimate artistic revolution against the bourgeois establishment.

This maxim – art for art’s sake, form over content, aesthetics over ethics – serves as an ideal defence mechanism against any moral objections towards art. Art is a free place in which the rules of society ‘out there’ do not matter. Within the walls of a museum or a theatre you can do whatever you like; the audience will perceive it as something sacred in itself: Art. Moreover, art is the place to push the boundaries, to break taboos, to act like an iconoclast. Conservative, reactionary, religious and prudish critics can object all they want, but in the art world we don’t care.

This ‘system’ works as long as the artists see themselves as progressive – as is often the case – and their moral critics whom they can ignore as conservative. Bertolucci was a Marxist and an iconoclast, whereas his critics propagated family values and resisted licentious sex. What we see lately, however, is a steep rise of moral objections against artworks from a progressive standpoint. Art that is deemed sexist, racist, homophobic or culturally appropriative has increasingly come under fire. Art can be aesthetically beautiful, a comedian’s joke can have an original punchline, but when it in one way or the other denounces women, people of colour or LGBT persons, it is put under a magnifying glass. Often it is not the art itself that has an issue, but the artist who produced it. Can we, for instance, still watch a Kevin Spacey movie without second thoughts? Art works are also criticised in retrospect. Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute is stripped of its most misogynist and racist scenes, an 1896 painting by J.W. Waterhouse was recently removed from Manchester Art Gallery because of similarities with #MeToo situations (though this soon turned out to be a publicity stunt); and even Friends fans are re-evaluating their favourite yet homophobic episodes from the 1990s. Of course, such debates are not entirely new – e.g., already in 1972 a feminist group criticised Last Tango for “male domination”, as the same Wikipedia page shows – but the strength, scope and impact of the current discussions are expanding.

Another point of this type of criticism is the way an artwork came into being. Here we return to Last Tango in Paris. Decades after the film’s release, in 2006, actress Maria Schneider revealed how Bernardo Bertolucci and Marlon Brando had sexually humiliated her, particularly in an anal rape scene.[5] Without her prior knowledge (or only just before) and certainly without her consent, Brando had used butter as a lubricant. Schneider felt raped and held Bertolucci accountable. Hence, Last Tango became controversial again. This story has come back in the limelight several
times: after Schneider’s death in 2011, and particularly when a semi-remorseful interview with Bertolucci on Dutch TV (College Tour, 2013) had found its international way in 2016.[6] He stated that he felt guilty towards her, but that he did not regret his decision. He wanted to capture her pure
reaction rather than let her act humiliation and rage. Hence, he expressed his guilt as a person, not as an artist. And he explained further: “To make movies, sometimes, to obtain something, I think that we have to be completely free.”

In other words, in order to make something aesthetically beautiful, in this case something authentic, one can put ethical issues aside. It is the modernist defence mechanism against moral objections to art that we got to know so well in the past century. However, when the critics are from the same – progressive – side of the spectrum as most artists are, this standpoint gets more uncomfortable. Moreover, if participants within the art world itself are protesting, such as actors Jessica Chastain and Chris Evans after seeing the Bertolucci interview, it seems to get untenable.[7] Many artists still emphasize the autonomy of their art (“we have to be completely free”) when encountered with moral criticisms on sexism and the like, and they refuse to ‘censor’ themselves. Some even regretfully say that prudishness is back, only a few decades after the ‘liberating’ 1970s, without realising that the current critique is of an entirely different type.

However, more and more artists are taking these increasing critiques into account, be it out of fear for Twitter storms and consumer boycotts – yes, social media can greatly escalate the impact of such critiques – or due to true awareness. This might differ per occasion, but in general, I sense that a shift is taking place. Can we still defend art as a purely autonomous place that does not have to abide to the norms of the rest of society? Are the current debates putting an end to this modernist paradigm that has endured for so long? Or is it just a strong but temporary storm? For now, these are open questions.

So, can we still watch Last Tango in Paris? In her obituary, Dutch cultural columnist Joyce Roodnat – herself a #MeToo accuser of another recently deceased acclaimed filmmaker, Claude Lanzmann – thinks we can: “Thank you Bernardo Bertolucci. Your films changed my life. I forgive you everything.”[8] Well, that might go a bit far, but I’d say we can enjoy the film, but with reservation. Nevertheless, present-day directors will no longer get away with it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Tango_in_Paris

[2] https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/834-last-tango-in-paris

[3] https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-last-tango-in-paris-1972

[4] Gene H. Bell-Villada (1996), Art for art’s sake and literary life. How
politics and markets helped shape the ideology & culture of aestheticism
1790-1990. Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press.

[5] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-469646/I-felt-raped-Brando.html

[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMl4xCGcdfA

[7] https://twitter.com/jes_chastain/status/804966641998168064 and https://twitter.com/chrisevans/status/805091489814548480

[8] https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2018/11/28/mijn-laatste-tango-met-bernardo-a2779325

By László Munteán

This coming July will mark fifty years since the legendary landing on the Moon by the crew of the Apollo 11 on July 20, 1969. Although the upcoming anniversary may not yet be at the forefront of our minds, Damien Chazelle’s First Man, featuring Ryan Gosling as the astronaut Neil Armstrong, is without doubt an early tribute to the mission. Considering the difficulties Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin faced when trying to plant the American flag into the dusty soil of the Moon, an event yielding one of the most iconic photographs in history, the absence of this symbolic event in Chazelle’s film is rather conspicuous. This is not to blame the filmmaker, however. Quite the contrary, in a new era of America First, this lacuna in a Hollywood blockbuster is rather refreshing insofar as it allows Armstrong’s psychological voyage as a man traumatized by the loss of his daughter to take center stage.

As First Man is still playing in movie theaters around the world, images about the successful landing of NASA’s spacecraft InSight on the surface of Mars on November 26 have gone viral. Among a series of objectives, the spacecraft is tasked with gathering information about the material composition of Mars. Instead of drilling a hole for a flagpole, InSight sends a probe deep into Martian soil. After years of trial and error, such an
achievement is, both literally and metaphorically, groundbreaking. The
belligerent rhetoric of Cold War space race that underpinned the Apollo
expeditions and left six American flags on the surface of the Moon has long
been replaced by the legacy of international cooperation in the service of
science.

In light of First Man’s silence on the flag raising ceremony and incoming footage of InSight’s activities on Mars, it is particularly intriguing to examine how NASA, a national agency of aerospace research, positions itself in its new promotional video entitled “We Are NASA.”
Less than three minutes long, the video opens with a montage of archival footage of emblematic launches accompanied by bombastic music and a fragment of Kennedy’s famous 1962 speech about sending a man to the Moon. A male voice reminiscent of the one used in Hollywood trailers declares that “we are building the next chapter of American exploration.” This chapter entails “returning to the Moon to stay so we can go beyond to Mars.”

While the rhetoric of “exploration” and the “pioneering spirit” is deeply rooted in the American notion of the frontier and coast-to-coast expansion, a notion which Kennedy upgraded by speaking of space as the final frontier, the voiceover also informs us, so as to underscore the aims for the new chapter, that “This is not hypothetical. This is not about flags and  footprints. This is about sustainable science.” At this point, we see
children looking at a photograph of the Apollo 11 Lunar Module with the American flag. The visual and textual rhetoric that unfolds in this sequence is laden with tension. On one hand, NASA takes pride in its achievements over the past sixty years and gladly embraces the vocabulary of the frontier and exploration. On the other hand, the new chapter of exploration on which it embarks seems to continue with a sentiment that absorbs us in Chazelle’s representation of the Moon landing in First Man: while acknowledging the legacy of American scientific ingenuity and the heroic act of the astronauts, the flag is withheld from anchoring this sentiment exclusively onto the fabric of the nation, as did the 1969 documentary Footprints on the Moon, featuring Wernher von Braun as narrator. If the gesture of refraining from using the national symbol in First Man brings to the fore Armstrong’s personality, “We Are NASA” re-inscribes the rhetoric of the all-American frontier into sustainable science as a means by which “to go farther than humanity has ever been.” At a time when scientific insights are often dismissed as fake at the presidential level, NASA’s new promotional video unmoors scientific goals from nationalism and inscribes science as a national interest.

Music streaming service Spotify has been criticized for making a ‘mindless’ way of listening to music possible. Unlike a record, which you have to turn over, or a cd that stops playing after a while, on Spotify you can endlessly stream one song after the other. The other day, however, a song started playing on my Discover Weekly playlist that utterly grabbed my attention. The song was ‘Father Neptune’ by Connie Converse. It sounded like some home recording by a contemporary ‘New Weird America’-type singer. I
listened to it again, completely struck by the way it sounded and its
self-deprecating, and highly amusing, lyrics. The song features a woman singing about her sailor husband, who quite openly loves the sea more than his wife: ‘When my man goes to sea / He steps so high and free / I think I know as I watch him go / That he has no need for me, for me’. Despite feeling rejected, she prays to ‘Father Neptune’ to keep her husband safe while he’s away at sea. Throughout, the song uses rhyme and repetition to great comic effect, and the delivery and the silly guitar riff in
between the verses make it all the more humorous. Then, there’s a verse that adds great depth to the song: ‘I know it’s a boat / That keeps him afloat / But I like to think it’s me / And if it were not for this / I would sink / To the depths / Of the sea’. All of a sudden, this quirky old-timey song about a sailor and his wife becomes about people’s ability to tell themselves little lies to make their day-to-day existence bearable – and, even worse, to know
that they’re doing this, while continuing to fool themselves nonetheless.

Intrigued by the song, I looked up the album on Spotify. Based on the quirky album artwork and the name of the artist, I thought this must be some vintage-inspired contemporary musician. A Google search revealed, however, that she was a singer from the 1950s, with a fascinating life story. The first hit – her Wikipedia page – tells you her full name (Elizabeth Eaton ‘Connie’ Converse) and her dates (born August 3, 1924 – disappeared 1974). Still further intrigued, I started to read more about this singer, who turned out to be a recently ‘(re)discovered’, but still relatively little-known musician.

The main sources of information about Connie Converse’s life are a number of online articles and a 40-minute documentary called We Lived Alone: The Connie Converse Documentary by Andrea Kannes (2014). In these articles, the main facts about her life and her recent rediscovery are listed over and over: she was born in New Hampshire, won a scholarship to Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, and left the college after two years to move to New York City. There, she wrote and recorded songs in her Greenwich Village apartment and performed at friends’ dinner parties, accompanying herself on guitar. Halfway through the 1950s, she recorded a set of songs in the kitchen of artist and entertainer Gene Deitch, who held music gatherings at his house. While Deitch and others tried to help her become well-known, her career as a musician never took off. In 1961 – the year Bob Dylan moved to Greenwich Village, and after around 12 years of trying to become well-known for her music – she gave up composing and moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where her brother lived. Here, she got a job at the university as editor of an academic journal. Then, in 1974, after writing a set of letters to friends and family, which could be construed as ‘goodbye letters’, she drove off, never to be seen again. To this day, nobody knows what happened to her – whether she ended her life, as her brother suggests on Kannes’ documentary, or whether she decided to start afresh somewhere else. Then, in 2004, Gene Deitch played some of Converse’s songs on a music historian’s radio show, and two listeners were inspired to set up a record label for the sole purpose of making Converse’s music known to the
public. Five years later, a collection of her music was released as How Sad, How Lovely (which you can listen to here: https://connieconverse.bandcamp.com/ or purchase here: http://www.squirrelthing.com/artists/connie-converse).

The common narrative in all the articles is that Connie Converse can be seen as a ‘singer-songwriter’ long before Bob Dylan was doing his thing in Greenwich Village, and as a ‘female singer-songwriter’, writing cleverly composed songs with confessional lyrics, long before anybody like Vashti Bunyan, Karen Dalton or Joni Mitchell came along.

As the articles show us, Connie Converse’s story has all the ingredients for creating a fierce and devoted fanbase: her story is repeatedly told as the story of somebody who was lonely-but-brilliant, independent and intellectual, and who seemed to live in the wrong place at the wrong time. There is a sense that she was ‘wrongfully’ overlooked during her lifetime, and that the large body of work she left behind (only a part of which is currently known to the public) is in desperate need of being uncovered,
written about and recognized. Also, because her songs don’t easily fit into any genre, she functions as a blank screen on which people can project their own labels: she has been classified, for instance, as ‘[a] prototype of the DIY artist’ [1], or as ‘a “singer-songwriter” before that term or style existed’. [2] Labels such as these create the distinct feeling, among her fans, that she was ‘ahead of her times’, which is another feature of the ‘textbook cult artist’ [3] that Connie Converse has been described as.

One thing the writers have in common is that they are all completely bowled over by her music. Also, many of them seem glad that Connie Converse’s music is ‘finally’ getting the recognition it deserves. And here I have to agree: Connie Converse’s music is simply great. The chords are unusual, the lyrics tell wonderful stories, and the songs are incredibly moving, as well as very, very funny. Her repertoire is very diverse, and includes songs in which she humorously criticizes the restrictions women faced in the 1950s (‘Roving Woman’), profound songs about loneliness and isolation (‘One By One’) and songs that feature surrealist humour, like ‘Unknown (A Little Louder, Love)’, which starts: ‘Once there was a trumpeter / Blew his love a ballad / That was not enough for her / So he blew her a lobster salad’. She plays around with rhythm, melody and pauses to create emotional effect, and while telling stories about domesticity and love, her songs also explore the darker side of life. This goes, for instance, for ‘Talkin’ Like You (Two Tall Mountains)’. This song is about a woman living on her own in a valley that people call ‘lonesome’, who states that she isn’t ‘lonesome’ at all. After the opening, there is a beautiful melody and the speaker sings about a whippoorwill ‘sitting on [her] windowsill’ and a ‘brook running by [her] kitchen door’. We get the idea she is perfectly happy being there by herself. Then, there is a humorous twist: it turns out that everything there is ‘talking’ at her, like her lover used to do. ‘See that brook
running by my kitchen door / Well, it couldn’t talk no more / If it was you //
Up that tree there’s sort of a squirrel thing / Sounds just like we did when we were quarrelling / In the yard I keep a pig or two / They drop in for dinner like you used to do’. This is the reason she isn’t lonely there: she has
all sorts of creatures and things reminding her of her annoying ex-lover. By
the time the song ends, she no longer ‘goes’ to the valley, as she sings in the beginning of the song, but ‘lives’ there: ‘In between two tall mountains / There’s a place they call “lonesome” / Don’t see why they call it lonesome / I’m never lonesome now I live there’. Despite the humour, there’s a sense here that the speaker can’t escape her somewhat tormented mental state – and that she is kidding herself in thinking that she isn’t lonely. Several of the songs on How Sad, How Lovely feature characters like this, with complex inner lives.

Of course, Connie Converse’s story is not unique. Elements of it are similar to the stories of singers like Sibylle Baier or Eva Cassidy. Also, music critics have pointed out similarities between her music and that of her female contemporaries, such as Peggy Seeger and Susan Reed. One reason why Connie Converse’s story is interesting, though, is that it shows us how a new discovery can change existing periodizations and, with this, our view of music history. Indeed, the ‘discovery’ of Connie Converse sheds new light on singer-songwriters and folk artists such as Bob Dylan, female
singer-songwriters and their precursors, and the music scene in 1950s New York. This reminds us, once again, that the periods that scholars, music historians and journalists refer to in their work, and that we teach to students, are not fixed entities with clear-cut boundaries, but are artificial constructions, made on the basis of the cases at our disposal. What’s more, the story of Connie Converse shows us that becoming ‘famous’ does not necessarily depend on talent, but relies on a combination of many factors: connections, reviewers, record labels, music journalists, scholars, luck, and timing.

[1] In press releases for Howard Fishman’s play on Converse’s life, A Star Has Burnt My Eye (2015).

[2] Spinning on Air podcast (2009, https://www.wnyc.org/story/62099-connie-converse-walking-in-the-dark/).

[3] New York Times review (2016) of Fishman’s play (https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/11/theater/a-star-has-burnt-my-eye-review.html).

By Roel Smeets

These months, research brought me to autumnal Montréal, Canada, where I am a visiting scholar at McGill University’s .txtLAB. Montréal is the geographical centre of cultural analytics, a quickly evolving discipline that uses the methods of data science for the study of culture. The young and blossoming Journal of Cultural Analytics is hosted here, which is one the leading platforms in this field of study.

In the cold and rainy atmospheres of the city I daily think and talk about devising and fine tuning methods to analyse novels on a larger scale than literary scholars commonly do. I like to think that I am not doing this because I am perverted by a neoliberal logic in which everything, including works of art, have to be measured and classified. I rather tell myself that my algorithmic approach to the contemporary Dutch novel serves a higher goal: revealing patterns of literary representation that are not visible to the human eye. Turning art into data thus becomes a means to a noble end –
or so I believe.

Last weekend, I took a break from research and went to see Julian Rosefeldt’s video installation Manifesto (2015), which was exhibited at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (MAC). In the first room of the exhibition, excerpts from a diverse collection of manifestos are shown on panels, ranging from Marx’ and Engels’ Communist Manifesto (1848), to Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Manifesto of Futurism (1909), to Lars
von Trier’s and Thomas Vinterberg’s Dogme 95 Manifesto (1995). In the next room, thirteen short movies are shown in which actress Cate Blanchett utters lines from these manifesto’s while performing various roles such as factory worker, homeless man and schoolteacher.

Manifesto: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOA6ramO1aw

Upon entering the room, I hear Blanchett’s voice orchestrated through a cacophony of sound. I hear the words from the different manifesto’s being uttered all at once. At first glance, it feels as if every short movie expresses radically different statements on the workings and uses of art, culture and society. As if everyone disagrees. But at the end of each short movie, out of the blue, a moment of apparent harmony emerges. All of Blanchett’s characters start to synchronously utter words that all sound very much alike despite their difference in meaning. It is as if all manifesto writers are suddenly on the same page, as if there is nothing but one shared belief, although it remains unclear what that might entail.

The first video features lines from the Communist Manifesto. The chief point of focus lies with the words “All that is solid melts into air”, taken from the
first section of the manifesto. Unhampered by what Marx and Engels might have meant by this, the words serve as metaphor for the seemingly inviolability of the idealistic convictions of all the manifesto’s portrayed in the exhibition. Listening to the concepts and ideas expressed in each individual manifesto, I had the experience of listening to clearly defined, impregnable beliefs, carved in stone. But listening to all these manifestos at once, the apparent solidity of each manifesto melted into air. What seemed solid at first, turned out to be unstable, relative, hilarious almost.

I see Rosefeldt’s Manifesto (2015) as a metaphor for my own research practices. Turning culture into data creates an illusion of solidity. Numbers instead of words, statistics instead of speculation. But a numerical representation of a novel is still a representation, a perspective, a point of view, and therefore not necessarily more true than other representations. I picture a future exhibition where excerpts from dissertations are read out loud with an air of solidity, seemingly disagreeing, but sounding alike. Words on a page melting into thin air.