the universal baroque

I’ve long been a casual and very amateur fan of emblems. I believe it goes back to Ian Hamilton Finlay’s forays into the genre with his Heroic Emblems, and other of his lapidary experiments with word and picture. I’ve fashioned my own emblems on various occasions, and frequently bring emblems and emblem-making into my teaching. I try to stay current with the literature, at least as manifested in the scholarly journal Emblematica.

In that journal’s volume 17 appeared Michael Bath’s review of Peter Davidson’s The Universal Baroque (Manchester UP, 2007), that led to my reading the book. Before presenting some thoughts on the latter, however, I should provide at least some description of emblems. A few pages in my own website are devoted to the topic, starting here, and from those pages I borrow this sketch —

Emblems were a genre that deployed word and image for rhetorical, ethical and/or educational purposes. Their economy of expression typically took the three-part form of motto, allegorical image and explication, that served to contain their baroque piling-on of detail in a tight, formalist forcefield.

Emblems came into being as a genre with the unauthorized publication in 1531, of Emblematum Liber, which incorporated epigrammatic writing that Andrea Alciato had compiled some years earlier. The Augsburg edition drove Alciato to prepare a second (and now authorized) edition for publication in Paris in 1534. This incorporated pictures and a different organization, and together with later editions of Alciato, who wrote 212 emblems in all, enjoyed great acceptance. Over 150 editions of Alciati’s collection, alone, appeared over the next century, and something like 2000 emblem books were published in the heyday of the genre. They were used in religious and other education, but also by artists, architects, decorators and others as visual dictionaries or pattern books. The most famous in this regard was probably Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia (1593).

Emblems are open, not closed. The cut-up, paste-up, juxtapositional nature of the emblematic mode lends itself to new occasions of inquiry and meaning. Now back to Davidson’s book.

The Universal Baroque finds in the baroque not a style nor period, but an open system of inclusion, a system of international discourses, a way of proceeding, a symbolic language, an agreed set of conventions overriding all of the alegiances of religious confession or nationality which have come to seem, since the turn of the nineteenth century, unavoidable descriptors of all cultural endeavour. (1) In Davidson’s baroque, there is no center, no metropolis. Its practitioners might be anywhere and, he finds, are often at their most creative in the margins — Scotland, China, Mexico, Brazil. The nation state is the enemy of the baroque, he writes at the start of his chapter on British Baroque.

Davidson derives some of his argument and evidence from Giovanni Careri’s stunning (and stunningly beautiful) Baroques (2002; Princeton UP, 2003), including Careri’s discussion of the mestizo character of baroque art in the Americas. Davidson takes this up and argues that the baroque is fundamentally mixed, hybrid; it delights in the marvelous and in curiosity, in queer juxtapositions. It takes its selections from both the vernacular and the international, the indigenous and global. It is oriented to antiquities plural, those known and those not yet uncovered. The baroque is an open system that operates with variations. Its practitioners moved between, or within, competing frames of reference. (85)

He introduces twelve aphoristic theses on the baroque, that are developed throughout the book. A couple of favorites : (1) Baroque art is never at a loss: it has evolved ways of dealing with reality; (2) The Baroque has no metropolis; and (5) The Baroque has reached the last possible point in eclecticism. Each of these and the other theses is followed up by an elaboration, almost in the form of corollaries. For example, to Thesis 1, The baroque system can find an artistic response for any occasion... it need not be original, but it must be accomplished. (p13)

The largest part of the book is devoted to instances of baroque literature, art, architecture and music in England, Ireland and Scotland, in the New World, and in the East (China, Japan, Goa). It is at the frontiers, Davidson writes, that the baroque arts become more interesting and compelling. There is much about the Jesuits in here. As for England, Davidson shows that much of the evidence is in Latin which, because not in the nation-building tongue, has been expurgated from the canon. (Metaphysical is a way of having a baroque that is native, unconnected to the continent or anywhere else.) He finds energetic examples of baroque literature in the English, Scottish and Irish diaspora on the continent, and also notes how many Scots doctors of medicine, theologians and jurists sought their education abroad. Davidson’s examples were almost completely unknown to me, and to follow his account required frequent reference to the internet, as well as Careri’s book, and Gauvin Alexander Bailey’s (very readable) Art on the Jesuit Missions in Asia and Latin America, 1542-1773 (1999). Many of my own delicious.com bookmarks tagged baroque are the result of searches triggered by Davidson — Giardino Buonaccorsi east of Macerata, near the Adriatic; the Sedlec Ossuary; the composer Doménico Zípoli (1688-1726).

Why did this book so amaze me? Probably because I like lost or forgotten or marginalized things. Probably because I gather and compile until overwhelmed by my own mess, whose secretary I become. The Universal Baroque came into my view as I was contemplating Umberto Eco’s list book, and thinking about compilations. The emblematic mind seeks to select and deploy unlike things in a composition: parataxis, hypotaxis, any device that can yield a thought or idea from the congeries, for rhetorical and cognitive purposes. It might be said that (graphic) designers also seek to bring significance out of the chaotic, by classificatory and visual means. And too, I see the baroque in many (not all) of the artists that interest me, including Ian Kiaer, whose work I became aware of around the time I was reading Davidson.

And more — Davidson draws from Eugenio D’Ors and others to argue for a new map of the baroque world. He would replace that chart in which lines of influence radiate out from European capitals to their colonial holdings, to another that would look much more like a net, whose nodal points or knots connect to every other knot, the medium being Latin and the shared visual systems of iconography and emblem ultimately derived from a plurality of antiquities. (183) As I think about education in the arts, say as discussed by Ken Lum in his Dear Steven essay in the collection Art School (Propositions for the 21st Century) (MIT Press, 2009), the orientation cannot be solely to the center: What students need to be taught is that art is about making everything in the world relevant. (339)

I’d encountered another Davidson book years ago, his collaboration with artist Hugh Buchanan entitled The eloquence of shadows : a book of emblems = emblemata nova (Fife : Thirdpart, 1994). Its text (including introduction) is in parallel Latin and English. I’ve shown it to students for 15 years now, as evidence that the emblem form remains alive even in our day.

index rerum

For Material Cultures 2010, Edinburgh, this proposal has been accepted under the heading readers and reading practices —

Indexing as autobiographical practice in the 19th century :
an examination of copies of John Todd’s Index Rerum

John Todd’s Index Rerum (1833, and much reprinted) was a personal database system designed to facilitate indexing of all the reading done by the student and the professional man. The system was borrowed from John Locke’s own. Key (index) words would be entered on the page whose two letters at the top — the first for a word’s initial, the second for the first vowel following that initial — matched that word. As a one-volume index to many volumes, Todd’s Index Rerum was obviously suited to the needs of ministers, lawyers, and physicians, among others. It was widely used.

And yet only two of the eight copies that I have closely examined used the book exclusively for its designated indexing purpose. Instead, we find short and lengthy extracts; personal resolutions; diaries; pressed flowers; autographs; ready reckoner data and computations for mill and other engineering work; drafts of (unsent?) letters; a personal memoir. We find multiple users, in cases where a daughter or widow takes over the unused or lightly-used book of father or late husband. We find experiments in writing one’s signature. We find receipts, drafts of poetry, and other matter loosely inserted.

How are these various practices — all captured in these Index Rerum — to be understood? This small sampling represents only a tiny reading experience database, but the reading is woven in with other practices. Taken together, I argue, these activities were instrumental in developing and maintaining a personal identity, one that indexing helped assure was connected to a larger intellectual milieu.
My reading takes into account critical contemporary views of Todd’s Index Rerum (there were competing systems, of course), and is informed in part by recent scholarship on what may be its closest analogue, zibaldoni (copybooks) of Renaissance Italy.

Reference: some scans, transcriptions and ongoing analysis of these copies is presented here.

telegraphic brevity

from Notes and Queries, 5th series, volume 10, 28 December 1878 —

Telegraphic Brevity.—The art of concisely expressing ideas is worthy of acquisition by all who write for the press. But the Queen has gone ahead of them all by her pithy telegram sent to Princess Louise from Windsor Castle, December 1, Delighted at reception. Say so. On this text a man writes in the New York Sun:—
Were there a medal or chromo on offer for the tersest comprehensive telegram, Queen Victoria would probably win it by her Sunday’s Delighted at reception. Say so. This despatch quite surpasses in compactness Caesar’s famous Veni, vidi, vici, since two-thirds of that was plainly surplusage, vici being all that was required. When cable despatches are paid for word by word, to combine fulness and brevity in them is a triumph of economy; and to transmit fully and fairly the Queen’s two distinct burdens of information and command in fewer than five words would puzzle most people. At all events, to exceed this royal brevity without sacrificing sense or sound would occupy an amount of time (which is money) that might cease to make success economical. Had the Queen and her daughter been experts in the tongue of the former’s great-grandfather, she might have accumulated into one formidable German polysyllable, several inches long, the latest domestic or political news; but, using only the Queen’s English, as she did, we think her clearly entitled to the championship.
John E. Norcross. Brooklyn, U.S.

A Boston Transcript article looks for further economy in the Queen’s despatch —

The Queen’s dispatch to the Princess Louise is pronounced extravagant, the last two words being superfluous, since the Princess would certainly Say so, and the second and third being equally unnecessary, since the reception was the only thing at which the Queen could have been delighted. Moreover, the dispatch should have been sent at night rates, and the Queen by neglecting to be economical has set a bad example to Canada and its new rulers.

It would appear, however, that the Princess did not say so, hence the Queen’s instruction.

on dotting the i's and crossing the t's

One encounters variants of this expression in the introductions of early telegraphic codes. Thus :

Be extremely cautious in writing the words in a plain hand to the dotting of i’s and the crossing of t’s. Invariably write the T at the beginning of a word thus, T, as printed, or thus t, to prevent the operator mistaking it for an F. Use no hyphens.
John Wills, his Electro-magnetic telegraph vocabulary, or, Condensing correspondent, designed to communicate commercial and other general intelligence, in abbreviated form and at small expense. Baltimore, 1846

and
In sending messages in cypher, write each word legibly. Begin each word with a capital letter, be sure to dot the i’s and cross the t’s and no mistake can occur.
George W. Phillips, his Telegraphic cypher for transmitting commercial intelligence, &c. by telegraph or otherwise. Third edition, revised and corrected. Cincinnati, 1860

In telegraphic communication, one codeword might unpack into a sentence-length's intelligence. A clerk’s or operator’s misreading could occasion a failed transaction, even significant loss. Nor would there have been much context to help; nor was much redundancy built into these early codes, as there would be subsequently. (Though Wills provided figures and letters — indicating columns and rows in a table, respectively — to follow codewords, where usage warranted. Example: the codeword Drumming might also be expressed as Drumming—3—U.)

telegraphic (swimming) meets

My younger son is a swimmer. I swim and am absorbed by telegraphy. And so Spalding’s 1935 Athletic Library handbook containing rules for National Telegraphic Meets came my way.

I wondered if telegraphic meets had appeared as a means to save travel costs, and even if they might provide a solution should high fuel costs and an eroded economy make a dent on the swim meet world, in which parents SUV and otherwise motor their swimmers many miles to weekend meets. But no. Telegraphic meets in the 1920s and 30s were motivated not by economy but rather by gender politics and principle.

There was tremendous pressure, from within the ranks of women physical educators, to reduce and even avoid competition, as competition was not viewed as consistent with encouraging physical activity among all women. There may also have been concern to avoid excesses that had emerged in men's intercollegiate sports. Solutions included “play” and “sports” days, as well as telegraphic meets which latter provided a means, particularly in the 1930s, for schools to engage in competition in a “form that by its nature was non-intensive and precluded emotionalism and spectators.” (Gerber, 1975: 4) They also avoided fatiguing travel over long distances.

In “play days,” athletes from several colleges would meet for a day of competition and socializing; here, mixed teams were formed of players from different colleges, to ensure against competition between colleges. Cahn (1994: 66) explains that “sports days” were more competitive, allowing schools to “form teams in advance, practice several times, and then gather to compete in a single day or weekend of competition.” It is not clear to me that either “play” or “sports” days were formed for swimming. But “splash parties” (found at Radcliffe in 1960-61) certainly would have been!

How did telegraphic meets actually work? “The students of one college put forth their best efforts and then wired their times and distances to their rivals at another school…”, writes Allen Guttmann (1991: 137). But it is not clear from the Official Rules that telegraphy was involved at all. Instead, we find instructions for recording of times on Results Blanks “a carbon copy being made,” which would be sent to a Regional Sponsor, who would in turn send these forms, and tabulations thereof, on to the National Sponsor, not later than April 3. Were the “results blanks” designed for telegraphic messages? These reports would be sent by “night letter”, a reduced-rate class of telegram introduced ca. 1915, where messages would be accepted up to 2:00 am for delivery during morning of ensuing business day, plain English (no code).

There would have been no instantaneous reporting during a meet : no reporting of split times in the way that innings or even at-bats in a baseball game might have been, or results of a horseracing heat. There could have been nothing “live” about the reporting of the short events that were run in meets lasting under 90 minutes (max), taking place in different pools and possibly at different times of a day. The official system required collection of data at a central point, where it was tabulated, vetted, and sent out (by telegraph? by post?).

There is some evidence — and I'll continue to look for more — about the use of telegraphs, at least in non-National meets. The Radcliffe News of May 28, 1926, reports on a meet “which was conducted between Radcliffe and Smith by telegraph [and] was an innovation here. As soon as a race was completed here the first, second, and third places were sent to the gym office, from which they were telephoned to the Cambridge Western Union, with whom Radcliffe had previously arranged a special wire to Northhamption. Smith did the same from Northampton.” Surely times would have been telegraphed, in addition to placings. The events were short: 40 yards free style, 40 yards breast, 20 yards back stroke, the so-called “plunge”*, 20 yards free style, 20 yards side stroke, and a relay. The final score was Smith 50, Radcliffe 12. This was a friendly meet arranged between two sister colleges, and does not relate to the National Telegraphic Meets in which neither school participated. Still, reports of results in between events might have motivated swimmers (and plungers!) in subsequent events.

What were the events in the National Telegraphic Meets?



National Records could also be kept for the 220 yard free style, but apparently not for Telegraphic Meets.

The Spalding’s book provides times and points for the top five finishers in every event (combined, and for Major and Minor colleges), and long (75+) and short (60-75) course records. Amazingly, five out of a total of 46 colleges competing in the 1935 National Telegraphic Meet were disqualified. The disqualified institutions might not have met reporting deadlines, or certified their pools or timing. It might also be that there were doubts about reported times. Jane Fauntz Manske (Olympic swimmer in 1928 and diver in 1932), states in a 1987 interview that “We had a swimming team but we had what we called telegraphic meets. We would swim our event against the clock, and then we would telegraph our times to the other schools. So who knows who was telling the truth or who was really champion.” And then there is the insistence on “scrupulous honesty” for “competition by communication,” in the Handbook language.

fast forward —
What might a telegraphic meet be today, using current technology? Could telegraphic meets provide an alternative to traveling to distant meets, multiplied each weekend in long and short course seasons by many thousands of swimmers across the country? Could they allow a sense of real competition to participants? And if all of this is too grandiose, does there remain at least some place for telegraphic competition in swimming?

I think that telegraphic meets might have a future, even if only a limited one. I assume this future would involve rethinking so-called swimmer treadmills like the Endless Pool or the Swimex 400-OS. With these devices, one swims in place, held not by a harness — as was done historically — but by swimming against a current generated by pump or paddlewheel. At least two things would need to be developed : a means of registering swimmer speed, and a means of communicating one swimmer’s speed to another swimmer — in a visual or some other representation. For the first, I imagine that waterflow speed would be controlled by the swimmer’s (telemetered?) action; water flow speed would proxy swimmer speed. For the second, I envision flat screen displays, along both lengthwise sides of the pool, that would show the remote swimmer(s) in action. (Naturally, swimmers would be video'ed as well, for transmission to their competitors' displays.) The respective displayed swimmers would be shown falling behind, or pulling ahead — and even out of view entirely — based on their telemetered speeds relative to each other’s.

I don’t see these as supplanting conventional swim meets and competitions, but as paralleling these amongst individuals with access to the swimmer treadmills. I can imagine “live” virtual competitions between swimmers at great distances from each other — say, at Antarctic and Arctic science bases. I can also imagine these telemetered swimmer treadmills as providing the visually impaired with an equal playing field with sighted competitors; here, cues about the performance of competitors would not be visual but audible, coded to signal changes in relative position and perhaps also indicating elapsed distance, and so on.

sources —
Susan K. Cahn, Coming on Strong : Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Women's Sport (1994) here

Ellen Gerber, “The Controlled Development of Collegiate Sport for Women, 1923-1936.” Journal of Sport History 2:1 (1975): 1-28 here

Allen Guttmann, Women's Sports : A History (1991) here

Interview with Jane Fauntz Manske (1928 Amsterdam Olympics, 200 meter breast stroke; 1932 Los Angeles Olympics, springboard diving, Bronze Medalist) by George A. Hodak (July 1987) here (The inline link to this interview, above, is to a family site, that includes a photo of Fauntz.)

The patent literature on swimming-related equipment, such as J Marwick's “exercising swimming tank” (US1,630,797, 1927) can be reviewed via espacenet, using the IPC classification A63B69/12 and a keyword like “swimming” or “tank” in the title and abstract field, and limiting years as need be. View original document, then save full document (as a pdf). The classification denotes “arrangements in swimming pools for teaching swimming [N: or for training].”

and —
from the Official Rules 1936 Third Annual National Intercollegiate Telegraphic Swimming Meet, this introduction —

“The annual National Intercollegiate Telegraphic Swimming Meets have evolved from a genuine interest in and appreciation of proficiency in swimming among university and college women throughout the country. As planned and organized they give women, in good standing academically, who enjoy swimming races, an opportunity to compete and compare times with other university and college women.
Practices other than those of scrupulous honesty are entirely foreign to the whole idea of competition by communication. Such practices as giving “athletic scholarships” to induce talented swimmers to enroll, and laxness by those in charge in obtaining skilled timers and in obtaining exact pool measurements, are violations against good sportsmanlike conduct and absolute honesty, and cannot be tolerated.
It is the function of the National Watersports Committee, the Advisory Committee of the National Intercollegiate Telegraphic Swimming Meets, to disqualify, when presented with good and sufficient evidence of violations, any college or university which does not value these essentials to fair competition by communications.” (p19)

Pageants...
(see cover photo above), water polo, canoeing and diving all have sections in the same Handbook. One also finds a “Crawl Form Swimming Rating Scale,” by Ann Avery Smith (Head of Swimming, University of Illinois), which “has been found to be of real value in rating swimming performances accurately according to accepted standards.” (Radcliffe swimmers competed in both “speed” and “form” events in the 1920s — it occurs to me that “form” provides an intersection between the swimming and diving worlds.)

* the plunge —
The plunge was a timed event in which the swimmer would dive into the pool and glide (strokeless) to the opposite end (if able?). Was it done underwater? Were bends and flexes of the body permitted? Might this have involved an early form of the butterfly kick? Not sure how this relates to the “distance plunge,” described here and there as a long-jump in water.

artificial / physical intelligence

how one might write poetry not for a human reader, but for an artificial/physical intelligence of the future, not a reader but an inclination to find and parse language against and even ignorant of the poetic grain, for purposes of its own. my notes to my son, from whom the PI link :

sounds like a version of AI that incorporates physical materials into its algorithms. soft/hard ware. ultimately unpredictable, because not fully "programmed." materials are that way — contain flaws — and also react in unforeseen ways to other materials, in various conditions.

and thought — dreamed, actually — of nails, anything, love, war, failure that abrades, stops us, provides gravity, traction, a here or a there or a no where.

recent weeks read these: Samantha Hunt her The Invention of Everything Else (2008/09) and The Seas (2004) and Deborah Moggach her In the Dark (2007), the latter on the strength of an installment in the Guardian series on Writers' Rooms. Fathers are typesetters in both The Seas and In the Dark. Reading Ryszard Kapuscinski his Another Day of Life (on the Portuguese egress from Angola, 1976/87, that puts me in mind of the other messy Lusitanian egress, from Timor), and the poet Anne Blonstein (who may write for that future artificial intelligence). more anon.

ah, and some writing by Elatia Harris at 3quarksdaily, including "My Mother's Secret Travel Diaries", whence this :

"Leaving aside whether the salient point of a thing eluded her — and believe me, it often did — my mother held ephemera in a tight grasp."

that could describe me.

noisesome nothing here

ex ABC Telegraphic Code (Fourth Edition, 1880); and aphorisms of W. Ross Ashby.