Intimate Transactions
http://www.embodiedmedia.com/projects/IT/

Legible City
http://www.lisaswanstrom.net/shawcity.htm

Plant
http://www.geekblue.net/archives/2005/08/plant_life_link.html

Respond to one of the following prompts, to someone else’s post, or start a discussion thread of your own by filling out the required fields (name, email, etc.) and clicking “leave a reply” to this post.

1. How does effective do you find Vonnegut’s presentation of time in Slaughterhouse-Five?

2. The “Green Wall” in We functions to secure the perimeter of the city and maintain a rigid cultural boundary. What is a comparable example of the green wall in contemporary society?

3. Despite Adorno’s pessimism, is there a way to escape the logic of the culture industry?

4. ee cummings’ “grasshopper” poem might be criticized for being all form and no content. What other examples of art (writing, music, poetry, web art, etc.) might also qualify for this description?

5. What is your reaction to Rilke’s poem, “The Panther”?

Proposal Workshop

1. Sit next to your partner and make your proposal available on the computer. Before reading each other’s proposals, present your topic orally to your partner (take turns). Summarize your thesis, share which texts you’ll be using, and describe which passages you are going to use to illustrate your thesis.

2. Trade places with your partner and read his or her proposal. When you are both finished reading, discuss the following: Does the written proposal match the oral presentation? Even if the two synch up quite well, how could they be brought into more harmonious alignment?

3. Select “track changes” from the Tools menu bar of Word. Type directly into your partner’s draft.

4. Re-write your partner’s thesis. This is not so your partner can use your work; rather, by re-writing the thesis you provide your partner with an alternative angle that he or she might not have previously considered in the initial draft(s).

5. How well do the supporting passages relate to the thesis? Pick two of the five passages your partner has chosen and write one sentence about how each passage relates to the thesis.

6. Comment on style—you obviously cannot comment on the paper as a whole, but comment on the introduction. Is it clear? Is it interesting? Does it provide a logical blueprint for the paper? Is its tone serious and sensitive? Is the writing articulate? How could the writer improve upon any aspect of style?

7. Act as a living thesaurus and suggest some alternative word choices for your partner’s introductory paragraph.

8. Edit your partner’s introductory paragraph—tighten it if you can. Clarify places that you find confusing. Note places that make good sense. Re-write any passages that don’t. If you have a question about something, write the question down on the paper.

9. Suggest any additional or alternative passages that the author might wish to consider.

10. Be kind. Be respectful. Be honest.

When you are finished, make sure you save yourself a copy of your partner’s commentary. Use what you find useful; discard what you do not. Turn this exercise in with your final draft.

Dice.com, S.O.A.P., etc.
http://www.lisaswanstrom.net/mediation.htm

4 Readings of ee cummings’ “r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r”
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/cummings/grasshopper.htm

The following is a list of some useful links and images related to this week’s readings.

Victorian Fashion
http://www.st-marys.hull.sch.uk/sites/history/images/Victorian_fashions.jpg

Poverty in Victorian England
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~peter/ve/homepage.html

“Sewer Boy”
http://www.sewerhistory.org/images/w/weel/1850_weel02.jpg

Escher’s “Relativity” (1953)
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a3/Escher%27s_Relativity.jpg

Boris Kustodiyev’s “Bolshevik” (1920) http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/12/Kustodiyev_bolshevik.JPG

Alexander Mikhailovich Gerasimov’s “Lenin on the Tribune” (1929-1930)
http://content.answers.com/main/content/wp/en/a/ab/Lenin_na_tribune.jpg

Lenin today
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2005-01/22/xin_12010222012083227551.jpg

The Benefactor?
http://www.adambellick.com/sitting%20lenin.jpg

Join Now!
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/11/Plakat_mayakowski_gross.jpg

Georges Méliès’Voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon, 1902)
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7533679508411916574&q=voyage+dans+la+lune&total=160&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0

Battleship Potemkin’s Odessa Steps Sequence (1925)
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8854558226988744692&q=montage+potemkin&total=10&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=1

Potemkin Poster
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b4/Poster15.jpg

Greta Garbo
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e8/Greta_Garbo_1925_by_Genthe.jpg

Veronica Lake
http://www.doctormacro.info/Images/Lake,%20Veronica/Annex/Annex%20-%20Lake,%20Veronica_02.jpg

Culturejammers
Adbusters
Bitch
Billionaires for Bush
Borat
Hackaday
Hacktivist.net

Instead of a normal forum response, please post the topic and thesis statement of your final paper. If you have your introduction worked out, go ahead and post that too.

Respond to one of the following prompts, to someone else’s post, or start a discussion thread of your own by filling out the required fields (name, email, etc.) and clicking “leave a reply” to this post.

1. Of all the different conceptions of time that you’ve read about in the past week, which one do you find the most interesting, appealing, appalling, probable, or impossible. Why?

2. Comment upon the role of (d)evolution in any of the texts we’ve considered.

3. How does Metropolis relate to the Time Machine?

4. What is one contemporary expression or remediation of time travel that appeals to you? Why?

5. Do you find it odd that Kipling wrote a poem about the transatlantic cables? Discuss.

The following is a list of some useful links and images related both to the Victorian Period and this week’s readings.

Now Romancer (Salon Interview with William Gibson)
http://www.salon.com/books/int/2007/08/11/william_gibson/index.html

The “Great Chain of Being” after Darwin (1882)
http://www.tulane.edu/~darwin/EEOB%20619/Darwin-Worm.jpg

Marey’s Chronophotography (1882)
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e0/Marey_-_birds.jpg

Eadweard Muybridge (187
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/73/The_Horse_in_Motion.jpg
http://www.univie.ac.at/cga/art/Muybridge.jpg
http://www.laurencemillergallery.com/images/muybridge_sale364.jpg

Gilles Guillain’s “Dualité”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfTxHw09Wa4

The course reader is available for purchase at the UCSB Bookstore. The following is a list of the Course Reader’s Table of Contents, along with some external links to a few of the other texts we will be examining.

Reader Table of Contents + External Links to Selected Readings
Alphabetical by Author

Adorno. The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception (excerpt)
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/1944/culture-industry.htm

Amis, Martin. “Denton’s Death”
http://web.media.mit.edu/~guy/misc/denton.html

Benjamin, Walter. “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”
http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm

Bichat, Xavier. “Cells and Tissues and Their Relation to the Body”

Borges, Jorge Luis. “The Garden of Forking Paths”
http://courses.essex.ac.uk/lt/lt204/forking_paths.htm

Borges, Jorge Luis. “El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan”
http://www.literatura.us/borges/jardin.html

Buffon, Georges. “The Rat”

Butler, Samuel. Erewhon (excerpt)

Carroll, Lewis. “Jabberwocky” & Humpty Dumpty’s Explication of Jabberwocky

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “Kubla Khan, or, a Vision in a Dream, a Fragment”
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/stc/Coleridge/poems/Kubla_Khan.html

cummings, ee. “r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r”
http://deadparrot.home.pipeline.com/poetry/eec/eec14.htm

D’Alembert “The Human Mind Emerged from Barbarism”

Darwin, Charles. The Origin of Species (excerpt)

Emmet, William. “Typewriter”
http://transcriptions.english.ucsb.edu/MA/Williams-typewriter.gif

Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny”

Freud, Sigmund. “Note upon the Mystic Writing Pad”

Galvani, Luigi. “Animal Electricity”

Hawking, Stephen W. A Brief History of Time (excerpt)

Heidegger, Martin. “The Question Concerning Technology”
http://www.english.hawaii.edu/criticalink/heidegger/index.html

Hesiod. “The Ages of Man.” From Works and Days
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ages_of_Man

Hoffman, E.T.A. “The Sand-Man”
http://gaslight.mtroyal.ab.ca/sandman.htm

Hume, David. “Of Miracles and the Origin of Religion”

Holub, Miroslav. “In the Microscope”

Kafka, Franz. “In the Penal Colony”
http://www.mala.bc.ca/~johnstoi/kafka/inthepenalcolony.htm

Kant, Immanuel. “What Is Enlightenment?”
http://www.english.upenn.edu/~mgamer/Etexts/kant.html

Kipling, Rudyard. “The Deep-Sea Cables” (Poem)
http://www.everypoet.com/archive/poetry/Rudyard_Kipling/kipling_the_deep_sea_cables.htm

Kipling, Rudyard. “The Deep-Sea Cables” (Illustration)
http://www.victorianweb.org/art/illustration/whr/47.html

Marinetti. “Futurists’ Manifesto”
http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/T4PM/futurist-manifesto.html

La Mettrie, Julien Offray. “Man a Machine”
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/la-mettrie/1748/man-machine.htm

Lux, Thomas. “The Voice You Hear When You Read Silently”
http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/poetry/lux.html

Marx, Karl. The Communist Manifesto
http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/classics/manifesto.html

Rilke, Rainer Maria. “Panther”
http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/136.html

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. “The Social Contract”; “The Duties of Women”

Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “Ozymandius”
http://www.internal.org/view_poem.phtml?poemID=292

Wells, H.G. Island of Dr. Moreau (excerpt)