Battlestar Galactica

The television show “Battlestar Galactica” ended in 2009, but I never had cable, so I’m catching up now on Netflix. I’m watching it a lot. In fact, it’s the only thing I’ve been watching over the past month, a behavior that, in a mysterious coincidence pointed out by my friend David Ressel, was recently parodied on the brilliant comedy show “Portlandia.”

I’ve been making the argument to my family that “Battlestar Galactica” is extraordinary television, that the writing and characterization is amazing, that you have to absorb yourself in the episodes in order to understand the multiple levels of meaning, that Edward James Olmos is in it, that it’s not really cheesy science fiction like the original series in the 1970s but rather a profound commentary on the War in Iraq, etc., etc. Reality, of course, is that I used the same intensity to watch “Mary Tyler Moore” reruns in high school and, later, “The Young and Restless,” “China Beach,” and others. In fact, I’ve done this all my life. I have never really just “watched television,” simply doing the act of sitting and seeing whatever was on. I “get into” a show and watch it with focus and enthusiasm. Talk about being on the "edge of your seat"--sometimes I can't help but stand near the screen while a favorite show is on. (Actually, that started because the antenna reception on our TV used to be really bad for certain stations, and you had to get close to hear and make out the shapes in the periodic fuzziness, but still....). I suppose I have what you might call a fan-approach to viewing.

Two things that have come from my recent BG fandom:

1. Non-fans may find this odd, but the characters and plot-lines of these shows have affected me; they have become a part of my thinking and somehow woven into my accumulation of experiences. They crop up at different moments and shape how I understand things. Recently, for instance, biotechnologist Juan Enriquez visited RISD and gave a scintillating talk on the human genome and the ways in which cloning and manipulation of genetic code might aid medical science. When the discussion turned to ethics, I immediately thought, “Just look at what happened with the Cylons!” Sure, that’s the nerdiest thing you might hear today. But it was there.

2. I'm not sure what I think anymore about spoilers. During the days of the “LOST” broadcast, I wholeheartedly embraced the online world of Lostpedia and avidly moved around on discussion boards, like The Fuselage or DarkUFO, before and after every episode to try and crack the mysteries of LOST’s mythology. This time around, though, with "Battlestar Galactica," I have resisted. With "LOST," there was a sense of camaraderie and engagement in spoiling the series as it was happening. As Jonathan Gray and Jason Mittell have suggested, spoiler culture was very much a part of Lost’s “operational aesthetics.” That may have been true, too, of "Battlestar Galactica," but in my engagement with it, now--after the fact of its broadcast serialization and with the answers to its mysteries readily available online--I feel the need to protect myself from those who have already watched it or know about it. When family members teasingly said that they had gone online and knew how the series ended, I covered my ears and fled. I don’t want to know how it ends, or who betrays whom next. This is not so much about eschewing extra-textual pleasures but seems instead about the deferred timing of my viewing experience. The series is functioning differently for me now, as a lone viewer, than it might have if I had watched it with others across the world when it originally aired. Or, maybe it’s just because I’m less interested in the “puzzle” of human-cylon history than in its characters’ developing relationships. I don't know.

I’m not big on extended self-examination, especially on a blog, so I’ll just stop now and say that this has me thinking. What are the various ways in which fans are managing their viewing experiences in this new age of media access? Are there real generational differences (broadcast/post-broadcast TV) that govern how we understand a series, or is it more appropriate to locate diverse engagement as more deeply rooted in individual preference? (After all, there has always been the divide between those who, say, read the conclusion of a mystery novel first and those who prefer to read with naivete). More broadly, what kinds of historical and personal circumstances govern how a person might choose to engage a text?

Football Girl

From Jesse Lynch Williams, The Girl and the Game, and Other College Stories, 1908.

The "football girl" was a type of audience member in the world of collegiate sports at the beginning of the twentieth century. She was defined by a particular historical context involving both the emergence of the "co-ed" on America's college campuses and the growing prevalence of football as the competitive game of choice between institutions in the late 1890s and early 1900s. (Aside from a comic recording by Miss Rae Cox in 1907 titled "Baseball Girl," depicting the ups and downs of a fan's emotions during a game, there is no significant corollary in America's other pastime).

Similar to the matinee girl, the football girl was a common subject of male journalistic curiosity. That someone of the "fairer sex" (gender stereotypes of women as emotional, overly-sensitive, and nurturing were alive and well in the 1900s) would be interested in watching a competitive match involving "brute" physical force was both titillating and confounding for many male writers. Historical descriptions in magazines and books typically described the football girl as separate from "regular" male fans, giving her both "special" and marginalized status, as Freeman Freebush demonstrated in his National Magazine article on football in 1897:

 “…So much for the player. Now for the people who follow the sport. There is an interesting assortment. There is, of course, first of all, the great body of college students, the men who know the game better than they do their alphabet.  At a very respectable distance from them comes the “old grads,” the men who year after year steal away from their business or their profession and “take in” the big matches as religiously as any youth of twenty. On that great day or days they don their colors, swing into line and cheer as lustily as in the days when the world had no care for them. After the above two types comes the average citizen, the man who attends the big games, not always from any great love of the sport but because he makes it a principle of his life to see all the big shows. Anything grand in the spectacular line and he is there. He is the man, moreover, who cheers for the winning team, the “upper-dog” fellow. In his wake, comes the inevitable “little mucker,” always irrepressible, always much in evidence. How some of these urchin-sports manage to secure the price of admission is indeed a sphinx problem, but without them, their antics and their wise remarks, the event would seem sorely incomplete.
  I reserve a separate paragraph in honor of the last and greatest group of spectators—the girls. The world has man creations but none quite so fetching as the football girl. You think you see the American maiden at her best at dances, promenades and summer resorts, but you don’t. She is tame on these occasions compared to the moment when she makes her triumphant entry on Hampden Park or Manhattan Field, a moving vision of bright eyes, sweet smiles, gay colors and a wealth of flowers. A bevy of such starts a cheer from the grand stand all along the line. Excitement and enthusiasm give luster to their faces, anticipation eagerness to their manner. Perhaps they are a trifle conscious of the striking picture they make before such a multitude, and the influence is as wine. Who knows? I’m sure I don’t.” [Freeman Furbush. “Football As We Find It.” National Magazine, Vol. 7, No. 2, November 1897: 161]

Writers regularly marveled at the possibility that women would want to watch football. Commenting on the Yale-Princeton game on Thanksgiving, 1880, for example, writer Henry Chadwick took special pains to note the stamina of the football girls in the audience, who stayed to the end of the game--through a snowstorm--just like the male spectators: 

“…The crowd present to see the match was thoroughly a representative American assemblage. Intelligent in its judgment and in its appreciation of the best points of the contest, full of vim and excitement, and bent on seeing fair play. While partisan feeling was displayed, it was too evenly distributed to exhibit any one-sided prejudices. Both sides were encouraged, and both had a fair filed provided for them. Moreover, there was American pluck shown in the staying powers of the assemblage in facing a heavy snowstorm to see the battle out to its close. In this the ladies present—and plenty of bright eyes gleamed on the manly players in the field from the grand stand—displayed as much spirit as the men. They stood it out to the last, like true American girls, who know no flinching when called upon to countenance their favorites of the opposite sex. Fortunately, the list of wounded in the battle was unusually small, despite the rough mauling and tackling they were in turns subjected to.”
[Henry Chadwick, “Foot-Ball: The College Championship” Brentano’s Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 3,  December 1880: 243-44.]

Conversely, writers rationalized women's presence at such a raucous sporting event by rendering them objects of beauty. As writer Jesse Lynch Williams suggested:

“…A good deal has been said about the American out-of-door girl. She is seen at about her best, I think, at a college football game. Of all the women of all the outdoor crowds in the world, so far as I have had the opportunity of looking them over, these animated faces are the loveliest. Two old bachelors, who are not very ancient, and who always go to games together, have an interesting scheme for deciding which shall pay for the dinner which concludes their day’s fun; they bet on which color will be sported by the greater number of pretty girls. So, as the crowd passes by, they solemnly check off each two girls in turn, according to her colors and her comeliness. That evening they toast all of them.” [Jesse Lynch Williams, “The Day of the Game,” Outing Magazine, 1907: 145]

Image from “The Day of the Game,” Outing Magazine, 1907. Note that the caption suggests that the women are not fans, attending a game for their own pleasure, but rather  the "sisters, cousins, and aunts" of the players. 

An anonymous poem in Judge's Library: A Magazine of Fun focused on the football girl not as a diversion for male audience members but more specifically as a muse for the "strenuous lusty play" of the men on the field: 

The strife is fierce on the gridironed field,

Where the lines of battle sway,

And strength and spirit alike are steeled 

For strenuous, lusty play.

The banner of fame streams forth as prize,

Its beckoning folds unfurl;

But mightier far is the flag that flies

In the hand of the football girl.

And many a stripling chants full oft 

the words of his college cheer,

And many a rival flaunts aloft

His colors of meaning dear.

But, straining phalanx or quivering rows,

Ah, where is the blind, dull churl

Whose heart swells not at the hue that glows

On the cheek of the football girl?

Renown will come to a favored 

The emulous crowd among

Their praise be spread by a generous crew,

In deafening chorus sung.

But, oh, most fortunate he of all

Who, after the furious swirl,

May hear his name as a token fall

From the lips of the football girl.

[Judge’s Library: A Magazine of Fun, No. 173, August 1903: n.p.]

This kind of evidence provides accumulates gender stereotypes and romantic fantasies rather than useful knowledge about women's football culture; we only know about the "football girl" through male eyes. It's clear that women were attending college football games in considerable numbers at the turn of the century and that their participation appeared segregated--both in the stands and in accounts of the games. But I'm still searching for evidence that might help us to learn more about the actual motivations and experiences of these female fans. How did they understand their own participation at games? How did they talk to one another about the play on the field? To what extent were they aware of male assumptions about their participation? Did they care? How did they negotiate those perceptions?

Searching for the Poe Toaster

The latest news among Edgar Allan Poe's followers is that they will wait one last time for the appearance of an anonymous dedicated fan, known as the Poe Toaster, who, until recently, paid tribute to Poe every year on January 19th. Visiting authors' (and performers') grave sites is an old fan tradition. (For more on literary tourism, see my recent post.) What's most fascinating in this example is the extent to which a Poe fan has created his own fans and admirers. As I first argued in Tramps Like Us, the idea that a fan is totally obsessed with the object of his/her fandom is a very naive view; most fans also spend a lot of time enthusing about fandom itself as a means to build and sustain the fan community.

Dr. King's Voice

I have written about oratory before on this blog. Today, I just wanted to point to the enduring power of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s voice--as heard, remembered, recorded, and re-created. Many talk about the content and message of King's speeches, as they should, but I have been struck also about how many news stories there are out there about the auditory experience of his speech: reprints of news accounts of him at the podium, people remembering where they were when they heard the "I Have a Dream" or "Mountaintop" speeches; stories about re-creations of his speeches in community centers and town halls and college auditoriums; people listening to recordings of him speaking and writing about their inspiration. In particular, there have been several accounts over the past several years about the recovery of "lost" recordings of King's speeches and the excitement over our ability to actually hear his ideas anew:

In Cleveland in 1967: http://www.cleveland.com/specialreports/index.ssf/2012/01/martin_luther_king_jr_in_cleve.html

At Kansas State University in 1968:
http://www.k-state.edu/media/newsreleases/jan11/mlktape11411.html

At Bethel College in 1960:
http://hnn.us/articles/122249.html

Part of recounting where and when one heard Dr. King speak is a certain claim to historical authority; we elevate the knowledge that comes from encountering social leaders face-to-face or participating in significant historical moments. But beyond that, I think there really is something special about having the opportunity to give oneself over to the power and resonance of his oratory. After all, we could just silently read transcripts of speeches, or watch his televised appearances, or converse about his legacy. But that's not really how MLK Day has come to work for many Americans. Audio clips of King's speeches are all over the Internet; many people, every year, reflect through listening, just as King, a preacher, asked his congregants in the 1950s and 60s to reflect through listening. This is not simply mimicry. There is something about the recorded human voice that provides for many hearers a sense of immediacy; inflection and "grain" can feel like a more direct trace of a person's body and spirit than published writing or news photographs. His words are still--literally--with us. By re-gathering each year to hear King's voice, we celebrate his legacy but we also create and sustain a new kind of call-and-response, one that is not simply in the past but across the past.

"I Have a Dream" Audio:

http://www.archive.org/details/MLKDream

Listening and Longing Giveaway

I'm delighted to announce that my new book, Listening and Longing: Music Lovers in the Age of Barnum, has been released by Wesleyan University Press. This book is a culmination of nearly a decade of research and thinking. After I published an ethnography of music fans, Tramps Like Us: Music and Meaning Among Springsteen Fans, in 1998, I began to wonder about the history of music listening in the United States (an unusual behavior in the context of the world's music cultures) and started visiting archives to find answers. I transcribed breathless descriptions of concerts from listeners' personal diaries; interpreted amateur commentary scribbled in the margins of concert programs and sheet music; and studied prints, cartoons, paintings, and other public representations of music audiences over time. Ultimately, I began to understand how the experience of hearing music was commercialized, augmented, fought over, institutionalized, and generally re-made between 1835 and 1885, a social drama that helped to shape our modern age of fandom, "following," and "playlists."

At any rate, in order to celebrate this occasion, I would like to give away a new paperback copy of the book to readers of this blog. I'm not very good at this sort of thing, so I am going to hand over the details to my daughter, Bella (who is an experienced blogger in her own right--I'm allowing her a plug at the end of the rules).

Hi :) Here is how you can enter for The Ardent Audience's first-ever giveaway!

The prize: One copy of Listening and Longing: Music Lovers in the Age of Barnum 
How to enter: Comment on this post and tell us what you're a fan of!
Bonus entries: Follow The Ardent Audience and/or tweet about the giveaway. Leave another comment so we know you have done so.
Giveaway closes: Monday, January 23 at 12 noon, EST.
Number of winners: One

Open to US and international readers, so everyone has a chance to win!

The winner will be chosen from among the comments posted by random.org and announced on Tuesday, January 24.

Good luck :) Bella 


Thanks, Bella. And thanks to everyone who participates! 

Name That Audience 10

Here's an interesting one. What's happening, here? It's obviously a theater, but why is there an audience on both sides of the proscenium? A theater in-the-round? An elaborate production about a large theater audience? The answer is after the jump.

Laurie Anderson on Audience

"The audience creates its own personality, I’ve noticed, in the first five minutes. They will either be generous, funny, silly, withholding, academic, analytical, grudging. And I’m fascinated with how that gets constructed, because it happens right away...."

Musician Laurie Anderson has interesting things to say about audiences in an interview published in the January 2012 issue of The Believer Magazine. She suggests that audiences very much bring with them associations and judgments to any performance--interpretive moves, in Steven Feld's terms--that a performer may, if they choose, then work to subvert with "jump cuts" and other techniques that might "throw things off." That, in turn, can create new sets of expectations. This dynamic game of performer-audience interaction, of course, is one comedians know well (Anderson appropriately mentions Andy Kaufman, with whom she worked in the 1970s, by way of explanation). And it's important to note that it also has a long and storied history in American entertainment, from P.T. Barnum's playfully deceptive exhibitions to today's spoiler culture. Overall, Anderson provoked me to think about questions of reception: Where do expectations for different forms of cultural performance--a comedy show, a concert, a lecture--come from? How do we shape and share audience literacy, not only at the large scale of institutions or culture but also in the dynamics of any performance, moment to moment? Fascinating, indeed!

Protest as Heard

One of the aspects of audience history I’ve been thinking about lately (since 2012 is the Woody Guthrie Centennial) is the reception of protest songs. Music historians and writers typically analyze the composition or performance of protest music; scholarship is relatively plentiful on the content of songs like “Get Off the Track,” “The Preacher and the Slave,” or “We Shall Overcome.” And news features, interviews, and biographies have filled us in about the great performers of protest music, from Woody Guthrie to Rage Against the Machine. But we don’t know very much about how such songs have been encountered by actual listeners in different contexts; what those encounters made people think, feel, or do; or how those songs and their reverberations were woven into the daily lives of abolitionists, workers, activists, teachers, police officers, politicians, businessmen, or even opposition groups.

There is some good work out there that suggest some answers by delving into historical or cultural contexts of social movements. T. V. Reed’s The Art of Protest, Annie J. Randall’s Music, Power, and Politics, and Mark Mattern’s Acting in Concert, among others, all have profound thinking about the power of music in society and in social change. Still, there is a general assumption in the scholarship of music and politics, influenced in part by the folk movement of the 20th century, that the best protest music is a participatory enterprise, a marked ritualized moment in which people make music together and, through that action, cohere and inspire the front lines of a social movement. Obviously, the shared experience that is engendered in such music-making represents a significant form of public discourse and social meaning. Music-making is politics, in that sense. But I think also that there is another way that protest songs operate, especially in the contemporary world of commercial popular music—through listening. How do we make sense of the fan who hears a song of conscience--on the radio or at a concert--or the average citizen who encounters singing protesters in the street? Presumably, that act of audiencing has the potential to change him or her in some way. But how?

Mark Pedelty and Linda Keefe have done a study of this very sort of thing over at the journal Music and Politics ("Political Pop, Political Fans? A Content Analysis of Music Fan Blogs"). Their research focuses on contemporary listeners, however; I wonder whether it might be possible to explore the effects of "political pop" for historical listeners. What was it like to hear Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” during the 1940s? How about a suffragette song like “Give the Ballot to the Mothers” at the turn of the century? When the Hutchinson Family Singers sang “Get Off the Track” in the 1850s, to the tune of the popular minstrel song, “Old Dan Tucker,” what did people hear, exactly?

In fact, what do we make of the large volume of 19th century sheet music that offered social commentary and even confrontation? Who was buying it and why? George P. Holt’s “Wanted a Substitute” (published by Oliver Ditson & Co. in 1863) offered a clever take on the class politics of the Civil War draft and the resentment it created. But how can we accurately assess the kinds of dynamism the song afforded various people in their daily lives in 1863 and beyond?

How protest songs were heard is an area that desperately needs more study. There are so many possibilities, here, for thinking about historical reception—one could go song by song, issue by issue, era by era, documenting listener's interpretive moves and/or the literacies of protest at work in each level of analysis. Scholars of fandom, who are already attuned to the varieties of attention and response to cultural forms, as well as to the intricacies of commercialized manipulation, might have something significant to offer.

Collecting

The New York Times recently posted a web page, "Why We Collect Stuff," featuring various experts weighing in on the phenomenon of collecting. While purportedly a "debate," the positions aren't really about collecting, or its history, or its complex role in broader realms of audiencing and the arts, but rather about the fine line between collecting and hoarding. Unfortunately, as a whole, it reads a lot like media analyses in the 1980s which sensationally--and wrongly, in my opinion--portrayed fandom as amusing on the surface but always ready to tip over into stalking and murder. (John Hinckley and Mark David Chapman were, in this analytical frame, simply extreme versions of any Trekkie or teenybopper). Why assert, as do several of the Times debaters, that collecting is all well and good in a quick opening sentence and then outline in lengthy detail how it can become a problem? Why connect collecting and hoarding at all?

I expect better from the Times. The narrowness of the debate stems, perhaps, from the fact that several of the debaters are psychologists specializing in compulsion disorders. Few elaborate very deeply on material culture and its long-standing role in creating meaning, memory, and identity for individuals and communities. And few acknowledge the growing academic work on collecting, which suggests that it is not a single behavior, good or bad, but rather an analytical category pointing to a range of human practices that articulate people's relationships with the material world. Where were the curators, anthropologists, and historians? They would have provided definitions of relics, souvenirs, exhibits, artifacts, and collectibles; shown how such items can be made meaningful through accumulation, association, interpretation, gifting, narrative; and situated collecting into wider contexts of imperialism, commericialization, ritual, and the modern self.  

At any rate, check it out, if you want. But do so knowing that there is better analysis and research out there, including the work of Walter Benjamin, Jean Baudrillard, Susan M. Pearce, Susan Stewart, John Elsner, Seth C. Bruggeman, Leonard J. Davis, Daniela Bleichmar and Peter C. Mancall.

Romantic Fandom

Before the holiday, I heard from Professor Eric Eisner of George Mason University, who shared that he had edited a volume of the Romantic Circles Praxis Series, on "Romantic Fandom," in April 2011. I am not very well-acquainted with literary studies these days (and especially not British Lit.), so I was delighted to check it out. Clearly there are exciting things happening in the study of Romanticism--between this and Judith Pascoe's book on Sarah Siddons, I now see the Romantic Era as a key moment in the history of audiences. Much as the "market revolution" in the United States during the 1830s and 1840s changed the very nature of cultural consumption and participation, Eisner writes that, in England, the Romantic period of the late 18th century

...saw the popularization of recognizable "fan practices," spurred by the growth of consumer culture and the development of a mass audience for culture generally. Admirers collected autographs, souvenirs, portraits and relics of celebrity writers, artists, performers, military heroes, and athletes; snapped up mementos associated with beloved plays or books or music; visited the homes and haunts of celebrities; pored over gossip-filled periodicals and newspaper notices; imitated celebrities’ fashion statements; fantasized about becoming friends or lovers with celebrities; wrote fan mail and formed communities of like-minded aficionados.

And while I’ve emphasized the connections between modern and historical fans in this blog, these essays advocate caution. As Eisner explains in his introduction, “If these essays contest literary criticism’s abjection of the fan as ‘naïve, obsessive, desirous, and dangerously predatory’ (Watson), they also resist simply celebrating the fan or identifying Romantic-era readerly desire with our own…Fandom is always historically situated, always tied to specific and shifting cultural as well as individual situations.”

The essays are consistently excellent, examining everything from the literary tourism of Lady Frances Shelley to the surprising mania in the 1820s for Pierce Egan’s Life in London; or, the Day and Night Scenes of Jerry Hawthorn, Esq., and his Elegant Friend Corinthian Tom, Accompanied by Bob Logic, the Oxonian, in their Rambles and Sprees through the Metropolis, with other contributions by Nicola J. Watson, Clara Tuite, Mark Schoenfield, and David A. Brewer. I have taken note!

Favorite Historical Fan Studies, 2011

While I have not covered every book in fan studies that has come out in the past year, I have encountered quite a few good reads in fan history. It really is time for fan studies to expand beyond the idea that fandom is simply rooted in the “popular media” of the 20th century. As many of these books and articles show, those with enthusiastic devotion to public cultural figures and forms, whom sportswriters first called “fans” in the 1890s, have been around for centuries. There were no “fans” before 1890, but there were amateurs, beggars, boomers, buffs, bugs, connoisseurs, devotees, dilettantes, enthusiasts, fanatics, the fancy, fiends, gluttons, habitués, heads, hounds, kranks, lions, longhairs, lovers, maniacs, matinee girls, nuts, rooters, Lisztians, Wagnerians, and more.

Here are some of my favorite historical fandom books for 2011. They all engagingly offer new insights into the practices of ardent audiencing, over time and across sports, theater, literature, and music.

Lapham’s Quarterly: Celebrity
In many ways an update of Leo Braudy’s Frenzy of Renown (1988) this special issue of Lapham’s Quarterly (Winter 2011) sought to collect primary and secondary sources about celebrity in history, from Cicero’s complaints about the demands of fame to Steve Martin’s tongue-in-cheek form-letter response to fan mail. I found Lapham’s opening essay a bit too dependent on Daniel Boorstin’s negative assessment of the media’s role in modern life; I would say that the overall skepticism of the issue’s interpretive essays stem from a Frankfurt School-like focus on the productive machinations of celebrity rather than the varied activities of media reception and their meaning in the daily lives of fans. The issue nevertheless offers very good writing and a useful compendium of audiences, culture, and desire over the past several centuries.

John Thorn, Baseball in the Garden of Eden: The Secret History of the Early Game
Written by the Official Baseball Historian for Major League Baseball, this book is a detailed and fascinating account of the early days of baseball in the nineteenth century, including some nice tidbits on fandom, from audiences’ frequent interference in games and penchant for gambling (which, in part, explains rooters’ fascination with statistics) to DeWolf’s Hopper’s popularization of “Casey at Bat” to the status of a cultural mania in 1888. Most interesting is the many ways in which team owners sought to make the game appeal to fans through all kinds of changes to games rules, as well as sales gimmicks. Not directly about historical audiences, it nonetheless is a very readable history of the entire culture of baseball and fans central place in it.

Judith Pascoe, The Sarah Siddons Audio Files
One of the pleasures of writing this blog has been learning about fan research outside of my own realm of expertise. Not only did I learn about all the work out there on historical readers or early sports but also on theater audiences. Judith Pascoe’s book, which was released in May 2011, enthusiastically outlines the appeal of British actress Sarah Siddons, who was the star of London theatre in the late eighteenth century and whose aural presence fascinated Romantic poets and philosophers. Pascoe not only outlines the culture of Siddons’s celebrity, but also the trials of her own learning. Historiography has never been so fun.

Daphne Carr, Pretty Hate Machine
Okay, so the history here is fairly recent, but this is still an incisive, daring, and sometimes quite moving analysis of rock fandom in the 1990s, based on Nine Inch Nails’ 1989 album, Pretty Hate Machine. Rather than merely offering a critical appreciation of the album’s songs or a history of the album’s creative genesis, Carr locates PHM’s most profound significance in what it has meant to the fans who bought and listened to it. Her thinking about Trent Reznor’s is deepened by the transcripts of interviews with fans of various ages and backgrounds, as well as interpretive surveys of the industrial decay of north-central Ohio since the 1960s. Personally, I never really “got” NIN, but I got this.

Emily Satterwhite, Dear Appalachia
Satterwhite examines fan mail from readers of Appalachian-set fiction from 1878-2003 and identifies the ways in which such fiction serves to affirm readers’ imagined understanding of the region as a “rural, rooted place populated by simple whites with a rich cultural heritage protected from mass culture.” The ways in which this romantic construction of “authentic Appalachia” has worked for fans over the past century (from the Gilded Age to the Neo-Gilded Age of the 1980s) is not without controversy (Satterwhite acknowledges that it reinforces “simplistic versions of the region that celebrate whiteness, glorify Americanness, and figure primitive people the world over as in need of the expert guidance of well-to-do Americans”). But Satterwhite also sensitively accounts for the ways in which regional fiction engenders its own kind of fandom for the idea of a place.

Still left to read:
Claudio E. Benzecry, The Opera Fanatic: Ethnography of An Obsession
Amy Blair, Reading Up: Middle-Class Readers and the Culture of Success in the Early Twentieth-Century United States
Nancy Newman, Good Music for a Free People: The Germania Musical Society in Nineteenth-Century America

Looking forward to:
Andre Millard, Beatlemania: Technology, Business, and Teen Culture in Cold War America

Popular Media Audiences Symposium

The latest symposium on popular media audiences has a good set of speakers; not surprisingly it's in England:

The Centre for Cultural and Creative Research at the University of Portsmouth presents:
Popular Media Cultures: Writing in the Margins and Reading Between the Lines
A Symposium to be held at the Odeon Cinema, Covent Garden, London
Saturday 19th May 2012

Keynote Address by:
Prof. Henry Jenkins
Provost’s Professor of Communication, Journalism and Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California. Author of Textual Poachers (Routledge, 1992), The WOW Climax (NYU Press, 2006), Fans, Bloggers and Gamers (NYU Press, 2006), and Convergence Culture (NYU Press, 2006).

Focus:

The first steps toward a wider consideration of popular media cultures surrounding film, television and the Internet, and the relationship between fans and their object of fandom, is to acknowledge the prominent position of what Jonathan Gray calls media paratexts as opposed to the centrality of specific films or television series as the text. Indeed, we are now accustomed in fan studies to state that the productivity of fans and their related fan practices represent an appropriate and worthy text to study just as much as the media text to which they are related or inspired by. So, rather than studying Star Trek as cult text, we might study fan produced videos on YouTube as important texts of fan activity that carry inherent meaning and significance in and of themselves. Or, for example, Star Wars carries with it meaning within and outside the narrative – from an analysis of its mythic story structure using the work of Joseph Campbell to studies of its fans who actively engage in their own meaning making by dressing up, making videos and writing fan fiction. However, the peripheral texts – those associated with the commercialization of the franchise such as the lunchboxes, toys, video games, and websites – are as much part of the meaning making process that they become texts to study in their own right.

Popular Media Cultures seeks to explore the relationship between audiences and media texts, their paratexts and interconnected ephemera, and the related cultural practices that add to and expand the narrative worlds with which fans engage. How audiences make meaning out of established media texts will be discussed in connection with the new texts produced by fans. The symposium will focus on the cultural work done by media audiences, how they engage with new technologies and how convergence culture impacts on the strategies and activities of popular media fans. If, Ken Gelder argues, “Subcultures are brought into being through narration and narrative: told by the participants themselves, as well as by those who document them, monitor them, ‘label’ them, outlaw them, and so on,” then this symposium will pay attention to what media audiences add to a text, what gets written in the margins of a text and what new meanings fans read between the lines. This symposium will bring together leading academics in the fields of film, television, fan and cultural studies to open up and take further the debates surrounding popular media, its producers, its audiences, and the cultures in which they are ultimately located.

Confirmed Speakers:

Dr Stacey Abbott, Reader in Film Studies, Roehampton University. Author of Celluloid Vampires (University of Texas Press, 2007), editor of The Cult TV Book (IB Tauris, 2010), co-author of Falling in Love Again (IB Tauris, 2009), and series editor of Investigating Cult TV for IB Tauris.

Dr Will Brooker, Reader and Director of Research, Kingston University. Author of Using the Force (Continuum, 2002), Hunting the Dark Knight (IB Tauris, 2012) and editor of The Blade Runner Experience (Wallflower, 2005).

Dr Joanne Garde-Hansen, Principal Lecturer in Media and Director of the Research Centre of Media, Memory and Community, University of Gloucestershire. Author of Media and Memory (Edinburgh UP, 2011), co-editor of Save As... Digital Memories (Palgrave, 2009) and co-author of the forthcoming Emotion Online: Theorising Affect on the Internet (Palgrave).

Dr Kristyn Gorton, Senior Lecturer in Television Studies, University of York. Author of Media Audiences (Edinburgh UP, 2009) and co-author of the forthcoming Emotion Online: Theorising Affect on the Internet (Palgrave).

Dr Matt Hills, Reader in Media and Cultural Studies, Cardiff University. Author of Fan Cultures (Routledge, 2002), The Pleasures of Horror (Continuum, 2005) and Triumph of a Time Lord (IB Tauris, 2010).

Prof. Mark Jancovich, Professor of Film and Television, University of East Anglia. Author of Rational Fears (MUP, 1996) and The Place of the Audience (BFI, 2003) and co-editor of Defining Cult Movies (MUP, 2003), Quality Popular Television (BFI, 2003), and Film and Comic Books (Mississippi UP,
2007).

Prof. Roberta E. Pearson, Professor of Film and Television, University of Nottingham. Author of Eloquent Gestures (University of California Press, 1992), co-editor of Cult Television (University of Minnesota Press, 2004), The Many Lives of Batman (Routledge, 1991), and editor of Reading Lost (IB
Tauris, 2009).

Further details of how to register and attend the event will be published in the New Year. For information on the Centre for Cultural and Creative Research at the University of Portsmouth please visit our website at: http://www.port.ac.uk/research/cccr/

Symposium Coordinator:
Dr Lincoln Geraghty
Director of the Centre for Cultural and Creative Research
School of Creative Arts, Film and Media
University of Portsmouth

Romanticism, The Voice, and the History of Listening

One of the problems of studying historical audiences is evidence. Listeners, readers, and theater-goers don’t leave many traces. While the scores, scripts, journals, account books, and correspondence of professional writers, composers, and performers have been preserved and deposited in public archives, the everyday experiences and activities of audience members have not enjoyed the same recognition, and thus potential evidence for their engagement—descriptive letters, scrapbooks, tickets, or souvenirs, for example—have been undervalued, overlooked, and often lost. Scholars of historical reception seek to recover such audience experiences. It’s painstaking and frequently frustrating work, requiring a good deal of creative interpretation. It’s far more like archeology than history, a matter of piecing together found fragments—a single diary description, or obscure periodical image--with educated assumptions about past cultural institutions and ideological expectations.

Judith Pascoe, in her new book, The Sarah Siddons Audio Files: Romanticism and the Lost Voice, writes engagingly and humorously about this process of historical recovery. Pascoe became intrigued by enthusiastic Romantic-era accounts of London stage actress Sarah Siddons, who manipulated audiences with her command of Shakespeare and had a voice which, as contemporary Joseph Severn explained, “thrilled the air with melodious tones, and at the same time touched the heart with such deep pathos that the audience seemed to think it a merit to shed tears and thus appropriately accompany such sublime acting.” Pascoe realized, however, that while Siddons’s "most celebrated roles all seemed to contain sonic highlights that were anticipated with pleasure,” and while paintings almost always showed Siddons poised to speak, she had no idea how Siddons actually sounded. So she resolved to find out. As she explained, “If I could figure out how Siddons sounded, I might also understand how people listened in the romantic period and how that style of listening influenced what they heard.” (14)

While the book is, in part about Siddons, much of the narrative, written in the first-person, is driven by Pascoe’s own search for an auditory past that always seems just out of reach. She explores Siddons’s life story, the world of London theater in 1775-76, and the acoustic design of theaters like Covent Garden and Drury Lane. She takes an acting class to learn more about vocal technique, reads Barthes on the voice, probes the history of recording, and studies Gilbert Austin’s 1806 Chironomia; or, A Treatise on Rhetorical Delivery: Comprehending Many Precepts, Both Ancient and Modern, for the Proper Regulation of the Voice, the Countenance, and Gesture. Along the way, she offers some wonderful insights in Romantic-era theater-going. As she explains at one point:

Romantic theatergoers not only enjoyed performances that we would find overwrought, they enjoyed watching these performances over and over and over again. In fact, the intensity of their pleasure seemed to stem partly from the repetition, which allowed for a deep familiarity with the lines and gestures associated with particular plays….And serving as a further aide-memoire was the condensation of the romantic theatrical experience to a collection of emotionally, visually, or sonically intense scenes that helped to imprint these plays on the memory. The memorization of these ‘points’ made theatergoing more intensely pleasurable, as audience members anticipated these particular moments, watched them play out, and compared them to versions they had already experiences or even enacted themselves. (72)

Pascoe has a great sense of humor about herself and her objective, which, as she herself quickly recognized, was doomed to failure. As she explains, “I had wanted to find out how Siddons made [audience member Joseph] Severn want to change his life, or, failing that, how she caused so many people to go into conniptions when she stepped out on stage, but this meant, of course, and I’d known this all along, that I really had to be there.” (108). In the end, though, Pascoe's frustrations are her readers' gain. Her book is a funny and meaningful meditation on historical methodology, written with both clarity and verve. Its sheer inventiveness reminded me most of Bruce R. Smith’s attempts to discover how the performance of Shakespeare’s plays "actually" sounded in The Acoustic World of Early Modern England. Both Smith and Pascoe acknowledge that we can’t positively know how the past sounded. But through careful historicization of diverse contexts of listening and hearing, and analysis of the fragments of evidence still with us, we can discover faint but tantalizing suggestions of how audiencing had the power to shape lives.

Gaming the Game

The latest in convergence culture: this video, from the English band Kasabian, features an experiment in which the framework of video gaming is used to shape a soccer game between living players on an actual field. Vocalist Tom Meighan and Aston Villa striker Darren Bent, up in the stands with electronic controllers, are playing the players, who all wear headsets and respond to their commands. What is meant by "audience" and "performer" in this scenario is complicated, which is precisely the point. I'm not convinced this is future, since the roles that are blurred still need to exist in some sort of meaningful tension, but I do wonder about the up-and-coming Xboxed generation and how they understand the experience of spectatorship in sporting events.

If anything, you have to give it to Kasabian; they're pushing the edge of music marketing. A bit of background on the experiment can be found in another video here.

Conference: The Audience Through Time

I'm sorry to be missing this conference run by Anna Kretschmer and Christine Twite from the School of English and Drama, Queen Mary, University of London, especially since it deals with many the same issues I explore here at the Ardent Audience. Still, I'm hoping to keep up with the events through Twitter.

Stumbling on the conference site has also made me aware of the audience-related blogs, Cultures of Spectatorship and The New Female Spectator. Theater studies has much to offer the study of historical fandom, so check them out.