Soundings in Kings: Perspectives And Methods In Contemporary Scholarship

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It was a home away from home. Many of us were underage, and this was one of the only clubs that would let us in. Arena was a cacophony of sounds that were part of the multi-sensorial experience of going to the club. There would be deep house or hip-hop music blasting from the cars in the parking lot, and then, once inside: Growing up in Montebello, a city in the southeast region of LA county, Irene overcame a difficult childhood, homelessness, and addiction to break through a male-dominated industry and become an award-winning, internationally-known DJ.

In addition to continuing to DJ festivals and clubs, she is currently a music instructor at various colleges in Los Angeles. This only made people love her more and helped her to see how she could give back by leading a positive life through music. Last December, a renowned sound scholar unexpectedly trolled one of my Facebook posts. With an undocumented charge, the scholar attacked me personally and made a public accusation that I have misinterpreted his work in a few citations. As I closely read and investigated the concerned citations, I found that the three minor occasions when I have cited his work neither aimed at misrepresenting his work there was little chance , nor were they part of the primary argument and discourse I was developing.

What made him react so abruptly? Consider the social positioning. This scholar is a well-established white male senior academic, while I am a young and relatively unknown researcher with a non-white, non-European background, entering an arena of sound studies which is yet closely guarded by the Western, predominantly white, male academics. This social divide cannot be ignored in finding reasons for his outburst. I immediately sensed condescension and entitlement in his behavior. Plants are the most abundant life form visible to us. Despite their ubiquitous presence, most of the times we still fail to notice them.

In this article, I map out a brief history of the different musical and sound art practices that incorporate plants and discuss the ethics of plant life as a performative participant. The Top Ten Sounding Out! Eye fucking entails going beyond the gaze of the audience into a realm where you meet your inner erotic, your inner gaze. Eye fucking creates arousal, homosociality, agency, femme desire, confidence, and a queer space with a lot of glitter. In this post, I reflect on the sonic intimacies between burlesque and boudoir photography.

I am sharing part of a larger film project titled GlitterBabes , where I tell a story of how burlesque as a recreational practice empowers women to engage their sensual selves. I tell this story through Glitter Tribe Studio , the first studio dedicated to the art of burlesque in San Diego. In fact, both the dance and photography studios I write about here have an intimate relationship. As a fat performer, I was particularly interested in the way that my burlesque sisters and myself would navigate topics of body confidence, sensuality and stripping.

As it turned out, these practices require a practice of listening to the details of our bodies and its engagement with musicality, the rhythm of our tease s , and our awareness for how the camera can capture our corporeal erotic wavelengths both on and off stage. The findings by Wentland and Muise share many commonalities with the way photographers in San Diego also engage the practice of Boudoir, particularly the understanding that agency is experienced along a continuum and photographers support their clients by accommodating different techniques that can silence their negative self-talk.

At Bad Kitty Photography, where both Raven and Sepia had their shoots, a layer enabling femmes to get into an affective state of sensual comfort is music. To prepare for shoots, Bad Kitty asks their clients to think about their favorite music to set the mood. On their website, they list creating a music playlist as a recommendation to prepare for the shoot.

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This recommendation intrigued me and aroused an intellectual sonic orgasm. Here, music is consumed in a femme-centered space to get the model and its photographer to a state of intoxicating perversity. Beyond the music recommendation, the photographer who worked with me also used sonic techniques to help me get relaxed and comfortable. While we were choosing my outfits, I shared with Ashley, how nervous I was about not being able to make sexy faces. I look at my photos and I see the effect it created. How does the address of speech transform the performative gesture of its utterance?

Dirty talk— how my photographer engaged me in dialogue — contributed to my afloje looseness as the shoot progressed. The address of her speech, along with her gestures, made me get lost in her camera. Witnessing the way she touched herself—and the way she wanted me to touch my body—formed a collective vision of sensuality, one where all femmes of color could feel like goddesses. It was her dirty talk, the tone of her voice, and the power of her Black Femme gaze that helped me get there. Beyond the shoot, the boudoir photos that she took of me would capture forever the fat perversity that she inspired in me.

The energy we created inside that studio lingers in my skin. As a fat student of burlesque, my dirty talk, my dirty listening, is inspired by other women of color, fat performers, and porn stars. I gaze upon them for inspiration, guidance on eye fucking, and poses. I submitted 20 pieces of boudoir photography to the show that celebrated the bodies of five women of color plus-size burlesque performers from San Diego. The other art pieces in the show also centered fat perversity by presenting women in shibari, bikinis, nude, and boudoir.

The all-women DJ collective Chulita Vinyl Club de San Diego played at the show while people danced, drank, and viewed the live fat artwork in formation. Listening to the charlas in the room, you could hear fat women share the power they felt from seeing other fat women feeling sexy.

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One of the participants approached Sepia and Smiley to ask us if we were also exhibited in the artwork. We both pointed at our images, celebrating each other by complementing our sexy poses. She told us that it was her first time ever taking photos in lingerie, and that playing with the shoot was empowering. We both agreed, because as burlesque dancers and students, stripping to nakedness has had multiple effects on the way we viewed our bodies, and their sensuality. Can you listen to how we use boudoir, erotic art and burlesque to create a visual archive of fat-sex-positivity? When I texted Raven, she told me she almost cried from seeing her photos framed on the wall.

Raven was art , a fat femme was art. But even though she was not there, her photos transmitted energy and a fat perversity: Yessica earned her B. She explores the social element of their gatherings, both inside and outside the concert space, and probe how these moments foreground transmissions of Latina power. Not Your Muse Episode 1 feat. She believes storytelling is all around us. It has the unique ability to connect and shape our society for the better; sometimes the best thing we can do is just listen.

The Sonic Landscapes of Unwelcome: The Women in L.

Punk Archive — Alice Bag. No Pare, Sigue Sigue: Round Circle of Resonance: Taylor Karen Tongson Alexander J. Martin Vest In the early s a talking machine, contrived by the aptly-named Joseph Faber appeared before audiences in the United States. I am immersed in the loop of my pre-performance mantra: My music and message is powerful, my music and message is powerful.

Femmes Fucking the Camera: She spoke dirty to me and I liked it. Each episode features an interview with a different artist; we talk about their entry into music, and the struggles and triumphs that followed. The goal of this series is to bring attention to the sexism, both blatant and subtle, that women have to process as professionals. You can find more here: Our debut episode features Hailey Niswanger, a year-old experimental jazz artist based in Brooklyn, NY. That narrative featured a motley cast of characters note-taking audience members or bit-part players , a clear motive money from selling the text of a successful play , and a coherent theory of how lines might go missing a slow pen, an errant memory, an actor off-stage in a particular scene.

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But despite these apparent differences, his approach and that of the memorial reconstructionists share a central assumption: Vickers never attempts to ground this assumption in textual evidence: It is, and remains throughout, a credo, not an argument. King Lear was far from unusual, but rather part of an industry-wide trend.

As scholars lost faith in that hypothetical context, what kind of text the Lear Quarto was thought to be had to change as well. If the book no longer represented an instance of corrupted transmission, the text it contained had to be substantively what was in the document from which it was set. The question therefore became why the two versions differed as much as they did, and when the passages only found in the Folio were added. Without accomplishing these objectives, the entire anti-revisionist thesis of The One King Lear collapses.

Vickers never attempts to make a textual or critical argument for the presence of the Folio-only lines in the manuscript from which the book was set. Although it would be difficult to imagine what such a case might look like, he certainly acts as if he, unlike his opponents, had in fact made it.

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Print is not the work of authors, nor is it, typically, a type-facsimile of a manuscript source. The kinds of arguments Vickers and his foes want to make cannot be made on purely bibliographical grounds. His entire case rests on his ability to show that it is more plausible , as a matter of print history, to posit that Okes cut those lines than to believe that they were added to the play in a revision. Never mind that this is a comparison between two categorically different kinds of arguments one based on the history of a craft, the other on aesthetic judgment: It alone can provide a basis for giving any credence to the notion that the Folio-only lines even existed prior to Does Vickers make his case?

With regard to the wider context, not at all. He offers no systematic analysis of how other printers or even Okes himself, elsewhere in his output compressed and abridged copy to fit a specific page-count. A scattered selection of other printed plays provides some anecdotal evidence. As sample sizes go, this is what one might expect from an unambitious seminar paper.

Soundings in Kings: Perspectives and Methods in Contemporary Scholarship

Even if he had managed to gather relevant evidence in the handful of other plays he has looked at, the sample size is so small that it cannot bear probative weight. To detail why that is, a brief technical detour is necessary. In producing a printed book, early modern stationers had two distinct choices of approach: Alternatively, a stationer could set by formes. As a consequence, a compositor only needed to complete the four pages of either the inner or the outer forme before printing could commence.

Setting by formes allowed for a more efficient work-flow between typesetting and printing, maintaining a steadier supply of new formes to the pressmen. It also required less type: However, that efficiency came at a price. Casting off was an imprecise art, and potentially time-consuming. Worse, if the compositor miscalculated easy to do especially in prose, with its unpredictable space requirements he might find himself with too much or too little text for the pages he still had to fill. A compositor in such a situation might stretch his copy by breaking verse lines more frequently than required by the meter, say, or inserting extra line breaks or ornaments; or he might have to compress the text to make it fit.

When setting seriatim, these problems would not normally arise: But in general, the specific need to begin and end each page at a certain point that was the major disadvantage of setting by formes did not arise when using the seriatim method. Early modern stationers used both techniques, sometimes even within the same book. Okes himself set other play quartos by formes, including The Two Maids of Mortlake the year after Lear. Vickers labors under the misapprehension that setting the text of Lear seriatim was a strange choice.

He is largely alone in this belief, even if he occasionally ascribes his own surprise to scholars who are in fact not at all puzzled when encountering plays not set by formes. This is where our detour rejoins the main road: As we saw, setting by formes could frequently create spatial complications unlikely to arise in seriatim work. In fact, a number of the scholars Vickers cites, including John Creaser, make this very point: Even in books set by formes, though, Vickers can find almost no unequivocal examples of stationers cutting lines from their copy to solve a space problem; in the few arguable instances he can offer, the problem invariably arises from the hard boundaries created when setting by formes, and would not at all have arisen in a text set seriatim, such as King Lear.

It is a story without context or historical precedent. Okes may, after all, have been a spectacular outlier. Here is what Vickers imagines must have happened: Okes provided the stationer Nathaniel Butter with a binding estimate for the cost of printing the book, based on the assumption that he could fit the text onto It is certainly true that Okes employed a number of space-saving techniques: There is no question that the Quarto is not a generously printed volume.

But neither are many other early modern printed plays. Three other books do not a corpus make. Okes repeatedly neglected to use all the space available to him. On the first page of the text, he chose to reuse the large type from the title page to begin the play: None of these decisions were dictated by rules or even conventions. There certainly was no need to repeat the title of the play on the first page, let alone in such large type.

In two cases, however, they added an extra line — demonstrating that his press could easily print pages with 39 lines of text. It would therefore have been easy, simply by adding an extra line per page, to accommodate an additional 77 lines of text. When one adds up all the additional space readily available to Okes in the Without interfering in the text at all, he could have found room for well over additional lines — far in excess of the Vickers says he was forced to cut.

Finally, as Vickers describes at length, Okes set verse as prose with some frequency; extending this practice would have been a far easier and far less invasive means of saving space than cutting lines. Okes is said to have cut 13 lines from the first sheet, and a further 12 from the second. It thus took Okes nine pages to think of the additional and far less invasive expedient of relining verse as prose.

The problems do not end there. One might reasonably ask when Vickers imagines Okes realized that his original estimate was wide of the mark. Blayney has established that the title page was printed before the rest of the book. How could Okes possibly have known this early in the printing process that he had made a catastrophic mistake? Did he suddenly realize that the majority of King Lear was in verse, and would therefore take up more space than anticipated? Perhaps — but if so, why would he come to that realization during the setting of the first page, which is in prose?

Okes would have to be a remarkably quick study, and a shockingly overzealous editor, to surmise the consequences of his mistake in that instant and jump to as drastic a measure as simply dropping eight full lines of verse. As it turns out, the explanation Vickers offers is more surprising still. In providing his apparently binding estimate to Nathaniel Butter, the printer therefore misjudged the actual length of the text by 14 percent. But as soon as the narrative shifts to an account of the supposed cuts to the text, we encounter a very different Okes: Perhaps needless to say, this kind of fine-tuned intervention would require a vastly more complete understanding of the relationship between copy and printed page than the relatively straightforward operation of calculating the rough estimate that Okes allegedly got so catastrophically wrong.

And there are still more problems. If Vickers is right and the Quarto really is an edited version of the same text that also underlies the Folio, then Okes did not just cut: Here is what might be the most glaring example: Let it be so.

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It seems obvious that this is an instance of revision of some kind — that the manuscripts underlying the two printed versions simply differed in this passage. Vickers ignores the evidence in order to pursue the tale he has already decided to tell. It has no historical or bibliographical context or precedent and it lacks all internal narrative logic.

It cannot explain many of the textual phenomena Vickers himself identifies in the Quarto. And it casts Okes as an extraordinarily strange figure: In one corner, then: A total absence of textual evidence in the Quarto that there are lines missing, and a narrative rich in inconsistencies, contradictions, and logical gaps.

An explanation of the differences between the Quarto and the Folio as the outcome of one or more revisions over many years. Peter Blayney, Adrian Weiss, and the late D. Other similarly basic failures of comprehension abound. Just a few more examples: Vickers offers a stemma — a diagram that charts the textual genealogy of the Folio; but his stemma does not correspond to the argument about textual genealogy he makes in the accompanying text.

And on and on. They may seem too insignificant to merit this amount of attention. But they point to a disturbing lack of bibliographical expertise in a book that repeatedly claims to make a case grounded in bibliographical detail in order to argue against a competing interpretation that Vickers repeatedly accuses of lacking scholarly rigor. Few skills are more fundamental to the discipline of textual studies than bibliographical description. It is one of the first things students interested in the field are taught. Any first-year PhD in the discipline should be able to tell at a glance how many sheets of paper a book was printed on when she learns that its signatures run from A to L: Given the modern alphabet, we might expect the number to be 12, but early modern books did not normally have both I and J as signatures or U and V.

• Maria Luisa dAustria, la donna che tradì Napoleone: La gloria, le passioni, il tormento (Le scie) (Italian Edition)
• Shiny Thing
• The King of the South
• Wingless
• Va, Pensiero (Chorus Of The Hebrew Slaves) (from Nabucco)
• Krebs!: Hummer wäre mir lieber gewesen! (German Edition)