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Tuesday, March 19, 2024

March 19, 2024: American Magic: Thurston and Kellar

[This coming weekend marks Harry Houdini’s 150th birthday! So this week on the blog I’ll perform some AmericanStudying magic of my own, leading up to a special post on that legendary prestidigitator.]

On a pair of magicians who help us think about both competition and collaboration.

I’m one of those film buffs who think that Christopher Nolan has gotten a little overexposed in recent years, but I’ll stand by many of his early films as truly groundbreaking and great in equal measure. That’s especially true of Memento (2000), which as I wrote in that post occupies a spot very high on my list. But not too far below it is The Prestige (2006), a very intricate and clever historical drama that also happens to be for my money the best film about magic ever made (as well as very much a magic trick in its own right, and if you haven’t seen it I won’t spoil the trick!). And while The Prestige is about many things within and around the world of 19th century magic (including electricity as its own magic trick, courtesy of David Bowie’s performance as Nikola Tesla [some SPOILERS in those clips]), at its heart it is a story of a lifelong conflict and competition between two equally talented magicians and showman and equally bitter rivals, Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman) and Alfred Borden (Christian Bale).

Late 19th century America was home to its own famous pair of rival magicians, Howard Thurston (1869-1936) and Harry Kellar (1849-1922). As I highlighted in yesterday’s post, both Thurston and Kellar claimed to be the true heir to the origin point for 19th century American magic, the Fakir of Ava; Kellar literally worked for years as the Fakir’s apprentice starting at the age of 12, so he might well have the better claim, but as with all things magic the question is at least a bit shrouded in mystery, natch. And in any case, the competition between the two men went beyond their relationship to this professional progenitor, with both for example claiming to be the true master of a very famous specific illusion known as the “Levitation of Princess Karnac” (neither man seems to have originated the trick, as that honor apparently goes to English magician and inventor John Nevil Maskelyne). As Nolan’s film nicely explores, the world of magic is often defined by these questions over what performer truly “owns” a particular illusion, both in the literal sense of proprietary concerns but even more in terms of mastery, and Thurston and Kellar embodied that competitive conflict in spades.

Or was it all just an act? (Not in Nolan’s film, to be clear—again, no spoilers, but those two characters really, really don’t like each other.) After all, Kellar was a generation older than Thurston, served in at least some ways as another mentor to the younger performer, and the two men toured together for many years with their Thurston-Kellar Show (which as that advertisement reflects billed the act as “Thurston, Kellar’s Successor). While any performer faces genuine questions about their legacies after they’re gone, questions which would certainly be connected to who “owns” a famous illusion, every performer also and perhaps especially wants an audience while they’re alive. Both of these magicians unquestionably learned from the Fakir about how to generate publicity, not only in one moment but across a long career, and presenting themselves as rivals (even, if not particularly, when they shared a stage) was quite possibly an elaborate way to do just that. As with any great magic trick, we’ll never know the answer for sure!

Next MagicStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Magicians or magic histories or contexts you’d highlight?

Monday, March 18, 2024

March 18, 2024: American Magic: Fakir of Ava

[This coming weekend marks Harry Houdini’s 150th birthday! So this week on the blog I’ll perform some AmericanStudying magic of my own, leading up to a special post on that legendary prestidigitator.]

On three ways that the first famous American magician paved the way for the profession.

1)      Persona: Isaiah Harris Hughes (1813-1891) was born in England and immigrated to the U.S., but the Fakir of Ava, Chief of Staff of Conjurers to His Sublime Greatness the Nanka of Aristaphae, was born sometime later. I don’t think too many future magicians have gone to quite the lengths that Hughes did to imagine and inhabit their constructed persona, as besides creating an entire fictional backstory (although not the character’s geographic origin, as Ava was the Anglicized name of a real city in Burma [now Myanmar]), he also put on blackface, wore elaborate costumes, and claimed that his tricks were “Oriental feats.” But at the same time, it seems clear to me that Hughes expected his audience to be in on the act, or at least to recognize it as a performance—“Fakir” is a pretty telling name for an invented role, after all. And once Hughes got successful enough, he apparently ditched most of the costume, but not the name—a persona is a persona.

2)      Publicity: The Fakir achieved that level of success not only because of his impressive bag of tricks, but also because he was equally adept at making people aware of them and him. He did so through a variety of techniques beyond his own elaborate advertising (although that was impressive as well, as that hyperlinked broadside illustrates), including befriending reporters to gain favorable newspaper coverage, joining popular existing shows like P.T. Barnum’s to tap into their audiences, and coming up with new promotional ideas like the “gift show” (offering lucky audience members prizes in the course of the act). Magic isn’t much without the show that accompanies it, and those shows aren’t much without an audience to trick and misdirect and amaze. Hughes’ mastery over connecting to and amplifying his audience certainly modeled that skill for future magicians.

3)      Passing it on: Some of those future magicians learned from Hughes quite literally, as his apprentices. I’ll write more about the two most famous, Howard Thurston and Harry Kellar, in tomorrow’s post, but will note here that both overtly claimed to be Hughes’ heirs: Thurston by arguing “The historian of magic can trace an unbroken line of succession from the Fakir of Ava in 1830 to my own entertainment”; and Kellar by performing under the Fakir of Ava name when Hughes became too old to travel and retired to his Buffalo home. It’s easy to think of magicians’ helpers as the stereotypical pretty girls in spandex—and maybe they too should be seen as apprentices instead—but the truth is that both persona and publicity are often intended to live on beyond the performer’s career, and heirs are a vital part of that goal. One more way that the Fakir set the standard!  

Next MagicStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Magicians or magic histories or contexts you’d highlight?

Saturday, March 16, 2024

March 16-17, 2024: NeMLA Reflections: A Special Organization

[This past weekend I attended the one scholarly conference I never miss: the Northeast MLA. It was a great time as it always is, so this week I’ve featured a series of reflections on some of the great work I heard, saw, and shared there! Leading up to these additional reflections on NeMLA as an organization!]

Much of what I’d want to say about NeMLA is summed up in two posts that I’ll ask you to check out if you would and then come on back here:

This one from 2017 when I left the NeMLA Board for the first time (only because my service time was up, as I’d happily and stayed on forever);

And this one from 2018 when, proving my above point, I rejoined the Board.

Welcome back! As of a couple years ago I am once again done with my service on the Board, and while I’ll never say never when it comes to anything and all things NeMLA, I think it’s likely that I will only be a conference attendee and participant from now on. (Or, putting this out into the Universe, maybe one day a keynote speaker?!) But on that note alone, my annual attendance at most if not all of the conference (which has been the case since 2013 and I hope will be in the future as well) is a very telling thing—I’m not so much of a conference person (I enjoy them whenever I get to go, but I just mean I’m not someone who seeks out and attends a ton of them), and as any reader of this blog likely knows it takes a lot to take me away from my sons for any length of time. So this history of annual and thorough NeMLA attendance, and a pledge to do the same moving forward, is high praise indeed.

If I had to sum up why that’s the case, I would use two words that appear in those prior NeMLA posts and other places I’ve written about the organization: community and solidarity. Community is the more obvious one, and the focus of much of what I’ve said previously about this particular community and all that it means to me. So to say a little more about what I mean by solidarity: at worst, academia can feel quite competitive, like others are our rivals for jobs or publishing slots or attention or etc.; and even at best, it can feel quite isolated, like we’re in those things on our own. Of course individual colleagues and friends and loved ones can be company for the journey, as with everything in life. But to find a whole scholarly community that feels very consistently like it’s got your back rather than is either turning its back or stabbing you in yours? That’s a very very rare thing in my experience, and that’s what I feel with and at NeMLA. Makes me want to keep coming back for sure!

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. If you were at NeMLA, what would you share? If not or in any case, other organizations you’d highlight?

Friday, March 15, 2024

March 15, 2024: NeMLA Reflections: Community Connections

[This past weekend I attended the one scholarly conference I never miss: the Northeast MLA. It was a great time as it always is, so as usual here’s a series of reflections on some of the great work I heard, saw, and shared there! Leading up to a few more reflections on NeMLA as an organization!]

On three ways the NeMLA conference connected to local communities and its host city.

1)      Boston Poetry Slam: In my experiences NeMLA conferences tend to find good ways to get attendees out into the local community, but this year the conference brought local communities to the conference space itself in two compelling ways. One was these three performances by local poets connected to Boston Poetry Slam, a weekly performance that features some of the most talented voices in the city’s poetry and cultural scenes. I don’t know who in particular was behind getting this very cool group connected to and present at the conference, but I definitely give them a standing ovation!

2)      Choreopoems/Choreotexts: The conference’s other unique poetic performance was a bit more scholarly, and thus perhaps more familiar for a conference and organization like NeMLA. But nonetheless, this trio of performances inspired by Ntozake Shange’s choreopoem For Colored Girls bridged the seeming (but far from genuine) gaps between scholarship, poetry and art, and performance, featuring five local scholars whose own work, voices, and careers likewise challenge our sense of these areas as distinct or separate silos. As someone who worked hard in my time as NeMLA President to diversify the conference’s program in every sense, I love this excellent example of that ongoing goal!

3)      Archival Spaces: While NeMLA 2024 thus did a particularly good job bringing local voices and communities to the conference, it still also featured its share of communal connections in the other direction. As someone who’s had the opportunity to give multiple book talks at both the Boston Athenaeum and the Massachusetts Historical Society, I was especially excited that NeMLA made sure to connect any interested attendees to those phenomenal local archives and spaces. Both of these kinds of communities, local archives and scholarly organizations, depend on support and solidarity from one another, and I’ve always loved the ways in which NeMLA models those interconnections.

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. If you were at NeMLA, what would you share? If not or in any case, other organizations you’d highlight?

Thursday, March 14, 2024

March 14, 2024: NeMLA Reflections: Guilty Pleasures Panels

[This past weekend I attended the one scholarly conference I never miss: the Northeast MLA. It was a great time as it always is, so as usual here’s a series of reflections on some of the great work I heard, saw, and shared there! Leading up to a few more reflections on NeMLA as an organization!]

On two interesting throughlines I took away from a pair of provocative panels.

Before the Saturday morning panel of my own about which I wrote in yesterday’s post, I had the chance to attend a pair of interconnected sessions organized by literary scholar Melodie Roschman around the same topic: Guilty Pleasures: Sexy Stories, Female Desire, and Resistance. A number of the talks understandably focused on aspects of the Romance genre (and related subgenres like Paranormal Romance, Romantasy, etc.), which is not a topic about which I know a great deal (although I did write a Grad school paper analyzing audience expectations and experiences through the lens of Janice Radway’s influential 1984 book Reading the Romance) and so I was happy to learn more from these scholars of it and the particular authors and works they discussed. But as with all of the NeMLA panels I’ve attended in my multi-decade association with the conference and organization, I also found ways to connect these conversations to my own work and ideas, and wanted to mention two of those thought-provoking throughlines from these sessions here.

One debate which came up in a number of the talks across both sessions, as you might expect with this overarching topic, was whether it’s a good/productive or bad/destructive thing to use literary/cultural works as escapism (or related frames like enchantment). To be clear, none of the presenters bought into the longstanding narratives that novels and other cultural works are themselves “bad,” not for women and not overall; but there was a great deal of thoughtful analysis of the potentially limiting but also potentially liberating effects of getting lost in such works. In particular, the chair of the second session, Babson College Professor Samantha Wallace, provocatively used a J.R.R. Tolkien essay to frame these questions in her talk on Romantasy novelist Sarah Maas and the dangers and benefits of becoming enchanted by such books and their worlds. Which was especially thought-provoking for this audience member as I’ve been having very similar conversations throughout my current section of Introduction to Science Fiction and Fantasy, beginning with our first reading, Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring. I always love when a NeMLA panel can inform my current semester and teaching, and this was an excellent example of that effect.

I frequently glean such lessons for my teaching at NeMLA, but I always learn a great deal about American literature, culture, and history—there’s a reason why I decided to serve a three-year term as the organization’s American Area Director, after all. And in this case, it was an excellent paper from the chair of my own panel (about which and whom I wrote yesterday), Vaughn Joy, that offered the most fascinating lessons about American history and culture. Vaughn’s paper discussed the Hays Code, the multi-code policy (first created as a set of recommendations, but shortly thereafter and for many years an enforced set of restrictions) through which Hollywood authorities sought to control and censor film productions. I had long seen reference to the Code as a part midcentury Hollywood histories, but Vaughn went into significantly more detail about its origins, evolutions, specific provisions, effects, and, most inspiringly, the manifold acts of resistance through which artists and filmmakers (including none other than Frank Capra himself) challenged and eventually helped end the Code. I’ve never attended a NeMLA conference without coming away thoroughly impressed by at least one scholarly presentation, and this was the paper that did it for me in 2024.

Last reflection tomorrow,

Ben

PS. If you were at NeMLA, what would you share? If not or in any case, other organizations you’d highlight?

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

March 13, 2024: NeMLA Reflections: My Panel on Nostalgia & the 50s

[This past weekend I attended the one scholarly conference I never miss: the Northeast MLA. It was a great time as it always is, so as usual here’s a series of reflections on some of the great work I heard, saw, and shared there! Leading up to a few more reflections on NeMLA as an organization!]

On three takeaways from Vaughn Joy’s excellent panel on “nostalgic extremism” on which I was lucky enough to speak.

1)      The Compelling Concept: I’ve thought a lot over the last decade or so about the role that nostalgia plays in contemporary political narratives like “I want my country back!” and “Make America Great Again,” and since my dissertation/first book my most defining overarching scholarly interest has been in our collective visions of the past. But there’s always more to think about and add into my sense of these topics, and Vaughn’s concept of nostalgic extremism represents a particularly well-developed and helpful perspective on those questions, especially when it comes to idealized visions of the 1950s specifically in late 20th & early 21st century American culture and society. I look forward to spending a lot more time diving into all the ways this concept can help illuminate both individual cultural works, broader social and political debates, and our overall narratives of past and present alike.

2)      My Complex Connection: For this panel, I applied that concept to an analysis of my favorite film, John Sayles’ masterpiece Lone Star (1996; SPOILERS in that hyperlinked post, as there were in my NeMLA talk as well). Most of the flashbacks at the heart of Sayles’ 1990s film focus on 1950s histories, and more exactly on an extremely nostalgically celebrated figure from that earlier era, Sheriff Buddy Deeds. But as I thought about what this new concept could help me analyze in this most-familiar film, I realized that (without getting into as many spoilers here) what its protagonist Sam Deeds learns about his father and the past both challenge some nostalgic myths yet also make the case for embracing others if they can help protect more vulnerable members of the community. Which is to say, I’d argue that there are distinct varieties of nostalgia, like patriotism, and that some are likewise more critical and constructive than others.

3)      Our Continuing Conversations: Besides Vaughn as chair and my talk, the panel also featured two other papers, William Magrino on the Back to the Future films and Eleanor Rambo on the 21st century Russian musical (about a 1950s subculture) Stylyagi. Each offered a unique lens on the 50s, nostalgia, and late 20th and early 21st century cultural works, but what was most interesting to me was the way that all three of our papers, as well as Vaughn’s concept and introduction, intersected around questions of where and how we can trace as well as challenge idealized visions of the past, from a fictional suburban community like Hill Valley to the unique and striking Russian trend known as “bone records” to the connections between familial and civic myths in Sayles’ film. As I’ve thought about throughout my career, narratives of the past are created and challenged in specific cultural conversations, and this panel helped me and all of us think through particular versions of that trend.

Next reflection tomorrow,

Ben

PS. If you were at NeMLA, what would you share? If not or in any case, other organizations you’d highlight?

Tuesday, March 12, 2024

March 12, 2024: NeMLA Reflections: NeMLA Reads Together

[This past weekend I attended the one scholarly conference I never miss: the Northeast MLA. It was a great time as it always is, so as usual here’s a series of reflections on some of the great work I heard, saw, and shared there! Leading up to a few more reflections on NeMLA as an organization!]

On two takeaways from the latest example of a wonderful communal endeavor.

Almost exactly four years ago, I wrote a NeMLA reflection post highlighting the first iteration of the organization’s then-newest conference idea, NeMLA Reads Together (which that year featured Andre Dubus III and his book Gone So Long). Before I say a couple things about this year’s Read and author, I’d ask you to check out that post if you would and then come on back.

Welcome back! This year’s NeMLA Reads Together book was Land of Love and Drowning (2014), the debut novel from our keynote address speaker Tiphanie Yanique. Land of Love and Drowning is a wonderful example of one of my very favorite genres: a multigenerational family novel, spanning decades in the lives of (in this case) a family on St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Many of the novels I’ve read in that genre could be described as social realism, but while Yanique’s certainly includes those layers, it also features more supernatural elements in a prominent and particularly powerful role (putting in conversation with another great multigenerational Caribbean American novel from a now frustratingly fraught author, Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao [2008]). I’ll have to think more about how I’d analyze those supernatural elements, and look forward to the chance to do so while teaching Yanique’s novel at some point; but I know they added something striking and meaningful to her work in this familiar literary genre.

The most important benefit of the NeMLA Reads Together initiative is not just the chance to have and read this shared text ahead of the conference, wonderful as that opportunity is. It’s also and especially the opportunity to follow up that collective reading by hearing from the author at the conference, in this special keynote address. As illustrated by countless interviews like this one on Land of Love and Drowning with Noreen Tomassi of Brooklyn’s Center for Fiction, Yanique is a thoughtful and compelling voice far beyond her fiction, one who can connect her formal, stylistic, and genre choices to thematic questions of place and community, culture and heritage, the history of the Virgin Islands and the Caribbean, spirituality, and more. To hear directly from such a voice offers distinct yet complementary pleasures and inspirations to reading their work, and I came away from Yanique’s talk as moved and inspired as I’ve been from every NeMLA Reads Together author and work alike.

Next reflection tomorrow,

Ben

PS. If you were at NeMLA, what would you share? If not or in any case, other organizations you’d highlight?