Mining Obscenity III: Failure, with Visualizations

January 26, 2010 in Digital Humanities, literature, obscenity by admin | 7 comments

So, lately I’ve been writing about my interest in the changing semantics of the word bitch, trying to pin down when it went from a term meaning primarily “female dog” to being primarily an obscenity. I still don’t have a good answer. In this post I’ll try to explain why.

Along the way I’ll talk about:

That might seem like a lot of stuff, especially if you’re the poor soul reading this; those links above can hopefully get you where you might be interested in going (and of course, there are more entertaining places on the internet anyway you know).

I need to make very clear here though that, despite all that follows, there is nothing even approaching an answer to the question with which I began in what follows. I will share a sort of dummy visualization of the changing semantics of “bitch,” but it is worthless as an answer to the question with which I started—G.I.G.O..

Last time on “Mining Obscenity”. . .

So, as I’ve written about before, I became interested in tracing the changing definitions of the word “bitch,” of trying to get some idea about when the shift occurred from bitch being used in print to mean “a female dog” (and, I learned, sometimes other animals) to its being a (mildly) obscene obloquy. (This is, of course, just one change in the term’s meanings—more recently, for instance, one could chart the way the term comes increasingly to be used by men to emasculate other men.)

But I think (and hope) the general premise is clear enough: to provide some sense about when, historically, the obscene/derogatory meaning took precedence over “female dog”, at least as reflected in print (which itself raises questions about how one gets a historically valid sample, et cetera, et cetera).


Exploring Project Gutenberg

So one source of textual data is Project Gutenberg. The amount of data ready to hand at Gutenberg, as well as its availability in vanilla plaintext, has made it attractive to folks doing stylometric analyses. And the very kind folks at Gutenberg have even included a very helpful way of getting all their ebooks. (Zipped up, that is something like 14.5 gigabytes according to the PG website).

Project Gutenberg also makes available its catalog data in one big RDF file. As a preliminary step I decided to start with this catalog file just to get some sense of the distribution of texts in the Gutenberg archive. So, using Python to extract data from the RDF and Processing to visualize it, I produced this picture of the distribution of texts.

Graph of Authors in Project Gutenberg

Authors in Project Gutenberg

Each gray horizontal line represents the lifespan of an author who has at least one work in the Project Gutenberg archive. Authors with more than 50 works in the archive get more than a line—they get a box with their name in it. These “major authors” are then color coded: authors with more than 150 works in PG get a red box; authors with between 100 and 150 get a blue box; and authors with more than 50, but less than 100, get a green box. The lines are stacked (using a very crude algorithm; “major authors” aren’t stacked the same way—they’re just chucked at some height), so that the height of the stacked lines gives some insight into the number of authors writing at a certain period.

It isn’t especially pretty (and some boxes are less visible because they have been drawn over), mostly because my programming ability is pretty limited. But it offers some insight into the historical distribution of PG’s authors. There are a lot of authors in the nineteenth/twentieth centuries, because the novel (with the predictable exception of Shakespeare) dominates PG’s holdings. (I’ve focused on the period from 1500 – 2000 here; PG includes some works in the period before 1500—some translations of the classics, some Li Po, some Confucius, and so on, but not too many by comparison).

But there are still lots of problems. If you were paying attention you’ll note that I said that authors with more than 150 works in PG get a red box, which would seem to suggest that Shakespeare was even more prolific than you remembered. This inflated number is because PG’s Shakespeare holdings include a number of different versions of each of Shakespeare’s plays, translations of some of them, as well as a version of The Complete Works. So what gets tallied up as a “work” is not really a work. (Of course what exactly defines “a work” —how we define its unity and its singularity—is just one more of those thorny questions that I’m trying to shunt aside to get some heuristic peek into literary history.)

This is (I hope) somewhat interesting, at least as a glimpse into PG. But if you’ve been paying attention you should be asking—by now you’re probably screaming in frustration—why are you visualizing the lifetimes of authors rather than publication dates of individual works? Well, that is simple. PG’s catalog data does not include publication date in its catalog data. (For that matter, it doesn’t include any data about what edition a particular etext represents at all).

Well, that’s certainly a problem.


But what if we just ignored all that: Visualizing the Semantics of Bitch (with Bad Data)

Okay, so that’s a problem. But let’s say we ignored this problem and tried to forge ahead anyway. Maybe you could take Gutenberg’s textual data and get metadata about the works from some other source. Great idea! But this solution proved more difficult than I could easily manage.

Well you could always just make the data up. Let’s just take each author’s birth year, add it to the year in which s/he dies, and divide by 2, effectively assuming that each author produced all of their work in one great burst of creativity midway on life’s journey.

This would be an assumption so ugly as to call any resulting visualization severely into question, as least in terms of its philological accuracy. But as proof-of-concept, I decided to make the assumption anyway.

So, after waiting for the massive 15 gig-ish download of PG’s etexts, how would one proceed? Well, I imagine that there are other ways to approach this, perhaps better ways, but I used used rgrep to search all the files for instances of the (case insensitive) string “bitch.” Using arguments you can have rgrep return a line on either side of the occurrence of the searched for term. The results will look something like this:

./etext97/itwls10.txt-4218-of the stag; but, partaking more of the nature of the domestic than
./etext97/itwls10.txt:4219:of the wild animal, it remained with the herd of cattle.  A bitch
./etext97/itwls10.txt-4220-also was pregnant by a monkey, and produced a litter of whelps
--
./etext05/8cptm10.txt-62244-"Yes; yes, by the stitching 'tis plain to be seen
./etext05/8cptm10.txt:62245:"It was made by that Bourbonite bitch, VICTORINE!"
./etext05/8cptm10.txt-62246-What a word for a hero!--but heroes _will_ err,

Above are two results from such a search, the middle line of each contains the searched for term. At the beginning of each line is the file in which the grepped-for term occurs, followed by the line number, and then a line of text. Pipe all those results into a text file and you have the raw material you need. The file info (by way of etext number) can connect the text to its entry in the RDF catalog (and thence to the author, title, and birth/death date info).

Determining the meaning of “bitch” in these passages though is not an easy task. One can imagine a machine learning solution—but on such small samples it seems unlikely to work well and would introduce a whole other level of complexity. You could try simply searching for selected key terms within a certain proximity of the occurrence “bitch” (like “dog” or “litter”) and come to a conclusion based on the result. But since the number of results was relatively low (around 400 results), I thought it would be easier and better to just do it manually. To ease the task I wrote a quick Python script to display each extract and accept as input a number (0 – 4) to classify the term. Here is what it looked like:

There are certainly other ways to break up the meanings, but after surveying the data this seemed sufficient. With this scheme, one could skip an entry if it was a false positive (for example, the name Bitchov or similar—there were actually a couple of these). I ranked “son-of-bitch” separately only because it occurred so frequently that it might be worth keeping an eye on it (as a specialized instance of the range of the term’s obscene meaning); and I left open the possibility of ranking a term as “ambiguous” since, even with 3 lines of context, the term’s meaning might not be obvious. (By keeping ambiguous results separate from false positives, “0″, one could go back and grab more context to resolve the ambiguity).

So, for a couple days I left this simple program running. Whenever I had a few free minutes to do some simple classifying while talking on the phone or waiting for water to boil, I classified some occurrences of the term “bitch.” Once all of them had been classified and the output written to a file, it was time to return to Processing to try to visualize this. After some futzing around, here is what all that bitch data looked like.

Visualization of the Relative Obscenity of "Bitch"

Let me first reiterate that this visualization does not really show anything—that the data it represents is fundamentally flawed. As I noted above, because date of publication was not easily available, the dates used here are effectively inventions. (They are accurate within a tolerance of, say, half three score and ten.) Moreover, even with all that text downloaded from Gutenberg, we still have a pretty small number of points to draw any conclusions from. (You’ll note that, for purposes of visualization, I’ve grouped occurrences by the decade in which they occur, fudging the dates still further). And, as if that weren’t enough, let’s recall that the same “work” can appear more than once in PG leading to double-counting. (I went through the data by hand to try to remove these, but I could have missed some).

So, this sure seems like a long blog post for a useless visualization, isn’t it?

Well, here is what I like: this visualization divides the two meanings of bitch horizontally—points appearing below the center, horizontal line represent instances of the term being used in its obscene sense (the color-code gives some further insight into how these break down using the 4-part division discussed above), points above the line represent instances where the term is used in a non-obscene way (to mean “female dog”). This is simple, but has the advantage of allowing that both meanings might be equally available, or available in some mixed proportion, at any historical moment. With a larger data set, and with correct publication dates, this seems to me to be a elegant way of answering the admittedly amorphous question with which I began (though I’m certainly open to criticism of this entire approach).

It could also be improved upon. You could keep in memory the text samples from which these points were derived so that one could mouse-over each point and get data about what author/work that point represents, a keyword in context sort of view, and even a link to the full-text.

With a sufficiently complete data set, I would expect expect that we’d see that, during the twentieth century, the occurrences of the term as obscene would greatly increase while the occurrences of the term as meaning “female dog” would decrease. Exactly where the obscene meanings takes precedence would be the interesting thing to know. (Indeed, it is the thing I was interested in originally.)


A Final Thought

While I want to stress once again that this exercise in digital philological visualization (does that sound suitably buzzword-worthy to win me a prize of some sort?) fails, it fails because the data is not readily available; to get a meaningful result would require more, and better, data than is available from PG at present. (I’ll be putting this little toy problem on the back burner now, but would be interested in exploring other sources of data—Google Books is the obvious choice, but after spending some time playing with the Books API, I’m not sure the necessary data is currently available [nor am I confident that such a use is even permissible within the terms of use]) .

If you will grant that ferreting out the historical contours of the changing uses of the term “bitch” is worthwhile (and maybe it isn’t; perhaps this whole post reeks of sheer pedantry), a visualization like this one seems to illustrate that change (or at least one aspect of). And if you’ll grant all that, there is a final point worth making. This sort of visualization answers the question posed simply and without oversimplification, but it is tailor made to this particular problem. This recalls something I recently read on the Humanist discussion list in a message by Richard Lewis. He wrote:

…I’m increasingly of the opinion that end user application style software is not really what scholars who are serious about exploring the possibilities of using technology to enhance their research or open new avenues of research require. Rather, I’m beginning to feel that a good grounding in programming, a simple, expressive language, and good provision of libraries for abstracting over data encodings and difficult algorithms required in each discipline will be much more conducive to interesting computational scholarship.

The things that make computational scholarship interesting can’t, I think, be packaged up in an end user application. Like scholarship conducted in any paradigm, computational scholarship is interesting and worthwhile when it’s exploratory. But the restrictions of an end user application seriously stiffle any possibility for exploration.

Such a statement has the potential to stir up a debate I’ve seen elsewhere about whether “Digital Humanists” should learn to program, which I have no interest in doing. Nevertheless, at least for tasks like the one I’ve (painfully) described here, I think the perspective Lewis describes is helpful. Insofar as I even made half a stab at solving this little riddle, it is because of the availability of a set of tools that are easy enough to be picked up by a nonspecialist, but supple enough to be used in unanticipated ways. In particular I would single out Python, the Natural Language Toolkit, and Processing. As has been been noted elsewhere, Python’s simplicity, makes it fun to work with and perfect for these sort of problems. In addition to Python’s native facility with strings, the NLTK makes all sorts of text analysis tasks (frequency counts, etc) very simple (and it is all wonderfully well documented). And Processing does for visualization what the NLTK does for text analysis.

Using them as I have here produces an admittedly heterogeneous solution, cobbled together out of what one can learn on the fly (biggest challenge—figuring out SAX processing to handle PG’s massive RDF catalog file). One could simply do everything I’ve done here using rgrep, Python, and Processing, within a single language: there are graphics libraries for Python, and one could do all the string/data manipulation by way of Processing (perhaps with some help from native Java libraries). But it seems that using a language in a task-specific way provides a helpful midway point between spending too much time trying to learn how to code, and just waiting for the exact right tool to appear (in this case, the obscene-semantics-historical-separator—surely it’s next from Google Labs).

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MLA 09: Some Notes on Panels

January 11, 2010 in Digital Humanities, Infinite Jest, blogging, intellectual property, literature, modernism by admin

In a great, collectively authored post at Profhacker, Janine Utell observes the comparative dearth of tweets concerning our shared field. “There was a silence, a whistling void where there should have been voices: where were the literature folks, people doing research, giving and listening to papers in my area? Where are my fellow modernists, commenting on what we were all learning at the convention?” I felt a particular pang of guilt.

While I attended plenty of panels at MLA this year, I didn’t tweet too much (that is, at all). While there are technological reasons for my relative silence (anyone want to give me a Droid?), the primary reason I didn’t tweet more is because of my assumption that only Digital Humanities folks follow MLA on twitter (not, say, modernists). I mean, what is the sense of tweeting a panel on Pound into a whistling void? But, of course, if there was a whistling void it is at least partially (though probably only partially) my fault. As Janine’s comment makes clear, there are actually a good bunch of modernists already on twitter. So, inspired by Janine’s comment (and the excellent write-up of the Legacy of David Foster Wallace Panel by Kathleen Fitzpatrick, which I was sure had me up at 8:30 Wednesday), here is a quick digest of my notes from MLA, with all snark and doodles redacted, made in atonement for my silence.

I haven’t included all my notes for all the panels I attended. I should note that “653. Cognitive Approaches to Literature: Are We Beyond Science Envy Yet?” was, with the Freud panel described below, the best attended of the panels I sat in on (I’ll leave the implied contrast between these two panels to your imagination); but I was primarily interested in trying to understand exactly what a “Cognitive Approach to Literature” would be, that I didn’t really take any notes. Should any of the mentioned below find this page and wish to amend/change/contest anything I say below, please let me know in the comments. I’m happy to amend the post as needed. Indeed, going over my notes, I learned that I probably need to take better notes in the future… But if nothing else, these notes may, through the deliberate serendipity of Google, allow some folks to find one another.

Panels

  • 150. Unboxing Modernism: Beyond the Divides”: Introducing this panel, Melba Cuddy-Keane provided a brief outline of the development of modernist studies from 1970s to the present, from the consolidation of definitions of modernism in terms of formal experimentalization, to the recognition of the exclusions of such formulations (broadly speaking, this narrative seems applicable to literary studies as a whole). Our own period, she suggests, is one of refusing of closure—of attempting to keep the very definition of modernism open. The panelists, she suggests, offer visions of how this might be achieved.

    Broadly speaking, the panelists seemed to split into two groups: Ann Ardis and Michael Leja were interested in locating modernism within a larger frame of cultural reference, taking modernism out of the hermetically sealed “box” of high culture (to use the somewhat abused metaphor dominating the panel). Leja was interested in showing the similarities between modernist art (construed broadly enough to include abstract expressionism) and larger developments in visual culture. Ardis discussed periodical studies as providing one avenue that can enrich our understanding of the period, by forcing us to return to the complexity of the primary source. She mentioned anonymous/pseudonymous/collective authorship, and the complex international circulation of such periodicals, as obvious areas of interest. Anita Patterson and Steven Yao were interested in challenging the geography of modernism, locating modernism within a transnational framework. Patterson’s work focuses on modernist poets connected to the Americas (Jules Laforgue, St. John Perse, Wilson Harris). Yao’s work focuses on the Pacific, particularly with the fascination of some modernists with translating works they could not really read (all those poems “from the Chinese”).

    In the comments, the provocative question of whether “modernism” was even a valuable term anymore was raised. Panelists did not seem to come to any consensus about this important question, and (alack!) the panel ended before it was fully pursued.

    The panelists also provided a helpful run down of some of the most interesting recent works in modernist studies. Among the works mentioned were:

    • Christopher Bush, Ideographic Modernism: China, Writing, Media(Oxford Univ. Press, 2010)
    • Pacific Rim Modernisms, edited by Mary Ann Gilles, Helen Sword, and Steven Yao (Univ. of Toronto Press, 2009)
    • Lesley Wheeler, Voicing American Poetry: Sound and Performance from the 1920s to the Present (Cornell Univ. Press, 2008)
    • Pericles Lewis, Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2010)

  • 235. Law and the Modernist Atlantic: These three papers all considered some aspect of modernism’s (broadly construed) encounter with “the law.” Lisa Fluet’s paper “‘Liberal Fascism,’ Human Rights, and the State: On H.G. Wells” pursued the imagining of the state in the work of H. G. Wells. While the state has tended to be an object of critique in leftist and Foucauldian narrative, Wells’s narrative, she suggests, offers a way of imagining the state more positively. Unlike figures like Henry James or Virginia Woolf, concerned with recording subjective experience (“how the world feels”), Wells offers something like a “novel of information” (Fluet here borrows James Wood’s term, describing the contemporary novel) concerned with describing how the world actually works. For Fluet, Wells’s work offers an important opportunity to do what the novels of James and Woolf cannot do—imagine the state.

    Kelly McDowell’s “The Perverse ‘Look’ of the Law: Ulysses and Obscenity” offered a close, theoretically informed reading of “Nausicaa” episode. The episode’s representation of Gerty MacDowell and Leopold Bloom demonstrate the perversity inherent in the law itself. The normativity of the law itself, in the interacting gazes of Bloom and Gerty, undermines itself. McDowell closed by reading the logic of the “Nausicaa” chapter into the obscenity trials that it sparked.

    Thomas Cohen offered a fascinating look at Kathy Acker’s literary appropriations, and the legal controversy, by looking at Acker’s text “Dead Doll Humility.” Drawing on Lyotard’s notion of the differnd, Cohen traced the conflict between experimental writing and intellectual property in Acker’s work. Cohen helpfully quotes Geoffery Bennington on Lyotard: “an accusation of theft might well also involve a diffénd, if one of the parties does not recognize that the object in question is a legitimate object of property.” Such, Cohen suggests, is the case with Acker’s appropriations/plagiarisms of four pages of Harold Robbins’s The Pirate in Acker’s “The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec” (“Dead Doll Humility” responds to the controversy which followed this plagiarism).

  • 294. The Death of Freud?: This was the most crowded panel I attended. The second panelist was unable to attend because of illness, allowing Jean-Michel Rabatè to speak at length. His paper, entitled “What is to be preferred, Death of Obsolecence?”, provided a fascinating meditation on the place of death in Freud’s work. Rabaté began by contrasting his two titular terms, obsolescence being a sort of incomplete, unsuccessful death. Freudian psychoanalysis, by midcentury, had been co-opted by a “weak adaptive culturalism,” (what Lacan decried in “ego-psychology”). Adorno and Lacan both sought to save psychoanalysis from this fate (cf. “In psychoanalysis nothing is true except the exaggerations” – Adorno; the entire Lacanian rereading of Freud). In this regard, death, indeed, seems preferable to obsolescence.

    From here Rabaté moved to a discussion of the changing place of death in Freud’s work. This preoccuptation with death begins early, in a set of letters written in Spanish to Edouard Silberstein. Indeed, Freud seems tohave taught himself at least passable Spanish in order to conduct this correspondence, which was inspired by Cervantes’s Dialogue of the Dogs. The letters are interesting because they are structued by an injunction similar to that of free association. They also, however, feature a prohibition on describing death (one is not to say that “One has died”; substituting instead some sort of euphemism). This correspondence, with its anticipation of free association, the obvious importance of language (it was conducted in Spanish), and its vexed relationship to death, provides a model for a set of issues which will continue to constellate in interesting ways throughout Freud’s work. (In its ambition to trace key themes throughout Freud’s work, and with death in particular, Rabaté’s talk reminded me frequently of Laplanche’s Life and Death in Psychoanalysis).

    This concern with death puts Freud in dialogue with the better part of nineteenth-century German philosophy: Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche. Rabaté continued to the famous discussion of death in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, where precisely the question of the origin of death is broached explicitly. Is death an internal necessity or is it merely imposed from without? (This is the key question about whether a “death drive” exists.) In closing, he briefly discussed a thinker (about whom I knew nothing) who most emphatically believed that death was not a necessity: the Russian philosopher Nikolai Fyodorov, a resolutely anti-Heideggerian (and somewhat crazy) figure for whom death is a purely external phenomenon to be resisted (he proposed, as humanity’s key project, resurrecting everyone… yeah).

    In the Q&A period questions returned to panel’s titular question, trying to think about Freud’s continuing relevance through the psychoanalytic categories of mourning/melancholia, or the Derridean notion of ‘hauntology’ (preserving “a specter of Freud”). Rabatè responded by trying to move past these oft-referenced categories. “There is no ontology of psychoanalysis,” he insisted. Ontology itself is not a Freudian category; the concern with language, the concern with the Other in us (the work of culture), that is Freudian.

    (Oh, and I learned that Freud, like W. B. Yeats, had had a vasectomy—or Steinach procedure—in the belief that the procedure had rejuvenating effects.)

  • 364. D. H. Lawrence’s Short Stories: Beth McFarland-Wilson’s paper, “A Family Systems Interpretation of ‘Horse Dealer’s Daughter’” offered a reading of Lawrence’s story from the perspective of “family systems theory.” This approach allowed McFarland-Wilson’s reading to understand the story outside the terms of Oedipal desire that predominate in existing readings. Carrie Rohman’s “Ecology and the Creaturely in ‘Sun’” draws on Merleau-Ponty and reads the character Juliet, in “Sun,” as an experiment in the role of the irrational and the creaturely, a flight from humanism to a view of the subject as ecologically situated. The streaming “dark flow” between Juliet and the sun captures well the relationship between the body and the world that Merleau-Ponty describes as the “flesh of the world,” the perceiving body that is at once part of the world it perceives. Pamela K. Wright’s paper, “Till Death Do Us Part: The Implications of Illness, Disability, and Death on Love and Romance in Lawrence’s ‘The Blind Man’ and Somerset Maugham’s ‘Sanitorium’”, explored the role of disability in the two stories. Lawrence’s ‘The Blind Man’, Wright suggests, offers a more complex and sympathetic representation of the disabled body than that, for example, of Clifford Chatterley, whose disability comes to symbolized a broader cultural impotence.

  • 513. Joycean Materialities: Christy Burns’s “Circean Sense: Phenomenology in Joyce” examined the representation of sensate experience in Ulysses. Burns suggests that Stephen (on the beach in “Telemachus”), and Leopold Bloom on the beach later in Ulysses, offer two different attitudes toward the object world (Stephen’s disdain of brute materiality and Bloom’s immersion in the sensual world). “Circe,” in which objects themselves take on a life of their own, dramatizes the tension between these two different attitudes. David Earle’s fascinating “James Joyce, Gently Used: Republication and Dissemiation of Popular Modernism” contested the fetishization of the first-edition, to suggest that pulp editions of modernist works served a too-often ignored role in popularizing these works. Earle shared many fascinating popular versions of modernist texts, including an appearance of Joyce’s poems in American Girl (the periodical of the American Girl Scouts), and even mentioned the pulp edition of Bubu of Montparnasse, with an introduction by T. S. Eliot (which I’ve mentioned here). Sean Latham’s “Joyce’s Dirty Work” took as its object of analysis the literal dirt of “dear dirty Dublin” as an especially valuable way about thinking about the mongrel nature of the Irish nation as it emerges in the age of what Ulrich Beck calls the “risk society.”

  • 588. Copyright and the Modernist Atlantic: Versions of the three papers from this panel will all appear in a forthcoming volume, Modernism and Copyright, edited by Paul Saint-Amour. Robert Spoo’s “Copyright Deformations and the Transatlantic Publishing Scene” offered a historically rich account of the complex ways copyright impacted modernist literature. The US in this period (and until 1989) did not participate in the Berne Convention which establishes international copyright standards. Instead, to claim a copyright in the United States, a book had to be published/printed in the United States (the “manufacturing clause” of US copyright). Informally, “courtesy of the trade” prevented rampant piracy, but this informal system withered in the early years of the twentieth century as new publishers emerged, and a more competitive publishing environment developed. Joseph Slaughter’s “Plagiarism, Promiscuous Translation, and Yambo Ouologuem’s Primitivism: or, The Following Takes Place (Again) between 12am and 1am, 14 July 1913,” began by comparing two different translations of Oulouguem’s Le Devoir de Violence (the long title makes sense). The 1971 translation by Ralph Manheim introduced allusions to Eliot and Dickinson in the novel (replacing allusions in the original to Homer). These allusions became an object of controversy in discussions of the novel. Generally, Slaughter suggests, allusion becomes plagiarism when writer and reader are not able to share a common text/heritage/culture. In this way, the question of allusion/plagiarism in Ouloguem’s novel became a question of cultural authenticity—to what extent can an African novelist allude to Western canonicals works without being accused of plagiarism? Paul Saint-Amour’s “Modernism, Copyright, and the Counter Factual” suggests a shift in the concept of copyright during the twentieth century from the individual to the population, from the individualized logic of the author function to a more biopolitical logic. This shift in conceptualization of intellectual property, Saint-Amour suggests, and the counterfactual logic the law sometimes uses, are behind contemporary extensions of copyright. But they might also open up new avenues of contestation. For example, while some arguments for extending copyright terms rely on longer life expectancies, mightn’t this same logic suggest that copyright should expire sooner in those nations with lower life expectancies?

  • 612. The Legacy of David Foster Wallace: Why would I write this panel up, when Kathleen Fitzpatrick has already done a fantastic job?

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Mining Obscenity II: Google “Bitch”

November 18, 2009 in Digital Humanities, literature, obscenity by admin | 1 comment

"Well, he made so much fuss that all the other dogs but Hence’s old bitch came in."

Well, he made so much fuss that all the other dogs but Hence’s old bitch came in.—Fur News, 1918

So, continuing from last time, I’m interested in trying to understand exactly what Pound means in his famous description of European civilization as “an old bitch gone in the teeth” in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. Comparing the line to one later in the Cantos, I suggested that Pound’s use of the term “bitch” in Mauberley channels some of the term’s obscene force while nevertheless referring primarily to an elderly female canine (and therefore being beyond reproach… or at least beyond threat of censorship).

An interesting theory but how would you prove it? In the next post I’ll begin to try some (slightly) more sophisticated solutions (and I am very open to suggestions, dear reader, so don’t hesitate to offer ‘em below).

So, let’s start simple. Geoffery Hughes’s An Encyclopedia of Swearing: The Social History of Oaths, Profanity, Foul Language, and Ethnic Slurs in the English-Speaking World devotes about two pages to “bitch.” The term, he notes, “has the longest history among animal terms as an insult, extending from the fourteenth century to the present, during which time it has steadily lost force through generalization” (23). Originally it referred to “a promiscuous or sensual woman, a metaphorical extension of the behavior of a bitch in heat” (24). The term begins to be applied to men around 1500. (Hughes doesn’t spend much time breaking down the gender differences in the semantics of contemporary uses of the term.)

But alongside its obscene meaning, and (as Hughes notes) not entirely unrelated to it, “bitch” continues to mean “female dog.” So, to reformulate my original question: Would Pound and his readers have seen “an old bitch gone in the teeth” as obviously and indisputably offensive? Conversely, might they have seen it simply as a description of a dog, with the obscene meanings safely segregated? For that matter—how do we read this line? Is there any reason to assume readers, ninety years ago, would have read it any differently, with any more or less unanimity of reference than is available when we read it?

Hughes’s analysis provides a basic framework, but offers little help on the competing place of the obscene and non-obscene meanings of the term. So let’s try some easy (read: lazy) solutions. Googling “bitch” reveals some interesting things—but all far too contemporary to answer this question (save, perhaps, the wikipedia page for bitch, which draws on Hughes and seem to be quite good). Urban dictionary surveys contemporary uses of “bitch” as a noun and a verb—though it doesn’t do any better than Hughes in addressing the gender disparities in the word’s meanings.

Let’s narrow this down by doing a Google Books search on the phrase “old bitch” (I use the phrase “old bitch,” rather than “bitch,” both to find instances with greater similarity to Pound’s usage, and to reduce the sheer number of results). The results largely corroborate what one would suspect: older uses (in, for example, the materials old enough to be in the public domain) tend to be technical sounding references to canines, while more recent usage is frequently the sexist term of derogation we all know so well.

Here are some of the more interesting examples Google Books offers, listed in ascending chronological order, and offered here provisionally, without any regard to the representativeness of the sample (of which, more below):

  • The Revised and Enlarged, Second Edition of The Courser’s Companion and Breeder’s Guide (1834) by Thomas Thacker gives this advice to the would-be dog breeder: “Most authors agree, that a similarity and maturity of age of sire and dam is requisite, as a general principle, to breed good whelps. Markham and others, however, admit, that ‘to breed with a young dogge and an old bitch, may bring forth an excellent whelp;’ but, on the contrary, it is contended, that when bred from an old dog and a young bitch, the whelps will never be good ones.” [1834, canine]
  • The 1867 Cyclopaedia of Wit and Humor includes a story in which, “there’s no telling who’s constable until the election is over; it will be like the old bitch and the rabbit, nip and tack every jump, and sometimes the bitch a leetle ahead.” [1867, canine]
  • Commentaries on the Law of Marriage and Divorce reports a husband who “habitually called [his wife] an old bitch, a bloody or blasted old bitch, an old bawd, and the like opprobrious name.” [1881, obscene]
  • An article in the May 1884 Journal of the American Medical Association describes a rather horrifying experiment on a dog described as a “Large, fat and old bitch.” (The “experiments” involved anesthetizing dogs and then shooting them with various caliber guns in order to determine the best methods for treating such wounds.) [1884, canine]
  • A 1916 issue of Fur News (!) describes a hunt, noting “The dogs all opened up at once nearly, but one of my dogs left the others . . . Well, he made so much fuss that all the other dogs but Hence’s old bitch came in.” [1916, canine]
  • The 1918 Pacific Reporter (which seems to collect court cases from states along the Pacific coast) includes a reference to a woman who called someone “an old wretch and an old bitch, and said she ought to go to hell” in the court of reporting a case. [1918, obscene]
  • In Noel Coward’s comedy “Fumed Oak,” Henry Gow recalls “My only regret is that I didn’t come to the boil a long time ago, and tell you to your face, Dorrie, what I think of you, what I’ve been thinking of you for years, and this horrid little kid, and that old bitch of a mother of yours,” Mrs Rockett exclaims (shrilly!): “Henry Gow!”; Henry insists, “You heard me, old bitch was what I said and old bitch was what I meant.” [1935, obscene]
  • The narrator of Tennessee Williams’s story “Gift of an Apple” describes an “old woman . . . making herself some suffer. She would eat it alone. Fat elbows planted on either side of the tin plate and her shoulders crouched way over. Wheezing a little. Washing it down with scalding black coffee. . . The old bitch. Oh, well. She would die some day. Some ugly disease like cancer. It might be already started inside her dark flesh. Just as well. A stingly old bitch like that . . . ” (last ellipsis original). [c.1935 , obscene]
  • William Carlos Williams’s “To a Lovely Old Bitch,” a poem addressed to Sappho. [1948, obscene]

All of which is interesting. But the data, particularly in this format, seems too anecdotal. One can used the advanced search features to limit the search to certain dates (although the quality of Google Books’s metadata sure ain’t what it could be).
The breadth of Google Books is both a strength and a weakness. In the results above (admittedly culled from a larger set) we find a poem by W. C. Williams and a play by Noel Coward alongside such oddities as the Cyclopaedia of Wit and Humor or the Pacific Reporter, which collects court decisions of the Pacific states (I think). And while we have access to wonderful publications like Fur News (finally!), it seems dangerous to draw any broad conclusions about linguistic usage from a publication that, I assume, has a very limited readership and addresses niche topic.

What we’d like, I think, is to see how the word “bitch” was being used in a wider context that is roughly historically contemporary with Pound’s Mauberley. Ideally, it would be nice to have, ready-to-hand, every published occurrence of the word “bitch” in 1920 (the year of Mauberley? Depending on the size of this set of references we could then manually inspect it, or further mine it to try to breakdown what percentage of occurrences were primarily obscene in denotation. And, since we’re speaking in ideal terms, wouldn’t it be nice to have every use of of the term in English language poetry from 1890 through 1950, to get some sense of how poetry and obscenity (and references to dogs) interacted.

Well, neither of those “ideal” cases seems tractable at present. But there are some practicable solutions that may shed at least some light on the question. That’s for next time…

Works Cited
Hughes, Geoffery. An Encyclopedia of Swearing: The Social History of Oaths, Profanity, Foul Language, and Ethnic Slurs in the English-Speaking World. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2006.

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“For an old bitch”: Mining Obscenity

November 5, 2009 in Digital Humanities, literature, modernism, obscenity by admin

The beginning of Ezra Pound's Canto 42.

The beginning of Ezra Pound's Canto 42.

I’ve been spending time tinkering, using a very basic question as an occasion to play with some digital tools. In this post I’ll introduce the question, and in a few others talk about some of the ways I’ve been trying to answer it. Ultimately I’m interested in mining large amounts of text (I’m thinking mostly novels) from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to explore uses of obscenity; but that is a big question and is a long way off yet. So let’s start with a more manageable question.

That question is: How “obscene” is the term “bitch”? How frequently did it appear in print? When? What did it mean?

The more immediate relevance of this question came from reading Ezra Pound. Consider two quotations, both from Pound. First:

There died a myriad,
And of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization.

Charm, smiling at the good mouth,
Quick eyes gone under earth’s lid,

For two gross of broken statues,
For a few thousand battered books.

These lines from Hugh Selwyn Mauberley are quoted frequently as representative of modernist disillusionment after World War I. They nicely encapsulate an anger about the first World War that seems to call into question the value of culture itself. Pound returned to this anger throughout his career. Here are some lines from the beginning of Canto 42, first published in 1937:

‘We ought, I think, to say in civil terms: You be damned’
(Palmerston, to Russell re/Chas. H. Adams)
‘And how this people CAN in this the fifth
et cetera year of the war, leave that old etcetera up
there on that monument!’ H.G. to E.P. 1918

(To quickly explain the references, as best as I understand them: the first line draws on the English response to the American Civil War. Palmerston was the British PM during the Civil War; Charles Francis Adams, son of J.Q. Adams, was Lincoln’s minister to England during the war. [So is Chas. H. Adams a mistake?] Russell is Earl Russell, British Foreign Secretary during the war.

The next lines describe a comment by H.G. Wells to Pound, here referring to a statue of Queen Victoria.)

Here, however, “et cetera” replaces obscenity (“leave that old bitch up / there on that monument” was an earlier version). In the first instance “et cetera” stands in for some intensifying, presumably obscene adjective. In the latter “etcetera”—now with no spaces—stands in for “bitch.”

The use of “et cetera” as a sort of circumulocution is interesting, but not unique. Compare Augustin, from Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, who replaces an actual obscene verb with “obscenity”: “I obscenity in the milk of thy tiredness.” In “Typhoon,” Conrad’s sailors replace actual obscene language with “blank”:

His teeth flashed angrily in hsi dirty face. He didn’t mind, he said, the trouble of punching their blanked heads down there, blank his soul, but did the condemned sailors think you could keep steam up in the God-forsaken boilers simply by knocking the blanked stokers about?

Cummings, in the delightful little poem “[my sweet etcetera]“, uses “etcetera” more playfully than Pound, but in an essentially similar way. (Indeed, both Pound and Cummings strategically toy with prohibitions on obscene speech to make a political point about war, but I digress. . .)

So here is the puzzle: in Mauberley, published in 1920, Pound writes “an old bitch” but in the Cantos, published nearly two decades later, (the Fifth Decad of Cantos was first published in 1937), he replaces the word with “etcetera.”

That’s odd, isn’t it? Why would the later text be censored, rather than the earlier one?

One possible explanation is that the second passage is potentially more libellous than the first. While Queen Victoria is not named explicitly, the reference to “that old etcetera up / there on that monument” is clear enough to bring the comment into the domain of libel.

Or perhaps it is because the word is more obscene in the latter than the earlier. For while the same phrase “old bitch” is used in both, it seems to in fact have two different meanings. When, in the Cantos, Pound/Wells refers to “that old etcetera up there on the monument,” the derogatory force of that obscenity is evident. But in Mauberley the word “bitch” is not necessarily used in the obscene sense. The “old bitch / gone in the teeth” for whom a myriad have died is a “botched civilisation” (botch and bitch chiming off another), not a specific (female) figure. And the abstraction of the indefinite article and the reference to “gone in the teeth” seem to make clear that if the tenor of this metaphor is “civilization,” its vehicle is an old female dog.

Today “bitch” is a minor-level obscenity. However offensive some may find it as a piece of sexist insult, its obscene force is not so great that it is prohibited from broadcast television. But it is still definitely impolite. And while the semantic borders of the word seem to be quite flexible, it continues to carry gendered meanings. One can refer to a male as a “bitch” (it was not always the case), but at least part of the derogatory force of so doing comes from the concomitant emasculation.

More could be said about the gendered complexities of contemporary usage of the word “bitch,” as both a noun and a verb. (And what about its short-lived career as an adjective—as in, “That fluorescent t-shirt and acid-wash denim combination is totally bitchin”?). But the primary meaning of the term “bitch” is clearly this derogatory one. To use the word to refer to a female dog is quaint. But for how long has this been so?

Here’s a guess: Pound’s lines from Mauberly capitalize on an ambiguity, drawing on ire of the obscene sense of bitch even while keeping the term printable by clearly attaching it to its older meaning.

Such an argument assumes a basic historical development of the meanings of the word “bitch,” and a parallel, evolving set of standards of print decency; the earlier, primary meaning of bitch as “female dog” at some point takes a back seat, becoming today what I think is almost a “technical” meaning (used, for instance, by dog breeders). And the primary meaning becomes the one we’re all familiar with.

Sound convincing? Well, how would you prove it?

Over the next couple of posts I’d like to use this question as an occasion for thinking about how such a question could be further explored with available digital tools.

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A Final, Belated, Infinite Summer Post

October 15, 2009 in Infinite Jest by admin

Needless to say, readers of Infinite Jest, spoilers follow.

So it is over. My own posts on Infinite Jest sort of suddenly stopped more than a month ago, but I thought a final reckoning worthwhile. My own rather abrupt retirement from regularly writing about the novel was largely a function of the way I read the novel—after Gately is shot, the sense of the plot coming together made the book compulsively readable. And so I raced through the final pages and once I’d finished the only thing I could really think of talking about was the novel’s ending.

When I finished the novel, like many readers, I initially felt a bit cheated. The discussion of Infinite Jest on Slate’s Audio Book Club (which I just discovered recently) does a good job of articulating this feeling of irresolution in the novel’s conclusion. The canonical statement of this feeling is probably Michiko Kakutani’s review of the novel—a review which itself elicited comments from Wallace).

In part this initial disappointment was a function of my own experience reading the novel; for the first 250 pages I was willing to entertain it as a big, expansive, funny, postmodern romp, but one which would be as much a demonstration of Wallace’s enormous intellect as it would be an actual narrative. But I became increasingly convinced around the 250 page mark that the novel was going, against all odds, to come together—that, in short, this was not simply a novel of complexity for complexity’s sake but a novel that would elegantly bring its numerous strands together.

I put a whole lot of stock in the brief comment on page 17 that seemed to suggest that Hal and Gately would eventually end up digging up J. O. Incandenza’s head together and awaited this moment with anticipation. Indeed, I made a habit of rereading the opening chapter on the assumption that it provided the horizon toward which the novel was inexorably moving. When Avery Edison wrote a post declaring “I am not enjoying this book,” I wore my plot-driven excitement on my sleeve in a comment on the Infinite Summer blog—a comment that in retrospect seems to quaintly mix naïveté and enthusiasm.

The promise of page 17 also offered the possibility of Hal and Gately meeting. Readers of Ulysses know that one of that enormous novel’s pleasures is finally getting to see Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom bump into one another after just missing each other during a day’s worth of walking about Dublin. When the bookish and melancholy Stephen finally talks to Leopold Bloom, it is a genuinely thrilling moment. And indeed the sort of strange spiritual kinship that seems to draw Stephen and Bloom together appears to be operating between Hal and Gately; in both novels we have a precociously intelligent young man dealing with Hamletian (Hamlet-esque?) family tragedy, and an older, less educated, working adult male who, though less obviously “intellectual,” seems the wiser figure in the end. Stephen’s late-adolescent intellectual angst is in part deflated by being juxtaposed by Bloom’s invigorating pragmatism, and one senses a very similar relationship in the parallel lives of the brilliant Hal and the more practical Gately.

And, of course, pg 17 holds out another sort of promise—a thrilling conclusion to the novel’s plot of political struggle between complexly motivated Quebecois terrorists and the O.N.A.N.ite government which will somehow bring together Hal, Gately, John Wayne, and J.O.I.’s head. I raced forward in part because the novel seemed poised to achieve the impossible, to wed genres that don’t seem particularly compatible—the family drama and the political thriller, to combine “a ripping yarn” (to quote the cover of a late nineteenth century blood and thunder boy’s novel that happens to be on my desk) with a thoughtful reflection on life in a hypermediated society. Such a combination might seem to present a paradox that is impossible to maintain. But this very paradox is folded into the novel’s persistent meditations on “entertainment.” Indeed the novel’s enormous size and chaotic seemed to emerge from the explosion of precisely such a combustible combination.

But that’s not how the novel ends. While the plot of the novel does indeed begin to come together to some extent in the wake of Gately being shot, it never delivers what seems to be promised on pg. 17—Gately and Hal never really meet, and the various threads of the plot are left hanging. This blog post from “I Just Read About That” does a great job of summarizing the plot issues and trying to put it all together. But what are we to do with this ending?

One response is to try to answer all the unanswered questions by rereading the novel. Maybe what happens at the end is basically hidden throughout the rest of the novel. There are a number of very ingenious readings of the novel’s ending, which try to put together the novel’s details to bridge the gap between where the novel “ends” and where it “begins.” And there is indeed a lot that Wallace has managed to put into this novel that is not immediately obvious.

I am convinced by some of the attempts to answer certain questions by retracing hints dropped throughout the novel—readings that, for example, trace who was in possession of the master cartridges of the “Entertainment” and how they came to be in possession of them. But I don’t think that ferreting out plot details alone will render the novel’s ending completely satisfying. Even were one able to answer all the plot questions (and I’m skeptical that that is possbile), that wouldn’t really allow one to understand the novel and why it ends where it ends. What happens is a crucial question; but why is the question that fiction, unlike real life, can meaningfully toy with, if not fully answer.

Gerry Canavan suggests something similar, I think, when he describes the novel’s plot as a sort of seduction,

you can allow yourself to be seduced by the teasing but doomed impulse towards closure, the fantasy that answers to all the mysteries exist somewhere inside the book. . . . But the impulse to make this sort of over-interpretive effort is itself a kind of misreading of the novel, which is, we must recognize, explicitly anticonfluential along the theories of Himself’s own films.

I worry about writing off the pleasures of plot too quickly; elsewhere Wallace seems too sensitive to pleasures of plot to simply step away from them. But I basically agree with Gerry; many plot details are buried away in fascinating corners of the novel. But finally possessing them all will not really solve things. I don’t, however, follow Gerry’s anticonfluentialist reading of the novel.

So one solution to the novel’s apparently untidy ending (Infinite Detox calls the ending “a reader-hostile kick in the nuts”), is to reconstruct the missing coherence from implications and hints from elsewhere in the novel. Another is disavow coherence completely, to read coherence as Gerry does, as an Entertainment-like seduction to be resisted. Because the novel offers no tidy, definite ending, it is tempting to read Infinite Jest as an instance of what the novel describes at one point as “anticonfluentialism.” I find such a reading, though, at odds with the novel in other ways. Endnote 61 describes anticonfluentialism as “An après-garde digital movement, a.k.a. ‘Digital Parallelism’ and ‘Cinema of Chaotic Stasis,’ characterized by a stubborn and possibly intentionally irritating refusal of different narrative lines to merge into any kind of meaningful confluence” (996). To my mind this is not simply a delightful red-herring, but a deliberate provocation on Wallace’s part (there are other such moments in the novel I think).

The pretensions of certain “avant-garde” artists, and the academics who discuss such work, are a regular point of satire for Wallace (as indeed they are to J.O.I. himself whose “found drama” provides one of the novel’s funniest bits of satire). The references to “anticonfluentialism,” rather than offering a model for how we should understand Wallace’s novel, provide an object lesson in exactly how not to understand it. The references to anticonfluentialism are prophylactic, vaccinating a reader against a particular understanding of Infinite Jest.

Rather than seeing the novel as either fulfilling or defying traditional expectations of plot, I’d like to suggest the novel ends by shifting the criteria of a meaningful ending. Rather than the plot, it is the narratives of Hal and Gately which hold it together, albeit not in the way that I had assumed they would. The long concluding passages about Gately which bring the novel to an end allow us to see Gately in the very condition that we find Hal at the novel’s the beginning, reaching something like “rock bottom” (I’d apologize for that cliché but… ). The novel therefore, in the same period of narrated time, is able to simultaneously tell the story of Gately’s recovery and Hal’s decline, twisting them together as two sides of a single mobius strip.

“So yo then man what’s your story?” is the question that ends the novel’s first chapter, a question that returns repeatedly throughout the AA meetings. Against the model of narrative as sheer entertainment, what one finds in the question “what’s your story?” is an ethical commitment to others by patiently listening. This, I think, is where the novel leaves us, preferring a mode of engaged ethical narrative to one of self-enclosed narrative pleasure.

While I don’t plan on rereading the novel again too soon, when I eventually reread it I will be paying much closer attention to J.O. Incandenza, for it is J.O.I. (as wraith) who most concretely accomplishes what I wanted from Wallace—that is,he brings Hal and Gately together. And rather than anticonfluentialism it seems as though annulation is the novel’s governing structure—Infinite Tasks suggests something similar in his excellent discussion of the novel’s conclusion.

And J.O.I. remains a compelling and difficult figure. Looking back over the novel, it is not the J.O.I. the film-maker who intrigues me, so much as J.O.I. the scientist. The references to J.O.I., director of the Entertainment, may mask another, equally crucial version of J.O.I.—the one concerned with annulation, and to whom the novel lends its own voice in a chapter near the center of the book in which the discovery of annulation seems to emerge from out of family trauma (491 – 503). (This chapter, to my mind, might be the most amazing stretch of writing in the entire novel, though I understand that this is a minority opinion.)

So, after all that reading, what is one really to make of a novel like Infinite Jest? Having finished it, and thought about it for a while, I remain convinced that it is a remarkable novel. I’m unsure that I could recommend it without reservation. For people who love reading big novels, it is wonderful. That said, it is a very demanding novel and I have a hard time recommending it, when short little gems like Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground and Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier are available and pack quite a wallop.

In bidding adieu to this novel, for now, I must lend my voice to the many others who have praised Infinite Summer for organizing a summer-long reading of Wallace’s novel. The persistent hum of twitter chatter on #infsum provided a comforting, ATHSCME fan-like, reminder of a world of readers beyond one’s own limited experience of the novel. Some of the best commentary on the novel came not from Infinite Summer itself but from the blogs which cropped up around it, some of which I’ve noted in the sidebar.

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