[-empyre-] COVID 19 Movement III: Presto

Thu Apr 30 04:38:53 AEST 2020

 Patty—you  inspire a presto search for that sonata
Writing about this grief and torment is far from easy - thank you for three
powerful  movements and moments ....
A grateful reader,
C

On Wed, Apr 29, 2020 at 8:17 AM Patricia Zimmermann <patty at ithaca.edu>
wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> *COVID 19 Movement III: Presto*
>
> Only the recent books on documentary history and analysis could be found
> as e-books, according to our librarians at Ithaca College.  The theoretical
> books in critical ethnography, critical historiography, theory were
> confined to hard copy.  Our librarians ordered every e-book on documentary
> they could find, squeezing out budget from small cracks so my students in
> my History and Theory of Documentary class could have some readings.
> Plenty of books on new media theory had been published as ebooks, so that
> covered part of my class, but not the abstract part, the meta.
>
> The college had shutdown. We had one week to "migrate" our courses to
> "remote instruction."  Words from administrators and not from faculty.
> COVID meant shelter-in-place. No more F2F classes as they have come to be
> called.  F2F, a phantom, a phantasmatic, a fantasy in this COVID world of
> invisible viruses, illness, death, and screens.  Migration from the
> embodied sensorium of the classroom to the emphemerality of screens. From
> three dimensions to two. From a world of chiararscuro to flat.
>
> The great migration as some have called it came with a great work speed
> up.  Many colleges, including my own, insisted on propagating ideas about
> "student centered," a neoliberal construct of consumerism and comfort
> displacing the messiness of ideas and debate.  A dangerous shift from the
> collective to the individual, from the abstract to feelings.  To be student
> centered, we should be synchronous, stay in touch with our students, send
> emails, be available on Zoom open office hours, understand. These
> ideologies ignored what faculty had to do:  redesign and restructure and
> reconceptualize courses in a new interface, a new format, under almost
> impossible conditions. And all of us, whether at elite schools, public
> universities, or third rate four year private colleges had to do it fast.
>
> Presto, I thought.  Very fast.  Tumultuous.  A forward driving rhythm with
> contrapuntal tension.  Presto.
>
> I scrambled to cut films and new media projects out of my syllabus, not to
> make the course easier, but to respect the labor of our librarian who
> digitized titles for Sakai. He was swamped by requests from across campus.
> He was digitizing ten hours plus a day to get it all done.
>
> When the Governor instituted PAUSE which shut down everything, this
> librarian brought in back packs and shopping bags to pack up all the DVD
> titles faculty needed, and many external drives.  He would digitize from
> home.  I cut and pruned and honed, trimming down titles.  I convinced
> myself that instead of my carefully curated sequencing of films and new
> media to use juxtapositions to jolt students into ideas through shock or
> through pleasure, I needed a new plan.  The curatorial plan would not work
> online.
>
>  So I brainwashed myself into thinking this could now be a "slow read,"  a
> deep dive into close readings of the texts.  In fact, Tim Murray, our
> comrade here on Empyre, even offered an argument that all undergraduates
> need to learn to read films and new media carefully on a formal level of
> textual analysis, so this was in fact, not defeat, but a good thing, a
> cleansing in a way, a paring down to what matters.
>
> I started to play Mozart's Sonata in A Minor during this scramble to
> transition my courses to online.  Written in 1778, it commemorated his
> mother's death, a mix of pounding repetitive chords and flying lines of
> fast notes, then a gorgeous sweeet andante movement, and the third
> movement, presto.  Tumultous, surging dynamics.  Juxtapositions of loud and
> soft, rage and sweetness.  The sonata sits as only one of two Mozart sonata
> in a minor key. I realized this so-called mass migration to remote learning
> catapulted me and other colleagues into presto.  Not the kind identified
> with magic shows, but presto, fast, furious, contrapuntal.
>
> But, as we say in critical historiographic theory,  there is the straight
> story and then there is the crooked story.  The straight story seemed to
> emanate from administrators emphasizing access to media technologies,
> teaching synchronously, simply transposing what we do in classrooms in a
> large media school to an online environment.  It meant an uncritical
> technofetishism of workshops, tutorials, webinars on various gadgets and
> interfaces that disguised the anxieties, work speed ups, and conceptual
> work.
>
> All to keep it ALL THE SAME, as though nothing had happened and as though
> the Zoom screen did not flatten our affect and transform our images into
> postage stamps.
>
> The straight story meant asserting without critique that students needed
> high end gear to make their films and videos, and that it needed to get to
> them at all costs.  The engineers called me, worried about how to
> decontaminate cameras with all their nooks and crannies.  They called
> various equipment places in New York where friends of theirs worked.
>
> Noone knew how to decontaminate lighting gear, sound recording equipment,
> cameras.  They worried if they went in to the building to get gear to ship
> to students for their thesis projects, they would die. Or their children
> would die. Or they would be sick for weeks. They worried if they did not do
> this, pretend everything was the same, the straight story, they would be
> fired.
>
> Their crooked stories unsettled me.  And as crooked stories do their work,
> their  bends, and forks and branches push us to see differently, that the
> straight story of official histories is a lie that camouflages terror of
> change. Historians like me look for turning points, shifts, where movements
> and layers recalibrate, reform, in the crooked stories where the tempo is
> not andante, but presto, where contrapuntal voices complicate the melodic
> line.
>
> A younger colleague called me. She was crying.  It was impossible to do
> all this synchronous teaching with a 2 year old and a partner who also
> worked at home.  Newly tenured, she wanted to know who I thought would be
> fired.  The college continues to worry about enrollment, a small school
> without a big endowment that depends on tuition.  Workforce reductions were
> mentioned at every webinar of what is called the Senior Leadership
> Team....I did not even know SLT referred to them.  She said it was
> impossible to even think. She could not write. She could barely read. Now
> she had to figure out how to manage cooking dinner, shopping with worries
> of infection, caregiving, finding a place to be quiet to do her Zoom
> meetings with students, grading, answering more and more emails from
> students who could not meet any deadlines.
>
> I joined forces with some other senior faculty advocating for extensions
> to tenure clocks, the adoption of P/F, the abandonment of student
> statements. We were not alone. It was a grassroots, national movement.
>
> Another woman colleague wrote me a long email. She said she could not
> think as her fear infused her brain and her heart. Anxiety consumed her
> like a mudslide.  She had a 1 year old, no day care, a geologist husband
> who worked in another state, pressures to be available to students and be
> synchronous, doing all the shopping, all the cooking, all the cleaning,
> tracking down students who never showed up or wrote back.  Then, she said,
> the college keeps messaging it is having financial problems, it needs to
> resize itself.  She asked me this:  will I be fired?  She had heard that
> most of the part time and one year contract faculty were not being renewed,
> and that class sizes would be increased. She said, "I feel terrorized, the
> speed of all of this, of just a day, leaves me depleted."  I told her we
> needed to do a Zoom at her convenience, just so she would not feel alone.
> In that Zoom, she told me that she did not feel anyone understood her
> research (she is a massively productive feminist social scientist in
> communications), that she did not feel anyone at all in her department
> supported her, and that the great migration meant a great migration into an
> anti-feminist work speed up. The isolation offered no community.  My heart
> broke for her.
>
> Another colleague wondered if the program he directed would be cut given
> the budget crisis and the perils of a drop in the first year class in the
> fall.  He shared that noone spoke to him directly, and that he has morphed
> into a Kremlinologist, watching the administrators webinars for clues, but
> finding they only propagated more anxiety.  Workforce reductions. No
> international travel.  No raises.  Larger class sizes.  Work speed up.
> Presto.
>
> If my emails were transcribed into musical notes in a score, they would
> reveal the last movement of a sonata, presto, with different voices layered
> in counterpoint. The student who shared he could not turn in his paper on
> time as his father, an emergency room doctor, contracted COVID in a Philly
> hospital. A young woman who told me she could never manage any theory
> courses, this was the fourth one, she preferred hands on, doing things, not
> reading or writing.  She said shelter in place robbed her of making videos,
> and therefore, she could not do my theory course because it did not matter.
>
> Another student wrote and said going online offered something he did not
> have before:  discussion postings where he could think about the media
> projects before the discussion, and get feedback. Another said moving
> online and sheltering in place offered solace and respite. With no parties,
> no socializing, no clubs, no internships, no extracurriculars, no love
> life, she had time to focus on her readings.
>
> Then, messages from colleagues, forwarding articles about the collapse of
> higher education, the great migration perhaps now meaning the great crash,
> where maybe only elite well endowed universities remain, and where places
> like I teach at reconfigure into something unrecognizable before they
> evaporate completely.
>
> The excitement, the fast paced presto, of the Rapid Response Salons on
> COVID featuring colleagues opening up ideas that we produce weekly, a space
> that renews us with community and purpose. Some deans and VPS jump on the
> team and get involved, eager to swim in the presto of ideas not yet
> solidified. A retired much admired colleague wrote after participating in
> one of the Friday salons. She said "ideas will get us through this."
>
> The third movement of the Sonata in A Minor pulses with tumultuous
> cascading motifs in presto in many voices.
>
> When I play it, I think of my own mother's death, maybe from COVID, of the
> death of higher education as we all once knew it or perhaps, more
> accurately, fantasized about it, of the death of calm and solace, the death
> of being with others.
>
> We are all in mourning for losses we can not yet name.
>
> We are all in presto, speedy notes tumbling out in all keys,some of which
> we do not yet recognize and can not yet play with any texture, nuance,
> dynamics, or ease.  Presto.
>
> Patty Zimmermann
>
>
>
> Patricia R. Zimmermann, Ph.D.
> Professor of Screen Studies
> Roy H. Park School of Communication
> Codirector, Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival
>
> Ithaca College
> 953 Danby Road
> <https://www.google.com/maps/search/953+Danby+Road+%0D%0AIthaca,+New+York+14850+USA?entry=gmail&source=g>
> Ithaca, New York 14850 USA
> <https://www.google.com/maps/search/953+Danby+Road+%0D%0AIthaca,+New+York+14850+USA?entry=gmail&source=g>
>
> http://faculty.ithaca.edu:83/patty/
> http://www.ithaca.edu/fleff
>
> _______________________________________________
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