Hunting in the Middle Ages was an integral part of court etiquette, as depicted in details of a wool tapestry called “Boar and Bear Hunt.” (©Victoria & Albert Museum, London)

Why would binoculars be an essential tool for a scholar of Renaissance literature during a study tour of Europe? What does crawling around on a castle floor have to do with researching the writings of Shakespeare and Spenser? Why would a professor of 15th- and 16th-century poetry and drama desperately need a therapeutic massage after a day of intense investigation? The answer is tapestries.

Massive, intricate, otherworldly weavings called “arras” were commissioned by European royals and nobles to adorn the walls of their palaces and estates. Peopled with life-sized figures depicting scripture, myth and legend as well as hunting, falconry and winemaking, they brought color and life to drab, drafty halls. But adornment was only part of the purpose of these colossal works of art, says Rebecca Olson, who has spent more than a decade studying their role in literature and, by extension, in Renaissance society.  They also reinforced power and inspired loyalty by evoking tradition and royal status.

“I use the analogy of Kindles and e-readers and how they retain some of the elements of an actual book.”
— Rebecca Olson

“These tapestries were everywhere,” says Olson, an assistant professor in the Oregon State University School of Writing, Literature and Film. “Besides the magnificent large-scale hangings, there were smaller, cheaper versions adorning humbler settings. They were as ubiquitous as TV is today. They had practical uses, educational uses, political uses. You can’t really understand Renaissance literature unless you understand how they were used and how people thought about them.”

Crafted of wool and threaded with strands of silk, gold and silver, the most impressive tapestries sometimes unfurled 30 feet long and soared 15 feet high, all the better to awe, educate and even intimidate the viewer. Studying them can be a workout. Olson once slid herself along the cold stones of Hampton Court Palace to view the underside of an arras laid out on a rack for repairs. To examine details at the top, she often resorts to peering upward through a pair of binoculars. After days of scrutinizing every last detail, she can wind up with a serious crick.

“Just to look at them is very physical,” says Olson. “You’re moving because you can’t take them all in at once, so you’re craning your neck, you’re bending down, you’re walking up to look closely, you’re stepping back. My neck often hurts quite a bit.”

Stories from the Past

The first arras hangings she saw with her own eyes were in the banquet hall of England’s Hampton Court Palace. Even as frayed and faded as the massive tapestries were, she found them enchanting, particularly the heroic scenes depicting the labors of Hercules. The 500-year-old weavings felt like silent emissaries from Shakespeare’s era. As she gazed on them — realizing that the Bard’s contemporaries had sat among these very hangings eating, drinking and watching live actors perform — her arms prickled with goose bumps.

“Boar and Bear Hunt,” detail. (©Victoria & Albert Museum, London)

In the years since, she has discovered a rich — and largely overlooked — literary and historical presence for the arras, which she documents in her upcoming book, Arras Hanging: The Textile that Determined Modern Literature and Drama (University of Delaware Press, in press). The arras was, for instance, central to one of Shakespeare’s most dramatic scenes: Hamlet’s stabbing of Polonius. In Act III when Lord Polonius plots with Hamlet’s mother and stepfather to hide behind a tapestry to eavesdrop (“Behind the arras I’ll convey myself”), he makes a fatal mistake. Hamlet, hearing the hidden voice, thrusts his sword through the arras (translated as a “curtain” in some editions), killing Polonius.

“The idea of a prince damaging one of these very expensive tapestries really makes us wonder about Hamlet’s sanity in that scene,” Olson says. Modern audiences, she adds, would fail to grasp the import of his action without the historical context. “It’s like when a rock star smashes his expensive guitar. It has real shock value.”

In Book III of Edmund Spenser’s epic poem The Faerie Queen, one of the great classics of Renaissance literature, the writer devotes 18 stanzas to the virgin warrior Britomart’s night in a room draped floor to ceiling with arras tapestries (“For round about, the wals yclothed were With goodly arras of great majesty, Wouen with gold and silke…”). On the tapestries were bawdy scenes of debauchery and sensuality, which Spenser introduced to contrast with Britomart’s chastity.

Inspired to Reverence

For the rich and the royal, arras hangings were status symbols. They depicted ancient stories of valor and virtue. Often designed to inspire viewers to be braver and better, they also were instruments of political propaganda and puffery. King Henry VIII favored images of King David in an attempt to associate himself with the great biblical figure. Queen Elizabeth I lined her outer chambers with woven figures of small size, yet as the visitor proceeded toward her inner chambers, the figures got bigger and bigger. “They were supposed to make you feel smaller and smaller, so by the time you got to the queen you just felt tiny,” says Olson.

Boar and Bear Hunt.” (©Victoria & Albert Museum, London)

Olson’s research has taken her to the Tower of London and to the National Archives of the United Kingdom, where she scoured ancient ledgers and inventories for clues to ownership and transport of arras hangings. She also has found evidence that tapestries were used to teach a young prince about the Battle of Troy, and that queens gave birth in chambers swathed in weavings.

As important as the woven images is the literary symbolism embedded in the act of weaving. Olson points out that the words “text” and “textile” derive from the same Latin roots texo and texere — “weaving” or “to weave.” Even though the loom has largely disappeared from daily life, the metaphor (to weave a story, spin a tale, follow a narrative thread) has survived all these centuries, cropping up in our most advanced communications lingo (the Web, the Net, an email thread).

Just as many moderns cling nostalgically to bound books of paper and ink, Olson notes, medieval Europeans would have felt attached to stories told upon the tactile surface of a weaving, even as the printing press was beginning to push the technology.

Illustration by Thomas James

Those halcyon days of trusted family doctors, vinyl discs and hometown papers are being left far, far behind as the world hurtles ahead on ever-faster, ever-smaller, ever more potent computing devices. Just as the revolution in technology has given everyone 24-7 access to The New York Times, a ballooning blogosphere and personalized, portable playlists, so has it given patients and consumers a limitless gateway to health-care resources. Within seconds, we can find news, information and chatrooms on WebMD, the world’s largest commercial health-care website, or up-to-date medical research on PubMed, the open-access site of the National Institutes of Health. We can get data on every disease under the sun. We can access details about an ever-widening rainbow of capsules, tablets, potions, ointments and salves. And we can solicit feedback from fellow sufferers around the globe, sharing symptoms and comparing diagnoses.

Now, instead of blindly following “doctor’s orders,” patients can power up their iPad, Google their symptoms and join a chatroom for a different kind of “expert” opinion — that of ordinary people who have “been there, done that.” They can add a health-related “app” to their smart phone, or post their ailments on Facebook. (A story about a mom whose gravely ill 4-year-old was saved by a Facebook diagnosis went viral on the Internet.) They can ask their doctor for all sorts of new drugs being touted on TV — many of them designed for just-discovered diseases that seem to pop up as fast as new products for personal computing.

In this brave new world of “e-health,” there are bounteous benefits, says Kristin Barker, a sociologist at Oregon State University.

“I think the overwhelming trend of health information on the Internet is positive,” says Barker, who studies the impact of electronic technologies on medical decision-making and power dynamics. “It gives us access to information in ways that are unprecedented. It allows us to be more engaged in our own health-care decisions. It empowers us. ”

Sitting in her third-floor office in Fairbanks Hall, she laughingly admits to typing in her own symptoms on a regular basis, looking for clues to why her head is aching or her energy is sagging.

“I’m a little bit of what’s called a cybercondriac,” she jokes. “I’ll look up two of my symptoms — headache and fatigue — and I’m convinced I have a brain tumor.”

This tendency to inflate or misinterpret ordinary aches and pains is one pitfall of seeking health-care information online. Others include grasping at “disease” models for problems that may, in fact, originate outside the biomedical sphere, and letting anecdotal evidence trump verifiable science.

Illuminating these kinds of hazards is the focus of Barker’s research. While she readily acknowledges that the “doomsday scenarios” of the Internet’s early days — people self-diagnosing with disastrous results, or falling prey to online charlatans — have not materialized to any significant degree, she has identified certain trends that are cause for concern, both for individuals and for society at large.

The Loneliness of Fibromyalgia

A woman called Yolanda posts the following comment in a chat room: “What I find in reading others’ symptoms is that I’m not nuts, and this really is happening to me.” In other words, her pain is not all in her head. And there’s an important subtext: She’s not alone in her suffering.

You can sense the gratitude in her words. You can almost hear her sigh with relief as she types her thoughts into her computer and then clicks “send.” With that tap of her finger, she joins the millions of Americans who are turning to the Internet for an astounding range of health-care needs, from basic information to psychological support. Of the nearly 75 percent of adults who use the Internet, 80 percent have sought health-related information online, the Pew Internet & American Life Project found in 2010. That’s almost 60 percent of American adults. Their search topics range from health insurance and environmental health hazards to drug safety, chronic pain, elder care, memory loss and a host of specific diseases.

Illustration by Thomas James

Sometimes, this electronic activity results in what social scientists call “illness affiliation” — identifying with others who report similar symptoms. These collectives of sufferers, joined in a spirit of “illness camaraderie,” as Barker calls it, typically push the medical establishment to bless their shared experience with disease status.

Yolanda (a pseudonym) is a case in point. Barker found her on a website fictionally named “Fibro Spot,” a chatroom for sufferers of a modern-day syndrome called fibromyalgia, which afflicts some 6 million Americans. Launched and run by laypeople, Fibro Spot’s homepage was one of the top 50 highest-ranked pages among the 6.7 million hits Barker got when she searched online for “fibromyalgia.”

For 12 months in 2004 and 2005, the researcher “lurked” in the background at Fibro Spot, eavesdropping on the conversations of Yolanda and about 250 other visitors who posted comments to the website. (Although some social scientists question the ethics of online lurking for data collection, Barker argues that if the site is public and doesn’t require a password or membership to join, then it’s open for anyone to read. The known presence of a researcher would alter the dialog, she says, diluting its authenticity and, hence, its value to science.)

Yolanda, having recognized her own plight in the stories of other virtual group members, found affirmation that her cluster of symptoms, ranging from pain and tenderness to anxiety, insomnia and fatigue, must certainly indicate an actual physical illness.

“By writing and reading postings at Fibro Spot, participants transform a collection of symptoms into a unified entity,” Barker explains in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior. “From the point of view of participants, shared symptoms, rather than objective medical evidence, substantiate fibromyalgia as an organic disease.”

Social scientists call this phenomenon “reification” — that is, inventing a real, material thing out of an abstract idea or belief that has been developed socially. In this case, the idea being reified is a perceived illness. But as Barker points out, just because people are reporting similar constellations of physical and psychological symptoms doesn’t mean there’s a biomedical basis for them. The aches and pains may be real enough, she grants. Their origins, however, may also lie in larger social forces that affect human wellbeing.

In the case of fibromyalgia, some research points to a central nervous system imbalance that causes hypersensitivity to pain. But medical science has yet to find a definitive source of illness. Social science, however, has given us perhaps the most telling clues to the disorder, according to Barker. Studies reveal that fibromyalgia affects mostly women (the ratio is nine women to one man), and that there is an overrepresentation of sufferers who fall on the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder.

To Barker, these demographics strongly suggest a social problem rather than a medical one. Fibromyalgia, she posits, is a classic example of a phenomenon she has studied extensively throughout her career: “medicalization.” She defines it as “the processes by which an ever-wider range of human experiences come to be defined, experienced, and treated as medical conditions.” In short, we are seeking pills and potions to fix problems whose solutions may well be non-pharmaceutical.

“I argue that the fibromyalgia diagnosis medicalizes a vast constellation of complaints that are associated with social, economic and personal hardships that characterize the lives of many women,” she says. “By focusing intently on gaining medical legitimization, Fibro Spot participants remain largely silent on the social circumstances in which suffering is grounded and experienced.”

Fibromyalgia is just one of the “contested diseases”— medically unexplained syndromes such as chronic fatigue, multiple chemical sensitivity and sick-building syndrome — being driven in large part by online connections among people like Yolanda and her fellow sufferers. Indeed, more than 10 million Americans have a diagnosis for a contested disease. Electronic “connectivity” and the collective validation of “lay expertise” that it fosters is “a potent element in contemporary lay challenges to scientific expertise and will become increasingly influential as online illness affiliation becomes ever more commonplace,” Barker and co-author Tasha Galardi, an OSU graduate student, write in the journal Social Science & Medicine.

Other examples of the “disease du jour” craze, such as “restless leg syndrome” and “low T,” are being propelled by drug companies pushing pharmaceuticals as “cures” for conditions that many physicians chalk up to normal aging, poor lifestyle choices (such as too much sitting around) or even, as Barker puts it, simply “part of the human condition.”

Illustration by Thomas James

These forces, which Peter Conrad of Brandeis University calls “engines of medicalization,” have shifted over the decades. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Barker says, doctors were in the driver’s seat when they redefined natural processes — especially ones related to women’s bodies, such as childbirth and menopause — as needing medical management. By the end of the last century, however, the pharmaceutical industry was the primary driver of the trend toward medicalizing experiences once accepted as normal vicissitudes of living. Riding right alongside the drug companies was the health-care consumer. Then the Internet arrived, creating the perfect platform for ramping up medicalization trends to breakneck speed.

“The transformation of medicine from being primarily professionally directed to being increasingly market-driven places the patient in a new role vis-à-vis medicalization,” Barker asserts, again drawing on the writings of Conrad. “It is increasingly the case that patients contribute to medicalization via their consumer ‘desire and demand’ for medical goods and services.”

When we latch onto organic explanations for troubles that are actually social in nature, Barker says, we lose the opportunity to find and address true root causes. “My concern is how electronic support groups may push for greater medical intervention when it’s not necessary, not effective and not in our best interest, either as individuals or as a society,” Barker says.

Warriors for Mammography

For Yolanda, chatting with her compatriots online gave her the gumption to tell off her skeptical physician: See? I told you so. You’re not so smart after all. Indeed, questioning traditional medical authorities is a hallmark of health care in many of today’s online communities. Barker’s Fibro Spot subjects, who were more than 90 percent female, were uniformly bitter about their physicians’ unwillingness to recognize fibromyalgia as a legitimate disease. “Idiot,” “bitch” and “clueless” were some of the virtual insults they hurled at their doctors while nursing fantasies of slapping them or kicking them in the shins. Their rage, clearly fueled by feelings of powerlessness, practically leapt off the screen. “Find a new doctor!” was their mad-as-hell advice to newcomers.

This rejection of doctors’ expertise and scientific findings, unheard of in the heydays of Rockwell and rock-n-roll, is at the heart of a firestorm that erupted on the Internet in 2009. This “populist uprising,” to use the words of Pew’s Susannah Fox, was triggered when a congressional task force issued new guidelines for breast cancer screening. The panel of independent experts, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, announced that it was rolling back earlier standards for routine screening. For 40-something women without any breast cancer symptoms or risk factors, the panel reported that routine mammograms don’t save lives and may, in fact, be harmful. And for women between 50 and 74, every-other-year scans are adequate, they said, thereby overturning earlier recommendations for annual mammograms.

The reaction from breast cancer survivors and providers was “swift and furious,” reported journalist Jennifer Goodwin on U.S. News & World Report’s “HealthDay” website. Within hours, the Internet was aflame with angry denunciations against the task force, which had based its new recommendations on rigorous, population-level statistical evidence.

This brouhaha “was a great illustration of how two worlds collide,” Barker told Goodwin for the U.S. News article. “On the one hand, you had the science that was saying mammography for women in their 40s might not be as effective as we thought, and on the other hand, you had the personal experiences of the women who believed they were saved by having a mammogram.”

What’s happening, she explains, is “a contemporary clash between scientific and lay ways of knowing.” These “two faces of medicine” (as Harry Collins of Cardiff University and Trevor Pinch of Cornell phrase it) are not only pitting patients against physicians, but also private wellbeing against the public good. In an era of scarce resources, unnecessary screenings shrink access and siphon funds that could be used for more effective, more equitable preventions and treatments for larger swaths of the populace.

“There’s a lot of overuse of health care that is unneeded and, in some cases, harmful,” Barker notes. “We have a right to be worried about not getting care we may need — that’s a real fear and one that should not be dismissed. But we also need to be afraid of getting health care we don’t need. Because somebody is profiting from it.”

The Image of Health

Even as they lose faith in their doctors, Americans are embracing certain medical technologies with the fervor of true believers, Barker says. Our infatuation with imaging machines that peer inside our bodies to see what’s wrong with us — CT scanners, PET scanners, MRIs — has exploded in recent years. High-tech imaging in emergency rooms, for example, quadrupled between 1996 and 2007, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). In doctors’ offices and outpatient clinics, imaging frequency tripled during the same time span, the CDC found.

Mammography, Barker suggests, along with these other high-tech imaging tools, has taken on the status of a “sacred technology” — something revered that cannot be questioned. Following the logic of sociologist Kelly Joyce of the College of William and Mary, who asserts that MRIs and the images they create “serve as totems and sacred objects” in the same way religious rituals and trappings do, Barker says the idea is an extension of the classic analysis in Elementary Forms of Religious Life by Emile Durkheim, who is widely recognized as the “father of sociology.”

Our faith in these technologies can blind us to the findings of science, Barker cautions. Despite the dramatic rise in imaging for injured patients in ERs, diagnosing life-threatening conditions has not improved correspondingly, according to a 2010 Johns Hopkins study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. As for mammography, research has found that for every cancer detected during routine screenings among 40-something women, nearly 2,000 mammograms are performed. The new guidelines were based on those findings. With no credible evidence linking more imaging with less mortality, the task force concluded that the risks (from radiation, false positives and follow-up interventions) were not justified for healthy, asymptomatic women.

Still, survivors and their supporters were outraged. Statistics, schmatistics! they lashed back. You’re talking about my life, my mother’s life, my sister’s life! Their passionate beliefs became amplified on the Internet.

Barker has enormous respect and empathy for the patients, survivors and consumers she calls “citizen experts” or “lay experts.” Anyone who has undergone breast cancer — or, for that matter, any life-threatening condition — attains a degree of expertise that has value and must not be discounted, she says. But she goes on to caution that when good science sheds light on questionable, wasteful or even harmful uses of medical personnel, equipment and money, connective resistance from stakeholders can be a dangerous barrier to good policy. That’s e-health at its worst. At its best, e-health can be a powerful fulcrum for balancing anecdote and science, private and public, individual and societal toward better health and greater wellbeing for everyone.

“When the Internet first came out,” Barker says, “it was a place where people went to get information. Then it started to be a place where people shared information. Now it’s becoming a place where people create information.”

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OSU’s Linus Pauling Institute maintains the Micronutrient Information Center, a popular online database of research-based information about vitamins, minerals and other micronutrients.

Inspired by the university’s upcoming symposium, Song for the Blue Ocean: Science, Art and Ethics (February 18 – 19), “Literature of the Ocean” will “pursue the subject across time as well as through the three-dimensional space of the sea,” says English Assistant Professor Peter Betjemann. Literary readings focus on oceanic zones (littoral, neritic, oceanic) as well as levels within the water column (surface, photic, aphotic) and places where human communities meet the sea (wharves, docks, beaches). The course, ENG 499/582, is being taught winter term.

A joint colloquium in anthropology and zoology will explore the relative strengths, weaknesses and assumptions of the worldviews underlying traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) and Western scientific knowledge (WSK). “Ocean Wisdom: Integrating Traditional and Western Ecological Knowledge of the Pacific,” will focus on the Pacific Ocean and its bordering lands. “Students will compare and contrast the different epistemologies on which TEK and WSK are based via case studies throughout the Pacific region,” says marine ecologist Mark Hixon, who will team teach the class with anthropologist Deanna Kingston. ANTH/Z 499H will be offered spring term.

Lewis’ approach to film was the subject of Leading Man, a feature in the fall 2009 issue of Terra.

As her family grew and endured a health crisis, Shelley Jordon underwent her own transformation from still-life painter to animation artist. (Photo: Jan Sonnenmair)

When Shelley Jordon was a little girl growing up in Brooklyn, she got in trouble for pulling her mother’s books off the shelves and drawing in the white spaces. Her need to create was so strong that she couldn’t resist, despite knowing her mom would be angry.

Many years later as an adult reeling from the news that her husband had a brain tumor, Jordon followed a similar urge. She printed out his MRI scans and started painting on top of them, covering them with her brush strokes, using personal imagery to come to grips with her fear.

“It was like going to a new country,” she says. “It was a whole new world of visual subject matter that I didn’t know existed, and it was my husband’s brain. It was visually exciting to me and at the same time a living document of the reality of our situation.”

Jordon, a professor of art at Oregon State University, has been an artist ever since she can remember. Painting has been not only her life’s work but also a lifeline during difficult times. Through trauma and transition, she has drawn from personal experience, but the feelings she captures are universal, grounded in the daily events that we share with the people who are closest to us.

Her early focus on still lifes took a dramatic turn with the uncertainty of her husband’s condition. Interpreting objects on a canvas was no longer enough to express her day-to-day feelings. She needed her pictures to move, to express a reality that was not fixed and a future that was in doubt. Adapting her work to a life in flux, she transformed herself over a period of several years from a renowned still-life painter to a creator of award-winning hand-painted animated movies.

“Shelley has recently embarked on an exciting new direction, exploring animation, installation and video in works that introduce a very moving type of content – the vicissitudes of human relationships,” says Sue Taylor, a respected art critic and historian at Portland State University. “This seems a pivotal point in her career, almost a reinvention of her artistic interests, and it will be fascinating to see where these experiments will lead.”

Well Known for Still Lifes

Before Jordon’s domestic life was upended by her husband’s illness in 1995, she had earned a national reputation as a creator of still-life images. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, she worked steadily, focusing on the objects in her daily surroundings. Her work was featured in a one-person career retrospective at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle. Other exhibits followed: the Oregon Biennial at the Portland Art Museum, the Northwest Biennial in Tacoma, Washington and galleries in San Francisco, Chicago and New York.

And then, everything changed.

Jordon, her husband David and their young daughter Clara were in Italy where Shelley was teaching as a visiting professor. Her husband fell ill, and they came home to Oregon early, only to receive the news about his brain tumor that was to refocus their lives.

“Thankfully everything worked out okay, and he is fine now, but that period from diagnosis to recovery really blew me open. And I started doing work as much as to keep myself sane, but also it took me down an entirely different path,” Jordon says.

Jordon began drawing on her husband’s MRI scans, layering image on top of image. “Drawing on them, I was thinking of previous traumas, and it made me think about how [with] each new trauma we re-experience previous traumas. Part of what was going through my mind was, I was thinking of the possibility that my daughter would not have a father, and I thought about the fact that I didn’t have a father growing up, and I made all those connections.”

Jordon started grasping for something new but didn’t yet know what she would find. In her grief and anxiety, she couldn’t even think about painting a vase, a flower or a rooftop.

“I didn’t want to even look at those then. And I didn’t know what I wanted to do,” she says.

Shaken to the Core

In the spring of 2009, Jordon was a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome when an earthquake struck the city. Aftershocks occurred every night for a week. The result for Jordon is perhaps her darkest and most accomplished work to date, a six-minute animation called Terremoto (“Earthquake” in Italian) that combines images from Roman mythology and history with an unsettling, jittery feeling. It is set to music by composer Kurt Rhode, who was also at the academy in Rome.

“Every night the room started shaking and my heart was pounding, and I soon couldn’t tell if it was an earthquake or my heart pounding anymore. One trauma brings up another trauma. These ideas of trauma, the illusion of safety, the fragility of human life are all very important for me,” she says.

Those themes show up in another animated installation that Jordon exhibited in May 2010 at Marylhurst University. “Morning Coffee” was part of the Motherlode exhibition for Mother’s Day. Jordon set a small breakfast table with linen, a morning paper and a cup of coffee. On the surface of the coffee appear moving, painted images culled from her personal life and from the news. A viewer might see an image of Michael Jackson and then a grocery list.

“What intrigues me about Shelley Jordon’s recent work is how it uses video animation to build on her paintings’ exploration of still life and family story,” says Terri Hopkins, director and curator of The Art Gym at Marylhurst. “Morning Coffee in particular is very successful in the way it integrates video and sound into the still life tableau.” (In 2007,The Oregonian named Hopkins one of the region’s most influential persons in the art world.)

Jordon’s recent success comes at a time when everything else in her life seems to have aligned. Her family, now living in a beautiful old home in northwest Portland, is healthy, and she continues to teach a full load of classes at OSU, including painting and a contemporary issues class for art majors that she helped to design.

“Thankfully, the old model of the genius artist who didn’t have to work very hard is very outdated now,” Jordon says. “Art students now understand that you need a plan. There are DIY (Do It Yourself) models of artists who find a way to make a living by working for nonprofits, interning at or starting their own gallery, curating, or like me they teach, do research, and find time to create art that fulfills their creative drive.”

She also paints herself as a student – now learning video software programs such as Final Cut Pro and getting help from both her art students and students in OSU’s New Media Communications program to gain the technical skills she needs to accomplish more sophisticated animation. After teaching for 25 years, Jordon is both learning from her students while imparting her own knowledge of traditional painting techniques. And now, it would seem, the sky, creatively speaking, is the limit.

“In New York where we all lived in small, cramped spaces, I had this reoccurring dream where I would open up a door, and there would be this whole room in my apartment that I didn’t know existed,” she says. “This is how all of this has felt internally for me. There was this door I had never opened before, and once I opened it, there was this incredibly huge space of unexplored creativity waiting to be tapped.”

A New Journey

Jordon’s newest project is just starting to take shape. Tentatively titled “Anita’s Journey,” the artist found inspiration in the incredible journey of her husband’s now-deceased mother, Anita Greenstein, who spent her childhood hiding from the Nazis in Berlin during World War II.

“His mother was six-years-old when they went into hiding and the entire family survived and ended up settling in Portland,” she says. “I want to explore Anita’s point of view, what it might be like to be this little girl hiding in various locations, from a coal storage warehouse to various basements.”

In June, Jordon traveled to Berlin to research “Anita’s Journey” with the help of awards from OSU’s Center for the Humanities and Valley Library as well as the Oregon Arts Commission. Before she left for Berlin, she received an international honor: The Jerusalem Cultural Fellowship named her one of four fellows for a pilot program for artists to work in the historical city. The Oregon Jewish Museum, which exhibited “Family History” in 2009, had nominated her (Read more about her fellowship experience here.). Also joining her were acclaimed novelists Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole Krauss; choreographer Reggie Wilson; and New York urban planner Joshua Sirefman.

In Jerusalem, Jordon met other artists, including filmmakers and animators who attended an exhibit of her work. Among those were Paul Vester, co-director of the experimental animation program at the California Institute of the Arts.

“Shelley has a sense of humor. This and her life experience, together with the connections she makes between traditional drawing, animation and technology, informs her work in unexpected ways,” Vester says. “She is treading here a relatively new path, that of the animation artist.”

The trips to Berlin and Jerusalem gave Jordon the creative freedom to visualize the place where her husband’s mother was hiding from the Nazis and the time to start shaping those ideas into her next animation. Again, she comes back to the importance of family, and the connections that shape people into who they become.

“Clara was three when her grandmother died, so she never got to know her and know the person she was,” Jordon says. “Not only is this an incredible story of resilience, and trauma, but it is the story of my daughter’s grandmother told from her point of view when she was a little girl.”

To support the OSU College of Liberal Arts, contact the OSU Foundation.

Geography of an Artist

Shelley Jordon grew up in a working class Brooklyn neighborhood. Raised by her single mother, she doesn’t remember any artists in her family but was praised for her artistic talents by teachers early in her education.

She received a college scholarship to attend the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, where she focused on illustration. After receiving her master’s degree in fine arts from Brooklyn College in the late 1980s, Jordon said she was offered three full-time teaching positions – one in Chicago, one in California and one at OSU.

At the time, Jordon said she didn’t know where Corvallis was on a map. She felt like a fish out of water in a small community and after a few years started looking at Portland.

“I’m an urban person; I need to be in the city,” she says. “I remember driving around in what is now called the Pearl District and saw a sign for the Irving Street Lofts. It said, ‘Artists: Live/Work.’”

Living in a loft with no closets but what Jordon describes as an “amazing raw space with fantastic light,” she had the freedom to paint in what would become her defined style for many years. Jordon was an acclaimed painter of still-life images, many of which were up to 12 feet tall.

Jordon met her husband David in the laundry space of the building and soon, both her personal life and her career came together.

“When I moved from Manhattan to the loft in Portland, the paintings got bigger, and gradually the compositions changed, became less compressed, and the skies became more open,” she adds.

The paintings from this period include “Sweet Delicata,” a piece on permanent display at OSU’s Valley Library. Jordon has never worked from photographs as some still-life painters do. She has always used what was around her, so as she moved physical locations, her paintings changed.

“Any of my paintings that I look at, I know where I was not only internally and emotionally, but also geographically,” she says.

In a study funded by the Oregon Transportation Research and Education Consortium (OTREC) and the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) in 2006, she led the development of three models to examine the effects of mileage fees on how much people drive, how the fees would be distributed among rural and urban motorists and how the tax change would affect different income groups.

Using data from a 2001 national transportation survey, McMullen found that shifting from the gas tax to a mileage fee made little difference in how much motorists would actually pay and thus had little or no effect on how much they drive. She also showed that mileage fees would be slightly more regressive than the gasoline tax. That is, motorists with the lowest incomes would pay a small increase, less than 1 percent of their income, under a mileage fee program. However, that pales in comparison to the more than 5 percent increase that occurred when gasoline prices roughly doubled from 2001 to 2006.

Comparing urban and rural residents, McMullen found that rural drivers would pay slightly less under mileage fees. Even though rural motorists tend to drive more miles, they also tend to have more pickups and other vehicles that get lower fuel mileage. Owners of fuel-efficient vehicles would pay slightly more under a mileage fee system.

A lack of car sales data prevented McMullen and her team from evaluating the impact of mileage fees on vehicle purchasing preferences.

OTREC honored McMullen with its first Researcher of the Year Award in 2009 for her leadership in the analysis. In March 2010, she was elected president of the Transportation Research Forum, an international independent organization of researchers and other professionals.

Her report, Techniques for Assessing the Socio-Economic Effects of Vehicle Mileage Fees, was published in 2008 and is available online.

OSU psychologist Sarina Rodrigues (photo: Karl Maasdam)

You don’t think of voles as paragons of virtue. Yet one species of these drab mouse-like creatures is loyal to its mate for life, helps around the den, cuddles its young, and generally exhibits what humans would call “family values.” Meet the true-blue prairie vole.

Its cousin the meadow vole, however, is a cad. Despite being 99 percent genetically identical to the prairie vole, the meadow vole is profligate in its ways — sleeping around, shirking nest-building and abrogating pup-rearing.

It’s not moral rectitude that makes the difference in voles’ domestic behavior but rather a couple of compounds called oxytocin and vasopressin. Doubling as hormones and neurotransmitters, these neurochemicals are major players in how animals, including humans, relate to each other both romantically and socially. They may even help to explain worldview differences among liberals and conservatives.

Scientists think that animals like the prairie vole, whose cerebral reward centers have evolved to associate vasopressin with pleasure, get more positive reinforcement for pair bonding and therefore seek it out. But exactly how these hormones function in the body and the brain is still largely unknown. Teasing out oxytocin’s and vasopressin’s precise mechanisms drives Rodrigues’ research as an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology.

“Oxytocin,” says OSU neuropsychologist Sarina Rodrigues, “is just such a marvelous, amazing and elegant hormone. It’s related to generosity, trust, empathy, mating, pair bonding, parenting. It facilitates social behaviors.”

Stress, Actually

This “elegant hormone” influences stress as well as love, not only strengthening pair bonds and social attachments, but soothing the mind and calming the body when faced with difficult or dangerous situations. Thus, along with the related compounds serotonin, vasopressin and dopamine, it has earned the designation “neuromodulator” — basically, a social lubricant and a brake on stress reactions.

“It dampens how much stress hormone our body releases,” Rodrigues explains. “It curbs our brain’s response to emotional stimuli and even how much our heart freaks out during stress.”

Inspired by her Ph.D. adviser at New York University, Joseph LeDoux, author of The Emotional Brain and the Synaptic Self, Oregon-born Rodrigues started her career dissecting both human and animal brains to map emotions at their source, in a part of the brain known as the amygdala. As a postdoctoral scholar at Columbia University, she studied the brains of psychiatric patients, looking for biochemical clues to mental illness. From there, she headed to Stanford to work with Robert Sapolsky, who discovered that brain cells shrink and die under severe stress. Before joining the faculty at OSU, Rodrigues did yet another postdoc, this time at Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, a move she laughingly describes as reflecting her “hippy-dippy” idealism. “Berkeley was my bridge from neuroscience to social psychology,” she says.

Although she sees herself as a “geek” at heart (“I love microscopes and pipettes and test tubes and all that sort of stuff”), she has veered from the merely molecular to the more broadly social. Whether seeking the physical loci of emotions in gray matter or exploring chemical responses to stress, she hopes her neurological knowledge will ultimately benefit the human condition.

“How can we use this information to make people’s lives better?” she wonders. “If we can better understand how people process emotions, we can create tools for dealing with feelings more effectively.”

The Mind’s Eye

Rodrigues’ most recent study, published in the November 2009 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has broken new ground in the field for a couple of reasons. One, it’s the first simultaneous investigation of empathy and stress on a hormonal level. And two, it’s the first to link a specific gene to both empathy and stress reactivity. “This was the first study that really looked at how one gene can affect our social behavior and our stress reactivity in tandem,” Rodrigues says.

If you think of oxytocin molecules as boats floating through the human body, you can think of oxytocin receptors as the docks where the boats tie up. Rodrigues calls these docks “targets.”

“Oxytocin has targets all over our body and brain,” she says. The heart and the spinal cord, even the uterus, have oxytocin docks. It’s not surprising, then, that the hormone affects such maternal functions as uterine contractions and breastfeeding.

Genetic variations in these receptors affect how people respond to hormonal signals from the brain. In her two-pronged experiment, Rodrigues tested the DNA of 200 college students grouped by genotype. Group A had a genetic variation associated with low levels of empathy and social affiliation (emotional bonds with others) and high levels of stress reactivity (jumpiness). Group B, in contrast, had genes associated with strong empathy and low stress reactivity. Each student was then tested for empathy by measuring his or her score on an instrument called “Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test,” which asks subjects to guess which emotion (such as “hateful, jealous, arrogant or panicked” for one image and “playful, irritated, comforting or bored” for another) is revealed in a photograph of a pair of human eyes. Stress reactivity was gauged by measuring the students’ heart rates after unexpected bursts of noise in a headphone.

The findings were strong and clear: Students in Group A were nearly 25 percent more likely to make an error on the facial expression test, and were also more jumpy on the stress test.

“It does seem that we are biologically hardwired,” Rodrigues says. “We do have a lot of inborn tendencies.”

She cautions, however, that our destinies aren’t ordained by biology. “We are this huge slurry of both nature and nurture, of genes and upbringing and experience,” she says. “It’s our social connections that really chart which trajectory we will go down.”

Rodrigues’ discovery adds to the growing scientific understanding of why some people are more tuned in to the feelings and needs of others. It even bolsters a growing body of literature pointing to oxytocin receptors as possible culprits in autism, which has been associated with the same low-empathy, high-stress variation in Rodrigues’ Group A.

“You can’t change your genes,” Rodrigues points out. “But you can change how genes are expressed.” Extreme loneliness, for example, can weaken genetic defenses against germs. She likens our genetic inheritance to a bottle. Its shape and composition are set. But by capping or uncapping it, by replacing a twist top with a cork, a glass stopper with a funnel, the bottle can be opened or closed, made more receptive or less receptive to new input, turned on or turned off.

Uber-Gooey Group

For young Sarina Rodrigues, it all started with a mystery experiment in her Portland high school chemistry class. “We had no idea what we were making,” she recalls. The blending of sucrose crystals, 3M glucose, protein pellets, solidified mixed esters, 4-hydroxy-3-methoxybenzaldehyde, sodium chloride, sodium bicarbonate and water yielded something a teenager could appreciate: peanut brittle. An apprenticeship at a neuroscience lab arranged by the same St. Mary’s Academy chemistry teacher set her on her current path.

She recently got a shock after testing her own DNA. To her astonishment, she found that she was born with a genetic predisposition for low empathy, high stress reactivity.

“At first I wanted to keep it a secret,” she confesses. “I like to think that I’m a very caring person with empathy for others. But In fact, 75 percent of the people in our study were in the low-empathic, high stress-reactive group. The uber-gooey, lovey-dovey, very empathic, low stress-reactive people were a really small proportion of our sample. Many of us have to really work at forming social bonds and not freaking out.”

To support research in the OSU College of Liberal Arts, contact the OSU Foundation, 800-354-7281.

You’ve heard of scout camp, church camp, even fat camp. But spit camp? That’s where scientists like Sarina Rodrigues go to study the practical applications of using saliva in the lab. A company called Salimetrics, a spin-off from Pennsylvania State University, offers workshops on using oral fluids as biological specimens for the behavioral, social and health sciences.

“It’s a boot camp on how to study biomarker fluctuations in people’s saliva — the best way to collect it, best time of day, best way to store it, best way to measure it — so I can get it just right,” she explains. “These are tricky things to get from saliva.”

Rodrigues signed up for the Salimetrics Spit Camp because, in her quest to unravel the mysteries of oxytocin, saliva has several advantages over blood (“I don’t want to be pricking people”) and cadavers (“I don’t want to be in the business of collecting fresh human brains”). First, needles aren’t needed. Second, subjects must be alive. And third, people can spit in a cup anytime, anywhere, making it handy and practical.

Saliva diaries are another tool Rodrigues is sharpening up for her research program. She wants to track biochemical changes occurring during varying emotional states. “I want people to take a little saliva sample when they feel really depressed and when they feel really warm and fuzzy to see how that might correlate how the body and brain react to various emotions.”

]]> http://oregonstate.edu/terra/2010/04/the-saliva-diaries/feed/ 1 http://oregonstate.edu/terra/2010/02/girl-girl-boy-boy/ http://oregonstate.edu/terra/2010/02/girl-girl-boy-boy/#comments Mon, 22 Feb 2010 17:15:31 +0000 Celene Carillo http://oregonstate.edu/dept/terra/?p=3340

The problem became clear to Sunil Khanna one hot, humid day in 1993 in a northern Indian village near Delhi. He was sitting in Dr. Mahavir Singh’s office, preparing to interview the local physician, when someone interrupted them.

It was a man, frantic, looking for someone to perform an ultrasound on his wife.

“Ultrasound is not available at this clinic,” Singh told the man. “But I can refer you to a nearby specialty diagnostic clinic that has ultrasound. Tell me, when would you like your appointment?”

“As soon as possible,” the man said. “The other doctor already said it was too late.”

“Is it so? How late is it?” Singh asked.

“It’s my wife’s fourth month,” he said.

“I don’t think it’s too late. I will speak to a doctor next door. You can come at 10 in the morning. We will take care of your problem,” said Singh.

“How long does the procedure take?” he asked.

“It will only take an hour,” the doctor told him.

“And if we need to get an abortion?” he asked.

“That will also be an hour,” the doctor said.

The man’s tone — and Singh’s — indicated that the procedures were routine. As the discussion unfolded, Khanna felt a growing sense of unease.

Slideshow by Celene Carillo; photos by Lakshman Chandra Anand and courtesy of Sunil Khanna.

In fact, the man next told Singh he already had two daughters. And if this child was to be a third, they would almost certainly abort her. Once the prices were settled (about $36 for the ultrasound, $24 for the abortion), the man left, and Singh turned to Khanna to resume their interview, as if nothing momentous had taken place.

Later, as he was interviewing parents and measuring boys and girls at the village school, Khanna started hearing shadowy suggestions that female-selective abortion was happening in the village. Occasionally, women mentioned village girls who had been born — and ones who hadn’t. Or they mentioned “other women” who had undergone abortions. But never had the practice been revealed so frankly as it was that day in Singh’s office.

Son Preference

This story appears in Khanna’s book, Fetal/Fatal Knowledge: New Reproductive Technologies and Family-Building Strategies in India (2009, Wadsworth Publishing Co.). Before he interviewed Singh, he spent two months in Shahargaon (a pseudonym he created to protect the identity of his subjects) studying how the cultural practice of son preference affected child growth and development. Son preference, he says, reflects a patriarchal system that “ensures the inheritance of family name, property and decision-making power in the male line.”

What occurred in the village was a turning point for Khanna, now an associate professor of anthropology at Oregon State University. The stories he heard set him on a path to confront practices ingrained through centuries of tradition. Today he specializes in the cultural circumstances that affect women’s health.

By 1995, Khanna turned his attention entirely to the practice of using sex-selective screening and abortion as family-planning tools. And he found significant evidence that it was widespread, not only in Shahargaon, but nationally. From 1993 to 2003, Khanna collected census data among the dominant Jat ethnic group in Shahargaon. He found not only an imbalance among males and females in the village but a declining trend in sex ratios of females to males, even as the Jat population was increasing.

He also found that families in both rural and urban areas were less inclined to care about the sex of their first child, but if that child was a girl, they would test the second pregnancy. One of the major differences between educated urban parents and uneducated rural parents was access to contraception. Women in rural areas were more likely to have more children, as well as more abortions, to reach the desired number of boys and girls.

Tradition and modern technology often clash, Khanna points out in his book, but in this case, they are complementary. “What I found is that traditions of son preference are being realized through technology. And technology is being used to perpetuate that tradition,” says Khanna.

A Growing Disparity

Although abortion has been legal in India since 1971, the use of prenatal screening to determine the sex of a fetus has been illegal since 1996. Still, the sex ratio in the northern Indian state of Haryana, surrounding Shahargaon, is 861 females per 1,000 males. “Imagine the complication of implementing a law that makes female sex selective abortion illegal in a country where abortion is legal,” says Khanna. “Doctors have to be on board not to use ultrasonography to identify the sex of the fetus. Ultrasonography machine sellers must be on board to not sell machines without registering with an agency. And parentts must be on board that they will not seek this kind of information.”

Girls, says Khanna, are often seen by families as economic liabilities. Even though dowries have been illegal in India since 1961, the practice is still widespread nationally. And doctors have their own coded language when it comes to sexing babies. Often doctors will tell parents they are very lucky if the baby is a boy — and to start saving money if the child is a girl.

Shahargaon was the perfect place for Khanna to perform his study. Over the past 20 years, the ancient village of about 1,400 has been engulfed by the city of Delhi and its approximately 15 million people. The village has retained its autonomy and rural ethos, only due to an archaic rule that protected its residential boundaries. Its narrow lanes, fragrant with charcoal smoke and crowded with old buildings, are evidence of that character.

Still, Delhi encroaches.

“This is a rural enclave stuck in the middle of this roaring metropolis where everything is happening, and where you can find Nike and Adidas shoe stores, McDonald’s and open access to the Internet,” Khanna says.

You can also find clinics where ultrasound technology is available. It was this intersection between old and new that intrigued Khanna. Shahargaon’s size, too, meant that Khanna could understand everything that was going on in the community. But what really clinched the deal for him was how receptive Shahargaon’s leaders were to his being there. “They were very inquisitive to what I was doing and why I was there,” Khanna says. “But at the same time they were open to it.”

Over time, Khanna won the trust of villagers as well. But it did not come easily. During his first visit, his research assistant often had to conduct the interviews while Khanna waited outside villagers’ homes. It wasn’t until two years after his visit to Singh’s office that Khanna felt comfortable bringing up the subject of female-selective abortion directly.

“It was terrifying to bring up this topic, risking that I would be thrown out of the community. It was only through establishing long-term, significant relationships that you begin to ask them,” Khanna says.

Stories To Be Told

Later, though, women insisted on having him in the house. They would ask Khanna to make sure his tape recorder was working and asked him to play back portions of their interviews so they could be sure. They wanted to be heard.

Ultimately, Khanna’s goal is to raise the status and role of women in Indian communities. “Khanna’s work exemplifies one of the pioneering long-term community studies that go beyond just examining the contentious issues from an academic perspective,” says Dr. Sunil Mehra, head of MAMTA Health Institute for Mother and Child, an Indian non-governmental organization. “Instead, his work involves building community-level opinions against this practice and developing meaningful linkages among key stakeholders in the community, government agencies and non-governmental organizations.” MAMTA provides reproductive health care to impoverished women and, through Khanna, maintains a formal working relationship with OSU.

In Oregon, Khanna’s research also finds its way into the classroom, where he relates his experiences in undergraduate anthropology courses on South Asia. His graduate students are studying access to abortion services in the state, in addition to son preference among Indian immigrants in the United States and Canada. And Khanna has completed several projects on the availability of health care to uninsured Oregonians.

“I continuously strive to produce knowledge that is meaningful and relevant to real people doing real things,” Khanna says. “My research and teaching allow me to engage in a continuous and critical conversation between the ‘theoretical’ and the ‘applied’ contexts of my discipline.”

Options for Women

In India, Khanna hopes to generate a community dialog that will help parents think differently about daughters. Such discussions, he adds, could influence policies on female-selective abortion.

Meanwhile, community leaders in Shaharagoan have encouraged people to talk openly about the reproductive and emotional consequences of female-selective abortion. They have highlighted the disproportionate sex ratios that result from the practice. Leaders have also been able to set up support for women experiencing domestic violence or intense pressure in their homes to have abortions. Khanna plans to implement this approach in both rural and urban areas.

“I want to develop programs, which are state or federally funded, but which are sustainable, so that people can look at their daughters not as financial liabilities, but as assets. And to think of them as equal to their sons in terms of ability and income potential,” Khanna says. “This project has been one of the most challenging and fulfilling experiences of my life.”

OSU News release, March 2007, “OSU researcher: Sex-selective abortion issue in India needs a ‘culturally relevant’ approach”

To support the OSU College of Liberal Arts, contact the OSU Foundation

Photo by Frank Miller

Moreland Hall faces the picturesque Memorial Union in the heart of a historic college campus straight out of central casting. Rounding a corner on the way to film professor Jon Lewis’ modest office, you’d encounter a poster that makes it clear he thinks in Technicolor and speaks in terms just as vivid: “REAL SEX: The Aesthetics and Economics of Art-house Porn.”

Ahem. Well, then. Not your usual promotional piece for an academic presentation, but then Lewis is not your usual academic.

One of America’s foremost authorities on censorship and regulation, film history and movie industry institutions ranging from Francis Ford Coppola to the Motion Picture Association of America, Lewis would be at home at UCLA, NYU or any number of other campuses known for their connections to Hollywood.

That he has had such a recognized impact from his modest home base at Oregon State University, which has no film program, is both a tribute to the importance of his work — he’s written seven influential books and has two more in process — and to his ability to make the most of his circumstances.

Straight Talk

“There is a kind of common-sense savvy in Jon’s work about the business, political and cultural aspects of the art form — he is really quick minded — but common sense in that he’s not approaching it as a economist or cultural critic,” says Oregonian film critic Shawn Levy, who has worked with Lewis on screenings and film discussions in Portland. Lewis’ writing portrays wisdom and insight, but readers can get it, adds Levy, while they’re “eating their eggs at a diner, too.”

A Baby Boomer who grew up on Long Island, New York, Lewis tried his hand at fiction writing at Hobart College before getting inspired at a campus showing of Out of the Past, a film noir with Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer and Kirk Douglas.

Suddenly, everything came into focus. “I got it. And I knew this art form was something special,” he says.

It was the renaissance of film as art, and when Lewis published a paper in a peer-reviewed journal, Quarterly Review of Film Studies, he became a film student with a reputation. During his doctoral program at UCLA, he worked part-time for a marketing company allied with Columbia Pictures and read scripts for an independent producer, “providing coverage,” as industry insiders say. This meant he would write a sort of CliffsNotes version so that the producer could give the appearance of being intimately familiar with the piece.

Hardcore Ratings

While researching an essay on “the new Disney” media empire, Lewis’ interest in the movies changed, as he began to see film as equal parts art and business. It’s a perspective that has informed his career deeply, manifesting in work such as the bookHollywood v. Hard-Core: How the Struggle over Censorship Saved the Modern Film Industry, which became the basis for the 2006 documentary, This Film is Not Yet Rated. Lewis appears significantly in the film, alongside directors John Waters and Kevin Smith and the chair of the MPAA rating board.

Filmmaker Kirby Dick (Outrage and Sick: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist) sought out Lewis after reading Hollywood v. Hard-Core. Unfettered by any need to stay on the right side of studio chiefs or other industry players, Lewis provides some of the most insightful commentary in the film, which has proven to be a cult favorite in Hollywood. “The common assumption is that censorship in films is all about morality,” he says. “The real story” — one that he has documented through archival research in libraries and Hollywood — “is that it’s about the market. It’s about making money.

“I was among the first film historians to insist on following the money. Most film history is about major films and directors, but it’s much more complicated than that. The real story is behind the scenes,” says Lewis.

With support from OSU’s Center for the Humanities, he scoured media archives and delved into records at the Academy for Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Beverly Hills for evidence of how ratings affected major studios and independent producers. He documented the relationship between industry regulations and market forces. “For a film to succeed, it has to play everywhere,” says Lewis.

One source that remained unavailable to him was the Motion Picture Association of America ratings board. The board’s deliberations are closed. Even the names of its members are kept secret.

“The MPAA is a PR outfit,” Lewis said in a 2006 interview around the film’s release. “It was started as a way to make nice with Washington, D.C. The current rating system was devised as a business proposition,” one that enables major studios to remain in control of theater offerings nationwide.

Accolades

As one might expect, Lewis’ subject matter is one that students gravitate toward, but it’s Lewis the teacher who captivates undergraduates and graduate students alike. Leading courses such as “The New American Cinema” and “History of the Documentary,” Lewis is an engaging classroom performer — equal parts Woody Allen and Ken Burns, delivering historical facts, insightful context and illustrative anecdotes with a good humor that prompts even the shyest 20-something to engage in the conversation.

The Oregonian’s Levy has known many former Lewis students. “Everyone I’ve ever talked to loves him, particularly on a campus where engineering and the sciences often get the lion’s share of attention,” says Levy. “Humanities students in particular are just overjoyed to find a guy like Jon. That’s why you go to college, to be engaged by that kind of a professor.”

In 2007, “that kind of a professor” published his most ambitious project yet through W.W. Norton, American Film: A History. The sprawling, 575-page work includes more than 250 images and traces the evolution of U.S. film through the work of early pioneers like Edwin S. Porter to current filmmaking, or “The End of Cinema As We Know It,” as he titled the book’s final chapter.

But don’t be fooled by that chapter title. Lewis is a believer in the film business. Try to engage him in the usual chatter about how lousy American movie making is these days, and Lewis responds with an endorsement of the quality he sees in such current pictures as Sugar, the compelling story of a Dominican baseball player recruited to play in the U.S. minor leagues, and Girlfriend Experience, director Steven Soderbergh’s provocative portrait of five days in the life of a high-priced Manhattan prostitute.

Two Thumbs Up

Paul Turner, owner of Darkside Cinema, Corvallis’ art house theater, has known Lewis for some 15 years, since the days when he, Lewis and Lewis’ two sons would sit in the projectionist room of Turner’s former theater and watch films together. “One of the things they say about Roger Ebert is that he’s been a champion of independent film, and that will be his legacy. Jon’s legacy will be in championing films that are even more esoteric and leading people to them,” said Turner, adding, “He has a heart the size of a small planet.”

Independent films (see sidebar) interest Lewis, not only because they break, often interestingly, from the Hollywood formula; they illustrate the structure of the business. “The studios are doing what they always do, working to limit output, focusing on fewer, bigger projects,” he says. “But boutique film companies, which by the way are usually owned by big studios, are doing well and producing interesting movies.”

In 2010, the British Film Institute will publish Lewis’ study of Coppola’s 1972 magnum opus, The Godfather.

This and other projects are indicative of Lewis’ belief in the enduring power of films well-made and the enduring worth of film as a means of communication that deserves to be placed in appropriate context, analyzed, understood. And while film has long since escaped from the theaters that once were its only home, showing up today in such once unimagined places as iPods and mobile phones, Lewis has a soft spot in his heart for the movie-going experience.

“There’s a different dynamic of watching it alone or in a theater,” he smiles. “I hope that never goes away. It’s an American pastime.”
Online: a digital version of Jon Lewis’ 2002 celebrated book, Hollywood v. Hard Core, is available at books.google.com

To support the humanities at OSU, contact the Oregon State University Foundation.

Mexican farm workers pose in camp, Hood River. (Photo: Braceros in Oregon Photograph Collection, University Archives, OSU Libraries)

It started with Salvador, the patriarch. In 1959, he left his wife and children near Guadalajara, Mexico, to work the fields of California. Salvador Castillo was a Bracero — one of more than 4 million who came to the United States from Mexico under an agricultural worker program that lasted from 1942 to 1964.

Salvador’s journeys would continue for the next 10 years, some under the Bracero program, some not. Although the first trip would remain the most profitable and his absences tore at his family’s fabric, Salvador left an impression of the U.S. that would forever change his family’s path.

“Salvador went back to Mexico the first time and told his children that this was the golden land of opportunity, that it was a unique place where, if they worked hard enough, they could carve out a better life,” says Tasha Galardi, a senior in sociology who interviewed Salvador and three generations of his family.

Using the Castillos as a case study, Galardi explored the long-term effects of the Bracero program on Mexican families and how their experience fit with immigration theories.

“I was studying the Bracero program as a starting point for the whole family’s migration to the U.S.,” says Galardi. She found that most of Salvador’s family members who live in the U.S. still maintain strong ties to Mexico, so much so that they lead full lives in both countries. “Everyone who has legal status here spends part of the year here and part of the year in Mexico. It’s as though they have one foot in each country.”

She also found that such close ties create a sense of obligation to family back “home.” The Castillos still send money to relatives and friends in Mexico. And often, as in the case of Salvador’s son, Raul, they bring family members to the U.S. to work and help sponsor them for citizenship.

“Raul came here, moved to Alaska, bought a fishing boat and has employed many of his family members over the years. He came with the expectation that he would work hard and be financially supportive. And his success has cascaded to the rest of his family,” says Galardi.

Galardi’s project began with a trip to the Valley Library’s University Archives. There, she met archivist Larry Landis, who maintains a collection of 102 photos of Bracero workers in fields and camps. Landis needed an oral history to accompany the images and asked Galardi to interview a Bracero in his late 80s — Salvador Castillo.

“I love doing life history interviews. Everybody has a story, and those collective experiences make up who people are and why they do what they do,” she says.

The interviews were emotional for Salvador’s family, particularly for his children. They told Galardi about what it was like to wait for his letters. The first thing they did when they opened them was to look for money. “They were incredibly poor,” says Galardi. “It was so hard for all of them.”

Galardi plans to apply for OSU’s graduate program in human development and family studies. “This project was interesting to me because it was an example of how immigration policies have fractured families. I’m interested in studying ways to strengthen families of many underrepresented groups and finding out which programs work.”

See Oregon Public Broadcasting’s documentary on the Bracero Program.

To support research in the College of Liberal Arts, contact the Oregon State University Foundation.

Loren Davis

Along the Oregon coast, in Idaho’s Salmon River canyon and in Baja California, Loren Davis has searched for signs of North America’s earliest inhabitants. His work along the southern Oregon coast has pushed back documented occupation of this area by 1,500 years.

Now, the OSU archaeologist will take a deeper look into the inland and coastal routes used by ancient people to reach the Americas. Davis has been named the executive director of the Keystone Archaeological Research Fund, established through a $1 million gift from Joseph and Ruth Cramer of Denver, Colorado.

The fund will provide research opportunities for students and new equipment for field studies. Davis uses Earth science techniques to identify sites where ancient people could have lived, made stone points or stored food. Recently, his efforts have extended underwater. Last May, he participated in a search for submerged prehistoric sites off the coast of Baja California Sur. He hopes to use similar methods to find early sites off the Oregon coast.

Watch a video of Archeologist Loren Davis at Cape Blanco on the Oregon Coast. Produced for educational use by Joe Cone, Oregon Sea Grant, 2002.

For more information about Loren Davis:

OSU archaeologist to investigate first West Coast humans with $1-million gift, 10-7-08

Ancient Site of Human Activity Found on Oregon Coast, 11-7-02

Support OSU’s archaeological research, contact the OSU Foundation

Tracy Daugherty is the author of nine books, including It Takes A Worried Man and Axeman's Jazz.

In 1948, Donald Barthelme was not quite 17 years old when he and a friend decided to hitchhike from Houston to Mexico City. They had a total of thirty dollars, and since both liked to write, they stopped at a drug store to pick up pencils and notebooks. They left a note for Barthelme’s parents (“We’ve gone to Mexico to make our fortune”) and thumbed a ride with a trucker heading south.

This willingness to take risks was to mark Barthelme’s career as one of America’s most influential twentieth century short story writers. In his new book, Hiding Man: A Biography of Donald Barthelme (St. Martin’s Press, 2009), Tracy Daugherty describes how culture (music, literature, film, architecture) and personal ambition combined to shape Barthelme’s vision and his experiment with narrative form. Daugherty’s story is as much a portrait of a time — places, ideas, events and personalities — as it is of a writer who struggled and delighted in finding ways to poke fun at and to comment on his world.

As he pushed the boundaries of fiction writing, Barthelme published over 100 stories in literary journals and magazines (especially The New Yorker) a dozen books, including three novels, and a children’s book that won the National Book Award. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he received the Rea Award in short story.

“Arguably, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, he was the most imitated short story writer in America,” Daugherty told an OSU audience at a book reading in March. “Some critics compared his impact on the short story to that of Hemmingway’s in the earlier part of the century.”

Daugherty is a Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing at Oregon State University. To his task, he brings both analytical insight and personal relationship. He was Barthelme’s graduate student at the University of Houston and opens the story with an experience that contains echoes of Barthelme’s own development as a writer in the same city. Houston’s boomtown culture, its neighborhoods and bayous are both backdrop and shaper of Barthelme’s art, but his desire to find new voices, to react to the images and cultural upheavals of those Cold War years, drove him to work in New York and Europe.

Barthelme’s “stories were surreal and often abstract and hilariously funny in a slapstick black humor sort of way,” said Daugherty. “And they seemed to capture the anarchic spirit of the time. Readers tended to look forward to those stories as they appeared so frequently in The New Yorker as dispatches from the front lines of the wildness on the streets of the country.”

Since his death in 1989, Barthelme’s work has largely disappeared from bookshelves and literary analyses, one consequence of a preference for “straightforward narrative storytelling” and of “officialdom’s widespread desire to bury the troubled 1960s,” writes Daugherty. It is time to reconsider him, he says, to acknowledge that dominant culture carries the seeds of opposition, of alternative ways of seeing the world.
Hiding Man is Daugherty’s ninth book. He is the author of three collections of short stories and a book of personal essays. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation and won the Oregon Book Award three times.

Costume designer and Associate Professor Barbara Mason studied history books and Web sites for inspiration.

Arianne Jacques pondered the graphs projected on the screen and listened intently to Professor Ken Krane’s explanations – Newton’s First Law of Physics, Chaos Theory. She filled her notebook with scribbles about thermodynamics, algorithms, fractals and cosines.

But at “iterative process,” the 21-year-old junior exclaimed, “I don’t get it!” and tossed down her pen. She giggled as she looked around at Daniel Mueller and other friends in the lecture hall near Withycombe Theatre’s backstage. Their return glances displayed concentration, confidence or consternation.

It wasn’t that Jacques and the others needed to master facts for an exam. Their only test would be whether 
they understood enough to act as if they thoroughly comprehended the math and physics concepts.

Fortunately, acting is what Jacques does “get.” She and her friends had landed roles in the University Theatre‘s winter production of Arcadia by Tom Stoppard. This was their first week of preparation. A veteran of the stage, Jacques is adept at drawing upon personal experiences; in her audition for teenage Thomasina, she used facial expressions, body language and voice to be playful, witty and flirtatious.

But, facing a complex role, Jacques said with a smile, “Thomasina is a genius, and I am not! I’m good at memorization, but I need to grasp how I’m going to say things before I get the words down. If I don’t know what I’m meaning, there’s no point; it’ll sound flat.”

That’s why director Elizabeth Helman had arranged for this special lecture with emeritus physics professor Krane. And why, as Jacques grabbed her pencil again and persevered, later studying her notes and Googling physics Web sites, she gained confidence in the science.

Working intensely for weeks leading up to opening night, Jacques became Thomasina the precocious protégée, convincingly rattling off insightful lines to her tutor, Mueller’s character Septimus, such as, “If there is an equation for a curve like a bell, there must be an equation for one like a bluebell, and if a bluebell, why not a rose? Do we believe nature is written in numbers?”

Science and Art

Arianne Jacques, a junior from South Carolina, found Arcadia difficult to understand when she first read it in high school. "Now I get it. It's an awesome play," she says. Video

Set in an English country house during two time periods, the early 19th and late 20th centuries, Arcadia offers nuanced and challenging roles for students, says Helman. Characters explore the nature of truth, contrasting science with art and poetry, and investigate a mystery about the English poet Lord Byron.

“Stoppard reveals the science in the art and the art in the math,” adds Helman, a visiting instructor in OSU’s Theatre Arts Program. The play addresses history, landscape design, English literature, botany, gender bias, even sexual mores. With characters separated by centuries, yet juxtaposed at one table, the plot is intricate. It’s a romance and a tragedy, a farce sprinkled with hilarious lines.

“Arcadia is about the search for knowledge, the human condition. Big ideas about everything, brilliantly. It’s perfect for the university,” Helman says.

It was also perfect for an interdisciplinary cast. Mueller studies anthropology, and among the other leads, Matt Holland is an English major. Kimberly Holling is in both theater and apparel design and helped sew the costumes.

Career Practice

Arcadia takes place in a modern English country house with flashbacks to the time of the English poet, Lord Byron.

Mueller appreciated the play’s relevance to his academic program. “I study gender inequality, and this play deals with that, in the 1800s and in modern times. And cultural issues like class,” he says. “Being inside a character is a different way of examining anthropology and philosophy (his minor). I gain perspective from experiencing my role and the reactions of other characters to mine – also from how other actors react to the script.”

As a business major, junior Heather Hewlett has worked in some capacity on every theater production since coming to OSU. For Arcadia, she was assistant stage manager. “Theater helps with professionalism, like honoring your commitments. I’ve called actors when they were late to rehearsals and made sure everyone walked on stage at the right time and had their props. I’ve made sure lines were right. House managing, I’ve interacted out front too, greeting audience, taking tickets, handing out programs. Customer service helps me overcome my shyness.”

Doubling as Arcadia‘s choreographer and dance instructor nurtured Hewlett’s career plan to open a dance studio. Teaching students to waltz on stage, she found, could be complicated: The actor Mueller had never waltzed, yet his character must dance smoothly enough to teach and lead Thomasina.

Holling, in contrast, enjoys advanced ballroom dancing, yet her character must waltz poorly and reluctantly. She told Hewlett, “It’s OK. I can act like a bad dancer!”

Romance on Stage

"It takes chutzpuh to get up before 300 people and say, 'Look at me!'" — Marion Rossi

Once Jacques learned how to act like a math whiz, she had to master the portrayal of romantic passion. Through working together on previous productions, she and Mueller had a comfortable friendship. Yet as their Arcadia characters matured beyond flirting, Act 2 brought them to not only the waltz, but also to their first stage kiss. After much joking (and teeth brushing), they made their initial, tentative attempts.

“You’re kissing like he’s your brother!” Helman called out. “It’s cold and uncooked, like sushi! We need hot and spicy. Think Thai food!” Day after day, with the rest of the cast and crew wise-cracking and cheering, Helman coached the couple on arm placement, eye contact, breath, angle and timing.

Helman notes that kissing scenes must be treated like any other choreography in the show, “or else it gets weird for actors. A production is a series of moments and each moment needs to be worked and given attention to get the timing and the mood right,” she says.

As dedicated students of the theater, Jacques and Mueller worked so diligently that by the final curtain, the star-crossed lovers and the whole production company had swept the audience off their feet to passionate applause.

For news about OSU’s Theatre Arts Program:

OSU Professor Awarded Kennedy Center Gold Medallion, March 3, 2009

OSU to Present Play by Former NEA Chairman; Noted Actor Stiers Joins Cast, April 22, 2008

Support Theatre Arts through the OSU Foundation

Euro-American traders and settlers brought Russian, French, Spanish and English to the region we call Oregon, but native people spoke at least 18, possibly more than 25 distinct languages. By 1859, English was becoming dominant, foreshadowing the almost complete loss of native languages and the development of Chinook Jargon (or “Chinuk Wawa”) as a common creole language. Ten of these languages are being revitalized today.

Below, in excerpts from Teaching Oregon Native Languages, OSU anthropologist Joan Gross offers a glimpse of this linguistic heritage. She and co-authors advocate for support of native language instruction “to promote the value of multilingualism in our society and the deep respect for cultural diversity that it brings.”

What became the state of Oregon, an area stretching south from the Columbia Gorge to the Siskiyous, and east from the Pacific over the Coastal Range and Cascades to the High Desert, was a land of many languages, each one encoding information about the land and how to survive on it. The various languages of Oregon belong to language families as different from each other as English is from Arabic: Athabaskan, Salishan, Shastan, Uto-Aztecan, and a number of families that have been roughly grouped into the Penutian phylum (Chinookan, Kalapuyan-Takelman, Sahaptian, Lutuamian, Molallan, Cayusan, Yakonan, Siuslawan, Coosan). Each of these families consisted of several languages, and each language of several spoken dialects. Even within what might be called the same dialect, each village probably had its own subdialect, differing from neighboring villages in the way certain sounds were pronounced and a few vocabulary words…

In addition to the high value placed on learning multiple Native languages, there was still a need for a means of communication in short-term encounters between speakers of different languages. This need was filled by the creation of a trade language that came to be known as Chinook Jargon. By the time Lewis and Clark made their voyage down the Columbia, there is some evidence of a mixed language being spoken, but it most certainly stabilized into a pidgin language during the fur-trading period.

Both natives and Euro-Americans in the Northwest saw the advantage of this easily learned language. Pidgins have a simplified grammatical structure and are much easier to learn than historically rooted languages that have developed all sorts of unsystematic complexities over the years. Languages that bridge communication gaps between speakers of different languages are know as lingua francas. Chinook Jargon quickly became the lingua franca of the Northwest.

The first European nuns who arrived in the Willamette Valley in 1844 to teach the children growing up in this multicultural area used Chinook Jargon with their students. Several Chinook Jargon words drifted into Northwest frontier English. Words like “tyee” (chief), “skookum” (strong), “tillicum” (friend), “wawa” (talk), and “alki” (soon) were used to metaphorically claim identity with the region. An Oregon congressman in the 1880s talked about how General Sheridan and the translator, Nesmith, conversed in Chinook Jargon back in Washington, D.C. (Once, one of their telegrams was intercepted by the Secretary of War who, seeing the incomprehensible words, suspected a plot was afoot.)

Teaching Oregon Native Languages, by Joan Gross, Erin Haynes, David Lewis, Deanna Kingston and Juan Trujillo, published by Oregon State University Press in 2007, can be ordered online.

Note: OSU Press will expand its work in indigenous studies through a $1 million grant to four university presses from the Mellon Foundation. See a January 9, 2009 story in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Illustration by Scott Laumann

When Spanish expeditions explored what is now the Santa Barbara, California, region in the 16th and 17th centuries, they found thriving native communities. Explorers’ diaries reported that the Chumash people were farming, harvesting shellfish and crafting canoes from local trees. Since then, archaeologists have documented more than 8,000 years of human habitation there.

For OSU historian Anita Guerrini such evidence of human influence on the land must be considered in modern restoration efforts, whether for salmon, marine mammals or birds such as the snowy plover.

“The goal of restoration is to create a self-sustaining environment,” says Guerrini, who came to OSU last summer as one of two holders of the Thomas Hart and Mary Jones Horning Chair in the Humanities. “You have to figure human use into it. You can’t just say, ‘OK, if we take the people out, this is what’s going to happen.’ But you can’t just take people out. You have to deal with that.”

In her previous post at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), Guerrini taught in the history and environmental studies departments. She was a member and chair of UCSB’s Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee. Her focus on restoration arose unexpectedly from what started as a narrow historical study of an oceanfront reserve on the UCSB campus. Bordered by a heavily urbanized area, the land is the target of plans that include development restrictions and ecological restoration.

In the course of her study, Guerrini discovered that both she and UCSB marine ecologist Jenifer Dugan had an interest in expanding the kinds of evidence that could be used to set restoration goals. They collaborated on a three-year project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities to explore the role of history in restoration.

Their report (upcoming in Restoria, edited by Marcus Hall) cites examples of dramatic coastal change and concludes that restoration should go beyond a specific set of conditions. “In this coastal context, it can only mean restoring the ecological processes, not a particular point in time,” they write. “Larger answers to the challenge of developing restoration goals for the . . . coasts of the world will require a synthesis of physical and ecological dynamics and processes, anthropology, history, sea level change, natural and cultural resources, and human population growth and needs.”

National parks, especially those that preserve history, face a similar challenge, Guerrini says. “Gettysburg is an example of this. It’s an historic but also an ecological site. How do you preserve history while making it ecologically sustainable? Do you keep the trees as they were in 1863?” she asks.

Guerrini has published on the history of European science, medicine and animal experimentation. She is currently working on a book about the groundbreaking contributions of animal anatomical studies to the study of natural history in Paris during the reign of Louis XIV. She has been a visiting fellow in Paris, Canberra and Edinburgh as well as at the OSU Center for the Humanities.

“Percussion departments have seen it as a nice way of bringing in world music,” says Bob Brudvig, leader of OSU’s steel drum ensemble. (Photo: Frank Miller)

OSU percussionist Bob Brudvig is leading a five-person ensemble in a practice session on the second floor of historic Benton Hall. It may be winter in Corvallis, but the music makes you forget the drizzle outside. It evokes palm trees, Caribbean sun and pre-Lenten carnivals. Brudvig works the melody on his chrome-plated steel drum, tapping out notes in rapid succession to an arrangement of “Gimme de Ting” by Trinidadian calypso legend Lord Kitchener. A bass guitar and marimba harmonize as bongos and drums carry the rhythm. Time to dance.

The group sometimes known as Dr. Bob’s Steel Drum Extravaganza, according to Sam Kincaid, band member and recording specialist in the OSU music department, has been bringing its energetic sound to Willamette Valley performance stages, weddings and other events for the past two years. Its repertoire emphasizes calypso and soca (an up-tempo dance form developed from calypso), traditions from Trinidad where its signature instrument, the steel drum or pan, was born.

“You know what it is the minute you hear it,” says Kincaid, who, as co-owner of RQM Strings, also builds and sells hollow electric guitars. “It is really bright. Some pans are a little more mellow sounding, but once you hit those high notes, it really cuts through. It catches people’s attention just like that. If we’re playing outside, maybe a marimba piece, people will notice and keep walking. When you’re playing the pan, it pulls their attention in right away.”

It’s a sound that Brudvig hopes to turn into new opportunities for OSU music students. “I think it could really take off,” says the assistant professor. “It’s not like the violin where you have to study first. Immediately you can play a note. The sound and the music that is performed are really infectious.”

Most of the ensemble’s seven to eight members get a single academic credit for their work, much less than their many hours of practice would justify. Money from performances pays for expenses such as new songs and instrument maintenance. Steel drums are notorious for going out of tune and have to be adjusted regularly, says Brudvig. “It’s kind of a scary thing. They (tuners) turn the drum over and take their hammer, wack them, maybe pop it back from the other side.”

Muffin Tins and Garbage Can Lids

In music classes, Brudvig introduces OSU students to a variety of percussion instruments, including the standard drum set, the vibes and marimba. His repertoire ranges from classical to contemporary. The OSU graduate (business and music) and native of Albany, Oregon, keeps a busy performance schedule with symphonies, operas and other groups in Oregon and Arizona, where he did his DMA (doctor of musical arts) at the University of Arizona. In Tucson, he combined his percussion talents with two harpists in a group known as Starfire, which toured in the United States and Japan.

“The steel drum is the newest member in the family of percussion instruments,” Brudvig explains. It grew from the culture of colonial Trinidad in which the British government, fearing the possibility of uprisings, prohibited the islanders from using skin drums to communicate during most of the year. The rules were often relaxed in the weeks before Lent, allowing street parades and musical competitions for the annual carnival. With drums banned, musicians turned to hollow bamboo sticks, which they pounded on the street during parades. These so-called Tamboo-Bamboo bands were prohibited as well, says Brudvig, and metal objects — muffin tins, cooking pots, garbage can lids — replaced bamboo. Musicians eventually found ways to use the ubiquitous 55-gallon barrel made available by Trinidad’s thriving oil industry.

Conversations about this history inevitably turn to Ellie Mannette, who is credited with creating the modern steel drum in the 1940s. The musician from Trinidad introduced the instrument to the United States a decade later and led workshops from 1983 to 1986 at Portland State University’s Haystack School of the Arts in Cannon Beach. OSU music professor Michael Coolen attended those sessions and learned to play and to make a steel drum. He founded an 11-member OSU steel drum band, Pura Vida, in the late 1980s, but a continuing case of tinnitus (ringing in the ears) eventually forced Coolen to stay away from loud, percussive music and discontinue the band. He had most of the steel drums auctioned off, but he kept one, which he now lends to the OSU ensemble.

In Trinidad, steel drum music continues to thrive. Annual competitions (“Panorama” and “Pan Is Beautiful”) are held during the carnival season. Bands can have as many as 100 players, and although most emphasize Afro-Cuban styles, some specialize in European classics. “Initially, in the 1960s and 70s, a lot of these groups started off playing orchestral transcriptions,” says Brudvig. “Most of these guys in the orchestra don’t read music. So it was learned by rote. They were learning a complete Mozart Symphony by ear.”

The instruments have also evolved. The lead pan on which Brudvig plays melodies in the OSU ensemble starts at middle C and covers slightly more than two octaves. Others in the pan family — tenors, guitars, cellos, basses — extend to progressively lower notes. Large bands also have a section known as the “engine room,” which keeps all the drummers on the beat by rapping out the rhythm on a drum set or steel brake drum.

Oregon is hardly a center for the instrument on the West Coast (that distinction belongs to the Seattle area), but Mannette’s Haystack workshops continue to echo in the state. James Leyden of Portland, who worked with Mannette on the East Coast and arranged for his Haystack appearances, offers a wide variety of steel drum arrangements at a Web site, www.hillbridge.com. A Mannette protégé, Dennis Martin of La Center in southern Washington, builds and sells steel drums, and the band he started, Rhythmical Steel, performs in schools and at public events in Washington and Oregon. Two Eugene groups, Island Accents and the all-female group Steel Magnolias, are active in Oregon.

Brudvig hopes to ride interest in the steel pan to build on the OSU music department’s ongoing public school programs and to expand performance opportunities for OSU percussion students. He expects students would agree with the observation of Rear Admiral Daniel Gallery who founded the U.S. Navy Steel Drum Band. After hearing a Trinidadian steel pan group in 1957, Gallery said, “The music just got inside me and shook me up.”

TERRA: If governments exist to keep people safe and functioning as a community, infrastructure seems to lie right at the heart of governments’ raison d’etre.

BILL LUNCH: In a modern, industrial economy, that’s right. Transportation and communication, along with provision of electricity, sewer, water–these are all basic public goods. Before the 18th century, people living in small, insular communities didn’t need big transportation and communication networks.

TERRA: If infrastructure is so critical to commerce and community cohesiveness, why have we fallen so far behind in infrastructure maintenance?

LUNCH: Most lawmakers know very well that we’ve got a very serious problem, and that we’ve got inadequate resources to deal with it. Congressman DeFazio has been warning for years that we’re just not spending enough on repairs, including reinforcing bridges so they’re less likely to fall in the drink in case of an earthquake, which is the biggest concern on the West Coast. The leaders are trying to lead. But they can only push so far if the public isn’t supportive. That’s the nature of democracy.

TERRA: So do we have to wait till bridges collapse before the public takes notice?

LUNCH: Not quite, but pretty close. Ours is a system that responds to crisis. Back in the ‘40s, for instance, Americans were very resistant to getting into World War II. It took the bombing of Pearl Harbor–a catastrophe of enormous proportions–to change public opinion. Most people have jobs to do and children to raise and leaky faucets to fix. They’ve got other things to worry about than whether the roads are falling down. It’s not the kind of issue that gets the juices flowing among the general public until the bridge falls down.

TERRA: But if you ask people if they want safe roads and bridges, very few say “no.”

LUNCH: Sure. But essentially, people don’t want to pay for the public services they’re getting. This is the oldest story in the book. When public opinion pollsters show Americans a list of 100 services–transportation, education, environmental protection, public health, campgrounds, parks–and say, “Do you think the government should provide more, less or the same amount of these?” people say “more.” Then a few minutes later, the pollsters ask the same respondents, “To pay for these services, do you think your taxes should be higher, lower, or the same?” and they say, “lower.” People want to have their cake and eat it, too. It’s human nature.

TERRA: The anti-tax movement has really gotten a foothold in Oregon, starting with Measure 5, the property-tax rollback of 1990. State services are still feeling its effects nearly two decades later, right?

LUNCH: Measure 5 was sort of like dropping, not just a rock but a very large boulder, in a relatively small pond. The waves that went out in terms of public finance were enormous. Oregon is a very low-tax state, ranking 44th in the nation for combined local and state taxes. Lower taxes equals fewer services.

TERRA: Proponents of unfettered free markets such as the Cato Institute, a Libertarian think tank, are calling for privatizing roads and paying for them with tolls. Do you see a trend toward more user fees on Oregon highways?

LUNCH: There has been more of a history of toll roads Back East on the New Jersey Turnpike and so forth. But here in the West, the toll idea is getting a lot of cultural and political pushback.

TERRA: If infrastructure is so vital, yet taxes and tolls are so reviled, what’s to be done?

LUNCH: Timing is everything. In Washington state where they have lots of bridges, the legislature passed a 9-cent increase in the gas tax in 2004, to be phased in over several years. Opponents referred it to the voters. The assumption of all the analysts was that the gas tax increase in Washington was toast. New taxes? Forget it. But the question was put to the voters in November 2005, right after Hurricane Katrina. What Katrina did was show people, very dramatically, that we are social animals and we live with each other for better or worse. And if you have a catastrophe and the government doesn’t respond well, which it did not, there are horrible consequences for lots and lots and lots of people. It was a very sobering object lesson. Well, surprise, surprise, the voters sustained the gas tax–and it wasn’t even close. The increased tax will provide them with a substantially larger pot of money, including very significant work on bridges up there.

Along the way, Goodman lived in Tokyo for an academic year, collaborated with OSU faculty members and set the stage for graduate work in computational linguistics. Not bad for a young man who taught himself computer programming at home, as he explains it, “just by messing around.”

The problem he tackled for his senior project stems from a fundamental difference between Japanese and English. “The Japanese language is different from English in the way pronouns — words such as he, she or they — are used. They exist in the language, but their use is less common than in English,” says Goodman. Instead, subjects in a Japanese sentence usually refer to the last proper noun mentioned in a conversation. This practice can make it hard for people, whose primary language is English, to keep track of whom or what is being discussed. In order to address this problem, Goodman has created a software solution that he calls Co-reference Resolution. The goal is to point a translation system to the subject in scanned Japanese text, increasing translation accuracy.

Goodman had help in bridging two disciplines: computer science and linguistics. His adviser in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Alan Fern, specializes in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Providing linguistics expertise was Setsuko Nakajima, a Japanese language specialist in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures.

Writing the software code might seem daunting enough, but the biggest challenge to Goodman’s research was getting access to annotated articles in Japanese. “To get all the articles I needed to be able to create the program and make sure it works,” he says, “would cost about $1,200 to $1,500.” Fortunately, a search for expertise on the science and development of translation systems led Goodman to a specialist in natural language processing at New York University who shared copies of scanned Japanese articles that his students had already analyzed to determine the subjects of each sentence. Using those articles, Goodman was able to focus on writing his software code.

“Doing this project has forced me to think long and hard about linguistic analysis and processing in a language that’s not my mother tongue, and has exposed me to the challenges and obstacles and ways to overcome them,” says Goodman.

Over the past year, he conducted his research and programming while taking a full load of courses. He credits his hardworking attitude to his parents who own a floor covering business in Florence. Watching them, Goodman learned that commitment and perseverance can lead to success.

Goodman plans to complete his project over the summer and enter a master’s degree program in Computational Linguistics at the University of Washington.

In the modern university, the academic and spiritual quests for understanding appear to be in conflict: the rational versus the mystical. The natural versus the supernatural. The intellectual versus the intuitive. Mind versus heart.

But these are false dichotomies, according to OSU English Professor Chris Anderson. The quest of the scholar, he argues, is the quest of the believer: the unraveling of life’s mysteries. And that quest begins in the same place: in story.

“Ideas emerge from experience,” he says. “Ideas are a result of reflection on the stories of our lives.”

Stories are as human as flesh and bone, Anderson posits in his 2004 book, Teaching as Believing: Faith in the University. In fact, the narrative of his own spiritual journey, which led him to take the vows of a Catholic deacon in middle age, forms the starting point for his treatise. He describes the setting of his re-conversion to Christianity, the bluff beyond Mt. Angel Abbey and Seminary in Oregon where he taught literature one sabbatical year, a time in his life when he was battling depression and burdened with disillusionment. He tells of walking along a “rutted road and then a path through the blackberry hummocks and dry grasses to an oak grove” where he often read and watched birds. “Sometimes,” he writes, “a downy woodpecker was going about its work in the branches. Chickadees bickered and fluted lower down.” One autumn day in this life-filled place, as he read Anglican theologian Andrew Louth’s Discerning the Mystery, Anderson suddenly understood how experience, faith and thought converge in the human search for truth. He still remembers “how the oak trees broke up the light” and “the smell of the dry grass” at that crystallizing moment — the moment he discerned that experience, as embodied in myth, allegory, poetry, parable, fairy tale, novel and scripture, is the locus of truth. The interpretations that arise from stories are our attempt to tap the truth within them. But only in the experiences themselves, experiences that bump up directly against life’s enigmas, does truth truly reside, he realized.

This insight, that “mystery gives rise to story gives rise to thought, in the words of theorist Paul Ricouer, is the pivot on which Anderson’s arguments turn.

The great literature of Western civilization includes the Judeo-Christian creation story, Genesis, and the first book of the New Testament, the Gospel of Mark. Noting that the Bible is “80 percent narrative,” Anderson stresses the open-endedness of these ancient tales. Like other classic works that Anderson’s students grapple with in his intro courses — Homer’s Odyssey, Dante’s Inferno, Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Shakespeare’s Hamlet — the Bible tells raw, “naked” stories of struggle, loss, triumph, redemption. What those stories mean is left to the reader. Their many possible interpretations can be explored and debated within the community of a college class. Such critical reading is, after all, what universities are for, says Anderson. But stories embody truths that can’t finally be divorced from the words, the tales, themselves.

“In the end, the answer is that life is a mystery,” Anderson writes. “All that is durable is the search itself.”