VisibleLink #6: Lazy W Bar

Cattle Brands

Anyone who has seen Oklahoma! the musical knows at least one basic element of the history of economic development in the American West: the farmers vs. the ranchers. Originally, lots of land and not too many fences made the territories perfect for raising cattle. This became even easier with the growth of cow towns such as Sedalia, Abilene, and Dodge City, where cattle could be shipped out on the railroads to urban markets. With all these cattle running around willy-nilly, however, you needed a way to keep track of which animals belonged to which owners. Hence, the cattle brand.

Branding itself isn't a new invention--it has been around for a millenia--but it developed into something of an art form in the West. Brands were used because cattle were run on open ground, rather than being raised on private ranches, so owners needed to a way to mark permanently their herds--to distinguish their cattle from all the other cattle running on the range. Branding, therefore, took place in large public roundups ("rodeos"), where several ranchers would drive their cattle together and then mark them. Daniel J Boorstin writes,

They found a secure sense of property in these improvised documents of title. Where people and their cattle were on the move, far from courts and lawyers, paper documents were of little use. Who wanted to carry them? Where could they be safely stored? (21)

The brand not only demonstrated ownership but it became the mark of the ranch. Cattle owners soon discovered, though, that when selecting a brand they couldn't simply choose their wife's intitials, but had to make sure the brand would be difficult or impossible to alter. Cattle rustlers, after all, had few scruples about changing a brand. A dishonest brander at a cattle roundup, who planned on later claiming cattle for himself or someone else, could use a "slow brand" (an unregistered brand), a "hair brand" (a brand applied very lightly so that it could easily be altered) or barely brand the calf so that the brand would soon disappear and could be replaced by the brander's own mark. If a cattle rustler were not the man actually holding the branding iron, though, he had other options. If he ran across a particularly nice, mature animal whose brand was already old, he might use a "running iron" (a heated rod, old horseshoe or piece of baling wire) to alter the original brand to fit his own mark (Boorstin 24-25). Those "brand artists" who were highly skilled stood to gain a tidy profit from altering brands, even if the punishment was high:

Brand artists became so highly skilled that their misdeeds could not be casually detected from the outside of the living animal. Some states actually required butchers, on demand, to display the hides of the animals butchered. A butcher might be in trouble if the hide did not show, properly imprinted, the legal brand of a lawful seller.

Cattle branding, as an art form, and "callin' a brand" (that is, correctly reading a brand aloud) hasn't died out entirely. The techniques have changed though, and one can't help but wonder how much longer before branding is completely gone, replaced by GPS chips implanted in the cows or some other technological advance.

InvisibleLink #6: Who said that?

Focalization

Literally focalization means what it sounds like: focus. It is used in a variety of fields--landscape architecture, art, film, and literature, just to name a few. In literature, at least, it is a relatively new invention, and one that most people are not aware of when they read. But focalization is also one of the most important rhetorical devices an author can use to create an "authentic" voice within a narrative.

Most readers can generally recognize the narrator in a story: that is, who is telling the story (first-person, third-person, first-person omniscient, etc.). But narratologists finally started asking a second important question about narration: who sees the story? The person who sees the story is not always the person who tells the story. So, for example, a third-person narrator might write a story (or a segment of a story) as though a character were seeing the events taking place--this is called internal focalization, or character focalization. In other words, a narrator will sometimes focalize the story through a character in order to take on another perspective.

Jane Austen, perhaps surprisingly to many of her readers, is one of the first and most famous experimenters with focalization (in British lit., anyway). The opening chapter to Emma makes this quite clear. Emma has a lively narrative voice--we, the readers, get the impression that the narrator on the whole likes Emma without being taken in by her charms. It is a narrator not unlike the character of Mr. Knightley, in fact. Early on the first chapter, the narrator informs us:

The real evils, indeed, of Emma's situation were the power of having rather too much her own way, and a disposition to think a little too well of herself; these were the disadvantages which threatened alloy to her many enjoyments. The danger, however, was at present so unperceived, that they did not by any means rank as misfortunes with her.

Here the narrator is clearly informing the reader about Emma's character--her faults and peccadilloes. This is, obviously, not Emma herself thinking about her own vanity. Later on in the chapter, however, it becomes unclear who is telling the reader what:

How was she to bear the change?--It was true that her friend was going only half a mile from them; but Emma was aware that great must be the difference between a Mrs. Weston, only half a mile from them, and a Miss Taylor in the house; and with all her advantages, natural and domestic, she was now in great danger of suffering from intellectual solitude. She dearly loved her father, but he was no companion for her. He could not meet her in conversation, rational or playful.

Here, Emma despairs about Miss Taylor being married to Mr. Weston and removing to her new home. The first phrase in the excerpt seems to be Emma's own thoughts, as does (somewhat) the last sentence. This is a narrative moment where it is ambiguous as to who is "speaking"--is this Emma's view of her situation or the narrator's?

The filmic equivalent of focalization is more obvious and generally easier to understand: it occurs with the "point of view" shot. Normally a camera takes on a somewhat anonymous point of view--we the viewers watch the scene from no particular assigned role or character. The movie Being John Malkovich played with focalization quite often, where one character enters the head of another character and suddenly sees through John Malkovich's eyes. The film seems almost to be making an elaborate intellectual joke about point of view--who is seeing (the audience, through John Cusack, through John Malkovich, who plays himself in a fictional movie about voyeurism)?

VisibleLink #5: He's Got a Body Like You've Never Seen Before!

The Visible Human Project

The human body is a messy thing and, quite frankly, most of us probably aren't interested in seeing (or smelling) the inside bits. Unless, of course, the body is frozen solid and cut into tiny, tiny slices. Fortunately for those of us fascinated by what the body looks like but who don't want all the gore, that's exactly what the National Institutes of Health has done--you can view a male human body from head to toe at one millimeter intervals.

InvisibleLink #5: You Can Almost See Them if You Squint

The Silicon Zoo

Computers are cultural icons; no one really disputes this, I'd imagine. They are (or have become) symbols of our modern society--fast, interconnected, and functional. Terry Gilliam's Brazil presents one possible interpretation of the type of world the computer could help create--workers, locked away in tiny cells, produce meaningless data that only serve to control their own lives to an even more extreme degree. And yet Brazil is only one prediction how the computer might eventually affect society. The original Macintosh ad of 1984 sought to break down the very image that Brazil presents, a year before the film was even released; the Macintosh ad argues for the exact opposite, in fact, of Brazil's totalitarian, machinist dystopia. The hammer breaking the Big Brother screen is meant to free the individual--to offer him or her a personal computer with which to make his or her own choices and decisions.

The personal computer (and related products that depend on microprocessors) has become essentially an extension of one's personality, just like a car or a cell phone. It is a visual advertisement to others of the owner's tastes, social and financial status. Surprisingly though, laptops and desktops, with the notable exception of Apple computers, have remained largely similar. One personalizes a computer by how one uses it (one's selection of wallpaper, programs, etc.) moreso than how the computer itself looks. Computers, by and large, have remained fairly stagnant in design and decoration.

At least, so we presume. As The Silicon Zoo demonstrates, our computers are often more foreign to us than we think, but not necessarily anonymous or impersonal. But does the invisible element on the hardware make it more personal to the creators than to us, the owners? Surely a microprocessor with a wedding announcement rather than a corporate logo becomes something more than simply a cold conglomeration of metal and silicon? And possibly more personal than whatever background image we use on the screen?