winter 2004 - Florida State University : Research in Review

WINTER 2004
49
IN•SIGHT
VOL. XII
XIV NO. I
I M AG E RY F R O M T H E W O R L D O F R E S E A R C H & C R E AT I V I T Y
WINTER 2004
2002
T H AT I S F L O R I DA S TAT E U N I V E R S I T Y
Cover Photo:
Photo illustration:
Ray Stanyard
Robert Celander
Florida State University Research in Review is published three times annually by the Office of the Vice
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NERVES IN 3-D: Scientists and computer specialists at
FSU recently collaborated to produce this remarkable,
sity faculty or administration.
administration.
Send correspondence to Frank Stephenson, commueditor,
to the address
nications
director
above,
andor
editor,
e-mailtotothe address above,
three-dimensional reconstruction of branches of a living
nerve cell (neuron) in the brain of a mouse. Neurobiologist
[email protected].
or
e-mail to [email protected].
Phone: (850)Phone:
644-8634.
(850)
644-8634.
Visit Us Online:
www.research.fsu.edu/RinR/RinR.html
Visit Us Online:
Charles Ouimet of the College of Medicine and his gradu-
www.research.fsu.edu/RinR/RinR.html
THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY
ate student Karen Dietz study how neurons grow and connect to form the intricate neural patterns that characterize
normal brain function. The image was generated by Dietz,
Wilfredo Blanco and Kevin Beason within the Visualization
Laboratory of the School of Computational Science and In-
ADMINISTRATION
THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY
Talbot H. D’Alemberte, President
ADMINISTRATION
Lawrence G. Abele, Provost, VP Academic Affairs
T.K. Wetherell, President
Raymond Bye, Vice President, Research
Lawrence G. Abele, Provost, VP Academic Affairs
Beverly B. Spencer, Vice President, University Relations
Kirby W. Kemper, Vice President, Research
John R. Carnaghi, Vice President, Administrative Affairs
Lee Hinkle, Vice President, University Relations
Winston Scott, Vice President, Student Affairs
John R. Carnaghi, Vice President, Administrative Affairs
Mary Coburn, Vice President, Student Affairs
EDITOR: Frank Stephenson
EDITOR:
Frank
Stephenson
ASSOCIATE
EDITOR:
James Call
SECTIONS
EDITOR:
James
Call
ART DIRECTOR:
Robert
Celander
ART
DIRECTOR:
Robert Celander
WRITERS,
THIS ISSUE:
Fran Conaway; David
formation Technology (CSIT), a unit directed by Gordon
WRITERS,
THIS
Ellen Kim
Ashdown,
James
Cox;
Jill Elish;
LisaISSUE:
Hutcheson;
MacQueen;
Call, Andy
Lindstrom,
Neils, Robert Pool,
Andy
Lindstrom;
PatrickParker
A. Smith
Erlebacher and David Banks.
Don Wood
ILLUSTRATIONS:
Robert Celander
ILLUSTRATIONS:
Celander
PHOTOGRAPHY: Robert
Ray Stanyard;
Steve Leukanech
PHOTOGRAPHY: Ray Stanyard, Jon Nalon, Steve
46
Leukanech
Florida State University Researchin Review
SHO’ LIKE TO BALL, PAGE 12
GLASS, PAGE 28
F E A T U R E S
during the turbulent days of the Depression. Still, each
year more than 30,000 Americans stun their friends and
relatives by taking their own lives. Why they do is a question few researchers have the courage to tackle..........32
Cover Story
Sho’ Like to Ball
by Steve MacQueen
David Kirby writes as though life were a whimsical dress rehearsal for the real thing. His zany approach to his art appeals to brows high and low, scratching itches common to
the human psyche..............................................................12
O T H E R
SOUNDS, PAGE 38
F E AT U R E S
Sounds of Place
by Andy Lindstrom
As Vienna’s Johann Strauss Jr. had his Danube River to
inspire his best known work, so have American composers
let their environments guide their muse. ...................38
The Rocky Road to E-Retail
by Parker Neils
By the time you read this, you may be a new—and happy—
convert to the world of buying online. Or not...............24
Glass Act
by Don Wood
Prussian Blue is not a Wagnerian opera, but it is from the
Old World. An FSU chemist has used this beautiful purple
dye to magnetic effect....................................................28
D E P A R T M E N T S
Abstracts
Periscope on Campus Life & Research..............................2
Sketches
Short Takes on the World of Arts & Letters...................8
Portrait
Spotlight on Florida State Faculty...............................45
The Why of It All
by Robert Pool
In the U.S., suicide rates are in decline from historic highs
see this issue on our website at
www.research.fsu.edu/researchr
WINTER 2004
UMA
Research-In-Review is a member of The Florida Magazine Association and
The University Research Magazine Association.
1
Abstracts
P E R I S C O P E
O N
C A M P U S
Big-Time Ball:
Hard Cash or
Hype?
It’s a given that’s rarely challenged:
American cities compete ferociously for the privilege of hosting
big-time sporting events because
these events are guaranteed to
shower them with big bucks.
Next year’s Super Bowl will
pump a cool $250 million into
the local economy of Jacksonville, Florida. In 2008, the NCAA
Women’s Final Four basketball
tournament will drop $23 million into the Tampa Bay area.
Or so say community and
2
L I F E
A N D
sports industry boosters. Problem is, some economists have
little faith in studies that generate such figures. And in Florida,
with a vibrant tourism industry,
the economic impact of both
events may be zero, says an FSU
sports economist.
Michael Mondello, an assistant professor in the department
of sport management, says many
of the dazzling figures quoted in
the media are really aimed at legitimizing a position and should
not be taken at face value.
For instance, his analysis of
the Women’s Final Four in St.
Louis (2001) and San Antonio
(2002) found a far smaller windfall for the host cities than was
reported. Instead of a $23 million impact he found that the
2001 games contributed, at
R E S E A R C H
most, $11 million to the St.
Louis economy and $19 million
to San Antonio. Tampa’s weekend of basketball in 2008 could
generate very few new dollars
to the Hillsborough County
economy because of what is
called “displacement,” Mondello argues.
Promoters are good at adding
up the dollars that change hands
during the festivities surrounding
the big game, he says, but fail to
subtract the money that would
have been spent anyway, regardless of a Super Bowl or Final Four.
The effect is magnified in a state
like Florida, he says.
“When you have a tourism
destination, like Florida is, what
happens is that people who
would normally come for a visit
will stay away and be replaced
by fans.”
Mondello cites a study of
Major League Baseball spring
training in Florida, which the
Florida Sports Foundation
estimates creates a
$490 million impact
on the state’s economy. But an analysis
of sales tax collection in counties that
host major league
clubs in 1995, when the
players were on strike, canceling spring training, and in the
previous and subsequent years
showed no change.
“If there is any impact generated by spring training it is
negligible at best,” said
Mondello.
His conclusion is supported
by studies conducted by other
sports economists. A 1998
Stanford University analysis
found there is little or no increase in taxable sales during the
month when a Super Bowl is
played in a town. A University
of South Florida review of sales
tax paid in Miami Dade County
showed $2.2 billion dollars collected in January 1999, when
Miami hosted a Super Bowl, and
$2.4 billion the next year, when
the game was played elsewhere.
And a study by a couple of
Mondello’s graduate students
indicates that the millions of
dollars of economic impact
promised by promoters may take
as long as 10 to 15 years to be
felt, if it occurs at all. A dollar
injected into a local economy
needs time to create benefits for
that specific economy. And if
that dollar is paid to a business
that transfers it to corporate
headquarters, its impact may be
close to zero.
“The biggest mistake made in
these studies is confusing gross
sales with income, money that
stays in the community,” said
Mondello. “Not all dollars are
equal. Money collected as sales
tax will stay but if a visitor eats
at a chain restaurant then some
of the dollars collected are
shipped to corporate headquarters and are barely felt locally, if
at all.”
Remarks like that infuriate Jim
Steeg, NFL senior vice president
in charge of the Super Bowl since
Florida State University Researchin Review
▲
Henry Morrison Flagler
1979. On a promotional tour for
this year’s Super Bowl, he told
the Houston Chronicle that when
he retires he is going to write a
book proving that sports economists are wrong about big games
lacking an economic impact.
“I’m tired of people making
a career out of being negative,”
said Steeg.
•••
Flagler’s Secret
Army
From Pensacola to Key West,
high-school history books
praise industrialist Henry
Morrison Flagler as “the creator of modern Florida.”
What Flagler did for the
state—building its first reliable
railway link to the industrial centers of New England—is well
documented. But how he did it
is much less so.
In researching the working
world of America’s notorious
Gilded Age of the late 19th century, FSU sociologist Larry Isaac
was surprised to find the names
of Flagler and John D.
Rockefeller on the membership
list of an armed militia whose
primary purpose was to force
workers to shun unions and accept company policy—or else.
That Flagler and Rockefeller
were ruthless entrepreneurs is
hardly news. The men who
turned Standard Oil into a nation-strangling monopoly in the
1870s implemented labor poli-
WINTER 2004
cies that
both their biographers have described as brutal.
In Cleveland, Standard Oil’s
headquarters, the company cut
wages, provoking strikes, and
then mobilized the Cleveland
police who waded into crowds
wielding nightsticks, cracking
heads and breaking unions.
Conditions at Flagler’s Key West
construction camps during the
building of his railroad resembled slavery. Flagler successfully fought off brutality charges
in court, although many of the
workers turned out to be convicts controlled by foremen
armed with whips.
But what Isaac found in the
Western Reserve Historical Society archives—proof of Flagler
and Rockefeller’s close
ties to a well-armed group of
company thugs—brings into
sharper focus the seedy picture
of corporate and political life
that marked the Gilded Age.
Isaac says the discovery shows
that the industrialists had become increasingly fearful of the
society they helped create.
It was a time when America’s
white Anglo-Saxon citizenry
viewed efforts to unionize immigrants from eastern and southern Europe as a threat to their
status. In the absence of any government labor controls, captains
of industry took matters into their
own hands, forming—and eagerly joining—private militias
trained to keep a lid on a
restless work force at
whatever cost.
But the militias also had
a secret agenda, says Isaac—
the preservation of men’s
dominant role in a society
that was showing increasing
influence from a nascent feminist movement.
“The privileges that the upper class enjoyed in the new
industrial age led to a fear that
someday men would no longer
be macho,” said Isaac. “The militia movement was a way for the
wealthy to address this private
concern while saying they were
arming themselves to maintain
public order.”
Rockefeller’s Cleveland militia even boasted a full cavalry
unit and a machine gun battery.
In the end, Isaac says these
Gilded Age militias were a rugged fraternity, offering manly
pursuits like horseback riding,
shooting and other martial arts.
That apparently wasn’t
enough for Flagler. Shortly after
joining the militia in 1877, he
moved to St. Augustine and
tested his manhood by taming
the Florida jungle—albeit on the
backs of an oppressed army of
workers. By the time his railroad
was finished in 1912, hundreds
of Flagler’s workers had died,
including more than 300 who
were drowned in a single day by
a hurricane in 1906.
•••
3
Abstracts/continued
Mideast 101
Florida State is gearing up to be
the first university in Florida—
and one of just a few in the
Southeast—to offer a bachelor’s
degree with a major in Middle
Eastern studies.
Since 9/11, FSU professors
offering courses with any Mideast content have been thronged
by students who want them.
“I went from four to five students to 10 to 15 in graduate
seminar topics on Middle Eastern subjects, and my 4000-level
survey on Middle Eastern history
was the same–now virtually al-
4
ways full,” said Peter Garretson,
associate professor of history
and director of the university’s
recently revived Middle East
Center. Garretson is an expert on
the Middle East, particularly on
Ethiopia and the Sudan.
Zeina Schlenoff, assistant director of the center and FSU’s
only teacher of Arabic, has to
turn away many more students
than she accepts, even though
she has added classes.
The new major, on track to
start next fall, will have a core
faculty of 13 Middle East experts
from seven departments: modern
languages, religion, history, classics, urban and regional plan-
ning, criminology, anthropology
and English. All teachers are already on the FSU faculty.
Garretson and Schlenoff
hope one day to add subjects–
Farsi (Persian) and Turkish, for
example. The degree in Middle
Eastern studies should make
graduates supremely employable, Garretson said.
“Every student with decent
Arabic will get a good job,”
Garretson predicted. With the
language and the background,
he said, Mideast majors will be
recruited by U.S. agencies like
the State Department, intelligence, defense, the Treasury, and
even the Department of the Interior, whose purview includes
domestic oil production.
Students who don’t want to
work for the federal government
will have their pick of companies doing business in the Mideast and non-governmental organizations doing humanitarian
work throughout the region.
“We need more experts,
graduate people who understand
the Mideast,” Schlenoff said.
The need goes beyond jobs,
she said. It also springs from the
current frightening international
situation, with war and threats
of war between cultures that
barely know each other.
“We’re not good at telling
people there (in the Mideast)
about democracy, human rights,
the good things this country is
founded upon,” she said. “This
education has to go both ways…
to have any hope for peace, respect, tolerance, understanding.”
•••
Research Rx
Florida State’s newly minted College of Medicine is raising its
profile in the academic world—
officially hanging out its shingle
as a place not just for medical
training, but for medical research as well.
This fall, the college adds a
Ph.D. program in biomedical sciences—the first non-M.D. track
within a new Interdisciplinary
Health Sciences Program that
eventually will offer other doctoral degrees, say school officials.
Initially, the new doctorate
program will focus on the roles
genes play in disease.
“The faculty of a medical
school should be generators of
new knowledge, problem-solvers,” said Associate Dean Myra
Hurt. “And when faculty research and teach graduate students, an atmosphere is created
that benefits the entire college.”
The med school currently has
14 full-time faculty members in
biomedical sciences who will
lead the new curriculum. Another nine faculty members will
be hired and some 25 faculty
members from other science-related colleges and schools at
FSU will participate in the program, Hurt said.
The program begins at a time
when interest in studying medicine is growing and federal funding of medical research is reaching an all-time high.
“The timing is perfect,” said
Brooks Keel, associate vice
president for research at FSU and
a professor of biomedical sci-
Florida State University Researchin Review
▲
ON THE MOVE: This scanning electron
microscope catches two Ascaris sperm
•••
WINTER 2004
. OF BIOLOGIC
S, FSU DEPT
P H O T O : TO
M ROBERT
The Association of American
Medical Colleges reports that
med school applications nationally rose 3.4 percent in 2003-04
and are up 5 percent compared
to fall of ’02.
To begin the program, the
med school will recruit seven
Ph.D. students for the fall semester. That number is expected to
increase to 50 by 2009, when
the school also will have more
than 300 students pursuing the
M.D. degree.
“We want students who will
train to become faculty at other
medical schools or work for
companies doing this kind of research,” said Hurt. “We’re a
new program, but we have a big
research infrastructure to work
with in a very collegial environment. “
P H O T O : JASON SMITH, (C) ENDEAVORS, UNC-CHAPEL HILL, 2002
ences. “The National Institutes of
Health (NIH) recently doubled
its funding of research and is
now emphasizing science that
explores the relationship between genes and disease. FSU is
now better able to compete for
some of that money and build a
bridge between the laboratory
and bedside.”
The NIH is the largest federal
grant-giving agency for biomedical sciences. Last year, it completed a five-year effort that
doubled its budget from $13.6
billion in 1998. The increase
showed NIH’s popularity on Capitol Hill and the political muscle
of advocacy groups seeking funding to battle dozens of diseases.
Enrollment numbers at medical schools are increasing as
well. More students are pursuing careers in medicine, as either practitioners or researchers.
AL SCIENCE
cells in the act of crawling.
One Small Step
Life first appeared on Earth, one
theory holds, when amino acids
organized themselves into what
eventually became living cells. A
little over 4 billion years later man
began to understand just how is it
that those tiny, muscle-less blobs
off protoplasm can move.
A team of FSU biologists have
reproduced in the laboratory a
key part of cell movement called
retraction. Biologist Tom Roberts
and two postdoctoral associates
collaborated with Murray
Stewart of the Medical Research
Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England to investigate how the
sperm cell of a roundworm
nematode retracts to create
movement. The scientists tore
apart a cell, extracted the molecules used for movement, reassembled the cell and manipulated it to move.
“Diseases, sickness and infections all involve the movement
of cells,” said Roberts. “Understanding how a cancerous cell
travels through a body will open
new strategies for fighting it.”
Cells move by pushing out a
finger-like protrusion from the
front while retracting, or pulling
their rear ends forward. Seven
years ago, Roberts was part of a
team that figured out how cells
push out forward. The mechanics of the pulling motion, the
retraction, remained a mystery.
“We thought, why not use
the same methods we used in
the protrusion study and see if
they reveal how retraction
works,” said Roberts.
It took two years of lab work
to understand the process and
the team published their findings
in the November 21 issue of the
journal Science.
The article describes how the
cells push out to grip the surface
in front of them by building a network of thousands of tiny protein
filaments from their cytoskeletons (molecular equivalent of the
human skeleton).
The cell moves forward as
the filament network moves
from the front to the rear of the
cell, where it comes apart while
pulling the cell forward.
Roberts’ team reproduced
the retraction, the pulling movement, by introducing an enzyme
called a phosphatase to the network of filaments.
•••
5
Abstracts/continued
Speed Machine
Albert Einstein was skeptical
about a meteorologist’s ability to
make accurate forecasts. “One
need only think of the weather,
in which case the prediction for
a few days ahead is impossible,”
he once said.
Since the late 1940s, computer technology has steadily
improved the accuracy in
weather forecasting.
Today, Einstein would gasp at
the progress scientists have
made in predicting the elements,
thanks to increasingly clever
hardware and software.
Last summer, projections correctly showed Hurricane Isabel’s
path more than a
week in advance. Scientists program wind
velocity and other related data describing a
storm into computers
and create pictures simulating the direction storms
will take and their chances
of becoming either
pussycats or monsters.
Mathematicians at FSU’s
School of Computational Science and Information Technology (CSIT) recently succeeded in building some new
tools that dramatically speed up
the prediction process. The tools
are algorithms—mathematical
equations—that scientists can
use to greatly enhance the powers of high-end computers to
draw clearer, animated pictures
of developing storms and even
oil spills.
6
The algorithms developed by
the FSU researchers vastly shrink
the amount of information that
must be transferred between a
computer’s memory and its
graphic card, explains Gordon
Erlebacher, a CSIT mathematician. Such cards, printed circuit
boards installed in the computer,
are devices that speed up the
downloading of data that create
images and animation. The CSIT
algorithms enable the cards to
translate huge data sets needed
to produce large-scale simulations much faster than anything
currently on the market.
“Our graphic card is 10 times
faster and provides a
much higher quality of animation than any card on the market,” Erlebacher said. “These
graphic cards have the potential
of turning a moped-like computer into a Harley Davidson for
analyzing wind and tide currents.”
Supported by $300,000 in
grants from the National Science
Foundation and FSU, Erlebacher
and his colleagues programmed
two different cards— a Radeon
9800 and an nVidia FX 5900
—both popular off-the-shelf
models—to create animation of
time-dependent vector fields in
real
time. They run the cards on a
Dell Precision Work Station 530.
“These new algorithms make
it possible to change the parameters as the information becomes available and (thus help)
make more accurate predictions,” said Erlebacher.
For information about the
availability of the software, call
Erlebacher at 850-644-0186, or
send him an e-mail query at
[email protected].
•••
Florida State University Researchin Review
▲
PHOTO: RAY STANYARD
The crater-like summit of Florida’s largest gyp stack at IMC-Agrico in Polk County.
Gyp-Stack
Cost Fix?
It’s not like you can lock the gate
and just walk away. Toxic waste
piled 12 stories high and holding a billion gallons of polluted
water makes closing down a
phosphate plant complicated—
and expensive, as state officials
are learning.
When the Mulberry Corporation, a subsidiary of the American Phosphate Corporation of
Delaware, declared bankruptcy
in 2001, it left a 200-foot-tall
stack of phosphogypsum, a
largely worthless by-product of
turning phosphate rock into fertilizer, at its Piney Point plant near
Tampa Bay at Port Manatee.␣
Phosphogypsum is piled into
what locals call “gyp stacks” —
massive
volcano-shaped
mounds with ponds of water
WINTER 2004
typically rich in ammonia and
heavy metals in their enormous
craters. The pond at the Mulberry site is 50 feet deep.
“This site constitutes one of
the largest risks to the environment in Florida’s history,” Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) Secretary Allan
Bedwell said.
Bedwell’s agency governs
who can maintain a gyp stack.
Two dozen of the huge piles of
slightly radioactive waste dot the
state, with the majority concentrated in central Florida, the
home of the state’s phosphate
mining industry.
To prevent leaks and spills,
when a phosphate plant is
closed, the water within a gyp
stack is supposed to be processed
and drained, the sides collapsed
and plastic tarp placed over the
site before it is covered with dirt.
The state assumed control of
the Piney Point stack when Mulberry went out of business and
has been spending about
$400,000 a month to close the
stack and avoid a massive spill
into the Gulf. The ultimate closure cost is projected to be $120
million.
To prevent getting stuck with
such a bill again, DEP is drafting new rules. Last fall, the
agency called on FSU finance
professor Pamela Peterson to
help identify potential “Mulberries,” companies that go out of
business and leave a toxic mess
behind.
Peterson devised a financial
test to determine if a corporation
had the money needed to close
a phosphate plant if it were
forced out of business. The
agency soon plans to include her
test in the financial assurance
provision for a phosphate permit.
At present, companies need
only submit audited statements
that show they have the ability
to close a facility. But a sudden
downturn in the company’s fortunes can lead to bankruptcy, as
in Mulberry’s case.
Peterson said that looking at
the ratios of a company’s net
worth to tangible net worth and
cash flow to total liability provides a better idea of its financial health.
“This is a better method to
measure the viability of a company,” said Peterson. “It provides assurance that they can
close the site even it everything
goes wrong.”
A DEP spokesman says the
new rules governing the mining
and processing of phosphate
will go into effect this March.
•••
7
Sketches
P H O T O S: JON NALON
SHORT TAKES ON THE WORLD OF ARTS & LETTERS AT FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY
Box-Office Ballet Debut
OFFICIALLY, THE ACCLAIMED Suzanne Farrell
Ballet opened its 2003–04 tour with a gala December performance at the Kennedy Center in
Washington.
But privileged Tallahassee audiences had an exclusive preview. Last October the legendary ballerina, and now FSU Eppes Professor of Dance, premiered the tour at the university to benefit the Department of Dance. (On Nov. 12, Farrell also was
honored by the White House, tapped as one of 10
recipients of the National Medal of Arts for 2003.)
Farrell’s impeccable company filled houses for
two different programs of ballets by George
Balanchine, the master choreographer who revolutionized classical ballet, and for whom Farrell was
a revelatory muse. The company also thrilled FSU
dance majors during two weeks of rehearsals and
demonstrations while Farrell honed the ballets.
Before retiring from the New York City Ballet,
Farrell—a daring virtuoso with deep musical and dramatic gifts—danced in more than 100 ballets, many
created for her. Now, her deft clarity as a director
has impressed both major critics and the public.
Her first 1998 concert for the Kennedy Center
was a special commission. Today the Suzanne
Farrell Ballet is a permanent center project, 30
dancers strong, and hailed for revitalizing
Balanchine’s legacy.
Dance chair Elizabeth Patenaude invited
Farrell to join the FSU Dance Department in 2000,
“turning a dream into an incredibly exciting reality.” Farrell, who teaches regularly, says, “I have quick instincts.
SUZANNE FARRELL (top), now of
I visited the campus, liked the
FSU’s School of Dance and Visual
faculty and students, and saw
Arts, chose the campus for the
how hard they worked. The FSU
premiere of her 2003-04 tour last
Dance Department is part of
October. In November, she was
what I do now. It doesn’t feel
recognized by Pres. George W. Bush
tacked on. I feel new and as
as one of 10 recipients of the
though I’ve been here forever.”
National Medal of Arts for 2003.
—E.A.
8
Florida State University Researchin Review
Hyper-groove. Royal riff. Rev the
tempo . Choose your music
metaphor—and then overcharge it. Not one but two jazz
giants are gracing the FSU music faculty this year.
Trumpeter extraordinaire
Scotty Barnhart and piano legend Marcus Roberts have been
on campus teaching, critiquing
students’ performances, sharing
the stage with students and faculty—and generally pumping up
an already potent jazz program
in the School of Music.
Leon Anderson, head of the
program, says jazz students get
a lifetime gift from master performers who also happen to be
master teachers. And make no
mistake, these are masters, each
with strong ties to Tallahassee
and Florida State.
Barnhart has soloed for 12
years with the world-famous
Count Basie Orchestra. As artist-in-residence, he’ll divide his
time among Tallahassee, Los
Angeles, and the globe.
Barnhart’s fall 2002 stint here
knocked out standing-roomonly audiences, as he played
with the FSU Jazz Ensemble, and
dazzled students, as he gave precise pointers.
“Scotty is a leading soloist—
no one better—playing with a
band with a deep legacy,” says
Anderson. “He knows the music inside and out, he’s worked
with everyone from Sinatra to
Gillespie, and his teaching skills
are amazing.” Add to that
Barnhart’s research and writing.
His forthcoming book The
World of Jazz Trumpet is the
instrument’s most comprehensive study.
WINTER 2004
Barnhart, who graduated
from Florida A&M University
and also spent hours in FSU
practice rooms, calls his residency a perfect fit: “I gather crucial experience with the orchestra and top studio musicians—
and bring all of it here. Jazz can’t
be learned entirely in a classroom.”
“Amen,” would agree the
ultra-talented Marcus Roberts,
who comes to campus as a
Wiley Housewright Eminent
Scholar. Roberts, a Jacksonville,
Fla. native, studied piano at FSU
under Prof. Leonidas Lipovetsky
before turning pro, honing his art
under the wing of Wynton
Marsalis. His first three recordings reached No. 1 on the Billboard charts—a first for any jazz
musician.
A spectacular performer of
stride piano and other styles, a
composer, and a learned interpreter of the vast jazz canon,
Roberts has directed the Lincoln
Center Jazz Orchestra, among
many super-achievements.
“This is an astounding musician at the pinnacle of his career,” says Leo Welch, professor
and publicist for the School of
Music. “As a Housewright
Scholar, Marcus—in fact the
whole Marcus Roberts Trio—
spends weeks at a time here.
The students’ respect is visible.”
“It feels good coming back,
to bring out students’ ability and
intellect, to pass on whatever
musical process I’ve discovered,” Roberts said.
As Barnhart puts it: “All jazz
masters pass on information, because that’s how they learned. It
creates a closeness and respect.
And that’s why jazz musicians
can get on stage and make music together on the highest level
with minimal or no rehearsal.”
Now there’s a white-hot session waiting to sizzle: The
Marcus Roberts Trio / Scotty
Barnhart / FSU Jazz Ensemble in
concert at FSU. A homecoming
to dream of. —E.A.
ALL THAT JAZZ:
Students get a
rare treat this
spring with the
addition of two
jazz maestros to
the music
faculty—
trumpeter
Scotty Barnhart
(left) and pianist
Marcus Roberts.
P H O T O : STEVE LEUKANECH
Jazz Squared
9
Sketches/
continued
Clockwise from upper left: Spaulding Gray; Cormac de
Barco; Michael McDonald; Richard Ford; a ceramic
horse from the Koger Collection; and Bobby
McFerrin highlight the sixth season of Seven Days
of Opening Nights.
Sixth Festival Shines New Light in February
WITH A NEW FLAVOR AND NEW PARTNERS, Seven Days of
Opening Nights, FSU’s annual festival of the fine and performing
arts, opens its sixth season Feb. 20.
This year, the festival links arms with Tallahassee Community
College, Florida A & M University and the Mary Brogan Museum
of Art and Science to bring the most diverse group of art and
artists since the event began in 1998.
Festival ’04 also will be the first to include both pop and folk
music performances in its repertoire. FSU’s Ruby Diamond Auditorium, Opperman Music Hall and Turner Auditorium at TCC
will host American pop singers Bobby McFerrin and Michael
McDonald, plus the Irish crooners, Barco.
Rounding out the festival will be performances by Hubbard
Street Dance Chicago; actor and writer Spalding Gray (e.g. The
Killing Fields, 1984; Swimming to Cambodia, 1987); a musical
10
theatre performance of “An Evening with Maltby & Shire,” and a
music and dance production entitled “Irish Melodies and African
Rhythms.” A special treat on Feb. 22 will be a screening of 11:14, a
newly released thriller written and directed by Greg Marcks, an MFA
alum of FSU’s film school. Produced by Media 8 Entertainment, the
movie—Marck’s first major film—stars Patrick Swayze and Barbara
Hershey.
The festival opens Feb. 20 with an exhibition of Chinese ceramics, a stunning collection drawn from the Ringling Museum. This
exhibit, in the FSU Museum of Fine Arts, will coincide with the opening of “Pop Art in the Space Age,” an art exhibit featuring the work of
Andy Warhol, Jim Dine and other renowned pop artists at the Mary
Brogan Museum of Art and Science, downtown Tallahassee.
For the latest information on schedules and tickets,
www.sevendaysfestival.org or call Kristin Roman at (850) 644-1151.
Florida State University Researchin Review
Dance
Showcase
Opens in April
P H O T O S: FSU SCHOOL OF VISUAL ARTS & DANCE
ONE OF FSU’S CORE historic
buildings, the Katherine Montgomery Gymnasium, finally
stands to be transformed into a
21st-century dance space.
After seven decades of sharing space in the old building
with other campus units—and
dodging construction for the
past three-and-a-half—the
university’s Dance Department
will soon have an impressive
new home.
The $17 million project—on
schedule to be finished in
April— is painstakingly restoring
and revitalizing a campus landmark whose history bridges remarkable eras. Built in 1929—
when Florida State College for
Women flourished as a “southern Radcliffe”—and expanded
in 1947 as FSCW became postwar, co-ed Florida State University, the Montgomery building is
a model of collegiate gothic architecture.
It was also “Miss Katie’s
Gym,” where the beloved
Katherine Montgomery led
women’s physical education
from 1923 to 1958 and founded
the famous Tarpon Club of synchronized swimmers. Montgomery even sketched the original building for architects.
FSU’s top-ranked dance program has been at home in Montgomery for some 70 years. As
other departments relocated, the
building became dedicated to
dance. And now the renovation
will turn the building into an ultra-modern showcase for dance
education. Consider these features:
• Of eight audio-visual, grandpiano equipped studios, the
4,000-square-foot Grand Studio
is a stunning light-filled space.
(Restoration uncovered an original open-vaulted ceiling.)
• The Nancy Smith Fichter
Dance Theatre now features a
separate lobby, more seating,
music and tech booth, sound
and light locks, and three-point
videotaping.
• Dancers and visiting artists finally have real dressing rooms
with audio paging, green room
with video monitors, on-site costume shop, and a conditioning
studio with advanced equipment
and sprung floor.
• The amazing Dance Technology and Music Wing adds a
black box theatre for 360-degree
viewing and filming; expands the
Music Resource Center (computer composing and editing)
with a recording sound stage;
and creates a video editing studio—all of it wired together, connected by observation windows,
and central to the National Choreography Center, an FSU initiative poised to bring major artists
to campus.
Dance chair Elizabeth
Patenaude relishes the fact that
at long last, history and vision
came together in Montgomery’s
remarkable make-over.
“This building is historically
significant for FSU and for our
respected dance program.
We’ve preserved its character
while propelling FSU Dance into
the future.”—E.A.
DANCE SHOWCASE: Construction, set to be complete
this April, will turn an entire wing of Montgomery
Gymnasium into exclusive space for training in dance
and music technology.
WINTER 2004
11
DAVID KIRBY
arrived home one night to find that construction workers had ripped up his sidewalk and re-
poured the concrete, leaving a moist tabula rasa right in front of his house. What writer could resist that blank page?
Kirby found a screwdriver and dug in. The wet cement had been there a while, so he didn’t have much time, but he
managed to scrawl out two names. His own? His wife’s? His children’s?
N o.
John Keats. Little Richard.
Question #1 of three most-asked-questions-of-poets is: Who are your major influences? A screwdriver-wielding Kirby,
an FSU English professor and highly lauded poet, was tipping his hat to a pair of his idols, and in concrete, no less. He’s
nuts for Keats’ graceful language of the 19th century, and Little Richard’s hopped-up energy of the 20th (I hear America
singing; it sounds like Little Richard.—line from “For Men Only,” LSU Press, 2000).
“A guy asked me recently to give him a list of 10 poetry books that were essential, so I’m listing Blake, Whitman,
Wordsworth, Dante,” recalls Kirby. “But I added The Essential Little Richard because, as different as his branch of show
business and my branch of show business are, I want my poems to move fast and I want people to like them. And you
can’t get all of that from Dante.”
’
SHO LIKE
David Kirby hits ‘em high and low in a galloping career through
12
Florida State University Researchin Review
DAVID KIRBY
P H O T O : BARBARA HAMBY
TOBALL
the quirky world of free verse. Little Richard would be proud.
B Y
WINTER 2004
S T E V E
M A C Q U E E N
13
Kirby has been an FSU English professor since
1969, and his poetry alone has earned him a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, four Pushcart Prizes, the Kay Deeter
Award, the Guy Owen Prize, the James Dickey Prize, the Millennium Cultural Recognition Award, two appearances in Best
American Poetry, and the Brittingham Prize. In 2003, he also
was honored by a fellowship from the Guggenheim Memorial
Foundation.
“The greatest benefit of the Guggenheim is peer recognition because it is so difficult to get,” says Kirby, who received
his award on the fourth try. “The result is that people look at
you in a different way. It doesn’t mean you’re any better, but
they look at you as though you are.”
Add numerous teaching awards, 22 books on a wide range
of subjects, hundreds of articles and reviews in major outlets,
and membership on the National Book Critics Circle’s Board of
Directors, and you end up with a pretty distinguished career,
one that last year earned Kirby the highest distinction that FSU
faculty can bestow upon a peers, the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professorship.
“That’s all the headlines,” Kirby shrugs. “They don’t talk
about all the liquor stores I held up.”
All in all, 2003 was a very good year for Kirby, but he keeps
it all in perspective.
“Since I got (the Lawton Professorship), I’ve been asked to
speak to every group on campus except the defensive line,” he
quipped. “For a year I get to do that, like Miss America.”
S ea mless Se ns ibilit y
Witty and soft-spoken, Kirby’s raspy voice is instantly recognizable to anyone who’s heard him read in public or taken one
of his popular poetry workshops. His conversation is marked,
like his poetry and his driveway, with references both high and
low. Henry James and Virginia Woolf sit easily alongside Fats
Domino and Fountains of Wayne. Compact discs by Bach, Aretha
Franklin and a New Orleans party band, The Iguanas, occupy
the top of the stereo.
A stack of books features poems by Keats and Nobel Prize
winner Wislawa Szymborska, etchings by Giovanni Piranesi, Sena
Jeter Nasland’s Four Spirits, and Simon Winchester’s Meaning
of Everything, which explores the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary. A few feet away is a turntable devoted strictly
to the playing of some nearby 45s, topped by Lesley Gore and
the Bee Gees.
So-called high culture and low are so co-mingled in Kirby’s
universe that there’s really no difference. In “Your Momma Says
Omnia Vincit Amor,” Michelangelo and Aretha Franklin collide to create a singular impression:
14
Running down the Via degli Annibaldi
I hear Aretha say
my momma said leave you alone
and as I hurry up the steps
of the church of San Pietro in Vincoli
I hear her say my daddy said come on home
and as I turn to go down the right aisle
she says my doctor said take it easy
and then I stop right in front
of Michelangelo’s Moses:
oh but your loving is much too strong
for the chain chain chains
which were used to bind St. Peter in Palestine
and are themselves preserved under glass
in the same church.
And in fact, Kirby explains, the goal is to get beyond such
distinctions of high/low and job/life and work/art, to see everything as more of a whole.
“The operative word is ‘seamlessness,’” Kirby explains.
“Once, Barbara (Hamby, his wife and fellow poet) and I went to
see this really interesting folk artist named Charlie ‘Tin Man’
Lucas in Rogue, Alabama. He makes these hybrid creatures out
of car parts, pterodactyls in trees made out of Dodge hoods,
and he has these creatures that look like deer made out of shock
absorbers. And he just came out and talked and showed us his
workshop and he hit this thing with a hammer a couple times.
“There was none of this feeling of ‘When are these people
going to leave so I can get back to my art?’ There were no seams
between this guy’s work and his art. That’s where I want to be.”
S t u f f i n g the Wa reho u se
Looking over Kirby’s bibliography, it’s clear that the man
keeps busy. But he’s no hermit. Kirby and his wife are fixtures
around town, catching bands in various nightspots, hitting the
art openings, attending the English department’s weekly readings, or perhaps sitting in the movie theater, where Kirby often
indulges his passion for “bad cinema” (his poem “An Otherwise
Mediocre Film” offers a very funny explanation for his attraction to this dubious art form).
But when he sits down to write, there’s never a shortage of
ideas.
“I don’t know when I learned it, but the key is just listening,” he explained. “Be a sponge. That’s where you get rhythms
and that’s where you get stories. You put the stuff in the warehouse. I have these long folders of 30 or 40 pages with quotes
and memories and sound bytes and snippets of conversations,
and I raid that all the time.”
Florida State University Researchin Review
It’s dark out there.
The woods are black; you could walk into them, if you wanted,
and a little path would take you farther and farther
from your old life, and soon you’d see this cottage,
and there’d be music coming out of it, and you’d look in,
and Little Richard would be there and Ali
and Roy Orbison and yourself when you were a child
but also a teenager and a young man, too,
and everybody’d be talking and laughing,
and somebody would look up and see you as you are now,
and they’d all wave and say,
hey there, we’ve been waiting for you, come on in.
—from “The House of Blue Light” ( The House of Blue Light, LSU Press, 2000)
WINTER 2004
15
Sam Cooke makes me think
of Herman Melville. Sometimes when I hear
Sam Cooke’s voice I feel as though I’m ‘speeding up,’
as Robert Lowell used to say when he started to go
into one of his manic phases,
and that’s when I feel about soul music what
James Dickey must have felt about poetry when he said
it was “just naturally the greatest goddamn thing
that ever was in the whole universe.” Sometimes
I go out in the morning and it is raining so hard
that the vines seem ready to reach up out of the earth
and pull me down and drown me. And on other days
the sun is out, and I still have the taste of a great cup
of coffee in my mouth, and there’s already a hint of fall
in the air, and my team won the night before,
and Sam Cooke is still dead.
—from “The King Is Dead” ( My Twentieth Century, Orchises, 1999)
16
Florida State University Researchin Review
That brings us to Question #2 : how do you deal with writer’s
block? Well, he doesn’t.
“There’s really not any such thing,” he said. “Writer’s block
is a false metaphor because it sounds as though you’re circling
this Fort Knox that’s filled with gold and rubies and sapphires
and you can’t get in. But you’re the one who put the gold and
sapphires there. And sometimes canned hams and old typewriter
ribbons and clarinet reeds.”
The secret is knowing that there’s nothing too outrageous,
nothing too obsessive or odd—and applying just a little dedication to the craft.
“John Kenneth Galbraith says if you write a page a day and
take off for holidays and weekends, that’s 300 pages a year and
that’s a book,” Kirby said “It’s just work habits. I think about
writing every day. Sometimes it’s two hours, sometimes it’s four
hours, but I always devote some time to it. I never sit and stare
at a blank page.”
C la ss Ac t , To o
Since arriving at FSU in 1969, he has directed 25 undergraduate honors theses, 41 masters theses and 20 doctoral dissertations. Thousands of students have passed through his American literature classes and poetry workshops. You’ll occasionally
hear professors rail against the failure of modern education, the
lax standards of today’s students and a lack of intellectual curiosity, but you won’t hear it from Kirby.
“The students that we get now are so much better than they’ve
ever been,” Kirby says. “I think that’s because we can be more
selective. When I first started teaching, about 20 percent of kids
went to college and now that number is up to 70 percent. Barbara had a kid who wanted to go to cosmetology school and her
parents wouldn’t let her. They told her she had to go to college.”
He’s also made a deep impression on hundreds of other students who didn’t pursue the artistic life. Chantalle Couba, for
instance, earned her master’s in systems design, but took every
Kirby class she could.
“When I was a sophomore at FSU, I was going to class sometimes and not going other times,” Couba recalled, “And he pulled
me aside and said, ‘Please come to my class: it makes a difference
when you’re here.’ In a school with 30,000 people, it really matters when a professor does that. He genuinely made me feel like
he cared.”
Tony Morris, who earned his Ph.D. in creative writing at
FSU, had a similar experience.
“David Kirby has this wonderful combination of not taking
himself too damn seriously and at the same time having a wealth
of information and knowledge that, because of his years in the
field of writing, I really trusted,” Morris said. “He was tough in
WINTER 2004
the sense of wanting to push us as writers, to keep working and
keep improving. He’s always been generous with his time and
his thoughts. It’s hard to be in a bad mood around him, unless
you’re determined.”
Such student praise helped Kirby earn special university teaching awards in 1992, ’94, ’97 and ’99.
“I’m lucky in that I have so much to choose from,” Kirby
said. “It’s not like teaching a German class, where every year
you have to say ‘Now, let’s conjugate haben.’ I can change the
form whenever I want to, so it’s never gotten boring.”
Pa rtners i n Verse
For 22 years, Kirby has been married to fellow poet Barbara
Hamby, whom he met at a New Year’s Eve party following the
demise of his first marriage. And while the movie version—obviously some updated Spencer Tracy/Katherine Hepburn rivalsturned-lovers tale that would focus on competition—the real
story focuses on cooperation.
“It’s more of an ongoing workshop,” Hamby says. “You never
have to explain what you’re doing. If you need to go off and
write something—like when we’re traveling and I get a crush on
something and start following it around—I never have to explain it, because David does the same thing.”
Hamby, a writer-in-residence within FSU’s English department, says their age difference (Kirby is eight years older) has
helped because the two are at different stages in their careers,
meaning they hardly ever compete directly against each other
for prizes, awards or publications. Instead, the two tend to nurture each other, frequently looking over each other’s work.
“It’s wonderful to have someone who can read your work,
someone you trust,” says Hamby. “That’s a wealth above rubies.”
Her husband concurs.
“I’ve had writers say they couldn’t imagine being married to
a writer, but I couldn’t imagine not being married to one,” Kirby
says. “It’s everywhere. We’ll be making dinner and we’ll start
talking about poetry.”
Hamby is a frequent character in Kirby’s well-traveled poems (just as he often pops up in hers). You can find her sketching in Italy, walking across a field in rural Alabama, dancing in
the kitchen and dining with friends. She doesn’t mind.
“I come off so well in those poems—better-looking, smarter,
funnier,” Hamby laughs. “Who wouldn’t love it?”
By t he B o ok
Kirby didn’t have to search for the academic life. He was
born into it. His father was a renowned professor at Louisiana
State University in Baton Rouge, his mother was an elementar y
17
school teacher, and his older brother became a medical-school
dean.
“My father was a Chaucerian, a medievalist,” Kirby recalls,
“And they’re a different breed. It’s like being in a cult. He knew
Icelandic and old Norse and he had all these dictionaries with
words where the o’s had smiley faces and there were umlauts
over the t’s.”
Kirby spent some of his pre-teen youth tending bar at his
father’s departmental parties (a job he passed along to his own
sons a few decades later), learning his mixers by pouring drinks
for the likes of Pulitzer Prize winning novelist and poet Robert
Penn Warren and the renowned literary critic Cleanth Brooks.
Kirby’s passions skewed to the literary, naturally, but not in
his father’s direction. Few would view a Ph.D. from Johns
Hopkins (which Kirby picked up in 1969) as a form of rebellion,
but that’s how it played out at the Kirby house.
“I wrote about Henry James (for my thesis), which my father
thought was pretty risqué, kind of avant garde,” Kirby says. “Like
I’d dropped out to go surfing.”
Moment by Mo m e nt
Given his extraordinary success as an academic and poet, it’s
logical enough to wonder what next? What is still left for Kirby
18
to accomplish in the world of poetry? The answer is simple: more
work.
“I don’t care if I ever win another prize in my life,” Kirby
says flatly. “Poetry’s one of those fields where honors come to
you because you’re so deeply invested in the pleasures of the
work itself. Prizes are surprises; you’re happily making your poems in your cave there, and suddenly there’s a shadow in the
doorway: it’s the prize guy! If you’re smart, you’ll say, ‘Hey,
thanks! Put it down over there, if you can find a space! Want
something to drink?’ But you don’t ask if you can have another;
you just go back to work.”
The real goal for Kirby is another of those fleeting times
when everything comes together in the poem and its presentation, something Kirby calls ‘the moment.’
“I’ve noticed that when I read a poem that’s really working,
it’s as though something else has entered the room. Usually you
can’t see your audience—they’re out there in the darkness somewhere— but you can feel them leaning toward you, or toward
the poem, actually.
“I’ve looked up from my page at moments like that, and
sometimes I’ll just stop. Sometimes I think I could wait up there
a half hour and nobody would move. They’d rather be dead
than not know what’s going to happen next. And then I wake
up and finish reading my poem, and you can hear the people
Florida State University Researchin Review
I first started giving poetry readings
about the time I re-discovered Whitman–
I’d been writing like Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins,
and people would say, “Hmm, nice!”
or “Now that’s some interesting language there!”
But then I started reading Father Walt,
he of the tousled locks and the vast, unkempt beard,
progenitor of all those bastards (or so he said
to woo the homophobes of his day),
and, after that, his fathers, the Hebrew poets
of the Old Testament with their towering accretions
of rhetoric that just built and built and built,
and my own poems started getting longer and–
well, damn it, better, I thought, only if there’s nobody there
to hear them, then what’s the point?
—from “The Werewolf” ( The Ha-Ha , LSU Press, 2003)
letting their breath go, and then there’s applause, and the lights
come up, and people start talking to one another… This doesn’t
happen very often, obviously. But when it does, you’d rather be
in that moment than anywhere else on earth.”
In the meantime, there’s another new volume of poetry, The
Ha-Ha (LSU Press, 2003), which has been receiving the usual
praise from sources like The New York Times Book Review:
“The loquacious style of David Kirby’s poetry can sometimes resemble the riffs of a brainy stand-up comedian... In relating seemingly autobiographical, spryly digressive sagas about
work, marriage, travel, and even the joys of mediocre movies,
Kirby makes the narrative poem—a form often proclaimed to
be outdated—amusing, lively and relevant enough for contemporary tastes.”
Of course, if Kirby needs a reality check on the popularity of
poets, he need look no farther than his own family. His elder
son, Will Kirby, a doctor specializing in internal medicine, became an overnight TV sensation and hear t-throb (see:
www.willkirby.net) when he starred on the reality TV show Big
Brother, in which a houseful of roommates take turns evicting
each other until only one remains. The show was a big hit for
CBS in 2001 and Kirby was able to log in to the show’s web site
and keep track of his kid.
“They had a 24-hour live feed and I’d minimize it up in the
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corner of my computer screen and I’d be able to watch Will
sleep, then I’d watch him wake up and stretch, go make an eggwhite omelette. It was very comforting.”
Will, who earned the nickname Dr. Evil for his tactics on the
show, actually won the competition, earning $500,000 and some
red-hot celebrity notoriety and perks.
“What I discovered is that when you’re related to a celebrity,
you’re a celebrity,” Kirby says. “We went out to eat one night
and we were waiting in line with everyone else when the hostess
sees us and says, ‘Will? How many?’ And we were seated ahead
of all these other people. Fortunately, we were in Los Angeles so
nobody cared.”
S u nd ae D rive
The poet who gets a lot of criticism is a critic in turn. Kirby’s
critical reviews and essays frequently crop up in the Times, the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Southern Review and the national literary magazine, Triquarterly. He also has written books
of scholarly criticism on Mark Strand, Herman Melville, Henry
James and Grace King.
Edward Hirsch, president of the John Simon Guggenheim
Memorial Foundation, called Kirby “one of the top poet-critics
working in the United States today,” praising his “literary range,
19
Pity the Poor Poet
The words “poetry” and “money” seldom occur in the same sentence. Poets
are expected to be poor: It makes about
as much sense to say “that big idiot
Albert Einstein” as it does “multimillionaire Emily Dickinson.” After
all, the poet of most people’s stereotype is Rodolfo of Puccini’s “La
Boheeme,” who burns his manuscript in
the opening scene to warm his garret
in the Latin Quarter of Paris.
Yet obviously poets have managed
to make ends meet over the ages. You
teach, you win prizes, you get grants—
you even make a little money from the
books you publish, though I’ve made a
by David Kirby
lot more by reviewing other poets’
books than from collecting royalties
from mine.
But the real wealth in poetry
isn’t monetary. People who question
the value of poetry need to consider
this: Why have there always been
poets? Since the dawn of history,
every culture has had poets; why do
people write and read poetry if it
isn’t hugely rewarding?
Of poetry’s many rewards, the
greatest is freedom to say whatever
you want. W.H. Auden pointed out
that, precisely because poetry is so
ill-paid, the poet can do pretty much
his quintessentially American openmindedness, and his humane sensibility.” Kirby’s
What Is a Book? (U. Georgia Press, 2002), a collection of essays and critiques, reflects those very
qualities.
Kirby’s not too hot on rhyming couplets or Jim
Morrison, or Jewel, or the so-called “wino poet laureate of L.A.,” the late Charles Bukowski. Kirby calls
the pop trio “the dark triumvirate whose evil influence is pervasive in American undergraduate poetry
these days.” But he’s constructive rather than hostile, a
level-headed reader who writes from appreciation rather
than high-mindedness.
“Reviewing is trying to describe what’s going on to
people who want to hear it, “Kirby explains. “And, as Kurt
Vonnegut said, a vicious book review is like a knight in full
armor riding full-tilt towards a hot-fudge sundae. You should
save your anger for things that actually deserve it.”
E ve r y m a n Po et
▲
EARLY INFLUENCES: Kirby’s parents,
Thomas and Josie Dyson Kirby, pose on a honeymoon
trip to Niagara Falls, 1936.
20
Reading Kirby’s six collections of poetry in chronological
order illuminates the development of his art. The early poems
are shorter, not as conversational and less directly autobiographical. Then, starting somewhere around the publication of My Twentieth Century (Ochises, 1999), the length expands, the pace increases and the tone shifts.
As Kirby himself explains in the poetic forward to My Twentieth Century:
Florida State University Researchin Review
as he or she pleases, because there’s
no possibility of selling out.
That’s why I get the feeling sometimes that my novelist colleagues are
looking at me with a faint air of pity.
After all, their novels might be
optioned by Hollywood, and as everybody knows, you get paid when a studio buys the rights to your book even
if it’s never turned into a movie. I,
on the other hand, will be fortunate
if someone pays me enough for my latest poem that I can take my wife out
to dinner at a place where I won’t be
asked if I want fries with my order.
Why write poetry at all, then? The
answer is that there are lots of different kinds of wealth, and money is
just one of them. When we think of
Homer and Virgil and Dante, we think
of laurel leaves, not gold (that’s
Midas’s department). I consider myself a rich man, even if I don’t have
a huge bank account.
So am I worried that Poetry magazine has just gone from being a postage stamp-sized operation to a
mighty empire? Not a bit. I’m rubbing
my hands together gleefully, because
it looks as though the Lilly bequest
is going to go to poetry, not poets.
After editor (Joseph) Parisi gets
I’ve been working
on what I call ‘memory poems’ or longish narrative poems
that stick as closely as possible to events
I actually experienced. Each memory poem
is thus part poem / part memoir, though each
has a certain shape to it that mere autobiography
doesn’t have
The words and the rhythm are conversational, despite their
velocity, creating the illusion of everyday speech—even though
it’s safe to say that nobody really talks like that. Kirby has his own
term for the style—“ultra-talk.”
“I wanted to make my poetry conversational but take out the
‘uhs’ and ‘ums,’ give it a cup of coffee, and just make it smart and
funny and fast.”
It seems to have worked. David Lehman, editor of The Best
American Poetry series, said that Kirby’s poems “demonstrate a
great agility of mind and a wonderful sense of humor. His poems
are discursive, conversational, skillfully blending narrative with
argument.”
Billy Collins, the current U.S. poet laureate, calls Kirby “one
of the most engaging and original voices on the American poetr y
scene today…I could recognize a Kirby poem on the page across
a room, just as I could recognize one of Emily Dickinson’s.”
Kirby’s poems are perfect for those who say they don’t like
poetry. Because of the conversational tone, the ever-present humor, and the grounding in realistic, everyday situations, they read
like lyrical stand-up humor frequently accompanied by a headslapping piece of insight at the end. Kirby finds comedy in Elvis
WINTER 2004
some expert financial advice, he says
he plans to move the magazine to more
spacious quarters, expand its staff
and start new programs, including
one to show high school teachers how
to introduce students to the pleasures of poetry.
But even if some money ends up in
poets’ pockets, I’m not worried about
anyone being corrupted. Poets know
the real money is in the poems. What
else would we conclude? We’ve been
writing for nothing too long to think
otherwise. — reprinted with permission from The Christian Science
Monitor
Presley (“Elvis would be a dim memory / to most people were
it not for the Weekly World News / and those crappy oldies
stations that people listen to / so they can find out what they
missed / back when they were too busy painting signs for /
their pro-segregation rallies to listen to the radio” he writes in
“The King Is Dead”) and the small obit afforded a baseball
player in “The Death of Fred Snodgrass”:
San Francisco,
April 6, 1974.
It says here
in the Chronicle:
“Fred Snodgrass,
who muffed
an easy fly ball
that helped
to cost
the New York Giants
the 1912
World Series,
died yesterday
at age 86.”
F— you,
Fred Snodgrass.
Some things,
we never forgive.
In House of Blue Light (LSU Press, 2000)—a title he lifted
from a lyric in Little Richard’s 1958 hit “Good Golly, Miss
21
It says HELL IS HOT HOT HOT HOT
and NO SEX WITH MEN ALOUD
and NO ICE WATER IN HELL
on the hundreds of washers and dryers
and air conditioner housings that stud the land
the land around outsider artist W. C. Rice’s house in Prattville,
though Mr. Rice isn’t well today,
so I’m chatting through the bedroom window
of a man I visit every three-four years
to talk a while and then stroll the property
that offers an ineluctable foreknowledge of The Pit
to people like me, though Mr. Rice has always been
nice as pie, never proselytizing or even asking
if I’ve been saved, which, according to him,
either you are or you aren’t.
—from “The Temple Gate Called Beautiful”
22
Florida State University Researchin Review
Molly”—Kirby puts verse to a cheeky encounter he had in
France with a hot-shot movie producer. In “Roman Polanski’s
Cookies,” the poet just happens upon a film shoot in Paris and
notices a plate of cookies on a nearby table.
…and even though the cookies
are obviously for the actors, I can’t help sneaking one,
and it turns out to be exactly the kind of cookie
I’m thinking of…
and soon I’m hog-facing
those cookies like nobody’s business, only
just then I look up, and there’s Roman Polanski
standing there with that big cigar in his hand
and staring at me with a look of pure hatred, as if to say,
“Stop eating all those goddamned chocolate-covered
graham crackers!” And while part of me
wants to say, “Make your movie, dude, it’s only a cookie,”
another part of me realizes that maybe they’re
his favorite cookies too, and that even while
he was blocking out the scene and moving lights around
and giving the actors their cues, what he’d really
been obsessing on was those chocolate-covered graham
crackers, same as me,
though who’s to say? Who, including ourselves,
knows what we know and when we know it?”
T o What E nd
And so we arrive at Question #3 of the three most-askedquestions-of-poets, this one hitting at the heart of poetry itself:
Why, in this media-saturated age, is poetry still important?
Kirby says the question of poetry’s ultimate value to the human experience has been the topic of debate by scholars and lay
people alike for centuries. Somehow, despite the profound cultural changes wrought ‘round the globe by modernity, poetry
has clung tenaciously to life as a unique form of literary art.
Kirby credits this remarkable survival to poetry’s success in surmounting two paradoxes that apparently don’t arise in other
forms of art and self-expression.
“The first paradox is that poetry is both the most worthless
and the most highly-valued commodity in the world,” he said.
“And the second rises from the first; it is that everyone hates
poetry and everyone is a poet.”
In an essay he wrote last year for The Christian Science Monitor, Kirby opined on the topic of poetry’s intrinsic worth.
“People who question the value of poetry need to consider
this: why have there always been poets?,” he wrote. “As far as
that goes, why is there a poet laureate but not a novelist laureate
WINTER 2004
▲
BO DIDDLEY, PERCY SLEDGE, and the Rotary Club
conspire to inform Kirby’s latest book, The Ha-Ha (LSU
Press, 2003).
or playwright laureate, not to mention a composer/painter/
sculptor/filmmaker laureate? Since the dawn of history, every
culture has had poets; why do people write and read poetry if it
isn’t hugely rewarding to them?”
Obviously, such rewards have little if anything to do with
money. When it comes to capitalist cultures’ obsession with putting price tags on anything of value, poetry may be the last art
form to wear one.
Last year, the poetry world was stunned by the news that
Poetry magazine, the art form’s leading American journal and a
publication that has survived on a shoestring for decades, was
handed more than $100 million from Ruth Lilly, an heir to the
Eli Lilly pharmaceutical fortune. Kirby’s Monitor essay addressed
the meaning of this windfall in typically humorous fashion (see
an excerpt, page 20).
Surely, to many devotees poetry’s appeal will always be its
power as a balm for deeply rooted personal fears, even an antidote to what they view as the creep of cultural malaise. And for
higher education, no better expression of the fundamental values of the liberal arts tradition (remember those?) can be found
on any campus anywhere—a curriculum exuberantly freed from
the trade-school imperative of pursuing high-dollar degrees.
Relievedly beyond the why of the art, here’s a final bulletin on
the matter:
From his dandy pulpit at Florida State, David Kirby is standup proof that poetry not only still lives, but good golly, rocks.RR
23
ee
Online buying is catching on—but catching up with our shopping
The Rocky Road
As the countdown to the holiday buying season ticked toward Christmas last fall, the nation’s retailers were salivating over what economic
forecasters were saying about online buying.
Prognosticators called for a record buying season, boosted by a predicted 40 percent
jump in online retail sales over last year’s seasonal tallies.
Has the much ballyhooed revolution in wired retailing finally arrived?
Hardly. While the popularity of online buying is obviously on the rise, the hyperbole of e-commerce
boosters heard in the nascent days of the technology seven years ago contrasts loudly with consumers’
overwhelming preference for walking into real stores—parking nightmares, rude clerks and all. And
nothing is likely to change that anytime soon, say researchers.
The online share of the 2002 holiday
retail total was pegged at just 2.3 percent—a figure some theorists compare to
something between a curious consumer
toe nudging the door open to a high-tech
way of buying things and a whole foot
making tracks to the virtual counter. If
projections held, that fraction of cyber customers responsible for the whole holiday
spending pie will jump to a whopping 4
percent for the season just ended.
In terms of raw dollars, the picture is
this: For the second quarter of 2003, the
U.S. Census Bureau reported $12.4 billion
of online sales, compared to about $860
billion total retail U.S. sales in those three
months.
“E-retailing has not taken off, because
the chasm between two groups (innovators and early adopters) r emains
unbridged.”
The statement comes from a summary
24
of a study done by a husband-and-wife
team of FSU researchers published last
year in The Journal of Product and Brand
Management. Here’s what Ron and
Elizabeth Goldsmith went on to conclude:
“As a result, the apparent mass market for e-commerce remains a future
dream. Two thirds of Americans might
have access to the Internet, but they are
not using it to buy things—at least not in
sufficient numbers.”
And the main reason?
“We know too little about the differences between the enthusiastic innovators
who buy goods online and the rest who
are happy to look but do not buy.”
The Goldsmiths are among a number
of researchers nationwide who study the
latter-day phenomenon of online buying.
Curiously, despite the undeniable fact that
consumers who buy goods and services
online represent the fastest growing crowd
of shoppers on the planet, precious little
is known about them, the Goldsmiths say.
Such a paucity of demographic information contrasts with a rich knowledge of
old-hat consumer behavior, e.g. hitting the
malls and mail-order catalogs. This disparity amounts to costly ignorance on the
part of retailers who are spending loads of
cash trying to capitalize on what everybody
sees as the vast potential of the Internet
marketplace. Today’s new breed of e-retailers knows that the age-old rule that applies to doing business the old fashioned
way also applies to e-commerce: Learn who
your customers are and what they like—or
watch your business sink like a rock.
Ron Goldsmith, the Richard M. Baker
Professor of Marketing within FSU’s College of Business, describes himself as a consumer psychologist. He’s co-author of
Consumer Psychology for Marketing (International Thompson Business, 1998), and
Florida State University Researchin Review
e
e
habits? No, but retailers ignore the wired store at their peril.
-Retail
e
to
three book chapters on marketplace innovation and more than 100 articles on consumer buying habits and related subjects.
Goldsmith’s frequent research partner
is his wife Elizabeth, a consumer economist and professor of textiles and consumer
sciences within FSU’s College of Human
Sciences. Like Ron, she also is interested
in helping the merchants know their customers, but she focuses as well on what
customers need to know about buying.
Working from somewhat different
angles in different disciplines, the Goldsmiths are trying to refine their answers
to the marketing question of the young
Internet age: Who’s buying online?
A corollary of nearly equal import is:
Who’s not buying online and why?
Both Goldsmiths agree that despite
merchants’ thirst for answers, to be successful in tomorrow’s economy, they will
have no choice but to go online. “It’s the
WINTER 2004
wave of the future,” Elizabeth
Goldsmith said, explaining why
universities, or at least the
Goldsmiths, feel obliged to research, report and teach it.␣
Despite the bumps in the
information highway, e-commerce is on a steady course to
reach a certain maturity before
too long, the Goldsmiths say,
which means online buying will
figure increasingly important to
retailers’ bottom lines.
The New York Times reported last November that 65
million U.S. households were
online, and 25 to 30 million
were buying online. As more
of the 65 million online users
B Y
P A R K E R
N E I L S
25
get into the habit of shopping by computer, some experts expect the current 2
to 4 percent will become 10 percent in five
to 10 years. That rate of increase may rise
even faster as computer users take advantage of improvements in safety, convenience and simplicity, some observers say.
Right now, this growth fits the pattern
of what marketers call innovation diffusion,
Ron said, the process by which new ideas
and products get accepted in a marketplace—or don’t. Despite its failure to reach
early projections, he said that the growth
of e-commerce is “on schedule.” He predicts that online sales will eventually settle
down to the same kind of
growth rate that all of retail is
enjoying (about 3 percent annually at the end of 2003).
Just as the flower of e-commerce shows signs of blossoming into a retailing colossus, the
A specialist in studying what
motivates consumers to buy anynation’s lawmakers are fiddling with the pruning shears.
thing in the first place, Ron says
Or so say those opposed to taxing the Internet. Last November, before the U.S. Senate
that decades of marketing recould vote on a House-approved measure to extend the country’s five-year ban on taxing
search have revealed a pattern
Internet access, the bill died in a bipartisan crossfire of complaints.
that is gradually unfolding in the
Enacted as The Internet Tax Freedom Act of 1998, the ban—now lifted—was aimed at blowbudding world of online buying.
No matter how anything gets ining life into the fledging Internet marketplace. The law barred states from slapping taxes on
troduced into the market—
Internet service providers, who would be obliged to pass those taxes on to their customers.
whether conventional or in
As long as the moratorium remains lifted, states and municipalities will have a legal shot
cyberspace—once there it has to
at taxing almost all phases of e-commerce, advocates of the ban say. This scenario opens
run a highly predictable gauntthe door to multi-state taxes on Internet sales, higher tax rates for online sales than tradilet of consumer tastes and habtional retail sales, new taxes on Internet service and on Internet access itself. As time ran
its to succeed, he said.
New products or technoloout amid rancorous senatorial squabbling Nov. 25, Sen. George Allen, R-Va., the extension
gies always must first pass musbill’s chief sponsor, vowed to bring the measure back for a vote as early as possible this year.
ter before “innovators”—
Allen, who favors a permanent ban on Internet taxation, had argued that lifting the tax
people who are quick to test
moratorium now would be a blow to the high-tech industry in general and could cripple
drive new things—and then
online businesses just as they’re beginning to turn a profit. Predictably, tech-sector lobbymove toward what the market
really craves—the eyes of mature
ists vehemently agreed.
customers who feel comfortable
“The last thing we need is for the cost to individual consumers and businesses to go up,”
with innovations and their buysaid Mark Bohannon, a senior vice president of the Software and Information Industry Assoing habits. In the marketing jarciation. “That would be a direct deterrent to using the Internet.”
gon, this is the “late majority”
Proponents for lifting the ban argue that e-commerce is now a mature, stable industry
crowd, says Goldsmith.
A primary reason for the dethat should no longer be given any special tax breaks. They argue that states are missing
layed arrival of the e-commerce
out on billions in tax revenues each year as consumers increasingly turn to the Internet for
revolution, they believe, is that
their news, entertainment and shopping. —F.S.
the true pioneers in Internet
The Taxman Cometh?
26
Florida State University Researchin Review
distinctions most marketing researchers
look for first.
The only important differences the
Goldsmiths have found so far between
online and never-online (so far) shoppers
are in their general habits, attitudes and,
to some extent, personalities. Internet
One recent
recent Goldsmith
One
Goldsmith
study of
of online
online
study
shoppers found
found no
shoppers
no
demographic
demographic
differences,
the very
very
differences, the
shoppers, Elizabeth said, are consumers
who most likely are going to be using the
Internet anyway.
“Buying is (simply) another thing to
do on the Internet,” she said. “It’s almost
less linked to shopping than related to being online. They just enjoy being online,
and shopping is another outlet for them.”
In several sur veys, the
Goldsmiths have asked consumers about their shopping—how and where they
do it and how they feel about
it. They found that the ones
who shop on the Internet are
more confident than the others that it’s a safe way to buy
things.
The never-or-rarelyonline shoppers are afraid of
the Internet, Ron said. They
say they don’t know how to
be sure the money will go
where it should, that their
privacy and control will survive and the products will be
delivered as promised. Online buyers do
have that confidence, the surveys showed,
and they say that kind of shopping is fun,
fast, easy and convenient.
On one point, both online and offline
shoppers agreed. Both groups said they
thought online buying saves money (although the specter of Internet taxation
could dampen that opinion before long—
see opposite page). Whether the prices are
better online or they’re not, the Goldsmiths do not predict that stores will ever
disappear, surrendering the bulk of retail
sales to the Internet.
“Everybody will keep shopping in
stores, catalogues, on phones, everything,”
Liz Goldsmith said. “Some people are totally online, but most are a combination.”
Will brick-and-mortar stores be hurt
by the competition from the Internet?
“Not if they’re smart and have an
online store, too.”RR
e
shopping—the innovators—are still a small
crowd. Innovators tend to be venturesome people who have enough money to
take chances and enough sophistication to
figure out how to use new technology.
They also generally have enough influence
on trends and tastes that other shoppers
eventually follow their lead.
But by all accounts, right
now these “fire starters”—innovators—make up only
about the first 2.5 percent of
the buyers, the Goldsmiths
say. If merchants are going
to make any money on the
Internet (most of them aren’t
making much yet, or are in
fact losing money, according
to the Goldsmiths), they need
to attract the next group of
consumers, the so-called
“early adopters.” Right now,
this group—which eventually
develops into the “late majority” of mature online buyers—
makes up about 13.5 percent
of Internet customers.
To do this effectively, of course, retailers need to know all they can about
who they need to pitch their online services to, and how best to do that. If merchants can figure out who the early buyers are and then make them repeat buyers, they’ll be able to use them to recruit
larger groups of customers, Ron said.
This will be the bridge between “innovators” and “early adopters” that’s sorely
needed, he said.
So just what have the Goldsmiths
learned about online customers?
Surprisingly, it doesn’t much matter
how old they are or which sex (although
men and women are interested in different products: women buy more clothes
and men buy more electronics), and
ethnicity and income don’t make much
difference either. One recent Goldsmith
study of online shoppers, in fact, found
no such demographic differences, the very
WINTER 2004
distinctions
most
distinctions most
marketing
researchers
marketing researchers
look for first.
look for first.
27
GLASS ACT
28
A RARE FORM OF MAGNETIC GLASS PIQUES
Florida State University Researchin Review
B Y
hemist Albert Stiegman wanted to make a
pretty glass that would change color when
exposed to light.
He failed, and he’s delighted he did.
He got his pretty glass, sure enough,
but its indifference to light ultimately led
to a discovery that may help scientists better understand the curious world of
nanomagnetism.
The buzz of science and engineering
these days, nanoscience—and its applied side,
nanotechnology—is revolutionizing how researchers in chemistry, physics and biology
approach their work. The field is focused
C
D O N
W O O D
The process produces glass that resembles ordinary glass—
but with a key difference. Stiegman’s glass is shot through with
tiny tunnels and caverns not much wider than a molecule. These
nano-sized pores can allow small molecules of various compounds
to penetrate the glass and react with any number of chemicals
that the glass’ gel can be doped with. The resulting chemical
reaction can do some neat things—from changing the glass’ color
to making it fluoresce all its own.
A few years back, Stiegman figured out how to make his
glass using a compound made out of vanadium, a silvery-white,
soft metal often used to make high-strength steel alloys.
Using vanadium oxide, he soon found that he could turn
the glass into various colors by exposing it to different chemicals. For example, in the presence of hydrogen sulfide (the
SCIENTISTS’ CURIOSITY OVER THE BOUNDLESS WORLD OF NANOTECHNOLOGY.
entirely on the atomic world, where size is indeed everything.
Everything super-small, that is. The prefix “nano,” from the
Greek, means “billionth.” Things within the “nano-world” are
literally at least a billionth of a meter in diameter or overall length—
and often far smaller.
Stiegman’s newest “pretty glass” (he’s created several varieties)
is a study in nanoscience with a surprising—if not yet fully understood—twist. So far, the substance is little more than a scientific
curiosity, a happy accident—and that may be all it ever is. Any talk
of the discovery opening a door to a snappy new high-tech product
is wishful thinking, says Stiegman, an inorganic chemist at FSU.
But the fact that this novel material exists at all intrigues more
than a few—last summer the discovery drew the attention of the
Chemical & Engineering News, a leading professional journal,
which reported on Stiegman’s find.
For years, Stiegman has experimented with making special, highly
colorful glasses in his lab using what is called the “sol-gel” process.
Basically, the technique is fairly simple: two or more compounds
are mixed together, and a resulting liquid slowly gels to a Jello-like
consistency that eventually hardens into a transparent solid.
“rotten egg” odor of freshman chemistry courses) his glass
would turn amber. Formaldehyde would turn it green. His glass
thus had potential for being a rather dramatic detector for these
and other pollutants.
This time around, Stiegman wanted to put a compound in
the glass so that it would change color when exposed to light, a
A FIRST FOR science is a magnetically distinct glass made by FSU
chemists. Al Stiegman, far right, examines a sample with Naresh Dalal,
chair of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry.
▲
WINTER 2004
29
The Blues of Prussia
Many scientific discoveries come about by accident–including the discovery of Prussian blue,
the first of the class of compounds FSU chemist Albert Stiegman used to create a new kind
of superparamagnetic nanoparticle.
Around 1704, a German dye maker named
Diesbach was mixing up a batch of red dye from
potash and iron sulfate. But unknown to him,
his supplier, a man named Dippel, had sold him
potash that had been contaminated with animal
oil. Instead of the red he expected, Diesbach
wound up with a pale pink. When he tried to concentrate the dye to produce a deeper red, to his
surprise he got a deep blue.
Chemistry in that day was too primitive to
explain what happened. Today we know that the
potash (an alkali) reacted with the animal oil to
produce potassium ferrocyanide, which in turn
reacted with the iron sulfate to produce Prussian blue–the first of the modern artificial pigments.
Even without knowing the chemistry, Prussian blue was easy and cheap to make, and took
the art world by storm. Never before had artists
had a stable, satisfactory blue pigment. The
color quickly became popular throughout Europe.
The compound proved to be very versatile.
It found use in ink, paint, typewriter ribbons,
carbon paper, blueprints and an early kind of
photograph called a cyanotype. Prussian blue
was even used to treat heavy-metal poisoning.
Used as an antidote, the molecule grabbed metal
atoms like a claw, allowing them to be flushed
from the body.
Eventually chemists found that other metal
atoms could be substituted for one or both of
the iron atoms in the original molecule, thus creating an entire class of compounds known collectively as Prussian blues. Stiegman created
his superparamagnetic particles from a Prussian blue containing cobalt and iron. —D.W.
30
property called photochromism. The phenomenon already is evident in the marketplace, a common example being sunglasses that
automatically darken when you step outside. Engineers also are
interested in such materials as a way to store optical data in devices such as CDs, DVDs and computer memories.
For this experiment, instead of vanadium Stiegman chose a
dye from a venerable class of compounds known as Prussian blues
(see box, left). These brilliant blue dyes are made up of molecules
built from two metal ions tied together by a molecule of cyanide.
In this case, Stiegman used a dye whose metal ions were cobalt
and iron.
Stiegman assigned graduate student Joshua Moore to work
out a way to put the Prussian blue into the sol-gel glass.
Moore soon realized his prof had thrown him a curveball.
What he faced was no simple problem—Prussian blues are typically made by mixing together two reagents containing the right
concentrations of metallic ions. The positive and negative ions
immediately join together to form the desired molecule, which
promptly “precipitates out”—as the chemists say—or clumps together and collects at the bottom of the container.
So, if you mix the sol-gel components and the Prussian blue
components together in the same vessel, the Prussian blue will be
sitting benignly on the bottom while the sol-gel is still slowly hardening above—without any dye in it.
“IT’S TRULY A NEAT APPLICATION WITH REAL
Moore eventually solved the problem by diluting the amount
of dye in his glass recipe. This allowed more control over the precipitation problem. Finally, he tinkered with this and other parameters until he hit what Stiegman called the “sweet spot”–just
the right formula so that the Prussian blue particles were trapped
by the hardening gel before they had a chance to fall out of solution. Delighted, Stiegman dubbed the process “arrested precipitation.” The result was a beautiful purple glass with some surprising properties.
With help from FSU physicist Eric Lochner, a member of the
university’s Center for Materials Research and Technology, Stiegman
and Moore began testing the material’s optical properties. Alas, the
hoped-for color change didn’t appear. As far as making a photochromic material was concerned, the experiment was a bust.
One day, while Moore and Lochner were discussing these depressing results, Lochner suggested testing the material for magnetic properties. He knew that Prussian blue compounds were
magnetic and thought something interesting might turn up.
When Moore took the idea to Stiegman, his prof was skeptical. Stiegman thought there would be far too few particles too
widely scattered in the glass to show any interesting magnetic behavior. Still, Moore wanted to pursue the idea and Stiegman didn’t
want to squelch his enthusiasm. So, collaborating with Lochner,
Florida State University Researchin Review
they tested their glass for magnetic properties.
What they found was astonishing. The Prussian blue particles
trapped in the glass proved to be superparamagnetic–a phenomenon of considerable interest to scientists and engineers working
in the field of nanotechnology.
Superparamagnetism is a daunting word, but the concept isn’t
too hard to understand—especially if you skip over the quantum
mechanics. The phenomenon occurs when magnetic particles are
made small enough—on the order of ten billionths of a meter. At
that size, each particle acts like a tiny magnet, but thermal agitation–the random jiggling of molecules due to heat–prevents adjacent particles from lining up with each other. Instead, the particles are all randomly oriented and behave like lonely, magnetic
islands with no common interaction. As a consequence, the material as a whole doesn’t act like a magnet at all.
But applying an external magnetic field can force the particles
to align so that the material temporarily becomes magnetic. As
soon as you switch off the magnetic field, thermal agitation
scrambles the particles again and you’re back where you started
with a nonmagnetic material. The phenomenon is so efficient
that researchers get excited over the prospects of using
superparamagnetic devices as tiny magnetic switches to control a
variety of electronic gadgets.
The possibilities have helped generate excitement about
▲
ANOTHER CLASS of glass made in Stiegman’s lab is the xerogel,
(above) coated with a variety of ultra-slick polymers. Made entirely
of silica, the glasses have surfaces full of nano-sized holes.
POTENTIAL IN THE DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT OF MAGNETIC MATERIALS.”
Stiegman’s discovery. (Lochner mentioned one novel idea–trapping both a superparamagnetic particle and a bit of a drug in a
membrane, then using an external magnet to direct the drug to
where you want it to go in the body.)
Another interesting discovery about the Prussian dye-impregnated glass is that the amount of magnetism can be tuned using a
combination of ammonia and light. Moore and Stiegman found
that by shining light on the glass they could increase its magnetic
strength, and doping it with ammonia changed its reaction to the
light. The upshot was a clever means of tuning the glass’ magnetic properties. This property suggests the possibility of someday writing to a magnetic memory using a laser, then reading the
data back with a magnet, said Stiegman.
But he’s quick to put the finding into perspective.
“This is a scientific discovery, and I’m not sure it’s an industrial discovery,” he said. “The novelty is in how it was made and
the kind of particles that make it superparamagnetic.”
The novelty of the method is the ease with which the nanosized particles are created, he said. Making these things is usually
a difficult process involving many steps. In this case, the Prussian
blue nanoparticles appear spontaneously as a result of the arrested
precipitation in the sol-gel.
Still, in the field of materials science, the finding is a first. In
WINTER 2004
the C&EN article last August, Geoffrey F. Strouse, an inorganic chemist at U. California, Santa Barbara, lauded the discovery for its potential place in technology, noting the importance of having a magnetic substance that can be molded.
“It’s truly a neat application with real potential in the design and development of magnetic materials,” said Strouse, who
is scheduled to join FSU’s chemistry department later this year.
“This could give rise to some fascinating magnetic structures
that can literally be cast into a device, rather than having to be
formed (via conventional) methods.”
Stiegman’s lab, meanwhile, is extending the sol-gel process
to create other kinds of entrapped nanoparticles (he’s already
succeeded with a different Prussian blue) and using heat, light
and chemical reactions to transform the particles into other substances of interest.
As for the pretty glass that changes color when exposed to
light–for now, that project sits on the shelf.
“My original idea didn’t amount to anything,” Stiegman
said. “We set out to do one thing and wound up doing something else.
“But the something else was even better than the thing we
were trying to do, so I’m not complaining. I believe in serendipity.” RR
31
32
Florida State University Researchin Review
The
Why
of It All
PHOTO: RAY STANYARD
by Robert Pool
By their
own hands,
more than
30,000
Americans
die every
year. Each
death
commonly
leaves a
wake of
grief and
empty
guesses.
WINTER 2004
It’s the question that haunts almost everybody who has lost a loved one to
suicide: Why?
Why leave this world and everything in it, knowing you’re never coming
back? Why say a permanent goodbye to everyone who loves you? Why
choose death over life?
Why?
The question hits Thomas Joiner on two levels—where he lives and
where he works. As FSU’s Bright-Burton Professor of Psychology, Joiner
has made the study of suicide his career. He also lost his own father to
suicide 14 years ago.
He reconciled his loss years ago, but his academic interest in mood disorders in grad school at the Univesity of Texas-Austin gradually brought him
face-to-face with the essential enigma of suicide—the ‘why’ question.
Soon, Joiner set his sights on understanding why anyone would kill himself or herself. The quest has produced some remarkable insights into the
question of whether it’s possible to predict which people are most at risk for
suicide. And, of course, why they are.
33
Frankly, Joiner has built a reputation for
himself as an expert in a subject that most
people would prefer not to think about.
His resumé is packed with honors and
awards, such as the Shneidman Award for
Excellence in Suicide Research, awarded by
the American Association for Suicidology
(yes, there is such a thing), and he is regularly asked by journalists and lawyers for
his opinions on suicide-related issues.
In late September, for instance, city officials in St. Petersburg, Florida, called on
Joiner when the city was trying to block
the rock group Hell on Earth from holding a concert in which a terminally ill person planned to kill himself on stage to publicize the need for physician-assisted suicide. Joiner suggested that the event might
lead to copycat suicides and, furthermore,
that the prearranged nature of the act
might push the terminally ill patient to go
through with the suicide despite lastminute reservations. Many people who
plan suicide back away at the last minute,
Joiner noted. The city won the case, and a
judge issued an injunction barring the
group from holding the concert. Later,
when the band announced it would hold
the concert and suicide at a secret location and broadcast them over the band’s
Web site, the judge barred that as well.
But the suicide work that Joiner believes will be his most important contribution is a theory that explains suicide far
better than anything proposed before. The
acid test for any theor y of suicide is
whether it can specify why some troubled
people kill themselves while others with
very similar problems never even try, and
Joiner believes he can do just this. If he is
correct, psychologists should be able to use
this new understanding to more accurately
pick out those at risk of suicide and intervene before they can hurt themselves.
It was 1990 when Joiner’s father killed
himself. At the time, Joiner was a graduate student in psychology in Texas.
“It was very tough,” he acknowledges,
adding, “but I don’t believe that it was
the main source of my interest in suicide.”
34
Instead, he says, the questions raised
by his father’s suicide dovetailed well with
the sorts of questions he had already been
asking himself in his psychology studies.
“I started off trying to explain social and
relationship problems in people with mood
disorders, and a lot of mood-disordered
people have suicidal ideas that are triggered
interpersonally, for instance, by rejection or
by loneliness. So it was a natural evolution
of interest to begin studying suicide.”
When Joiner turned his attention to the
question of why people kill themselves, he
found it to be a field that had been largely
overlooked by mainstream psychology.
“This field is underdeveloped, underfunded, younger and less mature than even
something like the study of mood disorders.” Amazingly enough, even though
more than 30,000 Americans kill themselves each year, relatively few psychologists have studied the topic directly, he said.
Joiner sees one reason for this neglect
being that psychologists have traditionally
seen suicide as part of a larger problem—
depression and other mood disorders. But
even if psychologists understood mood disorders—which they don’t, says Joiner—
Amazingly enough, even
though more than 30,000
Americans kill themselves
each year, relatively few
psychologists have studied
the topic directly.
that would not mean they understood suicide. Millions of people suffer from mood
disorders, and only a small percentage of
those kill themselves, Joiner said. Furthermore, some of those who commit suicide
are not suffering from any mood disorder.
A second reason that suicide has gotten relatively little attention from psychologists, Joiner suggests, is the stigma
and fear associated with it.
“Rational people get irrational when
they talk about things like this,” he says, and
even psychologists may find themselves unconsciously avoiding the subject of suicide.
Over the past decade or so, however,
this neglect has begun to fade. A growing
number of psychologists have begun turning their attention to the question of why
people kill themselves, bringing to bear a
whole new suite of cutting-edge tools, including techniques from molecular biology and genetics, sociology, anthropology,
even economics. They have brought new
insights and new energy to what had been
a very quiet, slow-moving area of psychology. Joiner is one of these young guns.
Traditionally, Joiner explains, there
have been two major schools of thought
on suicide. One follows the teachings of
Edwin Shneidman, a prominent
“thanatologist,” or suicide researcher, at
UCLA, and the man for whom the award
that Joiner received was named.
“Shneidman writes that suicide is the
result of intractable emotional pain,”
Joiner says.
This pain, which Shneidman calls
“psychache,” gets so bad that a person
prefers death over life. Shneidman further
claims that most people who commit suicide can be put into one of five groups
characterized by different needs, such as
the need to be loved, the need to belong,
and the need to strike first.
By contrast, another well-known suicide researcher—psychologist Aaron Beck
of the University of Pennsylvania—and his
followers have focused on hopelessness.
Known as the “grandfather of cognitive
therapy,” Beck, now an emeritus professor at Penn’s med school, believes that the
most important thing in explaining suicide is to understand the mental states that
lead people to simply give up.
Joiner grants that both these schools of
thought have a piece of the truth, but he
believes that they’re both missing something.
“Lots of people who are in incredible
pain or who are very hopeless never try
suicide,” he notes. “Also there are people
Florida State University Researchin Review
SUICIDE CLUSTERS
AT NEW YORK UNIVERSITY LAST FALL, the
semester began on a tragic note with the
death of three students within a four-week
period.
All three deaths were suspected of being
suicide.
If the students indeed died by their own
hand (all died from falls from atop campus
buildings), it wouldn’t surprise an FSU suicide expert. Last fall, psychologist Thomas
Joiner published findings on a study of the
phenomenon of suicide “clusters”—episodes
of multiple suicides by people whose close
friends or a mutually admired individual killed
themselves.
But the study, published in the Journal of
Adolescence, challenges the idea that imitation plays the biggest role in suicide clusters.
“Suicides do appear to cluster, leading to
the impression that they are ‘contagious’ or
that imitation may play a role,” says Joiner.
“But it may not happen that way. It could be
the result of vulnerable people who, having
sought each other out, are reacting to the
same general social environment.”
Joiner studied 138 pairs of college roommates and found that those who chose to live
together were more similar on a suicide index than roommates who were randomly assigned together by housing authorities.
Stress in the roommate relationship increased the similarity in roommates’ suicide
levels, he found.
“Vulnerable people are not randomly distributed in the population, but rather (they)
may be more likely to form relationships,” he
ters, which then may be activated by any number of severe stress factors that affect the
members of the cluster.”
Some people also may become simultaneously suicidal after a shared event that may
PHOTO: RAY STANYARD
said. “This process prearranges suicide clus-
THOMAS JOINER
have nothing to do with them personally. Researchers are no longer surprised when suicide increases after the death of celebrities,
for example. — (based on an article prepared
by The FSU Media Relations Office.)
WINTER 2004
35
Joiner said that a person who does not son might start, for instance, with a shalwho kill themselves without a lot of pain
or hopelessness, so it seems that there is a possess all three of these characteristics is low cut on an arm, then later a deeper cut,
lot more to it. I’ve taken a shot at what I unlikely to commit suicide, no matter how and still later perhaps a drug overdose,
depressed or hopeless he or she feels. On until the survival instinct can be ignored
think is a full explanation,” he says.
That shot begins with what Joiner be- the other hand, people who are in great enough to inflict fatal damage.
lieves is a fundamental fact about suicide that emotional pain, who feel hopeless about
But not everyone who commits suithe future, and who do have these three cide has to work up to it.
most people overlook or misunderstand.
“Most of the work on suicide that has characteristics are at a very high risk for
“About 40 percent of all deaths by suibeen done to date assumes a weakness of suicide.
cide are first attempts,” Joiner says. “These
The first characteristic is the most de- people must habituate by other means.”
will or of character on the part of the person committing suicide,” he says. “But ceptive, Joiner said, even though at first
Victims find various ways to do that.
suicide is actually about a kind of glance it seems obvious. After all, if some“Any set of behaviors where you get
one commits suicide then he or she must hurt a lot can lead people to habituate,”
strength.”
Self-preservation is a basic human in- certainly have had the ability to inflict se- Joiner says. This includes drug abuse and
stinct, Joiner points out. People try very rious self-harm. But that is seeing the is- “any lifestyle that regularly leads to serihard to avoid things that will harm them sue with the value of hindsight. It gets ous injury.”
or cause pain. The thought of, say, cutting much trickier to look at it prospectively.
A professional racecar driver, for inor asphyxiating oneself is very upsetting Which potentially suicidal people actually stance, goes to work knowing that on any
and difficult to contemplate for
given day he could end up critimost people. And that, Joiner
cally injured or even dead. Alsays, is precisely why relatively few
though the driver is not seekFLORIDA’S PAIN
people commit suicide out of all
ing to hurt himself, driving a car
In
2002,
more
than
2,300
Floridians
were
reported
as
dyof those who think about it.
into a turn at top speeds deing by suicide. Tragically, this number ranks Florida sec“There’s actually a large
mands that one ignore the selfond in the highest number of suicides reported nationnumber of people who express a
preservation instinct to a certain
ally, according to the Florida Suicide Prevention Coalition,
desire for death—about 85 perdegree.
a nonprofit statewide suicide prevention organization.
cent of mood-disordered people
That is not to say that
The problem is being countered by this and other
experience substantial suicidal
racecar drivers are more suicidal
state and private help groups. An excellent online reideas, for instance—yet very few
than anyone else. Many people,
source for information on coping and preventive strateof them will do anything to hurt
Joiner explains, develop the cagies, emergency help and counseling is maintained by
themselves and even fewer will do
pacity to hurt themselves withthe Florida Office of Drug Control at http://
anything that causes truly serious
out actually having any desire
w w w. my f l o r i d a . c o m / my f l o r i d a / g ov e r n m e n t /
damage.
to. But a racecar driver would
governorinitiatives/drugcontrol/suicide_prev.html.
“People who actually kill
be more able to act on suicidal
—Editor
themselves,” he says, “have (obthoughts than someone who
viously) managed to beat down
had never gotten inured to the
the survival instinct and the fear
idea of self-injury.
have the ability to kill themselves, and how
of pain and suffering.”
Another way to habituate oneself to
With this in mind, Joiner has proposed can anyone tell ahead of time?
pain and injury, Joiner believes, is to see
The answer, Joiner says, is that some those things in other people. Physicians,
that people who kill themselves are marked
by three characteristics that distinguish people over time develop the ability to sup- for example, regularly see people with serithem from people who might wish to be press their survival instinct—to hurt them- ous injuries and who are in great pain, and
selves- and they do it in certain characteris- this, Joiner says, makes them more capable
dead but never actually commit suicide:
• The ability to hurt themselves—and, in tic ways. In essence, they must habituate of injuring themselves. This explains, Joiner
particular, to hurt themselves enough and themselves to pain and to the idea of injury. claims, why physicians have a higher suiSome do it via failed suicide attempts. cide rate than the general population. Male
in such a way that it is fatal;
• A sense that one is a burden on one’s A large number of people who kill them- physicians have suicide rates that are 1.5 to
selves have had previous suicide attempts 3 times as high as men in general, and
loved ones, and;
• A lack of any sense of belonging to a that didn’t work, and typically the attempts women physicians kill themselves 3 to 5
group or a relationship that has some value. build in severity with each new try. A per- times as often as women in general. The
36
Florida State University Researchin Review
BREAST IMPLANTS & SUICIDE
THOMAS JOINER HAS STUDIED SUICIDE from a wide variety of angles, but perhaps
none is as curious as his look at the connection between suicide and breast implants.
Over the past several years, at least three groups of researchers have reported
studies that found women who received breast implants to be more likely to commit
suicide—up to about three times as likely as women in the general population. One
suggested explanation was that women who were desperately unhappy with their body
image would get the implants and then, when they found that the implants didn’t
make them feel better about themselves, decide there was nothing further that might
make life worth living.
After a careful study of the data from these studies however, Joiner came to a
different conclusion. He found that not only were the women who received implants
not at greater risk, but they were actually somewhat less likely to commit suicide
than might be expected by other factors. In other words, apparently the implants were
somehow partially protecting them from suicide.
What the other researchers had missed, Joiner explains, is that women who get
breast implants are different, statistically speaking, from average women. They tend
to be white and in the 25-to-44-year-old age group, for instance, and they are more
likely to be divorced and to smoke than are women in the general population. Furthermore, other studies of suicide have found that all these factors make women more
likely to commit suicide than women in general.
“It turns out that, based on currently available data,” Joiner says, “the expected
rate of suicide in breast augmentation patients should exceed the rate of women in
the general population by four-fold, but the actual suicide rate among these patients
is lower than expected. Therefore, the possibility arises that breast augmentation actually confers protection from suicide, presumably by increasing self-esteem and bodyimage satisfaction.”
Joiner is quick to say that his findings are hardly an endorsement for implants
which some womens’ groups condemn as being dangerous to womens’ health in general. On that issue, he defers to medical specialists, he said. “I’m confident only in
that breast implants don’t cause suicide, as a cursory look at the evidence may suggest,” he said.
This is certainly not the last word on the subject, but for now Joiner’s analysis
indicates that women who are not happy with their breast size can do something
about it without worrying that the decision could be a real killer. —R.P.
WINTER 2004
effect is greater for women, Joiner suspects,
because women in the general population
are less likely than men in the general population to be in jobs or to have hobbies that
habituate them to pain and injury.
Joiner’s theory predicts a number of
facts about suicide, such as the higher suicide rate among physicians, but it was designed to explain these details. The true
test will be whether the theory predicts
things about suicide that doctors and researchers had not already noticed, and that
is what Joiner is testing now.
The theory predicts, for instance, that
people who feel themselves to be a burden on their family would be more serious
about committing suicide. They would
employ more lethal means in their attempts, and they would be more likely to
be fatal. To test this, Joiner and FSU colleagues looked at 40 suicide notes, half
written by people who did indeed kill
themselves and half written by those who
attempted suicide but failed.
Those whose notes indicated a strong
sense of “my loved ones will be better off
when I’m gone” were indeed significantly
more likely to succeed in their attempts
and also more likely to choose a more lethal approach—gunshot and hanging, for
instance, versus cuts or a drug overdose.
On the other hand, Joiner found no relationship between the hopelessness a person expressed in the suicide letter and the
lethality of the suicide attempt. In short,
the sense of being a burden appears to have
been a more important factor in the suicide than a feeling of hopelessness.
A great deal of work remains to be done
to test Joiner’s theory and to extend and
refine it, but if it holds up as Joiner believes it will, it offers great hope to those
in the fight against suicide.
“Tomorrow there are eighty families in
the United States alone who will lose someone to suicide,” Joiner says.
He dreams of helping bring that number down so that fewer of us will be left in
the pain of wondering why a loved one
chose death over life. RR
37
THE
BEST
OF
A M E R I C A’ S
MUSIC
HIGH-ART
RUMBLES,
HISSES,
TRILLS AND CLANKS IN TUNE WITH THE
NATION’S UNIQUE
LANDMARKS.
SOUND
of P L A C
B Y
38
A N D Y
L I N D S T R O M
Florida State University Researchin Review
PHOTO: RAY STANYARD
DENISE VON GLAHN
S
E
WINTER 2004
THE THUNDERING ROAR OF NIAGARA FALLS AS IT CASCADES, FOAM-FLECKED AND FRIGHTENING, INTO
SHARDS OF MIST…
THE HIGH-RIDING SUN PAINTING A KALEIDOSCOPE OF
EARTH TONES ON THE CRAGGY PINNACLES OF
ARIZONA’S MONUMENTAL GRAND CANYON…
A STACCATO OF STREET NOISE REVERBERATING
THROUGH THE GLASS-AND-STEEL MAW OF UPTOWN
MANHATTAN…
From the flinty hills of Kentucky to the funky streets of Harlem, America’s
distinctive places have inspired generations of writers and painters in their efforts to capture our ever-changing national character.
Now comes an FSU music historian to describe how this country’s high-art
composers found a similar muse of place to inspire many of their best known works.
Denise Von Glahn, an assistant professor of music history in the School of
Music, says in her recent book (The Sounds of Place: Music and the American
39
▲
Cultural Landscape. Northeastern University Press, 2003) that key composers
through the last two centuries responded
to inspiring natural and man-made places
in what she calls their “place pieces.”
Whether they’re penning tone poems
to celebrate the pristine grandeur of a national landmark or putting to music a
modern city’s singular sounds, the composers Von Glahn chose to include in her
study created works that say as much
about our nation’s shared values as it does
the music itself.
“This (book) is for people interested
in American culture, in American music history, in what’s being called cultural geography,” Von Glahn said in a recent interview.
Negotiating its 350 pages—including
footnotes, bibliography and musical examples—calls for a certain amount of familiarity in those fields, she concedes. “But
I was hoping that the book could be appreciated by people without a specialist’s
background, too.”
THE POWER OF PLACE—
how one’s environment
shapes creativity in
American musical composition—is the theme of FSU
music historian Denise Von
Glahn’s new book, The
Sounds of Place (Northeastern University Press, 2003).
To make her point about place, Von
Glahn enlists works by 14 American composers ranging from the early 19th-century symphonist Anthony Philip Heinrich
(“the Beethoven of America,” as one music critic called him) to the modernist
Edgard Varese, as well as contemporary
composers Steve Reich and FSU’s own
Ellen Taaffe Zwilich.
Ferde Grofe’s Grand Canyon Suite has
become an American icon in its own right,
as have Aaron Copland’s ballets and Duke
Ellington’s jazz classics. Others such as
William Henry Fry, George Frederick
Bristow, Roy Harris, William Grant Still,
Robert Starer and Dana Paul Perna, while
perhaps not as familiar to the general public, contributed their musical postcards of
America as a special and distinctive place
inevitably morphing from an Eden-like
frontier of seemingly endless natural
beauty to a world-class urbanized nation.
“I wanted to show the changing sense
of what distinguishes America, both to the
CONNECTICUT’S
H O U S AT O N I C V A L L E Y
CHARLES IVES
(1874-1954)
40
Florida State University Researchin Review
Putting America in its Place
FSU music historian Denise Von
Zwilich began her career as a
tunes familiar to a large major-
the nation’s most treasured
Glahn’s new book captures the
violinist and trumpeter. After
ity of his contemporary audi-
myths. In a composing career
spirit of 14 key American com-
playing violin under Leopold
ence–American folk and popular
that spanned a full half-century,
posers who were inspired by
Stokowski in the American Sym-
tunes, revival hymns, parlor
he wrote in almost every genre
iconic places. Here are some ex-
phony Orchestra, she turned to
songs, jazz, military marches–he
and style.
amples:
composition full-time. In 1983,
created a complex web of musi-
she became the first woman to
cal and programmatic relation-
Steve Reich, 1936—. Originally
Duke Ellington (Edward Kenne-
win the Pulitzer Prize for com-
ships that supported the larger
trained as a percussionist,
dy), 1899-1974. Composer, pia-
position with her Symphony No.
idea he was seeking to commu-
Reich has studied philosophy,
nist, bandleader and seminal fig-
1. She has since been the recipi-
nicate. For years portrayed as an
composition, poetry and both
ure in the American jazz scene.
ent of almost every award avail-
idiosyncratic iconoclast, Ives
Balinese and African music.
Ellington came into the public
able to musicians. In 1999, the
more recently is hailed for his
Since his first recorded speech
spotlight in the 1920s with his
same year Zwilich composed
advanced and innovative works.
piece, It’s Gonna Rain, and
work at various Harlem clubs, es-
Symphony No. 4 (“The Gar-
His Symphony No. 3 won the
through his “phase” and coun-
pecially the Kentucky Club
dens”), Musical America named
Pulitzer Prize in 1947.
terpoint pieces, Reich has tried
(1923-27) and Cotton Club (1927-
her composer of the year. In
32). Early on, he composed and
2000, FSU named her a Francis
Aaron Copland , 1900-1990.
of American speech that he first
arranged pieces to suit the tal-
Eppes Professor.
Brooklyn-born Copland has
heard in the poetry of William
been called the dean of Ameri-
Carlos Williams, along with the
ents of particular band members,
to capture the melodic qualities
then began lengthening his
Charles Ives, 1874-1954. Widely
can composers, in part because
small rhythmic patterns that he
works until by the 1940s they
considered the first and most
of his ubiquitous presence in so
uses to set in motion complex
were comfortably suited for the
important indigenous American
many aspects of 20th-century
processes of musical unfolding.
concert hall. Along with arranger
composer, Ives’ reputation rests
music making, but also because
A leading spokesperson for the
and composer Billy Strayhorn,
on a body of work that includes
of his nurturing support of other
current cultural scene, Reich
he recorded hundreds of pieces
symphonies, string quartets, or-
American composers. After early
has produced a large and var-
that have become staples in the
chestral sets, chamber and cho-
training in New York and France,
ied body of works that resists
jazz repertoire.
ral works, as well as a body of
Copland set out to create an
categorization. In the dawn of
solo songs that compares favor-
American musical culture. Best
the 21st century, he continues to
Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, 1939—. Born
ably with the leading 19th-cen-
remembered for his ballets Billy
explore ways that music can
in Miami and educated at Florida
tury European art-song compos-
the Kid, Appalachian Spring and
speak with pieces that challenge
State University and Juilliard,
ers. Building his pieces around
Rodeo, he set to music some of
our sense of what music is.
world and to itself,” Von Glahn said of
her choices. “And, for me, it all started
with Charles Ives.”
Variously described as a noisemaker, a
musical iconoclast, a composer marching
to his own beat, most recently critics have
called Ives “the father of modern American music.” Ives converted a pastiche of
familiar American tunes into tradition-
WINTER 2004
shattering music that championed both his
nation and its culture, Von Glahn said.
“He is a national figure who wears his
‘Made in the U.S.A.’ label proudly.”
Bridging the late 19th-century chasm
between Victorian righteousness and
modern relativism, Ives stood firmly in
both camps as a successful insurance executive by day while composing what one
reviewer called “exceptionally inventive”
place pieces and other musical works in
his after hours.
Von Glahn grew up in New York City,
but her family spent several of her early
childhood years vacationing in the area
of Connecticut where Ives had lived.
While researching her doctoral dissertation on Ives’ work, she decided to visit
41
his hometown of Danbury, Conn., where
she was overcome by the familiarity she
felt driving through the countryside.
“Without any recollection of having
been here before, I thought, my God, this
is one of those spooky moments when you
think you’ve been somewhere before when
you really haven’t but it’s all familiar to
you, ” she said. “I recognized a particular
white frame house that I passed, and a rock
wall that hugged the road. I knew that view
of the Housatonic River. It was comforting, exhilarating and unnerving.”
Several weeks later, Von Glahn recounted what she called “the strange experience” to her father, who told her it
wasn’t strange at all.
“He said I had been there during the
summers when I was a child,” she recalled. “I stayed in a boarding house that
was owned by a relative, and I swam in
that very river. And I thought, that place
had unknowingly imprinted itself on my
very young child’s memory. Here was Ives
writing about these places in New England, and he was a New Englander and
had lived there all his life. How much
more important they must have been to
him than they were to me.”
At the time, Von Glahn’s focus was
on what she saw as Ives’ undeserved reputation as an isolated, unique figure in our
national culture. Upon further reflection,
she realized that Ives wasn’t really alone.
In fact, his music fit into a larger framework of American high-art music and culture as they grew from their early dependency on European models to something
more distinctly American, and from an
obsession with natural icons to reaching
for the rhythms and sites and sounds of
modern city life. As the nation changed,
she found, American artists including composers responded accordingly.
Limiting her study to what she called
“instrumental music of the high-art tradition,” Von Glahn included only works by
composers who exhibited a strong invest-
ELLEN ZWILLICH
(1939-)
T H E M I C H I G A N S TAT E
UNIVERSITY BEAL
GARDENS
42
Florida State University Researchin Review
NEW YORK CITY
AARON COPELAND
( 1 9 0 0 - 1 9 9 0 )
ment in specific environments that inspired
them. Several chose Niagara Falls, for instance. But their approach varied greatly depending on the time when they were writing and the composer’s particular agenda.
As the first important American icon,
the falls were a favorite subject for 19thcentury Hudson River School painters eager to broadcast what was unique about
this country.
“These idyllic scenes where it looked
like the Garden of Eden were unlike anything people knew of anywhere else,” Von
Glahn said. “It also dawned on me that at
the same time these paintings were being
created there was an early 19th-century
composer, Anthony Philip Heinrich, who
had written a piece entitled The War of
the Elements and the Thundering of
Niagara. It struck me that it wasn’t just
the visual artists who were commandeering the important natural icons. Here was
a composer doing the same thing.”
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Digging deeper, she found two other
symphonies written within 50 years—one
by William Frye and another by George
Bristow—that also had Niagara in the title.
In his work written at the end of the century, Bristow suggested religious connotations that others had imposed upon the
falls earlier, Von Glahn said.
“This is not whimsy, not just caprice.
They were using that icon for very important, very specific reasons. It changed for
each one of these composers, but in every
case they felt that by using Niagara in the
title they could suggest something unique
about the country.”
By 1960, Von Glahn said, the image
of the falls had changed radically. In his
Niagara Falls Suite, Ferde Grofé no
longer saw the falls as sacred or sublime.
Instead, for him this famous American
landmark had become a giant outdoor
generator of electricity for an industrialized nation’s insatiable need for power.
“Now it’s no longer the icon of
America, an object so fearsome and enormous that people couldn’t get their minds
around it,” she said. “It’s Niagara the hydroelectric power plant. And you get that
in Grofe’s music.”
In a similar vein, Von Glahn sketches
out a transition in the identity of place
among succeeding generations of American composers from celebrations of
woods, waterfalls and wilderness to urban
settings and their human inhabitants. Particularly since Charles Ives–whose piece
From Hanover Square North, at the End
of a Tragic Day, the Voice of the People
Again Arose is based on the dismayed yet
religiously comforted reactions of New
York City “L” commuters after hearing of
the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915—
people have become essential players in the
cultural landscape.
Duke Ellington’s Harlem Air Shaft is
inspired by the sounds and smells of a big-
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city apartment complex. Aaron Copland’s
Quiet City uses the haunting notes of English horns, trumpets and strings to underscore the isolation and personal longing that often accompany urban living.
Steve Reich carries the theme the farthest in City Life and New York Counterpoint, snapshots of millennial America
built around the speech rhythms and cadences of urban residents. Reich’s music
was influenced by everything from Bach,
Stravinsky and Debussy to Balinese
gamelan, African drumming and jazz, but
it is wholly American.
Zwilich’s place piece–Symphony No. 4
(The Gardens)—written in 1999 to honor
Michigan State University’s botanical gardens—fits right in with Reich’s work as
undeniably American, if unconsciously so,
Von Glahn said. Inspired by the gardens’
exhibit of threatened and endangered plant
species, it also reflects how we as a people
have come to understand the need to pre-
serve and protect our natural places rather
than simply stand in awe or exploit them.
And how does one judge these American composers of place? Is there any kind
of musical yardstick that applies to their
work? Do some deserve our ear more than
others?
“Judgments? I’m not interested necessarily in the abstract quality of a work
except that I wouldn’t have written about
schlock. The music would not have been
complex and rich enough to be rewarding.”
Von Glahn does admit to what she
called “my natural inclination toward 20th
century music and art.” Even as a teenager working in a library, she was drawn
to volumes devoted to modern art. She
pored over books filled with the paintings
of Wassily Kandinsky, Joan Miro and Jackson Pollack. “Where things were most
ambiguous and open to interpretation,”
she said. “And somehow, it spoke to me.
I loved it.”
Just as she loved at first hearing the
work of Charles Ives.
His music vibrates with meaning, she
said, her eyes widening at the memory. “It
spoke to me. It turns out it doesn’t necessarily speak to a lot of people instinctively.”
Even so, Von Glahn notes that she has
waiting lists for her classes in 20th-century music. And more thesis and dissertation students interested in 20th-century
topics than she can handle.
“I think it’s a matter of many people
having never heard this music,” she said.
“ They don’t know what to do with it.
Just listen without judgment.”
But fire engines, sirens in a symphony?
Dance-hall tunes? Sleigh bells, a lion’s roar?
None is particularly weird, she observed.
“The whole world of sounds is out there.
We hear those sounds, and we live among
them. They are all part of our environment,
and they locate us. They give us a sense of
place. And that, to me, is fascinating.”RR
G R A N D
F E R D E
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C A N Y O N
G R O F E (1892-1972)
Florida State University Researchin Review
Portrait
PHOTO: RAY STANYARD
SPOTLIGHT ON FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY FACULTY
p
A S S I S TA N T P R O F E S S O R O F N E U R O S C I E N C E D E B R A A N N FA D O O L
Plato’s allegory of the cave observed that humans experience
the world through their external senses. And neuroscientist Debra
Fadool thinks a close reexamination of the sense of smell will
reveal more effective ways to fight diseases.␣ ␣
Fadool, an assistant professor of biology and neuroscience,
studies how aromas are processed into the electrical signals that
make up the language of the brain. She manipulates molecules
from the olfactory bulb, the region of the brain responsible for
generating the sense of smell. Fadool studies how these molecules alter electrical signaling with the hope of understanding
how nerve cells communicate. That information could provide
clues to improper electrical signaling during the onset of certain
diseases, she says.
By directly stimulating a cell with electricity, Fadool is able
to focus on changes in what are called ion channels—tiny tunnels
embedded in the walls of cell membranes.␣ These structures regulate the amounts of charged particles of sodium, chlorine, calcium
or potassium that get passed into and out of cells.␣ Changes in these
channels’ structure can alter brain function, and scientists such as
Fadool suspect that the mechanisms that drive the behavior of ion
channels may offer clues to the origins of such diseases as cancer
and diabetes.
Fadool’s experiments are short and require her to quickly adapt
when the unexpected occurs.␣ ␣
“It’s like working with a live recording of the electrical pattern
that flows throughout the brain,” she said. “You have to think on
your feet because once you attach an electrode to a cell it lives for
30 minutes, at most.” RR
DEBRA ANN FADOOL, assistant professor in the Program in Neuroscience, was recently honored with the first Merck/WIN
Young Investigator Award from the Society for Neuroscience. A Kentucky native, Fadool holds a doctorate from the
University of Florida’s Whitney Laboratory.
WINTER 2004
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