Post Illa Verba: https://postillaverba.wordpress.com/

My final project attempts to recontextualize marginalia by transposing them (via Photoshop) onto other, unrelated texts. Part I juxtaposes commentary on William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience with a mathematical treatise on analytical methods. Part III juxtaposes the notes from a student’s copy of Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room with pages from Woolf’s collected letters, specifically the letters written immediately prior to her suicide. (Part II, when it is completed, is going to be a juxtaposition of a graduate student’s — not my — notes on a critical essay transposed onto a piece of poetry.)

I’m concerned here with the conditions of display and with the issue of context: should I tell the stories? Should I cite the source text? Part III stands better alone; Part I doesn’t.

Some brief larger thoughts this is intended to raise:
1. Do marginalia have to be authentic to carry some sort of affective value? The Photoshopping is sometimes, unfortunately, still clear — how does this affect the way it is noticed?
2. Marginalia as “co-reading”: how aware are we of the effects of marginalia/commentary on our reading of a text? Does this change if it is our own vs. others’? Does the quality of the marginalia change that? Does having our attention drawn to it change that?
3. Marginalia as anything other than individual, temporary, & intentional — i.e. the scholar’s research into their subject’s personal library, the annoyance at other people’s notes in a used/course book — are a function of the current market for books: cheap, often resold/circulated, paper texts.

I think what interests me about That This is the push between providing context — almost a surfeit of context — around the central moment in the tripartite book division, the very place where it seems like the entire point is to refuse meaning, to refuse conventional language: “The Disappearance Approach” (the first section) not only contextualizes but outright names “Frolic Architecture” as the thing she is composing with scotch tape and high-tech copiers.

The enumeration of technological detail to the digital photography studio at the Beinecke Library reaches an almost fetishistic level: “each light is packed with 900 watts of ceramic discharge lamps […] doubly fan-cooled, with one chamber for the hot (lamp) side and one fan for the electronic side […] one or two stuffed oblong cloth containers, known in the trade as snakes” (30) In some ways, this is just the same attention to detail that a writer might bring to all of their observations of the world, or the artisan’s pride in their craft – Anne Carson discussed the composition of Nox in similar craftmanlike detail during interviews about the book, though I think it’s telling it was in interviews rather than the text itself (and I promise I will only mention Nox about a dozen more times or so before the class ends). But I think it’s particularly relevant that Howe chooses to explain her collage/text-shaping before we are presented with it: it is a text that reflects on its own (unusual) principles and methods of composition.

I think it’s telling, too, that on either side this technological explanation is bracketed by quotes from the Hannah Edwards diaries: one numbered with archival specificity (though the page break makes an interesting cut away from that) as GEN MSS 151, Box 24, and so on, and the next quoted with a “…&” to begin the quote (from a different letter) and only cited afterwards as Edwards’ words. These are presented as fragmented; they are presented without as much context as we normally expect, even after we’ve grown used to the paragraph-level snippets of prose Howe is presenting us, and even after we’ve been contextualized by the information about the Edwards family on pg. 20 (and with the occasional reference to Jonathan Edwards throughout; it occurs to me only now that Howe did not pick his letters or materials but a female writer, much of “all that remains of this 18^th-century family’s impressive tradition of female learning” (20) – is this an implicit, if vague, critique of the archive she takes as her source?)

But the fragments we get of Edwards’ diary during “The Disappearance Approach” are still legible fragments; we can still read them, for the most part, and are used to situating coherent quotes of that length within a context. In that way it almost feels like they’re a rehearsal or shadow of the type of distortion and disruption that will occur during the second (and to some extent third) section(s), where the text will often become distorted beyond recognition. I’m interested in that movement; if within modernist and contemporary poetry the move toward incompletion, fragmentation, and refusal of concrete meaning is often an anti-elegiac or anti-consolatory tactic, then what of That This? It seems so carefully to situate and scaffold itself in the first section before the intense and bold gestures of the second section, and it seems deeply interested in the functions of archival in a way that “found” poetry/appropriation art often times is not (certainly, in a way that is less present in Nox.)

This is a bit of a close reading and doesn’t nearly begin to cover all of the rest of what’s going on in That This – all of the more explicit musings on memory, reproduction, echoes and loss; not to mention the playing with color and visual imagery throughout (the black and white conditions and machines of reproduction, the snow or absence of snow, the almost-too-perfect motif of the “paperwhite” flowers blossoming) – but I think it’s worth paying attention to the exact conditions of a text’s divergence from the narrative norm.

I took a Librivox recording of Virginia Woolf’s “The Mark on the Wall,” which is a very introspective stream-of-consciousness narrative of sorts (which at least one of you have had to read recently with me in ENGL 644) and started playing around with it to try to make a found poem out of it. Inspired by the fact that the original story has amazing dazzling lines amidst the only thing I’ve ever read by Woolf that bored me (possibly in part because it was so inward-facing and wandering) and also by rereading her letter to Vita Sackville-West, it starts, or perhaps the title is, In Such Queer Places. There’s a place or two I didn’t get the overlap quite right — I seem to have accidentally deleted one of the clips around :17, and there’s a clipped half-syllable or two in places where I probably should have faded and paused. I also couldn’t quite get the automatic leveling to work out, although it sounds better the worse your headphones are, I think.

I first wanted to do this with a remix of the Gawain-poet’s Pearl, but I couldn’t quite decide what pronouns to use to make a love poem out of a 21st-c. male volunteer’s reading of a 19th-c. unmarried female professor’s translation of a 14th-c. male poet. (And the pronouns mattered because, well, maybe it was originally going to be a queer elegy entirely to yank the posthumous chain of my favorite medieval sometimes-homophobic poet.)

There are one or two things which stood out to me in listening to these very different approaches to sound art, ways to characterize the relationship between the source text and its repurposing. One is the relationship or attitude towards the appropriated text itself — clearly the Reagan piece seems to be making a stronger gesture towards a political statement than Son of Strelka, Son of God’s use of Obama’s voice; even though I looked around and saw that the artist did intend for it to be a commentary on Obama’s elevated style of rhetoric and around the near-Messianic resonance his campaign and early presidency gained for his followers. I wouldn’t have necessarily guessed that, though; it could have been merely using Obama for the aural qualities of his voice or for its recognizability. Even the titles point out this type of difference, it seems.

I wanted to play around with Motif #1, which is apparently the “most often-painted building in America,” or at least often claimed to be. I probably would have given up on this in a larger project after having trouble finding a public domain / CC-licensed photograph of it, but I settled for one a bit too small for my liking (600×800.)

The reason this building is painted so much is due — in addition to its location, good lighting, and the fact that it’s in Rockport which has often boasted artist’s colonies — to the idea that it’s an almost archetypal New England fishing shack, down to the color. This attempt to evoke the past through a sort of classical aesthetics made me want to reread Prelinger, especially his note about how “remixing is estrangement […] and yet the raw material remains familiar and recognizable. It’s at once a subversive and reassuring process.” My sort of generic idea was just to recolor or decolorize the shed (which was relatively easy, though the reflection not so much), but I wanted to play with Photoshop a little more and also defamiliarize the Motif a little more severely, so I’ll show a few more in addition to that.

We could think of this one in relation to Barron’s discussion of the idea of colorizing WW2 film. Colored film — if “authentic” — feels closer to our lived experience, while artificially coloring that film would be a betrayal of the material’s documentary/evidentiary authority, even though color film from the era exists and it would only bring us closer to representing what life was actually like, since most of us experience reality in color. If Motif No. 1 is famous, and famously red, what does stripping that color do? Presenting a black-and-white image of this would be boring,  but does the contrast here have an effect? I’m not sure. I do find it aesthetically pleasing.

Similar playing with the aesthetic “striking red building” trope, although I couldn’t fix the water/reflection in this one. I almost want the effect here to be experiencing this photo as a digital artifact — the building itself was so clearly wiped out (painted over?) and replaced with an unnatural, intuitively recognizable-as-digital cherry red, or maybe I should say #FF0000. Here the digital format of the experience is a disruption of expectations.

I played around more with basic Photoshopping here — including replacing the building with an image  of the Photoshop “transparency layer” gray-and-white checkboxes, which got me thinking about signaling and framing a piece of material vs. the actual material itself (in this case, the checkboxes signaling transparency more effectively, at least in our current digital era, than actually leaving it transparent could have been.) The image I’d planned to present had thin strips of each of these “effects,” almost a collage of each of those layers, and the overall result was jarring; it might have veered too much into sheer glitch aesthetic, though, and more importantly that’s the only image that seems to have been messed up somehow when I saved (I could pull another copy from the original .psd, because you have to always always always save your .psd file, but I think I like the ones I’m presenting here more.)

I then had the idea of completely reworking the “Motif”: replacing it (since erasing it would be beyond my Photoshop skills entirely) with another building, preferably one that signaled modernity in the way that this signals “classic New England.” So I searched for a few entirely unscientifically conducted surveys on what the most-photographed building in the U.S. was, and the answer seemed to be, of course, the Guggenheim in NYC:

Ceci n’est pas une motif. (I could have gone with something iconic, the Eiffel Tower or the Sydney Opera House, something very modern and very recognizable, but I wanted something American; I was considering that one building on the MIT campus, please mentally insert whichever weird MIT building pops into your head first, but maybe that would have been too parochial; this was a good one for the shape of the building and provides exactly the visual discongruity I wanted, although there’s the obvious concern about deciding that an art museum’s exterior is the “most photographed” building in the U.S. based on geotagging.)

Some fun facts to leave you thinking about authenticity, replicating a “real” material object through visual imagery (of whatever medium), and the artifice sometimes involved with that: this historical building was destroyed entirely in the Blizzard of ’78 and they rebuilt it. My next step working along these lines would be to try to find a shot of it (the original or the rebuilt one) from a similar vantage point to the photos of its destruction and try to splice those together.

They also currently use a red paint that looks weathered even when first applied.

Food Porn from MJC on Vimeo.

I was having trouble doing anything productive with the hyper-short-form, so I decided to play around with conjoining two different types of (vintage) video instead: a ~1965 warning film on the dangers of pornography entitled Perversion for Profit, and several ads and educational documentaries on the food industry, including primarily the Miracles of Agriculture film produced by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Of course, I had to call it “food porn.”

Using the audio decrying the moral filth, degeneracy, and destructive effects of erotic literature over shots of mass-produced agriculture and agricommerce is at heart “a film with a punch line, a joke on the audience who is always looking at and trying to understand the wrong image.” (Barron 132) If “the joke may be the form best suited toward exploring the archive” because every use of archival materials is in some way a misuse, this is the unjustifiable reinterpretation of the archival material par excellence: it literally just seeks to exploit the similar vintage effects (film coloration, etc.) of 1960s-era film to mashup two different topics for surreal comic effect.

Sure, here I could make a sweeping claim about how the juxtaposition of food and pornography examines the way we “consume” the female form (or the sexual encounter/description) in general the way we consume food, and how the former is rightly or wrongly pathologized in our culture. I could also say something about wanting to mix two forms of propaganda with negative and positive aspects respectively (pornography is destroying our nation vs. the modern supermarket is the marvel of our times.) The production also theoretically pokes fun at the moral panic of the anti-pornography movement, troubles our relationship to food by putting it within an eery audiovisual disjunct AND highlighting the “manufacturing” of the modern food industry, and directly juxtaposes the 60s-era fear of communism with images of well-known capitalist food advertisers as a version of the perceived communist “masters of deceit.”

And all of those things were on my mind in part (mostly during my choices for the last few seconds of the mashup), but: really it’s just meant to be a joke. I considered making it a 30-second film with the 27-second dramatic leadup from the pornography narrator, followed by three to five seconds of the cherries in the industrial bagger (possibly with cheery music; there was some in the film, but it faded too quickly to a voiceover.) The long lead-up followed by the sudden cut seems to be a very digital-age form of video mashup humor — especially if the content after the cut is itself ridiculously short in comparison or otherwise surreal/funny.

It’s possible I was overly influenced by Trash Night Video, though I don’t think I sunk-slash-ascended to that level of Dadaist supercut humor. I’m also looking at it and cringing at some of the sloppy editing, now, which sort of kills the joke on an experiential level, but this is one of the drawbacks of working with the Healey media lab software.

The Voyagers in particular, of the appropriation footage films we’ve watched, collapses and simultaneously heightens the difference between “then” and “now.”

That might be a controversial statement. Obviously, the newness of audiovisual material in our cultural history means that – for now — most of the found or archival footage is going to be from within a single generation, featuring scenes which also exist in living cultural memory; there are probably people still alive from some portions of No More Road Trips? albeit probably rarer from the very earliest clips, and similarly there are still those alive from the era portrayed in The Maelstrom (although less than there were twenty years ago during that film’s creation.) And in fact the latter is one of the examples Barron uses for discussing the ironic distance that archival footage produces: the footage is “‘too close to home’ in both a literal and figurative sense […] we share in the same context of modernity.” (40)

But what to do then when the footage is even closer to home? One of the things that catches me about The Voyagers, especially in light of “the experience of the archive effect – as it occurs through the perception of temporal and/or intentional disparity” (29) is its concern with the temporal, and with the temporary: with the almost absurd temporality the audience is required to wrap their heads around, both the brevity of time and, paradoxically, its vastness.

Immediately after telling Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan’s love story from the launch in 1977, filmmaker Penny Lane inserts herself into the narrative in 1996: “I remember when Carl Sagan died. I was in high school. I guess you were in college.” Most of the film later, she muses on the visionary idealism of the Golden Record: “I wish I had lived in that time. It’s hard to imagine the Golden Record being made now.” This is the bizarre crux of the temporal issues of this film: the tension – the distance – between the portion of the story Penny personally remembers and uses as a way to daydream about her partner, and the portion that seems to her impossibly distant, is only a matter of only decades.

And that vast difference is marked perhaps by Carl Sagan’s particular lifetime (“I wish Carl Sagan were here…”), or maybe instead by the Challenger explosion that seems to serve as a “major temporal break” (Baron 40) at least as presented by the film: the dead silence around the sixth minute, the pause to play the familiar footage, the clip which shows a NASA(?) staffer stare in shocked silence before demanding that the cameras be cut. (We don’t see – can’t see — whether they are; within the context of the documentary, the film keeps moving.) Regardless, the “history” of the film seems compactly close to its personal memory and the present moment.

The distance between 1977 and 1996 (or even 1977 and 1986) seems immense here: one is a distant past and the other is a remembered experience. This is almost a hyper-temporal experience – what are its effects? One is to emphasize the brevity of life, the rapidity of change; the human lifespan being so short especially in comparison to the vastness of the universe, to the “thousand billion years” of cosmic time, which is just as much a timeline at play in this documentary.

But The Voyagers is a love story, too, and Carl and Ann have an answer to that: the sense of luckiness they had in an atheistic universe, “that fate could be so kind; that we could find one another in the vastness of space, the immensity of time.” By paying such loving attention to the temporal details of the space movement over a few decades of the 20th century, and situating it within the vast cosmic scales of time (the Voyager probes which are still traveling and their Golden Records which could stay intact for millions of years), the vastness of time is emphasized in counterpoint with the absolute importance, nevertheless, of the particular human moment. This is the heart, we seem to think by the movie’s end, of any love story: that it is impossible to know what will happen, but “why not try? Why not reach for something amazing?”

And if this reads as too optimistic, well, I’ll leave with Lane’s thoughts on the Golden Record: “Some people have criticized this, but I’m glad they did it that way. That’s what it’s like to look at the thing you love most. That’s why it’s a valentine.”

The Archive Of Lost Context attempts to expose the invisible — often deliberately obscured — organizational logic behind the construction and organization of archives by applying their logic to a private collection of photographs.

These are photographs selected from a family’s unorganized personal collection because of the unknown information about the photographs: the subject or time of the photo, the person responsible for taking it, or the motivations for its preservation. Because the selected photos range from the 1960s to the late 1990s, they play with the short-term nature of human memory: photos from as late as 1994 are presented without the requisite information to understand their context.

The interest in this collection is in the “cards” for each image (in this format, the posts associated with each image): their labeling is erratic because of the different types of information available for each object. The cards are also speculative: they draw attention to the subjectivity involved in their own creation. In interrogating the material as thoroughly as they summarize it, these labels no longer privilege the “known” information over the unknown, and the coexistence of different types of information draws viewers to think about the nature of knowledge.

The “call numbers” in the archive were determined by a personal logic. This logic will be completely opaque to other viewers/researchers (although I will say here that factors included the suspected photographer, the subject type of the poem, its location relative to other selected items, and my relative certainty about each of the previous factors.) This in some respects highlights the initially difficult internal logic of an individual archive — with its own private oddities, systems, and rules — but ultimately reclaims this “public” presentation of material as a personal collection.

The archive’s header quotes Virgil’s Aeneid: it will please us someday, perhaps, to remember even this. If an archivist’s goal in the digital age tends towards totality — or at least a broad swath — of preservation, the realm of personal memory is still one organized by whim, nostalgia, and inevitably loss. We preserve objects from our family history despite our shrinking contexts for the items; the sense of gradual loss surrounding them is part, ironically, of what gives them value.

 Archive of Lost Context

Some technical notes on this archive’s form:
–My decision to locate this archive digitally, and therefore semi-publically, resulted in the elision of most (full) names. Instead, I tended to describe people relationally: “my godmother,” “my grandmother.” While originally this was a presentation concern, the rather satisfactory effect of it is that the personal investment of the archivist (that’s me!) is highlighted.
–A larger “finding aid” was intended but turned out to be difficult in digital format, although I had a rough start on it in analog form. This is due to nothing more interesting than “technical limitations (in this case, skill gaps) prevent the adoption of certain features in an archive.” jQuery and WordPress is hard.

Our reading for this week seemed to stress the impermanence of digital formats, and for good reason – it’s already become hard to reconstruct files from the obsolete systems and bizarre programs of a decade or two ago, and yes, the medium of an archive changes at least its user experience, if not its broad philosophical scope. But I wonder whether some of it is technophobia masquerading as authorial panic.

I’m not an archivist, but I like poking around in classical and medieval studies, and so I can’t help but hold our halcyon analog past up to the same scrutiny: there are enough palimpsests out there that the “trouble-free erasure” of videotapes (90) doesn’t necessarily panic me, for example. Paper decays, or molds, or gets destroyed by flood or fire; the Library of Alexandria burned with probably tens of thousands of documents and manuscripts lost (or did it? – because we don’t even have good enough records to know what we lost, or even what century it was lost in. We do, though, have an incomplete but pretty substantial record of e.g. what public and university libraries in New Orleans lost after Hurricane Katrina.)

And as much as “a medieval document on or of parchment indissolubly fuses materiality and message” (88), a good deal of the content – literature, scripture, important letters – was copied, and often altered in the copying, and our trusty, reliable vocalic alphabet system was subject to profound human error in storage and distribution. And, of course, although it’s obviously the case that the sheer amount of data to potentially archive has grown exponentially with the rise of “user-generated content” and the audiovisual medium’s sudden entrance into legitimacy, the production of paper material was rapidly reaching that point as well before the switch to digital storage. I’m not sure I buy, at all, the “difference between the effects of Renaissance print and contemporary computer technologies” (122), or at the very least I want to also seriously look at that summary’s limitations, how reductive it is to the many print and literacy culture(s) there have been. And in fact Ernst seems to move to acknowledge this, before wandering off elsewhere: “of course there is a constant and permanent movement between the media-archaeological layers of writing.”

(Plus, of course, material degradation aside, learning paleography to actually read a medieval hand – and what is that if it’s not being able to access the information in the outdated medium it’s stored in – is as tricky to anyone working more than a few centuries out as finding the floppy drive or creating a virtual machine for an obsolete file is to a technology specialist.)

In case anyone else needs to wash their mouth out with a shot of technology after having read all of that meandering around the problems of the medieval archive, now you too can be the sort of person who reads about ISO standards for the PDF/A long-term archival file format. I like the standards they suggest for digital preservation: a file format designed for long-term use should be device-independent, self-contained, self-documenting, unfettered, publicly available, and widely adopted. This is the sort of practicality that I think broad-reaching claims about the authoritativeness or underlying assumptions of “cyberspace” tend to miss: rather than saying, for example, “the Internet can’t transmit the semantic content of pauses and silences,” we could say, yes, that’s true, but has any archive ever been able to do that? And if it’s important, how might we try to archive that? (My inner cranky tech hipster wants very badly to point out that data transfer — in particular of, say, film or audiovisual material — is probably a lot less “incapable of transmitting noninformation” (139) than, say, paper. )

MJ Cunniff will buy hoop food for anyone who comes to the hoop with a pair of dry pants for me to borrow. Seriously. I’m wearing the Amish dress right now.
–Feb. 25th, 2010

I’ve always been the person in my social groups who uses social media the most thoroughly – especially in recent years, when concerns about privacy and data mining have been on the rise, and the current tide of popular opinion has shifted to feeling anxious and unhappy about using Facebook and other social media sites. (I was glad to see a lifelogger claim what I’ve always said in these instances, that “knowing there’s a permanent backup of almost everything he reads, sees, or hears allows him to live more in the moment” (Thompson 32), but I also ended up thinking mostly of that XKCD comic: “why the fuck do you care how someone else enjoys a sunset?”)

So I already had an archive of certain moments — almost eight years of my life, between 2006 and now, was covered in my Facebook profile, with a new status or link between every other day and twice-daily over the wide majority of that time. Of course, this was a conscious archive: I had already chosen what to tell a narrative about, which strengthens that version of the memory, and separates it already from the actual lived experience; I could use my Facebook wall to remember things I’d forgotten, then, but I doubt I’d find much use for it to correct false memories I’d created. And, because Facebook is structured the way it is, it isn’t searchable; instead, the most I could do was sort chronologically, by object type (and then chronologically – such as with photos or locations or notes), or by person (“view friendship,” assuming we remained FB friends and that we had reliably tagged each other in our mentions and photos.) I could not, for example, check to see if my feelings about French in 2008 during my last long slog though my alma mater’s language requirement were the same as mine in 2015 while beginning to prepare for my future PhD program’s language requirement…though I was reminded of a similar thought through random browsing:

MJ Cunniff No matter how often I think or say otherwise, the Latin infinitive for “to be” is never going to be “être.” Non est bonum.
–Feb. 17th, 2013

The thing that, as you can see, I’m doing in this post – going through and looking at the statuses happening around this time a few years ago – is of course similar to the concept of the FoursquareAnd7YearsAgo app (Thompson 38), which has been applied to Facebook as well with the Timehop app (which pulls from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Flickr and even your smartphone’s camera roll.) Given the thrilled and surprised customer reviews for these sorts of products (“Happy Time Traveler” is currently at the top of the iTunes app store, giving it five stars), I’m starting to believe it more that “left to our own devices, we’re unlikely to bother to check year-old digital detritus” (38); I must have the particular weird habit of it, then, because I do so regularly – and use AIM logs to look at moments from before Facebook, although it’s rarer that I do that as they mostly chronicle intense and since-dissolved relationships.

I’ve also analyzed my Facebook usage through Wolfram Alpha and found that I average 8.5 likes and 3.4 comments per post over the past 300 or so posts, that my photo of a feminist power sign carved in a jack-o-lantern has been my most popular of all time (crossposted from Instagram, see below), and that as is probably common for queer progressives in large Northeastern US cities, my most significant friend groups are too intertwined and complicated for Wolfram Alpha’s friend-cluster tool to graph them effectively. I’ve also run my profile through Five Labs where keyword analysis suggests I am, among other things, inventive and intellectually curious…which I attribute 100% to the words “poetry” and “apparently” correlating with these traits.

#mypumpkinwillbeintersectionaloritwillbebullshit #halloweek #badoween

A photo posted by @gashgoldvermillion on Oct 28, 2014 at 8:11pm PDT

I didn’t intend to talk about Facebook at much at all, but it was the most interesting source for data, and my inner technologist isn’t surprised: as we see in Thompson, the best personal data management right now exists when it’s entirely passive, when it’s a program given free run of a preexisting large mass of data, or when the user has some other reason to use whatever site or service is keeping records, some immediate benefit. I tried more focused lifelogging over the past week, having been looking for an excuse anyway: I downloaded Saga, a relatively completionist “automatic lifelogging app,” and found that incessantly checking in on and correcting the app’s glitchy GPS and non-Aristotelian sense of time (“no, I left at 10:30, I got home at 12:30, not 3:13…no, I wasn’t at the Enterprise Rent-A-Car in Charlestown, the T just stopped for a minute…what do you mean you have no data from 5AM last night, was I abducted from my bed last night”) might have helped my short-term memory, but it wasn’t nearly enough of a set-and-forget system to be worth using. Similarly, I tried a sleep app, designed to both track your sleep cycles – based on the way your body movements shake the bed and are registered on your smartphone’s accelerometer — and serve as a smart alarm, waking you within a certain time period when you’re already in light sleep. I couldn’t get enough interesting data from a week’s use to say anything; if I do continue using it, it’ll be because it serves the in-the-moment purpose of being a more soothing alarm clock.