Diary of a Writing Teacher

Lamar of days past...

2011-03-17T14:48:00.000-07:00

A week ago, I was looking through old Lamar catalogs, trying to get a sense of what the advanced English courses looked like in the 70s and 80s. My original goal was to chart the development of the program, but then I got sidetracked by the utter awesomeness that is the Lamar General Catalog: 1985-1986. Everything you loved or hated about the 80s is here, and no, I have not cleverly retouched any photos to make them even more 80s-ish—you truly can’t make this stuff up. Please, join me as we take a visual tour, cover to cover, through what I now believe to be Lamar’s heyday as an institution of higher learning.

This cover tells us a lot--are these two students hiding from something? The fashion police, maybe? Fortunately, they both have the appropriate mid 80s coifs--she has some sort of graduated mullet, and he looks like he's rocking the man-perm. But honestly, wouldn't a college catalog be more appealing to prospective students if it was made to look as though there were more than two students on campus?

In essence, I would say the tone of this book goes something like this: Hey, students! It’s 1985! Reagan is President! Woo hoo! Forget Southeast Texas’s horrendously dismal economy—come to Lamar, where you can major in courses with ridiculous and politically incorrect titles such as, Education 432: Educating the Culturally Different, (WTF?!) Education 3311: Identification and Habilitation of the Mentally Retarded, and Music 333: Music of the Afro-American—a course described in the catalog as “A general study of the present day American Negro music and a study of the Afro-American music historical background”. Hell, yeah! We be down with the “Negros” at Lamar—just look at how many African American students we have pictured in this catalog!

As we well know, the 80s ushered in a whole new age of technology--the Commodore 64, etc. Lamar was on top of this trend, offering students access to a happenin' "Computer Center," in which "all jobs are automatically scheduled by the computer which considers computing time and storage requirements as well as other factors." Wow--that just sounds so neato and futuristic! Bite it, MIT! We got a main frame, and we're goin' FORTRAN on y'all's asses!

Hey, look, it's Bill Gates! Oh, wait--Nope--it's just a student channeling his inner nerd in the "Computer Center" and doing some sort of ancient CAD.

80s Lamar made every effort to make us believe that all over campus, you could find pulchritudinous (look it up) coeds strategically posed and chatting it up about their academic interests--basically, these following captions have the stink of a Sears Roebuck catalog ripoff all over them.

My, Becky and Ted are up awful early to be so chipper about whatever it is they're doing (none of the catalog photos had captions) in the Computer Center. Perhaps Ted is simply trying to get up the gumption to ask Becky to go see Back to the Future with him. By the way, Becky, nice feathered hair! And I looooove the thin silk long-sleeve belted dress--a must have for the 80s working girl.

In the following photo, we're catching up with Rocky and Janelle, who have just come from their Psychology 434 course: "An Introduction to Group Psychotherapy" (also a real class from the catalog)--they're discussing deep stuff about feelings, and Janelle, who seems to have just walked off the set of a commercial for feminine products, is trying to restrain herself from asking Rocky what is up with his barely-there polka dotted wife beater tank top and too-small Converse sneakers. I also have a really uncomfortable feeling that this photo should have had a caption reading, "Pay no attention to the three African American students in the background." Or at least a speech bubble for Rocky that says, "How you doin'?"

And here we have Peter and Sandy (oh, the sad, sad early days of experimenting with highlighting one's hair at home) cheerfully completing a very 80s pre-PETA science lab dissection project (yes, they really are dissecting what you think they are dissecting--and they're smiling while they're doing it).

I imagine their conversation went something like this:

Sandy: Hey, Peter, it seems like since Dr. Smith has taken over as head of Biology, we're not having that pesky feral cat problem on campus any more. I wonder why?

Peter: Yeah, totally. Hey, let's go see Police Academy 2 tonight!

Sandy: I'd love to, but I have to take my daughter and stand in line to get her a Cabbage Patch Kid at Toys 'R' Us.

Oh, did I forget to mention that animals were harmed during the making of this catalog?

So, there you have it--Part 1 of Lamar in all its BASIC, COBOL, cat dissecting, goofy nerd, 80s glory. Part II explores even more visual evidence of Lamar's 80s shenanigans.

The Homework Machine

2010-12-19T20:28:00.000-08:00

The other day I was reading some Shel Silverstein poems from A Light in the Attic (1986), and one in particular struck me as having relevance for contemporary first year college students. It's called "The Homework Machine." Here it is:

The Homework Machine, oh the Homework Machine,
Most perfect contraption that's ever been seen.
Just put in your homework, then drop in a dime,
Snap on the switch, and in ten seconds' time,
Your homework comes out, quick and clean as can be.
Here it is--"nine plus four?" and the answer is "three."
Three?
Oh me...
I guess it's not as perfect
As I thought it would be.

When I reread these lines for the first time since I was ten, I realized that Silverstein was a prophet who foresaw the impact that the internet would have on education, or, at least on my little microcosm, freshman writing. To many of my students, Google is the homework machine; it inspires awe with its ability to take students to all kinds of "reputable" sites (read Wikipedia, and that's on a good day) that answer their questions. Instead of "dropping in a dime," they enter search terms, and viola, their "homework" is instantly in front of them, ready to be plucked from cyperspace and pasted into their essays. The problem, though, is that, unlike the child in the poem, who recognizes that "three" is not the appropriate answer, many of my students tend to trust whatever they find, hoping that a mumbled statement that "well, I found it on the internet" will assuage my suspicions that Harriet Tubman may not have, in fact, been the first black woman to refuse to give up her seat on a bus to a white person.* I do not think the situation is hopeless--what I do think, however, is that I am going to need to do quite a bit more instruction on how to evaluate online source material. Yes, I am competing with the deceptively credible internet, but I am sure this can be done, somehow.

*It should be noted that Rosa Parks actually was not the first black woman to refuse to give up her bus seat--Claudette Colvin was (in 1955, months before Parks did the same thing), according to NPR's story: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=101719889

Although I did in fact find this tidbit through the "Homework Machine," I am more inclined to see its contents as credible because (1) it is through NPR and (2) well...in 1955, buses had been invented and in use for at least 6 years, whereas Tubman died in 1913.

Thinking about Pink

2010-10-07T22:27:00.000-07:00

In the midst of the giddy "I like it on..." facebook status updates and various other attempts to make breast cancer awareness a number one priority in the month of October, I am beginning to ponder just what "awareness" (of any disease, really) means for a culture that, for the most part, would rather focus primarily on cures and survival. (Cures and survival are *really* good things, so please know that I am not promoting a pessimistic view of the entire agenda--after all, part of its purpose is to raise money to help fund needed research.) The area in-between, however, by which I mean the treatments that can often be brutal, the uncertainty of making it through them, and, yes, even death, seems largely ignored by the mainstream media. What I am getting at is this: how "aware" is anyone really willing to be when it comes to the gray area of Stage IV disease?

Many women with metastatic disease live perpetually in the shadows of the "think pink" movement--why exactly this is, I am not completely sure, but I suspect it has a lot to do with the fact that they are, as they (and we) well know, probably going to die from the illness. Whether it may be two years or fifteen years down the road, who knows? But let's be honest--that's scary as hell. To them. To their partners and children. To us. And, given the sometimes fiercely overbearing rhetoric of those campaigns only concerned with promoting survival/cure as the only possible laudable goal of the cancer patient, they are considered to have "lost" their "battle" with the disease and are painted as "succumbing" to it (if, indeed, they are painted at all). I argue that these women should be acknowledged as having just as much relevance to the fight against cancer as those who have emerged from their own treatments without metastases. They have, quite often, participated in experimental drug studies to help researchers create better treatments. They have, through pain and uncertainty, raised children, held jobs, and kicked ass.

Rather than serving as frightening reminders of our own mortality, these women are, instead, a testament to strength, grace, and unbelievable perseverance. After my mother passed away from breast cancer in 2005 (after having lived with mets for ten years), I stumbled upon an online community called "bcmets"--a discussion board whose members are almost all women with metastatic breast cancer. They give each other candid advice, console each other's families when a member passes, and maintain a positive, caring approach to living in that precarious space between life and death. There is nothing maudlin about these women; instead, they seem to display a wisdom that comes, I suppose, from pondering all sorts of very heavy questions on a regular basis.

So, if I am going to do my part for raising awareness of breast cancer, my contribution is going to be to publicly declare admiration for those women out there with Stage IV breast cancer. They have not lost the battle.

Setting the record straight

2010-07-05T06:54:00.000-07:00

I know bad movies. And I can even admit when I have chosen one either to rent or see at the theater (I will, in fact, discuss such an instance, with a qualification or two that kind of shifts some of the blame, further below). But I have to set the record straight about something--"Fame" vs. "The Last Airbender".

On our first date, my husband and I went to see "Fame"--an event that he attributes entirely to me to this day. And it was a bad movie--the writing was bad, the acting was bad, and it even had no resemblance to the early 80s series of the same name, which was slightly less bad. Yes, I did in fact choose that film, but it was one of those instances where you show up at the theater, see what is about to start playing within the next 30 minutes (which limits options quite a bit) and pick something (this is the part I blame on my sweet hubby). I believe we were left with two options--the other one was something starring Matt Damon, and clearly I chose the wrong option. but yes, I did in fact choose "Fame." And we proceeded to sit next to each other, squirming uncomfortably, for the next hour and a half. So, I more or less attribute our "Fame" fiasco to haphazard moviegoing and a lack of preparedness. Shame on both of us, I say!

Yesterday, we went to see "The Last Airbender" with our friends and their daughter. Wow. It was bad--but at lunch afterward, the love of my life reassured everyone that it was not as terrible as the infamous "Fame," which he also made sure to declare that I had chosen for our first date. Here is where I must protest. And actually, my favorite movie review site, rottentomatoes.com, agrees with me, awarding Airbender a measly grade of 8 out of 100 (out of 114 reviews, 9 were positive--lukewarm, really), and Fame a 27 (out of 104 reviews, 28 are "fresh" and 76 are "rotten").

With "Fame", you had many of the usual elements of a bad film--undeveloped characters you don't care about, cliches in the script, cliches about people not making the cut, bla bla bla. But with films like that, they allow you to check out emotionally and think about other things. With "Airbender", I felt like I was being assaulted...assaulted by every kiddie epic cliche in the book (the weird names, the pseudo mythology b.s., etc.) and bad kid acting, which runs neck and neck with being assaulted by bad tween acting, such as appears in "Fame", but "Airbender" was still far more damaging to my psyche. In fact, I told my husband when it was all over that this is the first time I have had a real fear that a movie would never end. Given a few hours to contemplate that, I thought maybe I was overreacting, but then I read a review by Charlie Anders that describes in more detail that exact same sentiment:

"You resist following this movie into the dark, scary place where heroes are pieces of furniture and heroism is a Monty Python routine performed by someone who's never seen the original episodes. But then it's too late - you've passed over the threshold, you are committed, you are on the journey and the story won't let you go. You have been drawn into a place where you will lose, not only your power as an audience member, but quite possibly your mental faculties altogether." (the full review is at http://io9.com/5576076/m-night-shyamalan-finally-made-a-comedy)

I am not going to re-enumerate the Airbender's many shortcomings, because so many others have already rushed to do it in some kind of mass public service announcement to spare other innocents the pain of sitting through this thing, but simply have to say...Fame was not this bad.

And to my sweet husband, I love you! And I'm off to play with the pup now.

New Puppy

2010-04-19T17:31:00.000-07:00

I am supposed to be working on a way to do a quick and easy "semiotics for dummies" for my students tomorrow, but since there really is no way to introduce semiotics except to go the long and painful route, I am going to jettison that effort in favor of blogging about our new puppy.

Our new puppy is named Virginia Woof (a name my husband picked out long before we even had a dog), and she is a 5 month old Boston Terrier. We obtained her from a breeder--working with a breeder was a completely new experience for me, as I've usually in the past bought animals from the pound who have no apparent bonds with other humans--one of the perks of this arrangement (that I have a new appreciation for) is that people who have become attached to the dog do not call you for weeks afterward asking after the pet's health and temperament. In our case, the breeders consider their dogs and their respective litters to be like children, and so cutting the cord has proven to be rather difficult for them even though the check cleared about a week ago. That said, I don't mind giving an update once in a while, but really, what those updates amount to are something along the lines of, "yes, she's still teething, yes, she's still going on the floor, and yes, I'm still not going to take her up to my office with me so that she can spend every waking hour with me--she'll get over it."

Our new puppy came with several semi-promises, including that she was "semi" lead trained and "semi" potty trained. I've since learned that being "semi" potty trained is kind of like being a "little bit pregnant," as in, ain't no such damn thing. "Semi" potty trained means that Virginia goes when she needs to go wherever she happens to be at the time--if that somewhere happens to be outside, then so be it--I guess that's the semi-part--she gets it right about %50 percent of the time. But hey, it's kind of like that "acceptance of approximations" phase I tell my pedagogy students about--sometimes you have to recognize that "errors" are merely fumbles on the way to mastering the skill. But that may be a bad comparison after all, because teaching writing generally involves less lysol and fewer unpleasant smells...generally.

However, our new puppy is as cute and loving as she can be--all ears and big, inquisitive dark eyes. She loves to nap with us and makes us laugh by doing all kinds of cute puppy things to get a treat. So, despite any frustration with her learning curve, we are more than happy with our new four legged addition to the family.

The Onion, Once Again, Hits Too Close to Home

2010-01-23T08:35:00.000-08:00

I just ran across this story ("Watching Faces Of Students As They Finish 'The Lottery' Highlight Of English Teacher's Year") from my favorite news source, The Onion. For any of those who have an interest, here's the link:

http://www.theonion.com/content/news_briefs/watching_faces_of_students

I didn't laugh. I didn't find it rotflmao funny or lol funny or even "funny ha-ha" funny. And here's why. I read it and I was like, yeah? So? Welcome to my world, Miss Hamlin. So in lieu of an explanation, I'll offer my own eerily similar anecdote. I've had the opportunity to teach quite a few sections of our sophomore American lit survey: the one where students assume that the boring early travel literature and boring puritan poetry are surely a portent of more boring things to come, so they quit doing the required reading except sporadically because they *think* they can figure out when the pop quizzes are going to be. My favorite part of the year is when we get to Ginsberg's "Howl," which I pretend to believe they've read prior to coming to class. I like to instantly figure out who read and who didn't by asking them to re-read roughly lines 25-29, as though I think there is something particularly compelling in just those lines. In reality, what I'm doing is having them read the line about "cock and endless balls," because those who have read won't say anything or even flinch, and those who have not either squeal in horror or snort with laughter. It's a ridiculously stupid way to amuse myself at my students' expense, but there you have it.

A Cautionary Tale about Differing Philosophies of Gift-Wrapping

2009-12-28T13:53:00.000-08:00

Some people are meticulous when it comes to wrapping Christmas presents. They carefully pick paper that suits the occasion, the gift itself, and possibly even the personality of the person receiving the present; then, they work assiduously to cut in straight lines, tape everything together neatly, and then proudly present their handiwork with a self-satisfied grin, perhaps hoping that someone will say, "Ooooh, what a beautiful wrapping job! I honestly hate to open this!" I used to be one of those meticulous wrappers, though I cannot say this without any qualification--I was meticulous until, say, around the age of twelve when my mother stopped paying me ten cents for every neat wrapping job. After that, I became a lazy wrapper, and I have remained one to this day, at thirty-two years of age.

I am, unfortunately, one of those awful people who tends to prefer to buy those ridiculously overpriced gift bags--the ones that (whether or not this is an accurate sentiment) scream, "I dumped your gift in here because I didn't have the five minutes it would have taken to wrap it myself. Seriously, I'm just not that into you. But hey, at east it's a pretty bag. And I even did that swirly thing with the ribbon that's tying it together." Sometimes I even "regift" the gift bags that are given to me by friends and relatives who belong to my same lazy wrapper cohort. (I know: does it get lower that that? Well, read on...)

But the point of this post actually pertains to marriage, and how a husband and wife navigate and come to grips with their different points of view about gift wrapping. This, the issue of one's approach to preparing presents for family members, may actually be one of those questions a couple should ask each other before getting hitched, right up there with "Are you religious?"

I recently spent my first Christmas with my new husband, a wonderful man in every way imaginable. He did, in fact, wrap all of his presents to me very nicely, in several different patterns of Christmas wrapping paper. It was so sweet, and it gave me the chance to see each one several days before the holiday and wonder what each one was. I, in turn, did not wrap any of his gifts, but instead chose to lay them all out on the couch before he woke on Christmas morning and pretend that Santa had come. Perhaps that's a lame approach for people in their thirties, but, hey, I wanted to be creative on our first holiday. But I've never seen anyone pull a move like he did for his brother, for whom he bought some nice beer.

Who says you can't wrap an entire present in electrical tape? Not my innovative husband, that's for sure. So, that's exactly what he proceeded to do (as a joke, but still), and the job took several minutes, as I looked on in amused shock. Now, I am convinced that many women, faced with such a spectacle, might begin to question the entire foundation of their relationship. "Who is this man?" They might wonder in the wee hours as they look over at their sleeping spouse. However, I think I can see us using our disparate gift wrapping philosophies to bring us closer together. His birthday is coming up, so who knows? He may get something covered in aluminum foil, or even normal wrapping paper, but with a Hello Kitty motif...

How to Teach Writing?

2009-12-20T14:35:00.000-08:00

Clancy Ratliff, author of the blog Culture Cat, wrote the following, and I feel compelled to use this juicy tidbit as a springboard for this post:

"On a somewhat related note, I have a confession to make. I have now been teaching writing and studying composition theory for just over ten years. Over the years, I have come to realize that I have no strong opinion one way or another about How Writing Should Be Taught. I honestly think that students can learn useful skills in an expressivist course, a rhetoric-heavy course, a writing-about-literature course, a current-traditional course, a cultural studies based course, etc. I can't decide if this makes me a terrible writing program administrator or an excellent one."

Reading this comment was especially freeing to me as someone who has taught first year composition as a t.a., adjunct, and assistant professor for the last eleven years. Even in that short amount of time, I have seen perspectives shift within the profession regarding what approach to writing is best for our students. And I've tried several--believe me--here are some of the course content formats I've experimented with, beginning with my earliest days as a teaching assistant:

Writing about Generational Theory
Writing about Education in America
Writing about Language, Power, and Society
Writing about Literature
Writing in Response to Essays

These approaches, I would argue, worked just fine as far as creating a class that fulfilled all of the goals of a first year English course, one of which is to link the four language arts: speaking, listening, reading and writing. Students did all four, perhaps sometimes unsure of how every activity or assignment would aid them, but still, they completed their assignments. For the past five years, I have taught our second semester composition course as a writing about literature course, which is in adherence to the department's standards. Some of the original arguments against using second semester comp as "writing about literature" (see the Lindemann/Tate debate for more explanation) focused on the problems with the trend of having students read literary works and then, with no modeling or scaffolding of the writing process, produce essays that were nothing like what they were reading. Others argued that because first year composition should stand alone and not as a service course for upper level literature courses, the readings for these courses should not be comprised of fictional works. My experience in teaching 1302 as "writing about literature" has been that with enough modeling, students can successfully produce essays in the same genres they would produce in a course that does not use literature as the main reading content.

In teaching writing the one thing that I am absolutely sure of, and which is in accordance with the findings of Ronald Kellogg, author of The Psychology of Writing, is that in order to become better writers, students need sustained, repeated practice at writing in environments that are as distraction free as possible. This may seem like a small and obvious revelation, one that I should have come to early in my teaching career, but in truth I think that realizing this has allowed me to shut out some of the noise of the "Students should read/respond to this specific type of text in order to improve their writing skills" arguments that come and go.

One of the pitfalls I've discovered in teaching first year writing relates to that gray area of having students write about what they are interested in, which is, I think, I noble goal that most of us strive to reach, but a difficult road nonetheless. Students' interests shift constantly, and simply telling them something along the lines of, "This next assignment allows you to write about a topic you have an interest in" is generally not enough to ignite inspiration in students who (1) may have an undecided major, (2) may have already bitten off more than they can chew in taking too many hours. The idea of writing and having that writing critiqued is intimidating enough, but the idea of writing about a subject you genuinely are passionate about and giving that writing up for critique is downright scary. Furthermore, a student who begins the task of a research essay on, say, gender bias in the workplace, which he or she cheerfully assures you is an issue near and dear to his/her heart, may grow to despise that topic as the demands of prewriting, researching, annotating, and drafting pile up. This shift in attitude toward the topic (which I often see happen in our second semester first year composition course, which requires a significant research component) does not discourage me as it did when I began teaching. Instead, their frustration, I think, mirrors the frustrations of any serious writer who takes on a significant project and, along the way, has their own ideas challenged, runs into writers block, or, conversely, feels filled with too many ideas and no sense of organization, and sits down to draft at times when they would much rather be doing something else. I go through the exact same process (several cycles) with every article I write. And, as with most of my students, I go through the process hoping that what I am producing will be of value to someone else--that it will simply be read. My aim in teaching first year composition is not to make it "fun", necessarily, although I do my best with my classes to excavate whatever fun might be lurking beneath the mountains of work in a sixteen week semester, but to instead help students through what I know to be the processes that will lead them to produce work that showcases their best efforts.

Memoirs

2009-09-06T19:40:00.000-07:00

Memoirs (those that involve a considerable amount of biographical information abut a deceased person) are a curious genre--I just finished Ann Patchett's rather controversial narrative of her friendship with poet Lucy Grealy,Truth and Beauty: A Friendship, and, though I can certainly understand why Grealy's sister felt her grief had been "hijacked" by Patchett's haste to publish this work so soon after Lucy's death, reading it has made me more attuned to the inherent problem of memoir writing in general. This problem is that memoirs are just that--memoirs--written through the limited, imperfect terministic screens of human beings who are not necessarily intent on telling the "Truth," but rather a version of the truth. A version that suits them, a version that suits others, or a version that seeks to paint things as happier than they really were. And even for those who claim to give "the real story" in their memoirs, their tales are just that--tales. And they are dicey to write because, inevitably, you, as the memoir writer, will be vilified by someone who knew/loved the subject of the memoir as well as you and takes umbrage at the way you tweaked a story or left something out.

The sensitivity it takes to write a memoir has become more plain to me in the years since my mother's death. Several of her dearest friends, whenever I visit them, tell me that they are waiting for "that book you are going to write about your mother." This is a book that they created from thin air with the best of intentions. To them, this makes perfect sense--I write and teaching writing for a living, so why would it not be a perfectly natural impulse for me to take on exploring my mother's life in words? The thing that keeps me from taking on this task, and will probably keep me from it forever, is this: what they desire is not reallya book about my mother--it is a book about my mother the saint. But sanctification is boring, and I'd wager that even my mother wouldn't want to be associated with something so maudlin or saccharine. In reality, I could, and would love to, write a witty and fun memoir of my mother that unapologetically explains her through my eyes--but that effort, no matter how sincere and respectful, would undoubtedly fall short of everyone's expectations.

Here's an illustrative example from my own life, which I consider to be analogous to the tricky territory a memoirist must navigate:

The morning after my mother died, I was up at the funeral home making all kinds of arrangements, and I was told that I had 24 hours to gather up and deliver fifty photographs of her so that they could create a slide show for viewing at her funeral. I tried to find the ones that would display a kind of chronology--her as a little girl, her as an adolescent, her getting married, her with me as a baby in the hospital, and so on--the point, as I intepreted it, was to, in pictures, tell the story of my mother's life. However. There was this one photograph of her that, to me captured so much about her--it was of her sitting at a table in a restaurant about to take a bite of her salad, looking at my dad as if to say, "I'm going to shove that camera up your ass." She had this thing she did with her mouth when she was angry--we all knew that look--it was spectacular. I thought everyone would laugh when it came through on the slideshow rotation. Instead, there was a collective silence among the audience--almost a feeling of "Wow--she didn't want her picture taken then, I can't imagine she'd want it up here for all of us to see. What bad taste!" The air seemed to be sucked from the room in a vaccuum of awkwardness. Looking around, I literally wanted to say, "Hey, lighten up! You know this is hysterical. And you know that at some point, she looked at you like that too." But that experience taught me quite a bit about the rhetorical tact needed in such situations.

Incidentally, I recommend that if you do plan to read Patchett's work, you read Grealy's memoir of her own life, Autobiography of a Face first. If you read Patchett first, you may, as many people have been, be turned off by the image of Grealy that she gives us (much of the last part of the book focuses on Grealy's herion addiction, which, though part of the truth of Grealy's life and likely the reason for her early death at thirty-nine, gave me the uncomfortable feeling of reading tawdry tabloid fodder). Better yet, read some of Grealy's poetry first--sadly, 99% of the publicity surrounding Grealy, especially after her death, seems to revolve around the fact that as a child she had a good portion of her jaw removed, and, throughout the rest of her life, made her way through countless reconstructive surgeries, many of which failed. But, what seems to get lost in all of this is the fact that Grealy was actually an accomplished poet and writer. I can't say with any credibility whether she was a "great" poet, largely because I cannot find any of her poetry--but, when I do find some, I may post about it.

More Ancient Cyborg Pop Culture

2009-08-14T12:10:00.000-07:00

Given my obsession with late 60s, early 70s man vs. machine films, I thought I'd use this post to pay homage to one of the lesser known ones, called "Westworld" (based on a Michael Crighton work). Now, technically, it's basically a B-movie with an interesting premise: people have created the ultimate vacation getaway ("Delos"), which is staffed (I guess you'd call them "staff") by robots who, gosh darnit, look just like people, so no one knows for sure who's human and who's mechanical, but that's alright because this is a technological utopia...right? (cue ominous music). I realize that having actors walk around in period costumes to play the robots saved a bundle on any kind of special effects, but I actually think that move is what makes the film much creepier. Still, it plays on that predictable idea of what kind of hell-on-earth ensues when we put too much faith in technology and give far too much of our agency over to it and let it run amok. Completely unlike "The Forbin Project," where the tech is clunky and obvious and loud and terrifying, "Westworld" portrayed the tech as silent, invisible, and trustworthy--until it breaks down (and the breakdowns make for some amusing scenes, such as when a young, attractive female robot "malfunctions" and slaps a rather rotund, balding middle aged male tourist who's trying to make advances on her).

More importantly, though, this was the first film to use any kind of advanced (though primitive by today's standards) CGI techniques--those mainly relate to the parts of the film where you are supposed to be seeing everything through robot-Yul Brynner's eyes and everything gets all pixilated and grainy. So, in that sense, hooray for Westworld.

I can't find an actual clip of what I'm talking about, but here's the trailer:

Why I'm Smarter than Suze Orman

2009-07-05T14:31:00.000-07:00

The other day I was flipping through the channels and happened across the Suze Orman show where she takes calls from people (many of whom seem to be perilously and blissfully unaware of their impending financial doom) who are hoping to get a loan for this or that strange high priced knick knack that they are convinced will increase their quality of life. Suze then breaks it down for them, asking them questions about their income and savings, etc., and then tells them whether she would approve or deny them the loan. Many of these people seem to have little contact with what you or I would call "reality."

Here's a hypothetical, condensed (though not exaggerated by any means) example of a typical interaction between Suze and loan seeker:

Suze: Hello caller, what do want a loan for?

Caller: Hi Suze! I really, really want a life size replica of the Kool-Aid man from those commercials. It would go great in my living room as a conversation piece.

Suze: How much does it cost?

Caller: $15,000. It's a collector's item and there are only two in the world. But I need it!

Suze: So, tell me about your income.

Caller: Well, I'm currently unemployed, living with my parents, but I have $600 in savings and--

Suze: Denied!

So anyway, on the show the other night, a man called up saying he wanted to purchase a seaplane for $165,000. He sailed through Suze's interrogation of his financial situation (though he is really not affluent by any means) and she approved his request for the loan.

Here's what Suze did not take into consideration, and here's why she should have denied his loan: The cost of the plane itself is only the beginning and it is soon eclipsed by other stratospheric expenses such as insurance, fuel, and aircraft maintenance. If Suze knew about these things, she would have, I have no doubt, taken them into account.

It is a rare day indeed when I find myself in disgreement with a money whiz like Orman, so I thought this event was worth posting about.

"Smart Room"? I Beg to Differ!

2009-06-22T10:50:00.000-07:00

Well, I suppose now is as good a time to quit procrastinating on updating my blog as any. I am in the Maes building, after having just given my summer students a grammar practice test, and I am really not looking forward to stepping out into 96 degrees.

But here is my observation--this classroom is a "smart room": in theory, it should cater to the instructor's every whim just like George and Lydia Hadley's "Happy Life Home" in Ray Bradbury's story, "The Veldt." All the necessary equipment is here--the console holodeck thingy, the projector mounted up on the wall, the way cool screen I can pull down with a switch, and a remote control. Here's the thing--none of these high tech items seem to be willing to communicate with each other. When I turn on the projector, it says there is "no signal" from the computer--and I know very well it is lying. It is laughing at me! Someone stop this mad, conspiratorial collaboration among machines to ruin my career!!!!!

Cool Robot Stuff

2009-05-23T10:25:00.001-07:00

In lieu of taking a break from revisions on an article that is slowly killing me, I thought I would offer up some observations from the world of robots, fact and fiction (well, really, which is which at this point?).

The first is a fascinating clip of "Roboman," the robot twin of the Japanese scientist who created him--note how near the end of the report it is stated that Ishiguru feels that such beings might be used to study human behavior--interesting stuff!

The second article, which I happened across just the other day, is entitled "Real Soldiers Love Their Robot Brethren". I think the following quote, which I actually find quite moving, speaks for itself:

"One EOD soldier brought in a robot for repairs with tears in his eyes and asked the repair shop if it could put "Scooby-Doo" back together. Despite being assured that he would get a new robot, the soldier remained inconsolable. He only wanted Scooby-Doo."

And for anyone who would immediately dismiss this as "twaddle", I would urge him or her to think of some piece of machinery that has impacted his or her life in such a way that made the device seem animate. For me, the list might be quite long, starting with, of course, Speak'N'Spell.

And lastly, in order to tie up the threads of this human/machine emotional connection theme, I give you a clip of an early first season "Twilight Zone" episode (no, not the lame-o 80s Twilight Zone but the actual original late 50s series) called "The Lonely," in which a man who has been wrongly convicted of a crime is banished to a distant planet with only "Alicia," his human-on-the-outside, robot-on-the-inside companion, to keep him company. At first he is completely repelled by her and her audacity in looking like a human but being a machine, but eventually the two form a strong bond (to the point that he refuses to leave the planet without her and will not accept that she is, after all, a mere robot). Despite TZ actors' apparent inability to properly pronounce the word "robot," I actually found this episode to coincide somewhat with a theory a student introduced me to last semester--the "uncanney valley" concept.

Deep Fried Curiosities

2009-05-13T11:41:00.000-07:00

Following Thomas Browne's 17th century line of thought concerning keeping a "cabinet of curiosities", I thought that perhaps my own blog could serve as a kind of "cyber-cabinet" of my own odd experiences. Most of these little narratives have simply been tucked away in my memory for years now, just waiting for the right medium to come along to unleash them.

It's no secret that ghosts are big business. It seems that every time I turn around, there's some "10 Scariest This" or "15 Creepiest That" show on that purports to tell us that all the enticing details of places inhabited by, as my dad would call them, "haints." Well, the other day I was working on the computer and half-listening to the t.v., and the Travel Channel was running a thing about haunted restaurants. At the top of the list was "Catfish Plantation" in Waxahachie, Texas.

I've actually been to Catfish Plantation several times (as a kid). I had heard the hype (you know, the typical redneck-on-the-street interivews where people say things like, "that ghost threw a piece of broccoli clear across the room and hit me in the head!") on a local news station and, as kids are wont to do, I informed my mother this place was a must see. She agreed.

So, we went--I must have been thirteen at the time. (The food there is actually fabulous, by the way, if you're into "down home" southern fried stuff--I think this is actually the first place I ever had fried pickles, but I digress...) We ordered cheese sticks as an appetizer. At one point, when I happened to be looking away, my mother gasped in horror and swore up and down that some unseen entity had made one of the mozzarella sticks disappear and caused the tissue paper lining the basket to "float up." I did not count the cheesesticks before the incident, so I had nothing really to go on, but I bought into the idea that our foodstuffs had been violated by an apparition. It was thrilling.

Before we left, we passed the guestbook in which patrons write brief descriptions of their alleged encounters with C.P. ghosts. I read through a few--many were elaborate narratives focusing on some romanticized vision of a woman in a white flowing gown or a man in a suit that made him "look like he was from the 1920s." I brazenly added my own succinct experience into the mix. It read, "Ghost stole a cheesestick." Nothing more, nothing less.

Oh, no he didn't!

2009-05-10T16:45:00.000-07:00

Recently, a Chronicle of Higher Ed article by Geoffrey Pullum entitled "50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice" spewed forth venom (thinly couched in academese) about Strunk and White'sThe Elements of Style. Among the author's issues is the volume's increasingly apparent lack of pedagogical application:

"The Elements of Style does not deserve the enormous esteem in which it is held by American college graduates. Its advice ranges from limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense. Its enormous influence has not improved American students' grasp of English grammar; it has significantly degraded it."

Much of Pullum's article is a sanely reasoned journey through the contradictions found in the text--in short, Strunk and White do not seem to practice what they preach, and several of their examples do not even fit with the rules they are attempting to discuss. Point taken. But there is a subtext to the piece that I, as someone gearing up to teach a course in advanced argumentation, find just plain sad--it is Pullum's insistence on tapdancing on Strunk and White's graves (metaphorically) through incessant name calling. In prefacing his "ad grammarian" attack (in which he dubs Strunk and White bossy and "idiosyncratic bumblers"), where he cites both Strunk and White as "grammatical incompetents," Pullum simply assures us that "The authors won't be hurt by these critical remarks. They are long dead." It's almost as though Pullum takes great delight in the fact that these men have long since been six feet under, because their inability to retaliate allows him carte blanche to say whatever without fear of refutation--his glee at having the last word just seems rather offputting. I mean, really--put yourself in Strunk and White's shoes. Or, better yet, I'll use myself as an example. Let's say I write some little tome that enjoys some popularity but has some real flaws. And let's say I kick off, and somewhere down the road, someone smarter than I am decides to write a scathing review and mentions that, hey, it's not like Pace can say anything--she's dead, you know--so, nyaaa nyaaa nyaaahhh! I believe that Aristotle would hang his head in shame at such a cheap shot.

Though, despite the name calling, I do find much of Pullum's perspective intriguing, I do take issue with one particular point he makes, and since he is not long dead, I will handle my response with more tact than he has shown. Pullum writes:

"Several generations of college students learned their grammar from the uninformed bossiness of Strunk and White, and the result is a nation of educated people who know they feel vaguely anxious and insecure whenever they write "however" or "than me" or "was" or "which," but can't tell you why. The land of the free in the grip of The Elements of Style."

I truly find this claim a bit optimistic, but perhaps I am simply hampered by geography. Dr. Pullum, can you point me to the location of this "nation of educated people" who feel twinges of insecurity over their choices of which/who/whom/than/however? Because, you see, I have taught introductory composition for around ten years, and I'm pretty sure these hordes of overconscientious would be grammarians do not live in my vicinity.

How soon we forget...

2009-05-06T19:45:00.000-07:00

The other day my dad reminded me that our first computer was not in fact the Commodore 64, but rather the TI-99. (Texas Instruments was also responsible for the infamous and beloved Speak and Spell, and so in my book they can do no wrong.) This computer came out before floppy disks--to operate it, one needed cassettes/cartridges.

One can also visit the very cool site dedicated to all things TI.

Some things are still under construction, but you'll get the gist of the amazing-ness that was Texas Instruments in its 80s heyday.

To Tweet or not to Tweet?

2009-05-06T15:23:00.000-07:00

The other day, my dad and I were watching the news (CNN possibly), and at the end of the broadcast, the [male] anchor (in a move that is becoming more common and less likely to evoke giggles) said, "Be sure to follow the rest of the story on Twitter as it evolves." My dad (who talks to the t.v. quite a lot) offered the following bit of wisdom: "No grown man should have anything to do with anything involving the word "twitter." I concurred, as I always do with dad's edicts. Issues of manhood as they relate to digital status updates aside, however, the incident got me thinking further about my own attitudes toward various digital media.

Twitter has become a topic that has woven itself in and out of discussions in my multimedia writing class--I may, unintentionally, have poisoned the class's attitude toward microblogging in showing everyone the "Trouble with Twitter" video--perhaps, though, there are a few closet tweeters in the bunch who will (I hope) prevail and continue to microblog. I say go for it--it's all good.

Anyway, I started wondering just why it is that I am so sure I will never use Twitter, and I came up with an answer--my life is simply too boring (not in a bad way--just not in a way that is worthy of updates that make me look as though I am breathlessly sprinting from one adventure to the next). Blogger blogging has much more to do with what I am thinking than what I am doing, and therein lies the issue. Twitter's prompt, which one cannot escape, is "What are you doing?"

And, really, even in face to face conversation, I hate it when people ask me, "So, what are you doing?" as if they are waiting for me to say something like, "Well, my first novel sold really well, I just got back from a safari, and I'm really big in Japan. (I have a dear friend who hates that question even more than I do, and her stock response is "Whatever the hell I want to.")

If I were an avid tweeter, here is what an average morning's tweet's would probably look like:

8:30--enjoying Cheerios with a banana
9:33--trying to find a matching pair of socks
10:02--giving up on finding a matching pair of socks and who cares anyway because they're all either navy or black and my shoes will cover them up
10:46--getting ready to go to Lamar

I think you see the problem...

But--what if Twitter's prompt were "What are you thinking?" Such might be the beginning of a fantastic tool for low stakes freewriting that would allow students/writers to update their thoughts (from their cell phones, keyboards, etc.--from anywhere at any time), preserve them, and come back to them later on in the quest to construct an essay from their piecemeal observations. Plus, their classmates would be more likely to "tweet" back and create some really interesting cross referencing discourse. Here's the bottom line--I am planning to pervert Twitter for my own purposes and use it in the service of prewriting.

I'm not a doctor, but I play one on the internet...

2009-04-24T20:21:00.000-07:00

In light of the class discussion we had concerning Hayles' comment (in "An Interview/Dialogue with Albert Borgman and N. Katherine Hayles on Humans and Machines") about the potential future of medical diagnosis:

"HMO's are considering programming their computers to make medical diagnoses and recommend treatments based on probability distributions. That's a timesaver, to be sure, but has it crossed the line between calculation and moral judgement?" (http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/borghayl.html)

I got to thinking about another aspect of the issue: humans interacting with machines to diagnose themselves. There have been cases where people, frustrated by a string of doctors who were baffled by their symptoms, tenaciously searched the net until they indeed did find others who were experiencing the same things and found a name for their malady (which then in turn led them to the names of specialists who could actually help them). That, to me, is progress, and something close to the kind of "productive partnership" between humans and machines that Hayles alludes to. But there is another side to be explored, and that is the (sometimes) relative ineffiency and hypochondria inducing nature of that cyber-quest for answers. Check out, for example, the "symptom checker" on WebMD:

http://symptoms.webmd.com/symptomchecker

All you have to do is plug in your sex, click on where it hurts, and (though you can further narrown down symptoms) bingo, up pops a list of possible afflictions (we are, as always, dealing with probabilities). For example, if I indicate I have pain in my upper abdomen, according to WebMD, I could be suffering from anything from depression to sclerodoma. The vagueness is amusing, though the list does provide me a starting point to dig deeper into the rest of those diseases. But I also wonder whether I would really be able to handle being told exactly what is wrong with 100% accuracy after a few clicks of the mouse. In other words, if I had a terminal illness, I would rather hear that news from a human than my pc.

Another issue I've noticed (not that I spend hours surfing for this kind of thing, but there have been one or two times-ok, maybe more like 20--when I was sick and just wanted a clue as to whether I should just ride it out or go ahead and make an appointment) is the incredible overlap of symtpoms that span minor to major illnesses. For example, let's say one is having fatigue, general malaise, a sore throat, minor headaches, and trouble concentrating. Here's my tasteless parody (though not too far removed from reality) of what that person might find if s/he tried to get to the bottom line.

Common Cold

Early Symptoms Include:

fatigue
general malaise
sore throat
minor headaches
trouble concentrating
(and so on...)

Prognosis: With rest and frequent intake of liquids, a full recovery should occur in a week or two.

Mononucleosis

Early Symptoms Include:

fatigue
general malaise
sore throat
minor headaches
trouble concentrating
(and so on...)

Prognosis: May require hospitalization at some point, but patients generally recover within a few months.

Bubonic Plague

Early Symptoms Include:

fatigue
general malaise
sore throat
minor headaches
trouble concentrating
(and so on...)

Prognosis: You will most likely die horribly. But if you do survive, good luck leading any kind of a normal life because you will be permanently scarred both emotionally and physically.

Ebola

Early Symptoms Include:

fatigue
general malaise
sore throat
minor headaches
trouble concentrating
(and so on...)

Prognosis: You will die really horribly. No seriously--you don't even want to know.

And, finally, (drumroll, please), I give you Swine Flu:

My point is this--this kind of information was always available to people in books, but who has ever had the time to go thumbing through medical journals? By the time you figure out what's wrong, you're over it. But with the internet, there's immediate access to that same information that can be detrimental in its futility.

Being Erica

2009-04-17T19:46:00.000-07:00

Most people will readily volunteer the list of shows they watch as long as they are sure that list at least marginally conforms to what all the cool people are watching (things like "Lost" and "Grey's Anatomy," two shows that I have never seen, but feel as though I have seen because of the way blurbs about their gripping plots invade commercials and other media). I will, however, admit that I have seen a few partial eposodes of a new show called "Being Erica"; it's a series that's way too smart to be on SoapNet* (where it currently airs) but maybe too dumb to be on Bravo.

The issue is this: Being Erica has a premise that doesn't know how deep it is, and maybe this lack of awareness is what makes the show such fun to watch. I shall summarize:

Erica is a 32 year old single woman who is vaguely unhappy with her life because of myriad regrets about this and that. She is, in fact, all of us. She meets a shady shrink who somehow possesses the power to take Erica back in time to revisit certain times in her life to "fix" things (and during these extended flashbacks we, the viewers, are assaulted with endless 80s and 90s pop culture references; the show can be revoltingly self-referential). But, as Erica finds, fixing things is more complicated than she had envisioned, and often the original circumstances are not as she had imagined. This particular scene shows Erica trying to rectify a disastrous poetry reading in a college creative writing class from the early 90s--only instead of reciting the original poem she had written, she, due to the inexplicable antics of her stereotypical histrionic nutcase professor, is forced to rip off a Britney Spears song:

Being Erica, in fact, has a plotline eerily similar to an entertaining book I read in my late teens called The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin, by Russian author P.D. Ouspensky. Ivan Osokin, too, had many regrets and was in a rut much like Erica. Desperately seeking a chance to go back and change things and make better decisions with the mature knowledge he had as an adult, he happens to run across someone who can grant that wish. Ivan, thus, gets whisked back in time (only much further back than Erica--his first trip to his past takes him back to age 12). But, alarmingly, Ivan ends up making the exact same decisions--even bad decisions that are clearly going to have bad consequences. The novel is actually very funny--in the first episode, Ivan, even with his illuminated adult knowledge of right and wrong, is unable to resist the urge to draw a moustache on the portrait of his school's head master--an act for which he is severely reprimanded...again. Upon returning back to his present time, Ivan pleads to go back again and re-relive this event, asserting that this time he will not indulge in such childishness. He is granted the chance to go back, and whaddya know, he once again, even with full knowledge of the potential consequences, draws the moustache and gets his comeuppance. The point of the book is this: when we regret one of our actions, we have a considerable amount of distance from the circumstances, and often the truth is that, given the chance, we probably would still do or say everything as we did it then, because all of the tiny contextual elements we cannot even recall now dictated that response.

People love to say that hindsight is 20/20, but the truth is that even hindsight is blurred by our assumptions about the who, what, when, where, why, and how of everything that has happened to us. That book completely changed the way I think about memories and wishing for second chances, and now I'm seeing it warmed over in an hour long Soapnet show.

The ad hype for Being Erica (being as it is on "Soapnet", a station that shamelessly panders to the terminally brainless) promotes it as lighthearted comedy/drama for 30-something women who pine for the carefree-ness of their teenage years rather than the foray into wrenching metaphysical questions that the show actually is. What the writers and producers may not understand is that, in tackling the issue of regrets and going back in time to "do things better," they are tapping into some heavy moral and psychological territory.

*I don't actually watch Soapnet--seriously--it just happens to be part of the cable package I have that also allows me to get useful, academic stations like Discovery and the National Geographic Channel--by the way, if you've never seen that series called "Locked up Abroad," it is pretty fascinating too.

Eve Sedgwick

2009-04-15T20:32:00.000-07:00

Eve Sedgwick passed away on Sunday after battling metastatic breast cancer for several years. Though my connection to her did not extend beyond class discussions of her work or a few citations of her theories of gender and identity politics, I was very saddened to learn about her death. She was 58 (she had been diagnosed in the early 90s).

Eve contributed here and there to a well established discussion thread for women with metastatic cancer. I had been following this discussion for a few years after a close family member died of the disease, and I remember seeing Eve's name pop up and thinking, "The Eve Sedgwick? No way!" But sure enough, it was her; a theorist/woman/patient suddenly made more real and unsettlingly vulnerable.

I never knew Sedgwick personally, but somehow her precence on bcmets made her so much more real to me than the pages of brilliant theory I had buried myself in as a graduate student. She was humble, kind, and encouraging in her comments to the other women on the list, and unless one already knew who she was, they would have never known that this prolific woman had written numerous well respected texts.

Robots and Bionics vs. Zombies and Vampires

2009-04-07T19:31:00.000-07:00

"Priests and cannibals, prehistoric animals
Everybody happy as the dead come home
Big Black Nemesis, parthenogenesis
No one move a muscle as the dead come home"*

I have to admit, I do not understand the apparent obsession with dead people (or undead people) that has manifested itself in the form of popular novel trilogies and movies about vampires and zombies. I'm not saying I'm against this particular segment of popular culture, just that I am under the impression (perhaps woefully uninformed) that vampires and zombies can only do so much before they've played out their usefulness. Plus, they will never be part of reality (and this is where my analysis starts to get really subjective). They don't evolve or really contribute much at all to society, no matter how much theory we use to discuss their relationship to human culture. And because of that, they bore me. Before anyone starts throwing cyber-tomatoes at this post, I should point out that I did watch every episode of Buffy back in the day (my interest petered out with that "Angel" spinoff, though), I read all of Anne Rice's books when I was a teenager, and I actually count "Night of the Living Dead" (the original black and white) as one of my favorite movies because it has the distinction of being the first film that gave me nightmares (plus, the underlying social commentary makes it a classic). But, if I'm honest, I have to admit that I'm really more of an AI person than a vampire/zombie person (I hate to create a dichotomy where there may really not be one, but for some reason it seems like more and more we are called upon to pledge our allegiance to one or more cultish fads and, in doing so, exclude another).

I think what draws me to AI in popular culture and IRL is that, for one thing, the cyborg mythology really isn't a myth any more. Let's face it--"robots" have bridged reality and science fiction for quite some time--but now, it seems that, ironically, though in 1950 imagination could still far exceed what was possible in actual scientific application, we live in an age when imagination (as represented by examples of AI in films) is matched and even informed by actual application (for example, robots perform certain types of surgeries, and one was recently built that can conduct an orchestra, and then there was the infamous Deep Blue chess playing computer). Therefore, I think cyborgs, robots and bionic technologies in all their real or imagined glory are just plain cool. But this is coming from someone whose first favorite television heroine was Jaime Sommers, also known as The Bionic Woman; Who knows? Maybe if she had been "The Zombie Woman" instead, my devotion would go to the undead...

In this clip, Jaime (the perfect embodiment of Haraway's concept that we are all "chimeras" and human/machine hybrids) attempts to defeat a "fembot" while wearing sensible shoes (who knew fembots had Farrah hair?).

(Song lyrics courtesy of Shriekback's 1985 song "Nemesis," which used to play in constant rotation on 94.5 The Edge, a Dallas based alt station that no longer exists)

From Kairos 13.2's "Disputatio" Section

2009-04-01T17:40:00.001-07:00

Dear God, this may be the funniest thing I've seen in a long time. That's all I have to say.

It is "English Downfall" by "theamishaugur," (the full url is http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/13.2/disputatio/theamishaugur/index.html) and here is the brief abstract:

"In a remix of the infamous Hitler meme—taking a scene from the movie, Downfall (2005), and adding subtitles appropriate (in this case) for Kairos readers—theamishauger makes a pointed, humorous (to some) commentary on the status of multimodal composition scholars in English departments during job market season."

More stuff about words (Post #2 concerning books)

2009-03-29T16:12:00.000-07:00

When I was in grad school, I took a course that should have been called "Methods of Torturing Otherwise Sane People by Making them Look Up Things Like when the First Usage of the Word "Potable" Showed up in British Literature," but was instead called "Methods of Research and Bibliography." Oddly, I got really into using resources such as the OED to track down usages of certain words, and some of that fetish remains with me today. I love to find out what biases and prejudices some words have held in society throughout the last century.

Another book I bought (for around 2 cents probably) at the aforementioned bazaar was the (updated, mind you) 1938 Allen's Synonyms and Antonyms from Harper and Brothers. It is, truly, a goldmine of commentary (though it does not seem to intend to be) on the proper usages and meanings of various words in the American lexicon. My favorite section of the book is the brief preface entitled "How Shall I Say It?", which loftily assures me that, first of all, "...the richness of our English vocabulary betokens richness and variety of thought and experience", and secondly, that "Finding the right word builds vocabulary. The articulate man who is discriminating in his use of language has possessed himself of a valuable kind of power. How shall he say it?" God only knows what was to become of the articulate woman, as she was, in 1938, generally not presumed to need to possess herself of the kind of verbal ammunition referred to here. But I digress.

I also like this section because of the list of "chief explanatory terms" that accompany many of the words in the book--these explanatory terms are meant to let one know the subtleties of when/how a word should be used. And this section explains the explanatory terms. Here are a couple of the more snicker-worthy examples:

Obsolete: Abbreviated as obs. This term denotes a word no longer in common use, like horse-car or cotton for succeed.

Yes, indeed--I often need to be reminded that "horse-car" has fallen out of popular usage, as has "moving picture." I know, I know, it was 1938, but that really is funny to me.

rhetorical: This term indicates words which are characteristically used in language artificially or extravagantly elegant, or that specially seeks to convey an extreme or exaggerated effect, as where marmoreal is used for white, wroth for angry.

Well, shut my mouth.

This conception of the use of "rhetorical," though humorous and possibly somewhat offensive by today's standards (at least to rhetoricians), makes sense in context--in 1938, rhetorical education was still, presumably, in the throes of the belles-lettristic tradition, which in many colleges would have reduced the study and practice of rhetoric to mere ornamentation and style, which, in the eyes of many, came down to flowery or deceptive speech.

At any rate, I'll wrap this up with a lighthearted nod to early 80s era Sesame Street's "Sing Your Synonyms."

Pondering parachutes (Post #1 Concerning Books--the actual physical ones you can touch)

2009-03-19T22:55:00.000-07:00

I am a sucker for cheap used books--especially those mysterious old ones you find at flea markets--the ones that make you sneeze when you open them. Recently, I attended a bazaar where all attendees were given a brown paper bag (a rather big one) and told we could fill it up with as much "stuff" as we wanted, and for each stuffed bag, we would only pay $2. I went directly to the book shelf, because, clearly, I gravitate toward that sort of thing rather than the aisles of sentimental junk that everyone is trying to get rid of in hopes it will become your sentimental junk.

One of the things I love about finding books at places like this, where the works are used and have probably been read by more than one person, is discovering the notes people absentmindedly leave in them. In a copy of What Color is Your Parachute, a work I am constantly referred to by other people but have never gotten around to reading (and, really, it seems a little late to be figuring out what color my parachute is, since I'm already pretty firmly entrenched in a career), I found the previous owner's rather interesting ruminations on his/her job history (this is probably writing prompted by one of the book's many exercises focusing on the question, "Who Am I?"). They were written on a series of small notes that had been torn from a pad, and they read thusly:

"Recorded some good music

Finished college--After having left college for a period of 2 1/2 years, I returned to school to earn a degree in Radio, Tv-Film. Lacking the required credits to easily transfer into the new out-of-state school, I returned to my previous school. Working nights, playing music for a living, I earned the credits to help me transfer out of state and earn my degree quickly and with high marks. My degree is from a large, state school, in a very competitive field requiring talent and technical skills."

The rest of the notes look as though the author would have liked to continue the trip down career memory lane, but each one only has a short phrase at the top: "played music for people," "ran a large store," "owned a shop-photo," "took some great pictures," "started my own paper route," "rebuilt a house."

I really wanted to know the rest of the story, and also whether this individual figured out the hue of his/her parachute and lived happily ever after. I even considered writing the rest of the story in order to give myself some closure. It would have gone something like this:

"Eventually, because I discovered my parachute is actually orange and not dark green, as I had originally assumed it was, it became apparent to me that my talents lay in a variety of other areas, such as ventriloquism and rodeo clown(ing?). I have now taken my act on the road, and people from all over pay big bucks to see my show in Vegas."

Instead, all I have is this strange, fragmented, vaguely sad, anonymous "message in a bottle" snapshot of someone's life through the terministic screen of his/her trying to figure out an identity.

What Color Is Your Parachute, despite the inclusion of a disturbing number of "Cathy" cartoons, is actually a pretty interesting read, by the way.

I hate traveling (warning--absolutely no academic content follows)

2009-03-16T15:52:00.000-07:00

Really. I do. What I like least, I suppose, is the flying and the vague nausea and headache that stays with me for a day or two after a long flight (I should preface all this by saying that I flew back to Beaumont from San Francisco yesterday, and thus, I am still in the throes of some jetlagged crankiness). I should actually be grateful that the planes I've been in have never crashed. But that crushing boredom between takeoff and touchdown is what really gets to me. That and the patently offensive in-flight movies--yesterday, it was "The Women," and yes, I am completely embarrassed to say, I shelled out a dollar for the cheap headset (which, I kid you not, fell apart in my hand immediately after it was purchased, forcing me to do some pretty impressive makeshift engineering to get one headphone to work) to watch. "The Women" is one of those movies that is soaked in pathos but, ironically, is also so bad that I ended up hating all of the characters and not caring what happened to them at the end.

I did get some free food, though--a lunch consisting of a microwaved hamburger in a plastic bag (yeah, I know), a "salad" consisting of some room temperature iceberg lettuce and a tube of parmesan cheese dressing (which totally countered any nutritional value the "salad" might have otherwise had), and a mini KitKat. I ate all of it, by the way.

There, I said it. And I know I can't be the only one who abhors the process of travel.

Now I can get back down to the business of some scholarly writing and research...

Update:

OMG! Check out my distant colleague Cheryl Ball's blog post in which she vents about travel: http://www.ceball.com/blog/?p=418

Turns out she has had a similarly (but far worse in that it was even more tedious) dismal experience flying. But much of her post deals with traveling (by train) to and from the exact same conference! What a coincidence that we'd both blog about the same thing--cybertelepathy?

The blog ate my homework...Toward a Theory of Online Education's Marketing Rhetoric

2009-02-28T14:37:00.000-08:00

I am becoming increasingly fascinated with the marketing rhetoric of online education programs, and though this topic will probably span several posts continuing well after 4347/5347 has concluded, this post will be my first attempt at an analysis of, among other things, the uses of amplification and exclusion (i.e. what things are emphasized and what things are left out). I may in fact be getting into some dangerous territory here, so please understand that my views only reflect, well, my views. And before I really launch into this, I want to mention that I have, for the past three long semesters, taught both sophomore literature and advanced composition online through Blackboard, with what I considered excellent results. I did not consider those courses to be qualitatively different in terms of student achievement (though my students did do quite a bit more writing than they would have done in the face to face classes, which I consider a plus). Courses taught solely online can be wonderful, and they can even sometimes allow students to enhance skills that would have been marginalized in a face to face setting. However, my interest here is in advertising strategies, which I often find crass in their reduction of online education into a product rather than a process.

I'll start with the seemingly harmless and amusing "Classinpjs.com"--I could not find the video on YouTube to embed, but if you check out the following url you'll understand the concept: http://classinpjs.com/. The actual commercial being 4-walled right now features a young woman talking about how great online courses are because one can take said courses in his/her pjs, and, really, isn't that just the bee's knees? (She doesn't really say "bee's knees," by the way--that's me ad libbing). That really is the crux of the ad--so here, the advantage of online education boils down to, "It's totally cool because we can stick it to the establishment by being all rebellious and stuff by not dressing up to learn." (As if the "establishment" is not in complete control of the distribution and marketing of online programs anyway.) As has been eloquently stated on several forums discussing this commercial, that really is a pretty weak argument, because students don't dress up to learn anyway. I concur with that observation--especially when I taught at Texas Woman's University, I had many students who would show up to 8and 9 am classes in pj attire. I drew the line, however, at their bringing donuts and coffee with them.

Another more "serious" but no less flawed representation of online learning comes courtesy of Kaplan University. The ad shown on t.v. comments that students will be taught by professors with "real world" experience, although just what that means is left unexplained. This ad has fascinated me for some time due to the obvious dig at the present incarnation of university faculty (people like me), who, according to the ad, must lack "real world" experience because we probably live in our offices and, though we hold advanced degrees (or perhaps because we hold advanced degrees) couldn't tie our shoes without written instructions. The approach is rather flimsy, not simply because of the thinly veiled ad hominem attack, but rather because Kaplan specifically refers to online education as a "product."

Another ad for Kaplan has a prof morphing into a digitized version of himself, delivering a message that literally apologizes for the greivous injustices (though just what these injustices are remains vague) that have been inflicted upon students by face to face education (and in case you don't get the oh so subtle warrant here, it is this: "Tradition is bad":

This commercial shamelessly panders its message to what is being pejoratively termed "Generation Me" by declaring, "Hey, universities need to change to suit your needs rather than the other way around" and stating, "It's your time," a comment that may be temporarily inspiring to some, but when the swelling music fades, they're still left wondering what that means.

The truth is, unless a course truly is weakly designed and doesn't demand much student participation, online education requires quite a bit of effort on the part of the student in terms of time management and drive. And it doesn't take much to see past the smoke and mirrors rhetoric of these marketing techniques to see that they are doing everything possible to eschew those issues.

She's not ugly enough!

2009-02-14T09:25:00.000-08:00

For those of you in 4347/5347 who may be following this blog, note that the following post has no redeeming academic merit whatsoever--you may, in fact, lose IQ points if you read on. (Really--stick to Bolter and his ideas on refashioned dialogues for now.) It is simply a kind of warm-up for me to segue into writing something of more "substance" later on.

I have personally never seen "Ugly Betty", but I know enough about the show to get the gist--a young woman who, by some prefabricated, presumably Western, standard of beauty has been defined as conventionally unattractive (unconventionally attractive?) has a series of misadventures and somehow, even though our star is ugly, mind you, winds up with several friends and love interests. I'm bored thinking about it, because wasn't the ugly duckling dead horse already beaten to smithereens in the 80s with movies like Pretty in Pink and Some Kind of Wonderful? But my point is not really to whine about how the idea behind of the show is not new...

Rather, my point is that someone picked up on the fact that ugly Betty is not ugly at all, and is quite miffed about it. "Ugly Betty," is, in their eyes, quite pulchritudinous after all (look it up, people). That someone is China. See, China has its own version of Ugly Betty, and apparently (here is the one aspect of this post that marginally relates to MultiMedia Media) the web has been taken by storm with young girls angrily shouting (and yes, I think shouting is possible on the web) that the eponymous character is "not ugly enough" and "is an insult to ugly girls everywhere." I agree, as I have always felt that "ugliness" in contemporary cinema or t.v. entertainment was shoved into uncomfortably simplistic categories by people who have no real interest in ugliness at all and are quite loathe and, at best, ill equipped to handle the myriad cultural ramifications the subject brings up. So, here's the breakdown (and note that males seem to be completely exnominated from the whole ugliness dilemma--I mean, where's the companion show, "Hideous Fred?") But I digress.

Here's the thing--"ugliness" for women/girls in Western society and film seems to come down to about four common denominators: glasses, bad clothes, weight, and, sometimes, braces. Note also that three of those four things have nothing at all to do with the actual body of the person--glasses can be removed, braces eventually come off, and one can, apparently through some sort of aggressive intervention and humiliation on national television (think "What Not to Wear"), develop better taste in clothes. Those things are, simply, prosthetic devices to give an illusion of "ugly" that really has more to do with ugliness as physically constructed rather than innate.

There's a great scene in "Not Another Teen Movie" where the token "good looking guy," when faced with the prospect of going out with the token "ugly girl," exclaims, in complete horror, "Janey? I can't go out with her! She's got......glasses! And a...pony tail!" It's one of those great self-referential moments (even though the rest of the film is pretty base in its appeal to a Gen X audience) that kind of encapsulates what I've just claimed.

So, I concur with China, and I would go one step further to say that not only is Ugly Betty not ugly enough, she is not ugly period.

Italics

2009-02-03T09:24:00.000-08:00

this is an italicized phrase

And this is me using my test-in-class page as a springboard for another post. First of all, I am going to use my "invoked" audience of 17 Multimedia Media students for the first part of this post--so, you guys should feel superspecial. I am pretty impressed with the blogging so far (yours, not mine)--the voice, the style, the originality of ideas. Fantastic and entertaining stuff that I actually want to read and that, judging by the comments that are starting to emerge in response to your ideas, others actually want to read too. Whodathunk it? But how is all of this adaptation fo different discourses helpful to an English student? For one thing, being, as we are, in the "late age of print," we may not see certain beloved technologies "die" outright, but we will become more responsible for quickly adapting to engaging in multimedia discourses, the constraints and freedoms of which will be, as they always are, socially constructed. Am I trying to plug some kind of futuristic "All writing will be multimedia writing in five years! Bwahahahaha!" agenda? Not really, but from my observations of what kinds of writing are gaining popularity in the mainstream and in the classroom, blogs, wikis, and web texts are gaining currency in academe and elsewhere--these genres are becoming the norm, right along with their print ancestors. Oh, and just wait until you get into Donna Haraway! If you think Bolter's radical, you'd better fasten your seatbelts :).

Ok, end of message solely intended for 4347/5347 students.

Here's what I really wanted to talk about. If anyone has not yet seen the film Koyannisqatsi (1982), it's a pretty fascinating flick. In a nutshell (from the site that gives credible info about the film and the trilogy):

"KOYAANISQATSI, Reggio's debut as a film director and producer, is the first film of the QATSI trilogy. The title is a Hopi Indian word meaning "life out of balance." Created between 1975 and 1982, the film is an apocalyptic vision of the collision of two different worlds -- urban life and technology versus the environment. The musical score was composed by Philip Glass." (http://www.koyaanisqatsi.org/films/koyaanisqatsi.php)

The interesting thing about this film, to me, is that, although there is not one word spoken in it (it is all a montage of themed scenes of nature, man's impact on nature, and technology), most people have accepted the interpretation that this movie is presenting humanity as a negative force pushing nature to its limits (and I'm not going to deny that there are a few scenes that suggest this idea). True, Koyaanisqatsi means "life out of balance," but is that all bad? Really? I'm too rushed right now to get out my Kate Hayles "Posthuman," but I think some of her theory on chaos would help to rectify the film from the facile view that it is simply saying "Nature=Good, People=Bad, Technology=Worse." I'm just sayin'...

Anyway, see a clip for yourself, if you wish...

This just in! (Or, stuff by semi-experts on language I found this morning)

2009-01-31T06:19:00.000-08:00

Today, thanks to the web, I became a fan of Anne Trubeck's columns, particularly her latest one on the rhetorical/literary functions of the facebook status update, and also learned about the "100 Most Beautiful Words in the English Language". But, before I go on, I need to say this about the latter column--as a "word person," I'm on board with several of these, and use quite a few of them in speech and writing (for example, "obsequious" and "panoply," I cannot live without). Several others, though, I have serious doubts about. For example, years ago, a list of "do nots" came rolling down the WPA email pike: it concerned the linguistic faux pas presenters at a certain national conference should avoid: one of the recommendations was to steer clear of using the word "conflate" in any form because of its overuse and flatness--it had been, in fact, banished to the realm of "just don't go there" in academic discourse, and, by extension, to the list of words one could use to play a game affectionately known as "bullshit bingo"".

Clearly, anyone who calls himself "Dr. Language" must have a sense of humor and irony. But I take offense at the idea that simply because this guy posts a list of words, purporting to offer us the best of the best, we will start using said words and subconsciously thinking to ourselves, "My God, he's right! These are the most lovely words!" Such an assumption is pure madness, as "Dr. Language" is, first of all, no one's cynosure, and this epicurean ailurophile will happily eschew his list. And hey, if his pecadillo is to decree which words out of an entire language are beautiful, that is certainly his right: but, I find his motives umbrageous.

But back to Trubeck's thoughts on the status update--I find her ruminations an excellent springboard for further discussion the whole "medium is the message" debate--and I will not take sides with Burke vs. McLuhan on this one, though I think that what McLuhan observed in the 60s is far more true now (and Burke's criticism is, hence, less relevant), given the myriad intrusions eletronic genres make into our constructions of prose--case in point, the fact that the "prompt" for the status update requires that your name be the first word--such a constraint drives the message in that I need to mold my content to make the subject the doer of the action (unless I wish to subvert that structure rather awkwardly through a passive construction), and it also encourages egocentric writing--not a bad thing per se, but in that genre, *you* (or whoever's name appears to start the update) are always the focus/agent: the star of the show.

One issue Trubeck circumvents in what is really a great informal discussion of social-network mediated discourses, is how all this plays with the canon of memory. When writing was first invented, as Socrates explains to Phaedrus, this technology was suspect--what, oh what, would happen to the sacredness of memory in storing our narratives, speeches, plans, etc? (For a more contemporary contextualization, think of how riled up some get about spell check--i.e. what, oh what, is that horrid little mechanism doing to corrode our spelling skills?) But currently, although I agree with what Bolter contends about the breakout of the visual, we are in a hypertextualized society, in which memory's essence seems to be diminishing as we filter our lives through five, six, seven different media a day that beg for fragmentary, immediate updates deperately trying to gesture to (signify) our reality. We are textualizing our every move, perhaps in order to preserve "memory" through our own terminisic screens so that we have the goods on what really happened/is happening (or are we?). All of this reminds me of E.M. Forster's saying, "How can I tell what I think until I see what I say?"

New on Kairos

2009-01-29T05:56:00.000-08:00

I just noticed two new discussions on the Kairos blog that relate to Multimedia Media--one is the announcement for Matt Barton and Bill Loguidice's new book on vintage video games, and the other is a blurb about Microsoft's new "Word Stickers"--I don't really know how much of a learning aid those would be for someone just learning to type. As platypus matt says, one could find that same information from going through another route.

To whom it may concern...

2009-01-22T19:28:00.000-08:00

This is a sort of "random bullet" post whose purpose is to vent to an audience who will never read it. That intended audience is anyone who has ever written or will ever write a letter of recommendation for an ABD job candidate in the humanities.

Please, for the love of all you might hold sacred, do not open your letter to the search committee with that old chestnut, "This is not going to be the typical letter of recommendation in favor of a potential candidate." Although I know you are sincere in your praise of almost-Dr.-Suzy Twinkletoes, your writing that sentence (or some variation of it) makes me anticipate some actual, radical departure from the typical rec letter, like, say, a link to a YouTube video of you praising the candidate through the medium of interpretive dance. That would be totally cool. Instead, as inevitably happens, your letter does turn out to be the typical rec letter, and I become super disappointed in you and your candidate, because you have led me on.
If possible, avoid damning with faint praise. Or at least avoid damning with faint praise for two single spaced pages--what I mean is, keep the damning brief. (And by "damning with faint praise" I mean tactics such as going on for two paragraphs about how the candidate has really mastered the art of showing up for office hours.) I mean, I'm a rhetorician, and I know the tricks. If you can't write a glowing letter, try to weasel your way out of writing one at all.
I vomit instantly when I hear/read the phrase "best practices"--just an fyi.
If you have not witnessed this person's teaching abilities, don't turn the lack of observation into a red herring--such as, "I have not had the opportunity to witness Mike B. Pretentious's teaching. However, I am sure that, based on...." Um, no--stop right there. Do not pass go--for all you know, the dude could be turning his classes into devil-worshipping workshops (albeit ones that use "best practices"). Assume nothing.
When referring to the candidate's dissertation work, please do not speak of "exploding binaries," "counterhegemonic agendas," and "shifting paradigms." Because, um, although you think what your protege is doing is going to change life as we know it, I've just read 28 other letters that attested to those candidates' plan to shift, explode, and agenda the crud out of the next guy/girl. Maybe you guys should get together and talk and have some big counter-hegemonic tupperware party.

This has been a public service announcement from a concerned rhetorician.

Oh, Colossus, you nut!

2009-01-22T15:37:00.000-08:00

In 1970, "The Forbin Project" emerged as the latest in a slew of technophobic films that, perhaps, considered itself prescient of the inevitable destruction of mankind in a world ruled by technology (i.e. the dominance of the big creepy "supercomputer"). In this clip, Colossus spews his personal philosophy ("man is his own worst enemy", bla bla bla) through a really primitive text-to-speech program. He (and I stress he--we'd probably be pretty hard pressed to locate early cinematic equivalents of the likes of Colossus or HAL that talk through female voices) threatens to annihilate the world with the help of "Guardian," his counterpart, a computer built by the Russians.

I don't think it will surprise anyone to know that this movie does not have a happy ending. Nonetheless, I do find the film fascinating in that it is based on the premise that we imbue our machines with our own will, conscience, and possible bent toward the destructive. Now, in 1970, which was not so long after the introduction of the ENIAC--the first computer that was so big it filled a room (no, seriously, stop laughing!)--people still considered technology to be not only something they could choose whether to interact with--but also something that had a scary potential to undermine human life. So, when this film first came out, though it was probably chilling on some level, its premise was still unrealistic.

However...

Today, as Donna Haraway argues, we are all "cyborgs" in the sense of having a connection (both mental and physical) to myriad technologies, some of which we do not even notice as being a part of us. Furthermore, as Kate Hayles compellingly explains, the aspect of "relationality" between us and our machines makes it more and more likely that they can mimic our thinking and decision making processes; thus, taking into account her theories, we can see Colossus's going rogue not as some sort of terrifying "fluke" or bug in the system, but rather as an actual reflection of his adoption of his human creators' traits.

Embedding a video

2009-01-15T10:06:00.001-08:00

I am going to show students how to embed a video into their posts, like this one:

It's fairly simple.

But while I'm at it, I might as well post an observation on this random YouTube selection I chose to embed. Obama's speech clip illustrates several of the (sometimes paralinguistic) elements of Obama's speaking style (use of voice/tone to convey confidence, emphasis on "we"and "our" to solidify identification with his audience) that contribute to his percieved effectiveness. Still, (and I was truly shocked when I found out that his speech writer is 27 years old), he rattles off a list of binaries in this clip that, if examined closely, indicate just how deeply embedded non-neutral language is in our culture. For example, he makes the point that Americans from diverse walks of life have come together to prove that change is possible: these diverse groups include young/old, white/black/Hispanic/Asian, rich/poor; however, while this list of groups seems fairly obvious, he also include "gay/straight", and "disabled/non-disabled"--and although I am not here to go on a language police rant, I do want to point out that the gay/straight dichotomy has been cited as one that, through the metaphor of heterosexual=straight, gay=bent/crooked, presents an image of gays/lesbians as deviant. Likewise, the disabled/non-disabled dichotomy does something similar in defining a whole person as disabled (or not), rather than a person who has a disability. And yes, I understand that rephrasing those last two binaries would have thrown off the rhetorical flourish of the parallel structure.

Now, one could simply sigh and say, "But don't you get the point of what he's saying?" I absolutely do. It's all about inclusion and collective responsibility in achieving goals: awesome. But at the same time, those phrases, those tiny phrases, still bear some scrutiny--and I wonder just how much a 27 year old is aware of the impact of those seeminlgy infinitesmal phrases when taken in the context of a whole speech--language does, in fact, shape our reality.

Alas, "now is the time for all good rhetoricians to come to the aid of their country..."

Weight, Clothes, and Looks

2009-01-06T19:46:00.000-08:00

By way of more productive procrastination (I really should be finishing up an article draft now--it is in fact due to the editor soon, but I don't wanna) here I go on a half-baked discourse analysis that lazily throws in a few undeveloped theory references so I can feel like I'm doing something scholarly. Ladies, and gentlemen, I give you "Kymaro's New Body Shaper":

I am not an infomercial watcher (is anyone?)--but I was so struck the other day by the opening statement of that program--"Stop suffering everytime you look at yourself in the mirror"--that I had to sit up and take notice. What you have here is not a mere suggestion that your appearance (though surely pleasing as it is now, perhaps just needing a little help) could maybe be improved by this apparatus. No--what we have is a foregone conclusion that you, audience member, whoever you are, are so hideously deviant in some way that you are undoubtedly reduced to tears by the sight of your pathetic self. I ask you--is this really the best way to begin a thirty minute ad in which you hope to convince people (ugly and freakish as you believe they are) to buy something from you?

And in mulling over the unexplored warrant of Kymaro's rhetorically misguided imagineers, I began to feel rather uneasy about programs that have a similar subtext--where the aim is to get people to stop embarrassing themselves, their families, and the general public with what they wear. Consider, for example, a show like "How Do I Look?"--I actually watch this one because I find Finola Hughes far less shrill and abrasive than the duo on "What Not to Wear". In this clip, Finola and the fashion victim's buds verbally shred her wardrobe:

I'm not sure what my problem is with all that--it's not that I necessarily think that people shold not dress in manner that does not fit some system of propriety. For example: women my age just should not wear Hello Kitty anything. But at the same time there's a really Clockwork Orange kind of thing going on in these shows--a sort of "let's foribly re-indoctrinate you into the world of the sane through fashion. And let's do it under the guise of helping you find the 'true' you." And sometimes, the makeover-ees (generally female) rebel, making it clear that they are going to keep on wearing their green corduroy bellbottoms and crocs to work. I applaud them.

Oh, yeah, I forgot about the apathetic theory references that I won't bother to tie into this in any effective reader-based way...ummmm, Foucault and the Panopticon. Discuss :).

Did this actually happen?

2008-12-25T08:22:00.000-08:00

I could have called this post many things, one of which might have been "Early 80s Canadian educational television shows that scarred me for life," but I chose that title because a while back, something made a vague memory resurface of a program we used to watch in fifth grade called "Read All About It."

And I was thinking, did a show that dorky really exist? Didn't it revolve around some pre-adolescent time traveling kids who were always called on to defeat some "evil" nemesis called "Duneedon"? Naturally, I turned to YouTube to verify my hunch, and lo and behold, some gracious person has uploaded clips of seasons 1 and 2 as well as the openings (one of which you can see above--oh, that catchy theme song!) The show wasn't completely insufferable, because each episode was fifteen minutes long, and most of us were more captivated by those kids' accents [i.e. their pronunciations of words like house ("hoase") and about ("aboat")] than the plots.

In its own way, "Read All About It" tried to be "cool" by adding talking, thinking computers, "Otto" and "Theta" (cue pretentious critical theory-soaked references [informed by Hayles and Haraway] to human-machine symbiosis here). But this was back when the coolness of emerging technology lay in its clunky obviousness, not in its drive toward complete invisibility--therefore, our attention was constantly drawn to what one of the computers was "thinking" via its cacophonous print outs or Theta's mechanical voice, which said things like "We...refuse...to...comply...with...your...demands." There was something really Forbin Project about that whole situation (i.e. computers communicating with each other and with humans). This clip (mainly the first three minutes) is exemplary of how the two computers (with their strange loyalty to those annoying kids) exercised their human-like agency to thwart their enemy:

Here's another Canadian gem (an ancient clip of a program called "Bits and Bytes" which is trying to make painfully obvious the innerworkings of computer technology):

Maybe I really miss the days of "Read All About It," because that show represented a time when computers were computers and people were people, and we could all live in our comfortable binaries....nnnaaaahhhh!

"In Oklahoma, Not Arizona, What Does it Matter"...

2008-12-22T13:22:00.000-08:00

When people ask me where I'm from, I have an annoying tendency to change my story a bit based on whatever version of the ever elusive "(T)ruth I happen to be in the mood to adhere to. And the fact that I feel the need to launch into an explanation of my geographically challenged upbringing rather than simply saying "I'm from _____." is probably worth further investigation by a competent therapist. But I digress...

In a conversation the other day with several other people at a post-graduation party, out of boredom perhaps, we did the whole "Where are you from?" round robin (which was followed by the much more fun "What's your favorite movie?" discussion). Someone said, "You're from here, right?" And I replied, "Yes, we were here until I was seven and then we moved to the Dallas area, and I was there for about twenty years." And then someone else said, definitively, "I don't count anything before the age of thirteen." Then the person who had originally asked the question mentioned she had grown up in about three different states. All of this led me to the conclusion that the question of where one is "from" is one of the most confusing questions there is.

We all come up with some reasonable explanation for why we do or do not "count" certain places we have lived as having a claim on us, as if we wish to deny those places any part in forming our identities. For example, even though I will, to avoid further discussion, tell people I'm from Beaumont when asked, the truth is much trickier. Here's the cold hard math on where I've lived:

Age 0-6 weeks--Dallas
Age 6 weeks--7 years--Hampshire Fannett, Beaumont
Age 7-8--Dallas
Age 8-9--Richardson
Age 9-19--Garland
Age 19-21--Denton
Age 21-22--Stephenville
Age 23-27--Denton
Age--27-28--Garland
Age--29-?--Beaumont

And here's my interpretation of those facts...

Yes, perhaps it is ludicrous to claim that one is from a place if she only lived there the first sevel years of her life. BUT--no place has ever had a hold on my soul the way Beaumont did. No place ever beat me up the way Beaumont did. No place ever (and could ever in the future) give me the incredible formative experiences Beaumont did. For example: I fed alligators at the Boondocks here. I learned to swim here. I learned to read here. I learned to write here, for God's sake. My entire family (both sides) is from Beaumont. My parents met here as teenagers. So there's always been a sense of Beaumont being the root of who I am, no matter where else I went.

Strangely, from the time we moved to Dallas until the time I moved back to southeast Texas in 2006, I hated Beaumont. My forward thinking mother trained me to tell people I was from Dallas pretty much from the time we arrived there. Beaumont was supposed to be tucked away into a distant memory where, well, where we keep all our memories of economically depressed refinery towns we don't want to admit we've lived in. And so it was--I pretended I had never heard of Beaumont until 2005, when I saw a job posting at Lamar University, and suddenly then I began to feel I could tolerate the endless humidity and rain in exchange for employment.

No matter where else I lived (and Garland is clearly where I spent most of my time from age 9-29), I was simply "there"--not really a part of the fabric of the place, just kind of a resident who was formed, in personality and spirit, by another home. And I can tell now when I go back to Dallas or Garland that the cities quitely closed up around me and went on about their business after I left, just as Beaumont opened up to let me back in.

So, in concluding, I'm not sure what the point of this post is, other than to illustrate that for me, the question of where I'm from is not simple at all. And, in order to tie this into my profession, I am wondering what kind of interesting expository essay assignment could come from this kind of self-centered, navel-gazing rumination.

Oh, and thanks to Three Dog Night for the post title, because I couldn't think of one on my own.

My bike, dogs, and me...

2008-12-10T19:30:00.000-08:00

I am an avid bike rider. However, I am very old school. I mean really old school. I ride a baby blue beach cruiser with coaster brakes (thank you very much), and I ride it around the neighborhood all the time. So much so that people have started to recognize me as that woman who's always pedaling down the street. In fact, recently I ran into the university provost (not while on my bike--on campus), and he recognized me as, again, the woman who is always riding around the neighborhood (I didn't know he lived close by, but now maybe I should take better care not to wear unprofessional sweats while riding--I wonder if Ann Taylor makes any suits that double as sportswear?). He then reminisced about his own beach cruiser, stating that my bike looks just like one he had when he was twelve. I wasn't sure whether that was supposed to be a compliment, a simple observation, or something that should make me feel like a total dweeb (in a sort of "nobody's ridden those kinds of bikes on the street since 1956! Get with the program!" kind of way), so I just laughed good naturedly.

Anyway, I love my bike. It's retro, and it's pretty. But I don't ride it because it's retro or because I'm trying to start some kind trend, because believe me, if it ain't caught in the last four years, it ain't happenin'. I ride it because when you ride a plain beach cruiser you are really riding. There's no mediation of different speeds to "help" you avoid the strain of going up a hill--it's just you and the simple mechanics of the bike. I never caught onto dealing with ten-speeds anyway--I had one when I was twelve, with the upside down handle bars and all that, but I proceeded to ride it as a regular bicycle. I guess I'll never be a convert to the ten speed, which is rather odd because I really am a fan of mechanical progress and ingenuity.

I didn't even get the hang of riding a bike until I was 8. There were several awkward years between age 3 (when it's still marginally ok to ride a trike) and 8 (when training wheels can destroy your social life) where I spent most of my time frustrated that I just couldn't "get it". Getting the right balance was just too hard. But when I did finally graduate to a two-wheeler, it was like magic, and I've been hooked ever since.

But, one of the main points of this blog post is to talk about the bizarre relationship that the neighborhood dogs, my bike, and I share. Let me put it this way: dogs hate people riding beach cruisers in their territory. I have been chased (and caught!) by a chihuahua, who attached him/herself to my pantleg with his/her teeth, run down by at least two rogue weenie-dogs, and given what my mom would call "mean-eyes" by most of the other K-9's around these parts. Little dogs seem to have the most contempt for my bike and I, and they also possess the most ironic confidence that they are going to somehow not come out the worse for wear if they happen to get tangled up in the spokes. Then there are the dogs who threaten me from their yards—I’m pretty sure they’ve been trained by their masters not to leave the premises, so their m.o. is to, when they see me coming by, run to the edge of the yard, barking what I’m sure are epithets in doggie language at the top of their lungs. They amuse me—it’s kind of like they’re saying, “Boy, if I could catch up to you I’d make you wish you were never born! But mommy and daddy won’t let me leave the yard…” I actually do love dogs. But this particular widespread anti-bicycle pathology of theirs bears some real psychological analysis.

Cats on the other hand, are blasé. They couldn’t care less if I rode through the neighborhood in a tanker truck blaring threats to paintball the houses and t.p. all the trees. I guess that’s because they don’t feel “owned” by anyone particular, so they don’t feel the need to protect anyone’s property. In fact, in their egotistical little minds, they are probably convinced that I, my bike, and the air I breathe are part of their world, in which they begrudgingly allow me to make an idiot of myself by riding the same routes day after day, never branching out to seek different scenery.

Squirrels…God, they’re another story entirely. But I’ll end here for now.

I Am the Only Rhetorician in the Village...Right?

2008-12-04T15:17:00.000-08:00

In his excellent book Composition-Rhetoric: Backgrounds, Theory, Pedagogy, which offers a compelling history of my profession, Bob Connors offers the following delectable tidbit:

"Rhetoric, which had been dormant within composition since the 1890s, began to make a reappearance after 1944, when the first communications courses were taught at the University of Iowa. Communications courses quickly spread to other schools, bringing together scholars from English and speech departments for the first time since the tragic split between the disciplines that occured in 1914, teaching all four of the "communications skills"--reading, writing, speaking and listening. Rhetoric, which had been in the keeping of speech departments during the twentieth century, was a vital part of these courses, and many English teachers learned for the first time what might be some of the alternatives to mechanical correctness" (160).

What I am interested in here is the somewhat bizarre fallout in the aftermath of the apparently ongoing attempt to "heal" the split between speech/comm and rhetoric/writing (and I think the dichotomies are a big part of the problem-i.e. why should public speaking have been the domain of rhetorical instruction, while writing instruction was under the vague heading of "English" and left to languish in, quite literally, silence...).

What this means is the following: although rhetoricians-to-be may undergo quite similar training at our respective institutions (most of us have our PhD years split up into a mish-mash study of classical, applied, and contemporary rhetorical theory), we may wind up in vastly different departments--some of us in "Communications," some of us in "English," some us in "Cultural Studies," and on and on. The world of academe, quite simply, doesn't exactly know what to do with us.

I would like to "anecdotalize" the results of this 1914 split and their weirdo ramifications through a recent experience at my university.

I was asked to co-direct a student's McNair project this summer. Prior to asking two of her profs to co-direct it, my student came to me, agonizing over whether to ask me or this other instructor (she didn't say who it was). Both of us, she claimed, were great at giving feedback and understood her research interests. Ultimately, in the interests of a compromise, she asked both of us to split the duties. Both I and this other mystery prof agreed, separately. I emailed mystery prof, who, as it turns out, is a faculty member in the Communications department, to say something along the lines of, "hey, I hear ur gonna help direct Susan's project. awesome! lol. let's do lunch. ttyl." [No--not in those words, but you get the point.] So, we met at the campus dining hall one Friday for a friendly chat.

Come to find out, mystery prof is a rhetorician. She is a Burkean, like me. She has taught courses in political rhetoric and persuasion (!!!). She is "descended" from a dissertation director who studied under Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, whom I had just seen give an excellent keynote a month before on women's presidential rhetorics (rhetoricians tend to talk about our rhetoric/composition mentors in terms of "lineage" metaphors, and, though alluding to a kind of familial relationship with one's major profs may seem strange to those on the "outside," it makes sense to some of us). The similarities were hysterical, and I realized that, finally, I had a "colleague" in the sense of meeting another person who can discuss rhetorical "stuff" with the same arsenal of cool vocabulary words (like "anaphora") that I have. She just happens to be in a different department. Hmmm...

Here's the kicker--not surprisingly, this other faculty member mainly teaches public speaking for her first-year courses [she is, after all, in the "Communications" department across campus], while I teach primarily writing for mine [being, as I am, a denizen of the "English" department]. The speech/writing dichotomy lives on, folks, and I dare not go into any more tangents on this issue than this post should contain.

Even more "amusing" is that I truly believed when I took my position that I was the only rhetorician at LU and that I was, in fact, the first this college had seen in at least a decade and a half. I was special!

How interesting--I went two years at this institution without knowing there was another one of us rhetoric crazies lurking about. How did that happen? It happened because of the "tragic split" [which obviously still exists one some level] that resulted in rhetorically trained people being kind of funneled into positions that make use of their talents as needed--rhetoric does, after all, cover a tremendously vast number of areas. It branches out, for example, into the social sciences (and it would not surprise me to find that quite a few of us are happily and productively employed in soc. departments somewhere out there).

The result of finding a rhetoric colleague when you have deluded yourself into believing you are "big rhetorician on campus" is kind of like finding out you have a sibling...like that moment in "The Parent Trap" where Hayley Mills realizes she has unknowingly spent half her summer in a camp with, well, Hayley Mills (but without the resultant cat fights that made that film so much fun to watch--fun except for the part where they sing that god-awful duet).

But what really interests me about this case is that both of us work at the same institution, and even this one institution cannot quite decide exactly which department rhetoric people fit in. Insofar as we are all basically "communications" faculty in a sense, perhaps we should discuss these things. But more intriguingly, perhaps the strange dispersal of rhetoric faculty to different departments will continue, until every department has at least one resident rhetorician who is plotting with the other rhetoricians to take over the world. Naaahhh...I suppose a more likely, revolutionary step would be for us to even find out that the others exist on our own campuses. Baby steps...

Oh, if you don't get the post title, here's a clue (God love "Little Britain"):

Like Five Beagles in a Hurricane* (an Ike memoir)

2008-11-29T18:04:00.000-08:00

In lieu of a cathartic free-write on my experience of evacuating and experiencing a hurricane, I have decided to dabble in a kind of hybrid genre--the hurricane memoir blog post. I have actually been pre-writing this thing since I was in traffic going through Lumberton the day before Ike hit--I just didn't have that urgent sense of my ideas "bubbling to the surface," as Peter Elbow might say, until now, months after the event. I do not write this in the hopes that it will be entertaining to an academic reader (all the better, since I actually have no readers)--rather, I am writing it because I have had an uneasy feeling of being unable to fully commit myself to any of my other projects because this "thing" was swirling around in my consciousness, waiting to be written. Therefore, I remember...

...sighing after getting off the phone with my dad (the day before Ike), who urged me to get out of Bum-out in a hurry if I wanted to make it through Lumberton in an hour and avoid the really heavy traffic...

...me and a grad student whose thesis I was engrossed in directing exchanging lighthearted emails poking fun at the impending "doom," and me promising to get him comments through email that day unless I really had to leave (oh, the naivete)...

...packing up Sissy, who, after Gustav only 2 weeks before, had caught wise to the evacuation rigmarole and had to be stuffed into her pet taxi...

...her sad yowling all the way from Beaumont to Huntsville, except for a few blissful moments when she was napping...

...my aunt and uncle offering to let me stay with them in Point Blank, and me gladly leaving the Huntsville Econo-Lodge to ride out the storm with my family...

...getting to Point Blank, to find that I would be experiencing Ike with my aunt and uncle, my cousin and her husband, his niece and her parents and grandparents (and a few others--there were 13 of us when all was said and done)...all of us in the living room...sleeping on air mattresses...

...noticing that the weather had that warm, calm kind of "hope you enjoy this because all hell is about to break loose" pre-hurricane aura about it...

...me walking by myself down to the lake where my uncle keeps his boat docked, and noticing what I thought was a huge fake apricot colored water snake, coiled, sleeping around the rim of a bucket, and me, because I thought it was fake, bending over it to take a closer look...

...my uncle (in his seventies) coming down through the back yard with a 410 in one hand and a 357 in the other (muttering something about not being a very good shot, and me skittering off the premises to avoid becoming an accidental target), planning to do away with said snake when later on someone in the group alerted him to the fact that this snake was now swimming around in its aforementioned bucket...

...night approaching, and all of us settling down on our strategially placed mattresses...the weather channel going at full volume...me wishing someone would turn it down, as we were powerless to do anything except worry about potential damage to our towns and homes...

...someone making a joke about us writing our social security numbers on our arms and wondering out loud whether we could all fit in the bathroom, or better yet, in the basement, where my cousin and her husband had put their five beagles (adorable pups)...everyone laughing at that...

..later on, when the wind kicked loudly up to 90 mph and the countless pine trees surrounding the house started blowing sideways, and the power went out, and all was complete darkness and silence except for that eerie howling, someone asking again if we could all fit into the basement...and no one laughing this time...

...several of the older people saying things like "Oh Dear God," which I actually thought was something people only said in movies... me realizing I had not evacuated far enough but powerless to do anything now...

...hearing the weather channel reporter say definitively: "Crystal Beach is gone," which saddened me greatly, as my best childhood memories were of Crystal beach...seeing the Balinese Room in splinters (by the way, if you don't know what that is, there is actually a ZZ Top song about the Balinese)...

...once, when we had all gone to sleep, a terrible howling came from the basement that made us all sit upright--it was the beagles, and something (no one knew what) had set them off...

...all of us scattering to safer places over the next few days (me to Dallas, some others to Woodville, others who knows where) after it became apparent that no, we could not simply return home within a couple of days...

...me being happy that a week later my dad (who had evacuated with my grandparents to Marshall and stayed in his RV while they stayed with my grandmother's cousin) joined me in Dallas after he got tired of his diet of beanie-weenies and cheetos at the RV park, which had no power and no grocery stores open close by...

...me wondering what form this disjointed experience would take when I finally had the time to put it into words...

As a postscript, I'd like to point out that in my original draft of this post, I had written 3/4 of this story as a rambling essay. For some unknown reason, the text disappeared as I was trying to save it. Instead of scrapping the idea, I decided to redo the story as a series of cumulative sentences (the closest I will ever get to writing poetry). I'd like to kind of indirectly credit rhet/comp guru Dick Graves with this idea, as I had recently attended his fantastic NCTE panel on teaching the cumulative sentence before I wrote this.

*If you don't get the Tanya Tucker reference from the post title, shame on you!

Academics behaving "badly" (regarding profanity)

2008-11-29T14:27:00.000-08:00

I am fascinated by those instances in which scholars "break" with the norms of academic prose and interject surprising images or words into their texts--the more highly theoretical the work is otherwise, the more interesting the rhetorical effect of a well placed "damn" or some such "improper" utterance is. I am, in fact, in the process of collecting these examples as I run across them, hoping to make some kind of conclusion about their place in academic discourse (a genre that itself is beset by conflicting definitions--it is safe to say, I think, that those of us who are pushing against the boundaries of academic writing are, in this posthuman age, almost unsure at this point where those boundaries lie any more). The following example comes from Donna Haraway, in a chapter from Simians, Cyborgs, and Women entitled "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective," in which she explores feminist objectivity--this quote is taken from a compelling section on "vision" as a metaphor:

"And like the god-trick, this eye fucks the world to make techno-monsters" (189).

For some background, Haraway is a biologist whose interests also intersect with the humanities--primarily what we in the humanities might term "medium studies"--and her work that I am most familiar with is that on cyborg feminisms. Her prose is rich/dense, and I marvel at just how much revision she must have gone through to consistently produce sentences such as this:

"In our efforts to climb the greased pole leading to a usable doctrine of objectvity, I and most other feminists of the objectivity debates have alternatively, even simultaneously, held onto both ends of the dichotomy, which Harding describes in terms of successor science projects versus postmodern accounts of difference and I have sketched in this chapter as radical constructivism versus feminist critical empiricism" (188).

In order to "get" Haraway, you need a good deal of critical theory behind you (i.e. a basic understanding of Marx, Derrida, and Lacan is essential). Point being, if you spend a morning reading Haraway (as I did today), and go on to pick up Kenneth Burke later (as I also did), reading Burke will feel like zipping through a Dick and Jane novel. (And Burke is also fascinatingly, relentlessly metadiscursive, which is a topic for another post.) But this is not to say that she is dense in an off-putting way--quite the contrary--her work operates on such a high level theoretically that I constantly feel I have to stretch to fully understand her and effectively apply her to my own work (a journey that is well worth the effort).

But what does this all have to do with the eye that "fucks the world to make techno-monsters"? Precisely this: Haraway depends on a keen rhetorical sense in order to make her multiple perspectives and positions converge in a text that is understandable, even enlightening--she made a choice to use the "f" word (no, not "feminism"-the other one) in the context of vision as a metaphor for the masculinist "gaze" that lords over much technological innovation. She simply had no other way to convey this fact, and pushed the boundaries of depersonalized academic prose a little further.

Women and Narratives of Illness

2008-08-08T20:03:00.001-07:00

One of the things I admire about women is their ability to see humor in the most hideous situations and write that humor into engaging narratives that can almost make you forget you are reading about brain surgery/chemo therapy/insert your own worst medical fear here kind of stuff. At this point, since cyberspace is no longer in its adolescence, humor almost becomes a tool of solidarity for many women who participate in online communities that create a space for sharing medical information and experiences with treatments and procedures (for example, there is an asynchronous discussion board solely for women with stage 4 breast cancer, quite worthy of its own post, but not today).

I hate to sound sexist (no, really, I do), but, very often, when men face pain or get sick, they whine. (Please note--my esteemed opinion on this matter comes from my observations of, well, basically one guy, and it was my dad.) And whining is just not very interesting discourse. Hence, you do not see many men writing books like Karen Duffy's Model Patient: My Life as an Incurable Wise-Ass.

Don't get me wrong--I do not buy into the damaging "if you just have a good attitude and see the humor in everything your condition will improve" Pollyanna rhetoric--I actually find that idea repellant. Women have a right to have and express their rage, fears, and frustrations with illness--I just happen to enjoy the obvious strength that is shown when they channel those emotions into prose that does anything but make an audience see them as victims of the caprices of either their bodies or modern medicine (or both).

What made me think of all this today was a random book I came across in the public library this morning. It was too hot to do anything but read, so I trekked downtown and pulled about six books off the shelf, none of which had anything to do with my current teaching or research interests. One in particular, Never Apologize, Always Explain: How One Woman Regained Her Self-Respect After an Ileostomy and Made a New Life for Herself, literally made me laugh out loud in the library, which is rather rare. Here is the small passage that did it for me--it concerns the author's (Patricia Stout Skilken, who was pretty young at the time of her operation) preparation for surgery--the anesthesia is beginning to take effect, and she labors to clarify what she should expect after the procedure:

'"I asked," Isn't it a little messy when you go to the bathroom?'" Don't say shit, I thought. It sounds so immature and I don't want to sound immature, I want to sound sarcastic because sarcasm sounds tough and in control, and if I am in control I can beat this bastard."
'"No, you will wear a plastic pouch taped over the new opening, and your small bowel will empty into the pouch.'"

The hell with maturity.

'"WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?'"

The way that she narrates how she turned on a dime to disrupt the expected passive, patient politeness is brilliant. It's the raw honesty--the universality, I suppose, of that reaction that's so fantastic. It's kind of like breaking through the wall to question, and demand an answer for, the absurdity of what she's about to go through. And believe me, this narrative is filled with whining of her own and the recounting of some unbelievably histrionic scenes (one of which involves Skilken throwing a food tray at a cranky nurse). And I actually ended up wanting her to just get a grip several times throughout my reading--she was, afterall, throughout this whole mess, surrounded by a massive support system that included both of her parents, her husband, and her children--but what ultimately kept me glued to the book was the fact that it was beyond entertaining.

Clarification about "blurting"

2008-08-04T19:02:00.000-07:00

In my last post, I declared that I had created the genre of "airport blurting," a type of freewriting done in notepads by weary travelers who are waiting to board their planes (its usefulness in the genre foodchain is something akin to that of napkin doodling). I feel, however, compelled to give Peter Elbow some credit for the "blurting" part--as he is the first person I ever knew who used the term "blurt" in reference to writing--I love that, because I love anything that seeks to collapse the distance between writing and speaking. The following is a fantastic point Elbow makes about how much more clarity we can achieve if we just write it like we say it--we are (I think) so much more honest when we speak than when we write:

“When writers have to produce brief abstracts for long journal articles, they usually come up with paroxysms of nominalization, embedding, and lexical density. Yet most abstracts could be just as short if they were written in the blunt blurted language the writer would use over a beer if you said, “Damn it, what is your article actually saying?” Bar-stool colloquialisms could easily be edited out, and the result would be correct literate writing--and clear and brief.” (This excerpt is taken from a manuscript Elbow is working on, hence there is no correct MLA citation).

So, the concept of freewriting as blurting is quite useful if we can bring ourselves to admit that (gasp!) blurting, the spoken version, itself is quite useful in helping us to get to the core of our ideas. The point is that writing alone is often not enough to lead to good writing--speech, in many cases, is crucial in achieving elegant, blunt, witty, clear, razor-sharp, and/or perspicacious prose.

Writing all this has made me want to revisit Bakhtin and see how his writings on speech genres could further explicate the spectrum of spoken/written discourses.

Weakest blog post ever (apologies in advance)

2008-07-22T10:05:00.000-07:00

A couple of months ago, I attended a conference in Seattle (RSA for all of you rhetoric folks in the know). It was fabulous, and I really enjoyed the city. For the trip home, for reasons I still do not understand, unless I was interested in doing some sort of autoethnographic study about enduring sleep deprivation in various airports, I scheduled flights that would have me either waiting at an airport or in the air from 8 pm at night until 2 pm the following day. So, during those hours, I periodically journalled in a cheapo notepad I had bought (for $15) at one of those airport newsstands. Here are some of the results of that inspirational burst of unbridled freewriting energy (and keep in mind that I was literally doing this to keep myself awake and also dozing in and out of consciousness while I wrote):

What I guess is funny about this, and the reason I felt it to be worth retyping, is the increasing sense of desperate fatigue and annoyance with the people around me.

5/27/08

We begin boarding in 30 minutes. (and then a bunch of bla bla bla about how much I enjoyed dining at the Cheesecake Factory and the hot fudge sundae I inhaled without shame)

All the little shops and restaurants at the airport are closing now--I just want to get out of here. Everyone looks so tired. I tried to find out how close we are to Alaska--many people seem to be flying there from Seattle. I wonder if it's a place worth seeing.

(and then a bunch of pontificating about a book I am considering writing a proposal for)

6 minutes until my restroom break and then we board--hooray! (at this point I had taken to scheduling breaks for myself, trying to convince myself they were like mini field trips down the hall)

We'll get to Dallas early and I'll have 4 hours to bum around and scrounge up some breakfast. We board at 10:20. I'm so happy to be on my way back home.

(more pontificating about my book project, which was really starting to sound fabulous in the midst of the crushing boredom)

This [the airport] is a good place to people watch. You see people kissing each other goodbye, and your imagination can't help filling in a story there, bickering with each other, and sometimes just running their chubby bodies down the aisle to catch their planes.

6:30 am

I have almost 4 hours till my plane boards. This day is killing me! But at least I'm in Big D now. And it's a short hop to Houston.

I don't think I've ever really "killed" time before like I am right now. I am waiting these minutes out with a maniacal determination--why don't they have few little beds in airports? Or at least blankets and pillows? They know we're tired. And I'm starting to feel cranky too. But I have to maintain my sanity so I can greet my dad.

I'll find some coffee and something to eat at 7. Then before I know it, it'll be 8.

I drank some weirdo "passion fruit" tea at the Cheesecake Factory yesterday--it smelled like perfume and tasted like it too until I dumped in some Sweet'N'Low. Scary stuff.

Too tired to think any more, but I've enjoyed freewriting.

8:20 am

Why do all these stupid first class people get to get on first? And what makes them first class? Money? I just wish I could lay down--this flight is only a little over an hour.

Board in 80 minutes

I'll tell you one thing--I'm about sick to death of airport restrooms. I've been travelling since a little before midnight and I am finally on the last leg of the trip. I need some food and some comfy covers to snuggle/hide under for a while. Come to think of it, I have a whole summer to hide. Woohoo! This will be a good year.

Board in 35 minutes

I'm homesick for Dallas. I need a week there. Just took a pic of myself with the cell phone--bleccchhh! I look like a toad--with bags under her eyes.

My peeps will be p.o.'d that I took not a single picture while in Seattle. I'm sorry, but when I'm having fun, I'm concentrating on having fun, and not on going to great lengths to remediate that fun through a camera lens so that you can tell that I was, indeed, having fun. I guess I have a very Garfield perspective about some aspects of life. [clarification--Garfield the cat is my hero, and thus, when I notice myself adopting a particularly cynical or sarcastic view of something, I have to give him some credit--we can discuss the disturbing pathology of someone who admires a cartoon character later...]

[And now for the last gem, which was apropos of absolutely zip and was probably written on the plane ride back to Bum-out from Houston...]

There is nothing grosser than bar food. Really. Most of it is fried chunks of who-knows-what--maybe cheese--maybe meat--but what do the patrons care? It's a BAR--it's not about having a good meal--it's about getting tanked.

[And for clarification on that last "blurt"--I almost never go to bars unless I feel it is some kind of social obligation--this brief rant referred to one such outing in which several acquantances ordered an "appetizer sampler". "Appetizer Sampler" translated basically means "a bunch of stuff cooked/fried within an inch of its life and thrown on a plate--we're not even sure what all of it is, so out of pure laziness and to eschew identifying it, we're calling it a "sampler.'" I was all agog at this cornucopia of nastiness--it was like a train wreck on a platter, and no, I did not partake.]

So there you have it: airport blurting, a completely useless genre, which I have invented.

Second Blog Post...(on audience addressed and blogs)

2008-07-19T15:24:00.000-07:00

I have been working on this second blog post since December 1, 2006, so prepare to be dazzled by my brilliance.

Not quite. In reality, what happened was this; I created this blog with much excitement a year and a half ago with every intention of dropping by every day to wax rhetorical/linguistic/pedagogical. After a few weeks, the new semester began, I became bogged down with teaching and research, and once I actually sat down to write another post, I realized I had lost my blog. I literally misplaced it in the great chasm of the Internet (thank you, Steve, for reminding me to capitalize that, even though I know you are not reading this), having forgotten I created it through blogspot. But a week ago I decided to hunt it down, and lo and behold, here it is, intact.

If a blogger makes a post in cyberspace and no one is around to read it, does it make a sound? Yes, I realize that I have mangled one of the great philosophical questions concerning the presence of an audience, but, well, you know what I mean. The question of blogs and their audiences (and how the audience shapes the genre) is one that interests me greatly. I am considering having my Fall 2008 advanced students (perhaps even my first years) create a blog for the purpose of recording various structured freewrites and research logs. Many of them, no doubt, will have already had experience with blogging on myspace--a *good* thing, in my opinion. They will likely come in without the knowledge that one can create a very engaging academic blog that allows them to collaborate productively with peers, and so this little rhetorical adventure will (1) allow them to expand their knowledge of a genre they are well aware of, thereby allowing them learn by association, and (2) let them write for a real audience--an audience addressed (me, their immediate peers in the class, and whatever cyber-couch-potato-riffraff who randomly searches blogs and happens to find theirs) rather than invoked.

So, back to whether this post makes a "sound" (or perhaps "resonates" might be a more appropriate word) if no one reads it. In fact, is this even a blog if no one reads my posts? I don't know yet. I'm sure that over the coming months I will mention to someone that I, too, have a blog, and they will peruse it and perhaps even tell someone else, and eventually I will gain some small readership of likeminded rhetoric dorks who enjoy pondering things like this to no end. But for right now, it feels kind of cozy posting in what may be the last tiny undiscovered corner of the net.

First Blog Post

2006-11-30T19:05:00.000-08:00

This is the first blog post I have ever written.

I teach writing. For a living. I teach students to write about literature. I teach them to write about writing. I teach them to write about what other writing teachers have written about writing. I tell my students in general terms how technology (especially blogs (!)) will change their writing and the writing of their students in the future. And yet here I am, having never dabbled in the genre myself. I have, however, read quite a few blogs--some of these I have kept up with for the last couple of years.

I think I had a prejudice against blogs--something about the way they meld public and private lives and thoughts just struck me as strange and maybe even a little exhibitionistic. Are they journals? (I don't really think so, although on the surface they seem like diaries dressed up a bit and splashed across the internet.) And why do these people have such faith that what they think--about the war, about some book they read, about how cute their new puppy is--is something anyone would care about? Their contents usually read like extremely carefully constructed prose. Prose with a theme--posts generally have a point--a witty observation or critique of society or politics.

This is much more difficult than I thought. I have no theme today, and I do not feel like artificially inventing one. However, I will say this--this blog is going to explore the elements of my life that I have immersed myself in for the last nine years--rhetoric, feminism, technology, composition, and pedagogy.