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03/25/2005 Archived Entry: "Dylan at the CCCCs"

Dyaln at the CCCCs

The note attached to Dylan's "A Song to Woody" reads:
"Written by Bob Dylan in Mills Bar on Bleeker Street in New York City on the 14th day of February, for Woody Guthrie."

I find that note re-attached in two places: San Francisco (location of this year's CCCC) and Detroit. Using the principles of juxtaposition and found art (the avant-garde anticipates new media), I see that the note for San Francisco also reads: "RSA CONFERENCE 2005, SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., February 14, 2005."
This RSA conference ("the world's leading information security event") overlaps with the Rhetoric Society of America (RSA) in my report from the CCCCs. The usual complaint I hear (and others hear as well) is that every year rhetoric is missing from most of the CCCC presentations. When I report from the CCCCs, I use the Wood(y) metaphor to draw out an un-noticed connected.
"The Forest of Rhetoric" is the name attributed to Silva Rhetoricae, a BYU website which provides background and definitions on rhetoric. Connecting the forest to rhetorical expression, then, is an already codified act made electric through my inclusion of the bar (Woody Guthrie meets Bob Dylan in/via the bar). I expand this premise through the notion of the forest via W. G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, which concludes with a photograph of the author standing in a forest, in front of a tree. Sebald's book is about autobiography and place (what he terms "the mystery"). "I feel a bond unites me with these trees," he notes. That bond, in digital culture, might be understood as the over-emphasized bond with paper (all writing exists on paper). But I have a hard time believing that point as something noteworthy to learn from Sebald, for by the very end of the book, he engages in a series of temporal juxtapositions, all of which center on the date April 13. This anticipation of hip hop pedagogy interests me. I want to speculate that Sebald's bond is less with the physical tree and more with the metaphor of the forest and rhetorical expression (the mystery). While hypertext has often been opposed to the concept of the tree organizational scheme (in favor of the mis-matched notion of Deleuze’s rhizome), there is still a connection worth considering, one Silva Rhetoricae does when it states that in a forest "one can easily become lost." That sense of lostness is what I'm looking for...and here is maybe where Weinberger’s "trees" and leaves" attribute of tagging comes into play. The tag is not about referentiality, but getting lost in names. Being lost is a rhetorical gesture of not finding a place - San Francisco? CCCCs? Detroit? I hear Dylan singing at the CCCCs, "Now, little boy lost, he takes himself so
seriously." The seriousness of the event, of the "work" accomplished, of the papers given....is that just another way of being lost?
The mystery Sebald draws attention to (mystery as writing) is the overlap of autobiography and place; of tagging which as which. This mystery (obviously) borrows heavily from the mystory. But the inclusion of folksonome makes me consider how I am (to quote Barthes) the referent of every image. It’s not just that my stories (or areas of discourse) overlap, as the mystory suggests. It is that I am the referent of every image I project through folksonomes. The bar is the measurement (the height?) the “fitting” (or as Ulmer notes, attunement) I digitally play through to understand all this better (and, of course, I am still trying to do just that; this is all rough thinking). “Dylan at the CCCCs” is really “Rice in Detroit.” And what does that mean? Mystery, man. Mystery. I’ll end “Dylan at the CCCCs” (for now - or until I get some better ideas). And head off to my own bar, the WAB (misnamed) for some real work.

Posted by Matt @ 03/26/2005 12:52 PM EST