Saturday, February 28, 2004
The Metro Times comes up with Hipster Economics in order to explain the overlap of Granholm's Cool Cities plan and the CreateDetroit Collective. Much of CreateDetroit's plan to revitalize the city through the arts (rather than franchise expansion as the current Mayor has opted for) reminds me of Ulmer's emerAgency project. The emphasis for development is placed on the arts, rather than corporate franchising. Thus, mood becomes central to this endeavor since mood is a major part of any arts (or Humanities-based) project. Focusing on cool, therefore, could present a good move towards re-imagining the city (if the move is not based on only the cliché definition of the word). When the cliché meaning becomes the only available definition, reactions like this (as described in the Time’s article) are inevitable (and justified):
When Granholm donned a pair of dark sunglasses while launching the Cool Cities initiative, the subsequent photographic evidence had Detroit’s “cool” contingent groaning and rolling their eyes, as if their dads had turned their baseball caps around and tried to adopt a rap-star vernacular.
This is where they need to call me. Just as Ulmer's emerAgency designs and teaches a way to deal with community problems through the mystory, I can provide a way to use the rhetoric of cool. How? Well, one step might be to re-imagine the city not as a spatial area of visitation, commerce, and living, but as a series of sampled moments, ideas, and beliefs. Imagine an architecture based on cool (like Rowe and Koetter's Collage City almost does) where sampling provides the logic of implementation rather than unified vision or genius inspiration (i.e. Frank Lloyd Wright).
Posted by jrice @ 02:55 PM EST [Link]
Thursday, February 26, 2004
Happy Thursday.
Notes from Detroit:
Posted by jrice @ 06:41 PM EST [Link]
Wednesday, February 25, 2004
As promised, another usage of celebritacy:
I feel an article coming on here...
Posted by jrice @ 09:35 AM EST [Link]
Tuesday, February 24, 2004
Left on my windshield while I was downtown the other day having coffee at the Cafe de Troit:
It's another example of celebritacy - even if I have problems with the celebrity chosen to convey a message.
Maybe later I'll scan in my James Brown "Put Some Soul Back Into Your Shabbos" brochure a student gave me several years ago. Just for contrast.
Posted by jrice @ 03:41 PM EST [Link]
Friday, February 20, 2004
Friday Zen
Posted by jrice @ 02:40 PM EST [Link]
Wednesday, February 18, 2004
Celebritacy.
Thanks to a link found at Cup Of Chica (to the left), I came across the American Library Association using celebrities to promote literacy.
Excellent. But following the way the rhetoric of cool perceives the role of celebrity within literacy (borrowed heavily from Greil Marcus' Dead Elvis), I have to say that it's not enough to just have celebrities asking kids to read. Print literacy really isn't the issue (or entirely the issue) anymore. Digital culture changes the rules of what "literacy" consists of. What the ALA does demonstrate, though, is the need to understand and acquire celebritacy. Celebritacy is the usage of celebrity for making meaning. Celebritacy is a direct result of technology and mass-reproduction (see Benjamin and Warhol).
The Dead Elvis assignment I used to teach is a good example of celebritacy. How does Elvis become a grammar, a rhetoric, a way to critique, a way to understand various cultural issues? Marcus does a good job with Elvis; students generalize from the Marcus example and choose another figure to work with. Because celebrity imagery (textual and visual) appears in a variety of contexts and applications, collage becomes an appropriate medium for demonstrating celebritacy. Celebritacy is best performed through the collage.
So, these ALA ads need to be redone.
We don't want a poster of Weird Al. We want a collage of various usages of Weird Al. And we want it done by the students who are being asked to acquire celebritacy.
Posted by jrice @ 03:43 PM EST [Link]
Folks can't get enough of cool, can they?
Schlotzsky's Deli's website is cooldeli.com. And the company has started the "Cool Cloud" program, the plan to set up wireless in its restaurants.
"Each Schlotzsky's restaurant that offers free Wi-Fi is marked by a "Cool Cloud" decal inspired by the international war-chalking symbol for free wireless "
If anyone out there, for some odd reason, eats at one of these places, can you pick me up a sticker? I'd love to have that for my next book.
Posted by jrice @ 01:46 PM EST [Link]
Monday, February 16, 2004
I'm reading ahead for next week's class - the chapter on the Open University in As if Learning Mattered - and an email from Kennedy Western University arrives in my inbox. Kennedy Western is the American response to the Open University. Only, where Miller describes how the OU failed and why, schools like Kennedy Western find ideas for profit: too easy access, education for the already educated who are looking for more upward mobility, lack of innovation regarding technology usage on students' part.
There's also stuff here for an idea I have - and may present on at WPA if I apply - on the "self service university." I got the idea from a university memo left in my box last week which described the university's goals of providing more self service for students (until when? instructors are gone?). Kennedy Western is one kind of self service university, a McDonald's for higher education. "No Class Room Attendance Required." Of course not. The drive through is always open.
Posted by jrice @ 11:56 AM EST [Link]
Friday, February 13, 2004
I no longer believe in my previous pick of Louisville to win it all at the Big Dance. They are falling almost as fast as Mizzou fell. I have to now go with either Stanford (after the Arizona win, who can argue against Stanford as a team of destiny?) or Duke. Kentucky is strong, but not deep. St. Joseph's will suffer from not losing a game during the season. My Gators? I wish. But they aren't working together, are inconsistent, and Dreijer still hasn't lived up to the promise. Other potential "surprises":
Arizona
UConn (but they really aren't consistent either)
Mississippi State (don't laugh. This could be a final four team)
and:
UDM? Er....no.
Posted by jrice @ 02:53 PM EST [Link]
Thursday, February 12, 2004
The companion website to my textbook, which went live before I got to see any changes Longman may have made. Oh well. The author is indeed dead, as I often learn in academic publishing.
I also had a little Elvis/James Brown collage I was going to insert as background image in the css box. But I needed permission, and these are images just floating around. Who to ask? I had no clue.
Posted by jrice @ 09:33 AM EST [Link]
Monday, February 9, 2004
Random web moments found in no particular order today:
Posted by jrice @ 07:49 PM EST [Link]
Monday morning, and faculty email is down yet again.
Few people are as addicted to email as I am.
Posted by jrice @ 09:48 AM EST [Link]
Sunday, February 8, 2004
I felt obligated to quote this line from Shaviro's blog:
"Me, I'd much rather witness the grotesque spectacle of Heidegger and Hannah Arendt fucking than read another essay by either of them."
And while I know I'm not reading this the way he may have intended (seems he's just pointing to a boredom involved in reading Heidegger again), I'm more interested in how it suggests a non-literary approach to reading and writing, an anti-hermeneutics approach to rhetoric, which has something to do with an essay I started writing this weekend about the throwback jersey, nostalgia, and the university.
Posted by jrice @ 06:51 PM EST [Link]
Whenever I want to write about commercials, I find it difficult to do the research. Unless I sit at a VCR and try to tape them when they come on, I usually can't find the commercials I want to see again. This was a problem when I was working on the textbook, and it's a problem now as I try to hunt down Nike's "Rucker Park" ad.
What I don't understand is why the companies are so reluctant to archive their commercials. They want constant exposure to their products, no? What better way to do so than to archive the ads. There's a strange paradox here; millions of dollars paid out to produce ads which are shown a few times then hidden away forever.
Posted by jrice @ 12:50 PM EST [Link]
Friday, February 6, 2004
To be in this weekend's New York Times Magazine: "The Virus Underground". It's an interesting essay on hackers who create viruses as intellectual work. Another fine example of Burroughs' insight into media, technology, popular culture, and writing. “Word begets image and image is virus” (Nova Express 48). "This virus released upon the world would infect the entire population and turn them into our replicas" (Nova Express49). I'm reminded of Vitanza and Ulmer here (parasitic rhetorics). But let's face it. The virus already has been unleashed. We're not just seeing 15 year old computer wizes release viruses. We, as Burroughs knew in the early '60s, already are infected with the viruses of advertising, politics, desire, writing, technology, etc. Image is virus. A simple textbook like Seeing & Writing makes that clear (even if inadvertently).
School is virus. The SAT is virus. But these kids are doing something different, correct? The SAT is a virus, but it, as far as I see, does not reflect intellectual work. Its infection is more akin to Burroughs' metaphor of junk. These kids write viruses as a way to participate in knowledge production. They are infected the computer world with a new kind of knowledge. A dangerous knowledge, yes. But more dangerous than the virus of "purpose," which infects thousands of composition textbooks? What does it mean to teach writing as virus (doesn't Vitanza write about this?). Wasn't that Burroughs' lesson about the virus? Not to stop it, but produce it? To infect complacency? To infect meaning?
Posted by jrice @ 07:33 PM EST [Link]
Another Friday. In the words of Marvin Gaye, what's going on?
Posted by jrice @ 02:02 PM EST [Link]
Wednesday, February 4, 2004
My textbook is finally here. Got my copies today. Geez. It is small. Small guy, small book. I have book envy!
So, folks. Go out and order tons of copies! And no desk copies for you either! Make me a rich compositionist.
Ha!
If I’m lucky, enough people will use it so that I can do an updated edition. But if that day never comes (which is likely), I have ideas for a new textbook on invention and digital writing.
Posted by jrice @ 03:46 PM EST [Link]
Tuesday, February 3, 2004
Harper's lists topics The Princeton Review states students should not write about. On Boing Boing, there's a bit of commentary that the list excludes "virtually every subject of moment, depth or verve that I can think of, guaranteeing that the examples in these tests will be utterly devoid of any interest-grabbing content." Yes. But more troublesome is the idea of standardized writing assessment in general. Writing about rock concerts or drugs is not the issue because the general prescriptive to write about this issues often produces trite or cliche writing. The real issues involve rhetoric and context. Why write about these issues or any issue, for that matter? And how should I write about an issue? These are relevant questions for my 409 class and our reading of Graff. Many of us recognize the limitations of standardized testing or topic assignments, yet we see their wide-scale usage still very much alive. I love to rant about placement exams, but any kind of standard, non-contexual, non-inventive method of writing ("Write about the dangers of smoking") is problematic. Not really a radical position on my part, yet I see this kind of instruction everywhere, in The Princeton Review advice, and in the composition classroom.
Posted by jrice @ 03:55 PM EST [Link]
Monday, February 2, 2004
Just started reading Strange Foods, and I am already inspired to create a course around it for my Fall first year writing course. The idea is that we read this book, figure out what Hopkins is doing rhetorically in order to make our expectations of food change, and students work on stranging their own topic or interest. What Hopkins does to our expectations of food, do for some other area of interest. Make the everyday, the acceptable, the "natural," strange.
We'll call this kind of writing stranging.
Posted by jrice @ 10:38 PM EST [Link]
A bit of a food afternoon.
Stopped by Book Beat in Oak Park where I found a copy of Hopkins' Strange Foods. I've been wanting to read this book ever since I saw Tony Bourdain on Cook's Tour meet up with Hopkins in Bangkok for a meal of everything you would never think of eating. I can’t wait to read about the rotten fish pate.
Then it was a quick trip next door to the Bread Basket deli for a huge Reuben. This is a sandwich piled high. I could barely get it down and I have big appetite for a little guy. While I waited for carry out, the folks behind the counter got into a nice debate over whether or not Janet Jackson really planned to show her boob last night on TV. Everyone's talking about Janet, but what about the streaker? That's getting no press at all. Has streaking lost its interest or pizzazz?
Posted by jrice @ 03:16 PM EST [Link]
