Thursday, April 29, 2004
Leftovers
Posted by jrice @ 05:53 PM EST [Link]
Posted by jrice @ 10:00 AM EST [Link]
Tuesday, April 27, 2004
Tuesday Zen:
Posted by jrice @ 08:48 AM EST [Link]
Monday, April 26, 2004
For some reason, I’m always bothered by much of the meta talk regarding weblogs that circulates on weblogs. I’m reminded of an AOR radio station’s mantra: LESS TALK MORE ROCK. Let’s have less talk about weblogs, and more blogging. Brush off the cob webs, get to thinking, theorizing, commenting, ridiculing, etc. In short, more writing. Maybe because I don't engage in meta talk, lots of "academic" blogs don't link to me (hey, I have a PhD! I'm academic! I'm a WPA!)
Because what’s missing from much of the meta talk is the fact that people are writing and connecting their writing in all kinds of ways (he says, as he makes a meta gesture himself). Complaints I often hear around campus (our students don’t read/write) are turned on their head when we see the kinds of writing circulating around the economy of expression called the Web. Not everyone’s there yet, but many are; many we don’t realize are our the students in first year writing sitting there bored because of some textbook or uninformed instructor asking them to write about “a controversial issue” or their favorite shirt. Take it to the Web. There you’ll find the bizarre ideas and beliefs many of us hold linked together in Shaviro’s imagined connected world (Sci-fi? Life-fi as well). There you will create something to write about.
Why write? What pushes thousands to the Web (via the homepage or the blog)? What must comp do to get on board? Not what it’s currently doing, that’s for sure.
Exhibit A: Typical weblog assignment in first year writing course:
Find several blogs of interest to you. Do a rhetorical analysis of the blogs for your essay.
Wha? Wha? To paraphrase Woody Allen in Manhattan, rhetorical analysis is one thing; actually writing to the Web is another.
The assignment might be rethought in any number of ways. For ejemplo:
Start a blog which explores throughout the semester your favorite fetishes. Interconnect your writing with other blogs, similar or distinct, to what you are writing about. Find connections in places you’d least expect them. Make connections to force rhetorical situations and power.
Why not? That, folks, is writing.
Posted by jrice @ 10:41 AM EST [Link]
Sunday, April 25, 2004
Posted by jrice @ 11:51 AM EST [Link]
Friday, April 23, 2004
How about a talking board pedagogy? Used mostly by teachers to give grades (oh, great ouija, should it be A or F?), this practice can easily be made into a writing assigment.
A Breton-influenced idea, but one which bases itself less on chance and more on William Gibson's idea that voodoo is central to electronic writing, talking board pedagogy can actually be done the night before (sorry, Nancy Sommers and everything I have preached to date). What should my essay be about? Let the letters walk....
Posted by jrice @ 01:38 PM EST [Link]
Wednesday, April 21, 2004
Freezope's service sure gives you a lot. You can also set up your own Squish Dot through it. All of this has (which as you see is nothing yet) has taken up all my free time today.
Posted by jrice @ 04:38 PM EST [Link]
I've started a Yellow Dog Zwiki courteously of the fine folks at Freezope. I know almost nothing about Zope other than it looks pretty powerful and has the potential for serious interactive work. I discovered Zwiki through The Hive. Now I just need to figure it out, how to customize, and what exactly I'm going to do with this Zwiki for future work. Ideas, as always, are welcome.
Posted by jrice @ 10:19 AM EST [Link]
Tuesday, April 20, 2004
I used to think I didn't want an iPod. Do I really need to walk around with music playing in my ears? Will I really be able to drown out my gym's awful pre-programmed selections? I sleep on planes; what do I need a $250 snazzy walkman for (not that I ever used the walkman I once owned)? This player, however, looks really cool (found at gizmodo). I have no idea what it costs because the company makes you fill out a personal form first to find out. Very odd marketing technique. Viral? Not really. Just in your face we will spam you for life if you even ask how much our product is.
Despite my reservations, sometimes I do want to butt up against the street and public sounds I encounter with my own private library of breakbeats, Dylan, James Brown, Funkadelic, The Stones, Jimmy Smith, Madlib, and, of course, the new DJ Spooky (from out of the book). I don't care about iTunes or any other online store. But I do like creating the mix, entering the mix, living the mix. 20 gigs would let me do that just fine.
But I ain't spending $300 or $400 to do any of this.
Posted by jrice @ 02:13 PM EST [Link]
Monday, April 19, 2004
Started to redo my regular homepage. Maybe I'll redo the blog too!
Eh. Maybe not.
Posted by jrice @ 08:41 PM EST [Link]
Saturday, April 17, 2004
Looking to buy a house is an odd experience. Sometimes you enter and the owners are sitting there, in their chairs, looking sad and despondent (please buy our home). Other times, the home is empty of people, but it feels like a ghost is present. You look over the pictures on the wall: children since grown, war memories, cheesy art work, a diploma from a school you never heard of. What kind of food do these people eat? Why on earth did they pick this carpet? Did they really use this oddly shaped bathroom? What is that smell? What did this street look like in 1948 when the home was first built? What were they thinking of when they put up that paneling? What kind of books do they read? What crisis happened here? What joy? Who mourned here? Who did things that they would never admit in public? Thomas Edison imagined the phonograph as a way to capture voices from the past (ghost voices) and play them back (see Lisa Gitelman’s wonderful book). What voices or cries or laughter is trapped in the air here? If we could hear it all, would we run away screaming?
Posted by jrice @ 01:52 PM EST [Link]
Thursday, April 15, 2004
Usually, I'm asked about Alan Liu when I talk about my work. So every now and then I venture over to UC Santa Barbara to see what he's up to (no doubt he is not venturing over here to see what I am up to). One of Liu's courses begins with the statement that it will deal with the information economy through (among other things), our "sense of culture (the culture of 'cool,' it has been called)." What does Liu mean when he describes "our culture" as cool? Based on what he is asking students to do, he can't mean what I mean.
Term papers, exams, and lectures are not central to cool. If Liu uses cool to mean the interconnected, juxtaposed, remixed, dub world of information delivery, production, and storage, then why is he using print based logic to structure his course? Imagine the students in this course being told what cool does to information but never asked to use cool to construct information. And since this course comes with discussion sessions (taught by a TA, I assume), I imagine Liu doing a great deal of lecturing, a very non-digital (or cool) way of working. Another good example of Liu's that I often use is his usage of the list to create information networks - even though the list, as Jack Goody notes, is the product of print culture.
This is an excellent example of the gaps we find today between digital work an the univeristy. The university (represented here by Liu) is fascinated with digital culture. But it wants to work with digital culture using the tools invented in print (like the exam or midterm). The university still struggles to make the next necessary step in rethinking its apparatus.
Posted by jrice @ 09:39 AM EST [Link]
Wednesday, April 14, 2004
I just found out about Amazon's new search engine A9. Why the 9?
The first thing I did, like any good narcissist, is type my name in. The results. Different than Google? Not really. I feel like Alan Berliner in his wonderful documentary The Sweetest Sound. Why do we want to see our names in other places, on the Web, in print, on bodies, etc.? A new search engine! Where am I!!!! I'm like the Steve Martin character in The Jerk (hey, jde, don't call me a "jerk" now, ok?) when he realizes that the new phonebooks are out. "I am somebody," he declares upon seeing his name in the listings.
Posted by jrice @ 05:39 PM EST [Link]
Tuesday, April 13, 2004
Listening to the new Madlib disc, Madvillain. Fantastic. This is the model of the remix. After hearing the DJ Spooky disc which comes with his book, then listening to this, I am hearing the world mixed and remixed again and again. New composition modes are being created in music, advertising, TV, and the Web and the discipline needs to pay attention fast.
Posted by jrice @ 12:40 PM EST [Link]
Monday, April 12, 2004
Paul Miller's Rhythm Science arrived today. I open it up and read on the first page:
Make the link between the names people make up, and the image resolves. The game face moves from version to version. Whether you're logging in under a new name, or you're a DJ trying out a new persona, the logic is an extension rather than a negation.
So far, this resonates with a lot of what I'm writing about when I speak of funkcomp or celebritacy. Alter egos/naming is a central part of digital rhetoric. Not just for taking on a new name (like in the MOO where gender switching by name is celebrated), but for using new personalities/alter egos to create new forms of discourse. Often, the name and the action juxtapose (Cut Chemist/Kool Moe Dee/Busta Rhymes). Funkcomp adopts the George Clinton model and asks writers to first create alter egos on their way to constructing What the... projects. But the possibilities extend further when we rethink the whole notion of identity and move away from (or at the least add to) gender, race, class. Instead, we integrate media into this mix.
Posted by jrice @ 08:09 PM EST [Link]
Beers I'd like to try:
Three Floyds Behemoth Barleywine
Three Floyds Dark Lord Russian Imperial Stout
Full Sail Old Boardhead Barleywine
Victory Old Horizontal
Free State Old Backus Barleywine
DuClaw Devils Milk
Two Brothers Bare Tree Weiss Wine
Stone Old Guardian
Dogfish Head 90 Minute IPA
Dogfish Head Olde School Barleywine
Dogfish Head World Wide Stout 2001/2003
Posted by jrice @ 12:33 PM EST [Link]
Sunday, April 11, 2004
"Charting the Tarantino Universe". A nice rhetorical breakdown of some of Tarantino's major usages of allusion in Kill Bill and the soon to be released Kill Bill 2. Constructing a network of references and allusions, the films make a solid case for the power of new media rhetorical possibilities, all of which can be performed in print, but in film (or on the Web) function differently due to image and juxtaposition techniques. This is a solid example of how the network works when we bring various works together in a mix/remix method. Asking students (or ourselves) to remix the culture, we identify tropes and figures whose power to affect changes from text to text, depending on how we place and modify the signifiers (see Barthes, too, on this point). Michael Jarrett is doing a nice piece on Elvis and Goddard that tackles this idea for our collection New Media/New Methods. I would like to write a textbook on mixing, a rhetoric that teaches students to remix and mix texts as new media writing practice. For starters, I might include material on the Kill Bill films and ask students not to write about how the remix works, but to take the models as instructions for constructing their own mixes. Hey Bedford! Interested?
Posted by jrice @ 07:38 AM EST [Link]
Saturday, April 10, 2004
Saturday celebrity fetish:
Dylan:
Embrace your celebrity fetish. Post 'em on your own blogs!
Posted by jrice @ 06:34 PM EST [Link]
Friday, April 9, 2004
A flyer handed to me on the streets of San Antonio during CCCC:
Posted by jrice @ 07:47 PM EST [Link]
The Subservient Chicken. Try typing in "bad words" and see what he does.
The BKlounge is up to something weird here. Boing Boing shows how to get the chicken to do the dirty stuff. But why did BK film this stuff in the first place? How does it sell food? And whose apartment is that anyway?
Posted by jrice @ 10:27 AM EST [Link]
Thursday, April 8, 2004
Thursday Zen:
Seriously. It should be a good collection. I've seen some great stuff in Ctheory these last few years.
Posted by jrice @ 07:15 AM EST [Link]
Tuesday, April 6, 2004
Found this link over at Byron's site: George Pullman at GSU has his own homegrown blogging system, which looks like it runs on php. In an article I have forthcoming in the WPA journal, I talk about the need for programs to develop their own software, technology packages, etc. so that we are not dependent on managed software (and thus managed by the software companies regarding our intellectual work). This seems to me to be a good example of that process occurring.
Of course, it's not easy getting others on board when you want to go homegrown. Here at UDM, there is complete allegiance to Blackboard despite the product's problems (down every other week) or limitations. Along with technological shifts (what we use), ideological shifts must occur as well (how we think). The campus must find value in using products not produced by vendors (which is a very difficult task to achieve - and one I discovered in recent discussions about our digital portfolio initiatives), and, of course, the students must find value in putting ideas online via a blog or some other means of technology. The second part is extremely difficult when students have been told that either their ideas have little meaning (which I have seen some instructors do implicitly or explicitly) or when students have found no value in the work they do for the university (WHERE IS YOUR TOPIC SENTENCE) and therefore see no reason to write in general. Then there is the overall question of technology which must be integrated throughout the academic experience and not just limited to a loony professor like myself who shows interest in these matters. Otherwise, technology equals novelty and students find little long term importance in retaining interest or knowledge.
Posted by jrice @ 08:20 AM EST [Link]
Monday, April 5, 2004
Sprite Remix. What makes Sprite so relevant to the rhetoric of cool is not, as Frank would argue, its reliance on teenage habits or language. Instead, it has borrowed an entirely new media rhetoric upon which to organize itself. Note this excerpt from the article:
"The ReMix idea came out of Sprite's weekly talks with ''teenagers and young people'' about the drink and ''society and popular culture,'' Carroll said. Sprite has for some years courted hip-hop artists and fans, seeing the music as a kind of lingua franca of youth culture. But last year, Sprite's share of the carbonated soft-drink market fell slightly, partly because of competition from newcomers like Sierra Mist. So Sprite tuned into its teen feedback crew's interest in musical remixing. Taking a familiar song and ''adding a different and unique spin to it,'' as Carroll put it, sounded like a useful notion in a novelty-thirsty cultural moment. Sprite envisioned a soft drink that would riff off the familiar lemon-lime flavor and cultivate loyalty not to a consistent taste but to a consistent idea about taste."
The logic of the remix has made its way into consumer culture - we know that. But what we haven't yet identified is how to integrate that logic into the university (what I wrote about in my ctheory article). It took hundreds of years before the university completely adopted the logic of print as an organizing principle, and only in the late 1800s did the composition program evolve out of this logic. We can imagine assignments and pedagogy based on the remix ("adding a different and unique spin" to previously constructed arguments, writings, images, etc.). But what about the entire composition curriculum? How would a remix composition program function? What would it look like? How would students become remixologists instead of "precise" and "identifiable" figures (products of topic sentences and linear argument)?
Posted by jrice @ 10:16 AM EST [Link]
Sunday, April 4, 2004
Sunday Zen:
Cathy. Always yelling that girl.
Posted by jrice @ 11:39 AM EST [Link]
Saturday, April 3, 2004
Detroit blogs I found off of Whatevs. I like to keep the Detroit feeling going all around....
coax me
craig's list - detroit
create detroit
deckie holmes
detroit artists market
detroit blog
detroit free press
detroit news
detroit sports rag
the furnace
ghostly int'l
liz copeland
matthew tobey
metro times
michigan daily
motorcity rocks
motorcity rocks dish
the prime ministers
the real scoop
rob's blog
ron runs the city
television solar system
tom gage's tigers blog
unapologetics
wdet
wwkad?
Posted by jrice @ 01:14 PM EST [Link]
Posted by jrice @ 10:41 AM EST [Link]
Friday, April 2, 2004
Jenny is a fantastic writer. When I see her work, I want to teach a class in digital writing where students produce video essays. I would use this as an example of excellent work.
Posted by jrice @ 12:40 PM EST [Link]
Thursday, April 1, 2004
Posted by jrice @ 11:17 AM EST [Link]
Early morning email:
From: EVABREESE@wmconnect.com
Subject: Looking for Jeff Rice
Date: Thu, 1 Apr 2004 10:27:47 EST
To: riceje@udmercy.edu
Full Headers
Undecoded Letter
Sir,
Did you live in Iceland in 1973? Do you have at least two brothers, Ray and Steven Rice?
Posted by jrice @ 11:10 AM EST [Link]
