My Archives: June 2004
Wednesday, June 30, 2004
The jerks at UDM are now pulling my email next week. Jesus H. You think that they could leave it until my new email at Wayne is set up? Nope. Don't let anyone fool you: the Jesuits are not nice people. Anything for revenge. This is just one tiny thing compared to the other crap they've been pulling. Don't take a job at UDM and don't send your kids there. Not worth it.
In the meantime, if you try and reach me and can't, you can always get me at ydog at ydog.net.
Other news: My article “The 1963 Composition Revolution Will Not Be Televised, Computed, or Demonstrated by any Other Means of Technology" has been accepted at Composition Studies and might be out sometime next year.
Posted by jrice @ 10:31 AM EST [Link]
Tuesday, June 29, 2004
Via a Edbauer citation, read Bill Brown's "Thing Theory" today, actually, right after reading through a found 1999 piece by Francis Davis on Bob Dylan. The two in juxtaposition work well regarding material rhetoric.
If thing theory sounds like an oxymoron, then, it may not be because things reside in some balmy elsewhere beyond theory but because they lie both at hand and somewhere outside the theoretical field, beyond a certain limit, as a recognizable yet illegible remainder or as the entifiable that is unspecifiable. Things lie beyond the grid of intelligibility the way mere things lie outside the grid of museal exhibition, outside the order of objects. If this is why things appear in the name of relief from ideas (what's encountered as opposed to what's thought), it is also why the Thing becomes the most compelling name for that enigma that can only be encircled and which the object (by its presence) necessarily negates.Things pose a great deal not just for popular culture like Bob Dylan songs (quick aside): from "Highway 61 Revisited" - "I never engaged in this kind of thing before
But yes I think it can be very easily done" and
"I got forty red white and blue shoe strings
And a thousand telephones that don't ring
Do you know where I can get rid of these things."Things also comprise the Web in a Benjamin Arcades sort of way - a gallery of material objects linked to in complex assemblages, a network of fragmented moments, concepts, images, and "things." The topic sentence, too, is based on a thing - a reference to something specific thus marking the project we identify as literacy - but it's something else. It's a forced thing. A thing that isn't there and then considered, but artificially constructed out of an assignment's imagination, and not the writer's. But the digital thing – what I like to call the “whatever” – is based on elusiveness, like Barthes’ punctum, or Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man”:
Now you see this one-eyed midget
Shouting the word "NOW"
And you say, "For what reason?"
And he says, "How?"
And you say, "What does this mean?"
And he screams back, "You're a cow
Give me some milk
Or else go home"
To teach thing theory, as I understand it, is to construct what Brown calls “methodological fetishism” – an understanding of the relationship between objects and subjects, between rhetoric and the thing (like in The Fantastic Four - what drives Ben Grimm; which is the real Ben Grimm?). This kind of rhetoric feels very suitable to the Web where fetishized relationships are the norm.
Posted by jrice @ 01:08 PM EST [Link]
Monday, June 28, 2004
Seems the Chronicle's every other week contributor (not his real name) Thomas Benton has run out of things to say. Grad school is a cult? Oye. Now we have reached hyperbole overdrive. It's no cult, and neither is it the dreadful drudgery experience so many Chronicle pieces portray. These kinds of pieces do one good job: they remove agency from the students and put all the blame in the system. The system is messed up for sure. But students have agency; they can speak their minds, do their work (and do it more or less on time without complaining that they don't have time), find a more suitable profession that matches their skills if they don't like grad school, find advisors who will respect their work and not make them do the advisor's project, do better homework before they head off to grad school (where to go, who to study with, what to professionalize in), etc. Too many of these kinds of essays paint an inaccurate, sweeping generalization of the humanities graduate school experience that may reflect some experiences, but don’t reflect all. And in the end, we get a cartoon vision of graduate school and the results of acquiring a PhD - one not unlike the hyperbole which surrounded the Invisible Adjunct's weblog, it’s demise, and all the follow up "I'm leaving academia look at me ain't I brave and grand" speeches which appeared quickly on other blogs in that circle.
Posted by jrice @ 09:34 AM EST [Link]
Sunday, June 27, 2004
Getting accused of being mean on TechRhet the other day reminds of me of how pedagogy and personality get intertwined. We grow used to the image of Paulo Freire-nice guy saving the underclass or Peter Elbow using touchy feeling tactics to get the best out of young writers (or what others have called the feminization of composition studies), but I'm more attracted to non-nice models: Bear Bryant and Bobby Knight.
These guys aren't really mean per se, but tough. And out of their toughness emerges serious concern for the well being of their players. Just because Bryant pushed guys to exhaustion doesn't mean he wasn't on their side. He was. But he knew how easily people give up or perform mediocre work (chalk that up also to my army experience and 25 mile hikes into the desert - you never know your true limits). Yeah Knight's got the temper problem (I'm not going to throw a chair in class!), but outside of that, same thing. He won three titles because he's a good teacher - even if he's tough.
So I'm into Bear Bryant pedagogy over Elbow "write what you feel."
That's not being mean. That's being "coach."
Got a problem with that?Posted by jrice @ 12:32 PM EST [Link]
Thursday, June 24, 2004
When we write - we share our ideas out here in the blogosphere.
So as I jump around and rework ideas/organization, I construct a chapter around imagery. Imagery is important to cool for a number of reasons (can’t have electronic writing without images, eh?) - but mostly it stems from Robert Farris Thompson's 1963 observations repeated in The Flash of the Spirit that cool is a Yoruban practice which is expressed through colors, weaving, sculpture, and wood carving.
The point is generalized to the more contemporary question of what has come to be called "visual rhetoric" - a popular term more recently emphasized in the title of a Bedford St. Martin's sourcebook for teachers. It's become trendy to throw around this word. But in the narrative of composition's rebirth in 1963, the visual already exists in rhetorical production. It just goes unrecognized. We’re getting to “visual rhetoric” way to late in the game for ideological reasons (for how we have imagined our history).
Cool is a visual practice, as Farris Thompson makes clear. But we also see other moments in '63 centered around the visual - from McLuhan's questioning of alphabetic literacy to the many 1963 advertisements in education journals for video recorders and projectors to Ivan Sutherland's invention of Sketchpad, a pre-Photoshop tool (the first of its kind actually. His dissertation is about Sketchpad. Go read it!).
So all kinds of visual stuff is going on and composition misses out. Research in Written Composition poses 24 questions for the future of research into writing, and not one deals with the visual. Yet, ETV is being used in thousands of schools and film is making serious moves to disrupt linear narrative (Braddock et al dismiss film and TV as unimportant). When this text gets quoted throughout the years as influential (Young and so many others) see what the result is? The visual gets left out..
The consequences can be felt in how we imagine writing instruction today and how we visualize student writers. That Research in Written Composition is only about student writers (reducing students and their work to variables) and not about writers is an important point because it narrows disciplinary focus to only student production (which creates a tautology). How could (and can) composition understand the rhetoric of new media when it is working only to understand the rhetoric of student writing?
So we can't imagine (visualize) a student as a cool writer under the conditions I am laying out because what I'm describing is not a print-oriented actualization of a writer (the topos for cool - popular) but rather a choral description of a media-being (to highlight Burroughs' 1963 acknowledgement that we are media-beings).
Posted by jrice @ 04:02 PM EST [Link]
Wednesday, June 23, 2004
Maybe file this in the "not that anybody really cares" department:
One of the problems I've encountered in writing (and consequently publishing) The Rhetoric of Cool is organization. The original organization of the book divided chapters into those 1963 moments I draw upon in order to create the rhetoric of cool, moments which come from literature, film, cultural studies, music, and technology. All are areas (with maybe the exception of music) important to English Studies. But as a few publishers have told me: that kind of text is difficult to market. Make it more composition-oriented, how the rhetoric of cool informs composition of a new kind of practice.
So that's the new task. My thinking now is to organize around rhetorical moves cool creates: chora, juxtaposition, non-linearity, commutation, and imagery, and problematize these gestures for the teaching of writing. Of course, I'll throw in some pedagogy to compliment the theory - but I'm hoping that a more general node to the textbook I wrote (which has all the assignments) will satisfy the desire for making too much practice visible.
But even within all of this I see problems which I cannot solve (and I will be forced to ignore). For, if chora, for instance, is so vital (since I compose using three distinct meanings of cool from 1963) then chora also challenges the very nature of organization, no? It is not a place holder (topos) but an open container (for want of a better metaphor) which allows for movement. As Ulmer states, chora is in "the order neither of the sensible nor the intelligible but in the order of making, of generating." The logical arrangement of ideas around referentiality and representation is a literate practice (put this here cause it makes sense!). The choral move is not literate, nor is cool literate. We are beyond literacy, as I have heard VV say, whether we call what we are experiencing electracy or another name.
Posted by jrice @ 01:49 PM EST [Link]
Tuesday, June 22, 2004
Not to stretch out the weblogging thing too much...ok, I do want to keep it stretched (like Plastic Man; it stretches out until it gets too tangled to unstretch).
Some parts of composition studies want to get folks blogging in class. Other parts (though often the same) deny any need for technological know how (or a very limited grasp), thus differentiating between knowing technology and knowing writing (and this is where I part ways since I see the two as the same).
Without knowing both technology (and I'm not talking about tech-guru status here) and writing, there exist, then, serious limitations to enacting the blogging experience (like Derrida, I put another side comment here since I don't even care that much about blogs - I care about the generalizeable application of rhetoric to the digital. So include blogs. But, of course, include so much more).
Think about Warren Ellis zapping writing to his site via his phone, soliciting ideas and music and then posting them to his site, having others zap their photos to his site....and so on. We're getting interactive spaces here, eh? Or what about the manipulation and appropriation of technology for new communicative purposes, as in rigging iPods to become broadcast stations? Not to mention, of course, the iTunes model which could easily be generalized to writings swapped over frequencies (a Burroughs-fest of interruptions and psychotic dreaming, or manifestos and propaganda, or simple ideas floating around on an invisible network of webs....). I'd like to see an iTunes-styled composition class. Essays are turned in over each others file-swapping iPod-devices...but you can reach in too and rearrange the other's stuff (let's get Ted Nelson on this baby)! Then there's the Urban Tapestries project. Whew. Here's some serious usage of technology (and hey, you could do this with weblogs to some extent - or with a type of weblog not yet invented) and writing. It doesn't have to be done with a phone. Pick or create another device. But make the texts intersect and interact....
And if you can’t repeat the projects from teacher to teacher – as one such teacher made clear as necessary? Uh….so? It will come out a different way - difference and repetition. We’re teaching writing, not building cars.
Posted by jrice @ 05:09 PM EST [Link]
Monday, June 21, 2004
The TechRhet thread on weblogs is picking up some steam out on the Web. Jenny goes after it here and Richard Long briefly here. Collin's over here, and Samantha is here. (all these "blog links" make me feel like a gen-you-ine blogger, hot damn!).
So my take - since I'm in the mix on the listserv, sort of....
The thread is so way off but not for the reasons so far pointed out (don't be a know it all, Rice!).
A. It's not really meta talk so much - the blogosphere is full of blog meta talk already. This hardly comes close to the kind of meta talk you can find on any given Sunday.
B. It's a few people with invested interests in their own pedagogical missions - which are tied to financial interests - dismissing a technology (even if 20 years ago they saw themselves as the hot dudes pushing computers and writing).
C. It's being quickly confused as the battle between those who are tech-geeks and those who aren't (this is a very typical knee jerk reaction in composition studies (or at least on TechRhet) whenever technology-talk surfaces: "Oh, you're just a geek. That's too complicated for me” – Uh, no. You missed the point.).
D. It quickly falls back onto empirical observation: If blogs are good for writing, prove it! When that's not how writing works. That's how assessment works. Big difference. That difference continues to keep composition studies outside of the ways people write with technology. That difference also reduces university writing to student writing, and not writing. HUGE difference. If you think like that, you will never get how technology shapes writing.
E. It's forgetting the most important thing: FOLKS, PEOPLE ARE WRITING. All the talk about students (or in general, people) not wanting to write (or, of course, read) runs into trouble when you talk about blogs. Blogs are not an end all, nor the next best thing. But one thing which has happened, and which the homepage was unable to do, is that the weblog got a hell of a lot of people to want to write. That's a big deal. And composition should stop fretting about whether a weblog makes someone a better writer and start wondering why people suddenly feel the need to write so much, to connect their writings to other writings, and to enter the so-called public sphere.
Posted by jrice @ 10:29 AM EST [Link]
Sunday, June 20, 2004
For those of you keeping tabs at home, I'm using Firefox (version 0.9) these days. Difference? Negotiable. More lightweight than Mozilla (with same engine). That's helping keep my PC's system resources fairly manageable - with the newly installed DSL, my old box is not performing up to its old abilities. Firefox imports other browser bookmarks well...it has some extras you can install like Quick Note. But it isn't so much different than Mozilla. Maybe the missing email program is the big difference.
Posted by jrice @ 03:14 PM EST [Link]
Interview with DJ Spooky (Paul Miller). Miller's Rythm Science is an excellent mix of personal narrative, mixology, technology thoughts, and theoretical speculation about writing. Almost as good as Kodwo Eshun's More Brilliant Than the Sun, Miller's book is at least more accessible (Eshun's book really turns itself inside out as it tries to mimic the DJ/sampling process.
I'm going to teach a graduate course in Theories of Composition next Winter semester at Wayne (2005!), and this book may be on the reading list because of how it dismantles and challenges notions of writing. Like Ulmer, Spooky wants to include personal narrative openly as he debates writing's place in the digital. And while the short book drifts a bit in places, Miller speaks a lot to the types of things I have tried to write about regarding the rhetoric of cool, often drawing upon the same forces for appropriation (Baraka, Burroughs, Baudrillard, McLuhan).
Then there's the question of naming, the alter ego, a topic flatly rejected on TechRhet as not "professional" enough, but evident in Miller's work (and so many other forays into the digital, as the quote makes clear:
The other part, "that subliminal kid," is a character in William S. Burroughs' Nova Express. Basically, I sampled the two themes and made a mix out of 'em. I'd put stickers up and the stickers were meant to be a kind of invocation of that vibe. The stickers would say "who is dj spooky?" or "who is that subliminal kid" and after a while you started seeing them all over. I'd give the stickers out all the time, and people would just put 'em wherever. Stuff like that is spooky, but that's the way things spread in an urban environment—that haunted media thang.My job talk at Wayne identified Burroughs' character (and in an article still out at a journal hopefully being read and accepted) as the prototype for a new media compositionist, a media being unlike the "precise, restricted" model of discourse propagated through the legacy of textbooks like Writing with a Purpose and ideologically situated in the thesis. The media being is a mix herself, as is her work. Think of the Subliminal Kid collecting sounds and ideas in bars all over the country....then playing them back in provocative ways....Welcome to the mix, folks. I want to explore all of this further. . . maybe use the "urban environment" tag to specifically locate a practice in Detroit...of course I'd love to do a whole book on Detroit and writing if I could just get the cool book right!
Posted by jrice @ 08:52 AM EST [Link]
Thursday, June 17, 2004
Kevin Brooks, at North Dakota State, dreamt about me. Very interesting. And Barry Maid called me "edgy" today on TechRhet. Not a bad day for being referenced, or discovering past references.
Posted by jrice @ 07:14 PM EST [Link]
John Lovas' helpful and insightful comments have led me to discover The Committee of Ten Report from 1892. Until I can find a print version, I'll trust this online version for details. So far, what I see as helpful to my own wok in re-imagining the legacy of English A is the committee's emphasis on separate subject learning (expected since we are witnessing the reality of print culture settling in academia) and the consignment of so called "basic" learning to the high schools.
"Anyone who reads these nine reports consecutively will be struck with the fact that all these bodies of experts desire to have the elements of their several subjects taught earlier than they now are; and that the Conferences on all the subjects except the languages desire to have given in the elementary schools what may be called perspective views, or broad surveys, of their respective subjects—expecting that in later years of the school course parts of these same subjects will be taken up with more amplitude and detail."Such is the argument for foundation. The reason I focus strongly on the A of English A (and its cousins in Subject A, etc.) is because alphabetic reasoning structures relations by hierarchies. A is the lowest rung of that hierarchy. Writing mostly occupies the slot (thus, English A), but this report reveals many subjects pushing introductory work to be completed elsewhere. The difference, of course, is that these subjects will still carry over into the university, unlike writing, which remains at the level of A.
The network, the structure we are now within, cannot function by this same reasoning. My update of English A is English Tag A (sorry, I can't get Greymatter to allow me to write out the tag without it becoming a link), whose logic is the network, new media, and hypertext.
Posted by jrice @ 12:33 PM EST [Link]
Wednesday, June 16, 2004
To mis-paraphrase Queen, "keep critique alive."
Stumbling around some academic blogs this morning and saw a reference to Joe Moxley's plan to turn USF's composition program into an all online program. Ok. Figured as much since his online textbook is doing well (and apparently is being required for TAs over at Wayne State as well. I'm no longer WPA, so I don't need to fret about it). So let's see what they're doing in this online program.
This link seems to reflect a first week assignment (it's off of Joe's Sushi Wiki and claims to be the syllabus for a typical USF fyc course using Joe's book). Here's an excerpt from the assignment, a blog response to some online readings (I'll quote at length the questions which guide the prompt):Does the author supply specific examples to support his/her points?
*If not, how does this affect his/her argument? What do you feel is missing or what questions remain?
* If yes, then examine the type of examples the author employs (personal narratives/examples, use of authority figure [quote from someone in the know or citation of an outside source], comparative examples, definition, offer a model or solution). Can you think of a better way to argue this?
Does the author provide the other side of the argument (if applicable)? If so, how effectively does s/he refute that argument?
Does the author balance emotion and reason or does there seem to be one favored over the other? What is the effect of too many appeals to emotion with little to no reasonable/ rational arguments?
Ok. Anything wrong? I suppose not. And yet, at least three points seem worth pursuing:The blandness. The real question to ask here is "who cares?" These questions don't prompt inquiry or discovery, but are end of the chapter questions understood by students as something to complete. Typical (what I call in an article I'm revising on textbooks and web browsers) "cache": repeated instructions without rationale or context: "does the author balance emotion and reason." And if the author didn't? Maybe that's more important. The best arguments I hear don't appeal to reason and aren't balanced. They are in my face. They piss me off. Why does this need to be online? Is there a difference between the assignment (blog a reaction, follow these questions for guidance as you shape your reaction) and what you would find in a print-textbook? No, of course not. Here is a very good example of what I always draw attention to regarding blogging. This assignment really has nothing to with using the weblog for pedagogical purposes. Take away the blog, have students do the work on paper, and the result is the same. So why is the course online? It's all related to what I call cooltown (which I borrow from Hewlett Packard's project) - the image we are working in digital environments when, in fact, we are replicating the very print worlds we are accustomed to. Now I don't know Joe Moxley (other than his professional affiliation), and have nothing against him. But I find some serious problems here with how writing is being placed online in this model.
And related to what Jenny wrote about yesterday is yet one more problem: what happens when the DIY ethic merely replicates the very thing it was supposed to replace (i.e. WebCT or Blackboard)? We get cooltown, but we also get what I call Hackerism as well (yet another unwritten article which must be finished). Hacker's rules of writing (A Writer's Reference) have come to signify the standardization of writing instruction much in the way the hacker spirit (DIY) gets quickly standardized in examples like Moxley's.
Posted by jrice @ 09:21 AM EST [Link]
Tuesday, June 15, 2004
The Chronicle maps out tenure issues in the Ivy League. A few interesting points regarding tenure in the Ivies, but one of the most perplexing is why granting tenure to junior faculty is not deemed a good move. The whole point of hiring on the tenure track is to make an investment in the institution's future. In essence, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton are training and developing junior faculty to take over at other schools. Does that make sense?
But the Ivies maintain their own mystique regarding academia. I was lured into that mystique as an undergrad looking to transfer and as a job candidate my first year out. Academics, in general, finds inspiration in the Ivies. In an old Chronicle piece on writing instruction, Eric Schneider wrote, “When [the Ivy League] does something, all the other institutions perk up their ears.” We see that in rhet/comp; contemporary composition owes its status to Harvard's English A. But are the Ivies the best model? Not really. Following the Ivy model is almost like embracing WAC: there is the feeling of progress and the reputation of success on the table, but the result has little to do with the realities of academia, intellectual work, or anything else occurring outside the closed system set up. The Ivies don’t represent the network; they foreground the closed system. In an age when tenure requirements must be revised, the Ivy model has felt compelled to keep them rigid. They harm themselves, of course, but other institutions often turn to the Ivies for inspiration and, thus, perpetuate bad policy across the board.
As I move into my second tenure-track job, I'm glad to know that Wayne's chair has used the MLA position paper on publishing a book to argue against the rigid book requirement. No doubt most of us want the scholarly book published, but the reality is presses are cutting back, libraries are cutting purchases, and publishing is shifting focus. The Ivy model won't suffice in this situation (or in many others). The Wayne model (or emerging model) is a better one.
Posted by jrice @ 07:30 AM EST [Link]
Monday, June 14, 2004
In a not-entirely new entry (but I'm just seeing it) Alex has some good things to say about WAC:
"WAC seems theoretically unachievable (and has been practically so as well), expect as an incarnation of the worst possible writing pedagogy: a product-oriented approach hinged on correctness. Unless, I think, one can convince scientists and social scientists of the rhetoricity of knowledge."And towards the end:
"So in short I think the project of WAC must be founded on making connections between writing process as knowledge production and specific disciplinary developments that articulate the contingent and processural qualities of knowledge. This opens the doorway into the epistemological questions rhetoric raises and the means by which the writing process articulates a practice designed to complement a certain, rhetorical perspective on knowledge production."WAC interests me for a couple of reasons:
My paper at Watson this Fall will critique WAC as not suitable to digital culture and network logic. I recall an early meeting during my stint as WPA at UDM. The meeting was meant to bring together folks from across campus to address writing concerns, and I was to deal with various issues on the table - since I was the writing director. After my own critique of previous university work in first year writing and my policy for improvement was laid out, the dean wanted to know why we couldn't just do a WAC program. Why, indeed. No infrastructure to support it? No real logic behind it? No sense of rhetoric? No "connections" as Alex notes.
WAC is a flawed concept that is WACK, as I will talk at Watson. It makes odd assumptions about disciplinarity, adheres to a structure which doesn't seem to open up connections at all, and poses the "write to learn" model in a very limited manner. It makes assumptions about form (over content) and doesn’t seem to put much out there but abstract advice for WPAs which has nothing to do with pedagogy (“make sure you establish good working relations with other campus teachers”). WAC, like other writing instruction issues, searches out professional writing over rhetorical production, and forgets (or doesn’t know) how professions work across imposed boundaries anyway. It's WACK, dude.
Posted by jrice @ 03:46 PM EST [Link]
Sunday, June 13, 2004
Once again, Collin gets me thinking about stuff. All good points as he teases out connections between Readings' University in Ruins and weblogs. And while I agree that the university is stalled, I've yet to see blogging as worth the hype, at least not as we currently use the weblog. Its potential for creating short-term collaboration (as Collin quotes Reading) is there, no doubt. But weblogs have been absorbed into academia - or at least into writing courses - in quite another manner, as yet another "text" to read and analyze. I think the university is too bogged down in its own paradigm, or more specifically in Ted Nelson's paperdigm, to figure out how to allow new technologies to create their own practices and methods. My colleague (or really slowly becoming ex-colleague, but still Florida School brother) Marcel is writing a piece for our new media collection which, at one point, highlights Jung's theory of the archetype as representative of how the university - and specifically English studies - maintains the same template-like methods for producing knowledge. To that, he throws in a nice quote from Eagleton's After Theory, "Those who can, think up feminism or structuralism; those who can’t, apply such insights to Moby-Dick or The Cat in the Hat." There's a lot of truth in both remarks, and new media (which includes the rising interest in weblogs) is no exception. The issue of invention - what do we make with this idea/thing - gets lost quickly (similar to Robert Ray's point about cultural studies and film) as the template-producing machine called academics (or English studies) fabricates copy after copy after copy of the same usage. Benjamin's art of mechanical reproduction really should be applied to the university and its failure, at times, to allow for invention to occur. The university stalls (I like that word, "stalls") on fascination with reproduction, an appreciation of digital culture, I suppose, but one which maintains the status quo in place of facilitating difference (and, of course, repetition in a more Deleuzian sense).
Posted by jrice @ 07:47 AM EST [Link]
Thursday, June 10, 2004
Ray Charles, the Genius, is dead.
Great Ray Charles moments:With Aretha Franklin on the live Filmore album doing "Spirit in the Dark." In the Blues Brothers: "Hurts me so to see a boy that young going bad." "I Believe to My Soul": "Last night you were dreaming and I heard you say, 'Oh Johnny,' When you know my name is Ray." In the Blues Brothers: "Naturally, I got to take an IOU." "Hallelujah I Love Her So": "Ev'ry morning 'fore the sun come up, she brings my coffee in my favorite cup." On The Muppets. "The Right Time":
Baby
(night and day)
Baby
(night and day)
Baby
(night and day)
Oh, Baby
(night and day)
Posted by jrice @ 04:30 PM EST [Link]
Tuesday, June 8, 2004
I'm slowly emerging from one of the worse sicknesses ever. I think I've lost ten pounds. And yet, I have this to say:
Why doesn't Home Depot carry washer hoses longer than 4 feet? What is going on with the Budweiser/Miller TV/radio ad wars. Vicious stuff. Or all pre-planed? And don't they realize anyway that both beers suck? The Reagan phenomenon was proved years ago with Nixon. No matter how bad a president was, he will always be remembered as good. Reagan at Bitburg (for example): "They (S.S. soldiers buried there) sufffered too." And what is all this crap about Reagan being against big government? Depends on who the government is spending on, no? I've been here in the new place just three days and the city of Ferndale is hitting me with a lawn violation. Pistons, baby! Posted by jrice @ 12:13 PM EST [Link]
Friday, June 4, 2004
Friday Zen:
Got the flu (oh how I remember those Gainesville flu moments as well) the day before final move. Great. Once all the books are packed, the house really can echo. Packing epiphany: receipts. They're everywhere. What are these things I bought and/or charged? Cat Blog. Packing epiphany part II: change. Coins everywhere as well. Under the bed. In drawers. In the kitchen. Pennies. Nickels. If only I liked penny gum or the penny arcade still existed. To quote the Blues Brothers: "There must be twenty bucks worth of change here." A WTFL (White Trash Football League) reunion may happen in Gainesville this year. Would I go? Darfur. Ignored genocide. The UN proves again its worthlessness.
Posted by jrice @ 12:47 PM EST [Link]
Thursday, June 3, 2004
Need to read through all of Shirky's rant on the semantic web, but the first thing that strikes me odd is his calling it a web which functions by the syllogism. What I've understood about Berners-Lee concept is that it isn't syllogistic at all, but associative (thus, semantic), and not dependent on premises. As I write in my (still unpublished) Rhetoric of Cool manuscript:
Berners-Lee’s concept of URIs (Universal Resource Identifiers, transitive addresses that tell browsers where to find information) as opposed to the current URLs (Uniform Resource Locators, the version in place today on the Web which is more static than URIs) relies on a semantic system of writing (like Ulmer’s chorography) at the level of cool. Berners-Lee writes:
What makes a cool URI?
A cool URI is one which does not change.
What sorts of URI change?
URIs don't change: people change them.In the Berners-Lee excerpt, I understand “cool URI” not to mean “a worthwhile URI” but rather a URI indicative of the McLuhanist definition of cool, a highly interactive writing space. Berners-Lee’s cool URI comprises a part of his semantic Web, a medium where writing relates by semantic meanings. The semantic Web indicates a general interest in the principles of cool as I have been outlining them so far. I see cool URIs at work in my own juxtapositions found throughout this book (and which motivated me through the temporal associations in 1963); by writing with the interconnected semantic meanings of one term, I am composing by associative logic.
But..I should read through all of the critique first. What I do see (Shirky's emphasis on absolutes) doesn't fit with what I understand the semantic web does. Better informed folks (Collin?) help me out here if I'm wrong. If Amazon is creating its own semantic web, it seems to function by associations (matching words/phrases) which (in a commerical sense) does present a type of chorography (compose using all the meanings of a word).Posted by jrice @ 09:04 AM EST [Link]
Wednesday, June 2, 2004
Lookie here: Nelson George has a blog (I am breaking my rule about pointing out famous people having blogs!). I used to think George knew his stuff when it came to hip hop and popular culture. Then I read Kdwo Eshun (and more recently DJ Spooky) and realized I was wrong.
Posted by jrice @ 09:17 PM EST [Link]
Tuesday, June 1, 2004
I will blog more on the fetish and composition shortly...I've been away and am in transition...and under the influence of Hans and Thomas, I picked up Love's Body at the library today...
Posted by jrice @ 03:29 PM EST [Link]