Friday, July 30, 2004
Anecdote Pedagogy
I'm interested in how anecdotes serve writing. Barthes makes this claim a bit in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, and Ulmer turns the anecdote into an assignment in Text Book. But these are moments for writing, for inventing, for developing introductions, for getting readerly interest. What about for pedagogy?
Anecdote #1
The first rock band I can remember idolizing was The Rolling Stones. I bought Tattoo You after it came out in 1980 (there’s a long forgotten video of the song “Neighbors” I wish would re-circulate). I got an earring at 13 because Keith Richards had one. I had this really cool Rolling Stones t-shirt I bought at the flea market in Miami for about $5. The cake at my bar-mitzvah was a Rolling Stones tongue.
Anecdote #2
When did I first hear Exile on Main Street? I don't know. But no doubt I was attracted to the "shit" mention in "Sweet Virginia" (kids love to hear curse words in rock songs) and the line from "Tumbling Dice":
All you women
is no damn gamblers
cheatin' like I don't know how
I bought an additional bootleg disc in Tel Aviv when I was fifteen. It was supposed to be a double disc record of outtakes and unused tracks. But both discs were the same! I had bought the same record twice! I never got the second disc. The album art on the bootleg (the original concept of a urinal) was much different than the collage which appears on the commercial release:
Even though I feel haunted by that missing disc (always wondering where it is, what it sounded like, who has it now), I am equally haunted by this cover image. A collage of circus freaks - what does it have to do with "Ventilator Blues" or "Turd on the Run"? Why the circus? Why freaks?
Anecdote #3
My interest in collage does not begin with this album but with the collages my grandmother made of her travels (with my grandfather) around the United States. Every place she stopped, she collected postcards, newspaper clippings, local artwork, etc. and constructed collages to remember the trips by. They hung the collages in the guest room of her Kendall Lakes apartment, the room I'd sleep in while visiting. For some reason, I keep think that the Exile image - in the upper left corner - of a man with stuff in his mouth was in one of those collages.
Pedagogy #1
One of my PhD exams was on collage. I began it with this anecdote about my grandmother's collages and the notion of collage as a type of literacy practice (Eisenstein actualized the pedagogy of collage for non-literates in the concept of intellectual montage). Why does a woman without a complete education use collage to create expression?
It’s an expression of exile. Exiled pedagogy. World War II may have led to the GI Bill, but it kept many out of school as well so that they could help with the war effort at home (as was my partly my grandmother’s situation).
In the urban environment (DETROIT) exile pedagogy has racial and class meanings. What about an assemblage – like Exile on Main Street which has writers compose their own version of exile through image and text. Compose it on the website where rollovers, css, and scripts may be used as well. What is your exile? Name your freak. Get your freak on.
Posted by jrice @ 01:41 PM EST [Link]
Thursday, July 29, 2004
Posted by jrice @ 09:53 AM EST [Link]
Tuesday, July 27, 2004
Sometimes I feel like a founder of "jerk pedagogy" - the pointing out of how everything and everyone else is sooooooooooooo wrong (and a close friend called me a jerk not too long ago...).
I tried this morning to finally unsubscribe to TechRhet. Wouldn't work. Not the majordomo command, not the web interface. I'm stuck! Thank goodness the email address subscribed to TechRhet will vanish in two weeks. But until then, I'm stuck with a continuing thread on teaching....homonyms. In the spirit of jerk pedagogy, I will enact the "smart ass" feature of its core and note that this request started it all:
> I've gotta come up with a sample lesson that explains how to distinguish
between pairs of words that are NOT caught by spellcheckers - eg,
they're/their/there. (OK, so that's a triplet, not a pear - er, pair.)
>
> I've come up with the following (pitifully small) list, and I was
wondering if youse guys could think of others??
>
> its/it's
> weather/whether
> they're/their/there> I'm looking for items that would actually confuse people - I don't
> think something like pear/pair would, for instance . . .
>
To which we get suggestions, and of course, useless debate when someone writes that he doesn't teach this stuff at all:
If a student writes prose in which homonyms are obvious patterns of
error, isn't it our job as teachers to help them out? Just because
they're supposed to learn it in high school doesn't constitute a reason
to ignore them, does it? I'm not picking on you, [name not included here], whoever you are,
just thinking that as self-describe rhetoricians, we are ALL teachers of
language, linguistics, writing, and communication, and just because
we're capable of far more than error correction doesn't eliminate it
from our jobs. Or does it?
Ya. Big deal stuff here. Or is it? And what does this have to do with the basic principles TechRhet was supposedly founded on (or its predecessor ACW-L was)? You could turn this discussion into a demonstration of chora (the homonym as invention strategy) or the puncept on the Web (a la the wonderful punning of the Marx Brothers or Krazy Kat; didn’t I make that into an assignment in Writing About Cool?). But is it silly to make this into a TechRhet discussion? To quote Napoleon Dynamite: "What do you frigging think? Heck Yeah!"
Now to really encapsulate jerk pedagogy, I would note that this discussion could benefit by a little theoretical observation into the relationship between homonyms and say, differance, as well as the potential for rhetorical invention (Derrida, derriere, yadda yadda yadda doo). But since I have tried that route in the past with this list and been met with a barrage of “NO WAY JOSE” and “ARE YOU CRAZY THESE STUDENTS WILL NEVER GET A JOB IF THEY DO THAT,” I’ll just be content to hit delete and wait for the email address to vanish into cyberspace, where it will sit unwatched and unused and only exist as a remnant in archive.org’s database…and and and and and and and (wait, that ain’t no homonym, that’s repetition!).
There is only they’re there.
Ignatz, why is lenguage?
Posted by jrice @ 02:59 PM EST [Link]
Monday, July 26, 2004
Something I'm reading:
McSweeny's Quarterly Concern Number 13 edited by Chris Ware.
Something I'm going to read shortly:
"From Advertising to the Avant-Garde: Rethinking the Invention of Collage" fromPMC 14.2
Something I finished reading a week ago:
Responding to Reform: Composition and the Professionalization of Teaching by Margaret Marshall
Something I'm listening to:
Blue Note Revisited
Something I'm starting to write:
"Writing Detroit"
Something I've got to think about at some point in the near future:
Watson conference talk
Posted by jrice @ 12:44 PM EST [Link]
Monday, July 19, 2004
Man, I love spam. It's like poetry when you just read the subject lines. What the Romantics are to poetry, spam is to a 21st century digital poetics.
I have one email account (not revealing it!) which only collects spam. Nothing else. No personal emails; nothing professional. Here's a brief rundown of today's highlights (subject headings only):
Posted by jrice @ 08:06 PM EST [Link]
Sunday, July 18, 2004
The ALA information literacy standards something or other. Man. I can't even get through it. I just start to read to see what they're up to....and snore snore snore. I've fallen face down onto the keyboard and am dreaming away (mmmm...beer....).
Information literacy is a set of abilities requiring individuals to "recognize when information is needed and have the ability to locate, evaluate, and use effectively the needed information." Information literacy also is increasingly important in the contemporary environment of rapid technological change and proliferating information resources.
Uh. Yeah. That's pretty progressive stuff there. Finding out what kind of info is needed??? Huh. Who would have thunk that one up? And hey, iinfo literacy is "important." Good to know. Otherwise, you know, you wouldn't have written this document, right? Unless you want to spend 8,000 words on somethng that's not important.
Information literacy forms the basis for lifelong learning. It is common to all disciplines, to all learning environments, and to all levels of education. It enables learners to master content and extend their investigations, become more self-directed, and assume greater control over their own learning.
Whew. Hey, guys. Don't hold back. Radical thinking. How many of you did it take to come up with this anyway? How many years?
An information literate individual is able to:* Determine the extent of information needed
* Access the needed information effectively and efficiently
* Evaluate information and its sources critically
* Incorporate selected information into one’s knowledge base
* Use information effectively to accomplish a specific purpose
* Understand the economic, legal, and social issues surrounding the use of information, and access and use information ethically and legally
Boy, that sounds oddly familiar. Oh yeah. It's in any kind of "manifesto" regarding literacy, teaching, or writing I come across. Original, the ALA ain't. For all the time that goes into writing a long winded, boring, way too long, says nothing new, document like this, does anybody care? Documents like these get shuffled through admin university offices as if they prove something, they're tacked on to outcomes and mission statements, but is anything really being said? Use information for a purpose? Evaluate information critically? Is anyone really arguing that we teach students to not evaluate information critically or to have no purpose whatsoever? Well, maybe me on the last point. This kind of stuff is like preaching "family values" or doing something "for the children." Meaningless statements which just get people all excited because of keywords and catch phrases (MONOROAIL). Maybe the ALA, and all its information literacy supporters (YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE) aren't all that information literate yet to figure out that this document says nothing.
Posted by jrice @ 08:55 PM EST [Link]
Friday, July 16, 2004
I'm fascinated with freecycle. Over 1,000 cities maintain freecycle networks where folks offer, and then pick up, unwanted goods from one another. I'm not as interested in its Marxist-suggested orientation of alternative economic circulation (though one could argue that, I'm sure), but with the oddities of emails I receive every day from the Royal Oak freecycle listserv (it includes all the surrounding Metro areas). Today's offerings:
Man. I think I want all that stuff (except, I guess, the skirt). I could live like Fred Sanford and just turn my basement into a little shop of unwanted throwaways. I don't need an old fridge, but I would love to have that one in my basement (we had one like that in Tel Aviv that must have weighed a thousand pounds; we called it the whale). It could be the beer fridge. "Want a beer?" "Sure." "Go down and open the whale."
Posted by jrice @ 12:02 PM EST [Link]
Yesterday I saw a little girl run up to my door and then run away. Since kids often are hired to leave newsletters and other stuff on door steps, I didn't think much of it. I went out later and found this note in my mailbox:
Now, did I really break her heart? Who was she? Wrong house? Right house? Ah...mysteries....
Posted by jrice @ 10:44 AM EST [Link]
Thursday, July 15, 2004
Some days I think this blog is turning into a response to WPA-L threads.
Now the debate is over "reading being in decline" (a response to some recent report). All the voices chime in, with one claiming "I didn't need a report to tell me that
reading is in decline. I see it every year in my first-year
courses when students produce constructions such as 'should
of.' Obviously, they've heard it and know what it means, but
they haven't, or haven't often, read it."
I'll sidestep the odd reasoning here in this statement only to point out: uh, folks, tell Amazon and the other book sellers that reading is in decline. That should produce a nice laugh. Books comprise one of the largest aspects of the entertainment business. That they are aligned with music, video, etc. is revealing for how the culture has integrated traditional literacy practices (reading) with the non-traditional (watching/listening). Reading McLuhan today as I work through ideas regarding juxtaposition, I was reminded of this remark in The Gutenberg Galaxy: “The new physics is an auditory domain and long-literate society is not at home on the new physics, nor will it ever be” (37). When we start claiming reading is in decline to watching/listening we are failing to account for the so-called "new literacy" (for want of a much better phrase at this moment, though I should just use Greg's electracy). Actually, electracy provides a good response for how it recognizes auditory (the usage of voice/sound in the riff). The question is: why are compositionists still not ready for the "new physics" as McLuhan describes new media? I was reminded yesterday of John Trimbur and Diane George's work on the missing Fourth C (Communication) of CCCC, which they trace to the 1962 CCCC convention. That this moment coincides with McLuhan’s work is no accident. At the moment one part of communication studies (represented by media studies) is trying to understand literate conventions in terms of the new (Havelock another figure here), composition sticks to the literate, non-technological, non-auditory. So, reading is in decline, we hear. Of course, it isn't. How we perceive reading may, in fact, be. Big difference.
Posted by jrice @ 01:52 PM EST [Link]
Tuesday, July 13, 2004
The plagiarism debate surfaces again on WPA-L!!!!!
I can't get involved. Not this time. Oh it is so sad to read.
Instead, draft of Chapter Four rewrite beginning...the chapter introduces juxtaposition as a principle of the rhetoric of cool.
In his 1963 essay “A Conceptual Framework for Augmenting Man’s Intellect,” Douglas Engelbart proposed that juxtaposition be the focal point of writing with computers. In contrast to the logic of mainframe computing – entering data to be processed by a machine without continuous writerly input - Engelbart envisioned computer applications for purposes other than numerical calculation, notably for that of writing. Imagining an environment of what we now recognize as personal computing, Engelbart noted that
The category of “more radical innovations” includes the digital computer as a tool for the personal use of an individual. Here there is not only promise of great flexibility in the composing and rearranging of text and diagrams before the individual’s eyes, but also promise of many other process capabilities. (9)
Engelbart developed his idea of “composing and rearranging text” into a series of window-like boxes meant to resemble the size of actual paper, which, projected onto a display, a user could juxtapose and overlap. In turn, users could augment the strategy of comparing and manipulating texts through juxtaposition, a process difficult to do in a print-based environment which supports the separation of text and image by unconnected paper as well as logic. The potential of this juxtaposing-windows system, Engelbart argued, would allow writers the ability to work simultaneously with a variety of versions of the same text, each contributing differently to the learning and discovery process writing evokes. Juxtaposition, therefore, would be central to a computing-based heuretics.
I call this method of writing Engelbart proposed cool for how it replicates the same logic behind Marshall McLuhan’s 1963 insistence that cool media involve the rhetorical act of juxtaposition because of “its promise of depth involvement and integral expression” (Understanding Media 40). Moreover, the juxtaposition strategies central to Engelbart’s windows-based system theoretically resemble the cool-oriented writing machines suggested by William Burroughs.
The Burroughs machine, systematic and repetitive, simultaneously disconnecting and reconnecting – it disconnects the concept of reality that has been imposed on us and then plugs normally dissociated zones into the same sector - eventually escapes from the control of its manipulator. (Burroughs and Gysin 17)
In The Ticket that Exploded, Burroughs describes this machine in detail, noting how it brings together unlike text and image for rhetorical output.
A writing machine that shifts one half one text and half the other through a page frame on conveyor belts – (The proportion of half one text half the other is important corresponding as it does to the two halves of the human organism). (Ticket That Exploded 65)
My own interest in creating a rhetoric of cool reflects the Burroughs method of composing; the meanings of cool which direct my thinking all stem from an initial temporal juxtaposition. The very process of juxtaposition, McLuhan felt, is a cool one for how it forges readers (and writers) to interact with the unexpected textual and visual associations juxtapositions force us to encounter. Composition studies in 1963 was unable to recognize not only the power of juxtaposition for rhetorical purposes, but also the need to juxtapose composition with other interests in writing, like computing (Engelbart) or media (McLuhan).
The windows system Engelbart hypothesized materializes in the operating systems of contemporary computing, and in the interfaces of many web browsers. That we accept juxtaposition today as the basis of electronic writing is not as obvious, though, as it may seem. The nature of new media composition represented on the Web, TV, film, iPods, digital sampling, and elsewhere is the result of the complex juxtaposition of images, texts, and sounds. We do not need not look outside of popular composing practices to find juxtaposition, yet composition studies continues to resist these practices because of how they fail to fit within the field’s rebirth narrative. That narrative maintains a division, rather than juxtaposition, of writing interests; North’s categories of composition practioners and theorists are separate entities whose overlap is little speculated on and whose interests are restricted to classroom writing practices.
An anti-juxtaposition ideology can be found as well in the year’s own writerly output or pedagogical innovations. Even as the authors of the 1963 Conference on College Composition and Communication’s report (published in College Composition and Communication that year), encourage “debate on the long research paper, its purpose, its place in the program” (CCC 182), dominant responses like that of James McCrimmon’s popular textbook Writing with a Purpose ignore media based rhetorics such as juxtaposition. Even though research itself supports the juxtaposition of unlike ideas which, when synthesized, generate new knowledge on a given topic, the research paper, James McCrimmon notes, results from the very specific organization of information into linear argumentation, an organization where ideas are separated and categorized as distinct entities.
The writer of a thesis research paper is studying the facts to draw a conclusion from them; this conclusion becomes the thesis of this essay; and he selects and organizes his material to develop his thesis. (McCrimmon 240)
The kind of organization McCrimmon lays out for students to work with contrasts with the juxtaposing machine Burroughs describes and Engelbart theorizes. The discrepancy in positions is not a matter of preference or view points, but ideological positioning regarding the nature of composition. The ideology of the thesis – that writing depends on a single statement or idea – has led the initial CCCC call to not be fully answered. Indeed, the call for debate regarding composition pedagogy (generalized in the research paper issue) never has extended to include how writers juxtapose. Thus, even when Kitzhaber considers the role technology may play in writing, and even when he uses language similar to Burroughs’, he cannot think beyond the paradigms supported by what McLuhan would call “hot” culture.
A teaching machine or a programmed text is a device that presents one item or frame at a time; that is, it allows students to see one sentence with a critical word left out or one statement followed by a question. The student writes the required answer on the program itself or on an answer tape or booklet. If he has been using a typical teaching machine, it then activates a mechanism that moves his answer under a clear plastic window (where he cannot change it) at the same time that it reveals the correct answer. (Themes, Theories, Therapy 85)
I’m caught between these two visions of writing machines: The Burroughs juxtaposing machine and the Kitzhaber drill and answer machine. To more fully understand juxtaposition as a major feature of the rhetoric of cool, I choose to work with the Burroughs vision, to explore its power as a new media rhetorical device. The most immediate place to explore a Burroughs-oriented writing machine for the rhetoric of cool is hypertext for how it allows writers to juxtapose ideas, texts, sounds, images, and animation in ways print cannot accommodate. To do so, I turn to Ted Nelson who coined the term “hypertext” in 1963.
Posted by jrice @ 03:59 PM EST [Link]
Monday, July 12, 2004
Tentative reading List for my Fall practicum for graduate students, Theories and Practices of Writing, by semester section:
Intro to Writing Theory
A Guide to Composition Pedagogies eds Greg Tate, Amy Rupiper, and Kurt Schick
Somebody say Grammar?
Joseph Williams “Phenomenology of Error”
Patrick Hartwell “Grammar, Grammars, and the Teaching of Grammar”
Nancy Sommers “Responding to Student Writing”
Inventing Which University?
David Bartholomae “Inventing the University”
Geoffrey Sirc “Never Mind the Tagmemics, Where's the Sex Pistols”
Kathy Blake Yancey and Michael Spooner “Petals of a Wet, Black Bough: Textuality, Collaboration and the New Essay”
Joseph Harris “Revision as Critical Practice”
Cultural Studies/The Postmodern
James Berlin “Poststructuralism, Cultural Studies, and the Composition Classroom.”
Victor Vitanza. “‘The Wasteland Grows’: Or, What is ‘Cultural Studies for Composition’ and Why Must We Always Speak Good of It?"
And online talk of same name:
http://www.uta.edu/english/V/berlin/vjvcultstudies.html
Marshall Alcorn. “Changing the Subject of Postmodernist Theory: Discourse, Ideology, and Therapy in the Classroom.”
Susan Miller “Technologies of Self? – Formation.”
Poststructuralism/Writing
Cynthia Haynes "Writing Offshore: The Disappearing Coastline of Composition Theory"
Gregory Ulmer “Kubla Honky Tonk”
Posted by jrice @ 12:41 PM EST [Link]
Sunday, July 11, 2004
Back to Nedra Reynolds' book Geographies of Writing:
A serious problem I find with this text is its over emphasis on "dwelling." Reynolds tells us that "dwelling is not only about where but also about how - a set of embodied spatial practices," (158), and here I see the text's overall flaw. One could read Reynolds as possible suggesting a sense of "shifting" in place and then how that transfers to writing. But that's not what she's doing at all. She's emphasizing the stationary and permanent nature of place - dwelling does not change. The book stresses the point when it repeatedly associates place with the permanent tropes of cultural studies: race, gender, and class. Every so-called shifting position is read through the lends of this triad. The result is very predictable. Place is read over and over through some kind of insider/outsider expectation: you are white/the neighborhood is black, you are straight/the neighborhood is gay, you are upper class/the neighborhood is lower class. What's the purpose here? One already knows the answer before one begins. Or to phrase it differently: the one (Reynolds) who reads another’s spatial experience already knows the answer before the answer is given.
Such is the problem with topos - the places of argument. To return to the threads from a few days ago on this blog, this book represents a literate attempt to understand place and writing. The topos represent the predictability of argumentation and have served literacy well for some time now. But new media, with its problems with representation, its interest in mood, its usage of code to complicate discourse, its semantic linkings, rss feeds, hypertexts, etc., often is unpredictable - at least when users first encounter it or resist the impulse to adjust its logic to print. We are not dwelling in place, as Reynolds argues. We are moving. We are shifting. We are mixing.
I've also been reading Marc Augè's work on place - no place - and in In the Metro we get a better idea of globalization, the digital, and the individual who is not settled in at all in a dwelling. Augè's ideas don't seem to fit (at least not as I read them now) with the concept of the interconnected network, but I think he is complicating matters much more than Reynolds who seems to find solace in the comfortable familiarity of race, class, gender, as well as finding meaning in place (One passage describes a student searching out graffiti in a business district so that she can document "transgression." What better example of predictably than this can you ask for?)
For me, the issue is Detroit. I am not dwelling in Detroit (well, sure, I don't even actually live in the city, but on the other side of 8 Mile, yet I am in the city by work, place, association....). Detroit is my choral point of rhetorical production. Chora is the digital update of the topos. It can be understood through my relationship to Detroit. I got make a book out of that!
Posted by jrice @ 02:03 PM EST [Link]
An email Marcel received the other day and forwarded on to me:
Dear Friend,
My name is Jeffrey Rice, I am the credit manager in a bank here in the United Kingdom. I am contacting you of a business transfer, of a huge sum of money from a deceased account. Though I know that a transaction of this magnitude will make any one apprehensive and worried, but I am assuring you that everything has been taken care off, and all will be well at the end of the day. I decided to contact you due to the urgency of this transaction.
PROPOSITION;
I am the account officer of a foreigner named Gerald Welsh who died in an air crash along with his wife on the 31st October 1999 in an Egyptian airline 990 with other passengers on board. You can confirm this from the website below which was published by BBC WORLD NEWS. WEBSITE.http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/502503.stm
Since his death, none of his next-of-kin are alive to make claims for this money as his heir,because they all died in the same accident himself and his wife(May their soul rest in peace). We cannot release the fund from his account unless someone applies for claim as the next-of-kin to the deceased as indicated in our banking guidelines.
Upon this discovery, I now seek your permission to have you stand as a next of kin to the deceased, as all documentations will be carefully worked out by me for the funds (US$5,000,000.00) to be released in your favor as the beneficiary's next of kin. Because after four years the money will be called back to the bank treasury as unclaimed bills and the money shared amongst the directors of the bank. so it is on this note i decided to seek for whom his name shall be used as the next of kin/beneficiary to this funds rather than allow the bank directors to share this money amongst themselves at the end of the year.
It may interest you to know that we have secured from the probate an order of mandamus to locate any of the deceased beneficiaries. Please acknowledge receipt of this message in acceptance of our mutual business endeavor by furnishing me with the following information if you are interested.
1.A Beneficiary name..In order for me to prepare the document for transfer of the funds in your name.
2. Direct Telephone and fax numbers...For our personal contact and mutual trust in each other.
Upon your acceptance I shall send you a copy of my international passport for more confidentiality and trust. I shall be compensating you with a million dollars ($1Million dollars) on final conclusion of this project for your assistance, while the balance $4 million dollars shall be for me for investment purposes. Because I intend to retire after the conclusion of this transaction.
If this proposal is acceptable by you, please endeavor to contact me immediately. Do not take undue advantage of the trust I have bestowed in you, I await your urgent response.
Regards,
Mr.Jeffrey Rice.
Posted by jrice @ 10:22 AM EST [Link]
Saturday, July 10, 2004
I don't want the Heat to make this deal. Not that Riley is reading my blog, but if they trade away the team for Shaq, I'm done with the Heat until Riley retires. Why trade the potential of Odom and Butler in order to rent Shaq for two years (when his contract is up)? Shaq will not take Miami to the finals without any help (see last year's Lakers). Wayde, Butler, and Odom have to stay together. Get some big man help (Stromile Swift) through free agency and quit chasing Shaq. Odom finally proved himself last year. Riley, you need him. Shaq, as dominant is he still can be, is not the same player he was five years ago. This is a bad move for a team making serious progress.
Posted by jrice @ 02:10 PM EST [Link]
Friday, July 9, 2004
I enjoyed Will engaging me in yesterday's entry regarding new media literacy. Since I'm rewriting Chapter Three of my manuscript, I'll extend those thoughts briefly to the chapter's focus, appropriation.
The 1963 focus of the book finds appropriation in Amiri Baraka's definition of cool as an oppressive appropriation strategy for how it writes black cultural production in ways that undermine African American culture (credit not given where it's due). Baraka calls the response to this kind of appropriation cool, because dis-empowered people with no ability to respond can only be cool - not respondent, calm, detached.
My most immediate connection is Governor Granholm's Cool Cities plan for Detroit Metro- the appropriation of cool for urban planning - which attempts to equate the black city with hipness so that white professionals will return. This, too, is a powerful usage of appropriation (very much like Mailer’s own problematic concept of the White Negro).
Both could be easily read as appropriating signifiers (the city/dress/music) for purposes of theft - and that is Baraka's critique. But in '63, Burroughs argues that theft (as appropriation) is itself a new media practice (a point Ulmer makes in “The Object of Post-Criticism,” but regarding Cage). His character The Subliminal Kid represents a new media being who tape records conversations, ideas, thoughts, mixes them, remixes them, and "brought back street sound and talk and music and poured it into his recorder array so he set waves and eddies and tornadoes of sound down all your streets and by the river of all language. "
The Subliminal Kid is a media being who writes media. He is not a student writer, a placement test taker, a variable to be studied, etc. He doesn't have a thesis nor a conclusion. He is himself an appropriation as is the work he generates. The best example - which I am now getting to - we can find today to understand The Subliminal Kid's rhetoric is the DJ (or hip hop producer) who mixes and remixes culture into compositions. It just so happens that the sampler was invented in 1963 - the Mark I Mellotron. I use this moment to continue my choral thread of appropriation and show how this gesture makes up one part of the rhetoric of cool. While my book isn’t using the term “literacy” to describe any of this, all of these points lead to what I call something other than literacy.
Posted by jrice @ 02:43 PM EST [Link]
Thursday, July 8, 2004
Nice little post at Weblogg-ed about weblogs, wikis, and literacy. What I like about the post is the point regarding the openness of online writing.
In a nutshell, the Internet has changed the requirements of what it means to be literate. While just about everything we used to teach with was a finished, edited text, the Web now provides us with a gazillion unedited texts, which means it's no longer enough just to be able to read; we have to read critically.
I agree with the first part - open texts (not open source) within a network which writers and readers tap into, alter, appropriate, confiscate, download, share, etc. This sounds likea fundamental characteristic of working with new media. The second part I'm not as sure about: "we have to read critically." In this statement, I hear a return to literacy. The power of the first part is that it is imagining something outside of literacy - call it electracy, late age of print, e-literacy, whatever. But the minute we fall back on the vocabulary associated with literacy studies, we aren't completely understanding this something outside of literacy which we are experiencing. I want to call this a new "literacy myth," borrowing Harvey Graff's phrase for a new purpose (since Graff was more interested in the lore surrounding literacy and economic success). This version of the literacy myth applies literacy standards to information technology, aiming for some kind of rational match-up in order to explain how we use and construct knowledge online. The 23 points Weblogg-ed quotes from the Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education site provide a good example of the new literacy myth. These are all things one would do offline as well. Hear McLuhan here? We apply the old to the new; we look to the future through a rear view mirror?
New media is not really an extension of literate practices. And it cannot be explained through literacy. As long as we continue to use literacy to explain new media (as Wysocki and Johndan once note) we cannot understand how new media functions. In composition, I don't think we are anywhere near tackling this issue because it will undermine and reconfigure many of the truths we have accepted and hold so dearly. If we are to recognize that literacy no longer exists, what will become of composition studies which bases its identity on the ways writing empowers individuals to be productive members of society (see Brandt, Rose)? What will happen to topic sentences and Writing Centers, professional writing, or the first year textbook? Serious damage. But I don’t really see too many folks trying to understand how we are no longer literate. VV, Ulmer, those who work with affect, (and I always think Barthes was doing this even if he doesn’t say he is). I’m trying to think through all this through the whatever and a piece I’m writing on celebritacy. Still, this is an argument which will not sway many in composition because there is too much invested in literacy, in explaining technology through the language of literacy studies, and in returning time after time to literacy narratives as a way to explain how technology affects knowledge construction (“the first time I used a computer was back in 19…”)
Posted by jrice @ 09:42 AM EST [Link]
Wednesday, July 7, 2004
Detroit has spent about $2 million just to do nothing with Tiger Stadium. Tiger Stadium sits on a crumbling cobbled road across from Corktown, flanked by a few bars. What to do with this place? From the article:
Mike Novak, a Detroit entertainment attorney who brought acts such as the Eagles and Kiss to Tiger Stadium before the team moved, said it's a waste for the building to be unused:"It's a shame it's left sitting there like an abandoned car."
This sounds like a job for the writing class! Following the spirit of Stalking Detroit, I'd like to design an assignment that has students redesign a usage for Tiger Stadium that defies expectation (i.e., no shopping centers, condos, or other already proposed ideas). To do the assignment, you have to first conduct a walking tour of the area, map your movements and thoughts as you conduct the tour, research and investigate the neighborhood, roads, personalities, places, homes, etc. found within the area, interview and talk to residents, imagine and suppose, and finally use your work to create a new usage (appropriation) of the stadium. A Situationist meets Sebald meets Benjamin kind of project.
Do it as a website or multi-media presentation - video, film, Flash, or any combo.
Posted by jrice @ 08:40 AM EST [Link]
Tuesday, July 6, 2004
What I'm Doing
Posted by jrice @ 01:58 PM EST [Link]
Monday, July 5, 2004
This site reveals some of Google's untapped power. Here, he shows how Google can dig up passwords and authentication if you know the right words to search for. Here's another breakdown of using Google to find passwords. And more general Googledorks playing around.
I really like the idea of the hidden Web, the one search engines can barely reach, or can reach only if you know how to prod them a bit like the site above does. A few years ago, someone showed me Hotline and that freaked me out at the time. It was the dark side of the Web, a place where people were hiding all kinds of stuff: pornography, games, full programs, music, online books, movies etc. But you could only get there with Hotline's interface. And you could only get to the various sites by a mix of luck and secret codes hidden on porn sites (the porn site click throughs allow the owners of the sites where stuff is stored to make a few bucks).
I was also doing a review at that time for Kairos on Race in Cyberspace, and I remember thinking how bad Internet theory really is. While everyone fusses over access and how does gender and race play out online (Hey it's the same! People are still racist online! Who would have thunk it?), all kinds of weird activities were going on under the radar. Skimming through a Hotline interface trying to find a connection is a bizarre experience. Who are these people out there? Why are they spending so much time trading in bits of odd information? Who are we that we want to join in? How do these little, private worlds get created in cyberspace and how many more of them are out there? In Gibson’s world, Case jacks in and enters Molly’s body. Yeah, that’s weird. But go on Hotline and whose bodies are you entering when you explore their fantasies, indulgences, capitalist hording, and other online expressions?
Posted by jrice @ 10:11 AM EST [Link]
Thursday, July 1, 2004
Got to settle my basketball jones:
Trying to understand the Orlando/Houston
trade. I can somewhat get the McGrady/Francis swap, but when you throw in all these other players to make salary cap matches, it doesn't make as much sense. So now Houston's in Orlando and vice versa. Edge Houston, but who wants to take so many of the same team at once?
If Miami trades Butler to Orlando for Gooden and DeClercq as rumored on Pro Sports daily today, they are idiots. Gooden can't play. DeClercq (an ex-Gator from the Lon Kruger days) is ok (and old), but not worth Butler. Butler will be an All Star in two-three years. These guys won't.
Miami should do two things: resign Alston, see if they can somehow can Swift away from Memphis (I can't remember if he's a restricted free agent or not). If not Swift, then Blount. But neither deserves more than the exception. Just keep Alston and get Grant some help.
Summer means no sports on TV. Yo, Dilger! When does football return?
Posted by jrice @ 02:42 PM EST [Link]
I think I'm going to write an article for the Chronicle about the University of Detroit Mercy. I woke up this morning to find my entire inbox deleted. Accident? I think not. Yet another little step in trying to make me inconvenienced.
All these little (and major) things add up. The article will outline what happens when a school gets angry at a faculty member for leaving. In this case, we also see how small insulated universities behave when they have no clue how the profession works. When no one (or very few) do research and publish, when few go to conferences, when few read academic publications, many lose track over how one should behave in an academic setting. In short, they aren’t academics. They are something else: clueless folks trying to keep a few buildings full of students who pay way too much for a growing faculty of part time instructors.
Take the email example: it is common practice to give faculty who are leaving a short grace period so that they can set up their professional email at their new place of employment. At UDM? No such knowledge of this practice. Why? Because no one talks to other academics or university officials. No one understands how other universities function. They live in their own little Jesuit world.
The other and related consequence is that professional relationships with faculty who once worked at the university are quickly lost forever. So the university remains insulated even more. They burn bridge after bridge. This is particularly true for the former UDM English Department chair Hugh Culik who brought in $500,000 in grant money (money which established the E-Crit and Dudley programs) only to be booted the next year on trumped up bogus charges. He turns around and sues; the university shells out who knows how many millions to stop the suit, and the university is now without a strong leader in English, disgruntled faculty in English who liked Culik, and a bad reputation. Smart thinking.
So, of course, the dozen or so things done to me don't equal what happened to Culik. But they are part of the unprofessional attitudes you see at this university. An article in the Chronicle won't solve anything, but it will put the facts out there for others in the profession to see.
And, yes. I hope UDM folks are reading this.
Posted by jrice @ 10:06 AM EST [Link]
