My Archives: August 2004

Tuesday, August 31, 2004

Things I've learned these last two days:

  • All faculty can think about in orientation is how to catch kids cheating
  • The food at orientations always tastes like it came out of the back of a truck (actually I knew this one already)
  • My powerbook is nice
  • Sometimes, your closest friends are liars and cheats and never meant a damn thing they ever said
  • You got to make adjustments for the entire recipe!
  • School starts next week

    Posted by jrice @ 12:49 PM EST [Link]

    Sunday, August 29, 2004

    Sunday Music (Sorry, folks, I'm on a kick here and ain't got too much else to write about 'ceptin WPA and I'll leave that for now...how much can a fellow rant anyway):

  • "The Sky is Crying" by Elmore James. It's been raining all weekend. I had to go out last night and pick up a big bottle of Jolly Pumpkin brew (local Michigan brewery) and a four pack of Dogfish 90 minute IPA. I wanted the 120 minute, but it’s 9 bucks for a regular size bottle. This song makes me think more of empty bars than lost love. Stevie Ray tried to cover it awhile back and didn't seem to get either right. Maybe because it's not really a Texas song...it's more like Detroit come October (or as we see this weekend, late August) song.
  • "A World Without Tears" by Lucinda Williams. Another crying song. I just stumbled upon a website off of Metafilter a few minutes ago called something like: Old Men Who Cry. Dan Rather's mug was the splash page. Lucinda Williams writes songs and sings the way Sheryl Crow wishes she could. I used to think Chrissie Hynde was the female Bob Dylan. Now I think it's Williams. I heard this one off of a downloaded CD. “Are You Down” followed on its own thanks to the kind folks at WDET (I feel like I’m promoting them these days..). It, too, is about rain and crying

    Can't put the rain back in the sky
    Once it falls down
    Please don't cry

    Rain turns the dirt into mud
    Warm and messy
    Like your love


    On their own, the lyrics do very little. Within her raspy, mournful voice, they do so much.
  • "Chill Out (Things are Gonna Change)" by John Lee Hooker. I was on the phone when this came on the radio. It's from the "let's get together and collaborate with John Lee" days. The Healer worked well, this disc a little less. The last disc that came out in this spirit - either right before or right after he died; I can’t remember - was a failure. I once drove down to where Hastings Street used to be so that I could find the place Hooker sings about in "Boogie Chillin." All that remains is the street sign and the service ramp to I-75. City planners destroyed the historic Black Bottom neighborhood (after the War?) in order to build 75 - and with that destruction went Hastings Street. You would think that a city which experiences so much unwanted destruction due to neglect, racism, and economic issues would have not wanted to force destruction upon a vibrant community. Think again.

    Posted by jrice @ 02:34 PM EST [Link]

    Saturday, August 28, 2004

    Weblog Pedagogy:
    I really don't like jumping in on the weblog teaching bandwagon. But I've sort of skimmed some recent posts here and there about teaching with these things, and I'm going to help out next week for the orientation for graduate students (ah, this year, I don't have to lead an orientation...nice). So...that being said...what about weblog pedagogy?
    What I tend to be seeing is a lot of usage of the tool for non-web practices: taking notes, journal writing, etc. Some folks seem surprised that students yawn at this approach. Course, these students were probably yawning when we did the same thing without a weblog, right (and I, too, have been guilty of asking students to use weblogs in such a way for group work or research)? Oh great. Another stupid journal assignment, but now I have to do it on the Web... Will's got a nice response when he brings up the "artificial environment" argument. Weblogs are being used all the time, all over the Web, but in ways which don't mesh with many of these created assignments. Folks want to write. Many find this tool very helpful for writing. Academia is too far behind to understand how to integrate it into the classroom.

    So I've been jotting down these fragmented responses to music I'm listening to lately...and my responses seem to be a bit cultural, historical, personal...the weblog seems like an appropriate place to put these responses because I'd like other folks to read them, the space allows me (if I want) to link out to other ideas/responses/definitions/examples/excerpts/quotations, and the fragmented nature of the weblog (short, daily entries) ideologically and practically matches the types of writing I'm experimenting with (fragmented).
    AHA!
    A usage which isn't the same as a typical print-oriented assignment! A great assignment? Eh. Maybe not. But this type of cultural, (affective?) response could be generalized to a number of approaches/applications. Or it could be used in a Nick Hornby way – a handbook of music responses…I'd bet it would be more interesting to write (the student's perspective) and read (the instructor's). But - as Cynthia Haynes does such a nice job demonstrating with "offshore writing" - it's not argumentative, not thesis driven, etc. That will not sit well with a lot of folks who still cling to these aged concepts which don't always work in a networked, digital apparatus.

    Posted by jrice @ 11:47 AM EST [Link]

    Friday, August 27, 2004

    Friday Listening:

  • "Bring It On Home To Me" by The Animals. This sounds like it was recorded at the Holiday Inn outside of Ocala. Is the stage covered in red fur? Do they have one of those set ups like Murph and the Magic Tones? Someone is no doubt spilling a badly made martini on the hotel carpet as the band plays to a crowd of seven. "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" is probably the best Animals tune, but it was nothing until Elvis Costello turned it into a heart wrenching appeal for relationship understanding.

    Sometimes I lie awake long regretting
    Some foolish thing, some sinful thing I've done

    When The Animals cover '60s blues classics like this tune, they fall flat on their face. Who would have thunk, however, that it was the bassist who discovered Hendrix?
  • "Maiysha" by Miles Davis. From the creepy Miles Davis years. I can't imagine being in the audience for any of the tunes on the Get Up With It album. The music is uncomfortable. It gets under your skin. It makes you want to hide somewhere. When folks speak of jazz, they aren’t speaking of this bizarre mix of static sounds beeping and popping at will. When I lived in Bloomington, my then girl friend would never let me play In a Silent Way. "It scares me," she said.
  • "Freddie's Dead" by The Derek Trucks Band. WDET loves these guys. They are constantly in rotation. They’re like the Allman Brothers clones. The announcer says they'll be opening for an Allman Brothers concert in the Metro Detroit area. How will the audience know who is who? Why do people try and cover Curtis Mayfield songs anyway? The best line about Curtis Mayfield is in Robert Palmer's book Rock and Roll: An Unruly History. I'm paraphrasing here, but Robbie Roberston is explaining Dylan's and Mayfield's music. To Dylan he says: "You say so much, but I don't understand it." About Mayfield: "He says so little, but it just moves me."
  • "Dis Dat or Da Other" by Dr. John. Give it a rest WDET. The title alone gives the song away: crap.
  • "Insane Asylum" by The Detroit Cobras. The best band nobody has heard of. The Cobras find the obscure, the brief moments in r & b history, the forgotten songs that were never meant to be forgotten, and then reimagine them for the hard beats and heavy guitar sound only Detroit can generate. This is Walter Benjamin Arcades music. This is the kind of music that should have been in American Graffiti. If it had been, maybe Jameson would have changed his mind about pastiche. Maybe Milner would have been a better bad-ass and not a cartoonish character who can't even do the Harrison Ford character in completely in the drag race and who gets all sentimental when Dreyfuss' character goes off to college. “Oh boo hoo. You take care of yourself.” Listening to the Cobras, Milner would have said: "To hell with it. I’m getting a beer."

    Posted by jrice @ 01:01 PM EST [Link]

    The Gloom and Doom Chronicles:
    Collin offers an insightful comment regarding the Chronicle's persistent gloom and doom first person accounts of academia. Read the Chronicle as "truth," and you're bound to think that all academia is infighting, mistreatment, boorish profs who are older than 30, an environment in which nobody can get a job, and so on and so on (Dennis Barron's columns are usually the exception). This is also the theme of many "pseudonym" blogs and invisible adjuncts incorporated, who want us to believe that academia is the exception in the general category of labor, and that outside academia everything works so much better in the workforce. Ok then. Keep believing that.
    Today's installment of the Chronicle's first person account is no exception. Cabals/secret sides/blah blah blah. Yes, the author realizes in the end the error of his initial ways, but he doesn't dismiss the cliché of the roaming gangs of department members who size you up and include you in their secret groups....(ARE YOU ON OR OFF THE BUS?)
    Maybe academia would be better if we really were gangs out to do each other in. Warriors, come out and play-ay… Why not adopt a Two men enter, one man leaves mentality complete with Texas Chainsaw Death Matches in the Dusty Rhodes tradition....
    But I digress (sort of). We do love gut wrenching stories, right? Whoa is me...I'm no good...and academics love the self-deprecating stories: "Excuse the quality of this paper I'm about to give; I wrote it on the plane." "My work? Oh, it's no good." "Forgive me if I ramble." "I don't know what to teach." “I’m too busy to be human.” Melville had The Confidence Man. Do we have the No Confidence Wo(Man)? Then there are folks like me who, whatever confidence I may project, still read these columns even though I find them mostly to be rubbish. Every day. Is it the “I gotta look” syndrome? Is it the mirror complex? Both?
    Maybe there should be a collection of essays put out by NCTE called Fear and Fear on the Academic Trail: Tales of Self-Abuse, Insecurity, and Nothing Goes Right. Or the Chronicle could just publish it themselves. I’m sure there’s a good market for that type of thing. I’d read it.

    Posted by jrice @ 11:00 AM EST [Link]

    Thursday, August 26, 2004

    Recent Google-Based Referrals (or You Can Tell it's a Slow Day for Innovative Thinking)

  • Topic Sentence Generator: The person who got here from this search is either working for the MSU Writing Center ("anybody googling us?" ) or seriously looking for a way to make a topic sentence. Word of advice: Nobody really sits down an makes up a topic sentence before writing. Look: I just wrote this without thinking up a topic sentence first. Amazing, ain’t it? This search generates 22,900 hits. Yikes. Pedagogy walks backwards.
  • Cowboy Hat Superstitious: This is one of those interesting moments of juxtaposition where two or more entries respond to a user's keywords search. Very Burroughs-oriented in its combination possibilities. This search sounds like a band's name or a mantra to repeat at night in order to calm (or provoke) one's nerves. I'm ranked 7 on this search. Right behind an excerpt from a cowboy novel from Books for a Buck.com.
  • How to Make Instruction Rice. Hey, I'm on a Thai Google search! Cool. How do you make an Instruction Rice anyway? Three parts Bear Bryant (GET OFF YOUR ASS), two parts Dylan (mumble mumble the woman I love mumble), one part All Funk, baby. 305,000 hits on this search. Dang, I'm good.
  • jeff rice. This one always confuses the hell out of me in a very non-Alan Berliner way. Who on earth is looking for me? Mom? An old girl friend (we lost touch in second grade; you used to run away when I asked to borrow your pencil...)? A publisher who desperately wants to put out The Rhetoric of Cool (yeah, right)? Someone who refuses to bookmark this site and wants to see every now and then if I've finally found something worthwhile to write about? Probably that one. 1,010,000 hits. My more than fifteen minutes. Hey wait a minute! That's not me! And that neither! Hmmm. Maybe nobody wants me after all.....

    Posted by jrice @ 03:52 PM EST [Link]

    Wednesday, August 25, 2004

    On the Radio:

  • "I Shall Be Released" by Bob Dylan. More Dylan. This is one in a string of Dylan songs played this afternoon, among them "I'll Be Your Baby Tonight" and "Highway 61." The finale of The Last Waltz turns the song into an anthem of sorts. But listen closely:


    They say everything can be replaced,
    Yet every distance is not near.
    So I remember every face
    Of every man who put me here.

    This is a song about revenge. For every peace rally which revitalizes the song as an ode to final liberation, be careful. Dylan never represented the peace movement. While Woodstock roared, he was having motorcycle accidents in upstate New York. Dylan resists the movement. This song, therefore, should be the anthem of biker gangs, sub/versive compositionists, and anyone looking to knock off somone's hat just for the hell of it, as Ishmael wants to do in the gloomy opening pages of Moby Dick.

  • "On the Road Again" by Willie Nelson. I always associate this song with Dyan Cannon. Kind of silly, kind of bumpy. It's a song that's just like being on the road again...think about Opus sitting in the car in the driveway shouting out nonesense while pretending to drive. "Sorry, the road makes me giddy," he tells the character sitting next to him. This song is nowhere near as self-reflective and mournful as Red Headed Stranger. I was listening to Red Headed Stranger the other day, in fact. "When the killing is done...." is a line that keeps echoing throughout the room long after it's been sung...

  • "He Ain't No Better Than You" by Mavis Staples. Can you explain the non-Christian drawn to gospel music? If you've ever heard the Staple Singers' "Respect Yourself" or Dorothy Love Coates "Ninety Nine and a Half," you know what I'm talking about. These songs fill you with emotion and energy. Forget the Jesus riffs. Forget the Christian iconology floating around in morality and what not excuses. Just sit back and groove. If only the Christians were as groovy as some of their best music.


    Posted by jrice @ 12:51 PM EST [Link]

    Posted by jrice @ 12:10 PM EST [Link]

    Sunday, August 22, 2004

    Songs I Heard Today (No Part Indicated/Will I Ever Have the Desire to Make This List Again?):

  • "Cadillac Assembly Line" by Albert King. Originally written by Mack Rice, this song draws me in for its Detroit connection (Rice a native) and the name connection. My signature already ties me to this song. I also use it briefly in an article I'm writing called "Writing Detroit."
  • "Soothe Me" by Sam & Dave. I had this great idea today: why not make a Sam and Dave CD for when I'm traveling around and there's nothing on the radio. "Soothe Me" is one of my favorite Sam and Dave songs. Its romantic side is subtle; no bravado, just a simple request. It’s in the background of The Blues Brothers right before Elwood runs the red light early in the film and thus frames one of the movie’s best lines: SCMODS. I hear a bit of my signature in it as well: Same & Dave are the only real successful '60s soul band to come from Miami (my home town).
  • "Tangled Up in Blue" by Bob Dylan.
    I thought you'd never say hello, she said.
    You look like the silent type
    Epic Dylan. The lead in guitar strumming. The long narrative of romance and loss. The "book of poems" written by "an Italian poet from the 13th century." I read a review of a new Dylan book today, and the writer noted that Blood on the Tracks was the last great album of the '70s. He was right. First heard this record in 7th grade. My god, what would junior high have been like without Dylan?
  • "Bowtie" by Outkast. I was turned on to this album very late in its popularity. This song (and "Roses" ) are two of the weirdest on the disc. A hip hop song mocking folks for wearing outlandish outfits? Then you get a look at these guys and wonder if they're not singing about themselves. Fashion and music cannot be separated; whether it’s Alice Cooper's dripping make-up or George Clinton parading around in a multi-colored boa. Sometimes I wish I was a rock star just so I could wear better clothes. The shirt I have on right now is almost ten years old.
  • "Dead Man's Curve" by Jan and Dean. It was on the WDET Sunday radio show in honor of the weekend's "Dream Cruise." Take the curve, boys. Please.
  • "Manic Depression" by Seal with Jeff Beck. Also on the radio. How did these two get together? Do you remember Beck's stinging guitar on "Superstitious" with Rod Stewart? And now this? It sounds like Beck could care less. He's going through the Hendrix lick without any flair or emotion. Depression? Sounds like apathy. The other Beck has replaced this one time guitar hero. And who's idea was it to get Seal to sing the Hendrix lyrics? Now that we’ve all but forgotten Hendrix, this song gives us a moment to remember that underneath all that drug usage and slurred speech, he could sing. My favorite Hendrix moment is in some concert movie I saw on the old USA Network’s late night show Night Flight. Hendrix turns to the audience and says: “I gotta tune my guitar. You don’t want me to play if my guitar’s out of tune, do you?” No one cares, and Hendrix never gets it tuned right.

    Posted by jrice @ 07:59 PM EST [Link]

    Saturday, August 21, 2004

    Theories I Don't Believe In Part I:

  • Literacy: It's not that I don't believe it ever was a useful way of understanding how individuals use and create information, I just don't believe it exists anymore. Technology has altered literacy to something else (we hear new media, electracy, e-literacies...what's in a name? It ain’t literacy). Harvey Graff did a good job exposing the literacy myth in terms of its economic pay off, but even still, the literacy narrative has become a conventional trope in composition studies. Mike Rose may it popular, but others, even in technology-oriented studies, continue to believe that the individual’s work with a computer is what determines some variant of (digital) literacy. People are not empowered only by learning a tool. What we have understood as literacy is more than the ability to learn how to make information because I can write or read. What we call literacy is built in the infrastructure, the apparatus. The infrastructure has changed so much since the end of the Second World War, that literacy narratives don't explain much anymore (and neither do "sponsors" of literacy").
  • Hermeneutics: Please, please, please stop explaining to me what a "text" means. Frankly, I don't care. To paraphrase Woody Allen, explaining texts all the time means you don't know how to make them on your own.
  • Visual Rhetoric: Like literacy, it's an overused trope which really explains very little. Its cache is in its popularity: hey, there's meaning in them images. Really? And you just figured that out (see the latest JAC for yet another example of this kind of thinking)? That there is rhetorical value and usage in images is true, of course. But this phrase "visual rhetoric" has become little more than a synonym for how to read images. “Here’s a bunch of ads. Tell me what the visual rhetoric is.” To take a page from Austin, the folks who triumph visual rhetoric need to spend more time with "how to do things with images," and less time with how to read images.
  • Capitalism: I'm not against capitalism; I just don't think it exists. Whenever a finger is pointed at the U.S. and "down with capitalism" chanted, I think: but this country isn't all capitalism. There's way too much government involvement at all kinds of levels of economic production, and there is plenty (even if not enough) socialism. Like that public school you went to? How about that tax break? What about all the governmental subsidies floating around? And that road you drive on? Etc.
  • Vegan(ism): Listen, cheese. "nuff said. Can't be a vegan as long as there is cheese. And beer.
  • Clarity: The most popular trope of composition studies, it is passed from textbook to textbook as if a world of unclear rhetoric – from Dionysus to Nietzsche to Breton to Burroughs to Wu Tang to Adaweb to Madlib (and so many I leave out in between) - never existed. You would think advertising would put an end to the emphasis on clarity. Remember (or still see) those wonderful Levi’s ads of a few years back which made no sense at all ( DJ gets on a bus with a teddy bear in his arms, a cowboy hat on his head, heads off to some empty bar…what the hell was that about?) yet were very persuasive? When Berlin equated the clarity trope with the desire to produce students who wouldn’t challenge the system, he was on the money. We hear this false theory of discourse in its other flavors too: purpose, coherence, unity, the topic sentence, etc. But it all boils down to the same, to borrow from Elvis Costello, be uncomplicated. Don’t rock the boat. Make sure everything is nice and clear, open and fair, and justice for all. “If you’re not clear, you won’t be understood…” Oh really? Did postmodernism never happen? How about that lovely rant in the Phaedrus about love (that’s a psycho trip if there ever was one)? What about the fantastic Nike commercial for the Whatever…Mark McGuire being chased into a boat’s open port by us, the viewer…WHATEVER the ad states. Huh? Not clear at all. Doesn’t seem Nike was complaining about sales. Yeah, this entry could go on and one and one and one…BASS! How low can you go? Oops. Wasn’t clear about that last remark, was I?

    Posted by jrice @ 09:02 AM EST [Link]

    Friday, August 20, 2004

    Theories I Believe In Part I

  • Heuretics: Probably the biggest missed opportunity for composition theory. Invention for the digital. Instead, composition continues to imagine invention as anything but inventive, opting to teach students to draw only from commonplace assumptions (i.e. the cliché and what they already know).
  • Mythologies: Roland Barthes' concept of the mythology (what we assume to be natural is, in fact, a construction) informs most of cultural studies. Barthes later let go of the "unveiling" part of mythology and focused more on the productive part. Because that's the part most attractive to me, I also have to throw in Craig Saper's artificial mythologies, since my Florida School co-pat focuses on production over interpretation in his application of Barthes. Mythologies is also the basis of the "Writing Detroit" article I am working on (and the course which inspired it).
  • Gravity: Keeps us on earth for the time being. And important for beer making.
  • The Rhetoric of Cool: I'm from the Andy Warhol School of self production (carefully aligned with the Norman Mailer School of Advertisements for Yourself). So I got to say, this cool thing really is amazing.
  • Hip Hop Pedagogy: See above.
  • The Cut-Up: Folks, if you don't get it by now, get it. Burroughs' work is the basis of any interest in new media. Get your old copy of Nova Express out and start reading.
  • Interpellation: Althusser can be so boring. And maybe he was a fraud. But on this idea, he hit it on the head. All media hail us: HEY YOU!
  • Dissonance: Ornette Coleman, Sun Ra, Thelonious Monk ….who needs clarity when you have a system of composition which challenges all of our fixed beliefs, which unsettles everything we find comfortable and relaxing, and which still makes certain things meaningful again? Take it to the visual level and you have Kenneth Anger and Jack Smith. Take it to writing and you have Kodwo Eshun. VV’s sub/version comes to mind here…
  • Applied Grammatology: The guy was my dissertation director. You can't look away from your most immediate influence. The best thing Greg taught me was to teach folks "how to make stuff." The idea of "applying" theory still is lost among those who would rather test students for what about the theory they remember (and will quickly forget).
  • Collage: It's been with us for a long time, but typically is treated as novelty. McLuhan did the best job of applying it to new media and writing by actually using it in his work (both textual and visual). Composition reduces it to Elbow-based "but in the end make sure everything is clear for your audience" which isn't collage at all. Rotella's decollage is another missed moment in our field's history. His Elvis should be required theory-making. Greil Marcus' Dead Elvis poses collage best as a moment of celebritacy (or I pose it as such, see comments above for more self-promotion).
  • The Mix: Hell, if you’ve read this weblog before, you know how I feel about the mix and the re-mix.
  • English Composition as a Happening: Geoff makes writing studies enjoyable, but never sacrifices intellectual work in doing so. Too often, his work is treated as only something "he" can do. And there again, we miss the boat. Once we reduce theories to personality, we might as well concede pedagogy to the lowest common denominator and unflinching status quo. We'd be better off throwing a huge chuck of argumentation studies out the window, and start re-reading what Geoff is doing with the Happening, The A&P Parking Lot, The Sex Pistols, and writing in general.

    Next: Theories I Don't Believe In

    Posted by jrice @ 10:45 AM EST [Link]

    Wednesday, August 18, 2004

    Grammatology - Otis Style

    Otis Redding
    Dictionary of Soul
    Maybe not the strongest of Otis' pre-death albums. But let's explore its grammatological potential here - the motivating factor coming from the title: dictionary. Dictionaries hold prominent places in the popular consciousness of literacy studies. The example I often draw upon in my work is Malcolm X studying the dictionary while in prison, a moment which I, at 14 or 15, found inspirational enough to consider as well as an act of literacy acquisition: knowledge of words equates power. It's also a moment I draw upon in my article on cyborgography. Of course, literacy is more than the accumulation of words. Still, we cannot ignore the relevance of literacy studies to new media - even as the terms of literacy are drastically altered.
    Dictionary of Soul is a record, a material artifact relevant to the emergence of what Lhamon calls "the deliberate speed" of post World War II America. Because of its post War-technological origins (and it is a Stax product - I'm thinking of Tom Dowd bringing technology into the Memphis studio in the early '60s by refiguring its recording board), I consider Dictionary of Soul as a potential lesson for new media literacy. But what kind of lesson?
    Mood. Ulmer identifies mood as an electrate grammatological principle (funk is one example in Internet Invention). What can we do, though, with soul?
    From the album, lesson #1. Try a little tenderness.


    You know she's waiting
    Just anticipating
    The thing that she'll never, never, possess,no,no
    But while [all the time] she's without it
    Go to her and try just a little bit of tenderness
    [That’s all you gentlemen gotta do]

    From the album, lesson #2. Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa (Sad Song).


    All my life I've been singing these sad songs
    Trying to get my message to you
    But this is the only song [y'ALL] I can sing
    And when I get to singing my message to you

    Ulmer draws attention often to the Brazilian word saudade as he works through mood and electracy. Saudade has a sense of the word "sad" to it. So does Dictionary of Soul. To read this dictionary, and thus, to write from it, to be empowered by it (as Malcolm X is empowered by the English dictionary in his fight against racism), is to evoke the sadness invested in one aspect of soul music and conveyed by Otis into the world of new media. To write sadness...an act of melancholy? Maybe not. An alternative to the upbeat tone of many comp textbooks or the "fairness" lessons driven home in argumentation assignments (find the counter position/create a reasonable position/use logic)? Oh yes.
    Then the analogy:
    What fairness and rationality are to literacy/ sadness is to new media (?)

    Ties nicely into exile pedagogy of course....Choral move: Otis covering the Stones' "Satisfaction" early in his career. What if he had covered "Tumbling Dice"? Any reason to suggest it couldn't have been included on a Dictionary of Soul Part II - an imaginary record which pushes the exile/sad aspects of new media further....

    Posted by jrice @ 02:02 PM EST [Link]

    Monday, August 16, 2004

    Exile Pedagogy Part II
    The spirit of Exile Pedagogy comes from the cover of The Rolling Stones' Exile on Main Street. The assemblage places writing in exile, alienates it from the first year experience in the university and asks student writers to stop being student writers. They become exiles. They are not of the university. They belong to media, "media beings" in the spirit of Burroughs' work. Or: they experiment with the exile as a response to the out of touch demands print forces upon the composition sequence.

    Madlib's Madvillainy marks a contemporary example of exile writing: its beats comprised of samples and juxtaposed meanings and sounds. It also conveys exiled attitude.
    Put the CD into your DVD player and you get a Flash-based comic strip cartoon of the Madvillain. Media. Sound begets image. RUB OUT WORD. Listen to the tracks. "America's Most Blunted":


    Sometimes you need to detox
    It Can help you with your rhyme flow and your beatbox. . .
    Tear a page out of the good book
    Here's how you want it!
    America's most blunted...
    Even your pop's got smack
    Even your mom's got crack

    Nothing scares composition more than hip hop or worse: THE DJ. And the DJ rapping this kind of stuff - performed as Quasimoto (pseudonyms??? Try alter egos, baby) - how is this writer gonna invent the university? Plagiarized. Yup. Who cares? Media makes the copy the writing itself.

    This writer is exiled. Textbooks can't hold her in. Textbooks can't define her. "We need to communicate clearly and make sense of our world, more than ever before," Atwan's media-based textbook Convergences declares. Oh really? Exiled Pedagogy dismisses clarity. Clarity is what led to exile in the first place. Even the most banal of media like CNN opt for the assemblage. The newspaper was an exile media form. The sample is today's exile (unless we consider its commercial appeal to music. But its pedagogical value is still exiled. Journalism studies made the newspaper acceptable to the university; it pretended to be "ethical" and beyond plagiarism. But it's not).

    Note Madvillain's intro to "Shadows of Tomorrow" (or even remember the Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows"). Clarity? Where? Light? Past? Future? What are they talking about?

    We should teach (or not teach? encourage? promote?) the exile. Of course, one could argue that composition already exiles. Write about that? Why? Topic sentence where? Why? Who cares? Tell you this ad means what? The elections? Oye. WHY US???

    But we want to turn the exile into writing - or not "turn" but remind composition and the university that exile is writing. Anything outside the paperdigm remixes and mixes. Welcome to the Terrordome.

    Some of my best friends are DJs, after all....

    Posted by jrice @ 05:55 PM EST [Link]

    Sunday, August 15, 2004

    I respect the folks I know who run the MSU Writing Center. And I've always liked how they have worked to integrate new media into writing center activities. But this thesis tester component (and much of the video-based instruction) of their online presence is problematic. Echoing Kitzhaber's misunderstandings of technology as programmable writing machines fixated on drills and fill in the blanks, this Flash-driven device does little but repeat the problematic assumptions writing instruction makes when it confuses the digital with referentiality and the thesis.
    Now if MSU folks wander over here - please take no offense. My observation is a critique, but not personal in anyway. With all my investment in composition and new media, I have to note how this is not a new media site for students you have built. It is for the web person who made the site. The attractive interface was made by someone with good media skills. But asking students to fill in an online thesis template is not new media at all. Notice the discrepancy here? The center gets to work with new media; the student doesn't....
    Of course, the other major issue here is that there is nothing really "analytical" (as the module professes itself to teach) about the thesis. Quite the opposite. Providing a fill in the blank generator proves that by itself. The thesis is a formula best mastered when little thinking is applied. Its construction guarantees nothing regarding "good" writing, or at the least, writing which challenges an audience in any shape or form. A thesis generator perpetuates some of the worst features of composition studies; the proliferation of formulas and templates without regard to either technological innovation or why these items were created in the first place (often in response to labor issues or cultural capital issues).
    What is composition's fascination with the thesis? And why does a writing center with very smart folks - and good web folks as well - fall back on the thesis when instruction takes place? Are we doomed to butt up against the reality of new media forever by clinging to outdated modes of instruction? And heaven forbid – what if we drop the thesis issue altogether? Then what? Will it be Armageddon all over again (yo Yogi!)? Or will we wake up finally from this bizarre slumber of a 100 years, rub our eyes, and say: hey, this isn’t really how writing works, and this isn’t what’s going on around us?
    Yeah right. Exile pedagogy, here I come for real. No one digs a critic.

    Posted by jrice @ 03:25 PM EST [Link]

    Saturday, August 14, 2004

    Instructions I Never Gave:

  • Choke! Choke!
  • Now, make counterclockwise circles with your foot
  • An ounce of dry matter, two grams of fat....
  • Go left when you hit the possum
  • Plug it in the other way
  • Call that guy Mr. Dutchwater
  • Make mine with gopher
  • Don't ever spit there again
  • Go into that Ben and Jerry's and ask them for Murky Lurk: real vanilla ice cream made with sewage water (ok. I lied. I did give this instruction in Bolder, Colorado once).
  • Make mine green
  • Put the wrong name at the top of your paper
  • Burn the picture and then dance clockwise shaking your fists at the ground while chanting "mumba mumba moo"
  • Hold this while I flush

    Posted by jrice @ 11:10 AM EST [Link]

    Friday, August 13, 2004


    Celebrity Anecdote #1
    Julia Child died. I've never dug her cooking - not very inspired, too old school, no spices. But she's been the source of one of my favorite impersonations, "Julia Child/Sex Fiend-Racist." Not that she was either. But I got the idea from an episode when she was cooking with Madhur Jaffrey (I think it was her) and said about the color of the food: what an interesting color, dearie. The color was maybe brown. So I added: what an interesting color, dearie, just like the color of your skin. Yah. That led to: reminds of a cabana boy I did in Portugal when my husband was in the army...Track me down, and I'll do it for you one day. The voice makes it all come alive.

    Posted by jrice @ 12:02 PM EST [Link]

    Wednesday, August 11, 2004

    Ben Yagoda starts with a nice Chronicle critique on the importance of style, drawing attention to the "please bury this book once and for all" popular Elements of Style. But he errs in saying:


    But the traditional purpose of writing is communication, equally true in an e-mail message and a published book; if it leaves the person on the other end bored, bothered, or bewildered (or if it permanently remains bound in a journal), it is of extremely limited use.

    That statement doesn't mesh with his fawning over Charlie Parker's style - remember, California audiences hated Parker and Gillespie when they toured post-War. The hard bop sound was deemed "noise" and "un-danceable to." Audiences were, in fact, bewildered. So bewildered they booed the band off the stage (and remember crowds booing Dylan: “JUDAS” because they were so confused by the message – but Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home has style, man).

    And then Yagoda makes the big mistake - reducing everything to "our students can't write":


    Of course, anyone who's ever been hired to turn a couple of dozen undergraduates into competent writers will discern at least two problems with the notion of putting individual style on the syllabus. To put it bluntly, not just students but a vast number of our citizens are poor writers. A sort of triage is clearly called for: Sloppiness, mistakes, clichés, jargon, and obfuscations need to be addressed before one moves on to finer points of style and voice.

    Oops. First – too snotty a comment. Second, you can't critique Strunk and White for over-emphasizing petty grammar points then turn to "the finer points" as ultimate goal. "Finer" - itself a word referring to a vision of refined English (and grammar efficiency) may have little to nothing to do with '"style." Are you telling me the dissonance of Ornette Coleman has “finer points” of style and voice? And Sun Ra? And Funkadelic turning this mutha out? Don’t like music examples? Here’s my old favorite: Burroughs. Or Ballard’s Crash. Or Kathy Acker. Looks like the finer points issue falls flat on its face, eh?

    If we take seriously the Parker example of style Yagoda throws at us from the get go, we see that it doesn't mesh with his argument. "Style is expressed unconsciously, but shaped consciously, in revision." Not necessarily with Parker. The improv (yeah, maybe not always it was true "improv") mentality in bebop was not about revision. It was in your face, break up order, deconstruct convention, make you uneasy music. Today, Parker doesn't sound that wild. But imagine yourself in 1940 whatever listening to him and thinking: "What the hell is this crap?" Audiences thought that.

    And that makes hip hop a nice analogy. Wu Tang Clan is (or I guess, was) the Charlie Parker of the last decade. Finer points? Not when they're singing "Wu Tang Clan ain't nothing to fuck with." But there’s style there. That’s why I love it when Strunk and White make the big mistake and write:


    By the time this paragraph sees print, uptight, ripoff, rap, dude, vibes, copout, and funky will be the words of yesteryear, and we will be fielding more recent ones that have come bouncing into our speech. (Strunk and White 82)

    I love it because it inspired me to invent Funkcomp, but also because they are so WRONG. Funky is the style they cannot see because they are too involved in a culture of “finer points” – a belles lettres snooty world where being funky means “can’t write.” It is also the world of literacy – see previous rants – a system of thought unable to recognize that funk, in the words of George Clinton, is its own reward. May I frighten you?

    Posted by jrice @ 11:52 AM EST [Link]

    Tuesday, August 10, 2004

    From the list collection (a continuing weblog project sponsored by the Jack Goody society for grammatology):
    Places I Eat At Part 7

  • Thai Gardens: cheap cheap cheap. If they think you're not white, the food is really hot.
  • Beirut Palace: La Shish is too far away. Otherwise, they win. Royal Oak is closer. The only Arab restaurant nearby that doesn't serve crappy pita wrapped in plastic. I want my pita fresh!
  • Noble Fish: recent find. Best damn sushi around. And red bean ice cream out front in the store.
  • Udipi: All the time. Nuff said.
  • Star of India: When I don't feel like driving to Farmington Hills. But it's no Udipi.
  • Nami Sushi: The pre-Noble Fish days. And I could walk there if I wanted to. If I wanted to, I said...
  • Everest Express: It was just one time back in February or sometime around then. But not bad. Waitress: I bet you've never had Nepalese food before..." Sarika: "I have. Many times." I really don't like eating out that much actually...
  • WAB: I don't eat there. The place doesn't have a stove and serves the worse burritos in town. I just drink the beer. The marzen's pretty good these days...
  • Burrito Brothers: No wait. That's in Gainesville. (I could mention Pizza Palace too then..but no wait...it closed years ago... damnit to hell!)
  • Home: Ain't no place like it. Let me heat up the pizza stone....

    Posted by jrice @ 06:48 PM EST [Link]

    Monday, August 9, 2004

    Funky Do Moro
    Brazillian Funk

    Posted by jrice @ 09:25 AM EST [Link]

    Odd book covers at Sushiesque. I like this one:

    Could have used that one in high school....

    Posted by jrice @ 07:45 AM EST [Link]

    Sunday, August 8, 2004

    My Weekend Part #3

  • Bought a used copy of Kenneth Burke's Attitudes Towards History for 25 cents at a church rummage sale.
  • Lunch at Udipi
  • Pickled some banana peppers grown in the back yard
  • Saw a couple members of the Florida School who popped into town for a few hours
  • Made sweet potato fries
  • Drank a few beers at the Royal Oak Brewery
  • Started Paul Auster's Book of Illusions
  • Asked: By the way, which one's George?

    Posted by jrice @ 01:43 PM EST [Link]

    Saturday, August 7, 2004

    Ok. The dude faked his own decapitation. Big deal. We live in the society of the spectacle. But why, when the AP reporters came by to interview him about it, did he decide to be photographed in his underwear?

    Yikes. Out of shape and hairy shoulders. Hey, buddy, they got these things today called "shirts." Try wearing one.

    Posted by jrice @ 06:01 PM EST [Link]

    Thursday, August 5, 2004

    Notes on My Surroundings Part 1
    Cool Michigan breeze knocking papers off the filing cabinet
    Benefits letter from Wayne State on the floor
    25 cent copy of The Gutenberg Galaxy
    Broken keyboard
    Captain America action figure
    Paint samples from Home Depot
    2001 Mousepad from Custom Copies in Gainesville
    Unplugged in fax machine
    Austin Powers talking keychain

    Posted by jrice @ 04:14 PM EST [Link]

    Wednesday, August 4, 2004

    Part 1:
    Coming back from Windsor this afternoon:
    Security Guy: So what were you doing in Canada?
    Me: Met a friend and had lunch.
    Security Guy: Oh yeah? Where?
    Me: Sam's. A pizza place by the university. Ever been there?
    Security Guy: No. I don't go to Canada too much. I'm not very popular over there.
    Me: Uh..right.
    Security Guy: So are you bringing back anything? Any leftovers? Any wine? Any beer?
    Me: No.
    Security Guy: Why not?

    Meanwhile, the line of cars waiting to cross keeps backing up in the tunnel....

    Part 2:
    Steve is getting hit hard over at the Detroit Board. Those boys take their city seriously. Too seriously sometimes...but at least they love Detroit. As many of us do eventually...

    Posted by jrice @ 09:33 PM EST [Link]

    Tuesday, August 3, 2004

    Posted by jrice @ 12:39 PM EST [Link]

    Monday, August 2, 2004

    Fascinating notes from William Mitchell's DIS 2004 keynote on what can best be called wifi architecture. This is the kind of stuff I love to harp about: how does technology alter the apparatus?
    Some parts that stand out:


    New types of learning spaces not only incorporate new hardware and systems they also create new patterns of social and intellectual interaction,

    The entire campus becomes an interactive learning device

    and


    totally against standard ideology of modernism (i.e. separating and optimising functions)

    and from here:


    Dynamic of teaching and learning changing, especially seminars - any reference is instantly Googled and the results thrust back into the conversation... very high-speed investigation. Changes style of teaching - no superior command by the teacher (some have banned it)

    We too often forget the ways spaces are created by the communicative apparatus - yeah yeah McLuhan stuff again. But McLuhan and Ennis were onto this stuff in the '50s and '60s. And we still see the university structured around a logic (ideologically and physically) that is being taken over by mixology, new media, the remix, cool, and many other so called "new" methods upon us today.

    Posted by jrice @ 07:02 PM EST [Link]

    Interesting bit on p2p TV. Got me thinking, even though its focus is journalism which doesn't ever get me thinking. When the Web and TVs fully come together - and they will, of course - and when broadband and video become an everyday thing, what about the everyday joe like you and me? Will we be videoing (or vlogging) our thoughts, lunacies, desires, fetishes across the world's TV sets? I hope so. Reminds me a little of Greg's Mr. Mentality TV show - which I don't even think I can explain right now.
    The objection I can think of is one I came up with a few years ago. The www Web will vanish, leaving out the everyday web writers as large media corporations unify the spectrum to only their services on a subscription basis. Or maybe not "vanish." But we will be in an AM kind of situation where the meaty stuff ends up on some kind of FM styled protocol.
    Still - imagine the possibilities if we can put everyone on TV with a $30 webcam, a web hosting provider, and still not invented super broadband? Videodrome fantasy? No, man. Something far more perverse and amazing. A true McLuhan Global Village where there is no harmony, only voices and ideas clashing. It's everything first year writing fears, which reminds me somewhat of Jenny's post about cultural critique and writing textbooks. Of course critique has been homogenized. Homogenization, the Fordist mentality, is popular in both business (like TV) and education (no Ezra Pound "make it new" here). That critique should fall victim to the process of uniformity is no surprise; after all, uniformity is a treasured member of the clear and coherent gang.
    But I digress (again). Media beings! We need p2p TV to finally mix and remix ourselves into informatic high-ways (technical writing to the extreme, dude).

    Posted by jrice @ 11:58 AM EST [Link]

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