My Archives: November 2005

Wednesday, November 30, 2005

The Curriculum of Things
Influenced somewhat by the girl's recent book suggestion of Home Rules and Bill Brown's "Thing Theory."
A year long study.
First semester.

First few weeks

Places of exasperation

Things you beat people with

Lost items of significance

Ruptures and seams

Second few weeks

Rooms of embarrassment

Cassettes that no longer play (or that play scratchy)

Ripped clothes (from where/how/when)

Toilet trouble

Mid-term

Third few weeks

Sentimental objects long throw away

Living room pleasures

Broken or unplayed records

Memorabilia, trinkets, souvenirs of places you now hate

Receipts

Final weeks

Recipes scattered in drawers

Drug paraphernalia

Posters of rock stars and celebrities you hung or wanted to hang on walls

Rooms of drinking

Books. Torn books. Unread books. Cherished books. Loaned books. Books dropped in the tub. Books piled on books. Books with notes inside. Books written in ("Yes!" "Right on"). Books you want to throw away. Books given to you by people you no longer remember. Books given to you by people you no longer want to remember. Books you hate. Books you read more than once. Books you steal from.

Final Exam

Posted by jrice @ 04:26 PM EST [Link]

Monday, November 28, 2005

A New Geography Course
In Yonder Life on the Far Side of Change, Jim Corder writes:

Some months ago I proposed a new course to the curriculum committee at the university where I teach. I recommended it as sort of a geography course, though I thought it should bring together literature, history, art, and geography into a place to think about place, what it has meant to us, why a sense of place is strong in some of us but not in others. I'd be glad if I could say that I came to be interested in a geography course because of apparent student needs or because of society's apparent needs. But it did not arise out of students' needs or society's needs. It arose out of my need, my longing to know here, to know there, to know the one in relation to the other.

My needs in term of place. "Why do some people become attached to places while others don't?" Corder asks. "What are our personal geographies?" What indeed. A short list: Those places that construct my sense of geography, that are my personal geography.

Detroit. My adopted town (the one I don't live in but live near). Its ruins are romanticized everywhere, yet they are metaphoric as well. That metaphor is the invention of a rhetoric of a city not dependent on referentiality, not dependent on grand narratives or sweeping gestures promising economic revival. A rhetoric of fragments and linkages and broken linkages and dead ends and open writing spaces and folksonomy and websites and an odd passion that I read daily across the Web. I call that rhetoric a network.

Atlanta. A city of intimacy and southern charm. Yet it is a city of style and yuppies too. Where are the signs of its burning? In the bars or pizza places or half a million dollar homes (1300 square feet!) or Zagat rated restaurants? My ideal place to find good food and drink all day. Even when the food is just “ok” the places one sits in look wonderful and renovated. Old world charm? I always imagine myself a southerner even if the southern city I originally came from (Miami) is hardly considered southern by most people. No matter how hip it becomes, Atlanta is still southern.

Homestead, Florida. My mythical city of origins. Where my father and his family once lived. The frontier. Best mythologized for me in an anecdote regarding a pump in the back of my grandmother's house and the back cover of Parliament's Motor Booty Affair (an image which connects me back to Detroit): Riding the waves in a cowboy hat. The frontier meets South Beach. Where you can dance underwater and not get wet.

State College. Not really my place. But my connection to it is obvious if even new. It, too, is imaginary (what places aren’t) but personal in ways that the most personal of all my places aren’t. A large body of work struggles to understand relationships among places – argument, textual relationships, professional discourse, theoretical assumptions, memoir – but few can account for the thin line which connects two unrelated places like Detroit and State College. Only two specific people can make that connection occur.

Posted by jrice @ 09:37 PM EST [Link]

Sunday, November 27, 2005

She studies on Thanksgiving....

Posted by jrice @ 10:14 AM EST [Link]

Saturday, November 26, 2005

Back Home
There's snow. The cats are fighting. We're drinking Bell's. We're watching the Gators.

Posted by jrice @ 04:34 PM EST [Link]

Wednesday, November 23, 2005

Things To Do When You Go Back to the South

Drink quality Belgians in an Atlanta brew pub

Eat tacos

Eat a quality breakfast in a hip Virginia Highlands yuppy grocery

Make a Publix visit

Notice that you can buy better beer in Detroit

Remember that you don't like boiled peanuts

Ah Travelers Rest, SC.

Read Persepolis on the way up to Flat Rock. Damn good graphic novel. Very moving.

See that the folks' neighbors in Zirconia still haven't taken the old couches and car parts out of their front yard (four years later)

See that Hendersonville is suddenly a hip place to live for young urban professionals

It ain't snowing

Posted by jrice @ 10:34 PM EST [Link]

Tuesday, November 22, 2005

Posted by jrice @ 04:40 PM EST [Link]

Monday, November 21, 2005

From the Political Response Department

Side note: I seldom engage in this kind of writing. But if others have the right to spew crap, I - and others - have the right to respond.

Our sort of colleague Matthew Abraham is still obsessed with Israel.
Abraham's leading of the Pre-Text discussion list last year to promote anti-Israel thinking is now triumphed with Abraham's fascination with the Dershowitz/Finkelstein' feud. Nothing better than squaring Jews against one another, particularly in an effort to downgrade the legitimacy of the Israeli State. We saw this in American Civil Rights in the '60s when southern whites paraded local African Africans in front of the cameras as "opposed" to them northern agitators. Abraham seems to enjoy this rhetorical ploy. "Hey a Jew who opposes Israel. See! Israel is not legitimate! If Jews think so, it must be true!"
It's all one big yawn. But it keeps closet activists like Abraham happy. This kind of "political" activist writing is based on maintaining the solid lines of right and wrong. American (or the West) and Israel always occupy the wrong side. The East (and particularly Said's distorted vision of the so-called victims of imperialism, notably the Arab nations and peoples) are on the right. It's that simple.
Or is it?
So many inaccuracies in Abraham's simplistic historical summary. But besides his own implicit racism:

Denying nationalism to one people - his distorted and inaccurate reading of Zionism - and allowing it to another, the Palestinians is racist

His blatant racist accusation of “ethnic cleansing” which has no relationship to reality

There is nothing more racist than comparing Jews to Nazis, rhetorical ploy 101

Usage of Zionist as the boogy-man. Total racist. And total lack of knowledge of what Zionism is. How easy to just throw that word around: BIG BAD ZIONISTS!

That Abraham believes so strongly in the binaries of global politics is the real problem (and the problem of both Leftist and Rightist politics). It is too easy to think that this is how peoples of the world behave or feel about one another. The boundaries are highly flexible; the enemies are often allies in surprising ways; the so called allies are often enemies (Abraham needs to pay better attention - in the case of Middle East politics - to how the Arab and Moslem nations fought against Palestinian nationalism and aspirations for a new state).
It's incredibly irritating. But the irritation comes at a few levels:

One knows the person. I know this person. I have exchanged emails with him. I know he will make his mark in rhetoric and composition. Still, I find him disgusting and simple-minded in this review.

The real failure of binary thinking and how my opposition to that thinking will be translated as a belief that I oppose a Palestinian state or that I am right wing. Neither of those points is true. What I oppose is the nonsense this review spreads and how that nonsense has hijacked all sense of opposition to rightist thinking.
In fact, what is most irritating is that it is this very kind of one sided, simplistic analysis Abraham employs is what keeps geo-conflicts like the Palestinian/Israeli one alive. What has become highly disappointing recently is that as both sides work towards final settlement and peaceful co-existence (so many events before, during and after both Intifadas that Abraham shows no knowledge of), closet activists like Abraham work as hard as possible to keep the conflict alive. Is Abraham that naïve or that simplistic to not know what goes on day to day? In some ways, I think so. A good deal of academic readings of global conflict is quite naïve. I know such folks feel quite pleased with their so-called enlightened politics, but often they have no idea what they are talking about; they have just grabbed on to the latest hip position.
But I also think that this kind of politics must sustain itself even as its own ideology has shown terrible failure in recent years, even as it misjudged and mis-took its heroes who have turned out to be no better than those it rallies against. This politics depends on the false-ness of binary division the way that all ideologies cling to their foundations even when the support is missing. Once folks like Abraham realize that the world is not divided into right and wrong, their politics and reason to be collapses. The binaries of cultural studies collapse. Without a real answer to geo-conflict, this kind of political reading clings to binary divisions when the world is made up of networked connections that, at times, unite, but that at other times, disconnect, overlap, and contradict.

maybe more later....

Posted by jrice @ 09:45 AM EST [Link]

Saturday, November 19, 2005

Sports Saturday

Here you go folks, my Saturday sports talk:

Gators b-ball. Your heard it here. Took down Syracuse in the Coaches' Classic. Sorry Collin and Derek.

Larry Brown wants to trade Marbury? Good luck. For who? The best young guards on up and coming teams, Arenas and Richardson, aren't tradable. New York could trade for Francis, but really, is that an upgrade?

Biggest overrated pre-season college footbally listing: Tennessee. Started number 3. Now might not make a bowl game.

Whatever happened to all the talk last year about Adrian Peterson? Soones, as bad as they are this year, are bowl eligible. Or is this just another case of ESPN hype?

Matt Walsh cut by the Heat to make room for Gerald Fitch. Even in the NBA, the Gators abused by the Wildcats.

Let's hear your Motor City Bowl picks, folks.

Posted by jrice @ 02:23 PM EST [Link]

Thursday, November 17, 2005

CW 2007
Well well well.
We won the bid to host Computers and Writing 2007. Come on down to the Motor City to talk shop in two years.

In other news, influenced by Rich Doyle's Penn State Wiki program, I set up a 1020 Wiki, for our first year writing courses. I'm hoping some instructors will venture out into wikis and think about ways to set up and teach in this kind of space. Right now, it just hosts a draft of my writing course for next semester (but plenty of space for other courses!).

Posted by jrice @ 01:41 PM EST [Link]

Monday, November 14, 2005

Moments
Some moments, for whatever reason, become defined by song flashbacks. Like being a teenager....like discovering music for the first time...like a series of images that for no reason just appear through the always present lens of popular culture.

"La Grange" - ZZ Top.

Rumour spreadin' a-'round in that Texas town
'bout that shack outside La Grange
and you know what I'm talkin' about.
Just let me know if you wanna go
to that home out on the range.
They gotta lotta nice girls ah.

A gimmick band. But if you take away the long beards and the pun (Frank Beard, the drummer, didn't have a bear), you have old style Texas blues. Every kid learning guitar wants to play this riff (a play on "Shake Yer Hips" or any John Lee Hooker song). On Howard Stern this morning, Billy Gibbons played a little "La Grange" on the dulcimer but wouldn't play much. You almost get the feeling that he, too, feels the gimmick ZZ Top was/is. Those '80 videos were just too silly. This is a song I still hear as if I'm back in my friend's ''71 red Malibu, driving around Miami Beach on a Saturday Night. We probably wished we lived in Texas. I've since been to Texas. I don't want to live there.

"(Looking For) The Heart of Saturday Night" - Tom Waits.
I did hear this on a Saturday night, maybe when I was fifteen or sixteen. Driving around Miami Beach
again. I can't remember this friend's name, but eventually I will sell an old amp of mine to him (in a deal that lands me a harmonica holder, which, to this date, I have no idea where it is). "Listen to this," he said and slid a Waits cassette into the deck. What the hell? That rusty voice. Despair. Sounds like a guy about to fall off his bar stool.

Makes it kind of quiver down in the core
'Cause you're dreamin' of them Saturdays that came before
And now you're stumblin'
You're stumblin' onto the heart of Saturday night

Nothing like sixteen year olds thinking they're in their forties and already full of loneliness.

"Since I've Been Lovin You" - Led Zeppelin.
No band speaks more to my childhood than Led Zeppelin. And yet, unlike my friends, I never really cared that much for them. I didn't hate Zeppelin, and I bought some of the albums (Physical Graffiti the best of them), but I couldn't get the Zeppelin passion every other rocker wannabe had. You can only watch The Song Remains the Same for so long before you fall asleep from boredom (another man's high is not the same as being high yourself). I still remember kids wearing those "Tour Cancelled" t-shirts which were printed after Bonham died. It took me awhile to realize that these shirts were not printed for the tour and then stamped "Cancelled" after Bonham died. Ah, consumerism.
This tune, however, has always been the most intense of the Zeppelin songs for me. That haunting guitar ring - da da da da dooo. Like ZZ Top, Zeppelin was best when they just played blues. Plant and Page are powerful in this tune; each note mourning each passing note. As cliche as it is to say, this is a song about lost love - whether or not she has left him.

Baby
Since I've Been Loving You
I'm about to lose
I'm about lose
My worried mind.

This is poetry the way Lightnin' Hopkins is poetry. Like his "Sail On":

You know I can remember
First day she sail away
Cryin', I gotta go now, Lightnin'
I ain't got no place to stay

This is poetry for teenage boys. The best blues is the kind a fifteen year old can hear and then relate to some girl he's had a crush on for a month or two and who he knows (and she knows too) is too good for him. The best blues makes fifteen year old boys who think they're cool because they smoke dope and drink tall boys cry.

Posted by jrice @ 10:18 AM EST [Link]

Saturday, November 12, 2005

No!
Arrested Development, the best show on TV, is no more. This was the oddest, funniest show in a long time to be on TV. No doubt it will be replaced with a witty sitcom in which a family of four works to raise a loving relationship in either the suburbs or inner city, or in which two gay men and a straight woman learn to get along, or in which a law firm struggles to understand right and wrong, etc.

Posted by jrice @ 09:46 AM EST [Link]

Friday, November 11, 2005

Creative Non-Fiction
Twice this year, I've heard presentations I've given called "creative non-fiction." I have no idea what this actually means; I don't study anything that is called creative non-fiction, and I'm not really sure what the genre entails. I have no connection with any kind of “creative writing.” Is this a bad thing (being creative)? What is it we do that would not be creative? Is the opposite of what I'm doing some kind of stiff prose (and is it our desire to cultivate such stiffness)? Why would "creativity" be the anomaly, and not the norm (like some students tell me from time to time: "I can't do this assignment because I'm not creative"). I guess I got the label because:
1. Lack of objective stance (the distance prose mythologized as "academic writing")
2. Open nature of the "I" composing the writing; the self-reflection; the pauses to wonder and question what I just said or experienced, the open discussion of why I can't negotiate moments where there is no meaning, yet I am experiencing something, etc.
3. Concern with place (Detroit as moment of invention)
4. Reliance on association in place of causality for exposition

This label keeps returning to me in my thoughts. "Am I creative non-fiction?" I don't think so. But I went back to re-read Jim Corder, whose work is often called creative non-fiction as well. Corder's work is quite odd. Laments over the state of pedagogy, asides about cutting his grass, heavy self reflection, emphasis on Texas where he lived and grew up, critique of pedagogical practice that is stiff and out of touch with how rhetoric circulates outside a classroom, critique of the blind continuation of pedagogy that cannot justify itself as rhetorical practice (only as assignments to give). Sirc returns to Corder often. I see the parallels between the two, and knowing how much Sirc influences me, I began to see that a return to Corder was necessary. I felt the same years ago when I went back to Macrorie (who I also hear when I read Sirc), and despite my problems with expressivism, couldn't resist the lure of Uptaught. Macrorie and Corder are these two lost figures to composition - sometimes anthologized, but seldom placed in the kind of conversations we reserve for others. I'll have more to say on Corder soon; I'm waiting for a used copy of Yonder, Life on the Far Side of Change that I found online.

Posted by jrice @ 10:07 AM EST [Link]

Thursday, November 10, 2005

Mash
Sometimes I'm just sitting here working on something (grant application?) when suddenly a line, or a quote, or a riff, or something just pops in my head.
Today, this came to me:

Everybody's rappin' like it's a commercial
Acting like life is a big commercial

Beastie Boys. "Pass the Mic" from Check Your Head. No real reason why I thought of this. I wasn't listening to the Beastie Boys. No commercials on. Just me and this proposal battling it out. No connection whatever. No logical reason. No causality.

I don't know what to make of such moments. Occassionaly, they serve as points of inspiration. I have written a couple articles like that (and started one recently on folksonomy that way too - "This is folk music," Dylan protests at Newport, and suddenly I have an idea). The moment as invention is not popularized in any textbooks I know of.

Take a lyric you remembered today, a conversation you overheard, an image you barely saw, a flashback, a person whose face won't leave your mind, a moment of anxiety, or some other brief moment you experienced, and use it as the beginning of a piece of writing.

The moment meets up with larger issues, ideas, movements. A mashup invention style. Writing as mashup.

So what does this Beastie line tell me.....what.....?

Posted by jrice @ 02:41 PM EST [Link]

Wednesday, November 9, 2005

MashMash this. Garageband at the ready.

Posted by jrice @ 03:49 PM EST [Link]

Again?
Imagine my surprise.

Hard to imagine. After all his crap, his stealing, his high life, his lack of organization, his bad politics, his sense of behavior second only to the Bush administration during Katrina, the prime minister of cool is back. 53% over 47%, The Free Press reports. Just amazing. Is this what you want, Detroit?

Detroit is facing a projected deficit of $200 million in its $1.4-billion general fund budget, and Kilpatrick has delayed making deep cuts or layoffs until after the election. Unless Kilpatrick can perform a financial miracle in the next eight weeks, he may find paying city workers and vendors and warding off state oversight of city finances his next great challenge.

Which means many of those who voted for Kwame back will lose their jobs. Politics is the great logic-breaker. Next to advertising, politics defies all logic and/or rationale. It feeds on all kinds of emotions, vanities, fears, and complacency. Those who stand the most to lose when voting for Bush (those whose jobs are outsourced and whose kids will be shipped to Iraq) return him to power. Those who work for the city, who watch their schools close one after the other, who have few places to shop, who pay outrageous taxes for little service (while the mayor lives it up at P-Diddy's club in Atlanta) put the mayor back in power. Have another credit card, Kwame. Four more years to party! Fight for your right.

Update:
NPR now says that thousands of votes might be challenged because they were cast by people with dementia who voted for Kwame, yet can't name who was even running.

Posted by jrice @ 07:44 AM EST [Link]

Monday, November 7, 2005

Posted by jrice @ 09:31 AM EST [Link]

Sunday, November 6, 2005

Highlights of our Trip to Syracuse

Getting a new alter ego: In the Washington airport, a public call for "Jeffrey Romantic." I feel inspired.

Jenny brushed her teeth with my shaving cream.

Eating two big falafel sandwiches in the airport on the way back and then wondering why I did that.

Southern Tier IPA. Not bad.

A Writing Center and computer room equipped with G5s? Dang. That was nice.

Meeting the great faculty and students in the program.

The excellent hosting done by Collin, who treated us fantastically.

Posted by jrice @ 09:03 AM EST [Link]

Wednesday, November 2, 2005

Mid-Week

I'm in awe of my good friend Dilger. That baby is amazing.

The Dolphins go for years without any help at RB. Briefly they have Ricky. Now they have the 1 - 2 punch with Brown. Return to the Super Bowl in two years?

Ah WPA-L. Back to your old ways. Good for you!

When you're stuck on campus all day (a rarity for me) it's good to have falafel nearby.

Got to check out the bakery Bill swears by, especially since it's so close to me.

How is that Yahoo sends you an automaed reply "We don't know why you are experiencing what you are experiencing" and then asks you to fill out a form rating the help? Uh..."I don't know why you want the rating you want....?"

Detroit Film Festival this weekend, baby.

To MLA or not to MLA? Looks like we won't. Very cool. We have other ideas regarding how to work with candidates.....

Posted by jrice @ 04:37 PM EST [Link]

Tuesday, November 1, 2005

The Shelf Near You
Speaking of appearing on the shelfnear you, Sid's collection Don't Call it That: The Composition Practicum is out. My contribution is "The New Media Instructor: Cultural Capital and Writing Instruction."

Posted by jrice @ 10:07 AM EST [Link]