My Archives: December 2005
Saturday, December 31, 2005
shatila
Lovelies from Shatila in Dearborn:
Posted by jrice @ 03:49 PM EST [Link]
Friday, December 30, 2005
How to be an Anonymous Academic Blogger
Step One: Give your blog a cute-academic name: Dr. Insane, Chronicles of a Desperate Intellectual, Mister Grader, Is it Summer Yet?
Step Two: Tell your readers where you are by using cryptic clues: Big Southeastern U, Small Clueless Jesuit College, Anywhere America.
Step Three: Gripe about your students: "They don't read! They don't write! They want to know what their grades are! They talk in class! They have lives which don't center around what interests me!"
Step Four: Gripe about having to "work" when everyone thinks you are on vacation: "But unlike, lawyers, doctors, or construction workers, I READ during winter breaks!"
Step Five: Talk about going to MLA every year: "So, there I was standing next to Hot Shot Big Professor Who Blogs As Well, and I thought OMIGOD maybe he's the one who wrote me that rejection letter for the job I applied to at Super University Somewhere Back East Where Mom Lives!"
Step Six: Contemplate shutting down your blog every now and then: "Grumpy Colleague caught me blogging again. Maybe it's time I give this all up; after all, it’s been a whole year since I started (Please, readers beg me not to!)."
Step Seven: Take great public pride in helping that minority/disabled/clueless student see the light/get an A/realize his or her full potential (fill in your choice).
Step Eight: Make sure to share beginning of semester/end of semester anecdotes: "Worry Girl wrote in her final paper: Madam Ovaries! Ha ha ha ha." "Every semester I start off my course in Mid-Atlantic Literature of the 18th Century by reminding students that if I even catch them thinking about cheating, I will cut their legs off."
Step Nine: Every now and then tell you readers how much "your" students cheat, you ungrateful these students are and how they don't appreciate your brilliant insights into both the human condition and literature, and how hard it is for you to fail them (but how much they will learn from this failure).
Step 10: Make sure Inside Higher Ed blogs your site.
Posted by jrice @ 04:42 PM EST [Link]
Thursday, December 29, 2005
Slow
The emails grind to a halt.
The blog posts appear here and there.
The beer is vanishing from the fridge.
Detroit is a fine shade of gray.
A syllabus or two mostly written.
Resist temptation to critique Inside Higher Ed.
Blogku. An ancient form of blog poetry.
Posted by jrice @ 03:32 PM EST [Link]
Sunday, December 25, 2005
Top Ten
Now it's time for the ever popular top ten albums of the year! My best of 2005:
1. Swedish Nursery Orchestra I Only Cry When It's August. Always a favorite around here. SNO's 2005 release was moodier and more somber than past recordings. "Want Went Won't" kept me up at nights thinking about past lives, past romances, past everything. Pure madness, yet compelling in its mixes. Black Sabbath and the Electric Company on one song! Amazing.
2. Everything is Thread Sentimental Heartbeats Pitchfork canned this debut disc from the band which was previously Pepsico Swindle (a lawsuit forced the name change). Still, something odd about this disc has me returning to it every other day. “Rally Around” is vintage Box Tops with a touch of Madlib.
3. Badminton. Nothing But Net. I usually hate English post-punk pop medley. But after buying this disc, I kept it in the CD changer for three weeks straight. Then I forgot about it.
4. Leslie Warrington. I'm The King. A Stray Cats/Cat Stevens kind of clone. Her voice can pierce a tightrope. The cover of her standing on top of a pile of burning shoes made me think of classic Clas Oldenberg.
5. Burnt Rubber Sensation. Damn You All. It's no secret that I'm drawn to bands with three words in their names: BTO, ELP, BOC, SNO. BRS is no exception. Janice Wells, the bassist, is straight out of the Bootsy Collins school of hard funk. "Chain Gang Letter" is funny, yet driving. “I wrote you a chain gang letter/just to do time on your line.”
6. The Potty Girls. Don't Call Us Girls. Normally, I'm not into all girl bands (Girlschool was ok; The Go-Gos so catchy, Margaret and the Funny Bones brilliant). The Potty Girls appeal to the Bataille in me, the lure of waste. All is waste. Nothing is used. If you see this in a bargain bin in a few years, don't blame me. I paid full price.
7. Cross Eyed Strangers. So Much, So Little. Another three word band name. They were big in the Frankfurt disco/techno scene for a few years and then vanished. This long awaited release puts them back among the year's best in trans-techno-sense music. A friend of mine who sometimes stops in Berlin on "business" picked this one up for me.
8. Derrick May. Don't Make Me Forget You. Shout out to the new Detroit-native release.
9. Ormeganngangg. IV IX XX. A Flemish Zen-inspired indie outfit that will make you think Spoon meets Fiona Apple. The kind of album that will re-invent Internet downloading. “Ode to Lucy and Desi” is the kitschy kind of thing I love.
10. Astran DeChernoitz. My Kind of Gal. The little known Bolivian pop singer has gotten some airplay lately due to an NPR story on his music and work with Brian Eno. It took me awhile to warm up to the odd songs. "Changling Changlang" is weird for its nonesense lyrics (English and Spanish: “Duel/Rule/When we go mad we drool”), but the riff is very catchy. This is music you will hear on college stations where the students aren't learning anything but are still doing lots of drugs.
Posted by jrice @ 12:24 PM EST [Link]
Knee Braska
Back from the Heartland. Nebraska is the center of fast food, franchises, mobile homes, Colorado beer, and everything Detroit is not. While it is the capital, downtown Lincoln seems to have little character. There is a nice coffee shop, a good Indian restuarant, and a line of college type bars (and streets organized by the alphabet: O street, P street...). Am I snooty? Probably. I'm not a big city person, but I'm amazed by how quickly our culture becomes just a string of fast food and franchise outlets. Nebraska foregrounds that process more so than many other places.
The girl's family, however, is quite delightful.
Now we return to an empty fridge and every grocery shut down for the big day. How do you eat on the 25th when you been away and when you ain't Christian?
I ended up at a Walgreen's this morning buying cream for our coffee. In front of me, a woman is buying 100 bucks worth of crap. Obvious last minute shopping. But I'm thinking: I bet you don't have a lot of money (I say this because of the neighborhood I'm in), and you are throwing it away on junk (Santa trays, Barbie clone dolls, a singing Santa). You are everything that makes Walgreen's and all franchises possible.
Posted by jrice @ 09:49 AM EST [Link]
Tuesday, December 20, 2005
Changing Bios
Some displeasure with one of the Wikipedia founders changing his bio (18 times). But so what? In the age of new media, stable identities give way to always changing biographies. Who needs an auto-biography when we have multi-biographies? Mutliographies.
WannaBe
Dr. Fabulous
Jeffrey RomanticAlter-egos with overlapping (contrasting) biographies. Wikipedia is hardly the first place for biographies to shift (uh...George Bush?) but as a new media outlet it can foreground that process. We pride revision in the writing classroom, so give it its due in the telling of one's story.
Posted by jrice @ 01:56 PM EST [Link]
Saturday, December 17, 2005
Links/Maps
To build off Derek, the map serves as a type of post-literate practice for understanding identity formation. The literate model of mapping might be the autobiography, the identity card, or in the Web's early stages, the homepage. Jameson's cognitive map - though too dependent on allegory - is an effort to understand the kinds of linkages generated through the rise of new media (whether or not Jameson phrases the work as such). The return of the map to a dominant position in rhetoric and related studies is interesting, particularly for how the map is not a new form of technology and for how it is being juxtaposed with non-referential systems like the imagination (see Harmon's You Are Here). The point is not: how do I get from place X to place Z, but instead, how is my world view created (mapped) among the various areas of experience I link together in intentional and non-intentional ways. Blogs are but one way to explore that process - tags, images, hyperlinks are others - but not in the way blogs tend to be represented as merely the posting of diary or daily experience (though such postings constitute part of the overall process of world view). Passing the mic - the metaphoric update of cognitive mapping - is the exchange of words, ideas, concepts, images, moments, experiences in the quest for new media celebrity; i.e., new media identity.
Posted by jrice @ 08:34 AM EST [Link]
Thursday, December 15, 2005
Blog Notes
The history of writing shows that the experience of reading a text to oneself produced an experience of self-awareness that eventually produced the behavior and identity formation of self. In the era of recording technologies that capture the look and sound of the body in action, a new experience of identity is emerging. The vanguard of this experience of becoming image are the celebrities, whose images are appropriated and augmented by entertainment discourse in the spectacle." (Electronic Monuments 99)
Everyone on the Web is famous for more than 15 minutes. The common trope in English Studies is to draw an analogy between Benjamin's Arcades and the Web and extrapolate the emerging identity formation of a technologized Arcade: The Web. But it is not the Arcade nor the Web which generates the Star identity (weblogs, search engines, Facebook, del.icio.us, Amazon, Photoshop) but the process of the link, as Albert László details. The Web foregrounds this process as a chain of links. The Greek polis, congregating around the poet or rhetor, perceives identity as the group (or as some note, "the tribe."). The Web polis is but a chain of Star personas, each engaging in the post-literate (electrate) practice of self-googling (or as Edbauer says, "yougle"). Links are the basis of identity formation, celebrity based and made electrate through contemporary writing like hip hop, where passing the mic stands for the literate practice of “transitions” (making links). The MC is the electrate equivalent of Mike Rose's "I couldn't read/now I can" model of identity formation in literacy.
The name is d. y’all and I don’t play
And I can rock a block party ’til your hair turns grey
So, what you sayin’? I explode on site
I’m like jimmy walker I’m dynamite
And now I’d like to pass the mic
To adrock c’mon and do anything you like
I.e. the celebrity image (the spectacle) is an emerging literate practice of “learning how to pass the mic.”
Posted by jrice @ 12:57 PM EST [Link]
Tuesday, December 13, 2005
Radio
Radio is the last refuge of entertainment. It's hard, as you move from place to place, to find good radio. By "good," I mean non-top 40 pop, hip-pop, AOR rock, or other fast food listening. I like talk radio as well, but with Howard Stern leaving for satellite, that will end in a few days (how many packages can we pay for on a monthly basis?). Still, I clung to the jewel of Detroit radio, WDET. Now that, too, has changed. The fantastic, eclectic radio of WDET (unmatched in most markets...Gainesville at 97x with the Dogboy was the tops for awhile, but that didn't last long...), is being replaced by standardized NPR programming. Some welcome the return of NPR basics, but I'm sorry to see not only the wonderful all day programming we've had, but the weekend blues and Sunday shows (Willie Wilson and John Penny's Candy Store). WDET has been the only place to hear new music, electronic and other, and to hear a variety of music. I do my best writing to that music. Odd to hear about the station's change just days after I watched the documentary on CKLW, the late '60s and early '70s Windsor/Detroit radio powerhouse that was influential in shaping taste. Taste, as the best Frankfurt School critics know, is largely shaped by a variety of institutions. If we were seeing our area shaped by old blues, electronica, new rock, local music, quality DJ and hip hop, now we will see it shaped yet again by the standards: programming done elsewhere, top 40 Burger King music. Even if it is NPR, it is still all day standard fare.
Posted by jrice @ 10:28 AM EST [Link]
Sunday, December 11, 2005
By the way, we're getting hitched.
Posted by jrice @ 04:59 PM EST [Link]
Saturday, December 10, 2005
Pinter
Lots of folks on the Web (academic and other) have gotten excited about Harold Pinter's acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature. I don't know much about Pinter's work. More contemporary literature I am oblivious to.
The focal point of his acceptance speech which is gaining interest is his critique of the U.S. and its post World War II global policies.
The truth is something entirely different. The truth is to do with how the United States understands its role in the world and how it chooses to embody it.
The critique of a country's global decisions to support another country or invade another country (in this case the U.S.) doesn't need to be countered because a good deal of the critique may, in fact, be accurate. And I don't want to enter into an argument of accuracy or historical readings – such arguments are limited binary displays of right and wrong and do little to explain events. Instead, it is the question of global behaviors that interests me more and the rhetorical contention that countries act on
1. The claims that they publicly declare to support (we side with democracy/we oppose imperialism/we support global revolution/we are fighting evil)
2. Some spirit of goodness or justice
I don't think either is often the case. Countries act for all kinds of reasons (economic, political, against third parties, insanity, greed, desire) but seldom because of anything that can logically be explained (why do we support country X when its leader is a dictator/why do we support country Y when it oppresses Z population). Yet, knowing that, we construct critiques based on logic, critiques which explain the world rhetorically as logical. So the Bush administration struggles to find justification for its current war (weapons, democracy, stability) and the critiques point out the fallacy of each justification as if it really matters which is true. They are false. They are efforts to be logical, but they both fail. The administration knows its excuses are false. The public knows these excuses are false. Public response is often no more than superficial observation; the administration sees the public response as superficial as well. The circle of logic is not based on logic but the image of logic. And - no behavior or policy changes. So why enter into the critique? Why be obsessed with logical explanation when behavior is driven by much more?
When Pinter writes
The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.
my thinking is: yes, of course, but so what? Which country does not engage in such rhetoric? Which country does not pose its aims as "good" while exploring all kinds of policies which are often detrimental to some entity elsewhere? Where is this fantasy country? Is global critique merely the expression of fantasy (in a psycho-analytical sense as well)?
There is much in Pinter's address which is on target (maybe all of it; it doesn’t really matter) but still, I find the gesture futile and lacking. And I find it merely a cliché of global critique. It explains nothing. It produces a rhetoric which satisfies the already believers (so it is epideictic). And while the believers feel great satisfaction for pointing out this great injustice, injustice exists everywhere and anywhere; it is generated by every country on this globe. So, Pinter’s address is an empty rhetoric as well, for it has solved nothing other than a pleasure no different than a good meal or quick sexual encounter (ah…you made us feel good with your critique).
Without saying that one cannot critique the U.S. or any other entity, but at the same time while desiring a different model of exchange which recognizes that these gestures fail to acknowledge the complexity of global relations and rhetorical exchange, is there something else to work with or from?
I ask that as I also find myself over and over again returning to Vitanza’s critique of cultural studies, that it produces cynics more than it produces “awareness.” I am aware of much. But I am deeply cynical of the public rhetoric surrounding geo-politics. It is a rhetoric which demands the taking of sides in a never ending process of logical failure and little to no policy changes. This economy feeds on itself in ways the best Marxist critiques have observed capitalism doing with desire and exchange value. There is much more here to what I am trying to say…but blog space is limited.
Posted by jrice @ 06:49 PM EST [Link]
Friday, December 9, 2005
On the Shelf
Lists, lists, lists! All you do is list!
You must remember this, a list is just a list...
Dug out of the snow. Streets of Detroit are clear for now (or...streets north of Detroit are clear for now). Reading or about to read:
Architecture as Metaphor: Language, Number, Money - Kojiin Karatani. Might be useful for piece on space, Maccabees, and rhetoric I am working on...so far what I've read deals with thinking about deconstrction as a constructive practice - a practice of making.
Electronic Monuments - new Ulmer book which just arrived. Some of this looks familiar from previously published essays. But also space-relevant. Looking foward to the latest from my diss director.
Shaping Things - Bruce Sterling. Also just arrived. Not much of a sci-fi fan, I do find Sterling's insights into digital culture interesting. This manifesto (like the other short MIT books) for the future of design looks nice.
You Can't Win - Jack Black (not the actor Jack Black). Early 20th century hobo/vagrant/outlaw/drug using lifestyle fiction. Supposedly William Burroughs' favorite book (and sampled often from). So far so good. My kind of American lit.
Posted by jrice @ 01:58 PM EST [Link]
Tuesday, December 6, 2005
Literary Identities
From the school of fetishistic play. Notes in map making.
William Burroughs. "Listen to my last words anywhere. Listen to my last words any world."
Listen.
"For God's sake don't let that Coca-Cola thing out." Walt Whitman. The king of lists. How many things can one list in a single phrase? Bad, good, happy, sexual, arrogant, bored...a Whitman series of thoughts... Stan Lee. Able to create a superhero in a single minute. Anxiety + nuclear material + revenge = Primo Levi. Here is where my pedagogical training began... The Periodic Table... a fall semester as a graduate teaching assistant...the text as rhetorical model Amos Oz. They make fewer books more beautiful than To Know a Woman. At least that's how I remember the book. A moment of aesthetics. I only grant that moment once. Roland Barthes. How to make literary theory anything but literary. The rhetoric of being allusive. My theoretical alter ego. Muddy Waters. "I need a whole lot of lovin' / to make me feel good." What is more literary in post War America than music? And what more than that: the blues. "I'm drinkin' TNT / I'm smokin' dynamite / I wish some school boy / start a fight."
Posted by jrice @ 02:56 PM EST [Link]
Monday, December 5, 2005
Winter Mix
Plans in a staged encounter for upcoming break: The Winter Mix (scratch a scratcha scratch).
Either address or ignore house issues
Make room for the girl's arrival next week (with cat).
Find cat sitters
Try not to lose all of income on heating bill
Read new Ulmer book
Be cold
Drink Bell's new wheat ales many many times
Did someone say Dragonmead?
Watch stoopid bowls and foreground friendly competition with Hawkeyes fan.
Rant
Rave
Do what I need to do for campus invites to job candidates (no MLA interviews - direct to campus plan)
Finish many writing projects
Appreciate Nebraska
Posted by jrice @ 07:27 PM EST [Link]
Sunday, December 4, 2005
Shout out to Kathi Yancey who presented an excellent workshop on the profession and a talk on related matters Friday at Wayne. Much of Yancey's talk revolved around Fulkerson's CCC essay "Composition at the Turn of the Century" (previously riffed on at the carnival and James Williams' latest review essay in College English. Dealing with many of the limitations of both pieces, Yancey mapped out a response that worked out of both cultural studies and technology-based scholarship. In the talk, there was also a nod to those who think through issues of writing as they pertain to areas outside of the classroom, a nod which included thoughts on blogging by resident blogger Collin.
Posted by jrice @ 10:28 AM EST [Link]
Thursday, December 1, 2005
The Habitual
To follow up on Robert's comment (The Curriculum of Things), from Perec's "Approaches to What?"
To question the habitual. But that's just it, we're habituated to it. We don't question it, it doesn't question us . . . to question that which seems to have ceased forever to astonish us. . . question your tea spoons. . . it matters little to me that these questions should be fragmentary, barely indicative of a method."
A list, then, of things I could question, things which have ceased to forever astonish me, yet posed as a method in a preliminary course in personal geography (map making):
Billboards at Eight Mile and Woodward
Empty store fronts
Literacy
The Bodum coffee maker
A flyer handed to me in the elevator the night of November 30, 2005
Cell phone ads in the mail
Turtl
Students who come to class unprepared
A book on place I can't get through (read, stop, read, stop)
Web interfaces
The refrain “multimodal” (or, at times, “digital”)
Ethnography
Lists of things posted as blog entries
Posted by jrice @ 01:57 PM EST [Link]
Superman
Coming down the elevator last night before I teach, I heard a fellow call out to me. He handed me this flyer. "I can do any kind of music you want," he said. Superman?
Posted by jrice @ 11:33 AM EST [Link]
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