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06/20/2004 Archived Entry: "Miller"

Interview with DJ Spooky (Paul Miller). Miller's Rythm Science is an excellent mix of personal narrative, mixology, technology thoughts, and theoretical speculation about writing. Almost as good as Kodwo Eshun's More Brilliant Than the Sun, Miller's book is at least more accessible (Eshun's book really turns itself inside out as it tries to mimic the DJ/sampling process.
I'm going to teach a graduate course in Theories of Composition next Winter semester at Wayne (2005!), and this book may be on the reading list because of how it dismantles and challenges notions of writing. Like Ulmer, Spooky wants to include personal narrative openly as he debates writing's place in the digital. And while the short book drifts a bit in places, Miller speaks a lot to the types of things I have tried to write about regarding the rhetoric of cool, often drawing upon the same forces for appropriation (Baraka, Burroughs, Baudrillard, McLuhan).
Then there's the question of naming, the alter ego, a topic flatly rejected on TechRhet as not "professional" enough, but evident in Miller's work (and so many other forays into the digital, as the quote makes clear:

The other part, "that subliminal kid," is a character in William S. Burroughs' Nova Express. Basically, I sampled the two themes and made a mix out of 'em. I'd put stickers up and the stickers were meant to be a kind of invocation of that vibe. The stickers would say "who is dj spooky?" or "who is that subliminal kid" and after a while you started seeing them all over. I'd give the stickers out all the time, and people would just put 'em wherever. Stuff like that is spooky, but that's the way things spread in an urban environment—that haunted media thang.

My job talk at Wayne identified Burroughs' character (and in an article still out at a journal hopefully being read and accepted) as the prototype for a new media compositionist, a media being unlike the "precise, restricted" model of discourse propagated through the legacy of textbooks like Writing with a Purpose and ideologically situated in the thesis. The media being is a mix herself, as is her work. Think of the Subliminal Kid collecting sounds and ideas in bars all over the country....then playing them back in provocative ways....Welcome to the mix, folks. I want to explore all of this further. . . maybe use the "urban environment" tag to specifically locate a practice in Detroit...of course I'd love to do a whole book on Detroit and writing if I could just get the cool book right!