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02/14/2005 Archived Entry: "Rice-ness"
Rice-Ness
Sneak peak for (maybe) a part of next week's discussion in 7020:
As I noted yesterday, I found a copy of Su Tong's Rice in a local bookstore. I bought the book, not because I am familiar with the writer (though later I remember that I have seen the movie version of Raise High The Red Lantern, originally a Su Tong book). I buy the book because of it's title: Rice. It names me. Always accused of being an egoist (or arrogantist) by friends, I am made even more aware of this spirit of Rice when I purchase the book. What is this feeling of Rice-ness I am tapping into through a mere $6 purchase?
Next week, we'll read Camera Lucida. Barthes notes the "uneasiness of being a subject torn between two languages, one expressive, the other critical."
Each time I felt it hardening and thereby tending to reduction and reprimand, I would gently leave it and seek elsewhere: I began to speak differently. It was better, once and for all, to make my protestation of singularity into a virtue - to try making what Nietzsche called the "ego's ancient sovereignty into a heuristic principle."
I name this principle a digital one; I do so for reasons mentioned here before (the domination of the ego in digital or digital motivated work stretching from Mailer to Warhol to Eminem). But I also do so because. . . .I SAY SO.
This ability to write with ego – to enact what I also sometimes call Detroit Grammar (borrowing from the re-named Eminem song “Nuttin’ Ta Do” – renamed by others not Eminem on website bulletin boards) – is the feeling of being digital. It is, as Barthes might say (thinking of the Italianicity notion in Image/Music/Text), Riceness, that something which encompasses Rice, but which is not a referent in itself.
The heuristic challenge is to ask how does one not write Riceness, but one’s own ego as X-ness?
Replies: 8 comments
where in that commentary do i say that students are subliterate? i'm saying that strategic opacity in writing style may in fact be a way of articulating a particular stance of resistance.
Posted by off the boil @ 02/15/2005 11:50 PM EST
Tim:
1.Read up on what composition is first before you talk.
2. Don't call students subliterate on my blog.
Posted by jeff @ 02/15/2005 07:29 PM EST
man,
isn't that what students are supposed to get out of composition - the ability to impose their ego on the world through their writing. but do they need to be coherent to do that? any reader of herbert selby and irvine welsh knows that you have to fight the text for coherence because the author wants you to. but mindful subliteracy is much different than just subliteracy, no?
Posted by on the boil @ 02/15/2005 05:47 PM EST
My Rice-ness would be the "Life of Riley." The common use of that phrase is "great!" but I can use it all the time. Example: if it rains and I forget my umbrella, get attacked by pigeons, and get mugged on the way to work, the guard in my building can ask how I'm doing and I am, always already, "living the life of Riley."
Posted by Brendan Riley @ 02/15/2005 06:43 AM EST
Excuse me, but I think I know better what Riceness is. Why don't you butt out?
Posted by Wild Rice @ 02/14/2005 03:09 PM EST
Both great additions.
But Riceness (or any other X-ness) can only be determined by the writer. Thus, the ego-motivated principle of new media.
Posted by jeff @ 02/14/2005 12:50 PM EST
Or: This one. From the London Observer: Actually your first reaction on reading a [weblog] as mind-startlingly good as Yellow Dog is not so much admiration as a kind of grateful despair.
Posted by Derek @ 02/14/2005 11:33 AM EST
This isn't meant to be smirky: Does the word have to be spelled exactly as the name or not? For instance, what about "Reiss"--same thing or not?
Posted by joanna @ 02/14/2005 10:57 AM EST
