My Archives: March 2005
Wednesday, March 30, 2005
Pitched WB Shows That Never Made It
(after late night brainstorming)
The Bi-President - hijinx abound when everyone realizes their favorite president is bi-sexual!
Cat Bandits - two cats, fed up with home life, take to a life of crime.
Bowl Me Over - the days and nights of an under-appreciated New York toilet repair man.
The Bi-Neighbor - super hijinx when a suburban family realizes that their neighbor is bi-sexual!
Kiddie Principal - a super intelligent 5 year old makes it through high school, the university, and graduate work in education. He lands a job as a principal in his home town's troubled high school. Can he solve the test score problems or will he want his mommy? Tune in to find out.
I Married My Mother - Hank Willbetter accidentally marries his mother. Watch the hijinx!
No Room For Daddy - fed up with Daddy's hedonistic ways, the family kicks him out. On the street, he realizes he has uncanny abilities to solve crimes, but only when he's high on crystal meth or has recently visited a prostitute. One hour drama.
Hold It In – reality series about who can last the longest without going to the bathroom. Hosted by Jamie Farr.
Posted by jrice @ 10:37 AM EST [Link]
Tuesday, March 29, 2005
The Book
The book as moment of discovery.
What do you think and why do you think it? From the TOC:
Are You Responsible to Others? - No.
Is Violence Necessary? - Yes.
Is Honesty the Best Policy? - No.
Ok. Got that settled with. But have I done any "critical thinking" now that the exercise (answering chapter heading questions) has ended? What have I learned? Nothing. What have I repeated? The tropes of our academic culture. Cliche as archetype? Maybe.
Posted by jrice @ 12:43 PM EST [Link]
Monday, March 28, 2005
Posted by jrice @ 03:57 PM EST [Link]
Friday, March 25, 2005
Dyaln at the CCCCs
The note attached to Dylan's "A Song to Woody" reads:
"Written by Bob Dylan in Mills Bar on Bleeker Street in New York City on the 14th day of February, for Woody Guthrie."
I find that note re-attached in two places: San Francisco (location of this year's CCCC) and Detroit. Using the principles of juxtaposition and found art (the avant-garde anticipates new media), I see that the note for San Francisco also reads: "RSA CONFERENCE 2005, SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., February 14, 2005."
This RSA conference ("the world's leading information security event") overlaps with the Rhetoric Society of America (RSA) in my report from the CCCCs. The usual complaint I hear (and others hear as well) is that every year rhetoric is missing from most of the CCCC presentations. When I report from the CCCCs, I use the Wood(y) metaphor to draw out an un-noticed connected.
"The Forest of Rhetoric" is the name attributed to Silva Rhetoricae, a BYU website which provides background and definitions on rhetoric. Connecting the forest to rhetorical expression, then, is an already codified act made electric through my inclusion of the bar (Woody Guthrie meets Bob Dylan in/via the bar). I expand this premise through the notion of the forest via W. G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, which concludes with a photograph of the author standing in a forest, in front of a tree. Sebald's book is about autobiography and place (what he terms "the mystery"). "I feel a bond unites me with these trees," he notes. That bond, in digital culture, might be understood as the over-emphasized bond with paper (all writing exists on paper). But I have a hard time believing that point as something noteworthy to learn from Sebald, for by the very end of the book, he engages in a series of temporal juxtapositions, all of which center on the date April 13. This anticipation of hip hop pedagogy interests me. I want to speculate that Sebald's bond is less with the physical tree and more with the metaphor of the forest and rhetorical expression (the mystery). While hypertext has often been opposed to the concept of the tree organizational scheme (in favor of the mis-matched notion of Deleuze’s rhizome), there is still a connection worth considering, one Silva Rhetoricae does when it states that in a forest "one can easily become lost." That sense of lostness is what I'm looking for...and here is maybe where Weinberger’s "trees" and leaves" attribute of tagging comes into play. The tag is not about referentiality, but getting lost in names. Being lost is a rhetorical gesture of not finding a place - San Francisco? CCCCs? Detroit? I hear Dylan singing at the CCCCs, "Now, little boy lost, he takes himself so
seriously." The seriousness of the event, of the "work" accomplished, of the papers given....is that just another way of being lost?
The mystery Sebald draws attention to (mystery as writing) is the overlap of autobiography and place; of tagging which as which. This mystery (obviously) borrows heavily from the mystory. But the inclusion of folksonome makes me consider how I am (to quote Barthes) the referent of every image. It’s not just that my stories (or areas of discourse) overlap, as the mystory suggests. It is that I am the referent of every image I project through folksonomes. The bar is the measurement (the height?) the “fitting” (or as Ulmer notes, attunement) I digitally play through to understand all this better (and, of course, I am still trying to do just that; this is all rough thinking). “Dylan at the CCCCs” is really “Rice in Detroit.” And what does that mean? Mystery, man. Mystery. I’ll end “Dylan at the CCCCs” (for now - or until I get some better ideas). And head off to my own bar, the WAB (misnamed) for some real work.
Posted by jrice @ 01:28 PM EST [Link]
Thursday, March 24, 2005
Dylan at the CCCs
Part II
The bar - Ulmer writes - is one place where the popcycle operates.
Let me consider now the atmosphere or mood of the bar that my Analogy offers, as part of the acknowledgement of the way in which electracy draws upon the legacy of Marx. In heuretic terms, the bar, tavern, speakeasy, honky tonk, saloon by any name is the scene of writing analogous to what is needed in order to invent electracy
The bar as place; but the bar also as grammatology of music (how many bars in this song?).
The paragraph or sentence is to literacy what the bar is to electracy. In electracy, we learn to riff, rather than to argue.
Dylan's career began in the bars of New York: The Gaslight, Gerde's Folk City. The main composition conference, CCCC, is known for being a place where ideas are exchanged among those in the field. Most exchanges, participants often agree, take place not in the panels, but rather in the bars throughout a given host city's terrain.
Dylan's "A Song to Woody" is often listed as having been written in a bar. A handwritten note attributed to Dylan reads:
"Written by Bob Dylan in Mills Bar on Bleeker Street in New York City on the 14th day of February, for Woody Guthrie."
This is the legacy of the folksonome. In Guthrie, Dylan found identity. In Dylan, I forge a disciplinary identity (the critical and the personal). Some of this derives from Ulmer's analogy with Method Acting - merging the personal with the medium. Some of it derives from a desire to develop a digital rhetoric, my invention of the folksonome. In previous mystorical adventures, I found the "one" to be a major component of my search; it signifies the funk deviation from standard 4/4 time (and echoes my father yelling out "that's one," a threat that I would get smacked for misbehaving when he stopped the car).
In the folksonome, I want to know what the new bar should be. Not the one, but not 4/4 either. The clue for what it might be may (I am still in speculative mode) come from a local bar here in Metro Detroit, The WAB.
The WAB's initials (standing for Woodward Avenue Brewers) might be construed as a mis-spelling of WPA. Might it? Let me see. The connection may come out of the concept of "work" and "deal" (borrowing the choral meaning of the New Deal from the original WPA program). My occasional after work stops at the WAB for a brew make me wonder if it might serve as an analogy to what the New Deal Writing Program for electronic culture might look like if it makes the bar its basis of digital rhetoric. The key may be found in juxtaposition. My juxtaposition, intuition tells me, should come from Dylan’s note: the 14th day of February. Temporal juxtaposition, I have written, is the original model for hip hop pedagogy.
Posted by jrice @ 09:34 AM EST [Link]
Wednesday, March 23, 2005
Dylan at the CCCCs
The folk. The collective group. The people.
Dylan signifies the concept of "folk music" for the early 1960s. Following in the tradition of Woody Guthrie, Dylan represented a folk, a united belief in specific values and ideas attributed to young people at this point in American culture.
He did, that is, until the 1965 Newport Folk Festival when Dylan went electric. This moment of "becoming electric" is important; it marks my own interests in technology and electronic writing, the movement from The Gutenberg Press to the digital age. That connection is solidified by Dylan in his so-called autobiography Chronicles:
"Gutenberg could have been some guy who stepped out of an old folk song," Dylan notes (27).
The Folk Gutenberg might be better actualized in the concept of folksonomies, which David Weinberger writes about. In my juxtaposition of Dylan at the CCCCs, the distinction between trees and leaves Weinberger creates is not that important. Rather, I am interested in the grammatological folk, the open-naming gesture generated by this type of digital rhetoric.
The Newport recordings have always alluded Dylan fans. Bootlegged mostly, they exist in no one place (chora). That choral nature of the Newport recordings updates it for digital culture as a folksonomy recording, and not a folk recording. Among these no one specific places is the recording of "Like a Rolling Stone." "Like a Rolling Stone" marks the folk gone electric, Gutenberg in the guitar. But to make the folksonomy work, I re-tag this recording as folksonome. That retagging begins with a memory of jotting down a line from the song, "When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose" all over high school notebooks when I was a teenager.
Dylan’s Chronicles, with its odd natured autobiographical twists (do we really believe this book as is) more closely resembles my own interests in autobiography, learned greatly from Roland Barthes’ understanding of autobiography as code. “Where does this expression come from? Nature? Code?” Indeed, it is code I construct to make my own folksonome. I call this folksonome “Dylan at the CCCCs.” “Dylan at the CCCCs,” then, is not about Dylan at all. It is about the ability to rename Dylan as tag and to juxtapose that tag with myself.
Posted by jrice @ 04:45 PM EST [Link]
Tuesday, March 22, 2005
Dylan at the CCCC
In place of a CCCC report, I give you:
"Dylan at the CCCCs"
Part I
Dylan plays the Masonic Hall Memorial Auditorium 1964. The year of Understanding Media. In this image, I see the coolness McLuhan attributed to media that require high levels of participation. In Dylan's shadow, I find what Burke calls identification. Identification as coincidence? Or mere overlap? My office in the Maccabee building - a Masonic movement.
Burroughs notes in 1964 that the bar is the place of rhetorical activity:
“The Subliminal Kid” moved in and took over bars cafés and juke boxes of the world cities and installed radio transmitters and microphones in each bar so that the music and talk of any bar could be heard
"Stack-A-Lee walked to the bar-room and he called for a glass of beer."
Stack-A-Lee, covered by Dylan, comprises the WPA panel on the New Deal (WPA: Works Progress Administration). Stack-A-Lee the folk hero replaced by folksonomies in this panel. "We've come to work!" "We have?"
I find Dylan in one of the open bars taking place in an art gallery in downtown San Francisco. All the murals have been taken down and replaced with Deigo Rivera murals of the New Deal and Detroit.
He speaks in the voice of the contemporary WPA:
"As you stare into the vacuum of his eyes
And ask him do you want to make a deal?"
Posted by jrice @ 10:25 PM EST [Link]
Class Prep
I have usually pitched the weblog to students as a way to "think through" ideas either for future publication or a class or whatever. So sometimes this space translates into my own "do I as say" methodology, and, explicitly as well as implicitly, I plot course strategy.
Take the mystory, please. Next week Heuretics is on the reading list - following McLuhan. At CCCC this past week, Greg said to me that he liked that kind of follow up (his book following McLuhan) - yeah yeah teacher approval and all that. McLuhan's overlaps of cultural conditions (You/Your Education) resembles Ulmer's later notion of the popcycle. Typically, I have played with both to generate my own mystory involving Miami/Homestead (Family), Funk (Entertainment), Digital Writing (Discipline) and Detroit (School). With CCCC behind us yet again, and my previous posts on Dylan and memory, I am tempted to write a new mystory-ish tale tentatively titled: "Dylan at the CCCCs." Though its title too closely resembles "Derrida at the Little Bighorn," that resemblance may eventually prove fruitful (the Barthes’ instruction: We write with semblance). And while this project may never go beyond today's post (or more than a few posts at best), the intuition I have is to start it. Ulmer notes that an important aspect of electronic writing is learning to write an intuition.
But instead of a strict adherence to the mystory, I may evoke my own method of hip hop pedagogy more than I do the mystory. The motivation to work with my own method comes from Norman Mailer's sense of self promotion - a new media method of writing I am drawn to. Hip hop pedagogy emphasizes two areas of digital writing I want to employ: sampling and juxtaposition. Unlike the popcycle, the categories of exploration are not as important (category itself being placed more and more under erasure with the emergence of folksonomies). I work within categories, but they may shift under the weight of my writing and naming.
So:
Initial (flexible/choral) categories I begin with include:
Dylan (entertainment)
WPA (work: the composition organization and the New Deal program)
CCCC (tale [borrowed from the CATTt]: the place of meeting and idea sharing)
I will add more as I go and the need to expand the heuristic develops.
One place I might start is with Renuka's comment in the previous post, the line from "Ballad of a Thin Man":
"You walk into the room with a pencil in your hand."
I do? Ok then. Let me enter....
Posted by jrice @ 10:27 AM EST [Link]
Monday, March 21, 2005
McLuhan
To continue the previous post...
"Memories overwhelm me..."
For McLuhan, memories might be found in the media (Yates' art of memory brought into the 20th and 21st centuries). "Our time is a time for crossing barriers, for erasing categories." Whereas the memory palace categorizes place, media generates the overlap.
McLuhan throws out a few categories which overlap: You, Your Job, Your Family, Your Education. Early popcycle in the making.
You: Uh, that's me. The Yellow Dog.
Your Education: PhD
Your Job: Professor.
Now let's mix it up a bit.
Your Entertainment: Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone."
"How does it feel"
Ulmer: "Mystory is not a text, but a felt."
McLuhan: TV (signifying contemporary media) made us more tactile. "I Feel Good"? One suggestion Ulmer offers is to make fetish felts, as opposed to dramatic texts; opposing narrative (literacy) to electracy (fetish).
In place of narrative, Felt (feel your way around the connections):
Dylan: "We always did feel the same,
We just saw it from a different point of view,
Tangled up in blue."
Ulmer: "Such tangles hold together a felt (mystory is felt, not text).”
"She was married when we first met
Soon to be divorced."
McLuhan: "Rationality and logic came to depend on the presentation of connected and sequential facts or concepts." And "The whole concept of enclosure as a means of constraint and as a means of classifying doesn't work as well in our electronic world." Composition in the Center Spaces. Oops. Someone is not feeling it, eh?
Maybe the call should be for composition in the Web (not on)? Composition in the tangles? Composition as Felt?
On the flyer will be this quote (also from Dylan):
You hand in your ticket
And you go watch the geek
Who immediately walks up to you
When he hears you speak
And says, "How does it feel
To be such a freak?"
And you say, "Impossible"
As he hands you a bone.
Posted by jrice @ 08:18 PM EST [Link]
Rolling Stone
Back from the C's. Brief web surfing today reveals a new Greil Marcus book on Dylan about to hit the shelves. The book is all about "Like A Rolling Stone."
In The Rings of Saturn, W.G. Sebald writes: "the fact is that writing is the only way I can cope with the memories which overwhelm me so frequently and unexpectedly." Dylan is a part of my memories. And, it seems, a big part of Marcus' (this is the third book about Dylan he's done?"). The line I always remember from "Like a Rolling Stone" is one I used to scrawl on the back of high school notebooks or school book covers:
"When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose"
A teenage mantra, of course. But one that keeps with me. Continuum has a music series they do on records, 33 1/3 - a writer devotes the whole book to memories/thoughts on one record: Live at the Apollo, Dusty in Memphis. I would love to do one on Highway 61 Revisited, the album "Like a Rolling Stone" is on. In the photo above, lifted from a very brief Village Voice piece on the Marcus book, I recall those early moments of listening to Dylan as a teenager - the opening chords of the organ in "Like a Rolling Stone" ringing out, the call-out to narratives and story telling
"Once upon a time you dressed so fine"
The odes to Dada and surrealism
"You used to ride on the chrome horse with your diplomat
Who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat"
That wonderful point to do what the f you want
"When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose"
And if my memories are what force me to write, and if I keep coming back to that line, I wonder if I really can act on such a declaration.
"When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose"
In another place (other than the blog space), I could take that line into a series of notes and memories, into a lengthy piece of writing (memo for writing: use one song as a place to reimagine memories and thoughts in search of an identification). In the photo of Dylan leaning back in the studio, I no doubt form my own identification - that mix of conflicting points of reference which lure me into believing I see "me" or some other force. I identify with Dylan not because I want to be Dylan, but because of a series of memories circulating within my own internal rhetoric(s). These are, as Sebald notes, the places where writing occurs: inside one’s own rhetorical mix of identification and memory. That is not to say: it’s all personal. No. Not at all. Just as Barthes’ autobiography is not “personal” (it is code; which is the me; which is the code?). This mix is the place composition dare not enter, for it would negate a century of codified instruction that looks for identification outside of the internal mix – in a prominently placed sentence, in a controversy made cliché, in an analysis of a text.
Maybe more later.
Posted by jrice @ 01:13 PM EST [Link]
Tuesday, March 15, 2005
SAT Shuffle
S.A.T. talk is so boring. Yet I felt the urge to make up a little image today....the real answer, of course, is not have an essay test, or extend the test, or have people who live in states that begin with Y take the test, or any other nonesense a bunch of non-academics devise to make more money off of kids and their parents. The answer is for the composition folks to finally show some strength and reject the test altogether. While they're at it, they also should get rid of its cousin, the placement exam.
Posted by jrice @ 11:10 AM EST [Link]
Monday, March 14, 2005
I Move -eeeeee
Fun with iMovie
Posted by jrice @ 12:22 PM EST [Link]
Sunday, March 13, 2005
Bracketology
Collin has lots of good things to say about the seeds. I'll just throw out a few early thoughts.
Tough Calls #1
Texas/Nevada. The 8/9 question. Who to pick? Texas on the downslide for so long now. Nevada nothing like last year's team and had a weak schedule. You need upsets in bracketology and it's too easy to get confused by big name schools and top seeds. I'm leaning towards Nevada.
SIU/St. Mary's. The 7/10. Dang. St. Mary's beat Gonzaga once out of three tries. Weak schedule. SIU always tough. I want to pick upset, but I can't.
Pacific/Pitt. Another 8/9. Easier call. Pitt. Still a dangerous team in a low seed.
Minnesota/Iowa State. Another 8/9! Iowa State. Better conference this year.
Stanford/Miss. State. Ok. Let's just do all the 8/9s. Miss State. Pac 10 is so weak. Miss. State has had some problems, but it's a tough team. Biggest First Round Upset?
Let me make some bold predictions:
ODU upsets Michigan State. State has had some underachieving moments this year. Weak in the middle even with Davis (the guy can't hustle).
Creighton knocks off West Virginia (Am I really going to pick that one? Hmm. Probably not..but it's tempting)
Wisconsin-Milwaukee over Alabama. I feel better about this one. Horizon League is tougher than the credit it gets. Alabama has injuries (though so does Miss State) and has underachieved lately. I root SEC, but I don't think Alabama has it in them this year.
What I'm No Doubt Going to Do Despite Whatever the Matchup?
Put Florida in the Sweet 16. They can beat Villanova. Can they beat UNC? Probably not. UNC is deeper and more veteran.
More to come...
Posted by jrice @ 08:09 PM EST [Link]
Lost Moments in Record Collecting
Whatever happened to my copy of The Blues Brothers' Made in America?
Bought from a flea market in Miami, it was the second Blues Brothers' record I owned (the first being the soundtrack to the film; the James Brown track drove me crazy: DO YOU SEE THE LIGHT?). Two notable memories attached to this lost moment: The Blues Brothers' cover of Wayne Cochran's "Going Back to Miami" and the image of a young Paul Schaffer on the record's back cover (the band gathered after the show for drinking, drugs, and women). Wayne Cochran, otherwise known as the "white James Brown," is a rarity in Miami soul history. Sam and Dave signify Miami's other known soul act. Cochran's big hit was a cover of "C.C. Rider," also covered in 1965 by Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels who renamed the song "Jenny Take a Ride" (the original "C.C. Rider" done by Chuck Willis). Ryder's lyrics read:
Ah, Jenny, Jenny, Jenny, won't you come along with me
Jenny, Jenny - whoo - Jenny, Jenny
Jenny Jenny Jenny, won't you come along with me
Jenny, Jenny - whoo - Jenny, Jenny
I worry 'bout you, baby, spendin' nights in misery
Detroit, Miami, Jenny....Lost moments are the place(s) of personal expression; lost moments echo my interest in Barthes searching for a moment between the personal and the critical; a moment between fiction and theory. A lost moment signifies something outside of Booth's listening rhetoric, for I am not listening to anybody. But I am hearing. I hear specific markers/places of identification.
Where is that record...
Posted by jrice @ 12:59 PM EST [Link]
Saturday, March 12, 2005
Understanding Booth
Since we will read McLuhan in 7020 after the break, and since I have been reading Booth discuss issues of understanding and rhetoric in The Rhetoric of Rhetoric, just a few words on Understanding Booth.
Booth's contention that rhetoric is about reaching understanding is problematic. I called it totalitarian for how it quickly dismisses the need for dissent or even a lack of understanding as rhetorical goal. Settle quickly into understanding, Booth argues, to avoid conflict (opposite of Burroughs' Nova Technique). McLuhan's probes mark one place to think through the question of not understanding and how such a gesture undermines totalitarian tendencies in politics, ideology, and, of course, education. The probes are not meant to reach an understanding nor to "save the world" as Booth continues to triumph as central to rhetorical need. This claim is highlighted as Booth proposes a pedagogy of "How to Teach the Remedies" (100). In its place, I would offer a more McLuhanesque approach: How to teach the Remedi(ation)s. One remedi(ation)s-motivated probe I'll pick from McLuhan: "In the electric age, we wear all mankind as our skin." And: "People don't actually read newspapers. They step into them every morning like a hot bath."
Remediate that.
Talk among yourselves.
Posted by jrice @ 12:16 PM EST [Link]
Thursday, March 10, 2005
Odd email. With a hyperlink too....
~INVITATION~
To: Dr. Fancy Pants (and his girlfriend Boozy McSmartass)
Dr. Pants,
Please join us for free boozing and elbow rubbing.
Sincerely,
Big Time Publisher, Inc.
Posted by jrice @ 12:29 PM EST [Link]
Theoretical Fiction
My reading habits have become more and more like what Steve calls "theoretical fictions." The arguments and figures become fictions, Barthes-like mythologies, variations of what Kodwo Eshun calls "sonic fiction": an all inclusive juxtapatory reading/writing practice (not just the text, but everything related to the text).
So as I join the carnival late, I'm tempted to offer a different kind of reading than the already useful and detailed ones Byron and Collin give.
My first issue is with Booth himself. Booth is a character in my own Rhetoric of Cool, a figure who in 1963 pens the "rhetorical stance." The rhetorical stance is
a stance which depends on discovering and maintaining in any writing situation a proper balance among the three elements that are at work in any communicative effort: the available arguments about the subject itself, the interests and peculiarities of the audience, and the voice, the implied character of the speaker. I should like to suggest that it is this balance, this rhetorical stance, difficult it is to describe, that is our main goal as teachers of rhetoric.
And we still see that thinking in The Rhetoric of Rhetoric. In Booth's call for "common understanding" and "listening rhetoric," I hear that call for balance. But balance disturbs me (leaves me unbalanced?). The call for balance is a move to put down dissent/disagreement/dissonance. Dissent is about shifting balance, upsetting balance, kicking the jams out. It’s Monk and Sun Ra and Coleman and Coltrane creating a rhetoric of notes breaking up in your ears. It’s Lee Perry “upsetting.”
Booth writes in The Rhetoric of Rhetoric:
All major rhetoricians have argued that what is clearly unethical is to repudiate your main points or deepest beliefs solely for the purpose of winning an audience.
And
In a world where win-rhetoric of the thoughtless or vicious kind seems to triumph more and more, from top politicians and CEOs down to the talk shows, and where too much LR (listening rhetoric) produces nothing better than self-censorship, the training of everyone to pursue critically the defensible kinds of rhetoric is one of our best hopes for saving the world – or at least this or that corner of it
The statements seem so right, no? How can you argue with the desire to hold true to your deepest convictions or even, gasp, save the world! But, of course, such is the rhetoric of all dominating systems of thought. Deepest convictions are generated by, among other things, cultural dominance. “Work Hard and You Will Succeed.” A deep conviction? “Segregation is Justified.” A deep conviction? Are they innate beliefs we should never repudiate?
Storm the Reality Studio, Burroughs writes.
“Photo falling – Word Falling – Break Through in Grey Room – Towers open fire”
No middle ground/no listening in Burroughs’ media-rhetoric. Indeed, listening is mixed, jumbled, juxtaposed. It’s found in the Subliminal Kid “listening” through his sampled tape recordings of bars, political speeches, literary texts, and playing them back in various orders.
The Booth LR is more likely found in listservs, like WPA, where argument is quickly dismissed for agreement/can’t we all get along posts or disclaimers that nothing was really at stake anyway (after much heated discussion: “I’m enjoying this discussion” or “Maybe we can have it both ways” or “Hey, let’s not come down hard on this troll. We should hear him out first.”). Booth is like a composition textbook: Find both sides of the argument and create the middle ground. Then a MLK excerpt is offered as example (What about King’s notion of extremism? Oops.).
More later.
Posted by jrice @ 09:40 AM EST [Link]
Wednesday, March 9, 2005
Madness
I feel the madness.
Last night I found myself rooting for Detroit to win the Horizon championship. Cant' stand my old place of employment, but it would have been cool for Detroit to get back into the tournament (how long has it been? when I took that job in 2002, the one thing I knew was that once upon a time, they had a good team). Alas, wasn't to be. You have to feel for Perry Watson. He's a good coach. But how can he recruit with crappy facilities (no weight room worth a damn) and Michigan State and Michigan around the corner? Then you have Kentucky taking Crawford and lots of other schools a state away.
Thinking about who might be the sleepers this year. Pitt? Maybe. They've had some good wins. Syracuse? Feel the Cuse as someone used to say. Florida? I'm hopeful. They might get a 5 or 6 seed with the win over Kentucky. If they win the SEC tournament, they will be a 4 or 5 seed. They have talent. But they are not putting up points these days. If they get to the Sweet 16 that will be something. Georgia Tech. A sleeper? Their record sucks. With Elder back they can do damage. Utah? Hyped center. But they could be last year's Nevada. Indiana? Will they even get in? They don't deserve it. But that's my alma matta, baby.
I still have UNC winning it all.
Posted by jrice @ 04:35 PM EST [Link]
Tuesday, March 8, 2005
I read the Comics Too
It's getting fairly fashionable to make witty remarks about the comics. Comics Curmudgeon is the King. His stuff is the best. Kottke has one today too (sort of). I ventured over to the UComics website to see what's up and was surprised to see that Heathcliff is still being printed.
I don't know what's odder: The Pac-Man shaped moon in a black cloud (what kind of universe is this?) or the size of that cat. My cat is big, but dang. Heathcliff is standing up and almost reaching the dude's shoulders. That is a big mother. His litter box must have to be cleaned on the hour.
I'm wondering about the sign? The strip would be more realistic if some of the letters were backwards. Everybody knows dogs don't spell.
This whole cat thing (somone on my comments seems to think academics have a thing about cats) led me to this strip, Cats With Hands.
Ok. Why are the cats eating feces? Only freshly laid feces produces a whisp of fumes like that. Trust me, I know. It took me awhile to get the joke: The cats are acting like both humans and animals! Dang, that's funny. It's funny 'cause it's true: open the fridge and cats come a'running. I wonder how much this guy makes a year to draw this crap?
Anway. This post is lame. But maybe I can do some funny ones too later.
Posted by jrice @ 07:40 PM EST [Link]
Monday, March 7, 2005
CCCC
Rock and Rollers: Come out to our panel at CCCC and we'll go for beers afterwards (what's not evident in this brief program description is that each of us will riff on place and writing: Detroit, Austin, and Minneapolis) :
"Home Words: City Writing"
Session: N.03 on Mar 19, 2005 from 11:00 AM to 12:15 PM
In response to this year’s call for discussion on “access and success,” this panel asks that we focus on the spaces where students live, work, and study. It’s not enough to grant students access to the university; we must also recognize the urban/suburban experiences of place that students bring to [ More ]
Participants: Jeff Rice (Speaker 1), Jenny Edbauer (Speaker 2), Geoffrey Sirc (Speaker 3)
Posted by jrice @ 05:44 PM EST [Link]
Imaginary Theories Part III
Post-speculative Manipulation
Higher Ordered Web Trinkets
Fetishology
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Marginal Bandwidth Studies
Virtual Repetitive Syndrome
Detroitology
Posted by jrice @ 01:40 PM EST [Link]
Sunday, March 6, 2005
Imaginary Cities II
3930 Cass Ave. Detroit, Michigan: March 6, 2004.
Posted by jrice @ 08:26 PM EST [Link]
Imaginary Cities
1130 Griswold Street. Detroit, Michigan: March 6, 2004.
Posted by jrice @ 03:00 PM EST [Link]
Saturday, March 5, 2005
NYPL
The NYPL Digital Gallery as heuristic:
Cool Burgess. The "king of burnt cork artists," minstrel performer/hotel owner. Cool as name in the mid-19th century? Who named him? What is this:
November 23, 1867: Charles Vivian, Richard Steirly, Cool Burgess, Henry Vandemark and Hugh Dougherty play first game of "Jolly Corks" at Sandy Spencer's Bar at Broadway and Fulton in New York City.
A secret Order of Elks toast...I work in a building named after the secret order of Maccabees...what secrets passed through our building as it shifted ownership from Maccabees to Public School system to Wayne State...."First never enter this room..." .... in images are secrets too....the digital as one big secret (How do you find my url? how did you make your page look like that? how do you install this program?)...the blurred meanings.
Task: Find an image in the library collection via a search for a common word today: cool, hip, whatever, awesome, etc.
Ask not for the image's "Third Meaning" but instead the "Blurred" meaning - that meaning only understood by initial juxtaposition with personal information (I move from cool to Cool Burgess to the Elks to the Maccabees to...). Don't tell how you do it or why. It's a secret. Just present.
Posted by jrice @ 09:39 AM EST [Link]
Thursday, March 3, 2005
How to Get Linked to on Inside Higher Ed
How to Get Linked to on Inside Higher Ed:
Pick up a meme already in circulation, say: AIN'T DAVID HOROWITZ A MO-RON? or FREE CHURCHILL EVEN IF YOU DON'T AGREE WITH HIM.
Repeat the same mantra already being circulated in that meme: IT'S ALL ABOUT ACADMIC FREEDOM OF SPEECH!
Link your own repetition to really notable blogs like Talking Points Memo or anything by Andrew Sullivan.
Do a lot of griping: NOBODY LIKES THE TEACHERS.
Don't use your real name (works most of the time).
Lament over the really rough life of a professor - and if you can, make the title of your blog reflect that rough life. Possible titles still available: THE HARDEST JOB EVER, NOBODY LIKES A PROF, FLUNKING IN THIRD DEGREE, WHY ME, LORD?, OFFICE HOURS Inc., I CAN MAKE IT IF I TRY, PEE H D, YET ANOTHER UNREAD COMP PAPER.
Talk about the crappy job market.
Posted by jrice @ 10:18 AM EST [Link]
Wednesday, March 2, 2005
Posted by jrice @ 11:02 AM EST [Link]
Tuesday, March 1, 2005
Posted by jrice @ 08:19 PM EST [Link]
Celebritacy meets Popstrology
The notion of celebritacy has been taken up in this book, Popstrology: The Art and Science of Reading the Popstars.
The cosmos of popular culture overlap with my own cosmic fate. A technological update of Jung-ian practices.
NPR story here.
Website here.
The method best revealed with the author notes that he is born under the Double Monkee: The Chinese Year of the Monkee and the year of The Monkee's big hit "I'm a Believer."
The challenge is to find your own overlap and gain better understanding of how popular culture informs your own meaning making systems (another wonderful example the author gives us is how Britney Spears is born under the sign of Olivia Newton John's hit "Physical" - AH HA! Now I understand).
Posted by jrice @ 09:12 AM EST [Link]
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