Huh? Does this actually say anything? "You just gotta be here"...that sounds more like.."uh, we don't know what to write..." "It's everything you see..." Everything? Wow. Let's not get specific here, folks. "No one can resist when Smokey sings..." Hey, I like The Miracles, too. But for some reason, they don't seem to say "Detroit" anymore. Does Smokey even still perform?
Copy and paste song writing at its worst. Fill in your cliche. Meaningless crap. "A conscience so complete..." That's what I call talking loud and saying nothing.
I thought we already had a theme song anyway. Jay Dee's "Welcome to Detroit." I'll take Albert King's "Cadillac Assembly Line" anyday too.
Rice is mean
Posted by jrice @ 06:07 PM EST [Link]
Tuesday, April 12, 2005
Blood on the Tracks II
Some of us secretly wish to be music writers. I remember reading Greil Marcus for the first time (Mystery Train) and being fascinated with how he could weave his personal life through a series of fragmented entries on Sly Stone, The Band, and Elvis. Later, he juxtaposed the Sex Pistols with the Avant-Garde in a mammoth text of wandering, cut and pasted moments, made up history, and story-telling.
However hyperbolic and wonder-lust Marcus may get at times, he demonstrates voice. You recognize a piece of writing as Marcus' because of his voice, his specific tone, the mood he establishes that no other writer approaches. That mood is meant to represent our cultural habits; it succeeds, but not always.
Voice, a taught ideal in many first year writing textbooks as well as in creative writing, is the trait most obviously associated with Dylan. The roughness of voice was what made his career remarkable for many: a gritty Woody Guthrie trash compacted nasally sound. "Yeah, I like Dylan," some folks say to me. "But he can't sing." A song like “Rainy Day Women #12 & #35” emphasizes that nasally sound: “Well I would not feeeeeeeel so allllll alonnnnnnne….EVERYBODY must get stoned.” Nashville Skyline messed this image up. Dylan's voice is too clear on this album, his duet with Johnny Cash sounds like its coming through a hotel elevator’s speakers. I bought a tape of Nashville Skyline when I was 14 or 15 in one of those bargain bins, went home, put it on the deck, and thought: Who the F is that? That's not Dylan!
Blood on the Tracks is neither too rough nor too clear. It is voice. Appealing voice. Calling out voice. The kind of voice you want to use when you are caught in a tough situation, when you want to call for someone to come back, when you want to just think to yourself.
'Twas in another lifetime, one of toil and blood
When blackness was a virtue and the road was full of mud
I came in from the wilderness, a creature void of form.
"Come in," she said,
"I'll give you
Shelter from the storm."
Think of those voices which call out to you: Howling Wolf, Screaming Jay Hawkins, Son House. The anger. The hostility. The passion. Think of Howling Wolf's "Evil":
If you're a long way from home,
Can't sleep at night.
Grab your telephone,
Something just ain't right.
That's evil,
Evil is goin on wrong.
I am warnin ya brother,
You better watch your happy home.
The voice here argues that nothing ever is right. Think of Dylan hammering out the pre-hip hop lyrics of “Subterranean Homesick Blues” and how he fits neatly within that tradition. The staccato driven beat generates an energy of emotional and cultural restlessness (this ain't no Dave Brubeck!). This is a song which showed how weak the British invasion’s restlessness was, how a song like The Animals’ “We’ve Got to Get Out of This Place” is useless when confronted with Dylan’s vision of cultural despair.
Don't steal, don't lift
Twenty years of schoolin'
And they put you on the day shift
And just when you feel that Dylan is the so-called generational prophet, just when you feel you have American rock history all figured out, take a breath, relax, and then listen to the calm, yet emotionally charged voice of “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go”:
Flowers on the hillside blooming crazy
Crickets talking back and forth in rhyme
Blue river running slow and lazy
I could stay with you forever
And never realize the time.
I take the Blood on the Tracks voice over all the others. It’s the voice of mood, not lounge lizard mood. Cultural mood of longing.
Posted by jrice @ 09:06 AM EST [Link]
Saturday, April 9, 2005
33 1/3
The 33 1/3 book series produced by Continuum interests me still - though the one book I read so far, Live at the Apollo was good, but not too amazing (it didn’t’ go far enough with its temporal juxtaposition of 1962). The series editor has a blog devoted to the series' latest releases. I love the idea of this project. Small books devoted to one record; each represents a mix of history, impressions, personal narrative, and theory.
Engaging in an imaginary publishing venture of my own, I would do one of two albums for the series.
Blood on the Tracks - Bob Dylan
The Brides of Dr. Funkenstein - Parliament.
Neither are represented yet, and neither artist is represented. For now, I'll consider Blood on the Tracks. I was probably 14 when I asked my parents to bring me back a copy of Blood on the Tracks from the record store (why were my parents already going to a record store? The only records they owned were the ones my dad would buy for a dollar when he was in college: Count Basie, Hatari..). I had never heard the Dylan album. I probably read about it in Creem magazine, a magazine whose ripped out pages were taped up all over my room’s walls (Bon Scott, Keith Richards, Dylan, Jagger, Clapton). Instead of bringing it home, however, my parents brought me Blonde on Blonde. That album, too, would affect me; its raunchy singing and of the moment arrangements compelling for so many reasons. But it wasn't Blood on the Tracks.
Eventually (but when?) I bought a copy of Blood on the Tracks. Nothing like the other Dylan albums I owned, this one was soft, endearing, full of odes to lost love, women gone, moments amiss. The titles give its aim away: “If You See Her, Say Hello.” “Idiot Wind.” “You’re A Big Girl Now.” “You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go.” You listen to music like this, and you feel like you are at the center of all loss. Kodwo Eshun writes about post-humanity and sampling, but this is more like a pre-humanity music, a music before we’ve learned yet what it takes to remain human.
In lunch at school, someone showed me the chord changes to "Simple Twist of Fate." I once read Dylan describe this song as a painting. Its movement from scene to scene is picturesque, like a series of sweeping gestures to a city and to a woman.
They sat together in the park
As the evening sky grew dark,
She looked at him and he felt a spark tingle to his bones.
'Twas then he felt alone and wished that he'd gone straight
And watched out for a simple twist of fate.
and
He woke up, the room was bare
He didn't see her anywhere.
He told himself he didn't care, pushed the window open wide,
Felt an emptiness inside to which he just could not relate
Brought on by a simple twist of fate.
This is a song for broken hearts. And for impressing women. You play a song like this on your guitar in a crowd of friends, over beers, in an abandoned building area or drainage lake (this is Miami where the city is constructed out of commercial ventures), and you have won everyone to your side.
Now, I’ve been told that some one can’t listen to this album because it makes her too sad. But “Tangled Up in Blue” speaks to our very condition of meeting.
Early one morning the sun was shining,
I was laying in bed
Wondering if she'd changed at all
If her hair was still red.
And
She was married when we first met
Soon to be divorced
I helped her out of a jam, I guess,
But I used a little too much force
These are the moments where popular culture juxtaposes with our lives, but also informs our lives with levels of meaning other experiences cannot account for. It’s one thing to say about a song, “I can relate to it because it touches me.” But it’s another to actualize a moment, an encounter, a belief, a mood, a passion, a loss through the song not because you relate to it, but because you’re the song. You are these moments in the song. Thus, we could say that this is "our song" because of a moment of identification recognized in the lyrics. But the song is something beyond being "our song." It names us. It signs us.
Popular culture's strength derives not from the hegemony of the culture machine, but because we are popular culture. “Tangled Up in Blue” is important to me not because it reminds me of a condition during a specific time period. No. It is the condition itself. I spend a lot of time wrestling theoretical and pedagogical positions out of popular culture. But I also recognize the mix here, the ways that these positions are still tangled as well in the personal.
Posted by jrice @ 08:18 PM EST [Link]
Friday, April 8, 2005
Critique
Hi. This is Yellow Dog. You may know me from such hits as "Everything You Say is Wrong" and "Why Don't You Join the 21st Century?"
But seriously....I want to say one more thing about the question of critique, the Web, and the problems I see with complacency. I agree with my dear dear dear partner that critique's shortcomings are evident in a variety of situations. Critique fails so many time to accomplish much. Its best usage is to offer response (or alternatives), not to persuade. But a couple of points keep circulating in my mind regarding my own interest in critique and the profession. They involve more than how acerbic I may end up sounding when I feel the need to enter into a conversation (a parlor?) and respond to a position I feel is either problematic or dominant. The first is method.
Satire.
The method I chose the other day to respond to a piece of writing I felt was not very good - and which I felt appeared in a spin-off publication concerned more with surface level issues of academia than actual discussion - was satire. There are folks who may feel that my usage of satire was too heavy-handed. Ok. Fair enough. But the response I received from the writer I critiqued turned too personal to fast. Satire seemed off-limits to the writer. And here is the contradiction. Satire has been a form of writing taught in composition readers since whenever. The most duplicated satirical piece is one of the most heavy-handed, Swift's "A Modest Proposal." I hardly approach Swift’s wit.
Critical Thinking
This phrase has become extremely problematic. It is brought out every chance and used as a catch-all pedagogical imperative. Teach critical thinking. The phrase “critical thinking” is academia’s version of “family values.” Who on earth would teach a non-critical thinking? Who comes out and says: “I’M AGAINST FAMILY VALUES.” Yet, the moment I engaged in critical thinking, all hell broke lose from an individual pleading its usage. I.e. – be critical, but not of me.
Complacency/Dominance
Every time I enter into a rant on the field's listserv or even here in this space, I get all kinds of back-channel compliments (and at conferences I receive such compliments, too). But publicly, I am slowly developing a bit of a "hot head" image. No problem with the image. The question, of course, is why do so many folks feel reluctance to respond as well in the public arena? Probably, because they know that a dominant position of complacency will kick in and tell them to shut up. So why bother? Why bother, indeed. And here is where dominant positions make their mark, be they political (Bush) or institutional (name your school/department/field of study). The cultural studies tradition is to respond to such dominance. The composition position - at least as it is marked in public spaces like listservs - is to keep quiet. Or, at least it is to keep quiet when our own professional identity is at stake. When the object of interest is far away (Iraq, Churchill, etc.) and most likely will match the dominant thinking (we are against the war, we support academic freedom) we are eager to yell and scream and show where dominant thinking errs. When the object of interest is ourselves (we are not keeping up with innovations in technology and communication, we maintain a hierarchy of improper labor relations in our departments, we resist innovation in teaching that challenges convention, we strive for a positivist approach to assessment and teaching, we’re too enamored with keywords/phrases like “critical thinking” or “merge theory with practice” than with actual application, etc.), dissent is not allowed. Or dissent is allowed in designated places only.
And here is where the blog provides a place to rant and rave, to move outside of any kind of approved public sphere into a more general public arena. I can say more about how the blog altered the homepage in this sense for, not necessarily a “resistance model” (cause that’s not exactly what I’m thinking about), but the notion of the network, where it’s not such much resistance that occurs, but a series of alternative pathways. One key point is to not allow the fear of dissent to shut down all response. Institutionalized sites already do that. One’s space on the Web does not have to be dragged into that arena.
Posted by jrice @ 09:51 AM EST [Link]
Thursday, April 7, 2005
The Exchange
One of the things that bothers me the most about the now developing (though ended?) exchange for the W.P.A. Rag entry is not that the subject of my critique says "hey, I don't like your critique." It's how the exchange is framed as "that you critique me and the field means you're an asshole."
That's an easy move to make in order to avoid the critique. The points on this blog and here about the essay are valid. And if someone, the writer or someone else, wants to say that the points are not valid, then "I worked hard on it" or "I know what I'm talking about because I published in Kairos and set up our computer labs" are true enough statements, but not responses as to why our critiques are not valid. We are taking the writer to task for bringing up something as new which is not new at all, for circulating the mantra of "critical thinking," a phrase now used so often that its very usage is not critical, for demonstrating a lack of knowledge of technology and the Web (as well as recent scholarship which challenges conventional attitudes regarding these areas), and for actual errors in the piece. Rather than address our critique of the piece’s shortcomings, the writer calls me a jerk. That is how one ends discussion.
This exchange reminds me very much of how several of us were pissed off when the same method was used on WPA-L to dismiss theory or approaches which don't mesh with the old guard of composition. That WPA-L response used the word "cute" and claimed that those who write do so only "to get their names published." "Cute." "Angry." In search of self-fame. How useful such terms are to deflect the subject under discussion.
In other words, debate and exchange must never enter into conflict. Here we have writing textbook methodology: examine both sides of the debate, hear each other out, find a comprise. Booth's Listening Rhetoric, correct? And if I, or another critic, decide not to participate in that process because we feel it is a move to avoid the very critique or issue we see as in need of being addressed? Why, we must be an asshole. A jerk. A snob.
So this is where our profession finds rhetorical production? Exchange as an always agreement? That is a position of fascism. Once a side dictates that agreement must be settled, then that very side has already dictated the terms of the exchange on his/her own grounds. Hardly exchange.
The network is a troubled place. Its intersections, deletions, additions, connections do not always lead to agreement and getting along. The global village is, indeed, agonistic, as Lyotard claimed. Should we fight that sense of conflict, what Burroughs called "the nova technique"? I don't really see why. If blogs allow for something, they allow for the dissent to evolve and find its niche in the network. The network allows my responses to various issues/writings/whatever to be silly, critical, off-tangent, absurd, in comic-form, mystory-ish, etc. That is how I contribute to and help form this network of ideas. One is not obligated to venture into my niche in the network. But if you come in, welcome. The welcome is a welcome into exchange. It is not a welcome into “can’t we all just get along.” Once we do that, ethics or no ethics, the exchange ends. I want the exchange; in the exchange, ideas are formed.
Posted by jrice @ 04:52 PM EST [Link]
Wednesday, April 6, 2005
How Come
Posted by jrice @ 09:24 AM EST [Link]
Monday, April 4, 2005
W.P.A. Rag
Blogression:
1938. Big Bill Broonzy records "W.P.A. Rag"
The rag was a popular style of the '30s, a dance or piano-driven composition usually associated with ragtime.
2005. Post to WPA-L listserv requests readers to visit this.
To rag: to put down, critique. That composition still has no clue what hypertext is about encourages me to rag on this short article. Then again, Inside Higher Ed, so much like its cousin The Chronicle, is just a rag. A useless piece of information. A scrap. A throwaway. A tabloid of educational journalism.
Gimme that rag. I feel like rubbing out that article on hypertext which says absolutely nothing.
Our point here is that even techie teachers get technological blues. However, once we begin to figure a few things out, then interesting and good things begin to happen. We learn a new skill, our students get better Web resources, and both teacher and students have yet another new technology to think through practically and critically.
Ah, the rag. The fragment, the scrap circulated over and over in English and composition studies: critical. We must always be critical. Yet this rag is anything but critical. It is an overused, meaningless trope whose purpose is to divert attention from actual scholarship and inquiry into technology so that the least common denominator prevails. "Critical thinking/pedagogy" has become a meaningless term when there is little to no critical thinking going on around its usage.
Are professors today doing enough to use, improve, reflect and criticize our use of computers as tools to teach writing and support learning across the curriculum?
The article answers itself: no.
It rags me to see this kind of work taken as scholarship; banal observations as inquiry? In fact, this article I rag on is raggedy scholarship: tattered, shabby.
"Rice, your critique is too ragged. Too sharp. Take it down a notch."
Yeah yeah. Quit ragging.
Hail stones beatin' on the roof
The bourbon is hundred proof
It's you and me and the telephone
Our destiny is quite well known
We don't need to sit and brag
All we gotta do is rag Mama rag Mama rag
And don't accuse me of being on the _.
Posted by jrice @ 01:19 PM EST [Link]
Sunday, April 3, 2005
1989
1989 the number another summer (get down)
Sound of the funky drummer
Music hittin' your heart cause I know you got soul
(Brothers and sisters hey)
Listen if you're missin' y'all
1989 - the year of the Pistons. The Motor City Bad Boys win it all.
Sound of the funky ball-player.
A 1989 revolution. "The revolution will not be televised." Computerized? A $9,000 Radio Shack computer. A lightening fast 20 mhz. The Microwave? Move over. Here comes Tandy at the point. Motor Sity Doss.
1989 Detroit.
I'm saying nice things all the time....latest project: Digital Detroit. Technology in the bridge (TAKE IT TO THE BRIDGE), building (Renaissance Center), and computers (from Tandy to Compuware). Technology in dates (hip hop pedagogy).
1989 Gainesville, Florida. Load up that trailer. I'm dropping out... the number another summer...get down/drop out.
More?
Posted by jrice @ 12:00 PM EST [Link]
Saturday, April 2, 2005
News from the Motor City
The graduate student organization did a nice job yesterday hosting Geoff Sirc. Geoff and I hit the DIA early in the day before his talk. The collection has been put out thematically - work about postmen, work about spirituality, work about portraits. Art categories as pattern formation. Easy to imagine a curatorial writing project where students collect a vareity of imagery and categorize them by pattern, not concept. I'm also considering extending Geoff's game of "which piece would you take home if you could" into a writing assignment....write about which piece you'd put up in your home and why.
And, of course, much standing around and admiring the Rivera murals.
Detroit's technological past fresco-style. The metaphor is more than steel, right? Apply to your discipline where needed. Composition as Detroit Industry, North Wall. The machine apparatus continuing the failed project of Modernism: assembly line mentality. Machine scoring? Machine testing? Machine assessment? In all its forms and flavors (from Texas Tech to the SAT). In the words of Pink Floyd: welcome to the machine.
Posted by jrice @ 08:25 AM EST [Link]
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