favorite conference

last week, my time was taken up by another academic conference.

I presented on semi-academic podcasts and how awesomely they seem to cultivate discussions about scholarly things for the consumption (and perhaps participation) of non-scholarly audiences. such a thing seems pretty rare, but maybe it's less rare than I'm making it out to be. after all, 

“Podcasting’s bridging of knowledge barriers in an intimate manner is one of its key, and most readily apparent, properties. Thanks to the medium’s wide accessibility— given its general affordability and portability— knowledge in diverse domains can be shared by individuals and groups around the world. Thanks, as well, to their intimate, personal and often-conversational natures, podcast episodes can help individuals of different educational levels cross disciplinary boundaries easily. Audience members need not be enrolled in an educational system in order reap their benefits” (Swiatek, 2018, p. 177-178).​

how's that for a minimalist literature review, eh? Swiatek's chapter is in the collection I used as a textbook for my introductory podcast course last year. good stuff.

bridging knowledge barriers can happen across all kinds of lines, not just those of formal higher education, of course. academia is only one of many domains of learning. 

but for my presentation, I concocted a fairly narrow set of criteria for the four examples I showcased. to fit in properly with what I wanted to talk about, the podcast needed to be...

- officially made by/with credentialed, institutionally-affiliated academics ​
- making use of the ethos and/or expertise of their degrees at least a little
- purposefully talking to and/or translating for non-academic audiences ​to some extent

I also limited my examples to humanities/communication-y topics, because that's my discipline, and a 15-minute conference talk cannot be much more comprehensive than that anyway. I am curious to look at other podcasts in this vein though. eventually. Huberman Labs would count. and probably plenty of others I haven't heard of yet.

my observation, as a fairly high level podcast fangirl, has been that most scholarly podcasts don't bother talking beyond their own discipline, much less beyond the academy in general. in a sense, that might be what "scholarly" means-- by, for, and of scholars. but I also knew of a few counter-examples. a few podcasts that managed to feel more openly, accessibly, publicly academic.

for this little starting-place of a conference talk, I looked at these four: Material Girls; Lingthusiasm; Think Fast, Talk Smart; and Professors Play. 

according to my proposal for the event, I wanted "to highlight these as particularly valuable examples of public scholars demonstrating from the ivory tower how playfulness, connection, and personality are key ingredients for learning, teaching, and thriving as 21st-century humans."

want to see my little digital handout with transcribed bits from each show? there's a link to my slides from there too, which in turn have a few painstakingly chosen, hopefully entertaining-ish, audio clips. 

it is perhaps silly to turn my little presentation from last week into a blog post here, but (now that I'm halfway through doing it anyway) it does seem to match the spirit of my whole point— academia doesn't need to keep all of its cool conversations to itself.

on top of making that point, my other goal with the talk was to have fun introducing whoever showed up at my 11:00am panel to a few very engaging podcasts. I called it "Public Scholarship as Playful Pedagogy," but the title easily could've been shuffled into “Playful Scholarship as Public Pedagogy”— I'm still not sure which sounds better. the lines between all these things are fairly slippery at the best of times.

the lofty version of my whole argument is something like this: podcasts are conversations, usually quite public ones that can shape the cultures and communities of the world we live in. sometimes they even create new communities, which in turn have their own world-shaping power. so it matters who gets to be part of the conversation. it matters how the conversations are designed. 

Computers & Writing is one of the best conferences. next year it'll be in Athens, Georgia. will I get to be there and keep talking about podcasts as scholarship or pedagogy or public pedagogical artifacts or anything like that? we shall see.

under the bus

as promised, this blogpost delves randomly into a few rhetorical facets of the reality television show Hell's Kitchen, mostly it's about  some of the rhetorical commonplaces I noticed were shared among competitors across the show's 15-year run.

we finished watching the most recent eighteenth season of Hell's Kitchen last week, I think. (time is a giant blur because of summer and the pandemic, so who really knows when anything has happened.) it's quite a show. as uber-sensational as its episodes can get (emotionally-heightened music! suspenseful voice-over! dramatic pauses between every three words Ramsay says!), it's not too bad. my favourite segments are all the cooking challenges: de-vein as many jumbo shrimp as you can in 10 minutes exactly; cook 10 perfect mushroom and chive omelettes before the other team does; teach a semi-clueless college student or super model or Olympic athlete to cook your signature recipe using only words, no demonstrations; or create a delectable and perfectly-cooked dish using a random combination of one protein, one starch, one vegetable, and one "wild card" ingredient like truffle or blue cheese or something.

the challenges are always my favourite part of reality television. some people like all the interpersonal scheming and the drama of alliances and betrayal, but that's way less interesting to me than seeing how the variously credentialed guest judges will react to the contestants' cooking.

but anyway. the rhetoric of Hell's Kitchen. why not? there's a lot that could be analyzed along those lines. for this post, I'm dwelling on the idiom that stood out to me the very most among all eighteen seasons of carefully-edited contestant confessionals-- "to throw someone under the bus."

among the hundreds of chefs who have competed on Hell's Kitchen over the years, we see plenty of common rhetorical moves. chefs (especially in season premier episodes) insist that they're "not here to make friends, but to win." they refer to each other throughout as "dead weight" or "fat" that must be "trimmed" from their team. after any particular stressful dinner service (and they're all pretty stressful, no matter what), there is talk of so-and-so having gotten "in the weeds" and messing everything up for the kitchen. chefs hoping to prove their skill talk about "stepping up to the plate" to show the world what they can really do. these last two are sports metaphors, extended beyond the contexts of golf and baseball to describe competitive cooking instead.

if I was doing some serious rhetorical-linguistic analysis here, I'd need to track down transcripts of all these episodes and tally up the commonplaces I've noticed in order to properly see which were most used and when. that process would probably lead me to see others that my casual watching of the show didn't reveal, too.

but as it is, all I have is my gut sense that this particular phrase about throwing people under buses is the most interesting one to talk about.

why? mainly it comes down to the common usage of this phrase on the show illuminating its meaning with extra nuance, helping us understand how the saying has evolved. I suspect that the high-stakes context of a reality show is arguably a factor in distorting this odd little idiom from a term that evokes the blatant, dishonorable scapegoating of an otherwise generally innocent party into something a lot more ... flexible. 

the phrase "to throw someone under the bus" has a murky origin from what I have been able to find out. it's not that old, it seems-- first documented in the 1980s. Merriam-Webster traces its history back to British politics and similar "under the bus" phrases in use within that discourse. apparently "throwing people under the bus" has been regularly popularized by sports journalists in the meantime, which gives us yet another parallel between reality cooking shows and professional sports, I guess.

here, in any case, is the definition as summed up by everyone's favourite crowdsourced encyclopedia:

"to betray a friend or ally for selfish reasons; typically used to describe a self-defensive disavowal and severance of a previously-friendly relationship when the relationship becomes controversial, unpopular, or inconvenient."

how closely does the common usage of the phrase on Hell's Kitchen adhere to this dictionary definition? I'm not too sure.

the definition above gives us two core elements involved in "throwing someone under the bus":

1. a previously friendly relationship, or at least some kind of allyship.

2. a calculated movement in self-defense, to further one's own interests at the expense of someone else's.

usually the chefs on Hell's Kitchen accuse each other of throwing them under the proverbial bus as a defensive move in itself. does that mean the accused chef is guilty of truly, defensively, regardless of honor, throwing them under the bus? I'd argue not often.

given that most of the chefs on this show aren't there to make friends, that first element isn't so solidly present to begin with. however, the chefs are usually teammates, so that might count as an allyship, and thereby satisfy the first element of the definition. but still... as for the second element? this is trickier, and it often depends on a million things. in each chef's mind, they of course can't possibly be as horribly at fault as their competition, so naturally they insist that anyone calling for their elimination is doing so merely to save themselves. but is it really the case that those accused of throwing others under buses are always just as guilty of mistakes and incompetence and therefore just as likely to be eliminated by Ramsay at the end of the night? nope. of course not.

so what would be a more accurate term? well, the corollary commonplace in Hell's Kitchen discourse is "trimming the fat" or "removing dead weight" from the team. in that case, those being eliminated thoroughly deserve their fate and there isn't any defensive betrayal at all going on.

or at least that's one story we can tell. in reality, those who stay in the contest do benefit from every other aspiring chef's removal. it's convenient for some when others do poorly. and there must be a thousand shades of nuance between seeing someone as "dead weight" and seeing someone as an innocent bus victim. nobody is thoroughly one or the other, I imagine. 

{ image borrowed from the network that hosts the show, Fox }

as a postscript, I'd like to also note that Hell's Kitchen's creator and head chef/dictator, Gordon Ramsay, has catchphrases of his own aplenty. many are typically delivered in a screaming tone to function as humiliating insults. the more congenial of them are things like, "let me tell you" or "let's get that right" appended alternately to statements of praise or criticism. these are less rhetorical commonplaces in a bunch of shared discourse, and more habitual conversation fillers. they mark Ramsay's speech as his just as much as his accent does. I find the non-screaming ones pretty endearing.

there are, according to various entertainment news outlets, two more seasons of Hell's Kitchen planned for eventual distribution. but it may be a while before they come out on regular television, much less before they come out on any convenient online streaming services.

will the commonplace of "getting thrown under the bus" continue with seasons nineteen and twenty? I wouldn't be surprised if so.

land acknowledgements are not enough

when I wrote this post about how differently temporary some things are, I wasn't thinking about colonial ruin and the violent displacement of Native peoples.

my relative ignorance about that violent displacement is something to blame on my undeniably privileged upbringing.

when I wrote that 2013 post, I was moreso thinking about the fact that because humans and our vehicles move around at such a (one might say violent) pace, birds and squirrels must get out of our way or risk getting squashed.

this makes a pretty awkward, and in some ways even terrible, metaphor, I know. it's at least something to start thinking with, and hopefully move beyond.

I wrote in that post that "places themselves... they seem to always be there. to always have been there. but even here wasn't quite how it is now, once upon a time. this town and all the other collections of civilized life had to start somewhere. the static only seems static as a backdrop for all the movement and life and craziness. relatively."

this way of phrasing the seemingly "always there" nature of my world-- this way of looking at things-- it erases so much. not intentionally, of course, but it does-- similarly to how the movements of humans and all their stuff so easily overlooks, disregards, and damages the natural world, erasing what it is and might have been-- selfishly reshaping it all into roads and buildings and infrastructure.

there is that troubling metaphor again though, where it's 'humans' who erase and reshape, actively, and always nature' that is erased or reshaped, passively.

that's too simple, too vague, and if I follow that metaphor through, it's offensive in equating Native people with silent, inert, passive nature. so let me say it better. for one thing, Native people aren't gone. despite countless instances of rhetorical erasure and systematic disenfranchisement, they're still here living and working and making. these people have not been completely erased in reality, but we so often erase them from how we think about our country, its land, its history, its future. and that kind of thinking should stop.

for another thing, 'nature' (whatever we really mean by such a monolithic term) isn't truly so inert or passive--not even the rocks or dirt underneath all our feet and roads and infrastructure--and we shouldn't reduce the powerful grandeur of nature to a mere backdrop on top of which we can do whatever we want without consequences. the non-human all around pushes back in unexpected ways. we're all connected.

it would be nice if we all recognized the connections and acted accordingly. unfortunately it's way too easy, especially when wrapped up in a bubble of comfortable privilege, to erase the connections that feel too inconvenient to think about. too easy to assume that we've earned all the comfort we have, and that others deserve whatever discomfort they are facing. but the truth is that we haven't, not totally, and even if we can say we have, would that make it okay for our comfort to come at the expense of so many others? I hope not.

I was prompted via this Michigan League for Public Policy challenge to revisit this map that shows roughly the boundaries of various Native tribes' lands. they have a note on the site about publicly acknowledging whose traditional territories you stand on, as I have heard conference speakers do at the beginnings of their talks many times. I want to read more about this and think about how to follow suit in a meaningful way.

where we live now, in the middle of Arizona, happens to be right next door to a bunch of land that belongs--traditionally and officially--to the Yavapai tribe. fourteen hundred acres or so, reserved for the Yavapai tribe by the US government in multiple stages starting in 1935.

on some of that land, there are department stores and pet stores and a movie theatre and a sushi place, I recently learned. there is also the stereotypical casino resort, high on a hill overlooking this majestic desert valley.

and the name Yavapai is everywhere. the county is named for this tribe, and by extension the local community college and various streets and districts and businesses and services, too. but do all the things named Yavapai really count as acknowledgement of the people whose land this was and is? do those street signs and advertisements with the word Yavapai on them help prevent anyone from erasing actual Yavapai people from how we see the land, its history, or its future?

{image of the Yavapai tribal flag, borrowed from Wikimedia }

I'm definitely not going to solve all the problems and injustices caused by centuries of colonial horribleness in this blogpost. mainly I wanted to write this to reflect on past ignorance and to make a record (for future me and for whoever happens to read my musings here) of how I'm trying to process my own role within a system of colonial, racist horribleness.

there is plenty I still don't understand and possibly never will. for some of my ignorance, I have no excuse. for smaller fractions of my ignorance, there are plenty of flimsy excuses. so much of this precedes me, and I didn't choose to be born and raised in this system of privileging people who look like me at the expense of people who don't. most of the stories I was told as a child had white explorers, mountain men, and pioneers as the heroes. Native people were most of the time mythical villains, if they featured in those stories at all.

none of this excuses me from learning about this now and figuring out what to do about it now. there has already been so much violence done over this land. physical and rhetorical damage. intentional and unintentional damage. I can't necessarily undo it, but I can start learning enough to undo my own ignorance and stop myself from participating in any more of it.

the very least I can do is work on telling different stories. stories that don't erase (or worse, vilify) these fellow humans. I'm not totally sure yet what that looks like, but I think it starts with seeking out those kinds of stories. rich, complex, beautiful, human stories. local stories, hopefully. and seeking out stories is easy enough these days; two seconds of googling has given me half a dozen lists of "awesome/great/best indigenous podcasts" to listen to:

https://newjourneys.ca/en/articles/11-indigenous-podcasts-for-your-listening-pleasure

https://www.chatelaine.com/living/indigenous-podcasts-hosted-by-women/

https://player.fm/podcasts/indigenous

so that's what I'm going to try to do next. more listening, less separating myself from the stories and perspectives of my fellow humans. it might not feel like much and it might not make any kind of huge obvious difference. but those are flimsy excuses for not trying to do something, anyway.

from the air and from the sun

it was shady on the west face of Badger Mountain this morning. the inward corners between each ridge were especially cool. at the crests of each ridge I could look back north to see the whole town like a set of toy models, framed just so by Thumb Butte and Granite Mountain.

snippets of songs and past conversations and poems-to-be and a whole bunch of other ideas sewed themselves through my thoughts as I climbed. 

how to describe the sensation of one's body breaking spiderwebs. birds--I think it's a female bluejay but I'm not sure.

layers and layers of pine-scented Saturday. the striking, heavy-feeling color of smooth, dry, grey-white, dead trees.

oh how lovely was the morning. but what if there's no way of telling how virtuous or good-intentioned any historical figure truly was?

thinking of the outdoors as sacred. mountains and high places as extra sacred. the striking, smooth, dry, white-grey color of what once was a tree now feels like a symbol. persistence. potency. 

I give myself permission. or I take permission from the air and the sunshine like a plant takes oxygen and energy. permission to decide for myself and say what I want.

and what was the name of that book about forests? How Forests Think, by Eduardo Kohn. we read it for Thomas Rickert's class, almost five years ago. the most memorable thing about it to me now is the story the author tells about seeing a bird near a river and being suddenly, beautifully, drawn out of himself and his troubles.

conincidentally when I sat down to blog for today I found in one of my old drafts a copy of a paper I wrote for that class, mainly drawing on Kohn's book. much of the paper is semi-cringy, flippant grad school pretentiousness, connecting what Kohn writes with my own thoughts about food and food media. but even so, some of it might be worth remixing here.

it starts with food and eating, but then goes beyond that into where all the food comes from.

Kohn’s bit about “managing a variety of ecological assemblages” stood out to me most. at first glance, management has such a one-way connotation... but I want to pick that apart. ecosystems manage us back, after all, and have done for millions of years. we and world are meshworked together. one process.

James Gibson writes that “The possibilities of the environment and the way of life of the animal go together inseparably” (p. 143). my own management of eco-assemblages is pretty indirect these days, unless I’m home digging in my dad’s garden. as a non-hunting, non-fishing academic person, I take advantage of grocery stores and farmers' markets full of already-managed things to cook and eat—things that I will probably never need to learn to procure from the earth or the sea for myself. maybe that means my involvement with ecosystems is less intimate, but maybe not. the groceries I buy and cook and eat still matter, not only to my body and my kitchen but to the world I am a part of. every purchase makes marks and leaves traces in a hundred directions. the infrastructures that support grocery stores afford certain possibilities, and those are inseparable from my way of life, so far.

we could make a long list of specific ways non-human lives support our dietary habits. Ingold makes note of this mutual support in a broader way:

“Moreover, granted that not all producers are human, it is easy to turn the argument around and show how various non-humans contribute, in specific environments, not just to their own growth and development but also to that of human beings. … living beings of all kinds, in what they do, constitute each other’s conditions of existence, both for their own and for subsequent generations” (Ingold, p. 8).

A line before this lovely acknowledgement, Ingold writes rather simply (even naively? nostalgically?) that “The farmer’s work on the fields, for example, creates favourable conditions for the growth of crop plants, and the herdsman’s does the same for domestic animals” (8).

doesn't that just sound so symbiotic and peaceful. idyllic, even. but how exactly do we define favorable? whose favor are we most concerned about? Gibson’s observations on how much humans muck around with what our environments afford reinforce this tragic mess: “In making life easier for himself, of course, he has made life harder for most of the other animals” (p. 130). we don’t think about this very deeply very often. often we sometimes actively avoid thinking about it.

what one does or does not put into one’s body makes marks. dietary strictures may be religious, political, ethnic, personal, health-related, or any combination. the forbidden substances seem to make the deepest, most obvious marks: no dairy, no carbs, no pork, no coffee, no alcohol, because this is who we are.

or is it the other way around—this is who we are, because we can’t eat gluten or we won’t eat meat or we’d rather not support Chick-fil-A?

either way, as Ingold pulls from Marx and José Ortega, “what we are, or what we can be, does not come ready made. We have, perpetually and never-endingly, to be making ourselves” (p. 7). and for Thompson, these processes are about “I-ing,” but it seems just as important to think about “we-ing.” It matters who/what we tend to include in “we” and who/what we do not. our human management of eco-assemblages (and maybe of everything else) has been too shortsightedly human-centric for too long.

and then the paper quotes from Roy Scranton's “Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene,” and I question his rhetorical dichotomization of nations and markets vs. "our sense of what it means to be human."

it's not so separable, I say. organisms and their environments can’t really live without each other. it's too connected.

none of us can deny our intimate interactions with things we eat, even if we don’t think about them very deeply all the time. even if we actively avoid thinking about them.

{ apologies for my incomplete citations throughout this refurbished text. if I get a chance I'll update them here to specify titles and other info that was taken for granted when I wrote this for Posthumanism in 2014. }

thread count (1/1132)

the "twitter thread" as a genre fascinates me. I have so many curious questions about it. when was the first cohesive thread of posts created on twitter? who wrote it and about what?

threaded tweets are a reaction to the restrictions of the platform. it's like adapting the limited microblogging form to serve a longer form of writing. combining a handful of tiny posts into something bigger-- like building a tower out of toy blocks.

twitter added an official thread-making feature to its platform not that long ago. but threads (in the computer/internet sense) have been a thing for way longer than that. although etymonline doesn't mention this newer usage--perhaps it's too new-- in its word history of "thread," Merriam Webster does, interestingly. I guess regular dictionaries have a stronger incentive to keep up with the times than etymological dictionaries do.

I learned the internet meaning of thread on online bulletin boards, where a thread is an asynchronous conversation contained under a heading within a specific discussion forum. multiple people can post to a forum thread. everyone's replies are timestamped, linkable, quotable, reply-to-able, and it's all very organized.

a twitter thread is different. sure, the usual "any string of posts-and-replies" does technically constitute a twitter thread... but that's not really what anyone is talking about when they use "twitter thread" as a specific noun. any old string of posts and replies on twitter is more likely to be referred to as a conversation or an exchange. the connotation of "a thread" (often with an introductiony colon, like "a thread:") on twitter involves a string of posts written by a single author, on some focused topic, typically (but not always) within a short span of time. there can be replies, but they feel separate from the twitter thread itself.

so if we want to delineate the twitter thread genre, what are its requirements and hallmarks? and what are its conventions? every genre has conventions-- sometimes very strong ones. memos and emails should have subject lines, letters can have letterhead, and academic articles have references lists at the end. twitter threads have their own rules, too.

we expect a twitter thread to include at least three tweets linked together by topic, structure, and the platform's formatting. there are usually twice that many, if not more. sometimes there is a narrative feel to the thread, and other times it's more list-like. often the thread is announced and introduced as such in the first post, whether or not the ensuing thread is planned out or more off-the-cuff. at the end, especially if the thread has been shared repeatedly and garnered a lot of attention, the author may add a concluding postscript with a link to somewhere readers can donate or otherwise compensate the author's writing work in some way.

but the really interesting and evolving convention I want to talk about is the numbering. there are different ways to number the individual tweets in your twitter thread. in my experience, the numbers most often come at the end of each post, as in the following variations:

[content of tweet...] 1/12

[content of tweet...] (1/12)

(when the total number of tweets is known at the outset)

[content of tweet...] 1/

[content of tweet...] 1/x
[content of tweet...] (1)

(when the total number of eventual tweets is not known-- this mode seems more common)

I've been collecting twitter thread examples (a whole sixteen of them!) for a while now in anticipation of exploring these numbering conventions a bit more. the end-of-the-tweet positioning is the most common numbering style I've seen, overall. but it's not the only one. on rare occasion, the numbers may come first. plenty of threads don't including numbering at all.

so I have sixteen tabs-worth of twitter threads open next to this blogpost draft right now (I'll link them all at the bottom, pseudo-reference-list-style), and while such a random sample of course can't be truly representative of all the twitter threads that have been created in recent months, they at least give me the beginnings of some general insights into twitter thread numbering conventions.

my main finding? the convention of numbering the tweets in a thread on twitter is dying.

at the very least, it's become a marker of formality, more than a useful signal to readers about the order or length of the composition. numbers seem to be less important to a thread's legibility now that the twitter platform supports and displays threaded tweets so smoothly for most people.

I'm surprised by this, for some reason.

but of these sixteen example threads, only 4 include fully numbered tweets (3 at the end as shown above, and 1 at the beginning). another 10 forego numbering altogether, and 2 include numbering for content within the thread, but not as a marker for each separate tweet.

so there you have it. some really, really informally-gathered data about a quirky little internet genre.

it's interesting, right? it is to me. twitter is a culturally powerful and maddeningly ephemeral discursive space. how conventions emerge and spread and morph a little over time is fascinating in any genre or medium. looking at how it seems to be working on twitter helps me think of twitter as not so special. sure, it's different, but it's mostly made of humans just the same way email chains and academic journals are.

and speaking of platforms and their power...author Robin Sloan makes a good argument here (and a cleverly presented one at that) about how social media could work vs. how it currently works.
 

as promised, the twitter threads I referenced in this random exploration of mine, listed here in chronological order. I'll add a note that linking them here like this takes them out of context. they may or may not make as much sense from outside the constant/endless/fast-paced nature of twitter as experienced by those who spend too much time scrolling around within it.

research-based lessons on ending police violence

thoughts on how women get written out of history

how to save the USPS

linguistics and news headlines

on white silence

on the enduring nature of white supremacy

being anti-racist and avoiding burnout at the same time

pixel art and crossstitch

on voting differently vs. persuading others to vote differently

linguistics and the general horribleness of college sports

teaching students how to format memos

real grammar is very messy

reflections on how colleges are marketed

on white fragility (the book and adjacent mild uproar)

how to fight back against crazy new legislation concerning international students

commentary on material vs. symbolic crises

taste testing

from time to time I run out of podcasts that I feel eager to listen to, and let the ones I'm not so eager to listen to pile up in the little podcast app on my phone. I save those for times when I need a voice to fall asleep to. the Longform podcast guys have become falling-asleep podcasts, at this point. should I feel guilty about that? just a few years ago they were inspiring the journalistic fraction of my brain. hmm. ah well.

when I feel I have run out of all my staying-awake-and-actually-listening podcasts, I'll sometimes switch to music, but that's usually less interesting. so instead, I'll search for new podcasts. there are a ton. surely a few are worth filling my wakeful hours with. at least for an episode or two, right? to see what they're all about. give them a chance to grab me.

the other day I searched for rhetoric-related podcasts. for the sake of cramming even more relevant-to-my-degree stuff into my daily leisure time, of course. I found this one, was intrigued a bit by the way its title mirrors the well-known and longstanding NPR radio show in a rather ambitious sort of way, and tasted a few episodes. I unfortunately wasn't very into it. not sure why not. does it deserve a second chance?

more recently, this one showed up in my search results, and so far it seems more useful. shorter episodes usually = more likely to immediately entice, so that's cool. the bite-size overviews of one rhetoric-related thing at a time make it very straightforward. I've listened to three or four of these Mere Rhetoric episodes, and I think I'll keep at it. they're a good way to review stuff I learned in fundamental core classes in years gone by.

as I poked around collecting links for this post, I came across first the twitter account of Mere Rhetoric, and then via that, this article about even more rhetoric/composition podcasts. perhaps I will dip into those other two on Jen Michaels's list. I bet they are worth a try.

yet another rhetoric-focused podcast flew in with my email this week: Masters of Text. the show's most recent episode includes a segment that I myself am part of-- extra exciting! the organizers of this year's Feminisms and Rhetorics conference forwarded a message about the show from Ames Hawkins, its co-host. Ames included a bunch of us fem/rhet attendees in a piece about the conference and about making. go listen to the episode--"Vox Fabri, Vox Dea"--and see if you recognize my voice gushing about the carpentry demonstration I'd just attended.

the theme of the whole conference was making, and indeed much making of many kinds was showcased and discussed and accomplished over those four days. that carpentry demo, for instance, which was run by Maria Klemperer-Johnson, a contractor and entrepreneur from Hammerstone School: Carpentry for Women and Barbara George of Kent State University. we learned about measuring tapes and building conventions and how to drill holes in blocks of wood. power drills, at an academic conference! pretty awesome.



I don't know what I will do with this little double-knobbed board, but I made it. I'll let you know when I find a way to make it useful for hanging things on.

Maria came to my yoga panel, too-- she in her contractor's uniform and colleague/friend Jackie and I in our yoga outfits. we presented an interactive yoga-discussion, which went really well. some of the attendees were familiar with yoga, some were not, but we all talked a bit about crow pose and self-talk and the representativeness (or lack thereof) of #yogagirl, and the embodied, meditative, empowering aspects of writing and moving.

friend Jackie is working on a yoga-running-writing dissertation. it sounds like really great and interesting work. I'm really glad I got to work with her on the panel we put together. where she goes next with it will be way cool to watch.

I am not a runner. and I like yoga plenty but do not feel so very comfortable talking about it as one would probably want to be before writing a massive dissertation about it.

what I keep circling back to is food. food seems so central, so communal and yet so dividing at times. so universal and so personal all at once. maybe I should start looking into good podcasts about food. friend Patti and I have a ongoing messy google doc conversation about food and cooking going on at the moment, which despite its messy randomness is providing some really useful momentum for me. so thank you for that, Patti. I think it will be cool to watch where and how all my food-related thoughts go from here.

twentyeight: pointe

this is the whole world this time of year. blossoms, fat and frilly and clumped like tiny baby ballerinas. the light--when the sky isn't all April-showers, anyway--caresses them so gently, so goldenly.

look there, across from the bus stop on State Street. an arrow pointing to a tree. one with froths of flowers all around its edges. and off to stage left, sunset wandering in, all nonchalant.


besides blossoming trees everywhere, I have been noticing and noting some other cool and inspiring or interesting things. here they are, roughly in order from most-recently noticed to longest-ago noticed.

musings on animal-obsessed traffic engineers over at 99% Invisible. odd.

from Rhetoric: A User's Guide by John Ramage: “however much our language may fool us into thinking that we must choose between the two states, we all know better. Who has not described themselves as being ‘half awake’ or ‘half asleep,’ drowsy or wakeful? In our lives we experience the two states as lying on a continuum that we forever move along, experiencing more of one and less of the other but never fully ‘outside’ either..." (p. 29)

found listserv poetry by the lovely and brilliant and delightfully thoughtful, cemetery-loving poet-rhetorician-hybrid Beth Towle. I hope Beth will forgive me for all the gushing I will continually be doing about these little poems. I love them a lot, and I don't even know how to explain it.

on grade school male privilege by Shannon Hale.

this annoyingly captioned but morbidly beautiful instagram feed of stylish junk-food. why does this exist? well, who knows. but it does.

seven: the study of the true sense

I looked up the etymology of the word etymology a few days ago. and then I remixed that etymology into the title of my last paper-day paper for Postmodernism class. this was last week, at the end of March, which feels very long ago now.

the title was:

"the facts of the origin and development of the true sense of the study of the facts of the origin and development of the facts of…"

and then the rest of the page (legal-sized, remember) blathered on about origins and developments and traces and representations and categories and lines and labels. I read this page to my class as I sat on the floor. to add to the performative interactivity of the whole thing, the copies I'd printed for my classmates had been carefully perforated with the edge of an old pair of scissors. while I read, they could peel and tear and open my legal-sized page into a long, twisty ribbonloop.

to reproduce this page as a blogpost changes it quite a lot. you can't peel these bits and pixels apart the same way you can paper. sorry.

but I can add stuff (like this rambly new preface) and tweak bits of it and take things out that don't fit the new medium here, in a way paper and ink do not quite accommodate. so there's that. you'll have to imagine me on the floor, reading to you. and imagine the feeling of paper tearing in your hands.

---

the etymology of the word perforate takes us back to dear old Latin, as so many etymologies seem to do. via Middle French we arrive at two neat word-trios of infinitive verbs and prepositions: "to bore through.” “to pierce through." pair with these the resulting perforation: "a hole made through something" and that very specific preposition starts to pattern. it’s right there in the per prefix: "through." and it’s implied in the other half too: forare, "to pierce."

the origins and developments of postmodernism... how do those get represented? do they represent themselves? or does someone/something have to step in as representative? we access postmodernism through others’ words and others’ ideas. so far. and even the ideas that cocoon postmodernism are not here in front of us. we can't touch them. we access them through. Saussure through Foucault and Derrida. Foucault and Derrida through Vitanza and Spivak and Berlin. we are looking at a thing (is it a thing?) called postmodernism, but not directly. maybe we’re stuck in a cave. maybe Berlin is putting on a shadow-puppet show. and we are looking at (is it at? along? or into? around? under? which preposition is the best?) an idea called postmodernism through books and essays and art and memes and emoji. we are looking (are we looking?) at this postmodernism mist through our own arguments and faces and looks and voices and brains and time and pencils and paper and chairs and walls and space. does it all become part of postmodernism as we go? I wonder where our lenses and our specimens begin, or end. is there a recipe we can follow when we want to start mixing the message into its medium?

Victor Vitanza, from his article “‘Some More’ Notes, Toward a ‘Third’ Sophistic”:

We have categories so that we might ‘destroy’/’disperse’ them by allowing them to engage in a sophistic-rhetorical ‘diaspora’—that is, to engage in a holiday from any pull toward the infinite or the transcendental—so that we, in turn, might also ‘drift’ freely. We have categorical—‘knowledge,’ as Foucault says, ‘not... for understanding [but] for cutting’ (154). Does perhaps, then, Foucault mean a... ‘cutting loose’? ...does he perhaps mean a ‘drifting’?” (120)

so labels are for peeling very carefully, obsessively, from around the bottles they were glued on. the peeling might ruin them, but it won’t be the end of the world. no worries.

whatever the labels say or don’t say, none of them are neutral. James Berlin is always saying there is no innocent ideology. no innocent pedagogy. no innocence. I should print these introductory and conclusory bits of “Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Classroom” on bright posters and hang them in my office someday, I think.

“A rhetoric can never be innocent, can never be a disinterested arbiter of the ideological claims of others because it is always already serving certain ideological claims.” (447)
“Every pedagogy is imbricated in ideology, in a set of tacit assumptions about what is real, what is good, what is possible, and how power ought to be distributed.” (492)
“A rhetoric cannot escape the ideological question, and to ignore this is to fail our responsibilities as teachers and as citizens.” (493)

to “not ignore,” I must notice, is not the same as "to answer." good. if we had an answer, we might stop poking and peeling at things. as it is, we might never reach the end of the world. how exciting! we won’t ever run out of ways to represent and re-represent what all this theory is. we might never run out of mist and thought and media to look/wander/aim/drift through. a perforation, after all, only really pierces part of a thing. part way through. you have to show up with your brain and your hands and do the rest of the work.

three: unlearning

I shared this quote with my students this week, pulling it up right here where it lives on the little tumblr quote blog I keep. (who even knows what the students thought of the fact that their English teacher has a tumblr. are tumblrs cool anymore? were they ever? does it matter?)

“the most successful of our students have a worldview shift during our program, an entire change in their demeanor towards the built world around them. They come to see rules as malleable, power structures as changeable, and culture as embodied. They see design as a vehicle for slow but influential behavior change, and they recognize that over time, this behavior change impacts the landscape of the world. Over the course of the program, they see that they can design things (products, services, interactions, and policies), and these things cause the world to change.”

the quote is from this piece by Jon Kolko. he is interestingly the Vice President of Design at Blackboard, and Blackboard is the online course software I've been using to teach my writing class. my twenty students are analyzing space and the rhetoric of the built world around them. I am asking them to break apart the ways staircases and windows and furniture send certain kinds of messages. I want them to see that the way things are is not an accident, nor is it inescapable. the first step is paying attention.

reading Kolko's article made me feel a few millimeters better about my teaching. that failure and frustration are okay--that they are even crucial in the learning process--is something I always forget. or don't think about. I get too idealistic about the whole endeavor, too enamored of that Dead-Poets-Society-style magic, and then when almost nothing about the five hours a week I spend in a classroom every semester actually goes so smoothly or culminates in such exciting epiphany, teaching becomes very meh.

there are other articles and bits research and pedagogical theory I've latched on to with similar reaction. Robert Brooke's “Underlife and Writing Instruction” is one. the little summary comment-note I added to the top of my pdf copy includes the line "I found this very, very comforting."

teaching is hard. and it seems like we talk about it too much in extremes. that lesson you planned either falls on deaf ears or it lights up with fantastic sparks of insight. or maybe it's just that I selectively remember those extremes. class time is great or it's awful. we are either completely failing our students or we are doing all the right things for them. and our students are either complete slackers or overachieving superstars. these extreme stories are the most fun to tell, after all, whether to yourself or to your colleagues.

there are a million other stories.

learning doesn't necessarily happen on paper and it doesn't have anything to do with points for writing smooth transitions or points for drafting a logical thesis statement. it doesn't have much to do with the lesson plans you scribble in your notebook or the not-so-fabulous teaching evaluations you get.

I need to remember that getting things wrong and messing things up and wandering around on the wrong track are all useful learning activities. failures are probably more useful than "perfect teaching" or "perfect studenting" could ever be (not that either ideal is at all easy to imagine, from here). my frustration and faltering with this teaching gig... that's part of my own shift, too. don't forget. the failure is useful, for them and for you.

midterm excerpts

fuel coffeeshop. a few Fridays ago.
not pictured: Divining a Digital Future: Mess and Mythology in Ubiquitous Computing, with accompanying notebook and pen.

somebody asked me the other day what mind-mapping software I liked to use.

I muttered and gestured to all the notebooks in my bag. paper, of course. not sure it counts as software, being made of dead trees, but whatever. I map things into my mind using paper. that way I can doodle in the margins or write sideways or crisscross crazily between this note and that note. for example: the first leaf of the blue spiral notebook I've been keeping notes in this semester has some boxes, some circles, a sketch of an envelope, some numbers, some squiggles, an octothorpe, a non-existent email address, one question mark, four arrows, the word ungrateful in all caps, and the advice to Sing in Your Own Voice, followed immediately by the words blue ink in parentheses. on the verso, there is an overwhelming amount of math. I'm pretty sure all of this was written in late 2010 or early 2011, when I was studying for the GRE.

the rest of that blue spiral notebook is now full of notes from this very fall, 2014, my second year at Purdue University. I've had to start a new notebook mid-semester, which I guess is what comes of using one already half-used-up notebook for three different seminars + lectures + practica. because it's midterm-time, and because looking back at these notes might be a useful thing to do as I begin writing proposals and papers and essays and project reports, and because this blog needs more academic nonsense plastered all over it, here are some snippets from it. they don't always transfer very well to this stringent, linear, typographic medium. ah well. I can add hyperlinks to this version though, so that's something.

what does this mean? more money for ____ / quality +
find out the impact ★ 

agonism / movement
metis / arete / kairos / phusis / hexis

observing with no aim other than
normal/everyday
interaction
why that now
what next

ignoring ≠ not noticing ★ 
how to become sensible to things that are unremarkable? [doodle of fish under water]
ethnographers must join the fish but also remember what water is

tech separating creative process from production process --> bigger businesses
telegraph typewriter filing cabinet railroad copy paper

definitions need definers (+ attendant power structures)
I keep thinking about SUITS.

disconnects between writing/docs and + real expectations
or impossible to articulate things
beyond expertise

work (n)
work (v)
internal + external articulation

writers not writing.
interesting nod to Kant

"elite" / "male" / "western"

nature + functional historical knowledge (a formalist approach)
chronicle > story > mode: plot, argument, ideology

mystical / sociological / cultural models
unities / Weltanshauung, paradigm

★ sentience ★ consciousness
making of the world
torture - "torque"/twisting
terror - "to tremble"/terrible

useful vagueness!
scripts     schema
quantifying "shared knowledge"

rules tacitly learned
instruct > interpret > act > assume > instruct > interpret ....
making the world match the words

digital iterations are quicker
do machine made songs words art get copyrighted?

Taylorism = basic (time) task efficiency -->
Fordism = specialized production
functionalism = prototype prod. line + labor management
art?
passive / normative / or creative / or reactive

could machines cook?

what if actions are our bigger understandings of interlinked systems of interactions all working together? (more philosophically cool)
or we could see interactions as bubbly frothy conglomerations of discrete actions? (more etymologically consistent)

★  ideas precede expression
but we learn names before concepts.....
essence ≠ substance

man = ?
biology?
no immovable boundaries
men make sorts
nature makes qualities/matches

a set of subjects memorizable / polymathical
"tristapaedias"
categories / relationships / authorities

self-evident character of prison
war functioning as if...
prison NOT functioning as if... but pretending to try? <-- a="" br="" does="" how="" media="" play="" role=""> the Last Lecture Randy Pausch

practical advice / ❤ + integrity
"if small faults are to incur such grievous punishments, there can, indeed, be none found sufficiently sever for great crimes." (Edgeworth 245-246)

norms as processes, assumed in forming identities
legible / livable vs unlegible / unlivable lives / spaces
e. exclusion, boundaries exposing limits of constructivism

p 37 - always already material
centering the world symbolically
lack of control = castration

subject
abject

containing multitudes. [I was thinking of Maya Angelou at the time but really, Walt Whitman said this.]
"if the unconscious is the discourse of the Other, the unconscious necessarily exceeds the individual + becomes thinkable as Social + Cultural...

power (opposed to) ornamentation elitist finery
puritan austerity

Com 621 Social Media
Com 605 PW

blending sacred motherhood w/ secular moneymaking

regularity / order / harmony / sense

Beauty   Harmony / this sounds like Hume ^

ch 3 Zuern / "what we seek to master is the control of the cultural meaning of the body ... our offering of our bodies to the world as meaningful" p 62

scraps of life and truth and such

last week I was losing sleep over a ridiculous little essay about Plato's take on Socrates' take on a mysterious woman named Diotima's take on our deepest, most irrepressible human instincts and motives. that Plato buries his opinions three layers deep in this dialogue probably means something interesting, but I didn't focus on that. I took the words on their own and teased them apart into a giant fraying mess of ideology and metaphor. and then I tried to weave that mess into four thoughtful pages of inexact philological interpretation. maybe this isn't true for everyone else, but when my writerly self is losing sleep over such things, those things usually read like overly-obvious watered-down drivel.

I decided to title this four pages of watered-down drivel "A Supreme and Treacherous Pursuit: Creativity and the Endlessly Cyclical Quest for Immortality," which reads like what it is: a quite wordy and slightly pompous title. I like the contrast there hiding right in the space where Supreme and Treacherous seem to overlap a little. our many grand ideals, so lofty and pure-seeming--how often do they betray us, or turn out not to be so lofty after all?

whether I found whole premise of my essay hiding there in that overlap too, or whether I am only trying to cram my premise by merciless force into the space I thought maybe might be big enough, I am not sure. re-reading the essay now, one week later, lets me see, along with a few pesky typographical mistakes, that it might not be so greatly watered-down as it seemed at 2:29 a.m. the other night.

if you haven't ready any Plato lately, there's a handy translation of the Symposium here for you. the section I tore apart for this class, Diotima's second-hand ramblings on Love and Beauty, as reported to the gathered party by Socrates, come in about two-thirds down. what struck me about this section was its odd emphasis on creative (and procreative) processes.

immortality and endless copies... are those things the same? if we design the technology to make copies of ourselves and our things forever, will we have somehow unlocked the fountain of youth?

I don't quite ask those questions in the essay. I only had four pages. another bit I didn't end up having room for was this tangent into popular biology or genetics or whatever field it is. I wrote and scribbled and excised the following:

This deeply-rooted and almost irrepressible need for continued existence brings to mind Richard Dawkins' allegory of genes and memes. As human genes desire to perpetuate themselves via sexual reproduction, so ideas might be said to desire a similar avenue toward immortality. Dawkins famously introduces this concept in The Selfish Gene, saying,

“Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passes it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain. […] When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell.” (192)

what would Plato think, seeing me compare him to this raving evolutionary biologist fellow? who knows? I think it works though, even if just barely. there's something in us that seems to be forever stretching to get out, to reach farther, to be more. maybe it comes from Plato's unchanging Form of Beauty or from the stardust in our DNA. I'm not Plato and I'm not an evolutionary biologist either. what do I know?

just for randomness, I'm throwing in a handful of excerpted and carefully un-contextualized sentences that actually did make it into my wordily titled conference paper. I can't decide if they sound better or worse or more or less watery without all the quotes from Plato and associated criticisms stitching them together.

Our desires, which spur us toward the good and beautiful, are themselves spurred by this yearning for an identity and influence beyond the limits of our own. 

To be mortal almost by definition involves ceaseless wanting. 

The desire for immortality prompts a unique and paradoxical creative journey: supreme in the sense that it leads us to ever greater and purer understanding, yet treacherous in its demands for never-ending, Sisyphean progress. 

Somewhere between strength and weakness, between good and bad, progress and learning take place. Desire and pursuit flourish in these middle spaces, spurred by elements on both sides. 

To begin, we must realize and appreciate the times when we are not so ignorant as to have no desire for wisdom, but neither so wise as to have no room for learning. We must remain somewhat stranded between mortality and eternity, in order to sustain the potential for unlimited growth. The processes of meaningful creativity involve recognizing both the inevitability as well as the irrelevance of limitations to this transformative work.

I sound like such a grad student.

long lost goddaughter of Socrates

for spring semester, Classical Rhetoric will take care of my late-morning Tuesday/Thursday brain-stretching. it'll probably be good to get back to some of the older than old foundational western philosophies my Rhetorical Theory class touched on a whole year and a half ago. perhaps I'll get to revisit Bizzell and Herzberg's fat green anthology, even though it isn't technically on our booklist.

a bunch of other books are, though. Plato. Aristotle. Cicero. St. Augustine. our professor, Dr. Johnson-Sheehan (who will probably be an awesome professor, if the pattern of really great teachers who happen to have double last names continues...) emailed that we should all order I. F. Stone's The Trial of Socrates right away and devour it before our first day of class next week.

I'm about halfway through the thing and it's been a delightful read so far. methodical, but gentle and thought-provoking. not quite as relentless and heavy as some of the academic reading I've faced. it's like watching someone paint. Stone works through various themes, using shades and colors borrowed and mixed from Socrates's student-biographers and critics and successors. I'm still waiting to see how it'll turn out, though the poor philosopher's martyrdom has been thoroughly and rather unsympathetically foreshadowed.

he makes a curious character, this ancient icon. I wonder how he would feel, knowing the name Socrates has made its way into almost every half-educated human brain on the planet.

from the way Stone illustrates him and all his thoughts, I find the philosopher somewhat enchanting, in a puzzling, uncertain sort of way. I don't know if enchantment is what the author had in mind--much of the book focuses on how uselessly anti-democratic and impractical Socratic ideals were. so why am I so intrigued?

maybe it's because the portrait is so sketchy, or maybe it's that my own philosophies are currently so stretchable, but I see little specks of myself in this Socrates. I think he and I could've been friends. maybe.

a few characteristics of Socrates I sort of relate to:
-the asking all the questions
-a tolerance for absurdity and paradox
-an affinity for solitude and independence
-the assertion that perfect knowledge is more or less unattainable
-the willingness to poke holes in every point of view
-the inability to put forth any better, more coherent points of view
-an apparent apathy, even in times of awful national crisis

not all of these are characteristics I particularly admire in myself, nor does my sharing them with Socrates necessarily make them any more admirable. all I can say is it has made this treatise even more fun to read. from some angles Socrates still looks like a proud, lazy lunatic. but we all know lunacy and wisdom keep close company, eh?

{ quilt of image results for 'Socrates' }

I've dogeared a few pages in the floppy little paperback. perhaps I'll write more about those and my impressions once I've finished the story.

or dysfunctional nihilism

this is a bunch of small thoughts I've been collecting for a while. please, forgive the datedness and borrowedness of some of them and the existential generality of the others.

there is no shortage of tragedy in the world. perhaps this is because there is no end to our human ability to read our circumstances as deeply dramatic, emotional, and meaningful narrative. there is no shortage of tragedy at all. sometimes the tiniest things can dissolve away all the good things in your head, until it's hard to focus on anything but how little control you have over the way your life goes.

is it more depressing to think about how little control you have over the way anyone else's life goes?

for months and months I've wanted to blog something about this rather artistic video appeal concerning 'the leading cause of death in the world,' apparently, because... well, I guess because it seems clever. a clever and pathetic appeal to writers and journalists. and this kind of art and rhetoric intrigues me for some reason.

yesterday the grip of my own small tragic mood was loosened when I got out of bed and started cleaning my closet. a small thing. unimportant except in light of the fact that I'll be moving around the corner in a week or so, and need to put things in boxes and suitcases in preparation. anything, any mindless chore to distract us from the howling nothingness, eh?

I am totally up for wearing plaid with stripes. who cares anyway?

but we do. we care. we care about the silly details of what we wear every day and we care about the plight of illiterate children in Africa and lots of things in between. and we aren't exactly helpless puppets in the hands of fate, are we? I don't think so. there are things we can do. but do we? John Green provided me with the phrase 'functional nihilism' in this as-usual-enlightening video. we all wear a nihilist hat from time to time. but it isn't the only hat we can wear. we can get out of bed and do things. make stuff happen. change the world. in fact we can't really help changing the world. there is no running away. your breath, your apathy, your words, your footsteps. it's all here being mixed in with everyone else's.

are there reasons behind all this trite and inescapable no-man-is-an-island stuff? maybe. are they at all effable reasons? maybe not.

and this brings me to Ms. Rachel Botsman and her presentation on the the case for collaborative consumption. I can't remember where or when I came across this, nor am I certain exactly how it ought to connect with the above quote from Einstein or the Solidarités International video. maybe you all can help me out with that part.

a global village. trust mechanics. and this swap-trading stuff is the kind of thing my lovely, clever sister would get into and make awesomeness happen with, if she got half a chance.

maybe I'll read Botsman's book sometime. maybe I'll write one myself sometime...

reeling

my review of Kenneth Goldsmith's Uncreative Writing was published last week in The Journal of Electronic Publishing. it's nestled very nicely into the bottom of their latest issue. this will count as my second official academic publication. if I don't die of teaching freshman English or procrastinating research proposals, there should be more of them, someday.

in other news, I submitted an abstract of my food photography research paper (from Visual Rhetoric last spring) to the Annual Arts and Humanities Graduate Student Research Conference, which will be happening this month... but my project was not selected for inclusion. ah well.

I've also worked up a short one-act playscript for the theatre department. every spring, they put on a series of one-act plays and call it the Raider Red’s One-Act Play Spectacular. that's RROAPS for short, apparently. there was a call for scripts thrown out in our campus email announcements, and I felt like responding, so I did. we'll see what happens. many pre-emptive thanks to friends Chris, Tim, Nic, Cathy, Mel, Morgan, Zach, Allison and Sarah for their praise, feedback, creative readings/interpretations, and title suggestions. I'll let you all know when and if I hear back from whoever it is judging and selecting and all that for the actual spectacular event...

what else? well, if I don't die of teaching freshman English...

1. more food rhetoric. freund Kolby just last night was telling me about this rather marvelous repository of video lectures from Yale University. there's a course from 2008 called The Psychology, Biology, and Politics of Food he thought I might be particularly interested in (wannabe food blogger that I am, right?). I started with Lecture 16, just for kicks. it's about food marketing and such, so it seemed most relevant. someday it would be cool to watch the Milton course. or some Philosophy. it's pretty awesome of Yale to put these courses online like this, eh? we'll see if this one can lend any insights to my rhetorical analyses of food blogs and videos for Dr. Baake this semester.

2. argumentation theory and copyright laws. I need to start working on a lit review and a research paper. what am I waiting for? a warm, quiet moment to sit down and devour the books I've checked out on the subject. let's cross our fingers that such a moment will arrive this week. perhaps tomorrow.

3. a 2000- to 3000-word essay analyzing my development in this crazy MA program thus far, reflecting on the ways my academic work might (somehow) enact, complicate, or contribute to current research and theory in the field. this one is sort of past due already. um. yeah. excuses are for the weak... I know...

4. ten pages of reflection on my work for the Texas Tech University Press. I was musing just thismorning on how much I miss it there. teaching is good for me, I'm sure.... but doing my little bit to shepherd all those books-to-be through the publication process was so lovely.

so it looks like if I don't die of teaching freshman English, I might be severely wounded anyway by all these massive writing projects (curricular and extra-curricular). let's hope a bit of yoga and cooking and the fabulous weather we've been having will keep me alive.

to sing, to say, to do, to seem

so I dug up the full text of this lovely poem by E. E. Cummings, for May day. I did this during a longer-than-it-should've-been distraction/break from my visual rhetoric research paper. you might remember me having mentioned this poem last semester. who knows why I have become so fond of this poet and his quirky poetry. but this one especially seems so fitting (or at least I think so), and so fun. here, in case you like it enough to want any more, is the digitized text I borrowed it from. maybe these five little stanzas will be my summer poetry-memorization project. (wish me luck with that.)

SONG

but we've the may
(for you are in love
and i am) to sing,
my darling:while
old worlds and young
(big little and all
worlds)merely have
the must to say

and the when to do
is exactly theirs
(dull worlds or keen;
big little and all)
but lose or win
(come heaven,come hell)
precisely ours
is the now to grow

it's love by whom
(my beautiful friend)
the gift to live
is without until:
but pitiful they've
(big little and all)
no power beyond
the trick to seem

their joys turn woes
and right goes wrong,
(dim worlds or bright;
big little and all)
whereas (my sweet)
our summer in fall
and in winter our spring
is the yes of yes

love was and shall
be this only truth
(a dream of a deed,
born not to die)
but worlds are made of hello and goodbye:
glad sorry or both
(big little and all)

costs

this is the price tag that came with the brand new bicycle wheel I bought the weekend before I moved to Texas. it was tied around the frame of the wheel with a little bit of white string. yes, I save random things like this. price tags often have a really cool blend of style and functionality that just seems interesting to me.

attached to the same bicycle wheel was this warning sticker, wrapped neatly around one of the spokes. back when my dad and littlest brother and I replaced the old bent wheel with this shiny new one, I cut off the sticker and tucked it into my pocket. two days later, I traveled with it and the little price tag (and the bike of course) all the way from the mountains through the desert, down to the windswept plains of west Texas.

I hardly have time here, as a graduate student, to ride that bike anywhere.

but I do somehow have time to contemplate the bits of technical communication that came with my bicycle's new wheel. in 5371 yesterday, we were talking about ethics. there is a lot to talk about where ethics and communication are concerned. despite the fact that stereotypical tech. writers create documents that don't often get read, technical communication really does make a difference sometimes. the example we keep reading about is the Challenger disaster in 1986, where a technical report somehow failed to convince the people involved that there might be a problem with the space shuttle. that's a pretty extreme example, and even in that case, there is no easy way to think about the ethics of it.

for most of class we just asked questions:

-what interests are we (should we be?) serving as technical writers?
-who decides what is ethical ("good") and what isn't?

-how might we fill in the gaps between what is/isn't legal, ethical, or valuable?

-how far do our ethical responsibilities as technical writers extend?
-how much risk of miscommunication (there will always be at least some risk) is acceptable?

I love questions.

about my little bike wheel warning sticker I can ask plenty more of them. when was the decision made to include these warnings? was it just because some lawyer told them it would be a good idea? who actually wrote out these paragraphs, and how many drafts did it take before they settled on this version? they can't really expect me to thoroughly inspect the front wheel every single time I go for a ride, can they? my new bike wheel didn't come with a manual--are they assuming I have one for my bike as a whole? what other assumptions are being made here? and has anyone ever really died from a mis-adjusted bike wheel?

suspended in citrus

have I mentioned lululemon?

I discovered them in Canada at the bottom of the closet in the basement of 47 Laval Boulevard, Lethbridge, Alberta. there was a red bag there, beneath the rack of dresses and skirts. all over this bag were plastered the words of what I later came to know as the lululemon athletica manifesto (see image to the right; there's a text version over here somewhere).

months after this first random discovery, I had the chance to wander one wednesday into the physical lululemon store in Calgary's southcentre mall. their lowercase title impressed me. their branding, their attitude impressed me. every little cardboard tag hanging from each piece of merchandise impressed me.

they are like that gorgeous, happy, perfectly toned girl who sits so gracefully in the second row in your history class. you're almost afraid to be friends with her, she's so intense, so obviously driven and dedicated to something very different. but she's not afraid to be friends with you.

I am not a devoted athlete by any means. I will not, any time in the foreseeable future, be planning to spend $98.00 on flawlessly tailored yoga pants. that's just ridiculous, isn't it? do you really need that kind of fancy apparel to do yoga?

nevertheless, it's hard not to love this place. their website is slow, but it's got character. their stuff is crazy expensive, but the tags on it explain to you exactly, "why we made this." they might be hard-core and intense to the point of making the rest of us feel guilty about sitting behind a desk for so long, but they have good advice, no?

{ image borrowed from lululemon.com }

from my brain to yours

the question every English major gets is: "so, are you going to teach?"

we of the technical writing persuasion shake our heads solemnly. never. seriously. do we look like we'd be good at dealing with other people's children all day long?

such was always my response. there are a million other things you can do with an English degree. for teaching, what you want is an Education degree. I know they both start with E, but they're very different things.

I've met a lot of teachers recently. come to that, I've done a lot of teaching recently... not quite the public school kind, of course, but teaching nonetheless. and really, when you think about it, every person in the world, outside one's own family, fits into that box of other people's children. though I guess some of them do grow up eventually.

weird.

so...whether I go to grad school and end up teaching English to freshmen who are all taller than me or instead get a normal job writing instruction manuals for some obscure type of software or instead spend my life designing posters or labels or websites, it's all some kind of teaching. the transfer of information. rhetoric. I can't be too afraid of that, can I?

trussed chickens

I got a new desk.

slotted in among old copies of unloved software at the bottom of the old desk's drawers, I found my old Straylight Run album. I have been looking for it for months. having read Neuromancer, I can now taste the warm caramel sauce of trivial satisfaction on top of Straylight's lovely music, because now I know exactly where they got their name.

back when I had a job, I quoted the lyrics of Dignity and Money and pondered the demands life is always making of us.

thinking about that job today, I recognize levels on which I could have been more invested, could have cared a bit more, could have adopted the same passion my employers had for their many enterprises. I never have been very good at caring about things.

one rather famous cartoonist/marketing blogger guy once said, 'the market for something to believe in is infinite.' that makes it sound like it should be so easy to sell belief--to dress it up all shiny and sleek and labeled, with convenient price tags and bar codes dangling fashionably from its neck.

but he didn't say something worth believing in. he just said something. and we do offer up our faith in all sorts of things. it's so easy to trust. almost magic, the way we walk every day over an invisible common ground of trust, without thinking much of it. and on top of it there are all the strings of hope we tie to this tool or that accessory, all the paper chains of wishful expectation about this event or that experience. we are all so full of desire.

so a company wants to sell something people can believe in. to do that they need some salesmen to believe in it too. failing that, they might settle for salesmen capable of convincing others to believe, without having to believe in it themselves. such cognitive dissonance comes just as easy as believing.

but we want to believe and we want people to believe in us. why doesn't it always happen like that? cue up that Straylight Run song again...

there is a price for all this faith. even if our hypothetical company is trying to sell something worth believing in, and even if it is run by honest and passionate people, what creeps in is the need for money. money to feed the family. money to pay the bills. money to hire employees. money for advertising. money climbs up to the top of the list.

wanting things cannot take the place of needing things. believing in things cannot take the place of needing things. so our ideas get strung up with price tags. our greatest ambitions are slaughtered by some very sharp and nonnegotiable demands. but it's okay. they grow back. really.