A Little Knowledge is a Dangerous Thing

Well, I have already blown up my blog and my web page with my tiny bit of knowledge about html. Someone is working on Hilary's dissertation project. Check out the link titled Web Design. Now at the very bottom of the page.

The White Man, Malcolm X and Spirituality

One of my favorite quotes from Malcolm X:

. . . This is how the white man thrust himself into the position of leadership in the world--through the use of naked physical power. And he was totally inadequate spiritually. Mankind's history hs proved from one era to another that the true criterion of leadership is spiritual. Men are attracted by spirit. By power, men are forced. Love is engendered by spirit. By power, anxieties are created.

Autobiography of Malcolm X pg 424--Chapter 19: 1965

We're coming to the edge
running on the water
coming through the fog
your sons and daughters

Let the river run
let all the dreamers wake the nation
Come, the New Jerusalem.
Silver cities rise
the morning lights the streets that lead them
and sirens call them on with a song
It's asking for the taking
trembling, shaking
Oh, my heart is aching

We're coming to the edge
running on the water
coming through the fog
your sons and daughters
We the great and small
stand on a starand blaze a trail of desire
through the darkening dawn
It's asking for the taking

Come run with me now
the sky is the color of blue
you've never even seen
in the eyes of your lover
Oh, my heart is aching

We're coming to the edge
running on the water
coming through the fog
your sons and daughters

It's asking for the taking
trembling, shaking
Oh, my heart is aching
We're coming to the edge
running on the water
coming through the fog
your sons and daughters

Let the river run
let all the dreamers
wake the nation
Come, the New Jerusalem

Just like most boyfriends, Joe is not much help. I now have an index.html page and a page1.html page with a title and an FTP server, but it seems that never the twain shall meet. Joe will not help me find the Upload option. :( I guess these are the ups and downs of web page design.

This is my new boyfriend, Joe. He is going to get me through the making of index.html.

I have made so much progress, only to get stuck at making index.html. Go Nvu.

I did not know that html can have viruses, but the one I tried to download had one called jswindowbomb. :(

Pratt's pedagogy for producing critical discourse has been deployed for writing classes by Patricia Bizell and Bruce Herzberg (Negotiating Difference, 1996). In general, contact zone theory has a friendly fit with the critical literacy I defined elsewhere as
Habits of thought, reading, writing, and speaking which go beneath surface meaning, first impressions, dominant myths, official pronouncements, traditional cliches, received wisdom, and mere opinions, to understand the deep meaning, root causes, social context, ideology, and personal consequences of any action, event, object, process, organization, experience, text, subject matter, policy, mass media, or discourse. (Empowering Education, 129)

from Ira Shore's website

http://hyper.vcsun.org/HyperNews/battias/get/foucault/gen.html?inline=-1&nogifs

The Lady of Shalott.
And down the river's dim expanseLike some bold seer in a trance,
Seeing all his own mischance-- With a glassy countenance
Did she look to Camelot. And at the closing of the day She loosed the chain, and down she lay; The broad stream bore her far away,
The Lady of Shalott.
Lying, robed in snowy whiteThat loosely flew to left and right--
The leaves upon her falling light-- Through the noises of the night
She floated down to Camelot:
And as the boat-head wound along The willowy hills and fields among, They heard her singing her last song,
The Lady of Shalott.
Heard a carol, mournful, holy,Chanted loudly, chanted lowly,Till her blood was frozen slowly,And her eyes were darkened wholly,
Turned to towered Camelot. For ere she reached upon the tide
The first house by the water-side, Singing in her song she died,
The Lady of Shalott.
Under tower and balcony,By garden-wall and gallery,
A gleaming shape she floated by,Dead-pale between the houses high,
Silent into Camelot. Out upon the wharfs they came,
Knight and burgher, lord and dame, And round the prow they read her name,
The Lady of Shalott.
Who is this? and what is here?And in the lighted palace nearDied the sound of royal cheer;
And they crossed themselves for fear,
All the knights at Camelot: But Lancelot mused a little space; He said, "She has a lovely face; God in his mercy lend her grace,
The Lady of Shalott."

Slang is cool.

Academics are even Lamer than we originally thought:

In this area the deficit theory appears as the concept of verbal deprivation. Black children from the ghetto area are said to receive little verbal stimulation, to hear very little well-informed language, and as a result are impoverished in their means of verbal expression. They cannot speak complete sentences, do not know the names of common objects, cannot form concepts or convey logical thoughts.

But

the myth of verbal deprivation is particularly dangerous, because it diverts attention from the real defects of the educational system to imaginary defects of the child. As we shall see, it leads its sponsors inevitably to the hypothesis of the genetic inferiority of black childrent that it was originally designed to avoid (Labov 202).

Academics are Lames

Most of the black professors and students that I have met in the universities are intent on absorbing whatever the "high culture" of Western literature, European literature, art, and scholarship has to offer, but without losing what they feel are the essential values of their own background. But at the same time, many condemn "ghetto English" as an inferior means of communication and claim that black people can improve their social and economic position only if they aquire the formal means of expression used by this high culture. There is a division of opinion on the place for the vernacular, usually referrred to as "our own language," "home language" or "soul language." Most college students will claim to have a deep and intimate knowledge of it and insert it into their basically standard grammar quotations from the "language of the street" .

Labov, Language in the Inner City, 289

So are basic writers imprisoned by the vernacular?

Maybe they don't want to be literate, as it may make them lame.

Labov writes, "the student of his own intuitions, producing both data and theory in a language abstracted from every social context, is the ultimate lame" (292).

the grammatron

incoherence? or a new form of coherence?

If there is anything to be found in this text that is coherent, it will, certainly, be a "function of surprise."

" . . . our desire to construct a stable and specific meaning for texts is so strong that we invent contexts when none are immediately available (from Crowley, A Teachers Guide to Deconstruction).

But can we do this with the grammatron? We can do this with a grocery list that we find on the street, because we understand the schema--all of the events that organize its construction--but is there a schema through which we can understand the grammatron?

Mark America writes: The cyborg-narrator, whose language investigations will create fluid narrative worlds for other cyborg-narrators to immerse themselves in, no longer has to feel bound by the self-contained artifact of book media. Instead of being held hostage by the page metaphor and its self-limiting texture as a landscape with distinct borders, Hypertextual Consciousness can now instantaneously link itself with a multitude of discourse networks where various lines of flight circulate and mediate the continued development of the collective-self as it rids us of this need to surrender our thinking to outmoded conceptions of rhetoric and authorship.

Who cares what it means? America:
I link therefore I am.

What kind of experiences condition reading, writing, our ability to interpret texts?

Arche Writing:

all that gives rise to an inscription in general, whether it is literal or not and even if what it distributes in space is aline to the order of the voice; cinematography, choreography, of course, but also pictorial, musical, sculptural "writing" (as qtd in Crowley 4).

"Arche-writing is human inscription on the world's surface, human re-markign of the landscape. And this inscription, this remaking, is thorougly linguistic" (Crowley 4).