Notes from the Under(graduate library)

2007-02-13T06:36:00.000-08:00

Deutsche Sprachlehre fuer Auslaender mit Omi

So, I have committed an hour a day to becoming reacqainted with German. I thought that one of the best ways to try to learn to really speak German and get beyond the limited forms of expression provided by the grammar books would be to try to talk German with my mother, who was born in Germany in 1930. The only problem is that with Omi EVERYTHING is an argument and this makes it difficult to get through even a single thought in English, let alone in a foreign language. So my mother has asked me to give her a ride to the bank this morning, and now I want to try out the German I know after doing die Ubungen about the bestimmte und unbestimmte Artikeln.

Sharon: Mutti, wann du gehen willst, werde ich fertig.

Omi: Ach, Sharon, no--nicht wann, wenn--Wann is a specific time.

Sharon: But mom, I want to say when you are ready, not if you are ready

Omi: Sharon, it's wann willst du gehen

Sharon: No, mom, I am not asking a question--I want to tell you something, that I am ready to go when you are ready to go

Sharon: Okay, im funfzehn Minuten gehen wir--mit dem Auto? Is it mit oder beim? Beim Auto, Mit dem Auto?--and then my mother goes

Im Auto? nach dem auto

Sharon: hinter dem Auto, uber dem Auto, vor dem Auto

Omi: that would be suicide

And so the German will be learned--sehr langsam.

2006-11-23T07:31:00.000-08:00

Socrates: It is, Callicles, from the ranks of the powerful that the supremely wicked are drawn. Yet there is nothing to prevent good men from being found in this class also; and they, when they occur, are entirely admirable, for it is both difficult and most praiseworthy, Callicles, to live a just life when one has great opportunities to do wrong. Few, therefore, have survived this test, yet here and elsewhere they have sprung up in the past and there will, I don't doubt, be further examples in the future, honorable men endowed with the virtue of administering justly whatever one places in their charge.

2006-11-23T06:27:00.000-08:00

Socrates: Now what about the soul? If it is in disorder, can it be excellent? Or must it have some sort of order and harmony?

2006-11-15T21:31:00.000-08:00

Favorite quotes from Nietszche:

"Believe me! The secret of reaping the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment from life is to live dangerously!"

In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.

2006-10-11T18:25:00.000-07:00

Maddie's First Job

Maddie earned her first ten dollars at the mall the other day. Unbelievable! Who would have thought that her opinion would count in market research, but it does. She took two surveys--one in which she identified cartoon and disney movie characters and another in which she had to recognize juice boxes by brand name. I let her go in by herself, but I sat outside the door in the hallway and listened. When the second survey came up, I thought she'd have to opt out because we only drink one brand of juice since she can't have corn syrup. I was amazed as I listened to Maddie go on and on about Hi-C, Kool-Aid, Sunny D, etc. in great detail. At the end, the lady paid Maddie five dollars for each survey. Maddie was delighted with it all.

Several hours later Maddie wanted to get into this "philosophical discussion" about the nature of truth and lies. What is the truth, really, she wanted to know. Is it okay sometimes to tell a little lie? She rapped up the conversation with the telling comment, yeah, I didn't think the lady would understand about corn allergy, so I just made it easier on her and talked about juice, even if I had to make some of it up.

2006-09-30T20:39:00.000-07:00

the irony of academe

Kurt Spellmeyer:

Although Marx wrote a dissertation on insurgency, he completed his research with the aid of highly competitive fellowships; although he sided with landless peasants, he cut a sharp deal with Harvard; although he argued for cooperation and equality, he beat out his colleagues in the struggle for a big office. I cannot help thinking of another Marx, disenchanted with the academy, hounded across the English channel and living in London as his children died from illnesses that he lacked the money to treat.

2006-09-24T13:27:00.000-07:00

Docile Bodies

Maddie is not a docile body.

The project for next week is to recognize the sight words: "I," "the", "and".

I thought I'd give Maddie a head start. We tried to practice. I held up a flashcard with the first word on it. This is I, I said to Maddie. Now you say it. Maddie was silent. The next word is the. Maddie, look at the word and say it. Maddie started to smoulder, but still she said nothing. The last word is and, I said, as I held up the flashcard.

In a burst of anger Maddie screamed out:

Hey, how come you are using the letters from MY name for your words? That makes me angry!

2006-09-22T20:23:00.000-07:00

Flunking Kindergarten

I didn't think it was possible, but, apparently, you can flunk kindergarten--or at least be in very serious trouble all the time. Maddie has been in kindergarten for 3 hours a day for just about 3 weeks and already I get the strangest notes in her book bag. The notes are from the teacher and are usually about some sort of shortcoming of Maddie's. The first day the teacher wanted me to watch her run because she was sure Maddie was favoring one leg. Okay. We watched her and it looked like Maddie was running just like all the other kids. The teacher chuckled and moved on.

The next note was about rhyming trouble. I am familiar with the study. I know that it is believed that children who are good at rhyming are also good readers. (I have to check out this study more closely, but who has time?) I don't think this means that you must be a top-notch rhymer before you can learn to read. My thinking is at obvious odds with the experts. The teacher pulled me aside when I picked up Maddie one day last week, concerned that Maddie is an "inconsistent rhymer." I will admit, the teacher is right. Maddie can rhyme, but she is rather nonchalant about it. If you ask her what rhymes with bee, she will say tree. But then she will also say, hey, soft and drink, that rhymes. Of course, she is confusing words that are associated with one another with words that rhyme. But tell me, where is the fire?

The last note read: Urgent, Maddie is struggling with the letter d and t sound. I assume this means that the sound of the letters d and t sound similar to Maddie and she is confusing them. I think the sounds of the letters d and t are similar--and in some words--like city--you could confuse them, depending on how they are pronounced. And then it said practice! practice! practice! That last part really annoyed me.

The instructions for the letter sound exercise are fairly complicated for someone who is five. Color all the pictures that begin with the t sound red. Color all other pictures orange.
Some of the images are pretty ambiguous for people with limited experience. How do you distinguish between a pot and a pan? How do you know that a bad illustration of a wishbone is supposed to indicate the word wish, when you are only five?

I tried to help Maddie. On the t and d worksheet, I pointed to the picture of a tack. Maddie, I said, do you know what this is a picture of? A needle, she asked? I guess that that's why that one was colored orange, but it was wrong, nonetheless. Do the other kids have trouble? I asked Maddie. No, Maddie said sadly, only me.

The last worksheet was on the US Constitution. I just want to know, what happened to kindergarten? When I was little, we colored, painted, and played house.

Does anyone have a slightly used phonics kit?

September must be harass the single mothers month at the elementary school--at least it feels that way.

2006-08-08T11:56:00.000-07:00

But how will you look for something when you don't in the least know what it is? How on earth are you going to set up something you don't know as the object of your search? To put it another way, even if you come right up against it, how will you know that what you found is the thing you didn't know?

from Plato's Meno

2006-08-02T20:39:00.000-07:00

Karl Marx
Economic and Political Manuscripts

Man appropriates his manifold being in an all-inclusive way, and thus as a whole man. All his human relations to the world-seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, thinking, observing, feeling, desiring, acting, loving-in short, all the organs of his individuality, like the organs which are directly communal in form, are in their objective action (their action in relation to the object) an appropriation of this object, the appropriation of human reality. The way in which they react to the object is the confirmation of human reality. It is human effectiveness and human suffering, for suffering humanly considered is an enjoyment of the self for man. (159)

2006-08-02T19:52:00.000-07:00

Karl Marx
Economic and Political Manuscripts

It is not only the material of my activity--such as the language itself which the thinker uses - which is given to me as a social product. My own existence is a social activity. For this reason, what I myself produce I produce for society, and with the consciousness of acting as a social being. (157-158)

2006-07-19T16:04:00.000-07:00

There is little to know besides our descriptions of the world. This does not mean that we simply make up the world; on the contrary, what it means is that we have a responsibility to engage with the world as it exists in order to make it meaningful and useful to us.

2006-07-19T11:33:00.000-07:00

An interesting link:

http://www.livefrombeirut.blogspot.com/

2006-07-17T13:38:00.000-07:00

Name that poem

He had bought a large map representing the sea, Without the least vestige of land:
And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be
A map they could all understand.
"What's the good of Mercator's North Poles and Equators, Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?" So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply "They are merely conventional signs! "Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes! But we've got our brave Captain to thank:"
(So the crew would protest) "that he's bought us the best -- A perfect and absolute blank!"

2006-07-07T07:29:00.000-07:00

A passage on composing that I want to remember:

If a photograph is to communicate its subject in all its intensity, the relationship of form must be rigorously established. Photography implies the recognition of a rhythm in the world of real things. What the eye does is to find and focus on the particular subject within the mass of reality; what the camera does is simply to register upon film the decision made by the eye. We look at and perceive a photograph, as a painting, in its entirety and all in one simultaneous coalition, the organic co-ordination of elements seen by the eye. One does not add composition as though it were an afterthought superimposed on the basic subject material, since it is impossible to separate content from form. Composition must have its own inevitability about it.

In photography there is a new kind of plasticity, product of the instantaneous lines made by movements of the subject. We work in unison with movement as though it were a presentiment of the way in which life unfolds. But inside movement there is one movement at which the elements in motion are in balance. Photography must seize upon this moment and hold immobile the equilibrium of it.

The photographer's eye is perpetually evaluating. A photographer can bring coincidence of line simply by moving his head a fraction of a millimeter. He can modify perspectives by a slight bending of the knees. By placing the camera closer to or farther from the subject, he draws in detail--and it can be subordinated, or he can be tyrannized by it. But he composes a picture in very nearly the same amount of time it takes to click the shutter, at the speed of a reflex action.

Sometimes it happens that you stall, delay, wait for something to happen. Sometimes you have the feeling that here are all the makings of a picture--except for just one thing that seems to be missing. But what one thing? Perhaps someone suddenly walks into your range of view. You follow his progress through the view finder. You wait and wait, and then finally press the button--and you depart with the feeling (though you don't know why) that you've really got something. Later, to substantiate this, you can take a print of this picture, trace on it the geometric figures which come up under analysis, and you'll observe that, if the shutter was released at the decisive moment, you have instintively fixed a geometric pattern without which the photograph would have been both formless and lifeless.

Composition must be one of our constant preoccupations, but at the moment of shooting it can stem only from our intuition, for we are out to capture the fugitive moment, and all the interrelationships involved are on the move. In applying the Golden Rule, the only pair of compasses at the photographer's disposal is his own pair of eyes. Any geometrical analysis, any reducing of the picture to a schema, can be done only (because of its very nature) after the photograph has been taken, developed and printed--and then it can be used only for a post-mortem examination of the picture. I hope we will never see the day when photo shops will sell little shema grills to clamp onto our viewfinders; and that the Golden Rule will never be fourd etched on our ground glass.

If you start cutting or cropping a good photograph, it means death to the geometrically correct interplay of proportions. Besides, it very rarely happens that a photograph which was feebly composed can be saved by reconstruction of its composition under the darkroom's enlarger; the integrity of vision is no longer there. There is a lot of talk about camera angles; but the only valid angles in existence are the angles of the geometry of composition and not the ones fabricated by the photographer who falls flat on his stomach or performs other antics to procure his effects.

--Henri Carter-Bresson, The Decisive Moment

2006-06-19T18:56:00.000-07:00

The body is at its best between the ages of thirty and thirty-five; the mind is at its best about the age of forty-nine.”

If Aristotle was right in his thinking, there may be hope for me yet.

2006-06-16T14:08:00.000-07:00

I just love her.

2006-06-13T13:54:00.000-07:00

why should we care about the music of flute players?

2006-06-13T13:50:00.000-07:00

Surely wisdom is good fortune.

2006-06-13T10:00:00.000-07:00

The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest things without it.

Carl Jung, Modern Man is Search of a Soul

2006-06-09T09:07:00.000-07:00

All of my writing on this blog so far has been about collecting bits and pieces of other people's writing that I either enjoy or admire. I admire writing that, for lack of a better word, profoundly or beautifully articulates something that is true, wonderful, or mysterious about life. Lately, I have also appreciated meaningful interpretations of the work of what people refer to as "sophisticated writers." One passage that I have particulary enjoyed comes from Richard Grusin's and Jay Bolter's Remediation. In this passage, they are commenting on a passage from Camerica Lucida by Roland Barthes:

What makes Barthes's qualified and complicated realism so interesting is the way he used it to articulate the theme of desire. The most moving picture in Camera Lucida is the one that Bartehs describes in words but does not show us: a picture of his mother as a child, which becomes for him the expression of his own desire to be reunited with a mother who has just died. For Barthes, a photograph is always an expression (not a representation) of loss, of death in fact, because it is an emanation of a past that cannot be retrieved (111).

Barthes writes that photography is an emanation of the referent.

When I read that same passage in Barthes I was struck by another about photography's limitations. A photograph cannot ever capture the fullness of the immediate experience. The photograph can recreate an image of a reality that was once present, but it's kind of like a death mask. So much of what was there in the moment that was once present cannot be recorded. What the photograph captures on paper is so much different from how I perceive and remember an experience that was unique and important to me. There is a kind of trauma in it. Barthes has said that "the trauma is a suspension of language, a blocking of meaning" (Image, Music, Text). There are infinite ways in which a lived experience reaches us and the photograph/language misses most of them.

I also think it is interesting that Barthes points to rhetorical code that interferes with an emanation of an event. Barthes writes: Certainly situations what are normally traumatic can be seized in a process of photographic signification but then precisely they are indicated via a rhetorical code which distances, sublimates and pacifies them. Barthes writes that an image is a resurrection of experience, but it is weak. "How does meaning get into the image?" he asks. "Where does it end? --and what is there beyond?

2006-05-03T04:03:00.000-07:00

Victory in Baking

Because Madison is allergic to several foods, cooking has been tough, especially since she is allergic to milk and eggs which are common baking ingredients. It has been really difficult to make any kind of baked item that looks and tastes like the real thing. There is only one brand of boxed cake mix that we can use since most of the others have the potential to be cross contaminated with peanuts/treenuts in the plant in which they are manufactured. I've had to replace milk with juice, eggs with bananas, and butter with canola or safflower oil. We've had birthday cakes, but they have been very very heavy.

Last week I discovered Spectrum palm oil--and last night we had a real chocolate cake!!!! This feels like a true victory after four years of struggling to bake without the usual ingredients. The cake has the texture and taste of a normal cake. On most of Maddie's birthdays, the cake was more or less a prop. I did my best to bake it, but we typically let Maddie blow the candles out, passed out the cake, everyone took one bite and it was a done deal. Last night, everyone really ate cake!

2006-04-21T19:57:00.000-07:00

On the other hand, the Cynics' view of life agrees in spirit with that of J. J. Rousseau as he expoiunds it in the Discours sur l-origine de l'inegalite; for he too would lead us back to the crude state of nature, and regards the reduction of our needs to the minimum as the surest path to perfect happiness. For the rest, the Cynics were exclusively practical philosophers; at any rate, no account of their theoretical philosophy is known to me.

The Stoics proceeded from them by changing the practical into the the theoretical. They were of the opinion that the actual dispensing of with everything that can be discarded is not required, but that it is sufficient for us constantly to regard possession and enjoyment as dispensible, and as held in the hand of chance; for then the actual privation, should it eventually occur, would not be unexpected, nor would it be a burden. We can in all circumstances possess and enjoy everything, only we must always keep in mind the conviction of the worthlessness and dispensibleness of such good things on the one hand, and their uncertainty and perishableness on the other; consequently, we must entirely underrate them all, and be ready at all thime to give them up.

Arthur Schopenhauer

So it's okay for a Marxist professor to wear Nike tennis shoes.

2006-04-18T19:58:00.000-07:00

The real rulers in Washington are invisible, and exercise power from behind the scenes.
Felix Frankfurter

2006-04-18T14:03:00.000-07:00

The reformation of consciousness lies solely in the awakening of the world... from its dream about itself.

Oprah was trying to awaken people from their dreams today. She had several women on her show, single and married, who admitted to the lies that they were living in their life. All of the lies were strangely tied to the women's personal dreams for their lives. One woman (single, 24 years old) confessed that she was obsessed with living the celebrity lifestyle. This obsession resulted in massive credit card debt because she doesn't earn enough to purchase the expensive clothes she needs to put on the illusion. (She looked terrible in the clothes and had on a bad shade of lipstick. Oprah's producers should have helped her.) She thought it is easier to live as a character because it is harder to face criticism as a real person. A married woman confessed to faking happiness in her expansive suburban home. Other women confessed to wearing fake jewelry and other such things.) The whole time Oprah admonished the media for its falsity, for supplying people with the mental material for their illusions. It isn't real; it isn't real, she said repeatedly. But she didn't confess to her own involvement in it! She looked kind of strange with her false eyelashes and designer clothes instructing the 24 year girl to give up her illusions.

2006-04-18T05:54:00.000-07:00

Pumping Gas

This morning I put $10.00 of gas in my car and I didn't even get a quarter tank of gas. :(

2006-04-17T14:01:00.000-07:00

2006-04-17T12:15:00.000-07:00

Prefer et obdura: dolor hic tibi proderit olim.

2006-04-14T07:22:00.000-07:00

For those who are frustrated in grad school, a short quiz, courtesy of Matt Groening and Lisa Ede:

Should you be going to Grad School?

__ I am a compulsive neurotic.

__ I like my imagination crushed into dust.

__ I enjoy being a professor's slave.

__ My idea of a good time is citing authorities.

__ I feel a deep need to continue the process of avoiding life.

and for those who plan to stay:

The 5 Secrets of Grad School Success

1. Do not annoy the professor.

2. Be consistently mediocre.

3. Avoid anything smacking of originality.

4. Do exactly what you are told.

5. Stop reading this right now and get back to work.

2006-04-12T15:23:00.000-07:00

Why Write?

Proust, writes Benjamin, managed to make the pointless story interesting. He says: "Imagine, dear reader, yesterday I was dunking a cookie in my tea when it occurred to me that as a child I had spent some time in the country." For this he uses eighty pages, and it is so fascinating that you think you are no longer the listener but the daydreamer himself.

. . .

To this world belongs what happens in Proust, and the deliberate and fastidious way in which it appears. It is never isolated, rhetorical, or visionary; carefully heralded and securely supported, it bears a fragile, precious reality; the image.

. . .

What was it that Proust sought so frenetically? What was at the bottom of all these infinite efforts? Can we say that all lives, works, and deeds that matter were never anything but the undisturbed unfolding of the most banal, most fleeting, most sentimental, weakest hour in the life of the one to whom they pertain? When Proust in a well-known passage described the hour that was most his own, he did it in such a way that everyone can find in it his own existence.

Proust wrote: "and as soon as I had recognised the taste of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-blossom which my aunt used to give me ... immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like a stage set ... and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all weathers, the Square where I used to be sent before lunch, the streets along which I used to run errands, the country roads we took when it was fine."

2006-03-26T21:40:00.000-08:00

Postmodern Maddie

Mommy, said Maddie, I have an imaginary friend. His name is Trace.

2006-03-23T20:31:00.000-08:00

But the suggestion that Kant be sent to Solovki not only did not shoc the foreigner, but pleased him immensely.

. . . Exactly, exactly," he cried, and his green left eye turned to Berlioz, glittered. "That's just the place for him! I told him that day at breakfast , "Say what you will, Professor, but you have thought up something that makes no sense. It may be clever, but it's altogether too abstruse. People will laugh at you."

from the Master and Margarita--Bulgakov

2006-03-23T17:37:00.000-08:00

I am relieved to see that someone else thought Vitanza's line of thinking was difficult to follow. The exchange is great!

Aesthetics, Party Lines
Victor J. Vitanza
What I will have said, I address to "Jim" and to any of you in as much as "Jim" might be in your thoughts.
Jim and I used to talk on the phone. It was a kind of party-line conversation. I don't know if you know what a party line used to signify. When I was a kid, between 5 and 8 years old, my parents and I lived way outside the city limits of Houston, TX. We had a party line; that is, we shared a telephone line with another family in our area. Often my parents would pick up the receiver to make a call and the other party was on it. Actually, more often than not. Trying to get a call out to another was like trying to reach the proverbial excluded third party. I remember overhearing more conversations between my folks and the other party on line than a conversation with a third party (the normally intended audience for telephones).
The conversations I had with Jim on the phone, which were like none others that I have ever had in my life with another, were comparable, party-line telephone calls. We talked about You. The always intended, yet uncanny Audience, the ones we wanted to reach. We talked about what your expectations might be, and of course we talked about our differences concerning what and how we wanted to communicate to you. To be sure, we talked about much that we agreed about, and we talked about our careers and we talked about domestic things such as our families, our kids playing soccer and basketball.
A call would usually begin with hellos but without additional niceties, for there was always a cut to the chase. There is one particular call that I especially remember. I had just walked into the house with the last bag of groceries that I had purchased and a satchel of books that I had earlier checked out of the university library. The phone rang. (Ringggggg, Ringggggg.) I picked it up and Jim said, "Hello, Vitanza." From his saluation, I knew what kind of conversation it was going to be. When he said, "Hello, Victor," it meant a domestic, local call; when he said, "Hello, Vitanza," it meant a long distance, business call. I said hello and immediately preempted him by saying that I just got back from the library with a load of books on aesthetics. At the time, Jim was writing Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures and I was writing Negation, Subjectivity, and The History of Rhetoric. We both knew that we were writing sections on Aesthetics and politics and we both knew how difficult such a combination of loci were. I mentioned to Jim that I had just checked out Josef Chytry's The Aesthetic State and several other books; and he mentioned to me that he was reading Martin Jay's article "`The Aesthetic Ideology' as Idology." We continued the conversation on this theme for another 10 or so minutes, exchanging bibliographical references, all related to the problem of what Paul deMan labelled "the aesthetic ideology." Much time has passed, though there were intervening party-line conversations. Both books are in print now. I see what Jim had to say; he has not, as far as I can reasonably assume, seen what I have had to say. I can only imagine. Aesthetically and politically. Politically and aesthetically.
As I was telling another audience a few weeks ago, most, if not all of our arguments, are with the dead, yet very much alive. Often, I feel like Bellow's Augie March, writing letters of disagreement, or on occasion agreement, to the dead, yet alive. Virtually, I feel like an Augie on a party line. Dialing the numbers, waiting while it rings (Ringgggggg, Ringggggggg). And then someone picks up the phone, saying hurriedly, "Hello!"
And cutting to the chase I would have said: "Hello, Jim, I just got your book and though I have yet to read it, the cover looks like road kill on a rural Texas highway and the book smells like a sun-baked turd from an armadillo." There would be sardonic laughter and he would say, "Just a second Vitanza, I'm finishing up mentoring a student." And I would hear Jim say a few words to one of his graduate students at Purdue and then say, "Now, I have to take care of Vitanza." And he would continue, without transition, saying, "And I have your book . . . it was sent to me today . . . you understand, I would never buy such a satanic book, nor leave it lying around for young ones to read. . . . Let me tell you that your book cover with a background of aqua satin sheets looks as if it were done for a David Lynch film—which is a perfect match up, given your film noir approach to a history of this profession." And the repartee would continue, back and forth, punctuated with much good humored laughter. Later the snippets of biting critique would have been heard and counter-responded to in passing. But always eventually with so much laughter! It was always a virtual roasting!
Jim, as he often claimed, was a "laughing Marxist." The only one that I ever met.
(Ringggggg, Ringggggg).
"Hello."
"Hello, Jim, it's me."
"Oh, Hi, Victor. Glad you called. I've got a seminar tonight and I plan to tell my students about you. I mentioned your name last week and the class paused and asked, `Victor? Who's Victor?' And then one of them said, `Oh, yes, you mean Victor Villanueva!'"
After his laughter would have subsided.
I would have replied, "Jim, I just finished your book and I see that you mention my name on page 69 and direct your comments on postmodernism to me. I have to tell you, by the way, your response is a straw-man argument. Who in the hell is David Harvey to speak for you as a worthy critic of PostModernism with all of its peverse complexities? And then you turn to Martin Jay and his saying that Lyotard does not `afford much in the way of positive help with the choices that have to be made.' You merely suggest in passing that you read Just Gamino. Jim, return to the repressed and this time give us evidence that you actually read Lyotard and that you yourself understand his notion of justice. And Jim, What about Kant himself? Did you read Kant? The modernist father of aesthetics? Did you read what Lyotard has said in the Differend and in Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime and elsewhere about Kant's third critique? and its givenness to radical heterogeneities. And Kant's fear of what he saw in his thinking of the sublime. His attraction to and repulsion by the Ugly, the Monstrous! And Lyotard's own incipient fear of the sublime? in relation to justice. And yet, what Lyotard says about the sign of history? Jim, why do you rely so heavily on Harvey and Jay's readings? On secondary material? to be dismissive? Where are your own readings of Kant and Lyotard's texts? Why support your important position with their shakey testimonials!? Are you preaching only to the already converted? If either Harvey or Jay can be found lacking, the house that Jim built falls . . . and like a house of cards."

Jim would have said to me, in a counter-wicked way, "well, I think I read your book, too; but it's really hard to say or know. You see, I think that your book does not really exist because the audience here cannot understand the book or follow its overly detailed and serpentine-byzantine lines of thinking; and if they could understand the book or broken lines of thinking, they could not communicate the intuitiveness of the book because your position is too evangelical; and if some of them could communicate it to others in the audience here, what you have to say in the book would just scare the holy shit out of everyone! Victor, it's such a melay-knee-al thing you wrote!" And so on. And so on. And so on . . . the discussion would . . . will have gone. The unending life-in-death death-in-life, conversation.

I know, I know: though there is a "so on," it's rife with the conditional mode. I would like to think, however, that the conditional is the mode of hope. The conditions for the possibilities of hope for a revalution of justice, the most difficult of key, everyday words and concepts. Justice. Our task with Jim is to rethink justice.
Jim had party-line conversations with all of us. Some gentle. Some caustic. Many in laughter. In the healing balm of laughter. He best knew how to balance work with laughter, laughter with work. Jim had conversations with all of us. And had conversations with many of you . . . no, with all of us . . . and especially the multitudes who have yet to enter our field's or discipline's conversations. Conversations about composing justice. Collaboratively! Composing justice for Jim was not a division of labor but a co-labor of work and laughter.
Earlier, I said that our conversations, our arguments, are with the dead, the past. Our arguments are not only with the past but with the future. With a co-labor of past and future. With What will have been. And so much has been and will have been because of JB's exuberant laughter. His making party-line conversations possible. Lest we forget, Jim's praxis of laughter was never laughing at, but was—and must continue to have been—laughing with. And therein lies the condition for his, no, our perpetual rebeginnings on our own, more global, party-line.

University of Texas, Arlington Arlington, Texas

2006-02-20T20:31:00.000-08:00

A favorite line from McLuhan:

Nobody can commit photography alone.

2006-02-20T15:28:00.000-08:00

In the pasture behind my home there are still traces of how people used to live on my place. Just a ways down a creek full of cattails and reeds, an old farmhouse, faded gray and falling down, stands near a small pond and a dying tree. Beside it, barely visible through the growing grass, are the foundations of other buildings--a granary, a blacksmith's shed, a woodshed, and perhaps a barn. Farther away, a line of rhubarb plants still struggles against the prairie grass, probably near what used to be a garden. Farther away still there is a shelter belt of aged and slowly dying cottonwood trees, maybe sixty feet tall.

A family used to live here, but now the cattle have pushed into their old home, seeking shelter from the winter storms. They have stomped the floorboards into the ground, rubbed against the supporting braces, knocking down walls and leaving strands of their hair on the nails that stick out. The brick chimney has collapsed, leaving a hold in the roof for the rain, the snow, and the wind to come in. Soon, the entire building will fall to the ground, leaving the cattle without a shelter.

The soil around this old farm is sandy. In the thirties, when the drought and the grasshoppers came, it blew. Badly. Where there was once wild and lush prairie, a home to buffalo, prairie dogs, coyotes, and Indians, shifting sand dunes grew, rolling and crashing like a storm-tossed sea behind the plow. Now the grass grows only in clumps almost a foot apart, so fragile one can reach down and pull it up by the roots with one easy jerk. The thick rich sod of the prairie has been replaced by scattered desert plants, cactus, and yucca. Only a few years ago have some of the worst blowouts grassed over enought to stop the blowing. Now, depleted, exhausted, this old farm is a winter pasture for our cattle; the people who lived here have left, probably for the city.

There are many old farms like this on my family's ranch in southeastern Montana. We remember them by the names we call places--the Chapman place, the Morton place, the Pepper place, the Blazer place, the Sawyer place, the Harris place, the Jones place, the Hough place, the Frankie place, and the home place. And perhpas there are a few places whose names we have forgotten. Those all were farms and homes that my family took over when the land would no longer support them. When I was a little boy, we had one of the largest ranches in Fallon County. Now, though we have sold one of our land and have even bought some more, most of our neighbors are bigger than we are.

Perhpas one day, following this 'natural' progression, it all will simply become the Sikorski place, and the names of all the places my family remembers will be forgotten, like the names of all the places the Indians remembered.

The Reagan administration, and now the Bush administration, following the truth of our time, calls this progress. The ineffient and nonproductive are swallowed up and diplaced by the more efficient and more productive, and the whole economy is more rational as a result. Resources--human as well as nature's--are recentered, redistributed, and used in a way that maximizes their utility for a global economy. Large scale is more efficient and more productive, more capable of rendering up nature as a resource for the economy, and so it is more rational. Who but a poet can be so sentimental to doubt this truth?

--from Modernity and Technology: Harnessing the Earth to the Slavery of Man
Wade Sikorksi

2006-02-18T20:07:00.000-08:00

The practice of freedom in daily life, and that includes artistic freedom, is always a liberatory act that begins with the will to imagine.

--bell hooks

To begin with, artists have to engage in a process of education that encourages crtiical consciousness and enables them as individuals to break the hold of colonizing representations.

--bell hooks

2006-02-14T09:58:00.000-08:00

Maddie (watching a trailer for a futuristic film): Mommy, are we in the future?
Me: Yes, we are--we were born and we are in it!~
Maddie: Is there a powerful army protecting us?
Me: No Maddy, we are the army that is protecting us.
Maddie (after a silent moment): oh no . . .

2006-02-14T09:27:00.000-08:00

To tell the whole truth, our personal individuality is a personage which is never completely realized, a stimulating Utopia, a secret legend, which each of us guards in the bottom of his heart.

--Ortega y Gasset

2006-02-13T18:14:00.000-08:00

"Life in the late capitalist era is a constant initiation rite. Everyone must show that he wholly identifies himself with the power which is belaboring him. This occurs in the principle of jazz syncopation, which simultaneously derides stumbling and makes it a rule. The eunuch-like voice of the crooner on the radio, the heiress's smooth suitor, who falls into the swimming pool in his dinner jacket, are models for those who must become whatever the system wants. Everyone can be like this omnipotent society; everyone can be happy, if only he will capitulate fully and sacrifice his claim to happiness." (The Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1947)

2006-02-05T20:58:00.000-08:00

my browser does not support inline frames

2006-02-02T19:10:00.000-08:00

"Now is the time for you to access power," says the voice, "the power within your own imagination, the dream-apparatus you endlessly write into digital being. The first thing you need to do is encounter your screenal space of dreaming."

2006-02-02T19:02:00.000-08:00

That is why in the last resort there is only poetry. We cannot live without imagination; adoring and exaggerating life, lavishing itself of change. This property of imagination is not a human aberration, but a manifestation of the fundamental nature of life.

from Negation, Subjectivity and the History of Rhetoric
Victor Vitanza

2006-02-02T18:54:00.000-08:00

And writing itself, the process, the production of a script? It is a romance, of course, `an explosion of dreams and desires',[13] by turns painful and euphoric, but compulsive and utopian either way. Like romance, writing is narcissistic to a degree, at its most elementary level a quest for recognition, the place where the subject appears. But it is also an attempt to reach the beyond of the demand, to transgress the ordering processes of the symbolic or to suspend its prohibitions. And in this sense writing is where, paradoxically, the subject disappears, undergoes the death, precisely, of the author. Nowhere is it more apparent that subjectivity inhabits the field of the Other than in the effort to write something difficult, to formulate an idea which remains either stubbornly elusive or drearily banal. Moreover, to the degree that to write is to exceed, however momentarily, the space allotted to the subject in the signifying chain, to break the symbolic Law, it is also to know for sure, at least from time to time, that the cogito is neither in control nor an origin. In that respect, you might choose to say, why it's almost like being in love ...

from Writing about Desire
Catherine Belsey

2005-12-10T17:17:00.000-08:00

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.

2005-12-10T07:51:00.000-08:00

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

2005-12-09T21:37:00.000-08:00

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

2005-12-08T17:59:00.000-08:00

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.

2005-12-08T17:27:00.000-08:00

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

2005-12-08T17:24:00.000-08:00

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

2005-12-08T17:08:00.000-08:00

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

2005-12-04T15:24:00.000-08:00

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

2005-12-04T09:54:00.000-08:00

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

2005-12-04T09:02:00.000-08:00

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."

2005-12-01T18:59:00.000-08:00

Slang is cool.

2005-12-01T18:21:00.000-08:00

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).

2005-12-01T17:54:00.000-08:00

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).

2005-12-01T16:40:00.000-08:00

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).

2005-11-20T10:47:00.000-08:00

Literacy as a Call to Action

Postmodern cultural politics rejects the universal claims of modern humanist thought in favor of those that are local, particular and temporal. In addition, postmodern politics historicizes and pluralizes ideas by highlighting what is contingent, shifting and changing in events that make up the activity of the world. In her article, “Women and Literacy: A Quest for Justice,” Lalita Ramdas invokes postmodern polemics in her construction of a feminist politics of literacy. Ramdas rejects the universalist notion of literacy, claiming that being literate does not mean the same thing for all people everywhere. She claims that what literacy is and means plays out differently in the contexts of gender and class. In this article, Ramdas explains how women’s literacy issues are different from men’s literacy issues, and how literacy issues of third world nations differ from the literacy issues in more economically and industrially developed first world nations. Ramdas argues that there is a “women’s literacy.” Her ideas about literacy are particularly good for women in that she calls for the application of women’s concerns to literacy education as well as for recognition of their struggle to be affirmed in a world in which men maintain positions of dominance. Effective literacy initiatives for women are also calls to political activism. In order to accomplish this, literacy needs to be thought of in more local and particular terms. A literacy initiative that is truly empowering for women is one that instantiates an intersubjective dialogue between the empowered and the disadvantaged.
In order to be meaningful in the lives of women, literacy education should, as Ramdas claims, empower women to “analyze, understand, and transform their world” (643). Often literacy education misses this mark. When women participate uncritically in educational programs that are designed by and for men, they often learn to participate in and reinforce the hegemonic structures that limit their progress in society, instead of learning to transform them. Like Paolo Freire, who contends that literacy programs should be efforts towards freedom and that in order to do that they must teach people to “question the very reality that deprives them of the right to speak up,” Ramdas claims that literacy education for women should show them that literacy, for women, is “an issue of justice” (630).
Ramdas sees literacy programs as both quests for social justice and wellsprings of political activism. Ramdas writes that male-dominated policy-makers often design literacy programs to domesticate women rather than to empower them, and this is particularly because of the threat that libratory education poses to the social order (642,634). I contend that women often participate unknowingly in engendering these practices for the most part because they believe the social system works equally well for both women and men. I remember being told by a female educator that being able to use language well would almost guarantee my success in the business world. But as I worked diligently and intelligently for many years in many different kinds of businesses without making substantial progress, I began to realize that there was much more involved with achievement than just being “a person with knowledge [ . . .] who learns” (634).
This is particularly why literacy programs should also involve political activism, teaching women to recognize the structures that keep them subjugated and to resist them. Ramdas shows that this is possible when she writes about the reactions of the rural people of West Bengel to literacy initiatives designed to reach them. They write, “Can literacy help us live a little better? Starve a little less?” . . . (636). Literacy education is most meaningful for people, for women, when it works as a transformative tool. Literacy education should do much more than teach women to read and write well; it should help women to create better conditions of living for themselves by empowering them to become involved in making the decisions that effect the way they live.

2005-11-20T10:30:00.000-08:00

What is ideology critique?

According to Stephen Brookfield:

Ideology critique is a term associated with thinkers from the Frankfurt School of critical and social theory, such as Habermas, Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse and Fromm. The purpose of the process is to help us recognize how unjust dominant ideologies, uncritically accepted, are embedded in everyday situations and practices. Dominant ideologies are sets of values, beliefs, myths, explanations and justifications that appear to the majority to be self-evidently true and morally desirable. Because of their apparent obviousness, they are harder to identify and even harder to challenge. Ideologies manifest themselves in language, social habits, and cultural forms. They legitimize certain political structures and educational practices so t hat these come to be accepted as representing the normal order of things. When we do ideology critique, we try to penetrate the givens of everyday reality to reveal the inequities and oppression that lurk beneath. (87)

from Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher

2005-11-20T09:20:00.000-08:00

Brookfield and Pedagogy

What is critical reflection?

Stephen Brookfield wrote Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher for all teachers who want to become better teachers by thinking critically about their practice. He says that the readers who will benefit most from the book are college teachers who have a base of experience in the classroom, although new teachers might end up being much more apt to do a critical investigation of their own practices than veteran teachers who have been in the field for a long time. In the preface, Stephen Brookfield explains that “critically reflective teaching happens when we identify the assumptions that undergird how we work.” The core process of critical reflection, for Brookfield, involves looking at how we think and work through different lenses.

The four lenses are:

autobiographical reflection

students’ perspective: we need to look at our practice through our students’ eyes

colleagues’ perceptions and experiences

theory—we can try to locate what we do through alternative critical frameworks

He says that there are some professional risks connected with critically reflective teaching. Although it is done in a spirit of hope for the future, Brookfield warns against thinking that those who engage in the practice of critical reflection will be able to transform the conditions of their work. The process of critical reflection is a step towards becoming aware of the conditions that underlie teaching.

Brookfield writes that “a fundamental task of education for critical reflection is the careful study of forces and structures opposing those who raise institutionally awkward and professionally inconvenient questions about the “correct” forms or purposes of teaching” (xiv). He points out that it may be risky for teachers to acknowledge their errors publicly, even if it is part of the process of critical reflection. In the university we often "punish" people for the public disclosure of their private errors—and this dynamic often results in the privatization of practice. However, in spite of the risk, engaging in the practice of critical reflection is a meaningful activity because it can help us to avoid the pitfalls of innocent and naïve teaching that happens when we think that our private intentions are transparent to students, or that, when things don’t work out as they should, our inability to manage chaos seems to us to be evidence of our incompetence.

So critical reflection helps us uncover the assumptions we make about our teaching. There are three kinds of assumptions that we can uncover through critical reflection: paradigmatic assumptions, prescriptive assumptions and causal assumptions.

Paradigmatic Assumptions: basic assumptions that structure what we do. They are assumptions about reality that we casually believe to be true. Examples of paradigmatic assumptions: 1. critical thinking is a normal part of adult life; 2.good adult educational processes are inherently democratic (3).

Prescriptive Assumptions: are beliefs about what should be happening in a given situation. Prescriptive assumptions are often assumptions of value about the way things should be. An example of paradigmatice, prescriptive and causal assumptions working together: since adults are self-directed learners, the students in my classroom should be able to take control over the design of their own projects, and this will make them better writers (3).

Causal Assumptions: Causal assumptions are usually shaped as predictions. If we use learning contracts in the classroom, our students will be more self-directed (3).

2005-11-12T06:29:00.000-08:00

Inventing the University

In his essay, "Inventing the University," David Bartholomae offers insights that could help college composition teachers a way of understanding the position of students who have not had prior exposure to academic discourse and who are trying to write for the university.

Many beginning students are outsiders to academic discourse. They do not have knowledge of its conventions and logic. But they do a get a vague sense, probably from their interaction in college classrooms, of what the discourse sounds like. More than likely, they intuitively understand that they should reproduce this discourse in order to gain acceptance in the academic community and to succeed in their coursework. But they don't have the knowledge that it takes to appropriate the discourse. So one of the great first challenges with which some students struggle at the university is an understanding of language. They have to imagine what "privilege enabled writing" looks like (56). When they write, they are not actually conveying their own thoughts and ideas; they are producing the sound of a discourse that is distant from their own experience--trying to give the teachers what they want. Bartholomae writes that some students are "shut out from one of the privileged languages of public life, a language he is aware of but cannot control" (43). So the student's discourse is strong in places and in other places it breaks down and the student fall back on familiar language patterns. (Sometimes this is a good indication that a student has plagiarized a paper, another method of appropriating discourse.) Students who do not get exposure to sophisticated uses of language are at a loss when they have to write academic discourse. And if they do not ever get that exposure, they will not be recognized as scholars, and in this way, they will be excluded from true participation in academic life.

Bartholomae shows that some students handle their encounter with the discourse of the academe by producing a kind of hybrid discourse. Some parts of the writing may sound like academic prose and then suddenly the writer will revert to producing a text that sounds like a "how to" manual. Bartholomae writes that 'this is one of the most characteristic slips of basic writers' (41). Bartolomae recalls an essay in which the fiction of the academic discourse was broken, where the student suddenly breaks from academic prose and slips into a voice with which he is more familiar, using the pronoun you to produce a voice that sounds to him like the speech of an expert or a teacher--"You take your pencil in your right hand and put your paper in front of you." James Gee has referred to this hybrid discourse as mushfake, a use of language that imitates the sounds and rhythms of the discourse, but does not deliver meaning.

Bartholomae's instruction rings true with my own experience teaching basic writing courses. I don't know how many times I have written on papers, even after I have explained to students that they should avoid using the pronoun you in their writing. The first thing that usually happens is confusion. What is a pronoun? Someone will raise their hand and say, "I thought it was "I" that we couldn't use. That's what my high school teacher said." And I have written on countless papers the phrase, "your paper should not sound like an instruction manual." This is like a metadiscourse, using language to talk about how to use language. I wonder how helpful this really is. Perhaps a better way to help students would be by modeling a transformation of a passage. It probably isn't enough to simply tell students not to use the pronoun you, but to take a passage that the student has written and demonstrate how the idea could be written otherwise.

I also remember working one on one with a girl who had a lot of "ten dollar words" interspersed throughout the paper, but in a way that did not make sense. I asked her to read a passage she had written aloud. When she finished, I asked, "does what you read make sense to you?" She said, no, but all academic discourse is like that. Later she thought that she must make her passages her passages sound obscure they way the rest of the writing she had read at the university sounded. I told her I thought she was confusing clarity with complexity and we both got a good laugh out of it.

What Bartholomae wants us to understand is that students who are writing this way are not hopeless, and that their writing problems are not necessarily rooted in cognitive deficiency, but in "unfamiliarity with academic discourse." "I am arguing, then, that a basic writer is not necessarily a writer who makes a lot of mistakes. In fact, one of the problems with curricula designed to aid basic writers is that they too often begin with the assumption that the key distinguishing feature of a basic writer is the presence of sentence-level error." Bartholomae wants us to recognize that it is a challenge for students to struggle with content while trying to take on an unfamiliar discourse as well. Beginning writers are inexperienced writers, labeled as basic writers and thus marginalized in the academic community.

Bartholomae explains that when a student's primary concern is with "sounding right" that he or she is not really thinking when he or she is writing. They are instead being appropriated by a discourse, more concerned with how they should say something than with what they are saying.

2005-11-11T12:23:00.000-08:00

Malcolm X, Academe and Praxis

Once, one of my Mosque Seven Muslim brothers who worked with teenagers in a well-known Harlem community center showed me a confidential report. Some black senior social worker had been given a month off to investigate the "Black Muslims" in the Harlem area. Every paragraph sent me back to the dictionary--I guess that's why I've never forgotten one line about me. Listen to this: 'The dynamic interstices of the Harlem sub-culture have been oversimplified and distorted by Malcolm X to meet his own needs.

Which of us, I wonder, knew more about that Harlem ghetto "sub-culture.?" I, who had hustled for years in those streets, or that black snob status-symbol-educated social worker?

But that's not important. What's important, to my way of thinking about it, is that among America's 22 million black people so relatively few have been lucky enough to attend a college--and here was one of those who had been lucky. Here was, to my way of thinking, one of those "educated" Negroes who had never understood the true intent, or purpose, or application of education. Here was one of those stagnant educations, never used except for parading with a lot of big words.

from The Autobiography of Malcolm X pg. 272

Do you think Malcolm thought that the social worker should have gotten out there in the Harlem ghetto and helped some people? The academic probably missed the point of Malcolm's message. Maybe the phrase "the white man is the devil" was just too general, reductive and didactic for the educated social worker. Who can deny the reality behind what Malcolm X was talking about, no matter how he said it?

2005-11-06T19:04:00.000-08:00

"using the master's tools to dismantle the master's house"

2005-11-05T19:10:00.000-08:00

Cool sites.
Ignacio's site is pretty cool. Check his stuff out at My Original Designs.

2005-11-05T15:58:00.000-08:00

If the last stroke of midnight were to sound... oh, what a disaster that would be!

2005-11-05T15:52:00.000-08:00

Princess Madison

Who would be able to resist posting a picture like this?

2005-10-31T16:02:00.000-08:00

A reply to Jeff's comment. Jeff, the assignment was made BEFORE reading Haynes and Dworkin.

2005-10-31T09:29:00.000-08:00

Etymology Meets Cubism

Cubism is an artistic movement that breaks with homogenous form, the quality of uniformity in the structure of a painting or image. The subject matter is broken up and reassembled as an abstract form. Many artists following this form were involved in a project of showing multi-faceted views of an object assembled on a single plane, arranged in a way that you would not see in “real” life.

How would these ideas look if they were taken beyond the range of the image, if we looked at a research problem that involves writing in an electronic environment through this lens?

We thought students might look at a topic for research through a series of different visual and written forms (literary or prose writing from any discipline. i.e. a poem, an image, a quotation, and three scholarly texts) in order to come to a new understanding of the topic. Actually, you could probably take any term that represents a concept and use it to produce something else. The student would work through an associative thread to create a loose link between ideas.

For example, if a student were thinking about doing some kind of writing on the topic of rap music, they might draw connections between a particular rap song, a rap sheet and various other connotations of the term and address the range of indexical connections between them in a single piece of writing.

What does the writing look like? I don’t know. Perhaps it looks like an image on the web that opens up into different spaces through hyperlinks. So could the images above be used as a space for creating hyperlinks to the range of texts or images that connect to a particular topic? Or perhaps an arrangement on a single page of different categorical terms that open up into the various images and texts the student finds. Students might annotate each piece with a discussion of the nuanced ways in which different writers writing from different perspectives produce various conceptualizations of the idea.

Needless to say, this looks a little messy and we got stuck when it came to how a final assignment would look. We started by thinking out how the idea of repetition and variation might play out in a piece of writing.

2005-10-31T07:29:00.000-08:00

Why? Cause writing is complex. Work habits, material conditions, desire, ability to look at one's own work in a certain way, ability to give and receive feedback, etc. are all part of the process.

I really liked this part of Jeff's conversation, so I saved it on my blog, because I want to look at it from time to time when I look at student writing and nearly lose my mind.

Material conditions. I know a young woman in her 20s who would like to get an education, but seems to fail in her attempts at school because there is so much going on in her social environment that is working against her. She is married to a man who doesn't want her to be in school to begin with, but she can't survive economically outside of the marriage. She wants to get her GED so that she can go on to college and improve the conditions of her own life. Every time she defies him and signs up for a class, he harasses her about whether or not she is sitting next to and or smiling at the other men in the class. She often finds herself in the position of having to answer very detailed questions about all the men in the course (how many are there, how old are they, where do they sit, does she talk to them, etc.) in order to avoid ending up in an argument with her husband. She has asked me several times to help her with her writing, but can never seem to get together with me at the meeting times we prearrange--something always seems to come up. She can't read and write; she knows she needs to be able to in order to get a better job than the one she has now. So she signs up for courses, sporadically misses class meetings, falls behind, and eventually gives up.

I think there is a tendency to look at the work our students are doing and to assume that if the writing is weak, it is weak solely due to a lack of effort on their part, or because the instruction isn't adequate.

Not everyone gets the support they need to get an education, but it doesn't mean they aren't here trying anyway.

2005-10-30T10:03:00.000-08:00

Perception and Writing

McLuhan makes a profound distinction between percept and concept, assigning their difference to human understanding. We say one is perceptive when some thing is penetrated, extracting uncommon insight. Perception is enhanced when attuned to the 'secondary' senses, the tactile, olfactory, and acoustic. Only when all the senses are at work, can the eye see. Percepts function via the sensory world, not by concept. Percepts are participatory, involved. Percepts feel. The tribal mask for instance is sensory, and transmits subliminal energy. Concepts in contrast are detached systems that neutralize participation by explaining the world. Concepts distance us from objects by relying on the passivity of the eye. The visual unlike the tactile tends to stand back and inventory the situation from a safe distance. Concepts lead one to viewing life as the eye surveys the terrain, without involvement. To explain we generate concept after concept, and then more concepts, as we get further away from our powers of perception. These powers diminished at every step, surrendering common sense, instinct, intuition and free thinking. We become literal, deprived of participation and insight.

from Basic McLuhan

So if percept and concept form a binary it appears that much of academic writing asks students to explain the world rather than participating in it and feeling it. There is no reason why writing could be carried out in a way that students experience both of these aspects of cognition. Writing that is purely associative, contains associative threads of connection rather than narrative or logical threads favors percept over concept. Much of Breton's writing works this way. I am thinking about Najda. In the novel Breton is saying here are all the things that happened when I was with Najda. "For some time," Breton writes, "I had stopped understanding Najda."

"I shall discuss these things without pre-established order, and according to the mood of the moment which lets whatever survives survive." from Najda

2005-10-30T10:02:00.000-08:00

2005-10-26T09:24:00.000-07:00

How can I resize this?

2005-10-26T09:16:00.000-07:00

Coming soon . . .

Cubism meets etymology

after I grade a HUGE stack of papers and read two books.

2005-10-26T09:12:00.000-07:00

Favorite quotations:

I got my first schooling about the cesspool morals of the white man from the best possible source, from his own women. And then, as I got deeper into my own life of evil, I saw the white man's morals with my own eyes. I even made my living helping to guide him to the sick things he wanted.

from The Autobiograpy of Malcolm X

2005-10-23T08:50:00.000-07:00

Rethinking Writing

Most of what we teach and what we do is wrong, out of date.
Johndan Johnson-Eilola (from Writing in New Media)

Johndan Johnson-Eilola discusses how new technologies illustrate writing as a process of making connections between ideas--and across texts. Writers give a new shape to forms that are already in use. (Neither of these ideas are new.) Johndan suggest that:

we begin thinking about writing from a slightly (but crucially) different framework: WRITING AS THE RECURSIVE, SHARED, (AND SOMETIMES ABSCONDED WITH) COORDINATION OR BUILDING OF SPACES AND FIELDS. In other words, writers are not individuals (or even groups) who produce texts, but participants within spaces who are recursively, continually, restructuring those (and other) spaces.

Food for thought (from Johndan)

(But this application, reading the "laws of writing" in terms of the laws of thermodynamics is new.)

Writing begins with the assumption of something like a second law of communicative thermodynamics: symbols are never really created or destroyed, it only changes form, relation, or becomes duplicated. That is, writing doesn't spring full formed from the brow of isolated creative geniuses, but is always the ongoing manipulation of intertextual bits.

2005-10-21T20:47:00.000-07:00

She discovered with great delight that one does not love one's children just because they are one's children but because of the friendship formed while raising them.”
— Gabriel Garcia Marquez

2005-10-21T20:04:00.000-07:00

After looking at VanGogh's work we can understand how it is that Albert Schweitzer can say that truth is a felt force in the work, a stubborn moment experienced as transcendence or emptiness (kenosis), at once deeply private and cosmically impersonal . . .

2005-10-21T19:55:00.000-07:00

We can see in his work an intense love for a world that didn't always love him in return.

VanGogh will not let us forget the peasant or his labor.

2005-10-21T19:30:00.000-07:00

Mysticism and VanGogh

I have always liked Vincent VanGogh's paintings. Reading about mysticism helps me to articulate what I experience in VanGogh's work on an intuitive level. It fascinates me that VanGogh took on simple objects as his subject and made them resonate with the aura of the eternal.

2005-10-21T19:23:00.000-07:00

Simulacra

I am getting the uncanny feeling that Jack is not real.

Could Jack be the personification of spam?

It seems that it is my karma in this world to run into men who aren't real.

2005-10-19T20:28:00.000-07:00

Feelin' Groovy

2005-10-18T20:03:00.000-07:00

Ordinary Language

Technical expressions are a danger for every system of philosophy, whether Indian or European. For they may become formulae which hinder the natural development of thought in the same way that ruts in the road hinder traffic. So to find out what are its real contents it is reasonable to test a system of thought by setting aside the expressions which it has coined for its own use and compelling it to speak in ordinary comprehensible language.

--Albert Schweitzer

2005-10-18T19:36:00.000-07:00

Truth in Literature

Let me swiftly conclude. The globe may endure its vast discontents, but a reader or teacher or writer of literature can still experience the “truth of the text.” This truth is a felt force in the work, a stubborn moment experienced as transcendence or emptiness (kenosis), at once deeply private and cosmically impersonal--perhaps akin to the moment Ivan Ilyich experiences as he falls through the trapdoor of death at the end of Tolstoy’s eponymous story. Political as it may be, existential as it often is, formal as all recognize, literature, however skeptical, continues to persuade its lovers--must it persuade its enemies too?--that this earthly ride of ours is mystery and misery and glory beyond all our human reckoning, beyond human bounds.

This, as an itinerant lecturer, I can routinely avow: literature is the site where the local and the global, the concrete and the universal imaginatively transact the enigma of the human. That is why a beautiful sentence may contain more love than a mind full of isms. That is also why Saul Bellow strikes a perennial chord, in his Nobel Lecture, with a simple, spiritual remark: “When complications increase, the desire for essentials increases too” (93). Yet I would not say that literature redeems. Nor would I say that it redeems nothing. On this, the jury has been out for three thousand years. But we can do our work.

Ihab Hassan

2005-10-18T19:33:00.000-07:00

On Postmodernism

Our world is often described as postmodern. What is that? Put aside the sophistries and sophistications of the term, now a signifier floating in a sea of hype. Still, the term, contested as it may be in sober usage, yields consensus: postmodernism is pluralist, hybrid, ironic, an aspect of developed, media-driven societies, a feature of a globalized and localized earth.

Ihab Hassan

2005-10-14T12:44:00.000-07:00

The Mystical World View

We are always in the presence of mysticism when we find a human-being looking upon the division between earthly and super-earthly, temporal and eternal, as transcended, and feeling himself, while still externally amid the earthly and temporal, to belong to the superearthly and eternal.

---Albert Schweitzer

Photo: courtesy of Jack

2005-10-13T15:24:00.000-07:00

I have been reading--or mostly just skimming--College English with increasing irritation in the last several months, and finally I just have to protest. I find the magazine dominated by name-dropping, unreadable, fashionable radical articles that I feel have little to do with the concerns of most college English teachers.
Maxine Hairston

The fact of the matter—and what I think is really annoying Maxine--is that the intellectual context of composition studies has changed over the past five or ten years as teachers, theorists, researchers, and program administrators have found useful some of the ideas and insights contained in contemporary critical theory. . . . .

John Trimbur

2005-10-12T07:52:00.000-07:00

If I am right, certain professors of education must be wrong when they say that they can put knowledge into the soul which was not there before, like sight into blind eyes.

They undoubtedly say this, he replied.

Whereas our argument shows that the power and capacity of learning exists in the soul already; and that just as the eye was unable to turn from darkness to light without the whole body, so too the instrument of knowledge can only by the movement of the whole soul be turned from the world of becoming into that of being, and learn by degrees to endure the sight of being and of the brightest and best of being, or in other words, of the good.

--Socrates, Allegory of the Cave

2005-10-11T20:11:00.000-07:00

2005-10-11T19:57:00.000-07:00

Heuristics and Writing

From Gregg Ulmer's Internet Invention
Rather than arguing for a solution (or cause or definition) of binge drinking, therefore, students/users create a testimony. The issue-oriented writing exercises are testimonial heuristics: Make an inventory of the conventional policies and proposals regarding drinking laws and drinking etiquette circulating in society in general, and in your local community, college, or school in particular. Tell a brief story or anecdote about an experience you have had at a bar or similar establishment.

2005-10-11T18:25:00.000-07:00

Signlanguage

An image is a sign. According to Charles Saunders Pierce there are three systems of meaning at work within a sign--iconic, symbolic and indexical. An icon looks like what it is. Symbolic meanings are based on convention; they have to be learned. An indexical sign connects meaning to the image on the basis of the nature of an object. Most signs signify on multiple levels.
Just because a signifier resembles that which it depicts does not necessarily make it purely iconic. The philosopher Susanne Langer argues that 'the picture is essentially a symbol, not a duplicate, of what it represents' (Langer 1951, 67). Some people might agree that the hermeuntic code is particularly alive in this picture.

2005-10-11T18:04:00.000-07:00

Narratology

Roland Barthes was a narratologist. His five codes correspond to the properties of narrative form.

The hermeneutic code refers to the unexplained elements of the narrative.
The proairetic code refers to the structuring principle of the plot that builds suspense.
The semantic code refers to the system of connotations that work within a text.
The symbolic code refers to the deeper system of logic that organizes the semantic elements.
The cultural code refers to elements in the text that refer to a science or large body of knowledge.

2005-10-11T17:54:00.000-07:00

Barthes' Codes

The Text

The text is defined as the productive progression through codes: "The five codes create a kind of network, a topos through which the entire text passes (or rather, in passing, becomes a text)" (20). In an earlier essay, "The Death of the Author" (1968, trans. in Image-Music-Text, 1977), which took its cue from an ambiguous sentence in "Sarrasine," textuality is defined as an interplay of codes that negates any origin: "Writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing" (Image 142). And the essay tantalizingly concludes with the reader's new active role: "The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author" (148).

The Codes
Central to an approach to the story is the notion of textuality understood as a weaving of codes: "text, fabric, braid: the same thing" (S/Z [trans.] 160). In this braiding of textures, Barthes distinguishes five codes--corresponding to sequences of actions or behavioral patterns (proairetic codes), to the disclosure of the truth (hermeneutic codes), to descriptions of significant features (semic codes), to quotations from scientific or cultural models (cultural codes), and to the symbolic architecture of language (symbolic codes).

2005-10-09T10:29:00.000-07:00

Kathy Acker on Language

What is language? Does anyone speak to anyone? Is language computer language, journalese, dictation of expectation and behavior, announcement of the allowed possibilities or reality? Does language control like money?

. . . All Arabs know that "stranger" equals "evil."

Logocentrism and idealism, theology, all supports of the repressive society. Property's pillars. Reason which always homogenizes and reduces, represses and unifies phenomena or actuality into what can be perceived and so controlled. The subjects, us, are now stable and socializable. Reason is always in the service of the political and economic masters. It is here that literature strikes, at the base, where the concepts and actings of order impose themselves. Literature is that which denounces and slashes apart the repressing machine at the level of the signified (12).

From Empire of the Senseless

I am thinking about these excerpts in terms of Berlin's commentary on the intersection between the postmodern and composition studies. He talks at some length about the thinking of Teresa Ebert on the connection between language and ideology.

He writes that Ebert

" regards the sign as an ideological process in which we consider a signifier in relation to a matrix of historically possible signifieds. The signifier becmes temporarily connected to a specific signified--that is, it attains 'meaning'--through social struggle in which the prevailing ideology and social contradictions insist on a particular signified" (Berlin 80).

Berlin argues that discourse analysis can show people how to resist and oppose hegemonic ideologies, much as Acker sees literature as a site of resistance.

2005-10-09T09:12:00.000-07:00

Favorite last line:

Our work is to fathom possibilities for language and living heretofore unimagined.

--James Berlin, Rhetorics, Poetics, Cultures

2005-10-09T03:50:00.000-07:00

Thinking in Berlin

. . . the triumph of the professional middle class in discourse studies has been to naturalize its own rhetorical practices, concealing ideology by denying the role of language in structuring experience. The impulse to universalize its own conception of what is "natural" in economics, politics, sociology, and psychology was thus successfully extended to signifying practices. This is why teachers can ask students to write an essay about a literary text without saying anything about the methods of reading the student is to prefer o r the production process to be followed in preparing the essay. Both text interpretation and production are effaced, made invisible, their procedures readily accessible to those of the right class, gender, and racial background, while remaining inaccessible to those whose class, gender or racial backgrounds are "wrong" (121).

from Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures

The fact that the codes of reading practice and text production are made available only to students of the "right" social background is precisely why composition instructors should make them visible to students who have not had access to this kind of information, the kind of information that can lead to success in academic and professional life.

Berlin also says that "students [ . . .] should examine the rules for evidence these rhetorics [the rhetorics of the bourgeois order] display" [. . .] This is so they can raise questions about the underlying epistemological and ideological assumptions that bias the writer's position. Berlin writes "they [students] should locate principles for discovering the available means of persuasion, principles that distinguish true from untrue knowledge, indicating what counts as real and what is ephemeral, what is good, and what is possible" (147).

But still, this approach teaches critical thinking more than it teaches students how to convey their own ideas in written discourse. What does this way of thinking do to help a student, for example, who writes something like the following on the topic of the Autobiography of Malcolm X:

In 1965 "the conch" was a popular hairstyle. After Malcolm X got one he looked in the mirror and realized that all it did was make his curly hair straight.

Here, I think the student is trying to address the criticism offered by Malcolm X about African Americans who, in 1965, were assimilating into mainstream culture by conforming to white standards. The student seems to be struggling with her ability to construct an idea in writing, period. It is possible that, at the time of writing, the writer possessed neither the precise vocabulary nor the understanding of the conventions of language that may have helped her to convey the idea in its complexity.

Writers who already have masterful vocabularies and a firm knowledge of the conventions of written discourse write insightful critiques. But what about those students who are still working to master the conventions. How and where do they get an in to the discourse?

2005-10-02T07:18:00.000-07:00

And, moreover, what about these conventions of language? Are they really the products of knowledge, of the sense of truth? Do the designations and the things coincide? Is language the adequate expression of all realities?

--Nietszche

--write quickly with no preconceived subject
Andre Breton

I wonder how writing in the field would change if Breton's suggestion were the basic instruction for both freshman and advanced composition.

drop bydrophardlypale bluediesbetweenthe claws ofgreen almondon the rosetrellis
- Pablo Picasso

2005-09-29T17:15:00.000-07:00

Complexity and Writing

Central to an approach to the story is the notion of textuality understood as a weaving of codes: "text, fabric, braid: the same thing" (S/Z [trans.] 160). In this braiding of textures, Barthes distinguishes five codes--corresponding to sequences of actions or behavioral patterns (proairetic codes), to the disclosure of the truth (hermeneutic codes), to descriptions of significant features (semic codes), to quotations from scientific or cultural models (cultural codes), and to the symbolic architecture of language (symbolic codes).The text is defined as the productive progression through codes: "The five codes create a kind of network, a topos through which the entire text passes (or rather, in passing, becomes a text)" (20).

2005-09-27T11:09:00.000-07:00

Uploading Hilary's Work.

One way to be cool with Hilary is to upload her work to your blog. I am glad I did it!

2005-09-26T23:01:00.000-07:00

"Artistic" Proof

artwork by Hilary :)

2005-09-22T16:20:00.000-07:00

Expertise in Writing

In addition to developing an understanding of the various pedagogical approaches to teaching writing, I have been thinking about the problem of assessing expertise in student writing. The specific question that comes to mind is this: what distinguishes an advanced composition course from a freshman composition course, or a basic writing course from freshman composition?

I am more concerned here with understanding how we treat writing in an advanced composition course. In "What is Advanced about Advanced Composition?" Michael Carter proposes that "the purpose of the advanced composition course is to lead students to the expertise of specialization." So the move from freshman composition to advanced composition is the move from learning general writing skills and strategies to an application of that knowledge to specific contexts. Carter writes that "whereas freshman composition is mainly concerned with more generalized discourse contexts and has as its goal the development of generalizable skills, advanced composition is mainly concerned with more specialized discourse contexts and has as its goal the specialization of general skills."

When I think back about the advanced writing courses I have taken, it wasn't apparent to me that the concept of expertise was even considered in the design of the course. Are there other theories or approaches that help writing program administrators and teachers conceptualize what distinguishes advanced courses from beginning courses?