Canned Goods

Sunday, our cat escaped thru the back door into the backporch/addition thingy that leads up to the second floor apartment and the basement laundry room. There’s a space in the slipshod construction between a wall and the flooring, so Q jumped down the dark hole. She’s been trying to investigate regions beyond her apartment for some time now. And just that morning, a neighbor’s cat had leaped over my foot as I tried to block it from running into the kitchen as K and I were bringing in the groceries, so the addition of strange cat scent had probably giving Q some inspiration to make her escape.

There was no way she was going to get back up the way she went in, and besides ripping up the flooring to get to the foundation, I didn’t see how we could get Q out. K saw that the stairs to the basement didn’t have a the backs to them (or whatever you’d call that part of stairs you don’t step on), so we stuck a flashlight in there. The first thing I saw was a old cat carcass. Either another cat had crawled under there and couldn’t find its way out or Q had entered some weird accelerated decomposition. But I finally spotted her to the side of the stairs.

After trying food and petting as lures, I figured (by calculating her actual, non-long haired size) my only option was to pull her thru the stair case. Luckily it worked, and we just had to spend a little time brushing all the cobwebs and dead things she had accumulated in her fur. Maybe I should shave her.

some one in composition and rhetoric answering an email like this? Maybe I’m committing a faux pas posting this, but I recently had a conversation with another Comp/Rhetor that seemed to believe that everyone (in the room a the time) is teaching writing with the same awareness as she (at least, that’s what I took her position to be), but I’ve heard way too many conversations between non-Rhet-Comp people like this one. Of course, this could have simply been a bad joke, but it does represent a view of student writers that I’ve often heard. And wouldn’t you know it, but soon after this message hit the list a Composition and Rhetoric person called this TA on it

Query: Has anyone else been getting weird emails with lines from _Pride and Prejudice_ in them? Over the weekend I received several emails from random email addresses with the normal spam nonsense subject titles, but containing two lines at a time, each from separate sections of _Pride and Prejudice_. Just curious if this is a virus or a kind of spam others have been receiving, or if I’m receiving Da Vinci Code style clues.

No, wait, those were my students’ first essays on Austen. Nevermind.

I haven’t blogged in a bit. The midterm time of the semester gets a little crazy, with student conferences and all. And I’m not even taking courses this semester.

So I thought I’d make a list of what I have to do today. Maybe it looks like your list. [Add: I just couldn’t get it all done, and there’s a new list for today. Hmmmmmmmmmm.]

[DONE]Revise my English 201 schedule. Some of my students are having a hard time working with Audacity–mainly it’s dealing with file formats (importing/exporting) and uploading the final projects. Anti-piracy encryption has been an issue for all the iTunes customers.

[DONE]Read/Comment on student blogs. This has been the best semester of student blogs in my experience. Letting them write about what they want is one part of the success. Another may be that these are upperclassmen in contrast to freshmen.

[kind of done]Write up a FAQ for Audacity. With all the different issues people have had. This is a necessity. I can’t check my email all day and respond to all the questions.

Finish Understanding Media. I been trying to reread this all week, and without a sustained period of reading I feel like I’ve lost everything that was in my head from the first chapters already.

Read my blog roll, comment, and write some blog posts. I’m a week behind.

[DONE: but I need to start work on these–due mid November to Dec. 1]
Go thru the CFPs that are piling up. I really need to get moving on some proposals.

[DONE]Revise my tentative prelims list and try to break it down into these categories: Literacy, Pedagogy, Rhetoric and Theory. Then talk to each of our faculty.

Get to work on planning dissertation classroom research. My alma mater, Northern Michigan University has a great Art and Design department, and I’m thinking about working with the Digital Cinema and Electronic Imaging programs. UW-Madison doesn’t have either of these. I’ll need to move to Marquette this summer and get an adjunct position to pay the rent. And my amazing MA thesis advisor, Kia Jane Richmond, is there. It’s always good to have someone who is sooooooooo motivating around to get you going on a dissertation.

[Done] Order all those free Professional Development Resources from Bedford/St.Marin. For example, Cushman, et al.’s Literacy is a Core List item and $48. Note: Why won’t B/STM allow me to change my institution. Will I have to register will a new email address every time I order texts so my order doesn’t go to my very first institution. Tech support’s answer: YES!

[Done]Get quarters for laundry.

[Done]Make shopping list for Sunday morning.

[Done]Set up my fantasy football team for Sunday.

[Done]Patch rear bike tube on Super LaTour 12.2 and clean up transmission, again.

[Done]Lube up Giant Yukon transmission.

[Done]Make the switch from Outlook to Thunderbird. It’s free. It’s aesthetically pleasing. It has a built-in RSS feed reader!!! It doesn’t work with web-based email (hotmail).

[Done]Install and set up Sunbird. Mozilla’s calendar. It’s free. It’s aesthetically pleasing. It also allows me to ditch Outlook.

[Done]Read/comment on 201 discussion board. I’ve been really impressed with the smart comments my students have been making

[Done]Update the grading spreadsheet.

Remediation: (Richard Grusin and Jay Bolter) “the cycling of different [media] through one another” (5)
Medial Ecology: THe complex relationships involved in remediation.
Textimage: WJT Mitchell in Iconology—”Tis printcentric view fails to account for all the other signifying components of electronic texts . . .” (20).
Simulcrum: originally meaning a material object representing something
Technotexts (Hayles): “Literary works that strengthen, foreground, and thematize the connections between themselves as material artifacts and the imaginative realm of verbal/semiotic signifiers they instantiate open a window on the larger connections that unite literature as a verbal art to its material forms” (25).
Cybertext (Espen Aarseth): “a wide variety of texts that [use] combinational strategies, including print works . . . electronic fictions . . . [and] computer games . . .” (27).
“Ergodic” texts (aarseth): “those literary systems that require ‘nontrivial effort’ to allow the user to traverse them” (e.g. computer games) (28).
Media-specific analysis (Hayles): “a way . . . to think more broadly about the connections between strands of criticism that have not yet made common cause with one another” (29) by “holding one term constant across media . . . and varying the media to explore how medium-specific possibilities and constraints shape texts. MSA insists that texts must always be embodied to exist in the world. The materiality of those [embodiments] interacts dynamically with linguistic, rheotical, and literary practices to create effects we call literature” (31).
Materiality(Hayles): “The physical attributes constituting any artifact are potentially infinite . . . . From this infinite array a technotext will select a few to foreground and work into its thematic concerns. Materiality thus emerges from interactions between physical properties and a work’s artistic strategies [and] depends on how the work mobilizes its resources as a physical artifcat as well as the user’s interactions with the work and the interpretive strategies she develops—strategies that include physical manipulations and as well as conceptual frameworks” (33).
Proprioception (75): the reception of stimuli produced within the organism.
Cyborganization(49): “transforming human subjects into hybrid identities that cannot be thought without the digital inscription apparatus that produces them.”

–”In their general form, computers are simulation machines producing environments, from objects that sit on desktops to networks spanning the globe. To construct an environment is, of course, to anticipate and structure the user’s interaction with it and in this sense to construct the user as well as the interface” (48).

–”simulation does not necessarily mean that the processes running in a computer are artificial. The processes can be ‘natural’ as anything in the real world; they are artificial only in the sensethat they run in an artificial medium” (48). “To the extent the user enters the imaginative world of this environment and is structured by her interaction in it, she also becomes a simulation, an informational pattern circulating through the global network that counts as the computational version of human community” (49).

–”If books are seen only as immaterial verbal constructs, the rich potential of this interplay [Mindbody interactions with text] is lost. Literary critics have lon accepted that form is content and content is form. Now Kaye [Hayles] wanted to shout, ‘Materiality is content, and content is materiality!’” (75).

So I’m thinking about my first prelims essay using the core list for the most part, with some of my own in there too. My reasoning is seeing both essay as moving toward my dissertation, so the second essay will continue from the first essay but become more focused on my interests.

As requested by a few people, here it is—my reading list (just twice as long as it needs to be):

1. Virilio: The Aesthetics of Disappearance (Semiotext(e) / Double Agents)
2. Lost Dimension
3. Speed and Politics
4. The Vision Machine

5. Jean Baudrillard: Simulacra and Simulation (The Body, In Theory: Histories of
Cultural Materialism)

6. Lev Manovich: The Language of New Media

7. Brandt: Literacy in American Lives
8. Literacy As Involvement: The Acts of Writers, Readers, and Texts
9. “Accumulating Literacy: Writing and Learning to Write in the Twentieth
Century,” College English, 57(6), p. 649-668.

10. Smit: the End of Composition Studies

11. Bourdieu: The Logic of Practice

12. Plantinga: Rhetoric and Representation in Nonfiction Film

13. Wysocki, et al.: Writing New Media

14. Hayles: Writing Machines

15. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and
Informatic

16. Graeme Turner: Film as Social Practice

17. Chatman: Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film

18. Eisentein: Film Form

19. McLuhan: Understanding Media
20. the Medium is the Massage
21. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man

22. Selber: Multiliteracies for a Digital Age

23. Turkle: Life on the Screen

24. Castronova: Synthetic Worlds

25. Hawisher/Selfe: Passion, Pedagogies, and 21st Century Technologies

26. Haraway: Simians, Cyborgs, and Women

27. Mattelart & Mattelart: Rethinking media Theory

28. Sirc: English Composition as a Happening

29. Blair: “The possibility and actuality of visual arguments.” Argumentation and
Advocacy. Summer 1996 33(1) 23: 1996.

30. Kinross, Robin. “The Rhetoric of Neutrality.” Design Issues, Vol. 2, No. 2.
(Autumn, 1985), pp. 18-30.

31. Cynthia L. Selfe’s (Ed.) Multimodal Composition: Resources for Teachers.
Hampton Press.

32. Yancey, Kathleen Blake. “Composition in a New Key.”

33. Iser, Wolfgang. “Interaction between Text and Reader.” Book History Reader.
Eds. David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery, London: Routledge, 2002.
34. The Implied Reader

35. Kress, Gunther & Theo van Leeuwen. Reading Images: The Grammar Visual
Design. London: Routledge, 1996.
36. Kress, G. Before writing: Rethinking the paths to literacy. London: Routledge.
37. Literacy in the New Media Age (Literacies)

38. Lanham, Richard A. “What’s Next for Text?

39. Daly, Elizabeth (2003) “Expanding the Concept of Literacy,” EDUCAUSE
Review, p. 33-40.

40. Trayner, Beverly. Multiliteracies: A Theoretical Overview

41. The New London Group. A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social
Futures

42. Westbrook, Steve. “Visual Rhetoric in a Culture of Fear: Impediments to
Multimedia Production.” College English. May 2006 68(5) 457, 2006.

43. Jenkins, Henry: Convergence Culture
44. Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Media Consumers in a Digital Age

45. Deemer, English Composition as a Happening

46. Lutz, Making Freshman English a Happening

47. Macrorie, Blow that Horn, Man
48. Words in the way
49. The Movies Don’t Move

50. Perl, Writing True

51. Alexander García Düttmann, The ABC of visual culture, or a new decadence of
illiteracy

52. Rifkin: Waiting and Seeing
53. From Structure to Enigma and back perhaps

54. Mitchell: Showing Seeing a critique of visual culture
55. WJT Mitchell, Picture Theory

56. Fish, Doing what comes Naturally

57. Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art” (in Poetry, Language, Thought)

58. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

59. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

60. Worsham, “The Question Concerning Invention: Hermeneutics and the Genesis of
Writing” (in Pre/Text 8 [1987]: 197-244)
61. Dyson, Anne Haas. Writing Superheroes. New York: Teachers College Press,
1997.

62. Gonzalez, Norma and Luis Moll. “Funds of Knowledge for Teaching in Latino
Households.” Urban Education, 29 (19950: 443-470.

63. Applebee, Curriculum as conversation

64. Dewey: Democracy and education
65. The child and the curriculum

66. Burke, K. (1945). A Grammar of Motives. U of California P.

67. Chandler, D. (2001). Semiotics: The basics. Routledge.

68. Jakobson, R. (1985). Verbal art, verbal sign, verbal time. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press.

69. Jameson, F. (1972). The prison-house of language: A critical account of structuralism. Princeton: University Press.

70. Derrida, J. (1976). Of grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

71. Kristeva, J. (1980). Desire in language: A semiotic approach to literature and art. New York: Columbia University Press.

72. Wertsch, J. V. (1991). Voices of the mind: A sociocultural approach to mediated action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,1991.

73. Schmandt-Besserat, D. (1997). How writing came about. Austin: University of Texas Press.

74. Witte, S. P. (1992). Context, text, intertext: Toward a constructivist semiotic of writing. Written Communication, 9, 237-308.

75. Bolter, Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print, Second Edition

76. Landow, Hypertext 3.0: Critical Theory and New Media in an Era of Globalization (Parallax: Re-visions of Culture and Society)

77. Lankshear: New Literacies

78. Gee: Situated Language and Learning
79. What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy

80. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (1994)

81. Barthes, From Work to Text

82. Jeff Rice, “1963 Comp Revolution” &
83. “Networks and New Media”

84. Shaviro, Connected

85. Carolyn Miller, “Writing in a Culture of Simulation.” Towards a Rhetoric of Everyday Life.

So I just started using a feedreader last week (GoogleReader). Why did it take you so long? you might ask. Everybody’s doing it. Simply, I finally needed to. And I . . . I can’t say love it, but I do feel a strong, non-amorous affection for it. And the roll is getting longer because there are a lot of people writing about interesting stuff out there (where exactly is this, anyway?). If only I could get my own feed to work.

Here’s one of my final messages regarding this in the Blogsome support forum:

I was able to fix the “&” in the title error, but the others are errors within the theme itself, and I don’t know how to edit them.

I have 10 errors right now, with my current theme. And when I switched themes I went down to 4. I swithced back to my original theme; there were 10 again.

Heck, I’ve tried 5 different themes and the number of errors range from 4-14.

Maybe the problem is still something I’ve done, but the validation results seem to point to coding errors in the themes.

Again, I’m not totally certain this is a problem with the themes, although the errors in the code seem to be somewhere not visible in the files Blogsome gives us access to. But if it is the themes that are the problem . . . . DOESN”T ANYONE TEST THESE THINGS BEFORE POSTING THEM?

So, I’ve been looking into using Drupal or Movable, but from what I understand, I’ll need a server or a web host. Any suggestions?

NOTE: As with all these summary-posts, any readings/interpretations/interrogations of these texts (and suggestions for other readings) are welcomed! Me? I’m just note-taking.

From Doug Hesse’s Foreword:
—”is the nature of writing such that the course in composition can be justified at all?” (ix).
—he outlines competing aims for composition (all in Berlin’s Rhetoric and Reality; see previous post on that)
—summarizes the argument to abolish the required composition course (example used, Sharon Crowley): (1) it’s unethical to support an exploitave labor situation; (2) “acting as if the course can teach academic discourse defies current theory and research; and (3) all the time spent on the courses takes time and energy away from “the broader possibilities of writing pedagogy and scholarship” (xi). Counterargument: the course can still do good for students “as a space that has democratizing potential.”
—Hesse’s major concern: that the field will become one focused on the “management of teaching.”
—2 prospects for the field: (1) Writing: “focusing . . . on students as writers learning to write for extra-disciplinary, extra-academic situations, in genres practiced there . . . [and] civic rhetoric” (xi-xii). (2)Composition: “As digital technologies mix word, image, sound, and “the visual” becomes an important counterpart/constituent of “the verbal,” composition has an invitiation to transform itself in a fashion that would gain status along with currency” (xii).

Smit’s Introduction:

What is Writing: (1) “Some scholars . . . conceive writing as a body of knowledge and a fairly narrow set of skills that people use to communicate with one another”; (2) “Other scholars think of writing as a form of personal liberation”; (3) “Still other scholars think writing as part of a larger set of social or cultural practice”; (4) “there are scholars who think of writing as a way of participating in a civic culture, local, national, or even world culture, as part of a literate citizenry . . .” (1-2).

—The field “has lost touch with its primary reason for being–the teaching of writing” and it needs to go back to these concerns: “What is writing?” How is writing learned? Can writing be taught, and if so, in what sense? And if writing can be taught, how should it be taught?” (2). However, the field need “viable alternatives to current concepts . . . we do not even know how to think about the nature of writing differently than we do now.”
—”the recommended pedagogical techniques for doing so [the teaching of writing/exposition] were articulated in the first year of the organization’s existence [CCC], if they were not broadly accepted in practice: an emphasis on student writing, the discussion of students’ work in class, and teacher-student conferences” (5). Yet, it’s professionalization that is counted as one of the field’s major accomplishments, one other being “the promotion of a particular approach to writing instruction that was not current at the beginning of CCCC”–the process approach, both of which Smit says are being called into question (for example, professionalization by Bartholomae; and the process approach by Crowley and Joseph Harris: the process model often reifies current traditional rheotric (”a new sort of formalism” (Harris))–”Even Lad Tobin . . . admits . . . its proponents have oversimiplified both the premises and the pedagogies associated with the writing process” (8).

—”A number of fields and disciplines . . . have reached a remarkable consensus about how language works . . . the fundamental assumption that the way we understand one another through language is primarily interpretive, a matter of hermeneutics; that understanding is based on a kind of socially influenced psycholinguistic guessing game . . . [and] we often end up meaning what our language allows us” (9). —The importance of context in the “social turn” of the 90s.

The key tenets:
1. Human beings learn language by actively constructing their own individual mental representation of the world. As a result, instruction in writing will always be constrained by the background and experience, the interest and motivation, that novice writers bring to the classroom.
2. Human beings learn language primarily by acquisition, by subconscious internalizing what they hear and read they do not learn language primarily through formal instruction. As a result, formal instruction will never be able to supply most of what novice writers need to know in order to write well, and the content of writing classes will always be problematic.
3. Language is always a system of tokens on which human beings project their own meanings; meaning does not “inhere” in language; hence, the meaning or value of any piece of writing will be subject to a range of interpretations, depending on what readers bring from their own knowledge and experience to their understanding of the writing.
4. Language users rely on context a great deal in order to interpret the tokens of the language system; hence, the meaning or value of any piece of writing will be constrained by the social context in which it is read and the immediate circumstances and concerns of its readers.

According to Smits, “the field of composition studies has only tentatively begun to take the implications of these tenets seriously” (10), and what the field does know about writing “suggests some broad principles that the field has yet to act on“:
1. For writing instruction to be effective, students already need to know and be able to do most of what they are supposed to learn in writing classes.
2. Writing teachers get only what they teach for, which is only a very small part of what novice writers have to know and be able to do.
3. The primary benefits of formal instruction for novice writers are “tips” from those who already know how to do what the novice writers want to learn how to do.
4. The best way to promote a broad-based ability to write is to arrange for novice writers to learn the genres of the discourse communities they wish to join as they become members of that community.

As a result, Smit calls for moving the responsibilty of the teaching of writing to all the disciplines–”we must put an ‘end’ to the hegemony of writing instruction by composition studies as a field” and an “‘end’ to composition studies as a distinctive discipline” by “training scholars . . . to live in two worlds of discourse: one world of composition theory and padagogy and another world of the discourse practices of particular communities” (12-13).

So, I haven’t been able to get my RSS feeds to work, ever, and I need to fix this. The problem, as far as I can figure, is that the xhtml is invalid, meaning that there are errors in the code. Click the “Valid XHTML” link on the lower right of the navbar to see what I’m getting.

The second problem is that I have no idea how to fix the errors because I don’t know how to access the xhtml file. I can edit coding in the index.html, stylesheet, comments, and posts, but there’s no option for xhtml.

The third problem is that I haven’t received any assistance in the blogsome support forums, yet.

If you know how to fix what’s ailing my blog, I’d greatly appreciate it.

So a couple weeks ago, while walking with K. I stopped by Vinnie’s Bike Sale. We were looking for a bike with brakes, gears, an character for K. to ride, since Madison’s hill(s), the one up to Capitol Square (where K. works) is unfriendly to her Schwinn. While we didn’t find something for her, I spied exactly what I had been looking for myself—a bike without the weight and heavy treads of my Giant Yukon mountain bike: a circa 1977, Schwinn Super Le Tour 12.2.

I figure that during the roughly six months of the year I can ride this bike to campus, I’ll save about 14 hours on my commuting time. Sure, that may only be a couple days worth of work, but then I figure I can use the time to put a conference paper or two together. Besides, I feel like a “cutter.”

One thing that interests me in reader the blogs of people in-and-around composition and rhetoric is the immediate access to ideas-in-the-now. I can’t make it to every conference, and reading for prelims requires a reading of past bothers me in that with all this reading I don’t really know the context of the creation of these texts, but I’m reading for use-value in the present, so interaction with these now-ideas energizes me – when I have time to read blogs (And I need to make more time it. Is there a machine that makes time?)

What seems to work on the blogs I like to read is what appears to be a pure intentionality that draws others to comment on their blogs. Sure, the blogs can be crafted to engage participation, but that’s the intention and something those new to blogging can think about – yeah, I’m talking to my students.

If your blog isn’t getting comments, it may not be getting read by others yet; that can happen when you’re a new blogger. But you also got to look at the blogs you’re writing.

Is there space for engagement, interactivity?