Collage

      Patricia Somebody, who came to speak as part of the interview process for NEU's hiring of a new director of the writing programs, spoke about teaching and evaluating "experimental" student writing. She kept refering to the "collage," of which Susan Griffin's "Our Secret" essay is an example. Collages are meant to break down genre lines, to make us question what genres do, even as information is presented and art is made within the text. Somehow, however, this "anti-generic form" has become a genre.

Where's your messiah wound?
"Never seen a blue sky
Yeah I can feel it reaching out
And moving closer."

      This should not surprise "us." It doesn't. Instead it just annoys us. Now I'm reading for my Rhetoric As Cultural Studies class, and the issue of genre comes up again, and by "issue" I am refering to the Problem of Generic Definitions.

When they are running through the forest, she clings to his back and sighs.
"Things are turning deeper shades of blue."

      In this essay, Carol Blair--a visual/material rhetorician--describes what she does as a critic, and why it's important. She makes it feel so simple: She wants to "understand my own response" (Blair, "Public Memorializing in Postmodernity"). She even lays out clearly what makes a good rhetorical criticism: "a clear theoretical base and/or generalized implications for rhetorical theory or criticism" . (Blair, "Memorializing" 345). This was something I knew implicitly, but had never been able to articulate before: Why study it? Because it makes us feel something we don't understand. Why write about it? Because the object's full impact is not explicit, and we want others to know what the hell is going on. What is the larger purpose of studying a single ("particular") event? To fine tune theories that help us figure out what is happening in the real world, so that we can avoid misunderstandings that lead to griefs. Because we're all inscribed in/by language, and language is not utopian in nature.

Slipped, clung, iron reaver soul stealer on the heel of my hand, red faced when imagining the binding coming loose.

      Blair talks about all the memorials that have been created recently. She talks about the Kent State Memorial. I don't remember it, although I know I walked around it every day while at "Journalism Camp." I know I ate lunch on it one day, thinking of how war was bad, but not knowing, then, how bad. It was made of stone, but few memorials aren't. I remember framing it as an issue of the First Amendment, which I knew better than I knew the Ten Commandments. I remember it as being the first time I really understood punk music and the whys of the anarchists--that things go very wrong as a result of ideologies some times. Back then, I didn't know the word ideology. Now that I do...what? I am a better person? I have certainly signed more petitions, spoken with more (other?) knowledgeable people about social resistance. But I think I was more in touch (no pun intended) with the memorial when I sat on it or walked around it, bleary eyed. It was solid. It was in my way. It needed explaination. It was a presence meant to represent an absence in memory, but I had no memory to invoke. Memorials "answer needs" says this other critic, Morris. There are "energies" that need to be "marshaled."

Rust in the bathtub
Milk in my coffee cup overflowing
Needs are turning leaves in autumn
on the flickering, pall side
that fall upside down
brown or red once in the mud.