Fun with Teaching Week 3

A blog on teaching, learning, and tech writing. And Kenneth Burke by proxy.

          Time is of the essence. "The essence" is a phrase that is much abhored by pragmatists like Kenneth Burke because we don't really know what "essence" is, and never will.
          I'm starting to think that I will never know how to teach the essence of technical writing.
          I'm great with tutoring, writing lab, style teaching when it comes to instructing students on how to write things like proposals and resumes and scholarship essays--you know, writings that are primarily defined by their social impact, writings that are means to an end outside of communication. (Yes, I know Carolyn Miller says that ALL genres are evidence of social action outside mere comunication. But the "point" of literature is rarely seen as "moving an audience toward incipient act," as Burke would name it. Literature is pretty.)
          How does one teach what one loathes to do? Tech writing makes me itch uncomfortably because it is too transparent in its aims. "This is a proposal. I am proposing. I am moving my audience."
Alas, I may well weep with sighs deep
....and also my writing is full unready
How shall I do now for to excuse me?("Everyman")
Of course, Everyman was writing a different kind of proposal, a confession. I confess I don't know what to say about style. I confess I've largely made this an issue of plain old transparent rhetoric.
          Even if a proposal does what it is supposed to (propose a project by garnering interest in a party who has the means to make the project happen), it may not be pretty. It may not be subtle or clever or a good read. It may not make me put "hmm" in the margins. Even if all the threads are there, all the good points, and some interesting thinking, it could be a bad read. My "rhetoric of identification" fails quickly when it comes to talking about the rhetoric of tech writing. Burke is hard to fit in here.
          The classes themselves are fine. The students are getting used to me, which is good. I have addicted several of them to coffee, which is good because at least they're awake.
          The time goes by quickly, it is always of essence. Yet I cannot push them as quickly as I would like. When I see learning happening, I am not going to be a disruption.
          Today I began "organization" by cutting out paragraphs and making them rearrange them. As per usual, the students were upset when they realized I wasn't going to tell them whether they got the order "right." "Right" was not the point. How are we going to use this later? I always try to emphasize that "use" does not mean that they will be graded on it. Unlike high school, not all projects are given little percentages of the final. Some projects are for learning's sake only. Most students realize that this is actually in their favor. Some, however, get angry and tell me my assignments are "useless" on the course evaluation sheet. A means to an end? Are we so teleological?
          I try to be transparent. I try to tell them why we are doing certain activities. Some days I ask them to tell me why I've made the assignment: "What am I thinking here? Why did I choose these questions for you?" By making my teaching practice part of the discussion, they realize the web of authority around them. I can't remove my authority, but I can make my choices explicit.
Such a damn Foucauldian sometimes. I wish I could be a grammar nazi. It'd be easier.
          As I walked around, I saw good conversation happening. Before I even asked them to consider it, they were asking "Why do you think that's a conclusion? It looks like a body paragraph to me because..." When I asked them to write their justification down, they had trouble, though...they couldn't see that I was asking them to write down exactly the things they were saying. Instead they tried to make definitions. "A conclusion is________." That's not quite what I was going for, but a good practice time, nonetheless.
          The SRAs were due today. I'm going to mark them this weekend. I think I'll take a page from Northeastern's grading recommendations for once, and write a few individual comments on the papers themselves, then type up a set of "whole class comments" about style, grammar, etc. What I see good, patterns of "error" I see. It's not error; it's just a different set of conventions for a different discourse group. The theory echoes in my head every time my language subsumes my beliefs. I still try to call them errors, even though my subconscious doesn't really believe in mistakes.
          Where does the time go? I was barely handing them the fragmented essays before it was time for them to go. Where are those long pauses that used to happen?
          Mom asked "Is it because Purdue is easier?" A good question. Is this approach "easier" than Ways of Reading? It does not demand the academic rigor, the theoretical musings. But I am Essentially teaching the same thing: the how of communication. I will still speak of grammar as "ethos." I will still ask them to find points of "identification" in the essays (now ethnographies) they read. How is s/he trying to move you? What is s/he moving you toward?
          I know I should be more explicit with my use of rhetoric. I should tell them that this course is all about identification, ethos, etc. Instead, I've defined the terms and am using them frequently. It's not really modeling though. I should do that better.
          And I know my faults during class time: I forget student names, I sometimes gravitate more toward the extroverts, I don't always call on the quiet ones who are too afriad to talk on their own. I know, I know, I know. But I also know my own learning process. Once I identify a lack in my abilities, it is only a matter of time before that skill suddenly comes to me, overnight, when I'm not looking. Like how lesson planning has suddenly become very obvious of late; I know somehow what activity fits best with what. Like how I learned to ride my bike only after shutting myself up in the basement with it, exiling my parents to the upstairs; one day down there, I could just suddenly ride.
Like how Burke made my whole jumbled honors project arrange itself as a question not of Marxist literature, but of "literature as equipment for living;" how my own assumptions and major premises became explicit in one reading of the Rhetoric.
          Patience in waiting for my brain/body/soul whatever (no more corporeal divisions, Plato) to decide that NOW is the time for Amylea to understand things is the difficult part. Patience, as we said in elementary school, is a virtue, not a chicken.
          So one day, I will do so much better in domain C, or whatever domain it was that was concerned with my ability to manage the classroom in an egalitarian manner befitting all my students' levels of ability. And I won't even know I'm doing anything different until someone shows me what I've done.
          It's a lot more fun that way.

Counter-Statement statements (part 1)

In no particular order (that would be a valuation I am not ready for)
1. In "The Status of Art" Burke returns to his friends from the first chapter, specifically all those L'art pour l'art dudes. He traces some ideas about utilitarianism in art, and those who would defend the lack of utility by claiming art is a-moral, that is, outside the sphere of moral (and therefore consequential). Art for them is beauty. Beauty, apparently has no use. But isn't this why I started reading Burke in the first place? Because I was trying to figure out why I loved reading dystopias, only to find myself coming to purpose statements? And Burke said it was okay to read literature as purposeful, not just beautiful. That artful words do in fact have social consequences.
2. Eliot, qtd in Burke: "We fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that anything will triumph." Isn't this what dystopias do? They fight to preserve the current state, not for us to go overthrow the government of today. Keep alive the "freedoms" as they are, and we do not have anything that must be triumphed over?
3. The symbolists are always appearing in my classes, and I still don't know them like I should; unlike the way 11 dimensions are coiled up in quantum mechanics, I cannot explain them in my own language. The emphasis is on the image and the succession of images, but we are still in language, not visual rhetoric, so the images themselves must be described in a logical, noneliptical manner. The symbolists seem to have something to do with consubstantiality, with identification, as I asserted in my paper on Elizabeth Bishop, but I am still uncertain how Burke would read such progressions across images as rhetoric. ????????
4. The Mass Audience: "Mass market paperback" is a term that has tugged at my consciousness because the connotations attached to it bespeak of bourgeois identity issues. Burke outlines how mass literacy has led to pockets of "real" readers (those interested in "art for art's sake") but that texts have a mass audience. We should not separate them based on the old L'art pour l'art, an idea created for the utilitarianism of the previous century. There may seem to be an elite readership, but we must acknoledge that even non-savvy readers are acquiring the text, and may not even desire to engage in the reading that they are sometimes forced to do.
5. Literature as enthymetical argument? Burke compares a book's argument and need fulfillment properties to that of a politician's proposal for change. A book does not have to reveal the root of the problem; the premise can be left unstated, almost intuitive. A politician must, however, make explicit his desires and appeals for the best results. A book can fulfill our need for nature without pointing to our current dissatisfaction. A politician cannot propose a beutifying plan without pointing to the squallor of the city. Does that make literature more subversively suasatory because it is missing one premise that we all are already in identification with? (Random question without answers?)

That's not My Kenny

Reading CounterStatement
by the light of the laptop
by the glow of the Chemistry building
was not particularly Enlightening

Who is this man
who can yet speak of essences?
Who presents even criticism
without a hint of what's to come?

Tell me, Kenny,
please pun on the word "novel"
or tell me that the arguments
share the same lava flow.

This presentation belies you;
your certainty me fait peur,
and only your assumptions of my readership
let me know it's you

Inside the text
peeking out to reframe the white margins
There you are, on page 16, defining simple words
I thought I knew: Pure and art

And PreRaphaelite dreams
"Art was 'justified' because art
was an appetite--in being desired,
it found its reason for existence."

And, "inevitably" this all ends up
in the Church and Sex
"A people more direct in its religion
would divide and subdivide its divinities"

The immutable is important because
it adds to our lexicon of Flux
Countering, changing, adding, synthesis,
antithesis; it's the Other that show us Us

What is aesthetic?
I know what it is, but does he?
there's spirit and material
l'art pour l'art--sublime beauty or something

Lots of Ofs to link two words
Rhetoric of Motives, Aesthetic of Symbolism
the Name of Decadence.
The futility of the human race as a Whole.

If anything, our art should be like water
the arguments sliding over each other sensually
replacing each other like one ice skate
after the other to trace a figure 8.

An author ...must preform his transgressions
on paper (two divergent legs molten at the core
must cross and be relieved of control
or we all fall down)

Fun with Teaching and Technology

          Last year I thought about begging for use of the computer room at NEU to teach my composition class from. I was jealous of all the 302 TAs who got to teach there twice a month.
          Then, they hand me lab time once a week and I panic?
          Well, not panic. Panic is reserved for tests and defenses. I'd use "confusion," but that feels overused in my lexicon. I was Uncertain.
          Unlike what the Duffelmeyer reading for tomorrow, however, it wasn't because I was afraid of giving up the traditional classroom and the authority in it. Please, please, take away my authority. (This might have something to do with my undergraduate education at a Mennonite school, where everything was about mutual respect and making explicit forms of authority and ideology built into our systems). I don't want to control them. Please don't call me Ms Clemons. Please don't think I have this all put together.
          In fact, the only TA in Duffelmeyer's essay I could relate to was the one who felt that she or he had to be at least as good at computers as his/her students. This, I think, is built into my own perfectionist personality, especially when it comes to science. Just because I didn't study it formally doesn't mean I can't talk about theoretical physics. I don't know what it means to NOT own a computer. I think better with a keyboard at my fingers. I can't compose with a pen and paper, except poems.
          In other words, I love Mr. Computer. And it seems ridiculous that, as attached as Tek (the name of my computer: Short for, of course, Technology, but spelled like Boston catcher and team Captain Jason Varitek writes his nickname) is to my lap and palms, I would be unable to figure out his friends in the labs. Or that some of his words and applications are beyond me, but not those younger than me. I've had extra years with him! I remember a time BEFORE Frontpage! Before Instant Messenger, when, to chat, one used mIRC and had to know how to locate nearby servers, "ping" people to determine "lag", and write cool scripts so that when someone said "bye" a picture of a waving frog came up in ASCII. But I can't link a network connection?!
          Hell, I remember when network connections were only accessable through DOS, and there were backslashes and "dir"s and all that fun stuff that my kids don't understand, but I do. But networking now is scary because there are so many more options, so many more dirs.
          I remember when one of my darling classmates hacked into our high school network to change his grades, making the stupid mistake of printing out the port information (so he could erase his footprints) from the library computer, and leaving the sheets in the machine.
          So of course I want to be better than my students. And I was relieved today when I had to show the students how to use a pdf file I'm not old yet.
          And when I had to explain how to attach files, I was excited because I had a teachable moment, and tried to show how this knowledge will be useful later.
          I'm sure some of the students were wondering why we did the exercise in the computer lab, a waste of technology time but it some of them looked more relaxed in that environment. And, despite my fears, they did talk to each other, I think because they could always look at the screens instead of each other. Some may find this detrimental. I say, "baby steps."

Blogging Burke--scattered Essay of Doom Theory

It had to happen Sometime, so it might as well be Now: Reading All of Burke.
Yes, it is daunting, which is probably why we aren't doing it. Not all, that is. But most.
The thing about Burke is that he and I write and think alike, "strangely" recursive, reflexive, revising without erasing. Each concept reappearing in each book in a different form, a kaleidescope of the idea. It makes more sense to read Burke conceptually, not chronologically.
That, however, is difficult to do unless you already have read Burke chronologically. Which is why tonight I'm starting in on the First, Counter-Statement a title which reveals very little.
To help I have none other than Professor Dave Blakesley's book called "Elements of Dramatism." That title reveals very little; one might think it is simply an overview of Burke's Dramatism. But Blakesly recognizes (of course!) that in order to understand the system Burke finally ended up with (or, simply ended with due to old age?) requires knowing the steps Burke took to arrive at that hexad/pentad.
Every time I read "pentadic" I think it says "pedantic"
Reading "Elements" on the bus today, I realized some things.
When Burke talks about "imaginative works" as providing ways for writers to answer Big Life Questions that arise from the writer's (creator's?)current situation, he is talking about the representative anecdote (almost) described in the Grammar. The two ideas are inexorably linked: The representative anecdote is the result of the writings that are done in order to symbolically react to a situation. The situation is defined by the writer (the writer gets to frame it according to his/her past interpreations of OTHER representative anecdotes s/he's read) so as to provide an interpretation for other readers in similar situations. That interpretation is the representative anecdote, the "equipment for living" that literature provides.
Subjectivity, then, is not only the author's own self, but the interpretations that help him or her create new interpretations. At this point, if you're still reading my blog, you must know some Burke. Who gives a damn? Indeed.
Why worry about interpretations borne of interpretations? What the hell does that have to do with ANYTHING in the corpus of Amylea-dom?
I've been working this "Essay of Doom" for a few months now, getting down thoughts, noting theories or criticism that may come in handy, etc. You may notice I have uncharacteristically avoided Burke. Instead, I've been recursively revisiting the same ideas through different frameworks, hoping to arrive at the answer to "Why is Fan Fiction so alluring?"
Perhaps I was not using the right word? "Alluring" is close. Others I've used: Attractive, interesting (ew!), engaging, popular, involved...I'm sure there are others. That's not the point. I was missing one, one which triggers giant neon signs and fake animated idea light bulbs over the heads of lit crit people:
Desire
Why is it desirable? Desire, as the Freudian mechanism (eros, blah blah, need fulfillment, blah blah), desire as the Derridian deferral of (of WHAT?) pleasure (or meaning), desire as the trace where we almost get to the meaning, we want pure communication of angels, we are so close to being linked, but...
we are denied. The desire multiplies from this denial/deferal. We want more.
Blakesly interprets Burke's "syllogistic progression/form" via examples of arguments we're used to, namely, mystery novels and academic thesis on top essays. In these forms, we are given several pieces of "prior knowledge" to consider (oooh, I'm working in Ed Psych stuff!) which make us desire some end to all these proofs. "Where are you going with this?" we ask our composition students. "How does X lead to Y?" We desire to reach that end, the completion of the argument, and consent consubstantiality with the writer in order to achieve that end, to be "gratified by the sequence." It's a familiar form, we know how (or at least that it ends. We join the author in following the clues to generate conclusions.
This is lovely, and I would have missed the real loveliness of it had Blakesly not given his last example: "Television soap operas rely on such a form [Syllogistic], but in their case, the progression is unresolved; they must keep going and going (and therein is their lure)" (57). The defered desire that both Derrida and Freud note as a key to human action comes from the form (can I say "genre" in this case?).
Let me take this to my own interests before I begin waxing tangental on the problematics of genre and Burke. Mother often tells me that anime is no different from soap operas. I want to scoff, but know better; both are serial and seemingly unending. While most soap operas have yet to end, animes do. Manga do. And that's a big problem for all of us desire defering people.
Most of the popular anime in America, in fact, are already over in Japan. A big exception was, until recently, Inuyasha, and in that case, the manga continues. Because manga are more difficult for most of the US (those not living in cities, that is) to acquire, anime is the medium most popular for these serials. Anime is more difficult to continue, though, due to budget restrictions and TV ratings, and tend to end after a few seasons while the manga may or may not continue on afterward (an additional 100 chapters of Inuyasha have already been written past the "end" of the anime).
What do we do when we are given a conclusion? Particularly one that is not at all satisfying? Inuyasha ends with much of the plot unresolved, sexual tension still not released, and the bad guy still alive. If we wish to make Inuyasha a representative anecdote, to let it give us instructions for living, then our lives seem very bleak indeed--we are stuck in limbo with Inuyasha and the gang, unable to move beyond episode 167.
Fanfiction seems to do several things in light of this small section of Burkean prose, depending on the genre of the fic. One, the "continuation" fics (Media Miner genre label) allows us to move beyond the "end" of the series, or, in many cases, imagine that end. Two, as "interpretations of interpreations" that will help readers with their own interpretations, fanfics help writers symbolically mediate those confusing things in life, and work out--in fiction, symbollically--possible answers. Writers who make characters that seem particularly OOC are usually using the fic to answer questions via role playing: What if Inuyasha started feeling attracted to males? What if Kagome decided to stop being so forgiving? What if they weren't in Japan, but the US? These questions lead to some of the more improbable fan fics, but at the same time, are probably the most useful fics for us to analyze here; they are less of an explication of the original series than an explication of the "writer's situation."
Another possibility is that some are tired of defering the fulfillment of desire. In the Harry Potter fan universe, as well as Inuyasha, the "final battle" is a subject that is almost a genre of its own. (Note to self: All fan fiction is AU by necessity because we can never know where the author would have gone/is going (again, the terminal end metaphor!)) The end is written because the author takes the fulfillment into his/her own hands. Is there some sort of breaking point? Did anyone imagine the final Inuyasha battle before, say, episode 100? A critical mass of deferal?
If we want to think of other fan fiction actions ("Genre as social action"), the "original" category is interesting (again, an mm.org genre). In this genre, the stories are set in the middle of the series and seek to explore/exploit those moments the author has left open to interpretation. While PWP stands for "Plot? What Plot?" in so called "lemon" fics, in the "original" genre, there is often a TWT bent--"Time line? What Time Line?" The tongue in cheek manner with which the authors treat the adherance of their fic to the canon time line points to a different social action than simply fulfilling some desire within a conclusion: instead, there is further deferal of conclusions, but a satisfaction of questions about character. I'll have to read Counter-Statement, but I'm willing to bet Burke addresses this kind of symbolic action, where form satisfies something other than an end
Note: See ffn, mm.org and checkmated.com for stories that emerged just prior to and just after the release of Harry Potter VI. How do the authors situate themselves in this new situation?

Millions of leaves

Millions of leaves of paper I have marked
since emerging from the walls of that dark city.

Tonight I went through my papers from Bluffton and Northeastern in an attempt to find my copy of Bruno Latour's essay on "immutable mobiles." I found, instead, the essay I wrote about the case of the immutable mobile known as a church bulletin. Interesting, but not helpful.

I also found some of my first work with critical theory. I realized, for a moment, that I was far less trusting of theorists back then, that I did not immediately latch onto every abstraction. That I had a far better grasp on application before I understood it so well.

What has happened? Some sort of reduction, I'd imagine. The only reduction I haven't quite made has been with Kenneth Burke. I think that's because I keep revisiting the original text. When reading Dave Blakesley's explanation of Burke, "Elements of Dramatism," I found myself becoming increasingly frustrated because I could see the gaps where he was reducing for the sake of clarification. At other points, when he filled in gaps for me, I wanted to return to the original, to make sure that I agreed, that Burke hadn't been coy and slipped in some other thing to trigger that rush.

That's why I love theory, and always have. It's that brain rush. When everything makes sense all at once and there are no words. No pictures. Pure intuition. It's in this way that I understand James Watson's memior of finding the double helix; he's cocky while at the same time unsure, but he relies completely on intuition (so he says) for most of his time there. Lucky Jim luckily is male and his intuition is seen as revolutionary, not weak and emotional.

Emotional? Me? No, not as Watson imagines.


Such claims to the end have an absolute duty. The revelation was written to fit the genre, so it plays absurd, a bad drama on screen. It uses some conventions, to revel in the reveal and promote unity. Time, plot, a used, ordered world, seems included in this eternity of absurdity in play. Mocking not the core of real prophecy, but those browning leaves about it, it rules the way they create an understanding world. The end is near. A harmless arm comes out to embrace us all, and still we duck away.

Teaching Week 1

          Who knew fifty minutes could go by so quickly? I certainly didn't. For the last two days I've found myself staring at the clock in awe when it reads 8:17. What do you mean I only have three minutes left? I was initially worried about what I'd do with conference time; now I see that with only 50 minute classes, I will have to rearrange some of my teaching plans so that the little group work moments I usually have (Think, Pair, Share, people!) come during conferences.
          The class iself seems like a good one. My B group was a little more dynamic this morning than the A group, but, if I had to hazzard a guess based on pure stereotypical essentialism, I'd say it's because B was mostly male and A was mostly female. I asked them to divide themselves up into A1 and A2, B1 and B2, just so I could observe the group dynamics. And I found out that B is quick and decisive while A likes to mull things over and dialogue things into a conclusion. While they didn't get much done in the 12 minutes I gave them, I got to see them in action when they thought I was focused on something else, so the time was used wisely. Now I know I have to divide and conquer differently.
          As for the proposal stuff...I wish I could say that I was far enough ahead in thinking to worry about it. But I'm not. I've looked at it, made those intuitive mental break downs (where do those come from? I don't have enough experience for it to be that easy. Maybe I'm just winging it? It usually works out though. Does anyone else just seem to Feel where things would fit?). So I can't describe my plans--at the moment the only uncertainty in the schedule is where a discussion about rhetorical moves (what Tarez was outlining in her email) might come in. I agree that taking a sample text is best--that's how I learned rhetorical analysis. Practice makes perfect. Eventually, analyzing other people's stuff becomes--here comes the word again--so intuitive that you (me? They?) begin to write in a rhetorically sound manner because the moves are familiar. I didn't understand how to write an argument until I took Communication classes and learned how to analyze arguments. Sorry to say, reading literature does NOT teach one how to write persuasively according to the current conventions of academic writing. So, where does it go? I have listed that I will be giving them student samples to read over the weekend, but since I'm in the lab on Monday, I think I'd like to let them do it on a computer screen, and teach them to use the Word comment function, which is my main way of commenting on their papers (My hands give out too easily otherwise). Then they can mark up the papers just like I will mark up theirs; we will all be revisionist (ha) editors together. So now I have to figure out where I'm going to put the samples on my page, and where I'm going to put a list of questions. Since I plan on redesigning the page to include frames (sorry Tarez, but tables make me more frustrated than the Yankees do) and Amy's Famous Background, my purple venetian blinds look.
I'm not sure what else to say. It's day two, I'm not sleeping much, and I haven't had time to do yoga in two weeks. The stairs on this campus are a nightmare. I know there are handicapped accessible entrances, but to access them you have to walk all the way around the building and enter at the basement. That seems stupid to me, and since I can't move quickly, I'm always running later than I should be, so I take the stairs to save time. Then my legs spasm, and I look like a marrionette tangled up in its strings, kicking randomly with a dazed expression.
      At some point during mentoring today, I zoned out for about seven or eight minutes. I only know this because of the clock on the wall behind Tarez's head. I don't know what happened during those minutes. I must have been looking at the computer screen, because my eyes felt weird. I haven't zoned out for that long since my sophomore year of high school, wherein I entered third period and stared at the blackboard until some part of my brain heard the bell ring. Apparently, however, I still absorb info during that time; getting it out is the hard part. Whatever happened during those minutes had to do with activities for the proposal, I think. Or activities for the CD? I "woke up" when we started talking about students not finding the CD, so whatever happened before then....oh well. I can't go back.
      It's the first week. We're all tired. It's not just me (mantra of the year: It's not just me). To quote Five Iron Frenzy: "Amy's going back to school today. Elation, jubilation beams from her face....A new hope"



One of those pictures fell down. It doesn't really matter which one, as long as the edges aren't torn. I'm sliding out of the margins onto the blank white wall. They've encouraged me to move toward mauve before because in China red is the color of happiness, which is cultural, but too bold. Mauve is global, in the maple trees, the flowers, and the hair of those girls I used to envy in high school. When I edge out of the margins and onto the wall the sign will be signified, and we can all sleep easier. I'm being held up by a silver frame I'm being raptured by the pages beneath me.

A Nightmare on Essay Street, part 5.2

Rereading my July 20th post reminded me that Mediaminer.org has recently posted an email from a reader discussing the quality of fanfiction on that server. Mediaminer defended itself by replying: "We agree that, unlike what many smaller sites are starting to do, we do not disallow fiction based on its quality or lack thereof. That has been considered unfair to writers who are just starting out" (a 7-28-95 Homepage News post). The rest of Lady MacBeth's, one of mm.org's moderators, response points writers to their Beta/Pre-readers and Writing Help Forum as well as the FanFiction Author Review Guild. Lady MacBeth and company do not want to discourage younger writers, but, as moderators, also want their web site to have quality work. By posting this reader's "flame" of the website at the start page, the moderators are effectively directing the attention of anyone reading or writing on mm.org; the prominence of this message on the page cannot be ignored.
The rhetorical strategies behind the flame and the response could be analyzed here; but it is not the near admission of bad writing which caught my attention. Instead, it was a brief apostrophe in the last sentence of Lady MacBeth's reply: "The point of this Guild is not to give empty praise, which has lately become the meaning of 'review', but rather to give honest reviews - including critiqes - of submissions."
The second clause "which has lately become the meaning of 'review'" is the one that is of importance to my "study." The "bribes" I spoke of in the July 20 post are part of this problem: Writers refuse to write more until they are given reviews, and thus meaningless praise--even for somewhat bad writing--is dished out quickly. Other times, "celebrity" fan fic authors will receive praise because no one wants to be accused of "flaming" the well known writer. Some reviews for the more famous writers are pages long, exalting every description, and moving on to praise the personality traits of the writer him/herself.
These well known writers become well known by winning awards from various fan guilds or even the fic host itself. That is not to say these awards aren't merited--there are some truly talented writers in this genre--but that once the writer is recognized as being "one of the best" he or she is unlikely to receive constructive criticism. The reviews, as vast as they are, are not there to improve such writer's skills, but to become part of the strange entourage--a fan of a fan--forming a community with its own unique hierachies and seniorities, friendships and arch enemies, none of which seems to have much to do with either discussing good writing or the original text.
side noteOn checkmated.com (Harry Potter Fan Fiction) some of these relationships do extend into the writing; there are many more fics written by multiple authors, and readers continue or do "outtakes" of their favorite fics, with the permission of the original author. This style of communal writing reminds me of when we did writing exercises in elementary school, and one person would write one sentence, pass the paper down, the second person would continue that thought, pass the paper down, etc. By the end, the story was everyone's and no one's. And they usually made no sense. The importance of these communal "fan fic universes" is that they do make sense, and are expansive, excrutiatingly detailed to the point where the original text seems very far away, and that distance does not seem to matter one bit.

How Amy Gets Her Groove Back...again

Alternate Title: What the Hell am I Teaching This Semester? Part I
I've always hated the last week before school starts.
The last weekend I hate even more. It used to be that I'd get awful panic attacks about the task (why such a harsh word for fourth grade? Or even ninth?) ahead of me. Sometime in high school it shifted--I had panic attacks in which I was worried about having panic attacks.
I know for a fact that I never got a good night's sleep until the second Tuesday of the school year. Not even weekends.
So here I am, awake again at 6 a.m. because I just had to take that nap around 5 p.m. What better to do than to read the book my students will be working from?
The title is "Fieldworking: Reading and Writing Research." It's difficult to tell how much we will be relying on a "fieldworking" approach, but I can tell already that the philosophy of the writing programs here are much different from the "Question everything and everyone" subverting exercises that Bartholomae and Petrosky wished their students to engage in. I don't doubt we will be looking at and re-evaluating assumptions, but suddenly the idea of "reading against the grain" will be supplanted by a reading of the culture related to the text, not the author's attempt (or lack thereof) to imbed ideologies in my poor, naive kiddos. The introduction says that the book's authors want the students to act on their discoveries. I feel like there will be less me dragging them through the mud of some Foucauldian nightmare, grading them on their ability of not sinking.
I love Foucault, I really do. I just want my kids to be able to write when they're done with my Composition class, not just subvert things.
Subverting is exhausting.
One of the questions for the orientation week is "What is the difference between ethnography and journalism?" This is a good question. One that came up several times as I taught Fight Club and Notes on the Balinese Cockfight. The students seemed to think it had something to do with the "accurateness" or the "truth" of the writing. The transparency of "simply reporting the facts." And maybe at one point I could say that that was the goal of (although it could never truly acheive it) journalism. Journalism back in the throes of Woodward and Bernstein. Before 24 hour cable news programs.
But now what? No one but Fox News pretends they are "fair and balanced." We all know who owns whom (or at least that they are owned).
The book says the readings will draw from "fiction, non-fiction, and journalism." This sentence seems strange; isn't journalism non-fiction? Is journalism a genre of its own, is its job so different from the work of "non-fiction" that we have to point out the divide?
The concerns of this book seem to be drawn from Mary Louise Pratt's idea of the contact zone; of outsiders and insiders, self and other, questioning the daily practices (not those large ideologies) of a specific group that has somehow (ah, there's the question) divided itself from the rest.
Kinda like journalism?
They encourage "close looking and listening skills" (1) as opposed to close reading. But in order to "read" don't we have to first look and listen? Before we can give meaning to what we've just seen, we must acknowledge what it is we've seen. Clifford Geertz's "thick description" is misleading because it is both a close looking (for both the writer and the person reading the context being described) and a close reading. Can we ever really just look and listen?
It's been a while since I could just look. There is always a "hmm" at the tip of my tongue whenever I actually pay attention. Paying attention all the time, as Dr Susan Wall said, must be exhausting. We can't live like that. Like most people, I just block things out and move along merrily, unless wanting to engage in a "hmm" moment with friends. When a text--by which I mean a film or piece of writing or music or art--is presented to me, I automatically do a close looking, listening and reading all at once. I just jump from "What is this?" to "What does this mean?"
I wonder if my students will have similar problems, or if I am clouded by my own strange behavoirs. Now I remember that I wasn't always this way; it began when I took that Sociology class at OSU-M, and continued as Lou and I sat in Sue Biesecker-Mast's class (Mass Media, was it?). Sue's "hmm" became our "hmm."
I remember when it all broke for me; it was the night before the first Mass Media paper was due, and I had forgotten the paper was due at all. I finally listened to what Sue had asked us to do: I was too stressed to try do anything else. I looked at the ad I was analyzing, and began with its semiotics. Color? Shape? Angles? People? Text? Etc, etc. Typing furiously, trying to reach those ten pages, I wrote down every detail I could think of. The act of describing in that haze of tension made me stop making assumptions, and instead of seeing some random ad from some girly mag I saw the story that caused it to come into being, the ideology that made that ad materialize itself that way. As I finished the "description" section of the paper, looking at all my evidence, the intentions and ideologies of the ad became transparent to me, and I couldn't understand why I hadn't seen it before.
I thought, It's just like journalism. It's clearly not, but that was my thought. It was clean, organized, and there were sources to back up every comment I made. My opinions stopped whirling around each other into the abyss of "Vague, has no point. D-". Things started to have heirarchies. As my ability to clear all the assumptions from my opinions increased, so did my writing ability.
And none of it had to do with Freshman English. I could write a research paper; I have always been damned good--sometimes too damned good--at research. I could talk about how essays worked together to form a "theme." (Oh God! Not the Theme Paper!). But it was always the same thesis: "They're the same in how they x, but different in their idea of y." Which is probably why I get on the cases of students who do those theses. Because I know that in order to make claims they make with that weak thesis they have noticed other, bigger things, but are afraid of their sentences scrawling right off the off white bounds of Microsoft Word and into that territory: "I'm not really sure what you're arguing here."
Am I ranting? Yes I am. But usually in those rants, I find hints of things to share with others who are smarter than me, thus making me seem smart in the process. In time, I will go back over this, and listen to myself, see my own motivations and assumptions that drive these words, this organization and discover questions I have not yet asked, and answers to some that I have already.
How do you tell a bunch of scared 18 year olds that they might not have the answers? That you might not? That there may be no answers to all those teen-angst ridden questions they wasted the last 5 years on? That's when they looked the most scared: When I told them to argue either side, that both were right. Clifford Geertz is imposing Western views and Clifford Geertz is undoing Western assumptions .
Gotta love both/and. It's one of those things I can almost understand now.

The Essay of Doom: Fanfiction Reviews--The Rhetorical Situation

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After driving past Katherine Ave, Ashland

Interpret this, Freud

Somewhere around 10 am, needing desperately to pee, I dreamed of people I'd rather forget--the boys who sang NOFX songs in high school, only in my dream, they weren't boys. Hunched in an attic of a blue house, filled with bunk beds, the class of 1999 was escorted slowly away, down the stairs, out the door to a road called 150. It was flooded, a river, and we drove my mom's blue Jeep down it, trying to get away from that blue house, where there were fires behind curtains and an old woman protecting an old man who tried to feed us poisoned rice.
Upon escape, a blonde girl who shall remain nameless for the sake of the mystery, trapped me and someone in a basement slowly filling with water. Slates of concrete threatened to flatten us before we ever had the chance to drown. I used the last of my cell phone to call someone that I can't remember--why can't I remember her now?--and the door broke down as the boys awoke from their blondie-induced stupor and saved us with black spray paint and magical white tee shirts from Wal-Mart.
We went to the flat lands, where the poor people lived, and I rode the #1 bus (Boston MBTA--it was yellow) up a big hill with a broken bicycle in tow; the rubber had come off the tires. I got off at a park, where there was Chinese food cooking, and a woman who danced with red felt fabric like it was a silk scarf. There was a girl child with me, and I told her to be careful here, and that we would ride to safety once I fixed the bike (I don't know how to fix a bike). A boy looking like Derek Hatt did it for me, and told me to go back to the flat lands, that there were fires and tsunamis to see.
I was there, then, on a side street, watching everything get swept into the sea--was I in Boston, or was it what Ashland would be if the icecaps melted?--when a geiser of fire erupted from the top of a tall apartment building. We were in fire and water, and were trapped in an alley with no government identification. "What can they do?" asked one old homeless man. "They have a five fold plan," said a homeless woman. She pulled out an old newspaper, which was somehow digital. "Containment, military assistance..." she trailed off. "And the Tall Places."
The Tall Places rose from the sea, frightening self-contained structures thousands of stories high. The people around me and the girl child complained about nature and the destruction of the planet. I said, "It's beautiful. I hate nature," and I climbed to the entrance, pushing my way through to see Him.
He called us to his office at the top, and we rode the elevators that made the blood rush to our feet. He saw into our minds, and knew that we were planning revolt. "It's Bob!" I said. But it wasn't Bob, who had his name on his shirt like a mechanic. In line, He saw us all, and saw the black paint still on my white tee shirt. I thought as He passed by me with some slick piece of technology, I want to go back home, and when He was past, I opened my eyes, back in the basement where we were to be killed by concrete slabs, the smell of spray paint waiting just outside the door.

No Need for Poetry!

Eruption
On reading fanfiction and hearing fireworks

Someone's always trying to claim someone else. These declarations end with a slap and a little bit of blood on the mouth. This is how we beg for eternity, in chaining someone to us with a tooth or a nail. The moon is too full; it's going to overflow.
What better place, though, for the whitest of our fears to shine brightest once a month? If that tiny little door, the flimsy little membrane were to break in everyone, we might rend each other into little star-shaped pieces to hold on to and scatter from the balcony scenes. Would you join the fray if it were playing on your street? Could I ignore the bruises and the shards of glass under my feet? If we all go into heat, and set fires in the bonsai shrubs with the radiation from out skin, the city would erupt into desert, and the sun would be always setting. The moon is too full; it is spilling out milk.

Star Wars: Dystopia or Tragedy? (And is there a difference?)

Wow, long title.
Daddy and I went to see Star Wars tonight. We did this for several reasons:
1) We always go to major sci fi movies together as bonding time
2) I promised him 2 years ago that I would be in Ohio to see the final Star Wars with him
3) Anakin Skywalker is hot, Vader or not.

(Dad is exempt from number 3)

But as per usual, he and I did not sit there like the dummy kids next to us (two boys aged 17ish, major idiots, and not in the good Red Sox idiot way), but instead spent the 20 minutes prior to the film in our bad seats discusing the possibilities of the film. As with Kari, I jokingly asked him, "So, do you think he'll choose the Dark Side or the Light Side?"

As Kari did, he paused and looked at me as though I were the stupid kid next to me, who had by this point, scooted down so far in his seat that I was a head taller than him, and he spread his legs so wide that he looked like he had been riding an elephant for three days. I considered asking the kid if he would mind getting out of my personal space (or if I could perhaps drape my leg over his), but instead interrupted my father's insult-to-be by saying: "I know. I'm trying to make a point."

Who is the hero?
This question remains unanswered for me. Daddy and I attempted several guesses (including Yoda), but could not answer this until we decided whether to take the film as episodic or serial.

The genre of the film makes it difficult to determine the hero. Episode II and part of Episdoe III certainly contain "dystopian energies." A sense of impending doom, complicated government over throwing, rebellions, blah blah blah. It's the hero question that bothers me almost more than the chronology.

If I call Star Wars Episdoes I-VI "dystopian," then I am designating a special form of tragedy, a special postmodern form of tragedy that questions destiny and the ability of individuals to move against greater Forces (yes, I know). And if I designate it a dystopia, then there are requirements for the hero (according to me).

Luke Skywalker seems to fit these requirements fairly well. Taken as a single unit, the first (second?) trilogy Lucas released, episdoes IV-VI easily comprise the dystopian genre I initially outlined in my honors project. But what do we do with the second (first?) trilogy?

In dystopias, the "back story" of how the dystopian state arrived is often told in flashback, through a character I called the "Enlightener." Usually, the enlightener is the "magical helper." Sometimes, the enlightener is the leader of the State. When Obi Wan fills Luke in on The Force, he is enlightening. When Darth Vader tells Luke, "I am your father," he is enlightening. As a unit, the first released trilogy works as dystopian.

But now, now in a time of greater technological advancement, the back story is released as its own story and elevated to the status of explicit narrative. The completed sextilogy (is that even a word?) asks us to see it as a whole, or at least two halves which complement each other. We cannot read one without the other, not now.

And this second (first?) trilogy has those tingles of dystopian melancholy because of its chronological complexity. Is it first or second? Is it now or then? What does this say about destiny and possibility?

We cannot ignore that we knew Anakin Skywalker's fate from Episdoe I--that cute little kid was destined to kill millions. So why tell the back story? Lucas says it's just a story about a father and a son coming to know each other. But, as my father pointed out in less lit crit terms, even if this were Lucas's intent, the story has built into it other concerns. The confusion of the death drive and eros was particularly emphasized in this film. The "code" of the Jedi and the code of the samurai's of Japan's late feudal era (pre 1865). Power versus love.

And, to be American, the ability of an individual to overcome tyrany.

The constant mentions of democracy and "republic" remind us that this film was originally begun in Cold War American, and is finished in the midst of our bloody and equally ridiculous War on Terror (eek! Terror! Somebody go shoot the terror down!). The cultural changes (or not?) make me read the democracy/tryany opposition with a certain wince. Even as Dad leaned over to whisper "Hitler" at some points, I leaned over to whisper "Bush." I think we were both right. He certainly didn't argue with me when Anakin said "If you're not with me, then you're my enemy."

Star Wars will hit its 30th birthday in 2007. It is difficult for me to imagine a generation so engulfed in pop culture (like Dad's) and news and war and the effect that Star Wars had on their "ideological becoming" (Bakhtin's word). What about generations before them? After? What do you do when one of the defining narratives of a generation is dystopian?

Or, perhaps, simply tragic?

Tragedy itself allows more for a hero who is not just a goofy screw up (that's like Winston in 1984), but who has been deceived--someone good at heart, but twisted by some accidental, or coincidental happening. Think Oedipus here (and wow, could we make some massive comparisons). None of it was his fault.

But tragedies are individualistic in that the tragic events usually only "affect" the hero. We identify so soley with the hero that the deaths/plague/etc that emerge from his tragedy seem like side notes. In dystopias, it is the mass of people and their collectively tragic states that takes the stage. The tragedy in dystopias is already present. In tragedy, we watch it unfold.

Which makes me want to label this second (first?) trilogy a tragedy. Like all tragedies, the audience is aware of the destiny of the hero; we know he will fall. We watch it for the cultural lessons we can learn; like dystopias, tragedies are important because their hopelessness leads (hopefully) to action/attitude on the part of the audience. We see where the hero should have done something different, the one place where he could have changed his fate, and make notes to ourselves: Don't trust men in black cloaks.

I jest about the black cloaks, of course. I'm not sure exactly what the "representative anecdote" (K Burke) of this tragedy was. Calling it a tragedy does allow us to give the title of hero to Anakin/Darth Vader. Calling it a tragedy separates it from the "comedy" of the first(second) trilogy where the tiny, fuzzy Ewoks save the galaxy. American dystopias are comedies.

And if we separate them, what becomes of the series as a whole? If we were to watch all six episodes, how should we do it--Do we begin with I or IV? Do we end it as tragedy with episode III or comedy with episdoe VI? The choice here is important--now that we have both halves, indivuduals can choose how to read the epic. This is a performative. It is Act. Act is good.

I can't help but remember, however, how each episode begins. Star Wars, remember, does not happen in the future as most sci fi does, but in the past, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. There is never any immediacy for the American audience in the 21st century.

Then again, now that 1984 has come and gone, it, too, has less exigency.

I'm going around in circles. Despite the organized sounding title of this post, I really have no idea what I think about all of this. But I thought I'd write it down before I forgot the lines of argument that were being stubornly curvacious.

May the Force be with me...and you, whoever you are. (indeterminate audience makes for weird rhetorical situation--Bitzer)

Amy's endless waltz

The Endless Waltz is the subtitle of one of the Gundam series, I think. Gundam makes my nerve endings tingle because it is so different, so big, so full that I can't think all that I want to think about it at once.
Thinking several things at a time is no problem. I remember the first time I did it--it was during the "Otis-Lenon Test" (at least, that's what it sounded like to my little flightly ears. It might have been Otis-Lemon, or OTIS-Lennon or any variation in between that makes phonemic sense) in third grade. It was something like (something like something like) an IQ test, with those fascinating shaded boxes and triangles and word problems and inversions of 3-D images that our brains had to do. Some kids cried. I finished early.
Daddy used to play those games with me for fun. They are fun.
The answers to fill in were obvious to me before I finished reading the question. Once (okay, probably more than once), I chanced a glance around the room--fobidden!--to ease my neck muscles. I remember how Eric Yoder (yes, Yoder) sat with his leftarm stretched across the desk, left ear on elbow crook, right hand five inches from his face, eyes just about closed. I remember standing up once or twice in excitement. Nerves? Or is it like when I'm typing a paper and it's not happening at the speed of my thoughts? Freshman year of college I used to walk up and down the hall bouncing one of those Super Bouncy Balls, talking to myself, focusing on the sound of the pounding and not the multiple noises of fragmented thoughts. Too many possible directions. Writing is linear.
Multiple choice is linear. They probably would have sent me to the principle's office if I hadn't been an otherwise good kid. I think that's when I took to tying strings around my finger, to remind myself to sit still, to give my hands something to do, to focus the noise. I probably am hyperactive, minus the active part.
We are probably all hyperactive. The new commercials for adult ADD have me convinced of this. The myth of the productive, diligent worker (the pervading Puritan ideologies that clash with post modernism) continues to control things it shouldn't control. Of course, my desire to control my own ideologies is also a product of that ideology. We waltz again, repeat the coda. One two three.
One two three.
That, of course, was not the point of this post. The point was to say something about how I am still scrolling through internet sites, here the 19th of May (yes, Star Wars), clicking and linking and making favorites and deleting and other Ing words. Getting nowhere but to the Stoodt's Market in Bellville, where people stared at me. Granted, my hair was unwashed from the Budokon of the night before, and I was wearing a sweater with an inquisitive beaver on it, but that is no reason to stare.
Damn, I miss Boston.
I was right, when I thought that a city would afford me the annonymity I desire. It felt good to get lost for a while. And being back here for two weeks, no longer lost (once was lost, now am found) has me antsy again. I'm done being found.
So I search online for apartments to appease mother's anxieties. I email Purdue daily to appease my own. I try to let myself enjoy movies without thought.
It all ends up looping back anyway, and I have the urge to write about Gundam, or how Barnes and Noble have rearranged their shelving to allow for twice the number of Manga and graphic novels. I think about Star Wars and the fandom it spawned and my own fandom and the multiplicity of fandoms--no one is just a Star Wars fan, or just a DBZ fan.
Can you overload a fan? Is this psychosis a real necessity? What happened before media? What about Homer?
I'm reading an InuYasha fanfic that has finally been updated. I plan on nominating it for next quarter. I'm a member. The emails tell me so.

Animerica (tm)

[adultswim] announced part of its new lineup for summer. As usual, I am both excited and disappointed.
Taking the place of Trigun . (Good bye Vash; we'll see you when they need to fill slots again) will be FULL METAL ALCHEMIST (seasons 1 and 2). Woohoo, I say. Now, if you would all kindly translate the next 13 episodes, so we know who the hell Al meant by "Teacher?!" I will stop writing angry posts to adultswim.com message boards.
Taking the place of the Big O (insert required euphemism here) will be GitS: SAC (for those not in the loop, that's Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex which ended its run Saturday the 14th with the culminating episode wherein the Laughing Man is offered a job at Section 9, but turns it down. Everyone is alive and well, except the Tachikomas, which were never really alive, but are now definitely not well. They are in tiny Tachikoma pieces in a forest.
I just like saying "Tachikoma." Say it out loud. Ta-Chi-Ko-Ma. I can write that in hiragana.
I am special.
Adding on to [as] another hour has allowed them to bring back Lupin III and Case Closed/Detective Conan . So, if you're up at 5 am and bored, those are good, episodic little things to get you awake while your coffee brews.
Speaking of which, I've got 2 pounds of Kona just sitting here....and no coffee maker to be found in my car. Please don't tell me I left it in Boston!

Kono Ai-wo kese-wa shinai.
(this love will never die)
Kono Amylea...What is this Amylea doing? Waiting for May to pass into June, again.

In the Garden, In the Garden!

That book by that lady...Frances Somebody, with the girl from India named Mary popped into my head as I was reading Haruki Murakami's South of the Border, West of the Sun. And I started to write. I can't even tell what's good anymore.


"What you want to say is that the cement that makes you up has hardened, so the you you are now can't be anyone else."

"If you want a cat, all you have to do is choose a life in which you can have a cat. It's simple. It's your right...right?" (Windup Bird Chronicle)

Right. Simple.


      Just when I let myself relax into his prose, Murakami surprises me with a strange turn. It's not Vonnegutian. It's not even Pinter-esque. Is it Japanese? And if so, why? Is there really a difference between East and West?
      Does this have something to do with why I cry now at the end of Sex and the City? Is it the Pill or is it me? That's not nihilistic--I'm still asking "to be" questions.

Sitting there, marinating in coffee, I can almost feel it at the base of my spine. They did not remove it after all, when they laid me out too flat. It retreated for a time to tingle in solitude somewhere so centered that it was outside completely.




Waiting at B-Dub's

A murder of new ones tests the air. It's all pomp from here to the ocean--flight aside, they equate love with nearness and the scent of beer. Inspiration ruffles some feathers and we find it is easier to just enter than to wait to not be alone in the 11 o'clock hour. Bad noise under their ruby throats, they flick off the snow. I hope to sing, too, one day.

Post from Miami

Unfortunately, I mean Miami, OH.
Miami makes me think of miasma, which InuYasha has been using wrong in translation. Miasma is a gaseous substance that is thick and confusing. In InuYasha, "miasma" is the green poisonous gas let out by Naraku (evil trademark goes here).
We ate "Vietnamese" and I did not get sick. Apparently the trick is to eat crackers and drink enough water to pee out the Arctic Ocean.
And now, I'm typing on a Mac (shh, don't tell Gregg), feeling happy and content.
"We can say 'Vagina Monologues'--what's wrong with that word?" Tracey Ullman, Tonight Show.

The Vagina Monolgues reminds me of Anna Gleisberg, who is now basking in Hawaii.

I want a puppy. That will aid Derrida, perhaps Burke. But not Nature. Nature is never silenced.

There was a moment that I almost turned around. I-90 is monochrome, the rest stops filing away the miles. Somewhat missing, gutteral fricatives, those extra noises we used to make have revived with the long sleep long needed. The rocket tree, easily maneuvered, waits for earth to disolve.

Eatin Good in the Neighborhood?

Amy Limmer (aka "Amy the Officemate") told me today about a bad vegetarian experience at Applebee's--or rather, a lack of vegetarian experience. She has since emailed the company (I didn't know people still complained like that! Go Amy!) and requested that some sort of vegetarian dish outside the appetizer menu make an appearance. They have replied, telling her that any dish on the menu can be made meatless. Including the Chicken Fajitas.
Which then, as Amy pointed out, become "salad in a tortilla." Mmmmmmmm.

"It's alright for someone to sleep past noon every once in a while. That's what it means to be a free human being." The Big O, as rendered by Cartoon Network.

Meanwhile, I am eating enough turkey sandwhiches and fruit to...make me healthy? Oh, and Emma brought chocolate covered strawberries from Mike's Pastries (famous Boston patisserie). And smoothies, lots of smoothies.
But no coffee?
I have found that I do not like lattes made with skim. The coffee feels thin. My skin smells like skin again, not medicine or caffeine. Once I rasped loudly about cream and sugar, leaning on the dashboard, sticky hands on my steering wheel. What comes will come, then stop. Of course.

A case study in Juxtaposition

      Well, things were looking bad.
     Our hero was being eaten alive by the comps, by finals, and by the stone-ridden gall bladder that threatened to burst from her guts like Alien
     Our hero? I meant heroine.

      The letters were flying (okay, crawling) in. Minnesota, REJECT. Iowa REJECT. Northwestern?

I'm writing to bring you up to date on the status of your application for graduate study in rhetoric at Northwestern. At the moment you are on a very short waiting list.

As we indicated earlier, the Graduate School permits us to admit only as many applicants as we can fund. We found your credentials to be certainly worthy of admission, but there were not enough funded positions to enable us to admit all of the qualified candidates. This is why you are currently on our waiting list.

If initial offers are declined on April 15, it is possible that we may be able to extend an offer to you. In all frankness, though, this is a remote possibility, because some attrition is built in to the number of offers initially authorized. Even though the waiting list is very short, it is unlikely that we will be able to go to it.

Therefore, if you have an offer from another institution for which there is a reply deadline coming up soon, I would advise you to accept it. I make this suggestion very reluctantly, because we would love to have you come here, but I cannot ask you to keep waiting against what is a small chance that something will open up here.

Please let me know whether you wish to remain on the waiting list or whether you prefer to withdraw your application.

Sincerely,
David Zarefsky


      And I wrote this in response

it's not that
we don't want you
Oh we want you
enter our courts in praise

it's that
we can't afford you
lit whore
bad economy, cheerio


      And there was sorrow in the land...or something.
      And then there was the Gall Bladder of Doom. But that's another, yucky story.
      And then, it was Friday, April 15, the Ides of April, Tax Day. Mother called to tell me that The University of Denver had also accepted me (Yea!) But sadly could not fund me (Boo!).
      So I watched Buffy, I watched Stargate, and, after much procrastination, I cleaned. I cleaned the bathroom (toilet and all), I cleaned the floors (Both Swiffer Wet AND Dry, twice), I cleaned the dinning room, I cleaned the stove. I was eyeing the inside of the refrigerator when Sharon stopped me. Apparently I was clutching my stomach in pain and shouting obscenities at the germs I was vanquishing. So it goes (again?).
      Yea so I walked through the valley of the shaddow of Academia...
      In a "funk" (not the right word, but I have lost my words and dont know where to find them. Leave them alone, and they'll come home, wagging their affixed morphemes behind them), I tried to write my paper for rhetoric. This was, of course, not a good idea. But I did it anyway, and am on page Six, thank you. ("As Blair and Michel concluded, 'Quote'. Their assertion that 'Quote can add to our understanding of...")
      Sharon attempted to cheer me up by watching "The Fugitive" with me (mmm Ford) and then I took some pain meds to aid my poor stomach, now even more angry at me for the cleaning spree. Feeling a little loopy, I decided to check my email. This was the turning point.
      The first one was trying to sell me Viagra. I won't count that as the turning point.
      The second was from a student. This was also expected.
      The third was from Jackie Spada, our adorable English Department Graduate "Administrative Assistant" (sigh), with the subject line "RESULTS." As we all know, any subject line that is in all Caps and from someone you know is either a) Really important or b) Caps lock error.
      This, Of course, was a) Really Important. Quote

April 15, 2005
Ms. Amy Clemons
Department of English
406 Holmes Hall

Dear Amy:
Congratulations! I am pleased to inform you that you have successfully completed the MA Comprehensive Examination. Your exam results are as follows:

4 areas passed, 3 distinctions

You may review your examination in the Graduate Office if you desire. You may pick up copies of your reader’s comments from the Graduate Studies Office after Monday, April 25, 2005.
Again, congratulations and best wishes.
Sincerely,

Stuart Peterfreund
Chair, Graduate Committee



      And the seventh seal broke, and there was a thousand years of peace...
      Or something like that.
      Upon squealing (EEK!) and awakening my roommate (Sharon, not Emma), and rejoicing with Gretchen online, I checked the email immediately below Jackie's joyous response was an ominous email from one Jill Quirk. Yes, the same Jill who is in one of my January postings, Jill from Purdue.
Jill who had told me just days earlier that I was on the waiting list at Purdue. Jill who had, on just this Tuesday, shattered the last of my ego....

Amy -

We can admit you and offer you a teaching assistantship. Please contact me and let me know if you are still interested or have made other plans. I can send the offer letters out on Monday.

Thanks!

Jill

Jill Quirk
Purdue University
Department of English/Comparative Literature
304 Heavilon Hall
500 Oval Drive
West Lafayette, IN 47907



      Ta-da.

      I'll leave the "case study in Juxtaposition" part up to you. It's interesting to see how formal emails work and the constelation of forms they take on, isn't it?

Pop culture, popping a vein or two

I don't often quote pop culture. But it's not a rule or anything, so...
      Pardon me while I burst into flame.
      An apt description from our friends at Incubus.
      And, Trigun.
      Death and poverty like me so much that they brought friends!
I suppose the last one is a bit strong. After all, there is no death at the moment, and poverty is being staved off by "stipends." For the moment.

      I suppose I'm just freaking out.
      Child to main character, Vash: It's too late for us to go back now. And you're too damn clean!
Vash the Stampede's Response: The ticket to the future is always open.
My roommate told me to do yoga. Instead, I ate som HagenDaas. Rocky Road, a metaphorical ice cream.
Dead Metaphor, that is. "Life is a journey" is so romantic.
And although romanticism (note my lack of capitalization) is making a comeback (*pffttt noise goes here*) in composition--damn those expressivists who ruined my composing process and made me confess!--I am not yet ready for that sort of thing. I'd rather not make that kind of move again.
I'd rather move to a new place, and actually bond with people this time.
Anna came and hugged us yesterday, making me wonder if she was nuts. I wondered if I was nuts. We all decided there is "no love" in the English department. Wherever I go next, I will make there be love.
Let there be light, where word and thought are one. Where the author has only illucutionary language. Let there be sleep. Let there be peace.

Night Owl Falls Prey to Harry Dreams

      The Night Owl Bus Service in Boston is being shut down. This doesn't really affect me, except in dreams.

      I dreamed about owls and Harry Potter and being Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I was running toward a bus that wouldn't let me on, and everyone had Book 6 of J.K. Rowling's hit series except for me.

      So I woke up and watched the X files, last episode, and thought about Sci Fi Night in the Ropp Pitt. Damn, I miss those days. Bill and Todd, Taco Bell and Shameless Flirting. Now I'm worried about the history of rhetoric (rhetoric is history).

      They won't let me come in

      Waiting just might kill me. Emma's going home for a week, to celebrate Easter in Sweden, which is apparently better than Easter in Boston. I forgot that there was Easter. I keep forgetting to be worried. I keep worrying about forgetting. And all sorts of inversions like that that like to be inverted.

      I can smell the coffee on my skin

Rejection: An ode

Do not mourn the fall of daylight

It could be clearer to me, why I bother caring that Iowa and Minnesota don't want me. I could do some analysis of the market for students, something about alienation of labor, intellectual pursuits as labor...but I'm not going to. Instead, I'm going to eat a lot of Moose Tracks (R).

Before, her scent had been faint but vivid, showing she had not much physical strength, but did not lack in more magical powers. Now her scent was strong, sweet, vivid and long lasting, even though that sounded like a Winterfresh commercial.

When I read fan fiction, I become startlingly aware of the gap between normal people and me. And still I am not wanted. Or rather, there are certain restrictions to the desire. Must I seduce the school, or should they seduce me?

Wordsworth, that Romantic bastard, knew that ideas come from individual minds, which then put those ideas and emotions (mainly emotions, the overflow of emotions) into language, as though language were Tupperware (R), the transparent kind. I know that my ideas and language are constructed by the web of social powers. And I want out of the web before the spider eats me.

The spider scar on her naked back means she is not yet free

Lots of white space. The white space, says Bartholomae, is where readers can insert themselves, have a dialogue, be dialectic. Mom said today that I am eclectic, which is not quite right. Nor am I eccentric, or any of those other ec- or -ectic words. To do so returns us to the Romantic paradigm, where we are all responsible for our own fates.

And I don't want to be responsible anymore, because it is not up to me anymore, but up to the flow and ebb of anxieties and force. I am Jack's inflamed sense of rejection.

I am Amy's shoulder's tensed in expectation.

Post Break Post

      Oh, geez. It's over?
      How can it be over?
     Apparently I am done relaxing until April 20th or so. Oh well. It was nice while it lasted, this limbo.

      "I just thought you'd be fuller, and more metal."
      I got the first rejection letter on Monday, from Minnesota.
      "We don't know if that means he's dead, or just naked."
      That feels familiar.
Lion's head knocker
pages through
magic in the kitchen
from the agency of letters

      The pile of books keeps getting bigger, not smaller. I wonder what to do about that. "Treading water" would be an appropriate cliche for the moment. I suppose I will start with grading the stack of students (represented by their papers) that sits on the ottoman.

      Last night Sharon asked me "When was the last time you really liked a guy?" And I giggled and said, "Senior year."
      I hadn't realized how long ago that was. Must be all the words on all the pages in all the books, making the time fade strangely into other presences. We don't measure time in coffee spoons; we measure in responses to others' words.

The Ninth Parabola of Purgatory

Purgatory requires parabola.
Here comes the studying. Tomorrow: Edward Schiappa's Definitions of Reality , which will be the special work I answer questions for. So.
Stuart Peterfreund came to talk to us about the comps. By the end of the meeting, I became convinced I am screwed. But that's because he didn't really address any methods of studying for those of us not doing literature. It made me rethink that fourth question: Do I want to answer a question on Bishop/Frost (the postmodern/modern divide? Ways of knowing in modern?)?
I'm so screwed.
Walking down St Stephens Street, I saw a sign--who knows if it was from God; if nothing else, it was from Symphony Properties, Inc. "Where will YOU be living next year." Amid the snow, I said to the sign, "I don't KNOW, which is the whole PROBLEM!" The sign didn't talk back.
Oh well.

Spring "Break"

Alas, I may well weep with sighs deep
For I have no manner of company
To help me on my journey and me to keep
And also my writing is full unready
--Everyman

      Reading stuff for Rhetoric as Cultural Studies class makes me rethink again and again the implicit discussion at hand: How does Rhetoric fit into English studies? Cary Nelson asked the question in a different way, but the implications are the same. "The Linguisticallity of Cultural Studies" asks what place "language" has in Cultural Studies. Because Cultural Studies is one of those strange interdepartmental (non departmental?) disciplines, he is asking what I am asking: Why does Literature have to mean written, cannonized texts that we analyze via "critical theory? Why do we have two separate classes for "Lit crit" and "Rhetorical criticism"? If we are going to the trouble to acknowledge that our (and here I am identifying myself with the Lit people) objects of study are alwaysalready coded into a hierarchy of legitimization for anOther's purpose, and that we want to tease out those codes of legitimization--if we take all of that as our basic assumption of contemporary Lit Crit, then why the hell aren't we doing Rhetorical studies? Isn't it true that embedded in texts, discourses, genres and whole fields of communication, are "instructions to 'the audience how they are to respond and what sensations to experience'"? Isn't that Rhetoric Or am I stupid? (That was T Rosteck (233 At the Intersection , quoting E Black's "The Sentimental Style" (78)). Have I been using "Rhetoric" wrong?
      Ernest J Wrage findsthat we should, and here I'm being a "rhetorician," study "not only the conditions of the creatoins of ideas but allso the conditions of their reception" (Qtd in Rosteck 231). That the texts the audience make upon reception are themselves worth studying; that culture around a text, that contributed both to its inception and its reception should be examined. That Orwell was working from a Marxist perspective in an increasingly (and to him, frighteningly) Socialist England is important, but we must also examine who he was, how he got to pulish 1984 , who the publisher was, how it was recieved in the public, the discourses that surrounded its reception, other major political events happening both globally and locally, and finally, the literary tradition that shaped his text. What other anti-totalitarianism texts came out that year? By who? What were the universities teaching? What did the newspapers look like? How could the proles of his story be comapared to his readers? To those unable to read his story? (An important point).
      Further, am I giving too much agency to Orwell (and friends)? Too much intentionality? Am I falling into that Neo-Aristotelean trap of focusing on the success (or lack) of rhetorical production? If not examining success as my object, then what? Did I forget how often these are taught? Referenced? Turned into bad movies? If there is equal power in the reception as in the creation---what questions should I be asking? And how can I answer these, when most of the people who originally received the text are dead? I can't just use official, public documents. Those are fine, but not enough; what was silenced? Why have some of the dystopian fictions been appropriated to the English department, but not others? And where do they appear, when they are used?
      See. I'm just confusing myself now. In order to (re)fuse Literature and Rhetoric, we'd have to come up with new methodologies, new "legitimate" forms of proof for our readings of the text in question. And I haven't seen one yet, not even in cultural studies, where rhetoric is allowed to play with literture (but usually doesn't).
      And so Thursday begins Spring "Break." I'm planning on studying for the Comps all week, at the coffee shop, reminding myself of what I have, supposedly forgotten, or learning that which I never knew.
      Same thing.

The syllables were there, the ones that sang like poison in an open wound. They said "cut your hair" with the scissors in the kitchen. The scar manifests white, like we knew it would, right down the middle of the division. They said "go to bed" and forget about the bills in your pocket. The shiny backs of the books in question reflect like mouse eyes underneath the futon.

My mouse does not trot.

My GOD!

      Literally, My GOD! Because otherwise, I don't know how this happened.
      I sat down to begin the tedious task of wading through the Kenneth Burke bibliography (500+ entries, from the 1930s to 2001) for hints of Composition Theory, and decided to check my email, to gather my Notes to Self. Wherein I was greeted with this:
Hi, Amy! I'm sorry I missed you by telephone this morning. If you'd like to chat personally, please let me know what times of day are best for you, and
I'll call you. (If you'd prefer to try me, my office number is (847-491-5854.)
Here in the Department of Communication Studies, we are in the process of making admissions decisions. We wanted to let you know that you are on our short list of preferred applicants. Although at this moment we cannot offer you either admission or financial support, your application is one of a small number (fewer than ten) that we have forwarded to the School of Communication for further competitive review. Although we hope to be able to make you an offer, it is likely that not all the applications that we have put forward will be funded.
We wanted to contact you now to congratulate you on your success thus far and to tell you that we are very much interested in you and your application! We hope to be able to give you a definitive answer about admission by mid-March. In the interim, we want you to feel free to contact us with any questions that you may have about the program or about our admissions procedures. We hope that this information will be helpful to you as you receive offers from other schools.

      Pardon?

     First of all, as mother said, I no longer have to worry about living in my parent's basement, which is a strange concept since we have no basement. Upon reading the email seven or eight times to make sure I wasn't stupid, I squealed, and began announcing it to everyone in earshot. Shaking. Dry lips. Etc.


      I practically hopped into Professor Rotella's office, who seemed genuinely excited for me, who kept telling me what good signs were hidden in the rhetorically charged "almost acceptance" letter. At the moment I am sitting calmly in the computer lab, hair in a pony tail, looking demure. Mother and others tempered my excitement when they mentioned the fact that this is the first of what may be many offers. Then I remembered: I may have to make a decision in the end.


      Damn.
      I suppose I should say something here about being lucky. About being lucky to have the pressure of making this kind of decision. I suppose I could say this is justification for all those times I thought the Clemons family was looking down on me, for them making me feel stupid and inadequate. Maybe. Maybe I should celebrate tonight.


      If I were at home, I'd go out with K-dog and Lou. We'd drink coffee and eat cheesecake. Now, I'm just here, with me and the roommates. I don't know what to do. Mom's in Hawaii. Dad's got the flu. Emma started work today, and Kari's grandpa just died.
      Give me some damn cheesecake.

Fragmenting the Hell out of Essay (IV)

      Or perhaps it would be more appropriate to call this Essay version 3.5. or, rather, Somewhere else in the imagined outline than where I last left off. Oh well. I have ideas, and I am going to write them; organization is, afterall, the second step of Aristotle's 5 step model.
      I am reading Peter Elbow, a composition theory dude, and I run across his self-effacing remarks about not knowing whether he is exagerating a perceived conflict or not, a conflict between the act of writing and the act of reading. In some ways, he wants to see them on a continuum of meaning making, as people like Foucault and Stanley Fish do, to see the readers as makers of meaning, and thus "authors." On the other hand, Elbow is a writer, and like all writers, can't help but think of each text as his baby so keep your freakin interpretations out of my work! This, I think, is actually a good thing to hold in play; I can see the validity of each one. That "play" doesn't help me to do anything, though. So how is it handled?
      Let's turn to fanfiction again, as a place where people are, in fact, "Writing without Teachers" (the title of one of Elbow's first essays). They are, for the most part, not taking part in "academic" writing; there is no exchange value for their writing (that they have any control over). They are outside of many of the overt power relationships of the classroom (although, as Foucault says, we are always/already caught up in the webs of power and ideology, so there is no neutral writing space).
      Instead, there is a play between reader and writer which mimics some of the questions of domination we find in RL (Real Life). The review process on FFN and MediaMiner allows for readers to give suggestions and praise to the fanfic authors; this alone would not be of importance, except for the way that that feedback is often exemplary of the ideologies of power and truth in society at large. Who writes these feedbacks? How are they recieved? What does the author do with them? How do reviews affect the drafting process? How are these reviews like what we have learned to do in school? How might they affect the younger generation, who learn this type of feedback first, before learning the formulaic public school versions of "Peer Editing?" (And I do not mean to imply that these students will be at a disadvantage--they may, in fact, turn out to be better at responding to texts because they are used to being given the authority to speak on others' texts, where as some of my students still feel embarrassed or hesitant to (re)mark on their classmates' papers.)
      Elbow finds that as much as he wants to destroy the reading/writing binary, he can't help but feel that they are fundamentally opposed, that "readers and writers have competing interests over who gets to cntrol the text" (75). When we readers throw back to the idea that it is readers who construct the text (a reader response methodology), we can't deny that as writers, we are inherently frustrated when our work is misinterpreted. At the heart of this debate is "the question of what I 'said,' what meanings are 'in' my text" (76). Who "owns" the text determines who gives it meaning, value, and legitimacy.
      Elbow names the interaction between reader and writer as one of "disdain," approaching "mean and disrespectful." The reader wants to control the text, to remove the writer from the scene; the writer, already knowing s/he is absent in the mind of the reader comes to disdain the readers' misinterpretation and appropriation of her/his creation. This is when we may see the writer say, in the words of Elbow, " 'Readers are not my main audience. Sometimes the audience that I write for is me. For some pieces I don't even care whether readers always understand or appreciate everything I write [....] What do readers know?" (76). To me, this is a self-defense mechanism; always/already absent from his or her text, the author tries to regain control by making him/herself the audience; this, however, only serves to further the belief that the power is in the hands of the readers.
      These types of moves are common in fanfiction, but, as always with new media, the multiple authors, multiple texts, and fragmented composition of the texts create some interesting rhetorical moves and the creation of some strange writings meant to ease the shift from writer to reader. These, I think, are based on those common responses readers and writers have in classroom settings; the language of individual interpretation is learned early, and the ideologies of individualism are so tightly woven into American culture that self-expression through writing is a fairly common experience. It is when the writer can actually talk back, can use those responses to shape a continuing text that makes for an interesting study: What we would expect to be a typically (generically) monologic discourse is, through the implimentation and encouragement of peer review processes, becoming dialogic. And that dialogue between writer and reader is, as the genre expands, gains momentum, and establishes its own traditions, becoming an integral part of a text that is already complicated by problems of invention, authorship, and genre. And by "dialogic" I am not just refering to the way texts "enter into conversations with" other texts, or "respond to" other texts; I am refering to acutal dialogue between writer and reader about the writing process being inserted into the text itself, being refered to in various rhetorical moves that mimic other genres, but use these moves to create a further sense of fan community.
      What do these moves look like? What kind of feedback, and thus dialogue, is being created? How does it compare to what we do in a composition classroom? These are questions I want to consider in Return of the Fragmented Essay; I also would like to note to myself here that at some point I need to address (okay, figure out) my own standpoint on whether the peer review skills are "tools" that can be moved from context to context or whether the reframing in an academic setting means the skills must change, discourses must be silenced, fanfiction must be denigrated as non-legitimate texts...and how that affects peer reviewing in its two separate contexts.

Posting Apocalyptic

Demons always have red eyes

Overheard: Woof woof! Woooof! Aaaaaaah Oooooooh! I love you, Back Bay!

The dogs, the wolves, that are in all of us--the souls of Paradise--it's ecstasy when your skin can sing with chills and love.

InuYasha quote of the week:
As Kagome sat on her bed making these calls from her room, Inuyasha waited, content to give her some “privacy” as he listened to her through the closed door telling her lies to humans.
Everyone's got to have limits. Mine is when the strawberries are in my mouth and that's all there is to think of, not even the sleeting through the open window.

It wasn't meant to be sad. But she kept looking away, at the stars, craning her neck to look out the hatchback's window as best she could from the back seat. She got quiet always when we passed this intersection. She always was a drama queen. She told the best stories; even ones that were meant to be sad. I listened as she reworked the events, making important things into side notes, making subplots and satires out of the most mundane of things. We went to go eat, and this guy was there, staring at us--probably because we were half naked in the middle of winter--but what was important was when he looked at us, and said in this agonizingly slow--I mean, turtle versus hare slow--voice "Can I take that tray from y'all?" We were trying so hard not to laugh, and my bra strap had snapped, and it just made me remember why I have to leave this state. Really. Now.

Slowly, he told her about long sleep, about the divine interventions she had missed while napping.
trick
tickle
suffering of the lungs
the oil of the surface of water
trickling
Time is wasting
waist deep in water
the sum of the puns
equals that special number

unlike the savages of her day
she moves in sallow light with glee
not desiring more than what she sees
not informing the cold rooms with fires.

usual cautions surfeiting the way
she slightly limps to the shaddows wtih ease
the elves and imps about her free
her hair from binds and silver wires

Waiting out the Weekend (Perchance to Dream)

Oh, how horrible.
You'd think that someone like me would be thrilled to spend today, this dreary New England day, the Thursday before SuperBowl (or, as I think of it, Potential Riot Sunday), indoors, in a mediocre, yet comfortable office chair (forest green, swivel, fully adjustable), hiding from the little nature that there is out there.
You'd think that, and you'd be mostly correct. What is not said, is that if this were undergrad, I would SO be skipping class tonight. The thought of spending two and a half hours alert is about to break me down into my elemental pieces. Who says that to dream is to be unengaged? I promise, I'll dream of the various relationships between texts and contexts, and rhetorics of the body.
A dream in Japanese is "Yume." Yume is also a girl's name, as is "yumi" and "Ayumi." I don't know what either of those mean. To dream in French is "Rever." Tonight is last Saturday's FullMetal Alchemist and Ghost in the Shell. "Ghost in the Machine" is the term for our fears about communication, and "Rage Against the Machine" is a term for a band that fears Ghosts, Shells, and systems.
3 and a half hours to go. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. There are more things to think of on a Thursday, Chibi-chan, than we dream of in classes about philosophy.