Limbaugh confirmed a$$hole

Two news stories today caught my attention as I wasted the hours between class and teaching. The first you can access by clicking the title of this blog (at least for a few weeks).
Limbaugh confirmed as asshole
Monday during his all-too-popular radio show, Rush Limbaugh said the following of actor and activist Michael J Fox: "He is exaggerating the effects of the disease," Limbaugh told listeners.

He's moving all around and shaking and it's purely an act. . . . This is really shameless of Michael J. Fox. Either he didn't take his medication or he's acting.

This is the end of Disability Education Awareness Month, and Limbaugh obviously is not aware of the reality of chronic ilness. Nor is the editor of our lovely Exponent who stated in his editorial last week that Purdue is doing a good job paying attention to the architectural difficulties of our campus and is thus "aware." But making changes to architecture is only the beginning of disability awareness--just because access is "granted" to those of us with mobility issues, doesn't mean that the access is good or convenient access. It means that we have met the minimum criteria to be considered accessible. It certainly doesn't mean that this is a friendly environment for students with disabilities--instead, it means the administration can wipe its hands clean of the issue and pat itself on the back. The *real* problems that come with a disability are never addressed.
Limbaugh's comments make sense, given that most people do not understand the daily reality of those living with "impairments" (many quotation marks throughout). No, Fox doesn't shake continually, but that doesn't mean that he is faking during those times he does have to abandon control for awhile. Chronic illness is not constant, it is not eternal, it is not homogenous minute to minute. It is always shifting with the multiple constraints of each given situation.
I don't have to admonish Limbaugh; his comments are just plain insensitive, not just to Fox, but to all of us with neurological problems.

Reversion: Control and Mastery

Yes, I have been absently absent digitally. Note to self: Never schedule major presentations and papers to be due during midterms and your birthday.

In our Victorian Literature class, Emily Allen was surprised at the lack of ability to do a close reading among graduate students. I flashed back to my first close reading ever, on Blake's poem about the chimney sweep. My reading was pedantic, but at least it was a close reading: I interpreted the adjectives used, the line breaks, the form of the poem, and its allusions.
I'd never even consider that as a valide essay now.
We have become so immersed in "cultural studies" in the loosest sense of the term that we have forgotten the main methods of our field. Even the great scholars in literary theory spend so much time contextualizing that their "close readings" seem to be simply quotations with a nod toward the reader: Look at this quote. We all know how to read it. Now let's see how Dickens' financial situation influenced his use of the word "miser" here.
This is not a close reading. Instead, the sort of close reading and mastery over the text that the New Critics provided us with has been shunted aside; perhaps because we are loathe to remember the ideology from which close reading emerged. The "empirical" feel to close reading and the New Critics' attempts to scientize literary studies makes us very uncomfortable. And so close reading becomes one technique among many, and not the primary goal of an interpretation.
I won't say whether this is right or wrong in general (as a rhetorician, I cannot speak for the literary critics), but to me this feels irresponsible. As Professor Burleson so naively says in my communication studies class, the point of literary studies is to "understand" (another word we hesitate on) the work in front of us. And that means a certain mastery over, control over, the text itself which we in this postmodern non-arboreal, anti-hierarchical context cringe at. We say we are doing a "violence" to a text when we "mark" it (Bartholomae, Ways of Reading introduction and Derrida, Acts of Literature). The instant we comment on it, the text is no longer "the" text--it mutates and becomes something else, Derrida says. This may be true: My marks on Wordsworth's "Prelude" have made it very different from the original text. And I certainly intend to do a violence to it by leaving my own mark upon the history of that text and its various meanings.
But I do this through what I call a "rhetorical" analysis--and rhetorical analysis is not afraid of close reading. Rhetorical analysis seeks to master the text and its life in the real world. Rhetorical analysis looks at possible intent, possible effects, possible meanings: it is forceful and assumptive, and until recently was unapologetic about making statements such as "Women are drawn to softer colors; therefore, O'Keefe's painting is aimed toward the feminine understanding." We make assumptions about the meaning of an italicized word, about the use of a comma, about the need for a border around an advertisement based on the commonplaces of our given society. It's Aristotelian, it's Burkiean, it's whitemale.
Other than the types of questions asked, a "close reading" done for literary studies is no different from one done in rhetorical studies. I wonder why our students--and, it seems, grad students--do not seem to have the procedures embedded in their brains. (Of course, I didn't have those in there until I took Lamar's Intro to Lit and Sue's Mass Media class in the same semester and began noticing overlaps). Do we fear so much to master a text that we have abandoned the notion of getting "close" to a text?
I sound like a conservative East Coast literature person, I know. But cultural studies is not a method for getting at a text's meaning--it's a method of getting at a text's culture, it's ideologies, it's seeds and progeny. We have only one method of attempting to understand meaning, and that's through close reading. It may be a reversion of sorts, but it doesn't have to be. You can still use the methods of close reading and assert a multiplicity of views at once. You can make the large assumptions that rhetorical theory requires (thanks so much, Aristotle et al) and still acknowledge that for any given culture or individual, these readings might not be the same. There doesn't have to be an air of empirical certainty to your reading; nor is it avoidable to do the violence to the text that Derrida describes (in fact, he doesn't lament that we do this violence--I'd argue he simply points it out).
The mixed methodologies of cultural studies (in its formal sense) allows us to use whatever we can get our hands on in order to explain a given rhetorical situation. To do so, we examine texts and their interaction with the context in which they are created. We must read the texts a culture produces just as much as we should the research economics, ecololgy, material conditions, interpersonal relationships, etc that were available in that time. If the time is a present time, we should empirically research the attitudes towards an idea, towards a text, towards a statement and catalogue for future generations our understandings of this data. How do people feel about dystopian films? What explanations are commonly given for reading 1984? And then, what about Brave New World's construction, content, or style might be appealing to high school teachers so that it ends up on syllabi? How does the text argue for change, and how does that argument reflect the conditions in which Huxley was writing? What other treatises were available that same year, and how were those formally constructed? What genre conventions are present in these novels, and how do those conventions transfer to film? How is the hero represented, and how do audiences feel about that hero when they actually are reading? Close reading mixes with historical research and can blend in empirical, qualitative, attitudinal studies. (And it will).
Literature meets rhetoric in the text itself. A true rhetorical theory of fiction (sorry Booth, you didn't go far enough) would combine all of the elements above. And I believe that literature studies needs rhetorical studies right now (and perhaps vice versa), as we make the so-called "ethical turn" in literary theory. The ethical turn is concerned with the text's relationship to the reader and how much the text imposes upon the reader's values and selfhood. How can we possibly understand that without understanding how to read, and how a text is carefully constructed affectively (toward affect)?
As I read attempts at close readings, I keep thinking that if these critics had knowledge of rhetorical theory and methods they wouldn't be working so hard to make claims about "style". What is missing from close reading is a mastery of reading as an act that takes place in time and space. Burke's methods of criticism--if we can call them methods--seem to me the perfect blend of the literary and the rhetorical senses of close reading. He examines not only what happens as a reader reads, but looks at other uses of the metaphors in question over the lifetime of the author. He looks at how a sentence moves the reader from one idea to the next--how ideas get transformed and speculates, based on contextual information why an author would write such a transformation. He imagines what a reader "learns" or gains from a text as to why some texts become canonical or popular. He theorizes the connection between author and reader as one taking place in an undefined space that both share--shared values, common vocabulary, communal traditions and rituals that make two seem like one. And only then does he (begin to) consider larger social movements.
Literary studies tends to do this backward: the context is selected and then applied to the text. Good studies look at the give and take between text and context, but rarely do we see the close attention to each individual word and punctuation that Burke would have us do. His reading of "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is considered masterful by literary critics (traditional!) and rhetorical critics alike because it is such a close reaidng, not only of the text, but of the texts surrounding Keats at that time.
In order to write my dissertation, I am going to have to argue for a Burkeian methodology for literary studies. Few, if any, have tried to extrapolate what that methodology might look like, had Burke ever set a literary "program" as he did a rhetorical one. And I will use dystopian fiction as an exemplar to make this argument, showing how texts--especially modern ones--inflitrate so many areas of culture (and, of course, that it is important to study the arguments these texts make) that it is necessary to adopt a different approach to literature. Mastery of a text doesn't just mean exploring a context. It doesn't just mean doing a close reading. Mastery involves all those moves that Burke makes in his readings of literature that few have been able to replicate since then.
The question is, can I do it?

Reversion

six shots of espresso later and i'm still yawning
dawn is no closer than the last repeat of the cd
--can i call it a daydream when it's still night--
bloody cardinals and inky jays and muddy hawks
skirt the edges of the heavy parts of the air
that settled just above here last night
it's weighted with water to drown out the pain

musty carpets and bathrobes smell like before
(before i left for eastern pastures)
our insubstantial consubstantial murmurings at dinner
--we can call it immediate for now--
mixed elves wtih oily corn, love with silk shirts
the stones we leaped in the fog, in a waltz
reeked old dampness from the creek and the dew

elastic in my veins is like (mutatis mutandis)
when love was so easy (sine qua non)

Article on Dystopian Structures

Openning grafs of an article for Crossings.

If we take seriously Lacan's notion of the symbolic order, that which puts a screen over the Real, and Kaja Silverman's the idea that all narratives are about apocalypse, then it makes sense to study the ways in which we represent dystopia to ourselves. Apocalyptic writings have long been temporal paradoxes: John of Patmos's Revelation is just one example of the genre which writes present dystopian scenes as future apocalypses. Verbal tense issues aside, "time" in apocalyptic literature--and thus in dystopian literature-- tends to lack the linnear nature, the causality we traditionally use to order events in history. Dystopian literature, as a generic hybrid of science fiction and the literature of social criticism, uses this tradition of temporal tinkering as the main rhetorical technique in its warnings. Memory, nostaligia, and narrative order in dystopian fiction form the exigency upon which the rest of the argument of the text rests. Nowhere is this phenomenon used so efficiently as in LeGuin's The Dispossessed, Haruki Murikami's Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World, and Atwood's most recent dystopia, Oryx and Crake.
Peter Brooks describes the nature of narrative as an "arabesque," a squiggle representing turns and twists that prevent the story from ending prematurely. As Dino Felluga explains, "Brooks argues that we are driven to read because of our drive to find meaningful, bounded, totalizing order to the chaos of life; however, that drive for order is most fulfilling after the detours or dilations that we associate with plot. If the order of closure comes too soon, it can feel like a short-circuit, as if we were cheated somehow" ("Modules on Brooks: On Narrative Desire"). Borrowing from the Formalists, Brooks distinguishes between szujet and fabula, story (as the events happened in a linear time), and discourse, (events as they are retold). The difference is important for Brooks: discourse is the artistic, rhetorical method by which we attempt to make sense of our past. In Kenneth Burke's terms, narrative is the symbolic action that gives us "equipment for living;" in his opening pages of Rhetoric of Motives, Burke describes how writing about killing a person, is really "killing the principle which that person represents." Narrative, writing, for Brooks and Burke (and, to an extent, Freud), is not only theraputic, but is a necessary part of human existence. It is what defines us as human, as Burke notes in his "Definition of (hu)Man". Smbolic action is how we not only communicate and re-present reality to ourselves--is not "mere rhetoric"--but is the fundamental action of humanity. Literature of all types is aware of that fact and dystopian literature makes explicit to its readers the possible impact of the narratives we create for each other. Dystopian literature is as much about the possibilities of narrative as it is an exercise in didactic writing.
LeGuin's "ambiguous utopia", Murakami's dreamworld/real world split, and Atwood's schizophrenic narrator take out many of the neat divisions the first dystopian novels (We, 1984,Fahrenheit 451> depended on. Instead, the novels create a different binary than Dystopia/Utopia; each of these novels split time into a "before dystopic event" and "after dystopic event," alternating their chapters between the two times until the "before" meets up with the moment of the "after" the novel begins with. Structurally, the story is divided in halves, and invites contrast between the times. As the heroes' consciousness shifts in each time, the audience is given certain insights, many of which remain unexplained until the two halves meet up. This is not Brooks's squiggly line; the timelines are broken to the reader, and simple causality is denied.
There are many fictions dealing with trauma that make such rhetorical moves. This particular rhetorical move depends upon what Brooks calls "narrative desire"--the tensions a reader and teller experience as the story is transformed to discourse. The desire for knowledge about the trauma, to put it "into words," to tame the real with the symbolic order, drives these novels. Even the 9/11 commission report uses such a structure; instead of including the "after," however, we are asked to supply that on our own. Still, the report fills in our desire to make the traumatic events of that day meet up with our current experience, and despite its dry writing, the report sold millions of copies. The desire to narrate and the desire for narrative--to enter into symbolic action--is the lynchpin of many discourses, fiction and nonfiction.
What makes dystopian literature special, then? Why does 1984 still evoke such a strong response, despite the change of context? Why does Big Brother haunt our collective consciousnesses? Why is there a strong desire among academics to separate dystopian fiction from the ghettoized genre of scifi?

Wednesday Class: Fun in the Computer Lab

First 15-20 minutes of class

Click link above and log in

Watch video clip. Take notes either on your computer, or with the traditional method (pen and paper. Not stone and chisel.)

Respond for 5 minutes, free writing into your blog space

Watch again, amending your notes when necessary

Revise your free writing into a coherent blog

Read someone else's blog. Make a comment so you all feel loved

Second 20 minutes of class

Pair up with someone new. Work at one computer. (Fastest typer gets the privilege of keyboard control).

Turn to page 270-280, also keep open 402-403.

Go to This Website

Use your knowledge of ethos and pathos, and the "seven" things you need to think about when composing a text (I added more, remember?) to analyze the page. You might choose to focus on one aspect (such as the kinds of audiences or the genre) to make a claim or argument about what the page is doing or how it is doing it. Type up your comments, working together to create at least a paragraph.

Post it to one of your blogs--Mark it as a joint venture. This will not count toward your requirement.

Assignment for Thursday: Read CDA p.329-346

neither/nor

Kennedy, George. Classical Rhetoric and Its Christian and Secular Tradition.

Primary Rhetoric. Civic Rhetoric. Technical Rhetoric. Philosophic Rhetoric. If we break it down enough times, will we arrive at a definition that would satisfy even the Socrates of Gorgias?
Defining "rhetoric" or "communication" or "oratory" is practically a clichéd move in academia. How many classes have I had in rhetoric which started off asking us, in small groups, to try to write a definition? Each time it happens, I groan a little deeper, feel a little more frustrated, become more convinced that there is no good answer, that every answer is itself a rhetorical move (what does that mean?) meant to fulfill the ontological requirements of a university course. What is it that you're doing in your field?
And we say the word "constructed" as though it's very flimsy-ness could save us.
In Kennedy's history (overview? handbook?), I can see the threads that provide the base of our assumptions, our grounding of the universe. What is valued, what is given status as Real, what is appropriate to love. The poet-prophet didn't emerge suddenly in Romanticism, popping out of Worsdworth's head like the Robot on FLCL; it was coddled, protected, tended like a rare flower, set to bloom at the right time, throbbing underneath us the whole time. The philosopher-kings who will save us in Plato's The Republic were the forerunners to the poets who staved off dystopia during the Revolutionary upheavals of the 18th and 19th centuries. The rhetoric of dystopia is tied to the origins of rhetoric itself: as a political, civil tool, rhetoric shaped "Western" states and communities. Rhetoric is steeped in the goal of attaining the ideal, of receiving justice, ordering relationships among citizens. U/Dystopian rhetoric feels so didactic because its concerns are the same as those were when rhetoric was at its origins. It is what we know, and what we know well, what we Compositionists teach our students to see in the advertisements of magazines and TV shows.
I see it forming even in the dialogue Gorgias, the commonplaces that get transformed into plotlines in 1984, Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World. And I have to wonder: Are there African dystopias? Chinese? Middle Eastern? Of course, the apocalyptic narrative is as old as Judaism, but what of the focus that makes it uniquely dystopian: the desire that the text itself will change the future? That writing dystopian cities prevents their existance? Or is dystopia only possible because of its ties to rhetoric and logic, the need for binary oppositions and the privileging of the mind over the body?
In postmodernism, we revel at our "progress" past these definitions. A fictional place may be both utopian and dystopian, or neither/nor. Topian. But our ability to think out of these (Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, cyberpunk in general) is not so much a triumph of Derridian deconstruction and an evolving sophistication of thought as it is a haphazzared break from an ontological prison created by Plato and Friends a few thousand years ago. Thanks, Plato. Had we stuck with the Sophists, it is likely dystopian fiction as we know it would have never been written. Certainly the rhetorical strategies used to convince readers to embark upon social change would have been quite different. It is likely that literary style as a whole would be quite different. Imagine 1984 written not with the tone of desperation and suspense leading up to a climax, but the continual ebb and flow of tension, the stylistics of the Sophists making hell not just from description but from the rhythm and sounds of the words themselves. Imagine if "context" had been privileged throughout history, and relativism had come into our consciousness not via Albert Einstein's mathematical proofs, but as a cultural assumption just as firm as our belief in science.
And what do we do with that shaky category of text called "narrative"? Is narrative, as the early rhetoricians believed, a part of (tool of?) a larger rhetoric? Is narrative a style of speaking, of ordering information? Does it belong in the middle of an argument, as a method of support? As a rhetorical technique, is narrative outside the realm of the analysable?
Or, is narrative, rhetorical itself; always/already constructed with a careful beginning, middle, end, styled to an audience's taste, and contingent upon context? Perhaps my trouble with distinction is a historical one: When did narrative stop being a part of a larger rhetorical construct, and begin to be able to act on its own, without the appeals to the gods, the statement of purpose, the address to the audience, that Aristotle and others pre/describe? How did narrative get to stand alone--how, over time, did audiences become so accustomed to the commonplaces of rhetoric that we could skip all that beginning framing stuff and jump right to the story? And how do children today learn those assumptions? Are we yet trapped within our topoi? Is that why there hasn't been any new genres of literature in a few hundred years, only hybrids of existing ones?
How the hell do you get an entire world to change its generic expectations so that new types of argument and new methods of rhetoric can come into being?
What is rhetoric? What is communication? We could dwell on categorizations and qualifications of our terms. We could theorize the limits of human understanding, of identification, of brain chemistry and language. But these questions are themselves constructed questions, being important only in so far was we're told they're important, they've always been important. Etc. But I agree with Levinas, that there must be questions prior to ontological ones--not What is X?
Not What is the nature of Y? We've been trying to answer these questions ever since the Greeks woke up one morning and started a republic dependent on speaking. We all know what we're doing, we all have an implicit, intuitive sense of what rhetoric and oratory are--even Plato admits this in Gorgias. But to actually define it, in sentence form, with all qualifications and complications is a stupid, exhausting, and fruitless enterprise. We're asking the wrong questions for this context.
That's what I learned at Bluffton, I think. That the questions most academics ask will take us only so far: the limit of ontology is, for the moment, the sphere of the academy. If we want to move beyond the academy, we have to stop asking "to be" questions, and ask "For whom?" The "surprsing" move toward ethics (the "ethical turn" that comes after the "cultural turn" and the "rhetorical turn") isn't surprising at all. The dystopian threads that permeate everyting (according to me, according to Jameson, according to Booker), require that we take notice of where we are. Of what we're doing. And of how these texts keep pushing at us, being determinative. Even before our "post-9/11 world" dystopia was startlingly present, and dystopia has always concerned the relationship of the individual to the many, of self to state. Foucault showed us that we're living in dystopia and that we happily consent to it.
So pay attention: dystopia is utopia and utopia is dystopia. The difference is in the stories we tell about them. As I told Pam Nath three years ago, "It's all just words."

Thoughts while on 3A

Guardian
He never cared about the hole by her temple. An open space to worship near the sacred concrete. Here they could both stare at something else for awhile.
She always paused before entering into this contract. Head slightly cocked to the left, suspending words like marionets. She was the type of person to theorize each brick in the wall.
He turned his head away when she fell every morning. The ritual failure caught just enough to be unseen. She cried and rubbed the hole by the temple for hope tomorrow.
He piled the softness around her ankles more each afternoon. His halo made dimmer for her bright eyes. The pair scuffled, waded in cloth and silk and light.
She saw him as two people become one in her dreams. Lips poised at the ready to spur on great works of man. She closed her door so he wouldn't hear her pray.

Fear not

I thought Fredric Jameson had stolen my work. In a way he did; the heavy theoretical underpinnings I was trying to squeeze out in the Summer of Insanity (2004) make a neat and tidy appearance in a single chapter in his book. It would have taken me two or three. He did it in less than 30 pages.
I thought I would have to start over again. I had become so invested in my problems with temporality and causality that I forgot that which I seem to always forget. Let me quote myself from last year:

My thinking on it has shifted again; I realize, reading Shor's article,that I must rethink the rhetorical situation of U/dys-topian lit. That in many ways, I am correct that it is written to be received by all audiences, and that
the general public is aware enough of the conditions of Utopia and the problems
it could pose. In many other ways, however, I have forgotten that although
anyone can understand the literature, few actually pick up the books to engage
in that relationship I outlined. I need to add one more factor, one more
causality, into my neat little equation, one which will complicate the hell out
of things, but will clean up the ultimate problem I have with rhetorical
criticisms in general: How is it actually received? What are the conditions that
are behind any one reading of the text? Other than shoving the book in their
hands and holding a gun to their heads, how do publicists convince readers to
read? Who else, other than publicists, do this job? What other conditions
surround the reading of dystopian texts? Utopian texts? Don't they necessarily
assume an engaged reader? What happens when the reader is forced to read ( F451
in high schools, for example)? What about the physical presence of the
book? Silly Amy. How could I have overlooked such simple things? The theory, Oh, the theory....

Yes

These are the questions that are for me to answer; these are the Burkeian questions dealing with those beings Jameson does not seem to imagine: readers in a specific context. This is where cultural studies is most cultural: in the lived experience. That is what I will contribute; I will not contradict Jameson, but flesh out what he has left implicit, has left unsaid, or has simply ignored.
Mojo. Hell yeah.

Understanding Learning Disabilities: How Difficult Can This Be?

Frustration
Anxiety
Tension

The prepositions blend and idioms unwind. Do you turn a light “up” or “on”? Are my legs over the table or on it? Was that water passing under the bridge or the bridge going over water?

It is the lack that tracks our eyes to the skull in the center.

Let loose scraps of the alphabet into questions as weapons: nuclear phrases imploding over orations.

Fullmetal Alchemist: The Trauma of the Real

If, as Baudrillard claims, the postmodern era is that which is marked by the hyperreal, the substitution of the Real with signs for the Real, an inability to access the Real because our images and symbolic structures (systems of substitution) have superseded the Real, then what can we say about those artifacts of pop culture that wish to examine the Real via substitutions, by animation or performance—that is, how do our representations which have displaced the Real now attempt to explain that which we cannot know?

Fullmetal Alchemist is a rich text for its questioning of science, religion, and militarization. It also, however, begins to make an argument about the nature of the Real in its final episodes (48-51). When Hoenheim of Light appears to explain to Edward and Alphonse about the Philosopher’s Stone (a dense manifestation of the Real), he also hints at, but does not fully explain what exactly happened to Ed and Al when they attempted human transmutation. Edward is haunted still by the images of “The Gate” (or Door, depending on your translation) where some omnipotent Gatekeeper controls the flow between dimensions.

Edward is isolated by his connection to the Real, his memory of the Gate which controls material and temporal existence for two worlds. Alchemy, which on Earth never yielded any fruits and was replaced by the more scientific Chemistry, flourishes in Ed and Al’s world, Amestris, and is the legitimated form of science and power. Alchemy is how the people understand their world: through Equivalent Exchange (or Trade), where “humankind cannot gain anything without first giving something in return,” the people (for the most part) organize their philosophies and values. Alchemy, not the hard science we know on Earth, orders language and government. Alchemists transmute everything from water to radios (never gold, however—like the Middle Ages here on earth, transmuting gold is a crime), and are the privileged class for their knowledge about the universe.

But Ed and Al soon discover that there is more to Alchemy than drawing Transmutation Circles around the matter they wish to re-order when Ed attempts to transmute his mother’s remains into a living, souled person again. Despite drawing an intricate circle with all of the elements of fire, life, water, etc, despite using his own blood as catalyst, despite his knowledge and research, Ed fails at his attempt at human transmutation: it is not possible, he learns later, because there is no equivalent trade for a soul.

The attempt, however, is the closest anyone has gotten in years. Ed and Al managed to create a being, a mass of flesh and bone that groaned in pain before Ed destroyed it. And that being was created because Ed’s Circle managed to open and make manifest the Gate in his barn.

The Gate is left unexplained for most of the series. It appears as hands grabbing, little black homunculi babies with white eyes reaching for flesh—for the material of human bodies. These homunculi steal Al’s body as part of the Equivalent Exchange for his mother’s body, and use it to create the human-like homunculus named Sloth. Al’s mind is left at the Gate (this is never explained), but Edward, also at the Gate, manages to capture Al’s soul and tie it to a piece of armor by drawing a transmutation circle on the armor with his own blood.

Ed does not escape from his encounter with the Gate unscathed. His right arm and left leg are taken by the homunculi (later given to the homunculus named Wrath) and the images of the homunculi tearing his flesh flash throughout the series in short scenes. Mostly this encounter is left as a nightmare; despite the fact that it begins the series, Ed and Al’s foray into human transmutation and the resulting encounter with the Real are left unexplored until the end of the anime, when their father, Hoenheim returns.

When the nature of the Gate is explained as a conduit between worlds, as a transformation station of souls and matter, Edward begins to understand why human transmutation cannot work without a Philosopher’s Stone, which is itself made up of thousands of human bodies and souls, compressed into a small (blood)red gem. Edward is only 15, however, and since the series is conducted through his point of view, much is left unexplained and unsaid.

What is explained, however, is why Edward, unlike other Alchemists, does not need a transmutation circle to do alchemy. By simply clapping his hands and thinking of what he wants to happen, Edward is able to perform alchemic changes in an instant. Transmutation circles can take minutes or hours to draw (or longer, depending on the complexity of the transformation), but Edward no longer needs to draw out the relationships between the elements he plans to use. Transmutation circles can be seen as what Baudrillard calls “the visible machinery of icons [which] substituted for the pure and intelligible idea of God” (4). In fact, Edward refuses to believe in God after his encounter with the Gate: all is material presence to him. Icons, as representation of the real which supersede the real, like Transmutation circles, are simulacra; they get in between us and the Real and in doing so erase the Real completely. For the most part, humans are happy with this.

If Transmutation circles are simulacra that the humans of Amestris replace the Real with, it only makes sense that after his encounter with the Real at the Gate Edward no longer needs the circles to perform Alchemy. Whereas the circles mediate the Real so that Alchemists do not have to touch it (the Real, the Gate) directly, Edward’s “small inner Gate” (as Hoenheim explains) has been opened and thus Edward has immediate access to the Real. In exchange for this access, however, he loses his limbs and his ability to identify with the outside world. He becomes isolated and withdrawn, and it is only as his quest for the Philosopher’s Stone draws to an end--when he believes he may be able to stop using Alchemy someday—that he begins to reenter into the symbolic order by forgiving his father (or at least speaking to him) and hinting at his love for his childhood friend Winry.

Iconography marked Alchemy’s period here on Earth and the images of that time are still with us. The snake and pole which were symbols for renewal and rebirth became the caduceus of medicine, the five pointed star (representing the unity of the five elements) became a satanic symbol of inversion. These symbols are now simulations and parodies of their original meanings, back when we believed we could control the material world, the Real, by recombining its elements. When we codified matter into zodiac symbols and created a sign or representation for everything. Alchemy attempted to change the material world by working with the signs that simulate it. These signs, icons, at times sacred symbols, have stayed with us and have accumulated meanings—but not materiality. Symbolicity has not led us to the Real, but has led us to erase it.

Fullmetal Alchemist as a series resonates with us not only for its action/adventure treasure hunt for the Philosopher’s Stone or its detective story unveiling of Ed and Al’s father’s past actions, but for its attempt to explain Earth’s interaction with the Real, for our failure to conquer Alchemy. When Hoenheim explains to Ed that Earthling’s souls are the medium of transmutation, Ed is horrified: that is what he is touching when he claps his hands and imagines a transmutation, that is the purpose of the Gate—to regulate the flow of soul, body, and mind between dimensions of Being. The Gate that haunts Ed is the “desert of the real,” the unmapped, uncharted desert, the desert before we could represent it, pure materiality without symbols. The space of the Gate is white, sound echoes to an infinity, and the Gatekeeper’s being-ness is questionable. It is both nowhere and everywhere, nothing and everything, and the Truth that Ed claims to have seen there is so overwhelming it makes him sick. His father has passed through this Truth so many times that his physical body has begun to rot into its constituent molecules. Al’s mind resides somewhere there, in the inaccessable real.

If Baudrillard is correct in his assertion that postmodernity has led us to a kind of simulacra of simulacra, a disconnect with history and space, then how do we account for paranormal TV shows that attempt to explain the Real, to recover a division between reality and fantasy, to explore textuality and symbolicity in all their complicated glory? Fullmetal Alchemist is, of course, an uncanny text: the world of Amestris is so similar to Earth, yet the presence of Alchemy makes it strange. There is a historical resonance with the Middle Ages that cannot be ignored; FMA doubles the past and places it in the present. The story of the Philosopher’s Stone is fairly well known, and this retelling is an adaptation of an original tale. And the level of representation is further complicated by the medium: FMA is an animation created from a manga text. As a member of that genre called anime, FMA simulates the ur-anime text (whatever that may be) in its stylization. And, since Alchemy is a Western tradition, and anime is an Eastern one, there is some cultural translation (itself a reproduction/simulation) that causes a strange resulting representation. All of these factors of simulation, reproduction, and translation come together in a text attempting to discover/uncover/recover the Real by breaking down symbol systems (transmutation circles, bodies, cities), yet remaining within a readable language. How then, can any text explore the Real?

Much has been left unsaid in the series; startling images at the Gate are not verbally explained, but left only as iconography. While the FMA movie, The Gate of Shambala, attempted to delve further into this realm, it has served only to increase fan speculation about what the Gate “really” is and how it “really” works; the explanations were unsatisfactory even though the visuals were stunningly beautiful. It is unlikely that the “Truth” that Ed claims to have seen will ever be revealed to the viewers: it is something only Ed could see, as he was one of only a few to actually experience the Real of the Gate. As Baudrillard says, “It is always the goal of the ideological analysis [read: the fan interpretations] to restore the objective process, it is always a false problem to wish to restore the truth beneath the simulacrum” (27).
Poot--tee--weet.

Disability paper--I have no map

Clumps of thought to explore, or The Amylea Clemons Method of Paper Writing

“There seems to be a chasm between the medical knowledge of a condition, and how it impinges on academic progress.” (Report from Queensland University of Technology on ME/CFS in post-secondary ed)
Primary texts: Compliance documents from two universities. Purdue and Florida vs Queensland
Method: Close reading of the translation of ADA required material into web information on university sites.
Goal: to discuss the attitudes, values, and assumptions that underlie the construction of official statements (read: “legally mandated statements”) of disability services at the university level. What ideologies and definitions of “disability” are embedded in the language of the document? (Here I’m thinking of J Blake Scott’s article on Confide home testing for HIV, where “normalcy” and WASP ideology are constructed despite attempts at empathy and political correctness.)

Contextualization: ADA requirements, recommendations from ed.gov
Frameworks:
Use Mezzy’s terministic screens of interpretation of legal documents for own interpretations. Grammarian problems.
Edward Schiappa’s Defining Reality asks us to consider definition not as finding an “essence” but as contextualized:

It is not that X is Y, but that X should count as Y in context C. When we do this, however, we should ask “What are our shared purposes in defining X? What interests and values are advanced by competing definitions? Whose interests are being served by a particular definition and do we want to identify with those interests? What are the consequences of the ‘essential’ characteristics promoted by a definition, given that every category ‘valorizes some point of view and silences another’ (177-178).

To what extent do the definitions in university “judicial” documents (documents that serve a legal function) serve one interest or another? What definitions are used, and what are the attitudes toward that definition? What are the attitudes toward the ADA in general, and how is the ADA definition presented (where, to what extent is it quoted, how is it explained, links?) What version of “disability” emerges from the university’s use of the ADA’s legal language? Who benefits from these definitions, and what attitudes emerge from those definitions? What consequences might there be?

How is normalcy constructed in the documents? (Davis) What is “normal” for the university? How is “university” itself constructed in the documents? More importantly, how are these arguments made, and what authorities do they draw from?

Support for close reading: AHEAD website’s comments and recommendations. Overview of judicial rhetoric research in disability studies. Criticism of university regulations for chronic illness in Australia. (three studies)

Found poems--literally

I've been "cleaning" my apartment for the last week, in the process of rearranging furniture (read: "books") and I keep finding fragments of poems I seem to have written in strange places. I have no desire to lose these, but given my track record...
Presenting, Poems Found in Amy's Living Room

Prose poem: The month of May

If it were warmer and my head were clearer, I'd do yoga on someone else's lawn at midnight. Why bother crying? The film makes it obvious: Icons link the unknown dead to the known, my desires to my dreams. The History Channel mutters at me things I already know and mixes these with sleep. The need to fly east drives my eyes to the clouds I believe I can reach--I used to fly.
Why can't I ask about the star sickening my cheeks, my teeth, my gums? The scene was on the screen, and it bent my innocence back by degrees of horror and logic. If I ask, the door will be opened, but the words are coded too deeply in too many individuals who keep bleeding into each other, onto the floor which accepts their tissue and enlightenment ensues.
The furniture is above ground and I cannot sit still.
The door's wood feels fake, and its grainlessness makes me recoil my fist--I will not knock; I am not supposed to be here. The edges of my skin fade into the damp night, and being flashes for a moment: This is real, I am alive, and there is no one else who can hear my heartbeat.
Infinity for a moment, the flap of a butterfly's wings remiding me that I can, in fact, burn in hell. A brick wall between you and God--18 inches--if it's not from the heart, it's not praise. Where is my evidence, my salvation, but in my ends?
When I fall asleep, I tell myself lies about what will be--not the Beast or the bloody water, but of scenes of my own redemption in fractal forms. Sacred art, the cross around my neck, that snake I love for its unsealed mythology--worshiped representations shadowing the touchable. It is black or white or yellow. Be reverent as you circle round one another, triangles and stars and goats with piercing horns nailing him to a cross, driving through the varely holding sheath between This and That, the red on my sheet telling me it was more than a bad dream.
Let's dance and revere some new myth. It's not about divinity or truth holding or an Englightement. It never was. This represents the blood and mine has been impure for so long that I keep asking the wrong questions, forgiving the wrong sin. I know it's not your fault.
On the eve of the millenium, we'd have been under peach street lights, arguing about goodness and goddesses. I hold his body sacred and imagine his death and repentence playing on the lenses of my sunglasses. I want to dig my nails, my heels, my soul into him, but the star on his hand would burn me. He makes me narrate to myself all the time I do not have, rubbing together icons until they become my own raw fingers. Is it fear of death that makes me mourn a dead man's jump? Is it fear of dead things that makes me shudder in wonder or love? For a moment, silence the awe with another full moon and just sleep.

Lincoln Hall (YES, Kari. THAT incident)
Forbidden.
Do not enter here.
These doors cannot be opened again
once they close behind.
Trapped eternally in a place where
your deepest temptations all reside
and you break beneath the pressure of the brick walls.
Once you enter
you cannot exit.

But what if someone finds you here?
We brazenly played until midnight
but it is forbidden
and these old bricks hold many sins
--a dirty bachelor pad
smelling of old socks and of too much aftershave.
Recklessness inside these stones
older than the offenders' grandparents.
Here, where the red-haired boy flips his personality
on and off
more easily than he does the lightswitch (crusty, moldy)
that finally brings him darkness at 3 a.m.

Here is where his secrets lie
of the immoral deeds they speak of
in inside jokes at the dinner table.
This is where his decisions are made,
where he'd rather not be
because he hates masquerades,
and it's all so confusing and chaotic
in his cramped room here.

(Insert comment about our lost innocence here).

Blufton, Ohio (written 11/17/99)
My own breath
fogs my vision
when I step out the door

The morning is too bright
so I can't see the light

My eyes are still closed
lost in
that too real dream
he left me with

The sun shines through
I can't find you.


Ideology of Disability (Fall 1999)

The heart swells
it reaches out and moves beyond
the confines of this wretched body
it stretches to encompass the world--
Love!

Shrink smaller
the pressure causes cringing
shrivels the heart into the soul
egocentricism and anger
mix to hate another's life
hate a soul, hate God's feeble creation.
Survive.

The Fabulous (A parody of "take my water")
I'm having visions of your khaki pants hanging loose and suggestive and your silk shirts rolled up and your pink lips mouthing that word that makes the base of my spine shudder into swoons, and the pucker of your chin when a cigar is placed where my mouth should be.
I'd make your life a satire, and end the brooding and open those blue eyes always lowered humbly in beauty. I hear you now, your voice in my inner monologue, my dialogue of me and me and now you, for certain words, the words I've heard you speak, now splice into my own. Those vices make me grin until saliva drips uneasily.
I see you hate evil, you hate women and human emotions that weaken your alaredy low self-esteem. So short--you know what they say about the size of the chain. Those chained ringlets on your head--I fall down, spilling chi and feminism. Allen Ginsberg and your image are sensual combinations. I cannot help the chill.

Fragment
That stack
later found under the carpet
flattened,
making its own book recording
of our readings, never in my handwriting
nous le savons plus que les mots sur le peau

Fragment II
Suddenly I can't remember all those water meanings
eyes and miracles
something about whales and instant storms
Le centre--
que veut-il dire
quand nous dirons
"returnez!"
Il port un visage de la Morte.

Fragment III
Kiss the gall from her exchange
save yourself from the hours between one and four
(closed eyes, to shut from the fissions)
Fear of death of dawn, the morning mother of the day.
Proliferate, but not of sublimation, ecstacy,
loving each other in chants.

Beavers with Brains
If you keep the door locked and admit you have no chance, you can be guilty without consequence. The liquid screens are communal, the doors are close together, and every key opens every door to reveal two big beds unruffled of their silks. When it begins to snow, I run, tank top straps icy already, to where the two stains meet, up and down, in a no-place, which transports us back in time, back inside. Back to the deep purple caverns, bright with romantic glittering diamonds. Wait, please, wait behind the clapboard. There by the stones is our rage, is our fate. The hunger borne of low steps, of a need to see the watering colors of the fog.

Found poem (for real) in Robert Frost class (2004)

It's much safer to resurect him.
The people run onstage, then run way
A collection fo virtues opens
sounding of Judgement to
the tawny meadow that truthfully faits
un tempete. It cuts cross Hermes' purple sheets.

Most absolute, that known which says with will "I make not!"
most unconfused parent of opposites, most central tautness, across the chest.

Speed on, bonds we speak of only once separated;
post rivalry, post duel, poast the fade out snapped frame
where the metal becomes the hilt
where the weapon meets its sheath.

Paper to write...sometime...

Academics like to stake their claims on certain topics and arguments that they plan on working on in the future. These usually appear in conclusion sections of dissertations or books. Well, since I'm lightyears away from either of those, here is my claim on a topic that I think would go nicely at next year's ACA/PCA at the Hub in Boston.

{FullMetal Alchemist: Theorizing Disability and Subjectivity} is the intellectual property of Amy Lea Clemons, PhD Candidate at Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN. Touch it and I'll sue.

...not that anyone would have taken it before me...but...you never know.

I wish I could write it for Mike's class, but it has little to do with "Access" and more to do with social constructions of disability. After all, the only thing Ed and Al want to access is the Stone--they get information just fine because of Ed's military ranking.
Hmmmmmmm, says the theorist.

Oh what a tangled web we weave
actually it's not we who weave it
it's always already there
and it's deception is that it makes itself disappear
and convinces us we have the ability to unglue ourselves from it
(Foucault)

"enlightenment," ascendency, and Stargate discourse

Positivism, the belief that scientific reasoning will lead to reality, or truth. An ideology founded by and in the period we call the Enlightenment, positivism focuses on human progress through validated versions of science and technology, the teleology of which is infinitely in the future.

Mythologies: Narrative systems that seek to explore the nature of Nature, explain cause and effects, and prevent the breakdown of community (Rene Girard). Rituals do not emerge from mythology, but mythology from rituals; repeated actions meant to alleviate cultural tensions give way to stories that support those rituals. In Girard's formulation, mythology conceals the nature of ritual, which is the gratification of humanity's desire for violence, but Christianity, and the other four "enlightened" religions, reveal (apocalypse) the structure of ritual murder as a destruction of the Other and postponement of mimetic desire. In our post-Christian world, we no longer have the need to scapegoat and have no need to believe in mythologies that conceal the structures of culture. So says Girard.

Stargate: SG-1-- A strange blend of positivism, humanism, and mythology. Dead myths are revived for their misunderstood truth, "gods" are sublimated to aliens (the Other), and human progress (as technology and democracy) is touted as the revelation. There are tensions here, though. Mythology is no longer ridiculed for its primitive notions of gods and goddesses; by making the stories "real," the human relations the rituals and myths attempted to conceal remain concealed--Christianity becomes yet another myth involving aliens.

Whereas Girardian constructions of mythology present a hopeful future for humanity to recognize and thus correct our responses to the Other (human other), the narrative of Stargate presents mythology as yet another aspect of positivism, of human understanding, of Enlightenment. Furthermore, the "other" presented in in the series is problematical--nearly all of the characters from other planets are White English speaking peoples with mythologies stemming from a Western/Hellenic narrative.

This understanding of mythology provides other problematical discourses when we speak of "justice" --the early Daniel-centric episodes feature positivist, "enlightened" arguments for democracy and a sympathetic understanding of the "other;" later episodes (season 5), however, create a new mythology, a mythology of the show itself in its creation of "ascendant" beings, Daniel's own ascendance through his understanding of humanity and the universe, and the pre-ascendant, extent of bodily humanity (the end that postivism seeks to locate) "Lantians," who created humanity in this galaxy.

Why do we (at least a small portion of "we") need this new mythology? If Girard is correct, we should all be too Enlightened to fall back to mythologies--even mythologies that explain mythologies--because these stories are only ways to structure and justify human exclusion and murder of the Other. The shift in SG-1 that occured with the emergence of the "Ancients arc" discontinued the revelation of myth (A Girardian Move) that the first five seasons included. Daniel's increased militarization and his "fall" from ascendency have presented new arguments, new explications of familiar myths, and further proliferation of retrubutive justice.

To further think about: Trials and justice in SG-1, the scapegoat mechanism, rhetoric of anthropology available, arguments for positivism and progress, the Ori in relation to recent religious rhetoric (rhetoric which is definitely NOT "revealed" in the Girardian Christian sense), and the acts of "revelation" narrative naturally requires.

I miss my Utopia

When I left Bluffton College to go to the scary world of academia I thought I knew what I was doing. Nod your head, my readers. We felt confident in our abilities until about August. When grad school approached, we suddenly realized we were not in utopia anymore.
I wasn't worried academically; my brain is the only part of me that really is dependable (well, as far as literature and rhetoric goes), and the classes seemed to be repeats of things I'd already done at BC. In fact, that first semester they were repeats, but repeats intensified. I didn't even realize I was running myself into the ground until Dad called to tell me Aunt Karen died in December. That was when I started to feel tired.
All I know is that I didn't feel disabled until I went to Boston. I never would have called myself "disabled" or thought about going to disability services for help; the FMS, CFS and arthritis were my little problem, and problems (a la Mom) have multiple solutions which we must weigh for their life-affirming goodness. I handled Boston this way: I dealt with each problem individually, sealing off each problem in a little sterile ziplock baggie. I certainly didn't see it as an overarching decline in my health. I panicked for awhile about the aphasia affecting my career in English, but I didn't mark myself as truly disabled. "I have a little bit of a disability. Nothing to worry about," I told my profs, individually, only when I absolutely had to.
When Rick sent me to Adaptive Services, I was resistant and bitter. See the blog. It was immature and full of psychoanalytic goodies. I wanted to be normal so badly, to fix my fibromyalgia all on my own, that I got angry. Sure, Rick could have been a bit more empathetic, but I didn't help matters along by being flippant and defensively humorous about the situation. Yeah, but except for not knowing where I live somedays, it's not that bad.
Suffering defines us, says Levinas--but only the suffering of the Other defines us. Our own suffering makes us realize the il y a, the something that is almost nothing that terrifies us all. Suffering for Levinas, for me, for three million people with fibromyalgia, and another couple million with CFS, and another few million with Parkinsons and MS and a dozen other neurological diseases-- suffering is reality for us. It's how we affirm we are still here. Sometimes when my medication is especially effective, and I feel no pain, I get scared: Where is my body? Is my leg still there? I panic. Then I get depressed because I realize that what I feel isn't numbness, but normality.
Online, the FMers call non-sick people "the normals." The name of a punk band, but also a name that should be spit out with a twitching eyebrow. They don't know how good they have it. I used to hate, and I still hate, professional sports players who whine about their bad knees. You were healthly, and you did this to yourself. You idiot.
Online, they are angry. They are depressed. They are, for the most part, middle aged moms who lived a normal life until one day they had "the flu that never went away." They are overly fat or thin, white, and feeling helpless. They spend hours thinking about being sick, about what they can no longer do, scouring the internet for breakthroughs.
Once every few months I let myself read their stories. I let myself feel helpless, and I reread everything we know about the damned disease. I reread the studies on HGH and sleep and the mysterious and elusive Substance P that are all ruining my life, and I yell at the incompetent, male doctors who tell us with exercise and sleeping pills we'll be just fine. Then I slam my laptop shut, and decide I'm not going to put up with this anymore, and fight back again. I refuse to become like the women online. I'm not like them.
But Rick was right about a few things: If I am going to be in the University, the academy, I have to get used to the idea of bureaucracy. And bureaucracies require paperwork, and definitions and contingencies and laws. As Edward Schiappa says, we can never really define anything for "real"--there is no "essence" of what is a "wetland." Likewise there is no essence of "disability" that we can know (Sorry Plato); there is no normal against which we can measure all people. But humans, says Burke, says Schiappa act as though there is, and that is what we should study. What counts as X in context Y with constraints A, B, and C?
But there are cracks. The center falls apart, it will not hold. Sometimes what counts as X doesn't have a matching solution Z. Even our carefully litigated definitions don't line up every time. The university says I'm disabled. They say I should be in their system, marked with a giant D on my forehead, and I should talk about my difficulties. They want me to succeed they say. As long as what I need falls under their definitions of acceptable accommodations.
What I need, I told them, is time. I need more time to complete assignments, I need more excused absences, I need less time at the school, and more time in an environment that does not promote stress reactions. My doctor wrote this, my mother wrote this, I told them this.
They said no.
These are not accommodations that the University is willing to make, or that they have to make, or that they will make. We have standards to uphold. This is a University--deadlines and attendance are part of our very definition. Rigor.
What is frustrating is that I know what I need to succeed. When I have those things in place, I can do some pretty amazing things, intellectually. Unfortunately, what I need are not things that can be legislated, placed in stone or even ink. I have to move with my body, flourishing and achieving on good days, and letting myself off the hook on bad ones. The University doesn't allow for that.
Bluffton did. I remember the first time I realized I was getting special treatment. It was junior year, in Jeff's poetry (lit) class. My leg had just jerked me halfway across the room and he glanced up briefly at me, did one of his little chair dances, and said "All right there, Amy?" I said something flippant about Mr. Leg having mind of his own, and Jeff continued his lecture. What is remarkable about that (if you know Jeff) is that he didn't pause to make fun of my language, or the way I had figured my body part as Other, or some other Man as Muppet moment. In fact, he never said another word about my twitching ever again. Jeff doesn't do that.
At Purdue, I was suddenly pushed into thinking about those things, into doing those things, while maintaining my citizenship in the world of the able-boddied. It didn't work, so I revoked my citizenship and became a member of the Disabled.
But I'm not going quietly. Screw the regulations. If they can't give me what I need legally, I'll have to rely on the Blufftonness I see here at Purdue. It took me 18 years to learn to ask for help, and then when I finally did, I got nothing but a sad little letter and a note in my file. Because I'm not normal, but I'm not disabled enough or in the right ways. "Obviously this is problematic for your education, but I just can't see what we can do about that."

The class I'm taking this summer, The Rhetoric of Access, assumes we know what normal is (bad). It does not assume the University can fix problems legislatively (good). It assumes disability is identifiable and thus analyzable. "Usability" and "Access" and "Accommodations" all imply that these are problems to be solved with technology or additions--aids to help one visit the Country of Normals a few times per week.
But not live there.
I am not defined by my illness, but it has shaped me, it is part of my identity. You wouldn't pour white paint over a black person to help him or her gain access to a taxi. You don't "accommodate" women in the workplace by binding their breasts so they can fit into a suit. Instead, the rules must change and thoughts about what is "acceptable" or even "excellent" ("rigor") must change. There are separate Olympic sports for men and women because biologically men have more muscle mass, and excellence must be measured as relative. We don't give up our identities as women in order to be in the workplace, so why should disabled people ("people with disabilities, Amy--the person comes first") have to load themselves down with support and services and devices to create themselves as non-disabled?
Amazon women were said to have hacked off their left breasts so they could better shoot an arrow. What no one stops to think of is : "Why wouldn't they have just designed a bow that worked in harmony with a woman's body?" The crossbow is even more efficient and poses no such breast problem. But Amazon women are held to a male standard of war, and the legends were told by men. To give the women "access" to war, they had to imagine a way around the archery problem, and so they imagined hacking off a breast. Accommodation.
It's that sort of linear thinking (Problem: Breast:: Solution: Remove) that has created the accommodations we work with today. Instead of viewing learning and reading and writing and math and science as flexible fields of knowledge with several entrances and ways to succeed, there is only one way to get an A, one type of excellence, one definition of success (One type of bow, one kind of suit to wear to the office). And so we are left with a limited solution set (remove breast, don't fight, or aim badly). If we could just imagine another way, a third way (yellow) that would not reduce the meaning of the A or change the definition of the university, then these problems would all fall out. A crossbow is still a bow.
I'm afraid I'm in too deep to talk about this in class. That I have too much at stake here. That I still have a hard time not hedging on my own disability (It won't affect my course work; it's nothing I can't handle). I miss Bluffton, where I didn't have to say any of this, where it was implicit in Lamar's nod or Jeff's chair-bobbing. If schools for the deaf are the utopias for the hard of hearing, Bluffton was a utopia for the hard of walking. And I miss it, because I didn't have to analyze my own motivations.

Addictive personality

Coffee. Coffee. Coffee.
I'm obsessed by the bean. By the smell. By the way it enters my throat, trickles down into my veins and infiltrates my brain with life, hope, chi. When I'm awake, I'm thinking about it, about the frozen beans in my fridge. I eat three per day, and savor the flavor of chocolate and the earthy espresso.
How long till August 22?
Dana says she doesn't understand my addictive personality. I tell her she must have a thyroid disorder.
Addictive personality: as though people could become addicted to my personality. Or I could be addicted to personality. What is "personality"?
Last night I wrote a mental letter to Rick, my teaching mentor, in my head. I argued against his idea of excellence, based on disability studies. That "excellence" is contingent upon an established norm, that we don't blame ordinary people for not being able to hit a baseball like Big Papi or sing like an opera diva. And yet Rick would have us believe that all who are not daily striving for such excellence are somehow slackers, lacking initiative.
I used to believe that wholeheartedly. I believed it straight through freshmen year, through most of that summer. I was high strung, emotional, nervous, anxious, continually tensing my shoulders in fear of relaxation. Stay alert or you'll miss something.
Maybe it was Dragonball Z. Maybe it was the yoga or t'ai chi. But I learned to shut down that drive sometime during sophomore year. A switch in my head that still wants to be in the on position. I can feel when it flips on; my breathing changes, my cheeks flush, my shoulders hunch, a guilty knot appears in my stomach, and something goes down my spine--adrenaline, probably. Cortisol. Fight or flight.
And it hurts like hell.
I know I have it in me to be like Dana: to be addicted to action, motion, hard work, responsibility. I also know what it does to me. And instead of becoming anxious, sick, tired, and tense, I choose to find peace by subordinating excellence to my own sanity. To my personality.
Which may not make me the best, most organized teacher in the world, but it does make me a good person. I wish I didn't have to choose between those, but those are the set of terms I've been given, and until someone comes up with a cure, I'll have to keep making that decision.
Of course, I'll never write that letter. It won't do anyone any good; if you haven't lived with it, you can't understand it.
That being said, I've decided that it's time to try last ditch measures for getting back to a baseline pain level. Walking, yoga, and a massive cut down on sugar. Full doses of Ultram. Whatever it takes. I have an addictive personality, and it's time I use that to my advantage.
Frak you, FMS.

"I've never been a man"

On May Day 2006
In Findlay Ohio, where the roads are uneven with dust. My cheeks are sore, but not from the sunburn flush my face.
I want to be able to be angry again.
Here your servant was sent out amongst them. The Separation from the Sword doesn't intend
Departure from the World. No, we are safe in our Bubble, in our troublesome days; the Orb does protect our way from all but Stones of compassion and trust.
The music in his ear is partly mine; I'm a drop of a note, a ceasura, over Ropp's pit infinite
in its Sunday night TV.
We are sure of our hope, on these gravel-topped roads, of Reasons, not scapegots, to unload the rites of Spring and Ribbons and uncovered sores. The Face meets the Face in noodle-based plates, and desire unsated to melt with the grass at last runs mimetically wild.
In Bluffton, Ohio, the music was played, the standard was raised to dance around...we sang of the new earth, new grounds, bearing us. The greetings were made, the skin's limit was breached--oh, the touch reached us deeply apart from the curse.
The reason it hurts is unexercised joy

Seventy-five and sunny: Levinas

It's 75 and sunny, and I'm inside thinking about infinity, selfhood, and being. Oh, and the Other (the other, L'autrui). I'm trying not to think I'm stupid, but it's hard. What follows is my attempt to cram two or so years of the study of philosophy and Greek logic into two days, and to synthesize all of these with my understanding of the 45 pages I read last night and my own concerns about rhetoric and literature and Christianity. Forgive me for its length and absurdity.

Last night, sitting crosslegged on the floor while Stargate Monday dragged on to its own infinity, I came to a realization: I don't give a damn about ontology (study of being/Being).
Which, considering the dude I'm supposed to be reading about wants to disregard the idea of "Does existence exist" and move onto "How do things exist and what are the signs of existing?" this is probably not a bad thing. Levinas, unlike our friend Plato and everyone thereafter, assumes a certain "modality" or kind of being--after all, there are things, we interact with them, we either love them or hate them, and sometimes we use these things to kill each other--to end the Other's being. Proving self-being (Dasein) or Being in general isn't Levinas's project, and because of that, he can disregard a lot of the things most philosophers who deal with Being worry about. Like Aristotle's proofs.
There are four proofs coming out of the Aristotlean tradition, four laws we adhere to when discussing anything "logically." They are the foundation of all logos. These proofs were the main mode of mathematical thought until the 1800s; for more than 2000 years they held. Euclid, in particular, used these to think through geometry, plains, and lines--in other words, things that exist in space. Position equals presence equals being. And there can thus be only one line through point p outside a given line that is parallel to that given line. Anything else will not be parallel, or it will not be a line, or it will not be on the same plane as the first given line. Likewise, two parallel lines will never meet--they are defined by their continual separation at a fixed distance from one another. This is Euclid's fifth proposition, the one that was never proven, the one that had to be destroyed before we could think about wormholes and relativity and gravity as the result of space/time's shape (spacetime IS shape).
Non-Euclidean geometry says that several lines can be parallel to a given line, even when they are passing through the same given point outside that original line. We have a hard time imagining that--the drawings I've found online are counterintuitive and, in fact, cannot really be drawn (drawing occurs on a 2-D surface). However, in curved space, these multiple lines through the same point are possible, and are both the same and not the same as one another. They defy the Greek laws of both Identity (A cannot be Not A) and Non Contradiction (If two opposite statements are given, one of them must be false).
To speak of infinity, the other, ethics, and being, we have to return to a point prior to all of that Greek logic, Levinas says. To a point before our ideas about being were dependent on a self contained self which is either the Self or the Other (law of NonContradiction). Something can be neither being nor non-being--it can be something else. This is different from the "third term" Burke proposes as the "grounds" of oppositions. Burke is still working within identity there. When Burke says that there is a grounds of war and peace that is neither war nor peace, but that in this space war is a type of peace and peace is a type of war, he is still working with a set of dualities that must be one or the other (Ad Bellum Purificandum). Levinas posits a space that is neither Nothing nor Something--not that Nothing is a type of something or that Something is a special condition of nothingness. This space is what we all come from, this fabric of possible being and possible not being which has contradictory elements of both. Like Gravity, which is a noun and yet not a thing, a force and yet not generated by anything, Beingness emerges from this space. Gravity is the result of spacetime's curve. Humanity's self-knowledge of being is the result of this Il y a environment. It's almost accidental, being. And the Il y a is terrifying to us, because it is netiher/nor/both/and being and nothing.
What is the limit of being if we have three modes of it? It is not Death, as Heidegger says. To say that Death or Time (same damn thing) is the limit of being is to ignore the fact that we are constituted by the Other. Death is intimate, individual. It is the self becoming "unable to be able." But the rest of our natures are not so solitary. The limit of our Being is our relationship to the Other, Levinas says. Our infinite responsibility for/to the other.
Again, to even begin to grasp this I have to think about Aristotle and Burke. Both ascribe to entellechy as the culmination of the character of an existent, a thing that is (in itself "existent" is a strange word: Ex--outside ist--being---our existence is always materialized externally). In an entellechial mindset, we know a thing is by the way it ends up--instead of looking the process that thing (or person) took to get to this end, we define the thing by how it ends, assuming the end is the perfect form (see Frieza and Cell from DragonBall Z). Levinas argues that we can never see this end, anyway. That, if as Heidegger claimed in his later ontology, an object or person's being emerges from our encounters and experiences with the person or object, then we can never be finished knowing that thing/person, because experienced time prevents us from sensing everything about that object all at once. Being is not in the END then, but the means (to use an Aristotlean construction)--Being is in the way something makes itself known.
Thus the Other--that idea of a person who is not us that helps us define our Self--is never known except through our encounters with him/her/them. The existent that emerges from the Il y a only experiences being through his or her encounters with an Other. It is only through the Other's death and suffering that the Self can Be. And it is only through that experience with the Other that one can fear the unknowable Il y a (death--which is not NotBeing, but a return to that undifferentiated fabric).
Only through suffering the Other ("suffer the little children come unto me"?), by not just sympathizing with the pain of hte other, but by understanding Pain itself through our encounters with the suffering Other who is so near that frightening Il y a can we know time and being.
Right.
*pause for shooting self*
Which is not suicide, by the way, because Suicide is not possible. We do not ever kill ourselves, but Death Comes.
Right.
In the time it took me to type that out, the white bus went by twice. A freakin hour. And that was just from 25 pages of the Levinas I was supposed to have read for today.
Ontology is not my strong point. I have a hard time thinking through being/Being and Selfconsciousness because, like the fish who doesn't know or care that it's surrounded by water, I can't see that which constitutes me. Not that water constitutes the fish.
Never mind.
Time to synthesize.
Rhetoric isn't really concerned with ontology, except those places where ontology intersects with epistemology (knowledge of knowledge). Rhetoric is almost always concerned with epistemology, and if we need to think about whether something exists, we rhetoricians tend to worry more about whether we can *know* if something exists, and what textuality allows us to encounter that knowledge. Literature, I'd imagine is somehow connected to this mess because it is an object whose character reflected to us comprises its Being and helps us see our own Being. Literature, in making claims of presence, in attempting to make present the absent, points to Death, the Other, and Being but not, Levinas says, in an "ethical" way. Instead, because literature is, as Derrida notes, dissemination, not dialogue, it is not concerned with a continual encouter with an Other, it could care less about its responsibility to an Other. It is instead a social existent, encouraging us to act not toward or for the Other, but as one large mass, where occassionally, someone isn't suffered with.
I hesitate to agree here. Yes, literature is part of the civil, the "plastic" world, but it also, as Burke says, encourages consubstantiality--its representative anecdotes and the act of reading itself asks us to practice response-ability, identification, and sympathy. While literature may fail to be a one-on-one connection, it encourages such relationships and in the case of subversive literature, can even help us recognize that the civil society which we live in is flawed in that it does not, as Levinas says, even allow for an intimate relationship to the Other.
Not just literature, I would argue, but all communications try to cross or at least make visible the Self/Other divide. Imagine Kinneavy's commuication model--this looks frighteningly similar to Levinas's model of how the Self comes into Being--by first approaching the Other, in encoded and material ways (phenomenological ways), and then returning to the self (feedback) changed, with new realizations of the original message. To assume communication is a forcing of some cogito/ego onto an Other is to assume that all rhetoric and speech is "persuasion"--which Burke wants to deny. Rhetoric and speech is a coming to the Other, an approaching the third term between self and other for the purposes of benefiting both. The persuasion, if ther is any, is in convincing the Other to meet you halfway, convincing the Other to respond.
And all of this is connected to Girard and Jesus because....um...
Okay, I can do this.
Because Girard says that humanity, without "revealed" or "modern" religions will always try to destroy the Other because the Other does in fact remind us of the Il y a. Christianity (and the other four) shows us this structure of being quite explicitly (if we read like J Denny). Instead of killing the Other, we recognize our selves in the Other, we suffer the Other's frightening presence. Mimetic violence stops when we allow the Other to exist, when we finally face our own ability to *not be able*. We do unto others then, not because we hope they won't kill us in turn, but because we see our own suffering and death within the Other's suffering.
I think.
But I am not.
You are, therefore I am.

Not Knowing, not Being, but Goodness

Levinas: Ethics and Infinity

It's not about knowing (epistemology). It's not about Being (ontology). It's not about God (theological). It's about the Ethical.

Levinas was a student of Heidegger, who worried about being (Dasein). For him, philosophy's question was one of fundemental ontology, of essence, the copula "is". What is? Levinas wanted to move beyond this question of what is and if we can know what is into the realm of action--ethics, the Self and the Other.

But Ethics ("What is ethics") should be situated outside of that question. There's more than just ontology. Do we have to "Know" what is good to do good? No, first you act. Because we can never "know" fully. At some point we have to just sign up to with MVS. Even if they don't want us. The good beyond being, said Plato, says Levinas.

Heidegger worried about Being from the point of view of Time. The nature of the human is embedded in time. But is this the time we all know, where X did happen and Y therefore could not have also happened? The single, simple Aristotlean time. If "Time is the Horizon of Being" as Heidegger wants to say, if there is an analytic affinitutde ("to be" requires limitations), if we are limited by death and old age, then the question cannot cover those parts of living that are outside time. One of which is "How do we position ourselves ethically?"

Heidegger was a Nazi.

"It's hard to forgive Heidegger." We must not do violence, however. And Heidegger's inability to work past the ontological question left an opening for Levinas. Not just to take Heidegger's project, but to turn that project. It is not a question of Time and our own Being, but the Time of the Other (l'autrui). Time is not the limit of our being, but the Other's being is. Not just the Other (a category) but an Other Person, a real living being (no pun intended)--the real neighbor we must love as ourselves (in fact, we can only love ourselves if we love the other).

Oh, what does this have to do with Burke, you ask? (Okay, I ask.) Burke also, like Heidegger, noted that "essence" is a difficult question, that it has something to do with "grounds." Like Levinas, Burke moved the question of being into the question of the other, specifically, consubstantiality and rhetoric. Burke, however, only noted how these appear in communication and society, an anthropological, sociological approach. Burke would never place the theological, the revelatory, or sacred in the same question set. Ethics for Burke can be separated from revelation. He was a humanist. We are "response-able" because we as humans are speaking creatures, inventors of the negative. Burke believed we can act without the voice of the Revealed.

I'm not sure I do.

What I should do? (The ethical) Is what everyone ought to do (Kant). Goes through the juridical, the civic, the logical, a third party.
Levinas asks "What then shall we do?" Is what we should do when faced with a specific Neighbor. Goes through nothing but the Neighbor, is not a civic or societal question.
If it were only You and I, our actions would be easy. But a third party always enters--politics, "always" or "time" or "government" and we act through it instead, complicating our response. Do we bomb Iraq to save the oppressed? Which neighbor are we serving in which party?

What then shall we do? Large action in a democracy must always be produced through a civics. If we could move without government ("anarchy") if we could have only ethical (to the Other) repsonses, then we could have utopia--lack of suffering, equality, keeping our obligations to each other. This is what dystopias point to as the current lack. But if we recognize that we are not acting ethically, we cannot band together to create an ethical utopia--that would again create a new politics, a just politics, but still not one necessarily obliged to the neighbor. As the postmodern dystopianists say, one man's utopia is another's dystopia.

The Levinasian version of utopia is not possible, however. We can never reach that--we're too damn human, as Girard notes. Does this mean we stop trying?

Of course not. Hence Bluffton University's question posed to seniors: "What then shall we do?" We still must act despite the impossibility of acting.

Good luck.

Utopia: Not my class

Read James Berlin for today. Again. Reminded me why I left Rhet/Comp for pure theory. If pragmatic rhetoric is a theory, that is.
They pay me a little over 12,000 per year (plus tuition) to mold young minds. No, that's not quite true. They pay me to produce students. I am a student factory. The students enter my class, use up my resources, and then use those resources to form their studentness. I am not a teacher or a coach, I am their fodder.
Berlin wants (wanted?) composition classes to "teach" resistance to ideology. This is, of course, a ridiculous concept. No one can resist ideology completely, no one can teach resistance, and even if you could, you'd have to teach them to resist your teaching, which would become problematic. But others have said this before me. I leave the circular reasoning to those Marxists (like Allen) who can think about ideology for an extended period of time without making themselves dizzy with regret and guilt.
What bothers me about any composition pedagogy, any teaching theory, is the subsequent classroom the theories imagine being created. They imagine a pocket universe, a utopia in a white walled room, student-citizens emerging bright and motivated. The "radical" pedagogies particularly still see writing and reading through the Romantic rhetoric lens, even those like Berlin who categorically reject "Expressivism." Teach a man to fish, and he eats for life. Teach a man to read and write and he can take down the structures that have him eating only fish.
I loved 1984 because of this Romantic rhetoric that flows through it and other dystopias. As a writer, I want to believe I am acting. No wonder I have taken to Burke's theory of symbolic action so much--if it's not true, I really have no hope. I can't act, not in this cultural context, not given my various limitations. At first glance I should like Berlin because he wants to create whole universities of freshmen resistance through writing/reading/rhetoric. He wants us to use the classroom as a space for protest. He wants the English department to save us all.
And there have been cases of writing as savior. And Burke is right--moving problems and responses into the symbolic realm will most likely purify war, which is very very very good.
And if my students gave a damn, I could almost believe that my silly little ENGL 106 class could change the world.
But they don't give a damn--for the most part. Those who do give a damn about ideology and capitalism and myth and hegemony are too few, and like me, too weak to make a revolutionary stand in West Lafayette. And, from one theoretical perspective, the one I've been working with for three years now, that classroom utopian rhetoric is exactly what I should not be teaching toward.
If I'm right--or rather, if Burke is right--both dystopian and utopian rhetorics are conservative. More frightening is that dystopian rhetorics might be even more conservative than utopian ones. If I teach resistance in class, if I am able to create a utopian space amid the dystopian university (and beyond) then things can't be all that bad. And I am creating that space only in a university that is, frankly, far more egalitarian than much of the corporate world. As long as my students see that I am still around to make these dystopian claims, then the exigency toward action is lessened. No one really rebels until it's too late. The American Revolution is said to start with the "shot heard round the world," not a symbolic shot in a pamphlet from Thomas Paine. Symbolic action is, for the moment, not recognized.
Remember the protests before the war? Yeah, neither does Bush. Because symbolic action is not valued. If I teach my students in my utopian classroom how to resist symbolically I may be doing more harm than good. Especially if they start to believe that resistance is the job of flaky English professors and their hippie friends in the College of Liberal Arts.
And "job" is an interesting word here the Berlin wouldn't use. I am getting paid by and institution to teach "writing"--not resistance, not ideology formation. If I pretend I have a utopia in my class, I am not only invoking my own ideologies, but I am lying -- the class is just a class, entrenched in a university which is run by the state and tax payers' dollars; their Calculus TAs get more money than I do because my knowledge has less cultural capital.
So what do I do? Make them read 1984? Show Fahrenheit 451 like I did in class today? Create assignments that force them to action? Remind myself I've only got 16 weeks per set of students?
Hide out in some little liberal arts college in New England?
And if I actually don't attempt to produce utopia, if I ignore my instincts to teach awareness of hegemony, then I am failing myself. I study the rhetoric of dystopian fiction because I believe these fictions can show us how to act and how not to act. The books tell me I should start resisting now, do all I can to avoid Big Brother or book burning or the Benefactor (so many B words in my world).
Dystopias are normative, utopias are revolutionary. Don't teach the negative, then, teach toward the possibilities. It's not that we are in a dystopia now (for that's certainly not what Plato or More were saying) but that we are not in a utopia. Plato (damn him) and More and later Bellamy saw possibility, hope, in what could be and wrote in hope that we would not, perhaps, achieve heaven on earth, but that we would do what we could to be the most human we could be, to achieve as much as we can, given our various flaws (see Burke's "Definition of Human").
Berlin, in other words, imagines not only utopia, but asks that we implement it, whereas the utopian treatises and the dystopian fictions ask only that we act in the present. There are various dangers in this rhetoric--we always run the risk that our students will still see this project as only belonging in one space, the English studies space, or that they will not see the class beyond a set of assignments--but if I am to act responsibly as a "teacher," as a pacifist, I have to do something.
So as contradictory as it seems, if I want to encourage social justice in my students, I cannot create my classroom as a utopia where ideologies are abolished and egalitarianism reigns. I also cannot create the outside world as an evil dystopian land where the government is controlling us and corporations own us. Both rhetorics seem to fail to encourage future action on the part of the students.
And none of these seem to have anything to do with creating good writing.
Which is why I'm going to go read my theory like a good little Composition studies drop out, and hope that my colleagues will find a way to reconcile the two ideas of the job of the composition classroom without me.

On reading Girard's extended theory

Poetic notes on "Things hidden since the foundation of the world"

A hinge
on ritual
covering misconstrued Gospels
Instead of throwing branches:
prohibition
Propels fragile mamals
Why to be a dog--
no permanent sexuality
no possession of desire of possession of desire

Subdivision,
"Modern society has develped a violent collection of failsafes
through humanity's production of history"
We are in a spiral of surrogates
a nautilus of DNA and victims
The exception:
the confused mass
of arbitrary victims
Symbolic people witnessing each other
Ever increasing until a word appeared
Birth
L'arc en ciel
(See page 103)evading the inn
Les choses cachee
depuis la fondation du monde
depuis la morte de Dieu
What do we do with the Hindus?
Qu'est-ce qu'on faisait avant la Porte?

"The complete renunciation of violence"
empirical empire on the pyre.
Ghost in the Shell, in the Machine
in the mechanism
evading the innocence
Just because he knows its rhetoric
Just because we've seen the wires
The Budlight ads are still funny.
"nothing but the blood"
Tant mieux.

Invisible tombs
No culture without a tomb
hieroglyphs encoding gods of the gears
Oedipus, Ra, Dionysus, Bachhae.
Pure difference
Began again with interlocutors,
again.
Outside Cheektowaga University
The Bible deconstructs
everything:
all language is based on mythic substitution;
all substitutions are for a sacrifice.

Conceiving psychology,
Totem, taboo, the inefficient machine
(it's a management technique)
Moving toward the Buddhist
Go east to understand the absent myths
I'm human
"the animal who sacrifices"
(inventor of the negative)
Stoichasitic
to stay to eat bananas,
let the weak ones meet the knife.

They've begun to differentiate themselves
from those who can grapple with bananas.
Or each other.
Not many cultures survived
who thought living in a volcano
was a groovy thing to do.

Here I'd have to ask about the women
What do we do with
the Marys who threw no stones?
Hebraic thought is with the ethical
Tragic is with the critical
I am with the heretical
Scapegoat stories in Sethe
(Daniel Jackson killed him)
587 BC Chronicles in the picaresque
falling through the canon
Council of Nicea
making text into truth.

"Is this an account of
a guy named Jesus who all this stuff happened to
and he says some things
and some guy like Paul who never met him
writes about him
and these churches write about him
and by the 3rd century, these churches create a canon
then the 16th century ('I am a flaming athiest') with the Protestants."
"These Gospels take all these stories
and superimpose them on this guy named Jesus."

This is not just one more story
this is something like
the story of stories
(Jesus is Derridian before Derrida)
('Jesus gave an atheist account of these
mythical stories').
"I'm interested in what Nietzche said
what Hegel said--those are my gods--they're white men
they can do the job."

You don't need truth if you have Midrash
You don't need truth
You don't need.

A vision of the messianic

I see you in the finite,
Which is, of course, wrong.
I see you as a condition of my caught breath,
As a phantasm of a deeper structure.

I should pray for stronger words, angrier words
For words against completion
Something to beat a rhythm of protest,
And to pace the dampened streets at night.

I want to shiver in the air,
For without these I am hungry.
I see you as a condition of cradles and graves;
They fed into the delta valley.

Every other line is empty
Of devotion and vocation to cloister.
Not me, not in context, not in the northeast,
A condition of angrier words.

I've been here too long already
my blood stagnates when I taste
the exhaust of suburbia
My hands remember the spike
of fiberglass splinters

IRC, Mosaic, and Old School Communication

Or, /me slaps #nick with a large trout

Susan Herring, writing in 2001 (ah, the golden days!), questions the matrices of gender, power, and online communication. Something I'd like to think about: intersections of magic, the internet, and gender. Why "Wizzards"?

So here we might mention something about synchronous and diachronous textuality?
[15:06] *** driscodl has joined the chatbox
[15:06] *** cdoran has joined the chatbox
[15:06] *** Jen Backman has joined the chatbox
[15:06] *** rlnichol has joined the chatbox
[15:06] *** Allen Brizee has joined the chatbox
[15:06] *** Jess has joined the chatbox
[15:06] *** mgutowsk has joined the chatbox
[15:06] what is "diachronous"?
[15:07] It's much 'quieter' now....
[15:07] huh...amy...huh....what is it?
[15:07] in a standard time line
[15:07] nothing is equal - all rhetoric is political
[15:07] oh, okay
[15:08] What are we talking about?
[15:08] Here I'd say something about fanfiction and authority and gender


Conversations With Jon
Let's all be quiet and praise Robert Redford
for his contributions to Mankind. All the President's men
can't put order into chaos.
Again, I wonder: Do artists play guitar?
The answer is always Madagascar.
Where was the President when the Vietnamese died in our capitalist schemes?
Madagascar.
What is the fourth largest island on Earth?
Madagascar.
How do we reconcile pacifists and patriots?
Madagascar.
Who is our god?
Madagascar, Madagascar, Madagascar.
Let us all join hands and encircle the whole of our universe: America!
Send rice and pork.
Let them all eat cake, Jon, with Canadians while they wait for their friends to become pop stars.
But when push comes to love, a country in Africa will always be Madagascar,
so we can share inside jokes. Mix the small world's known images (Elm tree, Dog, Chair),
in the cauldron of the body until Paris is just a tower, New York was just two towers,
and Egypt is towers shaped like pyramids.
The smog we breathe is dope to the soul. But you know that.
In the baptistery, in blue costumes, in choir gowns, we will always have television. And Madagascar.
I miss being self-conscious of: bomb dropping, War Memorial Criticism, and the reporter's gaze right into our mouths;
she strings out quotes like handkerchiefs from a magician's sleeve.

Biblical language now: Thy grace befalls our plaster globes, oft colored sienna. Thou art Madagascar,
maddening allure of Madagascar drawing backward solid bodied objects.

Now you have etched yourself with frog brains and red ink. Hit play on the VCR, and wait to be overcome
with Disney and the urge to utter

Ethiopia.