Shaw Island

We are in some new time zone, in a place with very different light patterns because of the thick tall trees surrounding the house, a house with different internal rhythms than ours, too, slow and sweet rhythms, quieter, all of us gathered around the wood stove. I have no idea what time it is, which is a fine fine fine fine fine thing.

This morning, we woke slowly and stayed in bed to think and drift until we heard the others rouse. While Buni made scones, we all talked for a long time about family stuff, me going step-by-step through where all my brothers and sisters are now which also means talking about the nieces and nephews and crossing the continent back and forth and going back a few decades sometimes to fill in backstory, surprising that we need to do that given how far back we go together. Brian and Buni didn't know about Andrew's death, for example, which ties into why my father wants to move to San Diego now, and so I slipped back into the memories I have from being three and surrounded by very odd and intense events involving crying adults, a turquoise-and-white Chevy, and one of the most striking cemeteries on the planet.

We walked out later in the morning to Broken Point, through cedars, moss, and damp and past several new-to-us kinds of ducks out on the various views of the sound. There was a sea otter hanging out among what might have been buffleheads, and the ferry passed.

We drove into the little store at the ferry dock to get bread, wine, and the last bits of presents.

We wrapped the gifts, and Brian has made cherry pies. Buni is reading, with spotted Bindi all wrapped up around her.

Before that, though, Buni showed me her workroom. I don't know what Buni calls what she does, really. She goes to elementary schools and helps children perform stories. She adapts stories from books, makes costumes, and prepares relaxed scripts that get the children dancing and moving and singing and adding words and making guesses about what happens next, and that is how they tell the story to themselves. Any seven-year-old would want to wake up forever in Buni's workroom. It is full of sly-looking and jolly marionettes of all sized and kinds, and billowy dragon costumes and tails and snouts. There are too many capes too count, made of shiny fabrics and ribbons, and floating thunderstorm costumes and scepters, velvety hats. There are pinks and greens, silky and shiny, everything ordered and yet floating into everything else, and lots of tinkly and throaty musical instruments. I wanted to fall asleep in the soft colors and glints. I wanted to roll up in it all and listen to Buni tell her stories.

these foolish things

The phone rang at 10:30 last night -- Christmas night -- and Dennis answered. He sucked in his breath and said, "You'd better talk to Anne." It was a woman from the airport, almost in tears, telling us that our morning flight had been canceled. She said that the morning flight had been delayed or canceled three days in a row, and that she pretty much hadn't left the airport in five days.

She spent many minutes trying to reroute us, explaining how they had tried to get a bus to take everyone to the Green Bay airport in the morning but that the bus driver had bailed. She looked to see if any flights were available out of Green Bay. No. Marquette? No. Rhinelander? Yes! And it is a flight out at a human hour, 10:45am, which is Central Time, too, so 11:45am our time (psychologically), meaning that we didn't have to leave for the drive until almost 8am, to give us three hours of safe time to get there. Plus... because this is now the third flight we've been promised, we got sweetly upgraded to first class for both of the longer flights coming and going. Well, okay. When I got off the phone, I sent a thank you note to Melinda, the woman who had helped us. Now if only she could ensure our bus-to-ferry connection once we get there.

The drive down this morning was beautiful. Picture every Christmas card or child's book you've ever held that had a "Winter Wonderland" scene in it, and that was us. The roads were clear, there were bits and pieces of light snow falling here and there around Painesdale and Watersmeet, but all the trees were thickly dusted and the long views of the Ontonagon River Valley were gentled with the edgings of white and the low grey sky. Eventually as dawn came on the crows appeared, doing lookout from the white pines or digging in the banks on the roadsides.

I hope Dennis didn't mind that I needed to sing, the mix CDs keeping me going. (Thank heavens for Cole Porter.)

Now we sit in the Rhinelander airport, an hour to go, a blue-tiled waterfall-fountain making us doze against the other background noise of the TSA folk checking people's luggage. I think of Allan Heaps and Karla Kitalong, with whom I drove back from a Computers & Writing Conference in Columbia, Missouri many years ago now. Allan wanted to save money by not staying another night in a hotel, so we -- he -- drove all night, fueled by bridge mix he bought just north of the Wisconsin/Illinois border. By the time we got to Rhinelander it was close to 4am. Allan and Karla were in the front seat, shouting "Rhinelander" over and over in different accents, making each other crack up. They settled finally on a sort of Germanic accent, thick and authoritative in spite of their giggles. This morning I started the chant of it as soon as we saw the first road sign. Dennis didn't remember the story, and certainly didn't remember the emotional resonance and comfort of such chanting in the dark.

But we are here and, if we are lucky, we will be sitting by the fire at Shaw in about 14 hours. (And being grateful that all this didn't happen while we were trying to get to the MLA.)

where does chumlig come from?

Persisting to page 130 paid off; the last 200 pages of _Rainbows End_ went quickly. It helped, also, to have a large chunk of unexpected and unclaimed time today so that the difficulty of holding on to who is who in the book wasn't intensified by the gaps between my previous reads.

Arrogant judgment: If Vinge had written characters that were more than sketches with one or two traits -- sometimes visual, sometimes personality (Miri is heavy, Alice is withdrawn, Carlos flutters periodically into Mandarin and wears Bermuda shorts and T-shirts, Robert is an arrogant asshole) -- the book would compel as well as give fun. I might have also gotten engaged in the plot, which although was supposed to be tied to the-end-of-life-as-we-know-it had neither suspense nor weight. The pleasure for me was in his imaginings of technological implications, which are suggestive -- but schematic.

The descriptions of the protest at the library that weaves through most of those last pages -- pitting the belief circle of the Scoochis against that of the Hacekeans -- did bubble for me because it's Seuss meets Society for Creative Anachronism. Both come with already-established visualization and high silliness, and Vinge plays it out at night, under the eucalyptus. Vinge asks us to imagine this event drawing the attentions of hundreds of thousands of people, many participating in its distributed sustenance and movement. Within the book the event is supposed to be a big deal because it's the first time that belief circles have clashed with each other, rather than internally. They clash because the SCA contingent wants the library's books to be digitized, no matter if the books are destroyed; the Scoochis want to hold on somehow to the 'real' books while the digitization happens.

In spite of that, there's no real defense put up for books as unique objects. In the last pages, following the prevention of the dangerous mice being shipped out, the library is rebuilt as a place of haptics: feel the book, turn the pages: it's all digitized and being spread everywhere. Where the ‘real' books are stored or who has access isn't discussed. I must have missed something about the Scoochi position and how it differed from the Hacekean because it doesn't seem that there are two widely separate positions there: one is tied to a dream of chain mail fantasy and the other to plush furries, and it's okay that the British Museum can be made to fit on a sort-of floppy because there's haptics, and at the end Vinge tells us that this is the result of the two positions working in parallel.

At best, then, there is an argument for belief circles not being exclusive, without reasons being given and with an unspoken ambivalence about the materiality of words and books circulating throughout. But I want to stop complaining.

I do enjoy the descriptions of the wearables that allow the wear-ees different kinds of primarily visual overlays: a cop car on the freeway becomes a woman on a pterodactyl, the scrub of San Diego County reveals its water system or allows mutual game playing in the hills (where we lived when I was very little, before those hills were suburban). Vinge does allow me to imagine the results of thousands of people playing together as individuals, without planning or hierarchical oversight, to result in complex entertainments -- and he plays that off interspersed descriptions of hundreds of people in various security organizations looking, individually, within the playing for patterns that denote imposed plans and plots. It is distributed computing carried out through certain logics of social organization, where most people, it seems, are meant to be distracted and the rest are meant to keep them safely distracted by keeping anyone else from giving the distribution enough shape to bend it in any particular direction.

But what's of focused interest to me in all this, given what I do, are the occasional descriptions of the Composition class in which several of the principles take part. By having old people need to be educated into wearable and other technologies just as the young people do, Vinge sets up being able to explain stuff without having to have pages of overt let-me-explain-how-this-all-works exposition. And so the poet who has come back from Alzheimer's has to take a sort-of remedial Composition class at the local high school along with the kids who aren't the stars; the same teacher also teaches a "Search and Analysis" class. The Composition class consists of people making things, and being graded -- it sounds like -- on both process and product. The process, in part, is learning how to partake in distributed systems, in learning how to hook up with others and collaborate and consider how one contributes (the poet collaborates with a boy, teaching him to be comfortable with words in exchange for technical lessons); the products include water purifiers, musical compositions played by school orchestras thousands of miles apart, and a virtual bridge that circle the Earth.

I circle back then to the book's ambivalence towards words: these compositions are fully multimodal and collaborative, requiring lots of discussion -- which we never see -- and apparently no writing. Vinge is certainly doing things with words as a writer, and he must know his limitations because he doesn't give us any of the great poet's poetry -- which the great poet can no longer create, anyway, as a result of the medical procedures that have brought him back from Alzheimer's. The boy with whom the poet collaborates is drawn to the poet after after being transfixed by the poet's performance of a poem, and at the end the boy creates the words that accompany the musical composition I mentioned above. One of the minor -- and made-to-be mediocre -- characters comments that those words are beautiful, and the poet agrees, while thinking that in his past life, as the poet, he would have found them second-rate. Words are here, then, but uncomfortable, necessary but causing considerable tension in their print manifestations, allowed to be the past beautiful results of a single great (but asshole) man's efforts but fading now as biological patterning and collaborative creations become the dangerous or engaging ways of being with others.

Is distributed aesthetics about the fading of singular creative types and the glistening of those who know how to collaborate and spread and insert delight in many different and often small places?

It's time to sleep, and I have devoted more time to this than I should, but now I know even more the directions some of my reading has to take: sensation, aesthetics, distributed cognition, ethics, yee-hah. What would a distributed ethics be -- if it's different from how we already live? (What is morality in distributed cognition?)

the joys of traveling -- and not

Here is where we are supposed to be at this moment:

Here is where we are:

We woke at 5, showered, watered the plants, remarked the bright massy stars in the chilly darkness as we climbed up to the car, stopped at the Post Office to drop off the bills in the chilly outside mailbox, and at the airport were smug at not having to wait in the unusually long line because we'd already printed our boarding passes and had no luggage to check.

Until our friend Diane walked over out of the line to ask, "And where were you imagining you were going this morning?" She told us the plane was delayed three hours. Later, on the Northwest website, we read that the reason was that the plane crew needed required rest time -- usually you can count on that first flight out in the mornings as the most reliable flight, because it goes on the plane that came in the night before, but all we can figure is that the plane got in late last night and so the crew weren't allowed to leave on time. We hope they slept well. But at the airport the airline people were all too busy up to tell any of us.

From those past days of hanging around with Cindy Selfe I know that when there is a long line and a flight change you go to the phones, so we pretty quickly learned that there was no way we were going to make it to Seattle today, unless we wanted to risk stand-by.

So our plans have changes and we fly out on Tuesday, instead, fingers crossed. B&B won't be able to meet us at the airport, as they would have today (they spent the night in Seattle last night so they could meet us) -- so we're trying to figure out whether to take the bus from the Seattle airport to the ferry or the little plane to the island. There are less happy things to spend an afternoon considering.

We came home from the airport, still in the dark, slept a little, cleaned out the basement a little (amused at ourselves that this is what we do with a gift of a little time), shopped for food for the next day and a half -- and bought ourselves a bottle of champagne and some local smoked fish for tomorrow morning: this is our Christmas plan if we are here, a delicious one that has provided many good memories from the past -- like the Christmas morning a few years back where we came up with the five disk set of the best women's music of all time, in an operatic narrative of love sustained.

I had forgotten...

that momentary start of seeing the world change, of waking toward the window and having it all be the dim white of an early morning snow that has lined all the trees and erased all other detail. One morning at Vassar, when I lived in the townhouses with Rachel and Hilary, I woke to this and went out for a three hour walk along the edge of the farm and through neighborhoods I hadn't walked before, in the quiet and no one else was there until I came home and they were bustling about breakfast, Rachel having made something warm as she usually did. One morning some years later -- the first of Thanksgiving break after we had driven up late at night into the Sierras from the previous day of classes at Berkeley, a day that had been frustrating for some one of the reasons grad school can be frustrating -- we woke to several inches of snow and I headed out into it with our friend's dog, out and down toward the Stanislaus River through the big trees, several hours of sloughing off pissed-off-ness into the delight and beauty of it and the effort of it, too, the snow in some places knee-high. When we got back to the cabin, the dog passed out in front of the wood stove and I was back in the world of living with others.

I won't go out into this morning's snow, yet. Instead, I have printed our boarding passes for flying away tomorrow, off to Seattle to visit with Dennis's brother and Buni for two weeks. (Is there a way to type so that the letters sparkle with the gladdening they bring?) In the meantime, though, I am looking out into this snow for some consolation for the frustrations and bad-decisions-of-others of this past week.

Not counted in that list, however, is that my father put our Christmas package that we'd sent them on the stove. I heard this happening while on the phone with my mother, checking that the package had arrived. In the middle of talking about what is happening Christmas Day there, she said, an aside, her hand over the receiver, "Walter, that's probably not a good place to put that," but I could picture him standing in the kitchen with the package and no other place to put it because my mother is in cooking mode (hence, all the counter space is full). She and I talked a few minutes more, plotting various niece-and-nephew fun, and we finished and hung up. Several minutes later the phone rang, and Dennis picked it up and what I heard was, "But it's okay? Only the bottom was singed?"

meanwhile

I am trying to read Rainbow's End by Vernor Vinge as my "find a few moments in the evening to read something fun and distracting" book, and this man has won four Hugos? This is the first book of his I have read, and it's like chewing cardboard.

Vinge can develop edge-of-intriguing ramifications of current technological potential but he cannot write a person whose name I remember (or care to remember) or whose behaviors make sense or involve decision, thought, or concern. Vinge's place descriptions are flat and there is no rhythm or variety to the sentences. I'm staying with it now because it puts me to sleep.

His other books must be better somehow? How?

it is raining

It is raining? A year ago, it was not raining.

A year ago, I also did not have a General Education Distribution Lists meeting in the afternoon on the last day of the semester.

But the night ended with decorating Marilyn's Christmas tree, which is beautiful.

Maybe it will snow by morning. The tree will still be beautiful.

Escher and the duck lobby

The cat is licking out the bowl that held my morning yogurt and I am contemplating the last dream I had before waking. I often dream about being inside houses, houses with rooms that keep opening into other rooms but from the outside look small and tidy -- sort of like the Winchester Mystery House but not as built-for-forgiveness-or-avoidance and neither so imposing nor ornate. This morning's dream, however, took place completely inside a conference hotel.

It was not an anxiety dream about an upcoming conference. I'm not going to MLA this year, and so my next conference is not for three months -- what's to worry?

This conference hotel had at least seven levels of stacked lobbies and mezzanines, and I spent the whole dream wandering through their late twenties faded gilt and corner armchairs. I ran into people I knew in the dream but who bore no resemblance to anyone I know outside the dream, the usual logic of dreams. Once, I had to -- in my slinky twenties evening gown -- climb over the thirties-looking cars in the parking ramp opening onto a lobby, in order to get to the other side. Once, I walked up a ramp between levels, watching through the intermittent doors other people I knew having a pleasant conversation while they walked up a parallel ramp. Once, I heard ducks.

Perhaps it's because the semester has ended and the immediate day-to-day claims of meetings and people in classes has abated. I can turn to the longer term projects I've been wanting to get (back) to, but perhaps it's just that my brain now has some energy simply to divert itself. But is my sense of self now shifting from the cozy private-ness of all those houses that I used to dream to the faded publicness of academic conference attendance?

I would like, very much, please, to write like Twisty

"...I’m gonna go out on a limb and hypothesize that any research involving heterosexual spousal hand-holding and women on the receiving end of clinical cattle prods is going to end up, as far as media are concerned, portraying dudes, heteronormativity, and the dear old institution of marriage in a rosy light."

I'm dreaming of

I finished grading conferences this afternoon with the shiny group of people from the Intro to Multimedia class, and took care of the anthill of little things-that-must-be-attended-to at school, and came home and sent off another set of packages for Christmas and now I am on to one of the better pleasures of it, putting together a CD of music I like for one of my very cool nieces, who is 17 and can write the socks off a cat or a tall human. Here's what she's getting, so far:

Not California -- Hem
These are the Days -- 10,000 Maniacs
Highway One -- The Waifs
Things That You Know -- The Wailin' Jennys
Into the Open -- Heartless Bastards
Motorcycle -- Ana Egge
Milkman's Daughter -- Anne McCue
You Dance -- Eastmountainsouth
Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl -- Broken Social Scene
One Evening -- Feist
Hold On, Hold On -- Neko Case
In My Life -- Beatles
Some Good Thing -- The Wailin' Jennys
Fisherman's Daughter -- The Waifs
Open Your Eyes, You Can Fly -- Lizz Wright

You can probably see the delicate dance here of choosing what won't worry my sister but also won't have the obviousness of the too-encouraging aunt while still being of interest to the cool niece. But I could have used all of this when I was 17 (which was when I memorized In My Life, among other things less parentally easy) as I was leaving home and which seems an okay thing to pass along.

But am I missing anything?

when the old standards fail

There's nothing like bad news coming at the pinched end of the semester (I could link here to the welcome-home-feeling discussions all over the blogoround about grading, writing recommendations, having to finish overdue articles and reviews, meetings, hiring committees, etc., etc.) to make me desire childhood comforts. So I went and bought the classic blue box of Kraft macaroni and cheese and came home and fixed it and could only eat about a quarter before it lost all its ability or I lost all my desire.

Crap.

My friend Laurie's uncle (Cheesepowder Hal) invented the orange stuff that comes in the little metal bag, which meant that macs-and-cheese had a very powerful bosom-of-family-and-friends associative power for me. And now it seems to be gone.

Ah, world, what other comforts can you offer on such a grey afternoon? (Yeah, yeah, okay, fine, I'll go finish putting together the packages of presents that need to make it to the coasts quickly.)

I write a lot...

but someone I know commented the other day that this blog, for obvious reasons, is like a quarterly.

Having grown up with diaries, many of which I still have, sitting over on that shelf in the hallway by the window, I think of writing-for-thinking-to-myself as, well, writing to myself. Entertaining as it might be -- for others -- were I to publish here the words that help me think through a day's questions and tensions, um, well, you know, I like my line of work and the people with whom I work but about whom I sometimes need to think in less than quiet terms in order to work out how to work together generously. Sometimes my daily writing is private little silly giddy moments I want to recall, or little phrases that resonate that I want to remember, or descriptions of very private happinesses with others -- and my ideas about work and the stuff that I end up publishing often and usually entwine with all that: none of it separates out neatly into private and public-publishable-here.

Because LJ allows private and friends features, there's actually much more to this blog than most see, but still -- nothing approaching the non-quarterly. If there were more time, I might be able to work back through the other writing, to pull out what is share-able. But I haven't yet found how to do this daily. When I do write here in anything approaching regularity, if you track the dates, is over vacations, breaks, or in other breathing spaces. What is a good term for someone who blogs for a week or two and then not for a month or two?

But, like, how do others do it daily? Some of my pattern has to do (duh) with my sense of what counts as public and private; others have a sense of public that is much larger than mine, and others clearly have more time, or faster fingers or neurons, or all of it. You?

oh, yes, me, too

Your Birthdate: November 10

Independent and dominant, you tend to be the alpha dog in most situations. You're very confident, and hardly anything ever shakes you. Mundane tasks tend to drain you - you prefer to be making great plans. You are quite original. When people don't "get" you, it bothers you a lot. Your strength: Your ability to gain respect Your weakness: Caring too much what others think Your power color: Orange-red Your power symbol: Letter X Your power month: October

What Does Your Birth Date Mean?

in between a breath or two

Tonight, during dinner and while the cat slept with her head in the little tub of catnip, we watched some of La Femme Nikita.

I had forgotten how viscerally I responded when, on the night Bob takes her out to dinner and champagne and a gift of a gun, she finds herself in her little black dress and torn stockings in the restaurant kitchen, figuring out what to do while 5 or 6 gunmen hunt around for her. Her face runs through several severe emotions but settles mostly on the resolve of "I can handle this especially since I have an extra clip in my decollete." I could stand to channel that face -- and all that is behind it -- during some of the meetings and events coming up in the next weeks.

But I also wonder: given how many movies are about hired killers (we watched Shadowboxer the other night, which at least tried to think through questions of blood and violence but was too enthralled with Cuba Gooding Jr's ass to engage seriously with them), how many of our neighbors make their living in this way? The number of movies suggests that perhaps 20-30 percent of them are quietly and thoroughly cleaning their silencers right at this moment.

this is worth some exploration...

in the ever-elusive spare time: Google-mapping of other 2D representations.

home

The cat has come back out from her hiding place under my desk back in the farthest corner of the house (which just happens to be up against a heating vent) to welcome us back to this sweet house and work. My article writing is crawling, a paragraph and sometimes a sentence at a time, this being the slowest thing I have written in memory and I do not know why -- but I am not yet begrudging it even though everything else is piling up behind it, all behinder than it should be, a heavy dam waiting to break over my head.

The opening paragraph of this new little article, though, has a rhythm that makes me smile each time I re-read it, which is just enough pulse to keep me from throwing it away.

I am hoping that the iPod's semi-random function will come up with something new to goose me. Or an online random word generator. Or Babelfish, taking it to Italian and back again: "People in the codes category that we teach must learn approximately the academic expectations, but discursively."


This bit of writing needs something external to me to make it go right now.

a day off

It is Thanksgiving, and because it is also the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and in the fifties and sunny, everyone we have met today has commented enthusiastically but hesitantly about the weather. No one wishes to jinx this loveliness (although I did brag about it to my parents in Maryland earlier today, who groused about the drizzling damp and cold there) but also everyone wants to be out in it. We walked on the breakwater in Marquette where as we headed out one wide old man was heading in, sitting periodically on the large broken rocks to rest as he hauled his bucket of fish toward dinner. It smelled and sounded like the ocean -- water and fish and little waves -- on the West Coast during the gentlest of Januaries. There were three men still fishing out to the end, two on the huge cement blocks chatting while they lay there dibbling their lines, with their heads over the blocks looking down into the water, and one older man in a little bobbling aluminum boat, not quite asleep. It did almost put us to sleep to watch him. He was stretched out, his boat held in place by two anchors, one at either end, their lines visible all the way down, and he had his hat pulled down, and a rod over which his hands crossed but did not hold, and the little waves moved him and his boat slowly up and then back down, and again, and it was sunny but hazy and a few ducks floated on by and we all yawned.

When we walked back in, we passed several small groups of people, a young couple in sweaters only and big grins, an older couple with an eager Chesapeake Bay Retriever and a chatty daughter of about our age, and then a young father with two little energetic boys. The older boy (seven?) was running up and down the sides of the lower, sloped, concrete wall, exuberant to be out and able to run up and down, arms like wings. The littler boy (four?) stayed closer to his goateed father, who did encourage him to try to run up the slopes like his brother but the littler boy was just not enough settled into his bones and muscles to do it as gracefully and mindlessly as his brother. The littler boy looked nervous inside his big running smile.

I am reading, now, later, back in our hotel room, about the smallpox epidemic that hit the Americas between 1775 and 1782. Elizabeth A. Fenn wrote the book, Pox Americana, and she starts by describing how she got interested in the topic while an undergraduate but then worked for eight years as an auto mechanic, reading the whole time about smallpox and the life of the Americas in those years. She describes the high mortality rates for children under five and people over forty-five, and the lack of resistance of the people native to the Americas both because of non-exposure and genetic homogeneity, and so I am tacking her words onto the various people we have encountered today but also enthralled with the details that allow for more accurate imaginings about the past. She describes, for example, John Adams (the one who married Abigail) undergoing inoculation as it was practiced back in 1764. Adams writes Abigail about it: he and his brother are shut up in a house in Boston with a number of others, all under the care of different doctors with different approaches. First, Adams and his brother are prepared for a week through mercury treatments, various emetics, and a diet of bland soft things. Then their arms are cut and dried powdered scab material put in, and they pass through the course of the disease, but more lightly than had they caught it from someone else who had a full blown case: he comes out, a few weeks later, with only “eight or ten pockmarks.” How the fear of smallpox would have been background to everything one said or did (especially women who were pregnant, on top of every other fear).

The more I learn the more impossible I know it is to grasp any sense of the emotional tenor of other times but I look up from reading over lunch about smallpox and there is Dennis reading about something less scabrous and it is, after all, Thanksgiving and I believe I can take a few minutes from all that is due to enjoy this.

stuck

I am in a hotel room in Marquette, getting a short/quiet Thanksgiving away, and trying to push through a too-familiar wall in a short writing that is overdue.

The wall is this: at a point in this writing in which I am arguing for a pedagogy that mixes rhetoric with the New London Group's (arhetorical) notions of available designs-designing-the redesigned, my justification is simply to repeat what so many have been repeating ever since someone first brought a writing class to a computer: Look, writing is changing! Look, we need to acknowledge this in our teaching and so we need to acknowledge that we need to broaden/change how we teach! Look, writing is dead! Long live writing!

It's not that what I am recommending is tiring to me, it's that the justification is. It's worn and in that part of my writing I just want to insert a citation list of the 8 million before me who've made the same argument. I don't think I can get away without making it -- I need to offer some justification for what I am doing, given the context of my writing as a response to something published on hypertext almost 10 years ago now -- but I wish I could. I worry that when they come to that part of my writing (after some paragraphs that I admit to liking for their rhythms and cheery density) others reading this are going to start making that "yeah yeah yeah" sound in their heads -- and not in a happy Beatles remembering kind of way or even with Karen O in mind.

How can I make the argument that the NLG/rhetoric mashup can be one possible answer to a need without stating the need as that old retread?

Well, the need isn't exactly the exigency I've described (writing is dead, long live...) so much as it is the lack of change in our abilities really to understand what it means that writing *is* changing. (And, of course, to write that is to imply that *I*, Queen Anne, do understand.) If writing really is changing, in other words, then the audiences and contexts are changing just as much as the technologies and kinds of texts we make -- the texts with which people younger than I are so much more fluent. I need to approach this as a strong suspicion I have that maybe, just maybe, when we say writing is changing there is a whole lot more attached to than simply "Look, now I can cut and paste! It's easier than typing!" and that it's also a whole lot more than "Oh, and now I need to pay attention to typefaces, too." Like, duh.

I wish I could just presume that we were all on the same page about this and simply move on. I wish I had a pony. I wish I were 16, too, because I want to be fluent like a fish with some of these technologies that trip up my fingers. So I'll continue to work out in this writing just what it is I am recommending against, then, but I also want to point out (to myself, sigh) that I am now trying to use this blog-writing thing to think out loud, which I have not done before. (And so just where are my feet?)

We are off to one of the main reasons (other than Mavis, Andy, and Lily, and Snowbound Books) to make the trip to Marquette: Thai House.

you are not alone....

Those discussions we've been having about people in your classes turning in late work? The discussions don't end; they just keep getting more detailed.

You also might be interested in the latest teaching carnival.

break time!

It is not
yet noon,
and I have:
• written and sent off a review of a journal manuscript!
• changed the bed!
• started the laundry!
• vacuumed the whole house!
• cleaned the kitchen floor!
• cleaned the downstairs bathroom!
• begun procrastinating on the next article that's due!

The first day of a week-long break (and after returning from three trips in three weeks) suggests, seductively, endless time. Endless.

The water in the Portage right now is still, creating a late fall day mirror world of Houghton, trees, and the boat that goes out to Isle Royale. I think I could sit in this chair on the porch for the next week, drifting -- or at least continuing to procrastinate calmly.

Women Working 1800-1930 Archive

Via Scribbling Woman, this, an archive of manuscripts and images, a good way to get lost for quite a while.

This will be useful for the people in the New Media class I am teaching this semester, quite a few of whom are researching in local archives the lives of women in the Keweenaw Peninsula in the early 20th century.

tenure review overload

How would Kar Wai Wong write a tenure review? I need something to help me reinvigorate for this.

I'm working on my fourth review for the season (and have said no to others) and it should be an easy one, a case that is no question, but I look at the screen and want to go play. Maybe I have simply run out of words, or am feeling genre fatigue, or perhaps it is that the weather (rain/snow, lots of dripping noises) is universally agreed to be the sort that requires staying in bed watching good movies from other climates.

Would that I could write, "This person has earned tenure, anybody can see that, give it!!!" (With a smiley face, of course.)

Saturday morning

The slow down-drifting leaf movements outside this morning are my models. This semester, my to-do list is as absurdly long as my email inbox, and I am trying -- not hugely successfully -- to cultivate a slow acceptance that it will ever be thus: more requests and demands and projects than I can ever ever ever satisfy. Why not take this as a sign of the vibrance of this life?

My last five conversations with academic friends and colleagues -- and even one academic person on the other end of the phone with whom I have never spoken before -- have all been about this, about the apologies we continually make for not being in complete utter and total control.

And, well, f*** that.

If I ever think I am in total control, that's when I will scare myself and ought rightfully to be taken out behind the barn.

in response to Veritas Chick and MsLaoShi75

Back on September 28, VC and MsLS brought up some points that shape a discussion we need to have, ongoing and ongoing.

The tension is huge between acknowledging the backgrounds of people in classes and their efforts and holding them to an "objective" standard. That is, we want everyone to get 5s in their portfolios (the objective level), at the same time we want to acknowledge, first, that people in classes come from all sorts of different backgrounds and, second, that they then put in all kinds of different efforts.

In other words, someone who had all sorts of AP credits ought not to receive an A in class for never doing drafts, never really pushing, but still producing a shiny well-written research paper -- right?

All this make me think of Lisa Delpit's work in Other People's Children. The book is now over 10 years old, but is still provocative and important to me. Delpit was writing in response to arguments that we don't need to teach grammar and other 'basic skills' in (elementary) schools because children pick those things up anyway. She argues that this position is based in class structures: children who grow up in homes of privilege will learn -- without direct instruction -- the 'basic skills' that signify privilege and power.... and children who grow up in non-privileged homes will not. So we need to be providing overt instruction in 'basic skills,' Delpit is arguing, and we need to be aiming for a high bar.

But what is most compelling, to me, about her argument, is that Delpit didn't stop there. She didn't stop with arguing, "So we need to be giving overt instruction in 'standard' grammar." She argues, instead, that we need to teach grammars, that we need to help people in our classes see what their 'home grammars' give them, and what that other -- "standard" -- grammar gives them. She gives an example of a teacher in a Native community in Alaska, who helps people in her classes learn that their home language is about connectedness, family, closeness -- and that Anglo English is about distance, formality, hierarchies, etc. Delpit also has examples from teachers in other kinds of communities. Her examples -- about the real psychological and lived experiences of others -- are tremendously compelling.

So -- her argument (as I understand it) is that, if you want people in your classes to have the most cultural fluidity and agency, they have to know how to suss out AND USE the grammars of the powerful. They have to understand why trying to achieve that matters -- at the same time that they have to understand that doing this is not giving up on any home grammars.

In classes at Tech, this is weird, I think, because people in Revisions are either in the powerful grammar already (those students with all the AP credit) -- or they come from a nebulous middle/lower class background that hardly seems to be a community or a culture with its own grammar.

But if we can help people in Revisions understand that what we mean, in part, by 'choices' in the composition of texts is that they can be in a position to choose among a number of registers for writing -- including the so-called 'highest, most polished, most proper, most formal' (and that they have some understanding of how and why that register is considered 'highest, most polished, most proper, most formal') -- boy, if we can do that.... then we are golden.

So we can talk with them directly, I think, about this tension in teaching. We can talk with them directly about how we acknowledge their backgrounds and efforts, and how we also want them to have the agency to move among the different communities they will need to....

(Which means that those people with all the AP credit have to learn how to move in different communities, too... What would be ways to make THAT happen????)

the trees who whisper

talk to Chris Plummer:

the trees outside walker, suspended speakers (and hidden): motion -- and slow, continued motion -- brings on Ojibwe stories told by quiet voices, multiple stories overlapping, like water or breezes, for only a few people at a time

duh

In thinking about the presentation for Miami, I realize that my problem with the visual part of the presentation brings up exactly the same old word-picture problem. How to make the 'background' presentation something more than illustration, without it becoming distracting or overwhelming.

Lessig's presentation *is* illustration, with emphasis. His speaking and the projections play off each other beautifully... but what is up on the big screen is still illustration, still "here are my main points" -- just done with wit.

How do I want to go? Need to think on this... and how to compose the two parts together? As a whole?

responding to Multiliteracies

In your blog, please write on the following:

1 -- Summarize, quickly, what you see to be the 3-4 main points / arguments of the Multiliteracies article.

2 -- What would you say the purpose(s) of the article is (are)?

3 -- How do you see the arguments of the article weaving into our purposes in Revisions? Into how we are encouraging the class be taught?

4 -- What stands out for you in the article, as something you want to remember, or as a problem point, or as...?

Teaching carnival 11 is now up...

and ready for your reading pleasure.

school is starting up

We are in the last minutes of the Orientation for the new grad student teachers here at Tech. It has been 8 intense days -- 8 very full days -- with very wonderful teachers. The level of care and thinking about teaching has been inspiring to me, and I am thankful to Karen, Shannon, Nat, Becky, and Ethan for their sustaining intelligences, patience, and humor. I am so looking forward to our discussions this semester about teaching.

(And how to thank Christy and Moe, who are extraordinary? Winning lottery tickets? A pass on comps? Six weeks in Florence?)

more -- but good -- excuses

We are staying out at the lake (the one in the photograph above) and there are only phone lines, phone lines from, oh, perhaps 1965. There is no cable. So: if we want any internet connection, we have only dialup, and we average 5 attempts before we get a firm signal -- which often then cuts out within 5 minutes. If we stayed out there for a larger part of the year, a satellite connection would be on order.

The tradeoff? The lake. The bluebird that has been hanging out. The fox. The sunsets. The quiet. The water. The view. Sleeping. Air. The blueberries.

The bluebird sits on the phone wire with its ruddy little chest, nothing special, but then it jumps off and flutters and the blue of its open wings stuns us. We sit and watch, and wonder what sorts of special things we can pick up to keep it coming by. Meal worms? George Michael CDs?

Is it a good or uneasy sign that we are entertained by a bluebird?

the people formerly known as the audience

"The people formerly known as the audience wish to inform media people of our existence, and of a shift in power that goes with the platform shift you’ve all heard about."

the workshop is over...

and so more on that later and me coming to realize (once again) the limitations of throwing one's all into something to the point of becoming tired beyond the reasonable.

But, in the meantime, until I have some words in my head again, here is, via feministing, Joss Whedon on strong women characters.

You could call it...

a June swoon, except it started, well, in December or in 2003, depending on what markers you want to use.

But we are back from RSA and have mowed the lawn for the third time this season, a record -- but is it an indication of an upturn in our cultural embeddedness that we have mowed the lawn three times or an indication of a global warming-ed upturn in grass-encouraging temperature and wetness?

I am hoping, however, that -- regardless -- there will be an upturn in my email responsivity. May was pretty much a wash -- as was this whole past semester -- because of travel, which both broke down my tenuous discipline of response and also removed any reliable connectivity. (Having to stand at the counter of the Algonquin Hotel in order to pick up the lobby signal, with the hotel people cheeringly asking me about my mail and talking about how Dorothy Parker would have used email, was a fun but not productive point of the last several weeks.)

At the Peabody Hotel in Memphis, however, along with the ducks and other conference quack-stuff that others have mentioned in their always-ahead-of-me timeliness, there was (after we called down to the front desk every day for a new code to connect) strong signal in our rooms. There was also a paper to finish and much abuzz.

Last Monday at 8am I and a few others had the pleasure of seeing Collin Brooke awake and speaking not only coherently but also crowd-pleasingly humorously, on a panel with Dan Smith, Jeff Rice, and Jodie Nicotra on various new media issues. Collin asked after Manovich on the whole database versus narrative distinction (and Collin also embedded into his talk discussion of our discipline's current issues with disciplinarity, which he just ought to make its own paper, darn it, Collin.) Dan gave a very coherent presentation on Spinoza, one of those talks that sets all kinds of ideas spinning (including my memory of reading Spinoza in the early mornings in a high reading room of my college's appropriately Gothic library): it was very hard not think back to Collin's presentation on database narrative without using immanent relationality as a way in to conceive of the back and forth between the two -- among other sparks. Jeff continues to spin out his thinking on Ka-knowledge, with fresh moves between hip-hop and theory bites, and Jodie laid out folksonomy. That's my fast memory, which slowed down on the plane back home (needing to digest the barbecue from the airport pit probably helping).

It was a good panel, and -- like the other good ones at RSA -- should have had a meal afterwards for slow discussion. I'll be chewing on it (but the barbecue, I am thankful to say, is long gone).

One little thing that did come up during the panel was a comment (agreed to by many) about the sucky design of del.icio.us (for example). Not only is del.icio.us visually awkward, but it is awkward in the using, in the ability to categorize and compare and move among. This morning, WIRED has a link to del.icio.us.discover, to someone doing some play with what is possible with all those other del.icio.us people making their preferences visible to each other.

such a day

If there must be people, at least there are also lilacs.

Kool & The Gang sang

Kristin is now hooded.

no schedule

It is raining, I have a to-do list that (like everyone else's) is seven hundred years long, but I also have no more regular schedule because classes are out and weekly meetings are poofed away. Does anyone else -- upon hitting the first school-is-out morning -- melt into desire that time stopped and the to-do list vanished and the morning rained endlessly and there was nothing but Merchant-Ivory reruns and...? Well. Embarrassing but deep-running whines.

Off to do more prep work for the portfolio assessment session on Thursday.

and, finally, little colorful things

Oh so fem, I know, but nothing justifies Wordsworth faster than this. And out by the sewage plant, too.

and then there is sun

in the woods, walking

Still, there is this.

why I like Campari

The Little Campus on Maryland Avenue in Annapolis, replaced now by a pretend Irish pub, was our neighborhood bar, when Laurie and I lived on Hanover Street. It was where Laurie introduced me to Campari, which I have been drinking happily in the summers (and on winter nights when we need it to be summer) ever since. It is a drink that promises much.

waking up

Some mornings, right?, you just need some noodles so you dress quickly, cross the bridge, and try to decide which noodle shop in the block by the Suomi will provide the breakfast of choice.

Seasonal Tickland

Were it late May, we would not have walked where we did today. Two years ago we walked out at the Sloughs on a sunny afternoon, and after just a short time Dennis looked down at my legs (I was wearing the light yellow pants that Lynn Huddon finds a bit too neon) and asked, "What's that on your pants?"

Up to my knees, it was ticks. The same for Dennis, but they were less easy to see because his pants were dark. We ran back to the little parking area there by the two-lane highway and undressed and shook out our clothes and shoes and socks and brushed each other off closely and attentively and in the car on the way back we found a few more crawling on us and at home we left our shoes outside and undressed again in the basement at the washing machine. The next morning when I opened the top of the washing machine there were three ticks sitting on top of the agitator, their forearms raised, waiting.

But it's not yet been warm enough long enough for the ticks to be out, and so today we walked longer than that other time.

A sandhill crane sang its pterodactyl song from the old now-almost-underwater farm field -- angry that we were near? -- and flew heavily away. An osprey also flew over us, just after we saw our third set of muskrats. There were lots of ducks, and lots of some sort of fork-tailed swift that flashed a pale blue on its undersides and seemed even to glisten a darker blue above. Several pairs of Canada geese -- fairly large ones -- watched us. Flickers, and lots of little brown birds. Back in the woods, where the path leads to the Snake River, the moss was iridescent and thick.

It's hard not to wonder when we're back in there, though, what this area was like back before all the dikes and breeding ponds were built to stop the seasonal flooding that, according to people we know who've lived here a long time, used to cover the highway for weeks at a time.

But eslewhere...

Over at the Sturgeon Sloughs, south of Chassell, a few trout lilies are already blooming. The woods there are mottled light and today -- in the sun -- were considerably warmer than the Covered Road was on Sunday.

technology?

It's a railroad grade, from the early part of the twentieth century, the trains going out to the stamp mill at Freda but also for a while taking people from Houghton to the lakeside park at Freda and -- from 1908 until 1941 -- taking students to the high school in Painesdale. It's easy to see how the grade was built up, to see how it rises above the uneven ground around it in order to provide the even and low grade the ore-hauling trains needed. Once you notice the grade, you have to wonder how many hours and what sort of equipment it took to build, and to wonder who decided it was worth the effort and investment. The part that's still easily accessible is a road several miles long that has 2 farms off it, and is called The Covered Road because -- in the summer -- the tree leaves fill it in and make a tunnel.

In late April, though, those leaves are just tipping in. But the mottled leaves of the trout lilies are thick on the ground: if this week is warm (but it is supposed to snow tonight) then next week will be good for another walk, to see the yellow flowers.

Yesterday, though, 4 cars passed us in the in the two hours we walked. The people in each car waved and smiled. There were some birds, some calling and some drilling into the wood. Otherwise, we heard only our talking.

I think we need to live in Hong Kong for a while, for comparison, to shock our overly calmed systems -- or else to be transported back to this same place, just 100 years ago.

liminal seasons

Up here, in this north, the borders of winter are marked by fog. Early in the morning is a Twilight Zone episode, like one Zizek writes about, when the man in the cab can see nothing out the windows. There is a grey that starts right on the other side of the thin window pane, and there is that and nothing else outside our house. I go back to sleep rather than open the front door. I dream about Adrienne Barbeau, or else about Jamie Lee Curtis and Janet Leigh. When I wake again, the sun is out and the world has returned with its trees, cars, and birds.

The fog time happens just before the snow time and then again just after, as the ground and the water lose their heat to the air and then the reverse. I know this, and yet this science knowledge runs up against my film experiences and my latent want-the-world-to-have-some-mystery desires, and my own fog generator kicks in and I go back to sleep in thrall to the grey in-between so I can dream a bit more under some irrational blankets while the world warms (or cools?) around me and until I do have to open the door, again.

if Houghton were the bellwether for holidays

Even though the original event of Christmas, I was told while growing up, took place where there were palm trees and warmth, the lights and tinsel hanging in the palm trees of Los Angeles -- when we lived there -- were a sure indication that our ways of celebrating Christmas developed someplace other than around that original manger. Living now in the Upper Peninsula, I understand Easter as I never could in California: it takes being under snow for 5 or 6 months to understand, viscerally, why we celebrate the return of green and warmth.

But had it been populations in the Upper Peninsula who determined when something like Easter should be celebrated, it would still be a few weeks off. We would celebrate when the marsh marigolds were blooming, and the trout lilies, when even the last remnants of snow -- in the crooks still now under the shaded north sides of pine stands -- were gone. It is not yet warm enough to be out dancing, hanging pastel things in trees. But, still, we have begun to celebrate. It's nothing that needs planning: we step outside into the light and the green and the sky are simply enough to make us joyful, unbidden. People are in shorts, and it is just above 40 degrees. People giggle.

It is also not too early to eat chocolate, nor is it too early to admire what the snow melt contributes to the Sturgeon River, south of Baraga, where the small canyons of basalt look -- in their perpendicular breakings and moss cover -- like chilled remains of ancient castles. There was much noise there earlier today, when we walked through the woods to the river: lots of small ducks were passing through, small crisp black and white ones flying over, and other birds, some warblers hidden back in where we could not see them. And there was so much water, loud water, gunmetal colored except where it was pushing over the slabs of rock and the light made it yellow and brown because of the tannin and at the edges all sorts of moss and moisture-liking greens were pushing up.

the tree in spring

how delight happens

a reminder

To the best of my research, there is no yeast in these.

blizzard?

back home

We were in Maryland for the last week, at my parents' house. My two brothers who live in California, one of my sisters who lives near to my parents, and Dennis and I started the work of preparing the house to sell so my parents can move into a smaller living space, a living space on one floor. My mother likes to accumulate, um, stuff, and so there was much clearing out to do before we could begin to clean and paint. But we got the front room, dining room, and family room cleaned and painted (many many coats required, since the unpainted-in-40-years walls were very thirsty), as well as the entryway and the upstairs hallway. Sometimes it seems we accomplished a lot. Sometimes it seems that the five of us should have been able to do more.

But we worked steadily, listened charitably to each other's music, and occasionally groused about each other's painting habits. (Note to myself: when I start complaining about the drips in the paint that someone else put up while I am busy making my own drips, it means I need to go take a nap. From painting mullions {all 72 of them = 218 small strips of wood surrounding them} in the big windows in the front room and dining room, I also learned that painting mullions is a labor of love. And I better understand "decadence": ostensive definition: the desire to make houses *look* colonial even though we now have the technology to make large panes of glass so that mullions are no longer a requirement for large windows.)

I also got to work on her algebra with the coolest niece in the world.

We are home now, though, having arrived on the midnight jet, and, this morning, just missed the trash truck on its bi-weekly pass through. There is still snow here.

Better, however, is the current Carnival of Feminists.

.....

Octavia Butler has died.

I do not have hypergraphia.

I wrote and did layout work all day, and my brain is drained. It truly does feel as though I used up the day's portion of words, with maybe the exception of "piquant" and "trenchant."

I get engaged with the Olympics in embarrassing ways.

Like a dog rolling tongue-out on its back in grass, I wallow in the large onscreen glowing faces of women who have just won and parents talking in tears about the child who has just won (or even just made it down the hill, in the case of the skier from Madagascar). I also fantasize about the sport in which I will finally make it to the Games, but I think these days I watch more for the clarity, simplicity, and strength of the emotion.

And then I return to my undisciplined life of writing on demand -- although now trying to feel what it would be to do this as though I were Sasha Cohen in the short program.

The emotions evoked by what I see -- the transfer to me of Clara Hughes's joy at winning the 5000m speedskate, the joy reduced, of course, but still visceral -- are possible because of TV. I will turn from watching all this back to my writing, and the emotions will carry over a bit, for a little while that I wish I could stretch longer and that will make me regret the end of this Olympics, but I can stretch it some by recalling Clara Hughes's body on the ground, heaving for breath and in pleasure after she won. I can also call to mind Sasha Cohen's fingertips spiraling out from her body so lusciously, and feel -- because of my own memories of various kinds of movements -- something of what that must be, to let the whole of a body succumb into the curves demanded by momentum. Something of that I imagine I am feeling, a little bit of it, enough to provoke and tease and distract me from how today's work on a little book requires much smaller hand movements and bodily embrace.

Because I am fighting with the other writing I must do today, I am happy that the the televised experience of the women can meet up with my bodily memories and make my cells feel.

And this is why, of course?, television and movies are so delightful and dangerous?

the book is out

The book we developed within Jarndycean time is officially off the presses. We have received happy emails from friends and acquaintances all over the country and even in this town telling us they have received their copies, but we have not yet seen the book.

I am not sure I want to.

I will see only errors and what we could (should) have done differently.

The cat is snoring.

Brad Gushue

Schools in Newfoundland were closed today so that students could watch the Canadian men's curling team go for the gold -- which they won, allowing team member Russ Howard to become the oldest person (at 50) to win a medal in the Olympics. (Well, except that there's this: "The oldest man to receive a Winter Olympics medal is 83-year-old Anders Haugen. The Norwegian-American actually received his ski jump bronze medal 50 years after he competed in 1924 when a scoring error was discovered in 1974.")

Curling. The closest thing to bowling in the Olympics -- requiring more strategy but less cool shirts.

Marilyn came over tonight after dinner. We shared dessert and watched the Ice Skating Gala -- except that the ice skating was intercut with bobsledding on US TV so we switched over to Canadian TV during the long non-skates and watched the curling highlights. It is soothing, as Marilyn said, like watching the grass. But we can't watch the grass: when Marilyn left, there was 3" of new snow on her car. We have received 250 inches (give or take) this winter so far, and I can talk about curling with enough sophistication that it will undoubtedly show up, without any mindful effort on my part, as a metaphor in some paper I present in the near future.

Life in the north.

my own observations about responding to student work, from a non-composition class

For the past 13 years, I have taught (at least once a year) HU2645, Introduction to Visual Communication. The class always goes well: people are there because they want to take the class, and the work of class is always fun, with lots of production and lots of people ooh-ing and ah-ing over what each other has made.

Because I have taught the class so much, and because I know it will go well, I am comfortable with using it as a little bit of a laboratory for tweaking different aspects of class in different semesters. So, for example, when I first taught the class, I would ask students to put together, two times over the semester, notebooks of their work, with annotations of the work; I would spend anywhere from an hour to an hour-and-a-half responding in incredible detail to each notebook, the equivalent of responding to every grammar error in a written paper as well as to larger, global issues. Eventually that became untenable; I simply did not have that kind of time -- when I was a grad student or afterwards.

I started keeping the daily homework of people in class, and then responding to it every 2-3 weeks with observations about global issues that I could see because I had a number of their pieces to compare. The time required was much less.

I felt guilty about it: students had commented on how much they liked the thick and detailed responses they got to their notebooks. But no one complains about the feedback they get now (except for the times I let those 2-3 weeks stretch beyond 2-3 weeks, sigh) -- and the work students produce is, ta-da, even better than when I would spend huge amounts of time responding.

They have always gotten huge amounts of feedback *in class*, from each other and from me. (Just about every class is shaped around all of us looking at each other's work and making responses based on guidelines taken from readings and observations.) So that is clearly a factor in the quality of the work they make.

But what I learned from all this is that focused, short comments from me were actually more useful to them than longer, detailed comments. Although they probably felt warm and fuzzy because of the length of my comments (meaning: "She cares about *me*!"?), the focused global comments -- to my observational eye -- seemed to keep them more focused on the approaches to their work that were most useful to them in making aware progress.

So I figure out other ways to keep class warm and fuzzy (lots and lots of positive spoken-aloud comments throughout class, and so on) and students aware that I am thinking about each one of them (pulling them aside at various times individually to make comments) -- but I sure am happy that I can see how effective it is to keep my out-of-class commenting time short and focused. I do like having time to breathe, sometimes.

How do you test out similar approaches in your classes?

what I learn, 2

At the end of last 5931 Yang described an incident in her class that had upset her (the same incident she described in a blog entry). In the quickness of class ending I responded with assumptions about what had happened, and I was wrong. Yang and I sat and talked about what had happened afterwards, and looked the work of people in her class, and she had made beautiful comments on the student papers.

How do you handle the frustrations of students not understanding how much time and effort you put in to the work of class?

what I learn

It has been quite a week, with much going on -- and visiting classes has been the best part by far. It has been like Christmas, each class a different gift: inside the same little cramped 143 or 144, each teacher sets up different approaches, different ways of being with students, different rhythms to the class. Each class is for that reason refreshing, and might set me off to thinking about (for example) how important the phrasing of questions is for how students will respond (or even if they respond), how important setting up class patterns is (start each class with writing, or with a review of the assignments; end each class with a recap of what happened and how it ties to what is to come, or with chances for students to write questions about what's going on), and how important it is to vary the rhythm of a class (as I watch different teachers move from whole class discussion to small group discussion of a text, or vice versa).

I am reminded, more than anything, of how a successful class is woven out of decisions big and small. And of how the big, more structural decisions about the overall tenor of a class and about how we want to shape our authority are played out through the small decisions about where and how we sit and stand and move and talk, about how we phrase questions, about how we ask students to get up and move, all that. But those big decisions, too, the ones tied to the kinds of choices offered in the Tate book between different or overlapping conceptions of who students and teachers are and what learning it, give us the grounding for deciding what small specific moves we make in a class: If I want to take on feminist practice, will I sit up front the whole time? If I want students to question and experiment with how communication shapes the power relations among us, how do I phrase the questions I ask or, even, who asks the questions?

It's all fascinating, and subtle, and amazing to watch. Neither Fred nor Ginger -- even for all her dancing backwards and in heels -- had anything on a successful classroom waltz.

meanwhile...

a propos of some discussions we've had in 5931 about student email addresses, there was an article in yesterday's NYT about this, and it's been picked up on more frequently updated blogs -- with more tellings of why it is good reason to tell students you will only communicate with then through their mtu accounts. (But thank goodness, mtu -- in spite of other loosenesses with our social security numbers -- doesn't use them as our addresses.)

done

The three weeks of traveling: done.
The root canal: done.
The filling: several days later, done.
Hotels for three upcoming trips: done.
Flights for three upcoming trips: done.
Rental cars: check.
Email inbox: think of the time you walked into a goverment office of some kind, in a large city, and you took a number -- ah, a good prime, say, 137 -- and the receptionist-type person calls number, oh, you pick it. You know where this is going.

tomorrow

Tomorrow is the third flight in three weeks, this time to UWashington-Bothell to give some workshops on new media, scholarship, student writing... This is with the wonderful Becky Rosenberg who was at CIWIC last summer.

I never even unpacked from the last trip. I've acquired clothing that doesn't wrinkle, that resist wrinkles, that will come out of the suitcase in 6 years looking unwrinkled. I will look wrinkled. I will look sleepy and crumpled and flight-worn. But my pants will do all the work for me. In return for letting them out of the suitcase, they've promised to take over the talking at the workshops. I wish they would take over the last bit of preparation, too. Oh, and if they could get the root canal surgery for me next week, too, and help pack up and move my parents out of their house in March -- that would be a good pair of pants.

I am most happy to report, however, that the website for Writing New Media now works in IE as well as in all the better browsers. It wasn't until I was forced to do email in a cramped office off a hotel lobby last week, on an old computer, that I saw how badly IE munged the website. Microsoft never fails.

I want to teach elementary school

or in a one-room schoolhouse, sometimes.

Today Johndan has a link to an invigorating description of someone teaching base 2 counting through a Socratic approach.

How would this -- could this? -- work in a first-year college writing/communication class?

home again, again

We came back into a light snow very late Friday night -- or very early Saturday morning -- and spent yesterday catching up, as much as was possible, on email and bills and the odds and ends that are easy to forget when your attentions are completely absorbed elsewhere for a few days.

Last night Mary Durfee had one of her always-good wine tasting parties, with the theme of fault lines, and it was an almost raucous evening where we all told long stories (and learned how hard it is in Spanish to put pants on an octopus) and came home in a thick snow to our little but welcoming lit-up front porch. The cat is happy we are back, and is showing it in the best possible cat way, by sleeping for long and snoring hours pressed up against one or the other of us. For her, we take turns making the sacrifice of working in bed.

And because it is Sunday morning I have lulled a bit through Sunday morning reading, the Times and then across the blogs, finding thoughtfulness in this, for example, on Brokeback Mountain, the writer getting it right (I think) in the New York Review of Books. Jane has good openings into talking about the technological savvy of people in our classes. And Marilyn Manson is working on playing Lewis Carroll, which could, maybe, you know, perhaps be good if he gets the math right. Manson and Svankmajer could make a good evening together, perhaps, you know, maybe.

But what is perhaps, maybe, you know, more important, is this on what happens when science is trumped in order to "make the president look good."

home again

Three take offs, three landings, but only one bag of pretzels. It's good to be back home -- it was a good trip, I think, although we haven't had time to crash and reassess and pick at ourselves.

And my mother's surgery on Thursday ended up okay even though the surgeon pierced her lung and no one figured it out for almost 24 hours and she had to stay in the hospital a few extra days. When I spoke with my mother on the phone today she did something I have never heard her do before: she was doing some wishful matchmaking for one of my brothers. She was a bit breathless while she wished: a result of desire or heart? Or is one now loosened up so that the other functions in a new way? This will be fun to watch; I hope I get to watch for a long long time.

it's not Lake Superior

But it's where we ended up Saturday afternoon. Who knows where?

Sunday night reflections

Which of these two assignments would you rather receive in a writing class?

• 1 Write an essay that imitates the form of a Mark Twain essay, updating it to a modern topic.


• 2 Write a 4-page description of your kitchen. If you don't currently have a kitchen, describe the one you know best: your parents', or sibling's, or friend's. Use the passage from the class handout as a model. Try to describe the kitchen accurately to all the senses, so that we feel we're there; be sure to describe an empty kitchen, without people in it.

Why?

Being only slightly obsessive about things that happen in class -- and also needing to distract myself from a presentation that won't write itself -- and not finding sufficient distraction in Alchemy -- I am trying to think through the best way to talk about how the book for 5931 connects up specifically, directly, and poignantly with what happens in our classes day-to-day.

I got interested in theories about teaching when I taught for a few years at the Los Angeles Conservation Corps, a job training-education program in South Central Los Angeles. I had been a teaching assistant in rhetoric classes at Berkeley before we moved to Los Angeles. At Berkeley back then, the 10-week class was divided into 5 2-week sections, and in each section students read a book and wrote a paper about it -- no revisions, just final copy, please. For 4 of the sections I was responsible for grading 2/3 of the papers (and sitting in on the class) and for the remaining section I taught the book and graded 1/3 of the papers. Together with bits and pieces of substitute teaching from before, that was the sum of my teaching experience.

The teaching at the LACC came about backwardly (as most things in my life do): I volunteered to help them set up and run their computer lab, which led to teaching people how to use the computers, which led to teaching GED prep and life skills classes and developing a whole lot of education materials for on and off the computers (which led to a whole bunch of work for the government and other folks, but that's another life). Because the corpsmembers were most often people who had dropped out of high school (often in the second semester of their senior years, because they did have other whole lives that they valued over the poor quality of the schools), the take on teaching at the LACC was "Figure out what works." So I read off my little butt in order to get help and ideas.

I started by reading books that were directly about what to do in classrooms, and for that I found that it was writings from teachers in K-8 that were most useful to me -- and from specific teachers in that group. These specific teachers knew they needed to make class interesting, but in addition, the books I found that were most most useful were all written by people who valued student engagement, confidence, and pleasure. I found (for example) math books from which I learned that, to get students to trust their own thinking, you can put them in small groups to solve concrete (and fun: let's use raisins!) math problems, most of which did not have only one proper way-to-solution. In such situations, you can also make a rule: if anyone in the group has a question, you have to work it out in the group; if the whole group can't work it out, then you can ask the teacher. (My favorite writer by far from this set of favorites is Vivian Gussin Paley.)

The more I read, the more I realized that the books that were most useful to me all shared overlapping views of students: they were based on a belief that students are smart, that education is about building on what people already knew, and that students can tell you what matters to them. I also read books where the classroom activities were based on a(n implicit) view of teaching as being about filling lacks in students, about making them be what they weren't, about starting off by believing they didn't want what you had to offer; I didn't realize until afterwards, when I was trying to figure out why I had used almost nothing from those book, that the implicit theory underlying the activies they promoted was what pushed me away. All these readings made me realize that there is no way to approach what you do in a classroom without working from within assumptions (even if they are unstated and so not-open-to-questioning) about what classrooms and students are. And those assumptions, taken together, compose your teaching theory.

I realized that I could be teaching without paying any attention to theory and yet that all my teaching had theory underpinning it. The way I arrange a classroom shows who I think I am in terms of my authority; how I grade says something else about my authority and what I think people are learning; how I teach writing -- and communicating -- teaches students to think and act as though writing is an isolated intellectual act or a social practice articulated with identities and power.

All that is long lead up to explain why I chose the Tate book for us to read. Almost all the essays describe classroom activities that grow directly out of assumptions about who students are and what writing is -- and what the whole purpose of living is. I want us to be able to talk with as much knowledge as possible about what we are doing in our classes and why -- with that "why" articulating both to "Because the class could stand to focus on introductory paragraphs" as well as to "Because the class could benefit from discussing whether we want to be the kind of people who are attracted to flashy introductions" -- because I believe this to be my responsibility as the teacher of this particular class. Reading these essays -- and making decisions about where you fit among these approaches -- helps each of us contribute to building the world of relations we seek with others.

today is Blog for Choice Day

It's the 33rd anniversary of Roe v. Wade. Go here and here to see and read.

"faith" = "woozy old man shriveled little thing"?

This explains where Monty Python got many of their ideas about the teaching and learning of other languages: read An Invented Language, staying until the end.

via mirabilis

carnival of the feminists, #7

over at Feministe.

And through the Carnival, Do you want your wife to work after the war? (via Philobiblon).

young female teacher?

Over at BitchPhD today there's a useful discussion -- with lots of concrete examples -- about teaching while female.

Be sure to read the comments. That's where the useful stuff is.

how research goes some days

X Ten Top Trivia Tips about Composition!

1. Louisa May Alcott, author of 'Little Composition', hated composition and only wrote the book at her publisher's request!
2. To check whether composition is safe to eat, drop it in a bowl of water; rotten composition will sink, and fresh composition will float!
3. If composition was life size, it would stand 7 ft 2 inches tall and have a neck twice the size of a human.
4. Without composition, we would have to pollinate apple trees by hand.
5. Four-fifths of the surface of composition is covered in water!
6. Composition was banned from Finland because of not wearing pants.
7. 99 percent of the pumpkins sold in the US end up as composition.
8. Composition is often used in place of milk in food photography, because milk goes soggy more quickly than composition.
9. It took composition 22 years to build the Taj Mahal!
10. If you keep a goldfish in a dark room, it will eventually turn into composition.

I am interested in - do tell me aboutherhimitthem

from The Mechanical Contrivium, via Boynton.

"Let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness."

We are better for having had him here, and worse if we let the truths he spoke slip away.

King's legacy lives on through today's leaders (via pandagon) and The Biography of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., As Described by a Kindergartener.

thinking about 5931 -- and teaching

Since class on Thursday I keep going back to Yang's question about the readings -- about reading the whole book -- and to the comments of one person, from the final reflection, about the amount of work in the class. These matters circle around central issues for me in teaching, issues such as:

• Time -- and quantity. Ideally, for me, all classes would go very slowly. We would have time to savor and digest every reading, everyone could read at her own pace and still take happy part in the discussion -- and we wouldn't feel the need to move on until we felt we had completely satisfied ourselves with a reading or project.


• Authority. Also ideally, there would be no teacher and no class. The original home-schooling movement -- starting back in the 60s -- was a response to the numbing sameness and oppressiveness of elementary school classrooms. In his series of books meant to help parents figure out what to do if they made the decision to homeschool, John Holt describes how parents realized they could cover in 2 hours a day what a classroom would cover in 6; parents could also follow the lead of their children’s interests. I can't forget one description of a 9 year old child who got interested in plumbing and taught herself how to do it, to the extent that she replumbed her parents' whole house (learning along the way all the necessary math). I also remember how Tim Cahill (I think) in one of his travel books describes going to Timbuktu, at some point years ago when the infrastructure had fallen apart: the university was essentially shut down because no one was getting paid and so no one was coming in to teach -- but at a dry fountain there at the unviversity Cahill ran into a group of students who came together regularly on their own to hold a poetry class because they wanted to. In each of these cases, the authority about what and where and how fast to learn is in the hands of the learner.
  

So I place myself in a quandary: I am a teacher who wishes there to be no classes, either of students beholden to me in any way or of institutionally-delimited time. And as a learner, I like it best when I am, for example, in a reading group of friends where we meet regularly because we want to, we read as much as we can, and we do the reading because we've chosen it and it has use and interest for us.

As I read back over this, I see that I have -- sort of -- written myself into a corner: my use of "ideally" above implies a "but realistically..." retort. I could go off into a "But we are teaching and learning in delimited times blah blah blah and we have to give grades and there's academic-cultural expectations about what happens in classes and blah blah blah so forget the questions of time and authority."

Forget that.

I'd rather discuss with you all your take on these conditions. What would your ideal learning situation be -- both as a teacher and a student? In *your* classes, how do you decide what happens? When and how do you negotiate with people in your classes over these issues? (And do you negotiate at all?)

why the internets are cool

bat girl

it is awards season, after all

And so the People's and Critics' Koufax Award for Best Amazon Reviews linked from a Blog Comment Even though the Latest Posting is Two Years Old goes to Henry Raddick of (London UK).

our priorities

from the New York Times today:

"Ms. Olson said the I.R.S. devoted vastly more resources to pursing questionable refunds by the poor, which she said cannot involve more than $9 billion, than to a $100 billion problem with unreported incomes from small businesses that deal only in cash, many of which do not even file tax returns."

"...while tax fraud by the not-so-poor weighs in at about $340 billion."

My mother? Let me tell you about my mother.

It's my fault for wanting to watch Blade Runner, which is on Spike, which means at almost every commercial break there is an ad for a games-on-mobile service.

A young man with a light Eastern European accent is on a city bus. He impassively commands — and they follow — an old man to turn up his radio, a young woman to dance, two other men to fight, and the bus driver to throw on the brakes, causing others on the bus to fall. I am certainly not the audience for this commercial, but who is?

Who would be moved by the magical implications that playing the mobile games gives power over inner-city others? Who would not be offended by the presented naturalness of a young white man telling older, darker skinned, and poorer people what to do? (And why does the young man have an accent?)

Why is this commercial being made now?

How can it not know what it is?

or:

Because then we're stupid and we'll die?

a walk in the park

Yesterday we went for an afternoon walk at McLain State Park. There were about 30 degrees floating about, and the snow was compressed and crusty, with lots of ice underneath. The wind was sharp, there were lots of deer tracks, and there was no ice on the big lake at all.

if I don't understand you, it is your fault

Over at Washington Monthly, Kevin Drum asked Debra Dickinson to guest blog for a while.

Some of the responses to her various posts:

"Where did this Debra person come from, anyway? Is she here to stay? Most of the time I have no idea what she's is talking about. I mean, I'm sorry, but her posts are mostly incomprehensible to me." "Apparently, this writer thinks blogging is just journalism done to lower standards and with greater self-indulgence. It betrays a contempt for other bloggers and for her audience." "Oh rubbish, the woman was just feeling her way along. She got it wrong at first. So bloody what, it's not contempt, it's getting her bloody sea legs." "hey, this as a much better, more interesting Dickerson post than the last few." "uh, am I the only one here who's finding Dickerson's posts mostly incoherent? I can't even make out Will's argument, much less hers, from this mess. And maverick negro cowboys with made-up diseases wha?!? Maybe blogging actually *is* harder than it looks." 'Yeah, I agree. She needs to frame her arguments better." "Tony- there was an argument there? What was it?" "This was entirely unreadable. Incoherent, poorly written, largely irritating." "That was a terrible, terrible piece, and even aside from the awful writing, it's practically content-free." "Who is Debra Dickerson? And why does she write so poorly?" "Seems that Dickerson can actually turn in a coherent piece, as long as she lifts 95% of it from other sources." "I read the whole thing, even the silly link to the 1851 racist tome. What is your point?" "Yep, that post was the mother of all brainfarts. Race? "The Negro Cowboy"? Huh?" "I read Debra's post shortly after it went online. I didn't have a CLUE what she was talking about, but was too embarrassed to say so. I felt sure I was missing something fundamental." "That was.... a fine example of incoherent blithering on." "Typically one normally intends to have a fucking point when writing. And, given this blog is supposed to be about American politics one might expect a guest author would want to have something approaching a point." "Get rid of this Dickerson person, and her incoherence. Haven't seen a sensible piece from her yet -- what the fuck, is she doing some kind of low wage, between-terms internship or something? Sheesh." "Misogynists? I suppose illiterate looney Left have to dig around for hackneyed smears, but my problem with this incoherent twit Dickerson has fuck all to do with her gender and everything to do with her inability to write coherently or even in an interesting manner."

and so on.

People came down on her for writing "spoze" instead of "suppose." There are comments that took her points seriously, also, but I quoted comments above at length (and there were many more) to show how much her writing was denigrated.

Maybe I'm reading all the wrong blogs, but I read a lot, and I have never seen such responses. There's all kinds of writing in blogs, and people do comment on spelling sometimes (usually their own), but I have never seen such a pack response to a writer who is bringing into a blog arguments that haven't been made there before, arguments about how deeply race is embedded in all sorts of past and present practices.

Such responses to Dickerson are condescending at best, misogynist and racist at worst, and show -- minimally -- that a lot of readers are not willing to put in time and effort to read anything but that which is familiar and re-inforcing of what they expect. This is the pattern we get used to in writing instruction: some readers are blinded by one word they consider to be misspelled, seeing in it moral implications.

The people who wrote the comments I quoted will say, "It's only about the writing" -- just as (for example) was said by those who turned down an article by Carole Blaire, Julie R. Brown, and Leslie A. Baxter that focused on women and academia (Blair, Carole, Julie R. Brown, Leslie A. Baxter. (1994). Disciplining the Feminine. Quarterly Journal of Speech (84): 383-409). One example, but I'll let it suffice for now because it's a strong one and because my stomach needs soothing after reading those comments.

The teaching of writing also needs to be about the teaching of reading and about the teaching of generosity toward that which is not familiar.

flu almost gone; Habermas ringing the doorbell

I gave up and spent the last several days in bed, me, the computer, and the cat, with soup supplied by the sweet one. I got the Instructor's Manual for the textbook edited, following the proofreader's comments. I reviewed the index for the textbook and dealt with three different permissions issues with the textbook (there's only one left, but we're working with people in London on this one, people whose sense of timing is not just other coastal but other continental). I wrote three recommendation letters. I've written letters to friends and those nieces. And I've played a lot of MasterMind. And now I have to review the final pdf of the textbook by Monday (while waiting on those few pages that might need to be edited depending on the permissions from London.) So maybe just maybe this tenacious flu will finally float away and die.

I've also been thinking ahead to the writing I want to accomplish this semester. I have 2 conference presentations, 1 conference workshop, and four presentations at other campuses. Should I turn the MLA presentation into a paper? I'm not sure it has legs, but it was fun to put together, to play off the comparison of these current years to the Gilded Age, to think about the conditions for working, writing, and civic participation in these two different eras that many writers compare. (And upon which Karl Rove modelled the 2000 election.) But all it got me was paranoia: if the late 19th century was initially full of promise -- based on its communication technologies and worker practices -- for invigorated citizen civic participation but then went down in flames because of the turning of private potential toward corporate ends, the lesson for now would be that any communication technology that enables the conditions that lead to developed participation are going to be shut down (or regulated out of their raucous potential).

I was thinking specifically of blogs, and of the messy and enlivening openings they provide for citizens to develop a sense of self and connection. (In the talk I looked not just to 19th century communication and work practices -- quickly -- but also to 19th century theories of how political participation requires first the development of sense of self with agency and then development of self as communicator with others).

But all of this reinforced for me why I may not want to use blogs in teaching. Or, rather, if I use them, I know that I am using them in a very limited way, as a technology that can lend itself well to very focused directed reflection and highly useful record-keeping; I know that others use them very well as development writing spaces. But where I see blogs being most useful, politically, is in their potential to excite participation, to support us in reading and responding to each other's musings and rantings, and to provide wider perspective on events than we get in traditionally reported news media. And I know from experience that the fastest way to cool off a potentially hot medium (I am using the temperatures not per McLuhan) is to assign it as homework.

If I were to develop this presentation into an article, I think I would want to focus on that quandary, and how it relates to the relations between the public and the private Habermas argues are necessary for there to be a public. If a public can only happen because the private (for Habermas, the realms of drawing room and diary) is at least in part a nursery for a sense of self, then one way to diffuse the public, should you so want, is to break the possibility of the private opening into the public; at the end of the 19th century, that meant diffusing private potential within corporate-provided structures. And a classroom can so easily be that, no matter what we attempt otherwise.