the I-hope-it-ends-someday sigh

There is much blog discussion over the observation that, if you google "she invented," Google will ask "Did you mean 'he invented'?"

The digg posting that started this is mostly just plain sad in its unrepentant dinosaur boyness. Various people at the feministing posting smartly refuse to accept the explanation that there is no fault to find with Google because the "Did you mean 'he'?" response is simply the result of an algorithm.

When can we stop pretending that if it's math and or logic, it's neutral and therefore true?

if you were wondering...

where I have been, I have just finished my fifth tenure review letter for this year.

Uncle.

beginnings...

Tonight I teach my last class here at Tech, and then become peripatetic. (Sorry for the repetition, Derek, but it's a good word to describe the next months.)

One list item for this time is to migrate this blog -- such as it has been -- to a new site, one a little more flexible than LJ. I am determined -- in Life v.Milwaukee -- to write more regularly in blog.

And so I need suggestions and recommendations for where to write. Given that there are a good number of you who cannot post here, email me, wouldja?

tomorrow...

Another trip start tomorrow morning, rushing up the hill early for the first flight and then slowing down at the Minneapolis airport to wait for the second flight and then a quick jump over the central states to Memphis and then a mad dash to the third flight to Tallahassee. There is still a lot of snow on the ground here, even with today's bright sun. At 6pm tomorrow, when I do get to Florida, it is going to be disorienting: there will be seventy some degrees floating around, and green. But it will be wonderful to see Kathi Y.

Tonight, though, I am slow in this late glow of sunlight and the sound of roof snow melting. Sunday evenings are always melancholy, and I have never been able to say why. Thinking of this as our last snow in Houghton adds to it -- and so it is a pleasure to have a paper ready to go for this trip so I can wallow in some chocolate and memory.

history

It might as well have been an abyss over which my relatives sailed from Eastern Europe to here. Only they themselves made it across. No chairs, no jewelry, no books, no clothing even made it over; all dropped into that hole. Even their thoughts from before that moment dropped into that hole.

They came across and nothing came with them.

This is my history.

“It's thoroughly depressing to see how not-far we've come in the last 30 years.”

Washington Monthly had a little discussion Thursday about Wimbledon's announcement that women would now play for the same amount of prize money as men. The comments read as though it is 1960: "This is not about men and women, this is just about economics!" "But men are objectively better athletes!" "Men play 3 out of 5; the women don't." "It's the men that the audiences come to watch (except for the short skirts on the women)."

The title comment above was one of the few voices responding to the night-at-the-bar chest-thumping that characterized the conversation.

discussing Decoding Advertisements

We started with a little background in structuralism, as a way into understanding where semiotics comes from and the matters it considers important: structures. Yes, well.

And then we looked at how Williamson introduces semiotic terminology bit by bit, building a complex system of relations among the terms but also then, necessarily, building more and more complex systems for analysis -- which leads into the question of how much the system itself calls into play the dense ideological structures Williamson says we can never escape.

But that may be moving too quickly to the end of our discussion.

From the beginning, we all could see that the Williamson book does build, does have its own structure: Williams starts from the notion of difference as the base semiotic notion -- that we have language only because we define terms by considering something in its differences from other things -- to the notion of sign, to sign as signifier and signified, to the idea that a signifier-signified pair can itself be a signifier for another signified, to the idea that such layering become referent systems, all of which only point within or to each other. And so what is denoted is never "natural" or "real," but only ever, finally, the product being sold. We are caught up, then, in formal structures that only ever point at, circle about and within, other structures.

As we talked, we came to see and understand that Williamson's initial set of example ads depend completely on a particular type of ad, one in which there are two objects, with the qualities of one object transferring to another. In questioning how Williamson's structural analyses might work on more recent advertising (Alexa brought up the ongoing Absolut series of ads, for example, which depend on audience knowledge of the series) we talked about how Williamson's system of 1978 relied on then-available ads -- but Williamson would be ready with reply to newer ads: she could extend aspects of the structure she builds (such as the notion of how hermeneutics works in advertising ["by being given something to decipher, our comprehension is channeled in one direction only" 78], as well as her understanding of the purposes of advertising to build always internally-facing referent systems, to speak of the referent system of Absolut ads as building off audience desire to be in the know -- but the know is not something outside the system, and instead is completely inside the system, completely self-referential. Williamson would probably have a field day.

But it was questioning like that that led us to name a concern with Williamson's approach. Williamson acknowledges the powers of advertising because of these self-referential systems she describes, these systems that hold us within them so that there seems to be no outside, such that we "become signified by, and then summarized by, things": we become -- we are -- the "sum of [our] consumer goods" (179). Williamson also acknowledges the "danger in structural analysis, because of its introversion and lack of context" (178). That is, structural analysis (as Williamson presents it) is just as circular, system-building, and therefore all-inclusive of itself, as advertising: which begets the other?

There is a sense of defeat about the book, a pessimistic giving-in to the all inclusiveness of the system: Williamson ends by saying that the value of learning to decode isn't learning the code but learning to change the system. How is that ever possible if the system is -- by its very definition -- all-encompassing? But Alexa's question also led us to question how changes in ads come about, how changes in -- for example -- conceptions of male and female come about (because the first perfume ad we could find was for man scents), or changes in technological systems that shift what is advertised and how. The system of advertising is *not* cut off from other systems -- technological, cultural, geographic, gender, ethnicities -- and so ought not be discussed outside those other systems. What sort of semiotic analyses would help us with such extensions? (And would they only build bigger and even more inescapable structures?)

Other questions that appeared as we discussed, and to which we ought to return:

• How would you use a semiotic visual methodology in teaching undergraduate courses like Revisions or Tech Comm? What use would there be for people in your classes in such teaching? What would you emphasize? What cautions would you give?


• Semiotic analysis (as Williamson presents it) is a form of compositional analysis, by definition: it focuses on how ads are composed. Whereas Bang, Dondis, or Arnheim appeal to (an ideology of) the universal body as the explanation of why visual compositions work, Williamson appeals to ideology itself. How is Williamson's approach NOT an example of teaching people to have a "good eye" (to follow Rose's critique) -- with the "good eye" here being one that judges visuals not in terms of beauty but rather in terms of late twentieth century academic critiques of bad consciousness?


• Given that Williamson's system depends on transfer of meaning among different signifier/signified pairs, how applicable is such a system to other kinds of visual genres (film, plays, TV shows) where there rarely are -- as in advertising -- present at the same time such sr-sd pairs? Or do we need to shift what we consider to be the sr-sd pairs?

brought to you by Hallmark(tm):

It was 28 years ago today that Dennis and I met.

Happy Woman Professor Day

Okay, yes, this is most often what it is, as Barbara Ras writes it: "I want to shake the magnolia tree to see if I'm strong enough / to move any of the darkness inside its tangle of branches."

This morning at school began with Shannon, talking about teaching, coming up with strategies for moving an 8am class. Shannon is sick but is there and (as always) thoughtful and quick, and as she speaks of different people in her classes my office fills with them. We talk about the exact wording of what you say at the beginning of a class and whether you put something on the board or ask people to write about it. How all our small moves build larger patterns, and what single parts of the weave you can pluck all at once to have another pattern that morning and you only realize it afterwards as you walk away grinning. Shannon is smart about all of this, and I learn.

Then Shawn and I talk about his comps: he's moving back and forth between two-dimensional visual design and immersive games, asking about the entanglements of engagement and persuasion (how are they different?) in those differing visual objects. We figure out a few new things together about the library's database and e-journals, and find some new articles, and we talk about the connections you make with the people with whom you work and how they become really visible at a daughter's first birthday party while the wrapping paper is flying through giggling fingers. (Well, that later part is how I am remembering it later, how I will remember these meetings, as though Lily was there so graciously helping Christy and Hina with the presents on my office floor while Shawn's ideas glittered about the room with his grace and smarts like the light off the wrapping paper.)

Professor Hawhee came to the phone from snow shoveling or pushing but I got to speak to her twice today because during that first call Marilyn knocked on my door to remind me of our noon meeting. Our noon meeting is our writing group: Vicky, Marilyn, and I had read one of Marika's conference presentations, and we were talking about all the different article possibilities in the presentation. Marika makes sentences like magnifying lenses and Marilyn and Vicky are *smart* and the hour disappeared. Delightfully. Next week we read from Vicky's book and the week after we read from Marilyn's book, and then it's my CCCC presentation, which I've started writing, at least the first sentences that make me laugh and that chances are will be nowhere near the final version.

In our weekly meeting about the writing program, Christy, Moe, and I... well. I look forward to that meeting. Christy thinks about teaching with ethical rigor, gently teasing apart situations with such respect for who people are that I sometimes am tempted to make up problems so I can just keep listening and being made smarter. And Moe is Mr. Magic-out-of-the-Hat, so creative in coming up with assignments and workarounds it's as though he lives inside his collections of old ads, magazines, and costumes. And he is human, and styling, and way smart; his dissertation is going to be a genre-bending wonder, to which I am looking forward oh so selfishly. (And he comes with Liz, who is a gift to the world of textures, generosity, animations, and delight.)

Lynn came to office hours, to talk about science writing and snowboarding. This is a woman who makes me happy to think about the emails of 2 or 5 or 10 years from now -- like emails from Jana, davina, Kristin, Anna, Mavis, Jessie, Lisa, Vicki, Asha, Karen, Becky, Jess, Hannah, Pavi Elle, Jen, Amy, Diane, Emily, Erica, Erin, Nia, Katie, Eve, Orsolya, Evelyn, Josh, Aaron, Donovan -- emails about success and work and thinking and life and families after undergrad studying, emails that fall out of the morning inbox like petals, emails from friends.

Then I got to talk with Professor Hawhee again, laughing. Her warmth and piercing smartness made me think about talking -- just the talks of this past week -- with the ever graciously thoughtful Professor Hawisher, the ever sharpfunny Professor Ball, the bright and generous Professor Hocks, the Manta-wearing Professor Grabill who cracks me up and makes me think we can be f-ing brilliant together with Professors Sidler, Hart-Davidson, and to-be Lackey.

And I haven't even begun to mention the gifts of Professor Arola and Professor Jasken, and that Sajdyk woman. And Teacher-Kitchen Master Buchanan and Teacher-Dean-to-Be Corbin.

Why am I a Happy Woman Professor?

All that is above is just the today and some-of-this-week part; I need to add into the longer mix Johndan, Kate, Stuart, Geoff, Karla, Ellen, Linda, Cindy, Diana, Scott, Heidi, Barclay, Dickie, Madeleine, Marcia, Alice, Chuck, Brent, Matt, Paul, Anne, Jackie, Mary, Michelle, Collin, Eva, Amy, Joyce, Susan, Carrie, Martha, Derek, Jonathan... Any writing I do is thanks to every name here -- and many I have missed -- and all their ideas and generosity.

Oh, and the classes I get to teach.

Off, laughing.

........

But wait, there's more:
blogos
first efforts
see jane compute
blog her
neither necessary nor sufficient
lilysea
the most cake

et tu, Google?

Really, why should it be a surprise that Google has used the same techniques in North Carolina as Walmart used here in Houghton?

See Rough Type on Google's massive tax breaks -- and on elderly people being "persuaded" out of their homes.

our last 6112 discussion

We started our discussion of Donis A. Dondis's Visual Literacy by looking at a range of two-dimensional art pieces, asking what Dondis's approach encouraged or allowed us to say about the objects. We quickly ran up against the absence of the social / cultural in her approach. For example, when looking at Raphael's painting of Galatea we could talk about the arrangement and relationship of abstract elements and how they directed our eyes and attentions around the picture, and we could name (because they are represented) -- but not talk about -- humans, water, and animals. We were also very aware that could not speak much of gender, ethnicity, mythology, frescoes, the Renaissance; we knew from our experiences outside the painting that those factors and more shaped our viewing, but we needed to turn to other sources to inform our talk.

We looked at a Chinese painting and could apply Dondis's analytic frame to it: we could say that the colors are equally subdued, with little contrast except for the red; this is a landscape with few objects in it, and the boats are painted to blend into what is around them, as is the body of the flutist who stands out only subtly in the lower middle because of a shift in line. Most of us were uncomfortable with going any further, with coming to any judgments about the painting (for example, "This is about the smallness of humans in the landscape" or "This is about the passing of time in fall, about grabbing hold of the gentle moments of enjoyment"): we could see that it has been painted in a tradition unknown to most of us. Yang was able to tell us that this painting was probably a response to or illustration of a poem, a traditional Chinese use of painting. (Am I getting that right, Yang?)

We acknowledged that Rose's critique of compositional visual methodologies -- that they "do not encourage discussion of the production of an image…. nor of how it might be used and interpreted by various viewers" -- seemed an accurate critique for Dondis's approach. We raised but did not discuss much, however, our concern that Rose lays the blame for this lack of social-cultural reflexivity on how compositional approaches can be tied to the notion of the great artist or "the good eye" -- when Dondis's reasons for her system are different. The implication of Rose's critique is that compositional methodologies are used by critics to establish what are the best and most beautiful or otherwise worthy art objects; they are used, that is, to establish the tastes and so hierarchical placements of some people (I am thinking of Bourdieu and Distinction here). But Dondis is interested in larger cultural participation; she is interested in the thoughtful consumption AND production of visual objects by a wider range of people. Rose approaches visual methodologies as occuring strictly after the fact: they are, for her, to help with analysis of existing objects; she does not discuss them as possible approaches for anyone wishing to participate in the production of visual objects. Dondis sees production as a necessary part of cultural participation. Are compositional methodologies necessary -- or necessary and sufficient -- for producing thoughtful visual productions? Are visual productions necessary for -- and useful for -- cultural participation?

In our discussion, however, that thread about different understandings of the purposes of compositional methodologies very quickly led into something more compelling for our particular backgrounds and interests, and that is Dondis's definition of "literacy." Dondis uses her notion of "literacy" as the grounding for her arguments about how we should approach the visual (although she does reiterate, initially, that for her there are shortcomings with her approach because the verbal is more conventionalized than the visual). Steve pointed out that Dondis's definition of verbal literacy -- "To be considered verbally literate, one must learn the basic components of written language: the letters, words, spelling, grammar, syntax." (x) -- seems equivalent to Street's notion of "autonomous literacy" (which was published approximately 10 years after Dondis's book). While Dondis acknowledges that there are varying degrees of verbal literacy (from the ability to write "simple messages" to "increasingly complex and artistic forms" [10]) and so, comparably, "visual literacy" "means increased visual intelligence" (185), this does not change how she sets out to build a model of visual literacy parallel to her understanding of verbal literacy.

And so Dondis offers the visual equivalent of letters: for visual production, there are the "basic elements" of dot, line, shape, direction, tone, color, texture, scale, dimension, and movement. Syntax is covered through what Dondis describes as "the potential of structure in visual literacy" through denotative "psychophysiological" perceptions of balance, stress, leveling and sharpening, a preference for the lower left of a picture plane, attraction and grouping, and positive and negative; the meaning of these latter "short circuits the intellect, making contact directly with the emotions and feelings" (22); these contribute to our ability to build meaning through the techniques of kinds of contrast that Dondis describes in one chapter.

Dondis also claims that there are three levels to visual meaning: the representational, the abstract, and the symbolic (and these would be worth comparing to Pierce's index, icon, and symbol). The first arises out of "reality," "the basic and dominating visual experience" (68): it is the attempt to faithful recreate direct visual observation of the world. The second is "the reduction of multiple visual factors to only the most essential and most typical features of what is being represented" (71), and it

conveys the essential meaning, cutting through the conscious to the unconscious, from the experience of the substance in the sensory field directly to the nervous system. (81)

The symbolic "is an information-packed means of visual communication, universal in meaning" (72). It is not clear whether these levels are meant to correspond to some some aspect of verbal literacy, as the basic elements and techniques correspond to letters and syntax, but for Dondis both producers and receivers of visual compositions -- if the producers and receivers are to be considered visually literate -- have to be able to work with all three levels separately and entwined.

It is when she moves on to discuss style, that Dondis begins to address social and cultural aspects of visual composition. As with the levels, Dondis does not describe a verbal equivalent to style; instead, style is for her an unconscious cultural background that exerts influence over the choices composers make in working with elements and techniques of visual composition. Although Dondis acknowledges that there are and have been many different styles historically and geographically, she argues that all styles can be fit into five categories: primitivism, expressionism, classicism, the embellished, and functionality.

The last categorization is a symptom of what everyone in class noted as being a feature of every level of Dondis's arguments: she claims universalism for all aspects of visual composition -- for production and analysis -- and none of us were comfortable accepting that universalism. Dondis offers few non-Western, non-canonical examples, and offers no analysis of the material conditions of production (the marketing of art, the historic gendering of artistic production, and so on) that we know shape how we understand what we see. There is no discussion of advertising, of other than the fine arts.

In spite of our complaints, I think that following Rose and Dondis we have questions like these remaining:

1. Are compositional methodologies always necessary for starting analysis (especially if we take seriously Rose's arguments that all visual methodologies must "take seriously" "the image itself")?


2. Is something like visual literacy necessary for full cultural participation?


3. How can we know the limits of our methods of visual analysis, in terms of being reflexive about our geographical and cultural positioning?

Anything I missed?

grand rounds

Grand Rounds, like the Carnival of Teaching, always make me feel like those times in a coffee shop when I overhear compelling words from the next table: can I listen without tipping my chair?

We're invited to Grand Rounds, though, and it's a gift to listen in on what is -- often -- intimate and close talk, on what is figuring-it-out in words, out loud. Nurses and doctors quietly write -- well -- about what confounds, moves, or angers them.

The latest Grand Rounds, on "The People behind the Medicine," is about nurses and doctors making quick decisions about their professional roles as they treat others -- or are treated by others. The posts make me think about decisions we make as teachers about the self-consciousness we have toward students, about how we decide how much to open ourselves to the people in our classes and how much to stay at a distance, all depending on what we think is happening and needs to happen. I cannot imagine what it is to be a nurse in the Periodic Intensive Care Unit, and I am inexpressibly glad that my decisions can't so directly kill someone. But I know we can make others miserable or exalted. We don't need the education doctors get in how to live and think after someone has died under your knife or prescription -- but I would like beginning and continuing education in how to be alert to how much our teacherly ways with others matter, and in how to acknowledge that -- as with medicine -- the luminous right decision toward one person is not for someone else.

What would a Hippocratic Oath for teachers look like?

something like this: teaching digital production in a writing/theory program

I will be giving a presentation on production and the visual at Florida State in April (a chance to see Kathi Yancey and Kris Fleckenstein -- I am looking forward to this, hugely); David Blakesley and I will be there together, playing off each other. David may make a machinima, and I...

Well, I...

I am thinking about the possibilities. I have been needing for a while to write on production. Our latest job search, for someone to teach "critical approaches to media production," put me onto a committee with people who use Word for their scholarly or fun production, and so it became clear early on that definitional differences were the undercurrent. Our attractions to various candidates were very much tied to our differing notions of what production is and how it ought to play out in a program that has some theoretic bent, and we recognized this -- but we had no time for discussion, because it would have required the equivalent of several conference presentation panel ramblings and dinners afterwards.

By looking through a good deep set of applications, applications from people bringing all sorts of backgrounds and worldly engagements into their own work, people whom in the best of all possible worlds we would have hired as a collective, I saw my own teaching differently, and saw where some of my frustrations are. And I realized that, perhaps, we (an amorphous "we") still aren't too much past a discussion from Computers & Writing Gainesville (1998?), about "teaching software versus teaching writing" -- and at that time, even, the discussion was self-aware about being at least 10 years old. (For a crisper update and discussion of this than mine, see Kathie Gossett's take.)

No more do I want to teach classes that are titled along the lines of "Introduction to Multimedia Development" (a title that felt detergent-new and -fresh 10 years ago but now...) or "Introduction to Web Development." Perhaps it is just our school, but people come into such classes with the expectation that the class will be about learning software and nothing else. This past semester I did teach "Introduction to Multimedia Development," in which people did research in local historical archives and then built interactive pieces for helping others learn about local history (and boy did they build some great stuff). On the first day of that class, when I asked about people's expectations about what would happen, the common response was, "We're going to learn Flash!" I said that, yes, they'd be learning something about Flash, just as, back in first and second grades we were all taught how to hold pencils and paper and how to sit so that we could write -- but those were only the first steps toward using the technology to engage with others, toward considering how pencil and paper embed us into certain cultural structures of thinking and interacting, etc. etc. You know how this goes.

Twice during the semester, when we did class evaluations, I asked people in class what most stood out to them in what they had learned, what they thought they could apply most in the future, what helped them understand the ethical and moral dimensions of digital communication. "Flash!"

I clearly underestimate the cultural capital of knowing this software.

And perhaps I should also be pining for *a series of classes* -- working off the analogy of learning software as being like learning pencil and paper -- recognizing that all of what *I* (the selfish teacherly I) want to happen in class cannot possibly happen in one semester and must happen across a layering of classes.

Nonetheless, my sense of responsibility pushes me now toward thinking that the classes I should be teaching should be called, simply, "Public Writing" or "Digital Citizenship" or "Engaging with Digital Communities." Just as in "regular" writing classes, production is assumed. The readings and assignments center on how we engage with and act within different publics and privates, and production is -- as in a "regular" writing class -- a form either of reflection and action (or, as always, both). The "tools" are folded into the learning: you have to learn something about a game engine to build an environment that fosters first-person shibbolething; you have to learn something about Flash to build an argumentative essay about how different technologies enable differing forms of argument; you have to play with Photoshop to remix those characters from SL. Reflexivity about the technology has to be there, but so does placing the technology more into its cultural articulations from the beginning, rather than pulling it out as though it were a neutral little hammer.

The trade-off is that people then only learn the software so much, just enough to make a little argument or two. And this is where I could come back to wondering about the need for series of classes, and for a discussion about the professionalization of technologies: we have, in the past, spent many years of education on the commonly shared technologies of a certain kind of writing, the writing deeply tied to pen and paper -- and now we live in a time of technologies that separate out and that each have their own steep learning curve. All these latter technologies -- and I am thinking here within the bounds of software: Flash, Photoshop, FinalCut, Maya -- also have long learning curves if one is to be fluent. They also have long learning curves for parallel/congruent abilities one has to develop: to become a graphic designer or 3D artist, one has to devote some considerable attention to visual conventions, and so on with film, video, gaming, etc.

With that professionalization -- with that emphasis on professionalization and the taste that develops alongside becoming a professional with a technology -- comes a decrease in wider public participation. If the Photoshop picture you make shows you not to be aware that fuzzy edges are outré, then others will look with disdain (viz the Worth contests). If your Flash piece has code in all the different layers instead of only in the opening screen, well… you show yourself not to know what you are doing. If you are not willing, in other words, to spend the time to learn the software to a level of professional polish, then you can't participate. Feh.

So: teaching software only as a part of the whole process of developing arguments and pieces of cultural questioning would help me teach also about how taste develops, how people get to be recognized as able digital citizens -- or not. Teaching more of a "figure out enough to do what you want and to take control" helps develop confidence in being a non-professional in a world where professionalization is another gate. Teaching more of a "figure out enough to do what you want and to take control" can help shift tastes toward a more generous approach toward texts that look non-professional for all sorts of good reasons, texts that we might otherwise dismiss precisely because they don't look like what we're accustomed to.

Okay.

Hmmm.

I think there is something here toward a presentation on production. But I also want to make something, too, in which to embed this discussion. And it sounds as though it's going to have to be something un-pretty, ungainly, and unprofessional in all the right ways.

But people gotte be making stuff, because that's a non-trivial entry to public participation these days.

for 5931 folks: statements of teaching philosophies

For our February 15 meeting, we're asking you to post -- on your blog -- rhetorical analyses of the teaching philosophies of others. We're asking you to do this for two reasons: thinking more on rhetorical analyses for your teaching of them and thinking toward your own teaching philosophies.

Below are links to advice given by various teaching centers from various universities about what statements of teaching philosophy are supposed to do and how teachers are supposed to achieve all that. Such statements have multiple purposes (which makes them good for rhetorical analyses): they are a form of reflection for teachers, to help them clarify why they do what they do in classes; they can be public documents sent to hiring committees as part of a job application.

Below are also links to samples of statements, some from rhet-comp and some from other fields.

So: WHAT TO DO
Read through the guidelines, and draw up for yourself an understanding of the purposes, contexts, and audiences for statements of teaching philosophy. Use your sense of purposes, contexts, and audiences to post on your blog a comparative analysis of two statements. You can analyze two statements from rhet-comp, or one from rhet-comp and one from another discipline. (Lots of samples from other disciplines are linked from the general guidelines pages.)

GENERAL GUIDELINES ON WHAT STATEMENTS OF TEACHING PHILOSOPHY ARE AND DO
from Ohio State, with linked samples lower down on the page
from The Chronicle of Higher Education
from Iowa State
from the University of Michigan, with lots of links to example from other disciplines
some comments by MetaSpencer on Statements of Teaching Philosophy

STATEMENTS OF TEACHING PHILOSOPHY examples from RHETORIC AND COMPOSITION
John Walter
Judith Van
Laura Nutten
Susan Miller-Cochran
Mine

PS -- Know that I put all this together while Dennis watched a Richard Prior DVD in the background, as, um, research for a section in a class on rhetorics of humor.

alternative forms of visual analysis

using Skymall magazine.

"Now, class, what can we say about...?"

Very cool.

make it known...

The good professor Hawhee posted on a search string -- "happy woman professor" -- that led some one person to her blog... and the comments led to this:

Hear ye! Hear ye! Let it be known that February 14, 2007 will mark the observation of "Happy Woman Professor Day," a day inspired by a depressing google search string and comments on that search string (including my own overly cynical one). Thanks to, among others, Anne, Google, (or better, the anonymous googler) and Cara.

During this day, women professors across the academy will post blog entries about things they love about their profession. Go ahead, get mushy. And please advertise widely.

So, yes, please. Go!

enter! send!

To acknowledge and support the growth and acceptance of scholarship, research, and teaching in our field, we present on an annual basis the Computers and Composition Distinguished Book Award. The award honors book-length works that contribute in substantial and innovative ways to the field of computers and composition.

In recognition of the changing nature of publications in computers and composition research, theory, and practice, the Computers and Composition Distinguished Book Award is open to not only printed and bound books but also large hypertexts, multimedia programs, and Web sites. The Computers and Composition Distinguished Book Award complements existing awards for best article (the Ellen Nold Award) and best dissertation (the Hugh Burns Award). Computers and Composition will honor the winner during an awards presentation held during the Computers and Writing Conference. Winners will receive both a plaque and a modest cash award.

To nominate a book for the Distinguished Book Award, the nominator must write a letter outlining the ways in which the work contributes to scholarship, research, and teaching in computers and composition, and submit the letter and three copies of the book (or arrange to have the publisher send three copies of the book). Potential categories of emphasis for nomination include originality of research and/or application, methodological sophistication, and scope of work.

{Dates of eligibility for this awards is January 1 through December 31 of 2006.}

Deadline for nominations is March 15. Send nominations for the Computers and Composition Distinguished Book Award to:

Anne Frances Wysocki
Distinguished Book Award
Humanities Department
Michigan Technological University
Houghton , MI 49931

If you have any questions, please contact me...

damn

Molly Ivins has died.

thinking further on Rose

Christine sent along a link to this article "Feminist Art Finally Takes Center Stage", from the NYT (which I've also pasted in below). For me, considering our reading of Rose, this raises questions:

1. The only methodology Rose discussed that has an overtly feminist edge is that of psychoanalytic approaches -- and the feminist sensibilities of such an approach are tied to Lacan, meaning that the ties are always a little uncomfortable. The discourse analysis methodologies Rose discusses are applicable to feminist ends, as demonstrated in the examples she chooses to illustrate the methodologies. Do you think there ought to be a specifically feminist methodology? (As the article Christine linked tells, there have been feminist approached to *art criticism* since Linda Nochlin and Lucy Lippard were just beginning their work. Ought those approaches be more explicitly stretched to criticism of a broader range of visual objects?)


2. The article suggests, at least, that visual culture can be questioned through action, performance, and production as well as through criticism and written/spoken discourse -- as per Coco Fusco's presentation and the work of Navjot or the Guerrilla Girls. Your thoughts?

January 29, 2007 -- NYTimes
Feminist Art Finally Takes Center Stage

By HOLLAND COTTER
“Well, this is quite a turnout for an ‘ism,’ ” said the art historian and critic Lucy Lippard on Friday morning as she looked out at the people filling the Roy and Niuta Titus Theater at the Museum of Modern Art and spilling into the aisles. “Especially in a museum not notorious for its historical support of women.”

Ms. Lippard, now in her 70s, was a keynote speaker for a two-day symposium organized by the museum that was titled “The Feminist Future: Theory and Practice in the Visual Arts.” The event itself was an unofficial curtain-raiser for what is shaping up as a watershed year for the exhibition — and institutionalization, skeptics say — of feminist art.

For the first time in its history this art will be given full-dress museum survey treatment, and not in just one major show but in two. On March 4 “Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution” opens at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, followed on March 23 by “Global Feminisms” at the Brooklyn Museum. (On the same day the Brooklyn Museum will officially open its new Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art and a permanent gallery for “The Dinner Party,” Judy Chicago’s seminal proto-feminist work.)

Such long-withheld recognition has been awaited with a mixture of resignation and impatient resentment. Everyone knows that our big museums are our most conservative cultural institutions. And feminism, routinely mocked by the public media for 35 years as indissolubly linked with radicalism and bad art, has been a hard sell.

But curators and critics have increasingly come to see that feminism has generated the most influential art impulses of the late 20th and early 21st century. There is almost no new work that has not in some way been shaped by it. When you look at Matthew Barney, you’re basically seeing pilfered elements of feminist art, unacknowledged as such.

The MoMA symposium was sold out weeks in advance. Ms. Lippard and the art historian Linda Nochlin appeared, like tutelary deities, at the beginning and end respectively; in between came panels with about 20 speakers. The audience was made up almost entirely of women, among them many veterans of the women’s art movement of the 1970s and a healthy sprinkling of younger students, artists and scholars. It was clear that people were hungry to hear about and think about feminist art, whatever that once was, is now or might be.

What it once was was relatively easy to grasp. Ms. Lippard spun out an impressionistic account of its complex history, as projected images of art by women streamed across the screen behind her, telling an amazing story of their own. She concluded by saying that the big contribution of feminist art “was to not make a contribution to Modernism.” It rejected Modernism’s exclusionary values and authoritarian certainties for an art of openness, ambiguity, reciprocity and what another speaker, Griselda Pollock, called “ethical hospitality,” features now identified with Postmodernism.

But feminism was never as embracing and accessible as it wanted to be. Early on, some feminists had a problem with the “lavender menace” of lesbianism. The racial divide within feminism has never been resolved and still isn’t, even as feminism casts itself more and more on a globalist model.

The MoMA audience was almost entirely white. Only one panelist, the young Kenyan-born artist Wangechi Mutu, was black. And the renowned critic Geeta Kapur from Delhi had to represent, by default, all of Asia. “I feel like I’m gate-crashing a reunion,” Ms. Mutu joked as she began to speak, and she wasn’t wrong.

At the same time one of feminism’s great strengths has been a capacity for self-criticism and self-correction. Yet atmospherically the symposium was a very MoMA event, polished, well executed, well mannered, even cozy. A good half of the talks came across as more soothing than agitating, suitable for any occasion rather than tailored to one onto which, I sensed, intense personal, political and historical hopes had been pinned.

Still, there was some agitation, and it came with the first panel, “Activism/Race/Geopolitics,” in a performance by the New York artist Coco Fusco. Ms. Fusco strode to the podium in combat fatigues and, like a major instructing her troops, began lecturing on the creative ways in which women could use sex as a torture tactic on terrorist suspects, specifically on Islamic prisoners.

The performance was scarifyingly funny as a send-up of feminism’s much-maligned sexual “essentialism.” But its obvious references to Abu Ghraib, where women were victimizers, was telling.

In the context of a mild-mannered symposium and proposed visions of a “feminist future” that saw collegial tolerance and generosity as solutions to a harsh world, Ms. Fusco made the point that, at least in the present, women are every bit as responsible for that harshness — for what goes on in Iraq for example — as anyone.

Ms. Kapur’s talk was also topical, but within the framework of India. It is often said that the activist art found in early Western feminism and now adopted by artists in India, Africa and elsewhere has lost its pertinence in its place of origin. Yet in presenting work by two Indian artists, Rummana Hussain (1952-1999) and Navjot Altaf (born in 1949), Ms. Kapur made it clear that they have at least as much to teach to the so-called West as the other way around.

Ms. Hussain, a religious secularist, used images from her Muslim background as a critical response to sectarian violence; Ms. Altaf (known as Navjot), though based in Mumbai, produces art collaboratively with tribal women who live difficult lives in rural India.

Collaborative or collective work of the kind Navjot does has grown in popularity in the United States and Europe in the past few years. And several of the symposium’s panelists — Ms. Lippard, the Guerrilla Girls, Carrie Lambert-Beatty, Catherine de Zegher — referred to it as a potential way for feminist art to avoid being devoured and devitalized by an omnivorous art market.

It was Ms. Fusco again who brought utopian dreams to earth. While sympathetic to the idea of collective work as an alternative to the salable lone-genius model, she suggested that the merchandising of art is at present so encompassing, and the art industry so fundamentally corrupted by it, that even collectives tend to end up adhering to a corporate model.

The power of the market, which pushes a few careers and throws the rest out — the very story of feminist art’s neglect — was the invisible subtext to the entire symposium. It was barely addressed, however, nor was the reality that the canonization of feminist art by museums would probably suppress everything that had made the art radical. Certainly no solutions for either problem was advanced, except one, incidentally, by Connie Butler, MoMa’s drawings curator, who is also the curator of the Los Angeles show.

In her panel talk she said that when she was agonizing over what choices of work to make for the “Wack!” exhibition, the art historian Moira Roth suggested, brilliantly, that she just eliminate objects altogether. Instead, Ms. Roth said, why not invite all the artists who made them to come the museum for a group-consciousness-raising session, film the session, and then make the film the show?

Somewhat unexpectedly, signs of a raised consciousness were evident among young people in the MoMA audience, the kind of people we are told either have no knowledge of feminism or outright reject it. In the question-and-answer sessions after each panel, the most passionate, probing and agitating questions and statements came from young women who identified themselves as students or artists.

When they spoke; when Richard Meyer, a gay art historian, spoke about queer feminism; and when Ms. Mutu ended her presentation by simply reading aloud a long list of curators, scholars and artists — all of them women, all of them black — who, could and should have been at the MoMA symposium, I had a sense that a feminist future was, if not secure, at least under vigilant consideration.

reading Rose

Thank you all for the smart discussion Thursday night: I hope you enjoyed (as I did) the fineness of our talk, the good questions, and the understandings we built around Rose's arguments about visual methodologies. What follows is my memory of our main concerns -- so, please, in the comments, add to / subtract from / take issue with what I've written so that we have as strong a memory together as possible.

The place our discussion took off, it seems to me, is with what happens after Rose's claims that any "critical visual methodology" must do three things: "take images seriously," "think about the social conditions and effects of visual objects," and "consider" the critic/analyst/teacher's "way of looking at images." After she sets up those criteria (the latter two of which will come back soon) she describes the "sites" of sighting practices in which "meaning is made" (production / image / audience) and the modalities with which those sites intersect (technological, compositional, and social). We spent our time focusing on the sites and the modalities, and somewhat on their intersections, but we did not have time for asking what the resulting "grid" of intersections implies in terms of the judgments it encourages; I am pretty sure, though, that in the coming weeks, as we explore further some of the methodologies that Rose describes, as well as others, that more questions about the grid -- and what it encourages us to see or overlook, and how it positions us as reflexive viewers-critics, and about other possible configurations for considering visual objects -- will emerge.

You all noted how Rose's sites -- of production / image / audience -- parallel the 'traditional' triad of writing studies, of author / text / audience. We discussed why Rose would use "production" instead of "artist" or "composer," which would parallel the writing studies triad: this is a direct result, it would seem, with her concern that we consider the social conditions and effects of visual objects, such that we do not want to reduce production to an individual person purposefully and intentfully in control of a text. Rose's treatment does not come to production as Foucault's notion of the "author function" does, with the author/composer composed by readers out of and in response to a text (the closest to this would be her discussion of the what the "good eye" does in constructing ideas about great artists); instead, Rose's use of "production" seems aimed at keeping us imagining production as a coming together of a multiply scaled set of social / cultural / political /economic /technological processes.

But then why does she still hold to "audience," which keeps us imagining discrete people? Why does she not use "reception" as the parallel term? Alexa asked if this might be connected to a desire to make "audience" concrete as possible for us, to keep reminding us that this site is indeed real groups of real people responding, so that we do not think of passive reception. I have to admit, though, that "audience" carries precisely that connotation for me, of passivity. So why point us away (rightfully so, I think) from thinking of the producer as a single individual while keeping to the old term for the receivers?

We also asked whether "image" is inclusive enough for what she hopes to achieve, given that the word asks us to imagine static, 2D, realistically representative art works or photographs -- and such works are a tiny subset of the range of visual objects we compose for each other. The word also asks us to think of such work as statically contained, as objects that sit still before us; again, this goes against Rose's other attempts to encourage us toward more dynamic conceptions of processes. Here, for example, is where Christine pointed out the Eurocentricity of this -- and the other -- parts of this system: from her work with local tribal groups and photography, Christine noted that there is no word that captures, as "image" or "photograph" does for us, that sense of a stilled or caught object; she told us how the closest words always mean movement, someone doing something or on the way to somewhere. This, then, is a question we need to raise of the methodologies we consider this semester.

This also leads us into questioning after Rose's emphasis on reflexivity, her insistence that critical methodologies must consider the critic/analyst/teacher's "way of looking at images"; this is where Heather and Yang each asked about -- reminding us very appropriately -- of the place of the teacher in relation to the methodologies we teach. For each of the methodologies Rose presents in the book, she raises the objection that it is not or not sufficiently reflexive -- as we are noting that there is reflexivity about larger cultural positioning vis-à-vis historically/culturally developed systems of seeing and talking about seeing and the objects of sight. As our class talked, we realized that her complaints seem related to her grid of sites and modalities: within the grid, the alertness to social positioning that characterizes reflexivity is present for the sites of production and of reception -- but there is no overtly marked place in the grid for the reflexivity that Rose argues ought to accompany the work of the critic. In other words, Rose's grid does not, apparently, allow for there to be a methodological system in which reflexivity is necessarily called forth by the relation of the parts of the grid. If the grid is meant to encompass all the possible components of systems of looking and objects, then the critic -- and hence the critic's reflexivity -- is left out. The critic *could* be considered under audience, as some part of audience: how might the critic/analyst/teacher be woven into a visual methodology so that reflexivity would of necessity be part of the practice?

In addition, Steve wondered whether compositional methodologies are necessarily a part of any methodology that hopes to consider visual objects, since it is compositional methodologies that allow us to say anything about the structure of visual objects. Although Rose seems to dismiss such methodologies as the simplest and least reflexive of the methodologies, we noted that every other methodological approach -- when applied -- starts by describing in the object being analyzed its elements and the relations established between them. Rose's concerns about compositional methodologies ought to whisper behind us as we read for next week, for those readings -- the Donis and Arnheim (as with the Bang) -- are at the core of what many use for compositional analysis (as with Kress and van Leeuwen): are they as concerned with the "good eye" as Rose claims is the central point of compositional analysis?

comic book school

Interesting how, in this article about a new school for people who want to be comic book artists, all the talk is of visual literacy and how we are living in an "increasingly visual culture."

for people in 5931

This thread in the Chronicle of Higher Education, on "How to teach a young adult what 'effort' is..." resonates with some of our class discussions.

laughing water

On Friday night we watched Deepa Mehta's Water. I cannot shake from my head the scene of Chuyia and Kalyani laughing together, playing pattycake (what else would you call it?) while it is raining outside. Chuyia's face and body are absorbed in the rhythms of joy: they are joy. She moves back and forth smiling and her eyes open and close and she laughs and giggles and is lost to it or, perhaps better, is it.

And so what happens later -- when Gulabi brings her back from across the river, her stilled and folded into herself down in the bottom of the little boat -- is more abhorrent, of course, than if there hadn't been that earlier scene.

Chuyia's ability to be joy in a physical game is the high moment of her being a child in the movie, there in the middle between the opening and closing where, in both, she is carried and what we see of her are her dangling feet.

Why is such release into the joy that comes of having a body that moves -- and moves well with others -- usually restricted to childish things? Or am I wrong?

The physicality allowed adults is so often constrained: trained athletics, social dance... Where is play?

Chuyia's joy comes out of the rhythms of pattycake, of being able to move quickly and in rhythm with someone else. The rhythms have to be learned, and the pleasure comes from being able to be just on the edge of rhythmic harmony with someone else, of moving quickly, of having a body that can do this, of being in that body. (That the rain -- the release of the monsoon -- is there all around them: that's a part of it, too, in the movie.)

I'm going skate skiing this afternoon.

bless Collin's heart

because he found Le Grand Content, video that must be viral, now.

Frida Kahlo...

would probably have enjoyed robbing Mexican banks in the early twentieth century with Penelope Cruz in order to prevent the theft of farmers' property -- especially in satin corsets and with a scruffy dog named Stinky.

When I see Salma Hayek, her portrayal of Kahlo gets in the way of my seeing Hayek as Hayek. And so I watched the movie Bandidas (over two days, while exercising, honest) in some confusion: the movie seemed credible as an alternative bio, what might have happened if Kahlo had never been in the tram accident, had been involved with leftist politics in the desert countryside instead of in cities, and had taken up with Cruz instead of Rivera -- and if Sam Shepard had been around to help the two women clarify their shooting, knife-throwing, and body strength, and if she had decided to ride horses in breast-up-pushing lingerie. If Kahlo hadn't had that accident, if she had been able to live more easily in her body, wouldn't she have enjoyed all this? (Or at least the not-so-explicitly exploiting parts of it?)

Cruz and Hayek were clearly having fun. Frida would have had some laughs.

It's an attitude that might give me good perspective for thinking on Mark Hansen's Bodies in Code. I'm re-reading the book, for all its arguments on bodies, digitality, and recent art -- and is anyone else weaving Stiegler, Varela, Merleau-Ponty, Massumi, and Deleuze? I worked back through Hansen's introduction this morning. It is continuing the work of undoing philosophy -- and aesthetics -- that are based in the west's workings of sight in the last centuries, arguing for us to be operational rather than observational: for Hansen, it is possible with current digital arts (significantly, little that is visually 2D) to "facilitate the actualization of the organism's potential to extend its bodily boundaries and [so] to expand the scope of its bodily agency."

What underlies this, ethically, is a recognition that the ways of seeing into which we have grown up shape in too limited a fashion our sense of our bodies and so our sense of embodiment, where embodiment means to have a world. Hansen, given the theories on which he draws, is arguing that if we "expand the scope of bodily (motor) activity" we transform the "agency of collective existence.... from a self-enclosed and primarily cognitive operation to an essentially open, only provisionally bounded, and fundamentally motor, participation": this is to "think of human existence as a prepersonal sensory being-with."

The question becomes, then, how to provoke that expansion -- and the book is Hansen's look at various digital art works that, he claims, do this. But is it enough simply to hang around such art or to interact with it, or must one form some sort of discursive relation with it? It would seem from the basis for all of this that simply being around the art should do what Hansen wants: to touch the prepersonal sensory, the interaction should be non-discursive, non-visual or non-primarily visual, and should have visceral force, yes?

This is art, then, that is to be built by someone who knows who we all are to be together but it is art built for someone who isn't supposed to ask or think about that. (Shades of Brenda Laurel's programmers making their religious-like immersive experiences back in Computers as Theater.) So I need to read for that, to see if that really is an outcome of what Hansen argues.

I also need to consider the ongoing notion of transduction, of that movement across gaps and of conversion -- because it sends me back to the scale/level questions that arose for me most recently in Powers's Echo Maker.

But I want to think also of the place of bodily pleasure in this, of the energetic, non-discursive, delight of two beautiful women riding their horses into the sunset in Mexico a pretend century ago, converted into my laughing on a snowy Tuesday evening which has now turned into early Wednesday morning. Good night.

Ten years ago....

who would have predicted that the Diss Group -- well, four-fifths of it, at least -- would have a reunion in the restaurant at the Baraga casino? Karla wasn't there, but Peggi was up from Texas, and Baraga is about mid-point between Houghton and Skanee, where Mary B. occasionally stays when she is in from the Sault. (And there are not exactly many places to eat in Baraga.) Peggi and Denise picked me up at school this afternoon, and we drove down and found Mary, who had gotten there a few moments before us and was wandering on the casino floor, dazed by the sounds of nickels dropping through for winners, but only the sounds of: there are no nickels anymore, but there is a recorded happy clanging to let you know you've won.

The casino is a small one, and it was surprisingly full for a mid-month Thursday night -- but we had the restaurant in the back pretty much to ourselves. If you had been wondering whether the restaurant is worth the drive, the answer is, um, well, no. The menu said that my whitefish came with a choice of potato or pasta. I asked what kind of pasta was available. The waitress said, "Um. I don't think he's made any, and you probably wouldn't want it anyway."

But we hadn't come for the food.

I wish Karla had been there. We filled each other in on stories between then and now and laughed and laughed. Denise can crack me up every time with her giggle and her stories about (for example) Yang's shoes. Mary shines as always, and since September is just at the other end of the UP, at Lake Superior State, where she is discovering what administrations try to pull off to keep unions at bay. And Peggi had a story that had us weeping, about a young woman in a class, on a cellphone, telling a girlfriend all about her disappointing sexual adventures from the night before and not realizing that everyone else could hear -- and that the class had, in fact, stopped to listen. Peggi followed up with a discussion of the sense of space developing around new communication technologies.

Why do such friends move to other towns?

The Godfather is on in the background,

and the horse's head is under the sheets. A mixed response I have to the scene: someone was clever enough to think up the head as a very personal and fitting response within the lives of the movie -- and how seriously frightening and disgusting it would be to wake up within those bloody sheets.

Does that distinction parallel the distinction Richard Shusterman makes in Performing Live between "somatic practices of representation" and "the somatics of experience"?

Per Shusterman, "representational somaesthetics emphasizes the body's external appearance while experiential disciplines focus not on how the body looks from the outside but on the aesthetic quality of its experience." The first chapter of the book is Shusterman's argument that the notion of aesthetic experience has lost "power and interest" since Dewey: with Dewey, Shusterman claims, aesthetic experience was a valued experience of vivid sensuous/emotional/cognitive integration; Shusterman argues that, as analytic philosophers of art have written about aesthetic experience since then, however, Dewey's "transformational notion of aesthetic experience has been gradually replaced by a purely descriptive, semantic one whose chief purpose is to explain and thus support the established demarcation of art from other domains." Shusterman wants to be back, to some extent, with Dewey, to have complex bodily experiences merged through aesthetic experience: "By rethinking art in terms of aesthetic experience [instead of in terms of art works in museums], Dewey hoped we could radically enlarge and democratize the domain of art, integrating it more fully into the real world, which would be greatly improved by the pursuit of such manifold arts of living."

For there to be that reinvigoration of such experiences, however, there has to be a reinvigoration of (the study of and within) bodies. The notion of the aesthetic has to be moved from assuming a primarily visual basis and from assuming a primarily consumptive function: these underlie the representational kind of aesthetics that Shusterman places against the experiential kind. Shusterman doesn't discuss the current emphasis on visuality and consumptive practices much, but it's implied in what he writes about experiential somaesthetics. Experiential somaesthetics is about remembering bodies as media, in the sense that they -- like other media -- are inseparably wound into our constructions of what counts as real; bodies are therefore worthy of care and cultivation, so that their experiences are available for clarification, exploration, understanding.

I need to consider all this against Hansen's work in Bodies in Code, which begins with a focused argument (bringing Steigler together with some Deleuze) that we need practices that help us shift from understanding -- and using -- bodies as observational to bodies as operational. Hansen argues for digital artworks that address bodies on more sensuous levels than the visual. I also need to consider this all against the old arguments that start at least with McLuhan (and wind their way through Jay et al) about the poverty of the visual (at least as it has been deployed in the West).

But that is all for pleasure later. For now, Shusterman's distinction between representation and experiential aesthetics is useful for me (as are the further distinctions among performative and practical somaesthetics). My response to the horse's head ties in with what Shusterman acknowledges, that the representational and experiential feed back and forth into each other: what I see on screen results in feelings, certainly, but what Shusterman wants to encourage is more alertness to those feelings and to their causes and effects. Within this, though, how does one discuss the distinction between the more cognitive response I have to the formal/narrative aspects of the movie and the visceral response to the gore? This is a distinction whose separations and overlaps are so little addressed (to my knowledge) in the two camps that often address aesthetic issues now, that of cultural studies (which speaks of the content of representations) and that of visual literacy and visual composition studies (which speak of visceral responses to formal arrangements). I need to consider more where Burke comes down between these, and I need to return to someone like Williamson's semiotic take on advertising.

But now we are sleeping with the fishes, so it is perhaps time to let this little mess of thoughts rest and bubble.

Houghton, snow and brains

When we look out the house windows tonight, the lights across the Portage are faded, soft, and diffuse, one indication of snow; another is the pickup truck sliding backwards down our street's little hill (the truck and driver are okay; we made sure). When we first moved here, a night like tonight would have had us excited and happy: nothing like this ever happens in Los Angeles. After some years, though, our comments tonight are along the lines of "It's about time!" There is, finally, snow, and so the world moves as it ought and we can fit more easily back into the expected time zone and place.

And because I now can live here again without being distracted by my body clock, I spent the part of the day when I wasn't in meetings thinking about brains: last night I finished Powers's The Echo Maker. I have read almost all of Oliver Sacks's books, and knew about Capgras Syndrome from my reading about visual processing, where some explain the syndrome by speaking of how visual neural processing passes through the amygdalae on its way to the more visually focused parts of the brain; if the amygdalae are damaged, then the emotional connotations of all sightings can be damaged. The emotional tenor of involved in seeing one's parents (for example) will be missing, and so those people will look like the familiar parents but seem like impostors -- until one speaks to them on the phone, when emotion and sensation are once again linked. If one sees them again, however, they are no longer emotionally shaded people, but rather just people with whom no one feels any connection.

But the Powers's book -- like Sack's writing on neurology -- raises another linking (or dislinking) for me. When I read The Man Who Mistook... upon its first appearance (I remember speaking to Art Quinn about it, so this is back in the early 80s, sigh), I remember sensing a tension for Sacks: the people about whom he writes are lively and present, with quirks and unpredictabilities and intriguing characters; his writing is about how character is neurology. Sacks does not write about how his research suggests such a reduction; reading him is instead for me like reading through two different eyeglass prescriptions at once, one view of neurons linking to others, another of people linking to each other. And just as I have trouble with quick changes between prescriptions...

So: thinking out loud:

I have no problem conceiving of the overlapping -- and experientially incommensurate -- worlds of (for example) microbes and me: I have seen enough science visualization films to be able to imagine how a tabletop (for example) would simply not be a surface to a microbe but rather a permeability. I can start to imagine -- and understand some of the limitations of the imaginings -- moving through the world with an other-than-human sense apparatus, such as has a fox or tree, because their sensing/responsive structures are identifiable in their processes and recognitions; the fox or tree or slime mold, however, inhabits a different world than I do precisely because its sensing/responsive structures are not the same as mine. It is, however, when I try to do the both-at-once -- I am neurons and other cell types and mitochondria! I am a funky messy human not purposefully stepping on ants! -- that I have some translation anxiety. When I consider the neurons, whose actions make perfect sense and are a pleasure to contemplate, I am fine; when I consider the human scale, I am fine. But how can I be both at once? To whom am I both at once? Is there a scale at which I can be both at once?

This is, perhaps, the tension that implodes the Sacks character at the end of Powers's book, when the character tries to live both at once. This is more than "Two, two, two mints in one," more than Faye Dunaway's head snapping back and forth -- sister, mother, sister, mother -- in Chinatown or River Phoenix's rotting trailer flat stare -- brother, father? -- in his own Idaho. This is not the duplicity of Heraclitus or Hegel, where the other -- the opposite -- defines me because I can tick off what I am by negating each item of what the other is, where I can delineate my spatial location and shape because I am the space unfilled by the other. But the both-at-once definition instead rests on two beings not being present to each other in shared space and time, because their spaces, times, scales, and senses are not the same: they are not in the same world; their worlds are exclusive.

This is perhaps a little like the Eames's Powers of 10, I guess, the moving out and in from the couple in the park in Chicago to the edges of the then known universe and then out and in to the atomic level: everything contains everything else and the story could be a circle instead of a pendulum. What you see just depends on where you stop. But this implies a gradation from one perspective to the next -- and is that what differentiates the slime mold from me or a seedling from a city?

I should get on to the letters of recommendation I have to write tonight. Thanks for the fun.

returning to Houghton, day 3

The weather gods were gentle, providing sun most of the way home today for the last, not quite 3 hour, stretch of the trip. The blue of the sky was intensified by the snow on the ground and the occasional grey cloud. The roads were icy in parts, and there was some drifting, but we are home now, remembering our bodies back into this particular configuration of daylight hours. The cat has returned to our bed from her while-we-are-away hiding place, and has also quieted from her first hours of complaint.

This afternoon I read job applications as my warm up for the New Year; there are some lovely smart people out there. And now, Shusterman's Performing Live, finishing from the plane.

returning to Houghton, day 2

When there are only 5 people in a plane that seats 30, the pilots, "for reasons of weight during takeoff and landing," have you all move to the back of the plane. The move should inspire some of that "jeez, we live in small towns" camaraderie, but because the back of the plane is where riders feel more of the movements of the plane through cloudy and windy nights, especially when the plane is light, it tends instead to inspire quiet moments of hoping that the flight is smooth. Which it was -- all 26 minutes of it from Eau Claire, WI, to Rhinelander, WI. The flight attendant pulled off a beverage service, too.

We are, now, in the Comfort Inn of Rhinelander, looking out into an inch or two of snow covering the parking lot of the Home Depot, across which front -- in this cloudy night -- there is a huge shadow of a small American flag waving in a big light and small flurries. The ingredient on Iron Chef America is lentils, and I have Richard Powers's The Echo Maker to finish, having left it in the car at the airport because it was too big to carry in my backpack.

One more time zone to go.

returning to Houghton, day 1

Ferry leaves Shaw at 10:30am and arrives at noon at Anacortes: many cormorants and big ocean gulls, some grebes, some wide rolling swells in the Strait.

Bus to airport arrives, 1pm. (We waited with two people who had grown up together on San Juan Island, one now headed back to finish his first year of college, the other back to her job in Bellingham. Before we started talking with them, they were trading memories from kindergarten; Dennis said it was like watching Dawson's Creek.)

Bus drops us at airport, 4pm.

Shuttle gets us to hotel, 4:45pm.

Indian food delivered to the room, and here we are, Uma going after Lucy in the snow, with swords.

You would think we are traveling from someplace far away to someplace far away. If all goes well, we'll be home on Monday.

why, it's raining!

And so we talk about what to make for dinner and when to wake each other up from our naps. (Dennis, Brian, and Sam did chainsaw up a tree that had blocked a neighbor's road, while I read another Australian novel, this one about being dope addled in the seventies. The required efforts seem pretty equal -- and I would have helped with the tree, had there not already been too many hands and backs. Really. I like chainsaws and the smell of cut wood, especially in the rain. Especially when it's being described in someone else's writing.)

Meanwhile, we have learned that the ferry people do not talk to the shuttle-to-the-airport people, so, while the ferry arrives at the mainland at 3 pm tomorrow, the shuttle leaves at 2:55. The next shuttle is at 6. I hope there is another novel, one I can borrow, with long thick descriptions of what it's like to sift slowly through long hot Melbourne afternoons.

oz in the pacific northwest

Because B&B lived in Australia for eight years, they would send us things we wouldn't probably otherwise know about, like Tim Winton novels and TimTams.

On their island bookshelf, now that they are back, I have been looking through the mix of here and there books, and on Monday afternoon came to Tom Kenneally's Bettany's Book. It is six-hundred pages thick, and threads together the lives of several related people a century and a half apart, first several Europeans new to Australia -- both born and transported there -- and then two sisters several generations later. Along with paralleling these generations of people writing about their lives and becoming who they are, it also involves what happened in the Sudan during the nineties, for one of the sisters goes there. It is a book of echoes, and of deepening, and I happily slurped into it and just now am washed up afterwards, and B is calling me to a new episode of CSI, the original, and I am not sure I can handle the shift.

Nor am I ready to prepare to leave here, to make -- tomorrow -- the shuttle reservations for Saturday. I would be a dreamer and a drifter, always, someone not tied to where I live, for altogether too many reasons.

I like being on the edges

Where we are now is tucked about as far into the northwest of the U.S. as you can be and still be on the map, and where we usually live is enough on the edges that it doesn't even show up on some maps. I have always lived close to water with a non-visible other side.

I am a listener from the corners at parties, unless there is champagne. But I am also pretty good at asking questions.

I was the first daughter after three sons.

Just recording some observations, after a long walk in the rain, figuring out where I want to stand in this new year, what party dress I want to wear through the season.

The New Year...

is raining and cool, good for a long walk under the drooping cedars. Bindi -- Brian and Buni's round terrier -- walked with us but did not want to stay on one side of the road or the other, and we did not know her particular words for making her stay on one side or the other -- which gave us the pleasure of meeting Barney and Joyce, who live down the hill on the little isthmus out to Broken Point. Until we turned off the road to come home, Barney and Joyce drove their old pickup behind Bindi at Bindi's pace, which is also a good pace for a little conversation with people walking alongside. Barney had said, with a cheering smile, "I do not think it's a good idea to start the New Year by running over a dog."

The air is moist and full of cedar and pine smells, and we have progressed from not knowing what time of day it is to not knowing what day of the week it is. Brian has made bread and pizza (for last night's warm conversation and celebration at Gwen and Eric's glowing house right on the sound, with the red ravens), Dennis is now stuffing a chicken, I made a huge pot of soup from the Christmas turkey, and we have all been reading. And napping.

How good it is to be far away, on this island.