Come on, Vogue!

And that’s when I know/she’s gonna be pissed when she wakes up/from terrible things I did to her/in her dreams…

-Ben Folds

 

Okay, before I say much, here’s an image, linked from http://concreteloop.com/2008/03/comment-spotlight-lebron-the-vogue-cover (interesting mix of comments there, btw… well worth your time to read).

 

I’m a fan of LeBron James, though he’s not one of my once beloved Pacers. I’m not so much a fan of Gisele, as she dates that Brady fellow, but I’d like to think LeBron didn’t mean to be presented the way Vogue presented him on their current cover, and I’m not entirely sure Gisele should be comfortable with it, either.

I’ve read many comments around the net, so I won’t claim I have some brilliant observation, but my first thought was “oh, great, LeBron is King Kong stealing Tom Brady’s girlfriend.”

But let’s take a look at this cover, visually. The “real” cover, obviously, is the image to the left, while the alternate cover image uncovered by ConcreteLoop.com is  the tasteful photo on the right. On the actual cover, there’s brighter lighting (which brings the skin tone differences into starker contrast), and there are wildly conflicting facial expressions. LeBron looks angry, or beastly, while Gisele looks like she might well have been caught laughing at how ridiculous the image is. LeBron is hunched over, simian (also like one might drive with a basketball, to be fair), and he’s handling a ball. It’s a confusing composition, as I suppose we’re supposed to think we see the “essence” of the two (the intense athlete and the smiling model?) or perhaps that LeBron Kong has taken a woman as he streaks down the court. It’s also interesting that Gisele is wearing a dress that is roughly the same shade as the Statue of Liberty, not that anyone would be playing up the King Kong thing.

Contrast that to the other image, which looks like an actual fashion shoot. The colors are muted, the poses are relaxed and seem human. LeBron’s muscles are highlighted, as is his face (which doesn’t look animalistic in this shot) and Gisele’s figure is showcased without her being presented as if she is being seized and controlled (as a male, I have to say I think she looks better in the white dress, too). The composition has good lines, and other than the awkwardness of placing  Vogue’s header on the page, the spaces for the other cover text are all natural. If the image were cropped right at LeBron’s knees and some extra space were airbrushed in at the top, it’d be a perfect cover.

It looks like Vogue dropped the ball.  So to speak.

 

Sing(er) me a Song

Girl I’ve been shakin and mackin the donkey/Tryin to get to youuuuu and that monkey…

 -T-Pain, from his song with E-40. We all know what it means, but imagine if we didn’t.

I’ve been thinking a bit about remix, and I realized, as I was doing research for another project I want to attempt in the coming weeks, that one of my favorite films has an unconventional example of remix (or collage essay, perhaps).

Let me preface these clips: if you haven’t seen The Usual Suspects, and you plan to someday, don’t watch the two clips. The second on will spoil the movie for you, and the first contains perhaps the coolest line in the whole film. In fact, if you want to watch the movie someday, stop reading this entry. I’ll end up spoiling it, too.

Now then, two YouTube clips:

I gave the first one for context (and because I love the end of it), but notice how Verbal Kent/Keyser Soze/Is Spacey’s Character Either weaves his story, utilizing bits and pieces of things that are going on/sitting around. He completely tricks the police with what is essentially an on-the-fly “verbal” collage essay that utilizes the nature of remix.

As if I needed another reason to love Brian Singer…

What we do

I don’t wanna feel so different/but I don’t wanna be insignificant/I don’t know how to see the same things different now…   
-Still Counting Crows, still new album, still awesome   

So I’m about to rush over to a reading group about De Certeau (Ms. Jackson if you’re nasty). I’ve been looking at his work, thinking through the tiny chunk we read for today (and planning to finish The Practice of Everyday Life over the weekend). And I’ve been thinking about the field I’m in.

Rhetoric.

 I wonder if many of us don’t have it “wrong” on a certain level.  If you talk to a scholar in our field, he or she could probably say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ if you asked “is this rhetoric?” and rambled off a list of potential topics for discussion. We know what’s in our field. Mostly. Some people argue that some of what I– and what my mentors– do is not “really” rhetoric, but I think of those people the same way I thought of myself when I, upon entering my first algebra class, pointed out that X is not a number and shouldn’t be part of math. Sure… there’s a logic to it, but it’s a little short-sighted and immature.   

I made this argument in my history of rhetoric seminar last semester, and it was received with a mix of horror and interest. So… I’m going to toss it out again for my readers. I think in rhetoric we do ourselves a disservice by not acting like our field IS a field.  

Here’s what I mean.

Go watch Stephen Hawking speak. He’s not going to spend the first half of his presentation tracing physics from the start of the field to his particular brand of science. He’s not going to explain to us how gravity was “discovered” and documented. It would be foolish; that crowd KNOWS that physics is a thing. They came to hear a genius speak about his contributions.  

If you saw this recent news story about the near-retirement-age math genius who solved the “directions to anywhere” problem (I’ll link this later– I have the bookmark at home), you won’t catch him starting by saying “once upon a time there were two numbers, and *insert name* realized that by placing a plus sign between them one could indicate a desire to join them into a single number that was the sum of the two.” In fact if someone started a lecture by doing the basic “here’s six apples. I take two. How many are left?” math explanation we all get in elementary, we’d feel appalled and cheated.  

So that makes me  think that perhaps the answer to many of our problems is to simply stop trying to justify what rhetoric is. Stop tracing back to Plato and Aristotle, and stop charting through the Roman era into the enlightenment. Instead of trying to link everything back to the origin point, let the fact that the field exists do some of the heavy lifting for you.  

I get the feeling this will still be received poorly, but I ask you to consider it. A little field confidence could go a long, long way.

Comcast fail. Life Fail.

Shout out to Bill O’Reilly/I’ma throw you a curve/you’re mad at me because I’m a thief/and got a way with words…

-Ludacris

I came, I saw, I hit ‘em right dead in the jaw.

So I apparently can’t use the Comcast website to pay my bill. *sigh* Luckily the phone works.

Julie has had a rough few days, but she’s such a trooper. I’m about to catch up my posts for the last few days. This one is just to offer one of these fun little modules from Blogthings.com. I played with several, but I ended up deciding to post this one because it’s just perfect. It’s my band name. I haven’t had the time to do this sort of study yet, but these little plug-n-chug modules are an essential part of digital identity. We need to pay attention to ‘em. I’m also a comma, but I lost the code for that one in a “need your password” WordPress wipe. OOPS!

 

Your Band Name is:

The Supersized Androids

Band Name Generator

My name is not Nathan

This dizzy life of mine/keeps hanging me up all the time/this dizzy life/is just a hanging tree…

-Counting Crows (great new CD out today—check it out)

I’ve been thinking about writing this entry for a while and worried that it might offend a few people, but given my stellar track record of late… let’s just say I don’t mind if it offends anyone now (that ship–sailed ). But to be at least a little subtle, I’m just going to hint to the piece of scholarship I am responding to instead of stating the exact name.

At any rate, during my MA, I took a fantastic class on research methodology with one of my thesis committee members. One of the pieces we read early in the semester was a study by a pair of doctors who watched as their students became integrated into “professional” discourse.  Part of this article’s data—and the analysis of this data—was the slow tracking of one student’s frustration as he essentially lost his voice to become an academic.

At the time, I raged a little in class, and I suggested that perhaps this wasn’t the most healthy thing. Alas, this was the beginning of a full year of discussion in that program of “professionalization.” I whole time we talked about these things, I tried to balance my sense of what was being said and what I see out in the world.

This strikes me as one of the many places where our field has a bit of an identity crisis. I say “a bit,” because I do NOT feel the pressure from my current institution to become a tie wearing, jacket-with-the-elbow-patches, jargon spouting academic (I know this pressure does exist in some places, and I think it’s sad).

But let’s look at this for a second, from a logical perspective. We tell our first-year students to find their voice, to write in interesting and unique ways.

We praise the idea of being creative and innovative.

Then the suggestion is that we should beat a PhD student into being a sort of “disciplined” academic?

Someone actually implied on this blog, in a response, the same sort of mentality. FWIW, I don’t think there’s any specific behavior that defines PhDness or professionalism. I will always teach in shorts in the summer (unless I end up someplace where it’s not miserably muggy in the summer). I will always make pop culture jokes. I will always be who I am.

This is not to say I don’t think there is “a” professionalism. I show proper respect to other academics, I am careful about how I interact within the professional network, and my work does what my work needs to do.

I would argue, though, that the idea that there is some universal “professional” behavior, that we could/should shape every PhD student into a specific product, is ridiculous. I look at my heroes in our field, and they don’t all look and act the same. They don’t speak the same or write the same. They don’t even get along in some cases.

To claim we should all be the same is the very definition of hegemony. And that’s bad, right?

Words matter

I’m hearing what you say/but I just can’t make a sound…

-One Republic

I had one of those “wow, these people don’t like me” moments today. In my teleconference class (which is already in and of itself strange—being in front of a projected screen with most of the class on it). We were discussing indigenous politics, specifically a book called The Politics of Indigeneity by Roger Makka and Augie Fleras. The book looks at indigenous political movements in Canada and New Zealand. It’s interesting reading, but this one quote that another student pulled out for us to scrutinize bugged me on some level.

Here’s the quote, from page 32:

Immigrants differ [from the indigenous] in other ways. They have ‘voluntarily’ left their homeland, have opted to abide by the rules of their adopted country, and do not bring a government or legal apparatus that they can assert.

Now within the context of the argument the authors are making about Canada and New Zealand this seems like a legitimate statement, but the student who raised the question, and several others, made moves to equate this to America.

I said “I don’t think an American would ever write this definition of immigrant,” and the room—on TV—went silent. So I elaborated, pointing out that perhaps the most profound immigrant experience stamped into American history is slavery (which invalidates the first two criteria above) and the most currently discussed version of “immigrant” is the “border jumping” Mexican (which many American policy makers claim violate the second criteria above, and who some might argue through the way American law works DO have some measure of the final criteria).

A little more silence.

So I went on to point out, as I have several times in this course, that I am not an expert on Canadian policy or Canadian history, and that it was possible that in that construction (I didn’t get to New Zealand, but the same is true), such a reductive definition might work.

Then someone loudly asks, into the silence, “how can you claim an American wouldn’t write this?” then kept going. This class makes me totally uncomfortable because the only way to be heard is to yell over someone else (which is not my style), so I pointed out that if this were an American author, I would instantly press him or her about slavery (it would, at the very least, require a footnote if this quote were to survive more than a single reading as a rhetoric text). And I reiterated that I didn’t feel Americans could construct immigrant in that way. The person who asked the question then spoke for about ten minutes, moving in a constant line away from the question and into something else.

I asked myself, in the car on the ride home, if this intervention into class was worth it. I had a presentation in this course a few weeks ago, and instead of considering my questions/engaging with them, one of the remote site students (perhaps the same one—their faces are blurry on our screen) spent too much time being outraged about my question than discussing it.

I wrote on my notes, for the two students on my site to see, “I’m pretty sure they don’t like me,” and shrugged it off.

But I do think the point I made was important, because the text we were discussing today was (even if the prof wasn’t so sure) political science. And if we’re talking about a polisci definition of “immigrant” that one might want to utilize as an American, that definition simply will not work. America has the beloved “melting pot” (which also came up in class, ironically as some sort of support for the quote, which perhaps I’m parsing wrong—if you think so, comment). Immigrants founded this place, and in reality, it would be easy enough to make an indigenous/immigrant binary. The African slaves who later became African Americans were immigrants, if we use the term the way polisci has for generations (they weren’t JUST immigrants, obviously, and it sort of glosses over one of the true horrors of American history, but they were people relocated from one nation to another).

Behold: The Lester Faigley Gargoyle Cometh!

I set out on a narrow way/many years ago…

-Rascal Flatts (and yes, I’m a little worried that I hate country music and have found myself listening to a country band twice during my writing time this week, but I like these guys)

It hasn’t quite been a year, but I think I’m finally ready to deconstruct one of the most amusing dreams I’ve ever had. So let me tell you, dear reader, about the Lester Faigley Gargoyle.

Should Dr. Faigley find this entry by Googling himself or some other happenstance, know that I’m a huge fan of your work. I loved Fragments of Rationality. You could even say it got in my head. LITERALLY.

So here’s the story. At the end of my MA, I had a thesis defense/reading exam. This is, I believe, quite common in the field (though I envy some of my peers who wrote 40 pages and defended it—I read approximately 40 scholarly works and wrote almost 150 pages). My exam was scheduled, however, at a time that would work for all three of my committee members, and some of them were leaving the university for the summer. So the week of my exam, my mother had surgery and was laid up in the hospital AND I had three full day sessions of portfolio evaluation.

I hadn’t finished all of my reading when the week started. Yeah, I’m a bad boy. I was reading The Braddock Essays collection, and I figured “oh, I’ll be fine finishing this up!” and I hadn’t received one of the Jay David Bolter books I was reading a chapter of (I love that book, btw—it’s called Windows and Mirrors, with Richard Grusin, I believe, as the co-author. It’s oft overlooked in our field). But I had a pre-defense meeting with my chair, and she gave me a few sample questions. One of them was about Faigley’s book and a point I took issue with (wherein the doctor details online classes where he felt he couldn’t speak—I mentioned that as a longtime digital student/instructor I knew that one just had to take agency).

My chair mentioned that this same question might come up in my defense and that I’d want to have proof ready if I wanted to claim Faigley was wrong (which I’m not sure I was saying; it’s not about right or wrong, but rather it’s about perception of a moment. Chatters, particularly at that moment in internet history, wouldn’t grant space to anyone. It was a “take your spot” time). So I decided I better re-read that book.

The night before my exam was rough for my mom (not an excuse—I still passed with high distinction, and I only fumbled one question because I decided to be honest instead of lying and BSing about a text I couldn’t remember due to my mind just blanking on me out of panic), so I fell asleep in a chair at the hospital reading FoR. In my dream, I was in the room where my exam was to happen, and there was a gargoyle in the corner.

The gargoyle spouted lines and ideas from FoR in the voice of Patton Oswalt impersonating Tom Carvelle. It was a mix of terrifying and comforting, but in the dream my committee members couldn’t hear it, and at times I was using it as a citation.

The question didn’t come up in my exam. In fact no one brought up Faigley’s work in particular (though I used him myself to justify my postmodern stance). But some nights I am still visited by the Lester Faigley Gargoyle. I wonder if he’s not protecting the roof of my intellectual house, insuring that the water doesn’t seep in and cause damage and warding off evil spirits.

Or if maybe my imagination is too wild.

a Portrait of the Blogger as a not-so-young-Rhetor

Nail in my hand/from my creator/you  gave me life/now show me how to live…-Audioslave, almost always misquoted 

Today I want to get semi-deep and reflective. I’ve been thinking about something and resisting saying it to much of anyone because I’m afraid of how it might be received, but I’m quickly finding that in my field, at this level, it’s the time to say things without worrying so much about how people receive it. To comment back to someone who responded to one of my posts, I guess I just don’t “know better.”

I’ve been trying to decide lately what sort of rhetorician I am (will be). People keep saying that as a first-year PhD I probably shouldn’t know. I should be experimenting and digging into things and becoming instead of claiming I have become. My response to that is this: I am what I am.

I don’t talk much about my past. The truth is it’s not a story I think anyone really needs to dwell on, but if one wanted to write my biography, it’d read a lot like the story of the kid from a bad neighborhood with an absent father and a working single mother who learned he was good at basketball and rose up. Only when I learned I was good at basketball, I learned I was good at basketball… for a six-foot-tall slowish guy. I’m good with words, so I’m told, and I pick at the right things when I do research (so I’m told). Because of that, and a lot of work, and a lot of help from people along the way, I’ve made my attempt at rising up. But people should make no mistake; when I identify myself as a mixed-blood Cherokee poor kid from Indiana, the product of two broken families and a broken city, that is not an identity I take lightly or wear as some sort of plumage. That is who I am.

In much the same way, I think I know what sort of rhetorician I am. I have found over the course of the last year that elements of what I do upset many in the field (there’s some evidence of that here on this blog, and there are seeds for much more). I am generally unapologetic on that point; I never mean to insult someone personally, but no one says “with all due respect” before mocking the things I value, so if my criticism of some idea any of you hold dear feels bad, that’s academia for you. I find it interesting, though, that all of the “legends” or “celebrities” I’ve met in the field find my ideas either interesting, “fascinating,” “exciting,” or tolerable. It’s people who are just a bit ahead of me—or people who are doing the same sort of research in ways I would characterize as sloppy or incomplete—who seem to take such issue with me. People have presented to me theories for this breakdown in who is angry with me, but I’m not going to speculate.

Here’s where I “live” as a rhetorician:

 

1.   I think it’s important to investigate popular culture, specifically video games, television/film, and comic books. I do not, however, see a particular use in creating academic versions of these technologies (though I enjoy researching those products and respect the people who create them).
 

 

2.   I think there is a great deal that academia in general is missing about digital technology and fans of popular culture because so many researchers stand at the outside and lean over/peer in instead of diving in. There’s too much privilege still being granted to “high” culture in a world where America, at the very least, ditched high culture for “git er done” a long time ago.

 

3.   I want to help to expand the smallish field of Native American rhetoric, but I think it’s useless to try to generalize it too much (beyond building frameworks). There is no singular Native American rhetoric.

 

4.   I’m mixed-blood, so furthermore I want a mixed-rhetoric.

 

5.   I think the use of theory just for the sake of packing it in is pointless and anyone who does it should be ashamed. The same is true of jargon. Rhetoric doesn’t need to be hard to read to be “smart.”       

 

6.   I think we need to dig beyond “the tradition” (western rhetoric) to find the actual “tools” that constitute rhetoric so that we can use them to look at new things instead of constantly going back to Aristotle as if he’s the origin point.

 

7.   We need to blend more; hybridity and remix aren’t just buzzwords. These are things that create new understanding. We won’t re-create Aristotle’s wheel, but we’ll shy away from riding in Judith Butler’s car? Why?

 

8.   We need, as a field, to start saying “oh, I don’t know,” when we don’t know. Since I study things that people don’t know in many cases, I hear all manner of hedging and attempting to characterize things incorrectly. I won’t tell you Sassure is wrong if you don’t claim that the gamer community I’m studying isn’t a community, m’kay? Note: I don’t know if Sassure is wrong; I don’t know him well enough to make that judgment. It’s an example.

 

9.   Sometimes ambition kills. We’d all be better served by smaller, well-crafted studies than attempts to totalize by doing over-blown, super-crazy research projects. Don’t try to talk about anything “in America” or “In this century” or “on the World Wide Web.” We tell our first-year students to focus. Why don’t we? 

 

10.                  We have to embrace the sad possibility that we’re wrong about a few things. I see so many scholars who won’t entertain ideas that challenge existing structures. I also see people who think it’s “weak” to change their position. No one is going to sick the Swiftboat Vets for Truth on any of us. We need to, as a field, start saying “whoa, I totally got that wrong” when we totally get that wrong.

 

11.                 The “paper” is dying. It might not ever vanish entirely, but we’re quickly learning that all the things we ask for in a paper can be created virtually allowing for interesting new affordances (sound, video, image, more control over text shape and where the eye goes, color, etc.) and less dead trees. I know that many people want to burn me at the stake when I say that the traditional double spaced, Times New Roman essay isn’t long for our world (at least as a mainstream genre), but it’s important, as Cindy Selfe says, to pay attention. The newest generations communicate in such ways that email is becoming too formalized and restrictive for them. The way they perceive communication is changing, and pinning them to a sheet of paper for our sake would be akin to stunting their growth. The concepts behind writing an academic paper will live on to evolve, but the paper itself… I don’t think it’ll last.

 

12.                 We are going to fail at understanding communication and rhetorical practices in 2008 and beyond if we resist entering new digital/technological spaces. IDK, my BFF Jill might not be positive what is happening, but IIABD (it is a big deal). Much like we need to consider underlife in our classrooms, we need to consider “underculture” in our academic world. There are people  reading and writing as much as a lit grad student without ever touching a sheet of paper. If we miss that, we neglect the nature of reading and writing.

 

13.                 There is no “literacy.” It’s “literacies,” and they’re interdependent and recursive. We have to understand that or we’re just boxing people in.

 

14.                 To understand how certain people in this world of ours think, we have to collapse “space” and “place.” Sometimes geographical location becomes entirely secondary to an imagined/virtual space.

 

15.                 The same buzzwords that impress people can make one look foolish. If you claim, for example, that you’re a “digital rhetorician,” you better know what that means. If you don’t, you insult yourself and you insult me (as a digital rhetorician). And if you write a book called “Digital Writing in France,” it better not be based on five case studies of people who send email from cybercafés in Paris. I know it’s a rhetorical choice sometimes to overblow (I do it here), but some things shouldn’t be fodder for that.

 So that’s me. It’s too blunt to be part of a professional document, like my teaching philosophy (contrary to what some might think, I DO understand the field and how to behave within it), but that’s what I’m about. I don’t see this changing dramatically as my education progresses. I’ve been around 31 years, and I’ve seen a great deal. I’ve had to survive, and I’ve had to fight and claw. I’m fairly set in my academic ways, just as I’m fairly set in my personal politics and my spirituality. I will flex and bend, as we all have to in order to survive, but this is who I am. I ended up here, where I am right now, because I feel this way about things.

If this place, and the process of finally being ushered into the field, takes these major points from me, I don’t think I did it right. I’m rough around the edges, to be sure, but I didn’t come here to be smoothed. I came here to get sharp.  

Ritualistic Gaming… the start of a line of thought

Ever since I could talk/I was ordered to listen…

-Cat Stevens 

Today in community literacy class we had a special guest. I guess the fact that she was a special guest isn’t such a big deal.

What is important is that she’s a mixed-blood Cherokee (like myself) and in the middle of a presentation I was making on gaming literacies and group formation, something interesting was said.

A classmate, who I think is well-versed in gaming, made a point that some gaming guilds behave on a ritualistic fashion, using the “raid” as a ritual behavior. The special guest chimed in to point out how interesting this was. And I agree, the idea of clans/guilds/etc. becoming “tribal” or adhering to ritualistic behavior IS fascinating.

 I can think of a few examples.

But I don’t think a raid is one. Allow me to elaborate. When our guest—and native scholars—talked about ritual, she was talking about activities that are repeated in ceremonial ways due to the will of the tribe (group). These are usually traditional and in many cases are sacred acts.

This is not to say we can’t extrapolate the “raid” construction over. In fact my theoretical framework would actually push us to do so (I don’t think we can let ideology collide with theory in these cases, so “sacred” as an elevation of status vs. what a group of gamers might consider ritual is an unfair/unwise theoretical move).

The reason I claim we cannot look at a raid in this way is that raids are a software/developer construction. What I mean is this: if a guild’s tradition—their ritual behavior—was to attack a specific town at a specific time, that might fit the construction. But in a game like World of Warcraft (which is what we were discussing—that style of MMORPG), Blizzard Inc. establishes what can be raided, when, and sets a small pool of rewards.The tendency to behave as “raid” teams, then, is not classically “ritualistic.” It is following the lead of the software/game rule set.

I am fascinated by the idea of gamers being ritualistic, however. It warrants pursuit. I’ll dig into this deeper in the coming days. For now, though, sleep calls.

Why I’m voting for Obama

I can take the rain on the roof of this empty house/that don’t bother me…

-Rascal Flatts

As if this wasn’t enough already…

 Image from Flickr, uploaded by Obama's campaign.

Read the man’s speech.

Somehow I missed this one live, but thankfully Julie brought it to my attention. <3

Here’s the mind-blowing thing: Barack Obama wrote the speech himself.

HE WROTE IT.

I’ve had a special feeling about Obama since I first noticed him during his convention speech years ago. He’s intelligent. He’s charismatic, and he stands for all the right things. After almost eight years of what we have now… my heart is warmed by the idea that a man of such character, such passion, such intellect.

Those who know me know that I adore Bill Clinton. But having watched Hillary run her campaign, I have to stand firmly, once again, behind Barack Obama. He represents what we NEED in this country, and he represents what this country SHOULD be.

I’m floored. So floored I spent  my blogging time listening to the speech again. Check it out. In the coming years dissertations will be written about Obama, and this speech will be one of the major points of emphasis.