Still sickly after all these days: but on with the bloggin’ about third spaces

I had a dream I could buy my way to heaven/when I awoke I spent that on a necklace…
-Kanye West

So apologies again if you’re a regular reader; I cannot, for the life of me, get well, so I’ve been devoting my time to resting, doing things you don’t describe on the blog (and jogging to and from the restroom), and trying to keep up with my scholarly work.

I took a mulligan on an assignment this weekend because of one of those beautiful “you can drop one” policies that some professors put in their syllabi, but I feel like doing the thought work now (late) so I figure I’ll blog it.

We’re currently reading a book called The Third Space of Sovereignty by Kevin Bruyneel. The main thrust of Bruyneel’s argument is that scholars (and everyone else, for that matter) have to resist the idea that there’s a binary relationship for indigenous people in America (i.e. “part of the United States” or “independent nations”). He illustrates this tension in the introduction by using the example of Jesse Ventura and the Mille Lacs Band regarding hunting and fishing rights.

The third space, then, is somewhere in the middle. And it’s relevant.

This makes me wonder why there’s been so much flack given to my considerations of mixed bloodedness, as I would define mixed-bloods, in particular, as the vanguards of this third space.  In fact it seems that mixed blood– as a theoretical concept– gets to the heart of at least one of the issues that dominated the last book we read, Blood Narrative by Chadwick Allen.

Allen creates a triad (Blood, land, memory) that he uses to explore indigenity. I don’t personally agree with his comparisons across hemispheres (though I’ve already been criticized for criticizing), but I do see a dual-point intervention to be made for a mixed blood (like myself, part Cherokee and part European). Blood, obviously, is our major point of contention (we have SOME native blood– in many cases not enough, or not proven by enough paperwork, to be enrolled). Mixed bloodedness also touches on the idea of memory, though, as our histories and our understandings of tradition are skewed and modified– they occupy a third space of their own.

I see all these triangles emerging (curses, Aristotle!). Blood-Memory-Land. United States-third space-Tribal Government. Authentic-dependant-massmarket.

I wonder if my scholarship is turning into “native rhetoric”-Phill-”the field of rhetoric” and “native rhetoric”-Phil-”the field of native studies.” Perhaps I hover so much in the third space that no one can really figure out exactly where my work belongs. “gaming rhetoric”-Phill-”gaming studies.” “pop culture rhetoric”-Phill-”pop culture studies.”

It’s maddening!

But triangular.

 

Sometimes I just don’t get it…

…pour my life into a paper cup…

-RHCP

We had an “interesting” discussion in class today. One person dominated (look back over the blog for my thoughts on this) and I’m not entirely sure we discussed what was a very interesting text (Blood Narrative by Chadwick Allen), but there was a long breakdown interdisciplinary debate over this:

Should a “minority” writer identify as a writer, as a minority, or as both.

I felt like saying “this is shockingly similar to the dilemma I’ve been batting around on my blog, as to who can write about what, and I think it’s important to think about perception,” but I was mostly silenced by someone who needed to point out, among other things, that human beings just “deficate excrement.”

Yeah– I didn’t get that either.

This was a moment where I think the view of the rhetorician was really useful. Let’s say, just as a random example, that bell hooks were to stand up and say “I am a writer.” She is (she’s more than JUST a writer, and she’s fantastically talented), but her neglecting to say “African American” wouldn’t have nearly the impact that some of the other students in class thought it would. Anyone in the room, with the ability to see, would identify her as such, and her subject matter would also illustrate this point. It’s not like her author functionality (can we employ that term this way) can erase race. Of course I don’t think hooks would ever try, but I wanted a well known example. It might have been more ironic to choose Morrison, now that I think about it.

That is, of course, not to neglect the relevance of how one wishes to package and present herself (himself). There are many “minorities” as it were who “pass” (I’ve often asked people if I qualify as either one of these things– it’s not clear that I’m part Cherokee if I don’t point it out, unless people notice that I’m acting like a Cherokee, and that becomes a long performative argument for another post). In some sense, it becomes powerful for those people to declare themselves to be “X type of writer.” We see much more of this with gender/sexuality issues (the power of being “out” as it were, or declaring that one is transgender).

I wonder, though, if the other disciplines represented at the table (history, anthropology, American studies, Native American studies, architecture and library science) don’t give a little too much authority to what the author claims. Several people were trying to claim that one could erase ethnicity by claiming to simply be a writer.

That doesn’t work, I don’t think. Maybe small scale. Perhaps I could, in a gaming studies article, erase my Cherokee-ness (I tend to think I’d more be leaving it dormant than hiding or removing it), but if one is talking about issues of ethnicity, and is an ethnic minority, the audience is going to figure it out/construct that.

That’s why Aristotle created that triangle, isn’t it?

I really didn’t get why it was such a savage argument. It sort of distressed me, since there were a number of great things in the text (including a triangular relationship I’m going to try to write about here tomorrow– I need Photoshop and I’m too tired to Photoshop right now).

*sigh*

If anyone from that class is reading, sorry to dog it. I just don’t GET it sometimes.

Virtual presentation/virtual A to virtual Q

In my room/on a pad/is written a letter/return addressed to you…
-For Squirrels

Me and my peeps got some pub! http://www.vitia.org/wordpress/2008/04/06/cccc08-a25-reading-and-writing-virtual-realities/ (warning: if you click here, you’ll see my full name and might get beyond the thin disguise of me not identifying where I’m a student, so read at your own risk).

First of all, a sincere thanks to Mike for giving the panel some attention, and again a thanks to Doug for toting my video around New Orleans. I wish I’d been there to see everyone.

But Mike asked a good question. Allow me to quote:

The point of contention, I guess, is over reasons for bringing it into the classroom. I can see a games studies course as a cultural studies course, certainly. But what is the compelling argument for the connection between games studies and composition? What does game studies as an area of scholarly inquiry help us teach writing students to do that other areas of scholarly inquiry cannot do? There was some discussion of this in the Q&A, particularly in the concerns expressed about colonizing our students’ culture and appropriating it into a school genre, but I’d be curious to hear from the game scholars out there: why are games important to writing?

This is a familiar question for me, coming from an MA program where I faced a fair amount of skepticism. My first response is always this: we’re in a new moment. We now accept that it’s fine to subject a student to Moby Dick or The Dubliners, but there was no doubt a time when someone said “wait, is it fair to ask writing students to read this?” During my MA, the most popular text taught in first year comp was Fight Club; there would SURELY have been a moment when someone would ask if we should be teaching that.

So my first argument is that assigned texts don’t really “define” a writing course (unless someone’s assigning something like Stephen King’s On Writing, in which case I think that person is doing it wrong). Texts in a composition classroom open the discussion and provide a place where the class can have a common experience and see a common discourse. But the writing course is about the students writing first and foremost, and not nearly so much about what we have them read so that we can then ask them to write. If anyone wants to see what this sort of gaming comp class would look like, I’m going to present one of my syllabi with some notes at the upcoming Computers and Writing conference. I’d love to see anyone/everyone in the audience.

My second argument would be that while “reading” a game, students are much more active than they are while reading a book. *Phill ducks the lit scholars throwing things*. While I’m a fond, fond reader (I think all of us have to be in order to survive in this field), I think we can all agree that the agency for a reader in most of the texts that would be used in a composition class is limited, at least during the initial reading.  In a gaming environment– at least the multi-player games I personally promote and study– the reader/player must interact and make choices from the very beginning. In that sense, I believe the student has more agency and hence experiences something more robust than just leafing through a standard text. Students are starting to write as they read a game; I’m not sure we can claim that in the same way about most other texts.

My third reason for thinking gaming is valid in the composition classroom is that the idea that we’re “colonizing” a student genre to make it a school genre– which I know many use as an argument against it– doesn’t work IF certain criteria are met. For one, I think you really should be a gamer if you’re going to teach with games. That’s not to say you have to be a lifer (though many in my generation are); but you shouldn’t be someone who just started playing two weeks before the course. In that sense, you’re not “colonizing” the student’s discursive space– you’re visiting. The second thing is that moreso than with traditional texts (though I think we should all be open to this when we teach anything) one has to allow for the students to be better/smarter in the area. Let them own it. And if we’re not worried that we’re “colonizing” a space, we suddenly have an intricate digital media space that allows us to quickly move to video, to audio, to visual rhetorics, to digital identity or simply identity studies. Gaming is a rather solid hub for issues that can lead to unique and interesting writing.

And the last reason I’ll offer here, for now (I have many more justifications ), is that gaming is fun, and all too often we squeeze the fun from academia, particularly for our first year students who we bombard with grammar rules and MLA/APA citation formats and invention and revision and “don’t write the five paragraph essay” and “this is a good source/this is a bad source.” I’d like to think that most of us came to writing because we love it, and we had fun doing it when we were younger (there are better way to inflict torture), so why should we allow our classes to become stale, boring places? I want mine to be fun, and students tend to respond well to it.

So… there’s a bit of an answer. I could go on, but it’s almost 1:30 in the morning and I have a full day o’ classes tomorrow. More later, if anyone wants me to keep ranting.

The RickRoll is dead…

You wouldn’t get this from any other guy…

-Rick Astley

You must click play. Nothing in the universe can stop you. It’s amazing.

You’ve been ChuckWagoned! Tell a friend! Sometime in the next 24 hours, something chain letterish will happen and you’ll be completely happy or sad or scared or hungry or something.

 

And now, a little ranting…

You do it to yourself/you do/and that’s why it really hurts/you do it to yourself/just you/you and no one else…

-Radiohead

I recently received a few response papers back with comments. Now I know it’s taboo to talk about comments from an instructor to a graduate student, as all of that is supposed to be kept under wraps, but two things came up. They were “term” corrections.

One was when I said “America” which prompted “Do you mean The United States?”

Another was when I said “Native American” and was told “American Indian.”

Mundane things, right? Yeah… not earth shattering. I’m not going to cry myself to sleep over such “errors,” nor do I feel particularly slighted. But… it reminded me of a presentation I gave last semester on John Locke. The philosopher, not the awesome bald dude from LOST.

Locke had a lot to say for politicians and for other social scientists, but for rhetoric, his grand contribution is his sense of language. Now I’ve been told by some that I’m not reading Locke right, so feel free to slam me in response (as if you’d hold back had I not given you permission! ), but this is what I took away from Locke’s work as being important.

We have words, in our language. We seek, through those words, to express things to each other. But our words lack precision, and our attempts to say things in attractive– or high minded– ways often clouds understanding. As academics we might be the worst offenders of all. We say “heuristic” when we could say “tool” in many cases. We claim something is “structural linguistics” when no one needed to know. We pontificate upon how something has “concrecience” (did I spell that right, Dr. Latour?) or is “polemic.”

Clarity, Locke claimed, would lead us to much easier communication. And to get to that clarity, we had to know what words mean.

Right now I’m having a word war with my own mind over the term “practice.” I know what it means… generally. I also know that in high school I went to both basketball and speech team practice. I know that David E. Kelly wrote a fantastic TV program called The Practice. I know that practice makes perfect. I know that De Certeau is concerned with The Practice of Everyday Life. But when we talk about practices… what do we mean?

The answer– which I find maddening– is that it varies wildly from scholar to scholar.

Which is why it’s funny that “America” and “United States” didn’t parse across a set of two academics.

I think Locke was being idealistic (and that he had lots of other problems), but I’m thinking that the desire to have clear, concise language might be the smartest thing anyone ever asked for.

Or as my tenth grade honors English teacher said, “Phill, brevity is the soul of wit. You witless punk.”

 

What is this?

this is a list of what I should have been/but I’m not/this is a list of the things that I should have seen/but I’m not seeing…

-Counting Crows
I mentioned a few posts back– when I included the two The Usual Suspects clips– that I was doing research for another project. The project is to create one of these cool things that Julie showed me (I’ve lost the initial link– it was on my other laptop). Here’s one, from YouTube:

The author of this one calls it Kinetic Typography.  I think I like that.

But what IS this?

I plan to see if I can make one (using the Verbal Kent/Keyser Soze story). I did some scouring and someone said “use Adobe After Effects!” so… I’ll be learning new software. If it doesn’t kill me, I’d like to teach students to do this as a scaffold into new media composing.

But what IS it?

That’s been troubling me a little. Not in the “oh no! Life is awful!” way, but in the “well, it’s not…”

These are Remixes, obviously, on some level, as most of the Kinetic Typography on YouTube is set to movie quotes. But is it digital poetry? Is it strictly an exercise in visual rhetoric? Are they movies? Is this a new way of ‘writing’ in the ’pencil to paper’ sense?

What is kinetic typography?
 

and why not a remix?

Oh, no! CD repeat:
It’s under, under, under my feet/the sea spread out before me…

-R.E.M. (same song as before! EEK!)

I made this today while I was chatting and made a weird LoLjoke:

 

I have to pepper in a few short ones…

Lump sat alone in a boggy marsh/totally (e)motionless except for her heart…

-The Presidents of the United States of America

Sticking with the theme but leaning toward one of my current projects: Race in World of Warcraft.

The humans, who look human, sound like they have US “recieved prounciation.”
The blood elves, who look like sexy elf people, sound vaguely British
The Orcs, who are big green monsters, sound gutteral

The lanky, tusked, lumbering trolls… sound like islanders (most stereotypically Jamacian).

Hmmm.

The Tauren don’t SOUND specifically Native American, but those teepees, totem poles and dreamcatchers tell a different story.

Hmmm…

*told you, a short one*

I love Aaron McGruder

you just mad cuz your @$$ is old/first thing you do is just pick up the phone..

-Thugnificent, Flownominal and Macktastic, featuring Nate Dogg

I haven’t commented much on the Boondocks of late, but the re-run that ran on Cartoon Network this past Monday got me to thinking once again about how clever Aaron McGruder is. He might be the most effective critic we have of the constructions of “black” in America. While nothing he’s done since has made me quite as giddy as his reflections on Jar-Jar Binks, or the “What if MLK hadn’t died” episode, the “dis” rap about Grandad comes pretty close.

Let me give some quick context, just incase some of you don’t know the Boondocks. It started as (and still is) a newspaper comic strip featuring Huey Freeman (a young radical genius) his brother Riley (who longs to be a “gangsta”) and their Grandad (who at different times is actually “Grandad Freeman” and “Jebodiah Freeman,” and on one occasion “B!tches”).  Grandad, in hopes of saving his two grandsons from the strain of urban life, moves them into a house in the stereotypically white suburb of Woodcrest. That’s a REALLY quick summary, but honestly, if you don’t know McGruder’s work, I’d much rather you picked up a trade paperback of his strips or checked your local listings for the cartoon on Cartoon Network– I don’t think my summation can do the comic/show justice.

In this particular episode “The Story of Thugnificent,”a rapper named Thugnificent and his crew “Lethal Interjection” move to Woodcrest, right next to the Freeman family. Thugnificent is a sterotypical “gangsta”rapper, voiced by Carl Jones and drawing visually from acts like Ludacris:

Image linked from Carl Jones' MySpace page. If you happen to see
this on a back-ping,I LOVED the episode and loved your work.
I hope I didn't get my read on the episode all wrong.  

While I could go on all day about the things I find fascinating from this episode, which sends up “dis rap” and other aspects of rap culture, I want to focus here on one specific instance, the dis rap “Eff Grandad.”

In the cartoon, Thugnificent and his crew throw a party which gets too loud for Grandad’s taste, and Riley– without Grandad knowing– parks a number of the guests’ cars on the Freeman lawn (viewers find out later that Riley also gave Thugnificent a forged letter from Grandad giving him permission to throw the party).  When Grandad calls the police and issues a complaint, Thugnificent and his crew write “the first ever dis rap against an old guy.”

Warning– it’s profane. But here’s a link: http://antfanfare.imeem.com/music/xpiPt8Bp/thugnificent_ft_macktasticflownominaland_nate_dogg_eff/

Grandad, not to be outdone, records his own dis response which he posts to YouTube. But the fallout of the Thugnificent track is that several older gentlemen who look roughly like Grandad are beaten all across the country, presumably due to the lyric “old folks should get their a$$ whipped for getting all crazy,” or any of a host of other taunts in the rap.

This is why I love Aaron McGruder as a social critic:

1. The song is actually good (I’m not as good as I once was with rap, but I can identify Snoop Dogg on the track, and I think one of the others is Xzibit who appears elsewhere in the episide as himself)
2. The fact that it “features” Nate Dogg skewers one aspect of the rap scene, making it highly ironic
3. It functions just like a “real” dis rap (this gets back to point #1). It’s not like someone tried to make a clearly insane example of dis rapping gone too far; it is over-the-top (particularly some aspects of the video) but it’s not surreal
4. It provides a worst-case of one of the greatest criticisms of rap music: as a result of the song, many fans of Lethal Interjection attack old men.
and
5. True to the idea of being a “comic” and a “cartoon,” it’s pretty funny (if one can step away from academia and take it as funny, anyway) 

What does this tell us, then? Part of the reason that I wanted to write this reflection today, in this set of responses, is that I just posted about people writing about who and what they are. I feel a little exposed writing about African American culture, which in a way feels bizarre to me because I grew up in a “black” neighborhood and have been referred to the same way Grandad is here by my African American friends. But I’m NOT African American. As such, is my commentary here valid? Is it okay? Am I out of bounds? I’d like to think I can research and comment on this, just like I researched Baraka and Hughes as an undergrad or MLK and Malcolm X.

But more importantly… Aaron McGruder IS African American. And because of that, and because the Boondocks is well received and beloved by the same community he’s socially commenting on (famous rappers are in the episode), the message changes. I think this is both obvious and critically important to think about. I also love Seth McFarland. I adore Family Guy and always will. But if Peter Griffin and Cleveland Brown had written a dis rap about Quagmire, it wouldn’t carry the same impact that this piece does.

After the episode I found myself laughing at the idea that a rapper would ever record a studio track dissing his neighbor over a noise citation, or that the resulting rap would result in grandfathers across the country being attacked. It seems… less than likely. And that, I think, was McGruder’s whole point. Some of these things sound savage in rap (and are probably shameful on some level), but at the same time the thought that someone would carry out some of the outlandish narratives in these songs is a touch off-center in its own right.

I also found myself roaming around my apartment singing the rap, and giggling as I remembered the numerous ways Riley assured Thugnificent he wasn’t trying to “ride” him.

If entertainment can amuse and inform… and critique… it’s doing something special.

Honestly, this whole post is sort of a long version of me saying “please, everyone, watch The Boondocks. It’s the best cartoon I’ve ever seen.”

 

MacGruber Version Web 2.0

Read the scene where gravity is pulling me around…

-R.E.M. (again)

I bought a new laptop. It’s huge, which is both good and bad. It’s good, because it can handle my digital media demands (I’m still downloading WoW to see if it runs well). It’s bad, because the thing weighs like 10 pounds.

But my reflection here isn’t so much on my new machine (which I’m calling Orange Crush– a big ol’ Gateway PX from Best Buy), as it is on the lack of the machine. I know Lac(k)an talks about the phallic lack, but this isn’t quite the same. I’d compare being a digital rhetoric student without his laptop to the cliche nightmare about being naked in front of a bunch of people.

I have one class, in particular, where I use my laptop as a sort of “defense.” Due to the devisive nature of the people in the class, sometimes in addition to needing my reading notes and the ability to type (I cannot “write” notes anymore– I’ve lost the ability to write quickly enough to keep up with my own thoughts and a professor’s speech), I need a place to sort of hide/shield myself.

But it goes deeper than that. I am not personally a fan of some aspects of current cyborg theory. I think it’s fascinating, and that in some applications it’s brilliant, but before last week I would have called user-to-computer a relationship that cannot be seen as cyborg. I’m rethinking that now.

I read most of my class materials in PDF. I use Microsoft OneNote to record my thoughts while reading, my thoughts from class. I have folders on my desktop for each of my courses and each of my projects. My academic life essentially happens on this screen.

So maybe I AM a little more cyborg than I thought.

I felt an instant comfort when I started configuring my new system. Even if it is really heavy and part of me wishes I’d spent the extra money on the lightweight Mac. Because tomorrow is Monday, and I have a 3 hour class. A three hour class where I’ll have all my materials at my disposal and won’t feel naked in front of everyone.

Because really… naked Phill does no one any good.