This is probably the very last post you'll ever see here. I'll leave the site up for a while, until I decide what exactly to do with it, but I'm going to give version 2.0 of my blog a try, and I've chosen a new platform and a new host. My new space is at http://www.cgbrooke.net, and you'll want to update any blogroll links and/or feeds that still may be floating around out there.
thanks.
]]>First, I present to you similarly roman numeralled entries, bolded for your clicking convenience: D C L X V I
I'm warning you now: it's a motley bunch of posts.
Celebration #2 is that I'm going to finally upgrade here to MT4, and I'm hoping that a new suite of antisp4m will cut down on the crap round these parts. I had to clear out close to 600 junk comments this weekend, and it's catching legitimate comments from new folk way too often. Maybe I'll slap a captcha on there too. Anyway, that's coming soon.
And coming a little later is a redesign. I need to redesign the CCCOA too, and that has priority, so it may not be until later in the semester. But look for that...
Wow. 1000 entries. Mmmmmm good. That's all.
]]>I'm subbed to the ACRLog, and this came across the other day, a piece by "StevenB" about Why Students Want Simplicity And Why It Fails Them When It Comes To Research. The question of how to move students from "I'll just Google it" to a more nuanced, complex understanding both of research and of how to go about doing research is a topic near and dear to my heart. So I read with interest.
Two tangents. First, in the piece itself focuses on simplicity and complexity when it comes to research:
A defining quality of a complex problem is that right answers are not easily obtainable. Excepting those students who are passionate about the study matter and research project, most students would prefer to simplify their research as much as possible. The problem, as a new article points out, is that applying simple problem solving approaches to complex problems is a contextual error that will lead to failure.
For a long time, as I was working on my book manuscript, I had in mind something that I called my secret 6th chapter, the first 5 being revisions of the classical canons of rhetoric (and all beginning with the letter P, but that's even more tangential). The 6th chapter was going to be an exploration of another P word: plectics. I mistakenly believed that the word was mine all mine. Yeah, not so much. But anyhow, I'd planned on talking about how plectics might give us a spectrum along which to locate texts without recourse to the print/screen distinction. I've always been a fan of Deleuze's The Fold, and I'd never been happy with the assumption that even the most intricate and complicated print texts were simply linear compared with digital texts.
But alas, such a chapter was not to be. And that's the end of the first tangent.
Tangent #2 is a little shorter, and the reference in my title. StevenB draws on something called "Cynefin," which according to Wikipedia is a concept from Welsh:
The name Cynefin is a Welsh word which is commonly translated into English as 'habitat' or 'place', although that fails to convey the full meaning. A fuller translation would be that it convey the sense that we all have multiple pasts of which we are only partly aware: cultural, religious, geographic, tribal etc. The multiple elements of this definition and the inherent uncertainty implied were the reasons for the selection of the name.The name seeks to remind us that all human interactions are strongly influenced and frequently determined by our experiences, both through the direct influence of personal experience, and through collective experience, such as stories or music.
What's really interesting to me here is the parallel between Cynefin and ethos, specifically as it's defined as "haunt" as both a location and something that affects us. It reminds me a little of Diane's writing--here's a little taste of "Finitude’s Clamor; Or, Notes toward a Communitarian Literacy" from CCC, for example:
You (writing-being) are a limit-cruiser, so even when you’re alone, you are not alone. You are (already) heavily populated with encounters, with others whom you have welcomed and who continue to work you over—to live on in you, haunting you and making demands of you—even in your solitude.
Someone with more experience than I in Wales will have to decide how many times removed cynefin is from ethos, but they sure sound related.
What's uninteresting to me about cynefin is its appropriation for the system that apparently bears its name. Maybe I need to do some background reading, but I have a tough time understanding how the term itself translates into a "decision-making framework" other than to serve as a reminder that not everything can be reduced to conscious decision-making frameworks. But oh well.
Back (finally!) to the entry itself. StevenB restricts himself in his discussion to 2 of the 5 "domains," simplicity and complexity, which runs the danger, it seems to me, of inscribing a binary between them. One of the things that I think we try to get at with the notion of inquiry is the habit of allowing "simple" to become "complex" through what this framework calls "emergent practices" (and perhaps even complicated). The ability to take complex questions and to simplify them is (to my mind) the difference that turns research into research writing.
But neither of these moves, simple->complex or complex->simple, is (a) easy, (b) frictionless, or (c) naturally acquired through osmosis. StevenB's suggestion is
that we add “identify and understand the context of the research problem and choose a decision-making style that matches that context� to that long list of information literacy skills that many of us list in some planning document.
And that's all well and good. But I guess I feel like that just identifies what is for many of us (and I presume, our students) the black box of academic research. I can come up with 407 examples of good writers (and designers) taking complicated questions, issues, and ideas, and helping to return them to simplicity (which is one effect of much writing that is good), but examples of moving in the other direction are few, in part because we tend to box up that part of things ourselves. And part of that is because, in academic prose, making the complex simple is one of the few near-universal justifications for the work that we do. Figuring out and articulating how we arrive at those complex problems is one of the things that a course focused on research writing could usefully accomplish.
That's all.
]]>And as the week has progressed, ideas have come at me from all directions, but I've held back, waiting for the time to draft my early-week idea.
But now, I think I've mostly forgotten the original idea. Maybe I'll have a little time tonight to reconstruct it. Here's a tease: it's tangentially about the possibility of Welsh rhetoric.
More anon.
]]>Once again, I don't think that a Manning deserved to win the MVP. My MVP? Syracuse University's own David Tyree, who:
I am a little sorry that Merc won't have any company in Perfectville, and I'm even more sorry that Junior Seau didn't get a ring, but it's hard to feel sorry watching the SuperPats catch an elbow to the chops like that.
That's all. See you in the autumn, NFL.
]]>2. No more tv/radio spots talking about the Super Bowl without being allowed (I guess) to use the actual phrase Super Bowl™
3. 359 sweet, sweet days until the next Super Bowl Media Monday, where all the B-list media outlets compete with one another to be the most "viral." This year? Congratulations to TV Azteca for being the biggest jackasses of a pretty jackassy bunch
4. No more wondering why the hell the freakin SUPER BOWL needs (a) a red carpet, or (b) Ryan Seacrest to stand on it. I know that FOX is the king of irrelevant and intrusive cross-product advertisement, but isn't American Idol already the most popular show on TV?
5. Hey, those wacky! crazy! Super Bowl commercials!
Last year at this time, I cared, since my Bars made it to the Super Bowl for the first time since I was in high school. But as a result, I think I'm even more cynical this year about how shallow and vapid these 2 weeks leading up to the game actually are. I just have no patience for the fifteenth story about the point spread moving from 13 to 12.5, or Tom Brady's phantom sprain, or Eli Manning's magical transformation from schlub to star in 3-4 games, or worst of all, stories about the repetitiveness of the stories. Ugh. Play the damn game already.
That's all.
]]>The subtitle for this entry could easily be Holiday Loot, Part 3. One of the best gifts I got this holiday was a framed version of the picture above, which features me, resplendent in blue, sitting on my grandfather J.O.'s lap, being poked in the face by my dad, and looking at a photo of my great grandfather Collin, for whom I was named. J.O. passed away while I was still wearing onesies, so I don't really remember him at all. I'm not 100% sure when the picture was taken, although it would have to be either late 1969 or early 1970, which would put my dad at around 26 or 27 in the picture. And I consider this incontrovertible proof that short hair is actually genetic in my family. That, and baby-poking.
Anyhow, today would have been my dad's 65th birthday, so you'll forgive a little nostalgia on my part. That's all.
]]>So anyhow, the first book we chose is James Elkins' Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction (Amazon), both for its general overview of what is a fairly nebulous field (WJTMitchell calls it an "indiscipline") and for the skeptic part of it. I've read several of Elkins' books--he, along with Mitchell, Barbara Stafford, and a couple of others, is much of the basis for whatever expertise in visual theory I might lay claim to--and have always found him both accessible without being too evangelistic.
There's a section in VS:SI called "Ten Ways to Make Visual Studies More Difficult," and I found myself wondering what it would look like to try an analogous exercise for composition, rhetoric, and/or writing studies. "At the moment," Elkins writes, "visual studies is, to put it directly, too easy." His ideal?
I would like to see a visual studies that is denser with theories and strategies, more reflective about its own history, warier of existing visual theories, more attentive to neighboring and distant disciplines, more vigilant about its own sense of visuality, less predictable in its politics, and less routine in its choice of subjects....What matters most is the ease: visual studies is too easy to learn, too easy to practice, too easy on itself. I would like to see the field become so difficult that it can do justice to the immeasurable importance of visuality, which is still slighted throughout the university (65).
Substitute "writing" for "visuality" and all of a sudden, it sounds pretty familiar and (for me, at least) desirable.
Among various "cases" posed to his colleagues, Elkins closes with "The Case of the Writing Itself: The Challenge of Writing Ambitiously," wherein he urges his colleagues to know the field as completely as possible, to go beyond the name drop and to "do [their] sources the favor of a concerted encounter," and to write as well as they can. It reminded me in no small measure of what Latour says about writing sociology. It's easy enough advice to give out, but much harder to actually follow, but when I find writers from other disciplines convinced of how incredibly important writing is, I find it inspiring. Discussions like these make me want to be a better reader and a better writer.
And they make me want to write an article detailing ten ways to make writing studies more difficult, if for no other reason than my discipline's tendency to swing wildly towards inclusion as a solution for every perceived problem. Actually, as I write this, I think I need to distinguish between inclusion/exclusion, which is a pretty easy binary to resolve (i.e., one is good, one bad), and easy/difficult, which is less so. I don't think difficult necessitates exclusion, nor do I think Elkins is advocating that. I do think, though, that there are times where we make our field "easier" because we think it will thusly become more "inclusive." (And misguidedly so, on occasion, methinks.)
I think that's all I have for today. Although I will say that, if you have a passing interest in visuality, and want a decent overview of the "field"--and one that's well written--you could do far worse than Elkins. And I mean that literally--there is some real crap out there.
Okay. That's all.
]]>As of this month, I am no longer carrying any debt. No loans, no rotating balances on the credit cards. I am debt-free.
To provide a little context, let me repeat something I said the other night at dinner: I have been in debt for longer than I've been in academia. Yep. My entire adult life. And it's one of the things that grieves me mightily when I hear people talk about the cushy lives we lead. In preparation for a life in the professoriate, I spent 5+ years (and I was fast) earning less than 10,000 dollars a year. In Texas, the big perk I got for my TAship? In-state tuition. I made less than 10K, and had to pay for tuition out of that. Lucky me.
(A side-note: When I completed my dissertation, I had already taken my job at Old Dominion. I no longer had a TAship, and was living outside the state, and had to enroll for a mandatory 9 credits to complete my degree--I didn't need the credits, it was just a rule--and so I had to pay out-of-state tuition for them. I ended up having to pay something like $3500 to graduate. And as I told the representative from UTArlington who called me last night looking for donations, until I get a check for $3500 from UTA, UTA will not be seeing a check from me.)
Now, I'm not great with money. I overtip, I prefer to own the books I read and use in my research, and I generally subscribe to a philosophy of dinner karma, where the meals I buy for friends will roughly equal the number of meals they buy for me. I'd taken pretty solid control of my finances in the time I've been at Syracuse, gradually working my debt down (and correspondingly restoring my dismal credit rating) without feeling too put upon in terms of quality of life. I probably could have done it faster, if I'd really cracked down.
Anyhow, cushy lives. I guess I want to challenge the idea that our earning power offsets the financial hardships we have to endure to get to where we are, as is often the case for other professionals (lawyers, doctors, e.g.). It does eventually, but not nearly as quickly. Many of my friends still struggle with massive amounts of debt that for graduate students in the humanities is all but inevitable. We have the same taboos about talking about it that we do for all matters financial, but most of us still go through it, I suspect. And if their lives are anything like mine has been, graduate school debt is a dark cloud that hangs over each of us for a lot longer than it probably should. It's been a source of some personal shame for me, when in fact, it should be a source of shame for our institutions, who are more than content to exploit graduate student labor without even the mitigating factor of a living wage.
I don't have any grand solution to go with my personal celebration, although I wish I did. I can say that I spent part of this afternoon helping someone figure out some funding strategies for next year that don't involve loans, and I felt pretty good about that. I wish that I were in a position to be able to effect more change than I can right now--when I think of all the anxiety and stress that I experienced over my finances, I can't help but wonder how much more I could have done in their absence.
Guess I'm ready to start finding out. That is all.
]]>The other night, I happened to see a bit of the George Mason/VCU game on ESPN, and more power to the Sports Leader for broadcasting it (a) on something other than ESPN U, and (b) in a primetime slot. Seriously, good on them.
But at both ends of the floor on the GMU court, in big letters, was written "Mason Nation." You might recall a few years back that "X Nation" gained some popularity as the Red Sox finally reversed their curse. And honestly, I have no issue with the idea of Red Sox Nation, given how many fans of the BoSox live in other places than Boston. Ditto for Yankees and Cubs. Being myself a member of Cubs Nation, Nation is no exaggeration.
But lately, nation is used to describe the fan base of every team at every level. Did I say "used"? I mean to say overused and abused. Unless we're comparing them to small Caribbean islands, I'm afraid there is no Mason Nation. Nor would it even occur to me to talk about Hawkeye Nation, Bear Nation, Syracuse Nation, Bull Nation, etc.
And actually, given how loosely the term is used now, I'll be stopping with the Cubs Nation after this post. I'm pretty sick of seeing it. Almost as sick as I am of hearing the Dallas Cowboys referred to as "America's Team" 30 years now after the nickname was accurate and/or relevant.
So yeah, you can fill a small arena. This does not you a nation make. Quit it.
]]>When I read this just a few weeks after MB admonished someone to "do some homework before passing opinions on matters out of [his] depth,� my soul suffers from a similar overload, one of irony, that almost leaves me nauseous.
Apparently, we can now define "homework" as "skimming a 3-year-old conference program."
And that is all I can bear to say. Except maybe for a quick thanks to Trish Jenkins for being the first commenter.
]]>Another conversation occurred while that one was going on, tagged with the creepy subject line, "celebrating the deserving before they die," itself embedded in a post from another conversation. Among various points raised was the imminent publication of this volume, the unfortunately and strangely titled CompBiblio, which apparently offers just the sort of hagiography folks in my field are interested in, with 47 chapters on "Leaders in Composition."
You might think that this would lead to discussions about exactly what a "Leader in Composition" does, or how 47 was the magic number (only someone who didn't watch Alias or Lost could ask this sincerely), or just what role such volumes are supposed to play in the field, beyond reinforcing the canon-we-pretend-we-don't-have. Well, my friend, that's where you'd be wrong. We're more likely to celebrate the celebrations of the deserving before they die, I fear.
I don't really know what to say about this phenomenon, other than it felt like a perfect example for why I don't always feel especially comfortable with my discipline. I was reading around a bit in some organizational studies last night, following up a link to a piece about how weak paradigm development in that field makes it difficult for new scholars, and almost every avowedly depressing fact about that field was double-true for mine. Of course, we're "humanities," and so that's to be expected apparently. Would that it were not so, I suppose, but beyond that? I guess I feel like if books like these are responses to a widespread perception of fragmentation in the discipline (i.e., weak paradigms), then there are more fruitful ways of adding a bit of centripetality to the field. I've talked about some of them here over the years, and performed them both as a writer and a resource designer, but often feel like those efforts fall on mostly deaf ears.
I'm pretty sure, though, that amping up our "lives of the saints" output is more a gesture in the direction of the problem than an actual solution. And I know that that may be an unfair characterization of the books themselves (apparently, there's more than 1 scheduled for publication this year), but I'd give the field a shiny new quarter if even half of the hagiographies in our field were actually acknowledged as such.
And let me apologize half-heartedly for loving the word hagiography (From the late Latin usage, "that which is written about the saints": the type and also the body of literature and knowledge based on written sources and relating to the lives, sufferings, and miracles of the saints.). Blame DeCerteau.
That is all.
]]>Exhibit A: The Perry Bible Fellowship: The Trial of Colonel Sweeto and Other Stories (Amazon). You would be well within your rights to ask me why I got a book the content of which is already entirely online. You would be well within my rights, however, to remember that the book has been out for less than 3 months, received more than 27,000 pre-orders, and is heading for a 3rd print run already. I'm a big believer in supporting webcomic artists by picking up their books even if (and even because) their work is available online. Also, PBF is high-larious and utterly incorrect in the process. It makes me laugh and wince at the same time. Also? Here's from an interview with Nicholas Gurewitch:
I encountered a letter to a newspaper that questioned how I could make light of Jesus comically. She wondered, in her letter, whether I had any fear of God. Reading her question, I did have fear of her.
Exhibit B: The Invention of Hugo Cabret (Amazon) is a graphic novel in the sense that it's a story told at least partly through images, but the illustrations and the prose alternate pages and sometimes sets of pages. Invention is a much more earnest story, and the drawings are (intentionally) much more cinematic. It won the Caldecott medal this year, and is in that sense a children's book, but honestly, it's a little more all ages than that. The rhythm of the illustration, and that the book features automata and references the birth of cinema, are part of its appeal for me.
Apropos of nothing, the author is the first cousin, once removed, of legendary Hollywood producer David O. Selznick.
Exhibit C: The Nightly News (Amazon) was the one book I saw over the holidays that made me cheer inside when I saw it. A lot of folks are putting it on their Best of 97 lists, and with good reason. Take one part V for Vendetta, update it by about 20 years, and add in equal parts of media fatigue, contemporary graphic design and infographics, and you've got the makings for TNN. Seriously, it's the kind of book that, 20 years from now, will either mark a milestone in the industry or a missed opportunity. It's that interesting, and that different from anything else being published. Hickman's working on several new projects right now, and it will be equally interesting to see how his style persists, changes, etc.
Interesting to me, at least. That's all for now.
]]>If you're on Facebook, there's a good chance that you've come across Scrabulous, which is a Facebook module that allows you effectively to play Scrabble with other Facebook users. According to the Motley Fool, Scrabulous has upwards of 600,000 users a day. This popularity has unfortunately attracted the attention of Mattel and Hasbro, who own the rights to Scrabble. Their response? Cease and desist, of course.
What should happen? The two guys (count em: one...two) who created this insanely popular version of the game should be rewarded, licensed, franchised, and lauded for doing what the dinosaurs who own Scrabble haven't: produce a high-quality, online version.
What will happen? Scrabulous will probably get retired, and there will be tens of thousands of new, brand-hostile customers.
But it's less about avoiding hostility and more about understanding that "in an edgeconomy, people sharing/hacking/using/etc your goods can actually create massive amounts of value for you." That's from Umair Haque, writing about something else entirely and yet the exact same thing. Company after company walks down this path, and it seems like, to a person, all of the stiffs in charge make the wrong decision. Maybe this will go down differently, given that all the public clamor, from individuals to techonomics blogs, weighs in on the side of "opportunity." But somehow, I doubt it.
That's all.
]]>