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I have decided that after a nearly-five-month absence I shall once again (sporadically) be writing the Mild Sauce Brand Humorous Adventure Cartoon Narrative Sequence Strip.  Interested readers can find the first strip in the new volume here.

A music meme I came to by randomly following links at other blogs.

• Below are first lines from 25 songs, obtained by putting the iPod on “shuffle.” If you know the song, leave a comment and I’ll strike through it on the post (if I get around to it). If you care to play along on your blog, see instructions at the bottom of the post.

1. Old friends, old friends, sat on their park bench like bookends.
2. Can’t stop, can’t stop! Won’t stop, won’t stop, won’t stop the beat! and GO!
3. I was working for a time in a five-and-dime; the boss was Mr. McGee.
4. Sunlight opened up my eyes to see for the first time.
5. Joanie, don’t you worry; there is so much you have yet to see.
6. Speak to me with our sweet voice. (Matthew Sweet, “Your Sweet Voice”)
7. Is this the real life?  Is this just fantasy? (Queen, “Bohemian Rhapsody”)
8. Well, every highway I go down seems to be longer than the last one I knew about–oh well.
9. Stop! In the name of love, before you break my heart. (Diana Ross & the Supremes, “Stop! In the name of Love”)
10. The red lights mean you’re leaving; the white ones mean we’re turning.
11. I feel so bad, I’ve got a worried mind; I feel so lonesome all the time. (Roy Orbison, “Blue Bayou”)
12. You’ve got me girl on the runaround, runaround, got me all around town.
13. The old home town looks the same as I step down from the train.
14. Give me one more chance–you’ll be satisfied. (U2, “Even Better than the Real Thing”)
15. Oh, the thoughts of Mary Jane: why she flies, or goes out in the rain.
16. Over and over and over again, we say that we’re just friends.
17. Love of mine, someday you will die, but I’ll be close behind.
18. Receiving department: 3 A.M.  Staff cuts have sucked up the overage. (REM, “Daysleeper”)
19. I’ve seen love go by my door, it’s never been this close before.
20. I can hear them calling way from Oregon.
21. There’s a crack up in the ceiling, and the kitchen sink is leaking.
22. Soldier, your eyes: they shine like the sun.
23. Clouds so swift the rain’s pouring in; we’re gonna see a movie called Gunga Din.
24. You’ll have a tea with Graham Greene, in the colored costume of your choice.
25. You broke my heart cause I couldn’t dance; you didn’t even want me around.

• Step 1: Put your MP3 player or whatever on random.
• Step 2: Post the first line from the first 25 songs that play, no matter how embarrassing the song.
• Step 3: Post and let everyone you know guess what song and artist the lines come from.
• Step 4: Strike through when someone gets them right.
• Step 5: Looking them up on Google or any other search engine is ch-ch-cheating.

I don’t know if anyone’s gonna put up their own lists, but I’d like to see Kim’s, Clay’s, Jenny’s, and Jeff’s.

From the Chronicle of Higher Ed, a blog post from Prof. Laurie Fendrich. Some choice bits, then comments.

Freshmen arrive on campus with their own taste in everything from music to clothes, food, and electronic equipment. Consciously or not, they also have developed certain tastes in art. Taste being what it is, and young people being what they are, freshmen usually arrive with either no taste or very bad taste — not just in art, but in everything — but in either case, they’re very comfortable with their tastes. They don’t expect or want to change them. The paradox is that it just so happens that their taste, which they consider to be something that’s very particular and individual, is, in most important respects, exactly the same as that of most other college freshmen.

If college students have any opinion about art, it’s usually that M.C. Escher and Salvador Dalí are two great artists. Those who have “advanced taste”—i.e., have taken AP art history—love Van Gogh’s Starry Night. Only the rare bird likes Cézanne or De Kooning.

…

But it’s not just college students who often have narrow or bad taste (these differ, I admit, but they frequently overlap). I’ve known many powerhouse intellectuals, academics, bankers, doctors, and lawyers whose taste was execrable, or just plain ordinary, or who were completely oblivious to taste. How can smart, successful people hang tired, perfunctorily chosen landscapes on their own living room walls, or permit porcelain ducks with little bonnets on their heads to waddle across their coffee tables? Are they lacking some aesthetic gene that we artists have? Or are they just too busy to notice how things look in their own homes?

…

There are many who would argue that because of the subjectivity of taste, it follows that no one, including a college teacher, has the right to challenge the taste of another person, including students.

But taking my cue from the wise David Hume (whom I’ll explore further in a future post), I see another side to taste. For all the impossibility of defining good taste, good taste tends to precipitate out over time and then solidify. “Say, that Manet painting sure is beautiful,” is almost as much a fact in its universal application as, “Water boils at 100 degrees Celsius.” In fact, good taste easily ossifies, which explains Martha Stewart. The idea that taste is radically subjective is an utterly inadequate explanation of aesthetic matters.

Plainly, Prof. Fendrich has not read Crowley’s Composition in the University or Faigley’s Fragments of Rationality. Both texts take composition’s forebears to task for seeing their task as inculcating standards of appropriately middle-class, bourgeois aesthetics. For example, Faigley’s analysis of writing evaluation practices reveals an enduring interest in idealized student subjectivities by contrasting the results of the College Entrance Examination Board’s 1929 English exam with those of editors William Coles and James Vopat’s What Makes Writing Good, a 1985 collection of student writing. In the 1929 exam, Faigley finds that the evaluators privileged familiarity with canonical texts and penalized students for displaying interest in popular literature; moreover, the evaluators highly prized student work that reinforced assumptions that readers of popular texts were intellectually inferior (118-9). Drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Faigley argues that this attitude perpetuates “an asymmetry of literary taste” (119) that works to safeguard elite socioeconomic status from those deemed unworthy.

Granted, Fendrich has some vested interest in question: the authorial blurb describes her “a painter who lives and works in New York, is a professor of fine arts and the director of the Comparative Arts and Culture Graduate Program at Hofstra University. Her writing has focused on the place of art and artists in society and the education of young artists, but she has also written essays questioning the viability of beauty in a post-Darwin era, the meaning of abstract painting, and the tyranny of outcomes assessment”. Perhaps she and I might find some common ground on that last point, but I think what she seems to be about to propose here (this post is the first in a planned series on the question of taste and its teachability) seems retrograde and counter-productive.

If, as a compositionist, I am pledged at least in spirit to students’ rights to their own language, why should students’ engagement with creative language use and other discourses be subject to similar institutional tampering? What remains most problematic for me, perhaps, is that the justification for her proposal doesn’t seem to be grounded in any sense of purpose other than the perpetuation of “taste” for its own merits: students need to learn about good taste because if they don’t won’t know what is tasteful. So? Who gives a rat doot?

I’m trying to think of the question rhetorically: what might be gained from an education in taste? As presented here, it’s a matter of being able to listen to the right music or decorate one’s home in tasteful (that is, bourgeois) style.

The comments that follow the original post break down along predictable lines. I tend to agree with the comments submitted by two posters, Marcus and Maria. Marcus writes: “I am just struck by the arrogance and elitism inherent in that notion that college students have ‘bad taste’ and it is our job as the enlightened caste to fix their silly, misguided notions of aesthetic merit”. And Maria: “If I am a professor of early American history (which I am) and I have a very sophisticated understanding of, say, colonial legal and diplomatic history . . . why should anyone give a damn if I decorate my house with porcelain ducks?” And an irresistible summary of Fendrich’s essay from “Shortfingered Vulgarian:” “Banal bourgeois-bashin’, kid-hatin’ Bloomsbury-lite with a click-trawling promise of more to come? Now THAT’S tasteless.”

Fendrich promises more. I’ll be eager to see where this goes.

MacRorie, Ken. Uptaught. New York: Hayden Book Co., 1970.

I found I really dug Uptaught. For one thing, it is a pleasure to read a scholarly text that is not bound to some sort of disjunctive “academic” voice; MacRorie’s writing is highly personalized, both in terms of style and in his use of personal experience as the basis for scholarly inquiry. I found that a pleasant surprise: the book is very much a record of how MacRorie comes to recognize the limitations of “Engfish” and his attempts to find a pedagogical space beyond it–the space that would later become institutionalized as “process pedagogy,” although KM doesn’t use that term and, in this text at least, pays far more attention to student voice than the “writing process” as such (so, we might say, despite often being associated with process KM here is really more of an expressivist–but again important to note that this is our term and not his own).

Long-ass post.  Click the link below for more. Continue Reading »

What follows is my current summer reading schedule.  For those readers with whom I’ve bandied about the idea for an informal summer reading seminar, this offers some idea of the things I’m working with this summer.  Maybe you’re into them too, and we can just pick books off each other’s personal lists to share during the summer; or, alternately, we can choose books that aren’t on anyone’s lists at present.

If you know what I’m talking about, you’ve been tagged–post your summer reading lists too!

• 28 April: Uptaught, Ken MacRorie Done!
• 5 May: The Methodical Memory, Sharon Crowley (half done)
• 12 May: Yearning: Race, Gender, & Cultural Politics & Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black, bell hooks
• 19 May: Empire, Michael Hardt & Anthony Negri (first half)
• 26 May: Empire, Michael Hardt & Anthony Negri (through end)
• 2 June: The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism, Thomas Frank
• 9 June: Nova Express, Wm. S. Burroughs
• 16 June: The Medium is the Massage, Marshall McLuhan
• 23 June: Critical Intellectuals on Writing, Gary Olson & Lynn Worsham, eds.
• 30 June: The Illuminatus Trilogy!, Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson (through The Eye in the Pyramid)
• 7 July: The Illuminatus Trilogy!, Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson (through end)
• 14 July: The Cinematic Mode of Production, Jonathon Beller (’cos I never technically finished and it looks to be on JP’s Fall syllabus)
• 21 July: A Grammar of the Multitude, Paolo Virno (for the reason cited directly above

That’s as far as I’ve gotten to date.  If time allows, I’ll offer comments on MacRorie and Crowley by the end of the week.  If there’s any questions or comments about the list, please post!

Sometimes, I’ve decided, I will record dreams here.

So, I was in Paris.  Well, I seemed to know it was Paris, but damned if it looked anything like the Paris I’ve seen in films and photos.  For one thing, it looked rather like the titular Metropolis in Fritz Lang’s film: all glittering spires and towering edifices.  For another, half the city was filled with Chinese restaurants.

I was in a Chinese restaurant.  In Paris, of course.  And an emo band was playing on a small stage in the Parisian Chinese restaurant.  Not a specific emo band, mind you, not that I could tell one from other anyway, but just sort of a generic emo band.  And I began to recognize that the emo band’s songs detailed the exact way I would soon fall in love with some unknown young woman, only to meet my tragic, untimely demise soon after in a train accident.

Now, I don’t remember what precisely cued me to the prognosticative nature of Generic Emo Band’s lyrics, nor why they should pertain to me.  But I was certain that this was the case.  Moreover, totemic images from my tale of woe (spelled out in detail in the band’s songs, remember), were also represented on item’s of the band members’ clothing; in particular, I remember at one point noticing that one band member’s belt buckle bore the image of the very locomotive that promised soon to be the engine of my demise.

As you might imagine, this was cause for some concern.  I noticed the Generic Emo Band leaving the Parisian Chinese restaurant.  I followed them to a coffeehouse.  This was not, mind you, one of the arty bohemian coffeehouses of our collective imaginary’s version of Paris.  No.  This was a full-on, fully corporatized coffeehouse, of the Starbucks variety, complete with tchotchkes and knick-knacks galore cluttering the counters.

I found the Generic Emo Band in a small performance lounge past the main counter of the Fully Corporatized Coffeehouse.  I asked them why they wrote songs about my imminent demise, and how they knew with such precision the details of my fate.  They pled innocence.  They didn’t know me from Adam, they’d been playing these songs long before I saw them in the Parisian Chinese restaurant.  And so on.  This made things seem even stranger.  In the midst of my accusations and the Generic Emo Band’s pleas of innocence, I met the girl with whom the Generic Emo Band foresaw me falling in love, but now I don’t remember what she looked like, or if the dream girl (literally) was, in fact, anyone I know in non-dream life.   In any event, I fell in love.  I woke up.

I don’t even listen to emo music.

From Sirc, Geoffrey. English Composition as a Happening. Logan, UT: Utah State UP, 2002.

Elbow reminds us of the relative duration of academic-life to real-life. Just because the rest of the curriculum has banned enchantment in favor of a narrow conception of life-as-careerism that doesn’t mean we have to go along, does it? Can’t we be a last outpost? a way station for poetry, ecophilia, spiritual intensity, basic human (not disciplined) style? (28 )

I’ve been reviewing some notes for Dr. Ray’s final exam essay, trying to decide which option to pursue. Shall I write a statement of teaching philosophy? Shall I return to an argument from our discussion board and parse it out further? Don’t know yet. But I was reminded how much I like Sirc’s little calls to arms scattered through Happening, even if at times I think the polemic gets in the way of his argument–or, rather, it crops up at odd moments and creates a disjunction in the text. Although, I actually sort of like that too–it’s as though he’s latched on to an idea or image or scene that excites him so much that the thread of his argument falls out of sight for a moment, and he’s just compelled to proclaim something like the above, in spite of the body of work (like, say, Smit’s The End of Composition Studies) that insists on a utilitarian purposefulness for rhetoric and composition.

It’s not, then, that Sirc doesn’t see composition as owning utility, but rather a different kind of utility: a utility of affect, pleasure, mystification. Disjunction. It is, then, not the utility of disciplinarity, not an institutionalized utility. I note this thinking of my own writing, here and elsewhere–the M.A., the exam, eventually the dissertation, articles I don’t even know yet that I’ll be writing. I am compelled by the work of Sirc and Rice and others who have argued for a writing like this, a writing that (at the very least) reorganizes what it mans to write disciplinarily. Consider Rice:

In composition studies, rhetorical practice is often defined as acknowledgment of audience, purpose, and, even as many in the profession dispute its influence, ability to engage with one of the so-called modes: compare and contrast, definition, classification, narrative, or argument. None of these points prevents writing from being taught in constructive ways. These points’ dominant position within our pedagogical apparatus, however, is a topos of instruction in need of updating. We can no longer assume that the modes (or any variation of the modes) are appropriate for the sake of being appropriate. Chora, in particular, challenges each point’s relevance to digital writing because its focus shifts to a hyper-rhetorical method that displaces much of the fixity we currently associate with print culture. (Rhetoric of Cool 34)

While I understand that my writing is still developing (whose isn’t?), I look at the work of folks like Rice and Sirc and I’m driven mad with shame. Their work looks effortless, in some ways, even though I know that seeing only the end product of something mystifies its origins (the logic of the commodity concealing labor). This is particularly angst-ridden for me because I typically do find writing easy–or, at least, not difficult. But writing my M.A. essay this semester–my much delayed and fussed over M.A. essay–has presented a challenge that, frankly, I hadn’t anticipated. On one hand, I’m frustrated by my haphazard writing of this project; on the other, I think it’s great to go through it because I’m learning the writing process all over again, in some ways. I’m trying to appropriate something from Rice and Sirc that I find appealing, a method, a tool, a construct, and I’m not yet sure I’m deploying it as effectively as they have.

Turning back to the Rice and Sirc passages above, what I aspire to do is produce the choragraphic, spiritually intense writing that drew me into composition and rhetoric in the first place, but I keep struggling against what feels to me like a limit of imagination. Look, there’s Rice, finding rhetorical moments in P-Funk albums! Over there, Sirc’s dropping science with Situationist psychogeography. And Ulmer–Ulmer! Like a mad scientist, tossing together poststructuralists like Barthes and Derrida with the flotsam and jetsam of different discourses–hey, how did Einstein invent? throw it in!– with Hank Williams, Sr. tracks blaring as he coasts the wild silver ride of choragrapy to a transcendant wabi-sabi mood. I haven’t found my way into that space yet. The Lennon project might be a start, but I want to not just use the choragraphic method as others have before me, but I want to find the space where I can be–like Rice and Ulmer and Sirc–an Inventor, searching for, experimenting with, mixing together forms and genres and Situations to create new ways of writing. But I haven’t yet.

Don’t misunderstand me, dear reader. This isn’t one of my pity-me posts. I’m trying to articulate an ambition, a desire yet unfulfilled. Sirc, Rice, Ulmer . . . they’re not idols. They’re . . . what? Inspirations? Guides? I sort of like, if you can excuse the cultural appropriation, the image of them as spirit guides in the Native American tradition. Their work resonates with me; I identify with something they represent (even as they challenge the way writing is represented in the university); and there’s something of the way they do what they do that inspires the way I do what I do.

Please welcome Jason Loan’s (Cal State-San Bernadino) blog Resource-Control to the FoolsCap blogroll!

Howdy, Jason!