Author: dmueller

On Ramps, Fences and Proctors

/ dmueller

Heavy eyes and not a lot of time to post tonight.  So here are
a few things I’m reading alongside each other to round out (balloonishly round!)
my prep for tomorrow morning’s EN106 class session:

Mark Federman’s essay, "The
Cultural Paradox of the Global Village" (PDF) from the McLuhan
Studies program at Toronto.  I want to talk about the wheelbarrow
anecdote as a like conveyance of Postman’s "Invisible Technologies" pitch in c. 8 of Technopoly.  Postman’s chapter is all about the bent information of statistics and poll data.  I’m mildly concerned that I’ll have to jitterbug through the end section on management and systematized technique–as Postman calls it.  It’s a tough concept, and even though I’m rerereading it, it’s more of a puzzler than some of the other stuff.  Perhaps that’s precisely where we should begin.  Here’s a snippet of the wheelbarrow story from Federman:

There’s a cute story about a man who, during wartime, would come to the
country’s border with a wheelbarrow full of dirt. The border guard looked at
the man’s papers and all was in order for him to cross. But the guard was
certain the man was smuggling some sort of contraband in the wheelbarrow. So the guard took a shovel, poked around in the dirt, but found nothing. The man was allowed to cross.

The next week, the man once again comes to the border with a wheelbarrow full of dirt. Again, the border guard found that the papers were in order and dug through the dirt, but still found nothing. And again, the man was allowed to
cross. Week after week, it was the same story: Man approaches the border with wheelbarrow full of dirt. Guard finds nothing of interest and the man crosses.
At the end of the war, the guard sees the man and asks him: “Look, I know
you were smuggling something across the border, but I could never find a thing
hidden in the dirt. What were you smuggling all those years?” The man
answered: “Wheelbarrows.”

And then (like so many fence posts thinly wired and roughly in a row) this
from CNN via Scripting News:
"Welcome
to the ‘new’ Web, same as the ‘old’ Web."  We’re going to use it
as a way to talk about web quests and exploratory exertion.  Is RSS spoiling
us?  Complacency, so on.  The CNN article returns to the info
superhighway model to suggest that RSS feeds will serve as a different kind of
"on-ramp."  But I know when I lived in Detroit I generally had to
accelerate on the on-ramp, despite the caution signs, because my survival in
that context of pace and flow (I-696 W from Gratiot, 7 a.m. Monday morning)
depended on it.  Conversely, in KC, yield signs are, well, like stop
signs.  They actually mediate the traffic; in fact, it’s quite common to
see someone stopped on the on-ramp.  In brief, there’s plenty of variation
in on-ramping; probably always will be.  Not to mention the contraption
whose pedal you’re mashing: Yugo or Caddy, dial-up or Ether, on-ramping might
have less to do with the ambitions of the driver than the technical machinery
making it possible.

Speaking of fence posts, this
bit from National Geographic News explains what Max, our ancient Yorkshire
Terrier, has been failing to do on his trips to the yard for all these
years.  Why a failure?  Well, for one, we still have the Christmas
black cat hanging around the back porch.  My only question for Max, which
he won’t hear because he tends to be tonally numb or, at the very least,
indifferent, is: fencing in or fencing out?

And I have a student this term–the online term that started today–in HU211 who is on assignment in Uzbekistan. 
She slid me an email today asking who she should use for a proctor (on the final
exam) in Uzbekistan.  It’s an intro to humanities course.  Can’t anyone
proctor the exam?  *Looking at the ceiling*  I replied that I’d think
about it, then flicked up a red flag in Outlook so I don’t forget. 

Books I Didn’t Buy On D’s Birthday

/ dmueller

Wasn’t planning to post since it’s D’s birthday.  We already ate a
bit-o-cake. Now the phone’s ringing off the hook and The Practice is on commercial break, so I have a spare minute to put one together.  

We did birthday morning at B&N; could’ve gone to Borders, but, says D.,
B&N has a better selection of books for kids.  And it’s D.’s
birthday.  Did I mention that?  Here are the books I didn’t buy at
B&N (although I handled them, read parts, leafed and leafed, smiled at the
idea of purchase):

Simulacra and Simulation – Baudrillard
Cod – Kurlansky
The Social Life of Information – Brown, Duguid

Couldn’t justify buying them, not because
they’re not interesting or because I have too much to read already, but because
a move might be on the horizon and, well, books are heavy.  We already have
a ton.  Ton-and-a-half?  For the next three months or until the
crystal ball crystallizes, it’s the library for me.

Another book story: This afternoon in
Smithville, Mo., at Stampede’s last game (ever?), I spent a few minutes in the
second half digging in my coach’s bag (you know, pens, pencils, a dry-erase
marker board, first aid kit, whistles, note cards scribbled with practice
scripts, a binder with birth certificates).  I was rooting around for a
copy of the National Federation of State High School Associations Simplified
and Illustrated Basketball Rules for 2003-2004. I’m not usually one to fuss
about officiating, but today got me riled.  An abomination! I was this
close || to book-crossing
the unqualified duo, gifting them with the Simplified and Illustrated as
one to remember us by in our last game of the season.  Yep.  That
bad.  But I refrained, remembered that if they weren’t certified officials
by now, they probably didn’t aspire to be.  And I’d be villainized as one
of those coach/parents. And it wouldn’t be worth the $4.50 I paid for the
small, rule-filled pamphlet.  But that’s what was on my mind during a few
minutes of the fourth quarter of the last game I might ever coach: doing a
book-crossing for the refs with the Simplified and Illustrated. 
Maybe I should’ve. Then again, book-crossings aren’t supposed to be mean spirited. 
Right?

How Much Wood

/ dmueller

Most of the day chipping away on course updates.  Spring II starts
Monday.  Have to switcharound the major project in intro to
humanities.  So I’ll try a research question, annotated bib, and critical
evaluation of one source–a kind of heavy research lurch, like when a train
first moves from stationary, since that’s all an eight week term allows. 
In other words, we aren’t making it far up the tracks. I was looking at Humbul
Hub and one of its links, Blackmask
Online. And then this
trickled through WPA-L, where I lurk fondly.  Started to read it, but then
I had to get lunch.

The kids did have their last practice this morning.  And I messed around
with Mozilla Firefox.  Hell, at this hour, I’m quite a fan of its zippy
front, and the aggreg8 extension is better–so far–than Pluck or Feedster. 
Yeah, still dabbling.  Perpetuity.

Lastly, I noticed fragments bits and orts in the news of late.  Plane
pieces here
and here
(second via Preposterous
Universe who had this
to say about Rumsfeld’s horrible paperweight).  And it’s the first instance
of mishandled parts that I have more trouble understanding than the second
one.  Rumsfeld’s gesture, after all, is a lot like the gross
sentimentalizing and screw-bob keepsakes so many Americans cling to, like pieces
of petrified wood charms from national parks, even though the signposts and good
conscience tell us not to meddle, to touch nothing. But a black box in a file
cabinet?

Oh Those Forgiving Zips

/ dmueller

"It is enough for our purposes to say that what a word means is the missing
parts of the contexts from which it draws its delegated efficacy" (Richards 35).

I promise this won’t become a basketball driveller’s weblog.  But it’s
tournament time; the television’s noise is turning a beat in my head, and it
won’t quiet until I attempt this entry.  I saw Keith Dambrot’s name scroll
on the
ticker Wednesday night, and I had to take it up.  Why should Keith Dambrot matter to me?  I hadn’t had a thought about him in years.  He
was in his first year as the hoops coach at Central Michigan U. when I was a
freshman in 1992.  I tried out as walk-on.  Didn’t make the cut. 
Actually, nobody did.  He didn’t take one player from the tryout to add
depth to his short bench that season. Just as well.

After two seasons, Dambrot was dumped (following
protests) for tossing around "motivational"
racial epithets during a halftime rant at Miami (Ohio), in the midst of a game
when the Chippewas’ former coach, Charlie Coles and his team were putting a
whoopin’ on CMU (a
provocative entry on language control at
Critical Mass).  Who knows exactly how the talk came together in the
locker room that night? According to what reports came of it, none of the
players objected. Of course, in such power-loaded arrangements, open democratic
discourse doesn’t always surface.  The awful terms of Dambrot’s speech were leaked to the media and declared an event, a
happening. The
eventual ruling–Dambrot’s ill-advised choice of
words could cost him his job–rumbled through the academy as if on
tsunami of
free speech defense, countered by an undertow of good sense (sure,
there’s a lot more to it).  Here I don’t want to dodge the wave or diminish the
exigency of free speech in the academy and beyond.  But I do find it
incredibly difficult to put faith in Dambrot’s judgment, sensitivity,
wherewithal, and suitability to return to such prominent coaching ranks. 
In short, I wouldn’t want my son to play for him, and I guess that’s the measure
of my concern at this news. And it’s why I was surprised to see that he was
promoted to head coach at the University of Akron after one season–a mediocre
season at that–with the Zips.  It’s got me wondering about how he
recovered esteemed standing and privileged rank.  I know he was incredibly successful as a
coach at Ashland before heading to Mt. Pleasant and CMU, and I know his most
recent stint was as an assistant for the high school program from which LeBron
James turned to the NBA last year.  Others from that high school team are
freshmen at Akron this season.

I suppose it’s worth noting that I’ve been thinking about Dambrot’s recovery
from an egregious linguistic past while reading the middle chapters in I.A
Richards’ The Philosophy of Rhetoric.  It’s the source of the line I
dropped to lead this thing off.  Richards is concerned, in places, with
what he calls
Usage Doctrine.  About Usage Doctrine, he says this: "It can say and
truly, for example, that we learn how to use words from responding to them and
noting how other people use them" (54).  From here, Richards sifts
some important distinctions.  One problem of acute conformity (narrow delineations
of meaning) is "that it takes the senses of an author’s words to be things we
know before we read him, fixed factors with which he has to build up the meaning
of his sentences as a mosaic is put together of discrete independent tesserae. 
Instead, [the senses] are resultants which we arrive at only through the
interplay of the interpretive possibilities of the whole utterance" (55). 
This is challenging because, in one sense, we don’t know Dambrot’s "whole utterance." 
But it also applies to the sprawling significations of the utterance we do know,
its exhausting range of meanings and usages which expose roots in hatred and inhumanity. More from Richards
(on interanimation and sentence context, but I’m adapting it another way for the
heckuvit): "But in most prose, and more than we ordinarily suppose, the opening
words have to wait for those that follow to settle what they shall mean–if
indeed that ever gets settled."  I can’t think of anything profound to
write,
but I have this: Meaning is conditioned by time and place.  Semiotics and rhetorics
bear, among many qualities, spatiality and temporality.  And this, as I see it,
undergirds Dambrot’s hirability at Akron.  He has a great local reputation in
northeastern Ohio where his rhetorical legacy in mid-Michigan has been–in these
ten years since–overhauled by a surprisingly powerful ethos, made over by
social/regional heroism, a winning record in well-liked programs (this season at
Akron excluded), and access to elite recruiting channels.  And it is
possible that he has done a whole lot more to transform his serious flub into a
forgivable mistake.  I don’t know much about that, which is why the
ticker-tape gave me pause.  And which is why I’ll watch with curiosity what
develops in Akron, Ohio in the years ahead, knowing that I "have to wait for
those that follow to settle what they shall mean–if indeed that ever gets
settled."

Pure Madness

/ dmueller / 4 Comments

It’s all set.  Join in?

ESPN Women’s Tournament Challenge
Yahoo! Men’s Tournament Pick’em
Group: Bloggers Big Dance (ID# 15703 for Yahoo! only)
Password: ewm
Sign up by March 17.

I set up tournament groups on ESPN (women’s tourney) and Yahoo! (men’s tourney). Would you like to join?  The groups are called Bloggers Big Dance (ID# 15703 for Yahoo! only) and the password is ewm. Shoot me an email if you have any questions: derekmueller at sbcglobal dot net. All are welcome, bloggers and non-bloggers alike. Each group will hold 50 people. What’s at stake? Well, if the winner is a blogger, we should agree to laud the champ with comments. Otherwise, the winner gets abundant praise, admiration and bragging rights. Fair enough?

List-Listless-List-Listless-List

/ dmueller

 

  1. Let’s make an NCAA March Madness bracket-pool for bloggers. 
    Takers?  No monetary gambling.  The stakes will be comments on the
    winner’s blog.  Don’t figure I have a chance at picking the
    victors of many games.  I like Stanford, Illinois and Memphis this year.  First-round
    dancer: Illinois-Chicago.
  2. I appreciate the privacy
    argument     for athletes who are subject to drug testing.  But I also
    contend that we can’t trust the sporting arena unless controls ensure drugs
    aren’t affecting sports.  I generate the random lists and help organize
    one of the few random drug testing programs in small college
    athletics.  We hear plenty of arguments about the invasiveness of the
    test (a standard, five-panel DOT screening).  We also hear a fair
    amount of praise for challenging drug use head on and affirming the
    performative integrity of our student-athletes.
  3.  At a two hour follow-up meeting with the document-imaging people
    today, I noticed that the five laptops at the conference table corresponded
    in quality to the authority of the personnel using the equipment. 
    There were five reps from the doc-imaging company, five reps from the
    University.  To my left, the person with the most authority sat at a
    glitzy IBM Thinkpad; her assistant plunked in notes on a newish Dell; the
    three others moused around on run-of-the-mill Compaqs.  Should we be
    concerned at their hardware disunity?  Or the irony in leafing through
    an eighty-page paper plan for paperless workflow?
  4. Ph., who will turn 13 in ten days, asked me what I thought about
    helping him start a weblog.  His older friends have been carrying on about ejournaling. Dunno, I said.  Just plain don’t
    know. *Can I read it?* 
  5. I think my C’s carpool evaporated today. One of the riders ducked out
    because of too much other travel in the weeks ahead.  Plan B? 
    Damn, it’s going to cost a lot of chips to catch a flight at this late
    date.  It was going to be a long drive from KC to San Antonio (but a
    comfy one, thanks to good friends at the car rental place).  I planned
    on taking in a few sessions, bumming up and down the Riverwalk,
    maybe blogging the conference a bit, for the heck of it.  What now?
  6. Halfway through Spring Break now, so why am I more tired and more
    disorganized than I was on Monday.  Theoretical down-time gets turvied into catch-up time, time to work on my long list of stuff to
    do.  I’m getting a lot done, and idle time makes me stir crazy, so I
    guess there’s no problem with having a week off from teaching to get a few
    other things in order. 

I’m George W. Bush and I approved this massage.

/ dmueller / 4 Comments

Did you see Capricorn One–the movie about the staged mission to
Mars?  I looked it up, learned that it came out in 1978, that it got mixed
reviews.  It was one of the only action movies on laser discs at the house
of a childhood friend where I often slept over on Friday nights.  We
watched Capricorn One probably thirty or forty times.  Thinking
back, I can’t remember anything about the quality of the movie (granted, I was
nine or ten by the time we were watching it on disc).  But I do remember
the premise: the mission to Mars was faked, and the government and the media
were complicit in the scheme.  McLuhanesque, eh?

The movie has come to mind a time or two in recent months, reminders brought
on by an actual Mars
landing (it did happen, right?), the whole WMD spinabout (audio-taps
detailing uranium
transactions), and now, the launch of Bush’s
ad campaign.  Notably, his first ads are generating considerable hubbub
because they make full use of staging and arrangement.  Because they’re foregrounded
by the President’s voice making promises about his belief in the American
people, there builds a complex problem of discernment: how much to
believe.  I came across this from MSNBC (via I
Know What I Know. I Sing What I Said.):

Another less-publicized aspect of the ad flap: the use of paid
actors–including two playing firefighters with fire hats and uniforms in
what looks like a fire station. "Where the hell did they get those
guys?" cracked Harold Schaitberger, president of the International
Association of Fire Fighters, which has endorsed John Kerry, when he first saw
the ads. (A union spokesman said the shots prompted jokes that the fire hats
looked like the plastic hats "from a birthday party.") "There’s
many reasons not to use real firemen," retorted one Bush media adviser.
"Mainly, its cheaper and quicker." FULL
ARTICLE

Cheaper and quicker, indeed. So how do we whittle out the believable,
authentic bits from the spin? Of course, I don’t find the ads the least bit
compelling.  They’re politically unmoving.  I watch them out of
curiosity because they’re defining pop culture and creating a media stir. 
And they’re funny.  I laugh aloud at the line, "I’m George W. Bush and
I approved this message."  I know it’s become a mantra of ownership
among the leaders politic, but it’s so flimsy.  Does it mean the Prez
previewed the ad?  Revised its content?  Levied critical, reflexive
input to its production?  Whatever the case, it’s hard to regard it as
serious, responsible and emblematic of the best national leadership we can drum
up in ’04.  Don’t want to seem jaded, but voting is beginning to feel more
like damage control than a championed, contributory process.

Rugknots and Tardig

/ dmueller

Saturday morning was unusual; it was the first Saturday morning without a
basketball practice since late October.  To fill the time, we made a family
outing toRugknots and Tardig midtown KC, picked up a few things at Wild Oats, an organic grocer,
then headed over to Waldo on a whim.  See, we got a certificate for a
Persian rug from A.–a good friend who runs a gallery in south-central Kansas
City, just beyond the Plaza and the campus of UMKC.  We don’t get over
there often; in fact, we hadn’t been in at least a year.  Originally from
Persia, just before it switched to Iran in ’35, A., now 80-something, gifted us
a generous certificate for a 3×5 carpet from his shop; we’ve put off the visit
for the past seven months because of the chaos of our incongruent
schedules.  

A life-long chemist by trade, A. wasn’t at the shop.  His son-in-law,
J., was filling in.  He called A. on the phone, handed it off to me. 
A. and I visited for a few minutes, much like we used to, back when I was an
undergraduate ghostwriting monthly letters to antique dealers on his
behalf.  We met because he and his late wife, P., were alums of my alma
mater; I was the recipient of the first award named for his wife, the first
recipient after her passing.  And I thanked him with a letter.  He
invited me to lunch at the Kabob House, and so on.  Over the phone, A. said
he was disappointed to miss us Saturday, but he hoped we would return this week
to have lunch with him.  He was giving a talk on chemistry to a group of
boy scouts in the afternoon.  Couldn’t be at the gallery Saturday for that
reason.

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Top-Shelf A&P

/ dmueller / 2 Comments

A new local grocery store celebrated its grand opening earlier this
week.  Today was my turn for getting the food that will fuel our upcoming
week, so after Ph.’s scrimmage (is there such a problem as basketball poison?
My hoops toxicity level is at an all time high!), he and I popped in at the
glitzy Price Chopper to see what all of the hooha was about.  It’s Spring
Break–what do I need more than beer and Ruffles? And beef jerky for snacks
between high-carb meals?  I spend more money when I shop a store for the first
time.  I went in today knowing that I would pick up a few extra
things.  It comes down to new ways of seeing products, I think.  Or
maybe it results from new products.  I’m a ritual grocery shopper. Aisle by
tedious aisle, I usually stroll through Bressette’s Sun Fresh every other Sunday
picking out the bare essentials for meals.  But in a new store, like the
one we shopped today, I discover unforeseeable combinations.  Like at the
deli counter for example, I picked up a pound of chicken barbeque for sandwiches
tonight, since the Sunday evening meal is the start of the new weekly cycle.  Barbeque, brussels sprouts and various pickled garnishes–cukes and
beets.  Why not?

The store: like all new stores, it was a spectacle of consumptive
splendor.  High shelves, bright lights, and none of the dusty, uncirculated
products nobody ever buys–such as blue corn chips or ham and bean box
meals.  Surprising sight:  two men wheeling laptop carts with corded
scanner wands through the aisles–different aisles–to record the inventory and
inform the backroom about barren shelves.  When I worked in a grocery, we
actually pulled all of the back stock onto the floor during the night,
force-shelved as much as would fit, then carted it all back.  Night after
night.  That was twelve years ago.

When we approached the check-out, I saw three familiar students scanning
groceries.  I chose lane nine where B., a student from Nairobi who I got to
know last semester, was pushing clientele and their products through the
line.  I met B. in a class called Reading and Culture for International
Students.  And now, today, in our new local Price Chopper, I felt my
teaching shrink momentarily.  Although it was bent on critical reading and
cultural critique, something about the experience of reading American culture
through the checkout line, through the products and purchasing habits of the
upwardly affluent and economically safe (right, why was I shopping there?),
well, it seemed unusually powerful, unusually telling. 

It’s not a bad store, as stores go.  Unlike others places where I tried them once and
never went back, the Price Chopper up the street has potential to attract my
bi-weekly stroll-grab.  Heck, they even have Vernors (Michigan native
ginger ale; I had it every time I was sick as a kid–every time). 

E Pluribus Trivium

/ dmueller

I wrapped up Scholes’ Rise
and Fall on Monday morning while I was waiting in the auto shop. 
Since then, I’ve been reconsidering it from a distance–the full displacement
brought on by a hearty paper load, full-time work, and other important
stuff-o-life.  I keep coming back to a few basic ideas set up by Scholes in
chapter four, "A Flock of Cultures."  Throughout, Scholes uses a
split chapter system, so, for example, chapter four has a postlude called
"assignment four" in which he details–in practical terms–an
application of much of the theorizing he summons in the early portion of the
chapter.  Before the "assignment" section, he proposes a
design  for a general education curriculum parsed into grammar,
dialectic and rhetoric. Scholes introduces this threesome under the
heading, "A Trivial Proposal."  He’s having fun with the
connotations of "trivial,"
enlisting it as something of lesser consequence (than the Western Civilization
and Great Books canonical approaches) and also as a modern resurrection of the
medieval model for foundational education–the basis preceding advanced
scholarship in "arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music." He
explains the subtle differences between each of the course-types.  For grammar,
a course called "Language and Human Subjectivity" would comb over
pronoun usage and alienation in language structures.  A second grammar
course would concern "Representation and Objectivity." 
Anthropological perspective, ethnography, the objective discourses pervasive in
the observational sciences: these would be done up in this second grammar
course.  For rhetoric, he suggests a course on "Persuasion and
Mediation," which "would obviously include the traditional arts of
manipulation of audiences but would also point toward the capacities and limits
of the newer media, especially those that mix verbal and visual textuality to
generate effects of unprecedented power" (125).  To round this one
out–and because Scholes spends relatively little time on it–I would toss in technology. 

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