Oh Those Forgiving Zips

/ Derek Mueller
⏳ Approximate reading time: 3 mins

"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

/ Derek Mueller / 4 Comments
⏳ Approximate reading time: < 1 min

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

/ Derek Mueller
⏳ Approximate reading time: 2 mins

 

  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.

/ Derek Mueller / 4 Comments
⏳ Approximate reading time: 2 mins

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

/ Derek Mueller
⏳ Approximate reading time: 3 mins

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.

Continue reading →

Top-Shelf A&P

/ Derek Mueller / 2 Comments
⏳ Approximate reading time: 2 mins

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

/ Derek Mueller
⏳ Approximate reading time: 4 mins

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. 

Continue reading →

Math is dead.  Long live math.

/ Derek Mueller
⏳ Approximate reading time: < 1 min

Friday evening.  Lugging the end-of-term grading load has rendered me
too tired to report on the first fifty pages of Milgram’s Obedience to
Authority.  I picked up a dusty copy from the library shelf yesterday
morning after class.  Found time to read some over coffee this
morning.  Collin’s
entry is helping me think about agentic shift from several different
angles. More on that sometime this weekend, I hope.

For now, I just want to share a comment Ph. made when he got home this
afternoon.  He and I have been spending late afternoons before D. gets home
from student-teaching, working on math.  The latest feat: drilling through
multiplying and dividing mixed fractions.  So today he mentioned that
they’ve started a new section–repeating decimals.  He summarized the
lesson: "you just put a line over the number to show that it keeps going
forever."

Forever?  Wha?!  We traded one of our usual banters where I act
surprised by something taught in the school.  It’s not a serious, deep, or
undercutting skepticism (usually); it’s more of a game meant to tease out the
lessons, to reinforce the in-school learning.  So I asked him what forever
means in mathematical terms.  "If you couldn’t use the overline to
show that it goes forever, when would it end?  It can’t really go on
endlessly, can it?"

Ph.: Probably not.
Me: So when do you think a repeating decimal ends?
Ph.:  When math is dead, I guess.
Me:  *nothing to say…long pause*  That’s an answer I won’t argue
against.

Free Kick on Zeno’s Field, or It Doesn’t Matter Who’s Tending Goal

/ Derek Mueller
⏳ Approximate reading time: 3 mins

[Another soundtrack audio-blaring: O Brother, Where Art Thou?]

It occurs to me as I set out to key this entry that some things don’t belong here at EWM, some things should be off the edge of this weblog in a less
public space.  How will I know when I’ve crossed the line–fumbled in poor
taste by revealing something inappropriate?  Dunno.  Dunno.  I’ll
listen for the uncomfortable silence then.

About work: another busy week.  Eighth of eight in spring I online
courses, which means a heaping inflow of student writing from the accelerated
term is jamming my email box–but like coldstiff milkshakes to a small straw,
this too shall pass.  Ease will be restored.  Next week is spring
break.  

I’ve been talking about sports during the day; it’s one of my jobs to keep
two fingers on the pulse.  Latest:  there’s talk of a formal violation
of the NAIA
Coaches Code.  Specifically this:

I will ever keep before the students under my direction the high ideals,
honesty, sincerity, and integrity which have made our nation great. I will not
encourage, or ever tolerate, any form of trickery or evasion of rules in order
to gain an advantage over an opponent.

Continue reading →

Agentic Shift

/ Derek Mueller
⏳ Approximate reading time: 2 mins

*clicking persistently, feverishly because this stupid computer is so slow*

Not really. That was one example of Milgram’s
"agentic shift" from class yesterday. It was one of the more
interesting sessions we’ve had this semester. I referred students to
chunks of Postman’s chapter on "The Ideology of Machines: Computer
Technology." They collaborated to generate questions for their chunk,
which, after fifteen or so minutes, was passed into the hands of the next group
who took up the work of mustering a response. A rich discussion spun out
of this simple arrangement: "computer" as it referred to a
person who computes (pre-1940), voice bots and sometimes-undetectable
artificial intelligence, the technopolist ideology that relishes human-as-machines
models of efficiency, generally subscribing to the view that we are at our best
when we are most functionally productive (no excess) and refined in our acts
(without waste or deviation).

I’m still trying to get a grip on the idea of "agentic
shift." I haven’t read Milgram’s Obedience to Authority: An
Experimental View (1974). So it’s only a best guess that agentic
shift is a rhetorical event. Is it more than displaced agency?
Shirked responsibility? Does it flourish in the technological high
tide?

I’m wondering about this especially as it seems to relate to video
gaming. I want to be careful what I say because I’m not up on the latest
buzz in video game studies–only know that they’re here. But if agentic
shift is, as Postman calls it (acknowledging Milgram), the name of the process
"whereby humans transfer responsibility for an outcome from themselves to a
more abstract agent," then video gaming, and maybe all encounters with
technical machinery, fit. So maybe it’s possible to have a group agentic
shift (a collective of transference?), in which the group *thinking social
software here* transfers responsibility to an abstract agent-authority: the
software. Is this too much of a reach from Milgram’s Yale experiments or does this simply affirm–in a modern context–what Milgram proved forty years ago?