Sunday, March 28, 2004

Reason #153: Blogging is Safer than Grill Repair

First signs of spring include firing up the grill and contemplating an oil change and point by point inspection of the lawn mower.  I did both today, firing and contemplating.  The firing was inspired when D. returned from the market with bratwurst; the contemplating was brought on by the incredibly rapid growth of purple-flowered weed sprigs overtaking the lawn.  Creeping bellflowers?  Hell, I don't know what.  But they're tall and pleading to be cut soon.  

The Thermos Millennium gas grill is approaching its fifth birthday.  I spend the better part of Easter Sunday, 1999, with my brother-in-law (well, he wasn't my bro-in-law then, but he is now) matching up sprockets, force-fitting parts and having an altogether bad time of piecing it together.  It's named Millennium, but I don't think it will last more than another year or two, and certainly no more than three.  Just last week I replaced a couple of bolts holding one of the gas-regulator dials on; today, it was the igniter dangling by a wire beneath the grease-caked underbelly.  Tough to get at.  Tough to fix.  The igniter end is basically a spark plug--a ceramic separator creates a space for the friction-generated voltage to arc.  The arc lights the propane.  Burnt meat.  With the igniter end dangling beneath the grill, I wasn't sure what to do.  So I found a spot that looked like it might serve as a shelf to introduce the spark to the gas and propped it there.  But I had doubts that the igniter was working, so I popped the ignite button and absorbed one shock.  15 volts?  20?  It was working; we were well on our way to the first brats of 2004.  Well on our way.

The shock absorption and my reporting of it to you via EWM warrants a bit of explaining.  More than a few academic bloggers I read (more conveniently with the assistance of Mozilla Firefox's Aggreg8, which I'm learning to love) have been questioning the vexed relationship between their weblogs and their scholarship.  I consider myself to be more of an academic fringe-straddler, one whose life is spread out in ways that conflate academic interests with a less neatly intellectualized workaday life.  But I, too, wish for EWM to serve more than a writing habit of convenience, to do more than chronicle day to day ironies, the flush and flex of life.  I like the way the blog becomes a storehouse for contingent issues and ideas; its utility is multifarious: writing habit, public engagement, free-to-explore think space, platform, social forum, experimental lab, diary-journal, unruly zone for discursive play.  All of this will be worth returning to in the years ahead.  I'm sure of it.

You're thinking it was more than 15 volts, eh?  Well, actually, the shock is significant because I plied through 80 pages of Obedience to Authority today, and Stanley Milgram's study was all about the willingness of a subject to expose a learner to voltage-shocks,  escalating with each incorrect answer and commanded by an authoritative experimenter. I don't want to leave behind the idea of agentic shift as a rhetorical event, especially as it manifests through deference to technology in the guise of authority.  My notes are still messy, and I'm just now chomping through the theoretically tastiest one-third of Milgram's book, but I am seeing connections, seeing needs for differentiation and refinement in terms, seeing lots of ways agentic shift can serve as a descriptive apparatus in composition and rhetoric.  [situation is a locus of action, opposition to authority, agentic state, peer rebellion, cybernetics, conscience and tensional system of the individual, authority communicates itself, constancy of authority system, surveillance-panopticon iterations *Bentham/Foucault*, Berlin's noetic field]. I will flesh out those visions here, just as soon as I get my notes in order.  That, too, is what the weblog does for me.  It's ever-present, bringing me to the edge of the reading chair, excited and interested because my mind feels as if it is wrapped in one of those, "I'm blogging this" t-shirts.  The constancy of weblogging potential while reading is invigorating.

This brings me to one other out there prospect for EWM.  In the weeks ahead, I have slotted the return of Cross-Talk in Comp Theory and The Braddock Essays to my reading list (when does a list grow into something too big to call a list?).  Brush-up reads to lubricate(!) the merge into a doctoral program in the fall. So hold me to that; hold me to the promise of bringing notes (even brief summative jottings) from those fine essays into this space.  I know, lubricate sounds smartass, but it reminds me of my big brother who is an adhesives chemist working and living in Detroit.  He called today from his cell phone while driving to Toronto where he was heading to troubleshoot something (likely) to do with robotic arms and glue distribution.  J. and I have a terrific relationship; today he said he called because he had spare weekend minutes.  And I want to come back to that, also--agency in the communicative act, deference to commodified time as it correlates to telephony and telegraphy.  But not now.  The Practice is on the tube.

Posted by Derek Mueller at March 28, 2004 9:10 PM to Ground Swell