Olivilities Gardententiality

Dietarily speaking, quite a day!  No. of Italian restaurants I ate at/from today: due.  Other than a bowl of Life cereal to kick start things this morning (oh, and one caramel Frappuccino drink this afternoon--the first caffeinated beverage I've enjoyed since May 29), all of my food consumptions, Italian: first at the Olive Garden, then from a place with notable local repute, Pastabilities.  You should know that I didn't have a whole lot of say in either decision, which doesn't really mean anything beyond the alimentary coincidence of fettuccinic proportions.

First came our final class session of the summer term in CCR760.  To cap things off, we gathered at the Olive Garden ristorante on Erie Blvd.  I loaded up on the salad-soup-breadsticks combo.  And we carried on about class stuff after everyone gulped their selections.  All in all, an afternoon well-spent, rounding out a vitally important course abounding with serious and careful attention to genre and writing in academic contexts.  Just one note about the waiter (and I'm not a waiter-complainer usually, fwiw):  by muttering a certain and audible lord's-name-in-vain when I asked him to repeat the soup options, he made it exceedingly clear that he was less than content with something--serving a table full of mostly grad students who would spend the better part of three hours in his section?  I really wanted to know the soup options.  Everyone before me who ordered the same thing I ordered let him get away with the rapidfireindecipherable  blahdieblahminestroneblahdieblah: three soup choices as a single word.  "Minestrone," was the answer from every. other. person. before. me.  Thinking I might not have minestrone, I had to ask.  And when he said (after dropping the whispery J.C.) the last choice was something with sausage and potatoes, I doubled back for option two: the minestrone.  I had the sausage and potatoes selection a long time ago.  For the last time.  I remember distinctly that the sausages were rather like Franco American meatballs who'd wandered their way into my soup, having lost much of their usually savory flavor en route.  Last time.  In the end, the salad and minestrone were quite good; I ate until content; and the class ended on a high note. 

Later when D., Ph., and D.'s sister and nephew from Colorado suggested ordering takeout from Pastablities, I went along with the plan.  I agreeably drove over to Fayette and Franklin.  Parallel parked (so what if nobody was behind me?). Grabbed up the order.  And I'm actually glad I did.  Pastabilities has the absolute best sourdough bread to go with spicy tomato oil for dipping.  That sauce is really what I wanted this weblog entry to be about.  Negative: it's so damn good--dip-my-breadslice, runny-nose tasty--I stuff my poor self.  Overindulge.  But there is something to be said for having Pastabilities after Olive Garden.  And there's also something to be said for blogging this entry instead of accompanying D. and her sister for a long evening walk.  And third, it's an accomplishment unto itself that I don't even have the slightest stomach ache.  Must be something of a soothing quality (spiceopathic remedy?) in the zesty tomato oil.  Or maybe I didn't get enough of it.

Wanderlust

I've downloaded Google Earth.  It's loaded with visual-planetary wonder:  fly-overs, angular adjustments, and surprisingly clear shots of the terrain.  The upgrade, which allows annotations (something I might use) and .csv or GPS imports, tech support and crisper printing (stuff I might not use), is tempting for just twenty bucks.  But for now I'm content to mess around with the free version.  (via)

Here's a look at the main interface (simple, easy to use) and, in it, a from-above view of SU's main campus.

A Comp-landia Itinerary

Encouraged by C.'s comment at cgbvb and entries by Jeff and Donna, I'm in on the carnival; flipped through Fulkerson's essay in the latest CCC (56.4) this afternoon.  My general impression is that it's an interesting overview of the discipline--engaging for the divisions he suggests and for the grim note that caps the essay.  Good carnival entries (jus' sharpening the axiology), I think, keep it to a few points, raise questions or pull on knots, puzzles and so on. Right?  So, on:

1.  I prefer to think of the pedagogy volumes Fulkerson selects more as itineraries than maps (was also leafing in Jameson this morning for a short minute).  The itinerary anticipates the venturing out--into an actual teaching situation, let's say.  And while my experience as a beginning teacher in the winter of '98 might be idiosyncratic, the teacher training never neatly matches the course.  First courses (and later ones?) are grubbier--responsive, gut-following performances that often map quite differently than even the most keen plotter could exact.  And because Fulkerson's essay closes with an eye on the impending "new theory wars," I'm more content with the notion of itinerary than map.  In one sense, then, I'm trying to raise the question of the correspondence between edited collections arranged for teacher training and what shapes up in practice.  If we could map the enactment of the scholarship at a practical level, how completely would the taxonomy correspond?    

2. Fulkerson acknowledges that the chart (658) is inexact.  He suggests the fluidity of the categories, especially those defining the vertical columns (evaluative theory, views of process, views of pedagogy, epistemology assumed).  The rows, however, also reflect four positions: current-traditional, expressivism, cultural studies, and procedural rhetoric. Only the last three get sections unto themselves; current-traditional formalists, Fulkerson says in the endnote, "you shall have always with you" (682).  And so the current-traditional model doesn't warrant any reconsideration in "Composition at the Turn of the Century."  I wondered why current-traditionalism stands as the rock-solid camp of the bunch (a foregone conclusion, comma-splice menders?), whereas expressivism, cultural studies and rhetoric-oriented comp are the divergent axiologies--the less fixed models threatening to jeopardize the discipline's stability.

3.  As I understand it, Fulkerson's concern about the (in-different-directions) march of disunity in the field would be well served by some agreement about what constitutes good writing.  And yet that the field is somewhat more fragmented (after processual commonality) than it was twenty years ago isn't a ticket to a desolate future, is it? Or a prediction of even more dissolution in the days ahead?  What else might disunity say about the wellness of the field--the vibrancy of multiple, differing strains?  Productive contestations?  Needed specializations?  Flip it over: One counterpart claim--an expression of grave concern because of too much like-mindedness, too much agreement is even less encouraging from my perspective.  Even more worrisome.

Ending Foot-mending

The orthopedic doc finally buzzed the cast from Ph.'s right leg this morning.  Fhazzip-a! four passes.  The cast fell aside (a collector's piece because of the congested criss-cross of signatures and that one phone number).  Ph. sprung to his feet.  And except for the easing-back-into-it strain at the Achilles, he's healed.

Slow Reader

Never heard of competitive search-a-word?  Me neither.  Until today.  My sister-in-law--visiting from Colorado Springs--severely and thoroughly kicked my ass at the competitive search-a-word.  Get set.  Go.

She aced her puzzle in 3 minutes, 35 seconds.  Me with mine: 9 minutes, 22 seconds.  Pummeled me at the word search.  But I'm not so much disappointed as awe-filled (close to aw-ful).  Twenty-one words in just over three minutes is the sort of computer-like pattern-finding that proves a supremely trained eye (with a pinch o' luck).

In case you're in the mood for practicing, here's a search-a-word from the most common search terms at Earth Wide Moth in June. Yeah...enjoy?

Name ____________________ Date _____________________

June Search Terms

H P B I P R M D K Y R T G T E T S O A I D O C R S D P C K M I M R G T O U V D M T I P T N A O I A A I R R E C O M M H O N E A S T T M G E T A A O S I D I E S L E N E A N N R T T S P R O I P N R G W N H A L A L A O G I T E M M E I G A E T W T C A U S A M L B M R A T D R R C T L T O E R R H O I M Y R B G O G Y R E T T E T Y B C A E A T C R R N M C R T R H C E L S O O S O M O I E S M R B P S I K I P I L M I A B E O E P R A S V R I T M L A C A R G D G A E T E F L B M I F S F H M R D T D A A G E K C D C R A E I I S R V T D T K G A G C M A M H L R R R D M O R E A L A B E A A A O O R S R I A T E G S N R T P M E T G G O C D E G C B M O A L A I E L E P L R E G A Y R D K C C K A I A O R E E A D A B A E A P R C K K U A G A K M G R D N L S E E O M S P K R R L I P N T O E M T K P A H D G R R C A R A K L A I E E E E A A T R C O I N E R R T R K L M S R W L C S G D L E R R A E G E I A S F A D E S K O R O M Y A R T R A P B G A R D D P S A D G L B P E R S M I A L T K T R A A R N A I C C A K O R P V E C I P A N D C I K B T E A T E C F A P T G R I D S G O A D P L R I M S C I H M R S N C R W R P R K E P A C M E E L P A A O A L T M N A A O M R A S S E L M U N R D G L R N S V A N A E E M B P I T E M T L F R G A A A E B I M A P P E L E G E E

dream piaget cmap lost riverwalk genre self smart laser big trak matryoshka candied backdoor primp problem degradation moth theory gunnite camera

To Make FREE Word Search Sheets Visit: (www.teach-nology.com)

Walk-Don't-Run Aesthetic

You don't have to do it all at once.

Which is good b/c this song takes forever and ever to download.

Genre Sirc-umvention

We have evolved a very limited notion of academic writing (or any genre, really).  Our texts are conventional in every sense of the word; they write themselves. They are almost wholly determined by the texts that have gone before; a radical break from the conventions of a form or genre (and I'm not speaking here about the academic convention of the smug, sanctioned transgression, e.g. Jane Tompkins) would perplex--how is that history writing?  what community group would need that for its newsletter?  how is that going to help you get a job? A Happenings spirit would begin at the point of Elbow's "life is long and college is short" queasiness with academic writing ("Reflections on Academic Discourse" 136). (10)

A-la Geoff Sirc's English Composition as a Happening.

Geisler on Mental Models

Here, just some old notes on genre from the plane ride to Albuquerque last week.  Clearly, they were written at the choppy altitude of 6,000 feet or thereabouts.

Cheryl Geisler's chapter, "Toward a Sociocognitive Model of Literacy," presents the study of four writers (two experts and two novices) who are charged with producing an academic essay on the ethics of paternalism.  Centrally, Geisler sets out to complicate overlap of academic discourse and conversational models of literacy; she argues that the expert writers (who notably are performing in their primary disciplinary area: philosophy) are more adept than novices at "producing positions" that are better attuned to "specialized contexts."  Geisler advances her claim after referring to Langer and introducing the familiar axes of social and cognitive (which are admittedly too easily split):

"In particular, [the results of my study] suggest that experts at advanced philosophical argument use acts of reading and writing to construct and act upon socially configured mental models.  The presence of such mental models, I will argue, indicates that a purely conversational model of literacy may be missing the point of why individuals propose and maintain written interaction in the first place" (171).

Geisler draws on Scribner and Cole's literacy model and Heritage's conversation model to establish the framework for her hybrid model--a both-and of everyday conversational dynamics and what I will call logo-buffered cognitive activity.  Geisler explains that "researchers in cognitive science now generally believe that knowledge representations in the form of mental models play a central role in defining expertise (Glaser; Johnson-Laird)" (173).  These models are akin to "'mental maps' with which we plan shopping trips and give visitors directions" (173). 

To study the activity of the four writers, she applied three data-gathering methods: 1. speak-aloud protocols, 2. complete collections of produced text, and 3. interviews.  Geisler found that the participants followed relatively similar procedures; their reading and writing sequences, time-on-task and related activity were similar. Distinctive, however, were the experts' attention to authorship.  Both experts engaged the texts as authored and developed well-positioned critiques thereafter.  The novice writers, on the other hand, either forwarded a writer-centered perspective on the idea of paternalism or established two parallel tracks (i.e. "Here's what I think; Here's what they think.").  As a way of explaining what she means with "socially configured mental models," Geisler discusses the differences between turn-taking in conversation and reader-writer dialogism in literacy practices; the activity structure involved in writing includes a different moderation of "reflecting and organizing" (183).  In an echo of her earlier claim, Geisler concludes with an offering of the more nuanced hybrid model; she works through a characterization of expertise "as the construction and manipulation of special socially configured mental models" (184). 

Two amendments to the hybrid model: 1. "advanced literacy practices are embedded in different social contexts than those of standard conversations" (185) and 2. the incorporation of mental models, which "both move away from everyday practice and remain rooted there" (186).  And there's discussion of the configurative force of shared mental models (are they really shared?  how shared are they?): "These mental models create, in effect, a new plane of intersubjective knowledge, a third dimension of culturally shared abstractions" (187). 

Looser still:  What are mental models, anyway?  Are they more than metaphors?  Are socially configurative mental models the same as genres?  And where does consciousness figure in? IOW, must we be conscious of the configurative force of the mental model (its intrusion on our activity)?  In the planning of a shopping trip or the giving of directions to a visitor--take I81 North, exit 23, three rights), the directions and positions are materially distinctive.  The roads and laws allow only so many possibilities.  Different for models?   And finally, Bawarshi would have us teach a composition course attendant to genre awareness; to what degree are socially configured mental models beneath awareness (i.e. the unconscientization in everyday activity? sub-limin(al)ography?  We can perform skillfully without pausing to give conscious attention to the generic pre-configurations of the texts we write, yes?).

A Writing Teacher

Like so many others, I'm saddened to learn that John Lovas died yesterday.  John was a dedicated teacher and faculty member at Deanza Community College; he is well-known in the field as a champion of the teaching of writing in two-year colleges, as a recent chair of the CCCC in Denver in 2000, as a reasoned, thoughtful, and patient colleague.  Far more personal for me: John's frequent comments and encouragement here in this weblog.  In fact, as I just looked back at some of my early entries to find when I first came to know John, I found that he was my second commenter--the first who I didn't know (and I'd been blogging just one week).  A spark! From him, in that exchange on seating arrangements, I learned the "to each, one move" rule and stopped putting desks back into ordered rows once and for all.  He was steady with similar insights, and in time, I came to regard him as a friend and a mentor even though I hadn't ever met him in person.  I finally did meet John in San Francisco during the CCCC in March. I'll miss his being t/here.

Since early May, his own weblog had grown unusually quiet; his entries clued us to some change, but I had no idea he'd been diagnosed with cancer. 
Clearly this entry isn't half the panegyric I think his memory is due.
Other's are posting at the festschrift site and at their blogs.

Catch Up

Returned to Syracuse and a load of work--for the courses I'm teaching online and for 760: Genre Theory.  I'm watching the Pistons-Spurs out of one eye, futzing with a CMap with the other, and feverishly making up for Friday and Saturday offline.  I can never predict the ratio between workload and blogging impulse; every time I predict a lull, I take it up a notch in this space--oddly. I say this because the days ahead appear to be solidly, solidly packed.

Here are a few photos from the camp: individually and in a slideshow.

I like this one the best.  It's a shot of A., a young pre-camper who traveled with her family from Oklahoma.  Two of the athlete/coaches from each sport were talking on the microphone during lunch on Friday.  When one of them asked the campers, "Are you having a good time?" (or something), nearly everyone shouted "Yeah!" emphatically.  Not A. (pictured here, in red).  She was grouching because her mom and dad wouldn't let her interrupt the speakers to get a picture.  Can't blame her; the microphone was inaudibly low, so there was all kinds of frolicking in the stands.  Waited until the speakers were done to get this shot.

Squash, Turquoise

Yesterday we toured the San Felipe (St. Ph.) Pueblo, known for its traditional Green Corn Dance: "It is said by the end of the day that the plaza is worn down into a bowl from a day of dancing."  Known for Heishe, too, according to a handout passed around on the school bus as we rode to it yesterday.  They told us it was a medium-sized Pueblo--pop. 3,300.  It was also framed as conservative and traditional; these weighty terms were qualified for us: the San Felipe governor explained that they are committed to preserving their language and culture.  They also forbid photography.  Why?  No wish to make themselves into a spectacle.  The sign in front of the church (from which we could see the raging Rio Grande...what a sight! But, alas, no photo.) read: No Photography.  $3,500.  Camera stayed in my pack.  On the walking tour, one of the council members explained the tension between cultural preservation and economic vitality--the paradox of the casino as revenue source and the few other alternatives, such as relying on the Feds.  On one plateau at the pueblo's edge: foundations of buildings that stood during the Pueblo Revolt of 1680.

We also walked past one of the pueblo's two kivas, learned the each of the kivas (squash and turquoise, their names) is oriented to a slightly different political ideology.  In alternating years, each gets to appoint a governor for a one-year term.  I can't say whether this leads to see-sawing leadership, but it did make me wonder how different the kivas were and how much one can really get done in a single year.

In the afternoon, we ran three+ hours of basketball.  Oh how, at times like these, I appreciate that basketball's goes easily indoors/outdoors.  Three and a half hours of football, soccer, volleyball or running in 90-degrees and sunny?  I love basketball.  Today, it's supposed to be 98F; in the gym: maybe 85F.  Because today's the most intense day of the camp (two-hour morning clinic, lunch, three-hour afternoon clinic, dinner, all-star game) we don't board the bus to Bernalillo HS for another fifteen minutes. 

In-Flight

I'm safely in Albuquerque, even if the alarm clock didn't go off at 5:00 a.m. as programmed and even if, upon arrival here in the southwest, my cell phone lapsed into a spazmodacular fit of non-connectivity. Technically, the alarm clock did go off this morning, but the speakers didn't emit any sound. D. popped up at 5:35 a.m. to ask me if I meant to be sleeping in. Yeah. Didn't mean it. And the alarm clock is close to twenty years old. Time to make it to the airport by 6:00 a.m. for five hours of flying across the country?

I made the flight, thank goodness (who would've guessed we only live eight minutes from Hancock International when all the traffic lights sync green?). In Atlanta, delayed an hour. The Delta rep explained that service crews were replacing seat cushions, but I didn't get the rest of the story.

I know this is a lame, mad-dash entry. Best I could do. Plus, I'm keen on two things: in-flight photos and blogging the Native Vision camp. (I also wrote a long entry on genre on the plane; it can wait).

About the cell phone: I dialed D. from a pay phone. Asked her to call my cell (which was refusing to reset, just cycling on "Calling Voicemail"). Much to my relief, it snapped out of it, and I was able to call for the bus ride to the hotel.

Caught up with several colleagues and friends from my former U. this evening. The camp officially starts tomorrow. At 8:00 a.m. we're heading to the San Felipe Pueblo. After that we'll be at Bernallilo H.S. for the opening ceremony. This is the ninth year for the camp. They announced an anticipated record attendance of 750 kids this time. Considering that sixteen of us will work with about 300 kids in three gyms for basketball clinics and that the first three hour session starts tomorrow afternoon--I'd better get to sleep.

Cool Southwest

I'll say it because it's probably never been said before: I'm looking forward to a trip later this week from Syracuse to Albuquerque for a break from the heat.  Of course, the idling Central New York hot spell (record highs, pollen-dust haze, and hellacious discomfort of everything's sweat-tacky) is supposed to drift off just about the time I board the jetliner.

Pretty much unrelated: Ph. is hard-casted to the knee for the next two weeks.  After that, no rehab.  To get it back to kicker's strength, the doc recommended power-walking (only for the two-week window after the cast's off).

After Game One

The Almost

Eight years ago today my mother died; nothing predicted it.  Although we never learned the deciding cause (off with causality, off with dogma), it was a defining day that I've mostly come to terms with.  The day-marker is like an anniversary; it imposes a peculiar singularity of feeling (a lonely annuity): very few remember the deathdays of ordinary people (even D. and Ph. might not have felt the date had I not brought it up, and Ph. was there).  This is not to say, by any means, that my mother was merely ordinary; instead, I like to think of life--perhaps all lives--as small-world extraordinary.  The day-marker of death, in its singularity, fails to evoke a broad co-memory; it sparks only a local co-memory, reaching as far as the family.  And so this is most certainly the echo of a moment felt by my brother and dad, felt by mom's siblings.  Perhaps a few, close others.

I don't have a whole lot more to say, and I definitely don't have the impulse to over-intellectualize the almost.  Barthes, in Camera Lucida, writes about the almost--the paradoxical nearness/distance that confronts him in a collection of photographs of his deceased mother.  I don't have many photos of my mother, especially from the years immediately before she died.  But the few I do possess lend an astounding credibility and accuracy to the experience Barthes describes.  Without understanding it in his terms, I was sensing the incompleteness of the image, as I still do, over and over.

According to these photographs, sometimes I recognized a region of her face, a certain relation of nose and forehead, the movement of her arms, her hands.  I never recognized her except in fragments, which is to say that I missed her being, and that therefore I missed her altogether.  It was not she, and yet it was no one else.  I would have recognized her among thousands of other women, yet I did not "find" her.  I recognized her differently, not essentially. Photography thereby compelled me to perform a painful labor; straining toward the essence of her identity, I was struggling among images partially true, and therefore totally false.  To say, confronted with a certain photograph, "That's almost the way she was!" was more distressing than to say, confronted with another, "That's not the way she was at all."  The almost: love's dreadful regime, but also the dream's disappointing status--which is why I hate dreams.  For I often dream about her (I dream only about her), but it is never quite my mother: sometimes, in the dream, there is something misplaced, something excessive: for example, something playful or casual--which she never was; or again I know it is she, but I do not see her features (but we do see, in dreams, or do we know?): I dream about her, I do not dream her.  And confronted with the photograph, as in the dream, it is the same effort, the same Sisyphean labor: to reascend, straining toward the essence, to climb back down without ever having seen it, and to begin all over again. (65-66)

Yellow Fever, Broken Foot, Lost Dog

Although the decaf headaches were considerably worse today, the result, I suspect, of hay fever clobbering me while I slept, it's been easy to forget about my caffeine detox in light of the hardships of those around me.  Ph. came home early from school today because we had an appointment at Community General with the only doctor in Onondaga County authorized to administer Yellow Fever vaccinations.  Yellow Fever is the last vaccine he needed to be Kenya-ready in mid-July.  We hopped into the car and drove over to the complex, navigated the disorienting campus--the antiseptic hospital grounds.  And then we waited.  We sat through a few informal lectures, leafed through CDC pamphlets one more time, eventually faced off with the doctor--a reputed curmudgeon who picks apart travelers, detects all the shots they might need.  Sweet relief he's not Ph.'s primary physician.

The whole time Ph. was limping.  When he came home from school, the first thing he did was kick off his right shoe and present me with a swollen foot.  Gym class.  Unsupervised basketball.  Ph. goes up for a shot, a push in the back, rolled ankle.  Only it's not his ankle that's swollen. I know all about ankle injuries. The *pop* he heard and the knot he felt were further out on the side of his foot.  School nurse handed him a baggie filled with ice and said to ice it for an hour (I'm no orthopedic, but I'd never ice for more than twenty mins at a pass). 

So he limped through the rest of the school day, limped home, limped through the yellow fever appointment.  Once home, we had to decide whether to proceed to his sports banquet (an event where he would be honored as MVP of his soccer team, an event we'd already shelled out cash for) or, instead, take him to the the local prompt care for an x-ray.  We went with the latter, and it turned out to be the right decision: he has a busted foot.  I didn't see the x-ray, but the fifth metatarsal on his right foot has, at the very least, a chip fracture.  What does it mean?  Ten days in a splint, ten days on crutches, ten days without showers (leg-out-the-tub baths instead). 

We picked up some ibuprofen, then hustled home in time for a pizza to be delivered.  At home, we found our landlord (and friend, of course) sadly tacking Lost Dog notices on the utility poles out front.  His Jack Russell Terrier vanished from the back-yard in the afternoon.  Gone.  He'd already canvassed the area, but I hopped on my bike and cycled through the neighborhood once more before dark, if for nothing other than good manners.  That and E.'s a cool dog, and I can vividly remember the few times T. (my old, good dog) ran off.  With this heat, lots of people were out on the streets, on their porches.  Syracuse isn't an air-conditioned city, which is good for lost-dog searching.  One block over I secured a tip from a dog-walker.  He'd seen a dog like E. just an hour earlier.  And sure enough, it panned out.  E. turned up, brought home by the same young girl the tipster described. 

That accounts for just about everything since three o'clock this afternoon: two hospitals, yellow fever (Ph. has technically contracted it, albeit from a modified virus), a broken foot splinted, and a lost dog found.  And pizza.  Like I said, it's been easy to forget about decaffeination.

Note:  The prompt-care office out-sources crutches.  Before they could hand over the crutches, they needed another four forms filled out--forms where we give over all of our information, forms where we agree to pay for them if insurance won't.  Nurse: "Just fill out the highlighted portions of the forms." D: "What should I put for "Supplier"?  Nurse: "Um.  I don't know.  Just leave it blank."  D.: "It's highlighted." Nurse: "Just skip it."  Oh, and he had to ask us--as a matter of official procedure--if we had a preferred crutch provider. 

The Roselius Fog

Symptoms: faint and dingy-feeling headache, irritability, cravings, mild and temporary (but noticeable) shift in blood pressure. 

I'm now enduring a self-induced Ludwig Roselius Fog.  Feeling it.  It's the name I'm giving to caffeine detox.  Fifty hours now, caffeine free.  Not a single soda.  Not a sip of coffee.  Not a nibble of chocolate. 

Roselius is the German scientist credited with salvaging some bad coffee beans back in 1906 and finding a decaffeination process as a result.  In my present state, how can you blame me for not researching it more in-depth than Wikipedia? 

The purge is temporary.  I figured I'd lay off the usual routine of morning coffee and an afternoon caffeinated drink for the next ten days, then allow myself one or the other less regularly.  Over the past year I've gradually given in to a whole line of succulent caffeinated drinks, fallen in with a robust caffeine addiction.  In the never-ending battle between exhaustion and spry wakefulness (late-early reading, etc.), a proven ally in caffeine.

With this I say farewell to you, caffeine.  But it's not good-bye forever.  ; )

Genre Theory II

For yesterday's genre theory session we looked at the first chapter from Amy Devitt's book, Writing Genres, and the first and third chapters from Paul Prior's book, Writing/Disciplinarity (both of which have searchable copy at Google Print).  Devitt gracefully works genre into an interactive model between individuals (at a basic level); social structures, genre, and groups (at an intermediary level) and context of culture, context of genre and context of situation (at an ultimate level).  It's meant to simplify a complex set of relationships, I think, and as a model it does well to give a graphic alternative to some fairly heady stuff.  But I'm still a bit murky on the role genre plays in scaling between the lived, everyday activity (often communicative, often recurrent--as in, not another grocery list) and the higher/broader orders.  Genre, given to patterns of activity, would ask of us to point to evidence of the relationship between the broader abstract levels and the more ornate, idiosyncratic actions of individuals.  Forgive me though; I'm the one who's murky (shall I explain in a supplem-entry?).  Better to read Devitt first-hand than to take this as a solid handle on her project.

But I will say this:  Devitt presents genre as something that, in places, met up nicely with frame or framing. One in the same?  At another point, I was thinking that genre--if defined by its actants (ordinary folk rather than some higher elite)--challenges us with a problem of naming.  Who names genres?  Is the genre named suddenly afforded the possibility of recurring?  In other words, is an un-named recurrent activity outside the realm of genre or, as Prior thoughtfully tabs it, genrification?  Note that my fondness for genrification is purely spell-check serendipity: it's sub: gentrification.  Mm-hmm.  Something to it?  

Still confounding: I'm stuck on a question of the role genre plays in producing a situation.  Devitt suggests near the end of the chapter that the which-came-first paradox (the chicken or the text) between situation and genre is mixed with (though not solved by) a double-action.  Genre and situation are co-constitutive, "so tightly interwoven as to be interlocked" (22).  Following this logic, genre doesn't respond to a situation, nor does it enter only after the fact.  So it's neither deterministically a priori nor a clear consequence.  In another sense, "[g]enres are already always existing" (28).  Clear?  It's just that it seems a difficult move to go from the tight interlock between situation and genre and also to go for the always already.  At moments like these, I tend to defer to a less optimistic view of genre; I want to defer to a stance that prefers vocabulary of diffusion and pattern.  I'm not settled on the degree to which these distinctions are semantic, which leads me to question the extent to which knowledge of genre as genre shapes activity.  But then as I turn to working on something for prospective publication, does genre help (as Devitt says it does)?  Most definitely.

I found Paul Prior's first chapter, "Resituating the Discourse Community," especially point-on in its working through a sequence of Saussure, Ricouer and Bakhtin to present a range of thinking from structuralism to sociohistoricism as they, in turn (a turn taken up in the beginning of c. 3), apply to "discourse community."  In sociohistoric orientations we find more resistance to systematic, mechanistic treatments of form; and while this is useful for interrogating the genre-as-bucket metaphor, it also aligns Prior with much of the development of theories of genre in Miller, Bawarshi and Devitt.  In mentioning "indexical socialization," Prior cites Ochs (1988)--just something to look up later.  Genre as indexical socialization?  Perhaps not, but the idea that disiplinarity revolves around a kind of indexical socialization is interesting, even if it draws on a slightly different notion of activity patterns than genre theory looks at. 

Prior's work also gives us a nice synthesis of several Friends of Activity Theory; in a section subtitled "From Conduits to Communities to Persons: A Structuralist Network," he draws on Vygotsky, Wertsch, Bruner, Lave & Wenger to suggest the complicated nexus between the social and the cognitive, between which agency and multiplicity intercede.  Slowly and through heavily cited prose, he sets up a way of talking about "disciplines as open networks"; eventually, he says straight-out that he prefers the concept of "disciplinarity" to "discipline" because "disciplinarity evokes a process rather than a place or object" (26).  Perhaps more useful, however, is Prior's presentation of the possibilities in regarding disciplinary formations in network terms--preferring a more relational, networked model for disciplinarity to the more common "discourse community" frame. 

The Photographemic Map

I started with a simple impulse to document the park.  I walk through Thornden Park almost every day; it's familiar, safe-seeming despite the well-circulated commonplaces about the park's hazards: the "don't-go-alone" and especially after dark. 

I wanted to present the lilac grove (on the north end of the park) as an alternative to the groomed and showy E.M. Mills Rose Garden on the southwest corner, the point nearest the Syracuse University campus.  The lilac grove, by its location, is obscured, tucked away in a thicket; the named rose garden, on the other hand, is emblematic of Thornden Park.  And it is precious--maybe a formal apology for the half-policed expanse that is not the rose garden, that is, instead, a scene of litter with a mythic robbery-threat, an occasional homicide (one in the year we've lived in NY, anyway). 

Before moving here from Kansas City last summer, I couldn't get an impression of the park.  I had a hunch that it'd be ideal to walk to work every day through the park, but that prospect was countered by the faint inhibition I've tried to describe--the park's reputation.

The E.M. Mills Rose Garden gets daily attention, except in the winter when everything is wrapped tightly in burlap.  There's special parking for the workers who attend to it, trimming, fertilizing, great-pains rose-growing.  The lilac grove takes care of itself.  The rose garden has benches, a gazebo; wedding parties stop there for elaborate photos.  The lilac grove: no seating, no paths to it or through it. 

To present the lilac grove, I carried my camera one day, walked a slightly different route than the direct one I usually follow from home to campus.  Continuing through the park, I snapped a few more shots; they're unfortunately ordinary photos.  Nothing in them is "found" except the park itself.  And the "found"-ness of the park is, as should be no surprise, personal.  The lilac garden gives the routine pass through the park a distinctive new dimension; the rose garden isn't "it" (I never believed it was, even before I knew the lilac grove; rose garden: all genteel, all the time).

The photographemic map is an experiment.  I'm satisfied with this iteration for the successful layering of Cmap tools, Google maps, and photos housed in Flickr; I'm dissatisfied with the lack of imagination entered into play.  I have two versions here: a drawn and labeled street map and a satellite map.  The photos are Cmap nodes with thumbnails as backgrounds (w/o text labels).  On the primary level--same as the miniaturized photos--are the paths: yellow is the route from my neighborhood to SU.  Blue, alternatives (either hillier or longer).  The Google maps are backgrounds, too; by trading them out, I was able to keep all of the nodes--image markers, paths, trails, etc., in relatively stable positions.  In other words, it was easy to make the second map.

With each of them, I rendered jpg files from Cmap, then drew hot spots with links to the corresponding Flickr photos in Dreamweaver.  Result:

But there's more, and it gets better (for anyone interested in this sort of thing).  I didn't know it before undertaking all of this, but the notes function in Flickr allows for hyperlinks, so you can upload the image and build the hotspots into the Flickr labels.  Here's what came of that effort (I only bothered applying it to the satellite view):

That's about it.  I was just thinking about other projects involving imaginative photographemic maps (a coinage I twisted from Barthes' biographeme).  Maybe it lends some interesting possibilities to memory maps. As time allows, more to follow...heh, follow.

Where's My Money, BP?

I don't watch it often enough, that zany MTV program--Boiling Points--in which unsuspecting victims are taunted (in front of a hidden camera) by actors whose idiocy is meant to induce fits of rage--spitting, fuming, cursing rage.  If the victim clings to rationality/patience/kindness long enough, s.he wins a hundred bucks.  I think that's how it goes, anyway.  Every once in a while I imagine I must be on the program, like somebody's trying to frustrate me and taping the whole sequence.

On TV lots of folks lose at the game; they rupture temperamentally, letting loose the accumulating vitriol, venting.  I like to believe I could win the prize money, that I could sweat through twenty minutes of somebody's bull-crap antics instigating me to fury.  It's that little hopeful half-lie I tell myself when I'm particularly short-tempered.  Sometimes I'm great at refraining, breathing deeply, etc.; other times, less so.

Take today for example.  I'll leave the personal/family factors aside (they're just small pinches, fast-fading stings--all for which I'm thinking of adopting M.'s twist-tie technique or this and this).  A whole bunch of day-ruining crap-o-la starts caking up.  Now I'm going to have to switch into a certain necessary fuzziness--a cryptic gloss to cover the trails of this certain set of irritations. 

One has to do with systematically broken links.  Um...links matter?
No. two: content locking.  Here, in MD5 format, is what I think about locking: 52FB604B42D39836C4A2179A73CF2A82.  And that's putting it nicely.  Unconditional locking (imho)=distrust.
Three: Customer service phone trees with thousand ten-thousand-forked branches.  And! at the end of the last branch.  Leave a message. 
4.1. A "solution": When dealing with locked content, delete it, then add a new module and paste in the edited contents.

Me?  I'm trying to keep it together, practice my own little satyagraha of the everyday variety.  Voice inside is telling I probably should lay off with this before I wind up getting reprimanded for being vaguely critical.  It's just that I'm almost certain somebody's going to reveal the whole gag any time now, pull out a hundred bucks, and make my day bright again.  Any slow-passing minute.

Meanwhile, I should go back to writing entries on genre theory.

Milkweed in the Sky

Early this morning, just before leaving for work, D. stepped in and said she had an urgent message (was it a call, an email?) about a dead butterfly.  I was still half asleep, resting up from watching the Pistons-Heat clear to the end of game four.

Dead butterfly?

It's the life of an elementary school teacher, turns out, that some days start out this way, D. rushing to intervene in a grave situation, resolve what to do with the fallen corpse, determine whether to leave it or dispose of it before the kids get to the classroom.  As one among many year-end projects D.'s got 'em looking at the life cycles of butterflies. First, a whole batch of mail-order larvae showed up; each had to be separated into its own little home--a feeding cup of sorts with dirt and larva-decor.  Then the larvae were divided among the kids (something like two or three wigglers for each of the children to allow for the ill-fated, to allow for nature).  In each cup went larva food and a label matching the insect with the student-owner.  Next, incubation.

Now, after two weeks, several of the larvae have met the group's expectations for them; well on their way to becoming butterflies, former worm-bugs have spun cocoons, hooked them onto the lids of their feeding cups.  From there, D. moved each one to a bigger space--a kind of netted drum into which the butterflies will presumably unfold and flit around.  And some die, we've learned.

I don't know yet how all of this was resolved today; D.'ll be home shortly from picking Ph. up from his lacrosse finale.  And I'm quite sure that no matter what comes of it, nearly everybody will have forgotten by tomorrow, unless, that is, all of the hatchlings flit to premature overnight deaths (over the next few days).  Butterfly death: I'm hopeful for a more encouraging series of events to wrap up the school year.  Of course, with a small dab of Mod Podge, it'd be easy enough to tack on a preservative dimension, butterfly jewelry or something. 

Bawarshi, Genre and the Invention of the Writer

Anis Bawarshi develops a case for a genre-studies-based first-year writing curriculum.  In the courses teachers would introduce students to sampled genre sets from selected disciplines or professional fields (studying, in effect, lab reports as a genre, or other professional document types).  Students would analyze the genres, writing both in them and about them; hence, composition would have as its impetus a pragmatic extra-disciplinary awareness of the writing students will do in their major areas of study and, as well, bona fide content: writing itself (in all its forms, in and beyond the academy).  As Bawarshi's project builds an argument for this model, he reasons that a more comprehensive, nuanced understanding of genre is one (though perhaps golden) ticket to composition's status as a discipline and might also serve us with a compelling justification for the first-year writing sequence.

I finished the book still feeling somewhat unsettled with the ecological metaphors Bawarshi develops early on.  With genre theory, Bawarshi enfolds LeFevre's "ecology of invention" and Bourdieu's "habitus" to set up what he calls--following his accounting of the "social turn" in composition--"rhetorical ecosystems" (8).   How are such systems constrained by institutional dynamics--the forces of power inscribed, for example, in the first-year writing course?  Bawarshi presents a wonderfully rich, interesting set of definitional twists to account for the correspondence between ecosystems and genres; he spells out clearly that he is "more interested in what happens once genres are in circulation" than how they come to exist (10).  My uneasiness with the ecological metaphor, which I should explain more fully, stems primarily from two issues:  1.  institutional forces, power dynamics and pressures (which must, inevitably, give greater weight to certain genres, yes?) and 2. the presumption that genre as the reproduced communication patterns or recurrent exigencies suspended between individuals and social collectives are sufficiently explicit that we might study them, teach them, organize them into sets, and so on.  Briefly, in his discussion of the syllabus, Bawarshi mentions Swales and occluded genres: "According to Swales, occluded genres are genres that operate behind the scenes and often out of more public sight, yet play a critical role in operationalizing the commitments and goals of a dominant genre, in this case, the syllabus" (119).  But might there be other, more elusive genres at work in the classroom?  What of these?  [Look to Swales, eh?]

What gives a genre its stability?  Bawarshi gives us this: "Genres--what Catherine Schryer defines as 'stabilized-for-now or stabilized-enough sites of social and ideological action' (1994, 108)--thus constitute typified rhetorical sites or habitations in which our social actions and commitments are made possible and meaningful as well as in which we are rhetorically socialized to perform (and potentially transform) these actions and commitments" (81-82).  I like Schryer's definition, detached though it is here from its immediate context (Bawarshi puts it in a section called "Genres as Rhetorical Ecosystems" (80)).  With "stabilized-for-now" and "stabilized-enough" we are challenged doubly: a genre could be fresh and fleeting; a genre must be qualified as a genre--it must be named.  "Stabilized-for-now" also complicates the concept of a tradition or at least exposes another problematic dimension in approaching genre with any consideration of its history, evolution, past-ness.

I'm short on time, but I want to go ahead and post a few more notes from Bawarshi--continue my plan to write through the reading for the summer course.  These are really floating bits--note-worthy, but sliding underneath any more inquisitive response from me:

1. adopt-a-discipline (163):  This comes in the final chapter on the pedagogical implications of genre theory as Bawarshi entangles it with systems theory, situated cognition, ecologies of invention, and activity.  The idea is that FYW students would size up a discipline by examining various genres constituting disciplinary activity.  Seems to me that this, along with writing in the disciplines (WID) strands of Bawarshi's work might work better with final-year writing students, perhaps juniors or seniors who have more firmly committed to a particular field of study.  Lots of other issues with this, including whether it over-ambitiously emphasizes professionalization, etc.
2. "genre game" (164): Hold this up to Anthony Giddens's stuff on 117-118.  Gaming tropes can be misleading.  Are they misleading in this case?  If we accept that it's possible for students to "game" genres, what other forms of extra-generic activity are they entering into and what interest might we find in it?
3. list of B.'s examples (143): "PMHF [Patient Medical History Form], the social workers' assessment report, the resume, the course journal, the 'king's speech,' the greeting card, the syllabus, the writing prompt, and the student essay" (143). 
4. "One way teachers can help students reposition themselves within such spheres of agency is to make genres analytically visible to students so that students can participate within and negotiate them more meaningfully and critically" (141).  Does this refer only to "loaded" genres--pre-existing, recognized, conventional?  Genre as...?
5. choreographic force [of genre] (134): "[Yates and Orlikowski] describe how genre systems choreograph interactions among participants and activities chronologically (by way of measurable, quantifiable, 'objective' time) and kairotically (by way of constructing a sense of timeliness and opportunity in specific situations) within communities (2002, 108-10). In terms of chronos, the writing prompt assigns a specific time sequence for the production of the student essay, often delimiting what is due at what time and when" (134).  I understand the need for deadlines, but does this feature/attribute of genre suggest that it enforces artificial rates of production (given to institutional convene-iences)?
6. coercive genre (120): "No doubt, the syllabus is a coercive genre, in the same way that all genres are coercive to some degree or another.  It establishes the situated rules of conduct students and teacher will be expected to meet, including penalties for disobeying them."  Yikes.  Genre as fear-maker and order-keeper.
7. "Participants in one activity system, for instance, use some genres to communicate with participants in other activity systems, thereby forming intra- and intergenre system relations" (116).  How does this match up with what Miller gives us as both relational, hierarchic and virtual discourse communities.  Is the intra-/inter-genre system noted by Bawarshi oriented toward or within any particular one of Miller's classes?  Which one? The GC example (107) also defers to a hierarchical--nested genre systems, etc.
8. Ref. to Bazerman's "humble genres" (106)  Genres of the everyday?  What makes a genre humble?  Does this mean that it's not officially recognized as a literary genre?  Also, what are the limits to the communicative social activity spheres genre might be used to characterize?  If writing is a "way of being in the world," so are other (non-textual, non-linguistic?) communicative interactions, including ones where the utterance is less neatly captured in an explicit form or artifact-ready medium--tacit knowledge, feeling, patterned social action that falls outside the production of a text?

On Genre

From Anthony Giddens, "Problems of Action and Structure." The Giddens Reader.:

"If interpretative sociologies are founded, as it were, upon an imperialism of the subject, functionalism and structuralism propose an imperialism of the social object. One of my principal ambitions in the formulation of structuration theory is to put an end to each of these empire-building endeavours.  The basic domain of study of the social sciences, according to the theory of structuration, is neither the experience of the individual actor, not the existence of any form of societal totality, but social practices ordered across space and time" (89).

From Bakhtin, "The Problem of Speech Genres." Speech Genres and Other Late Essays.:

"We speak only in definite speech genres, that is, all our utterances have definite and relatively stable typical forms of construction of the whole" (78).

"If speech genres did not exist and we had not mastered them, if we had to originate them during speech process and construct each utterance at will for the first time, speech communication would be almost impossible" (79).

From Carolyn Miller, "Genre as Social Action" (1984):

"The genre classification I am advocating is, in effect, ethnomethodological: it seeks to explicate the knowledge that practice creates.  This approach insists that the 'de facto' genres, the types we have names for in everyday language, tell us something theoretically important about discourse."

"As a recurrent, significant action, a genre embodies an aspect of cultural rationality.  For the critic, genres can serve both as an index to cultural patterns and as tools for exploring the achievements of particular speakers and writers; for the student, genres serve as keys to understanding how to participate in the actions of a community."

From Carolyn Miller, "Rhetorical Community: The Cultural Basis of Genre" (1994):

"The genre set represents a system of actions and interactions that have specific social locations and functions as well as repeated or recurrent value or function.  It adumbrates a relationship between material particulars, instantiations of a genre in individual acts, and systems of value and signification" (70).

From Anis Bawarshi, Genre and the Invention of the Writer (2003):

"Guided by an understanding of writing as social activity, composition scholarship has become less concerned with inquiring into generalizable cognitive processes and more concerned with inquiring into the localized, textured conditions in which cognition and social activities are organized" (5).

"As we write various texts, then, we rhetorically enact and reproduce the desires that prompted them.  This recursive process is what genre is.  And as we rhetorically enact and reproduce these desires, we also rhetorically enact, reproduce, and potentially resist and/or transform the social activities, the roles, and the relations that are embedded in these desires" (45).