I Will Not Know

Close to five this afternoon, I was waiting for a ride home from D., and I had a few minutes to pass in my office. I'd already booted down the laptop and stowed it in my backpack. I didn't have the gusto to continue readings (for next week already) from the two seminars I had today, and I was feeling somewhat blaze after a full day on campus overflowing with six hours of intense discussion. So I straightened up one of my office shelves and got to leafing through a few odd journals casually handed off to me by a colleague last year. There were five or six yellowed issues of Composition Studies and JAC; I fixed on JAC 8 (1988), specifically David Foster's "What Are We Talking About When We Talk About Composition?", which ends

As informed readers and deliberately inclusive thinkers, we must be the measure of our discipline. Science cannot claim ascendancy in any area of human knowledge, particularly in that complex blend of knowledge-streams we call composition. We must be wary of those who, uncomfortable with the ambiguities of discourse and complacent with the quantitative, empirical perspective, would have us assume that perspective alone. As informed readers, we must juggle and juxtapose the claims of different modes of inquiry, recognizing what each contributes and what each lacks. To ref use this invitation to an intellectual pluralism, to settle in its place for a single perspective, is to invite the punishment we all hated in grade school: having to write the same sentence one hundred times. In this case, it would be "I will not know. I will not know. I will not know..."

Stimulating find, I thought, and then I started to wonder whether what we are talking about when we talk about composition in 2006 is so radically remade from what we were talking about when we talked about composition in 1988. And then my ride was waiting.

The End of Composition Studies; The Start of...

In some ways, it's like the Blockbuster video ad campaign from a year ago--The End of Late Fees; The Start of More. The title of David Smit's The End of Composition Studies invokes an endism that one might take to suggest to the demise of the discipline of writing studies. In Advanced Philosophy and Theory of Composition, we're looking at the first half of Smit's book for tomorrow afternoon (also looking at two chapters from Cosgrove and Barta-Smith's In Search of Eloquence, which, fingers crossed, will arrive in the mail later this afternoon). Smit's forthright early on about playing double entendre with "end," both as a variation of "teleology" or "aim" and also as "termination" or "cessation." I've been reading with a stronger sense of the first connotation (teleology/aim) because 1.) people still write and 2.) writing is sufficiently complex to warrant the continuation of its study, define it however you will. And actually, that's one of Smit's chief complaints. He finds that those who would self-identify with the field of rhetcomp have yet to agree on what writing even is, much less how to best to teach it given the institutional constraints of fifteen weeks (more or less in some places, but the bugbear of layering writing rhythms with institutional timeframes is what I'm thinking about) and wildly divergent positions on what ought to constitute writing practices and curriculum in the first place.

Like Fulkerson, whose "Composition at the End of the Twenty-First Century" appeared in CCC last summer making similar claims about the field's disunity and failures to achieve sustained agreement on what is good writing, Smit's project, or at least the half I've read of it, is troubling because he's right on several counts. We lack shared definitions, insights into how people learn to write (in any way that can be recast as curriculum), sufficiently complex models for how people compose, nuance in what we mean by "social," and, most importantly for Smit, we lack evidence of transfer, "the degree to which our ability to use a word, an introduction, or a problem-solving strategy in one context will carry over into another context" (121). I won't go into full-blown chapter summaries here, but basically each chapter in the first half of the book, "Conceptual Limits," calls out just that--fuzziness or ambiguity in the presumed givens of composition: how students come to be rhetorically mature, what we mean by discourse communities (and how to tell what distinguishes one such community from another, specifically), what is the relationship of writing activity to thinking (especially "critical thinking," which he deals with at length), and so on. The second half of the book promises to deliver a curriculum (much like other "Comp Liquidation...But Wait!" projects), so it's clear that Smit hasn't completely given over to despair. We'll get to those sections next week.

Two thoughts I'll take into class tomorrow: For all of the discussion of not agreeing on what writing is (or isn't...Is not! Is so!), Smit doesn't mention technologies, discourses of interface, networks or digitality. Provided that Yancey's address from '04, "Made Not Only In Words: Composition in a New Key," is explicit about the role of technologies (throughout all of time) as co-constitutive of writing, I'm concerned at this absence. It's not, as you might think, that I would prefer a technojubilee somewhere in there, but there are moments when I find that Smit, despite his early claims about widespread divisiveness on what writing is, has closed on a particular, none-too-expansive notion of what writing activity is (especially in institutional contexts; none of this extracurricular business here).

Secondly, in his chapter on transfer, Smit uses an analogy from D. Russell on ball games (120). But I'm not sure the comparison is adequate, or, to put it another way, I don't have the impression that Smit really wants to go the distance with the correspondence between writing instruction and learning to play games with balls. Raising a skeptical series of questions about transfer, Smit reasons that, following the ball game analogy, skillful performance in one ball game would, in turn, lead to skillful performance in others. Rather than "rhetorical maturity," I think this comparison works better with notions of "rhetorical agility," a phrase that played over and over in CCR601 last year. Agility in one ball game (or genre) stands to transfer to other ball games, except that the system of the sport (roles, rules, etc.) doesn't make the staging of transfer a priority. You wouldn't know from playing basketball with me that I never started shutting off passing lanes effectively with my feet (and often kicking the ball) until I started coaching Ph.'s soccer team when he was seven. Right, I was done playing for high stakes by then, but the point I'm trying to get at is that some kind of transfer is, at the very least, notable enough to report. And perhaps this isn't enough proof to say, finally and for good, that transfer happens.

Margarinalia

Because I fail to shop with a grocery list and I also fail to perform an exhaustive inventory before heading off to P&C every other week to collect things for eating, I often make the mistake I made today: picking up stuff we already have. Such as margarine. We hardly even eat margarine. So why I bought two squares of it this afternoon is unexplainable. Even worse, I returned home (thinking I'd done well to accumulate substantial meal-makings and cakehole pleasers while also staying within the food budget) to find three unopened squares and a more-than-half-filled tub of margarine in the fridge, enough to bring on in me a margaraine headache.

Fastr

Put your semantic-iconic quicks to the test by playing Fastr, a Flickr-based tag-guessing game (via).  I was in the lead for the better part of a round yesterday, but then I blanked on a series tagged "youth" (or "young", I forget) and wound up ninth.

Tag Brick

I went ahead and pulled the tag cloud from the right-hand column this morning.  It worked fine for a few months last fall, but for several weeks now the tags have ceded their cloudiness, freezing instead on the set you see here, many of which come from Ph.'s FR basketball schedule.  His season ended two weeks ago. 

I returned to the Tagcloud site, saw the latest news headline from 65 days ago: "TagCloud Continues to Grow." On an apathetic whim, I sent in a troubleshooting note: "What the hay's going on with my cloud?"  But I haven't heard anything back.  Maybe one of these days I'll look into a plugin that will allow me to do something similar. 

After Caffeine

Today makes three decaffeinated weeks. Well, besides two Cokes (one in a restaurant, the other on Sunday with lunch). I can't say that I've noticed a remarkable pickup in my productivity, but neither have I melted into a Caffeine Free puddle of lethargic goop, so that's promising. I suppose it helps that I've been exercising, too, steadily aching through Power 90 six days a week and playing ball when I can catch a break around classes and reading. Basketball didn't go well last week (felt like a benchwarmer for the Atlanta Hawks bumbling around out there), but the P-90 program worked miracles when I kept at it for four months back in '02. Now it's are-there-any-muscles-left? overdue. Also, with the exercise, I sleep soundly. At the rate I was going last semester, I would have required vice grips to close my eyelids at night. Rest, intermitzzz. Forget cliches about burning the candle; I was so juiced on caffeine some days that I was burning...I don't know. Something. But I'm back now. If the blog goes dull or altogether blanks out for weeks at a time, I think I've got a danm good excuse.

Detroit Eats Analogy

A reader writes:

If one was going to cook Detroit's favorite dish, what would it be? Here, SAT style: Barbecue is to Kansas City as _____ is to Detroit.

Good question. I'm overjoyed that the Superbowl is hosted in Detroit this year. Way I see it, an NFC team has a shot at winning a game played in the Motor City during the playoffs. That hasn't happened in a while (plus, the games against Dallas and Green Bay in '91 and '93 were in Pontiac, anyway). So, as we approach the Detroit Superbowl, I need your help.  What's more fearsome than a Seahawk? What's Detroit's marquee food?

My first (bad) guesses revert to up-state gourmet such as venison stew and Mackinaw Island fudge. Or nuts-n-bolts, middle-Michigan (elsewhere?) parlance for Chex mix. For our Super get-together, I'm thinking about trying (from memory) a variant of Tirechange Chili (some call it hunter's stew). Ideally, I'd sugar up on paczkis afterward, if only I knew how to make them.

The ultimate Detroit food, however, is the coney dog. Coneys and chili cheese fries (using Koegel Franks?). Of course, you could mod out the dogs with any mix of Soul food (collard-topped coneys), Meditteranean (couscous-topped coneys) and Italian (deep dish coneys) influences. That's probably the best I can come up with. Anyone else with a suggestion? What food makes Detroit proud and is suited to cooking for a Superbowl party?

Phenetic Urge

I was reading along in an article called "Neighbourhoods on the Net" when I ran across an unfamiliar phrase: phenetic urge. The article evaluates the impact of datasets circulating online about real neighborhoods.  The three authors collected links to 33 sites that make use of "geodemographic" data--income, pollution, average selling price homes, etc.  They reduced the list to seventeen profiled examples, and from there, zeroed in on four sites for extended "case studies." To conclude, the article offers a set of implications for policy, which includes conclusions about screwy data leading to flawed representations of certain places and accessibility concerns, notably--and repeatedly--cast in terms of age and economic status ("Those sections of the population that are financially unable and/or unwilling (as is the case with many older people) to access online sources will be increasingly disadvantaged as information availability and society's dependence on it expands" (37)).

Phenetic urge nods to the taxonomy impulse, the classificatory move.  Here's the immediate context:

Allowing for the enormous difficulties involved in 'un-inventing' IBNIS ['Internet-based Neightbourhood Information Systems'] (let alone the 'phenetic urge' of which they are so potent a symbol), the core policy issue to come out of this report is how best to ensure that the advantages of IBNIS are not outweighed by the disadvantages listed above. (36)

Specifically, the disadvantages are much like those I already mentioned: "mis-characterising localities," "inacurate depiction[s]," "unwarranted 'redlining,'" and "online marginalisation."   Ultimately, the concern-as-delivered is over the datasets (geodemographic and, perhaps, beyond) representing neighbourhoods on the net.  A Beckettian critique: "The danger is in the neatness of identifications."  IBNIS, their place-identifying data, are a potent symbol of "phenetic urges."

I went about digging around for "phenetic," and found its association with clusters whose correspondence rests in observable patterns.  Near neighbor: phylogenic: groupings based on known-to-be-inherited traits.  I wonder how this positions the phenetic urge differently in time.  Does this mean that phenetic urges are always momentary and impulsive or can those observations take years?  Also, does phenetic classification rely only on observational methods (phenomenology, the report of senses, etc.)?  Thinking through this keeps me at the question about the "urge," too.  Urgency; the urgent-ic state.  Given that the article is concerned with datasets as they apply to spaces, I'm interested in what this might mean for tagging, for the urge to apply a tag.  But there's more: how do our own tendencies for placing texts, let's say, in particular intellectual traditions reconcile with these two orientations: phenetic and phylogenic? 

Stopping here. I'm swamped, and need funnel what's left of the shortening evening toward a list of coming-dos in the week ahead.

A Typewriter?

In "Technology & Ethos" (1971), Amiri Baraka writes

A typewriter?--why shd it only make use of the tips of the fingers as contact points of flowing multidirectional creativity. If I invented a word placing machine, an '"expression-scriber," if you will, then I would have a kind of instrument into which I could step & sit or sprawl or hand & use not only my fingers to make words express feelings but elbows, feet, head, behind and all the sounds I wanted, screams, grunts, taps, itches, I'd have magnetically recorded, at the same time, & translated into word--or perhaps even the final xpressed though/feeling wd now be merely word or sheet, but itself, the xpression, three dimensional--able to be touched, or tasted or felt, or entered, or heard or carried like a speaking singing constantly communicating charm. A typewriter is corny!!

The passage streamed into our first meeting of Afrofuturism last night, framed some of our early thinking about innovation and technological promise. We're leading things off with the special issue of Social Text on Afrofuturism (Summer '02); and I'm volunteer no. 1 for leading the discussion, so I've got to wrap up Thomas Masters' Practicing Writing for 712 and get moving with how to frame this thing. I don't know when I'll return to this xcerpt from Baraka, but I wanted to set it aside, share it. The "entered" bit reminds me of Lanham's at/through, although Baraka is pushing toward something more bodily than the perceptual oscillations Lanham gives us. And I can think of ways this could connect with Hansen, particularly on point with the "body's framing function," even if the machine proper is "a kind of instrument."

Overview

I picked up this shot of a Chicago-area Target store on Tuesday (via via).

The initial write-up suggested that the big-box rooftop is advertising to the satellites orbiting on high, but the subsequent note acknowledges that the retail site is on O'Hare's well-traveled landing (or take-off) path. Whether it's aimed at folks in the window seats of airplanes or other sorts of eyes in the sky, the notion of discount retailers and other square-footage gluttons decorating their roofs for over-passers is something out of the ordinary (unless you count crop circles and Midwestern farmers cutting the hay-formations to root for the local team). You'll find a deeper collection of from-above shots at Google Sightseeing.

Ever since my days as an insurance claims adjuster, I've had a slight fascination with roofs, their ubiquity, their vital importance for the whatnots protected by them. Okay, so "slight fascination" is an overstatement. My first claim ever, however, as an apprentice adjuster ten years ago, involved a tornado-lifted rolled rubber rooftop at a sugar warehouse in Bay City, Mich (rel. to the Frankenmuth tornados in June of '96). The disaster had sort of created my job. In effect, the wind lifted the sealed roof, allowing the shallow pool of water accumulated on the top-side of the rubber to drizzle into the roof structure where it seeped along the steel beams and trickled steadily over the entire warehouse contents. More than a million bucks worth of rain afflicted sugar. It seems like there should be a point to this. Maybe it's that with logo-top roofs showing off to flight passengers and satellite mapping services, the underconsidered roof structures become even more complex. And so a claim for damages to the rooftop--beyond water seeping onto pallets of sugar--would now include a loss of advertising claim. Or something.

Also, it brings me all the way around to a few of the sites we looked at in GEO781 yesterday. I was especially impressed with the discussion of Dinkum Sands, Alaska, a seasonal speck of gravel-ice. Is it land sufficient for establishing coastal boundaries? I won't go too far with this because it's part of the professor's forthcoming book on coastal boundaries. But we looked at the charts of the area from the 1960s (right?), using the NOAA Historic Charts (search the charts for examples). We also looked at the American Memory archive at the Library of Congress (choose maps; MrSID viewing is enhanced with the downloadable viewer) and the intellicast.com US radar loops. For next week: ABAG on seismic activity and USGS GeoNames.

Hexagonal

Today in sixes:

6.1. Number of hours in seminars (GEO781 followed by CCR712 after a 15-minute break).
6.2. So I went to the gym.  The guy I was guarding...he dunked six times in two games.  All on fast breaks, but still. 
6.3 Number of times I thought to myself, Am I really so terrible at the sport I grew up playing all those years?
6.4 Number of times I thought, Yep.
6.5 Number of seconds I sucked for air after taking an elbow to the midriff and before getting up off of the floor.
6.6 Number of worksheets in the math packet--due tomorrow--that Ph. and I just finished working through.  Lots of shapes and drawings, protractor work, etc.

And the next fourteen Tuesdays stand a good chance of being equally overloaded.  Still, I can say that classes went well.  And the math packet: done.  Hoops? Well, besides having every waft of air knocked from my lungs that one time (it wasn't a charge?), I'm just happy for good-enough-to-walk-away health.

Trucking

You might have thought I was just horsing around last March when I posted a photo I'd taken of a delivery truck from a local produce distributor.  Silliness, you thought.  Sophomoric digression. 

Well, the email came today requesting an interview.  I answered with my cell number.  Then came the phone call. It's going to be a story about the Syracuse Banana Co.; I was told it will run in the Daily Orange later this week, probably Thursday.  No telling how many of my insights they'll have cause (or column inches) to include, but I hope they work in the part where I rattled off a version of, "We're accustomed to ordinary delivery trucks; then rumbles along a bright-yellow load of good from Syracuse Banana Co.  Wow! Because it's a riff on the university's hyper-orange mood, it's memorable.  When you're new to campus, it's the odd thing that's still with you at the end of the day."  Okay, so it was much more coherent on the phone.

Added: From the DO's Pulp Section, Friday (1/20): "Search Peels Away Banana Truck Mystery."

Lugging Around

Like Krista, I start back to classes tomorrow for the final semester of coursework.  The following selections fill the docket, in no particular order; they're the ones I'll be hefting around in the coming months.

GEO781: Seminar in Cartography: Web Mapping and Cybercartography
Mapping Hacks, Erle, Gibson, and Walsh.
Added (on reserve): Mapping Cyberspace, Dodge, Martin and Kitchen.
Maps and the Internet, Paterson, ed.
Web Cartography: Developments and Prospects, Kraak and Brown, eds.
Multimedia Cartography, Cartwright, Peterson, and Gartner, eds.
The Political Mapping of Cyberspace, Crampton.

CCR651: Interdisciplinary Studies in Language and Literacy: Afrofuturism
Afrolantica Legacies, Derrick Bell.
Race, Rhetoric, and Technology: Searching for Higher Ground, Adam Banks.
Technicolor: Technologies of Everyday Life, Alondra Nelson, ed.
Afrofuturism: A Special Issue of Social Text (July 2002), Alondra Nelson, ed.
Technology and the African-American Experience : Needs and Opportunities for Study. Bruce Sinclair, ed.
African Fractals: Modern Computing and Indigenous Design, Ron Eglash.
Information and Communication Technologies for Development in Africa, Ramata Molo Thioune, ed.
Black Inventors in the Age of Segregation, Rayvon Fouche.
Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora, Sheree Thomas, ed.

CCR712: Advanced Theory and Philosophy of Composition: Mapping the Future: Theory and Practice of "Writing" the Discipline
Practicing Writing: The Postwar Discourse of Freshman English,  Thomas Masters.
The End of Composition Studies,  David Smit.
In Search of Eloquence,   Cornelius Cosgrove and Nancy Barta-Smith.
Writing and Learning in Cross-National Perspective, ed. David Foster and David Russell.
Geographies of Writing,  Nedra Reynolds.
CityComp,  ed. Bruce McComiskey and Cynthia Ryan.
Writing Genres, Amy Devitt.
Tracing Genres through Organizations, Clay Spinuzzi.
Making Sense of the Organization, Karl Weick.
The Moment of Complexity, Mark Taylor.
The Tactics of Hope, Paula Mathieu.
The Language of Experience,  Gwen Gorzelsky.
The English Studies Book, 2^nd ed., Rob Pope.
Added: Literacy in the New Media Age, Gunther Kress.

There remains, no doubt, a wagonload of articles extending well beyond these fine selections.  And I've done pretty well to secure many of the books already, although my half.com orders placed just ten days ago haven't started showing up yet (most of the orders were for 712).  Also, I have a few high-priced items from the third list to line up once I figure out how extensively they'll be used.  Sixty-eight junior bacon double-cheeseburgers for the Foster and Russell edited collection had me thinking about how fond I am of libraries, for example.   

There Will Be No-Baking

I was standing in Home Depot this afternoon, browsing from item to item in the faucet aerators section of aisle ten. Yeah, we rent, but the kitchen faucet doesn't have an aerator, and so it gushes out far more water than we need or than is conservationally astute. I needed a fitting--a 15/16" double threaded, male-male to cobble together the faucet and the swivel head aerator we picked up the other day. But there were none. So I asked for help, but instead of talking to someone prepared to answer customer questions, I got an orange-frocked body in a trance: "We got nothing." No more discouraged, I asked another clerk. He scanned the same aerator section--just like I'd done twenty minutes before--and said, "We don't have anything like that." Damn. So I snapped open the flip-phone; dialed my big brother. He'd have to know an alternative.

Only he didn't answer. So I exchanged the swivel-head aerator for a conventional one and stepped back into the cold.

Next, J. called me back. By this time, I was on my way to P&C--our most recent grocery store of choice--for a few things to make meals come together in the week ahead. J. said he'd been on the phone with our grandmother because he was tracking down a recipe for nutter butters. Not the peanut-shaped cookies in the red package. These nutter butters were a treat from long ago. I would have claimed them as my favorite cookie for most of my childhood. Inexplicably, I'd pretty well surrendered any notion of them to the faded-forgottens of my memory, but since I was on the way to the grocery store anyway, I asked J. for the recipe (it was too late for his wisdom to rescue me from the aerator dilemma). Turns out the recipe--as my grandma told it to him--was my mom's. In fact, grandma read it to J. from a copy my mom had handwritten many years ago. So I figured, sure, that's all the motive I need to pick up the ingredients and stir together a batch. They're no-bakes--perfect balled-up cookies and good for involving kids in the kitchen. I came home and no-baked a batch tonight.

Nutter Butters

Into a bowl:

1 cup chunky peanut butter
2/3 cup honey
1/2 cup powdered milk
1 1/2 cups graham cracker crumbs (appr. one package yields this amount)

Incorporate the ingredients as well as you can. Next, dip out a clump and roll it into the shape of a super ball. Then drop it into a bowl of wheat germ or coconut, rolling it until it is coated. Repeat over and over again until all of the mix is used up. Also, for variety, I guess you can include a few chips (either chocolate or b'scotch), but I don't ever remember eating NBs with these add-ons as a kid, and I can't vouch for how it will turn out. Depending on the size of the cookie balls, you can get between 36-48 from these measures.

On account of the time-suck I endured at Home Depot and losses by the Bears and Colts, I can't give the day a high score overall. But it most definitely enjoyed a lift because of these cookies.

Miller on Collaboration

Catch Paul Miller's clip on the 24x7 film experiment weblog.  It's a short piece in which he talks about collaboration, jazz ensembles, software and interface (via).  Probably nothing in it that goes beyond what he does in Rhythm Science.  Yet, seeing/hearing Miller on video adds a little something.

Bibliometrics JACing

I got caught up reading the Moretti Event over at The Valve, but I still have a minute to post a few notes about something I was thinking about earlier today.  I read the introduction to David Smit's The End of Composition Studies yesterday; there, he has this to say about the ideological dissymmetry among compositionists, divergences characteristic of the field at-large:

No one can doubt that the field has become increasingly divided into narrow areas of concern with little indication that scholars and researchers in one area read, respect, or deal substantively with the work of those in other areas.  Since Stephen North's pioneering work The Making of Knowledge in Composition classified the work of the field into eight major areas, there have been few attempts to bridge gaps between those areas. A comparison of the works cited pages in College Composition and Communication, Rhetoric Review, JAC: A Journal of Advanced Communication Theory, and Written Communication reveals some overlaps, but not much.  Hence the need for additional taxonomies, frameworks, and "keys," such as those by James Berlin ("Contemporary"); Richard Fulkerson; and Mark Wiley, Barbara Gleason, and Louise Wetherbee Phelps to explain the various areas of the field. (7)

This is a common enough proposal about divisions, no?  A balkanism, attendant to new waves of theory wars, noting how we're crumbling apart, fraying.  Reasonable as Smit's insight may well be, however, I'm struck here by the notion that comparisons of our journals works cited pages somehow reflect a field "increasingly divided."  To compare for increasing division would necessarily involve some longevity and detail work.  It's just that the journals most readily associated with composition's disciplinary commons (the noetic field (Berlin) or epistemic court (Lauer))--the journals listed by Smit--aren't really data-made for exhaustive bibliographic comparison.  What method, then, is available other than what we can discern by scanning the listings for a selection of articles?  The interference for me as I read this passage from Smit is that our data structures for citation comparisons in composition journals are, well, quite scarce.  And that scarcity, while it leaves us with little alternative other than to intuit increasing divisions "into narrow areas of concern" based on citations, it also motivates our thinking with CCC Online.  As Collin has articulated before, with more discipline-wide embrace of data-mining, we would have--from all of the journals identified with the field--a more dynamic database through which to test claims about "increasing" divergence in citations.  For fear that this might sound disingenuous toward Smit, I'm not going for that effect.  In fairness, I've just read the beginning of The End....  But I'm increasingly alert to impressions of the field's breaking apart that might appear differently if held up alongside a comprehensive collection of all of the citations ever made in any journal associated with the field.  Why not?

More to point--and the last thing for the night: Matt Kirschenbaum, commenting at The Valve on the possibilities of the nora project, mentioned "the capacity [of nora's results] to startle." I find this turn far more interesting.  How would we go about assembling a comprehensive bibliometric/bibliographic database for an inter-discipline such as composition studies (based, perhaps, both in journals and in monographs) and, in doing so, celebrate its "capacity to startle," rather than denounce it as faux-empiricism?

Frappring the Consortium

Before the break, I spent part of an afternoon mapping all of the programs from the Composition and Rhetoric Consortium web site into Frappr, then copying/pasting the associated informational bits and URLs.  Once finished: a Frappr of the Comp/Rhet Consortium.  Sing sweet confessions, it was a fit of uninhibited geekiness, motivated in part by my recollection that, when I decided to apply to doctoral programs, I didn't have a simple way to single out the programs proximate to the Great Lakes--closest to where we ultimately hoped to move after KC.  Of course, the map stands the chance of amplifying other (surprising-insightful?) qualities of the consortium's East-leaning geography. It's possible that I've missed a program or two.  If you spot one, please let me know.  I'll add it (as long as its affiliation is undisputed).

Beyond that, there's another practical motivation: I'd been meaning to give Frappr a whirl (initially, I was thinking a collective From project with a DL course).  It's free and relatively easy.  The groups systematically associated  with the CR Consortium seem a bit off.  The Crochet Dude and Dr. Vino? Uh...if you insist.  Also, the system wants to remain open for others to add themselves. It would be nice if there was a moderator feature for sifting new member additions (the moderator is able to delete membrs and comments, fwiw, but anyone can add...I think).  Also, the data and profiles are somewhat constrained.  It's not possible--yet--to reorganize the listing of members.  They can be sorted by location, but you'll see that Syracuse is listed at the top.  I can't change that (well, right, maybe I wouldn't if I could, but still).

My hunch is that another mapping option (Google Maps EZ or a Google Maps API hack) would be better suited for the CR Consortium.  And although Frappr does an okay job of making available what I'd hoped to, I just might tinker with switching the map to a different system in the months ahead--especially if the geography course I'm taking encourages experimentation with Google Maps/Google Local.

Gamecast Viz

Sure, they've been around for a while, so it's a sliver shy of revolutionary that I'm calling your attention to the gamecast college basketball visualizations provided by ESPN.com.  There's something subtly inviting for me in the gliding mouse-over of the running score for a full game.  Pause at a spot; get the score for that moment in the game.  My only complaint: after the game has ended, the scores page drops the gamecast link and you have to wait a few minutes for the running score chart to be available again in the recap. Still, much better than anything going at CNNSI or CBS Sportsline (play-by-plays, stats leaders, etc.).

The More You Eat, Less Nights

Chorus to the Leftover Sup March when we have a huge vat of boiled dinner in this house, like we do now.  It's a rare feast (loaded with cabbage, of course).  Unpopular as it is, I figure I might as well stir up enough to hold over for a few days, what with it being the greyed-together days of early January and all.

Found Objects

In case you overlooked it, it's never too late to check out yesterday's Found Objects Zen.  Arguably worthy of a few minutes of your time: 10Eastern's Found Photos (a few bizarre, some ordinary-nothings), Look At Me (portraits of unknowns), and Swapotorium (a blog about junk).

Bigger East

With NCAA hoops conference play underway, I have to say I'm more than a little pleased to be in Big East Country for the upcoming college basketball season. The only shortcoming of the conference's schedule this year is that with sixteen teams, every program doesn't get a home and away match with ever other program. Our own Syracuse Orange aren't likely to be heading up the conference elite this season, and their chances of reaching the conference tournament championship: slimmer than last year (although they'll still pick up a few wins against the top teams and finish in the top six--behind UConn, Louisville, Nova, WVU and Pitt?). All the same, it's really hard not to be encouraged about Villanova's outlook. They posted a convincing road win at Louisville in the Big East opener for both programs the other day. I was lucky enough to attend the 'Nova-UNC game in the regional semifinals at the Carrier Dome last spring. It might have been North Carolina's toughest game in the entire tournament. Villanova had a legitimate shot at winning (game ended in favor of UNC, 67-66), except for a few late 50-50 calls going the other way. So save me a seat on the 'Nova 'wagon this year, at least to the Final Four, given everyone's healthy. If pressed to formalize other early hunches, I'd say they'll be joined by Illinois, UConn and Duke (yeah, the new Big East gets two to the FF this year). Want eight? Add in NC State, Florida, Memphis and Gonzaga.

We'll see if any of this holds over the next two months.

Celebrate Good Times

As of today, the blog is another year older. This makes two years of more or less connective, digitally habituated compositing. The 493rd entry, here before you.

That I don't have any grand celebratory declarations to offer suggests, I suppose, that I'm not ready to call it quits quite yet.  Blogging, whatever can be said about it (again and again) has been immensely useful for practicing writing in an out-there kind of way (sure, take "out-there" to mean anything you want it to mean).  But enough rationalizing already.  Here's to another assortment of entries--some irrelevant-boring, some notesy-academic and even some with pictures.

Broken-Down

While waiting in the customer service line at Kmart the other day--New Year's Eve afternoon--I had time to notice the recall posters taped along the top of the divider behind the counter. I suppose it's a formality--some kind of discount retailer requirement forcing them to post about malfunctioning products that've spent time on their shelves. The line was ten people long; I had plenty of time to look around, watch folks tug apart gigantic bins for storing away their holiday decor, listen to a cryptic exchange between two customers using Western Union to wire cash afar, and read over the fax-blob postings about failed products.

Among the recalls was a crock pot we received as a gift a few years ago: a Holmes Slow Cooker. I used it in early December for beef/vegetable improv. Just about anything slow cooked with salt and pepper turns out okay. Consequently, I cook in HSC all the time. I've never returned a product for recall. Never. But now I'll follow the instructions on the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission web site, "immediately stop using the product and contact The Holmes Group to receive instructions on receiving a replacement base." It is a crock pot, after all, and when I looked up crock just now, I verified that it refers both to an open, earthen jar and also to a nonsense message. In fact, it associates etymologically with the Norwegian krake, meaning sickly animal, and the Middle Dutch kraecke, or broken-down horse. So I guess this makes the recall seem imminent, as fateful as the contents of a slow cooker being, well, hot, which is among the complaints waged against the device.

Some Doodling Required

Complete with an explanation of the image retrieval logic under the hood (here I was thinking it might be hamsters on wheels), Retrievr, a beta search interface, returns the Flickr photos that most nearly correspond to the colors and shapes you draw (via).  Tagline: search by sketching. You decide whether its pre- or post-literate, electrate or something other. 

You read about it at EWM, er, something like 392^nd. 

Jamming, Sorta

Lest my wisecrack to C. the other day about my resolve to blog just once per week in the new year prove true, I really ought to get back into a groove with this business.  One at a time. Fifteen minutes at a time. I've run across a few momentarily interesting links, considered shoving them into this space.  Seconds later, they're lame.  But there's always the stuff of life to rescue me from blogthargy. At dinner tonight, for example, over reheated chicken noodle soup (home-cooked, no less, and stirred up to give an edge to D. in her battle against the villainous flegm-phunk), Ph. said something witty about chin-ups in P.E.  Chin-ups, eh?  Yep, he said. Scored a 38. So I was thinking chin bar, pull-ups...etc.  "Impressive." And then..."Overhand or underhand?"  Not even close.  The 21st-century "chin-ups," turns out, simply involve a measure from the floor to the chin while the back-arching student maxes out in an upward dog position.  I'm fending off the urge to invoke the presidential fitness testing jokes, relate it to Bushyacation programs such as No Child Left Behind.  Floor to chin, in centimeters.  Thirty-eight, eh? Guess that's blogable. Less so: that I tried it myself and managed a limber 44 cm (just getting onto the floor sets my shoulders to popping, flared my knees with pain, etc.). Even less so: those tasty flavored Triscuits and the talk about "What sort of Triscuits are they?" Followed by, shrug. Followed by, "Box says, Deli Style Rye." And so on.

Really, though, I've been jamming on CCC Online, working ahead on the archive, making the PDFs even more portable, running an OCR over their imageforms, touching up the text files, and cranking out keyword sets.  Also, doing a bit of course-developer oblige, answering questions, sprucing up course materials, and so on. And resuming a workout regimen that spelled body-magic a few years ago. And ordering books for my final semester of coursework.  And (re)reading through a few articles for a miniseminar next week (Ede, Logan, Fulkerson, Fleming and Yancey). And sneaking a few minutes of March Madness 2006 for the PS2.  And reading Scott McCloud.  And torture-eating, piece by colorful piece, through a two-pound baggieful of rock candy while worrying about my aging, weak, rotting enamel.  And scheduling dentist appointments, etc.  More than I realized, turns out.