Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Writing Feverlets^*

C urious about her critique of Derrida's Archive Fever, I picked up a copy of Carolyn Steedman's Dust: The Archive and Cultural History from Bird Library, recalling it from another patron who had checked it out (v. sorry about that). I deal briefly with AF in Chapter Three. Steedman makes the point that AF is less about archives than about Derrida's concern for the slippage of origins (a theme in his other work) and the inseparability of psychoanalysis from Freud (and also Judaism). She writes, "The Foreword [to AF] carried the main argument, about Freud's Jewish-ness, and the contribution of Jewish thought to the idea of the archive, via psycho-analysis" (7). Basically, Steedman is suspicious of Derrida's characterization of the fever (as a frenzied pursuit of origins which do not properly exist). She complains that the concept of the fever is degraded in translation from Mal d'Archive, and then she enthusiastically claims the sickness Derrida mocks: "Archive fever, indeed? I can tell you all about Archive Fever!" (17). Dust undertakes this "all about-ness" at fever's pitch; Steedman, all the while, works to correct (or tune, at the very least) Derrida's glancing consideration of the archive left behind in his treatment of other concerns (psychoanalysis, Freud, and so on).

Steeedman suggests that Derrida, in questioning the concept of archivization, was late to the game: "There was a further puzzlement (or more accurately, a bemusement feigned to mask a kind of artisant irritation) among those who knew the 'archival turn' to be well underway by 1994, with Derrida merely (though compellingly) providing a theoretical perspective on the institution of archives, the practices of reading and writing attendant on them, and the system of regulation and coercion they have (sometimes) underlined" (2). Here, identifying Derrida's tardiness to the conversation, next Steedman pairs him with Foucault and suggests that Derrida is merely winding down a path blazed by Foucault in the 1960s with The Archaeology of Knowledge. This all seems reasonable, except that Steedman downplays Derrida's insights on digital circulation. In twenty-first century discourse networks, an institutional (or disciplinary) memory is differently distributed (this strand of Derrida's lecture in 1994 seems to me to make him early rather than late, at least in terms of oncoming changes for archives because of digitization). As I read it, this is the point where Steedman's critique could be more lenient or forgiving than it is.

Steedman has more to say about Derrida, about magistrates, and about Michelet's work in the archive (some of which draws on an essay from Barthes I haven't read). Here's a sample of what she writes about the fever she knows so well, even relishes:

Typically, the fever--more accurately, the precursor fever^*--starts in the early hours of the morning, in the bed of a cheap hotel, where the historian cannot get to sleep. You can not get to sleep because you lie so narrowly, in an attempt to avoid contact with anything that isn't shielded by sheets and pillowcase. The first sign, then, is an excessive attention to the bed, an irresistible anxiety about the hundreds who have slept there before you, leaving their dust and debris in the fibres of the blankets, greasing the surface of the heavy, slippery counterpane. The dust of others, and of other times, fills the room, settles on the carpet, marks out the sticky passage from the bed to bathroom. (17)

Oye! To-do list: Reconsider the hotel booked for CCCC in April. As if the dust in the cheap hotel isn't enough, Steedman continues, describing the rising acuity of the hotel's built-in, built-up rattiness as a "screen anxiety." "What keeps you awake...is actually the archive, and its myriad of the dead, who all day long, have pressed their concerns upon you. You think: these people have left me the lot.... You think: I could get to hate these people; and then: I can never do these people justice; and finally: I shall never get it done" (17-18). Can their differences be summed up like this?: Steedman's work hinges on the past, the rank traces of dust (as material remnant of people and things); Derrida has concern for a fixation on the exhaustibility of the past the, in its obsessive pursuit, does not sufficiently heed the futurist orientation of the archive. Probably this is too simple.

I am losing hope that this one blog entry will mend the gap between Steedman and Derrida. I will shelve it in case I need to figure this out later (also because Steedman is not yet in the diss or my CCCC talk, for that matter). Before setting the entry to post, here are two more excerpts I want to hold onto:

This is what Dust is about; this is what Dust is: what it means and what it is. It is not about rubbish, nor about the discarded; it is not about a surplus, left over from something else: it is not about Waste. Indeed, Dust is the opposite thing to Waste, or at least, the opposite principle to Waste. It is about circularity, the impossibility of things disappearing, or going away, or being gone. Nothing can be destroyed. (164)

Curious here is whether Derrida works according to a similar set of principles: "It is about circularity, the impossibility of things disappearing, or going away, or being gone." Dust: no ends; AF: no origins.

Still more: Reading in a chapter called "The Story of Dust," Steedman's polarization of dust and waste is repeated; this time, however, it comes with a reference to Moretti:

Dust--the Philosophy of Dust--speaks of the opposite of waste and dispersal; of a grand circularity, of nothing ever, ever going away. There were complex, articulate and well-understood languages developed to express this knowledge, a few of which I have mentioned. And I suggest that Dust is another way of seeing what Franco Moretti described as the nineteenth-century solution to the violent ruptures of the late eighteenth century, a solution found in narrative. (166)

I am intrigued--even feverish (perhaps only struck with a passing feverlet)--by these tensions: narrative and database, a past-ist and futurist orientation for archivization, the im/permanence of material and digital substrates (nothing ever! going away, except when a hard drive crashes or a thumb drive takes an accidental tumble in the clothes dryer and no data is rescued in the lint trap). Different dusts, then, and different problems for archives, for the work of archivization and circulation, through which traces either go on or collapse into the brew.

Posted by at 10:40 AM | to Reading Notes

Thursday, December 20, 2007

Flight

A t the end of a semester, I'm usually in the mood for a change--something different. Weeks and months of pacing produce the deep craving for interruption--a break from duty-rhythm (in itself, a comment on rhythm of another scale). I am almost there; after tomorrow (the same day I finished with my q. exams one year ago) I will lay off for a week, ease into some consequence-light reading, nap, snack, take walks, watch a couple of Netflix DVDs.

Why not pick up something I wouldn't read but for the desire for a break? Okay, I already did this week. I was moping around the office the other night, nearly giving in to boredom, when D. handed me a copy of Sherman Alexie's Flight (cloud) and said, "Here, read this." What is it? Juvenile literature for book club. One hundred and eighty pages; a couple of one-hour blocks on the couch between 10 p.m. and 11 p.m. Quick read. Good, too.

Flight is Vonnegutsy through and through, the story of Zits, a pimply, edgy foster kid whose one-two of violence and defiance keep him bouncing from one terrible foster home to another. The book speeds Zits on a Billy Pilgrimage as he comes unstuck in time, drifting on a Ghost Dance in and out of a series of violent encounters: Custer's last stand, Gus's (conflicted) traitorous revenge, and a couple of others.

"You let him out of his cage?" I ask.
"Well, his wings were clipped."
"A clipped-wing bird ain't a bird," I say.
"All right, all right, Dr. Earth First, I'm not the one who clipped them. He was clipped when we bought him. And it wasn't like we bought him to be a tiny little Thanksgiving dinner. We loved that bird. I loved him. My daughter named him Harry Potter."
"That's cute."
"Damn right, it's cute. You want to hear the cutest part?"
"Yeah."
"I'm the cook of the family, the domestic, and Harry Potter loved to sit on my shoulder while I was cooking and insult my food."
"No."
"Yes, my wife and daughter told him to say Too much salt and I'm being poisoned and I want pizza instead."
"That's hilarious."
"Yes, it is. And there's more. You see, my daughter's favorite dish is pasta-anything. So I'm always boiling water. And Harry Potter is always sitting on my shoulder."
"Oh, shit," I say, already guessing the end of the story. (145-146)

Flight mixes in commentary on cycles of violence, innocence, and karmic retribution; combines a believably awkward teenage protagonist with his genuine 'whatever's and filthy language (enough that it wouldn't surprise me to hear about the language-chastisers complaining it off the shelves of school libraries). Maybe it's not quite a Slaughterhouse Five of 2007 (the ending is, after all, too nicely buttoned down given the upheaval of everything before it), but it is close: disturbing, insightful, layered. Close enough that you should pick up a copy if, like me, you are interested in a break that includes reading some stuff you wouldn't have any other opportunity to read.

Posted by at 9:30 PM | to Reading Notes

Friday, November 9, 2007

Narrative, Database

T oday I read Ed Folsom's PMLA article, "Database as Genre: The Epic Transformation of Archives," and the better part of the five responses to the piece and even Folsom's response to the responses. I won't attempt a full summary in this entry, but I wanted to note a few initial impressions and lingering questions.

The lead article discusses Folsom's efforts to develop The Walt Whitman Archive, a growing digital collection of Whitman's works--works not easily or summarily identifiable as narrative or as poetry. Folsom characterizes Whitman as a forerunner, noting that "[f]or him, the works was a kind of preelectronic database, and his notebooks and notes are full of lists of particulars--sights and sounds and names and activities--that he dutifully enters into the record" (1574). The identification of Whitman as an "early practitioner...of the database genre" (1575) doesn't, as far as I can tell, explain why his work should be any more appropriate for digitization and databased setup than any other, but it does give us the background on Folsom's insights into database as genre.

Folsom seems generally to adopt Lev Manovich's pitting of narrative versus database in The Language of New Media. The tension between database and narrative is repeated in Folsom's account of how the Whitman project evolved, with the database taking on a predatory dimension. Folsom explains, "Only if we insulated the narrative from the database could the narrative persist. As databases contain ever greater detail, we may begin to wonder if narrative itself is under threat" (1576).

In her response to Folsom's essay, "Narrative and Database: Natural Symionts," N. Katherine Hayles suggests replacing the rivalrous polarization of narrative and database with notions of compatibility and complementarity. Rather than accepting Manovich's description of the two as "natural enemies," we should think of them as "natural symbionts" (1603). Hayles introduces ecological and biological metaphors: "Database and narrative, their interdependence notwithstanding, remain different species, like bird and water buffalo" (1605). Each can do something the other cannot; together, they get along smartly. Yet, narrative (presumably the water buffalo; leaving database the back-pecking bird?) is "an essential technology for human beings who can arguably be defined as meaning-seeking animals" (1606). Citing Jerome Bruner, Hayles emphasizes the persistence and abundance of narrative: "Wherever one looks, narratives surface, as ubiquitous in everyday culture as dust mites" (1606). I admit to being mildly thrown off by the buffalo-bird-mites line-up. The mites--narrativistic minutiae--are not quite the same, I think, as the narrative-buffalo (or even narrative-bird, if that's the way you read it). Maybe the mites are more like data, and there is startling similarity in the small particles, whichever party they enliven. So many mites.

Hayles also has this to say:

"The constant expansion of new data accounts for an important advantage that relational databases have over narratives, for new data elements can be added to existing databases without disrupting their order ["to order" stands out earlier, as well, in Hayles' account of the strengths of database (1604)]" (1607).

"No longer singular, narratives remain the necessary others to database's ontology, the perspectives that invest the formal logic of database operations with human meanings and that gesture toward the unknown hovering beyond the brink of what can be classified and enumerated" (1607).

In his response to respondents, Folsom is won over by Hayles' replacement of "natural enemies" with "natural symbionts." Reading this series--the article and responses--I am wondering whether about the pairing itself. Does narrative go along with database? I mean that many of the treatments of the narrative/database dyad go at characterizations of the two. But why are there only two participants if, ultimately, we are thinking of these as they stand (water buffalo and bird) in the midst of a complex ecology of, well, everything else? I am not posing this question to detract from the quality of the conversation, only to call the terms back into question, and ask Why these two? Folsom's reference to database as genre makes this point seem all the more important to me. Is narrative genre? Maybe. In the same sense that exposition is genre, right? Should, then, exposition have a place in this discussion? Does database as genre parallel narrative as genre (i.e., does genre apply at the same scale to each?). I don't know. It seems like pairing of narrative and database, whether as "natural enemies" or "natural symbionts" is, in itself, adequate--and maybe it is adequate for getting at the two primary logics for arranging words and things.

Hayles characterizes some of the key differences between narrative and database; her account clarifies, for me, some of the basic qualities that hold them apart in their respective functions. Still, I wonder whether database and narrative should be predatory, symbiotic, even whether they might, in certain cases, be parasitic (one damages the other) or commensalitic (one gains from the other, but the one is unaffected). May as well be symbionts, right?

I'll stop here. This is all to say that the series slowed me down on the matters of 1.) genre and 2.) what other species are there besides narrative and database. I also need to spend more time reading on the concept of archives, beginning with the Manoff citation in Folsom's lead. If a carnivalrous mood strikes you, I'd enjoy more conversation on the set of articles.

Folsom, Ed. "Database as Genre: The Epic Transformation of Archives." PMLA 122.5 (2007): 1571–1579.

Posted by at 10:20 PM | to Reading Notes

Friday, July 6, 2007

Seasonal Visitors

E arly in The Function of Theory in Composition Studies, Sánchez discusses the differences between applying theory and writing theory. He refers to Hairston's "The Winds of Change," as a moment that inaugurates "an enduring method for 'doing' composition theory: take a term or concept from a more respected or respectable field such as philosophy and use it to illuminate some aspect of composition studies" (12). The way of theorizing about writing, according to Sánchez: appropriate and apply, appropriate and apply. There follows a soft critique: methods in scare quotes (i.e., "predominant 'methods'") and, within a few pages, a discussion of those who "have reasserted the importance of empirically oriented theorizing" (13). Sánchez echoes Linda Flower with his interest in ways "that composition theory might generate new theories rather than retrofit existing ones" (14). I haven't finished reading The Function of..., but I'm wondering at the end of the first chapter whether the retrofit and the new can coexist, whether they are hybrid and integral.

This feeds into another impression. In his chapter on "The Philosophers" (The Making of...), North draws on a metaphor of the marina to describe the group's turn-style make-up:

Given their backgrounds, the best first option of most of these movers (i.e., Practitioners), is the Scholars' community; and since Philosophical inquiry, in an area still so new, is so wide open--requiring the least retraining, demanding access to no special materials, and offering the chance of relatively quick publication--many have given it a try. A few, frustrated by what they perceive as the limitations of Philosophical work, are drawn on to try other modes of inquiry. Most presumably return to whatever they did before, finding themselves uninterested in or not suited for the effort involved in sustained Philosophical inquiry. The resulting demographic pattern is rather like that of a marina: a small core of full-time residents; a larger group of longer-term types, who may stay as long as two or three years, or move in and out with some regularity; and lots of one-time seasonal visitors who nevertheless--by sheet weight of numbers--leave their mark on the community. And so, even though we can say that the community has developed a stronger sense of its own identity--especially, like the Historians, in terms of a more potent critical self-consciousness--there are in fact enormous individual differences in the extent to which such a claim can be true. (92)

A long quotation, I know. I have italicized the line about the "resulting demographic pattern," in part because I have been thinking about patterns and disciplinarity, and I think that Sánchez is building toward a discussion of pattern generation (a theory of writing as pattern generation) in his push away from hermeneutics, away from writing as representation, and away from the appropriate/apply method of theorizing. But I want to add an asterisk, a qualifier, to this anticipatory sense of where Sánchez is taking me. Keeping with North's marina metaphor, might it be that professionalization and graduate training contribute to the appropriate-apply method of theorizing writing? Even the multi-year residents at the Complandia marina moved there at some point, new to the neighborhood with their things not far behind. Among those things, square boxes packed with "Derrida, Foucault, Cixous, Wittgenstein, Irigaray, and so on" (13).

Posted by at 11:15 AM | to Reading Notes

Wednesday, June 13, 2007

How Far Can We Drift?

I 've been re-reading Cynthia Haynes' "Writing Offshore: The Disappearing Coastline of Composition" over the past two days. I'd read it this spring, even referred to it in my CCCC paper and in my dissertation prospectus. But this time I wanted to work at it more slowly, soak in it.

This time around, I kept finding floating crumbs that made me think this is the 50-page scholarly article version of China Mieville's The Scar. I probably can't do justice to this in the time I have right now, but I will try. Considering that The Scar is an adventure on the high seas about a hybrid, hodge-podge floating city (Armada, as dappled and remade as composition studies) and the fetishistic Lovers who command the peculiar conglomeration, there are surprising tie-ins. [Spoiler alert.]

Haynes writes of her own sea-ward excursion, a whale-watching trip into the Artic Sea. This is the event that primes her call for writing offshore, for abstraction, drifting, and groundless solidarities that offset the anchor that is argumentation, the root of composition's "pedagogical juggernaut" (673). On abstraction and composition's containment of it, a "thunderous breach"!

Just there, beneath the seas of Eckhart's theological detachment and Heidegger's secular withdrawal, we witness the thunderous breach of our whale--abstraction. But unlike Melville's Ahab, we do not slaughter the abstraction and lash it to our vessel in order to preserve some divine balance between Kant's a priori and Locke's tabula rasa. We let it be abstract; we withdraw, move away, and tread in astonishment. Into its wake I would have us sail as awakened teachers of writing and rhetoric, inviting students to detach themselves from us, from the ground--and to think in the abstract, in writing. (677)

Leap from Melville's whale to Mieville's avanc, a too-deep-to-be-seen mythical underwater creature, harnessed by the Lovers in an attempt to tow the floating city and its castaways toward their destination, the mysterious scar. Preparations:

The frantic work continued, and below the water, the shape of the avanc's harness grew slowly more solid. It was ghosted, its outlines in girders and wooden supports, like an abstract for some implausible building. As the days went on it grew a little more substantial, its intricate spines and gears more like something real. It grew through extraordinary efforts of the crews. The city was on something like war footing, every iota of industry and effort commandeered. People understood that they were careening at breakneck speed into a new epoch. (345)

Back to Haynes who would have us steer "toward an abstract horizon" (671):

The diverse senses of converting argumentation pedagogy to teaching abstraction could also include teaching how to achieve distance, to detach from one's preconceptions, distill concepts, condense language, and translate meanings. Learning to abstract would involve learning the alluring nature of language, how it draws you away, how it seduces you. (715)

What are the limits of this seduction? I ask not because I'm doubtful of Haynes' push-off from the shore but because I find it reassuring, even encouraging, her discussion of abstraction. For the Armadans, including Tanner Sack, the underwater specialist given to morphing amphibious, and Bellis, the translator of many languages, containing the avanc took a turn:

The avanc is sick.
Trying to continue its mindless motion at the rockmilk engine's command, it slows and slows. It is--what? Bleeding, wounded? Fevered? Chafed sore by the alien reality around it? Too mute or stupid or obedient to feel or show its pain, the avanc's lesions are not healing. They are shedding their dead matter in suppurating clots that eddy free and drift up like oil, expanding as the crushing pressure lessens, enveloping and suffocating fish and weed, until what breaks the waves with a mucal slurp is a noisome coagulate of infection smothered sea-life.
Somewhere between two and three thousand miles into the Hidden Ocean, the avanc is sick. (491-492)

A groundless solidarity between the whale of abstraction and the harnessed avanc? Uncertain. But why not work at this in a course, say an unlikely graduate course, one piled high with ground/sea allegories for the discipline, for discourse, and so on.

A few of the readings:
Haynes, Cynthia. "Writing Offshore: The Disappearing Coastline of Composition Theory." JAC 23.4 (2003): 667-724.
Royster, Jacqueline Jones. "Academic Discourses or Small Boats on a Big Sea." ALT DIS: Alternative Discourses in the Academy. Christopher Schroeder, Helen Fox, and Patricia Bizzell, eds. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 2002. 23-30.
McComiskey, Bruce. "Introduction." English Studies: An Introduction to the Discipline(s).
Neel, Jasper. "Reclaiming Our Theoretical Heritage: A Big Fish Tale." Olson 3-11.
Mieville, The Scar.
Deadliest Catch, season I.
Sid Perkins on "Flotsam Science." Week of April 28, 2007; Vol. 171, No. 17 , p. 267.

Posted by at 10:15 PM | to Reading Notes

Sunday, June 3, 2007

Transmittable Airways

T racy Kidder's Mountains Beyond Mountains is the U.-wide shared reading for the fall semester at Syracuse. Because I will be teaching freshmen in the fall, I picked up a complimentary copy from the Writing Program office about ten days ago, figuring I'd read it sooner rather than later to get some sense of how it might merge in with the teaching I'll be doing in late August. I haven't worked that part out yet because I haven't received my formal course assignment (slight chance that it will be a Wellness Learning Community section). Still, it's never too early to begin thinking about such things. Basically, the book is Kidder's journalistic portrait of the life-work of Dr. Paul Farmer, a physician specializing in TB who is also trained as an anthropologist and who has deep convictions about treating infectious disease where it hits hardest--among the poor. A NYT Bestseller, the book trails Farmer from his start-up work in Haiti, which grew into Partners In Health, to related efforts to treat MDR (multiple drug resistant) TB in a region of Peru (eventually the entire country) and also in the prison system in Russia. Farmer is depicted as ingenious and unshakably committed to his work; he responds to ceaseless demands with a conventions-be-damned attitude toward medical treatment and cost efficacy when it comes to TB treatments.

I had considered posting about the book earlier, noting the few check-marks I've put in the margins next to the bits I want to find again--bits about Farmer's language games (ending assertions about commonplace attitudes toward the poor with the word comma to imply the unspoken word to follow: asshole; personifying infections diseases and closing his rants with Love, ID.; or his neologisms and PIH-speak: "[t]o commit 'a seven-three' was to use seven words where three would, and a 'ninety-nine one hundred' was quitting on a nearly completed job" (217). Or the bit about "hermeneutics of generosity" (215), where ethos blends with the believing game.

The TB-infected passenger who hopped aboard a flight to Atlanta generated more noise than I would have expected in light of reading Kidder's book. I'm no TB expert (not even close), but Kidder's book gives a reasonably straight-forward account of the differences among the virus's drug resistances. In fact, Farmer is notable in the subject-of-a-book sort of way in part because he is credited with getting at the complexities of TB's multiply resistant manifestations. The breakthroughs in Peru involved his realization that certain first-line treatments of the disease were, in effect, teaching the virus to resist certain drugs. Treatment success rates were so low because the medical establishment hadn't yet figured out that their treatments were smartening up the virus. The treatments were proliferating strands of the virus that were less likely to be remedied through conventional and decades-old practices.

This week's news, however, involves a case of XDR TB or extensively drug resistant tuberculosis, for which there is only a 30-pecent cure-rate (so says CNN). I can't remember any discussion of XDR TB in Mountains Beyond Mountains (my biggest complaint about the book is that it doesn't have an index), but as these events play out, as passengers who held seats on the plane get tested, and as we watch the airlines scramble to resolve the medicalization of air space (not only for flying and border-crossing, but for breathing), I am thinking about this splash of news as a kind of mini-sequel to Kidder's book, an extra chapter in what is, for me, a new awareness of the complex set of issues knotted together where medical research, germ circulation, epidemiology, border-keeping, and health care privacy come together.

Posted by at 8:15 AM | Comments (2) | to Reading Notes

Wednesday, May 23, 2007

Miscellaneous Notes

D avid Weinberger's Everything Is Miscellaneous (Amazon | blog) accounts for the overhaul of classificatory efforts brought about through various digital platforms--del.icio.us, Wikipedia, Flickr, and so on--as each affords nearly limitless reorganization. This third order, the digital, amplifies miscellany, and with it characteristics of mayhem, disorderliness, and pandemonium that distinguishes the digital from contending orders. Weinberger tabs this condition the "new order of order," and he ends the book's prologue with a gesture that brings information to life, infuses it with desire: "[information] wants to be miscellaneous" (7).

Much of what Weinberger does depends on his own taxonomy--an unshakeable bedrock of three orders, each distinct from the other. The first order is material (silverware drawers, shelved books); the second order is paper-bound (card catalogues, etc.). Each earlier order has its problems, Weinberger argues, and only a few of those problems are shared with the third order, the digital. His examples are persuasive, from the arbitrariness (and implicit cultural rootedness) of alphabetization to dogmatic assertions about the universe (or all of the fauna and flora in it) to the design rational of the periodic table of elements--with each anecdote, Weinberger shows the constraints of monolithic categorization schemes. In the digital order, the singular scheme is loosened; "everything has its place" shifts plural, as "everything has its places" (45).

To illuminate this sea change, Weinberger goes at the strained hierarchies of the Dewey Decimal System and contrasts it with the "planned serendipity" (59) in a system like Amazon's, where multiuser metadata and intelligent agents merge into a robust system for circulating interests, influence, and recommendations. He also writes about lists, about laundry, Linnaeus, and the inadequacy of trees (70) (See today's Wired: excerpt from EIM and this). On paper, a classification scheme like Linnaeus's gets bogged down. But the digital order supports layers of tags as well as "faceted classification" (76); now coated in metadata, the sorted object is readily traced along multiple arrays.

The book has much to offer; there's more here than I'm able to recapture right now. On the whole, Everything Is Miscellaneous accomplishes something we can use very much: it works through the ways classification schemes, if ever they were presumed to be rigid and reductive, are giving way to digital circulation and with it a certain buoyant impermanence better matched with the nature of epistemology, especially when we come at it with certain things in mind: rhetoric, production, circulation, and performance. That said, the entire project is circumscribed by its promising counterstatement: It's A Damn Good Thing Everything Isn't Miscellaneous (Weinberger says something similar near the end). I mean, where Weinberger is upbeat about the digital order, his focal premise forces more thoughtful reconsiderations of just how much shared ordering is necessary and practical. I would call this a symptom of all-isms or everything-ness, where the title's "everything" is bait rather than a blanket assertion.

EIM bears out a few confusing moments, as Weinberger himself has acknowledged. For instance, where he discusses meaning (169), I thought his approach risked moving too far in the direction of interpretation and away from production (i.e., knowledge wrought by reading, not writing, though I'm treating this split too simply). I also wondered how it might work to compound the order/mess pairing in chapter nine with something like stagnation and circulation (176); the activity Weinberger stresses with tagging is as much, to my mind, about scraping raw again that which has settled, grown inertial--commonplaces, givens, God terms, doxa. Again, I'm back to circulation.

I also like the section where Weinberger discusses echo chambers, "Shard Knowledge." But there's a point at which he distinguishes conversation from writing: "The noise this [conversation] makes is very different from the scratch of a philosopher's ink on paper. Paper drives thoughts into our heads" (203). Sure, there's something doctrinaire and trusted in paper's longevity, but I worry that anyone would accept as intrinsically more grounded (i.e., sensible, thought-out, careful) anything simply because it appeared on paper. Plus, conversation and dialogue don't belong to the third order digital apparatus any more than the second order of paper--just differently.

As I said three paragraphs ago when I sensed that I was nearing the end of this entry, there's much I'm glossing. I'll come back to some of these ideas later on, I suspect; they're good enough to hold with a favorable lastingness (esp. "joints of nature" (32), metadata defn (104), faceted classification (78), and family resemblances (185). I'll also formally, officially add miscellanize to the belt of verbs one day soon. And, as if that's not enough of an indication of praise, I'm also going to continue to think through how I might use Everything for the WRT205 course I teach next spring.

Posted by at 7:00 PM | Comments (2) | to Reading Notes

Sunday, April 29, 2007

English Studies' Anchorage, Flotilla

B ruce McComiskey begins his introduction to English Studies: An Introduction to the Discipline(s) with a striking anecdote about the annual Raft debate among scholars from various disciplines at Alabama-Birmingham. The Raft debates start with a sinking-boat scenario. The main ship is in crisis, and all of the passengers have hurried into lifeboats, saving just one spot for a final survivor. The quandary, however, is that three passengers remain on the sinking ship, and all of them are professors at UAB who must vie with the others for the final seat on the life raft by making the most persuasive arguments for their discipline. The arguments--a braid of humor, deliberate provocation, and refutation, frame the event, which unfolds in front of colleagues and students. Audience applause determines the winner. The scenario, in effect, contributes a sense of urgency to an otherwise playful (if viciously candid) cross-disciplinary interchange. A professor of public health defeated McComiskey (who was representing English Studies) in 1999, but the outcome was inevitably the result of disciplinary incoherence, a problem the book sets out, following the early pages, to resolve: "What exactly is English studies?" (2).

The bulk of the introduction is divided into three sections: English Studies in Historical Context, The Problem of Specialization, and The New English Studies. For my own purposes, I'm attending primarily to "The Problem of Specialization," as I intend in one chunk of the dissertation to address specialization and its forms of relief (if they're not bona fide remedies). The rest of the collection is organized according to fields and subfields more or less belonging to the super-category of English Studies: Linguistics and Discourse Analysis, Rhetoric and Composition, Creative Writing, Literature and Literary Analysis, Critical Theory and Cultural Studies, and English Education.

I find the sinking-ship scenario striking because there's a certain shock in considering how my own defense of English Studies above any other discipline would take shape. I'm not alarmed at the thought of defending or explaining the work I do, but it would be especially difficult to do so while at the same time disparaging the work of another field. I mean that I know little enough about surrounding disciplines (a problem of specialization) that the spontaneous assertions I could make about the work of most others in the academy would be based at best on myths, stereotypes, and rumors. Perhaps in direct proportion to specialization, all disciplines suffer from obfuscation and misunderstanding. Meanwhile, the ship bobbed in the on-rushing waters....

I have another reason for taking note of the sinking-boat scenario, a reason I will say a few things about tomorrow (or later in the week).

Posted by at 10:45 PM | to Reading Notes

Tuesday, October 17, 2006

Information Pickup

I was reading for exams when I came across "The Theory of Information Pickup and Its Consequences," Ch. 14 in James Gibson's The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Gibson writes about ecological optics; a version of his theory of affordances appears in ch. 8. He's a small piece of what he writes about information pickup:

The act of picking up information, moreover, is a continuous act, an activity that is ceaseless and unbroken. The sea of energy in which we live flows and changes without sharp breaks. Even the tiny fraction of this energy that affects the receptors in the eyes, ear, nose, mouth, and skin is a flux, not a sequence. The exploring, orienting, and adjusting of organs sink to a minimum during sleep but do not stop dead. Hence, perceiving is a stream, and William James' description of the stream of consciousness (1890, Ch. 9), applies to it. Discrete percepts, like discrete ideas, are "as mythical as the Jack of Spades." (240)

What I find interesting is how the idea of constant information pickup helps us move toward more nuanced understandings of attention and attention structures (more like Linda Stone's "continuous partial attention" than a reductive two-type alternative: focus and digression). Much in this always-on "sea of energy" will be noise. But if we accept the persistence of "exploring, orienting, and adjusting," even during sleep, then the polar extremes of focus and digression have a whole lot of messiness and richness going on between them.

So it is noted. And tossed into the rock polisher, set to agitate until smooth against some other ideas about pickup, collecting: Katamari Damacy, Benjamin's unpacked library, Sirc's box-logic, database v. narrative, filtering, aggregation, overload, and so on.

Posted by at 11:20 PM | Comments (1) | to Reading Notes

Thursday, September 7, 2006

No Last Word

R emembering to read a little bit of Barthes from time to time. I like this one (from RB):

When I used to play prisoner's base...

When I used to play prisoner's base in the Luxembourg, what I liked best was not provoking the other team and boldly exposing myself to their right to take me prisoner; what I liked best was to free the prisoners--the effect of which was to put both teams back into circulation: the game started over again at zero.

In the great game of the powers of speech, we also play prisoner's base: one language has only temporary rights over another; all it takes is for a third language to appear from the ranks for the assailant to be forced into retreat: in the conflict of rhetorics, the victory never goes to any but the third language. The task of this language is to release the prisoners: to scatter the signifieds, the catechisms. As in prisoner's base, language upon language, to infinity, such is the law which governs the logosphere. Whence other images: that of choosing up hand over hand (the third hand returns, it is no longer the first one), that of scissors, paper, stone, that of the onion in its layers of skin without a core. That difference should not be paid for by any subjection: no last word. (50)

After reading through Invention as a Social Act, I turned to this bit from RB to untwist what I was reading about collaboration as a dialectical process from Lefevre. No need to blur the distinction between synthesis (anti/thesis wound together like a bread-tie) and "scatter[ing] the signifieds."

Although this is as much because I was posting Barthes passages last year, 9/7.

Posted by at 11:00 PM | to Reading Notes

Saturday, August 26, 2006

Writing as Transcribed Reality

F rom Berlin's Rhetoric and Reality, a crumb from today's exam reading:

Current-traditional rhetoric did undergo a number of changes during this period [1920-1940], even though none of them were substantive. One new addition to the classroom was the use of the research paper. Requiring students to engage in library research was a predictable outcome of a course taught by teachers whose major source of professional rewards was the accumulation of research publications. Furthermore, the research paper represented the insistence in current-traditional rhetoric on finding meaning outside the composing act, with writing itself serving as a simple transcription process. The first article in English Journal to discuss the teaching of the research paper appeared in 1930 (Chalfant), but use of the research paper was commonly mentioned in program descriptions in the twenties. Textbooks that included discussion of the research paper began to appear in significant numbers in 1931. After this, no year of English Journal appeared without a number of articles on approaches to teaching the research essay. It should also be noted that the widespread use of this assignment was influenced by the improvements in library collections during the twenties, as well as by new ways of indexing these materials for easy access--the periodical guides, for example. (70)

Here, the point about research paper writing sparked by indexing systems jumps out at me. A good collection (institutional or personal; for the greater good or for my own good) needs only to be indexed when it is housed with other collections, right? The index associates and disassociates. It preserves a minor degree of granularity while introducing scalable ties (one with one, one with many, many with many). Or not. Not exactly, anyway. Still the thought of research writing before the convenience of libraries--collecting, tracing, indexing, tagging, associating--is somehow refreshing. There is a small, pleasant jolt in the reminder of something less systematized, less comprehensive: a pre-indexical aberrance.

Posted by at 10:40 PM | to Reading Notes

Thursday, March 16, 2006

Phonographies

B ut that's not what I went to the bookstore for. I stopped down there to purchase a copy of Weheliye's Phonographies (a late arrival, absent from the shelves when the semester started). It's assigned for Afrofuturism in two weeks, and as I've been trying to maximize break for getting a jump on the end-o-sem workpile, I read through the library's copy of the book, finishing it last night. But it's good enough to own. In fact, if the "DJing is writing, writing is DJing" plug in Miller's Rhythm Science resonated for you, Weheliye has an entire chapter on the mix (c. 3). His opening chapters (the Intro and c. 1) also have a few good pieces on the record's function as an inscribed sonic medium. There's much here to elaborate up the uncanny ties between writing and phonography, to extend them, etc. The second chapter, "I am, I be," links sound to identity, working across issues of opacity and "sonic conjuring" to categories and constellations of the subject (also echoes W.'s article on black subjectivity, the optic/phonic and posthumanism in Social Text). The third chapter: DuBois and the mix. c. 4: sound's construction of space, read through Ellison's "Living with Music," and Darnell Martin's I Like It Like That. And c. 5 reads the circulation of the diasporic motif in songs by The Fugees, Advanced Chemistry, and Tricky and Martina. The "Outro" has a bit to say about about his methods and also, drawing on Massumi briefly, makes a case for affirmative methods: "'techniques which embrace their own inventiveness and are not afraid to own up to the fact that they add (if so meagerly) to reality'" (208). Chapters 4 and 5 stand out from the others as places where Weheliye gives readings; his approach in those chapters is somewhat less theoretical than in the others, aligning with more literary studies or cultural studies re-presentations of sources. And yet, I expect to return to c. 4 for his arguments about "sounding space/spacing sound" and the issues of space remade by music, noise. For a more careful review, read this.

Posted by at 12:00 PM | Comments (2) | to Reading Notes

Sunday, February 19, 2006

Kress - Literacy in the New Media Age (2003) II

I n Literacy in the New Media Age, Gunther Kress settles into a gradual progression from long-held presumptions about alphabetic literacy to an increasingly hybridized and "multimodal" literacy based on the screen. The screen's proclivity for combining images and text has profound consequences, Kress argues, for the temporal/sequential logics of letter, word and clause as units of meaning. Kress contends that syntactic complexity is compromised as the frenetic reading pathways of the screen condition readers and writers to mixed-mode framings that, in turn, impact how they read and write. Contrary to my expectations, Kress is none too sour on this trend; in fact, his movement through dense sociolinguistic explanations of literacy, genre and punctuation as framing are impressively nuanced. Yet, very little of the first two-thirds of the book is explicit about the ways in which new writing technologies are entangled in the shifts he describes, and in this sense, I find Kress to be frustrating in how patiently he advances his back-analysis on traditional alphabetic literacy (replicated in formal Western schooling)--while the matter at hand--screens as a site of particular kinds of changed writing activity--hovers as a given. This book is far more about "Literacy" than about "the New Media Age;" it inches toward actual discussions of interfaces, and finally, near the end of chapter eight, offers a screen-shot of a web page with eleven (by Kress's count) "entry-points" for reading. Kress's point with the screenshot: "'reading' is now a distinctively different activity to what it was in the era of the traditional page" (138).

Granted, the tensions between linearity and directionality; image, writing and speech; space and time; and screen and page are significant, and because Kress is so complete in his attention to these contending factors, LITNMA is a solid primer for 'literacy after the revolution'. There are, Kress concludes, heavy implications from all of this on teaching--bang that drum, yes? I re-discovered, in chapter seven, "Multimodality, Multimedia and Genre," familiar ideas before I realized that I'd read it before. It's anthologized in Carolyn Handa's Visual Rhetoric in a Digital World, one of the collections we looked at two years ago in CCR601. In the chapter, Kress works on the problem of "ensembles of modes"--mixed imagetexts that don't reconcile neatly with known genre-types: "In the new communicational world there are now choices about how what is to be represented should be represented: in what mode, in what genre, in what ensembles of modes and genres and on what occasions" (117). At the end of the chapter, Kress determines that notions of mixed genres are less useful and that labeling is perhaps unhelpful; instead, we might prepare students to "feel at ease in a world of incessant change" (121) with something like Carolyn Miller's genre as social action or more generative applications of genre.

The chapter I'll return to, however, is chapter nine, "Reading as Semiosis," because it's the place where Kress best develops the shift from reading as interpretation to reading as design (50) (in new media encounters). He wants us to get at the question of whether "reading" refers to the linear process of following alphabetic sequences or, in light of the subordination of text to image and the ubiquity of the screen, something else, something akin to combinations, scanning, and reading paths (I'd include pattern) (156). There's much in this chapter to recommend re: reading the digital; it's the place I'll turn to first when I revisit this book for comps later this year. And just one last point (because it's late...), the final chapter is also a nice sketch of many of the other principles embraced by the New London Group.

Terms: display (9), scape (11), reading path (37), concept map (54), placement (65), genres (93), recount (108), ensembles of modes (116), distance (118, 141), transduction (125; elsewhere, see index), anaphoric (128), emergent writing (146), functional specialisation (20, 156, elsewhere), scanning (159), anchorage (165)

Of note: Chart on p. 70; Genre and labels 112 and 118 (conflict!)

Quotations

"A vast change is under way, with as yet unknowable consequences. It involves the remaking of relations between what a culture makes available as means for making meaning (what I shall call throughout the book, representational modes--speech, writing, image, gesture, music and others) and what the culture makes available as means for distributing these meanings as messages (the media of dissemination--book, computer-screen, magazine, video, film, radio, chat, and so on). 'Literacy', in whatever sense, is entirely involved in that" (22).

"A question that is pressing is, is it possible to make the same meanings with sounds in time (and all the cultural elaborations of that) as with light in space (and the elaborations of that)? This becomes urgent now that the new technologies permit a ready and easy choice: shall I represent this as written text or as image?" (33).

"This book is not the place to conduct this debate [on the cultural pessimism toward changes in reading and writing] in any extended fashion, but is can be the place for starting it in a way that goes beyond mere polemic, and might suggest the framework within which a productive argument might be conducted around this question" (51).

"My assumption is that syntactically and textually writing may be becoming more speech-like once again, while in its visual/graphic/spatial dimensions there is a move in the opposite direction, away from speech" (73).

"Does the category of genre remain important, useful, necessary; does it become more or less important in the era of multimodal communication? The answer is that the category of genre is essential in all attempts to understand text, whatever its modal constitution. The point is to develop a theory and terms adequate to that" (107).

Posted by at 11:10 PM | to Reading Notes
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Friday, February 17, 2006

Kress - Literacy in the New Media Age (2003)

I 'm just eight pages into Gunther Kress' Literacy in the New Media Age. I've read the chunk before the preface (what is this thing, a superpreface, an antepreface, pre-preface?): "The Futures of Literacy: Modes, Logics and Affordances." This much is clear: image and text function according to distinctive logics. With text, word follows word. It's sequentiality involves a distinctive commitment, both for writers and readers, to paths and naming. Text inheres time, whereas image inheres space, Kress tells us. Image involves a kind of commitment to location, and while Kress hints at the importance of perceptual paths for readers of images, that point doesn't get extended early on. Next, Kress discusses media and affordances; these few lines are a sample of what he's got going here:

1. Multimodality is made easy, usual, 'natural,' by these technologies. (5)
2. The new technologies have changed unidirectionality into bidirectionality. (6) (i.e. with the email, you can send and receive)
3. Writing is becoming 'assembling according to designs' in ways which are overt, and much more far-reaching, than they were previously. (6)
4. The affordances and the organisations of the screen are coming to (re)shape the organisation of the page. (6)
5. It is possible to see writing becoming subordinated to the logic of the visual in many or all of its uses. (7)

That subordination concerns Kress, and I anticipate that it fuels what will ultimately play out as a beware-of-image argument for Writing conservation (pictures are preying on our dull-wit kids, sapping their Literacy, etc.). But you're right; to be fair, I should read more of it before leaping to cyniclusions. Here's an overarching statement near the end of the pre-preface:

What do I hope to achieve which this book? There is a clear difference between this book and others dealing with the issues of literacy and new media. The current fascination with the dazzle of the new media is conspicuous here by its absence. I focus on just a few instances and descriptions of hypertextual arrangements, internet texts, or the structure of websites. I am as interested in understanding how the sentence developed in the social and technological environments of England in the seventeenth century, as I am in seeing what sentences are like now. The former like the latter--in showing principles of human meaning-making--can give us ways of thinking about the likely developments of the sentences in the social and technological environments of our present and of the immediate future. In that sense the book is out of the present mould; in part it looks to the past as much as to the present to understand the future. It is a book about literacy now, everywhere, in all its sites of appearances, in the old and the new media--it is about literacy anywhere in this new media age. (8)

With his explicit attention to sentences, I'm not expecting much in the way of arrangement at a larger scale--the relationship of larger units of writing as perhaps both spatial and temporal commitments. And I am glad to know that LITNMA is catalogued in Google Books, so I can find that "arrangement(s)" turns up 39 times, and "rhetoric" makes just three appearances. I'll also have to read this review after I get farther along with my own reading. More notes before the weekend's up....

Posted by at 10:00 PM | to Reading Notes
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Tuesday, February 14, 2006

Problems and Stases

A nother double-seminar Tuesday coming up:

In 720 this afternoon, we're talking up the stases (definition, fact, cause, value and action, following Fahnestock and Secor) and looking through Joseph Williams' "Problems into PROBLEMS" (PDF) to re-see the first few pages of two pieces--one of our own and one from a journal. I appreciate the problems brought up in the comments when Collin first mentioned Williams' monograph back in June--problems of being too dedicated to problem orientations, of fixating superproblematic. Still, I found this process immensely useful--returning to Williams, turning Williams' prototype intro-grammar toward an essay I've been struggling with, and giving a similarly framed writerly reading to a published article. Williams' model, like the stases, were exactly the heuristics I was needing to pull apart a few of the stifling think-knots messing up my writing. For next week, Gunther Kress, Literacy in the New Media Age. I'll try to post some notes; I've got to get going with it later this week because I'm also leading the discussion of Kress' stuff.

Before 720, however, I've got three hours of cybercartography, including pair of mini-briefings (short talks in front of the class). One covers good/bad examples of maps designed for the screen; the other is a report on early moves toward the larger project for the course.

Posted by at 9:05 AM | to Reading Notes

Tuesday, February 7, 2006

In Search Of

W e capped our discussions of Smit's The End of Composition Studies (2004) and Cosgrove and Barta-Smith's In Search of Eloquence (2004) in 712 this afternoon. Smit opens for us with six chapters leading down the skeptic's infinite regress into complandia's hopeless abyss before turning to his recommendations for reform. His plans for a refurbished curriculum aren't as despairing as his account of the impossibility of teaching writing. No screeching demons, no ravenous hellhounds. In fact, the curriculum pretty well matches with Writing Across the Curriculum efforts. Smit turns out to be a proponent of a first-year course called "Introduction to Writing as a Social Practice" (185). Upper division instructors would share responsibility for teaching the course; "They must," Smit contends, "be part of a broad university-wide program that introduces all novice writers 'slowly but steadily and systematically' to new genres and social contexts, a program that encourages students to develop their 'structural, rhetorical, stylistic facility' over time (Rose 112)" (188). The second tier of Smit's curriculum involves discipline-specific courses emphasizing writing, and the third tier involves "writing outside the classroom" (190). I'm sure I'll sound glib in characterizing it so flatly, but much of it sounds, well, familiar enough. A more radical turn, however, comes in Smit's proposal for graduate training:

Contrary then to current practice, I would propose that graduate programs in composition studies be organized in order to promote the training of compositionists as writers of particular kinds of discourse, as scholars of particular discourse communities, and as specialists in pedagogy.... In fact, I think it would be helpful if we abolished the expression 'writing instructor' and replaced it with a title that includes the kind of discourse the instructor teaches: newspaper editorial instructor, for example; or biology lab report instructor. (195)

Smit pushes dual-specializations, the combination of advanced studies in writing and rhetoric with advanced studies in the discourses of particular fields. The individual, according to this model, bridges the expanses between distinctive disciplinary forms of expertise and writing genres (in and out of school settings). In sharp contrast to Smit's model of WAC, Cosgrove and Barta-Smith approach WAC by enlisting their colleagues, involving them in ongoing conversations about their perceptions of the writing done in their field of expertise, both in and out of school. Their model values conversation; it is clearly more cooperative, more networked, than Smit's:

Each of the moves we see ourselves and our colleagues making in order to perpetuate our discourse--the mutual moldings of common meaning, the affirmations, the restatements, the discoveries or sharings of common experience or knowledge--seem born out of a desire to stretch, rather than eliminate, the confines of the knowledge and language bequeathed to us by our disciplines. (61)

The conversational methods used by Cosgrove and Barta-Smith are time-intensive, and they depend on shared respect, cross-disciplinary accountability, and recognition of the knowledge and insight folks from different areas have to offer each other. Their model is ambitious, and it might be impossible to implement at larger institutions (although they carry 4:4 loads at Slippery Rock, where they held the conversations, conducted the study). Yet because it emphasizes conversations about attitudes and understandings of writing held by specific faculty in other fields and also seeks to integrate those perspectives with the work of teaching lower division writing courses, it bears greater promise, I'd say, than beefed up training for graduate students in composition and rhetoric. Cosgrove and Barta-Smith's connective, institution-wide "search" makes composition's future appear much brighter than does a notion of added training for islanded instructors (of somediscourse).

Posted by at 9:25 PM | to Reading Notes

Monday, January 30, 2006

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

I n 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.

Posted by at 3:30 PM | to Reading Notes

Friday, December 23, 2005

Perdido Street Station

I recently finished China Mieville's second novel, Perdido Street Station (on a generous recommendation from CGB).  Difficult as it was to put it down, I read it in several delightful interludes over many weeks, just chipping away at it between the reading I was doing for coursework. And I've never identified as a genre-fan of science fiction or fantasy, but all of that's changed now (it's in crisis).

In and around the complex sci-fi/fantasy cityscape of New Crobuzon, Isaac Dan der Gimnebulin, a self-described "dilettante" scientist working on a crisis engine, dodges close-call after close-call after he accepts a project commissioned by a nomadic Garuda (bird-person) named Yagharek.  Yag lost his wings as recompense for a crime we only learn about at the end of the novel; he walks many miles to the city where he recruits Isaac's assistance in restoring him to flight.  Isaac accepts the difficult assignment.  He immerses himself in research on flight, and in doing so, circulates a call for winged things to observe (develop a heliotype, model, etc.).  Several roguish figures want in on the money.  They bombard his lab with winged specimens.

And this is just the start.  Perdido Street Station is unrelenting with its startlingly fast pace, vividly developed figures and terrain, and wild, shocking twists.  I don't want to give too much of it away; I suspect that if you read this entry and you haven't yet read Perdido Street Station, you'll be tempted to run out and pick it up.  Mieville's fiction, here overflowing with eccentricity and imagination, is so irresistibly, punishingly smart, the pages threaten to drink your mind like the antagonist slake-moths.  A taste:

     The construct jerked.
     Deep in the construct's intelligence engine circulated the peculiar solipsistic loop of data that constituted the virus, born where a minute flywheel had skittered momentarily.  As the steam coursed through the brainpan with increasing speed and power, the virus's useless set of queries went round and round in an autistic circuit, opening and shutting the same valves, switching the same switches in the same order.
     But this time the virus was nurtured.  Fed. (210)

There's so much more here that I'm afraid I can't really do it justice: Weaver, a plane-traveling spider-figure who wields razor-honed scissors; an army of remades who follow the orders of their pieced-together crime boss, Motley; a vodyani watercrafter, Lin, who dates Isaac; a Construct Council self-foraged from a heap of rubbish; and a bad-ass team of slake-moths who play havoc on the psychosphere of New Crobuzon. Oy.  I heartily recommend it.