Counting Empty Seats As Fans," intimates that seats cannot be fans. Yet the seats attend every game despite the weather. They are present for every pitch. They get sat upon, lines-of-sight blocked, schlepped with soda and mustard and nacho cheese, stepped on. What is more loyal, more devoted to the home team (e.g., the Mets) than a stadium seat? With new-vibrant materialism, game attendance should skyrocket. According to the object-oriented attendance-taker, the stadium was full! But the wonder-ful isotropy wobbles as it deflates, doesn't it?, like an air-filled beach ball that has been patted and patted and patted for a few hours, until abandoned for slow-leaking it isn't being patted any more (not even by the season-ticket-holding seats whose attendance did count). ]]>
I had a great CCCC. So many friends to catch up with, so many great conversations. Proud of how EMU students represented. Proud of the smarts and investment shown by the EM-Journal team. Proud of how Ivo Baltic and his Bobcats went toe-to-toe with basketball giant UNC on Friday evening. I damn close to wept with joy when Ohio surged late in the game and I got to see all the UNC fans next to me in Section 138 Row 22 biting their nails, holding each other's sweaty hands, looking like they'd encountered a real bobcat in the wild.
The ticket would've allowed me to stick around, but I skipped the NC State-KU game and instead walked to Bridge with a few colleagues, enjoyed a sour and an IPA, hummus and tapenade, smoked paprika popcorn that was too salty but ate it anyway.
Went to more sessions than I expected to this week:
Stars mark the sessions where I had some sort of speaking or leadership role. I have quite a bit more to say about several of the sessions, but I also face the inevitable workswell--a sheer ccccliff--that follows from several days of being online less than usual because who can afford in-room internet: advising emails, an online course to get caught up in, a batch of deep definition essays from graduate students, an article revision due 3/30. Plus, I drove both to and from St. Louis and the Element suffered an effed windshield wiper late last night, so I feel a bit road-weary today and also need to get over to Advanced Auto Parts for a replacement blade. Maybe around the mid-late part of the week I'll crawl back through my notes and elaborate on some of what I learned at the various sessions, or maybe not. I left St. Louis both exhausted and energized, which is in my eight or ten trips to the conference as much as one can hope for.
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Yahoo! Tournament Pick'em
Group: Brackstang Sally (ID# 54159)
"Guess you better slow your prediction-maker down."
Password: ewm
Firm up your picks after the selection show on Sunday, March 11. The latest you
can sign up is five minutes before the round of 64 tips off on Thursday, March
15.
Indeed, this is the feeling of Spring Break ending. 'Twas productive, though not as productive as I told myself it would be.
]]>No, not mine. Definitely not. No, no. However, at the very moment I started reading midterm course evaluations (collected in Google Forms), iTunes fortuitously shuffled to "Always Right," a song I will from now on set to repeat each time I read any sort of teaching evaluations, reviewer comments, etc.
]]>I couldn't come up with a title, much less the names of all of the books in any review essay. I recall reading Kris Blair's piece (had to look up the title: "New Media Affordances and the Connected Life") from CCC 63.2, but I could only remember three of the five books covered in that review: Dilger and Rice's From A to <A>: Keywords for Markup because I already own a copy, and two others because I knew something beforehand about their authors and would claim an interest in their work. Otherwise, working from memory, I can't come up with much--a vague recollection of another review essay by Schilb and one more by Villanueva on style. After reading the Villanueva review essay, I picked up a copy of Holcomb and Killingsworth's Performing Prose, but that was as much motivated by a Twitter exchange with a colleague as by the review.
Thus, when I started to see an unusually high level of discussion circulating about Geoff Sirc's "Resisting Entropy," a review essay published in the latest issue of CCC (Feb. 2012, 63.3), my first thought was something like, "Well, this sure is an awful lot of activity for a review essay." People were discussing it on Twitter, but I also received an email message from a student on the same day NCTE circulated the bulk email announcing the issue--an email message bringing up several questions and concerns based on things Sirc wrote. I hadn't read the then-day-old review yet, but I hurried my pace in getting to it.
As far as I know, review essays covering multiple books began appearing in CCC seven or eight years ago. Before that reviews focused on single titles. The review essay provides readings of and recommendations for a small collection of titles, presumably titles that have come out in the last three or so years and that share a topical thread. And as I understand it, there are a few motives behind the switch to review essays: 1) they are more tightly packed than individual book reviews , 2) they promote a more rigorous appearing scope which in turn justifies known scholars to write them, 3) the known scholar bi-line gets people to read them, and 4) clustering multiple books into one review essay means readers will encounter book reviews at the edge of (and perhaps just beyond) titles they would have otherwise already been likely to check out.
I've read Sirc's review essay, and although I realize it is poor cccarnival mmmanners to sidestep much substantive discussion of the article itself, all I want to say for now is that I appreciated the candor in his definitively recommending (or in not recommending, as the case may be) each of the four titles subject to review. The essay is polemic. Fine. It even toes the line between unapologetic critique and demolition-ball tear-down. But, despite however much or little I agree with Sirc in specific moments (i.e., there are points that resonate, others that trouble and confuse; I may well elaborate on a few in another entry), I know where he stands on these titles, and these titles become more decidable as a result. I want that nudge toward decidability from a review essay, and I suspect Sirc's "Resisting Entropy" is one CCC readers will remember for awhile--both for the hot stove arguments the essay stokes and for the titles covered in doing so.
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Woolgar and Cooper's article is one of those I wish I'd read years ago. It opens with an unexpected event: Jane, a student in a grad seminar, challenges the premise of Winner's artefact-politics example. In effect, she says the clearance-challenged bridges are passable, that they don't actually prevent buses from traveling the parkways on Long Island, that Winner's claim is a "crock of shit."
Woolgar and Cooper turn next to Bernward Joerges' investigation of Winner's bridges, their history, and the legitimacy in Winner's attribution of politics to these artefacts. Rather than accepting Joerges' position that Winner's example crumbles because the actual bridges allow buses to pass, however, Woolgar and Cooper suggest the bridges-articulated wield a certain "argumentative adequacy" that is not necessarily eclipsed by the bridges-actual (434). In fact, they say that proof of Winner's error is difficult to come by, despite the bus timetable they ultimately obtained, despite Jane and another student's efforts to corroborate the effect of these bridges on bus traffic.
The important recurrent feature in all this narrative [about efforts to corroborate the effects of the bridges] is that the definitive resolution of the story, the (supposedly) crucial piece of information, is always just tantalizingly out of reach.... For purposes of shorthand, in our weariness, in the face of the daunting costs of amassing yet more detail, or just because we're lazy, we tend to ignore the fact that aspects of the story are always (and will always be) essentially out of reach. Instead we tell ourselves that 'we've got the story right.' (438)
Following a discussion of urban legends and technology, Woolgar and Cooper conclude with several smart points about the contradictory aspects of technology, that it "is good and bad; it is enabling and it is oppressive; it works and it does not; and, as just part of all this, it does and does not have politics" (443). They continue, "The very richness of this phenomenon suggests that it is insufficient to resolve the tensions by recourse to a quest for a definitive account of the actual character of a technology" (443). And, of course, once we can relax in efforts to trap a-ha! an "actual character," we might return an unavoidably rhetorical interplay among texts and things, between discourses and artefacts. Winner, too, has built bridges, "constructed with the intention of not letting certain arguments past" (444). Periodically inspecting both bridges-actual and bridges-articulated is also concerned with mapping or with accounting for the competing discourses, the interests served by them, and so on: "Instead of trying to resolve these tensions, our analytic preference is to retain and address them, to use them as a lever for discerning the relationship between the different parties involved" (443). And, importantly, this is a lever that produces a different kind of clearance, "under which far more traffic might flow" (444).
Note: There's much more to this, including Joerges' response here (PDF), which I have not read yet, but I nevertheless find the broader debate fascinating, relevant to conversations about OOO we're having on our campus in preparation for Timothy Morton and Jeff Cohen's visit next month, and--even if I have arrived late--a series of volleys I need to revisit if and when I return to Winner's example in the future.
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I know the candy and checkout lane knick knacks are positioned by big box analysts and mangers to encourage spontaneous purchases. "I didn't intend to buy a Milky Way and a root beer, but they were right there. Practically jumped into my cart." However, here is a case where shoes found some host who ushered them into this primo location. Size 8. Now, in shoe stores, socks and shoe laces crowd the checkout area. But what kind of store--maybe a sock store?--would feature shoes in the checkout lane?
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The safety officer at Is.'s school hands out safety leaflets like this one each week. Most of these "coloring sheets" concern animal safety messages on letting sleeping dogs lie, never putting your face close to a dog's face, and so on. In a friendly gesture, s. officer always hands me two. "Take an extra one for the refrigerator."
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Another blogday. Now eight.
I'm tempted to write something reminiscent and festive, but if I do I will be late to DTW. Should've left five minutes ago!
To celebrate, there were pumpkin chocolate chip muffins last night.
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Building on yesterday's remarks, another scene. Another ride around the store. Another checkout line discard. Where are the King's Hawaiian dinner rolls in Canton's Super Walmart?, you wonder. I don't know about the rest of them, but you'll find one package at register fifteen, just below the gift cards.
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I see more of this, more items discarded in checkout lines, in discount grocer-retailers like Meijer and Super Walmart. Less of it at Whole Foods and Kroger. I suppose there's a higher randomness quotient in stores where you can pick up a half gallon of Silk, bath towels, an iPhone case, hanging file folder tabs, a Celine Dion CD, dog food, a Detroit Lions Pillow Pet, and "fresh" eggs all in one fell swoop. With so many choices, categorical thinking relaxes, loosens. Also, for context, I usually prefer the checkout lines with human clerks because the automaton clerks are always deferring to the monitoring human clerk, anyway. So I often stand in line. Waiting. Bored. Looking around at people and things. Too lazy even to tweet about the extreme ordinariness of the experience.
Lately we've taken a greater than usual interest, also a family-wide interest (i.e., multigenerational interest: Is. will go along with these what-ifs), you could say, in the castaway products--things misplaced among the indulgent and impulsive options attention-attractively located where shoppers are most idle. I see in these products a kind of distributed indecision that spans various distances from bins and shelves and departments to just before the terminal moment of consumer transaction. That is, the item has gone for quite a magnificent and hopeful ride, traveled around the store in a suspended state of possibility until, just before hitting the belt, it is denied. No sale.
And we don't know but can only speculate about what motivates the change of heart, change of mind. Why does the produce land there, so close to the end of the supply chain? The recipe didn't actually call for fennel. Or upon a closer look that's not at all like the celery we usually buy. Or I just remembered that we already have fennel in the crisper. Or fennel is too expensive (though this is less likely because the price of the fennel would show on the readout at which point, if refused, the cashier would probably set it aside for re-shelving, a set-aside that would land the fennel elsewhere than among the magazines).
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