Author: Derek Mueller

Learning to Sit

/ Derek Mueller / 4 Comments

At Fashion Square Mall, Saginaw, Mich., my mother bought an overpriced little
Yorkshire Terrier in 1990; "little" means he was smaller than the
large outdoor dogs we kept in a pen on the edge of the yard. "Little"
means he was vulnerable. He would be staying in the house.

Max grew to be large for a Yorky. At eighteen pounds, he muscled over other
toy pets. To the veterinarians with wide eyes and park walkers who would stare,
whisper, finally ask, we explained he was just a bit over-sized, big boned. Always
tall, Max, and wide.

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Go to work, St. Joe

/ Derek Mueller / 3 Comments

Do your thing, Joseph!We’re
resorting to witchcraft to get this house to sell.  Legend says a small statuette
of Saint
Joseph (the Builder, the Worker, etc.), planted upside down and feet toward
the road, will expedite the transaction.  I guess it’s spun out of the
"no room at the Inn" problem.  Need a place to stay?  Try
this house.  We looked around for a small figurine a few weeks ago, but
didn’t find one.  Dismissed it as mere voodoo and superstition,
anyway.  But a package arrived yesterday; D’s sister came through for us,
sending this little guy from Colorado Springs.  Since nothing else is
working, I troweled a small hole, positioned him just so, filled it in, and
packed it with my heel.

En Abyme

/ Derek Mueller / 4 Comments

Ended a seven-year career at the U.
yesterday.  It’s been more like twelve years, really, considering I showed
up back in ’92 with a rusted Chevy station wagon, a few duffels of crap, a pile
of books, and a basketball.  Time flies.

Now, I’m technically on vacation.  I’ve still got a few course
development projects floating around, a house to sell, boxes to pack, a trip to
NY next weekend, a mini-vacation at Drummond Island (Gem of Huron!), and hearty hunk of familiarizing and forethought for teaching and
studying at SU this fall. 

Nothing much has wrapped up smoothly in these last few weeks.  We
haven’t hired my successor at work, which means all of the systems are rather in
limbo–trembling toward collapse b/c nobody’s at my desk to hold them up. I’d
say it’s like force and energy to a black hole, but I was relieved the other day
to hear that Steven Hawking revisited his theories on the absolute envelopment
of black
holes into nothing.  Turns out it’s not nothing, but
something.  Radiation.  Histories.  Now we’ll need a new metaphor
for totalities of loss.  In the meantime, to the hole!

And no, I’m not drunk from celebrating the end (beginning!).  In fact, despite
sipping down a few Corona’s last evening at a kind, generous going away party, I
left feeling kind of sober about my departure.  All along I’d been looking
ahead, feeling happy about the switch.  But folks started filing in, eating
chicken wings, smiling and laughing, and showing their incredibly warm, friendly
best.  Before long, we shuffled to P.’s basement, where they played a
documentary put together by M. and E., a flattering splice-mix made up of
interviews of many of the people I’ve known, music, video of buildings (like
Graham Tyler Memorial Chapel, where D. and I got married last summer, like the
Breckon Sports Center, where Ph. hasn’t missed a basketball camp in four years,
like the ill-furnished offices and classrooms in Copley-Thaw Hall where I sat in
graffitied desks while sorting out King Lear, Frankenstein, and Go
Down, Moses all those years ago).  Which way to look,
Gloucester?  

I’m not so much down as adrift, reminiscent, deeply affected by the scene of
tribute, memories, folks saying goodbye like it’s permanent and final. 
Like I’m off to outer space.  Tinges of guilt come and go, too, from the
everyday reminders that I’m stepping out of a stabilizing role in a place where
stability is cherished, where a fair amount of my day to day work has kept
things normal-seeming: web
upkeep, news releases, photography, statistical compilation and reporting,
hiring and policy development, compliance, drug testing, publication design,
event coordination (halftime shows and such), work-study supervision, screening warm-up music.  On
Monday?  TBA.

There’s not much of a point to this.  It’s all just to say that I didn’t
realize the scale of what I was voluntarily leaving behind in KC until everybody
started gangpiling me with memories, hugs, sad faces.  Why blog it?  I
want to remember.  There’ll be time in the next few years when I’ll want to
recall July 17, the day I keyed notes about the 16th, when I’ll want to jog
fond memories of all the resilient friends and colleagues along the way. 
I’ll just click, click, and there it’ll be.  Right where I put
it.  And the video; I like to think I’ll be able to convert it to .mov or
.mpg, so it can fill a place here as well.

Peering At You Peering At Me

/ Derek Mueller

Reported in Wired News, Facetop,
a video feed in a background layer, enabling interactive co-contributions to
whatever’s on the (mostly transparent) desktop:

Now researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have designed a new system that cleverly blends a video-conference feed with a transparent image of a computer desktop into one full-screen window.

Called Facetop, the system simultaneously transmits a video feed of users along with a shared, transparent image of the desktop. It allows two colleagues to work on the same document, Web page or graphic, while communicating face to face.

The face fashions a visual backchannel (like way back when nods were it):
Look at me when I’m pointing (my icon-finger-eyes) at you. Planar, but eerily holographic, too.

Mortensen/Kirsch, 1994, “Authority”

/ Derek Mueller

 Mortensen,
Peter and Gesa Kirsch. "On Authority in the Study of Writing.” On Writing Research: The Braddock Essays, 1975-1998.
Ed. Lisa Ede. New York: Bedford St. Martin’s, 1999. 321-335.

Big Idea
Clearly enough, Mortensen and Kirsch set out to complicate conceptions of
authority beyond the autonomous, paternalistic, heavy-handed sort long
understood to be the source of oppression, as in a hegemony of control and
order.  This essay emphasizes the role of ethics and care in
contextualized authority systems, where power is understood through community
assimilation and distrust of autonomous authoritative forces are out in the
open.  Mortensen and Kirsch urge a shift away from long-accepted connotations of authority
as the continuation of autonomous and paternalistic legacies. 
More complex variations of authority look at knowledge sources as contextual,
assumable, provisional, situated (or locally distributed), and ethical.  By
turning to feminist critique, the essay seeks to loosen and re-associate the
significance of authority in relationship to discourse, power, and
community, the buzzwords of the 90’s
in writing and rhetoric.

Wondering About
"On Authority in the Study of Writing" leads with a note about Barthes and
dead authors, followed by mention of modernity’s unraveling of authorship
resulting in language re-styling English Studies, followed by the
question, "How are we to account for the theoretical erasure of the authority
that constitutes the writers–the authors–we face every day in our composition
classrooms?".  Authors are dead; authority is dead.  Right?  That’s
the linch pin for Mortensen and Kirsch, since authority is alive and well. 
But where?  They’re certainly not faulting Barthes for his excise of
authors; in fact, his move gave us good cause to look at all of the other,
perhaps more complex manifestations of authority, various forms wrapped in
power, discourse, and community dynamics.  I’d say this essay does a
terrific job of sizing up those forms, pointing them out, and reminding me that
they aren’t all evil (which is often my suspicion).  In fact, M&K’s answer
to the question is that there are at least two predominant perspectives on
authority–assimilation and resistance–and we (with our students) ought to know
both of them as well as other, subtler forms.

I’m not ready to answer M&K’s question about "theoretical erasure" because
I’d prefer to ask it just a bit differently, replacing "erasure," I think, with
"complexity."  Of course this kind of critique can give way to endless
tinkering.  I won’t do that.  But just this one turn–complexity
rather than erasure–would allow the question to point out what I think this essay does. 
Old, autonomous authority isn’t dead; it’s just buried (read: nested, resting). 
And maybe we should be just as distrusting of new authority (contextual,
assumable, provisional, situated, ethical) because it’s more elusive, harder to
know, but potentially as controlling, power-wielding, and uncaring. 
Potentially.  And then "how are we to account for the theoretical [complexity]
of the authority that constitutes the writers–the authors–we face every day in
our composition classrooms?".  Rhetoric: running the range of persuasive,
effective, compelling postures in variously authority-laden situations. 

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North by Southeast

/ Derek Mueller / 2 Comments


Great news for land surveyors in the NY Times today.  Seriously,
though, I have no idea what it all means or whether there are merits to the
science (which is clearly speculative, inconclusive, foretelling of widespread
catastrophes, etc.).  Because I’ve often thought of things like the Earth’s
gravitational polarity as stable, it’s wild to consider re-polarization, the
shift of magnetic North over time (see the multimedia link), and, in a
crazy-shaken world, the effect of knuckle-ball Earth spin in the millennia
ahead. So much for East meets West; East is West (granted…always has
been).

Recognize the Non-Obvious

/ Derek Mueller / 4 Comments

Passed an hour at the public library tonight after an ordered exodus for
house-showing.  There, I picked up Wired Magazine, flipped through a
few pages and learned about this:

NORA:
Non-Obvious Relationship Awareness Software

Among other things, NORA "extends identity recognition with relationship
awareness by detecting both obvious and non-obvious relationships." 
It’s the non-obvious part that intrigues me.  To the extent that it’s
obscure information, how is it discoverable?  It is pitched like the
Sherlock Holmes of software apps bent on digging up the dirt on criminal
associations and long-forgotten debauchery. From SRD’s
site:

NORA delivers unique Relationship Awareness capabilities.
The unique capabilities of NORA to discern obvious and non-obvious
relationships in real time against streaming data provides a view through up
to 30 degrees of separation that enables an organization to recognize the full
value or threat of an identity.

NORA sends messages to subscribers when it finds something of particular
interest. The gaming industry, for example, uses NORA as a real-time
"trip-wire" to flag high-risk or previously charged cheaters and
alert managers that an individual may pose a potential problem and should be
watched more closely. The levels of protection gaming enterprises gain from
this "trip-wire sensor" reduces the risk, in their case, of fraud.

Thirty degrees, eh?  Damn.  I’m sure I’m connected to some ex-cons
by fewer than thirty separations.  NORA basically infiltrates the
connections with a kind of surveillance, then reports non-obvious associations
for use–I guess–in characterizing prospective employees, scammers, felons,
crooks and plagiarists. But wait, there’s more:

Internally, NORA can reveal employees who:

  • Share the same address with people you’ve arrested.
  • Are related to slip-and-fall victims.
  • You’ve already fired or arrested. […]

With CRM, NORA uncovers:

  • Relationships between highly profitable and less profitable customers.
  • Nature of customer relationships, e.g., family or colleague.
  • The network value of your customers.

Amazing.  And it manages to do all of this (according to SRD’s home
page) "while protecting personal privacy."  How is that,
exactly?   I noticed that "relationship awareness" is
trademarked, and so I don’t want to get into any trouble for bringing this to EWM. 
It’s just that I’m confusing myself by trying to resolve the gap between
"awareness" and "non-obvious."  Maybe that’s where the
"value" element comes in.  The processing of
"non-obvious" into "awareness" is worth something. So
we ought to pilot a program in "non-obvious" studies–unaccredited for
obscurity’s sake, of course.

Network Captives

/ Derek Mueller / 2 Comments

I admire Jeff R. and
Will R., read their
blogs like clockwork; their exchange(s) over the last 24 hours have been worth
following, if you haven’t been keeping up.  I’m here giving nods to the
naming contentions as we slide between the print paradigm and electracy’s
futures.  In that slide, some folks pack heavy, others pack light.  I
suppose there’s a way of taking up the rift that contends, as Jeff often reminds
me, the new media/digital turn doesn’t need the lingo of literacy (or
even the name).  As necessary and tricky as it is to re-vocabularize
rhetorical agilities in a digital age, I wonder what–if anything
substantial–is at stake.  It is, of course, about more than the
terminology; it’s about what we do and what what we do does.  Jeff’s

assessment of the high stakes are fair, clear:

In composition, I don’t think we are anywhere near tackling this issue
because it will undermine and reconfigure many of the truths we have accepted
and hold so dearly. If we are to recognize that literacy no longer exists,
what will become of composition studies which bases its identity on the ways
writing empowers individuals to be productive members of society (see Brandt,
Rose)? What will happen to topic sentences and Writing Centers, professional
writing, or the first year textbook? Serious damage.

I can imagine this angle–in retrospect–shedding light on the grand
transformation from orality to literacy.  Switch in and out a few
indications of oral traditions giving way to Guttenberg’s giant, and, perhaps
from some perspectives, you have "serious damage" or at least wreckage,
abandoned traditions, even widespread human cognitive re-patterning. 
Forgive me for jabbing in the dark here (since I’m not well studied on Ong, for
one), but one must preclude the other.  True?  Why must electracy
unravel literacy as literacy unraveled orality?  Is it because electracy is
meanwhile enfolding a textualism of all, braiding realities and programs
and tunes…"I don’t know why she swallowed the fly, perhaps she’ll…."  Maybe
I haven’t read closely enough; maybe effacement is inherent in these
revolutions.

[Long hesitation…reading list has grown by twenty or so titles (Ulmer,
Graff)…having Friday fun…blog decorum…where’s that coming from?]

I set out to make notes on Will’s
mention of
collaboration.  My first thought is, Yes!, we are on collaborative
ground with weblogs and wikis.  Open texts, and so on, just as Jeff sets
them up as places where "writers and readers tap into, alter, appropriate,
confiscate, download, share, etc."  But then I keep thinking these few
thoughts about what I haven’t seen blogs do:  1. Blog entries are rarely
revised.  2.  Blog entries are rarely written collaboratively, perhaps
because most blogware doesn’t configure easily for partnering or group
authorship.

The tapping and commenting and fisking–linked, interested, etc.–seem more
prevalent than the sort of sharing and appropriating, which is to suggest that
blogging as spontaneous media doesn’t prefer to wait.  Entries are often
buried in a matter of days, comments with them, and the temporality machine
rolls, calendars overturn.  I get the feeling that blogs play the moment,
invite the rush; whereas collaborative efforts can be slow and laborious, blogs
thrive on freshness, vigor, never expiring. 

This is a jumble of (unfair, perhaps) assumptions.  I’ve been
thinking lately about the expenses of collaboration, the problem of
over-collaboration, of turning always to meetings about meetings, of everyone (including the ambivalent and disenchanted)
having a say and of feeling like that just takes toooo loooong for some matters. 
In part, I’m feeling jaded by the call for collaboration because I’m seeing it
done in a way that turns to wheel-spinning, indecisiveness, and gross, endless
shifts of leadership and agency to the (idle, vacationing, phone-message
ignoring) network.

Kludge

/ Derek Mueller

We’re moving to NY in about one month.  Summer is scooting by incredibly
fast: goodbye get-togethers, constant (hauntingly constant) house-cleaning and
perfecting (as in the inhumanity of sweeping the floor for sixty days or leaving
behind nary an item of clutter), out the door on a moment’s notice for showings,
pet adoption woes.  I’ve even been helping the neighbor lady’s mother find
a cleaning job so she can get financed to buy this place.  

If I ever sell a house again, I’ll do things differently.  1. List it
FSBO.  2. Register the property on the MLS (Multiple Listing
Service).  3.  Tack on a flat rate selling bonus for a closed
transaction by a specific date.  4.  Crank out a few full color fliers
and a web site. 5. Price it low.  6.  Make sure the exterior is
flashy.  Nobody makes it to the gorgeous interior if the outside is, as
ours has been called, "drab."  I’ve never had a good time in
sales jobs or the sales side of jobs I’ve held, and so I won’t carry on about
the profession of real estate brokering.  But I have opinions
now–hard-learned.

Where will we live when we pull the last plug in KC and relocate to
13244?  Here or there.  A cozy apartment is on hold, but we’re still
holding out hope for a different, roomier option. Might even
take a plane ride one more time to firm up choice digs. Optimizing proximity to
campus, Ph.’s school of choice, and affordable rents into one: labyrinthine
(that said, huge props to the CCR folks for unbelievable support in the process).

Why else is July a jumble?  Replacing myself at work keeps hitting
snags.  Protracted interviews, lunch follow-ups, interrogations of work
samples all resulted in a declination. Got a new stack of resumes today; set
another interview for the morning.  On top of that, I’m pounding through
some of the more difficult challenges I’ve ever faced with the online courses,
their maintenance, redevelopment, systemic supports, core outcomes statements,
and big stakes (well, okay, relatively small stakes, depending on how you fight
fights) wrangling over enrollment caps in all English courses set against
per-student salary structures for contingent faculty.  Grrr.  It’s
messier than I want to blog.  All blogging is messy? No…I mean Mess-ess-y.
Unrecognizable.

All of this stuff–as well as I think I’m handling it–has snuck into
my neck and lower back, forming knots, funking up my sleeping habits and
infiltrating my system despite any hearty attempts to meditate it away, release
it to ease.  These stressors accumulate into a kind of sub-affect,
subliminal intensity of circumstances, and inescapable duress.  So the strain isn’t a
mood-breaker or a pout-maker, but it has rattled the ordinary patterns I knew
just six weeks ago.  This is as near as I’ll get  to putting my cause
for bumbled blogging (and lots of other things) to words. And to beat the forces
back, I’ve been studying many of the insightful web
sites about stress, where I can find soothing advice such as, "Wear
comfortable and loose clothing when possible. Take off your shoes when you
can."  untying…untying…loosening. Shoes are off.  (Will they
know if I didn’t follow the instruction to "print out this document and
read it offline"?)

Leap

/ Derek Mueller

Be patient, dear frog.This
happy lud-ditty (MP3) has been playing a loop in my head for the last three
days.  I have no explanation.  (And no, I haven’t even been
gaming…just woke up Saturday…hopped out of bed.)

Fortunately, I was able to find it and several other game jingles at the Digital
Press Sound Byte Archives.  This
tune (MP3) still makes me nervous, and I was never any good at Tron.