Author: Derek Mueller

Pi Chart #4c14

/ Derek Mueller

I’d planned for this to be an entry about next Thursday’s roundtable, E.17, “Polymorphic Frames of Pre-Tenure WPAs: Eight Accounts of Hybridity and Pronoia,” 4:45-6 p.m. in the Indiana Marriott Downtown, Indiana Ballroom E, First Floor (that’s right: both hotel and room are named after the state…enough-iana alreadiana). But I’m short on time, looking at a to-do list the length of my arm, and due to be at a reading group at the Corner Brewery in a few minutes on Doug Brent’s “The Research Paper and Why We Should Still Care.” About the roundtable: eight of us put it together with the promise that we would present live versions in Indianapolis and at the same time deliver bundled and closed-captioned versions via scheduled Tweet-drops set for the same time as our panel. It’s an experiment with openness and circulation, in this sense, and since we’re one of the few E sessions scheduled in the Indiana Marriott (not the JW Marriott…though I’m still not sure I grasp what this even means), our double-up of live and YouTube versions is just as well.

My portion of the roundtable is called “Mad Handles”–a double-teaming of basketball handles and data visualization handles, but there I’ve gone and already said too much. For at least ten days in early February, I had this and only this as my main slide–even considered using it as the only slide for the entire talk, an animated GIFmash on an interminable “forever” loop.

This and more next Thursday evening.

A Kind of Real

/ Derek Mueller

I rarely mention dreams because I rarely remember them. But this morning. This morning I woke up from a vivid (seriously, vivid-qua-real) dream in which exactly twelve mud wasps had landed on me and were checking things out, feeling around for something to eat or sting or who knows. They were antenna-tive, curious, threatening, sampling but not feasting on sweat. And they were scattered, even-spread, in no especially clear way organized or systematic in their checking out the human landscape. In the dream–maybe also in the waking world–I was still and extremely cautious not to make any sudden movements. Yet, given those constraints, I was slowly managing to remove each mud wasp, one by one, crushing the thoraxes crunch and discarding them unstung and unstinging until exactly half of them remained when I woke up.

Bracketing the allegorical and resisting the dream-interpretive leaps (oh, well, yes, of course, this is about Writing Program Administration!), I nevertheless thought about the dream intermittently throughout the day, which makes it all the more un-usual. It’s one thing to dream, another to remember; quite another to rehearse the dream-memory throughout the day. Twelve wasps into six, stung or spared, the “experience” recalls and and at the same time deepens this curio from Eduardo Kohn’s How Forests Think, a book I’ve been reading off and on over the last two weeks: "Dreams too are part of the empirical, and they are a kind of real" (13). A kind of real.

Words Don’t Come Easy; Paris Soundnotes

/ Derek Mueller

After a long travel day yesterday, I’m back from WRAB, from Paris, home in Ypsilanti, unpacked and laundering, family gifts dealt, and more or less re-charged from the first decent night’s sleep in oh at least a week. In retrospect, I should have been more tired and draggy while in France. Probably some small lift is attributable to laying off vegetarianism for a few days and amping up on proteins. Travel warnings were right: it’s tough to avoid meat in Paris.

There’s much, much more to say about the trip than I have time for right now. Indeed, I have committed the classic mistake of pinning to-do list item after to-do list item on the week after WRAB (i.e., now) and have quite a backlog to level through this week (TGIWB…[W]inter [B]reak). For now, I only wanted to catch a few soundnotes, earworming auditory takeaways from the trip.

I’ve tried but could not locate a few things I heard on the Air France flight, though AF makes it a point to publicize their in-flight playlists, so on that basis might look further and listen more closely another day.

F.R. David’s “Words” was playing in the eco-shuttle I rode in from Charles De Gaulle to Ampere. More than any other track, it caught on as the trip’s anthem, harder and harder set on a loop as I fumbled “je ne comprends pas” each of the four times I was asked by locals (er…Fr. speakers) for directions. Je. ne. compren…here, just listen to this.

And since an 8.5-hour flight in coach ranks both as hell of hells and also as the longest flight I’ve ever endured, I didn’t expect it to be bearable. I escaped six hours by watching three entire movies–Gravity, Jobs, and Captain Phillips–before learning I was seated next to Marcellus Pittman, who was gracious enough to talk a bit about mixing, vinyl and new/old techniques, touring, and so on. Fascinating stuff that not only reminded me about intriguing questions about mixing as a productive method and about Detroit’s industrial, techno-feelic scene, but also about Archer Records, about yet underexamined practices and needed work to deepen sonic mix as one of writing’s favorite contemporary metaphors, and about my attraction to these sounds, especially when writing. There’s something in the beat mechanics that underwrites (or somehow nourishes?) an effective writerly attention structure. For me, at least. To sum it up: 8.5-hour flights are a helluva lot better sitting next to Marcellus Pittman (Discogs).

And this last one, “The Mad Underdog” (or, had I to add a subtitle to resonate with “mad” and “underdog,” “Writing Program Apothecary’s Dosi”) is a bootleg, but after the first few minutes, I’m not sure how you’ll resist clicking over to the iTunes store where you can pick it up for less than one euro.

Day Zero Flaneury

/ Derek Mueller

I jetted into Paris earlier today (a skyroad begun in Detroit and continued after a brief layover in NYC) for the Writing Research Across Borders Conference at Paris Ouest La Défense. Time changes meant six hours evaporated as I arrived in Paris at 1 p.m. local time, what felt like 7 a.m. EST. Factoring in that it was a red-eye spent in Air France coach, my body’s “felt like” time was even earlier and later: WTF Standard Time. And now it is both 6:30 p.m. local time and 12:30 p.m. back home. Time for supperlunch (no, I won’t be asking for supperlunch at a restaurant, unless, maybe that’s a Fr. word?)

The conference is fully underway, but I didn’t make it to the hotel until 2 p.m., and by then it was clear I would arrive late to the conference’s afternoon sessions even if I hoofed (or subwayed…still figuring out how that works) directly to Paris Ouest. Instead I followed what I could on Twitter, unpacked, and figured out the few streets I wanted to follow to go looking for bearings. Fitbit doesn’t know we’re in Paris, France, so we attempted to walk off some of the jet lag along the 8.4 km mapped here.


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Here are a few of the things I walked past.

L'église de la Madeleine

Alexandre Dumas Monument

And noticed: so much dog shit on the sidewalks; newsstands selling paper publications; two kids playing on top of plastic garbage bins near the park, one stopping to “pay the water bill” publicly; two different passers-by who politely asked me in French for help or directions or if I was having a good day or, truthfully, I have no idea. I tried to say something like, “Pardon, no francais,” but neither of them waited the ten minutes it would have taken me to figure out such an elaborate response.

Above all, the brief tour on foot reassured me with an orienting sense that I almost always lack when landing in conference city I haven’t been to before. Now that I am clearer about space and direction, I suspect the next several hours will be devoted to re-harmonizing with time.

Must Begin with I

/ Derek Mueller / 2 Comments

Along with several other colleagues in my department, I was invited late last fall to be posterized as a faculty researcher at EMU. It’s part of a banner campaign devised to connect campus and Ypsilanti, and to make abstract-seeming faculty more real-seeming, I guess. And it is an honor to be invited. Humbling, really. Like others, I had a couple of photos taken in late November. The email arrived yesterday asking us to choose the best one. I let D., Is., and Ph. weigh in; two-thirds of them agreed on #122. I think I look slouchy, tired, and over-stressed (i.e., like a first-year WPA!) in most of them and so didn’t quibble with the rec. #122 it is.

Next comes the harder part: along with formalizing a preference for a photo, we’re supposed to send in a one-liner–five words or less and must begin with ‘I’–that will function as a public research profile. Officially, it’s called an “integrated power statement”–but I’ll think of it as a bumper sticker-sized CV.

I’ll be the first to admit that my 4.5 years at EMU in research terms has been spasmodic at best–due in large part to a constantly challenging orchestration of service responsibilities, institutional and departmental dynamics, and herky-jerky, stop-start bursts of writing with more change of speed and more spills than bad Olympic figure skating. Whoosh! Whoa! Oh sure, I get it: that’s the nature of this work in many places.

But how does such a pattern of activity translate into four or five words of banner material? And what’s a more appropriate gesture–something with a university-ambivalent public in mind, something true to the specifics of a research agenda, or something attuned to undergraduates, prospective students, and their families? Fun to think about from a university outreach standpoint, but not especially helpful for settling on the best four or five-word string.

Here’s what I’ve come up with so far:

  • I create clouds, graphs, and maps.
  • I visualize discourse networks.
  • I trace disciplinary networks.
  • I make scholarly networks visible.
  • I make rhetorical connections visible.
  • I map scholarly networks.
  • I practice digital rhetorics.
  • I strengthen weaker arguments.
  • I write in code and light.

I’m open to other suggestions and will wait for a few days before sending in my power statement. Comment away if you’re so inclined. Give me a better five words, starting with I. I’d considered tipping the statement toward directing first-year writing, but I have yet to root that work in what I think of as my research (so much heft in getting some Venns to overlap, you know?), so the power statements would be things like, “I fight the textbook-industrial complex” (five words?) or “I dream of budget” or “I large-scale assess.” Nothing especially powerful or integrated or researcherly in these statements. Of course, maybe if I come up with something really catching, really, really inspiring, they’ll invite me to be on another poster in a few years, just about the time I get the hang of more research oriented WPAing.

Dream Trade

/ Derek Mueller / 3 Comments

Little more in what follows than a PSA of sorts buried in a wraparound narrative.

Last weekend, we heard an ad on Detroit’s Hit Music Station 95.5FM about Disney Channel auditions coming up in the area, at the Romulus Marriott, specifically. Somebody was interested–interested enough to listen for another hour until the ad played again so as to take down the phone number.

We called and—how could we not?—booked an audition for 2 p.m. yesterday.

Typical Marriott conference room, for the most part, but crowded hallways with a long, snaking line, many families standing in it, the parent-types filling out an application and the children between 6-18 practicing audition lines from a handout. The setup seemed more or less legitimate, and since we hadn’t been to anything like this before, we went along, cool cool okay, filled out the paperwork, practiced the line (from a classic television commercial), and waited. Just before 2 o’clock, the line funneled into the room and everyone sat down more or less in the order they arrived, filling the room with ~300 people.

The first person to speak introduced a talent search guru, Mr. Steve(?) Hughes, who was born in London and who had played an important part in identifying many big name talents (so big, in fact, that I can’t recall any of them, but you get the general sense of this pitch, nevertheless). Hughes and two others would be involved in the screening interviews, and he introduced another actress (I’ve forgotten her name, but supposedly she is a business partner with Jamie Foxx, was in an ER episode with George Clooney, and has made untold thousands in the biz). She would be judging the auditions.

After almost 40 minutes—lots of “let’s hear you parents shout “YES!” if you support and we mean really support your child’s acting dream!”—we were called row by seated row to the back of the room for standing interviews. We happened to land at Table 2 with Mr. Hughes himself and he asked us a couple of questions, but the curious thing was that he didn’t take any notes. Just a few minutes earlier, he’d told us he and his colleagues would be screening 900 of Detroit’s top youth talent that day. No notes?

Next, we went to the front of the room and stood in line for the audition, a one-minute exchange with the celebrity whose name I’ve forgotten, and then we picked up a Kinkos-quality brochure, which explained in some detail (though not much!) the “The Exclusive Acting League TV and Film Program,” a five-day acting camp at Universal Studios, available for just $4500. They also peddle “Prep-coaching Workshops” described as “6 One hour sessions (SKYPE) and interview with an Agent” for just $600.

Basically, The Acting League seemed to be leveraging a bunch of kids’ show business dreams against a pricey and convoluted “audition” process that put parents on the spot to either opt in or appear unsupportive. If left us to wonder—and as parent’s talked in the audition line, this came up: Just how selective was this process, really?, especially when the interviewers didn’t write anything down? We would have to wait until the next day—today—before texting the applicant’s name to 347-919-9716 and, in response, we would receive a text message about whether or not the audition was successful.

Meanwhile, I fished around online for more perspective on The Acting League. What sort of company is this? And has it been as fortuitously and as long involved in talent vetting as its representatives claimed? First, take a look at the website. Sparse. The “Success Stories” aren’t especially built up with successes or stories. But there is a phone number and email address. I called the phone number—424-220-4002—and the message indicates reception for all of MK Business Centers in Manhattan Beach, Calif. The relatively recent domain registration for theactingleague.com (8-18-2013) seems curious, as does the thinness of their Twitter account. Still, all in all, there’s not a whole lot to point at here other than some weird and over-prompted insistence on parental support, the fact that nobody involved in screening appeared to take notes, a dang near six bitcoin acting “camp” at Universal Studios, a new and crappy website, and a Twitter account built on the faint, fading footprint of merely three tweets.

But is The Acting League legitimate? A bona fide, up-standing business? I don’t know. When I called the Romulus Marriott this afternoon to ask if TAL was still set up there, the receptionist told me they were. I asked whether they’d heard that The Acting League may be iffy, and she said they’d heard this from several people and were investigating it. Relatedly, there’s a news report expressing similar reservations felt by parents in McAllen, Texas, last September. The one source in the story mentioned that after getting a callback, they were pressured to plunk down a $1000 deposit almost immediately for the pricey camp at Universal Studios. Also, there’s quite a bit matching up between The Acting League and some of the characterizations about auditioning scams here and here.

Without moralizing (more than I have or more explicitly) or sounding off about the scruples of any talent search process, I suppose I can only end with a shrug. Credit to (by which I mean something more like “shame on”) The Acting Guild, their presenters were dynamic and almost convincing. They seemed to have many in the room—including many who would have to dig deep to find that $1000 deposit—convinced that this was a genuine opportunity, an authentic audition.

Ideology of Wording

/ Derek Mueller

Don Angel’s viejito repertoire, it seems to me, implied a relationship to words that is distinguishable from the ideology of wording that is common in mainstream life to the extent that such life has been shaped by schooling. In this sense, there is much in schooling that encourages logos at the expense of the theatrical, distance at the expense of involvement. I am reminded of my own markings of student papers or my own student papers marked by teachers: “exact word?” “shift in diction,” “redundant,” “too wordy, tighten up,” “clarify!” “verb tense shift,” “awkward,” “dangling modifier,” “your thinking is not coherent here,” “is this logical?” “verb agreement problem,” “what?” and so on. During such practices the word, phrase, sentence, paragraph, and discourse become objects of consciousness and begin to create what I am calling here an ideology of wording whose ultimate goal is the mastery of both discourse and the lifeworld that the discourse points to. An aspect of this ideology of wording is that the theatrical becomes a set of effects, important in their own right and in certain contexts but potentially deceptive in knowledge-making contexts. Indeed, much of Don Angel’s knowledge—curanderismo, stories of the supernatural, and divining practices—were so far off the professional logos map as to be considered merely theatrical. In this sense, Don Angel’s narrative style reinforced the marginalization of his narrative content from the professional and mainstream styles of the modern world. (65)

Ralph Cintron, Angel’s Town

Over the two-week break between semesters (more on the front end of it, actually), I spent a few minutes with Cintron’s Angel’s Town, mostly because I wanted to trawl back through a good ethnography to refresh my sense of why ethnography is so demanding, so time and methods intensive. The First-year Writing Program I direct now has a number of instructors who frame research as ethnography, which is another reason I felt compelled to pick this up.

Cintron’s “ideology of wording” has stuck, this passage has held on, since I read it a few weeks ago. The viejito—here set in relief against a schoolish ideology of wording—is a punning language game with so much vernacular nuance and layered innuendo that Cintron freely admits how incomplete any representation of must be. Nevertheless, this tension between viejito and an “ideology of wording” stands as a terrific example of the hard-to-mix qualities of academically situated discourse practices (i.e., writing, speaking, and “reading” in school) with their legacy logoi, and, on the other hand, the everyday rhetorics that operate powerfully and cogently elsewhere.

In both classes I’m teaching this winter, a grad seminar in Computers and Writing focused in particular on “ecologies of practice” and an undergraduate class in style and technology, I have felt like this passage is trailing me around, shadowing me. Cintron’s account of viejito parlays gets at something akin to an “ecology of practice” for how the exchanges bloom, transcending and exceeding mainstream language conventions. Grasping this, then, by studying the viejito up close, requires what Richard Coe would have described as an eco-logic, because their systemic manifestation that cannot be explained by analysis of isolated parts. And in the (online) style+technology class, there has been quite a bit of discussion wordiness (Holcomb and Killingsworth 47). Concision has its time and place, of course, but wordiness (or the charge of wordiness) constrains the kind of theatrical, involved wordplay Cintron notices and calls our attention to.

Finally, I’ve been thinking quite a bit about Cintron’s contrastive pairings of logos vs. the theatrical and distance vs. involvement in the second sentence. The pairings accomplish some of the distinction that moves his analysis forward, but it also hints at a question about the tidiness and convenience of these conceptual frames. To break from this, for a second, for example, what might the combination of distance and the theatrical make possible? Is there already a distant-theatrical quality in Cintron’s (or, to be fair, any ethnographer’s) observing and filtering for insights? I’m interested in whether the distance-theatrical can advance other methods, too (or rather, by carrying out the distance-theatrical, explore other yet unasked questions). But this—as well as the tension between viejito and the ideology of wording—seems like a big deal for ethnography and especially for the kinds of ethnography attempted in first-year writing or by researchers who are just starting out in rhetoric and composition/writing studies.

Decade

/ Derek Mueller / 3 Comments

This, THIS, is what it feels like to celebrate a 10th blogiversary. And how it feels to read an entry on a ten-year-old–hang on a second…feeling overexcited…now catching my breath…blog. And how it feels to leave a comment on a ten-year-old blog (c’mon, people, when was the last time?). Also a glimpse of how well (or poorly?!) Movable Type has aged.

Well?

Seems like I should be able to come up with somethinganything important sounding, some epideictic gloss on all that blogging has been and all that it will be, on how blogging has died and come back and died again and come back so many times since about 2006 that it’s hard to keep track of whether it is alive or dead right now. Let me guess: alive. Proof enough that blogs, until deleted or lost in upgrades and platform roulette or suspended in an ambiguous cryogenic limbo, are their own dead-living monuments.

Exactly ten years ago I was applying to PhD programs. Owned a house on Missouri 9 Highway in Kansas City. Coached Ph.’s 7th grade basketball teams (Stampede Green and Stampede Blue). Taught as a part-time lecturer. Now am going up for tenure. Own a house in Ypsilanti. And I wear an old Stampede Blue winter hat when I jog the neighborhood in sub-50F weather. Turning over from a 9-ending to a big-0 birthday, myself, in a few months, blog.

I know the entries aren’t evenly spread across these ten years (nor are they likely to be for the next 10 years, although I promise a much bigger celebration in 2024), but thank goodness EWM marked off and has therefore helped me remember what happened, and happened, and happened. Just ten years in, I’m thinking, whatever else this is, it’s memory.

Some Angels

/ Derek Mueller

Some Angels

Began with pancakes and sausage, one game of NBA2K14, the first of two drive and walk shovelings, lazy adjustments to FYWP blog CSS, created an article review file and plunked down some impressions, sawed the Christmas tree in half for needling through the snow to curbside, vacuumed and emptied collecting chamber, prepped a lentil soup (tomorrow’s lunch) with football and hockey ambient-ambivalent in the background, shoveled again, dusted off the Element but did not drive it, gave up on snowball fight for poor snowpack, then made up a lousy game of tag on trails before the angels left wing-and-gown prints. Inside fifty pages fire and hot chocolate-side of Gaiman’s Fortunately, the Milk with Is., bummed to see Fitbit count only up to 7,595, 7,596, 7,597, and a blog entry–the first since October, first of 02014, but above all to make sure widemoth still turns over in this time of winter weather.

Remembering Joe C.

/ Derek Mueller

Much as I wanted to, I wasn’t able to attend Joe C.’s funeral Monday in Phenix City, Ala. The best I could do was to send personal condolences to his family via Facebook and to log on last Thursday evening–patchy though the connection was–to the webcast of a memorial service set in Park U.’s Breckon Sports Center, the same building where I worked with him for several years in the early aughts. Joe C. was the women’s basketball coach; I was the SID and Asst. AD. Our offices sat at the back of the building on the first floor–the only two offices tucked away back there, sharing a quiet hallway (quiet, other than during home events) with the concession stand. Often it smelled like popcorn, hot chocolate, nacho cheese. And when Joe talked on the phone or met with players–which happened often–I was near enough to overhear inaudible, muffled waves of dialogue. Day in and day out.

We were hired at the same time: July 1997. In fact, I interviewed that summer for the women’s basketball coaching position he was offered. That’s when Park instead hired me as their first full-time SID. D. and I had just moved to Kansas City that July–a few weeks after my mother died out of the blue–mainly to see to Ph.’s care and more generally to figure out this: “Now what?” Joe C. was the one colleague in the athletic department at the time who had kids within a couple of years of Ph. Feels now like an overstated memory to mention how Joe’s fathering modeled something for me, even tacitly. I can see now influences and affinities that operated only in a background way at the time.

I haven’t kept an office–day in and day out–alongside any other colleague for a full seven years, and who knows if that will ever happen again, especially considering the any-which-ways we rotate offices at EMU. Certainly I have known colleagues as mentors and friends for many years and across different institutions, but remembering Joe C. as a colleague and friend brings me back to what seem now, after his sudden death a week ago Sunday at the age of 59, like vivid and formative early influences. In this context, it’s appropriate to mention that one of Joe’s nicknames from way back (not sure whether it took hold at SIU or one of his NBA stops) was “garbage collector.” Garbage collector is, of course, a fitting name for the post player who rebounds and puts-back or relays the missed shots of others. Reminds me, too, of I.A. Richards’ definition of rhetoric as “misunderstanding and its remedies.” Basically, Richards’ rhetor is a sensitive “garbage collector,” a scrappy big–if I can blend these contexts–who wrestles for position, throws occasional elbows to clear stasis from the lane, and clears the glass, rebounding and thereby remedying others’ misses. A crucial professional role, isn’t it? Every department, every program needs a garbage collector. Now, I don’t want to trail off any farther than I have on this unusual point. Suffice it to say that Joe C. was the best at balancing a kind of quiet-but-commanding disposition, underwritten with a rare mix of qualities that coalesced into remarkable depth of character–compassion, conviction, humility, tenacity, good humor, toughness.

In 2001, Joe invited me to be his proxy at Native Vision–a stand-in at the camp held that year in Whiteriver, Ariz.–because he had been called to a Knicks camp on the same dates. I’ve returned to Native Vision almost every year since, invited by the camp’s organizers to chip in with Joe and others leading the basketball section of the camp. So even though I left Park U. in 2004 to take up the CCR program at Syracuse, I continued to see Joe every summer and as recently as this past June. That Ph. also attended Park in 2009, just before Joe resigned from coaching there was yet another reason we kept in contact. In fact, there were half a dozen times when it was reassuring to know that Ph. had run into Joe C., that they’d sat together at church, that Joe was looking out for him. What measure of influence or impact is this? I don’t quite know how to name it or how to reckon with its importance, other than to say that Joe dealt in magnitudes of kindness and generosity (of time and attention) far exceeding much else I’ve known.

And so what can you say when someone like Joe C. Meriweather–not that anyone else was quite like him–makes a premature exit? What besides remembering as hard as you can, telling others, scratching together a best-I-could-do-today panegyric, and vowing to become a kinder garbage collector? What other than pausing to notice, with a blend of sadness and anger, the unfair swirls snarling when you least expect them in time’s cross-currents? Ten days gone by and I don’t know.

But I do know this: I am lucky to have had Joe C. as a friend, and I sure will miss him.