Performing Blogging

So, here we are at the end of the semester, the last blog entry.

I’m intrigued by this word “performing.” Monika used the word in a recent conversation in which we were talking about some of Raymond Carver’s short stories. “Carver’s use of a particular narrative strategy performs X.” She actually said something smarter, but I can’t remember what it was.

Then last week’s reading focused on the idea of performing literarcy.

Now, we’re talking about performing professionalism. In any other job (in my estimation) this kind of talk would get you tossed out on your ear. Who’s going to pay a lawyer $550 per hour to perform law or is going to trust their health to a doctor who wants to “perform” medicine. (Yes. I know one performs surgery, but thing seems like a very different use of the word) Why do we just DO our jobs as academics rather than perform. This kind of “too cute by half” business seems like part of the reason you can go to school for 12 years only to get compete with 100 other people for a gig that pay less than middle management at Starbucks.

Now, on the other side of this…

The writers I know who are successful and who also hold jobs in the academy (as no landlord is currently accepting copies of the Kenyon/Paris Review(s) in lieu of rent) seem to be careful to only “perform” their roles in the academy. Most, seem to recognize it for the perilous, low stakes snakepit that it is and steer the hell clear as much as they can. By this I don't mean they don't care about teaching, but don't care about the academic stuff. They work w/ their student and try to write things that will win a National Book Award.

Excepting the creepy racist poem

Of the articles we’ve read this semesters, Performing Writing, Performing Literacy, was the most useful to me.

The idea of writing as performance is one that I have employed both as a teacher and as a writer for nearly twenty years.

For large chunks of my creative work, my method of composition is based in the aural. I imagine a story being told to a listener. The way in which I tell the story shifts based on who the listener is. Sometimes if I’m dissatisfied with the story’s language or plot I’ll attempt to re-envision the tale by giving it a different initial audience

This is also why I like to incorporate speaking exercises in first year writing. If students are speaking to an audience of classmates— who I have occasionally asked to role play as well, one day, the are loyal readers of Daily Kos, the next staunch members of the NRA—the student realizes the importance of both style and arrangement in composition.

I have also set up exercises in which students watch political speech and try to figure out which audience is being targeted —supporters, swing voters or likely voters for the candidate.

I'm planning to send this article to a friend of mine who's teaching a pedagogy of composition course in the fall.

Insert Catchy Title Here

I’m probably not the first person one would expect to complain about liberal bias in the classroom and I’m not that sure that’s what I’m planning to do here. Don’t believe me? Then by all means accept my invite to join a protest of Rudi Giuliani as the commence speaker at the University of Southern Mississippi May 15graduation in Hattiesburg.
What I do want to discus here in Scorczewski’s tone deafness to the politics of what she’s teaching. It strikes me that for all her talk of empowering the students and overthrowing the dominant culture (ok maybe not overthrowing, but you get my drift— AH! CLICHÉ! CLICHÉ! RUN FOR THE HILLLS) she stills seems on some level wedded to the receptacle model of education. I’ve got the good ideas and you students—when you’re smart enough to see what’s up—will get them. And I don’t just mean the language of the academy here. It’s political beliefs. Now, that said she does speak to this on p233. (She regained a bit of ethos for me here after she lost it utterly by referring to Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl” as an essay. It’s not an essay. It’s an excerpt from the NOVEL Lucy.) “”My relief revealed my entrenchment in another ideology, an institutional ideology so prevalent I perceived it as common sense.”

While not about cliché per se: I remember in an early class you suggested that we look for where the writing breaks down in student papers. This is what they’re trying to say. I’m still doing this and the jury still feels out. My own instinct in teaching creative writing is to tell students to look for where the language soars. This is their best material. This is what they want to try to develop.

Multi-Modal, My Aunt Fanny

(or Why I Think This is the Worst Idea Since Sliced Poison)

While I spent a meaningful amount of time as a technology executive as well as executive editor for a trade publication covering technology in finance, I’m still a bit of a Luddite when it comes to writing pedagogy. Now, don’t get me wrong. I love having computers in every classroom and having access to classrooms where each student can use a computer. I even use the MS Word comment feature to grade papers. But when it comes to the work being generate by the students themselves. I’m OLD SKOOL! I want to see 12 Times New Roman on 8.5 by 11 with 1 inch margins and a running head. Unless the essay is about a photo, or a chart or graph are truly helpful to communicate, no thank you, please.

So maybe I’m not the audience Takayoshi and Selfe had in mind for Chapter One Of Thinking About Multimodiality. I am a resistant audience. I’m twisting the rhetorical triangle into a parallelogram waiting until page nine when they finally speak to my primary concern: When you add a focus on multimodiality to a composition class, what do you give up?

Yeah. See that’s the nagging question that kept me from engaging with their argument. And what do they have to say on this: “We believe that teaching students to make rhetorically-based use of video, still images….can actually help them better understand the affordances of written language.” Well, pardon me for calling BS, but I wasn’t aware the composition studies was so close to theology that an “I believe” statement could be employed in place of evidence. Where are their rigorous studies performed with various groups/types of students performed over long periods of time tracking how well students learned in a composition class?

I applauded when Larry Ellison banned PowerPoint from Oracle as a colossal time waster. ( I had done the same at the PR firm where I was managing director the same month.) The joint chiefs of staff also saw an issue with people using all their time and bandwidth fooling with bells and whistles instead of communicating facts.

Southern Miss (Noun Followed By Verb)

One of things that really pleases me about Kathleen Blake Yancey’s address/article “Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key”—perhaps because it sets her apart from the great majority of rhetoric and composition studies material I’ve read— is her willingness to confront the material conditions, not only of our students and their writing process, but within our own departments and discipline. Yancey doesn’t eschew facts on the ground type analysis of the shift underway in today’s English departments in favor of esoteric and inside-baseball feeling conversations about this vs. that. She realizes the if none of us have jobs, this vs. that isn’t going to matter to any of us in our new careers as bricklayers.
Her discussion of the redistribution of funds from the University to the students themselves “in the form of scholarships called Lucky or Freedom” is interesting and something I’d be interested in learning more about. When I first came to Mississippi, I was impressed by the number of students attending my who had these kinds of scholarships. I’m embarrassed that I didn’t think “hey, where is this money coming from?” Perhaps, this is why the photo-copier in our department was used by 13th century Irish monks. Maybe this is why nearly all full time instructor/lecturer positions were eliminated. Perhaps this is the reason why graduate students were, with no warning or chance to protest, cut from 9 credits of tuition to 6 credits tuition in the summer. (The unfairness of this is mindblowing to me. We hold up our end of the bargain by teaching all year and THEN with two months left, they change the deal, reducing our compensation across the board. If this were a business, people would be Up In Arms).
The future of the university, not just English Departments, but the full on shooting match seems to be on a lot of folks mind as evidence by Jed Lapinski’s article in today’s Salon that I happened to be reading —(i.e.) alt./tabbing back forth— while writing this response. Enjoy…
http://www.salon.com/books/nonfiction/index.html?story=/books/feature/2010/03/28/anya_kamenetz_diyu_interview

The Only History of Literacy Paper That Could Ever Move Me

While Deb Brandt's "Accumulating Literacy" does a serviceable job of tracing the growth of literacy and the means by which it happened as well as what it meant during the 20th century, where she gets big points from me is for familiarizing me with Dorothy Smith's concept of DOCUMENTARY REALITY-- " so much of what passes for raw data has already been processed socially organized systems of recording and recording."

I agree with Smith and am interested in reading more about her ideas. The idea of filtered reality ascending to become so much the dominant reality that its very filtered-ness becomes unperceived is one of the concepts I'm interested in both in my fiction and in the classroom (In the first Argument and Research classes I taught I forced everyone to write on the cover of their notebooks "Facts all come with points of view"--Talking Heads.)

One of the exercises I used to help students understand this was to look at current event from four or five different points of view on the political spectrum. Today's health care bill passage would work. What's actually happening is largely up for debate. News aggregators like Drudge even work for the exercise-- what narrative is being pushed here.

As our media become fragmented the problem becomes more complex and potentially more insidious.

Graff-tastic!

I'm sympathetic to Graff throughout his essay, but he really wins me over at the bottom of p 72 "Hypothetical students who studied nothing but comics or texts like Vanna speaks would be very unlikely to produce intellectually valuable readings of such texts unless they had also read far more substantial works...(ones) that provided them with models of intellectual analysis."

Right on. I thoroughly agree with the idea of having students examine "lightweight texts" as I find the students are more easily engaged here and if the students are reading the assignments, it's hard to get a conversation going at all. That said we must give students tools to get them to think about this texts in interesting ways.

So here are my top three texts and my top three pieces of guidance:

1. Good Times http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070991/plotsummary
2. The Jeffersons http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072519/
3. The Cosby Show http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086687/

1. James Baldwin "Down At The Cross — Letter from a Region of My Mind."
2. Walter Benjamin The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"
3. Henry Louis Gates The Signifying Monkey http://www.amazon.com/Signifying-Monkey-African-American-Literary-Criticism/dp/019506075X