Catching Up

Wow, has it been this long since I posted? A few quick thoughts before I head out to teach:

• Rowan's MRI was clear--this is very good news. Retinoblastoma patients have a high chance to develop other forms of cancer, especially in the first two years. She will continue to get periodic exams, but we are encouraged that she is now cancer free.
• CCCC's in San Fran was a great time. I saw a few really spectacular panels (more on this later). My own panel went well, although we ran short on time and I had to cut quite a bit from my presentation. Sometime this week I need to carve out time to send emails to all the people I talked to last week.
• My parents are in town this week (and last week). Meg and I were able to take a short honeymoon trip down to Sarasota for a few nights. One experience urged us to start a food blog (more on this coming this weekend).
• I am sad to learn that blogs are dead, but must respect the validity of the source. Perhaps someday, in a distant future, humans will evolve into a species capable of caring. Here's to hope and the future.

Some Quick Sports Thoughts

In between pieces of fruit (a healthy non-Subway lunch), I wanted to spout the following:

• The injury is the best thing to happen to A-Rod this year. He needs to go away for awhile. Distance is good. There is nothing he can do on the field to repair his image or silence his critics. Unfortunately, hip injuries are baaaad. If this injury is as serious as some believe, then who knows if he will ever be "A-Rod" again.
• T.O. will sign with San Diego. They have an offensive minded coach who has worked with divas before (Irvin in Dallas) and a strong-willed quarterback. Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't touch this guy with a ten-foot pole. I'm hearing the Raiders, but I don't think Al Davis is that oblivious: after the Randy Moss fiasco, I think Al will sit this one out.
• The Patriots made the right move. Yes, we gave up more talent than we will receive in return. But the Pats also got cap room. Look for them to resign a bunch of players that fans outside of New England have never heard of before the NFL collective bargaining agreement expires and teams face a year of free agency without a salary cap. NE will resign as many veterans as they can before that time (e.g., Richard Seymour, Vince Worfolk, Stephen Neal, Ellis Hobbs, Nick Kaczur, Logan Mankins, and Stephen Gostkowski). All those players are free agents after 2009. They comprise 1/2 of the starting defensive line, 3/5 of the starting offensive line, a starting cornerback, and the Pro Bowl caliber kicker. I imagine at least three of those players will renew before the start of the 2009 season--except for Seymour. He's had a few subpar years in a row, and will want to prove himself this year in hopes of getting a shot at Albert Haynesworth type money.
• Which brings me to my final point: Albert Haynesworth's contract is the biggest mistake I have ever seen. I mean that literally. I cannot think of a single deal that makes less sense. Yes, Haynesworth recorded 14.5 sacks in two seasons from the D-tackle position. Yes he can push the pile and can chase down runners on the edge. But compare Haynesworth to, say, Warren Sapp. Compare Haynesworth to Bryant Young. Compare his numbers to Steve McMichael. His numbers in his first five seasons are so inferior to these three hall of famers that it is laughable. And you know what? D-tackles are not fine wines. They don't get better with age.

Colbert on the"Danger" of the Internet

This comes from Colbert's interview with Keen--it is presented as something of a nightmare. But I think it adequately describes a digital/rhetorical/sophistic new media environment, one in which there is not getting outside the cave. Responding to Keen's claim that digital culture destroys objective media and criteria for truth, Colbert responds:

isn't reality something we decide?

I never thought I would say this, but...

I actually find myself agreeing with Andrew Keen. Today Keen responded to Patricia Cohen's NYTimes article on how the pending economic crisis will affect the humanities. Keen concludes:

What I do know for sure, however, is that academic humanists -- especially the younger ones with a bit of life left in them -- better upgrade themselves before they get totally swept away by the digital revolution. Their traditional monopoly on wisdom, humanistic or otherwise, is being undermined by the communications revolution of blogs, Facebook & Twitter. Rather than learning to quote Shakespeare or W.E.B. Du Bois, I would advise aspiring humanities scholars to learn how to build their own intellectual brands and distribute their ideas more broadly and relevantly. Just as the death of newspapers is forcing smart young journalists to become self-employed entrepreneurs, so the imminent crisis of academic humanity departments, which will eventually do away with the archaic tenure system, offers a great opportunity to rethink what it means to be a professional educator in the 21st century.

Leaving the sarcasm aside, I agree that contemporary academics have to do a better job building their relevance, and that we have an opportunity to rethink the profession of higher education. Actually, I think this work can be traced back to before the Web2.0 revolution: to Lyotard's critique of metanarratives of progress and knowledge. Jumping back to my Lanham post the other day, we need to reconsider Kant's fracturing of the professors' public and private lives. For Kant, the professor must, in the "public" of his intellectual discipline, speak freely. But in his "private" duties as teacher and citizen, s/he must obey. Hence the motto "think, but obey."

A few centuries later, I think that disjunction has lead to the circumstances that Richard M. Freeman, Massachusetts Commissioner of Higher Education (quoted from Cohen's article):

But what we haven’t paid a lot of attention to is how students can put those abilities effectively to use in the world. We’ve created a disjunction between the liberal arts and sciences and our role as citizens and professionals.

Cohen concludes that "baldly marketing the humanities makes some in the field uneasy." But let's qualify this through Lanham: after the influence of the Modern Enlightenment, framing itself as something other than "stuff" makes the humanities uneasy. After the Modern Enlightenment, becoming a discipline founded upon praxis seems so inferior to being a discipline that focuses on production. Let's become something otherwise.

I am confused... someone explain this to me

Granted, I didn't get through my morning coffee today. But something really confused me on the ride to work. I live about 20 miles south of University of South Florida. Everyday I drive on I-75 I experience an incredible irony: flying directly opposite to the Martin Luther King St. highway exit is a huge, billowing confederate flag. The flag pole resides on a small trailer park protected by a security fence. A few weeks ago Meg and I were treated to a surreal scene: a group of elderly women sitting around on a Sunday mending the confederate flag.

Today, however, a different flag appeared on the pole: a flag of the 13 original colonies, the Betsy Ross flag.

I have never heard of any connection between the confederate flag and the Betsy Ross flag. Some needs to explain this to me. Slowly. Since I still haven't had that coffee.

Lanham definition of rhetoric; the Aim of Education(s)

I need to remember this somewhere, why not the blog. Now you can remember it, too.

"Rhetoric" has not always been a dirty word, the opposite of sincerity, truth, and good intentions. For most of its life it meant the training in expression, spoken and written, that you need to play a useful role in human society. It became a dirty word in the seventeenth century, when science, trying to describe the world of stuff, wanted to abolish the distortions of human attention structures. Human communication ought to be like the United Parcel Service, an efficient mover of information boxes from one destination to the other. This model for human communication gains its power from its narrowness, but we need a wider model for an attention economy. Information does not come in simple neutral boxes and its distribution is a more complex matter altogether. We need a more capacious conception of human communication, one that can accommodate the full range of human purpose.

All the more do we need it because the digital computer has created a new expressive space. The screen works differently from the page. Words don't stay put. They dance around. Images play a major role and they move too. Color is everywhere. And sound, too, spoken and synthesized. Above all, a different expressive economy prevails. The printed page depends on an economics of deprival. No color, no movement, images in careful moderation. All these sacrificed to create an expressive field that encourages concentration on conceptual thought. It is a monopolistic attention economy, directed from the top. The digital screen depends on an economics of plenty. It allows competition between word, image, and sound for attention. It is a market attention economy, driven from the bottom. You can map onto these two contrasting expressive spaces all the arguments about top-down versus bottom-up, planned versus market, economies. Market economies, like the political democracy that accompanies them, demand a full-range conception of human communication, the kind a rhetorical curriculum has always provided. And this new rhetoric will have to be built on the digital expressive space as well as the printed one, and teach how to move easily from one to the other

I have been writing and thinking lately about how badly we need to re-articulate the purpose of education. The social demographics and cultural conceptions of higher education have changed greatly over the last 50 years. Higher education is no longer the elite privilege for an elite few. It should no longer frame itself as such; yet Kant's ghost still drives much of the work we do, it still emphasizes the public/private obligations of the scholar, still protects the scholar from public interaction, still--to capture Lanham--fetishizes a print preference for the neutrality of information. It still aims to produce scholars.

I realize, clearly, now that I have no interest in producing scholars (at least at the undergraduate level). I remember Nathaniel Rivers, Ryan Weber and I sharing a similar reaction to Whitehead's description of undergraduate education in "Universities and their Function" (circa 1829): "wow, that sounds like grad school." And that is where scholars should be produced: graduate school.

My interest in undergraduates is to produce citizens. I like Lanham's definition, those ready "to play a useful role in human society." Notice this definition says nothing about the creation of knowledge. This isn't to say that citizenship cannot involve aspects of scholarship. But I am calling for us [rhetoricians, English faculty, humanists, humans--let the pronoun stretch as far as you want it to go] to reassess why we do what we do. I think the difference in not only technology, but also culture and history, will lead us to very different answers than what Kant and Humbodlt argued for several hundred years ago.

Then again, I just watched The Flock of Dodos, and that shit is scary. But, as the movie suggests, perhaps if Kant had trained his scientists to be a bit more rhetorically saavy with audiences outside the Universities walls, this wouldn't have happened in the first place.

Student Strikes Gold

I had my students do an assignment in which they had to characterize blogs. One student offered these nuggets:

Fourth, the blog that is the most idiotic tends to win. This is just like high school. The weird blog is the ugly girl, who when stripped of her ponytail and glasses, is beautiful. The weird blog tends to have the most readers and the most responses, so the more stupid you think your idea is the more you are swimming in gold.

Fifth, and by far the biggest tip, nice blogs always finish last. Nobody wants to read why your life is awesome. We do not care about your big green powered house (unless it was built out of rubber bands), your pink Barbie convertible (unless it flipped and left you with a harry potter esque scar), or your 2.5 perfect kids (unless one really is only .5 and he is the most normal of the three). It is wired into our DNA to love a good train wreck, and then to drive by it at 7 miles an hour staring on the high way because we were trying to ‘safely pass it’.

Sweet.