McLuhan and Ulmer, again

I just read this in McLuhan's From Cliche to Archetype: "How to elicit creativity from these middenheaps [the rag and bone shop of the heart] has become the problem of modern culture" (184). "Eliciting creativity" is one of the central goals of Ulmer's Internet Invention, although Ulmer foregrounds invention, rather than retrieval, as the primary means of achieving / being creative. That said, Ulmer's popcycle seems to be something very much like a "rag and bone shop of the heart," more personal than cultural, although blurring that line. Ulmer, in fact, is much more concerned about the student and the personal than McLuhan. McLuhan consistently acknowledges students' environments, but he seldom addresses anyone's personal history.

So, in making one more micro comparison of McLuhan and UImer, I also need to figure out where all these comparisons lead. An article for Computers and Composition, in which I compare these two literary scholars and literary pragmatists who haunt Computers and Composition, but were not identified in the "big survey" as among the most influential of the theorists, losing out to the New London Group and Lev Manovich. What do M and U give that the NLG and Manovich don't? Creativity would be a great place to start. A signifcant concern for composing in the general sense, perhaps? I do like this angle--I just need to read more NLG to see if the contrast is significant. Kress certainly makes the right gesture from "analysis to design," but he is making this gesture in the shadow of McLuhan and Ulmer, and "design" isn't quite the same thing as creativity. And of course, creativity is a hot word; companion to affect, perhaps.

A magical discussion

This discussion of magic and rhetoric is something I will need to come back to in the future.

The classical trivium and new media

Just finished McLuhan's The Classical Trivium and have some ideas for the special issue of Kairos--classical rhetoric and new media. McLuhan's thesis is that the branches of the trivium have historically jockied for position--rhetoric pre-eminent in Sophistic and Ciceronian educational scheme, grammar sustaining the middle ages, dialectic pushing grammar and rhetoric aside during the renaissance of the 12th-15th century, rhetoric re-emerging in the oppulent and lay-educated 16th century. Underlying this struggle is a bias against dialectics on McLuhan's part, although perhaps also a desire for unity--each element of the trivium playing its role in a comprehensive, encyclopedic education.

Mapped onto 21st century education and new media studies specifically, it seems possible that the classical trivium can help us think about how to approach this "field." Or, how English studies might approach this field. Wait. for Kairos, the issue is what do the rhetoricians do with new media. My sense is that the rhetoric and composition often draws its circle too tight (McLuhan says Cicero complained about the narrowness of the professors of rhetoric), so how do rhetoricians both adjust their own field to new media, as well as embrace the other two components of the trivium.

Grammar = connections, the editors and enclopediasts, the collators. Grammatical exegesis or hermeneutics looks for the unifying links in texts. The grammatical task facing those who study new media is to try and hold onto a graps of this moving target. There are multi-disciplinary readers (Multimedia from Wagner to Virtual Reality; the New Media Reader, etc.), encyclopedic-like texts that can be employed, and should be employed, rather than providing our students (especially u-grads) with rhetorical collections only (PP, New Words for a New World, etc.). Rhetoricians need to include a broad range of new media texts in their classes / in their research: television, film, games, web, video, etc. and understanding the interconnectedness (the transmedia, the interplay, the influences--as McLuhan notes in C-to-A). They need to practice the hermeneutics of the grammarians: seeing the connections, building eloquent knowledge, making use of taxonomies.

Dialectics = divisions, the deconstructions, the skeptics, the inventors. Recognizing critical theory / deconstruction as the heir to dialectics, and recognizing the ways in which dialectics has marginalized grammar and rhetoric since the late sixties, highlights in part why new media studies did not immediately follow from mcLuhan's work, and it also parallels the flight from comprehension by the lay public. That said, rhetoricians don't need to abandon dialectics completely. We need to break down and question our complicity with media outlets, with corporate softwarew giants, with corporate university plans; we do need to stay vigilant to both the material digital divide and the ways in whith the new media continue to repeat the binary biases of the old media. We also need to recognize that the dialecticians have been engaged in both hermeneutics and invention: Derrida's texts, Ulmer's work, Mark Taylor. But we cannot end with analysis: we must move to design, and generally I think the field wants to move out of obscurity and towards relevance again.

Rhetoric = production, persuasion, design. Rhetorical analysis as reception obviously still has a place in new media studies, as we break down not the binary bias of a new media production so much as its strategies, purposes, and techniques. In asking for and teaching production, we have new tropes and schemes to learn: camera angles, stategies of closures, the concepts of design, etc. We must also be careful not to limit our productions, and our student productions, to academic and technical communication, to argumentation. We must also explore self-expression and analysis (Ulmer), we must be willing to let students produce ads and MTV-like products as ways of understanding them, and we must teach them to design games, drawing on their understanding of myth, narrative, and ethical representation of the other.

Seems pretty do-able, except for the fast approaching deadline--October 15.

hot and cool, implicit or explicit

Thinking about how to teach genre, implicitly (though reading) or explicitly (through identifying of conventions, labels, etc. The former cool, the later hot. More generally thinking about approaches to composition--and learning. The hot approach prevails even in writing: work on skills, skills, skills--a narrow range of skills that students have difficulty mastering because that level of skill achievement is not possible or desirable. Even thought I am explicit in my genre instruction, I prefer the overall cool approach of teaching a wide range of skills, exposing students to the whole game of writing, and then encouraging them to keep playing, to develop their mastery as they go along. I think it is easier for them to understand the narrow set of skills that they are learning once they see the full range of skills that can go into writing. Students might be convinced that the specific set of narrow skills they focus on really are the right skills (not just the idiosyncratic preferences of their teacher), and then engage more fully in those skills. This model of education is not so different from what McLuhan proposed when he looked at the Hutchinson/Adler vs Dewey debates: stay broad through U-grad, get specialized when you are ready to specialize.

Still talking / thinking about New Media

If B&G add to MM the social, political, and gendered constraints and affordances of new media, and LM adds the truly digital components, as well as the centrality of database (a searchable and usable archive?), but all of them are still more or less grounded in hot and cool, what we get is a 40+ year history that has been reasonably consistent and constant even thought it keeps changing its terminology. We also get a history that is making some progress, although progress primarily means "filling in the picture." Is this an argument worth making? A picture worth painting? I think I prefer painting pictures to making arguments.

What does happen to Barthes, Derrida, Ulmer, others in my other narrative?

Ulmer looks more and more like MM to me: the same kinds of projects (making the humanities relevant, acknowledging that the environment has changed, encouraging creativity in balance with logos). He is actually more pedagogically focused, and does in deed think of the classroom as the space of experiment and invention. Duh. Teletheory, in particular, seems like McLuhan revisited: the Bacon connection, the oultine of projects, etc.

Does all of this add up to an intellectual history of new media studies and practices? Within English studies, have we chosen the tech comm / usability of new media over the creative / inventive new media? Probably not, but a lot of that action seems to come out of Art, only some out of English. Is English still all about the Blog?

Fog settles in...

Talking about NM: Are we getting anywhere?

I am always thinking about this:

hot and cool (and dry?)
immediacy and hypermediacy: what do B&G add: social, political, gender. See their article.
film and database: an unironic terminology, a use-based terminology, nice literal and metaphorical dimensions. Front and back: out of database comes film. Out of hypermediacy comes immediacy. Out of abstractness comes concreteness.

only McClould gives us the third term:

resemblance, iconicity, abstractness.
Although he is missing a fourth term: concreteness, which starts to look more like hot and cool, with resemeblance and iconicity being styles of achieving. But it ain't quite that simple yet.

Hypermediacy doesn't assume iconicity (although there is certainly a lot of it there.

We are probably getting somewhere, but we need to do a better job of building on existing scholarship.
We might need to get out of binaries.
And we might benefit from trinities that are not dialectical: no third term.

Is this where the Wysocki articles gets hung up?

What we might need next is symplexity, reversed.

Revising assignments

I just finished teaching English 120 in the summer, and was generally happy with how things went but I keep wanting to get a Photoshop visual commentary assignment worked in, and I need to give the "taking the lead" collaborative assignment a bit more of an edge.

For the former, i think I can probably focus on WLM more, and develop a visual commentary that might function more like a poster or an ad, although it has to be informative and have a substantial textual component (I'm guessing). Cindy Selfe's chapter in Writing New Media has some good ideas: a visual essay (or commentary) that would focus on a single issue like "White Privilege: Use it or Lose it" (a satire), or an ad for a diversity class (what would it take to make the class look interesting?), or maybe just a white face / black face side by side, with biographical information. I could imagine one of myself that might say something like 90% of professors are white on my white side and something like 2% of professors are African American (I would need to look this stat up). I could find additional stats. I could even try to layer in pictures from various points of my life, with tags like "Teacher's Pet" and "First one blamed" or something more subtle than that. How about this one: never learned to code switch -- code switching since 7.

For "taking the lead" I think I want to switch to "what's your issue" and include a video component--an ad that could run on television or the web; it could be produced in PPT or a video editing program. Future Tense reported on something like this--need to look that up.

What does McLuhan add to composition studies?

A real awareness of the environment children emerge from, and the effects that environment has on schooling. I guess we have some of that in comp studies, but I love his description of how children love to find things. He isn't a theorist in the way that Derrida, perhaps Foucault, others are theorists. He didn't very often start with an argument about a text--he started with an observation about the world. He started with where his students were at--compositionists should find a kindred spirit, a generous pedagoical spirit in his work.

A comprehensive vocabulary. I am not sure that anybody else in the field has offered such a comprehensive vocabulary. I am pretty consistently able to draw on his extensive vocabularly to understand a technology or genre and why it works, why it presents challenges, why it needs to be understood in the context of a media ecology. Blogging: hot genre, largely visual space (which means textual), the potential for acousitic blogging is hard to reach (where's the conversation), time consuming, better social networking software available, return on investment low for all except the writers, not likely to draw in and enage the non-writers, except those who see its social / therapeutic dimensions rather than writerly dimension. Blogging a figure on the educational / media radar for a while, now receeding into ground, getting used in ways that aren't about "blogging." Just getting used as a tool.

The medium is the massage. I can't believe how the "cutting edge" of new media studies is currently "discovering" the materiality of new media, and never discovering it through McLuhan, never pushing it past where he was at in 1964. All they are discovering is media ecology, sort of, and that the medium is in fact the message. Wow! So how do I make this point without just loosing my cool? I gotta go back and figure out what he really adds beyond what these contemporary scholars are saying. focus on KH and AFW? Others?

Cicero, McLuhan, Kairos

Thinking about the Kairos call for webtexts on the relevance of classical rhetoric to new media composition. Reading McLuhan on Cicero, the notion of encyclopedic eloquence, the training of citizens / princes, McLuhan's reading of Machievalli and Ramus as a narrowing and instrumentalizing of that tradition, in contrast to Cicero, Erasmus, and Nashe. McLuhan cites Joyce, Eliot, and Pound as the great rhetoricians / poets in the 20th century, so where does that leave us in the 21st century? David Byrne, Hillman Curtis, Laurie Anderson? I just went to Laurie Anderson's site for the first time and found out that she was NASA's first "artist in residence" in 2005, and that her newest work comes out of that experience. Without knowing any more than that, i know that there is a McLuhanesque article on the "two worlds," on Anderson translating the scientific experience, on tuning the public to the scientific endeavor that increasingly seems dangerous and perhaps pointless rather than exciting, brave, new.

For Kairos: as Sirc has shown us, we need to expand out understanding of composition beyond our narrow and specialized conversations or we risk losing the range and variety of human expression. I worry about offering up Byrne and Anderson because I worry about the "genius" status, but I don't think either would accept that label, but they both exhibit 21st century encyclopedic eloquence, an eloquence that is not high brow although not always accessible. To the extent that they can teach us and our students anything, Byrne's PPT has clearly shown us that the medium is the massage--students just don't massage in the same ways. Anderson is perhaps less accessible; i'll have to revisit her work. What does it mean that at 37 I am re-learning all that I new at 17? Look at the roadblocks my education and myself put up.

Students in the sciences, engineering, even business exhibit the same kinds of passion, curiosity, and amateurism as students in the humanities, who are equally susceptible to specialization, narrow-minded ness, and fragmention.

Anthony has been talking about the canons of skills, derived from Scholes canon of methods. Scholes is probably working in the Ciceronian tradition; collaboration with Ulmer on TextBook, I believe.

McLuhan and ulmer again

Ulmer, in his very first book, immediately distanced himself from McLuhan because he felt like McLuhan was privileging / encouraging a return to orality. The point you are making about Ulmer distancing himself from Ong is pointing out the same kind of positioning move--Ong was McLuhan's student, and both Ong and McLuhan are more conservative than Ulmer, and part of that conservatism is manifest in a certain nostalgia for oral cultures. Ong and McLuhan have more faith in the immediacy of the oral word (to bring Bolter and Grusin in) than does Ulmer, and Ulmer does not want to see the "literacy" of the 21st century return to an easy acceptance of immediacy and transparency.

That paragraph might have more background information than you need. What's relevant for our unit and our course, however, is understanding that Ulmer is trying to help us think about a new kind of literacy that is not fundamentally "oral." The MyStory, as you hint, shouldn't just be a "familiar telling of a tale," it shouldn't be just another story about the clear and easy coherence of your identify. Instead, it should be a story of the ways in which you perhaps have to force or yoke "discourses" (career, family, entertainment, community) together to find a coherence that you probably will acknowledge is accidental, social, and fragile, rather than natural, unique, and solid.

Labeling McLuhan

McLuhan is often labeled "postmodern" or "proto-postmodern," or more accurately, I suspect, a modernist in reverse, but I think I want to label him "anti-modernists," not because the label is important but because working through and with McLuhan means working on or through a particular kind of response to "the modern," which also needs to be clearly defined as the mechanical, the objective, the fragmented. McLuhan preferred the organic, and saw organicisim in the electronic, although didn't celebrate the electronic just because he saw echoes of the organic. McLuhan never took the distanced, objective, scientific stance, until he adopted Popper's definition of science as that which can be disproved. His science was the Science of Bacon and the Science of Vico: a human science. Pomo is often used a label to describe someone or some movement that celebrates the fragmentation of modernism (although Modernism is often wrongly associated with wholeness and integration, it seems to me), but McLuhan understood that in the electric age, people seem primarily interested in seeking integration.

This labeling of McLuhan, explaining where he is coming from, will likely come early in the book.

Natural Language Theories; retrieving cliches.

All ideas this morning.

Just helping MV with her facebook paper, and I was sketching some "ideal" scenarios. Even as I sketched them, however, I seriously doubted them, and kept thinking: Bad money drives out good. I think this law applies quite frequently in the high tech communication world: the early promise of a democratic web (good money) has largely been driven out by bad (commercial / pornographic / non-democratic bad--a value judgement, I realize); the early promise of intellectually rich blogging driven out by daily blabbing (again, I see my own biases her); Facebook seems to have great potential for creating community among students and faculty, retrieve the small college feel, but instead becomes "StalkerBook" and popularity contests.

McLuhan's laws of media try to remain value-neutral, but Gresham's law seems like a value-laden version of reversal.

Oh, and NLT: McLuhan was the master at using the vernacular to theorize: hot and cool mediums, the medium is the message / massage / mass age. I find myself increasingly drawn to aphorism like Gresham's law, and it seems like a retrieval of these cliches--retrieval is enhancements, as new application, as remediation--is one, potentially interesting, way to go about theorizing the world of media ecology (another NLT). I see in this one more way in which Derrida distinguished himself from McLuhan, one more way in which I distinguish myself from Ulmer.

School of Rock

This article got me thinking about a project that came to me this summer. The articles says students who can read complex texts are likely to succeed in college, and those who cannot, are not.

This summer, as I was reading CK's FRC, I was seeing in this text some pretty amazing levels of complexity. Okay, maybe not amazing in the big picture, but much more complex than the cover, the subtitle, the subject matter would suggest. When my student read the text and attempted a rhetorical analysis, the most common complaint was "he is all over the place, it doesn't make sense." While of course I would prefer that they love it and see its beauty, this complaint also confirmed for me that the text is college level worthy--this is the kind of complex reading text that will, hopefully, challenge students and prove to be a good lesson in reading complex texts.

I also imagined a paper this summer, about CK, about FRC, about CK as the "affective scholar," and more generally, after reading this particular article, about the value of using other complex texts about rock. But complex in the CK, affective way, not the middlebrow way that Sirc rightly complains about in "Box Logic." Greil Marcus comes to mind. Some of the documentaries. Interestingly our students who listen only to Xian rock don't find this writing about popular music to be valuable--for so many reasons. I wonder if there is good writing about X'ian rock? I am sure many people use readings about rock, rap, etc., but I haven't seen a fully articulated argument about the right combination of things: subject matter, complexity, relevance. Reading Don't Fix No Chevys seems relevant here too. Gotta bring Amy into the picture.

two ideas

I watched a lot of ppt music videos today, and read student reflections about that work. Most students can see the value of choosing the right image to match with the song and the overall message; I wonder if the analogy to working with sources would make sense? Locating, choosing, and using a direct quotation from a source, for example, is similar to locating just the right image (not usually an easy thing to do) because there are many images--choosing the right one is important to the overall message of the paper / videos. Choosing a quotation from an essay might be like cropping a photo--sometimes we get images that have a lot of information, but we have to select and crop from within that image. That probably isn't a useful analogy, because most video composers use full images, rather than cropped images.

Thinking through this analogy, however, highlights some fair use and citation issues. In the video, students tend to use whole images, but I think they understand that they shouldn't just insert a whole essay into their own essay. Or maybe there is yet another issue highlighted here: students aren't sure how to "crop" an essay, how to pick out the right "image" from an essay that is full of images.

Well, I could say more, but I want to get my other idea down before I lose it. I was just thinking about one of my dream articles--what McLuhan means for English studies. I was thinking of Rice's article on McLuhan and composition, and the media ecology article on McLuhan for rhetoric, and there is the Frye-McLuhan comparision that Cavell has done, but what about McLuhan for the whole enterprise rather than breaking him up. McLuhan as the glue, or at least a touchstone, or whatever the right image would be--which in fact is something that McLuhan envisioned, although he certainly didn't have composition on his radar. I was also thinking about McLuhan as anti-environment for English studies: clearly more conservative, un-disciplined, vernacular and populist rather than specialized and professionalized. Starts to move in the direction of The Arts of Living. Hmm--that seems pretty good.

way too long...

without a post.

I have been reading student papers and, and, and, I don't know what else. I guess I have been trying to get the ppt music video research project figured out and straightened out, and I have been running to meetings, and meeting with students. Busy, busy, busy, but a good kind of busy.

I just reviewed a set of proposals that went more quickly than usual. Made me feel like I do get better at something with practice.

I have been wanting to get to McLuhan for compositionists. The chapter in Mc's Legacy, "Beyond McLuhanism," is going to be able to function as an excellent starting point for a chapter on David Byrne, David Carson, Laurie Anderson, etc. I think many chapters will move along if I ever find the time.

what's the routine?

still trying to figure out how to fit my academic writing into my schedule. spent today grinding through committee work, doing class preparation, answering emai, thinking "i need administrative support," but never seeing any legitimate opening for writing or reading.

last night I spent a chunch of time locating some files and getting organized to do some writing, but I never got past the sorting stage. sigh....

I often hear about the person who gets up two hours early to write the novel or scholarship or whatever, but that doesn't seem to work for me. I do write better in the evening, but that usually keeps me awake much longer than I can sustain for long.

I just read a little analysis about my personality type (enji, I think)--it said "we" have trouble doing things we are not passionate about. Maybe I am just not passionate enough--although that doesn't seem right when it comes to McLuhan for comp. I am starting to think about doing something like getting a hotel room for one night over the christmas holidays--take off in the morning, work all day (probably at a library, but could be in the hotel), write as late as I can, sleep, get up and check out, keep working all day, head home for supper. Probably looking at about 16-20 hours of dedicated work time--I think I have enough material to pull that off without having to worry about running out of things to write. If I could flesh out all my chapters, get some feedback, and peck away at it over the semester, I could try to shop a manuscript around at CCCCs. That would be ambitious and professional of me.

life is not a game

I might have already written this post early this year--i guess that means the idea just won't die. I am thinking about the metaphor life is a game, a metaphor I have used in a paper that may never get published, and I have been thinking about it in the context of all the baseball "controversies" this fall. These artificial worlds are taken so seriously, despite the fact that the games are so meaningless, and if we think about these controversies in the context of world catastrophies that follow one on the next, it is hard to imagine how we have culturally got to a point where we value the games so much--want to discuss, analyzed, dissect them so much--and what we seem to want to do with the disasters is forget and move on. we don't want to point fingers.

But i digress. I wanted to write about a new framework for thinking about that paper: Spellmeyer's Arts of Living. I had explored, but not developed that framework earlier. I probably need to drop or cut back on the pragmatist framework. think I have thought about the persistence of this metaphor, from Johnny Damon to poker manuals for life, but if I get reader reports back on the piece and I get the expected rejections, I will try to move work into this other framework, and probably look at the journal college literature a little more closely.

research problem

So, I am trying to think of a good way to interact with the research class. I wonder if I can present them with a research problem like this one:

Marshall McLuhan provocatively suggested that kids in the 1960s were trying to interact with print like it was a screen: they scanned print, looked around, but didn't focus on words, had trouble holding the line of the line. How might we research a claim or hyposthesis like this?

Or, I want to develop a pedagogy that favors tactility and connectivity rather than abstractness and isolation? How might I do that, and how might I research this pedagogy?

Rather than read texts closely, I am interested in making connections among texts: compositionists after McLuhan. David Byrne, David Carson, Laurie Anderson, others.

Or really, really generally: I want to understand 21st century students. What is that going to take? What do writing instructors in particular need to know?

I suppose we could also play around with tetrads. Tetrad laptops, tetrad cell phones, tetrad personal essays, literature, the genre approach. I should probably bring in a bunch of McLuhan books.

What, if anything, are laptops doing for your classes (as student, as teacher)?

'nuff.

money, money, money

I am starting to think more seriously about books for English 120, and I ran across Barbara Ehrenrich's new book, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream. I went to Amazon to check out a price and it was grouped with a book called Class Matters, which in turn lead me to Money and the Meaning of Life and Money, Money, Money: The Search for Wealth and the Pursuit of Happiness.

all of these books have a lot of potential for teaching and scholarship. I am inclined to take a serious look at CM and MMM because those are edited collections--a little easier to work with in a writing class, and the first covers a wide range of stories about class in america. the ehrenrich book is interesting in the context of my poker paper and my interest in the changing american dream. according to the poker ads, the american dream isn't really pursued anymore: you hit it big with a few bets a kaboom! you live the American Dream.

AS I was thinking about the American Dream, I also thought about metaphors we live by as a context for my "Life is not a Game," paper. I think I have already blogged about Johnny Damon's biography and the poker as metaphor for life books I have seen, but I don't think I precisely thought of metaphors we live by as another context for that paper. I could probably drop the whole rorty and pragmatism thing if I made that shift. Certainly a book I have always wanted to read, although the title pretty much says it all.

One additional random thought: an assignment for Writing in the health Professions. Maybe it would come out in the journals / blogs, but I would like the students to compile a list of further readings as part of a strategy to get them to think about being life-long learners and readers within their field.

I notice I am at 9 minutes: I wonder if others write this much in 9 minutes? Now 10.

When I don't journal...

ideas get away from me. I know I missed a bunch the last 10 days, but let me try to get a few down.

I heard a wonderful radio show, Speaking of Faith, on Sunday. The host interviewed a surgeon / theologian who has written about the wisdom of the body, dying, and a memoir Lost in America. I heard lots of potential in Sherwin(?) Nuland's words for my course on Writing in the Health Professions, and for the memoirs 110 students are about to write.
http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/biologyofthespirit/particulars.shtml

I really enjoyed re-reading Klosterman's FRC last week; I saw all sorts of McLUhan traces, some of which I had already noticed, some of which were new to me. The complexity of his media ecology analysis is impressive. I am more certain than ever that there is an article to be written about learning from Klosterman. Although students struggled with the complexity and absence of linear line in his arguments, they also saw humor and insight in his work.

I need to write a proposal about style within the next two weeks. I was telling people about my theory of style as "space management"--informal brings everything close together: writer close to subject, writer close to reader--it is intimate. A duh-pithany, I suppose. Midlevel is about motion, about jazz and action, about being "stylish" and entrancing and enticing, about mesmerizing rather than than me and you. Midlevel is the only style that gets called "stylish"--informal is conversationally real; formal is devoid of style, without stylistic flourish, distant, professional, scientific--all that non-jazz. I think I might have fun with this. Oh yeah, and I want to argue about the importance of putting these styles in front of writers; an analogy might be to a color chart: style as circular, rather than grid-like, as primary, secondary, and tertirary styles, cools and hots, effective and dissonant blends.

Now that is using the journal: the whole color chart thing came to me as I wrote!