The rhythm of the semester.

If I were a better blogger, if I were to keep the journaling / notetaking up more consistently and be more precise with my observations, I bet I would find that every semester has a predictable rhythm. Because I am a sporadic blogger, I will just have to trust my memory, and record the rhythms of this semester.

1. Good (even high) energy start: students are excited to be at college, I have a pretty good set of icebreaking exercises--I've gotten off to a good start in the fall the last 4 years--memory starts to fade after that.

2. Energy drop about week 3 or 4. Students get overwhelmed and over-extended, the fun icebreaking gets replaced by the work of the class, they don't really trust me until they get grades. Then they just hate me ; )

3. Weeks 5-10 have ups and downs, but generally smooth sailing. Everybody gets in a rhythm, the occasional class goes "clunk," but overall, these weeks seem low maintenance.

4. Weeks 11-14 are tough. Everybody is exhausted, some people bail out. I might have lost 2 who were attending with some regularlity. I know I have lost three who have exceeded the limit. Even though students might be enjoying their work on PPT videos, they are tired in class. I worry that the videos might actually wipe a few of them out. I try to stay positive and upbeat here, but this stretch is tough.

I'm going linger here for a bit, because this exhaustion is what motivated me to write this entry. I see the exhaustion in my students, in the TAs, and while I am little tired myself, that is mainly because I couldn't sleep worrying about others' exhaustion. This collective exhaustion makes me question some of the work I am assigning, and the courses I am designing. Are there ways I can alter this pattern, or are the larger social factors--declining sunlight, absence of a fall semester break, first semester for 110 students and TAs--simply too great of an obstacle to overcome? We talked about assignments in TA strategies class yesterday: are there too many? Are some too difficult or simply too boring?

I have noticed another factor that plays a role in our teacher's rhythm right now--spring book orders. Two years ago I just locked up--I couldn't decide what to do in 120, which lead to my worst semester of 120. This year, I can't decide whether to stay with White Like Me or try out They Know What You Want. I think making this decision is incredibly difficult and anxiety producing when the fall semester is at such a tough point. And in thinking about these choices, I am trying to think about the rhythm of the spring semester. This year, I am also trying to think about the Fall 2007 TAs, and what their semester might look like. WLM would be the more familiar kind of text--memoir, substantial issue, a discussion generator. That is probably a good thing to keep in mind. Rebecca was talking about the troubles her students had rhetorically analyzing WLM, and 110 students had lots of trouble with FRC. Maybe a tweak to the assignment would be to pick a story within a chapter--every chapter has multiple stories. I think the commentary to follow WLM also needs to be supported by some fairly concrete, operational activities. Maybe I need to go back to a genre choice: memoir or commentary, with memoir defined as 80% you and 20% argument, and commentary as 80% argument and 20% you?

Okay, I think I just wrote myself into a decision, which is what these blogging things are all about, right? So, you are now wondering, what happens during weeks 15-16?

After thanksgiving, students come back surprisingly upbeat. They know that if they make it back, they will be okay. They realize that even though they might have received a D or two, they can now revise, and they can drop one assignment. In a good semester, they feel like they have really accomplished something--you offered them a challenge, and they made it. They might even feel like they have learned something.

ideas get away

wow, I am down to posting once every two weeks--not much of a model blogger, am I?

It's not that I haven't wanted to blog--I have just been a bit wiped out. Very groggy in the evening; I wonder if the lack of sunlight has something to do with my grogginess? Better get outside this weekend, even though I am trying to write three papers right now.

My memoir unit in 110 went smoothly. Students seemed to enjoy the "talk around" almost as much as last year's students. A nice low-key day that also has lots of learning potential. Students get to hear each other's topics, I get to try and stress the argument, I get to give them 30 seconds of feedback, and sometimes their peers give them great feedback. I didn't use the talk around with the commentary last year, but I think I will this year. The peer review day wasn't well-executed, but we listened to one student read--he was getting really positive feedback from his peers--and we looked at one student's paper on the projector. We were able to give him some decent feedback.

There is always too much to do and say in TA strategies, so we rushed through a discussion of Anne Wysocki's chapter in WNM. I don't know how much others got out of it beyond what we discussed, but reading her critique of McLuhan, then her implicit agreement with McLuhan, helped me see that whether McLuhan or a technological determinist or not doesn't matter very much. However we use or draw on him, we, in 2006, can do our best to NOT use the logic of technological determinism. Wysocki does a nice job of pointing out that we strive to support our students' (and our own) agency when we write the new media, but we also need to acknowledge the ways in which the technologies structure (or limit, or massage) our uses of them. Some version of this discussion will need to make its way into McLuhan for Compositionists.

Back to students. I asked them to bring in storyboards for their PPT videos. Last year it was like pulling teeth to get the storyboards, but this year, I made it worth 25 points and I asked them to bring the hard copy to the conference. They all brought something except one student, and she ended up doing a nice job on the spot, in my office. It was fun to see her work. I also had a student do some really good revising as we conferenced today--I guess the last two days of conferencing have been very good!

thinking about portfolios

Reading rhetorical analyses, seeing lots of potential, but worrying that many students won't revise. Also worrying generally about the "blow-off" factor--ignore one assignment, only three need to go into the portfolio, etc.

That got me thinking: maybe I should have each "pencil draft" be worth 50 points (which would add up to 200 points total) and then have the portfolio be worth 500 points--the revised papers plus letter. That would encourage stronger drafts (perhaps), but not destroy someone's grade if he / she did poorly on a draft. It would also result in lower grades overall (likely), but would also perhaps discourage me (and others) from giving really honest feedback (would I give out 30/50 if it wasn't erasable?).

Quick thought I didn't want to lose--back to grading.

You know you are writing a paper when . . .

it's 12:58 am and you are typing in your blog. That means a) you can't sleep because your brain is on fire, and b) you don't really want to write, because you'd rather be sleeping, so you blog instead.

Doc and I are messing with the classical trivium and trying to apply it to new media. I was actually dozing when I got hit by the so what, but I am not sure I caught it in my haze. I was working on this earlier in the evening, and it does seem like a number of people have identified various educational tensions, but they always identify those tensions in twos: rhetoric and philosophy (fish), orators and philosophers (kimball), rhetoric and poetics (Berlin), but the trivium suggests 3 ways of dicing and slicing research, teaching, and curriculums: grammar (now literature, linguistics, even history), rhetoric (still pretty much rhetoric), and dialectics (philosophy).

McLuhan often ends up blending rhetoric and grammar, and he more or less suggested in his diss that grammar (the collecting, sorting, categorizing, and interpreting of texts, including the book of nature) is necessary to support both rhetoric (eloquent wisdom) and dialectic (the pursuit of truth). Maybe what struck me as I was trying to fall asleep was that grammar (in the classical senses) has indeed been under attack in two ways that we need to articulate in this article:

1. the dialecticians pick away at the limitation of grammatical categories and labels, and
2. the rhetoricians of the 20th century teach their subject (our subject, my subject) as if we don't need all that wisdom, all those texts. We teach writing without Literature, and we teach "new media" without giving ourselves (in some cases) and our students a grounding / history / sense of the scope of new media.

We rhetoricians need the grammarians, and, despite what McLuhan thinks, we need the dialecticians. Or we need to be able to play all three in our classrooms and in our curriculums.

On a metanote, writing in a blog, ten minutes a day (as metaphor, not literal), is liberating. I have been grinding and hacking away at that essay when I can over the weekend, but the writing is slow and difficult when done within the essay as a whole. I came to the nice open space of the blog, and the dialogue box was mine to fill-up. This essay started with a blog note, developed through other notes, and will undoubtedly need get stretched out via blogging along the way.

More collections of thoughts

Not blogging enough to keep entries to a single topic, so here go a few more note(card)s:

1. Michael Ferris, MA student at Oregon State, dropped by Ten A Day and seemed interested in the teaching blogs collected at my bloglines account. I'm still a little freaked out when people stumble across my blog, because I don't have many identifiers on it, and I am not part of anybody's A, B, or C list, but it was nice that Michael found the site. I have enjoyed reading his blog as much as any other blog on my blogroll.

2. I noticed that Paula had a weekend away from teaching and school in general, and the same was true for me--sort of. Gave me a chance to do some scholarship: the relevance of the classical trivium for new media. I wrote about that on the blog way back in August, but haven't had a chance to do anything with it since then. Writing is good, writing is therapeutic, writing is my job--if only I could do it for 10 minutes a day.

3. The TAs are working on literacy narratives / memoirs. They seem a little bit nervous about the assignment (asking me what I am looking for, how long (just kidding), and stuff like that), but I am really excited to see where their memoirs go. I have seen some drafts and talked to a few people: great material.

Catching up!

It's been a while since I have blogged, and I have missed the process. Perhaps because no blogging = too busy.

I have been storing up some teaching observations, however.

1. My son is taking skating lessons--Beginner Level 1. Not unlike English 110, right? So what's the pedagogy? In a 45 minute session the instructors must have asked the kids to try 10-15 different things: arms out, knees bent, in and out, push and glide, etc., etc.. No "drill and skill." No "keep doing it till you get it right." More of a "try this skill, then this skills, then this one--have some fun. Week 2 they actually did slow down a little bit, and tried to be more interventionist--the instructors in Week 1 were doing some informal evaluation, looking for strong skaters and weak skater, and now they were trying to address specific issues with individual students. Proud Canadian Dad moment: when an instructor worked with my son 1-on-1 a few times, she asked him to demonstrate a couple of different skills, then asked him to move up to the next level for week 3. Just like being invited to skip 110?

2. I just came back from teaching in SE 314--NDSU's first really flexible, wireless, classroom. What a blast. I had notes on the north and south chalk boards, I was displaying CTW with the document reader up front, then I showed a little PPT, and we finished up with 25 minutes of group work, where the students did a decent job of moving tables around and really working together. This classroom isn't huge, but I was able to be much more mobile, and the students had more room and flexibility than Minard 204. The medium is the massage; the room massages the pedagogy and learning.

3. TA blogs sounded the theme "I have failed my students!" Most were able to recognize that they hadn't failed their students, but what an interesting response for so many of them to have. Being a TA is really "stepping behind the curtain." As students, they were all good writers, but probably didn't realize how others were doing in class. Now that they see the whole picture, they are finding the 1, 2, or 3 students who were like them, but also finding that 18-20 have skills that range from "okay" to "yikes"!

Teaching ideas

I just thought to myself: why don't I use a highlighter when I grade? Highlight passage that I want to talk about with students when we confernece, make a few notes, cut down on the writing, get them to make the note when they are sitting with me at the confernece. Makes sense--let's hope I can break my old habits of writing too much.

Also gotta remember not to write too much in the rubric, and then just repeat myself in the end comments. Big time suck. I could put numerical scores in the rubric, or actually add more lines to the rubric.

I've also been thinking about the difference between "teaching the course content" and "teaching with the course content." I feel like I have been giving my students a lot of information, but not necessarily teaching with the content as effectively as I could. I am trying to limit my use of "tell me what I am thinking" comments and "tell me what I have told you" comments, but I don't always break those old habits.

Where did all these old bad habits come from? Why are they still lingering? : (

Those highlighters should brighten my teaching day! And conferences were a really positive point in my semester last year--hope the same is true this semester.

RE-presenting McLuhan

Got my acceptance to CCCC--March in NyC. The title is "Re-Presenting Marshall McLuhan," and the session title is the ultimate wanker session title: "Imporant Men in 20th Century Rhetorical Theory" or something like that. As Betsy pointed out, however, it is good to call it what it is--not important rhetoricians in the 20th century, but important men who do rhetorical theory. Nice touch by the conference organizers--Cheryl Glenn's influence, no doubt.

So I was taking some notes on Eloquent Images and got distracted to thinking about how I want to do this presenting. I was thinking earlier this morning that the real things I have to say/ do include:

1. complicating the whole modern-postmodern binary by working in the anti-moderns and / as McLuhan. I have a tetrad like representation of this that could be a one page handout to talk through. IE. Exhibit 1: if we take McLuhan seriously, we should also take seriously the need to understand a wider range of responses to the last 150 years--since the photograph, since movies, since massive technological shifts (the age of invention).

2. I have also been working with hot-cool and the McCloud big triangle: that could be another slide Exhibit 2.

3. Two might be enought, but my third most interesting image might be the McLuhan map.

Just getting some response to these images would be really valuable for my book project. These would also be good, challenging design projects for me to be working on, and they might look good on my website! I suppose a bibliography with McLuhan in Composition Studies might also be a good handout as a way to re-present my literataure survey. I could organize it in revers chronological order, and change font size to indicate how much of McLuhan gets used.

Oh, and finally, I could present these images at our faculty lunch scholarship sessions to get some initial feedback. Good goal!

I wonder if DDV is reading this?

Two reasons for posting; as I read NSC's post at English Teacher , I couldn't help but wonder if your mutual friend, DDV, has taken to reading NSC's blog. DDV hates blogs, she hates reading about people's days, but I bet she would be pretty interested in reading NSC's blog--unless she has heard it all before it hits the blog.

Second reason--I am trying out the "blog this!" feature for the first time. Right click on any item and presto, a publishing box pops up. I've known of this feature for a while, just slow to use it. I am also trying out a new browser, Flock. I read blogs where people are always trying out great new internet software, and I think--I wish I had time to just mess around with applications.

Crazy busy this week with lots of classroom visits and meetings and my own classes, but if I stay calm and focused, it will go smoothly. As a brash 20 something, I figured experience wasn't all it is cracked up to be. As 40 looms, I'm kinda digging the experience. I wish I could teach experience to the TAs as I see them / read about the class conflicts they are dealing with. My class may look bored at times, but I don't get no guff and resistance--at least on the surface.

Or maybe I just wish I had designed more interesting classes for them to work with. Sorry team!!

: (

PS-- Blog this! didn't work so well.

We are what we do

I got some feedback on the Trivium project I wrote about a few posts back, and a reader understandably resisted my connection between Dialectic and Deconstruction. McLuhan's history is in part an affective history, a Burkean "attitudes toward history," perhaps, and for him the categories of grammarian, rhetorician, and dialectician are defined largely by what people do and how they do it.

A dialectician, like Aristotle or Aquinas, is not only defined by their use of probable reasoning to solve a problem, but their larger project of close analysis, division, some might say, hair splitting. These attitudes are evident when dialecticians, grammarians, rhetoricians are discussed informally, but seldom included in scholarly accounts--as far as I can tell, at least. When they are applied, the (mis)characterized party is heartily offended.

But I digress.

I am what I do: I increasingly teach the production of new media (rhetoric), typically in the context of a broad understanding of new media / models (grammarian), and find myself increasingly drifting away from the critique of new media (dialectician). I feel the critique can be absorbed into the grammarian / rhetorical aspects, and that critique on its own is something I used to do, but found increasingly unsatisfying and untennable. Untenable? Where's the spell check!?

Contemporary dialecticians, undoubtedly, don't see it my way, and will continue to privilege critique, although also exploring production through innovative presentation of ideas (Derrida, Glas; Taylor and Essanin, Imagologies, and Ulmer, if he hasn't already switched over into the grammar / rhetoric camp).

As a publication directed at a journal on rhetoric, I suppose the way to approach this project is to acknowledge the ways in which most of are approaching New Media as rhetoricians, and then make an argument for the importance of not looking exclusively at the work being done by rhetoricians. Not an earth-shattering pronouncement in a field that is frequently interdisciplinary; I guess my angle here is actually that us rhetoricians have frequently been dialecticians even as we call ourselves rhetoricians--we offer more critique than production. Old argument too--is there anything new under the sun? Is anybody in the field a grammarian? That might be interesting? My sense here is that when we teach topics like "digital rhetoric" we rely on anthologies of scholarship, rather than anthologies of production. We teach from theory rather than practice. That might be a point to push and press.

Sooooo, what does the trivium offer us: a tradition of balance, a recognition of attitude, a way to acknowledge that we are what we do. Can anybody spell "circular"?

A blogging community forming?

Last night, after I read 2 or 3 blog posts by the new TAs I am working with, I felt a palpable sense of relief. I could see them thinking through the challenges of teaching, and I could see them coming to insights (read yesterday's entry for more details).

Tonight, I went to Bloglines and there were 7 new entries--I was pumped, and enjoyed reading all of them. Chester followed up the dream talk with his epic dream of leading troops / students across the Alps, just like Hannibal. Meghan and Jenny both had great insights about not trying to do too much. DS found that Klosterman woke his students up--a good thing--but wondered: has he woken them up for the right reasons? KD is worried about how her students are perceiving her; she is wondering if they believe what she is saying. I remember those doubts, and I remember actually not knowing what I was saying, my first few years of teaching. I might be missing one or two entries here, but overall, reading their entries really helps me feel in touch with how their teaching is going, and while none would say "perfectly," all are doing quite well for the first semester.

I was saying to Betsy the other day that having 10 new TAs does make me nervous; I don't know if I can give all of them the individual feedback that would probably help them more than general discussions of teaching. The first time I taught the course, there were 12 new TAs, and a few were struggling in ways that I didn't realize until too late. Last year there were only 4 new TAs, and the semester went quite smoothly. How d'ya like that: teacher-student ratio probably makes a difference. Well I don't want to sound like some pie-in-the-sky technophile, I do think encouraging everybody to blog might be one way I can give more individualized feedback. And, if this isn't being similarly overly adjectively optimistic, I bet that a lot of them will figure out ways to improve their teaching via blogging--I think I see it happening already.

Teaching dreams

Paula wrote about a teaching dream she had, and it made me laugh a bit, although the laugh of sympathy. I frequently start the semester with any number of teaching dreams: forgetting where my class is, trying to teach two classes at once, completely forgetting what subject I am teaching, etc. Teaching can be stressful business.

But I also really like Paula's analogy with parenting: you worry that you are doing everything wrong, but your children turn out to be alright in the end. I would add, that if they don't turn out alright, it isn't necessarily the parent's fault ; )

As teachers, we need to believe in what we are doing, and trust that students will meet us half way. It is good to question, reflect, and improve upon our teaching, but we need to be careful not to try too hard. Sometimes we twist ourselves in knots trying to teach the perfect class or cover all the bases, and what is need is less, not more. Sure the postmodern architects like to say "less is a bore," and we need to keep that in mind too, but sometimes less really is more.

Time to reflect on teaching

My blog has been all McLuhan all the time as of late, but I have asked students in both of my classes to start blogging, so it might be a good idea to reflect on teaching instead of research.

After only a week and half, I am having to juggle the schedule in one class and explain a short assignment in another class. Both are really typical teaching moves, and they highlight two of the hardest things to master with teaching: pace and clarity.

Pace. I definitely err on the side of speed, thinking that it is better to get off to an energetic and ambitious start than a sluggish meandering start. Classes usually find a rhythm after a few weeks, and they always have their ebbs and flows throughout the semester. It took me quite a while to learn this--experience really is good for something.

Clarity. I wrote really short directions for a short writing assignment on my class schedule, and after I got a few emails from students, I realized that I was asking students to do about 4 things, all of which needed more explanation than the one sentence description I put on the schedule. These moments are really fascinating examples of just how hard it is to communicate effectively with people, especially with people you are just starting to get to know. I bet a one sentence description like that one might work late in the semester, when students are familiar with me and the assignments, but I can see how I was asking students to do too many new things all at once. Pace.

I will slow down in both classes on Thursday. We will talk, we will breathe, we will try to achieve clarity.

David Byrne understands Marshall McLuhan

There is lots of evidence that David Byrne understands Marshall McLuhan, but a recent blog entry makes the point that the medium is the massage beautifully.

MM's diss. ends with an analysis of how Thomas Nashe was influenced by the grammarians, dialecticians, and rhetoricians of his education. A similar analysis of many new media artists would uncover, I suspect, McLuhan's influence (grammarian/rhetorician). Some would uncover Derrida's influence (the dialecticians), probably the postmodern poets and novelists, perhaps Michael Joyce). If it weren't late, I would try to generate other names and connections. Gotta flesh out the web of relations.

Slightly related note: Sketches of Gehry, a documentary about Frank Gehry, illuminates creativity, collaboration, experimentation, and some beautiful buildings. Worth checking out!

How container ships changed the world

Three books on shipping contains reviewed in the New York Review of Books. McLuhan is probably never cited, but these books illustrate "the medium is the massage" beautifully.

From Cliche to Archetype: McLuhan's composition text?

I have actually been telling those who will listen that From Cliche to ARchetype is McLuhan's neglected masterpiece, but perhaps more relevant to us compositionists is the possibility that the book is a kind of composition text, in the philosophical tradition. McLuhan even makes a hint in that direction: "The banishing of the cliche from serious attention was the natural gesture of literary specialists. . . . The writers of composition texts have made much of the cliche as they understand it. They are right in saying that the cliche ought to get great crical attention" (55).

I suspect McLuhan is implying that the composition texts spend a lot of time advising writers to avoid cliches, while McLuhan is in fact suggesting that writers / scholars / artists (because the cliche is not simply verbal) spend a lot of time working with cliches. Cliches, McLuhan argues, are probes, a term he uses often and loosely, but what I think he is getting at is the fact that cliches used unreflectively can reveal all sorts of personal and cultural biases (embedded ways of thinking), while cliches that are carefully and self-consciously retrieved can be powerful means of communication that bring with them rich and evocative histories, having been retrieved from Yeates' "rag and bone shop of the heart."

Okay, so the whole cliche as probe thing needs some refining, but it definitely seems like it has potential for compositionists. McLuhan and his co-author, Wilfred Watson, have laced the text with many other composition tools to be used. For example, they essentially offer up a version of Peter Elbow's "believing and doubting game" and put that into the general set of perceptual tools they call probes. The book as a whole is concerned with the problems / challenges of creativity, which I wrote about a few days agao. This process of retrieval, as I also suggested the other day, is an approach to language and literature that assumes agency and action, rather than study and analysis. The book offers up McLuhan's standard argument that the role of art is to provide an anti-environment through which we can reveal the invisible environments we live in, the water we fish swim in. The chapter on genre is genre ecology and media ecology all roled into one and offers a nice critique of Frye's literary approach to genre. The chapter begins with the subtitle: "Talent rides in a hackneyed vehicle" which seems to me like a beautiful and under-used aphorism in genre studies.

I suppose there is a whole article just on McLuhan as anti-environment for genre studies: why are we just now (36 years later) coming to roughly the same conclusions McLuhan and Watson arrived at in 1970? Not because they were geniuses ahead of their time, I suspect, but because we are living through a long age of interface, a long age of literacy and electracy overlapping, and the transition will be slow, the "progress" meager, the theory hope and claims of radical transformation extravegent.

McLuhan in a different context

I keep writing about McLuhan and Ulmer, but last night, reading From Cliche to Archetype, McLuhan really clarified his difference from Northrop Frye, his nemesis. In defining "symbol," McLuhan quotes Frye's formalist / scientistic definition of symbol as something like (paraphrase here) 'any unit of meaning that can be isolated for examination of significance.' McLuhan's own definition of symbol draws on the etymology of the word, which means "thrown together," and McLuhan sees symbols not as static units to be analyzed, but the process of making symbols, the throwing together of images in order to create new meaning, or in the context of the book the throwing together of cliches (retrieving them) to make them fresh, to establish archetypes (which also happen to be "in play" and not static). In short, McLuhan sets up Frye as the formalist, and presents himself as the rhetorician.

This book also seems to be very much in concert with Derrida's thinking about the role of traces and marks that accumulate and that become part of the instability (or dynamism) of how we communicate. McLuhan even has a paragraph that sounds very much like the deconstruction of metaphysics, the notion that the cliches of the center and transcendence has been / is being replaced, in this era of discontinuity, by humans as, he wonders, "the missing link" or "hairless ape". I didn't understand what he was getting at when I read this passage last night, and why he was offering up the new cliche as a question, but I think I now see that he was documenting the same phenomenon as Derrida--the deconstruction of metaphysics, the replacement of humans as the center of the universe, as connected to or capable of transcendence--but he is questioning (because of his faith, perhaps) the emerging, evolutionary cliches--missing link, hairless ape. He seems to know and understand why those cliches are so prominently in play in the 20th century, but he is not likely excited by or inspired by those cliches.

So, what does it mean to re-read ALL of McLuhan? His texts provide an anti-environment from which to re-read all of the dominant scholarship of the last 50 years. In Cliches to Archetype, he quotes a long passage about the I-Ching being comprehensible in the west since we came to understand the computer. I think we are in a better place to understand McLuhan now (for Bakhtinian reasons, for technological reasons, etc), and when we understand him, we shed new light on more familiar faces.

Ads for each chapter

I just read McLuhan writing about ads at the end of From Cliche to Archetype, sounding very much like Ulmer on the logic of ads and the need to tap into that logic in a post print era, and I thought: "I essentially have ads (or at least images) to start every or most chapters of McLuhan for Compositionists. The map and tetrad for historical and intellectual context, the big triangle (which is feeling more and more like hot and cool all the time), and undoubtedly other tetrads or collages or interfaces (which I am seeing more and more in his work).

Not 10 minutes, but it's late, I'm tired.

McLuhan and Ulmer, ad naseum

Just looking at page 15 of Ulmer's applied grammatology again, trying to puzzle through the distinctions that Ulmer is making between Derrida and McLuhan, or actually, Heidegger and McLuhan, because Ulmer is saying that Derrida turns to Heidegger rather than McLuhan to work out grammatology, the study of writing. Ulmer says Derrida does this because McLUhan "projected the return of an oral civilization" while "Heidegger located the essence of modern technology in the family of terms related to Gestell (enframing). . . . Derrida took up the question of enframing, as indicated in his exploration of all marginal and paragonal phenomena, in order to prepare the way for the shift away from, or the deemphasis of, speech in favor of writing" (15).

Okay--big breakthrough in understanding here, maybe. While not versed in Heidegger and the subtleties of enframing, it seems to me that McLuhan's "the medium is the massage" is very much a mantra for paying attention to enframing. It also seems to me that McLuhan (and Ong) did not so much project a return to oral civilization as simply notice, and in some ways document, the return of orality, a pattern that is increasingly clear especially when images are understood as "acoustic" in their orientation, or perhaps more precisely, if images are understood to be closer to speech and orality than they are to writing and inscribing. The flip side of this argument would be simply to say that it is increasingly clear to me that we are not culturally making a shift towards writing.

That said, I believe there are probably some Derridian nuances to tease out of "writing" and the shift Ulmer says Derrida favored. Later on the page, Ulmer does write "before grammatology can attain its applied status by working in the video medium, whose audiovisual capacity seems to fulfill the requirements of a double-valued writing (phonetic and ideographic . . . ), certain theoretical problems must be resolved" (15). This "double-valued" writing--phonetic (oral) and ideographic (image? inscription) might actually be a another way of saying that Derrida, like McLuhan, was actually trying to work on the problem of "interfacing" as much or more than "enframing."

My new working title. McLuhan for Compositionists: Working at the Interface.

Cronenberg and Warhol

David Cronenberg is one of my favorite directors; Andy Warhold is a fascinating Pop Artists; these videos show DC talking about AW. I had the good fortune to see the Warhol exhibit, Supernovas, in Mpls this spring.