So it’s four o’clock in the morning and I just got back from the absolute best piece of theater I’ve ever seen in my life. Tonight was the penultimate night of the National Theatre of Scotland’s Black Watch at St. Ann’s in Brooklyn, and my date and I were amazed. Brilliant, far more physical than any other play I’ve seen, and an amazing combination of soldier humor, startling violence, and pathos. Parts of it were shocking, and parts of it made my eyes tear up a bit, and by the end, hearing that bagpipe-and-drum tattoo made something tighten in my chest. Reader, if you haven’t seen it, hope for an encore tour. See it, see it, see it.

Part of the reason it caught my attention was the intersection of matters military with my family’s Scottish heritage, which is a distant link, certainly (and one roundly mocked in the play), but there was also the memory of being very, very young and having the vinyl “Black Watch War Pipe and Plaid” as one of my parents’ albums that I loved the most, with — again — that bagpipe-and-drum tattoo. It stirs the blood.

And after the play ended, as snowy and cold as the Brooklyn weather was, I was lucky to have such an extraordinarily pretty woman on my arm. It was a good date.

The President came to visit campus yesterday, along with three Chinooks’ and two Sikorsky VH-3Ds’ worth of Secret Service and support staff, so classes were canceled and we dropped a lesson, making today the last class for two of my composition sections.

On the first day of the semester, I had my students do something called “the envelope exercise,” adapted from an exercise one of my grad school colleagues came up with: first, I gave an empty envelope to everyone in class. We read, out loud, two paragraphs from Peter Elbow on freewriting and how to do it. I then asked them to fill in the endings of the following sentences, in as much depth and detail as possible, on a piece of paper. I wouldn’t see what they wrote.

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I got word that my Computers and Writing 2009 proposal was accepted, but I’ve been hesitant to blog about it, for reasons that may be apparent in my proposal, which follows in slightly paraphrased form.

My proposed presentation poses as its problem the environment of pervasive computer-enabled surveillance at the United States Military Academy at West Point. The problem is both practical, in the labor and logistics associated with the ubiquitous application of technologies of surveillance, and ethical, in my concern that ubiquitous surveillance may inhibit the development of the risk-taking thinkers essential to the Army’s mission. The presentation theorizes possible responses, contrasting the writing of political philosopher Leo Strauss and Roman historian Gaius Cornelius Tacitus on writing and domination. Finally, the presentation offers suggestions for how those responses might be enacted at West Point, and possible implications for other institutions.

At West Point, Web surfing is monitored, and spiders crawl the web for any mentions of the Academy, with mentions sent to the chain of command. (Interestingly, the Academy writing program endorses the use of digital technologies in the classroom, following the lead of the Academy’s general embrace of digital technologies.) Such a seemingly contradictory context requires a rhetorical response that moves beyond crude applications of Foucault’s “unequal gaze.”

I pose two alternatives for such a response: first, using the analysis of simultaneously esoteric and exoteric texts suggested by Leo Strauss in Persecution and the Art of Writing, and second, using the perspectives implied by Tacitus in his Dialogus de Oratoribus wherein authors intentionally place their meaning sous rature in ways that deliberately challenge hermeneusis depending upon interpretive context. Both writers suggest the possibilities of texts that can be interpreted in opposite ways by different audiences, depending on all parties’ positions of relative power within the rhetorical situation. However, I argue that Tacitus’s accounts implicitly offer the possibility of a counter-imperial micro-politics of resistance to the combination of domination and surveillance. The presentation then explores ways to enact that possibility of resistance in ways that open up opportunities for rhetorical risk-taking without compromising military missions, principles, or hierarchies.

And that’s it for the proposal, which I know will make the crawls come Monday morning, and which my bosses will see. (Hi, sir!) That’s enough for some nervousness on my part. But I’ve also been thinking that a blog entry — this one, for instance — is really the only way I can frame the project (after all, the conference program’s going to be indexed at some point) without making the presentation into some sort of rhetorical ambush. So I feel like there’s a whole lot of stuff in here: about classroom pedagogy, first and certainly, and about theories of rhetoric, but there’s the back-text as well, the usually unsaid except in my explicit invocation of it, about professionalism and what it means to talk about your job. (I don’t think I’m saying anything bad, but some might suggest I’m better off not saying anything at all.)

We’ll see.

Can I show you it?

It deals with the day-to-day immediacy of lived experience qua experience, mediated through writing and particularly understood as the economic activity of immaterial production, appropriation, circulation, ownership, and use, and through use back into production. As such, it deals with the process of producing or composing (or recomposing) and circulating and consuming (or interpreting) signs.

I’ve decided to call it Phenomenological-Economic Semiosis Theory.

If you haven’t seen it already, I hope you’ll check out Pete’s 15-Month Adventure.

That’s some good writing, and writing from a soldier-PhD that you won’t likely see anywhere else.

It’s one of the words I think academia could adopt from the military. It refers to the pace of operations, and implies the considerations that such a pace places on all involved, instructors and students. The term implies, as well, the differing priorities for all involved, and the ways that students’ priorities are often obscured from instructors’, instructors’ from parents’, parents’ from students, and so on.

It’s an administrator’s term; a pace set by staff syllabi and due dates, by objectives and phase lines. But what academia knows and doesn’t admit, and what the military seems to know and admit and sometimes gauge better, is how optempo works on all involved. There are measures of optempo, and I’d like to see them more widely considered. I’d argue that when we construct outcomes statements, one of the things we need to consider is optempo, for instructors and students alike. Not only how much students are writing, and in what form, but how much instructors are responding, and how swiftly instructors are able to return feedback on students’ drafts. Certainly, that’s a matter of employment and staffing logistics, but it’s also a matter of syllabus planning, especially when programs are offering or requiring staff syllabi.

It’s what makes me think I’ve overplanned this semester: in trying to map out my students’ writing, I’ve failed to map out my own work in relation to that writing. I’ve tried to do too much, and the way I’ve paced my own work in relation to the syllabus I’ve set has been short-sighted. That’s something to think about when I lay out the calendar grid for next semester and next year: not only where my students are going to be, but where I’m going to be.

It’s odd for such a concern to come up so late; that it hasn’t come up before. That optempo has always seemed like a given; something unalterable.

Isn’t it?

I love Highland Falls on Halloween. I love the little kids with their parents who come early, while it’s still light out, including the absolute tiniest witch I’ve ever seen, with her even littler brother the spider.

(Halloween etiquette question, perhaps related to an implicit writing-teacher-etiquette question for those who work in computer labs: when you distribute candy and talk to the shorter kids, do you stoop, squat, or neither?)

And I love the big families and groups who come later, after the parade, sometimes with not-quite-finished or uncertain costumes, and how watchful and careful they are of their family members and friends, and how friendly. How connected.

And I love the last few after-eight waves of various diehards (including the no-costume dad who always asks for candy too, but I was a little worried that he was drunk this year: not cool) and teenage goths.

But this year’s absolute best, and most mystifying: at about 6:50, a skinny eight- or nine-year old boy, all in black, with a black felt western-style hat (think Stetson), black domino, and a big scythe.

Huh?

You win, kid. I didn’t even have the presence of mind to ask.

People in my academic discipline sometimes conflate “military” and “war.” From what I’ve seen of the broader scape of academe, that’s not uncommon. In listserv discussions, interactions at conferences, calls for proposals, and hallway conversations, there’s a common assumption that any association with the military must commit one to a monolithic and intolerant ideology supporting all war, always, in all contexts.

Two nights ago, on Monday, Eugene Jarecki showed up on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart promoting his new book. (Jarecki wrote and directed the award-winning 2005 documentary Why We Fight, which — while voluminously researched and attempting to provide the appearance of scrupulous fairness — mostly did a very good job for 99 minutes of proving that Jarecki agreed with the cautions offered in Eisenhower’s “military-industrial complex” speech: to paraphrase a number of critics, the movie was an op-ed piece, not investigative reporting.) He had some good things to say about today’s links between the defense industry and American foreign policy, and with Stewart’s prompting and assistance, he made a number of solid points fully and clearly in the nine minutes or so that he had.

Stewart’s a breezy interviewer, and I think Jarecki would have fared better with a more deliberate pace, perhaps even with being asked to read a passage from the book out loud, NPR-style, though that seldom plays well on television. (Would that it did.) I say this because Jarecki was invited here to West Point to talk to people — cadets and faculty — about his movie after its release, and accounts of those conversations have traveled, some of them making their way into his new book, and some of them making their way into our Dean’s annual address to faculty — all faculty, military and civilian — where I first heard them two months ago. I quote here from Jarecki’s book, The American Way of War, published ten days ago:

Located in wooded isolation some 50 miles north of New York City, West Point is very much in its own intellectual orbit, not entirely removed from the workings of the American defense establishment, yet not entirely in sync with them either. On my first drive there, I recall the incredulity with which friends and family reacted when I called from the road to tell them where I was going. They were surprised that a military academy would even show a film like Why We Fight, let alone invite a self-acknowledged critic of U.S. defense policy, to address its best and brightest.

As it turns out, this incredulity reflects a prejudice that sweepingly and mistakenly equates bad foreign policy with those entrusted to implement it. While soldiers come in all types and no single generalization can be made, one finds inspiring abundance on West Point’s faculty of responsible thinkers who feel a responsibility not only to train their cadets in the military arts but to educate them more broadly about the strengths and weaknesses of the nation’s foreign policy system.

Jarecki’s words are a careful and instructive counter to the myopic conflation I describe above. When our Dean read those words, and conveyed them to the faculty with an argument about their importance, they helped me see something more about teaching at this place, and about why I’m teaching here and want to continue to teach here. The engagement with diverse and critical perspectives that Jarecki describes is something I’ve seen here far more than at any other college or university I’ve attended or taught at, and seen especially with a remarkable openness in the classroom.

It’s remarkable the things cadets are unafraid to say and the criticisms they’re unafraid to make, reasonably and professionally, and how calmly and precisely they’re able to disagree with one another on loaded issues, and then think nothing of it and move on to celebrate and support one another. (Mostly.) In my class, they’ve just finished a unit on multi-modal argument, with more than a few of them giving presentations on similar or identical topics in rapid succession, and the kaleidoscope of perspectives has been refreshingly more wide-ranging than some of the homogeneous arrays of ideological and rhetorical commonplaces I’ve seen elsewhere. And in many ways more liberally accepting; more embracing of what Benjamin Franklin called “all these scatter’d counsels.” That ideological diversity and tolerance strikes me as one of the most valuable assets that a democratic nation might promote in its military, and one that I wish I might see more of in academe’s broader scape.

Here’s something that’s happened with lots of sleep and medication:

The first book — the one, mine, to be written — introduced itself, forcefully. Came right in and sat down in one of the wing chairs and helped itself to tea and wouldn’t go away. Tells me about structure when I feed the cats. Drops idle remarks about past and present, snarks about my inadequacies with Marx as a primary source, makes threatening remarks about exactly when the first intellectual model of the information economy broke, rolls its eyes and shuts up when I ask the (damn) classroom question. Roundly mocks chapters 1, 2, and 5 of the dissertation, and proposes they’re best left behind, especially with all the old stuff on class, and I’ve got a new focus anyway.

And it’s there, in something different from what might have been its old shape and rhythms, but insistent:

Write me, it says.

Started coughing September 19. Saw the doc September 24: tentative diagnosis of pneumonia. Chest x-ray confirmed it September 26. Medicated, slept, sick leave. Back to work October 6. Out of breath, easily winded. I’m moving like John McCain. Can’t take stairs. Saw the doc again today: second x-ray October 8 showed the gunk in my left lung had shrunk from the size of a fist to the size of a walnut.

So all this week, people at work have been saying, “Wow, Mike. You look like you lost 20 pounds.” Sure, I say to myself: I know my eyes and cheeks are a little sunken, but I’ve been eating. Soup and fruit, mostly, but hearty stuff too. Eating regularly, three a day. So I get on the scale.

Yeah. Holy shit. I’m down 22 pounds in two weeks.