PKD, Adapted
Collin beat me to the review, so I'll simply say: if you're a fan of weird fiction, Linklater's A Scanner Darkly is worth your time. I saw it with my attorney as my final Massachusetts art-theater moviegoing experience, and it was very, very good. In fact, I'd say that the movie version pulled together the incoherencies of the original text in much the same way that Blade Runner extrapolated from and pulled together DADOES.
It's a movie that knows all about drugs, and the tweaks and former tweaks who see it will well appreciate the ethos and deeply paranoid logic with which it constructs its paranoid anti-drug and anti-paranoia theme. I've heard some sci-fi fans complain that the movie fails in that it neglects to replicate the suffocating dread and paranoia of the book, but frankly, those fans are missing one of the movie's big points, and one of PKD's book's big implicit points as well:
Drugs. Are. Fun. That's why people do them.
Which, in and of itself, constitutes the lure of addiction, and its danger. The movie, in following the book's indictment of the drug culture and its horrible casualties, would be deeply dishonest if it didn't show why people do stuff like Substance D. (It also nicely encapsulates the reasons why "Just Say No" is an ineffective campaign to attempt to sell to teens: the logic of "Just Say No," as the movie indicates, actually creates desire.) The comedic and comedic-paranoid moments in the movie, in the way they get you to laugh along and see (and even empathize with) the skewed logic of intoxication, humanize Arctor and his friends, and that's what gives the movie's final act its emotional punch.
Check it out.
About That Seder
I'm not sure whether to characterize myself here as gentile or goy, since one term seems to carry offensive connotations and the other seems to name one as either Christian or non-believer, none of which I'd entirely want to apply myself -- but as my last name likely indicates, I'm not of the Jewish heritage. Welsh and Scots, mostly. Raised Unitarian but with Methodist and Episcopal grandparents, atheist as a teen and agnostic for a time after that, but now I'd characterize myself as having an uncertain and nondenominational but ultimately believing capital-f Faith.
And when I look at religion, I think my instinctive desire for order and my love for ritual and history and esoterica make traditions like those of Catholicism and Judaism deeply appealing to me. But this started out for me as a post about food, which is to say: I'm deeply curious about the ritual aspects of the Passover Seder. Albeit with a nod to the necessary heterogeneity of religious and cultural tradition, I feel impelled to ask: traditionally, the z'roa and the beitzah are cooked but never handled or consumed? Can the z'roa, as a roasted lamb shank bone, be used in the preparation of other Seder foods, e.g. in soup broth -- or does it carry its own necessarily independent semiotic value? Does the same hold true for the roasted egg beitzah? Is there a symbolic distinction between the things consumed and the things not consumed?
The FaceBook Storm
On Tuesday, March 30, I'll ask my students to read an introductory collection of essays that introduces the "Adding to a Conversation" essay, where they survey the breadth of research and discourse and written conversation (in academic journals, popular press, and elsewhere) on a topic of interest, attempt to find the lacunae and interstices in that conversation, and add their own perspectives. The current edition of the textbook that I helped our Writing Program to construct includes model or sample conversations about guns and school violence, censorship and youth culture, and debates about stem cell research and evolution. I'll have left the program by the time next year when they start thinking about revising the textbook, but on March 30, I think I might test-run an initial unit of readings that focus on the recent two-month perfect storm of controversy swirling around the Facebook and notions of academic and pedagogical freedom and restraint, with an eye towards suggesting it as a possible addition to the textbook.
Student Life on the Facebook
Teens' Bold Blogs Alarm Area Schools
Facebook Face-Off
Facebook Drama at SU
Of Free Speech and Student Materiality
When Journalists Attack!
Facebook, Online Student Networking, and Strategically Designed Student Selves
There are interesting subtle resonances, for me, with the things I've had to say about affectual labor and the commodification of identity, so I'll be curious to see how it plays out and what my students' reactions might be. Additionally, while I never, ever want to be the kind of teacher who requires his students to read his own texts, I wonder if there might be some way to get that article Casey and I did (if you want to make me happy, ask me for the link) on commodification and online identity in there, since it seems to be on (rather long) hold in terms of publication.
Paris and Me, Part 1
What follows is a very early draft of the first half of the Computers and Writing presentation I'll be giving in Palo Alto next week. I hope you might read it and tell me what's redundant, what's missing, and what's foolish. The presentation's major logical steps (of which tonight's argument comprises points 1 through 3) are as follows:
- Rhetorical self-production can be understood today as an act of product differentiation or branding; conversely, consumption of products or services can be understood today as a technology of rhetorical self-production.
- Foucault's governmentality -- as the relation between technologies of self and technologies of power -- is enacted in online writing on blogs and in the relation between individual and commercial institutions. [Sometimes, as implied by (1), the individual and the commercial can blur: see Paris Hilton and Jason Kottke.]
- This relation can be problematic in the case of public schools because of unequal power relations and the possibilities for domination. The massive resources of advertisers can change minds and shift opinion in undemocratic ways; more money can equal a larger voice and an increasingly unequal society.
- However, (3) is a characteristic of the environment of a mass economy. Today, self-production via branding is indicative of a move towards a distributed, peer-to-peer economy (facilitated by digital technologies) where the power relations we associate with a mass economy are being fragmented and replaced by other relations we haven't yet completely fathomed.
- In this individuated peer-to-peer economy, not all transactions are market or commodified, and the most promising and interesting possibilities for individual agency may exist within non-market, non-commodified transactions.
Here's the first half, with the second half to follow tomorrow:
Big Shoes
I'm taking a break from my struggles with the Computers and Writing presentation: thanks to a heads-up from Doctor Daisy, I picked up New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society, the, er, sequel to Raymond Williams's classic Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, which itself was originally intended as an appendix to the excellent Culture & Society: 1780-1950. When I first heard about New Keywords (I saw a draft version of the entry on "Economy" in a graduate economics seminar), my immediate thought was: them's some mighty big shoes to fill.
Despite the high caliber of J. K. Gibson-Graham's entry on "Economy," as well as a few other entries, my misgivings were not misplaced: New Keywords suffers from the same spotty, slapdash quality as most sequels, and it doesn't even begin to live up to the standards of Williams's original text. Certainly, the Revised Vocabulary fills in some of the gaps of the past thirty years, with entries like "Network," "Power," and "Self"; and there are some heavy hitters among the contributors. But far too many of the entries barely scratch the surface of their topics (the three-pager on "Class" I'll save for a longer rant: suffice now to say that both in terms of quality and in terms of depth of coverage, it would still be complete and utter crap even were it not compared to Williams's original, and it adds practically zero understanding to the topic) and end with empty platitudes.
Consider Karim Murji's vapid concluding thoughts on "Race": "The idea of race has been tainted, discredited, valorized, reclaimed, and contested. It retains positive and features that are both anachronistic and contemporary" (296). Or Craig Calhoun's last words on "Private": "The idea of 'private' remains contested" (282). And then on its counterpart, "Public": "In short, both the ideas of what the public is and what is in the public interest remain subject to public debate" (286). There seems to be a consistent tendency here, evident again in André Frankovits on "Development": "Development is bound to remain a contested term" (81).
One simply has to admire such breathtakingly steadfast commitment to equivocation.
The Personal
So this idea's got hold of me and I can't leave it alone, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that it's unsettling my notions of where I thought the final chapters of my dissertation would go. And I think this is what I'm going to have to propose for CCCC because I can't put it down, can't let it go unexamined, and so I've been following trails of sources at the library and on the Web the past few days, a little apprehensive at where I see it going.
What got me started was Jenny Edbauer's thoughts on the general equivalency of student essays written in the critical-pedagogical mode. The assignments required by critical pedagogues have become so common that they now show up -- in all their generic characteristics -- in the online term paper mills. As I tentatively concluded in my notes on Linh's CCCC presentation, they've become our unmasking-hegemony equivalent of the New Critical close reading, only the object is culture rather than literature. And as Jenny points out, they're so common that they're easily exchanged, one for another, to the point where -- as Doug Hesse suggested with his examples of the Intelligent Essay Assessor and the Essay Generator -- no writing needs to be done, because it's all been said. This is the end to which critical pedagogues have brought Paulo Freire: writing as the regurgitation of lecture, where the ultimate lesson the student takes from the teacher is this: "Do you now see how you've been duped by the dominant culture?" And of course the student will answer, outwardly: "Yes, teacher, I see." And inwardly: "Yeah, sure. Whatever. Just give me the grade." Because for all their hand-waving and hair-tearing about hegemony and ideology, many of the aging inheritors of Freire often forget that students are powerfully insightful cultural critics with a deep, thoroughgoing, and instinctive awareness of the performativity of culture, and the lessons that these inheritors of Freire would have them absorb about how meaning is constructed become so much lip-service bullshit, not worth writing about and simpler in its generic received-wisdom nature to download from cheathouse.com. Any individuated use value to the student is ignored in favor of exchange value for the grade.
This -- Jenny's "general equivalency" -- is shallow writing in that it offers no room for personal inhabitation. We've forgotten Freire's instruction that the subject must be the student's own experience, not the facile unmasking of the hegemonic functions of assertions about capital punishment or tax reform. But use value subsists in what the writing means, directly, to the student, and that's where I see an alternative offered by Peter Elbow's "believing game" and the pedagogical possibilities of personal writing.
I’m SO Not a Designer
OK, so it's a little less ugly, now that I've borrowed atthe404's Vesuvius layout. Haven't ever worked with PHP before, so while the learning curve isn't exactly steep, it's still making my head hurt. Had to try a couple different hacks to show recent posts; I'm sure I'll have to try a couple more to show recent comments. And I'm still not sure I like the layout; I want to get the pictures back on the left and the links and stuff back on the right, because -- knowing that people read left to right -- I want readers to see the attention-getting stuff first (the tall skinny semi-abstract greenish pictures), and then get to the meat of the entries, with the admin business (the links and such) saved for last, on the right. And that CSS skullduggery will take a non-technically-oriented person like myself a little bit of doing -- so, yes, this layout is gonna mush around some over the next few weeks. But the green and gray will stay. I like the green and gray.
What else is going on? Not doing much reading; trying to get some chapter-drafting done. The cats are at peace, and Dad's said that -- after a long, long time -- he'll be happy to host the extended-family Christmas Day dinner downtown again, which means I'm in for big-time cooking and cleaning duties. Having inherited my mom's recipe collection and some of her cookware -- including a molded English pudding steamer -- I'm on deck for doing the steamed-for-six-hours holiday plum pudding, so I'm going through a series of dry runs, making sure I can do this big involved recipe right when the time comes. (The recipes are all like, "Make sure the suet melts before the flour particles burst," and I'm like: huh?) I've never asked a butcher for beef suet before; never even thought I'd do such a thing, especially not for a dessert. But that's the odd thing, I guess: the radical disparities in the class backgrounds of my mom's side of the family and my dad's side of the family produced the strangest mishmashes of holiday meals; English puddings and birds cooked within birds alongside black-eyed peas or collard greens boiled with ham hocks. With my mom's family, you had stilton and scallion puffs as an hors d'ouvre; with my dad's family, you had pickled pig's ears as a snack. Popovers versus cornbread; grits versus grapefruit; "highballs" served at 6 p.m. on Friday versus a Pabst Blue Ribbon with lunch after you mowed the back pasture.
I learned about cars from my dad. The first car that was mine' to drive was Granny's farm-use 1974 GMC Custom 1500: a big, old, rusted-out pickup truck, painted Creme de Menthe green. To work on the engine, you had to actually climb inside the hood and sit on the wheel well with your head bowed. The do-it-yourself orientation I learned from driving and fixing that truck has really informed the way I approach Web technologies: while knowing I'm a complete novice, I'm not too afraid to climb in under the hood and tinker a bit. (My greatest victory with that GMC was using two scraps of pine 2 x 4 and an empty plastic oil bottle to get the engine to limp home a hundred miles from Harper's Ferry.) But see, until lately, until checking out my mom's handwritten recipes and comparing them to the dogeared and wine-stained pages in her Craig Claiborne, James Beard, Fannie Farmer, Julia Child, and other cookbooks, I hadn't figured out that she did the same thing in her cooking. In that realization, stratifications of class and gender, men's work and women's work, seem to collapse in odd ways.
I'm wondering how those stratifications might play out in Web work. Historically, doing code has been a more male-dominated thing, and design as a field has had (a few) more women -- does that divide point to a class divide, as well? Is design more upper-class, more stylish, more chic? Do we expect coders to have dirt under their fingernails?
Keeping Up With Tech?
I don't have the title of the CCCC presentation given by Pam Takayoshi, Gail Hawisher, and Cyndi Selfe in front of me, but all three focused on hidden, subordinated, or otherwise alternative literacies associated with computers. I'll admit that I had just come from a fantastic presentation on mentoring by Emily Bauman, Malkiel Choseed, Jen Lee, and Brenda Whitney, and found myself a bit underwhelmed: the computers-oriented presentations held little of the careful nuance, complex argumentation, and sophisticated reflexive richness of the mentoring presentations, instead favoring a straightforward, unadorned, and eminently practical outlining of real-world research findings. I'll hasten to point out that this is much more an issue of my own personal preferences regarding academic work than it is any comparison of the relative merits of the two panels: I've read enough of the work of Takayoshi, Hawisher, and Selfe to have seen that their scholarship is pretty much unimpeachable. So before I get myself in any more trouble, maybe I'd best just go ahead and describe what I saw.