Okay. So Zeugma graps the shoestring with one front paw (she’s right-pawed, apparently) and her mouth and like shakes it all around with her mouth, I mean she knows she’s giving it hell, and she’s got the other paw thrashing around up in the air while she does it.
I think she really likes it when I play the Black Sabbath CDs.
Anyway. Another short post, via my Rethinking Economy seminar, about attempting to apply the ways people are thinking about economics these days to what goes on in the first-year writing classroom. In an analysis of the way development discourse constructs the subject under development, we talked about Timothy Mitchell’s absolutely fantastic essay “The Object of Development: America’s Egypt” today. I’m happy to not be an economist, but as I’ve been saying, the stuff we’re reading really gets me going in terms of ways of thinking about how to think about composition. Mitchell is writing about Egypt’s relation via receiving development funding to the U.S., and the way USAID represents that relation: “Once the problems Egypt faces are defined as natural rather than political, questions of social inequality and powerlessness disappear into the background. The analysis can then focus instead on how to overcome these ‘natural’ limits of geography and demography” (139). In other words, we take the political and economic situation as givens, unchangeable, and then say: well, what are the the problems? What can we change? It’s in such an environment that technology suddenly seems to become the ideal fix. In short, the discourse of economics sees inequality and tells us that the problems arise either from natural causes or from a ‘productivity’ deficiency. The fix is seen as either easy (via technology, or via those slackers being less lazy) or impossible.
And since I’m almost at that 4:07 moment in “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath” where the bass riff kicks in, I’m gonna declare that enough for tonight and put my paw up in the air with Zeugma.
Aww, yeah.
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