Author: preterite

Underway, Well

preterite Education

Our school year here is already underway and at speed, with tomorrow being lesson 4 of a 40-lesson semester. I’m happy with what I’m teaching, and happy to have had a bit of a hand in shaping the curriculum related to some of the courses I teach. The students are wonderful, as they always are, and I think I’m going to try keeping a teaching journal again, as I’ve done sometimes in the past.

One nice thing about my institution is that we’ve been lately getting some recognition for the teaching we do: according to the U.S. News and World Report, we’re ranked #14 nationally for top liberal arts colleges, and #1 for top public liberal arts colleges. In a similar vein, Forbes magazine ranks us at #6 for top 10 colleges overall, and #1 for top public colleges. I’ll admit to having some questions about methodologies for those rankings, but I don’t mind at all that people think we’re doing good work here.

Next step: working towards some recognition of what we’re starting to do with the writing program here. (What’s that? Oh, why yes — we do have a plan.)

Dream Team

preterite Politics

I’m not sure how enthusiastic I am about Obama’s choice of Joe Biden as a running mate — I remember the ways he embarrassed himself in past candidacies — but I think Obama, if he and his team are smart, can use Biden’s past criticisms of Obama with some rhetorical savvy to show how an Obama administration might value diverse perspectives, in contrast to the Bush administration’s echo chamber of the last eight years. But it got me thinking: who else would I like to see contributing their perspectives to a possible Obama administration?

Secretary of State: Hillary Clinton
Secretary of the Treasury: Warren Buffett
Secretary of Defense: Wesley Clark
Attorney General: Lawrence Lessig
Secretary of the Interior: Al Gore
Secretary of Agriculture: Carolyn Mugar
Secretary of Commerce: Joseph Stiglitz
Secretary of Education: Kathleen Blake Yancey

Well, sure, some of them are reaches, but it’s a wish list, a dream team. An assertion of hope about the direction in which we might go. And, yes, I’ve left off Labor, HHS, Transportation, Energy, VA, and Homeland Security. So I’ll ask: what would your choices be, reader? Who would you change or add?

All In

preterite Rhetoric

Watched the Olympic opening ceremonies, and I’m amazed. It’s like China pushed its economic and public relations chips — its whole pile — to the center of the table, and said, “All in.”

Kairos CFP: dot mil

preterite Academia, Computers, Rhetoric, Teaching, Writing

Here’s part of my excuse for not posting much lately. Alexis and I are pretty excited about it. And I might be soliciting some of you, dear readers, for contributions.

Call for Proposals

Kairos Summer 2010 Special Issue
dot mil: Rhetoric, Technology, and the Military
Guest Editors: Mike Edwards and Alexis Hart

This special issue of Kairos seeks to investigate the intersections between technology, rhetoric, and the military, as well as the connections between the military and literacy instruction. During World War II, College English published four articles (February 1944, May 1944, March 1945, May 1945) explicitly concerned with connections between literacy instruction in higher education and the contemporary military. Today, in a time of ongoing conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan and anxieties about military action in Iran, such connections merit renewed attention. Furthermore, advances in communications technologies have complicated those connections. ARPANET, the first packet-switching network and direct predecessor to the global internet, went live as a Department of Defense project in 1969, and the intersection of networked rhetorics and military affairs has evolved in intriguing ways since. For example, email, web video, cell phones, video games, weblogs, and other digital technologies have become increasingly available as well as increasingly controversial within military contexts. For this special issue on rhetoric, technology, and the military, examples of possible topics of investigation might include, but are not limited to:

How soldiers’, sailors’, airmen’s, and Marines’ access to 24/7 networked communications technologies has changed the rhetoric of conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.
Online alternative news sources and their influence on public perceptions of conflicts.
How digital technologies complicate concerns of operations security (OPSEC).
The Army’s ban on weblogging by soldiers without command approval.
The rhetorics and aesthetics of military-themed video games.
Distance learning for deployed soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines.
The use of just war theory, torture, protest, and other military-related subjects as topics for argument essays in first-year writing courses.
Corporal Pat Tillman and the public uses of the rhetorical canon of memory.
The rhetoric of PowerPoint in command briefings.
The use of netwar strategies by insurgency groups and conventional military organizations.
Media representations of the ethics and rhetoric of the “revolt of the generals.”
The rhetoric of recruiting.
Online “swiftboating” and the place of military service in political rhetoric.
The rhetorical framing of conflict in documentaries and news reports, as well as in first-hand accounts from on-the-ground warfighters.

Submission Guidelines:

For this special issue, we seek submissions for all sections of the journal (Topoi, Praxis, Reviews, Interviews, and Disputatio). We ask that contributors visit current and previous issues to determine which section best matches your work.

Topoi: Extended scholarly analyses related to the special issue theme.
Praxis: Longer classroom spotlights and brief digital tool-use narratives related to the special issue theme.
Reviews: Individual or collaborative reviews of books, media, and other texts of interest related to the special issue theme.
Interviews: Interviews with scholars doing work related to the special issue theme.
Disputatio: Short digital texts that invite or incite further commentary. This section operates like letters to the editor in more traditional journal venues; however, these texts take native digital forms, even if rudimentary in nature.

Additional Guidelines:

Please consult general submission guidelines at http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/cfht.html.
Kairos can accept most web-ready file formats (check with the guest editors if you are unsure). Please keep in mind that this excludes word-processing documents.
We prefer URLs for review purposes. If you do not have access to open (or password-protected) webspace, please contact the guest editors in advance of the submission deadline to arrange alternate means of delivery.
We cannot accept email attachments larger than 2 megabytes (MB).
Queries to the guest editors are welcome in advance of the deadline. (Responses may take up to a week.)

Submission Deadline (Proposals): November 1, 2008

Contact both guest editors with a proposal via email. (Subject line: “dotmil submission: YOURNAME”.) The proposal should include a 1-2 paragraph explanation of the webtext’s topic and argument; a 1-2 paragraph description of the webtext’s structure, design, and associated technologies (including a URL and/or images, if authors wish); and a brief annotated bibliography. Authors will receive confirmation of submission, via email, within 2-3 days.

Publication Timeline:

Proposals due: November 1, 2008
Acceptance notification: December 1, 2008
Full webtexts due: March 1, 2009
Revised webtexts due: October 1, 2009
Publication date: May 15, 2010

Clambering on the Bandwagon

preterite Friday Fun

If you haven’t yet caught the awesome that is Dr. Horrible, do so soon, because it starts costing money on the 20th. I’m a sucker for smart humor and musicals, and Joss Whedon cranks up the goofy to eleven and has Mal Reynolds and Doogie Howser take it into the stratosphere.

(Or, well, actually, it’s probably OK to wait. I mean, it’s sufficiently brilliant that I’ll likely lay down some iTunes cash at some point in order to be able to watch it again. But go, now, look.)

Fifth of July

preterite Asides

I took the train into Manhattan yesterday and spent as fine a day as I’ve had in NYC in a long, long time.

It began inauspiciously, though, with the called-for rain starting almost immediately as my companion and I set out up Lexington Avenue. I’d brought along a $2 umbrella from a previous soaked visit to Brooklyn, but it wasn’t cutting it for the two of us, so I’m now the owner of two cheap disposable umbrellas. (::shrugs::) We meandered over and to and through Central Park and wound up at SummerStage in time for a set by Apollo Heights, who — for all the Cocteau Twins Mos Def TV on the Radio hype and indie music journalism love — completely sucked live. I mean, I get what they’re trying to do, and think it’s cool — wall of guitars meets soul-style vocal harmonies, or what some folks are calling shoegaze-derived Afrogaze — but the way they did it in performance was crappy piercing painful feedback for feedback’s sake and sounded nothing like their studio singles. In terms of musical genre, they’re loose cousins to TV on the Radio, who I like a lot, but with less polished vocals, and a guitar sound that can probably trace its lineage back through (very) early Catherine Wheel and Jesus and Mary Chain to the live portion of Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma. But still: when there’s no music happening between songs and you, Danny Chavis, are working to maintain that sustained painful nothing-but-feedback squeal for the umpteenth time and a substantial portion of your tiny audience is facing you with their fingers in their ears, it might be time to take the hint: dude, you’re just being a dick. They’re critical darlings, but their live chops and production are far from up to their studio sound — and that’s why they opened.

Fortunately, they opened for a far, far better band:

Read more

Independence Day 2008

preterite Asides

I put the flag out this morning, and watched the parade this afternoon. Apparently, Highland Falls has a brass marching band of big guys in black and yellow bowling shirts who do a great ragtime version of “Oh, Susannah,” and the village fire department has a dress uniform (white gloves, brass buttons, brimmed pillbox caps) and a bagpipe player. Who knew?

church_street_july_4

The neighborhood kids have been having fun with their rockets and mortars (no, not those neighborhood kids) this afternoon, and I’m getting ready to take Zeugma up on the roof with me to watch the village fireworks. (Tink doesn’t like the noise, and will likely open the kitchen cabinet and hide in the large saucepan.) Tomorrow — well, tomorrow promises to be interesting. I’m heading into the city with a friend, and am excited about the trip’s prospects. More soon.

Five Years

preterite Asides

The summer has begun, and I’m reading and writing and hoping to get a few things done. Graduation day felt like kind of the cusp, the transition from class time into this other less structured time, but one thing I failed to mention about graduation — one of the nicest things, or, well, the nicest, was being invited by a cadet to his commissioning ceremony, and then being (somewhat surprisedly) asked to say a few words at the ceremony. I don’t know what the word is for the combination between being flummoxed and honored, but that was me, and I hope I did OK. I couldn’t have had anything other than the best things to say about the former cadet and now lieutenant, who’s going to do well and go far, and who I would’ve been grateful to have had as a platoon leader in my days as an NCO: good luck and godspeed, 2LT M.; it was a pleasure and a privilege to work with you, and I hope — know — you’ll stay in touch.

So, after the cusp: with considerable pruning, the grape vine is flourishing beautifully on the pergola — the advice I found about trimming it back by more than half each year was right on the mark — but the birds are already in and picking the tiny berries away. The creepy carnival is back in town this weekend, but they’ve repainted the funhouse with a penguins theme, though the penguins’ lopsided eyes and beakéd lipless grins bring to mind nothing more than a Steve Buscemi psychopath. Tink is favoring her luxating patella again, and I wonder if the pain in that bad knee is connected to the incoming thunderstorms that mark June’s transition to ninety-degree weather, but she’s also my queen of feline neurosis; the girl who runs and hides when she hears childrens’ voices outside.

And this blog is five years old. Much more about the cats and the house and such than it was when I started; much less about scholarship and investigating ideas. Much more about the quotidian and the certain; much less about the abstract and the questions.

That feels like a bit of a loss.

Graduation Day

preterite Academia

Saturday was Graduation Day for us, when the graduating class took their oaths and were commissioned as second lieutenants. It was a good day and a good speech by the Secretary of the Army, Pete Geren, and a good ceremony, where I was happy to see a number of the cadets I’d worked with receive awards and recognition. And the military attention to the particulars of ceremony, if you’ve never seen such stuff, drew some emotion. Even though I knew what was coming, it was hard to resist feeling the grin and the slight tightness around my chest when the final words of the ceremony came, directed at the class of 2008, in the form of a preparatory command and a command of execution, with the emphasis on the second syllable of the command of execution:

“Class — dismissed!”

the cadet graduation hat toss

The Secretary of the Army’s speech was impressive. Low-key, certainly, and wide-ranging, as one tends to expect for graduation speeches, but he set as one of his introductory motifs Thomas Jefferson’s 1786 Bill for Religious Freedom, which states, in part, that

No man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burdened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer, on account of his religious opinions or belief.

Secretary Geren spoke out strongly against those who he called “zealots” who would oppress, restrain, molest, or burden those who do not share their religious beliefs, and while the implicit reference to the Taliban was clear, the fact that he did not qualify his critique suggests to me that it was likely aimed at zealots not only of one particular faith. And I find that commendable.

Writing for the Turk

preterite Computers, Economics, Writing

A few weeks ago, I netstumbled again upon Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, a for-hire crowdsourcing system that I remember causing a brief buzz when it came out in 2005 or 2006. I was deep in dissertation tunnel vision at the time, not wanting to let myself be distracted, but I remember thinking it held interesting possibilities as a highly decentralized market for immaterial labor, and wondered how it might connect to what I’d been saying about the economics of writing.

So I’ve finally caught a short breather from the end-of-the-semester crunch — I’m presently sitting in the hall while my plebes are about 25 minutes into taking their term-end examinations and typing busily away — and did some poking around. Interesting stuff. The job requester command-line interface stuff is a little daunting, but on the worker side, there are — as of this morning — 111 jobs available with the keyword “write” in the listing. Which made me wonder once more: how much should you pay for a C+ paper?

Or, OK, to be a little less opaque about it: the Amazon Mechanical Turk offers one system of thinking about the value of what they call Human Intelligence Tasks. In looking over those Human Intelligence Tasks, I think they’re certainly a form of Hardt and Negri’s immaterial labor, but of a somewhat different order than, say, writing an essay. Yet some of them — e.g., writing reviews — come close to the types of low-stakes tasks we sometimes assign in FYC. And “stakes” is yet another term related to value.

Curious. Further investigation needed.