A Libelous Display / Blissfully Astray

preterite Asides, Cats

It’s that day today, one of my favorite days, of budding trees and fecundity, of celebrating work and celebrating play. My lawn is already overgrown, the daffodils in the back yard come and gone with the crocus and bluebells and now the tulips in full bloom, the first sprigs of green on the grape vine.

There are, as you might expect, stirrings among the cadets, as well. Classroom discussions bubble over easily into jokes or teasing or just into that uncontainable energy, and today, I let it go. How could I not? I had an observer in the classroom, evaluating my teaching, and my lesson plan called for small group work in the second half of class, and the groups got loud and excited and sometimes off-topic — but it’s May! How can you not let that energy go?

It’s May, the lusty month of May
That darling month when everyone throws self-control away
It’s time to do a wretched thing or two
And try to make each precious day one you’ll always rue

It was a good class, however blissfully astray we might have gone.

It was also my morning at the shelter for the week, and the cats are as wound up as the cadets, full of impulsiveness and energy, fat and noisy Clark making the rounds of the room for the first time and falling into the tub, little megasophagus Willie climbing up top to bat at cross-eyed Laverne, and Sean and Joey and Ben performing their alpha-male drama on the reduced stage of the counter by the sink with no one else paying attention.

It’s May. It’s May.

And Tink and Zeugma are five years old today.

CCCC08 B15: Rhetorical Memory and Delivery 2.0

preterite Conference Notes

Kathie Gossett, Andrea Davis, and Carrie Lamanna (unfortunately, John Walter was unable to make it) began their panel with a quotation from Winifred Bryan Horner’s introduction to John Frederick Reynolds’ book Rhetorical Memory and Delivery: “We need to re-think rhetorical memory and delivery as pertaining to new media.” Their panel explored some of the ways in which memory and delivery could be re-thought in relation to new media.

Kathie’s presentation title was “Remembering When: the Temporal Mechanics of Multimodal Composing.” We’re familiar with the traditional modes of composing, Kathie asserted: visual, textual, aural. However, she proposed a perhaps previously underconsidered mode of expression: the temporal.

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Tink: Striker; Zeugma: Grappler

preterite Cats

When they mock-fight, Zeugma always goes to the ground. If my dining room’s the Octagon, Zeugma’s my Hoyce Gracie. Tink, while more tentative, has her own moves, and she’s good about cornering and using those front paws in conjunction with her weight: she’ll get in close to put Zeugma down, which Zeugma’s willing to do and go to work with the hind legs, but then she’ll break contact and go for the high ground, usually the arm of the chair, and whap Zeugma around the face from the stand-off distance.

CCCC08 A25: Virtual Realities

preterite Conference Notes

Doug Eyman, the chair, introduced the panel (the full title being “Reading and Writing Virtual Realities”) by describing his excitment not just about writing about games in our composition courses, but about writing in games. In fact, Doug noted, one of the chief concerns of the panel was not just with reading games as texts, but with reading how games work and can work in writing instruction.

Stephanie Vie’s presentation was first. She described an activity she had developed for a tech writing course, based on the conventional and long-standing genre of writing a set of instructions. Many of us may be familiar with asking students to write a paper explaining how to make a peanut butter sandwich, or perform some similar task. Stephanie noted that many of her students are gamers, and so decided to ask them to work in groups to produce collaboratively-authored game walkthroughs that would instruct another group how to make it to a specific point in a game of their choice. The students chose games like Tomb Raider, Half Life, and Metal Gear Solid; ones that had interesting plots and characters and multiple ways of achieving certain objectives. Stephanie assigned them to groups of 3 or 4, and the groups’ first assignment was to figure out what point in the game to play to and how, specifically, to play the game. The method of gameplay was a specific requirement of the assignment: they couldn’t just play randomly, but had to choose whether to try to play most efficiently, to achieve the objective in the least amount of time, to amass the most points or kills or treasure or experience, or to complete specific in-game quests. Stephanie then had the students negotiate group dynamics in very particular ways, particularly given that some students were more skilled at the games and some less so, and that some were more interested and some less so.

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CCCC08 Day 1

preterite Conference Notes

Arrived late yesterday morning after a 6 AM flight, in time for an early lunch and a nap, some exploring around NOLA’s central business district, and then a wonderful late dinner and live cajun music at Mulate’s. My hotel’s accomodations came at well under half one third of the price of the conference hotel, and the same could unfortunately be said of their quality: my first room had a Bartleby view through a single narrow window of chicken-wire security glass, with the barest dim daylight at noon, so I asked for another, and got a room with burned-out light bulbs and walls that shake when the door closes. But it’s got daylight, at least, despite the rather primitive facilities. After scant sleep before my flight, I hoped to catch up last night before helping to facilitate our all-day workshop today on course management systems, but given the room and impending workshop, I dreamed all night of my room’s electric, plumbing, HVAC, robotic maintenance, audio-visual, computing, and high-tech surveillance systems being managed by BlackBoard and WebCT. Like a dream of the opposite of being watched over by machines of loving grace, punctuated by sudden stirrings, awakenings, BlackBoard flushing the toilet next door, eCollege huffing its automated iron over my closet-hanging clothes, WebCT bitterly cycling the ice machine.

The workshop went fine. Good presentations, demonstrations, and hands-on guidance all around, even on BlackBoard and WebCT (I spoke not a word of their nocturnal activities), and I think Dennis and I did well, as well, on open-source and alternative solutions. It was a long day, though, and afterwards up into the skyward suites of the conference hotel to chat with some people I hadn’t seen in a while and then to Bourbon Street and back again. So I’m here, seeing familiar faces, going to panels tomorrow, hoping to make the time to take notes.

More soon.

Collum’s Song

preterite Asides, Music

I was listening to a rebroadcast NPR’s Mountain Stage this week, and heard Nellie McKay doing an absolutely wonderful version of a tiny little gem called “Collum’s Song.” (On NPR’s publicly available big whole-show MP3, it goes from 24:10 to 25:50: one minute and forty seconds of fine figurative language, nicely sung. I won’t put it up here, but the song alone makes for a very small 1.5 MB MP3 file that shouldn’t be too much trouble for most email clients.) My question, though: where is it from? I’m otherwise not much of a McKay fan, but I couldn’t find this on any of her albums, and the wordplay and imagery is rather a departure from what little I know of her usual fare. Anybody know it?

For Those Not About to Rock

preterite Asides

I’ve never been a big fan of the CCCC Friday night rock ‘n’ roll dance: for me, there’s almost always been an better time to be had elsewhere, with other similar-minded composition folks.

This year, for those of us with geeky inclinations (of whom I am admittedly one), there is an additional significant and compelling reason to find oneself elsewhere at 10 PM on April 4.

So the question would then seem to be: OK, who’s got the spacious suite with the big TV?

Teaching Bartleby

preterite Teaching

In addition to Advanced Composition, I’m teaching Intro to American Literature this semester, and enjoying it. We’re into the nineteenth century now, short fiction, and I’m rediscovering pleasures I’d long neglected. “Bartleby the Scrivener,” as fundamental as it is, is one such long-neglected pleasure for a rhetoric and composition specialist.

I’ll confess: the first time I read it, as an undergrad, I didn’t get it. Didn’t understand any aspect of it. Wouldn’t engage it.

The second time, coming back to it, reading it for pleasure, I was delighted. It was in a secondhand book with “Benito Cereno” and “Billy Budd” and I’d been on a Pynchon paranoid fiction kick after Lot 49 and Gravity’s Rainbow and my friend M. said there was more of that weird, freaky paranoid stuff going on in “Benito Cereno” and I ought to check it out, and I did, and then remembered that I’d wondered what the big deal was about “Bartleby,” and re-read it in a sitting, as well. As with Moby Dick and The Scarlet Letter, I was perhaps more surprised than I should have been by how much more I got out of it on a second visit. This isn’t a terribly original or interesting observation, I guess: the first time I encountered it, as a student, it was an Important Text; the second time I encountered it, as a reader, it was something else, something different. So it’s nice to be teaching it, and nice to be spending two class days on it.

Today was the first, and I stole the idea for my lesson plan from a colleague, who’d used it to great success. Minor modifications on my part, but it went like this: for homework, I’d asked them to read the story in its entirety, and told them to be prepared to lead discussion in class today, and to come to class with notes on motivation and action in the story to help them do so.

I brought my laptop to class, which I’d never done before. (Each classroom has its own dedicated computer.) I set it up on my desk. In the seconds before class started, I said to them something like this: “You’ve just read a story in which someone, with a screen between him and the other characters, fails to do what they expect of him, and in violating the expectations customary to their relationship, causes disruption and concern.”

And that was All. I. Said.

Not a word more. Not a single word, for the rest of class.

I typed notes, fingers flying to keep up with copying what they said, and yes I sometimes grinned or couldn’t stop myself from nodding. And some of them got mad, or frustrated, and some of them disengaged, but a few of them got into it, and discussion ebbed and flowed without me speaking a single word for the entirety of the class period.

I posted the notes to the course site when class was over, and from the notes — five pages, single-spaced — it was clear that they came to the discussion remarkably well-prepared, and managed to talk out a lot of the tough points of the story. Sure, it was hard to keep quiet: immensely difficult, for them and for me, for one section more than another. Fun, too, though, and productive, once they got what was going on. But I asked them to lead, and they led. And we’ll use those notes as a starting point for the second class session.

I also have the luxury that they’re cadets, though; that they’re motivated and obedient, and I wonder how well that’d fly with Michelle’s students, or Joanna’s, or Collie’s. How does the line between expectation and compulsion shift from classroom to classroom, from one institution to another? Sure, I’m a boundary case, a marker, an outlier: are there other boundary cases? Where would or wouldn’t my Bartleby act fly — and why?

Bad Day at the Shelter

preterite Cats

So of the sixty-odd cats at the shelter, Ebony and Mr. Pokey have been fighting, to the point where they can’t come out of their cages at the same time. Nobody knows why.

Other shelter things continue apace: Willie, with his enlarged esophagus, still has trouble keeping food down, as does Clark. We lost hypothyroid Agatha a couple weeks ago, after she was down to three pounds. Laverne and cross-eyed Shirley lost their cage to two very tentative unnamed new arrivals. Maine Coon Sean is still the alpha male trying to take Joey’s place, Jezebel’s temper has improved, Rocky is as stolid and affectionate as ever, and Buster needs lots and lots of attention, and digs in his cage if he doesn’t get it.

Agatha was a blow, because we all knew it was coming. She was spoiled, and we made a big deal out of her. But at some point: a three-pound cat. You know what’s going to happen.

That’s the thing about shelter work, I guess. You start to love the ones who you know won’t get adopted. They’re the ones you come back to every week: the sick ones, the spastic, the angry, the timid, the fearful.

So K. and I are cleaning out cages this morning, and Mr. Pokey’s got his eye on Ebony. Mr. Pokey’s one of those water cats, always wanting to play with the stream of water in the sink or the tub when we’re cleaning up, and always wanting to wait by the door to the dog room. Only today he’s prowling around, growling up at Ebony in her cage, and she growling back down at him, until they’re totally locked into each others’ attention and we don’t even realize it, and K. is doing the cages on that side and I’m on the other side, and she tries to shoo him, and in so doing comes between him and Ebony, and that’s it: he’s all of a sudden wrapped around K.’s wrist and arm, teeth and claws, and he’s hurting her, and she doesn’t want to hurt him and can’t get him off.

She gets him off once and then he’s on her ankle and I take way too long grabbing the big padded gloves and stuffing him into the nearest empty cage.

It was bad. Like, bad bad. He drew some blood, tooth and claw both, deep, and we got K. out to the quiet part of the dog room, and L. patched her up. She went home early.

Cats are fighting, you don’t get between them. I guess that’s one lesson. There’s another one, but I don’t know how much I feel like thinking about it.