— W.S. Merwin

All day the stars watch from long ago
my mother said I am going now
when you are alone you will be all right
whether or not you know you will know
look at the old house in the dawn rain
all the flowers are forms of water
the sun reminds them through a white cloud
touches the patchwork spread on the hill
the washed colors of the afterlife
that lived there long before you were born
see how they wake without a question
even though the whole world is burning

My friend Fresca sent this lovely, sad bit to me this morning after reading the previous poem I posted.

Posted at 10:18 AM | Permalink

I get a deep sense of stillness — maybe even peace — when I wander through graveyards. The new banner might not say spring to everyone, but it makes me think of wandering in the warm sun someday soon, enjoying the fact while I might indeed be feeling very still, I’m not nearly as still as some of the other folks nearby. Yet. A bit of momento mori is never a bad thing, yes?

This lovely tilt-shift shot (faked, actually) is by Jenny Spadafora, my co-conspirator in the Monday / Thursday project. One of the things I love about Jenny’s attitude toward photography is that she’s so experimental, always fiddling around and trying new things. Her enduring sense of whimsy also certainly doesn’t hurt. In fact, I had planned on using this shot of a life-size lego sea serpent until it became apparent it just wasn’t going to work as a banner. It’s really very her.

So the tiny tombstones will be up at the top of the page until June 1, when a new artist will go up. And they’ll stand on their own, since I managed to stop myself from pretentiously slapping an ars longa, vita brevis tagline on there.

(By the way, the early archives are littered with bits of my cemetery fascination, which dates back decades. In fact, one of the things I appreciated about my first love was that he lived next to a small, working-class cemetery.)

Posted at 10:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I'm very busy subconsciously not writing about my grandfather. The result is that nothing else non-academic is getting written, either. In other words, one can expect that hodgepodge effect will probably continue for a bit.

Posted at 8:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

December means time for a new banner. This London street scene from frizzyLogic replaces Mister Husband’s SoCal roadside shack. Rachel’s one of my oldest blog-friends, and I’ve been watching her flickr stream since she started habitual shooting several years ago. She was good to begin with, but it’s been so much fun watching her stretch and grow over the years. In fact, my occasional macro obsession is largely her fault, and I will never do trees as well as she does. (Susan, you really must look.)

So thanks for the banner, Miss Frizzy. It’ll be here until March 1, when a new artist will go up.

Posted at 2:32 PM | Permalink

So back in March I said I was updating stuff around here. And I ran around and stripped a bunch of code and then Ooh! Shiny! Other stuff! That, plus every time I do this I forget that I got no skilz and no patience when it comes to coding.

Luckily, Steve Himmer kindly saved me from myself. He cleaned up the general design, added in the banner at the top (more on which in a moment), re-installed the "Recent Comments" plugin, and added in collapsible categories and archives on the sidebar. The blogroll is also collapsible now, which tidies things up considerably. The body is wider, the better to display the photos. And he put up with me yammering in the background the whole time. Steve’s one of my oldest blog-friends, but he is also one of the most awesome.

Now, about the banner. It’s traditional for the blogeur to put their own work there, but I figure that this place already contains enough of me. (Besides, there’s more of me here and here and various other places.) What seems more interesting is to display the work of other photographers on a quarterly-ish basis. The first is Mister Husband, and not only because of nepotism. I would still be entranced if I stepped into a gallery and saw his work on the wall and had no idea who the artist was or what he was like. He’s just that good. I picked this shot as the first one because it works in the banner format, and because it looks like the Thinkery in my head this summer. This season I’ve been a little ramshackle and dusty, but happy. I have a couple of other folks in mind for the next two, and if they say yes then that’ll take it through to the beginning of next summer.

What else? Steve also re-coded the About page, and I’ve revised it to actually reflect the current state of affairs. I imagine I need to do some more work on it soonish. For the moment, I’m just basking in have a clean blog again. It’s at least as good as clean sheets. Maybe better.

If you notice any wonkiness, you’ll let us know, won’t you? Thanks.

Posted at 1:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Posted at 12:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Miss Frizzy says I’m a thinking blogger, which is nice because I wonder about this space sometimes. The thinking has drifted over the years, from more academic to more personal. Lately it’s drifted from words to pictures, and I end up having middle of the night conversations with Mister Husband about photography as a way of knowing.

It’s funny, this, because when Jenny sent out a Facebook question the other day for blog recomendations, I mentioned frizzyLogic. I so enjoy seeing where Rachel’s mind wanders and lights, and the ways she’s documented her various transformations. She’s taught me about Africa and London and photography and nameless cats, and now she’s seen Lou Reed perform Berlin live and I haven't and am quite upset about that. Plus, she’s funny and nice and writes wonderful emails.

If anybody except Jenny had asked that question, I would have also mentioned 12 frogs, but you can’t very well recommend someone’s own blog to them. Actually, you’re better off reading her Jaiku, so you get the full force of her web presence — especially her work on flickr. Her Project 365 is one of the wittiest I’ve seen, and it’s part of what inspired me to get out and about with my camera more this year.

I don’t know the proprietor of Osmium at all. I do know that Josh is an electrochemistry PhD student and runner. He’s another Southern expat (Tennessee to NYC and points beyond.) And he writes such odd, smart posts that I had to go back and read all of them from the start.

I discovered Xtinpore last week after she (?) linked me. That’s not much time to develop an affection, but this post on academics and their workspaces was so well-written and soulful that I was blog-smitten in that way that tells me I’ll be reading for some time to come.

Needless to say, the guy at This Public Address has made me think for years. We might not have gotten together if not for his blog. It’s drifted from personal to more academic over the years — an inverse of mine, perhaps. But he’s writing out his memories lately, and I find myself waking up every morning and going straight to the computer to see what he wrote last night while I was sleeping.

(You’ll notice I’ve not mentioned any Rhet/Comp/Internets bloggers here. That’s because they’re all over in their own Thinking Bloggers section in the sidebar.)

Posted at 10:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I need a survey app for my Tools & Issues course this fall, so I need to decide between SurveyMonkey (which I’ve used before), Flash-Gear (not as functional as I’d like), and Sparklit, which I saw for the first time over at George’s place.

So now I’m fiddling around with Sparklit to see if it’ll suit the assignment I’m building, and I’d love to know more about my audience here. Perhaps you’ll humor me? (And if none of these descriptions suit you, please feel free to add to them in the comments. I just wrote down ten categories I know some of you fit into.)

Test-Driving Sparklit Polls

Who are all you smart, good-looking people, anyway?   I'm a Rhet/Comp/Lit person who found you through other Rhet/Comp/Lit Blogs.   I worked with you in one of your previous professional lives.     I'm a Rhet/Comp/Lit person, and I started reading you after we met at a conference.   I like dogs. I like to read other people who like dogs, even if they don't write about their dog very much.     I'm related to you.   I followed the links from That Other Blog With the Post About Cast Fetishization.     I'm your drinking buddy.   I read you because I read your husband and I want to know the other half of that story.     I'm your art friend.   I don't know who I am or why I read you, ever. How long has this been going on?     I'm your colleague.         Current Results

Posted at 11:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

My favorite George is Areté/Thinkery/Whatever’s 1500th commenter! Sadly, all he gets is this semi-sparkly entry.

Posted at 11:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

This is my 1000th post.

Posted at 3:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

When I began doing this, Areté seemed like a good name. And it was, for a semester-long academic project that focused on classical rhetoric and new media. It’s never been a good name for a public blog, though. Most people aren’t quite sure what it means or how to pronounce it. Those who do know that it’s a remarkably uppity name — I mean, who goes around naming their blog “excellence”? And all this detritus certainly isn’t that.

But I’ve kept it all this time, because by the time I decided I was a-keepin’ this thing it was the way most people knew me. I tend to think of blog names as a strange confluence of brands and personal names, and am always wildly disconcerted when people change theirs. It’s a big shift in identity, and sometimes ethos.

Be that as it may, I am tired of Areté. Irked by it, even. It’s pretentious, and it doesn’t really reflect what goes on here. Henceforth, this space will be Thinkery. It’s a name that’s cracked me up for years, ever since I first read Aristophanes’ The Clouds. It’s my favorite of his farces (or at least on par with The Frogs), and features the blundering Strepsiades and a tongue-in-cheek critical portrait of Socrates and his school, here called The Thinkery:

Continue reading "all progress is incremental" »

Posted at 6:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

This is one of the weeks I regret giving up what anonymity I had. If I was still faceless, I’d be writing about the first week of teaching and how cool I think this group of students is, or the strangeness of living vicariously through my colleagues who are on the market this year, or the vagaries of one of my consulting gigs. I’d write about the academic small-world syndrome that has me taking a class in another department with a professor who chaired the dissertations of the professors who chaired the dissertations of the professors who chaired both Mr. Husband’s and my theses.

That’s what I’d be writing about. But I’m not.

Posted at 8:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

My third blogiversary was yesterday, and I totally spaced it.

What to say? I’m really quite amazed this project has gone on this long. And I’m also amazed at all the shifts between academic and professional emphasis that have taken place as things bumped along. It seems that the more academic I become, the less I’m inclined to write about it here consistently. Maybe this space is to remind me of all the other important things.

As always, thanks to all of you lovely readers, some of whom have come here the entire time. I wouldn’t keep doing this if not for you.

Some changes are afoot, as usual. More on that later.

Posted at 11:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

You know those errors that we all make once in awhile on these-here blogs? The ones where we argue vigorously, down to and below the fold, about some wildly mistaken point? Alert readers spare no blogger, and so we all must eventually acknowledge these blunders, particularly since blogging ethics prevent us from pulling them.

One of my advisors has finally proposed a term for these: The Litella. The Litella shall be so-named in honor of SNL’s dear Emily Litella and her energetically-argued, well-meant, completely-incorrect statements. Most important was her cheerful acknowledgement: “Oh. Oh, that’s very different. ... Never mind.” Per Logie, the criteria shall be three-fold:

• The argument in question must be both vigorous and erroneous.
• The error must be central to the argumentative core of the post. Tangential errors and typos do not count.
• The argument must be acknowledged by the initial poster, preferably cheerfully. (In all fairness, Litella did sometimes call Jane Curtin a "bitch" for having pointed out her errors, but this was always followed by a sweet smile toward the audience).

Posted at 10:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Torrill removed comments last month in order to see what it would do to her blogging. When I upgraded two months ago, I removed my site meter.

Off and on, I’ve been one of those bloggers who says “Oh, I blog for me. I do it for the content management system/the joy of writing/to keep in touch with folks back home/etc etc.” Then, after that, at the end, I tack on, “And I do it because you meet the coolest people!” (I think it’s the only-child isolationism kicking in when I push elements like community to the back.)

So I wanted to see if it was true: do I blog just for me? I haven’t had any idea who’s coming to see me or how many of you there are. There must have been a traffic spike from the Teaching Carnival traffic, but I don’t really know.

Results: I haven’t blogged even half as much. I haven’t been all that interested, and I definitely haven’t particularly cared. What dribbles I have written have flat, I think, especially compared to what I was generating a year ago or even earlier this year. The past few weeks, I’ve considered abandoning the entire enterprise.

So no, I don’t do this just for me. (Let this be yet another lesson unto me about these sorts of issues.) I’m reinstalling the meter, because it’s really just no fun without all you people.

Posted at 11:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I dreamt last night I was at my parents’ house, and it was snowing outside — Minnesota snowing, not Arkansas snowing. Copious, in other words. I looked out the window to the front porch and there was a man sitting in the adirondack chair. He was bear-like, and looked like he was freezing.

I opened the door and invited him in, and then he stood, covered with snow, in the living room. I peered at the glistening crystals covering the Jesus hair and beard, thinking he was quite familiar. Lo and behold: It was Steve Himmer, finally come to Arkansas.

Posted at 9:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Can you tell I’m slouching toward my annual August hiatus? I never thought there’d be such a thing, but looking at the archives, it seems I tend to disappear for a bit in the late summer. Why should this year be any different?

Actually, it’s important that this year not be different. I need to take some time away from the blog in order to do some internet detox. I’ve always been obessive about reading on the Net, but the long ankle recovery period pushed things over the edge. A couple of weeks ago, it became obvious that I’ve been spending entirely too much time on blog reading. (The increasing tendonitis in my mouse-arm is only one of the symptoms.) Since then, I’ve tightened up the blogroll considerably (from around 200 links to less than 100), switched all but 16 of them to RSS, and instituted personal rules to limit the time I spend on this. Still, I think some extended time away is in order, since I’ve never not read blogs continuously since summer 2002. (Even during the times I wasn’t writing, I was always reading.) There are some various things coming up this month that I know I’ll want to blog, but then I plan to disappear for most of August.

Posted at 10:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I am now the number three Google result for “preoccupied.” Appropriate. In return, I will endeavor to answer some of the recurrent questions that bring Googlers here.

learn to bake bread
There’s really no way to learn except doing it. Get a decent bread book that lays out basic techniques and equipment, and start with the recipe for plain white bread. Do not get fancy, because you’re most likely going to throw away this batch, and the one after it and the one after it. It took me four tries before I managed to make loaves that we were willing to eat. The previous three batches sat around on the counter like art objects until they turned green and I threw them out. When you make a passable white loaf, move on to wheat. Give yourself time to recover in between failures; I decided there would be a Weekend Bake, and that I would not fiddle with bread at all during the week.

Also: your yeast is very important, as you might suspect. If you can buy bulk, fresh yeast from a health food store, do so.

(For those of you who have been following my baking odessey: I successfully progressed to beer and onion bread this weekend. Not sure what’s next.)

Continue reading "I answer the world’s questions" »

Posted at 12:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I was remembering what it was like to be a brand new blogger, and the things that people told me and the things I wish I’d been told. Thusly, here are five things I was most ambivalent about at the beginning and advice regarding them.

1. You may be wondering how much of yourself you can reveal on your blog. The answer to that depends on you, and you should respect your boundaries. If you want to be anonymous, be anonymous. If you want to be pseudonymous, be pseudonymous. If you want to be full identity, then go with that. Do what makes you feel most comfortable, because if you’re not comfortable with your space then you won’t keep blogging.

1a. Identity doesn’t come overnight. It will continue to develop as you go along, and will be partly dependent on pragmatic things, like how much you want to be able to blog about private aspects of your life.

2. The best blogs are smart and funny and true. However, you shouldn’t feel like you can’t post unless you have something smart and funny to say. Something true is quite good enough, and most days that’s the best any of us can hope for. And true isn’t as lofty as it sounds. Sometimes true is something that you noticed in the course of your mundane little day. Sometimes something true is just a link to something else that made you laugh or cry or think.

2a. Even the bloggers you think are always smart don’t necessarily think of themselves that way. I once wrote to a blogger whose intellect is universally respected in order to get permission for a quote I was using in a publication. He said, "Did it sound smart? It didn’t come from one of my stupid posts, did it?" This from a man who seriously has no stupid posts.

Continue reading "Notes for New Bloggers" »

Posted at 9:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (2)

Today marks my second blogiversary. What started as an independent study project ain‛t done yet, I guess.

Thank you to all of you who have come here over the last two years, and who continue to be so interesting, supportive, and human. Without you, this wouldn‛t be nearly so worthwhile an endeavor.

To mark the occasion, Areté has become a little more human as well. This began as an anonymous, genderless space, but it quickly moved beyond that as so many of you have blogrolled me by one or both of my names. I‛ve finally added an About page to the sidebar, complete with a picture taken by the infamous Mister Boyfriend. Not all of the links are live yet, but all should be well by the time school starts.

Posted at 4:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Hey, kids! If you redesign your website (or someone else does), your traffic will triple in a week!

OK, not really.

Continue reading "spike" »

Posted at 6:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Jeff Jarvis and Ernie the Attorney call for the creation of a legal defense fund for bloggers:

In this case, I think there is a very specific need: Jason and Robert before him needed to tell the lawyers calling him to "call my lawyer."

Of course, bloggers can't afford lawyers of their own. But we know from Robert's case there there are a good number of good souls with legal degrees out there who are willing and eager to help.

I suggest that what we need now is a means of organizing them so a blogger who's getting harassed by big corporate or government attorneys can call for help. In some cases, the lawyers may say that the blogger did something wrong. But in most cases, the lawyer can breath fire back at the corporate dragons and skip the harassment stage and get right to the civilized discussion and agreement stage.

Posted at 8:53 AM | Permalink

A year and a half I've been meaning to redesign this blog. There's no time in the academic year for such a thing. The first summer I got tied up with a Foucault seminar and family matters. The second summer I moved across the country. And sometime in there I started reading Joelle over at Tenth Muse, who's funny and smart and always has the best looking blog around. And it turns out she's in the business of making blogs prettier!

The Faust Owl* is from a 1914 Louis Moe print, and Joelle worked it into a wonderfully wintery design. She also upgraded me to the latest MT, improved my archive functions and feeds, installed Blacklist, and put the accent back in Arete. I never felt so good about sending money to a stranger on the Internet. You should all hire her immediately.

Such a lovely home can only improve the thought process. I'm certain of it.

*Perhaps appropriate for a grad-student blog, no?

Posted at 10:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

A friend of mine and I talk about blog-crushes sometimes - you know, when you come across someone whose content completely intrigues you and proceed to click on their blog far more than is necessary for a few months. You never say anything to them about it*, and eventually the crush fades.

My current crush is on Vitriolica Webb and her Ite. Gorgeous, quirky scribblings from an anonymous artist somewhere in Portugal. You should go look too.

*OK, except for the time I did do something about it. That worked out really well.

Posted at 2:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (1)

More Rickard, from a paper read before the Institution of Mining and Metallurgy in 1910. He was talking about the purpose of technical writing, but I think it has a more current application. Namely, it speaks volumes about the reasons many folks blog: to make meaning out of the stuff swirling around inside our heads*. It's not any single post that accomplishes this, but rather the process of distillation that occurs over months and years of blogging. Go back in your archives and dig around to see what you were doing a year or two ago, and then look at where you are now - what you're thinking, how you're writing. Most likely there's been progress.

The purpose of language is to convey ideas; the intent of technical writing is to transmit accurate information, whether as fact or theory, from one man to another, to the gain of all. Indeed the benefit is usually more to the giver than to the receiver. In the exchange of ideas, it is particularly true that it is more blessed to give than to receive. ... At the start the writer finds his knowledge as full of holes as a sieve, and his thought as turbid as the pulp from a stamp-mill. In the effort to convey information by writing he crystallizes the amorphous ideas collected during years of study and observation, he submits the confused notions of his brain to the settling process of logical thinking, whereby the true is precipitated from the false, the accurate decanted from the inaccurate, fact is filtered from supposition, and finally the solution of speech, pellucid but enriched, is outpoured generously.
The value of such a performance, either to the author or to his readers, depends upon the manner of it.

*It also reminds me that I need to be writing about my research and classwork here in between yammering on about plants and whatnot.

Posted at 10:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Posted at 10:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

(via commonplaces) Blogalization, "an open community of bloggers who post in one or more languages about material discovered in one or more other languages: if I have languages A and B and you have languages B and C, we can share memes across barriers of mutual incomprehension."

It's a fabulous jumble of news and culture and language, and a wonder to an ugly American like me who only speaks (poorly) one language other than her native tongue.

Posted at 11:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This is odd. I've never just sat and watched my blog disappear day by day before as its seven-day cycle ticks by. It's gone away on various occasions, but it's been because I was away too. I wasn't sitting here and looking at it. And it's not like I don't have anything to say. It's that I've fallen prey to the same thing that stymies my first-year students: notions of audience.

I've always treated this blog like a commonplace book with a fictitious audience. (I wrote about that stuff here and here.) Then I went to C's and met a bunch of other bloggers, and we started a listserv and went around and gave out our blog addresses and everything. I do this all the time, right? Quite a few people I know read my blog, and quite a few strangers read my blog.

But I have been weirded out by suddenly actually knowing who a certain segment of my audience is. Knowing their names and what they do and what institutions they're at. And knowing that they think I'm (gasp) semi-professional.

They'll get over thinking that pretty quickly, because I've decided to get the hell over this and get to blogging again. So never fear: more redheads and disjointed meanderings coming up shortly!

Posted at 9:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Among the people I met last week during the Feasibility Study Road Show was Clancy Ratliff (she of Culture Cat). We didn't have a lot of time to hang out, but we did make a point of talking and taking pictures in between scheduled events at the department and at the reception last Friday. Over and over again during this process of investigating programs, I've been surprised at how nice and how human people have seemed. Clancy was no exception. She's answered a ton of my questions about the department and the Cities over the past month, and came and found us with her camera at the party. It's lovely to feel so welcome.

I had the definite sensation of worlds colliding, though. I know other bloggers in my daily life - Mister Boyfriend is one, and my friend Michelle was until she recently closed up shop. Still, I've never met someone whose blog I had been reading long before meeting them. It reminded me of the Seinfeld episode where George's friends start hanging out with his fiancee and he protests, "You're killing independent George!" (Only my experience wasn't nearly so unpleasant.) It's very odd to have the physical selves and the constructed, blogger selves collide. I was aware of meeting an actual someone who previously been only virtual to me -- but I was also equally aware of someone meeting two different parts of myself, the physical self and the blogger self. Both are true representations of me, but also entirely separate. Or perhaps the beer was just making me think too much that night.

Posted at 10:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

Somebody searched my blog for "glacial arete," and I think this is the best search that's come across in a long time. Because that's how it is, isn't it? Progress and excellence come slowly.

Which is why this blog has the name is does: it's good to have a goal.

Posted at 10:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A couple of you have written comments in the past few days that you felt were too long, and so you sent them as emails or just plain deleted them. (You know who you are, oh yes you do.)

People: at my blog, there's no such thing as a too-long comment. Write all you want. You are all wonderful, smart, funny individuals, and I want to know what it is that you have to say, OK?

Posted at 10:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

This is not me joining in the conversation about blogs as genre/medium/mode/conduit/freshly sliced avocado/the air between our ears. This is me sitting in the bathtub and reading Stories from the Nerve Bible and thinking. I'm thinking that lately my blog is a sort of personal art, especially since someone was nice enough to teach me how to put up pictures. But they're hardly ever my own pictures. Maybe a better description is as a big paste-in commonplace book. It documents my little obsessions - sophists, dead grandmas, Eugene Walter, rosemary.

[This week it's Laurie Anderson. I knew her work from my brief waltz with Art History in the early 90's, but I'd never really looked into her oeuvre. Then Mister Boyfriend delved into the depths of his massive record collection last weekend and pulled out all of United States and then reached into the CDs and pulled out Big Science and then went and got Stories from the Nerve Bible out of the bedroom bookcase and I've been entranced ever since. (Sorry about reading the book in the tub, sweetie. I promise it's still dry.) I remember thinking before that her art was very cold because of all the technology involved, but reading and listening to it now, I'm struck by the warmth of the words, and the interaction between performer and technology, and by electricity as literal and as metaphor. Interesting how a decade alters perspective.]

Anyway, so I'm flipping through her retrospective and looking at how she went from pulped newspaper bricks to books to music to film to computer generated everything to this to that to the other, and thinking about how much my perception of my blog has already been altered. I began it as a glorified research notebook, and that didn't last very long at all, because people started talking to me, and they were talking to each other, and it was much more interesting and social and constructed. Then it became a sort of public journal, not really of events but sort of, not really of thoughts but sort of, not really of memories. And now it's full of all that, and me pasting in entire bits of other people's stories, and photos and goofy postcards. It's sort of messy and incoherent, like me. It spills. If it had pants, it'd probably rip them a bit.

I guess what I'm saying is that I'm starting to see my blog as an entity of its own, that lives and breathes and sucks things in, and that I feed every day. Maybe it needs a haircut. (The fact that it runs off a generic template bothers me not at all, because I very much like the idea of imposing personality on generic blankness. It's very similar to the big artist's sketchbooks I used as journals for years. But I do plan on tweaking the sidebar soon.) It's like a favorite pet dog or something. When the host goes down, I worry about my blog and where it is and if it'll come back safe. I wonder how long it'll be before I go completely batty and start talking to it? But maybe the entries are me talking to it. And maybe you people make it talk back.

Posted at 2:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I'm not becoming a photoblog (yet). It's the end of the semester and I'm running low on free time for content. And there are all these fabulous photos to share. The one above is for everyone, of course, but especially for Jeff and Ailina (each for different reasons.)

Posted at 11:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I've had these quotes sitting around for several days now, and been convinced that I was going to turn them into a nice tidy post. It's finally dawned on me that it's not going to happen, since I'm snowed under with projects at the moment and have no hope of relief in the next week and a half. So I'm posting these puppies up anyway in the interest of preservation and filing them in the "Meta-blogging" category. I'm sure most of you will see why they belong there.

All of this is from Bruffee's "Collaborative Learning and the 'Conversation of Mankind," which is in my "Cross-talk in Comp Theory" text.

"We are the inheritors, neither of an inquiry about ourselves and the world, nor of an accumulating body of information, but of a conversation, begun in the primeval forests and extended and made more articulate in the course of centuries. It is a conversation which goes on both in public and within each of ourselves. … Education, properly speaking, is an initiation into the skill and partnership of this conversation in which we learn to recognize the voices, to distinguish the proper occasions of utterance, and in which we acquire the intellectual and moral habits appropriate to conversation. And it is this conversation which, in the end, gives place and character to every human activity and utterance."

Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics, quoted by Bruffee

"The range, complexity, and subtlety of our thought, its power, the practical and conceptual uses we can put it to, and the very issues we can address result in large measure directly from the degree to which we have been initiated into what Oakeshott calls the potential “skill and partnership” of human conversation in its public and social form" (Bruffee, 399)

"The first steps to learning to think better, therefore, are learning to converse better and learning to establish and maintain the sorts of social context, the sorts of community life, that foster the sorts of conversation members of the community value" (399).

Posted at 12:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For the speaker, the audience is in front of him. For the writer, the audience is simply further away, in time or space or both. A surface inscribed with information can neutralize time by preserving the information and conquer space by moving the information to its recipient over distances that sound cannot traverse.

… The person to whom the writer addresses himself normally is not present at all. Moreover, with certain special exceptions such as those just suggested, he must not be present. I am writing a book which will be read by thousands, or, I modestly hope, by tens of thousands. So please, get out of the room. I want to be alone. Writing normally calls for some kind of withdrawal.

How does the writer give body to the audience for whom he writes? It would be fatuous to think that the writer addressing a so-called general audience tries to imagine his readers individually…

Walter Ong, The Writer’s Audience is Always a Fiction

The death of the author is the birth of the reader. The writer’s audience is always a fiction. First there is the mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is. When I started blogging, I assumed I would be writing to a void of sorts, a string of anonymous IP addresses that would float through my small space. I would be faceless and they would be faceless and the words would just be.

When I write for school or for publication, I construct a faceless, mass audience. They are Academics, or Newspaper Readers, or Expository Folks. They want thoughts or news or feelings. When writing for a market, the audience is already formed. Blogging audiences seem to work the other way around: you write in your own strange, crooked way, and then people drift in. The audience forms around you. The audience is organic - it’s like mushroom circles springing up in the night. (Voluntary mushrooms – I love the fact that people choose to come here, instead of having my words foisted upon them.)

My blogging audience is an utter mass fiction, but some have become individual fictions. I find myself imagining a specific audience, one that has begun to individuate, and I create faces and details for them. The details are utter story, and usually inaccurate as well. (I was astounded to find that a blogging acquaintance who I had assumed to be rather clean-cut was instead long-haired and bearded. But I should know better than to try to pigeonhole academics and inky wretches.)

Continue reading "The Blogger's Audience Is Always A Fiction" »

Posted at 10:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Several of my meatspace friends have told me how innovative I am for blogging my independent study. While I would love to think that I'm original in some areas and I definitely appreciate their support, what I'm up to here is so not a new idea.

There are a bunch of wonderful research and Rhet/Comp blogs out there, but these two guys were my big inspirations. Both are using their blogs to organize a thesis and a dissertation these days. It's only right to acknowledge them here.

Posted at 5:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

“The writer, as he writes, is making ethical decisions. He doesn’t test his words by a rule book, but by life. He uses language to reveal the truth to himself so that he can tell it to others.”

Although blogging didn’t come along until 25 years after this essay’s original 1972 publication, these few sentences seem to apply to the concept. Putting your words out into a public forum (the workshop, the internet) is a way to test them by life — to see how they hold up in the world outside your head. Posting my thoughts here pretty much guarantees public nekkidness, yes, but it also creates the opportunity for feedback. What I need is for others to throw their thoughts into the pot, and then we’ll all see what cooks up. (Thanks, Earnest!)

Even when people don’t comment, they sometimes come up to me to discuss a topic, and that helps just as much. I’ve only been doing this for a month, but I can already see that it helps keep the evolution going. If nothing else, the discipline of putting words on the page forces you to organize your thoughts a bit. Surely if I keep talking and writing long enough, all will be revealed.

Posted at 3:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (1)