I.
See K8s and her friend's blogs. I've been tagged with the book meme, so here it goes:
1. Name one book that changed your life.
A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari.
2. Name one book you have read more than once.
Lord of the Rings Trilogy
3. One book you would want on a desert island.
American Indian Myths & Legends, Erdoes & Ortiz.
4. Two books that made you laugh.
Even Gowgirls Get the Blues, Tom Robbins
The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
5. One book that made you cry.
Truth & Bright Water, Thomas King
6. One book you wish you'd written.
Writing Without Teachers, Peter Elbow
7. One book you wish had never been written.
"The Song of Hiawatha" by H. W. Longfellow
8. Two books you are currently reading.
Richard Louv's Last Child in the Woods: Saving our kids from Nature-Deficit Disorder
Allison Wallace's A Keeper of Bees
So, who to pass this on to? Maybe Scot and Sarah.
II.
Oh, and I have my very own webpage. Some links are still forthcoming.
III.
Plus, it has been a year now that we have lived without our dog, Page. We miss her still.
1.24.2008
Southern Climate
I've live farther north and, on a couple occasions seen colder weather. But, hey, at least this gets some of the invasive species out of their encroaching range, no?
Current Conditions
Updated: 6 sec ago
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1.10.2008
Stochastic Quantitative Reasoning
Still on the political thought-train... but I'm thinking of using this article in my writing classes. Holland does a good job of working not just with evidence, but also with the vagaries of probability. Since so many of my students want to just put up some percentages or polling data in support of their argument, I'm thinking this might 1) show them how it's done and 2) open up a space for talking about why Holland chooses to make clear the limits of his speculation.
Beyond that, he's probably right. The media was caught up in Obamamania. Women turned out in greater numbers than in 2004 (57 v. 54 percent) and coupled with a switch in Biden voters (I can attest that in my own caucus precinct, we nabbed over 50% of Biden voters largely on the theory that supporting a clear front-runner in our precinct, Obama, might help erode a third-place show so that Biden might make up ground elsewhere in the scramble for that #3 spot. Risky and ultimately it lost, but that was what the Biden precinct captain advised, so I let him go with it.
Beyond that, he's probably right. The media was caught up in Obamamania. Women turned out in greater numbers than in 2004 (57 v. 54 percent) and coupled with a switch in Biden voters (I can attest that in my own caucus precinct, we nabbed over 50% of Biden voters largely on the theory that supporting a clear front-runner in our precinct, Obama, might help erode a third-place show so that Biden might make up ground elsewhere in the scramble for that #3 spot. Risky and ultimately it lost, but that was what the Biden precinct captain advised, so I let him go with it.
1.04.2008
First Caucus!
Wow is about all I can say!
 | |
Senator John Edwards : 29.75% Senator Hillary Clinton : 29.47% Governor Bill Richardson : 2.11% Senator Joe Biden : 0.93% Uncommitted : 0.14% Senator Chris Dodd : 0.02% Precincts Reporting: 1781 of 1781 | |
1.02.2008
Becoming 2008
I had thought about doing a list of things that distinguished 2007 for me: Top albums, books, movies, etc. However, I have been reading too much Deleuze and criticism on Deleuze, so I figured Top-whatever lists were pretty segmentary. As an alternative in a more becoming sort of way, here is what is rattling around with those things now:
Let's jump right to music: After 15 years of listening to Rage Against the Machine's eponymous first album, I finally used a Best Buy gift card to buy it (oh, the irony!). Fascinating how it is only recently that I have had the need to buy it because of its ubiquity. Along with this, I picked up Patti Smith's Twelve, a cover of twelve classic rock hits from the Beatles to Nirvana. It's a bit heavy on sixties rock, covering "Within You and Without You," the Stones' "Gimme Shelter," the Doors' "Soul Kitchen," Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit" and Hendrix's "Are You Experienced?" These are all excellent remakes, as is her cover of Dylan's "Changing of the Guards" and Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit." The one I could do without, though was the remake of Tears for Fears' "Everybody Wants to Rule the World." On top of that, I checked out Kings of Leon's recent album, "Because of the Times." They are new to me, but I like their grit and sound.
Right now, I am re-reading Into the Wild since i assigned it for my Expository Writing course. I like the different ways Krakauer builds a case out of his research. It is an excellent model, I think for students in that it blends his researched data into a definite perspective, using multiple rhetorical appeals and strategies. While the weakest in terms of logic might be his own personal relation between him, his father, and his experience climbing Devil's Thumb, it is nonetheless HUGELY engrossing and persuasive. Here at the office, I am also skimming William Germano's From Dissertation to Book, which I highly recommend to anyone undergoing this process. He's more readable than the authors in The Thesis and the Book and for that, I appreciate his candor and style. Oh, and Deleuze? Criticism, mostly: Clare Colebrook's article from Topoi, Zizek's Organs Without Bodies, and Rajchman's (Again) Deleuze Connections. I also cracked Michael Smith's Toward the Outside, a book on Levinas. My main concern in the theory here is 1) that ecocomposition acknowledges what I think is a real thorn in its side: the connection between its subject and its object. Broadly, ecocomposition finds it to be socially constructed all the way down OR posits some reality that can be accessed and must be saved from all this constructivist nonsense. How, then, can we remain committed to "sustainability" or saving the planet? 2) to get at this, I am researching what the links are/ have been/ and how we might look at writers as ecologically situated. This means 3) that they are at the intersections of ecologies rather than their interfaces. It's not enough these ecologies meet clash and grapple, but that they are, in the figure of the writer, virtually indistinguishable.
While I have been interested in Deleuze, I haven't seen too many movies. I got a HDTV for Christmas, so LOTR looks better as does my gift copy of Easy Rider. Jess is going back through Harry Potter, both books and films, so we just got through half of Sorcerer's Stone.
Ah, well, there is more to become and I could go on about politics and war and environmentalism, which are also part of my work and life (volunteer for Obama, community screening and discussing War Made Easy in February, organizing Focus the Nation in January). But my syllabus for Professional Writing needs attention before a 2pm meeting.
Let's jump right to music: After 15 years of listening to Rage Against the Machine's eponymous first album, I finally used a Best Buy gift card to buy it (oh, the irony!). Fascinating how it is only recently that I have had the need to buy it because of its ubiquity. Along with this, I picked up Patti Smith's Twelve, a cover of twelve classic rock hits from the Beatles to Nirvana. It's a bit heavy on sixties rock, covering "Within You and Without You," the Stones' "Gimme Shelter," the Doors' "Soul Kitchen," Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit" and Hendrix's "Are You Experienced?" These are all excellent remakes, as is her cover of Dylan's "Changing of the Guards" and Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit." The one I could do without, though was the remake of Tears for Fears' "Everybody Wants to Rule the World." On top of that, I checked out Kings of Leon's recent album, "Because of the Times." They are new to me, but I like their grit and sound.
Right now, I am re-reading Into the Wild since i assigned it for my Expository Writing course. I like the different ways Krakauer builds a case out of his research. It is an excellent model, I think for students in that it blends his researched data into a definite perspective, using multiple rhetorical appeals and strategies. While the weakest in terms of logic might be his own personal relation between him, his father, and his experience climbing Devil's Thumb, it is nonetheless HUGELY engrossing and persuasive. Here at the office, I am also skimming William Germano's From Dissertation to Book, which I highly recommend to anyone undergoing this process. He's more readable than the authors in The Thesis and the Book and for that, I appreciate his candor and style. Oh, and Deleuze? Criticism, mostly: Clare Colebrook's article from Topoi, Zizek's Organs Without Bodies, and Rajchman's (Again) Deleuze Connections. I also cracked Michael Smith's Toward the Outside, a book on Levinas. My main concern in the theory here is 1) that ecocomposition acknowledges what I think is a real thorn in its side: the connection between its subject and its object. Broadly, ecocomposition finds it to be socially constructed all the way down OR posits some reality that can be accessed and must be saved from all this constructivist nonsense. How, then, can we remain committed to "sustainability" or saving the planet? 2) to get at this, I am researching what the links are/ have been/ and how we might look at writers as ecologically situated. This means 3) that they are at the intersections of ecologies rather than their interfaces. It's not enough these ecologies meet clash and grapple, but that they are, in the figure of the writer, virtually indistinguishable.
While I have been interested in Deleuze, I haven't seen too many movies. I got a HDTV for Christmas, so LOTR looks better as does my gift copy of Easy Rider. Jess is going back through Harry Potter, both books and films, so we just got through half of Sorcerer's Stone.
Ah, well, there is more to become and I could go on about politics and war and environmentalism, which are also part of my work and life (volunteer for Obama, community screening and discussing War Made Easy in February, organizing Focus the Nation in January). But my syllabus for Professional Writing needs attention before a 2pm meeting.
12.19.2007
The Power of Dreams
Part of moving to Iowa (at least this year for me) means a renewed attention to politics. Arguably, I haven't been as politically minded or active since volunteering for Nader/ LaDuke in 2000 (and more her than him, really). The Kerry/ Edwards ticket just wasn't all that: too entrenched, too old school and a re-hash of hippie visionaries v. straight-laced Americana. Nader and LaDuke both had remarkable policy insights and a far-sightedness that I still don't see in Edwards and only saw as a glimmer of a possibility in Kerry. From my then Madisonian perspective, Kerry/ Edwards were certainly better than Bush/ Cheney, but between 2002 and 2004, we had slid so far back into despair it looked to me that we were willing to settle for middle-of-the-road.
Things are different now, and not just because I'm looking out from Iowa instead of Madison (which is, as I imply, it's own little sphere only technically part of the state). Currently the mediasphere is ablaze with talk of Oprah's endorsement of Obama. Normally, I wouldn't care. Kevin Bacon was just here stumping for Edwards (yawn), but Obama has swayed Cornell West to follow up Oprah's appearance in Cedar Rapids. Despite the fun in 6 degree games, the Obama campaign is not only putting together a collection of the finest African-American thinkers and speakers, I think it has some of the finest American thinkers and speakers.
More importantly, with the support of Oprah, there is a sense of dreaming again -- not just a dream of schadenfreude where we get back to a democracy before our current fascist interruption, but a real dream that recognizes the democracy we had before Bush II was itself broken. We shouldn't forget how the rich grew richer under the "Clinton I" regime, how he signed NAFTA, and how corporate profits supported Clinton policies. As this article from The Nation points out, there is a real dream awakening here and I think the anger directed at Oprah is part of that awakening. As the article says, even if Obama doesn't get the nomination, it is always "not too much to hope that the redemptive power of an intelligent dream might reinvigorate the exhaustion of our embattled political landscape."
Things are different now, and not just because I'm looking out from Iowa instead of Madison (which is, as I imply, it's own little sphere only technically part of the state). Currently the mediasphere is ablaze with talk of Oprah's endorsement of Obama. Normally, I wouldn't care. Kevin Bacon was just here stumping for Edwards (yawn), but Obama has swayed Cornell West to follow up Oprah's appearance in Cedar Rapids. Despite the fun in 6 degree games, the Obama campaign is not only putting together a collection of the finest African-American thinkers and speakers, I think it has some of the finest American thinkers and speakers.
More importantly, with the support of Oprah, there is a sense of dreaming again -- not just a dream of schadenfreude where we get back to a democracy before our current fascist interruption, but a real dream that recognizes the democracy we had before Bush II was itself broken. We shouldn't forget how the rich grew richer under the "Clinton I" regime, how he signed NAFTA, and how corporate profits supported Clinton policies. As this article from The Nation points out, there is a real dream awakening here and I think the anger directed at Oprah is part of that awakening. As the article says, even if Obama doesn't get the nomination, it is always "not too much to hope that the redemptive power of an intelligent dream might reinvigorate the exhaustion of our embattled political landscape."
12.10.2007
Sustainable Post-Humanity
Has it really been almost a month since my last post!?? Yargh! Things have been hectic adjusting to a heavier teaching load, winterizing the house, celebrating Ruby's birthday, organizing UNI's Focus the Nation events, plus coordinating Thanksgiving and Christmas festivities! I've still got to write the test for Native American Rhetoric & Literature, but the papers for my writing courses are done and I am just waiting on portfolios.
In the meantime, I have been moving slowly on my sustinability article for Writing the Earth. While much of it is a trimmed-down chapter from my dissertation, I am contextualizing it in critical takes on sustainability like Luke's (2005) critique that "for ecological debates [sustianability] is now being used, and perhaps abused, in webs of questions to refocus national economic prosperity as well as reposition present-day cultural identity in a corporate material culture of more efficient, but still unsustainable, consumption" (228). I just wish he wouldn't mince words...
Still, how might we reconcile this with being post-human or cyborg? If we are and have been contiguous or co-terminus with our technologies, can we keep those technologies and still remain sustainable? We can't simply glorify the web and computer technology without also recognizing the systems of briefly containing bio-hazards and dumping them on Third World and developing nations. While these technologies are affordances for first world capital, communication, and social organization that sometimes spills over to those privileged people in developing nations or that sometimes is harnessed by people living within what we would call less technological systems (remember Sting's posing with the Yanomami to save the rain forests?), it seems to me that it is more often an affordance for cancer, poverty, and ecological devastation among the least privileged of our species.
Ulrich Beck (1995) might argue that the market will work itself out here since I raise here a pretty classic example of distributing away the poisoned cake. But how many have died or been diseased since Beck argued this? How many more motherboards are destined to kill those who have little recourse other than to sift through a pile of toxins?
Of course, I write this at my Macintosh, knowing that Apple Computers has resisted market pressures to be more green. So, it's not an option to simply resist and say "Well, I'm going to make smarter purchases [or have my University make them for me] and therefore add my two cents to the marketplace in an effort to steer it in a way of my own choosing." I already do that by riding my bike to work, eating local and/or organic foods, conserving energy [passive solar, layering in winter, some wood heat, lower hot water temps, higher freezer temps, etc.], recycling, composting, and a fifteen year-old TV, not to mention other older electronics. Even with all that, I'm not perfect. But then, who is? It's not a matter of being "perfect" according to anyone's standards -- even your own. That's just an awful lot to live up to.
Still, we can do better and I'm trying to understand if there could be a sustainable post-humanity. It may even be the case that there can be no sustainability -- no concept of it at all -- without occupying a post-human position or consciousness. As N. Katherine Hayles argues, simulation is a binary to "nature" and cannot be divorced from it. However, if we follow her in locating the self "neither contracted inside the body nor unproblematically projected outside it, but at the cusp between the beholder and the world" (1995, p. 412), then these vast networks of technology are mere extensions of the body -- just prosthetics that we, in their novelty, use clumsily, just as my two-year-old daughter spills her cup of water on herself or on the table.
These prosthetics are not just cups of water, though. They are far more deadly -- even more deadly than cars and airplanes. Yet anyone can use these prosthetics. Of course anyone can have as many children as they want, too, which has its own impact on sustainability (sorry for the Malthusian interjection...). Like birthrates, though, we can affect them with out resorting to Malthus. We know there are economic and cultural influences on birth choices. Just as women and their partners learn to use their bodies to bear more children or not, what conditions might it take to affect the choices we make about technological prosthetics?
In the meantime, I have been moving slowly on my sustinability article for Writing the Earth. While much of it is a trimmed-down chapter from my dissertation, I am contextualizing it in critical takes on sustainability like Luke's (2005) critique that "for ecological debates [sustianability] is now being used, and perhaps abused, in webs of questions to refocus national economic prosperity as well as reposition present-day cultural identity in a corporate material culture of more efficient, but still unsustainable, consumption" (228). I just wish he wouldn't mince words...
Still, how might we reconcile this with being post-human or cyborg? If we are and have been contiguous or co-terminus with our technologies, can we keep those technologies and still remain sustainable? We can't simply glorify the web and computer technology without also recognizing the systems of briefly containing bio-hazards and dumping them on Third World and developing nations. While these technologies are affordances for first world capital, communication, and social organization that sometimes spills over to those privileged people in developing nations or that sometimes is harnessed by people living within what we would call less technological systems (remember Sting's posing with the Yanomami to save the rain forests?), it seems to me that it is more often an affordance for cancer, poverty, and ecological devastation among the least privileged of our species.
Ulrich Beck (1995) might argue that the market will work itself out here since I raise here a pretty classic example of distributing away the poisoned cake. But how many have died or been diseased since Beck argued this? How many more motherboards are destined to kill those who have little recourse other than to sift through a pile of toxins?
Of course, I write this at my Macintosh, knowing that Apple Computers has resisted market pressures to be more green. So, it's not an option to simply resist and say "Well, I'm going to make smarter purchases [or have my University make them for me] and therefore add my two cents to the marketplace in an effort to steer it in a way of my own choosing." I already do that by riding my bike to work, eating local and/or organic foods, conserving energy [passive solar, layering in winter, some wood heat, lower hot water temps, higher freezer temps, etc.], recycling, composting, and a fifteen year-old TV, not to mention other older electronics. Even with all that, I'm not perfect. But then, who is? It's not a matter of being "perfect" according to anyone's standards -- even your own. That's just an awful lot to live up to.
Still, we can do better and I'm trying to understand if there could be a sustainable post-humanity. It may even be the case that there can be no sustainability -- no concept of it at all -- without occupying a post-human position or consciousness. As N. Katherine Hayles argues, simulation is a binary to "nature" and cannot be divorced from it. However, if we follow her in locating the self "neither contracted inside the body nor unproblematically projected outside it, but at the cusp between the beholder and the world" (1995, p. 412), then these vast networks of technology are mere extensions of the body -- just prosthetics that we, in their novelty, use clumsily, just as my two-year-old daughter spills her cup of water on herself or on the table.
These prosthetics are not just cups of water, though. They are far more deadly -- even more deadly than cars and airplanes. Yet anyone can use these prosthetics. Of course anyone can have as many children as they want, too, which has its own impact on sustainability (sorry for the Malthusian interjection...). Like birthrates, though, we can affect them with out resorting to Malthus. We know there are economic and cultural influences on birth choices. Just as women and their partners learn to use their bodies to bear more children or not, what conditions might it take to affect the choices we make about technological prosthetics?
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