The dangers of reading on the train...

As in: ComicBlog , Thoughts from the "L"

Corny pun

As in: Comics

Every comic should have a corny pun like this once in a while.

Engineers

As in: Comics

This stereotype is so common.

Sarah Vowell 2

As in: Reading

Just finished Assassination Vacation last night. Excellent. Aside from her usual wit, Vowell included several awesome quotes from other places. One of my favorites is from James Garfield's address at some commencement:

It has occurred to me that the thing you have, that all men have enough of, is perhaps the thing that you care for the least, and that is your leisure—the leisure you have to think; the leisure you have to be let alone; the leisure you have to throw the plummet into your mind, and sound the depth and dive for things below. (134)

New Design

As in: Blogistry

In case you hadn't noticed, I'm implementing a new design this week (everybody's doing it). I'll be adding bits and pieces over the next week or two, but any errors/advice you have is greatly appreciated.

What the best college teachers do

As in: Reading

I finished reading Ken Bain's What the Best College Teachers Do a couple weeks ago, and its had me re-examining my pedagogy (as good books about teaching always do). I've posted a couple choice bits in the extended entry. The main page gets this one, though:

When introducing the class, one instructor "asks his students for a show of hands that they are willing to be on time for every class and participate intellectually in the deliberation of each day. "The decision to take the course is yours," we heard more than one person say, "but once you make that decision, you have responsibilities to everyone else in this community of learners." (113)

I like this idea—the making explicit that the first day is a choice. IF you decide to take my class, great. BUT, you make certain commitments when you do.

A few more choice quotes:

33 "...they have consistently found that most extrinsic motivators damage intrinsic motivation. That have also found that if they use "verbal reinforcement and positive feedback"--in other words, encouragement or praise--they can stimulate interest, or at least keep it from evaporating."

36 "...the "characteristics of highly respected courses" included "high demands" but "with plentiful opportunities to revise and improve their work before it receives a grade, thereby learning from their mistakes in the process."

On the first day of class, "Rather than laying out a set of requirements for the students, they usually talk about the promises of the course, about the kinds of questions the discipline will help the students answer, or about the intellectual, emotional, or physical abilities that it will help them develop."

74 Three parts of the 'promising syllabus'
1. Lays out "promises or opportunities" the course offers to students
2. Explains "what students would be doing to realize those promises" "avoiding language of demands"
3. "Summarized how the instructor and the students would understand the nature and progress of the learning."

93 On introducing the tasks/challenges to the students: ""You must want to do this," she will say, "and be willing to spend the time it takes to develop your character. But the choice is yours.""

131 they call on their students "the way they might do so around the dinner table rather than the way they might cross-exam them in a courtroom or challenge them to a duel."

The Mysteries of... weather?

As in: Photos

Bizarre day. I was visiting the in-laws in Lansing yesterday, and woke up to this out their front door:

A four-hour drive home to Chicago gives us this out our front door:

Music

As in: In the Stereo

Good mix this week.

• Modest Mouse, Good News for People Who Like Bad News
• Koerner, Ray, and Glover, Blues, Rags, and Hollers
• Blink 182, Blink-182

Obligatory Pet Photos

As in: Photos

So I just got a new digital camera and have been going photo crazy the last couple days. Of course, the most interesting subjects around the house are the pets. Here are my favorite pet photos so far. Other than cropping and re-sizing, I haven't altered these at all.

Loki on his morning squirrel hunt


Jawa kitty!

The Mysteries of Mailing lists

As in: Flotsam , Media

As I've mentioned before, I'm hooked on The Current, which I listen to over the internet. It's a Minnesota Public Radio operation that plays a very wide range of music from a variety of genres and eras. I knew it would be the right station for me during my first listening session. Within two hours, I heard a deep track from They Might Be Giants' Apollo 18 and a bit of Soul Coughing.

Because I support the idea of public radio and my listening costs the station real resources (I'm pulling bandwidth, rather than grabbing already-distributed airwaves), I pitched in a little bit during the last pledge drive. Apparently, MPR sells its member lists to organizations like the Walker Art Center—I expect this package I got is the first of many Minnesota-centered publicity I will receive in Illinois:

What I don't get is how they got my name wrong. I paid by Credit Card online, so it must have been right (the CC company wouldn't have processed the charge if I had mistyped my name). So how did my name get mis-typed on the Walker mailing list? I would assume they could just transfer the names digitally.

An anecdote from my days as a temp: I had a two-week stint working for Microsoft (this would have been in, say, the summer of 1996 or 97) in which my job was to take data from one spreadsheet (all typed) and enter it into another database. I spent the whole two weeks of data entry pondering why Microsoft hadn't worked out a way to transfer the data without a bunch of keyboard monkeys like myself as intermediaries.

Techno-Gotchas

As in: ComicBlog , Composition , Media

Jeff says it again (on WPA-L):

Blogmic?

As in: Blogistry , ComicBlog

Jenny and Jeff were right. Comics are the future of blogs!

Or, at least they're fun.

Vowell

As in: Media

I got to see Sarah Vowell give a reading from her new book Assassination Vacation on Friday. Very fun. There were moments where I could hear Violet (from The Incredibles) on stage instead of the NPR commentator. In waiting for the talk, I flipped through her last collection of essays, Partly-Cloudy Patriot and found a passage that I had starred:

The more history I learn, the more the world fills up with stories. Just the other day, I was in my neighborhood Starbucks, waiting for the post office to open. I was enjoying a chocolatey caffe mocha when it occurred to me that to drink a mocha is to gulp down the entire history of the New World. From the Spanish exportation of Aztec cacao, and the Dutch invention of the chemical process for making cocoa, on down to the capitalist empire of Hershey, PA, and the lifestyle marketing of Seattle's Starbucks, the modern mocha is a bitter-sweet concoction of imperialism, genocide, invention and consumerism served with whipped cream on top. No wonder it costs so much. And, thanks to Sophie and Michael Coe's book The True History of Chocolate, I remembered that cacao beans were used as currency at the moment of European contact. When Christopher Columbus's son Ferdinand captured a Mayan canoe in 1503, he noticed that whenever one of the natives dropped a cacao bean, "they all stooped to pick it up, as if an eye had fallen." When you know such trivia, an act as mundane as having an overpriced breakfast drink becomes imbued with meaning, even poetry. Plus, I read a women's magazine article called "5 Fabulous Morning Rituals," and it said that after you "bask in bed" and "walk in nature" you're supposed to "ponder the sins of the conquistadors." (42)

I like many things about this passage, but the reason I noted it, in particular, is that it demonstrates, in a few short words, the method of Ulmer's "MEmorial." It ties personal experience to daily activity to cultural relationships to history and back again.

This kind of move is exactly why I like Sarah Vowell's essays—she reflects on American culture with both humor and insight; she draws these ties between light-hearted moments and serious ones.

Mid-April tunes

As in: In the Stereo

Two CDs I enjoy very much; one I've never listened to before.

• Various, Soundtrack to Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?
• They Might Be Giants, John Henry
• Van Morrison, Paying Dues, disc 1

Do you know which is the "new" one? Bonus points if you can figure out why I've not listened to it before...

Spamstorm

As in: Blogistry

Like Jenny, I'm seeing the start of a spamstorm, so I'm disabling comments for a while. I'll post a note here when I've re-enabled them.

Update: Comments are back up.

The mysteries of menswear

As in: Flotsam

There's a strange reaction when I combine my black belt (not martial arts related) with my grey pants. After a couple hours of wear, the buckle has crept left as far as the first beltloop, where its gets stuck.

• Why does my belt creep to the left?


• If I had no belt loops, somehow, would it creep forever and, if so, how long would it take to do a full revolution?

The future is now!

As in: Prognostication

Warren Ellis points out that In the future, all jockeys will be robotic...

Camel racing is to be transformed as a spectator sport in the United Arab Emirates with robot riders taking the place of child jockeys. (New Scientist)

World leader bands

As in: Flotsam , Media

So what with the popularity of Franz Ferdinand, I'm not surprised to be listening to something on The Current right now by a band called "Louis XIV." It seems like only a matter of time before other bands come out with world-leader names (excepting those who already have them, like the Boxing Gandhis). So, I give you bands named after world leaders that I'd like to see:

• Sadat
• The Nevilles Chamberlain
• Anwar
• The Mondale Exposition
• Imelda's Shoes

I haven't listened to this in a while

As in: In the Stereo

• Smashing Pumpkins, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, Dawn to Dusk
• Greg Brown, Milk of the Moon
• Pavement, Crooked Rain

McLuhan -- Still got it!

As in: Media

I keep returning to this quote—I think it very much encapsulates how I try to think about what hypertext rhetoric should be: Rational? Yes. "Uniform and continuous and sequential"? No.

'Rational,' of course, has for the West long meant 'uniform and continuous and sequential.' In other words, we have confused reason with literacy, and rationalism with a single technology. Thus in the electric age man seems to the conventional West to become irrational.
- - McLuhan, Understanding Media, page 15

So how does one build digital argument (if one does at all)? In my online hypertext pieces, I try to do that using a variety of means, but usually it involves presenting a linear argument of sorts, and then offering other tracks through the "database" of information presented in my project. While I'm pleased with the projects generally (here and here), I'm not satisfied that I'm anywhere near digital rhetoric yet.

This all ties to my two PCA presentations, both of which attempted to present my "digital" research (a chapter of my diss on cybernetics and the random comic) in a spirit that embodied the rhetoric of those pieces. In both cases, the audiences, at the end, stared blankly at me—either unable or unwilling to engage with the stuff I'd offered. Of course, I'm not sure what I'd have asked either. Hrm.

Construction

As in: Flotsam

Oddly enough, when I searched for a wrecking ball image for this post, I found this one, of "Tim Riley's Bar" being demolished.

Walking from the train to my office today, I stopped to watch a demolition team using a wrecking ball to destroy a parking garage. They were working on some reinforced horizontal beam, and everytime the huge metal ball dropped on the beam, the entire building shook visibly, bits of plaster and concrete flaking off and dust billowing out. Most interesting to me, though, was the thunderous booming that reverberated through the ground with each drop. I felt a bit like Jeff Goldblum looking at that glass of water in Jurassic Park.

Games that weren't

As in: Games

While visiting home last weekend, I came across a copy of a game among my dad's things—I doubt he ever played it. There, right on the bookshelf next to pocket-paperback copies of McLuhan's Hot & Cool and Toffler's Future Shock was a bizarre Avalon Hill Bookshelf Game: Who Can Beat Nixon?.

It amazes me that this game could get made. I'm excited to play it sometime, but in the meantime, here are some other games I'd like to find in a closet:

• Philately, the boardgame!
• Assassinate McKinley: one player is Leon Czolgosz, the others are the security detail. Choose your moment at the Pan-American exposition. Get McKinley when he's in a good mood, and maybe he'll give you the famous "Go easy on him boys."
• Pedagogy Tycoon: navigate a semester of academic life; build an army of loyal undergrads; balance teaching, service, and research! For Mac and Windows. Also look for the Pedagogy Tycoon Expansion Pack: Search Committee.
• Board Game Brainstorm! Come up with ideas for boardgames, pitch them to one another, choose the best idea and make it. Box includes three decks of blank cards; a foldable, laminated board; one Dry erase marker; one Board Game Brainstorm Idea NotePad 2000; One box of Sculpey.

Fellow gamers? Have you more?

The Battle of the Zombies

As in: Blogistry

Yesterday was a particularly bad spam day, for me anyhow. No ~2000 spams like Clancy. On the other hand, I delete them all by hand, so there's that. If y'all know how to delete bunches of comments at once in MT, let me know.

Unlike many, I still keep a "banned IP" list and add every spam address to it. Of course, this won't stop the tide, but I figure that many of these spams are coming from zombie computers which probably record where they were able to spam, so they can return and spam again. Thus, I feel like I'm fighting the battle when I record their IP address.

What I'd really like is a comment-destroyer screen that gives me a list of all the comments posted since a given date, with a display of the subject, the email, and the first few words of their comment. Then there would be a little check box that allowed me to select the comment. Then the button at the bottom would be "Deleted selected comments and add IPs to Ban List." Oh, if only I had time and administrator access to my MT.

Doug commented that he thinks it's somewhat appropriate to imagine me on the net, fighting zombies.

Making Do

As in: Media

Re-read De Certeau's "Making Do" in preparing for my New Media class. Some choice bits:

• [O]nce the images broadcast by television and the time spent in front of the TV have been analyzed, it remains to be asked what the consumer makes of these images and during these hours. (31)
• What is counted is what is used, not the ways of using. Paradoxically, the latter become invisible in the universe of codification and generalized transparency. . . . The practices of consumption are the ghosts of the society that carries their name. Like the "spirits" of former times, they constitute the multiform and occult postulate of productive activity. (35)
• [Tactic mobility] is a guileful ruse. (37)
• [T]rickery is possible for the weak, and often it is his only possibility, as a "last resort." (37)
• Through procedures Freud makes explicit with reference to wit, a tactic boldly juxtaposes diverse elements in order suddenly to produce a flash shedding a different light on the language of a place and to strike the hearer. (37-8)
• [Tactics are] foreign to the rules laid down and imposed by rationality founded on established rights and property. (38)
• . . . strategies pin their hopes on the resistance that the establishment of a place offers to the erosion of time; tactics on a clever utilization of time, of the opportunities it presents and also of the play that it introduces into the foundations of power. (38-9)
• . . . from the sixty-four hexagrams of the Chinese I-Ching or the Greek metis to the Arablic hila, other "logics" can be discerned. (39)

It occurs to me that many of the bits above overlap with my previous post and with my thinking about the Random comic. In particular, my reading of this suggests that projects such as mine become manifestations of tactics--they're actions that make use of these other texts in new and unexpected ways. I wonder how the juxtapositions that Random creates relate to the intentional juxtapositions created by tacticians.

Seeing the future ... of the web

As in: Prognostication

So the April Fools Comics got me thinking:

In one of the classes I took with him, Ulmer led us in using divining tools such as the I-Ching (I used the Greek Marketplace) as heuretic objects with which to read the internet (Zach's project from such a class). What I carry away from the divining projects we attempted was the drive to "read" the universe by means of this other object, which mixed things up and returns them to us in new combinations, which we understand through metaphor.

Of course, the Ouija board becomes the least exciting version of these because it uses letters--if it spells a nonsense word, you're stuck. The solution to that is perhaps to use whole words or phrases, which will then re-invoke the metaphorical. My random comic kind of works like that.

The question, then, is to ask how this becomes research and not just play. I was talking about this with a colleague here after my presentation at PCA, which went okay, but seemed to leave the audience in a confused state. Things to think about with this kind of project:

• Does the internet push scholars toward being artists? (Amy Hawkins' question from our coffee-chat.) Vis jrice's comic-blog entries.
• Does play count as research? LT, MS and I wrote about this a bit before.
• If digital writing moves the burden for argument from the writer to the reader (and I'll happily acknowledge that it may not), how does one present one's digital research? Academic research as database writing becomes the accumulation and juxtaposition of ideas, perhaps.
• Is random-ness funny?

Spring Break is Over

As in: In the Stereo

Back to the grind

• Spacehog, Resident Alien
• Tori Amos, Under the Pink
• Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan Live, 1961-2000