My version of the Zombie Antidote

Up in the safezone, away from the zombies below, we are running out of time. They know we are up here. They can smell us.

Fortunately, I have been working on an antidote. A serum of sorts. Based on the ingredients I know to be in acrylic paint, mixed with the effects of hot chili peppers, I have deduced that the combination can jolt a zombie back to life… but the unfortunate trick is that I have to get verrrrrrry close to get it into a zombies mouth.

We have very little time, and I might not make it out alive… but I’ll try.

Get Higher – Twitter vs. Zombies 3 Safezone

I have somehow managed to remain human through what the news stations are now calling a “zombie apocalypse.” All the making fun of my friends and their zombie obsessions… I guess I got mine. But that friend that made the zombie fighting mobile – guess who got taken down before he ever got into his ride? Yeah… it’s been a hard couple of days. I’m haggard and I’m tired and I’m out of mousse. At least the zombies don’t care what my hair looks like.

My buddy @joeylunchbox

found me in Decatur where I was holing up in a service alleyway behind an old dumpster training. Getting stronger.

I couldn’t make it back to my university to get my good shoes – so my old pair will have to do.

@joey lunchbox was all covered in zombie blood and she scared the everliving crap out of me. I couldn’t believe she was alive, and I almost killed her with a knife I had been carrying in the back of my jeans.

Crouched on an abandoned porch of an empty restaurant, I ready for the attack.

We made it to the safezone and holed up there for pretty much the remainder of the night. I slept like a baby, and @joeylunchbox was able to procure a little food, thank goodness.

Now we have been amassing weapons like the chopsticks I am growing expert at throwing to fend off the smaller zombies.

like stars, these sticks work to ward off smaller zombies.

And knives we’ve collected from various kitchens.

My best ally, my attack chicken, I shall save for a zombie #weapon surprise. Best not to give away everything up front.

kitchen knives.

But if there’s one thing we learned the most – it’s to get higher. Zombies are some lazy fools and they don’t want to climb.

@joeylunchbox and I are refreshed and ready to run for our new location. Our current situation is getting too hairy. Good thing we’ve found an old abandoned house with a lot of wonderful floors. And outside stair from which we can survive any kind of attack.

Get Higher – that’s the answer!

COME ON! LET’S CLIMB!

On the way we find @profnwalker too!

Hurry! It’s our only hope!

Comprehensive Exam Progress

It has been a long time since I posted. I keep meaning to. I have a lot to say. I read Adam Banks’s book Digital Griots over a month ago – but I just keep on reading, and not blogging. So I took a moment to snap a few photos of what I have been doing and where my thinking is going, and I thought people out there might want to see how I am going to pull off my comprehensive exams in October.

As you might already know, I am a highly visual person. I’m that person who can draw a map to someone’s house based on directions over the phone, leave the map behind, and still make my way there, no problem. So I decided to map my thoughts as I read for my comprehensive exams.

Below is a wide shot of the map as it is developing (if you zoom, you might be able to make some of the details out).

The map is split into two sections – Materialism on the left, and Visual/Digital on the right. The idea is that the ideas from both with begin to meet in the middle and I will make my biggest connections right in the center.

Here is the left – where I have been spending most of my intellectual time. I want to get the material theory down first before I start applying it to the digital.

And here is the right. As you can see, I haven’t hit this too hard, but it’s coming.

So there you go – feel free to steal this idea and use it yourself. I bought a 7ft roll of paper at the art store and thumb-tacked it right to the wall. And I use pencil so I can erase and move. Ideally, I would have painted the wall with whiteboard paint, but I don’t own, so… paper it is! The plus side is that I can roll this up and take it places later, and if I need to start over, I can just take it down and replace it with new paper. Hooray!

Infographing the MOOC

I have pretty much always a fan of the infograph, yet still haven’t made one myself. Of course by always, I mean since last year when I discovered they were, indeed, a ‘thing.’ Recently, a woman named Allison Morris emailed me with this infograph about MOOCs and it’s worth passing along.

And while I must note that the infograph is a little too optimistic about the MOOC, what it does, and who it serves, it’s a great way to start explaining what a MOOC is, especially if you’re like me, and you’re on a single-woman crusade to get everyone (and their grandmother) to do some personal-information expansion.

Below is the MOOC inforgraph taken from http://www.onlinecollegecourses.com/minds-behind-moocs/

My Summer Romance with Raymond Williams

I meant to write this weeks ago. But then I began reading Adam Banks‘s Digital Griots, and was enjoying it so much, I just forgot about Raymond Williams.

But let me admit this to you – Raymond Williams is my summer romance.

When I first began to read him, I wasn’t sure I liked him much. I wasn’t sure if he was for me. He’s fast. He’s smart. I was lost. And then I wasn’t. And when someone recalled my Marxism and Literature book, my very next read, I got so upset, I just decided to read something else until I got over it. Recall is just mean, people. Mean. I feel like a teenager who’s boyfriend got stolen by a prettier girl.

But seriously, I am over it. Mostly.

So let me tell you a little bit about how I met Raymond Williams.

If you’ve read the last couple of posts, you’ll know I’ve been reading Terry Eagleton’s edited collection called Marxist Literary Theory. I was excited to read the excerpt by Raymond Williams because a lot of the Marxist criticism I’ve been reading cite him. It’s kind of like when you’ve seen someone across the room a bunch, but haven’t actually met them.

The excerpts I read are from “Tragedy and Revolution” (1966) and “Literature” (1977). Tragedy, in this case, is similar to the way Kenneth Burke talks about tragedy in a dramatistic sort of way. This is not the kind of tragedy where everyone dies at the end.

At first though, Raymond Williams gives a lot of information on the mechanisms of Marxist-esque structuralisms, assuming that the reader already understands when the -isms he covers occur in history. I decided, through context clues (forgoing the use of internet while reading) that Naturalism comes before Romanticism, which occurs sometime during the Enlightenment, and so on. I was kind of lost though. Raymond Williams was not giving me enough information for me to be able to keep up. But I was intrigued, and I kept reading.

I particularly like the bits about tragedy. Williams makes claims that I have not heard articulated in quite the ways he states them:

“We say, understandably, that we must avoid war at all costs, but what we commonly mean is that we will avoid war at any cost but our own” (257). – Get it Williams – that’s what we mean in America – otherwise, why would we all keep and maintain nuclear arms?

“The customary pretense that this organized violence is defensive, and that it is wholly dedicated to human freedom, is literally a tragic illusion” (256).  – I suppose that depends on what you mean by freedom? I can’t help but think about McGee’s notion of the ideograph here.

And relates to:

“It is a very deep irony that, in ideology, the major conflict in the world is between different versions of the absolute rights of man” (256). – I often have to remind myself that other people are actually people. Constantly. And learning to account for all of our differences is… problematic. This is a beautiful entry point to that.

“We acknowledge others as men and any such acknowledgement is the beginning of a struggle, as the continuing reality of our lives.” – keyword here is ‘acknowledgement’ – what happens when we start to think of other people as people that have value, just like I do?

— I’ve changed my mind on how cool I thought the recall was – I will be reading more Williams soon – Maybe my summer romance will blossom into something more long term.

Marx, Engels, and the Real

In my last entry, I talked briefly about Terry Eagleton and my foray into Marxism. I’m just getting started, and I must openly admit that I have not actually read Das Capital or The German Ideology. That’s coming this summer when I take Ted Friedman’s Post-Marxism course. Thank goodness my buddy Nick Sciullo will be there to tell me when I’m saying something crazy (or to get me to just say even crazier things than normal).

This time around, I read an excerpt by Marx called “Social Being and Social Consciousness” – in which he talks about the relations of production and of material productive forces. What I find myself most interested in is how he addresses consciousness: “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness” (31). To me, this is a reminder that Marx is not lucky enough to be smacked in the face by post-modernism every time he opens a book, or has a coffee house conversation. And as I begin this journey, I need to keep in mind that the rhetorical situation surrounding the information I’m sponging up.

taken from awesomepeople.com.ua

Moving from the speck of Marx above to Engels’s micro-discussion of Vulgar Marxism, and Realism, I am caught by his use of the term ‘real life.’ I’ve always struggled with the designation of the real – especially when I am informed that I don’t live in the ‘real world’ – as though somehow my status in academia means I don’t eat, sleep, or need to make a living since my life is somehow less ‘real.’ That quibble aside, Engels brings in important historical distinctions that include the real: “According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining factor in history is the production and reproduction of real life” (39). Later on the page, Engels (thankfully) defines realism, saying that it “implies besides truth of detail, the truthful reproduction of typical characters under typical circumstances” (39). This, however, does nothing to clear up my issues with the way we, today, use the word ‘real,’ except in that even the academy must produce and reproduce in real ways that relate to relations of production and labor forces. Especially when we apply this to the ways in which we create and provide labor in the lower division composition classrooms.

But I’ll save that conversation for another day.

My Foray Into Marxism

I just changed my ‘about’ page to reflect the changes that are happening in this blog.

I formally welcome you all to my comprehensive study response blog – where I will write my thoughts on the readings I am doing for my comps.

Just to give you an idea of where I’m going with this – my comprehensive exams are divided into 2 categories: Material Theory and Visual/Digital Rhetorics – all with emphasis on Critical Pedagogy.

I have no idea what I’ll write my dissertation on at this point, but I have been told by a reliable source that I’ll figure it out as I read – and  think she’s right (thank you Laurissa!).

So I decided, in order to create a solid base, I would begin by reading some post-Marxist theory. I’m about 7 sources into my list and so I’m going to break up my thoughts on those seven into several entries. Below, I address a little Eagleton.

Patterns I’m noticing that I am most interested in in the vein of post-Marxist theory have to do with production/reproduction, value, and the myth of individual freedom.

Terry Eagleton, in the intro to his book Marxist Literary Theory, says “Part of the crisis of Marxism would seem to be that it is no longer easy to say what counts as being a Marxist, if indeed it ever was” (3). This claim makes me feel a lot better because I’ve never known what people mean when/if they claim to be Marxist. Marxism, Eagleton explains, is a body of work, not a man. It is not just Das Capital, and it does not actually solve anything. He also claims, curiously to me, that “If postmodernism is right, then Marxism is wrong.” I assume this has to do with the structural nature of Marxism and its birth in the Modernist traditions.

What I’m wondering at this point  is – How is Marxism at play in our developing futures? – I will come back to this question again when I get to Jameson – I’m sure you ‘Marxists’ out there may know what I’m going to say already – you’ll just have to wait.

So that’s what I’m starting with now – but this week, I will cover Marx/Engels, Benjamin, My New Crush Raymond Williams, Alick West, more Eagleton, and some Frederic Jameson.

Please feel free in joining me on this journey into my comps and I welcome any of your perspective shifting questions, or comments about my thoughts.

Parenthetical Visuality and Third Space – 8150

This week we moved into feminist rhetorics, and our featured readings are kind of brilliant:

Royster, Jacqueline Jones. “A View From a Bridge: Afrafeminist Ideologies and Rhetorical Studies” – From Traces from a Stream

taken from http://www.iac.gatech.edu

and

Licona, Adela. “(B)orderlands’ Rhetorics and Representations: The Transformative Potential of Feminist Third-Space Scholarship and Zines.”

taken from mcclellandinstitute.arizona.edu

Although I found a lot of worth in Royster’s piece, like the fact that she begins with a story to base her theory on, and the fact that she taught (teaches) here in Atlanta – I am so fascinated by some of the things that happen in Licona’s article, that I am going to focus there. This post plans to be a little off from my more traditional posts (the end of the year is getting to me) – so put on your blog-post-seatbelt and hold on.

First I want to address Third-Space. Licona defines Third-Space as “a location, third space has the potential to be a space of shared understanding and meaning-making” (105). And while I agree that there needs to  be a designation of space for ‘other’ people to gather and talk and make their voices heard, I can’t help but wonder if our country is founded on too many binaries. Why third space? Why can’t we have fourth and fifth space too? We have two political parties, and people only ever talk about getting a third. What of a fourth or a fifth? We talk about race in terms of black and white – but anyone who’s ever woken up in the morning knows that this binary is false. I have no solution for this term ‘third space’ – but I view it as problematic.

Here’s the crazy part:

As I was reading Licona’s article, I began to think about dystopian futuristic science fiction. It’s pretty much the most entertaining genre ever created. Licona’s use of parenthesis creates a visual break in many of the words she uses in this article. The parenthesis cannot be heard: only seen. Further, Licona discusses intersexuality and “how the biomedical profession has, historically, occluded feelings, expressions, and experiences of sexual ambiguity” (107), which is largely true (and I believe Haraway addressed that last week). And then right after this, Licona talks about Haraway (eureeka!) and talks about the hybridized cyborg…

This is where my brain went:

It’s the future – but not that far – 2113, let’s say. Humans have long since legalized gay marriage. In fact, they have legalized polyamourous marriage too. People have names that contain parenthesis – names that must be both seen and spoken – names that give their identities such nuanced meanings that almost everyone wears their name stitched onto their clothing (this is also a display of subject-specific-superficial consumerism). And while at birth, almost everyone is designated as either male or female, as they get older, they are given a number based on extensive psychiatric evaluations through social interaction and testing. The number indicates their placement on the sexuality scale. You may be a straight male who sometimes admires the physique of other men, but not sexually (M9) or a fully lesbian Female who is disgusted by men and does not even feel comfortable in the same spaces (F1). Or perhaps you have decided to surgically alter your biological sex from Female to Male, yet you are still mostly sexually attracted to men (TM3). These labels may also be monogrammed onto all your belongings as a part of your consumer identity, if you should chose to have this displayed. There is even an option for those who find themselves to be sexual chameleons – that’s why there is the LCD- identifier – allowing your sexual identity to be displayed as it changes.

The above system was designed through a conglomeration of government and corporate sponsoring that the people accepted gradually. Many thought it would be utopian. Many felt more comfortable being able to identify each other – parenthetical names indicate a longing for deep conversation, for example. But then the (M5) and (F5) designated humans began to form a coalition and prove that they – the most open and willing to move through the sexualities, were dominant – somehow better. Because humans love hierarchy. I’ll let you imagine what happens next.

— Anyway – that’s what I was thinking about as I was reading Licona. I am not a fan of Zines. I had a bunch of friends in zine culture, and I get it. I’m just not a fan. So I’ll leave you with the craziest response blog I’ve ever done. I wonder if it qualifies as non-linear. Or stream of conscious, maybe? Hm.

A Quick Dip in the Visual Rhetoric Pool – 8150

I lieu of writing out a whole response on the topic of Visual Rhetorics, I am instead making my annotated bibliography available here in digital form.

Please let me know if you have any further questions. Or feel free to continue the conversation we have in class here on my blog.

Visual Rhetoric Annotated Bibliography

Intertextual America – 8150

This week, I decided to move away from the materialism and commodification of the university system I’ve lately become obsessed with and talk about a topic that’s a little more fun: intertextuality.

What is intertextuality?

If you ask Frank J. D’Angelo in 2009, he would tell you that intertextuality is deployed in a series of related ways. In his article “The Rhetoric of Intertextuality” published in the Rhetoric Review in 2009, D’Angelo informs the reader through the use of various definitions, that intertextuality can be adaptation, retro, appropriation, parody, pastiche, or simulation. And while this is an interesting and useful reading of intertextuality, it feels incredibly shallow, and… well… D’Angelo is not very cool. “The Rhetoric of Intertextuality” feels like my grandfather wrote it, and that’s only after he consciously decided to not know much about popular culture for at least ten years prior. His examples too often feel bizarre, and a little out of left-field. And I find it irritating that D’Angelo begins each section by using a dictionary definition – a technique I tell my students not to use since dictionaries don’t have context. And while D’Angelo has some great ideas, and I really really DO think this article is useful pedagogically, I think he’s reaching in a lot of places. When he’s talking about adaptation, and the way we make one work into various commodities like film adaptations, action figures, electronic media, and so on – is this really adaptation? Isn’t it just commerce gone awry? Then, I’m not sure why retro is separate from adaptation. Isn’t making something retro (or as D’Angelo tells it, recycled) just a re-appropriation of older ideas?

Wait – didn’t I say I’d be moving away from commodification? It looks like I lied.

However – if you sandwich D’Angleo with Baudrillard‘s essay “America” – intertextuality becomes beautiful. It becomes the way in which we look at space – and as anyone who has ever studied anything space related, “to examine space” is a BIG statement.

Taken from eswinfield.blogspot.com

By ‘sandwich,’ I mean I read the “America” excerpt, largely had no idea what it was about, read D’Angelo, and then went back to “America.” Then I said, “Oh. I get why this is cool.”

Baudrillard takes the vast, ’empty’ spaces of America and laces them intertextually with other concepts like silence, magic, objective, technology and primitivity. Reading “America” is like being reminded of all the things I’ve ever taken for granted. I grew up in the desert, and I always thought it was ugly. And then I left. And when I came back – I realized how much of what Baudrillard laces together here is the closest thing to an accurate description that I may have ever encountered. Silence is a big part of living an a desert. Before the Phoenix metro area got so large it takes more than 3 hours to drive out of it, we could drive 2 hours in any direction and be in almost any climate – totally disconnected, in technology-free, magic-like spaces, sometimes with no objective other that to just go. How very American.

It ACTUALLY looks like this – taken from http://www.sonoran-sunsets.com

And now I think I might get it.

Intertextuality is an illustrated (sometimes) version of metaphor.

Right?