debates and descents

A few thoughts on the debate quick. Visually, I thought Fox’s dual screen was a little odd, since this presents a “composition” and “balance” problem, inviting juxtaposition. Sen Kerry is taller that W by about 4 or 5 inches. So, in the side by side W had to be raised a little so that his lectern was a few inches higher than Kerry’s.

The farce was uninteresting substantively, in my mind, although I guess one could argue that each segment could be taken as a lesson on “delivery.” Kerry, however, came off visually as poised, controlled, and calm and reflective. W on the other hand came off visually as angry, frazzled, fumblesome, staring, and inept in his obvious repetition of arbitrary loaded phrases.

“. . . group of folks . . .” Wow.

what does the link mean?

But remediation allows for afterthought, and this is where I went: Beside the wooden bridge and railroad trestle, along the banks there are no Union soldiers, but instead the men are raggy-clothed and skinning possum for a meal. But hyper-reality, not fiction, changed the links to empty banks.

New Haven city streets where beggars sat on blankets at the front doors of the Malley’s, Eli Moore’s and Kresge’s to catch the shoppers at their slower pace. These too, are gone.

This is a great transition in terms of carrying over an “impled” link in terms of the hypertextual, a technique I’ve been thinking a lot about lately.

In the writing, what is the nature of the link?

debates and descents

I finished skimming the agreed upon rules for upcoming events between Bush and Kerry posted here in pdf format (which is itself politics). Something strikes me as weird about the agreement and the look of the document it rests on. It looks like an image of a typed document, as if it must be presented to look old, official, fixed, just beyond the ability to cut and paste as text, as if it it weren’t meant to be “text,” but an image of “text.” It reads like a joke, a parody of how things “should” work, as if it had been written by John Stewart or Sir John Falstaff on behalf of Hal. So this is the state of affairs.

As a student of rhetoric and politics in a lot of forms and times, I have to admit that such an agreement, such debates, such decisions make me sick and embarrassed. In Composition we’re talking about evaluation, and we could certainly bring the art of evaluation–making claims and discussing ho w a thing meets criteria–against the “memorandum of understanding” is really a “memorandum for obfuscation and trickery.”

What should debates look like, what is the criteria against which they should be judged? A debate should have a clear context and reason. It should be flexible and open so that debaters can show their depth of knowledge, wit, familiarity with evidence and issues, and their ability to think on their feet. It should be combative yet controlled, but that control should come from the interlocutors’ knowledge of “situational” ethics and rules of debate. They should be allowed to contradict, raise questions, and ask for clarifications. The moderator should control equivocation, interrupt filibuster. Questioners should be free to ask whatever they want so that the wit reveals itself. We need the mind in the open to some degree, better that than nothing at all.

In this time of political cliches and pixel-sized scrutiny of every candidate and day to day media memory loss and the bottom line of news as business, in this day of colorless yak and actors acting like newspeople, of commentators whose mouths spray strychnine and campylobacter, of bureaucratized party politics filled with cynics and losers and robots, in this space of smiling lies and blood for more of them we are often not what we say we are. Democracy? No. Something else. I don’t know if democracy is the right term, since I know people who could argue that such a term is imprecise and was “always” false. We’re a federal republic, a cyborg running on batteries. We may be a shadow looking for a form.

The “memorandum” is a “paradise” document; it’s a lie; an immoral scam; a blow to decent, reasonable people who try to do the right thing day to day in this country and who deserve better.

distance, peripheries, and penetration

Calvino writes,

from the terrace of the Swiss chalet, Silas Flannery is looking through a spyglass mounted on a tripod at a young woman in a deck chair, intently reading a book on another terrace, two hundred meters below in the valley.

Does this sentence “convey” distance in the writing? A sense of slow, divided descent? How does “in the valley” contribute to the “perspective” telephotoing?

“She’s there every day,” the writer says. “Every time I’m about to sit down at my desk I feel the need to look at her. Who knows what she’s reading? I know it isn’t a book of mine, and instinctively I suffer at the thought, I feel the jealousy of my books, which would like to be read the way she reads. I never tire of watching her: she seems to live in a sphere suspended in another time and another space. I sit down at the desk, but no story I write corresponds to what I would like to convey.” Marana asks him if this is why he is no longer able to work. Oh, no, I write,” he asnwered; “it’s now, only now that I write, since I have been watching her. I do nothing but follow the reading of that woman, seen from here, day by day, hour by hour. I read in her face what she desires to read, and I write it faithfully.” (italics mine)

Is this a transition of a sorts, from one spatial perspective to another? External to internal. Raymond Queneau could write this 99 different ways, but in Calvino this is the way it lays on the page. Flannery is evoking a fantasy, a dream of audience/muse by the writer, yet also imagining “obsession,” the “embedded” Flannery himself character-bound, perhaps real , perhaps not, while the observer, “The reader-protagonist.” the “you” of Calvino’s novel is gleening the story from letters, trying to uncover answers, yet finding only deeper mysteries.

letters and images

Letters are images, too. I’m not a drawer, but I do like to draw letters on the board:

Every page of Marshall’s story displays this incredible nuance of play between what is read and seen, in whatever order. The art and the writing are nuanced and complex on their own, but they are companions; they could be taken on their own, but without the image, the writing is incomplete, and vice versa. Later, on the final page, at 10:40, George can be seen seated at a chair, reading a book. He has a contended, oddly unknowing look on his face, the neck of the cuckoo clock fully extended behind him.

“Read and seen.” This isn’t such a great way of putting the issue. Words and image. Writing and watercolors. In any case, what do writers see when they work in a word processor in terms of the construction of an image? In other words, does double spacing matter to:

The dog ran
stopped, ducked
a red ball plaps the capstone.

But then, in the environment, what does matter: a column, a square border, or just the arrangement itself? How does the tool influence the image?

The juridical jokes continue: H.R. 2028

Here’s the text to H.R. 2028:

A BILL
To amend title 28, United States Code, with respect to the jurisdiction of Federal courts inferior to the Supreme Court over certain cases and controversies involving the Pledge of Allegiance.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.

This Act may be cited as the `Pledge Protection Act of 2003′.

SEC. 2. JURISDICTION LIMITATION.

(a) IN GENERAL- Chapter 99 of title 28, United States Code, is amended by adding at the end the following:

`Sec. 1632. Jurisdiction limitation

`No court established by Act of Congress shall have jurisdiction to hear or determine any claim that the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance, as set forth in section 4 of title 4, violates the first article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States.’

I left out the clerical ammendment. Here’s the roll call. This is the “priority”? Is Congress this bored and easily amused? Perverted? Currently, lots of things are up for grabs: intelligence reforms, appropriations, and this is what passes the House. Any change of this lousy example of “law” skating through the Senate? Can a mouse eat a ’57 Chevy? Chaos here; chaos abroad, and the smiley face smirks to smirk.

the tools we use 2

In college and high school I wrote most papers on a Corona typewriter and I can still feel the paper and sense myself grasping a page after lifting it out of the platen, leaning to read under the 60 watt bulb, pencil ready. It was a pain in the ass. Still, people remember the physical nature of this kind of writing, the lining up of the paper, the insertion of onion sheets, the quick roll with the thumb, the ching of the carriage bell, the slap of the return, and those old pictures, of course, of famous writers at their Underwoods, draft boxes, and ash trays.

I wrote with the typewriter and the word processor, when available. And left the TW pretty quick because of the light. But what about process. Yesterday I went through the routine with the creative writers who have to save drafts of their work. Poem_1.doc becomes a save as as poem_2.doc or txt. A totally different process of drafting and keeping track of things. I have drafts of old novels written years ago in boxes, all scribbled over, and still have piles of old drafts from the typewriter, scribbled over. These relics are distinct. Maps of change. Maps of thought process, a landscape.

storyspace and the software we use

I’ve experienced software of lots of kinds over the last 25 years or so, so I’ve had some experience with its history. Writing, accounting and so on. I don’t remember the name of the first word processor I used, but I do remember using early versions of wordperfect. Of course, my first experience with writing is with paper, ruled paper used for practicing penmanship in the early grades. Some of you know that the rules didn’t really stick.

How things have changed. What makes for good software is a big question these days. I don’t like to dump on things, but the newest installments of Microsoft products just keep getting heavier and heavier, yet a tool like Word is part of the history of writing nonetheless. We’ve seen the commercials of office people dancing in the hallways because of MS’s new products. Those are a lie. No one at Tunxis Community College is dancing because of Office 2003 or whatever we’re calling it these days. In truth, much of the problems we have are directly related to how we work with and learn our tools.

As a writing tool, Storyspace presents not a new landscape for writing, because the software’s been around a while, but it’s a landscape, an environment which transforms the process, the product, and the way I “think” about writing in a digital environment, unlike Word, whose environment becomes more and more crowded with options, buttons, icons, menus, and other refractions. I think Word is an interesting example of a new media tool because of the options it provides, but as a writing devise, machine, or document manager I find it clunky, opaque, slow, and a lousy example of the future of writing “in the present.”

In a way, Storyspace “defines” hypertext writing in a sort of collaboration with the writer. Working in (perhaps the better word is “with”) Storyspace, the hypertext writer learns and uses the functions, operations, spaces, and procedures as the “text” is being created, thus every new text can be constructed with a different set of dynamic rules. One text may not have a need for keywords, while another may want them badly. Another text may make heavy use of guardfields, while yet another, which has no need for them, wants only space to space links. And, by the way, I like the fact that it has no spell check. I’m not the greatest of spellers. Storyspace, like a typewriter, forces me to think about that.

Calvino and the reader

Back to grading grading grading, but the tasks have been interesting reading composition and contemporary ficion papers. It’s an interesting range of subjects: composition, fiction, and new media analyses.

We’ll be hitting Calvino on Tuesday, and I’ll be letting the student take over the discussion, have them struggle to deal with the complexities of If on a winter’s night a traveler. It will be interesting to see how the students in the class react to meta fiction elements and the twist of the second person address.

You, reader–what is the nature of a fiction? Can we be immersed in a story which constantly calls attention to itself? Of course. It’s a maze the reader must find their way through; but what if the novel you’re reading is “broken”?