27 August 2007

Look, Ma, no hair.


I cut my own hair this last week. The LAW, in her way, approved: "It doesn't look nearly as bad as I thought it might." Seriously, though, I thought how hard can it be? Use a #8 on top and a #4 on the sides; that was my compensation for my lack of expertise (when I have someone else cut it, it's a #7 and a #2). Besides, good gel can fix a variety of ills.

I've been reading pulp/thriller/detective novels: Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child's "Pendergast" series: Relic, Reliquary, Dance of Death, Cabinet of Curiousities, etc. A couple by Elizabeth Sims, including Holy Hell; T. Jefferson Parker's Blue Hour and Red Light.

And that's just in the last week.

At the same time, I've been trying to finish up my part of a paper I'm writing with Jonathan, so I've been re-reading Donna Haraway and cursing my brain for its slow, pudding-in-a-lint-trap behavior on matters professional.

An excerpt, to show I care:

To explore this phenomenon, we will bring together two key discussions in contemporary composition studies: (1) emotion, affect, pathos; and (2) the extent to which our students (and we, ourselves) are “cyborg,” to borrow from Haraway. In looking at the intersections of these topics, we will explore how today’s writers might make sense of subjectivity(ies) and literacy(ies) in the new media era. To what extent do we attempt to colonize students’ subjectivities through insistence on old technology/ textual models? To what extent is this colonization a preemptive strike against cyborged subjectivities more fully coming into being? What we want is a strong sense of how we discuss, with our students, technology and subjectivity in ways that extend beyond the cool critical thinking skills we can develop with videogames, or the *** of working with iMovies. Indeed, we want to push for something more, a (dare we say) humanistic, but still critical, approach to technology, particularly the new communications technologies.

3 comments:

Sonie said...

The difference between a good haircut and a bad haircut is one week. Or so my stylist's grandma says.

Anonymous said...

Along the lines of Holy Hell, I highly reccomend Ali Vali's Devil series. It's frigging fantastic.

Anonymous said...

I love your paper idea! After reading Haraway myself, and exploring the transhuman movement, I, too, would love to write a paper discussing cyborg identities in some way and what impact this will have in terms of a "human" identity. There is a song (within the electronic genre) that has a line that asks, "Am I dead enough for life?" I think that is an interesting question when we examine this move to the posthuman. Thanks for sharing a piece of what you are working on!