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.

C&W, again

Here, a visual representation of a textual representation of a fantasy representation: Shehun, my old DaMOO character. I miss DaMOO. I'm on SecondLife (in the cheap seats), but it's not the same (duh). This .gif was part of the hypnotic Captain-and-Tennille performance that we gave: Jonathan speaking, me accompanying with image, repeated image, text, repeated text. Iteration.

C&W parts 2-3

Okay, I PROMISE I'll write about Detroit, even though most of you have probably heard my schtick on the sad, sad Motor City. But first:

Part of what Jonathan had to say:

But what I have been missing (and longing for, not just not finding) in our recent pedagogical discussion about new media and the communications technologies is a strong sense of how we are having, with our students, discussions about technology and subjectivity that extend beyond thinking about what kinds of cool critical thinking skills we can develop with videogames, or how neat it is to have students make iMovies to practice a variety of rhetorical skills. Indeed, I want to push for something more, a (dare I say) humanistic, but still critical, approach to technology, particularly the new communications technologies. Specifically, I want to advocate that we interrogate much more forcefully than ever before, both amongst ourselves and with our students, the dense interconnections between technology and subjectivity.

And part of what I had to say:

What is the place of the sexual self, the somatic body, in rhetoric and writing? We are most comfortable with discussions of identity that are accessible to analytic language. That is, we like to talk about things that can be talked about. The feedback loop inherent in this system necessarily elides considerations of the body and of sex, that most persuasive of human endeavors. The dilemma is how we are to talk about non-discursive rhetorics, since, as Laurie Anderson once said on a similar topic, “Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.” We have also, since Aristotle’s time, steered away from discussions of the so-called “inartistic proofs,” and one might argue that it is this very realm of the inartistic that we find many of our pleasures. The other dilemma is how to value something that we can’t analyze in our analytical-discursive field.

My sense is that answers lie outside of our field, in visual arts and computer animations, in immersive technologies that demand full and embodied participation from writers and readers. But even there, we only can hope to surround the body’s argument—not speak it. At the same time, this very surrounding, or immersion, might give us a clearer sense of our available freedoms, with the hope of adding to that number.

But we didn't get to say what we had to say...more on that later.

C&W pt 1: After my

C&W pt 1: After my dog got me up @ 5 a.m. yesterday, I worked until 8 p.m., caught a redeye @ 11:45, and hit Detroit @ 9:30 Eastern. Yawn.

Working on my C&W paper

Really, I just want to be Laurie Anderson. Or have coffee with her.

Things you never learned in your doctoral program ...

(and you refuse to learn now, on the job):

1. committee work will suck your life out through your eyeballs
2. you can't "liberate" anyone--not your students, not yourself, not the bag of SunChips stuck in the machine
3. people will always complain about bad writing (student OR high theory) because that's easier to do than to actually read something
4. you'll never get enough sleep
5. "hammerheads" and "redeyes" are the best coffee drinks, but not after 4 p.m., because you need to ...
6. get more sleep
   

Done, done, done!

I finished the essay ("Lesbian Spectacle and the Disruption of Desire") at 7 p.m. Pacific Time and emailed it away. The LAW has read it and pronounced it intelligible, and she approved my decision not to end the piece with "And we all know Paradise is chock-full of lesbians." Too bad.

It was good to finish it--I think I've proven to myself that the brain still works in interesting ways, although I'll have to beat the lobes back into their cold, conjoined torpor by Monday, when Winter Quarter starts.

Just what is a "chock," and with what does one fill it?

A new turn.

I'm trying to re-focus myself. Really, what I want to do is reach a level above "Dan Quayle" in my Civilization IV game, but I suspect that obsessive gaming will not help me finish the article that's due this week. An excerpt:

Again: any techne of lesbian sexuality will do well to embrace the Spectacular as a force that makes fleshly bodies temporarily readable through its sustained jumbling of representation and desire. I won’t rehearse decades of psychoanalytic and/or French feminist and/or poststructuralist thought here, but instead offer one small proposition that we might agree upon: the body—the fleshly thing that carries us around, this ugly bag of mostly water, as Gollum would have it—is never really our own, never in existence apart from representation and desire. Perhaps we can express this relationship thusly: our self at its most simply speakable or readable is comprised of ratios between the nodes of Body, Representation, and Desire, much like the classic rhetorical triangle of speaker, audience, and subject.

Now if I could just remember how to write complete sentences so I could finish the other 18.5 pages.

Did you miss the CFA protest last week?

1500 CSU faculty (yes, I was one of them) and their supporters from campuses statewide protested outside the CSU Board of Trustees meeting last week to pressure the administration into re-entering contract negotiation. Here's one of several news stories about the protest, and here's the California Faculty Association website. We've had an impasse declared and are going into mediation. Job actions to come?

Updates

• My poem "Dubbel zoet" was accepted for publication in The Adirondack Review. Whee! Here it is.
  
• I found the shooting location for my early-stage-of-development Wine film. Stay tuned for the debut of my Nika-liscious star.

Oh, yeah, and the LAW is home and I haven't broken any dental work for days!