still grumpy but feeling a little better

well, i was walking around stv with, i'm sure, a very sour look on my face....some would even call it a smirk or scowl....until one of my former students ran up to me with a camera and took my picture. of course i had to fake a smile but nevertheless i played along. well i got an e-mail from her today...i've been added to her facebook? as a friend. it's kind of a nice feeling, kind of disconcerting...my face on someone's web page...but oh well...struggle on. i haven't seen this because i don't have an account...don't know if i really want one...this blogs hard enough to keep up with.

what a day

well, i must say that this is turning out to be one hell of a day for various reasons.
1) sick most of the weekend
2) really, really, really, not feeling comfortable with my body or image
3) my class (that i teach) seemed more than quiet today...and for some reason their silence bugged me to no end...trying to tell myself that this is not a reflection of me but that conversation with myself isn't getting anywhere
4) talked to my mother...she has a case of the shingles ON HER HEAD
5) my father's pissed that he didn't get my card i sent him for his birthday
6) both my mother and father are not very happy with me right now because i haven't been home since xmas 2005
7) feeling terrible about myself because I DONOT particularly want to go home right now and that really bugs me...no sense of place whatsoever (this can probably be related back to the body image thing...i don't feel comfortable in any place)
8) i have wonderful people around me up here who care deeply and i am lucky to have them in my life (you know who you are) and i would be in very sad shape without them but i still feel incredibly sad. btw: the random "christian" reader who stumbles upon this blog entry...please don't comment about how jesus is the way, blah, blah, blah...because HE isn't any way and i hold his church responsible for alot of this rant...so don't waste your time with a comment cuz i'll just delete it without reading past the first sentence (wow can that sentence be any longer?)
9) feeling kind of guilty about crying in my beer but sometimes the violins make the most excellent music and for anyone who thinks they are above this kind of self talk...well what can i say, i guess i'm not strong enough and you are...congratulations.
10) my apartment is still a mess and i'm sick of living in my own abjectness but i just can't seem to do anything about it right now...i'm not the person that i once was...not that that was an improvement but it was better than what i'm living now.
11) today i just want to disappear

poem for the week: on voice or the lack thereof

The Little Mute Boy

by Federico García Lorca
Translated by W. S. Merwin


The little boy was looking for his voice.
(The king of the crickets had it.)
In a drop of water
the little boy was looking for his voice.

I do not want it for speaking with;
I will make a ring of it
so that he may wear my silence
on his little finger

In a drop of water
the little boy was looking for his voice.

(The captive voice, far away,
put on a cricket's clothes.)




From The Selected Poems of Federico García Lorca, by Federico García Lorca, translated by W.S. Merwin, published by New Directions. Copyright © 1955 by W.S. Merwin.

poem for the week

For the young who want to

by Marge Piercy

Talent is what they say
you have after the novel
is published and favorably
reviewed. Beforehand what
you have is a tedious
delusion, a hobby like knitting.

Work is what you have done
after the play is produced
and the audience claps.
Before that friends keep asking
when you are planning to go
out and get a job.

Genius is what they know you
had after the third volume
of remarkable poems. Earlier
they accuse you of withdrawing,
ask why you don't have a baby,
call you a bum.

The reason people want M.F.A.'s,
take workshops with fancy names
when all you can really
learn is a few techniques,
typing instructions and some-
body else's mannerisms

is that every artist lacks
a license to hang on the wall
like your optician, your vet
proving you may be a clumsy sadist
whose fillings fall into the stew
but you're certified a dentist.

The real writer is one
who really writes. Talent
is an invention like phlogiston
after the fact of fire.
Work is its own cure. You have to
like it better than being loved.

william cook...whoever you are...you rock!

so, in my never ending quest to find new ways to procrastinate i found myself going through customer reviews of products on amazon.com. this adventure, as it were, led me to reviews of tony kushner's play made into an hbo movie: "angles in america." many of the reviews were really good and a lot of the criticisms seemed to me resonable. however, there are some insane people out there who wrote some pretty scary stuff. how can you rent (or worse, buy) a movie simply based on the cover...watch it over and over and then write a review saying that you wanted to puke? or complain the you were fooled by the cover and thought that it was about "angels"? the depth of humanity's utter stupidity amazes me sometimes (strike that..all of the time).
However, i did fine one comment in particular so great that i had to post it.

7 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

It's Just a Title, June 8, 2006
Reviewer: William Cook (Cleveland, Ohio USA) - See all my reviews

Reading these reviews, I was surprised by a number of the comments but most of all by those that rented/bought this movie believing it was somehow about "angels" and then had the nerve to complain that they didn't know what it was about or that there were no angels in the movie.

With that in mind, I'd like to offer some advice to those that may inadvertently rent/buy other movies:

There are no Cuckoo birds and no nests in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
There is no obvious wind in Gone With the Wind and what there was didn't blow anything away
There are few, if any, good fellas in Goodfellas
There are no lambs in Silence of the Lambs
Chinatown isn't set in a town in China
There is neither $1,000,000 nor a baby in Million Dollar Baby
You guessed it, no bulls in Raging Bull
The coats are made of denim or some such material in Full Metal Jacket
Paul Newman's body temperature is about 98.6 degrees just like the rest of us in Cool Hand Luke
There is little, if any, sleeping in The Big Sleep
The prison hallway is only a few feet long in The Green Mile
The African Queen is not about a gay black man
No waterfowl were hurt in the making of Duck Soup
The earth rotated as usual on the Day the Earth Stood Still
There are actually multiple conversations in The Conversation
The raunchy men's magazine does not appear in The Hustler
Nobody inherited the wind in Inherit the Wind. It still belongs to all of us
There is no discernible odor while watching The Sweet Smell of Success
All the President's Men is only about *some* of the president's men

I hope that some will find these simple reminders useful. If not, you may want to consider looking at the back of a DVD case, visiting your local library or going to one of the thousands of web sites that talk about every movie ever made.

As for this film, if you're not frightened by things that might be different than what you've experienced or that perhaps strike too close to home, and don't spend your time judging how everyone else lives, then there is much to love about this work. It may not be perfect, and there can be many legitimate gripes about it, but overall it's very, very good. Scan through the positive reviews here and you'll get a good sense of it. No need for me to repeat it all here. Unfortunately, most (but not all) of the negative reviews are just those with some sort of political/religious agenda to put forth instead of commenting on the film.

william cook...you rock!

"Nothing is lost forever"

Harper Pitt: I dreamed we were there. The plane leapt the tropopause, the safe air, and attained the outer rim, the ozone, which was ragged and torn, patches of it threadbare as old cheesecloth, and that was frightening. But I saw something that only I could see, because of my astonishing ability to see such things: Souls were rising, from the earth far below, souls of the dead, of people who had perished, from famine, from war, from the plague, and they floated up, like skydivers in reverse, limbs all akimbo, wheeling and spinning. And the souls of these departed joined hands, clasped ankles, and formed a web, a great net of souls, and the souls were three-atom oxygen molecules, of the stuff of ozone, and the outer rim absorbed them, and was repaired. Nothing's lost forever. In this world, there's a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we've left behind, and dreaming ahead. At least I think that's so.

Angels in America
Tony Kushner

thoughts while in my composition seminar.....

I had to read these articles for class and "journal" them...what a better place to work all of this information out than right here on this blog...for better or for worse.

Janice M. Lauer, “Graduate Students as Active Members of the Profession”
Robert Boice, “Work Habits of Productive Scholarly Writers”
Carol Berkenkotter and Thomas N. Huckin, “Gatekeeping at an Academic Convention”
Deborah Mutnick, “Time and Space in Composition Studies: ‘Through the Gates of the Chronotope’”

I read the articles in the order that they are listed above. The first three worked well together while I conceptualized the Mutnick piece as an elaboration or discursive outgrowth of the Berkenkotter and Huckin article. The tenor of the first three articles centered on writing and its various processes in regard to publishing while the fourth articles proved to be an effective, if not extremely compelling, example. I definitely felt that I was the audience for these readings. As such, I also became keenly aware of that old and familiar tension creeping up into my chest. I have a tenuous relationship with writing because whether it is “academic” or personal it reflects part or parts of my subjectivity/subjectivities. In short, I am always writing myself into any text that I am working on/with.
I thought that Lauer's article pointed to the crux of the problem when she describes the notional space of being a student and attempting to publish. She disrupts the “publish or perish” claim that haunts many graduate students' nightmares by positing other ways to conceptualize what constitutes our developing professionalism and the extrinsic and intrinsic pressures that accompany this rhetorical situation. I myself have been told on countless occasions to fashion my scholarship to fit a particular academic discourse community. I have been told to “be a player” and to “network.” I have found that this does not necessarily work well for me or for friendships. Indeed, I understand the value of dialogue and of the valuable work that can be accomplished in contributing to a conversation and “being” part of a community. But the question that I ask is to what cost? To be more specific, how much does one have to tailor or, better yet, camouflage particular aspects of how her/his personality, clothes, academic work, etcetera in order to survive? I would like to know just how “necessary” this is and what are the costs?
Lauer gives no answers, she simply posits more questions. I can appreciate this because I don't think that there are any concrete answers to gravitate toward when it comes to how one negotiates her/his self as an aspiring scholar and professor. To be a player and to network raises red flags for me that point out the potentiality of a rhetorical violence. This violence, while on the level of language, is extremely damaging, indeed. I have seen too many graduate students involve themselves in this “proactive” behavior that fosters a competitive spirit which inhibits supportive and collaborative networks. Consequently, to be a player and to network means to isolate yourself as a struggling academic while at the same time comparing your successes to others' failures. It is for this reason that I found Lauer's discussion on an “ethics of care” (234) to be comforting and, at the same time, challenging. I like this concept because it disrupts a negative environment that stultifies collaborative work at the expense of individual achievement. Lauer asks “[i]s an ethics of care possible, probable, practical, especially for our students who strain to position themselves in the field?” (235). I do not know the answer to this question and, I suspect, no one else does either.
Although I have some methodological issues with Robert Boice's article I found his psychological research on scholarly writers interesting if not compelling nonetheless. I was heavily trained during my undergraduate training as a music therapist in the area of behavioral psychology. The field of behavioral psychology is useful and in many academic circles valuable in the acquisition of monies for various programs. However, the work of behavioral science, like almost all other sciences, establishes a self imposed importance through empiric observation. When being trained as a counselor at Florida State University, I was always told: “If you didn't see it [meaning a certain type of behavior] and document it then it didn't happen.” This practice ossified in my young mind the privileging of materiality and its relationship to writing and its processes. This is not to say that I disagree with Boice's research or his approach per se but I do wonder if writers and writing processes for that matter can be observed and categorized so easily.
My writing process is always changing that is why it was hard for me to “place” myself under the various rubrics in Boice's article. For the most part writing, is excruciatingly difficult but not in the sense of a writer's block. Rather, I have all of these ideas swimming around in my head like little fishes and when I attempt to grab them they just slip out of my grasp...schooling in some dark corner of my mind. I'm also completely astounded at the amount of knowledge that I do not know and that I probably, when all is said and done, cannot know. Consequently, I become overwhelmed. I read texts and I ask myself: “what can I possibly contribute to any conversation?” Nevertheless, I have a few questions about Boice's article: Why is passive always negative? Why is active seen as the exemplar? I do appreciate Boice's attempt to disrupt the binary between passive and active by distinguishing active and passive waiting. I see this as an attempt to make a conceptual change on the level of language (217-18). However, this type of approach still creates binaries. I find myself occupying all and, paradoxically, none of the categories that Boice outlines in his article.
One of the more compelling pieces to Boice's argument is his approach to emotion and writing. It is at this point in the article where he combines behavioral and cognitive approaches in his research (212). Boice tells “blocked” writers to start writing before she/he “feels” like writing or “before feeling ready to write” (220). He suggests that we make writing a habit. “The most reliable motivation comes in the wake of regular involvement in writing, not in advance of it” (220). I think that this point of entry is most important. For me, writing as habit detours the other concepts of waiting that enfold active or passive approaches. I also found his concept of “stopping” to be most valuable indeed. I remember when I was writing my master's thesis. I was working forty hours a week and I was taking a night class. I would get up at 5:00 a.m. and write until 7:30 a.m. In the evenings, I would read and prepare. In essence, I established a writing habit that Boice describes and I found it highly productive. However, I have changed since enrolling in a Ph.D. program full time. I have found myself caught between active and passive approaches to writing and my sense of self has been disrupted to the extent that I cannot find a “writerly” self to engage with in the actual process of writing. Hence, this is what I mean earlier when I stated that I could not find myself in Boice's article.
Berkenkotter's and Huckin's article reminded me of the arbitrariness of the academy. I thought that it was insightful because what counts as an “excellent” CCCC's paper presentation abstract depends upon who is in power. This is where Mutnick's article became most compelling for me, since her article was, in it's earlier stages, a CCCC's presentation paper. I just kept coming back to the same conclusion as I read these last articles. The academy through a language system can be tenuous and rhetorically violent. Bodies that move within the academy's purview are constantly under pressure to fulfill the terms of what it means to be not only a scholar but a viable contributor to the conversations that shape the emerging field of rhetoric and composition. Must then writing and, more specifically, subjectivity formation through writing (and publishing) be dialectical and seemingly violent? I think that each of the authors of the articles that are represented here are grappling with how to detour the inscribed ways in which current traditional ideologies have come to define the academy. I would hope that the current will change.