September 06, 2005
was that inappropriate?
the football comment? was it? i can't decide. i was called to task about it by a friend yesterday--entirely of my own deserving, because of the way i prefaced it & led into the conversation. i'm sure--in no small part because my friend's comments made the impression absolutely crystal clear--that it's easy enough to read me as wholly hypocritical for that. after all, as my friend pointed out, there are often--if not always--tragedies unfolding while i'm writing about being *happy.* and i chose not to disguise my comment, not to question how people i didn't know could write about things i assume they're out in the world writing about rather than using the actual thing that struck me when i saw it central in the attention of people whose blogs i actually read.
in my friend's eyes, i was completely out of line, not only because i'm a hypocrite, but because knowing it was even possible that i'd be read by the people i was critiquing--and my friend assures me, and i'd like to argue but i'm not sure i can, that that sort of question is clearly a critique whether i ever phrase it as one or not--makes me deliberately a rabble-rouser (not in a good way) & also a sanctimonious shit.
my friend is far too polite to say these things. well. the "h-word" was employed, but the rest are my interpretation of the mood imparted. in any case, it brings me to an interesting intersection of a lot of different theories and awarenesses. like madeline over at academom has been talking about lately, there's an author/audience issue always on the table when you're blogging. who's your public? who's reading you? to what degree do you know who's reading you? what rersponsibility does that knowledge give you? does the existance of a huge possible-public defray responsibility--can i say that since it's just "out there" for anybody to read, i don't have to imagine what i wrote as if i'd written it on slips of paper & slid it under the doors of people on my hall who happen to care (like good, decent, caring, willing-to-contribute-to-the-disaster-relief-effort people all over the world, all the time, tragedy or not, which i never have really understood anyway, which might make my comment that much worse or that much more irrelevant--i can't honestly tell which) about football?
do i have to account for everyone who might possibly read my blog? everyone whose reading is just likely? how would i reckon "likely," anyway. likely now is a different pool than it was 6 months ago, might be a different one six months from now, or tomorrow, if i happen to say something today that someone in my incredibly small readership (at least that i'm aware of and consciously responsible to) finds worthy of picking up, linking to, arguing with, or otherwise drawing to the attention of other readers in other circles. i'm answering my own question there, & somewhat facetiously; of course i can't account for everyone. does it make me a loud-mouthed immature snot-head to say things i know people in my building might be hurt or offended by if i only say them here but don't say them about those people? is it better if i'm commenting about a behavior i find perplexing without naming names? or am i just as guilty as i would have been had i done so because it still amounts (or can be read as amounting) to calling out individuals for doing something wrong, because the question implies a critique and the behavior implies the individual and my location & position make it possible that someone might, without too much work, trace to see who on my blogroll happened yesterday to have recently posted about football?
in case anybody tries it, i should offer the following disclaimer: i really was puzzled & frustrated in the moment, but i don't think anybody's insensitive or unkind or whatever other words i didn't use but could be accused of having hinted at for being interested enough in their fan-sport of choice to write about it even while other things are going on. it just seemed amazing to me in that moment of contrast, when i was feeling guilty for watering my tomatoes because i had fresh water coming right out of the tap & i should have been pouring it into glasses to hand out to dehydrated people still waiting on overpasses in new orleans, but for the logistics of the whole affair.
i don't think i'm better-than. that wasn't/isn't my intention. theory intrudes (damn grad school anyway) at this point: is everything an argument? i know there's a book out titled that, as if titling makes it so, but i don't know if that's applicable or appropriate here--and i'm sure i'm not ready for the implications if it is. can one not make observations in the blogosphere--or anywhere--without being held accountable for arguments one hasn't actually made but which might easily enough be assumed or extracted from the observations made (and those withheld)? how accountable to the lives our texts take on beyond us are we or should we be? and what does the presence of emotion add to that query? is it not argumentative if i say "somebody wrote about football" but only if i also observe my own confused or frustrated emotive response?
i'm rambling. so i'm stopping. feel free to tell me that yes, i am a sanctimonious shit, if you want to. i'm okay with that accusation, or at least not unfamiliar with it. but if you don't mind, i'd also like a little more unraveling of why you think it fits.
Posted by ttobryan at 03:52 PM | Comments (0)
September 05, 2005
hurricanes
i went to class thursday with an agenda, but i couldn't not talk about the hurricane. i made it rhetorical, political, relevant to issues of american racism & reporting &... while that wasn't specifically on-topic either, i managed to connect it to what we were reading in our rhetoric book, to the dangers of generalization & creating--and stopping at--binaries as ways of understanding the world. looters vs. finders. as if there are only two kinds of people, black criminals & white survivors, in all of new orleans.
this is supposed to be a class whose first project is focused on education, because that's something they know, something they've always done, something they have longstanding practice at critiquing. it's not supposed to be a class about racism & ineffective disaster relief & presedential indifference, hype, empty promises & war-metaphors, but i can't promise right now that that won't happen.
it's hard to pay attention to anything else for long. it's hard to read the news & think anything else is significant. it's hard to read other people's blogs & see how everybody made that first push of focus & then moved on to other things. i know we're too far away to do much, once we've made our donations. i know there aren't any refugees in our dome--there can't be, after all, there was a game on saturday--to take in or help out. i know the human brain has a limited capacity for tragedy, especially when it has the option to turn it off, which tens of thousands of people down south don't right now but we do. i don't know how the hell so many people can write & talk & think & care about football.
Posted by ttobryan at 06:53 AM | Comments (0)
May 01, 2005
by the way, i'm kind of an elitist snob
i read a novel yesterday--don't tell the people i owe a lot of work to, because unlike my cheater-husband i haven't figured out a clever way to get reading fiction to count toward the academic work i'm supposed to be doing, so it was in no way technically productive. i didn't write a single word on any of the half-done or not-even-started-yet projects i'm supposed to hand in in the next few weeks. hell, it's hours into today, and i still haven't written anything but a poem. see why this fiction thing is bad for me? guilt is not the point, though. ffs, i've never been catholic! the point is, i loved this novel. adored every second of reading it. lost myself--lost an entire day--in it, to it, with it, and gained a lot of self back too, that i hadn't seen in a while, & lived a whole lot more than a day's worth of life inside the characters--i got by far the best end of the trade-off. and yet
when, finished with it and still delighted, i had a friend on the phone , & was bragging about my defiance and frivolity ("you inspired me," i said, "the other day when we were studying at your house and you were reading comic books!"), my friend asked what the book was, and i found myself embarrassed to explain.
"it's a probably-cheesy love story," i said sheepishly. "it's on the national bestseller list. oprah probably loves it. but it's this really cool story about..."
my friend, who is one of the wonderful kind who never lets you get away with shit like that, called me on it immediately. "why do we do that? why assume that because it's popular it must be crap, that if a lot of people are reading it that it must be somehow less worthy, that it's not refined enough for us to spend our time on if it also pleases-" "-normal people?" "normal people."
we had a good bonding moment over that, side-stepping sheepishness a little once we'd both acknowledged it was there; he admitted getting a rush out of the slash-burn-smash ending of a recently-read wolverine comic, and i confessed to having enjoyed the da vinci code--"it's not stupid," i said; "not to hear them describe it," my friend named a few of the grad students we know--and sometimes love--overheard trashing the book in the basement computer lab. "there are a few things he could have made a little more realistic, like, i don't know, the characters sleeping at least once in their 3 or 4 day wild adventure--they just kept running!--but i liked reading it. i didn't know all the answers to the puzzles, & it was fun to follow along, to try to guess, to figure it out." we also, it turns out, on occasion, both enjoy a little brain-candy detective fiction, so long as the pieces actually lead to some kind of conclusion that we get to cooperate with the protagonists to figure out.
all of that accounted for, however, i'm still a little embarrased at the "national bestseller" banner emblazoned in dark red across the top of this book, the "today show book club selection" banner mirroring it across the back, at the list of approval-granting organizations on the inside cover that includes the "book-of-the-month-club," and most especially--this is the part that has me considering not lending it out, even to people i know would also love it--at the set of book-club discussion-questions on the last few pages. this is the biggest sin of all to me--even worse than its publishers printing brag-lines about its own popularity all over the text is this set of guidelines for how to read it, how to talk about it, like it's an eighth-grade book-report assignment...
i'm more ashamed to be ashamed of these things than i am of the things themselves, but i'm still considering asking the friend who loaned the book to me if he'd mind me tearing out those question-pages before i hand it off to anybody else. that might be a personal pet-peeve; i won't adopt textbooks that have questions after the reading-selections they include either.
the most important point, though?
audrey niffenegger's the time traveler's wife is the best book i've read in years. i love the writing, i love the story, i love the voices for reasons this isn't the place to explain. it was the best way to spend a day i've stumbled across in months. it was one of those books you feel as you go through like you're recognizing your own face, and someone else's, even as you're seeing them for the first time, that you're coming home again to somewhere you've ever been. that might be a cliched appraisal, but cliches become what they are because they're true.
Posted by ttobryan at 10:36 AM | Comments (2)
April 27, 2005
actually, no.
ann landers today:
Class is an aura of confidence that is being sure without being cocky. Class has nothing to do with money. Class never runs scared. It is self-discipline and self-knowledge. It's the sure footedness that comes with having proved you can meet life.
i could almost continue this for her: "so, as you can see, if you don't have class, or people say you don't, or you're categorized or categorize yourself as being a member of a low class, it's not because you can't afford to shop anywhere but at the wal-mart, or because, sweet as your daddy is, he's a drunk with an 8th grade education who didn't know how to help you get ahold of any better opportunities than the ones your resource-deprived & underpaid school counselors could come up with, and you couldn't afford that car to get you to the community college, nevermind paying for tuition & books & gasoline & somebody to watch the baby. no, it's because you lack self-discipline, self-confidence. you just don't know yourself. you're a coward who hasn't proven that you can 'meet life'"--and who's administering those tests again? who are we supposed to prove it to? i wonder where she thinks that confidence comes from, if not from privilege, from being able to take enough of this for granted that you can focus on self-knowledge, from being well-equipped to "meet life" because the right people were there to teach you the appropriate handshakes?
can somebody please tell me what makes this any less a victim-rhetoric than saying "well, we don't think rape is okay or anything, but she did go out wearing that dress..."
no wonder we can't have a half-cogent conversation about class in this country.
(xp to lj)
Posted by ttobryan at 06:57 AM | Comments (0)
February 06, 2005
one limitation of print media
here's at least one way that blogging is just like other forms of conveying the written word... you still have to write it. with your hands.
i've written at least 6 clever, pithy blog entries today. entries for 711, entries for lj, entries for here. problem is, i've written them in my head. while i was virtuously vacuuming the house, washing dishes two three times today, scrubbing bathrooms, running & switching & folding 4 loads of laundry... and no matter the alarmists' predictions, the technology doesn't allow for automatic telepathic thought-transmission during other thought-inducing but hand-occupying activities.
(linked from 711 b/c my limited tech prowess doesn't include proper trackback-pinging ability.)
repercussions:
1) my rhythm's off. blogging is exactly not supposed to happen all in a chunk on sunday nights.
2) i've mostly lost track of those 6 (or more?) bright ideas, and whatever i come up with in their stead, even if it's brilliant, won't feel as brilliant as it would have if i'd done it in the moment.
3) "virtue" is negotiable. i feel good about what i've accomplished. i feel bad about what i haven't. this isn't a new conundrum, of course, but it is one i didn't expect to happen with "post to your blog" as the thing i feel guilty about not doing.
4) i had more things to put in my teaching journal instead of fewer this week, & so now i'm further behind than i'd have been had i been inspired to clean last week instead.
5) i find myself complaining in a post about what i haven't posted about. i hate when bloggers do this. i NEVER want to do this AGAIN.
6) when i catch myself reflectively complaining, in my head i sound a little bit like madeline. and i find that charming.
7) all day, while i was cleaning, blogging in my head, accomplishing some things, neglecting others, and watching inspiration run down my arms and into the sudsy sink un-recorded, i kept thinking: "derek does this & raises a teenager. ty o'donnell does it with two toddlers. aleshia & jonna do it--all of it--with three kids to come home to. every day. madeline goes home to four. and i'm proud when once in a too-many-week period i find time to vacuum?"
8) re: the mommy-blog defense... these maligned women are at least posting about children. real children. real diapers. real learning to share about besting real challenges. real communitiy-building. me? the inconvenient overlap of the assignment schedule & my threshold for cat-hair accumulation. hardly a cultural assertion of anything at all.
9) another thing i wonder: who are the real alarmists, the ones who think all of this technology is leading to direct brain-to-machine encoding, or the ones distressed that it's taking so long to come about?
10) in a way, there's probably a very cogent point in here about embodiment & technology. my cyborg tendancies aren't supported by my hardware.
Posted by ttobryan at 07:35 PM | Comments (5)
February 05, 2005
thought-full
"reading cannot be separated from thinking. reading is a thought-full activity." --frank smith, understanding reading, 20.
sometimes scholarship reminds me of winnie-the-pooh.
(xp to lj)
Posted by ttobryan at 04:23 PM | Comments (3)
February 01, 2005
en français, si'l-vous-plait
this morning i learned that poseur is actually a preferred & equally-if-not-more legitimate spelling than poser, for spelling the same thing. & all this time i'd thought there was something ironically apropos about including a dash of posturing & pompous french spelling in one's endeavor to insult another's lack of authenticity.
thanks, jeph!
Posted by ttobryan at 06:35 AM | Comments (0)
January 26, 2005
on blinker's barley and mushroom soup
"don't goats eat barley?" -elisa
"and little-lambs-eat-ivy." -tyra
"horses eat barley. that means people shouldn't eat barley." -elisa
"i'm sure all kinds of animals eat mangoes when they can get ahold of them, but that's not going to stop me--them things are good!" -tyra
"mangoes don't look like barley." -elisa
(it's a notoriously bland stuff, just for the record, although i'm not convinced the barley, particularly its aesthetic, is to blame.)
Posted by ttobryan at 02:28 PM | Comments (2)
January 23, 2005
latinate
synonyms, for the most part, do not annoy me. we have them for several reasons: because english has acquired words with similar meanings from multiple languages, or because words initially meaning different things have been used, metaphorically or otherwise, in ways that have caused one or more of their meanings to slide together until they're predominantly interchangeable. we tend to like having lots of words. i'm especially fond of them when i'm writing, because i notice the rhythm of phrases and sentences, i notice when consonance and assonance is working and should be emphasized, or is detracting and ought to be avoided, and having other handy words that mean close-enough-to the same thing but sound different makes more play possible. when, as in this case, though, you have a set that are almost entirely homonymous, sharing the same meter, beginning-sound, ending-sound, emphasis, and most of their spelling, the purpose of maintaining all three of them begins to elude me.
this ramble sponsored by louise rosenblatt's use of "abnegate," my geeky obsession with & thoroughly naïve knowledge of linguistics & etymology, dictionary.com, &, of course, the letter "a."
(x-posted to lj)
Posted by ttobryan at 02:39 PM | Comments (0)