Category: Writing

Exuberance is Beauty

Jeff

Sometimes I miss the way I used to write. I’ve been thinking lately about presentations. I’d never taught public speaking or anything approaching it before, but it seems to be a major component of the way that the University of Minnesota likes to do things. I’m pretty used to presentations—my experience with them started years ago in literature seminars where you have to present the significant aspects of a poem or section of it to the rest of the class. That small venue (usually 7-10 people) soon grew to full classrooms when I started teaching. To “teach” presentation I mainly thought about what I like in speakers.

Two primary aspects came to mind. First, I hate it when people “read” in public unless they are reasonably dramatic writers. Note cards and such generally just create a really annoying “presentation” that would have better been delivered in print/electronic format. Dull cadences of dull thoughts bore me. Enthusiasm is the primary quality I like to see. Second, I hate it when people say the words but really don’t seem to have a clue what they mean. Most papers about “blogging” or electronic discourse are written by people who started a blog because it was trendy, wrote a handful of entries, and then decided they knew all about blogging. I keep reading and seeing presentations on “visual rhetoric” by people who don’t really know much about the background of the age-old war waged between text and image, who cite clichés without ever seeking their origin and then proceed to offer “their thoughts” as if they were making an important contribution. To speak about something, one really should have solid control over the subject of which they speak. There has to be some amount of rigor. So, the primary advice I tried to get across to my classes was simply this: have control over your subject and be enthusiastic.

In the post-semester depression, I begin to wonder if these components aren’t some sort of dialectical opposition. Rigor frequently turns into rigor mortis. If you have to justify everything you have to say carefully because you fear challenge, unless you are of a particularly agonistic bent, stifles enthusiasm. I find this sad. I was thinking of the weird sort of fearlessness I used to have as a writer, a sort of beautiful exuberance that I couldn’t push back. I had this quality, I think, because I reached a point in my life where I really had nothing else to lose. Now, I do—the fearlessness has been replaced by a more careful emphasis on precision of expression. Writing in public can do that to you, and I don’t know what the way out might be. I’m not sure fearlessness can be taught, or even maintained. It’s just a momentary feeling which seems impossible to sustain.

I can’t get one of Blake’s :”Proverbs of Hell” out of my head: Exuberance is beauty. A frivolous google search turned up Myla Kent’s visual take on the phrase. I like it.

One Down

Jeff3 Comments

I had to go ahead and turn in a design proposal pertaining to adapting rhetorical heuristics into three dimensional multi-user computer environments tonight. I should feel relieved that I’ve finally let the thing go, but ultimately I feel pretty badly about it. I’ve already presented the concept to the programmers last week. They seemed to like it—and more importantly, the technology is available to do it within their current alpha state.

The thing that makes me sad is that I only just now figured out why a 3D environment might be a good thing for writers; the answer came from completely unrelated research into Walter Benjamin. In “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” Benjamin argues that new media (in his example, film) would profit from paying attention to architecture.

Buildings, according to Benjamin, are apprehended in a state of distraction—they do not rely on steady concentration to make sense of what they are all about. Aside from an architectural critic who might ponder them for hours, normal people don’t. They navigate buildings through habit. Benjamin saw film, with its emphasis on shock and distraction, to be a possible instrument for changing people’s habits—learning not in spite of a lack of concentration, but because of it. Apprehension through distraction. Buildings do not require, and seldom reward, sustained concentration.

Art, in Benjamin’s view, is apprehended primarily through concentration. I would say the same of writing in general. The confusing 3D interface does not seem a useful tool for someone concentrating on producing coherent writing. However, the set of relationships revealed through the distracting projection of the same words or concepts into three-dimensional space might be pedagogically effective for visualizing new relationships in a state of distraction. Like games, a 3D writing interface might promote entirely new habits. A 2D writing interface, however, remains essential as a method of concentrating attention.

Of course, this thought was too ill-formed to include in my final submission. I doubt that the programmers would have cared that much about it anyway. But I do. Adorno and most of Benjamin’s compatriots wrote at length against his proposed “learning through distraction.” They felt any dilution of concentration was a bad thing. I’m not so sure.

Techne

Jeff1 Comment

For the past few weeks, I’ve been reading and thinking about definitions of techne. The term is used in various ways in discourse about rhetoric, and each writer’s definition of course centers on their particular needs. Most writers don’t go into any depth about their peculiar usages, and as a whole I’ve been pretty puzzled by it. Like logos, it’s a term whose luster has definitely worn off as it has become currency.

George Kennedy, in Classical Rhetoric &#038 its Christian and Secular Tradition and A New History of Classical Rhetoric, consistently uses techne to refer to the “handbook” tradition in rhetoric. Kennedy suggests that there were three strands of rhetorical inquiry—that of the techne logon, or handbook, sophistic rhetoric which was taught largely by example, and philosophical inquiry into rhetoric which stressed its relationship to dialectic.

However, nowhere does Kennedy even attempt to define the term beyond its ordinary relations with art, knack, or skill. The subtle point that seems to exist between the lines is that techne is implicated in “rules,” which follows from the Lain ratio, which in turn is built from the Greek logos. In the later New History, Kennedy seems to collapse the tripartite “inquiry” into two distinct strands of pedagogical practice—that of the techne of handbook writers compared to the techne of practitioners, the sophists, who taught by example alone. He claims that these two strands begin to weave together by the fourth century in the school of Isocrates.

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Surface Thoughts

Jeff6 Comments

There are a lot of things I’d like to comment about at greater length, but the topics these days are so plentiful that it becomes hard to focus. So this entry is merely a string of pearls (or swine-ish swipes) at a grab bag of stuff.

I thought about saying something when Collin and assorted other folks were discussing Wayne Booth’s The Rhetoric of Rhetoric, but I read the book and found almost nothing of use to me. The issue which seems to lurk behind the book, I think, is brought into deeper focus with the faux-dialogue between Booth and Peter Elbow in College English March 2005—“The Limits and Alternatives to Skepticism.” The yawn which might have been heard (if you were near me) when I read these essays was deafening. Easy and unfair summary: people move across a continuum of belief and doubt. Fostering belief is as important, if not more important that accentuating doubt. Though critical thinking has pulled the foundation out from under most forms of any concept of shared belief, shared beliefs (Elbow’s “believing game”) still exist and we should listen to them (Booth’s “listening rhetoric”).

Okay, pass the milk and cookies. Next please! Can rhetoricians get over this already? I feel like I’m trapped in kindergarten.

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Inspiration

Jeff

I had a thought—teaching writing is like teaching breathing. It’s sort of an arcane thing, but people do earn a living in both areas (if you include yoga instructors in the mix). Recommending freewriting is like suggesting that people breathe rapidly in a shallow fashion until they get dizzy and hyperventilate. I’m more of a fan of deep breathing exercises, myself—take something in and hold it until the oxygen in the stream is exhausted. But there are an endless number of permutations for breathing, as there are for writing. A person has to find their own pace.

But the most important advice is to do it regularly. It is important both to inhale (read) and exhale (write). A person need not be taught these things once they have the basic impulse to adjust to the task. However, this doesn’t suggest that either can’t be improved with exercise.

The impulse to breathe comes naturally. The impulse to write is socially, rather than biologically conditioned. I suppose there could be something labeled a “healthy atmosphere” for breathing—people don’t normally seek out foul odors to inhale. But it’s hard to make a case for what constitutes a “healthy odor.” I know people raised around stockyards who felt that the natural atmosphere should smell like fecal matter—they missed it when it was gone. I was struck during a visit years ago to my birthplace— Ojai, California,— that I started surrounded by the smell of oranges. But in Bakersfield, where I grew up, the primary smells were oil and dirt. All these smells seem “healthy” to me.

In writing, I do think that you inspirate what you read. That’s why I can’t seem to stray too far from poetry. It just seems healthier to me. Not everyone feels that way. But if you’re teaching breathing, you can’t really tell people what to breathe—you can only recommend some sweet smells for them to try out. Politics has always had a foul stench to me; but that’s just me I guess.