Blogs

Charlie has posted his prospectus, for anyone who's interested. The title is "'The Future Is Open' for Composition Studies: An Alternative Intellectual Property Model for the Digital Age." May it be the inauguration of a movement in scholarly publishing in Rhetoric and Composition.

I'm not going to tell how I became privy to this photograph from Iraq, just in case it's classified, but I can say that these things crawl into people's sleeping bags at night. Can you imagine?! Look, if you dare.

I rarely get involved with student government elections, but in this case I've got to show my support for Tom Zearley for student body president. He's a former student of mine, and I can tell you that he's extremely intelligent and a thoughtful, caring, hardworking university citizen. I know he would be an excellent leader. Good luck, Tom.

Update: Zearley won by a close margin.

Holy crap! I was just doing a little research for my dissertation (I'm interested in looking at blogs by mothers) and ended up at the site for the Hip Mama (a magazine, in case you didn't know). I hadn't been to the site in a while, and I'm pleasantly surprised that they are now running on Drupal. It looks like they aren't running version 4.4, though, since my hub username and password didn't work when I tried to login. They hope that the site will have more of a community feel now. 8)

Purrrr, that's a sexy title, isn't it? ;) Seriously, I'm finally posting one of today's struggles--getting through a chunk of The New Rhetoric is somewhat akin to hazing for me. Here's the question I chose:

“Only the existence of an argumentation that is
neither compelling nor arbitrary can give meaning
to human freedom, a state in which reasonable
choice can be exercised” (NR, 514).



Apply this binary between a theory that is “neither
compelling nor arbitrary” to the first section
assigned for Wednesday (115-42). Do Perelman
and Olbrechts-Tyteca show how the selection of
data is neither compelling nor arbitrary?

I don't know if my post measures up to Amy's or not, but it's my humble attempt:

In The New Rhetoric, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca identify a dilemma in contemporary thought: On the one hand is Cartesian logic--certain premises are rational, and one cannot deny them; if you are rational, you must accept such premises as true, and the alternative premises are automatically false and irrational. Such a logic allows no space for agency, choice, or freedom; you would be compelled to think and do certain things and not others. On the other hand is total disorder; nothing is rational, and everything is arbitrary. This may allow for choice, but it drains all choices of any meaning or value. They seek another way to think about reason and truth and find it in their theory of argumentation, which can yield "the possibility of a human community in the sphere of action when this justification cannot be based on a reality of objective truth" (514). Theirs is a fluid system in which ambiguity is taken as a given, and meaning is not fixed or closed; instead, it is continually being negotiated and reinterpreted as new situations and contexts present themselves. In this brief essay, I will show that Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's thought on the selection of data, which emphasizes agreed-upon meaning, interpretation, and flexibility, is in keeping with their theory of argumentation, which allows for meaning and validity without a singular objective truth.

Today, among lots and lots of other things, I must write a 500-word essay for my Rhetorical Theory class on The New Rhetoric by Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca. I also have to do some work with the blog collection (for those of you who have been asking when the frell the collection is going live, we're aiming for mid-June). I should also be working on my final papers for my Rhetorical Theory class and my Women's Studies class, gah. For the former, which is intended to be a conference paper, I had been thinking about doing something applying the theory we've covered in class to blogging, but now that I'm all in a tizzy about taking the prelims this summer, I was thinking about doing something more like a prelim-style explication of Habermas and the public sphere. I figure a blog researcher ought to know her Habermas, since it's been linked to blogging by several people. For example, there's Invisible Adjunct's blogroll, and Andrew Ó Baoill has been doing some good work in this vein as well. I also need to be fine-tuning my CCCC proposal.

What I'd rather be doing: Knitting and exercising. I know it might be hard for you to believe, but for the past few weeks, I've been going to the gym nearly every day. I used to exercise all the time when I was in my late teens/early twenties, and I'm starting to get that kind of enjoyment out of it again. I do 30 minutes on the elliptical machine, and then I go to the weight room, where I do tricep presses, arm curls, the torso-twist machine that works your obliques, leg curls, leg extensions, and leg presses. Three sets, twelve reps each. It makes me feel great--lightweight and strong, like I'm made of titanium. :)

From Paul comes the news that Jesus C. Mezquia, the man who raped and killed Mia Zapata, was found guilty and is expected to serve between 22 and 30 years in prison. I hadn't heard of the case until I read Cunt some years ago, and I was saddened by this too-common story. What disturbs and angers me more than anything, though, is that okay, he is serving over 20 years in prison, and that's justice, but he raped and killed Zapata in July 1993, and he wasn't found and arrested for it until January 2003. I'm sure other women suffered at his hand in the nearly ten-year interim. How many? Is justice being served for them?

Sotto voce: "Hey! Download Johndan Johnson-Eilola's new book!"

Via Arete. (P.S. Arete, I hear ya--I would like to see some actual documents on how to deal with publishers and secure a more progressive copyright model too. Maybe when you get here in the Fall, you and I and Jeff and Logie can write some.)