Blogs

A couple of friends and I are putting together a panel on technology and new models of authorship and intellectual property for Computers and Writing 2005. The deadline is October 28, but one person on the panel emailed us suggesting we get started with the panel and added, "I know Clancy likes to get started early." :D This is my reputation now? All because I'm paranoid that my proposals for CCCC won't get accepted, so I always try to goad people into getting a draft ready by the coaching deadline? Okay, I guess I do like to get an early start. Here's the nascent idea -- a feminist analysis of weblog authorship -- which has been floating around in my mind off-and-on for a few months now. Because of said nascence, I'll do much meandering before I get to the point, if I even have one yet.

In "Rhetoric, feminism, and the politics of textual ownership," Andrea Lunsford critiques the solitary, originary, proprietary model of authorship and warns readers of the implications of the appropriation of authorship by corporate entities such as Disney and Microsoft (for a preliminary exploration of these ideas, see her 1997 keynote at Feminisms and Rhetorics). The article first appeared in College English in 1999, and much of it is a review of debates within postmodern theory about authorship and recent changes in U.S. copyright legislation. Postmodern/poststructuralist and feminist theorists, most notably Barthes and Foucault, have de-reified the Authorial Genius, showing him to be an historical construction and yielding two significant insights:

1. Authors do not exist outside a social and historical context; social and material conditions enable and constrain authorship. "Men of letters" are, historically speaking, usually men, usually white, and usually economically privileged enough to afford the leisure time it takes to write.
2. A text is not the product of a sole author. As Barthes writes, "a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation." The act of composition is exposed as a weaving together of other texts the writer has read and voices he or she has heard in conversation.

Lunsford juxtaposes these theoretical claims with large-scale efforts on the part of corporations to assume the role of author and hyperprotect content, e.g. Mickey Mouse and the Windows source code, and she rightly insists that in practice, the author is alive and well, so well that fair use (including for educational purposes) and the sharing of knowledge are threatened. This review is intended as a wake-up call for scholars in rhetoric and composition; five years ago, these issues were not discussed as often as they are now. (I'd still argue that intellectual property debates aren't as high a priority as they should be on the discipline's scholarly agenda; what do others think? Colleagues sometimes say to me, "I still don't understand why I should care about intellectual property." How can the stakes be better communicated? Does one have to have a direct encounter with "permission culture" before he or she fully understands?)

I just have to say, eight minutes into the debates, and people who are playing the Debate Drinking Game must already be plastered.

UPDATE: Bush keeps saying that if Iraq is free, the United States and the rest of the world will be a safer place. I'm not trying to say some places wouldn't be safer (take Kuwait for example), and I'm certainly not saying I don't think Iraq should be free, but still, I wish Bush would be specific and flesh out that cause/effect relationship. :?

ANOTHER UPDATE: See (and vote in) the MSNBC poll on who performed better in the debates. Now back to the "Truth Squad." Oh, and see the CNN poll results.

Some of you might have already seen it, but in case not, here's the course weblog for my Rhetoric 1101 class this semester. As you can see, it's a pretty free-form, open writing space. I distribute weekly topics, but the students don't necessarily have to write on those topics if they want to raise other issues instead. If you'd like to comment there, please don't hesitate to do so.

Tonight I'm going to be attending a "canciversary" party for a friend of mine who is celebrating the anniversary of the day she went into remission. She didn't get to go to her 1994 prom because she was in the hospital, so that's the theme for the evening. When I got my invitation, I called my mom to see if she'd mail me my red taffeta prom dress. I wouldn't be that embarrassed to wear it; it's a simple, floor-length dress with a slim skirt and a halter neckline -- imagine this dress in red. My mom looked around but couldn't find it anywhere. She did, however, find two other formal gowns I wore to the little debutante-ball style dances my high school sorority had. She said, "I found a purple one and a black one." I knew exactly which ones she was talking about and, amused, I said, "Okay, that works! Go ahead and send 'em." They both fit, so I think I'm going to go for the ugly, tacky gusto and wear the purple one. In about an hour, I'm going to start getting ready for the party, and, at the request of friends I've talked to on the phone today, I'm going to do an "Ugly Purple Dress, Then and Now" photo comparison. For now, the "Then" (I warn you, it's uuuugly -- oh, and it's from 1991, not 1994, but it's the thought that counts, right?). I hid the face of my date not because I'm ashamed, but because I want to protect his privacy.

UPDATE: Leaving for the party now...behold, purple dress 04. I'll see if I can get a better picture, full-length, at the party. :)

SECOND UPDATE: Oh yes...excellent pictures. See below:

Via Slow Learner: The Death Clock predicts your date of death. How morbid, and I can't believe I actually entered my information to find out my date of death. I don't know if I'm necessarily optimistic or not, but if for "Mode" I answer "Normal," I get Monday, December 15, 2053 as my date of death. I tried again with "Optimistic" as the mode, and I got Saturday, January 13, 2074. That puts me at dying between ages 83 and 100...not bad. :)

This post at Laurie's combined with my penchant for 80s young adult fiction got me thinking...what with all the vintage-mania going on, t-shirts with images of Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield like this:

Because you were probably wondering what it is I do when I piddle around the apartment.

Cooking: Lately I've been into steaming vegetables; usually I sauté them, but then I remembered I have a steaming basket and thought, oh yeah, there's another way to cook vegetables. Last night I steamed spinach and cherry tomatoes, then doused them with some balsamic vinegar and olive oil. Yum. Then tonight I steamed some broccoli to accompany my pork chops. Also, I've discovered that a banana covered in provençal fig jam is a delicious snack; I think I'll have one while I watch The Apprentice.

Knitting: I'm working on five projects right now, including a baby blanket in primary colors, a cushion in hot pink acrylic/wool blend yarn, K2 P2 rib, an forest green oven mitt which I'll be felting, a red and orange merino wool Windy City scarf with matching hat, and a purse I'm quite excited about. I was trying to figure out what to do with that ballet yarn, and then the other day I was going through my sock drawer getting rid of those threadbare-at-the-heels socks. Remember those trenchcoat-length cardigan sweaters that were in style a few years ago? The sash from one of those was in the drawer, and I was going to throw it away but thought, wait, I could probably use this thing in a knitting project. I think it looks nice with the ballet yarn:

So it's going to be the purse strap.

Via Crooked Timber, an article in today's Guardian about academic blogging: It's basically an explication of the academic blogging phenomenon, but Jim McClellan also addresses the concern of some academics that others might steal their ideas. :evil: :P Sorry, I tend to get a little flippant in the face of this postulate because Torill and Jill debunked it years ago:

The current reward system depends on certain formulas of academic
publishing that encourage exclusivity and the fear of being robbed of
thoughts and ideas. Since the real currency in the trade of academia is
originality of thought and imaginative development of theories, there is
more to lose than to gain in exposing your own ideas too early. The
danger of having thoughts, ideas or questions copied before they have
been published is not just a matter of some petty game between jealous
professors with too little time on their hands, it's a very real matter of
being robbed of the currency which measures academic success.

From this point of view a weblog that reveals the thoughts, arguments
and questions of the scholar continuously during the process of
research and long before academically accepted publication in print
seems like a waste of perfectly good imagination and theory development, an invitation to having your ideas looted. On the other hand,
published and archived in the World Wide Web, the same ideas and
thoughts are in fact published and as such better protected than if they were
for instance given away over a cup of coffee, randomly at a conference.

Into the Blogosphere gets a mention, which I'm happy about; we (the editors) were interviewed for this story a while back, but McClellan didn't end up using any of the interview. He took the story in a different direction, and that's cool, I'm not complaining. I do want to try to find the interview, which is floating around on my hard drive or one of my flash drives somewhere, and post it here for those who might be interested.