John Lovas Memorial Academic Weblog Award

I'm amazed. I am the recipient of this year's John Lovas Memorial Academic Weblog Award, given by Kairos. Thanks very much to the people at Kairos, and to the judges. I wish I could have been there to accept it in person.

Edited to add a link to a collection of links to most of my academic posts.

Battlestar Gacracktica

I'm finally on the train, and I love it, down to the last detail. I like the poignant theme song, the prominence of the women, the ethical, epistemological, and existential questions raised by the Cylons and the issue of artificial intelligence in general, the beautiful washed-out cinematography in some scenes, ALL OF IT. I'm almost through season 2 now.

Edited to add that I think I've died and gone to heaven:

Via Long Story; Short Pier.

Please update your address books

I've decided to take the plunge and switch everything over to Gmail. I'm having email forwarded to my new Gmail account, so I shouldn't lose any, but I'd appreciate it if everyone would contact me at clancy.ratliff at gmail dot com in the future. Matter of fact, it would be really cool if everyone reading this would email me just a quick ping so that Gmail will save your address in my list of contacts.

Over My Shoulder

It's a NotMeme from Rad Geek:

  1. Pick a quote of one or more paragraphs from something you’ve read, in print, over the course of the past week. (It should be something you’ve actually read, and not something that you’ve read a page of just in order to be able to post your favorite quote.)

  2. Avoid commentary above and beyond a couple sentences, more as context-setting or a sort of caption for the text than as a discussion.

  3. Quoting a passage doesn’t entail endorsement of what’s said in it. You may agree or you may not. Whether you do isn’t really the point of the exercise anyway.

Okay, you ready for this? It's from an article in JAC 25.2 titled "Postmodern Pluralism and the Retreat from Political Literacy," written by Donald Lazere.

Nearly three decades after [critical pedagogical ("decode" advertisements, the major media, etc.)] goals for English studies were formulated, while some segments of our profession have continued vigorously to pursue these goals (most prominently, advocates of critical pedagogy and, most recently, Rhetoricians for Peace), the general tendency has been to marginalize such goals, in composition courses and textbooks, our professional journals, conferences, scholarly books and research. In this article, I will try to trace the complex of developments in the profession that have converged toward this tendency, to analyze some of the excesses in these developments, and to advocate the re-affirmation of the earlier goals throughout the profession. In brief, these goals include the excessive or exclusive privileging of the production of students' personal writing (both expressive and argumentative) over analysis and criticism of public rhetoric; of non-academic over academic discourse; of "women's ways of knowing" over allegedly phallogocentric modes of cognition, reasoning, and discourse; of local and identity politics, communities, and cultures over cultural commonalities and unifying political causes. In spite of the unquestionable intrinsic value of all these diverse "literacy practices," some of their more doctrinaire advocates, whom I call "diverseologues," seem to me ingenuous in acting as though such practices in local communities either can operate outside the influence of national and international centers of power or can somehow counteract them, so that the latter are virtually ignored as a subject of critique and action. Thus, although most of the advocates of these theoretical lines consider themselves and their causes as politically liberal or progressive, their insistence on unlimited proliferation of localism and diversity -- coincident with an age of unprecedented concentration of economic ownership, political power, and social control by multinational corporations and the right wing in America -- has had profoundly conservative consequences in obstructing the kind of unified opposition that progressive constituencies need to counteract the right.

Tech Support Much Appreciated

I'm having a serious problem with Thunderbird. Context here.

Yes, nerds and geeks, I know I should have set up my email so that it's backed up on the server. Actually it doesn't look like any of the mail is lost; I just can't access it. My address book seems to be AWOL, though.

Textual Transgressions Online: Plagiarism and Fraud in Weblogs and Wikis

The following is our CCCC panel: myself, Rebecca Moore Howard, and Sandra Jamieson. Becky did a great job putting this together, so a public thank you is in order.

Session Description:

Contemporary life in the U.S. is awash in the discourse of transgressive textuality. Concerns about text owners' ability to profit from their property led to the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act of 1998, which extends copyright protection seventy years past the author's death. Many professional organizations include the subject of plagiarism in their statements on professional ethics; most colleges have established policies regarding plagiarism; and the Council of Writing Program Administrators has issued a Best Practices document addressed to college teachers, students, and administrators.

None of these addresses questions of plagiarism in weblogs and wikis. As Siva Vaidhyanathan has observed, plagiarism is a local rather than legal issue; it is adjudicated through institutional practices and policies. When one blogger plagiarizes from another—whether that plagiarism is unattributed quotation or wholesale appropriation of entire texts—there are no regulations to remediate the situation. Copyright infringement has occurred only if the appropriation deprives the originating blogger of income, which is seldom the case. When no colleges or professional organizations are involved, the appropriation falls under no one's plagiarism policies. This panel explores how web users define and deal with plagiarism in the absence of official policy and procedure; the implications of their definitions and responses; and the larger authorship issues raised by the Internet.

SPEAKER 1, "Negotiating and Regulating Plagiarism in Everyday Blogging Practices"
"You hv posted a very kewl blog. I have stolen a few things from It just to start with my own blog." This message, a curious kind of indirect citation, was sent to Speaker 1. The sender, who wishes to start a weblog and wants some startup material for it, copies and posts material from Speaker 1's weblog. However, s/he notifies the author shortly afterwards, along with a compliment and an expression of thanks. Speaker 1 discusses both this illustrative case and an argument about improper citation of material on the popular group weblog Kuro5hin*. In a comment thread at Kuro5hin, one poster publicly called out another for plagiarizing material from Wikipedia, and another poster made the argument that Kuro5hin "isn't exactly a formal publication." This is a moment in which notions of intellectual property and plagiarism are staunchly disagreed upon, and these cases demonstrate the complexity and variety of views of these concepts. Speaker 1 argues that these cases reveal a segment of the cultural milieu regarding the concept of plagiarism and that further exploration of plagiarism in nonacademic, everyday public discourse can enrich the existing body of classroom research about intellectual property, authorship, and plagiarism.

Friday Random Ten: I'm actually not embarrassed by any of these!

1. Heavy D -- Now That We've Found Love
2. Dire Straits -- Walk of Life
3. 99 Luft Problems -- Jay-Z and Nena (mashup)
4. California Love -- 2pac
5. I Get a Kick Out of You -- Dinah Washington and Cole Porter
6. Tennessee Flat Top Box -- Rosanne Cash
7. Strip -- Adam Ant
8. Devil May Care -- Diana Krall
9. Valse de Opelousas -- Geno Delafose
10. You've Been a Good Ole Wagon -- Bessie Smith

Two mighty fine reads

Oso Raro's got an excellent reflection/tribute post about Invisible Adjunct. He even refers to this old thing, a seminar paper I wrote back in the day.

Norbizness is asking us to "summarize the last five years of the Bush Administration and the nation's experiment with all GOP governance in one Simpsons quote or exchange." He ended up opening it up to lines or exchanges from Aqua Teen, Futurama, and other shows too.

Make that three mighty fine reads: I was just thinking about this oldie from Joanna: Sabbatackle! I know the grading is over for most of y'all, but the post still cracks me up.

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