Gorgeously Stupid

How to Pick a Paper Topic

2006-08-23T12:41:00.000-05:00

I've been trying to come up with a capstone topic for the past few months or so. I was really stressing about it because I wanted it to be something related to my field of rhetoric and also fresh and interesting, maybe somehow related to technology or teaching. All I've done for the past few months is read different journal articles in my field, key different, relevant searches into Google and JSTOR, and just generally looking at stuff. Of course, during none of that did I actually come up with anything worthwhile.

Today, however, as I was sitting by the Xerox machine making numerous copies of something for work, I picked up an eWeek magazine and starting flipping through it. Lo and behold, I find a blurb about Indiana University's ongoing study of synthetic worlds. And then it just came to me: to study the rhetoric and communication styles employed inside these virtual worlds:

What are the characteristics of communication within a virtual world?

How do these characteristics differ from communication in the "real world"?

What, if any, changes does real world communication undergo when practiced by those who also take part in virtual worlds?

What implications might my findings have in a college writing classroom?

How might the college writing instructor benefit from employing a virtual world for students to write and peer edit within?
What, if any, effects does participating in a virtual world have on student writing ability and/or attitude toward writing?

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Ambiguity and Activation

2006-07-14T10:45:00.000-05:00

"You have to activate the mind because most people are asleep. When they look at something they don't see it. But when ambiguity is present, they try to figure it out. So the use of ambiguity is about moving the brain to action, making something happen, because the species is a problem-solving species."

--Milton Glaser

Glaser is an illustrator and designer, and has not only some really interesting work but essays regarding that work and philosophies behind his design. I'd recommend checking out his site.

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Prescription for disaster

2006-06-28T18:02:00.000-05:00

"We've arranged a civilization in which the most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces."
--Carl Sagan

Politics with the Handmaid

2006-06-25T13:52:00.000-05:00

Pg. 174:
“It was after the catastrophe, when they shot the president and machine-gunned the Congress and the army declared a state of emergency. They blamed it on the Islamic fanatics, at the time.
“Keep calm, they said on television. Everything is under control.
…
“That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn’t even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn’t even an enemy you could put your finger on.
…
“Things continued in that state of suspended animation for weeks, although some things did happen. Newspapers were censored and some were closed down, for security reasons they said. The roadblocks began to appear, and Identipasses. Everyone approved of that, since it was obvious you couldn’t be too careful.”

It should be easy to note the parallels between this passage and our own government today. 9/11 was our own catastrophe, the enemy Islamic fanatics. And when on television they tell you to keep calm, they know damn well it’s the opposite of what you’ll do. When they tell you to keep calm, you should know it’s the opposite of what they want you to do.

Give people something to be afraid of. Make it vague. Make it expansive. Make it all-inclusive. Make people suspicious of their friends and neighbors, of their brothers and sisters. Make people want “their” protection. “…since it was obvious you couldn’t be too careful,” she writes. People will give up their civil liberties for protection, and that has been a prevalent concern in post-9/11 America. Our money- and power-hungry government wants to clamp down on its people for its own ends, not to help or protect us but to further their own selfish mission toward money, power, and control of everything they can get their hands on. And no one says anything, no one does anything, because they deem it necessary to stay “protected.” When it comes down to it, the average American will prioritize his material possessions above his liberties, his “mental possessions.”

Our media can tell us anything, and we believe it. Our president can tell us anything, and we believe it. Our favorite sports and pop stars can tell us anything, and not only do we believe it, but we spend more time thinking about it and repeating it and perpetuating those ideas than we do about things that are important, that affect us, that affect our brothers, sisters, neighbors and friends. In this world of distraction, we pay so little attention to what’s going on in real life (and by that I mean life as the average man or woman knows it, life as refugees know it, life as the minimum wage worker knows it, life as minorities know it) that our government can (and does) get away with (literally) murder (genocide, if you really want to get specific) and not only do we not DO anything about it, most of us don’t even KNOW. “Oh, that’s just liberal hooey,” or “That’s just radical nonsense.”

But it’s not hooey or nonsense-- our government kills and controls people in other countries without repercussion; if we don’t wise up to the way things actually work and start paying attention, start acting like we care, start understanding and disseminating and doing, they will be able to do the same thing here and no one will be able to stop them. I’m not suggesting that one day in the future I’ll be stuck in red robes and a white cone hat, getting fucked by some other woman’s husband just to give them a baby. But I do worry that, slowly, our freedom of speech, our right to gather in peaceful protest, our right to, basically, live as we wish, are being whittled away. Slowly, so it’s not like ripping a bandaid off in one swipe - surely, we’d feel that. No, very slowly, so that we hardly notice, what with working 5 or 6 days a week, 8 to 10 to 12 hours per day, raising families on less than the living wage, paying bills, keeping up with the Joneses.

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Reconstruction and the memoir

2006-06-25T13:50:00.000-05:00

Chapter 23 - p. 134:
“This is a reconstruction. All of it is a reconstruction. It’s a reconstruction now, in my head, as I lie flat on my single bed rehearsing what I should or shouldn’t have said, what I should or shouldn’t have done, how I should have played it. If I ever get out of here ---
…
“When I get out of here, if I’m ever able to set this down, in any form, even in the form of one voice to another, it will be a reconstruction then too, at yet another remove. It’s impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because what you say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too many parts, sides, crosscurrents, nuances; too many gestures, which could mean this or that, too many shapes which can never be fully described, too many flavors, in the air or on the tongue, half-colors, too many.”

Atwood displays a lot of her thoughts on the writing process throughout the book, and that is one of the aspects of it that I believe make it such an important literary work. Her terribly insightful comments, woven into the text with such masterful prose, give a valuable peek into a writer’s mind. I also think that it says a lot about life. “This is a reconstruction,” she says. Well, one constantly reconstructs one’s life through memories, recollections of the past that get skewed and swayed and battered and frayed over the years.

I think that this is the part of writing, or storytelling, that is so fascinating to the story teller, and also the greatest challenge, especially for the writer of nonfiction. Memory itself is a reconstruction of events, and after so long everything gets skewed in one way or another. Maybe you downplay an embarrassment, or perhaps you glorify some otherwise relatively mundane or boring event. And if the way you remember it is wrong, does that make it less fundamentally true? One’s memories dictate how one feels about a certain event, how that event affects one in the present time. What affects you more? The absolute truth, or the way you remember it? And does that justify presenting a false truth to others under the guise of “art” ?

Perhaps these truths are not “false,” per se, but, rather, relative truths. Absolute vs. relative. What really happened vs. what you believe happened. How others saw it vs. how you see it. What means more to you? What affects you fundamentally? Which truth rests in your heart? Which truth changes your soul? I believe that to be the relative truth. Yet as someone who puts so much stock in reason, logic, and science, it is hard to put any fallible mental activity above the absolute truth in importance.

And sometimes it comes down to story vs. teller: this is the personification of the battle, if you will, between the absolute and relative truths. What makes a story a story without the human element? The fallible mind?

The whole process of writing creative nonfiction revolves around finding a balance between the two truths, finding a balance that you as a writer can feel good about.

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The stories we tell

2006-06-23T11:27:00.000-05:00

I just came across this post today, although it's an old one, from January of 2004, and it really struck me with some things I think everyone should think about. Pollard makes some really good points about today's cultural rhetoric and why it is debasing us as individuals and as a society. He goes on to make suggestions as to how this cultural rhetoric should change, and how our lives would then tell a different story. The things he says are much in line with a lot of the ideas of my favorite author and storyteller, Daniel Quinn (if you haven't, read Ishmael and After Dachau).

Things have to change.

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XML

2006-06-19T12:41:00.000-05:00

I've come to realize, as of late, that to succeed in my desired niche field of document production and/or in academia of any kind, I'm going to need to increase my knowledge of and aptitute with technology. After looking through a number of descriptions of jobs I'd like to have, one thing that keeps coming up is XML, so I'm on the lookout for XML resources and such so I can learn about it and maybe even teach myself some of the basics.

I found this article on XML from IBM, entitled "Technical context and cultural consequences of XML" - very interesting and informative, with links to more resources.

And here's another good one with more resources and tutorials, etc.

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As it rises - the death toll in Iraq

2006-06-16T08:53:00.000-05:00

According to an article in BBC World news, the US is going to investigate the deaths of a couple Iraqi prisoners.

This made me chuckle. Very few investigations launched by our government ever actually result in any kind of redress for, or even acknowledgement of, wrongdoing. It seems as if these "investigations" are just carried out for show. I mean, seriously, when was the last time any important figure in our government, or even an unimportant one, was punished for any type of crime? No, really-- I'm asking... On the other hand, I'm sure they wouldn't hesitate to make an example of a couple of mere soldiers

Another reason I find this laughable is because no one ever even thought to investigate the numerous civilian deaths occuring in Iraq. No, our government doesn't do body counts. There is, however, an organization that is counting the bodies, through news reports, and posting these counts on the 'net: Iraq Body Count.

This Web site reports that the minimum number of civilians killed as a result of warfare in Iraq, as of today, is over 38,000. Unfortunately, it seems the people we're over there to "help," to "save from an oppressive regime," are the ones dying.

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What one can see from here...

2006-06-16T08:50:00.000-05:00

The International Space Station, as seen from here on Earth:

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space

Freedom and Names

2006-06-14T22:05:00.000-05:00

"There is more than one kind of freedom... Freedom to and freedom from." (24)
--The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood

I just began reading this book tonight, about three hours ago, and I haven't been able to put it down, except right now to force myself to make some notes about it. I'm surprised this wasn't on the reading list for my Women's Voices class-- I think it should have been. The issues of freedom and power and choice that come up are so strong.

There are many ideas of freedom, many interpretations. They vary from person to person, from state to state, from ruler to ruler. Freedom is different to women and to men, even in our "modern" and "civilized" society, but even more so in The Handmaid's Tale. The piece I've quoted above says a lot about how women are forced to view freedom in that particular setting. While before so many strictures were imposed upon them they were free to do things, they are now only free from atrocities that happen in a world in which women are free to do such things as expose their flesh, be individuals, make themselves attractive, acquire knowledge.

Who knew it could be such a freedom to hear the catcalls and the whistles of horny men, to feel the stares? But without that... and even lesser "evils," such as touching the body of a man you loved, putting your mouth against his, choosing him, your actions, your interactions... without that, how is a woman a woman at all? She becomes nothing but a black hole, a deep cunt... nothing more than a means to an end.

"I wait. I compose myself. My self is a thing I must now compose, as one composes a speech. What I must present is a made thing, not something born." (66)

So she loses her sense of self. Or, rather, self goes from something empowering and individual to a mere product, a product of her desire for self-sustainment, to keep her alive. She is an actress. She has lost all sense of displaying herself as it was, or perhaps still is, deep inside her; she now can only display her self, this thing she has created using the mold of her flesh and her bones, the ones she has been assigned but that are no more hers than is anything else in her life now.

No freedom. No choice. Or, as she would say, "very little choice."

The freedoms we take for granted every day. The right to wear clothing of our choice. Clothing is a very important issue when it comes to freedom and choice. The right to read. The right to write. The right to express oneself and one's ideas and one's dreams. The right to choose a partner. The right to create life through a chosen partnership, or to dispel that life if deemed appropriate (and yes, I am pro-choice). The right to a name.

Her name is taken from her, and replaced by Offred. Every woman is given a new name, of + man's name, to represent her belonging to him. She no longer possesses herself. He possesses her. In this way, names are very important. Names indicate ownership, power, control. She no longer has the name bestowed upon her by her mother - she has instead been given a name by a man. He has in essence taken the power and control over her which her mother once had, when she was a mere baby. He keeps that power, that control. He does what he wants with it.

It is easy to forget, in the mundane world that our lives might be, that we still have freedom, we still have choice, we still control our own bodies. There are people in the world that want to take that away, that want to blame us for the weakness of man's flesh. But women are not to blame for this, and we cannot be made to feel as if we are. We must remember our individual selves, our strength, our power that comes from within ourselves and from our mothers, sisters, grandmothers... But we must also be aware that it can be stripped away, and not become so comfortable or so ignorant in the daily ins and outs of life that we forget to hold on to the most important aspect of it: freedom of choice.

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