Baseball!

Posted on October 10, 2008 by insignificantwrangler@gmail.com

Watching the Red Sox play in the playoffs is comparable to sitting in a crock-pot for me: a slow, agonizing, gut wrenching cooking of my nerves. That will be intensified tonight with Dice-K on the mound. I know he doesn’t have the greatest stuff, so he has to mix up his pitch selection and location to keep hitters of guard. Still, he so pitches to the edges of the plate and throws ridiculously bad pitches when he’s ahead of the count that it pains me to watch. But watch I will.

I wanted to throw in a quick two-cents on the MVP races this year. I’m a fan of “money ball”; for those who don’t know, its a statistical approach to baseball that steers away from many traditional stats (particularly batting average and RBIs) in favor of a few other, more influential statistics (like OBP and SLUG) and some completely new stats (Runs Created and Value Over Replacement Player).

I bring these up because in the NL this year many people are calling Ryan Howard the MVP. Certainly, he led the league in home runs (important) and RBIs (almost meaningless). But his batting average is only .250, and this on-base percentage–an even more important stat–is a less impressive .333. That’s ridiculously low for a guy with his power since so many pitchers are going to refuse to throw him a single strike. Perhaps that’s why he struck out almost 200 times this season! Instead of Howard, I’ll go with Pujols (OPS: 1.114, Runs Created: 160, Total Bases: 342, at bats per HR: 14.2) over Howard (OPS: .842, Runs Created: 113, Total Bases: 331, at bats per HR: 12.7). Chipper Jones is a close second place. To me, the MVP stands for the one player who, if removed from a team, would leave their franchise worthless. I think you could make a very strong argument for CC Sabathia this year, because the Brewers would have never made the playoffs without him… maybe I just talked myself out of Pujols!

Slim picking in the AL this year–no one really had the monster year. Perhaps I’m a homer, but I’d give it to Pedroia for the Sox. With all the injuries the team had, he and Youk were the only two consistent players. And Ped stole 20 bases on top of 54 doubles– that’s getting yourself into scoring position. Oddly enough, most of the AL batting leaders in the important categories played for lousy teams this season, so Ped has a chance…

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When Economics Become Espionage

Posted on October 5, 2008 by insignificantwrangler@gmail.com

I just came across this story in /. on a new Chinese policy demanding that corporations importing electronics into China provide the government with all source code for their products. The story, of which I’ve heard nothing in our country, has become a point of contention in Japan–where companies such as Sony are worried that the Chinese government will pass sensitive information on to Chinese corporations (which, um, are owned and operated by the Chinese government).

In his recent book Source Code China: The New Global Hub of IT Technology, Cyrill Eltschinger argues that today’s companies are missing out on China as a potential resource (and cites a number of companies who are shifting their outsourcing from India to China). He gives a number of reasons for considering China, most of which would make someone interested in global human rights cringe. What he doesn’t comment on (at least on the website), is the dubious position the Chinese government holds regarding Western intellectual property laws. (I admit that I am relying on the website–I have not read the book. I use it as an example).

I am no expert on global relations. But to this outsider, it seems that China is practicing global economics as the USA and USSR practiced espionage during the Cold War. I might be paranoid. I might be disillusioned. But if I were Bill Gates, I wouldn’t be pushing Windows into China under these conditions.

The American economy is fragile–as we are now all aware. The decimation of the American dollar isn’t primarily tied to our inflated real estate market (the current crisis). The underlying problem is our massive trade deficit. Or so tells my stock broker every week as he laments our demise and warns of worse times. For those who don’t dabble in the market, let me assure you that its worse than you think. Here’s how to tell, the price of gold. Gold is an international standard, to see that gold prices have tripled means that, on a fundamental international level, our dollar is worth a third of what it once was. It doesn’t help (as some might assume), that other countries are experiencing a similar state. It means that a bigger market correction lies on the horizon, a global correction. It means things could get much, much worse.

In an era when our exports are tied almost exclusively to digital/intellectual products, we must protect this property as if it were our land.

Sometimes, in the middle of the day, I think of this shit and it makes me want to scream. I can’t wait for that next wave of meaningless presidential ads.

On a side note, the /. forum discussion is quite interesting and some of the best public dialogue I’ve seen in awhile. Sigh.

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New Course in Rhetorical Theory [Real]

Posted on October 4, 2008 by insignificantwrangler@gmail.com

First, let me say that Rowan is doing fine. She’s sort of rejecting the concept of sleep today (its 11:30 and still no nap–a very bad sign), but otherwise o.k.

In Marc news–official Marc C. Santos news–I’ve been asked to design an undergraduate course in Rhetorical Theory. I spend some time Googlin’ around the net to see what I could find, and basically saw two approaches. The first relied heavily on either Bizzell or Hawhee; these courses offered a pretty broad/historic survey. The second approach was heavily (heavily) steeped in 20th century pomo–but often looked more like a literary/cultural studies theory course than a rhetorical theory course. I’m going to try to split the difference (which means I bound to fail) and go for something like this:

  • Week One: Plato’s “Gorgias,” Republic VII (emphasis: the split between rhetoric and dialectic, rhetoric is too risky)
  • Week Two: Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Books I and II (emphasis on traditional appeals, relation to the audience, kairos)
  • Week Three: Cicero selections from De Oratore (emphasis: defense of rhetoric, response to Plato) and De Inventione (stasis)
  • Week Four: Lanham, “The Q Question,” Nussbaum intro to Cultivating Humanity, Jarrett intro to Rereading the Sophists
  • Week Five: Paper Week One
  • Week Five: Kenneth Burke selections from Permanence and Change (piety, perspective by incongruity); Blakesley’s Elements of Dramatism Chapter 1 (pentad)
  • Week Six: Kenneth Burke Rhetoric of Motives 17-65 (identification); “Definition of Man” essay; Corder’s “Argument as Emergence” (rhetoric as narratology, not persuasion)
  • Week Seven: Rhetoric (returns to?) Composition: Bitzer “Rhetorical Situation,” Ede and Lunsford “Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked,” something by either Toulmin or Lauer on invention (not sure yet–might do both).
  • Week Nine: Paper Week 2
  • Week Ten: Grassi, “Philosophy as Rhetoric”; Levinas “The Thinking of Being and the Question of the Other”; Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa”
  • Week Eleven: Derrida “At this very moment in this work here I am” (ethical relation between writer, audience, and knowledge) and Learning To Live Finally (pomo relation to audience)
  • Week Twelve: Ulmer, selection from Heuretics or Internet Invention; Davis, “Preambulatory Emmissions from Breaking Up [at] Totality
  • Week Thirteen: Rickert, “In the House of Doing: Rhetoric and the Kairos of Ambiance, “Edbauer “Unframing Models of Public Distribution: From Rhetorical Situation to Rhetorical Ecologies,” Hawk “Toward a Rhetoric of Network (Media) Culture: Notes on Polarities and Potentiality” (pomo complexification [sic] of r/c bedrock)
  • Paper Week 3
  • Week Fourteen: Rheingold selections from Smart Mobs, Porter, “The Chilling of Digital Information: Technical Communicators as Public Advocates”
  • Week Fifteen: Projects
  • Week Sixteen: Projects

I’ve taken the “paper weeks” from Rickert who took them from Frank who took them from ????: on a paper day, everyone in the class distributes a short paper and reads it to the class. I’m interested in this pedagogically in terms of delivery and kairos–two elements that are often a bit more muddled (Rickert might say) in traditional academic [for class] writing.

As far as the final project, I believe this will be on a per-student basis. I will allow traditional papers, disciplinary annotated bibliographies, wikipedia projects, multimedia projects (perhaps something out of Ulmer)–just about anything the students can offer.

I’ve still got to write up the course description, but I know I’ll be leaning toward providing students with a thorough understanding of the history of rhetoric and of the principle rhetorical concepts and techniques. Such historic understanding should help them to understand the fundamental positions underlying the work they do as technical writers. Familiarity with traditional rhetorical concepts and conventions should help all facets of their writing process, from invention to revision. I’ll have to clean this up and look at the other new course proposals in my department to get a sense of length/depth/sophistication. But I think I’ve got a legitimate course brewing here…

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New Course on Rhetorical Theory [Fake]

Posted on October 3, 2008 by insignificantwrangler@gmail.com

I usually leave the political comedy commentary up to others, but I had to share this. Via the Blogora (via 23/6):

Biden Debate Training

That was a direct quote.

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Oh my god oh my god oh my god oh my god oh my god oh my god

Posted on October 3, 2008 by insignificantwrangler@gmail.com

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Levinas and Weinberger

Posted on September 29, 2008 by insignificantwrangler@gmail.com

In jest, I offer my dissertation in two quotes. The other pages are just filler.

Levinas on difference as the foundation of the subject:

Reason makes human society possible; but a society whose members would be only reasons would vanish as a society. What could a being entirely rational speak of with another entirely rational being? Reason has no plural; how could numerous reasons be distinguished? (Totality and Infinity 119)

Dave Weinberger on how the digital “fractures” knowledge:

In conversation we think out loud together, trying to understand. The noise this makes is very different from the scratch of a philosopher’s ink on paper. Paper drives thought into our heads. The Web releases thoughts before they’re ready so we can work on them together. And in those conversations we hear multiple understandings of the world, for conversation thrives on difference. Traditionally, difference has been a sign that knowledge hasn’t been reached: There can be only one knowledge because the world is one way and not any other. But there will always be multiple conversations and thus multiple understandings. We’re never going to stop talking with one another, silenced by the single, unified, true, inescapable, and final knowledge of all that is.

I love Weinberger. He continues to point out that we’d be hard pressed to identify when the stable, unifying knowledge ever existed. But I do build off of his quote to warn that, when we work on the web, we aren’t necessarily “working” toward a singular understanding. The work we do is different–we’re working on the rhetorical bridge that keeps the conversation together, maintaining kairos, and shaping you in response to me (in response to you and in response to me, obligated to you, obligated to me).

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We’re Still Here…

Posted on September 28, 2008 by insignificantwrangler@gmail.com

I haven’t put anything up recently, but I wanted to let everyone know that Rowan is doing fine after the second round of chemo. She has become a big fan of the Wiggles. Somebody save us (for those who do not have kids, you just have no idea…).

My mom and dad came down to help us with this round. Dad has returned to Plymouth, but mom is still here. Meg and I got to go out for the first time in almost a year last night–good times. My mother also bought her first computer yesterday, so we’re teaching her some basics (and by basics, I mean what the space bar does. Seriously). Its exciting for her, and exciting for us to know that she can see Rowan over iChat every night if she wants to.

I watched the last half of the first debate the other night and will say this: I thought McCain did much better than I expected. I was disappointed in Barrack’s reversion into very strict partisan politics. His campaign has been so predicated on difference, change, and transcendence that I thought it really undermined his ethos. I want that ethos back (and not the guy forcing discussions of the environment into questions regarding Russian relations–boo, bad form). Don’t get me wrong, I’m still voting for him, but I hope he can improve his performance in debate 2 and 3 (which should target his strengths). If I’m worried about anything, its the silent racism underlying this election. The very fact that, the day after McCain stated “the fundamentals of our economy are strong” we suffered the second worse fiscal crisis in our nation’s history and the polls didn’t shift signifies that Barrack is up against something silent, hidden, and scary. Make sure you tell your students to vote… and tell them who to vote for…

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Derrida on Levinas

Posted on September 15, 2008 by insignificantwrangler@gmail.com

I’ve been enjoying Derrida’s performative essay “At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am… (He will have obligated [Il aura oblige]).” In the essay, Derrida explains that a reader can never be sure if the final clause of the title is part of the title or rather an opening epigraph. This indeterminacy, of the structural borders of an opening, reverberates through Derrida’s examination of the Levinasian subject, and of the complexities one such subject owes another for its being. Such complexity is exemplified by the content of the potential epigraph– “He will have obligated”–a meaningful yet meaningless fragment divorced from any context yet still highly contextual. Who is this he? Under what authority will he have obligated? What will he have obligated? Though definition cannot be assured, we can propose as responses: Both Levinas and the Other which speaks (through) him, the responsibility of Saying the law of Being/Said, mybeing, which in turn obligates a response. Sorry for all the language games–but I’m still working on an easier way of saying what needs to be said…

Anywho, I really like the following passage, in which Derrida explicates the “present” of Levinas’ “Here I am” (and, like everything else in L and D, presence is a double entendre: present as presence emerging in space time, and present as gift–how do we respond to a gift?). Derrida:

It is not the presumed signatory of the work, EL, who says: “Here I am,” me, presently. He cites a “Here I am,” he thematizes what it nonthematizable (to use this vocabulary, to which he has assigned a regular–and somewhat peculiar–conceptual function in his writings). But beyond the Song of Songs, or Poem of Poems, the quotation of whoever would say “Here I Am” has to mark out this extradition in which the responsibility for the other delivers me over to the other. No grammatical marking as such, no language or context will suffice to determine it. This present-citation, which, as a quotation, seems to erase the present event of any irreplaceable “here I am,” also comes to say that in “here I am” the I [le Moi] is no longer presented as a subject, present to itself, making itself present of itself (I-me): it [il] is declined before all declension, “in the accusative,” and it, il

—Il ou elle, he or she, if the interruption of the discourse is required. Isn’t it “she” in the Song of Songs? And who would “she” [elle] be? Does it matter? Is it EL? Emmanuel Levinas? God?

The passage ends abruptly, strategically signaling a desire to know the Other. But, such an interruption attempts to preserve Levinas’ injunction against reducing the alterity of other to a knowable same (in the form of the said). There’s two other things happening in the passage that drew me to it: first, Derrida’s highlighting that the subject emerges in the accusative: as the direct object of the verb of verbs (as D refers to it 152) “to be.” The subject is produced for the other / by the other in the movement of the verb to be. Second, that the first movement of the subject emerges “declined before declension.” I read this in light of the arguments surrounding Levinas and gender- a move toward a universality of the subject who first emerges as a movement irreducible to ontological distinctions. An odd move, given the highly emboddied nature of Levinas’ theory. It is quite possible that I am misinterpreting here.

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Trip to the Library

Posted on September 12, 2008 by insignificantwrangler@gmail.com

I went to find three books. One of which, Alex Reid’s The Two Virtuals, was lost. Of course, I walked out with a stack (listed in the order they appear on my shelf):

  • Derrida, Politics of Friendship
  • Derrida, Psyche / Inventions of the Other (one of the books I originally went to the lib for)
  • Moore, The Internet Weather: Balancing Continuous Change and Constant Truth
  • Mosco, The Digital Sublime
  • Sconce, Haunted Media
  • Poster, The Second Media Age
  • Purves, The Web of Text and the Web of God
  • O’Donnell, The Avatars of the Word
  • Eriksen, The Tyranny of the Moment
  • Keren, Blogosphere
  • Levy, CyberCulture
  • OCLC, Sharing, Privacy and Trust in Our Networked World
  • Galloway and Thacker, The Exploit: a Theory of Networks (the other book I initially needed)

When I first arrived at USF, MZ told me about this “to your desk” service the library offers: essentially, fill out a web form and someone will bring the book to your office and place it on your desk. This seemed like a great idea. But stumbling through the stacks this morning, breezing through introductions, flipping through bibliographies, I remembered how much I love rummaging in the stacks.

I don’t love carrying a pile of 13 books from the library to Cooper Hall, even if the building are right next to each other. Its Florida. Its hot. Its humid. And I will use that little service to help track down Reid’s book.

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For Your Viewing Pleasure

Posted on September 11, 2008 by insignificantwrangler@gmail.com

Rowan’s story will be featured on Inside Edition Friday night. Megan and I are fairly confident that we’re not made for TV, so we’re hoping to come out of this looking like semi-capable parents.

Here’s a link to find when the show will be on in your area.

UPDATE:

We just found out that Rowan’s segment will be on Monday’s Inside Edition, not Friday nights.

Carry on.

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