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Via 43 Folders, via George: How to Hack your way out of Writer's Block.
I need to create a writing configuration on my computer that doesn't have a gradebooks spreadsheet, a web browser, or a link to Spider solitaire.
Just word processing and my documents . . .
Part of the course on the rhetoric of spectacle next semester is going to be a journal of spectacles, where students need to observe several different types of spectacle:
+++Political (e.g. the inauguration),
+++Pop-culture (e.g. the Super Bowl),
+++Protest (e.g. the inauguration's blue attendees),
+++Recorded (e.g. blockbuster film)
+++Permanent (the Washington Monument),
+++Art-making (live theatre) and
+++Everyday (that woman making a scene in the grocery store line)
These categories may shift a bibt, but you get the idea: There's overlap, and possibility for other ways to talk about these issues. The idea is that these entries will serve as the foundation for researchj projects that feature a full rhetorical analysis of a selected spectacle, a full research paper on the background, history and execution of the spectacle, and a proposal for a some sort of spectacle-featured event in response, revision, or in support of the original event.
So the kick is this. Instead of a standard hard-copy journal, I'd much prefer to do a course blog, where everyone posts and comments on what's going on in the world of the spectacular. It would also provide an opportunity for me to participate more visibly in their writing community.
So does anyone have any advice on setting up and maintaining a course blog such as this? Should I look for University space to house it or could we host it here among the herders?
Which Disney Princess are you?
Of course, I'm Belle, from Beauty and the Beast. Don't I look lovely???
There's some cultural studies work to be done here, for sure.
It's really just nice to come home to three copies of a journal that has your name printed in it, followed by your work.
And being able to take the "forthcoming" off the cv always prompts a little sigh of relief.
To wit:
Claycomb, Ryan. "Playing at Lives: Biography and Contemporary Feminist Drama." Modern Drama 47:3 (Fall 2004) 525-545.
I was in Austin, Texas this weekend, and had the thrilling opportunity so see some theatre by the Rude Mechanicals, a fabulous experimental/political theatre company there.
Cherrywood is the name of a neighborhood in Austin--as far as I can tell, a neighborhood populated by brown folks, and not the folks who tend to inhabit the Governor's manse or own Dell computers.
The play's description doesn't do it justice, but it is at once a call to riot, a dream of a collective utopia, and a vision of the possibility of werewolves, all at a kick-ass housewarming party.
What I'm most interested in, though, is the idea of collective utopia that the play imagines. The basic gist is that there's a cocktail party throw by weirdos. Someone gets shot, but that's incidental. anyway, people get offered a chance at lycanthropy, and with it comes not only a certain invincibility (and a disdain for Abba) but also a chance to wish things into reality, including the option to not be a werewolf (I think).
Interestingly, feminist theatre critic Jill Dolan is on the board of directors for the Rudes, and the correlation between this vision of a resitant utopian collective seems right in keeping with her work on utopian performatives. Utopian performatives are not precisely a model for what should happen on stage, but for how what happens on stage should feel like, its experiential element for the audience, one that resists hierarchy, encourages community, and in its very definition, imagines human interaction as it should exist, but not as it does in the world at large or has in the recent past.
What I like about this is that it suggests that theatre critics are not merely parasites who feed off of "real" artists. This is a case of theory inspiring praxis, which I suspect happens a lot, but it's nice to see it in action, and in such a damn funny play--one that imagines a radical alternative utopia just down the street from the current president's last known address.
Plus I almost got a grown man in very tight biker's shorts to sit on my lap and sing some Modern English. What could be better theatre than that?
So I'm watching Peter Jennings on ABC tonight (without cable, we make these decision based on things like reception quality), and I am struck by two contrasting features of this broadcast.
One, is that infotainment drives the production values in these sorts of things. Just as John Stewart reamed the Crossfire crew (filmed a block from my office) for privileging entertainment over political discourse, the broadcast here has the sorts of bells and whistles--fancy graphics, a map that Peter Jennings can color with all sorts of hypotheticals. This is politics as spectacle at its best.
And yet on the other hand, there are all sorts of little production gaffes--cutting to a commentator still in shadows, camera angles that aren't set up right, asking questions of correspondents who aren't expecting them, etc. To some degree, this is the necessary side effect of such an extended live broadcast, but I wonder if these under-produced moments don't add to the effect, heightening a sense of urgency, constructing an authenticity to the effect. These gaffes suggest that this is real, real-time, and connected to its audience. These features of liveness are where the newsmedia derives its image of credibility.
Poor production values as rhetorical spectacle? In this case, yep.