Two Feet In | Writing and the Institution

I asked my students (my teachers) today what they've learned so far in this summer course on public sphere rhetoric. Some held their heads down -- because they've learned nothing? -- because they've not yet learned to speak up? -- because they don't believe in public rhetoric? -- because of their own insecurities? I don't know. Most of the responses below came from five students. Their authorities take no responsibility for communicating with the stakeholders  Authoritative texts too difficult to locate; language often inappropriately difficult for public to use  Lack of sufficient documentation and literature reflects authorities' apathy towards public engagement   Our own lack of knowledge about the power structures increases both our and their apathy  Public fails to recognize problems because we have been habituated to "learned helplessness"  Public notices but feel powerless because we've been taught we can't change anything  A...

Bb Minor Scale First, an update on reading. Among all the other rhetorical stuff I'm pushing through, I decided to throw my schedule to the wind and read Devon W. Carbado and Mitu Gulati's Acting White: Rethinking Race in 'Post-Racial' America . Table of Contents: Prologue : Acting out the racial double bind -- 1. Why act white? -- 2. Talking white -- 3. Acting like a black woman -- 4. Acting like a (white) woman -- 5. (Not) acting criminal -- 6. Acting diverse -- 7. Acting within the law -- 8. Acting white to help other blacks -- Epilogue : Acting beyond black and white. Am on chapter 2, and although the authors are not presenting any new material that I have read or spoken with blacks about before, their argument is concise and bold. This is a text I would love to use in a course to show how literature, rhetoric, writing, and all of material and behavioral culture in the US revolves so much around invisible assumptions of race. A brief response to Kevin'...

As the migrant crisis at the border worsens, federal and state authorities acknowledge the inevitable when hundreds and thousands of people are crammed into small, poorly ventilated rooms with minimal plumbing facilities, families and unaccompanied children coming from regions with poor health care in the first place:  The Department of Homeland Security says unaccompanied minors in Texas receive more ”advanced medical assessments” and care once they are moved from detention centers into   one of the state's   29 federal emergency shelters. At the shelters — which are managed by private companies or nonprofit organizations and financed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement — they  go through  a “well-child exam” and are given childhood vaccinations “to protect against communicable diseases.” They are also screened for tuberculosis and quarantined if they are diagnosed with a contagious disease or found t...

Years ago, the now-defunct Houston classical music station KLEF had an announcer who mentioned a listener request for "Forest Leaves" by Beethoven. Eventually the announcer realized the listener was referring to Für Elise, or  Bagatelle No. 25 in A minor. Jalen Jefferson notes For example, Für Elise written by Ludwig van Beethoven has the emphasis on has the emphasis on notes and rhythms that actually helps put the piece into perspective when heard. However, on paper it is merely a piece of writing. The quality of those punctuations; crescendos, decrescendos, adagio, adds to the reason that musicians under stead the concept of writing as well as the mission within different pieces. The similarities are so great that hearing the music while writing is merely the end product of the work of art. I began taking piano lessons when I was ten years old while living in the small town of Grenada Mississippi. Not many people in Grenada Mississippi listened to piano, much les...

Its 2:46 a.m. now and I've been awake since 1:07 a.m. and I'm not returning to sleep any time soon, I can tell. Its called racing thoughts and I've had the problem for years. For years I did nothing about it except stare at the ceiling, rolling over in the bed every fifteen minutes, with one thought, with another thought. When I was younger, I would pretend that I was the President of the United States and solve the problems of the world; somehow that fantasy trip would lure me away from the realities of my quotidian life far enough that I would fall asleep. Then the fantasy of saving the world stopped working; or perhaps my solutions to save the world weren't good enough and I over-analyzed my own limited domestic and foreign policies. Whatever the reason, I would lose hours and hours of sleep, every night. Usually the pattern was to crawl to bed around 10, then wake at 1, stay awake till 4 or 5, somehow fall asleep, but only to wake up with the alarm at 5:45 to ge...

Canaan McGee argues Failure births success. Pain develops pleasure. Inhale oxygen, exhale carbon dioxide. Living your life knowing you will die. The thought of my expanding maturation and contracting erosion reminds me of the heartbeat of nature—of existence. Isn’t this the one characteristic that all humans share—to be alive, to exist? Many claim that we wish to live happy, successful, meaningful lives, yet wait around stagnantly as if our dreams and desires will magically appear before us. Many of us put our faiths and beliefs into that which we do not understand—that which we do not know—and in this life time, will never know. Those who wish to become masters of their own destiny? take responsibility for their actions—they are content with admitting that they know what they know and they do not know what they do not know. (" Reflections of Failure ") When I was a wee Cub Scout, I entered by first Pinewood Derby. I would have been 8 years old. I don't remember much...

First, this: Amnesty International - Pens from Troublemakers.tv on Vimeo . That message -- that somehow the act of writing changes the world. I'm not wholly convinced, yet, though I suppose my students and colleagues believe that's what I think. I do, fully, believe that writing changes us, changes our world, changes the way we see the world, changes the way we make the world. But there are other writers, writers in the dark. Writers with law degrees and political appointments and writers who are the result of a sperm and egg of powerful males and females before them. They write too. Or sometimes they only speak, and someone they own writes for them. So my writing is against their writing; my words against their words; my letters against their letters; my comma against their comma. The belief that writing changes the world for the better -- that a signature, for example, will somehow validate the democratic experiment -- is ultimately naive. My signature cannot move ...

First, the breakdown of Gohmert's means of questioning: 1. Ask a question 2. Let the respondent give a partial response 3. Interrupt before the respondent completes a coherent answer, attempting to engage in civil discourse 4. Change the topic slightly, disparage the speaker's position through the straw man fallacy 5. Attempt a facade of legitimacy by brief back-tracking such as "I'm not judging ..." then proceeds to judge 6. Assume only he has the right to make universal definitions about issues that have been argued about for millenia, using some sophomoric authority which is not his, having never actually studied the issue in depth or through any academic institution 7. Repeatedly interrupt the respondent so that any inconsistencies in his own questioning are not easily exposed for the few minutes he has at the mike. 8. Take the whole episode back to his constituency, reframing the argument in terms of good vs evil, light vs dark, anti-Americ...

In my ("my" -- it's mine, all mine; no one else is responsible for this class except me; I own it; I possess their souls) 1302 course this term we're addressing the lack of public spheres in students' local areas -- ecological units as small as the street, seeing the public sphere as that necessary "rational, informed discourse" a la Habermas   constructed by private individuals to interact with the state. So, instead of writing letters to their congressional rep, we're concerned with why local public spheres have died, disappeared, or never appeared in the first place. The students choose their own "problems" to address and then investigate the stakeholders (the private) and the authorities responsible for the problem (the state; or in this case, the precinct, the county, the city, the school district, the college district, etc.). So, no authority is "higher" than a county elected/appointed official -- nothing at the state or f...

https://plus.google.com/u/0/112346994368946492346 Twitter @comstone On Saturday (after a minor rear-ending accident on that cursed freeway called Interstate 45; I always tell myself to avoid that trail of tears, but sometimes I don't listen to myself -- minor rear-end, other driver offered to pay for everything), I located the Leonel Castillo Community Center on South St in Houston where a few dozen folks seeking naturalization gathered for help with the monster of a form called N-400. N-400 has 21 pages of questions, some getting to the intensely personal (marriage, former marriage, children, etc.), some ludicrous (were you a member of the Nazi Party? -- no not neo-nazis, the  Nazi Party -- the one that got the headlines), and some just inane (have you been a habitual drunkard?). The whole form can be found here  and is worth reviewing. As a text, it's interesting. I realize that the Customs and Immigration Service  is obligated to keep old Nazis out of the US, b...