sampling project 4

As you head into the final project, and work on producing your strongest writing of the term, consider (as I have been suggesting throughout the term) some ideas from your peers. You can browse through all the final versions of the most recent project (digital wreading) published on the class glogs. I have pulled out a couple for you to begin sampling. As you work on your writing to-do list–adding to it as well as checking items off–this is one way to learn and develop: experiment with or, as the case may be, imitiate something you see in another essay that catches your eye.

A particlar aspect of Hannah’s project caught my eye: the way she experiments with a very lively introduction and returns to this frame (the metaphor of the playground) in her conclusion.

Nick’s project displays an effective use of the critical application, borrowing from Birkerts and Jackson. I noticed in particular how he manages to combine or weave (dare I say stitch?) that critical insight with his own argument and story.

Mary’s essay displays a strong statement of her thesis–her critical vision. I noticed that this explicit statement was also signalled in her subtitle–not a bad idea for a critical essay, kind of keeps you focused right away on her vision. She also effectively uses the keywords of her critical vision/thesis (metaphor and abstraction) throughout the essay.

editing workshop: looking AT/wordle

1. My emphasis on looking AT prose and not simply looking Through it (the traditional model) is informed, as I have mentioned, by a teacher, writer, critic named Richard Lanham. In his book Revising Prose, 5th edition, he offers this summary of how to swiftly assess and fix some typical problems. He calls it the ‘paramedic method’:
2. Circle the prepositions
3. Circle the ‘is’ forms.
4. Find the action.
5. Put this action in a simple (not compound) active verb. [for example: change “Birkerts is writing” to “Birkerts writes”
6. Start fast–no slow windups. [he calls them “blah blah is that” openings; for example: “The fact of the matter is that Birkerts…”
7. Read the passage aloud with emphasis and feeling; I suggest you do this at least once with the entire essay–or perhaps have it read and listen to it.
8. Write out each sentence on a blank screen and mark off its basic rhythmic units with a ‘/.’
9. Mark off sentence length with a ‘/.’ [can also do this by hitting return at end of each sentence, noticing sentence variety (or its absence).

Another way to use digital technology to look AT–really look at–our writing, the shape and vision of our writing: try Wordle. Copy your essay into the box: look for keywords that are important; look for words that are being used too much.

amniotic environment of impulses

Critical Application: Stitching Birkerts into our thinking and writing.

 

Birkerts concludes The Gutenberg Elegies focusing on an opposition between “the solitary self” and “the collective.” For Birkerts, a true self is solitary and a true sense of self exists only in solitude; this condition of selfhood is cultivated best through the pages and linear lines of books. Birkerts sets against this condition of solitary selfhood the “condition of connectedness” that he associates with what he terms “the ever-expanding electronic web.” “They are not only extensions of the senses,” he argues about the technological improvements of the electronic age in his “Coda,” “they are extensions of the senses that put us in touch with the extended senses of others.”  In other words, the problem is not so much that we are, in the age of overwhelming information, overloading our senses by extending their range and reach; more troubling for Birkerts, we are extending ourselves and our senses into and among the extended senses of others. “Others” is the real pejorative term here (224).

This is where I disagree most strongly with Birkerts’ understanding of the “amniotic environment of impulses,” to use his telling metaphor of the web. I think Birkerts aptly characterizes the effect of this environment of impulses. He gets the technology right; the uncited echo of Marshall McLuhan’s defintion of technology as the “extensions of man” brings that home. We have, as McLuhan shows, always used technology to extend our senses–long before the age of electronic communication. Birkerts could be more precise in recognizing that such “extensions” would include the technologies of writing and print and bookmaking that informs the books that thus inform the selfhood he fears we are loosing. Books are part of an earlier hive of information and communication network. But no matter; he elsewhere in this book admits that his beloved book is, of course, a form of technology–even if that view is kept to a minimum. Birkerts gets not the technology wrong nor its implications (the extension of senses); he misses the point in fearing the connection to others. That is to say, I am troubled most by the “condition of connectedness” that Birkerts, it seems, forbids the act of reading. Why is connectedness the problem and solitariness the goal of our selfhood or of the creativity of reading and writing that informs it? Why must we think of creation in solitude?

Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl, like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein before it, suggests that Birkerts’ problem is to see connection as the problem…  

My example of a critical application of Birkerts, stitching in, through paraphrase and direct quotation, a key idea from his conclusion to then set up the focus I will use to read Patchwork Girl: in effect, using Birkerts’ own terms and language (connectedness vs. solitariness) for my own thesis, though reversing his view, drawing distinctions.

It is worth noting that I have only recently discovered a thriving community of blogs out there that focus on books–passionate readers of books who blog about the books they are reading, want to read. A community of readers using the “condition of connectedness” of the web and blogging technology to extend their interest in book reading. What would Birkerts think? Here is a link to one such blog, So Many Books, which offers in its blogroll quite a list of book blogs. I look at this blog with interest in the social connections it makes between readers and books, through its “amniotic environment.” I am overwhelmed not by the electronic impulses, but by the reminder of the sheer number of books out there that we can, it seems, never catch up with and fully read. 

On the Virtues of Preexisting Material, by Rick Prelinger: A recent article that takes up the problem of originality in the digital age, and proposes that we think instead of collage and patchwork. He speaks of orphaned works of creationg and quilts: the echoes of Frankenstein and Patchwork Girl are noticeable.

Stitch/Pitch

With our compost workshop this time, you will pitch ideas to your writing partner; and with the feedback the partner provides, along with the process of talking through your initial ideas, you will begin to stitch (and re-stitch) the essay. 

Guidelines for feedback.

[1]What do you hear of the focus at this point–what is the writer interested in showing and arguing about Patchwork Girl? What seems to be a likely thesis? Report back what you hear.

 

 

[2]What is one place in Patchwork Girl that the writer will focus on: identify the specific ’space’ and the ideas the writer has right now for how s/he will focus on it? What are they noticing?

 

 

 

[3]What is a critical application/link that the writer has in mind? Identify a specific idea or citation from Hayles or Birkerts that the writer plans to make. Assess it: will it be an effective link to make? Is there another or a better place for them to go?

patchwork girl: story

Some responses from my most recent reading of Patchwork Girl.

Spending time in the “Story” section of the narrative. And that word points to the problem: this doesn’t read like a narrative; we don’t get a story to follow. Instead, we get the writing of a story (back to process, to the foregrounding of writing). And right away in this section, if we choose to see it, we get something of the wreading of a story. For example, notice the number of links from the space “birth.” Does it matter which path we take?

It does matter if the reader wants to stay within the section. Some links take me to spaces outside, such as “graveyard.” Others stay within. In other words, the links move away from what Birkerts calls “narrative thrust” and thrust us toward some sort of database: pieces that are here, but also elsewhere (where every elesewhere is also here, in computational space, as Hayles reminds us). A database of spaces that then require the reader to make some sense. Though not completely a database logic, since the links are provided by the author. We are just leave more to ourselves than we might like.

Does this sound familiar? Notice what we hear when we get to “plea” [here I return to the Story section/web, but this time aim to stay within it, and do this in using the storymap view to go space by space. The creature talking to Victor about his desire for him to create a being: so that he may become “linked to the chain of existence and events from which I am now excluded” and live in “communion” rather than in solitude. The creature has no story of his own (or in Jackson’s version, her own); communion comes only through communication (Birkerts, recall, opposes these two terms), through the workings of the database, the quilt. A story can be made; it won’t be found.

In “filthy work,” we hear again Shelley’s text echoed in Jackson’s creation; and in doing so, in linking the process of Victor into the process of this text–its hideousness–I think Shelley Jackson offers insight into the original novel: that Mary Shelley’s process of creation is also part of the story; hers, too, is a database struggling through the work of her hands toward a narrative.

“she”: the female monster speaks in a parenthetical, and illuminates the material metaphor of ‘linked to existence,” and extends the idea of the recombination at work (resemble, reassemble) to the word ‘web.’ By the way, a note on duration and slow reading. I agree with SB that these are important for critical reading and writing. I disagree, from my own experience, that such is excluded by reading in a networked environment. This section tonight is a small example. I am slowing down with this text: in part, because I have smaller spaces to work with; in part because of the lateral associations (a pejorative used by Birkerts) that Jackson makes with her words. In a word, the links move me sideways (if not thrust me forward); but the sideways move slows me down. Moving sideways, in this sense of association, can also–dare I say can better–cultivate understanding.

Isn’t this what Emerson means: all thinking is analogizing and it is the use of life to learn metonymy? Or try Jackson, from “Language, Voices”: “Everything I’m made of speaks up from the dead.” Think of the attention this gives to the langauge we read in this text; the language is the story.

A link to Jackson’s hypertext narrative (what seems to be more autobiographical) titled “The Body”

A link to Jackson’s website, Ineradicable Stain

An article on Web 2.0 storytelling; Patchwork Girl is more 1.0 (as an original hypertext, not built for the web); but it contains components that are key to what these authors call web 2.0: microcontent (chunks of information) and social collaboration. In both cases, one could argue that such storytelling resists traditional definitions of narrative. One might also argue that it takes narrative back to its oral roots.