Notes on Hedging and Introversion

A friend recently pointed me (via Facebook, of course) to a Carl King blog in which he outlines ten "myths about introverts." He bases these on his reading of the book The Introvert Advantage by Marti Olson Laney and on his own experiences. As an introvert myself, the list struck a chord with me, but I was especially interested in his third myth. He says:

Myth #3 – Introverts are rude.
Introverts often don’t see a reason for beating around the bush with social pleasantries. They want everyone to just be real and honest. Unfortunately, this is not acceptable in most settings, so Introverts can feel a lot of pressure to fit in, which they find exhausting.

This one stands out to me because I am often thought of as rude, aloof, and any number of other horrible things. It's something about myself that I have hated and that I have made concerted efforts to change. But the fact is, I don't ever even know when I'm doing something that others think is rude. And I am, in fact, far from being aloof; I am actually extremely emotional, though I am completely out of my element when trying to figure out how to express emotion in a socially acceptable way (so, I simply don't).

With regard to my accidental rudeness, I recently had an experience that I found enlightening, as I figured out what my misstep was, and why one particular person thought I was being rude, when I in fact, had no intention of being so.

Recently, while on a call, a coworker with whom I rarely work approached and asked "do you need anything?" I was extremely busy: I was on the phone with my our crime information unit, I was having an IM conversation with my dispatcher, and I was talking on the radio to our helicopter all at the same time. None of this, however, was anything she could do for me, so I said simply "no." She said something I didn't really hear in a tone of voice that was clearly perturbed and she drove away quickly. She then sent me a message that said "sorry I asked."

She apparently found my very terse answer to be rude. Of course, I had not intended to be rude. I was very busy, so I answered her question as directly and as quickly as I could. As a student of rhetoric, I was instantly interested in why my intention has miscarried. The fact is, and this is something I had not thought much about until this incident, there is an awful lot of hedging in our day to day communication.

"Hedging" is the process through which we qualify our language in order to soften the points we make, or the things we say. Our modern American culture seems to prize hedging a great deal. We are expected to use softening expressions like, "in my opinion," "I think," "but thank you anyway," and so on. It's a linguistic cue that is designed to be somewhat self-effacing ("this is what I believe, but it's only my opinion"), and thus exalting the other interlocutor.

Of course, these are dense, unspoken (and arbitrary) conventions designed to provide communicative context, especially with regard to how the speaker positions himself relative to the listener. In other words, by softening one's language, one in essence shows that he is not aggressive. Hedging is the linguistic equivalent of a dog's refusal to look her owner in the eye, in order to show that she is passive. And in a culture that presumes everyone to be equal, it's very important to us that we show through these cues that we are not trying to be the big dog.

It is this sort of dense communicative rule that is often lost on introverted folks like me. Perhaps this is because we tend to be fiercely interior and thus it does not occur to us that we will not be interpreted by our language alone, but also by these linguistic and contextual cues that we don't quite get--because we don't quite get other people.

Of course, while it has been a fun intellectual exercise for me to think about the importance of hedging, I don't expect that I'll start doing more of it. That is because I will continually fail to realize that I'm not doing it already.

Fathers, Sons, and the Badge: Just in Time for Father's Day

The truth is, though my close friends will already know this, I have very little in common with my father. He and my mother divorced when I was very young, my mother remarried, and I have basically been raised by my step-father, who I consider to be as legitimately titled as father as my "real" (my childhood term) dad. As a child, I spent weekends with him, as is the case in many divorced families, but as I got older and had more and more things going on, I saw less and less of my father. We are, therefore, very different in many ways.

But this never stopped me from idolizing my father any less than all sons do. So I was always impressed with my dad, the police officer, as a young boy. I was impressed with the uniform, with watching him work on his patrol car so he could go to work, and with the relatively mild stories he would bring home. I was in fact so impressed that I began "arresting" neighborhood kids. My dad tells a story about hearing a loud commotion in front of the house once, and coming outside to find that I had a row of young Hispanic kids "jacked up" against his take home car. It might not be surprise then that I would grow up to become an officer myself (the fact that my step-father is a firefighter also meant that I had my choice of hero jobs to follow. . .I chose the one I thought looked more fun).

Nearly eight years after becoming an officer myself, I sat with my father today on Father's Day, eating grilled brats and talking about the job. Of course, I've "talked shop" with my dad countless times since joining the department, but not until today did it occur to me how interesting an unique these conversations were.

I came to this today because my in-laws were over as well and, in the middle of my conversation with my father, I grew suddenly aware and concerned that they were totally left out of the conversation. I don't know if they felt that they were, and I'm sure that they must have found some of our stories at least entertaining. But the fact is, educated and open as my in-laws are, they could never be anything more than entertained outsiders in our conversation. Indeed, I forgot they were there entirely, and wasn't even thinking of them as an audience. I was too busy talking about the family business.

This made made me realize what a unique type of shared family experience these stories represent. Yet, as strange as this family dynamic must seem, it is one of the most often written about aspects of police families. Edward Conlon (a third-generation cop) writes about his conversations with his father, an FBI agent in his book, Blue Blood. Brian McDonald, author of My Father's Gun recounts watching his brother (also third generation) share stories with his father. The History Channel mini-series based on and named for his book references these conversations as well.

In the police family, all family gatherings become business lunches, group therapy sessions, water cooler talks, or any number of other things. Ultimately, though, these conversations represent an extraordinary and unique form of bonding. There are not very many sets of fathers and sons that work under the same incompetent structure, deal with the same types of "customers," and ultimately stare into the same abyss.

The police family is a rare type of family where father and son are also brothers--members of the same tight-knit fraternity. For me, my shared experiences with my father have given me much to talk about with a man who is otherwise hard to talk to, and with whom I might not have much to talk about. We've experienced the same kinds of fights, lonely midnight shifts, frustrations with a sometimes apathetic, sometimes critical public, we've experienced the same fears, and seen many of the same horrors.

This gives us a bond unique even among fathers and sons. Perhaps this bond, as well as the pride the job brings, is why so often police work becomes a family affair.

Bin Laden's Death and the Discursive Use of Scripture in Social Media

One of the interesting things about being both a Christian and an academic, particularly one whose interests lie in digital rhetoric, is getting to watch the interesting discursive practices of lay Christians as they navigate life. For this reason, the conversations in response to the death of Osama Bin Laden have been particularly interesting to me. So, here, in the midst of the moment, I'm dropping in to make some notes about this rhetorical event even as it unfolds.

Because social media sites allow such instantaneous, unreflective, and unrevised communication, it's a prime site for watching the ways in which people react to and discuss events, like the death of our current greatest enemy. For this reason, I've been watching facebook posts from my Christian (and a few former-Christian) friends.

I've seen three different threads running my friend's facebook posts. They are:

1) God does not delight in death, even of evil men, so celebrating Bin Laden's death is inappropriate (Ez 18:23, for example).

2) In this, I'm including variations on one theme: God is just and therefore it is right that the evil should die, and the emotions attached to retributive justice are human and natural and therefore cannot be judged (Psalm 137:8-9)

3) People shouldn't be using the scripture to make these arguments, since we must, by definition, argue these scriptures out of context.

I'll address the first two by critiquing the third. The view that we should not be using scripture to back our thinking on this issue seems to rely on a couple of assumptions. First, that the authors of the status updates falling into the first two categories intend to use scripture as evidence that their view point is the correct view. And, second, that they shouldn't do so.

This first assumption may very well be correct. Certainly, I've been watching a lot of arguments and implications that the author sees his or her view as the correct one and that others must get on board. The authors of the first category seem to be the bigger offenders in this regard. Some (by no means all, and probably not even most) of these authors wish to prove that those who rejoice in Bin Laden's death do not show the love of Jesus, and that rejoicing over death, even of a man as evil as Bin Laden, is therefore sinful. Implicit in such arguments is the suggestion that because I do have this kind of love, my Christianity is superior to your's. Certainly, I understand the critique of this type of argument. Such presentations of Christian thought make us look narrow, and completely out of touch with human experience/emotion.

Authors of the second category often seem instantly defensive, expecting or responding to the arguments of the first category. I can likewise understand the objection to this category. Such presentations of ourselves may make us seem unrepentant, showing a lack of understanding for how bad people become bad, and perhaps downright hypocritical (I'm supposed to love my enemies after all).

So I understand the objections to people using scripture to justify their own feelings on what is an extremely important national event. But I do not share it. This is because I question assumption number two.

One colleague of mine noted that this is evidence of why people ought not use the Bible as evidence in an argument. She says this from the perspective of a composition teacher in the Bible belt, where we are constantly trying to convince our students that there are very few academic arguments that benefit from citing scripture. That's just not the way academic writing works.

Indeed, the Bible is not written in such a way that it can work for arguments of scientific (social or natural) proof. Instead, the Bible is about the stuff of life. This is why I critique authors in category three. Writers in this category understand that the the Bible cannot be used to decide which side is right and thus they argue that it should not be.

I, however, think that this is exactly what scripture is for. Scripture is not helpful in arguing objective truth; it is, however, designed to help us navigate the subjective experience of human life.

The reason writers in both categories are able to find scripture that seems to back up their own feelings is because the Bible does in fact support both views. Jesus was the prince of peace, but he also came to bring division. As one friend of mine wrote "The Bible says not to get drunk. It also says God makes wine to make the heart glad. The Bible says God hates divorce and also says God divorced Israel. Go Figure." The Bible contains such contradictions (and they are contradictions) because life itself is contradictory. The Bible is complex because people are complex.

The purpose of these scriptures, then, is to help us make sense of and discuss the often contradictory emotions we experience in these events. My colleague mentioned to me that half the posts she saw used the Bible to support the idea that we should rejoice and the other half were used to support the idea that we shouldn't. My response was that this is because both were correct.

This is why I applaud the open conversations taking place on this issue. By discussing these events, and by struggling with our experiences and with how scripture relates to them, we gain a picture of the complexity of life and the complexity of God. Some in category three have expressed that these types of public debates are dangerous because they make Christians seem divided. But I have often though that the church's role in a post-modern culture ought to be to show the world that we too are complex and disintegrated subjects. That we too struggle with how we ought to feel and act. That there is room for other people to struggle with us.

We ought to embrace our own multiplicities and wrestle with them. In this way we, like Jacob, wrestle with God.

Radiohead and Samuel Beckett

In a paper I wrote during my MA, I argued that Samuel Beckett's writing career can be described as a process of deconstructing the theatre. Though I still have work to do to fully flesh out this claim (if I ever get around to it), Beckett's work suggests this to me because his work, especially toward the end of his career, becomes more and more minimalistic.

Through their repetitions, Beckett's early plays already subvert cherished theatrical conventions with regard to the plot model which requires rising action, climax, and falling action. Conflict is also a tricky concept in Beckett's plays. As his career progressed, however, he abandons more and more theatrical conventions. His plays get increasingly shorter and he begins to dissect his characters--rather literally.

In "Happy Days," Winnie is buried in a mound , without use of her legs. So body parts are disappearing in Beckett's plays. In "Not I," only a mouth is visible on an otherwise dark stage, and in "Breath" no character appears at all. There is only a stage covered in rubbish and the sound of breathing. At the end of his career, Beckett began writing radio plays in English, his characters finally completely disembodied and no longer physically present in the space of a theatre, existing only as sound waves.

Again, I'm not able to make the case fully that Beckett is trying to deconstruct the theatre in a linear and progressive way across his career. I'm not so sure the chronology of his plays allows this argument. But certainly his career trends this direction.

So this morning Radiohead's "The King of Limbs" hit stores, and I got to Best Buy thirty minutes after they opened to buy it (I still like CDs, or I could have bought it digitally on February 18th).

When I listened to it, I immediately thought of Samuel Beckett. It's perhaps a strange thing to compare a modernist playwright to a post-modern rock band. But I see Radiohead as doing to rock music what Beckett did to the theatre. As Radiohead moves forward in time, they are seemingly deconstructing rock music.

They began innocuously enough with their 1993 post-grunge "Pablo Honey" which some have taken to be a subversion of grunge music (using as evidence the eerie similarity between "My Iron Lung" and Nirvana's "Heart Shaped Box.")

Thom York has expressed dissatisfaction with that first album and their albums since have gotten progressively more ethereal and less musically unified. Their last two albums, "In Rainbows" and now "The King of Limbs," are particularly deconstructive. One blogger even calls "The King of Limbs" Radiohead's "least accessible album to date."

In both these albums, the music has become more and more electronic, increasing the level of mediation between audience and artist. The songs are also almost completely without hooks, making it easy to get lost in the music, rather than to sing along with the songs. Finally, it often seems that the melody (where one is recognizable) and the rhythm section are in two different meters, creating a disjointed feeling, as if one can never quite catch up.

The wonderful thing about Radiohead's dissection of music is that it questions the genre and indeed music theory in general. Radiohead seems to be asking just how important our Western notions of aesthetic actually are? Can music that doesn't conform to this aesthetic succeed, especially in a genre as flippant as Rock?

What Radiohead is doing is extremely interesting, artistic, and intelligent. I hyperbolically predict that, if Radiohead continues to make albums, their music will eventually consist only of screeches, feedback, and disembodied sounds. And I'm looking forward to buying these.

Memoirs of Spruill, a Plagiarist

In my composition classes, my students just read their rhetoric's chapters on plagiarism and how to avoid it. Of course, because of my own ideological perspectives, I have wanted to subvert common-sense, naturalized views of plagiarism and copyright as moral/ethical issues. So, my students are also researching the history of copyright and blogging about their thoughts.

Teaching these chapters and thinking about the issues from the perspective of an academic interested in new literacies (where issues of what constitutes plagiarism and copyright infringement are considered problematic) has made me recall the one time in my life that I myself plagiarized. What follows is my own confession along with a self-analysis of why I plagiarized.

As a sophomore at Moore High School, I was assigned a term paper in my Biology class. The way the assignment worked was as follows: the teacher had a list of possible topics which students were to sign up for, so that there were never more than one person talking about the same topic (probably to combat plagiarism, since students couldn't copy off of other students). I was one of the last students to get a chance to sign up, so I got stuck with the topic of Prostatitis.

The night before the assignment was due, I realized that I hadn't done a bit of research or writing. So, I sat down with an old medical reference book that my mother had bought second hand when I was a baby and she wanted to stop calling the pediatrician for everything. I performed the classical plagiarist move of copying the book but changing words that I didn't know so that they didn't seem out of place.

I was (and still am) the kind of kid who was scared to death to do anything bad, because I was always convinced that I would get caught. So when I got the paper back with the comment, "you should write for medical journals," I just knew that the teacher knew and that his response was a subtle way of saying "I know where you got this." But he didn't, and I got an A, both on the paper and in the class.

Now, years later, I am a writing teacher. So it's valuable to look back at my own crime and analyze why I did it. After all, I was not a lazy student. I was a very good student, which is actually probably at least partially what allowed me to get away with it. So, why do good students plagiarize? Obviously, I do not claim that my experience is representative, but here is what led me to commit plagiarism:

1) The topic. I was a good student, who loved to read. But this topic was a total dud. By the time I was able to pick a topic, I could only pick a topic in which I was not at all interested and a topic that was actually kind of creepy (high school boys do not want to think about or talk about inflammation of the prostate). This problem led to problem two.

2) I waited too long. Only hours before I was to turn the paper in, I still had not started. Many teachers agree that it is often the good students who plagiarize. This is a product of last minute pressure by students who are afraid of failing an assignment that they waited until the last minute to begin. So there is pressure on good students to perform well. For this reason, a good student will not want to turn in aomw have baked crap. And, for me, this problem was exacerbated by the fact that the assignment was a dud. I am and was a meticulous student, but and I am and was also a bit ADD. So, the fact that the assignment was not the least bit interesting to me made it awfully easy for me to neglect.

So what, then, are the implications of my story? How do we see to it that our assignments discourage, rather than encourage plagiarism? To finish off here, I will address what we can do to write assignments that will help to our students avoid the pitfalls that I fell into.

First, design assignment topics that tow the line between too open and too narrow. Allowing a students to simply write about anything may keep a student from straying beyond his comfort zone, and would make it easier for a student to hand in papers from the fraternity file. So an assignment should be specific enough and closed enough that the student must write his own material in order to fulfill the assignment.

But there must also be enough wiggle room in the assignment that the student does have at least some input into the topic. Freedom within boundaries is the goal. This allows the student to make the assignment her own in such a way that it will hold her interest, at least enough to get the assignment done.

Secondly, revision should be built into the assignment sequence. Though, by and large, we all except the importance of revision, a number of classes still do incorporate revision into the class. A teacher should be viewing, and commenting on multiple drafts of each paper. Doing so allows the teacher to watch the process of the student, which makes last minute plagiarism much more difficult. It also provides milestones for the student so that the student must work on the paper bit by bit, draft by draft. This negates the possibility that the student is waiting until the last second to begin a paper.

I don't intend to argue that these techniques will solve the plagiarism problem. Though these are cornerstones of the writing process in my classes, I still do face about one plagiarism case a semester. But these do a long way toward solving the problems that cause otherwise conscientious students to plagiarize.

Public Broadcasting, Democracy, and Market Economy

Since Plato, our belief has been that a well ordered democracy requires a well-educated public. Part of the project of ensuring one in modern America has been public broadcasting. However, on Wednesday, House Republicans proposed a budget that would end funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which receives a tiny .0001% of the federal budget. When I posted a link on facebook to an online petition against the upcoming cut, I aroused the well-meaning and respectful ire of some of my conservative friends who believe that public broadcasting ought to be left to market forces. Their argument is, to wit: if people want the educational programming offered on PBS and NPR, advertisers will pay for it. Therefore, let the market bear it out.

The problem with such a view is that broadcasting paid for by advertising (thus, "the market") inevitably follows the ideological perspectives of the advertisers. Thus, large advertisers with lots of money quickly hold a monopoly of information.

To find evidence of the problems with this, I need look no further than my home in Oklahoma City. During the debate surrounding a recent tax extension the state's largest newspaper, according to a local republican campaign strategist, refused to report stories which held the tax proposal in a negative light because it's largest advertiser (the Chamber of Commerce) was in favor of the proposal. The most interesting thing about this situation is that the newspaper is unabashedly conservative. So, a conservative newspaper refused to publish arguments against a tax because its advertisers wanted it. In this way, the market was able to make a newspaper violate its own ideology, and effectively quash dissenting views. Thus, the supposedly fair and democratic marketplace, which was controlled by a powerful few, effectively censored the press. Public Broadcasting, which hands money to LOCAL stations, allows the stations to base their programming on what it's local viewers and producers feel is valuable, free from the pressure of the large advertiser who may not have the best interest of democracy at heart. (See this blog by Rep. Earl Blumenauer)

What's also true is that what the market wants and what the people need are not always the same thing. The public WANTS American Idol. So American Idol is what the market will bear, but it's hardly what is necessary to ensure a citizenry capable of voting on something other than which seventeen year old singer is the most dreamy.

The assumption that the "market" will always allow what's best to win out (which has oddly become the central tenant of the modern Republican party) is naive at best. This is because the market has constantly shown that it will, if it must, sacrifice the good of democracy for the strength of the bottom line. Though we insist on a system of checks and balances in the federal government, no such system is inherent in the market.

An extraordinary amount of our legislation exists to act as a check to this power. It has often been argued that the consumer serves as the check to the power of industry by choosing what to buy and what not to buy, but this is only partially true. Indeed, a very large percentage of my income is spent on things that I need. I have no choice but to buy them. I must put gas in my car to get home, and the industry that produces that product is controlled by a small handful of people who can and do exert extraordinary control. This is the power that comes with controlling a necessary commodity. So, though in theory, the market polices itself, in practice things happen differently. After all, if a handful of businessmen can do, on a national level, what the Chamber of Commerce did in OKC, what results is known as an oligarchy. Thus, a capitalist market has the same potential to become tyrannical as it does to remain democratic. This is why we write legislation to control business--to provide a check on the power of industry, just as congress checks the power of the president.

Public Broadcasting is a part of that tradition. It ensures that the people with the most money don't get to own information.

Finally, I find the connection between free market and democracy implicit in these arguments a little problematic. Capitalism is a market system; not a system of government. As I hope my earlier syllogistic demonstration of how capitalism can in fact promote tyranny and the anecdotal evidence of the OKC tax debate have shown, democracy and capitalism are not the same thing.

That being said, the institutions that are designed to protect democracy need not and ought not be judged according to their market value, but in their importance in promoting and supporting democracy (Can you imagine if we subjected the US military to market forces? It hasn't turned a profit since WWII). I think people probably assume that the public school system exists to prepare students for the workforce. However, the pioneers of the public school movement (most notably John Dewey) never connected schooling with the market--such a connection is actually a much more recent phenomenon. Instead, they saw education as necessary in a vital democracy. Thus, the public school system is designed for no other purpose than to ensure an educated voter pool. Public Broadcasting was developed as a modern extension of that same project. Public schools exist to foster preparation for democracy through education; public broadcasting exists to foster participation in democracy through education. And if eduation is indeed vital to democracy, it must be protected and supported regardless of its market value.

This debate ultimately stems from the notion that to be "conservative" means that one supports saving tax payer money while prodding the market. But the word itself suggests that to be conservative is to hold on to our past ideals, one of the oldest and most important of which is that a well-educated people can govern itself. Public broadcasting is part of that tradition. It exists to educate those who would self-govern and it thus helps to protect democracy. And I happen to think that protecting democracy is a much more conservative ideal than protecting the market.

Questioning Art: Who Gets to be Called Artist?

Today was date day for Charissa and me, the gloriously rare day when we leave our kids somewhere and spend the day running around doing things. Not having gotten many chances to go since the boys were born, we decided on a trip to the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, one of our favorite and most frequented places before the boys came.

The museum has re-arranged since we were there last as it has some new collections, and seeing some of the new items, along with my criticism of some of the old has led me to some of the open theoretical questions concerning art, what it is, and who gets to make it.

These are famous modern questions of which art students and critical consumers of art will already be familiar. Indeed, as I suggested in my recent post regarding Duchamp, much of the work of modern artists has been to ask these questions as a way of critiquing their own artistic traditions. This has been a modern and post-modern concern in all the arts. Theatre has Grotowski, Brecht, and Artaud who played with theatre conventions by disentegrating the fourth wall, deconstructing the spoken word, and aboloshing elaborate sets in favor wharehouses and street corners. Literature has Pynchon who broke the conventions of space-time, Vonnegut who destroyed any illusion of the death of the author, and Saporta who destroyed the convention of linearity altogether. And visual art had of course Duchamp, Pollock, and so on. So the questions that I ask here are not new, but I am asking them anyway, in response to my own confrontation with these questions in my little hometown museum.

The centerpiece of the OKC-MOA is it's large Dale Chihuly exhibit. Chihuly began his career in stained glass and accidentally discovered the ancient art of glass blowing while fooling around with some of his glass. Henceforth, he has become world renowned for his work in blown glass. The reason Chihuly fits into my questions here is that many years ago, just as his work was getting larger and more complex, he was involved in an accident which rendered him blind in one eye. Having lost his depth perception, he gave up entirely doing the hands-on work involved in creating his own work. Instead, his sculptures are actually formed by a large number of apprentices, based on rather abstract paintings that Chihuly paints. The paintings are not schematic at all, and therefore do not serve as any type of blueprint for the actual glass sculptures, Instead, they seem to act more as inspiration for the apprentices who will make the sculptures as Chihuly stands behind them pleasantly shouting orders.

For years I've thought of this as an interesting extension of the work of other 20th century artists. Modern artists have asked the question of "who is the artist" in interesting ways. Duchamp critiqued the notion of an inspired genius when he began arranging things found in everyday life and calling them found art sculptures. Others have done similar things in their art. But in each of these cases, artists put their hands on objects not typically considered artistic and asked, "does it make it art that I, an artist, touched it." Chihuly extends this questioning even further because he doesn't touch anything. Instead, in his work, he is not the artist because he crafted the actual piece, but because it came from his mind. The actual building of the sculptures is performed by apprentices who are, we pressume, craftsmen and not artists.

Of course, as I've grown more sympathetic to the Marxist complaint, this definition of the artist has come to bother me. Chihuly hires an extraordinary number of young artists, they create magnificent sculptures, and he gets to put his name on the work. And so, with little physical input of his own, he has grown to world renown on the backs of people we've never heard of. In this system, the artist is the one who gets credit as the "idea man," while his workers, the artistic proletariat if you will, languish in obscurity and in the heat of the glass kiln.

I continue this question of who gets to be called artist as I move on to the work of Alfonso Ossorio. His bizarre collage sculpture INXIT is the centerpiece of a new collection of his work at the OKC-MOA. The piece is a door and door frame with an extraordinary Hodge-podge of strange stuff glued to it including animal bones, plastic birds, and a human skull, all of it creepily encrusted with glass eyeballs. The interesting thing about it is that it looks like every road-side oddity created by any local crazy man who ever donned greasy overalls. Upon seeing this piece, I turned to Charissa and asked, "do you suppose that artists sometimes trick us by saying 'I'm going to throw some bull-crap together and you have to take it seriously because I have an MFA.'"

This theme continued when we watched a film introducing the MOA's temporary exhibit of the constructivist sculptures of Jill Downen. In the film, she discusses how she became obsessed with texture while being placed in time-out by her mother. She notice a crack on the wall and became so excited by it that her mother no longer used time out as a punishment, making her wash dishes instead. The film then goes on to show her walking around an empty New York apartment with a small video camera gushing over the textures of the interesting apartment. The film shows a clip of one of these videos, which she uses as inspiration. The shot is zoomed in unnaturally closely and the video is shaky, and the whole thing is dubbed over by Downen as she said odd, artsy things. It's strangely reminiscent of "the Blair Witch Project."

It occurred to me that, in both the cases of Downen and Ossorio, this art is being produced by people who, if they were anything but artists, would be taken as mentally ill. I told Charissa at this point that the only difference between an artist and a lunatic is which side of the river the person went to school. If she is studying at MIT, she is a maniac. If he is at Harvard, he is an artist.

This is, of course, a joke, but it makes a serious point. That is, the label of "artist" is perhaps a great deal more arbitrary than we have often assumed. The difference between Ossorio and the goofball in Memphis who painted his house pink and glued bizarre stuff to it is a Harvard degree. The difference between Downen and a troubled kid with a penchant for taking strange videos is a Danforth Scholarship at Washington. In the case of Duchamp's "Fountaine," the difference between a urinal and a sculpture is where in the art gallery is stands.

This is not to say that these are not talented artists. They are, without a doubt. This is to say that who gets to become an artist and who goes unnoticed forever has as much to do with the relatively arbitrary forces of access and educational opportunity as it does with artistic "genius." It bears repeating here that this idea is not new to me. Many artists themselves feel this tension and play with these concerns in their own work. But, having been confronted with these truths, I had to make something of them.

Writing Students (and teachers) Take Heart; What we're asking you to do is really hard

Writing terrifies students.

Many of us who have been writing for a long time, or are "talented" writers, see writing as a relatively natural process. It's only putting language down on paper, after all. Yet our students shriek, shake, and cry with fear when we give them even "simple" writing assignments. Indeed, the act of writing paralyzes our students.

Flower and Hayes have explained the cognitive processes involved in the writing of actual written language, and their explanation helps to explain why the act of writing so befuddles our students. They explain that "the information generated in planning may be represented in a variety of symbol systems other than language." The ideas that generate writing often come in the form of images, sense memory, emotions and "even when the planning process represents one's thought in words, that representation is unlikely to be in the elaborate sytax of written English" (1981). The act of writing, to Flower and Hayes, is an act of translating ideas (which are non-linear and jumbled) into linear written English.

Writing, therefore, is an extememly complex cognitive process which requires our students to produce formal written English for discourses with which they are still infamiliar out of the jumbled mess of human cognition.

It's no wonder then that many of our students are overwhelmed by the task of writing. What we are asking them to do is difficult stuff--difficult stuff that we ourselves have often taken for granted. This is something to remember when we are frustrated that our students "just aren't getting it." We are asking them to lift heavy weights.

Since this is true, we must be careful not to assume that good writing just is. Instead, good writing is a carefully developed skill. We should see ourselves less as gurus or shamans, guiding them through the spiritual and mysterious process of writing, hoping that their exposure to our gods will magically enlighten them. Instead we should see ourselves as physical trainers, helping them learn to isolate their writing muscles. Though the act of writing is complex and recursive, the processes that make up this complex act can be isolated and trained. If we can help our students do this, then the act becomes easier and more natural (as it is for us) when they must put these processes back together to complete acts of meaningful writing.

But this requires careful work and patience on the part of both the teacher and the writer. So take heart, if it seems like this stuff is really hard, that's because it is. But just as you wouldn't give up working out the first time your muscles are sore, so you must not give up the first time your brain hurts. This includes both you students and you teachers.

The Right Hand is High School English; The Left Hand is College Composition

My freshmen often express disillusionment in their transition from high school English to college composition. Many of them feel (and I agree) that their high school English classes have left them unprepared for college writing in general, and my composition classes in particular. As a teacher, it is easy for me to suggest that such culture shock is a natural part of the learning process. As students advance both educationally and cognitively, it makes sense that the pedagogies upon which they once relied and within which they once thrived will seem inadequate. My students, on the other hand, have no such benign perspective. Many of them feel cheated or even led astray by high school teachers who would often justify hard or tedious assignments by claiming that they were "preparing them for college."

Thus, when my teaching points out the inadequacies of the five paragraph essay, or when I challenge often overly-pedantic views of first person writing and so on, my students respond bitterly about a secondary education that was supposed to "prepare them for college" but that has failed to do so. My students often hyperbolically express their desire to injure, maim, or kill their high school teachers for their false teaching. In fact, a student once told me that when he had gone home for a visit, he ran into his high school English teacher at Wal-Mart and he told her, right there in the store, that she owed him an apology.

On one hand, our students' feelings are natural to the educational experience and we need not worry about them; I remember having these same feelings as an undergraduate who had excelled in my high school English classes and had tested out of Composition I. But there is also a real and legitimate criticism couched in the responses of my students. At least from my perspective as a composition teacher, there is little curricular alignment between high school English programs and the college English departments their students are entering. There are, unfortunately, some unavoidable reasons for this.

Most high school English programs combine both the teaching of writing and of literature. And because most English teachers enter the field because of their love for literature, teaching about the history and interpretation of literature becomes the primary focus of the class. In fact, writing instruction in most high school English classes takes place while students are writing about the literary works they are reading. Thus, even in the English classroom, writing is treated as more of a skill set necessary for but peripheral to the real subject of the class. Writing is an activity that supports the teaching of literature, rather than being a subject of its own.

More significantly, though, is that high school and college teachers don’t seem to know what the other is actually doing. This should not be particularly surprising. Many high school teachers do not have the educational credentials and few have the time to teach as adjuncts in college composition programs. At the same time, only a few of the composition teachers I know have taught in secondary English programs. Though it’s an ever-present mantra in high school English classes to say that the class is “preparing students for college,” teachers of high school English know very little about what we actually do in the composition classroom.

To our shame, many first year writing programs have done little in the way of supporting secondary English programs. There are many researchers in the universities who are studying the writing habits, rhetorical prowess, and language usage of high school writers and proposing pedagogies based on their findings. But the lessons we are learning from this research seem too often to be getting lost in the ether. High school teachers aren’t reading our journals, and we’re not visiting their classrooms.

It is my admittedly un-researched argument here that there is a palpable disconnect between first-year composition programs and secondary English programs. It is also my assertion that this is a problem that we ought to work toward fixing. Without a doubt, true curriculum alignment will not be possible. The two enterprises are different enough to prevent this. Though high schools do indeed make it their goal to prepare students for higher education, they also have the burden of universal education. So it is also their goal to prepare students who will not and, perhaps, cannot go to college. Furthermore, high schools do not simply send students to the nearest state university, but instead send students to the four winds. Therefore, high schools cannot hope to account for the numerous pedagogical approaches at different institutions.

But even without some form of specific curriculum alignment, we can improve our teaching in both high school and college by fostering better communication between college English departments and high schools programs. We can help high school teachers better prepare their students for us by making clearer what we do, and what types of writing we privilege. We can also find ways to make sure that the research we do about their students gets back to them, so that the latest research a teacher has won’t be what they learned in their English education program while they themselves were in college. Furthermore, if we hate the five paragraph essay, we ought to be searching for and implementing new techniques to teach organization and invention. We are, after all, the research wing of the educational enterprise. And if teachers need these forms that we so hate because they work, it falls upon us to find something else that works and that isn’t antithetical to what we teach.

Ultimately, we must recognize that we are not involved in mutually exclusive projects, but rather we are indeed colleagues whose work can and should influence one another’s practices.

Duchamp: Post-Modern Forerunner; Practical Jokester

In 1917, while in New York, French artist Marcel Duchamp bought a urinal from an iron works company, signed it "R. Mutt" and called it "Fountain." The piece (if indeed it is one) has been considered a practical joke, but has also been taken quite seriously. Duchamp added the piece to his collection of found art objects which he had titled "Readymades." In 1915, Duchamp began displaying every day objects in artful ways in order to critique the adoration of art and the artist. Though there is as much playfulness in his movement as there is philosophy, his concept of found art, and his statements behind it pre-figured important post-modern ideas, a few decades before post-modernism became all the rage in Europe.

With his found art movement, Duchamp intended to question what defines art. Where does craftsmanship or utility end and where does art begin? What makes one piece of white earthenware featuring graceful geometric curves art, and what makes another a urinal?

Duchamp, who was critical of artist worship, played with the notion that by signing something and putting it in a gallery, one elevates it as art. This is particularly true if the signature is that of a well-respected artist. In fact, what allowed many 20th century artists to experiment with deconstructive styles was that they were already accomplished artists. Picasso's cubism might never have been accepted if not for his more traditional early work, his almost Classical Rose Period, and the aesthetically pleasing Blue Period. But, because he was who he was, he was able to experiment. People would expect the sometimes childish looking work of cubism because it had his name on it.

Duchamp seemed to recognize this ability, and he purposefully questioned this by simply signing every day objects, and placing them in galleries, knowing that folks would therefore call this work art.

This suggests then that the label "art" is arbitrary. The fact that "Fountain" was critically received as art (it was, in fact, named the most influential art work of the 20th century in 2004), suggests this. It's acclaim clearly had nothing to do with the graceful, arching lines of the urinal, or the pure white color, or the perfect classical geometry of its shape. If this were so, it would have been the original craftsman who made the first of these who would deserve credit as "artist." Instead, Duchamp signed a pseudonym on it, included it in a gallery show, and it was art, simply because the right person (Duchamp) put it in the right place (a gallery).

This attack on the arbitrary nature of art is decidedly post-modern. Duchamp questions to what extent art is art because it has some intrinsic quality, or to what extent is art art simply because someone decided that it was. In this way Duchamp is, in 1917, already doing what post-modern thought would do just after World War II, decades later.