“The Misty-but-Tactile Feeling of a Sense Memory”

Grabbed from the Pitchfork review page

In a review of Mount Eerie’s Clear Moon album for Pitchfork, Jayson Greene writes this delightful line:

The album’s sound, meanwhile has the misty-but-tactile feeling of a sense memory.

I keep thinking about that line.

A sense memory. The memory of how something felt, smelled, tasted, heard, or looked after the stimulus was gone.

Misty-but-tactile. Sharing qualities of certainty and uncertainty. Unmistakable, but unable to be brought to mind exactly. Sense memories are always augmented by all the similar memories we’ve ever had in the same vein. The thought “I remember how it felt when she put her arm around me” really means “I have memories of all the times she has ever put her arm around me, and I summon all those memories into a single, joined moment when I remember that single time.”

And perhaps most surprising: The album’s sound. An album, never heard before, works on us like sense memories, according to Greene. So the sense of its sounds on our ears is like the sense of other things we’ve heard before. That’s not to say it’s derivative or boring or predictably generic, necessarily. It’s to say that there’s a comfort, as if all the times I’ve ever heard sounds like these are brought together in my emotions when I hear this sound.

But wait. When are sounds not like that?

***

Half an hour ago, debating whether or not I would write this post this morning, Iron & Wine’s “Upward Over the Mountain” came on my music shuffle. Instantly, I felt.

It’s not that I have a long history of listening to this song. I finally bought this I&W album just a few months ago when it was $2.99 to download on Amazon. It’s one of my favorite songs on the album, but it’s not like I associate it with years of heartbreak and longing and relationships and late-night drives across the country or anything.

But when those chords started, I felt like I did.

There’s nothing fancy about the chords: Em, C, G, D. It’s one of the most common progressions in all of guitardom. I associate it with Ben Gibbard singing about Jack Kerouac and Smashing Pumpkins singing about whatever they were singing about in “Disarm.”

If I can get musicky for a moment: the chords fall into a i > VI > III > VII pattern, at first glance. But really, it doesn’t feel that way; not many affective lights go off in our brains for III chords, usually. Really, we’re hearing vi > IV > I > V.

So what? It means that even though the emphasis is on the Em, since it begins and ends the song–that lonely chord, the first chord every guitarist learns, the easiest and the darkest, with the low E string ringing for so-so long–we hear the song as if it were in G, the relative major, even though G is in the less in-your-face position of the third chord in the progression. It wouldn’t sound wrong if the song ended on a G chord, but it would change everything. Everything.

So I can’t help but wonder what it is I’m responding to emotionally when I hear “Upward Over the Mountain” begin. Does it have something to do with every other song I’ve loved with that progression? Or is something built into the progression, that gut-wrenching recognition that we’re in a happy major key but simultaneously pushing ourselves over and over back into the minor key surrounding it?

***

“Do you think we’ll ever get past the circle of fifths?” I asked my brother-in-law Matt. We were at a restaurant, and my wife/his sister was in the bathroom.

“What do you mean?” he replied.

“You know,” I said. I was struggling to figure it out myself. “So much music relies on the same chord progressions. And so often it follows the circle of fifths: we go from C to G to D and so on.”

Matt is a musician and occasionally a composer. He knows music theory better than anyone I know. I wondered if he thought the standard progressions were boring, hackneyed, old-school, overdone.

“No,” he said. “I don’t think we’ll ever get past that in popular music.”

“I know! Like, I hear Lady Gaga on the radio and think, Okay, this is seriously catchy stuff. What makes it so catchy? And it’s the flipping chord progressions! The same ones as ever, and yet somehow I don’t get sick of them!”

“Yeah,” he said. “People will never get sick of them. They’ll totally stick around forever.”

He didn’t really say if he thought that was a good thing or not.

***

Marc Hirsh at the Boston Globe calls the Iron & Wine progression the “sensitive female chord progression.” Some worthwhile quotes:

Let’s call this the Sensitive Female Chord Progression, so named because . . . well, because when I first noticed it in 1998 (when I became keenly aware that Sarah McLachlan’s “Building a Mystery” sounded an awful lot like Joan Osborne’s “One of Us”), it seemed to be the exclusive province of Lilith Fair types baring their souls for all to see. Think Jewel’s “Hands.” Melissa Etheridge’s “Angels Would Fall.” Nina Gordon’s “Tonight and the Rest of My Life.” . . .

Hooters guitarist Eric Bazilian, the songwriter behind “One Of Us,” has a particular interest in it. “I think it’s a comforting chord progression,” he says. “It was iconic with Heart. It became more iconic with Joan [Osborne]. It became even more iconic with Sarah McLachlan. There’s not a lot of testosterone in it, even though ['One of Us'] was written by a man. But it was written by a man to impress a girl. Think about that.” . . .

. . . when Beyoncé wanted to tug at the heartstrings, she knew exactly which tool to use.

***

This post is clearly getting away from me. There’s more to misty-but-tactile sense memories to talk about that I haven’t touched on: muscle memory (and the Beatles, according to NPR), Roland Barthes on gesture and musical “grain” and memory (as explored in Michael David Szekely’s “Gesture, Pulsion, Grain: Barthes’ Musical Semiology,” which I haven’t read yet), and worlds and worlds of thoughts about touch and taste in addition to sound.

And yet, there’s something familiar about that feeling too: the familiar memory of being so into a piece of writing that it wandered away from where I thought it would go into somewhere else. We come to writing (the most “misty-but-tactile” craft I can imagine) in the same way we come to sounds and chord progressions: connecting the new with the familiar, recursively adding to our memories, reliving our lives.

 

The Affective Slam of Sound

CC-licensed photo from http://www.flickr.com/photos/revdancatt/449142212/in/photostream/

“What you’re looking for,” he said, “are words to theorize that moment when sound slams into you.”

We were at my dissertation defense, the committee and I sitting around a table situated to ignore the rows of onlookers. One of my committee members was rephrasing what he saw as the core of my theoretical project.

I thought of the sounds in the room at that moment: the shifting in seats, the typing on all the laptops, the echoes of the “Fratelli Chase” theme from The Goonies that had recently played as people entered the room. And I thought of the silences: my wife’s silent, smiling face in the crowd, the committee member’s silent waiting for a confirmation of his summary, and my silent pause before answering.

“Yes,” I said. “That’s exactly it. The subjective, emotion-tinged, situated experience of hearing sound. And on the other end, the craft that goes into designing sound that will be subjectively experienced in such an uncontrolled way.”

(Of course, I don’t really remember what I said, or what was said next, or when in the defense this conversation happened. But in my memory-as-constructed-the-way-it-ought-to-be, my committee member waves away my big words and says:)

“Right, but it’s all about the slam. That slam of sound.”

***

We know sound affects our emotions in an uncontrollable, knee-jerk way. It’s almost not worth mentioning, it’s so obvious.

In Blade Runner, Deckard finds out who is a replicant and who isn’t by reading aloud scenarios that would lead humans to have an involuntary reaction in their eyes. The sounds of the spoken words lead to immediate emotion. Deckard doesn’t give the suspects a print-out of the questions; he says them out loud. That matters.

Here’s 19th-century music theorist Eduard Hanslick on the effect:

Even if we have to grant to all the arts, without exception, the power to produce effects upon the feelings, yet we do not deny that there is something specific, peculiar only to it, in the way music exercises that power. Music works more rapidly and intensely upon the mind than any other art.

Two things: I would extend his point about music’s “specific, peculiar” power to sound in general. Also, I can’t help but notice how he descends so swiftly, so gently from “the feelings” in the first sentence to “the mind” in the second.

It’s almost as if the slam of sound into our bodies (slam!) works on us in more ways than simply the emotional. It’s as if the very way we make meaning from sounds in our minds is tied to the way we feel about them.

***

Henry Jenkins (following Bourdieu): “Academics come to distrust their own affective responses, to speak of them apologetically or to deny them outright” (170).

I am thoroughly not disinterested in the music and sounds of Tecmo Super Bowl, an NES game from 1991. Let some of its music play while I tell you why I care.

Tecmo Super Bowl has a cheat built into it (though cheat is clearly the wrong word for such an aesthetically interesting, non-gameplay-related trick): on the intro screen, if you hold B and press left, you’re brought to an interface allowing you to cycle through all the sounds in the game.

From http://protipoftheday.com/node/184.html

I used to play around with this all the time, cycling methodically (frighteningly methodically?) through the sound and music samples, playing some of them over and over. There’s something satisfyingly physical about hearing, say, 5 different electronic sounds meant to reproduce players’ armored bodies slamming into each other. (Slam!) The sounds would grow more meaningful to me recursively, as I would recognize a sound I knew from the game, and then when playing identify a sound I had heard from the sound screen, and then return to the sound screen to listen again with fresh ears, and then later hear something new in the game. . . . (I’m embarrassed to say that I never noticed that Sound 32 isn’t in the game, though.)

I built emotion and meaning into those sounds, and echoes of those meanings are still with me, as corny as it sounds to write. They live in a part of me that I can’t access unless a similar sound draws it out of me, and when it’s drawn out it journeys through my whole gut and throat and head so it’s all my body hears.

***

Virginia Kuhn: “[A]nyone who has ever edited video clips would likely attest to the fact that one must have passion for the footage; editing demands extensive playing and replaying of clips. Whether this passion issues from a fannish impulse or is born of righteous indignation (or both) matters little. To argue, one must take a stand, not be disinterested” (3.11).

***

I can’t help but wonder what would evoke emotion and meaning from you. Yes, you: whoever is reading this. If I pulled some of the most commonly heard sounds from sources like Audioboo, SoundCloud, or Freesound.org, sounds like cars crashing or popular song clips or mothers’ heartbeats or ominous footsteps, would you feel something new when the sound slams (slam!) into you?

Or would I have to choose unusual sounds, hoping to catch you off guard and draw up a new emotion you hadn’t expected or remembered, perhaps since you last heard that sound years, or even decades ago? What would my success rate have to be to make that worth it? What does “success” even mean here?

And finally, where does, to use Kuhn’s phrase, “fannish impulse” fit in? Would sounds from Star Trek or Lost or Tecmo Super Bowl “work” on you in ways that the everyday wouldn’t? How would those sounds work on different fans in different and similar ways?

Obviously, the answer to all of those is a simple “I don’t know.” But let me add a: yet. I think I want to make you hear some sounds, and I want you to feel and think because of them.

Slam.

 

Scarcity

I was eleven when I moved from San Diego to Yorktown, Virginia. It must have taken my family’s Aerostar minivan five days to make the trip, a drive I would make today if you gave me one hour of preparation and an absolute promise that I would shirk nary a responsibility. (That’s right: nary.)

rockheim’s CC-licensed photo “Sony Walkman TPS-L2″

I had a chunky Walkman, a basket full of shared family headphones (most of which required a constantly crooked finger to bend the wires if you wanted sound to come to both ears), and four tapes that were mine and only mine:

1. Boyz II Men, Cooleyhighharmony
2. Mariah Carey, MTV Unplugged
3. Hammer, [some cassette single from the 2 Legit 2 Quit album]
4. Queen, “Bohemian Rhapsody” cassette single

Imagine that: five days of these four tapes, heard over and over. By the end, I could sing every note of them–not that I would, there in the van, moodily quiet, hunched away from my three siblings in my own corner with my headphones and Garfield comics. But I knew those sounds. I knew them.

***

Yesterday, I put in Hum’s You’d Prefer an Astronaut album to encourage me to do dishes, the thick guitars lushly tempting me to be responsible even when my wife is out of town.

I’ve always loved this album, but it’s not like it was one of my absolute favorites. I was too busy studying every second of Smashing Pumpkin CDs to really give Hum the attention they deserved, back in 1995.

But listening yesterday, I was surprised to hear that I knew the lyrics and musical turns better than I thought I would. When I listen to albums I’ve gotten in the last few years that I like with about the same level of fervor (“Hey, that’s great! I’ll listen every once in a while!” as opposed to “OMG DROOL”), I find they don’t work the same way on me as Hum did last night. That is, I can’t sing along very well when I listen to The National or School of Seven Bells, but I like having them on. But hearing Hum was really personal and intense and I sang and sang.

***

In that minivan, and listening to CDs in high school, I simply didn’t have as much media as I have today. Then, I listened to all my tapes and CDs, even the ones I didn’t like as much, because I didn’t have as many. And through repeated listenings, I got to know them in better, deeper ways than I could possibly have done without the experience of extended time spent with those sounds.

Because musical first impressions are so often wrong, aren’t they? The first time I sat down and listened to the Pumpkins’ Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, reading every lyric along with the music, I thought “Love” was going to be my favorite song. The spacey guitars, the newness of its sounds to me, grabbed my ears. But before long, through repeated listenings, it grew to be one of my least favorite, without the lyrical and structural complexity that went into so many other songs on that album.

So I’ll go out and say it: I’m worried about what I’ll miss as I increasingly have options. As I fill up my harddrive with free tracks from NoiseTrade. As I browsebrowsebrowse on Spotify. As I stream from Hulu, Amazon, Crackle, Vudu. As I download free book after free book to my Kindle.

And as much as I hate it when people say things like this, I’ll even take that next step, from the individual to the social: I’m worried about what will happen in society, too.

***

Once you start thinking about your life’s media scarcity, you quickly begin distrusting your ideas about quality.

Why do I think Star Wars and Return of the Jedi are as good as Empire Strikes Back, while everyone else seems to think Empire is best? Because I had taped-from-TV copies of SW and RotJ at home while growing up, but not ESB. In the context of VHS scarcity, I watched what I had, over and over and over. And what I watched, I loved.

From paperbackswap.com

Why do I love the scene in The Two Towers where Frodo and Sam pass the crossroads? Doesn’t it have something to do with the paperback I found on my Dad’s shelf in 6th grade, which I read even without ever having read Fellowship, looking at the cover over and over, which shows them passing that beheaded statue under a vanilla sky?

Why do I love playing Dr. Mario so much? Because it’s such an inherently good game? Because it’s natural to enjoy something you’re good at? Or because my parents, on a whim, bought it for me for a birthday present in 4th grade, which led to hours and hours of playing it, because it was one of just a few games I had?

Why did I read Judy Blume’s Superfudge so many times? Because I identified with the mixed emotions of love and annoyance Peter has about his talkative, bizarre younger brother, something I understood completely? Or because there were only so many books on my shelf, so I just kept on reading them repeatedly?

***

And even though my thoughts about scarcity always begin here, with white American middle-class media consumption, don’t the cultural effects of scarcity go further?

Is it unfeeling and rude to gently compare my version of scarcity with the scarcity of the worldwide poor–that experience so many report of meeting those living in rusted shacks who nevertheless tell stories of joy that exceed the lifeless, media-saturated lives of rich Westerners?

Don’t hear that the wrong way: I don’t want to romanticize the poor or in any way imply that they should stay poor. But I’ve met families living in the garbage villages of Cairo whose daily faith and joy surely seemed to exceed my own. Were those attitudes related to scarcity?

If so, what other attitudes are tied to scarcity, in all its incarnations?

 

Thinking Outside the Modes

This fall, the English 101 class I’ll be teaching is structured with a healthy mix of standardization and instructor leeway. That is, there are a few things that must be present in every section across the college, but there’s lots that I can jiggle around.

As I’ve been looking through the required textbook, though, I keep feeling this desire to challenge it, to think outside of its boxes. It’s quite solidly rooted in a modes approach (though expanded with plenty more than the classic 4, exposition, argumentation, description, narration)–which I think can be helpful in so far as the modes are differentiated from genres.

Like, the book has a chapter on Examples, which culminates in advice on how to write an “exemplification essay.” This is dumb. There is no such thing as an exemplification essay, and if there were, no one would read it–that is, unless it also had qualities of all sorts of other modes too, which all writing does and that’s obvious so why are we talking about it.

But there are all sorts of genres of communication that are more effective when people use examples well. So yes, let’s talk about how to use examples well in writing and talking and all sorts of multimodal genres, but let’s not isolate “exemplification” as something that can be studied all alone, as if it were a hamburger that you put under a glass dome and watched scientifically. While reading in genres where I expect to see good examples (scholarly essays, newspaper accounts of events, blog posts trying to persuade me of something), I often find myself skeptical because of the lack of good examples. So yes, let’s give writers lots of practice at choosing and integrating them.

All that said, here’s my point: according to the all-section guidelines, this class must give students practice in two out of the following three: definition, compare/contrast, and cause/effect. It also must give them practice at argumentation, which needs to rely on at least two of those modes. So I want to use this space (why not?) to brainstorm some of the many communication genres where these modes could be used.

Part of this comes from another thing I noticed in the textbook: about 1/3 of the readings (it’s a “reader for writers”) are from newspapers (nearly all from–can you guess?–The New York Times). And the more I think about it, the less I think that my 101 class is a course on newspaper writing. Sure, there’s lots of good stuff in there, and lots of good examples of people defining things in interesting, rhetorically powerful ways.

But for goodness sakes, I’d rather teach a class where students practice all kinds of defining (and cause/effecting, and compare/contrasting) in all kinds of genres, and are then equipped to use that basic practice as the ground on which they’ll stand when asked to perform all kinds of other communication tasks in the future, the scope and details of which I am absolutely unable to predict (and so are you).

So: let’s brainstorm. Off the top of my head, some genres in which rhetors will need to know how to use:

Definition

• Identity-focused journal entries (“Who am I?”)
• Scientific journal entries (like Lewis and Clark or Darwin, cataloging species for the first time)
• The beginning of a verbal argument (“Now let’s be clear on what we’re talking about….”)
• Wikipedia entries
• Science fiction stories (where new technologies should be gracefully introduced, not explained through awkward speeches)
• Labels on products (where the question of what something is–leather or pleather?–can make a big difference)
• Video documentaries, especially those that focus on unusual places/phenomena (“What you’re seeing is….”)
• Sonatas (when the music played after a brief introduction is “defined” as the main theme, to be developed throughout the piece)

So definition is fundamentally the establishment of something’s being. To define is to label, to explain, to name, to exert an understanding and controlling power over. It’s in the realm of science more than art (or is it?). It’s the end of The Matrix Reloaded, not the end of Lost. (See Damon Lindelof on this comparison in this amazing interview.) (It’s the moments that are explained in parentheses, not the moments that are left ambiguous, struck through.) It’s ontology: what are you? Writing definitions is the act of naming, of Adam watching the beasts pass and exerting a power over them. But to encounter a definition is to have a moment of sharing, not of domination: it’s to identify with someone who wants you to understand something, who wants to assert an equality with you that wasn’t there before her definition brought you up to her level.

Comparison/Contrast

• Conversations with friends who are trying to make difficult decisions
• Lists for yourself when you’re trying to make difficult decisions (“But if we move to the inner city we’ll save a lot of money….”)
• Product review websites
• Proposals to your boss about which course of action to take
• Blog posts describing the best way to bake bread
• YouTube videos that demonstrate the cinematographic and sound-design decisions used to affect viewers’ emotions in big studio films
• Arguments on a 24-hour news channel
• Political fliers in the mailbox
• Reviews of academic books, movies, songs, whatever (“It’s missing the pizzazz of Moulin Rouge! but retains the emotional upheaval of Romeo + Juliet.”)
• Scientific descriptions of the differences between related bugs (“Though the pincers are similar on both, notice the elongated thorax in species B.”)

The move to compare and contrast is usually a move to assert the reasons for your opinions. It’s justification. It’s “Look, I’m not crazy. This really is the right decision. There are all these things in favor of it, but only two things against it.” Of course, it’s not always: sometimes you want to help people make a good decision on their own, you want to use your expertise to lay out the various overlaps and divergences so they can be well informed, like on ConsumerSearch or when you’re a counselor. But that disinterestedness seems so rare, so gem-like, so ripe for self-deception, as someone tells himself over and over that he just wants to compare and contrast two decisions so she can decide even though he has so-so subtly tried to make the evidence lean in his favor.

Cause/Effect

• Warning labels (“If you stick your finger in the hole during operation, do not expect to retain it for long.”)
• Jazz improvisation (I play this collection of notes, she responds with that one; I decide to move this way, and she responds with that.)
• Proverbs (“If you want this outcome, you should start with this action.”)
• Plot summaries (“And then he went down this hill, but that made the hill disintegrate! So he got into a refrigerator, but that made him run out of air! And….”)
• Slippery-slope speeches (“Mark my words, if we allow this moral travesty to continue, we’ll have some dire consequences to deal with later.”)
• Recipes (“If you beat your eggs for the full five minutes, you should see a nicely puffed, lightly browned top to the souffle by now.”)

The language of causes and effects is the language of predictions, of asserting a control over time. It’s a claim that the way things have been in the past leads us to understand the way things will be in the future. Therefore, it’s not the language of chaos theory, postmodernism, or true love (which instead says that actions of love will continue to be the effect that follows inevitable human failings). Cause/effect is instead the world of Sherlock Holmes and Bean, both of whom are portrayed as so smart that they can look at effects and understand the exact and only causes that could have led to those effects. They are absolutely in control. This is also the language of warnings and hopes, anything that looks to the future with human emotion attached to it, fearing and hoping that certain causes won’t lead to certain effects.

What should I add?

While we’re on different ways of classifying discourse, I’d kind of like to host a video/audio contest where everyone takes the video, audio, or both from this video and remixes it into new fantasticness. Kinneavy have I loved:

 

Wrestling with Authorial Control

I like to think of myself as an active proponent of remix culture. I praise people who share their work with Creative Commons licenses that allow reuse, and I try to license my own works the same way. So if you want to take the words of this post and rap them over a beat you made, you can legally do so without needing to ask me, as long as it’s not a commercial venture, you give me credit for the original, and you use the same CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0 license I use on my site.

So it’s been interesting in the last few days wrestling with feelings of authorial control that, academically, part of me felt I had somehow transcended. Here’s what happened:

The Initial Essay

For a custom textbook at my current school, I was asked a couple years ago to write a student-friendly piece introducing them to rhetoric. The point was supposed to be the practical usefulness of rhetoric, as my piece would be paired next to a denser, more theoretically heavy piece. I love writing for students, so I submitted to the textbook editors an essay called “Why Study Rhetoric? or, What Freestyle Rap Teaches us about Writing.” (I also posted that original version here.)

The editors of the textbook made some edits, as editors are wont to do, so the version that ended up in the book is a bit different: two of my sections were deleted, my section breaks (marked with a *) were taken out, and some of the language and punctuation was, well, normalized. Here’s an example: after telling a story of someone whose Facebook posts made her seem rhetorically unsophisticated, I expressed my frustration at that sort of thing with this section-closing line:

Why study rhetoric? Because so many people so often seem to have no no no idea about how to communicate well.

In context, my hope was for the line to express the emotional level of my frustration, my punctuation-less “no no no” emphasizing the rhythms of speech more than the dictates of “proper” mechanics. But the edited version deleted the story that came before it and used this line instead:

Why study rhetoric? Because, communication is difficult, and even more difficult if we are not rhetorically aware.

Style-wise, the new line (to my ear) lacks the stylistic umph I was going for throughout the piece, and it lacks the rhythms of spoken speech. (Try sounding natural reading any sentence that begins with because-comma.)

I don’t want to sound too complainy, though–there was a lot of good work done to my piece, too. Many of my small errors were fixed, and plenty of my wordinesses (which I tend to drown in) were smoothed out beautifully. And hey, my piece was in a textbook for like 7,000 students! Rock on!

Revisions and Contracts

What does this have to do with authorial control? It gives you a sense of my attitude toward the piece as it grew into its next iteration, and as I locked the piece further and further into my mind as mine.

The essay as published in the textbook (the heavily edited version) was accepted for publication at the newish, online, free writing textbook Writing Commons. (Why was the edited version accepted at Writing Commons and not the original? It’s a long story; the short version being that the editors of Writing Commons used pieces written for the custom textbook as some of the first pieces to go through the peer review process at the new site.)

Leaping at the chance to revert some of the changes I wasn’t too happy with in the printed version, I used Word to compare my original version with the revised version. I then created a new final cut that incorporated the best of the book editor’s revisions while keeping a lot of what I had originally written. (I love showing undergraduate students the wonders of Word’s compare document features, which were made so much easier to use in Word 2007 and later.)

The best part: that the editors added “Lord” before “Voldemort”

Writing Commons graciously worked with me through these changes, and I now have this new version up at their site (where perhaps many more than 7,000 students will find it helpful), peer reviewed and all.

Even better: Writing Commons uses the same Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license I use on my blog, and I retain copyright over the piece. I love the idea that someone who found this piece helpful can print copies out, make a video of it, cut out the pieces she finds most helpful, and so on–and all legally (again, as long as she follows the guidelines of this particular CC license).

But the Writing Commons contract also includes an interesting optional clause: essentially, they wanted to know if I’m okay with other Writing Commons authors updating my piece later on. If I checked yes, I would always be first author, but later revisers would be included on the list of authors. This clause makes sense, especially given how quickly pieces can age and need updating, sometimes at times when the original authors can’t be contacted. If someone brilliant came along and wanted to add a few new paragraphs to my piece on rhetoric as freestyle rap, they would be able to, as long as Writing Commons allowed them to and as long as I checked yes.

But I said no. And as I checked no, my thoughts were, “I don’t want anyone else messing with my language. I don’t want my stylistic quirks reduced to voiceless academese. I don’t want my vignettes cut out in favor of preachiness. I don’t want someone else to change the flow I found and add some other stories that have nothing to do with me.”

And this mental defensive posture came about five seconds after I was congratulating myself on being so open, such an example of young scholars who embrace Creative Commons and the “some rights reserved” mindset, so morally superior.

Oops?

Thinking it All Through

In “A Loss for Words: Plagiarism and Silence,” from the 1994 issue of American Scholar, poet Neal Bowers tells the story of his obsessive search for a plagiarist who was publishing his poems verbatim in multiple journals. I haven’t read the piece for more than five years, but I remember my reaction to Bowers: a dash of sympathy and a healthy mix of “get over it, dude.” I remember thinking, “Well, duh!” when Bowers wrote:

As angry as I still am, however, I confess that after two years of thinking and talking about being the victim of a chronic plagiarist, I sometimes wonder if I shouldn’t have simply let the matter drop. In the end, my efforts to obtain justice have yielded few results; and I am not materially worse off than I was before my work started appeanng under someone else’s name.

Thinking back now, I realize this was at least a little uncharitable of me. It’s not like I’ve never felt I owned words before. I like writing, and I’m good at it; there have been plenty of pieces that I want to put my arms around and grasp, and if someone published them under another name, I would probably lash out with sudden Wolverine claws to protect my children.

But when I first read Bowers’s piece (which apparently he expanded into a book?), I was just getting excited about all the possibilities for purposefully losing control over writing. Authors like Kathy Acker and Jonathan Lethem and Dave Shields who blatantly create new, awesome things from the work of others, showing the claims of “I WROTE THIS JUST ME AND ONLY ME FOREVER WITH NO INFLUENCE” to be as flimsy as theorists have been suspecting for a long time.

In many ways, my thoughts on this stuff haven’t changed. I know that even my piece on rhetoric and freestyle rap isn’t as “original” as I feel it is: folded into it is something of Geoffrey Sirc’s ethos and the style of countless other essayists I’ve admired. The format of using clearly marked section breaks of varying length is absolutely stolen, but I’ve stolen it so often I have no idea where I first came to love it. Even the basic concept of seeing rhetoric as akin to freestyle rap was suggested to me long ago when I first learned–and this was a groundbreaking moment for me–that Homer’s poetry was performed orally by poets remarkably like freestyle rappers, who had a series of stock phrases in their mental storehouses that they could improvisationally (improvisatorily?) pull out when they needed them during a performance. I didn’t acknowledge this source in my essay. Heck, I didn’t even realize it was there until just now, as I consciously plumbed the influences that went into that thing, that collection of words that I love so much and want to protect.

So the closest I can get to a tidy, Full House-style conclusion right now is that I like the idea of living in that tension. I’m clearly more like Bowers than I sometimes like to think, protecting the fruits of my writing with a strong sense of authorial power. But even as I feel these feelings, I’m suspicious of them, wondering how much they’ve been infused into me from my Western cultural background and how much they were put there by a creative creator who revels in his own version of authorial control. (Wait, hasn’t someone else wondered something just like that before? I better go look it up. . . .)

 

Roundup of Writing on the Job Market

While at Computers and Writing last week, I posted to Twitter a link to my write-up of the digital tools I used to organize my job search, and I got more hits on this blog than I had ever had before. (This was at least mostly because the inimitable Tim Lockridge was talking about his clever tech-use when I tweeted, so everyone was all prepped up for thinking about this stuff.)

That made me remember that I chronicled my job search a bit for the graduate student newsletter Inklinks at the University of South Florida, edited this year by the amazing Jessica Cook. On the chance that they will help future job-seekers, I’ll post the articles here, informal and personal as they are.

• In the December 2011 issue, I wrote about the things I felt I had done well and poorly in the years leading up to the academic job search. Just my article | Entire issue
• In the February 2012 issue, I wrote about what it was like interviewing at MLA. Just my article | Entire issue
• In the May 2012 issue, I wrote some final reflections about the whole process, written after securing a tenure-track position. Just my article | Entire issue

Enjoy!

 

Computers and Writing and Memory and Meaning

I’d like to write a post summarizing the Computers and Writing conference. But right now, I’d rather live in the world of memory than summary. I want to think through the threads of uncertainty, time, and music that the conference brought to mind, which are so wrapped up in my ideas about memory.

*

Yoichi R. Okamoto, “THE TWO 14TH STREET BRIDGES, LOOKING NORTH FROM VIRGINIA TO THE DISTRICT”

I’m Washington, DC right now, even though I just left a conference in Raleigh and live in Orlando. Yesterday, a friend picked me up in Raleigh and I drove her to DC, where she’s moving.

Both of us used to live in DC, and it’s our favorite city. As the sun set, we crossed the 14th Street bridge and gawked and gaped and said things like, “Hello, crazy drivers zooming around me! Hello tourists with fanny packs! Hello unnecessary circle of flags around the Washington Monument!”

Now, I’m in the old terminal at Reagan National Airport, waiting to fly home. I’ve lived in this space before. I remember reading C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce sitting in the same collection of seats, even though that was six years ago.

I’ve only been in this city for seventeen hours, yet there is a pit of sadness in my belly over leaving.

*

For my musical presentation at the conference, I played a video with my voice talking over some images (and occasional black screens), while I played records live as a musical accompaniment. My motif was the musical prank, the moment where an audience’s expectation for how music will sound is thwarted, complicating the idea that we identify with music and make meaning from it based on how our expectations are met or not met.

To mess around with expectations in the audience, I changed the speed of the records, played them backwards, and played them along with video footage that they were never meant to accompany.

But my expectations weren’t met, either. A piece of fuzz in my needle kept the records from sounding the way I expected. The weight balance of the needle arm was probably misbalanced, leading to more skips than I expected. My arm was shaking more than I expected, so I missed a couple of precise arm placements thad had worked fine when practicing at home.

And just as when an audience is surprised, and thus is led to make meaning from the surprising sounds, I was surprised by what sounded, and I made my own meanings as well.

*

I asked my friend to drive me by my old neighborhood in Washington, DC, the Columbia Heights / Petworth area. Even when I left five years ago I knew the area was gentrifying, that the pedestrians were getting whiter and the stores were getting sleeker, bigger, more national.

But I didn’t expect the difference in the feel of a space that is surrounded by new, tall condos instead of three-story townhouses. What used to be on that corner, I kept asking myself, where that tall, metal building is now? I’ve walked by that spot hundreds of times–how could I have forgotten?

*

Anne Wysocki gave a keynote address introducing her long-term project on the rhetorical canon of memory. She’s designing a beautiful interactive web space that allows users to simulate a walk through the different ways people have engaged with memory over the last 2,500 years. It was lovely and important enough that I thought, I want to be involved in this project. I want to engage with memories from now on. I don’t want to forget.

David Burrows, Time and the Warm Body

Much of Wysocki’s talk reminded me of a book by musicologist David Burrows called Time and the Warm Body. (At rhetoric/composition conferences of late, I find myself mentioning Burrows once a day, and twice on days I present.) I tweeted the book title to Wysocki as she spoke, just in case she hadn’t come across it. It’s Burrows’s consideration first of how our bodies experience time and the “now,” an experience of time that he situates as the epistemological nature of how we experience music, given our nature as embodied, time-based creatures. Language draws our minds to other spaces and other times, but music draws us to the now.

Wysocki tweeted back, later, an earnestly cheerful reply that she didn’t know the book and was excited to look it up. It made me feel good, and it made me think about all the books the people in the room had read individually and all the books we had read collectively, as a massive library of memory that could never be perfectly tapped.

*

Drinking with Trauman the next day, he mentioned that I have an earnestness about me.

On the drive to DC, I told my friend that I always think of my wife as the earnest one, but that I liked the idea being earnest myself, too.

I want to be earnest. I want to construct things, and engage with memories through my earnestness.

*

At one point during the conference, I jokingly tweeted that the theme of Computers and Writing 2014 should be The Goonies.

Scott Reed rewteeted it with an earnest “THIS –>” preeding my tweet.

I could look up these tweets to make sure I’m quoting them correctly, relying on the exactness of a computer’s memory. But my memory is just fine, in this case, even if it’s not always accurate.

*

I remember where I was when I read another David Burrows book, Sound, Speech, and Music: the waiting room of the Tire Kingdom near my house in Orlando. The coffee was bad, and the 24-hour news network on the loud TV was worse.

I don’t remember what my car was in for that day. But I remember being surprised by Burrows’s prose, his theories of music and speech that included lines about psuedopods of meaning reaching between humans engaging and identifying with each other. And in my surprise, I found meaning. And in my meaning, I created memory.

*

Gryffindor, “Main hall of Union Station in Washington D.C.”

Before taking the Metro to the airport this morning, I met an old DC friend in Union Station. At first, I felt turned around: there is construction that blocked off the path I expected to take inside the building. And maybe it shouldn’t matter, but a net a few feet above my head blocked bits of my sight as I glanced up at the pounds and pounds of air between me and the distant windows near the ceiling. Even though I wasn’t walking vertically, the net made me feel even more disoriented.

But the Corner Bakery was still there, and so was the bookstore (though it’s a Barnes and Noble now), and so was the line of people outside waiting for taxis, and so was the neverending construction outside the station.

I’m not sure how I felt so comforted and discomforted at the same time, helped along by the con/destruction around me, and my confirmed and demolished memories.

*

Jody Shipka presented on the process of archiving and remediating found texts as a way to remember and honor the people who created them. She has amassed an astounding collection of old photos, home movies, and slides from various yard sales and such.

The clips she showed were comforting and discomforting, constructing and destructing (as some of the film she showed literally burned to pieces just after she digitized it). I tried to tweet during the talk but eventually had to stop, pulled to the now that Shipka drew to my attention with a beauty I didn’t expect. It was one of those wonderful presentations with ultra-small audiences that makes me feel I witnessed something rare.

During the question and answer period, we talked about what it means when bodies encounter retro, analog media. Keith Dorwick (whose presentation just before Shipka’s was also evocative and tremendous) said, “And I hope Kyle doesn’t mind my saying this, but it was a powerful moment during the question and answer of his presentation when he told us that his hand was shaking while he cued the records. There’s an inevitable indeterminacy that comes from the interaction between any physical media and a human body.”

I responded that there was something lovely and important–and indeed, unexpected–in the physicality of the analog, the touch of a record.

I also said, “Yesterday, I apologized to a friend about how many pops and crackles there were in the records, but so many people have told me how much they loved hearing those pops.”

Shipka replied earnestly. “Why did you apologize?”

I thought for a moment, said, “I think it’s because of this: I love vinyl, but I know there are people who love vinyl with a seriousness that I don’t have. They know how to wash it, and they have all the right brushes, and they hold it right, and all that. For me, it’s a much simpler preoccupation. Like, I like to buy ninety-nine cents records from the thrift store, to listen to them, not to preserve them or be an audiophile or something. I love them, but as an enthusiast, not a collector.”

Dorwick said, “There are people who say that listening to CDs is too sterile an environment. There are people who say that when you listen to a recording that is too perfect, you’re not hearing it right. We need the pops and crackle to hear it as a lived experience, as something that’s really there.”

*

The quotations above aren’t exact. I remembered them that way.

*

http://twitpic.com/9nqfhc

While waiting in the airport terminal a few minutes ago, a demolition project began outside. I watched out the window as a small, golf-cart-ish thing rammed into the concrete exterior wall of the terminal and shook with anger as it (I assume?) drilled cracks into the area marked for destruction. It looked like a small animal who was positive that it could knock over a skyscraper, if only it rammed and shook it hard enough.

But the quality of the sound had none of the cute, unassuming nature of the vehicle’s appearance. It was like a giant with metal teeth was chewing concrete for breakfast, like a jackhammer underground was coming at a square of sidewalk from below and I happened to be standing on it, like a memory being forcibly removed from my head instead of being allowed to fade into smells and images and sounds in the gentle way they’re supposed to go.

I moved to the other side of the circular terminal, but even there, it seemed just as loud. I couldn’t escape from it, regardless of how hard I tried, unless I wanted to leave security and come back in later. I looked up at the circular, 60s-ish ceiling of the old terminal and tried to focus on what I was seeing instead of what I was hearing.

*

David Burrows, in Sound, Space, and Music, writes, “Noise is a concept rooted in the domain of sound rather than sight, because the promiscuity with which sound addresses itself to appropriate and inappropriate receptors alike means that we must so often hear things we do not want to hear, whereas we can look the other way, or close our eyes, when we see something unpleasant or superfluous. Our auditory defenselessness casts us often in the role of victim, our privacy invaded by someone else’s stereo or car horn” (24-25).

*

I’m on the plane now, finishing this post in the loud, fuel-tinged air of the next-to-last seat in the cabin, so unlike the space in Union Station I wandered through so recently.

I’m hoping for a good glimpse of the National Mall as I leave, even as I know I can hardly bear it. It’s that pain you get when you have braces and you bite down on your aching teeth, and it’s good and hard at the same time.

Leaving the conference was cleaner, if more awkward. There were so many people I wanted to properly say goodbye to, who have begun to matter to both my professional and personal lives. But instead, I waved at the people I saw, hugged a couple, and slipped out the back door of the Syme Hall basement.