Theory Canal

Vis and dig

I'm at a workshop on visual and digital rhetoric with Jeff Rice, at the SU Writing Program. He is asking us to use a blog as a space to free-write on a theme in four different sectors of discourse, but it took me so long to find my blog (without its automated link), I probably won't have time.

It's nice to visit my blog again, though. I've been so busy, I haven't had any blogging time. Starting the teaching year, getting married, adjusting to my new little family.

Sorry, Theory Canal.

The stages of a jazz career

Q. says, “My son A. studied jazz with a Dr. Coolman? Could that really be his given name, a jazz player named Coolman?”

A. told me that one of his teachers (was it Dr. Coolman?) described to him the stages of a jazz player’s career:

Stage One
Who’s Coolman?

Stage Two
Have you heard of Coolman? I hear he’s good.

Stage Three
You’ve got to get Coolman for your next project.

Stage Four
What you need is a “younger Coolman.”

Tintinnabulum cum laude

Honors theses were due today.

As writing consultant for the Honors Program, I’ve been on the firing line for seventy projectors over the last many weeks. I worked with writers on about fourteen thesis projects, some quite long. I prayed more than once to make it through to today, hoping I might get a break until the reviewers start raining problem manuscripts down on me and calling the writers back in.

The students have agonized over their projects for two years. On deadline day, every time one of them finishes the paperwork and brings a completed thesis to the front desk, the staff halloos and claps and rings a bell.

I was in a nearby classroom this morning with my sophomore Honors class when they were startled by the commotion in the office next door, the obstreperous bell sounding rudely.

“What’s that?” they said.

“Another angel getting its wings.”

Jennies macaroons

Mmmm. Jennies macaroons. Weigh the can in your hand. It's like an oatmeal can. You know--cardboard cylinder, metal rims, replaceable plastic top. It has a metal pop-top seal inside. These aren’t cheap, either.

Each macaroon is a little coconut bomb, dense and heavy, about the size of a bon bon. Toasted till the edges are a faint golden brown. Richly moist, slightly chewy. Little detonation of coconut on the tongue. Mmmm.

Who is this Jennie?

A hundred percent natural. This wouldn’t come from a factory. Where would it come from? A magic little kitchen somewhere in the counterculture. Jennie must be an absolute darling. A cookie genius. Let’s see.

Here’s Jennie. White. Glasses.

Bald?

Bearded?

Arnold Jennie!

What were you thinking?

Sexist!

Snippet from Internet Relay Chat

#287414 +(9777)- [X]

[DeadMansHand] haha, last night, me and pete went out to celebrate his engagement and got hugely drunk

[DeadMansHand] we got this great idea to bury each other in the sand close to the water and see who would chicken out first

[DeadMansHand] took about a half hour, but the water got up to my face so i freaked and got out

[DeadMansHand] i looked around for pete and he must've chickened out before me and stumbled home or something heh

[DeadMansHand] What'd he say when he woke up this morning?

[Thirteen-] uhh.. he hasn't come home yet.. i thought he was staying with you?

[DeadMansHand] holy f--k.

[DeadMansHand] i f--king hope im wrong about what im thinking right now

[DeadMansHand] im f--king going back to the beach to make sure

[DeadMansHand] if he gets home, call me, i don't want to be worrying about this

[Thirteen-] will do. you better hope he's not still buried, you'll be in deep shit.

quit: (DeadMansHand)

[Tyran] wtf? pete came home last night you f--k. Ken's going to be worrying about this shit all day

[Thirteen-] haha yea, but it will be fun while it lasts

join: (PeteRepeat) (bob@3F8C4655.11D1C8C.18637D35.IP)

[PeteRepeat] f--king ken

[PeteRepeat] ken... that f--ker buried me in the sand last night, i ran off about 5 minutes into it, left him there to be an idiot

[quiqsilver] pete, ken didn't come back last night, i thought he was with you.

[PeteRepeat] oh f--k.

[PeteRepeat] if ken shows up, make sure he doesn't know that im at the beach digging for his body. i don't want him to think i care or anything.

quit: (PeteRepeat)

[Thirteen-] rofl. Those 2 are going to get a huge surprise when they meet at the beach.

[Tyran] i can't believe how perfect their timing was

Two Theory Canals

I was wondering how nakedly exposed my blog was, so I googled “theory canal” on a whim and found, to my surprise, that I share this name with a computer science theory group at the University of Rochester:

THEORY CANAL: The Rochester Theory Seminar Series

The THEORY CANAL meeting (the Rochester Theory Seminar) is a joint project of the UR and RIT theory groups, and the focus is all areas of theoretical computer science.

I would have expected a lit crit theory group.

Anyway, I'm pretty naked and exposed. Someday, I'll have to come up with a theory about something. In the meantime, subtract two originality points.

This is why I came to be with you

Saturday, Q. and I walk the bike path into the woodland by the Allegheny River. Two miles in, you can find us, lounging and tangled on a bench by the shore, talking in the sun. Across the water is a high, wooded ridge, the branches all brown with the season. Every now and then, time passes. A pair of ducks or geese cruises honking down the river, or there’s a mere shadow of a carp stirring up a faint plume of silt as it nuzzles the bank. Behind us, the occasional walkers or bicyclists go by on the path. And there’s a photographer off to the left trying unobtrusively to take our picture. It feels like this is something the sun imagined and stopped to wonder about for a few hours, entranced by the sound of our voices.

Collateral—a review

In this action thriller, a hit man (Tom Cruise) cajoles/engages/coerces a cab driver (Jamie Foxx) to chauffer him through a night of five hits, bumping off the testifiers in a big, upcoming drug case.

If this were the first thriller you’d seen like this, nocturnal urban noir, you’d be thrilled. Cruise acts an unsettling line between reasonable and monstrous (his Vincent is quick on the draw--twice in the chest and once in the forehead), Foxx between fecklessly nice and morally fibrous. The characters are engaging as we learn about them and try to figure how Vincent is going to keep Max in the game. The production values are high style.

But once the plot gets going, it’s just a cascade of cliches: annihilating the street thugs who think they can rob the cab (the old bring-out-the-Bernie-Goetz appeal); a visit to the squalid druggie flat; a trek through the nightclubs, and, of course, table chat with a club owner (at least there are no thong-clad pole-dancers in the background); the rescuer-after-killer-after-victim hunt through a dark office building; and a romantic interest (Jada Pinkett Smith), who, because she’s a high-powered federal attorney, shows a spark of heroic promise, but has to be saved from Vincent by cab driver Max in a showdown on a subway train (pullleeease; we would have guessed it, except it’s 2005--aren’t we over it by now?). In the end, Collateral is just a well-crafted index of the sorts of scenes that have been done better before.

Here's one for poetry month

[Note: all the lines after the first line of each stanza should be indented and aligned; I can't find an HTML tag for this.]

Brief reflection on maps
(by Miroslav Holub, trans. Ewald Osers)

Albert Szent-Gyorgi, who knew a thing or two about maps,
by which life moves somewhere or other,
used to tell this story from the war,
through which history moves somewhere or other:

From a small Hungarian unit in the Alps a young lieutenant
sent out a scouting party into the icy wastes.
At once
it began to snow, it snowed for two days and the party
did not return. The lieutenant was in distress: he had sent
his men to their deaths.

On the third day, however, the scouting party was back.
Where had they been? How had they managed to find their way?
Yes, the men explained, we certainly thought we were
lost and awaited our end. When suddenly one of our lot
found a map in his pocket. We felt reassured.
We made a bivouac, waited for the snow to stop, and then with the map
found the right direction.
And here we are.

The lieutenant asked to see that remarkable map in order to
study it. It wasn’t a map of the Alps
but the Pyrenees.

Goodbye.

This is only going to get worse

Yesterday was an effulgent spring day.

Here’s what I did.

I sat inside and read student papers.
I sat inside and read an article on social network analysis for a grad course.
I sat inside and read Honors theses.
I sat at the computer and read e-mail.
Inside, that would be.
I read a mountainous backlog of blog entries.

Some time after dark, half-blind, I stumbled down the street to be mercifully fed by a couple of friends.
I returned a few hours later.

I read more blog entries.
I read some more on social network analysis.
I read a very short story by O. Henry.

I closed my eyes.

I hear it was a gorgeous day.

There are links and there are links

We’re trying to get clear which song is which. JC says:

“Does it matter? All music is the same, like sausage. It’s just divided up arbitrarily into links.”

Tlön Uqbar Wikipedia

“Mirrors and copulation are abominable, for they multiply the number of mankind.”

In Jorges Borges’ story “Tlön Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” the narrator’s friend Bioy Casares cites this from the Anglo-American Cyclopedia, from the entry on Uqbar. Pulling Borges' copy off the shelf, however, the two friends find no such entry. Bioy later produces the text as it appears in his copy. Uqbar, however, appears on no map the two can discover, and references to it in ancient literature are arcane and trivial.

Then, by a fluke, the narrator comes by a copy of A First Encyclopedia of Tlön, Vol. XI, containing a wealth of information about the cryptic land of transparent tigers and towers of blood. Tlön is a cosmos with its own innermost laws. Tlön is not spatial, but “successive, temporal,” a “heterogeneous series of independent acts.” The language of Tlön is non-referential; to coin a noun is to call into being an object. Reality is a function of subjectivity and language, so that all disciplines are subordinate to psychology. All books are regarded as the work of a single timeless and anonymous author, and all complete books contain their antithesis, or “counter-book.”

Echoing the inexplicable versions of the cyclopedia, a characteristic of Tlön is the duplication of lost objects. Two people looking for a lost pencil may both find it, since seekers produce what they hope to find. The secondary reproduction is called a hrönir. Hrönir at various generations of removal from the original exhibit varying levels of aberration or purity. “The systematic production of hrönir . . . has been of invaluable aid to archaeologists, making it possible not only to interrogate but even to modify the past” (77).

Eventually, even an altered version of the First Encyclopedia of Tlön is discovered, as well as the fact that the project originated as the collaborative work of a secret society in the 1600s with the aim of inventing a country in exquisite detail.

There is an entry for Uqbar in the Wikipedia.

(Borges, Jorges Luis. “Tlön Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” Collected Fictions. Trans. Andrew Hurley. New York: Penguin Books, 1998. 68-81.)

Island of scorpions

In my dreams, I’m frequently with an ill-defined group of comrades, both male and female. In this dream, the group is marooned on a cold, wet, stony island, our raft shot to pieces. On a rock in front of me, two centipede-like insects, about seven inches long, come into view. One is tan, the other red. They’re fussing with each other. And then—whoa—up come the tails to sting. They’re scorpions!

Not only that, it turns out there are scorpions everywhere, in every crevice and cranny. There are these little ones, like little black and white etchings, and--oh my god--they can jump like fleas! Their pincers are almost microscopic; I don’t want to find out if they can get a grip. There are scorpions like pale cooked shrimp and little chubby scorpions and flat black ones that fit between the rocks, and tucked in over the side above the breakers are these ones like lumps of larval jelly, which I’m sure will start moving the minute things look quiet.

So I’m just standing there, mad and frozen with anxiety, thinking, “When I get tired, how am I going to lie down to sleep, with scorpions tucked like earwigs into every fold of clothing and bedding and creeping out of the very earth? We’re doomed.”

At least I have this hammer now. It’s ugly work, but there’s nothing else for it. Just go quietly crazy. Aim for the head.

I’m hammering up a fine lather and wincing with guilt at every stroke by the time I awaken. I’m exhausted and remain under the spell of the dream for a long time.

Two days after this dream, I was walking along stressing about all the things I had to do and it clicked. I recognized the feeling. This was the stress of the island of scorpions. They are all the things I have to do. And I have to labor at them with my hammer and get rid of them before they can sting me.

I’m working too much.

Misreading

"The future belongs to crowds." ---Don DeLillo

"The future belongs to cowards." ---Theory Canal

The structure of unburdening

"Hence, if you look for a man's burden, you will find the principle that reveals the structure of his unburdening; or, in attenuated form, if you look for his problem, you will find the lead that explains the structure of his solution. His answer gets its form by relation to the questions he is answering."

Kenneth Burke
"'Form' and 'Content.'"
Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action