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I’ve been presenting about AI lately. Here’s a link to my text-heavy slides. (This is mostly for people who are attending one of my presentations, but if you’ve landed here by other means, you are welcome to take a look! I’ll write up a more typical post about AI once my presentation schedule settles down.)

I recently took a sailing class. It started with two 2-hour zoom sessions (Tuesday/Thursday) and finished with two 8-hour sailing sessions (Saturday/Sunday).

When learning to sail, there is a lot of terminology (declarative knowledge) and there is the actual practice of sailing itself (performative knowledge).

Obviously you can’t sail on Zoom, so what we learned on Tuesday and Thursday was a lot of terminology, as well as the basic procedures of sailing. I did have a little prior experience with sailing, but had hit a wall because I really didn’t have any idea what I was doing. So during the Zoom sessions, I worked on memorizing the terminology (the parts of the boat, the various riggings, etc.) but didn’t do so well. And even though I had been on the water before, I still had some trouble visualizing what the instructor wanted to teach me about manipulating the sail in relation to the wind.

At the same time, though, I was glad to go over a few things before going out into the water. I think I would have been afraid had we just been told to head out without any declarative knowledge whatsoever.

As a teacher, I sometimes have trouble being a student because I’m often thinking about how the class is being taught at the same time that I’m trying to learn as a student. And so while I should have been listening to my teachers online I found myself thinking about how most of my career I’ve tried to find ways of giving students experience writing and terminology at the exact right time.

I often fail.

Why? Because there is no exact formula for when performative and declarative knowledge will meet up in a student. They meet differently for different people at different times. And for writers, no two days are exactly the same, and if my limited experience with sailing is any indication, the same is true for sailing.

So I guess the connection I want to make (and this is mostly for me but I hope you find it interesting too) is that we can’t fully abandon either mode of knowledge about writing. The turn toward threshold concepts is useful for our field, though only as useful as knowing the parts of a boat and sail are to sailing. There is no substitute for getting out on the water and watching what happens when you turn the sail in various directions in the wind.

My WRIT 319 “Technologies of Writing” class and I went back through Gregory Ulmer’s Internet Invention this semester. I decided to write a new widesite along with my students. You can find the navigation to this site in the upper right hand corner of the page.

I enjoyed going back through the process, and I think my students did too.

This was a talk I gave at the Rhetoric Society of America Conference a few years back. An audio version of the talk is here.

In summer 1989, couch-surfing cross country, I picked up this CD, knowing nothing about the composer or the composition, but noticing it was a long piece probably suitable for driving long stretches of road. This accident, and all the variables surrounding it, changed the way I heard music, the way I lived in and saw the world. 

Over the years, few of my room-mates, friends, girlfriends, or casual acquaintances I’d sometimes corner at parties, shared my enthusiasm for his work. Now, my wife doesn’t like it when I play him in the house, saying “I already have a voice inside my head that goes on like that. I don’t need another” and even some of my musicologist friends either dismiss him as ambient music or claim that I’m listening to him wrong: his is the kind of music you leave on while you’re doing other stuff around the house. It’s music to be heard, not listened to. 

(Note: this perception has changed somewhat, recently, after Robert Ashley’s death.)

 So on the release of Rickert’s Ambient Rhetoric and this panel’s suggestion that we might put something together on sound, I thought I would take this opportunity to dig into whatever scholarly work had been done on Perfect Lives. The first piece I found, opened with the following: “of the many things that can be said about _Perfect Lives_, the most important one to consider is that it is a failure.”

So at least for the purpose of this presentation I am putting the music criticism aside and focusing instead on what I see as the generative potential of this opera for work in object oriented rhetoric, by describing a few of its key scenes, not on what they mean but how they make meaning. It is my hope that this description will carve out a space for the opera to be considered as a unique form of epideictic persuasion. 

To enter the world of Robert Ashley is to enter a world of oftentimes commonplace rhythms, spoken observations, vocals that do not attempt to distinguish themselves in vocal registers but simply blend into the musical landscapes surrounding them. Listening intentionally, though, one finds layers of unexpected complexity: musical and verbal cliches coupled with profound insights. 

Perfect Lives is an opera centered around four characters, who hatch a plan to steal all the money from a small town bank in Illinois, carry it over the border into Indiana, drive the money back to IL the following day, put it back in the bank vault surreptitiously, and then let the entire world know that it was once missing. With this high stakes, conceptual art project at its center, the opera weaves together discussions of teenage love, marriage, Tourette’s syndrome, and selfhood with diverse topics like Giordano Bruno, boogie woogie, immigration, language, and the end of human thought–all the while performing invented pop songs, self-help treatises, marriage ceremonies, and philosophical dialogues. 

But what is key is the way that the opera makes its meaning. Traditionally, opera works from a grand central narrative with high drama, elaborate sets, and a libretto meant to emphasize human subjectivity, emotions and decisions. Perfect Lives, by contrast, levels the human with its environment (has the environment become a character in its text). For example, in the episode “The Bar,” the character Buddy, a writer of teach yourself boogie-woogie books, and the character Rodney, a bartender whose daughter just happens to be more or less failing to learn boogie-woogie from Buddy’s books, meet up by accident. While traditional opera would set this as a conflict, this opera presents the encounter in an idiosyncratic way, by leveling human and nonhuman relations. That is to say the performers sing/speak the words of a standard boogie-woogie lick:

CCEE CCGG CCBB CCGG CCEE CCGG CCBB CCGG ALWAYS. 

This boogie woogie lick, which represents for the character Rodney “Industry,” is an example of what Rodney believes separates us from the animals. Rodney’s view is challenged, though, by the composition of the piece, when Ashley juxtaposes the boogie-woogie lick with what he refers to as the “cowlick:”

But this leveling is not obvious to Rodney, who holds on to his subjectivity and his self throughout the narrative: “It does not occur to Rodney that he could lie down with animals. The bar is bad enough.” That is to say that Rodney’s character is haunted by his own lack of subjectivity, that he is always on the border of noticing his lack of it.  

[Following Rickert’s discussions of the relationship between theorists of language and human subjectivity it could be argued that Robert Ashley represents Heidegger’s sense of being in the world, while the character Rodney represents Kenneth Burke. While there is not time in this presentation to unpack this possibility, it is sufficient to say that this opera engages this kind of leveling.] 

There are numerous other examples, notably the discussions and performances of Tourette’s syndrome (a condition that Robert Ashley lived with and which he used to generate an entire opera “Automatic Writing”), but due to the relative weight of that topic, I want to focus on just one more example in the character of Dwayne, who throughout the opera struggles with the dilemma of not being understood. 

Like the imposition of the cowlick in the Bar, in this particular episode the Aria comes at what would normally be a moment of peak conflict, when a preacher asks if there is any man or woman in the congregation who knows for any reason why the couple he is marrying should not be joined. Duane uses this moment to say the following:

Duane’s Aria

Dwayne, my name is three sounds in one word or

Three hills or bumps, a kind of inter-something, where you can’t get  

Them apart. I keep saying to myself: Dquayne Djuayne  

Duwayne Dowayne Dewayne Dhwayne Dwayne. 

I can’t figure out how they got together. 

This attempt at stripping language of its signification through repetition is nothing new, as numerous examples can be found in literature, but what may be new and what is certainly a thread that runs through Ashley’s work is his figuring of this act in the position of aria. 

The open question, then, what does this have to tell us about rhetoric. My focus on these two details has led me to believe that despite what some music critics say to us Ashley should be listened to if for no other reason than to experience the performative effect of human’s being brought to the level of objects. As a genre, opera can perform what happens when characters and objects are leveled in a way that theory alone cannot. Of course, that’s essentially an argument that this opera should be studied. Enjoyment is another matter altogether, and perhaps it’s glib to want to articulate reasons for my own enjoyment of this work. But at least on the level of theory, even (maybe even especially) rhetoric will have to account for enjoyment in order to be complete. I suspect the path to this would be to artificially construct systems which illustrate to us what it means to be part (to use Rickert’s terminology) of a rhetorical lifeworld made up of “elements that lie beyond what humans can do or say” (213).

During the pandemic, Lisa and I moved west, to the Mount Olive, NJ area. Apparently I’m just a few miles from Kenneth Burke’s farm, where he wrote a good bit of his later work, but I haven’t figured out exactly where it is yet, and whether or not any of his papers are nearby. I’ve just mostly been trying to work peacefully with the bear that likes to hang out in my yard.

Twice a week, at Montclair State, I teach a hybrid class, where I teach some students face to face at the same time that I teach others on Zoom. I have a mask and a headset. Sometimes there are a few students in the physical classroom. Other times the classroom is empty and everyone shows up on Zoom.

All of this has me thinking about where “the university” actually lives, as student, teacher, and administrative versions of “the university” seem to have been brought into stark collision during all this.  I guess I want to update Pirsig’s chapter about people’s confusion of the University and its location, as it very much applies to what happened this fall with reopening. Just as the church is different than its building, the University is different than its location. That has always been true. But I wonder if the possibility that university classes can happen online hasn’t complicated that issue in different, more difficult ways. That is to say the forces that have always believed they own the university (trustees, admin, governors, and so on) fought this past summer to make sure that the location IS the university because that’s where the profitable machinery runs.

Faculty, on the other hand, can impart (to some degree) the University from anywhere, but of course we want to get paid for doing so, which binds us to the machinery of location in ways that some of us do not want to acknowledge. (Students have bought in to the University as location, too, because, well, that’s where the fun is at). 

I don’t know what else to say about that right now, but I’m interested in the tension that schools like Harvard are experiencing versus aspirational schools like mine are facing and maybe how that would graph in Lacanian terms. University discourse is unconsciously supported by the master, sure, and the master has been making its long arc toward capitalism for quite a while. But (And?) there are endowments that allow schools to just go online (because after all even the very rich can’t afford to take a gap year from Harvard and be in competition with the next rising class) and there are schools like mine whose endowments would be done in less than a month if they did not offer the promise of university as location.  

In any case, that’s what I’m thinking about this morning as I prepare to go into my campus classroom to stream a class to college students on Zoom. As the weather turns colder, the campus becomes emptier and emptier. Each student seems to decide that the university lives in digital space, and that seems to be a day by day decision.

A presentation for the Sound Studies, Rhetoric, and Writing Conference 2020

In the bluegrass community–to adapt a common expression from my hometown of Roanoke, VA–opinions about prewar banjos are like assholes, in that (unlike a prewar banjo) everyone has an opinion. Outside the bluegrass banjo community, though, very few people have an opinion on prewar banjos. It is difficult, therefore, to explain to an audience that may or may not be familiar with the amount of rancor involved in these discussions what’s at stake with two definitional arguments: 1) What is a prewar banjo and 2) what is prewar tone? I need to start somewhere, though, and so what I want to explain in this presentation is how and why people argue about prewar banjos and prewar tone, and why that argument matters for the study of communities that develop around particular sounds. 

At the most basic level, a prewar banjo refers to a Gibson banjo that was made between the years of 1927 to 1942. To a traditional bluegrass banjo player, the most desirable prewar banjo is one that is closest to the one played by Earl Scruggs, an original 5 string, flathead, one-piece flange model. At current count, there were only 206 of these ever made (Spann), so the cost of these often goes above $300,000. With the relative scarcity of these, it is safe to say that there are far fewer people with one of these than there are people with opinions about them. Most banjo players, if they are trying to buy a prewar banjo, settle for what is known in the banjo world as a “prewar conversion,” a less “authentic” banjo that has some component that was made before the war but that also has modern components. 

For example, there are many “pre-war” banjos that were originally four string flathead tenor banjos that were converted to 5-string banjos by replacing the tenor neck with a modern five-string neck. These are the most desirable of the prewar conversions because they have the highly coveted flathead tone ring, so many of these banjos still fall in the 100,00o dollar range. Another layer of conversion would be a banjo that has a modern 5 string neck, plus its archtop or ball bearing tone ring has been replaced with a modern flathead tone ring. More often than not, this kind of conversion requires putting the banjo rim back on a a lathe so that it can be turned to accept the flathead tone ring. In these cases, the banjo has an altered (but still prewar) wooden rim but an original resonator and metal flange, tension hoop and tailpiece, but the neck and tone ring–primary drivers of banjo tone–are all modern. Another layer of conversion would be further turning the rim of a two piece flange banjo to make it accept a one-piece flange. 

Even though having a banjo that sounds like Earl’s may be the primary factor for players, the reasons that emerge from that original desire become more complex. In order to avoid going into the minutia of an already esoteric situation, I attempt to lay out these reasons below without a great deal of analysis:

#1 Better Metal: Metal shipped to the Gibson factory before World War II was of a superior composition before WWII than after. Despite numerous attempts to recreate the metallurgical components, no metal (it is argued) has been able to match what came before WWII. Because bluegrass banjos have many metal parts that influence tone, in particular the tone ring, the composition of the metal is very important to the sound of a banjo. Therefore, the flathead tone ring is the holy grail of prewar parts. Following the importance of the tone ring, would come the flange, and then the tailpiece. 

#2 Better Wood: It is generally argued that wood from the prewar period was superior to wood today. “Old growth wood” from Michigan would have been from trees more than 200 years old at the time, where “old growth wood” today would be closer to 70 years old. Hence the rim, resonator, and neck of a banjo from the prewar period is significantly older wood than banjos made today. 

#3 Longer Time: Other arguments about why prewar banjos have a unique sound relate to the time that the instruments have been together as a banjo. 80 years of vibration through the wood and the parts make them better instruments. 

While I could go further into an explication of prewar banjo materials, I want to focus now on the mystical concept of “prewar banjo tone.” If you ask the question “what is prewar banjo tone,” the answers parallel answers to the question “what is a prewar banjo?” The first answer to the question is simply “Prewar tone is what Earl had when he played the banjo.” 

In this case, Earl is playing an authentic prewar banjo on a quintessential banjo album. Just as with the argument “what is a prewar banjo,” more complex arguments emerge when one moves outside this territory. That is to say when someone who is not Earl Scruggs plays a banjo that is not an authentic 5-string, flathead, one piece flange banjo.

The dilemma that this brings up is very well summarized by Banjo Lefty on the Banjo Hangout:

Here’s what I know for a fact: the majority of pre-war Gibsons were tenors. The “pre-war” sound you are supposed to hear today comes from banjos that have been converted to five-strings. This means that one-half of the instrument, the part that, according to many builders, is the second most important contributor to the tone, has been replaced with a modern (post-war) part. Of course, the tailpiece has to be changed as well; the strings are new, the bridge is new, often the original skin head has been replaced with a mylar one, and sometimes the rim has been cut to accept a modern tone ring.

So what exactly are we listening to? Not a pre-war sound, that’s for sure. What you hear is the sound that an old pot with new parts makes today. Would that banjo have sounded just like that in the twenties and thirties? I highly doubt it, although we’ll never know for sure because all the people who actually heard these banjos being played before the war are all dead and gone, and what recordings we have from that era are imprecise, to say the least.

What becomes interesting to me in the idea above is that “prewar tone” becomes something separate from the material that brings it about. Arguably, one could say that this separation does violence to banjos, as more and more banjos that were never meant to be 5-string, flathead, one-piece flange banjos are cut and reshaped to become imitations of “true” pre-war banjos. As one can see by scanning classified ads of “Prewar banjos” for sale, people are willing to put in a great deal of time and money in order to either obtain “prewar tone” or to obtain the cash of selling a “prewar banjo.” Beyond changing out necks and cutting rims, banjo makers are now adding additional wood to four- string necks and adding an additional layer of wood to the thinner rims of non-Mastertone banjos.

What I want to suggest is that the violence we see enacted upon the original intention of other kinds of prewar banjos has a parallel in bluegrass communities itself.

It always amazes me how much class discussion can be generated with a simple activity, especially when the activity is grounded in the experience of students. Take this one, from Graves and Graves’ A Strategic Guide to Technical Communication: 

In-Class Exercise 7.3

You have to miss class to attend the funeral of an extended family member, but you have an assignment due at the beginning of that class. Write an email message to your instructor using the information in the previous section and the organization pattern outlined in Figure 7.3 to help you develop and structure your communication. Remember, you need to both identify and solve the problem that your upcoming absence will create.

The organizational pattern for problem solving emails that Graves and Graves provides is as follows:

Figure 7.3

1) Identify and describe the problem.

2) Give whatever background is necessary.

3) Describe options for solving the problem.

4) Recommend a solution and offer assistance to solve the problem.

I believe the reason that this assignment generates so much discussion in the classroom is that it is a very real and relatable situation, but I also think it presents an important intellectual challenge for students because it asks them to think, in a very concrete way, from the reader’s perspective. Students have to think of the problem from the instructor’s perspective. The student has to miss class and will not be able to turn in an assignment and will also miss the work done in the class that day. The necessary background is not about the student’s life, it’s about the work missed, how it is articulated on the syllabus. It also give the students the ability, in presenting solutions to the problem, a chance to articulate their understanding of the values of the course.

 

I’m on a really large search committee with professors from both the Arts and the Sciences, and I’ve been surprised by the number of people in the Sciences who do not read cover letters, who only look at the CV portion of job application packets.

My students in technical writing mentioned that some firms hiring interns explicitly ask students not to include cover letters with their resumes.

I argued in class that even if an employer does not want a cover letter, writing one is a good idea because doing so will help you develop stories and examples that you could use in an interview session, but now I’m really curious what this potential trend means.