No Nunes-sense: Composition as Composition

For my final project, I decided to try and learn to do overdubs in iMovie, a la Julia Nunes, teaching myself through YouTube tutorials and trial and error. I love the way Nunes is able to transform a video-editing program into a recording studio, mixing music and video simultaneously. Her method, and that of similarly inclined YouTubers, brings to mind issues of materiality and (digital) literacy, while also challenging the regime of media professionals that evolved in the pre-digital age.

The very way I try to describe this endeavor, "overdubs in iMovie," shows how misguided about the whole thing I was. "Overdubs" is a word better suited to an audio-recording program such as Garage Band, with which I have some familiarity. Learning how to do this has convinced me that iMovie needs to be thought of in terms of video before it can be used for audio.

I started with some basic knowledge of iMovie: I'd made some very simple videos on my digital camera that I'd transferred to iMovie, and I'd filmed myself with the iMac's built-in camera. But I'd never edited any of the videos I'd made. They were stored and shared as unmanipulated chunks of video.

My first challenge was simply getting comfortable with iMovie 11. Because our home computer died earlier this year (causing a brief but intense panic), we bought a new iMac, complete with the latest version of iLife. The new iMovie looks nothing like the one I was accustomed to, so I had to figure out basics,  such as how do I record myself again?

But once that was out of the way, I was ready to dig in. Here's a brief, unimaginative clip (coincidentally shot on my birthday):

I needed some basic video to try and add more audio to. Thanks to this tutorial, I found a very easy way to add another layer of audio. Just by hitting the Voiceover button in iMovie, one can easily create and layer multiple audio tracks.

Aside from being confusing, this didn't really accomplish what I wanted. With Voiceover, I could definitely "overdub," but it felt like cheating. I wasn't really learning how to splice and layer video. To help me toward this end, I found a slew of YouTube videos on a number of topics:

• L-cut demo
• Video and audio + audio track added separately
• Audio editing
• PiP, cut-away, side-by-side view
• Screen set-up
• New features in audio editing for iMovie 11
• Using clip trimmer for audio
• Layering audio
• Adjusting audio and video
• Audio ducking
• More audio editing
• Lip-sync song
• Sync audio

I wish I could say that watching all these videos made me an expert in iMovie, but they really just helped me get acclimated. Certainly they got me excited about the potential for what can be done in the program, but it's difficult for me to know how to do something without actually doing it. And none of the videos specifically address the technique I was trying to learn. I was a little surprised that no one had made a "How to Make a Music Video Like Nunes" video.

One important thing I learned with the help of YouTube was how to make an L-cut. In such a cut, audio from one video clip continues while another video clip starts playing. These things are hard to explain, so here's an example:

The L-cut basically allows you to manipulate audio and video on separate paths, which is essential for composing a music video entirely in iMovie. I discovered that using the precision editor in iMovie lets you meld two clips and extend the audio past the point where one clip switches to another. The program also displays the audio for each clip as a wave form, providing a visual representation of the sound.

So I started a new project in iMovie and filmed myself playing guitar. I found that iMovie does not let you record another video while an existing video is playing, so I exported the guitar video as a .m4v file and called it "Guitar1." Then I played it back with Quicktime, through headphones, while recording another video in iMovie. This allowed me to play along with myself, much as one would when creating multiple tracks in Garage Band or ProTools.

I thought that the L-cut would allow me to "mix" my two guitar videos easily, but it didn't. I had a really difficult time getting the two parts synced. And once I did, I couldn't splice the video at all without completely unsyncing the audio. Everything about this first attempt at a music video failed.

Part of my problem was that I was thinking too much in terms of audio, or in terms of Garage Band or ProTools. In such programs, audio is layered track by track and then mixed. But I needed to be thinking visually as well as aurally. How was I going to mix and match video and audio together?

So I scrapped my first attempt and started another project. I would use guitar, hand percussion, and glockenspiel to create a very simple music video in iMovie. Each instrument would require a slightly different "look," or costume, so that the visual cuts would matter. And I would build the video clip by clip, rather than trying to sync the audio first and then manipulate the video.

As it turned out, I was able to do the "track" mixing, clip building, and audio/video syncing fairly easily. Once I figured out how, that is.

First, I "eyeballed it" with three video clips, one for each instrument: first guitar, then snap/claps, then glock. I used the precision editor to get the guitar and the snap/claps aligned correctly. But I wasn't sure how I was going to get the glock layer to work. I had learned to use the precision editor kind of by accident, just exploring the options you can get for each clip that you drag into the project window. My use of it was intuitive, and it was hard to apply that intuition to specific problems.

Then I had an important breakthrough: it's really easy to split audio from video in iMovie (duh!). Just by going to the Clip menu and clicking "detach audio," you can make separate audio tracks for each video. The selected clip will then have no audio of its own, but that's perfect for building a music video. You can then add the clips you want, line them up using the precision editor and the audio wave forms, mute the audio on the new clips, and extend the separate audio tracks beneath the video to the end of the project.

With each clip added, you extend the audio below the clips in the project window, which corresponds to a yellow line over your clips in the events window. This yellow line helps you figure out which clips you've already used as well as where your project is in real time. With that information, it's much easier to select the clips that you're going to add to your project without throwing off the syncing entirely. Then the precision editor can be used to fine-tune the syncing.

All of this is probably confusing in words. It would have been better if I had made a video to describe the process, because then all of the intuitive contextual things that I take for granted in describing would be intuitive to the viewer as well. But that's a bit beyond what I'm capable of in iMovie at this point (and this project is due today!).

So, without further ado, here's the video:

I must say, it was a huge relief to complete it. That being said, there is plenty of room for improvement.

I'm not thrilled about some of the cuts toward the beginning. The first one, from guitar to snaps, is about right, but then the subsequent cut has too much of the glock video (which is crummy because you can't even see the glock). It was right around this point that I learned to separate the audio from the video. When I tried to cut up that longish glock segment, it broke up the audio in ways that frightened me. So I said "screw it" and moved on. Looking back, it would have been easy enough to just delete the extant glock clip in the project window and start building again from the snaps--it was still early in the editing process--but I was still too unsure of what I was doing.

By the end I had become much more confident. Some of the cuts get a little crazy, and not all of the video is truly compelling, but I threw in some clips that weren't at all related to the real-time audio, which was fun and added a nice effect.

According to this interview, it takes Julia Nunes about two hours to make a video. When I read that, I thought, no effing way, but now that I've spent a couple weeks learning the skills involved, two hours sounds less than superhuman (but still faster than me). Considering composing in iMovie as a new form of literacy enabled by technology, Nunes is fluent and I'm still a neophyte, but I can see a whole new set of expressive possibilities sprouting from this skill set. I'm probably already near the point in the learning curve where "fun" outweighs "annoying."

It's worth noting that my final video has no verbal component whatsoever (except maybe my kids' noises). It is composition as composition, and it provides insight into writing by analogy. Music has the enviable ability to blend different voices simultaneously, and video can efficiently present visual information without using up a lot of descriptive words.

Writers seek the right turn of phrase to describe a scene or character without overburdening a reader with information, and they also seek to combine multiple, often conflicting ideas from a variety of sources in some logical or aesthetic way. The iMovie-composed music video enables a different kind of intertextuality, a dialogue between sound and vision, and the process of arranging clips sequentially presents an infinity of options not unlike those writers must face. The trick is in putting it all together.

Acknowledgments:
In addition to Julia Nunes and the YouTube-verse, I would like to thank my daughter, Desi, for contentedly sitting on the couch during filming; my son, Henry, for not hurting himself or knocking the camera over during filming; and my wife, Mercedes, for having an acoustic Telecaster and a glockenspiel.

Beliefs about Writing and Learning Revisited

1. In your experience, why do some people appear to be good at writing while others struggle?

I think at some point I started viewing writing competitively. A girl I knew in high school wrote really well, and I wanted to write as well as her. I wasn't terribly aware of or interested in struggles other people might have been having with writing. Nor did I have any idea what my college major would be. I was pretty self-absorbed, and probably just reacting to certain dynamics of the classroom.

People appear to struggle with writing only when they're writing to an audience they don't understand. If a student is texting a friend, it's not likely to be a struggle. But if a student has to write a paper according to completely different conventions for a teacher who is essentially a representative of an "academic" audience, that same student may struggle.

So if I became a good writer, it was probably because I wanted to excel in relation to my peers (especially if they were cute), whereas those who struggled simply had different relations to different peers (cute or otherwise).

2. Is writing a talent, or is it a skill? Is it both? If so, how? What does it mean to say that something is a "talent"? What does it mean to call something a skill?

I'm going to call "talent" personality, and I'm going to call "skill" technique. Anyone can learn a technique, regardless of personality. But different personalities gravitate to different techniques for a variety of reasons, and it can get fairly complicated. In the best-case scenario, personality and technique fuse in a satisfying expressive experience. The degree to which the experience is satisfying is often contingent on the social reception of the expression, or its interpretation. That interpretation is two-sided, including both the person doing the expressing and his or her audience, and it can change over time depending on how memories, experience, and discussion shape it. So merit and accomplishment are entirely fluid. But the degree to which the illusion of consensus regarding merit and accomplishment is maintained can have an enormous influence on the formation of personality and the application of technique. So this is why "talent" has become a value-laden stand-in for "personality." Similarly, "skill" implies mastery, whereas "technique" implies functionality.

3. How is writing best learned? Why? What do you think are some of the biggest impediments or difficulties people face when trying to learn to write better?

I guess practice is probably the best way to learn, although it helps to get pointers along the way. I remember feeling that writing was largely intuitive, and I got lucky that much of my intuition was informed by a bookish family background. This is tricky though because everyone learns differently. And a lot hinges on context. Practice with good pointers and feedback, along with opportunities for imaginative or self-guided exercises, is probably the best bet.

I think I said at the beginning of the semester that language fluency could be an impediment to learning to write. I still think that's true, though I would modify "language fluency" to be more nuanced. It has to do with stylistic fluency, or knowledge of expectations, intuitive or otherwise. That stuff needs to be as clear as possible. It should also be clear that no single set of conventions satisfies every writing task.

4. Close your eyes and take a few minutes to picture someone in the act of writing. Who are they? What do they look like? Where are they? What exactly are they doing? Describe the scene in as much detail as possible.

Writers are everywhere. On the train with smart-phones, in offices, in libraries, and so on. I like the idea of a very broad definition of writing: songwriting, video editing, Web design, copywriting, novel writing, technical writing, writing checks, skywriting, speechwriting, texting, tweeting, blogging, vlogging, tumbling, sampling, quoting, etc.

5. Where do you think this image of "writing" comes from? In what ways do you think this image actually represents what most people do when they write? Stepping back for a moment, are there writers or types of writing that probably aren't well reflected by this image you just described?

I think this image of writing comes from this past semester. Composition theory has a million ways of talking about "texts" and "writing." There is contextual functionality and there is the inherited, historical notion of book writing, which is dominated in my mind by the "literary." It would seem there is a profound tension between the two at this particular moment in history, brought about by technological remediation. I guess writers who aren't well reflected by this image are those who use pen and paper. I forgot to mention them!

6. What is a "technology"? How do you define the term? When you think of technologies, what kinds of things do you think about? Is writing itself a technology? How? Or why not?

I have the contemporary tendency to think of technology in terms of wires, gadgets, computers, solar panels, rocket ships, and the like, although I think it's fundamentally related to the idea of "technique" mentioned above. The technology is the tool or the combination of tools or the process, and the technique is how to use them. I think writing is a technology. Whether writing programming code or Greek poetry, writing is the technology that enables those techniques.

Writing is also a technology in the sense of the broad definition of "writing" given above. Yet it is like a component technology, or a metaphoric one. Is it possible to have a metaphoric technology? Um . . . yes. See Nietzsche.

7. Have you heard the term "writing process" before? What does this phrase mean to you? What is the "writing process" and how does it work?

I have head the term before. I forget what it is, if I ever knew. Something like outline, research, draft, revise. I never use outlines, but maybe I should. Usually I start with research to see where it leads. Then I write around it to try and make an argument, narrative, or analysis. That's a "process," right?

I like what we talked about this semester regarding the "moves of academic writing," as well as rhetorical principles involving audience and intention. It seems obvious in retrospect, but such ideas get de-emphasized in literary study.

8. Is writing a private thing, a social thing, or both? In what ways?

The work of writing often feels private, and this can enable thoughts to go unguarded and explored in more detail than in conversation. This can be a liberating aspect of it. But sharing the writing is social, and even when composing, choices are being made that are communicative. And the ideas and language being used are drawn from some social process, even if it happens to be written.

9. When people talk about "illiteracy," what do you think they are talking about? Who is illiterate in this country? What are some of the primary causes of illiteracy? Is illiteracy a problem?

Usually people talk about "illiteracy" in terms of the inability to read and write alphabetic texts. But my answer to this question is probably the most different from what it was at the beginning of the semester. If literacy is determined by one's ability to grasp and utilize media for expressive purposes, then I am functionally illiterate in all kinds of ways. I have a rudimentary ability to make videos. I've improved substantially as a blogger. I still have no idea how to make a Web site. I'm decent at recording music. I don't Tweet. I don't Tumble. My Facebooking is pretty perfunctory. I've never contributed to Wikipedia, even just to try and get away with a lie. I can't read braille. I don't know sign language or semaphores. Basically I just know a little bit about books.

So by this logic causes of illiteracy are too many to mention. It sort of depends. Is it a problem? That also depends. What does a person want to accomplish? For whom? Why? What are the best means and methods?

10. How have writing and rhetoric changed in the digital age? That is, how has technology affected the way people communicate? Is this a good or a bad thing? Why?

Technology has greatly expanded our communicative options and made us more aware of what each option emphasizes or de-emphasizes. Techniques that were prohibitively expensive a generation ago--film making and multi-track recording, for example--are now available to anyone with a computer. We now can consider: do I want to send an email or a postcard? Which would be more fun? Do emails with resumes attached need to be written according to cover-letter conventions, or should they be less formal? Or should job seekers just direct potential employers to their LinkedIn profile?

It's a good thing in the sense that it provides all kinds of options that weren't there before. It may even enable the alteration of power structures that seemed untouchable--the music business is a good example. It can be a bad thing in the sense that learning and embracing the new is often stressful. Why can't we just sit back in whatever world we're most comfortable in and have a couple drinks? I guess that can be a little anti-social.

In Which I Box Myself In

• From http://www.postcolonialweb.org/zimbabwe/music/kwaramba14.html:

In Africa especially, songs have continuously played an important role in shaping social relationships. In early oral societies songs, dance and performance embodied the people's aspirations and expectations. Africans graced almost all occasions with songs and dance. They sang and danced for joy, grief, love, sorrow, hate and even during labour and work. For most African societies, rhythm was an inextricable part of their everyday existence. Songs were therefore an expression of a whole people's experiences and not an individual's property, hence the existence of Shona hunting songs, Nguni bridal songs, Zulu war songs, to cite but a few examples. The music summarised the experiences of a whole people and were communally owned and enjoyed. It was the music of the people, about the people and by the people themselves.

• From http://www.postcolonialweb.org/zimbabwe/music/kwaramba15.html:

One major change that the choir concept effected was to cut a clear division between those who were "gifted with voices" and those who were not, who consequently became the audience in a society where, before, virtually everyone was considered a singer in their own way.

• From The Jazz Book:

The message of jazz is not only "Be yourself." Jazz is also telling us "Free yourself." Jazz is a music of community, of being together, of sharing, of skill, of negotiation: ultimately, of the ability to communicate. (xiii)


Old New Orleans must have been an incredibly musical city. We know of some thirty orchestras from the first decade of the twentieth century. To appreciate what that means, you have to know that the Crescent City had little more than two hundred thousand inhabitants then. And in a city of that size, there were thirty orchestras, playing a vital, new kind of music. (6-7)

• From Eric Havelock's "The Literate Revolution in Greece and Its Cultural Consequences":

a nonliterate culture is not necessarily a primitive one

• Lawrence Lessig on Charlie Rose: (Too bad you can't embed non-YouTube videos into a Blogger template. Or at least not without some html knowledge. I'm particularly interested in what John Philip Sousa said in 1906, regarding community singing. Also, the "infernal machines," record players.)

• Dizzy Gillespie, "Tin Tin Deo":

The above bullets constitutes some "box" research. I've decided to turn my blog post into an experiment with box-based construction, as well as sort of a proposal for my final project. (Plus it helps me get some of my thoughts organized.)

My idea is this:

Ear players play music by ear. Many of them cannot or do not read music. Yet they can express themselves wonderfully. I think this parallels much of our class discussion regarding print literacy, moral panics, and so forth.

For centuries, ear players, folk musicians, what you will, were not able to preserve their individual work. They could only pass down a tradition. Then came the record player. In less than 100 years, an entire regime of taste--one dominated by written music and musicians who could read and therefore perform it--was replaced by a regime of taste based on personal authenticity and expressivity. Just compare Louis Armstrong with Pavoratti.

Classical music tends not to resonate as strongly with contemporary listeners. It lacks wildness, abandon, informality. You're not supposed to sing along and dance, you're supposed to listen and respect. That says it all.


The new regime of taste, symbolized by Armstrong, quickly evolved. By the time you get to Dizzy Gillespie above (and I personally will usually choose to listen to Dizzy before Louis), jazz is an art music. How and why this came about is mysterious, but the bebop moment is clearly the moment of departure. Rock and roll would get people dancing again, and jazz would quickly start to feel as distant to many listeners as classical music. Some even call jazz "America's classical music."


To digress a bit further, Frank Zappa has some interesting commentary on taste-making:

So laissez faire cigar chompers are better stewards of taste than "hip" or "educated" people. Who are the gatekeepers of the market place?

But before I try to sort all that out, which is probably beyond the scope of this semester, I should focus on the following. New Orleans in the early twentieth century was sort of like Athens around 450 B.C., in the sense that a new technology (sound recording) was enabling a new type of person (musically illiterate) to become really really influential.

I'm a Big Fan, Charlie Brown

Reading Cynthia Selfe's chapter on visual literacy made me think of Scott McCloud. In high school I read his Understanding Comics, largely because I was a comic book nerd. It is probably the best of the very few books written about how comics work as a medium. It's like a theoretical approach to comics.

It reminded me also of the moral panic surrounding comics in the middle of the twentieth century, a topic we discussed briefly. It would seem that the comics moral panic, as well as the hierarchy of literary taste that has always dismissed the "funnies," has clouded Selfe's perspective with regard to visual literacy. She thinks that "image-capturing software, multimedia texts, and the World Wide Web" are the only genres, or literacies or venues, that could potentially impact our approach to composition.

Why then have "new media texts" been so effective in shaking up the world of composition while "old media" such as comics have had little impact? I suspect the answer lies in the ubiquity of technology, particularly among the economic elite. As Selfe puts it, "Global communications . . . exchanged via increasingly complicated computer networks . . . increasingly involve texts that depend heavily, even primarily, on visual elements." It's more difficult to argue that there's a practical value to encouraging facility in the grammar of comics in a culture that continues to disdain the form.

But comics are universal. Consider the airplane safety cards or pamphlets we've all seen. On some level, we rely on visual literacy all the time. (The image below and others like it can be found here.)

Consider also McCloud's follow-up to Understanding Comics, Reinventing Comics. In that book he makes the connection between comics and the Web, arguing that the future of comics is on the Web and that to an extent, the Web is comics. It occurs to me that a composition classroom would greatly benefit from a few chapters from one of McCloud's books. Just look at how cool this crusty old Web comics essay from 2000 is. Some of the ideas are no longer relevant, such as the concerns about scrolling and bandwidth, but McCloud's contribution to the broader discussion about the Web is really interesting.

It's not that Selfe is anti-comics exactly. She's striving valiantly to expand the palette of the composition classroom along visual lines. It's just that she ought to read Scott McCloud. Her vocabulary--"composer/designer," "reader/viewer," and so forth--seems so stiff by comparison. Why not just say "comics." And then say, "Comics probably provide the best, easiest, most intuitive, and most fun way to show how words and pictures can be combined in a way that tells a story or makes an argument." And then you could also say, "Gee, the Web is kind of like that. And kind of not. Discuss."

Are You Aware of the Materiality of the Comment You Will Soon Post to This Blog Entry?

We spent a fair amount of class time last Thursday considering Wysocki's definition of "new media texts," or "those that have been made by composers who are aware of the range of materialities of texts and who then highlight the materiality." Cynthia Selfe, in this week's chapter, defines "new media texts" as those that are "created primarily in digital environments, composed in multiple media . . . , and designed for presentation and exchange in digital venues."

Wysocki's definition of the term does not limit a new media text to a "digital environment." Many of her example activities do not necessarily have anything at all to do with "new media" in Selfe's sense. I suppose Selfe is not limiting her definition either, "primarily" is not "exclusively," but she is approaching the term differently, and intuitively her definition is easier for me to grasp.

If new media texts must, in Wysocki's sense, "make as overtly as possible the values they embody," could a novel with a certain jacket design be considered a new media text? Take my edition of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, a Vintage International paperback. It's really nice. Certainly the Vintage people wanted something that would look both serious and handsome. Ellison's name is a little bit lower than the halfway point on the front cover, white type on a black band, and a rust-brown plane spreads across the space above, more than half the cover. Below Ellison's name is the title of the book in a sans serif font I don't know the name of. For whatever reason, the two i's surrounding the letter s in "Invisible" are two shades of gray, and the a in "Man" is the same rust brown as the top part of the cover.

Certainly some design values are being embodied here. Maybe the two i's, both lower case, are pointing to some divided identity rendered unimportant, uncapitalized, by racism. But maybe I'm reading into it. Have a gander and decide for yourself (and keep in mind, I haven't really mentioned the novel itself!):

I guess what I'm getting at is any text, digital or otherwise, embodies some value, so then (a) what the hell is it? and (b) prove it. Can a composer of any text ever be completely aware of the values his or her text embodies? Given that even, or especially, in the digital age, texts are composed collaboratively, how does one account for the multiple values inevitably at play? The phrase "as overtly visible as possible" in Wysocki's definition is tricky!

Probably I am wading a bit into interpretation-related questions and not focusing enough on the materiality aspect. Something happens when you write in crayon or when you write a blog or when you make a YouTube video, something directly related to the materiality, or the inherent possibilities in the chosen medium or media. But whatever that something is, it seems to me, is inevitably an interpretive question, because it will always be a little bit different for each individual.

Does this blog entry qualify as a new media text? According to Selfe, it probably does--because it is digitally produced and offers interactivity (you can comment)--but I'm not so sure it does in Wysocki's sense. Or if it does, my awareness of this blog entry as a blog entry doesn't necessarily contribute anything more significant than the structure of this template. But maybe if I write, in the entry, "You must comment!" I have called attention to this blog entry's materiality. Hey, you! You reading this! You must comment!

Tasteless

When I got home from class last Thursday, I made some ramen noodles: the "oriental" flavor. My wife asked me how class went so I told her a little bit about it. We also discussed ramen noodles.

Her favorite flavor is chicken and mushroom, but she was disappointed last time she had this flavor because it didn't "taste right" somehow. To this I said, "As far as I'm concerned, they all taste the same. It just tastes like salt."

She replied, "You don't have a refined enough palate." This was funny because it was interwoven with the recap I had been giving of our class discussion.

So lately I've been imagining a world in which ramen noodles are haute cuisine. In this world, world-class chefs are judged by what they can do in that ever-so-subtle realm of salt and bouillon. Artisanal, hand-made noodles are boiled for exactly the right amount of time, to give them an extra slithery texture.

Maybe deep within me is a man capable of distinguishing flavors of ramen noodles, someone who could be worthy of this idealized world. But I haven't had the training, and I haven't been taught to respect the legacy and hierarchy of ramen. Is it too late for me? Can I be redeemed? Could I be brought to the "sweetness and light" of ramen?

Many and Frequent Are the Defects of This Post

Matthew Arnold, in describing the subset of the middle, or Philistine, class that "gives all its energies to organising itself, through trades' unions and other means," asserts that this group is seeking to affirm "its class and its class-instinct, its ordinary self not its best self . . . not an inward perfection." Arnold claims that this class is occupied, "according to Plato's subtle expression, with the things of itself and not its real self."

Arnold seems smitten with some abstract ideal of mind, a tendency toward "truth" and "right reason" that a few from each class will always be inclined toward, but which requires the right circumstances to be brought to its full potential. With Nietzsche's "original model" of the "leaf" in my mind, and the argument surrounding it, it's difficult for me to take Arnold too seriously. And after all, wasn't the struggle of the working class to organize and demand rights very much in pursuing its "best self"? Isn't that what Karl Marx would tell us?

When Arnold says of the Populace, "What hope . . . of inculcating the belief that excellence dwells among high and steep rocks, and can only be reached by those who sweat blood to reach her," I get the feeling he's placing his own internal struggle toward some abstract perfection over the material struggles of the various classes he describes. Material existence is steeped in "bathos," but using the material world, such as "high and steep rocks," as metaphor for an internal striving toward "truth" is apparently admirable, noble, and to be encouraged and cultivated as much as possible.

Hume, like Arnold, is interested in discovering broadly applicable truth, though primarily with respect to taste and aesthetics. Like Gorgias and Protagoras, Hume contrasts sickness and health, describing the "man in fever" and his diminished senses as a means of illustrating a "sound and defective state" in "each creature." Only if there is "considerable uniformity of sentiment among men" who are in the "sound state" can an idea of the "perfect beauty" be formulated. Unfortunately, "many and frequent are the defects" that keep us from a clear, healthy perception.

This move toward establishing a healthy perception is a moral one, and it suggests once again that some cultivation is required to get there. Though I'm not always comfortable with how Arnold and Hume go about making their respective cases, I think they have a point. Certainly practicing rigorous analysis and careful argument, as well as keeping yourself open to the various sensations a given text or experience might excite, have both practical and intrinsic value. And they are not skills we are necessarily born with. Arnold spends quite a bit of time describing Prussian education for a reason, though his argument, that aristocrats ought to be using their elevated status to create exemplary educational institutions, is a little strange.

How then do we establish educational practices and institutions that allow and respect difference without resorting to quasi-religious idealization of essentially privileged and protected sensibilities?

No Dessert Until You've Mastered JavaScript

Adam Gopnik recently wrote a pretty good article in the New Yorker summarizing many of the issues surrounding our transition to digital literacy (Feb. 14 and 21, 2011). Our friends Clay Shirky and Nicholas Carr are both discussed, along with a few others cluttering recently deceased trees with printed words intended to tell us what the future holds.

Gopnik references Kevin Kelly, who apparently compares our "fragmented, multi-part, shimmering" life to "Keats's 'waking dream.'" I read this article right after I'd finished Nietzsche's "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense," in which Nietzsche describes an Athens where, "as in a dream, anything is possible at each moment, and all of nature swarms around man as if it were nothing but a masquerade of the gods, who were merely amusing themselves by deceiving men in all these shapes" (89).

Part of Gopnik's point is that a sense of fragmentation has been with us at least since Nietzsche, so it's not necessarily significant that both pieces give us the analogy of a dream. And I'm also a little skeptical of Nietzsche's/Herodotus's characterization of the Athenians--were they really so gullible when beholding their returning tyrants?

But I can't help but find Nietzsche's description of the Athenian dream world quite appealing when laid over our fragmented, digital landscape. After all, many of us (I'm thinking of myself in particular) are wildly ignorant when it comes to the technical circuitry behind the letters we write into conveniently designed blog templates. Our programmers and designers seem to have supernatural powers, having invented even the "natural" environment we enter when we interact with the super-brain that is the World Wide Web, a place where "anything [seems] possible at any moment."

But when we've in effect become the gods animating the environment, how many degrees removed are we from the "essence" of reality? It would seem a sophistic attitude is most helpful here: reality is what we make it.

It also occurred to me that if those of us who really understand programming are at an advantage, are we living through a time similar to that described by Havelock? My wife has been learning html via the Internet, and I wonder if in another generation or so, programming languages will be taught as soon as kids grasp the alphabet.

My friends who got their bachelor's degrees in computer science waltzed out of U of I straight into $60K/year jobs. I got an editorial internship at $8/hour, and when they hired me as a full-fledged copy editor, my pay swelled to $10/hour. All right, English degree!

So was I like one of those upper-class-twit Athenians who wouldn't deign to learn to read and write (code) but still wanted to show off their pottery (blog)? Were my values rooted in cultural practices whose relevance was vanishing in the wake of an emerging technology?

Though I suppose radio and television made books irrelevant before I was even born, and I tend to agree with the argument that the Internet prizes a relationship with the text more than those mediums. So does that mean the Web is good news for people with my educational background? Generally speaking, it would appear that the Web is driving down the market value of writing and editing, so on that level, nope.

And I think this connects to another issue, particularly as we are (supposedly) lurching out of a recession:  what happens to displaced economic value? When people like Shirky celebrate all that we can now create with our leisure time, they conveniently omit the fact that leisure time is unpaid time. And it looks like it will be a while before the economy figures out how to create more paid time for those whose skills have officially become unnecessary. (This is particularly sobering when budget crises potentially give certain ideological camps the leverage they need to in effect leave those people out in the cold--though it might not be cold to you.)

Do Not Attempt to Engage the Static Words of This Post in Dialogue, for They Cannot Defend Themselves

The Miles Burnyeat interview available in the supplemental materials on Blackboard offers a number of good insights about what the dialogue is all about, both for Plato and as a form of inquiry in its own right. Because it's a video, it's difficult to cite specifically, so my ideas are probably mixed in with those presented by Burnyeat (sort of like we're schizophrenically in digitized dialogue).

The dialogue creates a common ground where ideas can be discussed in pure form, at least in theory. I like that the Phaedrus opens with Socrates and Phaedrus looking for a suitable spot to have a discussion, under a "lofty and spreading plane-tree" (loc. 691-99). I don't know enough about the various references, for example the digression about Boreas, but I wonder if Plato is trying to say something here, either about the neutrality of place or its inevitable bias. It's hard for me to say. Maybe it's just a convention. (Though there is this: "I am a lover of knowledge, and the men who dwell in the city are my teachers, and not the trees or the country" (loc. 699-705). There's a pretty significant statement about place.)

That it's a dialogue implies that there is not necessarily a power relation. The two people speaking are both equally capable of presenting valid ideas. Of course, in a Socratic dialogue, this is an illusion. Despite all the fawning charm--"My dear Phaedrus, you have been an admirable guide"--there's never any doubt that Socrates will be the "winner," and that this has been a contest all along. The added layer is that Plato is presenting all of this with his own agenda in mind. Burnyeat's take, if I'm representing it correctly, is that over time Socrates becomes more and more of a mouthpiece for Plato, who becomes more confident in his own ideas. Burnyeat thinks that the early dialogues are more of an attempt to validate and redeem Socrates after his death.

The dialogue then is a really useful trick for Plato. It allows him to express his ideas without actually having to answer for them. The form, and the fact of Socrates' life and influence, allows Plato to say, "Hey, he said it. Not me." And it's great that he does this in writing. Socrates dismisses writing, and his pupil adopts it at least in part because it allows him to, like a text, not have to answer for himself.

I wonder too if there might be some angst simply about the technology of writing. Hesiod and Homer, depending on which estimates you look at, only lived a few hundred years before Socrates, and the spread of that technology (writing stuff down), and its required literacy, was probably quite slow and mediated by factors such as region, class, sex, and so forth (sound familiar?). So if Socrates was this brilliant eccentric, it may be that he was just plain illiterate. Or maybe he distrusted writing in the way that many archetypal grandparents distrust the InterWebs.

But in Plato's hands, the only hands we have (because they wrote), it's something different. It's a philosophical point about the loss of meaning between what's represented in writing (the painting) and what actually is (the image the painting depicts). (Of course this happens in speaking, too! It happens as long as we're using language.) So Socrates' point is that a "living, breathing" person can defend his or her ideas in spoken dialogue, whereas the written word loses this authority and becomes utterly static.

There's something to be said here too about the simple pleasure of good conversation. I like that Socrates would prefer to chat you up over a beer rather than write treatises. There's a "down-home" charm here that's irresistible. (But then I find that I often have the opposite bias: what I say is so sloppy and regrettable; I have so much more control over what I write.)

And not only good conversation but good presentation. And these were all such central concerns of the sophists, why would Plato send Socrates after them? The Socrates of the Phaedrus is a sophist, it seems to me.

I think history shows that dialogue and writing are not competing forces. They work together quite nicely. The tradition of Westsern philosophy serves as evidence of this. And written texts aren't static. They're constantly reinterpreted, challenged, and built upon.

Help! I've Been Cyberattacked!

Did anyone else catch Clay Shirky on NPR this morning? The story discusses Egypt's recent Internet shutdown, and in particular the U.S. response.

Congress is currently debating a cyber-security bill that would allow the U.S. government to "permit some limits on Internet traffic into and out of sensitive facilities such as a power grid" in the event of "cyberwar" or a "cyber-emergency." But as Shirky points out, "Might not Egypt's Mubarak have argued that his government faced a 'cyber-emergency' — a political one, perhaps, but still a cyber-emergency?"

The point is a salient one, though let's not forget the claim of the Senate sergeant at arms that "Computer systems of Congress and the executive branch agencies are under cyberattack an average of 1.8 billion times per month" (as relayed by Sen. Susan Collins). What exactly does "cyberattack" mean here? Shirky is arguing that "cyberattack" can mean nearly whatever the government wants it to mean, whether it's Mubarak's or Obama's. What kind of agreed-upon norms are there for a cyberattack? We know that if the World Trade Center gets knocked down by two hijacked planes, it's a violent act of terrorism that will inevitably lead to a military response (whether or not it's a wise one). But how exactly do we conceptualize "cyberattack"?

Is Julian Assange guilty of cyberattacking? Shirky's blog has some interesting soul searching about WikiLeaks; he explores the ways in which the WikiLeaks phenomenon is and is not similar to the Pentagon Papers leaks of the 1970s. Perhaps Congress is looking to craft legislation that will facilitate the extradition and trial of Assange, and convince us all that we should be willing to give up some Internet freedom when it's "for our own good."

But why should the state be so worried about its secrets? Hasn't Facebook already shared all of them with app developers and advertisers? (Oh, right, that's just everybody else.)

I Totally Produced a Killer YouTube Video in My Mind

Because the ukulele theme popped up at the end of class, I can't resist sharing this rather stiff instructional article I wrote: http://www.ehow.com/how_5070360_strum-baritone-ukulele.html. The comment at the bottom is about right in its tone, but hey, my PayPal account swelled by a few bucks. It's worth noting here how difficult it is to write about certain skills, particularly musical ones. Thus, the beauty of YouTube learning.

Speaking of YouTube, here's a silly video that's become a hit in our house:

I'm not sure if the version I just embedded will have it, but the version I looked up on YouTube begins with an advertisement. This is something that aggravates me somewhat; one never saw this sort of thing at the dawn of YouTube. The early days of the printing press, as Sheldon mentioned in class, were consumed with figuring out how to make the new technology profitable. With the Internet, as was (and is) the case with much of the media that preceded it, advertising seems to be the answer to the how-to-pay-for-it riddle.

In my last post, I suggested that Shirky's optimism may be steeped in a somewhat conservative faith that "institutions" will arise to make sense of the new media landscape. But if these institutions--and YouTube is surely an Internet institution by now--are transformed into profit-making businesses (that essentially exploit user-created content with very little overhead), have we really changed anything significant about the way our society functions? And is the end of professionalism really to be celebrated if it means a regime in which creativity is still book-ended (old-fashioned metaphor) by "words from our sponsors" with even less compensation for artists? How long before Julia Nunes becomes a Horatio Alger myth, if that makes any sense? I fear that the Wild West of the Internet is rapidly becoming Bakersfield.

But back to the Mean Kitty song. It's good. Not "deep" exactly, but it does communicate a message in an entertaining way without using "text" (though he must have spent some time on the lyrics). I really want to learn to do video-editing on a computer. I like the implication that literacy in this century will mean something much broader than reading and writing. If one can easily and cheaply create a message using video, text, music, and, hell, holograms, and if that becomes our standard expectation of the components a message should be made up of, then it's inevitable that all educated citizens will be basically fluent in those skills, both in terms of production and interpretation. That would be totally cool! It would also enable brilliant rebuttals like the following:

Now that that's settled, I'd like to mention our old friend, Dana Gioia. I ran across his name in a Poetry magazine review of a new anthology of rap (Adam Kirsch, Feb. 2011). I can't link to that hopelessly dated print source, but I can link to this: http://www.danagioia.net/essays/ebohemia.htm. In true Internet-research fashion, I haven't read this entire essay, but I probably should. Gioia calls rap "the new oral poetry," which made me think of the "old" oral poetry: all the freestyling the Greeks did before Homer, among other things. Does the Internet present some full-circle moment? Do rap videos about house pets reveal a shift to post-print, performance-based oratory? And is there a Phaedrus 2.0 argument to be made here? Something along the lines of, "YouTube videos should be made as aids to memory only. The YouTube video which is produced with intelligence in the mind of the learner is far more powerful."

My Wife and I Sip Martinis While YouTube Reads to Our Kids

Looking at the NEA report, "To Read or Not to Read," it is clear that a certain segment of the population is deeply concerned about reading patterns in the United States. Dana Gioia, in his Preface, writes that "reading transforms the lives of individuals," echoing a common belief among those who would consider themselves "literary." The belief runs so deep that it seems more like the tenet of a religious faith.

Interestingly, Nicholas Carr argues from a scientific perspective that reading transforms us on a neurological level. Reading is "an unnatural process of thought," requiring that "we strengthen the neural links needed to counter our instinctive distractedness, thereby gaining greater control over our attention and our mind."

It is not clear whether Gioia is interested in critiquing the Internet as such, but he is definitely lamenting the loss of something, and he would probably basically agree with Carr. Indeed, a selling point of the Kindle is that it recreates a book-like environment, and is actually a fairly crappy browser. (I'm a little skeptical of this argument because in some ways it simply allows Amazon to pretend that it's not competing with Apple. See Jeff Bezos on Charlie Rose: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAo0IfOCevA.)

So in some ways, Amazon has attempted to forge a middle ground, combining the instant access of digital media with a device that facilitates contemplative interaction with long texts. I admit that I'm impressed with how nice the text looks on my new Kindle, and how easy it is to read, but I wish the browser were more useful. Like it or not, a huge proportion of new texts are made for Web consumption only, and any eReader should allow convenient access to those texts. Regardless of what Bezos says, no one wants to buy a different device for each different media experience that the Web provides. That's so twentieth century! (But at $140, the Kindle is still pretty cool.)

So would Nicholas Carr be OK with a Kindle? Or does downloading books cause ADD? Will there be a moral panic about all those poor children who can't focus because they read Dr. Seuss on a Kindle? (That would suck! Kindle graphics aren't in color, and the pictures would be really small. It's hard for me to see eBooks seriously competing with print children's books, which is maybe why the NEA is able to show slight gains in reading for younger kids, although none of the data seems terribly trustworthy. At any rate, you can find people to read to your kids on YouTube! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=992b_ek85BU)

But I want to try to get back to the religiosity of the literary in some quarters and the way this connects to the literacy question. There is cultural power at stake if the edifice of the literary, and its "transformative" power, is eroded by the Internet. Who has the right to say what's good and what's bad? In our culture, that tends to coincide closely with what's right and what's wrong. So the moral panic is about social control and moral power. Those who have it, or think they do, don't want to lose it.

Clay Shirky, despite his embrace of the Web's tremendous potential, points out that "[j]ust as required education was a response to print, using the Internet well will require new cultural institutions as well, not just new technologies." Wouldn't such "cultural institutions" inevitably reassign social control and moral power? Is that really what excites us about the Internet? Or does it excite us that it puts those very dynamics in play? In other words, once the Internet has developed and entrenched cultural institutions, it probably won't be as cool.

Beliefs about Writing and Learning

1. This is a hard one. I have no idea why writing is hard for some people and relatively easy for others. I think a lot of people simply aren't that interested in writing, or they're not passionate readers. Most of the time, the most voracious readers are the best writers, or at least the people who learn to write well quickly. If a person feels some creative connection to the act of writing, as opposed to feeling oppressed by grammar and style rules for an arbitrary assignment, he or she is much more likely to engage the work in a constructive way. I think a lot of people learn to fear language in grade school as a consequence of handwriting instruction and grammar instruction. Theses skills are certainly necessary, but a student needs to believe that his or her ideas matter as well.

2. I think of talent as something that you're born with. It can't be taught. It is usually some skill in excess of what the average person would possess, and it is discovered in the process of learning or trying different things. So one kid might find that he can swim faster than everyone else in class on the first day of swimming lessons, with virtually no prior experience. Another kid might find that she learns to read way faster than the other kids in her class, even though she's received no extra instruction. Talent is sort of a mystery, in that it seems to be genetically encoded and somewhat arbitrary.

But talent doesn't tell the whole story. A lot of people take their talent for granted, and their peers catch up to them fairly quickly. Skill to me is something gained through hard work. Maybe someone is refining and developing a given talent, or maybe someone is starting from square one, with no discernible aptitude, and working to gain proficiency. It requires discipline, patience, and faith that development will occur over time. "Talent" is sort of like where you start, and "skill" is where you go with it. The proportion of each is different for everyone in every aspect of life.

So writing is part talent and part skill for just about everyone. Over time it becomes difficult to tell which is which.

3. I think writing is learned through reading. And through play. Through imagination. And practice. I think kids start "writing" as soon as they start creating imaginary worlds. They learn to color, they learn the alphabet, and finally they learn to write. All of this learning is play. It isn't until we get older that learning is work. But I think even analytical writing--MLA style, citations, etc.--is ultimately imaginative, in that it requires application of unique interpretive abilities and personal experience. It's the conventions that scare people--they still scare me--but learning them allows the writer to refine his work so that it will be respected by certain audiences. In any kind of writing, this tension exists, between what the audience demands both conventionally and in terms of content and what the writer wants to express in its most unfettered form. Practice helps reduce anxiety over this tension, as well as an acknowledgment of its basically arbitrary aspects.

4. I can only think of a caricature. Someone with thick glasses hunched over a typewriter. Probably a chain-smoking coffee drinker, who also enjoys hard liquor and steak when not working. This person is crabby and opinionated, as a consequence of deep insecurity. He doesn't date much but considers himself extremely attractive, though not necessarily in a physical way. He is not a woman. He writes in a well-off friend's parlor, while the friend is out at an office job, and he's wearing a sweaty undershirt. He has a perpetual five-o'clock shadow. He is surprisingly likable and given to random acts of extreme generosity, such as handing all the money in his wallet (usually not very much) to a homeless guy.

5. This image of the writer comes from mid-twentieth-century American writers, kind of in the Jack Kerouac / Henry Miller vein. At least I think that's where it comes from. I'm not sure why, but I think it's a fairly common stereotype. It represents almost no one who actually writes. It's sort of a goofy ideal of masculinity, versions of which exist in shows like Mad Men, for example. I suppose it represents freedom and uncompromising artistic vision. I think most writers in this day and age are much less likely to smoke, and they definitely aren't using typewriters. I suspect most of them are women and are fairly well adjusted.

6. I guess I think of "technology" in terms of wires and gadgets, phones, computers, space shuttles, tanks, the Internet, and so forth. But in a broader sense, technology can refer to any tool or innovation that helps human beings perform a certain task. Technology is a "labor-reducer," maybe? But a paradoxical labor-reducer, in the sense that it always leads to more labor. In that sense, writing could be described as a technology. Without writing, oral culture never would have transformed into written culture, and whether or not that's a technological transformation, it is certainly a significant one.

7. Yes, I've heard the term "writing process" before. To me, it refers to whatever sequence of acts a given writer uses to accomplish a given writing task. So a fiction writer might have an idea for a story, sit down and try to write it, struggle through a first draft, let it sit for a while, revise, set aside, revise, set aside, revise, submit for publication, get rejected, re-submit to a different publication, get accepted. That's one potential process among many. Different types of writing for different types of audiences are likely to require different processes.

8. Writing is both social and private. It depends on the intent. I think I learned this the hard way. I shared some writing with friends that I should have realized was private. Years later, it still makes me feel embarrassed, though I don't think anyone remembers or cares. A writer needs to learn what work he's comfortable sharing and what work is essentially therapeutic. It's different for everyone. There are other approaches to this question. The act of writing itself is private (unless it's group writing, which I hate), but it becomes social once it's shared. But it's also true that even the private act of writing is social in the sense that it involves an interplay of different texts and conversations that are inevitably floating in the author's head. It can also be described in terms of "writing process." For example, a workshop involves the private act of drafting and the social act of critiquing.

9. Illiteracy means lacking the ability to read and write. I suppose there are varying degrees of illiteracy, depending on how much education a person has. The notion of illiteracy implies that there is some cut-off of learning at which a person becomes "literate." There are also terms like "functionally illiterate," which refers to the ability to do some low-level reading and writing, but not at an "adult" level. Judging from some of the readings from this week, the term is somewhat contentious.

My understanding is that the literacy rate in the U.S. is pretty high, something like 98% of adults, though probably this data is disputable. Primary causes of illiteracy could be learning disability or poverty. Illiteracy is certainly a problem for those who have it, but again, my understanding is that illiteracy is not at "moral panic" levels in the United States. To the extent that it is a problem, it is probably linked to systemic inequalities in education (and would therefore never be discussed in American politics).

10. Have writing and rhetoric fundamentally changed in the digital age? Or have they simply expanded in new directions, along with just about every other medium. Certainly technology has affected the way we communicate (blogs, for example), and I would say that it is a good thing on the whole. Locating "authority" is much more difficult, and that is definitely cause for some unease. "Editorial authority" has existed for centuries and has played an important role in determining what writing "matters," from journalism to creative writing to various forms of analytical and scientific writing. It has shaped discourse and given us a sense of order in how we think about things. Now all of that is under siege. Individuals are in a position to become "authorities," in the sense that they can get their message out quickly and cheaply. And all of us have to do more editorial filtering on our own, so that, on a very basic level, we don't give our bank account numbers to fictitious Ugandans. But I think it's a good thing because it demands more engagement on the part of the individual, and because authority in the most constructive sense only gains validity when it is challenged.