I was happy to see Rebecca Moore Howard’s recent post on Ten Principles for Teaching With a Handbook. I agree with every one of the principles she proposes, and I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how teaching with a good handbook often gets undervalued. Composition instructors often want to focus on (and argue about) what we characterize as the “content” of a course: in textbook terms, we have intense and longstanding debates that often focus on the course reader at the expense of our attention to the course rhetoric or the course handbook. I’m now starting year five of teaching writing and contributing to program and curriculum development at my current institution, and out of our cadre of instructors, I’m the only one who’s taught first-year composition every year. That’s valuable to me.

One reason it’s valuable to me is that we’ve had the same handbook for five years. It’s not Becky’s Writing Matters, which I’d love to adopt and have argued for, but the Little, Brown Handbook has served us well. (This is the part where I have to tread carefully because of who I work for and because I can’t use my position or my employer to endorse something. So: not endorsing; just saying what we use and how we use it, in a similar fashion to the way soldiers of all ranks describe the effectiveness of the M4.) When I got to my institution in 2006, we were using the 10th edition; we’ve since upgraded to the 11th. But one of the ways in which we adhere to Becky’s Principles 9 and 10 is that our first-year students get the handbook — the LBH, as we call it, in our institutional fondness for initialisms and acronyms — at the start of their academic careers, and are required to use it as a reference for all their subsequent writing, until they graduate. And our institutional policies refer to it by name and cite it. That’s some powerful stuff.

So I’ve got some acquaintance with our handbook. It’s no substitute for a rhetoric, but I enjoy teaching with it, and I’ve heard tell of students who get so familiar with it that they take it with them when they deploy after they graduate. And I found in our lesson conference meetings in the reorganization week run-up to the start of classes that I’ve internalized mental links to almost all the sections in the book: talk to me about citation practices or the rhetorical situation or fused sentences or nonsexist language or errors in the use of determiners or the distinctions between revision, editing, and proofreading and I can give you chapter and verse.

I’ve decided to take on a title for myself, and I made that title public at one of our lesson conference meetings: with the help of the Orientalist, I’ve figured out that my name should be الَّبِحُ: al-Lebihu, “The LBH,” with the (insurgent) understanding from Becky that the handbook is not the equivalent of شريعة, Sharia (law), but of علم الكلام‎, Kalam (dialectic).

The semester is underway, with lesson 2 of 40 taking place tomorrow. We had our academic convocation this afternoon, which was a pleasant enough ceremony in the Dean’s and Superintendent’s reminders that academic endeavor is of first importance in what we do. The need for such a reminder likely seems odd to those familiar with the environment of higher education, but here there are some who are occasionally eager to emphasize Sparta at the expense of Athens.

This semester I’m teaching EN101, our first-year composition course, and our course director has selected a new course reader. To increase our familiarity with the selections from the reader and our familiarity with one anothers’ interests and professional styles, and perhaps also to help remind us of what it is we’re asking our students to do, he assigned us homework: each member of the EN101 faculty was asked to choose one selection from the reader and write a two-to-three page summary and response essay. (I think assigning teachers to write at least one essay similar to what students are doing before the semester gets underway is a pretty good idea: I like that our course director did it, and wound up learning something valuable.) Two to three pages is not a lot of space, and I didn’t particularly cover myself in glory in what I wrote for the assignment: I’ve assigned summary and response essays in the past, and it’s not the most fair thing to ask of a student, since the genre almost demands that they respond with something fairly simple and basic.

That’s what I came up with, at least. This is some of the poorest writing I’ve done in a while; not really interesting or even original, with over-used analogies and recycled truisms that are likely familiar to most of us. I guess the thing I’m least unhappy with is the organizational device or trope, but even that is a bit of a gimmick. Why post this, then? For one, it’s a way to get me started blogging again after far too long a dry spell; for another, it’s a way to remind myself to carefully consider what I’m asking students to do, and what I expect them to get out of the assignments they complete. I’m not assigning a summary and response to my students this semester, and I’ll think hard before I do so again.

(And yes, it’s even got five paragraphs. Gah! What the hell is wrong with me?)

Cursus Imperii

In the Romantic view of Hudson River School painter Thomas Cole, civilization proceeds from an idealized “Savage State” and to a desolated version of that state ultimately returns. For Cole, as for Jos

Came today the first return on a few years of alternating sloth and work on the small patch of south-facing dirt beneath our kitchen window. When I moved into this house, that hundred and fifty or so square feet between the house and the driveway was thin and weedy, with occasional daffodils and tulips around the edges, monstrously huge hostas at either corner, and two large tree stumps. I developed a plan.

With enormous and invaluable advice and assistance from my father and brother, the pergola-to-be suggested in the above diagaram became Pergola Actual. Below it, that patch of dirt remained an eyesore, until I took it upon myself to investigate, and upon investigating, found that the weed patch had rooted itself well into a thin layer of topsoil that covered a long-lost attempt at a brick patio, itself laying atop a thin layer of sand, some scraps of weed-block fabric, and then clay and rock beneath. In a fit of ill-considered industry, I tore up the brick would-be patio foundations of the weed garden. To this removal, the weeds responded enthusiastically.

With prodding and assistance from the Orientalist, I weeded the remnants of the patio, and covered the remaining dirt in newspaper and plastic for the winter.

Note that the Godzilla hostas and one of the tree stumps at this point remain.

The tree stump required the application of a heavy-duty brass-ratcheted nylon web cargo strap to one of the towing pintles on the Orientalist’s vehicle and the judicious application of low-transfer all-wheel drive. Of the Godzilla hostas, two became eight and now further line the driveway with the assistance of a nursery spade, a mattock, and a digging bar.

After some graph-paper stagulating, we cut the trench for the new retaining wall. This involved demo of scant remains of an old retaining wall; scabbed-together bricks and mortar halfassery that was in keeping with the quality of workmanship and upkeep on the rest of the house when I moved in.

Note the initial use of the bowed 2 x 2 as a simulacrum of a level. That didn’t work so well, and we wound up tearing out most of those courses and starting over.

On the other hand, the use of an actual, real-life level treated us well, as much of a pain as it was to make sure that (1) each joint between bricks was level, (2) each brick was level left-to-right, and (3) each brick was level front-to-back.

And so now we have a garden with its wall and with its fruits, pole beans and okra and peppers and tomatoes and cucumbers and squash.

The Orientalist and I took our first small bites tonight: the green-tint pattypan squash, sliced and broiled; the pole beans, steamed; and cut small in a salad with balsamic vinegar and tamari, the cucumbers.

I took Julie Graham’s “Rethinking Economy” seminar in Fall 2003. I blogged a lot of that seminar: I had just started blogging as a way to help me move ahead on my dissertation, and Julie’s seminar pushed me in extraordinarily productive directions, as did later the scholarship she pointed me toward — hers and others’ — and her amazing mentorship. While Charlie Moran gave me the foundations, the direction, and the careful and rigorous criticism, and Donna LeCourt helped get me to figure out how it all fit together and pushed me both to integrate the sources I was drawing from and to go beyond mere integration, and kept me on track with her thorough and regular feedback and challenging questions, it was Julie who really showed me where my project could go in the remarkable balance of hope, rigor, and insight that she gave to that seminar and to all of us she worked with. I couldn’t be where I am today in my approach to the relationship between composition and economy without the spark that Julie lit. Earlier this year, she’d generously passed on advice and an article about Piero Sraffa and immaterial labor from a colleague after I’d asked her for guidance, now six years after I took her seminar and four years after she served as the outside reader on my dissertation committee. I’d thought her cancer was something she’d recovered from; thought her generosity, insight, warmth, guidance, and more than anything her hopefulness about the work that her scholarship imagined, made possible, and realized in the world — thought that these things would be there for a long time to come, and that they might go forward.

And, in a way, they will. She will be much missed.

So it’s Friday night and we haven’t had fish in a while and L. picks up filets and it’s up to me to cook and I’m thinking I need something that’s quick, easy, and uses up some of the lettuces in our crisper and the leftover cilantro, and I amazed myself a little.

Set rice cooking on the stove with a little seasoning and olive oil.
Chop and mix the greens and dress with a tiny bit of vinaigrette.
Spice four thin filets on both sides with Mrs. Dash and put on the grill pan on high.
While the filets sear for two minutes per side, mix up some mirin, nam pla, molasses, sriracha, and soy sauce.
Pile the greens on plates, then the rice, then the fish, then drizzle with the sauce.

That’s it: sushi, cooked and deconstructed and ridiculously easy. The only thing missing in between the fish and the rice was some tamago (I could have used ramekins to microwave little quarter-cup rounds of egg) and pickled ginger. Healthy, delicious, and I totally made it up on the spur of the moment. (As I reminded L. several times, enthusiastically: “I made this!”)

Robert Skidelsky’s biography of Keynes notes the importance Keynes placed on socially-based “conventional expectations” (93, emphasis in original) in the face of pervasive uncertainty, and contrasts those “conventional expectations” to the perfect-information wishful thinking of the proponents of the rational expectations hypothesis. Keynes’s insight was that what makes economics work and fail is adherence to conventional expectations and expectations of the conventional, and this is as true of social-epistemic models of knowledge work in composition as it is of economics. Collaboration as a generative activity is sustained by and generative of conventional expectations in the face of uncertainty, not by the perfect-information utopia of rational expectations. Writing is social, and exists in uncertainty: both those circumstances are what make it work.

I was intrigued to see two abiding concerns of compositionists rolled into one in the recent controversy over Helene Hegemann’s plagiarized/remixed novel Axolotl Roadkill. There’s the usual breast-beating and hair-tearing and garment-rending about these kids today from the usual choristers, but what I thought was interesting was the use of the trope of authenticity in service of defending representing someone else’s writing as one’s own. Hegemann, in her own defense, asserted that “There

I finished Jaron Lanier’s 2006 essay on “Digital Maoism,” and as I’d suspected not far into the article, there’s not much there beyond oversimplifications, weasel words, straw men, and sweeping generalizations. More than anything else, Lanier sounds like a snubbed Ayn Randian railing against the unwashed masses of the internets who don’t deserve or recognize his brilliance. He gets spanked hard and deservedly in the responses, most notably by Douglas Rushkoff and Yochai Benkler, but also — as you’d expect — by Clay Shirky and Cory Doctorow.

And that’s kind of the problem I’m finding: I very much agree with folks like Benkler — especially like Benkler — and so I want to seek the counterbalancing argument. When I find myself nodding my head in too-easy or too-vigorous assent, I look for the other side; I want to hear what the critiques say. Metonymically speaking, I’ve got my Wealth of Nations just as full of notes as my Kapital, and I’ve got Friedman and Hayek rubbing shoulders with Wolff and Gibson-Graham. But with the digital economy stuff, it’s either outdated like Shapiro and Varian or sloppy like Lanier, to the point where the terrain of the digital seems more and more like a limit case for the economic logic of capitalist exclusivity.

I’m reading Jaron Lanier’s 2006 cautionary anti-crowdsourcing manifesto “Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism,” and it’s interesting to look at the way he understands writing. On the one hand, in looking at “most of the technical or scientific information” on Wikipedia (I think I’d qualify that to say “much” rather than “most,” unless he’s got access to statistics he’s not citing), he notes that “specific texts get cloned from original sites at universities or labs onto wiki pages,” and such information thereby “loses part of its value” when taken out of its context of production and out of relation to its author. Fair enough: yes, I’ll certainly go with that; the notion that all writing is inherently rhetorical, and that context matters, although he seems to be performing the current-traditionalist move of privileging the primary or original (I’m resisting the urge to put that word in scare quotes) context over any subsequent context or recontextualization. (The New Critics said, implicitly, “Always dehistoricize,” to which Jameson rightly retorted, “Always historize,” to which in turn digital rhetoricians, remix artists, and others aquiver in the ecstasies of influence might respond, “Always rehistoricize.”) Of course, the critique he’s making could be leveled against the decontextualized knowledge found in any encyclopedia, and in fact it often is, implicitly, in the way that composition teachers forbid students from using encyclopedias (wiki or otherwise) as sources for research papers. It’s an interesting take on the value of writing, though; the suggestion that something is somehow worth less when it’s copied into a new context: does this work with or against the ideologies associated with the social turn in writing instruction? Against, I think: it’s a romantic ideal masquerading as a rhetorical ideal. This sense of the nature of his argument is strengthened for me when Lanier asserts that on the Web (and, implicitly, in writing), “value would flow from people” and that “value always came from connecting with real humans.” (Note the familiar romantic privileging of authenticity in the use of the word “real.”) Ultimately, in fact, writing itself becomes for Lanier an asocial act: “What I think of as real writing. . . involves articulating a perspective that is not just reactive to yesterday’s moves in a conversation.” For networked writing, that’s a pretty striking concept.

At Computers and Writing last year, I briefly chatted with John Logie about some of the smart things I’d recently had the good fortune to hear him say about intellectual property. He made the case in our conversation (as well as in some of his recent presentations) that advocates of openness in intellectual property would do well to reframe the debate away from the term “property” because of the ways the term itself — “property” — is both inaccurate (owning an idea is not the same as owning a car) and tends to make people feel instinctively possessive. I get that, and I’m kind of with him on it.

The problem I see, though, is that notions of property and ownership are so deeply woven into all aspects of our culture that it’s really, really hard not to say “mine.” Especially when it comes to stuff that is somehow connected to you. In fact, I’m kind of wondering: for some belief systems, doesn’t all morality and ethical individual conduct essentially come from the concept of ownership, and from the concept of self-ownership in particular? I’m thinking here especially of John Locke and Chapter V of the Second Treatise on Government (and, to a lesser degree, some of the ideas in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding): in other words, the concept away from which Logie wants to shift the debate is one that’s deeply foundational, and in some ways part of the bedrock of Western democracies.

Are there possible alternatives? Other ways to think about ideas in ways that don’t rely on conceptions of individual ownership as foundational and necessary to freedom? What are some positive opposing terms for “ownership”?

I don’t know. Rousseau’s notion of the freedom of the self and the way — in my limited understanding — that he seems to conceive of individual liberty and a sort of positive self-determination might be a possible alternative. But if Logie’s talking about reframing the debate, Western audiences tend to go for Locke a lot more than they go for Rousseau.