05/31/01       The last day for this section of the mess. I spent far too much time the last few days figuring out how to do stuff in CSS and JavaScript. I really wanted to be able to change the front end today, but I'm not quite there yet. But the tech stuff is making more sense. The weird thing is that a typical viewer of these pages won't notice much difference; from what I've seen most people are using IE 5 or better, and viewing the screens at higer resolutions.

     The primary goal was to try to get things to function better at lower resolutions. To do this, I'm going to dynamically load different style sheets for the different resolutions; this should make the lower resolution displays less cramped and free of fonts that fill up the freakin' screen. I've decided to get rid of the page-switching every day for now, until I get all the screens to conform to the new layout. Then I'll put it back, with new content. The other change is getting rid of conventional frames; that's going to take a major re-work of the gallery section later on, but for now I'm just going to work from the top down.

     By sometime tomorrow I should have the front-end and a redesigned blog page together. Just in time for the new month. I had hoped that the changing front end pages would make people want to visit more frequently, but so far it hasn't worked. Still hanging in there at one or two folks per day, mostly different though.

     As promised though, a suicide note written by Thomas Hardy:

Dear ——, Before these lines reach your hands I shall be delivered from the inconveniences of seeing, hearing, and knowing more of the things around me. I will not trouble you by giving my reasons for the step I have taken, though I can assure you they were sound and logical. Perhaps had I been blessed with a mother, or a sister, or a female friend of another sort tenderly devoted to me, I might have thought it worth while to continue my present existence. I have long dreamt of such an unattainable creature, as you know; and she, this undiscoverable, elusive one, inspired my last volume; the imaginary woman alone, for, in spite of what has been said in some quarters, there is no real woman behind the title. She has continued to the last unrevealed, unmet, unwon. I think it desirable to mention this in order that no blame may attach to any real woman as having been the cause of my decease by cruel or cavalier treatment of me. Tell my landlady that I am sorry to have caused her this unpleasantness; but my occupancy of the rooms will soon be forgotten. There are ample funds in the bank to pay all expenses.

R. Trewe.

     You've got to love the name . . .

05/29/01       The sky cut loose today. It rained hard for a while, and now it's quiet. Feeling dragged and down again, but I managed to get a revision memo e-mailed to Dr. Barb. I don't know why, but I spent the greater part of the afternoon teaching myself more about Adobe Illustrator and XML. I can't draw, and XML is much pickier than HTML and isn't really necessary on most sites, but what the hell.

     I managed to make the menu bar frame on the front page of this site XML compliant. Now it only remains to recode about twenty more pages before I can change the whole front end. I want to make things around here compliant, so if you're using Netscape 4.x there will probably be a rude message headed your way soon. I've decided that I like inline frames, and I want to use them to improve the searchability and functionality of this site.

     Took a break this evening to watch Girl, Interrupted and to read a couple of short stories by Thomas Hardy. I was amused by "An Imaginative Girl," which is about an affair that never happened with a poet. I love his description of her marriage:

Indeed, the necessity of getting life-leased at all cost, a cardinal virtue which all good mothers teach, kept her from thinking of it at all until she had closed with William, had passed the honeymoon, and reached the reflecting stage. Then, like a person who has stumbled upon some object in the dark, she wondered what she had got; mentally, walked around it, estimated it; whether it were rare or common; contained gold, silver, or lead; were a clog or a pedestal, everything to her, or nothing.

     The poet she fancies kills himself before they can meet; his suicide note is also a beautiful piece of writing. Perhaps I'll jot it down tomorrow; you never know when such things will come in handy. It reminds me of a lyric in a Pontiac Brothers song:

We keep passing suicide notes,
If you think yours is good,
Read the one I wrote.
Stole the best lines from the last paragraph:
"Think of me and try not to laugh."

05/28/01       Such a strange day. Just when I was starting to get into this online journal thing, I'm told they are becoming extinct. O well, I've always been out of fashion. However, it was far more fun to view the flash animations at nosepilot.com

     Long ago, I remember having conversations with Jeff Harris about the sociological implications of Star Trek. Luke's recent comment about William Shatner's acting ability (hey, the guy was born for overblown romantic period drama, but in this century he's certainly hard to take) and the recent season finale of Star Trek Voyager made those wheels start to turn again, thinking about how the series has evolved.

     Harris's thoughts were that the original Star Trek was a cold war phenomenon, where conflict was settled by sex and violence. The Next Generation was a product of detente, with Picard the diplomat resolving conflict through cleverness rather than force. I started extending that thesis today, thinking that Deep Space Nine was a failed attempt at multiculturalism, and that Voyager was an experiment in feminism. It was also the first Star Trek with an overall narrative arc: you knew they had to find their way home, and the series would be over. This element was never incorporated before, unless you want to count the original "five year mission" that was cancelled before it was completed.

     Is the blog concept being cancelled? I don't think so. I think that it's just an evolutionary weeding period. It requires a strong motivation to attempt to write consistently about something each day. Most people who keep journals give them up from time to time; why would the web version be any different? The lesson that seems most valuable from the experience of reading them is that timeliness is everything; the Internet is always in danger of becoming buried in static pages that are never updated. Why visit a site repeatedly, if you have no idea of the frequency of its changes? Chances are you'll only go back if some portion is updated on a semi-regular basis. Logs do that, and they also convey personality. However, I was thinking of a Nirvana song, School, when reflecting on some of the blogs I've read: "you're in highschool again... you're in highschool again... NO RECESS!! NO RECESS!!!"

05/27/01       Memorial Day Weekend. I didn't realize that till today, when a wonderful line up of cheezy movies on the Sci-Fi channel suddenly reminded me. A bunch I hadn't seen before; I didn't pay any attention to titles but they provided an excellent background drone while I finished the Keepsakes Site. Now all I have to do is the rhetorical analysis...

     There are a couple of good movies that I've watched in the last week that stand mentioning. First, there was The Magic Christian. I bought a cheap copy so the video quality was terrible, but I have to agree with the reviewer on IMDB: "If this movie does not make you laugh out loud (frequently) you should consider getting treatment for a severe case of humor deficiency." Yul Brenner in drag seducing Roman Polanski is a vision I won't soon forget. The chaotic nature of Terry Southern's screenplay seems like such a sixties artifact, though. File it with Head as far as coherence goes.

     While I didn't see all of it (it should come around again on Tuesday) Girl, Interrupted seemed to be a fine film as well. I nearly fell over; Winona Ryder actually acts in this one, turning in a stellar performance. The weird thing about both of these films is that they made me want to read the books they were based on. Just what I need, more books to read.

     Next on deck, I think, is The Clouds by Aristophanes. But that may have to wait until I re-read a bunch of Blake criticism I need to shape the freaking essay that is so long overdue! There was the briefest hint of thunderstorms as night fell; some big raindrops and a low rumble in the distance. I'm in shock; the first Riverfest downtown I've had to miss, and it hasn't rained all weekend. I didn't even look to see what bands were playing, I didn't want to torture myself.

05/26/01       Got the new scanner set up today. So far, it radically outperforms the old one. I tried scanning some transparencies and the results were fair, much better than the last one. I can't wait till the price/quality ratio on film scanners improves. Being able to look at some of the old passed over negatives will be lots of fun, and open up new possibilities for the site.

     Finished Ong's Orality and Literacy this morning, waiting for the scanner to arrive. I'm starting to feel more charged up about returning to the Blake essay; Ong's book, for all its flaws, casts a different light on the thoughts I've been having about Blake and Platonic rhetoric that I just couldn't find a place for in the essay. Writing it in my sleep, as I often do, has made me realize that it is really three or four essays in one. That's why coherence has been such a problem. I'm about 80% there in constructing a frame to hang them in.

     Jerusalem becomes more and more a pivitol text in the transition between enlightenment rhetoric, as exemplified by Ramus and Locke, and modernism. But it is not a modern text, and it resists all attempts to deal with it on those terms. I'm starting to think of it as an alternative to both the rigidity of the eighteenth century, and the slavery to symbols that became the driving force of modernism.

     O well. Everybody needs a hobby. Perhaps Jerusalem has become mine.

05/25/01       Slept fourteen hours. Discovered that much of my problem is probably the plastic boot I need to wear— it's very uncomfortable. Finally got up the courage to take it off. They told me to wear it while I was sleeping to avoid injuring my ankle, but I think not being able to sleep was more injurious. It's becoming less sensitive now, though it is still swollen, so I was less afraid about waking up screaming in pain because I moved it wrong. Maybe that's the reason for my shoe fetish.

     Opened up the curtains today. I was unable to the day before, because the light hurt my eyes. The sky blue sky helps. I was watching a promo piece about the movie " Girl Interupted" and someone made the comment "What you don't know when you are seventeen is that though things are bad, they do get better." Thinking about it, I have to admit that things started getting bad when I was thirteen, and didn't really get better until I was around 26. In retrospect, from 27-37 were perhaps the best years so far. What I didn't realize during the good years was that the " better" didn't last. Things got bad again at 38. I hope that they don't take as long to turn around this time, though it's been five years of bad so far.

     Since I have to take a pause on the revisions on the website because of the loss of my scanner, I returned to my books. I started reading Simulations by Jean Baudrillard. I'm about halfway through first essay, "The Precession of Simulacra," and the same sort of nagging "So?" that is my usual response postmodern theory has lodged in my brain. Roughly translated (because most critics use obscure medieval Latinate words to describe what should be accessible ideas) the title means the slow movement of representation. I suppose what troubles me is surrendering the idea that there is something that is real. While discussions of these effects is interesting, they speak as if nothing is real. If that were true, I could stop eating tomorrow and it would make no difference. Nope, I'm not buying this matrix idea, even if it is entertaining to play with.

     William S. Burroughs said somewhere, loosely paraphrased, " words generate images, not of things, but of other words." This is true. But I don't eat words; I eat food. All the theory stuff in the world doesn't negate real, physical, existence. And yet they ramble on as if it wasn't there at all. It doesn't bother me, except when they conclude that the basic human drive to deal with time has somehow changed. Baudrillard really lost me when he wrote:

     It isn't that the direct menace of atomic destruction paralyses our lives. It is rather that deterrence leukemises us. And this deterrence come from the very situation which excludes the real atomic clash— excludes it beforehand like the eventuality of the real in a system of signs. Everybody pretends to believe in the reality of this menace (one understands it from the military point of view, the whole seriousness of their exercise, and the discourse of their "strategy," is at stake): but there are precisely no strategic stakes at this level, and the whole originality of the situation lies in the improbability of destruction.

     On a certain level this is true; but applied to specific situations it falls apart. The Cuban missile crisis, for example. Russian army generals had tactical nuclear weapons in Cuba. They had, on their own personal discretion the ability to use them. Whenever human beings are involved, rather than theories, there is cause for fear. Fear of something need not paralyze; people have been killing each other for a long time, but these things are situational, not theoretical. I suspect that on a global level, unless faced with a real possibility, rather than a media fabricated one, of destruction people will not be "leukemised" [a fabricated word I haven't found in any dictionary]. The interesting thing, however, is that governments do become "leukemised". The fall of the Soviet Union, which occurred after this essay was written, is a testament to that. A testament to the failure of theory to cope with the real.

     Postmodern theory, for all its glory (and poetry, in the case of Baudrillard), does not make the real go away. The lack of real goods and services in the Soviet Union, its bankruptcy, was a real cause of the need for a new government. However "improbable" it might be to learn anything about the mechanisms of the real world, I do not think that it stops our drive to try to make sense of it. Saying that nothing is real, that everything is simulation, is not a jump that I'm willing to take.

     But it sure is fun to read about. Baudrillard does seem to anticipate the reticience of people to make the jump, which is part of what makes him so fun:

     There is an escalation of the true, of the lived experience; a resurrection of the figurative where the object and substance have disappeared. And there is a panic-stricken production of the real and the referential, above and parallel to the panic of material production: this is how simulation appears in the phase that concerns us— a strategy of the real, the neo-real and hyperreal whose universal double is a strategy of deterrence.

     The assumptions that riddle this really amuse me. Did the object and substance disappear? Wow, I didn't notice. Did people stop making narratives of real life experiences somewhere along the way, so that we are now returning "panic-stricken" to resurrect them? This is all posited on the success of modernism; the removal of the specific from art and literature, and its replacement by more abstract and loaded "signs". Sorry, but I don't think that the specific ever really dissapeared; it was never completely replaced by symbols. Nope, just not buying that at all. While levels of abstraction increased, I suspect that the dead-end involved is only of interest to intellectuals. People who buy groceries don't think of it that much.

05/24/01       I wasn't able to sleep at all last night. It's 2:30 in the afternoon, and my eyes are fuzzing over. I watched a few movies, read a chapter in Ong's book, and tossed and turned until I finally decided to get up at 5am, after never having fallen asleep. I went back to work on the Keepsakes Site.

     Wrote my first "ugly browsers go away" code. Wrote my first inline frame, and it's really nifty. It doesn't look like a frame at all, but it saves the problem of recoding the table of contents on fifteen different pages to change one item. Looking at the stats I've got from this page, the Netscape 4.x user seems to be only about 3% of the crowd anyway, and the trade-off is a must on the academic site. It's not as if the content is innaccessable to users of older browsers; there is a text version available for everyone including PDAs and cell phones. If you don't want to upgrade your browser, well, you'll just have to use that. Coding for fifteen different browser versions just isn't worth the aggravation. The new pages all comply with W3C standards.

     I was crusing right along when the scanner broke, effectively stalling the final stuff until Saturday when Karen can bring me a new one. I have the worst luck with scanners; this will be my fourth. I'm paying twice as much this time, so maybe it will last longer.

05/23/01       Put the new version of the Keepsakes Site online. The revisions are about half done now, and hopefully I'll get it finished tomorrow. Then I've got to write all the blasted memos. It was a nice learning thing though, I'm really starting to get a conceptual handle on web coding.

     There is a lot of stuff I'd rather be doing; observations to write down and such, but I've stalled long enough. I've got to get this school stuff done. Staring at code editors and Adobe applications for nine or ten hours at a stretch does cut into my reading time, so about one more day better be all it takes!

05/22/01       Worked on the Keepsakes Site all day. Didn't make any changes online yet, because I've still got too far to go. I had to redesign the front page graphic menu from scratch, because I had deleted the .psd file! O well, the new one is better anyhow. Too may hours slaving away at the monitor. Decided to go ahead and join the browser standards bandwagon, so I need to redesign major parts of it. I'll eventually do that here too, but I want to get that frickin' class wrapped up first.

     I know that Dr. Barb won't be expecting changes this major, but since I have the time and this site will wear my name on the university domain, I want it to be good. The stories on that site deserve it too; too many people put in too much work.

05/21/01       Modified some stuff around here. Moved the blog (the thing you're looking at) into a new directory, so if you like you can access it directly without going through the first screen. I'm not sure why I did it, perhaps a concession to poetry haters. However, in order to access the navigational menu you'll need to go to that screen anyway. I may change that later, I'm not sure. If you'd like direct access to the public address page bypassing the main screen, click on this— remove the frameset . Just in case you wondered, I change the startup screens frequently and they cycle on their own from day to day. Though I would prefer people to enter through the main screen, I thought it might be more convenient for a frequent visitor (as if I have any) to go directly to the most frequently updated page.

     I also have updated the descriptive catalogue with some new graphics and some new stories. I categorized things a bit better, and installed links so that people might better find what they'd like to read. Also new on the links page, was a modification of open() routine so that a person could actually bookmark the links if they care to. For a cleaner look, I'm sticking with my decision to dispense with the nav bars and such. There is a lot more to do, but I'll keep working on it though at the current rate it seems hardly worthwhile. I suppose I average about two visitors a day, in case you're curious.

     Though I slept like shit last night, my brain is starting to come together. I woke up several times, consulting Blake Books and sketching out an outline for my Cooper project. There are several troubling gaps that are keeping me from finishing the thing, but reading Yoder's article "Unlocking Language: Self-Similarity in Blake’s Jerusalem" more carefully cast a different spin on things. I suppose what my research has implied is that Blake's relationship with Platonic rhetoric is much the same as his relationship with Locke's view on language. Tonight, I finally figured out how to solve the extensibility problems with the Keepsakes Site as well. Over the last few days, I've restructured the text only portion to my liking, so now all that is left is a redesign of the main site!

     I'll get there somehow; all I have to do now is get some brain time applied to remembering Spanish so I can finish that up as well, and I'll be back together. Listen to me. This implies that I had it together at some time in the past!

05/20/01       Listening to a Nirvana bootleg this morning, "Banned for Life," when a very soft and insistent voice came from nowhere: "Hey mister, got a light?" My stereo is lifelike, so I scanned the room furtively for a few minutes before realizing it was just an artifact of the experience represented by the audience tape source of the CD.

     An observation from a few days ago that slipped through the cracks: one of the bizarre things that happens to people seriously involved in the study of poetry is that they can't help scanning the lines of whatever comes their way for metrics. When I was listening to Neil Young a few days ago, I couldn't help but notice the variety in his meter. As a child, I would get songs caught in my head when I was trying to write poetry, and emulate the metrics of the particular song without realizing it. I discovered William Blake about the same time, and I never found a reasonable way to connect the two fascinations; they really seemed to have nothing in common. Here's the deal. The songs that I always wanted to emulate were written in fourteeners (septameter for those who keep track of that sort of thing). So were the majority of Blake's prophetic works. There you have it, a Blake-Young connection.

     Another interesting thing about it was noticing that many of the songs were pentameter, "The Needle and the Damage Done" for example, but the ones that stuck in my head were septameter, "Don't Let it Bring You Down" and "Harvest" in particular. Moving into the "black period" songs, he simplified his meter into duple or trimeter. The contrast is striking, but it's the fourteeners that grab and move me. Long lines just twist and shake, packed with so much meaning that they burn off a page, or speaker for that matter. I started to wonder if there were other examples of this form in my favorite music. The first one I located was Steve Wynn. I suppose these extended metrics are part of the influence of Dylan, so there are no doubt more fourteeners in my collection.

     Because rock is built on 4:4, seven stress lines are not at all natural. For example, Nirvana seems to work almost entirely in trimeter and ballad stanzas (3:4). I read a plausible argument in one of my books on metrics that the three beat line is really a four beat line with an implied stress at the end that rolls naturally into the next line, so ultimately this means that a three beat line still has four beat rhythm. A fourteener is really a conflation, or doubling of these simple lines. Running them together squeezes them tight, packing the meaning into a denser package. It's funny to notice, listening to In Utero, that Cobain started working in some hexameter lines. Maybe with a little more time, he'd end up in fourteeners too. I haven't yet begun to scan Roy Harper yet. I suspect he's written more than his share of long lines! Now I know I've become a real freak— performing scansion on rock and roll songs.

     A List Apart was really dissapointing this week. Zeldman wrote a long winded article about the difficulty of creating new content each week. Ultimately, his rant had no content at all, reinforcing his point. How silly can you get. If I don't have an idea, I usually try to shut up. But it's hard to do that. It's painful looking at blogs that read:

• I finally changed the site design.
• I don't have time to change the site design
• Thinking about changing the site design.

There has been a real lack of content in most things I've looked at this week. Entries like those serve only to take up space and waste the time of anyone unlucky enough to read them. But there have been brighter spots on the web. Luke's suggestion of the Vocabula Review was a really good one, as a content source. I really liked the article Writing Down to Readers .

     I'm two-thirds of the way through Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy. I'm detecting a pattern though; I usually embrace the evidence presented in the first part of these books, and then reject the conclusions that the author draws from his "facts." This book seems a bit naive in some ways. Ong assumes that the major development in medieval society was the proliferation of literacy, and as such it is responsible for all the changes. Really? Perhaps writing is the symptom of forces of change, not the cause of them. This is a possibility that he never considers, or even gives the slightest nod to. There is no arguing that the changes he details did occur. His implications of causality seem strained at times. So far at least (Chapter 4), he completely ignores the modern impact of recording technology to oral discourse, particularly in saying that "Spoken utterance comes only from the living" (102). If indeed we have moved into "secondary orality" we must account for the increase in sales figures surrounding the dead voices of recorded music. As I said (or wrote), he makes reasonably unassailable points, then crowns them in presumptous judgments.

The writer's audience is always a fiction. The writer must set up a role in which absent and often unknown readers can cast themselves. Even in writing to a close friend I have to fictionalize a mood for him, to which he is expected to conform. The reader must also fictionalize the writer. When my friend reads the letter, I may be in an entirely different frame of mind from when I wrote it. Indeed, I may well be dead. For a text to convey its message, it does not matter whether the author is dead or alive. Most books now extant were written by persons now dead. Spoken utterance comes only from the living. [Ong, Orality and Literacy]

     The premise is strong; the narrowed signification of difference between written and spoken is just plain wrong. Most recordings of music extant are from dead folks too, and yet they conform to the same specifications of orality as when the speaker was alive. I'm listening to a dead guy right now. Note also that he refers to the message of the text as a singular phenomenon, "its message." I suspect that there are few if any singular messages; things are more complicated than that.

05/19/01       Today, I realized that perhaps the most important event isn't the fall. I suppose I spent most of my life thinking it was. I remember one of my earliest theories of photography was that it should be as easy as falling: a natural detachment from all the things that hold us back holding delicately to a loose and tender embrace of the world taken in by sight alone without attachments or ideologies.

     I suppose that's why I always liked photography from aerial perspectives. Many photographs I've taken have been from a higher perspective; sometimes, afterwards, I did physically fall. Nevertheless, ideologies always seem to creep in. I was reminded in my recent reading that the words idea and vision share a common Latin root: video.

     These days I feel earthbound. Reflecting on recent falls, I find that it's not the fall that seems most interesting, but the crawl that results afterward. I don't even remember breaking my ankle. No twisting sinews, no pain, no weightlessness. Just opening my eyes up on the ground, realizing that the only way I could get out of the situation was to crawl. And it wasn't easy; the pain was overwhelming.

     Maybe it's age, or chance. When I had my last life threatening incident, I rolled a truck moving to Arkansas. I remember when the wheel shot off, and the truck began to roll; the split section of decision time, to orient the slide toward the center divider, before becoming weightless and upside down, sliding to whatever chance might bring. I opened my eyes and saw that Karen was safe, six feet below me as I dangled in midair. I bruised my elbow, but was otherwise unharmed. Everything that has happened after that has been different; the outcome has become more important than the moment of change.

     Now, I don't remember falling in love with Kae. I remember crawling, forsaking everything that I once thought of as me, in the name of love. Falling in love took a split second. The crawl, and destruction of my life took nearly a year. The last six months, as I became nearer and nearer to the ground were the most painful, and the part that floats to the top of my memory. I don't want to dwell on it, or think about it, but I always do. I see it in my head like it was yesterday, though it's been almost five years now. The things she said to hurt me, intentionally, to drive me away and make her choices simpler.

     I don't remember breaking my ankle. I do remember facing the decision of crawling across the street to my apartment. Would I be able to make it? Would I become a pancake on the pavement at 3am if a car passed by? I remember passing out in shock after the first 30 feet. I remember passing out again, about 20 feet further. I don't remember how many times of waking up and passing out it took to reach the door of my apartment. I do remember thinking that I didn't want to die on the pathway, out of control. I wanted to be back in my room. Only determination got me there.

     After sleeping a few hours, the chore of crawling thirty more feet to the living room and the telephone seemed easier by comparison, at home in the cave. We always do what we have to do. It isn't the fall that captivates me anymore; it's learning to crawl. Maybe it's not just the vision; maybe the idea that survives the crawl that is most important.

05/17/01       Woke up this morning thinking about Blake. Better that than the hospital bill. Didn't get it down on paper, or in electrons. But the thoughts won't leave. They do that sometimes. They stick around until you shape them into something.

     Listened to a lot of Neil Young today. It makes me wonder about being sad and happy at the same time; it makes me think of a porch, down in a valley under the road. The twisting drive of trees, the stumps and rocks strewn around that were meant to be something someday. And the woman inside the house, who would walk out on the porch and listen to them, hoping that they might reveal what they want to be. Are these good thoughts or bad ones? I'm not sure; it depends on how I feel from day to day.

     On a much lighter note, the author of an online article Was Percy Bysshe Shelley Gay? seems to think that it's an unassailable truth. Nevermind what his friends had to say about his womanizing. It reminded me of a comment that was quoted somewhere from Michael Stipe about his bisexuality: "I'm an equal opportunity letch!" I suspect the same may have been true of Byron and Shelley; I don't think it's an either/or thing with them.

     Must be a rough lifestyle to lead, lusting after everyone in the room. Thankfully, I've never had that problem. My lust for women is hard enough to deal with!

05/16/01       Got the hospital bill today— $13,000. I really wish it was a joke, but it isn't. I have no insurance to take any of the bite away; it's going to be a long haul to pay that off. It must be the going rate for being able to walk, or the price of one bad step, depending on how you look at it. No matter how I look at it, it isn't very pretty. It's a good thing that money isn't that important to me, because it looks like I won't have any to spare for a long time. Karen tried to cheer me up by saying, "Well, it's like you just bought a car." Problem is, I've never paid that much for a car before. I never had it to spend!

     The site has been down most of the day for some sort of server move. Everything is quiet on the mailing lists too. I just can't seem to get into gear to get anything done. I keep looking at the Keepsakes site, trying to figure out how to fix it up. There is this dull hum in my brain, that I'm trying to drown out by listening to the pile of bootlegs that has built up on the stereo, printing out artwork and stuff. I keep telling myself it's time to get back in gear and finish the school work; I suppose my brain is about as clear as its going to get for a while.

     Read a bunch of essays today on definitions of literacy. I'm not sure what I think yet. But it makes it really easy to see why Rhetoric is such a screwed-up field. It's becoming the playground of social engineers who want to shape the desires of their students in their own image. I can tell right now that this is going to be a tough path to follow; I find myself chafing against the bit and they haven't even placed it in my mouth yet.

     It reminds me of Chris Burnett, my first photography teacher, and Harry Wilson, my second and final mentor. Both of them had the belief that their job as teachers was to make their student more complete human beings. The field they taught was just a beard, a disguise, for the greater purpose of changing people's lives. But the split between what they wanted to do, and the subject itself, was quite distinct. First, you had to learn the basic skills of making images. First, not along the way. Harry was very technologically challenged; he left this part to books and his lab assistants. But this was college, so he operated under the assumption that the students should be prepared read the technical stuff they needed to do what they wanted. He trained all of us to be critics of photography, rather than photographers. If you wanted to learn which button to push, he thought that was your responsibility to find out. Burnett was different. He was hands on, focusing on skills first. However, in private, he'd recommend books and stuff to give you more to think about— not just about photography, but about life. He didn't spend much lecture time on it, though it was always there just under the surface.

     I can't help thinking that you've got to learn the skills first. Writing instruction doesn't seem to focus on that much at all.

05/15/01       I finished Faigley's book today, and ordered a few new ones. I find it hard to get used to reading only secondary texts; it's weird to be asked to accept "Foucault sez..." or "Habermas means..." without reading it for myself. I suppose it's the literature guy in me. I would rather read the philosopher directly first, before being asked to agree with someone else's critique of them. Once again, it's a matter of emphasis.

     I remember clearly my displeasure at the dismissal of Foucault in my critical theory seminar, both by Dr. Ramsey and the student who presented him. They both called him "impenetrable." Maybe I've spent too much time reading Coleridge, but he seemed perfectly lucid to me. I had read Archeology of Knowledge and History of Sexuality as well as lots of excerpts from other books prior to the class. I thought there were some big issues to discuss, but all the class did was make fun of his prose style.

     I spoke to Dr. Ramsey afterward and found out his major problem with Foucault was his anti-humanist stance. He had a much firmer base for his argument than what was revealed in the free for all in class; right now, I'm having difficulty accepting that anyone is entirely right or wrong. It just depends on what part of their thought you care to emphasize.

     All the books I've looked at so far on composition theory seem to emphasize purely cultural concerns. I can't see why that should be the center of the teaching of Rhetoric, or literature for that matter. That's what kept me out of American Literature. I suppose I'm naive, but I still cling to the antiquated notion that the study of literature is about reading, and the study of Rhetoric is about writing. Psychology, History, and Sociology all have their own departments; while they influence all other disciplines, they should not be at the center of them!

05/14/01       Really found a nerve in chapter 4 of Faigley's book. "Ideologies of the Self in Writing Evaluation" explores several concepts about what constitutes good writing. It really explains a lot about the reason why I felt so out of place in the undergraduate writing program at UALR. It has to do with the concept of "the authentic voice of the writer." Faigley rightly questions why we seem to find more truth value in confessional, rather than scholarly, writing. He summons Foucault to explicate, placing it inside a sort of mechanics of power. Ultimately, Faigley sees this emphasis as a sort of conservative politics which rewards closed notions of self; writing that bends the individuality to societal norm, wins.

     This is pretty much the sense I got when I analysed the compilations of student writing produced by UALR. The essays were so freakin' boring to me; I saw no flash of originality in most of them. I don't blame the students; I blame the teachers and their narrow emphasis on cute little moral tales. Not everyone's soul fits in such a neat little box. The self is a very complex thing; I don't see writing as a "tool" to discover the self. It's a skill, pure and simple. We learn to conform to expectation in order to join a community— to communicate.

     I suppose that's why I'm more interested in teaching the writing of research papers now, rather than basic composition. There is a clearly identifiable audience, a distinct set of standards. This does not exist in evaluating more "creative" forms of writing. Research papers are about effectively structuring knowledge, rather than conveying any sense of personal ethos.

     I do think it is impossible to divorce ethos from writing, however— it's a matter of proportion. Marc Turner told me that he was forced, by his mentors, into teaching writing about controversial issues in his composition class. This seems to me to be an overtly political move to try to adjust their politics, probably to a more liberal agenda. While I'm a liberal, I find this to be completely wrong. Students should be allowed to write about what they personally care about; learning proper forms of argumentation need not be political! What am I getting myself into?

05/13/01       I'm watching a thing on HBO about child beauty pageants. It makes me think about a sort of double standard I've always felt about this sort of thing. I can't help but feel that playing dress-up with little kids is sick. One of the parents said that the reason they wanted their child to win was so that other people would think that their child was "special." Part of the lesson learned, in such early competition, is the art of losing gracefully. I noticed that a lot of the kids were very near tears when they lost. At 5-7 years old you have to wonder if they really care about the competition, or the reaction of their parents to the loss.

     But how is this different from competition in sports? Why do I find it so offensive? It could be argued that sports teaches teamwork, and all that stuff. Or social integration. I suppose the real divide is in the motivations of the parents. Only a small minority actually think that "winning" is the most important thing, I suspect, when it comes to kids in sports. However, the fact that star atheletes are treated differently than ordinary folks is also a bit of a downside, I think.

     What about academic competition, spelling bees and such? I haven't seen many parents think that winning was the big thing. I participated myself in math competitions as a kid. I won a few, lost a few. No one treated me any differently after I won; I was a nerd to begin with. Why do I think this sort of competition is okay? I've always been resistant to things like this, but I did it anyway.

     It dawned on me today what it was. I liked hanging out with smart people. It didn't matter if I won, it was the trips available to visit places filled with smart people that attracted me. So, if a kid likes hanging out with athletic people, or "beautiful people" what's wrong with that? Why do I find it perverse? I really don't know; perhaps it's just that these people don't have the same values as I do. It does make me question myself these days, rather than just condemn those who are different.

05/12/01       I found another gem in Faigley's book today, this one is quoted from James Sled: "English teachers have never been the public's darlings; and today there is more than usually widespread suspicion that those who can't write teach, and those who can't teach teach writing, and those who can neither write nor teach teach the teaching of writing." Now that's an interesting twist to contemplate, as I enter their den.

     The divide between literature and writing really bugs me. I'm interested in both, though I'm not in this to "write the great American novel" or anything like it. I like knowing stuff. I think that the tools of rhetoric and rhetorical analysis are part and parcel of the process of reading. I also feel that I learned more about writing by writing about other writing than I ever did just mining my subconscious for some demon to exorcise.

     One of the claims that came out in chapter two of Faigley's book was that English departments were failing to teach students to write. I find this hard to swallow, given that my grades have been almost entirely based in my ability to write. But of course, Faigley was speaking of the public rather than academic perspective. However, I think the point is well placed. Without the creation of a "discourse community" there is no growth.

     I've been blessed that way. I have always felt more in sync with the readers of literature than the teachers of writing, and those who taught literature acted more like readers than teachers, Dr. Yoder and Dr. Murphy in particular. Some of the faculty were more staid and traditional; but once I learned to cope with that I did all right. By contrast, I have always felt myself an outsider in the writing community, because it is my desire to learn to express myself more clearly about subjects other than myself! Because I am so broadly read, I suppose I intimidate some. No teacher in the Rhetoric department has ever attempted to reach me in the same way that the English professors have. Now I've got two years to figure out how to fit in, within that community.

05/11/01       Trying to get my brain back into shape, I started reading Fragments of Rationality: Postmodernism and the Subject of Composition by Lester Faigley today. It's pretty interesting so far. It's funny how simple so much of this stuff is when you reduce it down.

     Faigley sets up a primary opposition between two factions of postmodern theory: Habermas, who argues for consensus, and Lyotard and others who argue for discensus. It reminds me of something my instructor said in Historical Geology: "There are two kinds of people: lumpers and splitters." In classifying fossils, he suggested that it didn't matter much which one you were, just as long as you were consistent about it. I hate to be a fence sitter, but I would think that the correct approach would depend on the situation you're dealing with!

     The problem with reading this kind of book is that it inevitably leads to a hundred other books to read. One of the observations cited, from David Bartholomae, fascinates me. Bartholomae argues that becoming an insider in a discourse community "is not a matter of inventing a language that is new, but rather a matter of continually and stylistically working against the inevitable pressure of conventional language."

     This makes a great deal of sense to me, at least in my experience. I do write the way that I want to; but I shape it based on the restraints of existing dialogue rather than trying to invent anything new. I'm now wondering if that's a good thing.

05/10/01       I got my first real look at my ankle today. I counted 23 screws, and a plate that looks like a bit of plumbers tape running about five inches long. It was really scary looking, especially considering the 10 inch strip of staples on one side, and five inches on the other, where they ripped my leg open to work. Nevertheless, overall I can't complain. The doctor said that there was no reason why I shouldn't be able to walk perfectly well on it in the future. Removing the staples was very painful, but nothing compared to the pain a week ago.

     The bad thing is that I had to start medicating very early, so I've been slothful. I really need to get back on the schoolwork. They removed the dressing, and told me it was okay to bathe the leg. I now have a weird strap-on plastic boot instead of a bandage. My next appointment is three weeks from now.

     I don't like feeling this helpless. I don't like imposing on people. I don't like this much at all. It's like the Donne poem I added to Tuesday's start screen; everything seems to be defined more by negatives rather than what it really is. I want to get clear enough to write again, rather than just making medical reports.

     Patience has always been difficult for me to come by.

05/09/01       A really blah day. Wrote some stuff on the Rain Dogs list, but other than that my brain has been a test pattern. I revised the links page a bit, added an essay on Austen to the catalogue, but mostly I'm sort of dreading my visit to the doctor tomorrow.

     Watched Liberty Heights tonight. The Tom Waits songs were great, and the movie was pretty good. Just a lot of little moments. But then, life is like that.

     Trying to fight that overriding sense of mediocrity. I wonder sometimes; will I ever be good enough at anything? I mean, I don't think I'm exactly stupid, but I'm certainly no star. The only thing I have going for me is a bit of determination, I think. Most of my best qualities seem to be pretty useless left alone, as I am. I miss being able to do things for people. I can't remember the last time anyone really sought me out, the way they used to when I was younger, for anything.

     More drugs; that will fix it.

05/08/01       Never before has the Arkansas sky been so important to me. I've been spending a lot of time staring out the big doors at the end of the cave, watching the patches of blue. Yesterday, there was a lightning bolt that pierced the length of my apartment and the surface of my eyelids, at 2am, with a resulting thunderclap that set off car alarms for miles. This sure beats the crap out of California, where the smell of asphalt tends to overpower everything else and the sounds that pierce the night are more often car stereos or gunshots.

     One of the things that was really awful about the hospital was knowing that I was on the fourth floor, with an excellent view that I could barely take in through the cracks in the blinds. No one ever asked me if I wanted them open. No one ever really asked me anything. They just said: "Just doing and equipment check" or "I'm here to take your blood pressure" or "Can you wiggle your toes?"

     I'm doing a lot of toe-wiggling lately. It's so pretty outside. I remember a few years ago reading the Prelude by the river. I'm not a nature guy; perhaps I never will be. But what I value in it is change, and that's something that I've never had such a front row seat to before.

     I slept way too late. The pain is really messing up my focus. Maybe tomorrow will be better.

     While I'm not really all that impressed by his photographs, the site design at Ed Kashi's site is quite impressive. I really want to redesign this place again, but I have lots of other stuff I need to finish up first. But I can't stop tinkering with little bits of it.

05/07/01       The depression really set in today. I suppose it's because the crisis mode is now off, and I'm now able to feel the pain. And the loneliness. I'm adding a Wordsworth front page; but judging from the fact that no one has even looked at the site in days, it all becomes a little more pointless.

     Don't mind me, I'll take my drugs now.

05/06/01       Changed out the Sunday startup screen to a sonnet by Horace Walpole that seemed oddly appropriate. While a giant helmet didn't fall on me, it might as well have. For people who haven't read The Castle of Otranto that will make no sense at all; the sonnet was the introductory poem to the very bizarre novel. Don't blame me, I'm on drugs.

     Pretty much wrapped up the Austen essay, but of course by now I'm too loaded to proofread it. In the morning, in the morning... I'm not sure what I think about it; it was perhaps a little to adventurous for a short paper, but I always tend to push things.

     It dawns on me that after installing the page, and setting up some logging for site stats that no one has seen the Walpole page. Oh well, it will roll around in a week. Y'all come back now, Y'hear.

05/05/01       When I received my order of CDs and print catalogue from the vendor Disgruntled Records I didn't realize how prophetic the cover illustration was. But, casting aside the divining power of punk illustration, if you like the Detroit / Stooges / MC5 type sound check out the BellRays.

     I'm not disgruntled. My spirits have been fair, though my brain is a bit cloudy— and the body positions in the drawing are a bit too close to recent memory.

     Took the last steps needed to make my apartment "handicapped accessible." I've got a lot more respect for those words these days. Found all the books I need to complete the Austen essay; I felt very clear this morning, then suddenly this afternoon everything phased out. I'm struggling to get this done.

     I'm having trouble swallowing; the pills keep getting caught in my throat. Got the bill for the ambulance; it was just shy of $500 including the morphine. I've been trying to remember things.

     They installed the "get as wasted as you want to" machine Sunday afternoon, just after doing an initial surgical reduction of my ankle. They operated on Monday at about 12:30. The doctor seemed really pissed that I wasn't anxious to be released on Tuesday, ready to dance with the leg I had left. I got pissed, and demanded that they yank the damn IV out of my arm. The haze slowly cleared the next day. I think I only requested medication about three times after that, and it was milder pills like percocet and darvocet.

     Now, I'm using Excedrin to get up in the morning (for the caffeine) and Advil in the afternoon. In the evening, I usually give in to the call of the Lortab prescription, so I can sleep. This concludes the drug report for the day...

05/04/01       If you've noticed the static nature of this page for the last few days, let me explain. I fractured two bones and radically dislocated my ankle. I saw the x-ray briefly while under heavy morphine, and it looked much worse than this picture.

     Please don't write and ask me how it happened. I got out of my car Saturday night around 2:30 AM in the parking lot of my apartment complex. I must have stepped on it wrong because when I woke up, I was kissing the pavement.

     What happened after that is long and complicated, and will no doubt get even longer and more complicated. I'll write a bit about being plugged into one of those self-administering morphine machines they give terminally ill patients in a while, among other things. I still have to finish some school work.

     I suppose I am a bit dissapointed that no one seemed to notice that the web log just stopped for so long. I have an excuse. I just got out of the hospital yesterday.