FoolsCap

Whereever the holiday finds you, reader: "Merry Christmas!"

Afrikaans: Gesëende Kersfees
Afrikander: Een Plesierige Kerfees
African/ Eritrean/ Tigrinja: Rehus-Beal-Ledeats
Albanian:Gezur Krislinjden
Arabic: Milad Majid
Argentine: Feliz Navidad
Armenian: Shenoraavor Nor Dari yev Pari Gaghand
Azeri: Tezze Iliniz Yahsi Olsun
Bahasa Malaysia: Selamat Hari Natal
Basque: Zorionak eta Urte Berri On!
Bengali: Shuvo Naba Barsha
Bohemian: Vesele Vanoce
Brazilian: Feliz Natal
Breton: Nedeleg laouen na bloavezh mat
Bulgarian: Tchestita Koleda; Tchestito Rojdestvo Hristovo
Catalan: Bon Nadal i un Bon Any Nou!
Chile: Feliz Navidad
Chinese: (Cantonese) Gun Tso Sun Tan’Gung Haw Sun
Chinese: (Mandarin) Kung His Hsin Nien bing Chu Shen Tan (Catonese) Gun Tso Sun Tan’Gung Haw Sun
Choctaw: Yukpa, Nitak Hollo Chito
Columbia: Feliz Navidad y Próspero Año Nuevo
Cornish: Nadelik looan na looan blethen noweth
Corsian: Pace e salute
Crazanian: Rot Yikji Dol La Roo
Cree: Mitho Makosi Kesikansi
Croatian: Sretan Bozic
Czech: Prejeme Vam Vesele Vanoce a stastny Novy Rok
Danish: Glædelig Jul
Duri: Christmas-e- Shoma Mobarak
Dutch: Vrolijk Kerstfeest en een Gelukkig Nieuwjaar! or Zalig Kerstfeast
English: Merry Christmas
Eskimo: (inupik) Jutdlime pivdluarit ukiortame pivdluaritlo!
Esperanto: Gajan Kristnaskon
Estonian: Ruumsaid juulup|hi
Ethiopian: (Amharic) Melkin Yelidet Beaal
Faeroese: Gledhilig jol og eydnurikt nyggjar!
Farsi: Cristmas-e-shoma mobarak bashad
Finnish: Hyvaa joulua
Flemish: Zalig Kerstfeest en Gelukkig nieuw jaar
French: Joyeux Noel
Frisian: Noflike Krystdagen en in protte Lok en Seine yn it Nije Jier!
Galician: Bo Nada
Gaelic: Nollaig chridheil agus Bliadhna mhath ùr! German: Froehliche Weihnachten
Greek: Kala Christouyenna!
Haiti: (Creole) Jwaye Nowel or to Jesus Edo Bri’cho o Rish D’Shato Brichto
Hausa: Barka da Kirsimatikuma Barka da Sabuwar Shekara!
Hawaiian: Mele Kalikimaka
Hebrew: Mo’adim Lesimkha. Chena tova
Hindi: Shub Naya Baras
Hausa: Barka da Kirsimatikuma Barka da Sabuwar Shekara!
Hawaian: Mele Kalikimaka ame Hauoli Makahiki Hou!
Hungarian: Kellemes Karacsonyi unnepeket
Icelandic: Gledileg Jol
Indonesian: Selamat Hari Natal
Iraqi: Idah Saidan Wa Sanah Jadidah
Irish: Nollaig Shona Dhuit, or Nodlaig mhaith chugnat
Iroquois: Ojenyunyat Sungwiyadeson honungradon nagwutut. Ojenyunyat osrasay.
Italian: Buone Feste Natalizie
Japanese: Shinnen omedeto. Kurisumasu Omedeto
Jiberish: Mithag Crithagsigathmithags
Korean: Sung Tan Chuk Ha
Lao: souksan van Christmas
Latin: Natale hilare et Annum Faustum!
Latvian: Prieci’gus Ziemsve’tkus un Laimi’gu Jauno Gadu!
Lausitzian:Wjesole hody a strowe nowe leto
Lettish: Priecigus Ziemassvetkus
Lithuanian: Linksmu Kaledu
Low Saxon: Heughliche Winachten un ‘n moi Nijaar
Macedonian: Sreken Bozhik
Maltese: IL-Milied It-tajjeb
Manx: Nollick ghennal as blein vie noa
Maori: Meri Kirihimete
Marathi: Shub Naya Varsh
Navajo: Merry Keshmish
Norwegian: God Jul, or Gledelig Jul
Occitan: Pulit nadal e bona annado
Papiamento: Bon Pasco
Papua New Guinea: Bikpela hamamas blong dispela Krismas na Nupela yia i go long yu
Pennsylvania German: En frehlicher Grischtdaag un en hallich Nei Yaahr!
Peru: Feliz Navidad y un Venturoso Año Nuevo
Philipines: Maligayan Pasko!
Polish: Wesolych Swiat Bozego Narodzenia or Boze Narodzenie
Portuguese:Feliz Natal
Pushto: Christmas Aao Ne-way Kaal Mo Mobarak Sha
Rapa-Nui (Easter Island): Mata-Ki-Te-Rangi. Te-Pito-O-Te-Henua
Rhetian: Bellas festas da nadal e bun onn
Romanche: (sursilvan dialect): Legreivlas fiastas da Nadal e bien niev onn!
Rumanian: Sarbatori vesele
Russian: Pozdrevlyayu s prazdnikom Rozhdestva is Novim Godom
Sami: Buorrit Juovllat
Samoan: La Maunia Le Kilisimasi Ma Le Tausaga Fou
Sardinian: Bonu nadale e prosperu annu nou
Serbian: Hristos se rodi
Slovakian: Sretan Bozic or Vesele vianoce
Sami: Buorrit Juovllat
Samoan: La Maunia Le Kilisimasi Ma Le Tausaga Fou
Scots Gaelic: Nollaig chridheil huibh
Serb-Croatian: Sretam Bozic. Vesela Nova Godina
Serbian: Hristos se rodi.
Singhalese: Subha nath thalak Vewa. Subha Aluth Awrudhak Vewa
Slovak: Vesele Vianoce. A stastlivy Novy Rok
Slovene: Vesele Bozicne Praznike Srecno Novo Leto or Vesel Bozic in srecno Novo leto
Spanish: Feliz Navidad
Swedish: God Jul and (Och) Ett Gott Nytt År
Tagalog: Maligayamg Pasko. Masaganang Bagong Taon
Tami: Nathar Puthu Varuda Valthukkal
Trukeese: (Micronesian) Neekiriisimas annim oo iyer seefe feyiyeech!
Thai: Sawadee Pee Mai or souksan wan Christmas
Turkish: Noeliniz Ve Yeni Yiliniz Kutlu Olsun
Ukrainian: Srozhdestvom Kristovym
Urdu: Naya Saal Mubarak Ho
Vietnamese: Chung Mung Giang Sinh
Welsh: Nadolig Llawen
Yugoslavian: Cestitamo Bozic
Yoruba: E ku odun, e ku iye’dun!

As the title says. . .

Then the daily work of students in class meetings and email lists is to use the readings, lectures, tapes, websites, as sources from which must be derived the instructions for completing the assignment.  Assignments usually include a required “guide” or recipe, collectively brain-stormed, that explains the “rules” for making that website, and the maker’s specific plans or proposal for performing the task.  (6-7)

and later:

[Writing on using students’ materials in shaping the widesite.]  Translate them into instructions to be applied to the details relevant to your own case. (23)

So a question for those readers more experienced with mystory.  Is the value of the mystory genre on the “instructions” or on the final product, the mystory itself?  (Of course, I acknowledge, they both have value, but I’m trying to establish where the value lies in case I ever want to teach the mystory.)

Sting: Mum, I don’t want to be called "Gordon" anymore.
Mrs. Sumner: Wot’s wrong wiv "Gordon?"
Sting: Nuffink’s wrong wiv it.  I’ve got a new name, is all.
Mrs. Sumner: Oh yeah?  How’s at?
Sting: I want you should call me "Sting" now, mum.
Mrs. Sumner: "Sting?"  Loik a bee’s arse?
Sting: No, not a bee’s arse.  Just "Sting."
Mrs. Sumner:  Ooh. . .wait’ll your da ‘ears about this.

—Adapted from an improvised comedy bit a friend of mine came up with.  Sorry for the poorly transcribed accents; I think Sting and his mum oscillate between Cockney and Scottish at different points throughout.

File the following under the "nothing new under the sun" category:

• 1970, the Software exhibition.  Part art show, part technology convention.  Theodor Nelson exhibited the first publicly accessible hypertext, in the form of?  A catalog of short texts.  The user linked to other texts by typing in codes marked with asterisk connected to linking terms.  At the end of the exhibit, the user could get a hard copy of the text they had created through browsing.  The name of the catalog?  Labyrinth.
• Nelson also wrote an article about Computer Aided Instruction and the dangers of blindly implementing CAI along the lines of other educational models.  Nelson saw great danger in the teacher’s role as the official dispenser of knowledge rather than letting sudents explore how they chose.  Further, Nelson condemned the division of information/knowledge into taxonomied  "subjects" that created a sense of boundaries between bodies of knowledge.
• Nelson (what I’ve read so far) doesn’t address the question of personal experience, but it’s easy to see how it fits in here.  Traditional models of pedagogy/composition (I’m starting to be confused over where the boundary [ah!] exists between the two.  If it exists.) encourage "objectivity"–another division between the student and his object of study.
• As Nelson explains, hypertext can work to break down these boundaries by encouraging idiosyncratic connections between subjects.  So hypertext is not only a compositional theory (how to connect ideas through text) but also a pedagogical one (how to recognize and manipulate those links).  I’m starting to see how the mystory works as new media now.

A question: Which came first, pedagogy or rhetoric?  Did rhetoric arise as a field of study because it was an effective way to teach?  Or did pedagogy develop as people wanted to learn to use rhetoric more effectively?  Are these in fact the same question just reworded?

The potential of hypertext: http://www.tiddlywiki.com.  A "reusable, non-linear, personal web notebook."  It acts like a merger of wiki and everything2.com–you add tiddles as necessary, make links, explore.  Stupidly easy, with great potential.  It all gets stored in one html file, so it’s portable too.

Things To Do:

• Write final paper for Barrett
• Read Aristotle Poetics, Rhetoric, Nicomacean (sp?) Ethics for Flatley
• Read Plato Republic for Flatley
• Read Freud/Breuer Studies in Hysteria. . .Flatley
• Read Ulmer Internet Invention (Started, but so long ago I have to restart)
• Read Barthes A Lover’s Disourse (Started)
• View 24: Season 5 (Started)
• Purchase Tarnation, Koyaanisqatsi, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* *But Were Afraid to Ask DVDs
• Romantic despair.  Because of Barthes and others.
• Read Shaviro Connected: Life in the Networked Society
• View Pirates of the Carribbean: Dead Man’s Chest
• Celebrate crass commercialization of paganized Christian holy day
• Pretend to care about New Year’s Eve
• Sleep as much as possible between scholastic and social obligations
• Begin grad-school reading list for Jessica-Royanne-Me undergrad workshop project
• View likely to be Oscar nominated films

Things Not to Do:

• Resign from PhD program in frustration
• Succumb to feelings of social inferiority
• Throw myself from roof of 5057 Woodward
• Drink cyanide
• Eat rat posion
• Slit wrists
• Anything to make myself happier (haha)
• Embrace Catholocism
• Fret too much over possibility of Dems losing control of Senate
• Write bad poetry
• Post inconsequential, rambling, solipsistic blog lists–dammit!
• Abandon academia for wage-slave retail career
• Sleep.  ("I’ll sleep when I’m dead.")

Things I’d like to Do but Either Can’t or Won’t

• Write epic semi-autobiographical novel that Time magazine praises as "the sudden, unexpected appearance of the new master of American prose."
• Develop brilliant new philosophy of language and discourse that makes people forget about that chump Derrida
• Reread House of Leaves (started but need to use time elsewhere) and read Only Revolutions
• Write long, complicated letters to people justifying our presences in each other’s lives [Part of an idealized project of mine called Justifications that is all about justifying my own existence.  I haven’t written anything for it yet, mostly because (a) I’ve done nothing to justify my existence yet, and (b) I just now invented the project.  But more (a).]
• Learn CSS and HTML.
• Reinvent the wheel.  Why not a square?
• Learn guitar, piano, bass, and drums; write, record, produce and distribute revolutionary pop rock album; embrace rock godhood and die in pool of own vomit.  Alternative: die in plane crash; nation mourns.  Alternative: killed by crazy fan.
• Catalogue list of CDs I own, favorite tracks on each, and favorite lyric in those tracks.  Post to blog.
• Tell her.  This is both can’t and won’t.  The perils of self-awareness.  As Morrissey explains: "Shyness is nice, and shyness can stop you, from doing all the things in life you’d like to." [From "Ask"]

I was thinking, as I am professionally obliged to do, about books and things.  In particular, I was thinking about Benjamin’s Arcades Project and hoping that Sinter Klaas leaves it under the tree for me in week and a half.  Bejamin led me to Barthes’ A Lover’s Discouse (also in regard to Herr Klaas) and the rhetorical value of fragments–since that’s what the final assignment on my syllabus is about.

JR and I briefly talked about the value of condensation/fragmentation in class Monday, and I’ve been thinking since about where we read fragmented texts on a regular basis.  Lists.  It occurred to me, as the year draws to a close, that we’ll soon start seeing (and have already in some places) the annual "10 Best/Worst/Most" lists that always pop up at year’s end.  I’ve also given lists some thought before, because I belong to two cultural niches that are obsessed with lists: music geeks (parodied in book/film High Fidelity) and film geeks.

Often, these lists are ranked, but sometimes you’ll get lists that aren’t; Magnet used to run a semi-regular feature called the "Buyer’s Guide" or the "Listener’s Guide" that described the Top Ten (unranked) albums in a given field of music–emo, glam rock, loungecore. . .whatever.  These lists are interesing to me for a number of reasons:

1. The presumed authority of the list format.  Every time Blender, for example, issues the "500 Songs to Download" type of list, there’s always readers who write in appealing for their favorite album/cut/track/artist who didn’t make the list.  Readers’ comments about these lists almost always fall into three camps: the "what about?" letters mentioned above; the "thanks for recommending x" letters"; or the "so what it’s all arbitrary letters."  What interests me is that the "so what" camp never questions the list format per se, just the assumption that the present list compiler is the assumed authority behind the list.  The form itself goes unquestioned: lists are valuable to these readers even if they don’t agree with the compiler’s judgment/authority.
2. The preponderance of lists in pop culture discourse.  Top 10s, Top 40s, Top 8, Top of the Pops, Best Dressed, Worst Dressed, Most Memorable, Bestseller Lists, Most Downloaded, Most Wanted. . .I’m not listing any more of them.  Of course, in the mid-late 1970s, the Book of Lists was a huuuge phenomenon, with books for just about every nice market you can think of.  They were the Chicken Soup for the X’s Soul of their day.
3. There is obviously an appeal in these lists, along with an assumption of authority.  So what’s the appeal?  Is it the appearance of organization?  Is it a desire to see how your favorite whatever is ranked?  They’re easy to read–unchallenging but engaging–and easy to write–ahem.
4. Why, in particular, are certain markets prone to listophilia.  I’ve mentioned two: music geeks and film geeks.  But I wonder if it’s not just symptomatic of larger pop cult concerns, since as mentioned above it’s not just films and music that get ranked and listed.

The list is also intriguing to me because it sort of (in a vastly reductive way) recalls Sirc’s notion of box-logic; it brings together items under a given rubric– "Best Albums of the 70s," say–and makes the claim that these items are indicative of that label.  I think the obvious difference between lists and box-logic is that (the way I understand it), the "label" comes from writing what is in the box (whatever form your box takes, textual, artifactual etc) rather than motivating the contents of the box. 

To make a slight shift in purpose here. . .all of this because I was thinking about how’d I like more experience writing through fragments.  A colleague very kindly praised my "Writer’s Discourse," but I still feel it’s lacking.  So I was imagining a venue in which I could write in fragmented form (assuming it wasn’t the blog itself) and I came up with the notion of a magazine/website/forum where the whole idea is fragmentation and its rhetorical value.  Of course, I know there plenty of sites already that work this way.  I didn’t say my idea was brand new.

But what is more interesting is an odd coincidence that followed.  I was thinking about all of this (Benjamin, Barthes, fragments, lists) on my way home from campus Thurs evening.  I’d even come up with possible names for my site: The Catalogue (another form of list) or The Arsenal (where you store things until you need them).  Later that night, as I was reading House of Leaves, I came across this passage from Edith Skourja’s essay Riddles Without:

It is beneficial to consider the origins of "riddle."  The Old English raedelse means "opinion, conjure" which is related to the Old English raedon "to interpret" in turn belonging to the same etymological history of "read."  "Riddling" is an offshoot of "reading" calling to mind the participatory nature of that act–to interpret–which is all the adult world has left when faced with the unsolvable.

"To read" actually comes from the Latin reri "to calculate, to think" which is not only the progenitor of "read" but of "reason" as well, both of which hail from the Greek arariskein "to fit."  Aside from giving us "reason," arariskein also gives us an unlikely sibling, Latin arma meaning "weapons."  It seems that "to fit" the world or to make sense of it reguires either reason or arms.

Riddle–opinion–conjure–interpret–read–calculate–think–reason–weapons: Arsenal?  Hmm.  I’m not wholly sure this has anything to do on a more than tangential basis with lists and fragments, but it is was odd, nevertheless, to suddenly find that "reading" and "arsenals" are, in fact, related.

"Everyone who goes about with ‘cultural studies’ on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding and buried with a stake of holly through his heart."  A paraphrase of one E. Scrooge, adapted here for cultural studies rather than Christmas holidays.

Since my brain is a bit fried and all, please forgive the perhaps undisciplined (ha!) form this blog-esque reply takes.  As y’all know, I’ve been sort of stuck between disciplines of late, and this week’s reading has been an interesting opportunity to think more about those questions of where I belong in the academy, even if I’ve yet to resolve them.

Felski’s article prompted some thought on what exactly "Cultural Studies" means.  As Felski notes, it is, at present, sort of an amorphously defined discipline, with no set boundaries and no universally agreed-upon field of stuudy.  As I noted last week, and as Pruchnic’s chosen essays exhibited, there is interesting work being done in rhetoric and composition that incorporates what might be thought of as Cultural Studies, i.e., the articles on LSD and on the English Only movement.  And, as the Hartman piece this week shows, Cultural Studies works within the confines of traditional literary scholarship too.

As Felski notes, Cultural Studies as a field is sort of a postmodern discipline, inspired by the breakdown (or, at least the recognition of an arbitrary constructedness) of the modernist high-low great divide.  Cultural Studies, as I understand it, really got rolling in the mid-1960s (1964 I think)with the founding of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the Univ of Birmingham.  CCCS was one of the first major efforts to study popular culture and audience response thereto, and its founding is often described as the start of modern Cultural Studies.

Thinking about all of this, I want to make a few claims based on my understanding of the field of Cultural Studies (which is to say I don’t have the research to back my ideas up), and then, having made these claims, end with a few half-formed thoughts about the place of CS in the university today.

So: claims.

—Cultural Studies began, perhaps, as interest in popular culture and the media associated with them took hold in the university.  

—Threatened, as ever, by questions of relevance, the University (as an ideal) had to incorporate Cultural Studies in order to justify its ongoing mission.

—At the same time, however, there is a sense that studying popcult is a sort of exercise in intellectual onanism, that academics overthink works that are meant to be brainless pleasures.

—As postmodernism or Cultural Studies or whatever made disciplines more porous, the idea of Cultural Studies sort of expanded beyond popcult and mass media into sort of a catch-all term for any interdisciplinary endeavor, like today’s Hartman piece that incorporates history, readings of legal proceedings, and questions of African American subject identity–which then gets published in a literary journal despite only ever mentioning literature in passing.

So: half-formed thoughts (HFT) about Cultural Studies in the university today.

HFT #1: This leads me to a couple of extrapolations about the disciplinarity of Cultural Studies.  Either a discipline is strictly bounded by field of study (say, modernism) or by method (empirical research and experimentation in the sciences vs textual research in the humanities).  What makes studies inter-disciplinary is the fusion of one or both of these characteristics.  A literary sociologist (such as Felski mentions) might study the importance of a given text in a given culture (or subculture) through empirical research.  Or, again turning to Hartman, an African American literature scholar might look to law for ways of reading AfAm subject positions.  What this means for Cultural Studies, logically, is that, having neither set (by set I agreed-upon by a majority of scholars in the field, not arbitrarily defined by an outside authority) field of study nor set methodology, Cultural Studies is not, in fact, a discipline.

HFT #2: That said, I think there is still a way to embrace the inter-disciplinary work that CS often does by just a slight shift in the way we think about things (which is never slight in our realm, is it?).  Instead of thinking about CS as a discipline, might we not think of it as a method?  Hence, Cultural Studies (capitalized and plural) might become a method of inquiry, cultural study (lowercase and singular).  For me, at least, what this does is free scholars to work in the inter-disciplinary fashion advocated by the former Cultural Studies without necessarily having to be "inter-disciplinary" as such.  (I confess the boundary between interdisciplinarity and my proposed cultural study method is still hazy.)

HFT #3: If, as Felski alludes, Cultural Studies is generally concerned with contemporary culture, why not just say so?  In my proposed reworking of the field, CS would remain CS, but instead be rechristened Contemporary Studies in order to distinguish it from the cultural study method used across disciplines.  The question, I suppose, is where would Contemporary Studies belong in the university: Communications dep’ts or English dep’ts?  I don’t know yet, okay?–that’s why they’re called "half-formed" thoughts.

HFT #4: I’m still not clear on how CS (either the real CS or my thought experiment CS) differs from Media Studies (another misnomer perhaps?).  I say, fold MS into CS (my new CS) because that’s what I understand MS to be.  We all study media–film, books, WWW, TV–they’re all media.  Why have a separate division just called Media Studies?  Unless, of course, we want to get fancy and proclaim a new discipline along with Contemporary Studies called Digital Studies, which would incorporate the work of new media theorists with a method similar to traditional textual research?

Well, having proposed two new disciplines, reshaped the English dep’t (which would, per James Berlin, end up being renamed the Rhetoric Department because that’s what we’re all studying in one way or another), and sent Cultural Studies off to the dustbin, I think it’s time I shut up.

As others have said:  Much praise to all of my colleagues in 7010, whose work I’ve found enjoyable and engaging, challenging and exciting.  Don’t think I could ask for a better lot than y’all to start my grad studies with.  To paraphrase the bard, "Ta’en for all in all, he/she/post-gender subject was a man/woman/post-gender subject identity.  I shall not look upon his/her/post-gender subject identity possessive pronoun like again."

And that’s why identity politics is bunkum.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/98532031@N00/

Above is the link to my Flickr pix.