FoolsCap

Hark!

FoolsCap has been moved to a new address and new host: http://mitchmcg.wordpress.com Please update your links and hearts as necessary. This one will be kept active here as an archive of old posts–until the folks at Wordpress intro a Blogsome importer or until Blogsome boots me. So please follow as necessary.

What what!

A brief note to all and sundry. Well, not all. And hardly sundry, either. Really, just a shout out to those concerned. Ordered my copy of The Rhetoric of Cool today; it should arrive soonish. But, mea culpa, I ordered a used copy, so I don’t think Rice will get a royalty check ...

Diagnostic Report

The results of the diagnostic essays I asked my CBS students to compose: Overall, the products of the diagnostic in-class essay were encouraging. Every student was able to produce at least one substantial paragraph of writing. Although I had planned to allow students one full hour to compose the diagnostic ...

Call two, right?

Desperation for subject lines sets in when I find I’m resorting to homonyms. Homonyms! I know I’ve been the object of some fun-making regarding my devotion to a certain prof’s work, both in the classroom and out of it; of course, much of that is self-deprecating fun-making too: I admit I’ve been sort ...

Conversion Narratives

A response–or maybe, a harmonic reply–to Collin’s post here. One thing that’s interested me, given my own educational history, is the curious phenomennon that Collin describes: namely, the conversion of the aspiring literary scholar to an aspiring rhet/comp scholar. Collin, as I’m sure he knows, is not unique in this. Jeff ...

Grammatology I

So, for a couple of weeks now I’ve been wanting to post about Grammatology and haven’t. No suspense, it’s just ‘cos I’ve been lazy. I am trying to commit myself to the following for July: One article per day 25-30 pages of a major text per day At least one, and hopefully two, ...

Painless

Because I’ve been acutely depressed for a while now. Those who might be concerned, please don’t. Just a passage I want to share. From: Mitchell, David. Cloud Atlas. New York: Random House, 2004. The love-lorn, the cry-for-helpers, all mawkish tragedians who give suicide a bad name are the idiots who rush it, ...

Samplehouse Five

I just finished reading Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five for the first time. At a later point, perhaps, I’ll share some thoughts on it. Today, however, just a brief sample from the text, one I found rather attractive in light of other interests. From Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse Five, or, The Children’s Crusade. 1969. ...

I’m Looking Through You

Some afterthoughts from a conversation M. Karcher and I had during C & W. M. was trying to find the so what? question for her upcoming presentation and we were batting some ideas around. She was presenting on the online Snakes on a Plane phenomenon (or maybe phenomena) but hadn’t yet ...

C & W 2007 Revisited

So here’s some [further and more elaborate and specific] things I’ve gleaned from the C & W experience. This conf seems to fall into a more practical area of the broader field of C&W, in that many of the presentations were oriented toward reporting on new software packages, new websites, classroom ...

Next time on FoolsCap

Further thoughts on C & W Responses to two articles I’ve read Response to Spivak’s into to Of Grammatology The usual excoriations of my own limited talents

C & W 2007 Wrap Up

A compendium of lessons learned and thoughts thunk during the 2007 Computers and Writing Conference, May 17-20, at bee-yoo-tee-ful Wayne State. Holy damn, putting on a conference is a lot of work. I do not envy the organizers of larger conferences (the Cs, for example) their task. The best way to learn ...

Interim Catch-all post

My brain has been fried by all the writing lately, what with seminar papers coming due. But I still want to write here, in this space–indeed, I often had to resist writing here while drafting seminar papers. This venue seems, in some ways, so much more compelling. Is it the ...

People just ain’t no good.

I think it’s well understood. I wish I could take my own frustration and anger more seriously, but I realize what a. . .I dunno–failure? joke? stooge? creep?. . . it would make me if I took it seriously. Hence the ironic distance btw what I think and feel. A friend once asked ...

Do you want some Body to love?

So I have a possible line on joining a 4C’s panel submission with some colleagues from Fresno (some of whom will be joining MSU in the fall). The theme of the panel is "Writing the Material(ity) of the Body: Inscribing Change through Rhetoric(s) of Corpo(reality)." I think this might be a ...