Half of you: pick a thing.

areas of query:

• music
• canon
• food
• theory
• poetry
• pedagogy
• avant-garde

Half of you: pick a year.

areas of query:

• music
• art
• theory
• literature
• politics
• photography

Find a trajectory.

moving towards “stories that trace trajectories” (686).

Grounded writing. Claim. Argumentation.

Ungrounded. and unbuilt . . .trajectories.

Not every idea has to be grounded in reason. Or into reason.

3 kinds of trajectories:

Metaphor (wave, ground, ocean)

Mix (sampled moments)

Object that motivates writing (mushroom)

Prelude to a reading.

Exigence of the encounter: how do I respond to what I encounter, “building in encounter-possibilities” (Sirc 15)?

Temporal Liner Notes:

Blog writing where “passion” or “love of” are not the motivating forces of the composition (though “interest” sparks the composing process). Experiments in new media composing is the motivation. I encounter texts through new media. I respond accordingly. These albums are albums I have encountered at some point in different ways, but I do not listen to this music today. I am not responding as fan or in appreciation of an aesthetic. I am responding in general to an idea or point I have encountered.

Escape

Some Enchanted Evening

Ridin’ The Storm Out

As a series of assignments:

• Pick a record you have listened to, once owned, or have some other relationship with that does not have to be based on taste.
• Using the year of the record’s release, research other events - personal, historical, public - also from that year.
• At the point of pattern formation (where you see a reoccurring idea, image, point, concept, word), juxtapose the album with the various moments your research produces.
• Write a series of temporal liner notes that show the pattern.

Liner notes may be composed in a blog space (daily entries lend themselves to shorter compositions joined by united theme) or on paper. Project could easily be divided into three sequenced tasks/assignments:

• Identification of albums and their importance
• Gathering of research material
• Overall juxtaposition and delivery of liner notes

Assignment informed by encounter. Pattern formation (McLuhan, Ulmer). Juxtaposition (McLuhan, Ulmer). Temporality (Gilyard). A writing “along the bias” (Brodkey). Noise over settled thesis (Davis). The creative or imaginary (Walker, Corder, Bishop). Popular culture as model for writing or “to recognize the greatness in our country’s popular materials” (Ray, Sirc). “Moving through moments in the hopes of finding an understanding” (Sirc). Imaginary in place of “the fit” as response (Vatz). Critique as textual response (Harris). Image/Text/Blog (Yancey, George).

Overall outcomes (in addition to what our class readings teach me):

• Exigence (what to respond to)
• Invention (how to respond)
• Research (gathering of material for response)
• Arrangement and organization (putting material together)
• Delivery (presenting material to an audience)

Another kind of musical project with similar inspiration:

The syllabus: 1020.doc

From this week’s readings:

The encounter. The gatherer. The designer.

The one who is totally involved

• Web surfer
• Mystorian
• Visual designer
• Blogger
• Virtual flaneur
• Writer

The one who makes writing social. Identity moved from tutorial (student to teacher), solipsistic (student unto herself), or mere just doing the work (student as nothing more than empty category of “student”: one who fulfills the task). A pedagogy of encounter as declaration of identity: alter ego assignment.
Four areas made social: A major idea that has influenced. Popular culture. Major. Personal story.

Encounter of four areas one already works with but not in relationship to one another produces identity already in existence: alter ego.

Encounter with method (research).

Encounter at the point of juxtaposition (McLuhan). The details or noise that one notices (Davis). The play with form/appropriation of form (Ray). Response of one area with the next (Harris). Moment of personal insight via pattern (Ulmer). Creative production (Walker, Corder, Brodkey, Barthes). Underlife - areas that are often not emphasized as dominant (R. Brooke). Meta awareness (Hartwell). Institutional (auto) biography (Miller, Gilyard). Circulation of ideas through various points of delivery (Latour, Trimbur). Rhetoric of hyperbole (Vitanza). Research that moves away from expert model (C. Brooke). Designed in wiki (George). Ideas/research collected (Sirc). Using popular media forms to compose in a new key (Yancey).

Encounter of theory to produce pedagogy (invention).

Encounter with exigence (Bitzer, Vatz): what do I ask students to do? Or in voice of student: what do I do?

Overall outcomes (in addition to what our class readings teach me):

• Exigence (what to respond to)
• Invention (how to respond)
• Research (gathering of material for response)
• Arrangement and organization (putting material together)
• Delivery (presenting material to an audience)

Encounter with (an almost) semester long series of 8010 readings as involvement (letting each idea be involved with the next for invention purposes).

Reinvolve. Reencounter. What else would come out of the mix?

Overall, the mystory is a new media based writing that asks writers to consider the various areas of discourse that construct identity. Traditionally, we work in these areas in separate ways (I am formed by schooling practices; I am formed by family issues/moments, etc).

The mystory, drawing upon new media logics like pattern formation and juxtaposition, asks writers to compose with four areas of discourse at once. At the point of these areas’ (the popcycle) intersection, there is a moment of insight. An “ah-ha” experience. That insight drives the writing. The writing, therefore, is not argumentative - it does not “prove” anything - but instead is exploratory. The writing demonstrates the pattern (the insight). The one who benefits most from its composition is the writer, not the reader, for it offers the writer an insight not yet discovered.

The mystory, like the other three examples for this week, is still what we might call “academic.” Yet, it does something to “academic” that many, at first, won’t recognize. One challenge is to consider its usage of the personal. The same holds true for the other three weekly readings.

Or we can ask how a mystory, a writing on the bias, a generative ethos, and a merger of creative non-fiction with composition each draws on specific points, tactics, movements to create a piece of writing. One obvious “tactic” the essays ask us to teach is metaphor. Another might be the role of ethos (credibility, but also dwelling place). Others?

What the writers don’t seem to be interested in is personal writing for the sake of saying something about one’s self (i.e., “The time I went to camp,” “My favorite song,” “Why I Love My Mother”). Each essay complicates narrative, personal information, and how one’s story works across several social contexts (how it is informed by contexts or informs contexts).

A side note: “teletheory” - the term used by Ulmer in the intro to “Derrida at the Little Bighorn” is the name of the book this chapter is excerpted from. It is a prior theory Ulmer explores regarding the merger of video, theory, and pedagogy (when the book is written, video appears to be a major fixture in new media work). In later work, video is replaced by the Web.

Why does one write a mystory? To respond to a problem (whatever that may be) in a non-instrumental manner. It, like our other weekly readings, is a response to a dissatisfaction with instrumental approaches (pure analysis, thesis driven writing, modes of writing).

Problem solving, the mystory claims, is guided by experiences in other registers of life. Those experiences produce a re-occurring image. The re-occurring image offers insight instrumental thinking cannot provide.

The responses are to a an exigence: Why don’t instrumental thinking exercises  - compare/contrast, argument, personal narrative - produce sustained critical thinking gestures?  Here we get four responses that highlight personal writing in relationship to other registers of experience.  Mystory is one genre invented as response to the exigence.

The result of writing a mystory is not known until it is written, and it is meaningful only to the writer.