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.

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.

“If we perpetuate single visions, always see by a single vision, always judge by a single vision, then sooner or later we fall victim to arrogance, ignorance, dogma, rigidity” (Corder 15).

Multi-vision:

The Popcycle:

Ulmer’s Noon Star.

An example of having taught the mystory.

More Ulmer mystory.

The Bystory.

Lisa Coleman on teaching the mystory.

A student uses a weblog in order to produce a mystorical project.

Practice What We Preach. A mystory in progress.

Entertainment:

Parliament/Funakdelic. A collection of almost the same people who innovated funk-rock. “Who says a funk band can’t play rock?”

Motor Booty Affair

On the back cover of Motor Booty Affair is the picture of a cowboy (in hat and clothes) riding a wave with a ghetto blaster to his ear.

Parliament began in Detroit. They recorded their first single “(I Wanna) Testify” with Revilot Records. The B side was “I Can Feel the Ice Melting.”

Groovesville was another local label distributed by Solid Hitbound. Solid Hitbound was owned by Revilot.

Personal:

My personal involves Homestead and Miami, Florida, cowboy imagery and the frontier. I’m from Miami. My father is from Homestead. At my grandmother’s house in Homestead, I would pretend the water pump in the backyard was a horse. Homestead was the frontier for South Florida. Today, it is mostly suburban. In the 1970s, it was largely undeveloped with plenty of farmland and low cost housing. It had a “boonies” feel to it.

In Miami, my father would take me to Robert’s Western Wear so that I could buy cowboy boots. At six, I owned boots. Most likely, the sight of a six year dressed as if he were living in the West was unusal for Miami’s lifestyle (though it hadn’t reached the outrageous fashion conscious scene it is today).  I wore alligator boots with pull up straps. Bootsy Collins was the bass player for Parliament/Funkadelic. If Bootsy is known for anything outside of his playing (or the chant “Go Bootsy”), it is his outrageous attire.

The first image from Motor Booty Affair, then, functions as an emblem within my mystory bridging Detroit and Miami (motor booty and the waves off of South Beach where we would hang out as kids). It also contains elements of the frontier: Detroit bordering Canada; Homestead is the frontier. Cowboys. Case, in the sci-fi novel Neuromancer is a cowboy. He moves through a space we might now recognize as the Internet.

The character in the image, I assume, is Rumpofsteelskin whose name further aligns me with the auto industry of Detroit (STEEL) and technology (my discipline). The directive on the album, which is repeated in several songs and on the back cover, is “Go Wiggle.” This directive repeats in many URLs (on the Internet) as the tilda (~). It is in my homepage’s URL:

http://web.missouri.edu/~ricejr/

Rumpofsteelskin is aligned with Sir Nose D’Void of Funk. They want to kill the cool. “I’m too cool to swim or dance.”

Nose works by blasting his gun “at the drop of a ‘J’.”

Again, I am named.

Discipline:

Rhetoric and Composition. Director of Writing.

In my first book, The Rhetoric of Cool, I drew attention to 1963 and Douglas Engelbart’s invention of the concept of windows: multiple screens a computer user could use at once. Engelbart is well known for making a connection between technology and bootstrapping. The basic idea behind bootstrapping is collective work (intelligence and innovation). Engelbart is also one of the inspirations for the Internet and personal computing as we know them today (Ted Nelson being another).

This postcard below came to my office in my first job and first position as Director of Writing. It advertised Richard Florida’s talk for Create Detroit downtown. The idea behind Florida’s appeal is to bring creativity to the city as the focus of urban renewal. He is aligned with Gov. Granholm’s “Cool Cities” plan. Cool is found in my discipline (my textbook and book). And one figure in the card mentions “corporate cool” a term which reminds me of a recent article I have written called “Cooltown: The Place of Intellectual Work,” a critique of HP’s Cooltown project, WebCT, and managed software. It also reminds me of Wayne State University and Detroit’s Digital Detroit and TechTown projects in the New Center area.

But note the language of this card: “Groove.” “We’re starting a new groove” echoes Funkadelic’s “One Nation Under a Groove.” Florida accidentally names funk as central to his plan, not cool. And, the obvious signifier here, Florida, is the place I grew up in (I am reversing the trend - Michiganers go South; I went North. In the words of Funkadelic, am I creating “Promentalshitbackwashpsychosis”?). During that first winter in Michigan, I could not see the ice melting. I saw snow. And more snow. A backward psychosis indeed. Who leaves Florida for Michigan? Someone who wants to stay cool? “What’s cooler than being cool,” Outkast (a modern version of Funkadelic) asks? “Ice cold.”

I see myself, then, within this card (Florida, cool).

Florida’s basic premise is that a creative collective will rejuvenate urban renewal.

“We can dance underwater and not get wet” - the ultimate call for creativity?

My second book is about space, rhetoric, and technology. Its focus is Detroit. I call it: Digital Detroit.

“Hey, something to blog about.” I did blog it. I am blogging it now in this example. I’m posting this example to the Internet. CATTt requires a tale. The blogpost is my tale.

The mystory is about identity (popcycle produces a sense of identity). At the end of “Deep,” someone asks:

Excuse me, would you happen to be George Clinton?
Excuse me, but would you happen to be George Clinton
could you point George Clinton out to me?

Can you point out the J?