ENG 402 Post

Hawkins' piece completely challenged the way in which I have been thinking about new media. Am I allowed to say that? It's just one essay. It's just one person's belief about the importance of new media, and the connections she is making to her experiences with new media and the pedagogy she employs. I was confronted and shaken by this text. In my apprehension to seek out and utilize new media, I was affirmed and consoled by this text. We as teachers need to work with new media so that we can feel and understand the extent to which our students feel confused and challenged by their projects? Hells yes, praise the lord, and pass the salt! If this desire to deconstruct, make new, make fragmented, make visible, make unsure, create tension, is a main idea or ideal component of the pedagogy I am developing as a new teacher, which it most certainly is, how can new media function for me as a teacher and a learner? I challenge my students to write an

essay

…

paragraph

…

sentence

…

word

…

letter

…

THOUGHT

This is not easy for them. The impossibility of a word. I am challenged to further develop a pedagogy.

Hawkins says it best when she says we are situated within a "current historical context." Our current historical context is not only a suggestive for new media. We are not. It is not an option! We are not being asked to incorporate new media into our teaching practices and pedagogy. Our current historical moment demands it. "And your resistance will only result in your own disability, your own immaturity" she says. I see my students resisting and resisting, paralyzed by the inquisition of a why, the seemingly perilous nature of constructing the sentence, expanding the thought. I am equally resistant to new media. Paralyzed! Para/lyzed. Para/lies.

Everything comes back to queer theory.

Hawkins writes, "I imagined what it means to my students to 'read' as a butch lesbian, how that would or would not differ from reading as a trasngendered person, how and why this may or may not affect their ability to learn to write in my classroom. As a writing instructor, I mark their essays and mark myself. How are these markings related?" I love the parallel she is creating between genderqueer (I would even argue genderfuck), and new media. What happens when we step outside of a prescriptive method of identity is what happens when we step outside of a prescriptive method of composition is what happens when we step outside of a prescriptive method of language. Markings emerge on my body as a text. My power is exerted through my body. The choices I make pertaining to my body are the scripts through which my students read my text.

I am comforted and challenged by what Hawkins says at the end of her manifesto: "All you need to do is believe that you have a shot at the magic, your own magic." When such mechanisms for invention as the typewriter or the word processor came into being and students were confronted with learning how to use these mechanisms for composition, I'm sure there was apprehension and distrust. How could these students and teachers adapt and embrace these mechanisms, and how is this different from what contemporary learners and teachers are faced with today? Not so different, huh? We can do it, 402-ers! We can do it!

"The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm" - Wallace Stevens

The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.

The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,

Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be

The scholar to whom the book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.

The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:

The access of perfect to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,

In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself

Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

exerpt from "Infected Elegy," Selah, Joshua Corey

ah the moment before letters form
burns heaven behind your eyes
to empurple enroyal blood-temper
though I parted your book not in order
think skin a place for the pulse
to kneel or clutch your knees or bemoan
meeting and missing in the orchard
the hopeless equivalence of systems
what we were a blind pair of throats
who teaches me hot to find God
on the volume and verse of being
on the pale printed page of your bed
we had no recourse but discoursing
look love the light's better here

"57=12=3," from The Dik-dik's Solitude by Anne Tardos

Prostitution candy wrap gallivanting sweetie
Blues donkey, Jew's monkey, everlasting news junkie

Lavender elephant
Piggly Wiggly evidence

Grange wool simulacrum eigen perseverance.
Gangliated fitz-koh macafee connection, matz-koh.
Eagan again.

A baby gorilla mistook his hat for his gingiva. No shame, Sir. Your
hair is not my hair. No shame. Semiramis hubbub and a charivari
collarbone.

Fuck you, Semiramis. Macafee fromage desiration frock-coat.
I gladly form English sentences.

Iffy nanny incantations.
Five and seven make twelve.

The law says it all.
Maybe.

Steadfast kitchen drainage erosion darling.
V-neck validation negligenty critical.

What's my story?
Fifty-seven people were killed in the 1994 earthquake in Lost Angeles.

Words no longer pronouncing the letter l are walk, talk, folk,
yolk, palm, salmon, half, calm, almond, and a few others.

Vaccination metaphysics Iris Murdoch never mind.
Episodic nifty ginger.

Slide 57 shows an example of Acne Vulgaris. Ingenuity.
Fast Fifty Seven - Synovial Carcinoma.
Primitive simplicity.

Election enigma academic epidemic.
Maphtalene gossamer bioremediation.

The Male

Epilogue

Rituals are like ducks in pink water, says the Male. Like everything else he says this is from out of the blue. In the background Baudelaire imitates an orator, "If I am not decorated for having my duty, I will cease to do it..." Words come to the Male. They are not willed into being. There is a sinking feeling at the end of any utterance. The last word may be accident use up the potential of all the others. Then the pitch downward will be into the eternity of the Male's mind, his endless spontaneity and lack of preference. When I drink pink water out of the bowl shaped from his head, he looks at my throat. Bolus, says the Male. This seems to cover up some kind of disparity. The desire to be touched is overwhelming. But who's desire is it? This relates back to our initial conversation, where one word could be taken to the land of many.

-Carla Harryman

There is no first or last discourse, and dialogical context knows no limits...At every moment of the dialogue, there are immense and unlimited masses of forgotten meanings, but, in some subsequent moments, as the dialogue moves forward they will return to memory and live in renewed form...Nothing is absolutely dead: every meaning will celebrate its rebirth.

Mikhail Bakhtin, last written words, 1974

from The Cold of Poetry - Lyn Hejinian

The Person

I love the weather
The scene in nervous snapping
Rocks rise in a rain bearing bridges, chairs
The emotions follow...watchful
My desire is dragging direction to say this
The pen is a nag
The bulb crackles
The sky was never a chipped ceramic
Bulk is brightened by collapse

On my skin are a million lozenges
And outside are stalks of dirt upon inspection
Dimension and longevity--they raise ridges of
description
Here are Rock-drop and Asylum, almost alone
Poem, or ragged prose
The pulse is not an omen of rhythm to come
Pedagogic love
Learning is like poetry-an uncalm practice
It makes the promise of unlikeness and discipline
I love a trilling bird with extended dawn
vocabulary

LH