blog blog
So, I recently missed Foolscap’s first blogday, bad blogger that I am. A lifetime of therapy and counseling, I’m sure, awaits.
So, why do we mark blogdays anyway? Or blog birthdays, if you prefer, but my own preference is for “blogday”. We don’t mark the days we first learned to read (ReadDay?) or write (WriteDay?), perhaps because we tend to think of those events as more procedural and evolutionary: I know I couldn’t tell you what day I first knew how to read. (Although an aunt did get me a trophy for being the best reader in my kindergarten class for my birthday one year.) I point to these two “events” rather than one’s first word or first steps because they seem more integral to the way I use my blog–almost said the way blogs are used, but of course not all blogs are used the same way–in fact, we might even recall my own recent deliberations for how to use my blog.
I’ve not been writing here as much as I would like, esp. given the things I’ve been reading of late. I still owe the much promised responses to Rice, Derrida, Lakoff/Turner, and now I can add the Gorgias and the Sophist and Debra Hawhee’s book as well. In part, one reason I’ve avoided doing the page-by-page note posts is because I’m sort of more interested in thinking through these texts as applications, or maybe as rhetorical lessons, than simply as a collection of notes and bon mots. Of course, when I come to use these texts eventually, Ill need that citation mode, but I’m much more interested at present in seeing how I might link together Lakoff/Turner, Derrida, and Kant . . . or Rice and Derrida and Hawhee (which is sort of where my brain is at right now).
So, in other news, I’m coordinating a panel submission for RSA that will involve myself, Jessica Rivait, Kim Lacey, and Jared Grogan–no blogger he. When things are assembled, I’ll put up the preamble to the panel for general assessment–and on that note, anyone have any advice about good texts on celebrity, ethos, and media(tion). This isn’t the Lennon project again, (though it could work) but a new approach (for me at least) to questions of pop rhetoric.
My goal for the ucoming semester: One post a week if time allows; the 1020 course has a pretty rigorous online component so I want to be sure I keep on the ball with that.
Anyone know if I can set my MacBook’s delete key to work like the PC’s delete key with using the “Function” button?
Tentative Sources for "Dictionaries" Project
Now, some tentative sources for . . . calm yourselves . . . the “dictionaries” project.
- Hayakawa, S. I. and Alan R. Hayakawa. 1940. Language in Thought and Action. Fifth edition. San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1990.
- McFedries, Paul. Word Spy: The Word Lover’s Guide to Modern Culture. New York: Broadway Books, 2004.
- West, Paul. The Secret Lives of Words. New York: Harcourt, 2000.
- Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. New York: Oxford UP, 1976.
This post is more for archival purposes: If I don’t get a chance to read these in the next few month or so (well, “read” in a very loose sense–skim is more accurate), this way I’ll have a record of the texts I want to check out again.
If anything sticks out as being obsolete or roundly discredited, please let me know.
Three One Six
Something I noticed reviewing the previous post:
316 pages of Derrida’s Grammatology
Times six minutes a page equals:
1896 minutes to read Derrida.
Divided by sixty minutes per hour equals:
31.6 hours to read Derrida.
Divided by 24 hours per day equals:
1.316 days to read Derrida.
Is anyone else slightly creeped out by the preponderance of the numerical series 3-1-6 popping up in that series of calculations? I’m not getting all Jim-Carrey-in-The-Number-23 or anything, just something that caught my eye.
It might make the start of an interesting research project: what else can we associate with a common series of numbers? Starting with the basic series, we might read this any number of ways:
3/16-March Sixteenth. What has happened on this date historically or personally?
1896-The year, perhaps, as a strating point for research (like Rice’s temporal invention projects).
1/31/(0)6-January 31 2006. As starting point.
I’m not proposing this as a great assignment, but I like how simple series of mathematical calculations revealed a) a small, and no doubt arbitrary, repetition of a three digit sequence; and b) how that might be useful as at least one way of developing an invention strategy. Maybe a dumb one, but an invention strategy nonetheless.
Also, a meta tag here:
Please welcome Jessica Rivait’s new blog, Vita Activa, to the blogroll. As Kim Lacey has recently said, Holla!