What's Mine Is...

In this unit, we are all about considering issues that can mostly simply be summarized (not given the fair, comprehensive, and nuanced treatment, of course, of course) under the banner of "ownership."

The Banner, The Questions
A few of a zillion questions you can find on this banner: Who owns what I create? Who should benefit--intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, and, yes, monetarily--from my creations? (Me; my heirs in perpetuity; Columbia College Chicago; the corporation that produced my keyboard, my display, the font I've used; the corporation that provides the bandwidth that allows me to post my creation online?) How does what I create occupy the world? (Should a poem I wrote about the Holocaust, say, appear without my consent on a neo-Nazi web site? Should anyone be allowed to download a photograph I've taken and post it on their fridge?) What role do I play in the distribution of the stuff I've created? (Should I have a say in whether my class assignments are used in other classrooms? If I do receive royalties, should part of those be owed to my employer?) What role do I play in the re-conception, re-creation, re-purposing, re-directing, re-routing, etc. of the stuff I've produced? (Should I have final say over whether my creations are mixed and matched and mashed and?)

One Way In
How to get at this? Well, I produce stuff all of the time. I write poems. I create class assignments. I edit technical documents (please note: if you compare the final version of a document I was asked to edit with the original with which I worked, you'd have to agree that editing = creation.) I could discuss those. And likely I will if I continue in other posts. Here, though, I'd like to own up to the fact that I am an amateur photographer.

Like nearly everyone else with disposable income, I have a digital camera (okay, I have many), and use it, sure, to capture memories. But, too, I scratch a more profound itch. Let's call it art and be done for now.

Chiapan Art
Here's Chiapas from the window of a church tower in Aguacatenango (Chiapas, Mexico).

Here's another view:



So, now you know that despite my fear of heights, I climbed to the top of a church--up an incredibly narrow, chiseled stairwell (here's a mid-stair view)



and captured (made?) some art.

It's All Apparently in the Face
The reason I mention this is, on the same trip, I was fortunate enough to meet and spend the morning with a weaver's family, not a few hundred yards from the church. Whatever I can say about them here wouldn't do them justice, and, anyway, you can read about them in my two most recent copyrighted (Mammoth Press) publications (Burro Heart and Mixed Diction).

Drawn as I was to making art of the town, you can imagine how drawn I was to (making art of?) the family:







Given the price of digital film, I could go on. At any rate, here, as they say, is the rub. It seems that I am allowed without concern for the Spanish roof tiles, corn rows, or mottled main street cobbles to post the first three photos (the fruits of my creative loins) on a site such as iStock, "the internet's original member-generated image and design community." Where you can "Get easy, affordable inspiration with millions of safe, royalty-free photographs, vector illustrations, video footage, audio tracks and Flash files."

I am not, however, allowed to post the second three without express written permission from my Chiapan friends. Show a face, and you've got to cover your ass. Oy. Thanks, Canon, for making it possible for me to not bother with film, with chemical-based developing and enlargement. But what have I lost in the bargain? Guess it's all beer and skittles until money is involved.

In this instance, I did not want to sell those faces (as a Jewish grandmother I never had might have said, "who could sell such faces"?); rather, I wanted to post them on the site to get credits in exchange for the work of another photographer. I saw it as innocent trading. I still do. My art for yours.

Yikes, outside of a little lunch trading (my almond butter and fig jam sanGwitch for your Cheese Doodles), I guess nothing is innocent. What's mine is...

***

It Did Not Start

as the hand weaver

rose and shat in his pig

yard

nor as his wife knelt before

her glassed votives her executrix

her holy virgin idol

presiding

nor

on the swollen road risen

from the highland wash

nor during our talk

of freerange stallions

bolting through maize plots

morphed into monsoon lakes

not

as we grouped before the loom

to swig local beer

to distinguish between aniline

& beetle dyes

to hear

about a man’s warp

his indigenous woof

not

as we leaned from the bell tower

above the cathedral in Aguacatenango

not as the sweet

rains pelted

the cross-hatched cobbles

where mongrels and sots slept splayed—

a billion

motes of local light

baffling

our prodigal gaze

Copyright Jeff Schiff



"It Did Not Start" by Jeff Schiff is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Pin Point Laser Guided Stray But Don't Stray and For God's Sake Tie Back to Your Raison d'Etre

And my blog critique rolls on. This week: some words about not straying from the IT you have designated as IT (after all, it is your it; no one forced that it on you)... and honoring the reason you created your blog in the first place

Pin Point
Long ago back in the day way back when, I used to call it "focus," and harp incessantly about its glory. I even had a focus cudgel made--with which to bang upside my student's meandering, peregrinating, fickle writings (most often formerly, painfully, inaccurately, and purposelessly referred to as "essays").

Keep your thing on track--no rhetorical bait and switch, unless you were angling (oops) for that in the first place. Don't begin discussing thing #1 only to drift aimlessly to thing #2.5 and on to thing #6.

That said, let me exemplify by using recent post on my feature blog: "The ZEN of the penis." Got wood?

Promised and Delivered
Anyway, wooded or not, one cannot help but notice how J. forecasts a subject in her post title, uses topic sentence-topped paragraphs, and--although she is given to parenthetical interjections now and again and again and again--treats the primary subject until her graceful, rounded, tied-back-to-the-beginning conclusion.

With These Words I Thee Wed
In addition to staying on track, this post certainly honors the founder's bloggy contract with us: to deliver "A blog about life, sports, cats and dogs, politics, sex, the joys and frustrations of working at home, and whatever else I feel like writing about." Not difficult here to honor such a conceptually generous mission, but, still, she's not writing about helicopter parts (at least I don't recall any such mentions) or entomology.


Estoric Hughes 500D Parts


Ah, A Buggy Life

Simple stuff, really, to stay focused--but easily lost in the pressure to post and post. I know. I know.

Keep Me Interested or I'm Gone

Now where was I?

Oh, yeah, there's gotta be some there there and some real draw (the definition of which I'll keep working at in this and subsequent posts) if you want me to keep coming back to your blog well, to drink your bloggy draft, etcetera etcetera. So, what's next. Well, let me keep at J-Two-O (plus, I get bonus points for knowing the blogmistress; or, for which I get issued familial demerits--but which I'm inured to and so don't so much mind).

Keep Your Tone Trimmed and Burning
There's cheek at J-Two-O. Sass. Sometimes there's a bit or a ton of burn. Pique. There's angled disgust. Just-this-side-of-healthy funny stuff. However. Whatever. Here I'll say "tone." J-Two-O is tony. Not tony (as in fashion and glitz and sophistication), of course, just full of tone. Tone-y. Take, for instance, the September 7th, 2009 post on "Mattress hoping." That's typical. "Yeah, right, yada, yada, yada" is written all over it. "Yeah, right, even though I'm talking about inconsequential stuff, it's oddly important in this twisted, irony-filled, dog-often-eats-dog world." A kind of someone-is-looking -over-your-shoulder-and-you-are-gonna-snap-them-one tone--just for the relief of it.... At any rate, it is obvious, repeatable, and, if it were any other kind of tone, you might could call it a comfortable at-the-bar tone. That is, you can expect it. Like Mickey Dee. Same taste across the country, the world. Same tone (voice) post to post.

If you still don't catch my drift on tone, check out grammar.edu on the subject. Bottom line, have a recognizable tone or risk the loneliness of the long distance blogger.

A Beacon in the Forest of Blogs; or, Why Should I Belly Up to Yours and do more than Engage in a Perfunctory Scan?

Yes, they are easily conceived and nearly as easily executed, de rigueur in a world gone sharingly mad, part and parcel of one’s membership in the 21st century communication club, and therefore there are too many of them out there, and we are forced to pick and choose (still waiting for pick to differentiate itself from choose). So, other than the usual affinity draw (for me: Yankees stuff, middle-aged Jewish man living away from New York stuff, Grateful Dead stuff, best thin crust pizza stuff, etc.), which ones do you befriend? (That’s, after all, what you do with a blog. You “befriend” it—and hope it befriends you.)

Say you stumble upon one, though… what makes you stay long enough to rub against it for a while (that befriending metaphor can go a punishingly long way.) Well, let me use one blog (J-Two-O) to reveal what I look for… For you, yes, for you things might could be different.

Endo or Exoskeleton, I Need Some Scaffolding, Fella
I am harried guy. I’ve got six plates, two cups, and a knife or two or three in the air above by spinning hands and dizzied head. I want to be able to know within seconds what a blog is about. Take J-Two-O; although I may quarrel with the blog’s breadthy purview, I know straight off what I am (speaking ballpark here) in for: “A blog about life, sports, cats and dogs, politics, sex, the joys and frustrations of working at home, and whatever else I feel like writing about.”

Is There a You Behind the It
I also want to get a sense (real or invented) of who’s churning out these posts. In the case of J-Two-O that’s “J.” (J, followed by a period….)

Tasty Treats: for the Mind and for the Eye

Perhaps it’s the business writing teacher in me. Perhaps it’s the harried dude. Whomever is doing the talking, that person says: “give me headings or give me death.” And give me headings that zing or tingle or pang me or cause intestinal distress or crinkle me at the crow’s feet.

Here are some J-Two-O headings that did the trick:






•    Are people who use twitter twits?
•    Does size really matter
•    For god and underwear
•    How to lint roll a cat
•    Just say no to men in speedos

Okay, that’s a wrap for this morning. You’ve got better things to do. I’ve got…

Which I is I; or, Does it Really Matter Who Gets Credit?

I've been considering authorship here... especially in the new media world of aggregators and aggregation, mashups, bricolage, social and other forms of Web 2.0 collaboration.

While definitions abound, most of them seem to be old school--informed by and addressing antiquated realities. For instance, I ran into the following Harvard University "Authorship Guidelines"--aimed ostensibly at insuring integrity in the promotion process, but used in other ways to validate the relationship between content and creator. Original research is a giant issue here. (Such, however, seems less important to a poet, though.)

Old school, yes, but what strikes me is the document evidences a contentious battle, instigated, likely, by a cultural shift regarding authorship (and probably copyright, intellectual property, and ownership) even in the Harvard Medical School:

The (can you say, "irony"?) anonymous author here, writes:

"In practice, various inducements have fostered authorship practices that fall short of these standards... Disputes sometimes arise about who should be listed as authors of an intellectual product.."

Seems like some not so hidden thievery is afoot. Seems like even at Harvard Medical School there are many political dimensions to authorship--even when they are not impacted by Web 2.0.

Next, how to consider and/or value authorship alongside:  content and communication (re)directors, producers, managers, sifters, mixers, samplers, and the like.

Check out this Keynote Address on "Mass Collaboration and the Future of Higher Education." If you don't have all the time in the world, move the time slider to 32 minutes, or so, and begin.

***

“Web 2.0 is all about remixing, not about designing. The best metaphor for web 2.0 is the DJ, not the composer. Web 2.0 is a product of remix culture.” Jonathan Boutelle

Back to Materiality: The Poetry of Tight Places and Small Screens

So, how shall we begin our class discussion regarding materiality? I've got a Twitter account, and that's a good place to start. If you don't know Twitter, you should--at least for this class of ours.




So, what are the material concerns of writing in tweets? Are they similar to, say, writing haiku? Is there an art to them? a form (other than character limitation)? a governing rhetorical principle? Or, are tweets governed by the same principles I've trotted out in our Rhetorical Analysis wiki page?

And, oh, as you are thinking about thinking about that, don't forget to consider the broadcast and filter engines Twitter uses--how you can aim a tweet at a particular individual or group and how you can filter what you read. These, too, surely impact or issue from the material reality of Twitter.

BTW: as an English professor, the very notion of getting my word on in 140 characters should pain me--shouldn't it? Instead, it delights me. It delights the poet in me. It delights the 21st century me--the one who is tugged in ten thousand directions every day.

Literacy: Too Steep a Hill?

The whole shooting match of "literacy" daunts. So much to know in an ever-expanding world. Visual literacy. Technical literacy. Linguistic literacy. On and on. What to know? Where to search for the baseline?

It can all seem so Sisyphean. Push the rock. Push it. Wake the next morning and push it again.

Back in the day, literacy seemed a simpler thing. You learned the three Rs--reading, riting, rithmatic. If you were born in this America, and you read from a primer; you read books everyone else considered the cornerstones of literacy (The Scarlet Letter, Huck Finn, The Red Badge of Courage, and on), you learned how to spell; you learned to use words to form paragraphs to form sentences to form chunks to create descriptions, comparisons/contrasts, arguments; you didn't feel like you had to know everything.

Literacy, too, did not in those days seem synonymous with "expertise." You could have been an expert cabinet maker, expert farmer, expert milliner, expert chef--and still be illiterate. You knew a thing. You could have learned its vocabulary, its nuance, its practical and theoretical nooks and crannies. You could have "mastered" it. You could have been, in fact, a master carpenter. A master plumber. Etc. Still, you could have been illiterate. You could have been hard-pressed to read, to write a sentence, to carry on a conversation that involved anything beyond your world.

Now, we seem to use the word as a station on the expertise ladder. Literacy. You can... No, you should have multiple literacies. You should be a literate writer, a literate participant in the world of computing, a literate dresser, a... Perhaps "fluency" is a better word? You should be fluent in many areas. You should be able to talk/think/analyze computer-related matters; fashion-related matters; travel-related matters; cooking-related matters. But, how many is many enough? Shall we all strive to be Renaissance men/women, da Vincis? Or, is it enough to buy the Hirsch formula (literacy in a list)?

I'm tired here. I'm trying to know some stuff. I'm reading. I'm watching. I'm listening. I'm doing. Again and again, it seems like the rock thing, the Sisyphus thing. Up the hill. Up.