Dear Guy-sitting-next-to-me-on-the-plane,

You have got to be kidding me.

You wanna know why I don't want to talk to you?

Well, just to name few reasons: (1) you made mention more than once of your desire to physically harm all hippies, all Yankees, any guy that wears a pink shirt, all persons from California, and all persons from Oklahoma; (2) one of your life goals is to "talk to every person in Texas" (What?); (3) you prefaced more than four statements with, "This is going to make me sound racist, but..."; (4) as you got drunker, you edged your legs and arms closer to me, until I, trying desperately to just not have to touch you, found myself plastered against the wall of the plane, which was I guess a good thing; because (5) if I had been taking up my whole seat, you would have spilled your glass of whiskey on me and not just on two-thirds of my seat; (6) you stared at me while I was reading my book, and asked me each time I underlined something or made a note why I was doing that; (7) you stared at me for minutes at a time while I watched a movie and yelled loudly at me "Why are you laughing at me?" every time I smiled at the movie; (8) you woke me up to ask me "Do you prefer Mandy or Amanda?" and when I replied, "I'm not sure what you're talking about," you heatedly responded, with your face an inch from mine despite my desperate attempts to back away, "Listen, Erin, I want to see you again. I like hanging out with you, and I want to see you next week."

I don't like "hanging out with you," and I don't want to see you next week.

Very sincerely,
Ellen

'olidays for me

And some España también, but I don't have exact addresses for where I'll be there which makes finding Google satellite images for it a little less exciting.

"You're getting nothing, NOTHING FOR CHRISTMAS!"

pope dot el

I've been needing to do some exercising of my brain lately, so I went and checked out this exhibit at the Art Institute today. Pretty sweet. I was a little skeptical when the lady I talked to corrected my question, "How's that William Pope exhibit?" with "Um, It's William Pope.L," but his work is very cool.

(Click for more info on his performance art.)

Also cool is the photography exhibit downstairs, "Girls on the Verge: Portraits of Adolescence." You can't tell from this image, but the series of photos below, by Lalla Essaydi, depict girls and women dressed in and surrounded by cloth inscribed with Islamic calligraphy written in henna that also covers the exposed skin of each of the subjects. The placard at the exhibit said that the writing is typically reserved for the use of men only, but I'm not finding that specification here. Anyway, very cool. I'd recommend both if you're in Chicago!



(What intelligent commentary I've provided here! "Pretty sweet" and "very cool." A compelling review, no?)

Reality TV sucks.

I miss the writers.

"My So-Called Life"'s on-line!

And Jordan Catalano is like, so hot.

something sort of cool and something REALLY cool

The sort of cool thing is this: I finally got a chance to go through all of the mounds of paperwork I've collected over the course of the semester yesterday, and I found all kinds of formerly important notes and lists on slips of scrap paper. Some of them are quite cryptic, like this one:


Took me a minute to realize what I was doing here.

answer: checking a project I'd designed against Bloom's Taxonomy to make sure that I'd given roughly equal attention to assessment of work in each of the cognitive domains -- and adding on paper numbers that I should be able to add in my head

And the REALLY cool thing? Melissa, my good friend and thoughtful blog commenter, is coming to Chicago in March!

the battle cry of my generation:

"Don't tase me, bro!"

Seriously, if we had a "Remember the Alamo!" I think it would be "Don't tase me, bro!"

I mean, someone even re-mixed it:



Andrew wrote about this when it was actually new news. I think he's particularly poignant with his closing, "So be warned, young Americans, we may participate in the democratic process, but only for 45 seconds at a time."

Why am I writing about this now? Well first, a couple weeks ago I read this article for Campus Progress in which Tim Fernholz rips into journalist Courtney Martin for her article "The Problem with youth Activism" that blasts American college-aged activists for going about things all wrong.

"[Typical youth socio-political activism today] is sweetly collaborative, mainly focused on raising awareness among students, very keyed in to particular dates (Love Your Body Day, Earth Day, Black History Month), and most of all, safe," she writes.

He responds, "Martin would like to see today’s young activists adopt the tactics of the 1960’s student radicals—protests, theatrics, and the like. Martin’s complaint is that young people today are too complacent, too safe, and too co-opted by 'the man.' We’re just not angry enough, she argues. But today’s young activists are angry—they’re just too busy attempting to create meaningful change to sit around waving signs." And he goes on to chastise her for calling it "Youth Activism" when really she only addresses activists on college campuses (campi?). Nice point.

Last night, in a totally unrelated conversation, a friend of mine quoted, "Don't tase me, bro!" Since we all got the allusion, we laughed knowingly and moved on. It's some kind of joke. But come on. "Don't tase me bro!"?

As much as I think it's funny, re-watching the video this morning made me sad.They seriously tased him. And I can't understand how he was in the wrong. And nobody responded to his cries of, "Will somebody please help me!"

For young activists like us, this seems to be pretty quintessential The-Man-is-so-fucked-up. But then at the same time, for The Man, it's probably quintessential these-kids-are-morons. "Don't tase me bro!" What the fuck?

books in your pants

I'm a little embarrassed to be posting about Brotherhood 2.0 again, but seriously, I've not been able to stop watching it lately. It's becoming a compulsion. And, I'm pretty sure this is funny enough to warrant a post #3 on the same topic. (Maybe.)

So a long time ago, John's friend Maureen posted on her blog about a conversation that she had with John and E. Lockhart in which they discussed book titles that would be better if they'd been suffixed "in your pants." And then Hank and John posted videos in which they suggested even more in-your-pants titles. Since then, in-your-pants has really taken off on their site; their forum is called "My Pants" and they often suggest that viewers post comments in My Pants.

But I think they missed a few, so I've gathered some of the books from my room that I think get better once they're in-your-pants-ed.


Welcome to the Monkey House in Your Pants by Kurt Vonnegut
My Life in Your Pants by Bill Clinton
A Farewell to Arms in Your Pants by Ernest Hemingway
Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs in Your Pants by Chuck Klosterman
There Are No Children Here in Your Pants by Alex Kotlowitz
The Giver in Your Pants by Lois Lowry
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in Your Pants by Douglas Adams
Inherit the Wind in Your Pants by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E Lee
To the Lighthouse in Your Pants by Virginia Woolf
The Woman Warrior in Your Pants by Maxine Hong Kingston
Passing in Your Pants by Nella Larson
The Spanish Tragedy in Your Pants by Thomas Kyd
White Noise in Your Pants by Don DeLillo
The Women of Brewster Place in Your Pants by Gloria Naylor
And China Has Hands in Your Pants by H.T. Tsiang
The City of Joy in Your Pants by Dominique Lapierre
Invisible Man in Your Pants by Ralph Ellison
Coming of Age in Your Pants by Studs Terkel
Still I Rise in Your Pants by Roland Owen Laird, Jr. and Taneshia Nash Laird
Borrowed Time in Your Pants by Paul Monette


In some cases, these titles get funnier if you use "in My Pants" instead.

post 100!

Going through the mounds of paperwork I've collected over the past few months, I found my copy of this new version of The Pledge (on the right) that Steve from the Y wrote with his friend Joan and brought to a meeting a few weeks or so ago. Me likey.

And speaking of thinking people from the Y are sweet, how funny is Amy? (She's writing to let me know that there are some letters to donors that I need to come in and sign so that she can send them out.):

little kids are SO weird

As I was walking to the local library early this afternoon to sign up for a library card (ever since Mobile, I've been sort of in to collecting library cards?) and to get some finals work done, I happened to be passing an elementary school when the students were at recess. The whole playground there is surrounded by a six-foot- tall chain-link fence, and there were these three little fuckers pressed right up against it. They had to be in about second grade. They were standing on their tippie-toes with their heads tilted upwards and their tongues out, licking the tiny icicles that had formed on the horizontal bar running across the middle of the fence.
So I said: "Hey! Your tongues are going to stick!"
cute kid 1: "Huh?"
me: "Your tongues are going to stick to the pole!"
cute kid 2: "No they're not."
me: "Okay."
cute kid 3: "Are you going to tell?"
me: "No. What do I look like?"
cute kid 1: "We like to eat these."
me: "Well what about the germs?"
cute kid 2: "We like to eat these."
me: "Okay."

Here's a silly piece I wrote for a class this semester,

and by silly I mean dead serious.

This one goes out to all the haters: the back-to-basics, the five-paragraph-essays, the your-not-you’res and the you’re-not-yours, to the SATs and the ACTs, to the canonical-texts, and to the Standard-Englishes and English-Onlys; this one goes out to the cartoons-are-Saturday-morning-kid-stuffs: y’all are missing OUT!

I call urgently for inclusion of comics in language arts classrooms because:

1. It allows language arts teachers to be language and art teachers.

In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud maps out what he calls “the pictoral vocabulary," a comprehensive and multidimensional system of understanding how we represent what we’re thinking, feeling, seeing, being, wanting, needing, doing, etc (51-3). When classroom literacy gets isolated into one corner of Scott’s map, boringness threatens, but more importantly, students miss out on learning vital literacy skills. Go ahead and teach traditional text after traditional-ol’ text, and come crawling back to the graphic novel when you can’t peel your students away from the television and computer screen as they desperately seek ways to practice their visual literacy skills. The point is, whether we give students the opportunity to practice visual literacy in classrooms or not, they are going to seek out and encounter visual texts on their own anyway. Now, we could leave them to their own devices, and let them find and use their own strategies for understanding the visual texts that inundate their everyday lives, or we can guide them to critical readings and analyses of these texts, just as we guide them into critical reading and analyses of traditional texts. Why not show students that even a TV show is a text, a text ripe for questioning like any other text they’re used to seeing in English class? Take those close readings, those understandings of symbolism, irony, paradox, and ambiguity; take those deconstruction methods; take those contextualization skills, and apply them to Will Eisner’s texts as well as Will Shakespeare’s! That’s all I’m saying! (Except that I’m also about to say that reading comics takes those skills and more!)

2. Yeah, students need visual literacy skills.

I’m going to loosely define visual literacy as what it takes to make meaning of magazine ads, billboards, movies, facial expressions, hairstyles, flow-charts, tabloids, Picasso, and maps. More or less. Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen, in The Grammar of Visual Design, write about the ability to understand and produce “a complex interplay of written text, images and other graphic elements, and ... these elements combine[d] together into visual designs, by means of layout” (15). If you don’t teach students to read this stuff, and further, to compose this stuff, they’re not going to ask pressing questions about what they see in a world that requires them to take in and put out visual messages all day. Students who have practice with reading and manipulating visual texts will have an advantage over those who don’t. Let’s eliminate the “those who don’t” category. Students who are well-versed in visual semiotics, for example, will be able to look critically at a political debate before they vote, at advertisements for products they’re considering purchasing, at graphs they’re preparing for presentations, at their homes when they’re attempting to sell them, at clothes they’re considering wearing to job interviews, and at countless other nontraditional texts that nonetheless send messages. Pictures aren’t just for kids; they can be difficult and engaging – but not so difficult that students can’t learn their grammar. Kress and van Leeuwen observe that, “visual communication is either treated as the domain of a very small elite of specialists, or disvalued as a possible form of expression for articulate, reasoned communication, seen as a ‘childish’ stage one grows out of.” Word. (/Picture.) So comics can be eschewed from the language arts classroom as a way to ask students to grow out of their old picture books, or they can be held off as art teachers’ territory. Or, language arts teachers could embrace the opportunity that comics give them to draw on students’ prior experience with their childhood picture books and build into reading images using complex reading strategies. I’ll take what’s behind door number three, please!

3. All texts are visual, but comics are ultra-visual, and therefore better.

When we read any written text, we see the ink on the page, we process the arrangement of ink, and we make meaning from that arrangement. But check this out [image of traditional text], and check this out [image of Palestine]. Teach comic books and teach sequencing (McCloud 5), juxtaposition (7), iconography (26), closure (95), composition of space, time, change, and memory (115), synaesthtics (123), interdependency (149); give students the opportunity to think critically about what’s language and what’s art; what’s both (164). What could happen to students who don’t learn to read and write visually? I’d rather not think about it. But for the sake of going there, here’s what might happen:

4. Students might not learn to scrutinize essentialism if they don’t learn how to read comics.

Cat – it’s the ultimate classroom example for understanding deconstruction (Parker 54). When you have the word cat, Parker explains, "you can imagine a reference to the familiar domestic feline, or to a hugely inconsistent range of felines, domestic and wild, living and extinct. It can also refer to a bulldozer, a stylish man, any of several different colleges of advanced technology, the act of masculine philandering (catting around), a backbiting woman, a catfish, a CAT scan, a catalytic converter, and so on through a long and continuously evolving list of other meanings" (54).

In more technical terms, one signifier, cat, has multiple signifieds, all of the above. But when you’ve got [an image of “the familiar domestic feline”], the bulldozer possibility becomes a little less probable. A more problematic example? Signifer: woman. Signified: [image of a stereotypically feminine woman]. Now what? McCloud goes on and on about how cool the “universality of cartoon imagery” is because “the more cartoony a face is, for instance, the more people it could be said to describe” (31). Read: the more cartoony a signifier gets, the more we can make generalizations about the signified. Which would seem rather limiting. Except that I have this theory of the wink.

The wink: ;-)

The wink is a visual icon for “I’m kidding/I’m just playing/I’m being a little facetious here” (For the purposes of this text, I’ll refrain from deconstructing ;-) into “Come hither,” “Hey, kiddo,” “You know what I’m sayin, dawg?,” “My eye’s twitching,” etc. – or at least I’ll refrain from doing so outside of these parentheses.) So: given that the production of a text involves an innumerable set of choices (this-word-or- that, this-character-trait-or-that, this-event-or-that – or that or that or that), and given that comics bring together words and pictures and therefore multiply the range of choices by this-image-or-that, this-line-or-that, this-color-or-that, this-size-space-or-that (– or that or that or that), comics texts, even when they seem to send irreconcilably essentialist messages (i.e. This is what a woman looks like; this is what a Black person looks like; this is what God looks like), can wink at readers, can signify nuance.

They can wink at readers, that is, if readers know how to and so wish to make eye-contact with the text, get intimately critical with that text. When the reader is aware of the text’s creation process, that is, the set of innumerable choices the creator made, s/he can look for and find instances of textual ;-)ing. Paulo Freire might have called this ;-)-search in the classroom a type of “problem-posing education [that] involves a constant unveiling of reality... striv[ing] for the emergence of consciousness and critical intervention in reality” (68). And when students do that, there’s nothing absolutely wrong with using a problematic text. In fact, it’s useful. In one of her many works on the importance of prioritizing critical literacy in English language arts classrooms, Hilary Janks “uses critical discourse analysis to show that [certain advertisements put out by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)], designed to dispose us kindly to refugees, are premised on a discourse of sameness that constructs difference negatively” (1). She goes on in this article to deconstruct this discourse of sameness communicated by both images and written text in one of the advertisements:

In Spot the refugee, an obvious place to begin is with the opening instruction, prominent because it is printed in capital letters in a large bold font. This is the only command in a text that is otherwise made up of statements. If you respond to this imperative by looking carefully at the lego figures, trying to find the one that stands out as a refugee, the text has already constructed you as someone who thinks of refugees as visibly different. If you refuse this construction, but are nevertheless intrigued by the juxtaposition of lego dolls and refugees, you may start reading the text. If you then look for the refugee in the Fourth row, second from the left. The one with the moustache, you will nevertheless have been reeled in by the text, only to discover that you have been cheated, because—

The unsavoury looking character you’re looking at is more likely to be your average
neighbourhood slob with a grubby vest and a weekend’s stubble on his chin. And the real refugee could just as easily be the clean-cut fellow on his left.

In addition, you will have been constructed as someone who assumes that refugees look like “unsavoury”, unshaved “slobs”. And because you are now someone who sees refugees as both different from and inferior to you, you need to learn that “clean-cut” refugees are just like you and me. But do not worry, the UNHCR is there to set us straight. (Janks 4-5)

In this example, what Janks implies but doesn’t explicitly state is how the images of the lego dolls don’t just reinforce the messages in the visual text, but are rather an integral element of the text as a whole. (Incidentally, same thing goes for comics.) The advertisement overtly commands viewers to read the lego images; this students can do, and do do, on their own every time they watch television or read a billboard. That’s where prior knowledge comes in; students are familiar with combinations of images and words. What Janks demonstrates, and what she later asks teachers to help students do, is to build on this prior knowledge by reading the advertisement critically, analyzing the ways that the lego images work with the words to alienate and stigmatize refugees even as the UNHCR purports to do the opposite.

If more students learned to look for and recognize ;-)ing texts in the ways that Janks proposes, then maybe those students would have less trouble deconstructing pervasive images like this [Bush with the Mission Accomplished banner]. What’s wrong with literacy education when students’ can’t or aren’t asking what’s wrong (or right?) with this picture? Nothing un-fixable; just teach comics!

Okay, wait. Sure, you could work to “unveil reality,” as Freire suggests, within a word-only text, but using comics to do so is way better because comics more obviously reinforce metacognition. The very form of a comic text challenges an alphabetic text in the way that critically literate persons challenge every text. When a comic means “woman” and draws a human figure wearing a dress, the comic lays down essentialist content in an essentialist form. Once students learn the grammar of visual semiotics (eg. how does one communicate “woman” with an image), then practicing that visual grammar by reading comics lets them practice their pointing and jeering at the essentialization of what it means, or looks like, to be, for example, a woman. Or if you prefer critical consideration to pointing and jeering, that could work, too. Word-only texts invite these types of critical considerations also, I know. But compared to comics that lay it all out there for the reader, for better of worse, in an image-laden and therefore familiar form, word-only texts start to seem a little dodgy. You get a text from your friend Keisha, for example, that reads “How’s it hangin?” and you might reply “Can’t complain. What’s up with you?” If Keisha clarifies her message, though, by sending a picture of the Matisse she just bought and mounted, you might more helpfully reply, “It’s upside down.” For students learning to read critically, comics are more accessibly interpretable because of the fact that they employ a pictoral vocabulary that more often than not shows the reader what they mean more statically and universally than do words with their multiple meanings.

5. Um, students are already reading comics (or comics-like texts) anyway. Use that.

And not just as a ploy to “make school fun.” No, play the game. Meet those standards. Remember at the beginning of this rant when I warned that your students are already taking in combinations of images and texts in infinite multiplicities? (Okay, well actually I said, “Go ahead and teach traditional text after traditional-ol’ text, and come crawling back to the graphic novel when you can’t peel your students away from the television and computer screen as they desperately seek ways to practice their visual literacy skills.”) Let me reiterate that. Students are interested in comics. In his introduction to Building Literacy Connections with Graphic Novels: Page By Page, Panel By Panel, James Bucky Carter cites study after study that affirms the use of comics in the classroom as valuable tools for practicing Freire’s reality unveil-ation with students who are reluctant readers, reluctant writers, English language learners, and also, um, any student who spends any time engaging with our visually-saturated pop culture. Nancy Frey and Douglas Fisher, in the same volume, submit convincing anecdotal evidence to this accord: Comics, they write, “provided a visual vocabulary of sorts for scaffolding writing techniques, particularly dialogue, tone, and mood,” and that they “afforded [them] a space to provide students with instruction on the craft and mechanics of writing” (143). Finally, their students “not only became better writers, but also better consumers of ideas and information” (143). In short, by using texts, or textual formats, with which students already feel familiar, language arts teachers can affirm the knowledge and skills that students already have as a way of motivating them to learn and acquire more knowledge and skills.

So it goes that (1) if comics give teachers a way to teach language (and) arts as a broad system of representation that (2) build visual literacy which is (3) an essential skill that (4) invites students to practice critical literacy, and that (5) makes that type of literacy accessible to all students*, then not teaching comics disallows all of the above and therefore condemns students to the festering status quo.

* I'm not sure how to accommodate a graphic novel, nor therefore this text, to the literacy needs of students with visual impairments that inhibit their abilities to see a text. I'm not not thinking about this; I just haven't come up with anything yet.

When will we stop referring to Hillary as Bill's wife?

From CNN.com's "Kennedy aide: Romney's views on religion very different from JFK's"

Q. Kennedy's speech in 1960 is widely viewed as being successful. Do you think Romney's speech is likely to be viewed as a success?

Sorensen: I assume so. I don't think Mr. Romney should be denied the presidency because of his religion. Just as I don't think Senator [Barack] Obama should be denied because of his race. Or that Mrs. [Hillary] Clinton should be denied the presidency because of her gender. This country is in deep, serious trouble, and thoughtful citizens surely are going to make up their minds based on the major issues confronting the country and the major qualities of the candidates and not on such superficial tests as religion, race, or gender.

Senator Obama and Mrs. Clinton. Funny, I was under the impression that they're both Senators.

I am so sick of this archaic bullshit. Man and wife, not man and woman. Mr. and Mrs. or Miss, not Mr. and Ms. (Or Ms. and Ms., or Mr. and Mr., for that matter.)

Senator Clinton is a highly-qualified, articulate, intelligent presidential candidate; she's not in the news because she's married to Bill.

(And by the way, since when are religion, race, and gender "superficial" issues? I must have missed that memo when I was too busy looking for a husband by whom I can define myself.)

commemoration, just in case

The last thing I should be doing right now is posting to my blog. I have a paper due Friday morning for a class that I care about, and that I've learned a lot in, and that I want to do thoughtful work for. My last paper. Of college.

Okay, so I'll most likely have reflective analyses to do for my education classes next year, and I'll definitely have to write a philosophy of education. But this is the last real paper. My last piece of literary critical analysis. How sad.

As I'm reading back over what I've written of this last paper thus far I'm struck by how much my writing has changed in my time at UIUC. For example, I've used the word I in this paper six times already. In this blog post, so far, I've ended three clauses (one sentence) with a preposition. And this is the sixth sentence fragment. Four years of undergraduate coursework in English, and this is what I have to show for it. (And by this, I mean a departure from giving a rat's fat ass about mechanical convention and an energized focus on finding interesting and worthwhile things to read and write about, like the texts I'm writing about for this last paper, and the ones I'm using to inform my response.)

Forgive me the obnoxious navel-gazing, I'm just having a moment with my English-major-hood that's ending this week.

(And sure, I'll probably go back to grad school. This probably isn't my last paper. But things happen, and I thought I'd say a few words just in case.) Lots of parentheses in this post.

writing advice/I love this vlog

from the NY Times "The Geography of Hate"

See the accompanying article here.

(Click to enlarge.)