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I am startlingly tardy in posting about Inside Higher Ed’s article “Voltaire Wasn’t Cut Out to Be an Iowa State TA” and the videos that are the subject of this– linked on Facebook here and here. Frankly, for all the excitement over things like the Graff and Birkenstein exchange on WPA-L, I’m kind of surprised that no one in the Comp/Rhet blogosphere has commented on this.

I guess someone has to start.

On the one hand, I appreciate the experiences being noted/recorded in these two videos. I’ve been there, of course. And I don’t blame these grad assistants for making these two videos and I don’t dismiss the reaction they have to the writing program at Iowa State (if I was running that program, I’d see this video as a bit of a “warning sign,” frankly). But I do have more of an “other hand” here.

First, this is probably more of the kind of video that should have been shown at some kind of GA gathering more or less privately, giggled at, and then put away. Probably not a video to post on YouTube or, um, Facebook. Second, and I don’t mean to sound all old and WPA-ish on people, but it’s never a good idea for GA’s to make fun of students publicly, even it is in modest ways and clearly in fun (as is the case with this video). Third, the administrative folks clearly over-reacted in trying to repress this. That just goes to show you what happens when administrators freak out.

And fourth (no offense to those folks at ISU) this video is probably twice as long as it should be. A little sensible editing would have helped, honestly.

It’s that time of the semester, and I’m trying to slap together a presentation for the conference I’m going to next week. So here’s a bunch of links that I had meant to write more about earlier but I’m just going to mention now. Some of this might be handy for teaching at some point:

• “A guide to writing better emails.” Nothing earth-shattering here, but good advice nonetheless.
• The curious and odd ProfEssays site. I’m not sure how I came across this, but I think it is interesting and odd and strange that this paper mill’s web site has as much information as it has about plagiarism.
• A review of a book called Proust and the Squid. Sounds like a cool book. Here’s the first paragraph from the review:
  

  For most people, reading is a taken for granted skill. The purpose of Proust and the Squid is to reveal the magic and mystery of reading and its pathologies. This everyday activity is not natural, and is a recent development from an evolutionary perspective. There is no ‘reading center’ in the brain, but something a lot more enigmatic, an acquired way of using existing structures and connections. New imaging technology shows startling differences between dyslexics and others, differences that illuminate the journey to literacy as never before. It is only 6000 years since humans trained their brains to read, and during that time they have improved on the process to such a staggering degree that the modern child takes 2000 days to achieve a degree of literacy that took 2000 years to develop. The dark cloud on the horizon is another human invention of staggering genius: digitalization. This most economic of information systems was made possible by the very thing it now threatens: the ability to read.

• “How to start writing quality articles for blogs and article marketing.” This is a little too much in the “get rich quick with your blog writing” category of things for me, but still some interesting advice in this little piece. Might be good for Writing for the WWW.
• This link and this link go to popular press stories about a study some folks did about why people read blogs. I haven’t had a chance to look at all the details yet, but it looks interesting for all kinds of different reasons, and it looks like what they are arguing is that blog reading is practiced as “a habit,” and that there is a fuzzy line between blog writing and reading. All of which falls in line with my BAWS project. This might also make for good WWWW reading.
• Finally, WEbook, which I just stumbled across. It looks like a collaborative book writing site. I dunno, maybe that’s one way to get the ol’ scholarly work done, throw it out there on this site and see if other people will do the writing for me.

Via the wpa-l mailing list, I learned about two different and oddly related articles out there in the blogosphere: “What Is a Composition and Rhetoric Doctorate?” from Inside Higher Ed and “What is Rhet/Comp for?” from Mark Bauerlein in the CHE. The IHE article is reporting on a session from the current CCCCs about the “split” between composition and rhetoric, the future of PhD programs in the field, and the shift into more “media” and technology oriented kinds of things. The Bauerlein piece, basically, is him wondering why it is that the field of comp/rhet, when they should have the answer for solving writing problems in the workplace and everywhere else, is worrying about things like social justice, identity, inequality, etc.

Nothing new under the sun down there in NOLA, as far as I can tell.
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A handy and recent article from The New Yorker that might be good for English 444 this spring, “The News Business: Out of Print.”

… but it’s the only one I know of from a fish sock puppet:

Via Johndan, via boingboing.

I haven’t had time to read this yet, but it looks like it might be something pretty cool to play around with this spring in ENGL 444, or maybe even next week in ENGL 516: hypertextopia, which I came across via Grand Text Auto and if:book. I have to say that personally I agree with the if:book folks: as a reader, I am not really a fan of hypertext fiction. As a writer though, I think it’s a fun form to play with. Maybe it’s the “writerly-ness” of the form, a way of reading and writing that would have pleased Barthes to no end. Interesting and intellectually stimulating, but not exactly a page turner on the beach.

Last week, I posted about protests by grad students at the University of Iowa about putting their theses up online. Apparently, the MFA students won. And thus the title of this post.

(Deep sigh, followed by chuckle.)

For what it’s worth, my dissertation has been online for about 12 years now. Now, for a bunch of reasons I won’t go into now, I wasn’t really thinking about turning it into a book. But if I had tried to make it into a book (I think its too late at this stage), I would have had to revise to a point where I would have ended up writing a new book based on the diss, meaning that the print version would be notably different from the online version. I think this is pretty much par for the course for anyone trying to take a thesis or a dissertation to the next level, creative or not. Conversely, I can think of nothing but good things that have come from putting my diss up online. A couple of different scholarly things have come my way over the years because of this, I get emails from people who stumble across the site once in a while, and I still get around 100-150 hits a week on the site. So for me, putting my diss up online had no downsides and modest positives.

I appreciate that these MFA folks are hoping to be the next Vonnegut or ZZ Packer or something. But I dunno, this guy seems to do okay and he puts all of his fiction out there for free.

Via my friend Chris and via boing-boing comes this “Sweded” version of Star Wars:

Oh, where to begin?

First off, this is why I want to very much see the here and gone almost immediately movie, Be Kind Rewind. As the wikipedia entry suggests, the plot of the movie involves the characters remaking the videos in a rental store, and, when customers complain about the remakes, which are like the one above, the excuse offered is that the videos are from Sweden. Or something like that– I have yet to see the movie.

Second, I think this would be a fun way to spend the afternoon with Will and some of his friends. Not this particular afternoon, but I can see the film maker in me yet….

And third, I actually think this might be a kind of cool assignment for some of the writing classes I teach, particularly English 328. I am imagining something like asking students, working in small groups, to make a 2 minute or less “sweded” version of something. It could be a pop movie, or, if I wanted it to fit more in the theme of the class, maybe it could be of a style and/or grammar rule, maybe a writing “tip” of some sort. We have the cheap cameras and (I think?) things like iMovie to make this work. Then students would have to write about the experience in terms of the process, what this different kind of “writing” says about more conventional “words in a row” writing, etc.

I don’t know, I think this is just crazy enough to work.

I haven’t seen the whole piece, though this might be one I will actually track down through the library or through the paper version we get in the English department: see “U. of Iowa Writing Students Revolt Against a Plan They Say Would Give Away Their Work on the Web” in The Chronicle of Higher Education. The gist of it (at least I think) is in these two sentences: “Graduate students in the University of Iowa’s writing programs are up in arms. A new university procedure, they fear, will make their novels, plays, and other creative works—done as dissertations—freely available on the Web.”

Thus the title of this entry.

I was an undergraduate and English major at the University of Iowa way back when, and the creative writing program was of course as legendary then as it is now. In fact, I am sure that the whole vibe was what inspired me to pursue an MFA in creative writing. I applied to the Iowa program and of course did not get in– probably because my submission just simply did not rank, but I like to think that they also didn’t want folks from Iowa because they could draw from anywhere. At the end of the day, I went to VCU, I had a great experience there, and, in hindsight, I’m kind of glad I didn’t get into Iowa. Going to a lesser-known program gave me a chance to actually think about writing and not think about the “big contract,” which, rumor had it, was the problem with the Iowa program: too many of the students were looking too far ahead.

Anyway, the path to hell is paved with completely unpublishable MFA dissertations theses, and while I realize that the Iowa students are (arguably) the cream of the crop, I don’t really know where these folks are coming from here. Newsflash: if your goal of going to graduate school is to make money, go to medical school or business school or law school or something. And if you want to make a bunch of money and/or be famous as a writer, well, who knows the formula for that? I know it’s not getting an MFA just by itself. The two people I studied with the most at VCU didn’t have MFAs. Didn’t J.K. Rowling get her start as an unwed mother living on the UK’s equivalent of welfare? Didn’t Stephen King write his first novel while working in a laundromat? Didn’t Faulkner write As I Lay Dying while he was a night watchman at a power plant or something?

I do know two things though. First, an MFA and its thesis, regardless of how excellent it might be, is a long way away from a meal ticket in itself. Yes, there are these stories and legends about folks who were able to take their theses and turn them into publishing deals, but those stories are very few and far between. Second, it seems to me that if you did have this MFA thesis that publishers were clamoring to buy, having it up online for all to see could only be a good thing. A really really good thing.

So think that the one thing that is going to stop some MFA at Iowa from getting that sweetheart deal is electronic publishing of their theses is silly. Or, as I said to begin with, wishful thinking.

I found this via a Facebook ad: Word Clay, a self publishing service with a pretty snazzy-looking interface. And I like the name, Word Clay.

Of course, vanity press er, self published books are worth pretty much diddly-squat in academia and such, but this site and my recent trip to the new Borders (which features a sort of self publishing station in the techno-geek area) makes me wonder: has some marketing study decided that self publishing is the next big thing in the age of the Internets?