Ten minutes on January 24, 2008

Ten minutes on January 24, 2008
A shorty

Rain, rain rain. Sometimes rain is the perfect context for reading and today was that day. I read read read: a bunch of Critical Practice by Catherine Belsey, much of it in a café with greenhouse windows that leaked, so I sat away from the counter as water occasionally dripped down onto my plate, hitting the organic chocolate brownie I half consumed along with the macchiato. Critique of expressive realism; critique of the various attempts to reply to expressive realism: New Criticism in the 30s, Northrop Frye’s mythic work in the 50s, Iser’s reader-response theory, theories of “interpretive communities” by Stanley Fish. Post-Saussurean linguistics and their relationship to radical critiques of ideology. How identity is socially constructed, is constituted in and from language, and the implications of this. The rain kept up, a torrent, and the language poured out, a torrent of analysis, and yet strangely comforting. The relentless activity of a human mind attempting to think its way out of a variety of complicated epistemological, political and subjective boxes. At the end of the reading, the putting away of the dishes, the chat with the barista, the satisfying ring around the white ceramic demitasse.

From these lofty heights of analysis I could look down upon the material practices of my day: ordering parts for my vacuum cleaner (which the voice recognition bot at Sears can’t recognize so it gave me computers; the word it knows is “carpet cleaner.” Like I always say, if there is artificial intelligence, then there must be artificial stupidity.”). Sending the wrong parts back at the Post Office and watching the rain test the entire concept of “neither rain, nor…” Looking for a digital recorder to send to my brother so he can talk into it and make an art project for the two of us. Getting money. Getting new tires from Lloyd’s. Getting my teeth cleaned and getting praised for my flossing and brushing (it always makes me feel about 8, but in a good way: I get a gold star!!).

Then more reading as Bailey does his homework (he wrote the longest paragraph tonight, on myth; maybe this writing stuff is catching! And right after Ginny and I talked about Bruno’s resistance to the writing in his classes…) Tannen’s great book On Conversational Style. So much overlap between her analysis of conversation and Belsey’s analysis of ideology and language, though I imagine no one would ever suspect it on the surface.

I love this book. She explains all sorts of key terms in Discourse Analysis, cites the important studies. Like the one where they showed that both Chicano and White teachers praised white children more in class. But then they did a follow up and found that Chicano teachers praised the Chicano children too, but in private where it would not hurt the solidarity and community of the classroom. They also thanked the children for performing well for the teacher. White teachers emphasized performing not for the teacher but for the individual; praise in the classroom fostered competition. And the key notion of distance in language came up; the Chicano language use is connected to their physical relation with the children (holding them, calling them pet names) while much of the white school language is about distancing the subjective from the formal.

I love language; I love it like a warm bath and like a Hawaiian swimming hole, like the little nook at Natural Bridges Mark  showed us one night, tucked in behind the beach and up among the trees, and like the wide wide open breakers at Rio del Mar, the vast vast stretch of language as it rolls in on countless interactions every day…