Out of Gas

The one thing that I can think of today is the interesting parallel between the difficulty that I have beginning a paper and the difficult I had beginning the mix tape.

I think the content in the middle comes into play much easier - but starting out (and sometimes ending) has been always been a bit tougher. Perhaps this is true not just in writing, but in other forms of language and the arts.

Almost Like a New Language...

I had a lot of fun on Friday...especially when I found the Personal ads in the Isthmus and tried to mold them together. Here's a little bit of what I got...

"Assertive SWM: Fit - I'm looking for a single derstanding and considested in the finer things in about the sexual feeling, art & fine dining. I ated from an over a partner who enjoys the spanking."

"Average SWM, 51, Hair & Eyes, ISO SWM, good hearted womaalian or Jewish heritage ionship."

"Life Begins at 50! to make me their boy for a fun, energetisexy, clean serious/bi-range. iF you enjoy to serve and obey stimulating converme!"

And from two of my papers...

"Barrie immediately hits it off with the family, overburdening government regulation have an overbearing grandmother who stifles special-interest lobbying...constrains piques their interests. While out at the family's (Gilley's 245). The informal economy that he has written a play, which serves as family income of $1.00 per day."

Overall, I think these exercises continue to push the edges of "the box" and allow us to think more abstractly. Hopefully it can help me when reading something that I'm not used to.

Thinking Outside the Box

First, I would just like to make a comment that the fines for littering should be increased dramatically. I am purposing that anyone caught littering be fined $10,000. :)

On that note, I think that our exploration of "traditional" vs. "unorthodox" styles of writing in regards to instruction and composition continues to be interesting. I have to admit, this is one of the few writing classes I've taken that focuses on pushing the outside of the box. A lot of times I can just set up my outline, figure out my talking points, and go to work. It likes building a base-frame of 2x4s and pouring in the cement. But with Scot's work...it's been interesting. And I think that's a small snapshot of what's to come for good writing. For if college is to be a place where critical thinking skills are developed, then writing should also be a place where the box is pushed open. The classics and mechanics can still be taught, but more is needed to help the student become a flexible writer, able to enter the workforce with an array of writing skills.

Hippies!

I really have found the portions of Rhythm Science to be quite interesting.  It is definitely a change of pace.  DJ Spooky comments that people are very resistant towards change, and I have to admit, while I was reading his book I often found myself thinking, "What the hell is this guy talking about?"  It was almost as if I pictured him at one of those poetry sessions you always see on tv...people wearing berets, black turtlenecks, with candles and some funky jazz beat in the background.  Babes.  Beets.  Battlestar Galactica.

I think the approach to a less linear style of writing, and education, is on the rise.  I have met quite a few people that have attended a school in northern Wisconsin called "Conserve School," a place that takes different stylistic approaches when it comes to classroom instruction.  And more and more, I think that these styles, the "think outside of the box" strategies, will continue to form with the evolution of technology and culture.

Just think of how our kids will learn...it will probably be quite different than what we are experiencing today.  I think Rhythm Science is a snapshot of that.

The Free Culture

On April 1st, Google posted a feature that would allow you to go back and timestamp your posts, emails, etc, to the date you wished. Well, I wish that day was Friday, but it is not. It's Monday, but I'll still roll the rock up the hill with the ole' Blog Post.

I found the project to create something without permission to be pretty easy. I think it left open a lot of opportunity, however, to digress, and it was harder to focus your statement because you had access to everything you wanted. I felt myself asking, "Do I want to do say this, or take a shot at this?" With the permission culture piece, I found one theme and decided to stick with it, as it was hard enough to go and find the images for ONE theme, let alone multiple statements.

And perhaps that is reflective of the whole free vs. permission culture as a whole. I felt a lot more restricted with the permission culture, but I still produced something that was satisfactory to me. I just felt that I was almost led down a specific path of what to edit, crop, use, etc.

Then, when remixing a classmate's project, I found it even harder. I was lazy and used powerpoint and created a collage but to take something melded together in Photoshop and remix what has been mixed was difficult. I felt the most restricted here, and even wished I could add somethings to it to enhance my perspective, building on the original work.

This project tied in very nicely with the Free Culture/Permission Culture debate. I think it is possible to function within a Permission Culture and I don't find it as smothering as I originally thought. However, it is more difficult, and I think more people need to learn the rules as it can be quite shady.

See you all in class. :D

The Underground Media Market

A couple weeks ago I made a comment in class wondering how the relationship between the media machines and the public will change over time. If you think about it, as more and more media becomes concentrated and their power becomes greater and greater, they will most likely end up with more rights to protect their property and impose ludicrous fines on those who infringe upon it. However, I wonder if a) not if, but how the relationship between the public and the media will change, and also b) how the public will go about maintaining their free culture.

A free black market, if you will, already exists on the internet, and the more oppressive the companies become in tightening their property, the more "Robin Hood" torrent sites will pop up. iTunes struck a great compromise with this. $.99 is very reasonable. But the more they go after kids that make $10,000/year at $250,000 a pop, and the more they become money-grubbing and blood-thirsty, the less sympathy the public will have for them, and the less successful they ultimately will be.

Will there be, one day, a black market, where internet merchants distribute things for free with masked IP numbers? I don't know too much about it, but I know people who download these things, and then they have special software from keep the RIAA from pinging them. Maybe it has already begun...

Don't think of it as stealing...

So, another week in the books, and another abstract assignment which really allowed me to explore some things that I haven't had the opportunity to previously. For my plagiarism assignment, I chose to write about the lack of science and engineering graduates in the United States. It was a lot tougher than I expected.

My first plan was to find a paper that I previously wrote and touch it up by taking out a number of the citations, taking quotes out of passages, etc. However, I quickly found this to be impossible and unproductive. It was impossible because my voice and the voice of my quoted material were completely different. It would have been a dead giveaway.

Disgruntled, I decided to take a bunch of articles, and a passage from the book The World is Flat by Tom Friedman, and incorporate them into one. What was interesting about this was the effort it took to make my voice similar to theirs. My writing, because it largely citing statistics and making conclusions, was rather void of personality and flair. It blended it with theirs quite nicely. But it was harder to make my style fit theirs than if I would have written the paper on my own to begin with! Cheating should never make anything HARDER. :)

What I could have risked though, if I wrote it in my own voice, was unintentional plagiarism. Because I am not an expert on the topic, and because the research isn't my own, I would basically have to paraphrase any type of study I quoted. I don't know how much of that would equal plagiarism.

The other interesting aspect during my hunt for Courtney's work and vice versa was the plagiarism we found online. For example, Courtney took some of her work from MLB.com. However, when I found the material, it was at collegetickets.com, or something similar to that. It was a cheap knockoff of a website and they failed to quote MLB.com.

There was also specific phrase which Courtney googled from my paper, which led her an exact match in an National Science Board study. However, this exact sentence from the study also showed up word for word in Tom Friedman's book! Although it was one phrase, there was a hint of plagiarism, too. Now, perhaps it is hard to paraphrase the ENTIRE study, but he's a professional and a New York Times bestseller, and he did it.

So I guess we're all guilty, to an extent. This was difficult, more so than ghostwriting, because I had to find a different voice. And it was very interesting to see other's work in the act.

Have a great weekend guys.

Ghostwriting for America

I thought that the ghostwriting experience was easy for me, but it was only because of the circumstances. I chose to ghostwrite my girlfriend, Molly, who is a theatre major here at the UW. She needed to write a reflection/review paper after she saw the musical “The Bachelors.” This was easy for me to write about because I was familiar with her voice, her writing style, theatre in general, and the actors and show that we saw. If I were not familiar with these things, the task would have been far more difficult. Imagine if I had to write a paper in biology or chemistry, something completely out of my realm. Not only would one have to master the tendencies of the author, but one would also have to become familiar of language that is specific to the subject. That can take a lot of time and a LOT of energy, as many who ghostwrote for those with different subjects can attest to. When we started our study of ghostwriters, I thought they were cheap copy-cat artists, someone who just wrote down what was said into a tape recorder and added fluff to it with signature catchphrases. Now I realize that ghostwriting is far more complex. It is more like a cover band. You can’t show up and play the set without learning the music, but you also have to have an appreciation for the band’s history, the stories behind the musicians, the likes-dislikes of the musicians, the fan followings, etc. It’s the same thing with ghostwriters. Not only do you have to worry about pleasing your reader, but you have to please your author as well. This is an interesting dynamic that I have never explored, but I believe that it would be wise for academia to discuss it more often with students.



I am debating currently whether or not I should go to law school. But if I don’t go to law school, what would I do with myself? I’ve worked in radio and sales, so my skills revolve around being a wordsmith. Perhaps I could be a ghostwriter. Something that I’ve been curious about that wasn’t addressed in the articles, I believe, was the issue of how a company trains ghostwriters. Do they have specific divisions for various genres? Is there training in certain fields to make the ghostwriter sound credible? Or is it more like a scene from the old black and white movies…a newspaper editor barking out assignments to his reporters, telling them to cover the junior high bake sale and the other to go interview the mayor. I would assume that they would prefer someone with a background. Maybe there are agencies with specific genres of ghostwriting, like sports, history, pop culture, etc. That would make the most sense.



Don't forget the good behind the ghostwriting as well. It isn't all about going out and putting a celebrity's book out and making millions. There are good people who help those who are new to the country or language fill out forms, or help the disabled with their taxes, etc. It doesn't have to be a product of pop culture. As a political science student, I want to base my senior thesis on the idea of congressional casework and its relationships between constituents. In other words, I want to help government and the taxpayers get more out of each other. Currently caseworkers field calls from people that need help on issues like social security, medicare, immigration, the justice department, etc. But not enough people are educated properly (and it doesn't require going to college) about how their government works and what level of government does what. Often, we receive letters from lawyers trying to push things forward. Why not take my ideas and combine them? Not only could we fill in the information gaps that result in constituent frustration and ultimately, apathy, from the public (thinking government doesn't do anything for them), but we could also use ghostwriters to help folks fill out the forms! Sure, some forms need lawyers (maybe that's why I should go to law school, a ghostwriting lawyer), but not everything requires legal counsel. We could boost satisfaction, improve efficiency, and strengthen democracy! Now THAT'S change you can believe in!



I am going to go out on a limb here and say that I appreciate ghostwriting. I actually want to learn more about it, because it may be art in itself. Someone who is a ghostwriter must be tremendously gifted in social settings. You have to pay attention to what people do and how they do it. You have to know mannerisms and speech patterns, etc. I do think that it is possible to become disenfranchised. If it is your work and you are putting someone else’s name on it, then maybe they will take advantage of you. But imagine it from a different view. If you were a fan of the Packers, wouldn't you love to be Brett Favre’s best friend for a while and write his life story? Wouldn’t that be the ultimate honor? I am very happy we studied this topic. I respect the wordsmiths of the world. Perhaps some day this might be something for me.

Springtime for Hitler and Germany

I think the University should install an artificial sun to melt away all the snow and make it 72 degrees and pleasant at all times. Surely, someone is the sciences can do it. Please? Anyone?

It's amazing that we're on our FIFTH week of classes already...which means that we're a third of the way to a glorious summer, which will be, as aforementioned, 72 degrees and pleasant at all times.

Anyway, onto my two thoughts for the week.

1) This is from the Independent article that we are reading for Friday. Since my blog in informal, I will provide the link and it will be sufficient enough for my unique form of citation. After all, if Barthes proclaimed the death of an author, MLA must have gone with it. "In this struggle to separate an aesthetic debt from straightforward larceny, everything hangs on the intentions of the plagiarist. A popularising author who chances on an abstruse work by an obscure academic, takes its themes, structures and intellectual viewpoint and sells half a million copies on the back of this expropriation has clearly stepped over the line, but what about the innocent act of homage."

I think INTENT is very important in determining a student's punishment/lesson for plagiarism. And what if by intent, it is merely an imitation of a writing style, not an actual word-for-word theft? For instance, assume you watched a lot of Star Wars and you annoyingly spoke like Yoda all the time. "The death of the author, it is." Would I then be stealing the ideas of George Lucas? Most likely, no, I'd just be an idiot. But then would legitimate paraphrasing of another kind warrant discipline? I guess that's not for me to decide.

2) "If it appears to an instructor that you might be involved in an incident of academic misconduct-for example, cheating on an exam, plagiarizing a paper, or interfering with another student's lab work-the instructor will invite you to meet to discuss the situation.*" This is from the University website regarding academic misconduct. Note that there is an asterisk, and nowhere on the page does it list what the asterisk is supposed to mean. I'm just saying.

Ghostwriter! WORD!

I'll try to refrain from making references to the PBS show Ghostwriter, which was one of the highlights of my childhood.

Anyway, I was really surprised to find out how much ghostwriting takes place in today's literary world. I requested a few books for Christmas (I enjoy reading non-fiction) and they were: Al Gore's Assault on Reason (I can't find the underline tool) and Stephen Colbert's I Am America: And So Can You! And it hits me that both of these books were probably ghostwritten.

I really believe the name on the front of the cover is what sells the book. Do we ever think that ghostwriting will become unacceptable in the public's eye? What kind of situation would cause that? Some good food for thought, I guess.

See you all in class.

Plugged in to the world, Disconnected from Reality

I thought the article on cell phones was quite interesting.

I was fortunate enough to give a commencement speech last year at UW - Fond du Lac, a smaller, two-year college that flows in to the four year UWs. The focus of my speech was really community...and perhaps the loss of it.

Texting is one way that we can instantly plug in and get information, but then also choose to remain socially distant. I can claim my phone was on silent and in my pocket and I can choose to ignore whomever. But I can also make plans on a dime...such a dilemma.

But ultimately, I think some elements of community might be slipping. Civic engagement and involvement is rather lackluster in the United States - Madison is a unique place. I don't believe a lot of folks know their neighbors, and TV has replaced the need to go out and visit people. You can unplug your mind and just sit there...forever.

Likewise, although you must choose your music on an iPod or actively think to play a video game, perhaps that social detachment is causing today's children to lose ground in everything from handwriting ability and paper-writing skills, to social interaction and etiquette.

I never grew up in the Americana where the neighbors brought us pies and we visited on front porches and the neighborhood kids played baseball until it was dark. (We lived in the country.) Perhaps that has evolved and hasn't been lost. But I do see people afraid to talk to each other and unwilling to participate. They are plugged in, but disconnected from reality.

The Ivory Tower

I think Scott (the student, I believe the professor's name only has one "T") generated some interesting discussion in class the other day, and I'd like to expand with my thoughts.

Scot's (the professor) explanation of structuralism into poststructuralism allowed me to put the high culture / low culture debate into a contemporary context. Even though information is more accessible to the masses than ever, the notion of the intelligentsia still exists. And I think it becomes very confusing when we start talking about art, including literature.

If you think about the music you listen to - consider the different genres. Country music is made for the masses...apple pie, tear in your beer, golden retriever, God-lovin type music. And there isn't anything wrong with that. But then think about when you listen to NPR. Their voice suddenly becomes more distinguished...their vocabulary more assorted...and if you don't know the difference between Schubert's 16th Opus in D minor and Beethoven's Sonata in G, then maybe NPR isn't a place for listeners like you.

Think about the art you look at. We all enjoy a Starry Night, but I have a feeling most of us have gone to an art museum, saw a bunch of splattered paint on the wall, and thought, "Boy, my 5-year-old cousin could do that." Perhaps we are more attuned to the structuralist in this case.

Think about the movies we watch. Some of us enjoy indie films - and scoff and a certain director's work. Others just enjoy a movie and try not to be too critical. I happen to be in the latter...but that's still no excuse for Meet the Spartans.

Think about the theatre, and whether it is theatRE or theatER...and whether or not it's the opera or if it's Grease. The lady with a fancy dress who watches with little binoculars from the balcony isn't going enjoy any Greased Lightning.

So you see, all of us are at different spots on the structuralist-poststructural grid. We place ourselves above or below each other in different artistic categories. It takes all types, I guess.

Oh, and one more thing...how many times have you heard from people in the crowd at a sporting event, "Can't they just sing the national anthem how it was written? Why do they have to butcher it?"

My point exactly.

What a hat!

Hello all -

My name is Joe. I'm a 22-year-old Junior from Fond du Lac, WI. I'm majoring in political science and am hoping to go to law school...but the law school gig is starting to fade away somewhat. My current major goal is to apply for a Rhodes Scholarship this fall. I'm a political junkie - so this is a really good time of year for me. However, I must say I'm most disappointed that Green Bay won't be going to the Super Bowl. Here's hoping Brett Favre will return for a few more years.

Everyone has been writing really interesting things...so I'll try to post some oddball things about me to spark some conversation. I worked for a couple of years as an on-air announcer at a group of radio stations, I have ring announced for a professional wrestling promotion (perhaps it's better to not ask about that, lol), and I'm afraid I'm addicted to Diet Pepsi. Literacola.

See you all tomorrow.

Joe