Hey! Upon receiving a hilarious email from a student last night, some notes on how to discuss rhetoric, discourse without resorting to a phrase like "good manners."

NOTES. 

Late last night, I received this email from a student:

Hey,I'm looking at my schedule and trying to determine where our class will be meeting. Under the tab on the scheduling software labeled "schedule details" it says: "Location: None Building: None Room: None"

One bad email can get a person thinking. Even one not-so-bad email can wreak havoc on relationships. Considering the new freshman's words, written hours before embarking on his college career, I remembered James Paul Gee's famous line, "All discourse is like an identity kit." My student's identity kit might make him come off as sloppy and rude to a mean(er) professor. And, since the student's style was not at all unusual, I was hoping to use his words as a lesson. Hey.

Thinking of the line from Gee, I began kicking around the identity/discourse angle. Blogger Natasha Wickenheiser has clearly done some work in this area. Here she rounds up these excellent quotations from Gee’s Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics. Wickenheiser, an English prof in Bloomington, can be found discussing Discourse and many other cool topics on her Wordpress blog, Scrapbooked Inquiries.

1. “[Language] is not just about how you say it, but what you are and do when you say it” (525).
2. “At any moment we are using language we must say or write the right thing in the right way while playing the right social role and (appearing) to hold the right values, beliefs, and attitudes. Thus, what is important is not language, and surely not grammar, but saying (writing)-doing-being-valuing-believing combinations” (526).
3. “A Discourse is a sort of ‘identity kit’ which comes complete with the appropriate costume and instructions on how to act, talk, and often write, so as to take on a particular role that others will recognize” (526).
4. “Discourses are not mastered by overt instruction…but by enculturation into social practices through scaffolded and supported interaction with people who have already mastered the Discourse (Cazden, 1988; Heath, 1983)” (527).
5. “After our initial socialization in our home community, each of us interacts with various non-home-based social institutions–institutions in the public sphere, beyond the family and immediate kin and peer group” (527).
6. “I believe that any socially useful definition of ‘literacy’ must be couched in terms of the notion of Discourse. Thus, I define ‘literacy’ as the mastery of or fluent control over a secondary Discourse” (529).
7. ““Classroom instruction (in language, composition, study skills, writing, critical thinking, content-based literacy, or whatever) can lead to meta-knowledge, to seeing how the Discourses you have already got relate to those you are attempting to acquire, and how the ones you are trying to acquire relate to self and society” (532).
8. “It is sometimes helpful to say that individuals do not speak and act, but that historically and socially defined discourses speak to each other through individuals” (539).
9. “Children from non-mainstream homes often do not get the opportunities to acquire dominant secondary discourses–including those connected with the school–in their homes, due to their parents’ lack of access to these discourses” (541).
   
   

My student was telling me an enormous amount about their identity--family and immediate peer group--as well as their confidence in their discourse--as well as where their composition professor falls in this realm. The only problem? Their assumptions are wrong. They're playing on university turf now. As Gee intimates, there's no half-way mastery of a discourse.

On a related note, Wickenheiser has a blog post on Lisa Delpit, an education theorist grappling with student identity and the politics of teaching the "dominant" discourse. In Other People's Children, Delpit writes that teachers 

“must understand that students who appear to be unable to learn are in many instances choosing to ‘not-learn,’ as Kohl puts it, choosing to maintain their sense of identity in the face of what they perceive as a painful choice between allegiance to ‘them’ or ‘us.’ The teacher, however, can reduce this sense of choice by transforming the new discourse to that it contains within it a place for the students’ selves.”

The thought of a student rejecting arcane prescriptions that have nothing to do with their lives today fills me with as much pain as it does admiration. I'd do the same thing, of course. There are discourses I've said hell no to. But when money and class come into the equation, as they generally do, race is along for the ride, and this white lady has been painfully conscious of the conundrum (and not terribly articulate about it) on several campuses. Forcing my white-lady discourse on others was most concerning, especially when I was teaching creative writing to a few fabulously creative kids with rotten grammar in New Jersey. 

I think of the kids still. All the Yeats I gave them. Ugh. Hey.

In speaking of the earth, a poet beats the New York Times (again)

This week The Times devoted their Sunday magazine to a single article, which I only scanned, about how we (they?) didn't address climate change last century. Now some of my Facebook friends are arguing about the essay and about the real (real) cause of our failure to fix. I think it's too late for all of it, and maybe impossible anyway, and our only recourse is poetry.

Fortunately, poetry is quite a recourse. Poets.org has just published a brill pair of stanzas on and around the topic from Marcella Durand. Read from The Prospect here; below are a few lines that work like a surgeon on the situation, opening its ugliness cleanly to take stock.

                                                          I finally understand

what we’re doing, in this moment of glowing darkness I understand 

       what I put in the water I drink the water and if together 

       we are all getting hot we are making it hot and I must find 

       my way to the water 

The other night someone asked if I had a blog.

The other night someone asked me if I had a blog, and I've been thinking about the question, off and on, ever since. I told him about this blog, but I as easily could have told him about the poetry blog on blogger, Ab Chaos Poesis, which is mostly for the daily draft poems during poetry month, but now is a warehouse for links to other poems I've written and published on the web. Or I might have told him about Ab Chaos Iter, the wordpress travel writing blog started when writing for Travel Weekly and other trade magazines, now mostly abandoned.

No doubt this fellow was only trying to be polite. He couldn't have cared that I have three blogs, four if you count the one started just after marrying that I can't even find any more. (How many abandoned, ignored blogs are also forgotten by their authors?) So I conflated them and told him about the poetry blog but told him its name was Ab Chaos Lex. Lies still come very easily to me. And just today, after wasting a lot of time on my phone with the news, I thought I should take a look at the blogs, since it's been a while.

In a perfect world, my three blogs would be one blog, this one. I still like the name, its lifting from Finnegan's Wake, its play off my own name, and it reminder of my old sneaking certainty that Chaos is not only the mother of this world (thank you Hesiod) but its substance, too. Particularly these days, when the most powerful man in the world (what a world) has a little problem with mood swings.

But mood swings are a cinch, compared to chaos. As Hesiod wrote:

Tell how at the first gods and earth came to be, and rivers, and the boundless sea with its raging swell, [110] and the gleaming stars, and the wide heaven above, and the gods who were born of them, givers of good things, and how they divided their wealth, and how they shared their honors amongst them, and also how at the first they took many-folded Olympus. These things declare to me from the beginning, you Muses who dwell in the house of Olympus, [115] and tell me which of them first came to be. In truth at first Chaos came to be, but next wide-bosomed Earth, the ever-sure foundation of all¹the deathless ones who hold the peaks of snowy Olympus, and dim Tartarus in the depth of the wide-pathed Earth, [120] and Eros （Love）, fairest among the deathless gods, who unnerves the limbs and overcomes the mind and wise counsels of all gods and all men within them. From Chaos came forth Erebus and black Night; but of Night were born Aether²and Day, [125] whom she conceived and bore from union in love with Erebus. And Earth first bore starry Heaven, equal to herself, to cover her on every side, and to be an ever-sure abiding-place for the blessed gods...

Still Chaos isn't what I was thinking of when I opened my computer today. All afternoon, I'd been flipping through my phone's Washington Post app, squinting at the news and thinking of the limits of love (fairest among the deathless gods). Hate is not generative, as everyone knows, whereas love is--that's agreed upon. Even though it "overcomes the mind and wise counsels of all gods." Or maybe because of that overcoming. Still, love is not much better than hate in the face of the world described by the Washington Post.

No, in the face of this news, we need poetry. Lots of poetry. So I scooted around the web and landed upon this recording of a poem by Charles Bernstein, "Ballad Laid Bare by its Devices." It begins:

Somethin’ ’bout sound

Repeatin’ in degree

        A voice not mine

Singin’ as a we.

I've heard him read the piece, written for the 2017 MLA convention, and found a fulsome pleasure in its full displeasure. This urbane New York language poet mockingly considers the ballad while creating one, dropping his gs all friendly-like, and using it to critique a little post election pain as well as the current disaster in the academy. He even references my very fave Malcolm X speech.

A ballot says, this is what we want.

A bullet does that too.

A ballad’s just lousy fantasy 

Goin’ out from an us to a youse.

The effect was painful, for this listener. Toward the end, he recites lines from "Lord Randall," an actual border ballad that pretty well sings his song (mine too):

I ha been to the wild wood; mak my bed soon; 

I’m wearied wi hunting, and fain wad lie doun. 

Oh, yes, I am poisoned; mak my bed soon 

I’m sick at the heart, and fain wad lie doun.

We are poisoned here, and maybe we always were, or maybe it's been rising like the temperatures, the oceans; the border ballad lines (from two different stanzas) fit well. In all, cycle of the poem somehow cradles the incredible exhaustion of this moment, verse and voice vexed. And though I recommend listening first, here is a text of the poem, located on Critical Inquiry.

(Maybe the reason I don't blog is that, when I do, I write about three blogs, politics, Hesiod, squeeze in the name of Malcolm X, conclude on a poem by a male poet and still feel like I haven't begun.)