NYCMidnight Finals: Gentrified Chivalry

Ty picked at the deadened red slit of the coin slot. The dark screen of the Ms. Pac-Man game was more of a table now than anything; it hadn’t worked for as long as the nine-year-old boy could recall. Still, someone had tried to play it recently, managing to leave a quarter behind for anyone dedicated enough to dig it out. While poking for the coin, Ty’s feet scuffed along a tile floor thick with stains from thirty years of moms, kids, vagrants, and who knew what else. Yet the smell of warm clothes and bleach gave the illusion of sanitized safety.

“It aint comin’ out,” Lea said as she looked on with bored annoyance. “Ya gonna waste all the time before we gotta fold more clothes.”

Ty looked up. Long, straight waves of black hair framed a round face rich with indignation; indignation amplified by her slight edge in height over Ty and how quickly she now seemed to lose interest in all the games they’d played over the years. For as long as Ty and his mom had come to the mat on 5th and Trinity, so had Lea and the older sister who raised her.

The Laundromat wasn’t much to look at: two walls with three dryers each connected by a back wall of eight washers, only five that worked. A little room in the back right corner served as both bathroom and storage closet.

“I can get it,” Ty insisted. He didn’t look up at her, didn’t want to see if she believed or not. “Just give me a second. You said you wanted a gumball, and this is the easiest way.”

“Jus’ ask yer mom,” Lea sighed. She nodded to where Ty’s mother sat in a row of faded orange plastic chairs welded to the floor. Her eyes were closed for now, but his mother would pop them open the moment the washer stopped.

Ty’s nails turned white from being pulled away from the ebony tips of his fingers just before he lost his tenuous grip on the coin yet again. He shook his head and mumbled a curse. “She won’t give it to me, and I don’t want to ask.”

“Why not? She lets ya get stuff now and then. I seen it. Least when Ray aint around. I’d ask my sister, but who knows when she’ll be back.”

Ty shook his head. He wasn’t about to tell Lea how his mother’s description of her and her sister had gone from ‘Caribbean white’ to ‘white enough to fit in’ as the new buildings had gone up the last year. Buildings that had changed the neighborhood, bringing pockets of new families while others he had always known disappeared. His stepfather Ray actually liked the changes, but that only led to fights Ty didn’t want to think about, too distracting. “I want to do it myself.”

“Why?” she asked. “All ya gotta do is ask. Jus’ say it’s for you.”

He expected to meet a stern, I’m-the-one-making-sense glare, but a little smile greeted him. The ever-present flicker of the florescent lights let the smile dance a bit into her amber eyes. His feet scuffed the floor a little more quickly. Recently she always seemed a step ahead of him—another thing that annoyed him.

“King Arthur,” he said.

“What?” Her smile slipped away.

“My uncle teaches this class, and he told me about this guy, King Arthur.”

“I know who King Arthur is,” she scolded.

“Anyway,” Ty said. “King Arthur has everything—money, a cool house, and the hottest girl. But when the girl wants anything, he sends some other guy.”

“Like Richard Gere in that movie,” she nodded.

“Um, okay, Lancelot is what my uncle calls him.” Ty lowered his voice a bit as his mother shifted.

“Right, Richard Gere. It’s a kinda old movie, but you should watch it sometime.”

“And who ends up with the respect and the queen?”

“In the movie they all jus’ sorta get in trouble.”

“In the story my uncle tells, Lancelot saves the day again and again because he’s the one who does stuff?”

Her smile returned, but more mischievous. “So all ya wanna be is a white knight?”

Ty stuck his tongue out at her, eliciting a laugh from both. A slight stir and cluck from his mother subdued the two into more whispered giggles.

“I have an idea,” Ty said, standing up and walking to the bathroom. He shuffled around in the contents of an old wooden toolbox before puling out an old hammer with a splintering handle that he had to carry in both hands. “Perfect.”

“You are not going to try and break it open!” Lea pleaded in a hushed voice as he came back to the arcade console.

“No, this should be easy.” He placed the prongs of the hammer’s head near the coin slot’s edge. Slipping in the metal prongs as best he could, Ty pulled hard.

At first nothing happened.

Lea grinned a bit. “Why don’t ya let me try?”

Ty frowned and pulled again, every bit of determination going into his thin wrists. He slowly felt something give, and in anticipated triumph, wrenched the hammer with all his might.

The little plastic bit popped out and the quarter with it. Lea’s excited squeal woke up Ty’s mom, who cocked her head at the boy. He answered with a shrug, not breaking eye contact once as Lea retrieved the quarter, gave him a peck on the cheek, and skedaddled out the door with a ring of the bell.

“Boy, what was that all about?” his mom asked with that voice of hers that always left him wondering how much she knew and for how long.

“I was about to fix it momma, just needed to get the quarter out for Lea.”

“You better fix it before them clothes dry. You get used to it right now that you can break all the hearts you want, ‘cept your momma’s.”

Round 3 NYCMidnight CWC2008

Carthago Delendum Est

The scent of mustard seed drew the old man toward a garishly painted tent thick in the city's now sleeping bazaar. Even in a night lit by little more than the celestial eyes of gods and monsters, he noted the script upon the canvas advertising one of Libyssa's few Corinthian doctors. At least he hoped the lettering noted such. A mild curse escaped the man’s lips for spending so much time in the East without learning the Hellenic print. Yet, a hesitant glance into the dark tent confirmed his destination.

"Come, come," invited the voice of a pudgy little Greek. The Corinthian’s head was bent over a table loaded with burning incense so that the blonde crescent moon of hair atop his head frowned at the tent's entry flap. "Just a moment while I finish my preparations, but you may take a seat."

The Corinthian pointed at a plain wooden stool resting in the center of the tent's earthen floor. A thin layer of straw and loose soil covered the compacted dirt beneath.

A fresh layer of straw and soil, the elderly visitor realized. "You cleaned for me?"

"I did," the Corinthian said with a nod. "The process can cause quite a mess. Thus, I prefer to start in a place of more perfect form."

"How Aristotelian," he mused before resting upon the stool. With a smile, the old man quickly added, "I have not read any of Aristotle’s work, before you prattle on. But I am old and prefer to die without this pain in my tooth."

The little Corinthian returned his smile and nodded. From under the table, the doctor brought out a brown blanket. He lifted the large hide cloth, revealing straps of dried sheep gut along the edges of the coat. "You should wear this jacket—to ease the daimonos within you, those little spirits of unease that can grip the inner coil. It wraps around and I tie these ends to keep you calm and settled. It also keeps one clean."

The old man noted that the brown discoloration covering the coat appeared to be caked blood.

"Do you know me?" he asked the Corinthian.

"Yes, Son of Tunisia, I know you. Hecate whispers to her faithful at all crossroads to avoid the paths you travel. Word of your arrival fills any city you visit, ignites with each army you raise to shake at the Great Senate and its Empire of the West. Does hearing such make you feel more able to rest easy in my chair?"

"No, not much. But you cannot expect me to wear this coat." While he ignored the reference to Rome, it burned within him to respond. The world had changed so much during his lifetime to see a Greek piling praise upon their Western colonial spawn. "A little more blood on this old body will not matter."

"Very well, Great General." He tossed the splattered piece of hide back under the table. "Please, sit. And open wide."

Mouth agape, the general had little choice but to look up at the tent’s roof. An urn of oil burned at the end of a small chain. The links looked brass in the light, but that might only have been the amber reflection of flame.

“Oh, this is exquisite,” the Corinthian murmured. “These bands behind your teeth, are they copper?”

A slight scraping across the roof of the general’s mouth accompanied the taste of wood on his tongue. The thought that the Corinthian might try and adjust his teeth with only fire-hardened twigs almost caused the old man to blanch.

He moved a hand to the doctor’s chest and pushed him back. “It’s an Etruscan invention. At least an Etruscan built the device. They are the teeth of a Roman tribune, taken many years ago, banded together to replace the teeth I lost at Cannae.”

The doctor went back to his table. “I will need to remove it. Something has caused swelling between the tribune’s teeth and your own ridges.” From one of the burning urns of incense he pulled a thin-bladed chisel of iron. “Do not worry, I anoint such implements regularly in a ritual to Hephaestus. They remain sharp and precise.“

As the doctor approached, the general made note of a silhouette that stopped outside the tent. The figure did not enter, but the broad shoulders and short cape left little doubt as to the nature of the soldier behind the flap.

“Tell me, doctor, for what will you be remembered?” the general asked.

The doctor paused, chisel in hand. “Perhaps I will be known for bringing knowledge of this Etruscan invention to my fellow Greeks. Do you worry about how you will be remembered, General?”

The general nodded toward the tent entrance. “My time for such concerns has come to an end. Our good King Prusias, Prusias the Lame, has offered me to your Great Senate of the West. And a Roman assassin now awaits outside your tent. I am forever set as the man who stole the annals of time from the grasp of Mother Africa and gifted them to the blade and fire of Rome.”

“The time when we Greeks might be so dramatic has long passed,” the doctor said, leaning close. “Now, there is work we should finish here.”

The general gripped the doctor’s hand between his own in a sudden motion that caused the little
man to yelp. “I give you one last chance to spite the Romans as their greed siphons your culture and beliefs. Promise me only that you will not sell my gift, nor hand it to this Roman assassin. Bury it when you are done, in a swift river, knowing that what once belonged to a tribune entered eternity as part of my spirit.”

The Corinthian nodded, and with a sudden gesture, the general rammed the blade deep into his own throat. He did not gurgle as the doctor turned away from the spray.

“Sic transit Hannibal,” the shaken doctor whispered.

One Meme Wiki

Beyond Ideographic Nationalism in Collectives

McGee in "Ideographs" suggests that nations build shared societal concepts along the lines of certain words and phrases. His examples are strikingly political: liberty, rule by law, equality, trial by jury. His comparisons of these elements juxtaposes nations, mainly the USSR and the USA, as having completely different definitions for these terms while stating that intra-national differences are just nuances. Discourses of corporations, artists, educators, criminals, entertainers, and so on are ignored or dismissed in the face of purely political concepts. The hierarchy of McGee's world comes through loud and clear.

At his point, I should note that McGee's definition of rhetoric suggests only the realm of the civic and political--his work entitled, "Text, Context, and the Fragmentation of Contemporary Culture" further establishes this belief by rejecting poetics and literature as rhetoric. This is a stance I fundamentally resist, and hope this assists in explaining, particularly because once we ban high art discourse from the realm of rhetoric, we also ban low art and its massive influence upon popular culture and its pull upon popular discourses within societies and across them.

In McGee's world humanity is divided along national societies who share set Ideographs among the citizens and those ideas are unique to each society, there can be no shared ideology across nations using his examples. I expect this might be a flaw he would refute, but the work makes its case clear: nation exist as supremely complete discourses were ruler and ruled are subject to the structure of the ideographs, but segments of nations only vary slightly upon these ideographs and do not truly divide amongst themselves except at the aforementioned level of international discourse.

Similarly, the piece acknowledges dissent, but doesn't explain how dissent can occur. If Ideographs occur due to national ideology constraining the dialogue around accepted verbiage, how do we explain dissent? McGee is happy to just claim the majority shapes the ideology and that the elite and the base are both subject to these majority themes. However, he must admit dissent occurs even though he opts not to explain it.

All that said, our world now suggests that there are global memes/ideographs/concepts.

Consider this from Wikipedia.

The Wikipedia project suffers systemic bias that
naturally grows from its contributors' demographic groups, manifesting as
imbalanced coverage of a subject. This project aims to control and
(possibly) eliminate the cultural perspective gaps made by the systemic
bias, consciously focusing upon subjects and point of view neglected by the
encyclopedia as a whole. A list of articles needing attention is in the CSB
Open Tasks list.

Wikipedia presents a collection of entries capable of being edited by anyone with Internet access to the site. The site even offers more than a dozen language options. Yet, bias rules the content along demographic lines. However, one must note that demographic does not mean nationality exclusively. In fact, Internet access lines are more likely divided along rural-urban lines and economic lines, though elements of national infrastructure do play a role. Physical infrastructure, however, does not neatly fall into McGee's construct of Ideograph.

More importantly, for all its demographic bias, Wikipedia shows that International memes (I'll stop using the term Ideograph as they seem to violate McGee's implied restraints) can and do exist. More damning might be that nationalism is a relatively recent societal construct and identifying such a prior to the Enlightenment becomes difficult. For Ideographs to contain the organic meaning McGee suggests a clearer explanation of why the USSR and USA have different Ideographs, but New York and San Marcos do not; especially if pre-national societies such as Sparta and Corinth possessed different Ideographs--or, better, Sparta and Rome. How can Sparta and Rome possess different Ideographs, but New York and San Marcos cannot? It seems unlikely that 'cost of living' invokes the same image to both societies. I doubt that even 'community' actually brings to mind the same ideology to these two American cities, especially given the split heritage of the states that produced them. I would go so far as to say that 'cost of living', 'space', and 'community' evoke closer shared views in New York, London, Hong Kong, and Moscow than they do in San Marcos and New York. I would argue also that concepts of space and community are more fundamental to the daily human experience than the political Ideographs that McGee uses, where as cost of living is on par with them.

To highlight this issue, let us focus on the clear bias of Wikipedia, and it's non-national elements, particularly regarding non-political discourse.

From the wikis own Origin of Bias in Wikipedia section:

The average Wikipedian on
English Wikipedia is (1) a man, (2) technically inclined, (3) formally educated,
(4) an English speaker (native or non-native), (5) white, (6) aged
15–49, (7) from a nominally Christian country, (8)
from an industrialized nation, (9) from the Northern Hemisphere,
and (10) likely employed as an intellectual rather than as a labourer (cf. Wikipedia:User
survey and Wikipedia:University
of Würzburg survey, 2005).

More than the bias of national doctrine, what we see is bias of access. Groups with more ability or reason to access the Net also control the direction of Wikipedia. This bias of access suggests a key to illuminating McGee's point more accurately in that access to an ideology will tend to bias one towards engagement of that ideology. However, it may not bias the engager toward acceptance or rejection. McGee makes good points about discourse controlling speaker and audience and that engagement in discourse can direct group behavior along the lines of the discourse. However, again, ignoring that is a discourse with dissent harms his case, and ignoring that it is actually thousands of discourses who overlap and obscure and omit, also harms his stance. McGee's ignoring of the systems of communication limits the effectiveness of his analysis.

If discourse using Ideographs/memes does bias you toward acceptance, then rejection must be explained to understand the full nature of the bias toward acceptance. One example is the contradictory values of personal freedom and economic dependence on slavery in the USA. Can Ideographs explain the evolution and choice between two ideological causes of prosperity and freedom? The majority of the US now sees freedom as clearly more valuable than prosperity when it comes to slavery, but we also increasingly see freedom as less useful than prosperity when it comes to national security measures such as the Patriot Act. Surely, the existence of rebellion and civil unrest suggests that national Ideography is anything but absolute and stable. To be Unstable, dissent must at some point become the majority and escape the deadlock McGee creates.

Thus McGee is undermined in his two most important claims. First, national memes are transitory, even if transitory over centuries. Secondly, memes exist with powerful influence outside of national discourses on laws and politics. The Ideography of Microsoft is a separate entity faced in the USA, Germany, and Japan. As his Bollywood, the Kyoto Treaty, and the Catholic Church.

McGee's attempts to oversimplify with national rhetoric simply fails to address the issues he attempts. He cannot explain that nature of discourse by ignoring so many discourses or ignoring those who choose to engage in discourses of dissent.

20th Century Take on 21st Century Dialogue

Today I'm going to talk a bit about SXSWi in relation to Bakhtin, Richards, and Burke. More, I'm going to discuss the nature of modern rhetoric and social dialogue as increasingly reliant upon multidimensional forms and referents.

Sarah Lacy, Mark Zuckerberg, and a crowded audience all a twitter walk into a bar. In this case the bar is actually an enormous convention hall in downtown Austin, but everyone involved might have had a better excuse for what transpired if it had been held at a bar.



What transpires isn't fully evident in the video. The audience has twittered itself into a frenzy over Lacy's interview style. She reciprocates their anger afterward in a multitude of ways. This interview with a local Austin reporting right after the incident being one:



Now, keep in mind that Lacy likely has not seen any of the Twitter discussion before either of thse videos. She can't possibly understand the forces at work and isn't in on the discourse her audience has created. Basically, Lacy and the audience are both talking to walls.

Bahktin states that 'The theme is the expression of the concrete, historical situation that engendered the utterance.' But consider the wide-ranging nature of this discourse, because it didn't stop with the above.

The blogosphere caught fire, Business Week responded, and a week later, Lacy responded in Business Week. Numerous others then responded in the comment fields to her response.

The mind boggles at how to contextualize this dialogue. Trying to determine the concrete situation in this raging discourse seems impossible. The tangle of space, location, and participants appears complex and irreducible. The live performance contextualizes the video, the video contextualizes the blogs, the blogs contextualize the live performance, the magazine articles contextualize the video response, and comment field contextualize each separate part. As a whole, there's no traditional speaker or audience.

Whose referents matter to Richards' triangle? Zuckerberg's? Lacy's? The SXSW audience? Business Week's readership? In this case, attempting to justify a correct symbol, referent, and idea amongst so many diverse speakers and audiences becomes problematic. In fact, one could argue the only way to make sense of it all is for an outside force to backward rationalize referents unintended at any point during the maelstrom.

More so, keep in mind that Lacy's audience rebelled seemingly out of a feeling of disenfranchisement from her interview style. However, since she could not see the Twitter comments till after, her angry response mimics and reciprocates similar if not the exact same discourse failures as the audience's response. Bakhtin's theme in this case is that by avoiding dialogue, the speaker audience relationship showed disrespect to both agents. Must as Richards fast-talking preacher, Lacy and her audience talked themselves right out of the actual discourse that was occurring.

In Bahktin's view Lacy and audience used creative elements of style (chatty interview and Twitter antagonism) beyond the realm of their audience's social orientation. This lack of understanding, and later lack of respect, could not help but result in a failure of language and dialogue.

Even in Burke's view the story possesses so many elements that uncovering the action of the language seems difficult. Where one party see chaos, another sees empowerment. Where one sees arrogance, another sees professionalism. The number of actors who see different stories threatens the entire discourse. So many screens work against and with one another that the resulting chaos might negate the importance of individuals screens entirely. In the end, is the result not more important than any one screen, even Lacy's, Zuckerberg's, mine, or yours?

And this completely ignores Zuckeberg as a participant.

The point is that as brilliant as these writers are, their binary theories cannot quite solve the Gordian knot of true collaborative communication. These works offer a start, but something inherently less binary than individual/group or speaker/audience is required to make sense of modern discourse. Now I just need to find a sword sharp enough to cut it.

PCA/ACA Conference Blog!

http://pcaaca08.blogspot.com/

Heck of a lot more interesting than this one. I think this may become my hub blog to more exciting event blogs.

Clown warning!

After my day at SXSW, I came home to my youngest playing Pennywise:



A cute and adorable Pennywise! I'll take anyone who says otherwise to the sewers!

At SXSW for Springbreak

More about the SXSW trip at this blog:

http://sxtsu.blogspot.com/

I'll give you a little tease with my favorite picture of the day. Just screams Austin.




Oh, and I'm toying with a new website. You can check it out here. Very much a work in progress.