Show #2, The Rhetorical Situation

Well, Jacob and I survived our second show with no major mishaps this time around. We are still going to look into creating a podcast in the near future, but, in the meantime, take a look at our playlists. I'll post them here each week.

Tune in at noon each Thursday to hear The Rhetorical Situation on KBVR.com or 88.7 FM in Corvallis. Thanks, dear listeners, friends.

Today's playlist:

Sam Roberts Band, "Love At The End of The World"
The Detroit Cobras, "I Wanna Holler"
Portugal. The Man, "People Say"
Wolf Parade, "You Are A Runner"
Chris Bathgate, "Every Wall You Own"
Pavement, "Embassy Row"
The Dirty Projectors, "Winter is Here"
Thao and the Get Down Stay Down, "Feet Asleep"
The Builders and the Butchers, "Bottom of the Lake"
Massive Attack, "Splitting the Atom"
Grizzly Bear, "Two Weeks"
Band of Bees, "A Minha"
Neko Case, "Prison Girls"
The Flaming Lips, "The Ego's Last Stand"

Blazers season begins

I'm so thrilled to be able to watch the Blazers again. Such a good bunch of guys, so talented and well-coached. Can't wait to see how this team grows. I'll throw up just a few links right now, since I'm coming down with a cold and need to get to bed.

Jason Quick wrote a good piece about Roy's leadership today in the Oregonian.

Unfortunately, we received some bad news today, just 24 hours before the season tips off at home against the Houston Rockets, the team that bounced the Blazers out of the playoffs last season: Nic Batum will be out 4-5 months, most likely, due to a torn labrum requiring surgery this Friday. Batum was penciled in as the starter at small forward this year, and the young second-year player is a great defender whose offensive game developed nicely this summer playing for the French national team. Martell Webster will start in his place, and the Portland depth is already proving invaluable.

Finally, be sure to check out this fantastic season's eve preview from Blazersedge, the finest Blazers blog out there.

Cheers, Rip City.

Radio Show

Jacob and I hosted our first radio show today, The Rhetorical Situation. You can listen at noon on Thursdays online at KBVR.com, or 88.7 FM in the Corvallis area.

Several friends have requested that we create podcasts, so we'll work on that. Until then, hope you can catch us live. Here's our playlist from earlier today:

Mount St. Helens Vietnam Band, "Albatross"
Arctic Monkeys, "505"
King Khan and the Shrines, "Land of the Freak"
Run On Sentence, "Stonewall"
The Devil Makes Three, "Tow"
Starfucker, "Boy Toy"
Jenny Lewis, "Jack Killed Mom"
The Boggs, "Forts"
The Fiery Furnaces, "Take Me Round Again"
Broken Social Scene, "KC Accidental"
Camera Obscura, "My Maudlin Career"
Pixies, Complete 'B' Sides, "Manta Ray"
Of Montreal, "Oslo in the summertime"

2009 Beer Awards

It wasn't a great year for Oregon breweries, but, hey, the competition is growing.

Here are the 2009 Great American Beer Festival results.

Here are the North American Brewers' Association results.

I definitely need to check out the Pelican Brewery in Pacific City. Very soon. Pelican took home seven awards from the North American Beer Awards.

Cheers.

Columbus Day

Kudos to the University of Oregon Native American Student Union for protesting, once again, Columbus Day.

There's a growing movement against Columbus day, and while I don't necessarily agree to every group's mode of protest or reform, I certainly prefer to celebrate El Día de la Resistencía Indígena.

Another Top Ten: Songs

Again, a friend on Facebook prompts me to compose a list. This time, it's my ten favorite songs. Yes, the all-time favorites. I hesitate to post this even, since it's wholly inadequate and was drafted in about 7 minutes. I didn't allow myself to include more than one song for an artist. Really difficult for me to not include a few groups/artists, like Beck and the Pixies. Also, for my own time and sanity, I didn't include rap/hip hop or jazz, which may have brought in Snoop, Dre, and Herbie Hancock. But this is what I came up with:

Beatles, A Day in the Life
Blitzen Trapper, Furr
Broken Social Scene, 7/4 (Shoreline)
The Builders and the Butchers, Bottom of the Lake
The Decemberists, Grace Cathedral Hill
The Fiery Furnaces, Take Me Round Again
The Grateful Dead, Shakedown Street
Jenny Lewis, Rise Up With Fists!!!
The Shins, Gone for Good
TV on the Radio, Shout Me Out

Honorable Mention:
The Arcade Fire, No Cars Go
Of Montreal, A Sentence Of Sorts In Kongsvinger
Starfucker, Pop Song


What about you?

RSA Panel, Pedagogy of Advocacy: A New Media Argument

Two friends and I recently developed a conference proposal for the Rhetoric Society of America's biennial conference, a panel titled "Attending to New Media: Identification, Style, and Advocacy." We should know in December whether or not it has been accepted for the May conference in Minneapolis.

Below is my portion of the presentation. Fingers crossed.

Speaker 3: The Pedagogy of Advocacy: A New Media Argument

First-year students enter composition classrooms well equipped to use (and change) many new media and emerging technologies. Their experiences with advocacy--real or conceptual--however, are often more limited, at least in their eyes. In their first-year composition textbook, Compose, Design, Advocate, Anne Francis Wysocki and Dennis A. Lynch outline for students the parallels between argument and advocacy; all argument, they maintain, is advocacy--neither “left” nor “right” politically, but a matter of community health and one’s own happiness. The problem for many instructors of first-year composition quickly becomes one of merging two essential elements for student growth: new technologies (and the literacies therein) and rhetorical awareness. In this talk, I argue that one useful goal is to help students realize and appreciate the act of advocacy as both civilizing and expressive using Wysocki’s pedagogy and theory as a model. Essentially the pedagogical moves toward advocacy are queries on identification--who writers identify with and who dis-identifies with their writing. The communication between two or more people expresses values, beliefs, and concerns that help shape one’s sense of identification internally and in the eyes of others. Therein continues the growth of concord and controversy in our students, and as much in ourselves. In Compose, Design, Advocate, Wysocki and Lynch write that, “To talk about argument, and so to talk about advocacy, is to talk about how we can and should live our lives” (112). My talk promotes advocacy as a pedagogy and the benefits found in new media and emerging technologies toward that end: specifically, materiality and composition, user-centered web designs (often called Web 2.0), media convergence at grassroots and corporate levels, and how new media productions build relationships among people.

America

I've been staring at, plugging away at a thesis prospectus for hours tonight. Here, respite:

"America"
by Ginsberg

America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956.
I can't stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb
I don't feel good don't bother me.
I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I'm sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want to be a saint.
There must be some other way to settle this argument.
Burroughs is in Tangiers I don't think he'll come back it's sinister.
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?
I'm trying to come to the point.
I refuse to give up my obsession.
America stop pushing I know what I'm doing.
America the plum blossoms are falling.
I haven't read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for
murder.
America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I'm not sorry.
I smoke marijuana every chance I get.
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet.
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.
My mind is made up there's going to be trouble.
You should have seen me reading Marx.
My psychoanalyst thinks I'm perfectly right.
I won't say the Lord's Prayer.
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.
America I still haven't told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over
from Russia.

I'm addressing you.
Are you going to let our emotional life be run by Time Magazine?
I'm obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It's always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie
producers are serious. Everybody's serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.

Asia is rising against me.
I haven't got a chinaman's chance.
I'd better consider my national resources.
My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals
an unpublishable private literature that goes 1400 miles and hour and
twentyfivethousand mental institutions.
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underpriviliged who live in
my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns.
I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go.
My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I'm a Catholic.

America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?
I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his
automobiles more so they're all different sexes
America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe
America free Tom Mooney
America save the Spanish Loyalists
America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die
America I am the Scottsboro boys.
America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they
sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the
speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the
workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party
was in 1835 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother
Bloor made me cry I once saw Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have
been a spy.
America you don're really want to go to war.
America it's them bad Russians.
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.
The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia's power mad. She wants to take
our cars from out our garages.
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader's Digest. her wants our
auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations.
That no good. Ugh. Him makes Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers.
Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help.
America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.
America is this correct?
I'd better get right down to the job.
It's true I don't want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts
factories, I'm nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.
America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

Top Ten QBs

Today, on Facebook, a friend declared that Brett Favre isn't one of the top ten quarterbacks of all time. Naturally, riots ensued, but I supported the claim and came up with my own top ten list. This did involve some research at Pro-FootballReference.com, and I think there are two guys who could make this list depending on one's sense of how the game has changed or hasn't changed, and what makes a good passer: Steve Young and Tom Brady. Young didn't do it long enough, and, well, after seeing how Brady lobbied for a b.s. late hit this weekend, I feel justified in not adding little Tommy to the list.

1. Marino
2. Montana
3. P. Manning
4. Tarkenton
5. Otto Graham
6. Bart Starr
7. Elway
8. Moon
9. Unitas
10. Staubach

Total TDs doesn't do it, yardage doesn't do it, nor does winning rings alone. I won't bore you with the evidence.