the kafkaesque k

Read the Book

2007-09-09T17:22:00.001-07:00

Just before I moved to New Mexico, the film adaptation of The Hours came out. I should have known better than to see the movie, but a good friend of mine wanted to see it, and I wanted to spend time with her before I moved. Also, I hadn’t seen a movie adaptation of a book in a long while. And I do enjoy Nicole Kidman, though I’m not sure why.

When we left the theater, my friend swore she’d never go see another movie adaptation of a book with me. I spent the whole 2 hours drilling my foot into the floor and mumbling “This isn’t how it happened in the book.” When Nicole Kidman/Virginia Woolf had her meltdown at the train station, I had to suppress the urge to walk out of the theatre. There was no reason to invent that scene. To this day, I’ll argue that the movie version of The Hours takes the book’s subtle, rich, compelling female characters and reduces them to one-note emotional train-wrecks.

As you can guess, I will not be seeing the new Sean-Penn directed, mostly stunt-casted movie adaptation of Jon Krakauer’s near-brilliant Into the Wild. I hadn’t heard about this movie adaptation until my husband mentioned it to me in passing, and I’ve been Googling information on the movie all afternoon. I love Krakauer’s book—it’s one of the few books I’ve read multiple times. Every time I read the book, I’m struck anew by both the mystery of Chris McCandless—who was this man, and was he daring or crazy?—and also by the mystery of what he represents in our larger culture. The literary loner, the hero who rejects society for grander schemes, the zealot made largely in America—Krakauer’s exploration of these topics is near perfection.

Now, I understand (on some level) that movies are not meant to be mirrors of the book—that the different medium requires by its very nature changes to the original text. But when I stumbled across the following description on a page promoting the 2007 Live Wild Tour this morning, I began yelling at my computer. Here's how they describe the movie version of McCandless' journey:

"INTO THE WILD is based on a true story and the best selling book by Jon Krakauer. After graduating from Emory University in 1992, top student and athlete Christopher McCandless (Emile Hirsch) abandons his possessions, gave his entire $24,000 savings to charity and hitchhiked to Alaska to live in the wilderness. Along the way, Christopher encounters a series of characters that shape his life."

We'll skip over, for starters, the inattention to verb tense. There’s no mention here of the danger in what McCandless did. In fact, it would seem to make McCandless into that same literary loner hero that the real life Chris so misunderstood. Sure, the people he met "along the way... shape[d] his life"—but he was also on an ill-advised, ill-equipped trip that ultimately led to not only his death, but to deeper, more complicated losses for his family and friends. And now Paramount Vintage Films is turning this into the 2007 Live Wild Tour, and encouraging readers to share stories of their own adventures? Have they read the book? Do they know where “living wild” ultimately led Chris McCandless? Do they even want to touch upon the deeper questions inspired by the book? Let me answer that last question: no, they don’t, because there’s more money to be made from simplifying a moral into the story. And we all know how adventure sells these days! Chris went on an adventure and met people who changed his life=money in the bank. Chris as a complicated man guided by forces that can be speculated upon but not always entirely understood=not a very good marketing scheme.

Rather than go to the movie, I'm going to re-read the book. And I'm encouraging everyone I know to do the same.

Newbies

2007-09-02T21:13:00.000-07:00

Last week, I began my 8^th semester of teaching college writing and composition courses. For the first time, I walked into the classroom feeling confident and ready. Maybe it’s because I’ll be teaching the course’s first topic for the third time, and have an ingrained sense of the material. Maybe it’s because this topic—visual argument—is one that I find compelling and relevant, and, dare I say it, fun to play with and discuss in class. Maybe it’s because I’m finding that talking about writing fuels my own work—dare I say it, my students, if they don’t teach me something new, at least force me to stop and think about what I’m saying. Maybe it’s because I’ve been teaching for four years now, minus one semester, and it’s about damn time I realize that I’m not exactly a novice.

One thing I don’t often stop to consider, though, is my student’s p.o.v. They shuffle in and out of my classrooms, girls in pony tails and pearls and boys in baseball caps, and I give them grades and (I hope) insights into how to write good essays. It’s not exactly that I see my students as all together homogenous—every class has its surprises, and I can still list the names and interests of kids I taught several semesters back. But the same themes seem to repeat themselves over and over: the students who fill out the crossword rather than take notes, the ones who tell jokes just loud enough to reach the six others around them, the ones who live in an inexplicable constant state of tragedy (Freshman English, my husband likes to joke, is fatal for some students’ families), the ones who stumble in hung over, the ones who can’t seem to follow what I think are very clear instructions. The past few semesters in particular, I’ve been on a mission to erase bad habits: every semester I add a new course policy meant to force them to pay more attention to ME. I’m like a two-year-old, only smarter about language.

This semester, there’s a small girl with cropped blond hair and dark-framed glasses who sits near the front of one of my afternoon classes. On the first day of class, I asked her class to get into small groups and create a visual argument. They had to answer questions about their design decisions, and define the context for the argument. I’d left that question about context deliberately vague, both to give them the freedom to be creative in their definition, and also to help me figure out how well they understood the concept.

The blond girl was the speaker for her group. She seemed more nervous than I would expect: as she spoke, she blushed and looked around the room between answers. While she spoke I focused on what I wanted to address—why they’d chosen the color red, how their font might work in other rhetorical situations. I almost missed her point about context.

“The context,” she explained, looking quickly at me and then at her fellow students, “is that this is the first assignment in this class, and we’re all kind of nervous. We don’t know what to expect.”

Because I do know what to expect—I know that within the next week, at least four of her classmates (maybe even she) will e-mail me & ask me to repeat something I’ve said in class. And I’ll get annoyed. I know that many of them will truly be confused about the first writing assignment, that few of those confused will ask questions, and so a large chunk of them will get the lowest grades they’ve ever gotten on a writing assignment. I know that they’ll try to argue those grades by explaining how their high school teacher gave them all “A”s. And I’ll get annoyed. I know that no matter how many times I go over the importance of formatting and provide them with examples, I’ll inevitably see papers in Comic Sans font, or with margins as wide as my hands, or without any proper heading. And I’ll get annoyed. Why haven’t they figured this out, I keep asking myself.

Because this for them is new, and that’s easy to forget when you’ve been encountering issues that never seem to change. It doesn’t matter that I’ve said this for eight semesters times who knows how many sections now, these kids haven’t been to college yet. For many of them, entering the college classroom is more akin to entering a foreign country. All the familiarity of high school—the teachers they knew, the kids they knew, the activities they knew—none of them are here. Everything that’s familiar may be hundreds of miles away. No wonder they can’t remember—hell, my freshman year is nothing but a foggy memory, and not because of alcohol. Beneath all of my excitement about finally getting out of my mother’s house and moving seven hours away from the kids that sang songs about my frizzy hair & mimicked my high-pitched high school giggle, I was scared shitless. Take care of myself? What was that about? Solve problems on my own? What? There are still problems to solve when you move away from a place you hate? College blew my eighteen-year-old mind.

I’m not saying I’m gonna go any easier on these kids—anyone who didn’t take notes in class last week just cashed in on lost quiz points—but maybe I’ll take a stab at being a bit more patient, and a bit less annoyed. For all my insistence that they consider me when evaluating the rhetorical situations for their papers, the least I might do is more deeply consider their context.

Another Reason to Love Joan Didion

2007-07-11T13:12:00.000-07:00

"The peculiarity of being a writer is that the entire enterprise involves the mortal humiliation of seeing one's own words in print." ~Joan Didion, "Last Words"

I haven't written seriously in over a year. On occasion, I've sent out a long and descriptive e-mail, and thought to myself, "There. That wasn't so hard." But when I sit down to write, like I am now, I get stuck. I'll tinker with some sentences, move around a few paragraphs, make a general mess of a draft, if I create anything at all, and then I'll panic and walk away.

Didion's essay "Last Words," which I just read in The Best American Essays 1999, is a great read for anyone like me. She looks at the posthumous publication of Hemingway's last novel, but more than that, she explores how hard it is to write--not just novels, but letters and correspondence--knowing that you'll be read.

When I e-mail, I imagine a very specific reader, and it's mostly easy to write, when I'm in the right mood, because I mostly know what they'd like to hear. (Though even with e-mail I struggle, which is why most of my friends would rightly describe me as terrible at keeping in touch.) When I write, I find that reader elusive, mainly because I'm afraid of what--or who--I don't know. This fear and self-consciousness have got to go--I've got to find a way to plow through them.

Another reason to love Joan Didion: she knows it's hard to plow through, but her writing is so graceful and elegant that I feel understood, comforted and encouraged. Nothing beats reading an essay written by a master, and thinking that maybe I can do this. Maybe not as well as Didion, but better than I'm doing it right now.

(Really, though, there aren't many ways to do it worse, unless you count not writing at all.)

What will my very eager mother just serve us now?

2006-08-25T16:35:00.000-07:00

With absolute disregard for the importance--and the permanence--of mnemonic devices, the International Astronomer's Union has taken away Pickles. I mean Pluto.

There goes everything I can remember from the 4th grade.

Now That's What I'm Talking About

2006-08-21T17:10:00.000-07:00

I stand corrected. Deadwood does surprise. Or, I should say, Al Swearengen, masterfully portrayed by Ian McShane, surprises.

I finally got around to watching episode 10, "A Constant Throb." Most of this season we've seen Swearengen, usually Deadwood's main bully, being bullied and beaten by George Hearst. And as complicated as such matters get, Swearengen just hasn't been able to figure out how to solve the puzzle of Hearst. He's seemed, as the season has progressed, to become more and more powerless.

In "A Constant Throb," Hearst sends Barrett, his main enforcer, over to the Gem to deliver Swearengen a message. This meeting plays out the way Hearst would like--Barrett swaggers with his power over Al. Swearengen still seems muddled, like he's trying to figure out exactly how to handle this situation, but is still far from reaching any sort of decision. As Barrett stands to leave Al's office, he says to Swearengen, "You don't seem halfway like such a halfway bad fucking person."

The absolute beauty of this line is how thoroughly convincing McShane's performance has been in every episode leading up to this moment. The evolution of the confused, frayed Swearengen has played out to the point where, until the second Swearengen's knee makes contact with Barrett's crotch, beginning one of the show's most brutal shit-kickings to date, I'm ready to agree with Barrett's estimation. But no, Swearengen is a surprising character--thanks to both good writing and to McShane's stand out performance.

I'm still tired of the Jane & Joanie love connection, but I can't be bothered to care as much about that anymore. Sure, they're predictable. But as long as Swearengen's around, Deadwood is pure fucking magic.

If She Wears Pants, She Must Kiss Girls

2006-08-10T18:22:00.000-07:00

HBO's Deadwood is one of the finest shows you'll find on TV right now--possibly one of the finest shows ever made. But in the case of Calamity Jane, the writers appear to be taking the easy way out. In a manner of speaking.

Calamity Jane is, without a doubt, one of my favorite characters on the show. She's almost always drunk and dirty, and her mouth is among the foulest. She cares about Wild Bill Hickok, nurses the cocksuckers who suffer from small pox in Season 1, and generally does things of good fucking will. When she's not on a bender, of course.

Margot Mifflin, in a Salon.com review of a 2005 biography about Calamity Jane, writes, "Like so many pop culture icons, [Calamity Jane] lived fast, died young and was quickly canonized, yet her fictional self so quickly preempted the real one that it's almost impossible to say her legend is anything but fiction." Any internet search of Calamity Jane will give you a mishmash of facts about her life; few of those facts seem to be certain. And so her character is a gold mine for the writers of Deadwood.

Many of Deadwood's characters are based upon real people--if not upon an actual person who once lived in Deadwood, then upon an actual type of person would have lived in Deadwood. And a few of the characters based on real people get a bum rap. The rascally E.B. Farnum, for example, who no one in the HBO town seems to take seriously? In real life, Farnum was a husband, the father of three children (all of whom lived in Deadwood with him), and a much better businessman and councilman than the HBO show would have us believe. But because Farnum makes such an excellent foil for Swearingen, I'm willing to suspend my disbelief.

But I'm not willing to suspend my disbelief with the turn Calamity Jane's character took in the recent episode "Unauthorized Cinnamon." In this episode, Jane finally kisses Joanie Stubbs. I write finally because when this happened, I let out a sigh of disgust, prompting B to say, "Like you didn't see that coming?"

That I saw it coming was precisely the problem. Here's the deal: in all of the bios I've read online about Calamity Jane, none have asserted that she was a lesbian. They've mentioned her claims to an affair with Wild Bill Hickok, her possible crush on Charlie Utter, that she was (at times) a prostitute, that she had, later in life, a daughter. All of these are, more or less, hetero-normative activities, correct? Right.

But Jane, you see, doesn't (and in real life, didn't always) act lady-like. She wears pants, sleeps in the street and drinks so much that she pisses herself (although the book review on Salon.com claims that Jane mostly wore dresses). She lives on the frontier and she likes guns. She talks nothing like a lady--even the prostitutes of Deadwood speak in a (relatively) more refined language than Jane. So what do we do with the woman who does hetero-normative things but who doesn't outwardly present as hetero-normative? If we're the writers of Deadwood, we take the easy way out with her character. We make her the lesbian, because our idea (or the idea that a broader audience would have) of the way a lesbian performs her sexuality is as follows: she acts like a man.

The choice of portraying Jane as a lesbian is not surprising, and the reason I've fallen in love with Deadwood is that, more often than not, the show surprises. Which is why I'm wondering why the writers didn't pair Jane up with Charlie Utter, or some other male character. Why not really play around with the options history presents? Sure, a little girl-on-girl action can be good times, but why not a little man-and-woman-taking-the-pants-and-cowboy-hats-off-one-another action? Why not challenge the audience's desire to pigeonhole the pant-wearin woman? Even better--why not let Jane have it all--give her a love scene with Charlie Utter, and then give her one with Joanie. If you're going to make fiction out of history, why not just go full fucking tilt and make of these cocksuckers complicated characters?

Making Jane a lesbian is too easy, and I think it speaks to our struggle as a society to accept sexuality (and also, in many ways, gender roles) as anything other than a black-or-white, either-or concept. Jane can't have any kind of combination plate in HBO's Deadwood, because at this point in history, neither can we.

Non-fiction and the Peace Corps Problem

2006-08-09T13:19:00.000-07:00

I've finally gotten around to reading the essay that won The Missouri Review's Annual Editors' Prize. Since I'd also entered the contest, I admittedly read the essay with a more critical eye. Do I wish I'd won this contest? Yes. (The prize was $3,000. You wish you'd won, too.) Do I think that Erica Bleeg's essay "Obedience" deserved to win? Absolutely.

Bleeg's essay paints a startling portrait of a moment in time. She describes her training as a Peace Corps volunteer in the country of Benin. We're introduced to her first host family, the landscape of the country and of the city of Cotonou (where Bleeg is being trained), as well as to information about the history and culture of Benin. Bleeg does an excellent job of re-creating the sense of strangeness she encountered as a American in a foreign land: "All around us, humidity drenched the hours in a rich haze such that everything in view seemed temporary, like a mirage, while at the same time my awareness of every action as a means to stay alive became much keener" (95). Every sentence is meticulously constructed and rich in detail; Bleeg knows well how to take her time in telling a good story.

But. I can't help but put the essay down and think, Great. Another privileged, well-intentioned white girl goes to Africa and is confounded by the role of women there, and finds herself implicated in the process. And then she writes about it.

Perhaps I'm jealous because I haven't produced any writing from my AmeriCorps experiences, or because I haven't been published, or because I didn't attend as prestigious of a graduate writing program as Bleeg. (Though, to be fair, a woman from my program won TMR's Editors' Prize just a few years ago. Her essay was also about an experience she had in the Peace Corps.)

But I think I really am tired of reading this same essay. Because I haven't yet found a writer that really addresses, head-on, what I think is the most compelling issue to be found in such essays: white guilt. Or maybe not white guilt, but the kind of guilt that sends us out into the world to do this work, and then return and wear it as some kind of badge of honor. Because I don't believe in this work as being altruistic. Although, with very few exceptions, I simply don't believe in altruism. We do good things because we want something--an object, a feeling, a currency, a favor--in return. I joined AmeriCorps because I wanted to gain job experience without actually finding a real job, and because I wanted to move and AmeriCorps pays volunteers to relocate. Sure, I wanted to help the community as well. But would I have been as eager to help without the incentives of a few lines for my resume and a little money for my education?

To be fair, Bleeg touches on this issue in several places. She writes, "Having just arrived from a country torn by racial hatred and rife with racial epithets, whenever I heard [the term Beninois used to refer to white people], what I saw in my mirror eye, looking back at me, was a White Exploiter" (94). But what, I want to know, does she think of being a white exploiter? Or, does she even think she's white exploiter? How does she view the presence of the Peace Corps in countries such as Benin? What are the unique problems faced by volunteers who have so much history bearing down upon them?

Bleeg, though, attempts to immediately divert her readers' attention from such questions--she writes that she isn't sure if her presence helps, but that "there was nothing we could do to erase who we were" (94). Right enough, but if you've gone over to Africa as a white, American volunteer, isn't it your responsibility to begin teasing out and speculating upon some answers to those really large questions? Other readers may want to move on to the next sentence, but I want Bleeg to stop and explain.

But Bleeg also makes clear that her motive for joining the Peace Corps wasn't to tease out racial tensions and the impact of hundreds of years of exploitation. She tells us early on that she wanted to go to Africa because of what she knew of the poverty there. Television images of Africa--particularly of women--linger in Bleeg's memories of childhood. "It was women I wanted to understand. I wanted to help where possible; I wanted to deepen my life with hard labor, and I believed African women could show me how" (92).

Ok, I'll start by being snarky: no one wants to deepen their lives with hard labor. Go to any demanding job--find someone in construction, find someone working long hours in a field, find a fisherman or woman--go find someone in one of those jobs, and ask them: would they like a break? It is only those who can afford to be idle that romanticize hard labor.

My point: this sentence is a landmine in Bleeg's essay. She's so careful--her pages of prose about history and geography are, I think, a carefully traced path around other sentences like "I had grown up in a corporate family"(93). I wonder: how corporate? And I think that question is important. A woman traveling to Benin from an upper class family, for example, will have a wider gulf of differences to navigate than, say, someone traveling there from a poverty-stricken family. But, to keep our attention on the story she wants to tell (which is, ultimately, a story about her own inaction), Bleeg keeps details about her life to a minimum.

In the end, I think Bleeg wrote the wrong essay. She wrote the essay we've been taught to write since grade school: the "What I Did On My Summer Vacation" essay. She wrote the essay well, to be sure. But I can't help but wonder who much better it would have been if she'd written the essay "Who I Am And Why I Went On This Summer Vacation."

Accountability

2006-08-07T13:15:00.000-07:00

Five knitting projects I must finish before I can buy any more yarn from stores.*

Mohair scarf for J: http://www.mielkesfarm.com/oldshale.htm

Purses for my two step-nieces: http://www.groovy-mom.com/crafty/patterns/painlesspurse.shtml

Hat for B: http://alison.knitsmiths.us/pattern_beginners_hat.html

Sampler purse (for shits & giggles & to use up random yarn): http://www.philosopherswool.com/Pages/SamplerPurse.htm

*I can, though, buy yarn from yard sales. There is, after all, an exception to every rule.

I'm Loving It

2006-08-06T18:50:00.000-07:00

America's battle with the bulge is proving to be a good time for all involved, including marketers. A few recent ads seem to be asking the question How can we convince them we serve healthy foods, but get them to keep eating the high-fat stuff?

This morning I saw yet another commercial for yet another buffet style restaurant here in Texas. This buffet restaurant, though, is trying to change its tune. "We have healthy selections!" promises the voice-over as the camera pans various serving dishes of fruits and vegetables. "And as a reward for eating so healthy," the voice over continues, "treat yourself to some of our fried chicken!"

Right. Because fried foods are only a little bad for you. It's like reaching for a cookie, only different.

This advertisement is almost as funny to me as a poster I recently saw in a major fast-food restaurant. The poster encouraged me to have some dessert and tantalized me with a variety of offerings: ice cream (cone, sundae, or mixed with candy or cookies), apple pie, cookies, yogurt parfait. Most striking was not the offerings themselves, however, but their arrangement in the photograph: the yogurt parfait was in the middle, surrounded by cookies and ice cream and various sugary offerings. It looked like a big mouth of sugar was about to swallow the yogurt whole. I feared for the parfait.

You might argue that the eye is drawn to the center of the photograph, and thus the parfait, and it may well be. But answer this question for yourselves: "It's time for dessert! You can have ice cream or cookies or pie or a sundae or some candy mixed in ice cream or a yogurt parfait! Whatcha want?" Sign me up for anything but the parfait.

I'm not saying it's in any of these companies best interest to actually change their ways--I can't imagine fast food restaurants actually making money serving only tofu burgers and carrot sticks. Nor am I saying that I don't occasionally enjoy me some fried food and ice cream (either together or separate). But how can we expect people to make different, better choices--choices that will vastly improve their well-being and quality of life--when those choices aren't really being offered?

On Myopia

2006-06-26T07:17:00.000-07:00

El Borak has this to say about my last posting, in which I reject the dictionary for a broader view of the term "feminism:"

Insisting that one need know what subspecies of feminist is being 'invoked' is like demanding that before you can do anything about the ants in your kitchen, you must determine which of the 12,000 species you are having trouble with. The truth is that it doesn't matter which: once you note that what is crawling across your counter is an ant, it's not necessary to wiki before you reach for the Raid.

El Borak's right in that I wouldn't look up the type of ant before reaching for the Raid. But luckily, feminists aren't ants.

I find it necessary to alert El Borak, before he stamps out all feminisms equally, that he may want to take a closer look at Difference Feminism. The dictionary might say something different, but Difference Feminism, per Wikipedia,

is a branch of feminism that stresses that men and women are essentially very different beings, instead of past feminisms of equality that stress a fundamental sameness between men and women in some way.

Difference Feminisms include New Feminism, a branch that holds dear John Paul II's The Theology of the Body, and whose followers celebrate motherhood and are primarily pro-life. Of course, these gals also believe that women should be considered equal to men--different but equal, but still equal. Since I know from his previous post on the matter that El Borak finds that equality deal troublesome, I might ask him to look at cultural feminism,

the theory that there are fundamental personality differences between men and women, and that women's differences are special and should be celebrated. This theory of feminism supports the notion that there are biological differences between men and women.

Again, though, I can imagine El Borak might protest, not only because I'm still using Wikipedia, but because these gals celebrate that certain special something about women without so much as even baking a little cake for men (at least so far as I can tell from Wikipedia) .

But maybe El Borak is tired of Wikipedia. So how about this blurb on Moderate Feminism from Feminist Utopia:

This branch of feminism tends to be populated mostly by younger women or women who have not directly experienced discrimination. They tend to question the need for further effort, and think that feminism is no longer viable.

They think that feminism is no longer viable? But they're called feminists? And wait--there are feminists like the New Feminists that follow religious teachings? And still others who agree that men and women are different? Well, now, these seem like women that El Borak might be able to start talking to--they share a few (thought not all) beliefs with El Borak, which is always a good place to start a conversation. I might also point out to El Borak that an important difference between ants and feminists is that he wouldn't reason with an ant before exterminating the ant. No matter now many times you tell an ant that it does not belong in your kitchen, the ant is still going to come back. Feminists, though, are a sub-group of women, part of the larger species known as human beings. Human beings have the power of reason, and so I have a hunch that E Borak could, were he to view feminism as a continuum and not some hard and fast rule, sit down and reason with some feminists. I've even got a hunch that he could change a few of their minds, if he fancied a discussion.

But if that argument isn't enough to convince El Borak that I should just submit myself to the dictionary, let's head over to this Fox News article about Christian Feminism:

Feminism can be defined as the belief that women should be liberated as individuals and equal to men. It is only natural for there to be disagreement over what a personal ideal like "liberation" means and how a basic concept like "equality" should be defined. Indeed, it would be amazing if every woman who cared about liberation and equality came to exactly the same conclusions.

For example, what does equality mean? Does it refer to "equality under just law" -- under laws that protect person and property? Is it "socio-economic equality" that requires legal privileges for the disadvantaged and government control of the marketplace? Perhaps it is the cultural equality in which attitudes and social expression need to be controlled and "politically corrected?"

Disagreement on complex political terms and social issues is not only inevitable, it is healthy because it fuels open, honest discussion.

"Feminism" is more than just a word, and we need more than just a dictionary definition to understand its compexity.

Funny How Definitions Are Important

2006-06-24T23:07:00.000-07:00

There's been a lot of recent debate in cyberspace about feminism. Most of it has involved name-calling that could better be done by fourth graders, and so most of it I've ignored. But when I recently found a friend of mine under attack at Vox Popoli, I had to respond. Here's part of my posting from this past Friday afternoon:

1. Violence against women is never funny, and never deserving of ridicule. Never.

2. In case you don't understand, because most of you don't appear to be utilizing all of your God-given faculties, violence against women is NEVER funny.

My comments have been addressed, primarily in a recent posting by Vox himself (as well as in comments posted by his loyal readers). That Vox singled out my comment as worthy of response is nothing short of an honor. I was not aware of my power in this morass of pseudonym-riddled communications.

And had I been more aware, I would have taken more care with my short posting. Pithy, after all, isn't necessarily substantiative. It's since been pointed out to me, by Vox and others, that violence against women can be funny. Or rather, that there are people in our society who make audiences laugh with their humorous comments about such violence--people like Chris Rock, Dave Chapelle, and the writers of Family Guy. Without commenting on taste, which is always personal, let me say mea culpa, and thank you--you all pointed me to a fatal error in my rhetoric: I used the generalization "never." And in doing so I made myself an easy target. As I tell my composition students, when you use a generalization, you simply make me inclined to disagree with you. Lesson learned.

My rash use of the word "never," however, created a larger problem for my claim. It distracted readers from asking the right questions about my posting. Namely, readers weren't asking themselves questions such as What does k mean by "violence against women"? Why isn't it funny? How, in fact, does k define humor?

Those of you who've been following the Vox/Evil Bender/Lizard Queen drama know that one issue that's been at stake in this debate is definition. Evil Bender has asked Vox to define Judeo-Christian culture, and Vox has insisted that his terms have been defined. Today, El Borak got in on the fun with a response to Evil Bender. El Borak argues, among other things, that definitions are unnecessary:

Vox doesn't need to define feminism - it already exists and any political atlas or even a dictionary might answer his query

Well, I took it upon myself to test out El Borak's statement. I typed "feminism" into Google, and opened up the first link: Wikipedia, a source that Vox himself has turned to in this debate. Wikipedia's definition begins:

Feminism is a diverse collection of social theories, political movements, and moral philosophies, largely motivated by or concerning the experiences of women.

A diverse collection, they say. Of social theories, political movements, and moral philosophies: the use of these nouns in their pluralized forms indicates that we are dealing with more than one of each. Pluralized nouns, though, are not enough. Merriam Webster Online Dictionary further provides me with the following two definitions for diverse:

1 : differing from one another : UNLIKE
2 : composed of distinct or unlike elements or qualities

If we begin to pull apart this definition, then, we see that feminism may be composed of differing social theories, political movements, and philosophies. Lest we begin to think, though, that feminism is a recipe (add a dash of communism, a tablespoon of humanism, a quart of suffragism, and don't forget two tablespoons of reproductive rights!), Wikipedia lists, further down in its entry, subtypes of feminism.

Aha! Feminism is not a blanket term that can stand on its own. Not all feminisms are the same. When the term "feminism" is bandied about, readers need to know what type of feminist the writer/speaker wishes to invoke. They need to do this in order to understand what, exactly, is being argued.

Which brings me to stasis theory. Stasis theory posits that in order to really understand what is being argued, each party must define the terms of their argument. "[S]tasis marks the place where two opposing forces come together, where they rest or stand in agreement on what is at issue" (Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students, p44). Ancient rhetoricians have conveniently provided us with the following 4 questions so that we modern folk can determine stasis in our own debates:

1. Conjecture (stasis stochasmos)--"Is there an act to be considered?"
2. Definition (stasis horos)--"How can the act be defined?"
3. Quality (stasis poiotes)--"How serious is the act?"
4. Procedure (stasis metalepsis)--"Should this act be submitted to some formal procedure?"
(Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students, p47)

Let's take these questions and return to my faulty claim that "Violence against women is NEVER funny." In the conjecture stage, I laid out "violence against women" as the act to be considered. But I skipped the definition stage, which forced those who read my comment to define the term for themselves. When the term was defined by those responding to my post, they began answering question 3 with the idea that because Chris Rock makes jokes about violence against women, this is not a serious matter. While I might still disagree with them on that point, my argument had still failed. It failed because I failed to provide the terms--in a moment of anger (How dare they threaten my friend, I thought), I made a rash statement rather than stepping back and considering how I might attempt to move the conversation to a point of stasis.

Let's get back to Vox, EB, and TLQ. If Vox intends for this debate to be a name-calling shouting match, well then he'll surely he'll win. After awhile we all tire of being called names. But EB and TLQ (you can read their most recent postings here and here) have posed questions to Vox asking him to define his terms and clarify his arguments. In posing questions to Vox about his use of terminology and his positions, EB and TLQ are asking for stasis--they're attempting establish the grounds for a reasonable debate--though neither of them seem to think stasis is achievable. With good reason, TLQ writes of Vox,

His argumentation is faulty and, it would seem, deliberately inflammatory.

Name-calling is easy--we often master that game before we even step foot in a schoolyard. Making real attempts at communicating our position in an argument--so that we might better understand our disagreements and so that we might all take another step closer to understanding one another--is difficult. I'm hoping that Vox is up to the challenge.