dawn m. armfield
doctoral candidate in rhetoric and scientific and technical communication
on rhetoric
02 years ago
No apologies to Aristotle. We can all write “on rhetoric,” can’t we? I mean, we could, if we wanted to. Some of us do. Those of us crazy enough to entertain a PhD in said field; crazy enough to spend an entire day reading assorted writings of Plato and Gorgias and Antiphon.
And speaking of Plato. I was actually cheering him on today. Oh, yes! He made a strong character of Protagoras. One of my all-time favorite speeches in classical Greek speeches that I’ve read so far. Seriously. Finally someone gave it to Socrates good. And Plato wrote it. BEST EVAH.
And that Antiphon. Writing imaginary judicial arguments. Seriously, the boy in the javelin argument wanted to kill himself by running IN FRONT OF A JAVELIN? There must be better ways to die. He killed himself? Oy. Made me laugh out loud at the absurdity of the argument. But it was well done. I give you that (in case you care, 2500 years in the grave).
barefoot exercise
12 years ago
I heard about the three minute fiction contest on NPR. I started to think that this might be a great way to keep my blog up to date. I can surely take 3 minutes to blog about whatever is on my mind, right?
So, here goes (and note that I’m currently writing on a mobile device so it will probably be shorter than those done on my laptop):
—
I’m not a hater of exercise. I’m really not. I can happily walk for hours if I’m amused while doing so (photography, audiobooks). What I do have trouble with is footwear.
My arches don’t fit conventional shoes correctly. Regular closed shoes bind my feet in and hurt. They always have. So I tend to exercise barefoot.
I know. Bad, right? It just works better for me. It feels right.
Today I heard about new running shoes that are made to feel like you’re barefoot. I definitely am checking them out.
disclosure
22 years ago
by dawn
in social networking
Not too long ago I was commenting on how I talk to students about social media, about how much they want to share, not share, communicate, etc. because of the ramifications to education, friendships, and other relationships, not to mention future job prospects. The friend I was talking to said that I post everything, that I don’t really sensor what I post.
Today I posted on Facebook about not getting into the State Fair, then shortly after about my latest round of biopsies coming in benign. I was concerned about posting these (and I did not post them to Twitter). Was it too much? What was I expecting from the posts? Why was I posting them?
I posted the Fair topic because I knew of others who had entered. I wanted them to know I hadn’t made it in. I wasn’t sad so I wasn’t looking for condolences (although the ones that did come in were great — and the friends who enjoy my work made me smile). Maybe I was looking for camaraderie? I wanted them to get in even if I didn’t — but maybe it was that understanding that this was a big deal to enter. I don’t know. I really don’t.
I almost didn’t post anything about the biopsies. After my aunt asked about them (in the fair post), it made me think. I’m linked to a lot of family and long-time friends in Facebook. These are people who have seen me through my bouts with cancer, have been supporting me, encouraging me, and loving me as I have dealt with it. I worried that it seemed like much ado about nothing, but I also know that these are some of the people who care the most about me. I posted so they would know.
I’ve questioned myself (yes, I talk to myself) about how much I post, if I post everything, and if I post too much. When friends drop me because I “post too much,” I question my motives.
I realized, though, that I don’t post a 10th of what actually goes on in my life. Not here, not in Facebook, not in Twitter, not anywhere.
The last three weeks have been an emotional roller coaster, but I haven’t let on about most of that. I’ve kept it to myself, only discussing some of the issues with some people, and only all of the issues with one person — my therapist, because that’s what he’s there for. I really don’t find it necessary to share everything. But I do like sharing some things.
I am choosy about who I share with, and what I do share. I compartmentalize. It keeps me sane.
new
2A quick update: I added a new plug-in to my blog: a library (it’s also in the sidebar to the left). You can see what I’ve read, am reading, and will read.
Mostly I did this for miss ashley, because she likes to know. :-)
Back to your regularly scheduled programming (with an advertisement that I will blog again soon — just as soon as my wrists allow me to write more than the work I’m working on).
city snaps 2
02 years ago
by dawn
in just a thought
I was driving to the the Fourth Street Fantasy Convention this afternoon and, again, because the Twin Cities are so full of life, I saw things that I wanted to capture in words (since driving and photographing, especially with my big tank, would be dangerous). I’ll share a few things, then I expand with my own expository on some of the issues.
- Since I’m staying in Como Park, I’m right off of Lexington. Lexington was backed up almost to Larpenteur with people going to the park. Bikers, walkers, sunbathers, and zoo-goers were flocking to the absolutely gorgeous Como Park. This is one of the most beautiful parks I’ve ever seen. It has gorgeous buildings, rolling green hills covered by multitudes of trees and other vegetation, and captivating bridges. I’m often transported to a different time when I pass through this park.
- After passing through the park, going toward I-94, I passed through a different neighborhood. It’s doesn’t have the finely manicured lawn and gardens with impeccably maintained homes of the more northern Como Park adjacent neighborhoods. The lawns are longer, flowers are leggy, and homes may need a good painting. But this neighborhood makes me think more of childhood memories (although I never lived in a neighborhood like this — ever). I can imagine children riding bikes down the sidewalks, kick-the-can happening in the streets, and the local dog following the child with the dripping ice cream cone, hoping to get a taste.
- For only the second time in my life, I passed through the I-94 tunnel. I love tunnels. I was so excited to pass through it, and since traffic was backed up due to road work, I was able to enjoy it even longer.
- Every time the Basilica comes up on the horizon, I gasp. It is so stunning and large and jumps up out of nowhere. Along those same lines, I feel the same way about the Mississippi River. Today, surrounded by lush green vegetation, I could imagine Huck Finn cruising down it.
Now. I have some other thing to say:
- Are those teenaged girls absolutely insane? Do they not know that lying in the sun can lead to skin cancer? ARGH. I wanted to go be an old lady and admonish them.
- Drivers in the Twin Cities are as passive-aggressive as they are when speaking to them. Speed up, slow down, speed up, slow down. Put on your damn cruise control and go a steady speed!
- The further east I went, I noticed how white the and more expensive the cars got. Suddenly I was surrounded by BMWs, Saabs, Mercedesssss, and gone were the Hondas, Nissans, and Chevy vans (seriously). It’s a bit disconcerting, to say the least.
Ok. I’m done being a cranky old woman. I’m gonna hang out at the con now, and learn more about expository, sex, and all kinds of other things.
city snaps
12 years ago
by dawn
in just a thought
I took a break from writing to go to lunch with some friends. It’s a windy day, but the sun is shining and it’s lovely. As I drove to and from lunch, I saw people doing things that made me smile — there are those quintessential human things that do that, you know? So a few snaps from my drive across the cities:
- Lunch at Loring Pasta in Dinkytown. Piano man used the acoustics to his advantage and filled the joint with glorious music.
- Piano man invites anyone in town for the conservatory show to play his piano. A young woman takes her place on the platform and plays a Beethoven that would knock your socks off (if you were wearing socks in summer — which is kind of dorky looking, especially if you wear sandals — I’m just sayin’). She was shy at first, but once she got into her groove, she took over the piano.
- Walking back toward the East Bank campus, an older man on a tricked-out bike pulls up to the light we’re waiting at. The back tire on the bike is the fattest I’ve ever seen, and he has a boom box strapped to the handle bars. Better than that, though, is that he’s wearing a tux and a top hat. Very dapper.
- While driving home, I see a semi-truck driver pull over at a Dairy Queen, jump out, take photos of the Dairy Queen sign, and jump back in his truck and drive off. He maneuvered quite well and quickly for such a large rig. But I really wonder — what were photographs were about?
Everywhere people are out: walking, gardening, sitting at cafes with friends. Beautiful flower gardens leading up to lovely shaded Victorians were tended by people of all ages. Parks and lakes were crowded with people enjoying the Saturday sun.
And even though it stuffs me up, watching the puffs from the cottonwood trees float by as if pushed by fairies is a joy.
Yeah. This place ain’t so bad.
copyRIP!
22 years ago
Sound Unseen screened rip! a remix manifesto, a film by Brett Gaylor, last night in a small, intimate theater recently established (this was the premiere showing) in Minneapolis, filled almost to capacity.
View the film at http://www.ripremix.com/. Pay what you think it is worth (and it is worth the money, I promise), then can rip it, do a mashup, or simply watch it. Just don’t sell it.
Figuring prominently in the film are Lawrence Lessig (@lessig on Twitter), Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, Cory Doctorow (@doctorow on Twitter), science fiction novelist and blogger, and GirlTalk (aka Gregg Gillis), mashup artist, who not only give us information about remixing and mashups, but give us background and historical references to copyright laws. Each of them also shows how complex this subject is, from Lessig commenting on the illegality of segments of the video, to Doctorow discussing the Dickens / Twain copyright issues of the 19th century, to GirlTalk’s previous career in a field steeped in intellectual property issues (biomedical engineering).
The movie is informative and entertaining. The music is amazing, the sound bites are funny, and Gaylor discusses the reasons behind his advocacy of a remix manifesto. What he doesn’t do is discuss in depth the middle of the road between complete copyright control and no copyright control and what the differences are. There is a sense of US versus THEM to this film, but in the end the lines of US and THEM are definitely blurred.
At the end of the screening, the audience was given the chance to talk to the filmmaker over Skype. The conversation was lively and interesting.
In other news in the copyright fight, BoingBoing reported today the USA, Canada, and the EU attempted to kill a treaty to protect blind people’s access to written material. Doctorow writes
At issue is a treaty to protect the rights of blind people and people with other disabilities that affect reading (people with dyslexia, people who are paralyzed or lack arms or hands for turning pages), introduced by Brazil, Ecuador and Paraguay. This should be a slam dunk: who wouldn’t want a harmonized system of copyright exceptions that ensure that it’s possible for disabled people to get access to the written word?
Doctorow amends the piece and says there is victory (for now):
Victory! — the treaty proposal survived this meeting and will be back on the agenda at the next one. We’ve got a couple months to lobby our governments and make sure that the next time they show up, they don’t embarrass us by opposing this.
See the the final conclusions of the SCCR Eighteenth Session at Knowledge Ecology Notes.
And finally, the Chronicle of Higher Education, news was posted about different copyright law curricula being offered in higher education. The author, Marc Beja, discusses the Recording Industry Association of America’s (RIAA) curriculum for teaching copyright law, and the response of the Electronic Frontier Foundation in releasing their own curriculum. He writes,
The foundation’s program, “Teaching Copyright,” includes a Web site and five 60-minute lessons that the foundation hopes will give students what it calls “the real story” about their rights when it comes to downloading movies, music, and other media from the Internet.
Interesting that Brazil figures predominantly in both the rip/remix issues and the copyright issues. While Lessig was in Brazil talking about Creative Commons, he said
I come from the land where we talk about being free. I come from a land where we are lost. You are our brother in this debate, and you must remind us of what we have lost.
Brazil, again, has reminded us. Now it is up to us to listen.
me! me! me! (and books)
2
The link circulating amongst many authors on Twitter these days is a blog post by Neil Gaiman in which he addresses a fan’s concerns over authors producing works on their fans’ schedules. In fact, John Scalzi addressed the very same concern in his blog a few months ago.
I’m not an author. I don’t pretend to be (unless you count those behemoths that I have to write in academia — which most people don’t). But I am a literary fan. Books have been my salvation, my joy, my escape, and my home since I was a young girl (I was that kid who sat at the breakfast table, and if I didn’t have a book in front of me, I read the cereal box over and over and over until I could practically recite it.).
The point is, I see books as a gift. Do I get excited to read an ongoing series if it’s done well? Hell yes. Do I expect it? No. It’s not really about me, is it? It’s about the validity of the books, their characters and stories, and if an author has it in himself or herself to continue with that particular theme. Do I wish that some books did have sequels? Sometimes. But I also think there is a deliciousness in not knowing, in allowing my own imagination to lead the character somewhere. I read books for a good story (and no, I’m not counting those books that I read for my degree), interesting (not necessarily likeable) characters, and the ability to let my imagination roam.
It’s a symbiotic relationship for me. The authors do all of the hard work, I get to enjoy it and take the story from there.
–
Willow, my amazing niece, likes books. Lately, she has taken to reading Edgar Allen Poe – did we mess her up somehow? I think she’s turning out to be odd just like her father and I are. Heh.
Anyway, I like to send her books. She likes it if I read them before I send them, so I usually do. The two most recent books I sent her (well, I sent her three — including Blueberry Girl (a delightful book) — but I’m only looking at two here) were John Scalzi’s Zoe’s Tale and Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book.
Zoe’s Tale
I’ll admit, I haven’t read other books in the Old Man’s War series, but have been reading Scalzi’s blog for quite some time. One of the reasons I picked up this book was because Scalzi said it could be read as a stand-alone, and because it has a teenaged girl as the protagonist. Since it is up for a Hugo (and I need to read those anyway), and it is geared toward young adults (remember, Willow is a precocious 10), I thought it might be a good read for her.
I liked it. It wasn’t a difficult read, but it was interesting and engaging. From what I understand, it tells the tale of The Last Colony from a different perspective, but you don’t get the sense that it is connected elsewhere while reading the book. Some of the dialogue seemed a bit simple given that these characters in their late teens, but overall it wasn’t distracting. The only point that did distract me is that Zoe’s boyfriend, Enzo, who is a rockstar poet from his planet, can write sestinas in an hour. I kept thinking, well, he’s a teenager, they probably aren’t that good — but he was invited on this adventure because of his poetry. A sestina in an hour? C’mon.
I do think Willow will like it, and it will be her first foray into more scifi type of writing.
The Graveyard Book
After having read Coraline (which I had gotten her for her birthday), seeing the movie, and then telling me how good Neil Gaiman is (smart girl), I thought she’d enjoy The Graveyard Book.
I kind of cheated on this one. Well, not really, but kind of. I read it — but I read it along with Gaiman. It was fun to hear the voices in his voice, but to read it with him. I stopped when each video stopped, making the book last the entire video series (which, honestly, was not easy at all). As in so many of his books, the graphics are absolutely delightful, gorgeous, and enhance the tale.
I fell in love with Bod. How can you not? He’s a sweet boy. He does his absolute best in trying to be a good boy — but still a boy nevertheless. He has to get into trouble.
The language is delightful. I could picture every scene in the book in full rich detail in my head.
It left me wanting more of Bod.
But even if I don’t get more, he will live on in the discussions Willow and I have about the book after she reads it. And, after all, that is the delight of reading.
magic
02 years ago
After I wrote my post on faeries, a friend sent me a link to the comic strip PartiallyClips. In this particular strip, the characters are talking about magic, and how magic would be a useless discipline, like humanities or communications–although I argue that communications is in the “humanities.” Later in the week, PhD posted a strip about budget cuts and how the first to go were the humanities characters. I started thinking about two things: first, the idea of magic within the humanities, and secondly, the idea that humanities are an expendable discipline because no one quite understands them.
Magic scares people. It isn’t easy to explain, and it is often wielded by those on the outer edges of society. In much the same way, the humanities scare people. The humanities are about people. We extract information about people, analyze it, and reproduce it in different forms. This is scary for some. It is disruptive and worrisome. But it’s also the way humans are.
It is said that Socrates claimed that “the unexamined life is not worth living” (I say this speculatively, because there is some question about Socrates’ actual existence). We have been examining ourselves since the beginning of time. Is this why it is so ridiculed and feared? Have those in the hard sciences decided that we know everything there is to know about ourselves, whether it is philosophical, artistic, or linguistic? Is it possible to know everything? And if we look at it from a hard science perspective, understanding that we are still trying to understand the full capacity of our brains, isn’t the argument furthered that there is always something to learn about the human condition?
If there was a magic discipline, it probably would be the humanities. The humanities bring us the literature, art, dance, music, thoughts, and so much more that allow us to dream about the impossible. Do you think we could have gone to the moon if we hadn’t ever dreamed about what existed up there first? Would we have cared?
Maybe I’m biased — ok, I am. I love working in a field that looks at how humans use language, how it develops identity, and how all of it changes dramatically over time. I love understanding how images and text work in conjunction to create something more powerful than if the two stood on their own. I love it. It is magic. And it’s also science. And it’s also human.
I wouldn’t have it any other way.
crushin’
32 years ago
For the last month, I’ve been pretty much bed-bound. I’ve been very sick, venturing out only to teach, then heading right back home to bed to sleep. It hasn’t been a whole lot of fun.
In all of that downtime, I spent a lot of it online to amuse myself (as if I don’t spend a lot of time online anyway! Hah!). I followed link after link, learning about new people, following their blogs, their twitters, their other social networks. And then, out of the blue, it happened. I mean this kind of thing NEVER happens to me. It just doesn’t. I don’t get starry-eyed over many men, let alone those with some celebrity. But it happened.
I got a crush. On someone TOTALLY out of my league. I mean, we will never meet. Ever. Well, maybe someday, but you know what I mean. We move in completely different circles.
I was telling someone about this embarrassing, secret (not-so-secret anymore, is it?) crush. He said he could see why I developed this crush. The man is obviously intelligent, seems well-read, seems to be comfortable in his skin, can articulate himself in the written word (my favorite type), and is interesting. Then he said to me (as he stood in his office on campus (UMN campus, East Bank, if you must know) looking out a window), but you are surrounded by intelligent, well-read, articulate men. You’re in the perfect place for it! You’re going to school at a top university, pursuing a PhD in a field that is full of well-written men. Maybe you should look closer to home, he says.
Uhhh…what? That would require me actually TALKING to someone. And as anyone who knows me knows, I’m not the most outgoing person. I’m pretty introverted. Talk to a man — who may be potential partner material? Eek! I mean really. I can talk to male colleagues, professors, students, etc. But…seriously. I don’t talk to THOSE men.
The days wore on. I read more about my secret crush (and to those of you who know who I’m talking about, please don’t say his name on this blog — it would lead to my certain humiliation, and I don’t need that right now). I read more and more. I followed more links. And I still liked him — for his expertise in his field. But I realized that it would be an unrequited crush, and not worth spending too much time thinking about.
Plus, you know, it would be hard to compare any mere mortal to him. He is, after all, a celebrity.