20100625.1554

To continue on in catching up on my reading and the thrust of discussion here and here:

I recently took a trip to Boston, which accounts for some of the out-of-pocketness I have noted, and along the four-hour train ride each way (which was remarkably pleasant), I read through the June 2010 issue of College Composition and Communication. There were a few good things to come out of that reading.

One of them, and the reason that I continue to subscribe to as many journals as I do, is the simple pleasure at reading and pondering the work that other people in the humanities do. I like to know what is going on in the "out there" of the acadmeic world, and coming abreast of what the journals are printing helps with that.

Another, and one more practical, is that I came across a response to an article published in CCC last year. The response by Shultz Colby, Colby, and Johnson to Alexander's "Gaming in the Composition Classroom," and Alexander's rebuttal, which appear in CCC 61.4 (June 2010): 761-68, reminded me of one of my students. Said student is the most recent of a number who have given some of their assignments to the discussion of video games (and since I encourage my students to write about what they care about, it comes as no surprise to me that I see such papers); as I read the responses, and later re-read the article which spawned them, it occurred to me that the student would benefit from seeing them himself. I therefore printed out copies of them and handed them to him after he finished taking his midterm examination earlier this week.

The student seemed impressed that I had taken the time to prepare a wholly outside thing for him, and was a bit surprised to learn that there is research published in at least one major journal that takes seriously the social phenomenon of gaming. I was pleased to have made a connection to a student in such a way, and that my journal-reading facilitates such is enough reason for me, as an educator, to keep taking my periodicals.

More directly related to my own earlier writing, though, is Robert R. Johnson's article in the issue, "Craft Knowledge: Of Disciplinarity in Writing Studies" (673-90). In it, Johnson engages the notion that "a craftperson is just simply not an artist, let alone a thinker" (674), arguing against such a dichotomy between craft and thought and articulating the applicability of an older model of craftspersonship to current compositional techniques and pedagogies.

I have, I believe, ranted against the same dichotomy that Johnson identifies, and I find that I agree with him as he writes "Craft, after all, is one of the most central human essences" (675). While it is true that other creatures use tools and behave in ways that can easily be understood as agricultural, it is also true that much of our understanding of ourselves is predicated upon analysis of what we do--and making stuff is a big part of what we do. And while it can be argued that the English verb "to make" is a fairly general one (in terms of meaning, I mean), it is one that is applied to a great many things that do not themselves necessarily involve the actual creation of a product. We speak of "making love," when love is not actually produced by sexual acts. There is the idea of "making money," and unless we work at a mint or a press, we are not actually creating currency (and the ciphers that stand in for it in many cases, being "virtual," are not necessarily created in any event). I have read in the papers of Louisiana students about "making groceries" in a way that has absolutely nothing to do with the farms, ranches, or other points of production of foodstuffs, but only a point of dispersal and distribution of them.

The idea of our use of "to make" parallels Stephen R. Donaldson's statements on the verb "to feel" that appear in, as I recall, Lord Foul's Bane.

There need to be more articles, more discussions, that work to break down the rigid and all-too-often hostile division between those who study and those who labor. At its simplest, it is the work of those who labor that allows those of us who study the time and leisure to be able to do so; it is foolish of any of us who are in academia to spurn as unworthy and "less" those whose hands and arms and backs create and sustain our surroundings. But at its simplest also, it is the work of those who study that has enabled much of what those who labor do and enjoy; were it not for the researchers--not just in the hard sciences, though certainly not excluding them--there would be little of that which has resulted in improvements to the lives of those who earn their bread by the sweat of their brows.

And if you tell me that those in the United States are not, overall, better off now than in the days of their parents and grandparents, I do not believe you. I think I have discussed this somewhat.

We do each need the other, despite what some philosophies assert. None of us exists alone; none of us can exist without other people--simple biology commands it. And the idea that any of us, and I very much mean ANY of us, can be responsible without regard to other people, is flatly fallacious.

Works Cited
Donaldson, Stephen R. Lord Foul's Bane. New York: Del Rey, 1977. Print.
"Interchanges." College Composition and Communication 61.4 (June 2010): 759-68. Print.
Johnson, Robert R. "Craft Knowledge: Of Disciplinarity in Writing Studies." College Composition and Communication 61.4 (June 2010): 673-90. Print.