Visual Performance: My Block

As per requested, here is the video I showed in class.  Hope you enjoy!

-Augustus

Argument of Literacy in the Blog

Being a Rhetoric major, I am always looking for the argument something is making.  Always looking for terms to be defined, always wanting to interpret the 'true' meaning of what is being said and savvy enough to detect anything else that may be implied.  When I log into the blog roll, I cant help but feel the sublimeness of all the literacy that is occurring throughout.  Through hyperlinking, the size of our collective thinking that is interwoven through intertextuality is enormous.  But through it all you can still see the thread that runs through us all.  Their is a common discourse that we all use and speak of that is deeper than just the canonized readings that Dave has provided.  There is a language, a way of thinking and a fluid ease in which we all speak our opinions upon the subjects we write about.  There is a fearlessness that I see that is so pure, it almost resembles nativity.  This is our literacy, the literacy of the Ed 140 class.  The language in which we create in the community we have built.  Our collective thinking is like a quilt: funky looking, a bunch of bright, contrasting, very distinguishable, patches of humanity that even though might not agree with the patch adjacent to it, find a perfect harmony within the community.  Although it is eclectic, it oddly works, and boy is it comfortable;)

Life imitates Art

Henry Louis Gates writes about how race is but a troupe, the view of literacy allowing one to be seen as a person who could 'reason',the struggle of the black to be allowed into the enlightened class, and how blacks were "attempting to write themselves out of slavery".  It is crazy how mediums often affect each other, despite one being physical and the other metaphysical.  Gates through his writing had clearly written himself out of the troupe, had arrived at a level of prestige and notoriety, finding himself one of the most respected academic voices in all of America.  But being a Harvard professor with many know published works did not save him on July 16th.  In the end, he was still viewed as a black man possible breaking into a home and debatably arrested for being a flippant black man.

The whole subject is debatable but speaking with many about it I realize just like the OJ "Did he do it or did he not?" was answered significantly according to race.  Blacks will say how do you arrest an elderly man, clearly on his way back from a trip, who produces identification in what is clearly a misunderstanding about what is his home? Would this happen if he was a white man?  The white perspective being how do you not cooperate with a officer who is clearly operating in the best interest of the the neighborhood and the property owner to boot.

In the end, Life imitates the Art in which it created: Gates no matter how much he attempted to to write his way out of existence of the troupe he coined was unable.  In the end, I believe he was still viewed as a black man.        

Ebonics as a 2nd Language

Gloria Anzaldua’s argues that dialects of language are in fact different languages in themselves.  She states that variations of the language that we use with different groups of people are languages as well. I don't know if I would embrace her concept in its totality, but I am sensitive to the concept of slang as a language.  Where I am from, Ebonics is our language of choice.  Most see it as an ignorant expression but I see it for the genius that it is.  Like anything else it is built on metaphors and similes, building autonomous understanding amongst a select group uninterruptible to the masses.  Is this not the creation of another language? It sure sounds and feels like it to me.  Example, if I was to say,"The elroys was bluppin so I had to hop in the scrapper and get sidewayz, I was fresh from the L.I.Q. and rippter, feelin my season, and ridin dirty.  I'm already on paperwork and if I get pinched with elbow they bout to throw football numbers at me!"  Do you understand this?  People where I am from would, so how is this ignorant? Just because it is counter culture?  You decide.  As I see it, it is people creative enough to fix a need  voided by a system that has failed them.  But you decide.    

Word of the Day-Literacy

The 1st blog I have ever produced and what other then about the language of the medium itself?!?!  Now that is meta in its trues form!  The ability to critic a phenomena within the medium of writing, literacy, using writing as the medium of critic.  Literacy.  A word that just by its recognition performs itself.  The ability to take these manipulated shapes and identify them as building blocks of a language,literacy.  The ability to read a street sign, owner's manual, daily news, or newest Harry Potter's installment, literacy.  

A tool taught as soon as infants can coo out sounds, the alphabet in which constructs mighty language, broken down into its smallest form of the letter.  From letters to words, from words to sentences, sentences to paragraphs, paragraphs to ideas,Literacy.

The ability to escape the physical world, embarking on a mission to stop an alien race from gaining access to our galaxy by meeting them head on between ours and theirs somewhere out in oblivion, or hunting down the infamous Moby Dick in a life boat, just you, a spear, and a bottle of tatar sauce, literacy (plus a little im promptu).

What do all these things culminate to be:Literacy.  The learning and application of tool that opens the very doors of life itself in a multiplicity of ways.