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Tuesday, October 30, 2012

entry 7



Charlie Hynes
English 440
Professor:  Michelle Kells
Journal entry #9, Antonia’s Line

            Antonia’s Line was a nice movie, pretty long, but there was a lot of story to tell.  I enjoyed the journey through Antonia’s life line beginning with her mother’s death and her own re-emergence into the small farming village where she was born.  Antonia brings her daughter home to witness her mother’s passing, and to take over the family farm.  From here we are introduced to the villagers, and one by one their backstories and personas. It is a shame there aren’t more communities like the one from the movie.  I felt like once you were a part of the community, you were in essence a part of an extended family. 
            I think it was interesting that we started with Antonia’s passing, or her final day, then went onward to her mother’s death.  There is so much death in the movie, as well as so much life reborn.  I felt that was a strong theme.  Near the end Antonia is explaining to her granddaughter, Sarah, how when people die there is always something left behind for the growth of others, the dead’s ashes fertilize the soil for new life, and it is all just a cycle, that life wants so hard to go on living that it fertilizes the soil in its death to perpetuate life.   Crooked Finger was always talking about the misery of life; he never saw things improving so he killed himself.  He, however, might agree with the cycle of life notion that Antonia shared with Sarah.  The story was not very considerate of organized religion anywhere.  I also appreciated that part to the story.  The only thing organized religion does for Antonia’s philosophy regarding life and death and community is give her and her family a place to go and be with the community.  I hope that makes sense because I did not feel a lot of religious dogma being brought to the story.  Antonia brought her daughter to the city to get knocked up, because she wanted a baby, and not a husband.  When persecuted at church Antonia and her boyfriend set the priest up with his own sexual scandal so that he will retract his evil oratory about Daniela, Antonia’s unwed pregnant daughter.  I wondered why they would even go to church, until I realized that it may have been one of the few occasions where they could dress up and be in their community.  They needed to have something to do outside of farm work. 
            I enjoyed the rhetoric within the movie, especially between Teresa and Crooked Finger, and I enjoyed the simplicity of speech within the movie.   Again I felt people did not waste words, they were well thought, and said.  

Maria Elwan
Eng 440
October 30, 2012
Field Log Entry #1   Walk about on UNM Campus

Penny and I started our observation at the SUB and found a performance of SCRAP, a student performance group, which was acting out a mini-performance of what we believed to be their upcoming play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. This production was a recreated tale from Shakespeare’s Hamlet only with a twist. The play was being acted out with a homo-erotic flavor. The performance was being carried out in the lower level of the sub on the mid-section stage. There were not many spectators in the audience seating. We counted two guys and five girls, that seemed to be friends of the actors.

We then left the SUB and stopped in front of Mitchell Hall and chatted with the Rainbow Men, two middle-aged hippies and their dog-Almuerzo. The dog was a sweet pit-bull, friendly to students, but not so friendly to other male dogs. The Rainbow Men had been on campus all week, selling hemp bracelets and necklaces. They were on their way to winter in Mexico and attend the Rainbow Festival, thus their name Rainbow Men.

We bid a bon-voyage to the Rainbow men and proceeded to the seats at the end of Mitchell Hall (toward Science Learning Building) and sat and observed those who walked by.

UNM has a huge collection of young men and women on skateboards. Penny who knows much more about this subject than me, starting pointing out ‘distinctions’ between skaters. Some skaters use their boards for transportation and some just like to hang out on campus and practice their technique.  I documented the following groups:

a.       Late teens to early 20s in usual skater attire, t-shirt and baggy Capri’s.

b.       Girl skaters prefer long boards. One girl in particular on a long board was wearing a fancy, flashy hoody and shorts, and her hair was curled. She was more preppy looking than some other boarders we observed. I learned that long boards seem to be a crossover from surfing and have migrated from California.

c.       We also observed a young man sitting behind us, who seemed to be a serious student, sitting outside reading and had his short board alongside of him. He was dressed more like a typical student not in hipster attire.

I enjoyed our little field observation and became aware of the subtle differences between the skater groups on campus.

Thursday, October 25, 2012


Maria Elwan
October 25, 2012
Journal & Field Log 9  - Based on articles by Kent Ryden and Juan Guerra.

These two diverse essays of Juan Guerra and Kent Ryden depict the cultural or physical maps which are guides that help explain the environment around us. Our understanding of these genre maps depends on our ability to interpret their message. There are rhetorical, cultural landscapes all around us, some are visible at the surface and others require a deeper vision to see them and be able to spread their message. Writing about these different genre landscapes depicts how rhetorical and linguistic messages cross disciplines and cultures.

Monday, October 22, 2012

"Deep Alignment and Sponsorship" Discussion Questions

For our presentation, we plan on including the class in an extremely stimulating discussion lead by questions, in order to fully explore the topics handled in "Deep Alignment and Sponsorship" in Because We Live Here.

Below are those questions:


  1. Dougherty is helpful in identifying the main obstacles he believes prevent students from completing a baccalaureate.  In your experiences, do you believe these challenges (staying in school during the first two years, transferring to a four-year school, surviving in the four-year school) are correct?
  2. Higher ranking schools clearly have higher graduation rates.  Why is this the case and how can this be corrected in order to see higher graduation rates at all universities?
  3. Dougherty points out that studies indicate students who initially report wanting a baccalaureate degree but start out in a community college do not achieve their stated goal as often as students who start out at a four year college.  Is this true, and if so, why?
  4. In our community, we have a community college which funnels into the university, and many students use this to finish core requirements at a cheaper cost.  Do you have an experience with this system?  How did it prepare you for the university work level?
  5. There is a clear economic divide between community colleges and universities.  Does this make a difference in graduation rates and success rates?  If students are placed in remedial level courses and must then work their way up to the university level, is their success rate at risk?
  6. What can our community colleges and universities do to make the transition between them more seamless?
We'll be discussing them in class, so start thinking about your answers!

~Tiffany & the J-Man



Sunday, October 21, 2012



I can probably explain my enthusiasm for this English course, or, in this case, rhetoric and cultural studies, but I’ll save that for some other time. Rhetoric and cultural studies, the inside and outside of discourse (thanks, Don), and, as it’s turning out, a course in cross-cultural personalities. I’m speaking of Penelope, who in that beautifully crafted elegant essay, taught me for the first time in my life, what strife you live with in bridging two cultures, how difficult it is to have to deal with, among other things, nasty, unenlightened criticism from both sides. And yet, how beautifully you represent the-already-here–and-in-your-face future – the truly bi-cultural individual,.
It’s the future, however, as shaped by transnational corporations, little respectful of borders of any kind, they transgress them as standard operating procedure; they displaces whole peoples, if need be, it turns impoverished campesinos, driven off their land by, say, NAFTA, and turns them into subminimum wage slaves of US capital, or saves them as a reserve army of the unemployed, to be used as necessary. For this reason, without the overthrow of the reign of capital, it’s the future of humanity in the matrix, forced to adjust to what postmodernists call hybridity, nomadism, border crossings, multi-culturalism, all useful concepts, as I will argue, but then there exists as well the threat of amalgamation, the loss of all cultural identity, under the grinding effects of a ruthless economy, the postmodern self, the schizoid self, the actor self as played by Morgan Freeman, playing himself, the playful ludic self. This is the subject position which cyber capitalism wishes you to adopt, but don’t believe it! Still, it will have to be the subject of another blog, my critique of the ludic, postmodern subject.
As far as the modern or traditional unitary self goes, this is the way most of us think of ourselves as having a more or less stable identity, grounded in Cartesian logic and our own “experience” of ourselves in all our plenitude and presence in the “obviousness” and “common-sense” of it, as free agents, acting in reality, responsible for ourselves, grounding our identities in elaborate narratives of where we come from, and its traditions, where Patriarchy’s wisdom is respected: “My father always told me, when in doubt, empty the clip!” [sorry, Michelle]. If I heard her right, Michelle called upon her cultural values to help her come to terms with the possibility of her death in Afghanistan!
In Vietnam, however, one spoke of going into “Indian Country,” inhabited by “gooks” and “slopes,” [“Haggis” today] and free-fire zones where you were ordered to kill everything. The use of napalm, Agent Orange, B52s dropping 500 lb bombs, endless search and destroy missions, and for what? To stop communism, I guess. Far from being a noble cause, far from being a tragic mistake, Vietnam was a war crime against an innocent people. Many soldiers, to their credit, rebelled, and a major reason for the precipitous withdrawal of American forces at the end, was just that. They were fast losing control of their military.
And Maria. Born to Cuban refugees, raised for the first 17 years of her life in Cuban culture and language, from which experience she still bears the trace of an accent. I thought her first from some eastern European country like Hungary or Poland, but, I misspoke, and said, “middle eastern country.” Well, it turns out, she married an Egyptian and moved to Egypt and had a child, now a full-grown professional of one kind or another. Sorry, Maria, I forgot what you said she did. So, we’ve got another border-crosser extraordinaire, spanning three cultures and just getting started.
The only bordercrossing I’ve done is study foreign languages, and even there, it’s all academic. I can speak, read, and write in 3 languages, but I can’t understand any of them very well, when it’s spoken and especially if it’s spoken to me (I get scared and shut down). I did one involuntary cross-cultural stint in Saudi Arabia, but I made the mistake of thinking it would be cool, early on, to get some hash to while away the time, as I used to do back at the University of Arkansas in graduate school (French and English poetry). So I bought the hash, cost me 250, 1979-dollars, golden Lebanese brick of harsh the size of a match box. Now it so happened that the guy in the next room, not really a “roommate” – we never communicated, no mutual language, aside from assalmualaykem! Wa alaykemassalam! – was hosting a visit from his father, a Bedouin looking type, from Bahrain, Sunnis, to be sure – anyway I was in my room, smoking up some hash, and then I left the apartment and went down to the street. I sort of got swept along by a crowd heading for the Friday Mosque, so I followed. There, in the parking lot, for no apparent reason, a throng of Saudi males had formed the perimeter of a large, rough-drawn circle. In the middle were your typical Saudi military, armed with snub-nosed machine guns, teenagers really. I joined the circle and all of a sudden the “cops,” as they were, ordered those in the front to sit down, thus fixing the shape of the circle. A van drove up, and out came guards with two prisoners, arms bound behind their backs, their heads bare, and I think there was a red scarf around their necks or that could be a memory of when the sword blade  cut off their heads, which went rolling on the ground. I held an after image of a splash of red. The prisoners had first been forced to their knees and forced to incline their heads toward the saber, wielded, no doubt, by one of the official thugs in the service of the royal family, the House of Saud.
Bad enough that I chose to see that, while stoned, even worse was the experience of getting back to my room and not being able to locate my stash. I searched frantically, and, while fumbling around my belongings, I began to realize that my neighbor and his father had come into my room, discovered the hash and for some as yet unknown reason, had removed it. I was on the verge of preparing myself to go into their room and confront them, ask them what they wanted … and all the time my fear was a rising tsunami, till I was riding a veritable flying surfboard of terrorized paranoia… But then I found it. I sold it the next day for 50 dollars.
I felt so afraid and alone, one night, that I vomited in a can used for an ashtray at one of those open-air cafes, called Gahewah where you order Shishaw wa Shahi. After I had been there for a while in the ‘Kingdom,” as they say, I got more used to it ……. nah, never really … So I admire successful border crossers, for wont of a better word. They have a lot to teach us, perhaps the very most to teach us, about how we teach our students, especially those from different cultures, because these are going to be the students and teachers of the future of English, the profession. It ought to be their stories and experiences and knowledge at the center of the curriculum of how to teach writing.
The following paragraph by Raul E. Ybarra (Learning to Write as a Hostile Act for Latino Students. Peter Lang, 2004: 17) has caught my attention:
I found that cultural and communication differences do play a part in how Latino students respond and react to being taught academic writing. Cultural differences contribute to the different and/or negative impressions Latino students have about writing and other English courses. As Farr (1986) states, “Aspects of one’s culture are part of the tacit knowledge that members of a particular group unconsciously share simply by virtue of being members” (Farr, Marcia, and Harvey Daniels. Language Diversity and Writing Instruction. New York. ERIC Clearing House on Urban Education Institute for Urban and Minority Education, 1986: 200). When the culture or ethnic backgrounds of the culture differ, “meetings can be plagued by misunderstandings, mutual misrepresentations of events and misevaluations” (Gumperz, Jenny Cook, and John Jay Gumperz. “Introduction: Language and the Communication of Social Identity.” In John Gumperz, Ed. Language and Social Identity. Cambridge Univ Press, 1982: 1-21).





Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Acknowledgements and notes

Hey all,

I've posted the PP from our presentation today in the storage shed.  I encourage everyone else to do the same (if you want) with your presentation notes/materials, PPs, etc.  I want to give a shout out to Don and Phil for their excellent work on this project, as well as the valuable insights I gained just from talking with them.  Also, big thanks to the class for an awesome discussion--I learned a lot today.  I'm continually amazed by the unique perspectives everyone brings to this course.

Quick reminder, the Celebration of Student Writing (CSW) is this Friday, the 19th, from 11 - 2 in Ballrooms A-C on the 2nd floor of the SUB.  Hope to see you all there!

-Matthew

Monday, October 15, 2012

Ode to Mario Ruoppolo


Maria Elwan
Eng 440
October 15, 2012
Journal and Field Log 8 – Il Postino

The setting of the Film, Il Postino is Salina, Italy a small, very poor fishing village which has no fresh running water. The townspeople have been promised running water for many years by corrupt politicians. Election time comes around and the politicians flock to Salina and make their promises, after the elections the people are once again left to fend for themselves. Viewed from a Marxist lens, the film shows how these politicians exploit the working-class, townspeople both publicly and personally:

·         Making promises they know they won’t be able to keep.

·         Politicians personally trying to negotiate (haggle) for products the villagers are selling and offering a price that is much lower than what the politicians are actually able to afford., so in a sense, the villagers are being cheated out of their livelihood.
Pablo Neruda is a world-renown poet. His Marxist leanings have ostracized him and forced him to go into exile from his beloved Chile and take refuge in Salina. Here Neruda faces the alienation of being forced to be away from his homeland and friends, all the things that are dearest to him and bring him inspiration. But he also comes face to face with the social conditions that strengthen his Marxist ideologies.
Neruda’s path crosses with Mario Ruoppolo, a sweet, simple Italian who is given a job as a letter carrier by a local Postmaster who is a big fan of Neruda’s and also has communistic leanings. Ruoppolo is a young man with a sensitive nature who is not cut out to be a fisherman like his father. The mailman although semi-illiterate has more of a poetic inclination, but he is also painstakingly shy. Neruda is sensitive to the plight of the local people and takes a liking to Ruoppolo. He begins to mentor him through poetry and metaphors to help Ruoppolo win the heart of his beloved.
Ruoppolo has plenty of time on his hands because this is 1940’s Italy. The country has just come out of being on the wrong side of history in World War II and is facing extreme poverty and unemployment. Mario’s prospects are limited, so he accepts the only job he can find, a very lowing paying job as a letter carrier who only has 1 person to deliver to—Pablo Neruda.  
Il Postino illustrates Berger’s point that according to Marxist theory “the base (mode of production or economic system) shapes the superstructure (the institutions in that society such as the church)”(42). The local politicians make up the base that shapes the superstructure (the Catholic Church). Italians are traditionally devout Catholics. So in this case the townspeople are conditioned to accept their situation and instead of organizing and demanding running water, they simply pray for it.
            The film also illustrates how pervasive metaphors are in all cultures. Even Mario who is an uneducated fisherman’s son discovers the way to express the sentiments he previously had no words for. It is then through metaphor that the shy Mario Ruoppolo finally finds his voice and with the help of Neruda, Mario metaphorically wins the heart of his beloved. But in a twist of fate the Marxist realities of the day come into play because the audience loses their hero, Mario, when he is fatally wounded participating in street protests for workers’ rights.

Sunday, October 14, 2012

Phil and Don,

We're still on for tomorrow (Monday), 7:30 PM at Brickyard, right?