Euro-soul

This isn't gay but it is a little rambly:

When I was in fourth grade, I had to do an oral report on a famous scientist. I chose Evangelista Torricelli (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evangelista_Torricelli) because he was Italian, and I felt an vague ethnic fraternity with him. I remember three salient details:

1. I attributed the invention of the microscope to him. I think I even read this out of a book. I was very plaintive in my oral report, as I recall, saying that most people think it was Galileo but really it was this Torricelli guy. Now as I look at the wikipedia article, I don't even think the barometer occurred to me, either from reading or general thought. So I was doubly wrong, in a way. Do young people just read from the wikipedia page for oral reports today?
2. My mom's ironic helpfulness was at work here. She iterated that I was to pronounce Torricelli's name with an Italian accent, and that this would contribute to my impression of scholarly wisdom. I say ironic because her help usually led me to lower grades, since the aspects I concentrated on and the aspects important to the teacher were not always the same; this would repeat itself dreadfully in my high school English education.
3. This oral report would take place in a further context of my feelings to my (lack of) Italianness. In ways, I would be encouraged to foreground this in school because of my name. But I wasn't even 10 before I noticed the great incongruity of what I was imputed to be by my teachers and classmates (and mom) vs. what I found at home: my dad is just as American as any WASPy person I've ever known. He prefers sports to politics, eats dinner over the sink, and drinks light beer. As I've grown up, I've adopted the latter two tendencies and struggle to find anything other than an ironic like for Italian American culture.

So I stood up at the chalkboard and gave this report. This was at an age where I still thought my mom was cool and that what she cared about was what the rest of the world cared about. As I effusively pronounced his name, with accented Es and a ch sound and Is that sounded like ees, I was too smug to notice the class's indifferent confusion.

I got an average grade on the report. In the 21 years since then, I have become closed off to my mom's suggestions, and this only seems to imply to her that I want more suggestions--on relationships, my diet, my career plans, my pedagogy. I speculate, sometimes, that she doesn't have an off switch for these suggestions, and maybe she thinks parenting comprises two ages:

1. the age of being a proxy to your kids
2. the age of giving advice on what you would do

Stage 1 makes sense, perversely, if you want your kid to do well on the oral report. Young kid, basic needs. Stage 2 doesn't work well if you want your son to date a nice woman. And yet my mom's dispensation continues, often in discredited pop dualisms.

Oddly enough, it's my mom who was the more Italian of the two, most significantly in her provinciality-in-acculturation. She was the one who cooked Italian food and stressed this kind of inclusion in our school activities as if it spoke for me. She listened to opera at home when she cooked, and read Italian gossip magazines. And yet she was born in Nebraska and lived in Las Vegas until college. I think I grew up properly American in that the Italian ethnicity engendered in me was a mix of my dad's weary apathy to being the Euro in the room and my mom's dysfunctional, attention-less childhood. But those are worthy of their own thoughts.

Heavy Petting

My job is to teach college students how to write essays better. You may have taken a course that offered a similar goal in different words. Most likely it was a required course.

An good essay is an exercise in persuasion, not necessarily an exercise in rational inquiry or reasoning. (Teaching logic is perfunctory in most essay writing classes, as far as I know.) A peculiarity of learning how to write essays is that students are taught with the same methods of persuasion that they learn to repeat.

You should understand that there is no set of verifiable principles that guides this course; in other words, it's not a scientific course. Instead, the people who will teach this course start by training for several years, writing their own essays, to gain consent from an established group of so-called expert essay writers who say "you've written enough essays; now go teach the practice."

Here's an example: in Sandro's class, Sandro persuades his students to believe that certain essay-writing practices are the most--if not the only--effective essay writing practices. Where did Sandro learn those practices? Not from some set of standardized, reproducible practices, but by his own instructors who persuaded him; who in turn were persuaded.

When one tries to trace back the origin of the so-called knowledge that has floated down the river of persuasion, it's impossible to find that knowledge's origin in fact, if there even is one. The knowledge doesn't originate in fact; it just originates from the desires to persuade students certain things. These desires can be considered almost universal, and they change very slowly over time, but they're still desires, not science.

To say that science (if the complicated set of practices can be given that simple one-word name) is the opposite of persuasion is not as solid of an analogy as one might think. After all, humans created science, and despite the very "nature" of its infallibility built into its very functioning, science could be considered just another effective device of persuasion.

* * *

I put on a documentary about advertising for my students. One of the main messages from the movie, and this past unit, that I stressed is that advertising is duplicitous in that it promises the reward of a life of pleasure in exchange for the purchase of a product. The truth is that there is no pleasure. A person buys the product, experiences a narrow fraction of that pleasure, and learns only to buy more products in an even greater search for pleasure. Consuming the message of advertising just leads to more consumption; or, "advertising advertises advertising," as McLuhan said.

Couldn't one say the same of essay writing? Isn't it just an endless cycle of persuasion by just creating more situations that need persuasion? More nit-picky little moments that one can single out and write about because he or she needs to pass the class?

I need to better appreciate my fellow advertisers.

UV

antanaclasis - repeating a word or phrase with a different meaning

Burlington – Walking to the top of the university hill, I saw this building really high on the grass; at the same time, I was also really high on the grass.