detroit swing city

originally, i suppose i thought of using teaching as my Discourse for this post. or grad student. or, to be more specific, graduate teaching assistant in the humanities. at this point, i'm specific enough that i'm not dealing with an unwieldy number of possible genres, but i could still rattle off dozens without thinking about it too hard.

but that's easy. and easy, for me, often equals boring.

so then i thought about dancing. which is tougher. i know for sure this is a Discourse, but i was initially less confident about genres. what do we use? well. lots of facebook invitations to particular events. lots of groups (cleveland swing, louisville swing society, ann arbor swing group, swing detroit) have their own facebook groups. those seem like genres. but i'm trying to do two things here. 1) fulfill this assignment. but also 2) think of a good topic to write on now, so i don't find myself pressed for time later.

do i want to write about facebook groups? not really. so what about other genres we use? well, DJ lists. types of music. we're social dancers, but specifically in the swing tradition, so our music isn't club music or salsa. we listen to a lot of big band stuff. a lot of faster stuff for charleston. music from the 40s. many of us (especially in detroit) also blues dance, so we like blues songs. i could potentially find three good blues songs and write a genre analysis of them.

but then i also thought about dance moves. not like each move is a genre, so much, but i think in the realm of dancing, you could consider "salsa moves" or "ballet moves" genres of dance steps. so lindy hop moves, and blues moves, and charleston moves are things i use all the time in this Discourse.

what do these genres tell me about my Discourse? well, the groups and invites on facebook tell me that we're spread out. we don't see each other except for dances, and so we need ways to organize large groups of people and mobilize them. it tells me we plan things in advance. it tells me a lot of our members are more or less tech savvy, at least enough so to be into social media. the music tells me that we have a sort of fascination with the past, with the history of what we do (and most of us do. a lot of people wear 40s style clothes on special occasions.). the blues music (which you see more of here than you do charleston) tells me something about how this city got its "dirty detroit" reputation - we're not afraid around here to throw some spice in the mix. the steps i'd have to take individually, maybe. they tell me that each type of dance has a flavor to it, a particular feel. charleston is big and bouncy, high energy, lots of kicks. blues is more about expressing individuality, and about little movements, some of which are pretty risque. lindy hop moves tell me, again, we value our history. many of them have been around a long time. some of them are named for famous dancers.

this is a start. am i happy with it? no, not yet. i don't think i've articulated well exactly how i see blues moves as a genre, and i may have to abandon that idea if i can't think of how to make it work. but this is a start.

i'll end with this well-watched scene from an old (so you'll have to forgive it) movie:

relatable romney

the meme i chose is not actually the one i wanted. as no doubt many others discovered, memes are a genre with multiple sub-genres. there's the ancient walrus-bucket meme, the ehrmegod (spelling?) girl meme, the happy cat, etc. and then there's relatable romney.

memes as a concept are short pieces of information -they don't have to be pictures, but this is what we think of when we hear the term. and this type of picture is more or less what we imagine when we think of internet memes as a genre. it's a picture, repeated over and over, with different captions in a similar theme. humor is almost always the point, but memes are also often used as satire and make some sort of social commentary.

as a sub-genre, the relatable romney meme has certain expectations. the top line will have something to do with the hardships faced by many in the current economic climate - failing banks, lost retirement funds, unemployment, no health care, rising gas prices, inability to afford quality food - and in the bottom line will come the turn. it portrays romney as someone hopelessly unable to sympathize with regular people experiencing hardship. other examples say things like "i know how awful rising gas prices are - i own 6 cars, after all." or "i understand detroit - they built all my cars." as the election progressed some of these memes expanded to include topics like feminism and multiculturalism, again, portraying romney as a white guy totally unable to connect with female or non-white voters. as you can see, there was a general theme there. the comments are intended to be funny, but also barbed. and more barbed because they were often true statements about how many cars he owns, how much money he's worth, etc. actual things he'd said were twisted out of context to fit the meme.

obviously, these memes appealed to a wide audience, but perhaps most especially to a politically savvy and liberal audience. things like romney's tenure at bain capital were referenced, as well as remarks he made during debates or interviews. anyone not following the election and keeping abreast of current events wouldn't have fully understood all of the memes, although many of them would still be immediately accessible. the focus on actual information, even twisted, suggests that in addition to being funny, the community around the memes actually did want to use those partial truths and facts to be persuasive.

i could say more about this example, but i'll let it go.

the meme i wanted to find, but couldn't, used this same picture. the caption said something like "jokes about romney's wealth obscure the fact that he'd be a damned dangerous president." i found this particular meme *really* interesting. it deliberately ignores the conventions of the genre, refuses to play by the rules. and yet, it seems to have similar goals. it's obviously a liberal voice. what it seemed to be doing that i found so fascinating was calling attention to the meme in general as a genre and asking whether it was actually a useful genre for creating change. i think you could look at that a couple ways. is this someone who's missed the point? is the internet meme supposed to be a vehicle for change (i'm thinking here of the reading that said that genres are "how things get done")? if it IS, this is actually a potentially devastating critique, or at least one worth taking seriously. but if that's NOT what the genre does, if it's point is rather to be funny and create a sense of solidarity among members of the Discourse, then essentially that person is getting angry because their DVD player won't make toast. of course not, because that isn't its job.

but then this is part of why genre analysis is important. we need to understand what "texts" people are using to get things done. this helps us think about whether those texts are actually doing what we want. and it helps us chose appropriate genres in our own lives. if we want X done, a good understanding of how genre works can tell us what sort of text might best get us what we want.

speech and discourse communities

i often find Swales tough to grapple with. like most scholarly pieces, his has an agenda, and i feel it's important for me to keep track both of his argument, and the reason he's making it. there's this term, he seems to be saying, discourse community, and some people are suggesting that it's the same as a speech community and we don't need a separate definition for it. but he thinks we do, and he finds squishing the two concepts together like that confusing.

because, he says, it's not the same -for several reasons. for one thing, discourse communities aren't bounded by speech. it's not that they don't use speech, or that speech is trivial; rather it's that people can be in the same discourse community even if they live far away and never meet one another. if you think of nursing as a discourse community, one could suggest then that an american nurse and an italian nurse, in spite of distance, language barriers, somewhat different cultures, etc, would still "recognize" each other, share similar goals, etc.

a second difference, he says, is that speech communities are socialinguistic, not sociorhetorical. in the first, it's the socialization that is most important. when we spend time with friends and family, it's our sense of solidarity that is in the foreground. sociorhetorical groups tend to be united more by goals, which usually isn't the case for, say, a group of friends. so this is different too.

and then, he says speech groups include (i'm thinking here, maybe, of my arabic professor talking about the way a shared language might unite people with somewhat different cultures) while discourse communities tend to exclude. part of what makes them what they are is that their language and goals may not be fully grasped by outsiders.

teaching seems like a lame example here, but i'm going with it. a good friend of mine, who is a lawyer by trade, offered to cover a class for me. as i began talking about what he would need to do in the class session, i realized (and he realized) that the full implications of the assignments/activities weren't really available to him. i used terms he didn't know, or i used terms he thought he knew in ways that were new to him. (the same, i'm sure, would happen to me if he asked me to lawyer for him.) because i study rhetoric, and his profession closely touches rhetoric, we often think of ourselves as "in the same field," but this conversation showed that in fact there's a large gap between what i am and what he is. we have specialized knowledge and goals that make us Other. on the other hand, i am friends with a couple of older women who happen to be nuns. on the surface, it wouldn't seem like i (secular, flippant, fear of commitments) have much in common with these ladies. but many nuns are nurses or teachers, and these women happen to be teachers as well. and it turns out, no matter where you teach, a teacher is a teacher is a teacher. we understand certain things about one another's lives without needing explanation. we each belong to multiple discourse communities, but we have this one in common.

new semester, and first day writing sample

most ice cream fans will tell you that any ice cream flavor is a flavor worth eating. from the understated fun of chocolate chip, to the chaos of flavor that characterizes ben and jerry's line, to the exotic persian frankincense - any ice cream has its merits.

or so we tell ourselves. but while it may be so that all ice cream is beautiful in the eyes of its maker, there can be only one best ice cream, only one candidate which comes out ahead in the ice cream presidential election.

some may try to tell you that vanilla is the best. it's simple. but let's be honest - vanilla is the john kerry of ice cream. there's nothing wrong with it, but you don't get excited about it. when vanilla ice cream gives a speech, it's not memorable. this is no bill clinton flavor we're talking about. (clinton, by the way, is obviously a dark chocolate rocky road.) vanilla's okay, sure. but are we really looking for okay? is adequate enough in a contest of this magnitude?

i didn't think so.

consider what butter pecan brings to the table. it's a southern favorite, which makes it both staunchly American and just a little bit exotic. it isn't overflowing with add-ins and flavor combinations, creating the sort of chaos and confusion characterized by B&J's everything but the, or mitt romney's tax plans. no, butter pecan relies on its own natural gifts - the richness of the cream, butter, and brown sugar; the dark  toastiness of the pecans; the marriage of just-sweet-enough and almost-savory. if butter pecan ice cream wore clothes, it would dress like michelle obama. 

butter pecan: rich, smooth, elegant. the obvious choice.