The New York Sophist

I liked the tournament at Cornell – really well run and I feel like it was the most competitive tournament we’ve had in the east in BP format (so far). I think it’s going to get tougher as we go on. 

The tournament didn’t give me my usual great feelings mostly because I was doing some stuff with the tournament that I haven’t done before like helping to pick the topics, set up judging panels and stuff like that. It just reconfirmed by dislike for the running of a tournament, and how appreciative I am that there are people who like to do that sort of thing. I reconfirmed my belief that I am not one of them.  I’m happy to help out the running of a tournament, but I think where I’m best at that is in the low rooms judging, helping people get a bit better at argumenting. Yes, new word, jot it down.

I spent some of the bus ride home re-connecting wtih my students who I didn’t really have much of a chance to talk to during the weekend, which is, as everyone knows, the best part of a tournament.

Here’s a list format of the things about the Cornell tournament that were great. Marked with positives for your ease-of reading:

+ I came up with some new teaching ideas though after talking to a few friends about BP teaching methods. 

+Saw some freinds from California who came out for the tournament. I hope this means that more Cali BP teams will travel east more frequently. There’s a lot to learn from eachother.

+ Connecting with old friends and catching up as well as sharing some great stories.

+ Watching some really amazing students make arguments that I would never think of in years, much less 20 minutes.

+ Ate 3 blueberry bagels. So rare.  To get anything other than onion or Pumpernickle is super rare for me, so to get three over 2 days is out of this world.

Negatives:

– Having real responsibilities connected to the running of a tournament.

– Feeling disconnected from my students for most of the weekend.

– Having to vote against three of my most favorite teams, sometimes more than once

– Being away on Valentine’s weekend

– My new video camera doesn’t have the stamina of my older video camera.

I think the positives outweigh, kind of. They are of a different quality.

I’ll post what videos of the tournament I have later on.  Some of them crapped out I think. It’s too bad.

I plan to read some of these on the bus trip this weekend to Ithaca on my microtop, a computer that is about 8 inches in size.

These texts are mostly Buddhist commentaries, and I always think of Jack Kerouac when I’m reading this stuff.  When he got into it, he wrote Allen Ginsberg many letters about it, including one that was a bibliography.  At the end of this nice bibliography (he annotated it as well) he remarks to Ginsberg – hey, dont’ go looking for these books in the New York Public Library because I stole them from there.  

Ironic, but close to what I’m doing, except the theft is a bit more ephemeral. I wonder what he would have thought about BitTorrent and all the freely accessible texts on the internet? I do know he probably would have loved the word processor – no more taping together typing pages to write novels.

So I’ve been catching up on podcasts – mostly I listen to experimental music, classical music and buddhism podcasts.

I’ve also been watching some documentaries. I’m very interested in Tibet lately so I’ve been watching films about that. I just saw one that could have been really good – 10 Questions to the Dalai Lama, but the filmmaker was one of these oversimplistic neo-liberal types who asked loaded questions.  It was somewhat silly.

I also post to my blog.

I’ve been teaching a small seminar on Feminist Rhetorical Theory. I think it’s going well. One of the things that I did was make a chart to explain some of the differences between thinkers. The chart is problematic because it is essentialist. But it’s essentialist character, I think, makes it a good condensation point for teaching.

However the problem of how to point to the chart’s essentialist character hangs. If you do this, you might ruin the pedagogical value of the chart.

I think it is like identifying clash points in a debate – you start there and the debate goes and gets good. But if you finish with only that, you are actually more confused, and you wish the debate never happened.

Unsure where to go from here.

I doubt such wonderful intertextual and cross media moments could come from any other place than the internet. My evidence? this single frame from the Brick Testament, a retelling of the Bible done in the medium of Legos.

I rest my case.

This is a great event and I hope we can do it at least once a month, if not more. The next one appears to be scheduled the weekend after the Cornell tournament, unless I’m out of town that weekend. I’d better check on that sometime today . . .

Still figuring out the camera. This video is not in HD but was shot in HD – Google video does not yet support HD, and vimeo’s support even with subscription is only 1 GB files. This debate is around 2.5GB of data. I’m reducing it in various ways to preserve the HD quality and allow it to be posted on vimeo. Once it is, I’ll replace this lower quality Google video link.