The New York Sophist

This trip to Italy has been great if unexpected. Just goes to show you that you should reach out to any random academic emails you get if you think that the person on the other end shares your ideas or area even a little bit. I speak tomorrow at the University of Padua as a part of a conference interrogating the idea of judging sheets, rubrics, or as we call them in the U.S. “ballots.” It’s such a cute American name for what is essentially a rubric but we love to keep that democratic exceptionalism dream alive don’t we?

I am super curious how the event will go. I’ve prepared my remarks, about 8 pages worth, that I’ll post on academia.edu after the conference concludes. I hope I did it “right.” You never know what people might expect at a European conference. Sometimes you really hit a nerve, sometimes everyone shrugs, sometimes they get really excited about your perspective. Mostly I’ve gotten option 3 out of that list because I think the combination of the American rhetorical tradition along with concern for student production is really engaging for people who feel that more can and should be done with students in the curriculum. I think it’s one of the best connections between American academics and Europeans.

I think that most of the other speakers will be tournament-oriented, which is fine. There’s nothing wrong with the tournament, per se. The concern is of course “teaching to the test” where the subversive nature of debate education is stripped away by desire to conform to the ballot for the pleasure of winning, or what Starhawk might call power-over others. The trick is to make debate events that focus us on her idea of power-with or power-through (not sure if that’s her idea, but I thought about it through her work so if not, it might as well be her’s).

For those who are interested, here’s my Trip to Italy Photo Album in Progress. I’ll update photos probably for the last time on the 9th after getting back to the U.S. This is everything from the past 24 hours so far anyway, and it will update as I upload. Trying to get away from Facebook as much as I can, and when the tools are as good as Google Photos and Squarespace, it’s super easy to do.

More on the conference after it happens. This is a reflection post and I’ve turned it into pre-gaming a conference.

I was in Venice yesterday and had a bittersweet moment and wanted to talk about it. I really like the connections between places that you visit more than once in your life. Here goes!

Hooray for the GoPro, the best blogging/vlogging device I own.

I wonder if I really am done with debate, or will debate continue to use me, or in Lacan’s words “Spin me like a top” in pursuit of it’s own pleasure, with me playing the role of the disciplinary psychotic?

The author of this blog in St. Mark’s Square, November 2004.

Have I done a good job with debate over the last 14 years? There’s nothing tangible, no rewards from the University, no support that I really needed, no clear legal protections for what I was doing (travelling with students all over), no assistance from parts of the university that you’d think would be available for assistance, and the list goes on. I am glad to be done with it for sure. But I’m also glad to have done it. Everything that’s happened since 2004 I couldn’t have possibly imagined, and whether it’s good or bad, successful or not, I’m very grateful for all the experiences that happened between my first visit to St. Mark’s Square and this recent one. It has been a good time, good meaning that even the negative moments are good in the fact that they were bad; all things lead us to some sort of critical reflection if we try.

What will have happened between this visit and the next? If past is prologue, expect that video around 2032.

Debate continues to interest me but not in the more traditional capacities. Here’s to hoping tomorrow is a Burkean mystic’s “peek around the corner.”

For those of you who know me, or read the blog regularly, you know of my deep and abiding love for Chromebooks.

There has always been deep desire, really deep passion and attraction to one Chromebook above all the others, which is the Google premium Chromebook, now called the Pixelbook. It’s a Chrome OS device, but has a build like a mac book. It’s also a thousand US dollars. Who would pay that for a Chrome OS computer?

Well I have always wanted to, but felt like the price was well above what I could afford for a laptop (or what was appropriate to spend). Then there was Black Friday. $300 off the price. I had to do it. When would it be that cheap again?

Nevermind the fact that I’m surrounded on all sides of my life by computers. I have three chromebooks already, all were under 200 dollars, and two Windows machines – my 4k video editing and gaming laptop, and my University supplied Lenovo which is like a boxy sedan. I also have a tower I built that runs great, and another PC that I keep up at the University as our computer support person can’t figure out how to hook up the computers we ordered for that room. So if we want to have a video chat or whatever, we rely on the computer I supply. I know it’s ridiculous, but that’s the reality of where i work. Computer addiction isn’t a thing. It could be worse, I could be addicted to buying and messing around with cars. That would be really expensive and a big problem in a city where having one garage slot is often the same price as rent for a one-bedroom apartment in the rest of the country.

I can tell you now after using it for a week or so, nothing compares to this laptop. It’s the perfect size, perfect weight, the keyboard is absolutely dreamy for writers like us, and the screen is retina-display worthy. The icing on the cake is the USB C ports, one on each side for whatever you’d like to use them for, and the battery which I regularly get about 8 to 9 hours out of at work. This is playing music, typing a lot (email and writing), and surfing the web doing research, etc. I do not watch a lot of videos on the device nor do I use it often as a tablet.

This little computer just wants me to type on it all the time. It feels great. Also being a Chromebook I don’t have to worry about updates and viruses and stuff like that. The only difference in this one and the other’s that I’ve had is this one can run Android apps which is fantastic but takes some getting used to. I really like the productivity apps I have tried out, and most importantly, MS Word works perfectly. I’m still a Google Docs person at heart and just wish that Zotero would produce something for Google Docs that didn’t require the stand-alone Windows or Mac app.

So the machine met all my expectations and then some. I think it’s my go-to device from now on. I should have gotten it a long time ago and listened to intuition. I think if you are on the fence about it, just get it. It’s an amazing little device for writers, people who do a lot of research and reading online, or if your daily job requires a lot of attention to email. It’s a productivity beast.

Good morning!

here’s the sunrise we’ve been getting in Queens the last few weeks. It’s been really great, and I post this today because we have nothing but grey skies and cold rain today. At least I have no plans in going outside.

Stayed up late tweaking and finishing my lecture for Italy this week. I have been invited to speak about debate judging and debate evaluation at the University of Padua and I feel ready for that. A couple of more slides today and I should be set. I didn’t think I would do any more travelling for debate after the spring, but here we are.

One of the reasons I get these opportunities is the bad attitude toward debate as an academic subject shared by debate coaches and rhetoric scholars alike. Both are happy to hang onto the rhetoric of sport surrounding debate: It suits faculty who have no interest in teaching debate as a productive art, and it suits coaches under a rubric of specialization, to keep hold of this one thing that only they can do and nobody in their department, let alone the college, can do. This attitude harms the advancement of debate, making it responsive rather than generative of advances. Like American football, it will only change the rules or the play of the game if there’s a dire need, like a consistent injury that happens from playing. As we have seen, even that isn’t enough to change the fundamentals of the play.

Debate can’t cause this sort of harm, can it? Nothing physiological like that, but it sure can encourage people to avoid discourse and speaking where they need to be. Debate-as-sport encourages participants to view themselves as doing debate “the right way” or at another level, therefore always thinking of public engagement with debate as something beneath them. This doesn’t mean they won’t be political – debate students love activism, marching around at protests, shouting down speakers on campuses, etc. The question is: Is this the political we want to encourage? Is this the political we want to have? From the point of view of rhetoric, this political is a default, one with very little rhetorical perspective or training. From my point of view, it’s hardly sophistic. There’s nothing sophisticated about marching around in total opposition to something without a strategy of how you are going to reach unconvinced, or alternatively-convinced minds.

In treating the practice of debate as seriously as we treat chemistry, biology, or literature we get access to a forward-thinking model and practice of debate, one that can be generative of new ways to approach the issues we face. We can get ahead of ourselves and think about the normative rather than the responsive. We can construct a practice that would work well with scholarship and the university as a whole. There’s a lot to be said for attention this way. And there seems to be a community out there – disconnected from the tournament-addicted crew – interested in having this conversation.

Not sure what to expect, but since it’s the last week of class I have a lot to do to get ready to be gone for 4 days. I think my students appreciate it, although a big concern I have is with missing class as I get older. I want almost everything I do to have classroom implications, I want all the things I study and think about to be directly beneficial to the students enrolled in my courses. I want the cost and the structure of the university not to be something that I work with as a launchpad, or a springboard, or the start of a tangent, but to be immersed or meshed together. The university is an ancient machine for the generation of powerful scholarship, and it’s based on students attending, paying, and feeling like a part of it. My attention to those students is essential for my scholarship to matter.

Thanksgiving was spent in a friend’s apartment in Brooklyn where 18 people sat down at the same table and enjoyed a huge amount of amazing food that was prepared by a variety of those same folks.

It was really impressive to me. I had a great time talking to people who had all sorts of lives: There were a number of actors there, given that’s probably how most of them know one another. But I talked to freelance writers, photographers, and a number of other folks who I’m not sure what they do, but they weren’t academics, which is a big change for me. It’s also a big change to enjoy a holiday without the constant reminder that the next weekend you will be travelling to another competition.

Here’s the table in all it’s glory:

This semester has gone by way too quickly. I have been enjoying myself much more than I ever have at St. John’s. It feels like a new job to me. There’s always trouble, but I’m thankful that I’m no longer so stressed out all the time. I actually have time to work on my classes, to meet with students and give high-quality feedback, to read and write, and most importantly to think.

I thought about all the Thanksgivings I missed in the name of some higher calling or higher purpose in teaching debate. What a waste compared to time for introspection, and reflection. We are nothing if not reiterations of ourselves, and without time to think about that we are just bad copies. I feel this semester was one of the first times as a faculty member I really had opportunity to think about myself with myself and root my thoughts into particular, clear scholarship and teaching objectives. I hope it turns out as fruitful as the thinking was. It takes a while to get your bearings when you cut out a large part of your daily life very suddenly.

Now it’s December 1st, and the time between this day and the one pictured above feels like it never happened. The closing of the semester is always an acceleration toward speed, it feels like. I am very pleased with the speeches my students have made this term, but there’s still a lot missing. Next semester I’ll try again. Reiteration.