The New York Sophist

I give up. I don’t like anything I’m writing and I just really like reading. I can’t seem to get a paper into any shape that I’m happy about. And it’s mid July now. What happened to the productive summer?

I’ve been avoiding blogging because I thought of it as a waste of time and energy that I could put toward other, more meaningful writing. But what a weird sentence. Writing isn’t writing unless it’s meaningful, right? Right?? So to this end, it’s back to blogging as it might kick start a better writing quality in my other stuff. I hope it does. At the very least, blogging makes you feel like you’ve done something, so there’s a faux sense of accomplishment that I’ll get from these posts. But I really hope that writing is writing, and that some productive recognizable but unquantifiable good comes of this in the other stuff I’m working on. 

A big project I’m working on and thinking about is public speaking. The course. I teach it a lot and I’m usually pretty unahppy with how it goes. Since we live in the era of text, a tertiary literacy (riffing off of Walter Ong’s Secondary Orality idea) we should be very comfortable with the idea of what is meaningful and what is not. But instead of that we are racing to the shallow end of the pool – the facts. We think writing is good if it is factual, full stop. There’s nothing much more to it than that.

I really want to do my part to upend this but the rhetorical pressures are real. So what is it you teach? Oh, it’s like marketing but for all things and ideas in the world. There isn’t a soul alive at the university who wants to think outside of a career path for a course of study anymore. Or if there are, they are few and quiet. There have to be ways to make room for practices of daily existence and not just career planning. 

So to this end I have been working on Roman education and Roman pedaogy, something that is similar and familiar to being a young person in the United States would be being a young person at the end of the Republic and the dawn of the Empire. Ceasar was totally uninterested in the legality and the process of what he was doing, he just wanted to be in power. I think that’s probably where the comparison ends with Trump. Anyway, the transition for the Romans would have been pretty smooth. It would have been as if no transition had occurred at all (perhaps some future historian is reading this and laughing as in their field they identified this elusion with President Johnson. No not that one, the Lincoln one). This differentientation of Empire and Republic is easy to do if you are watching Star Wars or if you are looking at history. If you are living in it, much tougher to discern. The Romans are showing us this through their pastimes, notably declamation and the concerns therein.

Secondly the Roman pedagogy is good for my purposes because it is from a society that is not capitalist. Are they imperial, are they conquerers? For sure, but I don’t think they are capitalists. I think to have capitalism, you must recognize money as a material value in itself and not as an exchange medium. Perhaps the difference is that the exchange medium has a value that can be rendered. Anyway, people who have read Marx closer and better than me can comment on this. I think it’s good to show models of powerful societies to students that are not capitalist in order to get the wheels turning that they have all the choice in the world as to what sort of system or economy we are going to have and it starts with what they express and what they say.

So I’m thinking of a declamation style event at the end of the term that is similar to a TED Talk but it would be declamation TED, maybe something like Debate, Oratory, and Argument, DOA – an unfortunate acronym that is definitely an extension of my concerns about teaching this. For most people, the art of speech is dead on arrival – at the same time, they are up in arms about “communication skills” – whatever those are. People claim that these are the reason you get hired and fired and what builds a career and such. But if you asked them to name communication skills people would say all sorts of things that are really odd together: “Being able to write a proper email,” “Being able to look away from their phone for a minute,” “knowing how to engage in conversation,” “knowing how to give a presentation,” “understanding proper business etiquette,” Etc.

I hate to say it but there’s only one field historically that can handle all that and it’s rhetoric. Rhetoric is often thought of as oratory and persuasion, brilliant argument, etc. but more consistent through rhetorical history is the idea of appropriateness, or decorum. It’s mostly about attitudes and motives as Burke would say, and how we learn to respond situationally to what texts are presented to us.

It seems like looking back at the Roman educational system – the declamation and they way it was taught – was a method for dealing with a textual/oral culture that was somewhat overbearing and impossible to keep straight in your head. A lot of the panic about identity that comes out as racism now might be because of a loss of these abilities – complexity and confusion are good breeding grounds for finding scapegoats if you are not trained. This might be why the Roman declamation cases deal with torture, immigration, and people who are political or social minorities (women, slaves, children, children of slaves and citizens, foreign soldiers, poor people, etc). Still cooking on this but it’s coming together at least in my head.

So maybe all writing is writing. Maybe meaningfulness is what I am working on and writing is simply how you do it? Still not sure, but hoping that this post and the ones after it make me feel a bit better about the quality of what I’m making here at the midpoint of summer, whatever that is supposed to be for academic types.

E3 is a conference where all the new games for the next year are announced and displayed. Everything looks pretty great from my perspective as a gamer. From my perspective as a rhetorician, something else was presented: a budding literature of human extinction.

The new games at E3 all seem to address one begged question which is: How will we address the coming inevitable collapse of society, the extinction-level event, or apocalypse? I believe the games displayed this year are attempts to address a coming catastrophic collapse of global order. At a visceral level, we recognize that we do not have a rhetoric, a discourse, or a literature to help us make sense of what that collapse will be like for the survivors. In short, we can’t imagine what gaming, literature, entertainment, or life will be like after the  global market system fails for the last time. We are not sure what life will be like after democratic systems both state and interstate collapse. We need a new literature, and E3 presented it to us in what I’m calling “afterlit” – an open ended literary form that is participatory and is about “trying on” attitudes and motives that we might use or need in a post-governable world that has suffered a catastrophic, extinction-level event.

I believe video games are a literature in all the ways that literature matters. They show us potential attitudes and motives of various characters allowing us to react to those situations. They also set up something we could call the “haunting familiar” where the scene is such that no reader or participant in the narrative would recognize the game world, however that world is haunted by the ghosts of what was – more than ruins of a burned out world, like we get in the Fallout games, we get ruins of a burned out human sensibility – there are the structures and the ethics and economics that they used to reify, that they still somehow compel. The player is something like a ghost, haunting the world with attitudes and motives that are long dead, and the game world “haunts back” – absent the normal reified supports for particular systems of being and doing and thinking, the player is under a lot more pressure to justify their actions in this world. This is similar to Philip K. Dick’s theory of what makes good science-fiction. It’s not “cowboys in space,” it’s the guy going to work every day, but one thing is vastly different, and that drives the story.

We identify ourselves via our place in a very complex and very fragile interconnection of treaties, markets, currencies, and governmental arrangement such as party identity. When those go away – as we are more often imagining they will in a quick and painful jolt – what is left? Humanity, defining itself through Fiat money and work roles will have no discourse of identity left. How will people “size one another up?” How will we discover/recover/uncover our modes of interaction? How will life be arranged and lived? There are few literary resources available by people for people who are not trying to be consubstantial to a reified, institutional ideology that, post collapse, will only be fragments of a building and whispered memories.

This literature of human extinction presented to us at E3 communicated a universal pressing need to develop texts that help us navigate the impending implosion of the world, whether that is via weapons or financial markets subsuming governmental structures. The stage is set up by these games but this literature cannot be presented as a finished product. The games are open for the joint creation of these narratives. Think of these games as flight simulators for the apocalypse. What will you do? How will you know what could be done? How will survivors make sense of the silent ruins and each other?

Todd Howard from Bethesda put it best in discussing parts of the game Fallout 76: “We put a bunch of nuclear missile sites on the map, scattered the codes, and let you do what you want with them.” This after driving home the point that in the game, “everyone you meet is a real person.” As an online game, we can engage in social authorship, co-authorship of a literature meant to convey motives and attitudes and responses to situations that we are imagining while they are moving toward happening. All things are possible, except the normal tropes of meeting another person. Now we meet over nuclear silos and fight about destruction, becasue of destruction. 

Many games point us toward a world of a few individuals fighting back mobs of mindless creatures, while others suggest that the best use of our burned-out buildings and rusted signs of ideology are as cover for shootouts that are a cross between Hollywood-style gang warfare and the wild west. Groups of friends are meant to assist one another in these incredible military-style assaults. A clip of gameplay from The Division 2 showed how intertextual this new literature is. A group of friends playing online are moving through the ruins of Washington D.C., all of them carrying an array of weapons, saying “what do you guys want to do?” and “we need to level you” – “yea sorry I’ve been busy at work” – the conversation is the same at DuPont circle both before and after apocalypse. A teammate goes down from enemy fire: “Ooh, sorry guys!” “I’m coming to revive you” – connecting the dialogue of the anarchic world of the near future something like the dialogue at an ultimate frisbee event. The crossovers are eerie if not also evidence of a need for a discourse that can address a burned out world. The Division 2 gameplay is an attempt to see if we can wear what we are wearing now to the new party. It raises more questions than it tries to answer.

The Last of Us 2 is the most interesting, maybe even promsing, of what afterlit can be – placing our current uncertainties on a continuum with future uncertainties. This is explored well in the trailer that parallels female homosexual desire with an escape from a group of violent thugs. The Last of Us 2 gameplay/trailer blends the fear and awkwardness of teenage romance with the fear and awkwardness of a teen girl taking on a group of militant thugs in the post-apocalyptic wilderness. After watching them brutally murder someone in the name of “justice” she is detected and chased through the typical, double-haunted environment of the afterlit game world. The violence is personal and immediate in a way that is uncomfortable. People are hurt; they suffer – nobody goes down in the quick video game style we expect. At the end, she comes face to face with her opponent who is unable to fight back and delivers a lengthy killing blow. We are sent back to the teenage dance and are told that fear is a matter of perspective. It’s a really well done trailer not just for the game, but for the space we now imagine we occupy, a space just before collapse where we sense its imminence yet are going to be just as surprised as this young person who will have to transfer her concern from how to deal with romance to how to strategize against a five person group out to murder her.

Finally there are several games that move well past the normal venue of afterlit to what comes next. These games feature kingdoms run by humanoid animals, animal-human hybrids, or suggest a return to a Byzantine age of courtly intrigue where the most advanced weapons are swords. These are very related to the large category of historical-themed games where we work out how to be and act in previous catastrophic moments – such as the Mongol invasion of Japan, World War 1 and 2, and other tectonic conflicts – as training for our coming collapse. These don’t seem as connected to the more immediate games dealing with the recognizable collapse, but address the question as to what ideology and order look like after the last vestiges of our symbolic order have dissolved. We work through our coming dissolution by going back to past dissolutions to work out what works and doesn’t in that time and place. We try to learn from opening up history, playing through it, and seeing what our attitudes should and could have been, if that tense makes sense.

The most bizarre and confusing game demo was for the new Hideo Kojima game – a mystical director and creator of games known for being able, in Burkean terms, to “see around the corner” – called Death Stranding. This gameplay and trailer were nearly unrecognizable to me as either game, TV show, or film. It could not be placed what was happening, other than someone was trying to get somewhere and had enemies to deal with. But the dialogue, the interactions, and motives of the characters remain somewhat intelligible. This game, as afterlit, serves as a placeholder for what will become tropistic in ten years as games continue to work toward providing imagined discursive test spaces for coming collapse. Death Stranding is as creepy as it is confusing, and seems interesting and desirable to play, yet the situation, and all intelligible rhetorics of what could be happening are fully detached from our current world. It’s tough, maybe impossible to translate, but this might be the point. We need a Rosetta Stone for apocalypse.  Kojima rhetorically sets off our anxiety by offering us a world where it’s post-apocalyptic and ordered, yet we cannot make sense of the order. They are not anarchic, nor are they connected to our comfortable ideological arrangements. It reads as new and foreign and familiar all at once. We want to translate it, but can’t. 

E3 was great this year, particularly because of the undetected recognition that our desire for more shooter and zombie multiplayer games is our desire to identify and practice a discourse of pending apocalypse. The instability of democratic orders, the tremors in the global caplitalist system, and rising frustration and anger among populations have indicated to us, however collectively, that we need a new way of talking about our place in a world that is coming to an end. We need an afterlit, and the video game industry is offering the first glimpses of how it will be made.

Everyone is, deep at their core, what they express. Actions speak louder than words. These ideas are very old, and very real, in the way we size up the value of others. Institutions and people are evaluated, positioned, and judged based on expression. What we say, what we communicate, is seen as a direct line to identity. Imagine speech as the hole one looks through to see a diorama within what appeared to be just a simple box.

This idea is very old but who knows how old it is. Aristotle suggested in writing that the testimony of a tortured slave was admissible with the same credibility as a public oath in his Rhetoric. The suggestion being that a body under duress cannot edit and halt the truth of the soul that comes pouring out. There are some in the American CIA who still hold this view. Rene Descartes subverted speech with thought as the location of being, but did not provide a verification mechanism other than speech. To think is to be, but what if our speech indicates that we do not think, or we think incorrectly, or worse yet – that we are wrong about something? What then?

Daily we are all humbly reminded that when we speak, we are making mistakes. When we open our mouths, out come noises that sometimes resemble our ideas, sometimes they don’t. And often we find ourselves wishing we were at a loss for words. The only solution we have for this in our “thought above speech,” “ontology is determined by expression” world is to rearticulate or provide another articulation. Since we have subverted speech’s role in our lives, as the constitution of ourselves and others, we do not have adequate tools to repair situations when speech comes out with all its living force.

The Aaron Schlossberg controversy is a recent demonstration of the poverty of our ability to render accounting for the power of speech. Schlossberg’s rage at the number of Spanish speaking employees of a Manhattan deli was captured on video where he accuses them of living off of his tax dollars, that they are undocumented workers, and that he will call Immigration to have them removed from his country.

His expression was read by everyone as his identity. This is who he is. There can be no mistake; his speech is preserved forever on video.

As news spread and people began to respond – they hosted mariachi bands outside of his office, taco trucks, and someone has now even mailed white powder to his office – we can see that the Cartesian mode of identity is alive and well, thought not withstanding. Schlossberg doesn’t think, ergo he should not exist.

Schlossberg, after his lease was cancelled at his office building (since he does not exist) posted an apology on Twitter.

The apology – not to be confused with the rhetorical category of apologia – is simply that, not a defense of what he did. Or is it? The only discourse available to him in the world of unconvertable ideological souls is to deny, deny, deny. He does it three times: He denies being the person in the video in a very direct and literal sense: “is not the person I am.” Secondly he directly communicates his nature: “I am not racist.” Finally he does it a third time, praising the diversity immigrants bring as one of the reasons he moved to New York. Maybe it is apologia? He does take a careful, if hidden position behind civility: “While people should be able to express themselves freely, they should do so calmly and respectfully.” So maybe he believes he pays for those sandwich shop workers to be here? He believes that they should not speak Spanish at work? It’s unclear. All we know is that he has said that he is not racist. We must compare performances to determine the real soul. And under duress, the real soul is always revealed.

We lack the tools to speak about speech as going beyond ourselves. Since speech is merely a tool of expression of truth, we can follow the footprints to the truth of the soul and determine if the soul is good or corrupt. If we see someone emotionally out of control, we believe, for some reason that this is when the real person comes out.

We do not consider the fact that we are all subjects of the power of speech. We have no language for the role speech plays in interpretation and knowledge. All Schlossberg can say is that he is not racist. Yet his speech was clearly xenophobic and racist. If Schlossberg is right, who was speaking? Was it anger? Frustration? Something else? Was speech speaking Aaron Schlossberg? Did he become a conduit for a tectonic, ancient discourse about race, identity, status, nation-state violence, etc.? These are not excuses for him, but inroads for us to try to understand how our beliefs and how ideology is spoken through us by powers well beyond us that, with every utterance, constitute us.

Kenneth Burke discusses the difference between the comic and tragic frames as the difference between death and understanding. The comic frame allows us to separate soul from speech so we can identify with the subject speaking as mistaken. This assumption of universal humility is missing from our national discourse. Imagine if Schlossberg said, “I was simply mistaken” – This defense is impossible. Instead he says the video captured a stranger, someone who is not him. It’s tragic. He is the opposite of this doppleganger who hurt people. He is not the person who hurt, but he apologizes for it. It’s tragic frame all over, and he has to die. If not professionally or attitudinally, perhaps biologically, as the white powder sent to his office attests. The comic frame offers a chance for self-inventory of our own relationship to ideology, which is much more difficult than simply scapegoating the evildoer. Another more difficult comic framing is to take responsibility for a city and a world that allows for someone to speak this way, or to be spoken by such an ideology. The power of speech to rend people’s reality is always an utterance away.

The other path is the Buddhist sense of language – necessary yet fundamentally lacking. We have to speak, and speech fails. Sometimes though speech is necessary although terrible. Where does Schlossberg’s anger come from? We cannot accept, from the Buddhist perspective, that the sandwich makers made him angry. Anger comes from within, not from the outside. We blame the outside, but we are the ones who cook up anger. From this attitude we can generate a feeling of sympathy for such a sad and angry man. What sort of empty, horrible life does Schlossberg have that would allow him to speak, or for speech to use him, in this way? What lonliness and sadness makes him feel people making sandwiches are worthy of such derision? It is incomprehensible in its dark implications.

What Schlossberg did was horrible, no question. But the poverty we have in being able to talk about the role speech has in creating and constituting pain, suffering, horrors, hate, and a whole lot more we normally term “reality” is even more horrifying. If we see speech as only a way to glimpse the quality of a soul, we have no way to account for the operation of speech on our identities and beliefs in severe ways. Democracy cannot function if speech is merely a thumbprint of a being that cannot be altered, cannot be changed, cannot be reasoned with – all that’s left for us to do is elimination, symbolic or otherwise. We must believe that speech is not an indicator of one’s ontic state, but of one’s particular constitution in that moment – and address that person before us in a way that they can, and will, change. This is the root of persuasion, and Schlossberg’s horrible beliefs are not a part of his DNA. He was convinced of them somehow, and it is up to us to interrogate and figure out how belief can be altered. This expression hurt more than immigrants; the whole situation and response should give us pause in our assumption that we live in a democracy where people believe that others, and themselves, can or even need to be persuaded.   

Everyone is, deep at their core, what they express. Actions speak louder than words. These ideas are very old, and very real, in the way we size up the value of others. Institutions and people are evaluated, positioned, and judged based on expression. What we say, what we communicate, is seen as a direct line to identity. Imagine speech as the hole one looks through to see a diorama within what appeared to be just a simple box.

This idea is very old but who knows how old it is. Aristotle suggested in writing that the testimony of a tortured slave was admissible with the same credibility as a public oath in his Rhetoric. The suggestion being that a body under duress cannot edit and halt the truth of the soul that comes pouring out. There are some in the American CIA who still hold this view. Rene Descartes subverted speech with thought as the location of being, but did not provide a verification mechanism other than speech. To think is to be, but what if our speech indicates that we do not think, or we think incorrectly, or worse yet – that we are wrong about something? What then?

Daily we are all humbly reminded that when we speak, we are making mistakes. When we open our mouths, out come noises that sometimes resemble our ideas, sometimes they don’t. And often we find ourselves wishing we were at a loss for words. The only solution we have for this in our “thought above speech,” “ontology is determined by expression” world is to rearticulate or provide another articulation. Since we have subverted speech’s role in our lives, as the constitution of ourselves and others, we do not have adequate tools to repair situations when speech comes out with all its living force.

The Aaron Schlossberg controversy is a recent demonstration of the poverty of our ability to render accounting for the power of speech. Schlossberg’s rage at the number of Spanish speaking employees of a Manhattan deli was captured on video where he accuses them of living off of his tax dollars, that they are undocumented workers, and that he will call Immigration to have them removed from his country.

His expression was read by everyone as his identity. This is who he is. There can be no mistake; his speech is preserved forever on video.

As news spread and people began to respond – they hosted mariachi bands outside of his office, taco trucks, and someone has now even mailed white powder to his office – we can see that the Cartesian mode of identity is alive and well, thought not withstanding. Schlossberg doesn’t think, ergo he should not exist.

Schlossberg, after his lease was cancelled at his office building (since he does not exist) posted an apology on Twitter.

The apology – not to be confused with the rhetorical category of apologia – is simply that, not a defense of what he did. Or is it? The only discourse available to him in the world of unconvertable ideological souls is to deny, deny, deny. He does it three times: He denies being the person in the video in a very direct and literal sense: “is not the person I am.” Secondly he directly communicates his nature: “I am not racist.” Finally he does it a third time, praising the diversity immigrants bring as one of the reasons he moved to New York. Maybe it is apologia? He does take a careful, if hidden position behind civility: “While people should be able to express themselves freely, they should do so calmly and respectfully.” So maybe he believes he pays for those sandwich shop workers to be here? He believes that they should not speak Spanish at work? It’s unclear. All we know is that he has said that he is not racist. We must compare performances to determine the real soul. And under duress, the real soul is always revealed.

We lack the tools to speak about speech as going beyond ourselves. Since speech is merely a tool of expression of truth, we can follow the footprints to the truth of the soul and determine if the soul is good or corrupt. If we see someone emotionally out of control, we believe, for some reason that this is when the real person comes out.

We do not consider the fact that we are all subjects of the power of speech. We have no language for the role speech plays in interpretation and knowledge. All Schlossberg can say is that he is not racist. Yet his speech was clearly xenophobic and racist. If Schlossberg is right, who was speaking? Was it anger? Frustration? Something else? Was speech speaking Aaron Schlossberg? Did he become a conduit for a tectonic, ancient discourse about race, identity, status, nation-state violence, etc.? These are not excuses for him, but inroads for us to try to understand how our beliefs and how ideology is spoken through us by powers well beyond us that, with every utterance, constitute us.

Kenneth Burke discusses the difference between the comic and tragic frames as the difference between death and understanding. The comic frame allows us to separate soul from speech so we can identify with the subject speaking as mistaken. This assumption of universal humility is missing from our national discourse. Imagine if Schlossberg said, “I was simply mistaken” – This defense is impossible. Instead he says the video captured a stranger, someone who is not him. It’s tragic. He is the opposite of this doppleganger who hurt people. He is not the person who hurt, but he apologizes for it. It’s tragic frame all over, and he has to die. If not professionally or attitudinally, perhaps biologically, as the white powder sent to his office attests. The comic frame offers a chance for self-inventory of our own relationship to ideology, which is much more difficult than simply scapegoating the evildoer. Another more difficult comic framing is to take responsibility for a city and a world that allows for someone to speak this way, or to be spoken by such an ideology. The power of speech to rend people’s reality is always an utterance away.

The other path is the Buddhist sense of language – necessary yet fundamentally lacking. We have to speak, and speech fails. Sometimes though speech is necessary although terrible. Where does Schlossberg’s anger come from? We cannot accept, from the Buddhist perspective, that the sandwich makers made him angry. Anger comes from within, not from the outside. We blame the outside, but we are the ones who cook up anger. From this attitude we can generate a feeling of sympathy for such a sad and angry man. What sort of empty, horrible life does Schlossberg have that would allow him to speak, or for speech to use him, in this way? What lonliness and sadness makes him feel people making sandwiches are worthy of such derision? It is incomprehensible in its dark implications.

What Schlossberg did was horrible, no question. But the poverty we have in being able to talk about the role speech has in creating and constituting pain, suffering, horrors, hate, and a whole lot more we normally term “reality” is even more horrifying. If we see speech as only a way to glimpse the quality of a soul, we have no way to account for the operation of speech on our identities and beliefs in severe ways. Democracy cannot function if speech is merely a thumbprint of a being that cannot be altered, cannot be changed, cannot be reasoned with – all that’s left for us to do is elimination, symbolic or otherwise. We must believe that speech is not an indicator of one’s ontic state, but of one’s particular constitution in that moment – and address that person before us in a way that they can, and will, change. This is the root of persuasion, and Schlossberg’s horrible beliefs are not a part of his DNA. He was convinced of them somehow, and it is up to us to interrogate and figure out how belief can be altered. This expression hurt more than immigrants; the whole situation and response should give us pause in our assumption that we live in a democracy where people believe that others, and themselves, can or even need to be persuaded.   

Interesting book that takes some sacred terms in composition theory (audience, objectivity, voice, etc) and critiques them from the lens of whether or not teaching is in line with composition theory and pedagogical approaches to writing. After admitting several times in the course of the text a well accepted idea that pedagogy lags behind theory about 20 to 30 years, the author critiques contemporary teaching for being too dependent on objectivity, authorial intent, liberal construction of audiences, and thin conceptions of proof.

Although the critique is well made, I think it would be great to see more of the book written like Chapter 6 which really had me going. It might be my own biases in terms of what I’m interested in, but this chapter on audience was great. I think that what set it apart was specific ideas for very radical assignments and classroom activities. I would have liked to see more of that throughout the book.

I like the idea of upsetting these God-terms, either tumping them over or literally making people who think they are good teachers upset. But the critique really doesn’t go as far as it needs to and also avoids some necessary complexity. For example, the chapter on objectivity is very good and very right about its criticism of fact-reliance in pedagogy, which honestly impacts the entire education system. But there’s little discussion of the importance of facts for issues such as holocaust denial, conspiracy theory (moon landing and 9/11 sort of stuff) as well as other strange ideas that often appear in American student writing. Making the critique of fact addiction more fuzzy with an analysis of the false-flag conspiracy regarding Sandy Hook, for example, might have really opened up the conversation between text and reader about what is possible in the teaching of writing today (as well as what is needed).

In the end the book was enjoyable to read, it just didn’t rock me the way I hoped it would. The critique is obvious and agreeable, the Audience chapter is amazing, and the rest of it seems, well, right – but not radically upsetting.

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