The New York Sophist

Finding some pretty striking and pretty sad draft posts in my Google Drive, which honestly I haven’t looked at in many years. I started using OneDrive and Word exclusively a while ago and cleaned out my Google Drive to save money. I put everything on my NAS and deleted it from Drive except for the Google Docs. Those don’t take up any space, and there were about 1200 of them. So I figured I would just let them sit there until – well, probably forever. I saw no need to really mess around with them.

Now My NAS is getting older and I need to make a backup and put it somewhere else. Backups are tough. Without backups though you get no archive. And when I start to make a backup, I become an archivist. I have to decide what is worth keeping and what gets tossed. It’s costly to archive every single document and file you have on every computer. My NAS has a functional 16TB of space with 7.5 of it used. We’ll have to get bigger one day but at that point, I’ll just buy a new NAS unit with more drive bays. Restoring 16TB of data should be made as easy as possible. So I’ve been curating.

I’ve thinned out the backup as much as possible but in so doing found some drafts of things that I can’t believe I wrote – they seem too good for me from 11 years ago. I found some very sad, very angry things too – all of which I think I’ll post on here. They are worth sharing even though they strike me as not my own.

Years ago I did some archival research at the University of Maryland and met a great archivist there who was too busy to really spend time with me although he helped me a lot in preparing my visit. On my last day there we met and he apologized for being so busy – he had just been dropped into (or had dropped on him) boxes of Spiro Agnew’s archival material. Most of which was socks and gifts of geographically-themed ashtrays. This seems like garbage to me, but the rubric of the archivist says: Who are we to decide what future scholars should have access to? What becomes important in the future? What should we keep for them if not everything? It’s a tough thing to try to guess about future significance.

For me I’m glad I have a lot of backups. You can see on this “new” blogsite I have thousands of posts restored from frequent backups from all my old blogs, including the one from 2007 where I’m speculating about what it will be like to work at St. John’s. That positivity aged like milk, but it’s still nice to see it there. Is this an archive of ideas, and have I saved too much?

It’s late here and everyone is in bed, but I can hear my NAS uploading the backup to the cloud server.

I think I’ve finally done it. I’ve finally added the archive of every blogpost I’ve ever done (with a few exceptions) to this site. I think the earliest post here is now 2005 or 2006, when I was still studying rhetoric at the University of Pittsburgh.

There’s not a lot of interesting stuff back in the ancient days unless you are me or want to see what my posts used to be like. Otherwise it’s just nice to have so many posts in one place.

I also found some old blogs I used for class, and one we graduate students used at Pitt to host a reading group together. All of these were under an email address I haven’t used in some time, but WordPress found it and connected it here to my newest blog site.

It’s great that all these perspectives were preserved!

did you ever use LiveJournal? I miss it a lot.

The reason I miss it mostly is because LiveJournal existed prior to social media, and was a great way to have a social media style friends list and feed, but it was long form too.

LiveJournal though was only long-form if you wanted it to be that. Otherwise it could be like Twitter/X – a short one line post was totally acceptable. Composing for LiveJournal really, in hindsight, feels like freedom. We currently live in a very rhetorically rigid world, one where a Tweet has a style, a Facebook post has a style, an Instagram post has a style – and you cannot move between them very easily. There’s no way that these modalities can cross between one another. Very frustrating.

However in the days of LiveJournal I could post a picture with a short comment, a one or two line (160 characters) comment on something, or a very long blog post.

I think that using this blog like I used to use LiveJournal is going to improve the quality of my posting, or at least give me some rhetorical variety that I am just now realizing I miss from direct social media.

People do use Facebook like a blog, but it’s really not the same thing. They are able to really rail against the things they hate – political and otherwise, or make extreme statements because they know the exact limits of their audience. They only post to those who are of a certain bent or position, so they are able to really push views that are not well constructed, thoughtful, or considerate of oppositional viewpoints.

But a blog, like this one, can’t relax in that way. I have no idea who will read this, so I have to write to a “universal audience” – the theory that I have to imagine a typical person who reads critically and thinks about what they are reading, and attempt to write in a way that makes sense for this “subject” which I construct from my own experiences as a 21st century citizen writing for whoever is “out there.”

This is better than pandering, i.e. writing for the lowest common denominator to get views and clicks. Sometimes on Facebook and other social media you see pretty smart people doing this. Social media makes us very lazy when it comes to rhetoric. It might be directly responsible for the very poor quality of our public discourse and public political discourse today. We don’t have to adapt, and we mistakenly confuse social media audiences for a “public.”

LiveJournal had all the good elements of social media and you could post publicly too. I really miss it. I will try to reform it here, making this a place to try to recover those norms of discourse from the earlier days of the internet.

Writing studies seems so much more serious than anything going on in speech communication rhetoric to me these days. I think what’s most attractive is the focus on the idea of pedagogy. This requires the assumption that people can change if we give them opportunity to do so, and that opportunity exists in the carefully crafted use of language.

Some refutatio: No, it doesn’t mean this is the only way to change people. No, not everyone is always willing or able to change. But it does require some civic faith to live in a democratic order – part of that faith is not dismissing the assumption before you’ve had a go.

These things apply to speech comm rhetoric as well, but public speaking has been set aside as something irrelevant to the work of the verbal rhetoricians. The important thing is criticism not creation: The work that is to be valued doesn’t happen with students, it happens in monographs. Teaching is something that isn’t valued as a site of academic work by speech communication rhetoricians.

This isn’t everyone; there are speech comm rhetoricians who care about teaching, but their teaching is ironic in relation to what counts as good research in the field. You see people teaching modality as the heart of rhetoric, teaching peer-reviewed sources as the only form of evidence while writing and publishing about the speech that gets lost in between civic forms of power and testimony that is rejected as evidence by power because of race. If this appears in the public speaking curriculum, it would be a very rare thing indeed!

But in writing studies it seems that modality has been replaced by this idea of improvement through practice and reflection. This is what public speaking should be. I try to make it more like this, but I think I need more instruction from writing studies. There’s a depth there I can’t really seem to get into. So I’m trying to assemble a reading list for myself from the syllabi I can find online from writing studies graduate seminars.

In speech communication, there’s no premium on teaching whatsoever. Maybe it’s changed? I hope so. It’s assumed that if you have a tournament debate background you can teach argumentation. It’s assumed you can teach public speaking if you have been accepted to a graduate program. What training you get, or what supervision you get is really random. I know of a couple of programs where that supervision is from a lawyer – someone without an academic degree.

This is too much separation between graduate studies and teaching to be productive, and I hope maybe in writing studies I can find something to help me unlearn a few things.

There’s nothing like it. Bukowski really nailed it when he wrote about it. It’s my second day here at the Saratoga Public library doing some work and it’s overflowing with joy for me.

I’m in Saratoga Springs with my partner as she is here attending a state teacher’s meeting. I tagged along for support, good dinners, to fetch coffee from time to time, and to enjoy a new town together. But when she is in meetings, I have to find something to do. The public library is always a good choice, wherever you are.

The Saratoga Public Library on November 3, 2024

I like writing and working from home but this comes with a test of willpower: Can you stay seated, typing and reading, for a long enough time to get a boil going and then for the boil to actually cook anything properly? Chances are, no. There are myriad things to attend to at home such as cleaning, supplying the house, taking care of a whiny little dog, and various other chores. For example, today I spent a long time on the internet and the phone making doctor’s appointments (or trying to). This wasn’t the case when you are out of pocket and in a space reserved for a very specific kind of work – the work of words.

Charles Bukowski said it best about the library. For him it was a respite from the continuous torture he faced from his parents and from the other students at school. He would often skip and go to the public library instead where he would read a lot of the works that would inspire him to become one of the greats himself. He wrote a couple of odes to the library:

When I was dying of hunger and nobody wanted to publish me, I spent even more time in the library than I have ever since. It was wonderful to get a seat by a window in the sunlight where the sun could fill my head with music. (1965)

and from a poem “The Burning of the Dream” about the destruction of the library that saved him during high school:

it is
thanks to my luck
and my way
that this library was 
there when I was
young and looking to 
hold on to 
something
when there seemed very
little about

The relationship with the library is a layered thing. It was for me a place to find fun books on a weekend, then it became a weapons plant – something like Q’s lab when James Bond is being equipped for a mission. Many summers I would be asked to be dropped at the public library in Lakeland, Florida when visiting my Dad. There wasn’t a lot to do that interested me so being there was great. I could read and listen to CDs. They had quite the collection. I could also just look at whatever book caught my attention.

High School debate brought about the weapons lab, where the library was transformed into a place to sharpen iron and learn new spells to cast against one’s opponents. A grimoire of potential magic words for debate became a place to then write my own, drawing from it to create depth and flow for my own writing from high school to college. Since graduate school to today, the library is the place I go first when crafting ideas. I draw as many books as I can from it and then see where they can take my words. So far, so good. I’ve written a lot, and I’ve written many things that I think people like. Although I haven’t really written anything that is at the level of moving attitude and feeling that I would like.

Practice with writing is essential and I don’t do it as often as needed. Finding a space to dedicate to it is hard. I think I’ll try my own library now that I’m home from my fun trip up north. Working in your own space is a bit more challenging as there are distractions galore and priorities that can easily dethrone the practice of writing. Trying to draw upon old books to find new ways to say (or cast) the magic words about takes energy and time, two things that capitalism does not like to share. You should be consuming! That consumption shouldn’t inspire you to create, but to consume more! It’s a formidable foe.

Tomorrow will be a trip to a new library to me to donate books. Even this can be a distraction from writing. Reading can be a distraction, although a significant amount of reading is needed to be able to write anything decent. The energy for this art is enormous. And we think AI drains energy. Think about how much you are fighting against to write just one simple paper for a class. Your mind wants to think about a ton of other things. You feel anxious about all the other things that need attention. And also, what are you trying to say? What do you want to say? What does the paper want to be? What does the audience (aka the teacher) want the paper to be?

It’s a lot and too much at once. One thing at a time. A place and a means and a mode are what are needed for practice. And the writing will never be very good. But it will be done and contribute to a future writing, a future engagement that maybe someone will like.