{"id":370,"date":"2007-11-23T01:58:00","date_gmt":"2007-11-23T06:58:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tameri.com\/wordpress\/poetponders\/?p=370"},"modified":"2023-11-26T12:57:45","modified_gmt":"2023-11-26T18:57:45","slug":"geoffrey-sirc-box-logic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tameri.com\/csw\/2007\/11\/23\/geoffrey-sirc-box-logic\/","title":{"rendered":"Geoffrey Sirc: Box-Logic"},"content":{"rendered":"

For a Digital Writing Course<\/strong><\/p>\n

Responding to Geoffrey Sirc’s “Box Logic” (Writing New Media<\/a>\"\"<\/i>, 2004):<\/p>\n

[Note<\/strong>: I like Prof. Sirc and enjoy his presentations, but I disagree with him. You can like a person and not agree with the content of his works. And I did not like this essay.]<\/p>\n

1) What should we be teaching as composition? (p. 110) I do not spend much time on Web design (HTML, CSS) because those technologies will change within a year or two. Rhetorical thought, however, is a skill that can be applied for both analysis of existing material or synthesis of new. Thinking strategically is a portable skill.<\/p>\n

2) I truly despise the “creativity” of making blocks of text non-columnar (113). It is painful to read as it is, so why make it any more difficult? If this were poetry, I would be forgiving \u2014 poetry is condensed meaning. This is not poetry. It is a mockery of poetry and creativity to have a scholarly article make pretense of creativity. Bluntly, the blocks serve no purpose in this text. They do not move me emotionally, they merely annoy me as a reader of a dense text.<\/p>\n

If you want to be poetic be poetic, but this is not even prosaic. It’s silliness.<\/p>\n

3) I am generally repelled by quotes of Freud, as a reader of neurological research papers with an interest in psychobiology \/ neuropsychology. As a psychiatrist wrote: Only a professor in the humanities would quote Freud; we know better.<\/p>\n

4) This is all much too metaphorical for me. I don’t understand the purpose: what did any of these people accomplish? Clearly, I am missing something obvious to others. That frustrates me, since it must be an important concept. At the same time, I doubt my life is lacking anything for not grasping the concepts. Well, I am lacking the time it took to read these pages.<\/p>\n

5) What is a personal symbology? The only symbols I have voluntarily affixed to my life are Apple logos. Why? Because my wife says the stickers make it easier to locate our Jeep in a parking lot.<\/p>\n

6) I do not write because I am dissatisfied with existing books. I write because friends, family, and editors give me ideas and ask me to write. I get paid to write, to mimic genre norms, with plots provided in most cases. Others write for “art” and I write because I can sell my words.
\nPaychecks are a good and necessary thing. Art is good, too, but even Shakespeare sought to sell tickets to the plays.<\/p>\n

7) I do not wish to “spell my name” with adjectives, as some teachers required, or objects (121). My name is simply what people use to attract my attention. I have no particular attachment to the name, nor do I see a reason to create an artificial attachment to the name.<\/p>\n

8) Please, no, let it not be a teacher using Kurt Cobain as an example of anything other than teen angst that never matured. A drug-addicted waste of potential talent, remembered fondly until you listen to the albums without considering the mythology. Then, you realize Nirvana was nothing unique and of only mediocre musical ability.<\/p>\n

9) I don’t pretend to be a radical, railing against corporate powers, materialism, or whatever else Sirc wishes to cite (126). I do believe there are “finest” things in art and culture. I make no excuse for believing in meritocracy and the educational establishment’s role as gate-keeper. There is a lot of mediocrity and we seem to tolerate more and more of it.<\/p>\n

10) If the “box” is merely a repository for research, physical or digital, than it seems to be nothing more than the boxes of notecards I keep when working on a paper or project (135-6). I am left feeling like nothing “new” was proposed in the end. I tell my students to save research, to make copies and print Web pages. I ask them to spread things out and view them as a whole. I’m at quite a loss, still, as to what insights I should have gained after this article.<\/p>\n

Oh, well. I prefer Peter Paul Reubens to Andy Warhol any day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For a Digital Writing Course Responding to Geoffrey Sirc’s “Box Logic” (Writing New Media, 2004): [Note: I like Prof. Sirc and enjoy his presentations, but…<\/p>\n

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