Canadian Bacon Barbie

I stayed up to watch the Daily Show and the Colbert Report last night and was really glad I did. John Stewart interviewed the Bolivian president Evo Morales, who just seems like a really great guy. He talked about redistributing wealth and he questioned the role of developed nations in global warming and he just seemed really sincere and nice and funny. At the end of the interview he said something like “Please don’t include me in the axis of evil.” So I can totally see why we are supposed to hate him.

K. David Harrison wrote the book When Languages Die, which was recently covered in the New York Times and elsewhere.  I love how he talked about languages as repositories for ancient knowledge. And, for an academic, he was really cute and well dressed.

The Toronto Star has a cool article today on the phenomenon of inadvertent/unconscious plagiarism–not just of texts, but of ideas, musical phrases, and memories. Psychologists argue that cryptomnesia functions similarly to false recognition–the phenomenon that leads eyewitnesses to misidentify the perpetrators of crimes. But there’s also an interesting connection to argument:

A British study last year found that when someone elaborates on another’s idea, they’re more likely to mistake it for their own idea.

Lindsay says that’s an important finding because it suggests the process that a person uses to follow the argument of someone else “has a lot of overlap with the work that that person would do if they were generating the idea on their own.”

I find this process happens a lot when I’m writing–I’ll come up with what I think is a new argument about some material I’m working with, only to go back through my notes and find that I’ve already scribbled the argument down several weeks ago during a brainstorming session, or that it’s an idea that I’ve elaborated on from an article or book I’ve read. I guess this all lends credence to our contemporary ideas about authorship as (re)articulation of cultural ideas, codes, discourses, etc. rather than pure creative invention. But I don’t think this means that this process of articulation is not creative.

There’s also a body connection here, which isn’t explained well in the article but seems interesting:

Assistant psychology professor Jesse Preston, a Canadian at the Universtiy of Illlinois, recently extended this idea and reasoned brain effort followed by its release could create the impression that a mental task is complete.

She and a colleague tested the theory by having people solve anagrams in pairs as they expended effort on incidental tasks such as squeezing a hand grip, or working harder to read the anagrams when the experimenters displayed them in a difficult-to-read font.

The results, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology last April, showed that increased effort while thinking about a problem – and reduced effort coinciding with a solution – increased plagiarism, with people claiming credit for their partners’ answers more often. In other words, the change in physical effort was akin to having a flash of insight.

Hmm. So this might give people another reason to hop on the bandwagon of converting their office spaces to exercise/office spaces (i.e. walking on a treadmill while reading or writing)?

Anyway, this is all very cool stuff! And it’s being done by Canadian researchers!

The Sunday New York Times referenced rhetoric in an article about the declining arts of memory. The article uses Britney Spears’ slip-up at the VMAs to consider why it is that schools no longer teach oration and recitation, and it even quotes a few rhetoric professors who pin this decline (at least partially) on the fact that rhetoric no longer forms a central part of our educational system. While the article seems to give the impression that rhetoric is JUST about memory and recitation, I was happy to see rhetoric getting some attention here. The writer even mentions the Phaedrus.

But it got me thinking about memory (and recitation and oration), and a) how much of it I had to do as a student and b) how much I should require of my students.

When I was in 4th grade our class entered into a “choral speaking” contest. We lost. I remember that the poem was called “The Little Kite” and that it was a pretty dumb poem. The class that won used hand gestures, which were supposed to be against the rules. But they won anyway and then said rude things to us like “I hope you come back next year so we can kick your asses again.”

We also had to memorize poems and repeat them in class, such as this one:

Indian Summer

William Wilfred Campbell (1858 - 1918)
We always had speech competitions at school from grades 6-8. In Grade 6 I won for the whole school for my speech on The Baldoon Mystery (a local legend/myth), and I went to two regional competitions but lost to people with hand gestures. Hmm.  I guess that shows something about the role of gesture in effective public speaking.

In high school, we had to memorize speeches from Shakespeare’s plays and recite them in class, as a test. I remember memorizing Portia’s speech from the Merchant of Venice “The quality of mercy is not strained…”. But did any of this memorization actually do me any good? The NYT article mentions that memory exercises can help to stave off dementia and also that “reciting peotry in dactylic hexameter can help syncrhonize heartbeats with breathing”. So maybe their are some unintended health benefits to reciting such poems as:

There was a little turtle, (Make small circle with hands.)
He lived in a box, (Make a box with both hands.)
He swam in a puddle, (Wriggle hands.)
And climbed on the rocks. (Climb fingers of one hand up over the other.)

He caught the mosquito. (Hold hand up, palm forward; quickly bend fingers shut.)
He caught the flea. (Repeat.)
He caught the minnow. (Repeat.)
But he didn’t catch me. (Bend fingers only half-way shut.)

At any rate, when I teach oral presentations in my classes now, I tend to de-emphasize the role of memory and ask students to speak from talking points, which they usually put on a Powerpoint presentation. I don’t foresee my students ever giving completely memorized speeches in their future lives… it just isn’t done too often. Even academics at conferences primarily read their papers (at least in my field..)… which says something about the difference between theory and practice in rhetorical studies.

From Overheard in New York (my favorite site even though I don’t live there…)

 Guy: Bitch, I bet you couldn’t even spell ‘rhetorical.’
Girl: Yes I can! R-H-E-T-O-R-I-C-L-E.
Guy: Are… Are you serious?
Girl: Yeah! Who’s the dumbass now?!

–1 train

Overheard by: pokey

Someone with feet about the same size as mine keeps leaving shoes at the thrift stores by my house. This wouldn’t be a problem if I didn’t already own, like, 82 pairs of shoes. And if I would actually end up wearing these shoes. Which I might. Which is why I bought them. They are only $1-2 per pair, anyway. But seriously, this has got to stop. So far I’ve bought:

•  1 pair of red vintage pumps
• 1 pair of silver pumps
• 1 pair of silver flat sling-backs
• 1 pair of copper ballet flats
• 1 pair of gold shiny ballet flats
• 1 pair of purple shiny strappy shoes
• 1 pair of pink pointy-toed flats

Aside from the pink and purple pair, the others are definitely a bit on the “vintage” side of things. Meaning that they probably belonged to some older woman who had really great taste in the 80s. Luckily rounded toes are in again, which means these shoes actually look kind of cool. I hope. But if this woman keeps donating her old shoes I’m going to run out of closet space pretty soon.

The New York Times ran an article today about Tim Horton’s, the extremely popular Canadian donut franchise, and it’s plans/attempts to expand into the US market. The problem, apparently, is that Timmy’s has pretty much saturated the Canadian market: there’s one Tim Horton’s restaurant for every 12,700 Canadians, vs 1 MacDonald’s for every 21,000 Americans and one Dunkin’ Donuts for every 56,000 Americans. That’s a lot of donuts.

In the town where I grew up, there were about 40,000 people and I think at least 7 Tims. This is in addition to several other donut shops (both franchised and independent). But donuts make up only 10% of Tim’s current sales–which also include soups, sandwiches, and coffee. Oh, the coffee.

Here’s the thing: It’s not really that good. But if you drink 2 or 3 cups of it you will become addicted. I think there’s something in the actual coffee that does this. Plus, there’s the added incentive of being able to order a “double, double” (for my US friends, that’s two creams, two sugars).

The other major appeal of Tim’s is that it is everywhere. You literally cannot drive anywhere in Southern Ontario without seeing one at least every half hour (if you are on the highway) or every 10 minutes (in a city.)  The ubiquity topos functions spatially and temporally as well as rhetorically. When you see the first Timmy’s, you might think, “Hmm, a double double and a sour-cream glazed would be pretty good right about now…. but maybe I’ll wait…” By the second or third Timmy’s, you start to think it is a sign from God and that you are destined to drink a double double and eat a sour-cream glazed (by far the best Timmy’s donut offering, IMO) at that particular moment.

Finally, there’s a big patriotic investment in Timmy’s. Even more so than Canadian Tire, it has come to represent national pride. The main reason is that Tim Horton, the co-founder, played 24 seasons in the National Hockey League. Hockey players pretty much represent the epitome of Canadianness. So Timmy’s has a rhetorical and cultural resonance that other places (Country Style Donuts, Starbucks, Second Cup) can’t really hope to match.

Finally, unlike the “gourmet” coffee places, Tim’s keeps it pretty simple and is relatively cheap. As the NYT pointed out, it’s appeal spans generations. While you would never in a million years see my dad stop at a Starbucks, he’s almost always the one to stop in and buy the family a round of coffees if we’re driving somewhere together.

At any rate, when I was little I had a MacDonald’s play set for my Barbies, but I’m wondering if they ever thought to produce a Barbie Tim Horton’s set for the Canadian market. I bet it would’ve sold really well in the pre-Bratz/Princess days.

Apparently one of the main arguments launched against educating women–even as late as the 1950s–was that all of these uppity, college-bred women would end up unmarried and would therefore not be fulfilling their reproductive duties. They Went to College, 1952 book based on a survey conducted by Time Magazine, ranked men and women in the survey based on a 7 point scale. Those who earned the maximum, 7 points, represented “the ideal family situation–married to the original spouse, owning a house and having three children or more” (54). While 23% of the college-educated men in the survey earned 7 points, 34% of the women in the survey earned 2 points or less. 2 points or less meant “practically no family success at all; the majority with this score have never married or have made one attempt, never repeated, which ended in divorce or separation” (54). These people had no children and did not own a home. The horror! Here are some words of wisdom for all of you women who think you might want to, I don’t know, get an education, have a life and career of your own, and/or not bother with some loser husband who expects you to pick up his socks and cook him meatloaf:

• “For many coeds… college amounts to an education for spinsterhood” (54).
• College women may tend to get married less often because a) men like pretty women and b) parents might be more likely to encourage their daughter to go to college if she is ugly. (55)
• Girls who paid their own way through college were more likely to be spinsters than those who had mommy and daddy pay.
• Men tend to “marry down,” “looking right beyond the college girl to her less tutored and more admiring sister” (58).

So, girlies, if you want to snag a husband, you better work on your looks and forget about college. Of course, Barbie has not heeded all of this advice even though she was born around this same time period. While she has perhaps focused unduly on her looks, she has been exceedingly choosy about possible husbands and made herself financially independent. She even dumped Ken for being such a bland, annoying mooch.

I recently found a book in the library by John Erskine entitled “The Influence of Women and Its Cure,” dedicated to “The Men of America (Those Who Remain)”. The book is meant to mobilize men against those women organized and on the march and to counteract the influence women have when they “exercise in mass.” It’s actually an interesting case of a) fear of women’s rhetorical power and b) an attempt to isolate that power by arguing that women should only exercise it as individuals, not in groups.

Here’s what I learned from Erskine:

• If women show up at congresses or other organized activities, it is most often because some man has furnished the funds directly, or because she has inherited money from a male ancestor. So men should just stop paying for women to go to these conventions, and that way they wouldn’t be so darned organized.
• It is only the “women of leisure” who actually attend these congresses, because the competent housewives and working women of America don’t have time for such nonsense.
• Women are likely to elect a female candidate based mainly on appearance.
• Women have taken over education, and the result is that education for boys has become less manly. Instead, the male teachers “succumb to the fussy and enervating pedagogics which are the breath of life to women teachers” (71).
• “It would be a good thing if the bridge-playing women of all the states remained away from the polls, and the idle men with them” (79).
• “The meanest thing you could do to the women of America would be to give them what they pretend to want, equality with men” (127).

Here’s what I noticed about rhetoric in Cuba during my 2 week stay:

1) Obviously, propaganda. Here are some examples:

I don’t know who the guy on the right is supposed to be… anyone know?

2) The government seems interested in promoting and memorializing women’s contributions in the Revolution. The Museo de la Revolucion featured several women who played prominent roles therein, including combat roles:

These women, Haydee Santamaria and Melba Hernandez, served jail time prior to the success of the revolution. Women apparently played a major rhetorical role as well, and were charged with spreading the message of revolution around the country. Future project, perhaps?

3) Literacy also plays an important role in the rhetoric of revolution. Improved literacy rates (along with decreased infant mortality rates) are often cited as proof of the success of the revolution:

4) Finally, at least in the propaganda, there seems to be a different sense of kairos, one driven not just by a sense of urgency but a sense of ongoing, revolutionary time. In other words, many of the billboards and posters feature themes such as “Revolution is…. ” with a list of attached values. It seems that the revolution has not ended but is ongoing. Also, not surprisingly, 1959 provides a common benchmark. I went on a bus tour in the countryside, and the tour guide would often say things like “Before 1959, X% of the population was illiterate… after the Revolution, X% (major decrease) were illiterate… the government constructed new schools in rural areas, etc. etc.” 1989/1990 provides another benchmark, marking the “Special Period” characterized by hardships brought about by the fall of the USSR.

I realized when I got home that propaganda was pretty much the only form of advertising I saw during my whole stay, except for maybe the occasional poster in a storefront for Nestle ice cream. The average American sees something like 3000 ads every day. Almost as soon as I was home (or once I was in the Cancun airport, which is basically America–featuring a Starbucks, Bubba Gump Shrimp Restaurant, etc.), I suddenly had the urge to buy things, and ended up spending $80 on perfume and random stuff in the duty free shop.