A Whole Damned Slew of Thoughts Tonight . . .

So yeah, I'm literally aswim in thoughts tonight about this project. I discovered a pretty good wealth of resource material today that I need to "unpack" and sift through, to mix my metaphors some.

First of all, I'm thinking of Paranormal Activity and poetry tonight. I'd like to submit something poetic to LRR soon and I think I've figured out what I'd like to do. I'm thinking of a faux letter from Stalin's Russia circa 195- where the letter has been massively censored and blacked-over in huge swathes so that only a few words per line are visible. I'm toying with the idea here that, like in Paranormal Activity (or any good suspense / horror movie) the viewer is forced into a critical relationship with a) what is on screen, b) what is NOT on screen, and c) what could be onscreen. In my poem example, the reader would have to deal with the words of the poem, the formal convention of the poem as its presented, and the context of the letter's missing parts. The title in my head is something like "A Doggerel of Censorship: Moscow, 195-." If you steal this idea from me, I'll know it was you :{ and I'll find you. I will.

Anyway . . .

I spoke with the assistant director of U.C.'s Composition Program today and she was kind enough to forward to me the blank syllabi for their Comps I & II courses. I also tracked down similar information from U.K. and Thomas More College. Reading NKU's "Writing Goals for Students" against these makes NKU's sound downright anarchist but compared to the WPA's statement of 1st year composition goals, NKU's still sounds pretty traditional and even a little backwards. My work is definitely going to have to be framed as something of an intervention of the status quo.

I'm working / processing through Kathy Yancey's "Writing in the 21st Century" tonight and am surprised by both how much I am enjoying it and how really interesting it is. Once I finish it tonight, I'll do the entry for it on my Annotated Multimodal Bibliography for the Pedagogy Theory course that I am taking and then I'll be over half done with the assignment. Woot!