ENL 409

Our second assignment asks us to engage with an experimental writing practice. I can't predict that you will teach this practice one day. But by directly engaging with "reformist" efforts, we might better understand their impact on the students we work with (the positive and negative impacts). Because the most radical of our class readings proposes the mystory as a new electronic practice most suitable for education, we will write mystorys.

"Mystory" is Gregory Ulmer's coinage for an emerging, hybrid genre. It dramatizes the shift that occurs when writers foreground invention (heuretics) instead of interpretation (hermeneutics).

Mystory is a combination of several words: my story, history, mystery.

Constructing a mystory, Ulmer suggests, helps us anticipate or actually invent a rhetoric or poetics for electronic space, for it leads us to practice the "picto-ideo-phonographic writing" fostered by electronic technology. Of his own experiments with mystory (many of which are published at his homepage), Ulmer writes:

They were designed to simulate the experience of invention, the crossing of discourses that has been shown to occur in the invention process. Realizing that learning is much closer to invention than to verification, I intended mystoriography primarily as a pedagogy. The modes of academic writing now taught in school tend to be positioned on the side of the already known rather than on the side of wanting to find out (of theoretical curiosity) and hence discourage learning how to learn.

Mystory, then, should be regarded as a pedagogical experiment, a writing exercise that requires students to practice the art of speculation and invention.

Instead of concerning themselves with topography--with revisiting the places or topos traversed by storytellers--mystorians chorograph.

Usually, we are taught to write by way of topos: fixed places of argumentation. When we want to argue for or against abortion, smoking, public issues, we draw upon certain examples and evidence that have long been associated with these issues.

When want to develop an argument, we draw upon the set formula of argumentation: thesis, supports, opponent's viewpoint, conclusion.

Mystorians chorograph. They work by way of chora, a term designating the place which is not fixed. The best way to understand chora might be to use the metaphor of the musical term, the "riff." The riff is a pattern. It typically works by association. Think of a jazz song that starts with a popular melody, then "riffs" on that melody in order to produce something else, something the musician associated with that original melody.

As mystorians, we learn to write with patterns that function more like music than like concepts.

The move from a typical essay to a mystory is working with patterns. You are not arguing a point, but using patterns to demonstrate an insight.

But the question remains. How exactly does one make a mystory? What follows is a recipe:

Begin by working from three areas of discourse Ulmer names in Internet Invention the popcycle. The popcycle is the place where various areas of discourse come together. We'll work with:
1.Discipline (Career): Your discipline is your major (the area you are becoming an expert in).
2.Autobiography/personal anecdote: Work from one specific personal moment.
3. Popular Culture/Entertainment: One of the most dominant cultural forms we know. Pick one thing from popular culture/entertainment.

In each area, locate areas which are significant to you.

Once you've located these areas, research the last two extensively (you can draw from material you used in your first assignment as part of the research of discipline).

From your research, select the fragments which are relevant to your personal experience.

Arrange your material to highlight the chance encounters which occur among the three levels of discourse. There will be terms, images, words, which will form patterns. The patterns are what you want to work with.
The rule of thumb is: whenever something repeats, you have a pattern.

Write your mystory by way of these overlapping fragments/patterns.

You will only find patterns if you have done extensive research. The patterns will be found in details within your research notes.

Remember, in a mystory, you are not analyzing what the discipline or the popular culture moment means. You are demonstrating how something(s) is in common with all of the areas - something not obvious. That is your insight. That is your mystory.

The website (or widesite, as Ulmer calls it) is where you write your mystory.

Ulmer writes in Internet Invention that in the mystory:

The widesite itself is not an essay but an assemblage, a collage of heterogeneous, mixed documents of text and picture, that will come together in an aesthetic way, as an image. The widesite is a self-portrait, whose likeness is finally determined by recognition (you step back from it and say: that's me). (123)

Example
The Personal: My mystory begins in Homestead, Florida.
This is where my father grew up - just south of Miami (where I grew up). Then it was rural and the boonies. But what I remember most were the visits to my grandmother's house in Homestead and the big water pump in the backyard. This pump acts as my wide image. In imaginary games, me (and other kids) treated the pump like a horse. As if we were cowboys. And the image is still with me - maybe because Homestead is, by name, the frontier, the place where the cowboys settled. How did I tap into that at nine or ten years old?

This wide image includes a ten year old boy in cowboy boots and hat riding a water pump as if it were a horse (a silly, strange image that, nevertheless, I am drawn to). Born in the long-ago frontier: Oklahoma, on an army base (once the place where Geronimo was imprisoned - Geronimo representative of the frontier victim, the Native American displaced by Manifest Destiny), I seem to have a frontier connection. I am a cowboy - like it or not.

One day, in an Oklahoma super-market parking lot, I ask a stranger: "Hey old man, ever been in a jeep before? I have." At four or five, I'm already familiar with the army experience. A pattern which will repeat when I do my own army service and patrol another frontier in southern Lebanon. The unit I served in is called Nahal. Nahal originally was a youth movement whose name draws from the word pioneer, those who settled the frontier.

As these images come to me, the other striking memory from this wide image of the backyard pump (and contrasting image) is the ride home from Homestead. Maybe not the exact ride home, but a ride home (or car ride in general) with my family. Upset with me and my sister for fighting in the backseat of the car, my father would call out: "That's one." He meant, that's one time we would be hit when he stopped the car.

The Popular: Funk. Funk makes up the entertainment part of my mystory. In particular, I'm going to work with George Clinton's Parliament/Funkadelic bands (and probably James Brown). I'm thinking first of bassist Bootsy Collins dressed up as a cowboy - a cyber cowboy. Clinton's message was that Funkadelic was from outerspace, and it had come to earth to teach funk. In science fiction (like Star Trek), space is the final frontier.

Funk upon a time
In the days of the Funkapus
The concept of specially-designed Afronauts
Capable of funkatizing galaxies

Clinton repeatedly emphasizes that the importance of funk is learning about the one.
"Everything is on the one, so hit it and quit"

Discipline: Writing. I am an instructor of writing. I head the writing program here at UDM. My main interest in writing is the area known as computers and writing. I am most interested in web writing - cyber writing. Early writings about the Internet described it as a frontier, a wild west where anything goes. One thing Charles Moran leaves out of his essay on computers and writing in A Guide to Composition Pedagogies is student writing. How do students work with code, for example? How do they manipulate the ones and zeroes computer code is made up of?
One of the first science fiction novels to deal with cyberspace was William Gibson's Neuromancer. The novel's main character, Case, is described as a cowboy roaming what we might today identify as the Web. In the novel, a group of Zionites play a dominant role - they are almost a version of Clinton's cyber-funk

Case snatched a length of twisted paper and glanced at it.
0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0
"Systems crash?" The Zionite flicked a gloved finger at the column of zeros"

And as we known, grades (how we as teachers govern student performance) are based on numerical scales (100 - you get an A; 0 - you fail).

There are some initial patterns emerging here for me to work with. This is obviously just a sketch of early ideas. But let it and Ulmer's example in Internet Invention guide you, but not limit you to what you will write. I'm also sketching my mystory in a very linear manner here. As we experiment with hypertext in class (and outside of class), consider how your mystory will use images, links, short pages, etc to demonstrate your insight.

Use email and class discussion to work out your ideas regarding your mystory long before the assignment is due. This way, you will hopefully get feedback on your initial ideas. And the more you write about/discuss what you're thinking, the closer you will come to an insight.

You will also do some of the work when you complete the assigned small assignments listed on the schedule.