Sign, sign, everywhere a sign. blockin out the scenery, breakin my mind.

I am having a hard time reading Faigley's website, because it's a website. Too much textbooky type stuff to read and scroll through on a screen, although the pictures are nice. As portable as laptops are, I cannot underline things, flip to see how many pages I have left to read, or jot notes in the margin. It's interesting stuff, but it's not getting through to me as clearly as a neatly stapled packet. Anyone else? I guess the materiality does matter...

Speaking of which, the internet is apparently at risk of being clean-slated. See the newest link to your right for more details. I wonder if this is a step forward in the Digital Age or a step back. We evolve all the time. Just this morning I found this website, so who needs TV, really?

Ahead of its time:

Art in its various forms has been weighing heavily on my mind lately, between frequent discussions of Grindhouse, watching Entourage, trying to re-form my poetry habit, somehow getting signed up for the four posters-a-month club, and just trying to express myself in a way that is both effective and stylistically me. I wish I could paint or draw or do something artistic, although writing is definitely an art form as well, and I can make decent things out of clay...I'm working on a video for my final project about art in the form of graffiti. It's interesting to me because it's the only writing I can think of (besides slander I guess) that's automatically a crime. Berger's quote about the loss of authority over art that came with the means of reproduction reminded me of graffiti: "For the first time ever, images of art have become ephemeral, ubiquitous, insubstantial, available, valueless, free. They surround us in the same way as a language surrounds us. They have entered the mainstream of life over which they no longer, in themselves, have power." Aside from wanna-be gangsta tagging, the words themselves along with the surface they were painted, etched, or carved on create a meaning that's bigger and stronger than most textbooks I read. The message is short and powerful, sometimes incorrectly spelled, but contextualized in life. We all live the context, and I found that most of the messages in graffiti (found on this website and taken from all over the world) dealt with themes of love, politics, religion, the economy, etc...

non-sequitur:

In addition, Literacy in American Lives contains a chapter about the nature of early writing as secretive, rebellious. I think about notes passed back in forth in class, from my own schooldays. I once wrote the naughtiest words I knew on a chalkboard in the church basement (I don't know exactly why), knowing they'd be discovered and I'd probably go to hell for it.

I was excited to see that Faigley included information about Adbusters, I've used that site in conjunction with teaching a media awareness unit with high school kids. Other than the nonstop stupidity charade that is our current governmental regime, the hyper-consumerism of this country makes me itchy in unmentionable places. I always thought I could do well in advertising but never pursued it for the same reason I'm not a smarmy lawyer (not that all lawyers are bad, some of my best friends are lawyers): I don't think it's right to intentionally manipulate people and words, and people/words are obviously easily manipulated. Here's a few more pictures they didn't include:

I'll give you a moment to find your brain-sanitizer and acknowledge that reality is not as fun as the high-gloss air-brushed world we are continually fed.

Given what Siegel's article says about multimodality transformations and literacy, it makes sense that this is where we're at: we're a bunch of sign-reading mofos.