Kenny and Me

This is the singer Kenny Washington and me at the Marcus Shelby masterclass.

Postings have been sparse lately. I'm writing a paper for the 4Cs (College Composition and Communication Conference), and it's taking all my time. Here's my subject:

This panel extends Gregory Clark’s post-Burkean call for a “jazz rhetoric” by adding to Clark’s key term, “improvisation,” an exploration into the “dissonance” featured at the heart of Myron Tuman’s considerable body of work in the field of literacy and composition studies.

D. Stacey will trace Tuman’s achievement, through several book-length studies, of a complex ethical appeal to be described as “dissonant ambivalence.” This highly-developed point of view is a jazz-inflected, jangled, undecided, back-and-forth “dance-of-attitude” (see Burke) performed in Word Perfect as a celebration/lament of the displacement of old ways of reading by new technologies of writing; in Language and Limits with a critique of critical thinking in a description and defense of “deep language”; and in Criticalthinking.com as the intent to fashion a skepticism of assent (a la the Wayne Booth of Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent [1974]).