Life in the Sirc-us or

Sirc MMM-Venting Conventional Texts

I’ve always wanted to write something like the Rhetoric of Rock-n-Roll, or make some concert t-shirts with images of cartoon heroic ancient toga-wearing guitar-toting heavies, a civic battle of the bands, if you will.
I survived the “Revenge of the Rhetors Greek City-State Known World Tour 338!” and all I got was this lousy pedagogical attitude about what constitutes good writing . . . I mean this lousy t-shirt. Whooooo! “Free bird” “Free bird” Free bird”

O.K. well, this is what happens when I see Geoffrey Sirc use lyrics from REM to make a point about revolutionizing what teachers do when they talk about composition. For Sirc the artistic effrontery of works of Marcel Duchamp offers:
“Modernism-in-general: self-definitions when the definitions are endless, disciplinary critique as anti-discipline, and composition as a catalogue of the ideas that grow from such work. Duchamp wanted to evolve a new language, a new aesthetics, a new physics, dissolving the conventions that would inhibit such a realization” (183).
What?

Sirc locates hypertext and new writing technologies to the plastic arts, because they are so easy to lift, reconstitute, and all without the effort of finding one’s voice or following a model text. It means that taking a urinal and putting a mustache on it makes a statement that is both artistic and anti-artistic, because it provokingly subverts the notion of conventional aesthetics as the only game in town. The critics and three-headed dogs of the Art World told Duchamp to take his art and go home, you can’t play if you don’t observe the rules. Who cares if people ate it up---he got so hot you can’t even piss in his urinal anymore—because now its is
art.

Sirc would trade Bartholomae’s notion of the ideal text students must strive to achieve in the voice of their disciplinary communities and Bizzel’s contact zone for William Burroughs’ “Interzone” (192). “You can cut into Naked Lunch at any intersection point . . . Naked Lunch is a blueprint, a How-To-Book” Burroughs says of his stream-of-tonic-consciousness style. I decided to try it:

“Panorama of the City of Interzone. Opening bars of East St. Louis Toodleoo . . . at times loud and clear then faint and intermittent like the music down a windy street . . The room seems to shake with vibrate with motion . . . Migrations, incredible journeys through deserts and jungles and mountains (stasis and death in closed mountain valleys where plants grow out of genitals, vast crustaceans hatch inside the break the shell of body) across the Pacific in an outrigger canoe to Easter Island. The Composite City where all human potentials are spread out in a vast silent market” (Lunch 96).

Make sense now? Sirc says “over-specification, hyper-pedantry” (203) keeps the kids/and us down (gotta cite the pages George) and wants “composition to be seen as writing-at-large . . . let our default setting be the document, rich text format” (202). Alright, but this sounds a lot like a USA Network/Hallmark/Lifetime movie of a creepy commune where no one knows whose fucking who, but nobody understands or cares because they are so far out man, until the craziest one of um all takes things a bit too far. People will then take their stuff and go home, because we need some rules, otherwise it's just too groovy for real people with real lives.

What would George and Wysocki and Shipka say:

I know, but Sirc, “we all want to change the whir r-u-ld” Beatles