Intermezzo Essays

This blog post is about an essay entitled "Translinguality Transmodality and Difference: Exploring Dispositions, Change in Language, & Learning" by Bruce Horner, Cynthia Selfe, and Tim Lockridge.

If I told you or showed you something would you know it like I do? How precise could I write it to make someone understand? If I told you what my love for my ex-wife might be described as months before our divorce would you know the meaning beneath the words? Could the words make someone else feel it? Would an image help? Perhaps a few thoughts of giving her a birthday card might explain.

I love to run.

My third ex-wife was born on 9/11 and for her last birthday during the time that we were together, I bought her a birthday card. And, I thought that I would write something on it to indicate the love that we had over the years. I tried to think of something simple, something concise. I thought that if I took all the words from all the books, notes, letters, emails, blogs, and tweets in all the languages that could be used to describe our love, the sum total of it all, and put those descriptions into a large blender with acetone, and then poured the mixture into a drying vat the size of an automobile, and once dry ran that through a junkyard compactor, and then exported the solid word mass to a Mexican prison where four prisoners at hard labor beat on it with sledgehammers until their parole dates, the last word-hammered letters to appear on top of the pulverizing anvil, the words so beaten by the wretched inmates into the letters best suited to describe our love, just before they vanished into a dry summer whirlwind of a passing dust devil, would spell “shit.” I could not just write shit on her birthday card any easier than I could tell her that I loved her, so I wrote "It is what it is" and threw the card away.


"Intermezzo essays are meant to be provocative, intelligent, and not bound to standards traditionally associated with 'academic writing.'

While essays may be academic regarding subject matter or audience, they are free to explore the nature of digital essay writing and the various logics associated with such writing – personal, associative, fragmentary, networked, nonlinear,
visual, and other rhetorical gestures not normally appreciated in traditional, academic publishing.

Intermezzo essays are meant to be speculative, exploratory, and a mix of the informal and the formal. Essays may come from a variety of disciplinary approaches or may mix approaches" (the authors).

This is what Intermezzo essays are and what they do.
">>Are published as open source texts.

>>Are freely available for download.

>>Undergo peer review.
>>Take advantage of online distribution in order to publish projects
quickly and efficiently.
>>Are designed for desktop and mobile digital reading platforms.
>>Are assigned an ISBN number in order to provide authors professional
credibility and further accessibility to global audiences." --the authors' right angle brackets, not mine.

My first comments to myself while reading the authors' essay went like this: why the F couldn't they have formatted it like all the other essays that we've been reading. The sense is one of fragmentation and lack of direction which contrasts with their academically stereotypic style of diction. I looked up Blaise as a word that might apply, but muddled sterility seems clearer. Especially since, when I looked up Blaise, the definition stated "Blaise is a personal name (from Greek Βλάσιος, the name of Saint Blaise). The meaning of Greek Blasios is unclear." Which is not to imply one way or another if that is what the word means. It's just that nobody knows for sure what the meaning of the word is or was. It's unclear. Got it? And further, some but not all say that the good Saint is thought to have spoken with a lisp. I hope the rest of the essay proves this out--as if it is composed of saintly words spoken with a lisp; a solution to the problems that it raises.

"Huh?" I thought to myself, "how Blaise."

Key terms in the essay are multi-modality and multilinguality. Without researching multi-modality I assume the word refers to the modes of expression or rhetoric in a variety of digital mediums that an essay on the internet might employ. The word multilinguality is literacy in multiple formal languages. Later in the essay multilinguality inadequately addresses multi-modal communications and the authors consider transliteracy to get at multimodal meanings within online essays. The authors demonstrate their collaboration to create their essay through its appearance as a means to help people that read the essay to know exactly what they are talking about: how multi-linguality and multi-modal collaboration takes place as a form of contemporary communications. Their page layout adds meaning to their essay in a similar way that I've used the GIF images in this blog.

My answer to Bruce Horner's questions of "How do we learn to recognize the 'strange'/'new' in the 'familiar'/'old' and the 'familiar'/'old' in the seemingly 'new' or 'strange'" (12) follows:

And from my studies in medieval Digital Humanities, I immediately recognized the authors' use of mise-en-page as being at least 1,500 years old (familiar/old). Multi-modal communications are ancient as is multi-lingual communications. Translingual and trans-modal are the very nature of the medieval text via mouvance--from the oral to the textual--and from scribal variance.

Middle English Psalter, with a historiated initial C and marginal Latin rubric from around 1425

The authors acknowledge that medieval manuscripts demonstrate multimodal means but they don't go into it much (19). Some of the manuscripts are written in French, Middle English and Latin and the use of images in church stained glass as well as manuscripts, told stories to those who could not read. The medieval mind to me seemed to be dimensional in a kind of virtual reality way that allowed people then to communicate through systems that parallel online communications today. Not only were medieval manuscripts, as the authors point out, multimodal but they were multilingual and dimensional.

Below is a trilingual manuscript from  http://blogs.bl.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2014/08/parallel-lines.html About the manuscript they write "Harley MS 5786 is a trilingual Psalter, with three parallel vertical columns containing the Psalms in Greek, Latin and Arabic.  The manuscript was made at Palermo, within the court circle of King Roger II, between 1130 and 1153.  The Psalter reflects the multilingual culture of twelfth-century Sicily, which was inhabited by both Arabs and Greeks.  It may have been intended as a homage to Roger’s dominion over southern Italy and parts of northern Africa and Byzantium."


Multiculturalism is not something new; neither is page-layout; nor are images that effectively express meaning. What is new is global communications over the internet through text, sound, and video. At first, I thought the essay was a basis for establishing a new pedagogy but it turned out to be a discussion/exploration.

The authors discuss the limitations of the words multilingual and multi-modal. Do I need to use words to relay their message or just write: standard language>>multi-lingual >>translingual and mono norm>>multimodal>>transmodal all based on disposition--the set of everything that leads to the creation of a work. At this point in the essay, I find the authors aggrandizing themselves.

I'll continue.

Around page 15 they realize the complexities of global communications systems vastly exceed the ability for people to completely understand how they are evolving and how persons currently interact with them. Tech is out of human control because of the massive scale in which changes take place: from the top down and the bottom up. The communications systems both human and technological constantly morph at increasing speed into something larger: within the fields of law, finance, technology, medical and so on. Nevertheless, the authors articulate a Marxist analysis of new media during their dialectics and continued to question some important issues that relate to the interdisciplinary nature of transmodal communications.

I like Marxist strategies for purposes such as shown in the video below. Beyond that, not so much.

The explication of why people understand different media differently because of who they are seemed obvious and the authors' use of reductionism to say that danger exists in treating "modes and media and languages as an array of discrete resources" rather than realizing their interconnectedness seemed superfluous (20).

I find Cynthia's comments bizarre as somehow trying to find a basis for the lack of trans-modal communications because of the "current political climate of the United States, [which is] too often influenced by combined strains of isolationism and arrogance" (25). Her comments seemed very isolated within the current death cult of academic multiculturalism and social justice. If you can't find a legitimate basis for refutation then as a last resort don't use a similar basis for your refutation otherwise somebody will surely accuse you of a microaggression. That is my suggestion to her. I mean what is gained by dumbing down an already substandard educational system. By expanding the educational system's teaching facilities to include more highly specialized courses that require an ever greater intelligence within the student populace, aren't you isolating it further from the likes of Deqa Mahammed's mother? To the author's credit, they (although I don't know if that includes Cynthia) acknowledge such problems later in the essay.

As I study more deeply into critical theories and the humanities within academia the more I see the intentional separation of the classes. In the late 20th century criticisms enhanced national elitism and today it destroys the middle class and serves global elitism. The trick played on the less fortunate is that today a global agenda hides behind a Marxist mask of social justice. History shows that this peculiarly lethal strategy leads to the grandest of all human atrocities. Is it ignorance of human psychology, or the lack of understanding of the collective psychological processes that led to WWII, or is it an intentional misuse of ideological criticisms by professors who know exactly what they are encouraging? Certain professors from UCLA who work with NGOs in South East Asia obviously are acquainted with CIA developmental programs and know what they are doing. For them, the promotion of a social justice regime here in America is intentional and a way to subvert democracy as a means to unite the world under global governance. I don't believe that is the case for most professors who are sheltered within academia and who have decent incomes. Employment and standards of living are stable enough and they don't have the time to become conscious of the socio-political environment outside of casual media encounters. Most of the students, unfortunately, have no idea as to what is taking place. Having expressed my concerns about globalism and elitism, I want to conclude by saying that I'm not necessarily opposed to an egalitarian form of global governance. The concern that I have is about getting caught up in the shuffle that is due to undemocratic social engineering efforts.

Some may say "Ray, that sounds a little paranoid to me. Do you think a conspiracy is taking place?" My answer is this, "In 2007, they hired me to work for them for a short period of time." I was well known for videotaping events from my work with the Linux Public Broadcasting Network and a little ole lady from Forbes's 100 list of "Who's Who" hired me to videotape a three-day conference in the mountains. The conference attendees which she later told me she had hand picked consisted of CIA, FBI, FEMA, three active duty Marines, IT personnel from Southern Bell, and various other sordid types. This group of people referred to themselves as a paperless shadow government that goes into any area of disruption and does whatever they need to do without leaving a trace. This was the prototype group for the Fusion Centers that are now spread across the United States of America.

John Carpenter in They Live (1988)

I found the authors' discussion of collaborative tools interesting. For my project group in the Digital Humanities, we use Ryver, Google Docs, and Google Drive. We have also used Github. Their discussion reminded me of discussions at the Linux Labs Users Group from 17 years ago where we discussed the same issues. Collaboration over the internet has been a function of the open source software community since at least the early 1990's. Their essay made me think of how distant English departments are from those on the frontlines of tech. Over 20 years of exponential change has taken place! This is not to say that the authors are not current just that the concerns that people have about online communications seems to remain constant. Today, the questions are being asked in an effort to facilitate communications technologies and to make them available through state-sponsored educational systems. Back then, we addressed these kinds of questions for our own special interest groups via chat boxes, and for me, it is interesting to see the questions now being asked by English professors.

I liked the essay and it gave me reasons to have some fun. I also enjoyed reading an exploratory, dialectical essay rather than an argumentative essay. In college, I always write argumentative essays and it is not natural for me. I want to consider things and what they might mean rather than practice arguing that something is so, or worse attempt to use words to convince somebody that I believe a thesis has something to do with the truth. Laws are for those who know how to use them against those who do not know how or cannot afford to use them. The problem writing argumentative essays is that I know that I'm being less than honest as soon as I stake a claim. It is not that justification for any claim may be considered as insufficient that is at issue, only that I know the counterarguments and possible consequences: the uncertainty of sequences that may follow. Argumentative essays are unethical in that way. An exploratory essay is relieved of the unethical nature of the argumentative essay, at least to a degree, and therefore capable of revealing more ethical/beneficial information.