Morgan 1

Larry Morgan

I think literacy, or discrete literacies, are driven by our desires, or at least they follow a

moment of desire as we begin to dig deeper into something that has caught our attention and

spoken to something in us. Thats not entirely true, you can be literate in the sense of being

trained to scan or produce a body of knowledge or a type of text, but I think that is more of a

passive experience of literacy. Active literacies flow from our engagements, whatever form they

may take, in that sense I think active literacy is a generative experience. In picking objects to

represent my engagements and create a literacy narrative I had to think about what objects or

events represented generative experiences, that is, things that lead to other things that lead to

other things. In doing that, I picked three different objects from three different moments in my

life that contributed to where Im at now. Respectively these objects, a video game, a film, and a

work of critical theory, represent some turning points that I think were very important to me.

They dont represent every turning point or capture the entire thing, because no narrative ever

could do that, but looking back from this point this is what comes to mind.

The first object is a video game, Halo: Combat Evolved, which I finally managed to get

my hands on at about 11 years old. I got it with an Xbox for Christmas after months of playing it

at the houses of several friends (those childhood black market economies of what friend has the

video games). What I was drawn to in the game was the campaigns atmosphere, the grimy dirty

space aesthetic (influenced by Aliens, which I had never seen), the conflict between a guerilla

force of Marines vs their weird purple adversaries on an ancient installation left by a long dead

race. Loved all that mystery, it was all very fresh to me. On top of that there was the community

experience of LAN parties and the wider online community that I soon became a part of. Before

that, before I had a steady internet connection (Dial up!), I was obsessed with the media around
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it. I read magazines, I picked up the book tie-ins, I became a massive nerd. The Halo tie-in

novels, which expanded the universe, were the first books I remember actively devouring. They

set me off on what became a massive reading habit, beginning with sci-fi books and moving into

novels and so on, whatever I felt like reading, really. I was known for just being an absent-

minded book worm shortly after. Beyond book reading, what I really

remember this game for is the online communities it connected me to. Off the developers web

page (bungie.net) I found webcomics, fan fiction, and lore sites that I engaged with in different

ways. I joined a forum based around a now defunct fan comic and that became a huge part of my

teenage social life when my family moved to Germany with the Army, mostly because I was a

monolingual American boy in Bavaria so I didnt have much of a face-to-face peer group. I spent

a huge amount of time talking with people from this forum over IRC and MSN chat, making

friends from Australia, Canada, the US, Singapore, etc that I stayed in contact with for years. On

Xbox Live I would play Halo 2 and 3 with them and others, and my timezone (GMT +1) also

meant I was usually playing with people in and around Europe, people who were British,

Scottish, Dutch, Irish, etc, and we would chat for hours while playing custom games or other

titles. This exposed me to a lot of cultural difference and gave me a sense of myself as an

internationally situated person, which informed a lot of my worldview. I also became a

moderator on a small fanfiction board which is very embarrassing looking back. Over time I lost

contact with all of them, and in writing this narrative I looked up what happened to the forum

and everyone on it and found a reddit subforum where the survivors were all trying to get in

contact again, and asking what was up with everyone. Anyone who asked about me (my handle

was Nationwide1) noted me as if I had disappeared, ghosted out. It was an odd thing to look at.
1 It was taken from the name of a ZZ Top song, because thats exactly how cheesy I
was at that age. Little did I know it was also the name of an insurance company, so
my entire online career, particularly when I joined team games, was haunted by
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My second object is the 2005 John Hillcoat

film The Proposition. I had a little extra pocket money and I was looking through the DVDs at

the store, and what caught my attention was the DVD cover, the harsh relief and the color, two

dudes pointing their guns at each other, I was like this shit looks dope! I picked it up and

watched it at home and it felt like I was put in a trance. The movie is set in the Australian

outback in 1887, about a man given the ultimatum to kill or capture his psychotic older brother

out in the wilderness, with the deadline being the hanging of his innocent younger brother on

Christmas day. The ambience of the movie was unprecedented for me, it was like you could feel

the heat and the intense beauty and the languid misery of the Outback (curious lack of steaks or

bloomin onions, tho). The music was all violins and whispers, and I later learned that the

composer and the screenwriter were the same person, Nick Cave, and I quickly became obsessed

with his music (in the way you only can as an angsty teenager), but thats another story. Whats

important is that I remember this as my first movie movie, the first time I watched a movie and

was caught up in everything about it. The camera, the atmosphere, the music, the

characterization and the narrative with the sad, ambiguous ending.2 I even listened to the

commentary! You know you are lost when you listen to DVD commentary.3 This movie got me

interested in film as a thing to think and talk about, it kicked off my interest in visual media,

which lead to me learning about cinematography and later film theory. Im not exactly a

composer of such media, but the interest in it is a big part of my life now.

The third object is more related to where I am now in the University. After a while in

their jingle Nationwide is on your side!

2 What are you going to do now?

3 Film equipment melting in 135 degree heat, the implications of Aboriginal taboos
on pictures of the dead for a period piece, relentless flies, actors going mad
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undergraduate I had already developed an interest in reading theory and philosophy texts, partly

as a reflection of the peer group I was in and partly due to some of the classes I was exposed to.

After a while of working at the Writing Center, I had also been exposed to some scholarship in

rhetoric and had an interest in talking about the pedagogical issues around writing consultation.

Someone showed me documentary The Perverts Guide to Ideology by Slovenian film

theorist/philosopher Slavoj Zizek (who is really kind of an asshole, but he does have some good

material) and that along with my conversations with coworkers lead me to the book Acts of

Enjoyment: Rhetoric, Zizek, and the Return of the Subject by Thomas Rickert. This book was a

big experience for me, it spoke about pleasure and power, ideology and critical theory, in ways

that were very clear and expressive. It made things as abstract as Lacanian psychoanalysis feel

tangible and useful for talking about my experience in the University and about the kinds of

issues I felt invested in. Rickerts argument deals mainly with the limits of critique in critical

pedagogy (enlightened cynicism-Yes I can recognize the capitalist themes in this blue jean

adsbut Im still gonna buy the damn jeans) and felt like a fresh approach. I underlined this

book so heavily while I was reading it that its barely readable now in some parts. The book

inspired a presentation on writing center pedagogy, which at first came out as a bunch of creative

diarrhea that was as enthusiastic as it was scattered and unintelligible, like a revivalist preacher

with a head injury. Later, along with my copresenter/coauthor, it was developed as a presentation

for a writing center conference in Denver (much more refined this time). Nobody came to that

presentation, which was disappointing, but I at least got to visit the hotel bar afterwards and

drink fancy cocktails while wearing a suit, which at least felt a little classy. I also got to sample

some of the fine things that are legal in the state of Colorado, so all in all it was a positive

experience. Most of all though, this is the book that drove me into the field of rhetoric. I was an
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on the fence history major before that, contemplating what I would do after graduation. This was

the book that networked me into other rhetorical 1 I remember their names tho!
scholarship, and made me want to explore this field more in depth.

I suppose in some sense all objects are generative, in the sense that every moment or

experience in life leads to something else, which in turn leads to more, on and on until we die.

But for me, these three objects represent three key watersheds, some more significant than

others. Theres always more that could be talked about, but for me these are the three artifacts

that speak to me of the trajectory Ive taken over the past few years, in terms of whats relevant

to me now and where I stand when I look back from this moment. Who knows what else might

lie around the corner, excepting the event that a bus hits me on the walk to school, in which case

that will be the final generative object Ill ever need to worry about.