V's Pick #21: Rhetoric of Cool by Jeff Rice

I was so excited to see this book on my list and I finally got around to reading it two weeks ago (saving the best for the end). I'd heard Rice mentioned in various classes and have come across him here and there in scholarship, but I was not prepared for exactly how, well, COOL this book would be.

A graduate of UF, Rice talks about Florida a little, which is always kind of endearing. Also, as a Rhet/Comp major who admittedly had some problems with what was being asked of him, I identified. He was tired of the old and dry, the archaic and distant interaction of academic pursuits and the modern fast-moving information driven world. Trying to find a way to link his vast knowledge of the past with the speed of the future, Rice looked to one word to find the answer: "cool." Now, we know cool from the 90s - as in, you're cool or uncool. But Rice is talking about the kind of cool born in the jazz age, back when "cool" really meant you were chill, as in, relaxed. Rice uses music throughout his account of new media and composition studies, citing hip hop artists like Wu Tang and of course, the father of cool, Miles Davis. He talks about dancing and light-up shoes, about admittance to clubs and the difference between "hot" and "cold." But what he does mostly is talk about how we can teach Comp in order to prepare our students to write in the new media. For that and that alone, I am a forever fan of this man.

Rice does nearly everything in this book that I wish and hope more scholars pick up on - he's human, well researched, and not afraid to be relevant. I'm not sure how you can teach composition in the new media and not be just a little bit "cool" - but then again, I suffered through Brooke who wrote after Rice and is in my opinion, very "uncool." This book is the perfect marriage between substance and style, which makes me a believer of Rice even more...imagine that, he not only proposes it, he DOES it.