Why Not Blog?

Living la vida ahora

2010-03-02T14:55:00.005-06:00

It's like the good old days, reading a friend's blog and being inspired to riff off something found there...

Via Derek, who found the link at the Blogora, comes this 2007 New Yorker article on the language of the Piraha, a "remote Amazonian tribe." The article is, as Jim Aune commented when posting the link, fascinating on many levels.

The primary focus is on the challenge that the linguist Dan Everett's interpretation of the language poses to Chomsky's notion of universal grammar. What the Piraha language seems to lack is the very thing that Chomsky and his associates have posited as the key feature of human language: recursion, the embedding of one phrase into another. So, rather than saying the equivalent of "The man who lives downstream fell in the river," they would say something like, "The man lives downstream. He fell in the river." Their expressions are what prescriptive grammarians would call simple sentences. There's no sentence combining here.

Going along with this grammatical feature is a kind of radical empiricism. They speak of what they can see or of what someone they know has seen. While all language is abstract, they seem to eschew abstractions that are more than one degree removed from the concrete. Thus, they have no words for colors. Rather, they refer to color by way of simile, but without fixing upon a simile. According to the article, they might describe a red cup as looking like blood, but at another time say that it looks like a certain kind of berry.

They have no mythic origin stories, which makes me wonder if they have no particular religion. When missionaries have translated parts of the Bible into their language (a task that is itself apparently extraordinarily difficult), they have no sense of it as "spiritual." After being read the parable of the prodigal son, for instance, a Piraha speaker asked the reader if he knew this man. When the answer was no, the man showed no interest in the story. If it isn't close to firsthand, what's the point?

They have no art beyond art that momentarily exists to express something new. When an airplane lands, boys make model planes from balsa wood. But they're soon discarded and forgotten.

According to Everett, the linguist, these tendencies away from abstraction are not the result of some sort of cognitive deficiency. If a baby was taken out of the forest and raised in the city, she would be perfectly capable of learning another language and thinking in abstractions. Rather, Everett maintains, the difference is cultural. As a culture, the Piraha simply reject the abstract.

One might say they live in the moment.

And that's what's so fascinating to me. I don't want to fall into a sentimental fallacy here. I don't mean to romanticize the Piraha a la the "Noble Savage" ideology of the nineteenth century.

Rather, I'm fascinated that this kind of radical empiricism is possible, that a culture could create and maintain it for centuries.

In the practice of meditation, the intention is to abandon the conceptual, to "be with what is." It seems as if this whole culture is built on that intention.

Good, bad. That's not the point. It's just that it's possible. That there they are, a group of people who live in the moment. They don't store more than a few days' worth of flour. Theravada monks are not allowed to store food. It's the same principle, basically. It's a renunciation of conceptualization. Full attention is on the now, not on some abstract notion like the future.

So, yeah, fascinating.

The decade in music

2009-12-21T14:19:00.017-06:00

No, I haven't posted in many months. And lately this blog has become a big spam magnet. Still, I have a certain affection for it. And now that grades are in, I'm ready for a nice reflective bit of writing.

And so taking a cue from my friend and yours, Mr. Comoprozac, the one who keeps blogging, I am setting out to offer a list of my favorite music of the past decade.

I make no pretense at offering anything like the "best." I hardly listen to enough music to be able to make any such list. But I have developed a certain connection to many CDs over the years of this new century so far. And if Frank Rich is right (and I think he may be), that this had been a decade characterized by bamboozlement, there is at least the music.

And so a list of my favorites (which may or may not represent a hierarchy of preferences):

10. Krishna Das, Flow of Grace (2007)
It's kirtan music, which may not to everyone's taste, but it's wonderful for focusing the mind. I wrote the introduction to my book while listening to it. (And, yes, that is a monkey on the cover. A very special monkey.)

9. Sufjan Stevens, Illinois. (2005)
So much to love about this CD. An instrumental homage to coming "Out of Egypt," as I just had the previous year, along with what another former Southern Illinoisian has called the prettiest song ever written about a serial killer. Mr. Comoprozac puts it right at the top of his list, and it's hard to blame him.

8. Numinous, Vipassana (2009)
Be-a-u-tiful. "Vipassana" is a type of meditation, aimed at seeing deeply into things as they are. The title caught my attention. The music kept it.

7. Kronos Quartet, Terry Riley: Cusp of Magic (2008)
C. bought this and played it and I loved it. It's beautiful. That is all.

6. Panda Bear, Person Pitch (2007).
It might be heresy to say so, but I really enjoy this effort by the Animal Collective member more than the collective's much-lauded Merriweather Post Pavillion.

5. Dave Douglas, A Thousand Evenings (2000)
It's hard to pick a favorite CD among the many amazing CDs released over the past decade by one of my very favorite jazz artists. He's nothing if not prolific, that one. But I choose this one, with which he opened the century, featuring one of my favorites of his groups, Charms of the Night Sky. I just wish the woman on the cover didn't look so uncomfortable.

4. Ben Allison, Peace Pipe (2002)
Fresh jazz composing with Mamadou Diabate's kora-playing. This CD was in heavy rotation back in the early years of the decade, when I still was in Carbondale, working out at the Rec Center.

3. Marilyn Crispell, Amaryllis (2001)
Glorious. The kind of playing that makes me search for everything I can find by the artist, even if it means sending my credit card information over email to some small music store in New York.

2. Wayne Shorter, Footprints Live! (2002)
A legendary jazz composer and saxophonist puts together a quartet of young talent, with wondrous results. Ah, Wayne.

1. Fleet Foxes(2008)
I've played this CD so many times I've practically worn it out. Probably the last thing I re-played so obsessively was Synchronicity, which I listed to every afternoon for months on end. (I was young and prone to strong addictions.) The haunting voice of Robin Pecknold together with the unlikely synthesis of something like the Beach Boys and a Baroque sensibility keeps bringing me to tears. That's right. Tears.

I've already got in mind a lot of things that could be included here, but aren't. Including Johnny Cash, The Man Comes Around, with that incredible rendition of "Hurt"; Jolie Holland, Escondida; ); Tin Hat Trio, The Rodeo Eroded and it could go on. But I've been at this long enough. Time to post.

RIP

2009-04-12T19:55:00.003-05:00

I haven't been keeping up with the news as well as I might. So it wasn't until today, when I saw the article on the front of the New York Times, "A New Chapter of Grief in Plath-Hughes Legacy," that I learned of Nicholas Hughes's suicide.

He was an academic. He studied fish. Ecologies. He lived in Fairbanks, Alaska.

According to the article, he never talked about his parents, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. His life was quite apart from that legacy. He directed dissertations. He wrote proposals for internal grants. Like one for "Video analysis/editing workstation for graduate students and faculty of the UAF School of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences (SFOS)." He gave talks for his department: "Developing the Theory Needed to Predict the Migratory Routes and Distribution of Salmon at Sea."

He was an academic. An ordinary academic. And one suffering from a malady not uncommon among academics: depression.

But I would never have learned of his death were it not for his parents. And the sadness from anyone's death seems magnified by the tragedy of his mother's death.

And since he never talked of his mother, who died when he was still a baby, it seems something less than appropriate to bring forth a poem from her. And yet it's what I can't get out of my head. And so here it is, a poem I've taught, in my own academic life. Students have commented that she put too much pressure on the little baby. I've always felt the turn toward the baby is one of the most moving tonal shifts I know of. "Nick and the Candlestick."

I am a miner. The light burns blue.
Waxy stalactites
Drip and thicken, tears

The earthen womb

Exudes from its dead boredom.
Black bat airs

Wrap me, raggy shawls,
Cold homicides.
They weld to me like plums.

Old cave of calcium
Icicles, old echoer.
Even the newts are white,

Those holy Joes.
And the fish, the fish----
Christ! They are panes of ice,

A vice of knives,
A piranha
Religion, drinking

Its first communion out of my live toes.
The candle
Gulps and recovers its small altitude,

Its yellows hearten.
O love, how did you get here?
O embryo

Remembering, even in sleep,
Your crossed position.
The blood blooms clean

In you, ruby.
The pain
You wake to is not yours.

Love, love,
I have hung our cave with roses.
With soft rugs----

The last of Victoriana.
Let the stars
Plummet to their dark address,

Let the mercuric
Atoms that cripple drip
Into the terrible well,

You are the one
Solid the spaces lean on, envious.
You are the baby in the barn.

The Sleeper team

2009-03-27T12:13:00.004-05:00

I have to tell you, my interest in following men's basketball has waned over the past few years. Like I said below, I just couldn't get into following Missouri. Now SIU, that was a team I could get behind. They constantly surprised people. The players weren't a bunch of stars. No one left to join the NBA after playing a year. They were a mid-major team, and they were fun to watch.

Then I come to Missouri, a place with a whole lot more money, and a coach who nervously met with the public to defend himself against their disappointment. But things never got better, and when they lost against, as one radio announcer put it, "Big 12 bottom feeders Baylor," well, that was it. He was out of here.

So when Missouri hired Mike Anderson, I was kind of hopeful. He came out of a mid-major program, UAB, one that had surprised people. I liked that. But still, I was so jaded from the Quin years, I just didn't pay that much attention.

But, wow. Did you see the game last night? Yeah, it got kind of messy for awhile toward the end, but their energy level was something to see. And there was that shot that they're talking about, that was featured on the front of my Yahoo page this morning, that had the most amazing and beautiful arc. (Reminds me of a shot I saw at the SIU Arena back in the day.)

And so it seems, while I wasn't paying attention, that Mizzou has transformed itself into exactly the kind of team I like. A team's team. Not a team that forms itself around a star or two. A team that believes in itself, that works together. That surprises people. Back in January, a Sports Illustrated writer called them the "Sleeper Team."

Last night's game was pretty spectacular. And I'll be watching on Saturday. Even though I was thinking they can't possible win, that's not what the critics are saying. It should be a good game, no matter the outcome.

Brits say yes to blogs, ho-hum to history

2009-03-25T11:07:00.003-05:00

Or, as The BBC puts it in their lead-in:

Primary school pupils should learn how to blog and use internet sites like Twitter and Wikipedia and spend less time studying history, it is claimed.

The British primary school curriculum has undergone review, and the resulting recommendations put greater emphasis on information literacy. The report apparently identifies six key areas of learning:

* understanding English, communication and languages
* mathematical understanding
* scientific and technological understanding
* human, social and environmental understanding
* understanding physical health and well-being
* understanding the arts and design

This is for primary school, but it overlaps quite a lot with what folks like the New London group have recommended for higher education, especially greater attention to design and to ecologies.

It's also significant to remember that British educational innovations have a history of bleeding into composition studies, most notably the work of James Britton and his associates. So perhaps some borrowing might happen again?

(via Heidi on Facebook)

I don't do brackets

2009-03-17T09:59:00.002-05:00

But I do take an interest in the NCAA tournament. Comoprozac remarked to me last evening that none of my teams made it to the tournament.

Au contraire.

Let's not forget Butler. A former student of mine was on the team that went to the Sweet Sixteen a few years back. Sure, I taught there only one year, but I have allegiance.

But the biggest surprise (for me, because I wasn't paying attention, I have to admit) is #3 seed Missouri. I haven't been able to generate a lot of love for the Tigers in my nearly 5 years in Columbia, but maybe I can begin to. They won the Big 12 Tournament (beating, bizarrely, my tainted alma mater Baylor)!

The biggest disappointment? Well, that would be the Salukis. They appear to have finished 7th in the Missouri Valley. And there's only one MVC team in the tournament. What happen to the good old days of just a few years back, when THREE MVC teams were on the brackets?

Things change. Alas.

At any rate, I'll be routing for my two teams. And that's really all the bracketing that I do.

A return? Or a last hurrah?

2009-03-16T14:27:00.002-05:00

My blogging guru has been posting like a fiend over the last few days.

Maybe that will prompt me to begin posting, too.

Back in the day, he helped me with words of wisdom like, Imagine you're writing on a post-it note. Or, establish a rhythm.

And now he's modeling it once again.

So maybe, just maybe. There could be hope for me.

Autumnally turned

2008-10-25T20:13:00.003-05:00

A couple of days ago I wrote an entry in response to a tag. And then there was some malfunction with the blog, and it completely disappeared. I don't feel inclined to recreate it. Instead, I'm offering a poem, because I'm currently undergoing a Rilke revival. Back when I was doing the MFA, Rilke was all the rage. So I bought books of Rilke, and, while I liked them well enough, they seemed heavy and sometimes hard to understand. Now I think I just wasn't ready for Rilke when I was 23. In fact, I ended up selling some of the books, but I kept two: Letters to a Young Poet, a book of prose that has one of my favorite lines in the world, the admonishment to "live the questions," and also a selection of poems edited by Stephen Mitchell. I've been dipping into the poems here and there lately, and finding them all wonderful. Here's one I read today, entitled, appropriate for the season, "Autumn Day":

Lord: it is time. The huge summer has gone by.
Now overlap the sundials with your shadows,
and on the meadows let the wind go free.

Command the fruits to swell on tree and vine;
grant them a few more warm transparent days,
urge them on to fulfillment then, and press
the final sweetness into the heavy wine.

Whoever has no house now, will never have one.
Whoever is alone will stay alone,
will sit, read, write long letters through the evening,
and wander on the boulevards, up and down,
restlessly, while the dry leaves are blowing.

I love the way the poem moves from a pastoral scene, with the wind on the meadows, and then moves to the flaneur, wandering, restless, among fallen leaves.

Technology is not one

2008-10-09T15:21:00.002-05:00

JBJ over at The Salt Box offers a nice little reminder that no one technology is "the" answer. Rather, they're all tools, yeah? Technologies of possibility. Technes. Rhetorical. An excerpt:

Anyway, all of this is to say that if you give me a goal, I can tell you why I prefer one form to another. I prefer wikis to blogs for my class notes assignment, for instance, because that assignment focuses on the public, shared work of the class. The collaborative nature of wikis is good for that. In cases where I want students to develop, over the course of a period of time (a month, a semester), a perspective on a topic, or when I want them to roleplay in an interpretative game–well, a blog sounds better for those tasks, since it’s probably going to be organized chronologically. But I cannot tell you, abstractly, why one tool is always better than another.

Now that Bloglines decided the other day that it was time to clean out my feeds, I'm keeping up a little better with my subscriptions. So now maybe that will feed (yes, riffing off yellow dog) my blogging again. Goal: blog more frequently. Tool: RSS feeds.

There is joy in Blogville

2008-10-05T22:31:00.002-05:00

for the mighty Bérubé has come back.

(Now I have to remember how to do the accent thing again. I had become habituated to it just before he retired the blog back in 2007.)

And, yes, I'm several days beyond the scoop. He resumed last Tuesday, announcing:

My friends, I suspended my blog retirement so that I could see us through this crisis.

Ah, yes. Thank goodness. It makes me think that maybe I too can suspend my default retirement.

A call, a box

2008-09-30T11:56:00.003-05:00

My friend hails me, and so I feel I should slap up something new.

I've been blogging this semester, but over at my class site on ning. Yesterday, I asked the folks in my class to read Sirc's "Box Logic" and to make a basic box. I love that article and I love that assignment. So simple, so elegant. I made a box, too, starting with a photograph by Shelby Lee Adams. (That inspiration came from my many conversations with A, who is in the process of writing a mighty fine paper about a documentary on said photographer.) Adams 's photographs have generated controversy among critics who say he is reinforcing stereotypes about Appalachians. He responds that if people would just look at the pictures, without their preconceptions, they might have another kind of experience. So that's kind of what my box is playing with.

TGIJ

2008-09-05T16:02:00.002-05:00

This blog needs some content.

A picture of a baby?

Not really content.

Too bad. I think it might make you smile.

(My great nephew J; pic lifted from his dad's myspace page.)

In Defense of Hippies

2008-07-30T16:17:00.003-05:00

Once again, my colleague inspires me.

Before ascertaining during his campus visit here last year that he too hated hippies, I had only met one other non-conservative person who claimed to hate hippies. That other person is my good friend and local blogger ComoProzac, who recently suggested my interest in Tapestries was hippie-ish. But after having a conversation with another friend, I find that many people share this aversion toward hippies.

I guess I've lived in too many hippie havens. I've always thought the presence of hippies signaled the presence of many good things: yoga, natural food co-ops, progressive politics. And hummus. I had never had hummus until I went to the Trojan Horse in Bloomington, Indiana (an alleged hippie haven) with my grad school friend Kitsey. Perusing the menu, I asked her, "What's hummus?" (I had never been offered such food in Weatherford, Texas. Not in Waco, either, though they may have it there by now.) "It's hippie food!" she answered. I love hummus. And whenever I eat it, I think of hippies. (Yes, I know it didn't originate with hippies. But I can't help it.)

And the Wikipedia entry on hippies says that they have philosophical progenitors in such luminaries as Jesus Christ, Hillel the Elder, Buddha, St. Francis of Assisi, Henry David Thoreau, and Gandhi. You know, it's all about counter-culture, finding another way. Peace, brother/sisterhood, understanding and living in harmony. I like those things.

But "hippie deodorant"? No, it doesn't work. And maybe some other aspects of hippie culture aren't things we ourselves pursue. But I stick by my assertion that the presence of hippies in a place is a good sign. At least in the midwest. I can't speak for other parts of the country.

And now after all this hippie talk, I've got a hankering for hummus. I'm at Uprise (yet again)--I think I'll get some!

A little something for July

2008-07-29T12:32:00.003-05:00

I still have plans to be a jane come lately to the CCCarnival. But, until then, I feel obligated to make at least one post before the month ends. Here are some highlights from July 2008. Lest we forget.

1. We closed on the house! Yes, the big purchase I have been alluding to was our house, which we've been renting since we moved to Columbia four years ago. For various reasons, from contract to close was drawn out for three months. It was, as I told one friend, the worst experience of my life. Maybe that was an exaggeration, but it was close. But now we have the title! To our house with purple shutters and an attic painted like the sky.

2. By the end of the week, I will have taught a whole class this month. Like the past two summers, I taught Intro to Women's Literature. The students do a lot of blogging and two very simple new media productions. It's a good time.

3. C and I went to Carbondale before the session started, back at the very beginning of July. We were there for just one night and didn't get to see everyone we would have liked to see. Our main purpose in visiting was to have dinner with K, who was the chair who hired me. He's leaving to be a chair out west.

4. I went on a silent retreat over the weekend. Ah. Grounded again.

5. I finally finished the introduction for my book (although I still want to change a couple of small things).

6. I ate the best cookie in the world at Uprise. Ginger chocolate chunk. Two of my very favorite flavors, together.

7. Which reminds me: I've been spending a lot of time at Uprise. It's a pretty good place to write, despite the really bad design choice of putting electrical outlets UNDER the benches. It means there's no graceful way to plug in one's laptop. None at all.

8. I am mourning the loss of Scrabulous on Facebook. Sure, there are other word games, but no other has the nice leisurely pace of a game of Scrabble between two remote friends.

9. Hansel, my brown tabby, came down with a urinary tract obstruction. This is one of the things I have always feared, that my cat would get blocked. It's very dangerous--can lead to death within 24-48 hours because of the toxic build-up. We rushed him to the emergency room at the vet hospital at midnight last week. He's back home. (And was he ever happy to get home! Little can match the happiness of a cat back from the hospital. As C. said, being in the hospital must seem like an alien abduction. The probes, the lights, the strange beings. And to suddenly be rescued from that! What joy!)But apparently he's at a high risk for getting obstructed again, especially for the next two weeks. He's currently enjoying an all wet food diet to help keep him hydrated and diluted.

10. I am so so tired. Bone tired. Many high stress situations over the last few months. Next week I'm going away. Although it's a curriculum workshop, it includes yoga everyday. So I have some high hopes.

Well, well, if it isn't June

2008-06-22T12:29:00.003-05:00

And even past the summer solstice, no less. I have good friends who are visiting Vietnam for something like two months! They update their blog more than I have of late. They have pictures even! Take a look.

Some things have improved since I last blogged:

* I no longer sound like Marge Simpson, for instance. (At least I think I don't.)

* I watched There Will Be Blood, the first movie I managed to sit through in months. That final scene. Hmmm. Still thinking about that. Other than that, I was struck by the ordinariness of greed, hatred, delusion.

* I have a car! (Thanks to Jenny!) Now I can drive myself places, just like the old days.

* The house is back in a semblance of order. C. has taken to interior design and has made some nice improvements in the arrangement of some things.

* I've got a book to finish. Is that an improvement? Sure it is. I actually believe I'll finish it, despite recurrent moments of fear. Maybe after that I'll have other, more interesting thoughts.

Until then, I can offer you a picture of one of the happiest parts of my last sad trip to Texas:

Little Jay, my newest great nephew. With his Tia Donna. ¡Que allegria!

No Sea-Tac for you!

2008-05-22T19:45:00.001-05:00

Hmmm. I'm home, listening to music. Various things, here and there. A nice little song from Portishead's latest. A lovely saxophone riff from my man Wayne Shorter on Herbie Hancock's Grammy-winner.

I'm sick. I really do sound like Marge Simpson. C is also sick, though so far sounding mostly like himself.

But grades are in. That's a good thing.

Tomorrow the Rhetoric Society of America Conference begins. After the last RSA, I declared I would always go to RSA. And I planned to. I'm on the program. But even before so many other things happened, I was beginning to wonder if I could really swing it. For one thing, there's the whole cost of going to Seattle, yeah? And that kind of bucks up against this big purchase C and I are still hoping to make but that has been in process since, well, January.

And then there are some things I haven't reported on this humble blog. The wrecking of my beloved blue Escort, for example. It was my first new car, purchased in Milwaukee, at a dealership practically across the street from our apartment there. And I lived on the fashionable eastside!

The dealership is gone now, replaced by Whole Foods.

And now my blue Escort is gone, totaled when a teenager in an SUV ran a redlight. Sigh. She cried. I didn't. But it made me sad, all the same.

Other things, too. Some things reported here, some things not. It's been maybe one of the most concentrated periods of "major life events" that I've ever experienced. Perhaps a hip fracture is next? (Bad taste. Shouldn't joke.)

So things have been a wee bit chaotic here. And so I decided no RSA for me. Not this year. It makes me sad. Because I do think it's the greatest conference ever. So if you're there, you better enjoy it. Just think of me, sitting here in my house, talking like Marge Simpson. How much I wish I were you, staring out at Pugent Sound.

You'd better enjoy it. Are you enjoying it yet?

Jazz lists

2008-05-13T15:27:00.003-05:00

My soon to be former neighbor has a list of jazz greats, of jazz albums he likes, that he can remember without looking at his collection.

OK, then. I like jazz. It may not say that over on my sidebar, but I do. I go to jazz concerts whenever I can (and when I like). Last one: Kurt Elling in KC, to celebrate an anniversary in December. But this isn't about concerts, is it? It's about albums. Here's my list of albums I love, that may or may not be "great":

1. Miles Davis, Kind of Blue. Yeah, it's on everyone's list. But it's the one that turned me on to jazz and that never gets old. Doo-do-doo-do. I heard a jazz singer in Carbondale, IL do a vocalese version of Freddie the Freeloader. Didn't like that so much. But the original version is what interpellation means. It's calling you.

2. John Coltrane, Love Supreme. (I seem to have inadvertently deleted #2-4. I'll have to restore them a little later.)

5. Kurt Elling, Live at the Green Mill
. Kurt Elling is getting a lot of love in this entry. My first exposure to Elling was this CD (bought in Indianapolis during my one year there). His version of "Going to Chicago," with vocalese great Jon Hendricks, is as memorable as songs get.

6. Patricia Barber, Modern Cool. Another vocal CD by a Chicago-based musician, also purchased during my one year in Indy. (Or The Nap, as some of my summer students at IU called it.) She does an amazing version of "Light My Fire." Also a be-a-utiful vocal dance on "Constantinople." (And features my favorite contemporary trumpet player, Dave Douglas, on one track.)

7. Dave Douglas, Charms of the Night Sky. Oh but I love this CD. I love the mingling of jazz trumpet and Eastern European instruments (accordian, violin). I love the ease, the delight. Mmmm. (He did A Thousand Evenings with the same musicians. Also unforgettable. But those are just two of many, many great discs.)

8. Wayne Shorter, Footprints Live! . The greatest living jazz musician and composer, imho. This CD was his accoustic comeback. Astounding music. But let's not forget the old ones: Juju. Night Dreamer. Speak No Evil. Hearing McCoy Tyner play the opening notes of Juju always takes my breath away.

9. McCoy Tyner, Quartet. His latest. A Christmas gift last year. A current favorite. No one hits the keys like McCoy. (I've also loved The Real McCoy and Trident.)

10. Dave Holland, Prime Directive. Another one that has seen a lot of play. Another (along with Coltrane, Shorter) Miles Davis alum. Another (along with Mingus) bass player. I like the bass.

11. Ben Allison, Peace Pipe. A third bass player. He teamed up with Malian kora player Mamadou Diabate to produce sounds that resonate deep in the gut.

12. Duke Ellington, Ellington at Newport, 1956. The classic recording of a classic set. "Take the A Train." "Mood Indigo." Good stuff. Good energy.

13. Cassandra Wilson, Blue Light Till Dawn. Another vocalist who blurs lines. Her version of "Tupelo Honey" often gets lodged in my brain, and I don't mind at all.

Help with reading

2008-05-11T12:54:00.003-05:00

It's finals week, and as summer quickly approaches, I'm thinking of celebrating in my usual way: reading a novel.

But what to read? I'm having a hard time deciding. And then I thought: surely there's an app out there that will tell me. Or will at least suggest something.

Behold: What should I read next? I'm currently adding titles to see what they recommend.

Update: Um, I kind of think its database is kind of limited. I'm not getting great recommendations. I mean, like they're suggesting I read the Complete Works of Shakespeare. Not that there's anything wrong with that. It's just not what I had in mind.

Disaster relief

2008-05-07T14:52:00.003-05:00

The death toll in Myanmar/Burma may top 100,000 and those who are left face long term food shortages (especially given that they were already facing food shortages). I have it from a source I trust that the Foundation for the People of Burma has a long history of good work in that area. If you're wondering what to do in the wake of so much suffering, you might consider a donation to FPB.

Thanks on this disorienting day

2008-05-05T22:06:00.003-05:00

I'm grateful to all of you who stopped by and left a comment about my father's passing or have otherwise sent condolences. I used to wonder what a person can possibly say to someone who has lost a significant person. And now I know that it's simple: a kind word. A memory, if you have one. A shared experience, if that's there. But, mostly, it's meant a lot to me to have the loss acknowledged. To know there's support. And so I very much appreciate all of you who have sent those words, those thoughts.

And so it's also my birthday today. I usually make a big deal out of it and write some sort of silly post about Kenneth Burke or cats or something. Today, I'm just not feeling it.

But I am feeling gratitude. So that's what's here.

With love

2008-05-01T23:40:00.003-05:00

Travis Houston Strickland
June 27, 1926-April 27, 2008

My father died of a massive heart attack Sunday morning. Although we knew he had heart disease (he had a quadruple bypass six or seven years ago), we were much more concerned lately about the hydrocephalus that was causing memory loss, dizziness, and trouble walking. I talked to him Saturday night. He was starting to sound better. I wasn't prepared at all to get the frantic calls early Sunday morning. Not at all.

But rather than dwell on that, I'll just point to what he loved. He loved that he served in the Navy during World War II. He loved Branson, MO, and laughing. Folks loved his easy smile and his friendliness. He loved carving wood figures with a group of friends who called themselves the Wood Chippers. There's a photo of him I'd like to have, sitting in front of a store on the road between Weatherford (where he lived) and Stephenville (where my sisters live). He and his wood chipping buddies are carving for crowds who visit. He has a piece of wood in his hand, and he's smiling.

He told my mother he loves her. Those were, I think, his last words.

I already miss him so much.

What kind of example am I

2008-04-24T12:31:00.004-05:00

Not much of one, at this point, I should say. Some things that have been happening in the many days when I haven't blogged, some good, some not so:

1. I went to New Orleans for CCCC! I don't care that the beignets are greasy and the coffee diluted with chicory. Cafe du Monde is the oldest coffee stand in the world (or so they say)! And I went there with Jackie (and M and F)!

2. I also did yoga while in New Orleans, at Wild Lotus Yoga. The teacher, Amanda, offered a lovely synthesis of flow and alignment.

3. Before New Orleans, I was in Texas. My dad had neurosurgery. The surgery went fine. The recovery and results are still in question.

4. Over the past five months, I've been invited to join three boards (one on campus, two community-based) and one handbook-writing group. It's work I'm very committed to, but it's keeping me busy.

5. A sibling was first diagnosed with a mild heart attack, then just heart problems. We're still waiting for something a little more definitive.

6. The redbuds are in bloom. It's my favorite time of the year, when the trees are almost fuzzy with buds and the purple blossoms startle here and there.

7. C. and I are making a significant purchase. It involves a lot of paperwork. It's making me tired.

8. Much rain. It turns the yard into a swamp. It drives my sinuses crazy, the shifts in barometric pressures.

9. Three siblings, two parents in Texas. Much stress. I'm here in Missouri. Much stress.

10. But, still, much to relax into. Friends. Dinner at R & Z's with Debbie a couple of weeks ago. Dinner tonight. Dinner tomorrow. Dinner next week. All with friends.

It's April, and so it's time

2008-04-14T15:56:00.001-05:00

To blog some more. And since it's National Poetry Month, it's time for a poem.

And I offer you John Berryman, specifically a poem I once enjoyed reciting. In my youth, ennui seemed cool. Not only that, but my mother really did tell me she was never bored. And so she reprimanded me if I dared to say that I was.

Dream Song 14

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) "Ever to confess you're bored
means you have no

Inner Resources." I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as Achilles,

who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into the mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.

Another one

2008-03-18T15:02:00.003-05:00

I've begun a new blog. Yes, another. This one charts my progress on my RSA presentation. In fact, it will be part of my RSA presentation.

The folks in my Writing Web 2.0 class are working on their final projects for the next five weeks. So I'll be working on this RSA presentation alongside them.

Wiki writers

2008-03-09T20:56:00.004-05:00

In the Web 2.0 class last week, I asked everyone to find something on Wikipedia that they knew a lot about and to edit something on the page. I decided to do this because so many of the folks in the class had been blogging about how they couldn't imagine editing a wiki and didn't really like the idea of wikis because someone might come along and mess up what's written.

Luckily, SZ's excellent presentation on Tuesday about her own wiki helped to dispel some aversion toward wikis. But, still, I wanted writing to happen. So we all edited on Thursday.

As I was illustrating to the class what I wanted them to do, I had to think quick to try to find an entry I thought I would be able to edit. What popped into my head? Peter Elbow. So I went to his page, which is in fact surprisingly short. I edited it by adding a word to one sentence and then adding an entire sentence that linked to another Wikipedia page. That was my contribution.

The most popular pages for the folks in the class were their high school pages. Some of them had to start from scratch, while others were able to add just a sentence or two to already existing pages.

A couple of students after class blogged about still not wanting to contribute to wikis.

But what struck me about the activity is how much, really, it IS writing. There's the myth of the author, of course. But didn't the author die in the 60s? Why is that specter continuously haunting acts of writing? What is writing if it's isn't adding a little bit to what's already accumulated? Even when we're writing a whole entry (or paper or book or whatever) ourselves, we have to accumulate. Aggregate. Select. Then create some sentences. Go back and add some words. Write some new sentences.

The wiki. It *is* writing. That's what I say.

Great age, great youth

2008-03-07T11:15:00.002-06:00

I stole this pic of my father and my newest great nephew from V's MySpace page.

When I went to Texas for Thanksgiving, my dad was having pretty severe memory problems. But he remembered this little guy was supposed to be arriving.

Something you might not want to know

2008-03-04T13:09:00.005-06:00

I was away Friday through Sunday, at a retreat for teachers in Barre, Massachusetts. The retreat itself was wonderful: I met some fabulous people and spent a significant amount of time in silence.

Also, it snowed Saturday morning. I had expressed concern the previous evening about the upcoming snow. I don't think I'm ready--that's the gist of what I said to folks at dinner, most of them New Englanders, who seemed to believe I must be used to lots of snow. I don't have a hat, I complained.

Saturday morning, it was my duty to ring a bell, to let everyone know it was time to assemble. I had to go outside, to ring a little bell under the falling snow. As I was putting on my shoes in the foyer, a fellow retreatant came out of her room, presented me with a fuzzy hat. (I learned later she went looking for a hat in the lost and found after she heard me say I needed a hat. How nice is that?)

I wore the hat later as I walked up the little road that led to another retreat center. The snow was barely falling then. Mostly I heard the snow compacting under my feet. When I stopped, I could hear birds sing.

So it was all lovely, lovely. Then the return late Sunday. It was fine, until the very last bit. And that's the bit you might not want to know. Rain in Kansas City. A tiny plane bouncing through the storms from Kansas City to Columbia. I didn't mind. I felt peaceful. But my gut--well, it had other thoughts. I had to reach for the bag. You know the one.

Oy.

And then when we landed, my one piece of luggage didn't arrive with me. So the next day, no hair dryer. No moisterizer for my dried out face. And on top of it all: a very bad headache.

But I'm all better today. And, yes, able to remember what a beautiful weekend I had, after all. Plus, reading the blogs from my class: another pleasure. Thanks, all.

A book for my class, had it existed

2008-02-24T08:38:00.003-06:00

Clay Shirky's book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations would have been perfect for my Writing Web 2.0 class this semester. If only it had appeared a few months earlier!

Here's what Shirky himself says about the book:

Here Comes Everybody is about why new social tools matter for society. It is a non-techie book for the general reader (the letters TCP IP appear nowhere in that order). It is also post-utopian (I assume that the coming changes are both good and bad) and written from the point of view I have adopted from my students, namely that the internet is now boring, and the key question is what we are going to do with it.

Yes, as I said: woulda been perfect. Because that is exactly the question of my class, and exactly the question that interests my students. So we have all these cool tools. So what? What can we do that we couldn't do before?

Actually, I think the folks in my class are coming up with some pretty good responses to that question. They're just now working on concept maps to think toward their final projects, and a number of their ideas have me pretty excited.

Social network/social action

2008-02-19T12:55:00.003-06:00

So I was saying last time that I would like to see scholars of social action rhetoric take up network theory, and it seems that they might be. At least, it seems that sociologists of social movements are taking it up. Through the power of networks and the long tail, Amazon recommended Diani and McAdams's Social Movements and Networks: Relational Approaches to Collective Action.

To be of use

2008-02-14T13:23:00.003-06:00

We've been talking in Web 2.0 about aggregation. Aggregation of knowledge is one of the principles of the wisdom of crowds: individual pieces of knowledge come together. And aggregation is a good thing to do with all the content of the Web, so everyone now has an account on Google Reader.

And Duncan Watts mentions aggregation in the first chapter of Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age, in which he asks the basic question informing the book:

How does individual behavior aggregate to collective behavior?

One piece of that puzzle: they become a collective through action, specifically through interaction:

Although genes, like people, exist as identifiably individual units, they function by interacting, and the corresponding patterns of interaction can display almost unlimited complexity.

The emergence of collective behavior, then, comes about through the way in which individuals interact:

the particular manner in which they interact can have profound consequences for the sorts of new phenomena--from population genetics to global synchrony to political revolutions--that can emerge at the level of groups, systems, and populations. (27)

This is why I would say that insofar as rhetoric folks want to study social action, they should be studying networks. Of course, I know only a tiny bit about the scholarship on the rhetoric of social action myself, so who am I to be giving advice?

At any rate, as a final piece of this aggregation/emergence ratio, I want to quote a bit more from Foucault's The Use of Pleasure, adding a bit more to the brief quotation that Shaviro includes in the preface to Connected:

[quotation is forthcoming]

Not as Connected as I thought

2008-02-12T13:13:00.000-06:00

I thought for sure I had blogged about Steven Shaviro's Connected, or, What It Means to Live in the Network Society. But a search for "Shaviro" on this humble blog comes up with a couple of links to entries on his blog, but nothing about Connected.

So, I guess this is my entry in response to Connected, which is on the agenda today in my "Writing Web 2.0 class.

I assumed I had written about it because I rather love this book. I love the writing in the book. I love the tiny, blog-entry-like sections. I love that he includes my favorite quotation from Foucault in the Preface (the quotation from one of the last two volumes of History of Sexuality, where Foucault in his own preface asks what knowledge is worth unless it leads "in one way or another and tot he extent possible, in the knower's straying afield of himself").

I love his discussion, drawing from Burroughs, of addiction and viruses. Shaviro writes,

the logic of networks tends toward the algebra of need because the addiction process is facilitated and accelerated when materiality is replaced by information (11)

That seems to explain my experience, reaching way back into my childhood, pre-internet, when I would sit in read what were almost the only books in the house (save for the Bible and other religious materials, and a few random books here and there): the many-volumed Britannica Encyclopedia. I could sit and read for hours and hours, spurred on by the cross-referencing, the thoughts sparked by something I had read in one entry leading me to another. The information network. The draw of knowing, the need, the urge.

And it loops back, infecting "me":

identity is implanted in me from without, not generated from within. My selfhood is an information pattern, rather than a material substance

(Kind of one of my repeated topics, as seen here: see more here.)

And while the idea of the viral spread of information isn't new, I still find it useful, explanatory, heuristic:

The message propagates itself by massive self-replication as it passes from person to person in the manner of an epidemic contagion. This is supposed to be more than just a metaphor. The viral message is composed of memes in the same way that a biological virus is composed of genes. the memes, like the genes, enter into a host and manipulate that host into manufacturing and propagating more copies of themselves. Packages of information spread and multiply, just like packages of DNA or RNA. (13)

"Packages of information": for a junkie like me, that sounds mighty tasty.

But wait! Is it a package or a performance?

We cannot think of information as just a pattern imprinted indifferently in one or another physical medium. For information is also an event. It isn't just the content of a given message but all the things that happen when the message gets transmitted. As Morse Peckham puts it, "the meaning of a verbal event is any response to that event." In other words, meaning is not intrinsic, but always contingent and performative.

And so this blog entry performs these memes in a certain way. It gives some sort of new meaning to these words from Shaviro (and Foucault and Peckham and). And so on to class, where more performance will happen.

Morning kind of person

2008-02-10T12:56:00.000-06:00

I found this quiz at Battle of the Ants, and it turns out I'm just like JM:

Hmm. 6:49 am. I have to say that really does sound like my favorite time to be up and doing, even if it doesn't always happen. Especially in the dark days of winter. (Which, happily, are getting brighter and brighter.)

"Severe creativity"

2008-02-08T17:52:00.000-06:00

While I'm in the quoting mode, I'll add this from poet Major Jackson, who I had the pleasure of hearing speak today. In response to difficult topics, he said, we need to approach them with "severe creativity."

I love that.

Pleasure

2008-02-07T10:34:00.000-06:00

I'm reading the blogs of students in my "Writing Web 2.0" class, and I'm noticing the pleasure of it. (Although I've been practicing mindfulness for awhile, I'm taking an 8-week class, offered freely to MU students, faculty, and staff, on "Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction." I'm planning to use aspects of that class for a class I'll be teaching in the fall, "Mindful Writing." And the reason I mention this class is that one of our homework assignments is to notice something pleasant everyday. Today, I'm noticing how pleasant it is to read these blog entries.)

Why pleasure? There's the pleasure of a person's excitement in encountering a text, the recognition that this is d*** fine writing, as in Aa's post. After a long quotation from David Weinberger's Small Pieces Loosely Joined, he writes:

HOLY CRAP.

So, after I ignore that strange quotation mark, this is something I really wish I'd written. In a thesis or something. Maybe for the dissertation, to be named later.

I love the ALL CAPS of inspiration, of, as Aa goes on to say, feeling good.

Lauren also uses quotations as a way of blogging, writing,

Because it's late, and I've worked 9 hours today, and I'm very tired; the following is a simple list of my favorite quotes from The Medium is the Massage.

Yes, absolutely: favorite quotations are a great blogging strategy, a great way to use a blog as an extension of the brain. A way of tapping into Web 2.0's ability to aid the rhetorical canon of MEMORY.

And what are some of her favorites? Those are a pleasure, too:

"The alphabet and print technology fostered and encouraged a fragmenting process, a precess of specialism and of detachment. Electric technology fosters and encourages unification and involvement"

"The amateur can afford to lose."

Yes, yes. And, as amateurs together, we're bringing our expertise to bear, our outside connections to bear, teaching each other, as Julia frequently does, linking readings in our course to her current schooling in law. Her most recent blog entry, for example, links the idea of crowd wisdom to the jury system. She notes that the jury system is similar to "the wisdom of crowds" insofar as "the individual intelligence, prejudice (or lack thereof), and innate and learned biases will balance to result in a reasoned and appropriate judgment." But, the similarity goes only so far, causing her to question what really makes the jury system work:

The author notes that four conditions characterize wise crowds: diversity of opinion, independence, decentralization, and aggregation. These conditions do not exist in the jury system because jurors are severely limited in what personal, specialized knowledge they apply to the facts of a case. Jurors who are experts in certain fields may be excluded from sitting on a jury; jurors are not allowed to draw on local knowledge, and their private information is not supposed to inform their decision. . . .
The limits placed on juries lead me to wonder: is it the “wisdom of crowds” or legal rhetoric that shapes a jury’s decision?

Good question. And that simultaneous linking with and questioning with a text is another thing that Web 2.0 makes visible: connection is learning, and connection is what the web enables, and what the social web enables even more. And when those connections don't quite fit, questions emerge, and that leads to more inquiry, more learning.

jsdp59 offers another good example of linking, using the traditional rhetorical appeals to think about political rhetoric:

I think the most effective form of rhetorical communication is probably pathos. Appealing to people’s emotions is generally the best way to get a response out of them. I think if you play off of people’s fears and worries, you will generally get more of a response out of them. I was watching the political debate tonight, and I was looking for examples of these three types of communication and which one would be used the most. I saw examples of the candidates using pathos appeals when talking about the economy. They tried to say that right now it is bad, but if you elect them they will fix it for you. This probably isn’t completely true, but nevertheless it makes us feel good.

I'm also moved by pathos, finding pleasure in the sheer beauty, the sheer facility in writing that many of the folks in class are sharing with me and the rest of the class. Riffing off Anne Wysocki's notion of "reciprocal communication" in design, another Anne writes:

But people “in love,” or those choosing to practice the art of loving others have long participated in the tradition of building beauty. Parents find their children beautiful. Spouses find each other beautiful. Dog owners find their mutts beautiful. Many children, spouses, and dogs (to make an odd collection) may possess the kind of beauty (abstract formality?) that would win them facebook contests and endorsements, but not all of us that have found ourselves lucky to be loved in one of these ways could make that claim!

So beauty is (or ought to be) reciprocal. It involves communication. Communication is reciprocal. Even blogging.

How will I understand this union of form and content that I call my blog? Is it beautiful? Will I be able to make “day-to-day particular[s] stand out against the background of the larger realm of steady social practices”? Can I make that change?

A beautiful reflection on beauty. The whole entry is quite beautiful. You should go read it.

And in contemplating a similar question (how to understand the "union of form and content" that is the blog), Jake writes:

Consider what is necessary: everything.

Well, not exactly. I guess it's no surprise that in this age of technology more and more things go into a work of composition to make it work. I am not simply a writer. I am a graphic designer. I am a computer programmer. I think I may even be an interior designer--at least in some sense of the word.

I love the isolated first line, the follow up that qualifies it. The rhythm of the repeated subject, and then the surprise of that final line that interrupts the repetition: "I think."

And there's humor. McLuhan:

Humor as a system of communications and as a probe of our environment--of what's really going on--affords us our most appealing anti-environmental tool" (The Medium is the Massage 92)

Juanita:

I can't figure out how to attach my blog to my Facebook account, so I just put it in the info column as my website. Is there another way? I started going through the applications to see if that would give me a clue about attaching my blog, but I got distracted by the hugs, farts, and how-smart-are-you ads.

I love how the humor here gets at the amazing mix of fun and annoyance of the environment that is Facebook.

And that isn't even all the blogs. That isn't even all the pleasure.

In progress

2008-02-01T15:52:00.000-06:00

That's right. I'm finally--finally!--updating my template. I gave the assignment to my students and felt I had to do it myself. It's long overdue. More to come.

Ah, rhetoric

2008-01-29T13:24:00.000-06:00

Ah, rhetoric.

Light of my life, fire of my neurons.

No class can begin without rhetoric.

Rhet.O.Ric.

And so I directed the students in my Writing Web 2.0 class to the Forest of Rhetoric, Silva Rhetoricae, to learn of rhetoric’s wonders.

I wax poetic. I can’t help myself. I love rhetoric. Sweet rhetoric.

The challenge, then, is how to talk of it. What is it that I really want them to know, to be able to use, as we write web 2.0 together this semester?

I want them to know, I think, that when I talk about the rhetoric of a given text or site, I’m talking about what the text is doing. Not what it means, but what effects it might have. And who it might effect. And how.

According to Gideon O. Burton, the guardian of the Forest of Rhetoric,

for most of its history [rhetoric] has maintained its fundamental character as a discipline for training students 1) to perceive how language is at work orally and in writing, and 2) to become proficient in applying the resources of language in their own speaking and writing.

Yes, that’s basically it, isn’t? I want us all to be curious as we look at Web 2.0 applications and sites, to perceive how they work, and to consider how to apply them.

But there’s always more. Much more.

To some extent, I’ll be using the “canons” as jumping off points. I want to promote the virtues of Web 2.0 as a tool for invention, the first of the canons. Gathering, sharing, juxtaposing, mapping: these are all activities made easier with Web 2.0. But I also want to talk about arrangement and delivery, about the design of pages, about the viral travel of memes. And once we’re talking about memes, we’re talking about memory. And if Web 2.0 doesn’t promote experiments in style through web self-fashioning by way of blogs and social networking sites, well, then, I don’t know what does.

And, of course, I’ll want to talk about the persuasive appeals, with the caveat that they work together, that we can’t privilege logos as folks are sometimes wont to do.

Plus there's the whole situation/ecology thing to talk about. But that will have to be saved for later.

Work to do

2008-01-28T19:50:00.000-06:00

This week marks the return of Lost, the beginning of Season 4. (I won't be watching it Thursday night, however, due to other obligations. I'll download it from iTunes the next day. So don't give it away, please!)

For the past 13 weeks, however, there have been these mini episodes, released first on Verizon phones and then over at ABC a week later. But the good folks over at the spoilers page of Dark UFO post the episode each Monday, prior to its being posted over at ABC the following Monday. I've been watching them, thinking they're ok, filling in a little bit of the plot here and there.

But today's, the last one: pretty freaky. Just go look, why don't you, and tell me if you don't think so. Someone has work to do. Just like John Locke in the final episode of Season 3. And someone has come back to say so.

And here's the title "So it begins." A glimpse just seconds before Jack's eye opens in Season 1. Just go watch. Before I spill all the beans.

The Dalai Lama on economic systems

2008-01-27T20:51:00.000-06:00

At a gathering at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A), [the Dalai Lama} said: “I am a Marxist monk, a Buddhist Marxist. I belong to the Marxist camp, because unlike capitalism, Marxism is more ethical. Marxism, as an ideology, takes care of the welfare of its employees and believes in distribution of wealth among the people of the state.”

Source

Of course, he was talking about ideology, not about actually existing communist societies. He noted, for example, that "There are very high degrees of exploitation in . . . China, similar to the exploitation during industrialisation of Western countries a century ago."

Today on Facebook

2008-01-24T13:06:00.001-06:00

I'm teaching a class called "Writing Web 2.0" this semester, and I'm beginning the class with a tiny little ethnographic assignment. Take a close, curious look at Facebook, as if you hadn't encountered it before. What do you see people doing with Facebook? To what use is it being put?

This, then, is a record of some of my observations.

Facebook is clearly a place to connect with people. Each member of Facebook has a profile, where he or she usually posts a photograph and has some information about him or herself (including birthdate, interest in men or women, relationship status, political affiliation, etc.).

It also seems to be a place for a kind of ritualized, low stakes competition. For example, I have received several notifications over the past few days, telling me that someone has fed a friend to my vampire, that someone has challenged my movie knowledge, that someone is playing a game of Scrabulous with me. As the last example suggests, this ritualized competition is a kind of play. So, in addition to connecting with people, Facebook offers a space to have fun without leaving your chair.

Facebook also allows people to join groups. One of my Facebook friends, for example, is a member of the following groups: Kill Beacon Now ▪ Computers and Composition Online ▪ Graphic Design and Adobe Photoshop ▪ 4Cs: Conference on College Composition and Communication ▪ H-DigiRhet ▪ Rhetoric ▪ Kairos: Rhetoric, Technology, Pedagogy ▪ Laurie Anderson has it all figured out! ▪ Equality California (EQCA) ▪ What the Foucault ▪ Composition Community. Some of these groups are professional (4Cs, Kairos), some are political (Equality California, Kill Beacon Now), and some are "fan" groups or just for fun (Laurie Anderson has it all figured out). What they have in common is the goal of connecting people with similar interests. These groups also allow the people who join them to "brand" themselves as a certain kind of person. Facebook, then, is also a place to "build" and circulate an identity (or maybe identities).

And, lest I seem over serious here, let me add a link to "Crackbook," which I found via my Facebook (and f2f) friend Zac. Crackbook is a spoof of Facebook, claiming the mere illusion of connection.

While I was away

2008-01-13T18:09:00.000-06:00

Some things I've done since my last entry, lo these many weeks ago:

* Met up with my online writing groupies in Chicago

* Silently retreated in St Louis

* Re-viewed all of Lost, Season 3 on DVD

* Bought a new appointment book (half price after January 1!) and began filling it up

* Began a new yoga class because one just isn't enough

* Discovered a Columbia restaurant I might just be willing to love

* Listened to some wonderful jazz (the latest by Kurt Elling and McCoy Tyner), thanks to holiday gifts from C

* Made it to some amazing live jazz (also Kurt Elling, jazz singer extraordinaire) in KC, in celebration of our anniversary

Some other things, here and there. Some involving pumpkin dip. Some involving the possibility of a very big purchase, the like I've never made before. Classes begin in another week. Much left to do before then.

Teachers

2007-12-07T17:18:00.001-06:00

Billie tagged me, and I'm happy to participate in this meme, which honors the important teachers in my life.

Here's the meme:

Who are the thirteen teachers who have most personally influenced you and how?

Would you share your baker’s dozen of mentors with the world?

And here's my list, in chronological order:

1. Mrs. Williamson, my first grade teacher. I adored her. I thought she was soooo nice (as I would say back then, she never gets mad, except when a boy ate glue!). And she was the first person to tell me that I was smart.

2. Mrs. Skidmore, my high school English teacher.

3. Ms. Campbell, my high school psychology teacher. She was the first feminist I ever met. She showed us women-positive films while keeping the class discourse extremely casual and fun. I was very conservative in my youth, and she encouraged me to speak my opinions, even though I was pretty sure she didn't agree with them. She was the first person who showed me that teaching was about respecting those you're teaching.

4. Dr. Goode, a Byron scholar, and the director of my honors thesis before he had a heart attack and sat out a semester or two. He taught me close reading, a skill I'm grateful to have even as I moved far, far away from the New Criticism.

5. Ann Miller, who introduced me to Mary Oliver's poetry and who became my honors thesis director. Her amazing passion for literature and for the world in general continue to ripple after her passing.

6. Linda Walker, whose delight in Thoreau was contagious.

(And now as I get to people who I still have some contact with, I feel shy about making them Googleable. So I'll use first name, last initial.)

6. Roger M., who said, "You're a good poet," and introduced me to Language Poetry. If I had finished the PhD at IU, he would have been my director.

7. Cary W., who intimidated me, but introduced me to theoretical readings I'm still indebted to.

8. Susan G., who also intimidated me, but introduced me to feminist criticism.

9. Yusef K., who actually gave us assignments in workshop, and so forced me to stretch myself as a writer.

10. Laura S., who taught me yoga and mentored me as a beginning teacher of yoga.

11. Alice G., who modeled and included me in a collaborative approach to administration.

12. Lynn W., who introduced me to Foucault and myriad other theorists, who gave me renewed belief in myself as a scholar, who directed my thesis.

13. Ginny M., who teaches me to be mindful.

And even this list seems inadequate. How can I not also mention David W., who directed my MFA thesis; Kathryn F., who introduced me to CCCC and has been such a supportive reader of my work; Sienna, whose classes inspire me and have reignited my commitment to yoga practice... Not to mention all the friends, students, colleagues, who have taught me.

So much to be grateful for.

Celebrate!

2007-11-30T19:28:00.000-06:00

It's November 30, which means my failed NaBloPoMo is over. And it's Friday! Together, the two things call out for something special, don't you think?

And what could be better than a photo of Gabe and Simon, sleeping like angels?

Nothing. Nothing could be better.

Happy December!

Hmm...is this about me or about them?

2007-11-29T18:22:00.000-06:00

A few weeks ago, Spencer posted a link to this site that will measure the reading level of your blog.

Like Spencer's blog, this blog you're reading right was rated at the elementary reading level.

Hmmph! I thought. What does it take to get a higher reading level?

So I put in the url for my graduate class's blog.

That blog has a high school reading level.

So I guess if I posted almost exclusively about academic articles, I might boost my blog's reading level. Or if I imagined an authority figure was always reading.

TV, 1970s style

2007-11-28T16:04:00.000-06:00

Dan, taking a cue from Jeff, talks about memories from the 1970s, including a television show. I'm thinking I watched a lot of TV in the
1970s. Maybe more than I've ever watched since then, even. What was I
watching? A sample below.

Ah, yes. Little House on the Prairie. I remember being pretty excited when it started up. And even though I was irritated when it was less than faithful to the books (Pa should have a beard! Mary never got married!), I still watched it faithfully. Or did I? Seems like maybe I was less than faithful at one point. Then the Laura/Almanzo romance got me hooked again.

The Cyborg. That was the name of the novel on which The Six Million Dollar Man was based. Who knew many years later I would be reading "The Cyborg Manifesto" in graduate school? I was totally into the bionic man and woman. I even had, yes, action figures. With arms that made a noise mimicking the distinctive sound of the bionics-in-action on TV. I've not watched the recent incarnation. Not planning to, either.

I actually thought Fonzie *was* cool. But only with the leather jacket. The blue canvas jacket in the very early episodes is pretty funny. (And it's set in Milwaukee! Where I would later live. As was Laverne and Shirley, the spin-off.)

Yep. That's right. Donny and Marie. Donny Osmond (along with Jack Wild) was the object of my earliest crushes. I felt that I would marry him one day. After he switched from being Mormon to being Baptist. I mean, I knew he would do it. For me. We practically had the same name. Come on.

Another composing process of the body

2007-11-27T21:13:00.000-06:00

Chris has written on more than one occasion about his bodily composing process. He tends to write about it as an active, conscious process, something he works on through lifting weights and such.

But there's an unconscious bodily composing process, too, one that speaks to the importance of such things as yoga and bodywork.

For example, last week I shared the 12-hour drive to my ancestral home in Texas with C. I was pretty impressed that at the end of the 12-hours (both going and coming back) I felt ok. Usually, by upper body feels pretty crunched up. I've rarely been able to drive for more than two hours at a time: within two hours, my neck and shoulders are usually sending me pretty intense messages. But since I've been doing more yoga and have discovered the wonder of myofascial release, I don't get the messages so much anymore. It's made me complacent. It's made me think all is well with my body, that I don't need to treat it so gently. It's open! It's not all tied up in balls!

Then I went for a massage today. (I hesitate in calling it a "massage," since it's so much more than what I used to think of when I would think of massage. It's bodywork. It works the body: it, dare I say, affects the body's composing process.

And, yes, I went in with some issues: that cold has collected itself in my sinuses, so I knew I had pressure there and tension down the side of my neck and shoulder.

But, wow. There was so much tension I hadn't sensed into, because, yes, some of the more familiar tensions were gone. I was pretty crunched up, but my body had (intelligently?) found new ways of crunching up, of getting tense, since I have in fact changed my body in certain ways. Certain parts of my body don't get tense in the way they used to. So other parts are kicking in. Getting tense instead.

So how about that? The bodily composing process, like the writerly one, is fraught with unconscious holdings, parts we just can't "see" as yet. It's a humbling realization.

A list! Give us a list!

2007-11-26T21:36:00.000-06:00

Please, stop clamoring! Here's your list, a basic set of whatever:

1. I have a cold. My second in less than a month. It seems unfair. But, then, who is being unfair? The cold genie?

2. I had enchiladas for dinner. At a nabor's house!

3. I've found a new way to spend all my extra time on the internet: www.freerice.comIt's a vocabulary game that rewards you with rice that gets donated to the United Nations. I worked hard and donated a whole cup today.

4. I made an apple crisp! With gluten-free flour on the top.

5. I watched the second half of the big Missouri-Kansas game Saturday night. I think it might have been the first time I voluntarily watched college football in, oh, 20 years or so. (There's a story there, but I'll spare you.)

6. I don't want a failed (but extremely rich) businessman to be the president of my institution.

7. Nor do I want the Ministry of Magic to infiltrate the universities, for real.

8. How long does this need to go on? I think I've done enough.

My always-viewable writing planner

2007-11-25T10:26:00.000-06:00

Twenty days ago, Krista requested that I provide pictures to illustrate my entry called "How to write a lot." I promised to do so, but since it's taken so long and the entry has now entered the archives, I'm putting the picture here, in its own post.

Writing down project goals, according to Paul Silvia, should be the second step of the planning process. (The first step, he says, should be realizing that "goal setting is part of the process of writing"--seems like maybe we've left that out in academic writing instruction, having set the goals for the students.) I like what he says about the project goal-setting process:

What do you want to write? When reformed binge writers first set writing goals, one`project always leaps out--usually the dreaded project they had been avoiding for the past 3 months. Certainly write that goal down, but don't stop there. What else would you like to write during the next few months? Is there a grant proposal deadline on the horizon? Does your file cabinet have any unpublished experiments that deserve a good peer-reviewed home? Is there a review article you always meant to write? Put down this book, get some paper, and make a sprawling, discursive list of your project goals.

After you settle on a list of project goals--and it might be a long list--you need to write these goals down. It's a waste of your writing time to rehash the planning process. Get a whiteboard or a bulletin board, put in near your writing space, and proudly display your list of goals. A binge writer would feel anxious when confronted with this long list of projects, but you have a schedule. Binge writers ask, "Will I get all this done?"; disciplined writers idly wonder how many weeks it will take to write everything on the list. It's gratifying to cross a project goal off the list. (How to Write a Lot 30-31)

Since I didn't have a whiteboard or bulletin board handy but still wanted to get that second step under way, I used the oversized post-it notes that I picked up on sale a few months back and stuck them to the closet doors in my office. On the far left, I have projects that have a deadline more than three months in the future or are iffy. In the middle are projects with upcoming deadlines or on which I am actively working. On the far right are completed projects (completed since I began this). And, yes, it does feel nice to have something over there.

It also feels nice to see that I have multiple things in play. The third step in the planning process is to use these project goals to set concrete daily goals. For this week, my concrete goal is to write 10 revised pages on my second book chapter. That's just something in my head. Silvia recommends spread sheets and such for tracking daily progress. I haven't set one of those up, but perhaps I will. I do have a couple of writing groups I'm accountable to on a daily and a bi-weekly basis, and those are helpful. There's also the book blog, which I haven't been very faithful to, alas. But, still, I have been writing. Not binging. Writing. It's a good thing.

Thanksgiving week

2007-11-24T16:43:00.001-06:00

So, yeah, I've pretty much failed on the blog every day of November thing. But, really, I didn't have internet access most of this past week. It was an eventful week. In some wonderful ways and some not so wonderful. I'll tell you about it below the fold. With pictures!

First, we drove to Texas. Every year around the holidays, since we moved to Columbia, we drive through Oklahoma on the way to visit my family. Near Ardmore, OK, there's an elaborate display of lights. I tried to capture it, but you can't tell much. Still, I'm going to force it upon you.

That's a reindeer? I think?

But down home, things were a little iffy. My newest great nephew was being born as we drove, but my father had been in the hospital since Saturday. Dizziness. Shortness of breath. He was being kept for tests, tests, and observation. Despite all that, and despite a deteriorating memory (when asked which holiday was approaching, he guessed July 4th), he remembered that my niece's baby was coming. And he wanted to see him.

Happily, my dad was able to leave the hospital Tuesday night. So we packed up my parents and headed to my sisters' places for Thanksgiving. But we made a stop, just in time to see a homecoming:

My first glimpse of him was something like this. The next day, he got all bundled up to enjoy his first Thanksgiving at his other great aunt's house:

And then it snowed! On Thanksgiving! In Texas! I've never seen such. It mostly melted, but I caught a little lingering the next morning above the bedroom window of my youth.

Then we left Friday morning, for the 12-hour drive back. But we made one more stop, at a Starbucks in Fort Worth, for a very cool blogger meet up!

And, that, dear readers, was my week. Mostly wonderful, I should say.

Oops

2007-11-18T19:01:00.001-06:00

Forgot to blog yesterday. Am very unlikely to blog tomorrow. So 28 out of 30 days is still something. Just not blogging every day for a month.

Because it's Friday!

2007-11-16T21:49:00.000-06:00

Gabe and Simon lol

Blossom

2007-11-15T17:57:00.000-06:00

It isn't April.

But C. found a website that has poets reading their works (specifically, poets in response to Emily Dickinson). And he is currently playing a reading by Mary Oliver, who used to be my favorite poet in the whole world and whose poetry in fact was the subject of my undergraduate honor's thesis. At the time, no one else had done a critical study of her work. I was the first!

I didn't know then that such things as summer writing workshops existed. But one of my professors told me Mary Oliver would be at one in Washington, and I determined to go. How amazing, I thought, to be able to go where a poet is. What an amazing, unbelievable idea.

Turns out the Honors Program had money for travel and research expenses. Who knew! I think I was the first person to ever use it. I got on a plane for the first time ever in my life (I was 21) and flew to Seattle, sat in a bus station for several hours, took a bus (which got on a ferry) to Port Townsend, up in the Olympic Peninsula. It was one of the most beautiful places I had ever seen. Fog hung low every morning. It was July, but every night I got cold as I tried to sleep in the dorms. Finally, a nice woman loaned me her sweats to wear.

One afternoon, I walked by a field where Mary Oliver was flying a kite.

It was all magical. Completely magical.

And when Mary Oliver read her poetry one evening, I snuck in a recorder. On the tape, when she says she's going to read "Blossom," you can hear me gasp. It was my favorite poem. And she just read it now on the recording C. is playing, and when she said she was going to read it, I gasped again.

It's more of a memory of loving it now. If you're curious, you can read it below the fold. (Blogger, however, takes away the indentation. It's in quatrains, with each line in the quatrain indented from the margin of the previous line.)

Blossom

In April
the ponds
open
like black blossoms,
the moon
swims in every one;
there's fire
everywhere: frogs shouting
their desire,
their satisfaction. What
we know: that time
chops at us all like an iron
hoe, that death
is a state of paralysis. What
we long for: joy
before death, nights
in the swale-everything else
can wait but not
this thrust
from the root
of the body. What
we know: we are more
than blood-we are more
than our hunger and yet
we belong
to the moon and when the ponds
open, when the burning
begins the most
thoughtful among us dreams
of hurrying down
into the black petals,
into the fire,
into the night where time lies shattered,
into the body of another.

Mary Oliver

Face to face with academic capitalism

2007-11-14T14:20:00.000-06:00

OK, so, maybe this is a fiction.

Maybe someone wrote an application for an externally funded fellowship. It's a modest grant, about 1-10% of the numbers she's heard bandied about for things like NSF grants. It's to develop a course to teach at her university.

And then she realizes, oh! This is supposed to go through the campus grant-machinery. And she learns that she has to ask for a kickback: some funds (almost 50% of her budget) to go to the college. You know, to pay for all the wear and tear she's going to put on the university just by her presence. (Of course, she would be present even without the grant.)

And then she says a little offering of gratitude. Because now she's really seen it. The machinery of academic capitalism. And she understands, better than ever, why the sciences get so much attention. Cause their grant kickbacks are way more than 4 figures.

Yep.

Just saying.

Plantings

2007-11-13T17:09:00.001-06:00

You all have heard, I suppose, about the recent Robert Plant/Allison Kraus collaboration. They were on NPR a few weeks back. I mean, what a hoot, huh? Mr. Heavy Metal Man meets Ms. Bluegrass. I'm a total sucker for odd combinations, so I've been thinking from the minute I heard about it (even before the NPR interview) that I would probably want to get it.

So the other day I was talking to C. about it, and I found myself "treating" him to my version of "In the Mood" from Plant's Principle of Moments (circa nineteen-eighty something or other). C. claims he's never heard this song. And he isn't much impressed with my rendition of it, either.

So I went online to listen to it, thinking I might play it for C. Then I thought, why not order it? It's cheap! And I'll order Raising Sand, too. And, heck, I've always had a soft spot for "Stairway to Heaven." (Cause I used to be a geeky lover of Renaissance and Medieval music, and it reminded me of that. OK. Maybe I'm still geeky. Whatever.) So I ordered Led Zeppelin IV, too. (It's even cheaper than Principle of Moments!)

C. said we could listen to them on the way to Texas next week. But! I ordered them via "Super Saver Shipping." And they haven't shipped yet! So they probably won't arrive on time!

It makes me sad.

Revolved, not shaken

2007-11-12T21:26:00.001-06:00

Some time ago, my local yoga teacher asked the class to name their favorite pose, the one pose we would do if we could do only one yoga pose.

Many people named Downward Facing Dog as the one.

It’s a great pose, so I can understand. The shoulders open. The spine lengthens. The head and neck point down, bringing some of the same benefits as an inversion like headstand.

It’s certainly on my top ten list. Maybe even my top five.

But my “one pose,” the one I couldn’t do without, is Parivrtta Trikonasana: Revolved Triangle Pose.

I love twists. This is a twist. They lengthen and massage the spine. I love that. But it’s also a standing twist, and so requires some attention to balance. Standing poses are foundational, creating a sense of stability. Twists do their lovely work of opening and massaging. Stability and opening. Attention and concentration. That’s what I can’t do without.

Plus I kind of like the sound of it. Parivrtta. Trikonasana. Especially the "vrtta" part.

Breads, pies, etc.

2007-11-11T18:23:00.001-06:00

OK, so, I didn't actually bake any bread on Saturday. Things came up (including a whole house of cats--not mine--needing some care). I did go over to R's place, and she had made some bread. I got to sample it. Freshly baked bread. Nothing like it.

At any rate, I have no bread making pictures to share. Instead, I will tell you about a trip C. and I took a few weeks back to Rolla, MO.

Rolla is mostly known as the home of Missouri's tech university. But that isn't what drew us to Rolla. Instead, we went for the sake of going (we had heard the road was lovely), and we went to get a piece of pie.

While entertaining a visiting rhetorician a few weeks back, colleague A. revealed his love of pie and his own trip a few years ago to Rolla, solely for the sake of pie. Since C. and I were already planning to drive down to Rolla when we thought the leaves would be at peak color (turns out, they were ok, but not really at their peak), we decided a piece of pie would be a nice way to mark the end of the road.

A Slice of Pie, as it's called, has what may be the best pie I've ever tasted. We got two slices, one apple and one pumpkin. The apple was unbelievably delicious. We had it a la mode, and it's always served with a cinnamon sauce. The pumpkin was also wonderful--not the nasty watered down stuff that passes for pumpkin pie at some establishments. Hearty, spicy, delicous.

So, yeah, highly recommended. Worth the 2 hour drive down a lovely, hilly road.

Reluctant rhetor

2007-11-10T20:25:00.000-06:00

I love the story of the Buddha’s reluctance to teach after his enlightenment. (It’s recorded in the sutta called “The Noble Search.”)

He recognized that his experience was subtle, and would be hard to understand, especially among people “delighting in attachment,” and that teaching it to others, consequently, would be difficult:

if I were to teach the Dhamma and others would not understand me, that would be tiresome for me, troublesome for me

So he leaned toward avoiding the trouble that sharing his teaching might bring to him:

my mind inclined to dwelling at ease, not to teaching the Dhamma

Then, the story goes, a heavenly being came down to him and told him the world would be lost if he didn’t teach. He appealed to the Buddha’s sense of compassion, and he assured him that “There are beings with little dust in their eyes” who would be able to understand the Dhamma.

So the Buddha was persuaded, through what we might (if we move west to ancient Greece, which would, in the following century or so, produce Aristotle) call pathos.

There’s also what we might call propriety or even kairos. Sure, the heavenly being said, it might be that everyone won’t understand. But some will. There are those with little dust in their eyes.

Something like kairos became important to the Buddha’s teachings on right speech. One should speak only that which is “factual, true, beneficial, and endearing.” And even then, one must have “a sense of the proper time for saying them.”

Why is that? Because the Tathagata has sympathy for living beings. (MN 58)

There’s something dynamic about pathos and kairos, compassion and timing in the suttas. Speech isn’t a contest; it isn’t about winning. So the attention to timing isn’t strategic so much as it’s simply thoughtful.

But what I love, really love, is the humanity of the Buddha. That initial reluctance. The inclination to avoid the difficulty of addressing an audience that just isn’t ready for you. Then the change of mind, the realization of the benefit that could come from giving words to what he knows, to teaching.

Friday cat litter blogging

2007-11-09T14:46:00.000-06:00

I have more than one cat. More than one litter box. And so accumulate in a given day a goodly amount of used litter.

Now there's a use for it. Flushing expired drugs down the toilet is bad for the environment. Instead put them in, yes, a "yucky bag" that mixes them up with soiled litter.

And I was wondering what to do this weekend.

O wad some Power the giftie gie us

2007-11-08T12:38:00.000-06:00

OK, all you new and relatively new parents out there. I need your input.

Like I said, I've got a new great nephew coming in a matter of days. I have yet to buy a gift for this new nephew. Why? Call it gift anxiety.

My niece (the mother of said great nephew) has had FOUR (count 'em, 4! 4! 4! 4!) baby showers. So she's received a lot already. I want to get her something that she'll like AND that will be distinctive.

So...any suggestions? Maybe something you didn't register for but that you're really glad you got? Or something you registered for but no one gave you? Or just something?

(I was thinking at one point of something like this hoodie swaddling blanket, but someone out there suggested the hood might pose a breathing hazard. So I'm thinking maybe not.)

Grains

2007-11-07T17:38:00.000-06:00

Saturday, I'm going to learn to make bread. Maybe I'll take pictures!

I tried making bread long, long ago when I first took to cooking on my own (when I first started grad school). I was all about whole grains, so that's what I tried first. It came out like a brick. I'm thinking that might have been my mistake: trying whole grains. In fact, if I remember correctly, I think I might have made some successful white loaves. But that wasn't good enough for me, so I gave up. I decided I couldn't make bread.

So Saturday I'm getting with colleague R, and she will help me. However, it will be white (French) bread.

And the complicating factor now is that C was recently diagnosed as being highly allergic to all gluten-containing grains. We don't really know what that means (he doesn't break out, have breathing problems, or any of the usual things associated with allergies.) Still, he avoids them on the whole. (A few weeks ago, he started the day with pancakes and continued to eat wheat-based foods throughout the day. He didn't sleep so well that night, but his allergist thinks wheat was not likely to be the cause.)

So what I really need to learn is how to make rice bread. Or tapioca bread. Or something on that order.

And I have a feeling that if whole grains were hard, gluten-free grains are another thing entirely.

Sigh.

No! Onward! Face the challenge! Develop those skills.

All righty, then.

Being great-aunted

2007-11-06T21:44:00.000-06:00

As reported earlier on this humble blog, I became a great aunt this year.

And, well, it's turned out to be quite the year for great nephews, because another arrived last month and still another is coming in two more weeks. Yes, I know the date. My niece has an appointment. Conveniently, it's during Thanksgiving Break. So I'll get to go down to Texas and visit him when he's just a day or two old.

In the meantime, let me share with you this amazing photo of my second great nephew, grandson to my brother. (Yes, my siblings are grandparents. How bizarre is that? Remember, if you will, that I'm the youngest by an average of 10 years.) This little guy came forth with a whole head of hair. You can see him below the fold.

How to write a lot

2007-11-05T19:18:00.000-06:00

That's the name of a book I ordered a few weeks back. It came up as a recommended title for me on Amazon, and I decided to order it, thinking I might use it in a class I'm cooking up for next year.

I probably won't use it in my class (its target audience being psychology scholars, though it's pretty applicable to any academic audience). But it did have some useful hints.

Hint #1?
Write every day. I knew that one already, having picked it up from my new hero/guru Robert Boice. (I really want to use his book, How Writers Journey to Comfort in Fluency, in my class, but look at that price tag! 100 bucks! How can one book cost so much?) Boice recommends writing in what he calls "Brief Daily Sessions" of 15-60 minutes a day. Good advice. I used to believe I couldn't get anything of quality done in 15 minutes a day, but, in fact, it helps a lot to keep a writing project in mind by spending at least that much time on it daily. (Silvia, the author of How to Write a Lot, prefers about 2 hours a day.)

At any rate, the major hint I took from Silvia is to write out all your projects in a visible space. I think that's in part what Chris was doing here, back in July. Silvia recommends a white board. Not having a white board and not feeling like going right out and buying one, I opted to use oversized post-it notes, which I do have. (The white board would probably be more environmentally sound in the long run, so I'll switch to that eventually.)

It's nice to have all the projects (even the potential ones) up where they can be seen, rearranged according to priority, marked off. I never have to wonder what to do.

Update: Picture forthcoming, per Krista's request. :)

Begin the week with a list o' randomness

2007-11-04T20:53:00.000-06:00

(1) The Bee Movie gets mixed reviews. I really wanted it to be good. It's Seinfeld! I love Seinfeld!

(2) I finally picked up a copy of An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World this weekend, after having seen a review of it in the NY Times a few years back. It's a good read: part travel narrative, part intellectual history of India, part reception of Buddhism in the West, part meditation on poverty and suffering in the contemporary world.

(3)C. says Mizzou Football has become too much this year. I'm not sure what he means.

(4) I wrote something in August and it's already in print. I've held it in my hands! What wonders.

(5) After almost a year, my newest cat, Hansel, still lives segregated from the other cats. He seems to be capable of only dysfunctional relationships: he's either hiding under the bed from Gabe or scaring Casey with his over-zealous romping.

(6) Two words: Myofascial release. It's good.

(7) November? Already?

Bodies of information

2007-11-03T19:20:00.000-05:00

Over at Post-December, KR writes about the effects of the information economy on bodies. On graduate student bodies, at any rate.

She notes that the time to complete a PhD in her field seems to increase by a half year or so every year, just because of the increase in knowledge. More past knowledge, more time sitting and stuffing it into the brain cells. She wonders about the physical effects of all this consumption:

The immediate consequence of having to go over the sheer volume of material, is the exponential increase in time you spend sitting, reading, straining your eyes, and writing your fingers to the nubbins. I have succumbed to the pains of being serially sedentary, sacrificing for the knowhow. I have gained physical mass, as well as intellectual mass. It seems that the two can be connected all too easily.

So what comes next: the physical limit--in which our body mechanically fails to deal with this job? Or the time limit, where we literally won't have enough time to learn it all? Or the limit of thought?

Her question about the physical limit of the job reminds me of those studies done of college composition teachers back around the turn of the last century. The famous (well, in some circles) Harvard Report of 1892 estimated that 38,000 separate writing exercises were handed in to the composition faculty each semester. This work, according to the Report, overextends the limits of body and mind:

Few persons not intimately connected . . . with the existing Department of Rhetoric and English Composition . . . have any conception of either the amount or nature of the work now done by the instructors in that department. In quantity this work is calculated to excite dismay; while the performance of it involves not only unremitted industry, but mental drudgery of the most exhausting nature (qtd. in Brereton 75).

The information society is often connected to the virtual, to things we can't see. But the load of information is exhausting. The load of teaching students to work with information (which is what composition classes do, I would say) tests the physical limits of teachers, not to mention students.

Of course, there's the idea of "pathways, not things," that what we need to teach (and learn) is how to store, categorize, and work with information. And so that might lead to a more problem-based curriculum, as is used often in medical schools.

Does that work for all disciplines? And what about KR, who is educating herself to be a scientist (as if she isn't one already)? Is it possible to use pathways to avoid the physical breakdown? Or does the physical necessarily strain with information, no matter the path?

I like pumpkins

2007-11-02T20:10:00.000-05:00

A colleague at a reception this late afternoon told me he doesn't like pumpkins. He doesn't like pumpkin pie. He doesn't like pumpkin anything.

Now, I don't understand this. I like pumpkins. I write this every year at about this time. I love fall. I love the increasing availability of all things pumpkin.

Which is why, you see, I've been bidding all week on an Alsatian feast.

Every year the graduate student organization here at MU hold a fund-raising online auction. Last year I got the most delicious cookies ever. This year, I set my sights on a feast promising pumpkin custard as dessert.

We were encouraged to take pseudonyms. Mine is the perhaps all too obvious: Aspasia. My nemesis in the bid for the pumpkin-finaled feast? Oracle. Pretty funny, huh?

I think I may have won. Rhetoric over prophesy.

It's a great badge, after all

2007-11-01T20:09:00.000-05:00

Clancy reminds me that it's National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo)!

It worked last year. I blogged daily! For a month! And some of you out there did it, too!

Not only that, but this year, there's a cat.

Let's do it! Post! And post some more!
And, hey, look at this other version of the badge:

It's got a good badge. If that's not persuasive, well, I'm throwing in the towel on that rhetoric thing.

I LUV these!

2007-10-29T14:44:00.000-05:00

Meeting tokens. One good for 15 minutes. One to announce that the meeting is over.

Luv. Them.

Via Jason at The Salt Box, who asks:

Can anyone in higher ed imagine deploying one of these nifty tokens at a meeting of any standing committee ? Or, for example, at the faculty senate?

Really, though, tokens for meetings seem like a good idea. Apparently, some feminist consciousness raising groups back in the day used tokens to keep everyone's contributions equal. Everyone got, say, three tokens at the beginning of a meeting. Had to use them up. Had to stop talking when they were gone. I've sometimes thought of using a system like that in my classes.

Teaching Web 2.0

2007-10-22T15:38:00.000-05:00

Next semester I'm teaching a course I'm calling "Writing Web 2.0." I've been asked to please hurry up and submit my course description since registration starts next week. Here's what I've got. Would you take it?

Web 2.0 or the “Read/Write Web” refers to the many social networking and collaborative applications that characterize the second-generation World Wide Web. In this course, we’ll experiment with a variety of applications, including blogs, wikis, real simple syndication, and social networking sites. We’ll also read some practical and theoretical explorations of Web 2.0 and social networks. The major project for the course will be student-designed and will make use of at least one Web 2.0 application. Because the Read/Write web also has many educational applications, this course will be especially useful for both writers and future teachers.

Movement/Mystory

2007-10-15T16:34:00.000-05:00

Bonnie's comment sent me (where else?) to Google. According to Wikipedia, the Jesus Movement

was the major Christian element within the hippie counterculture, or, conversely, the major hippie element within the Christian Church. Members of the movement are called Jesus people, or Jesus freaks.

Wow. I had forgotten all about "Jesus freaks." It was the melding of being "born again" with being a hippie.

I also found this pretty cool website on the Jesus Movement. According to the "History" section of that website,

Though the Jesus People Movement remains relatively neglected by mainstream and religious historians, its influence throughout the church had a profound affect upon shaping many facets of the contemporary evangelical movement.

So, Bonnie, you aren't the only person who hasn't heard of the Jesus Movement! But, thanks to my older sister, it was part of the culture of my childhood. In Texas. Among evangelicals.

And thanks to the One Way website (as well as its Jesus Music site), I'm able to add these images to my on-again, off-again exploration of mystory. I haven't thought about these things in a long, long time:

Don't you love that last one? The appropriation of popular culture was a big part of the Jesus Movement. I remember another poster that riffed off Coke: Jesus, He's the Real Thing.

But "one way," as you can see in the posters above, was the big slogan.

One way. It sounds dogmatic. Only one way. But that first image, from Agape's LP Gospel Hard Rock, was popular exactly because it wasn't clear cut. What is it? Mountains in snow? No: it's Jesus. Yeah. It's Jesus. Yeah. (A snippit of some more lyrics I remember from my sister's record-playing.)

I remember (as a fuzzy emotion, not a definite thought) the Jesus Movement as risky. Not clear cut. My mother didn't like my sister's records. It didn't seem right to mix church with rock and roll. And look at those Jesus freaks in Dallas! One of them is shirtless! That's not my grandmother's worship service!

Another link to explore another time.

Something good is going to happen to you

2007-09-25T17:13:00.000-05:00

When I was a little girl, the television would be on Sunday mornings. I'm not sure why. We would eat breakfast, then get ready for church. Why did the TV need to be on? Because what was on, you know, was mostly yet more church.

Like Oral Roberts' program, from the campus of Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The opening song:

Something good is going to happen to you
Happen to you
This very day

It's the earworm that just came to me, that song. And so I share it with you. Though if you've never heard it, if your Sunday mornings weren't like mine, then I guess you are innoculated.

But now that I have that song in mind, I'm thinking of other songs, songs from the Jesus Movement, songs that pre-dated the Christian Contemporary music of today. My sister played them on her stereo:

Maranatha Maranatha
The Lord is coming back
Let all of us rejoice
To truly me-e, e-et him.

Songs that weren't exactly pop songs, but that still would be part of Mystory,so part of the PopCycle. Yeah?

I made a box

2007-09-13T21:36:00.000-05:00

I asked my 8010 (Theory and Practice of Composition) grad students to try out Geoffrey Sirc's initial assignment from Writing New Media. Make a basic box: find an image, find some text, then add your own text. Voila! A basic box.

I asked them to take writing and/or teaching as their topic.

So I made one, too, and it's visible below the fold. (Click on it for a larger view.)

Yogic bodies

2007-09-10T13:53:00.000-05:00

Chris says,

i want bodies to be more visible in academia. physical bodies *should be* more visible in academia. not (half)naked bodies, but bodies made present. bodies looked *at* as opposed to through. as doing and not simply done to. as creating and not just containing i.e. not "embodying" knowledge, but itself knowing.

But, no, I'm not offering any close-ups of my biceps or anything below. In fact, my "body composing process" takes a different direction from Chris's. But that's part of the point, no? How do bodies know? Surely in more than one way. And maybe in ways that aren't always visible by looking.

For example, last week I did a 2 1/2 hour yoga workshop with Doug Swenson, author of, yes, Power Yoga for Dummies and Mastering the Secrets of Yoga Flow. Power Yoga (ie, hot and sweaty yoga) is not my usual choice of yoga, though I have tried it out. After all, according to a quiz at yogajournal.com, I'm a "Balanced Yogi," one who isn't dogmatic or snobbish about yoga. I'm interested in everything yogic, even if I do have predilections in favor of certain styles over others. (Iyengar is my foundation, if you want to know, but some teachers in that style are a little too inflexible for my taste. Pun intended.)

At the workshop, Doug demonstrated some pretty amazing postures that he moved in and out of with the most beautiful grace and fluidity. Here he is in an arm balance, for example (though not from the workshop, which was held indoors):

I can look at the photo and I can see what his body knows. I could watch him move at the workshop and see what his body knows, what it can do.

Usually, I take yoga classes with S., mostly her "Deep Stretch" class on Saturday mornings. She calls it "Yin Style" yoga. When I'm doing deep stretch, I can feel changes happening deep inside my body. What does it look like from outside? Probably not much. Certainly not like an impressive arm balance on a cliff. But my body is learning. My body is doing. My body is revising itself, learning to be in new ways.

So I was reading about "yin yoga" online, and found the website of yin guru Paul Grilley. Yin yoga focuses on holding poses for long periods of time (as in 5-10 minutes, not hours or anything) in order to affect the connective tissues. Because of his interest in bodily connections (hmmm...I often talk to grad students about working on the "connective tissue" in their writing), he also gives workshops on joints. He also brings attention to bones, how the shape of bones affects how muscles can move. Here's a link to a slide show on bones. Just look at the differences in those clavicals! Look at the different angles in the two femurs. Grilley says:

The bend at the neck of the femur of these two specimens vary by 40 degrees. This could mean 40 degrees wider splits.

Forty degrees difference! And here I've been thinking that when a yoga teacher says "every body is different" she meant that every body has a different level of fitness. No. In fact, every body is different. Differently composed. And so differently able.

But those things are hard to see. They're under the skin. Under the muscle. Hidden away.

How do we make visible the composing processes of bodies like those? Exceptional bodies, bodies with spines that wind like a river, hip sockets oriented inward rather than outward? How to make visible the subtle changes that happen when a body relaxes, as in restorative yoga?

The body is supported. It relaxes. The mind relaxes. Muscles decontract. It's hard to see. But it's there, all the same.

This is Donna Strickland, and I'm here to talk about....

2007-08-31T15:07:00.000-05:00

Just had a meeting with A, an MA student in rhet/comp. We were talking about his comp class as well as about his thesis, when this idea blossomed: "The making of this paper or project," modeled on the "Making-of" feature on DVDs. Students would narrate the process of creating their papers or media projects for class. I like to do reflective writing in classes, in which students reflect on the choices they've made as they were writing their papers and the potential effects of those choices. The "Making-of" would be a "multimodal" version of the reflective paper, maybe a podcast, maybe a movie.

Has anyone already tried something like that?

On the record

2007-08-28T17:17:00.000-05:00

I got an email yesterday, during my day-long writing marathon, asking my opinion about some new plagiarism detection software. And so now I'm online, saying, yeah, I wouldn't use it, but I guess other people would.

I'm speechless

2007-08-21T20:54:00.000-05:00

Got your interest? Here's the video. Available (for a few hundred dollars) from your local Big Box pet store.

Eight things for the eighth month

2007-08-20T19:24:00.000-05:00

Sometimes, you know, you just put things off for too long. Last month, for instance, I was tagged. In fact, it was exactly one month ago yesterday that Shehun stopped at this humble blog and announced, "You're it."

In the month that has passed, I've composed some parts of my eight random things list. I was especially inspired by Dan's contribution to the meme. So, although I have no video to accompany it, I shall begin my list with a tribute to Dan's.

1. My senior year in high school, our local chapter of the National Honor Society put on a talent show. Don't ask me why. I can't even remember quite what I did. I think I was in a skit. But I do remember the finale, in which we all paraded out on stage to the tune of "If They Could See Me Now." We were all told to dress as we thought we would look in ten years. So there were doctors, teachers, that sort of thing. I wore a gold lame shirt and plastic pants. I was, I imagined, a punk rocker. My costume was quite the hit. I'm not kidding.

2. Taking up the example of my nabor Jenny, I now have a book blog. (And thanks to my other nabor for making the blog possible. He is not, however, responsible for its horrifically bland look.)

3. My book blog is called "What it all might mean." That was a line from a poem I wrote during my MFA days. I wanted that to be the title of my MFA thesis, but my thesis director wouldn't have it. So now it's the title of my book blog.

4. Now that I'm doing the book blog, I have three support systems for finishing the book. One is a writing group of a few colleagues and the other is an online writing group of folks at various universities. The former is devoted mainly to product, the latter mainly to process. I'm trying to cover all bases, you see.

5. After the success of my "punk rock" costume in high school, I began to slowly accumulate accessories that belonged to an alter ego I called "Blue." I no longer have these accessories, however.

6. Between Thursday and Saturday, I experienced a 40-degree drop in temperature. (Atmospheric temperature, I mean.)

7. There seems to be the beginnings of a rhet/comp network on FaceBook. Do more folks FaceBook than blog?

8. Speaking of the field, aren't we way overdue for another Rhet/Comp reading carnival?

Hit and miss

2007-08-05T19:30:00.001-05:00

I have an old wiki up from a class I taught in 2006 on the literature of working women. That semester marked my first stab at using a wiki in class, and I found it only somewhat successful. (I think I've made better use of wikis since that time.) What it features now, basically, are pages about authors or specific works we read. You know, sort of like something maybe wikipedia-ish.

At any rate, now and again I'll get an email from the wiki service, indicating that someone has invited me to join their wiki space. I find it odd, since these aren't requests from folks I know. So tonight a request shows up in my inbox, only it's a request to join my wikispace. And I'm thinking, this has to be spam or something. Because who would want to join an inactive course wiki?

But no. It was a request from one of the authors featured on the wiki. She was curious about the class.

So that was cool. I emailed her.

And I noticed one day that over at the Tree of Rhetoric, there's a link to my blogging course, because I had a link over to something on that site on my syllabus. And I got a number of emails while teaching the blogging course from folks whose blog articles I linked to.

Ah, Web 2.0. Connectivity. Just a little Google search, and you can find out who's talking about you.

I'm not knocking it. I like to know who's talking about me, too. But it does still surprise me, I guess. Suddenly, a sighting. From something awhile ago, something almost forgotten. Brought back into the present. Because the web, it is the eternal present. It's always now.

Which could be scary. Connectivity is a little scary in Shaviro's Connected, or What It Means to Live in the Network Society. (And, by the way, don't you prefer the "or" to the colon? Jameson uses it for Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. I always loved that.) The borg--with their "singular goal, namely the consumption of technology" and "hive mind"--are scary on Star Trek.

But it's a strange fear, isn't it? This fear that connectivity leads to the extinction of individuality. We're nodes, sure. I don't have a problem with that. But all nodes exist at unique points of convergence.

I'm just going with the flow, folks. You know, writing for the sake of writing. And I think that's enough of that for tonight.

Slow reader

2007-07-30T12:58:00.000-05:00

I was just reading Jeff's blog about changes after the baby, and change #1 is reading. Before the baby, he says, he read a book every couple of days.

Can I pretend I've spent my life having babies? Cause I've pretty much never read a book every couple of days. I can read a novel in a couple of days if I really want to. But I rarely do. And I'm pretty sure that I've never read anything like theory in a couple of days.

I've never been a fast reader, and that has sometimes bothered me. As an English major, I sometimes wondered why my peers talked about reading voraciously as the mark of someone who loves to read. I love to read. But I don't read fast.

But, you know, you can find a quote to make you feel good about almost anything. I remember watching a movie in which a writer extols the virtue of reading slowly, saying that he wishes he could read even more slowly. I remember loving that line. Yes, I thought. Reading slowly is good. Writers read slowly. I read slowly. I read the right way.

I can't remember the title of the movie. I think it came out in the late 80s. But I remember the writer was also plagued by bad teeth and had some other not so admirable tendencies. So one wonders if he really was such a great role model.

Ah well. I can't help it. I still read slowly, even without a baby.

Out of silence

2007-07-28T21:12:00.000-05:00

One week ago, I opened my email box and learned that a former student of mine had died the previous day.

That was sobering. But, in truth, I didn't know him well. I wasn't close to him.

And so I told myself I couldn't blog about his death. It wouldn't be right.

But he wasn't just my former student. He was the husband of a former thesis advisee, a person I hold dear.

His death has been on my mind all week, and not writing about it has plunged me into silence.

And so I write, with the wish that he may rest in peace. That J and all those who loved him may find peace.

Meet Elleron

2007-07-18T13:13:00.000-05:00

Makes sense that my Dæmon would be some kind of cat, don't you think?

Scroll over the image to get an explanation of Dæmons and to find out how to meet yours.

List o' stuff

2007-07-15T20:35:00.000-05:00

(1) Before leaving for Texas on July 3, I breakfasted once again at Cafe Berlin. This time I tried the Turkish eggs and quite enjoyed them. Tomatoes, peppers, onion. Feta cheese. Nice. Thanks, Cafe Berlin.

(2) It's true: I read Harry Potter. I go to the movie versions, too. So last night C. and I saw the fifth installment, The Order of the Phoenix. C., who hasn't read the books, enjoyed it. But it's hard to feel really satisfied with a two hour movie based on a book of over 800 pages. What--no Howler for Aunt Petunia? It's one of my favorite moments in the early part of the book. So mysterious: Remember my last, Petunia. I actually got goose bumps the first time I read it.

(3) So, yeah, Book 7 is pre-ordered. Guess I know what I'll be doing come Saturday.

(4) I hear I'm getting some new nabors tomorrow.

(5) I teach in the mornings. Every day.

(6) My students just made collages. I've been impressed with their willingness and even often excitement to do this assignment. And the results are so fun to browse through.

(7) Early to rise? Must mean early to bed. Signing out.

Summer school

2007-07-09T19:30:00.000-05:00

My summer class started this morning. As I noted last year, I almost always really love teaching summer school. I like the intensity of the short session (4 weeks, in this case), of meeting daily.

In fact, as I was saying to C. this morning, I would say my all-around favorite teaching ever were the three summers at Indiana University when I taught Introduction to Composition in the Groups Program. The summer program was (the website has no mention of it that I can find, so I'm assuming it's been discontinued) a bridge program, designed to give the primarily first-generation college students who are admitted to the program a summer of college-level work before classes began in the fall.

These were students who really wanted a college education and who were, for the most part, highly motivated. And, being a first-generation college student myself, I in many ways identified with them.

In fact, teaching in that program was one of the experiences that motivated me to leave a PhD program in American literature for one in rhet/comp. I realized that--hey! wonders of wonders!--students and teachers really *can* talk about writing in the classroom and practice taking on different rhetorical strategies. Somehow teaching comp during the year hadn't provided me with that insight in a very strong way. But the summer experience did.

So, yeah, teaching summer school always feels pretty good to me.

But I don't want to jinx myself. So: knock on wood.

Mi familia

2007-07-07T19:57:00.000-05:00

Thursday, as my sister and niece shredded up some beef for barbeque sandwiches, I expressed my wish to eat Mexican food before leaving Texas. I don't eat beef, anyway, so my sister suggested I order takeout from Mi Familia, a restaurant just a couple of blocks away from her house, to substitute for the barbeque sandwiches. And so I did (although finding an entree without any carne was a bit of a challenge in itself).

Mi familia. I spent a lot of time Wednesday and Thursday with the newest member of mine.

And, taking up a suggestion from Z, (and product advice from Dan), I spent a couple of hours my last evening in Texas, getting down a few short interviews with my parents on my new Olympus digital recorder.

I talked to my father about joining the navy in the last year of World War II.

Why the navy? He didn't want to sleep in fox holes. Pearl Harbor? It's a nice place. Worst moment? Being followed by three Japanese submarines, staying at his gun station on deck from 1 am until 9 or 10. Smoke filling his lungs, his nose, giving him a headache.

And I talked to my mother about going to business college. Her classes included one devoted entirely to spelling. She went to business college because a recruiter came to her house her senior year in high school and her father signed her up. Afterwards, she worked not as a secretary but as a switchboard operator. That is, until she married my father. Here they are, just a little while before that:

My father liked talking into the recorder. My mother, not so much. Is that on? she would ask. I was just going to tell you. I didn't want you to record it.

Taking the plunge

2007-07-02T21:34:00.000-05:00

Tomorrow I'm heading to Texas, where most all of my immediate family lives. After many summers of drought, this summer, as you may have heard, is bringing flooding.

(Photo from dallasnews.com)

Including flooding in the county where my parents live.

My parents live a good ways away from the Brazos River, so they're fine. But I have to admit to some trepidation, nonetheless. I'll be driving through Kansas, Oklahoma, and north Texas--all areas with flooding and with rain predicted for the rest of the week.

But, on the bright side, I haven't heard of any interstates being flooded.

It's been unbelievable, though, to hear these reports of evacuation orders in north central Texas. More believable would be the fires that ravaged the area a couple of years ago. Grass dies in Texas in the summer. My memories are full of brown grass.

But this year, floods. It's enough to fuel those fires I've talked of before: the brimstone-laden belief in the End Times.

Wish me luck.

Good things

2007-06-30T13:32:00.000-05:00

In the tradition of a recurring feature at Parts-n-Pieces, I offer a list of recent good things.

1. S. and K., two former grad students from SIU, visited me yesterday and today. I hadn't seen either of them since leaving Carbondale, and so it was awfully nice to spend a day or so with them.

2. We walked down 9th St. this morning, stopping in at all the cool stores along the way.

3. All three of us bought these wonderful little sun-catchers, composed of pieces of old lace encased in glass. They're made by a woman in Kansas City. Local art.

4. I bought a pair of "Moroccan pants" for my new great nephew. I'll see him for the first time this week.

5. I got some good publication news yesterday.

6. Tonight, C. and I are driving to Jazz at the Bistro in St. Louis to hear jazz bassist Ben Allison, whose 2002 release Peace Pipe is one of my recent favorites.

7. I'm going to make French toast in the morning for R. and Z. (Well, and C., too.)

8. Also today, while out with K. and S., I bought some bamboo flip flops. I've admired my yoga teacher's bamboo flip flops for awhile. Now I have some of my own. So does K.

9. I'm going to a Bead for Life party this afternoon.

10. I had cinnamon ice cream last night at Sparky's. But it was hard not to choose the lavender honey instead.

Pranamaya kosha

2007-06-27T13:56:00.000-05:00

At alleyCat Yoga, Columbia's downtown yoga studio, a prospective yogi/ni must purchase a pass that includes a certain number of credits that must be used up by a certain expiration date (depending on the pass you choose). I typically get the 8 classes/8 week pass. And I typically go to yoga class on Saturday mornings.

But over the past six weeks or so, I've been out of town or otherwise unavailable for yoga at least three of those Saturdays. And my pass expires next Friday. And I'm going to be out of town most of next week.

So last week some time it occurred to me that I had to start using up that pass. I've thus been to yoga four out of the past five days. And, let me tell you, friends: if you think going to yoga one day out of the week is good, yoga just about everyday is transcendent.

You heard me. Transcendent.

The most transcendent moment of all came toward the end of yesterday's yoga class. We practiced ujjayi pranayama--"victorious" or "ocean sounding" breath. Sienna, yogini extraordinaire, calls it the Darth Vader breath. For five minutes, we all sat still, breathing loudly. After five minutes, Sienna asked us to sit, to notice how effortless sitting upright now felt. That, she said, is pranamaya kosha, the energy body.

And it was true.

And transcendent.

(Just a little caveat to those who might try this at home: I tried it at home this morning, and while I felt a bit of that good pranayama kosha energy, it was less intense than yesterday. I chalk that up to not doing an hour of pretty active yoga asana practice beforehand.)

Visual rhetoric in the old west

2007-06-26T15:42:00.000-05:00

Last Tuesday was C's birthday, and, at his request, we spent part of the afternoon visiting the George Caleb Bingham exhibit at the Museum of Art and Archaelogy on campus. Bingham was a nineteenth-century Missouri artist (and, for the last couple of years of his life, the University of Missouri's first professor of art), and C. studies the nineteenth century (including literature of the "old southwest," which included Missouri), so it was a natural fit.

The exhibit was small, but C. was particularly interested in a piece called "Martial Law, or Order No. 11."

The Missouri (slave state)-Kansas (free state) border was a major site of battles during the Civil War. Missouri also harbored a number of guerrila groups (think Jesse James), and, after a massacre at Lawrence, Kansas, the Union suspected that rural Missouri towns along the border were harboring these groups. These towns were ordered to be evacuated, and that was Order No. 11.

Although he was a Unionist, Bingham vehemently opposed this order and the havoc in wreaked on people's lives. This painting, then, was meant to protest the order. He sent it to have it copied onto a steel plate and reproduced. Unfortunately for his purposes, the copiest took a couple of years to finish the job, at which point the exigency for the protest had passed.

I was intrigued, however, by this idea, something I hadn't really thought about before: the use of reproductions of paintings as distributed rhetoric. I wonder (in a light, curious sort of way) how prevalent that was. I think of "art" as maybe epideictic rhetoric (think: monuments), but I hadn't really thought of its use as part of a deliberative process or a distributed network.

Who's afraid?

2007-06-25T16:17:00.000-05:00

I've been reading Virginia Woolf lately. I have to admit to not having a very good background in Virginia Woolf, and I also feel somewhat strange and guilty about that since I sometimes teach classes in women's lit, and Virginia Woolf seems to often come up in discussions of women's lit (because, well, she wrote A Room of One's Own, didn't she?). I mostly teach American women's lit rather than British, but, still, there's the guilt.

Not only the guilt, but I've always thought I should enjoy Woolf's writing. The problem is that for years I've done most of my fiction reading right before going to bed. Often, I'm sleepy at this time. Often, I need a really clear and overt narrative to hold on to. In my experience, reading Virginia Woolf isn't mostly about getting the plot. (I suppose one might say that about a lot of fiction, huh?) So I would read, and I would get frustrated. Or I would read, and I would have trouble retaining. All very unpleasant.

So when,shortly before boarding the airport shuttle, I happened upon this nice little bookstore in Pittsburgh earlier this month and found a copy of Mrs. Dalloway there, I thought, This is it! This is my chance to really read Virginia Woolf! I have a couple of hours to kill at the airport (little did I know, it would be more than a couple!), and that will give me the perfect chance to really get into the experience of Woolf's writing.

So it worked, and now I want to continue reading more Woolf. I'm finding that as long as I sit upright while reading at night, I can retain and enjoy the experience.

What can I say. I'm a slow learner.

Still and all, I think Virginia Woolf is maybe better at--ahem--"this time of my life." Not that I'm the same age as Clarissa Dalloway or Mrs. Ramsey, but I think maybe I'm picking up the feel of the books better than I did when I first encountered Woolf at 22 or so.

And that--yes, that--is all.

Eagle Bluffs

2007-06-24T15:03:00.000-05:00

C. and I took a little car trip to Eagle Bluffs earlier today. It was indeed a little trip, since Eagle Bluffs is in Boone County, which is the county Columbia is in. But we had heard it's a good birding area, and since we like birds (but aren't devoted enough to call ourselves birders), we wanted to check it out.

Sadly, we took neither binoculars nor camera (like I said, not devoted enough--also out of practice). So I can't show you the wetlands, the herons, the egrets. But there's a nice gallery of photos taken at Eagle Bluffs here, so you can get an idea of what we saw. Without binoculars, though, we didn't get any up close views of eagles. We did see what we think were eagles coasting high above us. We did see, close-up, an indigo bunting, which was stunning--an almost luminous blue.

Back in the day, C. and I spent a lot of time taking walks, looking at plants, trees, birds. It was easy to do when we lived in Bloomington, what with woods right on campus and all. I remember one evening walking onto campus at dusk and seeing a whole set of small owls in a tree. They turned their heads, looking at us. We kept going back, around dusk, hoping to see them again. We never did.

The posthuman: science and suttas

2007-06-23T16:32:00.000-05:00

From "The Mystery of Consciousness" by Steven Pinker, in the January 19, 2007 issue of Time:

ANOTHER STARTLING CONCLUSION FROM the science of consciousness is that the intuitive feeling we have that there's an executive "I" that sits in a control room of our brain, scanning the screens of the senses and pushing the buttons of the muscles, is an illusion. Consciousness turns out to consist of a maelstrom of events distributed across the brain. These events compete for attention, and as one process outshouts the others, the brain rationalizes the outcome after the fact and concocts the impression that a single self was in charge all along.

And from The Great Causes Discourse (Digha Nikaya 15 of the Sutta Pitaka, one of the three "baskets" of the Pali Canon):

Now, Ananda, in as far as a monk does not assume feeling to be the self, nor the self as oblivious, nor that 'My self feels, in that my self is subject to feeling,' then, not assuming in this way, he is not sustained by anything (does not cling to anything) in the world. Unsustained, he is not agitated. Unagitated, he is totally unbound right within. He discerns that 'Birth is ended, the holy life fulfilled, the task done.'

Back to blogging practice

2007-06-22T14:21:00.000-05:00

It's never inspiring, for the writer or reader, to encounter a blog entry that apologizes, or rationalizes, or otherwise makes reference to the dearth of blogging.

And yet, my readers, here is such a beginning.

I'm writing today to renew my dedication to the practice of blogging. Blogging as practice.

Natalie Goldberg, author of Writing Down the Bones and a number of other Zen-inspired books on writing, talks about "writing practice," about making writing a daily practice in the way that meditation is a daily practice. You do it because you do it.

Says Goldberg in a Sun Magazine interview:

But interest in Bones crossed every cultural line. Vice-presidents of insurance companies in Florida bought it, and so did quarry workers in Missouri. It was as though people were starving to write, but they didn’t know how, because the way writing was taught didn’t work for them. I think the idea of writing as a practice freed them up. It meant that they could trust their minds, that they were allowed to fail.

I love the reference to quarry workers in my current home state of Missouri. My father worked in a quarry most of my life. He never finished high school, but he was a manager of a quarry before he retired. I can't exactly imagine my father doing writing practice, but now that I think of it, he is an awfully good example of the kind of steady patience that practice cultivates.

The less one blogs, the more one feels obligated to say something "deep." (Not that I'm trying that now.) It's important just to practice. To allow oneself to fail. And not to fail.

Here and there kind of summer

2007-06-13T13:54:00.001-05:00

Derek's entry today reminds me that I, too, have had a lot of small things going on this summer. C&W in Detroit last month, a visit to Pittsburgh this month, a retreat starting this evening and lasting until Sunday. A visit from my good buddy I. and her husband last night. Need to fit in a visit to the family in Texas--got to meet that new great (or is it grand) nephew

before second summer session starts in July. And then, yeah, teaching a class (Intro to Women's Lit, like last summer). And in August, believe it or not, my in-laws, like Derek's, will also be celebrating their 50th anniversary. So we'll be heading up to northern Illinois for that.

Lots going on. Not to mention a book and a couple of articles to write.

Favoring curry

2007-06-10T16:02:00.001-05:00

I'm back from Pittsburgh and happy to report that, as advised by Debbie and Mike, I had a delicious meal at the Spice Island Tea House. Wonderful little samosas as an appetizer, spicy Vegetarian Curry Trio for my entree. And, Mike--they seem to have a liquor license now! Because there was wine for our table.

And, since I'm speaking of meals, I'll mention that I also enjoyed a wonderful tofu curry at Soba, in Shadyside. Also some amazing blue cheese ravioli for an appetizer. It was a curry kind of trip for me.

I walked around the Pitt campus a good bit, looked around in the Cathedral of Learning, and found a nice used bookstore close to Carnegie Mellon. But that's about it for siteseeing--though I hoped to make it to the museums, I didn't.

But the people! K was an absolutely splendid host (as was J), B a wonderful new doctor of composition, and the other K a fabulous person who I was delighted to meet and talk with. And I got to talk to even more cool people, too.

Lots of spice to this trip. It was a good one. Many, many thanks to K for making it possible.

Industry

2007-06-05T21:14:00.001-05:00

Tomorrow I continue my tour (begun last month with a visit to Detroit) of cities made great by industry. This month it's Pittsburgh.

I've never been there before. So if anyone would like to suggest things to do or see (ideally, in the vicinity of the Oakland neighborhood), I'm all ears.

To dream, perchance to blog

2007-06-04T21:52:00.001-05:00

Last night, I dreamed it snowed.

I was walking down the street, my feet sinking into the snow.

It's June! I thought to myself in my dream. It snowed in June! I can't believe it!

And then I thought, still dreaming: I'm going to blog about this.

Random things, including vampires!

2007-05-31T09:03:00.000-05:00

Lanette tagged me last week with the "Seven Random Things" meme. And since I seem to have taken a week off from blogging, I'll use the meme as a jump start. Here you go, seven things, all random:

(1) The Lost season finale was great--intriguing to move off island, in the apparent future. Just please, don't turn it into a narrative about Jack's redemption or some such.

2. I'm going out of town for part of next week.

3. It's raining today. Lots of rain this spring.

4. The Missouri Supreme Court just ruled that public employees have the right to collective bargaining. Good news for all teachers and university employees.

5. I'm reading Dracula. I'm sorry to say I've never read it before. I tend to avoid vampires and such, having been traumatized by them as a small child. My sisters watched Dark Shadows, and I feared Barnabas Collins.

6. What's prompting me to read Dracula? It's full of characters using shorthand and typewriting. Who knew?

7. Yesterday was Wednesday, and there was no Lost. No Lost until next winter. Ah well. I have other things to occupy me, don't I?

But wait, there's more

2007-05-23T09:30:00.000-05:00

The most fun I've ever had in thinking about copyright law and fair use:

via Krista

This blog needs some pictures

2007-05-22T21:39:00.001-05:00

But I didn't take my camera to Detroit. No reason. I just didn't manage to pack it.

It's just that I was thinking about how students in 8010 said they thought the blog looked better once they started posting their visual arguments in April. And how they wished they had realized before they could incorporate images into the blog. Images make the blog more appealing, they said.

And they do, of course.

So here you go. An image.

From our visit, last December, to Kansas City. A lamppost in the Plaza.

And a couple more from that trip:

Taking leave

2007-05-19T17:39:00.000-05:00

In the Detroit airport, on my way home. My first Computers & Writing Conference was a good time--just the shot of intellectual/collegial interaction/energy I needed after a fairly exhausting semester.

So, thanks to Collin for putting the panel together. Thanks to my fellow panelists. Thanks to the audience, who asked questions that got us talking with each other.

Some other highlights:
* A frenetically energizing keynote by the inimitable Geoff Sirc
* An introduction to Bio Mapping from Scot
* An Ong panel put together by John
* A presentation by Jackie and Jonathan, that included images of lampshade-headed people and Laurie Anderson!
* Excellent conversations, including a most useful one with P
* Breakfast at Toast with D and H
* A visit to the Institute of the Arts, featuring the amazing Diego Rivera mural

A good time, even if a couple of important folks were otherwise occupied outside of Detroit.

[I'll add links later. Gotta board.]
[Update: Links added.]

So sleepy

2007-05-16T16:28:00.000-05:00

It makes no sense to be as sleepy as I am today. I turned in grades Monday. Sure, I've been working on my paper for Computers & Writing, but I haven't been staying up to do it.

And yet, this afternoon, on the extremely short drive to campus, I fell asleep. (Don't worry: I wasn't driving.) Bizarre.

It doesn't bode well. I leave my house before dawn tomorrow morning for the flight to Detroit. I never get enough sleep when conferencing. So if you see me there and don't seem to have much going on in the synapse department, you'll know why.

That is, you'll know that I'm sleep-deprived. Even though it isn't clear to me why I should be so sleep deprived before the conference even begins.

Five things I could do, in a parallel universe

2007-05-13T18:17:00.000-05:00

Grades are due tomorrow. I've never liked grading, though I have to say this semester it isn't that hard and is even pleasurable. I taught two grad classes, so I'm reviewing teaching portfolios for one class and seminar papers on "the social" in rhet/comp for another. It's more enlightening than difficult.

Even so, last week I was prompted by someone to think about what I might do if I wasn't doing what I'm doing (as in, for work). So this is a list of five things I've thought of doing in my life, and still think about sometimes. Of course, most of these things would require further schooling. And some aren't particularly practical. They're just things that come to mind now and again.

1. Mediator
2. Yoga teacher
3. Psychologist
4. Educational union organizer
5. Physical therapist