RIP

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.