b l o g o s

netflix blogging: dear nancy botwin,

Why do I root for you so? Is it because of your lustrous hair and skin, your gorgeous eyes and cute dresses and jeans? Is it the way you're always casually--and noisily--sipping some icy drink from a straw? Is it because you are white and middle class and a woman and in there mixing it up with some major drug czars, a woman who seems to not know wtf she's doing but is really often shrewd about her place in it all? Is it because all of your partners in crime are frequently good looking and also at times compelling (including, in season 4, your son Silas? when did he have time to get all buff while you were fleeing from the burning agrestic)?

And/or is there a deeper feminism at work in your show, in that it stages the desperation, heightened now by current economic conditions, of a woman who has relied on her husband for income and whose options are seemingly slim after that husband dies? Is it that once you got a taste of drug dealing you just can't quit it, and that fact that while I don't really comprehend it on some level I guess I do? Is it the constant drama presented by your work, and the charming losers with whom you are surrounded?

It's a little bit of all these things, I think. And the excellent writing for season 4 does not hurt. Not one bit.

sincerely,
debbie

p.s. given your new, ahem, business arrangement (middle of season 4), you should probably learn spanish, funny as it is that you're always just saying "hola" and using unconjugated verbs.

pps your hot son is banging the mother of the kid next door. i thought you might want to know. 

Sarah Palin's basketball analogy

When Sarah Palin resigned yesterday, she helpfully framed her resignation from her long-ago position as point guard. Here's what she said:

Let me go back quickly to a comfortable analogy for me, and that’s sports. Basketball. And I use it because you are naïve if you don’t see a full court press from the national level picking away right now. A good point guard, here’s what she does. She drives through a full court press, protecting the ball, keeping her head up because she needs to keep her eye on the basket and she knows exactly when to pass the ball so that the team can win. And that is what I’m doing. Keeping our eye on the ball.

This jumbled analogy tells it all. The first confusing point is the language of a full-court defense "picking away." Now maybe she's using "picking" in a non-technical way, but any basketball player knows that a pick is an offensive move. It's what a teammate would do to help create room for the point guard under pressure (say); it's what Todd does for Sarah on occasion.

But the best part is the mixed message (nay, mixed metaphor) about where a point guard ought to keep her eyes. She's right of course in saying that the point guard needs to keep her head up, but in a full court press, she would be wrong to keep her eye on the basket, especially if (as Palin says in the next phrase) she's looking to pass the ball. When one is on the extreme other end of the court, one ought not care where the basket is, unless time is running out (which, hey, that could be significant for Palin's situation). But then, awesomely, she switches from keeping her head up to keeping her eye on the ball, which is exactly what she shouldn't be doing unless she is suddenly playing baseball.

This former point guard's eyes are on one thing, and one thing only: the door. She is fleeing, afraid, and what follows is not going to be pretty.

hopes for july

Lots of stuff is happening this month. I have a number of writing commitments that I need to get going on honoring, and two will dominate July. The first is a conference paper (ISHR in Montreal) that will also be the foray into my book. Ideally I would have liked to be culling that paper from a chapter draft, but moving has intervened, and I will instead be posing questions and positing theories more than I will be offering any fully-formed set of research results. Even so, it's exciting to have my head in that next book, albeit preliminarily.

The second is a piece for a collection on Burke in the Archives called (tentatively) "Historiography by Incongruity." This piece is kind of the underbelly of my recent book--stuff that I've been thinking about, like how so much fascinating archival material doesn't make it into histories we write because that material documents a darker story or some sort of failure or a research "dead end." I want to do a little reading on archive theory to get myself going on that one, and maybe poke around in some new archival material, since I am now within a mile from the KB papers.  

Then there's a course that I'm directing, a really cool new honors course that combines oral, written, visual, and digital communication. I met with the technology folks on campus to talk about the technology piece, instructional support they can offer, and available resources, and they BLEW ME AWAY. As in, they are assembling a team of technology specialists (one from the digital commons group, another from instructional design, and more) to help with this course. The its guys told me about these "whispering booths" (podcasting studios) that they have installed in labs around campus, and how some of them are mobile. Crazy. I left that meeting a) thinking I need to amp up (even more) the technology ambitions of the course, and b) knowing how glad I am to be here.

There's some other stuff I've committed to for the fall, but I can't think about that right now. Draft of conference paper in 8-10 days, and a sizable chunk of the collection contribution in 21 so that I can take it with me to Montreal, these are my hopes.

too high to get over

"[B]ecause of his music, we danced, and we sang." -Roger Ebert [h/t to dj x 3]

 

The news, a three-word text message sent from my sister, chimed at me while I was crossing college ave, walking to my house with RG, who was in town to co-lead a workshop with me on the history of rhetoric.

It was appropriate for me to receive the news from my sister, because together she  and I played, and played, and played our album Thriller, smearing our fingerprints all over its vast cover, the one with the angelic image--the back-lit, white-suited, jheri-curled, side-lying Michael on the front. RG's phone went off not long after that.

All weekend, then, I have been talking with workshop participants about the challenges of doing historical work in rhetoric with the insistent, dramatic lyrics of "Billie Jean" rolling through my head. That's the song of his that took hold of me. Images of ancient archeological sites competed with vastly more kinetic memories of sock-footed, locker-room moonwalks, the secret to which was taking all the weight off your sliding foot for that split-moment. The thrill of getting to fill in during my sister's practice of a dance routine to "Thriller" when one of the other cheerleaders couldn't make it. The fourteenth co birthday with hs bf A, which we celebrated by giving each other the same present: Jacksons' Victory Tour (the cassette version). Had I known on Friday night that one of our houseguests was in bed watching muted videos of Jackson, which sounded perfectly ghastly to me, I no doubt would have joined her.

_moving bodies_ is out

a month early!

(clicking the image will take you to the amazon site)

hey mama rock me

My car turned over to 100,000 miles about 2 hours south of Rochester today. I was coming home from a quick trip to visit E! and to hear her band play at a local farmer's market there. They were great! Folky, bluesy music by the likes of Bob Dylan and Steve Earle (e.g.), with even a gospel song tossed in. Totally fun. I personally loved their version of "Wagon Wheel," which I decided was an adult version of a lullaby.

And it's also just as comforting as a lullaby to hang out with a long-time good good awesome friend and HOPS ("her own personal spouse"). We got to eat Ethiopian with their most delightful in-town friends. With E!'s visiting me a couple weeks ago and my visiting her this week, no one can accuse us of not taking advantage of the painfully short period of time during which we live within 4 hours of each other. But soon she and HOPS are off to a new house in SW VA for some fun new adventures. Luckily they'll live right on the way to my folks' house in Tennessee.

hills, riff raff, grass.

These are some things about our new town that please me/us greatly (my new old town, JM's new town).

Whenever we walk to the end of our street and look to the left, THERE IS A MOUNTAIN. One of us inevitably starts (as in jumps in surprise) at the sight of the mountain, and hits the other one on the arm. The other one, upon turning to look, starts too. Our neighbors say that in the winter when the leaves fall, we will be able to see said mountain from our deck, with a sunrise and everything. Cuckoo. Not that I'm looking forward to winter, but at least there will be something nice when it does come.

Relatedly, my calves are always sore. I am cooking up a new theory which is this: the ratio of availability of delicious bread (lots) to hills (none) in my previous home town was such that living here, where that ratio is the obverse (no bread and lots of hills), is worth negative 4-7 pounds on my frame. I have previous data to support this theory (the last time I lived here, and our year in Pittsburgh), but we shall see. I do miss that bread from Mirabelle, though. Mah gahd that is delicious.

Also, this town not only has a city leaf-removal service that will COME AND SUCK THE LEAVES RIGHT OFF YOUR CURB rather than forcing you to bag the leaves (Pittsburgh has the same thing; it was divine), but it also has a service called "borough riff raff pickup." The riff raff pickup is separate from garbage--ahem, refuse--it happens on a separate day, and by request only. This means you can put just about anything on the curb and have it taken away without paying anything extra. Plus, come on, riff raff? That's awesome.

And finally, every day around 11 in the morning if the sun is out, the whippets will ask to go outside. Then they stretch and flop on the grass in the front yard and just lie there watching the activity on the street through their pleased/relaxed half-open eyes. Grass in the front yard! That is a novelty for all of us.

It must be said, though, that we really miss our friends in U.

here are some of the reasons why i LOVED "the hangover"

1.  It didn't have the predictable cast of dude comic actors (e.g., no Bill Hader, even though I think he's funny.)
2. I have never been to Vegas.
3. Zach Galifianakis.
4. it's summer, and my critical acumen seems to drop as the temperature rises, hence i am able to almost ignore the fact that there are, like, no women in this movie.
5. that ridiculous wedding band singing about nymphos.
6. the trunk scene.
7. the breakup scene.
8. Ed Helms's non-cosmetic toothlessness (thanks to E! for this tidbit)
9. "Carlos."
10. it combines hi-jinx with mystery, with a little narrative help from roofies.

netflix blogging: wendy and lucy

As JM was putting this movie into the dvd player, he turned to me and said "this is about a dog that gets lost." I looked at him suspiciously--he knows I couldn't watch that movie amores perros past the opening scene because of dog-on-dog violence or some such. so i said "does it get found?" I really, really wanted to watch a movie, and this was the only one we have on hand, so I asked hopefully, "does the dog have lots of adventures?"

So we started Wendy and Lucy with one whippet splayed over my stomach and the other hogging one side of the couch, both with their shiny green PA tags (yes, we registered our dogs before our car, so what?). I won't give anything away about what happens, but this is a very good movie. Sucks all the life out of the romance of living in one's car on a cross-country trip, but maybe I only have that romantic view because I've never done it. It's probably pretty hard to render loneliness cinematically, but the filmmakers and the actress (Michelle Williams) do a pretty smashing job.

where there's a dissertation there's a whippet (ongoing series)

not really.

Having spent several weeks away from cable internet, JM and I have started catching up on missed tv shows at hulu.com. Last night we caught the episode of the office called "casual friday," in which one of the subplots features Michael discovering what fun it is to fake fire people, wherein he gives the worker the bad news, watches her face fall. Then Michael's own face fills up with air, and he explodes with laughter. The worker is of course appreciative to find out that she still has a job, but only partly so. That shit is not funny (though watching it kind of is in an outrageous "The Office" sort of way).

Today, JM and I experienced our own little taste of a real life Michael Scott, and he works at the DMV. The DMV is outside of town in a little village called Peru. It's a nice drive that takes you past the (s)mall and Mt. Nittany, then past the prison and into Peru. When we first arrived there was miraculously no waiting, but of course we were told we didn't have nearly the proof of identities and addresses that we needed. We needed passports, social security cards, our Illinois licenses (the only things we actually had), and two proofs of our new address. So we drove all the way back home to get these items--past the prison, Mt. Nittany, the (s)mall, and back again, and presented them to the same guy. The DMV guy took one look at JM's passport and said "this won't do." My shoulders fell. I looked at JM, panicked. Then the DMV guy burst out laughing: "I'm kidding! It's great! Funny, huh?"

catching up on correspondence

Dear person whose phone number is really, really close to my new one:

I understand from some of my friends that you have been getting a number of calls for me. I thought of calling you to apologize for temporarily misremembering my number on a day when I gave it out to a bunch of people, but Z said I probably better not unless I want to get yelled at. So sorry. I have now memorized the right one. It ends in an 8, not a 2.

numerically yours,
debbie

-----

Dear person who rehabbed and then sold us our house:

You are very talented and for the most part did stellar work. I especially love the massive picture windows downstairs. But I have to ask, did you know that a dryer outlet is totally different from a range outlet? And if you did know that, did you install the wrong thing on purpose, or just because it's what you had lying around? Because it seems pretty stupid to me, and if I hadn't just given out the wrong phone number to a slew of friends and businesses, I would be even more indignant. 

debbie

-----

Dear closet guy:

You. totally. rock. I can't believe how much storage I have after the magic you worked in the room that the rehab guys didn't get around to making into a proper closet. I'm glad they didn't. I love it. Thank you.

debbie

-----

Dear State College,

Coming back to you is a little like meeting up with an old friend: I know you pretty well, and there's some new stuff to keep things interesting, but in all, things are instantly comfortable, none of that awkward reacquaintance time. Oh, and your surrounding mountains are still beautiful, only I appreciate them even more now.

cheers,

debbie

-----

Dear man who works at the PNC bank near campus:

You talk too much.

very sincerely yours,

debbie

everyday reading: rapt

I have taken to liking this new--or maybe not so new--genre of trade books I referred to last night at dinner as "pop neurology." It's kind of like pop psychology, but with more attention to neurons and chemicals. This week I read a book called Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life by Winifred Gallagher.

The book itself has multiple commitments. At times Gallagher sounds like an English major, quoting from Poe, Emerson, and Milton. At others, she sounds like a philosopher, hewing closely (very) to the writings of William James. At still others, she sounds like cross between a buddhist monk and the master on Karate Kid. And often she sounds like the researcher she is--or used to be (does one every really stop being a researcher?). At any rate, Gallagher does a nice job synthesizing other studies related to attention and the mind, many of which (like the nuns doing puzzles) you will have heard or read about.

But more than that, while the book is a trade book, it manages to maintain its integrity in a way that trade scienc-y books seem to me to struggle to do, lapsing into hyperbole that often begins with the title. But this book, like the title, is elegant and even spare. The length of chapters even seem to take into account what Gallagher has learned about human attention these days. Which is a lot. This book is valuable because it encourages its readers to slow down and focus. There's a touch of technophobia lurking in some chapters, but by and large Gallagher gives people good tips to manage our networked lives. The best part though is that the book isn't simply about developing a machine-like focus, but it urges an almost magical approach to attention, one that combines attention with appreciation, advocates for an eastern way of giving one's self over to the moment, combined with a western way of choosing--very deliberately--what those moments will be, or what will get our attention. The word "rapt" works well to capture that part of the book's mission.

Toward the beginning of the book, Gallagher uses the parlance of bottom-up vs. top-down attention, where bottom-up is the chaotic kind of attention that I often practice during a day at the office, letting an email or a drop-in structure what I'm doing or derail what I'd planned to do. Top-down attention is more commanding in that it refuses to be sidetracked. It struck me while reading that this book would be particularly useful for graduate students who are trying to structure their lives and days around large, looming writing projects and smaller, yet still important duties. And I recommend it confidently because it is both demanding and forgiving, which is what we might all aspire to be as researchers, writers, teachers, and advisors.

why i like loops

JM makes fun of my love for loops. And here loop is more verby than nouny because I like the kind of loops that involve movement. This preference began with my little running habit, or rather as a reaction to the coaches that made me and my teammates run down and back, down and back, down and back. God, how boring and awful that was: running by the assistant coach with his clip board over and over again, or in college by the scorekeeper's table, the opposing bench, back by the scorekeeper's table and the home bench. Touch, go. Nothing to look at but one wall getting closer, and then the other.

So when I was finished with organized sports, I will tell you that I resisted any sort of down and back or out and back, opting instead--and resolutely so--for loops. For starters, loops offer so much more variation than downs-and-backs. It is possible to avoid a certain hill on the path home, more or less. It is less likely that you will twice encounter the exuberant woman who made you stop your run and take your headphones off so that she could pronounce that you had "two whippets! not one! two!" or any other version of that person who will inevitably comment yet again.

JM and I just finished a lovely loop. We didn't plan it that way, but we set out on foot and with the dogs in search of a root beer float. We headed south to paradiso. They didn't have root beer. Then we headed across campus, through the lingering graduates and their families to stop at my office and print something, then up by the long line of people waiting to have their picture taken by the alma mater in their caps and gowns, then down green street to cold stone creamery. They didn't offer root beer floats. We then went to potbelly's, where JM had to opt for plan B, a vanilla milkshake. After that, we made our way back to the mouse house by cutting through the north quad, across boneyard creek, by university high school. And yet even though our main goal of a root beer float went unfulfilled, we didn't have to walk on the same sidewalk twice. I'm pretty sure the whippets appreciated that. More smells, more discarded food, more whippet fawners, and no embarrassing repeats.

so excited

Joshie just posted a video link over at FB to the Pointer Sisters' "I'm So Excited" from 1982 (sorry I can't embed it), which has meant the tumbling in of some serious high school memories. As my sister can tell you, this was the song I listened to over and over (and over) before every one of my high school games on my walkman or car tape player (depending on whether the game was home or away). My focus song.

In watching the video just now, I realized that while the video renders it as the ultimate going out song, for me the song conjures the long treks to away games, the back of a bus seat in front of me, missing chunks of black rubber, my teammates (like me) wrapped--rapt?--in headphones, my cheerleader friends chattering and shimmering.

Before every one of our games, no matter how important, I was super nervous and keyed-up, and this song helped me to re-interpret those autonomic responses--heart racing, mind darting, sweating--as sheer exuberance rather than fear. This song is largely why I associate the high school portion of my career with utter positivity and happiness (even though objectively I know there was lots of pain and suffering). At some point, my team started running out to this song--in a layup line--and the exuberance spread through the bleachers. I hadn't realized that the song was at that point 5 or 6 or 7 years old. Its liveliness endures; it makes me want to pull on short polyester shorts, long stripey socks, string up my hi-tops and do some passing drills and figure eights with old friends.