b l o g o s

netflix blogging: thanksgiving break edition

On Thanksgiving night, having stuffed ourselves for hours, John and I came home at 6 and crawled into bed to watch Tina Fey's 2008 film Baby Mama. Now, I love Tina Fey. I do. And she looked really great in some of those dresses and suits, especially the short sleeved navy dress one with piping, and those pre-Sarah Palin Sarah Palin shoes. Amy Poehler has some hilarious scenes--my favorite is the one when she is trying to take the horse pill--and Steve Martin's long ponytail is a character unto itself.

But I was still underwhelmed by the flick, actually. I'm not sure if it's because it's hard to make comedy out of reproductive choices or because my sense of humor lost its vital fluids to my digestive processes, but this movie didn't do it for me.

Tonight, though, we watched Definitely Maybe, and I admit, I liked it. The narrative frame--the youngish dad telling his daughter a "mystery love story"--kind of worked. And yes, it was sappy, and even maybe a tad predictable, but there was something compelling about watching it all play out. There was recognition. There was reversal. More than once, in fact. And the three women in the movie are all, of course, so very lovely (especially Sacha Baron Cohen's pardnah Isla Fisher, left). This movie definitely isn't for everybody, and maybe I liked the early- to mid-nineties setting with Bill Clinton as a minor character, or maybe I just like the novelty of being narrated into the position of a bright and sympathetic eight year old, but yeah, I kinda liked it.

scattershot 8: technology edition

1.  by my estimation, between 71 and 88% of the time "lol" is a big fat lie. these people are not even laughing, let alone doing so out loud.

2. holy mother of god, our library just added a little feature whereby you can, by clicking on a little button, have call numbers and locations texted to your cell phone. i've been using it all morning long. i may well still prefer the paper version when on the library portion of the hunt, we'll see about that.

3. the new gym on campus, which JM and i don't go to because it's further away than the other new gym, and because it is so gargantuan that it's like being in a multi-level mall, but which i have been going to this week because the other new gym is closed for break, has all new cardio equipment with individual televisions attached to the machines, and squat racks as far as the eye can see. it is total and complete workout nirvana.

4. facebook is glutting my inbox, but for some reason i don't really care.

5. i am quite fond of looking at people's photos on facebook, but if those same people were to send me these photos directly, i would find that extremely offputting. what is that about?

6. ebay bids on items i am selling seem to go up only during the night. i'm not sure whether this is because a) people wait until they get home and put the kids to bed, or b) people have a few drinks and lose their sense of restraint bidding for items that are not all that exciting.

7. i once did 6 b) with a women's denim jacket that i hardly ever wear and haven't bid on anything since. i feel certain i was in a bidding war with another size XL tipsy woman, or maybe a drag queen.

8. visual medical technology is INSANELY, unbelievably cool, the feminist critiques of it notwithstanding. in fact, the next time i see a paper that is dismissive of the medical gaze, i am going to raise my hand and say "but they can SEE STUFF INSIDE YOUR BODY, WITH LIGHT!!!" and i will expect the nearest person to give me ten dollars for raising this insight. okay, maybe fifteen. my copay has recently gone up.

bureaucratic poetics

anticipated deficit

contingency reserve

in these challenging times

carefully manage

tradition of careful financial stewardship

financial distress

extra vigilant

expenditure guidelines

terminate

The expectation is

extremely disquieting

remain strategic

an opportunity to create new efficiencies

guided by our strategic plan

emerge

from

this

crisis

a stronger institution.

if you're going my way

Not being at NCA this year is a little weird, if only because last year I had such fun with nca's queens. So what is a girl to do with herself at the onset of a week-long break during which she usually has two trips, but during which this year she has no trips?

Well, here's what I've done so far. First some decidin'. Then some mom-in-law hosting, including a tasty dinner at Luna (though Luna REALLY needs to lose the headache-inducing jazz). Then some much needed sleeping. Then some organizing of recipes and some digitizing of music. I have also been on something of a Sophocles bender that is kinda, sorta related to a writing project I'm hoping to revive, let's say, Tuesday. And I have mightily begun my quest to replicate the vegan cornbread at my favorite campus restaurant, The Red Herring. (Oh, and you locals, please help save them.) Then some co-planning for T-giving, and relatedly, some food shopping.

I also (with JM) watched the charming and light-hearted Be Kind, Rewind, starring Jack Black and Mos Def. This morning I read the ENTIRE paper, and was intrigued, first by this whole "slow blogging" business, and then by the prospect of conjuring woolly mammoths from dna culled from a woolly mammoth hair ball. These two stories, and for that matter, the movie too, seem to me to be philosophically related in a technology-goes-around-the-bend-retro kind of way.

Even though--or perhaps because--I'm not traveling this week, I have this scene stuck in my head. It is also sweetly retro, and I wish it were at least another minute longer:

my contender for best dramatic scene, ev0r

He Saw. And bellowing in anguish
he reached up, loosening the noose that held her.
With the poor lifeless woman laid out on the ground
this, then, was the terror we saw: he pulled
the long pins of hammered gold clasping her gown,
held them up, and punched them into his eyes,
back through the sockets. He was screaming:
"Eyes, now you will not, no, never
see the evil I suffered, the evil I caused.
You will see blackness--where once
were lives you should never have lived to see,
yearned-for faces you so long failed to know."
While he howled out these tortured words--
not once, but many times--his raised hands
kept beating his eyes. The blood kept coming,
drenching his beard and cheeks. Not a few wet drops,
but a black storm of bloody hail lashing his face.
                             (Oedipus the King l. 1434-50)

barf

Here's something. Yesterday when JM and I were walking to the gym, we saw on the sidewalk ahead of us the remnants of someone's Saturday night heave. Knowing I have a queasy countenance, JM told me not to look, but I did anyway. About when I saw what I think were pieces of lucky charms, I started gagging and finally looked away.

And then this morning I did it again, only this time, I let myself look at general reader comments at an online news site. My problem began, innocently enough, with IHE, where the readers are often judgmental and outrageously cruel. Noticing that my blood pressure went up when I scrolled through the comments, I decided to stop reading them. During the election, I let myself peek at some comments over at CBS news. (Fox news comments are just entertaining.) And this morning, to fill the election-watch void, I clicked on a post or story or some trash called "the note" over at ABC news.com that had rotated up on my news feed. It mentioned that Obama and McCain are going to meet.

And then, scrolling down to the sidewalk puke, I read the first comment. And the second. And all of them. The first one, posted by "theologicalones," (that first "o" makes all the difference) claimed that Obama was elected by "nitwits and druggies." Hm, I wonder, which one of those am I? The next one calls Obama an "empty icon," and others allude to the impending dictatorship and Obama's selfishness.

Incredulous, nearly gagging, I wonder why can't I not look?

first person, plural

This time of year, we are a busy lot. Our email pronounces things to us. Things like good news. itinerary. reminder. favor. checking in. favor. big favor. ms. review?. urgent. We send emails with these same subject lines to others, like barely mutated viruses. We get colds. We medicate. We wonder why, with medical advances and so many medications, we still feel as if we lost an eraser up each nostril.  We quickly skim the surfaces of each other's lives via facebook and blogs. With others we have drinks and think through more important matters with the kind of attention they deserve. We join groups online that cohere around fleeting desires. We attend curriculum meetings; we shuffle papers; we receive news about the dire budget situation; we read first-person columns in the Chronicle detailing problems with one aspect or another of our jobs, the framing of which make the authors seem virtuous, suspiciously so. Some of us sneer. Others of us snort. Others of us wring our hands as if we wrote the column and are about to be discovered. Maybe we did. Maybe we are.

Some of us check email incessantly and cultivate reputations for our lightening-quick response time. Others of us ignore email for days and days. This slowly drives us fast responders insane and perhaps it serves us right for not having a more full life. We stand in front of classrooms, looking out upon distracted faces, formerly chatty and bright young adults whose slouching seems to have deepened as the semester goes on, turning to slumping after the end of daylight savings time, when even the reasonably timed afternoon classes spill us out into darkness.

We try with varying degrees of success to conceal our weariness. Some of us act more beset than others. Others have little patience for the contest of who is busiest. We are all very tired; this is the point. We read Nietzsche and wonder why more people don't think this way. We are very tired, but we wake up at 3 am and can't go back to sleep. Our days become shorter. We begin to feel out of touch with our research, which in turn makes us restless. Those of us who are on leave feel their euphoria giving way to a vague anxiety about not having done enough. To steel ourselves and remind ourselves of a more productive time, or to postpone beginning that conference paper we proposed in some spring haze, we check on the status of manuscripts we submitted at the end of summer, when everything seemed bright and fresh, and turnaround times could be counted in weeks, not months. We get cheerful but vague replies from overworked editors and/or their overworked assistants about how they are still waiting. We wait. We unroll our lunchbags and chew on cold sandwiches. We attend afternoon talks and fend off sleep by snickering at our colleagues who nod off in the front row.

Soon (though not soon enough) it will be time for thanksgiving break. Some of us will travel a long way for a big meal, while others of us will lay around all week, catching up, peeking at our research, falling into slumbers, rousing ourselves only to make soup and bread and eat turkey and pie, all in an effort to regroup somehow. 

It helps to know we're not alone.

church, space; gender, race

Last night the IPRH-supported Rhetorical Studies Reading Group had the pleasure of hosting Roxanne Mountford from the University of Kentucky, author of The Gendered Pulpit and co-author (with Michelle Ballif and Diane Davis) of Women's Ways of Making it in Rhetoric and Composition.

Professor Mountford's work on the history of preaching in protestant spaces attends to the whole material swirl of bodies, gender, race, and belief in the context of space. Hers is that kind of research that nearly everyone can connect to in one way or another--either they have studied history of religious rhetoric, have a religious background themselves (think VBS or tent revivals, or maybe that's what I think because I'm from the south), have thoughtfully set aside religion, have given more than a passing thought to Jeremiah Wright, to megachurches, to Christian youth movements or mission work. Our discussion last night was even more wide-ranging.

One of the things I admire about Mountford's book is how it mixes historiography with ethnography. Last night we talked about how the two work together--in this case, historical work helps Mountford figure out how and when the pulpit became so masculinized, and ethnographic investigation helps her to explore the ways women are inhabiting those  masculinized spaces and, effectively, change them in the process. It's a complicated, time-consuming, and challenging set of methods, I'm sure, but seeing as how I have directed/am directing/ am planning to direct four dissertations that mix methods in a similar way, it sure was great to have an opportunity to reflect with her on that mixture. I've often thought about how both methods involve finding or developing a narrative arc, and how doing so requires laborious sifting and searching. Historians and ethnographers really ought to talk more across their methods.

Last night everybody munched on Antonio's pizza and posed thoughtful questions about sexuality in churches, about race and religion, about the African American Jeremiad tradition (which she focuses on in chapter 4 of her book), and about the role of the progressive church in combatting the liberal discourse of tolerance (hat tip goes to Sharon Crowley's Toward a Civil Discourse).

Roxanne also took advantage of having so many scholars from the "communication side" at the event to inquire about how the work "plays" with comm scholars. The answers covered a) what RM brings that rhetoric/communication scholars might not (e.g., ethnographic methods); b) the seeming welcoming of literary texts in communication; c) contextual expectations, and d) graduate student research in communication that RM's work has spurred.  I love these kinds of cross-disciplinary meta-conversations, and they are best when rooted, as ours was last night, in specific work rather than generalities. One communication graduate student, who immediately went home to draft a short document about his research trajectory mentions having been inspired by Mountford's focus on the importance of the progressive church for progressive politics in this country.

If you like what you're hearing, but don't happen to be in Urbana, don't despair! Professor Mountford, along with Patricia Bizzell, Shirley Wilson Logan, and Jane Donawerth will be co-leading a workshop at the Rhetoric Society of America's Institute this June in State College. Click here for details. 

"yeah, whatever scares you the most, yes."

 

by way of Z! 

overheard in the locker room: complicity

co-ed #1, stepping off the scale: "OH MY GOD I have totally gained my FRESHMAN 15!!!!"

co-ed #2:  it's just a number, and you're soaking wet.

co-ed#1: do you think that's why my pants are kind of tight?

co-ed #2: probably.

co-ed #1: do you think it's drinking weight?

co-ed #2: maybe. that shit has a lot of calories. do you work out?

co-ed #1: when i'm at home, I play tennis? OH MY GOD. I really can't believe this.

co-ed #2: shut the hell up, before I punch you in the face.

co-ed#1 (small voice): I think I need to eat at Allen hall tonight so I can have a salad.

co-ed #2: okay. that way we don't have to walk very far.

presidential fitness

This photograph of Barack Obama leaving a gym makes me wonder what his fitness routine will be like come January; indeed what he does now. I know he plays basketball, and no doubt he'll be able to organize that at the white house;  though maybe he'll need to recruit secret service agents who happen to play. Does he use machines like the stairmaster or treadmill? Does he spin? He doesn't seem like an elliptical kind of guy--those things are too easy. Maybe he lifts weights. Does he sweat a lot or a little? Will the White House have a fitness room? Does it already? W. probably rides one of those windy stationary bikes.

When he's president, will he schedule a fitness session into every day?

These questions don't, at first glance, seem to bear on the important issues pressing on this nation, but they also kind of do. He seems like the kind of guy who needs to exercise for sanity and focus (something I can relate to). On the one hand, it would seem pretty difficult for the most powerful man in this country to find time to work out, but on the other hand, not at all. I know people have written about the obsession with presidential fitness, which in the popular imaginary usually slides into fitness to lead (think FDR and Houck and Kiewe's book). There's also the obsession in the popular press with such matters, but this is the first time I've actually started to pay attention. I'll probably try to track such matters here, so if anyone sees related articles, please send them along.

this is the song in my head

(not that you asked)

obama's race

Like most of you, I couldn't be more ecstatic about last night's outcome. The swell of the crowds and tears last night at Grant Park, with Oprah packed right in there with the rest of them, crying on that white dude's blazer; the balloons and dancing outside the White House; the superbowl-style celebration in big cities--all these testify to the power of our soon-to-be president. Our country did some serious face-saving where the world is concerned; civic activity made an historic peak yesterday, and at long last, we will have an honest-to-goodness orator in the White House. All that pent up "unfeeling" as Lauren Berlant calls it, from 2000 and 2004, finally got replaced by, well, feeling.

But as with everything good, there is also a potentially troubling side to this occasion. This election shows that Americans are not an apathetic lot; that we can be convinced to try to make a difference, yes. But I think we ought to be very careful about hanging too much symbolic value on the election of the first black president, and what that means for equal opportunities for people of all races, ethnicities, and economic backgrounds in this country. The disgust on some of the faces in the crowd at the McCain concession speech last night ought to serve as a chilling reminder that electing Obama does not automatically diminish the race-based hate that still endures in some areas, shoddily shrouded as it has been in discourses of fear and otherness.

What I mean to say is this: electing Barack Obama president is not tantamount to waving a magic wand over inner city schools and having shiny new computers and resources materialize. It does little to eradicate poverty that so closely tracks with racial inequality. Obama is no doubt committed to working for widespread equity, for righting the longstanding and shameful wrongs that persist along racial lines, or to use his language from the now-famous race speech, to eliminate bigoted policies, but as he said last night (referring to a lot of things, not just race relations), we have a long road ahead of us. We must not let his election lull us into a dimwitted complacency about race in this country. Electing Obama is a necessary first step, but it is by no means sufficient.

anticipation

Waiting for Tuesday feels a little like waiting for a really important championship game, only the players will have gone home; many of the judges don't seem to have watched the same contest I did; and the scoring system may or may not work properly. In the meantime, though, lots and lots of things to keep me busy, in addition to shaking my head at the latest Palindrone: that the press's labeling her critiques of Obama as "attacks" threatens her freedom of speech. I mean, please. Pretty please?

Those scoreboards had better fucking work.

Anyway. My first full weekend at home since early September (and end of D.S.T no less) means catching up by tending to deadlines and promised reading and also some really, really good mountain biking. Nothing gives those endorphins a kick quite like riding at high speeds deep in the woods where the fall colors have turned the sun into a gigantic, super high wattage red/orange/yellow disco ball. I would have enjoyed it even more if not for our governor's plan to close down those trails, along with so many rape crisis centers, to balance his budget. Last week his approval rating was half--half!--that of W's.

Which brings me back around, worrying toward Tuesday. Get that vote on out, people.

tricks for treats