b l o g o s

overheard at the PA state dept. of health

vaccine volunteer to the mother of the ten-year-old girl in front of me: so, has she had tetanus?

mother: yes, just this past summer.

ten-year-old: and I don't even have a boyfriend!!

on being edited

Yesterday I received two documents via email from the editors of a special collection on Burke and the archives. Since my co-prof and I are in the process of wrapping up a seminar on Kenneth Burke, and just this week, we ran a class on academic publishing that included some tips on incorporating archival findings into their nascent articles, I have archives--and Burke--freshly on my mind. So rather than wait until close to the deadline the editors gave me for turning this thing around, this morning I figured I'd settle in with the editors' suggestions to see just what I needed to do to make this piece a better contribution to the collection. 

And then it dawned on me: this is the first real line-by-line feedback I have gotten since I don't know when. Sure, there are reader's reports for journal submissions and book manuscripts, but sometimes those come down to cantankerous quibbling or generalizations about writing style. In the past few years, I have been doing this sort of editing/feedback work for others in the field--for dissertations-in-progress, for jr. colleagues, for journal and book submissions, for (especially) book reviews that I edit for QJS.

Academia is strange this way. We spend the first parts of our careers receiving more feedback than we give (obviously there are exceptions, like writing groups, etc.), and then once that first book is published we find ourselves squarely in the realm of giving far more than we receive. I by no means want to discount the importance of my "first reader" JM, who sees and helps improve everything before it leaves this house, nor do I want to discount colleagues who have lent a pair of eyes on chapters or articles-in-progress. In all, though, what we have is a pay-it-forward model that I have usually not given a second thought to.

Until this morning. This morning I find myself giddily--that's right, giddily!--plotting changes my editors requested and reworking sentences they have marked as trying to do too much. The piece is getting the benefit of two pairs of eyes, and the result is the most informed, thoughtful, and smart comments I've received since my dissertation advisor combed through my limp-along chapters some years ago. And I'm only now in a position to really appreciate the kind of time it took to offer this feedback. My essay has been in the hands of two very talented and knowledgeable in-the-field colleagues, and I couldn't be happier with or more grateful for their labor.

bureacratization of the nonimaginative

Most other people probably realize this, but at NCA this past week, it finally hit home with me that the longer we are in the field, the more our conference experience becomes bureaucratized. For all the board meetings, business meetings, individual meetings, meetings with publishers, and mentoring meetings, I pretty much didn't get to attend a panel unless I presented on it.  I'm also fairly sure--because we talked about it--that the other senior people in the meetings I had on my docket were having the same kind of conference. 

This is a sad state. I generally like to be in the conference audience, to see what's going on in the field, to ask questions and get conversations going from the other side of the podium. I hope to do more of that at RSA in May. I remember one president of ASHR who made a point to go to every single panel that made it onto ASHR's schedule. Tiring, I'm sure, but boy did he get a good sense of what kind of intellectual work the organization is supporting.

nca, yay. chicago, double yay.

The dryer just shut off, so I really need to go finish packing and therefore need to make this short. I am giddy about heading to Chicago for NCA. It's the Chicago part, more than the NCA part, that has me giddy. But NCA is okay, I suppose. I like the people, no doubt, and look forward to running in to everybody.

As an extra bonus, I convinced JM to fly and meet me there after his teaching obligations for the week are done. Chicago is where we always used to go to shake off the end of the semester, to eat some good food, and to catch a film that we might not otherwise catch in a theater. Mornings will be early for me--chock full of meetings and panels--but Friday and Saturday evenings, back to our favorite spots we will go. I even managed to work in an appointment with my favorite hair stylist. So if you don't recognize me, it's either because I'm 6.5 months pregnant, or because my hair has been blown straight. Come to think of it, the combination might not work very well, but I don't even care.

I do know that we miss you, Chicago. We look forward to toting our kid there. But in the meantime, we are excited to have you all to ourselves, even in the midst of the crazy convention.

post-halloween, post- D.S.T. seminar

sartre's crabs

This morning at breakfast I read the most delightful piece in this month's Harpers--a short excerpt of a conversation between Jean-Paul Sartre and John Gerassi, a scholar who interviewed him in 1971. The excerpt details Sartre's post-mescaline visions of crabs. They followed him everywhere, "just three or four of them." (The crabs, it turns out, were lobsters, but having not heard this anecdote before, imagine my delight when the interviewer knowingly responds to Sartre's reference to his near-nervous breakdown with, "you mean the crabs?" And Sartre, interestingly, chooses to refer to them throughout as crabs.)

These crabs kept Sartre company at movies, on walks--always when he "was going someplace." He consulted a psychotherapist, some fellow named Jacques Lacan, who suggested that the crabs were his way of coping with loneliness. It's odd, then, that they were never around when Sartre was writing, for there is nothing more solitary, more grippingly lonely (often) than writing. Simone de Beauvoir (jeez--this guy and his no-name associates) considered crabs a sign of his depression. 

The crab's mode of life seems rather relevant. Crabs are not sing-songy bluebirds, or sweet furry creatures. They are hard-shelled, pincered bottom-dwellers that scurry on the ocean floor, eating algae, worms, bacteria, what have you. With creaturely life in mind, the standout line of the interview is this: "Despite their mocking, my crabs never said that my books would not be on the shelf, or that if they were, so what?"

Sartre's crabs kept him grounded and real. From time to time, we could all use a few crabs.

from the top of mt. nittany

cool midwestern cities, awesome midwestern rhetoric scholars

I am on a two-legged midwestern trip, having completed the first one yesterday with a drive from Madison to Minneapolis. Appropriately, on the drive, I stopped at the Norske Nook to buy a lingonberry-apple pie.

The folks in English and Communication Arts at U of Wisconsin invited me to present at their colloquium, and I had a blast. For starters I got to see lots of my good friends from Pittsburgh K and M, in addition to dinner with the good comp/rhet folks, and coffee with SZ. One very nice graduate student, A, made a pan of what she called "pregnancy bars" [A, I need that recipe, please!] for the post-colloquium refreshments. At Wisconsin I presented a "bridge" project on Kenneth Burke and animals. Burke won't show up in my animals book--Aesop to Erasmus is already capacious enough--but he is a good warm up for it, because I can ruminate on the question of rhetoric and nonhuman animals more easily given that all his work is fresh in my mind and I'm teaching him this semester. The audience responses also helped me think about the next book while I'm still in the research stage, and so the bridging really is serving its purpose. 

Now I'm in Minnesota for a colloquium on Modern Rhetoric. Tonight's talks by Jim Aune and Bill Keith kicked things off nicely, positing some categories and provoking thought about autonomy, art, and much more. Richard G and I are presenting together in the morning, and we'll be talking about Modern Rhetoric's forwarding of Aristotle.

Now, I think I'll take a break from the cerebral to watch an episode of Friday Night Lights. It must be said that I miss JM and the whippets, and no that's not a band of fast ribby guys.

scattershot 5: plenty for a wednesday

1. I can't *wait* for the holidays, when I will apparently get my copy of this long-awaited release.

2. Something unexpectedly cool about expecting is learning about other people who are. Two cousins will now have babies 4 or 5 months on either side of ours. And then there are the academic "cousins" like little Nancy Wible or little Pezzullo-Striphas jr. Fun!

3. Now that my papers are mostly done, I'm really looking forward to my trips to the good old Midwest. Madison and Minneapolis in the same week, hooray. Nevermind that in my spare time while traveling I will be writing one of my NCA papers.

4. Speaking of NCA, one of the grad students in our seminar just informed me that this year's conference is *not* the week right before Thanksgiving but rather the week before the week before Thanksgiving. I was just assuming it was the weekend preceding T-giving, not having scrutinized the calendar all that closely, and having become quite accustomed, thank you very much, to chasing the conference with a nice (and much needed) week-long holiday. Such rhythm disruptions are definitely discombobulating, to me at least. 

5. And speaking of Thanksgiving, Thanksgiving this year will be all kinds of fun. JM's sister KM is flying to State College from London, and we are going to assemble the crib and the new stroller and whatnot. It also marks the end of my talk-based traveling for a good long while.

lost and (in some cases, marked with *) found

the garden hose

the silver bicycle pump*

my course director folder

two recommendation letters that were supposed to be in the mail*

my awesome columbia titanium jacket

a check for $75.00

that book about the history of speech communication**

order in my campus office

**if anyone at Illinois has this, the library there would like it back.

dueness

Sometimes semesters creep along and then with a whoosh they are over; time moves unevenly, even erratically, crushing us midway and not really letting up until finals week. This semester, though, is different. Time seems to be moving steadily, as I track the weeks with my little "i-pregnancy" app, and as our graduate seminar marches chronologically through Kenneth Burke's decades of writing. The semester is about 15 weeks behind my pregnancy, so that when we met our first class no one except for my co-teacher knew about my "condition," and now at week 22 (week 7 of the course) it's hard to imagine how anyone wouldn't have noticed. The halfway points of both are neatly correspondent.

There is a new physicality to the passing of time. Each week brings more wiggly, fluttery movement, or new positions I can't sit comfortably in. The increasing swell probably also serves as a reminder that paper topics are due soon. By the time the deadline for the papers themselves is looming, the sticky heat will have given way to frozen ground; Burke will have aged nearly fifty years, his theories fitting together a little better, though still not perfectly; and the movements inside me will feel less like fluttery, wiggly calisthenics and more like squirmy, crowded kicks. Most everything comes due; it's all a matter of waiting, marking growth of all kinds with patience and even a little glee.

conversations at borders

UK Immigration

Immigration officer: What is the purpose of your visit?

Me: I'm visiting my sister-in-law.

IO: Is she your husband's sister, or your brother's wife?

Me: husband's sister

IO: Why isn't your husband visiting?

Me: He has to teach.

IO: It says here you are a professor. What do you teach?

Me: English, rhetoric.

IO: What is rhetoric?

Me: We teach Speaking, Writing, Communicating...

IO: But doesn't that just come with practice? I used to get up and give presentations and I got better with time.

Me: Sure! And there are also improvisational moments that require responding to a situation.

IO: Like this one right here?

Me: Yep.

IO: welcome to the UK.

...

U.S. Border Control, JFK

IO: State College is the name of an actual town? 

Me: Yep, it's where Penn State is.

IO: (shaking head): go ahead.

falling

A couple years ago, I blogged about the phenomenon of "octobering," that crush of work that hits the second full month of the new fall term, and includes all manner of the kind of labor we do in this profession: writing rec letters for job marketing grad students; attending can't-miss talks; preparing for conferences; going to meetings about everything; more letter writing. Oh! And teaching happens somewhere in there usually.

I've noted this to other people, and others have noted it as well, but this year there seems to be considerable October creep. For starters, deadlines for job recs are inching up earlier and earlier, probably because folks lucky enough to have lines want to get the ball rolling before higher-ups change their minds, and also they are seeking a competitive edge over the other two or three schools with lines. True, a lot of this work could spill into October, but I have such an insane travel schedule in October (trying to pack it all in before traveling becomes difficult, flying impossible) that I'm having to frontload some of the work before the end of this month, and thus Octobering has come to be something more like "fall"ing. 

The new liberal arts course I'm directing comes with a ton of meetings, and though I'm grateful that it takes a village for this kind of thing, I'm having a hard time figuring out how to schedule the work that should follow these meetings, all the while composing two talks for mid-October--one I found myself structuring, I kid you not, while I slept last night--and helping my advisees make it to their dissertation defenses this semester (both of which require me to travel back to Champaign-Urbana). All told, between now and December I will make a total of four trips back to the midwest (including NCA's Chicago and a Minneapolis/Madison trek in mid Oct.--I'm ever grateful to M-city hosts for helping me combine those). I won't even be home for my favorite holiday--halloween--so those little Kiss costumes I was hoping to create (Tillie as Gene Simmons and Jada as Paul Stanley) are unfortunately going to have to wait until next year. Of course I'm not alone in my busy-ness, and knowing that actually weirdly helps.

Even so, at 6:30 this evening I fell into a deep, twitchy sleep while watching "Flight of the Conchords," waking up when JM started giggling at some crazy dance Brett was doing. I pulled myself out of my grog so that we could walk the dogs and clean up from dinner. There was just enough energy to answer some emails about courses for 2010-2011 (!) and write this blog entry, and very soon I'll be heading to bed. 

here's a little kiss for you.

office hours

I held two extra office hours today, and I'm so glad I did. I got to talk with three smart grads, two of whom are already hammering out topics for their final project, and one of whom wanted me to take a look at his RSA abstract.

And when folks weren't here, I got a chance to tinker with a little teaching grant proposal, copy a section from a rare greek book that I have to return to the farflung place that lent it to me this summer, fiddle with my new psu website, AND write a blog entry. How productive is that? 

Wildly. Even the little sprog is kicking around, seemingly with excitement.