JM and the dogs and I are headed to a cabin in southern Illinois for a few nights to hike and watch movies and just be away for a bit. I'm going to take some laptop work, but there won't be any internet connection, so without email the work will (hopefully) go quickly. Luckily, though, there's satellite tv, so we won't miss the season finale of The Office. Catch you on the weekend.
This past Saturday, I hooded my first doctoral student, K. It was an occasion for happy reflection. Like when K came to my office many years ago, planted herself in the chair facing me, put one arm on my desk, leaned forward, and said matter-of-factly, "I want you to direct my dissertation." I was still quite new to faculty life, and I wasn't even sure if directing was something I was supposed to do, but she didn't let me protest; instead, she listed for me the reasons we were a good match. And we were.
Having been a secondary teacher before coming to graduate school, K was the kind of person who knew what she wanted, so there were many, many moments when I felt like she was training me rather than the other way around. We had our share of disagreements, but they were just disagreements, never arguments, never bitter fights. And she coaxed me to her side just as much as she capitulated to mine. She let me be tough on her, and by maintaining the frankness with which our advising relationship began, she taught me how to let someone find their way while still providing strictures. Her maturity (and my year away) kept me from becoming a helicopter mentor. She also spoiled me just a little because she is fantastic with deadlines, not something that all graduate students--or many academics for that matter--observe. She even gave birth during it all, but still didn't slow down, learning to focus and write during her son's naps, which is really amazing if you think about it.
And K can write. Oh, can she write. But even more than that, she can revise. She would internalize feedback from her writing group, from me, from her other advisor (who is also a hugely important mentor for me), sort through what she wanted to do and what needed to be done, and she would work steadily and regularly, through frustrations and breakthroughs, through to good drafts, and finally to damn good final versions. K thinks about writing as a craft, and she knows that a craft takes regular and protracted contact with that which is being crafted.
So she returned this weekend, at the end of her first year in her fabulous new job, along with her hubby and her friends A and J, who also returned from their fabulous new jobs, and whose dissertation committees I had the privilege of working on. Having them all back here, smiling in their regalia on the quad, mixing news from their new jobs (and new grants!) with sweet nostalgia for their grad school town, brought to light yet another way that this job can be, really, breathtaking.
Speaking of rhetorical exercises, I just finished drafting my abstracts for ISHR and CCCC, two conference cultures that, as I mention in my previous post, could not be more different. Even though I'll be presenting pretty much the same material at each conference (I have learned that it's not realistic to write brand new papers based on brand new research for back-to-back conferences), the papers will end up being very different. The difference, though, is largely because of the audience.
I'm posting these here just to highlight the differences. Note, first of all, that the Cs proposal is shorter by about 100 words. The online submission box only allows 5000 characters, including spaces (thanks to advisee, C..., for the headsup). I've gotten mine down to 1600, which is a third of that, to allow room for my co-presenters. But I'll still have to chop more, mainly because the 5000-character limit applies to the entire session, and so I'll need considerable space (relatively considerable, anyway) to set up the panel itself. So I'll probably end up cutting this one in half, just about. It's way easier for me to cut stuff, though, once everything's there.
I decided to put these up here in part because we don't often share abstracts (they feel so wee and vulnerable--they might get rejected!--and this is just a little teeny slice of a much, much larger project), but also to show how starkly distinct they are. Even though they end in the same way, they begin and, largely, reside in very different argumentative spaces. ISHR is a smaller conference, but--sorry for the overused term here--the footprint of the argument tries to be a bit bigger. Or maybe the Cs one is bigger, I don't know. Now I can't tell.
Abstract One, ISHR
Performing as Animals
Recently, critics in the humanities (e.g., Agamben, Wolfe, Atterton, and Carlarco) have engaged what has become known as “the animal question,” which is to say they have focused on the enduring role played by animals in writings about human identity, values, and ethics. Most of this work has centered on philosophical texts. Yet rhetorical texts deserve consideration as well, not least because ancient rhetorical treatises are crawling with animals. Aristotle finds beasts useful when theorizing humility and shame. Cicero and Quintilian write of horses, dogs, and birds. But the rhetorical genre with animals at its core is that of the fable. Fables appeared early in the sequence of ancient school exercises, or progymnasmata. That animals figure so prominently in these stage-setting composition exercises calls for more scrutiny. What, exactly, are animals doing there, and what can their presence tell us about rhetoric as an art?
The treatise on progymnasmata attributed to Hermogenes asks students to consider the collective delight experienced by humans in cities, but to do so from the vantage point of an ape. The writer of the treatise suggests that students expand this fabulous scenario by composing a speech for said ape. Later, John of Sardis develops the ape example in an exercise found later in the sequence, ethopoeia, or speech in character. Students, that is, were frequently asked to compose in the “voices” of animals, to perform as animals.
My paper will examine such prompts to perform as animals in educational settings, with a particular focus on the progymnasmata tradition. I will argue that performing as animals helps to infuse early rhetorical education with more than low-stakes fictitious play, but that animals function more generally as an other—an other to humans, and uniquely, an other to children. Here the stakes of the animal question become more apparent for rhetorical studies: animals’ centrality in rhetorical education expands rhetoric from the art of observing the available means of persuasion to an art of becoming someone—or something—else.
Abstract Two, CCCC
Animals in Ancient School Exercises
The recent flurry of attention to ancient school exercises called progymnasmata has interested compositionists for the way they make writing regular and habitual, and how they ease students into the difficulties of rhetorical training. Thanks in part to J. David Fleming’s recent exhortation to embrace the “very idea” of these exercises, the progymnasmata are finding their way into classrooms and textbooks (D’Angelo, Crowley and Hawhee). This small but discernible shift in practice might usefully be accompanied by careful scrutiny of the exercises themselves, their history, their sequence, and their often striking content. Why, for example, are the progymnasmata crawling with animals?
Students working in this tradition usually began by composing fables about animals, but they were also, later in the sequence, asked to compose as animals, to write in the “voice” of, say, an ape interested in forming a city with fellow apes. I propose to examine the prompts that ask students to compose as animals. If, as Fleming (quoting Murphy) argues, the point of the progymnasmata was to “‘become rhetorical,’” then the exercises’ more peculiar features might tell us a bit more about what exactly that means. For starters, the prompt to compose as animals helps to infuse early rhetorical education with more than low-stakes fictitious play; the animals, rather, function more generally as an other—an other to humans, and uniquely, an other to children. A look at animals in these ancient school exercises begins to expand rhetoric from the art of observing the available means of persuasion to, more generally, an art of becoming someone—or something—else.
The proposal deadlines for CCCC (Conference on College Composition and Communication) and ISHR (International Society for the History of Rhetoric) are within a week of each other, and they are coming up f a s t. My proposed panels just--just--came together. I'm going to propose brand new work for both of them, on animals in the history of rhetoric.
For CCCC, we are going to coalesce around past educational practices, and for ISHR, around performance and theater. For both, I'll likely be looking at ancient fable assignments, particularly the request that students write in the "voices" of animals. My preliminary research question is: what's that about?
But hopefully that question will be refined as I work.
Now, if Hillary Clinton manages to wangle the nomination, I'll vote for her, don't get me wrong. But I hope against hope that by then she will not say anything as colossally stupid as she says in this AP release about the contributions of economists. The two highlights are 1) waving away as "elite opinion" the observations by economists that a holiday gas tax rollback would do nothing to help consumers, and 2) when asked to provide the name of one economist who endorses the plan, HC replies "I'm not going to put my lot in with economists."
Any president who won't listen to economists would be a scary president. And I'm not sure which word--elite or opinion--pisses me off more, but I think it might be opinion. Because heaven knows (don't you, heaven?) that GWB and his administration have used similarly dismissive strategies with scientists for the past eight years. Maybe those scientists who have "opinions" about global warming ought to be consulted about the gas tax rollback proposal. That is if they're not too busy sitting at the opera.
End rant.
After spending yesterday in Chicago for a fine, fine phd exam (and also, while there, trying out a prit-tee delicious vegetarian restaurant), I was a wee bit restless today. Just didn't feel like settling in to work. Maybe it was the nearly 70 degree weather. So I read some advisee writing, worked on one of my RSA presentations for a little while, ordered some new summery shoes, answered a ton of email, did some light gardening, took the dogs for a run. At least three times today, not including the time I was gardening, I went outside to look at the spinach growing in our garden. I swear it grew today.
When JM got home, we got on the internet and ordered moss. Our front yard is so shady that neighbors think our white house is gray. Of course grass won't grow, and although in early spring before the leaves return and with them the thick, thick shade, there are nice flowers, not much else is there. OK, strike that. Everything that will grow in shade is there, and I'm not a fan of hostas. So we're going to try some combination of brick walks and moss. From what we've read, moss will love our front yard. It's environmentally friendly, and it makes me think of when I was a kid, sliding on slimy, moss-covered rocks at horse creek. And in the fall, the busiest time of year around these parts, we are going to cover it with a net to catch leaves, just like the guy in the article.
This morning, with the last days of sabbatical draining away, and with today being Monday, and my nocturnal clock still being just enough on European time to be waking up with lots of energy at 5 am, I decided it was time. I started reading for my next book.
It's so wee and nascent right now, this next book, which (perhaps paradoxically) means it is huge. And that means I have license to read capaciously this summer, as I figure out what the chapters might be like, expanding and/or ditching the ideas I have already.
It is also the case that this will be the first book that I have started as a book. My first one, of course, began as a dissertation, a wholly different beast in emotional and intellectual heft. The second one began as an article that spun out of control. This one, though, this one is starting as a book. (We'll see if it ends that way.)
Someone asked me recently how long it takes to write a book, and that is a tough question, in that it depends on the book itself, and even more importantly, on the position one is in when writing that book. So, for example, I wrote my last book partly as an assistant professor with lots of time for writing, and partly as an associate professor; the first book, partly as a graduate student with all the time in the world, and partly as an assistant professor. (Note how time always seems to expand when looking backward. I think this is a real condition of faculty life, or at least for faculty life where I work, but that might be for another post.) In effect, then, the first book, from conception to covers, took about eight years. Although if I were to count the response paper I wrote as a first-semester M.A. student that tried to articulate the ancient relation between sports and rhetoric, then it took more like twelve years, but that seems a bit long. And counting the protracted period when I worked on the second book as an article, that second one will have taken about eight years too. These two overlapped for a few years, though, in that I started the second book-as-article well before finishing the revisions on the first one. So I can count on eight years till this next one is done, right? I hope not, but if that's what it takes, then totally. And it might well take longer. I'd love to hear how long others' books have taken/are taking. I'm sure there is lots of variance, because we all work with such different rhythms and under widely divergent conditions. I've learned that my long-term projects tend to have lots of stops and starts by necessity.
This book has been percolating for almost two years now; I would say it started in the early fall of 2006, and Burke (from the book just finished) gave me the idea. I read enough then to write a sabbatical proposal, and last spring I found lots of leads for it when teaching history of rhetoric. But then I set it aside this year while finishing that second book. And now my program for the summer (and, let's face it, next year) will be to read and think broadly before settling on--and into--the texts I will focus on specifically. This morning I started with Aristotle's History of Animals, which is ten books and three loeb volumes long. Reading and thinking about animals in the history of rhetoric will most likely, like the last books, take me into biology, religion, politics, and education. And who better to start with than the dude who wrote about all of these matters, as well as rhetoric? It's still early, but I must say that I don't think I'll soon tire of reading about horses and elephants and otters and dogs, and thinking about how they have--some quietly and some noisily--shaped our views on language.
I'm home from a fantastic trip. There's so much to say about the port-tasting, about how awesome JM's sister is, about the joys of European breakfasts and urban hiking, or even about how much I love the days and weeks following a return from the east, because I wake up so early without effort. But instead I want to ruminate a little on stuff related to what I write about professionally. I guess that's what I get for setting aside work for a couple of weeks.
On one of our hilly urban treks, I believe on our way up to what we thought was a convent with beautiful tile, KM and I cut through one of Porto's many lovely parks. Here we saw a series of sculptures of three men laughing. 
They are perched on what looks like a steep set of bleachers, surrounded by the lush placidity of portuguese landscape. And they are laughing themselves silly--even to the point where one guy has fallen backwards. I write about this a little in Bodily Arts, but ancient greeks knew better than anyone how tough it is to make a sculpture appear to be in motion; movement, after all, is almost antithetical to the durable solidity of bronze and marble.
But they got better and better at it, and eventually they were able to lose the wings and other add-ons that were meant to symbolically indicate movement. Now, these are by no means high quality sculptures, and one might say that the guy falling backwards ought to be a little more concerned, or at least that his arms might have changed from the leg-slapping guffaw to an "oh-shit" self-catch. But there are other ways that the motion of laughter is captured quite nicely here. There are the curled feet of the guy to the left, especially visible in the picture on the right. There are the different bodily styles of laughter--one leans forward, reaching to slap the ground or swat the air, while another throws back his head, and the third his whole self. The thing I like most about this little sculpture set is how it goes against the staid solemnity of most sculptures. All over Dublin, for example, as in most cities, there were those erect statues of leaders and revolutionaries, their chests raised to the sky, looking out over the roundabout or the city, faces grim, sometimes with women and weapons swirling at their feet. But these guys in the park are nameless anybodies. They are bent and gasping for air. They are laughing their asses off.
Somewhat relatedly, because it also involves depicting movement, the thing I noticed in Dublin and Portugal (and also Lisbon) is the ever-so-slight variants in the lighted sign that indicates it's okay to walk across the street now. I don't have photos of these (though I wish I did). The U.S. has relatively bland walking men. In Dublin, though, the walking man is slightly hunched, and he appears to have his fists clenched (he is probably cold). In Portugal the chests of the walking men are puffed out. One in particular, by the river and near where all the wineries are, looks like he's been doing some serious weight training, and he holds his chin high. The faceless man in the sign walks with purpose. Both the hunched, clenched Dubliner and the proud Portuguese seem, in their own ways, to book.
And finally, the owners of a little glass restaurant where the ocean meets the river in Porto seem to know that the real thing that distinguishes men's from women's bathrooms is not so much what they wear, but how they get down to it. 
JM and I arrived in Dublin with no trouble at all; I even managed to sleep on the plane. JM doesn't really fit in airplane seats, though, and as a result he got kneecapped by the duty free cart in the middle of the night--hard enough to knock him into me and wake me up--and I don't think he slept after that. Poor fella. We checked into our hotel over near UCD where JM's conference is, and fell into that lovely deep sleep brought on only by zooming across so many time zones. I woke up in fact thinking of Athens and Prague, two of the last places my body gave in to such immobility.
Of course we woke up starving, and I made the rookie mistake of ordering food at the hotel lunch bar--18.65 euros. I was staring at my cold fish when I looked up to see JM's sister KM, who had just decided to walk to our hotel after arriving from London. Our phone wasn't turned on (oops). We took a bus into Dublin and walked all round, ordered three cups of foamy chocolate, and wandered over to Trinity where we found a used book sale. Picking up the 1931 title The Art of Mime for .20 euros made me feel better about my lunch error. The three of us sat on a bench and watched some fellows play cricket and then made our way back to donnybrook where KM is staying. She and I bonded over our love of aesthetically-pleasing groceries by going to one and fawning over all the baked goods and fresh, brightly packaged yumminess. I always find it strange to notice which foods are imported from the U.S. Here it was jif peanut butter, stove top stuffing, and aunt jemima pancake mix. Maybe europeans feel the same way about nutella. I doubt it.
In any case, to our moms and dads: we're here. Everything is great. Ireland does look a lot like eastern Tennessee. And apparently JM and I missed a midwestern earthquake.
1. Oh, but I have myself a little addiction. To avocados. I ate half of one at my cousin's house in Maryland, and on the days I've been home since I have eaten about one a day, usually half sliced on a sandwich for lunch, and half sliced on a salad at dinner. Damn, they are tasty. Avocados have lots of vitamins and goodsies, but it's still a little strange. Maybe I'll kick this while in Ireland.
2. In getting ready to leave town I have been emailing with people who are writing reviews for QJS, making sure they have received the books I promised, etc. One reviewer in particular is quite well known in rhetoric/communication, and must be one of the field's busiest. And yet this person is delightful--super friendly and cheerful, and has already started reading for the review. How utterly refreshing to see that not everyone turns into a jerko when they become well known.
3. In the category of way past due: I just gave the dogs baths, cleaned off my desk, and backed up my computer files.
4. JM's sister KM and I are going to a spa in Portugal where we are to choose between wine therapy and chocolate therapy, and something called thalassotherapy. Thalassa means 'sea' in greek, so maybe it has to do with salt water. I'm thinking chocolate. Oh, and E! wants me to locate that little girl who went missing there.
5. I am determined not to do any work on this trip, and the way to ensure that is to leave my laptop at home. Bye bye, laptop! Apologies in advance to anyone who receives my automated email reply. Those things are as annoying as they are necessary, I'm afraid.
Those of you who have textbooks or academic books for which you receive royalty checks, where do you list those royalties on your tax return? I have only been receiving these since 2005, but for 2005 and 2006 I listed mine in line 17 on the 1040, which is rents and royalties. That line mostly looks like a real estate issue, though, and it mentions oil and minerals and the like. I always just figured it all fell under the loose term of property. I just now read the instructions for that line, though, and it says that authors should put royalties under business income, and that's where turbotax directed me to put them this year. If I understand that correctly, that means you have to claim something like a side business. And so now that we have filed that way in 2007, the IRS has written to inquire about my 2006 royalties. Really, it's quite sad that taxes are so complicated.
What fun I've had in Columbia, MO today. Thanks to everyone who turned up for the talk on such a blustery day, and a Friday at that. And then an evening with the rhet comp folks-- Rebecca, Donna, Jenny, and Jeff--at Rebecca and Zac's house with an awesome big sweet dog named Bodie who wandered from person to person swinging his tail. And Vered! I finally got to meet little Vered, and we passed around her monkey.
I think I've posted here before about how different parts of the Burke book "play" with different audiences, and today's talk on Burke and body biography got good vibes, I think. Before today I had not met a creative writer who has read Burke, and today I met nine or ten. Huh.
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