b l o g o s

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.