b l o g o s

scattershot 8, cinco de mayo edition: or, why today feels like a good day

1. I woke up at 5:45 with no alarm feeling rested.

2. It is the birthday of many important people.

3. I get to have lunch with a sweet and funny friend at my fave campus lunch spot.

4. JM and I are going to take six huge boxes of books to the p.o. to mail to Powells, and Powells will then give us money in return. We are also going to donate about a hundred and fifty books to the books for prisoners program.

5. That swine flu isn't all that scary after all.

6. The economy is showing signs of recovery.

7. I have been reading this interview with our president, who is a very, very, very, very smart man.

8. My dissertating advisees are, as the kids say (or maybe the fact that I am saying it means they are no longer saying it), rocking out. Two have recently won very competitive fellowships, another is making crazy headway on her diss, and another is defending hers on Thursday. Another of these recently bungee jumped from the highest commercial bungee point in the world. And she lived!

 

what one can learn about one's self from cleaning out one's office

A few years back, during a round of budget cuts, the English Department, which never, ever has any money, made its final cuts.* It cut out long distance telephone service, and it cut out exam books. These are the little booklets of lined paper (sometimes known as blue books) that students use for exams. The solution was to xerox exam books, and so students were given stapled sets of paper with lines crookedly xeroxed onto them. These little copies were so sad.

And then a couple years later I was jointly appointed in English and Communication, a department where people get grants, and things are much more flush. Imagine my delight when, during a supply-gathering visit to the main office I discovered that Communication had exam books! Loads of them, sheathed in plastic wrap, in various sizes (5, 10, 20 pages).

Today while I was cleaning out my office, I found several stashes of those exam books, tucked under a stack of folders on my filing cabinet, hidden away in a drawer, stacked with my course packets on my bookshelves. Two packs weren't even open. Apparently over the past four years I have been hording them, like a child of the Depression who dies of old age in a house with a basement full of canned beans, or a hibernating animal after a long, hungry winter with a fort of twigs and nuts. After I cleaned out my office, I had a stack of exam books more than a foot high, my little nutty stash.

*by final, I mean final. When the next round of budget cuts came, the Head reportedly showed the Dean the budget, and the Dean reportedly said "nevermind."

here's something

So far, the single biggest advantage to being in London vis-a-vis my job is that I can wake up in the morning, answer all my email, and then have about seven or eight hours of a day before another email trickles in, since it is the dead of night back home. Experience tells me that another advantage, to be felt when I return home late next week, will be that I will wake up prit-tee early and have lots of time to work in the still and dark.

rhetorical studies reading group: Joshua Gunn

Last night the rhetorical studies reading group had the pleasure of spending time with Joshua Gunn from the University of Texas. We read three very recent essays of his--one on freemasonry (R&PA), one on the "big rhetoric debate" (RSQ) and one on sonorous rhetoric (QJS). Gunn is perhaps best known for his book Modern Occult Rhetoric (go here for my review of that book), and all his work, as we discussed last night, engages the category of the ineffable. More than the other meetings this year, this meeting felt like an episode of "Inside the Actor's Studio."

When CF, JMM, and I arrived at the IPRH building, we were delighted to see this blown-up image of the Sizing up Rhetoric volume hanging out in the dark hallway at the top of the stairs. I've included a blurry i-phone image at right, with my hand to give you an idea of the scale. Given that Josh's piece, "Size Matters," is a direct response to the 2006 RSA conference which bore the same theme, we couldn't have asked for a better visual aid. So we lugged it downstairs to set up for our meeting.

The conversation ranged from taking risks in scholarship,  to exercising tenacity in the face of grim reviewers, to the difference gender makes in calling something privacy or calling it secrecy, to the distinction between play for play's sake and play mixed with a heavy shot of rigor (Josh's work, in my view is most definitely the latter). Josh played Led Zeppelin backwards on his portable phonograph to help explain how he started working on the occult, about his interest in secrecy, and forecasting his current interest in the affective quality of sound and projected meaning. (His current book project is on haunting voices and sonorous rhetoric, which I am very keen to read.)

The reading group had the best turnout we have had since we served free pizza and quite the cross-disciplinary section of grad students and faculty too. Thanks, Josh, for visiting our campus, for giving a talk to our undergraduates on love and rhetoric (I understand there was standing room only and that the talk made everyone want to transfer to Texas). Those who attended are invited, as always, to use the comments to reflect on various parts of the conversation. 

Dear people who like to call me "Deb,"

I don't want to sound like a jerk, but I really really hate to be called "Deb" by anyone except my dad. People in the field have taken to calling me this, though, and in the past several months, it has taken on a viral quality. There could be a number of reasons for why people have started this. I'm thinking here of Judith Butler's famous meditation on the faux-familiarity of "Judy," and I know there are other women in the field who go by Deb and probably likewise dislike being called Debbie, so this can lead to some confusion I suppose. Another likely reason is that I have two other names--Debra and Debbie--the former is my formal/legal name that I use professionally; the latter is what I've gone by all my life. Deb might be some sort of common denominator that people choose when they don't know what to call me. But it's not my name. In fact, I really don't like being called Deb for reasons that date back to awkward teenage years. When folks address me directly as "Deb," I tend to find a way to let them know, but it's harder when it's happening in conversations of which I'm not a part.

A friend who just returned from CCCC tells me that he heard lots of people referring to me as "Deb Hawhee" there, and I see it on the internets too.  I'm not sure if I can stop it, but I'm hoping that by posting here, I can at least spread the word beyond the people who know me pretty well: I loathe being called Deb.

I know I'm not the only one who experiences this--a good rule of thumb is to call people by their full/formal name until told otherwise. Thanks for understanding.

sincerely yours,
debbie

to a small handful of graduate students in my (English) department,

When I was a graduate student I did some dumb things. Like that email complaining about an administrator that I accidentally sent to the administrator. Oops! And a couple of snotty, haughty letters about hiring issues wherein I, who had not yet stepped foot on the job market, pretended I knew what I was talking about. Cringe.

I'm embarrassed about these now and am grateful that I was in a department where such mis-steps could be forgiven. This week I have had cause to remember those dumb things in part because a group of graduate students here has been acting in a manner that I find quite appalling. (None of these graduate students, for the record, is in my own field, though the controversy is swirling around that field.)

The controversy is about changes being implemented in the rhetoric program. I have no problem with people raising concerns--and any drastic change is going to draw attention, even pushback--but the manner with which concerns have gotten raised is what really bothers me. This department prides itself on a supportive environment for graduate students; what is more, faculty political views range pretty much from liberal to radical, and many colleagues would rather have their books wither at the hands of angry peer reviews than be deemed unsympathetic to graduate students.

For my part, though, that goodwill has been eroded after the behavior I have witnessed and heard about this week. The behavior runs the gamut from bullying other graduate students who offer alternative viewpoints or--worse--reducing them to tears with facebook tirades, to circulating anonymous biased surveys, to writing nasty, disrespectful letters of protest, to undermining departmental protocols for raising concerns, to trying to pit faculty members against each other. All because of some curricular reform that is in my view much needed and still very much in the works.

Graduate students, I urge you to learn collegiality early on. You are professionals, and professionals treat each other with respect, not derisive dismissal. I am deeply saddened about the behavior around here, and in response to that behavior I maybe haven't been the model of collegiality myself, in part because I felt like some rears needed some serious kicking. While the department is fortunate to have leaders who have stepped in to clear up the confusion and paranoia, I fear lasting damage has been done, and it spreads across your ranks (the graduate ranks) like a spilled bottle of toxins.

People, it's really not worth it. Try stepping outside of your own narrow interests to see a broader institutional picture, including (gasp!) the people who take these classes. Write your dissertations, teach your classes, and work on being collegial and navigating differences with respect. It will be good practice, and your future colleagues will be grateful.

sincerely yours,
debbie

here's something (else) cool about illinois

Thanks everybody for your comments on my bittersweet post. But enough about me, let's talk about Oronte Churm, one of my favorite features of these here parts. Oronte, for those of you who don't know, has a column called "Dispatches from Adjunct Faculty at  Large Research University" at McSweeney's and a blog/column at Inside Higher Ed called "The Education of Oronte Churm." "Oronte Churm" is of course a pseudonym, and while it used to be an air-tight pseudonym, it's now a pseudo-pseudonym, because he revealed his identity earlier this year, and with a fair bit of local publicity, I might add.

But I had been on to Oronte before that. It started when I was sitting in the waiting room with my colleague who was about to have his wisdom teeth removed, and said colleague (also a fan of Oronte's) announced to me that he had almost tracked down this person's identity and that maybe I could help him because he was fairly sure Oronte taught in my other department. He explained that he kept noticing little local coincidences. Apparently the clincher was the topic of a particular talk Churm mentioned in one of his columns, and it happened to be a talk my colleague had noticed in the scores of titles that flash across our screens. He then started to narrow things down.

While my colleague's head was rolling from his surgery drugs, I came home and picked up the matter from there. I looked through McSweeney's backlogs and discovered an anecdote that overlapped with my first year here in which Oronte was asked to leave a job market meeting. It was a meeting I also happened to be in (as a guest speaker), and I remember the moment as quite tense. I didn't understand why people who didn't happen to hold degrees from our program ought to be asked to leave, but as a brand new assistant professor, I really couldn't say anything. Anyway, his descriptions of the players were unmistakable. This particular entry, like so many of his others, combines range with wit, the intimate with the political. His prose usually makes me forget I'm reading on a screen, or reading at all.  

Anyway, it has been cool knowing that he's in our department, and reading his occasional pieces that reference life in and around the University of Illinois Hinterland University, even though I never see him. Check that: ours was one of the random houses he brought his kid by this year for trick-or-treating, and it was kind of appropriate that his son, whose screen name is "Starbuck" and whom I've read about but have never seen, was in disguise. I was distributing candy and looked up at John/Oronte waiting on the stairs. I have never properly met him, but not knowing his son's real name, and not bothering to introduce myself, I asked: "which one is Starbuck?" He sweetly pointed out one of the masked characters clamoring for tootsie rolls.  Being a local celebrity is probably weird that way.

All of this is to say, that the department that hires him will be a lucky department indeed.

on leaving

I am not good at leaving places. The summer before I started high school, my team spent a long week in Pulaski, Tennessee, a wretched place. We slept on hard tiled classroom floors, the only good thing about which was that the tile was cool at night, and summers in middle Tennessee are blazing. We played basketball for 10 or 12 hours a day and got sick on long john silvers fish. I got kicked out of a game for fighting with a girl who weighed way more than me, and our coach yelled and yelled and yelled at me and our point guard, the only two rising freshmen who would (he could only hope at the time) become starters that year. I should have been miserable--it was objectively miserable--but I cried when we left.

When I left for Illinois from central PA in the summer of 2000 to start my new job as an assistant professor, with my new (to me) whippet Jada rolled up in the back seat next to my big television, I went off the road a couple of times because my vision was all blurry and watery. State College had been so good to me.

When I left Illinois the first time (and yeah, yeah, as one colleague helpfully pointed out, I know we can't come back again), I was totally fine, quietly excited even, until I went to give my office keys to the secretary, a sweet woman who had just started working in the English department. One moment I was cheerfully offering her my keys, and the next moment I was sobbing so uncontrollably that her eyes filled with tears. Before that day, she had never even met me.

All this is to say what some of you already know: we are moving. I told my last phd advisee yesterday, and appropriately it was the most wrenching of the conversations. Let's just say there were, once again, tears, and I have been mopey ever since. If I think about how great my Aristotle students have been this semester, I'm afraid I'll break down even more.

JM and I are very, very excited about where we are going (Penn State), but the joy of going to a great department where rhetoric is cheered by department heads and higher-ups alike, and where there are hills to bike and hike, and where there is my favorite indian restaurant ever, and where E! and Z will both be seven or eight hours closer, still does not make it any easier, any less heartbreaking, to leave a wonderful place with such smart, good people and great friends.

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.