b l o g o s

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.

hopes for july

Lots of stuff is happening this month. I have a number of writing commitments that I need to get going on honoring, and two will dominate July. The first is a conference paper (ISHR in Montreal) that will also be the foray into my book. Ideally I would have liked to be culling that paper from a chapter draft, but moving has intervened, and I will instead be posing questions and positing theories more than I will be offering any fully-formed set of research results. Even so, it's exciting to have my head in that next book, albeit preliminarily.

The second is a piece for a collection on Burke in the Archives called (tentatively) "Historiography by Incongruity." This piece is kind of the underbelly of my recent book--stuff that I've been thinking about, like how so much fascinating archival material doesn't make it into histories we write because that material documents a darker story or some sort of failure or a research "dead end." I want to do a little reading on archive theory to get myself going on that one, and maybe poke around in some new archival material, since I am now within a mile from the KB papers.  

Then there's a course that I'm directing, a really cool new honors course that combines oral, written, visual, and digital communication. I met with the technology folks on campus to talk about the technology piece, instructional support they can offer, and available resources, and they BLEW ME AWAY. As in, they are assembling a team of technology specialists (one from the digital commons group, another from instructional design, and more) to help with this course. The its guys told me about these "whispering booths" (podcasting studios) that they have installed in labs around campus, and how some of them are mobile. Crazy. I left that meeting a) thinking I need to amp up (even more) the technology ambitions of the course, and b) knowing how glad I am to be here.

There's some other stuff I've committed to for the fall, but I can't think about that right now. Draft of conference paper in 8-10 days, and a sizable chunk of the collection contribution in 21 so that I can take it with me to Montreal, these are my hopes.

_moving bodies_ is out

a month early!

(clicking the image will take you to the amazon site)

how bellyache?

"All tangled. But how bellyache? If I were untangled today, I'd be tangled again tomorrow. But it's all worth trying to understand and formulate--and one should try to write a tragedy about it so that he'll be cleared for writing a farce. Half the time I'm quite gloomy--and then I suddenly feel that it really is a privilege to go through the mill, whereat I favor maintaining the same rules that had proved discomforting."

- Kenneth Burke to Malcolm Cowley, January 4, 1929

here is something i'll be writing about this week.

 
Giorgio de Chirico
Cavalli in Riva al Mare 1934

"and there may even be animals among them."*

This week I started on another article--working through a backlog here--on Burke and nonhuman animals. To this end, I have reread a bunch of Burke, taking notes whenever animals pop up. So far in Permanence and Change, I have made notes about chickens, a trout, grasshoppers, an eagle, horses, birds (more generally), a fox, a lion, a lamb, a cow, mosquitoes, apes, termites, a rabbit, and an old hen. Oh, and lots of dogs, including Schopenhauer barking like one.

*KB, Attitudes toward History 65

file under makes me excited to work on my next book even though it's not really all that related to it.

these hair designs strike me as rather greek. hat tip to mar. for more, go here. happy weekend, everybody. i'm going for a run (in a simple ponytail).

on editorial amputation

College Composition and Communication, as many of you know, is a major journal in the field of rhetoric and composition. Those of you who subscribe and have received your December, 2008 issue might have noticed that it's a rather hefty issue. This is because it features five main articles as well as the customary chair's address from this year's CCCC.

The heft is not, however, due to the usual end-of-issue shorter pieces, such as the "interchanges," review essays, or the feature that the current editor Deborah Holdstein started, called "Re/Visions," in which scholars revisit and reconsider articles that appeared long ago in the pages of CCC. These, you may have noticed, have been amputated: each piece--including a three-part "Re/Visions" feature and three review essays [!]--is printed for a few paragraphs, and then it trails into a web address that is presumably a site called "The Extended CCC," where interested (and subscribing) readers can read the rest of the piece. The issue also includes a four-page editor's account of why the amputation occurred, and this account reads like a polite defense, including a long discussion of CCC's miniscule acceptance rate.

I first found out about the editorial decision when Holdstein called me up a couple of days before the issue was going to go to press. She called me because I had organized the latest "Re/Visions" feature, a set of essays by Dana Anderson, Christa Olson, and me about a little-known article that Kenneth Burke published in CCC in 1978. The editor wanted to explain to me what was going on.

Needless to say, I was not happy about this decision, and I told Holdstein so. I also let the journal's officers know that I don't think it is the right decision to ghettoize the lively shorter pieces by lopping them off and placing them online. Practically, it means that citing the pieces is very weird. What page numbers ought to be used? And it means that people who rely on library subscriptions of the journal won't have easy access to the essays. And finally, no matter what the editor says about how these are real publications, it means that our work has been devalued.

In looking through the print edition of the issue under question, I also noted that there are THREE review essays. Review essays are also VERY hard work, and they constitute some of the most crucial evaluative work in every field. I also have to wonder why there are so many review essays. Isn't there usually only one? If that is the case, then the acceptance of so many review essays is a case of mismanagement that is unrelated to the low acceptance rate that Holdstein puts forward as the main justification for the EP CCC. What's more, our Re-visions piece ends with a blank half-page, which means three more paragraphs could have been included. The poor review-essays only got a paragraph printed in the journal, if that, before slamming into the circulation information and advertisements. Seeing those review essays, and knowing how much work went into the writing and editing of those essays made this book review editor very sad.

In any case, the thing is a bit of a mess, and even though there are various accounts about who is to blame, and even though the editor is obviously in a tight spot where page limits and acceptances are concerned, and even though I understand the problems and costs associated with publishing a book-length issue, I think this never should have happened. Jenny Edbauer Rice's piece on "Rhetoric's Mechanics" is cool, though--check it out.

Anyway, while I by no means think our "Re/Visions" essays are earth-shatteringly important, they were great fun to pull together, and the process of writing mine helped me to compose the epilogue to my forthcoming book. I also happen to think they are unfairly lopped off. I am therefore making our "Re/Visions" contribution available for download so that interested people can read it without trying to remember their usernames or passwords. You can access our essays, "Burke is Dead: Long Live Burke!" (Anderson); "The Squirm" (Hawhee); and "Burke's Attitude Problem" (Olson); as well as the original Burke article, "Questions and Answers about the Pentad," by following the links below.

Download Burke revisions
Download Questions and answers about the pentad

netflix blogging meets the article i'm drafting: brand upon the brain!

Last night we were iced in, and our dinner guest was iced out, so we watched the netflix  we had here, Brand upon the Brain!, an indie silent film from 2006, complete with intertitles. (Trailer is here.) The movie poster is pretty good, and it nicely depicts how well the film relates to an article I'm working on about Aristotle's notion of phantasia, the term he (and other ancients too) used for visual capacity in a variety of indirect contexts--e.g., dreams, memories, hallucinations, delusions, reflections in mirrors. Aristotle also uses the term to talk about the images that remain when we look at the sun and close our eyes, or to discuss what happens when we strain to see whether something at a distance is in fact a man.

Phantasia, in other words, is sight or vision (visions?) that gets called upon in fuzzy contexts, in contexts of uncertainty. 

In any case, Brand upon the Brain! turns on phantasizing--most of the plot action is a man's childhood memories on the island where he grew up, and those memories often feature dreams, blurry images, a delusional mother straining to find her children using the lighthouse spotlight, and there is also considerable intrigue involving uncertain identity. Sound, too, enters the phantasia picture with a large instrument called an "aerophone," a portable device that looks like a small phonograph but works more like a walkie talkie, created by the main character's kookoo inventor father so that his mother can keep track of her children on the island. The detail I love and that works so well in the film is that words weren't exactly discernible on this aerophone, unless, that is, the person speaking/shouting them is emotionally exercised (which their mother often was).

Since this is a silent film, and the characters do not speak per se, the aerophone stands in for speech by hurtling impossibly scratchy, screechy noises over long distances. In De Anima, Aristotle also talks about how a noise made by a mouth is not tantamount to a voice, but in order for someone to have voice--i.e., to be articulate, and to make meaning--there has to be phantasia, or the ability to envisage or conjure images that go along with words. And get this: phantasia is totally ramped up when emotions are running high, or so says Aristotle. Relatedly, I'm arguing that phantasia is rhetoric's primary perceptive faculty, at least where Aristotle is concerned.

In any case, movie does really interesting stuff with these categories of sight and sound, experimenting with the way that sound (not voice) can also help images narrate and emote. Silent movie makers knew (know?) this better than most, I suppose. And Brand upon the Brain!'s replication of the fuzzy filmstock and circular vignettes with darkness and light only enhances the rest of the film's narrative dalliances with phantasia.

reasons to look forward to January 20

1. Our new president gets inaugurated!
2. My page proofs are slated to arrive
3. Andrew Bird's new album, Noble Beast,  will be released. (We saw him perform a song or two from this last spring. Awesome. Plus it's about animals.)
4. Speaking of animals, Animal Collective's new album, Merriweather Post Pavilion, will be released. Pitchfork gave it a 9.6, which is the highest score JM or I have ever seen them give. (As a point of reference, they gave Fleet Foxes' self-titled debut a 9.0, and it received their album of the year award.)