b l o g o s

scattershot 10: not enough time to process

1. Daniel Gross's book, The Secret History of Emotion, is an important one. A few of us in my seminar felt like he beat up on science unnecessarily toward the beginning of the book, and that surely there is more to say about scientific accounts of emotion than that they are reductive, but others made a good case that he had to do that in order to make room for his intervention on behalf of the humanities. (By the way, having a class full of productive critics totally rocks.) The end of the book moves toward a much tempered critique of work about emotions that relies on scientific findings, but the imbalance is noticeable and off-putting. We did wonder how Gross might respond to recent work in rhetoric that makes use of some of the very scientific work he critiques without ever losing sight of what rhetoric brings (and must bring!) to the table (e.g., Crowley's Toward a Civil Discourse).

When a fellow Aristotle scholar saw Gross on my syllabus, he said "you know that book isn't really about Aristotle," I was all "I know!" But approaching it  from the depths of book II of A's Rhetoric makes it very difficult to read as a book about anything but Aristotle (despite its focus on 17th- and 18th-c rhetoric), because of its sustained case in favor of rhetoric's usefulness for conceiving the emotions as active energy that happens between people. My class has developed the parlance of "dispositions on dispositions," which is well supported by the first lines of Book II. Aristotle hangs with Judith Butler as Gross's heroes, a pairing that no doubt deserves its own post.

Since I don't have time to say more, I do welcome comments on this or other parts of the book--I know some of you have read it thoroughly (and this goes for people in my class who definitely have and other scholars who I believe have), so do post away. 

2. My visit to IU was fast, fun, and pretty intense. When I first started in this business, I was not all that good at thinking on my feet, but now I feel a lot better equipped for doing that, in part because I've had a lot of practice, and in part because I acknowledge that no answer will ever perfectly address a question because of the intractable problem of other minds and the inherent difficulty of knowing where a question is really coming from (and the strictures that prevent us from saying that on the spot). But/and so it's a good idea to check in with the questioner's nonverbal cues and to keep checking back in verbally (and nonverbally--with looks and gestures) with the questioner even in the midst of other answers in order to keep interesting lines of discussion alive.

3. I have only once been stumped silent by a question, and so was quite relieved when the questioner interrupted the silence and said something along the lines of "Oh! Did I ask about the implications this research holds for ethos? I meant pathos!!" (Those of you from Purdue probably remember this.)

4. Even though I have just finished an entire book about Kenneth Burke, I still find it difficult to sustain a conversation with someone who *only* uses Burkean terminology. Now, this might just be my problem, but I still think it's important to make an effort to break out of the terminology. (This problem is not of course confined to Burkeans, but also to Deleuzians.)

5. When you are doing a presentation of some sort, if you're lucky, there will be a question or two that will "stick" and end up moving the whole project (or the next one) in an unanticipated direction. You might not realize this for several months or years, but it is still very cool. As a scholar I chase that feeling.

6. As an audience member and a student, nodders sometimes bug me (I say this as a partially reformed nodder), but as a speaker and a teacher, oh lordie, nodding and its bodily partners--hastily writing something down, low rumbles of assent, even good eye contact--are oh, so welcome.

7. I had a good conversation with someone this week about how the best classes are often the ones you're least prepared for. It strikes me that this only works if you are not expecting the class to go well because you haven't prepared. It also strikes me that I might test this hypothesis this week, since I'm flying back on the day of my seminar meeting.

8. Moderating a long discussion (which I did for Tuesday's panel on the Media and the Election) is kind of awesome but also a teeny bit stressful because I don't want to play favorites, and it is impossible to tell whose hand goes up first when they all shoot straight into the air. 

9. If you have not seen David Sedaris on his current tour or had the good fortune of knowing people who have recounted to you the highlights, I suggest you read his piece in this week's New Yorker on undecided voters, like, right now.

10. Come on, November 4!!!! I America can't wait much longer.

philosopher cocks and other wildness

Let me let you in on a little secret: I am excited to be working with ancient material again. I loved doing the research for the Burke book--don't get me wrong--but I also love our classics library, and I have missed it. It's a great space with lots of little nooks that are all only steps away from, really, all the resources one would need to research ancient texts and artifacts. Today I spent hours there, gathering up books, leafing through some of them, discovering (to my delight) that this is one of the best places in the world to research Aesop, catching up with the two wonderful classics librarians, and tracking down different encomia and dialogues written about animals. One in particular is by the 2nd century rhetorician and cynic Lucian, and it's a dialogue between a fellow called Micyllus and a rooster. The rooster, as it turns out, is Pythagoras reincarnated. When the rooster reveals his true identity to Micyllus, M exclaims, "Now this is far more miraculous than [a talking rooster]! A philosopher cock!"

Now do you see why I missed the ancients? They're totally nutty.

physicality and libraries

Yesterday I spent some unhappy, downright uncomfortable time in the library. I allowed myself 15 minutes to  check out the 2001 bound volume of RSQ, which has, among other things, Richard Graff's cool article on Aristotle and written style. Twenty minutes should be fine, no? No. I've been retrieving articles from rhetoric journals for years here, and so spatially I know what floor and approximately what shelf they are on--the usual suspects, Rhetorica, Philosophy and Rhetoric, Rhetoric Review, QJS. They're all proximate to one another because of topic and title. And as far as I can remember, RSQ has been right in there with them. So without bothering to check the call number, I bopped down to floor 3.5 (yep, there's a touch of Being John Malkovich in our stacks), but lo, there was no RSQ.

Long story short, RSQ is now (or was it always?) shelved in the Q section (for oversized stuff--the RSQ newsletter was at one point 8.5 x 11). The Q section is on 2E, the dungeony, musty, not temp controlled, dark depths of the east part of the library. The ceilings there are low--about 6.5 feet--but the doorways are way lower, and the caged lightbulbs hang down, like bats, waiting to graze the head of any person of estimable height (ie me). It sucks to hit your head. So I stoop. As in bend-at-the-waist stoop. It turns out this posture, and the lack of light, makes it nearly impossible to read the call numbers, and so I got lost. Also, stooping while trying to read call numbers puts one at risk for tripping over the large piles of books in the walkways. I felt like I was doing some secret academic obstacle course. (The place is an utter mess thanks, I think, to some book shifting that's going on this summer.) And then? When I finally found RSQ tucked on a shelf next to a caged cubicle that looked like it would be used by Oz of Buffy fame if he decided to go to graduate school to study history, I could not find my way out of the second floor. I took one stairway that led up three flights (half-flights?) to--I kid you not--a sealed wall. It was a little unsettling, and physically just awful. When I got out of there, I was clammy and nauseous, and a little disoriented. And it took much longer than 15 minutes.

ARTstor score!

While I was digging through Jstor, C was figuring stuff out on ARTstor, and she sent me this image, a fresco titled "Augustine Teaching Rhetoric in Rome":
look at the little pooch! He is paying just as much attention to Augustine as everyone else.

Thanks, C!

photo credit:

Benozzo Gozzoli: Augustine Teaching Rhetoric in Rome (1463–5), fresco, S Agostino, San Gimignano; photo credit: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

anatomy of a conference abstract

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.

 

 

book-making

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.

the dirt

In the  last chapter of my soon-to-be book I quote Burke in an interview saying "the only cure for an idea is digging in the dirt." (And I also quoted that here at the end of last summer.) This morning I finished a last pass through my book manuscript, and then JM and I bought some topsoil at Blain's Farm and Fleet and put in a garden.

I'm going to ship off the manuscript on Monday, yay; next time I see it will be in the copyediting phase. The title will be Moving Bodies: Kenneth Burke at the Edges of Language. Here is the table of contents:

Acknowledgments
Introduction: "An Excursion"
1. Bodies as Equipment for Moving (from Artist to Audience)
2.Burke’s Mystical Method                                       
3. Burke on Drugs: Efficiency and the Valuation of Habits
4. From the Rhetoric of Science to the Science of Rhetoric: The Case of Endocrinology
5. Seeing ‘Deviance’ as Inclination: Kretschmerian Constitutions and Bodily Occupations
6. Body Language: Paget and Gesture-Speech Theory
7. Welcome to the Beauty Clinic
Conclusion: Action in Motion

Here are the garden contents:

1.rosemary
2.sweet basil
3.thai basil
4. spinach
5. lettuce
6. swiss chard

We did a modest garden with only our daily and weekly standbys because we'll be getting lots of veggies from the CSA and the farmers market. In the extra space and along the fence (away from the whippets), we sowed about 60 sq ft of wildflowers.

when self loathing becomes productive

I'm happy to report that today I reached that stage in the life of my current writing project (a collaborative article) in which I got so disgusted with myself that I actually began to write. I bet you know what I mean: that point where you keep nattering around on the internet in the name of "research," reading articles that are only tangentially related to the one you are writing, or in some cases not at all (this is NOT to slight the amazing availability of almost any journal I looked for yesterday; god, our library rocks).

But here's a case in point: yesterday, while looking for an article in a journal called Wordsworth Circle I came across a new piece by my friend and colleague who has started working on climate change in the 19th century. Which one did I read more carefully--the one I set out to get that had only a passing reference to Wordsworth's use of David Hartley, or the one about John Constable's cloud paintings? (I loved it by the way.) Sigh. These are all activities that can be called work, but at this point they are sheerly avoidance tactics. I made up my mind to get up this morning and write no matter what! Two full hours of writing, I promised.

And so I woke up, made my hot morning drink, opened the Priestley book to the page where I wanted to begin writing, and hit check on my email. And lo, down came a long-awaited message about book contract negotiations. A few email exchanges with a press, a dog walk, a phone call from E! and an attractive lunch invitation from JM later, and I hadn't gotten a single minute of my pledged two hours of work in. So I set the damn timer that I bought after reading a post Jenny made a long time ago about getting things done (GTD), and I made myself write for four thirty-minute increments, checking email only after those thirty minutes were up. At the end of that I now have a (too-long) part of a section that I think my coauthor and I can work with.

I rarely write after lunch, and if I do it means I'm either on a roll or under a deadline. But this afternoon I was neither. I was just pissed at myself. 

making it

There are so many measures of academic success: publications, awards, promotions, raises, etc. But in writing a book that inspires an indie rock song, Phaedra Pezzullo has introduced a new measure. Caraf, when Phaedra gives her talk here next month, can we play this song for her entrance?

Download hollanddutch-03.m3u

Oh, and here's the Atlanta band whose song it is.

This is so exciting, Phaedra!! (Thanks to Meta-S for the tip.)

 

scattershot 12, before the weekend

1. JM and I watched every second of last night's debate, except for when the live stream konked out a couple of times. I even made a batch of vegan chocolate chip cookies for the occasion. Aside from a constant low-level annoyance that CNN hogged all the coverage--what is this, Monday night football?--I enjoyed every second of it. Okay, maybe not so the question about plagiarism, which made me want to smack with a ruler the knuckles of the moderator who asked. I very much liked Obama's "silly season" response. Both candidates were poised, smart, and except for the xerox comment which garnered some boos, they were collegial. In my view Obama notched more jaw-droppingly well-formulated answers, but Clinton had her share of good moments too, such as the closing comments, including the line about how everyone knows she's been through her share of rough times. Tell it, sister!

2. After such events, I tend to seek out the new blog of a colleague-to-be who specializes in matters presidential, and whose analysis is unfailingly spot on.

3. I am positively giddy that this person is going to be our new colleague next year.

4. I am almost halfway finished proofreading my Burke book, which means if everything goes well it will be off my desk again soon, hopefully.

5. Books are long.

6. Proofreading is boring.

7. Proofreading is also kind of nice for the distance it requires. I actually sit back further from my computer when I proofread as opposed to when I write.

8. I am beyond the point of worrying about pissing people off in this book. How's that for distance?

9.  I heard two gunshots in our neighborhood at 2:30 a.m. Weird.

10. After the gunshots, I slept very deeply and had an intensely vivid dream about not being able to sleep.

11. After lunch, I will walk to the store in the snow and buy ingredients for flourless chocolate cake with raspberry sauce, and then I will make said cake and then this evening, we will eat said cake in honor of two--2!--awesome friends' birthdays.

12. This winter has been long and relentlessly cold, and I wish I could wait it out in a position like this: