b l o g o s

leaving-town madness

It being the day before we leave on our annual trek to Wisconsin's northwoods, there was quite a lot to do around these parts. But in addition to the packing, list-making, errand running, rental car retrieving, cooking for our co-travelers, and cleaning, I managed (with co-author's help) to send out that article we have been working on for so long now, and also to break up a tangly, squealy, scary, but ultimately bloodless whippet brawl with the help of a bag of fresh thai basil. Since we didn't have quite enough to do, JM and I made a giant batch of marinara sauce and did a little canning. Ripe tomatoes (fifteen pounds' worth, from Tennessee and Illinois) above all else.

scattershot thirteen, high-school reunion edition

1. Our tenth-grade English teacher gave a really wonderful talk, during which she read from some of our essays about music (circa 1985-86), including a little chunk where I earnestly discussed my admiration for the band Chicago. I was topped, thankfully, by the QB who wrote about his preference for Lionel Richie.
2. During that talk, someone's cell phone rang, and the ringer was "Danger Zone" from Top Gun. This was not a special reunion ringtone, I don't think.
3. Pour Some Sugar on Me, why don't you?
4. A woman I've known since fifth grade (and who I adore) came up and shouted enthusiastically, "I used to have big curly hair, and now I have big straight hair!"
5. A classmate informed me that it's obvious I had moved "up north" when I used the word "commute." (As in: "You work in Knoxville and live in Greeneville? That's quite a commute!")
6. The refrain: Classmate: "Do you have any kids?" Me: "no..." A sampling of responses after a slightly awkward silence: "Is that because you don't want to, or can't?"; "At least you have a life!"; "Well, you better hurry!"; "Dogs?" 
7. R.C.'s homemade pickles! 
8. "Oh my goodness! I didn't recognize you!" (Usually not a good thing to have to say.)
9. "Oh my goodness! You haven't changed one bit!" (A bit better, except when there is a mullet involved.)
10. Business in the front, party in the back! (hat tip to JM; c.f. the lead image.)
11. Someone asked our classmate, who is now a highly regarded pediatrician, if he went through a late puberty.
12. My h.s. bff, who is a full foot shorter than me, got mistaken for a child. [for the record, 11 and 12 both go in the !? category.]
    
13. The Lionel Richie fan in #1, who got voted "most athletic" with me our senior year and who now, besides owning a wildly successful engineering firm also does a little coaching on the side, asked his daughters to guess who I played ball for. One daughter shouted,  "Coach Ricker!" (our famed high school coach). Their dad said, "Yeah, and guess who else?" There was a long pause, and then another daughter shouted, "You!"

grounds i used to stomp

In a span of about 20 hours, I have visited the two places on the University of Tennessee campus in which, with the possible exception of my dorm rooms, I spent the most time as an undergraduate: Thompson-Boling Arena, where the basketball happens, and McClung Tower, where the rhetoric and literature (and all the humanities, for that matter) happen. Last night we went to the women's game against Arkansas, and this afternoon I did a little talk on my research in my old department.

Both the arena and the central part of campus have undergone significant changes: the arena has all new seats, and a main thoroughfare that runs by McClung tower got transformed into a pedestrian-only walkway. At the game last night, I recognized several of the media and facilities staffers working on the main floor, and half the coaching staff  remains the same, with Holly Warlick and Pat Summitt still going strong. Today, I recognized some of my old professors in and around McClung and chatted with them briefly.

This seemed to be the obverse of so many other places I know where the people come and go while the structures go on unchanged. And yet somehow the continuities are as reassuring as the new seats and bricks are lovely.

hometown gym culture

At the Y in my hometown, some men and women still wear T-shirts with the armholes down to the waist--maybe it's to match the 80s music, which, truth be told, no one will hear me complain about. But I do prefer arm-size armholes.

In the spinning class I tried where hard core heavy metal alternated with christian rock, and where the instructor exhorted us to "poooosh those pedals," the men apparently take seriously the instructor's strategy to take us to 'a fantasy place.'  One man, for example, requested that we ride down a beach full of naked ladies.

Before class started, one spinner told another spinner the following joke:

Q: How do you tell the difference between a Baptist and a Presbyterian?

A: The Presbyterian will wave to you at the liquor store.

write-athon

According to the OED, -athon is "a combining form, barbarously extracted f. MAR)ATHON, used occas. in the U.S. (talkathon, walkathon), rarely in Britain, to form words denoting something carried on for an abnormal length of time."

The most awesome part of this entry is the part that reads "rarely in Britian." The subtext mutters, "those Americans are really the only ones who 'carry on.'"

I have taken part in only one 'official' -athon--this when I was 10 or 11. It was called a "rockathon," and it involved rocking in a rocking chair until I could rock no more. (Yes, in other parts of the country a rockathon might mean something way more exciting, but hey.) It turns out that a rockathon is a brilliant stroke for those who want the things to end already, because the rockers all rock themselves to sleep with remarkable speed. I didn't last more than a few hours myself.

Penn State is famous for its dance-a-thon, a.k.a. THON, where students dance themselves into a frenzy for a whole weekend and are only allowed a minimal number of timed bathroom breaks and food breaks.

For the last couple days, though, I have conducted my own little write-athon. I came up to Chicago with my laptop and five Burke articles that are forming the center of my chapter, bought some food, and basically stayed in the apartment to write all day yesterday and the entire morning today. With the exception of a bike ride along the lake during which I was arguably still writing (I hit on a couple of useful categories), and of course excepting sleep, oh, and a beer- and scotch-tasting break with M from UIC, I've pretty much just been writing and writing. My chapter draft is ten single-spaced pages and 5,000 words longer than it was when I arrived, and more importantly, it's finish-ready, which is to say I have extensive notes about the parts I need to finish to fill this thing out. The writing has finally--finally--reached the point where it has taken over.

Burke himself writes about this moment in writing--the moment when, as he puts it, a "work reaches the fatal point at which it 'begins to write itself,' spinning from what has gone before, and perhaps actually forcing the writer to change [her] original plans." He also notes that the writer must "constantly be goaded anew," or "the project would lapse." I think I pretty much agree with his theory of "the goad." How else would we keep writing if we aren't goaded by something--some line of inquiry, some external requirement, a deadline? (Though I'm pretty sure Burke is not talking about deadlines--oh, and the piece is from 1954 and is called "The Language of Poetry, 'Dramatistically' Considered.")

Even when, on my dinner break last night, I wandered into Borders looking for some good trashy magazine to clear my head, I found myself instead leafing through this volume, a beautifully-designed coffee table book wherein writers talk about how they write, mostly their quirky associated objects and activities (Jonathan Franzen describes his squeaky desk chair; Jane Smiley talks about hot showers). It's quite the compendium of habits. I've ordered it up and may write more about it soon.

For the record, though, no one in the collection talks about carrying on writing for an "abnormal length of time."   I think it's just assumed.

some stuff I learned on this trip

1. If you ignore the rental car low-fuel warning too long, it will start flashing and commanding you to exit, and there will most likely be no exits for miles and miles. And miles.

2. How to use an inversion table.

3. I still shoot best on my home court--grass, broken concrete, and cracked ball notwithstanding.

4. My niece, Sarah, looks kind of awesome in the gemmed fake eyelashes I bought her in New York.

5. I would like to wear gemmed fake eyelashes some time.

6.  My nephew, Seth, does not watch the news because it gives him nightmares about terrorists.

7. Somehow I know lots of lyrics to songs that are popular right now and that are on Sarah's i-pod. 

8. I think I owe this mysterious knowledge to my gym.

9. People I knew in high school think it's slightly odd that I have written a book.

10. It might seem cool to drive a keyless car, but all it means in reality is that it's more difficult to find the locking device when you get out and need to lock the car or open the trunk.

11. April snow in Tennessee is as drowsy and floaty as it is rare.

12. Twenty years ago, basketball players wore very, very, VERY short shorts.

13. And very long socks.

on time

I am in a heavily-paneled hotel room a la Almost Famous somewhere in Kentucky, where I have stopped on my way to my parents' house in Tennessee, having left so late in the day that I could only get through part of my drive before needing to sleep. (Plus I'm too much of a wimp about driving more than nine hours alone and so I couldn't bring myself to do it all tomorrow.) The day began with Nietzsche in rhet trad, then turned in to a mash of meetings and emails (the meetings were lively and fun, thank goodness); zero time for working out; barely time to eat. Definitely no time to get lost finding the rental car place, because it moved from its location four years ago when I last rented there. Packing consisted of scooping warm clothes out of the dryer and into the newly-emptied suitcase. Ugh.

Tomorrow night I'm joining in with women who played basketball at my high school over the past two decades to gather around our coach, a hard-nosed, driven, warm, funny, and loving man who was badly injured in a boating accident this past summer. Very badly. Still can't walk. Not sure if he will. The whole thing is flatly awful, not least because he lost his son in the accident too.

But I think the idea for the gathering is to remind him just how many lives he has shaped--for awhile there, every player of his played in college on scholarship, and he coached four teams to state championships. Coach Ricker loves winning, that's for sure, but he lives for the moment just before winning--the crucial moment when a surge of intensity will put away a game, what he has always called rally time. And I guess to some extent that surge is what we're trying to create.

I hope it works.      

Athens, 20 years hence

In the fall of 1987, after one of my high school games, I was transported (I probably shouldn't blog about the means by which I was transported) to Athens, Georgia for a recruitment visit. To a senior in high school, Athens was a very big deal; and to this senior in high school, it was even a little overwhelming. By now my recollections of that visit are rather dim, but they're tinged in red, black, and the greyish-white of a bulldog. That was a loud visit. There was the noise of the marching band--it was one of those choice, busy weekends late in fall where the football and basketball seasons overlap--and so the UGA fight song merges in my memories with the shrieks of the coach Andy Landers in the dressing room, yelling at his players, ridiculing, really. I stood off to the side imagining myself looking him in the eyes and taking it. (I didn't think I could.) Afterward, one of the players who did look him in the eyes and take it took me to hear live music of the non-marching-band variety. I'm pretty sure that marked my first time seeing music performed in a venue that wasn't a big arena, a church, or a stage in either my high school gym or at the county fair.

And even though I returned to Athens twice more in the next four years to step on the court as an arch-rival, I only remember two things: the inside of the hotel, and the inside of the arena. Both were unremarkable.

In fact, it would be twenty more years until I would be able to really inhabit and fully appreciate Athens. My visit this time included a nice stretch of morning time with Cara at Walker's, a brick-and-tile cafe/pub that throws up a garage door every morning, probably to keep its hipness from combusting; a lovely, hospitable hour in which I got to share my work with the Speech Communication dept (currently ranked the number one rhetoric program in the country); a retrospective/prospective convo over yummy indian food with the good people from my days at Penn State; a sprawly afternoon of shopping and beer tasting with my cousin Jim, who is in his first year of law school at UGA; a lively, warm, and chatty happy hour at 283, and a knockout dinner at Farm 255. (Apparently the number of hip places in Athens are quickly approaching 300, and why bother naming them when numbers will do?)

I have seen more exposed brick and, counting the middle-eastern lunch the next day at The Grit with CF and JM, enjoyed a wider range of cuisines than I did last week in NYC. Also, augmenting the joy of seeing old friends was the pleasure of meeting people I really, really should have met before now--they know who they are. And no one--not one person!--came close to yelling or ridiculing. For that I had to go to Jim's tort law class on product liability, and even there the ridiculing was gentle and good-humored: total kid gloves. (But exceedingly witty kid gloves.)

Add in the waggy cuddly pets in my host home, and it was, in all, a perfect visit. The Platonic ideal of visits. Thanks to everyone involved, most especially John Murphy. Athens rules.

I am one of those people

who, upon learning of the latest winter storm warning from departmental staff, heads straight to the grocery store and spends almost $200 on food that she will only have time to prepare if the worst of the forecast comes true.

And yet I also believe that such reports are often exaggerated, so my just-home-from-the-grocery store motto is this: I will believe it when I snowshoe it.

[The move from third to first person in this entry plainly marks the conflict between my southern roots and my daily midwestern life.]

Xmas driving

A few years ago I made the happy discovery of what it's like to make a long solo drive on Christmas day. At first it sounds sad, or even--to the melodramatic--tragic. But it's really, really not bad, as long solo drives go. There are, for starters, about 90% fewer trucks on the highway, and even if it rains the whole day--which it did--you aren't constantly engulfed by the powerwash that is the highway spray. I can count on two hands the number of trucks I passed. Gas stations are all open, and as long as you remember to bring a cooler, and as long as you charged the cell phone and ipod and your dad doesn't trash your half-eaten, carefully saved bags of salty snacks from the trip down along with all the aluminum cans you were going to recycle when you got back, you'll have plenty of yummy fun stuff for driving. And plus, if you are staying where there are kids, as I was, you can be assured of a nice, stretchy morning, beginning with thumps, giggles, and whisper-shouts "I'll wake her up!" "No I'll do it!"

While I am accustomed to waking up before 6:30, I'm not, I realized, accustomed to being videotaped only 4 minutes later.

But! All of this leaves plenty of time for setting up the wireless router for the niece's new laptop; failing to help the nephew open that pain-in-the-ass thief-proof (because human-proof) hard plastic gadget packaging; hopping around on the outdoor trampoline--I can still, 20 years later, do the seated twister!--; making a batch of mini-biscuits for the annual fambily brunch; performing a last minute sweep-save when the nephew feeds Jada a mini-cream puff; making digital, dancing elves out of the entire family, and keeping Tillie from chasing the nephew's remote-control motorcycle to downtown Knoxville (most easily achieved by having the nephew direct said motorcycle back to the house). And there's still time to load the sacked whippets in the car and make the eight hour return trek to Urbana--closer to seven if you're driving on Christmas day.