b l o g o s

in between

A lot of academic life is spent in the interim, waiting for the next meeting, the next class, the next talk. I'm in my office this evening, between talks. Sometimes it's harder to go home and come back to campus than just to stay here and do it all. So after the job talk that ended at 5, I met John at Murphy's for a drink, and then we picked up a pizza and ate dinner in my office. That bottle of screw top wine I lugged here in my backpack made it a bit more civilized.

And I'm waiting around now for the evening event, a multi-sponsored talk by Anne Balsamo, who is a very cool person with very nice glasses who does very smart work. I have now lent my copy of her Technologies of the Gendered Body to no fewer than seven graduate students. There are at least a dozen people in both my departments who would give their eye teeth to hire this woman away from Southern California. I am, of course one of those people. Who needs eye teeth anyway? Aren't they just one of those vestiges of a time, yunno, before silverware?

Since a bowl full of eye teeth padded with lots of dollar signs probably won't be enough to convince the likes of Balsamo to come here, we at Illinois have to be a bit more, shall we say, innovative. Last night at dinner, for example, my dear colleague Bob Markley was telling Anne all about his new work on global warming, and he described in his patented offhand manner how by the time he's his father's age, southern California will most likely simply not be there. I wondered as I chomped on calamari if this was one of Markleys's subtle recruiting pitches--Come to Illinois! We'll be here for the rest of your life!--but it's hard to know for sure. Actually come to think of it, I've been on the receiving end of one of his recruiting pitches, and I'm pretty sure that's what this was: he pulls out all the stops. And, he'd be the first to add, with a glint of "you came back didn't you" vindication, he's usually right.

Hiring fantasies aside, it is nice to be in the company of someone like Anne who has such fond associations with Urbana-Champaign. She did her graduate work here, and I can tell she takes great pleasure in driving herself around, in the way her body just kind of knows which direction to head. And also in the way, contra Los Angeles, it only takes about 10 minutes to get anywhere. Chances are mighty slim she'll run into an ex in L.A. Whereas here? Let's just say people have a tendency to stick around and remain visible. It's a ghosty town that way.

Needless to say, I'm looking forward to her talk, which is in the building next to mine, and then to a nice, late, i-pod assisted stroll home.

going down

At long last, John and I finally went down the waterslide. The waterslide is a main feature of the recent renovations to CRCE, the recreation center on the campus's east side. Apparently the Illinois students who voted to raise their own activity fees to enable these renovations, also got to vote on the shape of the renovations. They were offered the following choices: 1) extended hours of operation (more workout time); 2) more treadmills and elliptical machines (less waiting), or 3) an aquatic center with no lanes for swimming, but instead a shallow pool with a volleyball net, a water basketball goal, a volcano fountain, palm trees, a hot tub and, you guessed it, a big fat water slide (more sliding).

We'd been daring each other to try out the slide for some time, and so today after our workouts, we met in the aquatic center, and each solemnly took our turn. In the hot tub afterward, John finally gave voice to what we have both been thinking--and I'm sure we're not alone--from the moment we first glimpsed the monstrous indoor slide: "That slide reflects all the developments in higher education over the past 10 years."

A recent survey of Illinois grads showed that "recreational opportunities" topped their list of campus positives--as well it should. Most of this renovation and new construction happened while we were away at Pittsburgh, and so the transformation seems all the more dramatic to us. When we came back, John kept marveling about how in our absence the campus had turned into a giant cruise ship floating over corn fields.

The university should really make more use of this water slide, perhaps marking all milestones from admission to graduation to faculty promotions with a trip down the slide. The chancellor, we decided, could wait at the bottom with speedos and a high five.

It's true that the slide holds all kinds of significance beyond its metaphorical downward spiral. It also signifies the increased competition among schools for tuition money, which is rising like the stairs to get to the top of the slide. The results, documented in Murray Sperber's Beer and Circus and Frontline's slide-like named documentary Declining by Degrees, include more money spent on visible glitzy recreational facilities like CRCE, and less spent on classroom facilities and faculty lines, which are of course being slowly replaced by cheaper adjunct and graduate student labor. (Locals will want to check out the labor in the humanities panel John has organized over at IPRH next Tuesday. No sliding, however, until the IPRH building expansion in 2009.)

To those of us in higher ed, these trends aren't of course news, and many of us have also learned the lesson John was reminded of on today's trip down the slide: you go faster if you lie down and go with the flow rather than sitting up and looking around.

routine exchanges

1. overheard this morning at the hospital from the other side of the pink curtain:

Nurse: Have you ever had surgery?

Patient: When I was in grade school I had an emergency appendectomy, and while I was under they went ahead and took out my tonsils and circumcised me.

2. late afternoon encounter on Vine street with a young boy, about 8, while our dogs sniffed each other:

Me: That's a nice dog.

Boy: Yes, he only kills birds.

2 in a row

Dawn (my sister) just left a message on my cell phone to tell me that the Tennessee women lost to Kentucky tonight, which is kind of startling news in light of the 20+ point trouncing they got at Duke on Sunday. Even more intriguing to me, though, is that Kentucky's coach, Mickie DeMoss, was also my coach at Tennessee--she was Pat's assistant for 18 years--and we all ADORED her.

Mickie masterminded so many small adjustments, many of which won us games, like deciding to play in front of rather than behind those gigantic twins from UVA. She was the one who wisely advised me to never let Pat see me cry unless it was because we just lost, and who would even stand in front of my face (out of protection) if I happened to be upset after a victory.  Mickie was our out-of-state recruiter, which meant she went after the big guns, the Ms. Michigan Basketballs, or the Chamique Holdsclaws. She recruited almost every All-American at Tennessee.

Even though Mickie was a wisp of a woman, she was in charge of coaching Tennessee's post players, the big gals. I moved in between post and guard, which meant that on occasion I would get all 110 pounds of her plus a big blocking pad, the kind designed for football, pushing me from behind during offensive drills. She liked to eat big garlicky lunches in the arena cafeteria and would suck on halls cough drops to try to mask the odor. Sometimes I thought this was to make her seem more brutish.

She was, in other words, charming in ways that the head coach can't be. And so I'm curious about her as a head coach: is she still able to maintain levity with players, or does she have to be all business? Or is my notion of what a head coach can and can't be skewed by my small data set (one high school coach and Pat Summitt, both very serious, intense, and, well, sometimes just plain mean)?

I'm sure Pat and Mickie hugged after the game, but I wish I could have seen how they really responded to each other, these women who worked together for so many years, who developed a system together that only Mickie could devise a plan to defeat (okay, Mickie and the Duke women, and as my colleague Joe Valente insists with his exquisite trash talking, UConn women at the end of the day).

I just have a hard time picturing Mickie without the coughdrop or the blocking pad, but I think I'll probably have my chance come tournament time.

damning by faint praise

The best illustrations of this, one of the most bizarre and sometimes amusing forces of utterance, often come in student evaluations. And even more frequently the comments that damn by oh-so-faintly-praising sum up in almost soundbite form how the class went, and so they are frequently quite revealing about multiple parties involved. Here's the best example from the most recent batch of evals:

"Didn't let an unenthusiastic class change overall trajectory of course"

And this under instructor strengths, people.

Here are a couple of readings, and oh do I welcome more in the comments:

optimistic: The class wasn't interested in obviously interesting material, but she persevered, remained upbeat even. She really sticks to her theoretical and pedagogical guns.

pessimistic: This woman is boring AND stubborn.

the vortex has spun me out

As evidenced by the fact that I just woke up in the middle of the night without the pressing need to record symbols on index cards. Only things pressing, in fact, were 8 whippet paws on my back. I'm now at the phase where I'm tinkering with and smoothing the 26 or so pages I've written as a way to delay having to finish that last section, which is going to require some major compacting, and then, yunno, concluding. Hooray.

Last night in lieu of compacting or concluding, I virtually helped my niece with some research for her social studies report and poster on Ancient Greece. Since most all the kids will want to do the Olympics, we decided that schooling in Athens would be an interesting focus. My sister said she and Sarah tried to find good illustrations in my book, but that all the vase scenes and sculptures showed naked people, which might not be appropriate in Tennessee's public schools or for the age group. So I dug up the three remaining school scenes where everybody has on their chitons and sent them along. Here's one of Heracles/Hercules being escorted to school by his music teacher Linus.  I omitted the legend that once when Linus was beating Hercules for being a not-so-hot student, Hercules, fed up, bludgeoned his teacher to death with his lyre. That detail might not appeal to Sarah's social studies teacher. I love that Greece still issued a stamp bearing their images in 1977. And here Linus appears to be nagging him about doing his homework. [update: the person accompanying Heracles might also be his paidogogos or a servant in charge of taking him to school; others say it's his nanny or nurse, Geropsos]

I also described in an email how boys were required to recite from Homer's epics as a way of producing allegiance to Greek values. Kind of like the pledge of allegiance, I said, but longer. And for that matter, more plot-driven. 

All the gathering and sifting took about an hour. If she doesn't get an A, folks, I'm doomed.

the vortex

Woo, the past few days I've been caught in a serious writing vortex. This mostly toward the end of last week. I wrote so much on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday that my hand hurt on Saturday (sth vaguely carpal tunnelish) and so I tried to take the day off to read and do other stuff but I found myself sneaking--sneaking!--back up to my computer to fiddle and adjust and then ended up writing more. The last two nights I have woken up with larger structuring ideas that I recorded on an index card in the dark: "Kennedy/rhetoric: physical energy" reads one note. Another says "other ggΘ" (Θ=the symbol I use for theory), and that's followed by an arrow (-->) which is followed by nothing. I seem to put more bleary thought into punctuating and symboling my index card scribblings than the scribblings themselves: surely I could have remembered, upon waking, to work the Kennedy piece more. But I can't seem to recall what comes after -->

It's a little weird because I haven't written this way in awhile--the daily rhythms of teaching and advising normally make us do scholarly writing around the edges of the week and the semester, and then there's the interminable process of gearing up to write--but there's something about the combination of cold weather and sleeping whippets and a still house, oh, and no teaching that has produced this typing frenzy. I've always been a spurty writer, but this is a little extreme. If I keep it up, though, I'll be able to swap the new stuff with Cara on Friday, even though I already told her I was going to dust off a chapter I wrote months ago for that.

It makes me a fairly boring blogger, though, and even worse live company--I walk the dogs in a hazy daze and have barely managed to hold up my end of weekend phone conversations with friends and family. Luckily, John and I went to the movies yesterday which gave me a) a way to conceal my blurry condition and b) something besides my work to talk about at dinner. Phew.

Oh: The Squid and the Whale. Best movie I've seen in awhile.

OFL on . . . Burke! (sort of)

Popped into the grad stacks today to grab a first edition of Burke's Attitudes Toward History (vol. 2), which if you don't know already is (like the first edition of Permanence and Change) very small and drab-olive with two red stripes of different thickness (though both kind of thin) criss-crossing on the lower left side. I've always thought the red had some communist significance, given Burke's early membership in the Party. Significant or not, OFL (aka Our Favorite Librarian) did not like the book's design one bit.

She held up the book to show me, wrinkled her nose, shook her head slowly, and said, "One plaid. Now whose idea was that?"

I shrugged and said something about how it's from the 30s, and she speculated that since it was the Depression, there must have been an ink shortage.

And then, no kidding, she launched into rhyme.

At this point, I'd thankfully located my pen and was able to write it down, and anyone who knows OFL knows she didn't notice that I was recording what she said, which was apparently her mother's mantra during the 30s, and subsequently for the better part of OFL's childhood:

"Use it up/Wear it out/Make it do/Or do without."

And then she added, unaware of the clashing prosody:

"or make it yourself."

And presented me with the newly stamped and desensitized little volume.

my weakness

Today's New York Times ran a piece on beards in the NFL, focused mostly on those sported by Jake Plummer and Ben Roethlisburger (whose name I can almost spell correctly thanks to my near-year in Pittsburgh), whose teams will meet on Sunday in the AFC championship. The writer, John Branch, combines NFL facial hair history with local ethnography, like when he interviews Denver stylist Johnna Pasquin, who says "No one has come in and asked for the Plummer."

Branch takes this as evidence that Plummer and Roethlisburger are truly going against the grain, but what he fails to realize is that no one who wants to grow a big beard is going to go to an expensive salon, since the very idea of a "Plummer" means an unkempt, wild, just let-it-go growth. Something that one can do on one's own. Something that will need to be bush-hogged, not shaved.

The beard indeed is making a comeback. It's most likely the new hipster thing. Goatees are so 1998. But full-on, untrimmed bushy-ass beards are hip. And at the risk of losing my feminist credentials, I will go on record saying I think they're pretty hot.

I mean, Plummer, who looked so conventional pre-beard, has one; George Clooney (in Syriana) has one; and the last time I ran into Michael Berube, he had one. (And that was in the middle of summer.) Thank goodness winter and winter break came, and I could talk my more practical-minded honey into bringing one in. Hooray.

Maybe it comes from being an impressionable kid in the 70s or growing up near the mountains or watching Grizzly Adams reruns in the early 80s. I don't know, but if 2006 turns out to be the year of the Big Full Beard, I won't be sad at all.

fashion tools

My belt is too big, and it is apparently made out of the toughest suede and leather-like material available, because the previous implements I've used have not helped me to make a new hole:

1. a hole puncher. Which I need to return to our department secretary.

2. a pocketknife. Honestly, it would not puncture the belt.

So today, after doing a bunch of writing and emailing, and still having time leftover before I needed to come to campus for a slate of meetings, I ventured down to the newly organized basement in search of harder core tools for the job. It turned out that three tools used in order can make a nice new belt hole:

1. an awl. This tool is apparently for carpetmaking, and I have no idea why we have one, but we do. It's also useful for making a small--too small, it turns out--puncture in a belt.

2. a drill. The awl gave me the drill idea, which I thought was brilliant. And the leather just stepped aside. Still, the bit I have in the drill is the teeny one I'm using for cabinet refurbishing, and so I was hesitant (and too impatient) to change it. But the drill got me thinking about other possibilities, and the final combo worked beautifully:

3. A big screw with an electric screwdriver. I think 1 and 3 would have worked just as well in tandem, but #2 was necessary in my thought process.

I thought of going online and seeing if anyone sells a belt hole maker, but after the tsk tsking from Rice over the panini maker, I figured I gots to earn his respect. 

[Update]:

Spencer's image contribution is priceless, so I'm elevating it from the comments. See, it turns out that the only problem with the hole puncher was that the punch-part was too blunt. So at base yours was a really good idea, John. I just needed this thing:

What's great about it is the choice of puncture widths. And that it looks like a prehistoric sea animal.