b l o g o s

whassa?

While driving home from a run at Allerton this afternoon, John and I heard a segment on our local NPR station that--no joke--opened like this:

"Students at Danville High gave up part of their day off today to help commemorate Martin Luther King, Jr."

I'm with RMH; something is very wrong with the assumption that nonsouthern states do not need to celebrate King's birthday. 

chiasmus

Yesterday the rhetoric folk here at Illinois had a playdate with the rhetoric folk from Indiana University. The colloquium, held here in Urbana, was organized by graduate students from both institutions and involved a couple of faculty panels and lots of time in the middle of the day for the graduate students to share their work.

It was a day of exchange and reciprocity, and that reciprocity is elegantly underscored by the chiasmus formed by our institutional initials: IU-UI. A chiasmus, of course, is a rhetorical term for linguistic reversal (as in JFK's famous "ask not" twist). The term has visual roots too, since it's derived from the greek letter CHI, which is rendered as an X, itself a cross. And there's also, if I'm not mistaken, a medical use of the term to indicate the way the tendons cross on the front of the knee. Those tendons provide a kind of flexible support even as they enable movement, not unlike the rhetorical chiasmus, which through its movement helps a sentence stick in the memory.

This sort of cross-institutional bond is so important, I think, to get outside of one's own insular institutional world and to see what terms and trends are operating elsewhere. And it's a different, more up-close view than a broader conference would offer, especially since there's such a wide cross-section from both schools. Illinois had strong representation from both Speech Communication and Writing Studies, the two places where things rhetorical tend to crop up on our campus.

All the grads got good practice discussing their work and sharing ideas with a new and non-threatening audience of faculty and grads. And I finally got to meet Bob Ivie, one of the many famous Bobs who have been shaping the field for some time. (If you haven't looked at his article on Bush's 'War on Evil' in the inaugural issue of KB Journal, you should.) What a treat, too to meet Phaedra Pezzullo (environmental communication) and Ted Striphas (philosophy and media), also from the IU faculty. Pezullo shared some instructive and amusing tales from publishing her (really cool) ecofeminist work, and Striphas boldly put Raymond Williams next to Gilles Deleuze to theorize the virtual--now THAT's a play date I'd like to see.

The day ended with a lively potluck at Stephen Hartnett and Brett Kaplan's house, where we all did a pretty good job with the chiasmatic mingling and with the hefty supply of booze and food. The whole day, in fact, like that shot of grappa I did with Stephen before leaving, was resonant.

And when we make the trek to Bloomington next winter, the chiasmus will continue.

XXXX

movie lessons

Last night, John talked me into watching War of the Worlds, and I learned some important things:

1. Dead beat dads can sometimes come through in a pinch.
2. In case I ever need to dress a 10 year old for the apocalypse remember: layers and lots of bold colors are best.
3. Throw away all anti-bacterial soap.
4. Dakota Fanning looks a lot like my niece:

watching our words

Currently I'm reading Elizabeth A. Wilson's Psychosomatic: Feminism and the Neurological Body and thinking about the relationship between biological reductionism and biological determinism. Previously, I've lumped the two together in a kind of causal relation whereby reducing humans to physiological processes alone entails a kind of determinism--i.e., those processes get credited with everything that follows, and even the notion of “following,” in that it presumes a body-before-culture, is a huge problem. In other words, biological reductionism and biological determinism fall in the same category in which the South Park school counselor puts drugs and alcohol, "Baad, 'nkay?"

But now Wilson is helping me imagine the possibility of a more productive, strategic kind of reductionism, which is less reductionism and more scrupulous focus on physiological processes, their changes, their movement, the way they are intertwined with other movements deemed less physiological--meaning making and language use, for example.

And her move to boldly and rigorously rethink terms that have been all but banned from academic vocabulary (in the humanities anyway) has me thinking too about a broader issue: the further I get from graduate school, the more suspicious I become of the habit of avoiding certain words.

An anecdote may help here: at MLA I met a friend of mine from grad school chaffed at my description of the paper I was to give there, which was going to talk about how ancient rhetoric as a field suffers from conflicting identity crises by its affiliation with classics on the one hand and rhetoric on the other.

He screwed up his face at the term “identity,” something our grad school theory profs had little patience for, and he proposed that we should talk about “alterity crises.” But just how reflective is my friend’s find-and-replace tactic? Can’t we do better than a covert insertion of a new term? I am of course well-schooled in all the issues that rage around something like identity politics, and this isn’t meant to be about that particular term as it is about these sorts of flaggy words in general. 

It seems to me that one way to come to terms with these sorts of terms is by carefully considering the various fractious debates that have led to their suspension, and either looking for something the debates are missing, or asking what is lost through the jettisoning of a particular term. Jonathan Arac is currently writing a genealogy of the notion of identity, I imagine, for these very reasons. It may be that certain concepts have run their course and others are more useful or specific. But to use an analogy Kenneth Burke used for aesthetics in the 30s, if we take one last look around before clearing out, we might be surprised what we find, and what we find may change the whole place.

review of Kraps Universal Panini Grill*

is this model supposed to be disposable?, January 12, 2006 Reviewer: sandwich lover (Urbana, IL United States) - See all my reviews This machine has many genius features--the back flexi-coil that allows for even heating; the perfectly separated ridges that also cook evenly and make lovely sandwiches--but the one feature that is annoyingly unreliable would be the machine's ability to work for more than 6 or 8 months. Our first Krups panini maker went by halves. With only one half of the grill working, we even settled for flipping the sandwiches for some time because the damned thing cost so much. But soon we grew tired of that and perhaps ill-advisedly bought another one. The second one worked for maybe 7 or 8 months, and then it just stopped. If you do buy a Krups FDE312-75 Universal Grill and Panini Maker, save your receipt because Krups customer service department, where they are well aware that I'm writing this review, won't help you without proof that the machine is still under warranty. If the machine keeps working beyond the 1-year warranty time period, consider yourself lucky! We're now buying a Cuisine-art griddler in hopes that it will last longer. Update: *this review is exclusive property of Amazon.com and protected by U.S. and international copyright laws. Here's the relevant text: REVIEWS, COMMENTS, COMMUNICATIONS, AND OTHER CONTENT If you do post content or submit material, and unless we indicate otherwise, you grant Amazon.com and its affiliates a nonexclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, and fully sublicensable right to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, and display such content throughout the world in any media. You grant Amazon.com and its affiliates and sublicensees the right to use the name that you submit in connection with such content, if they choose. You represent and warrant that you own or otherwise control all of the rights to the content that you post; that the content is accurate; that use of the content you supply does not violate this policy and will not cause injury to any person or entity; and that you will indemnify Amazon.com or its affiliates for all claims resulting from content you supply. Amazon.com has the right but not the obligation to monitor and edit or remove any activity or content. Amazon.com takes no responsibility and assumes no liability for any content posted by you or any third party.

OFL on my hat

Back at the library today, and Our Favorite Librarian (OFL) actually spoke to me while I was being helped by another librarian. The subject--object?--this time, was my hat. This hat, a brown houndstooth hat with a little pearl-dotted houndstooth flower on the side is probably the most stylish hat I own at the moment. 

"That looks comfy."

I responded with a pensive (or maybe perplexed) look, and OFL added, "and warm. It looks warm."

Truth is, the hat in question, which I was forced to buy at a Pittsburgh boutique along with a matching bag because I liked the bag so much (I try not to sport the two together because it makes me look like I'm trying to be francais), is neither comfy nor warm: it leaves my ears exposed and presses onto my forehead, making it itch. But in the library the itchiness was nicely translating into heat, so I nodded--"oh yes, it's definitely warm." OFL, looking satisfied, returned to organizing the hold shelf.

wonky slicing

Today I discovered that without a big calendar hanging over my desk for me to quickly glance at multiple times while emailing and phoning about appointments, commitments, and deadlines, I'm just lost. Never mind that open in front of me was my 2006 planner, the place where I actually write down those appointments, commitments, and deadlines. It's the wall calendar, though, with its big blank squares, that helps me visually map the weeks to come. Making matters worse, when I do glance up at the wall, there's December staring back at me because I've yet to take the old one down. And trying to overlay January onto December makes my brain hurt.

So at the gym today when Brett, the spouse of my colleague Stephen, cheerfully ended our convo at the elliptical machine with "see you on Saturday at the rhetoric thing!," it's no surprise that I gave her a blank look, producing anxiety on both our parts that I was somehow not invited to said "rhetoric thing." I finally registered what thing she meant--a dinner event for a rhetoric colloquium that I'd entered into my planner literally hours earlier today--and replied "oh yes, that's next Saturday." And she gently informed me that no, it's this Saturday. Of course Brett's right, but without my visual map of the week or month, the dinner could be three weeks from now for all I know. And it might not even be dinner.

The calendar-glancing and visual mapping must occur more or less unconsciously, because I've never really noticed I do it until this past week of December-induced dissonance. Maybe it's something along the lines of the kind of split-second rapid cognition that Malcolm Gladwell calls "thin slicing" in his latest book Blink. Even though Gladwell doesn't discuss such a phenomenon, the visual nature of thin-slicing makes me think I thin-slice stretches of time, forming a snapshot of commitments and prospective commitments in relation to each other and quickly batching them together or spreading them out as appropriate. I'm sure others do this too. But this works only if the familiar calendar squares beginning with Sunday and ending on Saturday are numbered as they're supposed to be numbered, and for this month. Otherwise, my slicing goes all wonky, and everything's disrupted.

This is pathetic: what are we, a third of the way through the month already? How the heck would I know?

from the team annals

Yesterday my old team played the University of Connecticut in front of 24,653 spectators at Thompson Boling Arena, and on CBS. That's a lot of eyes on the game.  When this gets added to the record books, 5 out of the 7 largest crowds to watch Tennessee women will have shown up for the now-storied rival with UConn.

When I arrived on campus the UConn rival hadn't materialized and the TB arena was pretty new--less than a year old. The very first time the team had packed it nearly that full (past the 20,000 mark), was the year before when they played Texas.

That game didn't go so well.

When that Tennessee team, just coming off a national championship, stepped onto their new and shiny like a polished orange floor, the crowd was like nothing they'd ever seen. I've played in front of crowds that big, and it really feels like all the seat-holding concrete is going to cave and the loudly dressed shouting and waving people are going to tumble right down on top of you. Scary. The first game like that was in 1987, and I remember it not because I played--I was still in high school then--but because that game went down in team history as the Biggest Embarrassment Ever. The Tennessee team froze in front of that big crowd, and not even the heat from Texas's guard shooting could thaw them. They lost to the Longhorns 97-78.

I remember the score because it was painted above the entryway to the interior part of the locker room before the smell of the new building materials had a chance to settle.

I also remember the score because Coach Summitt designed a special 97-second drill that involved a shitload of running for 97 seconds. I can't even remember how much running--must have blocked it--but I do know that if the entire team didn't finish the amount in under 97 seconds, that meant a do-over. Which meant tongue dragging, eye rolling resentment. Which meant no one ever went over.

Pat kept that 97-second drill around for a couple years as a reminder of just how embarrassing it is to get walloped in front of such a massive home crowd, and every time she would lecture us about defense and about how each second that ticks off should remind us of a point that got given up. I admit to not so much thinking about points accumulating as about the number of seconds until the dreadful thing would be over. The 97-second drill didn't go away until we won a second championship, at which point the locker room score finally got painted over with some statement about how rebounds win championships.

So this would explain why upon seeing the score of yesterday's game (89-80)--Tennessee won, by the way--my response wasn't so much pride or happiness as relief.

truck o meat

Today I made the first entry in my pristine 2006 planning calendar, and I'm proud to announce that the calendar item had nothing to do with work or even beginning-of-semester socializing. Instead, the entry, for 14 January reads simply:

Pick up Meat!

I tend to use exclamation points when the item is either a) an urgent matter, or b) something I'm excited about. This one probably qualifies as a little bit of both.

With no reliable organic market or grocery to speak of, buying meat that comes from ethically raised and drug-free animals in the winter when the local farmer's market isn't running can be something of a challenge. But a local farm, the Moore Family Farm, that usually sells beef, lamb, poultry, and deliciously rich eggs at the market has also set up a direct order system so that customers can order in advance and pick up the food at an undisclosed "location in southeast Urbana" the second Saturday of each month.

So I just called to order our meat, and the woman who answered the phone--Mrs. Moore?--gave me directions to said location, which basically went like this: go until the roads are no longer named but numbered (as in county road 1501; not 1st avenue), then head south, then turn into a place called "deerfield trails," which I'm guessing is less a subdivision and more of a field full of deer trails, and look for the white pickup truck with the Illinois license plate that says GRASS FED.

And we wondered how we'd live without a Whole Foods.

belly mending

This morning Jada and Tillie got into a scrum over their stupid dog food, and Tillie ended up back at the vet's for the second time in three days (because it was the second whippet fight in three days). Unlike a "redneck fight," which David Cross hilariously describes as beginning with the sound of two bar stools scraping against the floor and allowing plenty of time for you to grab your beer and get a good view, whippet fights are over before they begin, or before I can make it down the stairs to see why the dogs and John are making such a ruckus.

Whippet skin is super thin--they have five as opposed to the seven layers of skin that normal dogs have--and so they just rip right open. Leslea, a Berkeley anthropologist friend of ours who digs up 6-million year old bones in Kenya, tells me that the village she works in has lots of whippets who are constantly getting torn open on the sharp fencing material and then getting sewn up by the locals: sewing up the whippets is something of a village hobby, apparently. John and I have decided we might need to learn how to sew up the dog, since belly mending costs upwards of $300.00 a pop.

It's odd that this hasn't happened before; they're usually either minding their own business or are all cuddly and lovey like in the picture above left. But the folks at the vet office told us, with a hint of portention, I might add, that things might be changing now that Tillie is hitting pubescence (their term). One vet assistant moved her entire mouth to the left side of her face, screwed up her eyebrows, looked at us pityingly, and told us we "just might be in for a long haul."

The vet herself (not our usual vet; Dr. Dust doesn't work on Thursdays), who incidentally has the mouth, teeth, and the facial symmetry of a former super model (John claims he has a crush on her competence, not her cheekbones), told us that we have to adhere to the alpha order, but the trick, she explained, is that this means figuring out who's really alpha. We've been acting as if Jada is, and so we let her in the door first and feed her first and try to greet her first. But Tillie has been developing her own alpha tendencies: perching her front paws on Jada's back when we come home so that she might be the first to be stroked by the new arrival; making crazy yowling noises when we do manage to pet Jada; and basically acting like a little wind-up maniac when there's greeting or toys or food involved. But I don't know if mania=alpha or if it means pubescent puppy.

And Donna Haraway's Companion Species Manifesto, while offering a terrific critique of the tired habit of referring to dogs as daughters or sons and owners as "mom" or "dad," and insisting instead on a relationship of reciprocity between humans and dogs, is really no help when we need to figure out how the pack that is our household is going to be structured--that is, how we are going to prevent more whippet fights.