b l o g o s

I want a leader who loves Elvis

GWB's trip to Graceland with Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has gotten a fair amount of playtime in today's news. Apparently Koizumi has himself a little obsession, or at least that's what The Independent says. In one of the best pieces I've come across, the high-powered visit prompted Independent writer Clementine Gallot to muse over the obsessions of other world leaders, including Jacques Chirac's love of Sumo Wrestling, Kim Jong II's hankering for cinema and Jordan's King Abdullah II's car racing and sky diving habit. Many of them, with the notable exception of Hungarian prime minister Ferenc Gyurcsany's thing for Hugh Grant, are hypermasculine. 

And yet mysteriously absent from the discussion is anything about the U.S. leader's obsessions. I remember that Jimmy Carter loved peanuts and Ronald Reagan jelly beans, but what, besides his devotion to god and love for power and wealth is our president obsessed with? I'm going to go out on a limb and guess it's a tossup between gadgets (left) and costumes (right). Or maybe he's content helping foreign leaders like Koizumi feed their own obsessions. In that case, perhaps his next foreign policy move can be a special screening of Team America: World Police for Mr. Kim.

Damn. He's already seen it.

the one or two problem

When June flips over to July this weekend, the summer will pretty much be half over. I am appropriately in the middle of revising my book's two middle chapters--I gave myself til mid-July to finish the second middle one--and they're giving me fits. Both chapters are about half the length of my other chapters and have each had different conference-related lives so they feel like they're in arrested development in that sense. And yet I was joking with Katka that I know I sound like one of my students, but both really say all I feel needs to be said about their respective topics. So, are the topics just wispy? Maybe.

The chapters are also similar in that they both deal with history and rhetoric of science: one is on Burke's engagement with endocrinology, and the other is on his interest in constitutional medicine, which is to say one considers internal bodily process, the other external bodily form. Both show Burke trying to use scientific discourse to respond to psychoanalysis. In these senses they can be put together to make one nice-sized chapter--a chiasmus of sorts--and that could work in a number of ways, but every time I try that it feels like each chapter's individual argument gets compromised and that together they become a chapter that tries to do too much.

Katka, in a middle of her own--having ended one project and beginning another--kindly offered to have a look at both mini-chaps. Whatta dear. Meantime, I prefer to come up with lots of ways to describe their leanness and meanness to myself. Like dental floss. Like UT's 1991 championship team that only had 9 scholarship players. Like hand grenades. Like slim jims.

Having reread this bit, I realize that if one of my graduate students was in this situation, I'd be telling him or her to try putting the two together. And then if I were the student, I'd say "I tried that! It didn't really work." I'm starting to think they need to be stitched together again. Maybe I can at least use dental floss.

an experiment

For some reason I've been thinking a lot lately about the only college summer I spent at home. I had a job at a home-town law firm to which I had to wear shirts with collars and pants or a skirt. I think dots were in that summer (this was 16 years ago, mind you). I also had a physical training regimen motivated not by some personal virtue but by my athletic scholarship and--truth be told--fear of my coach.

Mornings I would wake up at 4:30, drive 20 minutes to the Y, run 7 x 400 on the mulchy outdoor track (with timed rest that decreased each week), drive home and shower and sleep for two more hours before getting up to put on my dotted collared shirt and pants or skirt. I've been eyeing the track over at Urbana High and for some reason thinking about trying to run some 400s. In fact, maybe I'll head over here between thunderstorms to see what kind of time I can make and if it's even possible to do seven. I'll post an update soon, but if you think I'm posting my times, you can think again my friends.

UPDATE: Woo, that was hard. John, who has never run on a track (!), came along and smoked me but as usual was sweet about it. We made it through six of them, and let's just say that if I would have posted these times in college, my teammates and I would still be running the punishment laps. I'm going to try to shave 10-15 seconds off each one by summer's end: totally doable.

"Their pants are full of poop."

That line, uttered by Elizabeth at her dissertation defense this past Friday, is the afternoon's most memorable. The remarkable thing is that she delivered it so casually, and while those of us on the sidelines snickered, not one of her committee members cracked a smile because the conversation was so energized and serious, and because it really wasn't supposed to be funny. The line of course refers to Everest climbers once they reach the top (E's diss is about the technological-cultural-rhetorical production of Mt. Everest), and responded to one of the committee chairs' remarks about how all the climbing discourse is about climbing's production of vitality and yet no summitter actually exhibits signs of vitality upon summitting--in fact, quite the opposite. Witness, their pants and what is often in them.

My second favorite line, spoken by philosophy prof Dan Conway (who is on his way to A&M) was "Everest is for sissies."

lions and tigers and sleds (oh, my.)

That title refers to the decor in our NW Ohio bed and breakfast last week, and if you don't believe me, see for yourself.
I'm pretty sure the room itself was leaning toward an Asian theme, what with its bamboo print duvet (though the victorian doily valence doesn't fit that either). I suppose Tigers--okay, even leopards, since the stuffed thing among the sleds has dots, not stripes--can probably fit with that. But the sleds? We spent two nights befuddled. Well, one actually, because during our first night the electricity went out while we were watching the Cubs-Indian game on sweet, sweet B&B cable, and we could no longer gaze dumbfoundedly at all the sleds and therefore had no choice at that point but go to sleep.

In Assassination Nation, Sarah Vowell has a great tale-within-a-tale in which she regales her incredulous B&B co-guests of New England elite with reports of the jaunty, kitschy musical she'd seen the night before called Assassins, which draws together several presidential assassinations, yunno, with dances and music, all the while sipping coffee from the daintiest tea cups imaginable. Vowell clearly does not like B&Bs, and I may be with her. I always like the idea of B&Bs--the organic gingerbread scones and veggie omelette at the house of sled were, to be sure, delicious--but I guess chatting with strangers just isn't my thing. And it's too easy at B&Bs to give or take offense. There was the one in Peoria where the bland-palated John got a mean look for requesting just plain toast. There was the one where we were served coffee in cups emblazoned with verses from Corinthians. I did rather like the brownstone B&B one where I stayed in DC, because it was cheap, the room was urban tiny, and the breakfast was serve yourself. Still, there was some sort of day-long meeting in the main room there, complete with big charts and graphs, and I had to walk right in the middle of it in my running shorts going and coming.

A lot of people like the quirks of B&Bs because quirks--the sticky toilet handle, the too-short bed, the rusty scary fire exit stairs one set of owners asked us to use if they weren't home--somehow equal homeiness. But I must say that the highly impersonal Days Inn State College with its ugly ass electric blue carpet and cheap poly-blend bedspread that makes the same swishy sound as my grade school teachers walking down the hall in skirts and pantyhose--brought a sigh of relief from both of us.

post defense

Here is Elizabeth recreating her wildly successful dissertation defense for Jamie, Bram, and Jackson. The response, this time around, is mixed.

re: turn

You know what's stupid? Driving the 11 hours from State College to Urbana in one day, that's what. It was a drive best characterized by John's remark at our 10th and final rest stop: "You go on in and pee; I'm tired of peeing."

Since I arrived home a couple of hours ago, I've had a protracted wave of nausea, which is to say not a wave at all but maybe more of a bout. I'm not sure if the nausea is a result of the hole that developed in our muffler on the trip, which made it sound like we were in fact traveling by prop plane (the very term produces nausea for me); or if it's from eating lunch in the car at 11 am E.S.T, and then finishing the trip rather hungrily at 7 pm C.S.T, thereby recreating Daylight Savings Time for my appetite all over again; or it could be the somewhat radical (if gradual) change in altitude combined with the (related) realization that once you hit I-70, that does it for the hills. So long, hills.

Speaking of that flat part of the drive, I'm sure others who've approached C-U from the east have noticed that Danville, one of the only towns between here and the Indiana line has back-to-back exits, one called Lynch Road, followed swiftly by Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive. Is this the Interstate equivalent of a makeup call or what? Sheesh.

Still, the trip was made a little more enjoyable with the help of an audiobook called Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell, comic historian extraordinaire who is rather obsessed with both the 19th century and with how events and bodies--and sometimes their parts--are memorialized. I now know 300% more about Lincoln, McKinley, and Garfield--and their assassins--than I ever could have hoped to know. All you pres. rhet/public address/memorial rhetoric folks should really check it out if you haven't already. It can make a long stupid drive slightly less stupid.

I've at least two entries queued in my digital camera if not my brain, but those will sadly need to wait 'til tomorrow.

reviewing

[pre-queued entry while I'm away]

Here are two pieces of advice I've gotten about book reviews:

1. [when I was a graduate student] Book reviews are a good foray into the field, a great way to "enter the conversation."
2. [when I was a new assistant professor] A book review is a waste of time on a publication that's not really a publication.

Maybe it's because I work on Kenneth Burke who practically reviewed for a living, which is to say he reviewed in order to read deeply any number of books, that I'm a little wary of the second piece of advice, which smacks of so much cut-and-dry professionalism. (sidenote: Has anyone counted KB's extant reviews? I think Nathaniel Rivers and Ryan Weber are collecting them, so perhaps they have a clue. My guess is definitely in the hundreds.) There's also the perq of the free copy. I can recall coming across several letters to editors in which Burke asks if he can write a particular review. If the editors are his friends, like John Crowe Ransom or Malcolm Cowley, he'd even write something to the effect of "be a pal and save me two dollars on a book I'd read anyway." Other times he seems to want a little retribution on some rat bastard who panned one of his early books. But most times, Burke is in it to have a say, and he usually has fun with it too, making jokes about hasheesh in his review of P.D. Ouspensky's mystical followup to Tertium Organum, e.g.

So if book reviews come with free books (now upwards of $30-50), can be fun, and call for the kind of critical engagement we do regularly anyway, then even if don't really count as a full publication (where I am at least), maybe there are still good reasons to write them. I for one think they serve an important purpose, helping busy folks in the field get a sense of what's new, what they might need to pick up, what they might want to add to their syllabi. So here's my advice on book reviews:

1) Book reviews are a good way to engage a book in-depth and have something to show for it.
2) Book reviews provide a way to get out of the tiny little world that is Your Own Research and into a slightly larger world that is Your Broader Field.
3) (and more of a cautionary note) Book reviews come with deadlines, and if you're the kind of person who does not like having these things hanging over you, no need to do 'em.

I'm in the process of reviewing Josh Gunn's Modern Occult Rhetoric and am having fun. I'll even post here the opening of my review as a teaser and to get you to a) go ahead and find a copy of Gunn's book, which is really, really smart, or b) look out for the review which I think will run in RSQ come January, when the days and the mercury line are both much shorter.

___________________________________________

More than a decade ago when, as a new doctoral student, I first encountered the writing of Judith Butler in a graduate seminar on critical theory, I found it strange, almost ghastly in its elusiveness. Most of the words in the first chapter of Gender Trouble I could, at a basic level, comprehend, but not in the peculiar way they were arranged, socked into sentences, coiled into paragraphs, squashed into the small-margined pages, and tangled with proper names--Wittig, Irigaray, Heidegger, Derrida--about which I only had a vague notion. Which is why, when I needed to write about these words, I, a nonsmoking athlete who has always preferred to write at my desk in the bright lucidity of morning, waited until well after midnight, lugged my laptop and a dorm burner lamp onto the tiny perch of a grad apartment balcony, and wrote my way through an entire pack of cigarettes trying anything to get these strange piles of words to do something for me. In the end they did something to me all right: by the time the sun rose, I had a wicked nicotine hangover and a seminar-length paper. And yet I still felt as if I didn’t quite have those words; instead, the words themselves, with their strange, lurid pull, somehow had me.

On one level, my eerie, nonrational, quasi-alienating encounter with Butler’s words is what Joshua Gunn’s book, Modern Occult Rhetoric, is about . . .

___________________________________________
and we're off!

miracles of summer (and good readers)

I asked three people 'in the field' to read my first chapter, which I finished drafting a couple weeks ago. Of the seven chapters in the manuscript, I think this might be tied for the most surprising argument--at least as far as Burke studies goes--so I needed committed Burkeans to have a look, to tell me if they 'buy it.' And get this: they all read it and got back to me in less than two weeks. Five, seven, and ten days, to be exact. Pretty amazing, especially when one of those readers is a busy assistant professor finishing up her first year and working on her own fabulous research, one is a journal editor and a department head who just got promoted to deanhood, and another is an associate dean with a boatload of graduate students. I know this isn't typical, but I still suspect that this field (i.e., rhetorical studies) is remarkably collegial.

Oh, and they all bought it, hooray.

excursion

etymology: f. excurrre to run out (OED)

This week we are going on a little trek to Ohio and Pennsylvania, first to see John's family and then to attend Elizabeth's defense. Happy trips both. In Ohio, we'll be staying at a place that triples as a spa, a horse boarding locale, and a B & B. It's also dog friendly, and the woman who made our reservations seemed positively gleeful to be hosting two whippets. While we're there, we'll see most of John's immediate and nearly immediate family, throw tennis balls for Petey (John's mom's dog), eat Buena Vista fried chicken, and maybe squeeze in a hike or a run.

In PA, the only plans are to eat at India Pavilion--my all time favorite restaurant--, to attend E's defense, to drink at Whiskers, and then likely drink some more at a post-defense party hosted by Leisha and Jeff. And it may be a rumor, but Elizabeth's defense may also feature a guest appearance by a close likeness of a near-celebrity. Here's a hint: