b l o g o s

all the words in my hands

John is out of town again, and so I taught his class today. At the outset, I felt the need to 'come clean' to the class and to say that I don't "do" poetry, but it's also the case that reading poetry draws on a lot of the skills we rhetorical critics develop, especially those of us interested in materiality and language. And since today was Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton day, I found myself drawing on my background in feminist theory and even Roman history in the case of one Sylvia Plath poem.

But one of the Sexton poems really got me, especially for its attention to the energy of stuff, or what Jane Bennett calls "the force of things." Even more than that, though, the account of writing here is eerily lovely, like when the typewriter gets monstrified with all those unblinking eyes, and even more pointedly (particularly at the end), the way words reside in hands, working to make things, well, come alive. So things attain their force through the liveliness of words themselves, with all their "dreams" and "costumes."

"The Room of My Life"
by Anne Sexton

Here,
in the room of my life
the objects keep changing.
Ashtrays to cry into,
the suffering brother of the wood walls,
the forty-eight keys of the typewriter
each an eyeball that is never shut,
the books, each a contestant in a beauty contest,
the black chair, a dog coffin made of Naugahyde,
the sockets on the wall
waiting like a cave of bees,
the gold rug
a conversation of heels and toes,
the fireplace
a knife waiting for someone to pick it up,
the sofa, exhausted with the exertion of a whore,
the phone
two flowers taking root in its crotch,
the doors
opening and closing like sea clams,
the lights
poking at me,
lighting up both the soil and the laugh.
The windows,
the starving windows
that drive the trees like nails into my heart.
Each day I feed the world out there
although birds explode
right and left.
I feed the world in here too,
offering the desk puppy biscuits.
However, nothing is just what it seems to be.
My objects dream and wear new costumes,
compelled to, it seems, by all the words in my hands
and the sea that bangs in my throat.

copia = abundance (notes on Unofficial)

Today in my Rhetorical Tradition class, I asked my students to follow the advice of Erasmus, the early modern rhetoric guy who believed that in order to become a great speaker or writer, one ought to really work to develop copia, or abundance, which is basically a facility with expanding and contracting one's sentences (though as we discovered, as a method, it can also be quite inventive). Copia is a matter of style, Erasmus argues, or even something like stylistic muscle. He even invokes the legend of Milo, a mythic Greek wrestler who is said to have developed his strength by lifting a calf every day after it was born and gradually becoming a mighty, mighty man.

It follows, then, Erasmus argues, that in order to get strong with words, one needs to develop a store of words and sentence structures. He suggests that it might be useful, for example, to write one sentence 100 different ways, and his example is "Your letter pleases me very much." And then he proceeds to give us a bunch of varieties of that sentence, such as "Your letter heaped joy upon me," and one of my favorites, "Once I had received your longed-for letter, you might have said Erasmus was drunk with joy." We talked about how this sentence is very a propos to Erasmus's day--early modern folks loved writing and receiving letters!

And so I had my students try it with a sentence that resonates in the immediate campus culture: "U of I students enjoy Unofficial St. Patrick's Day a good deal."

They came up with some funny stuff about how "inexplicably joyful" U of I students become on the first Friday in March. That sort of thing. I of course practiced copia along with them, and here are some of mine:
1. When people study hard, they also like to play hard, which is why students at U of I came up with their own play day and called it Unofficial.
2. Everybody loves Unofficial at U of I--everybody, that is, except administrators; faculty, however seem split on the matter.
3. Unofficial, dude.
4. Green beer provides a tremendous sense of amusement and intoxication for U of I students on Unofficial.
5. For some U of I students, the most enjoyable part of their college years is Unofficial; most, however, don't officially remember one, and so they make Tshirts.

And then this afternoon, we received this email from the Provost's office:
_______________________________________________________________

On Friday, March 2, 2007, many Campustown bars will participate in the 
annual business promotion known as Unofficial St. Patrick's Day (USPD). 
While the University does not support or condone this promotion, we are 
taking steps to ensure the safety of students who choose to participate, 
and to insulate academic instruction and campus operations from disruption.

In the interest of safety, Champaign Police will have a visible presence 
in Campustown on March 2. They will enforce all applicable ordinances in 
commercial areas, and have been given special authority to intervene if 
private parties threaten to disturb the peace. In addition, Champaign city 
officials have enacted special restrictions on liquor sales that are 
intended to curb overconsumption. Given the probable limitations of these 
efforts, emergency medical personnel will stand ready to provide care as 
required.

The profile of University Police will also be elevated during USPD. Their 
work will focus on protecting students, staff, faculty, and University 
property from harm caused by the disorderly conduct of event participants. 
Report emergencies to METCAD at 911 (or, from a campus phone, 9-911). For 
this event, requests for non-emergency response by University Police 
should be directed to 333-1216.

The Deans of colleges that enroll undergraduates recently sent out 
messages detailing resources  that college personnel can draw on to 
preserve the integrity of academic instruction and campus operations on 
March 2. Those resources include:

-- The Student Code (http://www.admin.uiuc.edu/policy/code/) addresses 
student responsibilities on campus. Sections 1-102(d) and 1-302(f), on 
classroom conduct expectations, and section on 1-307, on alcohol 
consumption, are particularly relevant. The Code empowers instructors to 
ask disruptive students to leave class; after class, names of dismissed 
students should be reported to the Office of Student Conflict Resolution 
at 333-3680.

-- If asking a disruptive student to leave class could escalate into 
confrontation, it will be best to avoid confrontation and seek assistance. 
>From 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on March 2, teams of Student Affairs and Academic 
Affairs staff will walk through and around buildings with classrooms and 
lecture halls where disruptions were experienced last year. Roaming team 
members, wearing their University IDs as nametags and identified as 
university officials, may be summoned to assess problematic situations. 
Teams will be prepared to document any apparent Code violations and call 
University Police if necessary. However, instructors and students are 
encouraged to report emergencies directly to METCAD at 911 (or, from a 
campus phone, 9-911).

-- In the two largest lecture halls on the Quad (Foellinger Auditorium and 
Lincoln Hall Theater), both of which experienced significant vandalism 
during last year's event, students will be asked to surrender liquids 
prior to entry. This represents enforcement of standing policies that 
prohibit food and beverages in these venues.

Recent communications to students about USPD have stressed that those who 
choose to interfere with the academic mission of the University will face 
serious consequences. Instructional and support staff are thanked for 
joining the effort to reinforce this message before and on March 2. 

Office of the Provost
Office of the Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs

_____________________________________________________________________

Like I said. U of I students enjoy Unofficial St. Patrick's Day a good deal.
(for the record, I did ask them all to be careful)

an open call:

Last week two friends wrote me with apologies; they thought they had mortally offended me because I had not replied to their emails. This morning a wonderful graduate student dropped by because I hadn't replied to his last-minute request for a letter of recommendation. In all cases, I had done what I sometimes do: not reply immediately because a reply required a little thought for one reason or another. And then other stuff tumbled in to my inbox (both the metaphorical one and the actual one), and--this is very atypical of me--I forgot to write back. In one case I actually forgot that I forgot and assumed I had replied. Nice.

I admit I've got a lot of shit going on, and I fear that I might be accidentally forgetting something else. So if anyone feels slighted by unreturned emails, please, I beg you, call me, or give me another e-nudge. And know that if I ever am mad at you, I will most likely not ignore you!

(If you have asked me for a rec letter, I think I turned it in today.)

In the meantime, I will be joining my friend Elizabeth in fending off distractions

ah, dammit. While wading through my giant to do list, and anticipating the arrival of a certain houseguest. (hooray!)

Dear People with Compelling Arguments about Computer Allegiances:

I am at a point where I am considering switching back to Apple from PC. I was a Mac Person before it was a full-fledged identity category, writing my first graduate papers on one of those little SEs that seem to have been gobbled up by a place like Sharper Image and repurposed into teeny office fridges and microwaves:

 

At some point in graduate school I bought a PC desktop, mostly for price--that, and this was at a point (1997 or so?) when the two seemed more compatible than they had been previously. And aside from occasionally wanting to gaze at the lovely wide screen of my friends' ibooks or whatever the new ones are called, and occasionally noticing a smarty pants ad, oh, and once or twice going shopping for i-pod speakers at the Pittsburgh Apple store and noticing a slight shallowness in my breathing as I passed the glass tables full of clean-lined machines, I admit I have lost track of the distinguishing factors (or maybe they have lost track of me).

Lots of grad students here use Apples I've noticed, and last semester when I had a projector in my seminar room we would on occasion cable up one to watch a video clip, and I did notice what seemed like higher res with their machines v. mine. But it's also important to note that while I do frequent You Tube, I still use my computers for fairly basic file storage and transfer and composition.

I believe that one is not born but rather becomes a Mac person, and I don't even care about becoming one. But I would like to hear more reasons for changing over (or not). It may be that the aesthetics are enough of a draw, but I would like to know how else mac aesthetics would register on a daily basis to this user's tactile and visual sensibilities. I know scholars in computers and writing are interested in how technology changes our writing practices, but what about Mac v. PC? Has anybody studied THAT? Anecdote, in my case is unreliable: my first grad papers were crap, but I don't think I can blame that on the maker of my word processing machine. Let me have it!

Dear Mid-Modern Scholar,

I like that I can call you from my paper-strewn office to strategize about a grad student's need for a last-minute independent study, and that I can also call you, a day later, amidst the fork drivers at Lowes for final approval on an eco-friendly washing machine.

Happy birthday.

snaps and shots

People, it is only Wednesday, and this week has been so densely packed with conversations, antics, and information that I feel I must catch some of the catchable stuff here.

1. A level-headed discussion about The Chief and collective action with my first-year students on Monday.

2. Immediately on the heels of--and not unrelated to--#1, the students' divulging of this year's date for Unofficial St. Patricks Day, a day-long custom wherein students and returning alums wake up at 7 am, don their green Tshirts and funny hats, start drinking, and then take to classes with friends who don't have classes on Friday, and which the campus and community are supposedly taking measures to prevent this year.

3. My own visible and audible relief when I discovered that said date corresponds with a designated "conference day" on our class syllabus.

4. My horrified realization (what's the opposite of relief?) that John Murphy will be on campus to give a colloquium presentation on said date. Even though Murphy is Irish and has a good sense of humor, this will be embarrassing. My immediate ditching of the plan to take Murphy to Murphy's for happy hour.

5. An overheard conversation in the locker room about how, in response to those measures mentioned in #2, some students are planning "room crawls," wherein a particular dorm room will be serving a particular drink, and students are to move from room to room. (This sounded very sad to me, but the cleanup will be a cinch.)

6.  A very serious (some might say grim) discussion with a brilliant graduate student about futures real and imagined, and how the two may meet, someday.

7. Contra to #6, and a contender for the funniest moment of my professional life thus far: Cary Nelson pretending to choke on an i-pod shuffle (the tiny clippy kind) at a PhD exam.

ritual signs, team pride

All the discussion in the comments of my last post about representational politics, real racism, the stars and bars, and the chief calls for a discussion about the racial and ethnic contours of team pride. (Also: hat tip to this afternoon's phone convo, Katka, and to this evening's dinner convo, JM.)

Most of you who know me know I'm from the south. My high school, South Greene High School, perhaps because it was in the south side of the county--the most southern of a southern county!--has as its mascot The Rebels, and its symbol (at least when I was there) was the confederate flag. As a high schooler, I never thought much about the flag's history, but saw it as something that demarcated South Greene from North Greene and West Greene. I can remember pausing sometimes when the Charlie Daniels song lyrics "Be proud you're a rebel 'cause The South's gonna do it again" were blasted at half time, and, superstitious athlete that I was, wondering whether we ought to align ourselves with the losing side (I honestly, believe it or not, didn't register Daniels's lyrics as the post-Civil Rights call-to-arms that they were until much later.)

Now, the South Greene-North Greene distinction seemed quite quaint, if incongruent: North Greene's mascot was the huskies or some such--not, as you might suspect, a legion of Union soldiers. But it occurs to me now that we (South Greene) were the only school in the county to not have African Americans on our teams. Maybe I'm blocking someone important, but the star black athletes went to Greeneville high (the only city school) or the other county schools. And when we went to state and played teams with black players, "our" rebel flags flew with a certain fierceness that I found intimidating at the time and now, frankly, I find embarrassing, especially because it's so obvious that the flags were conveniently doubling as tools of racial intimidation in the name of school pride. I know people in my home town won't agree with me, but I remember playing an all black team from near Jacksonville (I think) in the state semi-finals, and the flags did not get put away once during the game. And I remember going to summer camp with that same team in Pulaski, Tennessee, where the KKK started, and that team's van--and only that team's van--was vandalized with all kinds of KKK graffiti.

Yeah.

Anyhow, I'm fairly certain that my high school has curtailed its use of the flag--if not gotten rid of it altogether--in favor of this little colonel guy (pictured above right) who is likely ripped off from Ole Miss. On second thought, he (above) looks a little more like a pusher or pimp of some sort, but I'm sure he hates black people all the same.

I raise these points not to say how racist the South is, nor even to call my high school racist, but to make a more complicated point about mascot logic, how mascots were chosen in the first place, and how they are so often charged--and recharged--with regional, racial, and ethnic sentiments that, while often sublimated, forgotten, or denied, are still very persistent. I've thought about this for some time and no doubt someone has written about this more smartly and longer ago (if so, please give me the citation!). But I started thinking about this issue of college and team "pride" again this morning when my students and I were examining the Board of Trustee's comparison between the Fighting Irish and the Fighting Illini to account for why the school's mascot (Illini) is being retained while the "Chief tradition" is being retired.

No doubt certain mascots get chosen for their fierceness (Wolverines, Gators) or loveability (Prairie Dogs) or for general toughness associated with certain ethnicities or even, as is the case with the Volunteers, certain politico-geographic allegiances. In the case of the Fighting Irish, there's always a kind of hard core swaggering tough guy 'underdog' ethos that galvanizes Notre Dame fans.

All of which is to say that it becomes difficult to separate the at-times violent and damaging histories of the mascots from the enterprise of college athletics, or any athletics, which as Jim has pointed out below, quietly (or not-so-quietly) celebrates violence and--I would add--separation and superiority. 

So what is the problem here? The mascots or the sports that require and invent the mascots? 

provocation from the left

Over at the blogora sometime this weekend while I was at my conference, Jim Aune posted something of a provocation about The Chief. Since then he and the other blogoroggers have posted about other topics, and since the discussion might get buried,  I thought I'd like to revive it here to see what people think (and of course, to say what I do). Basically, Aune wonders why academics who otherwise argue for polysemy believe that this mascot has one meaning. Aune seems to be conflating what's going on here at Illinois with other eruptions about native team names, a la the Stanford Indians, which, by the way, was changed to Cardinal in 1972--that's thirty-five years ago by my count. But U.S. trends, they say, creep eastward.

Aune also wonders what this move will do to help native americans economically, a point that on its face should be allowed to stand, but I also do wonder how such stereotypical portrayals continue to affect actual economic prospects--here I'm thinking jobs in the central Illinois region--for American Indians.   

When considering the question of local economics, it's important to remember that what we're talking about here is not a team name. To compare the Chief to the Indians dilutes the point, so I want to make sure people outside of this community know that The Chief refers to the painted, buckskinned, befeathered undergraduate who performs halftime dances that bear no resemblance at all to tribal dances, and that instead appear to have been derived from old westerns and cowboy-and-indian myths. (Some have said too that The Chief in recent years has been a particularly bad dancer, with which I have to agree!) Aune claims as well that there's not clear consensus among American Indians on this topic, and again, I think he's referring to mascots in general, not The Chief, because there has been a surprising degree of uniformity about this particular iteration of American Indian identity. Here are some examples.

Having the Chief dance around at half time is tantamount to erecting a giant statue of a black lawn jockey in front of Assembly Hall. I mean, come on.

For the record, the name "The Fighting Illini" will be kept.

responses to retirement

Today's Tribune reports that Chief memorabilia and products are "flying off the shelf" in response to the  recent announcement of the last half-time performance by our school's racist mascot, Chief Illiniwek. At CRCE yesterday (one of the campus gyms) I noticed more chief T-shirts than usual.

There have been two fellows who dress up as the chief, okay one as the Chief, and the other as the "assistant chief," which I agree with Z is very funny in part because it overlays the U's preferred corporate structure onto what is supposed to be a 'native tradition.'  [John REALLY wants the asst. chief to be called "assistant TO the chief," a la the british version of The Office.] In any event the two guys tried unsuccessfully to obtain a restraining order against the University to prevent it from retiring the chief. I'm a little confused about how that would work anyway--don't restraining orders usually establish a set distance that the 'restrained' must keep from the person who is granted the r.o.? How would that work with a campus?

I'm also interested in the rather vague section of the NCAA's fax (below) to the Chair of the BOT that claims the use of "related Native American imagery" will cease. (Thanks to Z for pointing this out in the comments of my previous post.) I've noticed that the most common T-shirts on campus simply have the word CHIEF (all caps), no images. I do wonder, practically, how all the image limitation is going to work. I guess it means the U can no longer profit from the licensing. Perhaps these questions are unanswerable precisely because the NCAA's legislative powers are so limited.

I will admit I'm a little uneasy about what will happen on Wednesday night at--or after--the final performance. Does anyone know if campus is going to increase security measures at the arena and on campus?

woo hoo!

I am so pleased to announce that at long last, Chief Illiniwek is being retired.

I would say more, but I need to return to the New Materialisms conference on campus: Jane Bennett and Rey Chow are talking as I type! And Brenda Farnell, who has been a key campus leader on the issue of the Chief is presenting later on.

Materiality indeed!