b l o g o s

local conference blogging: Plato's Timaeus Today

1. How did all these scholars--all of them so marvelous and from so far away!--make it to the Plato's Timaeus Today conference here in Urbana, Illinois? The UK is very well represented (see #3).

2. Did Plato wear a ponytail? Because the look among Platonists is definitely full beard with ponytail and glasses. 

3. So far this conference wins the award for best readers. Being in the audience is a little like listening to an audiobook narrated by an English actor: Such intonation! Such perfect cadence! The arguments are actually followable this way. And the Q&A sessions are a little like British Parliament, if members of the british parliament based every question on their Oxford editions of the Timaeus.

4. The conference is so perfectly organized. Every session starts at the precise moment listed in the program. Every paper runs exactly 28 minutes. I would think it's a little creepy, except the whole conference is devoted to Plato's thoughts on the order of the kosmos.

5. I'm keeping a tally of the number of times rhetoric gets mentioned. This morning's total is one. But it wasn't used disparagingly (hooray).

Danville!

Today while Jada got some teeth pulled, I spent the day in Danville, home of the Danville Dans and also Gene Hackman, hoops player extraordinaire (?). (Oh, and first efforts, I even found the answer to our  question.about when Hackman was likely to have visited last. We were both way off!)

There is a cute little coffee shop downtown called The Java Hut that closes at 10 a.m. The owners however are so nice that they don't worry about the out-of-towner who's working away on her laptop well past the time they lock the door. Until 10, though, other people trail in and out, not quite meeting each other in a planned way, but just joining each other at the big wooden tables, or if they are senior citizen women, going into the dining room (it's actually a dining room like in a house) for the morning book club. At 10 they open up for lunch in their other location, which is right behind the morning location. Aside from big wooden tables, both Java Huts have high tin ceilings and free wireless. The lunch location (on Hazel street) has beautiful dark wood floors and a tasty selection of sandwiches, oh, and lots of yummy bottled sodas including both orange cream and root beer in a sugar free variety. Those tasted good after my mid-day break to mountain bike over at Kickapoo, where there are the best set of trails in the state (I haven't tried Carbondale yet, ftr).

And to make a sunny day of exam reading and proposal writing and mountain biking complete, Jada survived her procedure. Danville!*

*Now don't get too excited. As far as I can tell, the whippet vet and the coffee shops and the bike trails are about all Danville has going for it. Oh, that and cheap ass real estate. 

Dear kid whose bike I accidentally locked to mine today:

My gut hurt for about 40 minutes after I unlocked your bike. You were pretty sweet to accept my abject and curse-filled apologies and to suppress all the bad things you were thinking about me. The eyewitness claims there was a note at some point, and if it's still around he would like to have it, because he collects those kinds of things. And you have him to thank for alerting me to the mishap. Anyway, I probably deserved whatever the note said. Because when someone locked up my bike last year at the library and I had to walk home? I left a nasty note too.

Also? I'm sorry I made you miss work, but maybe someday when you look back you too will think it just a little bit funny that I invoked my status as a professor when I offered to call your boss and explain the matter. 

meekly,
professor hawhee

insert frowny face here

first efforts is putting in long days--in the office at 7:30! a.m.!--and I don't know if this makes me feel better or worse about the fact that I started writing (for myself) at 6, then moved to writing (for others) at 10, wrote straight through lunch, went in to campus for a late afternoon faculty meeting, and--here's the real frowny face--found myself going through copyedits for ARCS 4e until 9 pm. Such tedium.

There were, however, three highlights: a sunny afternoon run at the prairie park with JM and the pooches; a quick (worky) phone convo with first efforts around lunchtime; and a late-night airport retrieval of B, our houseguest for the week. B is returning from her brand new ivy-covered post out east to run this conference on Plato's Timaeus here in town. I'm very much looking forward to sitting in a chair and letting others do the work--when I can make it, that is.

here's something i've noticed about being tenured

Writing of my own (i.e., the writing of my own books and articles) no longer counts as a legitimate* item on the "list of things that are keeping me super, duper, busy--around the bend and over the cliff of busy" while items like soliciting and editing book reviews, writing job recommendation letters and tenure review letters and fellowship letters and evaluative reports, and commenting on grad student writing all count as all fully legitimate--i.e., urgent and real demands.

And yet I remain stubbornly committed to and interested in my own writing.

*[updated to add]: by legitimate I mean conversationally legitmate. This is pretty different--even opposed to--other, more official forms of legitimacy (like, say, merit raises), but it's a powerful economy all the same. Oh, and there was also one exception: a very kind scholar friend reminded me that my own writing belonged in that list.

safety of objects*

As indicated in the previous post, E! and I are in Iowa visiting M and J, friends from grad school, to welcome thier little guy, Max.

Last night we ate pizza at the sweet little 1950s kitchen table they bought in Lock Haven where we would go for cheap funky stuff to fill our apartments with. The table, which sits under their three arts-and-craftsy square dining room windows, used to be tucked into their tiny apartment kitchen not far from the green couch (also from Lock Haven) where M would sit with me, speaking in soft tones about stain removal and food preparation while her hair dried. This soothing little ritual began late one day when I wandered in from my apartment down the hall, cracking under the stress of diss-completion and job searching.

Last night as we all took turns walking and jiggling Max and fondling J's new book, talking tenure clocks and teaching schedules, comparing colleagues and trading bits of news from the places we and our other friends have scattered--New York, Rhode Island, Iowa, South Carolina, Illinois, Nebraska--I noticed a few other items from the old apartment: the Day of the Dead figurine collection, now slightly larger; the gold totem-head ashtray that says Aloha Hawaii; the virgin mary candle; the glass head; the orange endtable and funky divided chip bowl.

In the room where I slept last night is a painting J once bought because the subject in the portrait, a slouchy, goateed, bespectacled fellow in a fishing hat, looked so much like J. It used to hang in the middle of their apartment. Occasionally, after a few beers, we would all just stare at the painting, stunned silent by the uncanny resemblance while Grumpus the turtle flopped around in his tank.

*title from A.M. Homes, whose fiction J introduced me to a few years back.

doing the coo

Today I heard that first efforts and her beloved find it amusing that blogos and neither necessary nor sufficient are meeting in Chicago to drive to Iowa in order to coo at a baby. Yes, it's true: despite the high-mindedness of their respective blog names, their rare mentions of little people, their frequent use of profanity, and their stiff sometimes-habit of referring to themselves in the third person, they still do the coo. Besides, who wouldn't want to meet a little fella named Max, tout suite?

Oh, and the only thing better than eating at Vong's Thai Kitchen  is eating at Vong's Thai Kitchen with someone who loves it as much as I do.

connex

In the middle of cleaning up the stuff I wrote in Chicago, which actually has a bit about the impulse to "clean up," I ended up clicking serially in a way that landed me here at Jodi Dean's blog. Now wait a second--how did I get there from my chapter? With effort I recreated my trail: I arrived in the chapter at a point about affect where I had inserted one of those lazy placeholders that reads "[more, more Rei Terada, Brennan, blah blah; Berlant]" I remembered that Lauren Berlant is going to be on campus in what? A couple of weeks?

Search-and-click for the answer (yes, a couple of weeks [add to calendar and make mental note to remind rhetoric reading group about her visit]), and also the citations of two articles that have been recommended to prepare for her visit. One is in this newish journal called Theory and Event in which the paragraphs get numbered so that it has the feel of reading a series of footnotes or a resolution or a manifesto or some combination of the three. It's probably to help obviate the interminable reference problem when dealing with online docs. I hadn't known T&E was digital.

In any event, I pulled up the Berlant piece which was part of a symposium on the 2004 election that Dean put together with someone called Thomas Dumm. And having just mailed out Dean's Zizek book for review, and having just learned that she is a new colleague of my good friend C (of E and C), I clicked. Her bio links to her blog--again, click. I see APSA and Jane Bennett and a critique of food chain talk, all of which connect in some way. Jane Bennett is after all in another chapter, and I just retrieved my friend T from the APSA train. Plus I do love discovering good bloggies.

And now that recreating these associative connections has taken far more work than making them in the first place, I need to get back to cleaning up. Oh, and saving that Berlant piece.

on not writing

Those rare productive spells are enabled (for me at least) by periods of varying duration in which I do not write (oh, and obv. getting tf out of town helps too, apparently). Weekends are good examples. As a rule, during the weekend I don't much think about my chapters except for lining up the book or article that I'll need to peek into next, and except for keeping the to-do list (modeled after caraf).

But then there's always the problem of what to do with the long holiday weekends that  bookend the summer. Should I treat tomorrow like any other Monday and return to writing? Or should I remove most of the garden and finally dig up the peony that is taking over the back yard?

Given the weather forecast, the back yard and garden will win out. One of the sentences of Burke's I've been writing around is "the cure for an idea is digging in the dirt," so I'm on my way to Lowe's for a wheelbarrow and some gloves, to complete another to-do list.