b l o g o s

the gear

This NCAA commercial, which features people who are presumably former student athletes in their professional garb, makes me and JM giggle. This is because if I were in it, I would be wearing pajama pants, a ratty tee shirt, and no shoes.

re-entry

I have a little time to kill between our awesome dinner (Chicago Diner's recipe for "no meata fajitas") and the championship game, and so I'm going to kill it with what will likely be an aimless post.

What does one do after sending off a contracted and revised book? Well, apparently one sleeps for more than ten hours like a little drooling baby. This morning I couldn't quite bring myself to start reading for the next book just yet. Instead I wrote a script for my part of an RSA roundtable on "making rhetoric relevant in the classroom," and sifted through the permissions for the book, including, of course, the permissions to publish material from my own damn articles. I figure if I check through the permissions list every Monday or so it won't be too bad. I also did some other bureaucratic work with an approaching deadline and looked through some new writing sent by one of my advisees. Then when my burning shoulder alerted me that I had spent way too much time working at my desk, I headed out on my bike to return a book to the public library where I also picked up an audiobook for Friday's drive down (over?) to Columbia. 

It's nice to be home for a few days, to return to the day-to-day stuff.

the dirt

In the  last chapter of my soon-to-be book I quote Burke in an interview saying "the only cure for an idea is digging in the dirt." (And I also quoted that here at the end of last summer.) This morning I finished a last pass through my book manuscript, and then JM and I bought some topsoil at Blain's Farm and Fleet and put in a garden.

I'm going to ship off the manuscript on Monday, yay; next time I see it will be in the copyediting phase. The title will be Moving Bodies: Kenneth Burke at the Edges of Language. Here is the table of contents:

Acknowledgments
Introduction: "An Excursion"
1. Bodies as Equipment for Moving (from Artist to Audience)
2.Burke’s Mystical Method                                       
3. Burke on Drugs: Efficiency and the Valuation of Habits
4. From the Rhetoric of Science to the Science of Rhetoric: The Case of Endocrinology
5. Seeing ‘Deviance’ as Inclination: Kretschmerian Constitutions and Bodily Occupations
6. Body Language: Paget and Gesture-Speech Theory
7. Welcome to the Beauty Clinic
Conclusion: Action in Motion

Here are the garden contents:

1.rosemary
2.sweet basil
3.thai basil
4. spinach
5. lettuce
6. swiss chard

We did a modest garden with only our daily and weekly standbys because we'll be getting lots of veggies from the CSA and the farmers market. In the extra space and along the fence (away from the whippets), we sowed about 60 sq ft of wildflowers.

spinning

yowz. Just touched down more or less from an awesome trip out east. Not only did I get to meet my adorable new cousin with the super cool name of Dylan, and snag a quick session with longago friends from State College days, but for the main event I got to see (and in some cases meet for the first time) all the fabulous rhetoric folks at the University of Maryland. Thanks to everyone who came out for the talk; I was thrilled to see such a turnout, and that the audience came from both English (which hosted) and Communication was paydirt. Don't forget to email me if I promised to send you a citation or something. 

I'm now repacking for 16 hours in NOLA; leaving in . . . 16 hours.