b l o g o s

Samantha Bee: you tell it, sister.

Having been taken to task for being patronizing, I will do penance by offering this gem. (Thanks, Aspasia!)

now i feel better.

Sarah Palin wore basketball shorts as short as the ones I wore! And she played in a gym as small as the ones I played in! (Thanks to plm for the photo, which came from The Huffington Post).

But in all seriousness. This choice reveals more than just bad judgment on McCain's part. It's even worse, I think, than the pandering to women voters that people say it is. It reveals McCain and his campaign's deeply held belief that while he might need help with that pesky little detail of building a voter base, he needs no help leading this country. McCain is clearly not going to consult Palin on anything. As of not too long ago, Sarah Palin didn't even know what the job of VP entails. Choosing such a blatantly unqualified* running mate is insulting to women, to republicans, and hell, to Americans.

*[UPDATED to add] And if anyone is going to challenge me on this, I offer the fact that a mere 4 years ago, when John Kerry was getting tug-boated, Palin made two political donations to Alaskan republicans and listed her occupation as "housewife" and "homemaker." Story here. Now, homemaking is work--don't get me wrong--but it is in fact one of the last jobs that comes to mind when thinking about getting in line for the vice presidency, which is ultimately (and literally) getting in line for the presidency.

McCain's running mate choice

I am not speaking as an expert in these matters, but I'm pretty intrigued by McCain's choice for running mate. Of course he's trying to attract disenchanted supporters of Hillary Clinton. But someone who is even more pro big oil than most republicans? Pro-life/anti-choice? anti-polar bear? (thanks, caraf!) Alaska? Apart from chromosomes, this person really couldn't have less in common with HC.

Maybe he thinks her age (44) will balance his. Or her beauty (haha). The best response so far is of course from the ever-smart Obama campaign, which responded by saying "Today, John McCain put the former mayor of a town of 9,000 with zero foreign policy experience a heartbeat away from the presidency." I look forward to the vice presidential debates.

Check it. Palin got her start in the P.T.A--she says so in her acceptance speech. She also spent 1/4 of that speech introducing her family.

"I would put my money on the sun."

WoooOOOOOOOO! Al Gore is getting me so totally fired up! I never thought I'd utter that sentence. I know everyone has been asking this for some time, but where TF was this Al in 2000? The speed! (ok, maybe he is going a little too fast actually) But the passion! The facial expressions! sigh.

I am of course watching the DNC and reading my colleague's liveblogging of it--go check it out. During the commercials, I'm going through the copyedits on my manuscript, reinserting commas that the editor took out. I couldn't be happier. Or, let's face it, nerdier. Whatev.

Gore's recycling joke was funny.

Also, is that a mini-pnyx, complete with a bema, in the middle of Invesco Field?

not one, not two, but THREE rhetorical theorists

featured in rocky mt. news's prospective on tonight's Big Speech.

way to go y'all!

(concluding sports language duly noted.)

aristotle and the profane

Even though I was expecting it, because my roster told me so, it was still a little odd to walk into my Aristotle seminar today and have fifteen graduate students. That's a lot, especially for a class on one extremely dead dude. There are a couple of familiar faces from my bodies seminar and from rhetoric reading group, and several people I and my colleagues worked very hard to recruit in the past couple of years. A good mix of communication and writing studies folks, and even a literature person in the mix, and above all, quite good energy, I thought. The challenge will be to maintain that energy. Aside from the unexpected weirdness that I  kept wanting to swear (this was the only sign that I hadn't been in the classroom for over a year, and was wholly attributable to my enthusiasm), I thought things went swimmingly. I'm even toying with the idea of making a slide show for next week.

[Updated to add: the syllabus]

reflections on my first sabbatical

I have been avoiding writing this post, because once I write it that means--performatively--my sabbatical is over. And so given that classes start tomorrow, it is (over), and so I will (write about it), with the cold grammatical comfort of the adjective "first," helpfully implying that there will be more. I have decided that sabbatical is, hands down, the very best thing about this profession. It's better than being able to go biking at 1 p.m. on a gorgeous afternoon if you don't have a meeting scheduled (and that's pretty damn good). It's better than May, June, and July (anyone who claims that August counts as summer in this profession is either delusional, high, or on the quarter system).

My sabbatical had a nice mix of professional and personal schtuff, of finished and launched projects, of travel (for work and for play), and staying at home for days on end, writing, gardening, and learning to make indian food. I liked that mix.

The biggest thing I noticed, though, is that it takes work to make a sabbatical good. First off, you have to say no repeatedly. I learned that at this university, the sabbatical is the only time one has license to do that. And even though I was asked to do things I would normally say yes to--like be on a search committee for a new classics head--I had to force myself say no. That was harder than it sounds. I did a (mostly) in-town sabbatical, and that meant that I needed to stay away from campus, to make my house my work spot, especially during the week. I managed that by working out a deal with my advisee, K, who managed my mail in exchange for the use of my campus office. I couldn't sneak in there, then, without getting caught by K. As part of our deal, every other Sunday I would go in and sift through mail stuff. This only took an hour or two. This meant that my office was remarkably tidy all semester long. It's already getting messy again.

Also hard was the need to regulate contact with graduate students. But I got good advice from experienced sabbaticalers, and I limited contact to 1) when they had amassed a number of pressing questions, or 2) when they had writing ready for me to read. It turns out that for the most part, the dissertators got a lot done, and no one else lost their way.

Including the buffer summer, I was able to wrap up four writing projects, including two wee little ones start to finish, and two larger ones that had been ongoing. I also started a habit of reading through new journal issues while working out at the gym, so I feel a little more in touch with "the field" than I do when I'm covered up with teaching and meetings. I hope to continue that, but I'm not sure my unsabbaticaled brain can take it. I may need to revert to the trash I normally read. Today, for example, I dipped into the latest Vanity Fair. How about that Christopher Hitchens going and getting himself waterboarded?

The travels in April were definitely the peak of sabbatical. I went to Dublin as a conference spouse, which meant I didn't do anything related to work, and even went on to Portugal with JM's sister. I also got to visit a couple of places to give talks. It's always nice to test-drive new writing, to meet new people, and to see old friends.

I thought I would miss the daily interactions with colleagues a bit more, and now that I'm back at it--poking my head in people's offices, stopping and chatting in the hall--I realize I probably did miss that. But a break from the dailies can be quite good, and a break I had. I can't say I'm totally ready to get back into it all, but the energy level is good, I am feeling grateful to have such a good job, and as my Greek teacher used to say at the beginning of every class, "ho kairos estin." It is time.

 

semester preparedness list

syllabus: check.
new pens: check.
converted from paper to iphone calendar: check.
calendar filling up: check.
TAs oriented: check.
RA task planned: check.
attended freshman convocation in full regalia: check.
met enthusiastic and charming new graduate students from one department: check.
half wondered if I'll ever meet all the new grad students in the other: check.
bought cheesy land of lincoln mug at a garage sale down the street: check.
returned canning paraphernalia to t: check.
finally answered all email from vacation: check (i think!)
house clean: check. (good enough)
laundry done: almost.
completed reading4others: never fully checkable.
tenure reviews finished: hm, nope.
journal reviews finished: not yet. one more to go.
prepared first class: oh, shit.

disciplinary grappling

I have spent the week in orientation for new TAs. For about an hour on Monday, I sat in on a colleague's orientation for an oral and written communication class, and the rest of this week I have been doing--mostly observing--the orientation for Speech Comm 101, "The Principles of Effective Speaking." I'm directing 101 this year. Fortunately, there are many other people involved, including a coordinator, an assistant director, and three peer leaders (all five really fantastic) and so my main job is to think about the course itself and the training we do.

On Monday, one of the new TAs in the other orientation used English classes as a point of contrast for this particular course. The main idea there was that the writing that gets done in English classes is, well, overdone. And the unspoken assumption was that such writing (think of the words flowery, beautiful, ornate, and use really elaborate 19th-century gestures when describing such writing) is not only condoned by English professors but demanded. Hm. That's not really how it works, though it is often true that students in English classes come in thinking that this is what we want as well.  The result is often (not always, but often) clotted, thesaurized prose that needs to be pruned. Badly.

Then today in a really terrific teaching demonstration, the assistant director of 101 used English papers several times as a point of contrast when describing the kind of writing students need to do for an oral presentation. She used the phrase "write for the ear." Writing for the ear, incidentally, is something that really, really interests me, and Quintilian was a little obsessed with it too. And while it seems like writing for a composition class is more writing for the eye, written discourse also, Sharon and I stress in our book, ought to be composed for the ear. Why? Because when someone reads, even silently, they often hear the language. Now, it is definitely true--and I'm pretty sure this is what the a.d. was getting at--that writing for an oral presentation needs to be quite crisp, and that shorter sentences are almost always more articulable and therefore more easily understood when spoken (or in the case of a conference featuring mostly English professors and graduate students, when read out loud). It's also true that when speaking from an outline of keywords, it would be next to impossible to recall a complex sentence, draped with dependent clauses, kind of like this one.**

But. I praise crisp, short sentences in essays written in my English classes just as much (perhaps more than) I do really complicated sentences. Both can have a certain elegance that gets worn away when the same sentence structure gets repeated over and over. This wearing away might not happen as easily in oral presentation, but I'm still thinking about that.

There were many more instances in which my training as a teacher of English seemed to go against the training as a teacher of communication. There is, in one (the speech comm class), a huge emphasis on thesis statements, whereas it's a big no-no in current writing pedagogy to build everything around a thesis sentence.* I also had to wrestle my own hand back to the desk to keep from pointing out a really big (huge) misplaced modifier in one of the model sentences today. (I didn't want people to roll their eyes at the English professor.) For now, I'm content to observe and to reflect on the disciplinary distinctions--or assumptions about disciplinary distinctions--and what might be behind them.

*note: For the record, in the hour I sat in on the oral and written comm orientation, I didn't hear a single mention of thesis statements, so I don't want to generalize from 101 to the entire discipline of communication. Instead, there was a heck of a lot of rhetorical training going on. That probably owes to the person in charge.

**updated to add: I've had even more a.d.-inspired thoughts on the two-wayness of memory in writing-for-speaking pedagogy, but I've recorded those in a comment below, like the 8th one or so. I expect to have much more to say on these distinctions (and nondistinctions) later on in the term, and am loving the comments, so keep 'em coming!

bikes, hills, lakes.

We just rolled down from our northwoods vacation, where we hiked and/or biked and/or ran daily. Three out of the six days, we logged more than 15 miles each day, including one hike and one bike around this trail system. The trails, you might notice, even with the blurry i-phone picture, wind around lake after lake. The closest approximation to sublime for me is zooming on a path of pine needles, woods and hills to my right, a beach and shimmering lake to my left. And that's after the bike shot out from under me on the dew-soaked trellis with its surprise curve.  I know a lot of road bikers and non-bikers who think mountain biking is crazy, and given that this trek gave me the occasion to come up with the word "scruise" to name the hideous scrape/bruise thing my handlebar made on my left bicep, they have a point. Still, the concentration and sheer effort required by mountain biking can get my mind off everything else in the world while at the same time concocting some equally crazy endorphines. So yeah, crazy good.

And here is a photo of some cute little duckies in the lake behind our cabin. The little guy kept dipping its head in the water and shaking it out, like ducks do, and well, that's a little bit how we all felt, just being away for awhile.