b l o g o s

speaking/writing/performing

A PhD advisee of mine, C, did her exams yesterday. The exams in Writing Studies are oral (the exams in Communication—formerly Speech Communication—are written, but this curious transposition is a matter for another post).  C, more than anyone I have ever met, is a writer. She has an M.F.A. in creative writing, for starters. She wrote her way through two seminars with me, and when I say that, I mean she sat through each class, head down, scrawling in a big notebook from one end of the page to the other, top to bottom, page after page, occasionally looking up to see who was talking. This is how she learns, and I’m reasonably sure that what happens in her notebooks tilts more toward invention than transcription.

Her response papers are the reason I became very strict about length limits. They always spilled over, and she also prefers a smaller-than-usual font, which more than anything else, serves to underscore the density and liveliness of the writing. (I had to finally ask her to at least bump it up to 11-point.) Emails from C, too, tend toward the unusually long, thoughtful, and carefully crafted. The most challenging part of these exams, she and I have both known for awhile, would be that she would need to put down her pen, pull her head up, and speak rather than write. This was the cause of much anxiety for C, and has been since she first entered the program three and a half years ago.  

I don’t know the details about her exam preparation, except that she read or re-read probably 250 or so books and articles in the past several months. I’m fairly certain that writing featured prominently in her preparation—I rarely saw her in recent months without the 3-inch-thick notebook she brought back from Portugal, which seemed to be getting thicker.

Listening to C in her exam yesterday, I realized that she speaks like a writer, like she writes—in full, vivid, paragraphs, her answers forming something like narrative arcs. Plato talks about writing taking the place of memory, and whether he is right about that or not, it is definitely the case that writing facilitates memory. C buttressed her answers with quotations, illustrations, descriptions (my favorite description was when she compared reading one particularly troubling scholarly book to watching a house burn down—“at once fascinating and horrifying”), weaving answers on the spot to our pointed questions.

C's answers brought the seventeenth-century chironomist John Bulwer as close as he has ever been to composition researcher Janet Emig, thickly described psych-lab experiments that suggest gesture does not just convey thought but helps constitute it, and explained to us precisely and without hesitation why Descartes ought not be so easily tossed out with cartesianism.  Toward the end of the exam, I wondered whether it was possible to speak in a 10-point font. If it is, she was doing it, only instead of filling the page, her words filled the room. No squinting was necessary.

buck flagojevich: the unraveling

Just a few excerpts from the 78-page affidavit I decided to spend some time with this evening. I'm particularly intrigued by the escalating awareness of possible surveillance interspersed with his highly illegal utterances. As awful and of course corrupt as the senate-seat trading is, I find the attempted quashing of the Tribune writers to be the most stomach-turning. Oh, and by way of OA, here is a terrific little one-act play drawn from an earlier part of the affidavit, and starring Patti Blagojevich as Lady MacBeth, er, Patti Blagojevich. 

76.
[On the Chicago Tribune] ROD BLAGOJEVICH stated that “our recommendation is fire all those fucking people, get ‘em the fuck out of there and get us some editorial support.”

84.
On December 4, 2008, ROD BLAGOJEVICH spoke with Spokesman. On December 4, 2008, the Chicago Tribune announced it was reducing the size of its workforce by 11 members. During the phone conversation, Spokesman informed ROD BLAGOJEVICH that the Tribune had its “cuts” but that Spokesman did not think the “person we mentioned” was cut. ROD BLAGOJEVICH asked “McCormick?” Spokesman responded “right.”

91. On November 4, 2008, ROD BLAGOJEVICH spoke with Deputy Governor
A. This was the same day as the United States Presidential election. With respect to the Senate seat, Deputy Governor A suggested putting together a list of things that ROD BLAGOJEVICH would accept in exchange for the Senate seat. ROD BLAGOJEVICH responded that the list “can’t be in writing.”

92.
On November 4, 2008, ROD BLAGOJEVICH spoke with JOHN HARRIS regarding the potential vacant Senate seat. ROD BLAGOJEVICH stated that the “trick . . . is how do you conduct indirectly . . . a negotiation” for the Senate seat. Thereafter, ROD BLAGOJEVICH analogized his situation to that of a sports agent shopping a potential free agent to various teams, stating “how much are you offering, [President-elect]? What are you offering, [Senate Candidate 2]? . . . Can always go to. . . [Senate Candidate 3].” Later ROD BLAGOJEVICH stated that he will make a decision on the Senate seat “in good faith . . . but it is not coming for free. . . .It’s got to be good stuff for the people of Illinois and good for me.”

101.
On November 10, 2008, ROD BLAGOJEVICH, his wife, JOHN HARRIS, Governor General Counsel, and various Washington-D.C. based advisors, including Advisor B, discussed the open Senate seat during a conference call. (The Washington D.C.-based advisors to ROD BLAGOJEVICH are believed to have participated on this call from Washington D.C.). Various individuals participated at different times during the call. The call lasted for approximately two hours, and what follows are simply summaries of various portions of the two-hour call. [ . . . ]
c.
ROD BLAGOJEVICH said that the consultants (Advisor B and another consultant are believed to be on the call at that time) are telling him that he has to “suck it up” for two years and do nothing and give this “motherfucker [the President-elect] his senator. Fuck him. For nothing? Fuck him.” ROD BLAGOJEVICH states that he will put “[Senate Candidate 4]” in the Senate “before I just give fucking [Senate Candidate 1] a fucking Senate seat and I don’t get anything.” (Senate Candidate 4 is a Deputy Governor of the State of Illinois).

111.
Later on November 12, 2008, ROD BLAGOJEVICH talked with JOHN HARRIS. ROD BLAGOJEVICH stated that his decision about the open Senate seat will be based on three criteria in the following order of importance: “our legal situation, our personal situation, my political situation. This decision, like every other one, needs to be based upon on that. Legal. Personal. Political.” HARRIS said, “legal is the hardest one to satisfy.”

ROD BLAGOJEVICH told Fundraiser A that “you gotta be careful how you express that and assume everybody’s listening, the whole world is listening. You hear me?” ROD BLAGOJEVICH told Fundraiser A to tell Individual D if there is “tangible political support (campaign contributions) like you’ve said, start showing us now.” Fundraiser A stated he will call Individual D on the phone to communicate ROD BLAGOJEVICH’s message. ROD BLAGOJEVICH responded that “I would do it in person. I would not do it on the phone.”

convergence

1. Last week we did practice interviews for our students who will be attending MLA and hopefully interviewing there. I had a good discussion with one of our students in Writing Studies about the unfortunate separation between Linguistics and Rhetoric.

2. I am working on an article about ancient notions of rhetorical vision, the idea that words help people see (this is not, for the ancients at least, strictly metaphorical).

3. That article folder, into which I have been tossing anything related to the idea for the past three years, contains a piece by Dan I. Slobin, an emeritus professor of psychology and linguistics at Berkeley. The essay is titled "Relations between Paths of Motion and Paths of Vision: A Crosslinguistic and Developmental Exploration,"* and it examines what Slobin calls "the recruitment of path expressions to verbs of looking." The upshot of this "recruitment" (which incidentally is itself a verb that I like a good deal) is that verbs of vision are most usually accompanied by prepositions and other words that indicate motion, e.g., we "look over" or "into" something, or "across" a room. In other words (namely mine), vision travels, and that observation is performed and preserved across a number of languages.  Slobin intimates (rightly I think) that such an idea probably owes to the ancient Greek notion of extramission, whereby vision was thought to emanate from the eyes (some thought)  through invisible fire that travels toward and "meets" the fire emanating from objects (I write about theories of extramission in Bodily Arts).

4. The linguistic residue of extramission is an instance of a feature of language that Kenneth Burke always was quite interested in as well: the incorporation of physicality and physical movement into language and grammar. Such incorporation is so subtle as to be stunning when we (with the help of the likes of Slobin) notice these tendencies.

5. That such tendencies largely go unnoticed speaks volumes about scholarly preferences for disembodied ideas, which is one of the points of chapter 7 of my forthcoming book.

*I found the piece on the internets, but it is no longer there. It is, however, slated to appear in a fetschrift later this month. Here is the citation:

Slobin, D.I. "Relations between paths of motion and paths of vision: A crosslinguistic and developmental exploration." In V. M. Gathercole (Ed.), Routes to Language: Studies in Honor of Melissa Bowerman. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

here's something (else) cool about illinois

Thanks everybody for your comments on my bittersweet post. But enough about me, let's talk about Oronte Churm, one of my favorite features of these here parts. Oronte, for those of you who don't know, has a column called "Dispatches from Adjunct Faculty at  Large Research University" at McSweeney's and a blog/column at Inside Higher Ed called "The Education of Oronte Churm." "Oronte Churm" is of course a pseudonym, and while it used to be an air-tight pseudonym, it's now a pseudo-pseudonym, because he revealed his identity earlier this year, and with a fair bit of local publicity, I might add.

But I had been on to Oronte before that. It started when I was sitting in the waiting room with my colleague who was about to have his wisdom teeth removed, and said colleague (also a fan of Oronte's) announced to me that he had almost tracked down this person's identity and that maybe I could help him because he was fairly sure Oronte taught in my other department. He explained that he kept noticing little local coincidences. Apparently the clincher was the topic of a particular talk Churm mentioned in one of his columns, and it happened to be a talk my colleague had noticed in the scores of titles that flash across our screens. He then started to narrow things down.

While my colleague's head was rolling from his surgery drugs, I came home and picked up the matter from there. I looked through McSweeney's backlogs and discovered an anecdote that overlapped with my first year here in which Oronte was asked to leave a job market meeting. It was a meeting I also happened to be in (as a guest speaker), and I remember the moment as quite tense. I didn't understand why people who didn't happen to hold degrees from our program ought to be asked to leave, but as a brand new assistant professor, I really couldn't say anything. Anyway, his descriptions of the players were unmistakable. This particular entry, like so many of his others, combines range with wit, the intimate with the political. His prose usually makes me forget I'm reading on a screen, or reading at all.  

Anyway, it has been cool knowing that he's in our department, and reading his occasional pieces that reference life in and around the University of Illinois Hinterland University, even though I never see him. Check that: ours was one of the random houses he brought his kid by this year for trick-or-treating, and it was kind of appropriate that his son, whose screen name is "Starbuck" and whom I've read about but have never seen, was in disguise. I was distributing candy and looked up at John/Oronte waiting on the stairs. I have never properly met him, but not knowing his son's real name, and not bothering to introduce myself, I asked: "which one is Starbuck?" He sweetly pointed out one of the masked characters clamoring for tootsie rolls.  Being a local celebrity is probably weird that way.

All of this is to say, that the department that hires him will be a lucky department indeed.

on leaving

I am not good at leaving places. The summer before I started high school, my team spent a long week in Pulaski, Tennessee, a wretched place. We slept on hard tiled classroom floors, the only good thing about which was that the tile was cool at night, and summers in middle Tennessee are blazing. We played basketball for 10 or 12 hours a day and got sick on long john silvers fish. I got kicked out of a game for fighting with a girl who weighed way more than me, and our coach yelled and yelled and yelled at me and our point guard, the only two rising freshmen who would (he could only hope at the time) become starters that year. I should have been miserable--it was objectively miserable--but I cried when we left.

When I left for Illinois from central PA in the summer of 2000 to start my new job as an assistant professor, with my new (to me) whippet Jada rolled up in the back seat next to my big television, I went off the road a couple of times because my vision was all blurry and watery. State College had been so good to me.

When I left Illinois the first time (and yeah, yeah, as one colleague helpfully pointed out, I know we can't come back again), I was totally fine, quietly excited even, until I went to give my office keys to the secretary, a sweet woman who had just started working in the English department. One moment I was cheerfully offering her my keys, and the next moment I was sobbing so uncontrollably that her eyes filled with tears. Before that day, she had never even met me.

All this is to say what some of you already know: we are moving. I told my last phd advisee yesterday, and appropriately it was the most wrenching of the conversations. Let's just say there were, once again, tears, and I have been mopey ever since. If I think about how great my Aristotle students have been this semester, I'm afraid I'll break down even more.

JM and I are very, very excited about where we are going (Penn State), but the joy of going to a great department where rhetoric is cheered by department heads and higher-ups alike, and where there are hills to bike and hike, and where there is my favorite indian restaurant ever, and where E! and Z will both be seven or eight hours closer, still does not make it any easier, any less heartbreaking, to leave a wonderful place with such smart, good people and great friends.