I am on a two-legged midwestern trip, having completed the first one yesterday with a drive from Madison to Minneapolis. Appropriately, on the drive, I stopped at the Norske Nook to buy a lingonberry-apple pie.
The folks in English and Communication Arts at U of Wisconsin invited me to present at their colloquium, and I had a blast. For starters I got to see lots of my good friends from Pittsburgh K and M, in addition to dinner with the good comp/rhet folks, and coffee with SZ. One very nice graduate student, A, made a pan of what she called "pregnancy bars" [A, I need that recipe, please!] for the post-colloquium refreshments. At Wisconsin I presented a "bridge" project on Kenneth Burke and animals. Burke won't show up in my animals book--Aesop to Erasmus is already capacious enough--but he is a good warm up for it, because I can ruminate on the question of rhetoric and nonhuman animals more easily given that all his work is fresh in my mind and I'm teaching him this semester. The audience responses also helped me think about the next book while I'm still in the research stage, and so the bridging really is serving its purpose.
Now I'm in Minnesota for a colloquium on Modern Rhetoric. Tonight's talks by Jim Aune and Bill Keith kicked things off nicely, positing some categories and provoking thought about autonomy, art, and much more. Richard G and I are presenting together in the morning, and we'll be talking about Modern Rhetoric's forwarding of Aristotle.
Now, I think I'll take a break from the cerebral to watch an episode of Friday Night Lights. It must be said that I miss JM and the whippets, and no that's not a band of fast ribby guys.
