k
Let us hypothesize there is a person I know who we can identify with the initial K. I really like K. Quite a great deal. And I think K really likes me. Also a great deal. Sadly, K is in Chicago. Well, sad not because of Chicago but because I am decidedly not in Chicago. And this is problematic. Because I desperately want to be in Chicago. It is where my thoughts are … and where my heart is as well. I write this not in self-pity, but because I know K has looked at this blog on occasion, and I want to be clear for both myself and him that there is little doubt that he still occupies my thoughts and feelings … even in the midst of an impractical situation and in the midst of a kind of awkward juncture between he and I. The QEs are demanding of my time and concentration, and that I should have met K this summer is … cruelly inconvenient. But that doesn’t mean I have any doubts that meeting him and being able to spend the time I have with him have been immensely fulfilling. I just don’t know how to make that clear in any material way at the moment … words seem so impotent at the moment.
nvm. spoke too soon
Back and forth. Happiness again. nvm the nvm above.
end of days … well, 2009 at least
(Cross-posted at the Book of Faces)
The setup remains the same as last year: 12 thoughts about the year that is drawing to a close, but not necessarily in chronological order. The goal is not to account for the year in narrative detail, but to draw attention to those moments that mattered most this year, for good or ill. (Mostly ill, in my case but that’s because I am who I am.)
1) I was involved, in detail, with the appointments committee this year. A fantastic learning experience! Immensely useful for when I hit the job market in a number (two?) of years. Not just the bureaucratic side of things, but a rhetorical learning experience as well: the job talk & the interview & the grad student lunch are all rhetorical moments: pitching yourself to an audience of potential colleagues and students. It looks intimidating at this distance, but I think all of our interviewees acquitted themselves well. Having said that, welcome aboard again Jim, and I look forward to being in at least one of your courses before I move into ABD status (Fall 2010, with any luck).
2) So … in my last Year in Review (2008, for those keeping score at home), I mentioned certain essential life goals that had not yet been fulfilled at the time, and which I felt were unlikely to be met by the time of my 30th next year. I have taken action on that front and those goals have been met several times over. The point is not that these particular goals were met, but that I recognized the fact that I couldn’t just wait for these goals to be fulfilled by the fickle finger of fate. So … being proactive can work. I guess. It’s still not something that comes natural to me, but, as always, I’m learning.
3) As many of you know, I had to put my cat Schnickelfritz to sleep earlier this year. I don’t feel quite as awful as I did for the first few days after, but every once in a while I find myself thinking I catch him walking down the hall or laying on a bed, only to realize its one of the other cats. I mean, I don’t get to the point where I believe its actually him, but I find that for just a second I could say “Hey, Boo” only to realize that, no, it is not my Boo nor will it ever be my Boo again.
4) I presented at my first CCCCs this year. San Francisco was nice, but I’m not enthralled by the notion of cities that have so many damn hills. Why weren’t all the places we wanted to visit *downhill* from the hotel?!?!? And, friends, you are sorely mistaken if you think I am eating so much Chinese food when we go to the 4Cs again next year. Anyway: I made an ass of myself around Nonny Mouse at the conference. The SNAFU with her still weighs heavily on my heart, but at times I can see myself being ready to write her off. But I don’t want to, all the same, because she’s written me off and I don’t want to end up doing the same to her. Hrm. This will continue to be a thorn in my side for the foreseeable future.
5) As long as conferences are on my mind: I got into C&W for this year, but ended up having to scuttle my appearance there due to cost & SCT obligations. I did get a very complimentary comment from a colleague about my (aborted) paper title though, which she encouraged me to preserve for a future project. I’ve also been accepted, with a whole passel of peeps, to RSA for next year. w00t! It looks like I should be okay for another year when funding renewal letters come due.
6) What was *up* with that meerkat thing?
7) It would be remiss of me not to mention this, but it’s the first time I’ve been so open about it so I feel kind of awkward addressing it. I met and lost my first boyfriend this year. We weren’t together very long (six months, for those of you who have a bizarre obsession with trivial details), and I admit my own anxieties about the relationship were probably the root of a lot of the conflict between us. That, and, in retrospect, maybe he and I were not so well suited to one another as I would have liked. But, alas. This is the kind of thing one learns along the way, I suppose.
SCT! Ithaca! Carl freaking Schmitt! Although at times I felt a bit disengaged from some of my literary colleagues at SCT, the theoretical work there really engaged me and has given me many new avenues for pursuing work within rhetorical studies. Much thanks to the Wayne State English Dept for sponsoring my participation, and much thanks to the SCT staff and faculty, as well as my SCT peers, for making this summer a great one.
9) I didn’t think it possible, but I think I’ve seen even fewer movies this year than last. Of course, this year didn’t have anything like *The Dark Knight,* which galvanized me for the better half of the year last year, before I even saw it. At the moment, the two standouts from the few I have seen this year would be *Star Trek* and *Up.* *Watchmen* was … meh. I miss seeing more films, but at the same time, I don’t really feel like I need to see them the same way I used to. More than anything, I guess I see the steep drop in my filmgoing as evidence of the fact that I’m (gasp!) moving into “official” adulthood, with responsibilities and a profession and all that jazz. WTF?!?!? … On a similar note, I’ve not heard much new music this year, but I’ve fallen madly in love with Lady GaGa. She can do no wrong with me so far. The hip-hop experiment lanuched this fall is still continuing, and for the most part I’ve liked everything my friends and colleagues recommended. And I’ve discovered, much to my admitted surprise, that I really like Jay-Z. Who knew?
10) This semester’s teaching has seemed much less of a burden than the original 3010 syllabus did. I’ve got one class in particular that is a really great collection of students: they do strong work on their projects and have thoughtful, detailed responses to the issues I’m asking them to think through. We have very good camaraderie together and it is always a pleasure to come to class and work with them. Thanks bunches, guys. You won’t get a chance to read this, I imagine, but you kind of saved teaching for me. Seriously.
11) So, there’s this guy I just met. I don’t want to say too much. He touched my neck in a cafe. I could be very happy if things go well. I feel much more comfortable being with him in general than I did with SM from #7 above. More importantly, I feel more comfortable with *myself* with this guy than I did with SM. (Which, admittedly, is more about me than SM).
12) All in all, I feel like 2008 has been an okay year. I’d give it a B- at this point (understanding that maybe that grading this year is a little premature). The rough things that have happened have been more or less balanced out by the good things that have happened. I mean, granted, losing Boo does weigh heavily on the grading scale for the year, and breaking up with SM was rough but I think I’ve come out relatively unscathed on the other side. I have a report from a reliable source that I’ve been described as seeming “more vital” lately (or something to that effect). That seems like an able way to describe how I feel.
13) As before, one to grow on (looking ahead to the coming year): I’m pleased that I’ve been able to befriend at least a couple of the new GTAs in the dept. I want to continue building on those friendships and offering advice and support where I can. I need to lighten up and take myself less seriously, perhaps. I’ve been unpleasant to many people too often this year for reasons that more often than not had little to do with those people–and if you’re one of the persons concerned, please accept again (or for the first time) my apologies.
boo
So, yes, we did put Boo to sleep today. I feel as awful as you might imagine, even if (as I keep reassuring myself) we Made the Right Choice.
To my baby, Boo (1991-2009): Sweet dreams, pretty boy. See you soon.
loss
Sorry for the absence everyone. Most of my readers are also on Facebook with me, so it’s too easy at times to forget to maintain the blog when I can use FB for quick status updates or letting people know how cool meerkats are. Tonight I’m taking the rare step of using the blog to address two kind of personal issues rather than reflecting on scholarship questions. The blog is a medium, not a genre, but I try to avoid admitting I have a personal side whenever possible, although long-time readers of the blog know I don’t always keep up that distinction very well.
As the subject line suggests, I am concerned with loss tonight. I won’t go into too many details, but it looks like there’s a very real possibility that either tomorrow or Tuesday we might be putting my cat to sleep. Please note the distinction here: not “one of my cats” (since most of you know I have several), but “my cat.” I love all of my feline friends, of course, but Boo (his full name his Schnickelfritz Abraham McGinnis, usually aka Nick, Nicky, or Nicky-Boo) is mine. And not mine because I chose him, either; we adopted him when from a litter born to a cat owned by a workmate of my mother, but after a few years it was evident that he’d adopted me as his favorite human member of the family.
He’s had a recurring kidney condition for a few years, and now it seems as though the episodes of his illness are coming closer together. There are treatment options, but they basically amount to little more than keeping him from being in complete misery; there aren’t any options that make recovery possible. At that juncture, it becomes a question of a) quality of life for Boo, and b) the expense of maintaining his current condition for us. So I think that unless he makes a turn for the better in the next day or so, it is likely that while he might be taken to the vet this week, he might not be coming home.
Boo with Your Humble Narrator
Loss is also on my mind because I am confronting the very possibility that I have lost one of my very best friends, perhaps for good. Not that she’s died, or anything, but my own self-absorption and bad behavior led her some months ago to cut me off as her friend. While I had thought that maybe that decision would be a temporary one, I’ve sent her a number of e-mails asking for forgiveness the last few months and tried to explain how much I’ve been missing her. Neither of those amount to being grounds for forgiveness, I know that, but I guess I didn’t realize how deeply I had hurt her. I sent her a long e-mail this weekend, again asking for reconciliation and forgiveness, but as yet, no reply. I don’t even know whether she reads the e-mails I send her or not. I suspect that they either get deleted right away or she has her filters send them to Trash automatically.
(Some of you, I know, will recognize who I’m talking about here, but I will keep her a nonny mouse all the same.)
But anyway, in my most recent e-mail, I tried to describe to her how losing her friendship has felt to me. I want to put up a small section of it here, not because I have any interest in airing private business publicly (except to claim my own responsibility, as I’ve done here, for hurting her in ways deeper than I knew) but simply in the vain hope that even if she doesn’t read my e-mail she might, on a whim, decide to visit the blog and see this small portion of a much (much!) longer e-mail and give a second thought to reconciling our differences with one another:
We are both of us now within two years’ time (or just slightly more) of being finished with our studies. I am being wholly honest with you when I tell you that I would not have made it past my first semester, much less my first year, of graduate school without you. Nor, even more definitely, would I ever have found my way into rhetoric and composition without your passion for the field to guide me. There is so much of who I am now that is owed to you that losing your friendship was like being amputated from the better part of myself. I have tried, as much as possible, to present my appeal to you here as an appeal to reason and decorum rather than to emotion and pathos. My past appeals to you for forgiveness have failed, perhaps because they relied too much on pathos and too little on reason–hence the shift in tone here. The fact remains though that this is for me an emotional issue, despite what claims I may make for the reasonableness of beginning a process of reconciliation. The metaphor of amputation is a useful one for describing my distress: not only have I lost part of myself, but I still feel your presence in my life like a phantom limb every time I find a book, or idea, or conference paper, or question, or song or whatever that I wish I could share with my friend and I find myself overcome by an aching sense of her absence. I can not … can not … believe that the [Nonny Mouse] with whom I used to share so much is gone forever. And if she is not, then, please … please … let her read this. Let her respond.
So: I suppose this is a public admission of my guilt for hurting you, Nonny Mouse, as well as a public apology for so doing. If you read this, which you probably won’t, please–reconsider.
a popular misconception
This actually does a fairly good job explaining how I’ve been feeling lately:
"Misunderstanding" by Steve Burke
and so it goes
I’m submitting a panel to the 4Cs with JG, WD, KL, and MK. Here’s my bit:
Speaker 1: Invention: The Crowded House of Writing as a Social Process
The idea of the individual writer as an isolated fount of rhetorical invention has been challenged by research about social and community literacies (Flower, Gee, Grabill), collaborative learning (Bruffee), post-process theory (Kent, Foster), and the so-called “public turn” in composition (Mathieu, Weisser), but this work assumes stable social realms understood variously as “discourses,” “communities,” or “publics.” Conversely, work in a variety of fields—business (Howe, Tapscott and Williams, Brafman and Beckstrom), information science (Shirky, Weinberger), critical theory (Hardt and Negri, Terranova, Virno)—have pointed to the efficacy of temporary, contingent groups such as crowds or the multitude to respond to short-term, immediate problems; that is, they seem to respond to Muckelbauer’s interest in “what particular concepts can do” (44). This paper seeks to argue for the productive potential of contingency by asking how research on crowds and crowdsourcing can be remixed into what we already know about invention as a social process.
Meh. We’ll see what happens. On the whole, the panel is strong, remixing the canons of rhetoric, and my colleagues have told me they think the proposal is decent, but I’m just phoning it in at this point. I’ll be glad to get to Cornell this summer: I think a change of scene and a summer of intellectual vigor will be good for me. Please don’t read that as saying my friends and colleagues don’t provide plenty of i.v.—I love you all dearly even when I am acting like a total hatebag, as I have been lately. But I think Cornell will be good all the same, and I will return to you renewed and revived.
And because I don’t see the point in the half-truths anymore: I was seeing someone, I ruined it, the end. My fault entirely. What a surprise.
I know some good texts to read arguing in favor of critical pedagogy. Can anyone recommend the texts to read for the counter-arguments? I need to see if there’s a way to better articulate my opposition to it, and I’m hoping some decent readings will give me the way in.
slow burn
Easier to just be miserable, isn’t it? Happiness is hard work. Things we learn along the way ….
all this hassle
So, I was headed to the official campus B&N in order to gossip about my latest peccadilloes with a friend and colleague, and I noticed something in the bookstore window that kind of set me off: a number of tee shirts emblazoned with the legend “All This Hassle for a Tassel,” then marking the graduation year of 2009.
I think the sentiment expressed in awful enough: for one thing, while it is true and problematic that university life is bound by bureaucracy at many levels, and while it is true that university study is often stressful and frustrating, I think it is immensely inappropriate for the university’s Board of Governors (or whoever is in charge of licensing the use of university insignia) to allow university images to be associated with that sentiment. The university should not be in the business of encouraging students to think of its rules, structures, and guidelines as a hassle.
I think the other part of the phrase (the tassel) is equally egregious, if not moreso. What this little rhyme does is suggest thatthe end product of a university education is nothing more than signifier of having completed four years of hassle and frustration. In a university like my own, which has struggled for many years with low retention rates, an equation between education and a hassle is ethically unconscionable, at least to the extent that our (much-touted) Urban Mission charges us with the work of reaching out to and assisting those students at the greatest risk of falling prey to the “all this hassle” mindset. Moreover, I believe this is also part and parcel of the trend toward vocationalization of the university, which is a problem I’m still very much invested in working through at the theoretical and pedagogical levels.
Grr! All this dirt for a shirt.
hints, allegations … another fine mess
I’ve updated Mild Sauce once again, adding a new character. Either it answers questions, confirms suspicions, or makes things more oblique than they already were. Comments are off for this post — any responses, send to me via e-mail.
a familiar scheme
From xkcd:
an eerily familiar scheme
Intended here, in part, as a response to recent reader e-mail, and also as a commentary on why a recent event (unblogged thus far) went perhaps predictably down the crapper. Goodbye, 2008, and good riddance.