Monday, November 27, 2006

in between a breath or two

Tonight, during dinner and while the cat slept with her head in the little tub of catnip, we watched some of La Femme Nikita.

I had forgotten how viscerally I responded when, on the night Bob takes her out to dinner and champagne and a gift of a gun, she finds herself in her little black dress and torn stockings in the restaurant kitchen, figuring out what to do while 5 or 6 gunmen hunt around for her. Her face runs through several severe emotions but settles mostly on the resolve of "I can handle this especially since I have an extra clip in my decollete." I could stand to channel that face -- and all that is behind it -- during some of the meetings and events coming up in the next weeks.

But I also wonder: given how many movies are about hired killers (we watched Shadowboxer the other night, which at least tried to think through questions of blood and violence but was too enthralled with Cuba Gooding Jr's ass to engage seriously with them), how many of our neighbors make their living in this way? The number of movies suggests that perhaps 20-30 percent of them are quietly and thoroughly cleaning their silencers right at this moment.

Friday, November 24, 2006

home

The cat has come back out from her hiding place under my desk back in the farthest corner of the house (which just happens to be up against a heating vent) to welcome us back to this sweet house and work. My article writing is crawling, a paragraph and sometimes a sentence at a time, this being the slowest thing I have written in memory and I do not know why -- but I am not yet begrudging it even though everything else is piling up behind it, all behinder than it should be, a heavy dam waiting to break over my head.

The opening paragraph of this new little article, though, has a rhythm that makes me smile each time I re-read it, which is just enough pulse to keep me from throwing it away.

I am hoping that the iPod's semi-random function will come up with something new to goose me. Or an online random word generator. Or Babelfish, taking it to Italian and back again: "People in the codes category that we teach must learn approximately the academic expectations, but discursively."


This bit of writing needs something external to me to make it go right now.

Thursday, November 23, 2006

a day off

It is Thanksgiving, and because it is also the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and in the fifties and sunny, everyone we have met today has commented enthusiastically but hesitantly about the weather. No one wishes to jinx this loveliness (although I did brag about it to my parents in Maryland earlier today, who groused about the drizzling damp and cold there) but also everyone wants to be out in it. We walked on the breakwater in Marquette where as we headed out one wide old man was heading in, sitting periodically on the large broken rocks to rest as he hauled his bucket of fish toward dinner. It smelled and sounded like the ocean -- water and fish and little waves -- on the West Coast during the gentlest of Januaries. There were three men still fishing out to the end, two on the huge cement blocks chatting while they lay there dibbling their lines, with their heads over the blocks looking down into the water, and one older man in a little bobbling aluminum boat, not quite asleep. It did almost put us to sleep to watch him. He was stretched out, his boat held in place by two anchors, one at either end, their lines visible all the way down, and he had his hat pulled down, and a rod over which his hands crossed but did not hold, and the little waves moved him and his boat slowly up and then back down, and again, and it was sunny but hazy and a few ducks floated on by and we all yawned.

When we walked back in, we passed several small groups of people, a young couple in sweaters only and big grins, an older couple with an eager Chesapeake Bay Retriever and a chatty daughter of about our age, and then a young father with two little energetic boys. The older boy (seven?) was running up and down the sides of the lower, sloped, concrete wall, exuberant to be out and able to run up and down, arms like wings. The littler boy (four?) stayed closer to his goateed father, who did encourage him to try to run up the slopes like his brother but the littler boy was just not enough settled into his bones and muscles to do it as gracefully and mindlessly as his brother. The littler boy looked nervous inside his big running smile.

I am reading, now, later, back in our hotel room, about the smallpox epidemic that hit the Americas between 1775 and 1782. Elizabeth A. Fenn wrote the book, Pox Americana, and she starts by describing how she got interested in the topic while an undergraduate but then worked for eight years as an auto mechanic, reading the whole time about smallpox and the life of the Americas in those years. She describes the high mortality rates for children under five and people over forty-five, and the lack of resistance of the people native to the Americas both because of non-exposure and genetic homogeneity, and so I am tacking her words onto the various people we have encountered today but also enthralled with the details that allow for more accurate imaginings about the past. She describes, for example, John Adams (the one who married Abigail) undergoing inoculation as it was practiced back in 1764. Adams writes Abigail about it: he and his brother are shut up in a house in Boston with a number of others, all under the care of different doctors with different approaches. First, Adams and his brother are prepared for a week through mercury treatments, various emetics, and a diet of bland soft things. Then their arms are cut and dried powdered scab material put in, and they pass through the course of the disease, but more lightly than had they caught it from someone else who had a full blown case: he comes out, a few weeks later, with only “eight or ten pockmarks.” How the fear of smallpox would have been background to everything one said or did (especially women who were pregnant, on top of every other fear).

The more I learn the more impossible I know it is to grasp any sense of the emotional tenor of other times but I look up from reading over lunch about smallpox and there is Dennis reading about something less scabrous and it is, after all, Thanksgiving and I believe I can take a few minutes from all that is due to enjoy this.

Wednesday, November 22, 2006

stuck

I am in a hotel room in Marquette, getting a short/quiet Thanksgiving away, and trying to push through a too-familiar wall in a short writing that is overdue.

The wall is this: at a point in this writing in which I am arguing for a pedagogy that mixes rhetoric with the New London Group's (arhetorical) notions of available designs-designing-the redesigned, my justification is simply to repeat what so many have been repeating ever since someone first brought a writing class to a computer: Look, writing is changing! Look, we need to acknowledge this in our teaching and so we need to acknowledge that we need to broaden/change how we teach! Look, writing is dead! Long live writing!

It's not that what I am recommending is tiring to me, it's that the justification is. It's worn and in that part of my writing I just want to insert a citation list of the 8 million before me who've made the same argument. I don't think I can get away without making it -- I need to offer some justification for what I am doing, given the context of my writing as a response to something published on hypertext almost 10 years ago now -- but I wish I could. I worry that when they come to that part of my writing (after some paragraphs that I admit to liking for their rhythms and cheery density) others reading this are going to start making that "yeah yeah yeah" sound in their heads -- and not in a happy Beatles remembering kind of way or even with Karen O in mind.

How can I make the argument that the NLG/rhetoric mashup can be one possible answer to a need without stating the need as that old retread?

Well, the need isn't exactly the exigency I've described (writing is dead, long live...) so much as it is the lack of change in our abilities really to understand what it means that writing *is* changing. (And, of course, to write that is to imply that *I*, Queen Anne, do understand.) If writing really is changing, in other words, then the audiences and contexts are changing just as much as the technologies and kinds of texts we make -- the texts with which people younger than I are so much more fluent. I need to approach this as a strong suspicion I have that maybe, just maybe, when we say writing is changing there is a whole lot more attached to than simply "Look, now I can cut and paste! It's easier than typing!" and that it's also a whole lot more than "Oh, and now I need to pay attention to typefaces, too." Like, duh.

I wish I could just presume that we were all on the same page about this and simply move on. I wish I had a pony. I wish I were 16, too, because I want to be fluent like a fish with some of these technologies that trip up my fingers. So I'll continue to work out in this writing just what it is I am recommending against, then, but I also want to point out (to myself, sigh) that I am now trying to use this blog-writing thing to think out loud, which I have not done before. (And so just where are my feet?)

We are off to one of the main reasons (other than Mavis, Andy, and Lily, and Snowbound Books) to make the trip to Marquette: Thai House.

Tuesday, November 21, 2006

you are not alone....

Those discussions we've been having about people in your classes turning in late work? The discussions don't end; they just keep getting more detailed.

You also might be interested in the latest teaching carnival.

Saturday, November 18, 2006

break time!

It is not
yet noon,
and I have:
• written and sent off a review of a journal manuscript!
• changed the bed!
• started the laundry!
• vacuumed the whole house!
• cleaned the kitchen floor!
• cleaned the downstairs bathroom!
• begun procrastinating on the next article that's due!



The first day of a week-long break (and after returning from three trips in three weeks) suggests, seductively, endless time. Endless.

The water in the Portage right now is still, creating a late fall day mirror world of Houghton, trees, and the boat that goes out to Isle Royale. I think I could sit in this chair on the porch for the next week, drifting -- or at least continuing to procrastinate calmly.