Including, but not limited to, Chicago (yesterday), Madison (tomorrow), St. Louis (next week), and Bloomington, IN (in two weeks). Also including, but not limited to, a damn good haircut, great thai food, good friends, the Magnetic Fields, doughnuts, bodies of water, and some of my favorite people in communication.

I'm being asked by a few folks to circulate the following call for proposals for the next Feminisms and Rhetorics conference, which follows below. Bravo to Michigan State for taking out the parentheses -- as in feminism(s), rhetoric(s). If we're going to use the plural, let's use the plural.

One bit of criticism I have, which isn't necessarily directed toward Michigan State's department, or even the Feminisms and Rhetorics conference, is that I wish we could start putting conference sites in ONE place, like all FemRhet conference sites could be on the Coalition's site. We tried to do that with Computers and Writing, but it didn't catch on, as Stanford did their own site for 2005's conference, Texas Tech did their own for 2006, Wayne State did the same for 2007, which doesn't seem to be there anymore, and UGA created a site for 2008's conference.

The problem for Feminisms and Rhetorics, though, is more serious, I think. At least most of the Computers and Writing conference sites are still available. Try to go to the conference site for 1999, and it's not there. 2001's conference in Decatur, IL doesn't have a site available either. Ohio State's 2003 conference site redirects to the English department's main page. I couldn't find sites for Michigan Tech's 2005 conference or even the most recent one, 2007's conference at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.

I understand if universities want to create their own sites for conferences they're hosting. Still, I don't think these sites should be thought of as ephemera. They're historical documents about fields of study. I think it's important to at least archive the files at some stable site that represents the organization and isn't hosted on a particular university's web space. If Michigan State does this, I will be very impressed.

Michigan State University / East Lansing, Michigan / October 7–9, 2009 *

The 2009 Feminism(s) and Rhetoric(s) conference will be hosted by the
Rhetoric & Writing program at Michigan State University. We invite proposals
that:

• *reflect* the complexity and diversity of who "we" are as a scholarly
community;
• *make manifest* the deep structure of the connections, intersections, and
overlaps that actually
make us a community;
• *help articulate* who "we" are as a deliberate community of scholars, and
what that means about our responsibilities and relationships to one another
across scholarly areas and institutional positions;
• *highlight* scholarly and teacherly activities that deliberately create
space for more complex notions of scholarship and teaching within the
discipline of Rhet/Comp;
• *include* and significantly engage communities outside of the academy;
• *focus on* antiracist pedagogies and scholarship; present
interdisciplinary scholarship in Afrafeminist Rhetorics; American Indian
Rhetorics, Chicana Rhetorics, Asian American Rhetorics, post/neo-colonial
rhetorics;
• *highlight* the intellectual traditions of women's communities, especially
communities constellated around specific identity markers such as race,
ethnicity, class, sexual orientation issues, geographic origins;
• *explore* the relationships between written, oral, and material discursive
production;
• and other topics that *address* the connections in the conference theme.

We also welcome proposals on relevant topics not directly addressed above,
that significantly engage disciplines other than Rhet/Comp, and that have
consequences for communities located outside of the academy.

Although traditional presentations are acceptable, we encourage participants
to create formats that go beyond the read-aloud academic paper. Interactive
sessions that include discussions, dialogues, and performances are
especially welcome. Proposals should be uploaded to the FemRhet 2009 web
site (www.femrhet2009.org), and can be for:

• 20-minute individual presentations (250-word proposals)
• 90-minute 3–4 member panels (500-word proposals)
• 90-minute workshops or roundtables (500-word proposals)

Please plan to submit a title, a proposal the length indicated above, and a
program-ready, booklet-friendly 50-word blurb for the presentation.

Proposal System Open: December 15, 2008
Proposal Deadline: February 1, 2009
Acceptances Distributed: April 30, 2009

For more information: Contact Malea Powell (powell37@msu.edu), Nancy DeJoy (
dejoy@msu.edu), or Rhea Lathan (lathan@msu.edu).

Yes, the exclamation point is default punctuation for Little Miss Intense.

• Can I watch Dora for a little bit?
• Mama, your toothpaste tastes NASTY!
• Oh. It’s the merry-go-round song again! I turned it on with my foot.
• But we don’t have a rhinoceros!
• Does anybody want to go to the… children’s museum?
• Daddy, you’re sweaty. Get in the shower right now!
• My mouth is EM-PTY!
• This is the mama. She has a baby in her tummy.
• Do cereal bars taste good?
• Miss Poo Poo has problems. But Big Big doesn’t.
• I don’t want to do ANYTHING!
• But I’m not pregnant.

  I thought Obama did well last night in the forum that was supposed to favor McCain. McCain's jokes were oh, so flat--he hunches his shoulders and laughs at them before he even delivers them. And then they're not funny. Oh, and the moment he referred to Obama as "that one" was stellar. He might as well have said "You know who voted for it? That terrorist-loving negro!"  Just forehead slapping. In contrast, Obama's comment about a wheel falling off the straight talk express was well delivered and quite funny. Maybe I'm just revealing my bias.

And speaking of which, for an audience supposedly full of undecideds, I thought it was quite obvious which candidate was favored by certain individuals in the audience. A couple of the bald white men trembled with pleasure, their glasses quaking just a little bit when McCain walked close to them (I would argue too close--he looked like he was going to climb into the petty officer's lap at one point, or at least give him the special hug he reserves only for W), and at the end these same fellows shook hands with Obama for the briefest possible second and never looked at him. And then--then, there was the woman in blue. There she is, right there, circled in the photo below, gazing adoringly at the Obamas, like a 1960s teenager just home from a Beatles concert.

Does anyone else remember her?

We know from the introductory remarks that the town hall audience was asked to behave with restraint--no applause, no calling out. And yet what that meant was that the Obama fan in blue was about to lose a wheel herself from all the restraint. She was quite often in the shot when Obama was answering questions, and she looked like she was on the brink of standing up and shouting "I am sorry Mr. Brokaw, but OMYGOD OBAMA is our MAN, and he's STANDING RIGHT THERE IN FRONT OF ME!" When Obama got off a good zinger at McCain or delivered a particularly impressive answer, her eyes widened, her mouth spread gleefully, and her head pulled back. She would have looked around at her fellow townspeople to see if they got that, but her eyes were stuck on Obama. When McCain was talking, she looked around, bored, probably wondering what those lights on the floor were for. And then, post debate, when Obama came close to her section, she pulled out her standard-issue disposable camera, snapped one shot, and then slid it away, always keeping that free eye on the man she hopes with all her heart will be our next president.

Undecided, my ass. Indeed, I would offer that the photo above reveals nearly everyone's preference. The guy in the tie beside the obama fan is looking fondly at McCain. The woman to her left is craning her neck just a little for a better view of Obamas. The woman in front of the obama fan with the black blazer and cool glasses is following Obama with her eyes, while the woman in front of her (same back blazer) has just snapped a picture of the McCains. It's less clear who the guy in the upper left corner is shooting with his disposable camera--maybe he likes Tom Brokaw.

An article on CNN reports on a recent study of the links between creativity and mood disorders. As the article notes, "The research of Verhaeghen and colleagues shows when people are in a reflective mode, they may become more creative, depressed, or both." The article also reports that

Creative people in the arts must develop a deep sensitivity to their surroundings -- colors, sounds, and emotions, says Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, professor of psychology and management at Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, California. Such hypersensitivity can lead people to worry about things that other people don't worry about as much, he said, and can lead to depression.

All of this sounds reasonable to me. Perhaps such connections exist. We might also consider the cultural contexts here. I would be interested in seeing if the same conditions apply in other cultures. The article doesn't report on that. In my view, in the U.S. creativity and individuality are punished, particularly in the teen years. One's family or school may not tolerate genuine creativity. After all, in our culture, individuality means "having it your way" at Burger King. Perhaps later on, one might find a community of creative types, but I would think that by then the damage would be done. Obviously it doesn't happen to everyone, but that's not the point.

On the other hand, I certainly agree that there is suffering in speculation. Perhaps if you are creative in certain ways you might have a tendency to speculate about possibilities others would not imagine or bother to imagine. The ability to imagine a different world and then to emotionally place yourself there can certainly be painful or pleasurable. But at a certain point, pleasure and pain are the same as affective overload.

However such practices are not necessary for creative expression. When we naturalize creativity, as we often do, we ignore the possibility of developing specific techniques and practices. That is, creative people can learn practices for making the most of their creativity without injuring themselves, just as dancers or athletes learn to hone their physical talents while minimizing the possibility of bodily harm.

I’m happy to say that at long last, From A to <A>: Keywords of Markup is under contract with the University of Minnesota Press. Jeff and I hope to see it in print in Spring 2010.

two seven zero.

with the economy in the toilet, election outlooks are something of a comfort. these two things are not unrelated.

I was just (Thu-Sat) in Minneapolis for CPTSC. Very quick, pretty good conference. Amy Patrick volunteered to drive; I agreed. On the way there I slept and wrote. On the way back, I drove a lot. I made only one major wrong turn, going about 15 miles out of the way. Whee… regardless, much less hassle than flying, even if took a bit longer.

The first night keynote, in the pattern of conference talks which fail to take a position, but just “present issues,” was underwhelming. The plenary session the next morning was better, especially Dan Riordan’s talk. But the sessions were most rewarding; the “five minutes per speaker, no PowerPoint” format delivered. Every panel I attended was followed with a strong conversation, and while there were a few of the typical show-off or didn’t-listen questions, real engagement was the norm. Highlights: Karl Stolley on integrating free and open source into TC programs; Richard Johnson-Sheehan on sustainability; Gretchen Perbix on TC and IT; Jason Swarts on situatedness and software. And very good conversations afterward with Jim Dubinsky, Susan Katz, and other folks. No strong negatives at the conference, but a lot of little problems: very late posting of information on the web site, some unpolished presentations everyone had to sit through, lots of errors on name tags and in the program, a very cramped and loud hallway outside the session rooms.

Given that I had to do the conference on the cheap, I stayed in a hostel ($30) instead of the conference hotel ($130). Thursday on the way there, I drove through a neighborhood filled with Carribean restaurants, and I ate at a Jamaican place. Buffet-style. Lordy, it was good. Lentils, chicken, goat, red beans and rice, steamed vegetables, rice pudding. I plowed through a huge, heaping plate and pretty much didn’t feel hungry until we left Saturday morning.

The hostel was in a typical city neighborhood, a mix of rentals, beatifully groomed two-story houses, places a little run-down, small apartments. New BMWs parked next to listing Pontiacs. Lots of Somali and other African influences and people. A guy at the gas station where I bought coffee was selling sambousas. Beef, or I would have bought a few. I enjoyed the opportunity to get off campus a bit, though I imagine the folks I heard complaining about the shuttle ride from the airport wouldn’t have taken the bus with me. I was in a room with four beds, but had no roomies either night. And my room really did smell like diesel… thankfully, not the whole time.

But the best experience was two trips to Stub and Herb’s, once for lunch with my former student Joe Weinberg and later with Amy for drinks before the dinner session. They’ve changed hands about a year ago, and their Beer Advocate page reflects a lot of problems which I believe are no longer present. Let me put in a vote of confidence: about thirty taps with excellent variety, local flavor, and multiple beers I hadn’t seen. Our waitress was outstanding. When she began explaning something to me, I started to cut her off, then realized: this woman knows her stuff. I apologized and went on to have a great conversation with her. My bill of fare:

• Tyranena Hop Whore (Am Imperial IPA): powerful citrusy hops, nice balance of malt/hops, and bitter/flavor/aroma. Not aggressive up front, and stronger than it seems.
• Lift Bridge Farm Girl (Saison): lovely pale yellow-brown, with a little funk. Excellent.
• Two Brothers Cain & Ebel (rye ale): nicely hopped, with a little astringency from the rye. Lighter than I expected. Amy ordered one of these after trying mine. “I didn’t think I liked beer,” she said. “You need to drink my kind of beer,” I replied.
• Boulder Brewing Cold Hop (English IPA): very true-to-style English, not outlandishly hopped, pretty solid malt, even that touch of metallic flavor I identify with British beer.

Wish I’d gone back for a few more I didnt’ get to try (Surly Cynic, Flat Earth Onvi, St Croix Maple IPA), or made it to Town Hall. Next time.

The preparation that goes in to teaching graduate seminars can pay big dividends in terms of one's research. This is often the case where my seminars are concerned. But this week I'm finding another pretty interesting confluence between the readings I have assigned and the administrative and service posts I inhabit. The topic for this week in my Aristotle seminar is "friendship, justice, and democracy," and in addition to assigning excerpts from Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics and Politics, I also assigned two chapters from Danielle Allen's book Talking to Strangers. This book never fails to resonate with me in one way or another. The last time I taught it, for example, I was also teaching in the Odyssey Project, a free humanities education program for people in the community living at or slightly above the federal poverty line. That particular context made Allen's arguments about equity glow on the page; they still do. And incidentally, if Barack Obama gets elected, we might well be hearing more from Allen, an idea that makes me shiver with excitement. 

At any rate, the year I last taught Allen was also my tenure year, and post tenure I have become (as many do) more active in the inner workings of campus and my departments, and so Allen is rattling in my head as I adjudicate plagiariasm cases and worry about the culture of criminalization that often crops up around plagiarism charges. In addition, one of those departments has been going through a particularly rough patch and has experienced what Allen might call the corrosion of trust. So this time, Allen's arguments about friendship without emotional charge serving as a model for citizenly behavior, and about rhetoric as an art of trust production resonate on an even more local level.

At the end of last week, I agreed to serve on a committee whose explicit charge is to develop a plan for spending a pot of endowment money in a way that improves the departmental climate and attends to the aforementioned corrosion. It's not too often that one gets to join a committee and think about spending money, and so I of course said yes, and I reread Allen with this committee's charge in mind. As with all theory, though, the big challenge will be to translate principles of equity, democracy, trust, and healing into an event--or a series of events.

Enculturation and The Writing Instructor, two journals that had gone a few years without publishing, are back online. I'm happy to see them.

Mark Marino at Writer Response Theory reports on a recent presentation by N. Katherine Hayles and Lynne Withey on this subject. Withey is at the University of CA press, and one of the things I can glean from this post is the ongoing challenge of establishing a working business model for digital publishing. As we know there are ongoing problems here including:

• maintaining the model of authorial expertise and copyright
• establishing a digital genre that would be analog to a book so that you aren't continually reinventing the publication process
• getting readers/users to pay for access.

I'm confident that some future digital publishing will follow this remediation of the monograph, but really it does seem to miss the point by a wide mark. When I think of many of the exemplary models of single-author digital scholarship, I see one of two things. Either they are pretty much just print texts online, or they are very experimental pieces that operate more like art than scholarship. Both of these things are fine, but neither are good arguments, in my view, for digital scholarship.

Marino reports Hayles identifies the following shifts in the move toward the digital:

• "Decenters the individual human researcher (solitary work of genius)
• Pushes toward collaboration (humanities scholars working with designers and other programmers)
• Shifts expertise
• Puts data-collection over meaning making"

As Marino observes, there would appear to be a notable shift toward social scientific and scientific modes of research here. Hayles uses the example of moving from Latourian ANT methods toward a Moretti-like distant reading analysis. I see where she's coming from. I agree that computer networks allow us to deal with more data through a new set of analytic methods. Computer networks also facilitate collaboration, which includes the expertise shift. All of this runs antithetically to Withey's concerns.

In all this shifting though, I think it is important to remember that the human still serves as a nexus in this network, particularly from our perspective, as... ummm... humans. That is, if I do a new critical reading of a poem, my body sits in front of the text. I read it and process it. Yes, I am connected to a network of cultural, disciplinary, ideological forces. I am in the middle of a network. And though I can try to sit back and decenter myself to a degree, I have to recognize that I am situated. I am where I am even as I am distributed.

Similarly, if I am analyzing an extensive corpus using distant reading methods, my body still sits in front of a text, the output of my data mining. I read it and process it. Yes, I am connected to a network of cultural, disciplinary, ideological forces. I am in the middle of a network. It is a different network than the one above, but a network nonetheless. I am situated and distributed.

As humanists, we can still focus on the experience of the body and consciousness, on the singular, on Agamben's whatever while operating through the network, through data collection. In the old model of the humanities, data collection pretty much happened in graduate school. That's when you read all the canonical texts in your literary period. That was your data set in literary studies, and the data set would bascially never change. Now we have experimental methods for producing new sets of data which certainly would result in new information about a broad range of writing practices. Of course we would still need to determine the meaning of such data.

Obviously the problem with digital scholarship is that it continues to reassert writing/publication as supplemental to knowledge production. That is, we continue to think of media networks as simply a different way to present the scholarly work we have always done. That's not the case with Hayles, nor is it the case with many scholars experimenting in this area, but for the most part, looking at the typical humanities scholar, I don't think there is much recognition that emerging technologies are shifting the material contexts of knowledge production.

That means that regardless of whether one chooses to embrace digital scholarship or not, the status of old methods of scholarship will necessarily be transformed. 20th century humanities scholarship was a product of industrial publishing technologies and Cold War-era higher education. Now we have new conditions. The 21st century will be no more like the 20th century than the 20th century was like the 19th century. That's all we are seeing here, except that maybe now changes happen more rapidly. We need to take the core of the humanities--our concern with humanness in ethical, aesthetic, collective, and experiential/singular terms--and bring that forward into a new set of informational and media contexts.

And all the rooms, they smell like diesel
And you take on the dreams of the ones who have slept there
And I’m lost in the window
And I hide on the stairway, and I hang in the curtain, and I sleep in your hat
And no one brings anything small into a bar around here

I picked on this article in TechDirt from academhack. It's another one of those situations where there's some conflict over the issue of twittering and blogging the classroom. The article and the comment discussion really points out two separate questions.

1. Is the professor within hir rights to forbid students from twittering or blogging in the classroom? But perhaps more germane, why would you do this and what would be the basis for such a policy?
2. Is there an intellectual property, copyright or privacy issue here in relation to twittering or blogging, as opposed to audio or video recording?

#2 is real simple. Is it a violation for me to go to a movie and then come back here and tell you the plot and/or tell you my favorite lines from the movie? Of course not! So how could it be illegal to talk about a class you are taking. And exactly why would we want to stop our students from discussing the things they hear in class? Honestly, I don't get the professor who would want students to keep the matters of the classroom secret. It isn't group therapy. It's not an AA meeting. No one is signing a non-disclosure agreement. As to the issue of A/V recording, while I'm not a lawyer, I think this varies from state to state. I can understand why one wouldn't want to be taped, especially without foreknowledge.

From a general ethical perspective, as a professor, I would think of my presentation as my property. That means you aren't allowed to record or distribute the audio or video without my permission. Additionally, the documents I write for a class are copyrighted. Now generally speaking, my choice is to give this material away under a creative commons license (attribute/non-commercial). But that's an individual choice.

However you are entirely free to write about my class. You are entitled to dislike my class. You're entitled to say anything short of slander, though I am assuming that if you were to have such a low opinion of me you wouldn't be coming by my office to ask for a recommendation letter. The point being that you have a right to free speech but that doesn't absolve you of the consequences of what you write.

#1 is more complicated.

As a professor you certainly have the right, if not the responsibility, to eliminate unwarranted disruptions in the classroom. I think it is questionable whether or not a student typing on a laptop or into a mobile phone is necessarily any more of a disruption than a student writing notes in a notebook. You could argue that students wearing inappropriate clothing in the classroom are more disruptive, but when is the last time you saw a student sent from the classroom b/c of some dress code? Certainly a student could be disruptive in his/her use of a laptop. A student could make disruptive use of a chair or shoes. Are we going to make all the students sit on the floor and take off their shoes? Are we faculty or the TSA?

Now a professor might think that student laptops are not a best practice for learning and forbid their use for that reason. I think this is the argument we have heard from some law schools. Do you think that it would be acceptable for a professor to forbid note-taking altogether based on the same argument? Or forbid the use of pen and paper but permit electronic recording and note-taking? The only real differences here are cultural-ideological-rhetorical. It is more acceptable, right now, among faculty to forbid laptops than pen and paper. It was once acceptable to forbid silent reading. I would think the more logical and ethical path is to allow students to make their own decisions that reflect their own learning styles. Personally I never took notes as a student. Occasionally someone said something that made me think of something that I would jot down on the corner of newspaper or on a book. But that was just my style.

In any case, I'm not much impressed by the arguments of disruption or best practice.

Honestly, I think this issue is largely one of control, just as it was for the faculty who forbade silent reading and limited access to libraries. The idea of students writing about classes, sharing their notes, and having discussions in public online spaces about classes is a little frightening. Who knows what will be said?

But isn't this the point? Isn't the idea of education for knowledge to be spread? Sure, students can and will misunderstand things they learn. They may bring uninformed and sophomoric perspectives. If you think that's scary, imagine what percentage of American voters will cast their presidential votes based on misunderstandings or uninformed perspectives! What do you think? 80%? But I digress. Maybe our job as faculty is to engage our students in these public dialogues, not only as best practices in terms of their education, but also to rise to meet a larger educational imperative.