I took this Friday just before 10 a.m. as I wrapped up a short workout in Olds-Robb, or Rec-IM (this second one is the better-known of the building's names, I'm told). The photo is East-facing, a view of Pray-Harrold and other structures on either side whose names I don't know (education on the far right; health services, I think, on the near left). I opted for a day-pass on Tuesday to try out the facility and found the small satellite fitness cove on the fourth floor was exactly what I was looking for. The weight equipment is slightly worn, but it works. It is heavy. And the cardio options are adequate, even a cut above adequate. A row of bikes, ellipticals, and treadmills face... dmueller http://www.earthwidemoth.com/mt/ dereknmueller@gmail.com

I'm between classes: two sections of ENGL328: Writing, Style, and Technology. Today was our third meeting in the first section. The third meeting of the second section happens in 90 minutes. The only trouble with teaching two sections is that the session details collapse into one another. That is, I reconstruct an approximately full experience from bits of each, roughly as if the 150-minutes, divided in two, amount to a singular 75-minutes of layered memory. A memory so blended, so woven I cannot account for what happened in one section distinct from the other. No, I'm not complaining. Not that at all. I am taking the long way, the curving route to say that the 90-minute window between classes is the only time I can... dmueller http://www.earthwidemoth.com/mt/ dmueller@syr.edu

This was a jam-packed week (local travel, semester buildup, starts), so I neglected to celebrate properly the Barthes of September. Barthes of September is my own semi-forgettable holiday, Sept. 7, a day when in years past I have posted something or other from Roland Barthes. Pure negligence on my part to miss such an event. I did, nevertheless and a few days late, leaf around yet again in RB by RB, and I smiled--a smile of understanding, a smile of 'yes, this one'--when I read "The privileged relationship." The singular-multiple dynamic he describes matches up well enough with my own radical social reorientation in recent weeks. He did not seek out an exclusive relationship (possession, jealousy, scenes); nor did he seek out a generalized, communal... dmueller http://www.earthwidemoth.com/mt/ dmueller@syr.edu

Norm MacDonald tells a moth joke (via):... dmueller http://www.earthwidemoth.com/mt/ dmueller@syr.edu

I've been pleasantly surprised--impressed, even--by EMU's new faculty orientation. Monday and Tuesday consisted of optional workshops: one- and two-hour sessions put on by everyone from librarians and IT folks to faculty and human resources staff. The required two-day orientation started today and runs through tomorrow. I would guess much of the program is similar at other universities. We (26 new faculty) met and talked with the president and provost, worked through a stack of HR materials (benefits, direct deposit, flex accounts, and so on), looked at couple of FERPA scenarios with assistant general counsel, mingled with various department chairs, board of regents members, and new colleagues during a mid-day social hour, snaked through the EMU information fair booths, and ended the day with a 40-minute... dmueller http://www.earthwidemoth.com/mt/ dmueller@syr.edu

I could use a pair of scissors right about now to remove the last scrap of packaging on another (new) pair of scissors. The problem-solution I'm describing is something like Cut It Forward, shears' equivalent to Pay It Forward. Or, Do unto Fiskars, a gift-economy rule among craft tools and other similar objects. Then again, what do I even need scissors for? Extracting book shipments? Rescuing single paragraphs, sentences, or words from printed drafts via old-way cut/paste techniques? Non-symbolic games of Rock, Paper, Scissors (which, if I was lucky, might produce the rare play of double scissors, which, although a draw, would solve the initial problem)?... dmueller http://www.earthwidemoth.com/mt/ dmueller@syr.edu

Late last week I finished China Mieville's latest, The City & ytiC ehT. TC & CT is a detective story, but it's not just any detective story (what Mieville calls a "police procedural"). In terms of theoretical richness, this one holds even with Perdido Street Station and The Scar. Mieville creates a pair of cities fraught with boundary in.discretions. Citizens from Beszel and Ul Qoma pass by each other every day, but as they do so they must unsee people and things from the other city. Even where the borders become confusing overlaps, in cross-hatched zones likely to draw heavy traffic from autos and pedestrians, unseeing remains a necessary tactic (sort of the opposite of panoptic conditioning; unseeing here as deliberate, uneasy negligence). Political, jurisdictional... dmueller http://www.earthwidemoth.com/mt/ dmueller@syr.edu

By way of WPA-L and Twitter, I learned yesterday that Ken Macrorie passed away earlier this month. Macrorie was, among other things, an innovator, a teacher well-known for parodying the most "dehydrated" approaches to English Studies, for railing against mechanical prose, for cracking jokes on hyper-cantankerous pedagogies and their perpetrators. I encountered a little bit of Macrorie in CCR732, our course on curriculum. We didn't read all of Uptaught. I don't even think I own a copy (it might be packed, if I do). But copies are surprisingly cheap on Amazon: used for 25 cents plus four bucks S&H. They're worth more than that. I also had three or four conversations with my first MA adviser about the I-Search paper, Macrorie's self-styled take on the... dmueller http://www.earthwidemoth.com/mt/ dmueller@syr.edu

We took the Empire Service to New York City last week, then strolled around the city for a couple of days as a kind of three-way graduation present to ourselves. D. hadn't been to the city during our five-year stay in NY, having missed the 2006 CCCC and our sprint down to the old Yankees Stadium last year around this time. During this little trip we took the W line from midtown Manhattan down to South Ferry, rode across the harbor and back on the Staten Island Ferry, wandered around Central Park (including the CP Zoo), ate brick-fired pizza at Angelo's, and generally just meandered around and made the most of it. D., Ph., and A. (Ph.'s friend) took in a Broadway show last Wednesday,... dmueller http://www.earthwidemoth.com/mt/ dmueller@syr.edu

Reading this evening about the 19231 beginnings of the Great Outdoor Fight in Bakersfield, Calif.: Figuring that where there was noise, there must surely be money, [Ken] Crandall decided to make the G.O.F. an annual event and become wealthy by selling sandwiches  to the crowds who came to compete. He cleared an acre of his land, put up a high chainlink fence around it, and distributed hastily printed fliers throughout central California. An excited public quickly phoned, mailed, or telegrammed the information not only throughout the nation, but throughout the world. Newspapers in Italy ran sensational articles about the "Festival of Beasts," while papers in China advertised trips to California so that one might "Defeat Over Long-Time Dudes." (7) Onstad, Chris. The Great Outdoor Fight.... dmueller http://www.earthwidemoth.com/mt/ dmueller@syr.edu

Spent a few hours this weekend restyling the blog. I'm almost satisfied with the new front page. The internal pages and archives will have to wait. They're still functional because they pull from the style sheet, but I have to shift attention to the other, more pressing work I'm doing this summer or it will mount into a punishing backlog. More about that soon. The latest design makes better use of Cron rebuilds. I've installed MT-Twitter (Brandon Fuller, I.O.U. $10), created a blog to archive the activity stream, and then ported that blog's contents to the EWM front page using the multiblogs feature. I'm still on the fence about Twitter. Not sure I will do anything worthwhile with it (I haven't adjusted to the different... dmueller http://www.earthwidemoth.com/mt/ dmueller@syr.edu

The 13th annual Native Vision camp concluded earlier today in Whiteriver, Ariz. I had a great time, all in all: a lot of fun working with the campers and catching up with the coaches and pros. I'd like to think I will have more to say about the camp in the next couple of days, but I have a busy week ahead, so we'll see. Anyway, here's a photograph of the basketball crew. Notice that there's a hint of photobomb going on here in that the basketball campers are on the court in defensive position while we are posing for a group photo (this was possible because Coach Frost was leading the campers in the a.m. warm-up).... dmueller http://www.earthwidemoth.com/mt/ dmueller@syr.edu

For several weeks after I'd happily accepted EMU's offer of a faculty position, the dmueller-edition Q&A recordings continued churning through my portable MP3 player every so often. By then I found them somewhat silly-sounding, an off-key sequence of quirky, wandering think-alouds, something like little pacts between me, my iPod Shuffle, and Kathryn Hume, whose Surviving Your Academic Job Hunt was never out of reach from September through late February. I finally removed the tracks after CCCC, more than a month after I no longer needed to listen to those droning loops of me rehearsing 120-second answers.... dmueller http://www.earthwidemoth.com/mt/ dmueller@syr.edu

One second I was on my bike. The next second I was off my bike. I had no choice but to ditch it. Only, upon ditching it, I also turned my ankle. It went like this: Riding along on the grass as we exited the Barry Park playground last evening, D. and Is. (in the tot-seat) ahead of me, I came upon a dip--a three-foot rise from the park lawn to the road. Crept slowly, approaching the dip. Rode up the dip. I had the strange feeling that the front tire was lifting too much, like I was pulling a wheelie. But it touched down again, and when it did, the front wheel lurched just enough to create a momentary loss of balance. I was... dmueller http://www.earthwidemoth.com/mt/ dmueller@syr.edu

<snark>Every so often I go looking for examples of astonishingly astonishing web design. With that said, I'm no standards-waving design puritan, and I admit I am attracted to departures from conventionality (unusual CSS tricks, and so on). This morning an email arrived with a link for PTA listserv subscribers to the Syracuse City School District web site, a site so overstocked with informative tidbits that it can only be described as belonging to the "dump it in, anywhere" school of design, a school matching with the old industrial mindset that caused Lake Onondaga to be so choked with mercury and other debris that it for many years won acclaim as the U.S.'s most polluted. I get it that the school district is complex, but...my oh... dmueller http://www.earthwidemoth.com/mt/ dmueller@syr.edu

The latest round of seasonal allergies aren't exactly killing me, but they are causing me enough discomfort that I just about scratched out my eyes out earlier this evening. No willful, deliberate, or careful scratching in this. No, this is a vile alternative, a reflexive (even precognitive) knuckling of the lids so frenzied my eyeballs should be grateful I saved them. Interrupted that fit with a couple of itch-halting eye drops and another dose of generic loratadine. Not the sort of thing I'd say most days, but today: Thank goodness for pharmaceutical drugs. So what if sparing my eyes from the acid pollen drifting across Central New York means I wake up every morning for two weeks with a metallic taste in my mouth and... dmueller http://www.earthwidemoth.com/mt/ dmueller@syr.edu