The Week That Was Blankety-Blank

No blog entries this week! Yet somehow, even without the oak beams that are
my more-or-less-daily entries, the blogosphere did not collapse, did not
implode, did not fold in on itself. I count this a miracle.

I’ve been writing elseblog. Pushing on through a draft. This
dissertation is stubborn. It mocks me. It raises a skeptical eyebrow
and smirks at these words I feed it, as if to say "They don’t make any sense,
grasshopper." Heh, gras shopper is right.

105ers turned in first essays and invention portfolios last night. I
will read them and write responses this weekend. In last night’s session,
I was reminded of how much I appreciate the reflective (i.e., house of mirrors)
piece that goes at the front of the three-week collected works. Make it a
rant, if you must rant. Drum up some meta. Tell me what you want me
to do with your writing. Why should these meta pieces be as
interesting as the projects? Because they’re pulsatile; something raw and
honest in them that oftentimes has been tamped out of academic prose in the mill
of conventionalism and purported needs–habits of schooling. Not that
these are all evil. But there I go, back-peddling, too busy and tired to be
pedagogically radical?

Which reminds me: to what extent are wiki textbook projects studium-like?
I mean that I was looking at one the other day and thinking how it could only
ever be the average effect. Then again, that’s the textbook’s appeal,
isn’t it? Textbooks are almost never about singular compositional
production.

I self-censored an entry earlier this week–the only other entry of
the week. Spotted a couple of frogs on my seven-tenths-of-a-mile walk
along Colvin Avenue home from the bus stop late Tuesday. Thought of the
un-performative Michigan J. and the snappy Rag. Looked up "One Froggy
Evening" on YouTube, and I was having fun. But then I didn’t post because I was struck by the uncanny
correspondences between that silly cartoon (a commentary on greed, no doubt) and
images of 9-11. See
for yourself if you don’t believe me. "Slide, ride, glide the Michigan…"
straight to the cutting room floor.

Netflix sent Waking Life
on Tuesday, and I haven’t watched it yet.

Wow. Quite a heap of job ads piling up at the wiki.

Shipped an article to a journal this week (the emphatic gesture, after many choppy onmthmonsmonshtths of elliptical writing). And a panel proposal went off to
the Rhetoric Society of America, as well. I don’t know what on earth will
fund RSA. Can and bottle refunds? A baked-goods sale? Auctioning off the
collected dissertation Post-It notes on Ebay in late April? Ah, but the ’08 RSA
is in Seattle, and even though there are no easy or responsible routes
from Syracuse to Seattle, we’re planning (should the proposal be accepted by the
Society) to make a family trip of it.