Friday, March 7, 2008

Serial Consulting

As expected, today's Writing Center work was the most demanding yet--eight appointments in seven hours (with a brief break for lunch). I don't mention it to complain. Rather, in those five-minute lapses between appointments I was thinking of the surprise and exhilaration in the unknown of what was to come. What is in store? How long will it take to get our bearings and decide what to do next?

Stacked appointments require a generalist's deftness (even if one is not steadily capable of this)--there are great leaps from this to that, from one thing to another. A first and second appointment do not make the third appointment easier. But the language from the previous hour re-surfaces again and again in subconscious performance residue: how many times did I say "prime" or "primes" between 9 a.m. and 10 a.m.? Three? Four? Maybe too many, as if in caught in a strange loop, some phrase or concept pops up unexpectedly in fits of over-talking while searching for the elusive right words. Serial consulting: in certain ways it's like being locked in the media closet with a flickering television set all day, sometimes fancying coherence and intelligibility, sometimes doubting whether this or that thing fits with this or that other thing, and sometimes marveling at the great range of possible directions lurking everywhere in a draft.

Now I can't remember them all: a "professional statement" for a made-for-television movie production internship, an essay on music as argument, a comparison of Hindu epics, Rubin Carter as inspiration for law school, contending worldviews between Hmong Brahmanism and Western medicine, a close reading of Huck Finn (requiring specific references to 'semiotics', 'reader', and 'interpretation'), early planning and exploration on a five-page piece that will get at gender roles, mass media and the Cold War, and, finally, a discussion of Obama's vague references to "they" in the Iowa victory speech. At the end of it, two senses: one is a kind of merry-go-all-directions spinning around--the disorientation in rapid sequence conversations engaging all of this; the other is a (cloudy) surprise at the degree to which a long string of consulting appointments is like drilling a core sample of the curriculum (as if boring into a glacier).

Posted by Derek Mueller at March 7, 2008 9:36 PM to Writing Center