Tag: review

Farther Away Than They Seem

/ Derek Mueller

Twenty-twenty-three in a word was reparative, rested-through with healing and repair of different sorts: reconnecting with longtime friends, quieting the email inbox and impulses toward glinty but ever-toilsome careerism, and too, physically, sticking with the trouble of massage and physical therapy regimens, and making a certain amount of peace with the notably prevalent Western mythology that embodied life is possibly pain-free, when it turns out that time wags a finger and says no it’s not.

I re-read those resolutions from 2017, a good enough set for an echo:

more laughter, longer beardgrowth, occasional blog entries, regular running, new tattoo, Grand Canyon, more kimchi, early yoga and earlier meditation, watercolors, heartier alliances, coalition building, political resilience, generosity and kindness, when to habituate and when to digress and when to rest, longer olive branch, mightier dynamite, more olive branch dynamite, cayenne hot chocolate, eclectickler reading, more drawing, bigger optimism, more sunshine, and more laughter.

From “Resolving in 2017“

Running is out, but there is biking, swimming, and yoga ahead. No Grand Canyon coming up. Olive branch and dynamite were administrative tactics, and although I will have a brief interim administrative stint in 2024, all that’s needed for a few months is a steady hand and a positive outlook. I will be doing well if I continue the reading and writing and drawing rhythms that found cadence over the second half of 2023. Cayenne hot chocolate is always a sure, why-not treat, but it’s better enjoyed infrequently, every third month, let’s say.

In numbers, 2023 reduces to the following easily tabulated scores. There’s always more in that hazy margin of activities that don’t deserve to be record kept for future lookbacks in future orbits: hours around the house doing this or that, the repairs and painting in the shed, cooking, mowing, and so on.

  • Email confirmations tell me I spent 40 hours in the pool at the Christiansburg Aquatic Center in 2023.
  • Forty rides totaling 25 hours, 41 minutes on the stationary bike, according to Strava. Most of these were in the cold weather months, Jan-Feb and Nov-Dec.
  • 20 hours, 32 minutes with the healthy back set of exercises, each on its own standing as a 16-17 minute clip.
  • This averages 100 minutes each week of fitness activity, but these figures are not especially flat considering that some months saw a lot of activity, and others, less.
  • There were 29 blog entries in 2023, more than I’d posted in any other year since 2011, back when del.icio.us bookmarks were automatically setting up at EWM. I also posted a handful of entries at the RIDE Blog for ENGL6344, but I haven’t included those in this tally.
  • I drew 41 new illustrations, including the last six in the Cirque du Felinity set. ProCreate doesn’t make it especially easy to get to the time-spent ticker for each image, but these average maybe 2.5 hours each, which I would crudely extrapolate to 100 hours of drawing. But this, too, falls very unevenly across the months. Not as much drawing in the summer months, for example.

I’m tempted to extend this to workside scores for committees and teaching, mentoring and advising, review tasks, letters, and more, but I will resist that temptation, and, anyway, Faculty Activity Reports are due at the end of January, so I will have cause to look back at 2023 through the lens of productivity. There were events, like rallying for a response to the proposed landfill nearby and like listing and selling the Ypsi condo, but these, too, are difficult to quantify. Hours pile up. One other outstanding impression as we flip the calendar to ’24 is that I was in Michigan in every month except April, and that meant seven round trips by car, one half trip (returning to Va. on January 5), and one roundtrip flight for a campus visit, so 3,500 miles on the Subaru and occasional twinges of fatigue from packing and from 120 hours in the car. This is one score I’d like to be a tiny bit lower in 2024, though I do miss Ph. and Is. and T. mightily when I am not in Michigan.

That’s it; that’s the look-back roundup. May 2024 clear way, wiser and kinder as we go.

The Bituminous Time It Takes to Rebegin ⏳

/ Derek Mueller

The obvious pattern here is that I write Earth Wide Moth entries on breaks. This time it’s Wednesday of spring break, the middle of a week in the middle of a semester—that temporal middlemost divot for a slouch and an exhale and a say.

I was thinking of bitumin because ever since I learned of the (by now well-known?) Queensland U/Professor Parnell pitch drop experiments, bitumin comes up as a terrific example of patience and the taffy-pulled reward of studying for many years things slow, old, and transforming though inobservably so. I’m no geologist, but this solid-seeming bitumin fascinates because even while it is friable, or ready to crumble, so too is it viscous. Given time enough, it forms and relinquishes droplets to gravity. Bitumen drips, if you leave it alone. Wait for it. Wait.

This spring break, like so many other breaks I’ve shoe-horned in and amidst WPAing responsibilities over the past five years at VT, has meant once again driving 500 miles from SW Virginia to Michigan, jeans and sweatshirts shoved into a luggage, watching the weather along the route so as to avoid freezing rains or patches of snow, fetching groceries, and upon arrival generally going along with the anything-whatever of granddaughter time, Is.’s club volleyball schedule, and then some. The practice, if it can be called a practice, is to be easy with it all. Equanimity-crafted lifestyle. And this time of year, there are thesis and dissertation chapters to read and comment upon (two on Monday, two more on Tuesday), continuing teaching prep and some comments on the short-form writing we’re practicing in Food Writing, a boomeranged second-time-around review task due next Tuesday and too long put off across the accelerated and travelsome and also cough-hacking throes of February. Yeah, sure, it’s work, but I experience it as slowed down during the break. Meanwhile, the email inbox has quieted. This week it has lessened to a trickle of reply-all-good job-all-well done-all congratulations among faculty colleagues and a few one-offs about the latest surveillant impulses and precise questions people have about AI-screened computing activities disguised in the protective father logics of cybersecurity, like if robotic dogs chased aggressively a twenty-first century suspicious hermeneut. If you can imagine these as blue-skied comforts, it’s some kind of time at some kind of beach or the like.

Warming up again to the ms review is next on today’s to-dos. I first read the manuscript and wrote 914 words of reviewish guidance ten months ago, May 2022. And because those ten months since have proven to be the most locally extreme and austere in what is now a decade of WPAing, I find it’s requiring more concerted effort to prioritize and focus upon this routine work, to muster a bituminous rebeginning and to return to the manuscript so I can read every bit as generously as before. At sloth’s pace, it stably holds together; quickened, it crumbles and fragments: I get it.

Discomfort Inventory

/ Derek Mueller

Catching singedwhiff of burnout or year-end case of the enough-alreadies (it’s like the slows but more existentially introspective), I was looking ahead to February 1’s deadline for Faculty Activity Reports, trying to reconcile Virginia’s 60+F temperatures with December, and regrouping after an unusually challenging writing program administrative week. Sometimes you take a hard look, you know?, and remember these orbits are few, the lifting not entirely yours to heft. I keyed in the neighborhood of eight “comfort inventories” from 2004-2011, but then a decade passed and for those ten years, none. Wonder why. Today, in the spirit of FAR anticipation (FARticipation would be a whizpopper portmanteau but risks poor poor taste), keen on the feelings a’coursing through the great resignation, a discomfort inventory for 2021.

  • Chaired 2 faculty searches that brought 9 new colleagues (4 TT, 5 instructors). In the last 2.5 years, that brings it to 4 searches for 25 new colleagues.
  • Completed 2 external reviews for tenure and/or promotion. I could’ve said yes to 2 more, but I just couldn’t. In a balanced year, 3 are possible; this year, only 2.
  • Reviewed 1 book manuscript. A terrific book which I cannot wait to teach, but I wrote to the publisher this week and learned it won’t be out until September 2022.
  • Reviewed 4 articles (Enculturation, CCC x 2, Intermezzo)
  • Co-led a workshop on daily drawing for the Lifelong Learning Institute
  • Gave an artist’s talk about the pandemic bestiary
  • Prepped the pandemic bestiary for the Squires gallery, and then submitted 1 piece, which sold for $225, to the Artful Lawyer show in downtown Blacksburg. With this, I’ve made more cash from illustrations than from writing in this life.
  • Did 44 illustrations. I think? Could be more. But at least 44.
  • Gave an invited talk and teaching workshop at U Virginia in January (virtually)
  • Sent Radiant Figures into the world (i.e., published chapter and co-edited collection)
  • Taught 1 section of Technical Writing
  • Wrote 9 letters of recommendation
  • Bought a 70-year old house in a bona fide hollow and a used car (Honda Civic).
  • Drove the Michigan-Virginia roundtrip 6.5 times
  • Interim co-directed the Center for Rhetoric in Society
  • Committees: 7. Served on Comp, Ex Comm, RW, Professorial Personnel, ad hoc Teaching Evaluations, CID Advisory, and LVE Community Engagement Committee, chairing or co-chairing two of these. Must give up 2 in the year ahead.
  • Coordinated 4 Writing Program Dialogues sessions (WAVA and/or UVa)
  • Highlight of highlights: presented at the CID, “Lines Drawn Home,” with Ph. and Is.
  • Published a co-authored chapter in Composition as Big Data
  • Co-developed/co-piloted SSWPI placement system, but breakdowns have us redrawing things (generative failure, in effect). This included receiving 300 emails from first-year students in June alone.
  • Served on 10 dissertation committees; 3 who graduated in 2021; 2 new ones; chairing 2
  • Co-authored or co-sponsored 2 course proposals: 1) Food Writing and 2) Advanced Writing and Research.
  • To date, I’ve done exactly 200 transfer equivalency reviews; in all of 2020, there were 182. Up is up!
  • There’s more: promotion to professor, serving on various boards, including CWPA and WAVA, again negotiating and executing a program textbook, illustrating its cover, and so on, but this is a pretty thick-cut slice of what the year has held, and I know for casting it as I have that the volume, it’s nope not sustainable.

Resisting “Resisting Entropy”

/ Derek Mueller

Quick question: What’s the last “review essay” published in CCC you can name without searching?

I couldn’t come up with a title, much less the names of all of the books in any review essay. I recall reading Kris Blair’s piece (had to look up the title: “New Media Affordances and the Connected Life”) from CCC 63.2, but I could only remember three of the five books covered in that review: Dilger and Rice’s From A to <A>: Keywords for Markup because I already own a copy, and two others because I knew something beforehand about their authors and would claim an interest in their work. Otherwise, working from memory, I can’t come up with much–a vague recollection of another review essay by Schilb and one more by Villanueva on style. After reading the Villanueva review essay, I picked up a copy of Holcomb and Killingsworth’s Performing Prose, but that was as much motivated by a Twitter exchange with a colleague as by the review.

Thus, when I started to see an unusually high level of discussion circulating about Geoff Sirc’s “Resisting Entropy,” a review essay published in the latest issue of CCC (Feb. 2012, 63.3), my first thought was something like, “Well, this sure is an awful lot of activity for a review essay.” People were discussing it on Twitter, but I also received an email message from a student on the same day NCTE circulated the bulk email announcing the issue–an email message bringing up several questions and concerns based on things Sirc wrote. I hadn’t read the then-day-old review yet, but I hurried my pace in getting to it.

As far as I know, review essays covering multiple books began appearing in CCC seven or eight years ago. Before that reviews focused on single titles. The review essay provides readings of and recommendations for a small collection of titles, presumably titles that have come out in the last three or so years and that share a topical thread. And as I understand it, there are a few motives behind the switch to review essays: 1) they are more tightly packed than individual book reviews , 2) they promote a more rigorous appearing scope which in turn justifies known scholars to write them, 3) the known scholar bi-line gets people to read them, and 4) clustering multiple books into one review essay means readers will encounter book reviews at the edge of (and perhaps just beyond) titles they would have otherwise already been likely to check out.

I’ve read Sirc’s review essay, and although I realize it is poor cccarnival mmmanners to sidestep much substantive discussion of the article itself, all I want to say for now is that I appreciated the candor in his definitively recommending (or in not recommending, as the case may be) each of the four titles subject to review. The essay is polemic. Fine. It even toes the line between unapologetic critique and demolition-ball tear-down. But, despite however much or little I agree with Sirc in specific moments (i.e., there are points that resonate, others that trouble and confuse; I may well elaborate on a few in another entry), I know where he stands on these titles, and these titles become more decidable as a result. I want that nudge toward decidability from a review essay, and I suspect Sirc’s “Resisting Entropy” is one CCC readers will remember for awhile–both for the hot stove arguments the essay stokes and for the titles covered in doing so.

Fall Backglance

/ Derek Mueller

I turned in grades almost ten days ago. And ten days has left me enough time to defrag what was the Fall 2011 semester (also enough time to see The Muppets, watch Breaking Bad through season 3, and finish Shields’ Vonnegut biography, And So It Goes). The highlights follow, in no particular order.

  • I taught three classes, 50+ students altogether: a new (for me) grad class, ENGL505: Rhetoric of Science and Technology, and two sections of ENGL328: Writing, Style, and Technology. 505 went well for the most part; I’ll probably return to Metaphors We Live By and Science in Action when I teach it again in Fall 2012. But I’ll replace The Social Life of Information with Kuhn, Polanyi (lectures), or Darwin. Or Mol, if I can ever get around to reading Body Multiple. Maybe add some of the “rhetoric as epistemic” conversation.
  • The two sections of ENGL328 ran back to back on Mondays and Wednesdays. One section was in a preferable lab; the other section was in one of the worst teaching labs I’ve ever set foot in. A horrible space. And this was an improvement–an upgrade–from the space into which it was originally scheduled. Consequently I had more conversations than I can count with IT folks about why certain lab configurations work differently than others for teaching. This was one of the most nagging and unavoidable frustrations of the semester.
  • These two classes were as night and day as any two I can remember teaching. Same projects. Same readings. But drastically different personalities.
  • My teaching was observed three times in the second week of the semester, and the timing, while somewhat less than ideal in my opinion, had everything to do with the October 15 deadline for my third-year review materials. Why less than ideal? Well, it’s plain to me that my classes are stronger, move lively, and more representative as a scene of teaching and learning in the last one-third of the semester than in the first two weeks. Semesters follow arcs; relationships develop. The observations were overall fairly favorable nevertheless.
  • Other than teaching, the first half of the semester was consumed with preparing the third-year review binders (which went in without incident and, by all appearances have been well received at the various stop-offs they’ve reached thus far) and planning and organizing the WIDE-EMU Conference.
  • The conference went well, especially considering it was an experiment in conference-hosting with no costs to anyone, but had I to do it over again, I don’t think I’d both plan a conference and give a talk at that conference–on the same day third-year review materials are due. Too much. Everything went fine, but it left me sapped for the second half of the semester.
  • In the second half of the semester, I gave a “Tech Talk” to our Art Department on “A Quick Rhetoric of QR Codes.” Basically it was 30 minutes of examples, how-to, and a plea for more discriminating uses. I also carried a digital-installation-qua-“poster” into the HASTAC Conference in Ann Arbor in early December.
  • I attended commencement, heard George Gervin’s address and saw a half dozen students I’d had in class recently accept their diplomas.
  • I helped the Honors College revamp its Presidential Scholars essay prompts and assessment tool (as a member of the HC Advisory Council). I also interviewed Presidential Scholar candidates in early December.
  • I touched up the Masters Degree Consortium site, added a map, and more importantly, collaborated on a survey and all of the required IRB solicitations so we can proceed with circulating the survey in early-mid January.
  • We released two issues of EM-Journal, one on the first day of the semester, and the second on December 1 at the Celebration of Student Writing.
  • At our symposium on pursuing graduate education in written communication, I gave a short spiel titled, “Graduate School in Ten Understatements.” Tricky to offer one-size-fits-most advice that avoids 1) being discouraging and 2) meaningless platitudes.
  • Nudged along a proposal for an online version of ENGL326 I’ll likely teach in the spring term. I think it’s finally, officially approved, and I spent a couple of hours this morning on the course materials.
  • And then there were a small handful of proposals and ms. submissions at various stages that crossed my desk, that waggled through my in and outbox–one ms. revised and accepted, another conditionally accepted, and two different chapter proposals (one accepted; the other in the eds.’ hands).
  • For the first time in a long time, I didn’t submit any proposals for a spring conference. No C&W. No RSA. And that’s in small part because travel funds will have long since dried up by then, I have a busy CCCC docket in March, and I’m usually too fatigued by May to feel all Let’s Go! about academic conferences. Might keep an eye out for the WPA Albuquerque CFP though. Or, if there’s a Great Lakes THATCamp this spring, might check it out.

Bolt Fix

/ Derek Mueller

While driving to the grocery store last evening, I heard a sudden, distinct drumming of one tire against asphalt–an instantly deflating sound-report of a crisis likely needing repair. I pulled over, walked a circle around the Element, checked the tires, found nothing, drove a bit farther, heard it again: a pronounced clack synced with each tire’s full orbit.

When I reached the Meijer parking lot, I walked the perimeter once more, and this time spotted the thumb-tip sized head of a bolt protruding from the face of the right-rear tire. Just after 7 p.m. on a Monday, so I guessed the odds of finding a repair shop open and accepting new jobs was very low. But this was a big bolt, and even though the tire appeared to be maintaining its full pressure, I wasn’t all too keen on driving more than necessary before arranging a repair. I don’t own a fancy Internet phone (might pick up an iPhone later this month…maybe), so I dialed D. and asked her to search out a tire shop proximate to Carpenter and Ellsworth. Belle Tire was closest.  I called, told a rep. named Mike about the desperate condition this poor tire was in, and he said, “Bring it over.”
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