Short post tonight: I’m tired and stressed. The stress comes from the fact that a contention I’ve been involved in for the past year and a half is close to being settled, and I’m negotiating among a bunch of different people, some of whom are quite helpful and generous, some of whom are concerned for me to the point of being unwilling to see any other points of view, some of whom are doing their kind and tolerant best to be impartial, and some of whom are graceless, friendless, paranoid assholes. As the end gets nearer, it seems, the stakes get higher, and so too the stress — and the higher the stress gets, the less willing I am to negotiate, and the more I feel like tossing it all out the window and saying: to hell with a settlement; let’s go toe-to-toe, because you know I’ll win, asshole. My wrath is huge. My case is stronger, my will is stronger, my friends are stronger. And, morally, I’m right.
I can’t really say more than that here, at least until it’s done, but I’m happy to have an excellent ally in my corner, and I don’t think the graceless, friendless, paranoid asshole quite grasps how lucky he is to have a tentative agreement from me, since — after the unbelievably scummy things he’s done — nothing would make me happier than to see him ruined. Part of me would be willing to give up everything to see that happen. And it gives me a grim smile to think about that.
On the good side, I recently picked up Nigella Lawson’s wonderful cookbook, How to Eat, and am delighted by its voice, its wit, its downright (dare I use the word?) snarkiness. It’s a pleasure to read, and the recipes are terrific: last night I had company for dinner, and tried my hand at making a fish pie. It came out so, so good.
Lastly, and the point of this post: John, in a recent response, points to the “intellectual blindspot” of the discipline of composition (at least as it’s portrayed in the highly four-year university-oriented discussions in CCC and in the popular histories of the field) in its complete refusal to acknowledge community college scholarship. He’s absolutely right, and this is one of the things I’d like to focus on in my dissertation; the ways in which university-oriented composition scholars avoid talking about composition in community colleges because to talk about such things would be to talk about class, and class difference. In fact, the absence of talk about community colleges in the discourse of composition would seem to me to be the single most significant factor in favor of my thesis about why we don’t talk about class, which in some ways goes back to Burke’s notions of embarassment, but also goes back to constructions Berlin offers of the vocational eduacation and liberal education models. Compositionists have a stake in seeing their — our — discipline as egalitarian, and any talk to the contrary is dangerous, no matter how obvious the problems it points out may be.
John recommends Howard Tinberg. Perhaps it’s another piece of evidence in his favor that none of the five colleges in this area have his books in their libraries.
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