My Friday

preterite Asides

I wake up to the 0600 NPR weather forecast, and sleepily mishear the announcer’s “four to eight inches” into “forty-eight inches.” Holy shit, I think, blearily, shaving, showering. It’s the blizzard of the new millennium. Student conferences at 0745, and I need to buy fruit juice and cat food before the deluge.

A cup of coffee and a post-shower second forecast listen help. It’s not the apocalypse. It’s four to eight inches. Student conferences go as well as they can, and I have to give a lunchtime presentation, and I’m maintaining the whole day through with aspirin and antitussives and decongestants, with as bad a case of the creeping crud as I’ve had in a long time; a case that my conferees tell me is sweeping through the corps, as well. Chest and throat cough; loss of voice; body aches like I’ve been stuffed in a bag and beaten with a stick. We get good things done, me and the cadets: they figure out smart things to do with their essays, and I do my best not to breathe on them. Regular application of hand sanitizer.

I come home and lie down on the couch. Coat’s a blanket, and that’s about all I have energy for. Church bells ring at 1800, and Tink and Zeugma know that means it’s time for dinner. They get fed, and I go back to bed, until I hear odd cat vocalizations. Tink and Zeugma, up on their hind legs, looking out one of the front windows at the snow coming down on the porch and front yard and sidewalk.

OK, I figure. I’ll indulge them. The front porch has only two exits — steps down to the front yard, and door back into the house — and I can easily herd my two indoor kitties back inside should they get too ambitious in their engagement with the big white snowy world.

I let them out onto the porch, and Tink is well-behaved, sniffing the bounds, examining the perimeters, making sure everything’s safe.

And Zeugma takes a blind leaping header out into the snow, four feet below.

She gambols and frolics up the side yard, intent on the bush where the birds she watches from the kitchen window rest, and it’s all I can do to eventually herd her back up in the front door, and that’ll be the last of her outdoor activities. The girl is far too bold for out of doors.

The Luxury of Revision

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Recipes, Writing

I enjoy cooking. These days, with what feel like ever-increasing obligations in my work schedule and my increasingly long days at work, one of my low-key, relaxed pleasures remains experimenting with recipes, trying things out, refining them. And I wish the way I taught, the way I ask students to write, matched up better with the way I cook.

It starts with when I want something, with desire: when I’ve got a taste in my head, or an ingredient I want to work with. Lately, it’s been fish soup — not quite chowder, but close — and I’ve been coming at it from different directions, most of them involving Thai and Vietnamese flavors. So for the first draft, I tinkered with onion and garlic and sesame oil, fish broth, catfish, potatoes, green vegetables. Not good: the textures were terrible. The flavor of the broth was right, at least. So I regrouped, cooked the vegetables separately from the broth, used clam juice and curry paste and lime juice, added scallions and basil and cilantro at the end. Still not there: the broth is again the best part, but too many different vegetables are distracting, though it’s a gloriously green soup. Better than the first version, at least, in that it’s worth keeping and will feed me for a couple days. But too spiciness and citrus obscures the seafood flavors. I’m almost there, and I’ll try again in a week or two, reducing and focusing the base, making it simpler, making the accent notes work together.

I wish my students had the luxury of that extended process in their writing. I’ve tried to plan it into the course, to make it available, but when I write, I know that availability and desire without time — or any of those terms without the other — are often and too easily a recipe for 1-2-3 casseroles and tupperware leftovers. When I cook, I can come back to it because I want to.

Where’s the place for the student who makes the burnt dish and then makes the same burnt dish again? Sure: I need Shaughnessy and Bartholomae helping me with the recipes. Part of it is certainty and vocabulary, making a roux, roasting the spices, knowing when to deglaze; part of it’s knowing what ingredients you like to pull from. But the most important part, I think, is knowing what you want. What you’ve got a taste for: desire.

Lately, I’ve felt like I don’t know how to teach that last thing.

Toilet Bowl Sunshine

preterite Academia

I’ve alphabetized and tabulated the survey results for words we like and don’t like in conference panel presentation titles. As I’d hoped, people had more than a little fun with the survey (thank you, Mr. Garcia, for risky, frisky, and Lebowski), but there are some interesting minor findings here, as well. (I’ll refer to respondents as “we,” but with such a small sample I’m not in any way suggesting that these findings are generalizable to a broader population of “we.”)

First: our likes are more diverse than our dislikes. The only repeated concept in the “yeah, I’d go see that panel” was punk, either as pseudo-punk or as punk rock. (Apparently, we’ll take punk any way we can get it.)

In terms of what we dislike in conference titles, there were a number of repeats: “post/process/ed” in its various forms (all from one respondent, who apparently really doesn’t like that construction), assessment, community, diversity, expressive or expressivism, literature or literary, praxis, Derridean parentheticalized prefixes, and — of course — Mark Bauerlein. I get the sense that some of these dislikes are tropes — as with the Derridean parentheticalized prefixes, modes of disciplinary talk that have reached the point of tiresome over-use — but with others, I’m not sure if it’s a sense that the terms or topics have been over-discussed to the point of redundancy, or if it’s a sense that use of the term in presentations has been consistently and problematically imprecise (as in the point Joe Harris uses Raymond Williams to make about the term “community” in what we call “discourse communities”).

Note, also, that the one term occurring in both columns is “queer.”

Results follow.

Read more

Patriots

preterite Politics

I voted on Tuesday, and felt good. It’s a satisfying thing to do, isn’t it? There’s a small emotional high afterwards; a hopefulness, especially with primaries. A pleasant feeling about democratic processes.

My lesson plans for the two courses I’m teaching intersected with that pleasant feeling in interesting ways. I hadn’t figured the primaries into my syllabi, but in a nice bit of synchronicity, one course was responding to Ernest Renan’s “What Is a Nation?”, and the other course was responding to our Declaration of Independence and the documents Jefferson drew from in composing it.

But nobody in either course raised the question — despite that Super Bowl defeat — of what “patriot” might mean, and I’m curious about that silence. It’s a gendered term, of course, and so carries certain difficulties, but its semi-synonyms — “nationalist,” perhaps, for one — are even more troublesome to some.

Certainly, the students I teach can’t not be patriots, in the service they’ve volunteered to their country: one reason it doesn’t come up in discussion is that it’s beyond argument for them.

But I bet, readers, that some of you might not want to be labeled as patriots. So I’m curious: how has our sense of what it means to be a nation, or to be a patriot, or to declare allegiance to Renan’s patrie — how has that changed from 1776 to 1882 to today? On November 4, will you think of yourself as a patriot — and if so, or if not — why?

The Unbearable Ugliness of Panel Titles

preterite Academia

In the interest of the advancement of knowledge and the quest for unalloyed truth, disciplinary status, and shameless self-aggrandizement, I’ve put together a research instrument that I have no doubt will lay to rest for all time the ugly questions surrounding improper areas of focus at academic conferences. To that end, reader, I’d be grateful for your input, if you’d be so generous with your time as to

take a very brief survey.

I’ll post the results here.

Or maybe propose to present them at an academic conference, in the interest of confirming certain folks’ ongoing fears.

Still Lazy After All These Years

preterite Academia, Composition Pedagogy, Politics

On March 31, 2006, John Schilb referred to Mark Bauerlein as “lazy and paranoid” in response to Bauerlein’s uninformed attack in a blog post at The Valve on that year’s Conference on College Composition and Communication, with the evidentiary basis of Bauerlein’s attack being a few presentation titles.

In what one might see as a generous attempt on Bauerlein’s part to confirm Schilb’s assessment, he’s recycled his 2006 blog post at The Valve into a 2008 blog post at The Chronicle Review, with exactly the same method (cherry-picking presentation titles) and exactly the same evidence (the 2006 conference program).

Versions and Upgrades

preterite Asides

Upgrades for the new year: WordPress 2.3.2, Mac OS 10.5.1, Adium 1.2.1, GraphicConverter 6.0.2, Transmit 3.6.3.

Curtains 1.2.

Living room ceiling fan 2.0, with substantial advisory help from Dad, chisel work on the joist, and wire nuts by flashlight.

ceiling fan

As a relatively new homeowner, I’m always relieved and surprised when I do something to my house that doesn’t result in catastrophe. (And, frankly, always terrified by how bad things always are in their current state, said state being the one in which the last owner left them.) But I’m starting to see why people want to build their own homes: the chance to do it right, from the first time, the ground up.

Huckabee’s Paralipsis

preterite Politics, Rhetoric

Congratulations are apparently in order to Mr. Huckabee, both for his win in Iowa and for his familiarity with the classical rhetorical figures. While I’m not in a position to say anything about Mr. Huckabee’s forthrightness or his politics, it was at least amusing to see him on December 31 taking advice more than 2,000 years old:

Occultatio est cum dicimus nos praeterire aut non scire aut nolle dicere id quod nun maxime dicimus, hoc modo: …”Non dico te ab sociis pecunias cepisse; non sum in eo occupatus quod civitates, regna, domos omnium depeculatus es; furta, rapinas omnes tuas omitto.” Haec utilis est exornatio si aut ad rem quam non pertineat aliis ostendere, quod occulte admonuisse prodest, aut longum est aut ignobile. Rhetorica ad Herennium IV.xxvi.37

In Harry Caplan’s 1954 translation:

Paralipsis occurs when we say that we are passing by, or do not know, or refuse to say precisely what we are now saying, as follows: … “I do not mention that you have taken monies from our allies; I do not concern myself with your having despoiled the cities, kingdoms, and homes of them all. I pass by your thieveries and robberies, all of them.” This figure is useful if employed in a matter which it is not pertinent to call specifically to the attention of others, because there is advantage in making only an indirect reference to is, or because the direct reference would be tedious and undignified.

Mr. Huckabee, it would seem, knows his pseudo-Cicero, although I’m not quite as inclined as the New York Times is to call his recent performance in telling reporters that he would not air his negative ad about Mr. Romney (and then showing them the ad he wouldn’t air) “remarkable,” unless it’s in his savvy deployment of paralipsis / occultatio / praeteritio by proxy. However, it did get me into an interesting discussion with a colleague of what the device is actually called. You’ll notice that Harry Caplan takes the Greek term paralipsis as a translation for the Latin occultatio, which is what my colleague wanted to call what Huckabee did, with the emphasis on hiding or obscuring. I had always understood the figure to be referred to as praeteritio, though, with the emphasis (as in pseudo-Cicero’s infinitive praeterire) on ostensibly passing something by, which seems more appropriate to the quoted examples.

So I’m left with a distinction that maybe isn’t a difference. I think paralipsis works fine as a catch-all term for the general practice of saying something by saying we’re not going to say it, but I kinda like the fine-grained distinction we see in the Ad Herennium between saying something by obscuring it (occultatio) and saying something by passing it by (praeteritio). Are they two different things?

And if so, which is the more appropriate term for what Mr. Huckabee did?

Hoppin’ John

preterite Recipes

New Year’s Day dinner, with its accompanying football games, is a family ritual that I’ve missed since moving to New England. For me, cornbread on New Year’s Day is important, as are the hog-flavored black-eyed peas with onion that one eats for good luck in the coming year.

One of the first dishes my mom showed me how to make was Hoppin’ John, with its rice and meat and black-eyed peas, and I make it in years when I’m away from my family on New Year’s Day.

1 cup dried black-eyed peas
1 pound sausage
1 vidalia onion, chopped
1.5 cups dried white rice
0.5 teaspoon ground black pepper
0.5 teaspoon cayenne
0.5 teaspoon cumin
0.5 teaspoon thyme, rosemary, or sage
0.5 teaspoon salt
1 bay leaf

Soak washed peas in cold water overnight.

Brown the sausage over medium-high heat. Set aside and reserve the liquids. Cook onion in the sausage liquids for 6-8 minutes over medium heat, until the onion turns translucent. Add powdered spices while the onion cooks.

Add 6 cups water and bay leaf and sausage and bring to a boil. Boil 10 minutes and add peas. Keep at a low boil for 25 minutes, uncovered, until peas are almost tender. Add rice and simmer, covered, for 20 minutes.

Stop cooking. Remove from heat, keeping the lid on, for 5 minutes. Toss with fork and serve hot.

That’s the basic recipe, at least. I’ve got some shrimp shells that will help flavor the 6 cups of water when I make a broth today, and some cilantro that I’ll add at the last 5 minutes.

Happy New Year to you, reader. I hope the stroke of midnight finds you with money in your pocket and someone in your arms.

Christmas Pudding

preterite Recipes

From the recipe of Janet Klink Irvine, my mother’s grandmother.

2 cups grated carrots
2 cups grated potatoes
2 cups sifted flour
2 cups sugar
1 teaspoon baking soda
2 pinches of salt
.75 teaspoon nutmeg
.75 teaspoon cloves
.75 teaspoon cinnamon
2 cups raisins
1 cup chopped walnuts

Mix baking soda with grated potatoes. Combine mixture with grated carrots. Coat walnuts and raisins with flour. Add flour, then coated walnuts and raisins to the mixture. Add spices and mix thoroughly.

Spoon into a well-greased mold. Steam in the top of a double boiler for three hours.

May be cooked the day before: remove from mold and cool. Wash and grease mold, then store the pudding in the mold ready to reheat and serve hot with hard sauce. Serves twelve.

Hard sauce:

.5 cup soft butter
2 tablespoons brandy
3 cups sifted powdered sugar

Combine and blend with electric mixer at lowest speed, then at medium speed until fluffy. Chill. Makes 1.5 cups.