Preterition

I was happy tonight to see some brief news footage of a convoy of National Guard truckers hauling food and water on HEMTT 985s through the flooded streets of New Orleans. The CNN newsreader described them as “amphibious,” which I guess they are, but it’s really just that the engine sits up high behind the cab and has a vertical stack. I never got to drive one — my gig was M931 5-ton tractor-trailers and M1070 HETs, the big 70-ton-capacity heavy-haulers with 40 wheels in 5 rows of 8 on the trailer — but I always wanted to, mostly out of curiosity about having two steerable front axles instead of one, since the HEMTTs had a total of four axles and eight big, big wheels, with 350-pound tires. And they never got stuck, as you could probably tell from the news footage. But the nice thing about the HEMTT — pronounced “hemmit”; it stands for Heavy Expanded Mobility Tactical Truck — is that it’s got what they call (if memory serves) a palletized load system: there’s a little crane right in front of the cargo area, and the cargo area is actually a detachable flatbed with a hook on the front end. So the trucks can come in, use the crane to hook and drop the pallet with the load, and turn right around for another run. It’s a lot faster than waiting for a forklift to unload you, which is a good thing: those Guard truckers are gonna be busy folks.

Anyway. Seeing the footage brought back some 24th Infantry Division trucking memories, and made me hope that maybe things in NOLA are starting to improve. And it also gave me a little non-dissertational nostalgia and a sense of wishing I was doing that. At least after the end of a mission (if you weren’t busy munching on dry Taster’s Choice from MREs to try and stay awake) you could look and say, “I hauled that load, and helped some people.” Right now, the academic work feels rather less fulfilling, comparatively speaking — but I’m looking forward to next week, when the fall teaching semester starts.

I hadn’t felt like it was my place to say anything about the hurricane’s aftermath, but this post from Daisy made me both angry and sad. Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert said yesterday that “It doesn’t make sense” to rebuild New Orleans, apparently relying on the same logic deployed by the adolescents on Slashdot who’ve been declaring that New Orleans residents deserved their fate for choosing to live there. John Breaux, quoted in the article Daisy cites, has it right: “That’s like saying we should shut down Los Angeles because it’s built in an earthquake zone.” In the hope that more people share the perspective of former Senator Breaux than of Speaker Hastert, I’ve donated to the Salvation Army for their relief efforts. If you haven’t, I hope you might, too. (And take care, Daisy and Sharon.)

I got a letter from my brother today. He’s in prison, but moments like this in his letter let me know he’s doing OK: “[W]e caught two more toads and we kept them all in one of those large pretzel jars with some moist gravel in the bottom. Then outside at work we built a terrarium out of lexan and filled it with gravel, a plant, and a water dish. Some afternoons out at work at the powerhouse we scour the neighboring lawns and gardens and catch crickets and grasshoppers for food.” Like most large prison complexes, Jessup has its own machine shop and power plant and vegetable gardens inside the razor wire, and its own native fauna, including geese and cats in addition to the toads my brother describes. And I’m glad he and the guys on his tier have pets; that they have other living things to care for, to create an environment for and to feed. Tink and Zeugma do a lot for my mental health; I know toads aren’t quite as cuddly, but I’m psyched they’re giving him a sense of satisfaction and responsibility, however small, as an antidote to the relentless infantilization that the prison system exercises on inmates.

After much agonizing, kicking, fussing, gnashing of teeth, and spleen, I finally today turned in a draft of Chapter 3. It’s ugly, but it’s a draft. And I’m more than relieved to have the horrible thing off my desk, even though it’s the place where I really start synthesizing my own theory of the interrelationships of class, economy, technology, and composition pedagogy and theory, because I’ve been incredibly vile and pissy and distracted these past few weeks while working on it, like practically snarling at almost anybody who crossed my path, to the point where if I were dating someone right now, this would’ve been when she said, “OK, we’re done; I’m not putting up with your silly crap anymore.” But, yes, it’s a draft. Very, very far from a polished final state, but at least initially complete, like a whole entire honest-to-goodness dissertation chapter.

So OK: deep breath, relax. Time to have some tea, maybe. Time to indulge in a little turn-off-the-brain mass-market McMyth reading. And TV. I could use some really dumb TV.

And the other cool thing is that I stopped by the Writing Program office and picked up the second edition of The Text-Wrestling Book, the FYC textbook our program’s fifteen-member “editorial collective” (of which I was lucky enough to be a part for both editions) has put a whole lot of work into these past couple years. And one thing that kinda startled me is that I took the idea Lesley proposed for the cover and did a few dummy versions of it in Photoshop, so we could tweak it some and then show it to the Kendall-Hunt artists and say, “This is sort of how we’d like the cover to look,” and they actually used most of the elements of the thing I put together from Lesley’s idea. I mean, they made some substantial necessary improvements — making the title pop more, filling in the back cover that I’d left pretty bare — but I was substantially amazed that they’d use the work of someone who’s very much Not A Designer, rather than having their in-house artists do something with it. So I’m simultaneously pleased and a little apprehensive, like worrying: “What if people think it sucks?”

Meh. Then they think it sucks. There’ll be another edition with a different cover in a couple years.

But working on the book was a lot of fun (and a lot of work for all of us involved), and I think it’s pretty good, and I was glad to be able to contribute to it as a co-editor, in addition to being able to offer my beginner’s Photoshop skills.

Derek’s post about berbere on injera got me homesick for some of DC’s Ethiopian restaurants. Which got me thinking that I’m really, really going to enjoy being at MLA in December, just for the food, although I’m sure I’ll be stressed from interviewing. First on the list of priorities is Dukem for a proper Ethiopian dinner, but I’m also thinking Eat First on H Street in Chinatown for the best (and cheap!) Cantonese roast duck I’ve ever had, taking the Metro up to Negril in Silver Spring for a fine Jamaican lunch, Mama Ayesha’s in Adams Morgan for Lebanese, maybe Jaleo for tapas (I used to temp just up the street) after the theater rush, definitely Half Moon BBQ with live music in Silver Spring, and — though it’s a little more than walking distance from the Silver Spring Metro stop; like a five-minute cab ride down Wayne Avenue — El Gavilan’s Salvadorean food is not to be missed.

Dang I’m hungry.