I haven’t posted as much as I had hoped lately. Something about finishing my dissertation and utterly complete energy drain. It’s done. Since defending I’ve attended two weddings and traveled to my refuge (picture below). I’ve now re-emerged to hastily pull together two papers for the biennial Rhetoric Society of America Conference, which will take place in Minneapolis this year.
My re-emergence from the cabin and my paper title, “Style: An Anti-Curriculum Based Upon Richard Lanham’s Anti-Textbook,” bring to mind Catherine Prendergast‘s recent and enviably smart article on Style, Strunk and White, and the Unabomber, titled “Fighting Style: Reading the Unabomber’s Strunk and White.” My second paper, also in a state of incompletion as I write this, is titled “Realism, Plain Style, and Arguments from Authority in the US Intelligence Community” and draws more directly on my dissertation work.
Clearly this site is still in a stage of some as-yet-determined development. I’ve been trying to figure out how to document the experience of transitioning from the life of a graduate student at a huge R-1 institution (UT Austin) to a rookie faculty member at a regional university (WCU). I figured that one important thing for a new faculty member to do would be to read some of the work of my new colleagues. One, Ron Rash, is a novelist, and novels seemed like a nice place to start. In one of Ron’s novels, The World Made Straight, a character reads a Civil War era doctor’s log. A typical entry from the log, which I excerpt from the third page of Ron’s book, reads:
Lansford Hawkins, age 48.
Complaint: Fevered, headache.
Diagnosis: Corizia. Consulted Wood’s Theory and Practice of Medicine.
Treatment: Dover’s Powder. At patient’s insistence cupped sixteen ounces of blood from left arm to remove morfibic matter. Rest in bed two days.
Fee: Fifty cents, paid in cash.
After reading the fictional doc’s entry, I thought maybe such spartan entries might occasionally be useful on this blog. One of the difficulties of this transition will be balancing all the new roles — teacher, researcher, community member, citizen of new home, aficionado of the hops, etc, etc. So, I’ll make some posts along those lines, bare-bones tabulations of how I’m spending my time, and hopefully getting done everything that needs to get done.
24 May 2010
Tasks: Unpack from New Mexican misanthropic jaunt (not completed); write RSA paper (not completed); pack personal possessions for transport to North Carolina (not completed); ride bike (not even attempted).
Personal Reward: Two beers and a movie.
And that, folks, is how not to get things done. See folks in Minneapolis, at which point my papers will definitely be complete.
Also, anyone reading this should check out my colleague Dale Smith‘s blog, Rhetoric and Publics. Add it to your RSS reader. Dale is good people, doing very cool work, and I look forward to his posts.
