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Rhetorics of the Midwest: A Course Soundtrack

Here’s the official soundtrack for my upcoming course (Rhetoric of the Midwest). Each song will kick off a week’s discussion, so there’s a logic behind each song choice. I will gladly post my syllabus once it’s all official and stuff. I will provide this soundtrack for students on the first day of class.

1. “American Band,” Guess Who

2. “Little Pink Houses,” John Mellencamp

3. “Nebraska,” Bruce Springsteen

4. “Whiskey Bottle,” Uncle Tupelo

5. “Endless Kansas City,” Van Morrison

6. “Ohio,” Crosby Stills Nash & Young

7. “Detroit Rock City,” KISS (there ya go, Mike)

8. “The River,” Bruce Springsteen

It’s worth noting that these aren’t necessarily supposed to represent anything. The lyrics don’t tell you anything about the midwest. The songs don’t tell you anything. At the same time, these songs are just a few “ways in” to a place that most people tend to gloss over.

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Midwest Soundtrack

For my Rhetoric of the Midwest course, I’m thinking of making a soundtrack. Want to add any songs? This collection is amazing, by the way.

• “Omaha,” Counting Crows
• several Sufjan Stevens songs
• “Gary, Indiana” from The Music Man
• Soul Coughing: “True Dreams of Wichita”
• “Omaha Style,” 311
• “St. Louis Blues”
• “Ohio,” Modest Mouse
• “Ohio,” The Pretenders
• “Ohio” - Crosby Stills Nash & Young
• “Little Pink Houses,” JCM
• “Johnsburg, Illinois” - Tom Waits
• The Nields, “Nebraska”
• “Nebraska” by Bruce Springsteen
• “North Dakota” by Lyle Lovett
• “Iowa” - dar williams
• Old 97s - “Bloomington”
• Otis and Shugg - “Indiana”
• The Jackson 5 - “Goin’ Back to Indiana”
• “Small Town,” JCM
• Joni Mitchell w/ Minugs - “The Dry Cleaner from Des Moines”
• “Kansas City,” James Brown
• Van Morrison - “The Eternal Kansas City

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Dear 2008,

You were a pretty so-so year. You actually ruined a lot of people’s lives with your economic collapse, so I’m thinking that 2008 wasn’t such a swell year to remember. On the other hand, there’s the whole Obama thing. That counts for something, if only because it was the final year of that idiot Bush ruining this country. (Let someone else ruin things for a change.)

A lot of friendships faded away this year, and not so many came to replace them. That’s a sad thing about 2008. I didn’t read any books that lit my fire. Didn’t discover new music that I can write clever reviews about. On the other hand, I did discover The Wire in 2008. Very, very good on you.

My daughter learned to walk, talk, and be a little kid in 2008. Maybe that is the most terrific thing about you. This was the year she learned to hug. And kiss.

Professionally speaking, 2008 has been my most frustrating year ever. Sometimes the work seems good. Sometimes not. Sometimes other things make me want to bang my head against the nearest wall. Luckily, 2008 was only my third year post-PhD. So I’ll have lots of other years to add as a professional. I’m sure 2008 won’t end up as the best or the worst. It will just be one of the many years that end with a strong whimper.

2008 was my first year in Seattle. I loved it there. I also travelled to Texas, Illinois, Indiana, Louisville, Nebraska, North Carolina, and Georgia. I had some great meals this year. And I drank some very good beer and wine. Not unrelatedly, 2008 was not the year that I lost my baby weight.

So, all in all, you were an okay year, 2008. Just okay. Like everyone else, tonight I am thinking of another year while still on your watch. We’re all hoping that something amazing, life-changing, and beautiful is ahead for us in 2009. I simply wonder what this next year will bring. My hope is that I’ll be sitting in front of a computer exactly one year from tonight, composing a letter to 2009. I hope that letter is a love letter, one that is full of excited memories.

But all the same, 2008, let me end like this: Thank you for the year. Thank you for another year with my family and the people I love. I end with gratitude in a cosmic sense. I wasn’t crazy about you, but I end with gratitude.

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Any ideas?

I’m confused. Is The Valve a blog where literature grad students publish in order to avoid publishing actual scholarship, or is it a blog where failed literature scholars publish when they can’t hack actual scholarship?

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Deep Thoughts

• When can we finally dump the term multimodal? Is anyone else getting sick of hearing that word?

• I think I should collaborate with Stanley Fish, just so we can play up the Fishy Rice connection.

• How does one actually go about changing academic fields?

• Am I crafty enough for Mod Podge? Meredith thinks so. I think probably not.

• When is the next time I will eat really good Indian food?

• Is it really too much to ask that my kid sleeps until 6:00 am? What’s so great about 5:30 in the morning?

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Harmony (on New Beckys)

The other day, I rained on a potential grad student’s parade when I told him that being an academic is frequently no fun. Why would I say such a thing? Here was my logic (I could be wrong):

You spend a lot of time in grad school with smart, fun people who like to read and drink and do things that you like to do. Getting a job isn’t like grad school. You’re still surrounded by people who are smart and who like to read and do things. But these people aren’t like you at all. They read different books. And they like to do different things. They go out and drink, but they drink different things. It’s like you’re watching the same old TV show you’ve always known, but the dad character is suddenly replaced by a whole new actor. And nobody even seems to notice.

That’s essentially what moving into your first or second real job is like. It’s mostly like that time on Roseanne when Becky was replaced by that chick from Scrubs.

Don’t get me wrong–differnet isn’t bad. But once you plunge into your job, start struggling with your book, get a kid or two, it gets sometimes hard to meet people who are kind of like you. Wait. Strike that. It gets hard to click with people in the same way that you clicked with your older crew.

This brings me to my current obsession. Lately I’ve been wondering why someone doesn’t make a version of eHarmony for normal people who are looking for folks to hang with. No dating or weird sexual scenes. Just people who you can hang with.

Just like online dating, you could scroll through the potential hangees. What are they looking for? What are their hangin’ turn-ons? Turn-offs?

Here’s what I think I’d look for in someone to hang with in the 65203:

• A gal who has a kid and a career. So, basically, someone who schedules her crying spells in the shower
  in order to multitask. And someone who understands why 9:00 pm is so very, very late at night.
• An email/chatter. Not a phone talker. Phone conversations are for perkier types. Don’t ask why. It’s just true.
• A self-effacing person who can laugh at herself. But this doesn’t stop her from the oh-so-important work of gossip.
• A lady who can curse with style and verve.
• A liberal, progressive type who gets frequently disgusted with liberal, progressive types. Someone who has wanted to shake Amy Goodman from time to time (but still listens to Democracy Now every day).
• Someone who also finds it hard to relate to New England.
• Just an ordinary girl who knows the lyrics to “Lose Yourself,” and sings them to herself whenever she’s about to work out for 20 minutes on the Stairmaster.

But, sadly, HangHarmony is doomed to fail from the beginning. These searches are usually designed to re-create something that you remember. It’ll never happen in exactly that way again. So you have to learn to enjoy the different things. You learn that the new Becky (or Darren) isn’t that bad. After all, you are someone else’s “new Becky.”

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Best student exchange of the week

Overheard while I was walking past the Anthropology building. Two students are comparing notes.

Student 1: Did you put “A” or “C” on the family tree question?

Student 2: I think I put C.

Student 1: Huh. Okay. Hmm. . . . But they’re all monkeys, right?

Student 2: Yeah. Exactly. They’re all fucking monkeys.

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Routine Maintenance

What has this semester wrought? It wrought some stuff. Most notably:

A kid who walks, runs, walks backwards, and dances. In August, the doctor told us to start physical therapy with her. We did that. She moved from scooting to crawling to walking to walking backwards (as I witnessed today).

She Walks!

And it got colder here, as you can tell from the coat. That’s something else wrought by the trajectory of this semester: seasons. I’m still getting used to seasons. Texas has none, but that was mostly okay with me. I am increasingly homesick for Texas, and I catch myself daydreaming about how I would ever return.

The semester wrought some more stuff. One conference that I barely attended for lack of interest. One missed conference that I really, really wanted to attend. Sometimes I think back to really great conference experiences, and I anticipate those moments again in future conferences. They won’t all be glorious. Most are a drag. But some moments really shine. That’s what keeps me excited about my work and my chosen profession.

Some classes happened. You know how that goes.

I got some writing done, and I worried about the writing when I wasn’t actually doing the writing. I dreamed about the writing. And when I didn’t dream about the writing, my body woke up so sore from the tension that comes from displacement. So, the writing was a constant.

We settled in a little more, making plans to paint and fix bathroom floors. We had date nights. And we watched five seasons of The Wire, which is maybe the best show I ever loved.

And my kid talks. She laughs. She has learned to tickle us so that we laugh, too. She wants to hold my hand while she walks. She is a break from the routine.

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Taking care of business

• Cleared almost 4,000 spam comments
• Upgraded Wordpress
• Figured out why I couldn’t log into my blog
• Watching Ironman
• Planning for one last class left before the (near) end
• Ahh. Yes.

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Stasis as seen via Spinoza’s concept of power

Just to prove I’m writing, here are some pre-Thanksgiving notes about stasis and power. Heat up your turkey pot pie and read away. Or don’t. I can’t force you. I’m just thankful that there are some ideas still cranking quietly inside my head.

In a rhetorical sense, gaining power might mean that a body’s words compose a strong connection with another group’s words, hopes, or actions. “When a body ‘encounters’ another body, or an idea another idea, it happens that the two relations sometimes combine to form a more powerful whole,” writes Deleuze, “and sometimes one decomposes the other, destroying the cohesion of its parts” (19). Powerlessness is thus a lack of connections—weak linkages or articulations between my words and the words or actions of others. To say a group or a body lacks power is a serious misunderstanding of how power operates. Power always involves a relationship between at least two bodies (whether those bodies are actual individuals, or whether they are ideas, concepts, groups, ideologies, etc.). Within the context of that relationship, there is a capacity for certain connections to grow or degrade. That capacity is at the heart of power.

This concept of power casts an interesting light on stasis. As we have seen, stasis is also about relations between (two or more) bodies. Stasis is the meeting point between ideas; and in that space of relationality, these two ideas compose a discourse that a wider public is invited to debate. What kind of discourse is produced is thus a matter of power, or the capacity for connections to that wider audience and its willingness to take action. In other words, one group’s desire for certain outcomes (federal protection for reproductive rights, loan forgiveness to third-world nations, better teacher standards in rural school districts, etc.) depends upon its own ability to make connections between the group’s words and the actions of a public who is willing to deliberate this problem. Stasis involves a struggle to create connections that are stronger than someone else’s.