first efforts

The grouchy runner

In the Annals of Bad Running, only the Whiny Long Run beats out the Grouchy Run as the Worst Kind of Run. Yesterday afternoon I experienced my first truly Grouchy Run in quite a while. And I hope not to repeat it anytime soon.

A word to the uninitiated: for a run to qualify as Grouchy at least three of the following conditions must be present: 

(1) Weather that you didn't dress properly for, especially when it's colder and windier than you anticipated;

(2) A route that you didn't think through carefully enough, often one with more traffic than you anticipated;

(3) Annoying encounters with others on the road; often those others are driving giant, gas-guzzling SUVs and they do not register your presence, even though you are wearing a bright red vest and your day-glo orange Second Wind gloves and you have the right of way at the "walk" sign;

(4) An accompanying physical problem that gets worse as the run goes on; often this problem is tied directly to something you did (ran too hard or too long) or didn't do (stretch or warm up properly);

(5) Tiny burns on both your wrists which you got while putting dinner in the oven. (Okay, that has nothing to do with running but after my Grouchy Run I did that too, just to put a little icing on the cake).

Of hundreds

On Friday two co-editors and I submitted the manuscript for our book that is under contract with Sage.* The book reprints essays which have appeared elsewhere, but it also comes with a substantive and really useful editorial apparatus: an extended introduction, five substantial section introductions with discussion questions and suggestions for further reading, and both a foreword and afterword contributed by senior scholars in the field. My co-editors and I have had an incredibly fruitful and productive collaboration, but I don't think they would feel bad if I said that I am really glad that the bulk of the process is behind us. When you get to the point where all you have to do is type one initial of a co-editor's e-mail address and the whole thing magically appears, or when you do an e-mail search of a collaborator's name and the phrase "1-21 of hundreds" materializes, you know you've been doing a lot of work.

I have gone four days now without receiving a single e-mail from either one of them, or sending one. I scarcely know what to do with myself.

[*shameless promotion: Olson, Finnegan, and Hope, eds. Visual Rhetoric: A Reader in Communication and American Culture, forthcoming March 2008 (perhaps even sooner)].

Prison break

I have lived in Nashville for about five months now, which completely qualifies me to make some broad generalizations about this place. The first is that Nashville is St. Small with better weather and no Irish Catholics. The second is that Nashville attracts escaped prisoners.

I don't have enough fingers on both hands to count the number of escaped prisoner reports I've seen on the news since I moved here. Sometimes these are quite dramatic. Last fall some guy jumped bail and then stole or carjacked a series of cars all over Nashville and somehow got as far as Kentucky without getting caught. My beloved and I spent practically an entire weekend watching that drama unfold in bits and pieces on the local news.

This week brought another escaped prisoner tale, the best kind -- the kind that attracts the attention of Nancy Grace! 

"Fugitive steals country legend's bus"! It seems Christopher Daniel Gay (they always have three names, don't they?) just wanted to see his dying mother. So he escaped while being transported to Alabama from a Texas prison, stole a tractor-trailer and headed for Tennessee. Then he swiped a Wal-Mart truck containing $300,000 worth of merchandise south of Nashville and crashed it near his mother's house. You would think that's a dramatic enough story, but no. He then took off on foot and at some point swiped Crystal Gayle's tour bus, which was in storage outside of the city. Considering the guy was driving CRYSTAL GAYLE'S TOUR BUS, it sure took a while for them to track him down. He was arrested late Friday night in Daytona Beach. Florida. After spending a little quality time with a prostitute.

I like this place.

Stop the presses! Get me rewrite!

Last night instead of going to bed at my usual time, I got caught up in All the President's Men. It was airing on AMC as a part of what they were marketing as "DC Intrigue" night -- timed, I'm sure, to coincide with the opening of Scooter Libby's trial (and aimed at those of us geeky enough to make the connection). I have seen the movie before, but not until last night did I realize that this movie is my childhood. I don't mean in the sense of being a kid in the seventies, a decade defined by Watergate. I mean, this movie is my childhood.

The movie's newsroom is exactly like the newsroom where I visited my dad at work. The same clackety-clack typewriters, endlessly spewing wire machines, and heavy black rotary phones. The same bad seventies hair, big glasses, and wide ties. The same young hotshot reporters and seen-it-all editors, some of whom actually smoked (smoked!) at their desks. And Jason Robards as Ben Bradlee? Striding out of his glass-walled office, pulling out his red pen, ripping the hell out of Woodward and Bernstein's prose, and commanding them to "come back to me when you have some facts"? That's Dad! And that's real journalism, people!

I know the movies and tv don't always get it right. As Dad used to tell me when we watched Lou Grant, "That's not real, you know." I knew. Like All Star Wrestling, tv and movie journalism is fake. Dad didn't get to shout "Stop the presses!" and I'm sure he never got to actually stop them, which Lou Grant seemed to do like every other week.

But that movie newsroom, man? That newsroom was real.

Fun with presidential rhetoric

Eszter's blog tipped me off to the U.S. Presidential Speeches tag cloud site. Move the slider left and right to go back and forth in time and note the frequency of particular words and concepts in presidential speeches.

It may be no surprise to you to know that George Bush has a rhetorical thing for TERRORISTS, but did you know that Millard Fillmore was all about APPROPRIATIONS? Or that FDR favored VALUES and AUTOCRACY?

Fun for the whole family!

The Jane Smiley Index

I went to hear Jane Smiley give a talk on campus last night. Here's the breakdown, by the numbers.

13 -- ways of looking at the novel, of which she only discussed one

5 --  number of inches in height that separate Jane Smiley, who is 6'2", from Vanderbilt's Chancellor, who introduced her

4 --  number of decent audience questions before they devolved into the inevitable, "How many hours a day do you write?" and "Right now I'm writing my first novel..."

1 -- number of jokes about Iowa farmers

3 -- approximate number of people in the audience who mooed audibly when the Chancellor mentioned Moo.

Was yesterday YOUR most depressing of the year?

According to people who know these things and the media organizations that report them, yesterday was "the most depressing day of the year" because it marked the confluence of a whole range of stuff that makes us glum:

So welcome to "Blue Monday" - Monday, 22 January - officially designated by a psychologist as the most depressing day of the year. It has been singled out by Dr Cliff Arnall, psychologist and former tutor at Cardiff University, who has used mathematical equations to reach his verdict.

He worked out that people are most likely to get the blues in the final full week of January because of the combination of bad weather, Christmas debts and broken New Year resolutions.

My January 22 was quite fine. I started with a run (in admittedly rainy weather), tossed in a fine scholarly conversation with my fellow fellows plus some lovely phone chats with graduate students, and finished it all up with a pot of homemade soup, corn muffins, and a toast to Good Brother Joe, who would have been 48 years young yesterday. Something tells me that he would have had a few (very funny) things to say about his birthday being coopted by Welsh doctors for such dreary purposes ...   

Geo-art

Running karma

A snippet of this morning's run, courtesy of Gmap Pedometer. 1 hour and 20 minutes, my longest run since Scott and I did that cold, rainy 9-miler in St. Paul in September. Felt good. That's practically 90 minutes, which is practically 2 hours, which is practically a half-marathon. Hey, I think I can do this again!

Two instances of good running karma today. The first was that my run 8 minutes, walk 2 minutes approach accidentally (miraculously, you might say) worked out perfectly so that I began a 2-minute walking break at precisely the moment when I hit the nastiest, hardest hill of the whole run. Good timing.

Second instance of karma came when I got home and found this in today's e-mail, my guru Joe Henderson's thoughts on "running the good race" when you aren't in PR-land and your legs and lungs are only getting older and tireder. Also good timing.

The rest of today? Homemade quiche for breakfast/lunch, the couch, Michael Kammen's Visual Shock for an R&PA book review, and the Illini vs. Wisconsin. Talk about some folks who could use some good karma...

A Thursday of realizations

1. Even though having HMO coverage is only good for healthy people, it's still much better than the pay-as-you-go version, which requires you to spend two hours of a perfectly good workday on the phone trying to figure out why a prescription that cost you $20 to fill in November now costs $40 and arguing with the people who process insurance claims, who do not seem to accept the fact that a bill containing information about one item is an "itemized" bill.

2. No matter how many times you try to force yourself to like it, running on the treadmill sucks.

3. If you go away on sabbatical you absolutely should hire someone to do your taxes; you wouldn't believe the stuff you can deduct. Can you say "federal meal per diem"?

4. You can make waiting for the bus go much faster if you try to figure out precisely what had to have happened in order for a half-eaten apple pie to be left on the bench at the bus stop.