first efforts

Delayed Gratification

Ask everybody who has known me since I was a kid, and they will tell you: I'm not into delayed gratification. I always polished off my Halloween candy by my birthday, which is a mere five days later. I love Girl Scout cookies but I have never understood why anyone should have to wait six weeks for a box of Thin Mints. And don't even mention Easter -- that basket was practically empty by Easter Monday (except of course for the Peeps, which everybody knows taste better if they are allowed to become stale and stretchy first).

Delayed gratification has never been my thing and that's why I have never planted bulbs. Doing all that work in November for something you won't see for four or five months just seemed pointless. Still, as I run and walk around the neighborhood each spring, I marvel at other people's colorful yards, the crocuses and daffodils and tulips and hyacinths.  "I could do this," I tell myself, "It won't be that much work and it will look so great in March and April."

Last fall I did it. An unusually warm November inspired me to dig something like sixty little holes in my front and side yard. All I had to show for it at the end of the day was a backache and a bad case of carpal tunnel.

Until now.

A teeny tiny crocus with a teeny tiny white blossom.

Totally worth the wait.

Unofficial Intemperance

SIGH. I heard on the radio this morning that this coming Friday is "Unofficial St. Patrick's Day" on campus -- also known as "The Day When Our Students Get Pathetically, Blindingly Drunk and Then Come To Class Thinking You Won't Notice." When I first arrived on campus seven years ago I was told that we "had" to have Unofficial St. Patrick's Day because St. Patrick's Day usually falls over Spring Break. With the students off in Florida and Mexico, the Champaign-Urbana Liquor Industrial Complex would lose out on lucrative cash if there were no alternative day of celebration. Yet this year and last year we were still in classes on St. Patrick's Day and still we had Unofficial. Apparently Unofficial is now Official.

Last year on Unofficial St. Patrick's Day I taught my Gender and Rhetoric class at 11 a.m., late enough that several students had time have a few at Kam's, but not so late that they were too drunk to skip class altogether. By a happy accident, we were scheduled to discuss an 1890 speech by Frances Willard, founder of the Women's Christian Temperance Union. I walked into class and immediately called on the student who looked the least temperate (his green t-shirt, gold beads, and loose smile gave him away). I asked him, "What's the definition of irony?" He stumbled. A few more students tried, and eventually we generated a suitable definition. "Does anybody know what's ironic about today?" I inquired. One student raised his hand and offered, "That there's anybody in class today?" "No," I replied, "that's not ironic, that's unexpected." Eventually somebody caught on that we were talking about temperance rhetoric on what is perhaps the least temperate day of the campus calendar.

So we dove into Frances Willard and the students took turns declaiming from her text as groups of drunken, screaming undergraduates thundered down the hallway outside of our classroom in Lincoln Hall: "...the average youth knows that the smiles he covets most will be his all the same, no matter whether he smokes, swears, drinks beer and leads an impure life, or not....all this gives him a sense of freedom to do wrong which, added to inherited appetite and outward temptation, is impelling to ruin the youth of our day with a force strong as gravitation and relentless as fate."

Who says rhetoric has nothing to do with real life?

Governor Blagoj-, er, "Smith" - PunK'd

A few weeks ago our oddly coiffed governor, Rod Blagojevich, appeared in a hilarious sketch on The Daily Show. According to a story in yesterday's Chicago Tribune, the governor thought the interview was a legit story about pharmacists who refuse to fill prescriptions for the morning after pill. Apparently he wasn't aware that The Daily Show is, as the Chicago Tribune put it, "a spoof of the news." Governor Rod started to wonder, though, after interviewer Jason Jones struggled in pronouncing his last name and elected to call him "Governor Smith" instead. Oh, and when he asked him if he were the "gay governor."

Of course the ultimate irony here is that as a "spoof of the news," The Daily Show piece offered the most incisive analysis of the issues at play than anything else I've seen. In interviewing the pharmacist, Jason Jones declares, "How dare the government make a moral judgment over you? You're supposed to be doing that for the woman!" And he ends the piece with this revealing closer: "The question remains, who will control a woman's body, her governor or her pharmacist?"

Nobody expects references to the Spanish Inquisition!

I have to admit, I'm quite disappointed that nobody commented on the sly reference to Monty Python's Spanish Inquisition sketch in my last post. "Fanatical devotion"? "Ruthless efficiency"? I was very proud of that. Come on, people, you are getting soft. Do I have to keep you after class for tutoring?

"NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition! Amongst our weaponry are such diverse elements as:  fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency, and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope."

SIGH. Joe would have caught it.

What's a penguin doing on the telly?

I miss Joe all the time, but sometimes I really miss Joe. Like last night, when I spent two hours watching the PBS Monty Python "Best Of" fest. The tributes to Eric Idle and Graham Chapman contained many of my favorite sketches--if "favorite" is what you can call the thing that your brothers repeated over and over again with such fanatical devotion and ruthless efficiency that you can still recite it all perfectly along with the "telly" years later. As I sang along with the "Lumberjack Song" and anticipated the answer to the question, "What's a penguin doing on the telly?" ("Standing"), I realized that when I think of these silly sketches, I don't think of the high-pitched voice of Graham Chapman doing Mrs. Conclusion, I hear Joe doing Graham Chapman doing Mrs. Conclusion. When I was a little kid I had no idea why any of this was funny, but my big brothers thought it was hilarious and that was good enough for me.

Communication Day

I spent much of today at "Communication Day" at Eastern Illinois University. Fellow rhetoricians and EIU faculty Suzanne, Darrel, and Angela kindly invited me to be the keynote speaker for this year's event, which featured the theme of communication and poverty. This morning I responded to a fabulous faculty panel on visual representation and marginalized communities. In my talk, I did a mini-history of the FSA's photography project and also speculated about why the FSA photos came up again and again in public conversations about Hurricane Katrina last fall. My argument is that the FSA made available an American visual tradition for talking about poverty and displacement. I ended my talk with the story of Nancy's grandfather Scott Marshall Ramsey, and people seemed quite struck by how his story encourages you to interpret the picture differently.

The audience was primarily undergraduate students, and quite a few,  too. One faculty member unexpectedly brought her giant comm theory class over, which meant that a room meant to accommodate about 120 people was overflowing and sweltering with 200 or more. Let's just say the students sitting on the floor in front of the lectern were definitely close enough to see me sweat. Which I did. Profusely.

On the way back up I-57 I stopped at the outlet mall (yes, I am aware of the irony of giving a talk on poverty and then going shopping). I bought three (THREE!) purses, for the low low price of $27. Total, not each. As to why I need three purses, I am not sure. Maybe I am becoming a girl or something. My sisters would like that very much.

I ended my trip with a stop at the Dairy Queen and then I blasted Sugarland in the car on the way home. Two thumbs up for Communication Day!

Nancy's grandpa, the update

I heard back from Nancy today. Here's what she told me about her grandparents:

"I am so happy to tell you about my Grandfather and Grandmother: Scott Marshall Ramsey and Lillie Otto (Weatherman) Ramsey. They came from Springfield, Missouri in 1935 to the San Joaquin Valley, in search of work.  They had 3 sons and a daughter. My dad was the baby, Roy Ramsey, born in 1923. He was in the backseat when Dorothea Lange asked to take the photo (he remembers the incident, mostly because Lillie did not want her photo taken, and she was upset because she was embarassed how she and her family looked). Scott and Lillie settled in Thorton CA, and remained there until their death. He worked in the Thorton Canning Company. All three sons served in WWII. And all the children stayed in California."

Visual history as family history

Documentary photographer Dorothea Lange made this photograph in the San Joaquin Valley of California in 1935. This image is one of thousands of government-produced photographs that documented poverty, drought, and displacement during the Great Depression. While this picture isn't Lange's most famous (that distinction would go to her 1936 photo "Migrant Mother"), it's still a very recognizable image in her oeuvre. Until last night, I had always known it by the caption Lange gave it: "Ditched, Stalled, and Stranded." Now when I look at it, I think, "Wow, that's Nancy's grandpa!"

Just who is Nancy? She's a stranger from California who e-mailed me yesterday to ask if I knew whether this photograph had ever been published in LIFE magazine during the 1930s. She found a reference to my book during a web search and thought I might be able to help. She knew that Grandpa and Grandma were photographed by Lange (Grandma's typically cut out in most reproductions but once in a while you can find her) and even that the photo was featured on a U.S. postal stamp a few years ago. But Nancy's dad had always told her that the image was published in LIFE, though no one in the family has been able to find it there. In PIcturing Poverty I studied how the photographs made by Lange and other photographers circulated in magazines during the 1930s and in my research I spent some time with LIFE. I was sorry to tell her that I am pretty sure the photo was not published in LIFE -- at least not in the thirties. However, I did discover today that "Ditched, Stalled, and Stranded" was one of the 80 or so photographs Lange selected for a retrospective exhibit of her career held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1966.

I haven't heard back from Nancy yet, but I hope she gets back to me and answers the one question that I asked her: What are your grandparents' names?  I'd love to put a name, instead of a caption, to a face.

Basketball girl

This is Basketball Girl, my beloved's awesome gift to me for Valentine's Day -- in honor of my little basketball problem, of course. According to her informative box, she is a metal windup toy inspired by "an old Japanese toy titled 'Pretty Girl with Ponytail Playing Bouncing the Ball'." When my beloved and I fired her up this past weekend, we discovered that this pretty girl has, shall we say, some interesting features. Not only does her right hand very skillfully bounce the basketball, but her left hand engages in a hilarious reciprocal movement that can only be described as "ass-slapping."

If you want to check her out for yourself, she'll be taking up residence in Lincoln Hall this week.

Who needs photosynthesis when you have a flask?

From today's Chronicle of Higher Education:

"Officials at Stanford University have fired the student who served as the university's bouncy tree mascot for boozing it up inside her costume. According to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle, Erin Lashnits, a 23-year-old biology major, was seen to be drinking out of a flask during a men's basketball game last week against the University of California at Berkeley. Tests found she had a blood-alcohol level of 0.15 percent, and she was cited for public drunkenness. She apologized, saying she hoped the incident didn't hurt the Stanford band, which oversees the tree. A university spokesman later pointed out that 'the tree's movement is usually consistent with that of someone who's had something to drink.'"