first efforts

A Monday of Realizations

Departmental e-mails about closed classes, waiting lists, and fall orientation do not apply to me.

My hostas are growing back because even the rabbits have a reduced appetite in this heat.

I am needlessly overcompensating for next year's absence when I send my advisees detailed little memos about how we will interact when I am on sabbatical.

Cafe Kopi sells Dove Bars.

Nashville will probably be hotter than this.

From the land of sky blue waters

The other night after I picked up my beloved at the airport, we joined Ben for dinner at the Esquire. And had the chance to marvel, yet again, at their vintage Hamm's beer sign (image below stolen from Google).

According to e-Bay, the sign is most properly described as a "scenerama motion light," where the image pans from a northwoods campsite past a waterfall and then, in miraculous 360-degree sceneramic splendor, eventually back to the waterfall again. Over and over again. It's all wonderfully backlit and wonderfully Minnesotan.

Which of course made all three of us feel the need to hum the Hamm's beer song. Which made us realize that we couldn't remember the cumbersome the second line. But we hummed it anyway.

For the record:  "From the Land of Sky Blue Waters (Waters), From the land of pines, lofty balsam, Comes the beer refreshing, Hamm's the Beer Refreshing (da-da-dum-dum-HAMM'S)."

She's ba-ack

My sister-in-law told me recently that she misses Alien Baby on my blog, and would I please put her back? This summer I have been toying around a bit with the blog photo. For a few weeks I used a current photo of me "at the lake." My beloved liked this one because he said it was nice to be able to see me every day (aw, ain't he sweet?). But everybody else who has expressed a preference (three people) wants Alien Baby back.

I think my family's love of Alien Baby is deeply tied to fears about their own mortality. They have no anxieties about the fact that they are aging, but it really freaks them out that I am.

Or maybe they just like her cuz she's freaky.

Speaking of aging, today is my sister Bobbi's birthday. My *much older* sister. Happy Birthday!

On failure and communication

This week's Chronicle Review offers an article by Carlin Romano on the recent International Communication Association (or ICA) annual meeting held in Dresden, Germany. For the record, I am not currently nor have I ever been a member of ICA, though I do associate with many people who are card-carrying members. The article isn't friendly, exactly, to communication scholarship, nor is it entirely dismissive. As The Chronicle's "critic at large," Romano seems to have a more ethnographic purpose: who are these odd people, he asks, and what were they up to in Dresden?

One thing they weren't up to, apparently, was talking about Dresden. Romano observes that not a single panel at Dresden was devoted to the bombing of Dresden, what Romano calls the "The most famous act of communication — or failure of communication — in the history of this iconic 800-year-old city". In fact, Romano didn't find much discussion of failure at all at ICA. Judging from the conference program, he suggests, communication scholars tend to focus more on success than on failure. I'm not so sure that I agree; I can think of numerous counter-examples from both the social science and the rhetoric side, but for now I'll leave it at one shameless plug: my colleague and friend, Jeff St. John, does just that in a wonderful essay called "Communication as Failure" in the new volume he co-edited with Greg Shepherd and Ted Striphas, Communication As...Perspectives on Theory (Sage, 2006). The book takes up various metaphors for communication (such as performance, storytelling, and deliberation) and probes how those metaphors enable and constrain our ability to understand communication phenomena. It's a different and welcome approach for thinking about our theories of communication. (Disclosure: I have a chapter in it, too, but Jeff's is way better than mine).

As for why I'm not a member of ICA, well, I have no idea. My grad students, who notice that everyone else in our department goes to ICA, have asked why "we" (i.e., rhetoricians) don't. The only answer I can give is, "Because they don't do rhetoric." But of course that begs the question. I'm sure there are complicated institutional reasons for why rhetoricians traditionally haven't "done" ICA, but thus far I have failed to uncover them.

Slimming down

In my adult life I have moved at least once every four years. Right now I'm experiencing what may be the best kind of moving: the temporary relocation. I head off to sabbatical-land in three weeks. I'll be crashing in a furnished apartment and someone will be living in my house while I'm gone. What's great is that I don't have to go to all the trouble of packing and moving the big stuff, but I will still get the benefits of the slimming down that a move forces on you. To make space for the renters, I will pack up and store personal belongings like clothes and books. And I'll hide away those family photos scattered all over the house and remove the shrine to finnfam on my fridge. (You are all fabulous, that goes without saying, but I'm not sure that strangers will enjoy looking at your ugly mugs every time they want a cold beer).

My strategy thus far has been to make three piles for everything: pack, store, or toss. I'm finding to my delight that there's not much to pack, even less to store, but a whole hell of a lot to toss. I carted seven (SEVEN!) bags of clothes to Goodwill today. It seems my dresser drawers were full of jeans that no longer fit, giant baggy sweatshirts and countless race t-shirts, many of which I never wore because they are very, very ugly (e.g., every t-shirt design for the Indy Mini and most of the River to River shirts too).

As this process unfolds I'm noticing funny things. While I have no problem tossing out half my wardrobe or putting books in the box that's headed off to Books to Prisoners, I can't seem to bring myself to throw away a bag of rocks I brought back from Iceland. And I keep going back and forth on the Dana Scully action figure.

Regenerating paradise

A major forest fire is burning in paradise right now. Last Friday, a lightning strike started a fire on Cavity Lake in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area. Since the Blowdown of July 4, 1999, this federally-protected wilderness of millions of acres has also been home to millions of dead trees:

 

With all that fuel in the forest and no way to clear it from the remotest areas, it was only a matter of time. Temps in the 90s and low humidity combined last week to start the fire.

(July 16 photo by Carol DeSain; more photos here)

Thanks to prescribed burning near the Gunflint Trail over the past several years, so far people and property on the periphery of the BWCA have been protected. And it's important to remember that wildfires can be a good thing. In fact, the boreal forest cannot regenerate without fire; fire helps white, jack, and red pines establish themselves. Fire, in essence, is what makes paradise paradise.

How the mighty have fallen

I developed exercise-induced asthma in my twenties and I blame the Brawny paper towel man. At the time I was living downriver from an Old Town, Maine paper mill, where they made Brawny paper towels. I know this because I saw the Brawny man's face in my window nearly every day. Remember those 1970s tv commercials where the housewife had a horrible mess to clean up and the Brawny man showed up outside, bent down, peered into her kitchen window like some Paul Bunyan-sized peeping tom, and handed her a roll of Brawny paper towels? My encounters with Brawny were kind of like that. Only he never offered paper towels, his face just rolled past my window, painted on the side of a train that ran from the mill through my backyard and on to the kitchens of America. Truly, my asthma is a small price to pay for clean counters.

My asthma doesn't typically bother me, except when I push it too hard at the end of a long race (which almost never happens), when it's really cold and dry outside, or when it's really, really humid. Like today. This morning I bailed on my running buddies only two miles into a six mile run. In weather like this I just can't catch my breath. In the larger scheme of things, bailing on two-thirds of a run is really no big deal but still, I hate it and I'm annoyed.

Because I sometimes like to make myself feel better by making myself feel worse, when I got home from my run/walk I decided to do a little time travel. Come with me, won't you, back to the summer of 2005 as we look at what my workouts looked like just one year ago this week. Back then, I was training for the Pikes Peak Ascent, a half marathon to the top of Pikes Peak. Here's what my log tells me I did that week:

Monday, July 18: 4 hour run

Tuesday, July 19: 1 hour run, 2 hour yoga class

Wednesday, July 20: 1 hour yoga practice, 1 hour hills on elliptical trainer at gym

Thursday, July 21: 40 min. run

Friday, July 22: Rest day

Saturday, July 23: 2 hour run

Now, I don't do nutty stuff like that race all the time, so this was hardly a typical week. But still. That was me, a year ago. SIGH.

Ringtone rhetoric

Tonight during an NPR interview about Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, the host commented that Nasrallah is so popular among his followers that they download snippets of his speeches as cellphone ringtones.

Wouldn't it be great if the rhetorically-minded among us could do this too? If I could I just call up my cell phone company and ask for a little "ask not what your country can do for you," a few rounds of "I've been to the mountaintop," or a heaping helping of "nothing to fear but fear itself"? This got me to thinking...my employer is quite interested in fostering faculty entrepreneurship in the new global economy. Maybe I should try to market this idea? Wouldn't you know it, somebody already beat me to it. Three years ago. Foiled again!

I'd pick FDR's "when there is no vision the people perish." Biblical resonance, contemporary relevance, and that tinny-sounding, I'm-speaking-to-you-from-the-bottom-of-a-swimming-pool patrician voice. Pure magic. 

How 'bout the rest of you rhetoricians?

My new blogger manifesto

Found this today on the McSweeney's web site. Thanks to these lovely folks I will no longer feel anxious when I skip a few days on the blog.

Frequency
We will put some things "up," so to speak, on some days, and on other days, we will not put things up. Whether or not we put things up will depend largely on whether, on a particular day, we have anything to put up. For example, let's say that on Monday we have something which we want to put up. On that day, we will put that thing up. On Tuesday, though, we might not have anything to put up. We will worry for a moment about not having anything to put up. "Oh no," we might say, "another day has come, and we have nothing to put up. What will happen if someone visits this site and there is nothing new to look at? Will people be angry?" But then we will realize that, chances are, people will not be angry -- that, chances are, people will understand. Most people are pretty understanding.

The teacher becomes the student

As part of my frantic quest to take advantage of all of my various forms of health care before I leave town, today I went to the eye doctor. I was sitting in the waiting room reading Assassination Vacation (awesome) when a doctor's assistant came out to get me. She looked vaguely familiar, but I wasn't quite sure why. As she led me into the dim little exam room I looked at her name tag; nothing jogged my memory. Then she said, "Hi, I'm X," X being a nickname, not the name on her nametag. That did it. All at once a warm and also slightly sinking feeling rushed in: damn, a former student! I just want to sit here reading Sarah Vowell and waiting for my eye exam, I don't wanna be Professor Finnegan.

"Did you go to the U of I?" I asked. She grinned: "I wondered if you remembered me." Instantly it all flooded back: rhetorical criticism class about two years ago, struggling writer but very, very hard worker, very sweet girl, lots of office hours visits.

We chatted briefly about what she's been up to (working at the doctor's office, thinking about moving to Seattle), me slipping almost imperceptibly into slightly-formal-but-friendly office hours tone. It was pleasant and nice. Then suddenly the tables turned and she got to business. For the next 15 minutes she instructed me to put my chin here, rest my forehead there, put drops in my eyes, and ran me through a battery of tests designed to make me feel blind and to remind me that I was never very good at video games.

Perhaps the worst part came when I had to put the plastic stick over my eye and read the eye chart. Who designs the font for these things? Writing teacher my ass! Professor Finnegan can't even tell the difference between a frigging E and a B on an eye chart.

The eye doctor visit finally gives me a timely reason to ask this question: am I the only person who ROUTINELY types the wrong letters and numbers into the Typepad comment verification box? I can't see those damn things for the life of me.