first efforts

Visual literacy

Yesterday I did a guest lecture for a grad seminar in the education school, where I talked about visual literacy. I ran them through a short exercise in "reading" photographs that they could use in the high school English classes they are teaching. We started with the following two images by Dorothea Lange (click on image to enlarge): 

   

We talked about each image in succession, discussing how composition and cropping influence our potential interpretations and considering the relationships among bodies -- white bodies and black bodies, fat bodies and thin bodies, male bodies. The students overwhelmingly interpreted the photograph as an image about race. One student suggested that the second image offers a picture of "racial integration," while others disputed that reading and suggested that it is an image of segregation and racial domination (one student mentioned something I hadn't noticed before, that the Coca-Cola sign over the head of the African American man on the far right reads "sold here"). Then I gave them a third image, the actual exposure from which the first two photos were derived by cropping:

This image introduces yet another body, that of agricultural economist and Lange's research partner (and husband) Paul Taylor. Though barely visible, Taylor's white, lanky, casual yet professorial body introduces yet another juxtaposition, that of insider and outsider. The students remarked that while in the first and second images the white man is visually dominant and powerful, in the third image Taylor's presence mutes that power and at the same time heightens the tension. 

During our discussion we talked not only about composition and cropping but also captioning, context, and circulation. Dorothea Lange made the photograph in Clarksdale, Mississippi in 1936 while on assignment for the Farm Security Administration. She originally captioned it, "Plantation Owner, Mississippi Delta," though sometimes you will also find it titled, "Plantation Overseer" (a caption that she gave to a different photograph of the same man). If you do a google image search of "plantation overseer," the first two images that come up are this one.

None of this is rocket science in terms of interpretation, but sometimes it's good to go back to the basics, to see what you can see, look harder, and try to see more.

Well...

In my ongoing effort to exploit my visiting fellow gig as much as I possibly can (i.e., figure out a way to get into the new, **free**, **faculty-only** gym on campus), yesterday I was required to submit to an online "wellness assessment." It's actually pretty cool if you like that sort of thing. After answering a battery of questions that addressed such things as family health history, weight, how much I drink, and whether or not I wear a seatbelt, the computer spit out an eight-page "Personal Wellness Profile." My PWP (as I like to call it) gave me my "overall wellness score" (74 out of 100, just one stinking point shy of "excellent"), ranked my individual risks, and even estimated my "health age" (as opposed to my chronological age).

Based on the data I provided (self-report being what it is, one should be skeptical), my "health age" is 35.6. If I follow the PWP's guidelines for improvement, apparently I could get even younger: 32.2. Glorious! All I have to do, says my PWP, is reduce my BMI (belly massiveness index) and get my (kind of high) cholesterol down. Which means eating even more vegetables, giving up things like cheese and chocolate, and abandoning my snacky habits.

The big question, of course, is what those 3.4 years are worth if I can't spend them snacking on cheese and chocolate. I think my PWP needs a better quality of life measure.

Definitions

When I teach undergrad Rhetorical Criticism, I incorporate an ongoing discussion I call "Rhetorical Criticism in the News," where the students and I agree to monitor popular media coverage of rhetoric, language, and persuasion. (An archive of last fall's RC in the News may be found here).

If I were teaching this fall, I know we would be spending a lot of time this week talking about media organizations' recent decisions to label the Iraq conflict a civil war. And why this makes our current president cranky.

Sundays are nice

Sleep in. Do some yoga. Go to brunch here; have a mimosa. Take a stroll around one of Nashville's oldest neighborhoods. Come home. Sit around. Read the Sunday Times. (All of it.) Go for a run in 70-degree weather. Watch some football. Enjoy a lovely light dinner with my beloved. And ponder where exactly I will wear this, a most excellent gift from one of the curly-haired professors, which was waiting for me at my front door when I returned from my Thanksgiving travels.

Yeah, baby.

Ruins

On Thanksgiving morning my beloved and I took a walk along the Mississippi River in Moline. Accidentally, and much to our delight, we ended up at a place called Sylvan Island Park. From 1894 to 1956 Sylvan Island housed a Republic Steel plant that processed recycled railroad ties and other iron scrap.

Over the years all of the buildings were dismantled. During the 1990s it was turned into a beautiful park with biking and hiking trails. This is the kind of thing that's left (click on images to enlarge):

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Gobble, gobble

Road trip!

Surprise, surprise

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Inland North You may think you speak "Standard English straight out of the dictionary" but when you step away from the Great Lakes you get asked annoying questions like "Are you from Wisconsin?" or "Are you from Chicago?" Chances are you call carbonated drinks "pop."
The Midland
The Northeast
Philadelphia
The South
The West
Boston
North Central
What American accent do you have? Take More Quizzes

from RhetDem, whose blog contains my most favoritest feature of any blog anywhere: Friday Cat Blogging.

Five little words

An open to letter to finnfam, my beloved familia:

Thank you for loving me enough to call me and leave messages on my cell phone. It makes me feel warm and fuzzy and in touch with all of you, whom I miss very, very much. But I do have a tiny request. When I am getting off a plane and check my messages on the cell and there are two messages, one from Dad and one from Big Brother Who Doesn't Usually Call Me, left within minutes of each other, and when the one from Dad says little but says it in that patented "voice of doom" style of his, and when the one from Big Brother is perkier but equally vague, it makes the Prodigal Daughter who lives far away a little nervous. Her mind starts to wander toward the negative: who's sick or injured or what really bad thing happened that they don't want to tell me on my voice mail?

So, finnfam, I beg you, call me all you want, whenever you want, for any reason. But if it's really just to say hi (which, in this case, thankfully it was), then please just include these five little words in your message: "Just calling to say hi." It would make me much less nervous.

Thank you for your support.

Love, the Prodigal Daughter

Mentor and mentee

Do you ever have a day where suddenly the big picture snaps into view and you get a glimpse, an ever so tiny glimpse, of the arc of your vocation? I did, on Friday, at NCA.

9:30 am - 11:00 am: The mentee remembers a mentor, attending a panel honoring her late dissertation advisor. An intense and emotional experience. Good, but hard.

11:00 am - 1:00 pm: The mentee becomes the mentor, holding two hours of one-on-one meetings with some of her graduate students, a few of whom she hasn't connected with in person since she left on sabbatical. Equally intense, though in a different way; she talks with them about their work and their job searches and their lives.

3:30 pm - 4:45 pm: The mentor becomes the mentee again, spending over an hour bending the ear of one of her beloved senior colleagues, who not only offers his usual sage and judicious advice but also very kindly tolerates her complete and utter selfishness. She realizes later that not only did she dump on beloved colleague with issues and questions and problems, she doesn't think she even asked once how he is. Maybe the mentor didn't notice or mind this omission, but the mentee sure wishes she had better manners.