first efforts

When your running is good for your research but bad for your running

Folks who rhapsodize about running like to emphasize how time spent running allows you to move beyond linear thinking to free-associate, problem-solve in creative ways, etc. But what happens when that goes awry? This morning my run put me into a lovely zen-mind space in which I found myself ruminating on a couple of pressing projects and getting good, creative ideas for how to tackle them. However, I got so preoccupied that I failed to realize I had somehow cut my usual route short and was back at home again, about 15 minutes too soon. Oops.

On the running front, here's an early holiday gift idea for those of you with runners in your lives: Haruki Murakami's short but lovely memoir, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. I bought it this summer and finally got to it this week. Murakami is also a (hugely famous) novelist (whose novels, I'm embarrassed to say, I've never read), so there's also lots in the book about the relationship between running and writing.

Second ever first efforts image challenge: Food as "safe" regionalism

This pitch is going to have a long windup, so bear with me. I promise that the end result will be some much-needed diversion for those of you who, like me, are ready for this election to be over so that you no longer need to lie awake at night worrying that fivethirtyeight has somehow gotten it horribly wrong. 

This week we rhetoric folks hosted our beloved friend and colleague Vanessa Beasley. In keeping with Illinois tradition, we put her to work. Vanessa met with Professor Murphy's grad seminar, participated (with Murphy and our political science colleague, Brian Gaines) in a wonderful IPRH panel on rhetoric, politics, and the election, met with folks from our colleague Scott Althaus's political communication seminar, and ended her visit last night by meeting with the Rhetorical Studies Reading Group. Thanks to our lively discussion of a selection of Vanessa's published work, I got an idea for the "second ever first efforts image challenge." (See here for the history of the first ever first efforts image challenge).

One of the essays we read was Vanessa's 2001 QJS piece about presidents and local addresses. Vanessa argues in this essay that presidents from 1885 to 1992 used the local address - speeches delivered around the U.S. - to, in part, manage American pluralism in safe ways. Vanessa found that presidents manage American diversity by promoting "occupationalism" (i.e., value of different kinds of work/jobs); by promoting partisanship; and by promoting regionalism. Although Vanessa offers examples where presidents used regionalism well, there are bad ways to promote regionalism; we have seen this kind with McCain-Palin in the last few weeks -- e.g., declaring that northern Virginians are liberal socialist hippie freaks while southwestern Virginians are "real Americans." Obama's "clinging to guns and religion" comment would certainly fall into the bad form of regionalism as well. 

During the discussion, it hit me that perhaps the safest visual or performative way for a president or candidate to promote regionalism is food. Think about it: President X or Candidate Y goes to the Iowa State Fair. S/he looks at the giant vegetables, talks to some folks, to be sure, but s/he also eats something. Eats a lot of somethings. One promotes regionalism by eating that region's food. Here's John McCain at the Iowa State Fair this past summer, eatin' a pork chop on a stick and lookin' oh-so-happy to be there:

 

Finally, here's the pitch (I told you it would be a long windup): Go forth and find more images of presidents, candidates, and regional food. Post links in the comments section, and/or email images directly to me (credit info is also helpful). You have until Election Day, when I'll post all the images I've received as a slide show.

Awards (virtual ones) will go to the person who locates the oldest image and also to the person whose image contains the most unusual food item.

[image credit: Steve Pope, Getty Images: Aug. 8, 2008: "Sen. John McCain eats a pork chop on a stick during a campaign stop with wife at the Iowa State Fair Friday, in Des Moines, Iowa"]

Picturing, um, public health?

Public health images in the news this morning...

First, this timely poster, courtesy Matt Yglesias's blog (thanks, oa!):

And today's NYT science section features this visualization of a cough, courtesy of Gary Settles at Penn State and something called "schlieren photography," which allows you to "see the invisible."

 

Cool! Gross!

Slideshow of other visible invisibles here.

Orange and golden

 

The results of last night's pumpkin carving event. All in all pretty good, esp. for folks who hadn't carved a pumpkin in over two decades. The great "angry eyebrows" pumpkin on the right is courtesy of Mandy and Bengineer, who was celebrating his golden birthday yesterday. We toasted that with homemade calzones, beer, and Mandy's fabulous chocolate inchworm cake.

Orange food and crockpot season

The local eaters in this household have gone decidedly orange this week, as we officially made the transition to the farmer's market's autumnal offerings. My beloved was skeptical, but even he admitted the sweet potato quesadillas I made the other night were damn tasty (Moosewood Cooks At Home recipe here except I nuked then whipped the potatoes rather than shredding them). Last night we broke out the crockpot for maple ginger squash and glazed carrots. And this weekend there will be pumpkin carving - for displaying, not eating, but I may toast the seeds. I do love pumpkin seeds.

Speaking of photography: Colin Powell

A few weeks ago my colleague DB passed along his copy of The New Yorker, bookmarking a photo series he thought I might be interested in seeing. I was.

So was Colin Powell, apparently, because he referenced one of the images in his interview on Meet the Press this past weekend. Powell pointed out that an image of Elsheba Khan at the gravesite of her son, Specialist Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, revealed the soldier not only to be the recipient of military honors such as the Bronze Star but also a Muslim. Powell stated explicitly that viewing the photograph crystallized his frustration with Republican attacks about Obama, terrorists, and Obama's supposedly "secret Muslim" faith:

I'm also troubled by, not what Senator McCain says, but what members of the party say. And it is permitted to be said such things as, "Well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim." Well, the correct answer is, he is not a Muslim, he's a Christian.  He's always been a Christian.  But the really right answer is, what if he is?  Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer's no, that's not America.  Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president?  Yet, I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion, "He's a Muslim and he might be associated terrorists." This is not the way we should be doing it in America.

My current book project explores what I call the "textual residue" of people's historical responses to photographs. From a scholarly perspective, I'm greatly interested in Powell's explicit account of how viewing this image contributed to his political judgment about McCain. I would hope, though, that Powell also felt more than a little guilty when viewing some of these photos, given the way he's (ab)used photographs in the past. But, as far as I can tell, he has left no textual residue of that kind of response.

For more see The BAG and related link. 

3 of 3

Now that I've had time to recover from jet lag and sleep in my own bed and work in my own office, some thoughts on Copenhagen and the rhetorical citizenship conference...

(1) Attending an international and interdisciplinary conference is a little bit like coming upon a bicycle in a tree. Sometimes confusing, but always lively, interesting, and presenting the possibility of new perspectives.

(2) It's a unique experience to be in Europe while the global economy is crashing down around our ears.

(3) Danes and other Europeans are not only following the U.S. election closely, they can quote from Saturday Night Live skits.

(4) I think I finally figured out why the deliberative democracy folks are ambivalent about rhetoric. Keynotes -- and especially the Q&A that follows -- are handy!

(5) Even when we work hard to make them explicit, we all have unstated assumptions that ground how we talk about our work. In the context of an interdisciplinary conference, it's a productive game to  listen well and carefully in order to uncover them.

(6) I love Scandinavian breakfast! Cheese, jam, bread, cheese, and cheese!

(7) Like oa, I'm a fan of the method of panel presentation used at this conference: thematically organized panels, each speaker gets 45 minutes (30 to present, 15 for questions). Enough time to develop an argument and engage in useful conversation with others. And if your paper goes over, you're not stealing time from others, only from yourself.

(8) I truly believe that the global economy could be saved if the recovery were put in the crisp, efficient hands of SAS flight attendants.

(9) I made my mother happy because I spent three hours in Sweden - the real MotherShip. My beloved and I joined our new scholar friend Anders for a tour of the "city of ideas," where we enjoyed the sights, much rhetorical conversation, and one awesome piece of cake. 

(10) To talk with Europeans about rhetoric, democracy, citizenship, and public deliberation, you gotta know your Habermas. Which further justifies my continuing emphasis on him in my publics theory grad seminar. Get ready, spring semester students! I'm gonna go all facts and norms on yer asses!

(11) When was the last time you attended a conference that began with a lively address from a famous politician who came armed with his own theory of rhetoric and ended with the gorgeous performance of a string quartet by Dvorzhak?

Visualizing economic crisis, global edition; and, The Annotated Fuld

 

I scanned this image from the front page of this past weekend's Financial Times. Being in Denmark last week (more on that in later posts) gave oa and me the opportunity to see how Europe was responding to and visualizing the global economic crisis. Judging from this picture at least, Europe's crisis "looks like" what we are seeing here in the U.S.: reaction shots of individual capitalists expressing anxiety, shock, and disbelief, captioned geographically to suggest the breadth of the crisis. 

While I have not systematically tracked the visual representations, I have in recent months noted a few trends here on the blog. Images illustrating the subprime mortage crisis didn't visualize people, they visualized property. Gas price imagery visualized numbers and alternatives. Once the crisis broadened and hit global proportions, we started to get the "economic gesture" images like the one above. The face of the crisis at present seems to be the individual trader on the floor, watching the numbers fall on the screen, powerless to do much to stop market forces. These representations are notable in part because they mute an easy assignment of agency to the crisis.

But one recent image foregrounds agency quite explicitly:

 

This is a painting of Richard Fuld, CEO of Lehman Brothers, made by New York artist Geoffrey Raymond. According to this Associated Press article, about 4 weeks ago Raymond placed the painting outside of Lehman Brothers' headquarters and encouraged passers-by to write on it; Lehman Brothers' employees were encouraged to use green ink so their comments would be differentiated from others'. For a close-up version of the image and some of the comments, see here. Here we get a direct, and multi-vocal, sense of agency  - not only Fuld's as an ideal scapegoat for the crisis but also the participation of those who wrote on the painting.

Raymond set up a blog called The Annotated Fuld, which he created explicitly for the purpose of selling his painting (interesting way to critique capitalists, to be sure, but that's for another blog post). Raymond has not only targeted Fuld, but other prominent New Yorkers, capitalist and otherwise - his "Annotated Spitzer" and "Annotated Fed" are also for sale. As of last Friday The Today Show had interviewed him and images of his paintings displayed on Wall Street sidewalks have appeared in a number of newspapers, including at least twice in the New York Times. Here's its Sept. 16 version, in a photo by Tina Fineberg:

 

The Economic Gesture

Image credits: Front page of today's New York Times and, well, you know...

[addendum: a related (and more explicitly snarky) critique from Wonkette, courtesy Professor Mercieca, aka Our Lady of Italia]

2 of 3

Just returned from the conference in Syracuse. Great all around - good work, good art, good excursions, good company. Anne Demo and her colleagues and grad students at Syracuse put on a marvelous conference. The conference was not only interdisciplinary, it was also international, with scholars from Europe and South America in attendance. Here's a bit of what we heard, saw, and talked about.

Then there was the bizarre juxtaposition, visual and otherwise, between our group and the other group that gathered Saturday in the same conference center. When we arrived Saturday morning the hallways were crowded with young girls, maybe 11-15 years old. The girls, each one heavily made up and dressed um, fancy, waited in line to register at a small table where an equally made up and fancy young woman checked them in by consulting a huge, hot pink three-ring binder. The sign on the door to their meeting room said "Barbizon." I flashed immediately to these commercials I used to see on TV in the 70s for the "Barbizon School," which, according to the ads, would help you start an "exciting" career in modeling. Sure enough, walking by the room later in the day, I observed an older woman instructing a roomful of young girls how to enter a room properly. Several of us joked that we should organize some sort of radical feminist intervention whereby we would rush in to save these girls from the "whoremakers" at the Barbizon School. But then I figured they'd probably the signs on the doors to our meeting rooms, signs advertising panels on things like "Visual Memory, Trauma, and Death." Maybe they thought we needed a little intervention too. And definitely a little mascara.

On to Copenhagen, where there will also be interdisciplinary and international goings-on. And Carlsberg. LOTS of Carlsberg.