slow bloggitry

Music: Lucette Bourdin Rising Fog(2008)

There are strangely small flying creatures on my patio tonight. I have brought out a table lamp and, with the help of an extension chord, illuminated a table in sore need of its annual weatherproofing. Small flying creatures are drawn to the light---to the pages of the dissertation I am reading under the light. One creature was white, solidly. Another, lime green, solidly. As they landed my skin began to itch---on the forearm, a calf. I'm sure there was no reason to itch other than the thought that bugs were there, a thought layered onto experience, and an experience that did not actually entail bugs landing on my forearm and calf. The creature that (who?) landed now on this white page could be mistaken for a mosquito, however, it has a rather long, Y-shaped tail, which it wiggles in a strange dance of detection. I do not know what it seeks to detect, or even if it is detecting.

I learned in these past minutes I should blow these creatures away, if they were disturbing. They hover over periods, sometimes apostrophes. But I can still read the writing with them there. The last time I tried to flick one it offered me the gift of death, in the form of wet insides, that have now crusted upon my computer's track pad. Of course, "gift" is a euphemism.

Reflecting, a colleague related a story today about a philosopher who encountered a kitten in his bathroom as he was about to disrobe, and the confrontation there---I imagined it was a tiled there, and probably brown and beige tiles, or blue, since the philosopher was French. The philosopher mused on his confrontation with the consciousness of the animal, and what recognition means, beyond---or just prior to---the cognition. The story played on nakedness, the denuding of interpersonal encounter. Except it was an interspecies encounter. And Peter Singer aside, such encounters are never certain.

I read for a while, just now. Smartness. I am caused to reflect on the Bush administration, and how I have so quickly packed away the horror of those years; this is what Freud termed afterwardness. Did we really live through that? I guess we did. The recession is, in some sense, a reckoning with the evil under our noses.

I remember the freckles on her shoulders.

I remember leaving the parking garage. I have to add on an extra fifteen minutes to my commute to and from the university, since I park there now. One must drive, loop after loop, searching for the empty spot. But at five miles an hour---ten tops. Yesterday someone almost ran into me hurrying in the parking garage. You cannot hurry in a parking garage. Such structures demand a kind of patience most of us are not accustomed to. "Most of us" meaning the sorts of people who people a university. Not the sorts who people Afghanistan.

After reading about Kabul, I'm not so sure there are parking garages in Afghanistan. Or at least not in that city. I'm probably wrong about this.

Facebook reveals someone for whom I have deep affection is losing a loved one, and while the sadness is degreed---the dying is not someone whom I know very well---there is sadness nonetheless. Sometimes prayer is not a petition. Sometimes it is wishing to be with someone to witness their grieving. At a distance, there is a tinge of guilt.

I am annoyed in my wanting to find grace and poetry in my mundane, in (my) publicity. And yet, I still write about it.

I have turned out the table lamp, and not-so-miraculously, the flying creatures are gone. My dog parades under the table, "snarking." It is a "backward sneeze," and it sounds terrible. "Inspiratory paroxysmal respiration" is the official term, I think. "Oh, all small dogs get that," I remember the rescue person explaining. Still, it makes me worry about him. I don't want to give my dog a half benedryl, as was recommended. I know what that drug does to me (it's called "sleep").

There is now good news. My friend's mother has pulled through, against odds. Hope explodes on status statements. The support network has gone cyber, and affect swirls around nodes (of what, I'm not sure) spread across the country. And so we, the friends, can go to bed with a hopeful thought. But there is that knowing bottom, as it were, that there is a new greeting in the morning. This is the basis of our worrying.

Inside and outside, through the door, Charlie Rose brays (he does, even in his hushed and humbled tones) with an expert about the salvation of the iPad---book publishers are relieved Amazon.com's strangle on electronic books has been loosened.

My arriving neighbor's car needs some sort of axel repair. As he arrives, his vehicle squeaks loudly. He drives too fast. I worry sometimes he will swing into the alley and mow over another neighbor's toddler.

Two cigars were spent.

It's another Friday night in adulthood. The dishwasher is on. I have not yet examined my navel, although the temptation is there---in jest, as a joke---but I cannot bring myself to look. The dog is now curled behind me on the bench, sharing my couch pillow (which I'm using as a cusion). I'll check some email here in a moment. Floss. Then brush. Then curl up with a comic before turning out the light.

I've been reading the hardbound special collection of Sandman, a comic. I'm just now to the point where he goes to hell to reclaim a talisman from a demon.

It's starting to rain, so the moment has arrived to go inside.

I came and went here, back and forth, reading and writing over some hours. Blogging is such sweet conceit.

it's . . . rest-pop friday.

a beavis and butthead moment

Music: Her Space Holiday: Home is Where You Hang Yourself (2002)

administriva

Music: Passion Pit: Manners (2009)

I had a delightful lunch with a friend who was just promoted to full professorship and is now suddenly (that is, somewhat unexpectedly) contemplating being appointed chair of her department. As someone who has just been passed to associate, the conversation was informative, for all those projective reasons one would imagine. As my advisees would be quick to report, I'm not the best administrator. So chatting with my friend about potentially administering a department was fascinating to me. She's in such a different place than I am in---and her grasp of what it takes to carry an academic department is beyond my comprehension.

I've often joked---because it is true---my advisees are more mature than I am. So the thought of someone close-ish to my age getting all administratish . . . er, it scares me. But, then again, I recognize competence knows no age.

Perhaps because I'm nearing my "late thirties," I'm noticing this more: my friends are becoming leaders. They're chairing national committees. They're directing centers. They're becoming directors of graduate studies. They're starting to chair departments. I am proud of their leadershipy acumen, and admiring---and I'm terrified I'll be called on to do the same at some point. Ahhhhhhhh!!!!! Given my personality, I don't think I'll be called upon soon.

I think the difficulty is this: to be an administrator one cannot be a sensitive person. Now, the (American Heritage) dictionary definition of "sensitive" is "having or displaying a quick and delicate appreciation of others' feelings." But I think this misses what I mean by sensitive. What I mean is also how one deals with that appreciation, how one internalizes it. Speaking only for myself (of course, because I'm sensitive), when another's feelings are bruised or hurt, I feel guilty. Even if I'm not the person to blame, or am not the one truly at fault, I tend to carry guilt when someone feels wronged or aggrieved. I don't think I would ever be a good administrator because I would feel bad if someone else felt bad. And in ANY line of work, people feeling bad is inevitable.

I cannot help but think of my chair and how he administers our department. Frankly, I cannot envision or conjure a better chair. He is sensitive in the right way---that is, he has a delicate appreciation of others' feelings---but somehow he manages not to be sensitive in the way I would be (feeling guilt when others are unhappy). Perhaps he does, I'm not in his head, but it seems to me a tough row regardless. Guiding any group of people in an organization larger than two or three requires a skill and certain management of heart. My chair has a seemingly endless depth of humor---a sense of the comic---that I think really carries my colleagues and me. If I've learned anything from my immediate boss, it's that a sense of humor and joy in living makes "work" worth working.

These musings lead me, of course, to thinking about humor and governance. On the one hand, humor can run cover for the inhumane, and I think we have a deep well of examples where humor has helped to mask a deep inhumanity---a lesson for those who celebrate the parodic in the public domain as corrective to political malfeasance. On the other hand, without laughter, what is the worth of work?

I cannot imagine administrating for anyone unless I can encourage laughter. I applaud and readily support those who can. Leaders who cannot laugh are suspect, and leaders who cannot make us laugh are not leaders. And while we should always be suspicious of laughter, we should be most especially concerned if there is no laughter. Laughter is the sole province of the human. Without laughter, we are machine.

changing guards: communication studieses

Music: Drive-By Truckers: The Big To-Do (2010)

This week I received the new issue of Communication and Critical/Communication Studies, a new-ish journal in "my field" dedicated to an interdisciplinary, humanities-style approach to critical work. I'm using "scare quotes" here because I'm not so sure this journal, sponsored by my professional organization (the National Communication Association), will retain the character of its first six years. That character has been "speechy" in orientation: the articles published in most its pages to date have been penned by folks reared in departments formerly known as "speech communication," departments like the one I was reared in. But owing to the strange slash in the title (a signifier of something to be sure) the journal's audience and mission are larger than speech. There are many "communication studies" in the United States. And there are many "cultural studies" here and abroad. With this inaugural issue edited by J. Macgregor Wise, the journal is journeying into other pastures of the communicative and cultural that are bound to cause confusion in the disciplinary imaginaries of many.

Ok, so, what do I mean?

My answer is, "I'm not sure." I'm not playing coy here, I mean it. I think the shift in the editorship of this journal means there is a genuine opportunity to widen our intellectual and institutional networks (perhaps part of the vision of the journal creators, I'm not sure). Perhaps this marks an opportunity to converge the "communication studieses" of North America, an opportunity to unite us!??! But for folks who work and study in my area (rhetorico-cultural studies), Wise's editorship of the journal is a new moment, because he comes out of a different communication studies.

Ok, so, what do I mean?

There are many "communication studies" in the United States, but (if my history is correct), all of us came from the same root [later edit: not true; there is no institutional common root; see comments below by Gil Rodman]. I have been professionalized under the banner of the National Communication Association. I hail from a discipline that was built largely in the 1920s over the object of "speech." My field advanced public speaking and debate and "discussion" as its service to the community (since our field was a consequence of the land-grant and adult education movements). My understanding of the field's history gets murky in the 1940s-1970s, frankly. But I gather it was during this thirty-year period that some folks stuck with speech, some folks pioneered communication technologies (known as "mass media" and, for some old timers, as "telecom"), and, of course, there are the speech sciences that branched into various directions for "communication theory." Then, there was the introduction of "cultural studies" into the mix in the 1970s and, as best as I gather, this was inflected in different ways in the 1980s. Feeding into this was the Canadian version of communication studies, which many of us today would associate with media ecology [later edit: Again, wrong; see comments]. This journal titled Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies seems to jam all of this together under one banner, and deliberately. This journal is forcing a conversation.

And this is the problem, of course. C&C/CSis deliberately yoking many different humanistic communication traditions, which means that it's bringing together a "promiscuous audience." While our professional affiliations may be rooted in the same 1920s folks, the fact is that in the twentieth century different trajectories developed with different inflections, resulting in a number of different brands of communication studies.

As best as I can figure it, in the United States there are two different expressions of critical communication studies: the speechies and the media folk. The speechies break down into the social scientists and the rhetoricians (with Organizational Commies playing the middle ground), while the media folk have similarly broke down into the media effects/mass comm folks (sometimes associated with journalism) and the cultural studies folks. This is hard to keep straight in one's brain, but I think the best example of the "two" communication studies traditions is found and formally institutionalized at the University of Illinois: the speechies are in the Department of Communication, while the media folk are in the Institute of Communication Research. It doesn’t help, of course, that these two programs have swapped faculty a lot in the past decade. Nevertheless, I think if one wants to understand the predicament of a journal like Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, one can look to the University of Illinois. Here is a journal that seems to be trying to bridge the institutional and disciplinary divide---in some sense literally across these departments.

I would really like to see someone write an article or book that breaks down this disciplinary history. Hell, I'm sure it's already out there and I've simply missed it (and if so, it should be required reading). Provided this monograph does not exist, I'm so bad at archival work I'm not the one to do it. I think, however, a scholar who takes on this task should be knighted, or given lots of beer, or something. What I can contribute is simply this: the journal C&C/S addresses two audiences who read and see things differently, two audiences who attend different conferences (I think), and two audiences who run in different cliques. I've blogged about this problem of two audiences before, with the exchange between my friend Dana Cloud and a scholar whom I don't know, Jennifer Slack. I don't envy Wise's challenge of editing a journal that addresses multiple audiences, with different ways of arguing, and different argots.

Evidence of the challenge is in this first issue. With perhaps the exception of Ted Striphas, whose work "walks the line" between these two audiences, the current issue replicates the divide. It's really weird to realize that the authors of all the featured essays are friends of mine, from the speech side of communication studies (I think I've had a drink at a conference bar with every one), while those contributing to the forum are strangers. I don't say this to brag or to create division, but simply to say that I get the argot of the lead article writers and less so those of the forum writers. I can only suppose the article writers were in the pipe-line with the previous editor, John Sloop, a Speechie. We were disciplined in the same kind of departments, and we write with the same habituated turns of phrase (for example, speech-comm writing is fiendishly clear, often with enumerated points). One the other hand, the "forum" section of the journal is written by scholars associated with mediated communication studies, a different tradition.

Insofar as the journal's audience is not united under a habituated writerly gesture, the challenge is more formidable than simply communicating ideas---the ideology that motivates the journal's title. As a rhetorician, I want to point out that this ideology---or idealism, take your pick---is going to be a problem for the new editor(s). It comes right down to writerly style, the way of making arguments. For example, the forum introduction by Briankle G. Chang opens thus:

Labor matters. It cuts and cuts into matter (mater, materia [line over the a---wordpress does not let me code for this])---the mother of all. To labor is to affirm life which begins with labor. "A child is born," says Hegel in his Phenomenology; like a decision, the newly born cuts into being and begins to be. [cut paragraph] To the extent that labor labors on itself, labor is inescapably historical. It creates a past, and it promises a future. . . .

This kind of writing is poetic-philosophical in its orientation---a kind of writing I cotton to myself, but which is generally discouraged in speech-style communication studies journals. I can imagine folks bristling at the statement that "labor labors on itself." So, too, can I imagine Speechies mystified by the opening paragraph of Jonathan Beller's forum essay:

For more than two decades, the multitude, who ought, to some extent at least, be us, have been rewriting the social contract. I emphasize writing here because writing is, perhaps, the only other system of accounts legible as a direct and antagonistic response to those numerical methods that reassure capitalists that the vast social changes which they endeavor to manage are on track for next quarter's profits. The escalating critique of an emergent sovereign order oft referred to as "Empire," the locutions around new modalities of labor and value transfer including "immaterial labor," "the attention theory of value," "cognitive capitalism," virtuosity," the shift from the "mass worker" to the "socialized worker," the "social factory," the "deterritorialized factory," the "world-media system, and the "score," along with the refurbishing of Marx's terms "social cooperation," "general intellect,' and "sensual labor" are nothing less than the products of a new poesis, an endeavor at the world-making that at once critically analyzes the logistics of capital and asserts the possibility of another world.

The values informing the readerly habits of the two audiences of this journal are very different. I know if I had written an opening paragraph like Beller's thatI would be raked over the coals for the abstraction by blind reviewers.

The most notable and widely read labor theorists/critics of my communication studies are Dana Cloud and Ron Greene, but neither were asked to participate---nor are they cited---in the recent forum on the topic of labor. I am absolutely convicted this has nothing to do with deliberate omission. It has everything to do with different audiences and different institutional affiliations and conceptual pieties. I don't envy Wise's (or the past editor's) position here. But the recent issues wildly divergent modes of address between the articles and the forum suggests to me a profound need: we need to map our common topoi; we need an account of our different histories; and we need a forum for an open discussion of our relationship. We need more than journaled butt-sniffing. We did the butt-sniffing with Critical Studies in Mass Communication and it resulted in the see-saw problem. We need a scholar to help us to understand our common heritage and history, and perhaps we need a conference to work out our common history and purpose.

Or, to put this crudely: Dana Cloud and Jennifer Stack's exchange was like two ships of Communication Studies passing in the prose. How can we unite the cultural/critical folks over the aegis of communication studies?

it's synth-pop friday!

on the misdirection of, and addiction to, classing-up

Music: Drive-By Truckers: The Big To-Do (2010)

A couple of years ago I remember sitting under an overpass at the intersection of Cameron Road and Research Boulevard and listening to the radio. At that time there was a lot of construction, so getting caught at the red light meant a four minute wait---enough time to wave off a church ministry panhandler and to hear a complete NPR segment about popular perceptions of wealth. I cannot recall much detail about the story except that a Very-Important-Firm's polling revealed a majority of "Americans" believed they would be wealthy one day. The story concerned our mass delusion, as a majority of this country's citizens would never be among that top five percent. I recall the story ended in speculation: despite a growing rich-poor gap, and the ever-increasing ranks of the poor (many who identified as the "middle class" were, in fact, the working class), why is it that a majority of those polled believed they would be wealthy one day? Television, of course.

I say, however, if there is any one agent responsible for fantasies of unlikely wealth, it's HGTV. I jest, of course, but really: what is up with this cable channel? More rant to come.

It's been some years since I caught up on research in television studies, but last I checked the industry rule was that television families were deliberately two or three tax-brackets higher than the target audience. Sure, there are exceptions---Sanford & Son and Married with Children come to mind, maybe Family Guy---but by and large(r) television families are much more affluent than those watching them. Chicken or egg, yes? I side with Stuart Hall on this one, but even so, television executives will tell you ratings depend on audience projection.

The exigency for these musings is a show I saw this evening when I got home from school: HGTV's Selling New York. The show is about two real estate firms selling condos and apartments in New York city to wealthy clients. Tonight's episode was about an international writer of "shopping guides" looking for a place in Manhattan, with about three million to burn, and a "photographer" wanting to sell his loft for six million (but being talked down to 4.9). I expected to be repulsed by the whole thing, but instead, I was surprised: both the agents and their clients seemed very down to earth. These millionaires were not pretentious, and while the places they were selling or considering were eye-popping, these folks seemed like people you could go out and have a drink with. Perhaps I wasn't offended because the money they're throwing around is inconceivable to me? I mean, I'm scrounging and saving to get a toilet flange repaired, so maybe their reality is so unreal to me that I just let them have it?

I reckon my reaction surprised me because I get so irritated with the people usually featured on HGTV real estate shows. I originally got cable last summer to watch celebrity-related things in preparation for a course I was teaching on celebrity. I found myself utterly addicted to the Food Network. And then, I don't know why or how, I migrated over to HGTV---and have been hooked (if the Food Network stops creating competition cooking shows, I might go back). I cannot explain why I get hooked on HGTV, because normally I get so ticked off at the house-hunters on their real estate shows. Unlike Selling New York, on shows like House Hunters or Property Virgins extremely picky and fickle couples dither about half-million dollar home purchases. I love to watch Property Virgins cause I have this thing for Sandra Rinomato, but I usually cringe at the couples she advises who are pissy about paint color or the fact a house doesn't have stainless steel appliances. And is a "popcorn ceiling" really all that devastating?

Unlike fictional television families, real estate shows on HGTV are in the "reality" genre, which means the tacit claim is one of fact: the bulk of 20-somethings are white and wealthy; they can afford homes that are hundreds of thousands of dollars. They exhibit an expectation of a dream home, the kind featured in magazines and, er, on HGTV. And while the folks featured on this cable network can probably afford the homes they are buying, the fact remains the vast majority of viewers cannot---and these viewers are getting younger. They're the folks sitting in my classes.

In a time of recession, massive layoffs, high unemployment, foreclosures by the fistful---in a time when young people are finishing college and moving back in with their folks---in a time when the average student can no longer afford a college education at a land-grant university, it seems like the affluence fantasyland is growing like the blob. Commentator after commentator warns that people need to be adjusting their expectations and "living within their means," and yet, we seem to be bombarded with fantasies of excessive extravagance (stainless steel appliances and granite countertops seem to me the key signifiers). HGTV thrives on the promise of effortlessly produced value---the promise of lifestyle magic.

So why is it that I get pissed off at the young couple who turns up their nose at non "open concept" home but not the uber-rich professional shopper dropping a few million on Annie Lebovitz's loft?

I'm not sure. Perhaps it is because of the Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous thing, that the uber-rich are presented that way: out of my reach. Perhaps it's because what's advanced as "normal" for HGTV is impossible too, but does not come with the signature disclaimer? Perhaps its because the fantasy of "middle class" puts off the vibe of magic, that one's stuff is the way to recognition and love, instead of who is sitting on the couch, drinking coffee with you?

Here's one thing I noticed: the uber-rich folks looking for places to live in New York are thinking about where they will be living. They comment about where they will be sleeping, bathing, doing their writing, and doing their cooking. The "middle class" folks on the other shows mention, time and time again, how their home will show to their friends. Almost every one of them make comments about "entertaining"---about showing off their home for friends and family. It's not about living, but rather, the appearance of a life. The rich folks comment about life in their lofty lofts. The "middle class" comment about living life in the tomorrow. Thoughts of Baudrillard on Disneyland come to mind.

I keep thinking of one of Walter Benjamin's theses on the concept of history. He says that the Hegelian notion of progressive history encourages us to put our hopes in an abstract future instead of reckoning with the brutal reality of the present, and the sins of the past. Maybe I get so pissy with HGTV's presentation of normalcy because it encourages the young and the working class to think of themselves as something other than the young and the working class?

Ultimately, I think the reason why Selling New York doesn't bother me, and House Hunters does, has something to do with the way the former impresses upon the viewer her class standing, while the latter works to erase it. If there is anything good about the recent economic recession, it's that it has reminded "Americans" of their class standing, and that this standing is neither "natural" nor "fair." Home ownership is the dream of affluence, of course. The more MSM promotes the fantasy of the unattainable, the less likely we are to be pissed off about where we actually live.

a manufactured haunting

Music: David Sylvian: Dead Bees on a Cake (1999)

Last Wednesday night Nike broadcast their newest commercial featuring Tiger Woods on a cable golf channel. It was strategically planned to come before Wood's Master's tourney appearance on Thursday and after his press conference on Monday. Reaction to the commercial has been mixed. While almost everyone I've heard or read who has seen the thing seems to agree the spot is "creepy," folks are divided about whether or not the commercial is appropriate, ethical, or shrewd. The division has everything to do with the way in which the commercial makes explicit its purpose: it announces itself as a statement of authentic affect, and at the same time, is unapologetically commercial with the foregrounding of the Nike swoosh (it's doubled for that smack-on-the-forehead effect). Having studied the commercial and thought about it for many days, I agree with Donny Deutsch that the ad is, in fact, genius. Just in case you haven't seen it, here we go:

So, why is the ad genius? The party line of commentators on television seems to converge on the notion that any publicity is good publicity, however controversial: "people are talking," and ultimately, this supports the brand. I think this is exactly right. The ad walks the line of taste, but the black-and-white and slow-zoom communicate the kind of "respectful" production values of Shindler's List (I'm sure the ad agency discussed, but decided against, making the swooshes red). I'm not sure what to make of the flashes at the end (except, perhaps, to communicate "this is in the past"). In other words, the aesthetic values communicate "taste," however tasteless the ad actually is.

But, what accounts for the creepy? Certainly the overall effect of a sepia-toned gossip chic is part of it. Some say it's the fact that the voice is of Wood's father, who is dead. Some say it's manipulation of his father's voice for different ends (it turns out the father's statements were made about Wood's mother in a documentary, and that the address "Tiger" was spliced in). Some say that creep has to do with the fact that someone's pain---er, and lack of shame---is being used to sell athletic clothing and equipment. Some say the creep has to do with credibility (Wood's father was, apparently, a philanderer too).

Of course, it's all of these things.

Because I've been working on a book about disembodied voices, of course, I'm drawn to the way in which Wood's dead dad haunts: it's Hamlet warmed over. In the popular imaginary, the narrative of Tiger Woods is, pretty much, an Oedipal narrative: the driving discipline of the father molded Wood into one of the most successful and popular athletes of all time. This makes the Freudian effect rather obvious: if it's the case that the superego---what most folks would recognize as the voice of conscience---is really the internalized expectations of our parents, then we have a staging of the charioteer. The bad horse of the "id" was let loose for years on end, and now, the good horse of the internalized father is reasserting it's dominance. Never mind that the good horse, in reality, was in the end a naughty horse. The staging of the commercial is that Woods' internalized voice of conscience is back and calling the shots.

The brilliance of the ad, seems to me, is in the moral ambivalence---something all of us can identify with. It's that moral ambivalence that humanizes Woods in a way that allows us to allow him to be a great athlete, and to sell Nike goodies. It's the fact that Wood's father was also a philanderer that makes this ad so powerful. This is to say, the labor of the ad is not in its immediate impact, which is "creepy." It's in the commentary, in thinking about it, in "working it out" that the ad does its brilliant work.

Ok, so what do I mean?

Well, upon first viewing the ad, the spectator identifies with the voice of the father. Viewers are not encouraged to identify with Woods, with his puffy, puppy-dog eyes. Rather, the viewer is asked to identify with the father, the voice questioning him. We're asked to identify with the law and to take a side with the moral high ground. As viewers, we get to punish Woods "at a distance." It reminds me of Chris Hansen busting would-be pedophiles in those abhorrent To Catch a Predator television shows. The enjoyment offered immediately by the ad is one of emasculating Tiger.

But then, upon reflection, we're caused to reflect on the construction of the ad itself. The commentary about Woods' father this past week has been precisely about his shortcomings, and the logic, "like father like son" quickly comes to mind. Now we're dealing with hypocrisy as one of the fundamental truths of the human condition.

In the end, the commercial is fundamentally Freudian---it relies on a Freudian logic and the shock most of us feel as we become adults. Let me be clear: I'm not saying that Freud helps us to make sense of this ad (even though he does); rather, I'm saying that the ad draws on the Freudian logics now soul-deep in our culture. The ad announces itself as a psychoanalytic ad. It does not make sense unless one knows about basic Freudian ideas.

That said, the creepy factor is also based on common experience. There are two truths of adulthood that are devastating: (a) love is not enough; and (b) adults are just kids with experience. Who among us has not been shocked to learn that someone whom we looked up to and admired turned out to do unsavory things? Who among us has not been disappointed to learn an authority figure did something that was contrary to the law he or she ceaselessly intoned? Isn't this the basic plot of (melo)drama?

In the end, the advertisement stages what it means to become an adult, it replays the shock of leaving behind the idealism of childhood. It stages the realizations we all have about getting to a space of responsibility. In some sense, Nike's ad shifts the locus of Woods sins to the father, however subtly. I would submit that is what is so creepy about the ad. Or in other words, it stages something uncanny and all-too familiar: the possibility there is no God.

it's synth-rock friday!

easter dinner at chez joshie

Music: The Antlers: Hospice (2009)

Last year I decided that the perfect Easter supper must entail eating Peter Cottontail. I mean, any holiday celebrating The Zombie to End All Zombies must involve eating the host in some way. I think the more traditional flesh is lamb ("Oh, Lamb of God/I come, I come"), however, I think it is funner to eat the other host: the Easter Bunny! And I'm proud to report this year's rabbit recipe was better than the red wine wabbit we-duction recipe of last year.

Since giving up my food column, I confess I sometimes miss the opportunity to share my culinary perversions. So, hooray the Christ has risen! Here's a great new rabbit recipe to celebrate! It's a version of Lapin à la Moutarde. You'll need this stuff:

• a rabbit, skinned (3-4 lbs.)
• 1/2 of French Dijon mustard (not the cheap stuff)
• a half a stick of butter
• 1 small white onion, finely chopped
• 1/2 cup of dry white wine (left over from whenever is fine)
• bouquet garni of sage, thyme, oregano, rosemary, and whatever
• 1/2 cup of crème fraise
• fresh chopped curly parsley

Ok, so, the first step is to catch you a rabbit and skin it. I just set out a trap on the patio (baited with a Cadbury egg) and, SHAZAM!, I had me a bunny when I got up this morning. He also left me a basket with the new Drive-By Truckers CD and some boiled eggs in fake grass. Awesome. Anyhow, basically, you can chop off the legs and arms and salvage the saddles (back muscles). Now, some folks say the arms are only good for making stock, but I disagree---there's enough to nibble, so I say cook 'em.

Now, what you want to do is salt and pepper the bunny bits, and then slather them in mustard. Once they're slathered, salt and pepper them again. Melt half a half-stick of butter in a Dutch oven, and then, brown the rabbit all over (about eight minutes or so) on medium-high heat. Remove Peter the rabbit from the Dutch oven and set aside. Melt the remaining butter and sauté your onions until they're soft and translucent.

Now, pour about a half a cup of wine into the Dutch oven and lower the temp to "medium" or so. With a wooden spoon scrape the oven bottom to liberate all the black bunny bits for flavor (and help cleaning later). Then, put your browned rabbit back into the pot. Toss your bouquet garni on top, and put the lid on. On low-medium heat simmer the rabbit for about 30 or so minutes until it gets really tender, turning the pieces occasionally. When the bunny is done, remove the pieces and arrange them on a pretty plate. But wait! You're not done yet!

To make the sauce, add the crème fraise and the chopped parsley and stir for about five minutes. Then, with your rabbit neatly arranged on a plate, ladle the sauce on top and garnish with a sprig of rosemary.

And there you have it! Peter Cottontail Dijon! I enjoyed my rabbit this evening with a nice Greek salad and some fresh, homemade tabbouleh. You can enjoy a gallery of my Easter culinary festivities here. Bon appétit!

the god thing (on good friday)

Music: Mark Hollis: Mark Hollis (1998)

When I was a junior at GW, I remember (and perhaps erroneously) . . . I remember I had a shocking meeting with my advisor. She was an expert in the rhetorical theories of Nietzsche and I was in awe of her knowledge. As a graduate student she had received a Fulbright to travel to Germany to translate a number of Nietzsche's lectures, which she shared with me. I read them eagerly (I also thought they were rather pedestrian, but figured I was probably missing some secret subtlety). At that time in my life---22, I think---I thought I understood Nietzsche. Now, especially having a best friend that's finishing a book on the subject, I realize I didn't understand it at all---except, perhaps, at an affective level. Nevertheless, my advisor had convinced me "rhetorical studies" was a place I could pursue my interest in philosophy, and I looked to her for guidance. She was, and remains, a formative influence.

Anyhow, knowing her expertise in all things Nietzsche, I remember I was surprised and confused about why she chose to tell me about her religious conversion experience years before I had taken my first class with her. "Is this appropriate?" I thought. And I remember being shocked that someone so influenced by Nietzsche's philosophy would be espousing the grace of Christ. Because of my so-called religious upbringing, I recognized immediately she was witnessing to me from her religious conviction ("it's an evangelical thing; you wouldn't understand," the t-shirt might read). Intellectually I was thrown by her confessions as a glaring contradiction. And as my advisor, I thought she had crossed some sort of invisible boundary.

Of course, I had drawn the boundary myself. There is no official boundary that says advisors cannot confide in their advisees about issues of faith.

I think I was shocked by her witness because I had been wrestling, for some years, with my own loss of faith. In the middle of my first year of college---the first year I had lived away from my family and from Georgia, a year in the fast-paced, markedly class-based world of Washington, DC, a year in which I was frequently ridiculed for my suthern accent---I raced via Greyhound bus to be by the bedside of a powerful father figure in my youth. He was a close boyhood friend's dad, a neighbor, and eventually my Scoutmaster. He was the man who modeled for me what it was to be a good person---a good man. After 16 hours on a bus I ended up watching him finish a slow and painful death from cancer; I sat horrified as his wife fed him morphine with an eyedropper. And when I arrived in Statesboro he was dead within four hours---by the time we had all got there, his "family." I'll never forget the sound of his labored breathing, like there was gravel in his lungs.

It was a formative event, when he died, because I decided then that I no longer believed in "a God." I have known grief and despair since that moment in my life. But that moment was the benchmark. I am still not over it.

So here I was, in my professor's office, and she was witnessing to me about the saving grace of Jesus. She told me about her horrible car accident. While in the hospital clinging to life, she said she read the bible and for the first time she said she felt the presence of deity. Since her recovery, she dedicated her life to Jesus.

She also advised me, in the same meeting, that as a scholar I didn't need to buy books and that I should really take advantage of interlibrary loans.

I'm sharing this story for a number of reasons. The most obvious is that I'm currently teaching a course titled "Rhetoric and Religion," and I sense my students wanting me to disclose my religious beliefs. But because the class is about the interrogation of faith in a way that does not close any doors or offer any answers (the skill of asking the questions is stressed), I resist telling them. When a student asks me a question that I sense is testing my faith, I always counter, "well, what I think is not as important as what you think. What do you think?"

So, the question of faith has been on my mind. I've been having dreams about the apocalypse (these were common in my teen years, and often make an appearance when I teach this class).

Yet the "god thing" also strikes me as especially important to my line of work. The question, "do you believe in god?" really strikes to the center of what many in my line of work do. That's because it's simply another way of asking "why does evil exit?" or "what is evil?" And if you think about evil, what it is and why it happens, then you're talking about the question of the academic humanities: what and whence evil? Alternately stated: what is the cause of suffering? and what is the best way to end suffering?

It used to be the case I was surprised to learn that such-and-so a big-name scholar was a devout Catholic, or that an expert in, say, the work of Jean-Paul Sartre attended synagogue every Saturday. This surprise was born of a certain stupidity and way of thinking: that somehow consistency was the foundation of conviction. I no longer think this way.

And I am no longer an atheist.

I could go on (and on and on) for some pages about my thoughts about deity, but I'll spare you. And, there are some things one needn't blog about. In retrospect, however, my advisor telling me about her faith in Christ was a good thing for me to hear, especially in the moment that I heard it. It showed me that to be a thinker, to live the life of the mind, meant that one did not rule out this or that. Quite the opposite.

I will note that I am agnostic. To paraphrase Shaw, an agnostic is an atheist without the conviction. And I think that absence of conviction is precisely it---I cannot dig my heels into resolution about something beyond my ability to comprehend. That is to say, I am convinced now, more than ever, of my limitations. It seems to me awfully arrogant to assume I can make pronouncements about something that is, by definition, unknowable. (Kant is fiendishly persuasive on this score; Adorno even more so.) I find myself at the moment in the place that Burke seemed to center himself, uncertainly (and therein, I think, is the appeal of his later work).

It's quite funny to read that last paragraph, however, and to think about where I was ten years ago on the question of deity.

But I hope, at the same time, that is the point. Conviction should be a matter of life and death. I am convicted that hurting others is wrong---and I can find a place for solidarity in that. I just cannot find a place for conviction in a projection into the unknown. I don't, however, think badly of those who do (er, summarily, anyway).

I don't think I could teach a class titled "Rhetoric and Religion" if I was convicted in matters of the ineffable, or if I had a firm belief in issues of spirit. And I don't think I could research the things I'm interested in researching.

I'm also amused---even pleased---that I no longer react to the religious righteousness of others as I used to. When witnessed to, I used to get angry. I'd tease the Mormons at my door. I'd get angry at family funerals when the preacher would turn the eulogy into an alter call. Today it just doesn't bother me. Sure, I get troubled by the religious tincture of politics---of excising Jefferson from our Texas textbooks (and lets face it, because of his doctrine of the separation of church and state). But I'm not outraged. At this point in my thinking, it just doesn't make sense to be a butt about a public prayer at an event I'm attending. So the PTA wants to pray before meeting? Well, ok. That prayer is really about our community, in the end. It's about us.

I'll also confess that reading Levinas has really changed my thinking about deity in the last few years, too. More about that in another post, perhaps.

I'm 37. I wonder if ten years from now I will have identified myself with a religious belief system. I've always thought if I "got the fear," to paraphrase the immortal Jack Dangers, I'd be a Quaker. We all seem to have a desire for ritual comforts, and I like the Quaker's politics.

But, I guess, the point of this post is that I don't know. And I think finding conviction in the not-knowing, a conviction in not finding conviction in this-or-that Ultimate Stop, is perhaps the best policy for me. Caputo describes this (of Derrida) as "religion without religion." The convicted would say it's atheism. I would say it's open-ism. Atheists are fundamentalists, in---or about--the end.

it's synth-pop friday!

getting performance

Music: Fields of the Nephilim: Dawnrazor (1987)

While I've mostly been focused on writing a textbook, I've been tinkering on the scholarly book as well. Rosechron readers may recall the book is about "the haunting of speech," and heavily informed by Derrida and Lacan in almost equal measure. It also takes inspiration from performance theory, especially the work of Peggy Phalen, Diana Taylor, and Ann Cvetkovich. It's my hope, in fact, that "cultural performance" or "performance studies" might appear on the back cover.

I confess, however, Richard Schechner's work drives me nuts. All those damn diagrams!

Anyhoo, today I tinkered on a chapter that started off as a media ecology driven analysis (lots of Walter Ong), but ended up as a performance theory piece. I thought I would offer a tease:

On Speech Recording

I buried my mother in February 2002. My sister asked me to organize and conduct the service for my mother's funeral. . . . Several weeks later my sister sent me an audiotape of the service. I had no idea that the memorial service had been taped. Frankly, I was horrified. . . . I didn't want to hear my voice, the auditory tracings of my lightheadedness, my disengagement as a strategy of control . . . my voice as tracing.
--Ronald E. Sheilds (379-380)

Mourning metes speech. Not all the time, of course, but usually. In this sense Sheild's moving mystory on the gestures of grieving is witness to the archiving of speech. His horror concerns the drive toward death that recording represents: he does not wish to hear himself repressing pain or how he cordoned off affect in script. His horror is not so much about the revival of grief as it is the way in which recording amplifies the process of putting-away, of making distant, of archiving. Simply and doubly stated, the recording of speech turns up the disassociative machinations of meaning. Perhaps this is why hearing a recording of one's own voice is frequently an unnerving experience of self-alienation, as if we are somehow auditing our own demise.

As is the case with the trace, the traumatic truth of the taped tongue is the condition of all performance, a sort-of-lie of liveness: it is meaningful, "but never for the first time. It means: for the second and nth time" as a kind of "twice-behaved behavior" (Schechner 36). Any doing is meaningful retroactively, and not in negation, but rather in relation (see Wilden, 155-195). Such a definitional gesture situates performance as an echo of trauma. Thereby, performance as "restored behavior" is simply what Freud termed Nachträglichkeit, the "afterwardness" or "belatedness" of the attribution of meaning in the wake of a shocking or traumatic event ("From a History" 7-122; also see Rickert 8-32). As a kind of fixing repetition, recording—at least analogue recording, the kind that hisses back at us—intones a time delay.

At some level, Sheilds' horror echoes a well-known anxiety about recording among (some) performance studies practitioners. It reflects an unwillingness to forswear presence and admit a belatedness, the temporal delay central to all knowing. Recording unavoidably delivers affect to meaning/the signifier and, consequently, runs roughshod over those romantic fantasies of "tracelessness" and "liminality" that we tend to ascribe to important, performance events, like a funeral service or a spiritual awakening or a rousing aesthetic spectacle (Phalen 148-149; McKenzie 8-9). This is not to deny there are embodied experiences outside the domain of the symbolic (e.g., Massumi 1-28). It is to say, however, that as a form of inscription, making a record "succeeds in separating the source of 'knowledge' from the knower" in way that displaces affective relationality into what we might simply term "text" (Taylor 19). In other words, where embodied experience is concerned, words inevitably get in the way.

Because it reflects a fear of fixity, I suggest that recording anxieties are fundamentally anxieties about speech as such, and that voice recordings work to amplify those anxieties. Derrida's well-known critique of phonocentrism identifies speech is as yet another form of inscription or recording (Derrida, Of Grammatology 18-26). Ong's work shows us how innovations in media technology, such as that of sound recording, tend to amplify the voice's presence effects. Both thinkers help us to discern better what it is about the human voice that gives it such a special, ontotheological status, something that the example of sound recording helps us to hear more clearly.

What is the special status of speech, and what is the relationship of that special status to sound recording? Why does this relationship impinge on how we think about performance, broadly construed? To answer these and related questions, I'll riff between two conspicuous cultural performances of recorded speech, electronic voice phenomena (or "EVP" as it is known among enthusiasts) and backmasking. EVP is the practice of recording ambient noise to capture the voices of ghosts, and backmasking is the practice of playing sound recordings backwards in search of secret messages. Complimenting Derrida and Ong's theories of presence with psychoanalysis, I suggest that EVP, backmasking, and related recording practices are motivated by two powerful desires: a profound, affective ambivalence toward human speech, and an appetite toward preservation or what Derrida terms "archive fever" (Archive 91-95). Together, I argue that the love/fear of speech and the archival impulse comprise the affective precondition for acoustic or "vocalic projection," which concerns the way in which a person attributes presence and meaning to sounds. I conclude by suggesting that to perform is to cry.

it's synth-pop friday!

don’t-tread-on-me fundamentalism

Coldplay: Viva La Vida Or Death And All His Friends (2008)

While I was traveling in beautiful Louisiana, apparently there was much going on in the wide world of "news" surrounding the health care bill pushed through by the Obama administration. Politicians supporting the bill were called "baby killers" and statesmen of color were hailed by the n-word. A number of lawmakers have received death threats, in tweets and faxes, and to top it off Sarah Palin is urging her fans to "reload" as she visually targets democratic opponents.

What is going on?

I know I'm not the only one who finds the weaponry talk disturbing, riding the wave of cultural assassination fantasy as it does (but with the misdirection of "campaign-as-war is commonplace" excuse). I think Jim Aune makes a very compelling case for worry in his Obamanon conference paper, "Obama's Two Bodies." I won't rehearse his paper here, but I encourage folks to read it because of the "deeper narrative" he hints at in conclusion. If I might extend an explanation: the symbolic body of Obama, as much as the symbolic body of Palin, is superegoic in character.

Mark Edmundson's highly accessible explanation of Freud's insights on group psychology a few years ago is helpful. In Freud's later work, he advanced the "secondary topography" of ego, id, and superego to explain the economy of motive. The "id" of impulsive, primal desire is held in check by the superego, internalized codes of right and wrong. The "ego" has to hold these two competing forces in check, as well as the demands of external reality. To be a paradigm person is to be, at base, in constant conflict with oneself. Sleep is usually our most cherished relief from such conflicts, as are various intoxicants that relax, for whatever reason, the exacting conformity demanded by the superego. Booze is a good example: it somehow deadens guilt and inhibition . . . .

Anyway, as Edmundson suggests, Freud's conjectures about group behavior go something like this: a powerful leader is able to substitute his or her symbolic self (the second body, as it were) for the superego, as if he or she were a kind of intoxicant. Political leaders often do this: Obama certainly did during his campaign, as do most demagogues. To say that we fall in love with our favored leaders is not far off the mark: when we are moved by a lover, we often adopt their own wishes and desires as our own. Or in a more Lacanian fashion, desire is the desire of the Other.

When a political leader succeeds, however temporarily, in usurping the role of the superego for a group, previously impermissible behaviors become permissible. Inciting a "riot" is a good example: people become violent when they normally would not. It's even possible, Freud suggested, for a group to fashion its own superegoic agency---but this will be short-lived. Freud argued that most "crowd" behavior will eventually peter-out without a figure to focus its energy. In other words, the "swarm" will dissipate. It needs a leader to focus its codes, or the individual superegos of individuals will return to censure the id.

Whatever you think of Freud, he gives us a vocabulary to talk about the current political atmosphere: when we have racist violence breaking out, when we have death threats leveled at lawmakers, previously impermissible behaviors are felt to be permissible, at least "in the moment."

It seems to me the recent verbal (and in some cases, physical) violence around the "Don't Tread on Me" flags is a good example of the formation of a collective superego. So, too, of course, is the Teabagger movement, and these two groups seem to bleed into one another. It's already been noted that the focal point of this ebbing formation is the (symbolic) body of Obama---many papers at the recent Obama conference at Texas A&M were about precisely this ("race" is certainly code for a body).

It is in this Freudian context that we should understand Palin's recent appeals: " Commonsense Conservatives & lovers of America: 'Don't Retreat, Instead - RELOAD!' Pls see my Facebook page." Most journalists reporting on the Palin "crosshairs" sense what she is doing, as does just about anyone with a pulse. As with most politicians, she is inserting herself into this superegoic embodiment. The troubling difference is precisely that she is "rogue": she is no longer constrained by the norms of political office---norms that would condemn any recourse to weaponry metaphor. Incitement? Not quite. It's called transference. And it's scary.

I get the sense that MSM journalists believe the increasingly visible don’t-tread-on-me formation (larger than the Teabagger group, IMHO) is a fringe (counter)public. Many of us in the academy are a bit more worried, and I think for good reason. If this sentiment continues to build, the affect will focus on a figure. I'm not convinced Palin is strong or smart enough to embody it---but deity forbid someone steps forward who is.

from incivility to schadenfreude

Music: Robyn Hitchcock: Queen Elvis (1989) Over the past week leaders in my professional organization, the National Communication Association, were beset with more critical emails from disgruntled members (details are here and here). Perhaps the most damning letter was the one drafted by Art Bochner and posted by Bill Baltrhop in this CRTNET post, which is signed by five past NCA presidents! The letter notes the lack of trust among the Executive Council, NCA staff, and President Braithwaite, the illegitimacy of the appointment of Bach, and calls for the Legislative Assembly to be empowered to conduct a review and recommended policy.

Today or tomorrow another letter will post to CRTNET, expertly penned by Rosechron regular Bryan McCann, that urges members to phone this year's conference hotels to pressure them to resolve a heated labor dispute. The letter also encourages those members of NCA who wish to honor the labor union's efforts to secure benefits and health care for the hotel staff to sign a petition. By signing the petition, one is agreeing not to attend or register for the conference if an amicable settlement is not reached by the union and the conference hotels. (I have signed this petition.)

Things have gone from bad to worse for the national office. I am a strong admirer of how Lynn Turner has been handling these crises, and I know my and others' criticisms of the current and past presidents and national directors do not make her job easier. At the same time, the incompetence and lack of (ethical) common sense by these unquestionably well-meaning people has caused thousands of folks to become witness to an implosion drama---a drama that has been described as "uncivil" by both Bach and Kidd.

I've been wanting to blog about the use of the conception of "civility" by Bach and others for weeks now, but the usual shuffle-o'-busy has gotten in the way. I don't have a lot of time to fill this out and am only stating the obvious here, but: disagreement and critique is civility, if we understand civility to mean "good citizenship." Rooted in the Latinate conception, civilitas, civility references behaving as a good citizen would. In history classes we've been teaching civil disobedience for decades, and in my field debate has been taught since the 1920s as crucial for public deliberation. So, even in its most basic sense disagreeing with cronyism and calling on our professional leaders to behave ethically---even in angry tones---is civil.

Of course, I think what Bach and Kidd mean by "civility" is a much newer notion: politeness. Civility didn't take on this connotation until the 16th century, and in some sense this coincided with the emergence of the conception of "publics" or the "public sphere." What is amusing to me is how oblivious Kidd, Bach and others who evoke "civility" as a requirement seem to the research done in our field on civility. To evoke the concept as a requirement for communication is to ignore a big (and foundational) flank of the field: rhetorical studies. Indeed, one of the basic pickles of democratic theory and for those who study publics and counter publics concerns the ways in which various norms of civility, propriety, decorum, and so forth do the dirty work of ideology. For example, the most recent critique of "invitational rhetoric" by my friends and colleagues Nina and Dana helpfully rehearses decades of discussion and criticism about notions of public deliberation and civility. "Civility," they conclude, "should not be advocated as a stance for feminists or others struggling for change." This is because the "polite" conception of civility masks inequality. To be civil, they argue, communicators must be equal, and history teaches us this is rarely (if ever) the case, even if it is a worthy ideal. "Unfortunately," history teaches us, "invitation and civility are as likely to be bludgeons of the oppressor as resources for the oppressed. . . . The cause of justice may not need a theory of invitation but rather a theory of the uncivil tongue."

The problem with how Bach, Braithwaite, and Kidd (mis)handled the appointment of Bach is that it models---textbook style---the way in which those in power use civility (sometimes in the form of Robert's rules) to silence, oppress, and shut-down conversation. Incivility is clearly code for simple "disagreement," however polite or dirty.

Because this dramatic display in my national organization is so parodic (almost like a sit-com), my worry is no longer a refusal to try on the basis of outrage, which itself has become formulaic. Rather, my concern is that the longer the Criminal Three dig their heels in, the more and more they offer themselves up to the sublimity of Schadenfreude, the jollies we get from the misfortunes of others. I suspect this is the fear of the Executive Committee, that rather than get upset and demand change, the NCA membership is finding the whole situation rather amusing, even comical, like a Ray Stevens song (dunno Ray? Click here). The trouble with a bemused membership, of course, is that our professional organization no longer can fulfill its mission. The problem with a bemused membership is that it becomes fun to watch the thing implode.

Too many people care about this organization (including myself) for it to fail, and too many folks I admire and respect have worked hard to make NCA stronger. As fun as it is to sit back and enjoy the show, I hope more and more folks will continue to put pressure on the leadership to right their wrongs and put this ship back on course.

(another) open letter to NCA members

Dear Colleagues,

Like the rest of you, we are looking forward to the upcoming NCA convention in San Francisco. We anticipate many excellent opportunities to reconnect with colleagues and friends. It will also be a chance to engage in the kind of intellectual work that keeps our discipline vibrant and relevant. And all of this will take place in one of America’s great, historically progressive cities.

However, as many of you are no doubt aware, a labor dispute threatens to compromise the ability of many NCA members to attend this year’s conference. As NCA First Vice President Lynn Turner recently informed us, one of this year’s conference hotels, the Hilton San Francisco Union Square, is the target of a labor-related boycott that may soon give way to a strike. The hotel is a frequent target of rallies and pickets that NCA members will be forced to cross if a resolution does not take place by November (for a video of these pickets, see http://is.gd/av7oH). The other conference hotel, the Parc 55 San Francisco, also faces a potential boycott. This situation is due to the failure of hotel management to negotiate a mutually satisfactory labor contract with the hotel workers’ union UNITE HERE. A particularly acute matter of concern is the status of health and retirement benefits under the new contract. As a result, UNITE HERE is asking sympathetic customers to abstain from patronizing the Hilton.

We are pleased that Professor Turner and NCA President Dawn Braithwaite have taken early steps to alert the membership of this situation. They are currently in dialogue with the hotel and union in hopes of reaching a resolution that will allow all NCA members to attend the conference without having to violate a union boycott. We also believe that there is a role for all interested NCA members to play. We recognize that the last time NCA confronted a labor boycott against its convention site in San Diego, members were faced with difficult decisions and engaged in heated debates over our institutional identity and appropriate courses of action. While those of us who participated in that year’s “UNconvention” remain proud of our efforts and cherish the experience, we have no desire to repeat 2008. NCA members will undoubtedly have differing opinions about what steps NCA should take in the face of this current controversy. We may also disagree on the merits of UNITE HERE’s positions and strategies. It is our hope, however, that we can share a desire to see all NCA members who wish to attend this year’s conference do so without choosing between their professional and ethical commitments. For this reason, we are asking our fellow NCA members to contact the Hilton San Francisco Union Square and the Parc 55 San Francisco and encourage them to arrive at a resolution with their employees. You may call the Hilton at 415-771-1400 and the Parc 55 at 415-392-8000.

For those who will not attend NCA without a resolution to the current labor dispute: We ask that you sign the petition, linked here: http://is.gd/aOKIR. This petition is intended to express the intentions of NCA members in the wake of this labor dispute. We will deliver the document to NCA membership well in advance of the conference registration deadline. We have already informed Professor Turner of our intention to collect names of members who would not attend NCA in the case of an ongoing labor dispute, and she indicated she would be pleased to learn of members’ plans. Thus, by adding your signature and expressing your intentions, you are allowing the NCA leadership to have a very clear and tangible sense of how labor disputes at site hotels affect members and conference attendance.

At last year’s NCA in Chicago, many members engaged in lively discussions about the appropriate role of politics in our organization. Indeed, these are important and enriching conversations that we should continue to have. We draft this letter in the spirit of continuing this and other important exchanges. In the interest of a spirited and well-attended conference in November, please contact our hosts and encourage them to resolve this current impasse.

Sincerely,

Adria Battaglia, University of Texas at Austin

Dana Cloud, University of Texas at Austin

Kathleen Feyh, University of Texas at Austin

Joshua Gunn, University of Texas at Austin

Michelle Hammers, Loyola Marymount University

Kristen Hoerl, Butler University

Casey Kelly, Butler University

Ashley Mack, University of Texas

Bryan McCann, Marian University

Charles Morris, III, Boston College

Jon Simons, Indiana University

Amy Young, Pacific Lutheran University

it's synth-pop friday!

badass burfdee weekend

Music: Grafton Primary: Eon (2008)

It is always just a smidge depressing when turning a year older. My special day of arrival on the planet has always fallen on spring break, and so, I have frequently done little to nothing. Thanks to the recession, however, a lot of folks have not left town and so I got to party a bit. Yay! This Saturday I celebrated my tenth 27th year old anniversary with plenty of food and friends and . . . chicken shit!

The birthday celebration started with dinner and drinks at one of my favorite restaurants. It was nice to see so many folks out and enjoying margaritas. I scored a special armadillo, who was frequently getting into mischief. I also scored a number of cucumber margaritae (which were strangely not as strong as they normally are, so, you know, we had to drink more). Then we capped the night with a cigar at NOMAD.

On Sunday the party didn't stop. Christopher and I checked out the views at Mt. Bonell, and then he showed me a secret hiking and climbing spot I didn't know about. The traffic for SXSW was a bit insane, but getting to the trails we spied a kite festival in Zilker park (I've never seen so many kites in the sky at once).

After a very short hike, we trucked it over to Ginny's Longhorn Saloon to catch Dale Watson and play some Chicken Shit Bingo. Basically, for two bucks you get a ticket with a number. If the chicken shits on your number, you get like $100. I had no idea this was such a big deal; people were camped out all around this tiny bar---the music was blasting, and big biker dudes were out back showing off their Harleys. It was a lot of fun.

A few of us topped off the weekend with some Thai food at Satay. Christopher and I finished off the evening watching the original Clash of the Titans (so bad) and Demon Seed (even worse). It was a lovely weekend. Thanks so much to folks who came out to celebrate with me and buy me margaritae---y'all rock! (A gallery of the weekend is here).

Alas, I'm back to work today. On tap: "speaking to inform." Meh.

it's synth-pop friday!

Fischerspooner "The Best Revenge" from SUBVOYANT on Vimeo.