New York!!!

I had planned to blog from New York but I was too caught up in the NCAA games and too tired once I made it back to my room. Conferences are always so exhausting. Still tired I will give a quick recap by category:

Not expected: an engaging conversation with a cabbie from Ghana coming in from JFK. Turned out he was taking night classes and currently writing a paper on polygamy so we talked through strategies he might use to convince an American audience that polygamy is integrated with Ghanaian culture and is about more than sex.

Funniest: From the opening lines/song “What Do You Do with a BA in English?/It Sucks to Be Me” performed by the aptly named character Princeton to Trekie Monster (yes, based on Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster) interrupting a “learning” type Sesame Street song about the benefits of the Internet by piping in “For Porn” every few minutes, the Broadway show Avenue Q was hilarious.

Most insightful: Doug Hesse’s, Chair of CCCC’s last year, contention that compositionists have “bungled” it rhetorically by responding to critiques of education and writing teachers with piles of theory and words of anger, which makes us seem “aloofly self-interested.”

Blast from the past: I met up with a good friend from my undergrad days at BYU. We talked and talked, never quite able to catch up on decade plus of history. Still, it was worth the effort. Amazing how connections to people remain intact after years of disconnect--my mind was flooded with 15 year old snippets of conversations, camping trips, and Wayne C. Booth debates.

Most Angry: In a panel discussion about who owns English, one of the panelists, Jack Selzer, suggested that in order to come together (CCCC, NCTE, MLA, etc.) we need to reorient English degrees to composition and dislodge MLA domination. This was met by white men in suits (I kid you not) taking the “stage” to restore order: “Let’s not criticize; let’s be productive.” What a bunch of hypocritical bullshit! It was scarily familiar: the same move administrators at our college make when faculty raise issues about adjunct working conditions and faculty pay: “Oh, let’s not argue now; let’s get along and work together (you with your 30K, me with my 110K) so we can find a working solution. But above all let’s stay positive.” I guess the MLA thugs forgot about the decades of literary theory dedicated to post-modernism and dislodging the Canon.

Most nostalgic: Seeing Times Square and remembering my first trip to NY when I was 18. Somehow I got it in my head I was going to go to NY (maybe the numerous New Year’s eves at my grandmothers watching the ball drop or maybe Woody Allen films) while attending Methodist College in NC. I went by myself—none of my friends could afford it--even though I’d never been in a taxi and hadn’t the slightest idea how to negotiate NY. Back then the ½ price tickets for a Broadway show were sold right in Times Square—I saw Fences, Cats, and some show I can’t remember. I even ran in Central Park by wearing a back pack and then changing in a nearby museum bathroom and then running with the backpack on. I just can’t quite believe I pulled it off. My favorite memory was sipping one of my first cups of coffee in an expensive restaurant after having been dosed with rain—I ordered lobster which the waiter had to show me how to eat. Unbelievable.

Best food: An Italian desert—freshly cooked little doughnuts holes with a pile of cream and grapes.

Pleasant Surprise: Dream Girls on the long flight home—quite a performance by Jennifer Hudson. Man, do I hate flying but this innovative musical full of great acting made it go by quicker.

Spring break

I had thought I'd take a blogger break over my spring break, but as I'm watching the first real potential upset of this 2007 NCAA tournament (VCU an 11 seed up 2 over Duke a 6 seed, not to mention they are Duke, with 1:08 left), I got reading Mega's blog where she already has two lists of spring break accomplishments. So, now, I feel compelled to list, a deep seated need to measure out what I've been up to with my time off. But first I much pay attention to the last minute of the Duke game.

...50 seconds left and Duke and VCU tied
...16 seconds Duke down by 2
...10 seconds Duke ties it with a lay-up
...1.8 seconds Duke down two with a VCU 15 footer

whoa, that was some minute of basketball. A timeout. Not sure they will get anything off--no Christian Laetner on this Duke team.

...it's over with a respectable attempt--the first upset

Spring Break 2007 List (or my way of staving off vacation blues)

• Completed one physical therapy appointment: ASTYM i.e. the scraping of another's leg meat with cocoa butter and hard plastic tools which is not helping my bursitis
  
• Filled out NCAA Tournament bracket with family, a more difficult concept to explain to young children than one might expect
  
• Finished Atonement by Ian McEwan--a good novel but a bit too self-referential and crafty for my tastes (Book club discussion tomorrow!)
  
• Read much of Wysocki's Writing New Media: I'm going to remember her contention that writing teachers need strategies for “generous reading[s]" of student texts in order to “approach different-looking texts with the assumption not that mistakes were made but that choices were made and are being tried out and on.”
  
• Completed 2007 taxes, a spring break tradition--$1000 bucks coming our way and real soon thanks to TurboTax
  
• Watched parts of most NCAA open round Tournament games
• Three bike rides and 40 pages of Indian and the Cupboard with 5-year old son
  
• Two 25 mile bike rides--much stretching and some pain but at least I'm out and about
• Several on-going productive relationship talks with wife
• Bid through www.priceline.com on a hotel room for a SF family vacation in May; my $50 a night bid didn't get accepted, but I now have a strategy
  
• Ate lunch at Sill's (the only real restaurant in Layton) with a good friend and past student from Mt High school
• Read NO student work
  
• Best of all: filed and cleaned up in my office for several hrs
• Will see Breach tonight at the theatre, a rare non-Netflix film for me
  
  

Rock Stars

Every few minutes there is yet another knock at the door. I do not get up after the first one; I merely yell “they’re downstairs” and point. Music keeps wafting up through the heating vent: a few drum beats, a riff on the guitar, a mixture of something which approximates music. Somehow I have a bunch of pre-teens rocking out in my basement. I’m not sure how this happened. I mean, I’m just a young 130 lb. male trying to get some work done; there’s no way I am capable of being responsible for 425 lbs of stringy, sweaty, pre-pubescents. Surely I didn’t have anything to do with creating this commotion, right? I mean…it can’t be time yet. All too soon there will be girls, pimples, making-out, driving lessons...

Shit, somewhere along the way I really screwed up.

Busy w/ just enough time to watch The Departed in three sittings

Not much time for winter hikes or lengthy posts. I'm pretty much going to work all weekend except for some cards with friends for a couple of hrs tonight and my one little weekend treat, The Departed. I started it last night, will watch again while I do my physical therapy regimen, probably won't finish till Sunday. I'm excited to see if I will like it as much as Mega (i.e that much more than Babel). So far it's pretty solid--it'd certainly has more amazing actors in one film than I've seen in a long time. Too bad that this probably worked against any acting Oscars.

I'd be interested what you all think about the Oscar attention it got, especially considering the view that the attention was more about finally giving an Oscar to Scorsese than about this particular film.