• bodyrock
• dance
• synthpop

With this post I end my month-long tenure at the Blogora. Many thanks to the folks at RSA for inviting me to blather; what fun! I'll see you here in the comments, and o'er at the Rosechron for the usual yammer. Don't eat the yellow snow!

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• blogging
• on-line discussion
• the blogora

Music: Aphex Twin: Selected Ambient Works, Volume Two (1994)

The Blogora gets hundreds of discrete "hits" a day, so we know folks are reading. There is wonderment, however, about the general paucity of response posts on this forum in general. Some of us have speculated some rationales: (1) the response interface is confusing; (2) folks without job security (e.g., grads) are "afraid" to post out of fear; (3) there's just no time to sit down and make a response, it's the end of the semester, and so on. But we don't know for certain. So, I offer the question: why don't you post responses on the Blogora? The reason could simply be "I have no compulsion." But, again, we dunno. Feel free to email me anonymously if you don't, you know, want to respond in this forum: slewfoot at mail dot utexas dot edu.

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• intimacy
• presidential rhetoric
• public sphere
• sexuality

Music: Willard Grant Conspiracy: Mojave (1999)

Tonight President Obama will hold a press conference in honor of his first 100 days in office. The speech coincides with a current project I am writing today on the tone of presidential public address; I have been arguing for almost a year now that Obama's ability to dispense intimacy without ecstasy with his voice partially explains his rhetorical successes. To this end I have been reading-up on Lauren Berlant's work on public intimacy, and I think her arguments give us something to think about as we watch the president this evening.

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• academic life
• blowhard
• culture wars
• dunderhead
• tenure

Music: Dead Heart Bloom: self-titled (2006)

Every couple of years a professor---usually fully promoted, established, and without any fear of job insecurity---decides to bite the hand that feeds him or her in The New York Times (a newspaper that, not coincidentally, never seems to tire of critiquing academics and the academy, despite that fact that's one of the few readerships it has left). As my colleague Rick Cherwitz announced to the faculty this morning, Mark C. Taylor, a well-regarded scholar and chair of the religious studies department at Columbia, is the latest academic to "provoke" the professoriate by joining the corporate chorus, singing for the demise of tenure---and academic departments while he's at it.

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• citation practices
• publishing
• shout-outs
• voice

Today I submitted a response essay to a major rhetorical studies journal. My co-authors and I take issue with the way our work has been critiqued by a relatively unknown scholar trying to get back into academics after a long hiatus. Some of the author's criticisms are valid and well taken, but his tone in general seems needlessly snide and polemical. Essentially, he argues our work is "simplistic" and "misleading" because he thinks (erroneously) we have ignored an important thinker from the sixteenth century. He groups about four scholars together, says we're all arguing the same thing, and dismisses us. Obviously when you do that to four very different scholars with five different projects you're up to something that exceeds setting the record straight. You're trying to "make a mark" and get noticed.

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• And One
• shakeyerbudie
• syth pop

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• Grateful Dead
• occult rhetoric
• secret code
• walk out today

Another occultic rhetoric: now yer on da inside. How about a moment of silence today for "peace in the drug war?"

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• citation
• ethics
• teaching

Music: FENNESZ: Black Sea (2008)

Many if not most of the readers of this blog are teachers, which means we deal with the issues of intellectual property with our students. Although the observation may be a perennial fantasy of teachers of writing and speech, based on anecdotal evidence it seems incidents of improper citation and acknowledgement have been increasing (there is, however, some empirical evidence to suggest the observation is not without merit). I know that every year I teach, I seem to "catch" more and more students using cut-and-paste material from the Tubes, and usually without even trying.

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• dancing
• synth pop
• Wolfsheim

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• gun control
• school shootings
• Texas poltics
• violence

Music: Willie Nelson: Stardust (1984)

Today is the "student walk-out" day to protest a bill that would allow licensed gun-owners to carry concealed guns on campus. When I first heard about this I laughed it off as ridiculous, but apparently it actually has a possibility of passing. None of my students elected to participate in the walk-out (I told them they could without penalty).

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