I promised more from this pretty setting and now, finally, you’re getting 99 seconds more. Click, play, enjoy.
adventures
28
Mar 11
It is blurry
Yesterday … yesterday was a day. It. Would. Not. End.
Which sounds negative, but let me tell you why it was not. I woke up in the 501 area code. I had a late breakfast with my lovely bride. I took her to The Old Mill:
(A little more on this place soon.)
And then we drove. After a few hours we made Memphis. Then we started trekking through Mississippi, taking the scenic route. Pine trees. We saw pine trees. We raced the rain the whole way.
And then back into Alabama, where we saw pine trees — these growing taller and straighter. We hit Birmingham just in time for dinner and made a literal mid-intersection choice to visit Dreamland. And then we drove home. This took the whole day. The trip got so long that she found herself dancing along to Miley Cyrus song. I did not dance, I merely nodded my head like “Yeah.”
When I lived in Little Rock years ago (this is the last time I’ll mention it) I made the trip from central Arkansas to Birmingham quite frequently. The trip feels a lot longer now. I’m older. Also I drive a little slower.
So we made it home, petted the cat and I loaded up the laundry. Sat down on the sofa and almost fell asleep there before the spin cycle ended.
Today it was back at it. The library, back on campus, back in class and having a grand time.
One of my colleagues asked me to guest lecture for her. Knowing that she has a very high-energy style I resolved to be very enthusiastic myself for the day. Did anyone ever mention it is hard to be an informative comedian while talking about building web pages?
Most of my off-the-cuff jokes worked just fine. I had to wing part of the presentation because my printer jammed and the server knew it was Monday, but things went fairly well.
And then there was reading to do, and that’s been the rest of this day, which has just drifted into haphazardly drifted into yesterday and promises to lazily stretch into mid-afternoon tomorrow.
Several updates to the LOMO blog today. Twitter always, and other stuff later this week when I can get to it.
Is it the weekend yet? How about now?
25
Mar 11
Meanwhile, back at the conference
I need a Hall of Justice wipe, don’t I?
We walked into the conference this morning just in time for this session where The Yankee was chairing and I was responding to the papers being presented. The presenters were graduate students, their scholarship quality.
One wrote a piece on the rhetoric of Photovoice, which is a particular photographic methodology. I found myself agreeing and disagreeing with the paper until I heard the author present. She’d written her master’s thesis with this method, but had now changed her mind on it. And that made a lot of sense.
Another was a look at the rhetoric of Blaxploitation films. The paper was good, though it isn’t anything I’d ever consider doing myself. But I did find myself quoting some of the movies he mentioned for the rest of the day.
A third paper on the panel was an analysis of some of the political segments on Saturday Night Live.
Somehow I managed to give my response without referencing this segment:
This one did come up:
I love those bits.
Which made the schema-relational-media theory paper look smarter than all of us, really. Always nice to learn new things, and that’s what happened for me in that paper.
We took in a session featuring some of the great political academics of the region, including our old professor Dr. Larry Powell. I love to hear him hold forth. He’ll sit back, cross his arms and tell you how this most recent campaign was like something Goldwater did. And how it was different, too. He’s just a walking education and a very nice man.
I dropped in on an undergrad presentation because one panelist was talking about the rhetoric of World War II posters, an art form I really admire. She talked about this one — essentially women were hard at work, but being “protected” or “held back” by their husbands. Note, too, the form-fitting overalls. On this poster she discussed the rhetoric of mid-century race relations. More gender roles and race rhetoric is found in this poster, she argued.
And then a young woman stood up to deliver her paper on the rhetorical analysis of photojournalism on Katrina coverage. It was more gripping when she discussed how she was an evacuee of that storm.
Later in the afternoon The Yankee delivered her paper on the Kay Hagan-Elizabeth Dole North Carolina senate race. She won top paper honors for this research. (She’s very good.) And then she took a picture of me taking a picture. (She’s so meta.)
We had dinner at Famous Dave’s, a barbecue place from whom we’ve been holding onto a gift card for years. We walked in and Ray Charles started playing on the speakers, so everything was just right. Good food, we just don’t have one around us. Being Friday, which is Pie Day, we had the pecan. (I like everything about pecan pie except for the pecans.)
I drove her past my old apartment, showed off a few things in town — but not my former station because, really, when you’ve seen one building you’ve seen them all.
And then back across the river to our hotel room, where I must prepare for tomorrow’s presentation.
24
Mar 11
“Yee-haw Arkansas”*
Field trip day today. My students visited Hoffman Media, who publish 11 magazines from a cozy little office space here in town. During our visit the students met Phyllis Hoffman DePiano, the founder and her sons who help her run the place. We heard from advertising people, designers and an editor.
We also learned that the next big food thing is going to be chocolate-covered bacon. You’re welcome.
The students enjoyed their visit and learned a great deal about cover design and magazine publishing and when that was done we hit the road. The Yankee and I have a conference in Little Rock this weekend, and so we made the drive, tucked ourselves into a hotel just across the river.
Tomorrow we’ll attend sessions. She’ll chair one and I’ll be the respondent in a session. My job is to provide some unity among the papers and offer some constructive criticism on where the papers are. I’ve never done this before, should be fun.
Tonight I had my first banana pudding milkshake in Tupelo, which sounds a lot better than saying “We stopped off the interstate and had a sandwich at Chick-fil-A.”
We stopped off the interstate and had a sandwich at Chick-fil-A.
The ubiquity of fast food places is a blessing when you’re hungry, and a curse when you’re trying to say something about the South, or your travels or your general condition. But, on the other, other hand everyone can relate to Chick-fil-A, I guess.
So the milkshake was terrific. So good, in fact, that I didn’t even mind that I spilled a bit of it on myself.
OK, that’s a lie. Of course I minded. Spills are the worst part of gravity, but at least I was covered in something delicious.
* The first time I ever visited Arkansas, as a senior in high school we were driving across the Mississippi River, the state line when we heard Alan Jackson, who sounded like he was about three days into a two-day all-nighter say that in the most disconnected tone you could imagine. One of the only other things I remember about that particular drive was seeing the “Welcome to Arkansas — Home of President William Jefferson Clinton” full of birdshot. I’d make that drive a few dozen times in my year working in Little Rock. Tonight I remembered: central Arkansas is flat. I’m sure I’ll recall more in the daylight.
18
Mar 11
Remember what the train conductor said
My four tokens to the general usefulness of things today:
- I graded a lot of things.
- I prepared a bit for my comps defense.
- I read a lot about Libya, the slow-motion thing that can’t be stopped, with fascination.
- And I built a mobile version of my website.
The world really needed that last one. Someone poked fun that I didn’t have a mobile version to the blog yet. But late this evening I added a plugin for that too. So you can easily see this drivel anytime.
I tinkered with this one for a while, but couldn’t make it go. So I found another one to build from. I’m on the fence about it, but what do you think? The mobile site is here. The mobile version of the blog is … well, found on your phone.
It is a curious thing, but I like that particular mobile theme on a friend’s site, but I’m not sure it works here. When these are the problems in your life you’re doing OK, though, so I won’t be too upset about it.
My comps defense is rumored to be next week. So I’ve been consolidating a few ideas I’d like to incorporate into that conversation.
On Libya, these types of stories are always good reading, and the reporting here is fine:
“This is the greatest opportunity to realign our interests and our values,” a senior administration official said at the meeting, telling the experts this sentence came from Obama himself. The president was referring to the broader change going on in the Middle East and the need to rebalance U.S. foreign policy toward a greater focus on democracy and human rights.
It will be interesting to see how long this shiny spin on things remains in place.
“In the case of Libya, they just threw out their playbook,” said Steve Clemons, the foreign policy chief at the New America Foundation. “The fact that Obama pivoted on a dime shows that the White House is flying without a strategy and that we have a reactive presidency right now and not a strategic one.”
So the next few weeks should be interesting.
Baseball this evening, Auburn hosts Arkansas this weekend, but dropped the opener 6-5 in 11 innnings. The bullpen is still working itself out and Auburn stranded eight runners on base and seven of those were in scoring position.
We had pizza after the game at Mellow Mushroom. We noticed that Moe’s Original Barbecue is now open downtown. Finally, our style of ‘cue. Now we just have to become regulars.
YouTube Cover Theater is a little feature intending to point out the art of people making music in their homes to their video camera. There’s a lot of talent out there, some of it is more than worth sharing. I hurriedly picked REM as this week’s featured cover act. It didn’t seem the best pick at the time, but now I’m glad of it. Their music seems to have a lot of room in it for others to play. Unfortunately none of these particular three covers have been seen by more than 2,000 people.
Doug McKenna is an independent artist, but unfortunately his site has been neglected. Nevertheless, Sweetness Follows is a good tune and he does a nice job here:
My favorite REM song, and it is a shame this has only 59 views. Unfortunately there’s not much biographical information about the guy here, but his treatment of Driver 8 is good fun:
In a different career on those rare times when I had to play music at radio stations I’d always end my shift with this song, so we’ll end this post the same way.
