Love those simple pleasures...here are two in particular that have happened to me recently:

1. Several of the students who are taking my first-year composition class this semester want to take my speech class next semester. I'm honored. :-)

2. I just weighed myself, and I lost four pounds, probably from my recent trips to the gym. Excellent. That makes a total of eleven pounds lost since I started this weight-loss plan in early October. I'm telling you, cutting out caloric beverages and not eating late at night, combined with a little exercise, WORKS.

I'm so very busy grading. I don't have that many more to go, but it's tiring nonetheless. Plus, I'm getting my annual observation by a faculty member tomorrow. We'll be talking about writing abstracts. I'm not just lecturing about writing abstracts; I do have an activity for them, but I don't know if it will be one of those sizzling and swinging activities. Hopefully, they will learn something about writing abstracts from it, though. Anyone got any colorful, fabulous ideas for making abstract writing fun?

Edited to add that they're writing abstracts of their own research papers, not just a summary of something I'm assigning them to read...if that helps.

Yesterday, for kicks, I diagrammed the following award-winning sentence on the chalkboard in my office:

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

What follows is my attempt. Yeah, I know all the diagramming isn't right; I forgot some little things like how to diagram infinitives. I might try again later, but I consider this more of an artistic installation, a little roadside attraction in the rhetoric department:

On Tuesday in my Women's Studies class, we talked about Judith Butler. We read excerpts from Gender Trouble, the introductory chapter of Bodies That Matter, and "Imitation and Gender Insubordination." I volunteered to write a summary of one of the excerpts from Gender Trouble, the short concluding chapter. Here are the recurring concepts I saw in my read of it:

Butler begins by rearticulating her thesis that gender is a performance that is never stable or absolute, but tenuous, reified and made powerful by its constant repetition. Gender and sex are not natural; they are only naturalized through repetition and people's belief in the correct performance of their designated gender—their designated term in the binary. Western epistemology, with its need for (and reification of) self/other hierarchical dualisms expressed in discourse, produces masculine domination and compulsory heterosexuality, and Butler argues that no subject (“I”) or body precedes, or exists outside of, that discourse. She goes on to argue that, when reduced to a set of identity categories such as “woman,” “bisexual,” “white,” “disabled,” and “working-class,” the subject's potential agency is enabled by, but also compromised by the same categories. Such categories are not useful as a foundation on which to build a politics. Butler argues that there are no foundations or ontologies, that such concepts are mere discursive constructions. As a theoretical tactic, Butler argues for “subversive repetition” of gender performance, or disrupting constructions of gender through parody, and “proliferating gender configurations” (p. 187), or many genders.

Just watched Brain Candy again this weekend. A good friend of mine and I used to watch it pretty regularly in undergrad. It's still so relevant today.

Submissions are due 15 February 2004 for the Thomas R. Watson Conference. More info:

The University of Louisville announces the fifth biennial Thomas R. Watson Conference in Rhetoric and Composition. “Writing at the Center” will be held October 7-9, 2004, at the University of Louisville. Under this theme, we encourage composition scholars to address the administration and institutionalization of programs designed to foster, support, and enhance students’ abilities to write. The conference seeks to examine writing program administration, with a particular interest in writing centers, and requests proposals in the following areas:



Promoting student agency



Cooperative relationships among Writing Program Administrators



The relation of writing programs to academic departments



Perceptions of upper administrators, accrediting agencies, and funding sources toward the work of composition professionals



Writing program research, history, and theory (One facet of the conference will highlight the Writing Centers Research Project archives at the University of Louisville.)



Efforts to change public attitudes and politics surrounding the teaching of writing

I hope people will consider going to a small southern conference! :-) I've heard from plenty of people that the Watson conference is worth the trip.

Nick Olejniczak of blogosphere.us is teaching a class on weblogs in the spring at the University of Wisconsin. I'm guessing it's in his home department, Family and Consumer Communications. His syllabus is a wiki on which he would like feedback and suggestions for reading assignments. Olejniczak writes, "In the spirit of the medium that inspired the class, let's see if we can build a syllabus that will itself demonstrate the collaborative power of the blogosphere." Open design for open design. Very cool--I would love to teach a similar course.

Link via Blog de Halavais.

Hilarious. I have the same fears, sort of. I also love how the story is set in Minneapolis, MN.