1. Here are two good posts related to the African Diaspora.

2. To the person who just surfed on in here from a calpoly.edu IP address by searching for spelling atwood metaphor essay, I really hope you won't paste my essay on Burke's "Four Master Tropes" into a word file, put your name on it, and turn it in. I worked hard on it. Thanks. It probably wouldn't address the assignment directly, anyway. Feel free to use it as a reference, though.

3. Guess I'll have to watch Lost online tomorrow. They're preempting it here once again for basketball.

4. In your opinion, what are the most important things new graduate students need to know (in terms of professionalization)? I have my own ideas: I think they need to have a strong handle on how they intend to position themselves in the field, specifically which conferences they plan to attend regularly, what their target journals are, what listservs they want to participate in, what professional organizations they want to join, what kinds of jobs they want to apply for (and whether they want to do national, international, or regional searches), etc. They need to have a clear understanding of what the term research agenda means. What else?

5. Where are the prolific graduate student bloggers in rhetoric and composition nowadays? Well, obviously I know where a lot of them are -- see the Rhetoric section of my blogroll -- but I'm interested in the bloggers I don't yet know about: the ones who are now in their second or fourth semesters of coursework, who are posting their reading responses for class and reading notes, the ones who are wrestling with theory in public (Smackdown!). If you're out there, I'm interested in getting to know you.

Today was the deadline for the Penn State Conference on rhetoric and composition. It and Watson are the most prestigious regional rhetoric and composition conferences, and I have every intention of going to both someday, but I didn't submit a proposal today. Conferences are expensive and time-consuming, and I don't want to go to too many. Too bad, though; I'm very interested in the rhetorics and technologies theme.

In other conference news, the full-service site for Feminisms and Rhetorics is now up. I'll be going to that one for sure -- I haven't been to it since 2003.

You may know the title of my post if you've ever worked in a restaurant. That's the only place I've ever heard that expression, anyway. You have two tables already, then someone seats you with a large party. The first table wants mustard, more bread, a side of ranch, another beer, a spill wiped up. The big party wants to place their drink orders. And who's going to run those salads to that second table so that their entrees don't come out five seconds after their salads?

I love "in the weeds" as a metaphor. You're standing in weeds, some already tall, others getting taller by the minute. Still others are quickly sprouting up out of the ground.

"In the weeds," obviously, can apply to any line of work, including academia. I've been in the weeds for weeks, especially with teaching prep for two new courses. I'm told this is one of the worst things about the first year or two on the tenure track. It looks like I'll be teaching another new one in the fall. After that I'm going to try to teach the same courses for a while, if I can.

Not that anyone's been asking, but yes, I have been following the M&M controversy intently. To make a long story short, the John Edwards '08 campaign asked two excellent bloggers, Amanda Marcotte* and Melissa McEwan of Shakespeare's Sister, to write for the Edwards campaign blog. They were hailed by lefty bloggers, not only because they demonstrated web savvy by picking established bloggers who had built audiences, but also because these particular bloggers were women, who are, as we know, underrepresented in punditry.

Then the protests began, spearheaded by Michelle Malkin and Bill Donohue. They, along with some other politically conservative bloggers, objected to posts Marcotte and McEwan had written about the Duke lacrosse team rape case and about reproductive freedom. The Catholic League called for their termination from the Edwards campaign. Edwards seems to have decided to keep them, at least for now. You can find more detailed analyses at Noli Irritare Leones, Obsidian Wings, oh, and a couple thousand via Technorati.

Web 2.0 network ecology stories. This, to me, is potentially a very productive methodology for understanding networks and social software.

If you haven't yet read this stunning and courageous narrative by Eric Fair, do so now.

Watch A Girl Like Me, a film by Kiri Davis. Via BlackProf, and read that post too.

Anyone know how to tweak Google Reader to filter out all stories related to sports? I subscribe to Google News and BBC News, and I want to keep those, but I don't give a yotz about sports.

* whom I'd love to hang out with now that she's in Chapel Hill!

The title of this post is the subtitle of The Freedom Writers' Diary, which I'm reading right now (among many other things). Here's the premise, in case you've been living under a rock:

As an idealistic twenty-three-year-old English teacher at Wilson High School in Long beach, California, Erin Gruwell confronted a room of “unteachable, at-risk” students. One day she intercepted a note with an ugly racial caricature, and angrily declared that this was precisely the sort of thing that led to the Holocaust—only to be met by uncomprehending looks. So she and her students, using the treasured books Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl and Zlata’s Diary: A Child’s Life in Sarajevo as their guides, undertook a life-changing, eye-opening, spirit-raising odyssey against intolerance and misunderstanding. They learned to see the parallels in these books to their own lives, recording their thoughts and feelings in diaries and dubbing themselves the “Freedom Writers” in homage to the civil rights activists “The Freedom Riders.”

The story of these students is so overtly about the power of writing and language that I'm frankly appalled that we're not talking about it in composition studies. I keep waiting to see a thread about it on WPA-L or posts on blogs, but I've seen nothing (and if these discussions are happening and I'm missing them, do let me know). What are the implications of this story? What composing practices are taking place? What rhetorical interventions are being made? What connections can be made between expressivism (scroll down) and the writing these students are doing? What, according to these students, does it mean to write about their experiences? What are the consequences?

I am going to write a review of this book when I finish it. Maybe I'll send it to a journal. I'll either do that or post it here.

Hopefully by now you've read that article about the creator of 24 and his politics. Full disclosure: Jonathan and I are both rabid fans of 24, in spite of the fact that we snicker about the predictability of the ethnic stereotyping and some of the dialogue and improbabilities (e.g., Jack shoots down a helicopter with a handgun). The article is really interesting, and I'd like to extract some of the parts I found particularly intriguing:

[U.S. Army Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan, the dean of the United States Military Academy at West Point] told the producers that “24,” by suggesting that the U.S. government perpetrates myriad forms of torture, hurts the country’s image internationally. Finnegan, who is a lawyer, has for a number of years taught a course on the laws of war to West Point seniors—cadets who would soon be commanders in the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. He always tries, he said, to get his students to sort out not just what is legal but what is right. However, it had become increasingly hard to convince some cadets that America had to respect the rule of law and human rights, even when terrorists did not. One reason for the growing resistance, he suggested, was misperceptions spread by “24,” which was exceptionally popular with his students. As he told me, “The kids see it, and say, ‘If torture is wrong, what about “24”?’ ” He continued, “The disturbing thing is that although torture may cause Jack Bauer some angst, it is always the patriotic thing to do.”

Wow. I never would have expected the cadets to take 24 that seriously. Could they have just been kidding around with Finnegan?

I thought it was interesting to juxtapose the New Yorker article with the In Media Res project by Jennifer Holt. (Aside: I am one of the founding members of the editorial board; hooray!) In her commentary, Holt writes, "In light of the current clamor about this show’s alleged right wing agenda (which I would argue are far too simplistic) and the debates over the limits of indecency on television as (not) defined by the FCC, Jack Bauer is literally going for the jugular on both counts." I wish Holt had gone into more detail about "far too simplistic," but I realize that the In Media Res blurbs are supposed to be short. In sum, the political slant of 24 seems pretty right oriented to me, but I do agree with what Jane Mayer writes here:

Indeed, the story lines sometimes have a liberal tilt. The conspiracy plot of Season Five, for example, turns on oligarchic businessmen who go to despicable lengths to protect their oil interests; the same theme anchors liberal-paranoia thrillers such as “Syriana.” This season, a White House directive that flags all federal employees of Middle Eastern descent as potential traitors has been presented as a gross overreaction, and a White House official who favors police-state tactics has come off as scheming and ignoble.

Also, for what it's worth, Kiefer Sutherland, the article says, places himself left of center on the political spectrum.

What are your thoughts on 24 and what it may or may not be inculcating in the audience? And how about The Half Hour News Hour, the conservative fake-news comedy after the style of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report? I can't wait to see what that's like.

From Gabriel García Márquez's Memories of My Melancholy Whores, page 65:

Thanks to her I confronted my inner self for the first time as my ninetieth year went by. I discovered that my obsession for having each thing in the right place, each subject at the right time, each word in the right style, was not the well-deserved reward of an ordered mind but just the opposite: a complete system of pretense invented by me to hide the disorder of my nature. I discovered that I am not disciplined out of virtue but as a reaction to my negligence, that I appear generous in order to conceal my meanness, that I pass myself off as prudent because I am evil-minded, that I am conciliatory in order not to succumb to my repressed rage, that I am punctual only to hide how little I care about other people's time. I learned, in short, that love is not a condition of the spirit but a sign of the zodiac.

Last night I watched Mad Hot Ballroom, and I can't recommend it highly enough. It's a great movie to watch if you're depressed, especially. I had a big grin on my face the whole time (trailer here). The premise is that several classes of fifth graders in New York City public schools take ballroom dancing lessons and compete for a top prize. The children are in that awkward stage, but they are all so adorable. The documentary doesn't explore the class implications of ballroom dancing except to mention briefly that ballroom dancing isn't just about dancing, but also about etiquette and learning about other cultures, and the camera doesn't follow the kids very closely into their home lives, though they are interviewed about how they feel about dancing and a few other innocuous topics. The teachers seem to be lovely people; they clearly care a lot about the children, and they even choke up when talking about them and the effect dancing has had on them. If you're like me and love dance movies, this movie will make you feel all squeeful and joyous. This is why I love Netflix.