July 14, 2005

The panelists, plus Jodie



A Panel + 1

I'm sure that there's someone somewhere who hates photos of themselves as much as I do, but oh well. Here we have Dan, me, John, and Jodie. As John noted later, and you can observe, it's a rare panel indeed where John is the scrawny hippie of the bunch, but there you go.

I can relate about Tuesday night that I was wearing sneaks, which I only do occasionally in lieu of sandals in the summer, and as a result, kept catching my feet on chairs, bottles, etc. Felt like a klutz, but mostly it was just that my body sense was thrown off. Surprisingly enough, the liberal consumption of alcohol did little to improve the situation. Perhaps the single most astounding thing about our little party was the truly encyclopedic soundtrack: seven hours of songs performed by bands other than the ones who'd originally recorded them. Wow.

Posted by cgbrooke at 03:07 PM | Comments (2)

Jodie is my hero



Jodie

Hard to tell from this photo, but this is Jodie who, on the basis of knowing me for all of like 15 minutes, offered her spare room and futon bed as a solution for my sleeping woes. I know that she's probably tired of me thanking her, so I won't. I will say that she came home after a pretty long Monday night, and stayed up with me for a while helping me revise my paper, which did I mention was the worst paper in the world at one point? In less than a week, she's driving cross-country to take up her newly-appointed position at the University of Idaho, and I'll have the chance to repay her kindness by offering her a spare room in Davenport while she's on the road.

At the risk of sounding maudlin or addled with thoughts of serendipity, I'd add that Jodie and I hit it off almost immediately, in a way that really made the conference for me. At the risk of adding in ulterior conversations, I'd add that a lot of what we do as academics is incredibly isolating, and so meeting people and clicking with them is a rare luxury (this is one of the best reasons for academics to blog, Ivan).

I've thrown up a set for the handful of conference photos I took, and this is among them (and large enough to actually see).

Posted by cgbrooke at 02:35 PM | Comments (1)

July 12, 2005

Penn State, Day 3

Tuesday began with my own session, featuring first me, then Dan, then John. My paper wasn't the worst paper in the world, apparently. I'd share it here, but it would require me to retype almost half of it, and I haven't decided whether that's something I want to do. It's a slight re-focusing of the essay I've been working on for CCC, revised to include a little more Burke than I did originally. I wrote probably about half of it from scratch (twice--ugh.), and learned a little more about what I need to do with that essay. So that was good.

I don't really take notes during my panels, because I'm usually too keyed up. On Tuesday, given my lack of sleep, being keyed up basically counteracted my exhaustion, leaving me awake. Dan and John were both very good. As I've mentioned to a couple of people, I often feel like my own work is a little thin conceptually next to them, but then I remember that pretty much most of the rest of my field would feel that way (if not moreso) on a panel with them, and then I don't feel so bad.

The highlight of the panel for me was during Q&A, as Robert Wess was asking John a question. Most people didn't see this, as they were watching him, but John was taking a drink just as Wess suggested that he go back and read more Burke, leading to the most spectacular spit-take I've ever witnessed at an academic conference. Bad news was that I was right in the path of the spectacle. Still, pretty funny stuff.

We skipped the next session (surprise!), and hooked up with the conference again over lunch. Having gotten a little more sleep, food and I weren't mortal enemies, and so I actually ate a real lunch and listened to the session, which involved the officers of the Kenneth Burke journal urge us to submit and support their efforts. It was a little creepy at times, as they referred to Burke variously as our hero, our guru, our world-class genius, etc. I must admit, too, that the idea of keeping track of the activities of his children and grand-children strikes me as a little off as well.

I'm a little torn, because I'm often seen in my program as one of the people who really advocates for our students to read more Burke than they do, but in the face of many of these people, I was almost certainly an outsider. There's a weird vibe of hero-worship that it's hard for me to feel comfortable around, and it surfaced every once in a while, including this session.

Anyways. Believe it or not, I actually went to the final session. But with food in my belly, the inevitable crash after the adrenalin spike that accompanies every time I speak, and the fact that I hadn't slept much for three nights running, I didn't take great notes, or really do much else than struggle to stay awake during the final session I attended. One thing I'll note, and that's that Debra Journet's paper, on W.D.Hamilton's original work on selfish/altruistic genes, was by far the best application of Burke that I saw all conference. Not everyone was "applying" Burke, so there were other presentations of different sorts that were equally good, but she did a really nice job of using the pentad to open up Hamilton's work and identifying it as a moment of productive ambiguity. I'm not doing it justice, but it was really strong. If I feel like I can do it without sounding too critical or shrill, I'll talk later and try and get at this a little more.

That night was a porch party at Jeff Nealon's, featuring a nice spread, 7 hours of covers, a lot of good conversation (including a moment or two of heated debate). I have a few pix from that to post, and not much more to say just yet. We were there until around 3:30 in the morning, I think.

Posted by cgbrooke at 01:57 PM | Comments (0)

July 11, 2005

Penn State, Day 2

Sunday night, or Monday morning more precisely, we came back to Jenny's after shooting pool until about 1, and I proceeded to work over the paper I was delivering Tuesday morning. Two things of note: I had had a fair amount of beer, and I hadn't really slept more than about 2 or 3 hours the night before. I stayed up til about 5 or 5:30, and got up around 9:30 on Monday morning, although to describe my state of being as "up" is probably hyperbole.

Anyhow, I missed the session on "Virtual Burke, Visual Burke," one of the ones that I'd really hoped to catch. And then, because the next session began at 10:15, I missed "Burke Embodied," which I also really wanted to see. Who's a crappy conference attendee? Yeah, that'd be me.

I did make it over to the Inn in time for my free lunch, though, although I don't remember being able to eat all that much. The lunchtime speaker was Cary Nelson, who was "Leveraging a Career with Kenneth Burke." I didn't take notes, but the cheesecake was very good. The session ended with a little Q&A, which included a slightly embarrassing question by someone who had just found George Lakoff's new book and wondered if he wasn't just recycling Burke. Embarrassing because this fellow seemed not to realize who Lakoff was, or that his ideas have been circulating for quite some time, or that there might be some relation between L's earlier work on conceptual metaphors and terministic screens. Hell, for all I know, someone's already written that paper. I don't mean to dwell on it, but it was a little odd.

Oh, and then I skipped the next session. But to make up for it, I did go to the special collections room during the reception, and look around. Jack Selzer's students have been doing all sorts of archival work on Burke, and the results were really impressive. I'm not just saying that. Each project was laid out in a display case, and they were almost to a person really interesting. Made me wish I'd gone to the session.

I made it to the afternoon keynote, which was Ed Schiappa's "The Texts We Make: Revisiting the Textual Analysis/Audience Research Dichotomy in Popular Culture Criticism." Yeah, it made me tired just typing the abstract title. As we decided whether or not to go to the talk (which was really pretty good, I thought), I had cause to reflect on whether or not, in the end, the texts we take are equal to the texts we make. And I offered up $20 to anyone willing to raise their hand and ask whether or not it was true. No one took me up on it.

Anyway, Ed's talk was a good one, and not just because he and I were making very similar arguments in our papers, although that helped. I heard later about people not liking it, and my impression was that they were missing the point in exactly the way that Ed was trying to explain that critics were missing the point. But oh well. His talk was about how pop culture critics, in the guise of representing the texts they analyze, are basically making conjectures about audience, and that those conjectures would be better made if supported by research into actual audiences. I'm not really doing the argument justice because I don't have the handout nearby and that where I took notes. I think that the detractors thought the paper was about Ed's "subject" when in fact it was about his method, and from that perspective, I thought it was good.

The closing event of the day was a picnic and awards ceremony, which we held at an alternate location (Mad Mex's, I think). We had a couple of drinks, and turned in early, not the least reason for which was that Dan, John, and I were doing our panel at 8:30 the next morning.

And thank goodness we did. I printed out my paper on Monday, and mentioned to Jodie and John the fact that I had to resolve my sleeping situation (since I wasn't doing well on Jenny's couch). Anyhow, Jodie had a spare futon bed at her place, and offered it. So I went "back" to her place, and read over my paper for the first time, whereupon I discovered that I'm a much less talented writer when I'm drunk than I supposed I was (while I was drunk, to be fair). I ended up rewriting the last five or so pages, and Jodie got back just as I was hitting the end of it. She managed to persuade me that it actually wasn't the worst paper ever written, and so I only stayed up until around 2:00 or so to finish it.

That was Monday.

Posted by cgbrooke at 01:31 PM | Comments (0)

July 10, 2005

Penn State, Day 1

I drove down to State College, PA, on Saturday, met up with Jeff and Jenny, got a subpar night of sleep (see above), and on Sunday, the conference began. We got there earlier than we needed to be, so we registered, and bounced down to the retail/restaurant stretch bordering the Penn State campus.

A fair portion of the conference took place in the Nittany Lion Inn, which was really a pretty nice facility. Good spaces, good food. But no wireless, which was really quite strange. And by strange I mean inconvenient in various ways, not the least of which was the complete pointlessness of lugging my laptop to the first day of the conference. But oh well. Good cheesecake.

Leading off the conference were a couple of keynotes: Debbie Hawhee's "At the Edges of Language: Burke and the Mystical Moderns" and Robert Wess's "Burke's McKeon Side: Burke's Pentad and McKeon's Quartet." Really, the only thing I remember from either talk, though, was this line from a newspaper review imploring us to

let a dozen lovely young girls devote their entire day to modulations of body, until they become miracles of gracefulness

I do remember a little more than that. Debbie's focus was on Burke's theories of the body, and she presented some archival work connecting Burke to 1930's mystics, including Gurdjieff, he of the whirling dervishes. If my notes are right, I think that Burke was interested in an embodied mysticism, one foregrounding transformation, communication, vitality, et al. I have to admit that I didn't track Robert Wess as closely, partly because I was still pretty concerned about getting my own paper done, and partly because I simply don't know McKeon that well. What notes I have suggest that Wess was interested in rescuing Burke from contemporary appropriations of his work on behalf of relativism or constructivism, particularly when it comes to Burke's terministic screens.

Anyhow, after the keynotes were the first round of concurrent sessions, and Jenny and Jeff were tag-teaming their talk during onesuch, so that's where I went. And this was probably my first taste of what was different about this particular conference. It was my first trip to a Penn State Conference (which meets every other year), and my first to a Burke conference (which meets every 3 years), and while there's plenty of overlap in the audience for the two conferences, it's not what I would call a total overlap. My sense was that maybe 3/4 of us were there for Burke, and the remaining quarter for Penn State.

So anyway, Jeff and Jenny did an alternating presentation where they reinvented the idea of the Dictionary of Pivotal Terms. They made the argument that they took from Burke his attitudes toward production rather than technology. A couple of highlights from my notes:

The other two papers were both applications of Burke's pentad to online "cases," IM tutorials in one, and the process of developing online educational tools on the other. Not a lot more about them to say.

One thing worth mention is that during Q&A--the singularly unbearable part of almost every session I ever go to--one of the Burke purists asked, in what would come to be something of a theme of our conversations, how Jenny and Jeff would use Counter-Statement (one of Burke's earliest books). Or maybe he "asked" that they should go back and read it, I don't know. Let's just say that there were cross-purposes at work. One sign of this? The dinner session (which we chose not to attend) featured a keynote session called, literally, "We Knew Kenneth Burke." Umm. Okay. The counter-session, called, literally, "We Didn't Know Kenneth Burke," was held in the basement pool hall of Champs until about 1 in the morning, and featured the emergence of a new game called Muckelball. But I'll save that for later...

Posted by cgbrooke at 12:51 PM | Comments (0)