Like Five Beagles in a Hurricane* (an Ike memoir)

In lieu of a cathartic free-write on my experience of evacuating and experiencing a hurricane, I have decided to dabble in a kind of hybrid genre--the hurricane memoir blog post. I have actually been pre-writing this thing since I was in traffic going through Lumberton the day before Ike hit--I just didn't have that urgent sense of my ideas "bubbling to the surface," as Peter Elbow might say, until now, months after the event. I do not write this in the hopes that it will be entertaining to an academic reader (all the better, since I actually have no readers)--rather, I am writing it because I have had an uneasy feeling of being unable to fully commit myself to any of my other projects because this "thing" was swirling around in my consciousness, waiting to be written. Therefore, I remember...

...sighing after getting off the phone with my dad (the day before Ike), who urged me to get out of Bum-out in a hurry if I wanted to make it through Lumberton in an hour and avoid the really heavy traffic...

...me and a grad student whose thesis I was engrossed in directing exchanging lighthearted emails poking fun at the impending "doom," and me promising to get him comments through email that day unless I really had to leave (oh, the naivete)...

...packing up Sissy, who, after Gustav only 2 weeks before, had caught wise to the evacuation rigmarole and had to be stuffed into her pet taxi...

...her sad yowling all the way from Beaumont to Huntsville, except for a few blissful moments when she was napping...

...my aunt and uncle offering to let me stay with them in Point Blank, and me gladly leaving the Huntsville Econo-Lodge to ride out the storm with my family...

...getting to Point Blank, to find that I would be experiencing Ike with my aunt and uncle, my cousin and her husband, his niece and her parents and grandparents (and a few others--there were 13 of us when all was said and done)...all of us in the living room...sleeping on air mattresses...

...noticing that the weather had that warm, calm kind of "hope you enjoy this because all hell is about to break loose" pre-hurricane aura about it...

...me walking by myself down to the lake where my uncle keeps his boat docked, and noticing what I thought was a huge fake apricot colored water snake, coiled, sleeping around the rim of a bucket, and me, because I thought it was fake, bending over it to take a closer look...

...my uncle (in his seventies) coming down through the back yard with a 410 in one hand and a 357 in the other (muttering something about not being a very good shot, and me skittering off the premises to avoid becoming an accidental target), planning to do away with said snake when later on someone in the group alerted him to the fact that this snake was now swimming around in its aforementioned bucket...

...night approaching, and all of us settling down on our strategially placed mattresses...the weather channel going at full volume...me wishing someone would turn it down, as we were powerless to do anything except worry about potential damage to our towns and homes...

...someone making a joke about us writing our social security numbers on our arms and wondering out loud whether we could all fit in the bathroom, or better yet, in the basement, where my cousin and her husband had put their five beagles (adorable pups)...everyone laughing at that...

..later on, when the wind kicked loudly up to 90 mph and the countless pine trees surrounding the house started blowing sideways, and the power went out, and all was complete darkness and silence except for that eerie howling, someone asking again if we could all fit into the basement...and no one laughing this time...

...several of the older people saying things like "Oh Dear God," which I actually thought was something people only said in movies... me realizing I had not evacuated far enough but powerless to do anything now...

...hearing the weather channel reporter say definitively: "Crystal Beach is gone," which saddened me greatly, as my best childhood memories were of Crystal beach...seeing the Balinese Room in splinters (by the way, if you don't know what that is, there is actually a ZZ Top song about the Balinese)...

...once, when we had all gone to sleep, a terrible howling came from the basement that made us all sit upright--it was the beagles, and something (no one knew what) had set them off...

...all of us scattering to safer places over the next few days (me to Dallas, some others to Woodville, others who knows where) after it became apparent that no, we could not simply return home within a couple of days...

...me being happy that a week later my dad (who had evacuated with my grandparents to Marshall and stayed in his RV while they stayed with my grandmother's cousin) joined me in Dallas after he got tired of his diet of beanie-weenies and cheetos at the RV park, which had no power and no grocery stores open close by...

...me wondering what form this disjointed experience would take when I finally had the time to put it into words...

As a postscript, I'd like to point out that in my original draft of this post, I had written 3/4 of this story as a rambling essay. For some unknown reason, the text disappeared as I was trying to save it. Instead of scrapping the idea, I decided to redo the story as a series of cumulative sentences (the closest I will ever get to writing poetry). I'd like to kind of indirectly credit rhet/comp guru Dick Graves with this idea, as I had recently attended his fantastic NCTE panel on teaching the cumulative sentence before I wrote this.

*If you don't get the Tanya Tucker reference from the post title, shame on you!

Academics behaving "badly" (regarding profanity)

I am fascinated by those instances in which scholars "break" with the norms of academic prose and interject surprising images or words into their texts--the more highly theoretical the work is otherwise, the more interesting the rhetorical effect of a well placed "damn" or some such "improper" utterance is. I am, in fact, in the process of collecting these examples as I run across them, hoping to make some kind of conclusion about their place in academic discourse (a genre that itself is beset by conflicting definitions--it is safe to say, I think, that those of us who are pushing against the boundaries of academic writing are, in this posthuman age, almost unsure at this point where those boundaries lie any more). The following example comes from Donna Haraway, in a chapter from Simians, Cyborgs, and Women entitled "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective," in which she explores feminist objectivity--this quote is taken from a compelling section on "vision" as a metaphor:

"And like the god-trick, this eye fucks the world to make techno-monsters" (189).

For some background, Haraway is a biologist whose interests also intersect with the humanities--primarily what we in the humanities might term "medium studies"--and her work that I am most familiar with is that on cyborg feminisms. Her prose is rich/dense, and I marvel at just how much revision she must have gone through to consistently produce sentences such as this:

"In our efforts to climb the greased pole leading to a usable doctrine of objectvity, I and most other feminists of the objectivity debates have alternatively, even simultaneously, held onto both ends of the dichotomy, which Harding describes in terms of successor science projects versus postmodern accounts of difference and I have sketched in this chapter as radical constructivism versus feminist critical empiricism" (188).

In order to "get" Haraway, you need a good deal of critical theory behind you (i.e. a basic understanding of Marx, Derrida, and Lacan is essential). Point being, if you spend a morning reading Haraway (as I did today), and go on to pick up Kenneth Burke later (as I also did), reading Burke will feel like zipping through a Dick and Jane novel. (And Burke is also fascinatingly, relentlessly metadiscursive, which is a topic for another post.) But this is not to say that she is dense in an off-putting way--quite the contrary--her work operates on such a high level theoretically that I constantly feel I have to stretch to fully understand her and effectively apply her to my own work (a journey that is well worth the effort).

But what does this all have to do with the eye that "fucks the world to make techno-monsters"? Precisely this: Haraway depends on a keen rhetorical sense in order to make her multiple perspectives and positions converge in a text that is understandable, even enlightening--she made a choice to use the "f" word (no, not "feminism"-the other one) in the context of vision as a metaphor for the masculinist "gaze" that lords over much technological innovation. She simply had no other way to convey this fact, and pushed the boundaries of depersonalized academic prose a little further.