These are the musings (personal, academic, perhaps sometimes borderline wacky) of a rhetoric and composition teacher who adores the written and spoken word in all its forms.
Welcome to my world!
I could have called this post many things, one of which might have been "Early 80s Canadian educational television shows that scarred me for life," but I chose that title because a while back, something made a vague memory resurface of a program we used to watch in fifth grade called "Read All About It."
And I was thinking, did a show that dorky really exist? Didn't it revolve around some pre-adolescent time traveling kids who were always called on to defeat some "evil" nemesis called "Duneedon"? Naturally, I turned to YouTube to verify my hunch, and lo and behold, some gracious person has uploaded clips of seasons 1 and 2 as well as the openings (one of which you can see above--oh, that catchy theme song!) The show wasn't completely insufferable, because each episode was fifteen minutes long, and most of us were more captivated by those kids' accents [i.e. their pronunciations of words like house ("hoase") and about ("aboat")] than the plots.
In its own way, "Read All About It" tried to be "cool" by adding talking, thinking computers, "Otto" and "Theta" (cue pretentious critical theory-soaked references [informed by Hayles and Haraway] to human-machine symbiosis here). But this was back when the coolness of emerging technology lay in its clunky obviousness, not in its drive toward complete invisibility--therefore, our attention was constantly drawn to what one of the computers was "thinking" via its cacophonous print outs or Theta's mechanical voice, which said things like "We...refuse...to...comply...with...your...demands." There was something really Forbin Project about that whole situation (i.e. computers communicating with each other and with humans). This clip (mainly the first three minutes) is exemplary of how the two computers (with their strange loyalty to those annoying kids) exercised their human-like agency to thwart their enemy:
Here's another Canadian gem (an ancient clip of a program called "Bits and Bytes" which is trying to make painfully obvious the innerworkings of computer technology):
Maybe I really miss the days of "Read All About It," because that show represented a time when computers were computers and people were people, and we could all live in our comfortable binaries....nnnaaaahhhh!
When people ask me where I'm from, I have an annoying tendency to change my story a bit based on whatever version of the ever elusive "(T)ruth I happen to be in the mood to adhere to. And the fact that I feel the need to launch into an explanation of my geographically challenged upbringing rather than simply saying "I'm from _____." is probably worth further investigation by a competent therapist. But I digress...
In a conversation the other day with several other people at a post-graduation party, out of boredom perhaps, we did the whole "Where are you from?" round robin (which was followed by the much more fun "What's your favorite movie?" discussion). Someone said, "You're from here, right?" And I replied, "Yes, we were here until I was seven and then we moved to the Dallas area, and I was there for about twenty years." And then someone else said, definitively, "I don't count anything before the age of thirteen." Then the person who had originally asked the question mentioned she had grown up in about three different states. All of this led me to the conclusion that the question of where one is "from" is one of the most confusing questions there is.
We all come up with some reasonable explanation for why we do or do not "count" certain places we have lived as having a claim on us, as if we wish to deny those places any part in forming our identities. For example, even though I will, to avoid further discussion, tell people I'm from Beaumont when asked, the truth is much trickier. Here's the cold hard math on where I've lived:
Age 0-6 weeks--Dallas Age 6 weeks--7 years--Hampshire Fannett, Beaumont Age 7-8--Dallas Age 8-9--Richardson Age 9-19--Garland Age 19-21--Denton Age 21-22--Stephenville Age 23-27--Denton Age--27-28--Garland Age--29-?--Beaumont
And here's my interpretation of those facts...
Yes, perhaps it is ludicrous to claim that one is from a place if she only lived there the first sevel years of her life. BUT--no place has ever had a hold on my soul the way Beaumont did. No place ever beat me up the way Beaumont did. No place ever (and could ever in the future) give me the incredible formative experiences Beaumont did. For example: I fed alligators at the Boondocks here. I learned to swim here. I learned to read here. I learned to write here, for God's sake. My entire family (both sides) is from Beaumont. My parents met here as teenagers. So there's always been a sense of Beaumont being the root of who I am, no matter where else I went.
Strangely, from the time we moved to Dallas until the time I moved back to southeast Texas in 2006, I hated Beaumont. My forward thinking mother trained me to tell people I was from Dallas pretty much from the time we arrived there. Beaumont was supposed to be tucked away into a distant memory where, well, where we keep all our memories of economically depressed refinery towns we don't want to admit we've lived in. And so it was--I pretended I had never heard of Beaumont until 2005, when I saw a job posting at Lamar University, and suddenly then I began to feel I could tolerate the endless humidity and rain in exchange for employment.
No matter where else I lived (and Garland is clearly where I spent most of my time from age 9-29), I was simply "there"--not really a part of the fabric of the place, just kind of a resident who was formed, in personality and spirit, by another home. And I can tell now when I go back to Dallas or Garland that the cities quitely closed up around me and went on about their business after I left, just as Beaumont opened up to let me back in.
So, in concluding, I'm not sure what the point of this post is, other than to illustrate that for me, the question of where I'm from is not simple at all. And, in order to tie this into my profession, I am wondering what kind of interesting expository essay assignment could come from this kind of self-centered, navel-gazing rumination.
Oh, and thanks to Three Dog Night for the post title, because I couldn't think of one on my own.
I am an avid bike rider. However, I am very old school. I mean really old school. I ride a baby blue beach cruiser with coaster brakes (thank you very much), and I ride it around the neighborhood all the time. So much so that people have started to recognize me as that woman who's always pedaling down the street. In fact, recently I ran into the university provost (not while on my bike--on campus), and he recognized me as, again, the woman who is always riding around the neighborhood (I didn't know he lived close by, but now maybe I should take better care not to wear unprofessional sweats while riding--I wonder if Ann Taylor makes any suits that double as sportswear?). He then reminisced about his own beach cruiser, stating that my bike looks just like one he had when he was twelve. I wasn't sure whether that was supposed to be a compliment, a simple observation, or something that should make me feel like a total dweeb (in a sort of "nobody's ridden those kinds of bikes on the street since 1956! Get with the program!" kind of way), so I just laughed good naturedly.
Anyway, I love my bike. It's retro, and it's pretty. But I don't ride it because it's retro or because I'm trying to start some kind trend, because believe me, if it ain't caught in the last four years, it ain't happenin'. I ride it because when you ride a plain beach cruiser you are really riding. There's no mediation of different speeds to "help" you avoid the strain of going up a hill--it's just you and the simple mechanics of the bike. I never caught onto dealing with ten-speeds anyway--I had one when I was twelve, with the upside down handle bars and all that, but I proceeded to ride it as a regular bicycle. I guess I'll never be a convert to the ten speed, which is rather odd because I really am a fan of mechanical progress and ingenuity.
I didn't even get the hang of riding a bike until I was 8. There were several awkward years between age 3 (when it's still marginally ok to ride a trike) and 8 (when training wheels can destroy your social life) where I spent most of my time frustrated that I just couldn't "get it". Getting the right balance was just too hard. But when I did finally graduate to a two-wheeler, it was like magic, and I've been hooked ever since.
But, one of the main points of this blog post is to talk about the bizarre relationship that the neighborhood dogs, my bike, and I share. Let me put it this way: dogs hate people riding beach cruisers in their territory. I have been chased (and caught!) by a chihuahua, who attached him/herself to my pantleg with his/her teeth, run down by at least two rogue weenie-dogs, and given what my mom would call "mean-eyes" by most of the other K-9's around these parts. Little dogs seem to have the most contempt for my bike and I, and they also possess the most ironic confidence that they are going to somehow not come out the worse for wear if they happen to get tangled up in the spokes. Then there are the dogs who threaten me from their yards—I’m pretty sure they’ve been trained by their masters not to leave the premises, so their m.o. is to, when they see me coming by, run to the edge of the yard, barking what I’m sure are epithets in doggie language at the top of their lungs. They amuse me—it’s kind of like they’re saying, “Boy, if I could catch up to you I’d make you wish you were never born! But mommy and daddy won’t let me leave the yard…” I actually do love dogs. But this particular widespread anti-bicycle pathology of theirs bears some real psychological analysis.
In his excellent book Composition-Rhetoric: Backgrounds, Theory, Pedagogy, which offers a compelling history of my profession, Bob Connors offers the following delectable tidbit:
"Rhetoric, which had been dormant within composition since the 1890s, began to make a reappearance after 1944, when the first communications courses were taught at the University of Iowa. Communications courses quickly spread to other schools, bringing together scholars from English and speech departments for the first time since the tragic split between the disciplines that occured in 1914, teaching all four of the "communications skills"--reading, writing, speaking and listening. Rhetoric, which had been in the keeping of speech departments during the twentieth century, was a vital part of these courses, and many English teachers learned for the first time what might be some of the alternatives to mechanical correctness" (160).
What I am interested in here is the somewhat bizarre fallout in the aftermath of the apparently ongoing attempt to "heal" the split between speech/comm and rhetoric/writing (and I think the dichotomies are a big part of the problem-i.e. why should public speaking have been the domain of rhetorical instruction, while writing instruction was under the vague heading of "English" and left to languish in, quite literally, silence...).
What this means is the following: although rhetoricians-to-be may undergo quite similar training at our respective institutions (most of us have our PhD years split up into a mish-mash study of classical, applied, and contemporary rhetorical theory), we may wind up in vastly different departments--some of us in "Communications," some of us in "English," some us in "Cultural Studies," and on and on. The world of academe, quite simply, doesn't exactly know what to do with us.
I would like to "anecdotalize" the results of this 1914 split and their weirdo ramifications through a recent experience at my university.
I was asked to co-direct a student's McNair project this summer. Prior to asking two of her profs to co-direct it, my student came to me, agonizing over whether to ask me or this other instructor (she didn't say who it was). Both of us, she claimed, were great at giving feedback and understood her research interests. Ultimately, in the interests of a compromise, she asked both of us to split the duties. Both I and this other mystery prof agreed, separately. I emailed mystery prof, who, as it turns out, is a faculty member in the Communications department, to say something along the lines of, "hey, I hear ur gonna help direct Susan's project. awesome! lol. let's do lunch. ttyl." [No--not in those words, but you get the point.] So, we met at the campus dining hall one Friday for a friendly chat.
Come to find out, mystery prof is a rhetorician. She is a Burkean, like me. She has taught courses in political rhetoric and persuasion (!!!). She is "descended" from a dissertation director who studied under Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, whom I had just seen give an excellent keynote a month before on women's presidential rhetorics (rhetoricians tend to talk about our rhetoric/composition mentors in terms of "lineage" metaphors, and, though alluding to a kind of familial relationship with one's major profs may seem strange to those on the "outside," it makes sense to some of us). The similarities were hysterical, and I realized that, finally, I had a "colleague" in the sense of meeting another person who can discuss rhetorical "stuff" with the same arsenal of cool vocabulary words (like "anaphora") that I have. She just happens to be in a different department. Hmmm...
Here's the kicker--not surprisingly, this other faculty member mainly teaches public speaking for her first-year courses [she is, after all, in the "Communications" department across campus], while I teach primarily writing for mine [being, as I am, a denizen of the "English" department]. The speech/writing dichotomy lives on, folks, and I dare not go into any more tangents on this issue than this post should contain.
Even more "amusing" is that I truly believed when I took my position that I was the only rhetorician at LU and that I was, in fact, the first this college had seen in at least a decade and a half. I was special!
How interesting--I went two years at this institution without knowing there was another one of us rhetoric crazies lurking about. How did that happen? It happened because of the "tragic split" [which obviously still exists one some level] that resulted in rhetorically trained people being kind of funneled into positions that make use of their talents as needed--rhetoric does, after all, cover a tremendously vast number of areas. It branches out, for example, into the social sciences (and it would not surprise me to find that quite a few of us are happily and productively employed in soc. departments somewhere out there).
The result of finding a rhetoric colleague when you have deluded yourself into believing you are "big rhetorician on campus" is kind of like finding out you have a sibling...like that moment in "The Parent Trap" where Hayley Mills realizes she has unknowingly spent half her summer in a camp with, well, Hayley Mills (but without the resultant cat fights that made that film so much fun to watch--fun except for the part where they sing that god-awful duet).
But what really interests me about this case is that both of us work at the same institution, and even this one institution cannot quite decide exactly which department rhetoric people fit in. Insofar as we are all basically "communications" faculty in a sense, perhaps we should discuss these things. But more intriguingly, perhaps the strange dispersal of rhetoric faculty to different departments will continue, until every department has at least one resident rhetorician who is plotting with the other rhetoricians to take over the world. Naaahhh...I suppose a more likely, revolutionary step would be for us to even find out that the others exist on our own campuses. Baby steps...
Oh, if you don't get the post title, here's a clue (God love "Little Britain"):
Me, at five, in all my Strawberry Shortcake obsessed splendor (and if you look real close you can also see "Western" Ken and Barbie in their Winnebago at the bottom corner)
Sara: I teach composition, rhetoric, and literature courses at a local university. And, when I have the opportunity, I paint watercolors. I am married to Brian, the wonderful man with whom I am enjoying a fantastic life and who loves wine as much as I do.
Brian:
I love poetry and wine and food. But I love nothing more than making my beautiful wife smile and laugh.
