This August I am moving to Indiana to attend Purdue's Composition and Rhetoric program. It will be about two and a half years of course work followed by a dissertation that seems to take most a year and a half, possibly two. If all goes well, I'll end up with a PhD. All the fees are waived plus a stipend and health insurance provided I teach one class a semester, which of course I will, beginning this August. This is all good and exciting news, old news if I've spoken to you in person anytime in the last couple months, but serious life changes await and I've been doing a lot of thinking, chatting, moving towards planning, about what these next four months are going to look like.

As much complaining as I've done about my employer in the last five years, I am so ready, in part because of the trial by failure after failure my hair is turning white rapidly, to formally study Rhetoric and Composition. A study of what writing is, how it can be taught, a history and sociology of the written word, along side philosophy and theory. There's formal rhetoric, ancient Greeks and Aristotle, what we like to think western civilization is based on, there's rhetorics of particular groups of people, say the rhetoric of the medical profession or the rhetoric of twitter, and there's also more philosophical and psychological questions about how we identify with the written word, and how we come to ideas through articulation. This is what I'm most interested in, a kind of applied philosophy in the context of the classroom. And there's another part about the actual nuts and bolts of classroom application, so it's also a kind of an education degree.

I might be wrong about some of this, but that's what I understand about "Rhet/Comp." Teaching writing for six plus years has gotten me pretty curious about what exactly I've been doing this entire time. Teaching writing, along with ESL and pronunciation, alongside my own writing, poetry and whatnot (this blog qualifies as "whatnot") has lead to many many questions about what actually works and why. I'd like to be able to not just teach and write, but to talk about what it all means in a context outside of my own experience. Plus I'd like to get paid three to four times what I'm making currently. Which leads me back to complaining about the insanely dysfunctional bureaucracy that is my employer. I can do that now that I'm leaving. But I won't. Freedom!

Hi. It's about noon on Monday. It was supposed to be raining but its not. As I keep saying: we need the rain because it's been very dry. Dry like a bone or a dry rock. This weekend I went hiking up Dry Rock where I could see all the way to Dry Bone Valley. Not true. It rained all day Saturday and into Sunday. Made music on Friday watched an old movie with Dara on Saturday. On Sunday I went to visit Amy and Steven's new baby. Very cute. Then came home and finished the last hundred fifty pages of Reamde, the newish Neal Stephenson that was really hard to stop reading. Normally this is good when it comes to novels, but it felt a little yucky at times, addicted to turning pages. A thousand plus and now I am free to read something not so controlling.

You may notice to the right that I've added a blog, a Tumblr account that I'm going to use for posting articles that I used to post on Google Buzz, the now defunct social media service that worked though gmail. Buzz worked well for me, but apparently nobody else liked it, so it disappeared along with my ability to share articles. There are many services that do this, but my doubts about sharing information with strangers and gigantic companies that mine my data to sell it back to me always keeps me from committing to an entrenched matrix of public internet activity indicators. I still regret the time I filled out my Facebook profile after drinking a full cup of Theraflu. Even though I erased what I wrote, it's still out there. No doubt, in the middle of a job interview ten years from now they'll ask me how often I abuse over the counter painkillers.

One of my proudest internet moments was deleting my Facebook account last Spring, after I had to reject a student's request to be Facebook friends. I never know what to do in these situations, and so decided that instead of grappling with this question at the end of every semester, I would just delete the question itself. I never used it anyway. I'm an introvert you know, and sharing my junk via somebody else's tightly controlled system always made me squeamish. This blog is personal but I leave large swaths of my life unmentioned. Which are usually the parts and stories that make me look bad. Maybe they can come up with a service that will let us be the assholes we really are. But don't get me wrong. I love the internet, and am happy to have a platform that enables me to write whatever and put it out there. Magical tools that enable us to build houses, or put people in the hospital. As if anything outside of ourselves could satisfy us.

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Who designs noodles? Is there somebody in charge?
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A little introduction to this poem: Lorine Niedecker was a poet, Wisconsin born and raised and died, who was loosely affiliated with the second wave of modernists, a small group of "Objectivist" poets, that included Charles Reznikoff, Louis Zukofsky, and George Oppen. They were largely influenced by the visual art esque poetry of William Carlos Williams (think The Red Wheel Barrow), the idea that there is "no ideas but in things." Niedecker wrote in the vein but was not published much until the 60's, when all of a sudden she became a little more popular until her death in 1971.

During the 50's she wrote a series of poems called For Paul, for the new born son of Louis Zukofsky, who she had a long running correspondence with. However during the 30's Zukofsky and Niedecker had a love that resulted in an abortion. During the 40's, when Paul was born, they continued to correspond and these For Paul poems were based on what Zukofsky said about his son's growth. Niedecker never had any children herself. The poems were a mix personal information alongside larger historical events, though they were never published due to Zukofsky's discomfort with them. Here is one these poems:

Understand me, dead is nothing
whereas here we want each other,
silence, time to be alone
and Paul's growing up—
baseball, jabber, running off to neighbors
and back into the Iliad—"do you really believe
there were gods, all that hooey?"
And his violin—improvising
made a Vivaldi sequence his,
better than I could have done with poetry
at twice his age...
so write your father, L. before P.

A start in life for Paul.
The efforts of a life
hold together as Einstein's
and lead to expectations of form.

To know, to love ... if we know nothing,
Baruch the blessed said, would we exist?

For Paul then at six and a half
a half scholarship—
turn the radio dead—
tho your teacher's gone back to Italy
stumped by American capital.

In my mind, the child said,
are rondeau-gavottes 1 to 11,
here is number 12.

Bluebird

You can't expect
the milk to be delivered
to your house
by a bluebird
from a picture book
you looked at
at the age of four:
he's much older
now, can't carry those
bottles 'neath his wing,
can hardly even carry a tune
with his faded beak
that opens some nights
to leak out a cry
to the horrible god
that created him.

Don't think I'm
the bluebird, or that
you are. Let him get
old on his own and
die, like a real bluebird
that sat on a branch
in a book, turned his head
toward you, and radiated.


________-Ron Padgett

Two Quotes

"I said to them, look at the Taliban. They believe in their cause, and that sustains them. You people have no cause. You don't believe in anything. And these guys just sat there in their chairs. They agreed with me."

"In rural communities especially there's very strong feeling that the land belongs to you and you belong to it, and if you lose that, you're not just dislocated physically, but you start to lose a sense of who you are."

**

An Afghani businessman talking to other Afghani businessmen and Kai Erikson on displacement.

Freedom Story

After eleven years of slaving over the hot stove
a yellow bird came to
tell her she didn't have to do it anymore. This freedom

was all consuming, like a grease fire
late at night when all you have to fight it is a grease
monkey fire. "Where will I go?" she asked herself.

"What will I do without this claptrap husband of mine,
this virtual Tiger Woods of a bitch?"
What is the opposite of sitting in a patch of flowers?

What is the square root of decision?
"It's not an emergency," she thought, "I can stay here for as long as I like."
Silent dreamer! I want to hatch from a dragon's egg!

We need more training to leave the dojo.
Seventeen years isn't a short time at all to become a master.

From the Haruki Murakami book What I Talk About When I Talk About Running:

I don't think most people would like my personality. There might be a few - very few, I would imagine - who are impressed by it, but only rarely would anyone like it. Who in the world could possibly have warm feelings, or something like them, for a person who doesn't compromise, who instead, whenever a problem crops up, locks himself away in alone in a closet?

These are the ingredients for my new shaving cream/gel: Organic Sucrose, Organic White Grape Juice, Organic Coconut Oil, Organic Olive Oil, Organic Shikakai Powder, Organic Fair Deal Hemp Oil, Organic Jojoba Oil, Organic Corn Starch, Organic Lemongrass Oil, Organic Lemon Oil, Organic Lime Oil, Citric Acid, Tocopheral.

It's like smearing food on my face, and then shaving it off with plastic razor. It smells like food, and I think as I shave, if things get tough, I could probably eat my shaving gel/jelly, maybe put it on a piece or bread or leather.