PIZZA!!!

Hooray!  Sodium Girl, introduced to me by the great Emily Nolan, has posted a super low sodium pizza.  YUM.

Sodium Gir's Pizza:  GalloLea Organics. (Photo sodiumgirl.com)

Here is the recipe.  I will be able to add a little cheese instead of the carrots, and am way, way excited.
Eat on, my friends.

Miscellany, wishful thinking, and a teaser or two

Hello again, and sorry for the hiatus.  I should be back in full once-weekly-post swing in a week or so.
My next post will likely be about historiography, insularity, and dinosaurs; I hope to follow it with reflections on attending the UNC-UT basketball game with my parents, hosting my in-laws for Christmas, and taking a New Year's trip to Galapagos.

While working through my last week of this semester, I've increasingly missed blogging.  Instead of putting it off until I could write a longer piece with in-text citations and everything, I thought I'd take advantage of the urge to write and shoot for  a shorter post.  Several topics have come to mind-- the background of Christmas traditions, the Jesus v. Santa dialogues, the UN climate talks, and various, public moments of extraordinary bravery, but I don't have as much time to spend on them as I'd like.

So, I'll spend what little time I have on myself-- and you, hopefully-- by sharing some Christmas wishes:

1. (you knew this was coming) That at least one of my friends sponsors, fosters, or adopts a shelter pet. Read common misconceptions about shelter pets here, but know one thing: I am pro-adoption, not particularly anti-breeder.
2. That some trees are spared by people wrapping amazing gifts are in even more amazing gift-wrap scarves, like this (there are totally awesome, less expensive alternatives as well).
3. That Santa, whoever he may be, drops the keys to my #1 gift of all time down the chimney.

I've provided some scholarly links, some news articles, and a bit about dogs.  It seems, then, that I've got no excuse for not returning to my schoolwork.

Until soon,  friends.

PS: Today is the last feast day of Our Lady of Guadalupe-- a tradition I hope my grade / middle school in Austin keeps up.  Vive la virgen!  (google for more info on a great story; NPR had a very cool interview with a Franciscan friar on the topic, as well)

Values of the Hidden

You might have heard about the Carrier IQ app that "logs text messages, dialed calls, URL searches and more -- all without the user's knowledge" (Gilbert).  If you haven't, you can read about the online exposure and the response in this article.  In strikingly similar news, Ally Bank is tracking users' locations as well, because "[i]n these economic times, financial institutions like banks are looking for extra revenue sources" (Yoo, in Kavoussi of HuffingtonPost).  Both phone carriers and the bank, though, failed to tell clients that they were being tracked.  I know, I know. We're all appalled.  But are we surprised?
There's been a lot of political talk about the rights of corporations lately, and given what we know about Google and Facebook privacy, we might not be as shocked as we'd wish.  
"Outrageous!" I find myself thinking.  "They've got no business tracking my whereabouts, purchases, texts, and searches."  And yet, it is just that-- business. So what does this mean for the -- dare I use scare quotes-- "individual"?  
It means that we've become commodities; it means our secrets have become commodities.  What we do with our time, in our homes, on our phones and computers, has become valuable to others, to strangers, to anonymous and autonomous corporations.  How did this happen?  Whose fault is this? What can we do?  And importantly, on what do we base our assumption that we can, and indeed should, hide what we've been doing from these faceless, nameless, number-crunchers?  What is the value of a secret?

Lelio Orsi, 1555

I recently turned in a paper about what I call the "Economy of Secrets" in two of the Canterbury Tales.  I spent most of my time on what editors usually call "The Second Nun's Tale," which is based on the legend of Saint Cecilia, who seems to come from the 5th or 6th century.  Like so many saints' legends, hers is the story of her virgin martyrdom at the hands of persecuting Romans.  
On her wedding night, she tells her husband that she has a secret.  He's fine with that, and promises his discretion in exchange for her revelation.  "I have an angel who protects me from anyone who would love me uncleanly (physically)," she responds.  Rightfully skeptical, her husband Valerian tells her that he can't see an angel, but if she will show him the creature, he will do as she wishes.   Cecilia replies that he must be confessed and baptised in order to see the angel, and his conversion sparks a series of events that allows her to convert the hearts of countless others until her martyrdom.
Although I began my research looking for ways in which the body was valued, and how that value might have related to the narrative strategy of the original legend and Chaucer, I ended up discovering something else: the secret has extraordinary purchasing power.  In a way, the whole story is set in motion when she trades her secret for his confidence.  After converting her husband and his brother (who are martyred for their belief in the middle of the story), she is also brought into the authorities for practicing Christianity. Although her faith has been revealed, the public interrogation provides her with a last (and her largest) audience to convert.  Ultimately she gives her life-- her bodily life, anyway-- to turn pagans  into Christians, and Pope Urban takes her body away in the night to bury it in secret.  On the hallowed ground of her hidden body he builds a church, which according to the legend still inspires worshipers.  
Her body becomes the secret-- the object valued as something once hidden, now revealed.
It seems, then, that we've had a preoccupation with the powers of secrets for quite some time.  Although the situations are quite different, both my newsfeed and this saint's life demonstrate the inherent value of secrets to outsiders and the power of disclosure.  And yet, when Cecilia's story narrates a series of exchanging secrets, our current story tells a far different tale.  What do we receive in exchange for our browser history, or GPS use, or MMS? Is ours the narrative of a zero-sum game rather than trade? Whether for profit, salvation, or persecution, we endow great value in secrets.  But given the current stakes, will we ever see a return on this investment?

A very brief post-Thanksgiving post

Welcome back, all!  I hope everyone is returning rested and rejuvenated.  I had an amazing time with 40 family members at mom's barn, decorated perfectly.  I'm hoping to get a pic of it soon!
We were lucky enough to meet up with family and friends at my cousin's deb party (Congrats, C!) and during the weekend.  I'm particularly thankful for an incredibly fun, kind family and inspiring friends.
As some of you know, I've been diagnosed recently with Meniere's Disease-- a condition that affects its sufferers differently, and about which very little is known.  The result of this diagnosis is that I have to limit my sodium intake to 1000-1200 mg a day-- a challenge that is difficult enough without the holiday food.  So I was worried about my first Meniere's Thanksgiving, but found great solace in an ah-mazing soup from sodiumgirl.com. I've listed the ingredients below; check her website for the full recipe.
Sorry for such a short post; I'll be back Friday (after my first paper is due) with more.
Until then, stay hungry (and saltless!)

• 1 teaspoon olive oil (or avocado oil for extra flavor)
• 4 cloves garlic, chopped
• 1/4 teaspoon whole coriander seeds
• 1 cup frozen corn
• 1 teaspoon chili powder
• 1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
• 2 to 4 boneless, skinless chicken breasts (116mg sodium per 1/4 lb, but most likely less if air-chilled and not plumped)
• 4 ripe tomatoes, roughly chopped
• 1 tablespoon no-salt added tomato paste (5 to 10 mg per tbsp)
• 1, 10-oz can no-salt added black beans (30mg per can) – optional
• Garnish: 2 to 4 green onions, sliced; 1 small red onion, diced; 1 avocado, diced; 1 lime, quartered; 1 jalapeno pepper or cayenne, diced or sliced; 1 cup shredded red cabbage (19mg per 1 cup); 2 tortillas, cut into strips

A very sad story and a little grey fur ball.

Many of you only know part of the story of what happened a day short of one year ago, so here's the whole thing.  Ready your Kleenex, kids.  Because this is a long post, and because parts will be familiar to some of you, I've annotated the paragraphs to optimize skimming.  If you want, skip it all and just watch videos: one of Beatrice and one of Tabitha.

The wreck>> Last November 17, Beatrice and Baloo got out of our back fence and were hit (and left) by a car only one block from our home. They were picked up by separate good samaritans; one person stopped for Beatrice and the person behind him got out of his car to see what was happening and saw Baloo in the woods.  The one who found Baloo called Drew, who followed him to the emergency animal clinic, where Beatrice was no where to be found.  He had called me immediately, and I was at the Trader Joe's near UNC.  I got in my car, cancelled dinner at my professor's house, and started calling other vets near our home.  Beatrice hadn't had her collar on; we'd taken it off for a photo shoot the night before because Campbell was having a "cutest dog" contest.  We had puppy pictures like these, but I didn't want to cheat.

I don't remember which one we submitted, but this is one of my favorites, taken at her first (ugh-- and only) birthday party that Dogtopia Cary hosted while we were getting married:

The nurse at the third place I called told me that she might have one fitting her description, and put the vet on the phone.  It was dark, and I was driving home in such a state of panic/disbelief that I was utterly, utterly calm.  "She didn't make it," I heard.  Ok.  That's fine.  I'm driving, so I have to make this work. Can't lose it now. "Alright," I said.  "Can I come see her?"  I called Drew to tell him what happened, and I frankly don't remember the exact order of things from then on.  I went to where Beatrice was, and waited for Drew before I saw her.  The people could not have been more kind, and kept asking me if I needed anything, or if I wanted a drink, or if I wanted to be in a room alone.  Absolutely not, I thought.  The presence of others was the only thing keeping me together.


At the clinics>> After we saw her we had to figure out what to do with her.  Not owning our home in Cary, we let the vet cremate her-- an act which still to me seems so violent that it's nearly inconceivable.  I wanted something of or from her; there was a very strange urge of materialism involved in those last minutes at the clinic.  I knew she had died.  I had seen her.  And when the nurse had brought her in, Drew moved to touch her and I had snapped at him, as a reflex, without really knowing why.  She was just that way, and I didn't want to disrupt her body.  It was as if our touch would have profaned this perfect object.  I'm still not sure why I felt the way I did.

Nevertheless,  I didn't want her ashes; even for me that's a bit morbid.  But they had the PERFECT solution.  They made a little paw imprint in wet cement for us and wrote her name at the bottom.  It was so appropriate-- a physical, palpable, visual impact of her little body on our big human world.

Then we went to the second clinic, where Baloo was in pretty bad shape.  Drew was understandably distraught, but being in my hyper-objective state, I could tell that, big picture, Baloo would be fine.  I couldn't stand that Drew was so stressed out, and the vet asked me if I were ok.  "No, I'm not. My dog just died.  His, however, will be fine.  She was just over a year old. He's five.  I'm not ok, but thank you for asking." This cruelty on my part (and the utter breakdown I had upon seeing Beatrice) belied my ever-useful, if still insufficient, coping mechanism of performing well through trauma.  I was totally unsympathetic, and I couldn't understand why my husband was all up in a bunch about the dog who would live.  Why couldn't he understand the vet's tone like I could? I was certain that Baloo would survive, but Drew seemed so much more doubtful.  I was right, but in the most trying night of our marriage so far, I was shamefully self-centered.


That bit of academia>> Those who have known me for a while will know that I've been fascinated with the rituals of death and burial for years.  This interest comes out in almost all of my papers, and has since college.  I don't think there's anything more illuminating about a cultural time and place than how people within it deal with loss, the afterlife, and the logistics of getting a loved one from one to the other. What I notice in retrospect is, despite pretty drastic changes in the Church in England (which is what I study),  what stays the same is the communal aspect of it.   Words in the service change; burial practices change; processions change; prayers for the dead change.  It all changes, except the assumption that no one mourns alone.  


Intervention of saints >> We had no body, no service,  no preparations to make.  There was no check-list of things to do; we faced coming home to a dark house with a lonely dog.  However, we arrived home to a scene so incredible that it still makes me all teary to remember.  We walked into our home with lights on and arms open.  Lucy and her roommate Casey met us at the door with Bojangles and ice cream-- and most importantly, hugs and sympathy.  They were in disbelief, too, and clearly upset.  They stayed with us for a bit, being heartbroken and mad as hell and utterly confused with us.  That camaraderie was absolutely what we needed; these were our fellow mourners, gathered in our kitchen and helping us search for solace in this extraordinary moment of sorrow.  I found great comfort in this late-night, impromptu wake.


Self-reflection about how selfish mourning is/was for me (irony acknowledged) >>What follows is a reflection of my first experience of really mourning, and things I learned about myself in the process.  Grief is SODAMNLONELY.  It sounds horrible, but I needed others to be sad.  I regret sending a mass text with "please don't call" in it; what I needed more than anything was the voices of friends and family who were so sweet to let me be upon my request, but to whom I was too proud to say "actually, scratch that, call me all the time."  I don't know why I needed that-- why I wanted others to miss her like I did, not just be sad because I was.  I remember sitting in front of my computer refreshing Facebook like you wouldn't believe, hoping that one more person had reached out, had been affected, was hurting.  Again, my mourning manifested in excruciatingly self-centered ways.  Where was the outpouring?  Where were all the phone calls?  Why did condolence cards not arrive that night at midnight?  It was a strange, strange desperation that still overtakes me from time to time.

Amazing friends and family support us>> We received incredible gifts of condolence,  like an enlarged version of this photo, which we see in our kitchen every day.
We got a children's book about "dog heaven" from Brianna, who helped me find Beatrice and reason with the bizarre adoption lady at Petsmart; she and her sweet Daisy accompanied Bryant and me (and then Beatrice too) on countless walks over my two years at SC.  The very next day we got a goody basket-- for us and, even more kindly, for Bryant-- from the amazing staff at Dogtopia Cary.  My sisters were extraordinarily sympathetic, and I live on their advice every day.  Drew's Campbell friend, Carson, came to sit with me when Drew couldn't be home and I wasn't at school.  We got wonderfully sweet cards from friends all over the place, with plenty to do besides write to us.  It all helped.  I am especially thankful for Nicole Fisks's emails, which helped me feel justified in grieving, less alone in sadness, and empowered by the remaining choices I had.


Our next step>> Yet when it came down to it, the house was quiet.  We'd always said that we wouldn't have three dogs again, assuming that we would eventually lose one to old age.  But losing the puppy was bizarre.  One lab was immobile, the other confused.  Neither of them was playing, and it was too much to bear.
We'd gone with a friend to a shelter so that he could find a puppy, which helped us get back in the mindset without any pressure.  And then, on the day after Thanksgiving, we went to Wake County (yes, the Wake County shelter that's been in the news) for their "black Friday" sale (all dogs were discounted in preparation for the holiday influx).  They only had one litter of puppies, so I knew we had to go then or else they'd all be gone.

We found a sizable litter of white fluffy things-- some with black spots about to come in, some with little brown patches.  And among this white fluffiness was one little grey thing.  She had very deep scars and scabs all over and the bluest eyes I'd ever seen.  We sat by their kennel, playing with most of them for nearly an hour.  Others came and fell in love with the one who might be spotted, or the one with the eye patch, and I watched as our choices dwindled, which is what I wanted, since we couldn't decide.  I was fixated by the one who was different, but Drew rightly worried that she might be sick and didn't want to see me lose two puppies in so short a time.  Yet I just couldn't let her go; she was the only one with grey fur, the only one with blue eyes, the only one with these horrible scabs (which we now know are the result of liquid burns).  As I wrote in my email introducing her to family and friends, we couldn't save Beatrice, but we could save her.  I realized that losing something I'd meant to protect-- not just to love, but to rescue-- was still haunting me, and indeed does to this day.
If I had felt alone in grief, she was alone in her pain, too.  She was the outlier, the injured one, the dark one. We brought Tabitha that very morning, just days before the first snow fell, and her sweet grey fluff was both striking and salvific against the silent whiteness all around us.

On Chaucer's Pardoner and Joe Paterno

In The Canterbury Tales, our dear friend Geoff Chaucer tells the story of others telling stories (about others).  It's a text rich in material for study, especially on narration and authority.  One of the most memorable characters/narrators is the Pardoner, a man whose job is collecting extorting money from penitents.  The Pardoner introduces his tale with a confession, admitting that he is a phony driven by avarice and listing some of his most egregious misdeeds, including peddling false relics.  His actual tale is a story that illustrates how destructive avarice can be, so this confession ultimately builds his credibility as its teller, establishing him as an expert on the issue.  But the sticking point for so many readers (and scholars) is the claim that links his confessional prologue to his tale about three greedy thieves seeking Death:
"For though myself be a ful vicious man,
A moral tale yet I yow telle kan" (460, 461 in Bevington).
He knows that he is a "vicious man" yet maintains that he can tell "a moral tale."  He's been perfectly up-front about his cheating, stealing, and ostensibly unrepentant self, so it seems unlikely that he'd lie in this instance.

I find myself trying to redeem the Pardoner here.  "He's at least honest; that's a start," I say.  But is it?  What happens when someone who does bad things does something good? Do we always see these notions as either withdrawals or deposits into our human-ness account, looking for good deeds to undue past cruelties, and expecting all our meannesses to undo that volunteer work we did in high school?

Regardless of the speaker, what's at stake here is really the difference between being a good person and doing good things.  We all think, say to ourselves, say to our loved ones, "good people can do bad things, and bad people can do good things."  This is certainly convenient.  But what this assumes is that what a person is, fundamentally, is static.  To assume that a good person can do bad things doesn't seem to account for the possibility of transition from "bad person" to "good person"-- or any mutability or boundary-blurring between.  One simply is good or bad, and is allowed (even expected?) to deviate from time to time.

How easily we as students, teachers, parents (of pets or people) hear and say that we meant better, that we're really not like that, that our actions this one time define or express us less than better moments.  Are we so involved in a culture of disclaimer that we can't even fathom being a bad person, if only for a moment?  And is it so impossible for someone to be bad one day and good the next?  Why must we couch all devious actions in the context of our personhood?  When do actions speak for themselves?

I saw the resurgence of a Taylor Mali poem about conviction on Twitter last night.  The youtube clip is here, and I encourage all to check this, and his other work, out frequently and thoughtfully.  Here is an excerpt from the poem that examines a trend of decreasing responsibility in writing and speech (my favorite bits are in bold):

What has happened to our conviction?
Where are the limbs out on which we once walked?
Have they been, like, chopped down
with the rest of the rain forest?
Or do we have, like, nothing to say?
Has society become so, like, totally . . .
I mean absolutely . . . You know?
That we've just gotten to the point where it's just, like . . .
whatever!

And so actually our disarticulation . . . ness
is just a clever sort of . . . thing
to disguise the fact that we've become
the most aggressively inarticulate generation
to come along since . . .
you know, a long, long time ago!

I entreat you, I implore you, I exhort you,
I challenge you: To speak with conviction.
To say what you believe in a manner that bespeaks
the determination with which you believe it.
Because contrary to the wisdom of the bumper sticker,
it is not enough these days to simply QUESTION AUTHORITY.
You have to speak with it, too. (taylormali.com)

During a week that's been particularly hard for me as a teacher (and therefore also as a student, wife, sister, and everything else), I'm thinking a lot about personal responsibility and open-mindedness.  But I'm not thinking about open-mindedness in terms of throwing the first stone, or living in a glass house.  I'm thinking about what it means to turn the gaze inward and see something ugly, or scary, or cruel, or BAD.  Are we, as Americans, less likely to do that than to excuse, or sugar-coat, or justify?  And if this is the case, what might be the cause of such resistance?  Is the internet world of celebrity divorce, rehab, madness, fetishes, and scandal somehow also one enmeshed in dissolving culpability?

Certainly,  the Penn State rape cover-up has been horrifying, disheartening, and strange.  Please notice that I used the word "rape" instead of sex scandal.  As Tommy Christopher points out in his awesome article for Mediaite found here, "Sandusky is not accused of 'having sex' with little boys, he is accused of raping them. In our civilization, 'sex' with a child is not possible, since a child cannot consent to sex" (Dear Media, It's not a 'Sex Scandal'...).  Watching ESPN and reading other news coverage of what was disclosed to a grand jury has shown me that perfectly articulate, professional men and women, working with the same knowledge-base about the accusations, are still not decrying Paterno outright.  There is a lot of "great coach, but this is horrible" and "he admits he should have done more, which tells us something" floating around.  I would like to think that I wait to hear all the facts before making a judgment, but the media seems to be suspiciously cautious about this case.  This unusual delicacy leads me to a question that renders Paterno a contemporary Pardoner:

over half a millennium after Chaucer, why is it still so difficult  to reconcile a horrible deed with an old man committed to promoting a cult of false relics and superstition, even after he admits to exploiting the ignorance of others?

Until next week, my fellow authorities. 

Halloween for Kids

We had a great Halloween here in suburbia!  Our tricker-treaters were all adorable, and we got great feedback on our decorations.  I changed out all the lights in the study with orange bulbs (not on in the photos) to backlight a ghost costume in the window and made crooked all of the prints hanging on the walls.  I was afraid no one would notice the prints, but  our first set of parents complimented the attention to detail.  A win, and a legacy of Mom's impeccable taste in lightbulbs over the years.

We hung Walt on our front porch, whose light we had also exchanged for an orange bulb.  He was originally out on a flagpole but had to seek cover because of the rain.  What's great about Walt is that he screams and shakes when he sees or feels anything (although we had this setting off because of all the little, little kids we got).  Quite frankly, he was really frightening; his desperation seemed so sincere that we could only assume he had been falsely imprisoned.  And so, the namesake: Sir Walter Raleigh.

Doubleday, 1902

And now to another set of kids: my class.  I showed them clips on Halloween morning of the 1931 and 1992 versions of Dracula and assigned excerpts for homework.  While their responses were less than stimulating, I'm looking forward to teaching a subject I enjoy. If you haven't read the book--now's the time!  It's a great read, regardless of the time of year.
I will almost certainly post on the secondary sources we're reading, so get excited for some crazy writings about just how interdisciplinary monsters really are.

Until soon, readers.

The Art (s and Crafts) and Science of Facial Recognition

Woo-hoo! It's almost Halloween, one of my favorite holidays.  Per a long-time, long-distance tradition with my mother, my first move was to sit "the family" down to watch Tim Burton's strange and inspiring The Nightmare Before Christmas.

Disney (Touchstone), 1993

I've found no better way to get in the goblins, ghosts, and ghouls mood than watching this movie.  To my horror, it was Drew's first time to watch it all the way through; he nevertheless found a noble way of commemorating its important place in our newly married tradition.

Disney.com

 

Impressive, no?

And Drew's not the only skilled at recognizing and rendering graphics across disparate media. 

(How's that for a segue!)  According to this article in LiveScience, Tel Aviv university is using computer software "based on facial recognition technology" to recognize-- and importantly, reunite-- "hundreds of thousands of fragments from medieval religious scrolls that are scattered across the globe" (Pappas).  Evidently, the program can distinguish handwriting, spacing, and even peculiar properties of the pages themselves.  

This new software isn't just for people who love old and dusty esoterica for ancientness' sake.  The Cairo Genizah (storage room for Jewish holy texts), for instance, "contains merchant's lists, divorce documents, and even personal letters" which will give scholars "a firsthand look at hundreds of years of history in the Middle East."  Indeed, scholars are even trying to use this technology to study the Dead Sea Scrolls, shown above.  For those interested, here is a LiveScience article about the Dead Sea Scrolls' digitization.

Well, that's all for now.  Until next time, stay ever-watchful; there's no telling what you might piece together.

"The pen is mightier..."

Having three dogs is awesome.  Their sweet faces, tail-wags, and "kisses" make us feel immediately adored.  But there are less emotionally satisfying scenes than, say, a dog greeting you eagerly at the door. Take this, for instance:
This is Tabitha, our youngest, by a new ink stain on our sitting room carpet.  You can see the wet-vac in the far right corner of the photo.  Yes, ladies and gents, the photo was taken after the cleanup.

Incidentally, the ink somehow hitched a ride on one of their toys and made a similar, though slightly less noticeable, stain in our TV room.

Even a house of professional students can underestimate the power a pen can wield.

Speaking Typing of pens, now to the academic segment of my post.  I've completely fallen in love with Twitter-- for scholarly purposes, of course.  Other than my friends, my favorite groups/sites to follow are Medievalists, Al-Jazeera English, Gawker, Huffington Post, and Slate.  I posted yesterday about the A-J's compilation of international responses to G/Qaddafi's death, which I hope you found interesting, challenging, and revealing.

That I saw it on Twitter and reposted to a blog speaks to my next posted article from A-J, "Mass media, or public media?"  Its blurb reads, "The way communication is organised is developing as public societies encourage deliberations between equals."  WAIT! Don't give up! This is a really, really cool article, despite the brutally bumpy start.  Below is a slicker snippet describing the difference between public and mass societies.

In a public society the archetype of communication is a conversation between equals where 'virtually as many people express opinions as receive them' and 'communications are so organised that there is a chance immediately and effectively to answer any opinion expressed in public'. A public, as opposed to a mass, can translate its opinions into effective action. It can change policy as its opinions change. In a mass society, on the other hand, the most characteristic form of communication is a broadcast that delivers one unanswerable voice to millions of quiet and attentive listeners. There is little or no scope for individuals to answer back to the messages they receive. There is certainly no way that the inhabitants of a mass society can translate their opinions into politically effective action.

Certainly, we can see what's at stake here.  The article goes on to suggest that shortcomings in the media over the recent years have inspired "politically motivated publics" to assemble online and in person, having recognized that mainstream media's coverage "doesn't make sense, that the machinery of representative politics is broken, and that these two are aspects of the same problem."   


Here is the rest of the article. Enjoy!
Until soon, my fellow media participants.  Keep your pens on the ready-- and away from pets.

Holy rhetorical analysis, Batman!

IF ONLY I had time in my rhetoric of news unit to cover this! I might just print it out for them anyway. Below is a link to responses across the globe to Gaddafi's death. Wildly, wildly fascinating insight.

Gaddafi's death: World reaction - Africa - Al Jazeera English

Let's do this thing

I'm determined to make this blog work.  Here we go again.

The semester has begun, and I'm on UNC, but not Duke, fall break.  At least I have Friday off!

Some non-academic highlights of the semester:
trying to get involved with Second Chance Pet Adoptions
helping pups get adopted through Middle Mutts (love-out to Nicole Fisk!)
chatting with Brianna about dresses
an amazing weekend in the mountains with Emily, etc.
planning a trip to DC (now postponed until December)
celebrating Tabitha's first birthday with best sister-in-law of ALL time and Drew
started allergy shots-- in a year my eyes might not be puffy all the time!

Teaching this semester has been rough, not least because my class starts at 8am.  And we all know how much of a morning person I'm not.  But I've also tried a lot of new things which have proven less productive than I'd hoped, like my visual analysis of comic books unit.

William Morrow Paperbacks, 1994

I had expected the rhetoric of news unit, which we're in the middle of right now, to be better than it is, but it's an improvement for sure.  Also, we've had our first round of conferences and I always feel like I have a little better grasp on things once I speak to everyone face-to-face.
Sadly, some of my students have had some serious issues, whether personal or physical, and that's been hard to keep track of.  Nevertheless, they are all great, great kids who are tolerating this class admirably.

M Nagle, New York Times

I've really enjoyed my 17th century class at UNC, which is a total shock.  We started with Donne, who usually drives me crazy.  But somehow he was different this time, and that is no doubt due to Dr Barbour's teaching. Un-freakin-believable, this guy.  I could listen (and watch-- his lectures are highly dramatic) to him talk about anything.  He's electric. Even our meetings are awesome.  He is the most thoroughly engaged, inspiring professor I've ever had, and has done more than accommodate me in a class that's so many centuries ahead of my own interests.  I'm totally, totally stoked that he'll be on my minor committee!

The Duke class is challenging, which I love.  Dr Aers leaves it all to us-- here's a recommended reading list, do what you will-- and there's a lot to be said for that kind of self-starting scholarship.  The seminar has warmed up a bit, though it's still a bit awkward at times.  The biggest perk so far is that my new hero, Michael Cornett, gave a presentation on ALL the English (or Latin, written in England) confessions.  I emailed him to follow up and the man replied by sending me his entire nearly 900-page dissertation.  At this point in my career, every book I want to buy is close to $300, so getting his unpublished but invaluable research over my computer rocked my life.  He just sent me this damn thing, and then recommended a seminar paper topic!  Here's the real closer, though.  He scanned a 16th century confession manuscript that follows quite closely an 8th century confessional prayer by Alcuin.  He sent me the images and I'm transcribing it now.

Speaking of book accessibility, I received my Kindle (and its burnt-orange cover) and am loving it!
More details on what I'm reading, how I'm cleaning up a massive, massive pen leak (courtesy of Tabitha) on two carpets, and how we're spending the weekend to come.

Jerusalem on the mind

I’ve been reading Reynolds Price’s Three Gospels, which has me thinking a lot about my adult-life-long dream to go to Jerusalem.  An interesting article on traveling there

new blog, new post

This blog, as its name suggests, is about home and school.  I grew tired (read: embarrassed) by flooding the fb newsfeed, so I decided to take the leap to posting on a site that is explicitly about my life and interests.  So, onward.