These are a few of my favorite things.

1. our family doesn't *have* to do anything, go anywhere, be anybody on this particular saturday. The feeling of Shalom is deep and rich and beautiful

2. Emily H. gave me my favorite compliment yesterday while stopping by the office to say hey

3. I boiled a chicken carcass and leftovers down to broth for about six hours last night after dinner. Slow food is an even more profound favorite thing in the face of watching SuperSizeMe last night.

4. I found a card from my sister which is my favorite birthday card ever (along with a few others). The cover says: "Nothing worse could happen to one than to be completely understood." This seems like a good summary of a prescriptive philosophy of human relations. Do you remember Schmuel's Big Bouncy Ball from Myerhoff's Number Our Days? He tells this story:

I have a friend. a woman i know already many years. One day she is mad at me. From nowhere it comes. I have insulted her, she tells me. How? I don't know. Why don't I know? Because I don't know her. She surprised me. That's good. That is how it should be. You cannot tell someone. " I know you." People jump around. They are like a ball. Rubbery, they bounce. A ball cannot be long in one place. Rubbery, it must jump.
So what do you do to keep a person from jumping? The same as with a ball. you take a pin and stick it in, make a little hole. It goes flat. When you tell someone, "I know you," you put a little pin in.

5. Thanksgiving in Michigan -- it's my favorite holiday to be with my family...my kids are counting down -- 3 days til we leave...

You.

You always lead the way back to us.

When I've lost something, I'm always too busy looking for the larger picture, to realize how much it means that:

I can't find something that I need.

..

And you never mention what you're doing.

You're not given to grand pronouncements, so sometimes I have no idea that its even happened:

I just feel different. I feel like I've found something.

..

And if I'm lucky, I pay attention to that feeling.

And realize that you can't find what you didn't lose, and that truly finding something is only possible when:

there's true need.

..

And even thought I may not be smart enough, on my own, to understand this need that radiates from me, toward you:

I do need the way that you're always giving me:

You.

the unsayable as transformation

today i found something that i think is pretty funny. there really really is, truly, a blogring called:

"all my favorite christian bands say fuck"

(now, mom, if you're reading, i want to make it clear that *I* did not just say that word. I would *never* say that word. Daniel, on the other hand...well, i'm just saying that maybe you should reconsider who should be your favorite son.)

(and in case you're reading and you're *not* my mom, my mom insists that she has no favorites, but my little brother convinces her to make sandwiches for him all the time. and plus, she calls me sometimes just to tell me what a hard life he has. It's kind of crazy, because he actually has this really posh job where he just sleeps until ten in the morning and then wakes up and tells a bunch of people what to do.)


so what i think is great about this is that B. Romanowski, in his good book, Eyes Wide Open, labels a group of christians as:

"Christians who drink beer."

and back when I was in college and John Fisher got banned from ever coming back to Cedarville, he had just written his book:

"real christians don't dance" (only with the don't cross out)

so my question is:

when will the madness end?!?! first christians dance, then they drink beer, then they (!) say fuck?

(no i didn't say that. I was just quoting. for goodness sakes, i'm a christian! )

My dad used to explain to me that one of the reasons that we didn't allow singers of "special music" (and if you don't know what that is -- ask me sometime for another interesting cultural analysis) to hold their microphones was because there was still some residual connotative baggage for those who had seen rock and roll become a cultural phenomenon and knew that the microphone had actually been used (!) to simulate sex acts.

Don't EVEN get me started on the ways those rockers used their guitars.

So anyway, my point is, that the name of this blogring is pretty fascinating. There's a very intentional interpenetration in these terms that introduces a new rhetorical possibility:

that people who have "favorite christian bands"

can also appreciate the value and power of saying:

"fuck"

(i'm telling you, I absolutely have impunity on that one. that actually even has the quotes around it. I would *never* say that word...)

John Cawelti writes that the successful popular fiction writer is able to manage:

"the delicate balance between convention and invention"

and I always tell my classes that this is *the* trick. If you can dwell for long enough in a given semiotic domain until you have the "chops" to use their conventions well -- then you will both earn the right (with them) to *invent* / introduce new ideas to them and the ability to say these things in ways that are hear-able.

but obviously finding that place is quite a precarious business.

micro cinema

one of the blowhards takes on the problem of distribution and short cinema recently. He writes ambivalently about Amazon.com's new series of short films, and asks:

Amazon: the new Paramount?

He's kidding -- but the question feels like a good one to me. Robert Rodriguez issued a challenge to BIG filmmakers in the Utne Reader a while ago -- make small movies to democratize (again) the access to storytelling machinery in our culture...

I think these films on amazon (at least the two that are up there) are at the bottom of the barrel in terms of short films. They're both hackneyed hollywood myths in the barest bones telling. The shorts at triggerstreet (the finalists) are much better quality. Sometimes you'll find good ones at IFILM.

do you know about microcinema already? It's an occasional theme of mine -- maybe something i'll actually open one sometime later. You should, though, if you're interested in alternative modes of storytelling, check out some of the links in my alt.story section way down on the right hand side....

Have you ever not liked what you're doing?

Felt DESPERATE to get out of your skin? To do something. Anything. that was different than what you're supposed to do? (and presumably if you're mature and responsible) Anything different than the supposed to that you're laboring away at just now?

Sometimes I'd like to live inside of sensuous music like my new favorite magnet or Over The Rhine.

Tonight I feel like ironing hundreds of rows of shirts. Ironing and ironing and ironing. Flying while I'm ironing. And changing into the starchy warm fabric every few minutes.

Time to wake up

I need to go up to wake up Jaelyn so we can make it to school on time. Before school was an every day thing for her -- she woke up every day by seven a.m.. Sometimes earlier. Now she won't wake up if I don't wake her.

It would be great if at several key junctures during every day, you could wake up again, you know? Emerge from the tedious reality that your day becomes into some new reality?

You know how the rules of dreams seem so totalizing and exhausting sometimes. And what a relief it is to wake up and realize that it isn't true after all?

What if we kept realizing that over and over?

It isn't true.

Wake up.

what I noticed in chicago...

1. a line of blue trucks with big cranes on them lined up next to a huge line of 747s, all sitting dormant on the tarmac.

2. that the endless rows and blocks of perfectly symmetrical suburban chicago laid flat against the midwestern terrain resemble a computer chip or trash on an assembly line depending on how high you are.

3. the largest part of academic conferences would be best characterized as academic masturbation.

4. the power of rhythm and ritual and markings can make everyone feel the same about everything. (after an evening spent with these guys)


5. (in one of the delightfully non-self-indulgent sessions I attended) I heard about how tourism of the amish country is often a way for time famished middle america to *consume* a nostalgic past where time was aplenty. Slow food (like the stuff at this place where our wedding rehearsal dinner was) serves as a rhetorical mechanism for this purchase / performance.



6. academic conferences are not, after all, fantastic opportunities to catch up on your novel writing ambitions. I'm so far behind that my EXCEL spreadsheet says that if I keep on at this rate, I won't finish until mid-December. Trust me, I'm going to prove this spreadsheet wrong.

7. good wine + good friends + long downtown walks + chilly clear November nights = some funny and revitalizing moments...

i'm back to grading and novel writing....