The family portrait. Its representational value - or its compositional value - is recognition: my grandfather, grandmother, great-grandmother, father, uncle. We find the namesake (Rose). The pattern of male philosophy (grandfather to father to me). The most dominant real life figure (grandmother) stands behind them all.  The last figure is problematic. An aunt who was only my aunt before I was born. How does one represent that kind of relationship?

Even odder: the cooking apron around my father’s waist. If there is a punctum here for me, it is that apron. What was he, who does not cook, cooking? The image on his apron: A mad, crazy cook making a hot dog. Not a typical culinary representation.

I am obsessed with the culinary. Food shows. Craft beer. Cooking. This punctum strikes me for it suggests a cooking legacy (even if that legacy never existed). If I depend entirely on representation, the familial legacy should involve home repair, a garage of tools, woodwork, car maintenance. Cooking is not represented in this legacy. But if I imagine a leagacy by focusing on a wayward, striking detail (punctum), I find cooking. McLuhan wrote that literacy created abstract time and led man to eat (behavior dictated by organization patterns, not desire or emotion). In this literate photographic moment, I am led to a metaphoric eating, a quest to gain nourishment from a non-representational meaning the family portrait creates. There is meaning, and I am looking to foreground that meaning. It is found, though, not in the moment of cutting a wedding cake (being led to eat via ceremony, not hunger), but in the apron. It is the moment of being led to eat (exigence) that is at the heart of the literate experience (writing).

Meta: Writing lends itself to fragmented entries. Bits and pieces of a day, a moment, a thought, a joke, a blog post. What if every day cold be organized as a series of fragments? Why didn’t the paragraph escape the boundaries of the page when it was invented? Today, we would have nothing but paragraphs. No essays. Just paragraphs.

Classic Rock: The iTunes radio option offers “classic rock.” Each option has its own byline: “Classic rock from those who know it best!”  “The best rock period!” “The nation’s best rock!” Usually, the declaration is emotional, marked by the exclamation point (Elaine got carried away from exclamation points - to the extent that even a phone message became riddled with them). Why classic rock? Its “classic” status? I am, after all, a member of an academic department that treasures the classic. Classic words. Classic texts. Classic authors Classic ideas. “Nobody reads the classics anymore,” someone always laments.  Only classic rock is belittled.

Barthes: I think of that repetitive Barthes line: he yearned to… Sometimes it becomes: he imagines a language that..or he considers a word that could…Barthes employs the rhetoric of possibility. After structuralism, why be tied to concrete ideas or tasks? And this possibility is a sense of selfhood in the third person. Its importance? Ego as the possible other. In my own fragments of possibility, I write, he wanted to drink a Russian River so badly….

Daycare: A dozen kids with runny noses, calling each other mommy, spreading disease, having their diapers changed. At any moment, I walk in, they are all seated around a tiny table, with handfuls of crackers stuffed into their mouths while they attempt to steal their neighbors’ crackers as well. Every daycare moment I enter into feels hectic and crowded, but not in an oppressive way. There is room to move and observe. You can walk amid these kids as they hit each other or fall down clumsily. At home, with only one kid, everything feels very different.

• Reading. Kenny Shopsin’s Eat Me. Tales of attitude. My kind of thinker. The restaurant as site for relationships.
• Suddenly Googling: Lefse. Probably too difficult to make. And so many Norwegian bakeries are still churning them out for mail order. Potato bread rolled thin. Filled with whatever you want (eggs, potato, cheese, and so on).
• Fooling: Vered.  Sneaking objects into her toy shopping cart that don’t belong (it comes with eggs, apple, and cereal box). Any object that didn’t come with it gets a big NO from her (spoon, puzzle piece, sock, our cat).
• Suddenly wanting to be: Kenny Shopsin. The antithetical academic role model. But his pedagogy works.
• Knowing I should buy: A Mizzou hoodie. Nothing at all wrong with interpellation. I have been hailed. We’re number 11!
• Not paying attention: To the election. My party isn’t running anyway.
• Drinking: You have to read the other blog for that information.

from the genre of “Vague Notes” - notes that do not claim authenticity, though they may, indeed, be authentic

On the Way to Louisville

- Graffiti on the wall of a building (abandoned?) off of I-70 in downtown St. Louis: “You go girl.”

- The view of East St. Louis from the highway. “Can we stop and look around,” Jenny asks.

- Overhead car phone conversation: “She still hasn’t pooped?”

- Howard Stern. Oct 14. Played on the iPod.

- Two roast beef and cheese sandwiches.

In Louisville

- The only picture I took. The back of a chair in the auditorium where plenary speakers gave talks.

In New Albany, Indiana

- At NABC, the waiter tells a few of us waiting: “It will be an hour wait.” Everyone else leaves. Fifteen minutes later, we sit down.

In Louisville, The Brown Hotel, a Conference Reception

-After gobbling down three plates of free food, Jenny asks: “No dessert?”

In Louisville, The Brown Hotel, the First Room We are Given

“Looks like someone was murdered here,” Jenny says. A big square has been cut out of the wallpaper. There are empty glasses and an empty Bud bottle on the table. The sheets are missing. Cabinets are open.

On the Way to Columbia

- Sandwiches sitting in a heat tray in a gas station outside of Evansville, Indiana. A sign on the door says: No tobacco products today.

- A truck stop in Nashville, Illinois. We order two patty melts to go. Then Jenny opts to try the chocolate pie. “It’s chocolate pudding,” I note. “You don’t like it?” she asks. “I know what I’m in for when I go to diners and truck stops,” I say. “That’s why I go to them.”

- Driving into St. Louis, the traffic heading West into the city is backed up. Along I-70 West, Jenny looks over at the eastbound lane and notices that there are no cars. A police caravan then passes along. Obama’s entourage are heading for the event. “It must be difficult to stop interstate traffic,” I say. “You can lay out cones and whatnot, but at some point, the cars have to stop.”

- The graffiti on the building, “You go girl,” is still there.

• REO Speedwagon 7 disc set packed. Check.
• Socks with holes left aside for socks without holes. Check.
• Potato and cheese sandwiches still not made.
• What I Will Be Reading at night at the hotel: Beetle Baily #719 (Sarge yells at Beetle), Stories From the Swedish Heartland (ah, herring), No Man’s Land: The True Story of Frank Gifford. Check.
• How’s My Driving bumper sticker back on the car. Check.
• Blankets. Lots of ‘em. Not yet finished.
• Grouch Marx glasses with the eyes that pop out on springs. Ask neighbor for tenth time to please return them.
• Extract from the pineal gland of a male iguana. Check.

In the new JAC, Volume 28: My folksonomic essay, “Folksono(me).”

Also, a collaborative piece by our two good Purdue friends that is next on my reading list.

Me: Oh boy. Look at this post linked to from InsideHigherEd’s Around the Web. It’s our old crazy buddy. Oh boy. Yet another “Don’t people realize how hard professors work in the summer?” bit. I’m going to attack her.

Wife: Give it up. That schtick is old.

Me: What schtick?

Wife: The attack shtick. You got to get some new material.

Me: But she’s calling “correspondence” work. Correspondence? I exchange at least 50 emails a day. Who cares?  She’s fretting over a couple emails sent over the entire summer. Oh boy. Professors work hard in the summer. Right. I’m on 12 month contract and I’m not complaining. “I wrote an article.” Wow. One article. I’m going to attack.

Wife: Let it go.

Me: (Looking down at keyboard). Dawg. You’re right.

A few mintues later.

Me: I really want to attack….

Debbie’s Friday talk on the body biography prompted the question I was too slow to ask: how is the method generalizable? Afterwards, we discussed briefly the possibility of other “celebrity” body biography (in place of Burke, McLuhan), but now I am thinking of one’s own body biography. An auto-body biography. In place of the obsession with bodily fluids (Burke), what other pattern might emerge?

Eyes: When I complained about seeing “double” at age six or so, I got glasses. But I only wanted dark, black glasses. That’s all I would let my dad buy me. Blues Brother glasses without the shades. 1950s style. Then I didn’t need them anymore. How can one’s eyes be fixed? Today, my eyes feel less than fixed. Reading. Reading. Reading. My eyes blur. I can’t see signs at night. I struggle to read the unimportant headline news. I have glasses again, but I hardly wear them.

Knee: Without athletic ability, I jump at the chance to pretend I have it. A pick up game a few months ago blew out my knee. Finally, put in a game, and my body choked. It collapsed upon itself. It knows its limits. It wants me to look weak in front of my colleagues.

Hair: The great male problem. A running joke. An embarrassment. A sign of age. There are the different kinds of losses. The Larry from the Three Stooges side accumulation (nothing in the middle). The monk look (big plate on the back left exposed). The rocker look (so thin, but grown out in the back to look stringy and long).

Height: The desire to be tall. To tower. To look down upon others. Even at small stature, I have no problem with the last item on this list. We compensate height with attitude. Or that’s what the cliche says. Maybe one can have attitude regardless of height? is it all envy in the end? Vered loves the game: SO BIG. Me too. But my game is metaphoric.