Bad Rhetoric

How this fellow got an interview with Rush, we’ll probably never know, but it turned out a very interesting portrait. I am reminded of Cicero near the end - influential, powerful, yet sidelined and consumed by ego, which led to a sudden and, in hindsight, predictable end. I wonder if Jindal will be his Octavian.

Henry Chadwick, translator of Origen’s Contra Celsum into English in the early ’50s, among a great number of other things, died last Tuesday. Without that work, much of Chapter 1 of my dissertation would be impossible.

I don’t pay a great deal of attention to sports most of the time, but I did watch Tiger Woods beat Rocco Mediate in a 19-hole U.S. Open playoff on Monday when my Mom was in town. That was incredible enough; now we learn that Woods was playing on a fractured tibia, as well as the newly reconstructed knee, for the entire U.S. Open, an act that will require him to sit out the rest of the season.

And he still won.

So I formatted what I have today into the graduate school’s formatting guidelines, or at least managed a reasonable fascimile of doing so.

The five chapter drafts that I have now, excluding the introduction and conclusion, neither of which I have written yet, come to 277 pages double-spaced, in 82,000 words, with roughly 150 entries in the references. The last figure does not include all the Greek and NSRV citations, which I’m not even going to bother trying to count.

The total page count, after the introduction and conclusion are written, will probably be very near 300. If I write Chapter 6, which I still intend to do,  it will end up around 350.

The number of references is a bit low for my tastes. Just the books and articles lying around on my desk, waiting for a mention or two, is enough to move it to 200, and I’d like it to be even more comprehensive, maybe 250 or so.

Much work lies ahead.

Saw Eddie Izzard tonight at the Orpheum downtown. He certainly hasn’t lost it.

Also, Barack Obama is now the Democratic nominee for all intents and purposes. So, other than a few spots of bad news, I think today was a pretty damn good day.

I arrived around 2 pm that Friday, went and found my cheap hotel, then went to the following panels:

Friday - C02 (Ancient Greek Technical Terms)

Saturday - E04 (Sacred Rhetorics of the Ancient World), F01 (Writing and the Sacred), Go7 (Obama), H02 (Has the History of Rhetoric Losts Its Coherence?), I01 (Supersession on Rhetorical Pedagogy)

Sunday - K09 (Hermeneutics), L08 (Pedagogy on the Edge, where I presented), N05 (The Rhetorical Turn in Jewish Studies), 011 (Rhetoric and Responsibility), P02 (Rhetorical Decisions: Ethics, Subjectivity, and Law)

Monday - Q08 (Theorizing Narrative and Poetry), R01 (Pondering Whiteness), S13 (Presidental Rhetoric)

Two presentations spoke to early Christian rhetoric in particular. F01’s “Disciplining the Word” by Dale Sullivan and Katie Gunter suggested that the opponents in 1 Corinithians were some sort of proto-gnostics. I had a bit of a problem with that because of Goulder’s excellent defense of F.C. Baur’s hypothesis that the opponents are, surprise, agents of Peter and James, as well as the possibility of gnostic forces rampaging through Pauline churches in the 1st century seeming rather dim. 011’s “Between Orality and Hermeneutics: The Responsiblity of Rhetoric in Religion” by Robin Reame talked about Paul’s “rhetorical hermeneutic.” I talked briefly with her afterward - turns out she’s in the early stages of a diss on Pauline rhetoric.

H02 was also of great interest, as it looks like the new rhetoric reader that Lunsford & co are assembling will take a closer look at religious issues. That’s fantastic.

My panel on Saturday went ok, though it was too long by two paragraphs and I had to wrap it up. I always, always go longer than what I timed. I should really start aiming for, say, 12 minutes to fit a 15 minute timeframe so it will magically even out at 15. I think the argument is good enough to send out later this month.

Overall, I liked this conference more than the last CCCC. It was big for an RSA, I was told, but there were still far less people and yet the panels were of high quality throughout. Such a statement is hard to qualify, of course, but I didn’t hear any presentations that seemed thrown together or lacking in seriousness, not even on panels comprised only of graduate students. I came away thinking I’d gotten a brief sample of the pulse of rhetorical studies, as narrowly focused as my panel choices were. I also felt much more comfortable asking questions and approaching people, and I was approached several times by folks who I did not know from Adam, but knew who I was, which is an extremely odd sensation.

What else? Finding a place to eat in Seattle was difficult, as every street corner where a deli or restaurant might have been is occupied by a Starbucks. My sole activity as a tourist was going up the Space Needle Sunday afternoon to take pictures. The layovers necessary to get home cheaply were brutal, but they raced by fast enough via phone calls and my restarting of an old console game on the laptop.

Got back from RSA 2008 in Seattle this morning. I’ll review the conference in more detail via a post tomorrow or so; I’m too burned out with jet lag to think straight right now. But it was a very good conference overall, with an apparently record attendance of 903 registrants, and I not only learned a great deal in general, but I met some interesting folks, and clarified my thinking on some of the chapter revisions that I need to do next month.

Saw a midnight screening of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull with H.

The verdict is pure popcorn goodness. I was a little iffy about the MacGuffin at first, but I warmed to it, and it did its good-evil sorting task quite competently. Indy already exists in a universe where the Jewish, Hindu, and Christian religions are simultaniously valid - why not throw in that particular B-movie staple?

Gotta love that hat.

Clinton’s campaign, desperate at the knowledge that Obama will get enough delegates to declare victory tomorrow, has decided to claim that they have a lead in the popular vote. Well, they don’t. They’re taking advantage of the fact that four states have not yet reported their popular vote totals, and assuming FL and MI will count as is, a reality that only exists in the heads of the converted. As the site I’ve linked to shows, when those four states report, even with FL and MI counted as is, Obama is still ahead.

And, of course, the FL and MI results will not be admitted - at best, there will be a compromise that saves face for the party and the two states, but doesn’t threaten Obama’s nomination.

I really hope Clinton does not try to force herself as VP on the convention floor by bullying the Obama superdelegates for their VP vote. I wish someone would talk her down, now. At this point everything she does besides stand down works for McCain.

I have quite a bit on my plate over the next few weeks.

The draft for Chapter 5 is due on May 31st, 16 days from now. That’s going well enough so far. I have shifted gears in June, though, setting that month aside to edit chapters 1-5 instead of drafting chapter 6, which is now pushed back to July.
RSA (Rhetoric Society of America) holds their conference a week from now in Seattle, May 23-26, and I’ll be there, presenting on the 25th a more history-oriented and updated version of the prose rhythm paper that I gave at CCCC.

The kicker is that paper needs to be sent out (again) right after the conference, and that threatens the deadline for Chapter 5. So I think I’m going to have to stop working on Chap. 5 around Sunday to prep that paper for submission, and spend Mon-Wed revising, so I can go to Seattle with a polished version in hand instead of just presentation notes. Then all I’ll need to do is incorporate any comments and sent it out when I get back, leaving the last few days of May to finish Chapter 5, and June free to concentrate on revising the 240 pages of sheer nonsense that I have currently.

At least that is the plan.

H and I have tickets for Indy 4, next Wednesday at midnight, so I should be in a good, if tired, mood going to Seattle that morning.