Panels and Proposals

Well, it’s almost been a month since my last post. And let me tell you why.

I’ve been drafting the final version of my dissertation proposal (which, for those of you interested, looks at the historical and theoretical relationship between music and the Western-European rhetorical tradition in order to productively frame concerns regarding the limits of representation and the writing situation. In other words, what does writing look like when we frame it musically, and what would the writing subject be able to do with it? That's the gist of it). The proposal itself went through various incarnations before finally becoming something that my committee could make sense of. There were days during this past month when I thought to myself “I just want to talk about music and writing. Isn’t that enough?” Apparently, institutionalization requires making sense of what we want.

The good news is that it’s shaped up nicely and I’ll be “defending” it on Friday. I’m told it’s a conference, but I still feel like Mumbles under the hot light in Dick Tracy.

Now all that’s left is finishing up that pesky 4Cs paper.

Which, thank god, I’m co-writing and Scot (my partner in crime) has been keeping me on task. We’ve managed to write something that’s not only pretty damn interesting, but also something I want to talk about to boot…(which is nice). If you’re going to be at Cs, stop by our panel (“Other Rhetorics: Cookbooks, Graffiti, and Post-Rock”). We’re the “Post-Rock” paper (“Making a Scene: Spaces of Affect and the Erasure of Language in Sigur Ros”). It should be cool. We’ll play music. We’ll try to rock it out.

Avery, the fiction anthology I co-edit, also hit bookstores since my last post—this is, of course, undeniably rad. We’ve managed not only to gather 19 awesome short stories, but we also managed to get 10 color illustrations (nine black and white), produce one handsome book, and stay within budget. If you’re interested, check it out: www.averyanthology.org. It’s very exciting...