Things I've learned in the last two weeks...

1) Doctors and nurses who work in Neonatal Intensive Care Units are the most patient people scurrying about this mortal coil.
2) Grandmas won't let Daddies hold their babies. Daddies must pry them from Grandma's kung-fu grip.
3) Establishing a schedule to see your kid in the hospital is simultaneously comforting and infuriating.
4) When doctors say call anytime, they mean it.
5) The sounds babies make during the day are beautiful. The same sounds are terrifying in the middle of the night.
6) Bringing your kid home after he has spent nine days in the hospital is so totally rad.

A new arrival

I'm very happy to report that Steph and I are the proud new parents of Sebastian Fiorelli Koehler, born on June 10th at 12:51pm, weighing in at 7 lbs and 11 ounces. He's had a rough start of it so far: he was born two weeks premature and had under-developed lungs, but has since shown significant progress and is doing nicely in the Neonatal ICU at St. Mary's here in Madison. We've been in and out of the hospital all week and are very anxious to bring him home, hopefully early next week.

A word about process...

My writing process tends to be very...big. I schedule huge blocks of time, at least a few hours at a time, sometimes days even, surround myself with stacks and stacks of research, make a pot of coffee, and hunch over the computer until I "need to get the blood moving," then I stalk around the apartment for a while (maybe eat something over the sink) and get back to it. In a six hour block I'll usually get a good five pages written. Call it slow, call it inefficient, call it privileged - but don't call it unproductive. These are habits I formed as an undergraduate who worked during the day and had only the night to write. Writing papers through the night was not uncommon. Yes, these papers tended to be due in the morning.

But these habits followed me to graduate school, which was fine at first, I guess. It's very difficult, granted, when there are several commitments throughout the day demanding your time and taking away writing time. But I managed. Weekends, nights, and the occasional non-teaching day.

Last week, though, my wife asked me to drive her to work everyday this week (she's expecting in a month (our first, yeah!) and has to drive an hour each way, so there's no way I would say no). I did, though, stupidly bring up the problem this poses my writing process. (Idiot).

"But I need my computer and, you know, stuff, so that I can write," I say.

"There's a library there. Can't you bring it with you?"

Of course I can. And I did. But I put on the back burner any hope of getting writing done. New environment and all that.

But you know what? I'm writing more and in shorter bursts of time.

Weird.

I haven't blogged since when?!

...Since April!?

Damn.

Been knee deep in dissertation stuff, wondering what the view's gonna be like when I'm neck deep...

In the meantime, I recently finished Michael Jarrett's *Drifting on a Read: Jazz as a Model for Writing* and loved it. Here's the third paragraph:

"Elvis Costello once said in a remark now widely quoted, 'Writing about music is like dancing about architecture. It's a really stupid thing to want to do.' Costello's wit is notoriously barbed, which ensures that interviews with him are always thoroughly enjoyable. But his sentiments, echoing and extending Armstrong's ("Lady, if you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know"), are diametrically opposed to mine. First, as a side point, I'd jump at the chance to see dancing about architecture. Second, writing about music is hardly any more problematic than writing about any other subject."

He had me at "notoriously barbed."

Alternative alternatives

I re-read Raul Sanchez's *The Function of Theory in Composition Studies* last week and have been wondering about some of the ways he portrays the field, specifically his claim that Composition and Rhetoric has not dealt with the relationship between knowledge and writing. To quote Sanchez: "To date, composition theory has helped turn on its head the idea that writing is only the recording or reporting of knowledge. It has instead asserted that writing produces knowledge. But it has not questioned the terms of the supposed relationship between writing and knowledge; it has only inverted their order."

Now.

He's probably right. He thinks the field has "undertheorized" writing and there is certainly a wealth of work that still needs to be done regarding the ways we theorize writing. I've been thinking about this, though, specifically in terms of his critique of Diane Davis's *Breaking [Up] at Totality,* a book that had a pretty huge impact on the way I imagine studying rhetoric and writing - and what "theory" means in that context. Sanchez quoting Davis: "Davis asks 'What would happen if writing were dismissed from its representational servitude, if, that is, we put ourselves in the service of writing rather than the other way around.'" Cool. I'm there. Great question. Later, Sanchez says that by turning to a Nietzschean "pedagogy of laughter" Davis's "theory of writing situates itself squarely within a strand of the philosophical tradition it might otherwise disdain. In other words, under-writing Davis's theory is a discourse with a narrative thread running through the work of Nietzsche, Deleuze and Guattari, and Cixous that Davis cites. But because of this, her alternative theory's status as an alternative within an established ideological system--made up of "traditions" and "countertraditions"--undercuts its own claims to a thorough recasting of writing. Furthermore, it has no empirical dimension."

To what degree are Composition and Rhetoric scholars expected to draw from theorists and philosophers in order to better theorize writing? Does Davis actually call on a "thorough recasting of writing" in *Breaking [Up] at Totality*? A major part of her work in that book seems to focus on "the leak" and the ruptures of language--but this is hardly a thorough recasting of writing. In fact, the "undercutting" that Sanchez points would would seem to re-inforce a lot of what Davis argues.

A major part of Sanchez's own project rests on his claim that Composition Studies has "undertheorized" writing. And it probably has. But Sanchez himself tries to make a case for the need to turn to rigorous theory in order to better understand the relationship between writing and knowledge. He argues that we need more Derrida. Is there a more established theoretical and philosophical tradition within which to work? (There's a great scene in the documentary *Zizek!* where Zizek shouts and spits and pounds his fists at the dogmatic way in which Derrida has been taken up...) I guess Sanchez's critique is a larger question: to what degree has "alternative" "countertradition" become tradition?

But that question gets boring fast. I think Sanchez is simply asking the wrong question (his point, though, is a good one). So what if we draw on countertraditional work that has become an established mode of thinking (which is, of course, arguable)? We should be asking Davis not what her rhetoric of laughter owes the tradition from which it emerges, but rather, how do we begin to use that to recognize the ways in which the scene of writing makes possible more writing, which makes possible (other) ways of imagining what may (or may not) be limited by representation. If Sanchez is willing to take Derrida at his word, why not take Davis at her's?

Spring Fake

How many of you out there knew it was possible to get strep throat in your finger? And why didn't you warn the rest of us?

Like so many others, I had high hopes for the amount of work I would get done over Spring Break (which was last week). I tried not to let the freezing temperatures get the best of my attitude and I decided that I would, no matter what, feel good about catching up on some dissertation reading and organize the next few weeks worth of writing. The freezing temperatures didn't get the best of my attitude, but they still managed to get the best of me.

I came down with a wicked cold/flu thing on the very first day of break. I tried to get some work done, but the theraflu had taken over and I decided that I wouldn't be able to get any quality work done anyway, so why not just lay on the couch and sweat it out? Then, in a couple days I could hit the ground running and get some work done. The next day I noticed my finger was swollen almost twice its normal size.

Doctor does some tests. "Drains" my finger. And the next day the nurse calls to tell me I have strep throat.

Me: But my throat doesn't hurt. I have a cold, but I know what strep feels like and this isn't strep. My finger is what hurts.

Nurse: Well, then you've got the strep bacteria in your finger. You've got a bacterial infection.

Me: Awesome.

So I've been on antibiotics while still trying to catch up. I've been re-reading Sanchez's "The Function of Theory in Composition Studies" and have been trying to nail down what about it I'm reacting against. There's so much in his argument I can get behind, but there's this underlying feeling that I can't shake, one that says "where would Sanchez's writing take us...?" More later...

The Sound of New York

There were, of course, several cool things about Cs—meeting old friends and making new ones, seeing some cool panels, actually feeling surprised that people came to ours—but the following was actually the coolest…

My friend Corey and I escaped the conference for a little on Friday afternoon and went down to a village bookshop, where I found Jeff Chang’s *Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation*. As we left, I was flipping through the book and Corey tells me that the book was written by the cousin of a friend of ours. How cool?! But that’s not actually what I was getting at.

I flew out on Saturday afternoon. And after I met up with the woman who let us rent her unused east village apartment, I had some time before I had to meet my fellow cab-ride-splitters. So I walked to the park and started reading. The first section of the book is about Moses’ famed urban planning, specifically the construction of the Cross-Bronx Expressway (straight through several Bronx neighborhoods) and the way it re-divided those neighborhoods, killed local businesses, and, perhaps most importantly, posed the question: now that the Bronx has been re-divided and economically sucker-punched, what do we do with the people whose neighborhoods and businesses have been displaced? Well, apparently we build filing cabinets (surrounded by a block of park) to stack 170,000 apartments (per building!) on top of each other. Part of Chang’s project looks at how these re-divisions created slums in the south Bronx, how that led to gang culture, and how gang culture begins to find a voice in hip-hop. I’m really flattening his argument here, but immediately after reading this section of his book, I had the opportunity to actually fly directly over the Bronx on our way out of New York and get the bird’s eye view of the places he was talking about. Of course, it really makes you wonder what New York would look like if Moses’ urban planning had been a collaboration with the neighborhoods he sliced up. But I couldn't help thinking about what it would *sound* like.