tuesday round-up

• It must be the end of November. I'm starting to get that burned-out feeling.
• Thanksgiving. The long weekend couldn't have come at a better time. Tomorrow a.m. we're off to O'Fallon, IL. to visit old pals from Tucson, who now live in suburban St. Louis. I'll do the cooking on turkey day. I love cooking, and I'm pretty good at it, but being responsible for Thanksgiving food always freaks me out.
• Saw the Johnny Cash film Walk the Line over the weekend. How could a film about Cash fail to please? Full of affecting moments: singing "Cocaine Blues" to prisoners at Folsom, watching a violent filmstrip about Folsom while still in the military and identifying with the hard-timers, singing "It Ain't Me Babe" as a duet with June Carter while his wife sits in the frontrow and being too strung out and confused to know who he's singing those words to, etc. etc. The pic uses rags-to-riches and salvation-via-the-love-of-a-good-woman and even VH1 trappings and tropes and probably neglects Cash's religious conversions and ambivalences, but comes out a winner anyway due to the unbelievable music and the performances of the two leads.
• Best Johnny Cash song ever: "One Piece at a Time," about an auto worker who devises a plan to steal a Cadillac: "I'd sneak it out of there in a lunchbox in my hand. Now gettin' caught meant getting fired, but I figured I'd have it all by the time I retired. I'd have me a car worth at least a hundred grand." Song did NOT appear in the film, sadly.
• Current writing projects: three entries ("Community Colleges," "Higher Education," and Vo-Tech Education") for Greenwood's Class in America encyclopedia; revisions to the introduction of New Rhetorics of Working-Class Consciousness, now--at last!--under contract with Pitt; article on working-class poetics and my grandpa's writings; a reflective piece about teaching the rhetorics of class for a special pedagogy issue of Living Forge; next term's syllabi.
• UM Dearborn's hiring a writing program director. Not too late to apply.
• Tonight's the last in MCHR's film series. 7:00, St. John's Church at 11-Mile and Woodward. Tonight's film: "Oil Factor: Behind the War on Terror," narrated by Ed Asner. Followed by what's sure to be a heated discussion.