thursday misc.

• I'm happy to report that I got my acceptance letter from the 4Cs. NYCity here we come--if only for a week, if the conference is still six months off. Lots and lots of noise in the rhet/comp blogosphere over the past two days, almost exclusively of folks saying they got on the program. Good work, bloggers. In the meantime, e-mails from various friends saying they did NOT get on the program--reminders that it's tough to get accepted at the Cs. Maybe blogging helps to polish the proposal-writing skills? Hmmm, a good study for someone to conduct. Our panel, "Labor of Love: Research as a Lived Process," consists of my UMD colleague Liz Rohan and Gesa Kirsch (a frequent collaborator of Liz's whom I've never met in person but whose work I've admired for a long time) talking about familial and personal-cum-ideological committments to scholarly work. I'll talk a bit about writing on my great-grandfather's poetry as a moment of Burkean identification.
  

• Steven Climer, right here in the motor city, has started a research and resource portal, Basic Writing.org, which looks to be useful. Good going, Steven.

• See blogroll to your right for links to new blogs maintained by students in my Honors Tutorial, 'Working-Class Cultures, Identities, and Rhetorics.' As term unfolds, those bloggers will reflect on issues of rhetoric and social class, discuss readings, and generally engage in critical discourse. We'll be meeting with some of the writers we study, including Detroit-bred poets Jim Daniels and Lolita Hernandez, heading down to the Detroit Public Library for a presentation by Barbara Ehrenreich, and conducting new action research. So stay tuned to those new sites, if such things interest you.
  

• Tomorrow, off to Youngstown for the annual Apple Butter festival at my parents' house. In which big crowds gather to eat, drink, play, and, yes, stir a ginormous pot of homemade apple butter as it brews in an outdoor copper kettle. Perhaps some photos of said event next week.