Courageous Acts of Friends: Holly White and Lisa Schamess
One of the questions I struggle with in this blog is how personal I should get. It is, after all, an academic blog, but that doesn’t preclude the personal1 and and especially when mnemonic practices is itself a topic. For instance, I touch upon a five-year struggle with situational depression and the end of a 19-year relationship in just a few posts, “Emerging” and “Year in Review, both in 2008. The lack of blogging during 2009 is a direct result of this struggle, but I don’t think I ever touch upon it. However, I have discussed such thing as recording Winnie-the-Pooh for my niece just as my grandmother did for me, confronting my father’s mortality and the dangers of his career as an FBI agent, or the loss of two mentors important to my growth as an academic, Steven Gloseki and Thomas Walsh, let alone more mundane posts on topics such as my personal fandoms such as science fiction/fantasy, old school role-playing games, and comics/manga/anime. But enough about me. This is about the courage of two friends to go public with the private in ways I could never imagine.
As those on my Facebook friends list know, my high school friend Holly White has gone public about being kidnapped and sexually assaulted at the age of 14 to combat the attempt to whitewash the event by mother of the serial rapist who attacked her. The other courageous act I want to highlight is Lisa Schamess‘ recent musings on writing a book about coping with her husband’s death of cancer ten years after the event, and to link to the set off essays co-written by the two as he was dying and a set of essays written in the first year after his death when Lisa found herself a young widow with a young child.
Central to both these issues is the question of how personal is too personal, how much one wants to reveal about oneself in the electronic age where the anonymity of print gives way to the interconnectedness of McLuhan’s electronic global village. In Holly’s case, while her act of revealing the personal was a choice, it was a choice forced upon her by someone else. Here we find her using social media as well as the traditional press to combat a whitewash of events in a small town. For her act to work, she must make public her very private role as a victim of a serial rapist, something unknown to most of us who lived with her daily in a small town, a traditional village, if you will. Friends, acquaintances, and even strangers with no direct connection to Holly or our small community now know of some of the most private details of Holly’s life because she has used social media such as Facebook and the press to combat the distribution of this self-published book.
While Holly’s choice was thrust upon her by the self serving acts of another, Lisa’s choice to go public, to first use an online forum, her blogs, and now her book-in-progress is a choice that comes from within, although the event(s) that serve as the genesis of these choices are no less wanted than Holly’s.2
While both contexts are quite different, in their motives, in the results, and in what they are revealing, both Holly and Lisa have chosen to make the very personal public in ways that I can only call acts of courage. My own struggles with the walking the line between the personal and public pale in comparison to theirs, and I am in awe of these two women.3
- The medieval studies group blog In The Middle, Jeff Rice’s Yellow Dog, Bonnie Kyburz kind of…, Mike Edward’s Vita, Brendan Riely’s Digital Sextant, and Lance Strate’s Blog Time Passing are all excellent examples of academic blogs that effectively and engagingly slide into the personal. [↩]
- Just so it’s clear, Lisa is published writer and novelist, which for me means that when she says she’s writing a book, this isn’t the same thing as your cousin or neighbor or person you meet in a bar telling you that they’re writing a book. Unlike the average person who says they’re writing a book, Lisa has a track record of making it happen. [↩]
- As a footnote to this post, I feel compelled to comment on the mnemonic function of these acts of courage. Making the personal public brings personal experience into the shared experience of the social, into the realm of communal experience. In this way personal memory becomes social memory. Their public acts of personal remembering transfer those personal experiences to us through acts of Burkean identification through consubstantiation. To paraphrase Maurice Halbwachs, the father of social memory studies, all memory is social, which means that all remembering is rhetorical in nature. And in realizing this, the lines between the private and the public, the question of how much personal might belong in an academic blog, becomes more muddled. Or maybe it becomes more clear. I’m still trying to figure that bit out. [↩]
Ten Questions about Movies
Apparently I’ve been tagged by Brendan for simply reading his post, so here it is. Consider yourself tagged if you wish to be.
First movie you remember seeing
Pinocchio or one of the original Witch Mountain movies.
The most important movie to you before you graduated high school
Star Wars or Ran. Star Wars because I turned seven the year it came out. While it’s likely I would have fallen into SF regardless, I’m sure Star Wars helped. Ran not because it was the first foreign film I saw, but because it was the first foreign film I chose to see and it introduced me to Japanese cinema. Well, there was also Cry Freedom, the first political movie that really had an effect on me.
The movie you watched the most in college
I didn’t have a TV or VCR so I really can’t say. Maybe, maybe, Blade Runner.
The movie you own a copy of, but are ashamed to admit
My collection of movies is way too small. I can honestly say nothing.
The movie you own a copy of that other people think you should be ashamed of, but which you aren’t
Mystery Men or Minority Report? Again, there isn’t much to begin with.
The movie you’ve watched the most times
Probably the original Star Wars movie.
The movie you used to adore but don’t hold so highly any more
Akira. For whatever reason, while it blew me away when it came out, it just doesn’t seem that cool any more.
The movie you liked that everyone hated
The Christopher Lambert Beowulf.
The movie that most surprised you
Hero. I went in expecting an action-packed Jet Li movie and got something less action-packed that Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s a great movie and I love CTHD, but the cognitive dissonance between what I expected and what I got was so jarring I didn’t enjoy the movie the first time around.
The movie that most disappointed you
Mall Rats, maybe?
Newsy News
With one of my cousins telling me this blog is a bit too dry, I realized I’ve stopped posting the personal and fun, so I’m going to try to do a bit more of that. To that end, a bit of “newsy news” of the solipsistic variety. Not that I really have any…
Deciding I need to get to know my adopted state, I picked up The Complete Roadside Guide to Nebraska; Off the Beaten Path: Nebraska; and Nebraska Folklore, the later primarily because the first chapter is “Nebraska Cave Lore” and I love caves. From some skimming of the books, I’ve learned that National Geographic has called State Hwy 2 one of the top 10 highways in the country; that there is a place called Toadstool Geological Park, where “the land seems to have been twisted into a nightmare of strange beastly shapes”; and that Diane Nelson, wife of Senator Ben Nelson has said that Chadron State Park “looks just like Colorado.” (Then governor Nelson is reported to have replied, “No, Colorado looks just like this.”) I’m thinking about renting a cabin in Chadron during our week-long fall break. I also need to think about doing some camping.
As part of my quest to get to know my state and region better, I’ve started scouting places to go canoeing, kayaking, and/or rowboating. As I don’t own a canoe, kayak, and/or rowboat, this also requires finding places to rent them. I’ve found some great places in the far west of the state, but I’m still looking more locally. I got a few local suggestions this morning which are over in Iowa.
With the iPad’s iBooks app comes Winnie-the-Pooh, which I think is a great selection to show off iBooks’ ability to display color graphics. Winnie-the-Pooh holds a special place in my heart. When I was four or so, my grandmother sent me an audio cassette of her reading the book, which included the occasional comment to me to make it more personal, and I’d think about the Winnie-the-Pooh audio cassette regularly when I’d see the book in my iBooks library . My grandmother died this April, a few days before her 101st birthday. Home for her funeral, I showed my parents the iPad, including Winnie-the-Pooh, and I realized my niece was about to turn three. Well, I knew she was going to turn three, but the fact she was turning three, the fact I have a copy of Winnie-the-Pooh, and the fact that I have an audio recorder all came together. I bought her a copy of Winnie-the-Pooh for her birthday, and I’ve been recording the book for her. I hope she looks back on it as fondly as I do the recording her great-grandmother made for me.
And now a bit of fun from from xkcd:
Pooh image from Pooh Corner: A Short History of Pooh and Winnie.
Dr. Thomas Walsh
My discussion of E. O. Wilson and Walter Ong reminded me that I’ve neglected this post for far too long. On 19 October 2009, Dr. Thomas Walsh died. He was an Associate Professor at Saint Louis University and the compiler of the definitive bibliography of Walter J. Ong’s works. Both a former student and close friend of Ong, Dr. Walsh was also a mentor and friend to me. Dr. Walsh shared with me an interest in the arts of memory (with Dr. Thomas Zlatic, he published “Mark Twain and the Art of Memory,” which won the 1981 Norman Foerster Prize for the best article published in American Literature and had returned to studying renaissance memory) and provided a wealth of information about Fr. Ong as I worked on the collection.
He was a careful and deliberate scholar who spent most of his career teaching for the Saint Louis University Parks College of Engineering, Aviation, and Technology, which meant that most of his career was spent teaching in a trimester system with 4 courses/term at the Cahokia, IL campus. With the merging of Parks College and its faculty into SLU proper, Dr. Walsh returned to research, gained Graduate Faculty status, and was working on a number of projects involving renaissance memory, renaissance rhetoric and literature, and Ong’s work on Milton. (I pulled everything I could find in the Ong collection relating to Milton for Dr. Walsh to work with during a recent semester-long sabbatical.) I’ll note here, now that he is no longer with us, that Fr. Ong had asked Dr. Walsh to work on an update of the Ramus and Talon Inventory, the companion volume to Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue, a testament to the kind of scholar Ong believed Dr. Walsh to be. And witnessing first hand the care and rigor Dr. Walsh approached the Ong Bibliography, I understand why Fr. Ong believed Dr. Walsh was up for the task of updating the Inventory.
He was far too young and his death came as a surprise. While losing a dissertation committee member is hard enough, I have lost a friend and I don’t think he knew just how much he meant to me.
Inbetween the First and Second Week
At Creighton, the semester started Wednesday, which means the first week has come and gone. This term, I’m teaching first-year composition and directing two independent studies. The Advanced Composition: Image, Sound, Text course was canceled due to low enrollment and in its place I’ve been assigned an alternative service project in which I will compose the first draft of a handbook for English majors.
I’m looking forward to that project for two reasons. First, there’s the obvious fact that in creating the handbook, I’ll be getting a crash course in the various aspects of my new academic home, including meeting and talking with each member of the department one-on-one. And then there’s the fact that it’s a new kind of project for me. I helped write sections of the Writing Program Resource Manual at Saint Louis University and co-authored a computer-assisted instruction guide for the same. And I’ve written various small technical documents from assignment guidelines to how-to guides for using a MOO and specific computing tasks. All of those projects, have had little input from others and while I was writing for a specific audience, either I was the “boss” or I had one specific person overseeing what I wrote. This project will incorporate existing material and pull in information and ideas from close to twenty people. While the chair is my immediate editor/boss, the department as a whole have a stake and say in what I write, to say nothing of the primary audience for whom this manual is being created. I’ve taught introductory techincal and professional writing classes before and I hope to do so again, so I’m looking forward to taking on this new writing situation. I like to practice what I teach.
The first-year composition course is a modified version of what I taught last semester, which is a course centered around Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Masssage. For the first time in my life, I’m not making any significant changes to a course. However, I have rearranged the major project sequence, rewrote some of the assignments and structured more assignment sequencing, added Donald Murray’s The Craft of Revision, and style and immitation exercises drawn from Crowley and Hawhee’s Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students (a textbook I really hope to organize a course around someday). The major projects involve “Your Life in Media,” a project which asks students to define themselves through five mediums important to them—we use McLuhan’s definition of media as an extention of some human faculty and last semester students included cellphones, the spoken word, color, dance, passports, and friends); a playlist assignment in which students create a playlist to represent an idea, event, mood, or theme; an annotation project in which students research and annotate sections of McLuhan’s The Medium is the Massage for future students; and a rhetorical analysis of a section from McLuhan’s book. There’s also a midterm and final portfolio that include an essay reflecting upon their writing and engagement with the course, using their own work as evidence to support their claims. A couple of the FYC classes are far from full, but for whatever reason the powers that be made the decision not to cut any of them, and I’ve got one of those. Right now, the class is less than half full. I had a FYC class like this once before and it was awesome. Because the grading load was so much less than I’m used to, I was able to spend much more time tailoring the course to meet the individual needs of each student in a way that I’ve just not able to do with a full class.
Back in November, I was asked to direct an independent study in Medieval and Early Renaissance literature by a student who needs this class to graduate the spring with an emphasis in British literature rather than a generic “English” degree. After talking with my chair, I agreed and we’re off. We’re reading the following texts:
- Alexander, Michael. A History of Old English Literature.
- The Anglo-Saxon World: An Anthology. Trans. Kevin Crossley-Holland.
- Beowulf: A New Verse Translation. Trans. R. M. Liuzza.
- Boethius. The Consolation of Philosophy. Trans. Richard Green.
- Burrow, J.A. Medieval Writers and Their Work: Middle English Literature and Its Background, 1100-1500. 2nd ed.
- Medieval English Prose for Women: Selections from the Katherine Group and Ancrene Wisse. Ed. Bella Millett and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne.
- The Lais of Marie de France. Ed. Robert Hanning and Joan Ferrante.
- Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo. Trans. J.R.R. Tolkien.
- Geoffrey Chaucer. The Canterbury Tales. Ed. and Trans. By A. Kent Hieatt and Constance Hieatt.
We’re also reading a few Old English poems not in the Crossley-Holland anthology, including “Juliana,” “Elene,” “Christ II,” “Genesis A” or “Genesis B” and/or “Exodus,” and “Christ and Satan,” and we’re going to look at Tolkien’s “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son.” (The student has done an extensive project on Milton’s Satan, so I thought looking at the Old English Satan and Tolkien’s discussion of ofermod might be fun because, you know, Milton’s friend owned the Junius MS and there’s speculation it might have served as inspiration for Paradise Lost.) We’ll also be reading some poetry by Skelton, Elizabeth I, and maybe some other stuff. Said student has a decent grounding in Renaissance lit, so we’re focusing on the Medieval.
Finally, the other independent study is with a student who was enrolled in the canceled Advanced Composition: Image, Sound, Text. Said student was in the Composition in the Digital Age course last semester, so I agreed to direct this one as well. I’m scheduled to teach the Advanced Comp class in the fall, so this will let me better thrash out some ideas and assignments before it’s a full course.
Things to work on over break
Last day of classes is this Friday, followed by a week of finals, and then comes the break, which, of course, isn’t. Things I need to do over break include:
- Revise this term’s FYC course for next semester. I included a number of new assignments this semester and most need revising (I’ve been keeping notes); I want to rearrange the schedule, including adding Murray’s The Craft of Revision into the mix to see what happens; and decide if I want to keep They Say/I Say in the mix. (I know They Say/I Say is a controversial text and one could teach it as (and students could take it as) rote method. However, Graff and Birkenstein argue against that in their introduction and I’ve decided the book is actually a memory text. I see and teach the templates (really, I think “moves that writers make” or commonplaces are much better terms for what the templates are) as readymades good writers rhapsodize with. In short, I see the goal of whole process as an act of reminiscentia. I’ll be talking about this at CCCC in the session “Revisiting the Readymade” (J.38) that Bradley Dilger organized.
- Get the syllabus together for Advanced Comp: Image, Sound, Text, which is a new course for me.
- Finish Teletheory and move on to Electronic Monuments.
- Write.
- Start reading for the independent study in Medieval/Early Renaissance literature I’m directing this spring. I’m particularly looking forward to rereading Boethius and the Katherine Group, neither of which I’ve read in far too long.
- Reorganize my entire life.
- Put together the my annual review materials. (Yes, the paperwork for my first annual review is due at the start of my second semester.)
- Install a newer version of WordPress.
- Come to terms with the fact I’ll have to go to Missouri—Maryville or Kansas City—if I want some Bell’s beer. Buh.
My Dad, the “Kingpin”
From the Glenwood Springs Post-Independent:
The local investigative kingpin now runs Walter and Associates Professional Investigations, a private investigation agency. He retired from the FBI in the mid-1990s when turning 55 meant he could no longer be a special agent.
He’s conducted background investigations for various federal agencies and consulted law enforcement agencies with complex and sensitive investigations like homicides and internal affairs investigations, among other things. He’s currently helping investigate a 1975 cold homicide in another judicial district.
He’s studied and taught investigative tools like statement analysis and interview and interrogation techniques, which he has decades of experience using. [Read more.]
Kingpin is an odd choice of words, I think, but otherwise it’s a good article.
A Few Pictures
These pictures were taken before we bought the house.
An exterior shot of the house.
Settling In
After two weeks of traveling from Wilmginton to St. Louis, St. Loius to Omaha, Omaha to St. Louis, and finally St. Louis back to Omaha, I’m no longer on the move.
Like the old house, the new house has lots of windows and high ceilings, which means lots of light. And keeping with the other features of the old house, it’s a corner lot (fewer leaves for this house, I think, but a lot more snow), it’s near a major city park, and it is within walking distance of the other university in town.
One thing the new house has that the old house did not is a Frigidaire Flair oven. We were going to replace it, but I looked it up online and it’s got quite a following. It’s also the oven used by Samantha Stevens, although ours is a single rather than double bay model. 
One of the coolest features of this oven is that the door opens up rather than down. Who ever decided it was a good idea to make us lean over a hot door to reach into an oven?
Transitions
While I should be at Computers and Writing 2008, I am instead starting my first of two moves. The movers loaded most everything up yesterday and took off with my stuff (leaving me to sleep on a borrowed air mattress). I saw the Indiana Jones movie last night and this morning I’m packing the car, checking out of the apartment, and leaving Wilmington, where I’ve been visiting faculty in the English Department at UNCW for the past academic year.
In less than a week we’ll have a new house in Omaha, where I’ll be an assistant professor in the English Department at Creighton University, and in less than two weeks we’ll be packed and moved just in time to close on our house in St. Louis.
Allowing for some unpacking, I expect to catch my breath sometime during the week of June 9. We’ll see if I get any blogging done before then.
Twitter Feed- "Never try to out stubborn a cat." -- *The Notebooks of Lazarus Long*
- My Twitter BFFs: @girlofnewmedia @sisypheantask @billiehara @digital_sextant @minute @tengrrl. Find yours @ http://twitterbffs.com
- Four separate sets of plans canceled on me this weekend. With few friends in this state, that's an epic failure.
