deflation
Music: Coil: Moon's Milk
TWO DEATHS
Last Tuesday Roger scored four guest list spots for a posse at the Hank 3 show, so we went expecting yodelish twang for hours. I had been told he did throw in some punk covers, but I had no idea that there was going to be a massive bait-and-switch maneuver. The crowd was promiscuous: rednecks and cowboys were littered about with their rebel ball caps and gallon hats; goth chicks with tattoos downed Lone Star while bubbas hooted and hollered along with Hank's country musings (mostly about getting "fucked up" and why "pop country sucks"). The bassist had a Mohawk and looked menacing. Hank himself was a lanky boy with tattoos all over and a long ponytail . . . Yeehaaaaawwww we were getting' down.
About an hour into the show, however, this black-clad tattoo guy comes out and starts doing some screaming; it's like this thing Linkin Park started where one guy sings and then the other "comments" in between, like call and response, but, you know, screaming. It was a strange "country-punk" sound. Then, we were told a new artist was going to join them on stage. Hank left and this dude with a black long-sleeved shirt and a rebel had with long hair came back and started screaming in song too. The music gradually became more aggressive, and eventually a rock/funk bass replaced the stand up bass, and the drumming picked up to a double-barreled death metal litany of thuds. Soon the music was unabashed death metal. The bubbas and cowboys went to the back of the floor, while the metal heads and gothy types started crowding the stage. Roger says to me, "when's Hank coming back?" And I says, "Roger, that's Hank—he just changed his shirt, put on a different hat, and let down his hair."
It was a hilarious scene and very fun. I thought that the music would return to twang, but after a half hour they were still pummeling the crowd with uber-macho "GRRREWWWAAAARRRRRRR!" barbaric yawpage, and so we left. It was truly a trip seeing all those different kinds of fans in one room.
SELF IMPORTANCE
I enjoyed the Rhetoric Society of America conference in Memphis this past weekend. The weather was quite humid, and I was amazed at how easily my body has adjusted to the Austin "dry heat," as it was quite uncomfortable to be outside there. As is the case with most southern meeting places, the Peabody had the air conditioning jacked up to near frigid levels, and without a sport coat one was likely to get frostbite.
I didn't do many panels; the ones I saw with Longhorns speaking were great, but some of the others I saw were not. Part of the problem is that rhetoricians in my institutional affiliation—Communication Studies (or "Speech," to hear an outsider say it)—have very different questions than rhetoricians in English departments. I try to read stuff across both fields, but obviously not everyone does. It can be annoying hearing calls for "civic engagement" and for teaching rhetorical criticism to undergraduates when, well, when "Speech" people have been doing that for fifty years. Also, I'm simply amazed at how poorly some people present their work. I'm far from "great" myself, but I do practice my stuff—a lot—before I offer it at a conference. I also try to consider my likely audience, and craft what I say to the audience, even if I must compromise this or that subtlety or complexity. Let's just say far too many people do not follow such a model. Some folks speak for twenty minutes after they should; some think everyone has read some obscure text from the time of Columbus; and worst of all, some people take themselves way too seriously and have no sense of humor whatsoever. I detest panels where no one laughs. I can see a place for the somber if one's panel is on atrocity or something, but c'mon folks: LAUGH.
Our panel on "Sizing Up/As the Symptom" went fairly well, although Ken had to stay home with his sick munchkin and Barb was attending the nuptials of a friend. Chris and I began with a humorous homage to Beavis and Butthead (the room we were in was the Cockage Room, or something like that). The room was also freezing, so a bunch of folks bailed toward the end to warm up. I've posted a draft of my complete manuscript (not the one I presented) here: "Size Matters: Polytoning Rhetoric's Perverse Apocalypse." I've sent it off for review, although I suspect getting this essay in print will not be easy, at least if the RSA gossip about how "vulgar" and "inappropriate" "ShitText" is any measure. The problem with psychoanalytic theory is that "it goes there." Few people like to "go there" (I mean, I don't on the therapist's couch myself).
Anyhoo, the worst part of the conference was waiting for the elevators. They were very slow. Sometimes you had to wait an hour. Yes, that's right, an hour. You see, the Peabody has a fountain in the middle of the lobby that has ducks paddling around in it. In the morning and the evening, a red carpet leading to the elevator is rolled out for them. A huge crowd swarms around the elevators and fountain for this event . . . their freakin' ducks, for Christ's' sake! It was cute the first time I saw it, but then it quickly became annoying. By the end of the weekend, I wanted to poison the ducks and gouge out my eyes. The ducks were everywhere and on everything: soap, pats of butter, stationary, matchbooks, etc. They only thing the Peabody lacks for each room is an alarm clock that quacks!
The best part of the conference was talking with friends, often one-on-one, hiding from the conference traffic. And I met a few new faces, which was great.
BLOGCRASTINATION AND THE VOICE ABJECT
A'ight, I need to get started on the next project and stop what I shall term "Blogcrastination." Blogcrastination is using blogging to stave off working and researching, especially of the writerly sort. So to get in the mood: I'm now working on a short forum essay tentatively titled "Speech Melancholia, or, the Stuttering Discipline." This is also something related to the issue of disciplinarity owing to a special thingie David Beard and Bill Keith are putting together on the history of Speech Communication. My argument is that Speech was founded on the death of oratory, which makes the discipline fundamentally mournful. The problem, however, is that every few years or so "speech" as an object comes back and sometime tries to re-center it. Currently it's back in terms of "voice," but it will be killed off again (oh, as the logocentric abuse of self-affection or something). So the idea here is that we cannot mourn speech properly, but rather, cycle through its death and rebirth (melancholia) such that the field "stutters." Now, I'm not sure what the consequence to this observation will be: is this a good or bad thing? I don't know. I'm prepared to argue we could do more work that seeks to integrate speech, not as a "rhetorical situation" or something existential, but as a love object that we are uniquely suited to theorize into the twenty-first century. As I am trying to suggest in the book project, speech is the ghost of our postmodern times.