urbanarama, part two: bon voyage edition
Music: David Bowie: The Buddha of Suburbia (1993)
I am sad to leave the folks at UIUC, where the love-bombing and beer-feeding was fierce. On Monday evening I dined with Kassie, Ian, and Peter at a fabulous place called Radio Maria. I had a frog leg. I then gave an undergraduate talk on the love essay, followed by pints with Peter and Kassie. It is really enjoyable to get a feeling for what other programs are like, which gives one a better perspective on one's own in return.
While very different in a number of respects, the Communication Department here is also very similar in structure and "feel" to my home department at the University of Texas---something I didn't expect. We have around the same number of students (although their faculty felt much larger outside of the rhetoric area, and they have an affiliated cultural/media studies "center"). We have a similar storied history stretching back to the early twentieth century, and so on.
One of my charges was to locate Richard Murphy's office and check the bottom right drawer for bourbon. Bob Scott (my advisor) said that when he was a beginning graduate student here, his first encounter with Murphy involved opening his drawer and offering Scott a nip of bourbon. Incidentally, Murphy was a graduate of the Cornell rhetoric program, which means my intellectual lineage can be drawn from that "school" of thought (humanistic rhetoric, vis-à-vis the scientistic turn Woobert advocated for Speech). Murphy's old office is 128 Lincoln Hall. I didn't get a chance to get in there, but Debbie is going to try after my departure.
Cara Finnegan was simply wonderful with mentoring advice (how to mentor high numbers) and suggestions for my upcoming course on publics/celebrity. She also provided some department history for me (also, props to Kassie for the blue book!). She had been given a file of letters written by Murphy that detail some of the discussion about the department name and curriculum, which was exactly the sort of thing I'm looking for in writing the second chapter of my book in progress (which is on the history of the field). I'm so grateful for the useful nuggets Cara gave me!
Yesterday begin with a delightful lunch with Ned O'Gorman (whose completed book on early cold war discourse sounds awesome). Ned probably didn't know I was already a big fan of his until I told him so noshing on roast beef (anything on the sublime in our field gets read; such an important concept). I then had a good chat with Cara and went to spy the Mandeville Collection in Occult Sciences one last time (I was less successful on the second trip). The extent of the collection is pretty much in the photograph to the left: one wall of stuff. Combined with the database, it didn't take long to finish perusing the volumes.
Last evening began with a delightfully delicious dinner with Debbie, Cara, John Murphy, and Pat Gill. I was especially excited to meet Pat, whose work in film (and especially slasher films) and psychoanalytic criticism overlaps with my own interests; we had a chance to talk about the "Gorno" movement and whether or not it was overall a positive filmic development. I didn't get a strong sense of her opinion, but I did learn that "Saw IV sucked!" Pat rocked!
Finally, the evening ended with "reading group," a venue in which faculty and graduate students read a few of a person's articles and then discuss them. This is quite the love-bomb ego boost, of only because you're guaranteed someone is reading your work! We spent a lot of time discussing the scholarly invention process, how one was led to write this way as opposed to that---generally, the sorts of questions you never get to ask of a piece of writing. Oratorical Animal helped to draw out the marvelous observation that one cannot avoid the desire for "mastery," even if one eschews the disposition of mastery. I think this is the predicament of the critic. Also, John and Ned helped me to underscore that this theory/criticism divide is a false one, that you can do both, that public address without theory doesn't make sense (I mean, I would call KKC a theorist-critic, for example). Anyhoo, one could quickly get addicted to this sort of engagement! Perhaps the best thing about the experience, however, is that I came away with some awesome suggestions and ideas about how to move on with my current project (and again, Cara was there with some fascinating information about speech as the index of authenticity in early photography).
It's been simply a marvelous visit with a heaping dose of warm fuzzies. I'm happy to have seen where my own educational lineage has come from, as well. I will miss Michigan Avenue in Urbana. John and Debbie have been marvelous hosts, and I feel a bit of a dork for dropping in on them during a very busy time (they're preparing to sell their home and heave toward State College, PA!). Now, it's on to Chicago to see Angela and Harold, and then Dekalb to play with Zack and E!