For the past few weeks, my life was mostly on hold. No, I wasn’t working nonstop on the campaign, although I made a few calls and knocked on a few doors. No, I wasn’t ill or incapacitated. I was waiting for Tuesday, for the decision that became clear at about 9 pm PST.
Posts Tagged ‘politics’
Regarding Hope
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged election, generation, hope, obama, politics, rhetoric on November 7, 2008 | 1 Comment »
Power[less], Point[less]: an exercise in wide-ranging frustration
Posted in rant, tagged audience, communication, election, obama, politics, powerpoint, presenting on October 15, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
This weekend, at the urging of many Obama campaign emails, I attended a Get Out The Vote training. As I walked into the nondescript, poorly-lit building in Seattle, I followed hand-painted signs to a large room where they had set up maybe 75 chairs. I was early, so I stopped into the bathroom (one light [...]
WORDS [may or may not] HAVE MEANING
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged derrida, economy, madsen, meaning, ny times, politics, words on October 10, 2008 | 3 Comments »
Every day between nine and ten am my first semester of college, Dr. Madsen found time to instruct us to pick up our pencils, move to the top of the pages we were writing on, and write in all capital letters: WORDS HAVE MEANING. At the time, it seemed like a frustrated, obvious reminder to [...]
The Engfish Lesson: for Ms. Palin
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged election, engfish, palin, politics, teaching on October 5, 2008 | 8 Comments »
Each semester, while I was teaching, I found I had to spend some time within the first few classes on the problem of Engfish. The first assignments always came back in a sort of half-language carefully constructed to reveal nothing, commit to nothing, and generally avoid saying anything dangerous or objectionable.
Reading Maureen Dowd’s piece in [...]
Limberlost Quagmires
Posted in reviews, tagged America, contradiction, election, freckles, gene stratton porter, identity, limberlost, politics on October 4, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
One of the vague projects that followed me out of my Master’s degree involves re-reading some of the century-old children’s books I loved when I used to walk to my grandmother’s house after middle school and read (and read and read) them. The past few days saw me working through two of Gene Stratton Porter’s [...]
Demeaning the Mind: The Language of Politics in America
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged clinton, elitism, hegemony, language, mccain, ngugi, palin, politics, postcolonial on September 19, 2008 | 1 Comment »
In 1981, Kenyan author and theorist Ngugi wa Thiong’o formally renounced English as his artistic medium. The English language, he claims, is too bound up with colonialism, exploitation, and hegemony to be useful as a means of fighting those forces through literature. Language and politics, for him, are too entwined, too married to one another, [...]
