LY #115 Conventional This and That

Kake at the lecture she didn't actually use

Kake falling for the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror

Here are some observations of the convention at Anaheim.

It was held in a resort area.  This was great for folks with kids and others like myself who really wanted to go to Disneyland and Disney's California Adventure.  It wasn't so great for graduate students traveling on a budget.  There were no real grocery stores within walking distance.  Food at the Hilton was overpriced. 

Ah, food at the Hilton.  The convention lunch was terrific -- a small Romaine heart with tomato and grapes, a main dish of very nice salmon over a risotto and a totally scrumptious dessert of chocolate moose with raspberries and a raspberry drizzle.  Someone sent pictures of the dessert to her Instagram site but I forget who.

On the other hand, I had one of the worst breakfasts ever at the Hilton -- $20 for coffee, two eggs, 2 slices bacon, and a handful of Sysco systems reconstituted potato forms overcooked in burnt grease.  Yuck. 

The keynote speaker, George Lakoff, was a smart man who kept talking about how smart he was and quoting himself but what was more annoying was his unquestioned assumption that everyone at the convention was a liberal.  His presentation was more like an off the cuff lecture than a keynote speech.  He also made a Jewish joke. He also went over time, even though he was given an hour.

This convention seemed to have many more people of color than I remember of conventions past.  I appreciated the growth of "diversity."  The service staff of the hotel, as of almost all hotels in which past conventions have taken place, was largely made up of people of color.  It always seemed somewhat amusing to me to hear white middle class (usually) male leftie academics spouting off about race, class, gender while being waited on by servers of a different color, sex, and class.

The Hilton bar only had three single malt whiskies and none of them from Islay or the Islands.

Some folks expressed trouble believing that I would really retire and assumed they'd see me next year in Spokane:  "You don't have to retire from WSCA just because you stop teaching."  Well, I made it a point to register for the convention as a non-member.  And the funny thing was that it cost me $10 to be a non-member (and NOT get the journal) than it would have cost me to register as a member.  But you know what?  I really don't want the journal.  It's a good one and sometimes a great one but it's still an academic journal and not The New Yorker.

I did not attend one panel that had everyone on it who was supposed to be there.  This absenteeism would not have happened "back in the day."  My buddy Alexis thinks this started happening after the downturn in 2008.  Not enough money now.  And perhaps the newer generation just doesn't think that it's important to be where you say you're going to be.  Or maybe convention papers don't count anymore.

LY #114 Conventional Purposes

(Written in the Portland airport on the way home.)

I was happy at WSCA this year because most of the papers I heard were given as presentations instead of being read.  I attribute this to the fact that most of the panels I attended were sponsored by the Community College Interest Group.  My favorites, as always, were the Great Ideas for Teaching Students panels.  Of course I liked the presenters shared the panel with me the best. The always dynamic Amy Edwards of Oxnard College chaired and panel and also took the lovely photo I’m sharing here.  We were missing one panelist which meant that we could take 15 minutes rather than 10 to talk about our ideas. My chin-wag about the interpersonal communication course project that involves creativity (making a short movie), analysis (writing a critique of the relational message), and understanding (students need to know the six steps of constructive conflict management and use them to explain to the characters in the movie how to problem solve) took only 8 minutes.  I believe that shorter is better when it comes to public communication.  

The other panelists took more time but were very energized and interesting. Linda Carvalho Cooley of Reedley College offered a GIFT in which she used “What do you want to be when you grow up” as a topic to teach students the parts of the Toulmin Model of argumentation.  (From her I learned another way of explaining “warrants,” a concept I always struggle to clarify in the classroom.)  I also appreciated another argument-oriented presentation by Anthony Ongyod, of Mira Costa College, that required students to teach certain principles of fair argument to someone “important” to them (relational partner, parent, child, friend) through the 18 weeks of the semester.  He said one problem that he faced was making sure students didn’t choose their most recent love-forever as the focus of the teaching project.  And Christine Burke of CSU Channel Islands talked about how in her public speaking courses she required students to do some public performance of a more artistic type to sell their view on an issue of “social justice.”

Besides my own panel and a few other G.I.F.T.S., I also enjoyed some of the more academic research presentations.  One favorite was “Disaster!  Imperialism in Crisis,” an analysis of four environmental disaster movies by Jenna Hanchey of the University of Texas at Austin.  She looked at two movies from the nineties and compared them to two movies in the oughts and found in the latter a greater sense of anxiety about the ability of both science and the American government to solve problems.  The imperialism comes in with the idea that some cultures and countries (notably in Africa) don’t matter when it comes to saving people from disaster.  

Speaking on a panel sponsored by the Health Communication Division, Mary-Jo Losso-Engle of CSU Northridge offered a fascinating analysis of the way in which breast cancer survivors either deploy or reject the images presented of them by the media.  What I liked in this presentation was hearing about all those who reject the “battle” and “hero” metaphor, adopting instead a view, “well, what other choice did I have?”  Her paper was called, “Warriors in Pink:  The Negotiation of Mediated Breast Cancer Rhetoric by Long Term Survivors.”

But as an old (in all ways) fan of Kenneth Burke, my favorite presentation was the one given by Scott Church of Brigham Young University:  “Perspective by Congruity, Possession by Misnomer, and the Rhetoric of Girl Talks Mash-ups.”  He managed to speak with energy and wit as he reviewed Burke’s concepts and link them to his text.  I also liked the texts on which he focused.  I enjoyed the return to Burke as well as the bits of video he showed on his own laptop.

And of course I enjoyed the panel on assessment in which my colleague Jon Bouknight participated.  It taught me that there are no perfect methods of assessment and that colleges differ monumentally when it comes to the ways in which they measure, test, review, etc etc student and program learning outcomes.  Knowing the vast diversity in the universe of assessment just made me feel a little bit better about the known world.

LY #113 Conventional Behavior: Old Friends

I was looking over the history of the convention at the WSCA website to try and figure out how many I've attended.  The first thing I noticed is that my memory of going to a snowy Denver WSCA was incorrect -- it was a snowy SCA (Speech Communication Association convention) in Denver in fall of 1985.  Then I figured out that I've been to over 16 WSCA conventions.  Why do I go?  Well, a convention paper looks good on one's vita.  Hearing about new developments in teaching or hearing interesting research in one's field can regenerate interest in subjects grow stale.  And then there are the people.

One of the great pleasures of attending the Western States Communication Association conventions over the past 29 years has been catching up with old professors and the folks with whom I attended the graduate program at the University of Utah.   But time and fortune happeneth to them all.  This year I saw very few.  My profs are mostly retired, too old to travel, or deceased.  Many of the Utah folks with whom I went to school are now scattered around the country and not settled in the West.  But I did have brief interactions with a few old faces.

Of my old profs, I saw only Dr. Robert Avery, phasing toward retirement at age 72.  Bob is still tall, slender, handsome, and given to obsessive boosterism.  He met folks at the door of last night's Utah reception, wearing the customary bright red Ute sweater and handing out the bright red on white U badge stickers.  I chatted with Bob a bit, finding him still cheery.  As long as I can remember Bob's been the man in charge of the party.  Back in the day, he would sneak booze or champagne into whatever hotel was hosting the conference for the Utah party.  But now, perhaps having been caught once too often (or perhaps because the University coughed up some funds) there's now a no-host bar (though Utah Alumni get tickets with their invitations).


Way back in MY day, graduate students who attended the convention were rounded up to act as servers at the party and actually poured champagne for everyone in attendance.  I enjoyed this activity.  First, because it made for a nice change from listening to panel presentations and doing coursework.  Second, because it underlined our role as servants to the department.  We were the ones who did the scutwork for major professors and who taught the "weed" classes.  We were the cheap labor who taught the highly popular basic courses that supported the graduate school.  Acting as a servant, towel over my arm, enacted the "truth" of our relationship to the department in ways that turning in papers never could.

I spoke VERY briefly (2 minutes) to Dr. Jeanine Congalton, of Cal State Fullerton.  Jeanine was at Utah when I arrived and was one of those deeply dedicated forensic types, focused on speech and debate.  I also spoke with Dr. Michael Salvador of Cal State San Bernardino.  I knew almost from the first year we were at Utah that Mike would become a department chair.  He had the proper mix of force and subservience that makes for a good faculstrator.  Mike was a department chair at Washington State University for many years and has recently been hired in as a chair further south in the land of his youth.

My only vital link to my graduate student days is Dr. Professor Alexis Olds of the University of La Verne and Cuesta College.  In the mid 90s Alexis encouraged me to be active in the Media Studies division of WSCA and convinced me that I wanted to be Vice-Chair and program planner one year, an experience that taught me a lot about organizational structures and event planning.  (Mostly what it taught me about event planning is that I hate event planning.)

A story that Alexis told me that she has told her children about me is about the night that she drove me home from a giant celebratory party and I was so drunk I upchucked on the outside of the car.  She claims now that it froze on the outside of her car and that it was horrible all winter.  The last time I heard the story she told me my cathartic upheaval was so corrosive it took the paint off her car.  I remember the upheaval but I never actually got word from her about any damage at a time when I could have done something about it.  I don't remember the actual celebratory purpose of this party.  I do remember that I got sick from drinking ouzo straight out of the bottle.

A person I was worried about seeing, of course, was Professor Fox.  I'd actually done some work with my therapist around the possibility of such an event.  But he was absent and so that problem didn't need to be managed.

Tomorrow night I'll offer a few notes about my favorites among this year's presentations.

LY #112 Here we are now, entertain us . . .

Writing in a very quiet room at the Hilton Anaheim after a lovely flat iron steak and a Beefeater's martini, eaten all by myself while perusing the program for the Western States Communication Association convention.

I remember the first Western I ever attended.  It was in the winter of 1985.  I didn't have a convention paper so the school didn't send me down.  (Utah was always very good about paying for graduate students to attend conventions when they had papers accepted.)  A gang of us drove from Salt Lake City to Denver to see what the convention was like.  I remember absolutely nothing of the convention itself.  I remember just two things:  1)  taking a long walk through Denver and stumbling upon a gay leather shop and suddenly feeling at home in a way I hadn't since beginning the doctoral program at Utah and 2) getting snowed in on the drive home and having to stay overnight in a single room with five other graduate students when I had a paper on Kenneth Burke due the morning after the day we returned and no one was going to sleep.  I remember raging against them as I walked around the halls of the hotel in the early morning hours because it seemed like I was the only one who wanted to sleep instead of drink and talk.*

The next convention I attended I DID have a paper.  The department sent me to the Popular Culture Association convention in Atlanta in 1985.  I was thinking about that today as I dragged my backpack and carry-on through the John Wayne airport.  I carried so much less baggage to this week's convention than I took to Atlanta almost 30 years ago.  Then I was hauling my overstuffed suitbag AND a smaller suitcase.  I carried I don't know how many copies of my paper to hand out. 

Oh, that paper.  It wound up being published, don'tchaknow.  It was a Foucauldian analysis of three short cartoon books by gay porn  icon Tom of Finland.  I'd kinda scandalized the Utah communication department when I wrote the paper for our "Introduction to Graduate Studies" course in fall, 1984.  I thought I was just doing what people did in the academy.  Turned out that my use of terms like "fisting" as though they were known by everyone was a bit outre for the department.  But back to my suitcase (although not my closet, which has pretty much always had very little in it).  I remember how heavy the suitbag and carry on were, filled with papers. 

Fortunately, some friends from Utah also had papers.  My now deceased friend Mike Swan and his friend from his college days, Scott Schamp.  I delivered the speech based on my essay to a room with over 50 people in it (folks at Pop Culture always turn out for the porn sessions.).  Did I throw out all the copies people didn't collect?  I certainly hope I did, though I don't remember.

For the short presentation I'm giving on Monday, I've brought 20 copies of only 4 pages.  It's part of a G. I. F. T. S. panel.  These used to be "Great Ideas for Teaching Speech."  But now the word speech has become "students," probably because so many programs have adapted the term "communication" rather that "speech."  Also, interpersonal, group, and the basic "overview" course are all part of the focus of these panels now and they are not as easily understood as fitting under the umbrella term "speech."

Turns out that my buddy and sometime boss (and sometime underling) Jon B. is also here to be part of a panel on assessment.  Fond as I am of the guy, I think I'm too close to escape time to sit down and listen to one more thing about SLOs. 

Sadly, the tour of the Queen Mary, scheduled for tomorrow, was cancelled.  Oh, as I registered for the convention tonight, I found out that it cost me $10 more to NOT get the journal (to register as a non-member) than it would to revive my membership and get the journal.  I decided to spend the extra money so that I would not receive the journal. 

Sunday night is the Utah Party and the Sock Hop.  Much more on those two events later.  Now I think I'll go down to the fancy bar and get some Drambuie.

  *  It just occurred to me that almost the same thing happened to me in fourth or fifth grade when a group of girls went out with the parents of one of the girls on a boat on the Sacramento River and come 9:00 pm I wanted to go to sleep but all the other girls wanted to stay up giggling and talking.  Gosh, I am stick-in-the-mud!  Lifelong, it would seem.

LY #42 The Utah Party

Today I received my annual invitation to the Utah party at the National Communication Association convention.  I used to love these parties at both the national convention and the Western States Communication Association convention.  There was almost always good food at the Utah parties and plenty of alcohol.  (I think that the department was often trying to override people's opinions about a largely "dry" state.)

When I was a graduate student, the tradition at one of the Utah parties was to have us grads pouring "champagne" for those attending.  Cheap "champagne" (but not Utah champagne, if there is such a thing.)   The lead party-maker in the department, who we'll call Dr. A., used to sneak champagne and then hard alcohol into the hotel for student minions to pour for party attendees.  My spouse has fond memories of running into Dr. A. on the streets of some city (New Orleans, I think, or perhaps Seattle) with a box of liquor in his arms.

"Shhhh," he said, and laughed.

 I noticed that the practice of sidestepping certain rules ended some years ago and now those with invitations get a ticket for one free drink at hotel-catered parties.

But back in the day what I enjoyed about pouring champagne for my betters was the feeling of being one of a crew, like a theatrical company.  It felt like I was truly being made to serve the department when I did an activity so not-part-of-the-job-description.  It was part of the hazing ritual that is graduate school.

This year the convention is in Washington, D. C.  in late November.  I'll not be attending this one, or any in the future.  I do, however, plan to attend the next WSCA in Anaheim and go to one last Utah party before I retire.   Utah is a large presence at the regional conventions which are usually held in February.  I remember one party with snow blowing outside onto the party room's balcony.  I got into my goofball state of mind and decided that what some of the younger stuffed shirts then serving the department needed was snow on their necks.

Yeah...I know.  Uncool, man, uncool.    But not as uncool as the time I showed up at the Utah breakfast, a recruitment tool to bring in new graduate students.  I showed up a year or two after getting my PhD, sat down with a young professor who had been hired at the school after I'd left the program, and asked him about what Utah had to offer.  He took several minutes to give me the spiel, all while a senior faculty member was as amused as I was over my jest.  Once the younger prof caught on that I didn't need to hear the sales pitch, he was very annoyed and for years after would bring up my "cruel" joke whenever  we met at conventions.

I guess there's just something in me that doesn't take academia all that seriously, even though I'm part of it.