officially down, but actually pretty high

This blog is still officially down while I still officially draft my dissertation. Last week, my dissertation committee played musical chairs. (Officially, there is a new committee chair and a new member, who I'll officially meet this week. Oh, and my new chair is a blogger, but shhh, no one's supposed to know, even though she got me into blogging herself, once upon a time, unofficially of course.) This week, I'm happier.

So this post is not official. I'm officially not reading anyone else's blogs either. So don't read this blog or this post.

You'll just overhear that I had absolutely my happiest day ever yesterday, spending time with my best friend and her children (who are my son and two daughters) laughing and enjoying our differences around an unnecessarily drawn out meal together followed by sno cones in the Texas heat. Damn heat! Stupid dissertation. They all call it, "the thing."

You'll just listen in on me confessing that I think Iyov's post on the need for multiple voices in translation is one of the best statements I've eavesdropped in on in a long time. And he's labeled it post 1, so I'm going back unofficially.

You'll find me reading and pasting in for my dissertating stuff from Krista Ratcliffe, whose stuff is sponsoring my friend Jason's dissertation. Here's the quotation he sent me from her unofficially:

Defining rhetorical listening as a trope of interpretive invention not only emphasizes the discursive nature of rhetorical listening but also plays with the etymology of the term trope as “a turning.”

For rhetorical listening turns hearing (a reception process) into invention (a production process), thus complicating the reception/production opposition and inviting rhetorical listening into the time-honored tradition of rhetorical invention.

Second, rhetorical listening turns the realm of hearing into a larger space, one encompassing all discursive forms, not just oral ones.

Third, rhetorical listening turns intent back on the listener, focusing on listening with intent to hear troubled identifications, instead of listening for intent of an author.

Fourth, rhetorical listening turns the meaning of the text into something larger than itself, certainly larger than the intent of the speaker/writer, in that rhetorical listening locates a text as part of larger cultural logics.

And fifth, rhetorical listening turns rhetoric's traditional focus on the desires of the speaker/writer into a harmonics and/or dissonance of the desires of both the speaker/writer and the listener.

[dear eavesdropper, guess what book that's from, and what page? If this were an official post, we might talk to each other. I might say something like "rhetorical listening is feminist rhetorical translating," and you might laugh or try to argue. Then, I'd say the same thing with a Texas twang, then a British air, then you'd see that the official names need translation, and we'd both laugh, all of us. I'm officially off some where else writing, drafting shittily, as if I've overheard Ann Lamott's voices well enough. Well, enough then.]