tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-76157050642816768342011-07-31T02:36:05.204-04:00Rebecca Moore Howardnoreply@blogger.comBlogger161100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7615705064281676834.post-24259940110838170212010-10-25T07:24:00.003-04:002010-10-25T07:28:36.459-04:00

Stage One involves emptying out the barn that will be dismantled in the spring. We have a construction-site dumpster beside the barn, and that dumpster is now full. Taking the picture on an iPhone through a windowscreen yields crummy photo quality, but you can nevertheless get the idea. Is it full? Yes, it is. Is the barn empty? No, it is not.

Rebecca Moore Howardnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7615705064281676834.post-49325132345103231622010-10-12T21:56:00.006-04:002010-10-12T22:39:57.175-04:00

Here's that front porch, at a point in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. Note the hand-hewn lamppost. K points out four chairs on the porch, in addition to the inviting hammock. G muses on how low the bannister is.Compare that to what it looks like today.Still a lovely house, but not nearly as much as 100 years ago. I've been mulling over the puzzle of why anybody wanted to change

Rebecca Moore Howardnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7615705064281676834.post-67836037502793338792010-10-09T11:41:00.046-04:002010-10-10T08:44:21.332-04:00

This week the Beloved Partner and I start on a three-year project of remodeling our house. It's a 130-year-old house in a rural farming village in central New York. The house appears to be just another house on the street, but behind it is 5 acres. For the first half of its life, the house was a farmhouse: This was a chicken farm, with big barns and a carriage house out back. Harry Conley, who

Rebecca Moore Howardnoreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7615705064281676834.post-15256034834930903362010-09-12T13:53:00.005-04:002010-09-12T15:54:28.176-04:00

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Rebecca Moore Howardnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7615705064281676834.post-19791816726135761932010-08-22T09:55:00.005-04:002010-08-22T10:34:44.566-04:00

This summer hasn't been the one I'd planned. At the beginning of the season I had surgery that has improved the quality of my life enormously, but much of the summer has been diverted to incorporating that surgery into my life--coping with the terror of the suddenness of it, adjusting to the sheer freakiness of being cyborg, and beginning the process of rebuilding fitness. (I'm up to 22 miles for

Rebecca Moore Howardnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7615705064281676834.post-72991241417816491622009-10-18T09:16:00.004-04:002009-10-18T09:23:12.458-04:00

The Beloved Partner shares this tidbit from an encyclopedia: J. William Dawson, Emeritus Principal of McGill College, refers to his time as "an age characterized by a superficial and confused expansion of thought and discussion, and by an intense craving for the exciting and sensational."But his time is 1898.So if that's true in 1898 and if we really are on that long slide from a civilized time

Rebecca Moore Howardnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7615705064281676834.post-76794569041160953602009-09-17T09:54:00.010-04:002009-09-17T10:26:36.818-04:00

I have reached the place in life where strangers, always men, feel called upon to hail me as "young lady." Not incidentally, this always comes in a loud, confident voice."What can I do for you, young lady?" (Club car attendant on Monday's train)"Why, hello, young lady! How are we today?" (Random pasty young man encountering me in the post office parking lot last week.)I've noticed and abhorred

Rebecca Moore Howardnoreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7615705064281676834.post-31732959815454834882009-07-17T23:01:00.006-04:002009-07-18T00:00:57.175-04:00

I don't know when I've attended such a stimulating conference. WPA has been my favorite conference since I first attended it. That was in 1985. No, that's not a typo. This is where community, mentoring, and inclusion happen for me. WPA is where I discovered my discipline.That hasn't changed, even as the conference has grown bigger. What has changed, though, is the quality of presentations. Always

Rebecca Moore Howardnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7615705064281676834.post-73837445913724117212009-07-16T22:39:00.009-04:002009-07-17T07:52:27.531-04:00

These are necessarily just quick notes before I pack it in for the night. Just listened to Brandt's opening plenary for the WPA conference. She was pulling her talk in part from her new book, Literary and Learning: Reflections on Writing, Reading, and Society, which I haven't read yet but which is now in my shopping cart. Part of it resonated with, if it wasn't pulled from, "'Who's the President?

Rebecca Moore Howardnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7615705064281676834.post-31578926473306844522009-06-26T21:45:00.009-04:002009-06-27T07:36:25.249-04:00

Tell me you love it. Because I think it's the best-looking thing in the universe. I love the spare, dramatic design. I love the origami bird, reminding me of one Brooke did when she was at my house writing her dissertation. Orange is my favorite color. This exterior design harmonizes wonderfully with the interior design of the book (which I also l.o.v.e).The designers produced what felt like

Rebecca Moore Howardnoreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7615705064281676834.post-26903347295219570342009-06-25T16:04:00.006-04:002009-06-27T15:33:50.567-04:00

[Six months of blogsilence, and now I can't shut up. . . .]Every smart, responsible writer works very hard not to plagiarize—not only because one doesn't want to be caught and punished but also because smart writers want to demonstrate the entire conversation they're participating in. And also because writers want others to see how hard they've worked to understand their topic. Etc. There's a

Rebecca Moore Howardnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7615705064281676834.post-36749116883153683552009-06-24T19:49:00.004-04:002009-06-24T20:10:52.562-04:00

Susan asks for an explanation of a Twitter entry forwarded to Facebook; here ya go.I'm a longstanding user of the 43 Folders system. I can't immediately find the ur-post from that blog that explains the system (anybody else got it bookmarked?), but it's basically that you set up a hardcopy file folder for each day of the month (31 folders) and for each month of the year (12 more), and you file

Rebecca Moore Howardnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7615705064281676834.post-59679433296650160572009-06-22T15:41:00.008-04:002009-06-22T16:24:24.680-04:00

Dear dissertation-writer,Congratulations on having passed your exams. Now let's talk about the next stage. In it, three huge monsters await you, and I want you to know about them in advance so that you can recognize (and avoid) them when they rear their ugly heads. These are the monsters of inspiration, extended uninterrupted time, and additional reading.Don't wait for inspiration or for huge

Rebecca Moore Howardnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7615705064281676834.post-69959726114157130102009-06-21T15:44:00.001-04:002009-06-21T15:45:49.321-04:00

In 1999 I signed with McGraw-Hill to write a handbook. Delayed by surgeries, family deaths, being department chair, and then having a car wreck that derailed me for months, I didn't really get started on writing the handbook for several years. At last, though, Writing Matters will soon be published.It's standard wisdom in composition and rhetoric to speak of textbooks as something one does for

Rebecca Moore Howardnoreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7615705064281676834.post-18344808634981436942009-06-18T08:03:00.002-04:002009-06-18T08:08:31.350-04:00

But how long, really, can one just not blog at all?

Rebecca Moore Howardnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7615705064281676834.post-50133185794340083272008-12-20T09:55:00.001-05:002008-12-20T09:55:56.795-05:00

With neither a bang nor a whimper, this blog now quietly closes.

Rebecca Moore Howardnoreply@blogger.com