This has to be a record, sadly

Hey, this has to be an almost record of blog continuity. I have posted twice in the same week! Planning to blog with my 601 class is a big motivator to keep this account going. I may move the blog to another site--we shall see. I'm going to talk to Collin about it because it's clear this is a pretty rudimentary space (at least the way I'm working with in it).

Well, I made it through the first week of classes. I'm looking forward to the semester, but I must admit I was absolutely sick by Thursday night with a headache. My theory is that three days of not getting in a run didn't help matters. I plan on a long run today to remedy that situation--maybe 6 miles at Beaver Lake Nature Center today. Or maybe I'll run three and crawl the rest.

I'll be blogging later this weekend about the readings for 601, and today is a "research day" so my focus is on my book _New Agrarian Rhetorics_. I was pleased to see that the _Nation_ focused its recent issue on Food Politics. There are a series of mini-essays by leading lights like Alice Waters, Eric Schlosser, Michael Pollan, Vandana Shiva, and others on what is going on with the Food and Farming system with recommendations about how to change the food system. This issue is a great example of the new agrarian literacy that public interesting journalists, scientists, and farmers are trying to foster among the general public. I'm sure the issue will make it into the new agrarian literacy chapter of the book.

Here's a brief description of the book I'm working on from the prospectus:

New Agrarian Rhetorics will analyze, from a rhetorical perspective, the public debates, surrounding the ongoing loss of small family farms in the U.S, the rise of the food industrial complex, and the constellation of local food movements currently underway. The book will analyze media treatments of the contemporary farm crisis, public policy documents (including farm bills), nonfiction books and essays on the food industrial complex, alternative agrifood advocacy movements (local food, slow food, organic farming, community-supported agriculture, local farmers’ markets, farm to cafeteria programs), and efforts to sponsor alternative agrarian literacies through critical literacy education. The book argues for an alternative agrarian literacy as a significant component of the public rhetoric on agriculture; it also offers one of the first book-length rhetorical analyses of the public discourses surrounding the transformation and debate over the food and farming system in the U.S.

Anyway, on to reworking chapters 1 & 2 of the book and to that run, which I consider to be a form of prewriting and invention.