PlanetUSF

This video of Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor speaking is absolutely amazing. [BTW all of the TED talks are great]

I appreciate her honest emotion so much, particularly b/c it helps me understand my best friend Sarah’s recent stroke [chronicled here on NOLA.com] and once again feel completely optimistic that she will recover 100%!

I’m so happy Leisa posted the link to this in her Twitter stream. I think I had heard of this project through the Open Society Institute, but never got a chance to read more or watch the student-produced videos until now.

The Katrina Media Fellows’ mission is stated as follows:

Through stories and images, the fellows aim to deepen public understanding of the government’s long-term response to Katrina; failures of public policy; use or misuse of public funds; the role of private contractors; the effectiveness of clean-up and rebuilding efforts; the psychological impact on residents, now more than two years after the storm; and lessons that should inform the handling of future disasters.

One of the most powerful videos, considering the subject of my dissertation research, is the one entitled “Not As Seen on TV.” Not only does it let locals speak for themselves, it shows the pain that permeates the city still today. (However, I actually wish less edits were made because I think some interviewees were on the verge of sharing more and, while that may be uncomfortable to watch, how else can their grief be honestly represented and understood?) Still, heavy emphasis is also made on the music, culture, and humor of New Orleanians, with one interview subject stating it quite plainly, “New Orleans is not just a place, it’s our soul.”

I’m in the midst of revising my own narrative which deals with my denial during the week of August 29, 2005, and watching this only reminds me of how my parents could have also been part of those people left behind had the storm not hit the magic number 5. I truly think that’s the only thing that convinced them to evacuate at the last minute. While they were lucky and never had to live in a FEMA trailer, I know we are all still trying to deal with the loss, the gutting & buy-out of our home, and the feeling of “not knowing when this was going to end.”

Even though I blog about this quite often, it’s not something I voice out loud much, probably because I’m still suffering from the pain and anger of things being forever changed by the levee breaches. Because I’m not living in NOLA now, and because when I visit I see friends who seem genuinely happy with the way their lives are going, it’s easy for me to purposefully forget how traumatic it must be to cope with the many changes that have occurred the past three years.

All I can do though is write my story, share the blogs of those living there now, and try to remain as involved in the city’s recovery as possible.

In fact, next week when I am there for the Conference on College Composition and Communication I’ll have a chance to meet again with fellow New Orleans bloggers and have my first ever “tweetup” with eve11 who I’ve connected with through Twitter. Her blog is wonderfully written and I’m looking forward to both talking to her about a term she introduced me to called “naked blogging,” and donating my OLPC XO laptop to her proposed children’s social media project!

Watch this space for updates on this next week. Til then, go watch the videos at the Soros site.

[I started composing this post before Thanksgiving, but never got around to finishing it until now–my apologies]

As you all know, this has been the most hectic semester for me. While I probably did not have the time to attend a conference, I knew I had to attend the Louisiana Association for College Composition conference for several reasons:

1. It was being held in New Orleans, my hometown
2. Its theme was re•NEW•al, the overarching subject of my dissertation
3. It was hosted by Xavier University of Louisiana, where I was an Instructor for three years before starting my PhD
4. I had attended two of these conferences before when I was teaching at Xavier, and I’ve always appreciated its close community and small number of panels. When you’re faced with the immense program books of national conferences, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. Here I only had to choose between two sessions each hour!

Needless to say, every trip I’ve made to NOLA since Katrina has been an emotional one and this would be no different, especially because I got to see my friend, Sarah, who recently had a stroke. I also had the chance to see my undergrad university’s ballet program, something I don’t think I have ever done as an audience member! I know watching the show was hard for Sarah to do, especially since some of the choreography was originally chosen for her to perform, but she was a trooper. Just last week she returned to a ballet and a character dance class, which is more than I think I’d ever do only 12 weeks after a stroke. She’s got amazing will power, and I’m so proud of her for never giving up!

Another off-putting feeling I had was checking into a hotel for this visit. Typically, we stay with my parents or friends, but because of the conference, I thought it easier to stay in the conference hotel than rent a car or rely on friends to drive me around. [Just the week before, though, the St. Charles streetcar began running again, so I could have had an alternative mode of transport]. Anyway, I felt weird being a tourist in my hometown, but got over it pretty quickly when I was reminded of all the fun things to do nearby. Walking St. Charles is something I’ve done every Mardi Gras so I just pretended there was a parade to get to and I was fine

But how about the conference?! Friday morning I attended a great session on Literature and Writing, and while it was noted that the second composition course requirement is moving away from using literature, I was reminded how much I enjoyed teaching the genres and creating unique paper assignments that asked for reader responses and new historical/social commentary. Perhaps my interest was piqued by the emphasis on regional literature and how students can supplement, in this case their reading and scholarly research of A Lesson Before Dying, with newspaper archival work and oral histories. The presenter, Elizabeth M. Beard’s, goal was to share how she helped make literature meaningful for her students, and I appreciated her strategies since this projects really pushes students to become critics and creators of cultural narratives. A text she referenced that I want to check out is a 2006 NCTE edited collection, Bergmann and Baker’s Composition and/or Literature: The End(s) of Education.

The Keynote Speaker at LACC was Dr. Jacqueline Jones Royster who shared 5 wonderful goals for all teachers, particularly those who Katrina has left traumatized, to consider:

context matters–specific circumstances have a way of changing our world view so what can we learn from these circumstances, what teachable moments are out there? How can be on guard to patterns of action?
vision–who are we as teachers and what it is we’re trying to enable our students to do?
courage–a motivating force; be upfront with students about the limitations of language b/c when they leave the cocoon of the classroom, they may be shocked at the lack of response
compassion to act responsibly–Q: why should we care about others? Who is included in “our circle”? A: Draw larger circles of caring–connect to others around the planet
conscious of our global realities–have the fortitude and commitment to be consistently “fired up.” Link lives and stories to those of others in humanity.

Her hope for those of us in the field of writing studies is for more opportunities to stand back and think about what we do and what we must do–>professional integrity. Most applicable to my work with trauma theory and the connection between the body and mind [writing to heal] is that we should pay attention to the whole body experience when writing, not just the “writing about.”

On Saturday I had the pleasure of chairing the panel on Civic Rhetoric and presenting along with Lei Lani Michel and Clancy Ratliff. Because I was chair and didn’t have a lot of time to take notes, but I did record my fellow panelists’ talks with my new i-pod attachment. I haven’t had a chance to listen to the recording, so for now I will share the memorable names and phrases from each.

Clancy’s presentation proposed “Opportunities and Ideas for Teaching Civic Literacy in Louisiana” and used Donald Lazere’s definition of civic literacy, which includes having a store of knowledge of history, civics, political movements and theorists. Obviously many of our students lack this specific background but if we localize the experience to issues specific to Louisiana–Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, FEMA trailer standards [or lack thereof], the Jena 6 case, etc., perhaps our students will thrive at vocalizing their opinions and grounding them in research/history.

Lei Lani’s presentation focused on “findability” and a course exercise she conducted with her students in order to emphasize writing for both people and search engines. Reminding us all that technology is unfixed and we all have the chance to be part of its change, a part of the information[’s] culture, it became clear that those of us who aim to teach technological literacy that we should also model “finding” for our students. One unique way she suggested we could do this is to ask students to do a rhetorical analysis of a search engine beyond Google and Yahoo, e.g. Kartoo.com, IceRocket.com, Like.com, and MsDewey.com. I’ve never heard of any of these and am fascinated by their emphasis on visual design [although I’m kind of scared of Ms. Dewey!], so I’m eager to explore these further and try this exercise out next semester!

More blogging to come over the next 2 weeks!

I’m happy to announce that my meta-blogging meta-narrative has been published in Computers and Composition Online. The entire Special Issue about Online Research, Writing, and Citation Practices can be found here and my webtext is available here.

I am not well-versed in Dreamweaver, but I do know that this is a much “easier-on-the eyes” version of the piece, which was first submitted in FrontPage. I know I have a lot to learn about navigation structures and I actually thought the whole left bar column would be fixed, but I guess that means the reader really has to finish each section before they can move onto the next!

Jeez, am I a linear kind of gal or what?

Day 2 of my exams was in the area of trauma theory. Since I’ve been reading texts of this nature for about a year now and the details are typically vivid, I wasn’t nervous about recalling the central themes. I was, however, freaked out when I got to school and all of a sudden felt exhausted. I bought a smoothie to perk me up and just kept my I-pod on my “Mix 4 Exams Playlist.”

A half hour before I was to go in to take the test I was pumped up and that lasted about three hours. The last hour of my exam I was fading but I managed to answer all of the questions I needed to, but the last short 2 answers might not be as developed as the others. Oh well…one more day to go!

I got a lot of sleep last night so all I will do today is stay home and read til about 6pm tonight when I go to my ZUMBA class. Yay!

This has to be quick but as you know one of the areas on my exams next week is Trauma Theory. With that comes a lot of reading of typically depressing things–about war veterans, Holocaust survivors, and unexpected deaths. But I find it to be the most insightful reading I’ve ever done and think our society should be more open to discussions of dying rather than make it a taboo subject, which does nothing to prepare us for how to deal with it when it faces us.

Here are links to some readings I’ve found intriguing this week:

Joan Didion’s “After Life,” which is the opening to her book The Year of Magical Thinking. Go buy the book–it’s fantastic and sad and beautifully written.

Dave Winer’s “Preserving Ideas” and Ryan Meehan’s “Life, death and mourning on the social web: What should Newsvine do?” are both interesting takes on how long our online presence lasts after we die and what mainstream sites should do to let our “network” know, if anything.

Finally, a book I’m reading for my Autoethnography class, Communicating at the End of Life: Finding Magic in the Mundane. I never thought I’d be open to the idea of volunteering at places with people on the cusp of dying, but Foster’s book tells us all about the rewards of doing so through her experience with hospice that I think I actually could one day. The book is written as an evocative tale of her meeting her patient Dorothy and interviewing other volunteers, and I think anyone interesting in communication and discourse, never mind human life and experience, would benefit from it.

I haven’t been blogging much because I’ve been on a narrative project writing streak. Usually I put off writing and end up rushing to a conclusion, but this Communicating Loss, Grief and Illness class has really changed things for me. Once I started writing my story and sprinkling it with dialogue, I was fully back in the moment–that week of Katrina. I wrote every day for 13 days straight, and I plan on writing for another 3 more before taking a long weekend break.

I presented my narrative tonight and of course cried throughout most of it. I had practiced at home and cried, so I was prepared. Even brought my own box of Kleenex. Typically for class presentations, I create a Powerpoint or made handouts, but in the days of presentations before mine, I noticed that everyone was simply reading their paper. And everyone had a moving tale to tell. They cried and I cried for them. Now I had to make the leap from writing my story to verbally sharing it. I am quite proud of the paper I produced and hope to see it evolve into the opening chapter of my dissertation; however, I really didn’t want to cry in front of everyone. But there’s the rub. If I didn’t read my paper aloud, then my story would go unheard. Turning it in is one thing, but reading it does much more. Posting it online would do even more than that, but I’m not ready for that yet. Frankly, I don’t have a webspace to do that anyway considering it’s over 25 pages. But here’s a snippit or two:

I intended this narrative to focus on the guilt of not taking the storm more seriously, not telling my parents to drive to Tampa, not being there to help my parents empty and gut our home of thirty years, and not being there in New Orleans for friends who had to move into FEMA trailers, are currently dealing with relationship problems, and are overmedicating to cover up their sadness. But once I started writing, I realized I felt more relief from telling my story about what I went through that week of the storm. Could my guilt this whole time be because I had not told my story sooner?

I feel guilty about labeling myself a “Katrina victim” because I didn’t have to endure anything other than frustration at not having any precise information. Even my parents are better off than most “Katrina victims” due to their relocation to a second home we already owned in Picayune, Mississippi. In general, when I tell people that my parents evacuated the day before the storm, I am convinced that whatever sympathy they may have had for us will diminish. Louise DeSalvo writes, “Often…trauma remains undisclosed because, though people would like to discuss it, they can’t or won’t because they fear punishment, embarrassment, or disapproval or because they can’t find an appropriate audience. So, many people actively stop themselves from telling their stories; they inhibit the need to tell their traumatic narratives” (24). DeSalvo has explained my situation exactly. However, I did begin telling my story online. Turns out, I have a different, more emotional persona online. Online, I have my blog space to share how upset I am.

As you can see, Katrina still haunts me. I came home from class tonight emotionally exhausted, with a migraine, and now can’t get to sleep. I tried grading papers, but I cannot focus for very long. Let’s just hope I get this Hurricane bitch off my back soon. I don’t think that will happen til 2008 when I defend my diss., but a girl can hope for some relief, can’t she?

I just spent some of this afternoon working on my essay for Lisa’s Placeblogging Project and felt good about it, considering I felt sinusy all morning and didn’t want to leave the house. Well I come home and find this excellent piece already written about the same topic I’m writing on: “Blogs are building community while rebuilding Big Easy.” While I know the heart of my dissertation is the same topic, that at least will throw in some trauma theory to academic-tize it .

The Placeblogging piece will have to be revised now to make sure I am not framing things in the same way, which shouldn’t be too difficult considering it’s an expository essay and not a newspaper story that surely had its limits in terms of word count and personal voice.

Actually, I look forward to the challenge!

I really was kidding in the previous post about forgetting what my fellow presenters and I proposed, but here’s the whole kit-n-kaboodle for those interested:

An increasing number of people living with a disability, an illness, or having survived a natural disaster are narrating their life stories to experience healing.

“Deformed” vs. “normal”, “diseased” vs. “healthy”, “fragmented” vs. “whole”. While the construction of self is never so blatantly binary, we are always hailed as embodying some normative or non-normative identity, and we must resolve our relationship to it. Cheryl Glenn asked, “What specific discursive features of reading, writing, speaking, listening, and/or silence contribute to representations of identities? With what consequences, in/exclusions, or possibilities? With what permanence?” We propose to answer these questions through an examination of narratives that are the ongoing results of traumatic events. The extent to which the narrator forms (or aligns him/herself) with an identity, whether online, in the local community, or in the classroom, presents both challenges and opportunities for analysis.

In “Enabled Identity, Written Identity: Disability and Ethnographic Narrative in the Composition Classroom,” Speaker 1 addresses “disabled” as another culturally constructed marker, defined by expectations about what constitutes “healthy” bodies. As Rosemarie Garland Thomson observes in her 1997 work Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature: “Disability, then, is the attribution of corporeal deviance – not so much a property of bodies as a product of cultural rules about what bodies should be or do.” Disabled and non-disabled bodies and identities are locked in an ever-shifting social web, constantly defining and being redefined. Moreover, those touched by the unique circumstances of disability and traumatic illness extend from the individual to family, friends, and those in care-related positions. Thus, few adults today have not been touched by disability; however, many avert their eyes in order to quell the pain and anxiety raised by the perception of suffering, silence and vulnerability. Speaker 1 will examine a study of ethnographic narratives written by or about people who are defined as “disabled” in the Composition classroom. These “disabled” people engage their own limitations and potentials. Their narratives, as well as the narratives of family, friends and members of a broader community, offer students a point from which to begin questioning and delineating how identity formation takes place. Furthermore, coexistent in an investigation of ethnographic method and disability studies are questions of who is “native” and who is the “fieldworker”. Or, are we all “participant-observers”? Speaker 1 concludes that this exchange challenges the students to locate an appropriate position and identity from which to situate their own intellectual (and emotional) understandings in the form of written responses.

In “Re-remembering HIV: Using Lore to Build a New and Less Traumatic Cultural Collective Memory in Gay Chat Space,” Speaker 2 discusses how the increased visibility of HIV on the web has allowed both HIV positive and negative gay men in a state located in the deep South to construct new identities. These new identities can be placed along a continuum that, until a few years ago, used a “clean” vs. “dirty” binary heuristic, which was regarded as “dramatic” (i.e., traumatic) by some members of the community. As of 2000, lore concerning HIV in gay chat space available to the local community was often wildly out of date. Created out of a sense of panic, this incorrect lore added to the trauma surrounding HIV, especially as this misinformation was sometimes deliberately disseminated in an attempt to project an image, and therefore an identity, of HIV positive gay men as both disease-ridden and villainous. However, as community members saw HIV represented both accurately, on websites such as Test Positive Aware and The Body, and inaccurately, on pages touting HIV as an easily treatable disease with few to none permanent consequences, the technology of the chat room was remediated from a means of social control of HIV positive men to a collective effort that constructed HIV status as merely one characteristic used to describe a given individual, similar to other less traumatic (though still charged) markers as age, gender, class and race. Speaker 2 concludes that this re-remembering created a new cultural memory that reconstructed HIV as neither always fatal nor as a minor illness, but as a serious though treatable sickness.

In “Online Communication Before, During and After Hurricane Katrina: Creating Relevant Truth and Offering a Sense of Comfort, Trust, and Familiarity,” Speaker 3 explores the breakdown of communication at times of crisis and how online spaces offer new ways to create knowledge and trust that are different from traditional media. The immediacy of the Internet allows websites and weblogs to have their own validity, levels of interaction, and concept(s) of truth, and thereby offered Louisiana, Texas, and Mississippi natives and Hurricane Katrina and Rita evacuees much-needed information and comfort. Using the theory of Cathy Caruth and Bessel Van der Kolk, an analysis of the online postings by those traumatized individuals separated from the place where their trauma occurred will illustrate how the web became their only means with which to take action, whether that be correcting overblown predictions by television broadcasters or pleading for help to save people and pets left behind. Through an exploration of the processes involved in the acts of witnessing, documenting, reacting to, and dealing with loss, Speaker 3 will demonstrate how the typically de-centered and diverse web created knowledge in a cooperative way more effectively than traditional media and ultimately created a collective voice for those trauma victims rendered physically helpless.

Woohoo! Like so many other of my peeps, my 4Cs panel was accepted. Now I need to go back and see what it was we proposed…just joking!

I also cannot wait to see some of my NYC pals again. When I lived in Boston I would be down there every month or so, then when I moved back to NOLA, every year or so. Now it’s been almost 4 years!

I need to make sure I balance conference time with Big Apple time, which is gonna be very difficult. At least I present Friday morning and can have the whole weekend to hit the streets! Of course, this conference isn’t until March 2007, but hey, a girl blogging this from a freezing cold library needs some distractions.

Tonight in my graduate course with Carolyn Ellis, Communicating Illness, Grief, and Loss, we went over the topics of Illness Narratives, Life Writing, and Wounded Storytellers. Dr. Ellis told us how she made her move from sociology to communication and we all discussed where we feel we fall on the critical, interpretive, naturalist continuum. We also discussed how storytelling is vital to healing, the types of personal writing out there and how this type of writing is a response to the representational crisis of the mid-1980s [a time when people began questioning social scientists, e.g., “What right do you have to tell someone’s story? How do you capture reality and evaluate and interpret research in an ethical way?]

The reason I am blogging about tonight’s class though is because it is 9/11 and so much has changed in how we think about crisis and fear since then. Another exercise we had due in class was related to Expressing Emotions of Loss: Writing, Music, and Healing. We were to bring in a song on CD and its lyrics–as long as it dealt with a wounded body. I brought in “Numb” by the Pet Shop Boys. Their website is weird so I can’t link to the lyrics directly, but I will paste them in at the end of this post.

Anyway, once we listened to the song, I was asked if this is how I felt during/since Katrina and my answer was a definite “no.” Since the song is about hiding from emotion and not wanting to deal with pain or to even think about what’s going on in the world, I think it is more suited to an individual crisis rather than a national one like Katrina or 9/11. Sure, I know we as a nation were taken aback by both of those events as well as angered by the fact that so many innocent died, but in both cases of national tragedy I think we immediately wanted answers and we weren’t going to shy away until we got/get answers. It’s late and that’s my take on it as of now. I hope I’m not sounding defensive–I just found it to be an interesting question because as much as I may have tried to remain in denial about the loss of my house and that place I call home, I’ve never wanted to feel numb or shut out sources of information. All I have wanted to do is think about it and what I can do to help, nothing else. With that said, I’ve got to go to bed and read before teaching tomorrow morning.

Don’t wanna hear the news
What’s going on
What’s coming through
I don’t wanna know
don’t wanna know
Just wanna hide away
make my my escape
I want the world
to leave me alone
Feels like I feel too much
I’ve seen too much
For a little while
I want to forget

I wanna be numb
I don’t wanna feel this pain no more
Wanna lose touch
I just wanna go and lock the door
I don’t wanna think
I don’t wanna feel nothing
I wanna be numb
I just wanna be
wanna be numb

Recently reported, in “Stress building in New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina anniversary could spark more problems,” was the story of a Times-Picayune photographer who “was seen driving wildly through the city Tuesday, attracting the attention of police. He eventually was arrested, but not before he was subdued with a Taser and an officer fired twice at his vehicle. During the melee, he begged police to kill him.” According to a friend of the photographer and NOLA Metroblogger, “Police quoted the photographer during the first attempt to stop him as saying ‘Just kill me, get it over with, kill me.’ John’s home in Lakeview was destroyed and he was under-insured. He is one of the thousands of people in New Orleans who’s financial life has been flipped and flopped to where he saw no way out.”

As the numbers suggested in “Blues are rampant; too few helping,” the number of therapists in NOLA is scant; however, this man had gone to therapy sessions three times a week. What else could he have done to recover from the horror of Katrina? Was talking not enough?

Leader in the field of psychological trauma, Bessel Van der Kolk, would say “yes.” The traditional “talking cure” of Freud’s time is not enough; the body is connected to the mind. In brief, Van der Kolk reasons the connection here [PDF] as follows:

When people get close to reexperiencing their trauma, they get so upset that they can no longer speak. It seemed to me that then we needed to find some way to access their trauma, but help them stay physiologically quiet enough to tolerate it; so they didn’t freak out or shut down in treatment. It was pretty obvious that as long as people just sat and moved their tongues around, there wasn’t enough real change.

That’s a snippit from my lit review…here is the link to Trauma Pages, a recent find I’ll have to explore later…

Blogathon for Pearlington was successful and I really recommend checking out the posts they made every half hour for 24 hours. They plan to maintain the blog even now. Two of their posts stick out to me: the one promoting The Katrina Collection, in which the artist “used fragments of old paintings, keys to my home, clocks which stopped when the storm reached Clermont Harbor, and many other pieces of rubble to represent this journey.” The other post is on Katrina and the media. In it they write:

The media used the graphic nature of tragedies in New Orleans to run its own self-serving campaign against the government. They did this at the expense of the storm victims. That’s not to say the government didn’t make its share of mistakes. It is only to say that the media was so focused on sensationalizing government culpability that it failed to tell the whole story.

I couldn’t have said it better, and again I have to tell you that Douglas Brinkley’s book The Great Deluge is amazing on this front of being a factual representation of what went on [on so many levels] that week of the storm. I’m learning so much even about how much damage the actual storm/Mother Nature did. I think I’d been forgetting how much wind damage was done to certain neighborhoods in the area even before the levees broke. Guess that proves we all need to learn more and keep the story alive rather than let it be brushed under the rug.

In addition to Rudy telling his tale in “Fleeing Katrina,” numerous film documentaries have been/are being made in NOLA, which I find extremely important. Two are discussed in the Times Picayune here.
I’ll have to find someone with HBO to tape the Spike Lee one for me.

I haven’t returned to the difficult book I mentioned 2 posts ago, but instead returned to Trauma and the Teaching of Writing where I found Peter N. Goggin and Maureen Daly Goggin’s essay, “Presence in Absence: Discourses (In, On, and About) Trauma” to be helpful, straightforward and quite applicable to my work, especially in how I think about and define my role as a first and second-degree witness to Katrina.

With that said, these documentaries are another venue for all such witnesses to tell their stories and share their “infinitely diverse reactions–grief, anger, ambivalence, hatred, silence” (Goggin & Goggin 38).

Looks like I am not the only one thinking about the post traumatic stress in NOLA.

Photographer: Charlie Riedel/AP

When I was reading Douglas Brinkley’s The Great Deluge last night, I decided to check out the photo section in the back. While I felt numb when I read about people tying bodies to trees in Anderson Cooper’s book, when I saw this photo and realized that something like this happened with my neighborhood church and elementary school, St. Raphael the Archangel on Elysian Fields Avenue, in the background, I freaked out. It all came back…walking the 3 blocks between my house and that school with my friend Adrianna, attending midnight masses at Christmas, singing in the choir during our weekly school masses on Thursdays, and all of my teachers. As much as I try to think about the future and try to feel optimistic about the New Orleans spirit, here I am traumatized all over again. I am reminded that “it” happened…the storm we all knew would come one day but brushed it off saying, “Those hurricanes always turn and head to Alabama or Florida or Texas. I’m not going to evacuate this time.” Death was everywhere, water was everywhere, and we’re a long way from feeling normal again.

To be able to apply theory to what I feel when moments like this happen, I’m also pushing myself through the book Trauma: A Genealogy, but it’s been difficult. So far, the first chapter on Freud summarizes his work and what is often not grasped in his work, namely that “anxiety is both cure and cause of psychic trauma” (28); however, once all the psychoanalytic talk of ego, libido, mimetic and antimimetic identification comes in, I’m lost. I think too that my frustration stems from many of the examples in this chapter referring to traumatized soldiers of war and not victims of natural/man-made disasters. I can see how “The response of the traumatized solider thus at one and the same time represents the achievement of defense and the failure of defense, the success of protection and the breaching of the protective shield…” (35), but how can that detachment and impressionability apply to victims of Katrina where there was nothing but failure?

Typically, if I am reading a difficult text and cannot see a way of applying the work to my topic of interest, then I skim or close the book. With my comprehensive exams coming up, though, I’m plugging along through this one until something makes sense or becomes applicable!

I finished an annotated bibliography today and have one more to go. This second one is the more serious of the 2 and will be the heart of my trauma theory lit review. All summer I’ve been jazzed about reading the stuff, then kept letting myself be distracted by examples [most recently the Douglas Brinkley book I bought months ago] to apply the theory to, even though I haven’t read the cold, hard theory yet! Talk about belated immediacy…

In other news about texts and what people need to understand about NOLA, here is an excerpt from Poppy Z Brite’s post:

Something you need to understand, if you’re not in New Orleans or in unwilling exile from here: This is probably the worst, scariest, most unstable time for us since the immediate aftermath of the storm. It feels like we’ve reached an unsatisfactory plateau of progress, especially with Nagin back in office and not talking to us, and many of us are still waiting on insurance/FEMA/LRA while our homes sit and rot, and the one-year anniversary is coming up and we’ve all got to argue about how it should be observed the same way we had to argue about whether or not we should have Mardi Gras. Things are just going to get rawer and rawer and crazier and crazier in this town until August 29. I don’t know what’s going to happen after that, but until then, we don’t need people who don’t know what it’s like to be here SAYING SHIT TO US.

I haven’t read anyone as feisty, and legitimately so, since BitchPhD, and do I love it! I also cannot wait to read Brite’s new book, the third in the Rickey and G-man series,
.

I’ve seen the name Carolyn Ellis on various articles (most likely during my research methods courses) and knew she was at USF, but now that I’m researching and reading more trauma theory-related stuff, I have come across her work on autoethnography and want to meet with her, talk to her, work with her! Her recent essay in the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography reads as a conversation with her husband, Arthur Bochner, and is titled “Analyzing Analytic Autoethnography.” It opens with the two of them watching victims of Hurricane Katrina tell their stories on CNN, and then segues into a discussion about an article she is to be writing but naturally is distracted by the footage. She is to respond to a work by Leon Anderson and for the rest of the essay, she and her husband go back and forth about how Anderson defines autoethnography and how they wish to see it the label used for those stories that cause readers to empathize rather than theorize. They prefer a work that lets readers “see the presence of the author” and posit the following:

If you turn a story told into a story analyzed, as Leon wants to do, you sacrifice the story at the altar of traditional sociological rigor. You transform the story into another language, the language of generalization and analysis, and thus you lose the very qualities that make a story a story.

While I don’t know how much storytelling I can get away with in my dissertation, I hope that I do not have to sacrifice the unfinished stories told on the New Orleans-based blogs I plan to pull from in favor of “generalization and analysis.” Just as Ellis and Bochner admit early on in their essay, “Disasters…shake you loose from ordinary time and you find yourself concentrating on the moment at hand rather than worrying about the past and future,” I want my story of dealing with, learning about the storm and finding friends and family online to be immediate, engaged, and embodied.

I could go on and on about how much I enjoyed this piece, but I’m going to try and read another one by Ellis published in the JCE, “Shattered Lives: Making Sense of September 11th and its Aftermath,” before hitting the sack. We’re off to New Orleans for the weekend early in the morning and I cannot wait to be THERE, the place where all of my energy for my academic work comes from!

P.S. Here is another related piece from Harpers Magazine: “The Uses of Disaster: Notes on bad weather and good government.”

2 links to share:

NYTimes’ “For Many, Education Is Another Storm Victim” which tells a sad tale of displaced kids not bothering to continue with their education

Trina’s post “Here Comes my 19th Nervous Breakdown” explores some of the feelings I’ve mentioned and can now begin applying trauma theory to.

Back from Hawaii on Tuesday, jet lagged all yesterday, and supposed to move into a new apt today.

Problem is, the maintenance guys are still there and I don’t feel confortable going in and out with piles of stuff with them there. AC is at yet another promising job interview and I can only hope it’s like that when I go looking. I guess I will go pack some more stuff until he gets back, but wanted to blog about a certain topic: GUILT.

So I am at a beautiful botanical garden in Hawaii and I see a man wearing at Tulane MBA shirt. He is videoing his wife and they’re making up witty facts about the waterfall flowing behind them. Although I am not one to talk to strangers, I decide that their banter is welcoming and I can remark about how me and my Hawaiian host both went to Loyola. I do this and the guy asks when we graduated. I say 1996. He says, “I got out just before Katrina.” So I imagine this business school fella literally evacuating with diploma in hand. His wife then chimes in, “You graduated 2 years ago!” And he says, “Well comparable to them in 1996…” I say no more. Actually I think I mumble that I am actually from New Orleans, but don’t even bother to see if they heard me. I just resume taking pics.

What the f***? Why on earth would he say something like that when he didn’t have to deal with the storm in any way? Was he actually looking for sympathy? And to think that I often hold back from telling people about my loss because I don’t feel like I had to endure what so many of my friends did. Being the person that I am, I didn’t dare start a verbal sparring with this guy in the middle of a botanical garden, but the episode has lingered with me.

What do you think?

Thanks to all those who left comments on my last post. I’m still baffled that I cried so uncontrollably. I mean, I know I have reason to and I am not embarassed by it, but I was not expecting to be so affected by the thoughts of my NOLA. But that again proves I am the perfect case study for my dissertation…

I like the discussion that has started at Composition Southeast, which is actually a post referencing my initial trauma theory post. Guess I haven’t looked at my incoming links page in awhile, otherwise I would have seen this earlier.

I wish I could be around to help students directly affected write through their experiences, but only hope that I will be able to soon enough. Trauma and the Teaching of Writing discusses what teachers can do with traumatic moments as well as what to think of when our usually writing-centered ideas fail us. I’ve not finished the whole collection but will post a response up tomorrow before I take off for HI.

I’m going to write about my time at the C&W conference backwards because I presented today and much of what I said in the final version of my Powerpoint was influenced by what I heard on Thursday and Friday.

And the main thing I need to say off the bat is that I cried.

Yes, I got up in front of my audience and as soon as I saw the slide with the pic of me in front of my house in New Orleans [the same one on the front page of this blog], I said “That’s my house,” and the tears started coming down. I’ve been writing and thinking about this presentation for months now and had felt no emotions stir up, then everything changed. I don’t know why, but now I am scared that it will continue to happen all the way through the dissertation defense and job search. And that is very scary. But I do feel that writing a personal piece is more important than anything else I could do right now.

Per Heidi McKee’s suggestion, I was going to write about this immediately after it happened, but I got a phone call from my NOLA actorgirl friend Lara, who I have not spoken to in months, and it was more important to have that outburst all over again with her. She’s been most affected by the storm and is still living in flux, but as soon as I started telling her about today, she completely understood and was proud of me for sharing my experience. The more people, even those in academia who are already thoughtful and celebrate personal narratives, that hear about how painful it is to lose your home and see your city underwater, the more they can begin to think about the rebuilding efforts and what we can all do to try to help.

Anyway, other than that session, the Graduate Research Network Forum really helped me pull out key words that I can use to frame my dissertation. As I have mentioned before, I’ll be using trauma theory to write about how going online during times of crisis is a physical action and something that the body and mind can do together. Therefore, “event,” “embodiment,” and “ethos” are words that I will use to guide that writing and make the dissertation more of a rhetorical one than quantitative or one that adheres to a fixed set of methods. As strange as it sounds, I will be building a theory around what happened to me during Katrina. It was also suggested to me that I make the examples people-based in addition to text-based, and I think that is a good idea, but since I am my own case study and (as evidenced by today’s proceedings) it’s an emotional topic for those personally affected by the storm, I think writing a text-based dissertation will allow me to finish it quicker and make some important points. I can keep track of people’s stories in the mean time and use them in subsequent projects.

I have to get ready for tongiht’s dinner, but will write about the video panel I saw yesterday later.

Well, I have yet to begin writing my dissertation, but I am so happy with the topic and my outline that I cannot wait to get some feedback from the CandW crowd this week. And after reading “The Apparently Bearable Unhappiness of Academe,” all I can say is that I am so glad to be writing about something that I am personally invested in. The more I read abstracts of others, I feel that we’re all thinking, reading, and writing about the same thing in often similar ways. And that stresses me out. I always feel like someone else will have said it better, so what would be the point of me repeating it?

At least with my topic and connection to NOLA, I know that my dissertation will be more of a personal journey…a way for me to heal from the trauma of losing my home as well as analyzing how/why evacuees turned to the Internet to help themselves heal and get much needed information.

Also when reading the Inside Higher Ed article, I began thinking about my future, when I might go on the job market, when I might fit having kids into this whole plan, where I might end up teaching, etc. Thank goodness I am so ready to get out of FL and start my life in AC, otherwise I’d be tempted to stay in school longer to avoid thinking of these topics!

Well, Ray Nagin won a second term. Interesting…I don’t have anything against him, but I am surprised that Mitch Landrieu didn’t win just for the sake of needing a change…but like the presidential election, no one likes change in the midst of turmoil. Metroblogging had a great post on election-eve asking for readers to spread the word online and off. Main message is to communicate, any way possible, and I like the way they are saying that.

And speaking of remembering, I am glad I will be able to check out the “KATRINA EXPOSED: A Photographic Reckoning” exhibition when I am home in July.

Nola.com reports the latest numbers of Katrina-related deaths. Here’s a passage I find most interesting:

…weeks after it made landfall Aug. 29, Hurricane Katrina kept claiming Louisiana victims, often in more subtle fashion and often in other states: elderly and ill evacuees too fragile for grueling trips on gridlocked highways, infants stillborn to mothers who were shuttled to other cities when they should have been on bed rest and residents overcome with anxiety by 24-hour television broadcasts of the devastation back home.

The last part of this is fascinating and links to the work I’ve read of Bessel van der Kolk [see page 5 of the PDF “The Limits of Talk”]. Being left helpless in a strange city and separated from where the trauma occured can be more mentally devastating than being there, evacuees want nothing more than to physically do something. They don’t want to talk or reflect; they want to move on, check on their homes, rebuild, save pets, find tangible memories…unfortunately, as this article reports, many lives were lost to such anxiety.

As you know, my focus of study is, what about those who went online to try and do something? How did that inform the traditional media’s reporting of the hurricane? How can trauma theory be used to articulate and analyze those moves?

I can’t wait to start writing! I ordered several more items from Amazon today to keep my work up-to-date and comprehensive: Anderson Cooper’s Dispatches from the Edge : A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival and the 2005 Complete Guide to the Hurricane Katrina Disaster – Federal Reports, Government Response, Science Reports, Devastation to Louisiana, New Orleans, Mississippi, Alabama dvd. It’s been pretty difficult to read about the goings on of that week in late-August, but I have to make sure that I contribute something, even if it is in dissertation form rather than physical labor.