When I started teaching college writing classes (here meaning mainly rhetoric and composition) in the early 1990s,  I attended the national Conference on College Composition and Communication at least three times at university (i.e. taxpayer) expense.

One of them produced an early Letter from Hardscrabble Creek piece back when it was a column appearing in print: “A Pilgrimage to the Parthenon.” I was learning how to pursue my own agenda.

I did that because the “4C’s” conferences themselves increasingly bored me. They were full of grad-student-ese (“foregrounding the hegemony”) and the usual citations of Foucault, Bakhtin, and Paulo Freire.

I heard papers written in perfect, grammatical English about how students did not need grammar, etc. Were the authors part of a conspiracy to keep practical language skills down so that people like themselves could succeed? Or where they so far under the spell of Freire, etc.., that they neither practiced effective rhetoric themselves nor taught it to their students?

Attending the 4C’s, I learned a lot about university writing-teacher culture but much less about teaching writing to my students.

Apparently the 4C’s conferences are still the same, only more so, according to Mary Grabar, whose piece “Writing Teachers: Still Crazy After All These Years” is a reaction to her spending “four depressing days this month at a meeting of 3,000 writing teachers in Atlanta.”

She quotes a presenter  who is all too typical in my experience:

“We are bigger than comp/rhetoric. . . . We do language,” she declared to nods of agreement.  Because we do “critical analysis,” we occupy the most important position in the academy.  But her own comments and repeated references by others to Marxist theorist Paulo Freire, “post-capitalism,” and “Marxian” readings, betrayed her call for neutrality when teachers engage in classroom discussions of  “what is good for society.”  In bypassing the traditional modes of argument, teachers deny students the very tools necessary to make and  [any?] “critical analysis” of their teachers’ political objectives.

It is true that a  lot of university writing teachers want to teach “critical analysis,” and true that they often have politically desirable outcomes in mind. I saw that happen frequently. Not all are that way: the honest ones can appreciate (and fairly grade) an argument that runs counter to their own personal positions.

The second group, however, is  not that much represented at the 4Cs.

One problem is that the issues faced in the first and second-year composition classes don’t make for exciting conference papers. How does the student learn to paraphrase without plagiarizing? How does the student learn to intellectually evaluate difference sources? What sentence structure best reinforces a desired rhetorical effect?

But at the 4Cs, these bright, verbal products (increasingly) of graduate-level comp-rhet programs can set aside their huge stacks of papers to be graded and instead delight in deconstructing Facebook’s “colonized vision” or whatever, well-mixed with political group-think. Think of it as the scribal class at play.

Contrary to what some people think, this is not good academic writing:

The theory of [redacted] that have [sic] been presented in this paper [not that she actually, like, presented it ] could considered as plausible theoretical guesswork that could illuminate that presumed cognitive imaginative devices that led to the conceptualization of the initiatory experiences and their incorporation in the wider narrative life-story …. [it goes on].

That sentence fails the “Who did what?” test. It could be revised as “Blank’s theory does XXX because YYY.”

But I think it deserves as Author’s Query to that effect, because I really cannot tell what the writer wishes to communicate here.

There is a verb, however. Several, in fact. We have something to work with. But what should be the main verb?

Glass of red wine time.

The Reed College alumni magazine came today, announcing the passing of several faculty members of my time there, including my thesis advisor, the poet Kenneth O. Hanson. (I like the way the article calls Greece “the country that he discovered in 1963.” Land ho!)

Regrets: that I never gave his poetics and prosody class the attention it deserved.

Hanson was something of a “Poundling,” an admirer of the poet Ezra Pound. I was much more under the influence of Robert Graves; it was in the summer between my junior and senior year, while helping to build a house in Talpa, New Mexico, for another of Hanson’s friends, Robert Peterson, that I read The White Goddess, was swept away, embraced Her faith, and set out to read virtually everything Graves had written.

Graves’ essays included much criticism of Pound, whom, among other things, he considered uneducated; Pound’s background in Latin was lacking, raw American that he was (both Pound and Hanson had roots in Idaho.)

During one of our thesis conferences (held always in Hanson’s living room), he puffed his cigar, admitted Graves’ fine command of poetic diction, and then added, “But then there is that Moon Goddess nonsense.”

I bit my tongue.

The relationship with your thesis advisor always has multiple levels. While I did not ever become a great admirer of Pound (leaving his politics entirely aside), I did start smoking cigars. Because I was an impoverished student, getting food stamps, walking or hitch-hiking everywhere, the cigars were usually cheap ones, such as Swisher Sweets.

Today I bought a medium-priced cigar at a tobacconist and smoked it, walking up and down the muddy drive, putting away the garbage cans at the cabin, listening to the rushing of Hardscrabble Creek, watching cloud-blurred Venus hanging in the western sky.

My thesis was A book of poems titled Queen Famine, after a line by Graves. In a letter to Peterson that I sneaked a look at after my graduation, Hanson wrote: It was good, he said, but not as good as it could have been. That comment burned into my soul, of course.

Hanson’s example also stopped my cigar-smoking. First, there was the experience of coming home to my little apartment, part of a tall wooden house by the southeast Portland rail yards, and smelling the reek of stale cigars.

Second, I remember stepping into Hanson’s kitchen, where he had a wall-mounted white telephone–a rotary-dial telephone, as most of them were. Under the dial, going all the way around, was a brown smear, left by his cigar-stained fingers as he dialed. I was grossed out.

But I still have my copy of The Distance Anywhere. And I have reached the age that he was when he was my advisor.