Episode 2: Cultural Rhetorics Cabana

JUNE 2024 — Building, writing, researching, questioning, editing, sitting with, and workshopping are actions that act for me as molecules do for other people, comprising the air I breathe. How is that for a long-winded, sneak-up-onya English instructor quip?

The second episode of a podcast called Cultural Rhetorics Cabana is out and available for streaming.

It has been a good summer, and as a rhetorician and writing instructor who considers how she might better her writing practices, "sitting with" has emerged as a new practice of mine.

Slowing down can be beneficial. I think of Guy Claxton, an internationally renowned cognitive scientist, who has been credited by comedian and writer John Cleese with saying that the leisurely “Tortoise Mind,” for all its apparent aimlessness, is just as “intelligent” as the much faster “Hare Brain.” “Recent scientific evidence,” he says, “shows convincingly that the more patient, less deliberate modes of mind are particularly suited to making sense of situations that are intricate, shadowy or ill defined…when we are not sure what needs to be taken into account, or even which questions to pose—or when the issue is too subtle to be captured by the familiar categories of conscious thought—we need recourse to the tortoise mind… This type of intelligence is associated with what we call creativity, or even ‘wisdom.’”

(Above) AI-generated photo above of "a tortoise and a hare listen to a podcast together generated by WIX AI Tools JUNE 2024.