Peter Elbow is a really, really smart guy

I was re-reading the most recent collection of Peter Elbow's work, _Everyone Can Write_, yesterday. When I read Elbow, I think about something that Joe Harris wrote _about_ E. - something to the extent that while he doesn't always agree with everything that E. writes/says (in writing), he admires the way that E. is able to contradict himself in his writing and really turn things around. Both Joe Harris *and* P. Elbow are two of my favorite writers in our very excellent field (even though the subject line is about P. Elbow). I like them both because they write so very, very well - elegantly, clearly, and in complicated ways. I like messiness, and they're both all about the messiness. Elbow, especially, is about the messiness - but in most excellent ways. I'm reading _ECW_ again because I'm grappling with my own messiness for the OMB, trying to get it together for the big final push and write the last half of the intro and the first half of the conclusion (and then the draft is DONE! DONE! - I will have revised all of the chapters about a million times each...). Anyway - the last half of the first chapter is about working from principle, and how it is that one finds principles (which is a tough thing to write about, I think!), and Elbow is such a great example of working from p. He talks about it quite a bit in the essays in the first part of the book, actually, which I really like. I also love how incredibly positive he is - that is an absolute model for all of us. It's the "liking" thing - I still use "Ranking, Evaluating, and Liking" w/students because I think it's so important, that liking. So - hats off to Peter Elbow, because he is smart and his writing is so complicatedly terrific, even if - like Joe Harris - I don't always agree w/everything in it, either.

This hats-off post also reminds me of something that Crunchygranola wrote on _her_ blog about why she likes our field so much. I believe that included in her list - #1, even - is that we work with incredibly nice people. This field of ours is _full_ of nice people - and how cool is that? How many other people can go to their professional conferences (and Cs is coming up in a couple of weeks) and say, "Geez, there are smart and super excellent people in this field?" I contend that people generally don't even go into comp unless they are nice. You have to be interested in people and their ideas and all of that, and want to talk with them about that stuff, if you want to do this job. Of course, Crunchygranola herself is one of the most excellent people _in_ this field.

I'm all abuzz with niceness today, I guess. That's a good thing - maybe it's my mental counter to the snow that fell last night, or something.