For my first assignment as a graduate student in a composition pedagogy seminar, we read about epistemic, expressive, and cognitive approaches, which were the options at the time. I did mention it was the Stone Ages? We were asked to create a metaphor for these concepts. Mine was this.

There are three guys arguing over a bucket. They are standing in a boat with a hole in it that is sinking, so they are agitated over who gets to use the bucket. None of them realize they are only in two feet of water.

Later my seminar paper was on Barthes’ analysis of bunraku as a model for the subjective-cultural relations of writing pedagogy teacher-student relationships: your typical, smart-ass grad student stuff. But I was approaching these things poetically. I was there working on my own poetry.

A few years later, now in a doctoral program and married, I decided to connect to rhet/comp as a strategic career decision. I.e., I wanted a job and there weren’t many openings for high theory poetics or whatever I was doing. But I never felt in the discipline, if anyone does feel such things. I hear tell of it. And that’s as much about me as about anything else. In such matters, I have revised the Marxian credo and I simply do not wish to be part of any club that would have members. That’s just me.

For example, around 15 years ago, Computers and Writing was in Ann Arbor and there was some Town Hall thing about the field. I remember saying that the thing that I liked most about the conference was that the only thing that unified us was the t-shirt. However I realize that most people want more from such ventures, while I would only ever want less.

Now, the title of this post references three things: the frog who doesn’t leave the slowly boiling water pot; the frog and scorpion whose natures lead to their deaths; and the Peter Greenaway film. [SPOILER: there’s a rather provocative cooking scene at the end of the film.] The frog is Michael, our tragic bookseller. He’s the one in the pot. So we might envision our frog and scorpion who try to overcome their natures to cross the river. But it isn’t a river. It’s a slowly boiling pot of water. They can’t tell. The scorpion kills the frog, but they were both going to die in the pot anyway. And then some X-rated shit goes down. In any case, none of this was about the frog, scorpion or the lover. We were just heating up water to run a steam engine.

What’s that a metaphor for? Not sure. Obviously you start with an interesting metaphor and see what nail it fits like a hammer. Then, BANG!