Welcome to Kevin Mahoney’s Home Page!
I am currently an Associate Professor of English at Kutztown University. On this site you will find my blog, “Cooking with Dionysus,” which contains musings on rhetorical politics, political rhetoric, language, work, and hope. You can also find my course syllabi and other professional materials such as my cv and professional bio.
If you are looking for my blog, click the blog link at the top of the page or click here
If you remember one of the previous versions:
I made the switch to WordPress from Blogger as a way of launching into 2008. After years of being frustrated by the fact that my university’s servers do not support PhP (a standard web script), I finally bit the bullet and went out on my own. Got my own domain name and everything.
So far, WordPress is great…but my skills are a little…well…lacking. I had a great start on my blog only to crash the whole thing on Valentine’s Day. So, I’m starting from scratch. If you notice a whole bunch of posts on my blog from the same day, that does not mean that I am some kind of aspiring super-blogger. I’m just doing a little reconstruction.
About the name:
“Cooking with Dionysus” replaces both my awkward web page and my former blog “Kevin’s Comp/Rhet Blog” as the title of this little writing space. “Cooking with Dionysus” came to me while I was driving home from work one day.
“Cooking” comes from my re-reading John Ramage’s Rhetoric: A User’s Guide, which I am using for a couple of my classes. In response to Plato’s charge that rhetoric is “mere cookery,” Ramage decides to take up the comparison–but likens “cookery” to the slow food movement. Ramage writes,
In all likelihood, Plato himself was not much of a cook, which is why he could be so dismissive of the culinary arts. Being something of a Puritan, he probably ate plain, bland food, skipping means to dream up dialogues and fasting for long periods of time to keep himself sharp…But for those who care about food, its preparation, and consumption, not all meals are created equal…[C]ookery, like rhetoric, is not something we can choose to do without; we can only choose to do it ill or well (30).
I liked thinking about cooking in relation to Dionysus–the ancient Greek god of wine and labor, was also known as “Eleutherios”or “The Liberator.” The combination of wine, labor, and poltical action seemed fitting.
In the Preface to Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of the State-Form, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri write this about their project:
This book is aimed toward the proposition of a practice of joy–joy in the sense of the increasing power of an expansive social subject. The living labor of this subject is its joy, the affirmation of its own power. “Labor is the living, form-giving fire,” Marx wrote, “it is the transitoriness of things, their temporality, as their formation by living time. The affirmation of labor in this sense is the affirmation of life itself…Dionysus is the god of living labor, creation on its own time…Our work is dedicated to the creative, Dionysian powers of the netherworld (xiii-xiv).
Hardt and Negri’s characterization of Dionysus has always stayed with me. So, we’ll see what we can cook up.
