favorite conference

last week, my time was taken up by another academic conference.

I presented on semi-academic podcasts and how awesomely they seem to cultivate discussions about scholarly things for the consumption (and perhaps participation) of non-scholarly audiences. such a thing seems pretty rare, but maybe it's less rare than I'm making it out to be. after all, 

“Podcasting’s bridging of knowledge barriers in an intimate manner is one of its key, and most readily apparent, properties. Thanks to the medium’s wide accessibility— given its general affordability and portability— knowledge in diverse domains can be shared by individuals and groups around the world. Thanks, as well, to their intimate, personal and often-conversational natures, podcast episodes can help individuals of different educational levels cross disciplinary boundaries easily. Audience members need not be enrolled in an educational system in order reap their benefits” (Swiatek, 2018, p. 177-178).​

how's that for a minimalist literature review, eh? Swiatek's chapter is in the collection I used as a textbook for my introductory podcast course last year. good stuff.

bridging knowledge barriers can happen across all kinds of lines, not just those of formal higher education, of course. academia is only one of many domains of learning. 

but for my presentation, I concocted a fairly narrow set of criteria for the four examples I showcased. to fit in properly with what I wanted to talk about, the podcast needed to be...

- officially made by/with credentialed, institutionally-affiliated academics ​
- making use of the ethos and/or expertise of their degrees at least a little
- purposefully talking to and/or translating for non-academic audiences ​to some extent

I also limited my examples to humanities/communication-y topics, because that's my discipline, and a 15-minute conference talk cannot be much more comprehensive than that anyway. I am curious to look at other podcasts in this vein though. eventually. Huberman Labs would count. and probably plenty of others I haven't heard of yet.

my observation, as a fairly high level podcast fangirl, has been that most scholarly podcasts don't bother talking beyond their own discipline, much less beyond the academy in general. in a sense, that might be what "scholarly" means-- by, for, and of scholars. but I also knew of a few counter-examples. a few podcasts that managed to feel more openly, accessibly, publicly academic.

for this little starting-place of a conference talk, I looked at these four: Material Girls; Lingthusiasm; Think Fast, Talk Smart; and Professors Play. 

according to my proposal for the event, I wanted "to highlight these as particularly valuable examples of public scholars demonstrating from the ivory tower how playfulness, connection, and personality are key ingredients for learning, teaching, and thriving as 21st-century humans."

want to see my little digital handout with transcribed bits from each show? there's a link to my slides from there too, which in turn have a few painstakingly chosen, hopefully entertaining-ish, audio clips. 

it is perhaps silly to turn my little presentation from last week into a blog post here, but (now that I'm halfway through doing it anyway) it does seem to match the spirit of my whole point— academia doesn't need to keep all of its cool conversations to itself.

on top of making that point, my other goal with the talk was to have fun introducing whoever showed up at my 11:00am panel to a few very engaging podcasts. I called it "Public Scholarship as Playful Pedagogy," but the title easily could've been shuffled into “Playful Scholarship as Public Pedagogy”— I'm still not sure which sounds better. the lines between all these things are fairly slippery at the best of times.

the lofty version of my whole argument is something like this: podcasts are conversations, usually quite public ones that can shape the cultures and communities of the world we live in. sometimes they even create new communities, which in turn have their own world-shaping power. so it matters who gets to be part of the conversation. it matters how the conversations are designed. 

Computers & Writing is one of the best conferences. next year it'll be in Athens, Georgia. will I get to be there and keep talking about podcasts as scholarship or pedagogy or public pedagogical artifacts or anything like that? we shall see.

unread and half-remembered

everyone is talking about commencement speeches, it seems, and that got me curious about who the speaker must have been at Utah State University's spring 2006 commencement. in my searching I found this handy archive of the past 12 years of commencements, but there's no speaker listed for my year. I wonder why not.

I wonder many things. including what is this blogpost is going to be about, ultimately. there are various notes here in front of me now. links to this and that, references I half-remember adding when I opened this draft. now I'm sitting down on this mid-week evening to connect them all up with words. or at least try to. what may end up happening is that I replace all the things I thought I might blog about with completely new things, now that I'm here. such is my impetuous yet meandering writing-process.

I have not yet read any Neil Postman, but his name has been coming to my attention over and over and over again in recent days. he wrote a book called Amusing Ourselves to Death. Brooke Gladstone of NPR wrote a book of her own using Postman's work as a springboard. the Richard Lanham book I finally finished the other day quoted Postman, too. Gladstone and Lanham take very different approaches, using their very different lenses (pop journalism and literary philosophy, respectively). from these two second-hand servings of Postman's book, I see a theme of worrying about too much silliness + worrying about not enough silliness. nervous hand-wringing that our culture will stagnate into everything bland and flat and human-less. more nervous hand-wringing that our culture will dissolve into nothing at all meaningful or deep or serious.

probably, a little bit of both will happen. it'll all get mixed together and nobody will really know where to draw the lines between what's stagnant, cold, heartless and artless and what's only buzzy, frothy, sugary air bubbles and useless. it most likely depends too much on who you are.

Mr. Postman's title reminds me of another book's title: Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace. I started reading a copy half-borrowed from friend Tony. I say "half-borrowed" because I don't think I ever took it out of Tony's house--just read it while I was there dog-sitting the pugs several summers ago. according to my goodreads archive, where Infinite Jest is (perhaps fittingly?) still listed under "currently reading," I first opened the book on August 3, 2014.

someday I'll get back to it. I did finish that Lanham treatise after starting it even longer ago.

I'm sure Amusing Ourselves to Death and Infinite Jest would resonate rather grandly, were I to read them together. have any of you read them both? what were they like? do they talk to each other interestingly?

so many books I haven't read. did I mention yet this Ben Terrett fellow is posting reviews of books he's never read and never will read? with pictures? it seems a cool thing to do.

so many books I'm in the middle of reading. and non-books, too. this, for example, seems intriguing, at least from the twitter commentary and the first three sentences: "What It's Like to Use an Original Macintosh in 2017."

and a bunch of articles like this one over here.

well, I guess this blogpost is about mostly books and about the immortality of cultural crises. with a little dash of possible subtext about change writ large, and how we bolster each other for such changes in moments marked by speeches and such.

and only two or three of my original inspirational jottings for this post have been clipped out, to be saved for something else later on. there.

conferences and art

for the past two weekends I have been whirring here and there to and from academic conferences. they were pretty fun, if a little nervous-making. the first one, two weeks ago now was in Washington, DC. having an excuse to go there was fabulous. freund Jeremiah came with me, I got to meet his most charming aunt and uncle, and when I was not conferencing, we saw as much of the city as we could drag ourselves around to see.

the brand new National Museum of African American History and Culture.

the treasury, and a statue of that Alexander Hamilton guy.

this dashing fellow, waiting with me for the streetcar to take us down H street, near Capitol Hill.

the gallery we wandered into had some interesting art.


we also took in some theatre; this is the playbill from a pretty hilarious 5-woman comedy.

an inscription on a statue outside the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center. "The voice of reason is more to be regarded than the bent of any present inclination." I imagine the guy in the statue is the guy who said these words, but I didn't ever figure out who it was.

the next conference, last weekend, wasn't so much attended by fancy sight-seeing. are there sights to see in East Lansing, Michigan? if there are, I did not take time to see them. I only saw Michigan landscapes on our way there, the insides of conference rooms most of the rest of the time, one hotel room, one Thai restaurant, and one coffeeshop.


the Michigan State University conference center had this cool piece of art. I promise, it did look less gloomy in real life.

and in one of the conference workshops, I got to make this little double-walled basket out of reeds. I don't know what I'll keep in it-- maybe coins? or jewelry? or ... dried flower petals?

in conclusion, count me grateful that my life gets to have conferences and travel and art in it. I came away from both conferences with some pretty clear threads of inspiration, and now I'm gonna use the rest of the semester and year to make some serious scholarly things happen.

shiny emerald wisps of inspiration

sometimes, though not so much lately, I feel like I am fighting inspiration off with a stick--making great efforts to do one thing at a time and actually finish a project before yet another wouldn't-it-be-nice-if-I-also... comes along to take me in some new direction.

inspiration, for me at least, isn't always the most useful thing. it can be distracting. or infuriating, the way it tantalizes me. I tend to be plagued with flighty, wispy kinds of inspiration. the kinds that hover just out of reach, just beyond practical-possible priority.

an hour or so ago I read this piece about teaching abroad. about the prospect of "relocating to a continent renowned for civil unrest, poverty, and disease-- but also for untarnished landscapes, wildlife, many cultures, and a complex history." high daydream potential, this sort of thing.

and yes, some of the descriptions in this piece are on the sweeping, sensationalish side. but you can at least see what I mean about the distance stretched out between me and such prospects. this inspiring stuff always seems to float just six inches or so higher than my hands seem to reach-- things to daydream about but not things I could actually do-- not yet anyway. and perhaps that's the way daydreaming is supposed to work. before you can reach a thing with your hands, you can settle for reaching it with your brain. imagining it. a first step, of sorts.

on Monday I attended a very nice talk by a former professor of mine: Dr. Cheryl Ball. she taught my professional writing capstone course ten whole years ago. since that far-away semester, she has worked at three other institutions and done many more boundary-pushing academic things. she taught and researched in Norway on a Fulbright scholarship. she is developing this fancy-looking revolutionary publishing system.

sometimes inspiration starts out as envy.

or maybe they are secretly long-lost twins, envy and inspiration. yeah.

anyway. the talk on Monday was about digital humanities + digital publishing and the paths Dr. Ball has wandered in getting to where she is now. now she is scholaring in an emerging field she calls publishing studies, a place full of multimodal and digital work, editing, technology, infrastructure, and lots of other finicky processes that have to do with making things public.

she began the talk with childhood tales featuring inspirational words like vision and initiative. and she ended with this slide, of which I took a crooked and slightly fuzzy photograph:

there are, I saw on facebook earlier, several much better photos of Dr. Ball's visit to Indiana in an album here.

her concluding list of lessons learned isn't earth-shatteringly inspirational in general, but in this specific sub-section of academia it counts. for me, swimming in semi-aimless circles in the middle of my PhD, it very much counts. so I have typed these points out again for ease-of-reading and for the thought-provoking reminders they might be to my current and future overly-inspired but somewhat lost, less-motivated self.

publishing studies has taught me [Dr. Cheryl Ball]...
- editing praxis for media-based texts
- the arbitrariness of style guides
- the ethics of access/ibility and preservation
- the importance of building communities and infrastructure
- the importance of global communication practices
- the necessity of teaching writing in use-contexts
- the necessity of teaching multimodal communication
- that vocational training isn't a dirty word for liberal arts.

there were examples and stories referenced at each of these points, but stories and examples are not as easy to transcribe into a neat list. I will have to trust my memory to weave the stories from her life into and alongside stories from my own.

the paths I'm wandering aren't the same. ten whole years is a long time and lots of things are different in the world. the wouldn't-it-be-nice-ifs that I follow around (or don't) will be unique to my brain and my habits.

at the moment, one of the wouldn't-it-be-nice-ifs that I have wrapped my fingers around is reading audiobook snippets for LibriVox. I have an official page in their catalogue as a reader, even. I've only just started. the project is wide and ambitious. it's not the exact same kind of digital publishing Dr. Ball presented, but it is a digital publishing project nonetheless, and a fascinating one. we'll see what it teaches me.

Blue Apron: reflections

back in November, which feels far more distant in timespace than it really is, a conversation began:

@plaidsicle It looks like there's a link for a free box or something. I'll try it if you will!

— Patti Poblete (@voleuseCK) November 19, 2015

I mentioned a while back that Patti and I have been discussing food just for kicks, over in a messy google doc where I have too many distracted half-formed blabberings. it is fun though. we both love food and cooking, in our non-professional yet notably dedicated ways. so this fun idea to test out a meal subscription service fell right in line with the way brain was so increasingly fascinated by the things. they seem to be so popular, so talked-about. what does it mean?

this, "Is Blue Apron the Future of Home Cooking in America?" was one of the slightly more thoughtful, slightly (only slightly) less buzz-wordy pieces I came across. Jamie Weibe asks whether these sorts of mail-order services are "the future of home-cooked food" or simply "a mindless extravagance for wealthy Americans?"

do they have to be one or the other? likely not.

Patti and I scheduled our deliveries to come the same week, so that we could virtually cook together via Skype and talk through the one recipe our boxes had in common. she has a great write-up of her experience here. I have been slow about reporting back on my end, but I did take pictures!

they sent a little card with an apron-shaped bit of seedpaper. it's basil, it says. where shall I plant this thing? in a pot out by the back steps next spring? or in a shoe on my windowsill tomorrow?

the giant box I received had ingredients for three recipes, each one with a longer, fancier title than the one before. they are all in Blue Apron's online cookbook, so I've included direct links in case you are curious.

Tamarind-Glazed Cod with Lime Rice and Cucumber Relish (this is the one Patti also got to cook)

I had not heard of putting lime zest in rice before, but it was pretty delicious. that relish was great, too, but it made Way Too Much for the two pieces of cod and the little bit of rice. easier to precisely portion out fish and grain than whole cucumbers and jicama, I guess. 

it was fun cooking this one simultaneously as Patti did the same in her kitchen. there was a bunch of multitasking involved, and I remember we both did things in different sequences, slightly (I get very scatterbrained when I cook, sometimes, leaving things half-done and disorderly). I recorded our whole Skype conversation, in case I ever want to go back and look at it again for researchy purposes or anything. 

Beet and Barley Risotto with Swiss Chard and Goat Cheese (my favourite of the three)

this stuff was so good. but it took a good three times longer than the recipe told me it would. which knowing a thing or two about risotto, I suspected might be the case. perhaps it tasted so wonderful because I was so hungry by the time it finished cooking. strangely, my box had 3 whole beets instead of the 1 that was listed on the recipe card. not sure what that means, but I love beetroot so I will not complain.

I am determined to gather the ingredients for this one myself sometime, and make it again. perhaps I'll come back and do a price comparison when I do.

Roasted Sweet Potato and Caramelized Onion Pizza with Béchamel Sauce, Fontina Cheese and Arugula Salad

I quite enjoyed this pizza, and I could see myself recreating it on my own as well. at the end of it all, I had too much sauce for it--even though I stretched the dough pretty thin. in fact, I think there is still a tupperware thing of extra sauce doing nothing in my fridge. ah well. 

 

overall, I had fun with this. having a box of food to cook just show up on your doorstep is somewhat exciting, and it gives you every excuse to make a dish you've never made before. it is expensive though, as Patti's post mentions. she also pointed out just recently this breakdown comparison of Blue Apron's costs vs. other similar services. there are also the concerns about waste and carbon footprints; you can't not wonder about the environmental costs of shipping and of a thousand tiny plastic bottles, no matter how recyclable they are. 

the existence of Blue Apron and all the rest of these new companies raises plenty of questions besides those of cost, too. what gets me wondering most of all is what doesn't show up in the box, and what kinds of assumptions are being demonstrated by those decisions. how do all these lines get drawn? why is it assumed I will have salt and pepper and oil, but not oregano or ginger or a tablespoon of flour? who figured that out? why do the recipes leave me to chop and peel so many, many vegetables, but send me pre-mixed, plastic-wrapped pizza dough? chopping vegetables is counted more convenient than mixing up dough? maybe most people would agree, but it's still interesting to think about the factors behind that piece of the whole puzzle.

I may try out one more box of Blue Apron eventually, depending on what kinds of recipes show up in rotation this semester. it seems like a special-occasion sort of thing, to me. a reward or an escape from the mundane. new recipes, no need for shopping. no need to decide on which restaurant you want to eat at. an excuse to invite someone over for dinner. too bad Patti lives so far away now, or we could share Blue Apron in real life. that would be awesome.

two: yesterday

wore purple socks, black pinstriped trousers, plain grey t-shirt, and a red quarter-sleeved jacket that clever sister made and bequeathed to me once upon a time. walked out my front door to a blaring yellow morning.

hopped onto a few buses, that Weird Al song in my ears, and arrived on campus just before half past eight.

walked past this amusing combination of tree and bicycle.

stopped. tried to angle the photo halfway-decently.

used the proper key to unlock my office. (some mornings I try with my house key. it doesn't work.)

sat down in what has been known in the office as "the Seamus Haney chair." it's blue. the arms of it are leaking their upholstered guts out onto your sleeves.

looked for a moment into the camera-mirror, still on from the bike-in-the-tree memorialization. made faces. took a few photographs for no reason whatsoever.

I guess the reason was simply to look at myself. how often do you do that, really?

blogged. checked emails. read some, wrote some. met with students. printed a bunch of things. forgot to print a few other things.

sometimes I wonder if there's a way to get a real outside perspective on my own day-to-day everything. is there a way to access the secret recording of my life that the universe might be keeping in its memory banks somewhere? what file formats would I be able to download that in, do you think?

other times I realize that there is no such recording. I have to make my own. I have to cobble this picture together using camera-mirrors and words and scrapbooks and other people's reactions to whoever I am and whatever I do. maybe the universe isn't recording--it's not a camera--but it might be a mirror. reminds me of some of these musings.

yesterday's version of me is cool with how the day turned out, I hope. 

other people's art

last week most of my colleagues were at the Conference for College Composition and Communication in Florida, and many of them posted snippets of all their inspirational notes from panel sessions and special interest groups and workshops. some of them have collected these snippets from the various social media slots where they started into a more accessible space. Patti's excellent recaps are linked from her blog here. there's also this monstrous box of tangly data. it is slightly less monstrous than this bottomless hashtag pit. and plenty of other attendees have compiled their streams of conference thoughts too.

I did not go to this conference. I went to Kentucky instead. so it's nice to have so much second-hand info about the conference floating about out there. I can look at other people's notes and take what I want from them.

this blogpost is not really about any of that academic adventuring, though. I've been thinking about many other things... the story of my life. the future. solitude. light and trees and footprints and trade-offs. Robert Frost.

these street art photos were taken during a sunny walk many weeks ago. it seems longer-ago than it probably really was. today, winter saw fit to revisit us with a whole day of intermittent flurries. it's been a fairly grey week. these pictures from early March don't match. 

"The best stories take us inside of storytelling so seamlessly, that when we emerge, the impossible is easier to imagine."
— Disgruntled Haradrim (@pdjeliclark) July 30, 2014

Pro Tip: When you like people, tell them you like them. Some people have a hard time believing other people enjoy them and need to be told.
— Hank Green (@hankgreen) March 6, 2015

the twitter-thoughts embedded here originate with various strangers. they've hitched themselves interestingly into my thoughts over the past months and months and months, for one reason or another.

Don’t underestimate the importance of describing “the obvious”. It is meaningful to have the world described in certain, subjective terms.
— PBS Idea Channel (@pbsideachannel) March 24, 2015

“I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.” ― Roland Barthes
— Daily Zen (@dailyzen) July 12, 2014

I wonder if it would be cool to plan out a mural or a wall-painting like some of these around town. what colors and shapes would I want to plaster on the side of a building, if I could? what marks would I leave out there for the public to walk beneath? would they tell an intelligible story?

Death is only the end if you assume the story is about you.
— Night Vale podcast (@NightValeRadio) January 6, 2015

your story can be about you, of course. but it probably isn't only about you. your voice and your colors are not the only ones telling it. 

the future is mostly a question mark, haunting and deep, but it's not only a question mark. there are a lot of other tracing and tangling lines in it, too.

on the back of a giant turtle

about a week and a half ago, there was sad news. Sir Terry Pratchett died.

this, unlike any similarly stumbled-upon news of any other famous person's death, struck me differently for a few reasons. some of the reasons are directly related to Pratchett's writing--which is marvelously entertaining and brain-massaging stuff, all in all--and some are indirectly related to a bunch of other things that are indirectly related to Pratchett's writing. since that Thursday two Thursdays ago, when I first heard that the man was gone from the world, I've been wanting to write something. I spent the beginnings of my spring-break roadtrip thinking, driving and thinking, remembering stuff that would make a decent tribute.

in October of 2002, in some old library computer lab at Utah State University, I signed myself up as a member of a message board dedicated to this fantasy author, run by one of his publishers, HarperCollins. these message boards don't exist anymore. in internet-chronology, 2002 was something like four or five centuries ago. but luckily, someone saved a bunch of the most important threads from way back then. I have them copied from Dropbox and squirreled away in a file, for posterity. there are important memories in there. or at least some of them seem important.

early in 2003, HarperCollins invited (begged? bribed?) Pratchett himself to visit our crazy little message boards and answer people's tedious questions. this event lasted a whole week, and it seemed pretty darn exciting at the time. the questions I put forth were: "I've always wondered if you are the one who composes the little blurbs to put in the front or on the back of your books" and "do you have a favorite food?"

his answers were short:

In the UK I write the cover copy, or at least that bit of it which is about the book (I'm too modest to add all the quotes from reviews, so the publishers kindly do that for me). In the US they're done in-house, but I get a chance, these days, to suggest tinkering. 

Favourite food? Oh...good sushi, maybe. Oysters Kilpatrick, possibly. Or Lyn's fish pie :-)
Terry

a seafood-lover, eh? me too.

that fall, I traveled to England to live for a year. one brave and nervous-making Saturday while I was conveniently in the same country as she was, a friend from the message boards--Grace--met me in London and we explored old buildings and cafes and sights, bundled up against the drizzly weather. a few months later we met up again, with a few other message-board folk in tow. more cafes. cathedrals. pizza.

I owe a lot of friends and hilariousness and personal growth to the strangers that message board drew together. the original boards don't exist anymore, but there is a spinoff here, and an email list there, and we've got facebook and such now too. I still chat with a handful of these no-longer-strangers. they give much-appreciated advice and take time to listen when I have silly random stories to tell. Grace and Clay let me stay on their sofa when I visited England again in 2010. Ella and I saw some Shakespeare together last summer on my last night in Scotland. friend Yvonne in Berlin has been trading me postcards and sending hours of German pop music and audiobooks. I'm gonna visit her someday, I hope. and whatever on earth would I do without bestfriendface Chris? it's very possible that I would not even at all know how to handle my life. that's what.

without Pratchett, none of these meetings and relationships would have had a proper petri dish. this man, Sir Terry... he visited our message boards for a week but he likely never had any idea how pivotal that place was. perhaps his publishers hold more of the blame for the boards' existence, anyway. but without the books, what would've been the point?

{ the xkcd in memory of }

if you haven't enjoyed any Pratchett in your life yet, you should. The Bromeliad Trilogy is short and cute and awesome. I'll recommend the Johnny Maxwell Trilogy too, since nobody ever talks about it even though it is very cool. and of course, you'll find any old Discworld novel full of delight, I promise, it doesn't matter which one you pick up. they are quirky and pointy and slightly irreverent. they are worth reading. they are worth talking to strangers about. the strangers you talk to about these chunks of fiction might not stay strangers for very long.

“libidinal multiplicity” is a cool phrase?

this handy borrowed image here is my reaction to the section of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble we read this week for my Postmodernism seminar.

and this blogpost, the one you're reading here, is a slightly smoothed over and abridged version of the reading response I posted to our class forum. yes, I posted it under this very title. the phrase "libidinal multiplicity" is from this little chunk of Gender Trouble:

For Kristeva, the semiotic expresses that original libidinal multiplicity within the very terms of culture, more precisely, within poetic language in which multiple meanings and semantic non-closure prevail. In effect, poetic language is the recovery of the maternal body within the terms of language, one that has the potential to disrupt, subvert, and displace the paternal law.

see why my brain is crying Escher?

I know Butler and her theory is purposefully difficult. this section (and lots of this week's readings, actually), so crammed with according to so-and-so, and she says and he believes, and for this person, and if we accept that then, and allegedly etc., is live intertextuality. so exciting. Butler references Foucault’s “matrices of power” and seems to surrender to the fact that we are always participating in them, somehow. she picks apart Julia Kristeva's theories relentlessly, resigning everyone, much like Richard Rorty seems to do in his “What Can You Expect from Anti-Foundationalist Philosophers?” piece, to a world where everything is socially constructed and nothing else makes any reachable sense. In Rorty’s words “We anti-foundationalists have no hope of substituting non-social constructs for social constructs; we just want to substitute our social constructs for theirs” (726).

Dr. Salvo asked us, earlier, whether or not the articles and excerpts this week were going to cohere. in my notes I have tried tracing behind Butler’s complaints about the circular self-defeating nature of Kristeva's arguments. it's not easy. I am distracted by the words. libidinal. cathexis. semiotic. repression. ontological. circular.

as I ponder the word “circular,” and how many assumptions and perspectives and arguments about the world seem inescapably circular, I also let myself entertain appreciative thoughts about how satisfying circles can be. “to come full circle” in a story or a presentation or an experience always feels so right, and fitting, and complete. maybe even… coherent? I’m not sure this is anything like what Dr. Salvo is really asking, but the noticing of circular constructs seems like a theme of sorts to me.

these two Kenneth Bruffee pieces I had read before. the bibliographic essay on "Social Construction, Language, and the Authority of Knowledge" has been especially useful in previous composition theory classes. Bruffee implies that knowledge is a social artifact and asserts that because of this, collaborative learning and the synergy of working together = awesomeness. he makes an especially bold point about better conversations leading to better thoughts and then to better writing. I am not so sure about this. Richard Rorty, also dealing with authority and language, touches on and troubles a similar-ish idea. to Rorty, vocabulary matters. but he also points out what he sees as a virtue of his anti-foundationalist pragmatism: that “pragmatism doesn't provide much of a jargon. So it is hard for devotees of pragmatism to hypnotize themselves into thinking that by reciting the jargon they are changing the world” (725). however... just one page later he admits that the particular ways we talk about ourselves and our potential can be way rhetorically powerful. this latter comment seems more in tune with what Bruffee is saying, too: “I see no better political rhetoric available than the kind that pretends that 'we' have a virtue even when we do not have it yet. That sort of pretense and rhetoric is just how new and better 'we's' get constructed” (726).

that reminds me of the time I wrote this.

we are not only creating a world. we are creating the we that lives in it, too.

interesting.

reflexibly

what would you say was the prime of your life? the time when you were happiest, on top of the world?

somebody asked me this question the other day. it's one I hadn't thought about before, so it wasn't easy to answer. I love collecting questions and inquiries like this, though, to aid in conversational-scuba-diving efforts. for example:

-if you had a plant growing out of the top of your head, which kind of plant would you prefer?

-name your life's greatest ambition.

-what color would you most like to paint your ceiling and why?

-when or if you have children, would you rather they be dazzlingly clever and generally miserable or hopelessly unintelligent but generally happy?

-which food would you choose to be the only thing you ever ate from now on, every day, for ever?

the responses to these are usually less like answers and more like explorations of reasons and motives and priorities and hypotheticals of all kinds. much better than talking about whether it might rain tomorrow.

lately, on my travels, I've been noticing reflections. puddles. train windows. lakes. shopfronts. such surfaces make crazy collages of here and there, above and beneath, inside and outside, forward and backward. the photographs flatten a lot of that deep, shifting, photo-overlay feeling into an only slightly disorienting double-exposure feeling... but until I get around to figuring out proper gif-making, these static juxtapositions of image-within-non-image-within-image are what I have.

I once asked my physicist sister whether the reflections of cars' taillights in dark, wet streets look infinitely long, extending infinitely deep because those cars are moving, or because the car I'm in is moving, or what. she wasn't sure how to explain the optics of it all to me. I'm still wondering, a bit, how that works. maybe I should ask this guy.

of course the feeling of infinitely long, red taillight streaks and/or of a whole world upside-down in the canal water is an illusion. the look of all that space is a trick. but maybe so is everything. human eyes are complicated. optics and light are complicated.

on the wall of an Indian restaurant we visited the other day for lunch, I noticed a wallpaper pattern of the following quotation, all slanted in elegant script: "Illusion is the first of all pleasures." what does that mean? maybe I'll add it to my collection in the the form of a philosophical challenge-- does all enjoyment predicate itself upon a false sense of security, permanence, or desert? hmm.

on slaughterhouse 90210 the other day I saw this excerpt from Catherine Lacey's Nobody Is Ever Missing:

“We don’t get to stay in moments and that should not be news to you. We are both familiar with the concept of time, the awful math of it, how our history always gets larger, less understandable, overweight, overworked, over and over, and memories get misfiled and complicate feelings for no good reason and some people seem more able to deal with this, to keep their histories clean and well ordered but I still don’t understand why we came unstuck from those moments we wanted to stay and why the moments we wanted to forget still haunt us.” 

I've mentioned Slaughterhouse 90201 before, eh? tumblr is a strange universe, but it is great for thought-provoking snippets like the above paired with television stills. this quote goes pretty interestingly with the question I began with. what period would you say was the prime of your life? the time when you were happiest, on top of the world? out of all the moments and seasons in your ever-deepening history, which are the very best?

while I pondered what answer I would give the questioner, she told me that most people do say right now, or at least include right now in the span of time that counts as their most happy, confident time.

I wonder if that's because everything else seems either haunting and heavy or lost forever. unreachable like the sky, or mere reflection like the sky's image. in comparison with the all-encompasing now, the past and future look like tricks of the light.

extemporaning

arguably, summers (and weekends, so the following is doubly true for summer weekends) are for reading outside in the grass and taking aimless walks all over town. which is part of what I did today.

the background music to this early evening excursion was a mix of songs by The Killers, The Beatles, Dispatch, and Barenaked Ladies.

I meandered over to the useless side of that parking lot next to the bus station. the side that leads nowhere at all, where one might feel a little out of place, or even delinquent simply for not having any real reason at all to be there... and I walked along all this chainlink marveling at the train (so huge) and the graffiti (so colorful).

who wrote all these things? are any of them local artists, or do the trains get their faces painted in other, far-off counties? or both?

and is there a way to tell which bits come from whom? there is a literacy in it all that I can't thoroughly access.

I found the juxtaposition of all the blocky markings on the stolid, utilitarian train next to so much bubbly, curving, spray paint, as well that of all the green bushy weedlike-stuff along the fence foregrounding the carefully unobstructed, quarantined tracks, quite interesting elements in my casual photographs.

who was it I was recently talking to about trains and graffiti and art without audiences? or was that what we were talking about? do any of you readers remember? anyway, this here is the episode of 99% Invisible that came up during that conversation.

I want to say this one said "oink," but I really, really don't know.

is it sort of like drawing things in the sand, leaving a mark and then walking away? do those two things have anything more than their transience in common?

along with worrying about where all the decoration on the outsides of these trains came from, I could worry about what's in them and where it's going to end up and why.

I've been paging leisurely through Alain de Botton's The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work this summer.

de Botton's whole first section chronicles (with a bit of extra, romantical detail, we might argue) the comings and goings of barges along the Thames, all full of cargo from opposite hemispheres, ready to be unboxed and distributed to a thousand supermarkets or department stores around the UK.

trains are not barges, and a railroad in Indiana is not the Thames, but both the river and trains generally have some romance about them, don't they?

river barges probably get some graffiti, too. I wonder if it lasts as long as train graffiti. 

the road to where?

one week ago, at brunchtime on the sparkly penultimate day of December 2013, I spent two hours guzzling hot cocoa with friend Wilson (who does not have a blog, but does regularly post wonderfully thoughtful and provocative things on facebook). we discussed many things over our sugary beverages: families and freedoms and connectedness and consequences. we told each other long stories and caught up on each others' lives a bit. it had been at least seven years since we'd spent much time in the same vicinity. I think at least since back around this little era of my life. long ago. that version of this amelia girl seems a long way away.

{ photo borrowed from A. Hoffritz on flickr. }

at one point Wilson and I came around to the subject of good intentions, their worth and efficacy. I don't remember the very beginning of that conversation, but I remember cringing a little and conceding that in so many spaces, it isn't ever what you intend, but what happens to result. it can't be what you meant, it has to be what all those other humans in the world interpret. yes, okay, I see... but really?

once, much longer ago than last week, I was asked, in exactly this odd mathematical construction, if I thought "inferences > implications or vice versa?" the questioner meant to say, "which has greater weight when it comes to meanings made and shared and used to construct what has happened and why?" is it the meaning in your own head, the implicit, transcendent mush behind all the words and gestures you're making to your friend or partner or colleague? or is it the meaning that person is building, piecing together from her memories and experiences with you and your world and your shared vocabularies of sounds and spaces?

I am still not sure I can answer. you need them both, or you're only talking to yourself, right? does one of them have to be > or < at all? is there no way to = them or smooth them closer to each other? no way to make a little more certain that they match?

last Monday when I brought up the low-rung place intention seems to keep, Wilson elaborated interestingly on the whole idea. whenever we speak or act, we usually get to learn things about how the world works, how the world will respond (re-speak? react?) to our movements. our intentions are answered by those results, those interpretations, and if we find they do not match what we intended or expected, then we'll know better how to speak or act in our next set of circumstances. at least, hopefully we will.

{ photo borrowed from Sarah Ross on flickr. }

the beginnings of a million yoga classes and yoga videos will tell you, everso calmly and confidently, to set an intention for your practice. quiet your whirring mental contraptions and come to light on one small thing--any lovely little thing--one thing you and your yoga might accomplish together in the next hour or half or however long. one candle-bright thing with which to fill your world and your mind and your life in seeking, moment by moment, more breath, more joy, more peace.

set an intention, they will say. and then in the middle of the million yoga classes, again: reconnect to your intention. tune in, remember, bring awareness to, focus on. intend.

I'm struck by the similarities to 'attend' and 'tend.' they all have slightly different but unsurprisingly analogous etymologies. 'tend' looks to be a shortened alternate of 'attend,' and their history goes back to the Old French "to direct one's mind or energies," "to expect, wait for, pay attention," or more literally from Latin, "to stretch toward." the direction seems important here. the destination. the discipline. we must attend to what is. no effort of ours will necessarily make a difference.

this is only a hair or two different from the etymology of 'intend', which gives "direct one's attention to," also from Old French, and then from Latin, "turn one's attention, strain," or "stretch out, extend." and here, is the center more important? is this version a little bit more egocentric? more powerful, more wild? is this where we can gently start to bend reality?

both words share roots in the Latin tendere, or "stretch." and I suppose to stretch must imply more space than a single point, no matter which (the center or the edge, the to or the from) gets the focus. all this stretching and turning and yoga go pretty awesomely together. there is a substance to be stretched and space to stretch across--both are just as crucial. the resonant tones + the silences between them. the great nothingness of space + the little spheres of something scattered around it, all pulling and tugging at each other. there is the you and all the not-quite-you. the dust and the sunlight, inside and outside and everywhere. a whole lot more of our brunchtime conversation could fit here; we talked about the oneness of the universe, our limited abilities to do anything about anything, and the paradoxical, quantum possibilities of all things--but nobody wants this blogpost to go on forever.

Wilson's parting thought was something like "may the eventual results of our good intentions be well-matched to what we intend," which I thought was just about as profound and poetic a prayer as any.

{ photo borrowed again from Sarah Ross on flickr. } 

ours was, as most awesome, beverage-accompanied chats with friends are, much too short a chat. with any luck we'll fulfill an intention to meet up again before another seven years stretches by.

for the moment, I am going to put my memories and wonderings away and embark on a short, solitary practice of equalling out my intentions and attentions with the calm and confident Adrienne Mishler. may all your good intentions for this brand new 2014 lead you to happy, well-lit, friendly, open places too.  

bookshelf feminism and other thoughts

months ago, friend Priya had us all over at her place and as we admired her bookshelves she boasted of the diversity they represented. she said something about how few of her books were written by white men. most of them were the work of women and minorities. Priya owns many books. she's into minority rhetorics. her shelves are full of Victor Villanueva and bell hooks and this makes plenty of sense.

I came home from Priya's to look at my own bookshelves. they are not as extensive or as well-populated as so many of my colleagues'. I am not and may never be much of a book owner. but aside from a few anthology/textbook conglomerations, which seem in some sense semi-obligated to be comprehensive and broadly inclusive, and The Beekeeper's Apprentice, all my books--the Oscar Wilde, the C.S. Lewis, the George Orwell, the Arthur Conan Doyle, the Norton Juster, and the Mervyn Peake--were the work of this sampling of a long-privileged majority.

if my book collection were of any substantial size, maybe this might be more worrisome. maybe someday I'll look through a list of all the books I've ever read and tally the white/non-white ratio there. that could be interesting.

in any case, what Priya reads vs. what I read is not a contest that makes sense to hold. in fact, lumping all white men into a category like they're all the same bland mush has its own problems. as homogenous as my bookshelves' authors may seem, Wilde and Orwell certainly didn't have the same background or lifestyle or perspective.

but last month, as I spent a day in that room full of women learning Ruby on Rails, one of them spoke for a few minutes about women in tech and the importance of role models. she said it's hard to feel like you can or should do a thing if you don't see people like you doing it, and this is one reason there's such gendered segregation in some professions. not seeing women or minorities represented in a field will make that field seem fairly off-limits to you if you're a woman or a minority.

this TED talk by Chimamanda Adichie (thanks to friend Chris for sending the link) touches on similar ideas, using stories from her own life. I love what she says about stereotypes being more dangerous for being limited than for being wrong: "the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete; they make one story become the only story." if the only story involves only certain characters, where does that leave the rest of us? if only men can be successful programmers, or if only women can knit, or if only tall black guys can play basketball--that leaves out a million other stories--stories that are totally possible, but somehow get hard to imagine without some precedent.

so yesterday, when I was thinking about my teaching plans for next semester and listing out ideas for the kinds of examples I'd show my future students, ideas for models they might find useful as we approach our various writing projects, I wanted to diversify the story. "smart, successful writer" does not have a single definition or single story. the experiences and imaginations of white men are not the only meaningful kind.

the thing was... I also wanted to include examples of well-done, well-presented, nicely-scripted but not too scripted-sounding, researched-based compositions in video form. stuff like Vsauce, CrashCourse, this C.G.P. Grey guy, and my new obsession, the PBS Idea Channel. there are a plenty of similar productions all over youtube. there are algorithms that suggest ones you may not have seen yet. I started exploring, using my half-formed syllabus as a framework for the kinds of material that might be most useful.

and somewhat depressingly, I realized all the youtube channels I've so far been exposed to along these lines are hosted by men. young-ish. white. men.

John Green (echoing what bunches and bunches of people have been saying for ages about women in [insert your favourite male-dominated whatever]) presents a few reasons why this might be so.

for a good hour I wrestled with search engines, trying to find similar research-based content as part of established, well-designed programs presented by a non-white, non-male host. it was hard. it was hard to even know what to search for. results for "women on youtube" merely compounded my disappointment.

thankfully, when I explained my frustrations to friend Chris, he reminded me of this channel and its collection of fascinating and diverse vloggers (Kiri Callaghan's Kiriosity seems most like what I'm after) and also suggested Feminist Frequency.

so there is hope.

at some point in my searching yesterday I came across this short interview on women and philosophy, which made me think that in looking for clones of shows like CrashCourse or Vsauce, with nothing much different but the race or gender of the host, maybe I'm looking for the wrong thing. what if there is as much lack of diversity in the form of these well-done, well-presented (according to my academic self), research-based video compositions as there is (superficially at least) in the group of people who happens to host so many of them? what if that whole logocentric, "objective," "factual" approach is just as dominant and arbitrarily privileged as white males have been for so long? then what? these are topics for another day (unfortunately).

in the meantime, if there are youtube shows or vlog channels you've seen that present well-thought-out and semi-thorough research (on any topic whatsoever--comics, science, life, whatever) in interesting ways, please comment to let me know about them. bonus points if the creators or host fit into some section of non-majority.

in/appropriate appropriation

soon enough friends come to know how crummy I am at keeping other people's secrets and gossip separate from all the regular small-talk conversation fodder. most of the time all of it ends up in the same box. mixed, shuffled, ready to be retold or cut-and-pasted however my random brain decides it might need to be thrown back into circulation.

there are times when this is more or less appropriate, of course, but as far as I know there aren't many laws against gossip. unless my friends start getting me to sign non-disclosure agreements, I'm probably okay. sometimes a tactless jerkface, perhaps, but not a dangerous criminal. after all--like Jefferson said, information tends to do that thing where "the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone."

a million social rules and conventions and expectations govern the paths information takes through our heads and pencils and mouths. nobody can really own them, but ideas do seem to become attached to certain people. specific iterations can seem to belong more rightly to one person or situation than another. how does this work? when I retell a rather funny story that was originally told to me by someone else months and months ago, I hardly need to ask permission, do I? if I'm quoting a film or the catchphrase of some advertisement, nobody's going to sue me, I hope.

I recently read (on the suggestion of friend Brandon) an article in Wired claiming that this giant half-empty digital notebook called the internet collects trillions of words every single day. "We compose some 3.6 trillion words every day on email and social media"--something like "36 million books," according to Clive Thompson. most of that content is probably personal, voluntarily composed, shared without compensation--thrown out there wild and open for not much reason other than why not? or just because we can.

and all this sharing is good for so many things, in so many ways. Thompson goes into this with a few examples. and it is neat to see ideas from this and that part of the globe bumping up against each other--getting mixed and shuffled, retold and re-pasted. we have new ways of making this work. hyperlinks and interactivity and creative commons. so much of this changing ideoscape is changing the ways we understand ownership and authorship. property and freedom. the ease of copying makes a lot of great things possible. maybe we should simply say it makes a lot of things possible, some of which are great and some of which might be sketchy.

friend Chris pointed out the other day just how much hype this new little plot of internet ground called Medium has been getting lately. it looks pretty neat. when Chris brought it up I knew not what he was talking about, but when I went to look, I realized I'd been there before. I'd noticed their sleek design and oddly time-stamped posts, each marked as "4 min read" or "6 min read," in recognition of just how crazy busy everyone's lives are and how important it is to map out and prepare precisely for just how much time you're gonna spend reading stuff off this screen in your lap (or on your desk or in your hand). weird, right? maybe somewhat helpful, but still weird.

so Medium is a semi-new realm of digital creativity or something, it looks like. why does it matter? what's it going to do? Medium itself has some answers, but are those good enough? I like the idea of experimenting with alternative ways of producing and arranging written content. but what about the answers to these questions about cake-having, cake-eating, credit, blame, and definitions? or responses to these questions about the iffiness of ownership, representation, and exclusion? these seem very important questions, I think. Marco Arment, in a footnote to that last piece, asks "what kind of magazine is Medium? What’s it about? Who’s it for? And if they narrow the focus enough to make that easier to answer, who gets left out?" that is a fascinating question. somebody always gets left out, you know. that is part of having standards and being unique. nobody can be everything. the internet tries, but even 36 trillion words is still not everything.

we might want to say it doesn't matter what ideas belong to who. once you put the words and thoughts and connections out there, they force themselves into the possession of all the people they bump up against. we almost can't help it, can we?

it's not so easy. the universe doesn't come out and tell us what's most important or how exactly we ought to value, share, guard, borrow, honor, credit, pay for, or otherwise handle the information we get from our fellow human beings. I don't know what the answers are. I can't even always figure out which kinds of confidences really really must be kept that way. and if I can't figure that out among my few hundreds of words of daily conversation, how can I expect the internet to figure it out for so, so many more times that number?

making is the new thinking?

I can't remember if I knew about this Russell Davies fellow back in 2006, but I probably did. that was my true designery phase, that year. working what seems to have been my only full-time job ever at in web development and graphic design. it was a very neat slice of my early-twenties life.

Russell Davies's blog has been and still is in my feed reader, though I don't remember how or when it got there. the posts that show up these days are often very short, image-based snips. I kind of miss the days when Mr. Davies wrote longer bits and kept up with his few endearing little projects. I remember being enchanted by the idea of Eggs, Bacon, Chips, and Beans and A Good Place for a Cup of Tea and a Think. there is this tumblr version of EBCB now, but it isn't the same, is it? these old celebrations of British food and drink make my inner anglophile yearn for that rainy little island.

it was somewhere completely else, in the comments of Mr. Kleon's blog or tumblr or something the other day, maybe, that I again came across this 2006 post from Davies. It is called "how to be interesting." go read it. there is the usual vague advice about going out and being interested, which will somehow magically make you seem deeply interesting to all the people you talk to--but there are also ten really pointed, specific suggestions to put on top of that. some of the things are things you probably already do. but others could shake up your life in some unexpected, interesting way. you never know. number nine is my excuse for taking little crochet breaks from all the academic brainwork I am so wrapped up in all the time. and I think number five would be excellent for a revival of the podcast I started two years ago. I very much want to do number seven. basking in conversations sounds very relaxing.

number eight also sounds fabulous and easy. it reminds me of the mini book reviews I just threw together for blog-friend Gina, who was hosting a virtual summer reading club of sorts and asked her readership to review at least five books. I sent her short thoughts on twelve of the barely more-than-twelve books I was able to devour inbetween spring semester and now--including a few I've already blogged about here, plus What a Piece of Work is Man (written by friend Melanie's own brother), Gibson's Pattern Recognition, and Gaiman's The Graveyard Book. maybe I should start a mini-review series of other media too. video, or music, or postcards, or people's handwriting. there would be no pressure and no reason. I could just do it, whenever and however.

the comments on Davies's post also provide some cool thoughts on how to be interesting. like taking steps to randomise your life (they're British, you know. yes they spell randomise like that) by getting off at the wrong bus stop. someone else suggests trying to listen with your toes, which the yogi in me is all excited about. there is an advocate for flirtatiousness. I am not good at flirting. but could I be? if I tried?

but speaking of randomisation and low-pressure enterprises, this very short essay popped up in my hourly dose of internet the other day: The Power of the Meaningless.

there are some odd claims in the piece (is there really any such place as a place with no consequences?), but the overall breakdown of risks and play and freedom is very nice anyway. space for doing lovely yet inconsequential things, for no real reason other than you feel like doing them... well yeah, why not?

I want to try, anyway. I may still spend every other week of my life torn and tossed along a spectrum between the awful, helpless, drowning feeling that comes from realizing that so much of my life lacks concrete meaning and at the other end a brilliant, scintillating, glory-colored feeling that accompanies the same realization, just on different days. does anyone else feel the strain of those two extremes? I know dichotomizing it like that is a little dramatic. but really. meaninglessness is so double-edged.

the motives we claim (or don't) might not matter a ton in the end. maybe it's the ends that matter, much more than whatever gets us there. a desire to be more interesting or a need to take things less seriously or whatever mood it is that claims you and your short set of strung-together split-second nows, do something with it. it might matter, it might not. it might change your life, or it might not. it might hurt, or you might love it. it might be everything or too much or just right. you don't know yet. but you'll figure it out.

the meanings of

I've been wanting to write something about this fascinating triad of animator, author, and principal ever since I learned about it in the spring. why haven't I yet? the summer has been crammed. so delightfully, crazily crammed.

{ photograph by friend Trevor Crane; used here by permission }

one of the five and a half textbooks we used for my Intercultural Communication class was called, everso fittingly, Intercultural Communication: A Discourse Approach, by Ron Scollon, Suzanne Scollon, and Rodney Jones. in a section on forms of discourse and plagiarism, they cite the work of sociologist Erving Goffman, who in studying the ways we communicate with each other in speech, divided the process among three roles: an animator, an author, and a principal. adopting this three-part version of authorship means we have to question a lot of things about inherent creative sovereignty. my role in any communicative act may or may not give me the kinds of control I might want over whatever aspect of the communication I am involved in. my role might infringe on the kinds of control others might want. their roles might overlap. creation and communication--they aren't so straightforward anymore.

the first (and thereby most important, you know) of these textbook authors, Mr. Scollon himself, also wrote an earlier article called "Plagiarism and Ideology," where he engages in more detail with Goffman's work. while Goffman deals with spoken language (I need to get my hands on his Frame Analysis, perhaps...), Scollon applies the animator-author-principal distinction to printed communication, using it to make some cool points about "rights to animation." who do we want to let produce the words and messages we want to share with the world? why do we choose any certain publisher or other agent? what should we expect from all these relationships among various levels of communication? digging around in all this scholarship is fascinating. I don't need to tell you how much I'm looking forward to more graduate classes starting in a few days, do I?

anyway--now that I've thrown this triangle of terms at you a few times, let me find a way to tell you what they mean.

the animator in Goffman's sense would be the speaker or actor--whoever might be heard and seen making the words physically audible. for written communication it could be a scribe or typist or designer. this person does not necessarily own the words or meanings he is putting down on paper or recording on video. he could... but that isn't part of this job description.

the author doesn't quite own the words or meanings either, I don't think. or does she? Scollon relates Goffman's definition: "Someone who has selected the sentiments that are being expressed and the words in which they are encoded." this is a poet. a wordsmith. she composes and arranges and expresses. she dances and paints with all those words--but as Scollon reminds us, she "may or may not choose to take responsibility for them." 

the principal seems to have the most claim on whatever is being said here. this person is responsible for and committed to the message. in some real-enough sense, it is this person's beliefs and perspectives and truths that are being shared. (there are a dozen more questions I could ask about what it means to be responsible or committed to the things one says, but they might have to wait.)

the traditions of creative/communicative rights and ownership aren't the same in all spheres of discourse, of course. Scollon points out a few varying standards--in corporate settings, the animation of messages is often done by secretaries or office assistants, who in turn make use of pencils and sticky-notes and keyboards and email software. the messages they write could be composed by PR committees, and broadcast under the principal name of the company as a whole. in the literary world, writers delegate the animation process to publishing houses, and they in turn share the job with printers and binders and booksellers.

we could think of plenty other examples here-- among my dear Lubbock friends, Sarah, Meekayla, Melanie, and the girls spend evenings animating and re-animating the carefully recorded words of their general acquaintance, all selected specifically for their hilarity and immortalized in Cathy's Quotebook (now in its third volume). on stage, performers recite words originally animated on paper by a playwright, but ostensibly claimed by the principal of Shylock, Lady Macbeth, or some other personality. in political realms, would-be congresspeople have speechwriters to dress up the ideas they want to share with the masses. in my little apartment, I author and animate my own random thoughts in my own shabby notebooks with my own ballpoint pens. sometimes I put down other people's thoughts, too (or at least approximations of them): friends' or strangers' or imaginary characters'.

the point of these careful distinctions isn't to assign ownership once and for all, though, or to figure out where the responsibilities of each role begin and end, really. there can be overlappings, and negotiations, and uncertainties. the point is to pick apart the traditional notion of communicator and stare thoughtfully at all the assumptions we often make about authorship. really looking at this stuff can teach us something. maybe even many somethings. Scollon uses it to pull apart cultural understandings of plagiarism. I like to think about where in this triangle you and I might be standing when we copy-and-paste snips of code from one place to another or when we post lovely quotes on pinterest or tumblr.

how many kinds of animation can there be? do photocopies or repeatedly played recordings count? if I rephrase the message a little bit, or change the punctuation, then do I get to share the authorial corner of the triangle with the original arranger of words? and how do we know everyone is fulfilling their roles in the process honestly? what happens when it gets too difficult to trace where the animator ends and the principal or author begins? and what if we can't trust any of these people to say what they really think or go by their proper titles? what then?

no one ever said the process of getting ideas from your head to mine and back again was simple, did they? even asking your sister how her day went might very well be fraught with problematic inferences or misunderstandings. you never know. so when you think about how much time and how many people, roles, technologies, settings, and steps can be involved in all the various kinds and modes of communication we use beyond the in-person kind, it gets even more complicated. keeping track of all this role-switching seems an exciting task, one which the part of my brain that finds sentence diagramming so relaxing would probably also love.

Scollon et al. in my slim little textbook from Dr. Rice's course last spring do observe that "even though the elaborate system of attribution in academic prose is designed to preserve scholars' 'ownership' over their words and ideas, one rarely has the same kinds of control over what happens to one's words as one does over other things one owns like cars of houses which one can secure against trespassers or thieves and bequeath intact to one's relatives after death" (151). the immateriality of words and ideas makes them such a special case. there's something important, even urgent at times, in tying every message clearly to a messenger. to give up on that would seem a sad, chaotic fate. but treating ideas like cars and houses doesn't sound very marvelous either.

so what are we to do? how do we best navigate this twisty triangle of writerly, communicatorly roles?

I'm going to keep looking at it, to start. maybe Goffman's triangle (or is it a triangle? it could be. or it could be a spectrum with three parts, or something more like a Venn diagram, or...who knows?) is not the only way to map such things. but for now it looks like a neat little map to use.