bunny vs. fence

the other day, this lengthy stretch of fencing (branded nicely enough with so much black, white, and red to represent the construction company Sundt, whose slogan seems to be three standalone words, "Skill. Grit. Purpose.") went up all along the drive that goes between my academic office building and various parking lots between here and places off-campus.

I'm told that they'll be building a new dormitory somewhere on top of the rocky, scrub-filled gully on the other side. it'll have more student housing and more classroom space. so cool. so necessary. 

some of us in my academic office building are mildly worried that this new construction will block our most excellent west-facing views of Granite Mountain. we shall see, I guess. I remain hopeful that the slope of this gully will mean the top of the new dorm will be low enough for us to look over from our third floor offices.

as I walked back out from my office to my car last Tuesday, I noticed a little grey-brown bunny frantically searching for a way through the fence, up and down the hill in short bursts, back and forth over the blaring red curb, every so often sprinting for its life all the way across the road back to the unfenced rocks and bushes to the east.

I watched it for a solid few minutes. it hopped away in panic from my slowed footsteps, then dashed in further panic across the path of someone's big white SUV driving up past us both. 

I didn't see the bunny come back that evening. so I studied the fencing as I walked. surely one little bunny would eventually find a gap to squeeze under, I thought. (the creatures seem to squeeze through pretty tiny gaps in our back garden gate, after all.)

if the chainlink were bare of this black branded tarp, then could a little bunny more easily get through? or if the corners of each fence panel were less square and more rounded, that would surely help.

I wonder if any of the planners and facilities and maintenance people worried about the impact of this construction project would have on the non-human critters in the area. hopefully at least a little bit. probably not as much as they worried about other aspects though-- the costs of labor and fencing and other materials; the design and the blueprints and the building's whole physical footprint; and the timing and logistics and how soon they can start selling spots in the new dorm.

at the bottom of the hill, the fence merely ends,. for now. the sidewalks remain open and the parking lots in regular use. for now. if the bunnies are persistent enough, they will find their way back into their hideaways in the scrub-filled gully. 

and hopefully they will all find new hideaways once the gully is dug out and filled with a bunch of concrete and whatever else dormitories are made of.

and if not?

they're just bunnies. some of their cousins, whichever side of whichever fence they've ended up on, will replace them soon enough.

repost rewrite rethink

today I'm revisiting a lot of old writing-- not really for any reason, just because. I always think there's possibilities for remix in a lot of those old notebooks. my 13- 18- and 24- and 37-year old selves wrote a lot. mostly questions. in retyping it, I get to half-remember the past and half-imagine it through a bunch of differently-colored lenses. what if it weren't my past self writing, but an excessively introspective character in an epic science fiction novel?

who knows what will become of it. 

on top of the notebooks, there are these digital writing spaces too. so many of them.

for randomness and miscellaneous academic commentary.
for studying abroad.
for an independent study course.
for studying abroad again.

who knows when I shall next get to go abroad. in the meantime, I can continue sifting through old posted snippets from myself, re-framing and remixing them however I might feel like it. present me has new thoughts to add. and editorial scissors with which to cut things up.

 

I failed to take any photographs of all the signs I noticed in Edinburgh eight years ago now, so all I can give you are brief descriptive sketches of the plain sandwich boards propped up under glossy window grates or simple laminated sheets of paper zip-tied onto open window shutters, all declaring "wet paint" and implying "please don't touch or smudge or disturb this area."

in Cockburn Street there was a man on a ladder, with bucket and brush, putting in a few lines of bright pink detailing behind the words "Pie"and "Sky" above a shop door. he was not accompanied (when I saw him at least) by any printed "wet paint" notice. his presence (and the ladder's) was enough of a warning, and perhaps the height of his hand-painted sign would exempt it from the need of any other.

all these signs, linguistic or not, are a subtle and temporary form of crowd control. I have noticed plenty of other methods, less subtle, but presumably almost as temporary, for reasons beyond wet paint: airport hallways halved by plywood enclosures, whole streets closed off and walkways blocked by aluminum fences or orange cones. during my time in Manchester, a makeshift sidewalk diversion over/around a new tramway construction site seemed to shift several feet every time we walked that way. men in orange vests and hard hats milled about, posted signs instructed cyclists to dismount and take especially care. having recently read and written about Shapin and Schaffer's Leviathan and the Air-pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life, I started breaking all of these situations down using three technological categories: the material (the fences, the ramps, ladder, paintbrush, the strewn-about tools), the social (our training in walkways, the significance of orange vests and brawny workmen, our polite obedience to posted notices), and the literary (the language and color of the posted signs themselves).

where else, how else, might we reverse engineer this three-ingredient recipe of material, social, and literary technologies? they seem to be everywhere. technical and professional writing combine them all in the most diverse ways whenever machines/tools/material tech + groups of audiences all need to work together using language and rhetoric.

because not everyone understands everything about everything. an obvious claim to make, right? 

obvious, and perhaps even truer in our massively global and ultra-specialized 21st-century times. modern life involves (could we even say depends on?) some things being mysterious to some people but not to others; specialization allows us to safely ignore a lot of stuff in favor of becoming an expert in a more manageable amount of stuff.

and with specialization and globalization come standardization. rules. expectations. conventions. if someone else is making all the nuts and bolts and screws, we better make sure those bits are all some sort of proper, expected size, so the everything everyone else is an expert in can fit together with the slice of everything that I am an expert in.

 

such standardization, according to Andrew Feenberg, author of all the essays in Between Reason and Experience, is a black-boxing process-- a way of bundling up a lot of decisions and values and maybes so we can hide them behind a curtain. once an Official Standard forms, it tends to become an unquestioned, unexamined packet in the three-ring-binder of the Way Things Are. it becomes infrastructure. it becomes almost invisible.

it's fun to look around at all networks and all infrastructure-- and even bigger things like paradigms and ideologies-- as black boxes. these background standards and expectations are at work in and on the way life happens (or doesn't), but we don't often notice them, much less look inside them. that's someone else's job. I don't need to think about or questions that stuff too much-- especially if some complicatedly venerable, official, voted-on ruling put it there. once that happens, it’s settled. the chosen system becomes dominant and invisible. so easy to ignore. or forget entirely. or lose without even realizing it, even when it seemed so normal and essential once upon a time.

I inherited a sackful of various craft things from my grandmother a few years back when we moved to Arizona; among the familiar crochet work and skeins of cute yarn was a yellow plastic tatting shuttle.

tatting is about to become a lost art, probably. I have made only the barest attempts to un-black-box it for myself. it is one among many, many summer craft projects (as you may be able to tell from my instagram lately).

how much do I need to know to be inside the black box? even if you spend hours on YouTube trying to learn how to tat... will it ever mean that you really get it? thinking and watching are not the same as experiencing, doing, being.

 

does the antique spinning wheel I acquired last week count as a black box? to me two weeks ago, I think it did. I've learned a whole bunch since then-- reading diagrams for terminology, watching videos for processes and techniques, and of course interacting with its material pieces to get a feel for how they work. I am climbing inside the no-longer-black-box of old spinning wheels. it's pretty fun.

but I can't climb into every black box I happen to notice on the side of the street, can I?

 

so I continue to wonder. when does it become our job to un-black-box the world around us? and when can we leave the black boxes alone to trustworthily feed us electricity or news or legislation? I can't answer that for anyone. I hope people take all the opportunities they can to question the things that seem to have been settled and handed down, especially if they were handed down to you by some complicatedly venerable, allegedly sacred, self-professed moral authority. there is value in asking "how did it get to be that way?"

 

here's an example: NPR's Throughline podcast tracing how abortion even became the never-ending political crusade it seems to be today. very much worth a listen.

early February, now and then

yesterday, on a lark I looked at the date and trawled through my blogpost archive to find all the posts that just happened to be posted on February 7.

there are three:

an untitled Sunday scribbling from 2010.

reflections on who a person is or isn't after they run 5 whole kilometers for the first time (2012).

and these twice(now thrice?)-framed and re-framed ramblings about who a person is or isn't after dying their hair for the first time (2013/2004).

are there coincidences here? a theme of identity and the capacity for novel experience to encroach interestingly upon it. 

while I meandered through this blog archive timewarp (knowing I wouldn't write the rest of this until Monday) I also checked for old posts from today's date, February 8:

a meditation on parts of ourselves that are unknown, occasioned by a book and one verse of a hymn (2011).

and this "nostalgic little rant" about how we store old media and what to do with old dreams (2007). 

so?

present and past and future selves. all of them fluid, none of them ever fully left behind. 

and who am I this week? the sixth full week of this sixteenth year of blogging here? 

I am doing a little bit of yoga every day, pondering what it really means to have a good relationship with my own breath. the snow of late January is mostly melted. teaching and teaching prep are taking up the bulk of my days. our pugs still want to hibernate some mornings. we are soon to be buying a house, and the land under it, which seems both like a very weird, half-unthinkable but simultaneously perfectly logical, sensible life decision. 

what will owning this sliver of earth with a house on it mean for the selves we become over the rest of the year? 

I hope it means more time reading and writing outside on the back patio. I hope it means lovely neighbors and a quiet cul-de-sac. it will mean more responsibility and more space. more food storage, more crafts, more plants! more making. more stargazing. more driving for me but somewhat less for Jeremiah. 

and a lovely ancient volcanic hill down the road for both long and short hikes.

land acknowledgements are not enough

when I wrote this post about how differently temporary some things are, I wasn't thinking about colonial ruin and the violent displacement of Native peoples.

my relative ignorance about that violent displacement is something to blame on my undeniably privileged upbringing.

when I wrote that 2013 post, I was moreso thinking about the fact that because humans and our vehicles move around at such a (one might say violent) pace, birds and squirrels must get out of our way or risk getting squashed.

this makes a pretty awkward, and in some ways even terrible, metaphor, I know. it's at least something to start thinking with, and hopefully move beyond.

I wrote in that post that "places themselves... they seem to always be there. to always have been there. but even here wasn't quite how it is now, once upon a time. this town and all the other collections of civilized life had to start somewhere. the static only seems static as a backdrop for all the movement and life and craziness. relatively."

this way of phrasing the seemingly "always there" nature of my world-- this way of looking at things-- it erases so much. not intentionally, of course, but it does-- similarly to how the movements of humans and all their stuff so easily overlooks, disregards, and damages the natural world, erasing what it is and might have been-- selfishly reshaping it all into roads and buildings and infrastructure.

there is that troubling metaphor again though, where it's 'humans' who erase and reshape, actively, and always nature' that is erased or reshaped, passively.

that's too simple, too vague, and if I follow that metaphor through, it's offensive in equating Native people with silent, inert, passive nature. so let me say it better. for one thing, Native people aren't gone. despite countless instances of rhetorical erasure and systematic disenfranchisement, they're still here living and working and making. these people have not been completely erased in reality, but we so often erase them from how we think about our country, its land, its history, its future. and that kind of thinking should stop.

for another thing, 'nature' (whatever we really mean by such a monolithic term) isn't truly so inert or passive--not even the rocks or dirt underneath all our feet and roads and infrastructure--and we shouldn't reduce the powerful grandeur of nature to a mere backdrop on top of which we can do whatever we want without consequences. the non-human all around pushes back in unexpected ways. we're all connected.

it would be nice if we all recognized the connections and acted accordingly. unfortunately it's way too easy, especially when wrapped up in a bubble of comfortable privilege, to erase the connections that feel too inconvenient to think about. too easy to assume that we've earned all the comfort we have, and that others deserve whatever discomfort they are facing. but the truth is that we haven't, not totally, and even if we can say we have, would that make it okay for our comfort to come at the expense of so many others? I hope not.

I was prompted via this Michigan League for Public Policy challenge to revisit this map that shows roughly the boundaries of various Native tribes' lands. they have a note on the site about publicly acknowledging whose traditional territories you stand on, as I have heard conference speakers do at the beginnings of their talks many times. I want to read more about this and think about how to follow suit in a meaningful way.

where we live now, in the middle of Arizona, happens to be right next door to a bunch of land that belongs--traditionally and officially--to the Yavapai tribe. fourteen hundred acres or so, reserved for the Yavapai tribe by the US government in multiple stages starting in 1935.

on some of that land, there are department stores and pet stores and a movie theatre and a sushi place, I recently learned. there is also the stereotypical casino resort, high on a hill overlooking this majestic desert valley.

and the name Yavapai is everywhere. the county is named for this tribe, and by extension the local community college and various streets and districts and businesses and services, too. but do all the things named Yavapai really count as acknowledgement of the people whose land this was and is? do those street signs and advertisements with the word Yavapai on them help prevent anyone from erasing actual Yavapai people from how we see the land, its history, or its future?

{image of the Yavapai tribal flag, borrowed from Wikimedia }

I'm definitely not going to solve all the problems and injustices caused by centuries of colonial horribleness in this blogpost. mainly I wanted to write this to reflect on past ignorance and to make a record (for future me and for whoever happens to read my musings here) of how I'm trying to process my own role within a system of colonial, racist horribleness.

there is plenty I still don't understand and possibly never will. for some of my ignorance, I have no excuse. for smaller fractions of my ignorance, there are plenty of flimsy excuses. so much of this precedes me, and I didn't choose to be born and raised in this system of privileging people who look like me at the expense of people who don't. most of the stories I was told as a child had white explorers, mountain men, and pioneers as the heroes. Native people were most of the time mythical villains, if they featured in those stories at all.

none of this excuses me from learning about this now and figuring out what to do about it now. there has already been so much violence done over this land. physical and rhetorical damage. intentional and unintentional damage. I can't necessarily undo it, but I can start learning enough to undo my own ignorance and stop myself from participating in any more of it.

the very least I can do is work on telling different stories. stories that don't erase (or worse, vilify) these fellow humans. I'm not totally sure yet what that looks like, but I think it starts with seeking out those kinds of stories. rich, complex, beautiful, human stories. local stories, hopefully. and seeking out stories is easy enough these days; two seconds of googling has given me half a dozen lists of "awesome/great/best indigenous podcasts" to listen to:

https://newjourneys.ca/en/articles/11-indigenous-podcasts-for-your-listening-pleasure

https://www.chatelaine.com/living/indigenous-podcasts-hosted-by-women/

https://player.fm/podcasts/indigenous

so that's what I'm going to try to do next. more listening, less separating myself from the stories and perspectives of my fellow humans. it might not feel like much and it might not make any kind of huge obvious difference. but those are flimsy excuses for not trying to do something, anyway.

more listening

what and who do you find easy to listen to vs. difficult to listen to? I've had reason to ponder this lately, mainly with regard to diversity and tolerance and such. but of course, as I tend to do, I'm getting broad and philosophical about it.

my favourite things to listen to include:

- rainfall

- string instruments

- well-structured podcasts while I'm working with my hands

- chill, lyric-less music while I'm working with my brain

- husband Jeremiah playing the guitar

- vegetables sauteing or sauce simmering on the stove

- soft, gentle pug snoring

there are probably many more that I can't think of right now, too.

sometimes there are voices I get really sick of hearing, or that I'm impatient about listening to. I tell myself that it's not because of the voice itself, but some quality in it or some context around it that makes it insufferable. the ponderous, over-thoughtful droning of too many academic podcasts. the hyper-critical griping of various YouTube reviewer guys. or the two-dudes-talking podcasts that for whatever reason can't seem to edit out even a shred of their blathering (ahem).

I have limited time in my life. I can't be expected to truly listen to everyone. being picky is not a bad thing.

but lately I'm thinking listening as activism. I'm thinking about who we listen to as a crucial moral and political choice. (it isn't always that, I hope, but it can often be that. the personal is political, they say.)

part of what sparked this thinking of late was my slowpokey journey through the Me and White Supremacy workbook. I've been going through each chapter, journaling as earnestly as I can about each prompt (me and tone policing, me and white superiority, me and white silence, and so on). along with a few of the prompts there are a videos from the workbook's author, uploaded back when the book was still just a daily instagram challenge. and the videos are long. some of them are over an hour long.

listening to a stranger talk to me for that long (and about a subject so potentially touchy, at that) takes some discipline. focus. commitment.

in the first section of her book, Layla Saad has said as much. love, truth, and commitment: we won't get through this workbook and its work without those things. and I feel like I need to re-read that section of the book every other day, to help me keep going and stay committed as the discomfort of unpacking all the ways I'm steeped in white supremacy soup intensifies.

listening to a voice that's so different and so passionate isn't easy. the videos that go with the book aren't totally unscripted, but they're conversational. they're personal. it is so easy to say I don't have time for all that.

for me, putting off this set of intense, fine-grained confrontations is convenient. I have every excuse to put it off for next summer or the summer after that, and very little pressure from the outside world to stick with it.

but... as Ms. Saad writes, in address to white people like me and almost everyone else I have ever closely interacted with,

"Whether or not you have known it, [white supremacy] is system that has granted you unearned privileges, protection, and power. It is also a system that has been designed to keep you asleep and 'unaware' of what you having that privilege, protection and power has meant for people who do not hold white privilege. What you receive for your whiteness comes at a steep cost for those who are not white. This may sicken you and cause you to feel guilt, anger and frustration. But you cannot change your white skin colour to stop receiving these privileges, just like I cannot change my black skin colour to stop receiving racism. But what you can do is wake up to what is really going on, challenge your complicity in this system and work to dismantle it within yourself and the world."

there are things I can't change and things I can change.

maybe I can't change my basic inclinations to choose Margaret Atwood's The Testaments off the digital library shelf instead of buying the more 'experimental' Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo's from an airport bookstore. but I for sure can reconsider those basic inclinations and push myself and my brain to include more non-white voices more often. even if (perhaps especially if) those voices seem strange to me.

in this vein of feeding myself more Black voices, I requested some Audre Lorde from the local library the other day. I mostly wanted to read the oft-recommended Sister Outsider, but the copy I found of that collection also included two other works of hers: Zami (semi-autobiographical loveliness) and Undersong (poetry and such). the blurb on the back cover about Zami, the first of the trio, didn't sell it in a way that grabbed me. but as everyone should do with any book they happen to find in their hands, I read the first few lines of it anyway. and it is loveliness. lyrical, thoughtful, evocative, full of allusion and depth and feeling.

previously, the only Audre Lorde I'd ever read was in an Argument Theory class during my first round of grad school: "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House." (it might actually have only been a section of it; mainly I remember that we discussed-- fitfully-- whether or not one could discuss an argument's structure and effectiveness without discussing the argument's content). I'm looking forward to reading more of her.

I will keep reading and listening to Layla Saad, too. I've also added the more-conversational-than-I-usually-want-to-tolerate Pod Save the People and the deeply educational and impressive 1619 Project to my podcast queue. is it enough? who knows. it feels like barely, barely enough to be beyond tokenism. it's not likely to be enough to thoroughly crack through all the ways I've been conditioned to prefer and validate white voices over any others.

from the air and from the sun

it was shady on the west face of Badger Mountain this morning. the inward corners between each ridge were especially cool. at the crests of each ridge I could look back north to see the whole town like a set of toy models, framed just so by Thumb Butte and Granite Mountain.

snippets of songs and past conversations and poems-to-be and a whole bunch of other ideas sewed themselves through my thoughts as I climbed. 

how to describe the sensation of one's body breaking spiderwebs. birds--I think it's a female bluejay but I'm not sure.

layers and layers of pine-scented Saturday. the striking, heavy-feeling color of smooth, dry, grey-white, dead trees.

oh how lovely was the morning. but what if there's no way of telling how virtuous or good-intentioned any historical figure truly was?

thinking of the outdoors as sacred. mountains and high places as extra sacred. the striking, smooth, dry, white-grey color of what once was a tree now feels like a symbol. persistence. potency. 

I give myself permission. or I take permission from the air and the sunshine like a plant takes oxygen and energy. permission to decide for myself and say what I want.

and what was the name of that book about forests? How Forests Think, by Eduardo Kohn. we read it for Thomas Rickert's class, almost five years ago. the most memorable thing about it to me now is the story the author tells about seeing a bird near a river and being suddenly, beautifully, drawn out of himself and his troubles.

conincidentally when I sat down to blog for today I found in one of my old drafts a copy of a paper I wrote for that class, mainly drawing on Kohn's book. much of the paper is semi-cringy, flippant grad school pretentiousness, connecting what Kohn writes with my own thoughts about food and food media. but even so, some of it might be worth remixing here.

it starts with food and eating, but then goes beyond that into where all the food comes from.

Kohn’s bit about “managing a variety of ecological assemblages” stood out to me most. at first glance, management has such a one-way connotation... but I want to pick that apart. ecosystems manage us back, after all, and have done for millions of years. we and world are meshworked together. one process.

James Gibson writes that “The possibilities of the environment and the way of life of the animal go together inseparably” (p. 143). my own management of eco-assemblages is pretty indirect these days, unless I’m home digging in my dad’s garden. as a non-hunting, non-fishing academic person, I take advantage of grocery stores and farmers' markets full of already-managed things to cook and eat—things that I will probably never need to learn to procure from the earth or the sea for myself. maybe that means my involvement with ecosystems is less intimate, but maybe not. the groceries I buy and cook and eat still matter, not only to my body and my kitchen but to the world I am a part of. every purchase makes marks and leaves traces in a hundred directions. the infrastructures that support grocery stores afford certain possibilities, and those are inseparable from my way of life, so far.

we could make a long list of specific ways non-human lives support our dietary habits. Ingold makes note of this mutual support in a broader way:

“Moreover, granted that not all producers are human, it is easy to turn the argument around and show how various non-humans contribute, in specific environments, not just to their own growth and development but also to that of human beings. … living beings of all kinds, in what they do, constitute each other’s conditions of existence, both for their own and for subsequent generations” (Ingold, p. 8).

A line before this lovely acknowledgement, Ingold writes rather simply (even naively? nostalgically?) that “The farmer’s work on the fields, for example, creates favourable conditions for the growth of crop plants, and the herdsman’s does the same for domestic animals” (8).

doesn't that just sound so symbiotic and peaceful. idyllic, even. but how exactly do we define favorable? whose favor are we most concerned about? Gibson’s observations on how much humans muck around with what our environments afford reinforce this tragic mess: “In making life easier for himself, of course, he has made life harder for most of the other animals” (p. 130). we don’t think about this very deeply very often. often we sometimes actively avoid thinking about it.

what one does or does not put into one’s body makes marks. dietary strictures may be religious, political, ethnic, personal, health-related, or any combination. the forbidden substances seem to make the deepest, most obvious marks: no dairy, no carbs, no pork, no coffee, no alcohol, because this is who we are.

or is it the other way around—this is who we are, because we can’t eat gluten or we won’t eat meat or we’d rather not support Chick-fil-A?

either way, as Ingold pulls from Marx and José Ortega, “what we are, or what we can be, does not come ready made. We have, perpetually and never-endingly, to be making ourselves” (p. 7). and for Thompson, these processes are about “I-ing,” but it seems just as important to think about “we-ing.” It matters who/what we tend to include in “we” and who/what we do not. our human management of eco-assemblages (and maybe of everything else) has been too shortsightedly human-centric for too long.

and then the paper quotes from Roy Scranton's “Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene,” and I question his rhetorical dichotomization of nations and markets vs. "our sense of what it means to be human."

it's not so separable, I say. organisms and their environments can’t really live without each other. it's too connected.

none of us can deny our intimate interactions with things we eat, even if we don’t think about them very deeply all the time. even if we actively avoid thinking about them.

{ apologies for my incomplete citations throughout this refurbished text. if I get a chance I'll update them here to specify titles and other info that was taken for granted when I wrote this for Posthumanism in 2014. }

vengeance vs. leverage

an old facebook friend of mine, a few days ago, shared this Martin Luther King Jr. quote about the inability of violence to bring peace.

I was tempted to respond in a comment, something like "I hope you're using this to denounce all the terrible police violence and other terrible racially-motivated violence in the world, rather than as a shallow move to discredit some or all of the protestors who are speaking out against that violence, just because their response makes you uncomfortable."

but I didn't.

I've only been to one protest event in my life. it was at the end of 2014, during Dr. Jenny Bay's grad seminar on gender, rhetoric, & the body. Dr. Bay suspended our class meeting that day for anyone who wanted to go march, and despite my general hesitance to be seen making any kind of fuss at all, I left my books in my office, joined my peers, and marched. chanted (not loudly). laid down in the street in my red winter coat. listened to others' impassioned speeches and pondered in my highly introspective way what all of it meant.

that was a long time ago. I don't remember everything about that cloudy Indiana winter day but I remember one of the chants:

no justice, no peace.

no justice, no peace.

if violence cannot bring any lasting peace, as MLK has said... well, neither does injustice.

if I ignore the violence and injustice that others experience, that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

there are plenty of parallels between lyrics from Hamilton and the happenings of now. it's such a rich and tightly-woven work of art that you can look into it for insight and inspiration every morning for the rest of your days, never running out of reminders about what's difficult and crucial and powerful and beautiful about life. the closing number alone! "when my time is up, have I done enough?" it's gorgeous and it's full of heart-wrenching provocation like that.

yesterday we, along with the rest of the internet, watched the Disney+ release of the Hamilton film (thanks to friend Kay who shared her account info with us for the occasion).

these lines from "My Shot" stood out a little bit extra to me as I watched the protagonist take up a place on the soapbox and monologue:

And? If we win our independence?

Is that a guarantee of freedom for our descendants?

Or will the blood we shed begin an endless

Cycle of vengeance and death with no defendants?

I don't think most of the protests going on today are about vengeance. thankfully. and thankfully most of them aren't violent protests either.

there's another thought-provoking line on independence later on at the end of Act I, too. the exchange between Burr and Hamilton before the latter goes on to write a large portion of The Federalist Papers:

Burr: The constitution’s a mess

Hamilton: So it needs amendments

Burr: It’s full of contradictions

Hamilton: So is independence.

and so it is. independence is a neat idea. but we're also all connected. we all depend on so much outside ourselves. what "justice" and "freedom" really mean is a whole other set of questions, I admit. but we have to start somewhere. admit that not everyone is treated so equally as our Declaration of Independence implies they should be. stop ignoring that inequality just because it mostly doesn't affect us. start somewhere. change your perspective. change the way things are.

or at least try.

{ some holiday reading/viewing: Frederick Douglass's 4th of July speech from 1852 + Douglass's desendants read and reflect on said speech. }

on being intellectual in public

sometimes you hear about the dearth of brilliant public intellectuals these days. where is our 21st-century Marshall McLuhan or Noam Chomsky or Susan Sontag? headlines like this one seem to resonate, recurr. how nostalgic and melancholy for us, that somehow the world's society is just too big and fractured now for anyone to uniformly celebrate and respect any public figure. everything and everyone is too much undermined by shadows of problematicalness.

but at the same time, it's easier now to be a intellectual in public with the internet. public doesn't just mean on mainstream television or at the top of the best bestseller lists or in the biggest newspapers anymore. you can be intellectual on twitter (like this historian who has a pet bunny), or on Twitch (like these climate scientists), or on your own little blog (like Sara Ahmed).

all of us on the internet are more or less in public, whenever we want to be and sometimes even when we don't want to be.

do I count this little blog as part of being a public intellectual? not really. it's not quite public enough. it's not always very academic either, despite its humble ivory tower origins.

but is academic the same as intellectual? not always. you can have one without the other. academic seems more of a form to be followed-- conventions and styles you expect scholars to use. intellectual feels more inward, more spiritual almost-- of the mind. regardless of outward form, we can be intellectual as long as we're sharing our understandings of things or exploring our thoughts and reasons.

this brings me back to Sara Ahmed. she's someone I'd vote for in the category of admirable public intellectual for this century. since 2016 she's worked as an independent scholar, which makes her an academic intellectual without a formal academy. that takes guts and clout and determination. very admirable.

I'm glad she does the work she does in public. someday, hopefully, I'll get a chance to hear her speak. until then, her writing is all over the internet, and in some books and articles, and I really should read more of it.

who gets your vote for coolest public intellectual? I feel like this post could've been much longer and ramblier, full of disjointed musings about other public figures who work with thoughts and ideas in front of large audiences. Neil deGrasse Tyson probably counts, though he says some wacko things about the arts and humanities from time to time. Gloria Steinem and Jane Goodall too, though they seem like figures from the core of the 20th-century even though they are surely still using their intellects today. do John Oliver and Trevor Noah count? Oprah? what about YouTube personalities like this lawyer or the Green brothers? are they all public enough? intellectual enough? I think they are, at least some of the time. let's not pretend we have to separate intellectualism from entertainment.

maybe anyone can be a public intellectual for at least 15 minutes. and hopefully those who get more lasting attention are those who really deserve it.

must be seen as

I have been wanting to write something about this newsworthy mess that unfolded in Virginia ever since it happened over a month ago. but what to write? and why? and why now?

my thoughts have needed time to percolate. I still don't know if they are done percolating. is there an ideal thought-percolation time? is there a point at which you have thought enough about something? I kind of don't think so. but probably it depends on what your thinking-goals actually happen to be. are we thinking to do something, or solve something, or...? usually I am thinking for the sake of it, and in that case there is never enough. but I usually have to stop at some point, because only so many things can fit into the whole percolation.

more and more thinking about Charlottesville would also need more and more data about Charlottesville. and while I've been able to get some, there is no way to get it all. I wasn't there. what I have to think with are observations and thoughts that other people have written down on twitter and facebook and other internet spots. such places become the avenues by which I find my news and my sense of newsworthiness. there is so much room in the world for so much news these days. so many stories and voice. this twitter-essay is less directly related to the Charlottesville mess, but it's a story and a message I keep thinking about.

to supply my brain with more informed view, I could, I suppose, listen to more newsy podcasts. or watch some more newsy videos. the podcasts I tend to put on while I wash the dishes are more ponderous, less newsiness. although, in the way of timeliness, 99% Invisible did recently re-run this Memory Palace episode about a statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest.

I don't know if there are any confederate monuments in Indiana anywhere. there is this place, though, just up the road a bit. though it fits the theme of memorials to dead white guys who participated in the general ruination of many, many non-white guys, I don't think anyone is likely to get all enraged about it. I'm not sure though.

it's difficult to think about the complexities of causality and blame. I wonder quite often, what good does blame do? what use is it to spend so much time investigating the precise sources of evils and ills and wrongs and badness, even if we are able to figure it out? does investigating it all make us think we will have any control over the wrong?

maybe just knowing is control enough, in some way. however complex and impossible, we have to try to make things less bad, if we can, right?

sometimes it's hard to see how. sometimes it's easier. sometimes listening is enough. and sometimes listening isn't even that easy.

I've been listening to a few new podcasts lately. Malcolm Gladwell's pet research-and-thinking-aloud project Revisionist History has been a mix of interesting and meh. this very first of the episodes struck me--it's about art and snobbery, patriarchy and sexism, and the concept of "moral licensing." go listen. learning about moral licensing was worth it despite Gladwell's rambling self-important tone.

moral licensing. a justification for keeping all our old and toxic ways of thinking because we spent a little time poking a hole or two in their edges.

so much to think about. I've also been reading a little from a book called Intersectionality. the chapter on how educational institutions play various roles in perpetuating injustice has been thought-provoking for me, now, as I consider my future as a small piece within larger systems of educational institutions. my favourite part of Intersectionality was a quote from Audre Lorde.

"Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. Only then does the necessity for interdependence become unthreatening." (qtd in Collins & Bilge, p. 169)

necessary polarities. necessary and productive difference. no consensus, no flattened-out unity. difference. to see difference differently changes it. is that what Lorde means? that what might be threatening to us if we resist will transform into a beautiful, wonderful thing is we'd just learn to see it that way?

or is it actually that the threat was all in our heads to begin with?

I'm not sure who the we is. hypothetical we. everyone we.

or me and you. maybe. partly.

and then there is the whole paradox of tolerance to grapple with. what belongs in this world we are creating, and what doesn't? what things are okay, and what things are so bad we shouldn't even look at them? think about them?

background signal

what if it were illegal to yell?

part of me almost sort of likes that idea. criminalizing all the obnoxious, excess noise...

101 years ago, a fellow named Dan McKenzie published a book called The City of Din: A Tirade Against Noise. someday I will have time to read it and when that time comes I'll be so excitedly interested I can hardly imagine it. The City of Din is a public domain text (available via the Hathi Trust), so maybe someday I'll read it (calmly and softly and in a lovely, quiet room) for LibriVox.

McKenzie's tirade was made known to me by Russell Davies, who blogged about it in the context of a more recent book: The Age of Noise in Britain. that one also sounds like a fascinating-to-me book. there is always so much and more to read. not enough time.

what I am reading (still), is Benkler's The Wealth of Networks. I'm treading water in this fat, deep treatise, soaking up quarts and quarts of 10-year-old wisdom about humans, technology, ideology, policy, and the economy. this quote stood out to me yesterday, and I transcribed it first into a notebook and then into this blogpost:

“culture operates as a set of background assumptions and common knowledge that structure our understanding of the state of the world and the range of possible actions and outcomes open to us individually and collectively.” (p. 297)

a few pages on he points to a need for us to study how culture works on us, how it influences policies, how it does its structuring and how it draws its lines. he writes, “we must diagnose what makes culture more or less opaque to its inhabitants…” (p. 299). Benkler consistently uses a metaphor of containment and habitation in this discussion. culture is all around us. it's what we swim and breathe and see in.

of course that reminded me of David Foster Wallace's renowned speech (do you remember me blogging about it before, once?)--"This is Water," as it's sometimes called. this video rendition is rather neat. go watch it if you haven't. it isn't that long. not even 9 whole minutes. totally worth it, believe me.

in other related and semi-relevant things-I've-been-reading lately, there is an article (stumbled upon via the smacksy blog) about how powerful it can be to recognize the frames of your own perspective. I'm thinking that the phrase “the story I’m telling myself is…” can easily be adapted into “the culture I’m swimming in says…”. either mental trick can pull us out of our bubbles for a moment or two, help us remember our limits and our contexts, yes, but also our agency and our responsibilities. it's empowering to reflect on the background structure of your whole life. to actively participate and acknowledge your role in either accepting/reinforcing or resisting/revising the culture you swim in--that seems important. that's what it takes to make all of that power and structure more open-book, more readable, more transparent and less like a vice.

today, in my LibriVox researching (I'm almost one year into all ten+ years of these), I wound my way over to this set of slides from a 2007 podcasting conference. I'm curious what the spoken half of the talk must have been like, but the slides do stand alone pretty well. transparency is a theme there, too. openness and empowerment.

I do not think I would really want yelling to be illegal. a quieter culture might be nice, and if I can in some small part bend my world that direction, maybe I should. but then I think about how subjective it will always be. what's horrible noise to me would be awesome entertainment to someone else, and what's perfectly comfortable background music to me could be uselessly inaudible to the next person.

and then there's the whole issue of times when making some serious noise seems useful, meaningful, and lastingly important. it's probably very meaningful and important that yelling is not illegal.

usable pasts

one thousand blogposts. it would be cool to make a chart or map or diagram of them all.

I found these old sketches last week in old notebooks. the old notebooks will help me (presumably) study for prelims over the next six weeks.

the sketches are pretty much just there. not relevant to studying at all, really. I took photos of them and have thereby transferred some of their inky randomness onto the internet. I think they were drawn sometime late in 2013.

I keep coming across this phrase, "a usable past," in academic books, mainly, where authors use it to hedge around the reality that the true past is and ever will be inaccessible. our biases will always cloud our memories--personal and cultural. the biases of past peoples don't exactly help clarify reality for us either.

I wonder in another thousand blogposts how I will look back and read the things I'm writing here. already the ten years of this blog stretch off into foggy, familiar, fuzzy, foreign places. are they usable, now? will they be usable still in ten more years?

probably to someone. but it's hard to say what for...

thirteen: unlucky

not even the heady scent of fresh-mown grass or the sweep of springtime clouds and breezes--not even a strawberry ice cream cone--none of it, nothing--has succeeded in lifting me up out of this well (deep, deepening, deeper than yesterday) of what if why not when where how not why which who why why not but why. I am choking on feelings. smothering.


there are no stories in this. no sense. the universe is sinking me.

three: unlearning

I shared this quote with my students this week, pulling it up right here where it lives on the little tumblr quote blog I keep. (who even knows what the students thought of the fact that their English teacher has a tumblr. are tumblrs cool anymore? were they ever? does it matter?)

“the most successful of our students have a worldview shift during our program, an entire change in their demeanor towards the built world around them. They come to see rules as malleable, power structures as changeable, and culture as embodied. They see design as a vehicle for slow but influential behavior change, and they recognize that over time, this behavior change impacts the landscape of the world. Over the course of the program, they see that they can design things (products, services, interactions, and policies), and these things cause the world to change.”

the quote is from this piece by Jon Kolko. he is interestingly the Vice President of Design at Blackboard, and Blackboard is the online course software I've been using to teach my writing class. my twenty students are analyzing space and the rhetoric of the built world around them. I am asking them to break apart the ways staircases and windows and furniture send certain kinds of messages. I want them to see that the way things are is not an accident, nor is it inescapable. the first step is paying attention.

reading Kolko's article made me feel a few millimeters better about my teaching. that failure and frustration are okay--that they are even crucial in the learning process--is something I always forget. or don't think about. I get too idealistic about the whole endeavor, too enamored of that Dead-Poets-Society-style magic, and then when almost nothing about the five hours a week I spend in a classroom every semester actually goes so smoothly or culminates in such exciting epiphany, teaching becomes very meh.

there are other articles and bits research and pedagogical theory I've latched on to with similar reaction. Robert Brooke's “Underlife and Writing Instruction” is one. the little summary comment-note I added to the top of my pdf copy includes the line "I found this very, very comforting."

teaching is hard. and it seems like we talk about it too much in extremes. that lesson you planned either falls on deaf ears or it lights up with fantastic sparks of insight. or maybe it's just that I selectively remember those extremes. class time is great or it's awful. we are either completely failing our students or we are doing all the right things for them. and our students are either complete slackers or overachieving superstars. these extreme stories are the most fun to tell, after all, whether to yourself or to your colleagues.

there are a million other stories.

learning doesn't necessarily happen on paper and it doesn't have anything to do with points for writing smooth transitions or points for drafting a logical thesis statement. it doesn't have much to do with the lesson plans you scribble in your notebook or the not-so-fabulous teaching evaluations you get.

I need to remember that getting things wrong and messing things up and wandering around on the wrong track are all useful learning activities. failures are probably more useful than "perfect teaching" or "perfect studenting" could ever be (not that either ideal is at all easy to imagine, from here). my frustration and faltering with this teaching gig... that's part of my own shift, too. don't forget. the failure is useful, for them and for you.

rolling credits

fall 2011, my very first semester of grad school adventuring. I took a Bibliography class and a Publications Management class at Tech, where both instructors assigned Foucault's “What is an Author?”

amusingly, they each sent out very different PDF versions of this Foucault. this semester, spring 2015, in Postmodernism class, I have collected yet another version.

this Michel Foucault guy. he is undeniably prolific, and not just of his own accord either. these are three different English translations. the essay has been collected and recollected in lots of places.

he shows up in snippet-form in a million other people's work. quotations and paraphrases and summaries and re-purposings galore.



look at all that proliferation, uncontrollable and unending. [sidenote: prolific/proliferate. hmmm. those are cool words.]

speaking of unending proliferation... when we read this Foucault (in company with "The Death of the Author" by Roland Barthes) for Postmodernism this week, I saw these theorists from the seventies prophesying the messiness of internet culture.

Barthes gets prophetic with the assertion that

“In a multiple writing, indeed, everything is to be distinguished, but nothing deciphered; structure can be followed, 'threaded' (like a stocking that has run) in all its recurrences and all its stages, but there is no underlying ground; the space of the writing is to be traversed, not penetrated: writing ceaselessly posits meaning but always in order to evaporate it.” (5)

this reminded me a bit of our class discussion the other week about memes (in particular, this one, which requires advanced Superbowl XLIX background knowledge to even attempt to make sense of--I still don't know if it's parseable, really) and their funny, short-lived, nonsensical nods at “meaning.” and I thought of Tony’s paper day presentation on Wikipedia. what is Wikipedia if not a floating, threaded, tagged, metadata-ed parade of version upon version upon version of writing, editing, responding, and so on? (this whole Barthes piece also reminded me of Doctor Who, for some reason. I think it was the talk of dimensions and eternally present texts and utterances that are always “here and now.” weird connection, I know. I'm not even any brand of a Whovian.)

Foucault's foreshadowing peeks out here, where he tells us that

“as our society changes, at the very moment when it is in the process of changing, the author function will disappear, and in such a manner that fiction and its polysemous texts will once again function according to another mode, but still with a system of constraint--one that will no longer be the author but will have to be determined or, perhaps, experienced” (222). 

he doesn't know or say what exactly would replace the standard model of authorship, and neither can we... yet. we are in this very moment. (maybe the 1970s were in it too. I don't know.) one version of my online self, a few weeks back, made a copy of a statement by some unknown writer on Tumblr about this whole idea: "we live in a post-copyright society," the guy says. Tumblr itself seems to be exactly the world Foucault is describing. on Tumblr it doesn't matter who is speaking.

I now interject with a complicatedly relevant and timely example from an (overly popular?) author/vlogger/whoever:


(for the record, I saw only seventeen--actual seventeen, not seventeen hundred--likes when I checked on goodreads the other day. there are eighteen now, and it's been reattributed. that was quick.)

later on in his essay, Foucault admits that he has “unjustifiably” limited his definition of authorship and discourse (216). what about so many other forms of creative work, he asks? what if we're talking about painting or music? what if? what if we're talking about pixels and code?

the (really awesome, I think) postmodern tendency to keep widening and broadening everything, always chopping down boundaries, tearing up labels, smashing traditions, etc. makes me want to ask so many questions. if everything counts as discourse, what then? leading up to this, Foucault also explains that “all discourses endowed with the author function possess this plurality of self” (215)... as if the self is a text, also. not only is everything discourse, everything is plural. me included. from there, it’s tempting to imagine a "death of the self" along the same lines as this famous "death of the author." someday we may only have self-functions. hmmm.

in our class forums, colleague Beth made a very cool point about the roles and threats and newnesses of technology in this whole shifting authorship/compositionship situation, citing a fellow named Friedrich Kittler on the topic of typewriters. and then friend John posted a link to this awesomeness, which I found delightfully mindboggling. I have a machine that in theory could do such cool things. perhaps I should learn.

back to technology though. technology + humans = cyborgs. and that reminds me of Neil Harbisson. and it reminds me of David Eagleman's Sum (a pretty blue paperback that I actually own). of death-switches. functions without selves. hmm.

“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.

the point is to live everything

I picked up Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet for a few moments at a party in October. sometimes, I behave rather anti-socially at parties. music, small talk, and hors d'oeuvres aren't always quite enough. I want my eyes to have more to look at, my hands to have some kind of project or game. so at certain kinds of parties, even though it might be weird to be embroidering while the music blares, or crocheting as the small talk happens, or browsing bookshelves inbetween hors d'oeuvres, these are things I have been known to do.

the music and food and company at this particular October party was all lovely. the bookshelf of poetry in the corner took up a small set of moments that night, but those moments popped back into my head when I came across a quote from Rilke's book earlier. recently, On Being joined the handful of podcasts on my iPod, and I have been letting old episodes play in the background of my housework and bus riding. they are sometimes a little too earnest, these soft, meandering conversations between curious, profound people. there is almost an overly-tender, tenuous idealism hanging over it all. but usually they're interesting despite this. so when a friend posted a link to the On Being blogpost of today, I let my intrigue follow it, trailing its author from Anne Hillman's poem and the Rilke quote to the five questions below-- and eventually to google where I found this digitization of all ten letters. the inspirational tidbit in question is from letter 4. "have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language," translated Rilke advises. I was talking to my clever sister about this earlier--about the complex value of holding pluralities and indeterminacy in one's head. uncertainty is precious. ignorance is room for discovery. darkness and shadows make cradles for the candles and the lightbulbs. the blogpost at On Being suggests that to not know = to be alive.

these are the questions Parker J. Palmer has come up with, remixing Rilke and Hillman into New Year's inspiration:

• How can I let go of my need for fixed answers in favor of aliveness?
• What is my next challenge in daring to be human?
• How can I open myself to the beauty of nature and human nature?
• Who or what do I need to learn to love next? And next? And next?
• What is the new creation that wants to be born in and through me?

I love questions. how they lead to more and more and more unknown, unsettled, untraveled spaces. the idea of living in the moment, living in questions, feels excessively appealing. and here, in no particular order, are my pondering, tentative responses:

• keep asking questions. around and about and underneath all the answers you think you might be setting in with, there are always more questions.
• prepare for and take responsibility for the things you want, even if you aren't sure you want them, even if you aren't sure how or why or when or what will happen as a result.
• get a haircut.
• walk to school one or two mornings every week.
• collect and cultivate a few more potted plants.
• listen more selflessly.
• write on paper. take more notes. make more connections among the books and articles and conversations.

these aren't all. I'll come back and keep pondering.

years and their turnings are indeed arbitrary temporal thresholds. every millisecond could be just as momentous as this one we're waiting for at midnight tonight. that the digit at the end of 2014 is switching by one is pretty neat, and this sort of switch does only happen once every thirty-one-and-a-half-million seconds, but given the way we quantify time, every single moment some digit of the timestamp is switching, spinning, ticking away. we could use every one of those ticks as an excuse to throw confetti, to dance, to live. every moment is a beautiful new question.

the world we are creating

if there are things you love on the internet, save copies of them. this is advice that Dr. Sullivan is alway giving us with respect to our wandering research. if you even sort of think you might want to use it someday for an object lesson, class project, seminar paper, conference illustration, or article-fodder, download the thing. as endless and un-erasable as the internet seems most days, the stuff of it doesn't always stay there. you cannot trust the cloud.

(whether you can trust the integrity and/or longevity of your harddrive to any significantly greater extent is a separate though not unrelated question. all is temporary, and the scales of temporariness are complicated.)

if there are people you love on the internet, I don't know what to tell you. so far, there's no way to download people. that's probably a good thing.

early thismorning I saw people linking to a new post by Kathy Sierra. it is a long post, personal, a tad meandering, but it seems everso soul-questioningly, heart-wrenchingly important.

read it. go on. I've linked to it twice now, redundantly, asking you to read this long meandering story even if you have not been a Kathy Sierra fangirl since at least 2005, and even if you have no clue who this Andrew Auernheimer fellow (hm... he blogs on livejournal. how old-fashioned...) might think he is, and even if you, like me, find life much more effective without worrying very much about the hopeless-seeming, headache-inducing state of the universe.

Sierra's post might not be there very long. I have made a copy of it, in case the original disappears. it's also on Wired, for the moment. (if Wired and Dropbox disappear, who knows what we shall do).

two-thirds in, Sierra shifts into saying we. "This is the world we have created."

not only does that make us sound so implicated, so conspiratorially close to culpable... it also makes us sound so finished. so final. we've hit send. we've checked enough boxes. the world has been published. editing is over and this is the product we're stuck with.

not so. please, not so. I'd rather say "this is the world we are creating."

the we is still there. I don't see any ways of getting around that we, though parts of me are tempted to pick we apart and subdivide it into some sort of graph with axes like experience, influence, responsibility, investment, and such.

all the other words could stand to be picked at too. which exact this? creating how?

in one of those neat serendipitous internet moments, the following video was posted today. Mr. Rugnetta says a few things on cultural (re)production that answer that last question. the how is discourse. pens, not swords. writing and media, not sticks or stones or construction equipment. it's actions too, of course, but what we say about how we act, and how we storify things that happen = way incredibly powerful. Sierra's story similarly notes that stories with enough inertia and spin can permanently warp one's perspective. even the most disturbingly inaccurate stories, like the kind you might hear about scaly, murderous llamas, can stick in your head and tint everything you see. all the Pratchett you've ever read will say the same thing--narrativium is not to be trifled with.

I wonder sometimes if the stories we tell about the stories we tell carve ruts as deep or as damaging. those are thoughts for future blogposts, I think.

as long as I'm being redundant today, I'm going to include another video--yes, more of this silly Rugnetta fellow and his ponderings. it's relevant, I promise. and the followup comments/responses over here are also enlightening and chewy. (my brain has been particularly hung up over the 8:40 mark. it's a part of me that's been trained to meekly accept and swallow all things as somehow divinely-permitted-side-effects-of-this-fallen-mortal-experience-which-will-ultimately-all-work-together-for-my-everlasting-good that wants to say, "yeah, shrug off those death threats, everything will be fine." what does that mean? who does that make me? am I supposed to squash this attitude? or unravel it away? maybe all I can do is wait to see how I actual feel when or if death threats are ever made in my direction, and keep my mouth shut about the concept until then.)

anyway. this whole situation--trolls, women, internet, life--is more than a story. we can uses stories and conversations and videos and blogs to reach out for little parts of it, and build what we see into some sensible structure, with sections and headings and terms lined up for convenient deconstruction. but labels make me squirm, generally. what we mean by troll and or victim obviously isn't easy. it's not even always useful. the definitional blurriness between criticism/harassment is another thing that might deserve plenty of more discussion. my own experiences of such things aren't the same as anyone else's. that's why we need to tell the stories, after all. that's why we invented ways of sharing all the crazy insides of our heads.

maybe all this talking and thinking will help. somehow.

inhale envy

Saturday I was out running errands (legitimize the new car, donate all those excess clothes, pick the last two zucchini from the garden plot) and had a few moments to kill in between places of business that open at 8:30am on weekends and stores that didn't open until 10:00. Barnes and Noble presented itself, conveniently in between these times, and I wandered in to browse.

my favourite shelves in bookstores are the ones with the blank books. there's only so long you can gush over those, though, so I also explored the games aisles and the news aisles and the clearance bins. there were tempting boxes of chocolate in the clearance bins... but I was only there to kill time, not spend any money. I'm still subsisting on the tail end of tiny slash nonexistent summer paychecks, so I'm putting off as much spending as possible until next month.

my other favourite shelves are the ones with new books. Barnes and Noble has one of these too, perpendicular to the coffee-dispensing section of the store.

I picked up and perused the first pages of a little paperback with a yellow-pea-coated girl on the cover. white block letters, out-of-focus trees in the background. it was the title that caught my eye. The Opposite of Loneliness. Marina Keegan. Introduction by Anne Fadiman.

I must admit I didn't remember any of that information over the weekend. I didn't remember what it was called or what it looked like or how it was bound. all I remembered was the twist that jumped out from the middle of that glowing Introduction by Anne Fadiman, and the reason I put the book down.

but in order to write about that, I needed to remember all the other details. an isolated, poignant twist with no detailed context wouldn't quite be a story worth telling, would it?

as anyone else would have in this forgetful situation, I turned to the world's favourite (or least favourite?) external memory aid slash search algorithm.

these are the words I ventured to feed into the search box:

writing student dies dead student publishes collection

and there I've given away the whole sad, slow, sinking, twist, so there may not be much hope of painting for you the sense of holding a lovely book of essays in your hands, of reading along about the quirks and dreams and pleadings of its author, starting to wonder, to envy, and feeling even a bit anxious to skim through this Introduction and taste the insides of this collection--to traipse right into the essays this student of Anne Fadiman's must have had such writerly fun drafting and polishing...

...and then realizing, without knowing why it took you so long, that Anne Fadiman's past tense was is not the regular, innocent past tense was.

I snapped the book shut and half-tossed it back on its shelf, not even bothering to straighten it up with its fellow copies.

her last Yale Daily News column comes up first in the search results.

a Huffington Post eulogy-esque review (or is it more a review-esque eulogy? I'm not sure) is second.

I'm not sure what made me so suddenly give up on that shiny new book. maybe, after hearing so much praise and promise, it seemed unfair. maybe the praise and promise seemed pasted-on and obligatory to me, too thick, once I knew their recipient wasn't around anymore. I felt cheated, disbelieving. maybe I couldn't swallow the implications of envying a talented but tragically dead Yale graduate.

fall semester, 2014

last week at this hour large parts of me were dreading the pressure and obligation of classes and campus. maybe I've been too busy to think about all that this week. or maybe the dread was unfounded and silly.

maybe both.

I have surrendered my life for the next four months to many, many things. it's exciting for now, and I'm hoping I don't get strangled by difficulties later on. there will be so much reading. so much theory. so much mental chewing-on-things and so much hurrying about from classroom to classroom, wearing different hats, looking through different windows.

I'll manage. I must.

English 680 Gender, Rhetoric, and the Body with Dr. Jenny Bay 
we'll be working with a few local social service programs in this class: Food Finders and WIC. our first readings have covered the connections between athletics and rhetoric, some thoughts on violence as related to gender and race, and a lot of fascinating theory about pain, torture, war, and language. I think this is the class I'm most excited about.

English 680 Professional Writing Theory with Dr. Patricia A. Sullivan
and here we will read and read and see if we can figure out what makes professional writing what it is, or what we want it to be, or what other people might want it to be. discussions about these disciplinary definitions always seem to go around in circles, but somehow I don't hate them for that. it's kind of awesome that we have the power to define and redefine what we do, who we are, and what it means, isn't it?

English 624 Issues In Composition Studies: Modern Period with Dr. Patricia A. Sullivan
once upon a time I had a semester of Modern Rhetorical Theory, but I am not very sure that it was in any way the same thing. maybe it was. if so, it was at a less-intense undergraduate level anyway, less flooded with primary texts from Ramus and Whately and other such folks. that was a long time ago. I blogged a few times about that class. it was my first introduction to rhetoric. and I wrote an essay about the Bible. crazy. I'll try and pay more attention this time around, in any case. I'll try not to blog too much or too boringly about Ramus and Whately and other such folks while I'm at it.

English 681 the Hutton Lectures In Rhetoric And Composition
there are all kinds of rumors about who will be the invited speakers for this lecture series. Dr. Blackmon is keeping us in some suspense about the schedule, so I don't have much to say here yet.

English 502 Writing Lab Practicum with Dr. Richard Johnson-Sheehan 
did I mention I've been hired at the writing lab for this year? I have dreamed of this day, and the silver platter of fate (upon which have been delivered most of the other great things I've been lucky enough to participate in) has finally obliged to hand me a job as a tutor. my first week has been pretty fun, and this class will make sure I keep enough professionalism and strategy mixed in, as well. writing lab work will probably contribute to 59% of all my rushing around this fall, but I am pretty sure it will be worth the craziness.

and now, I think I'll go sit on my back porch and continue with all the reading...