three sisters

over the past few months I've been devouring audiobooks on the weekends. I basically listened to Stardust in one long stretch on a Sunday, knitting and gardening and crafting and tidying the house as I did so. (in the meantime, my backlog of podcast subscriptions is somewhere close to 100 hours. trade-offs, eh?)

there was plenty of Tana French and a bunch more Barbara Kingsolver too. and then, friend Michelle recommended Alix E. Harrow's Starling House somewhere around the end of August. I loved this book, despite its few melodramatic tendrils of YA-ness, which honestly I cannot really fault it for anyway. the ending was excellent and poignant and deep and gritty. so, so good.

I'd heard of Alix E. Harrow quite a bit, so I somehow assumed she'd been around for many years and that I was super late to the fangirl party... but nope, her first novel was published only five years ago. (I just finished listening to that one too-- The Ten Thousand Doors of January. it's a most adorable and fun adventure indeed.)

by the grace of my library audiobook app, I ended up making my way through Harrow's novels in reverse order. her latest, Starling House, first, with its echoes here and there of Kingsolver's Appalachia, sketched in words as vibrant, shadowy, heartbeatingly real and more-than-real. 

then Libby handed me The Once and Future Witches.

a fairly trite title with many echoes of its own-- will we get any scraps of Aurthurian ledgend here? 

I wasn't sure what to expect but this story drew me in completely and I was marvelously invested in all of it pretty quick. the book rotates among the points of view of three sisters. eldest, middle, youngest-- maiden, mother, crone-- each with her own ferocious sense of how the world could be, if only... 

and there is real magic. witching. spellcraft bubbling all through this alternate New England at the end of the nineteenth century. so cool. the story as a whole pulls and pries and re-weaves so many other stories into itself. I loved it. and before long it made me think of my own sisters.

I have two sisters. I don't often consciously think about the fact that two sisters means there are three of us. 

I've given us epithets before though, not realizing the cliche of it. one of us is the fearless one. the popular one. the clever one. the pretty one. the smart one. the nice one. or at least it's kind of neat to boil our essences down like that, sometimes.

The Once and Future Witches leans a fair bit on this concept for its central three sisters, and to some extent for the other trios of women who show up along the course of the plot. Bella is the wise one, the scholar, the librarian, the eldest. Agnes is the strong one, the independent one, the middle child about to have a baby of her own. and June, the youngest, is the wild one: rebellious and untamable, and most naturally talented with witching. 

three witches. such a ubiquitous trope. three itself is practically a trope, right? the rule of three. beginnings, middles, and ends. it's a sturdy, solid, sustainable prime number, lending its lovely balance to three-legged stools, three-corner hats, three primary colors, and a bunch of other things. witches. sisters. bears. pigs. amigos. stooges. musketeers. branches of government.

does one of the three being wise mean the others are necessarily less wise? or does the beauty of one necessarily outshine that of the other two? cannot three sisters be more or less equally strong?

yes and no. maybe. maybe not. it depends on how you measure these things, I suppose.

of course I also thought of Pratchett's three witches-- Esmerelda Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg, and young Magrat. perhaps I should reread their books to see how his version of the trope look to my 20-years-older perspective.

what would my sisters and I do if we had magical powers? so many things, I imagine. our circumstances aren't so neatly intertwined and story-arced as those of the sisters in this novel, but I do like to imagine we each have our own ferocity for changing some little segment of the world. 

and I've got brothers too. four of them. how does that change the math and dimensions of the trope, I wonder?

 

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.

goodbye, January

since the eve of 2024 one month ago, it feels like so much has happened. some of it too fast, too soon, too painfully. 

the grief of losing the first little doggo that I ever really shared my longterm day-to-day life with... I cannot describe it. as much as I'd like to keep trying to, the feeling altogether and gargantuanly transcends words. the whole experience is impossible to talk about in any satisfying, accurate, indubitable way. "losing"? "letting go"? that we "had to" say goodbye? what kind of stupid, broken euphemism circus is this? everything about our language-cloaked expressions of such pain just feels utterly inadequate.

{ I suppose we can't have sunrises without some sunsets. }

{ and nothing lasts forever; dog-years are too extra short. }

it is probably irrational to think no one else could ever know what I mean, even if the words and metaphors feel so flimsy. it's not like I'm the only person to ever experience this sort of sadness. nor is this the first unexpected loss in my life. but it has been the closest and the sharpest. so far.

on new year's day I wrote something about how the world (a world so embroiled in hate and genocides and ugly senseless conflict!) is an absolutely crushingly horrific mess, how my heart hurts and hurts and hurts, and how this loss seems to prefigure and to threaten-- or, even more, to promise-- every other inevitable loss I will ever have to face for as long as I live.

it's one thing to philosophically observe, in general, that nothing can last forever. okay. of course. to confront and deeply feel it-- specifically-- as one solitary ending to the life of a inimitably cuddly goofy fuzzy little domesticated animal... that is different.

other aspects of this January were plenty normal, whatever that means. most of my activities seem to come with rather suitable words with which to sketch them into sharable imagery: going to bed early and sleeping in. checking out library books. reading and ignoring and sorting and replying to emails. seeing friends. enduring snow and rain and cold. demonstrating crafts at the museum. putting birdseed in the feeder in the backyard. talking with family on the phone. eating quiche. drinking tea. making soup. needing a haircut but not yet ever managing to go out and get my hair cut. sweeping the floor. running errands. craving hot chocolate. writing lists and syllabi and assignment sheets. spending money. making things. existing. 

{ eclipse shadows from October, 2023. Wesley's last weekend camping trip with us. }

sure, nothing lasts forever. change is nature. this too shall pass: all of these phrasings alternatingly as full of solace as they are of tragedy, representative of a fact more solid than perhaps any other so-called fact. death and endings are, from one point of view, more normal, more mundane, more irrefutable than any of the other relatively comfortable, unassuming, smoothly proceeding lifestuff I might casually document and remember about this particular month of the year. that's what feels so difficult and impossible about it.

the vortex of this heartache felt immeasurable, indescribably vast and infinite, from the inside. 

even so, from a day or two or ten beyond, it begins to shrink and fade. all future moments frame it into something more manageable.

but again the words seem to balk and fail me. "manage"? is that what we are meant to do with these feelings? this grief? is that actually possible? the stringy, endless paradoxes curl up inside of each other, confounding my basic little human brain with ineffability.

{ classic pug-under-the-table photo, new year's eve 2023 }

January, perhaps fittingly, seems so very long. all the transitions it spans-- all the shifting, deepening of the dark season, the post-holiday recoveries, the shiny new beginnings of a calendar year and of an academic semester-- all of that is a lot for 31 average winter days.

I don't know if it really did feel longer for me this year, or if I'm only saying that because it seems like an appropriate thing to sigh into this semi-bleak and impermanent world. 

one month ago, as the cold moon began to wane and the spinning earth began to tilt just barely back towards the sun, our little old dog ate his last breakfast and went on his last stumbling walk and took one final car ride, sitting on my lap. I only knew him for half his life. I wasn't sure if I'd get along with such a beast at first. but we did get along, so well. I loved that pug and I'm glad he was here to share so much of the too-short day-to-day of my life for a while.

places and possibilities

thinking about going places. far away places.

nearby places have their charm... but running errands is mostly tiring; walking the dog is lovely but routine.

summer and travel go together most years. or they have in the past, anyway. lately it seems like so long since I've gone anywhere new just to see what's there and what it looks like.

as i reread some of my old journals, it seems astonishing how much I traveled even just five or six years ago. so much back and forth home for holidays, random cities for conferences or helping friends move, and a few weeks-long adventures for studying abroad. it seems like half my journal entries back then were prefaced with "notes from [insert name of airport here]." 

 

there are many reasons for the relative lack of travel these days, of course. there's a pandemic still wandering around mutating and spreading. small, short, careful trips seem best. we also just bought a house, so it's everyone's turn to come visit us now, to see what's here.

here is pretty beautiful, I must say. we have an ancient volcano overlooking some very fine walking and biking trails. we have (unlike last year, during which this rainstorm was practically the only one) an almost-nightly pattern of refreshing monsoons feeding into a bunch of glorious greenery. we have cool mornings and a very serviceable set of patio furniture. and a fire pit too, for roasting things and for cozy evening ambiance.

last week Jeremiah's aunt and uncle stopped by for a night on their way from west to east. they brought a handsome dog named Herschel with them and we had a grand time showing them around, catching up on each others' lives, and playing a bit of mahjong.

who else wants to come visit? we can teach you mahjong if you like. or we can hike up to the top of Glassford Hill and have a picnic.

what else? 

I've been teaching this summer. small sections of Technical Report Writing over two six-week terms. it's been mostly fun. but I'll be glad for a few weeks' break between summer and fall classes starting up. maybe we'll go camping. maybe we'll squeeze in one more tiny, careful roadtrip. or throw one or two more dinner parties. or just sleep in more and read all the books. 

my other activities for summer have included daily morning walks with our restless little Hamilton pug, pulling weeds out of our rock-covered yard, potting and re-potting succulents (new and old), tending to a dying basil plant and a thriving tomato plant (many thanks to my dad), taking a few bike rides, committing to bits of yoga, baking too much for two people, and reading outside as often as I can get away with.

oh, and I'm running a little game of Dungeons and Dragons-- a pre-written adventure entitled Curse of Strahd. there haven't been any dragons in it yet, but there might be. it's proving quite interesting and entertaining. ostensibly, I am using this set of published ideas to create a backdrop of tension and danger mixed in with meaningful story and fun rewards for the players who roleplay in the foreground of it all. from the first few sessions though, I've felt like my role is equal parts creator and observer. the player characters are out there on a stage that I threw together, putting on fascinating and rich performances for us all. I hope I get better at it so I can keep doing it and find out what happens next.

in other news, I want to soon blog properly about Braiding Sweetgrass and all its lovely messages about paying attention to nature. I should also finish reading and taking some more organized notes on a few books about collaborative writing pedagogy. there is a conference talk to prepare in the next two months, and always more scholarly books to read. one on my mind this afternoon is Against the Romance of Community, the pdf of which is sitting around in at least three digital folders somewhere, waiting with its few scattered annotations for me to get back into it. 

I know it's kind of cheesy to use books as a stand-in for travel, but ah well. if Scotland and Paris and Germany and London and Beijing are out of reach for the next long while, at least I can read and re-read about everywhere else. everyone else. all their connections and intricate influences on one another.

 

and because I needed an excuse to type it all out for myself here, I'm going to include these paragraphs from near the end of Kimmerer's book about indigenous wisdom. this chapter is called "People of Corn, People of Light," all about the marks we are leaving on the earth through our ways of being, our ways of knowing, and our stories.

"Many Indigenous peoples share the understanding that we are each endowed with a particular gift, a unique ability. Birds to sing and stars to glitter, for instance. It is understood that these gifts have a dual nature, though: a gift is also a responsibility. If the bird's gift is song, then it has a responsibility to greet the day with music. It is the duty of birds to sing and the rest of us receive the song as a gift. ....
"Other beings are known to be especially gifted, with attributes that humans lack. Other beings can fly, see at night, rip open trees with their claws, make maple syrup. What can humans do?
"We may not have wings or leaves, but we humans do have words. Language is our gift and our responsibility. I've come to think of writing as an act of reciprocity with the living land. Words to remember old stories, words to tell new ones, stories that bring science and spirit back together to nurture our becoming people made of corn." (p. 347) 

I promise I'll blog more about this lovely book one day soon, blog-all-dogeared-pages style. and if you've read it too, let's have an impromptu book club about it so I can hear all your thoughts. wouldn't that be fun?

minds bodies words and shared responsibilities

this draft has been waiting some time for this day. I'd been thinking for a while to rework it into a post, but something always got in the way of my actually doing it. and then when I realized there was a date on the thing-- today's date-- I put it off yet again just so I could ultimately post it on its anniversary. 

this end-of-September Monday marks five years since I wrote the following five paragraphs for Dr. Thomas Rickert's posthumanism class. it is in a genre of grad school essay called the "paper day paper." (if you're curious for more examples, it just so happens that fellow Purdue student Ryan has impressively assembled all of his paper day papers here. not all of mine would be so easily digitized, though I have repurposed snippets from them before, but maybe it would be cool to follow Ryan's example someday eventually.)

-

Mind and Body are Just Words
28 Sept. 2015

I stole the title there from a recent podcast episode of Krista Tippett’s On Being, where she interviews Dr. Ellen Langer. Dr. Langer’s experiments on wellbeing and mindfulness hinge around an idea that “mind and body are just words,” separation between them is artificial, and there is real power in our expectations and perspectives. I am skeptical about the word just. It carries such belittling dismissiveness. Yes, mind and body are words, but words and meanings surely play into Dr. Langer’s whole point that perceptions can make a physiological difference. We can’t ignore words in all that. As Francesca Ferrando puts it, “futures do not appear out of nowhere: they are based on the presents, the pasts, and the ways they are being envisioned” (1). How we talk about things is part of how things thing for us, after all. How we talk about the future will be part of how the future futures.

One thoughtful listener’s reflection on the podcast’s webpage, from a semi-anonymous Sarah, adds, “Our whole body thinks, it's not a function confined to (that admittedly amazing organ) the brain; and the body, with it's [sic] internal and external senses, is dependant [sic] on it's [sic] environment as part of that thinking process.” Perhaps Sarah has been reading Andy Clark. He and this Sarah person at least seem to share some enthusiasm for the possibilities of describing our selves as inseparably enmeshed with environments and tools. Clark writes, beautifully, that “Minds like ours emerge from this colorful flux as surprisingly seamless wholes: adaptively potent mashups extruded from a dizzying motley of heterogeneous elements and processes” (219). Without all that mess, minds like ours (…if we can call them ours…) may not be possible. But for all we owe to the motley universe, Clark does allow us to own our minds and our agency. He describes these “surprisingly plastic minds” as belonging to “profoundly embodied agents: agents whose boundaries and components are forever negotiable and for whom body, sensing, thinking, and reasoning are all woven flexibly and repeatedly from the accommodating weave of situated, intentional action” (43). According to this model we are individuals, yet also systems and parts-of-systems, with flexible boundaries and all kinds of negotiable bits and pieces.

I wonder who/what has the upper hand in these negotiations. Where exactly does agency live in these woven, mashedup contraptions? Anywhere? I imagine it must be distributed, shared among world and self and materials, just as enmeshed as anything else. And if so, the question of control and responsibility—of agency—begins to feel worryingly and impossibly mystifying. This On Being episode that I have stuck in my head suggests, in its earnest, pop-sciencey way, that if one can just change one’s attitude, one can change one’s whole life (for the better, presumably). What power. What responsibility. Several comments in response to this theme argue with great concern about the ethics of asking, say, a lower-class/minority laborer to adjust their attitudes to their work, as if that should be empowering and liberating enough for any profoundly embodied agent. Is it really? Could it ever be?

Along these lines, Katherine Hayles points out early on in How We Became Posthuman the need to consider “how certain characteristics associated with the liberal subject, especially agency and choice, can be articulated within a posthuman context” (5). It doesn’t seem very easy. She later returns to the concern of subjectivity, recognizing that “As the liberal humanist subject is dismantled, many parties are contesting to determine what will count as (post)human in its wake. For most of the researchers discussed in this chapter [Narratives of Artificial Life, ch 9], becoming a posthuman means much more than having prosthetic devices grafted onto one’s body. It means envisioning humans as information-processing machines” (246). And this, of course, is only one sense of human-ness. We can—and at times already do—conceptualize ourselves as information. Hayles quotes William Gibson on the posthuman body as “data made flesh” (5). But might we reverse this? Will distinctions between information and identity blur as much as those between mind and body and world are blurring? Activist and tech designer Aral Balkan would argue and has argued in numerous talks that they have. In a manifesto-esque blogpost called “Indie Data,” (and elsewhere) Balkan writes about the tools and information and processes that are our digital selves—informational yous and mes—digital selves caught up in a market where human rights don’t necessarily apply, where corporations ask us to trade all our digital fingerprints for free access to technology. Balkan begs his audience to pay attention to the ways we participate in that conversion of self into data, and he hopes “to create, support, and popularise products that empower you to own your digital self; your data, tools, and derived intelligence.” Such ownership is not given. It too must be negotiated. Clamored for and defended and somehow brought into sustainable possibility.

Our texts so far in this class have been prodding us to draw fewer dividing lines and to start recognizing the ways in which every thing is part of a lot of other things. Whether it’s Heidegger’s Being and presencing, or Hayle’s enacted/embodied/empatterned systems and information-processings, or Clark’s EXTENDED models of mind, all these words urge more careful thinking, more open awareness, more inclusive considerations of a good future for humans and non-humans and everywhere they overlap. I’m not sure exactly how much control we have over using our present presencing to carve out space or language where the future will best future for the most people, places, and things, but I hope we have a little bit. Whether we do or don’t, we should keep talking about it and writing about it with words that are just words and words that are more than just words. Whether we do or don’t, we should try not to mess it up, if we can.

Scholarly References
Clark, Supersizing the Brain: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension
Ferrando, "Is the post-human a post-woman?"
Hayles, How we Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics

 

Postscript:
I have a new academic idol of sorts. Patricia Roberts-Miller blogs about key principles of argument and rhetoric and how those intersect with politics and demagoguery and it's all gloriously insightful stuff. I might blog more about her work later on, someday

birthday weekend, or an excuse for photographs

today, at least according to his paperwork, is Hamilton's birthday.

there are a bunch of August birthdays in my family. my paternal grandma (the one who first taught me to knit) will turn 81 today, I think. my genius brother's birthday is in another week or so. and my sweet husband's is at the end of the month. so much to celebrate.

this is one of the very first photographs I took of the puppy, when we first brought him home in mid-January. he was skinny and timid.

now he is about ten pounds bigger and only very rarely timid. he is a good companion to Wesley and most of the time to us.

Wesley's birthday is sometime in April and I never have been told the precise day. maybe it should be April 1, for symmetry. next April, he'll be a lucky thirteen years old.

even though birthdays are just regular days and they don't really need all the pressure we put on them to be glittery and special, I ordered new nametags for both the pugs today. we've been meaning to acquire them anyway, for almost seven months now, so a birthday may as well be the prompt that gets it done. and hopefully they come in the mail soon, despite all the semi-horrifying corruption etc. that seems to be going on with the US Postal Service lately.

this last photo is Hamilton as of today, in one of his favourite spots under the chair I sit in to work. sometimes he's a perfect angel under there, quiet and content to chew on his toys. sometimes he is a hooligan who can't sit still and just wants to chew on everything but toys. but I guess we all have our angelic moments and our hooligan moments, sometimes quite close together. Hamilton is a good pug anyway.

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. }

typical wednesday

today, in no particular order, has included:

hiking. even though it is the hottest week of the year so far and even the energetic puppy got really worn out within an hour.

several episodes of Hell's Kitchen. we're on season 14 now I think, and I have plans to blog more about our summer of Gordon Ramsay sometime. 

some tea and biscuits (the chocolate covered ones of course).

reading. I'm on page 501 of Dune. it's getting intense. (and just now as I checked what page I was on I may have gotten biscuit crumbs all over the book. forgive me, everyone)

emails. the ATTW email list is abuzz with commentary and reactions to this fully unreasonable notice regarding international students. a student from spring is still trying frantically to finish her editing coursework and replace her Incomplete with a real grade. my new university has re-announced its intentions to teach face-to-face classes in the fall. my new colleagues are forwarding such things and offering all the advice and insight they can. five and a half weeks until fall semester.

Librivoxing. I have seven recorded sections of City of Din to edit and upload before summer is over. totally doable, I hope.

what else?

later, probably pasta and cheese. walking the pugs. prep for more roleplaying games (vampire, pathfinder, star wars). other games too? more reading. more writing. eventually, sleep.

summer is for being outside

they call this piece of geography The Granite Dells. from a distance, the rock formations look like orange mounded towers guarding the water, huddling together in confident solidarity.

we currently live less than three miles from this gorgeousness. every time we drive within view of it I gape at how striking and beautiful it is. how grateful and happy that view makes me.

on Wednesday we went wandering around some of the trails out there. there were lizards scurrying about, and we saw a few rabbits. also a disc golf course, but that's not as cool.

someday we'll find a canoe to borrow and spend a day out on Watson Lake, hopefully not getting sunburned.

someday we'll plan a weekend of camping somewhere out here in this beautiful desert, whenever the National Parks decide to open their campgrounds up again.

affection, safety, and a puppy

I learned just today that the German word halten can mean in English to hold or to stop.

this seems profound for some reason. the sentence in my Duolingo German lesson was "die Eltern halten ihr Babies (the parents are holding their babies)" and when my first instinct was to translate that verb as are stopping, I figured I should check the app's hints for it first. they did show both options, but the context seemed to call for are holding instead. depending on the age of one's baby, there aren't that many things you need to or can stop one from doing, really.

if I stop to think for a moment about the same range of meanings in all the history and senses of to hold in English, does that make the whole thing less profound?

the word's etymology is a long one. some snippets that resonate this afternoon:
"to contain; to grasp; to retain"
"to possess, control, rule; to detain, lock up"
"to foster, cherish, keep watch over"
"to keep back from action"

all this potent potential meaning curled up in to hold. and then there are all these phrasal verbs, too: hold back, hold up, hold out, hold off, hold against, beholden to...

to be held as a parent holds a young baby is to be safe. comfortable. cared for. right?

to be held is also to be restrained. controlled. and to be restrained isn't usually considered comfortable, though... right?

or is it?

maybe it is.

paradoxically.

in a "limits are possibilities" sort of way.

I don't remember when exactly this photo is from. September 2016 when we went to the National Zoo? probably. it's been sitting on hold in a blogpost draft for at least three years or so.

to hold also has a sense of continuation. to hold a note. to hold your position. to uphold a ruling. to have and to hold.

sometimes all of that isn't comfortable either. but sometimes it is.

I've been doing this year's 30 days of yoga. it's wonderful even when I don't think I have the time or energy for it-- alternating movement and holding, centering body and mind and breath so all is balanced. not always easy. but it is enough.

I am enough. now is enough. I hope.

in other news-- last week we added to our household a new puppy.

his name is Hamilton.

or, if you're feeling extra fancy, Hamilton Chidi Chewbacca Chesley Alonzo. he's already learned to come when called and to sit on command. Wesley's still warming up to his rambunctious, half-tamed puppy energy, but they're getting along pretty well so far.

what good pugs.

Thanksgiving retrospective

this week, we are baking and eating and family-ing in Chicagoland. Chicago itself, over to the east of here, has a famously wonderful city flag. the state of Illinois... not so much. its flag is okay, I suppose. it could definitely be uglier.


last Thanksgiving, we stayed down south in our current Louisiana home. its state flag is pretty distinctive, so it would probably win a flag contest against Illinois any day.

how would Louisiana's fare against Indiana? or Texas? (I never did look up Rhode Island's state flag when I spent Thanksgiving there in 2013. it's actually quite well-designed. possibly more beautiful even than the Texas flag.)

anyway.

family-ing in Chicagoland over the last six days has involved late nights playing Rocket League, grocery shopping with grandma, tons of reading (I finished The Subversive Copy Editor and In Watermelon Sugar in the last two days), and endless football games on the television. right this moment, it's the college variety: University of Utah Utes v. the University of Colorado something-or-others. (Buffaloes, the internet tells me.) 

I am more or less ignoring the football and poking at bits of work. budgeting work. emails. edits. to-do lists. the husband is napping on the couch next to me, murmuring nonsense in his sleep. the dogs are lounging (except when they're fussing mildly at each other). we'll eventually have one last dinner of leftovers, re-pack the suitcases, and get ready to drive home tomorrow.

there are two more weeks of the semester. so much to be thankful for. 

I am especially glad for time to rest, for the hospitality and coziness of family, for memories and togetherness, and for all the places (remembered and imagined and inbetween). 

this decade has had a lot of big, wondrous stuff in it. how much I've seen and learned and changed since ten years ago. you too, probably.

now how much more learning and growing and living can we fit into December?

witnesses, multiple

this blog has changed a whole bunch over its decade or so of existence. some of the changes are probably more obvious to some of you than to me.

if you have paid very close attention, you may know that I've referenced (twice!) the seed of an idea that once upon a time and eventually (today) would become this blogpost. back then, it was in draft form. and it stayed trapped like that in draft form for at least five years.

of course, now I've fiddled with the draft over and over again, for at least five years, and I cannot tell you what the original seed of the idea actually was.

five years ago I put the idea in a list of things I wanted to blog about: "something about Marc Chagall + 2 Corinthians 13:1" 

two years ago I listed it again, as something "about Chagall and repetition and shared-ness," alongside several other ideas, this time hinting that these might be ideas to give up on already.

whether or not I've given up on the idea remains to be seen. I'm writing this, but will any of what gets published in this blogpost match up with what I was thinking about in 2012?

my memory tells me that I may have been thinking about the remarkable sense of one day knowing nothing about an artist named Marc Chagall and the next day hearing seven different people mention the artist Marc Chagall. or it could be any artist. any name. any concept that's new and interesting. the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, it's called. while I didn't remember the term, I know I've learned it before. what I didn't know, and just now learned, is that the phenomenon got its name in 1994 from a West German terrorist group. interesting.

somewhere in between 2012 and 2016, I actually experienced some of Chagall's art. the images from that trip to the Chicago Art Institute are probably 40% of the reason this old draft of a blogpost has survived so long. 

the textual evidence that has accumulated here over the years tells me that past-amelia, at some point between then and now, was also thinking about ownership.

creative and intellectual property have long been scholarly and philosophical interests of mine. who owns things? when and how does the ownership of things make a difference? why?

Chagall has nothing in particular to do with these thoughts, I don't think. but he is an artist. this stained glass design is his work. nobody else's. his art exists in the world, and it belongs to him in some sense.

but also... it doesn't. Marc Chagall died a year and a half after I was born. his art belongs to his estate, perhaps. to art collectors. it is owned by other people. museums, galleries.
 

and even if Marc Chagall were still alive, the galleries and museums and collectors and other audiences would could still own--in some sense--this art.

there are many kinds of ownership, just as there are many kinds of authorship, performance, and other art-making-ship.

if not to share some of one's own art with someone else, why does anyone make art?
 
here are a few other pieces of art and history we saw in Chicago five years ago:

the Art Institute's ownership of the Chagall stained glass piece, and of every other piece of art in their grand space, has made a difference to my experience of Chagall and of life. which is nice. I like to think that art (and non-art too, probably) gathers more and more meaning when more people experience it. more witnesses, more part-owners, more connectedness. maybe.

and now, if the sudden evening downpour has paused, it is time to walk the pug, make dinner, and bake a cake.

sharing

as of two weeks and three days ago, this is our new place.

it is a very nice place, freshly painted with all the windows and light my plants and I could ask for. and it is where we are finding places to keep our things. old things and new things. some things that once were mine and some that were once his (and a few that were once other people's, too), most of the things don't really need those separate pronouns anymore.

the dog is ours. the furniture is ours. the dishes in the sink are ours. I have hung clocks on at least one wall in every room, and there are piles of books and notebooks on at least three different tables.

we still don't know where (or if?) to keep our bikes, there are shelves that don't have anything on them yet. but most of our things have settled in with us now. and we get to share this balcony and a bench swing here, for one more year of phd-ing.