the pen is mightier than

so I haven't blogged about our Texas writing group yet. we've met three times now, and our fourth get-together is scheduled for this friday evening. tomorrow!

Melanie and I talked about starting a writing group long ago in September, and after cautiously plotting the select few whom we would invite to join us, we held a very important what-kind-of-writing-group-do-we-want-this-to-be meeting.

much of the standard set-up from my Utah writing group (which I miss most dearly. Jen, Bekah, Mara... I hope you are carrying on tolerably despite my absence!) has carried over to this new one: monthly meetings, alternating submissions of 5 to 10 pages, rotating hostessing responsibilities. pretty basic. but there were new suggestions too-- what about snacks? and Shelley suggested including a short writing game at every meeting. in January we threw in a delightful dinner and a movie. it's been most fabulous, so far.

so we settled the logistics. and then we turned our minds toward picking a name. shall we model ourselves after some famous writing group? or pick a fantastical mascot of some kind?

hmm. we've got Amelia, Melanie, Rebecca, and Shelley. look at how conveniently those initials permutate into words. we couldn't decide on 'arms' or 'mars' or 'rams' or--okay, those are about the only real words we've got to work with--but instead of deciding which of those might most excellently embody our goals and ideals as a fledgling writing group, we in the end decided to use them all. I think it was Shelley (such great ideas that woman has, don't you think?) who created the thoroughly hilarious combination: Rams in Arms on Mars. (R.A.M. for short).

I know. it's probably not as thoroughly hilarious as I like to think. but honestly we did laugh very hard as we accepted the obvious fact that Rams in Arms on Mars was going to be our name.

and then of course we scheduled our first proper meeting, at which Mel and I presented the first ten pages of our stories. (yes, I'm still working on the aliengirl.)

and then of course, I threw together this ridiculous logo/mascot/whatever/thing:

don't be too astonished. I know it's awesome. but it isn't really that awesome.

last month, for our writing exercise, Rebecca (woah. I just realized, there was a Rebekah in my last writing group too. there must be a theme there. or good luck charm?) we talked about dream sequences in stories, what makes them work (or not), when they might be appropriate to use (or not), and then had us write a dream sequence. I used the characters from my aliengirl work-in-progress, and this is a small chunk of what I came up with in the six or so minutes we had to write:

‘You know where to look, green-hair girl?’ This time it was Fro speaking. His face looked normal but the rest of him seemed melted. ‘You lost him. You find him. You lost him....’

The city looped itself into the sandy wooden platform and the same wind blew through both the streets and the flat empty space. She saw the oil district shops and the defunct streetlamps. Instead of her own face on the posters it was her mother, her aunts, her sisters. Raylia and Ilia blinked at her, watching her walk past the oil district shops and the flat empty space and the streetlamps and alleyways, the sand-strewn platform and the oil district shops and the streetlamps, the alleyways, the oil district shops and the sand-strewn platform. Dad? Are you okay, Dad? Her telio was missing. her... antennae...

and I am in charge of our writing game this week. in preparation, I have made use of this digital curation of inspiration, and this simple site full of bizarre six-word stories. what will we all come up with on friday? hopefully something useful. whatever happens, it'll be an awesome meeting.

with mud or glue or persistence

have I mentioned our writing group? hmm... I guess I have, a bit.

we met last week after what seemed like a long, long time of not meeting, and this month it was my turn to submit pages for critiquing. I've been working on the alien-girl story for the last year or so, and it's been fun, and my fellow writers had lovely things to say about my description and my dialogue... but this month I found myself almost completely stuck (only slightly more stuck than usual). for a while now the others have been trying to figure out where I was going with my frayed-beyond-recognition bits of plot, and all I've been able to say to them has been, I have no idea.

and still I have no idea. nothing that could truly be called a clear, over-arching, or thematic idea anyway. my plot is still pretty ragged, made up of barely pasted-together chunks. but last week, after a few nights of scattered re-reading and sloppy revision, just as I was about to fall completely asleep, I had a split-second flickering of inspiration. some writers keep a pencil and a notepad next to their pillow at all times in case of such moments. I don't. despite having notebooks of every shape and color strewn about my bedroom and tins full of writing implements propped upon the windowsill and desk and makeshift nightstand, I confess I am not prepared to record ideas that come to me when I'm on the brink of unconsciousness. or ideas that come to me at any other inconvenient time, now that I think about it. I'm sure some people would love to point out how silly it is of me to trust myself to remember potentially perfect details about the stories I'm working on... but... well... yeah... so?

usually I just hope that somehow I will retain these sparkling ideas somewhere in my brain until the next time I sit down to write, or at least that I'll coincidentally re-think the same ideas at some more convenient moment. after all, if an idea isn't sticky enough to stay in my head, it must not have been that great, right?

in this case, I did remember the idea--though whether or not that means it's a great one I shouldn't speculate, I guess. at writing group the others seemed excited about it. we'll have to wait and see if inspires further narrative progress. I hope so.

I, pedagogue (spring semester, 2021)

back in the day, I thought I'd never want to teach. and then I realized that in some ways, everything everyone does can involve a layer of teaching somehow. even if it's a very subtle one.

even still, for these past seven years of wading deeper and deeper into teaching college writing classes of various kinds, the real practice of teaching (with all the planning and record-keeping and decision-making and performing and grading and authority-wielding it typically requires) has not often been my favorite part of academia. it's fine. but it's hard. and I never feel very good at it, so it simply can't be as naturally rewarding as all the other corners of academia where I feel far more skilled.

for better or for worse, my two full-time assistant professor jobs so far have been quite teachingcentric. twelve credit hours of teaching every semester, plus a few during summer semesters, until this year. dozens and dozens of students show up in August or January or June for whichever iteration of professional writing I'm teaching this time, working and sharing and hopefully learning, and then they disappear again.

this year, I have one course release for being brand new in town. it gives me a chance to get used to things a bit.

they also gave all the new faculty a copy of the book What the Best College Teachers Do, by Ken Bain. a few colleagues and I read through it together last fall semester and talked about ways to apply the findings in our own classrooms.

the book and our little faculty discussion group made me think much more intensely about my teaching than I've cared to thus far. it also gave me some concrete hope that maybe I can become better at this thing I don't feel very expert in at all. 

so. what am I trying to do a little better this spring? what have I begun to internalize from Bain's research?

possibly more things than I can articulate very well in a little blogpost. but here are a few:

> talk about your own learning journey with students. model or reenact the kinds of transformation you hope that they will undergo as a result of your class.

> trust students and treat them like whole humans with a million shifting priorities, just like you. this is something I already knew and practice decently, I think. but I took particular comfort in it this past year. my course is a small droplet in the ocean of everything these students are trying to learn and become. if my teaching isn't perfect, they probably won't notice or remember for too long.

> ask students big, meaningful, authentic questions--the kinds of questions that professionals in your field will ask and try to answer. (this is particularly tricky in writing because writing, for most people, in most important contexts, isn't very often about itself. its actual subject is the everything else that we write and communicate about.)

I think I do pretty well being authentic and open and compassionate as a teacher. but I have been guilty in the past of assuming students could never be all that interested in the big questions that I study. we don't have time for that, do we? especially at a fancy aeronautical university where nobody is an English major and everyone mainly wants to design or build or test or fly airplanes and other such contraptions-- how could any of those students care about a communications course?

but if Bain is to be believed, the enthusiasm of a teacher combined with the sparks of a big, meaningful question can draw students in, motivate them a little, even if they didn't think they'd care very much about a communications course. 

and I can be good at questions, surely. 

especially big ones! like: how do you know what anyone means? how do you know what anyone else thinks you mean? how people really ever understand each other enough to make good things happen in the world? and what does it mean to read? to write? or to do those things effectively?

the trick now becomes figuring out how much time to spend getting philosophical about definitions inbetween all the more "practical" work of practicing reading and writing and revising and all that. I still think students learn most from doing things, more than they can from reading about things or discussing them or whatnot.

but anyway, I added this little linguistics video to my list of assigned readings. I opened the first day of class reading from Celeste Headlee's book We Need to Talk, which recounts the tragedy of an ineffective conversation in an airplane cockpit. in technical writing we spent the first day exploring informal crowdsourced technical descriptions on Reddit.

and when I listened to this recent episode of So Many Damn Books with George Saunders I felt more affinity for Saunders's love of teaching writing than perhaps I might once have felt. his advice is to remember that you're never just teaching 20-somethings who barely know what to do with their adulthood when you meet them-- you're also teaching the 40-something-year-olds that they'll become. I like that. (not all college students are 20-somethings, but the concept holds. we are all humans-in-progress.)

maybe I'll go back and give the Pedagogue podcast another chance, too, now that I feel more hopeful and less grumbly about this whole teaching business.

reflections on teaching online

the online summer class I've been teaching ended last Friday, when all the last final projects got turned in. as of five seconds ago, all the grades are tallied and posted and submitted. hurrah! two weeks til fall classes start...

did any sort of learning happen over those 8 weeks of summer term? on my end, definitely yes. I hadn't taught online before. during the spring and beginning of the summer I attended conference panels galore about online writing instruction. my wonderful mentor Kelli Cargile Cook spoke about the best practices she's developed and studied over her career. friend David Grover from Texas Tech presented on his dissertation research--all about how underprepared graduate students are when they get the chance to teach writing online. at Computers & Writing, I met the brilliant and generous people behind the OWI community website. so many awesome resources and inspirations. it was terrifying, but encouraging.

I was arguably more prepared (on paper, anyhow) for this course than for anything else I've ever taught in my life. most other things I've ever taught involved sticky notes with tentative 6-point outlines and thoughts, all scribbled down mere hours before the lesson. sticky notes don't work for online classes, though. instead, there were dozens of PDFs, a screencast video introduction, a website thing, bits of Blackboard fiddling, many many emails, and many Slack messages.

the slick, fancy Slack messaging app suggested itself as an especially appropriate online teaching tool for professional writing. I'd been hearing about the app on all the podcast advertisements, and I figured my bundle of Business Writing students could benefit from some exposure to it. with help from friend Michael, I poked around and tested things out and got everything set up just how I needed it for the various sections and projects of the class. hosting the whole class within Slack was disorienting for students at first, but most of them caught on quickly and enjoyed the interface. we didn't have quite as much fun as this Zach Whalen fellow seemed to have with his students on Slack, but ah well.

as the course got busier and summer ticked itself relentlessly into the past, I found myself wishing I could be sure my students were reading the announcements I made and the updates I posted. is there such a tracking device? my search just now brought me to this detailed list of Slack shortcuts and tips. there is a way to see who has logged in to Slack-- I'll have to explore that option next semester. it may or may not tell me who has read which channels. this piece might be something to share with students as they set up their Slack accounts for my class--hopefully they'd find it helpful. I need to remember the "reminder" function and the "pin file" function, for important information that students might lose track of too easily. the user-name policy also sounds pretty useful-- one way to maintain a sense of professionalism.

benefits a face-to-face class include students seeing each other and talking to each other a lot more, instead of merely performing for me and my syllabus of requirements. I'm not sure how well my students got to know each other. I did create an "off-topic" channel and let students have it to themselves (I checked now that class is over to find 4 lonely little posts there). our Slack space stayed very to-the-point and business-oriented, a place where work got submitted and readings got "discussed" within minimum wordcounts and with little dialogue. next semester, I'll have to incentivize more student-to-student communication and discussion. this boils down to an odd form of pandering bribery and forced-ness, which my soul squirms and recoils about just a little. I like to think that as an undergraduate student I would have been utterly happy to talk to my fellow students of my own accord (very not true). who needs incentives for that? but that's my vaguely-more-enlightened and far-less-shy gradstudent self talking.

my course was 99% asynchronous, and I so wished that I could have all 17 of my students in one channel at the same time. more focused, immediate discussion could have been way more useful. all the best online courses I've ever taken have included a synchronous Skype or chat-room element. but the way online courses are marketed in this program means students sign up expecting to work at their own paces and not expecting to show up to be counted at any particular time. because of that, I didn't feel like I could design a course with much, if any, synchronous discussion time in it at all. this summer, I asked students to sign up for one-on-one video conferences, so at least there'd be a sliver of synchronous discussion. this worked pretty well. for next semester, I may consider assigning small-group conference meetings, perhaps to discuss peer review work more directly. the institutional constraint here is a challenge to work around. perhaps it deserves to be brought up with my supervisors and program directors. we'll see.

this weekend I talked with a few potential community partners about linking my fall Business Writing assignments to their local, real-world business contexts and needs. it's lovely to know people who run small, local businesses in this lovely college town. wish me luck getting myself organized to incorporate some of those ideas for the next batch of scattered, disembodied online students.

me and mine

several weeks ago I had my students read and respond to these two online pieces: Stop Worrying and Learn to Love Cultural Appropriation by (which also has a part two) and But Why Can't I Wear a Hipster Headdress?

each puts up a different perspective on how the average consumer might consider and deal with instances where culture seems not to belong to the people who are making use of it. where it seems like these colorful, textural, symbolic wrappers we wrap our identities in get stolen. or at least thoughtlessly borrowed. to be bought and sold.

the boundaries between cultures and subcultures and groups are complicated. the beginning to a recently reposted episode of This American Life includes an interview with Jared Diamond (who incidentally is the author of a short essay my Texas Tech students had the option of writing about a whole year and a half ago) on the subject of groups and the costs of inclusion. and exclusion. no man is an island and all, so this stuff is important. belonging and contributing are both important.

the value of these things isn't exactly quantifiable. it's hard to measure all the tradeoffs and sacrifices and perks that get thrown around in any arrangement of human beings (or any living organism, come to that). these things don't have price tags, usually.

this fashion piece does. so do memberships to things and applications for citizenship.

membership and belonging don't seem quite the same though. and monetary costs are not the only kind. does wearing a fancy headdress make you a member of a certain group? or do a certain lifestyle and certain shopping habits even moreso? paperwork and legal distinctions might hold lots of weight, but can those things reflect the essence or core of any nationality?

belonging could be a matter of action rather than of paperwork or decree. yeah? but then I want to ask whether acting and being are the same. impostors and decoys and spies say of course not. Jared Diamond's bit explains that well enough.

so my next idea is that belonging, being included, is a relationship. nobody can belong anywhere without both action on their part plus a reaction of some sort on the part of the group. this of course seems pretty fundamental--a group defines itself through such relationships. members of a group have to be related somehow, even if only spatially or by the colors of their shirts. but I don't only mean that kind of relationship. we're all related some way or another through such abstractions. that's too easy.

the groups that seem to matter more are groups that make us negotiate our way into them. they ask things of us. they have conditions.

in a few hours, I'm going to join the group of people (how many are there, I wonder?) who are currently hanging out in the state of Utah. when I get there I'll sleep for a bit before being stolen away for a star-gazing camping trip down in the canyony, National-Park-ridden southern bits of the state. I have plenty of more thoughts to spin out about groups and requirements and ownership, but the conditions of my getting to Utah include getting in line to board an airplane just about now. we'll continue this blogpost somehow later on...

the penultimate monday

In the next week I must finish:

• professional editing project for Dr. Hailey and Prof. Parisi - this is a group project, due 12/12. we still need to receive a full second draft back from Dr. Hailey and go through it again to edit.
  
• book cover design project for Dr. Shook - this is also a group project, due 12/12. this morning in class our group basically finished this one, all it needs is a bit of font tweaking and to be printed.
• modern rhetorical theory essay for Dr. Grant-Davie - i'm writing on dissociations of the bible through translation for the purpose of fitting different rhetorical situations and catering to different audiences. the draft i have so far is much too short; it needs lots of development.
• proposal, presentation, and styleguide for Dr. Cargile-Cook, Dr. Smitten, and the English department - this is one of the most extensive and important group projects I have ever worked on in my life, due to Dr. Cargile-Cook for perusal by noon 12/12. upon me hangs a lot of responsibility because I am the one the group chose to edit the entire proposal. we will present it on tuesday 12/13 to the department. there are three teams in the class competing to be chosen for the official design. may the best team win.
• narrative adaptation of the screenplay Like Clockwork for Mr. Anthony Maitz and his investors - this is not academic work but i do consider it somewhat professional, even if Tony is nothing more than an old high school friend. it's going to be fun to work with him now that we're both a bit more mature.

I also have three final exams to study(ish) for, my own portfolio to flesh out, isotope to work on, the alumni site to start building, people to call, cards to give out, and travelling to arrange.

you shall not need to butter your plates

for 5340 (yes, all I'm ever going to blog about for the rest of the year is grad school, just in case you were curious), I've chosen to research a seventeenth-century cookbook called The Queen-like Closet, by a woman many scholars cite as the first to have made a living writing books. neat, eh?

I was telling friend Chris the other day that this means my food-blogger-wannabe status is about to be intensified. I bet if they'd had blogs in 1670, Hannah Woolley (or Wolley, if you like that spelling better) would have been great at blogging. can you just envision the titles to her posts? the full title of the cookbook I'm studying is: The Queen-like Closet or Rich Cabinet Stored With All Manner Of Rare Receipts For Preserving, Candying And Cookery. Very Pleasant And Beneficial To All Ingenious Persons Of The Female Sex. woah.

here is her recipe for sugar cakes, as copied from the second edition of The Queen-like Closet, as transcribed by the people of Project Gutenberg. if you have a pound of sugar that needs something done with, I dare you to try it.

To make Sugar Cakes.

Take a pound of fine Sugar beaten and searced, with four Ounces of the finest Flower, put to it one pound of Butter well washed with Rose-water, and work them well together, then take the Yolks of four Eggs, and beat them with four Spoonfuls of Rosewater, in which hath been steeped two or three days before Nutmeg and Cinamon, then put thereto so much Cream as will make it knead to a stiff Paste, rowl it into thin Cakes, and prick them, and lay them on Plates, and bake them; you shall not need to butter your Plates, for they will slip off of themselves, when they are cold.

see? doesn't that read just like a recipe some enterprising young food blogger would post--including the wacky spellings? [searced--in case you are too lazy to put up with google thinking you mean "searched" when all you need is a seventeen-century definition of a word you've never heard of--means sifted.] it's so interesting to think about the evolution of recipe formats, and how there are so many different ways to write them. some people like the story-like instructions. some people like step-by-step details. and you are always free to write them however you want, as long as they make enough sense to be followed. hm.

alright. in an effort to make time for blogging this month, I'm going to include a short list of blogposts to come. any requests for which ought to come very next?

-things I've learned from working at the University Press.
-more photos of tech campus and environs
-additional food-blogger-wannabe nonsense (this time featuring bologna)
-the debut of writing group: texas edition

wandering

"...our brains are very active when we daydream – much more active than when we focus..." -Professor Kalina Christoff

I borrowed this quote from a blog about distractivity. I'm not going to say much about it. all I'm going to do is place it next to another quote, from this fellow about ommwriter:

"My favorite feature of OmmWriter is the soundtrack. .... The keyboard sounds have variation and generally don’t annoy. My favorite is #7, which I call: 'My old school typewriter and I sitting at the bottom of a well'. OmmWriter leads with a simple idea: creativity has a soundtrack." 

I used ommwriter to compose the latest sections of the novel I'm working on for our writing group, which meets next Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. in our front room. ommwriter's soundtrack, even without the recommended pair of headphones, does indeed lend one's brain a perfect audioscape for wandering around in.

while I'm quoting things, here--have a snippet of said novel:

They played. They jazzed. Kia soon realized that her ancient cowboy trinket clashed hugely with the techno-soul of Bruce's digital sax, so she stopped and joined Soak on the opposite curb. He had his telio out, recording. Kia watched, took out her own system and did some recording of her own: Celia with green hair--Celia with green hair jazzing on a dirty dead-end street corner with a strange earth boy, no less--deserved to be posted in at least someone's digital scrapbook.

family pieces

last month, there was a funeral.

it was the first of my grandparents' funerals that I've been able to actually attend.

I worried for a minute about the cost, the time, how I'd find a substitute for my undergraduates. and after that I worried a little about the risks of traveling by air during what has now become a rather more alarming global pandemic.

but being there last month felt more and more important than any of those worries. I'm glad they didn't stop me.

in the week leading up to this family gathering, my aunts and uncles asked us to write down some of our memories. mine are flickery at first, like an old-school slide projector. the more recent ones are smoother.

my very earliest memories of Grandma and her home and that whole side of the family are of the basement with seemingly endless bedrooms. every corner of that basement was made up to welcome a whole bundle of little grandkids. there was room for all of us, it seemed like. I remember so many bookshelves and books. under the stairs, along the hallways-- books everywhere. on my own bookshelves now I have a book that I must have "borrowed" from Grandma at some point. The Best Known Works of William Shakespeare--pages of Elizabethan drama in double columned layout, in a tattery black cover. I devoured most those plays as a teenager. how grateful and lucky we were to have grandparents that lived right down the street from the Utah Shakespeare Festival.

I remember tagging along with Grandma to a summer writing group on the SUU campus at some point between college semesters. I was trying to write some good short stories. Grandma worked on poems and song lyrics and things. it felt like such an honor to be included in that.

we talked about family history, too. before I went off to study abroad in England in 2003, Grandma gave me a folder of family trees and other history, so I would know what names to look for if I had a chance to explore the areas our family came from. even though I never did make it to any cemeteries or archives or genealogy centers in Kent, I loved having those stories and names anyway-- hints at memories and lives that predate me and everyone I know.

last summer Jeremiah and I were able to visit and spend two or three days with Grandma, playing cards just like always, doing puzzles, singing a few songs, sitting out on the porch in the mornings and late afternoons. she was as welcoming and lovely and serene as ever, though the house was so much quieter and calmer than it was when we are all little grandkids. I'm going to miss those visits. the house.

the idea of Grandma not being there at all anymore-- all her things boxed up to be given away, all the space so empty and different-- it's still a little unreal.

 { 1928–2020 }
 
just a few months ago, I wrote Grandma a postcard from Prescott, Arizona. I was out there for a job interview (for a job I later was offered, and accepted). I hope it put a smile on her face when it arrived.

I wish I'd called to share the news about the job-- it meant we'd be moving 16 hours closer! we could've reveled in that prospect, enjoyed the happy thought of seeing her more often. but in between the job offer in mid-February and my official acceptance at the end of the month, she passed on.

as empty as her absence leaves us, there's still plenty of family in sunny southern Utah. it'll still only be a six hour drive from where we're moving this summer. there will still be reunions. and family will always include Grandma.

longingly and shortingly

months and months back, I created this thing. for a class. it sprouted uncontrollably out of a fledgeling preoccupation with a certain someone and his increasingly important-seeming emails. I was quite proud of it when it was finished, and naturally I showed it off to nearly everyone I know.

coincidentally, around this very same time, I stumbled across the announcement for an information design contest. hm, I said to myself. I just designed a bunch of information. visualized a set of data, even. I could submit this. and so, with permission from the fellow whose emails I spent so much time word-counting last March and April, and a donation from my dear, admiring writing group in hand to cover the entry fee, I sent my little timeline chart in for assessment by the official Information is Beautiful panel of 7 judges.

then I finished the semester, survived finals, went to Europe, came home, got busy with class and work and summer, and near the middle of July remembered that the Information is Beautiful people would be posting their longlist of finalists any day now. so I checked. and kept checking. and waited.

just last week, mere days ago, they finally posted it.

I scrolled through the tall thumbnails without a crazy amount of hope. they'd had a whole thousand entries after all, and I knew mine was sure to be relatively simple. nicely arranged, but definitely not overly impressive. and compiled from irrelevant personal details nobody would ever really care much about.

but my timeline of emails was there in the data visualization section among these 110 other awesome specimens of visual information design. go check them out. be fascinated.

the shortlist will be up in a week or so (unless it isn't. the longlist took a few weeks more than originally predicted, so I'm not exactly holding my breath). cross your fingers for me, eh?

painstaking needlework and such

none of the following were on my list of things-to-blog-about last week.

does that matter?

the list is pretty amorphous, and to it I have recently added some random works-in-progress, which probably don't deserve all this attention quite yet.

this embroidery/hand-sewing project has been and will be unfinished for a while. I've been working on it intermittently for months and months. but I'll let you know if it ever gets done.

and here is a hint at a project I haven't even started working on properly. but I'll write more about it... sometime. in the meantime, be curious.

this one, a very fuzzy and wonderful scarf (yeah, I know it's summer. so what?), I am right in the middle of. I began the thing with borrowed crochet hook, and I have yet to locate my own hook with which to continue. isn't that beautiful yarn? thank you, littlest sister, for not wanting it, so I could have it.

I haven't told you all about this, have I? it's... I don't even know yet. it doesn't count as literal needlework, but it is definitely painstaking. I've been revising The Plaid Identity for writing group lately. for some reason. it's a fun story, but it needs so, so much attention. the blogs I keep setting up for the monstrous thing haven't really helped motivate me to work on it much... but for now, there is the beginning of yet another spin-off (remember this little pirate one?). maybe it will amuse someone while I work on all my random unfinished projects.

PS: happy first of June.

reading theatre

last evening I had the most delightful pleasure of being accompanied to the theatre. it was the opening night of Molière's Les Femmes savantes--or in English, The Learned Women or The Learned Ladies. Molière wrote it in 1672. the version our theatre & dance department is putting on this weekend was translated from the French by its director, Jonathan Marks, and I loved it very much. it was hilarious and thought-provoking, which always makes for wonderful entertainment (here, just in case, is a pre-review sort of article about it). I wish I had more time to sit and blog about all its themes--the dichotomy of body and mind, the merits of philosophy over well-cooked food, the roles of women at home or in love, and what kinds of love are most worthy.

but I do not have time to blog about any of that. nor about my pinterest research project, our book history videos, writing group, my current job or the totally different one I will have once summer has come and gone, or even about the tortuous but titillating countdown til the end of the semester I have running in one corner of my sleep-deprived brain. just eighteen days until this trip to Europe... just eighteen days...

as consolation for all this useless I-have-no-time-to-blog fluff, here is the script of this litle Molière play. no, it isn't the same translation, disappointingly. let us all hope that someday Mr. Marks publishes his. I would like that, even though reading a play can never match being there to see one performed. this one is a much older translation (1877) by Charles Wall, with interesting interspersed footnotes and comments. Mr. Wall, incidentally, also translated Molière's The Imaginary Invalid, which features a character by the name of Toinette. I've heard the name in an adaptation but never knew how it was spelled. how interesting. French pronunciation is so wacky.

self-proclaimed

what's next? I have a shuffling list of Things To Do as deep and insubstantial as a cloud. 1. fix the flat tire on that borrowed bike. 2. review Bekah's and Jen's pages for our writing group next week. 3. don't forget to study for the GRE...

and I've been invited to give a presentation or the Intermountain Chapter of the Society for Technical Communication all about online portfolios, how they contribute to one's online "presence," and how having one can add so much to your professional life. this is quite an interesting development, seeing as how my own online portfolio is crumbly and cobwebbed, not having been updated for practically two and a half years now. I'm working on it. (in other words, it's scribbled down on that list of Things To Do. which instead of looking anything like an actual list, moreso resembles a deck of cards--or perhaps two decks?--strewn all over the carpet. I'm quite sure some of them have gotten irretrievably lost under the sofa.)
anyway, in preparation for this event, which will take place the morning November 14th, up at Weber State (here. in that very room is where I will be, hoping that whatever I have to say will make a small difference, and hoping I can talk loud enough for everyone to hear me), I'm going to ask my fairly small readership what they think. a small survey, if you will. and even if you don't think I'm talking to you, I would be happy to have at least some kind of response from everyone who reads this.

- what counts as part of one's online presence and what doesn't?
- what examples have you seen of individuals or groups who have a strong online presence?
- what elements of those people's or groups' portfolios or websites make the most difference in how we see, appreciate, or interact with them?
- what would you say about your own online presence?
- how does your own facebook/blog/twitter/website/portfolio make a difference for you, your business, or whatever it is you do?
- what are you able to accomplish as a result of investing in these various electronic platforms?
- is it worth it? are there any drawbacks?

a few people I've come across who have absolutely gorgeous online portfolios: Meagan Fisher, Kevin Cornell, and Cameron Moll. of course, the concept of a strong online presence is up for interpretation here. there are so many solidly separate spheres of existence in this giant internet place. so people I think are completely famous may be people you've never heard of. naturally, my list of people with gorgeous portfolios leans heavily toward the design side of technical communication. I'll have to start looking for some outstanding examples from the plainer, black-and-white side of the spectrum.

thanks in advance for all your thoughtful answers. feel free to leave a response in the comments here, or email me. facebook me. whatever you like, eh?

revise or remix

so for 5371 (Foundations of Tech Comm) and 5387 (Publications Management), I get to write book reviews.

for some reason, the art of the review seems to be an extremely crucial thing to learn as a graduate student. we had to present a review for 5340 (Bibliography) also, though that was a group project, and not written. Dr. Hawkins gave us 7 minutes to talk about an online edition of our choice. my group did the Rossetti Archive.

that was fun. and our presentation went quite well. 7 minutes, 21 seconds. and I even got to talk a bit about the geeky web-design stuff I love so much. cross-browser compatibility, XHTML, javascript. mm. the cool moment was showing this screenshot to a bunch of literature grad students.

yes, I am trying hard to reinforce the idea they've all got about the crazy tech comm people. it's fun.

my other two classes are not lit. classes. they are full of the technical. and I've got six weeks or so--amongst all my other projects and research and essaying--to read and review the following two books.

for Kelli, the 5th edition of Technical Editing, by Carolyn Rude and Angela Eaton. we've read a few articles by Carolyn Rude already, and so much that she says impresses me. Dr. Eaton works here at Texas Tech, which is just a neat connection.

also, I love editing. I think this book will be great. many thanks go to the editors of Communicator, an ISTC journal who sent me this, my very own copy.

for Dr. Still, I've got this. it's called Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age, by Kenneth Goldsmith. he teaches a class all about this at the University of Pennsylvania, apparently. sounds quite fascinating.

this one, I had to request from the far away land of Arizona. U of A was kind enough to lend me this copy all the way til the end of the semester. so nice of them. I've just read the introduction so far. the rest of it, I can already tell, is going to be extremely interesting. (note to self: take a few notes on this stuff for the alien-girl story.)

other news from my little planet of grad school:
-got an A on my 5371 midterm. go me.
-met with Dr. Snead today to talk about the mystery of Hannah Woolley. need to start drafting...
-spent an hour in the Letterpress Lab cleaning out old rusted trays and weighing drawers full of type. so awesome.
-finished editing that index about wine thismorning. learned a lot about grapes. fun fun.

and now, for a semi-irrelevant postscript:
this article and this comic were both published today, the 2nd of November. that is called timeliness. or something. (is tongue-awareness even a thing? really?)

his real last name was Deutschendorf

the thing about scrounging through boxes in the basement is you often come across a lot of junk. why did I want to keep this? why have I let all these papers and bits pile up in here?

my parents' collection of records has been sitting on a low shelf in our spare room. this week as we were moving things around, we set them aside with similar questions. our old record player, which didn't work anyway, was given away long ago. should we bother keeping these ancient relics?
today I went through them, looking for something. something just as mysterious as the scraps of writing I've been finding in my boxes, perhaps. but there are no fabulous, colorful albums of any long-lost musical group. there's not any new hints at my parents' former lives as teenagers and college students. for all I could tell, they were the same back then. it's only the fashion that's changed.

most of the large square covers proclaimed the contents to be recordings of my mum's high school and university band concerts. there was a bit of classical stuff, a bit of religious music, one Carpenter's album and one John Denver.

if I had to choose two musicians to represent my mother and my father and all I know about their sense of style, I could look no further than Karen Carpenter and John Denver. the voices of these two artists will be forever familiar to me. with the memory of my mother singing along mixed in.

oddly enough, I have learned to appreciate John Denver and do enjoy some of his music, but I have yet to acquire a liking of anything the Carpenters sang. perhaps that's because Karen Carpenter died the February before I was born, while John Denver was around for fifteen years more. perhaps I simply take after my dad here. I don't really know.

anyway, though this stack of old records may or may not be junk, I imagine we'll keep them lying around. I'm okay with that. so what if we can't play them? so what if they just sit there? they will be a tribute to things my parents were and are and did and liked. a useless sort of tribute, I suppose, but a tribute nonetheless. maybe some day we'll buy another record player.

photo borrowed off flickr. cheers

twentythree: idiomanimals

for the past fifteen Thursdays, I've been assigned to lead a one-hour conversation group for the Writing Lab. it's great fun.

this week's theme was "idioms and slang," so we talked about all the odd, poetical, metaphorical, idomatic phrases that we use in English. a million of them involve animals. to count chickens before they hatch. to let sleeping dogs lie. to open a can of worms. to rain cats and dogs, or let the cat out of the bag. we also noticed a bunch of cloud-themed idioms. on cloud nine. head in the clouds. clouds with silver linings.

I also asked my conversationists about idioms from their own languages. it took them a few minutes to think of some, but I learned three that tickled my brain most delightfully. I feel so grateful to have stumbled into a place where I got to have them explained to me. I wish I could spell them in Chinese or Korean, but these less-than-exact translations will just have to do. they are all animal-related, too. if a dragon counts as an animal, and why wouldn't it?

"a dog catching a mouse" (Chinese)
someone who encroaches on another person's responsibilities, or oversteps their bounds somehow by trying to do more than their own job entails. it's as if the dog doesn't think the cat is doing it right, so he has to but in.

"drawing feet on your picture of a snake" (Chinese)
when you think you can add just a little bit more or keep working a little bit longer on a project, but the extra work you put in ends up ruining the whole thing.

"to paint the dragon's eye" (Korean)
this one is sort of the opposite of the snake-with-feet idiom--it means putting the perfect finishing touch on something. traditionally, the eye of the dragon is painted very last.

I love all of these concepts. aren't they awesome? if you hear me trying to use them in conversation, please play along.

filtering memories into the future

a little more than a year ago, I lived two floors down from four rather amazing boys. talented. gracious. friendly.

a little more than a year ago, I interviewed them, dreamed up a glamorous alternate reality for them, and wrote an article about their not-so authentic musical group, Stridency Deletion, for one of my final assignments in Dr. Hailey's class. it was a piece of writing I am particularly proud of. I recently revised the thing and made sure to spell everyone's name right in it. I promised the drummer I'd print him a copy of the thing all laid out pretty with photographs... but I never did. i'll make up for that someday.

a little more than a year ago, these four boys and several of their neighboring friends congregated in their third-floor apartment--number 6. nearly every musical instrument you could ask for was brought. a cello. drum kit. three or four guitars, a violin, accordion, recorder, and a penny whistle.

and Richard just happened to have a small recording device.

on the CD I am lucky enough to have a copy of, the sound quality is not so perfect. it's not easy to distinguish which instruments are playing all the time. the rhythms sometimes blend and sometimes clash. it's just a jam session.

there are seven tracks, a few repeat versions of the same song.

{ more pictures, courtesy ms. mitchell }

my favourite part about listening to this haphazard, imperfect recording are the moments when the music falls apart and the boys talk. 'I can't get that key,' the violinist complains. 'Wait, play that part again,' the guy on the bass guitar asks, trying to figure out the chord progression. I remember all those voices. I remember being in that room on similar occasions, drinking in the wild, powerful music as each musician threw it out. Beatles' songs. hymns. random noise.

a little more than a year ago. and so much has happened since then.

I think I see where I'm going. but I can't really know what I might have missed, what I might miss by taking the path I'm taking versus another completely different one. I just hope.

I hope that CD is still around when I get back.

fall semester, 2024

the word semester shows up in at least 130 of my past blogposts, which is a little more than 10% of all the posts I've thus far posted. considering that this little blog has always been roughly half focused on various academic and intellectual pursuits, this makes plenty of sense. semesters are like seasons.

the word itself is not even 200 years old, the etymology dictionary tells me: "...semenstris 'of six months, lasting six months, half-yearly, semi-annual,' from assimilated form of sex 'six' (see six) + mensis "month" (see moon (n.)). The word, and the idea, were picked up in the U.S., where the German higher education system served as a model."

apparently the Latin-y adjective forms semestral and semestrial are a few centuries older. interesting. 

anyway, I'm glad our semesters are not a full six months long these days. four months is plenty. 

and for these upcoming four months, I'm teaching three batches of students, including a few repeats from past semesters. the longer I hang out at this institution, the more that will keep happening I suppose.

COM 221: Technical Report Writing
counting the two sections I have this semester, I've taught practically a million versions of this course (okay, 15 total sections. that is still a lot). it's becoming a bit of a struggle to not get completely burnt out and bored of it, but I'm doing my best to keep it interesting for me. we're only in week 3, so I'm still getting to know the vibe of the students. we'll have some fun together I hope though.

HU 356: Audio Production & Podcasting
this one is going to be interesting no matter what-- it's a brand new class, only recently outlined and designed and proposed by me for our catch-all Humanities & Communication department. I am pretty excited to see how this goes. so far I'm having students practice various little audio recording tasks, then we'll level up to remixing all those clips into some fun story-arc, before finally moving on to pitching and workshoping individual podcast projects. the students all have great ideas so far. (wish me luck persuading the one who simply wants to copy Mr. Rogan's insufferably long-winded (at least it is to me) format into doing something at least slightly more inventive.)

what else? I signed up for a weaving class next month. some family is visiting next week. we have some more camping planned for during fall break. we're having a brand new screen door installed sometime soon. and our Monday evening D&D group is on the brink of moving up to level 8. in November, our crazy puppy will turn 1 year old.

at some point we should work on the mish-mash garden projects and other household tasks that need doing. and eventually figure out our holiday plans. 

or maybe we let go of shoulds for a while and enjoy the almost-autum while it's here.

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.

bookshelf feminism and other thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

so there is hope.

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

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