summer in progress

if only I had known about Audio Flux when the semester began, it would've been great to challenge students to meet the circuit 7 criteria for part of our class. ah well.

my students did some great work anyway. here are a couple of their final projects: 

Social Upkeep 

Everything Breaks (episode 1 and episode 2) 

I hear that circuit 8 of Audio Flux is coming soon, at least, so maybe I can work it into something for English Composition (our first-year writing class) this fall. in my one 10.35am section I want to focus on listening and understanding and responding thoughtfully. I am not yet sure how, exactly, but hopefully the students will be open to it and cooperative with each other. part of me is skeptical about building real community within the deeply trenched constraints and stretched-out shallowness of classrooms. Dead Poets Societies are not and never have been real, right? but more of me is gonna try anyway. it is worth trying, no matter how slowly and incompletely each little classroom community seems to develop. 

my very intermittent course prep thoughts are mixed in among many, many other plans and ideas and projects and to-do lists. that is what summer is, usually-- a big mishmash of ambition and dreaming and doing stuff and lounging about.

I finished reading (and lazily annotating) John Durham Peters' The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media some several ages ago now. I keep meaning to send my marginalia-ed copy to friend Chris sometime. we'll see if I get around to it.

this week, I'm getting around to posting all the neat quotes and concepts from all the dogeared pages. they are a little grandiose and navel-gazey at times, but maybe that is okay given that all our navels are made out of the same dusty star crumbs anyway. 

as I compile and remix these quotes a little bit here, I'm thinking a lot about place. it's been 6 full years and a bit since we moved to Arizona. a new record for longest-time-in-one-area. and while I never really wanted to settle down much there is something nice about being known and being somewhat settled. 

still, we'll see how much longer we last in this scrubby desert land. I can only be in one place at once, physically. and there are so many places! media can bridge them somewhat (and times also, a little). but old postcards from California aren't the same as actual California. 

"We make meanings, but do not so in media of our own making; our bodies are embedded in climate history, fire regimes, the spin of the earth, north and south, and relations with plants, artifacts, and organisms of all kinds, especially each other. Whatever nonverbal communication might be, it is certainly richer than our bodies' hints and gestures, rich though they are" (p. 380)

"Real meaning is not fragile: it is exuberantly abundant, overwhelmingly so" (p. 379)

"Nature has meaning, but not for us" (p. 379)

"But the human condition is recursive; it is a conditional condition: our actions change the conditions they act in, especially since they change us; we speak and act, and as we do we change the conditions in which we speak and act" (p. 51) 

"Communication is deeper and older than language" (p. 133) 

(that bit reminded me of this little post by Ian Leslie, which I usually ask all of my students to read in any writing or communication class I'm teaching. the communicative force field around us all has an elemental nature, I suppose.) 

"The stars were both divine and cozy" (p. 386) 

"This is what the universe has yielded: another being in your same form, improbable and precious, with whom you may be able to contribute to the ongoing history of life. Love and beauty are the meaning of the universe, and such meaning is not a human fiat imposed on raw and unfeeling matter by the effort of our will, but rather the product of cosmic history" (p. 385) 

"Perhaps the past cannot be tapped in its full immediacy because the present is not fully immediate. There are vast patches of unobserved magnification, for different organs of sense, for minds quicker or slower than ours. Even for the most acute observer, descriptions might be incomplete, not only because of limited tools but because reality is lacking. Just as we often do not know what we mean when we speak, so the universe might not always be so sure of itself. The cosmos is structurally incomplete, as gap-ridden as its files. Such wonderful conditions these are! The universe generously accommodates our every new act, word, or thought. There is still plenty to do. It is open for new events; it is a container with a gracious void. A growing universe is a (retroactively) incomplete one." (p. 354)

"A phonograph record, tape, or compact disc does not really hold sound: sound exists only as pressure in time and space. Acoustic storage media hold recipes that, with the right equipment, can produce more or less the same sounds over and over, but they don't hold sounds the way a cave wall or canvas can hold an image. Everything that happens in time has to be started over and over in real time. The sound does not last, the word flies away, the vibration dissipates. The vinyl record can endure, but the music it plays on a stereo does not." (p. 311)

"All complex societies have media inasmuch as they use materials to manage time, space, and power. Kittler's point, that culture was always already a procedure of data processing, follows confidently in Innis's path. Kittler's word was Kultur, a term that can mean both "culture" and "civilization"-- and, never shy about grand claims, he certainly meant to include both." (p. 20) 

"For [Norbert Elias], the civilizing process involved three fronts in need of taming: pressures inside people, pressures between people, and pressures between people and nonpeople" (p.159)

"There is an old clash between the ethic of detachment, which calms the soul so well, and the ethic of commitment, which calls us to upsetting action." (p. 384) 

"Death can feel completely normal, dull, and expected, as blank as boredom, and also unbearably bitter and impossible, as hard as thoughts of falling. Death is a great revealer of infrastructures, and, like them, it partakes of the habit of coming out of hiding traumatically." (p. 383) 

"... but this blessed earth will live on, and the clouds and sun will continue to radiate for a season, and the beauty that pulses in our senses will continue to pulse to other senses or just to itself, and that will be enough. Knowing that this beauty will persist gives some comfort. When we go, natality might well bring something new forth. There might be long periods of anoxic oceans and arid wastelands, but something will happen and eventually wildflowers might sprout in the ash we left behind." (p. 387)

 

I will blog more this summer. so much has happened already and classes haven't even been over for a full month yet.

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.

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.

and spring semester 2024

eleven years ago, back at the very beginning of my academic career, I trekked 6 hours west from Lubbock, Texas, in my very old leper of a car (the paint was all but totally peeled way from its poor hood), to attend my first ever academic conference in Albuquerque.

this week I'm gonna trek 6 hours east and attend the same conference, this time in a rental car, with way more academic experience, an institutional credit card for travel-related purchases, and a significantly different research agenda. I'll be presenting this Saturday all about how I designed and get to teach a fun little class on podcasts. 

 {the title slide, so far anway}

 

and I'll get to see some of my old professors from USU. very excited for that bit. 

it'll be fun, hopefully. I hope I'll meet some other cool new interesting fellow scholars along the way, too. we shall see, given how sunny and warm it looks to be in Albuquerque this weekend, how much of the conference I actually sit through.

in the more normal weeks of this semester, I'm teaching a couple sections of technical writing. the same old basic tech writing course, only slightly different every time by virtue of new students and a new me and a new world.

besides teaching, I'm also working on a book chapter about podcast transcripts and leading various faculty from various other programs through a series of mushy but important assessment adventures. friend Caroline and I are still working on soliciting content for a new issue of the campus literary arts magazine (the second since we took charge of it last year). maybe we'll have an official reading event at the library with the creative writing class-- fingers crossed. 

it's all nearly haflway over, this set of 16 work weeks called spring semester. at the moment the halfway point feels encouraging. time ticks onward. work gets accomplished. knowledge is made and shared and reinforced. skills are modeled, practiced, learned, forgotten, re-learned.

in other news, I'm also finally getting to see some work from the past year come out in official publication! perhaps the coolest online academic journal of all, Kairos, made space for my multimedia oral history-ish interview piece all about two colleagues who recently retired.

and then colleagues and I have a co-authored piece in the most recent issue of Programmatic Perspectives (the differently cool but still very awesome journal from the Council for Programs in Technical and Scientific Communication). some awesome Purdue colleagues have an article in the same issue, which is quite cool to see. 

time ticks onward. I've been here 4 years. 2 more until hopefully they give me tenure. 

in the meantime, age and experience accumulate. some days I feel older and other days not at all. 

next January, in the auspicious year of 2025, it'll be 20 years since I started this blog for a class. how will we celebrate that, I wonder?

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.

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

land acknowledgements are not enough

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://player.fm/podcasts/indigenous

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

more listening

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

my favourite things to listen to include:

- rainfall

- string instruments

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

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

- husband Jeremiah playing the guitar

- vegetables sauteing or sauce simmering on the stove

- soft, gentle pug snoring

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

charismatic forest spirits

this was the podcast that came up in my long queue of podcast episodes (37 hours' worth, my podcast app tells me) today: "Return of the Yokai" from 99% Invisible. very worth listening to.

near the end of their discussion about the yokai-- which they note is "a pretty broad term that includes everything from shape-shifting demons to cuddly animal-like creatures as well as spirited inanimate objects and ghosts"-- the podcast hosts recognize echoes of the Yokai in the work of several famous Japanese artists, among them Hayao Miyazaki of Studio Ghibli. 

I nodded and smiled at hearing his name, remembering the kodama forest spirits from Princess Mononoke. they're adorable and enigmatic, as well as generally helpful.

aren't they cute?

we had actually just recently rewatched the movie with my niece and nephews. beforehand, we asked my sister's family to think about who the "good guys" and "bad guys" are in this movie and have an answer to share at the end. since we're all a pretty taciturn bunch, the post-movie discussion wasn't so very lively, but I am sure it gave them all something to think about. perhaps it will inspire some of the stories they'll invent and share with the world.

Princess Mononoke is just as poignant and lovely this year as it ever was, and being more familiar with the story this time I found myself attending more closely to the art, the lines and textures and colors and movement of it all. not long ago friend Chris pointed me towards this essay on the impact of art style on the story and affective messages of Princess Mononoke (it does spoil the plot, in case that matters to you). having read that, I was primed to notice variations in clarity and level of detail. messier art for the things we're afraid of. sharper portraits of everything calm and safe.

the yokai story from 99% Invisible transitions from pointing out Miyazaki and Pokemon as vessels for the continuation of yokai into making a broader philosophical point about our unquenchable thirst for wonder and mystery, even (and perhaps especially) in the face of deeply frightening unknowns. one of the guests on this episode explains that "putting a form and a face and sometimes a name and various attributes to something gives you a sense of control over it." in the absence of real control, a story can at least give us a feeling of it. a layer of calm to cover the fear.

science may have replaced spirits and legends in how we explain and understand nature, but it hasn't explained away everything. there's room for a few enigmatic stories here and there to help us personify nature and appreciate its variably fearful or wondrous mysteries and rhythms.

sometimes mistaken but connected anyway

I barely remember this, but when I was younger I would sometimes pile sliced strawberries in a bowl, spoon sugar over the top of them, pour in a medium amount of cold milk, and eat them for a snack.

and that's what I had for breakfast this morning. early.

later I had a second breakfast (yes, really) of cereal with frozen blueberries. that's a much more common occurrence these days. (I never use fresh blueberries fast enough, so I freeze them. added to breakfast cereal, they are perfect. they collect a thin layer of frozen milk around them which I love even though it sounds kind of odd now that I type it out here.)

what else?

one week into July.

it already feels like this vast, empty, sun-baked summer is going by too fast.

it feels like the basics of the following paragraphs were excised months and months ago from some other blogpost. was it this one about love? or this one about familiarity? that seems like the likeliest bet. it wasn't this one about light and illusion, but I was happy to reread that one anyway during my search.

*

comparison usually starts with connection, for me. a similarity strikes my brain like an embroidery needle. it pulls through me and darts back out into space toward the next thing, sewing little scraps of thoughts loosely together like a hurried, festive bunting.

and these are a handful of things I have connected and compared in this way. perhaps shallowly, for now. stories I heard that my flitting brain once just tossed together in a box with some kind of shared label.

Lucky Boy by Shanthi Sekaran is a book about mothers. it's about journeys where your body moves through space, across land, among others, and about journeys where you stay home but you transform because your world transforms and everything is wildly, newly drastic and potent and even painful.

for some reason I thought of this podcast episode from The Sporkful, "Feasting in War Zone" in connection with Lucky Boy. now I also think of the play Anonymous, which my brother-in-law wrote his thesis about a while back. journeys. circumstances that transform us.

my old blogpost draft also had a note and a link to another podcast episode, "To My Heart," which I heard when it was rebroadcast on The Heart. the series is called Love Me.  this episode is set in Guantanamo Bay.

the resonance I track among all these stories may not be there for anyone else. it might have changed for me too, by now.

*

from the dates on these episodes and the fact that goodreads tells me I read Lucky Boy in 2018, I'm now certain that these paragraphs couldn't have come from any of the old posts I thought they might have been abortively written for.

I guess they were written for this post, their very own July 2020 blogpost, after all.

both, and, oscilatio

halfway through the year.

and such a strange year, so far.

on Independence Day this weekend, we're gonna stay home. I don't think I'll make a cake but you never know when or if a cake-baking mood will strike. (the cake pictured is from two or three years back, I think.)

what we are planning on doing is watching the on-demand film release of Hamilton at least once. very excited for that.

it's the middle of the year. halfway. for another six weeks, I'm inbetween official full-time tenure-track jobs. I'm biding my time to see what this pandemic is really going to do to the university's plans for fall semester.

from the middle of Arizona, these precious summer days are ticking along, all of them similarly sunny and breezy and grand.

Richard Lanham (one-time academic idol of mine) writes in Economics of Attention about the concept of oscilatio. it's the way we can look at something and through that thing in turns. like the screen of your phone or laptop or television. if there are cracks and smudges on the glass, you can look at them--consider the glass and its material conditions on their own. or you can train your eyes to ignore the cracks as much as possible and look through them to whatever the light behind the screen is showing.

it's been a little too long since I read Lanham's book, so I remember the concept itself much more than I remember why it's so rhetorically important. the concept itself is so interesting though.

oscilatio reminds me of something I read even longer ago from C. S. Lewis, about what it's like to look at a beam of light vs. looking along it to see the things it touches. in his metaphor, standing in the light and seeing through that light is more valuable than standing outside the light and watching dustmites dance within the beam.

that depends, I imagine. there is beauty in both vantage points. dustmites are a simpler beauty than a garden landscape, and the cracked screen itself doesn't tell you as much as all the news and social media you can read through the screen. maybe all it tells you is that it's time to save up for a new phone.

it might be impossible to look at and through something at the same time. but that still doesn't mean you have to choose only one or the other forever.

oscilatio means the skill of shifting positions. recognizing the difference. having it both ways depending on what you're after.

right now it's halfway through the year. and sometimes it's good to take out your calendar and look at this set of moments from above. June gone, July unfurling in similar languor. six weeks left til I go back to work. other times, it's better to look through it or along it. let it engulf us like all this steady sunshine. what can the days and their cycles show me? time with myself, my love, my two silly pugs. time with books and crafts and food and creativity.

one of my flaws is a tendency to look at everything--time especially--as a scarcity. there's only so much of anything, and the everything I want to cram into my life is a glacier of potential that completely dwarfs the handful of moments I can hold in my brain at once. but that's only one way of looking at it. in another sense, time is a constant. even if I can't cram the everything into it, I still have plenty. life is a brilliant candy store of possibility. I want and need to stop focusing so much on the what ifs and might have beens.

this is the gorgeous, uncertain middle of the year. there is light and dark. screens and shadows and stories to look at and to look through. so it goes.

and here are a few other things that I am in the middle of right now--

- replaying Horizon Zero Dawn. it's one of the first videogames I've ever touched that feels like more than a game somehow--it's easier in this shiny, open-world design to get lost in exploration, combat, questing, and so on. I like it. the sequel looks very neat, too.

- reading the old science fiction novel Dune. I'm not sure what made me want to read it after having heard vague praise of it for so long. it's good though. very engaging and well-constructed.

- editing various projects on the side. some computer graphics analytics, some organizational leadership stuff, some orthodontics, some social work. editing is almost always fun.

- working thoughtfully through this workbook, slowly. it's not easy, and not enough, but it is important stuff. it feels important for me and for the world. it also led me to the author's podcast: Good Ancestor, which is quite lovely stuff.

endings, middles, randomness

September is nearing its rainy, grey end.

yesterday, I opened three windows in our house, and the gentle, humid breezes felt almost a little chilly. does this mean my sensitivities are fully transitioned to southern climate mode? that 72° Fahrenheit is on the cold side of things?

before classes started, I spent many mornings coloring. listening to podcasts. it was lovely, and I actually did finish some pages from this stained glass mandala book friend Patti sent me way back during prelims time.

I find I have less time for podcasts these days. my commute is 1/3 the length that it once was, unless I bike to campus-- and listening to podcasts while biking is probably an ill-advised course of action.

so instead of listening on the bus or in the car, I listen while I craft or color or clean.

or while I roadtrip to Arkansas.

it was in preparation for that roadtrip that I found this old-but-new-to-me podcast, Never Not Knitting. it seems to have run for 10 seasons between 2008 and 2016. one hundred episodes. and surprisingly, the host's blog is still around.

so far I've listened to 40something of those one hundred episodes. and also skimmed the whole accompanying blog and associated Ravelry content. I want to make a version of these mitts. and possibly this hat. and also someday be good enough to knit a whole sweater/cardigan or a nice top.

a few other new-to-me podcasts have joined my podcast queue recently, too. among them:
Science Update
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
and
Out on the Wire.

the first and last of these are inspiring me to eventually design some technical communication coursework around podcasting. 

eventually and soon, I also want to write about the final episode of one of the most unique scholarly podcasts out there: Masters of Text. now that I think about it, a review of that podcast might belong in a more scholarly venue than this blog. hmmmm. I shall have to ponder. maybe the answer could be both.

speaking of scholarly venues, I shall have a piece coming out soon as part of this fall's blog carnival with the Sweetland Digital Rhetoric Collaborative. the short speculative little essay was originally spawned from a prickly little question my dissertation committee asked me last May, and it's called "Hypermediated Workscapes and the Digital Rhetorics of Personal Branding."

and speaking of short digital publications, I was poking around on Google Scholar the other day and found that this long-ago book review of Goldsmith's Uncreative Writing has been cited in an article about publishing information systems from the European Journal of Information Systems. how random.

must be seen as

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

or me and you. maybe. partly.

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

briefly, for now

apparently Rosa Parks wrote recipes on the backs of envelopes too. really, is there anything else as useful to do with the back of an envelope? maybe doodling.

just the other week, right before our roadtrip to Utah and back, I wrote this brownie recipe down on the back of a small, greenish envelope. the brownies were baked, and then proceeded to get lost in our box of roadtrip snacks for almost the whole trip. but we found them again, and I ate several alongside the bananas.

speaking of recipes, I've been very much wanting to make this marvelous pie again, but there has hardly been any time inbetween celebrations and driving and driving and more celebrations and more driving. making pie crust is the hold-up today. if only I had pie crust in the freezer, I would be set.

all I have in my freezer by way of crust-esque stuff is phyllo dough at the moment. so I have been prompted to go searching for a phyllo tomato and corn pie recipe. and I found one. my hastily-thrown-together version of it is in the oven now.

unrelatedly, I am recently fascinated by Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own. my sister had a copy of it sitting around when I was at her (very cute, new) house in March, and while she hemmed a huge fat white ballgown for me, I read to her from it. we only got to chapter 3 or something, but ever since I have been thinking about it and wanting to keep reading. not long ago, on my little non-LibriVox LibriVox app, I found a free audiobook copy, read by the lovely Cori Samuels, whom I feel like I sort of know from listening to practically every single episode of the LibriVox Community Podcast.

I have a section and a half still to go, I think. I'll finish it soon and then see where my thinking takes me next. I'm especially intrigued by Woolf's section about women writers in the centuries preceding hers. there are so many she cites that I want to go look up and investigate a bit more: Anne Finch, the Countess of Winchilsea. Aphra Behn. George Eliot.

Mary Carmichael is fictional, it turns out, or I would want to look her up too.

but ah well. I do have enough reading to do anyway, without adding fictional novels to my list.

and oh, guess what-- my first audiobook solo has been catalogued! I may work up a whole post for it one of these days, in which I'll have space to outline the tricky process of translating a text into a series of audio files, and comment on the intertwining layers of authorial and narratorial presences. we'll see.

and oh, one more thing-- it did rain, but not too much. I loved it all.