the good fight

what does an average middleclass person in the developed world have to really fight for? stand up for? do capital-S Something about?

plenty of stuff, surely. but then again... fighting seems dangerous. difficult. as long as we have access to some safe-enough shelter, plentiful-enough groceries, functional-enough plumbing, a little companionship, what else could we need to really worry about? with those basic necessities secured, most of us will be content with the state of things, whatever mild to moderate chaos or metaphorical storm clouds may swirl around on the outskirts of our little routines. 

do I mean "be content with," or "get complacent about"?

both, I guess. the main difference between the terms is in the level of awareness each implies. complacency means ignorance. we can frame our implacable cockroach-like ignorance as blissful and cozy, or as a challenging opportunity to learn more stuff. or maybe as protective wall, willful and resolute. which way we see it (or if we see it at all, I suppose) is a decision to make. a mindset we get to set. more likely, multiple shifting mindsets that we trade in and out as days come and go. 

my list above of all the basics that would be worth fighting for if we had to didn't include any education, but really it should. what kind of teacher would I be if I couldn't say learning and knowledge are worth fighting for, standing up to demand, or working as hard as possible for, after all? we need good food and good information to really survive on this planet. we can't leave our brains out of the game. useful stories are what civilization is made of.

we've watched the newest Superman movie more than a few times this summer. is it a useful story? (perhaps I should ask "useful for what?" or "useful to whom?" here. stories can be made to do many kinds of work in the world. not every storyteller has the same kind of use in mind. not everyone understands their needs for safety, shelter, food, and information in the same terms as other people's.)

despite the comicbook/superhero genre not being my usual cup of tea, I did like the messages this one braided together for us. 

• your biological family and their cultural values aren't the be-all-end-all of who you are or can be. 
• seeking peace and justice is not easy; people will probably complain no matter what you try. 
• success of any kind at almost any level takes a ton of collaboration: there's work for the superheros, for journalists, and maybe for the unruly canines too. 

not all fighting is physical or violent (thank goodness). inasmuch as my daily work might be considered a figurative battle-- to wrangle my modest expertise in technical writing into a series of effective lessons for a bunch of college students every semester-- to apply decently rigorous empirical methods to relevantly articulated research questions in the field of media studies-- and all the other paperwork and collaboration and sitting through meetings that attend my little academic career-- then we can say I've fought to defend my few square feet of shelter and my $600/month grocery budget. perhaps I also fight here and there for recognition, for friendships, for leisure time, for a little peace and quiet. what advocacy my life entails beyond these selfish pursuits is very small. smaller than a pebble thrown into a puddle, it seems.

professionally, I advocate for all the podcasts to have transcripts. for inclusive and non-punitive learning-centered pedagogy where students get to make a lot of decisions for themselves instead of merely following arbitrary instructions. for a rejection of the workaholic mindset that still pervades academic culture. for everyone to do their best to read more and communicate clearly and vote in all the elections.

does all of that make a difference? I'll at least say that it doesn't not make a difference, so that's something. I won't always be able to measure the difference it might be making. there is plenty of hope involved.

could I make more of a difference if I were a scrappy investigative journalist? 

more or less is not the right question here though. it'd be a different kind of difference, on a different stage, but another form of education in any case. keeping people empowered with accurate and relevant information about the present universe. meaningful work, indeed. 

but also... maybe scathing exposés about the far-reaching misdeeds of tech billionaires only bring about lasting consequences in comicbook movies with happy endings. 

what does an average middleclass person in the developed world know, really, about all the bigger things out there to fight for? all the things we could/should/might/ought to/would do capital-S Something about before it's too late? nobody can be rationally informed about everything everywhere all at once. it's too much. even if we are informed enough about reality, learning/knowing/deciding what to do about it is another set of mental battles in itself.

my currently second-most-favorite podcast Never Post published a roundtable episode on this idea, back in May. the host (Mike Rugnetta--the one and only. I know, I know, will I ever shut up about Mike Rugnetta?) notes the tension between how we use the internet and how we might wish we could use the internet. it is a global medium--that's why it was made. one of the coolest things we do with the internet is "to socialize and connect globally, which, you know, that's powerful and that's important," Rugnetta says, "but we can't act globally. [...] it's even hard to act locally given the state of especially American politics.
"And, you know, I feel like even my ability to even know how to act locally has perhaps atrophied a bit because of my focus on the importance of familiarizing myself with national and global events."

are there information diet plans out there, something akin to the handy food pyramid, but for sources of news instead of calories? probably. 

do they teach such things in grade school so everyone grows up knowing that your brain will not thrive on a diet of nonsense and trash? maybe somewhere somehow. bless everyone who dares teach grade school.

there is so much information in the world to be had. maybe I shouldn't say "too much," because that depends. too much for what? for whom? 

sometimes it does seem necessary to just stop for a little while though. to push back on all the information (the firehose, the overload, the deluge, the six-lane highway traffic jam) with a little carefully cultivated ignorance: "I haven't looked into that myself," "that's not my lane," "I trust someone else to be smart about and work on that particular problem" and so on. (this brings to mind some of Hank Green's recent vlogbrothers video in which he touches on the difficult value of trusting our fellow humans.) we can all find our own good fight to fight-- there isn't just one. 

hopefully we aren't all fighting alone and/or at cross purposes though. hopefully we have some kind of justice gang/league/squad to back us up at least some of the time. smart and good people don't only exist in the comicbooks and movies. the Green brothers are on my list of people I admire for trying to make the world better. academic acquaintances are on the list. non-profit organizations managed by people whose names I may never know are on the list. 

its been a week or so since I read this detailed breakdown of "The Dark Internet Forest" as a concept for understanding the possibilities and risks of all our globally mediated connectedness and was thus suddenly enchanted with its author, Erin Kissane. she comes back to the centrality of place-- real or physical or digital or conceptual, place is important to remember. positionality. relationality. places matter. where are you? what other places are within reach right now? who else is there? how can you join forces and do Something?

I especially loved that Kissane cites this beautiful pushback against the classic "tragedy of the commons" idea. Elinor Ostrom's book helped me write my dissertation. I should read it again sometime. 

doing capital-S something is not always (probably not often) gonna be easy even when you have a team of active, collaborative superheros to work with. it's still messy. pebbles in ponds sometimes and big splashing ordeals other times. 

flip a switch somewhere and set your mind to care at least a little. doesn't have to be about everything. just don't get totally complacent.

the tournament of TTRPG books, final round

the final round:
Dungeons & Dragons (5e) vs The One Ring (2e)
 

in the beginning, along with a lot of scribbly scattered notes and spreadsheets of metadata on each RPG book, I mapped out my relative prior experience with each of the 16 systems, like so:  

None-- The One Ring (2e), Cyberpunk RED, and A Song of Ice and Fire
    
Barely any-- Wrath & Glory, Scion: Hero, and Exalted 

Some-- Pathfinder (2e), Shadowrun (5e), Mage: the Awakening, and Changeling: the Lost

More than some-- World of Darkness, Star Wars: Force and Destiny, and 7th Sea (2e)

Lots-- Vampire: the Masquerade (5e) and Dungeons & Dragons (5e) 

there were some idle thoughts about coming up with a color code to go along with this, even. maybe it would've started with grey, then blue, yellow, green, up to a nice purple for the ones I've played most, or something like that? not important, I suppose. arbitrary distinctions to signify those slightly less arbitrary.

in any case, The One Ring has already vanquished one of my most-played RPGs. does it have what it takes to beat the other? 

either way, it will feel like Tolkien wins.

we recently finished listening to The Fellowship of the Ring narrated by Andy Serkis. so excellently done-- all the voices and the singing. I loved it. at least 20 years have gone by since I last read the book myself. I still mean to reread them all at some point, but who knows when. there is such a richness in that story. it is beautiful, touching, deep, and timeless. I'm not saying anything here that hasn't been said a hundred times.

last week, we gathered friends at our table to begin another D&D campaign. I'm still working on putting the finishing touches on my first-ever bard: Ennagold Lindenrill, a wood-elf from Waterdeep. the rest of the party shall include a couple of wizards, a couple of clerics, and a paladin. it's exciting to be gearing up to play once again after about a year and a half spent in other game systems.

judging these two against each other is as expectedly challenging as most of the last few matches have been. which do I value more? the focus, simplicity, and artistry of the newer book, or the flexibility, openness, and mainstream appeal of the older? which deserves this more? the world-changing system that paved the way for pretty much all the others, or the beautiful latecomer based on a world-changing fantasy that paved the way for it in the first place?

SYSTEM	Dungeons & Dragons (5e)	The One Ring (2e)
cover tagline =	"Arm yourself for adventure."	"Enter the world of Middle-earth..."
publisher =	Wizards of the Coast	Free League Publishing
pub. date =	2014	2020
original cost =	$49.95	$49.85
length =	11 chapters / 320 pages	10 chapters / 240 pages
my exp. level =	very much lots	none prior

---

 

the easy part is judging these two on aesthetics. The One Ring will probably never lose on that count. I bet the designers of this book put as much attention and effort into its appearance as Tolkien himself put into the elvish language. it seems to me almost as perfect as any functional book could ever be (semi-garish cover notwithstanding). beyond the surface of the pages, too, the aesthetics of this epic storyworld come with all the depth and richness of their source material. it's lovely.

and while The One Ring is soaked in the vibes of deep green-grey forests and cozy, semi-lit hobbit holes, D&D injects all that with a little more brightness. the saturation is turned up, the gleam of adventure a little more polished against a grab-bag stage-set of fantasy. they aren't opposites, but we might say they are different shades of the same hue: The One Ring a deep piney dark-olive, like those magical woven elf-cloaks in shadow; D&D more like new grass, or spring-time oak leaves in the sun, or a green leather satchel freshly polished. you can tell serious, weighty stories in either game, but D&D will always feel lighter to me.

judging on mechanics, I have a harder time choosing which I like more. The One Ring is simple and unique. it's character creation options are very focused, its gameplay processes similarly so. destiny and heritage and lore combine to draw strong lines around the possible story arcs. player characters rotate through adventuring phases and fellowship phases. journeying, counseling, and resting are given just as much attention (if not more) than combat.

D&D divides its gameplay slightly differently into exploration, social interaction, and combat. it's close enough to the same ingredients, but used in a significantly new recipe. and much like an easy, endlessly-adapatible recipe (like this one-- so easy and so fun to mix and match with), D&D feels infinitely flexible. dial down the combat and add more exploration or skill challenges or socializing if you're feeling like it-- it'll still taste awesome. it will still be exciting. 

in terms of approachability, do these games come out equal? as I've said before, D&D has the advantage of being very well known, with an established fan base and a widespread community to help ease new players into it. practically, playing D&D can be as basic or as convoluted as you choose.

without the same relatively longstanding advantages, The One Ring does just fine. I like its organization and approach a bit better, and that beautiful simplicity earns it plenty of points here.

if we wanted to get quantitative about it, we could tally things on a rough scale like so, dividing a pool of 10 points per category between the two systems...

SYSTEM	Dungeons & Dragons (5e)	The One Ring (2e)
points for aesthetics =	2	8
points for mechanics =	6	4
points for approachability =	6	4
total =	14	16

 

a close match if there ever was one, eh? and honestly, I keep wanting to fudge the points further. (full transparency: I have fudged them up and down and back already a few times. this is my tournament, so it's allowed, right?) I mean, are the aesthetics of D&D so very lackluster in my eye? and maybe shouldn't the mechanics be weighted more heavily, given that's what the game is essentially built out of? 

but beyond my trusty old three-pronged rubric... I wrote last time that I value vividness, simplicity, and consistency in these forms of interactive art. I seem to have the most imaginative fun with a clear framework in which to invent freely, wildly, with all the power of the game's limitations to help me build something cool. 

so which of these truly offers me more of that feeling?  

in another prior match-up, I also wrote that compared to D&D, The One Ring's character creation process seemed so limited, so relatively constrained. this remains pretty much my only grasped-at disappointment with The One Ring, I think. a barely-there complaint. and yet I concede that there is a nice structure to it and to everything else in the game, though. it's fitting, given the game's setting and all that. it's a great framework for narrative gameplay, narrow and vivid in its scope.

on the other hand, D&D has a bigger, wider frame. just as sturdy and serviceable, if far less technically beautiful. 

I think what really makes the most sense, to me today, is to add a fourth category and do a little bit more math. so here we go-- along with aesthetics and mechanics and user-friendliness, I'm going to look quantitatively at flexibility. 

and there, using this arbitrary system I've suddenly applied across this match, I'd give D&D a whole 7 and The One Ring the remaining 3. it's still awfully close, but D&D ekes out the higher score. 21 to 19. 

 

imagine approximately three seconds of a low and subtle drumroll for us, please?

the 2023 champion of the Tournament of RPG books: Dungeons & Dragons (5e)

certain shades of darkness

quarterfinals match 3:
World of Darkness vs Vampire: the Masquerade 5e

since opening match 1, our zombie-plagued World of Darkness chronicle has ended. my stubborn, workaholic Andi Garcia did survive, somehow. in the end, wrapped in a metaphorical shroud of mourning and dampened ambitions, she held on to just enough hope for teaching the younger survivors everything they could want to know about the technologies of the past. given the campaign's Lake Michican setting, Andi's epilogue has some real Station Eleven Museum of Civilization vibes-- in my imagination anyway. a little bit like that. but different.

sadly, I have not played any more Vampire this year. but I do think about the world and the system fairly often. driving past a self storage compound on the highway, I wonder how Anarch vampires could use such a space for hiding their renegade plans and secrets. hearing news snippets about a rapper on trial for drug trafficking, I wonder what kind of vampire story that might be, if the drug dealers were in thrall to vampires, or if the rapper himself were undead, using a late-night partying lifestyle to disguise his sun allergy. it would definitely be depressing to be a vampire in real life-- but isn't it interesting to ponder the logistics of living in darkness for decades on end? I can't be the only one who thinks so.

mechanically, these two games are almost identical. the one system encompasses the other entirely, pretty much, and the other is a sharply focused specialization of the first. on that point of my rubric, I cannot really distinguish them. 

in terms of relative approachability, there are perhaps some differences but not substantive ones, for me. World of Darkness can stand alone, just as this version of Vampire can. the possibilities for branching out or remixing other subsets of the world don't take away from that.  

so does that mean my only meaningful axis of comparison, other than past gameplay experience, is aesthetics?

I initially summed up the vibes of World of Darkness as "film noir–artsy" and "alternatingly grunge/emo/punk," with a heavy tinge of romance and mystery. then, in Vampire's opening match 6, I wrote, "let's take everything I said about World of Darkness in opening round #1, but add a few gallons of flawlessly immortal elegance and deep red, viscous blood."

so... which is more worthy of this arbitrary prize? the artsy black-and-white film noir? or the highly polished, classic gloss of black-and-white-and-blood? which one looks best posed against the backdrop of a perfectly staged alleyway at night?

 

SYSTEM	World of Darkness	Vampire: the Masquerade 5e
back cover tagline =	"Your greatest fears aren't make believe; they're real."	"Death is not the end."
publisher =	White Wolf	White Wolf
pub. date =	2004	2018
original cost =	$24.99	$55.00
length =	8 chapters / 223 pages	13 chapters / 400 pages
my exp. level =	more than some	lots

---

 

it is a difficult choice. both of these styles please me. both games and gameworlds have helped me experience visceral, intense struggles and tell sweeping, tragically beautiful stories. 

my decision comes down to a fairly small nuance, I guess. for all that these two systems share, the one is by design very broad and open-ended, accomodating of plenty fairly typical man-vs-monsters adventures. World of Darkness will most likely have you roleplay a communal struggle against encroaching supernatural evils from who-knows-what great beyond. and while that is is awfully heroic and awesome, it is a bit less unique. 

to instead struggle against a persistent, internal, irreversable corruption inside your own blood... that is different. it feels... more, somehow. less trite, less bounded by the rules of a proper hero's journey and all that. the focus of it, the individuality of it-- it makes the struggle a lonely, desperate, mostly hopeless one. how much more romantic can we get than that? and with the focus of Vampire, we get to fight-- for whatever idealistic or misguided or prideful reasons-- against something our own fallen selves have become. that dark conflict gives this game a more unique and interesting trajectory for stories than any other game I've ever played. so far.

 

next match-up review (the last before the semifinals!): The One Ring vs A Song of Ice and Fire

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

unprepared for proper wordsmithery

the third section of the Audre Lorde collection I've been reading is about two hundred pages of poems. here, for this Friday evening, are some snippets, in no particular order, of all the ones I would have dogeared if it weren't a library book.

I wish I could record "Song" for LibriVox. such lovely slant rhymes and even measures.

Wild trees have bought me
and will sell you a wind
in the forest of falsehoods
where your search must not end...

it keeps going in that steady, almost hypnotic way for six more dreamy stanzas.

"Sister, Morning is a Time for Miracles" has this great little metaphor about words being destructive. I could re-read this and think about it for a whole weekend.

Reaching for you with my sad words
between sleeping and waking
what is asked for is often destroyed
by the very words that seek it
like dew in an early morning
dissolving the tongue of salt
as well as its thirst...

I almost couldn't stop quoting from "New Year's Day." top to bottom, this one is a perfect jumble of different feelings and judgements and senses. it is a poem you could shrink down and live inside, fleetingly.

This day feels put together hastily
like a gift for grateful beggars
being better than no time at all
but bells are ringing
in cities I have never visited
and my name is printed over doorways
I have never seen

Extracting a bone
or whatever is tender or fruitful
from a core of indifferent days
I have forgotten the touch of sun
cutting through uncommitted mornings
The night is full of messages
I cannot read
I am too busy forgetting
air like fur on my tongue
these tears
do not come from sadness
but from grit in the sometimes wind.

the opening of "October" is another one I just want to re-read, re-imagine, over and over. it's another poem you almost want to live in for a little while, just until it gets too chilly.

Spirits of the abnormally born
live on in water
of the heroically dead
in the entrails of snake.

Now I span my days like a wild bridge
swaying in place  caught 
between poems like a vise
I am finishing my piece of this bargain
and how shall I return?

the opening question of "Change of Season" hits heavily. a confrontation.

Am I to be cursed forever with becoming
somebody else on the way to myself?

and the rest unfolds more and more on identity and memory. uncertainty. 

of course I like poems with questions in them. here is the entirety of "Fantasy and Conversation," because I could not choose only a segment and none of it is quite as awesome without the rest, anyway.

Speckled frogs leap from my mouth
drown in our coffee
between wisdoms
and decision.

I could smile
turn these frogs into pearls
speak of love
making and giving
if the spell works
shall I break down
or build what is broken
into a new house
shook with confusion

Shall I strike
before our magic
turns color?

I also really liked "Spring People" and "What my Child Learns of the Sea," which has such a gripping image here with the line "of the ways / she will taste her autumns / toast-brittle or warmer than sleep / ..."

for this Friday, on which it might thunderstorm or it might not, could I write my own poem?

in her preface to this collected poetry, Lorde herself talks not about writing poems but about building them, and about re-building them if they prove a little out of joint.

to build a rightly-jointed poem right now, here, behind this blinking screen, would take more time than I have to spare, I think. instead, for now, I'll prosify the sounds of stormclouds, the weight of a workweek in my shoulders, and the strewn-everywhere coziness of a shared life-in-progress with whatever thin words I can. poetry can live outside of poems sometimes, I think.

vengeance vs. leverage

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

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

but I didn't.

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

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

no justice, no peace.

no justice, no peace.

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

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

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

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

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

And? If we win our independence?

Is that a guarantee of freedom for our descendants?

Or will the blood we shed begin an endless

Cycle of vengeance and death with no defendants?

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

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

Burr: The constitution’s a mess

Hamilton: So it needs amendments

Burr: It’s full of contradictions

Hamilton: So is independence.

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

or at least try.

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

on being intellectual in public

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

affection, safety, and a puppy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

or is it?

maybe it is.

paradoxically.

in a "limits are possibilities" sort of way.

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

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

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

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

I am enough. now is enough. I hope.

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

his name is Hamilton.

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

what good pugs.

images, tendencies, and commandments

the local public library is doing free Monday night yoga this summer, led by one of the proprietors of this local yoga place that I haven't yet visited.

I've been to Monday night library yoga twice so far. it's nice. last week, I lay there and breathed and thought a bit about about my ideal self.


{ image borrowed from this kind soul on Flickr } 

past versions of my ideal self have taken various shapes and sizes and attitudes. but one thing seems to always happen when I think about this future maybe-barely-realistically-attainable person. I think about what she looks like. 

draped over an armchair. surrounded by books and children in a sepia-looking library. wearing comfy (but very stylish) grey loungewear. surrounded by plants, accompanied by a fluffy orange cat and a cup of tea. dressed in homemade and perfectly-tailored dresses. slender but not too tall of course. curly (not frizzy) hair in a perfect messy bun. the perfect pair of glasses on a thoughtful face with a flawless complexion.

why is most of what I think about when I think about her centered on what she looks like? dresses like? what her body is shaped like and how her hair is styled? I picture her in short bursts of vivid-- with this kind of dress. that kind of toned abdomen. a certain kind of skin.

why don't I think half so much about what she does? how she spends her time and energy?
I do think about that too. but it's less easy to fixate on. visuals are easier. for some reason actions don't print themselves so firmly on my thoughts. they don't fit into the short bursts.

why not?

{ favourite oatmeal-chocolate-chip muffins } 

I’ve read so many blogs that have praised Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project. Smacksy is the one that comes to mind most readily at the moment but I'm 76% sure I've seen the book mentioned by at least twelve other bloggers, too. 

maybe I'll read it someday. (probably not really though)

for now, I'm skim-reading Rubin's blog. which I came across not long ago, as one does, via another blog entirely, when a fellow-academic on twitter linked to this handy blog about building robust academic writing habits, in that post, under habit #6, there was a link.

this link: The Four Tendencies Quiz.

academic writing habit blogger, Dr. Katelyn Knox, advises that knowing what your tendencies are when it comes to meeting expectations (whether your own or other people's) is helpful for knowing how to nurture good habits.

so I took the quiz, and at the end I was supremely interested (though not really surprised) to learn that I am a Questioner.

of course I am. I would have to be, eh? (I suspect that most of my family members are also questioners-- we like to understand the reasons for doing a thing before we're gonna set out and do it.)

now, I know very well from skim-reading the rest of Gretchen Rubin's blog and website that she is using this quiz and her blog and her online presence generally to sell books and to book speaking gigs and such. and books with titles like "The Happiness Project" pretty much always sound hokey to me. it seems sales-pitchy, snake-oil-y, just a little bit. "buy my book! be happier!" yeah, okay.
but I'm also not unconvinced that there is value in these ideas. the knowledge that I tend to Question before I commit to any course of action or acquiesce to any expectations about how I should do things is kind of eye-opening, however much it also confirms what I already know about myself. it seems like there’s something to it. something insightful, something that feels mind-expanding and practical. it’s not The Answer or The Solution to anything-- no silver bullet-- but it is a starting point, perhaps.

elswhere on Rubin's blog there is a post about writing custom personal commandments for your life, as aspirational guideposts or whatnot. maybe this is hokey and maybe it's helpful. it can be both at once.

the first custom amelia commandment that came to mind was "always whip your own cream," which is an easy one, but also a synecdoche for my general preference for homemade and handmade stuff. if there is ever a plastic tub of cool whip in my kitchen, it will not be because I wanted it there.

it's kind of fun to try thinking of personalized commandments. I could probably articulate a few unconscious ones I follow already, about word usage and getting enough sleep and such.

maybe "take photographs of your old beat-up shoes" is another one I could formally adopt?

{ black flats from Goodwill }

{ polka-dot flip-flips from a Ross in Hawaii }


last week while I was laying in savasana at the end of yoga practice at the library, letting my thoughts drift, I thought of one more custom commandment: refuse the numbness. I guess this one is also shorthand. it's about a deep hope that I'll always be able to be surprised by things, to be affected by things instead of jaded and uninterested. that I'll always be able to listen to the universe sending me messages about itself, about me, about everything. it's easy to let default mode take over, but I don't want that. I want to always be looking for connections, finding things to care about, practicing sensitivity to the world and what I can do in it.

numbers, words, process, and "progress"

at some point about a year ago, in the midst of my dissertation labors, I wrote down the in-progress word counts (and page counts) of all five not-yet-actual-chapters.

why did I do this? I can't remember exactly. but I was probably curious, of course. and I probably also very much needed a brief numerical distraction from the laboriousness of actually writing. I thought, perhaps, that quantifying some of the work I was doing would illuminate the process, somehow.

here are the numbers I documented:

chapter 1 = 27,589 (70 pages mostly single-spaced)
chapter 2 = 8,822 (24 pages mostly single-spaced)
chapter 3 = 3,998 (16 pages mostly single-spaced)
chapter 4 = 6,799 (33 pages mostly double-spaced)
chapter 5 = 18,442 (61 pages mostly single-spaced)

for a grand, messy total of 65,650 words.

I also made a note that the smaller word counts signified the most finished and most actual-chapter-like chapters. chapter 4 at that point was the very closest. the hardest chapters to finish were the first and the last-- last most of all. that 61-page draft of chapter 5 had all the potential citations I'd eventually have to put into my reference list. all of the drafts contained many, many blabbering notes-to-self.

now that it's almost the end of March, my dissertation monster has been finished and tied up with ribbons for about nine months. I recently added it to the Humanities Commons. I'm trying to keep my profile there alive and up to date. it seems useful and Humanities Commons generally seems like a platform worth supporting.

but anyway, when I came across this old saved list of in-progress word counts, I started to wonder... what were the final numbers?

so I had my word processor calculate them for me again.

chapter 1 = 6,081 (20 pages double-spaced)
chapter 2 = 10,045 (31 pages double-spaced)
chapter 3 = 9,842 (34 pages double-spaced)
chapter 4 = 8,144 (28 pages double-spaced)
chapter 5 = 3,644 (12 pages double-spaced)

plus... 20 more pages of references and almost 80 pages of various appendices. the whole fat document, title page, abstract, acknowledgements and all, comes out to 53,845 words.

the five chapters alone are 37,756 words. that's 27,894 words that got smushed together with other words or chopped out entirely or maybe were only ever there as mental scaffolding for the words that got to stay.

do these numbers illuminate some of amelia's writing process? perhaps. I've long known that I'm the type to over-write and cut-and-paste and whittle the thing-that-will-be-written out of a giant boulder of words-that-could-be-the-thing. I don't think I'm the only one who writes that way. writing is not linear. progress of all kinds is zig-zagging and loopy. there isn't a true end to it.

whatever illumination is there also casts some shadowy questions. why is chapter 2 so long? could I have done more with that tiny conclusion chapter? what does everyone else's dissertation chapter word count table look like?

goodbye, facebookland

this week I deactivated my 15-year-old facebook account.

why?

many reasons. mainly, it's a new year, time for trying new things. facebook's role in my recent life has largely been a passive, bad-habit-esque waste of time, and I'm increasingly convinced that its recent roles in spreading terrible ideologies and misleading nonsense makes it problematic for anyone to continue supporting it at all.

so I want to live a year or so truly without it and see what happens. perhaps I'll have more time to write and blog and exercise and knit and make phone calls.

speaking of more time for blogging, over the past months I have been (as is usual) sifting through a dozen different ideas of what I might blog about, with new ideas poking at my brain every few days, too. there are podcasts to blog about, and the upcoming semester to blog about, and gardening plans to blog about. but when? I can't feasibly blog about everything all at once, sadly.

for now, I guess I'm blogging about facebook.

somewhere in the depths of all my old blog drafts, I've had a collection of notes sitting here, from a talk given by a facebook executive or employee of some sort. it was hosted in the student union at Purdue University, where I sat and took notes in the blogger app on my old phone.

here's me, kicking off my mild resolution to blog here more often in 2019, attempting to reconstitute and expand these old notes and snippets into something intelligible and interesting.

facebook's goal/mission/quest/thing has been, for as long as I've heard them talking about having one, is to connect the world.

is this a noble and valiant thing for facebook to be doing? does it seem like a mission that we should trust facebook with?

well, in any case, the speaker opened by stating facebook's mission. and then he spoke excitedly about new developments like live video, virtual reality, and artificial intelligences. oh and about how many new jobs facebook was creating every day. hurray for tech jobs.

he also, unaviodably, had to address issues of privacy and tracking, and he did touch on the ethics of selling users' data to marketers. I'm reminded now, several facebook privacy and ethics scandals later, of this twitter thread about ethics and technology:

The thing about ethics codes is that, like many other forms of “code,” we code around our current way of working. The industry will never create and adopt and enforce an ethical code that disrupts their present flow of capital.

— Emily G (@EmilyGorcenski) January 8, 2019

Gorcenski writes in her informal critique there that there are no universal codes of ethics. ethics standards are always situated. they're constructed, imperfect, with plenty of ambiguity-- often just enough ambiguity to make companies and other institutions feel halfway okay about carrying out very questionable actions in the world.

from my notes, I see that most of my interest and my strongest reactions to this talk had to do with what the speaker said about facebook-as-governing agent. he shared his experience dealing with the many challenges of managing, filtering, and/or censoring public and semi-public online expression across national borders. he reminded us that facebook has employees and users all over the world. what's legal and appropriate in one country doesn't always match what's legal and appropriate in others. but somehow, facebook's own community standards have to make the whole world happy, to at least some extent.
in negotiating with governments about how to enforce or uphold various local standards, the speaker explained, facebook does as much as they can to push their own values. yes, there are tensions between how a borderless online community wants to function and how more traditional global powers want to run their more traditional, border-bound nations.

facebook, the speaker emphasized, tries to be an agent of empowerment. a platform for making invisible things visible. shining light into dark corners. facilitating new and more transparent conversations. changing the balance of power.

and then the speaker said something about facebook hopefully having a major role in someday establishing some kind of global online government. after that, according to my notes, I typed out this:

"eeeeek."

does the world want and need to be connected by a central online platform, really? is the capitalist interest that facebook has in being the medium by which everyone is connected anything we can trust?

I'll end this post with two more brief thoughts (the second of which is more of a gesture towards some other people's thoughts, really).

1. it is worth admitting explicitly that the phone-typed notes I took on this nameless facebook employee's presentation are at least three years old at this point. I wish I had included the fellow's name and title and the date of the talk and all that, but I did not. it is also worth admitting that I have not included every single thing I made notes on. what I have done is shape the more timeless bits into a satisfying order and fit them carefully into real sentences. in any case, I make no pretense that my reconstituted representation of the talk and its mood is fully accurate.

2. one of the many awesome podcasts I've listened to inbetween semesters has been ZigZag's end-of-season offering, "If Capitalism and Socialism Had a Baby." they interview Rufus Pollock, who wrote a book called Open Revolution (which you can read online in PDF form over here). I love the ZigZag podcast, and their whole second season was a carnival of great interrogations and important questions about technology and humans. go listen to it!

moving, books, and titles

in the mornings I put on a podcast and wash whatever dishes have accumulated over the previous evening. it is a nice routine for when I'm not yet really awake enough for much else.

our next place of residence will have a shiny dishwasher in it. and this means I will need to find a new morning routine of some sort. podcasts and doodling instead? maybe just skip straight to yoga? we shall see what the shape of our new place of residence might suggest. perhaps it will be checking on all the plants and reading under a tree.

June and mid-June and late-June have all arrived, rushingly. my dissertation is finished. a printed, bound copy is on its way to the graduate office in Heavilon Hall. I'm not a graduate student anymore. how strange. in four short days we'll be off on our way to another timezone, leaving things behind and hoping that the new place won't be too full of bugs or alligators.

this week is a weird in-between week. boxes galore. cleaning out bunches of dusty papers and things. planning at least two trips to goodwill. saying final goodbyes to people and places. returning all the library books.

there's one more left I need to return-- The Book of Joan by Lidia Yuknavitch. reading its Tournament of Books review/commentary intrigued me toward this novel, but I do not think I'll finish it. firstly, it has not managed to coax me into its world very well. secondly, we are moving away.

speaking of books, my old, dear friend Kalli (whom I have seen exactly once since her 2006 wedding, I think), tagged me in one of those facebook daily challenge things, with these instructions:

In no particular order, list ten books you love. Pick books that really made an impact and are still on your reading list, even if only now and then. You can post the cover. You don’t have to explain, but nominate people each day to do the same.

perhaps you have seen this interactive list-meme going around on social media yourself. I'm going to  break the rules a bit and not take one whole day per book and not nominate anyone else. if you are reading this and you'd like to do this thing or any other list-meme thing, just do it.

what I will do is list ten books. as I wondered which ten I would pick, I consulted my goodreads archives (where I famously do not rate the books I read unless I love them completely) and found, to my surprise, exactly ten books with five-star ratings on them.

so here they are, roughly in order of when I first read them, with brief notes about why I have found them so worthwhile.

The Picture of Dorian Gray was vivid and sensuous and a little bit mind-twisting with its dancing dichotomies. it impressed my impressionable self so much the first time I read it.

Ella Enchanted is a Cinderella story, and I for some reason just love those. this one is one of the most interesting, playful, and real versions I've ever come across.

Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy, which I have blogged a little bit about previously, and should really re-read as soon as it gets unpacked next week. why did we have to pack up all the books first?

The Actor and the Housewife. Shannon Hale is a treasure. she should blog more often. I related to this book and its characters far more than makes any sense. I wonder what I would think about it upon re-reading.

The Book Thief was as beautiful and touching as any book ever could be. that and its narrator are all I remember about it. also the author has a cool name.

Einstein's Dreams, to quote a past blogpost, is "like the most delightful vacation you ever found yourself enjoying. new places and sights like postcards, bite size and almost (but not really, because there is the next place and the next) over too soon." I also called it "blatantly thought-provoking," which is one of the best things for art to be. I still don't own this book but I wouldn't mind owning it.

Americanah grabbed me in a bookstore one winter. it was gripping. meaningful. the kind of semi-autobiographical story that I have always wanted to write at least half as well as Adichie wrote this one. I don't feel the need to own this book, but I would enjoy re-reading it.

The Interrogative Mood was a gift. predictably, I reveled in it. sure, its form got slightly tiresome... but I loved it anyway. to write a novel of nothing but questions is silly and brilliant.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog came recommended by (and borrowed from?) friend Lizz, I think. honestly I don't remember what struck me so much about it. the ending, probably. I'm very picky about endings, so when endings surprise and delight me somehow, I notice.

Code Name Verity was one of the audiobooks that kept me company during the early months of longdistance-dating-a-fellow-in-Chicagoland. it was beautifully written, sculpted from pure, sparkling narrativium, and just as beautifully performed. the sequel, Rose Under Fire, is rather great too.

three young adult novels, two kind of strange, short experimental things, some classics and classic-ish books, and a couple of semi-autobiographical pieces. ten books. there are handfuls of others I could have chosen for different/better reasons. but for this I let my past self (via goodreads) choose for me.

---

and now, a ridiculous post-script that I've been meaning to blog about for several weeks. it is partially book-related, so it won't feel too out of place at the bottom here, I hope.

you know the Blade Runner film? and how I've always been mildly obsessed with why it was called Blade Runner even though it was based on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

I finally found an answer that mostly-satisfies my strangely tenacious need-to-know-why.

apparently the screen writer stole the title from a totally different script--one by William S. Burroughs, based on an older novel by Alan E. Nourse.

presumably, the screen writer and his colleagues thought this title sounded cooler. but now my questions is why? should I try contacting Mr. Fancher about it? would he remember his decision and why he made it? would his answers, if he did, be in any way satisfying?

I thought for the longest time that it was impossible to know how this weirdness with this random movie title happened. but it isn't.

now I need a new thing to wonder incessantly about.

questions about invisibility and value

this is a fascinating and enlightening and somehow very important thing to note, I think:

"...the platform replaces labor that was previously invisible. We have a hard time figuring out what Facebook actually is because we have a hard time admitting that at least part of what it supplanted is emotional labor—hard and valuable work that no one wants to admit was work to begin with."

it's from an article by journalist Sarah Jeong about why it's such an ordeal to extricate ourselves from facebook once we start letting it connect us to people and groups and events and things.

this particular passage above is not the only thing that has pushed me toward thinking about invisible labor, lately (there was this call for papers last fall, for one thing, and various feminist chatterings on twitter, also). but this has me also asking why we don't want to admit that social/emotional labor is labor at all.

what makes it so difficult for society at large to "count" these things—Jeong lists things like keeping address books up to date, knocking on doors to make invitations to neighbors, and putting together cards to mail out for holidays—as work? do we feel obligated to count them as fun, instead? as leisure or play? is it because the social value resulting from all that work has always been enough to compensate for it, such that the work itself seemed like its own reward in a way? or maybe we feel like categorizing holiday cards and such as work would open up too many wheedling excuses for us not to do all these social-connection-making things anymore?

is it because social-connection-making activities are coded as domestic and therefore feminine and therefore "less important" than work you might go into an office somewhere to do?

even if the answer to that rather loaded question is yes, I am still going to ask why.

invisibility serves a purpose sometimes. it can be an awesome superpower, enabling accomplishments that might not get accomplished otherwise. or so the stories say.

or invisibility can be oppressive and dehumanizing. isolating. life-ruining. 

how do you tell the difference? are there times when it's both at the same time?

has anyone written a superhero story about a lonely, invisible-turning vigilante who is both empowered and crippled by his abilities? probably. I haven't read any H. G. Wells in a long time.

{ green treetops blocking the sun }

when is it valuable and affirming to be noticed, acknowledged, seen, and appreciated? and when is it valuable, even more empowering, not to be seen or noticed at all?

and does someone have to see you doing a thing to value the effort you put into it? is seeing/valuing the results at all the same as seeing/valuing the effort?

this reminds me suddenly of black boxes + related thoughts from Glasgow four years ago. (maybe it's terribly self-involved to enjoy rereading my own writing so much but I really enjoy re-reading that post.) black boxes hide things. sometimes that's useful. sometimes it's frustrating. or, as in this Invisible Bread comic, it's just really weird. 

part of my brain is telling the other part to stop asking questions and think of more concrete examples of this to talk about. I think I will, eventually. but tonight... I just want to wonder about the best ways to crack open black boxes like Facebook or Google, and whether the cracks will break them forever or not. when is the impenetrable blackness of any given magical black-box tool actually essential to the functioning of the tool, and when is it not? is the opacity of a black box correlated in any way with the amounts of labor it might be erasing or replacing? if what functions as a black box to one person is actually pretty transparent to another person, what does that mean? and do we ever black box ourselves and keep our emotional labor hidden on purpose, on accident, or out of some social pressure to keep pretending that it isn't really actually "work" work?

deadly light

we searched out an audio-short-story with which to pass the time on our way to and from Chicago several weeks ago. it was "The Call of Cthulu," by H. P. Lovecraft, streamed on Spotify. it begins with a few lines that I've since thought about over and over again:

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."

I've been writing (in what is shaping up to be chapter 2 of a sure-to-be-marvelous dissertation project) a little bit about what Lovecraft's narrator here describes as a terrible horror--the distant someday when knowledge from every possible corner of the world will finally be pieced together into a comprehensive whole. such a vision is what plenty of people seem to be working toward now. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales boasts that the the Wikipedia project will make it happen. The Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle insists that such a thing is more than possible. in 1926 when "The Call of Cthulu" was written, I expect it didn't seem quite so possible.

despite all the fancy internet-connected technologies that make access to information so incredibly and amazingly simple compared to how past centuries must have done things, I do have rather many doubts about whether access to knowledge could really ever be comprehensive and universal. knowledge isn't quite the same as information, after all. and whether or not it'd be easy to gather up and store some version of all the knowledge any human has ever professed to know, what would that actually look like? and how would one actually interact with it? I have a feeling that human knowledge is so diffuse and multiple and embodied that it can't ever be summed, can't ever be so singular as to be stored in any static form. no matter how interdisciplinary things get, all the kinds of knowledges out there in the world will always be in some way dissociated.

but it is interesting to imagine it differently. to dream for a moment, with Wales and Kahle and Lovecraft, that all the edges might someday match up.

and if they ever did, and if we dared to let ourselves read through the everything, would we really go mad?

or run as fast as we could back into a blissful pool of ignorance?

or both? or neither?

word quartets

in downtown Lafayette, there is this new sculpture-statue-thing. it's tall and shiny. two metal figures on tip-toes are holding an interesting metal version of the city flag.

you can't see it very well in this photo, but their stylized metal thighs have word-shaped cut-outs on them. I will list them for you here and ask you to pay attention to how the list makes you feel.

Trust
Kindness
Love
Believe

if I could format them all vertically, I would. you'll just have to imagine how they look going up and down these metal thighs in all capital letters.

we could put them in this order instead:

Love
Believe
Trust
Kindness

do you have any preference? did you or didn't you cringe a little bit at the lack of parallelism? does it feel different to treat "believe" as the misfit verb in a list of nouns, or "kindness" as the misfit noun in a list of verbs?

now that I've done a smidge of googling research, I have learned that the artist behind this piece is named Robert L. Barnum. the words were chosen by children involved with the Hanna Community Center and they are also the ones who named it "We Rise Above," which is how it is listed here on this list of other local public art.

as much as the inconsistency niggles and pokes at my hyper-educated writerly brain, I of course can't fault children for choosing this particular quartet of words without thinking about which parts of speech they all function within. most people do not automatically think about such things. even if part of my hyper-educated writerly brain thinks they probably should.

but the more I think about this sculpture and is misfit verb and its misfit noun, the more strangely grateful I get about how mismatched the words are. had they all four been straight-up non-ambiguous verbs or nouns, with no funky Venn-diagram of just noun, noun-or-verb, just verb going on, then I wouldn't have stopped to pay that much attention. if you just gave me a list of sappy-sounding nouns like

Trust
Love
Kindness
Belief

then that's all it would be and my allergies to sappiness would have kicked in and dismissed the whole thing.

instead, the funky Venn-diagram that these words presented got me pondering. how interesting it is that love and trust, simple little words, are both noun words and verb words. commandments and descriptors, both. but the other two, they aren't. they have to be one or the other. and it's simple enough to flip the verb believe into a similar one-word noun. not so simple with the noun kindness, though. why is that? probably there are linguistical, etymological word history reasons for which overlapping functions and orthographic representations match up or don't. I haven't looked into that yet.

I walk past this tall, shiny sculpture fairly often. someday it may lose its thought-provokingness for me. but until then the hodgepodge of words stir up lots of lovely questions. is this art speaking imperatively, or narratively? is it reflecting something the artist and his consultants see in the world, or is it praying for something they would like to see? are these virtues the sculpture asks us to admire in the world? to nurture in ourselves? are they efforts and actions we are supposed to take up, or are they knick-knacks and baubles we should collect where we can? or both?

of course it's both, probably. if they'd all been cut out in noun form, that wouldn't mean love and trust would lose their imperative vibes altogether. if they'd all been in verb form, with kindness split into its English infinitive, be kind, that wouldn't stop us from noticing the moments where those verbs swirl and collect around us into warm fuzzies to hold on to. and maybe our parts of speech are only one limited and insufficient way of chopping up language for storage. these four cut-out words have no context, after all. there is no frame for the list that they seem to make up. there is no sentence for them to live in. nothing outside this sculpture of words dictates how one is supposed to read the thing. that makes the hybrid noun-verbiness of half of them even more exciting, almost. you can interpret these words in multiple ways! and the unwritten noun and verb forms of the other half can perhaps haunt this tall, shiny art, hovering in the gaps for anyone who wants to notice them.