completely, partially

my latest LibriVox contribution-- The City of Din, by Dan McKenzie-- surprisingly made its final journey through the prooflistening stage rather quickly this week, and I am pleased to announce that it's been officially catalogued here for all the world to enjoy if they so desire.

the most unique part of this audiobook is that our pug Wesley has a role in it. in the middle of section 2, Mr. McKenzie is discussing whether to categorize dogs as noisy or not, and he re-enacts the inner monologue of a man trying to sleep while a dog barks somewhere out in the neighborhood. rather than boringly intoning the word "bark" myself, I conveniently captured some of Wesley's insistent barks and used those instead. it took a lot of editing work, but I think it was worth it.

LibriVox relies on the Internet Archive for the bulk of its hosting needs. everything on that LibriVox.org page I linked to above is really pulled in from Internet Archive, where it's all displayed a little differently.

the Internet Archive is undeniably awesome. you probably agree, right? I hope so.

unfortunately the organization is dealing with a pretty awful lawsuit at the moment, one that has some terrible implications. this thread from author Cory Doctorow goes over the issues concisely and forcefully. there's been quite a lot of talk about the lawsuit all over twitter, lately. I very much hope that these greedy print publishers don't succeed in wrecking the Internet Archive's plans for facilitating free circulation of digital books. what an awful world it would be if we had to pay greedy corporations for even the most temporary access to any of media at all.

in all my researching and theorizing about the Internet Archive and similar projects, I've more regularly thought of it as what it has named itself-- an archive. a collection. a carefully stored pile of carefully gathered and curated and digitally infrastructured content. 

libraries are that, too. what's the real difference between a library and an archive? well, some archives are a little more closed-off to the public, but other than that, nothing. they are both, like so much else we humans are about, places to keep things.

sometimes I also think about these digital archives as communities, too. they are collections of things--artifacts, manuscripts, whatever... but those collections of things don't just happen without people. that's what my dissertation was all about: people working together to build archives by building tools that help them build and maintain and expand the archives. LibriVox is a really cool example of that.

I have gotten to know some of the other people who work with LibriVox, a tiny bit. some of them I feel like I know from studying the history of the site and listening to all of the old podcast episodes. some I have interacted with more closely on various projects. it would be fun to meet some of them someday, as I've done with other internet friends. who knows if that will happen or not.

two years ago I read the closing sections of this L. Frank Baum story, Phoebe Daring. the project had been initially started on LibriVox in 2015 as a solo, by a reader who worked on dozens and dozens of LibriVox projects but died before she could finish this one. when the community learned what had happened, they opened her project up and ten of us completed the recording and prooflistening work for it.

thinking about that makes me wonder what I'll leave unfinished. who will finish it. ideally I'll have several decades to keep thinking about that question.

this week, as I approached the end of this month of blogging, I kept coming back to the concept of ...well, I guess of incompleteness. but that word feels overly negative. what I was really thinking of were partly-complete things. partly-done, partly-finished. parts. partialities. my mind has been more or less fascinated lately by the idea of everything always being partial.

in some sense, that can be a negative thing. the partial nature of so much can leave me so unsatisfied. so paradoxically full of what isn't there or what I haven't collected.

in another sense it's comforting. there's still more. it isn't over yet. we have some space to add and grow and keep going. that's the side my wondering wants to be on the most.

July, however, will be complete after today. utterly in the past, over, done, gone, irretrievable. and my month of blogging will be, too. that, at least, is something finished. how I'll look back on everything I've posted in another year, or five years, who knows? but from here, it's done. perfect enough because that's what we (the royal we) decide to call it from this precious, precarious vantage point of now.

Were you thinking that those were the words, those upright lines?
those curves, angles, dots?

No, those are not the words, the substantial words are in the
ground and sea,

They are in the air, they are in you.

   -- Walt Whitman, "A Song of the Rolling Earth"

August aspirations

goals, of a sort, for the last two weeks of summer break:

sewing. last weekend I cut out pieces for two sundresses and picked apart a long skirt to transform into a third sundress. I also have some trousers to mend and probably a few other random small projects too.

reading. I'm still working my way through the Audre Lorde collection from the library. I also have five tabs open right now that need the attention of my reading brain. (there are usually much more than five, but I'm trying to be realistic and abandon any that have been open for more than a week; I know deep down I won't get around to them anytime soon after all.) one of those tabs is this article, which I've read already but want to plan on rereading every semester for the rest of time, as a reminder that however lazy or unmotivated students may seem, it's more complicated than that. if there's time, I'll also fit in some more short stories from Tor.com, one of the most useful online venues for new and intriguing short fiction that I've come across.

seeing the Grand Canyon. I haven't visited this landmark since I was fourteen, I think. we're just going to make a day of it. drive two hours north. bring snacks. take photographs. indulge in a moment or two of reverence for nature and its grandeur.

writing. even after this month of blogging-every-day is over, I have chapter revisions to work on for an edited collection on user experience research. I have letters of recommendation to write. there are also a few more editing projects to tidy up in the coming weeks, not to mention syllabi and lesson plans. will there be time for fun writing, too? I hope so.

gaming. I completed my second playthrough of Horizon Zero Dawn not long ago. only one irritatingly difficult hunting task was left incomplete. I'm now working on Detriot: Become Human-- a unique sort of game where almost all the choices you make change how the rest of the game goes. yeah, it's got problematic elements, but it's also thought-provoking and intense, which is interesting to me.

of course at some point I also should probably figure out how I want to arrange my new office-- not that I'll be there that often, since in-person office hours are prohibited this semester-- and make sure I'm as ready as possible for teaching three hybrid face-to-face technical/professional writing courses. it's a lot.

but two weeks is also a lot. fourteen days or so. more than three hundred hours. not counting the hundred-ish I'll spend sleeping, that's an abundance of time. hopefully I end up happy with how I use it all. even if I don't officially accomplish all the things I'm presently imagining I might.

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.

saturday night existentialism

this book, At the Existentialist Cafe: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails, is an excellent book.

it's by a wonderful and engaging writer, Sarah Bakewell. and she also writes romance novels, interestingly.

I finished the book many months ago now. nine of its pages have been successfully dogeared.

the trouble is... I rarely remember which specific passage or paragraph on each dogeared page is the one I most wanted to go back to. so I reread the whole page, searching my memory and the words and waiting for it to click. sometimes, I don't know for sure if I've remembered right at all. sometimes, nothing clicks and I curse my past self for not adding a little pencil mark in the margin to help me out.

in any case, I'm gonna blog today about my best guesses for the quotes I meant to remember from some of those dogeared pages. first up, the most dramatical of them all, on the topic of love:

"If I love you, I don't want to control your thoughts directly, but I want you to love and desire me and to freely give up your freedom to me. Moreover, I want you to see me, not as a contingent and flawed person like any other, but as a 'necessary' being in your world. That is, you are not to coolly assess my flaws and irritating habits, but to welcome every detail of me as though no jot or tittle could possibly be different." (p. 214)

this is glorious and tantalizing. the idea of being utterly necessary, just the way you are, no matter what, to somebody else's world. so romantic and also so unrealistic. in real life, the practicalities of love are so much more difficult.

many of my other quotes here are on the topic of freedom and its paradoxes. there's one each touching on what Jean Paul Sarte, Simone de Beauvoir, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty have to say about it.

"None of this means that I make choices in a completely open field or voice. I am always in some sort of pre-existing 'situation', out of which I must act. I actually need these 'situations', or what Sarte calls 'facticity', in order to act meaningfully at all. Without it, my freedom would only be the unsatisfying freedom of someone floating in space .... Freedom does not mean entirely unconstrained movement, and it certainly does not mean acting randomly. We often mistake the very things that enable us to be free-- context, meaning, facticity, situation, a general direction in our lives-- for things that define us and take away our freedom. It is only with all of these that we can be free in a real sense. / Sarte takes his argument to an extreme point by asserting that even war, imprisonment or the prospect of imminent death cannot take away my existential freedom." (p. 157)

this is frustrating stuff. very familiar, but frustrating at the same time. recognizing that the funnel I feel like I live my life in is actually structuring whatever freedom I do have? not a very comfortable thought. but without it, can I ever really rebel against the funnel and transform my future path into a candy store instead of a funnel?

freedom and control. limits and possibilities. beautiful, ineffable paradoxes. how Bakewell writes about all this is so masterfully smooth. I loved reading this book so much.

"The ambiguous human condition means tireless trying to take control of things. We have to do two near-impossible things at once: understand ourselves as limited by circumstances, and yet continue to pursue our projects as though we are truly in control. In Beauvoir's view, existentialism is the philosophy that best enables us to do this, because it concerns itself so deeply with both freedom and contingency. It acknowledges the radical and terrifying scope of our freedom in life, but also the concrete influences that other philosophies tend to ignore: history, the body, social relationships and the environment." (p. 226)

and then in a section closely following that, Bakewell quotes Merleau-Ponty's note that "The philosopher is marked by the distinguishing trait that he possesses inseparably the taste for evidence and the feeling for ambiguity." and in the next paragraph, she elaborates:

"What Merleau-Ponty is describing here is another kind of 'chiasm'-- an X-like interweaving, this time not between consciousness and world, but between knowledge and questioning. We can never move definitively from ignorance to certainty, for the thread of the inquiry will constantly lead us back to ignorance again. This is the most attractive description of philosophy I've ever read, and the best argument for why it is worth doing, even (or especially) when it takes us no distance at all from our starting point." (p. 241)

I learned about this 'chiasm' concept in Sunday school once upon a time. there were anecdotes about learned, cultured people recognizing a chiasmus as a mark of divinity. the internet tells me that such awe-filled discussion of this literary form in the scriptures I grew up studying goes back to the 1970s. interesting. thinking about chiastic forms and what they can mean, outside of a religious context, is new. expansive.

in the book's last chapter, the discussion of freedom gets pragmatic (or as pragmatic as can be expected for a historical/biographical book on philosophy).

"...freedom may prove to be the great puzzle for the early twenty-first century. In the previous century, I grew up naively assuming I'd see a constant, steady increase in this nebulous stuff through my lifetime, both in personal choices and in politics. In some ways, this has come true. On the other hand, unforeseen by anyone, basic ideas about freedom have been assailed and disputed in radical ways, so that we are now unable to agree what it amounts to, what we need it for, how much of it can be allowed, how far it should be interpreted as the right to offend or transgress, and how much of it we are prepared to give away to remote corporate entities in exchange for comfort and convenience. What we cannot do any longer is take it for granted." (p. 318)

freedom, justice, peace-- what do we say these things are? for whom?

relatedly, I have this twitter thread about how to preserve freedom in the face of authoritarian terribleness bookmarked to read later/soon.

the next few pages I dogeared and remembered more or less why I dogeared them feature an infamous Nazi philosopher, Martin Heidegger. to quote Heidegger is quite often controversial these days. if I were writing a real scholarly paper about anything, I'd very much pause and consider not quoting him-- not giving him any further authority or power in our always-already problematic ivory tower.

for now, I'll put aside the discussion of how and when and why we should or shouldn't separate someone's scholarship from their politics. there is a meaningful discussion to be had there. I may save a slot in my July of blogging to take it up in earnest.

initially I marked these two passages because of their relevance to work, technology, and the way we value human beings. I'm not sure what else to say about them here yet; they give me plenty to think about in terms of thinking and being and material consequences.

"Phenomenology itself is thus threatened by modern humanities challenging, devastating way of occupying the earth. This could lead to the ultimate disaster. If we are left alone 'in the midst of objectlessness', then we ourselves will lose our structure-- we too will be swallowed up into a 'standing-reserve' mode of being. We will devour even ourselves. Heidegger cites the term 'human resources' as evidence of this danger." (p. 183)

the insidious danger of the term 'human resources' reminds me that I still want to write a scathing rhetorical analysis of all the ads for ziprecruiter.com that I hear and cringe at on all the podcasts. someday...

here is the last dogeared page:

"Later Heideggerians, notably Hubert Dreyfus, have written about the internet as the technological innovation that most clearly reveals what technology is. Its infinite connectivity promises to make the entire world store-able and available, but, in doing so, it also removes privacy and depth from things. Everything, above all ourselves, becomes a resource, precisely as Heidegger warned. In being made a resource, we are handed over, not just to other individuals like ourselves, but to an impersonal 'they' whom we never meet and cannot locate." (p. 324)

now, enough writing for this infinitely connected impersonal placelessness of a blog. it's past time for dinner, and there is pizza dough waiting to be pizza-ified and eaten.

thread count (1/1132)

the "twitter thread" as a genre fascinates me. I have so many curious questions about it. when was the first cohesive thread of posts created on twitter? who wrote it and about what?

threaded tweets are a reaction to the restrictions of the platform. it's like adapting the limited microblogging form to serve a longer form of writing. combining a handful of tiny posts into something bigger-- like building a tower out of toy blocks.

twitter added an official thread-making feature to its platform not that long ago. but threads (in the computer/internet sense) have been a thing for way longer than that. although etymonline doesn't mention this newer usage--perhaps it's too new-- in its word history of "thread," Merriam Webster does, interestingly. I guess regular dictionaries have a stronger incentive to keep up with the times than etymological dictionaries do.

I learned the internet meaning of thread on online bulletin boards, where a thread is an asynchronous conversation contained under a heading within a specific discussion forum. multiple people can post to a forum thread. everyone's replies are timestamped, linkable, quotable, reply-to-able, and it's all very organized.

a twitter thread is different. sure, the usual "any string of posts-and-replies" does technically constitute a twitter thread... but that's not really what anyone is talking about when they use "twitter thread" as a specific noun. any old string of posts and replies on twitter is more likely to be referred to as a conversation or an exchange. the connotation of "a thread" (often with an introductiony colon, like "a thread:") on twitter involves a string of posts written by a single author, on some focused topic, typically (but not always) within a short span of time. there can be replies, but they feel separate from the twitter thread itself.

so if we want to delineate the twitter thread genre, what are its requirements and hallmarks? and what are its conventions? every genre has conventions-- sometimes very strong ones. memos and emails should have subject lines, letters can have letterhead, and academic articles have references lists at the end. twitter threads have their own rules, too.

we expect a twitter thread to include at least three tweets linked together by topic, structure, and the platform's formatting. there are usually twice that many, if not more. sometimes there is a narrative feel to the thread, and other times it's more list-like. often the thread is announced and introduced as such in the first post, whether or not the ensuing thread is planned out or more off-the-cuff. at the end, especially if the thread has been shared repeatedly and garnered a lot of attention, the author may add a concluding postscript with a link to somewhere readers can donate or otherwise compensate the author's writing work in some way.

but the really interesting and evolving convention I want to talk about is the numbering. there are different ways to number the individual tweets in your twitter thread. in my experience, the numbers most often come at the end of each post, as in the following variations:

[content of tweet...] 1/12

[content of tweet...] (1/12)

(when the total number of tweets is known at the outset)

[content of tweet...] 1/

[content of tweet...] 1/x
[content of tweet...] (1)

(when the total number of eventual tweets is not known-- this mode seems more common)

I've been collecting twitter thread examples (a whole sixteen of them!) for a while now in anticipation of exploring these numbering conventions a bit more. the end-of-the-tweet positioning is the most common numbering style I've seen, overall. but it's not the only one. on rare occasion, the numbers may come first. plenty of threads don't including numbering at all.

so I have sixteen tabs-worth of twitter threads open next to this blogpost draft right now (I'll link them all at the bottom, pseudo-reference-list-style), and while such a random sample of course can't be truly representative of all the twitter threads that have been created in recent months, they at least give me the beginnings of some general insights into twitter thread numbering conventions.

my main finding? the convention of numbering the tweets in a thread on twitter is dying.

at the very least, it's become a marker of formality, more than a useful signal to readers about the order or length of the composition. numbers seem to be less important to a thread's legibility now that the twitter platform supports and displays threaded tweets so smoothly for most people.

I'm surprised by this, for some reason.

but of these sixteen example threads, only 4 include fully numbered tweets (3 at the end as shown above, and 1 at the beginning). another 10 forego numbering altogether, and 2 include numbering for content within the thread, but not as a marker for each separate tweet.

so there you have it. some really, really informally-gathered data about a quirky little internet genre.

it's interesting, right? it is to me. twitter is a culturally powerful and maddeningly ephemeral discursive space. how conventions emerge and spread and morph a little over time is fascinating in any genre or medium. looking at how it seems to be working on twitter helps me think of twitter as not so special. sure, it's different, but it's mostly made of humans just the same way email chains and academic journals are.

and speaking of platforms and their power...author Robin Sloan makes a good argument here (and a cleverly presented one at that) about how social media could work vs. how it currently works.
 

as promised, the twitter threads I referenced in this random exploration of mine, listed here in chronological order. I'll add a note that linking them here like this takes them out of context. they may or may not make as much sense from outside the constant/endless/fast-paced nature of twitter as experienced by those who spend too much time scrolling around within it.

research-based lessons on ending police violence

thoughts on how women get written out of history

how to save the USPS

linguistics and news headlines

on white silence

on the enduring nature of white supremacy

being anti-racist and avoiding burnout at the same time

pixel art and crossstitch

on voting differently vs. persuading others to vote differently

linguistics and the general horribleness of college sports

teaching students how to format memos

real grammar is very messy

reflections on how colleges are marketed

on white fragility (the book and adjacent mild uproar)

how to fight back against crazy new legislation concerning international students

commentary on material vs. symbolic crises

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.

because poetry.

there's a scene in John Green's latest book, Turtles All The Way Down, where two teenagers sit next to an outdoor in-ground pool and the young man's simple bits of poetry, spoken off-the-cuff under the stars, seem to successfully unseat the young woman's (the protagonist's) spiraling, paralyzing anxiety.

it was a very lovely scene. and it made me think back to a headline I'd seen just a day or so earlier: "How Doctors Use Poetry."

upon first clicking that link to that headline, I read as far down as these few lines:

"...reciting poetry engages the primary reward circuitry in the brain, called the mesolimbic pathway. So does music—but, the researchers found, poetry elicited a unique response. While the mechanism is unclear, it’s been suggested that poetic, musical, and other nonpharmacologic adjuvant therapies can reduce pain..."

and then, a week or so later, I finally came back to read the whole thing. and eventually look up the cognitive neuroscience study the author references. I wanted to blog about this. because poetry.

because the idea of communication beyond the 'restricted' language of 'science' is interesting. because feelings and power and pathos and transformation feel important.

perhaps something about this time of year makes poetry feel especially necessary. seasons changing. colder, darker times pressing in upon us. stresses of the semester intensifying...

I often think I should read and savor more poetry more regularly. but sometimes it doesn't seem accessible or convenient. making space for poems isn't always easy.

our lovely local poets here at NSU have offered me an excuse for savoring plenty of poetry lately though. they're participating in a month-long poetry marathon to support a small indie non-profit literary press. one poem every day, for almost all of October. I like it. maybe there's something about knowing that poems have been written under a time constraint that makes them especially delicious and interesting.

almost all of these poems evoke some kind of emotion. some ask more patience of me than others. I like the ones that make me feel pried open, or guided dot by dot around a gallery of newness, or plunged into a deep ocean.

all the poems of the 30/30 poetry-fest are on one webpage, which makes it difficult to send you to the ones I like the most. you'll have to search a little bit for them. some of my favourites so far:

• A Study in Time and Space / by Rebecca Macijeski
• God owns a carwash in Iowa / by Ally Schwam
• Two Heads / by Karen Greenbaum-Maya
• Camelot’s Redemption / by Chad W. Lutz
• If I could make this easy / by Jen Stewart Fueston

and there are still 15 more days of poems to be written! if you're into it, you can donate to the press and incentivize our lovely local poets this month, here and/or here.

more poetries, previously:

• Emerson
• my littlest sister  
• Whitman
• Cummings, twice
• Kay
• Rilke 

also, all of this poetical literary mashup film by Yulin Huang is very cool.

background signal

what if it were illegal to yell?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

among other small beauties

a Monday. the first Monday of winter break, post-finals-week.

everything seems quite disorganized. I should be writing, revising, Librivoxing. my to-do list is a frayed tangle, pulling me in a dozen unproductive directions.

I should be writing. drafting a proposal for this and thinking of ideas to submit to an edited collection, prepping course materials for next semester's class-- English 203: Introduction to Research for Professional Writing. I have articles to finish for submission to this journal and maybe that journal.

and I should be finding time to listen to sections of this audiobook and this backlog of podcast episodes. I want to be reading and recording sections of this collection about libraries, and then the narrator's liens for this play, and eventually all of this (except probably not the footnotes).

and then when am I going to stretch out in a warm, quiet room to read or finishing reading Les Miserables, which I got for Christmas at least two Christmases ago, and The Myth of Sisyphus, which I'm still in the middle of, and How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis?

when when when?

I'm feeling paralyzed by it all, and hence this frenzied blogpost. a selfish little piece of writing that I can get done in half an hour or so, and not stress very much about.

earlier today, browsing the pretty social media land of snapshots that is Instagram, I scrolled onto this simple, homey little image from knitting expert Bonnie Sennott. seeing it-- this beautifully neat, orderly, hand-made piece of art, part of a series she's been working on all year, stitch by stitch, day by day--made me so out-of-nowhere happy. I was so deeply sloshingly at-sea happy for a moment, to glimpse that careful, beautiful thing from inside my tangle of unorganized, unmotivated, unfinishedness.

my tangles of writing and reading and listening will take some time and some dancing with entropy. I'll get somewhere with it all, little by little, day by day.