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.

decades and novelty

there were exactly ten other blogposts on this blog with the word decade in them, before I wrote this one. is that serendipitous and random, or what?

once it is published, this newest post will ruin the nice resonance, but ah well.

just before the year switched from 19 to 20 last month, friend Chris and I swapped book lists in honor of a new decade. ten books published any time at all, but that we'd encountered and loved at some point within the last ten years.

here are mine, with links to any previous mentions/reviews:
A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf (2017)
Americanah, Chimamada Adichie (2018)
Pastoralia, George Saunders
the Prospero Lost series, L. Jagi Lamplighter
Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn (2013)
Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel (2015)
The Likeness, Tana French
After Method, John Law (2016)
Lines: A Brief History, Tim Ingold (2015)
Syllabus, Lynda Barry (2015)

and I may as well list a few close-ish runners-up too:
The Shape of Design, Frank Chimero (2015)
Spinster: Making a Life of Own's Own, Kate Bolick (2016)
Bats of the Republic, Zachary Thomas Dodson (2016)

all these books stand out against so many other books for usually a similar reason: novelty. 

sometimes, especially with the non-fiction, the novelty comes from an incredibly unique, expansive, and new-to-me set of ideas. more often it's channeled with a vibrant, undeniably rich and present voice--like with the Adichie and Saunders and French. with the Dodson book, it was quirky art and formatting.

if you are in need of good books to read, all these are awesome. (though the Law and Ingold are terribly academic. fair warning.)

sometime soon perhaps I'll blog about my current reading. bell hooks. Sarah Bakewell. the Tournament of Books is coming up soon, too...


in the meantime: may the decades ahead keep us all stocked up on delicious, expansive novelty, with just enough sameness underneath for us to stand on.

{ in the mountains somewhere near Denver; I love how the sky almost looks like a pathway }

briefly, for now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

unread and half-remembered

everyone is talking about commencement speeches, it seems, and that got me curious about who the speaker must have been at Utah State University's spring 2006 commencement. in my searching I found this handy archive of the past 12 years of commencements, but there's no speaker listed for my year. I wonder why not.

I wonder many things. including what is this blogpost is going to be about, ultimately. there are various notes here in front of me now. links to this and that, references I half-remember adding when I opened this draft. now I'm sitting down on this mid-week evening to connect them all up with words. or at least try to. what may end up happening is that I replace all the things I thought I might blog about with completely new things, now that I'm here. such is my impetuous yet meandering writing-process.

I have not yet read any Neil Postman, but his name has been coming to my attention over and over and over again in recent days. he wrote a book called Amusing Ourselves to Death. Brooke Gladstone of NPR wrote a book of her own using Postman's work as a springboard. the Richard Lanham book I finally finished the other day quoted Postman, too. Gladstone and Lanham take very different approaches, using their very different lenses (pop journalism and literary philosophy, respectively). from these two second-hand servings of Postman's book, I see a theme of worrying about too much silliness + worrying about not enough silliness. nervous hand-wringing that our culture will stagnate into everything bland and flat and human-less. more nervous hand-wringing that our culture will dissolve into nothing at all meaningful or deep or serious.

probably, a little bit of both will happen. it'll all get mixed together and nobody will really know where to draw the lines between what's stagnant, cold, heartless and artless and what's only buzzy, frothy, sugary air bubbles and useless. it most likely depends too much on who you are.

Mr. Postman's title reminds me of another book's title: Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace. I started reading a copy half-borrowed from friend Tony. I say "half-borrowed" because I don't think I ever took it out of Tony's house--just read it while I was there dog-sitting the pugs several summers ago. according to my goodreads archive, where Infinite Jest is (perhaps fittingly?) still listed under "currently reading," I first opened the book on August 3, 2014.

someday I'll get back to it. I did finish that Lanham treatise after starting it even longer ago.

I'm sure Amusing Ourselves to Death and Infinite Jest would resonate rather grandly, were I to read them together. have any of you read them both? what were they like? do they talk to each other interestingly?

so many books I haven't read. did I mention yet this Ben Terrett fellow is posting reviews of books he's never read and never will read? with pictures? it seems a cool thing to do.

so many books I'm in the middle of reading. and non-books, too. this, for example, seems intriguing, at least from the twitter commentary and the first three sentences: "What It's Like to Use an Original Macintosh in 2017."

and a bunch of articles like this one over here.

well, I guess this blogpost is about mostly books and about the immortality of cultural crises. with a little dash of possible subtext about change writ large, and how we bolster each other for such changes in moments marked by speeches and such.

and only two or three of my original inspirational jottings for this post have been clipped out, to be saved for something else later on. there.

one: mushrooms and media mail

today is April. new month. new rules.

last month, a mere two weeks and a bit ago, I was exploring Kentucky and taking too many photos of pretty mushrooms on fallen logs. I still haven't transferred most of my photographs into any useful place, but I'll probably make a flickr album sometime. eventually. it will be mostly photographs of trees and mushrooms.

last month, just yesterday, the Tournament of Books ended. I haven't blogged even at all as much about the Tournament of Books as I should have. I haven't blogged at all about the times I randomly say to clerks at bookstores and librarians at libraries, "have you heard of the Tournament of Books? check it out." so far none of these strangers has responded with any recognition whatsoever. so I'm going to keep bringing it up to these book-adjacent people until everyone knows about it. it is a thing worth knowing about.

the finalists this year were both among the pile of books (and cookies) that dear, dear Patti sent to me the other week. she, ambitious soul, made time to read all sixteen of the contestants in this year's tournament. I've still only read one (Dept. of Speculation) and snippets of three others (The Bone Clocks before the library reclaimed it, Annhiliation until the semester got even crazier, and All the Light We Cannot See so far in very tiny bits, at bedtime).

I very much want to read Station Eleven now. it was the champion, the winner of the prize-rooster. the judges voted 15 to 2. wow.

once I read these few books--unless they are the breathtakingly, insidiously, unavoidably soul-firing kind that I might daydream about reading to my children someday--I will give them away. keeping books is not my style. friend Gina already has dibs on All the Light We Cannot See. I owe that Chris fellow a book or two or ten, I know. and who else, I wonder, would like a share of this handmedown book chain I will be starting...? I hope the books themselves will suggest future readers to me. it will be fun to find them homes among my many book-loving acquaintances and friends.

“libidinal multiplicity” is a cool phrase?

this handy borrowed image here is my reaction to the section of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble we read this week for my Postmodernism seminar.

and this blogpost, the one you're reading here, is a slightly smoothed over and abridged version of the reading response I posted to our class forum. yes, I posted it under this very title. the phrase "libidinal multiplicity" is from this little chunk of Gender Trouble:

For Kristeva, the semiotic expresses that original libidinal multiplicity within the very terms of culture, more precisely, within poetic language in which multiple meanings and semantic non-closure prevail. In effect, poetic language is the recovery of the maternal body within the terms of language, one that has the potential to disrupt, subvert, and displace the paternal law.

see why my brain is crying Escher?

I know Butler and her theory is purposefully difficult. this section (and lots of this week's readings, actually), so crammed with according to so-and-so, and she says and he believes, and for this person, and if we accept that then, and allegedly etc., is live intertextuality. so exciting. Butler references Foucault’s “matrices of power” and seems to surrender to the fact that we are always participating in them, somehow. she picks apart Julia Kristeva's theories relentlessly, resigning everyone, much like Richard Rorty seems to do in his “What Can You Expect from Anti-Foundationalist Philosophers?” piece, to a world where everything is socially constructed and nothing else makes any reachable sense. In Rorty’s words “We anti-foundationalists have no hope of substituting non-social constructs for social constructs; we just want to substitute our social constructs for theirs” (726).

Dr. Salvo asked us, earlier, whether or not the articles and excerpts this week were going to cohere. in my notes I have tried tracing behind Butler’s complaints about the circular self-defeating nature of Kristeva's arguments. it's not easy. I am distracted by the words. libidinal. cathexis. semiotic. repression. ontological. circular.

as I ponder the word “circular,” and how many assumptions and perspectives and arguments about the world seem inescapably circular, I also let myself entertain appreciative thoughts about how satisfying circles can be. “to come full circle” in a story or a presentation or an experience always feels so right, and fitting, and complete. maybe even… coherent? I’m not sure this is anything like what Dr. Salvo is really asking, but the noticing of circular constructs seems like a theme of sorts to me.

these two Kenneth Bruffee pieces I had read before. the bibliographic essay on "Social Construction, Language, and the Authority of Knowledge" has been especially useful in previous composition theory classes. Bruffee implies that knowledge is a social artifact and asserts that because of this, collaborative learning and the synergy of working together = awesomeness. he makes an especially bold point about better conversations leading to better thoughts and then to better writing. I am not so sure about this. Richard Rorty, also dealing with authority and language, touches on and troubles a similar-ish idea. to Rorty, vocabulary matters. but he also points out what he sees as a virtue of his anti-foundationalist pragmatism: that “pragmatism doesn't provide much of a jargon. So it is hard for devotees of pragmatism to hypnotize themselves into thinking that by reciting the jargon they are changing the world” (725). however... just one page later he admits that the particular ways we talk about ourselves and our potential can be way rhetorically powerful. this latter comment seems more in tune with what Bruffee is saying, too: “I see no better political rhetoric available than the kind that pretends that 'we' have a virtue even when we do not have it yet. That sort of pretense and rhetoric is just how new and better 'we's' get constructed” (726).

that reminds me of the time I wrote this.

we are not only creating a world. we are creating the we that lives in it, too.

interesting.

inhale envy

Saturday I was out running errands (legitimize the new car, donate all those excess clothes, pick the last two zucchini from the garden plot) and had a few moments to kill in between places of business that open at 8:30am on weekends and stores that didn't open until 10:00. Barnes and Noble presented itself, conveniently in between these times, and I wandered in to browse.

my favourite shelves in bookstores are the ones with the blank books. there's only so long you can gush over those, though, so I also explored the games aisles and the news aisles and the clearance bins. there were tempting boxes of chocolate in the clearance bins... but I was only there to kill time, not spend any money. I'm still subsisting on the tail end of tiny slash nonexistent summer paychecks, so I'm putting off as much spending as possible until next month.

my other favourite shelves are the ones with new books. Barnes and Noble has one of these too, perpendicular to the coffee-dispensing section of the store.

I picked up and perused the first pages of a little paperback with a yellow-pea-coated girl on the cover. white block letters, out-of-focus trees in the background. it was the title that caught my eye. The Opposite of Loneliness. Marina Keegan. Introduction by Anne Fadiman.

I must admit I didn't remember any of that information over the weekend. I didn't remember what it was called or what it looked like or how it was bound. all I remembered was the twist that jumped out from the middle of that glowing Introduction by Anne Fadiman, and the reason I put the book down.

but in order to write about that, I needed to remember all the other details. an isolated, poignant twist with no detailed context wouldn't quite be a story worth telling, would it?

as anyone else would have in this forgetful situation, I turned to the world's favourite (or least favourite?) external memory aid slash search algorithm.

these are the words I ventured to feed into the search box:

writing student dies dead student publishes collection

and there I've given away the whole sad, slow, sinking, twist, so there may not be much hope of painting for you the sense of holding a lovely book of essays in your hands, of reading along about the quirks and dreams and pleadings of its author, starting to wonder, to envy, and feeling even a bit anxious to skim through this Introduction and taste the insides of this collection--to traipse right into the essays this student of Anne Fadiman's must have had such writerly fun drafting and polishing...

...and then realizing, without knowing why it took you so long, that Anne Fadiman's past tense was is not the regular, innocent past tense was.

I snapped the book shut and half-tossed it back on its shelf, not even bothering to straighten it up with its fellow copies.

her last Yale Daily News column comes up first in the search results.

a Huffington Post eulogy-esque review (or is it more a review-esque eulogy? I'm not sure) is second.

I'm not sure what made me so suddenly give up on that shiny new book. maybe, after hearing so much praise and promise, it seemed unfair. maybe the praise and promise seemed pasted-on and obligatory to me, too thick, once I knew their recipient wasn't around anymore. I felt cheated, disbelieving. maybe I couldn't swallow the implications of envying a talented but tragically dead Yale graduate.

foreshadowy snippets

next thursday I'll be more than halfway to Minneapolis. there is a conference. once there, I will present something (the something I didn't quite get around to blogging about in this post). I will hopefully meet some other fascinating scholars who share my geeky interest in copyright/authorship/ownership/remix/etc. I even have plans to sneak into blog-friend Gina's studio and say hello, if I can (did you know she's writing a book? it looks very lovely).

as seems usual at these times when I have so much going on and so many preparations to make in the run up to a small journey, my list (pile? collection? backlog?) of things I haven't yet blogged about but very much ought to is expanding beyond control.

I could make an exceedingly random photo essay using some of the photos currently saved in my blog-drafts file. that might be interesting.... but I think the photos deserve their own less-random accompanying text. forcing them into one crazy blogpost together is not what I want to do with them.

what I do want to do with them is...something else. maybe I don't know what that something else is yet, since presumably if I did, I would not have so many unfinished blog-drafts piling up. there are too many ideas for blogging. and I don't always remember all the ideas well enough or long enough to get back to them and make them fully intelligible to other humans. if I were better at remembering, and/or deciding, and/or writing in my sleep, this pile of drafts might be smaller and my blog might also be, on the whole, more interesting.

one of these old saved drafts (from mid-2011, says the blogger timestamp) has had (for who knows how long) nothing in it but the following quoted material on the subject of false memories. mid-2011, I should note, was a little while before Jonah Lehrer went and ruined his career by making up things and being lazy. he has, since that whole scandal two years ago, lost much of my respect and largely disappeared from the public eye. blogger and I kept this quote around anyway. today I've come back to it and now it is no longer languishing as a lonely little draft.

revisiting the quote and its link of reference, I was a little surprised to see that Wired has so far sustained not only this, but all the rest of Lehrer's old columns as well.

"A memory is only as real as the last time you remembered it," he writes. but that's not the beginning. the piece starts with a rambly story about drinking Coke at a football game. it isn't his story to tell, though. it's not his memory--it's totally fake. apparently "we can’t help but borrow many of our memories from elsewhere," and "This idea, simple as it seems, requires us to completely re-imagine our assumptions about memory. It reveals memory as a ceaseless process, not a repository of inert information."

processes. mm. I like thinking about things as processes. the never-ending kind are the most attractive, for some reason.

Lehrer goes on about memory and marketing. who knows why I saved this whole excerpt for my blog way back in mid-2011. today it still speaks to plenty of my own half-formed ideas on narrative power and cognitive malleability.

It’s the difference between a “Save” and the “Save As” function. Our memories are a “Save As”: They are files that get rewritten every time we remember them, which is why the more we remember something, the less accurate the memory becomes. And so that pretty picture of popcorn becomes a taste we definitely remember, and that alluring soda commercial becomes a scene from my own life. We steal our stories from everywhere. Marketers, it turns out, are just really good at giving us stories we want to steal.

stealing and inventing... honesty and accuracy... "borrowing" and "forgetting" original source material. hmmm. falsified memories, fabricated quotations? oh the foreshadowy connections we might want to draw between the words this talented science writer is using, the themes he is dancing with, and his eventual semi-tragic, very disappointing downfall.

in my drafts file, two additional words accompany the pasted set of quotes from Jonah Lehrer's old Wired article. those words are "graven images."

I have no clue what I was thinking when I added them to that tiny seed of a blogpost idea.

I have a few clues about some of my other standing drafts. some of them wouldn't be so hard to flesh out into something useful, if I'd just sit down and write.

there are photos of:

• piecrust (filled with cheese, noodles, spinach)
• a stack of textbooks from last fall (English 680: digital studio)
• important Texas landmarks (the Alamo and the capitol building)
• a stand of trees in the middle of Idaho
• art and architecture from Chicago
• a box of yarn (mostly shades of pink)

there are also scrambled snippety notes about desire and calculus, about teaching and failure, disciplinarity, technological shifts, and the Management of Digital Rights. I want to blog about secret codes and the meaning of The Period Store and informally conducted surveys. there is a draft containing only the words "decidedly analog," and someday I'll figure out what to write about that will fit that title.

un-rerun

these are my folders full of sketches. (I want to say folderfuls. like handfuls or bucketfuls or something. can we make folderfuls a thing? okay, cool.)

fat, overstuffed, manila folderfuls. I am pretty sure this is most of them. others might be scattered around various other notebooks or piles, but these here constitute the closest thing to a sketch archive that this disorganized amelia girl keeps. the sketches are mainly sorted according to the size and shape of the paper they were drawn on. it would of course make more sense to categorize the things by date or by theme, but I just have this feeling they'd take up too much space that way. they take up enough space already. 

plenty of these things have been digitized at this point. don't ask me which ones. don't ask me when.

there are too many. I have been blogging one every Sunday since 2009.

the digitized versions don't weigh anything... I don't think... (or do they? do stored gigabytes technically have any mass?)

but as I wondered how much the paper-and-ink collection might weigh, I realized that I had the tools with which to answer that wondering.

my little kitchen scale says the whole pile weighs eight pounds and almost twelve ounces. there are entire human newborn babies that don't weigh quite that much. and these are only most of my accumulated sketches. I wonder how many sheets of paper are really in this huge pile. I'm not going to count them though.

there is an almost-memory I keep thinking about, from somewhere in my almost-tween years, when I was a young girl scout. mum and I were visiting neighbors, hawking cookies. I noticed all the similarities in every doorstep conversation, every description of the caramel-nut-cluster Juliettes. I may have even commented, in a clueless, judgey, childlike way, on how silly it seemed for this articulate parent of mine to be so, so tiresomely repetitive.

this memory (half re-upholstered with inaccuracies after all this time, I'm sure) adds to the shame I feel about having eight pounds of sketches to choose from and yet redundantly posting at least a handful of them more than once. as if someone might have missed them the first time. as if I couldn't bear the thought of those particular sketches not being seen by as many eyes as possible. as if the internet is in need of even more multiples of even more images of mediocre quality. none of these as ifs are true. I am not worried about my silly sketches being missed or being lonely. I have no excuse at all for littering my dear blog with duplicates. as yet un-remedied proof of my carelessness is openly available here in exhibits 1A, 1B, 2A, 2B, 3A, and 3B. and there have been more cases; sometimes I do catch them and replace the repeats before too much time goes by. but who knows how many I have yet to notice.

tiresome repetition is all in the eyes and ears of the beholder though, really, which is a thing I recognize much more maturely now than I ever did as a not-quite-tween-year-old. if the doorsteps are new and the neighbors lucky enough to be unspoiled by your cookie-spiel, you probably don't need to worry, no matter how clueless your selectively-perceptive daughter might be.

the internet is not a series of separate doorsteps. this blog makes a very different and less forgiving context than a neighborhood, I think. reposting stuff--even if from bouts of inattentive blogpost scheduling, and even if my distracted, forgetful brain does give the stuff a new title--feels intolerably lazy. I might owe my tiny audience here an apology or two. or my tiny audience may not have noticed, since one random ink sketch per week most likely doesn't count as high-priority web content.

nevertheless: I am disappointed in my distracted, forgetful self. one day I'll automate the sunday scribble posts entirely, and then things like this won't keep happening. 

scraps of life and truth and such

last week I was losing sleep over a ridiculous little essay about Plato's take on Socrates' take on a mysterious woman named Diotima's take on our deepest, most irrepressible human instincts and motives. that Plato buries his opinions three layers deep in this dialogue probably means something interesting, but I didn't focus on that. I took the words on their own and teased them apart into a giant fraying mess of ideology and metaphor. and then I tried to weave that mess into four thoughtful pages of inexact philological interpretation. maybe this isn't true for everyone else, but when my writerly self is losing sleep over such things, those things usually read like overly-obvious watered-down drivel.

I decided to title this four pages of watered-down drivel "A Supreme and Treacherous Pursuit: Creativity and the Endlessly Cyclical Quest for Immortality," which reads like what it is: a quite wordy and slightly pompous title. I like the contrast there hiding right in the space where Supreme and Treacherous seem to overlap a little. our many grand ideals, so lofty and pure-seeming--how often do they betray us, or turn out not to be so lofty after all?

whether I found whole premise of my essay hiding there in that overlap too, or whether I am only trying to cram my premise by merciless force into the space I thought maybe might be big enough, I am not sure. re-reading the essay now, one week later, lets me see, along with a few pesky typographical mistakes, that it might not be so greatly watered-down as it seemed at 2:29 a.m. the other night.

if you haven't ready any Plato lately, there's a handy translation of the Symposium here for you. the section I tore apart for this class, Diotima's second-hand ramblings on Love and Beauty, as reported to the gathered party by Socrates, come in about two-thirds down. what struck me about this section was its odd emphasis on creative (and procreative) processes.

immortality and endless copies... are those things the same? if we design the technology to make copies of ourselves and our things forever, will we have somehow unlocked the fountain of youth?

I don't quite ask those questions in the essay. I only had four pages. another bit I didn't end up having room for was this tangent into popular biology or genetics or whatever field it is. I wrote and scribbled and excised the following:

This deeply-rooted and almost irrepressible need for continued existence brings to mind Richard Dawkins' allegory of genes and memes. As human genes desire to perpetuate themselves via sexual reproduction, so ideas might be said to desire a similar avenue toward immortality. Dawkins famously introduces this concept in The Selfish Gene, saying,

“Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passes it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain. […] When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell.” (192)

what would Plato think, seeing me compare him to this raving evolutionary biologist fellow? who knows? I think it works though, even if just barely. there's something in us that seems to be forever stretching to get out, to reach farther, to be more. maybe it comes from Plato's unchanging Form of Beauty or from the stardust in our DNA. I'm not Plato and I'm not an evolutionary biologist either. what do I know?

just for randomness, I'm throwing in a handful of excerpted and carefully un-contextualized sentences that actually did make it into my wordily titled conference paper. I can't decide if they sound better or worse or more or less watery without all the quotes from Plato and associated criticisms stitching them together.

Our desires, which spur us toward the good and beautiful, are themselves spurred by this yearning for an identity and influence beyond the limits of our own. 

To be mortal almost by definition involves ceaseless wanting. 

The desire for immortality prompts a unique and paradoxical creative journey: supreme in the sense that it leads us to ever greater and purer understanding, yet treacherous in its demands for never-ending, Sisyphean progress. 

Somewhere between strength and weakness, between good and bad, progress and learning take place. Desire and pursuit flourish in these middle spaces, spurred by elements on both sides. 

To begin, we must realize and appreciate the times when we are not so ignorant as to have no desire for wisdom, but neither so wise as to have no room for learning. We must remain somewhat stranded between mortality and eternity, in order to sustain the potential for unlimited growth. The processes of meaningful creativity involve recognizing both the inevitability as well as the irrelevance of limitations to this transformative work.

I sound like such a grad student.

rearranging vowels and spices

if I may share a confession (of sorts) concerning my occasional absentmindedness--

I too often copy recipes without bothering write down their titles.

in my fat yellow folder of recipes, you can find lists of ingredients and instructions all over the place. if those lists are in my handwriting, there's a 87.4% chance there is no name at the top, and you'll have to read in patient puzzlement before you can even make a guess as to what these instructions are supposed to result in. here is an example:

can anyone guess what foodstuff we're after here? maybe I should offer a prize if anyone does.

titles or titlelessness aside, the way I transcribe recipes, whether from books or blogs or wherever, is a little bit unique. at least I don't think I've seen anyone else write a recipe the same way. my usual approach involves a list of ingredients, attended by some carefully layered sets of brackets. sometimes the brackets are curlier than others. you can see this in the sample recipe above, as well. the brackets and the instructions vary greatly in placement and notation. it might be "} combine" around the 4 cups flour and ½ teaspoon cayenne, or it might be "} whisk together" around the 1 large egg and 6 tablespoons water. these lists and brackets amount to a strange kind of shorthand, and I admit sometimes it fails to make sense to my three-months-later self. but then other times it works out just fine (upon reflection, it seems that the key difference is the size of the paper upon which I'm trying to cram all the information I need. paper size is for some reason fairly crucial to the level of clarity).

as I pondered the weirdnesses of this transcription method, a quote popped into my head, from deCerteau and Giard in The Practice of Everyday Life.

 “...the study of cognitive processes shows that new information is received and assimilated, that is, becomes appropriable and memorizable, only when the person acquiring it succeeds in putting it into his or her own form, in making it his or her own by inserting it into conversation, into usual language, and into the coherenecies that structure his or her previous knowledge. Failing to pass through this stage, new information will remain fragile and at any moment likely to be forgotten, distorted, or contradicted.” (253)

I find this thought quite applicable here. of course it makes sense that reincarnating things is one way you really learn them. to rewrite, re-organize, and re-interpret instructions, cooking and/or whichever kind, is an important step. reading them is completely inadequate if you want them to actually teach you anything. you've got to use them for something. assimilate them. wire them into your head and make them part of you.

I've done this kind of thing before. surely most of us have, probably without thinking about it much. recipes are just the most common example in my little life. there's also the slippers pattern.

my littlest sister pointed me to this pattern, one she has printed out and annotated and used to make lovely slippers for herself and all her greatest fans for years and years. after having her teach me all the right stitches again and again, I finally attempted the pattern myself.

one of the very first thoughts I had looking at all those long strings of "ch 1 and 1 sc in first st, 2 sc in next st, 1 sc in next 9 sts" was: I want to translate this mess into something more familiar. since that first thought, I have become gradually more and more fluent in the vowelless dialect of crochet patterns. but still. I think if I invented this art, I'd invent different abbreviations for it.

not everyone does this same kind of drastic restructuring with the instructions they use. maybe you are more likely to print off the blogpost or just bring it up on your smart phone while you work. but even without re-writing, we all interpret and re-interpret the stuff we read. the way I interpret and transcribe a recipe or a pattern for a scarf is just my own way of fitting new knowledge into "the coherencies that structure [my] previous knowledge." another cool thing is that the addition of new knowledge will probably change the previous structures, and that will have an effect on how all the future knowledge gets added.

it would be cool to study how people do this in other ways, or in other media, perhaps. does my readership have any thoughts? is there work that you do or ways that you've noticed your own transformation of new-to-you information? do you take patterns or how-tos or maps or instructions and rewrite them, re-frame them, or re-organize them?

reeling

my review of Kenneth Goldsmith's Uncreative Writing was published last week in The Journal of Electronic Publishing. it's nestled very nicely into the bottom of their latest issue. this will count as my second official academic publication. if I don't die of teaching freshman English or procrastinating research proposals, there should be more of them, someday.

in other news, I submitted an abstract of my food photography research paper (from Visual Rhetoric last spring) to the Annual Arts and Humanities Graduate Student Research Conference, which will be happening this month... but my project was not selected for inclusion. ah well.

I've also worked up a short one-act playscript for the theatre department. every spring, they put on a series of one-act plays and call it the Raider Red’s One-Act Play Spectacular. that's RROAPS for short, apparently. there was a call for scripts thrown out in our campus email announcements, and I felt like responding, so I did. we'll see what happens. many pre-emptive thanks to friends Chris, Tim, Nic, Cathy, Mel, Morgan, Zach, Allison and Sarah for their praise, feedback, creative readings/interpretations, and title suggestions. I'll let you all know when and if I hear back from whoever it is judging and selecting and all that for the actual spectacular event...

what else? well, if I don't die of teaching freshman English...

1. more food rhetoric. freund Kolby just last night was telling me about this rather marvelous repository of video lectures from Yale University. there's a course from 2008 called The Psychology, Biology, and Politics of Food he thought I might be particularly interested in (wannabe food blogger that I am, right?). I started with Lecture 16, just for kicks. it's about food marketing and such, so it seemed most relevant. someday it would be cool to watch the Milton course. or some Philosophy. it's pretty awesome of Yale to put these courses online like this, eh? we'll see if this one can lend any insights to my rhetorical analyses of food blogs and videos for Dr. Baake this semester.

2. argumentation theory and copyright laws. I need to start working on a lit review and a research paper. what am I waiting for? a warm, quiet moment to sit down and devour the books I've checked out on the subject. let's cross our fingers that such a moment will arrive this week. perhaps tomorrow.

3. a 2000- to 3000-word essay analyzing my development in this crazy MA program thus far, reflecting on the ways my academic work might (somehow) enact, complicate, or contribute to current research and theory in the field. this one is sort of past due already. um. yeah. excuses are for the weak... I know...

4. ten pages of reflection on my work for the Texas Tech University Press. I was musing just thismorning on how much I miss it there. teaching is good for me, I'm sure.... but doing my little bit to shepherd all those books-to-be through the publication process was so lovely.

so it looks like if I don't die of teaching freshman English, I might be severely wounded anyway by all these massive writing projects (curricular and extra-curricular). let's hope a bit of yoga and cooking and the fabulous weather we've been having will keep me alive.

a weirdly symbolic goat

alright. here it is--

when this blogpost gets posted (I'm writing it from Monday evening), I'll be safely aboard KLM Royal Dutch Airline flight 670 from Dallas, Texas, to Budapest, Hungary (via, of course, Amsterdam).

don't be jealous.

to keep my dear blog alive while I'm gone, I've got a short two-part short story lined up. as per your requests a few weeks ago, it will be the story of the boy and the goat. I haven't posted any complete fiction on the blog yet, so hopefully it isn't too weird. sorry, if it is.

the idea for this story wandered over a hill one day, just sat down in my head, and didn't do much. it was a very odd concept. silly. inexplicable. but eventually I used it to write this--an excerpt from what I decided to call The Adventures of William Neil Phaleenkanos--and I finished it for the creative writing class I took in England way back in 2004. part of the assignment was to include at least a few random items from a list the professor gave us. I know the telescope was one of those things. maybe you can spot others?

anyway. this post serves as an introduction. there is a boy. there is a goat. their story has something like a tinge of the panoramic, but it's tiny. and it's in present tense, but awfully aloof and eerily certain. it will be a quirky tale, and short, and allegedly 'excerpted' (though from what I have yet to figure out). I hope you like it. I hope it provokes some sort of twinkling introspection or at least a detached bemusement. parts 1 and 2 of the 2085-word adventure will be up one after the other, next week and the week after that. stay tuned, or whatever.

if all goes well, I'll be back in three weeks, with a huge amount of photos and maybe some Hungarian or Slovak stashed away in my head. wish me luck.


PS: I still think this is undeniably adorable.

take a few guesses

fieldnotes, one of the sponsors for the tournament of books, decided they would send out a few prizes to some lucky people who happened to correctly predict the winning book and its score in the final championship round.

my guess (The Sisters Brothers to win 10 to 6), thrown up in the comments section without much thought, was just a guess. I hadn't read either book, I had no idea what the judges would vote. but I got lucky (much as I did a few months ago with the robotgeek folks), and not only was my guess correct--it was also chosen at random from among all the other correct guesses. and so it came to pass that I received in the mail...

{ image borrowed from these way cool people who make notebooks. }

... one of their specially created rooster notebooks. and a whole lot of other things. field notes pens. pencils. bands of rubber. steno books. a handy 2012 calendar. and a gorgeous trio of Texas field notes, from their county fair installment. on the back of these are lots of interesting Texan facts. did you know the smallest town in Texas is called Telegraph, and its entire population consists of a mere 3 people? crazy.

anyway, I guess you could say I was thoroughly flattered to win this little contest. and getting that package from Chicago last week pretty much made my evening. call me a geek. I'm okay with that. we all know Amelia loves blank paper and writing utensils. I'm only a little bit sad I didn't get a 1-inch button.

but not complaining! I have seven new little notebooks! it's wonderful.

other bits of news:

I am running away to Eastern Europe next month. it'll be a short little study abroad excursion, with one of the geography professors (whose daughter was in my bibliography class last semester). after a few weeks of thorough deliberation I decided it would definitely be worth going on. why not? it's summer. as long as graduate school is eating me alive, I may as well let it take me around the world a bit. Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, and Austria. I'm crossing my fingers we get to do something like this while we're there.

I've been thinking about blogging one of my short stories, in small pieces, once or twice a week, just for you all. but which one? I'm going to ask you, and if you have an opinion please express it to me in some fashion. here are the options (listed not by title, but by vaguely surmised subject/tone):

a. the story about the boy and his goat (quirky)
b. the story about the girl who never woke up (melodramatic)
c. the story about a solipsist princess (freakishly depressing)
d. the story about the mermaid (cold and silent)

thanks in advance for your thoughts.

brought to you by the letter Z

the main character of this book I just finished is described by the blurber (yes, that is a true job-title, I promise) as "a quixotic renegade" and "delightfully oblivious." his name is Zeke. he is not perfect. he is not very smart. but I wanted him to have a happy ending. (I'll apologize in advance if I spoil this novel for any of you. I'm not trying to. but then I'm not trying not to, either. sorry?)

title: My American Unhappiness. I heard about this book on NPR. the author, Dean Bakopoulos, was being interviewed about it, sharing snippets and drumming up a bit of relevance. it sounded like a quirky and potentially fascinating read, so I read it. funnily enough, Zeke, working on his American Unhappiness project in the book, lies to people all the time about working for NPR, just so they will be more willing to participate and share the reason they are so unhappy. that connection amused me, just a bit.

the ending of this book was suitably heart-wrenching--page after page of disappointment and bogs of stupid semi-tragedies--but then the heart-wrench gets chewed into bits by a piercing, shiny ambiguity. I don't know if Zeke ends up unhappy or happy or if he finds what he's looking for or not. I guess I'm okay with that. I didn't dog-ear too many pages, but here are the ones I did (not counting the three-page section on the institutional slavery of Americans between pages 45 and page 48. that would've been insane to retype. I did read it aloud to my father though).

"My favorite sort of Facebook status update is the sort that is obtuse and unknowable. ... A good status alludes to some sort of emotion, some sort of yearning, but it doesn't offer any sort of clues..." page 179

"We love stories in which we are the protagonists in search of truth.... But my feeling is that we can cope with the increasing smallness, rapidness, and indifference of our changing, violent world only by seeing ourselves as noble characters caught in the struggle. We are all, as Turgenev so presciently said over a century ago, either Hamlets of Quixotes, and we must be these kinds of people if we are to endure." page 252

"What makes me so unhappy?
People walking away, dressed in winter clothes, the sky the same gray as their coats, the branches of the trees around them, black-gray and skinned." page 266

"As I drive among the streets of Livonia, so geared toward the life of family, of stable and easy domesticity, I live a fantasy life of regrets, missed opportunities. I imagine them as if they had taken flight." page 269

that penultimate quote wraps itself perfectly around the whole meaning and title of the story. why are you so unhappy? why are we so unhappy? is there anything to be done about it? will cataloguing our emotions make us feel any better?

maybe "Identity Borrowing" would've been more apt

today I finished putting together a twenty-page essay for English 5340, which I decided to call "Hannah Wolley and The Gentlewomans Companion: A Case of Seventeenth-century Identity Theft." an excerpt:

"Passages from this particular text have been referenced and re-contextualized again and again, far more than any other work by this prolific female writer. But if a close study of the text and its contexts reveals that she is indeed not responsible for the text of The Gentlewomans Companion, then who is? Is our modern habit of ascribing the majority of textual authority to an author or even a set of authors adequate when so much shaping of the text can be done by editors, agents, publishers, printers, marketing departments? So many contextual factors influence the final form and meaning of a text, but it seems many of these realities are often overlooked in favor of more salable points such as authorial reputation, the ethos of well-known names, and pertinent authoritative biographical details. The case of Hannah Wolley and The Gentlewomans Companion sheds light on how valuable the reputation of an author can be to publishers and scholars alike."

and to accompany this string of scholarly inquiries, a few quotes from class tonight:

Dr. Hawkins on the guilt-inducing effects of studying Bibliography as thoroughly as we have done: "You'll find yourself being warped by this class."

Dr. Snead, referring to one possible outcome of a class on Jane Austen jointly-taught by four literature professors with different period focuses: "Or they'll see that historical periodization is an invention of the Institution. It's useless!"

tuesday evenings are the coolest.

it isn't really too much

there's a chubby paperback book open on my knee. my left elbow is gently leaning right in the middle of page seventeen, holding the book open while I type. and yeah, there's a folded green scrap of paper there to serve as a bookmark, but it isn't worth closing the book. I am going to get back to the short story any moment. it's called "Elegy for a Young Elk," by a Finnish fellow named Hannu Rajaniemi. it's a science fiction story. very futuristic, full of jarring, unexpected events like cyber-esque women raining out of the sky and monsters consisting of old rusted automobiles attacking you as you walk down the street. there are also pigeons.

I am going to go back to reading it any moment. there's an email I'm trying to finish. and a few conversations I'm in the middle of. and this, of course.

earlier today, my genius brother (who is always linking to fascinating articles by Dave Pell) linked to this fascinating article by Dave Pell. it's a clever mesh of action movie and thoughtful blogpost. you should read it. laugh. come back and finish my much less clever rambling about science fiction anthologies later if you want. it's okay.

I will tell you, since for some reason I'm still talking about it, that the paperback on my knee is 537 pages chubby. Mr. Rajaniemi's "Elegy for a Young Elk" is the first of twenty-nine short stories that make up volume five of The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year. maybe I need to read Jonathan Strahan's introduction to this book more closely, because nowhere have I seen any mention of what year they're talking about. anthologies like this are interesting things. what makes this Jonathan Strahan so certain that he picked the absolute best science fiction and fantasy of the entire year? what if he missed something? why did he only choose twenty-nine stories? isn't that a strange number? did you know that the Greek word from which our word anthology stems actually means garland, or bouquet of flowers? interesting.

anyway, I am only on page seventeen, technically. however: I did also flip to page 73 to peek at Holly Black's contribution. I was sucked right into Cory Doctorow's on page 215 and almost finished it. there is one story called "The Care and Feeding of your Baby Killer Unicorn" on page 393 which I just had to take a quick look at. I realized that I've read a novel by that author once. maybe I should go looking for its sequel. we'll see.

I will get back to "Elegy for a Young Elk" very soon. hopefully my attention will stick, and I won't have to turn back to page fifteen to re-figure out what everything means. the next short story, all the way on page 21, is by Neil Gaiman. I'll let you all know if I make it that far. there are a lot of other books I'm in the middle of right now. but none of them are open on my lap right this minute, so I should be able to handle this. my brain feels a bit like several bouquets of flowers are being crammed into it, dozens of stems and twigs and blossoms at a time. none of the arrangements stay looking how they're supposed to look. almost none of the flowers can escape being irreparably squashed. leaves and petals are falling out. pretty soon no one will want to use my brain as a centerpiece at all.

I won't even try

maybe it's that giving things names is too much like commitment. too much like completion. and that's hard. but whatever the reasons, I'm no good with titles. they don't come easy to me. all the perfectly descriptive, succinct, and evocative titles for some reason run away and hide whenever I'm trying to come up with one. I usually end up relying on other people to tell me what they think the story should be called.

titles are part of a first impression. and names have power, right?

the coolest titles are those that don't seem obvious. I guess they have the power to make us think. to trace new connections between ideas we thought were familiar.

some interesting names and titles I've come across lately:

On the Pleasure of Hating: a beautiful, slim, white paperback collection of essays by William Hazlitt.

of Montreal: an indie pop/rock band from Athens, Georgia, whose songs tend to have insane and wonderful titles like "Heimdalsgate Like a Promethean Curse," "Labyrinthian Pomp," and "Gronlandic Edit."

Noble Shropshire: the actor who played Polonius in Pioneer Theatre's Hamlet last month.

Kaolinite: an interesting clay mineral. I think it has a cool name, eh?

anyway. those are some random things and people. what other awesome titles might I come across next, I wonder? and will the awesomeness of them ever rub off on me and make up for my lack of title-giving talent?

look again

change.

I'm slightly afraid that I'm becoming rather dangerously optimistic about life. this is really different. in fact, it clashes dreadfully with my traditionally pessimistic insides. the result is a lot of me feeling like I don't really know myself. me feeling like some other person. living some other life. which of course makes very little sense.

which of course... may not make such little sense after all. today is not yesterday and maybe we all wake up in the mornings with some potentially other life in front of us.

change is good. it's wonderful. without it I'm sure I'd go crazy.

I guess the stories I've told myself always have had an eclectic mix of fairytale and failure. light and frothy hope stirred in with the dark molasses of realism. so this new-feeling sunshiny perspective shouldn't be too surprising, really. it's almost delightful, knowing things don't have to stay the way they always have been.

however long ago it was when we were wandering about art museums in Los Angeles, we wandered by a table with a lot of round things on it.

and we would have kept wandering, except an art professor leading a small tour group told us we should stop and just look for a minute at all these round things.

so we did. she asked us a lot of pretentious-sounding questions about our thoughts on this piece of art. and when none of our answers seemed good enough, she asked us all to step up right next to the table and just look at one thing on it for as long as it took...

and that's when I realized the little brown bowl was spinning. and the letter P on the pepper shaker had disappeared... for a moment I thought I was going crazy, until Ms. Art Professor grinned and told me I was right: everything on the table was spinning--very slowly. so slowly you might not notice unless you have a bit of patience.

I don't remember the artist's name, and the MOCA's website is not telling me. I never found out who that art professer was or why she asked us to join her little group just then. but the rest of that day I kept thinking about that. how a bunch of round things on a table may not count as 'art' to a lot of people. but all it took was a little bit of the unexpected, revealed at the last minute, to impress me.

now I've ruined the installation for all of you, maybe. sorry.

anyway:

there's been a slight tweaking of the blog. you probably noticed, right? it's been less than a week. and all the google traffic I used to get--people searching for remedies for their anger and doubt, mainly--has disappeared.

that's probably good. though instead of changing my title I suppose I could have written up some remedies for those angry, doubtful people...

was that what I was trying to do for myself with all these theories and reviews and aphorisms? maybe it's still what I'm trying to do. words do make everything better. find someone to talk to. things will work out.

I guess I'll see what happens next...

free samples

I live with a librarian.

there are books all over the place. it's lovely. Bekah leaves them lying conveniently on the edges of tables or next to the sofa and then, when she goes off to her wonderful job, I innocently pick them up to inspect their covers. then I curiously peek inside them to see if the first sentence is any good. and then I ravenously sit down and devour them. Bekah's taste in books makes this pretty easy to do. she doesn't tend to bring home stuff like Gone With The Wind or War and Peace. mostly we get young adult fiction things. literary chocolate chip cookies, if you will. I love it.

here, have a short list:

How to Ditch Your Fairy, by Justine Larbalestier.
Wings, by Aprilynne Pike
Unwind, by Neal Shusterman

and just today: The Thief, by Megan Whalen Turner (for our book club this evening. that's my excuse.)

next? Rampant, by Diana Peterfreund. or perhaps one of the others I've seen lying around in the basement lately. Academy 7 looked quite mysterious. Never Slow Dance with a Zombie's got a nice font on the cover. and maybe my lucky librarian roommate will come home today with half a dozen more to choose from. who knows when I'll finish the books I've checked out for myself.

but I suppose there's no rush.