repost rewrite rethink

today I'm revisiting a lot of old writing-- not really for any reason, just because. I always think there's possibilities for remix in a lot of those old notebooks. my 13- 18- and 24- and 37-year old selves wrote a lot. mostly questions. in retyping it, I get to half-remember the past and half-imagine it through a bunch of differently-colored lenses. what if it weren't my past self writing, but an excessively introspective character in an epic science fiction novel?

who knows what will become of it. 

on top of the notebooks, there are these digital writing spaces too. so many of them.

for randomness and miscellaneous academic commentary.
for studying abroad.
for an independent study course.
for studying abroad again.

who knows when I shall next get to go abroad. in the meantime, I can continue sifting through old posted snippets from myself, re-framing and remixing them however I might feel like it. present me has new thoughts to add. and editorial scissors with which to cut things up.

 

I failed to take any photographs of all the signs I noticed in Edinburgh eight years ago now, so all I can give you are brief descriptive sketches of the plain sandwich boards propped up under glossy window grates or simple laminated sheets of paper zip-tied onto open window shutters, all declaring "wet paint" and implying "please don't touch or smudge or disturb this area."

in Cockburn Street there was a man on a ladder, with bucket and brush, putting in a few lines of bright pink detailing behind the words "Pie"and "Sky" above a shop door. he was not accompanied (when I saw him at least) by any printed "wet paint" notice. his presence (and the ladder's) was enough of a warning, and perhaps the height of his hand-painted sign would exempt it from the need of any other.

all these signs, linguistic or not, are a subtle and temporary form of crowd control. I have noticed plenty of other methods, less subtle, but presumably almost as temporary, for reasons beyond wet paint: airport hallways halved by plywood enclosures, whole streets closed off and walkways blocked by aluminum fences or orange cones. during my time in Manchester, a makeshift sidewalk diversion over/around a new tramway construction site seemed to shift several feet every time we walked that way. men in orange vests and hard hats milled about, posted signs instructed cyclists to dismount and take especially care. having recently read and written about Shapin and Schaffer's Leviathan and the Air-pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life, I started breaking all of these situations down using three technological categories: the material (the fences, the ramps, ladder, paintbrush, the strewn-about tools), the social (our training in walkways, the significance of orange vests and brawny workmen, our polite obedience to posted notices), and the literary (the language and color of the posted signs themselves).

where else, how else, might we reverse engineer this three-ingredient recipe of material, social, and literary technologies? they seem to be everywhere. technical and professional writing combine them all in the most diverse ways whenever machines/tools/material tech + groups of audiences all need to work together using language and rhetoric.

because not everyone understands everything about everything. an obvious claim to make, right? 

obvious, and perhaps even truer in our massively global and ultra-specialized 21st-century times. modern life involves (could we even say depends on?) some things being mysterious to some people but not to others; specialization allows us to safely ignore a lot of stuff in favor of becoming an expert in a more manageable amount of stuff.

and with specialization and globalization come standardization. rules. expectations. conventions. if someone else is making all the nuts and bolts and screws, we better make sure those bits are all some sort of proper, expected size, so the everything everyone else is an expert in can fit together with the slice of everything that I am an expert in.

 

such standardization, according to Andrew Feenberg, author of all the essays in Between Reason and Experience, is a black-boxing process-- a way of bundling up a lot of decisions and values and maybes so we can hide them behind a curtain. once an Official Standard forms, it tends to become an unquestioned, unexamined packet in the three-ring-binder of the Way Things Are. it becomes infrastructure. it becomes almost invisible.

it's fun to look around at all networks and all infrastructure-- and even bigger things like paradigms and ideologies-- as black boxes. these background standards and expectations are at work in and on the way life happens (or doesn't), but we don't often notice them, much less look inside them. that's someone else's job. I don't need to think about or questions that stuff too much-- especially if some complicatedly venerable, official, voted-on ruling put it there. once that happens, it’s settled. the chosen system becomes dominant and invisible. so easy to ignore. or forget entirely. or lose without even realizing it, even when it seemed so normal and essential once upon a time.

I inherited a sackful of various craft things from my grandmother a few years back when we moved to Arizona; among the familiar crochet work and skeins of cute yarn was a yellow plastic tatting shuttle.

tatting is about to become a lost art, probably. I have made only the barest attempts to un-black-box it for myself. it is one among many, many summer craft projects (as you may be able to tell from my instagram lately).

how much do I need to know to be inside the black box? even if you spend hours on YouTube trying to learn how to tat... will it ever mean that you really get it? thinking and watching are not the same as experiencing, doing, being.

 

does the antique spinning wheel I acquired last week count as a black box? to me two weeks ago, I think it did. I've learned a whole bunch since then-- reading diagrams for terminology, watching videos for processes and techniques, and of course interacting with its material pieces to get a feel for how they work. I am climbing inside the no-longer-black-box of old spinning wheels. it's pretty fun.

but I can't climb into every black box I happen to notice on the side of the street, can I?

 

so I continue to wonder. when does it become our job to un-black-box the world around us? and when can we leave the black boxes alone to trustworthily feed us electricity or news or legislation? I can't answer that for anyone. I hope people take all the opportunities they can to question the things that seem to have been settled and handed down, especially if they were handed down to you by some complicatedly venerable, allegedly sacred, self-professed moral authority. there is value in asking "how did it get to be that way?"

 

here's an example: NPR's Throughline podcast tracing how abortion even became the never-ending political crusade it seems to be today. very much worth a listen.

adopting stray antiques

this machine followed me home today. 

I wish I knew more about its history, but the museum curator had only this story to tell: 

... once, not very long ago, an elderly gentleman donated it carelessly, haphazardly, with some mild hope that it could find a use or purpose among the museum's collections, but also with perfect willingness to chuck it in a dumpster if not. 

the curator could not leave this old thing to such a fate, but nor could he keep it for the museum. its lack of reliable provenance and the museum's lack of storage space meant that someone else would have to rescue it...

so I did.

the machine itself has plenty of stories etched all over its varied wooden parts. after poring over a few books from the guild's library, I'm learning to recognize some of the signs-- grooves along the flyer where twisted fiber has rubbed against the wood over and over again enough to leave a mark. the extra-smooth dip along the front of the treadle where someone's foot put energy through the crank and drive wheel, into the twist that made the yarn. there are even tiny bits of fiber left on the bobbin hooks, from who knows how long ago. my guess is that it's wool fluff caught and torn and matted around the metal, but I'm not sure at all.

after carefully propping the pieces of this wheel into my car's back seat, I rushed over to the local yarn store to see what books they might lend me. this evening, I read through the entirety of The Care and Feeding of Spinning Wheels. I know what all the parts are called, now: wheel posts, tension screw, footman, maidens, and so on.

this poor lost wheel is less broken than it looked at first. I've already acquired a new drive band for it, thanks to Karma at Fiber Creek, and for now some cotton string is holding the footman and treadle together. a few missing pegs will need replacing somehow, which doesn't seem too difficult. 

the whorl and bobbin shaft seem quite rusted together, so that may be a challenge to deal with. one of the small bobbin hooks is broken, but that isn't so important in the grand scheme of things-- all the rest are there. 

the wheel's front leg is crusted with wood glue from some sort of drastic repair, but so far it's sturdy enough. maybe I'll see about replacing or repairing it more elegantly, someday.

here's a photo of it all assembled again, after a basic cleaning and dusting.

it needs more cleaning, probably some sanding and oiling or polishing too. then I can see about using it...

my brief evening of research has informed me that this is a Saxony wheel, maybe a century old, or more. it looks quite similar to this one, but much less damaged. this one is pretty similar too, though it looks newer (or at least cleaner-- my new pet has sections that are caked in grime).

I have tons more research to do. what are the odds I can finish all the cleaning, refurbishing, and polishing of this beauty before fall semester starts?

spindle spinning snapshots

now I have three little top-whorl spindles. the photo above shows what they look like today, Thursday, June 2, now that I'm back from the informal museum spinning demonstration at the downtown Sharlot Hall Museum.

and this, below, is from some weeks ago when I'd first bought the two new ones. the plainer old one is a basic Schacht spindle from my local yarn store. the others were ordered from Snyder Spindles in Wisconsin.

they are all very cool-looking and fun.

I'm only spinning wool thus far (various textures of merino roving), in these three quite lovely colors: oregano, grey, and begonia.

I'll probably blog more about spinning and spindles sometime this month. today I am too busy just spinning, though.

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

wool

during fall break in October, Patti introduced me to the woman who spins the yarn that Patti so often sends me.  

we both ended up buying more yarn that day. 

I got two skeins of what the maker called Jupiter-Capricorn, if I remember correctly. it's a dark-pink, grey-blue, mottled handspun mix of Cashmire, Angora, Wool, Alpaca, and Silk.

I knitted a scarf out of it, just finished yesterday. 

it's not the softest, but it has lovely character. 

reflections on teaching online

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

taste testing

from time to time I run out of podcasts that I feel eager to listen to, and let the ones I'm not so eager to listen to pile up in the little podcast app on my phone. I save those for times when I need a voice to fall asleep to. the Longform podcast guys have become falling-asleep podcasts, at this point. should I feel guilty about that? just a few years ago they were inspiring the journalistic fraction of my brain. hmm. ah well.

when I feel I have run out of all my staying-awake-and-actually-listening podcasts, I'll sometimes switch to music, but that's usually less interesting. so instead, I'll search for new podcasts. there are a ton. surely a few are worth filling my wakeful hours with. at least for an episode or two, right? to see what they're all about. give them a chance to grab me.

the other day I searched for rhetoric-related podcasts. for the sake of cramming even more relevant-to-my-degree stuff into my daily leisure time, of course. I found this one, was intrigued a bit by the way its title mirrors the well-known and longstanding NPR radio show in a rather ambitious sort of way, and tasted a few episodes. I unfortunately wasn't very into it. not sure why not. does it deserve a second chance?

more recently, this one showed up in my search results, and so far it seems more useful. shorter episodes usually = more likely to immediately entice, so that's cool. the bite-size overviews of one rhetoric-related thing at a time make it very straightforward. I've listened to three or four of these Mere Rhetoric episodes, and I think I'll keep at it. they're a good way to review stuff I learned in fundamental core classes in years gone by.

as I poked around collecting links for this post, I came across first the twitter account of Mere Rhetoric, and then via that, this article about even more rhetoric/composition podcasts. perhaps I will dip into those other two on Jen Michaels's list. I bet they are worth a try.

yet another rhetoric-focused podcast flew in with my email this week: Masters of Text. the show's most recent episode includes a segment that I myself am part of-- extra exciting! the organizers of this year's Feminisms and Rhetorics conference forwarded a message about the show from Ames Hawkins, its co-host. Ames included a bunch of us fem/rhet attendees in a piece about the conference and about making. go listen to the episode--"Vox Fabri, Vox Dea"--and see if you recognize my voice gushing about the carpentry demonstration I'd just attended.

the theme of the whole conference was making, and indeed much making of many kinds was showcased and discussed and accomplished over those four days. that carpentry demo, for instance, which was run by Maria Klemperer-Johnson, a contractor and entrepreneur from Hammerstone School: Carpentry for Women and Barbara George of Kent State University. we learned about measuring tapes and building conventions and how to drill holes in blocks of wood. power drills, at an academic conference! pretty awesome.



I don't know what I will do with this little double-knobbed board, but I made it. I'll let you know when I find a way to make it useful for hanging things on.

Maria came to my yoga panel, too-- she in her contractor's uniform and colleague/friend Jackie and I in our yoga outfits. we presented an interactive yoga-discussion, which went really well. some of the attendees were familiar with yoga, some were not, but we all talked a bit about crow pose and self-talk and the representativeness (or lack thereof) of #yogagirl, and the embodied, meditative, empowering aspects of writing and moving.

friend Jackie is working on a yoga-running-writing dissertation. it sounds like really great and interesting work. I'm really glad I got to work with her on the panel we put together. where she goes next with it will be way cool to watch.

I am not a runner. and I like yoga plenty but do not feel so very comfortable talking about it as one would probably want to be before writing a massive dissertation about it.

what I keep circling back to is food. food seems so central, so communal and yet so dividing at times. so universal and so personal all at once. maybe I should start looking into good podcasts about food. friend Patti and I have a ongoing messy google doc conversation about food and cooking going on at the moment, which despite its messy randomness is providing some really useful momentum for me. so thank you for that, Patti. I think it will be cool to watch where and how all my food-related thoughts go from here.

and back

almost a week ago, prelims were suddenly over. finished. behind me.

it's a weird feeling. for so much of the year, prelims loomed like this thing beyond which nothing at all could exist. like death, almost. but I'm on the other side now and there is all this open space and crazy playground equipment.

okay, I don't mean playground equipment. I mean more phd-land. a prospectus proposal and a dissertation plan and all that. (sometimes it's like a playground. other times it's like a hamster wheel.)

but at least prelims are finished.

on the unfinished side of things are... well, almost everything else. 

these coloring pages, for example.

dear friends Trinity and Patti separately sent coloring accoutrements in their pre-prelim care packages. Patti even sent shimmery crayons.

theses tools were marvelous for giving the back burner of my brain time to simmer away with whatever problem/question/hurdle I was stuck on.

I didn't finish any of the coloring, but that's okay. there will be more stressful days when I'll want to do something semi-mindless, creative, and calming. there are plenty of pages left, and the crayons will surely last a while too.

so thanks to everyone who cheered me on and/or left me alone throughout the prelim madness. I'm glad I have you. don't go away, okay? the whole dissertation thing is not going to be a coloring book, I'm pretty sure.

tools and other tools

during my lovely, long winter break, I asked my dad if his magical shop of tools and wood scraps could possibly facilitate the reverse engineering and re-creation of one or two of these eighty-dollar wooden crochet hooks.

he said "eighty whole dollars!? for what?" and we trekked out to the shop to find out what we could do. 

dad's lathe is pretty old and creaking, but it works beautifully. I watched him trim down and carve the first prototype out of a prism of quarter-sawn oak. 

then it was my turn, with a prism of lovely, creamy-looking maple. 

that one didn't turn out as nicely. the handle was alright, if a little rough, but as we experimented with the actual hook, things got weird. you'll excuse me if I didn't take any photos of that unfortunate failure, I hope.

after that, dad and I were on a roll. he pulled out a length of black walnut, next. black walnut from the tree that once grew out front at the house where I spent my childhood. black walnut from that tree in my once-upon-a-time hometown. black walnut that my dad himself cut down and sliced to pieces. 

the sawdust of black walnut has spice in its smell. it's a dark wood, and spinning on the lathe it blurs to a chocolatey chocolate brown. it was my favourite to work with. maybe that's cuz it's so beautiful and maybe that's cuz the wood is soaked in so much nostalgia. or both. 

this is how I carved the handle, using a few of dad's chisels to dig each groove and smooth all the curves. then the sandpaper, with the lathe settings on way-faster. then the hack saw, to crop out the lathe-bitten edges.

the little bulbs near the end are not perfectly spherical or smooth. there is some skewing to them. I think it adds character. 

I whittled most of the hook myself, after dad drilled the center out. he helped with a few other bits too. I am quite proud of our joint efforts. both my expertise on the shape of crochet hooks and his expertise with the wielding of whittling knives were needed here. and I couldn't have done this without all his fancy tools. he possibly could've done well enough without my insisting on testing the thickness of each hook against the cheap aluminum hook we used as model, or on bringing my yarn out to the shop so I could make sure the curve of each beak would function properly--but we worked together. one type of craft meeting another type of craft. one set of hobbyists tools' giving birth to another.

while I worked, trying to finish the black walnut hook before I had to get on a plane back to Indiana, this twitter conversation came to mind. knitting needles are pointier and stabbier than crochet hooks, but the principle stands. "domesticity is funny like that," Liz Abinante says. making yarn into scarves or hats is just as much a hobby as making trees into figurines or walking sticks. 

also funny (and fascinating) is the network of tools and tools-to-be that circle around all these hobbies. a whittling knife is a tool for carving wood into a crochet hook, which is a tool for turning yarn into a hat, which is a tool for keeping one's head warmer when it gets freezing and blustery outside. 

some of these tools all need each other to exist. things and their many supporting characters have a way of crowding together, accumulating.

I wonder now if you could say any of this slightly the other way around. a block of wood is a tool for keeping your whittling knives in use, and a knitted scarf is a tool for keeping your hands busy with knitting needles while you watch films. it's less usual to say things that way... but I don't think it's less true.

and if we continue, my neck and head are tools for wearing scarves and hats. my brain is a tool for reading patterns and imagining yarn as afghan or block of marble as impressive sculpture.

whichever way it is that these tools and tool-like objects work, I now own many more crochet hooks than I actually need. maybe I should give one or two away.

you can't dog-ear digital pages

just so you know, I am blogging about my summer academic reading over here. my post this week puts a ridiculous music video in conversation with a rather fat historical text from the eighties: Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life by Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer.

I say fat because I have experience with the weights and thicknesses of other 450-page books, and fat is an applicable word for them, but I actually read this one in pdf form on a kindle. reading practically weightless digital text isn't very new to me, of course, but the neat little kindle itself is. it has its perks, but some of them are double-edged. the kindle I have isn't only for reading. you can put apps on it. watch videos. skim comics and blogs and any other website. (now part of me wants to say all those activities are their own forms of reading, so how does that change my point? hrmm.) anyway, a little while ago I read a snippet from this Dan Hon fellow on books vs. other media and the self-containment of the former vs. the dependence of the latter. he says,

"in my geeky head, books are their own runtime environment. The bound paper is the interface method. They are self-executing. They have direct-manipulation user interfaces that have been standardised now and are pretty intuitive. [...] You can’t just go to a library and get out a DVD and experience the content on it without also owning or having access to an additional access/interface layer. You can do that with a book."

of course, and he also admits this, you do have to know how to read. it is only because literacy and print publishing have become so standard and efficient and well-oiled that these book technologies work so almost-flawlessly. I could keep thinking out loud here about the infrastructures of all that, but really my reason for bringing in Hon's ramblings here is to say that the one-thing-at-a-time awesomeness of a book contrasts pretty obviously with the complexity and multifaceted shininess of my new kindle. I can take the thing out into the woods and disable its wifi, but even then the kindle won't be one single, self-contained book for me. it has dozens of pdfs on it now, and a feedly RSS app, and a slowly growing collection of half-finished ebooks. all that potential reading material in one slim seven-by-five-inch gadget is spectacularly, dazzlingly, befuddlingly cool and overwhelming.

before I started reading that fat-yet-weightless tome about science and history and such, I began my for-fun summer reading with What's Wrong With Plastic Trees? Artifice and Authenticity in Design by Martin H. Krieger. I found this book using my most favourite book-finding method: wandering library stacks until a title or spine calls out for attention. maybe it was the allusion (intended or not) to that Radiohead song. maybe it was that lovely question mark, or the nice deep green of the cover. once I opened it for a taste-test, the alliterative contradiction of the subtitle latched itself onto my curiosity and I took the thing home.

mostly it got read while I galavanted around Utah last month, sleeping in tents and on various sofas, and gradually beginning to look at all things--even the random spinach plants out by the shed and even the sage brush along the side of the road--as at least partially designed.

I began dog-earing at page 42. luckily, the copy of What's Wrong With Plastic Trees? that I read was a paper-and-ink book, with pages I could gently dog-ear without damaging its inner workings at all.

"Canonical descriptions of the world make sense only in terms of the concrete cases to which they are to apply and the hard cases that resist them. That is why we learn from examples and exemplars rather than from generic principles." 42

some of these bits, now that I look at them, speak to the themes from Leviathan and the Air-Pump, maybe. an experiment can be a way of managing a certain concrete situation of possible learning/knowing. how we shape that case will then shape our perspective, and vice versa... around and around.

this next one fits too:

"When we disagree about values, that disagreement has little to do with arbitrary subjectivity. We disagree because we have different conceptions of a good world, different conceptions of how we might achieve that world, different conceptions of what matters and how much. yet those differences are not simply to be noted; that we disagree sets up the necessity for argument. That we can have such arguments, or that we feel insulted by the claims of others, is a sign of community, and so we speak of a community of architects or scientists or programmers. It is consistent to believe that we share notions of quality and that we disagree in our conceptions of a good world." 58

but Robert Boyle and Thomas Hobbes disagreed about this, too--about knowledge communities and what their boundaries should be. hmmm.

there is a whole section on Niagara Falls that I think I might have my students read in the fall. Niagara is a grand, imposing, natural phenomenon... or is it? do we consider it (or any other "natural" thing) more as a place, as an event, or as a spectacle? can we experience it in more than one mode? how?

later on there were exciting references to technology, originality, and value. my copyright-obsessed academic self will want to keep coming back to this stuff.

"Reproducibility affects rarity. Technologies, which may involve physical processes or social organization, determine how reproducible an object is, for we may be able to make a copy of the original, or we may transfer to another object the significance attached to the original, or we may create virtual environments that are reproductions that acknowledge their lack of identity. Copying natural environments may be easier than copying artistic objects, because the qualities of replicas and forgeries are not as well characterized in the case of the natural environment. And rarity and reproducibility may be a matter of death and the end of production, whether of a photographer or a place." 69

composed reality... perhaps another idea to bring up for my students:

"If reality is a representation or at least a presentation of the world to ourselves, composition is what makes reality satisfying. We show the world to ourselves, and we might say, is is composed, much as God in Genesis saw, it was good." 105

the shifting, relative values of things that are persons and things that are not persons:

"Almost everything has been objectified as a purchasable or at least valuable commodity, human beings included, in slavery, in death, in injury. In modern economies persons are treated in terms of their purchasable capacities, as labor, and their capacities for consumption, as consumers. Things that are not persons may surely be exchanged for each other. Their relative prices are determined in an economy of supply, demand, and to some extent taboo, which restricts the places where they may be exchanged." 114

taboo and convention and tradition... all these factors that influence what we see as possible, or right, or good. will we ever overcome all those limitations?

"When we manage nature we are not forging or destroying a masterpiece untouched since it was originally fabricated. Untouched nature usually means untouched by white men, just as a pristine masterpiece is what has remained untouched for several generations--but has almost surely been deliberately tampered with or preserved at some time in its history." 121

nothing escapes human meddling, I guess. and if anything did, how would we know about it? we wouldn't. as soon as we noticed, we'd have already meddled.

I don't have a list of quotes from the pages of Leviathan and the Air-Pump. there were so many times I wanted to make notes in the margins or tuck bookmarks between certain sections. even though I can keep that pdf forever, it's much more difficult to go back and reference my reading experience of that book. the Krieger had to go back to the library, but my experience with it even still feels so more easily accessible, simply because I could dog-ear the pages.

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?

not a raven, just a writing desk

these are the books I pulled off the shelves of the non-fiction section yesterday. if I'd had more time, I may have pulled off even more. fortunately, friend Jen and I were about to run away for a very random lunch date. I have enough to read.

I kind of want to make a full-size version of something like this:

 { photo borrowed from somewhere in this mess of dollhouse miniatures }

or this one (it's a little more normal-looking):

after all, one cannot rearrange furniture that does not exist in one's house. and since I've been in this empty new house for three weeks and a bit, this existential problem has started bugging me. in another week or so all the belongings from our former house will be sent down here, and then I will have plenty to arrange and rearrange. I am looking forward to that, yes.

but learning a bit of carpentry and building a writing desk of my very own would be awesome, wouldn't it? we'll see, I guess. first I'll read a few of these furniture-making books. then I will think about form and function and hardware and types of wood, make a hundred sloppy sketches and fiddly little diagrams, and figure out all other such preliminary stuff. then maybe dad can teach me how to use his table saw. or whatever saw you'd want to use to make a desk.

patriarchal

once upon a time, I took a bunch of photographs out in my dad's garage. these are just a few of them.

the garage is not where the family vehicles live. there are too many tools and things in there to fit any cars in. instead, there are shelves and shelves of camping supplies, boxes and boxes of random hardware and scraps of leather. old furniture and bicycles hang from the ceiling. cabinets. toolboxes. buckets. an anvil. a forge. lots of rope. isn't there a lathe in there somewhere? pliers and hammers and vices and clamps and knives and screws and glue and bolts and pipe and saws and sandpaper... it all takes up space.

the garage is probably where you will find my dad when he isn't at work, sleeping, or on a camping trip. the radio will be on. (actually the radio is usually on in the garage, even when dad isn't out there.) the doors will be open. he'll spend whole afternoons fixing things or moving stuff around or carving or hammering or working on some project or other.

my dad collects wood just as veraciously as I collect blank paper and empty journals. he has a few hundred long, straight tree limbs that he's saving to make walking sticks out of. there are logs and planks and boards and weirdly-shaped scraps. walnut and pine and birch and oak of all kinds. the entire garage is practically full of wood. my dad can tell you exactly where he got each piece.

other stuff collects in the garage, too. I don't even know what these round things are, but if they weren't so thick and heavy they would make an awesome pair of clocks, I think. wouldn't they? maybe I'm crazy.

don't ask me why or where or when I got on such a clock-making kick, but now I joke with dad all the time about making clocks out of some of the junk that ends up lying around the garage. seriously though: old circular saw blades = brilliant clock faces. yes?

I took these photographs at least two years ago, and now almost none of this stuff is in our garage anymore. it's being packed up and moved, little by little, into the giant shed behind our new house. that is where all the tools and camping supplies will live. that is where sawdust and wood shavings will begin to pile up. and that is where we will find dad from now on, carving eagles out of whale bone or crafting feathers out of rawhide, at least when he's not at work or sleeping.

beyond the periphery

the word zoom is an onomatopoeiac sound that indicates swiftness.
that's what wikipedia tells me. swiftness. motion. speed. rushing.

to take myself as quickly as possible from this place where I am...

...to a place farther away. somewhere else. changing my position.

and my perspective. (do you see the interstate, right on the edge?)

you can zoom in. or out. around. past. (there is the copper mine.)

is there any preposition that doesn't work? (and look, the salt flats.)

go fast enough, and you might get lost. (wow, that's the west coast.)

far enough, details get lost, too. (but then you can see Greenland.)

and maybe there's something out there you never even considered.

google's map starts tiling the surface of the planet so it repeats in a strange kind of scrollable loop. I know that isn't really what the earth would look like from such a distance. but seeing it that way is interesting. it could be wallpaper. it could be an endless chain of hand-crafted continents around the neck of some gigantic cosmic personage. it could be the artistic result of that gigantic cosmic personage dipping this lovely spheroid in greenish bluish ink and rolling it across the floor of the universe.

this fascinating map tool gives me one way of pinpointing my current location and moving myself little by little further and further away, until that single point gets blurred among so many other points and I am forced to reconsider what it is I'm looking at.

I need to learn how to zoom out of my own head, sometimes. does google make a tool for that? they probably do.

self-proclaimed

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

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

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

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

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

whatever you say

a few things I have recently figured out:

• just as genius brother says, jquery is indeed pretty awesome
• php is not nearly as hard as it looks
• wordpress does not seem to be as cool as it looks.
  
• with google, all things are possible.

I cannot and may not ever be able to call myself a programmer. at this point, even webdesigner is a tortuous stretch of description. there are so many ways this new website could be better than it is.

here are my thanks to Bekah for the chance to pick through all this once-forgotten and unknown mess of knowledge among the piles of junk in the dark corners of my brain and in the not-so-dark corners of the world wide web. may I humbly present to you the completed Sugarbee Cookies website.
programming is such a mysterious thing. tiny little bits, very basic concepts and such, are collecting like lint in my pockets--but it's so vastly more complicated and powerful than lint, this stuff. you can do anything you want. anything. just say it in the right words and magically... things happen. you can say this = that and pull things out of everywhere and put it somewhere else entirely.

for helping me endure this round of beating the code into submission, I am indebted to the following tutorials: this one, by Mr. Vaswani and this one, by Mr. Dhandhania (if those are indeed their real names.)

ahead of me is a long road, shadowed and precarious and crowded and messy. I can still turn back. but what if the road is just as long and precarious in the other direction?

effective

gone are the days when my siblings and I had to play silly alphabet scavenging games to keep ourselves occupied during long trips in the family van (such as when dad refused to take us home after church and instead made as many wrong turns as possible, all in the name of exploring the countryside).

now our vehicle is equipped with a DVD player.

unfortunately, I in the passenger seat am only able to enjoy the soundtrack of Pirates of the Caribbean and not the entire film.

as the illustrious Captain Jack Sparrow repeatedly demanded the return of his effects and his hat with each suspense-filled turn of the plot, I pondered what items I might demand, if I happened to find myself in comparable situations.

things that came to mind:

notebooks
box of pens and pencils
camera
favourite sandals

these are the things with which I daily attempt to change the world. in my current position they are all very disorganized and rarely on hand when I want them, but they are my effects. well, except for the sandals. I suppose they would be my version of Sparrow's hat. i'm not much of a hat person. though if I had a hat like his, perhaps I could be converted.