“Spooky action at a distance,” the phrase credited to Albert Einstein, reduces to a shorthand phrase a much more complex phenomenon. More complex because not conveniently observable, shades incommunicable. More complex because strings are only sort of followable. The ‘theoretical’ in theoretical physics allows for quantum leaps. Matter or whatever holds together somehow. For now.
This fall, September especially, jutted jabbingly an abrupt switch-up from how I had imagined things would go. I have always cherished my routines; there is safety in them, is one way to think about it. Boring gray-hairedisms; I age and with each passing year become even more of a routinist, clinging to dailiness with eating, walking, writing, reading, drawing, yoga, rest, and so on. And only now, October turning the leafy page to November, am I beginning to reclaim routines. Some, may they rebecome rituals. As I worked on the presentation I gave last week at the Conference on Community Writing, I kept closeby a variation on ‘drive according to conditions,’ instead recast as ‘walk according to conditions.’ Verb according to conditions. And then, from the upheaved start of September, verb according to prepositions.
Now I write in vagaries, mumbles a cryptologist, or cyber security specialist, updater of passwords unguessable with the goal of keeping a vault secure. After weeks of practicing, Feta finally lays down on command after walks. We’re moments from going on her late morning walk now, in fact. Learning, like every other speck in the burbling cauldron of verbs, takes the time it takes. And yet. And yet. Orange vest because it is hunting season, the one neighbor warns us. How much dew holds on determines which shoes. Hawks harass the chickens even more than usual on windy days and other hunches at the cusp of nascent, local mythologies. Ask a quark what it remembers, and it could be anything. Or everything.
Glimpsing almost Ontario, eyes pointed east across Lake Huron from Lexington, Mich., where I meandered for a beach walk on whatever day it was, maybe Thursday.
Or Lake Huron wavelets breaking teensy-tinily with another on its heels.
Tuesday the 26th, second day of classes, I learned that my last living bioparent aka my 75 year-old dad drove himself to the local hospital just before daybreak, reaching the ER with a symptoms mélange that included cusp kidney failure resulting, as I understand it, from several months of what, as a non-physician, I would characterize as “low flow.” Kidneys back up. Supplements, most egregiously in the form of potassium, fail to reset us back to level best. Fluid builds in the best guess range of an extra eight liters, which converts to approximately 17.6 pounds. With urine as with language, our systems are built to process and express. Consequences follow from not paying the water bill, etc. You get the idea. I drove the 570 miles north from Virginia to Port Huron on Sunday of Labor Day weekend in routine supportiveness, as much for the living as for the dying.
The hospital stay was a stressful ordeal. Striving for survivable ranges: hemoglobintrotters shooting trick free throws more misses than makes, GFR high-shrugs, creatinine low-shrugs, drink your Ensure, waiting waiting, and noticings of the contents of catheter bags with an almost aesthetic quality, blood orange amber colors and hues and volumes not unlike talking and nodding about oh-would-you-look-at-that artforms with an inaesthetic lot, no art classes in medical school, I mean. McLaren Port Huron third floor was a doctors and nurses carousel with no simple roster or schedule of who is a nephrologist, who is a urologist, and no critical perspective on what hellscape fragmentary specialization has wrought. Good thing higher ed warmed me up all these years for right hands not knowing or caring about what left hands do, so to speak (quick parenthetical for the literalists: in the metaphor, hands are people who don’t communicate with one another about what they think they know, especially when wayfinding is in-progress).
I’m skipping a lot. A lot, A LOT. Things leveled off, stabilizing enough that he could return home on Friday. Pick up meds at the pharmacy. For this, you can talk to a Walgreens AI on the phone who will only tell you about how you have selected unwittingly a short-stocked pharmakeia; intelligent agents don’t experience stress despite having bad days, which must be wonderful for them. Home has entailed moving furniture, clearing space for intuitively prepared beef liver (not by me; no thank-you, I’m good), and watching the first half or so of the U Michigan-U Oklahoma football game. In Spanish. Because you get what you get and anglophone ABC no es esa cosa.
But that’s not the whole story, just a little slice. On the Saturday of Labor Day weekend, I took to painting the rest of the front shed ceiling at the holler. Four-inch roller, discounted dark blue paint; slackers and mediocres just like me can make their own Sistine Chapels. As I did so, I began to notice a faint sting at the center of my right eyebrow. I listened to the sting and could not quite grasp what it was saying, something like a wasp or spider assaulted you in the night, you have a pimple coming on, did you touch poison ivy to your face, and so on. I listened and listened and mentioned to A that something was off with the sting but I did not quite understand what. Sunday drive blurred long miles into Monday hospital visits, and for a break I walked along the place where Lake Huron funnels narrow into the Saint Clair River, noticing more acutely the face pain compounding from sunlight and wind. I guessed it was shingles, an old friend from 1979 when I was five and had the chicken pox, now waving hello I’m back after all these years and what is new with you.
Everyone’s shingles will be different but awful. The thing I’ve learned about my own lifelong companionable varicella-zoster virus (VZV) is that, not unlike a 17-year brood long-underground cicada, it came back with astonishing alien energy singing its head off, weirdly wave-making intense sensations, like the cross-calling of whale songs mixed with ticklish, firey, explosive sonar, a storm of swirling pain, inflamation, blisters, then scabs. And this particular frienemy, my personal varicella-zoster virus wandered and dallied, flaring my eyebrow, no big, whatever, I’ve got other things on my mind, then my eyelid, forehead, scalp, and why not, more forehead. I found a local urgent care along this local main drag whose street name I still can’t quite remember (24th?). The attending physician told me she didn’t want to worry me but “you could lose your eyesight on the right side,” and here is a prescription for an antiviral which you can fill across the street at that same Walgreens. Good luck. Thank you. Good luck to you, too.
My childhood friend the long-dormant virus is now saying farewell so long and until next time. Cold compresses were too cold, the antiviral effective in countering, okay, if you must, you can visit, but you cannot stay long. I’m mending but not quite ready for the full moon observation, the talking and nodding about oh-would-you-look-at-that artforms with an inaesthetic lot, no art classes in so many degree programs, as it goes. Might be scars but I don’t have anything noticeable in the way of feelings about that prospect, German stoic compartmentalization coping for the soft-hearted; they wouldn’t be the only scars from when I was five.
I’m gonna stick around Michigan through the 14th, hopefully catch a hug from my granddaughter next week. I had planned to be here, anyway, for Parents’ weekend at U-Mich, which is coming up, plus a few other vague errands in-around Ann Arbor. And so that’s that. A travelogue dispatch and an explanation for why I’m kicking sand at the beach early September same time as holding it down with the online teaching and more.
Figure 1. “A Bubbling in the Sty.” A shorter than usual timeframe for this month’s illustration, but then again what’s more American than microwaved bacon? This, for the July POTM themed “Hot,” which paired with william o’neal ii’s “American Erotica.”
Job Numbers
Sixteen years in the professoriate. Two institutions (EMU and VT). One year as associate WPA. Ten years as WPA (five at EMU, five at VT). In that span, eight department chairs, five deans, four provosts.
Nineteen
Figure 2. Last of the teenaged chrysalis years queuing in 3…2…1 for Is. who turns 19 today. HB! Proud of all daughterchild has accomplished and the many big things ahead for her this fall at U of M. 〽️
5ives Expanded
For Some But Not For Me
I’ve been doing some light tech backups this week, deleting some old files; routine stuff, like decluttering my notes app (contemplating jump from Drafts to Google Keep), and there in an old note was a list of nineteen things I could do without. They’re not in rank-order of most to lesser disdain or golf and cilantro would be nearer to the top. And sure, it’s more than five, but back to school season means back to rule breaking season.
Bow ties
Easter 🐣
Berries
Vampire pop culture
Leaf blowers
Pocket change
Chipotle
Bob Newhart Show
Fireworks
Carnival games
Cruises
Princess Bride
Meetings without agendas
Rosewater flavored anything
Cilantro
Magic tricks
High fives
“Enter Sandman” as VT pep song
Golf
Out and About
Figure 3. Wizard, the hydration nerd of the flock, gulps water extremely. Figgy 4. Figgy thrives but showing a touch of brown leaf had low-leaf undersides misted with dish soap and baking soda antifungal.Figure 5. Feta steps gleefully to the wind-down of tick season.
Unroll Themselves
“In Essays in Radical Empiricism, James writes: ‘Knowledge of sensible realities . . . comes to life inside the tissue of experience. It is made; and made by relations that unroll themselves in time. Whenever certain intermediaries are given, such that, as they develop toward their terminus, there is experience from point to point of one direction followed, and finally of one process fulfilled, the result is that their starting-point thereby becomes a knower and their terminus an object meant or known‘ (1996: 57). In ‘The Feeling of Effort,’ James similarly sees the feeling as occurring ‘inside the tissue of experience.’ Yet, and this is where his later work assists in the understanding of the text, while created in the relation—’made by relations that unroll themselves in time’—the feeling (of effort) only comes into itself as such through the motor of a terminus. The terminus is what vectorizes the agencement, pulling the force-of-form to singular expression. This motor is not the end point in any direct sense. It is a force that activates the movement. The terminus acts as the pull, setting up the field that becomes the knower-known relation. Here, once again, there is not yet a predetermined subject or object, but rather, as Whitehead might hesitantly say, recipient and provoker” (160).
—Erin Manning. (2016). The Minor Gesture. Duke University Press.
In July’s second half, reading for wonder and curiosity slowed. Instead, review tasks like the wind. Three external reviews, a set of DRC fellow applicants, two manuscripts. Only ever part of the story, as relations unroll themselves. Yesterday it was an encounter with a rabid raccoon, a real-time fiasco while wielding merely a stick, which broke; the unwell critter growled at me, crossed the road, later died in the neighbor’s yard. Vultures wasted no time. Picture window sky burial. Unroll. Bills to pay and travel. Unroll. You can opt out altogether from Transunion, Experian, and Equifax cold call and list selling nonsense, did you know? The lab in Madison, Wisconsin that handles Cologuard telephones but is strangely, almost theatrically, plucky about their offers of help. Unroll. Lazily searching around for Kittler on media phantasms, spiritism, ghosts. It only feels right to find so little. This-above Erin Manning quotation, some veneer of it perhaps in Walking Methodologies, holds what I want my CCW paper on hand maps to engage, but how? Unroll. Let this fall’s teaching mix in, I think, because it needs more time. Doesn’t it always? Unroll.
About Collectanea
Collectanea is a series I’m trying out in Summer 2025 at Earth Wide Moth. Each entry accumulates throughout the week and is formed by gathering quotations, links, drawings, and miscellany. The title of the entry notes the week and year (the tenth in this series from Week 31 of 2025, or the Week of July 28). I open a tab, add a little of this or that most days. Why? Years ago my habitude toward serial composition and, thus, toward blogging, favored lighter, less formal, and more varied fragments; gradually, social media began to reel in many of these short form entries, recasting them as posts dropped a Facebook or Instagram or Twitter (while it lasted), albeit with dwindling ripple effect into the ad-addled and algorithm-ambivalent streams. This space, meanwhile, began to feel to me like it wanted more thoughtfully developed entries bearing the shape and length of what you might find on Medium or Substack. But, because I am drafting toward a book project most mornings, I don’t quite have reliable essayistic bandwidth for Earth Wide Moth this summer. Collectanea, if it goes according to my small bites chicken scratch plan, will be a release valve for the piling up of too many tabs open, functioning as a shareable, intermittent (weekly?) repository for small pieces cut and pasted from stuff I am reading, and also as a scrapbook for illustrations. -DM
Duolingo streak ist sehr gut! 🇩🇪#wonderhollow #rollcall
“Sometimes a branch grows long and another grows short, although the pattern stays the same the branches can point in different directions. They seem like different trees, but if you look carefully…” (16).
Figure 1. “Morningdala Gloryala.” In seasonal presences, summertime’s acuity.
Erin Manning on Sap-to-Syrup
“Experience grows from theoretical premise, but does so incorporating ecological emergence. It becomes sensitive to how a process is interlaced with the complexity that makes it singular in all its different ways. It’s not just a question of knowing what to look for – it’s about having been attuned to the quality of a practice over a long duration such that its minute shifts are discernible in the feel. It’s about being in the care of its many durations” (para. 8).
Writing Studies Tree bonsai, How might we re-activate, or re-engage, the invisible ramuli of advisory genealogies?
The Big Kettle Drum
Painting the front shed ceiling. Dark blue because a miss-mixed gallon was nine bucks at the hardware. Opportunity in the mistakes of others. Also being dumbshit because only recently have I discovered that one gallon will not quite cover the entire ceiling. Another fifty bucks for a second dark blue gallon to finish. Step ladder to reach. Step up, step down, step up, step down. Temporarily anchored thin chain segments to release the old, rusted, and very heavy florescent light bays each into a cradle so the electrical wires can stay put. Paint around the edge. La la. Johnny Cash Unearthed for a while. Hymnals for church of holler projects. Jesus, let it dry. Re-attach with same mildly corroded lag screws. Right shoulder aches familiarly. Pain Friend forewarns a visit. Overhead painting summons the pair of 1995 surgeries. Back when I was twenty-one. Pins to hold its many unpredictable slippages, hem in structural flaws. Paint on Monday and Thursday afternoon because those are the right recovery intervals for the age I happen to be now. Not finished but soon. Painting the front shed ceiling. Dark blue because.
Disappeared
“Suppose all of the syllabi and curricula and textbooks in schools disappeared. Suppose all of the standardized tests–city-wide, state-wide, and national–were lost. In other words, suppose that the most common material impeding innovation in the schools simply did not exist. Then suppose that you decided to turn this ‘catastrophe’ into an opportunity to increase the relevance of the schools. What would you do? (59).
—Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner. (1969). Teaching As a Subversive Activity. Delta. #reboot #education
About Collectanea
Collectanea is a series I’m tiring out in Summer 2025 at Earth Wide Moth. Each entry accumulates throughout the week and is formed by gathering quotations, links, drawings, and miscellany. The title of the entry notes the week and year (the ninth in this series from Week 30 of 2025, or the Week of July 21). I open a tab, add a little of this or that most days. Why? Years ago my habitude toward serial composition and, thus, toward blogging, favored lighter, less formal, and more varied fragments; gradually, social media began to reel in many of these short form entries, recasting them as posts dropped a Facebook or Instagram or Twitter (while it lasted), albeit with dwindling ripple effect into the ad-addled and algorithm-ambivalent streams. This space, meanwhile, began to feel to me like it wanted more thoughtfully developed entries bearing the shape and length of what you might find on Medium or Substack. But, because I am drafting toward a book project most mornings, I don’t quite have reliable essayistic bandwidth for Earth Wide Moth this summer. Collectanea, if it goes according to my small bites chicken scratch plan, will be a release valve for the piling up of too many tabs open, functioning as a shareable, intermittent (weekly?) repository for small pieces cut and pasted from stuff I am reading, and also as a scrapbook for illustrations. -DM
2025 John Lovas Award showpiece arrived in July’s mail. #wonderhollow #rollcall
We traveled to Michigan this week, Sunday through Thursday, so Collectanea slipped from routine to resting pose. Laptop in backpack. Vary your compositional yoga. Trip was two very different Airbnbs in and around Washtenaw County, winding routes through Dexter, Chelsea, Manchester, Saline, and Milan, then through Pinckney, Gregory, and Unadilla. A swim at Pickerel Lake. Ice cream in Hell. A just so-so “glop” taco salad in Depot Town. A Zoom meeting from a cafe. Catching up with friends and family as much as time and coordination allowed. Great to see some yas; sorry to miss some yas! And then back to Virginia, across Ohio and for too long stormed upon in West Virginia.
Airbnb #1
Figure 1. Der hund, relieved to be out of the car.
Ice Water
Figure 2. Shifted plans and there was Sweetwaters delivering cool-off refreshments.
Anecdoted Topography of Ann Arbor Chance
Figure 3. Before brunch, Zola Bistro. Outdoor options, calling ahead to learn which places were easy-agreeable to Feta’s companionably sitting sidetable: Zingerman’s Roadhouse, Jolly Pumpkin, Hell Saloon, too, were welcoming.
Airbnb #2
Figure 4. Portage Lake near Pinckney. Much to say about this place, but for that very reason, I’ll let it go, unsaid and unreviewed. No comment. No stars.
Take A Stick! Do Not Take A Stick.
Figure 5. Feta passed on Hell’s Doggie Library, perhaps because the offerings were not as appealing as the many sticks back at home, perhaps because she determined that this is exactly the sort of conditional enticement an officer of the devil would place before an unsuspecting canine. 😈
Downpours of Charleston, WV
Figure 6. Thunder and lightning and downpours and slow-downs for what felt like hours on the drive back to Virginia.
Cutie-pies, Cerberus
Figure 7. Back at the holler, Friday morning, this pair of black bear cubs playfully sauntered over the creek, along the yard, pausing, hummingbird nectar I smell?, at the walnut tree before heading up the embankment behind the mailboxes again.
Now What
The rest of July is a heap of review tasks and further syllabizing ENGL3844 into existence, plotting out two fall conference presentations, painting some more of the shed, keeping the hummingfeeders nectared, the tiny birdkin fueled, fed.
About Collectanea
Collectanea is a series I’m trying out in Summer 2025 at Earth Wide Moth. Each entry accumulates throughout the week and is formed by gathering quotations, links, drawings, and miscellany. The title of the entry notes the week and year (the eighth in this series from Week 29 of 2025, or the Week of July 14). I open a tab, add a little of this or that most days. Why? Years ago my habitude toward serial composition and, thus, toward blogging, favored lighter, less formal, and more varied fragments; gradually, social media began to reel in many of these short form entries, recasting them as posts dropped a Facebook or Instagram or Twitter (while it lasted), albeit with dwindling ripple effect into the ad-addled and algorithm-ambivalent streams. This space, meanwhile, began to feel to me like it wanted more thoughtfully developed entries bearing the shape and length of what you might find on Medium or Substack. But, because I am drafting toward a book project most mornings, I don’t quite have reliable essayistic bandwidth for Earth Wide Moth this summer. Collectanea, if it goes according to my small bites chicken scratch plan, will be a release valve for the piling up of too many tabs open, functioning as a shareable, intermittent (weekly?) repository for small pieces cut and pasted from stuff I am reading, and also as a scrapbook for illustrations. -DM
The vulture guardian, Hell, Mich. #travelogue #rollcall
“Perhaps the most profound relationship between walking, thinking, and writing reveals itself at the end of a stroll, back at the desk. There, it becomes apparent that writing and walking are extremely similar feats, equal parts physical and mental. When we choose a path through a city or forest, our brain must survey the surrounding environment, construct a mental map of the world, settle on a way forward, and translate that plan into a series of footsteps. Likewise, writing forces the brain to review its own landscape, plot a course through that mental terrain, and transcribe the resulting trail of thoughts by guiding the hands. Walking organizes the world around us; writing organizes our thoughts. Ultimately, maps like the one that Nabokov drew are recursive: they are maps of maps.”
Figure 1. “Fetadala.” The hound arranged in hues and textures of her own making.
The Teeming World of Funes
“I now arrive at the most difficult point in my story. This story (it is well the reader know it by now) has no other plot than that dialogue which took place half a century ago. I shall not try to reproduce the words, which are now irrecoverable. I prefer to summarize with veracity the many things Ireneo told me. The indirect style is remote and weak; I know I am sacrificing the efficacy of my narrative; my readers should imagine for themselves the hesitant periods which overwhelmed me that night” (151).
—Jorge Luis Borges. (1942, 1999). Funes the Memorious. Collected Fictions (A. Hurley, Trans.). Penguin Books. #remembering #forgetting #mnemonism
Nudged from a Write! conversation earlier in the week, I re-read Borges’ “Funes the Memorius” and have been thinking about the accursed blessing of remembering more, remembering less, and the pleasurable inevitability of forgetting (thanks to CGB‘s mention of the 1942 short story).
Mists of Academic Majors
Figure 2. A Tagcrowd word cloud rendering of the majors listed for the forty-four students enrolled in two (online-asynchronous) sections of ENGL3844: Writing and Digital Media coming up this fall.
5ives
Midsummer To-dos
External review letter No. 1
Syllabus for ENGL3844
Electrician to lend me a bzzt with swapping out remaining switches and outlets in front shed
Virginia DMV registration renewal
Finish painting shed
A Map May Be Concealing
“Such maps are widely assumed to convey objective and universal knowledge of place. They are intended to orient us, to tell us how to get from here to there, to show us precisely where we are. But modern maps hold no memory of what the land was before. Few of us have thought to ask what truths a map may be concealing, or have paused to consider that maps do not tell us where we are from or who we are. Many of us do not know the stories of the land in the places where we live; we have not thought to look for the topography of a myth in the surrounding rivers and hills. Perhaps this is because we have forgotten how to listen to the land around us.”
“Soon enough it will be me struggling (valiantly?) to walk–lugging my stuff around. How are we all so brave as to take step after step? Day after day? How are we so optimistic, so careful not to trip and yet do trip, and then get up and say o.k. Why do I feel so sorry for everyone and so proud?” (42).
—Maira Kalman. (2009). The Principles of Uncertainty. Penguin Books. #walkingmood #proud #lugging #walking #steps #trip
About Collectanea
Collectanea is a series I’m trying out in Summer 2025 at Earth Wide Moth. Each entry accumulates throughout the week and is formed by gathering quotations, links, drawings, and miscellany. The title of the entry notes the week and year (the seventh in this series from Week 28 of 2025, or the Week of July 7). I open a tab, add a little of this or that most days. Why? Years ago my habitude toward serial composition and, thus, toward blogging, favored lighter, less formal, and more varied fragments; gradually, social media began to reel in many of these short form entries, recasting them as posts dropped a Facebook or Instagram or Twitter (while it lasted), albeit with dwindling ripple effect into the ad-addled and algorithm-ambivalent streams. This space, meanwhile, began to feel to me like it wanted more thoughtfully developed entries bearing the shape and length of what you might find on Medium or Substack. But, because I am drafting toward a book project most mornings, I don’t quite have reliable essayistic bandwidth for Earth Wide Moth this summer. Collectanea, if it goes according to my small bites chicken scratch plan, will be a release valve for the piling up of too many tabs open, functioning as a shareable, intermittent (weekly?) repository for small pieces cut and pasted from stuff I am reading, and also as a scrapbook for illustrations. -DM
Downspout, PVC drain line near-neighborliness, or where, with a plastic joint and a piece of rebar to shield it from the garden house, mending is overdue. #wonderhollow #rollcall
“The integration of LLMs into learning environments presents a complex duality: while they enhance accessibility and personalization of education, they may inadvertently contribute to cognitive atrophy through excessive reliance on AI-driven solutions [3]. Prior research points out that there is a strong negative correlation between AI tool usage and critical thinking skills, with younger users exhibiting higher dependence on AI tools and consequently lower cognitive performance scores [3]” (10).
—Nataliya Kosmyna, Eugene Haptmann, Ye Tong Yuan, Jessica Situ, Zian-Hao Liao, Ashly Vivian Beresnitzky, Iris Braunstein, Pattie Maes (MIT, MassArt, Wellesley1Why don’t citation systems include institutional affiliations?). (2025). Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task (arXiv:2506.08872). arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2506.08872 #cognition #debt #writing #LLMs #AI #frenzy #atrophy #performance #humanbrains #consequences
A prepublication version of the Kosmyna et al. article, “Your Brain on ChatGPT,” circulated a couple of weeks ago. At >200 pages, whew, it is long and ornately specialized at points. I’ve read enough of it to conclude a) it will, on the sunny side of review, be a landmark study, an important account leading to further research on the cognitive consequences of LLM over-reliance (notably, a developmental vortex fueled by enthusiastic, uncritical adoptions and battering-ram marketing efforts by boom or bust AI startups), b) the approach to writing essays at the center of the study is woefully reductive (i.e., timed for 20 minutes, AP-test-styled prompting without much context or purpose), c) the ability to quote one’s own essay shortly after writing it is a bizarre and not altogether persuasive indicator of cognitive performance, yet this was the greatest differentiator among the three participating groups (brain-only, search engine, and LLM), and d) there remains a vast gulf between cognitive neurosciences, rhetorical invention/eureka/epiphany studies2We don’t really have anything like Eureka Studies or Epiphany Studies; perhaps all of the Humanities should retool in this direction, renaming minors as Epiphany Studies, or, if you are at a tech/stem school, Epiphany Engineering. The curriculum would draw upon writing and rhetoric, philosophy, history, language and literature, and cognitive neuroscience, regarding learning as a so-called “open period,” of the sort that the neuroscientists studying psychedelics describe in reparative/therapeutic terms as a window for synaptic rerigging., and reading and writing research as it is valued in the humanities, much less in Rhetoric and Composition/Writing Studies.
Visual Portmanteau: Monarch Butterfly + Mandala
Figure 1. “Monarchdala.”
Mature, blooming milkweed at the back of the holler is aflutter, buzzing with pollinators, including a small kaleidoscope of Monarch butterflies. And lately I had been exploring in Procreate various brush and palette customizations, watching a few tutorials, learning how to make stamps. What followed were experimental, exploratory pieces, like this one, which uses drawing guides for mirrored quadrants, then bending and combining selected elements, adding color from a custom butterfly photograph palette, and inlayering a gradient backdrop for a fade of center-to-periphery brightness.
The Standard Way into the Sheepfold
“What is the good of research ? What is worth doing ? Shall we be allowed to do it ? Who will do it ? In answering the first question, I hold that by the scholarship which is the product of research the standing of our work in the academic world will be improved. It will make us orthodox. Research is the standard way into the sheepfold” (17).
~
“Now, is there any reason, in this age when every other branch of human knowledge is being ruthlessly pulled to pieces and tested why our branch should be passed over?” (18).
—James Winans (Cornell U). (1915). The need for research. The Quarterly Journal of Speech, 1(1), 17–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/00335631509360453. #branches #research #orthodoxy #sheepfold #speech #communication #disciplinarity
From the Mail Bag 📭
Sadly, there was no mail from readers this week.
G-l-o-r-i-a
Figure 2. Summer 2025’s first morning glory bloom.
5ives
CCCC Covers and a Poll
Five years, five program covers from past Conferences on College Composition and Communication. Why these? Albeit somewhat peripheral to my current research project, they’re quirky with their idiomatic, time-spanning expressions of then and now: the phrase “composition and communication” repeated 53 times from 1960; warpy, nested Cs from 1962; an optical illusion from 1974; seven missiles soaring from left to right in 1977; and an earth-sized pencil from 1983.
19601962197419771983
Walking as Artistic Practice Syllabus
“This workshop is designed as a brief survey of some of the origins, theories, processes, and manifestations of walking as art. We will read, watch, and discuss perspectives on walking-based projects. Using this information as a springboard, we will complete walking exercises, and execute our own original walking projects.”
I have been meandering in wide arcs toward a plan for this fall’s pair of online-asynchronous sections of ENGL3844: Writing and Digital Media. The course description mentions digital writing within “the context of business, organizational, and political practices.” It also mentions production, devices, data visualizations, videos, web design, “and more.” Sample syllabi I have been able to track down tend to outline three major projects, usually something related to podcasting or sound editing, something related to data analysis and visualization, and something related to video. The official, CUSP-approved outcomes are keyed toward ethics (“ethical design strategies”) with three bullets emphasizing visual, video, and web. I haven’t taught this particular class before at Virginia Tech. The online-asynchronous format adds complications to the kinds of engagement and interaction one can reasonably expect, of course. But I have been thinking more about short-form exercises paired with an anthologics-styled (perhaps ABCDEary format) assortment. Self-introductory account of digital mecology/technologies of self; microthemes prompted with alternatingly terrestrial (food, walking, fieldwork) and digital (photo, sound, hypertext, map, 4D/time, etc.). Inflections of Ashley Holmes’ device-mediated environs (writing on location), inflections of Ellen Mueller’s walking courses reframed as writing on foot, Geoffrey Sirc’s seriality, throwback maps of the imagination (e.g., what goes on in that building I walk past every day?), and more. “And more” as the inventive indeterminacy better fitted with digital writing than anything else I am finding or can think of as of yet, seven weeks or so from the start of classes.
Collectanea is a series I’m trying out in Summer 2025 at Earth Wide Moth. Each entry accumulates throughout the week and is formed by gathering quotations, links, drawings, and miscellany. The title of the entry notes the week and year (the sixth in this series from Week 27 of 2025, or the Week of June 30). I open a tab, add a little of this or that most days. Why? Years ago my habitude toward serial composition and, thus, toward blogging, favored lighter, less formal, and more varied fragments; gradually, social media began to reel in many of these short form entries, recasting them as posts dropped a Facebook or Instagram or Twitter (while it lasted), albeit with dwindling ripple effect into the ad-addled and algorithm-ambivalent streams. This space, meanwhile, began to feel to me like it wanted more thoughtfully developed entries bearing the shape and length of what you might find on Medium or Substack. But, because I am drafting toward a book project most mornings, I don’t quite have reliable essayistic bandwidth for Earth Wide Moth this summer. Collectanea, if it goes according to my small bites chicken scratch plan, will be a release valve for the piling up of too many tabs open, functioning as a shareable, intermittent (weekly?) repository for small pieces cut and pasted from stuff I am reading, and also as a scrapbook for illustrations. -DM
Buck moth larva, near posts at SW corner of the holler. #stinging #caterpillar #wonderhollow #rollcall
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Notes
1
Why don’t citation systems include institutional affiliations?
2
We don’t really have anything like Eureka Studies or Epiphany Studies; perhaps all of the Humanities should retool in this direction, renaming minors as Epiphany Studies, or, if you are at a tech/stem school, Epiphany Engineering. The curriculum would draw upon writing and rhetoric, philosophy, history, language and literature, and cognitive neuroscience, regarding learning as a so-called “open period,” of the sort that the neuroscientists studying psychedelics describe in reparative/therapeutic terms as a window for synaptic rerigging.
“As I have tried to demonstrate, the use of key terms such as ‘current-traditional rhetoric,’ ‘process,’ and ‘post-process’ has contributed significantly to the discursive construction of the history of composition studies. On one hand, these terms have helped to clarify changing currents in the intellectual practices of composition studies; on the other hand, they have oversimplified the multiplicity of perspectives within each ‘paradigm.’ These keywords also imposed discursively constructed boundaries on complex historical developments, as new ‘paradigms’ criticized previously dominant theories and pedagogies for certain features while appropriating or ignoring other features—as in the post-process dismissal of social process theories and pedagogies. Such negotiation is inevitable because knowledge is discursively constructed in so far as discourse is used as the dominant medium of thought and communication (Bazerman, 1988; Berger & Luckman, 1966; Rorty, 1979)” (74).
—Paul Kei Matsuda. (2003). Process and post-process: A discursive history. Journal of Second Language Writing, 12(1), 65–83. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1060-3743(02)00127-3 #terms #keywords #oversimplification #process #post-process #current-traditional
Gardener’s Ascent—Illustration Paired with the OnlyPoems POTM for June
Figure 1. “Gardener’s Ascent.”
June’s OnlyPoem’s Poem of the Month, “Diocletian Upon Being Asked to Return to Rome,” by Kate Deimling, greenleafed for me this illustration, an experiment with horizons and scale, rolling and peaked, striped in cabbages. I guess this is the fourteenth monthly POTM illustration I’ve done for OnlyPoems since April 2024. I’m low-key exploring the possibility of an ekphrastics exhibit this fall, thinking through how best to arrange for printing the illustrations alongside each poem. #ekphrastic #POTM #illustration
Taken to be Dogmas
“How many ideas that were so sure they were taken to be dogmas have disappeared from knowledge?” (38).
—Michel Serres. (2020). Branches: A Philosophy of Time, Event and Advent. Bloomsbury Academic.
From the Mail Bag
Figure 2. Letter from Z.
Zed,
Thank you for writing in. It’s always nice to get old-timey mail. And foremost, my compliments on your handwriting. It looks a lot like my own, the scratches of a Gen-Xer who half-heartedly practiced cursive letterforms forty-some years ago and whose script habits have dwindled though not to the point of illegibility, not yet. I have the weak hands of an aging English professor and so have chosen to type in reply; I hope you understand.
The most number of times I have been stung since moving to Rosemary Road in 2021 is three. Three times. The record is now, this summer, in fact. Last week I was moving a pile of big rocks to the creek bed, procrastinating civilian corp of engineers-style, one by one, giving the flow path something to think about, rocks and water doing their endless dance and such. With the final rock, I bumped the plank fence and out from where the ivy lushly clung to the boards swarmed what I’d guess were 20-30 wasps. I know they say to keep calm because so many of the stinging insects can sense fear. But no. That does not work. There is no keeping calm when swarmed by wasps. I fled, scrambled for some distance. Ribs and left arm. Two stings. And then the third sting was just this week. While walking in flip-flops I stepped such that a bee found its way underneath my left “ring” toe (fourth toe; seems to me strangely matrimonial to call a fourth toe a ring toe). I would have described myself as bee+hornet+wasp allergic in my younger years; now, less so. The toxin is uncomfortable and would be worrying if I was stung more than, say, four or five times, but I’ll be fine, and I know there are more allergic people out there encountering stinging insects with more justifiable alarm. -DM
Stick Henge Update
Figure 3. One-third of Stick Henge.
As of the end of June, just one pile of branches still needs to be integrated with the accumulating sections of the henge. Here, pictured, is one section of the larger circular form. I’m still trying to decide at what rate to clip branches from the red oak, and this week’s “heat dome” discouraged me from working on it.
5ives
The Profiteering Publishing Corps
Elsevier (Computers and Composition, Journal of Second Language Writing); Dutch, 2022 revenue: £2.909 billion
Springer Nature; German-British, 2024 revenue: €1.82 billion to €1.85 billion
Sage Publishing (JBTC, Written Communication); U.S., 2023 revenue: $140.0 million
I will never get used to the idea that scholarship gets written, voluntarily reviewed, voluntarily edited, and then it is published by these corporations before being sold back to colleges and universities through library subscription packages.
Farther from Home
“Of course, the farther from home you go to solve your problem, the more expensive the solution will be” (68). from “Three Ways of Farming in the Southwest,” 1979.
—Wendell Berry. (1981). The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural and Agricultural. Counterpoint.
Flock Under Cover
Around ~11 a.m. is the latest the chickens will linger on hot days before seeking shade. Mo appears to be doing his diligent best, keenly alert to disturbances and anomalies, though I am nevertheless nervous because it was just about exactly a year ago when we lost three chickens to a raccoon attack at the edge not 30 feet into the thicket behind the house.
Figure 4. Wonder Hollow flock. Perla, Mo, Lightfoot (back row, left to right). Tiny Honey, Betty, Wizard (front row, left to right).
About Collectanea
Collectanea is a series I’m trying out in Summer 2025 at Earth Wide Moth. Each entry accumulates throughout the week and is formed by gathering quotations, links, drawings, and miscellany. The title of the entry notes the week and year (the fifth in this series from Week 26 of 2025, or the Week of June 23). I open a tab, add a little of this or that most days. Why? Years ago my habitude toward serial composition and, thus, toward blogging, favored lighter, less formal, and more varied fragments; gradually, social media began to reel in many of these short form entries, recasting them as posts dropped a Facebook or Instagram or Twitter (while it lasted), albeit with dwindling ripple effect into the ad-addled and algorithm-ambivalent streams. This space, meanwhile, began to feel to me like it wanted more thoughtfully developed entries bearing the shape and length of what you might find on Medium or Substack. But, because I am drafting toward a book project most mornings, I don’t quite have reliable essayistic bandwidth for Earth Wide Moth this summer. Collectanea, if it goes according to my small bites chicken scratch plan, will be a release valve for the piling up of too many tabs open, functioning as a shareable, intermittent (weekly?) repository for small pieces cut and pasted from stuff I am reading, and also as a scrapbook for illustrations. -DM
F., hyped about suppertime. #wonderhollow #rollcall
“One new approach that I incorporated was the use of microthemes. A microtheme is defined as ‘an essay so short that it can be typed on a single five-by-eight inch note card.’ There are four types of microtheme that I have used successfully. These are (1) summary writing, (2) supporting a thesis, (3) generating a thesis from provided data and (4) quandary posing. Each can be used to have students focus on a small segment of material and write short responses” (33).
—Janet D. Hartman. (1989). Writing to learn and communicate in a data structures course. Proceedings of the Twentieth SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, 32–36. https://doi.org/10.1145/65293.71191
A reference to Hartman’s work on microthemes appears in Chapter 5, “Writing to Learn,” from Bazerman et al.’s 2005 collection, Reference Guide to Writing Across the Curriculum. As I followed this farther, I stumbled upon Trish Roberts-Miller’s 2020 blog entry, “Teaching with Microthemes.” Initially I’d been wondering about whether writing-to-learn bore even the smallest hints of drawing-to-learn, but so far I haven’t found anything connect them directly (over and above the “[blanking]-to-learn” phraseology). So, that’s it–microthemes widened to an etcetera, miniatures, the dinky heap of speck genres we have named as a way to patch wee scale pedagogical interactions and large scale genres.
Felt Sense
Figure 1. Think of it as a snowball.
F. sheds. A lot. A LOT–a lot. And so, what might these wool heaps become? From a 2009 Maker page and from elsewhere, we’re lint-rolling for ideas.
“But that hair! It gets everywhere. I’ve seen it floating around like snowdrifts under the couch, and of course it gets on every piece of clothing in the house! Grooming your dog is the best way to keep the hair from finding its way into your wardrobe permanently. The hair that you remove from the dog when you brush her can be put to crafty use! It can be felted, just like sheep’s wool. Well, not exactly like wool, but close enough! Don’t let the soft fibers go to waste. Use some pipe cleaners and a felting needle to create a replica of your pet, made from her fur!” –Brookelynn Morris
Methods of Placing
“Some methods of placing freshman writing before students are particularly interesting. Fifteen schools [out of 186 respondents] place themes on a bulletin board for student inspection. In nine schools, themes are returned and circulated in class for reading and comment. Three schools place themes which exemplify certain assignments on a reserve shelf in the library for use by students in the course. One school devotes the entire May issue of its alumni bulletin to the publication of freshman composition work. The yearbook, a printed anthology of themes used as a text, and a local newspaper are all used as media for the presentation of freshman writing.”
This, from the first CCC article, Edith Wells’ report on a survey of 400 colleges and universities’ first-year writing publications.
—Edith Wells. 1950. “College Publications of Freshman Writing.” College Composition and Communication 1.1.
Food Poisoning
Figure 2. “Easy Queasy.”
Stick Henge Update
Writing this week about branching indices in the morning and then in the afternoons, when the skies cooperate, piling sticks to hengiform monument. Stick Henge has three perimetering arc segments; each amounts to a cradle held vertical by hammer-set wooden posts. Two sets of posts are 3.5 feet tall; the third is seven feet tall. The twiggy offshed from the two black cherry trees and the catalpa have been piled into the cradles, along with a few branches from the red oak, though that one is harder to cut and slower to sculpt with. I thought I might be able to get Stick Henge finished by solstice, but Thursday’s work session convinced me that even as it is well begun and more than half done, not unlike a book project, the finishing shall be a Zeno’s paradox considering there is a slower-more to do and even after that another stick can always be placed atop.
5ives
Writing’s Microgenres
Microthemes (Hartman, 1989)
Aphorisms (Haynes, 2016)
Representative anecdotes (Rice, 2015)
Hundreds (Berlant & Stewart, 2019) (or nineties, my preferred variation)
Crots (Weathers, 1980)
What other microgenres can you think of? I am teaching two sections of ENGL3844: Writing and Digital Media this fall, and I think I might build the class around microgenres and digital circulation.
Somewhat of a Virgule
“I have been hailed by a slash, called into these questions (How has the slash between rhet/comp come to be and to mean? Will the slash between rhet/comp persist?) by a virgule, a solidus, a dia/critical mark (of sorts). It is not a task I take lightly, nor one that I find distasteful. I am somewhat of a virgule myself, poised on the cusp of a slightly disreputable figure. (I once bristled when an oh-so-proper official of the MLA requested that I remove a slash from the title of my already-accepted MLA conference presentation. Before the program went to print, you see. I said no. The slash was necessary, and it stayed. For once in my life, it was an either/or decision.) Such it is with rhetoric/composition—both doomed and/or fortunate to live with this aporetic virgule between them, listing like a slightly disfigured lightning bolt” (para. 1).
Unexpectedly, ill-advisedly, Betty briefly took an interest in doppelgänger Hisstilla. The encounter was short-lived, peaceful. I am convinced there are at least two black racers canvassing Wonder Hollow, this younger, smaller one at the front (east), and an older, larger one at the back (west).
Collectanea is a series I’m trying out in Summer 2025 at Earth Wide Moth. Each entry accumulates throughout the week and is formed by gathering quotations, links, drawings, and miscellany. The title of the entry notes the week and year (the fourth in this series from Week 25 of 2025, or the Week of June 16). I open a tab, add a little of this or that most days. Why? Years ago my habitude toward serial composition and, thus, toward blogging, favored lighter, less formal, and more varied fragments; gradually, social media began to reel in many of these short form entries, recasting them as posts dropped a Facebook or Instagram or Twitter (while it lasted), albeit with dwindling ripple effect into the ad-addled and algorithm-ambivalent streams. This space, meanwhile, began to feel to me like it wanted more thoughtfully developed entries bearing the shape and length of what you might find on Medium or Substack. But, because I am drafting toward a book project most mornings, I don’t quite have reliable essayistic bandwidth for Earth Wide Moth this summer. Collectanea, if it goes according to my small bites chicken scratch plan, will be a release valve for the piling up of too many tabs open, functioning as a shareable, intermittent (weekly?) repository for small pieces cut and pasted from stuff I am reading, and also as a scrapbook for illustrations. -DM
The diverter pond’s liner experiment. #wonderhollow #rollcall
Figure 1. Hisstilla (Northern black racer or Eastern rat snake, she won’t say) sunning in the Catalpa tree, back edge of the holler, a few steps away from the Phone of the Wind and in-progress Stick Henge.
Horror Vacui 🕳️
“At Physics IV, 8, 216a26-7, Aristotle cracks a joke. It is one of the relatively few deliberate jokes in the corpus, and its occurrence here is not without significance. Aristotle in these chapters is arguing against those who believe in the existence of the void, or vacuum, or empty space; he says, ‘even if we consider it on its own merits the so-called vacuum will be found to be really vacuous.’2
To be sure, this is not a very funny joke; what is interesting about it, though, is that it underlines the general attitude of dismissive flippancy that seems to run through Aristotle’s consideration of the void. He seems to refuse to take the hypothesis of the void at all seriously. He never argues directly that the void does not or cannot exist,3 but contents himself with criticizing the arguments that other thinkers had advanced in its favour. And even this criticism seems disorganized4 and strawmannish—it doesn’t really meet these thinkers on their own terms; moreover, it is heavily bound up with Aristotle’s peculiar views about the phenomena and laws of motion.5 One comes away with an uneasy feeling that the problem itself has not been addressed, that Aristotle has been unable or unwilling to give his real reasons for disliking the void; it seems almost as though he suffers from an irrational aversion to the void, a neurotic horror vacui, and will clutch at straws to refute it.”
—John Thorp. (1990). “Aristotle’s Horror Vacui1. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 20(2), 149–166. #emptiness #vacuum #void #clearings
CCC Editors
Kara Taczak & Matt Davis, Feb 2025- (U Central Florida & UMass-Boston)
Malea Powell, Feb 2020-Dec 2024 (Michigan St U); 4 years, 10 months
Jonathan Alexander, Feb 2015-Dec 2019 (UC-Irvine); 4 years, 10 months
Kathleen Blake Yancey, Feb 2010-Dec 2014 (Florida St U); 4 years, 10 months
Deborah Holdstein, Feb 2005-Dec 2009 (Governors St U; Columbia C Chicago); 4 years, 10 months
Marilyn Cooper, Feb 2000-Dec 2004 (Michigan Tech); 4 years, 10 months
Joseph Harris, Feb 1994-Dec 1999 (U Pittsburgh; Duke U); 5 years, 10 months
Richard Gebhardt, Feb 1987-Dec 1993 (Findlay C; Bowling Green St U); 6 years, 10 months
Richard Larson, Feb 1980-Dec 1986 (Lehman C CUNY); 6 years, 10 months
Edward P.J. Corbett, Feb 1974-Dec 1979 (Ohio St U); 5 years, 10 months
William Irmscher, Feb 1965-Dec 1973 (U Washington); 8 years, 10 months
Ken Macrorie, Feb 1962-Dec 1964 (Western Michigan U); 2 years, 10 months
Cecil B. Williams, Dec 1960-Dec 1962 (Texas Christian U); 2 years, 10 months
Francis E. Bowman (noted as interim), October 1959-October 1960 (Williams took a Fulbright at U Hamburg) (Duke U); 1 year
Cecil B. Williams, Feb 1959-May 1959 (Oklahoma St U); 4 months
Francis E. Bowman, Feb 1956-Dec 1958 (Duke U); 2 years, 4 months
George W. Wykoff, Oct 1952-Dec 1955 (Purdue U); 3 years, 2 months
Charles (Chas) Roberts, March 1950-May 1952 (U Illinois); 2 years, 2 months
〜
Recently I was revisiting Lisa Ede’s editor’s introduction to the collection of the Braddock award-winning essays, On Writing Research: The Braddock Essays, 1975-1998. I noticed the book’s frontmatter included an up-to-date at the time list of CCC editors, Charles Roberts through Joseph Harris, which in turn pointed me to the Wikipedia entry to see whether an up-to-date now list was there, which in turn nudged me to attempt a little bit of updating, so I added institutional affiliations and lengths of terms. A section of this manuscript I’m working on deals only tangentially with this stuff; thus, it’s fitting for Collectanea. Depending upon how you score the Williams-Bowman terms in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Taczak and Davis are editors #16 and #17, or, for the interims-do-count crowd, #18 and #19; they’re the journal’s first co-editors, however you add it up. No institutional affiliations repeat, except Duke with two (Bowman and Harris). Irmscher’s nine year term is longest; Roberts’ is shortest.
Donelon as Elondon
Figure 2. “Elondon as Donelon.”
“In the 2015 anthology First Comes Love: Power Couples, Celebrity Kinship, and Cultural Politics, Vanessa Díaz, an assistant professor of communications at Cal State Fullerton, wrote a chapter analyzing the term ‘Brangelina’ and the practice of combining celebrity couples’ names into one. Díaz, currently a postdoctoral fellow at UCLA, pointed out that most previous notable portmanteaus were either self-created (Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball’s ‘Desilu’ production company, John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s ‘Lenono Music’) or used by as a term of derision (Bill and Hillary Clinton as ‘Billary’). But the ‘Brangelina’ tag arose during an intense period of competition between celebrity tabloids, and it was part of a wave of gimmicky namings that helped feed public fascination with famous couples—but only certain famous couples” (para. 2).
“In the last few years, the mind of Elon Musk has dramatically moved in two directions, one lateral and the other vertical. Ideologically, he has shifted from a moderate big-business centrist who supported Barack Obama to a far-right partisan of Donald Trump, a White House adviser whose contentious tenure ended last Wednesday. Cognitively, Musk has gone from being hyperbolic but still grounded in reality to being—or so it would seem—almost permanently high as a kite.”
5ives, or Merlin’s Lists of Five Things was one of the early standouts for me among 21st century, digital progymnasmata. The site’s first Internet Archive snapshot shows it was well underway by September 4, 2003, though the earliest entries don’t bear datestamps to follow the sun dial’s shadow any more finely than this. The last entry, Five Musicians to Whom I’ve Drunkenly Introduced Myself, was posted on December 2, 2016, and the site has subsequent sporadic snapshots through this spring, April 2025. Now the URL shows “error establishing a database connection,” so 5ives, well, it’s a gone. And yet. The list of five things still toe taps, still sparks synapse. Gones branch out; what looks like disappearance can be ulteriority, a slow circulation, tacit and inobservable. Why not give 5ives a try here from time to time?
The Wonder Hollow Hens Ranked by How Many Eggs They Laid This Week
Perla
Betty
Tiny Honey
Wizard
Lightfoot
Fivure 3. A screenshot of the last entries posted at 5ives: Merlin’s List of Five Things on December 2, 2016, and July 2, 2015.
Operative Proximity, or Why I Am Growing [Snoring Sounds] of Literature Reviews
“We apply what [Albert North] Whitehead said about a philosophical system’s dynamic self-relation to the relation between generative works. Certain authors’ works share orientations that place them in operative proximity to each other. These are less doctrinal principles than motivating presuppositions that set the conditions of possibility for what the thinking can produce and work it continuously from within. The concepts of different authors working from a similar presuppositional field have the same characteristic Whitehead sought: they connect on the level of what each leaves effectively unsaid for another, by dint of mutual oversaturation. So rather than critiquing, we draw out threads and weave them into a movement of thought emergent in the between. If this is successful, it creates a transindividual field of consistency that becomes our habitat of thought. This way of approaching works constitutes a ‘minor’ treatment of the texts: sidestepping general discussion of ‘major’ concepts (periods, schools, doctrines, stock philosophical problems).”
As I was taking the garbage to the Rogers drop-off site last Sunday, Hisstilla was napping in the middle of Rosemary Road. So, rather than wait, I grabbed a longish stick from alongside the road and scooted her safely to the edge before continuing on my way. I’ve seen her three times this week, twice while F. was with me. In almost four years that’s more snake encounters in one week than ever before, which gets me thinking, what if she has a stunt double—the racer’s two bodies.
Figure 4. Look, it’s Hisstilla (or her doppelgänger?) in the road.
About Collectanea
Collectanea is a new, provisional series I’m trying out in Summer 2025 at Earth Wide Moth. Each entry accumulates throughout the week and is formed by gathering quotations, links, drawings, and miscellany. The title of the entry notes the week and year (the third in this series from Week 24 of 2025, or the Week of June 9). I open a tab, add a little of this or that most days. Why? Years ago my habitude toward serial composition and, thus, toward blogging, favored lighter, less formal, and more varied fragments; gradually, social media began to reel in many of these short form entries, recasting them as posts dropped a Facebook or Instagram or Twitter (while it lasted), albeit with dwindling ripple effect into the ad-addled and algorithm-ambivalent streams. This space, meanwhile, began to feel to me like it wanted more thoughtfully developed entries bearing the shape and length of what you might find on Medium or Substack. But, because I am drafting toward a book project most mornings, I don’t quite have reliable essayistic bandwidth for Earth Wide Moth this summer. Collectanea, if it goes according to my small bites chicken scratch plan, will be a release valve for the piling up of too many tabs open, functioning as a shareable, intermittent (weekly?) repository for small pieces cut and pasted from stuff I am reading, and also as a scrapbook for illustrations. -DM
Mint sprigs growing mid-creek in the stretch we have with fondness and great creative effort dubbed Mint Creek. #wonderhollow #rollcall
