Counting Skunks

/ Derek Mueller / Leave a comment
⏳ Approximate reading time: 8 mins

I am beginning this short piece on the afternoon of June 30, a postmark I am recording because I don’t know how long it will take to sort through the many stripes of skunk thoughts I have been thinking over the past month. It has been just one month since I moved back to Washtenaw County after eight years living very rurally, as in no-cell-signal-rurally end-of-dirt-road-rurally, in SW Virginia. As it happens, this is also the eve of a new job, an appointment as faculty director of the Sweetland Center for Writing at the University of Michigan. Tomorrow I will walk to the near end of the block, wait for the AATA’s The Ride, bus number 5, and take it to the vicinity where the BTC hub is under construction (along with 90% of Ann Arbor, evidently), then walk to the humanities building basement to retrieve a work computer, and then to the office, which I’ve learned flooded sometime in the past month.

I went with Counting Skunks for two reasons. The first is that last evening as A. and I played a couple of hands of gin rummy around 9 p.m. ET, we listened to Ann Arbor’s 107.1 FM on the radio, a show I know and enjoy from way back called Sonic Bliss, which played a song, Mr. Jones, by the Counting Crows. A. loves the Counting Crows; I plug my ears, please, no. We hadn’t ever talked about the Counting Crows nor about how polarized we were in our tastes-distastes for their music-hellnoise. Searching for the right words, I quipped that I felt the Counting Crows’ music stunk, that they had not rightly earned their association with crows and that instead a better fitting name would have been Counting Skunks. The second reason is that soon after moving to East Ann Arbor a month ago in late May, when we would walk Feta, we saw a remarkable number of skunks. Stenches and stenches of skunks wandered the streets, casual-like, carefree, like this was just how things worked around here. Some evenings between 7-8 p.m. we would see as many as three skunks scuttling about, on the sidewalks and in the street, in yards, ducking beneath vehicles, slinking into shrubbery, etc. Feta, our cherished Norwegian Elkhound, doesn’t seem to have had many encounters with skunks in the time before we adopted her from the Montgomery County (Va.) Animal Care and Adoption Center and none over the past two years at our place at the end of Rosemary Road, either. Low skunkeracy, if skunk knowledge was a kind of canine literacy. I say this because Feta does not seem to realize the potency of any skunk’s defenses; she barks and tugs on her leash, like she wants to chase the skunk, like the skunk is no different than a rabbit or squirrel in the game of pseudohunting. But these semi-urban skunks respond to Feta with the flattest of dispositions. As though cloaked in nonchalance, they act like they don’t hear or see her. They just check in winningly with their fulsome anal glands readied for directed expression, milling about as though Feta presents not a speck of threat in their worlds. This skunk coolness fuels Feta to yet greater displays of pulling and vocalized woof woof-woof woof. Meanwhile, it’s like we have a clearer and clearer foresight into Feta’s inevitably befouled future, the expectancy of seers-as-smellers, olfactory prophets.

Shortly after we saw the first skunk milling around our backyard chicken tractor (mobile coop and run) one evening, I looked up local pest removal services. There are at least two such services in Ann Arbor. I won’t name them here because I have not employed them and I am not interested in that kind of trouble; truly, I don’t have much evidence upon which to base any evaluation of their quality. I learned from one that their pricing starts at $800 for the first assessment and trapping, followed by additional fees for successive trappings. In Virginia, a comparable service was available for raccoons, which started at $150 for a ten day period, which included setting and baiting a live trap for ten days along with removing the first raccoon, and then each subsequent raccoon caught and removed within the ten day window would add $50 to the invoice. Three raccoons in ten days would cost $250, much cheaper than the $800 starting charge here locally in Michigan. I continued to call around. Another national franchise gave me an appointment window for doing an on-site assessment, but then the person never showed up, never called, nothing. When I called the dispatcher to ask if there had been a misunderstanding, they offered to reschedule, which I said no thanks because no-shows on two hour service appointment windows rank right up there with being sprayed by a skunk. I then placed a call and left two different phone messages for a small animal removal specialist in Jackson, Mich., but he never called back. Too busy? Out of business? I don’t know. And finally I reached a second service and received a bid exactly matched with the one I already had in hand, $800 for the first removal and then $80 per month for continued monitoring and removals. Prices match in Ann Arbor’s skunk removal duopoly.

When taking Feta out for a walk, especially first thing in the morning, around 6:30 a.m., we angle west, south, southwest, south, southwest, south, west, then north along Platt Road, then west into Mary Beth Doyle Park, bending course to the paved path, and home along Packard Road, 2.5 miles altogether. Overnight sprayed zones disturb the route at seemingly random locations, though there are more spoiled air pockets in the neighborhoods than in the woods. I imagine this to be a kind of smell-o-map nose coded with red zones suggesting more frequent escalatory encounters; more skunk meets non-skunk encounters happen in the suburbs—with dogs, cars, and people—thus, more spraying. So although I have not been sprayed directly by any skunk, the smell is familiar enough, its distinct heavy mattress holding wretched shape, an air stain of old coffee, decay, urea, and marijuana smoke. Read around online about skunk odors and you will see this scent characterized as “musky.” Again and again language betrays reality, reality-adjacent through deficits, excesses, and skews, but musky is a more extreme betrayal. Not the right word, not close. The scent is so much more than musky.

This world has skunks with many striping variations, though around here it appears that we have Canada skunks, or mephitis mephitis, if given over to Latinate taxonomies. You need to know this so you can, when you whiff a skunk’s air stain, exclaim, “Putrid mephitis at it again!” The Wikipedia entry for Striped Skunk traces the etymology of “skunk” to a few different indigenous sources, and it includes facts like, “The Cree and Ojibwe word shee-gawk is the root word for Chicago, which means ‘skunk-land’.” One of us will win a midwestern trivia night for remembering this. By reading in wider circles, I learned that skunks perform masterfully a sensorial traversal considering that their highest possible contrast coloration evolved to impress upon observers of all species and all chromaticities marks of distinction indexed for long-term memory. The black-white alternation sears a visual impression; it pops with black-white non-color, establishing for itself an unmistakable know-it-when-I-see-it reputation. Simultaneously, its visual language pairs with subtlety and reserve, as it withholds its most arresting defenses—the intensely odorous liquid jetted (or, as situation warrants, misted) from its anal glands. A blog entry titled, “How Many Times Can a Skunk Spray?”, from a Dallas, Texas, critter control service, tells it like this:

A skunk’s anal glands have two protruding nipples for spraying. These animals can control their sphincter muscles and get their nipples to spray in whichever direction they want. They can even control the size of the openings to adjust the spraying consistency. If a skunk knows what and where its attacker is, it will produce a stream aimed directly at its face. But if unsure, it creates a fine mist of pungent liquid that covers its attacker. A skunk spray is so potent it can cause temporary blindness and vomiting.

Blindness? Only temporary blindness. One must imagine the skunk’s anal glands to hold a limited volume, and though there are variable, skunk-controlled flow rates and correspondingly differential rhetorical velocities from direct shot to misted ambience, the well will run dry. A listicle from a Maryland-based contractor, Calvert Exterminators, notes that a skunk’s refractory period is approximately 10 days. I wonder how ornately this has been studied, whether there is seasonal variability (e.g., related to abundance of food or weather/climate) and whether expressions are always total or are, instead, partial at times. A quarter expression in April, for instance, or a half expression in September.

I read in one forum that skunks cannot resist classic nacho cheese Doritos with each chip touched by a dab of creamy peanut butter. What else, besides humans, would find this snack attractive? Possums, maybe? Squirrels or mice? But not feral cats. Dogs, yes. As I write nearing conclusion, now on Thursday, July 9, the grassy areas near the mobile chicken coop are scratched here and there, passing divots from where probably a skunk paused in the dark of night, scavenging for traces of pelletized chicken food, or whatever. On Tuesday evening at dusk there were two skunks in the yard. We are watchful, alert, extra vigilant, counting skunks, counting as miraculous that we have not, not yet, been “introduced,” though Michigan, no wonder it is so wanting for peninsulas, is one of seventeen U.S. states where it is legally allowable to keep a skunk as a pet.

Lightfoot

/ Derek Mueller / 1 Comment
⏳ Approximate reading time: 5 mins
Figure 1. Lightfoot. A Black Sex Link chicken, beak open, free-ranging in the hills of SW Virginia.

Lightfoot was one of the Wonder Hollow original six, fetched from the bin of Black Sex Links from the Radford Rural King three years ago in April. Along with Bitumen, her sister from another motherhen, she was one of two Black Sex Links in the flock. I observed her to be the most cold hardy of the bunch. January-February mornings with snow on the ground, Lightfoot was unfazed, first at the run door with free-ranging gusto. Life is for cold living. I admired her for being dynamic, spirited relative to others, like Tiny Honey, who carries along with a more monolithic-seeming disposition: Lightfoot was sometimes shy and deferential, sometimes independently confident (flock-be-damned), and always fast, the fastest, especially when there was a threat or when there was a treat to be had. For the late afternoon round-up call “here, chickens,” and shaker cup of meal worms, she did not dally. First every time. And for a short time after that day Henry’s dog got loose and ambled through the holler, we called her Lightning because she fled the scene as though on a photon beam, up the steep slope in three wingflaps, a record. I remember saying to A. after Lightfoot flashed off to the highlands that she would surely live the longest.

Her namesake, songwriter and musician Gordon Lightfoot, died May 1, 2023, around the time the six chicky-pullets formed feathers and graduated from the front shed incubator boxes to the mobile coop. Lightfoot was keen witness to our grave learning curve with predation and backyard chickening, witness to Big Sweetie’s fatal encounter with a hawk some months later and to Fluffy, Cinnabon, and Bitumen’s violent ends at the hands of a raccoon some months after that. Lightfoot adapted to the four new pullets and to our welcoming Mo, the Brahma rooster, to the flock. Gradually she seemed to be laying fewer eggs or to be laying broken or shellless eggs. We observe what we can with the flock and never known exactly how shifts happen among their respective orders and centralities. Lightfoot began to appear on the outs, and, on some days, contentedly so, as she would free-range independent of the others.

Earlier this spring, we’d noticed that she was sleeping in the nesting box with Mo standing in the doorway to the coop where the other three hens slept. With this evident sequestration, we guessed that Lightfoot’s illness was knowable to the others in the flock—though not necessarily communicable or transmissible. We sought advice, read widely, took her to a country vet, had an x-ray done, tried a couple of rounds of medicines. In March and April, these efforts alleviated symptoms for a few days at a time. But then the observable bouts of the slows would resume, she appeared to be self-isolating, not her usual self. She would allow us to approach her and pick her up, which had not always been possible. We decided to bring her inside where we could monitor her more closely, and for a time, this, too, perked her up. From within a clear/translucent bin with pine flake wood chips for bedding, she rested, often alert and engaged, holding onto good-seeming days with applesauce and scrambled eggs, occasional mashes of pelletized food, a new round of antibiotics. Avian veterinary care is not easy to come by. When she developed ascites (water belly), we studied up, then did the procedure ourselves. About a month ago. Again she perked up, acted like she felt better. In between packing boxes, we sat with her. A. mentioned noticing Lightfoot’s black feathers as blue iridescent and purple iridescent.

Along with Tiny Honey, Betty, and Perla, she made the move with us from SW Virginia to Ann Arbor, and she enjoyed rounds of outdoor time with the other three hens a few times, too. On Wednesday this past week she was outside and only wanted to lay in the grass inside the run, before moving to a spot below the deck, near its corner, where she could see well and dig in the dirt, though she was weak, not able to scratch all that much nor keep balance while attempting to scratch. We noticed how thin she’d become when we picked up the other hens. Lightfoot was becoming air. Guess we should think of this a kind of deep seated, primal tenacity in her, a spirit whose mantra I would translate from Gallus into English as “fuck flightlessness.” It’s a quality I don’t quite know how to perceive other than by dwelling with a dying bird over several weeks. There isn’t a whole lot in it that indexes to conventional interspecies knowledges; rather, it sits at the far outer edges of existential gradients where one faintly perceptible trichromatic hue meets and blends with another’s faintly perceptible tetrachromatic hue. Not really jumping to auras here, nor to formless energies. I only mean that when I would step to the kitchen first thing in the morning, Lightfoot would make a sound sort of like “here we are,” or “good morning, friendly giant,” or “don’t be heavy; another great day for preparing to fly,” or “soon I’ll be the sky.”

Lightfoot died on Friday. A. noticed she’d lost all of her strength and balance, that she was lying in her nesting box having leaned forward, too weak to do anything about it. We swaddled her in a towel, carried her to the screened front porch, held her for a little while each, expressed gratitudes, admirations, and flight permissions. Go on, take off. She blinked a few times. On a felt breeze she lifted her head, eyes closed, beak angled up, dearly loved, and then Lightfoot took off, lofting onto countless flightpaths. There, dreams and dogwood fluff. There, pollen and the eternal sisterhood. There, dandelion pappus. There, memories we were so fortunate to share.

[Blank]-in-the-loop Writing Warm-ups

/ Derek Mueller
⏳ Approximate reading time: 2 mins

Having posted and circulated by email, listserv, and social media, this latest CFP for an upcoming Sweetland Digital Rhetoric Collaborative blog carnival on [blank]-in-the-loop writing, I thought why not list a magnitude order of variations in the style of skipping rope one hundred times.

Shoop-in-the-loop writing; Chicken-in-the-loop writing; Dog-park-in-the-loop writing; Password-reset-in-the-loop writing; Advil-in-the-loop writing; What-am-I-forgetting-in-the-loop writing; Cheese-snack-in-the-loop writing; Medical-emergency-in-the-loop writing; Zoom-in-the-loop writing; Government-shutdown-in-the-loop writing; Facism-in-the-loop writing; Soup-in-the-loop writing; iOS-update-in-the-loop writing; K-pop-in-the-loop writing; Overzealous-editor-in-the-loop writing; Cancer-diagnosis-in-the-loop writing; Blizzard-in-the-loop writing; Retirement-in-the-loop writing; Teacup-pomeranian-in-the-loop writing; MLB-opening-day-in-the-loop writing; Sparkly-CFP-in-the-loop writing; Chronic-pain-in-the-loop writing; Dr.-Pepper-in-the-loop writing; Divorce-in-the-loop writing; Dongle-in-the-loop writing; Union-negotiations-in-the-loop writing; Instagram-stories-in-the-loop writing; Supreme-court-ruling-in-the-loop writing; The-Pitt-in-the-loop writing; Laundromat-in-the-loop writing; Debt-in-the-loop writing; Coffee-shop-closure-in-the-loop writing; Fasting-in-the-loop writing; Optometrist-in-the-loop writing; COVID-in-the-loop writing; Tenure-clock-in-the-loop writing; Almonds-in-the-loop writing; Gossip-in-the-loop writing; Burnout-in-the-loop writing; Caffeine-in-the-loop writing; Pomodoro-in-the-loop writing; Trouble-in-the-loop writing; Donut-in-the-loop writing; Nap-in-the-loop writing; Wine-in-the-loop writing; Outrage-in-the-loop writing; Microsoft-in-the-loop writing; Grandmother-in-the-loop writing; Postcard-in-the-loop writing; Baklava-in-the-loop writing.

Faculty-Activity-Report-in-the-loop writing; Sushi-lunch-in-the-loop writing; Flat-tire-in-the-loop writing; Record-player-in-the-loop writing; Absurdity-in-the-loop writing; Grue-in-the-loop writing; Inforg-in-the-loop writing; Funeral-in-the-loop writing; Full-moon-in-the-loop writing; Scorpio-in-the-loop writing; The-Fool-in-the-loop writing; N95-in-the-loop writing; I-696-in-the-loop writing; Doo-wop-in-the-loop writing; Reddit-r/-in-the-loop writing; Privacy-in-the-loop writing; Kevin-Bacon-in-the-loop writing; Genus-in-the-loop writing; Dada-in-the-loop writing; Extreme-tabs-in-the-loop writing; Reply-all-in-the-loop writing; JPG-in-the-loop writing; Beloved-in-the-loop writing; Kismet-in-the-loop writing; Cilantro-in-the-loop writing; Quark-in-the-loop writing; PowerPoint-in-the-loop writing; True-crime-in-the-loop writing; Bugonia-in-the-loop writing; Loopsmaxxing-in-the-loop writing; Barbecue-in-the-loop writing; Red-40-in-the-loop writing; Melatonin-in-the-loop writing; Pollen-in-the-loop writing; Spreadsheet-in-the-loop writing; SRTOL-in-the-loop writing; Mirror-in-the-loop writing; Preschool-dropoff-in-the-loop writing; Life-Savers-in-the-loop writing; Quill-pen-in-the-loop writing; Inkstains-in-the-loop writing; Mustard-biscuits-in-the-loop writing; Alexa-in-the-loop writing; Monsters-in-the-loop writing; Therapist-in-the-loop writing; Tomorrow-in-the-loop writing; Down-Slope-in-the-loop writing; Florida-in-the-loop writing; Velcro-in-the-loop writing; Tootsie-Pop-in-the-loop writing.

While co-drafting the CFP, I read in some definitional place that a loop is a type of line which curves at rate so that it eventually crosses its own path. The self-crossing takes time. The line could wander and never loop; the line could redirect too sharply and become an angle rather than a curve. Thus, the loop forms out of an away trajectory and a rate of return.

Name-Image-Ficus (NIF) – Tournament Pick’em Invitation

/ Derek Mueller
⏳ Approximate reading time: 2 mins
Photo by Oleksii S on Unsplash

You have better ways to spend your time? Impossible. For the 22nd consecutive year, March is when we squander 30 minutes daydreaming about NCAA men’s basketball tournament glory by participating in the Earth Wide Moth Tournament Pick’em, Name-Image-Ficus (NIF), such a figging awesome event as it is. Since forever and again, we’re using Fibonacci scoring with points increasing round by round (2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21). You’ll also receive bonus points for upset picks (+1 point for upsets in the first round; +2 for upset picks thereafter).

Everyone is welcome to join, so pass along the invitation. You still have a few days, but time is thinning for studying up, pitching pick-em darts at the pick-em dart board, or finding any friend in western Oklahoma who can talk you out of rooting for the Big Twelve champion. What even are athletic conferences anymore?! 

So, sign up! It’s free to join this year’s group on Yahoo!, Name-Image-Ficus (NIF) (ID#33775). If you have questions, you can reach me via email at dereknmueller at gmail.com. Invite your friends, frenemies, faux-frenemies, weed eaters, apple pickers, affordable flooring installers, Norwegian Elkhound groomers, panels of judges, blueberry juicers, greeters at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, pontoon boat welders, AATA bus drivers, dancing bear merch peddlers, yard regraders, trail walkers, etc. The group has space for the next forty-something who sign up. Egoless, impermanent stakes: reputations are made (and quickly forgotten) year after year.

Yahoo! Tournament Pick’em 🏀
Group: Name-Image-Ficus (NIF) (ID#33775)
“22nd annual.”

Firm up your selections any time between the selection show on Sunday evening, March 15, and first tip of the round of 64, sometime around noon EDT on Thursday, March 19.

Added: Michigan outdoes UConn, 69-63, for the tournament championship. Timothy wins the bracket pick’em with 165 points (45 of 63 correct), followed by Joe with 159 points (44 of 63 correct), and in third, yours truly, with 156 points (42 of 63 correct).

A Note to Commemorate

/ Derek Mueller
⏳ Approximate reading time: 2 mins

A note to commemorate the day when, around 4 p.m., the more or less regular into-the-run hour after a day of free-ranging, only four chickens (Tiny Honey, Betty, Mo, and Lightfoot) were in the yard and Perla was nowhere to be found. And to commemorate the rallying of a couple of different search parties, A. and Feta looking ALL OVER the place for any trace of a feather, then me doubling down and canvassing EVERY steep, slippy embankment at the edge of the yard for an hour. In my mind goddesses merciful I climbed the entire Blue Ridge Mountains. And to commemorate how as A. left for her evening volunteer hours a short time later, she asked me if I thought Perla might be alive, and I said, no, I don’t think so. She must’ve gotten scooped by the strongest and stealthiest of creatures mid-morning because I was outside all afternoon and though I didn’t do a head count, I was sure I would have heard such an incident, or Mo would have raised a fit, or there would have been a floof of feathers to show for the vanishing. And to commemorate how at around 6 p.m. I went outside to bring the four chickens some bereavement meal worms and to spend a moment with them in quiet observance, only to see Perla there on the first terrace near the pines, strutting toward me, not wanting to miss the stories we were going to tell about her, or maybe just checking to see if an afternoon fugue state would improve her place in the pecking order. tldr; Perla is fine and the five are safely in their run for the night.

Perla (left) says to Betty (right), she says, “I got lost!”
Perla evidently hadn’t changed her timekeeping for daylight savings time.
The flock enjoys a few more late day free-ranging minutes together.

Cleveland 2026 Cs

/ Derek Mueller
⏳ Approximate reading time: 3 mins

Cleveland 2026 Cs in the rearview mirror, 400 miles to Virginia yesterday, the few photos I took (or 📸 friends sent me), like a flipbook with two-thirds of its pages missing: 24th story strictly fog in the forecast; 8 a.m. Friday on bandwidths; skyline; presenterism; more cowbell; Lake Erie(lhonan), which I learned translates to ‘long tail’; 8 a.m. Saturday on worknets; two of VT’s best!; and once back at the holler, Feta admiring my tree climbing skills. Saw some fantastic presentations and always-always rewarding to see so many longtime friends. #travelog #4c26 #cleveland

Added: I should have mentioned that Cs feels livelier when it coincides with a major fencing tournament, hundreds of young competitors scurrying through the convention center hallways with foils drawn and us academics trundling with the slow confidence that says, ‘Younguns, impale me if you must but I won’t feel it because I am MADE of scar tissue.’ 😆

  • Thick fog viewed from the Hilton Downtown Cleveland.
  • Friday 8 a.m. presentation on temporal bandwidth and disciplinarity.
  • Cleveland downtown skyline on midday Friday.
  • Friday 8 a.m. presentation, “presentism” slide, invigorated that the loose wires on the projection system held their connections.
  • Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Saturday Night Live exhibit–the costume and accessories from the Blue Oyster Cult more cowbell skit.
  • A few of Lake Erie.
  • Nine photos from the 2026 Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) in Cleveland, Ohio.
    Saturday 8 a.m. prespondent slide, What’s in a Worknet?
  • Photo with two of VT’s outstanding RW PhD students, Gideon and Temi.
  • Back at the holler on Saturday evening and Feta is enamored of my tree-climbing skillset after so many days of travel.

Reading Rebalance

/ Derek Mueller
⏳ Approximate reading time: 3 mins

A drizzly Sunday mid-February. Woke up to onomatopoeia percussing in downspouts out the window. “Good news. At least they’re not frozen solid any more.” I expected that feeding and watering the chickens first thing would be slipperier, which before I ventured out with the watering vessels detoured to listening karaoke-style to Paul Simon’s 1977 Slip Sliding Away and then to Little Richard’s 1957 recording, Slippin’ and Slidin’ (Peepin’ and Hidin’), an associative path unfolding from the difficult to track down Simon quotation in which he says, “I didn’t originate that title. It came from that Little Richard song Slippin’ and Slidin’,” slip sliding owing to slippin’ and slidin’. Mo crowed. By that point I was filling the water carriers and delighting in the chickenicity implied in Little Richard’s parenthetical, peeping and hiding. Moments later, imagine what a changed chore it was to find that each footfall held without trouble, a better than expected grip in the mud-ice-grass trivium.

Among the rewards of a sabbatical, aka research leave, aka duty off campus is that I have made it a point to reclaim studying; with a little bit more time than usual, studying fans out again. It is possible for these few months to chip away at a bigger writing project, to hold a scatterplot of meetings each week (usually with grad students), and, to lay out a mosaic of readings purposefully juxtaposed. Read for accidents, surprise angles. With a little bit of time, eclectic reading totters again; its balance otherwise, in entrained semesters, is prone to tilting heavily toward the necessary, pragmatic, and bureaucratic anchors for professional attention.

Past few days a rewarding zigzag has come from clicking along in PDFs of Meg Sweeney’s Mendings (2023), Roland Bathes’ Mourning Diary (1977), and Tim Ingold’s 1993 article, “The Temporality of the Landscape.” Sweeney’s book is helping me think about gone noting and about the personal-theoretical in familial memory work; it’s a marvelously visual book, too, and at 47k words helps me gain a feeling for the scope of my current project. Ingold is (maybe?) jogging some of the earliest motivations for worknets when I drafted that 2015 Composition Forum article and plotted its rationale using Lines: A Brief History (2007). I will have occasion early next month in Cleveland to say a few words (as “prespondent”) about worknets, about what I imagined they would activate in service of reading in service of research design beyond the typical ramp-ups to literature reviews. The gist of this is that worknets promote reading expectant of wider and weirder flight paths; literature reviews are prone to formulism, IMRAD-pleasing, over-torqued to function. Which is another way of saying a generous comparison will take more time and nuance; I tend to be nap time! with lit reviews. What was the last unforgettable lit review you read?

The Barthes reading is just because I hadn’t read it before. It’s a fast read because it amounts to 262 pages, 14k words or so, of translated notes, journal entries, and introspective asides. They’re diaristic, abrupt, reflective in a manner of ritualized self-noticing. How am I doing? How am I doing now? Richard Howard, translator of several Barthes books, wrote in the afterword about how the entries served as warm-ups, as RB would cut paper into quarter sheets, then type the date-stamped missives as an exercise, perhaps, to shift from the underlayment of private grief to a more readerly register—although, that said, Henriette is unavoidable in his other writing around that time, late 1970s, Camera Lucida and Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes.

I highlighted sixteen passages, some as small as words or even symbols, like the Φ on p. 177, with a footnote that RB used the phi as a symbol for photograph in Camera Lucida. The highlights glowed brighter in the second half as can be seen in this highlighted contact sheet, where just over half of the sixteen annotations landed on or after p. 200.

Figure 1. Highlighted contact sheet, or the sixteen annotated Mourning Diary pages.

Here are a few of the corresponding passages, which I will end with because the afternoon is a’slipping.

July 18, 1978

Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.

August 18, 1978

To share the values of the silent dailiness (to manage the cooking, the cleaning, the clothes, the choice and something like the past of objects), this was my (silent) way of conversing with her. —And this is, her no longer being here, how I can still do it.

October 3, 1978

The profound modesty she had—that made her possess, not no belongings at all (no asceticism), but very few belongings—as if she wanted, at her death, that there would be no “getting rid of” what had belonged to her.

January 30, 1979

We don’t forget, but something vacant settles in us.

A Feeling for the Data Set

/ Derek Mueller
⏳ Approximate reading time: 5 mins

For the last week or so I have been collaging together small pieces readying for a guest presentation and workshop in Virginia Tech’s ENGL6364: Research Design in Rhetoric and Writing tomorrow afternoon, a presentation and workshop I’m calling “A Feeling for the Data Set.” I taught the class in 2020 and 2022, so I have a feel for it, and now—the 2024 & 2026 rounds—it is being taught by my friend and (former, in the sense that I no longer work at VT) colleague, Dr. Shakil Rabbi. The class is reading an old friend, Network Sense; my prompt for the visit is to talk about how to create a data visualization from a large, unwieldy data set.

A Feeling for the Organism
A Feeling for the Organism, Evelyn Fox Keller, 1983.

As moving would have it most of my books and materials are in boxes in Ann Arbor at the moment, so I had to approach this a little bit differently and work only with what I had on these few small shelves at home. Thus, the setup sent me back to Evelyn Fox Keller’s book, A Feeling for the Organism (1983), a biography of 1983 Nobel prize winning geneticist Barbara McClintock, whose research on maize led her to insights about “jumping genes,” or gene transposition—the abruptive events that cause genetic mutations. With the purpose of contextualizing the lag in the reception of McClintock’s work, Keller wrote that her prose was alleged by some to be “difficult to follow” (10). Keller continues, “When she made these ideas public in 1951, in 1953, and again in 1956, in spite of the fact that she had long since established her reputation as an impeccable investigator, few listened, and fewer understood. She was described as ‘obscure,’ even ‘mad'” (10).

I won’t have time on Tuesday evening to go into McClintock’s ingenious research nor into Keller’s brilliant and accessible account on McClintock’s life and career. I will mention it briefly at the beginning, nevertheless, because it has provided me with what I consider an engaging, intuitive analog in the “A Feeling for” precept. Later in the book, in Chapter 12, “A Feeling for the Organism,” Keller wrote, “Over and over again, [McClintock] tells us one must have the time to look, the patience to ‘hear what the material has to say to you,’ the openness to ‘let it come to you.’ Above all, one must have a ‘feeling for the organism'” (198). The time, the patience, the openness, a feeling. Tuck this mantra away on a sticky note and you’d be surprised, as I have been, that it maps as research wisdom again and again, for me, in my own work, and for offering guidance and support to graduate students.

The way I remember it, A Feeling for the Organism first came up in CCR720: Interdisciplinary Influences on Composition and Rhetoric: The Making of Meaning, a class I took with Louise Phelps at Syracuse in Spring 2005. The class compiled with an endless, robust reading list, some of which was focused on “the making of meaning,” and much of which was peripheral, circulated in weekly optional sets of PDFs and in in-class discussions about cognitive psychology, distributed cognition, models of mind, comprehension, memory and forgetting, and more. I must have picked up Keller’s book and read it leafingly-flittingly. And then more recently, a couple of years ago, I picked it up again and read it more carefully after I heard the story that A.’s mom was at Cold Spring Harbor on the day McClintock, who was also working there, learned of the Nobel prize, about how they walked together to the building’s entrance that morning, congratulatory small talk, about how McClintock said it was occasion to have cupcakes at the cafeteria later in the day. “A Feeling for” has become more sticky, a more appealing premise, as I have aged into a career and with each successive research experience.

My picking up and extending “A Feeling for” is also meant to respond to what I have noticed at times an implicit argument that data analysis, data visualization, and big data fascination are appealing because they are, with the heave-ho of computing might, expeditious. Dromological determinism, we might call it, owing to Virilio. This attitude supposes that if you just feed enough interview transcripts or whatever into the software, it will do the “feeling for” part in a jiff and the researcher will have assertion-worthy baseline evidence upon which to build a dissertation, a book, a career, etc. This is akin to a party popper enthusiasm for generative AI, implying that you can dump the data in, wiggle your nose, and ta-da! To contrast this counterpart to “a feeling for” would amount to “a shortcut for,” and its byproduct is more of the mythology that your life will improve because of all of the time you have gained back.

Not everything has held on much less held together through the collaging. For instance, I spent some time looking at the Nobel Prize website and at the photo gallery, McClintock’s prize lecture, and the short banquet speech. The banquet speech is especially badass for McClintock’s suggestion that being so long ignored might be construed by some as painful and disappointing, it was, for her, rewarding to be left alone with her work and to have so much time to get to know (and name) each corn plant. She said,

“Subsequently, several maize geneticists did recognize and explore the nature of this phenomenon, and they must have felt the same exclusions. New techniques made it possible to realize that the phenomenon was universal, but this was many years later. In the interim I was not invited to give lectures or seminars, except on rare occasions, or to serve on committees or panels, or to perform other scientists’ duties. Instead of causing personal difficulties, this long interval proved to be a delight. It allowed complete freedom to continue investigations without interruption, and for the pure joy they provided.”

Following this framing gesture, which amounts to a few minutes on a book recommendation underscored with why “A Feeling for,” I plan to say a little bit about immersing with the data, which for me in the context of Network Sense and before that the dissertation was stacks and stacks of CCC PDFs, followed by the importance of making visuals, being invested in the imagetext problem, and learning from the dataviz examples modeled by others. Next, a few remarks on CCC Online Archive, on those early graphs, on fretting much later about extending the dataset from 20 to 25 years, and then on word watching and turn-spotting, which will segue to the applied part of the session, where everyone will in effect make a simple cluster map of keywords in their research, then attempt to resolve which of the terms are rising, falling, or flat, and which corpora would be appropriate for corroborating the guesses.

Dam Road – Then What Happened

/ Derek Mueller
⏳ Approximate reading time: 3 mins

Napjerks between naps, this sabbatical is some but not all resting pose. A privilege and a luxury of course, I’m profoundly grateful!, the sabbatical is the first for me since winter 2016, a decade ago. This time is clockfaced with transition and red-inked bleedingly with fascistic bombardments on all sides of the U.S. news. Moving is manageable and not felt to be a remarkable upheaval, at least not yet, midwinter, but awful, abhorrent stuff, the latter. I write each day, finding or losing rhythm, but sitting and making words into lines, usually in the mornings. January was a blur and has passed. Groundhog saw its shadow today so who can say how long February will last.

I’m in Chapter Four (of Five), plugging away, thirty-seven ephemeralist episodes drafted and four to go. I left the more personal set for last, mistakenly imagining them to be clearer to me. They haven’t been. It’s merely drafting, which must come with small doses of self forgiveness. I draw in the evenings. Twenty-six drawings so far. Twenty-four to go. Soft goals are ~50k words and 50 original illustrations. Earlier today a few words on hand entanglement, carrot peeling, and continuous soups reached 400-some words; enough for now. But it pulled me down the mirror hall of half-memories of Tillie and Fred’s (my grandparents’) house in West Branch, which real estate websites pin to a lazy timeline as being built in 1900 along Dam Road, a couple of miles out of town, dirt road. I guess they were only there until I was 9 or 10, since by that time Fred had died (in August 1979) and Tillie had moved to the apartment, Winchester Towers. Tillie died in September (maybe August?) 1984. I don’t remember ever going back to Dam Road after Tillie died, after her funeral, only that the division of assets was fraught, adults fighting. You’d best go outside and play, which of course I did.

Figure 1. Tillie and Fred’s (my grandparents’) house, Ogemaw County, Mich.

A few different real estate websites host undated photos of the place, though I guess most of the photos are from the last 15 years. I recognize a few things. The brick planter box next to the front door. The sliding glass door leading into the kitchen. I know the floor plan well, the smaller bedrooms, the utility room at the back, the kitchen. I wonder what remains of the early 1980s features in the yard, the trees, or the rhubarb patch. I only remember climbing the one weeping willow and white pine near the road. The willow was always being climbed by older cousins; it felt more dangerous because big kids were waiting in line or had already climbed ahead of you, all of the right setups for being shoved out of the best perching places. The pine by contrast was not in demand because every branch was covered in sap blisters. Had to be careful not to let clothing touch the sap because it was impossible to wash out. None of this is in the book manuscript other than a passing mention of the willow and the pine.

I read again over the weekend in Caitlin DeSilvey’s Curated Decay and have been thinking appreciatively about how she framed her methods for writing about a sea and storm wracked pier. Many histories are keyed to events, and keying to events spotlights the constitutive and the formidable, leaning toward progress, rebuilding from loss, and repair. Given this, how might one write from the obverse, the inevitabilities of decline and recession? How, in this, can we carry out an ephemeralist practice observant of gone-going yet not presumed to be sparring with, or against the Modernist grain of a more commonplace historiography stitched from this-then-this-then-this eventfulness? DeSilvey described storying in service of analysis, but the vignettes accept and humbly call attention to their assured incompleteness, their unfinishability. Nothing turns out. We don’t know what happened next because next hasn’t happened yet. It follows, then, that one approach to decay curation unfolds through incomplete stories, making method through scraps and fragments whose accumulation cannot add up to a complete picture but instead accepts slivering, impermanence, and loss. Ends never-ending. The epigrammatic. Vignettes ending in ellipses, em-dashes, question marks. Writer and reader shrugging in tandem, so, what then? Is that it? I want my money time back. Why didn’t anyone bother with a new roof? We used to eat whole stalks dredged in white sugar, so who exactly abandoned the rhubarb patch to overgrowth and rewilding? What fungus is growing from the split portion of the willow chipped and scattered a couple of inches deep along the fence line? Then what happened.

Myscot Wheel (Update)

/ Derek Mueller
⏳ Approximate reading time: 2 mins

X-posted from the socials, a note about a job change:

Figure 1. Updated myscot wheel1Otto the Orange is at the twelve o’clock position in the first myscot wheel mock-up I created (and posted to Flickr), which implicitly clocks the genre to 2004, the move from Kansas City to Syracuse and matriculating in CCR. I am seeing EWM entries about myscot wheels made in 2006 and 2009., or the institutions whose halls I have travelled.

This morning I updated the many-years-forged and still turning myscot wheel, whose every stop along the way has been powerfully rewarding2By “rewarding” I mean rich with realizations, commiserations, and learning. Louise Phelps emphasized to me, as I was nearing graduation from Syracuse, that every faculty position, no matter how high-gauged or low-gauged the system, could serve as a poignant teacher if we simply choose to look at it that way. and whose zenith position now reflects my most recent—and hopefully last ever—job change. Today is as apt as any to share the news with you all, since it is my first day as faculty at the University of Michigan. I will be on research leave/duty off campus through June 30 and begin a term as Director of the Sweetland Center for Writing in July. Goes without saying and also WITH saying that I am profoundly grateful to everyone who made this possible—you and you and you, friends and colleagues and students, encouragers, urgers of patience during patches of uncertainty in the long run-up, confidential external reviewers, and more. I hesitated to social-mediate the news but nonetheless wanted friends and family whom I haven’t told yet to know; plus, Is., who is in her first year in Ann Arbor (after transferring to U-M), thriving and loving it, nudged me over the holidays to share it, homecoming that it is, and here goes, an old taking the advice of a young, as they sometimes should. 💛💙〽️ #myscotwheel #jobchange #update #goblue

Notes

  • 1
    Otto the Orange is at the twelve o’clock position in the first myscot wheel mock-up I created (and posted to Flickr), which implicitly clocks the genre to 2004, the move from Kansas City to Syracuse and matriculating in CCR. I am seeing EWM entries about myscot wheels made in 2006 and 2009.
  • 2
    By “rewarding” I mean rich with realizations, commiserations, and learning. Louise Phelps emphasized to me, as I was nearing graduation from Syracuse, that every faculty position, no matter how high-gauged or low-gauged the system, could serve as a poignant teacher if we simply choose to look at it that way.