Collectanea 23.25

/ Derek Mueller / Leave a comment

Week of June 2, 2025

Shadows, Giants, and Shadow Giants

“They stand not on the shoulders of giants, but in the shadow of them. Many of these student writers are haunted by college regulations against plagiarism that they suspect they regularly break, since they ‘know’ that nothing they write is or can be original and that they do not acknowledge every single source” (101).

〜

“To locate plagiarism in an ethical realm is to describe it as a choice behavior; hence those who plagiarize can be punished and numbered among the rejected—consigned to dwell in the shadows of giants—for they have chosen to transgress against fundamental morals” (160). 

—Rebecca Moore Howard. (1999). Standing in the Shadow of Giants: Plagiarists, Authors, Collaborators. Ablex Pub.

Say Hello to My Little Hen

Figure 1. “Say Hello to My Little Hen.”

Or, “Don’t Shoot Shoot Shoot That Thing At Me,” or “So I Says to the Security Guard, ‘For Pete’s Sake, She’s a Therapy Chicken!,'” or “Hall County (Ga.) Fair Best in Retribution for Extreme Overproduction,” or “Loaded with Oyster Shells,” or “Bawk bawk ba-glock,” or “[your best title/caption].” This is a dusty one, a few months old, inspired by noticing someone packing heat in public but wearing the piece casually, more like a shawl or high-riding fanny pack than with the self-seriousness of a safety conscious gun adorner.

Incredible, Edible

Salad season is hard-boiled egg season is now, the time of year when the hens are laying more eggs than we can reasonably consume. So, insofar as batch hard-boiling, here is what I do to hard-boil 18 eggs because the outer shells slough off like boom bam bing nothing.

  • Prepare the pot. Combine and bring to boil.
    • A volume of water that will cover the eggs ≥ 1 inch without boiling over.
    • Teaspoon of salt.
    • 1/2 c. white vinegar
  • Add the eggs and reduce temperature to medium-high for a lower-rolling boil.
    • Boil for 13 minutes.
  • Ferry the eggs to a bowl of ice-cold water. Let rest in the bath of cubes for 15 minutes.
  • As a last step in prep, peel and eat, dry in-shell and store in the refrigerator, or peel and jar with vinegar or brine.
    • For a dozen and a half stashed for lunches and salads, I will peel them, jar them in a half gallon mason jar with apple cider vinegar and dill sprigs, beet juice optional.

With a few minor modifications, this is close to the “perfect” process published on AllRecipes.

Prose Expression Courses

“The cultural needs of the nineteen-sixties will probably determine the shape of the prose expression courses in colleges. Many would say that the needs of any time are the best norm for selection of courses to be used in that time. Certainly it would be safe to say that a course in rhetoric, composition, speech, writing, or communication that did not meet the needs of its time could be put forward only at the risk of failure” (126). #presentism #curriculum #newrhetoric #failure

—Daniel Fogarty. (1959). Roots for a New Rhetoric. Teacher’s College, Columbia.

Keiko, The Good Whale 🐳

“In the summer of 1993, the movie Free Willy—about a captive killer whale that’s heroically set free—was an unexpected hit. But when word got out that the real whale who played Willy, an orca named Keiko, was dangerously sick and stuck in a tiny pool at an amusement park in Mexico City, the public was outraged. If Warner Bros. wanted to avoid a P.R. nightmare and not break the hearts of children everywhere, then it was clear: Someone had to free Keiko—or at least try.” –The New York Times

I drive the 500 miles between Ypsilanti and Christiansburg frequently; when I do, I catch up on podcasts, since they aren’t an especially common part of my everyday media. “The Good Whale,” a six episode season from Serial, dropped late in 2024. Altogether, TGW amounts to 3.5 hours of audio, perfect for a summertime roadtrip. I found it all the more moving because Free Willy was Ph.’s favorite movie around 1995-1996. While it is something of a behind the scenes for that movie, TGW floats at that uncomfortable depth of the known-unknown where animals star in popular movies. The series is a carefully produced blend of historical narrative, investigative reporting, and analysis that lays plain the exploitative impulses and brand safe-guarding behind hit movies and featured attractions. If you’re looking for a podcast this summer, give it a listen. You’ll also pick up a few musical surprises, like Yellow Ostrich’s 2010 track, “Whale.”

“Whale,” Yellow Ostrich, 2010.

Make Much of This Distinction

“We are now inclined to make much of this distinction between amateur and professional, but it is reassuring to know that these words first were used in opposition to each other less than two hundred years ago. Before the first decade of the nineteenth century, no one felt the need for such a distinction—which established itself, I suppose, because of the industrial need to separate love from work, and so it was made at first to discriminate in favor of professionalism. To those who wish to defend the possibility of good or responsible work, it remains useful today because of the need to discriminate against professionalism” (89).

—Wendell Berry (2010). “The Responsibility of the Poet.” What Are People For?: Essays (Second edition). Counterpoint. #professional #amateur #love #work #professionalism

Black Bear Season

Last weekend’s wanderer, a black bear maybe a year or two old, crossing over Rosemary Road. It’s common in late May through the end of June to see bears. They’re a different kind of trouble for F., however, because she would likely chase the bear if she was out off-leash, and it’d be a steep, slow while before any humans could catch up to call her off if she felt and followed such an impulse.

Figure 2. Look, it’s the bear 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 second in this series from Week 23 of 2025, or the Week of June 2). 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

Creekside raised bed cabbage shoot. #wonderhollow #rollcall

Collectanea 22.25

/ Derek Mueller / Leave a comment

Week of May 26, 2025

But When Are We, Then?

“But what are we, then, in this space of all spaces all at once and no temporal flow? Under the sense of literacy we unpacked in the earlier/previous part of this writing, we rely on our ability to construct ourselves at some nexus between past and future, to have faith in the present as the point where past and future meet like (exactly like) a reader progressing through a linear text, uniting what has gone before with what is now and with what will come.

[P]ersonal identity is itself the effect of a certain temporal unification of past and future with one’s present …. If we are unable to unify the past, present, and future of the sentence, we are similarly unable to unify the past, present, and future of our own biographical experience or psychic life. (Jameson 27)”

—Anne Wysocki & Johndan Johnson-Eilola, “Blinded by the Letter: Why Are We Using Literacy as a Metaphor for Everything Else?” Hawisher, Gail E., & Cynthia L., Selfe (Eds.). (1999). Passions, Pedagogies, and 21st Century Technologies. Utah State University Press.  https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/usupress_pubs/119. 349-368.

Longue—Illustration Paired with the OnlyPoems POTM for May

Figure 1. “Longue.”

Longue, as in a duration of waiting, a rest, an eventually. An em-dash-like figure relaxes in repose, punctuation appearing to grow tired of always the highs and lows of overuse followed by neglect. The editorial illustration paired with the OnlyPoems May 2025 Poem of the Month, “Ars Poetica as the Sexy Little Em Dash,” by Katherine Irajpanah. #ekphrastic #POTM #illustration

Remain a Ghost

“As I said, I was a ghost. The truth is that, even all these years later, I remain a ghost. You wouldn’t know it if you saw me. I’m not morose or retiring. I laugh a lot. In fact, I’m genuinely happier than many people I know. But I can’t help but feel that, on one level, I do not exist.”

—Vauhini Vara, “Ghosts.” (9 Aug. 2021). The Believer Magazine. https://www.thebeliever.net/ghosts/. #AI #interface #authorship #ghost #existence #loss #grief #design

Learning to Love You More, 2002-2009

A., in the midst of class planning for fall, sent me a link to this project from back when the WWW felt funkier, freer, more alive, interactions less overdetermined by platforms. It’s like a click-around at a bygone thing, a plunge on Boblo Island’s Log Flume. In it, teaching possibilities. Seventy assignments, complete what you will. -DM

“Learning to Love You More is both a web site and series of non-web presentations comprised of work made by the general public in response to assignments given by artists Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher. Yuri Ono designed and managed the web site.

Participants accepted an assignment, completed it by following the simple but specific instructions, sent in the required report (photograph, text, video, etc), and their work got posted on-line. Like a recipe, meditation practice, or familiar song, the prescriptive nature of these assignments was intended to guide people towards their own experience.”

—Harrell Fletcher, Miranda July, & Yuri Ono, “Learning to Love You More.” http://learningtoloveyoumore.com/. Accessed May 27, 2025. #installation #digital #art #participation #throwback #assignments #teaching

Peculiar Form of Intellectual Currency

“In particular, I am troubled by the limited circulation of student texts in our field—very few of which are requoted or reanalyzed outside of the articles in which they first appear. Student texts thus turn out to be a peculiar form of intellectual currency. We establish our bona fides as compositionists by quoting them, but we seldom revisit student texts quoted by others.”

—Joseph Harris. (2012). Using Student Texts in Composition Scholarship. JAC, 32(3/4), 667–694. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41709848 #student #texts #disciplinary #epistemology #subjectivity #usable #writing #circulation

Twenty-six Titles, Sixteen Years

Figure 2. Computers and Composition Digital Press logo.

Computers and Composition Digital Press (CCDP), an imprint of Utah State University Press, has published twenty-six titles since its launch in 2009. The first book, Technological Ecologies & Sustainability, edited by Dànielle Nicole DeVoss, Heidi McKee, and Dickie Selfe, reads as especially salient for the 2026 Computers & Writing Conference in Charlotte, NC, considering that sustainability will be the conference’s theme. Sifting for a moment through the TES materials, the mixed modalities, from the 383-page PDF (size noted as 4.8 “meg”) to the embedded videos, call up impressions suggesting both novelty and time-capsulism in its feeling much more than sixteen years removed from today’s digital environments. I have been perusing all of the titles as I think about the still-complicated prospect of producing scholarship that simply cannot abide the constraints of the printed page, while still living up to long-held commonplaces about what constitutes a “book.” One more noticing: there are titles published in every year since 2009, except 2023. #digital #press #publishing #books #reliquary #sustainability

Phenakistiscope Mock-up: Kite Lost to Upsky

For the past few months, in the narrowest of narrow slivers of eveningtime, I have been attempting to create a phenakistiscope workflow in ProCreate. I first heard about phenakistiscopes from CGB a few months ago, and I found I was thinking about them more than I expected I would. Phenakistiscopes are pinwheel animations of old; they spin out stroboscopic movement from one wedge to the next. Insofar as rounding the bend from admiring them to making them, I am still puzzling through some of the finer points: which elements should be fixed (or in the exact same position), if any; what sizes of figures show up more legibly than others; whether text can be fitted into the sequence (so far, not with any result worth celebrating; how many layer-frames amount to something both visually inviting yet with a lean file size; and how to manage the bleed-edge for circular rotations converted to a square canvas. I had envisioned this one below, Kite Lost to Upsky, as a child flying a kite on a beach, only the kite catches a gust and the kite string snaps the kite sailing off irretrievable. So, as you can maybe? see, not quite a disastrous failure, but also not the sort of success you’d send to a friend with a Wow! subject line.

Figure 3. Phenokiteiscope.
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 first in this series from Week 22 of 2025, or the Week of May 26). 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

Lightfoot and Mo. #wonderhollow #rollcall

No Telescope Except Our Attention

/ Derek Mueller

I shouldn’t pick back up here before first acknowledging head bow hands folded and humbly that Earth Wide Moth received the John Lovas Award from Kairos last Friday evening at the 2025 Computers & Writing Conference. I learned about the award early that week, so I drove to Athens, Ga. to accept the award on Earth Wide Moth’s behalf. Striking to realize this event as punctuation, a pause EWM—dash to notice simultaneously how much and how little a two-decade-plus installation of this serial variety holds. The nomination was co-signed by sixteen or so brilliant, generous, and ever-supportive colleagues; some of them even wrote brief rationale, testimony to the value of what happens here from time to time. I’m grateful for the twenty-one years of write-living, a variation on life-living (Manning), the sorts of activation and articulation loops that, come what meandering-may, dances as moth to flame and flame to moth.

Figure 1. Athena statue, Athens, Ga., stony and still before the Classics Center at the University of Georgia.

—

While in Georgia, I attended a few sessions, the opening reception, the Kairos-Digital Rhetoric Collaborative karaoke event, a meeting, Saturday’s keynote by Jen Sano-Franchini, titled “What’s Critical about Critical Interface Analysis? A Recommitment to Humanistic Inquiry In the March to Hyper-Automation,” and the social gathering at Creature Comforts. I drove home on Sunday, on the road by 8 a.m. ET, 370 miles, four states, giant peach water towers and turbulent speed differentials from one lane to the other along I-85, and as I drove I kept thinking about conferences and bandwidths, about desires for disciplinary community and mutual attention. It’s not such a surprise that Computers & Writing was saturated with polemics, gestures, and questions revolving heavily around generative AI. What are we, 2.5 years on since the November 2022 release of Chat GPT? 

Many have turned sharply to AI; love AI or hate AI, the polemic casts triumphalists and refusalists in sometimes-heated exchanges, though much of the time we are nevertheless grasping for context and honing definitions that eventually return us to earth.

Returning to Earth Wide Moth, I happened across an entry from a decade ago, “Overlooking,” the entire entry consisting of a quotation from Oliver Sacks’ book, A Leg to Stand On (1994). Here it is:

I thought of a dream related by Leibniz, in which he found himself at a great height overlooking the world–with provinces, towns, lakes, fields, villages, hamlets, all spread beneath him. If he wished to see a single person–a peasant tilling, an old woman washing clothes–he had only to direct and concentrate his gaze: “I needed no telescope except my attention.”

It helps to remember that dreams, though they are not the same as windows, shake up monadic tendencies. There was a time, too bad it has elapsed, when the digital opened up a comparable sense of possibility. Byung-Chul Han writes in Hyperculture about how the hypertextual world roils with “possibilit[ies] of choice” (43), its windowing refrains inviting inhabitants–hypercultural tourists–to experience the vastness of boundless opening. Yet, as Han continues, screens akin to windows, the possibilities of choice run their course, and the “Being-before-a-window” resembles “the old windowless monads” (45).

I understand why there is so much wrapped up in generative AI, its swift onset flaring as it has across every sector, informational and communicative, industrial and material. Academics are thrashing AI for its promises and pitfalls, separating out its big-tech-pushed inevitabilities and coming to terms with its consequences. Monadic routines, or call them turtles, lurk all the way down. Post-C&W 2025, though, I don’t harbor any particularly renewed perspective on AI, digitality, or the panacea of a World Brain, impressively omnipotent. Something about a cheaper (seeming) writing tutorbot who never sleeps. Something about assessment magic and administrators raising course caps because automation frees up your time. Is the hype gaining? Fading by now? Still-glinty gewgaw, I don’t know. But I have returned from the conference uneasy about the hype cycle, for in the event of swivel-necking toward AI, what are we turning away from, abandoning, suspending mid-gesture as unsuspecting mortals covered over by volcanic ash. Almost had that last slurp of ramen, almost gathered that last fleck of pollen, almost fetched today’s eggs from the nesting box, almost sighted something marvelous through the telescope, almost, almost, but for AI’s dooming and dominant gusts.

Pond Patching, Cusp Gones

/ Derek Mueller

As springtimes bloom, 2025 has been like no other, January through April telling it like yo, hey, kapow. I’ve traveled a little bit because I am teaching only online, two sections of technical writing: to Fort Lauderdale for Try This workshops, to San Diego for Is.’s spring break, to Georgia for a few days visiting with my longtime friend and mentor and former college coach. Here at home, February delivered intense storms, the ice that brought down as crashingly as crystal chandeliers from vaulted ceilings coniferous tree tops, the rain less than a week later that flooded and washed out parts of the driveway. There went the gravel. Closely following storms of the year or decade or century on rural parcels are new, unplanned-for workloads, some of which I have handled smartly by hiring out, much as we could afford, and some of which I have shouldered to the dull everyday drumbeat of two or three hour blocks. For storm cleanup, the outdoor labors meant hauling brush, cutting and clearing limb snarls, the brambled imbroglios that if you are not careful will shred you with thorny surprises. Wear eye protection. Go slowly. I’m not complaining but recounting what has been. Close calls. Blood-drawing cuts and pokes. Even tallied a slip and fall, the third time in three years for a bona fide tumble, as a small, perfectly round piece of wood rolled from beneath my footfall and planted me, heavy as a stone, on my back.

I roofed the older chickens’ run, framing it and fastening corrugated metal over the top, then built on those beginner lessons to wrap in Tyvec and corrugated metal a few corners of the upper shed where particle board sheeting was naked to the elements. The front shed has the same issue, exposed sections on the back side whose composite materials are aging, flaking. I’ve spent a couple of outdoor working sessions this week wrapping sections, fitting and affixing furring strips, readying it for the corrugated metal that will come next, possibly this weekend. I am optimistic that the metal will be the easy part, except for one especially complicated corner piece I will need to cut so it wraps around the gutter and juts with an acute angle with a neat tuck under the eaves. The metal work is easy except for the hard parts. The sharp edges, they cut too.

Figure 1. After round two of patching the pond, a rinse of the rubber gloves.

And then there is the pond, which is truly more like a diverter-fed estuary whose waters detour from the creek only to accumulate and, albeit pooled and slowed to a trickle, return to it again. The pond’s concrete retaining wall is cracking and aging, upheaved by moisture. When doesn’t water win? I started with skim coatings of hydraulic cement, mixing the slurry in a five gallon bucket. But in one section of the pond, the original blocks were split, so I branched out to other kinds of cement, picked up a mixing tub and masonry hoe, cut braces to hold the cement in place, and gave it my best attempt. This was all new to me, this so-called formwork, and it was achingly evident right away that hand-mixing cement is top-five among the heaviest of multimodal composing practices (right up there with shoeing horses and stacking boulders). On Monday I hand mixed six bags of Quikrete, filled the ad hoc form, reinforced the corners. Now, it cures. A post-preservationist would second guess my attempt, a brazen postponement of the retaining wall’s inevitable collapse, instead, musing, “something there is that loves a wall enough to let it crumble completely.”

Repairs of this sort–exposed particle board on the shed, fractured pond retaining wall–are ‘cusp gones’; they are almosts, though not quite in the same way Barthes wrote about photographs of his mother in Camera Lucida, the image teasing at life, at vitality. Repairs to these weathered structures extend and renew a once-built thing; repairs of this sort traverse time, a paratemporal practice (beyond/around, protective) not unlike mending, not unlike retouching artifacts Least Recently Used (LRUs). Call it maintenance, familiarly. This is home ownership, too, and the care accorded to living in a place, but it is also etched with a variety of mindfulness differently circumscribed in relation to time. I mean that mindfulness oftentimes fixates on the present, on now; but this paratemporal practice is a function of stewardship and distributed cognition (writ expansively, as corporeally and as worlding). This practice follows the beckoning of cusp gones, involves us in their somehow carrying on. As such, it extends gone-noting, summoning from attention and repair, in tandem, recomposing in palliative patches with purpose.

To end here leaves off not quite having sketched the outline. I sought to recount these outdoor projects and to suggest through them a variant of mindfulness less preoccupied with the present and more attuned to a blend of attention and repair at that hazy, disappearing contrail where a gone goes dormant. For in the many references to Paul Klee’s 1920 Angelus Novus, mascot of modernity ‘progressing’ while looking backward at the wreckages, harms, and atrocities, we ask when we cannot sleep at night, ‘to where or to when is the angel of history directing its attention now?’, a heavy game of imagining looking together, imagining being in this together, with cherubim and fictions, with pond walls and old sheds, I Spy.

Least Recently Used (LRU)

/ Derek Mueller

As I was following through on a couple of questions related to gone-noting this week, to my surprise I ended up looking at the Harris & Harris textbook, Digital Design and Computer Architecture (2021), chapter 8, “Memory Systems,” and even more closely, section 8.4.5, “Replacement Policies,” where I found a description of how programmers and computer engineers might name a vanishing edge of retrievable memory. Least Recently Used (LRU) policies provide a processing system with a cut-off, a threshold past which, well, the thing in question gets cached (i.e., reclassified from available to gone). Although less spiritually awe inspiring, it’s sort of like a sky burial for digital objects, where the algorithmic replacement policy is the buzzard and least recently used artifacts are ferried to the great elsewhere-beyond. I don’t anticipate clinging too tightly to computer architecture analogies for the research project I am working on—puzzling through, drafting—but LRUs have given me a lot to think about.

LRU analogs are everywhere. The obvious and most intuitive examples come from computer environments, such as when an iPhone autodiscards a too-long-unused apps. Suppose I last used the Zoom app on my iPhone two years ago; a least recently used policy “evicts” the unused app, frees the memory, and keeps the system fresh, nimble, less crowded and cluttered. It lightens the processing load, a modest sacrifice to efficiency gods. According to Harris & Harris, LRUs rely on a “principle of temporal locality,” which posits that, as in this iPhone example, the app most recently used is likelier to be used again sooner than an app gathering (hypothetical) dust or lagging forgettable toward oblivion. The LRU is gone-going: forgettable, archaic, disposable. Temporal locality reminds me of Jenny Odell’s books, especially where she writes about all we perceive to be accelerating, bustling, and compressing, which oftentimes leads us as mere mortals to feeling fogged, tired, and overextended shells of our best selves. In How to Do Nothing (2019), a chapter titled “Uselessness as Survival,” Odell writes about “Old Survivor,” the only old-growth Redwood in Oakland whose persistence owes to being unsuitable for logging. By extension, old growth forests, rarer and rarer as they are these days, hang back in the arena of least-recentlies, Least Recently Logged (LRL).

In the front shed, somewhere down deep among the tools lurks a Least Recently Purposed (LRP) jimmy jammy. Racked in the mud room are few pairs of shoes, and one of them is the Least Recently Worn (LRW). The refrigerator holds condiments Least Recently Sandwiched (LRS). The pets agitate and jockey for couch positions when they realize themselves to be Least Recently Petted (LRP). Somewhere an overzealous homeowners association president issues a fine to the neighbor whose lawn was Least Recently Mowed (LRM). You get the picture. Temporal locality splits the rhythms of everyday life until there is no slowness, only acceleration. Recentliness, a function of efficiency drive, acts as a winged chariot and speeds us, time doing its flying, us to the grave.

Figure 1. Cover of the inaugural issue of the Journal of Advanced Composition, published in Spring 1980.

But LRUs also connect with questions of disciplinary epistemology and memory: What can (big, collective) WE claim to know? How does (big, collective) WE access it? In recent weeks, I have been sifting through old issues of Journal of Advanced Composition, like its inaugural issue, 1.1, from Spring 1980, forty-five years ago. The table of contents was printed on the gray-blue cover:

  • Transferable and Local Writing Skills, W. Ross Winterowd
  • Cassette Commentary, Alex Medlicott, Jr.
  • A Reply to Medlicott, Karen Pelz
  • Some Theoretical Speculations on the Advanced Composition Curriculum, Richard Fulkerson
  • The Subject is Writing, Richard Gebhardt
  • Writing for the Pre-Professional Within the Liberal Arts Curriculum, Roberta M. Palumbo
  • Advanced Composition: A Survey, Michael P. Hogan
  • Review of Composition and Its Teaching, Richard Fulkerson

Listed in order of appearance in the issue, all eight contents are available as PDFs from JSTOR. The list invites questions. When was one of these last cited? Which item is Least Recently Cited (LRC)? Is citation the only meaningful (or relevant) index for use? Is Composition and Its Teaching still available after all these years? Some questions are easier, some harder. If we can agree to entertain use indices beyond citation, Which item is Least Recently Taught (LRT)? Which is Least Recently Read (LRR) by a human (not some AI agent)?

We should feather these questions out and ask them of our own work, our own collections, whether print or digital, partial or whole. Which PDF from the trove is Least Recently Read? An LRU policy might be tempted (or strictly rule-bound) to evict that PDF, to condemn it for having faded to the disappearing edge of attention’s long tail. I understand the impulse to evict what is longest-unused, the shoes with a split seam or broken lace, the pair of socks whose one mate is frayed, etc. Whether for material objects, or for digital archives of academic journals, an epistemological (and, therefore, existential) consequence looms over impending, inevitable eviction. The consequence, as I think of it, reunites for knowledge the far too commonly sequestered phenomena of repair and attention. That is, to read the Least Recently Read activates memory and patches epistemology; it invigorates a temporal bandwidth with a wider, not narrower, aperture. The least recently becomes most recently. Neither alchemical nor acrobatic nor special, this least-to-most contrapuntal might just be the practice any academic discipline needs to endure.

Here We All Are Again

/ Derek Mueller
Flock of wild turkeys, mid-holler.

April 3 midholler hokie rafter, 10-12 who gathered to gobble and wave tail feathers, courtship or death ritual or just checking in on the state of the world. Here we all are again. It’s taken three years, three springtimes, to learn some of their regular routes, subsets of this flock, or where they roost in the trees at dusk on an impossible to reach embankment a couple of steep juts down creek. #wild #turkeys #flock #circle #wonderhollow

L’odeur de Fieldhouse – Tournament Pick’em Invitation

/ Derek Mueller

Photo by Troy T on Unsplash

It’s March again. For the 21st year in a row, March is that time of year when we squander 30 minutes daydreaming about NCAA men’s basketball tournament glory by participating in the Earth Wide Moth Tournament Pick’em, L’odeur de Fieldhouse, such a pungent event as it is. Like before, we’re still 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 (except Elon Musk) is welcome to join, so pass along the invitation. You still have a few days, but time is running out for getting your pets to eat treats that will alleviate decision fatigue, or finding a friend in western West Virginia who can talk you out of rooting for the Atlantic Sun Conference champion. What even are athletic conferences anymore?! 

So, sign up! It’s free to join this year’s group on Yahoo!, L’odeur de Fieldhouse (ID#25110). If you have questions, you can reach me via email at dereknmueller at gmail.com. Invite your friends, frenemies, faux-frenemies, saw sharpeners, amphibious types, crows and crow feeders, school bus drivers, lyric poets, flyers of homemade kites, people who convert VHS videos to digital formats for a living, banjo strummers, night sky oglers, Bluetooth dentists, soakers of beans, teacup Pom trainers, 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: L’odeur de Fieldhouse (ID# 25110)
“21st annual.”

Firm up your selections any time between the selection show on Sunday evening, March 16, and first tip of the round of 64, sometime around noon EDT on Thursday, March 20.

Fractally Branched and Oozing Sap

/ Derek Mueller

A month ago, around February 13, SW Virginia sagged under an ice blanket, everything coniferous leaning or buckling or some combination thereof. Roads blocked, downed lines, a pop rocks concert throughout the long dark of night. We lost power for 48 hours, only to have it restored just as steady rains rinsed through the region dumping more water than we’d gauged in one day in these three plus years. The holler washed, toggling from soil course to water course, to what I would guess was a depth of at least 10 inches. And the creek spilled over the driveway, another first, though the washout was minor in the end. Not that there is any such thing as an end. A weather event lashes down. We clean up. And so that’s pretty much what I’ve been up to for the past several weeks, aside from joining Is. and her roommate E. on short trip to San Diego, and then being sick for a solid week at the end of that trip. Friday I was back in the yard again for some tree cleanup.

Figure 1. Shed and coops at mid-holler, facing north, where a tall stand of white pines populates the ridgeline. During a mid-February ice storm, 5-7 pines split and fell over, littering the terraced slope with branches and trunks.
Figure 1. Shed and coops at mid-holler, facing north, where a tall stand of white pines populates the ridgeline. During a mid-February ice storm, 5-7 pines split and fell over, littering the terraced slope with branches and trunks.

A mature stand of white pines towers weak and leanerly over the north side of the holler. It has ‘we are soon about to fall down’ energy. Are they thirty or forty years old? I’d guess so. Fifty or 100 trees dropped in the ground in, say, 1985. They are bedraggled, showing lots of signs of shedding whole trees or major parts of trees in recent years. I am older than them; I get it. February’s conditions brought down four or five of them, and elsewhere throughout the holler as many as ten more trees snapped off their tops or leaned over kaput. I have a decent Echo chainsaw. It’s plastic, nothing to brag about it’s bar length, so just one notch up the model numbers from a child’s chainsaw. But just this once, I decided I could use an extra hand. I texted a landscaping crew we’d used a couple of times to weed eat the creak bed last summer, and they were interested, said they would stop by, then didn’t. No show. No message. Just blew it off. So I crawled back to the drawing board, a new query posted to Everything Christiansburg, and found a generalist willing to cut the trunks into 15-inch pieces, wood burner sized.

I have brushed a few of the trunks so as to introduce a gradual, incremental method to the cleanup. I’d told myself this week, spring break week for VT, would be good for two hours a day in springlike weather, late afternoon breaks from the computer to chip away, saw away, branch dragging into piles, the slow clearings not long behind. Two hours on the Echo chainsaw is about two refuels, allowing for interruptions to clear branches and make space. But then I got drawn waders deep into detailing the pond, and that cascaded into bigger pond retaining wall problems than I was bargaining for, so there went a day, and I still don’t know enough about hydraulic cements but the pond wall still stands. And it will be repaired, eventually, or even likelier, it will crumble. Masonry not being high on my short list of competencies.

When I look at the trees in various states of brokenness and leaning along the banks, I size up their cleanup and think it will quick, manageable, even basic. They look small, no more heavy or complex than a nub of steamed broccoli. I’m really ready. Gloves on. Water bottle. Appropriate footwear. I let the chickens out and get to it, sawing then hauling, bigger branches then smaller ones. I am not getting better at guessing correctly the work involved. I always underestimate. The cleanup is slower; the work is more; the wood is heavier. The chickens, if they notice at all, quietly celebrate that there will be more snail’s-paced afternoons free-ranging as I trundle along, small branches in this pile, medium limbs still needing chainsaw work here, the rest stacked in the woodshed.

A blue Ford Maverick loaded with 12' sheets of corrugated metal, sandwiched between a few framing planks, flagged with pink plastic, and secured with nylon straps.
Figure 2. A blue Ford Maverick loaded with 12′ sheets of corrugated metal, sandwiched between a few framing planks, flagged with pink plastic, and secured with nylon straps.

Tree cleanup notwithstanding, dubious labor estimates favor me now and then, meaning that sometimes I imagine something will be arduous and it turns out to be a cinch. This happened to be the case when, after weeks of overthinking the tools I would need to cut sheet metal, I got started on the chicken coop roof. I’d read around about needing right and left curving sheers, about grinder blades, about using a circular saw with a cheap wood blade on backwards, about nibblers, and so on. Phone calls to my dad and to my brother. How would you cut it? And then I ordered the metal, picked it up, and got started, figuring it would be the hardest part of the job. I was convinced I was going to screw up a few cuts. But then I tried it, and it was nothing, a breeze. Measure twice, Sharpie line, and tin snips eased through it swiftly, straight lines, not much hazardous waste (I was worried about curls of sharp metal too small to clean up effectively and right-sized for harming the chickens). This kind of being wrong about labor feels light and the holler saturates again with hues of hope and possibility.

Photograph of a chicken coop and run, an 8' by 8' metal structure wrapped in hardware cloth and covered with a shiny metal roof.
Figure 3. Photograph of a chicken coop and run, an 8′ by 8′ metal structure wrapped in hardware cloth and covered with a shiny metal roof.

Such is wayfinding in projects. Venture in and rarely is it as I imagined it would be. I’m routinely off at guessing how many hours it will take to clear a tree. Yet, in another project, like the coop roof, a task I imagine to be immensely complicated turns out to be as easy as cutting a sheet of construction paper. As grand inconclusion goes, these puzzles are a lot like scholarship, grounded formations beholden to the unpredictability of labor and materials and time.

The Last Human Teachers

/ Derek Mueller

Tuesday. February snow day. One app said 8-10 inches of snow. Another said 1-3 inches followed by a coating of freezing rain. Artificials slackly forecast the weather, having never shivered much less set foot outside. Put on a scarf humans. School’s out. My fingers are cold but not freezing as I type this. Snow day not a great difference maker for me. Because I am teaching online this semester, the snow day is better news for everybody else. We haven’t had much good news lately. CNN and Fox sniffing each other’s indigestibly rotten reflux. Al Jazeera wide-eyed half a world away. Social media dead zone. Another twirl of enclaving and homophily, each whispering ta-ta-ta in best friend’s ear, the whole scene with less thunder from the device-glued herd. Thinning wisps as fuhrer DonJay’s hair, not that I can stand to look at it much less imagine for a microsecond its sadness. Gel, mousse, weariness. Context collapse. An ever distanter relative party pops on nimshit Zuckerberg’s tired platform about how DOGE is rooting out FEMA excesses. Are we even related? A part of the context that collapses would if it could tell of how weird it is to labor, to give away a third of your income to strangers, and then for those strangers to be wealthy oligarchs who have abandoned financial disclosure rules, who have carried menacingly a “corruption detector” to the beach and here we all are mere granules of sand at shores that keep washing wave-wash after wave-wash not even touching a coin Foucault. Beach appears smooth, pristine. Nothing to see here. And the penny is going away, soon gone. Ephemerality of the nanoscale.

Snow Day Chores

Tuesday. February snow day SW Virginia. Slippy Blue Ridge. Figured we would lose power. We’re only ever an unkempt tree branch away from all of it shutting down. So I was up earlier than usual for the juice meaning electricity, to make coffee and heat water. Predictable oatmeal bowl. Sucks bawk-bagawk feeding the chickens in the snow. The youngster pullets looked at me and it felt like they understood something like what the hell you acted like spring was coming. Hush now have your layer pellets, I didn’t make this weather. Neither am I free from participating in the day’s rituals just because this rarer, noise dulling precipitation has blanketed us over. Elkhound Feta in her Scandinavian element. I shoveled a little as she dashed about, gulping flavorless snow maws midstride. Bursty joy contagion, now come on let’s go back inside.

Have You Heard This Song?

Couple of weeks so not so long ago Is. first-yearing along up north texted me first thing, first class of the day but the teacher hadn’t arrived yet, so Gen Z-style whatevering at 8:30 a.m. and wondering had I heard Big Thief’s “Simulation Swarm.” I hadn’t. So I listened. Spotify is a contemptible pillage for artists, extracting at that razor’s edge between profitability and streaming use. Here we are. Flawed world accruing flaws the more you really think about it. But I’ll take the song rec from my daughter with an ounce of Spotify forgiveness. Good enough to add to Liked Songs playlist, hoggy trough that it is, such a careless curation with a declining chance of replay. There in the song, a burdock line about “the last human teachers.” It stuck. I wrote it down. Everyday collectanea.

Guest-Led Class Gets Bigger

The same week, a day or two on, collared shirt and good shoes, I guest-led an in-person class, same class I guest-led last fall though it has a different professor this semester. Last semester, they all gathered in a nondescript classroom, capped at 40 students. This semester, the cap doubled to 80, it meets in a lecture hall. Clip on a wireless mic for audibility. An activity on what you were eating for lunch in 2016. Lunch tray handout. Northern Virginia schools and memories about cow jokes printed on half pint milk cartons. Here, now, theater seating, and weren’t those corny puns the days. Here, now, discussion groups made into flat-lines by bolted down row seating and meanwhile from outside the ambience of heavy equipment building new and sparklier halls.

The same week, two days on, in my Shanks office on a Friday morning, small talk check-in with a colleague, and I learned that home department now has an online-asynchronous class capped at 500 students. Theme is true crime. People are ooh-ahhing about it, tongues out cash register pupils emoji, this new model for scaling up English Department’s offerings. Bigger being better, when bigger refers to the translation of credit hours pouring in, black gold, Texas tea. First thing you know, humanities are a millionaire, but the sing-along gets interrupted because, that’s peanuts considering there is another class, design appreciation, capped at 4000. I only know of design appreciation because from time to time someone in a much smaller technical writing section (capped at 22) will mention it as the only other online class they have taken before, hinting that it forges schema and functions almost as a model, an ur-experience, of an online learning sort, forget Dewey. So the road forks; teaching changes. The more costly and higher caliber thing dies out. The new thing is better because it cheddars more lunches, whopper profitable and there are so many other institutional priorities to underwrite. Sure, we could hold a yearning seance with the days of human teachers and human students gathering in a room and talking, interacting, making stuff, connecting, puzzling through. I’m not writing this as a proposal, only a thought-yarn, “last human teachers” setting in motion that flurry of questions, much as before, about what we’re doing now and why, about what the something-doing does.

Same Old Love

/ Derek Mueller

NFL football. Divisional playoffs. Top-seeded Detroit Lions, following a franchise-best 15-2 regular season record, host the Washington Commanders. It’s Saturday night, Saturday, Saturday. I had to fiddle around for an hour to get viewing options to work, as Sling Blue disappointed, then Fubo seemed fubar, and then finally I could dial in via a YouTube TV free trial (streaming medley relay can be such a drag!). Ford Field, bluelit and roaring. Despite being favorites, the Lions lose, 45-31. A two touchdown margin. No shade to the Commanders, but I do think it’s apt to say the Lions lost more than that the Commanders won. Detroit turned the ball over five times. That’s too many. Notwithstanding sixteen players on injured reserve, the Lions defense pressed again and again, aggressive style reduced to too many big gain giveaways, wide open receivers, running lanes the berth of a country road, all while committing fewer errors. Good on the Commanders for doing what they had to. But about those Lions:

I’m from Michigan. I grew up with the Lions on TV most Sundays, CBS 9 out of Cadillac because we didn’t have cable and nobody I knew had cable, though satellite dish receivers were coming on by the late 1980s. Adjust the antenna and Wayne Fontes comes to mind. Monty Clark. James Jones and Gary James. Chuck Long. Coaches and players from around the time I was 10, 11, 12. The refrain was “same old Lions,” after a loss, which was most of the time. From the time I was 10 until I was 14, the Lions season total wins amounted to this: 4, 7, 5, 4, and 4, with double-digit losses every year except 1985, when they finished 7-9. I suppose there is nothing special about my fandom for the Detroit Lions. In fact, around that same time, I took a stand, shifted my affinity to the then-and-only-briefly-ascendent Cleveland Browns (who, arguably, became the Baltimore Ravens a few years later in 1995). There was that subscription to the tabloid-paginated Browns Digest, with its full-color posters accompanying each issue, and there was that Browns bomber jacket, shiny in a way that was singular and rare in my school’s one long hallway joining together the middle school and high school. The digest and the jacket were splurges, probably two of the most expensive gifts my parents footed in those years, and the jacket especially was such a curious choice in retrospect because I wore it proudly but also took an impactful amount of crap and scrutiny and teasing for wearing it. At the scale of school experiences, which in those days were the main hub of socialization, that Browns jacket galvanized a deeply personal knowledge about community, belonging, testing alternative gravities akin to centripetal outsiderness. I could be making too much of it; I could also be making too little.

All the while, the Lions were still there, patterned results. I kidded that a Lions-Browns superbowl was my dream. And as I’ve grown older, I’ve marveled in moments at how far out of reach that ultimate matchup continues to be (forgiving, of course, the warp-wobble-weirdness of the Browns becoming the Ravens followed by the Browns rebeginning, a classic gone-noting where the gone comes back). As I watched on Saturday night, Saturday, Saturday, I felt disappointment. Dan Campbell is different. Wow, what heart. The disappointment is not for me but instead, somehow, it’s almost but not quite in that orbit of a solastalgia variant, growing up with the bookends of pigskin-headed rowdiness and shambling commercialism, where the s-o-l is “same old Lions.” A high anticipation, high expectations loss carries me back, reminds me of a time when to root for the Lions and to know serial disappointment as a regional phenomenon was also to feel a peninsular place, the ground underfoot, hold something. This is here, where I am from. Winning by contrast is easier, emotionally. But losing and knowing the aftermath of losing, long losing, its accrual too touches feeling even all these years later and from 500 miles away–in such a way that I wanted to note, here, in a low key entry. Carry on and go back to what you were doing and no big deal just a flit.

Coaches and players revolve, leave, turnstile churning, and change is skipping afoot after a 15-2 season with an early exit from the playoffs. This team’s coordinators are going elsewhere to become head coaches (OC Ben Johnson to the Bears is yesterday’s news). Yet this season wasn’t without its rewards. I’ll be pulling for them again next year. Wearing from time to time the Lions sweatshirt Ph. gifted me this past Christmas, knowing what losing knows, knowing its affective rinse as reaching long before me and far around.