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.

If I’m Butter

/ Derek Mueller
⏳ Approximate reading time: 3 mins

Cube-like Boxing Day, may the sides square to proper corners, may the glues adhere, may the receipts please the clerks and bureaucrats, may fibrous corrugations bear out an enduring physics and corresponding strength. SW Michigan Detroit Metro drizzle comedownance, or “sleet” on one of the free weather apps, and atmosphere holding on at the edge of slippery road surfaces, only of concern because I have to ‘get to’ go out in it to shuttle T. from Livonia to Ypsi around 3 p.m. ET. From here where I sit warmly in the morning, I envision the afternoon route as being traveled slowly-safely, though it is always the other drivers who no matter how much you imagine their skillful attentiveness may careen at any moment like Gen Zers checking phones for notifications, knees on the steering wheel at 4 and 7, low tread tires which also happen to be under-inflated, hydroplaning’s slick thrills, no faults to give in a no-fault state. Ford engineers do not do much for me, but to their credit they do make the default settings easy and automatic. I will drive with my lights on.

As I drive slowly later, over and back, or across and around, according to conditions, I will continue to listen to the audiobook I enjoyed enough to savor intervals of sublimity in West Virginia and Ohio as I drove north on Tuesday. Or I will listen to Fiona Apple’s “Hot Knife,” which I was surprised to learn early in December was my most listened-to track in 2025, probably because it was on a loop that one day when I was at the back of the holler piling the last downed branches upon Stick Henge. When? I think June. Because I was out of signal range, the track wouldn’t advance, so I let it loop for oh I’d guess 90 minutes or so. Long listen the glitch.

As I drive slowly later, and as I listen to whatever, I won’t think about the Detroit Lions’ disappointing 2025 season. Won’t think about how I know I should unpack a collared shirt I brought to wear for a Tuesday evening New Year’s Eve Eve dinner. Won’t think about the clumsily worded email I received from VT’s IT division overnight, 2 a.m. on the 25th, about how my vt.edu email address would be terminated and all associated data storage expunged between one and thirty days from now and to contact 4Help if I need any assistance with getting everything saved, moved over, preserved, etc. Server farm can’t be bothered to wordsmith. I felt relieved, call it a Christmas miracle, that I had done well to predict the impersonal notification, to move everything, to set up forwarding, to delete OneDrive contents, Google Drive contents, to empty trash, to download Canvas materials, to empty my office, to turn in the institutionally issued computer. Everything listed on the autogenerated email, I had already done. Weeks ago. Prescient we are digital time travelers, and I was visiting December 25 in October. Lo and behold it is wondrous how many of tomorrow’s emergency headaches are forestalled by deleting early and often. No biggie if a little bit of memory spills and leaks, but that was always in motion and already assured.

In addition to that overnight work email, one of the gifts I received yesterday from my daughter, Is., was Amphigorey, a super-book collection of fifteen Edward Gorey books into a single volume. Uncomfortably, peculiarly delightful are The Gashlycrumb Tinies, of course, but The Listening Attic in limerick-illustration pairs has also piqued intrigue. They are bawdy, violent, awful in moments, yet they also, therefore, blossom indecorous and rare in today’s media environment, as if certain identifiable genres are endangered, out of fashion, almost gone. And so, a Boxing Day limerick inspired by the Gorey collection.

Boxing Day eff! as rainfreeze blew sidesies
Remote start boo-bloop do your thing please?
Over roads he then drove
GPS Livonia arrove
Whining Pig cringed cried wincing oh-why-me’s.

Twelve Twelve Gong Song

/ Derek Mueller
⏳ Approximate reading time: 3 mins

Tuned in a minor key so high it is audible only to the canine, I am partial to doubled numbers, especially on the calendar: five-five, my birthday; twelve-twelve, my mom’s birthday. And though she died out of the blue nearly three decades ago, we can all remember cake. A 1948-borne, she would have been seventy-seven yesterday. 🧁

Oh, would-have-beens, would-have-beens, pointed and darting and privately felt felt! The day, otherwise, was plenty full. The end of the last last week of classes for me at VT. A.’s dad visiting from Minnesota and so a morning of conversation on political idiocracy, AI, higher ed’s shambling, and more. Later in the afternoon and evening, two department holiday parties parties in Blacksburg, first a SOPA and SOVA joint gathering at Maroon Door for A.’s people, then an English Department event at Hahn Horticulture Garden, mountains of spinach artichoke dip and drinks, good cheer, spirited littles darting about, the mood of soft goodbyes, heartfelt and moving. Summa this group so generous to me; damn sure going to miss their everyday good humor, sincerity, and smarts. A few delivered toasts unforgettably nuanced, such that I, verklempt and feeling deep-down known and appreciated, could only witness in wonder the Hokiechromatic spectrum of feeling that reaches past tearfulness to esophageal flex, upper chest warming, and not to blame the poets, we do not in the English language even after all this time have nearly enough words for love love.

Figure 1. Wrapped wind gong.

I carried in a humble gift, wrapped in non-symbolic garbage bags, the best I could do, I apologize, I could have added a bow at least: this wind gong. Strike it well, I said; it is meant to be big enough to alter through waveform resonance pockets of afflicted energy, to create clearings, to elicit a smile; it is meant to be small enough to carry along to meetings, to share, to circulate.

Figure 2. Unwrapped wind gong.

When you are in Shanks Hall, Blacksburg, Virginia, listen. Strike it. Listen again. Does the gong song end, or does it go on, despite infinitely, inevitably fading?

Figure 3. Wind gong dedication.

Out of time, today is plenty full, too, just one more jot on Feta, who without thinking about it I sometimes call Feta-feta. Feta came home from the shelter in late May 2024, vet-estimated to be a year and a half old, though guesswork is guesswork and close enough is good enough. The inexact agespan opens to calendrical invention such that we decided recently, double numbers being astronomically favored as they are, twelve-twelve capacitating valences of already observable meaning, to call it Feta’s birthday, too. She is three. Extra extra pets, a kong packed with peanut butter-laced carrots, a twinkle in her eye expressing that what she really wants most of all, as do we all, maybe next year?, is a VT-English-mirrored wind gong for here at home, as gong songs surround, call call back back to one another one another.

Figure 4. Feta-feta photographic parallax.

A Reversing Course

/ Derek Mueller
⏳ Approximate reading time: 4 mins
Figure 1. At a major trail intersection, Claytor Lake State Park, Saturday, November 29, 2025.

It is peculiar, isn’t it, the way a passing comment can stick, linger, resurface unprovoked again and again. For example, last May at Computers & Writing in Athens, Ga., upon humbly and graciously receiving the Lovas Award for this-here decades-long, meandering, and often self-indulgent blogging effort, in a casual side conversation I said something about redoubling the effort, writing here more frequently, and someone said in so many words Why keep doing such an outdated thing? Why not try something new? I suppose the stickiness of those questions owe to their being good, challenging, existential questions, questions about human aging and range, about the short little blink of time we have here together, much less in this (or any) academic field, career, or professional role. The questions come up, then fade, come up, fade.

Lately I have been preoccupied with emptying my Shanks Hall office. After hauling three pickup loads of books and office wares to Ann Arbor since August, just yesterday I went to campus to collect the last three or four remaining items—a small mirror on the wall, the same second monitor I brought from EMU seven plus years ago, a last box of books. I fetched the cart from the printer closet, rolled it into the elevator, then to the first floor, out the doors to the landing, and item by item, into the back seat with it all. Shanks 315 was a good office space, though I haven’t experienced any particularly noticeable senses of missing it. The remaining to-dos amount to turning in keys, making sure my gong away present reaches the right people, and tending to a handful of transition tasks, like setting up MailJerry to test whether it will move vt.edu emails to the umich.edu account, and checking in with HR here to make sure they have everything they need from me before Day Fin, New Year’s Eve.

Figure 2. Last of the move-out. The last cart load of stuff from Shanks 315 waits for the elevator. After I loaded these things into the pickup, I tried to return the cart to the third floor but the elevator would not open. So I had to carry the cart up the stairs in order to return it to the copier closet.

Meanwhile

Aside from clearing out the office and winding down this ultimate semester in SW Virginia, I’ve been making strides with the book, alternating between writing and drawing in Chapter Four, the chapter that I have planned to house approximately 40 gone notes, each with an illustration. Writing and illustrating together in my experience lends to a lot of hitches. How drafty can the writing be? Must the illustration always follow the text? Last week I had a plan for an illustration that proved impossible to execute. It just was not working. So I adjusted, reimagined it, drew something else. I could puzzle over any one toggle for a day, then a week, get vortexed into caring too much about the feeling that they must make a special, memorable match. But the schedule I have drawn up for completing the full draft of the project doesn’t benefit from this degree of perfectionism.

Gone notes have on days thrown me some genre trouble. I suppose I’ll never quite feel like short form observances are harmonious with academic writing per se. One gone note is ugh…dryly encyclopedic, too short, underresearched, flat, even banal. The next gone note is too personal, marking the end of a project I cared a lot about and invested countless hours in but that few others seemed to pay any mind. Another sparks registers of feeling for what I think the larger field (and especially its newcomers) needs, and another gazes disaffected at the haze of negligent austerities that have defined higher education over the past twenty years or more, where tuition pays for a whole lot of something but not this. This brings me around to wavelets of uncertainty about just how much or how little to pose gone noting as stable-for-now; as an ephemeralist observes impermanence, those observances turn out to be as idiosyncratic as grief. It has been in moments a stumbling dance to crossover from practicing gone noting to defining the practice for others to one day do.

Why keep doing such an outdated thing?

We went to Claytor Lake State Park on Saturday afternoon, a 75-minute hike with Feta from the Dublin boat launch to the lakeshore and back. It was new, a hike I hadn’t been on before but that A. and Feta had done with other friends a time or two before. In late November the lines of sight in the words are longer; we look to white-tailed deer where hunters cannot pick them off, a committee of buzzards congregated at the top of a white pine, and one gray squirrel daring enough to tempt Feta for a chase and a thrill, but for the leash. The two-truths paradox applies. You can do old things and new things; each comports bandwidth and is a shadow of the other. So blog, if it means writing, a warm-up with only the lightest touch of wordsmithing; and do new things, to—take a new job, work on an unwieldy book parts illustrated and parts written, go for a hike, double-back on the routes you’ve been down once, and look again, it is never exactly what it was before.

Spooky Action In Your Face

/ Derek Mueller
⏳ Approximate reading time: 2 mins
Figure 1. Screamer.

“Spooky action at a distance,” the phrase credited to Albert Einstein, reduces to a shorthand phrase a much more complex phenomenon. More complex because not conveniently observable, shades incommunicable. More complex because strings are only sort of followable. The ‘theoretical’ in theoretical physics allows for quantum leaps. Matter or whatever holds together somehow. For now.

This fall, September especially, jutted jabbingly an abrupt switch-up from how I had imagined things would go. I have always cherished my routines; there is safety in them, is one way to think about it. Boring gray-hairedisms; I age and with each passing year become even more of a routinist, clinging to dailiness with eating, walking, writing, reading, drawing, yoga, rest, and so on. And only now, October turning the leafy page to November, am I beginning to reclaim routines. Some, may they rebecome rituals. As I worked on the presentation I gave last week at the Conference on Community Writing, I kept closeby a variation on ‘drive according to conditions,’ instead recast as ‘walk according to conditions.’ Verb according to conditions. And then, from the upheaved start of September, verb according to prepositions.

Now I write in vagaries, mumbles a cryptologist, or cyber security specialist, updater of passwords unguessable with the goal of keeping a vault secure. After weeks of practicing, Feta finally lays down on command after walks. We’re moments from going on her late morning walk now, in fact. Learning, like every other speck in the burbling cauldron of verbs, takes the time it takes. And yet. And yet. Orange vest because it is hunting season, the one neighbor warns us. How much dew holds on determines which shoes. Hawks harass the chickens even more than usual on windy days and other hunches at the cusp of nascent, local mythologies. Ask a quark what it remembers, and it could be anything. Or everything.

The Way Shingles Snug Layered One Over the Next

/ Derek Mueller
⏳ Approximate reading time: 4 mins
Glimpsing almost Ontario, eyes pointed east across Lake Huron from Lexington, Mich., where I meandered for a beach walk on whatever day it was, maybe Thursday.

Or Lake Huron wavelets breaking teensy-tinily with another on its heels.

Tuesday the 26th, second day of classes, I learned that my last living bioparent aka my 75 year-old dad drove himself to the local hospital just before daybreak, reaching the ER with a symptoms mélange that included cusp kidney failure resulting, as I understand it, from several months of what, as a non-physician, I would characterize as “low flow.” Kidneys back up. Supplements, most egregiously in the form of potassium, fail to reset us back to level best. Fluid builds in the best guess range of an extra eight liters, which converts to approximately 17.6 pounds. With urine as with language, our systems are built to process and express. Consequences follow from not paying the water bill, etc. You get the idea. I drove the 570 miles north from Virginia to Port Huron on Sunday of Labor Day weekend in routine supportiveness, as much for the living as for the dying.

The hospital stay was a stressful ordeal. Striving for survivable ranges: hemoglobintrotters shooting trick free throws more misses than makes, GFR high-shrugs, creatinine low-shrugs, drink your Ensure, waiting waiting, and noticings of the contents of catheter bags with an almost aesthetic quality, blood orange amber colors and hues and volumes not unlike talking and nodding about oh-would-you-look-at-that artforms with an inaesthetic lot, no art classes in medical school, I mean. McLaren Port Huron third floor was a doctors and nurses carousel with no simple roster or schedule of who is a nephrologist, who is a urologist, and no critical perspective on what hellscape fragmentary specialization has wrought. Good thing higher ed warmed me up all these years for right hands not knowing or caring about what left hands do, so to speak (quick parenthetical for the literalists: in the metaphor, hands are people who don’t communicate with one another about what they think they know, especially when wayfinding is in-progress).

I’m skipping a lot. A lot, A LOT. Things leveled off, stabilizing enough that he could return home on Friday. Pick up meds at the pharmacy. For this, you can talk to a Walgreens AI on the phone who will only tell you about how you have selected unwittingly a short-stocked pharmakeia; intelligent agents don’t experience stress despite having bad days, which must be wonderful for them. Home has entailed moving furniture, clearing space for intuitively prepared beef liver (not by me; no thank-you, I’m good), and watching the first half or so of the U Michigan-U Oklahoma football game. In Spanish. Because you get what you get and anglophone ABC no es esa cosa.

But that’s not the whole story, just a little slice. On the Saturday of Labor Day weekend, I took to painting the rest of the front shed ceiling at the holler. Four-inch roller, discounted dark blue paint; slackers and mediocres just like me can make their own Sistine Chapels. As I did so, I began to notice a faint sting at the center of my right eyebrow. I listened to the sting and could not quite grasp what it was saying, something like a wasp or spider assaulted you in the night, you have a pimple coming on, did you touch poison ivy to your face, and so on. I listened and listened and mentioned to A that something was off with the sting but I did not quite understand what. Sunday drive blurred long miles into Monday hospital visits, and for a break I walked along the place where Lake Huron funnels narrow into the Saint Clair River, noticing more acutely the face pain compounding from sunlight and wind. I guessed it was shingles, an old friend from 1979 when I was five and had the chicken pox, now waving hello I’m back after all these years and what is new with you.

Everyone’s shingles will be different but awful. The thing I’ve learned about my own lifelong companionable varicella-zoster virus (VZV) is that, not unlike a 17-year brood long-underground cicada, it came back with astonishing alien energy singing its head off, weirdly wave-making intense sensations, like the cross-calling of whale songs mixed with ticklish, firey, explosive sonar, a storm of swirling pain, inflamation, blisters, then scabs. And this particular frienemy, my personal varicella-zoster virus wandered and dallied, flaring my eyebrow, no big, whatever, I’ve got other things on my mind, then my eyelid, forehead, scalp, and why not, more forehead. I found a local urgent care along this local main drag whose street name I still can’t quite remember (24th?). The attending physician told me she didn’t want to worry me but “you could lose your eyesight on the right side,” and here is a prescription for an antiviral which you can fill across the street at that same Walgreens. Good luck. Thank you. Good luck to you, too.

My childhood friend the long-dormant virus is now saying farewell so long and until next time. Cold compresses were too cold, the antiviral effective in countering, okay, if you must, you can visit, but you cannot stay long. I’m mending but not quite ready for the full moon observation, the talking and nodding about oh-would-you-look-at-that artforms with an inaesthetic lot, no art classes in so many degree programs, as it goes. Might be scars but I don’t have anything noticeable in the way of feelings about that prospect, German stoic compartmentalization coping for the soft-hearted; they wouldn’t be the only scars from when I was five.

I’m gonna stick around Michigan through the 14th, hopefully catch a hug from my granddaughter next week. I had planned to be here, anyway, for Parents’ weekend at U-Mich, which is coming up, plus a few other vague errands in-around Ann Arbor. And so that’s that. A travelogue dispatch and an explanation for why I’m kicking sand at the beach early September same time as holding it down with the online teaching and more.

Collectanea 31.25 Hot-Ticks-Unroll

/ Derek Mueller / 1 Comment
⏳ Approximate reading time: 5 mins

Week of July 28, 2025

Porcine

Figure 1. “A Bubbling in the Sty.” A shorter than usual timeframe for this month’s illustration, but then again what’s more American than microwaved bacon? This, for the July POTM themed “Hot,” which paired with william o’neal ii’s “American Erotica.”

Job Numbers

Sixteen years in the professoriate. Two institutions (EMU and VT). One year as associate WPA. Ten years as WPA (five at EMU, five at VT). In that span, eight department chairs, five deans, four provosts.

Nineteen

Figure 2. Last of the teenaged chrysalis years queuing in 3…2…1 for Is. who turns 19 today. HB! Proud of all daughterchild has accomplished and the many big things ahead for her this fall at U of M. 〽️

5ives Expanded

For Some But Not For Me

I’ve been doing some light tech backups this week, deleting some old files; routine stuff, like decluttering my notes app (contemplating jump from Drafts to Google Keep), and there in an old note was a list of nineteen things I could do without. They’re not in rank-order of most to lesser disdain or golf and cilantro would be nearer to the top. And sure, it’s more than five, but back to school season means back to rule breaking season.

  1. Bow ties
  2. Easter 🐣
  3. Berries
  4. Vampire pop culture
  5. Leaf blowers
  6. Pocket change
  7. Chipotle
  8. Bob Newhart Show
  9. Fireworks
  10. Carnival games
  11. Cruises
  12. Princess Bride
  13. Meetings without agendas
  14. Rosewater flavored anything
  15. Cilantro
  16. Magic tricks
  17. High fives
  18. “Enter Sandman” as VT pep song
  19. Golf

Out and About

Figure 3. Wizard, the hydration nerd of the flock, gulps water extremely.
Figgy 4. Figgy thrives but showing a touch of brown leaf had low-leaf undersides misted with dish soap and baking soda antifungal.
Figure 5. Feta steps gleefully to the wind-down of tick season.

Unroll Themselves

“In Essays in Radical Empiricism, James writes: ‘Knowledge of sensible realities . . . comes to life inside the tissue of experience. It is made; and made by relations that unroll themselves in time. Whenever certain intermediaries are given, such that, as they develop toward their terminus, there is experience from point to point of one direction followed, and finally of one process fulfilled, the result is that their starting-point thereby becomes a knower and their terminus an object meant or known‘ (1996: 57). In ‘The Feeling of Effort,’ James similarly sees the feeling as occurring ‘inside the tissue of experience.’ Yet, and this is where his later work assists in the understanding of the text, while created in the relation—’made by relations that unroll themselves in time’—the feeling (of effort) only comes into itself as such through the motor of a terminus. The terminus is what vectorizes the agencement, pulling the force-of-form to singular expression. This motor is not the end point in any direct sense. It is a force that activates the movement. The terminus acts as the pull, setting up the field that becomes the knower-known relation. Here, once again, there is not yet a predetermined subject or object, but rather, as Whitehead might hesitantly say, recipient and provoker” (160).

—Erin Manning. (2016). The Minor Gesture. Duke University Press.

In July’s second half, reading for wonder and curiosity slowed. Instead, review tasks like the wind. Three external reviews, a set of DRC fellow applicants, two manuscripts. Only ever part of the story, as relations unroll themselves. Yesterday it was an encounter with a rabid raccoon, a real-time fiasco while wielding merely a stick, which broke; the unwell critter growled at me, crossed the road, later died in the neighbor’s yard. Vultures wasted no time. Picture window sky burial. Unroll. Bills to pay and travel. Unroll. You can opt out altogether from Transunion, Experian, and Equifax cold call and list selling nonsense, did you know? The lab in Madison, Wisconsin that handles Cologuard telephones but is strangely, almost theatrically, plucky about their offers of help. Unroll. Lazily searching around for Kittler on media phantasms, spiritism, ghosts. It only feels right to find so little. This-above Erin Manning quotation, some veneer of it perhaps in Walking Methodologies, holds what I want my CCW paper on hand maps to engage, but how? Unroll. Let this fall’s teaching mix in, I think, because it needs more time. Doesn’t it always? Unroll.

About Collectanea

Collectanea is a series I’m trying out in Summer 2025 at Earth Wide Moth. Each entry accumulates throughout the week and is formed by gathering quotations, links, drawings, and miscellany. The title of the entry notes the week and year (the tenth in this series from Week 31 of 2025, or the Week of July 28). I open a tab, add a little of this or that most days. Why? Years ago my habitude toward serial composition and, thus, toward blogging, favored lighter, less formal, and more varied fragments; gradually, social media began to reel in many of these short form entries, recasting them as posts dropped a Facebook or Instagram or Twitter (while it lasted), albeit with dwindling ripple effect into the ad-addled and algorithm-ambivalent streams. This space, meanwhile, began to feel to me like it wanted more thoughtfully developed entries bearing the shape and length of what you might find on Medium or Substack. But, because I am drafting toward a book project most mornings, I don’t quite have reliable essayistic bandwidth for Earth Wide Moth this summer. Collectanea, if it goes according to my small bites chicken scratch plan, will be a release valve for the piling up of too many tabs open, functioning as a shareable, intermittent (weekly?) repository for small pieces cut and pasted from stuff I am reading, and also as a scrapbook for illustrations. -DM

Duolingo streak ist sehr gut! 🇩🇪#wonderhollow #rollcall

Collectanea 30.25 Syrup-Ceiling-Advisors

/ Derek Mueller
⏳ Approximate reading time: 3 mins

Week of July 21, 2025

Another Grows Short

“Sometimes a branch grows long and another grows short, although the pattern stays the same the branches can point in different directions. They seem like different trees, but if you look carefully…” (16).

—Bruno Munari. (2017). Drawing a Tree. Edizioni Corraini. #branching #pattern #directions #trees

Dawnwatcher Heliotropism

Figure 1. “Morningdala Gloryala.” In seasonal presences, summertime’s acuity.

Erin Manning on Sap-to-Syrup

“Experience grows from theoretical premise, but does so incorporating ecological emergence. It becomes sensitive to how a process is interlaced with the complexity that makes it singular in all its different ways. It’s not just a question of knowing what to look for – it’s about having been attuned to the quality of a practice over a long duration such that its minute shifts are discernible in the feel. It’s about being in the care of its many durations” (para. 8).

—Erin Manning. (2025). Promiscuous Pedagogies – on Creativity. Three Ecologies. Substack. https://threeecologies.substack.com/p/promiscuous-pedagogies-on-creativity

5ives

Degree-Granting Institutions, Year, and Chairs of My Dissertation Committee Members

  1. University of Texas–Arlington, 1997 (Victor J. Vitanza, chair; Frank, Kellner, Kolko, Van Noort)
  2. Case Western Reserve, 1980 (P.K. Saha & Frances Wolpaw, co-chairs; Stonum, Sweeney)
  3. West Virginia University, 1984 (Patrick W. Conner, chair; Almasy, Elkins, Madison, Miles)
  4. SUNY-Albany, 1997 (Not available in the Proquest filing)
  5. Michigan Tech, 1999 (Marilyn Cooper, chair; Selfe, George, Durfee, Bolter)

Writing Studies Tree bonsai, How might we re-activate, or re-engage, the invisible ramuli of advisory genealogies?

The Big Kettle Drum

Painting the front shed ceiling. Dark blue because a miss-mixed gallon was nine bucks at the hardware. Opportunity in the mistakes of others. Also being dumbshit because only recently have I discovered that one gallon will not quite cover the entire ceiling. Another fifty bucks for a second dark blue gallon to finish. Step ladder to reach. Step up, step down, step up, step down. Temporarily anchored thin chain segments to release the old, rusted, and very heavy florescent light bays each into a cradle so the electrical wires can stay put. Paint around the edge. La la. Johnny Cash Unearthed for a while. Hymnals for church of holler projects. Jesus, let it dry. Re-attach with same mildly corroded lag screws. Right shoulder aches familiarly. Pain Friend forewarns a visit. Overhead painting summons the pair of 1995 surgeries. Back when I was twenty-one. Pins to hold its many unpredictable slippages, hem in structural flaws. Paint on Monday and Thursday afternoon because those are the right recovery intervals for the age I happen to be now. Not finished but soon. Painting the front shed ceiling. Dark blue because.

Disappeared

“Suppose all of the syllabi and curricula and textbooks in schools disappeared. Suppose all of the standardized tests–city-wide, state-wide, and national–were lost. In other words, suppose that the most common material impeding innovation in the schools simply did not exist. Then suppose that you decided to turn this ‘catastrophe’ into an opportunity to increase the relevance of the schools. What would you do? (59).

—Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner. (1969). Teaching As a Subversive Activity. Delta. #reboot #education

About Collectanea

Collectanea is a series I’m tiring out in Summer 2025 at Earth Wide Moth. Each entry accumulates throughout the week and is formed by gathering quotations, links, drawings, and miscellany. The title of the entry notes the week and year (the ninth in this series from Week 30 of 2025, or the Week of July 21). I open a tab, add a little of this or that most days. Why? Years ago my habitude toward serial composition and, thus, toward blogging, favored lighter, less formal, and more varied fragments; gradually, social media began to reel in many of these short form entries, recasting them as posts dropped a Facebook or Instagram or Twitter (while it lasted), albeit with dwindling ripple effect into the ad-addled and algorithm-ambivalent streams. This space, meanwhile, began to feel to me like it wanted more thoughtfully developed entries bearing the shape and length of what you might find on Medium or Substack. But, because I am drafting toward a book project most mornings, I don’t quite have reliable essayistic bandwidth for Earth Wide Moth this summer. Collectanea, if it goes according to my small bites chicken scratch plan, will be a release valve for the piling up of too many tabs open, functioning as a shareable, intermittent (weekly?) repository for small pieces cut and pasted from stuff I am reading, and also as a scrapbook for illustrations. -DM

2025 John Lovas Award showpiece arrived in July’s mail. #wonderhollow #rollcall

Collectanea 29.25 Topography-Hell-Cubs

/ Derek Mueller
⏳ Approximate reading time: 4 mins

Week of July 14, 2025

Travel

We traveled to Michigan this week, Sunday through Thursday, so Collectanea slipped from routine to resting pose. Laptop in backpack. Vary your compositional yoga. Trip was two very different Airbnbs in and around Washtenaw County, winding routes through Dexter, Chelsea, Manchester, Saline, and Milan, then through Pinckney, Gregory, and Unadilla. A swim at Pickerel Lake. Ice cream in Hell. A just so-so “glop” taco salad in Depot Town. A Zoom meeting from a cafe. Catching up with friends and family as much as time and coordination allowed. Great to see some yas; sorry to miss some yas! And then back to Virginia, across Ohio and for too long stormed upon in West Virginia.

Airbnb #1

Figure 1. Der hund, relieved to be out of the car.

Ice Water

Figure 2. Shifted plans and there was Sweetwaters delivering cool-off refreshments.

Anecdoted Topography of Ann Arbor Chance

Figure 3. Before brunch, Zola Bistro. Outdoor options, calling ahead to learn which places were easy-agreeable to Feta’s companionably sitting sidetable: Zingerman’s Roadhouse, Jolly Pumpkin, Hell Saloon, too, were welcoming.

Airbnb #2

Figure 4. Portage Lake near Pinckney. Much to say about this place, but for that very reason, I’ll let it go, unsaid and unreviewed. No comment. No stars.

Take A Stick! Do Not Take A Stick.

Figure 5. Feta passed on Hell’s Doggie Library, perhaps because the offerings were not as appealing as the many sticks back at home, perhaps because she determined that this is exactly the sort of conditional enticement an officer of the devil would place before an unsuspecting canine. 😈

Downpours of Charleston, WV

Figure 6. Thunder and lightning and downpours and slow-downs for what felt like hours on the drive back to Virginia.

Cutie-pies, Cerberus

Figure 7. Back at the holler, Friday morning, this pair of black bear cubs playfully sauntered over the creek, along the yard, pausing, hummingbird nectar I smell?, at the walnut tree before heading up the embankment behind the mailboxes again.

Now What

The rest of July is a heap of review tasks and further syllabizing ENGL3844 into existence, plotting out two fall conference presentations, painting some more of the shed, keeping the hummingfeeders nectared, the tiny birdkin fueled, fed.

About Collectanea

Collectanea is a series I’m trying out in Summer 2025 at Earth Wide Moth. Each entry accumulates throughout the week and is formed by gathering quotations, links, drawings, and miscellany. The title of the entry notes the week and year (the eighth in this series from Week 29 of 2025, or the Week of July 14). I open a tab, add a little of this or that most days. Why? Years ago my habitude toward serial composition and, thus, toward blogging, favored lighter, less formal, and more varied fragments; gradually, social media began to reel in many of these short form entries, recasting them as posts dropped a Facebook or Instagram or Twitter (while it lasted), albeit with dwindling ripple effect into the ad-addled and algorithm-ambivalent streams. This space, meanwhile, began to feel to me like it wanted more thoughtfully developed entries bearing the shape and length of what you might find on Medium or Substack. But, because I am drafting toward a book project most mornings, I don’t quite have reliable essayistic bandwidth for Earth Wide Moth this summer. Collectanea, if it goes according to my small bites chicken scratch plan, will be a release valve for the piling up of too many tabs open, functioning as a shareable, intermittent (weekly?) repository for small pieces cut and pasted from stuff I am reading, and also as a scrapbook for illustrations. -DM

The vulture guardian, Hell, Mich. #travelogue #rollcall