Appealing are the sense-making motives in the Berlant-Stewart exchanges, with a nod echoic to Jenny Rice’s variation—gorgoylean methods—in Awful Archives where the generative tenets follow, 1) What is going on? and 2) What accumulates as being rhetorical figuration? and 3) How does it (fail to) add up? Not anchored entirely in story nor narrative, in description, in data nor database/collection, the gorgoylean approach hearkens maybe to positional disruption: What is for me phenomenological is for you empirical is for Earl not even worthy of inquiry.
Tag: accumulation
Suspense
My two Twitter accounts unexpectedly synchronized yesterday, matching in number for the first time ever. Two-hundred forty-three tweets in each. #sotta
Right-o: #sotta is a hashtag for State of the Twitter Accounts. Of course, I realize that hashtags don’t help organize blog entries the way they do Twitter updates. So much runs together nowadays.
Their unplanned alignment, though not especially remarkable for everyday people (even Digg overlooked this happening), was just uncanny enough for me to justify taking a step back, a deep breathe and reflective, 24-hour pause. Could be a conductive, insightful occasion, or not. The two accounts resemble fraternal twins. One came first. They have much in common, but they do not quite look alike: different avatars, different personalities, different aliases, different habits of writing and linking.
I keep the older account around because it follows and is in turn followed by a somewhat more collegial and professorial company than the other. The second account is more teacherly; it fills a pedagogical need for the activity streams ENGL328ers write throughout the semester. In other words, the second account is more for orchestration and course-specific guidance.
Two-hundred forty-three tweets: that’s nothing. Even multiplied by two, it’s in the shallow end of the pool some measure away from Twitter users who have upwards of two thousand entries. So in this, my first half-year of tweeting, I’m still trying to figure out where my own writing and working rhythms blend in with the Twittersphere, whether I’m being (perhaps somewhat willfully) negligent of the accumulative effects of writing not only in a networked platform but in a networked platform with such a boundless temporality as this.
Accumulations
What is on your mind if you live in Syracuse in mid-late February? Snow
statistics.
On average, Syracuse endures 117" of snowfall per year. If you insist
that I need a source for this, my source is Ph. He has, without flinching,
handled the largest share of shoveling this year. One hundred and seventeen
inches equals just about ten feet. If you don’t trust my source, maybe you
should do a google for the "National Weather Service" or "snowfall totals" or
"enough of this torment already."
This year we had 117" before the end of January. Ph. would probably say that
he shoveled 110" inches of it and that I struggled with the other 7" before
crying out from flesh-shredding back spasms. I, on the other hand, would offer in my
own defense that we have just one snow shovel.
Ever curious about snow statistics, I went online myself, checked out what
data the internet had to report. And I found the blog for the
New York State Golden Snowball Award,
which tracks the prestigious annual honor for the city that suffers the most
snowfall among Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo, Binghamton, and Albany. No contest!
The site reports that No. 1 Syracuse has taken on 127.8" of snow this year,
although as I look out the window right now, I think their measure is not up to
date. Make that 127.9…128….
I can’t continue to watch. Of course, snow isn’t the only thing
accumulating on Westmoreland Ave this winter. I have
a CCCC paper to
spit-shine (it’s written-ish, if I can decide which six pages to graft
from the diss), a dis’tation to finish, a book chapter draft to collaborate, and
teach teach teaching to do.
Not to mention resuscitating EWM. Or unburying it, at the very least.
Perhaps I will have more to say about these accumulations again sometime.