Tag: float

Drift Types

/ dmueller

Early this morning I read Michael Finkel’s recent GQ article, “Here Be Monsters,” about three Tokelauan teens who survived fifty-one days adrift at sea. It proved an uncanny read on the Kindle, considering I pushed it there mostly to try out Readability’s new “Send to Kindle” option, and I have also been slow-slow-Kindle-reading Arum and Roksa’s report on the failures of colleges, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. Some sort of reading device-based juxtaposition in this, I guess.

The fruits of this pollenation, if they can be called fruits and not flotsam, include a hypothetical reading list for a course I will probably never teach on different types of drifting (dreaming it up, so let’s consider it a course on curriculum).

From “Here Be Monsters,”

Some-times boats are blown off course; there’s even a Tokelauan word for this: lelea. It’s theorized that the very existence of people on the island–is has been inhabited for a thousand years–is because a Polynesian canoe drifted off course. But there is also another, more complicated Tokelauan word: tagavaka. This applies to boats that have purposely sailed away–for love, adventure, or suicide.

What, for example, comes of viewing academic drift in terms of lelea and tagavaka? And what of the here/there reference to monsters (in the article’s title) might productively refocus academy drift characterizations on drifting from and drifting toward?

And we would need additional readings in this speculative scenario: Singer’s “The Castaways,” Menand’s “Live and Learn” (an ENGL328 student just shared this one with me), Haynes’ inestimable “Writing Offshore,” and, why not?, something on The Essex. And, it’s undeniable, I wrote an entry a lot like this one just about four years ago. I have continued in the intervening years to drift away from and, having surrendered to currents, back toward ideas like these–ideas rekindled, of course, by my dissatisfaction with academic drift-states cast too singularly as a problem to be buoyed simply by resetting drifters on a fixed, positionally precise course.

The “Here Be Monsters” article includes a nod to assessment from a New Zealand psychiatrist who examined the boys: “‘They won’t ever forget this,’ he says. ‘It won’t be put out of their minds. But young people tend to be resilient, able to work through tragedies with reasonably good long-term results.'”

Star Whale

/ dmueller

Harnessed beneath the floating future British metropolis, a star whale labored against zero gravity, acting as a gentle, unassuming engine to carry humans toward some uncertain destination. This is a near-spoiler, I suppose, since it gets at the gradually unraveling Smilerpremise of “The Beast Below,” the second Dr. Who episode to air this season– Sat. night on BBC America. For the second consecutive week, I watched, not fully sure whether I would grow bored with Who’s kitschy special effects or impatient with the show’s fantastical excesses. Yet, like the week before (unlike some), I was pleasantly surprised. I thought Episode Two was well done–well enough that I recommend it: an army of creepy fortune-telling machines (think Zoltar Speaks with extreme mood swings: called “Smilers”), a blaring, flickering civics quiz after which participants have the option to forget or protest (mass, self-selected forgetting preserves the Queen’s authority; too much protest dethrones her), and, of course, the city’s hefty, bottom-floor host, a schizophrenic giant merciful toward the children but unkind to adults. Enough.

All the more striking in this episode was the unmistakable family resemblance between the star whale and the withering, abused avanc in Mieville’s The Scar, that massive underwater creature yoked to Armada as their floating conglomeration of warped hulls and things drifted toward the water’s edge.

Don’t Sink the Boat

/ dmueller

Two videos. The first one is a music video for Flogging Molly’s “Float” (lyrics). Basically, a bearded cotton swab collects a bunch of odds and ends and then assembles them into a raft (via). I won’t spoil it by telling you whether or not it floats.

Second, a cut from Jan & Kjeld’s performance of “Tiger Rag” in 1959 (via). I watched this for the first time on Thursday within earshot of Is., and ever since she has asked to watch it again and again, even claims it as her “favorite song.” As if that isn’t enough, she also said she favors Jan (right) over Kjeld. Perhaps because of Kjeld’s impressively fearful (verging on creepy) expression–the wide eyes and sucked-in cheeks unmatched by his brother, she insists Jan is the more likable of the two.

I admit it, I’m growing weary of watching this second video. But I’ll post it nevertheless because the chances are high I’ll hear another fifteen or twenty requests to watch it before something else comes along.

Crunchy Sweet

/ dmueller

Because 1.) dissertation jokes are funnier to me these days than they will ever again be for the rest of my life and because 2.) I had a floaty-full bowl of whole grain Cheerios for lunch today, check this from McSweeney’s, “From My Unfinished Doctoral Dissertation on Breakfast Cereals,” by Dave Frye:

In Linnaeus’s rudimentary typology, all cereals were divided into two broad categories: those that float and spill all over the place when you pour the milk in and those that sink and harden into something like cement if you forget to rinse the bowl. Linnaeus’s work was greeted with broad enthusiasm in the 18th century, particularly in England, where Dr. Johnson adjudged his work “crunchy sweet,” and Gibbon was inspired to begin work on his magisterial Sinking and Floating of the Roman Empire.

Plus, who doesn’t feel overjoyed at the prospect of reading from an unfinished dissertation?