And Now Here

A week ago Thursday we stopped through the closing reception of a show at the Delavan Art Gallery here in Syracuse. Hadn't been to the gallery before, but several pieces produced by our friend (and former neighbor), Amy Bartell, were on display (some of it by such enigmatic and inventive techniques I can't get my mind off of it). I don't have a program with me now, and I couldn't find the exact title for her exhibit online, but I think it was called "Archeological Memoir." Basically, she works with various materials (impressions, overlays, exposure, stamping) to layer together what I would describe as 'geographic impressions.' They're not impressionist, in the sense of that tradition; rather they involve the plying (layering, doubling over, folding and folding) of found things (symbols and materials)--a sandwiching effect by which their pressed-ness amplifies the deep entanglement of place, object, and spatial imagination. I was struck by the collection because it resonated conceptually with some of the stuff you would find in Harmon's You Are Here and at Strange Maps. This it to say it hooked into the same way-finding attitude or manner I continue to find tremendously appealing. But the pieces were also detailed and varied--as pastiche: almost imaginary maps, almost documentary, almost autobiography. Digital versions of two of the pieces are online--Travelogue and Your Call Cannot Be Completed At This Time--but the entire exhibit is worth experiencing in its entirety, and because she does at least one show each year, there is a decent chance of catching it again in Central New York.

Ting-a-ling

Alone on a plate, a tingaling is not the most eye-appealing treat of the season. But what of it? What their presentational aesthetic lacks is recovered ten times over in their flavor. These are indulgent, easy cookies.

Just like I do every year (it is customary), I mixed together a batch of them the other day. When I was a kid, these were a sure bet: a seasonal staple. They were in all of my grandparents' kitchens (or cookie tins, elsewhere positioned) at the holidays. These simple cookies are, for me, like a portal to another time and place. By scent alone they relocate me in Sheboygan, Wisc., fill my head with strong impressions of that happy, recurrent scene that played out year after year throughout the late 70's and early 80's.

Tingalings

First, the family recipe:
1 - 8 oz. bag of butterscotch chips
1 - 6 oz. bag of semisweet chocolate chips
1 - 4 oz. can of chow mein noodles
1 - cup salted Spanish peanuts

When I made them the other day, however, I used the following combination for a double-batch:
2 - 8 oz. bags of butterscotch chips
1 - 8 oz. bag of milk chocolate chips
2 - 6 oz. bags of chow mein noodles
2 - cups dry roasted peanuts

Combine the crunchy noodles and the peanuts in a medium bowl. In a glass dish, melt the chips into a liquid. I did this using a medium setting in the microwave. Pour the melted chocolate and butterscotch over the dry ingredients in the bowl. Stir it together until everything is covered. Spoon the mixture onto parchment, wax paper, or aluminum foil, and let cool.

The gobstuff archive at E.W.M.--a well of alimentary delights--would not be complete (nor ready for The Food Network to sponsor) without this recipe in it.

It Is a Lot to Think About

I woke up at 4 a.m. this morning, and couldn't get back to sleep for about 90 minutes. Coincidence?

Voracio.us

Over the last three days I have read more than twenty books from beginning to end. Granted, not one of them was more than ten or so pages long, and few of the pages were covered with words alone. In fact, fifteen of those books were Frosty the Snowman (Is. refers to this one as "Mona;" all snowmen, for that matter, are "mona" or more likely "monae"). Frosty the Mona, fifteen times. You've forgotten it?

She probably didn't realize (or care that) anybody was watching when I snapped this one while she flipped through the latest CCC, turning, no doubt, to the Revisions piece by Anne, Collin, and Jeff for something to relieve the mona earworm (what's more accurately an earfrog when I am the one sing-reading the lyrics, fifteen times over).

Few other events and curiosities to report about this quiet, restful week. I am back to ±90% of full strength and energy after a surprisingly intensive bout with the flu (an after-semester flu-crash has become an annual pattern by now, our fourth year in Syracuse). Ahead, a couple more days of laying low, flipping back and forth between sporting events on the television, and not feeling bothered that large blocks of time slip by without anything work-like to add value to them. In fact, so that Y. is not bored, I am obligated to at least eight or nine more hours of sitting on the couch and holding his new football toy just out of reach between now and the kick-off of Saturday evening's Pats-Giants game. Would it be too much with the dog-toy voodoo to call Y. "Tom Brady" for the next three days and then let him hold the ball just long enough that I can rough him up and force him to fumble?

Nah, I probably won't do that.

Winter

High, gray clouds and 40F: good enough for a short sledding trip on this, the first full day of winter. Is. is too young to say for certain how well she likes the wintertime outdoors. When I was her age, I was the cold-weather innocent of the family; fifteen minutes in the snow was ten minutes too long (minute one: yeah, snow!; minute two: dang, it's cold?!; minute three: ice-cracking shrieks). Bring me some cocoa with marshmallows! Is. was a little bit like that today, although, to her credit, she never got to the shrieking part and we were also bumping up against nap time.

Flight

At the end of a semester, I'm usually in the mood for a change--something different. Weeks and months of pacing produce the deep craving for interruption--a break from duty-rhythm (in itself, a comment on rhythm of another scale). I am almost there; after tomorrow (the same day I finished with my q. exams one year ago) I will lay off for a week, ease into some consequence-light reading, nap, snack, take walks, watch a couple of Netflix DVDs.

Why not pick up something I wouldn't read but for the desire for a break? Okay, I already did this week. I was moping around the office the other night, nearly giving in to boredom, when D. handed me a copy of Sherman Alexie's Flight (cloud) and said, "Here, read this." What is it? Juvenile literature for book club. One hundred and eighty pages; a couple of one-hour blocks on the couch between 10 p.m. and 11 p.m. Quick read. Good, too.

Flight is Vonnegutsy through and through, the story of Zits, a pimply, edgy foster kid whose one-two of violence and defiance keep him bouncing from one terrible foster home to another. The book speeds Zits on a Billy Pilgrimage as he comes unstuck in time, drifting on a Ghost Dance in and out of a series of violent encounters: Custer's last stand, Gus's (conflicted) traitorous revenge, and a couple of others.

"You let him out of his cage?" I ask.
"Well, his wings were clipped."
"A clipped-wing bird ain't a bird," I say.
"All right, all right, Dr. Earth First, I'm not the one who clipped them. He was clipped when we bought him. And it wasn't like we bought him to be a tiny little Thanksgiving dinner. We loved that bird. I loved him. My daughter named him Harry Potter."
"That's cute."
"Damn right, it's cute. You want to hear the cutest part?"
"Yeah."
"I'm the cook of the family, the domestic, and Harry Potter loved to sit on my shoulder while I was cooking and insult my food."
"No."
"Yes, my wife and daughter told him to say Too much salt and I'm being poisoned and I want pizza instead."
"That's hilarious."
"Yes, it is. And there's more. You see, my daughter's favorite dish is pasta-anything. So I'm always boiling water. And Harry Potter is always sitting on my shoulder."
"Oh, shit," I say, already guessing the end of the story. (145-146)

Flight mixes in commentary on cycles of violence, innocence, and karmic retribution; combines a believably awkward teenage protagonist with his genuine 'whatever's and filthy language (enough that it wouldn't surprise me to hear about the language-chastisers complaining it off the shelves of school libraries). Maybe it's not quite a Slaughterhouse Five of 2007 (the ending is, after all, too nicely buttoned down given the upheaval of everything before it), but it is close: disturbing, insightful, layered. Close enough that you should pick up a copy if, like me, you are interested in a break that includes reading some stuff you wouldn't have any other opportunity to read.

An Address

Today's Strange Maps shows a map of 'the island' in Lost, and in the discussion, there is a question about naming, an observation that it is peculiar that the island is un-named.  In one sense, the LAT-LON coordinates name the island, locate it, provide it with an address (I would repeat those numbers here but for the jinx). But the island is not named (Formosa!) in the conventional sense of toponyms.

The map itself displays layers of plausible locations (colored dots) and zones (rings) meant to match up with events over the first three seasons of the program. I find the map interesting because it surfaces at the same time I am reading and (sketchily) writing about archives, tagging and keywording, what Derrida in Archive Fever calls the archontic dimension--consignment, the gathering and piling on of signs.

What does the map archive? And where is the imaginary map between commencement (sequential) and commandment (jussive)?

I don't know.  I cannot settle this yet, and I am in no hurry. Lost is not even airing again for a couple of months, and then, only if the writers' strike is resolved. Nevertheless, I am--for these few minutes--taken on a detour through the map as a museum of Lost, of a topo-nomology embedded almost entirely in television (a domain, like many others, about which we must continuously ask, What is lost (er, diminished) in "legitimate hermeneutical authority" (3)?).

Who's Counting?

I shoveled snow from the driveway four times this weekend. My back just pinched me and said, "Shouldn't that read fourteen?" No, only four. But it will require shoveling again in the morning. The only recompense for this is that I turned grades in on Friday, so I am officially enjoying a "break." Mostly the ongoing snow removals and the third quarter of c. 3 to keep me busy between now and Friday.

Field of Bingos

Believe it or not, I've been playing Scrabulous less frequently in recent weeks. Still, because the game developers make it so easy to grab columnized data on the bingos laid down over a given period of time, I couldn't resist fiddling around with some post-game (maybe post-fall-season) bubble chart analysis using Many Eyes.

Also, because posting one's trophies so openly risks projecting an aura of excessive pride, I have to add that I'm not all that accomplished of a Scrabble player (i.e., I've never won anything other than the occasional match). This fall I have grown accustomed to keeping Scrabulous open in a tab each morning while I write. When my writing mojo plummets, as it does from time to time, into the deeps of 'what ever am I going for here?', I mouse over and play a word. Call it productive digression.

I guess this also means that for as long as I am working on the dissertation every M-F morning, I will cautiously accept all* Scrabulous challenges.

_{* This conditional promise no longer applies after you have defeated me once}.

Blogabilia

 [we]blog · a · bi · lia (n.) [blog-uh-bil-ee-uh]
     -plural noun, singular -a · bi · le

1. digital scraps, orts.
2. points worthy of posting to a blog, esp. when they are underdeveloped and list-like.

[Origin: 2007, Earth Wide Moth; n. use of L blogābilia things to be blogged, neut. pl. of blogābilis blogable]

Tonight's will be a ten item list:

• Blogabilia reminds me of the local liquor store chain in and around the Kansas City area called Berbiglia. The cut-off for friends who were drinking in college was when they could no longer mutter Berbiglia without spit flying from the mouth. Rarely, rarely did it come to this.
• Bird Library sent me an automated message this morning explaining I had accumulated $30 in late fees for books due on 11/30. I jumped on the phone to the circulation desk and explained that up until this last summer, overdue notices arrived by email in time such that I could either 1.) renew online or 2.) expediently return the books to our fine library. The system has changed, I explained. On the other end: "We'll look into it. The software was updated over the summer." Aha! And so the debts were forgiven. I am once more in Bird's good graces.
• Ph. has a chemistry project coming up that requires a caloric and substance analysis of a homemade goodie. It must include at least five ingredients. Up to five more ingredients will count toward extra credit. I'm open to any and all ten-ingredient suggestions you can make (in part because I don't feel like messing with the gingerbread cookies).
• Yesterday I learned that PHP has an "explode function" for those arrays that reach a max size of 100,000. The factoid effectively detonates a planned portion (ciao, so long, arrivederci) of the diss.
• I renewed the domain name earthwidemoth.com, which means this blog will carry on through yet another year. Blog Day's not until after the New Year, but today's hosting renewal had to come first.
• Today is the tenth birthday my mother has missed since she died suddenly and unexpectedly in the summer of '97. I still pause when I reiterate "suddenly and unexpectedly," as if I cannot mention her death with any other adverbs. There is a dull timelessness in those descriptors. I have dwelt on this before. Also, because she was a 12/12er and I am a 5/5er, I am especially keen on birthdays with a day/month match, like the one belonging to my nephew T., 11/11.
• I was on campus earlier for a pair of practice job talks.
• While I was on campus, I printed the first sixteen pages of chapter three. There is a certain shadowy corner to this moment in the chapter. The shadowy corner? In pre-dawn basketball workouts the shadowy corner was the part of the track where coach could not see whether we were actually running on the track or cutting the corner and running on the grass. Many of us kept to the track; a few did not. Nobody said anything about it. Describing this section of chapter three as a shadowy corner does not resolve for me whether I am thinking of it as a coach who cannot see or as a runner who faces the dilemma of either keeping to the paved lane or straying for efficiency's sake. It is worth mentioning in these terms because it is both (and, therefore, mildly conflicted).
• Tonight I re-read Matsuda's chapter, "Coming to Voice: Publishing as a Graduate Student." I ran across it when I was leafing around in a pile of materials from the genre course I took in the summer of 2005. He writes: "Now that I have a tenure-track job, however, I have come to think of being a graduate student as a somewhat privileged status. At Purdue, I was only teaching three courses per year. I had no obligation to administer programs, serve on academic committees, or mentor graduate students, although I did so voluntarily" (50). Lest, in the fogs of dissertating, I forget.
• The blogobilia were going to be ten-long. Was? Were? Was, I think. Was going to be ten-long.
  Maybe not.

Address Keywords

How best to arrive at keywords (before they are tags)? One humorless punchline is that I will not soon have a degree in computational linguistics. I have dealt superficially with the question this week, first by thinking about the relationship of the terms assigned by various methods--where we have keywords at all, that is. The most prominent journals in composition studies do very little with keywords, much less with tags (here I am thinking of tags as the digital iteration of keywords that includes latent, descriptive, and procedural labeling). Why is that?

The table below grew first from parallel questions about the overlaps between Mehta's chronological approach to tag clouds (with hues that explain persistence) and Marlow's process, which remains important because it can return multi-term noun phrases rather than only one-word keywords (also because Marlow's is the one we use for CCCOA). As of yet and because I am short on space, I do very little to account for TagCrowd and ManyEyes: TagCrowd because I too quickly hit the memory ceiling with the files I am working from; ManyEyes because there are copyright concerns with uploading full texts of articles that belong properly to NCTE. Anyway, I will return to ManyEyes in chapter four.

Below I have boldfaced common terms across the three keywording methods. The second two columns apply duplicable computational methods of great relevance to the diss. Still, they are not perfect matches. Is this a flaw? I think of it instead as a sign of life--a slight rattle in the imperfectly fitting (and therefore thought-provoking) works.

Page Count

Because I have been running into some PHP road blocks that I have been unable to resolve, I needed to answer a dumb question: How long are the articles in CCC over the past twenty years?

This simple line graph charts the page count of CCC articles over the period in question. It answers my question, and it also more or less affirms the lengthening of article manuscripts--a gradual inflation we may well know about implicitly. Glancing the stacks in this way simply attests to it. The shortest are, these days, less short; the longest are longer. At this rate, in as little as 50 years, scholarly articles will on average exceed 100 pages. With any luck I will retire before then. If nothing else, the next half-century will require us to be more discerning readers, if the manuscript up-tick we have already witnessed has not already.

In putting the graph hastily together, I have neglected a number of factors--pull quotes that made articles slightly longer, changes to the layout of the journal around 2000 (did the average words per page remain constant?), and probably a few other things I haven't thought about yet.

What remains puzzling is that the PHP script I have been working with will not do its thing with Rouzie's 49-page article from 2001, but it is successful with Selfe and Hawisher's biggest-of-them-all, a 50-pager from 2004. The difference between them is slight. It can be measured in words. I will see to that soon. But I am closer to troubleshooting the PHP, closer to figuring out why. Think of this as one of the what crumbs sprinkled along the uneven path.

Fluff

Imagine a scenario in which Yoki hallucinates that he is Maya and that he must rescue Is. from the sub-zero blizzard conditions by melting the entire drift (three feet from the back door of the house) with his pug-sized tongue. I was not present at this scene earlier today, but by all reports neither of these two were long for this outdoor play session. Still, I have to admire Y.'s courage (his thirst!) and add that Is. appears in her winter get-up to be better prepared for the cold weather than I am.

Snowing Here More Than I Likesacuse

Twenty-four hours and six-plus inches in to the season's first major snow event and it's still coming down steadily. The accumulations meant a snow day for D., Ph., and Is. And while I had strong, vivid dreams around dawn that I would wake up to the News 10 Closings & Delays site posted above, my dreams did not win the day (dreaming, I mean, of the item listed at the bottom of the screen-grab more than of the weather map or the link to Clinton's cranked up "rhetoric"). I awoke to find that the (indoor) stairs leading up to the office were snow-free and not the least bit slippery. I would characterize the morning's writing, on the other hand, as patchy, drifty, and slick. We have not had any indoor snow yet (Lalo told us that last year they had traces of snow blowing in through the eaves of the room that is now the office--a converted attic--where I am now writing this). Nonetheless we are steadily learning about the lack of insulation in the house where we now live. The North wind pretty much blows undiminished through a couple of small draft-slits around certain doors and windows.

Classes at SU are on as usual, which means I will soon pile on a couple of layers, tie up my boots, and head over to campus for the second-to-the-last class session of the semester. Planned: course evals and the finishing touches on projects, due Thursday.

When For The Second Consecutive Day

Unexpected potential here for a prolonged and increasingly hilarious series. Who really looks at site statistics every day, anyway?

Haskins, "Between Archive and Participation: Public Memory in a Digital Age"

Haskins, Ekaterina. "Between Archive and Participation: Public Memory in a Digital Age." RSQ 37.4 (2007): 401-422.

Opening premise: public memory work must consider the digital archive. Haskins writes, "This article proposes to examine memorial functions of the internet in light of recent scholarly debates about virtues and drawbacks of modern 'archival memory' as well as the paradoxical link between the contemporary public obsession with memory and the acceleration of amnesia" (401).

Section I: Archival Memory and Its Discontents, 402-405
The curatorial quandary (who does the keeping, why, and who decides what is preserved) pervades institution-led archiving ventures. Public memory has throughout the twentieth century merged with monumentality and "narratives of victory and valor" (403). Digitization confuses the once-tidy roles of the removed observer-celebrant and the monolithic cast of official memory. Haskins identifies the Vietnam War Memorial in D.C. as an example of a participatory monument because "its polished black surface reflects the visitor's image and its modest scale allows one to reach out and touch the names inscribed on the wall" (404). Accessible, ongoing participation function to "guard against the tin dangers of ideological reification and amnesia," Haskins contends (405).

Section II: Promises and Problems of Digital Memory, 405-408
Haskins does not come down firmly in favor of or in doubt of digital memorial projects in this section, but instead she builds parallel accounts of the promises ("public engagement," "representational diversity," "collective authorship," and "interactivity") and problems ("rapid obsolescence," compromised "historical consciousness," impermanence). Haskins concludes this is a "mixed bag," that even while traditional keepers of official memory are watching as digitization attracts unprecedented energy and interest, digital archives are not without limitations. Haskins writes, "It is one thing to collect and digitize large quantities of memorial artifacts; it is quite another to display them in ways that stimulate not only spectatorship but also meaningful participation" (408). This is a point worth keying on, even if "meaningful participation" deserves more unpacking and elaboration.

A brief discussion of blogging as "self-memorialization" appears on 407-408. Tagging practices as an alternative to the narrowing effect (blogging as "sav[ing] the most trivial details of one's past" (407))?

"If archival preservation and retrieval are not balanced by mechanisms that stimulate participatory engagement, electronic memory may lead to self-congratulatory amnesia" (407). I am interested in pairing this word of caution from Haskins with a comment from North: "Composition's collective fund of knowledge is a very fragile entity" (2). What are the mechanisms that would stimulate participatory engagement in "composition's collective fund of knowledge"? Wikis? Forums? Tagging? We have systems of archival preservation and retrieval, but have they been properly balanced? If they have not, have we, then, experienced anything that could be described as "self-congratulatory amnesia"? And what are the symptoms of this "self-congratulatory" variety of amnesia? Too many questions to untangle right now, but one of the most useable threads (for me) in this article is counterpart to its discussion of digital archives of such prominent status as the September 11 Digital Archive (how much monumentality does it inherit from the affected structures themselves?): take similar propositions to the more mundane digital archives--those whose participation is not as *P*ublic or pulsatile.

Section III: Between Archive and Public Participation: The September 11 Digital Archive, 408-418
Memorial gestures moved from the streets to online spaces and consisted of an overabundance of "vernacular" fragments. Here Haskins details the multi-institution initiative to build the September 11 Digital Archive, a project that "epitomizes inclusiveness, which is made possible in no small degree by the interactive capacities of electronic media" (410). There is much description here of the archive, the various pieces assembled in it (personal narratives, political interchange, photographs, nostalgia, etc.).

Section IV: Conclusion, 418-419
"Online memorializing, thanks to technology's capacity for virtually unlimited storage and potential to engage many diverse audiences in content production, appears to mitigate against the ideological ossification associated with official memory practices and the fragility of vernacular memory gestures" (418).

When You Are Your Blog's Most

Relation and Association

Aha! I catch myself being loose with these terms (and two or three others). What is the difference between relation and association? Are they equivalent? Synonymous?

These are connective devices, right? They indicate a tie that can be expressed, though perhaps this is not always so for association. They do not seem to me equal in this job they do of indicating ties. Relation, as in relation-ship, is describable, identifiable, and perhaps even compulsory (cannot opt out; the evidentiary ground is too firm). Association, as I think of it, tends to be breezier and more speculative. Association meanders; relation takes the shortest available route. Association nods in assent; relation points its index finger. Association is spherical, maybe even elliptical, curvy; relation linear by comparison. Association is possible and sometimes roundabout; relation is direct and existent, meaning it plots a different ontology. Relation is verifiable; association is a degree removed, hazy and faint (not equally observable; therefore, refutable, enigmatic). The two terms begin to have a pact something like connotation and denotation.

Could all of this be flipped around? Reversed? Well, maybe (try it and you will see whether anything happens). Yet association has become much more theoretically important for me in the past year. With Latour's Reassembling it is the activation (and verbing) of the social that manifests in networks, and so association gives off sparks, emits a different energy than it once did (first in algebra, with the associative property). Every encounter with "social" is interrupted with this: associative how? The "social turn" is, when matched with network studies, an "associative turn," which, in effect, is an expansive turn outward. What are "social networks" if we take association for granted or treat it as a given?

This does not quite make the point I thought it might make when I first typed "Relation and Association." The point: these two have diverged (I hedge, hesitate; I am also asking). I should add that I have been thinking lately about vocabulary, about "speaking the same language" in the sense that Raymond Williams mentions it early in his introduction to Keywords:

"When we come to say 'we just don't speak the same language' we mean something more general: that we have different immediate values or different kinds of valuation, or that we are aware, often intangibly, of different formations and distributions of energy and interest" (11).