Least Recently Used (LRU)

/ Derek Mueller / Leave a comment

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.

Faculty Activity Report Season

/ Derek Mueller / 1 Comment
Figure 1. Sheaf sheaf ply sheaf.

FAR season. Annual faculty activity report season. Workload percentages in each semester must add up to 100%. Except for those who agreed to overload administrative responsibilities in spring which were offset in fall. Or the reverse. You whose workloads are atypical, say so by adding parentheses to standard workload percentages. The parenthetical percentage offsets can look like this, (+20%) and then this (-20%). A workload can tip, lean, favor one semester, but then it must balance again, like a semi trailer at a weighing station. “What is the pressure in your tires? Over.” “Eighty-nine give or take, but that should be enough. Over.” “Ten-four.”

What did you even do, really? Whirload percentages are in section one. Provide context but not too much. The committee is tired and has dozens of these to read. Include supporting documentation if needed but really and truly please don’t. Rubrics are a modern extension of rubine, rubrication, the red ink used in medieval European manuscripts for emphasis. Each section of the workload agreement will be rated using a rubric. The textual part of the rubric uses language you might be familiar with from everyday life, namely, High, High Normal, Normal, Low Normal, and Low. These words are too long and so they are abbreviated to H, HN, N, LN, and L. How are you feeling today? HN. What mood is the cat in this afternoon? LN. What would you like to have for dinner tonight? N. Numbers are more authoritative. Each descriptor lines up with a range of numbers. The numbers are doing the real and keen mathematical work behind the scenes. They are engineered with greater precision than the human eye can discern, especially when drawn all the way down to the thousandths place. If you require a magnifying class, so be it. For example, a high normal day could be a day rated as 6.001 or it could be as amazing as 7.999. Decimal places in rubrics are almost like context in that they can bring us up close to the microscopic details. Like Serres writes in Branches, accounting expedites.

What do you mean you have not been keeping up with data entry in the eFAR system? You’re not in trouble trouble; you just have months of data entry to do. The eFAR system is a grand database where every faculty employee fills in blank fields, thereby creating records of the work they do. Some records are autogenerated. Teaching and course evaluations, for instance. Some records are presented as hedges, machine guesses, speculative possibilities: “Are you the author who should receive credit for any of these 49 publications whose author teams have names resembling your name?” Then from the eFAR system, output a report. You will need to make careful revisions to the vast majority of the translations from the raw database to the .doc form. Don’t whine about it. It is what we have and we are thankful. Plus you are not alone. You are among friends and colleagues who also are carrying the weight of periodic reductive reflection. Low Normal years are a part of life. Low years, too. High years. Normal years. During FAR season, surrender to the old you. Remember the best parts and know they will be translated fairly and equitably from the hundredths place into next year’s cost of living pay increase. Submit the completed FAR to Canvas. Exhale normally. Watch the snowflakes fly. Now you are dallying. Next year’s FAR cycle is already underway. You have an article to review. A pair of emails needing responses. A conference abstract to draft. Fractions of points to earn.

Michigan Pot Hole & Durability Myths

/ Derek Mueller
Two scoops of light green ice cream in a cup.
Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash

It wasn’t always the case that you could breeze into Sugar Magnolia, the confectionary and stationery shop in downtown Blacksburg, for an ice cream cone and find among their eight or ten regular rotation flavors one called “Michigan Pot Hole.” The store opened in the summer of 2018, just as I was preparing to move to SW Virginia and begin a faculty directorship position at Virginia Tech. My daughter, Is., and I did visit Sugar Magnolia during a housing lookabout trip that summer; Sweet Magnolia’s locally renowned flavor, “you have got to try it,” was something citrusy, and the rest of the big bucket choices included the greatest hits: Butter Pecan, Chocolate, Mint Chip, and a few more. A year or two later, I was surprised to see Pot Hole first appear. Being a Michigander from day one, I ordered a scoop, no hesitation. I was genuinely curious about how one state’s notoriously unreliable and heavily trafficked asphalt shifts out to become a jokey-har-har ice cream flavor, and then how that ice cream flavor circulates into coolers 500 miles away. Fudge ribbons stand in for tar; cookie chunks stand in for #89 limestone pea gravel, and road surfaces become delicious, playful, a treat. Make that two scoops in a cup with a spoon, please. I asked what was up with the name of this new flavor, and someone from behind the counter explained that it was supplied by a new vendor, ranking its way into the default lineup because it was popular elsewhere, apparently. In a marketing meeting somewhere: “name ice creams playfully and to commandeer attention.”

Michigan’s saga with potholes may not be unique among northern U.S. states. Road materials don’t last forever in Wisconsin or Minnesota or Upstate New York, either. I’m no materials engineer, but it doesn’t take a specialist to recognize that heavy traffic and erratic freeze-thaw cycles speed up the deterioration of roads. Surfaces don’t last. Things fall apart. Drivers and, increasingly, politicians pay the price, as the direct experience of tires-touching-asphalt makes this into a problem whose reminders are loud, jarring, and oftentimes damaging to vehicles. Expecting better from those responsible for roads and being serially disappointed ascends to the status of myth; Michigan becomes known for pot holes. Big Gretch runs on “fix the damn roads already” and gets elected. An EMU student goes viral in 2018 for eating Lucky Charms from a pothole in West Bloomfield, just a few bumpy counties over from Battle Creek and the Kelloggs headquarters. Eventually we have Michigan Pot Hole ice cream. In SW Virginia. But what sort of shift-out is this, a transformation from a materially improved, engineered roadway into a foodstuff? I didn’t foresee this question calling to mind that moment at the end of JimBruno JohnsonLatour’s 1988 ‘door-closer’ essay, where he returns us to “a Columbus freeway” (309), to stage one more example of the shift-out engineers facilitate, first from personal safety concerns, then “words and extended arm to steel,” such that the risk is mitigated, machined into a built environment with reduced risks for humans riding in the back seat of a car. In the case of Michigan Pot Hole ice cream, the multiple shift-outs and shifts-back accrue, a criss-crossing if tiresome saga. Failing asphalt into ice cream returns the road to the human; it has a full circle going round and round quality, a hint of irony, and the road resurfacing contractors (with their teams of engineers) who completed the terms of hire a decade ago, have moved on. Sweet nourishment. Without implying too forcefully negligence or dereliction, we roll ka-thunk ka-thunk ka-thunk wide-eyed across their aftermath.

An assortment of related, namable decay conditions could pair with this scenario: scheduled or planned obsolescence, overuse as accelerant, climatological flux intensifying the stark shifts between freezing and thawing. Here, friend, have some ice cream. Yet, why do any of us expect the roads to last longer? Or to be in better condition than they are? To follow this a step farther recalls enshittification, or long game strategy (or con) that first rolls out a new social media platform with a strong skew toward favorable user experiences and then gradually, over many years at the black-boxed mix board, dials down the substantive interactions, visibility of likely-interesting posts, and dials up the tolls, ads, noisier ratios to meaningful content, more ads, pay-to-play fees, verified checkmarks, and so on. No matter how mightily we want the good to last, rarely does it endure. Repair dreams as for-profit screws tighten. Tragedy of the commons with the sheep bleating incessantly about who in the hay mawed all of the grass. And paving over desire paths with asphalt faster to crumble than the by-now-long-gone contractors promised ka-thunk. Of course it’s not just road surfaces, but so much of the built environment: houses and cars, strip malls and bridges, parking garages, decks, chicken coops. No exemption for familiar workplaces, for writing programs, English Departments, humanities and social sciences divisions, public higher education, or, for all I know, the entire education sector, pre-K to specialized surgeons, public, private, etc. Holding back on cynical or accelerationist grand conclusions, this moment broadly feels abuzz in wait-and-see, instead an exercise in inventing more ice cream flavors: Professorial Salted Caramel Teardrops, Slow-melting WPA Brickle, Austeritycello, Limitless Course Cappuccino, Dulce AI Leche (vegan), Peanut Shared Butter Governance, Faded Ink Faintly Contractual Anise, Successive Terms Chairberry, Sweet Clotted Budget Models, GTA Moonlighting Oreo. Make that two scoops in a cup with a spoon, please.

Verbing Methodologies

/ Derek Mueller

Walking Methodologies in a More-than-Human World demonstrates that walking-with is an important methodology for thinking ethically and politically. Yet, Springgay and Truman assure us that ‘walking-with’ is best practiced with a method that betrays any strict adherence to method. While there is no stone left unturned (and if there is, it is because they have chosen to leave it there for the reader to engage with), their thinking is certainly not one that aims for an anchor. On the contrary, it is thought as provocation, as ‘research-creation’ of frictions, engagements (in)tension with the world. What a courageous intent given the spacetime in which they practice this endeavor, when global affect has reached a point of hatred with horrifying implications.–Patricia Ticiento Clough and Bibi Calderaro, Foreword to Walking Methodologies (2018)

Called back to Springgay and Truman’s 2018 Walking Methodologies in a More-than-Human World, dialed to a yes-hopefully something taking shape for next fall’s Conference on Community Writing in Detroit, October 23-25. So I meander back in again, leafing in this book released seven years ago, just as I was moving from Michigan to Virginia, a book I later excerpted for the seminars on research design I taught in Spring 2020 and again in 2022. Back then, I thought the book would sew throughlines with method as mess, with embodied wayfinding, with writing on foot, with more-than-words (or more-than-strong-text) rhetorical velocities, and with localized, here we are now, personal geographies. I don’t know how much of any of this carried over into practices or projects, yet, these few years later, it all still feels like a vibrant accrual, a bundle of possibilities I am not finished with, even if I can’t quite pinpoint why.

Yesterday, after a mid-morning dental checkup, some odontal dialogue about how the early September root canal on #19 has not fully quieted, humming as it does through a bite guard tested lately by a grim political horizon and other unsurenesses, personal and professional. I went to the office to polish and print a planning document for this Friday’s food studies meet-up, which I happen to be leading (on foodplaces), and to check off a few other minor to-dos. I remembered to pick up Walking Methodologies, to carry it home for re-reading. And again, as before, it strikes chords. For example, from the Foreword, the doing without anchor, a nod to groundlessness, or the summoning of method to call for its discarding strict, replicable proceduralism. I nod. Yes, this. This makes sense, these dotted footfalls. I am also drawn this time to the verbal methodology, ‘to walk’ supplying splendid, sensorial abundance, lattices of affect and memory, a well of noviceness, or beginner’s mind along the lines of ‘you can never step into the same river twice.’ This reminds me of Thich Nhat Hanh’s mindfulness essentials series, verbed as it is with eleven How to titles: How to Listen, How to Smile, How to Focus, How to Connect, How to See, How to Fight, How to Relax, How to Love, How to Eat, How to Sit, and How to Walk.1I might wish for a twelfth title, How to Draw. I would also pose with this exercise a recasting each verb as x-ing to learn, e.g., Walking to Learn, Relaxing to Learn, Listening to Learn, Drawing to Learn, and so on. Springgay and Truman’s WalkingLab and related research, when paired with the context of Hanh’s essentials, blooms consideration of what would it be to sketch and to explore methodologies verbed across this set: Listening Methodologies in a More-than-Human World, or Smiling Methodologies, Fighting Methodologies, Eating Methodologies, and so on. I suppose that’s what this thread loops me back to, a question, as a teacher, that cares for whether someone, in the frame of writing, or in the frame of being, is aware, reflectively, of experiences named by these (and other verbs). It’s nothing grandiose, just a simple provocation, to bundle as a set of teacherly a prioris questions like these (how do you eat, how do you see, how do you fight) and then to know, thereby, patchworks existential and if we are lucky that collage a more-than-humanism worthy of fostering.

Notes

  • 1
    I might wish for a twelfth title, How to Draw. I would also pose with this exercise a recasting each verb as x-ing to learn, e.g., Walking to Learn, Relaxing to Learn, Listening to Learn, Drawing to Learn, and so on.

At What Rate, Fascism’s Perceptibility

/ Derek Mueller
Photo by Karsten Würth on Unsplash

Here in SW Virginia, it was 81-degrees Fahrenheit on Wednesday, the day after the 2024 U.S. presidential election, which yielded a sweeping mandate–a mandate damningly, tragically scored with misogyny, xenophobia, and economic desperation. Woo, don’t catch you slippin’ now. Bracketing momentarily the political climate, the unseasonably hot and dry weather of late tends to slip us into passing small talk about how uncanny it is, this late fall heat, to be sweating in the sun this time of year as the hens roam close gobbing grubs. We haven’t lived through the burning up of this planet before, most of us. We’re in its midst, the changes at a scale (and of an ideological order) imperceptible, what Timothy Morton theorized as a hyperobject, the everywhere all around and in motion planetslide whose signs are rising, whose mildest symptoms tempt us into grimly ironic reflections, “sun sure is warm,” “nice day for shepherding the flock,” “don’t remember the last time it was this hot in early November.”

But laxly waste and exhaust-addled ecocide is just a parallel, intertwined example to grasp the rebound of fascism, in that although perceptible, the most tangible forms of evidence (e.g., stark articulations direct from the mouth of the winning candidate, or concepts of plans drawn up in the Project 2025 report, an especially “rigid discombobulation”) are encased in a squishy frame of might-mean-nothing. In other words, overt threats and grim warnings can be dusted aside as meaningless, forgivable bloviation (“he long-talks and says lots of random stuff he doesn’t mean”). Many of his proxies and surrogates filled the air in the second half of the week with shrugs of uncertainty; “his waste and exhaust, though noncommittal and vague, is notoriously well-received by his supporters.”

But what even is fascism? If only it was as easy as pointing our cell phones at the sky and letting their lenses do the work of casting it in a purple-pink halo, the way we do with the Northern Lights, we’d know-know. See? Look here. The trouble, in part, seems to be from the inexact matches among the variations on fascism, their family resemblances abiding both similarity and alibi; alibi, or that skeptical, dusting-aside loophole that hedges and qualifies, ultimately dismissing the premise that fascism is upon us, queued up and substantively in motion.

In his 1995 essay, “Ur-Fascism,” Umberto Eco, who was born in 1932 and who grew up in Mussolini-era Italy, wrote about the common-ish features shared among fascism’s subtly shifted forms. If you, like I do, perceive that something deeply troubling is afoot, something dangerous, misguided, and poisonous, “Ur-Fascism” is a must-read; the contextual resonances add up; the fourteen features of fascism listed in the second half of the essay point a blazing, blinking arrow to the past eight years, to now, to January 2025’s inauguration, to this is US. A friend sent Eco’s essay to me late this week with the purple-pink haloed message, “so we are on the same page.”

An excerpt from Eco:

During those twenty years, the poetry of Montale and other writers associated with the group called the Ermetici was a reaction to the bombastic style of the regime, and these poets were allowed to develop their literary protest from within what was seen as their ivory tower. The mood of the Ermetici poets was exactly the reverse of the fascist cult of optimism and heroism. The regime tolerated their blatant, even though socially imperceptible, dissent because the Fascists simply did not pay attention to such arcane language.

All this does not mean that Italian fascism was tolerant. Gramsci was put in prison until his death; the opposition leaders Giacomo Matteotti and the brothers Rosselli were assassinated; the free press was abolished, the labor unions were dismantled, and political dissenters were confined on remote islands. Legislative power became a mere fiction and the executive power (which controlled the judiciary as well as the mass media) directly issued new laws, among them laws calling for preservation of the race (the formal Italian gesture of support for what became the Holocaust).

The contradictory picture I describe was not the result of tolerance but of political and ideological discombobulation. But it was a rigid discombobulation, a structured confusion. Fascism was philosophically out of joint, but emotionally it was firmly fastened to some archetypal foundations.

Now go read the whole thing.