Week of June 9, 2025

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Horror Vacui 🕳️

“At Physics IV, 8, 216a26-7, Aristotle cracks a joke. It is one of the relatively few deliberate jokes in the corpus, and its occurrence here is not without significance. Aristotle in these chapters is arguing against those who believe in the existence of the void, or vacuum, or empty space; he says, ‘even if we consider it on its own merits the so-called vacuum will be found to be really vacuous.’²

To be sure, this is not a very funny joke; what is interesting about it, though, is that it underlines the general attitude of dismissive flippancy that seems to run through Aristotle’s consideration of the void.
He seems to refuse to take the hypothesis of the void at all seriously. He never argues directly that the void does not or cannot exist,³ but contents himself with criticizing the arguments that other thinkers had advanced in its favour. And even this criticism seems disorganized⁴ and strawmannish—it doesn’t really meet these thinkers on their own terms; moreover, it is heavily bound up with Aristotle’s peculiar views about the phenomena and laws of motion.⁵ One comes away with an uneasy feeling that the problem itself has not been addressed, that Aristotle has been unable or unwilling to give his real reasons for disliking the void; it seems almost as though he suffers from an irrational aversion to the void, a neurotic horror vacui, and will clutch at straws to refute it.”

—John Thorp. (1990). “Aristotle’s Horror Vacui¹. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 20(2), 149–166. #emptiness #vacuum #void #clearings

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CCC Editors

• Kara Taczak & Matt Davis, Feb 2025- (U Central Florida & UMass-Boston)
• Malea Powell, Feb 2020-Dec 2024 (Michigan St U); 4 years, 10 months
• Jonathan Alexander, Feb 2015-Dec 2019 (UC-Irvine); 4 years, 10 months
• Kathleen Blake Yancey, Feb 2010-Dec 2014 (Florida St U); 4 years, 10 months
• Deborah Holdstein, Feb 2005-Dec 2009 (Governors St U; Columbia C Chicago); 4 years, 10 months
• Marilyn Cooper, Feb 2000-Dec 2004 (Michigan Tech); 4 years, 10 months
• Joseph Harris, Feb 1994-Dec 1999 (U Pittsburgh; Duke U); 5 years, 10 months
• Richard Gebhardt, Feb 1987-Dec 1993 (Findlay C; Bowling Green St U); 6 years, 10 months
• Richard Larson, Feb 1980-Dec 1986 (Lehman C CUNY); 6 years, 10 months
• Edward P.J. Corbett, Feb 1974-Dec 1979 (Ohio St U); 5 years, 10 months
• William Irmscher, Feb 1965-Dec 1973 (U Washington); 8 years, 10 months
• Ken Macrorie, Feb 1962-Dec 1964 (Western Michigan U); 2 years, 10 months
• Cecil B. Williams, Dec 1960-Dec 1962 (Texas Christian U); 2 years, 10 months
• Francis E. Bowman (noted as interim), October 1959-October 1960 (Williams took a Fulbright at U Hamburg) (Duke U); 1 year
• Cecil B. Williams, Feb 1959-May 1959 (Oklahoma St U); 4 months
• Francis E. Bowman, Feb 1956-Dec 1958 (Duke U); 2 years, 4 months
• George W. Wykoff, Oct 1952-Dec 1955 (Purdue U); 3 years, 2 months
• Charles (Chas) Roberts, March 1950-May 1952 (U Illinois); 2 years, 2 months

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Recently I was revisiting Lisa Ede’s editor’s introduction to the collection of the Braddock award-winning essays, On Writing Research: The Braddock Essays, 1975-1998. I noticed the book’s frontmatter included an up-to-date at the time list of CCC editors, Charles Roberts through Joseph Harris, which in turn pointed me to the Wikipedia entry to see whether an up-to-date now list was there, which in turn nudged me to attempt a little bit of updating, so I added institutional affiliations and lengths of terms. A section of this manuscript I’m working on deals only tangentially with this stuff; thus, it’s fitting for Collectanea. Depending upon how you score the Williams-Bowman terms in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Taczak and Davis are editors #16 and #17, or, for the interims-do-count crowd, #18 and #19; they’re the journal’s first co-editors, however you add it up. No institutional affiliations repeat, except Duke with two (Bowman and Harris). Irmscher’s nine year term is longest; Roberts’ is shortest.

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Donelon as Elondon

“In the 2015 anthology First Comes Love: Power Couples, Celebrity Kinship, and Cultural Politics, Vanessa Díaz, an assistant professor of communications at Cal State Fullerton, wrote a chapter analyzing the term ‘Brangelina’ and the practice of combining celebrity couples’ names into one. Díaz, currently a postdoctoral fellow at UCLA, pointed out that most previous notable portmanteaus were either self-created (Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball’s ‘Desilu’ production company, John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s ‘Lenono Music’) or used by as a term of derision (Bill and Hillary Clinton as ‘Billary’). But the ‘Brangelina’ tag arose during an intense period of competition between celebrity tabloids, and it was part of a wave of gimmicky namings that helped feed public fascination with famous couples—but only certain famous couples” (para. 2).

—Spencer Kornhaber. (2016, September 22). Brangelina’s Mystique Was Because of the Word “Brangelina.” The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/09/brangelina-brad-pitt-angelina-jolie-divorce-vanessa-diaz-interview-celebrity-marriage-nicknames/501050/. #strangeloop #blends #tobetwo #celebrity #combos

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As A Kite 🪁, The Nation on Elon Musk’s Drug Use

5ives

5ives, or Merlin’s Lists of Five Things was one of the early standouts for me among 21st century, digital progymnasmata. The site’s first Internet Archive snapshot shows it was well underway by September 4, 2003, though the earliest entries don’t bear datestamps to follow the sun dial’s shadow any more finely than this. The last entry, Five Musicians to Whom I’ve Drunkenly Introduced Myself, was posted on December 2, 2016, and the site has subsequent sporadic snapshots through this spring, April 2025. Now the URL shows “error establishing a database connection,” so 5ives, well, it’s a gone. And yet. The list of five things still toe taps, still sparks synapse. Gones branch out; what looks like disappearance can be ulteriority, a slow circulation, tacit and inobservable. Why not give 5ives a try here from time to time?

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Operative Proximity, or Why I Am Growing [Snoring Sounds] of Literature Reviews

“We apply what [Albert North] Whitehead said about a philosophical system’s dynamic self-relation to the relation between generative works. Certain authors’ works share orientations that place them in operative proximity to each other. These are less doctrinal principles than motivating presuppositions that set the conditions of possibility for what the thinking can produce and work it continuously from within. The concepts of different authors working from a similar presuppositional field have the same characteristic Whitehead sought: they connect on the level of what each leaves effectively unsaid for another, by dint of mutual oversaturation. So rather than critiquing, we draw out threads and weave them into a movement of thought emergent in the between. If this is successful, it creates a transindividual field of consistency that becomes our habitat of thought. This way of approaching works constitutes a ‘minor’ treatment of the texts: sidestepping general discussion of ‘major’ concepts (periods, schools, doctrines, stock philosophical problems).”

—Erin Manning, Brian Massumi, Stacey Moran, and Adam Nocek. 2022. “3Ecologies Project: An Interview with Erin Manning and Brian Massumi.” Techniques Journal 2 (Spring).

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Reptile Life

As I was taking the garbage to the Rogers drop-off site last Sunday, Hisstilla was napping in the middle of Rosemary Road. So, rather than wait, I grabbed a longish stick from alongside the road and scooted her safely to the edge before continuing on my way. I’ve seen her three times this week, twice while F. was with me. In almost four years that’s more snake encounters in one week than ever before, which gets me thinking, what if she has a stunt double—the racer’s two bodies.

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About Collectanea

Collectanea is a new, provisional 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 third in this series from Week 24 of 2025, or the Week of June 9). 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