Week of July 21, 2025
Another Grows Short
“Sometimes a branch grows long and another grows short, although the pattern stays the same the branches can point in different directions. They seem like different trees, but if you look carefully…” (16).
—Bruno Munari. (2017). Drawing a Tree. Edizioni Corraini. #branching #pattern #directions #trees
Dawnwatcher Heliotropism
Erin Manning on Sap-to-Syrup
“Experience grows from theoretical premise, but does so incorporating ecological emergence. It becomes sensitive to how a process is interlaced with the complexity that makes it singular in all its different ways. It’s not just a question of knowing what to look for – it’s about having been attuned to the quality of a practice over a long duration such that its minute shifts are discernible in the feel. It’s about being in the care of its many durations” (para. 8).
—Erin Manning. (2025). Promiscuous Pedagogies – on Creativity. Three Ecologies. Substack. https://threeecologies.substack.com/p/promiscuous-pedagogies-on-creativity
5ives
Degree-Granting Institutions, Year, and Chairs of My Dissertation Committee Members
- University of Texas–Arlington, 1997 (Victor J. Vitanza, chair; Frank, Kellner, Kolko, Van Noort)
- Case Western Reserve, 1980 (P.K. Saha & Frances Wolpaw, co-chairs; Stonum, Sweeney)
- West Virginia University, 1984 (Patrick W. Conner, chair; Almasy, Elkins, Madison, Miles)
- SUNY-Albany, 1997 (Not available in the Proquest filing)
- Michigan Tech, 1999 (Marilyn Cooper, chair; Selfe, George, Durfee, Bolter)
Writing Studies Tree bonsai, How might we re-activate, or re-engage, the invisible ramuli of advisory genealogies?
The Big Kettle Drum
Painting the front shed ceiling. Dark blue because a miss-mixed gallon was nine bucks at the hardware. Opportunity in the mistakes of others. Also being dumbshit because only recently have I discovered that one gallon will not quite cover the entire ceiling. Another fifty bucks for a second dark blue gallon to finish. Step ladder to reach. Step up, step down, step up, step down. Temporarily anchored thin chain segments to release the old, rusted, and very heavy florescent light bays each into a cradle so the electrical wires can stay put. Paint around the edge. La la. Johnny Cash Unearthed for a while. Hymnals for church of holler projects. Jesus, let it dry. Re-attach with same mildly corroded lag screws. Right shoulder aches familiarly. Pain Friend forewarns a visit. Overhead painting summons the pair of 1995 surgeries. Back when I was twenty-one. Pins to hold its many unpredictable slippages, hem in structural flaws. Paint on Monday and Thursday afternoon because those are the right recovery intervals for the age I happen to be now. Not finished but soon. Painting the front shed ceiling. Dark blue because.
Disappeared
“Suppose all of the syllabi and curricula and textbooks in schools disappeared. Suppose all of the standardized tests–city-wide, state-wide, and national–were lost. In other words, suppose that the most common material impeding innovation in the schools simply did not exist. Then suppose that you decided to turn this ‘catastrophe’ into an opportunity to increase the relevance of the schools. What would you do? (59).
—Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner. (1969). Teaching As a Subversive Activity. Delta. #reboot #education
About Collectanea
Collectanea is a series I’m tiring 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 ninth in this series from Week 30 of 2025, or the Week of July 21). 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
