Tag: change

A Reversing Course

/ Derek Mueller / Leave a comment
Figure 1. At a major trail intersection, Claytor Lake State Park, Saturday, November 29, 2025.

It is peculiar, isn’t it, the way a passing comment can stick, linger, resurface unprovoked again and again. For example, last May at Computers & Writing in Athens, Ga., upon humbly and graciously receiving the Lovas Award for this-here decades-long, meandering, and often self-indulgent blogging effort, in a casual side conversation I said something about redoubling the effort, writing here more frequently, and someone said in so many words Why keep doing such an outdated thing? Why not try something new? I suppose the stickiness of those questions owe to their being good, challenging, existential questions, questions about human aging and range, about the short little blink of time we have here together, much less in this (or any) academic field, career, or professional role. The questions come up, then fade, come up, fade.

Lately I have been preoccupied with emptying my Shanks Hall office. After hauling three pickup loads of books and office wares to Ann Arbor since August, just yesterday I went to campus to collect the last three or four remaining items—a small mirror on the wall, the same second monitor I brought from EMU seven plus years ago, a last box of books. I fetched the cart from the printer closet, rolled it into the elevator, then to the first floor, out the doors to the landing, and item by item, into the back seat with it all. Shanks 315 was a good office space, though I haven’t experienced any particularly noticeable senses of missing it. The remaining to-dos amount to turning in keys, making sure my gong away present reaches the right people, and tending to a handful of transition tasks, like setting up MailJerry to test whether it will move vt.edu emails to the umich.edu account, and checking in with HR here to make sure they have everything they need from me before Day Fin, New Year’s Eve.

Figure 2. Last of the move-out. The last cart load of stuff from Shanks 315 waits for the elevator. After I loaded these things into the pickup, I tried to return the cart to the third floor but the elevator would not open. So I had to carry the cart up the stairs in order to return it to the copier closet.

Meanwhile

Aside from clearing out the office and winding down this ultimate semester in SW Virginia, I’ve been making strides with the book, alternating between writing and drawing in Chapter Four, the chapter that I have planned to house approximately 40 gone notes, each with an illustration. Writing and illustrating together in my experience lends to a lot of hitches. How drafty can the writing be? Must the illustration always follow the text? Last week I had a plan for an illustration that proved impossible to execute. It just was not working. So I adjusted, reimagined it, drew something else. I could puzzle over any one toggle for a day, then a week, get vortexed into caring too much about the feeling that they must make a special, memorable match. But the schedule I have drawn up for completing the full draft of the project doesn’t benefit from this degree of perfectionism.

Gone notes have on days thrown me some genre trouble. I suppose I’ll never quite feel like short form observances are harmonious with academic writing per se. One gone note is ugh…dryly encyclopedic, too short, underresearched, flat, even banal. The next gone note is too personal, marking the end of a project I cared a lot about and invested countless hours in but that few others seemed to pay any mind. Another sparks registers of feeling for what I think the larger field (and especially its newcomers) needs, and another gazes disaffected at the haze of negligent austerities that have defined higher education over the past twenty years or more, where tuition pays for a whole lot of something but not this. This brings me around to wavelets of uncertainty about just how much or how little to pose gone noting as stable-for-now; as an ephemeralist observes impermanence, those observances turn out to be as idiosyncratic as grief. It has been in moments a stumbling dance to crossover from practicing gone noting to defining the practice for others to one day do.

Why keep doing such an outdated thing?

We went to Claytor Lake State Park on Saturday afternoon, a 75-minute hike with Feta from the Dublin boat launch to the lakeshore and back. It was new, a hike I hadn’t been on before but that A. and Feta had done with other friends a time or two before. In late November the lines of sight in the words are longer; we look to white-tailed deer where hunters cannot pick them off, a committee of buzzards congregated at the top of a white pine, and one gray squirrel daring enough to tempt Feta for a chase and a thrill, but for the leash. The two-truths paradox applies. You can do old things and new things; each comports bandwidth and is a shadow of the other. So blog, if it means writing, a warm-up with only the lightest touch of wordsmithing; and do new things, to—take a new job, work on an unwieldy book parts illustrated and parts written, go for a hike, double-back on the routes you’ve been down once, and look again, it is never exactly what it was before.

Sky Watcher Lays Down

/ Derek Mueller
Windthrown trees toppled by Helene on Friday, September 27, 2024: a 160 year-old red oak and a younger, long dead ash.

Fourteen days now since Helene winds laid the holler’s oldest tree on its side. A red oak. Another much older ash, long dead, hugged close to its side and toppled, too. When the red oak fell, the dead ash fell with it.

The ash’s naked trunk, having several years ago shed its bark, is inscribed with ash borer hieroglyphs, but those meandering assassins of ash stands are long gone from this scene. They’ve moved on. Scads of dead ash around here. Neighbor mentioned once that it is a bad omen to mess with dead trees. Don’t cut them down, he said. Along came Helene, not a superstitious one.

The red oak’s trunk is forty inches in diameter, which timestamps it to 160 years old, give or take. I emailed the photo above to a local arborist who last winter stopped out to pass his knowing eyes over the trees around here and to bid on some corrective pollarding for the black walnuts nearest to the house. But the arborist lives in a place that was washed hard by New River flood crest, plus no doubt the crew is taking on more urgent work over the last little while.

Wednesday I called a local sawmill. The hulking oak is too big for many loggers to cut on site. He told me about a couple of chainsaw millers from the Floyd area who might be able to slab it on site, thus making it possible to haul away. While red oaks are valuable, they are not as valuable as white oaks, black walnuts, and so on. He explained, too, that the size of this hyperion would be a problem for most mills. So although the tree has a lot of “board feet” lumber to it, getting someone to take on its transport and milling will be difficult. I listened. It was an earnest and generous conversation; free consultation of a sort. And afterward I wrote to the one chainsaw miller whose contact information I could find.

We haven’t decided to do anything with the windthrown tree. It stood there flourishing such a short time ago that it is taking some getting used to, its collapse. Walking Feta on the loop means witnessing accelerated leaf exfoliation, and the hummock and hollow shows for where an animal has burrowed beneath it, where water is puddled, where the upper third of the hummock is drying out. I read about how the hummock and hollow is a site for bursts of living, what might count as a bloom space, a swell of activity. So maybe that is that. The resting oak has already been disturbed enough. And in another 160 years how many of its acorns will have rooted?

In the among the branches, the post where I had mounted the phone of the wind is also on its side and the phone itself is tossed, not unlike the two times I accidentally bumped its edge with the mower’s roll bar and sent it dialing its own long gone elders with a plea of will somebody please discourage this clumsy fool from mowing back here. Heard! Heard. Left as-is, the sprawled crown won’t allow me to mow there again. But I would like to recover the phone, reconnect for this spectral time of year, maybe fasten it to the red oak. Or let the ash have a turn.

Nothing much especially conclusive in this. The uncertainty, the surprise, then wobble, then wilting loss, maybe, is the feeling set. A dry, cool feeling set, and crunchy. When a storm blisters a region as forcefully as Helene did western North Carolina, Asheville and surrounds, something about noting the end of one special tree and noticing it as an intensity doesn’t seem entirely appropriate. Sure, it is unfortunate, but the feelings, like breeze sweeping last summer’s tall standing grasses, are not quite structural enough to write into emotional terms. Whatever sense of loss folds into the everyday, a puff of metabole, ferried by a flash of rain and wind, thus crossing over, quietly, wondering what tomorrow holds and the day after that and next spring, too.

The towering red oak shown here, two weeks after the storm took it down.

Flock of the Pines

/ Derek Mueller
Figure 1. Bagawk Bawk Side of the Moon. I have yet to post this drawing from early May (5/11/2023) because this summer has been more slip-n-slide accelerometer than planned and patterned desk-sits.

Today, like most days in the past week, the Wonder Hollow Six has wandered farther than before from their run and coop. As early in the day as the pin holding the run door gets lifted, without so much as a good-bye flap or side glance, they’re zip…gone. Door busters. And that leaves us, their lookouts and keepers, a tad nervous. We’re committed to their free-ranging. They do seem genuinely contented by the openness of their peck-what-you-will days. But they also seem genuinely naive in that they haven’t had many bona fide predator encounters. Only that one set of raccoon mud prints on the side of their Eglu cube, and when that happened the chances were good they corning and gritting deep in the dreamscape.

They’ve taken to the woods, undoubtedly because it is, for chickens, a cool and shaded carnival with lots of scratchable leafy detritus covering the ground, edged with poison ivy and wine berries, which they’re said to enjoy, and a carpet of soft-bodied wormy assorteds to feast upon. In the woods, no boredom; only food and fun.

We do check on them periodically. Yes, they’re still there, kicking leaves and razing foliage, a hop beyond Moon House and the forsythia stand, in the pines, in the pines, where the sun don’t ever shine. Mid-afternoon, back from a “dump run” to the Montgomery County Waste Site on Pilot Road, I found the six were unexpectedly sunning themselves on the moon house stairs, Bitumen and Lightfoot with their wings extended, doing beached seal imitations, eyes slowly closing before napjerks called them back, and again. Looking closer at them, their crops were distended, more overstuffed than I’d seen before, kind of like when Yoki (who was a puggle) busted into his 40 lb dog food bag and ate so much he nearly split his trousers around, when was that?, 2008.

Our hope is that they are alert in the woods, that they are learning, that whatever they are eating in the woods is more good for them than bad for them. By respecting their free-ranging and by therefore courting the risks associated with being a young, flightless bird in the woods where there are hawks nesting nearby, where a possum and groundhog possibly share a subterranean burrow network, where predators occasionally lurk, I know freshly that feeling of groundlessness and the limits of control. The six have each other in a super-organismic way, and so it’s true, too, that their being more than alone gives these conditions a halo of friendliness, like it’ll be okay, come what will.

EMU and Real Sports

/ Derek Mueller

We’re in an interesting, important moment at EMU these days due to greater and greater concern about the institution’s budgetary condition and the sieve units on campus most prone to runaway spending. Ever since an HBO Real Sports segment, “Arms Race,” aired just over a week ago, the volume of these issues has climbed. In local and regional media, we’re catching various castings almost every day, many of them quoting regents, administrators, students, and Howard Bunsis, Professor of Accounting and faculty union leader, who has been among the most vocal proponents of more transparent and responsible spending. The most pointed details circulating are that over the past two years, athletics has operated on deficit (or General Fund dependency) of $52 million. Here’s a screen shot posted to Instagram from the report delivered to the Board of Regents that details how that deficit implicates all EMU students in patterned spending that obligates many of them to long-term payback via student loans. Each student who completes a four-year degree at EMU, the report says, contributes approximately $3600 to athletics, whether or not they attend a single event.

With this in mind, I wanted to note a couple of impressions:

  • It’s difficult, a heavy chore to call for less of anything, to call for less spending on athletics or on any university venture that involves people we work alongside, because there is always a risk of it seeming a personal attack. I mention this as a former student-athlete, myself, and also as someone who worked in higher ed athletics administration for seven years. These discussions of change, particularly dollar-wise change, are fraught, intensely emotional on all sides of the issues, and therefore incredibly difficult to reduce to clear causes much less clear solutions.
  • There are lingering narratives about underdogs (EMU is down but not out), about almosts (what if this is our breakthrough year?!), about unification (we’re all in this together), and about proportion (athletics is but a small sliver of the institution’s overall spending). These circulate as commonplaces, or readymade arguments that expedite, skipping over the nuance and subtlety, side-stepping the stickier work of correcting the problems. And as such, these are the sorts of snippets that tend to circulate in the news accounts because they are reportorially convenient.
  • It is always to admit failure, particularly for those in the mix (e.g., an AD or particularly supportive regents) who themselves have sports backgrounds because the allure of sports is in part its continuous progress trope: always improving, always getting better, no obstacle too grand, etc. But this thinking is especially dangerous if it manifests as an expensive hubris or megalomania, an inflexible insistence on staying the course when there is abundant and costly evidence that it is not going well. Could EMU make a change and therefore save money? Sure it could. But there are people in this mix who hold power and who are beneficiaries of the runaway spending. As these conditions solidify, we return to the familiar patterns of a growing, better-and-better-paid administrative class, rising tuition, and institutional inertia–conditions for inflexibility that cannot help but compromise the quality of academic programs while reaching as deeply as possible into the pockets of those who are most cheated–students.
  • For these issues to continue circulating, for them to become unstuck and for EMU to take up the hard work of institutional change will require more (and more public) faculty voices than Bunsis’. Discontent has been building for at least a few years, and it makes athletics difficult to really get behind, while sapping the morale in academic units on campus (where in some very specific cases, none of last year’s 7.8% tuition increase landed).
  • I’ve attended at least one football game every year since I was hired seven years ago. Ron English was the coach back then, and I recall that faculty (perhaps only new faculty) were provided season tickets for home games free of charge. But this has not happened since. This season, for the first time, I purchased season basketball tickets for both men’s and women’s programs. I went to maybe 20 home games, total. I noticed at the football game–season opener–that tickets cost considerably more than in past years, enough to make me pause and wonder whether at that price point I would return. Exiting the stadium after that game, I walked with two colleagues, and we found that half of the stadium was not only vacant but that many of the exits were locked. The Convocation Center, where basketball and a few other indoor sports compete, tends to feel better occupied for home events, but the entire upper deck of the stadium (much like the entire away side of Rynearson) is blocked off with tarps that prohibit anyone from sitting there. These are expensive tarps, too, elaborate in their printing and designed to condense the facility’s attendees, mitigate the traffic areas for cleaning, and so on.  There are numerous minor details to point out about the experience of attending these events that I won’t go into, but suffice it to say that these small details, such as the merchandise shop rarely being open during home basketball games, resonates with an overall impression of flagging institutional investment in the fan experience. That is, the investment is purely financial; it doesn’t show up as a more compelling experience at the events themselves.
  • Finally (for now), I’ll reiterate that without pointing a finger at anyone or calling into question the wisdom of university leadership in such matters, wherever that responsibility might fall, football in particular has been implicated in some questionable and expensive choices lately, from extravagant uniforms whose digital readout-like letterforms made it impossible to distinguish sevens and ones to efforts to rebrand Rynearson Stadium as “The Factory”–a move that to this day is an unsettlingly absurd turn of events. With concession stands called “Assembly Line,” gray artificial turf, hard hats, a quitting time whistle upon major in-game events, and promotional gimmicks that put real sledge hammers in the hands of football players so they can pose as if about to swing away at loose-stacked cinder block, “The Factory” is downright embarrassing–a conceptual fumble whose oh-no-not-again weight is heavier than all of the real football team’s real turnovers (punts included) for the last decade. I’d better not go on. But I sure would hope that investing bags of money in a wobbly enterprise would take greater care than to put good, long-loaned tuition dollars behind such an unconscionable rebranding effort as that.

This is enough for today, enough for now. I’ll end with one last quotation from a news article circulating in Mlive today, “EMU AD Lyke: ‘no question’ football must improve, wants to stay in MAC“:

In addition, a report, issued by members of the Faculty Senate Budget and Resources Committee, the EMU-AAUP and the student body, points to an increase in the total full time equivalent athletic staff from 64 in 2006-07 to 85 in 2015-16. Staff salaries doubled from $3.2 million to $6.4 million as the department saw 10 more coaching positions and more than 11 “athletic personnel” added during the same time period. During that same time period, the report indicates EMU’s entire faculty increased by just 15.78 full-time equivalent personnel.

Here is where the frustration builds most pointedly: in the quiet, whispered truths like this that are uncomfortable to circulate because they amount to breathing lungfuls day in and day out of some fetid campus wind. In rates of personnel growth like this comes the disproportionately burdensome long-term investment that sets the university and its most vulnerable academic programs on a (possibly) disastrous course–unchecked spending justified by bizarre attachments to notions that ESPN broadcasts will compel, what? droves of new students? more ad revenue for activities not on ESPN? sudden national interest or relevance? I don’t know. But I will continue to pay attention as this plays out and try to make some sense of it in an occasional entry.

Changeling

/ Derek Mueller

I spent the better part of today finally finally finally after years converting from Movable Type to WordPress. I’ve run EWM on Movable Type since 2004, and the blog has in part as a result of its cumbersome platform dwindled, faded, crept quietly into an idle corner of the web. If I don’t write into it or visit, why would anyone.

The changeover was easy enough, since I’d upgraded Movable Type in early January. That upgrade was necessary for restoring the blog to logging in. Once I could login, I could back it up. Once I could back it up, I could export it, do a little dance.

I’m at the end of a four-month research leave, with a few days to meander before closing in on the last two chapters of the book I’m working on. And with this meander, I’d like to dust off the various websites I keep up, especially this blog and my landing page for the CV and teaching dossier. I’m discovering the limits of my having kept up with HTML5, the limits of letting weeds creep in and not especially paying much attention to the interplay of various javascript modules and snippets from elsewhere.

I have a couple of IFTTT recipes I’d like to chisel free, and maybe this will spur new or different energy for Twitter, or for posting here and relaying it to Facebook. I pose this more as possibility than prediction and publish it with a shrug, a maybe, a glance out the window reminding me that it’s springtime and won’t for all the rest of the days between now and summer’s end be raining quite as steadily as it is today.

This is Kairos?

/ Derek Mueller / 1 Comment

Australian reporter Harriet Alexander, in a January report titled “Quick! Before the Worm Turns,” looks into the practice of beach-worming–the harvesting of wormbait from sandy beaches using fingers or pliers. Use of fingers reduces the risk of breaking apart the long worms in the process, according to Col Buckley, the human subject of the story. Buckley suggests a linkage between the beach-trawled worms and the fish in the neighboring waters. He also prefers a conservative ethic:

Buckley can be found splashing around the watermark at low tide during summer, pulling up slimy invertebrates and stuffing them into a pouch. They sniff out decaying fish and seaweed and poke their heads up to feed, concealing the rest of their bodies, which can be up to 2½ metres long, beneath the sand. Bream, whiting and flathead all like to eat worms, although the portion of worm threaded on to the hook needs to be varied according to the size of the targeted fish species. Recreational fishermen can harvest up to 20 worms a day, although Buckley does not believe in taking more than are needed.

The question surfaces again. Worms turn, diverting away from a danger. This is not the same “worm turn” as the idiom induces, which implies revolution–a reversed power dynamic in which the worm, relative to the lion, ends up on top. The worm turns, in this second case, means the underdog ascends. But in the context of this Alexander’s report, these turns are more or less successful, whether we think of them as a body (the individual worm turns) or a species (the lot of worms are vanishing). In the bodily sense, they turn, sometimes caught and split apart at this or that segment. Other times they turn and by turning escape harm having dived underground again. Worming, Buckley explains, is not about speed and quickness; its success hinges on being “gentle and smooth.” The predatory kairos operating here finds opportunity improved not by timing but by manner. A severed worm, now part-safe in the ground and part-pierced on a fish hook, I imagine, experiences without “experiencing” a regenerative if bifurcated metanoia.

By the way, the story also mentions that the beach worms are wind-shy, which means they don’t surface as often on windy days. This, too, goes against the sand-grain of a winds-of-change thinking about revolutions and instead recognizes winds-of-change thinking as partly responsible for worms-returning to their safe havens.

I realize this is obtuse and playful stuff, folks; just using the blog to pluck away for a few minutes at the threads of a couple of ideas.

CCCC Atlanta Rewind, Part II

/ Derek Mueller

I don’t think there will be a part 3 in this series, but I wanted to post in a consolidated location the various pieces I brought to Atlanta last week. Steve offered a careful play-by-play of many of the meals and local excursions I was a part of. And he mentioned in the entry that we had a fairly small audience at the N.30 session. With that in mind, I figured I may as well render my talk into an overdubbed video and post it to YouTube where it will surely get a couple of more views in the year to come.

But first, Steve’s video, which initiated and enframed our roundtable:

Below is my contribution to the roundtable. To continue experimenting with YouTube’s closed captioning, I uploaded the full script of my talk as a text file. I’m impressed at how capably YouTube creates alignments between the video’s audio track and the text. Also, all of the oooh-aaah cloud photographs come from the recent New York Times installation, “Up in the Clouds.”

And finally, here’s the poster I tacked up in the Computer Connection room and that I’ve posted in a half dozen places already.

3.33 Ways: Tracing Rhetorical Style from Prose to New Media

The accompanying a/v playlist (linked from the QR codes) is available over here.

Ark

/ Derek Mueller

This Ypsinews.com story of The Ark reminded me of Brand’s How Buildings Learn: Huron-side tannery, disassembly, reassembly, blacksmith shop, furniture store, deterioration, pigeon training. Ypsilanti’s The Ark, its adrift, undecidable architecture fittingly named, an example of an early “portable.” Here’s an excerpt about its initial site:

The site was likely chosen on purpose. Tanneries were smelly places, where piles of cow skins were scraped of their remaining flesh and soaked in vats of chemicals in order to process them into leather. A location downstream from downtown meant that meat scraps and used-up chemicals could be drained into the river without creating a stench in the stretch of river traveling through town.

The lazy Sunday morning click with Brand’s book, however, (un)builds toward The Ark’s demise, which, as parallels go, blightfully suggests another end-variant true for so many buildings in aging cities: How Buildings Learn No More.

Wonder how many of those century-old pigeons are out there homing on this missing place?

Ark.jpg

In Other Words, Hello

/ Derek Mueller / 2 Comments

I read with great interest last week’s announcement from Ben and Mena Trott, co-founders of Six Apart, Ltd., that they had merged their shop with VideoEgg. After the dust settles, the new entity will be known as “SAY Media, a modern media company.” Anil Dash’s “SAY, Goodbye to Six Apart,” for example, sheds light on his part in this transition. I haven’t looked too deeply into what motivates SAY Media; give it a week, right? It’s difficult to really know such things, anyway. Commenters responding to the smattering of Six Apart’s end-times disclosures suggest SAY Media is interested foremost in monetizing blog traffic by way of advertising. My first thought: best of luck.

My next thought is, Earth Wide Calamity!, this blog runs on Movable Type, one of Six Apart’s first blogging systems. If Six Apart disappears, will Movable Type also vanish into thin air? Early, findable answers are exactly what you would expect them to be: no, no, of course not. Movable Type and Typepad are making the transition right along with the Trotts. Nevertheless, there is a bit of anxious buzz floating around that SAY Media is concerned with easing the Typepad subscribers through the transition, but they don’t appear to be especially forthright with promises about Movable Type. The word on Movable Type is, in effect, “mum.” In fact, the SAY Media blog’s latest entry has as its title, “We Love Bloggers, We Love Typepad, We Want to Hear From You,”–a hand-patting “it will be okay” from Matt Sanchez, the new company’s CEO, who, curiously enough, has not himself responded to the comments.

For my own part in this anticipating of the worst, I’ll just hang around, waiting and seeing, until there is more definitive cause for concern (e.g., if this entry does not publish because SAY Media has corrupted my MT installation). Another way, as with much change-anxious worrying, rehearse a dozen times with a succession of deep breaths, “nothing happens.”

Theory Blackmailed, or Invention Hobbled?

/ Derek Mueller

Yesterday–day one of teaching in the new semester–did not quite go as planned, and in the wake of a couple of surprises, I didn’t get around to posting like I intended to in recognition of the nth annual RB of September. After a few years such postings carry a some heavy, if solitarily imagined, burden of tradition. Thus, “theory blackmailed”:

Many (still unpublished) avant-garde texts are uncertain: how to judge, to classify them, how to predict their immediate or eventual future? Do they please? Do they bore? Their obvious quality is of an intentional order: they are concerned to serve theory. Yet this quality is a blackmail as well (theory blackmailed): love me, keep me, defend me, since I conform to the theory you call for; do I not do what Artaud, Cage, etc. have done? –But Artaud is not just “avant-garde”; he is a kind of writing as well; Cage has certain charm as well… –But those are precisely the attributes which are not recognized by theory, which are sometimes even execrated by theory. At least make your taste and your ideas match, etc. (The scene continues, endlessly.) (54)

Why blackmailed? Translator Richard Howard could have selected a different connotation of “la chantage,” e.g., bluff, or intimidation. When the avante-garde serves theory, theory in turn may be said to hobble invention, to wrap it in a splint, to contain it. I read in this Barthes passage a concern for theory’s disciplining of innovation. Unexpectedly, this clicks with concerns in the Introduction and first chapter of Muckelbauer’s The Future of Invention, a book I’ve just started. Related are questions about what becomes of “the attributes which are not recognized by theory,” put another, perhaps more helpful way, Can theory keep up with avante-garde performances? Must it?

Anyway, happy RB Day, twice belatedly.