Tag: ekphrastic

Collectanea 26.25 Henge-Dogma-Bees

/ Derek Mueller
⏳ Approximate reading time: 5 mins

Week of June 23, 2025

Oversimplified the Multiplicity

“As I have tried to demonstrate, the use of key terms such as ‘current-traditional rhetoric,’ ‘process,’ and ‘post-process’ has contributed significantly to the discursive construction of the history of composition studies. On one hand, these terms have helped to clarify changing currents in the intellectual practices of composition studies; on the other hand, they have oversimplified the multiplicity of perspectives within each ‘paradigm.’ These keywords also imposed discursively constructed boundaries on complex historical developments, as new ‘paradigms’ criticized previously dominant theories and pedagogies for certain features while appropriating or ignoring other features—as in the post-process dismissal of social process theories and pedagogies. Such negotiation is inevitable because knowledge is discursively constructed in so far as discourse is used as the dominant medium of thought and communication (Bazerman, 1988; Berger & Luckman, 1966; Rorty, 1979)” (74).

—Paul Kei Matsuda. (2003). Process and post-process: A discursive history. Journal of Second Language Writing, 12(1), 65–83. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1060-3743(02)00127-3 #terms #keywords #oversimplification #process #post-process #current-traditional

Gardener’s Ascent—Illustration Paired with the OnlyPoems POTM for June

Figure 1. “Gardener’s Ascent.”

June’s OnlyPoem’s Poem of the Month, “Diocletian Upon Being Asked to Return to Rome,” by Kate Deimling, greenleafed for me this illustration, an experiment with horizons and scale, rolling and peaked, striped in cabbages. I guess this is the fourteenth monthly POTM illustration I’ve done for OnlyPoems since April 2024. I’m low-key exploring the possibility of an ekphrastics exhibit this fall, thinking through how best to arrange for printing the illustrations alongside each poem. #ekphrastic #POTM #illustration

Taken to be Dogmas

“How many ideas that were so sure they were taken to be dogmas have disappeared from knowledge?” (38).

—Michel Serres. (2020). Branches: A Philosophy of Time, Event and Advent. Bloomsbury Academic.

From the Mail Bag

Figure 2. Letter from Z.

Zed,

Thank you for writing in. It’s always nice to get old-timey mail. And foremost, my compliments on your handwriting. It looks a lot like my own, the scratches of a Gen-Xer who half-heartedly practiced cursive letterforms forty-some years ago and whose script habits have dwindled though not to the point of illegibility, not yet. I have the weak hands of an aging English professor and so have chosen to type in reply; I hope you understand.

The most number of times I have been stung since moving to Rosemary Road in 2021 is three. Three times. The record is now, this summer, in fact. Last week I was moving a pile of big rocks to the creek bed, procrastinating civilian corp of engineers-style, one by one, giving the flow path something to think about, rocks and water doing their endless dance and such. With the final rock, I bumped the plank fence and out from where the ivy lushly clung to the boards swarmed what I’d guess were 20-30 wasps. I know they say to keep calm because so many of the stinging insects can sense fear. But no. That does not work. There is no keeping calm when swarmed by wasps. I fled, scrambled for some distance. Ribs and left arm. Two stings. And then the third sting was just this week. While walking in flip-flops I stepped such that a bee found its way underneath my left “ring” toe (fourth toe; seems to me strangely matrimonial to call a fourth toe a ring toe). I would have described myself as bee+hornet+wasp allergic in my younger years; now, less so. The toxin is uncomfortable and would be worrying if I was stung more than, say, four or five times, but I’ll be fine, and I know there are more allergic people out there encountering stinging insects with more justifiable alarm. -DM

Stick Henge Update

Figure 3. One-third of Stick Henge.

As of the end of June, just one pile of branches still needs to be integrated with the accumulating sections of the henge. Here, pictured, is one section of the larger circular form. I’m still trying to decide at what rate to clip branches from the red oak, and this week’s “heat dome” discouraged me from working on it.

5ives

The Profiteering Publishing Corps

  1. Elsevier (Computers and Composition, Journal of Second Language Writing); Dutch, 2022 revenue: £2.909 billion
  2. Springer Nature; German-British, 2024 revenue: €1.82 billion to €1.85 billion
  3. Wiley-Blackwell; U.S., 2023 revenue: $2.02 billion
  4. Taylor & Francis/Routledge (Rhetoric Review, RSQ, TCQ); British, 2022 revenue: £593.6 million
  5. Sage Publishing (JBTC, Written Communication); U.S., 2023 revenue: $140.0 million

I will never get used to the idea that scholarship gets written, voluntarily reviewed, voluntarily edited, and then it is published by these corporations before being sold back to colleges and universities through library subscription packages.

Farther from Home

“Of course, the farther from home you go to solve your problem, the more expensive the solution will be” (68). from “Three Ways of Farming in the Southwest,” 1979.

—Wendell Berry. (1981). The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural and Agricultural. Counterpoint.

Flock Under Cover

Around ~11 a.m. is the latest the chickens will linger on hot days before seeking shade. Mo appears to be doing his diligent best, keenly alert to disturbances and anomalies, though I am nevertheless nervous because it was just about exactly a year ago when we lost three chickens to a raccoon attack at the edge not 30 feet into the thicket behind the house.

Figure 4. Wonder Hollow flock. Perla, Mo, Lightfoot (back row, left to right). Tiny Honey, Betty, Wizard (front row, left to right).
About Collectanea

Collectanea is a 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 fifth in this series from Week 26 of 2025, or the Week of June 23). 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

F., hyped about suppertime. #wonderhollow #rollcall

Collectanea 22.25 Dash-Ghost-Kite

/ Derek Mueller
⏳ Approximate reading time: 5 mins

Week of May 26, 2025

But When Are We, Then?

“But what are we, then, in this space of all spaces all at once and no temporal flow? Under the sense of literacy we unpacked in the earlier/previous part of this writing, we rely on our ability to construct ourselves at some nexus between past and future, to have faith in the present as the point where past and future meet like (exactly like) a reader progressing through a linear text, uniting what has gone before with what is now and with what will come.

[P]ersonal identity is itself the effect of a certain temporal unification of past and future with one’s present …. If we are unable to unify the past, present, and future of the sentence, we are similarly unable to unify the past, present, and future of our own biographical experience or psychic life” (Jameson 27).

—Anne Wysocki & Johndan Johnson-Eilola, “Blinded by the Letter: Why Are We Using Literacy as a Metaphor for Everything Else?” Hawisher, Gail E., & Cynthia L., Selfe (Eds.). (1999). Passions, Pedagogies, and 21st Century Technologies. Utah State University Press.  https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/usupress_pubs/119. 349-368.

Longue—Illustration Paired with the OnlyPoems POTM for May

Figure 1. “Longue.”

Longue, as in a duration of waiting, a rest, an eventually. An em-dash-like figure relaxes in repose, punctuation appearing to grow tired of always the highs and lows of overuse followed by neglect. The editorial illustration paired with the OnlyPoems May 2025 Poem of the Month, “Ars Poetica as the Sexy Little Em Dash,” by Katherine Irajpanah. #ekphrastic #POTM #illustration

Remain a Ghost

“As I said, I was a ghost. The truth is that, even all these years later, I remain a ghost. You wouldn’t know it if you saw me. I’m not morose or retiring. I laugh a lot. In fact, I’m genuinely happier than many people I know. But I can’t help but feel that, on one level, I do not exist.”

—Vauhini Vara, “Ghosts.” (9 Aug. 2021). The Believer Magazine. https://www.thebeliever.net/ghosts/. #AI #interface #authorship #ghost #existence #loss #grief #design

Learning to Love You More, 2002-2009

A., in the midst of class planning for fall, sent me a link to this project from back when the WWW felt funkier, freer, more alive, interactions less overdetermined by platforms. It’s like a click-around at a bygone thing, a plunge on Boblo Island’s Log Flume. In it, teaching possibilities. Seventy assignments, complete what you will. -DM

“Learning to Love You More is both a web site and series of non-web presentations comprised of work made by the general public in response to assignments given by artists Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher. Yuri Ono designed and managed the web site.

Participants accepted an assignment, completed it by following the simple but specific instructions, sent in the required report (photograph, text, video, etc), and their work got posted on-line. Like a recipe, meditation practice, or familiar song, the prescriptive nature of these assignments was intended to guide people towards their own experience.”

—Harrell Fletcher, Miranda July, & Yuri Ono, “Learning to Love You More.” http://learningtoloveyoumore.com/. Accessed May 27, 2025. #installation #digital #art #participation #throwback #assignments #teaching

Peculiar Form of Intellectual Currency

“In particular, I am troubled by the limited circulation of student texts in our field—very few of which are requoted or reanalyzed outside of the articles in which they first appear. Student texts thus turn out to be a peculiar form of intellectual currency. We establish our bona fides as compositionists by quoting them, but we seldom revisit student texts quoted by others.”

—Joseph Harris. (2012). Using Student Texts in Composition Scholarship. JAC, 32(3/4), 667–694. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41709848 #student #texts #disciplinary #epistemology #subjectivity #usable #writing #circulation

Twenty-six Titles, Sixteen Years

Figure 2. Computers and Composition Digital Press logo.

Computers and Composition Digital Press (CCDP), an imprint of Utah State University Press, has published twenty-six titles since its launch in 2009. The first book, Technological Ecologies & Sustainability, edited by Dànielle Nicole DeVoss, Heidi McKee, and Dickie Selfe, reads as especially salient for the 2026 Computers & Writing Conference in Charlotte, NC, considering that sustainability will be the conference’s theme. Sifting for a moment through the TES materials, the mixed modalities, from the 383-page PDF (size noted as 4.8 “meg”) to the embedded videos, call up impressions suggesting both novelty and time-capsulism in its feeling much more than sixteen years removed from today’s digital environments. I have been perusing all of the titles as I think about the still-complicated prospect of producing scholarship that simply cannot abide the constraints of the printed page, while still living up to long-held commonplaces about what constitutes a “book.” One more noticing: there are titles published in every year since 2009, except 2023. #digital #press #publishing #books #reliquary #sustainability

Phenakistiscope Mock-up: Kite Lost to Upsky

For the past few months, in the narrowest of narrow slivers of eveningtime, I have been attempting to create a phenakistiscope workflow in ProCreate. I first heard about phenakistiscopes from CGB a few months ago, and I found I was thinking about them more than I expected I would. Phenakistiscopes are pinwheel animations of old; they spin out stroboscopic movement from one wedge to the next. Insofar as rounding the bend from admiring them to making them, I am still puzzling through some of the finer points: which elements should be fixed (or in the exact same position), if any; what sizes of figures show up more legibly than others; whether text can be fitted into the sequence (so far, not with any result worth celebrating; how many layer-frames amount to something both visually inviting yet with a lean file size; and how to manage the bleed-edge for circular rotations converted to a square canvas. I had envisioned this one below, Kite Lost to Upsky, as a child flying a kite on a beach, only the kite catches a gust and the kite string snaps the kite sailing off irretrievable. So, as you can maybe? see, not quite a disastrous failure, but also not the sort of success you’d send to a friend with a Wow! subject line.

Figure 3. Phenokiteiscope.
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 first in this series from Week 22 of 2025, or the Week of May 26). 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

Lightfoot and Mo. #wonderhollow #rollcall