Pond Patching, Cusp Gones

As springtimes bloom, 2025 has been like no other, January through April telling it like yo, hey, kapow. I’ve traveled a little bit because I am teaching only online, two sections of technical writing: to Fort Lauderdale for Try This workshops, to San Diego for Is.’s spring break, to Georgia for a few days visiting with my longtime friend and mentor and former college coach. Here at home, February delivered intense storms, the ice that brought down as crashingly as crystal chandeliers from vaulted ceilings coniferous tree tops, the rain less than a week later that flooded and washed out parts of the driveway. There went the gravel. Closely following storms of the year or decade or century on rural parcels are new, unplanned-for workloads, some of which I have handled smartly by hiring out, much as we could afford, and some of which I have shouldered to the dull everyday drumbeat of two or three hour blocks. For storm cleanup, the outdoor labors meant hauling brush, cutting and clearing limb snarls, the brambled imbroglios that if you are not careful will shred you with thorny surprises. Wear eye protection. Go slowly. I’m not complaining but recounting what has been. Close calls. Blood-drawing cuts and pokes. Even tallied a slip and fall, the third time in three years for a bona fide tumble, as a small, perfectly round piece of wood rolled from beneath my footfall and planted me, heavy as a stone, on my back.

I roofed the older chickens’ run, framing it and fastening corrugated metal over the top, then built on those beginner lessons to wrap in Tyvec and corrugated metal a few corners of the upper shed where particle board sheeting was naked to the elements. The front shed has the same issue, exposed sections on the back side whose composite materials are aging, flaking. I’ve spent a couple of outdoor working sessions this week wrapping sections, fitting and affixing furring strips, readying it for the corrugated metal that will come next, possibly this weekend. I am optimistic that the metal will be the easy part, except for one especially complicated corner piece I will need to cut so it wraps around the gutter and juts with an acute angle with a neat tuck under the eaves. The metal work is easy except for the hard parts. The sharp edges, they cut too.

Figure 1. After round two of patching the pond, a rinse of the rubber gloves.

And then there is the pond, which is truly more like a diverter-fed estuary whose waters detour from the creek only to accumulate and, albeit pooled and slowed to a trickle, return to it again. The pond’s concrete retaining wall is cracking and aging, upheaved by moisture. When doesn’t water win? I started with skim coatings of hydraulic cement, mixing the slurry in a five gallon bucket. But in one section of the pond, the original blocks were split, so I branched out to other kinds of cement, picked up a mixing tub and masonry hoe, cut braces to hold the cement in place, and gave it my best attempt. This was all new to me, this so-called formwork, and it was achingly evident right away that hand-mixing cement is top-five among the heaviest of multimodal composing practices (right up there with shoeing horses and stacking boulders). On Monday I hand mixed six bags of Quikrete, filled the ad hoc form, reinforced the corners. Now, it cures. A post-preservationist would second guess my attempt, a brazen postponement of the retaining wall’s inevitable collapse, instead, musing, “something there is that loves a wall enough to let it crumble completely.”

Repairs of this sort–exposed particle board on the shed, fractured pond retaining wall–are ‘cusp gones’; they are almosts, though not quite in the same way Barthes wrote about photographs of his mother in Camera Lucida, the image teasing at life, at vitality. Repairs to these weathered structures extend and renew a once-built thing; repairs of this sort traverse time, a paratemporal practice (beyond/around, protective) not unlike mending, not unlike retouching artifacts Least Recently Used (LRUs). Call it maintenance, familiarly. This is home ownership, too, and the care accorded to living in a place, but it is also etched with a variety of mindfulness differently circumscribed in relation to time. I mean that mindfulness oftentimes fixates on the present, on now; but this paratemporal practice is a function of stewardship and distributed cognition (writ expansively, as corporeally and as worlding). This practice follows the beckoning of cusp gones, involves us in their somehow carrying on. As such, it extends gone-noting, summoning from attention and repair, in tandem, recomposing in palliative patches with purpose.

To end here leaves off not quite having sketched the outline. I sought to recount these outdoor projects and to suggest through them a variant of mindfulness less preoccupied with the present and more attuned to a blend of attention and repair at that hazy, disappearing contrail where a gone goes dormant. For in the many references to Paul Klee’s 1920 Angelus Novus, mascot of modernity ‘progressing’ while looking backward at the wreckages, harms, and atrocities, we ask when we cannot sleep at night, ‘to where or to when is the angel of history directing its attention now?’, a heavy game of imagining looking together, imagining being in this together, with cherubim and fictions, with pond walls and old sheds, I Spy.

Least Recently Used (LRU)

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.

Once Folded

Every June 11, calendar taps my shoulder, Do you know what today is?

Of course, I do. It’s the day my mom died. On a Wednesday. In 1997. At the age of forty-eight. *looks back at the calendar, unfazed and unflinching* What’s it to you?

I’ve written about it before, not remembering as much as returning to something temporally recognizable, a time of life and time of year faint and hollow but still capable of stinging, in the orbit of one strange loop. In 2005, making sense of Barthes’ the almost; in 2007, mysterious disappearances, a bona fide insurance coverage, resonant for conceptual elasticity, bearing on the job I worked in 1997 when my dad called out of the blue, bearing on the how death and why death questions that never gathered much in the way of answers. And then, “Have Some Soup,” an entry I still read from time to time when I’m missing her because I came close to getting it right, language being clumsy and unwieldy, minds too for the curlicued circuits of remembering and forgetting, processing loss and processing continuations, pin-pointing a few of the (oftentimes kitchen-based) clicks of “I’m here now,” “I” referring, of course, to “we.” Here we are now.

I went to her gravesite in Missouri last September. And after, posted this on FB:

Stone and grass and engravings.

Of course a Kansas City excursion includes a visit to my mom’s gravesite, what’s a burial site twenty-two years conventionally groundset in a regularly mowed cemetery at the bank of a nondescript Blue Springs, Mo., suburb. Here. Friday. It’s sunny; it’s sunsurface hot, too. Sit, anyway. Bring water. Let time teach that fuzzy edge, what boundary really?, between person and place, a body quickly and slowly (paradoxically quicklyslowly) from that to this, being becoming becoming. And then there’s just earth, prairielike, wind bending grass, or a stone performing durability, a bronze plaque, a few lines, and time’s circlings, bringing me back here without reason (i.e., reason suspended), to visit. And to find a place more than a person, wherever for now along death’s sure reaches.

Facebook entry, September 28, 2019.

About that prairie wind blowing the grass blades, what’s especially striking is how each strand stands again, gets back again on its little rootfeet, bowing to the elements only momentarily, knowing strength (and I mean this as really knowing embodiedly strength). Some of that strength, I suppose, comes from grasping intuitively that we only get this for a little while. The calendar nods.

There’s a numerology blinkered all around this year’s deathdate, a numerology that lurks, gazes, hails, beckons. In its rouletted triviality, something is piqued as serendipitous, though possibly it’s a low-grade poetic flit, possibly a nothing-at-all. Let me try, anyway (not that I’ve got the time; busy AF with work, to-do list is a task-lavishing spawnmonster…though the truer truth is that for this, there’s time more than enough). Mom died when she was 48. I was a few days more than a month into being 23. And now, today, I’m that same measure, a month and six days past turning 46. Math math math, abacus beads don’t fail me now, carry the one: nearly half of this life has gone by without her. Carry on.

The implied hmm and huh in this is with what Louise Phelps wrote to me about a few weeks ago as folded time, a theoretical extension of something from Julavits’ The Folded Clock. It’s that kind of interval-ed co-experience of being an age, some age only now (in this moment for me) mirroring some age only then for another. This stirs an ordinary but marvelous experiential deixis. Then and now, then as now. I remember my mother at 46. That’d have been 1995. A year I started off spending ten–offs!–days in North Kansas City hospital, eleven staples or was it fifteen squeezed pla-chunk into the top of my head at the ER before dawn, early January. A year when I also sat scalpel and scope through three surgeries. A year when I stopped playing college basketball days before the start of what would’ve been my senior season. A year–still in 1995–when my mom was there for me a lot. A lot, a lot.

That’s all I mean by the hmm and huh: noticing a life once folded, first twenty-three years with a mom, next twenty-three years without. Onward, onward, grandbabies and (17-year-brood, is it?) cicadas. Onward looping, onward heart.

Can’t especially much sidestep or neglect to mention that this kind of look-back too means I’ve been a parent for twenty-three years, and whatever kind of parent I was ready to be or not ready to be at that age (there were a thousand generous friends and strangers looking out for us all), it’s what brings us to a now, Ph. at 29, Is. at 13, V., Ph.’s daughter, at 1. Another angle on folded clocks for how in a life they keep folding, relational entanglements and relational accountabilities (an idea best-set by Shawn Wilson), brother-sister, father-son, father-daughter, aunt-niece, and grandfather-granddaughter. Sure do believe it to be true, my mother would’ve marveled.

She’d have been deeply, wrenchingly disturbed, though, by this moment. And she’d not have been complaining but acting, perhaps privately and semi-privately (not online), to sew change. I don’t mean the pandemic, though that’s brought to the fore a measure of static and gnashing, privilege and comfort hard-checked, (ever-more-distant) family members grumping and whining about mask inconvenience and how a basic do-unto-others empathetic regard, call it civility or decency or neighborliness, gets twisted social-media-megaphonic into villainy and fascism. I miss her, but I’m relieved too that (were she with us, abacus, that’d be coming up on the age of 72), she is not around to feel the anguish brought on by such selfish nonsense as has been expressed by relatives. Linda? Oh, she’d have been pissed. She’d have drawn lines. She’d have nevermind Costco Kleenex box wept. She’d have marched. She’d have taken down with force some of this bullshit y’all kinfolk are far too casually espousing. Let me be clear: I’m not saying I knew her best, but I am saying I know this much.

Brings me to another very closely related clock-fold thread, more than a mirage in remembering well my mom’s lessons and values, her priorities for parental consciousness raising, justice, awareness, and accountability to others. Recently I’ve seen some flappings-on in certain small-ish-familial circles about how unfortunate (saddening) are the removals of confederate statues, prospective renamings, and so on. I grant that phrase, “flappings-on,” implies critique. So be it. I don’t have the slightest damn to give about the swift extraction of public monuments or public memorials dedicated anyone who tolerated, promoted, abided, or was otherwise receptive to or amenable with slavery. Clear away all of that ugly and traumatizing shit. Those markers are not teaching history. They’re signaling explicitly the persistence of a dehumanizing value system–and that dehumanization disproportionately applies to some (BIPOC) and not others (white folks). So openly and uncritically sentimentalizing or reveling in public markers rooted in the subjugation of fellow humans, it expresses a reckless and unchecked obtuseness. It’s serially injurious, inscribing legacy fear, legacy pain, legacy nastiness overtly into the commons. It’s an asshole thing to do. Seriously, fuck that.

Ok. Counting to three. Gonna take a breath and try it one other way. Clockfold. It’s June 11, 2020. Murders of Black folks at the hands of police officers (Breonna Taylor, George Floyd), as well as documented lynchings (Ahmaud Arbery) have motivated and recharged civil rights activism, all for the greater good, nothing left to lose, and enough is enough. Breonna Taylor was 26; Ahmaud Arbery, 25. And George Floyd, 46, my age, also tall and a former high school tight end, a dad with a young daughter. A dad, dammit. They should be alive.

Four paragraphs ago I mentioned my son and daughter and granddaughter. There is so much more that can and should be said, that is being said, that must be deliberated over, acted upon, sorted out, made better in light of that last paragraph. But up there four paragraphs ago, where I mentioned Ph. and Is. and V., to those in my family singing woe-song about slipping handles on history due to the sociocultural eviction of atrocity memorials, I have only this scenario to offer. Bracket history for one beat to consider whether you would believe it reasonably safe for Ph. and Is. and V. to drive together to where I live, to pay me a visit, the three of them. Consider it carefully. Their different last names. Their different races. Their unusually different ages. Ph. driving. Their navigating state highways in Ohio, especially southern Ohio, and West Virginia. Consider it. Consider why such a road trip would be terrifyingly precarious, dangerous, risky. And then mull over what you are actively doing to make it otherwise. Give it a minute. Try.

So, here’s where I’ve veered to this morning in the clock-folding. Entirely on (circular) track. I think about my mom often, especially on her deathdate, especially in this particular moment. The personal. The familial. Can’t find in all that introspective deep digging and self-awareness any fire to relate, really? Ask what it would take to make the constant threat and trauma and springloaded trigger-happy state violence–the anguish perpetuated through structural-systemic and targeted dehumanization–personal for you, for those to whom you are accountable.

Good Ideas

I like much of Steven Johnson’s stuff, and undoubtedly I will pick up a copy of his latest book project, Where Good Ideas Come From, though probably not until next summer. As I watched this TEDtalk, though, I’m dissatisfied with how little work on rhetorical invention surfaces here. Johnson’s “liquid network” is an intriguing metaphor, indeed: drink together, think together…eureka! Or, sometimes, “I’ve got nothing. May I have another?” But I wonder whether this “natural history of innovation” will do much more to advance thinking about how good ideas happen than did Karen Burke LeFevre’s Invention as a Social Act (1987), a book whose premises have by now become a given for contemporary rhetorical thinking. This “noodling around” and “hacking” is fascinating stuff, especially when such innovative acts are paired with vivid, thoughtful anecdotes, a storytelling strategy Johnson deploys with distinction. Since Johnson is great at making theoretical concepts accessible, maybe this new project will be a good fit with existing work on invention. On the other hand, absent some acknowledgment of a larger family of ideas related to invention, e.g., “systematic serendipity” (via Merton via Halavais, a concept we discussed yesterday in ENGL326) or contingency (an alternative to managerial rhetoric Muckelbauer develops smartly in The Future of Invention), the originary “where” from which good ideas come will remain partial, incomplete, problematically runny.

Allowing that I haven’t picked up the book (!), I look forward to reading it with these few provisional concerns in mind. In that sense, I guess this amounts to some sort of TED-motivated pre-review. Furthermore, I wrote it while sitting all alone in my campus dorm-office, which probably means good ideas here are few, far between.

G.O.F.

Reading this evening about the 19231 beginnings of the Great Outdoor Fight in Bakersfield, Calif.:

Figuring that where there was noise, there must surely be money, [Ken]
Crandall decided to make the G.O.F. an annual event and become wealthy by
selling sandwiches  to the crowds who came to compete. He cleared an acre
of his land, put up a high chainlink fence around it, and distributed hastily
printed fliers throughout central California. An excited public quickly phoned,
mailed, or telegrammed the information not only throughout the nation, but
throughout the world. Newspapers in Italy ran sensational articles about the
"Festival of Beasts," while papers in China advertised trips to California so
that one might "Defeat Over Long-Time Dudes." (7)

Onstad, Chris. The Great Outdoor Fight. Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse,
2008.

New Echo, New Narcissus

Kopelson writes,

Yet, as composition studies is distinct in its penchant for ‘borrowing,’
we are also, in my opinion, unrivaled in our proclivity for
self-examination. I am not arguing that this is an unimportant
activity, but only that the costs are indeed high when self-scrutiny comes
at the expense of taking up other critical concerns and of making other,
more innovative and far-reaching forms of knowledge (775).

This appears in the final section of the essay, the part titled "Conclusion:
Banishing Echo and Narcissus." Here, Kopelson takes exception with the
field’s self-reflexivity, the growing heap of self-interested and self-absorbed
assessments of where we are or where we are heading. There is an
unidentified villain here, and I wondered as I read whether Kopelson has any
favorite ‘misses’, accounts that get it terribly wrong or that are built up on
marsh-lands of mushy data.

Reading this section and the quotation above in particular, I had the
sense that Kopelson wasn’t as interested in "banishing" Echo and Narcissus
as in giving them overhauls, in renewing them, even in teaching them how to
resonate
and reflect less recklessly. In other words, what is
wrong with many self-reflexive disciplinary accounts (or "discipliniographies"
to lift and bend a term Maureen Daly Goggin introduces in Authoring a
Discipline
) is that they succumb to a localist impulse. That
is, they un-self-conciously extrapolate from local experience and anecdotal
evidence onto the field at large, projecting some local knowledge onto the
expansive abstraction that is the discipline (however we imagine it to be).
The localist impulse can take many different shapes; often it is akin to reading
patterns through the course of an individual career (i.e., "in my thirty years
at Whatsittoyou U.") or by cherry-picking from an exceedingly thin selection of
data (titles of conference presentations or tables of contents for teacher
training manuals). We all do this to some extent–making sense of the field at
large through our local, immediate experiences, but it is dangerous to arrive at
conclusions about the field (or world) at-large solely by examining one’s own
neighborhood.

What I’m getting at is that I don’t have any beef with the disciplinary
practice of self-examination. Perhaps there are more than a handful of
fields in the academy that would benefit from more of it. I hold history (the calling of others who’ve navigated this canyon) and
reflection in high regard (perhaps not to the ill-fated extremes of Echo and
Narcissus). Resonanceresonanceresonance and reflection are valuable, especially for newcomers,
for the "new converts" Kopelson mentions. But they will not be successful–or
very useful–until they get beyond that localist impulse, until they involve
earnest field-wide data collections and collaboratively built databases. I
don’t know how well this matches with Kopelson’s "innovative and far-reaching
forms of knowledge," but it is increasingly where my own interests lie.
If those far-reaching forms of knowledge included disciplinary data (even simple
stuff, like how many programs offer undergraduate writing majors), they could
generate insights about disciplinarity. In the meantime those full-view
insights will continue to elude us as long as we leap from local knowledge to
widespread pattern, without addressing sufficiently the intermediary scales.

Kopelson, Karen. “Sp(l)itting
Images; or, Back to the Future of (Rhetoric and?) Composition.” CCC 59.4
(2008): 750-780. [Carnival]

Writing Feverlets*

Curious about her critique of Derrida’s Archive Fever, I picked up a
copy of Carolyn Steedman’s Dust: The Archive and Cultural History from
Bird Library, recalling it from another patron who had checked it out (v. sorry
about that). I deal briefly with AF in Chapter Three. Steedman
makes the point that AF is less about archives than about Derrida’s
concern for the slippage of origins (a theme in his other work) and the
inseparability of psychoanalysis from Freud (and also Judaism). She
writes, "The Foreword [to AF] carried the main argument, about Freud’s
Jewish-ness, and the contribution of Jewish thought to the idea of the archive,
via psycho-analysis" (7). Basically, Steedman is suspicious of Derrida’s
characterization of the fever (as a frenzied pursuit of origins which do not
properly exist). She complains that the concept of the fever is degraded in
translation from Mal d’Archive, and then she enthusiastically claims the
sickness Derrida mocks: "Archive fever, indeed? I can tell you all about
Archive Fever!" (17). Dust undertakes this "all about-ness" at fever’s pitch;
Steedman, all the while, works to correct (or tune, at the very least) Derrida’s
glancing consideration of the archive left behind in his treatment of other
concerns (psychoanalysis, Freud, and so on).

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Veysey, "The Plural Organized Worlds of the Humanities"

Veysey,
Laurence. "The Plural Organized Worlds of the Humanities." The Organization of
Knowledge in Modern America, 1860-1920. Alexandra Oleson and John Voss, eds.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1979.

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Daly-Goggin, Authoring A Discipline.

Daly-Goggin, Maureen. Authoring A Discipline: Scholarly Journals and the
Post-World War II Emergence of Rhetoric and Composition
. Mahwah, N.J.:
Lawrence Erlbaum, 2000.

Searchable text available in Google Book Search.

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