Tag: knowing

Collectanea 31.25 Hot-Ticks-Unroll

/ Derek Mueller / 1 Comment
Reading Time: 5 minutes

Week of July 28, 2025

Porcine

Figure 1. “A Bubbling in the Sty.” A shorter than usual timeframe for this month’s illustration, but then again what’s more American than microwaved bacon? This, for the July POTM themed “Hot,” which paired with william o’neal ii’s “American Erotica.”

Job Numbers

Sixteen years in the professoriate. Two institutions (EMU and VT). One year as associate WPA. Ten years as WPA (five at EMU, five at VT). In that span, eight department chairs, five deans, four provosts.

Nineteen

Figure 2. Last of the teenaged chrysalis years queuing in 3…2…1 for Is. who turns 19 today. HB! Proud of all daughterchild has accomplished and the many big things ahead for her this fall at U of M. 〽️

5ives Expanded

For Some But Not For Me

I’ve been doing some light tech backups this week, deleting some old files; routine stuff, like decluttering my notes app (contemplating jump from Drafts to Google Keep), and there in an old note was a list of nineteen things I could do without. They’re not in rank-order of most to lesser disdain or golf and cilantro would be nearer to the top. And sure, it’s more than five, but back to school season means back to rule breaking season.

  1. Bow ties
  2. Easter 🐣
  3. Berries
  4. Vampire pop culture
  5. Leaf blowers
  6. Pocket change
  7. Chipotle
  8. Bob Newhart Show
  9. Fireworks
  10. Carnival games
  11. Cruises
  12. Princess Bride
  13. Meetings without agendas
  14. Rosewater flavored anything
  15. Cilantro
  16. Magic tricks
  17. High fives
  18. “Enter Sandman” as VT pep song
  19. Golf

Out and About

Figure 3. Wizard, the hydration nerd of the flock, gulps water extremely.
Figgy 4. Figgy thrives but showing a touch of brown leaf had low-leaf undersides misted with dish soap and baking soda antifungal.
Figure 5. Feta steps gleefully to the wind-down of tick season.

Unroll Themselves

“In Essays in Radical Empiricism, James writes: ‘Knowledge of sensible realities . . . comes to life inside the tissue of experience. It is made; and made by relations that unroll themselves in time. Whenever certain intermediaries are given, such that, as they develop toward their terminus, there is experience from point to point of one direction followed, and finally of one process fulfilled, the result is that their starting-point thereby becomes a knower and their terminus an object meant or known‘ (1996: 57). In ‘The Feeling of Effort,’ James similarly sees the feeling as occurring ‘inside the tissue of experience.’ Yet, and this is where his later work assists in the understanding of the text, while created in the relation—’made by relations that unroll themselves in time’—the feeling (of effort) only comes into itself as such through the motor of a terminus. The terminus is what vectorizes the agencement, pulling the force-of-form to singular expression. This motor is not the end point in any direct sense. It is a force that activates the movement. The terminus acts as the pull, setting up the field that becomes the knower-known relation. Here, once again, there is not yet a predetermined subject or object, but rather, as Whitehead might hesitantly say, recipient and provoker” (160).

—Erin Manning. (2016). The Minor Gesture. Duke University Press.

In July’s second half, reading for wonder and curiosity slowed. Instead, review tasks like the wind. Three external reviews, a set of DRC fellow applicants, two manuscripts. Only ever part of the story, as relations unroll themselves. Yesterday it was an encounter with a rabid raccoon, a real-time fiasco while wielding merely a stick, which broke; the unwell critter growled at me, crossed the road, later died in the neighbor’s yard. Vultures wasted no time. Picture window sky burial. Unroll. Bills to pay and travel. Unroll. You can opt out altogether from Transunion, Experian, and Equifax cold call and list selling nonsense, did you know? The lab in Madison, Wisconsin that handles Cologuard telephones but is strangely, almost theatrically, plucky about their offers of help. Unroll. Lazily searching around for Kittler on media phantasms, spiritism, ghosts. It only feels right to find so little. This-above Erin Manning quotation, some veneer of it perhaps in Walking Methodologies, holds what I want my CCW paper on hand maps to engage, but how? Unroll. Let this fall’s teaching mix in, I think, because it needs more time. Doesn’t it always? Unroll.

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 tenth in this series from Week 31 of 2025, or the Week of July 28). 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

Duolingo streak ist sehr gut! 🇩🇪#wonderhollow #rollcall

What in the Antilibrary Grumbles?

/ Derek Mueller

Reading Time: 2 minutes

In The Object Stares Back (1996), James Elkins writes

In my living room there are two large bookcases, each one eight feet tall, and they have about five hundred books between them. If I step up to a shelf and look at the books one by one, I can remember something about each. As a historian once said, some stare at me reproachfully, grumbling that I have never read them. One may remind me vaguely of a time when I was interested in romantic novels. An old college text will elicit a pang of unhappiness about studying. Each book has its character, and even books I know very well also have this kind of wordless flavor. Now if I step back from the shelf and look quickly across both bookcases I speed up that same process a hundredfold. Impressions wash across my awareness. But each book still looks back in its own way, answering the rude brevity of my gaze, calling faintly to me out of the corner of my eye. At that speed many books remain wrapped in the shadows of my awareness–I know I have looked past them and I know they are there, but I refuse to call them to mind. (73-74)

I read this in the hallway of Rackham Hall yesterday where I sat for ten minutes–not staring back, ironically–as ENGL328 students filled out end-of-semester course evaluations. But what was on my mind as I read this was the workshop I was scheduled to lead at noon today for EMU’s Nelson Faculty Development Center, a workshop titled, “How to Curate a Digital Antilibrary: An Introduction to Google Reader.” The antilibrary comes from Taleb’s characterization of the unread portion in Umberto Eco’s personal collection of 3,000 books. Those unread items project felicitously some horizon of possibility. The antilibrary is not antithetical to the library; it is its premonition, its ghost from the future.

I can’t decide about the relationship between Taleb’s conception of “unread” and Elkins’ idea here that even those books that are technically unread (whatever that means) are well-enough known to grumble for their having been neglected. At first I thought, Elkins has no antilibrary. But that’s not quite right.

Instead, his books are always a little bit read: read through their titles, through an author’s or publisher’s reputation, through a book jacket, or even more fundamentally (as objects) through an assumed to be recognizable materiality. These are bound, shelved books, after all. Consequently, they never rightly, properly fit in the antilibrary, do they?

Elkins takes a hypothetical step back: “I know I have looked past them and I know they are there, but I refuse to call them to mind.” This refusal is a curious game, striking for its thin, wispy relationship to rapid cognition, or thin-slicing. The refusal is a sort of will to indeterminacy, to unknowing, to disassociation. And I guess that’s what I’m thinking about now, having read this, having talked earlier about digital antilibraries: the persistence of an antilibrary requires one part a refusal to look at what is already in the collection, one part embrace of the potentialities in the nearby-but-unknown, and another part thrill in expecting a future in which those materials-awaiting will still be there for taking up.