Tag: pig

Collectanea 31.25 Hot-Ticks-Unroll

/ Derek Mueller / 1 Comment
⏳ Approximate reading time: 5 mins

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

Pig

/ Derek Mueller
⏳ Approximate reading time: 3 mins

This here is a short piece about how children say what they say and it sticks. “Short” because of the number of words. Short so short it might also be called “flash” because this piece happened in one sitting and didn’t take much time. Very little rethinking. Very little editing. “Piece” because that’s a way of saying unit of writing that’s not essay or article or blog or tweet or chapter or status update. What is it to always run away from the stale names for units of discourse (units big enough to be called genres and not small enough to be waysided as low order minutiae).

? That is a slow wind-up. But I’m gonna let it stand, “short piece” or “flash” being a writerly hit of Fuckitol.

When Is. was a wee and knee-high–age 2 or so–having begun to compare sizes of things, she recognized I was taller than many other fully grown adults, and putting height+BMI descriptors to work, came up with the name for me, Daddy Biggie. Some days, maybe it was Biggie Daddy. It was cute and descriptive and earnest. Fine by me. And delightful, a source of joy.

Some years later, now that T. has so swiftly grew to be wee and knee-high–age 2 or so–upwelled the question, what’ll be the names she’ll use for grandparents. She has awesome grandparents. The local ones, incredibly giving and loving. I just so happen to be T.’s least-known grandparent, also the grandparent who lives farthest away, who is most tattooed, most Virginian, and so on. Tallest. Because I am at a distance of approximately 500 miles removed, living the farthest away from where the everyday action is there in SE Michigan, time and proximity are precious. Profound are the lessons in time’s passage and in missing.

To the question: What’ll be the names? To be fair, I was consulted, but I credit her aunt Is., now 15, with cementing the reference and supporting, developmentally, T.’s referring to me as Pawpaw Biggie. Pawpaw is a name for a yellowfruit, it’s true, but it’s also afoot and circulating as a southern-regional variation on grandpa. Heckuva lot better than “peepaw,” another variation. And “Biggie,” well, that also stands up to time, descriptive, earnest, delightful, a source of joy.

I really do think T. gave the name a good faith try. And yet morphemes morph. Pawpaw Biggie next Pawpaw Piggy. When in May I picked up Is. from her house, T. in the doorway expressing sendaway wishes said, “Bye, Is.! Bye, Pig!” And then in a recent text message, Is. wrote so share with me that when T. was going to sleep, lulled by a who’s who tiredness litany, “x is going to bed; y is exhausted, too,” she asked, “Is Pawpaw Piggy sleepy?” Sure is sleepy, child. And smiling. Who on this earth gets to be called Pig?

Figure 1. It’s June 2021 and we’re at Go! Ice Cream in Ypsi., T., Is., Ph., and me getting our order together, here gesturally describing the bowl option relative to the cone option. (Photo by Is.)

A serendipitous enunciative event is pig’s alliterative click–Varaha snorted!–and it is there, penned up top among the finest mudrolls of 2021. With it have been unexpected echoes, too, for one a reminder that my mom had a pigculiar interest in swine–more a collector’s persistent return and accumulation of tchotchkes than a researcher’s study, but valid all the same: a hand-made rocking pig, piggy banks, and for some years a real interest in getting+keeping a pig as a pet. Dream what you will, now as then. I don’t really want or need anything more from this Pawpaw Piggy moment than to note it, as if at a trough well stocked with discarded cabbages and other random table scraps and memories, weird fuel sourcing smiles every time after all. ?