Tag: presentism

Collectanea 23.25 Giants-Eggs-Amateur

/ Derek Mueller

Week of June 2, 2025

Shadows, Giants, and Shadow Giants

“They stand not on the shoulders of giants, but in the shadow of them. Many of these student writers are haunted by college regulations against plagiarism that they suspect they regularly break, since they ‘know’ that nothing they write is or can be original and that they do not acknowledge every single source” (101).

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“To locate plagiarism in an ethical realm is to describe it as a choice behavior; hence those who plagiarize can be punished and numbered among the rejected—consigned to dwell in the shadows of giants—for they have chosen to transgress against fundamental morals” (160). 

—Rebecca Moore Howard. (1999). Standing in the Shadow of Giants: Plagiarists, Authors, Collaborators. Ablex Pub.

Say Hello to My Little Hen

Figure 1. “Say Hello to My Little Hen.”

Or, “Don’t Shoot Shoot Shoot That Thing At Me,” or “So I Says to the Security Guard, ‘For Pete’s Sake, She’s a Therapy Chicken!,'” or “Hall County (Ga.) Fair Best in Retribution for Extreme Overproduction,” or “Loaded with Oyster Shells,” or “Bawk bawk ba-glock,” or “[your best title/caption].” This is a dusty one, a few months old, inspired by noticing someone packing heat in public but wearing the piece casually, more like a shawl or high-riding fanny pack than with the self-seriousness of a safety conscious gun adorner.

Incredible, Edible

Salad season is hard-boiled egg season is now, the time of year when the hens are laying more eggs than we can reasonably consume. So, insofar as batch hard-boiling, here is what I do to hard-boil 18 eggs because the outer shells slough off like boom bam bing nothing.

  • Prepare the pot. Combine and bring to boil.
    • A volume of water that will cover the eggs ≥ 1 inch without boiling over.
    • Teaspoon of salt.
    • 1/2 c. white vinegar
  • Add the eggs and reduce temperature to medium-high for a lower-rolling boil.
    • Boil for 13 minutes.
  • Ferry the eggs to a bowl of ice-cold water. Let rest in the bath of cubes for 15 minutes.
  • As a last step in prep, peel and eat, dry in-shell and store in the refrigerator, or peel and jar with vinegar or brine.
    • For a dozen and a half stashed for lunches and salads, I will peel them, jar them in a half gallon mason jar with apple cider vinegar and dill sprigs, beet juice optional.

With a few minor modifications, this is close to the “perfect” process published on AllRecipes.

Prose Expression Courses

“The cultural needs of the nineteen-sixties will probably determine the shape of the prose expression courses in colleges. Many would say that the needs of any time are the best norm for selection of courses to be used in that time. Certainly it would be safe to say that a course in rhetoric, composition, speech, writing, or communication that did not meet the needs of its time could be put forward only at the risk of failure” (126). #presentism #curriculum #newrhetoric #failure

—Daniel Fogarty. (1959). Roots for a New Rhetoric. Teacher’s College, Columbia.

Keiko, The Good Whale 🐳

“In the summer of 1993, the movie Free Willy—about a captive killer whale that’s heroically set free—was an unexpected hit. But when word got out that the real whale who played Willy, an orca named Keiko, was dangerously sick and stuck in a tiny pool at an amusement park in Mexico City, the public was outraged. If Warner Bros. wanted to avoid a P.R. nightmare and not break the hearts of children everywhere, then it was clear: Someone had to free Keiko—or at least try.” –The New York Times

I drive the 500 miles between Ypsilanti and Christiansburg frequently; when I do, I catch up on podcasts, since they aren’t an especially common part of my everyday media. “The Good Whale,” a six episode season from Serial, dropped late in 2024. Altogether, TGW amounts to 3.5 hours of audio, perfect for a summertime roadtrip. I found it all the more moving because Free Willy was Ph.’s favorite movie around 1995-1996. While it is something of a behind the scenes for that movie, TGW floats at that uncomfortable depth of the known-unknown where animals star in popular movies. The series is a carefully produced blend of historical narrative, investigative reporting, and analysis that lays plain the exploitative impulses and brand safe-guarding behind hit movies and featured attractions. If you’re looking for a podcast this summer, give it a listen. You’ll also pick up a few musical surprises, like Yellow Ostrich’s 2010 track, “Whale.”

“Whale,” Yellow Ostrich, 2010.

Make Much of This Distinction

“We are now inclined to make much of this distinction between amateur and professional, but it is reassuring to know that these words first were used in opposition to each other less than two hundred years ago. Before the first decade of the nineteenth century, no one felt the need for such a distinction—which established itself, I suppose, because of the industrial need to separate love from work, and so it was made at first to discriminate in favor of professionalism. To those who wish to defend the possibility of good or responsible work, it remains useful today because of the need to discriminate against professionalism” (89).

—Wendell Berry (2010). “The Responsibility of the Poet.” What Are People For?: Essays (Second edition). Counterpoint. #professional #amateur #love #work #professionalism

Black Bear Season

Last weekend’s wanderer, a black bear maybe a year or two old, crossing over Rosemary Road. It’s common in late May through the end of June to see bears. They’re a different kind of trouble for F., however, because she would likely chase the bear if she was out off-leash, and it’d be a steep, slow while before any humans could catch up to call her off if she felt and followed such an impulse.

Figure 2. Look, it’s the bear in the road.
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 second in this series from Week 23 of 2025, or the Week of June 2). 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

Creekside raised bed cabbage shoot. #wonderhollow #rollcall

Pond Patching, Cusp Gones

/ Derek Mueller

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.