Tag: professional

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).

〜

“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

Vervous Blogging

/ Derek Mueller / 2 Comments

I have been preoccupied lately with wrapping my head around the question of
"professional ethos" concerning graduate students who blog (e.g.,
me).
Questions: Does the blogging graduate student assume risks that the non-blogging
graduate student avoids? Are there greater risks or rewards in either
choice? What, then, are the payoffs? And are they immediate and tangible,
delayed and abstract?

The puzzler has been, "Why should a professional ethos for blogging graduate
students be any different than it is for non-blogging graduate students?" This
is a puzzler because every response I can come up with demands qualification:
whether A.) it’s no different or B.) it’s the blog.

Take the first response: "It’s not all that different." Professional
ethos is, after all, performed.
It is performed in the more long-lasting snapshot of the CV and in the fleeting
here-now moments when we, say, utter something in a class we are teaching or
taking (any venue, really, where we have a chance to say something insightful
and smart or irrevocable and humiliating). Professional ethos for graduate
students leaks into all of these activities; it is performed at nearly every
turn. Graduate students who perform their professional ethos well
in all its aspects will not be harmed by blogging; graduate students who perform
their professional ethos egregiously
(which is almost to say unethically or unawares in this regard) may find that
blogging makes the quality all the more conspicuous, that it makes ethical
recklessness, to say nothing of the lessons learned from mistakes, somewhat more
transparent and lasting. Already I can see that this tentative response is
beginning to buckle under the possibility that a blog may serve as a record of
the messy lessons where professional decorum gets tested (see Tribble).
Then again, that’s what I’m trying to get at: testing professional decorum,
whether blogger or not, bears consequences, and how we anticipate those
consequences and work through them when we’ve messed up seems thickly entangled
with the very idea of professional ethos, whatever the stage of the game.

At least that much is settled.

To reiterate and to put it more plainly, many aspects of professional ethos
(as performance) pertain to blogging graduate students and to non-blogging
graduate students alike. And yet, as a blogging graduate student (as one, that
is, who has blogged through a near-complete program of study), my own practices
rather tip my hand
(a Euchre reference, not Go Fish) and give away my clear preference. Keeping
mind that many aspects of professional ethos are shared by bloggers and non-bloggers,
what about blogging makes it different? How does blogging add dimension to
what it is we are trying to do while we are in graduate school? I’m not
all that keen on the fast switch to personal, anecdotal experience as evidence,
but maybe I can frame this as a series of professional-ethical convictions or
principles (as performed ethics) that have loosely guided
Earth Wide Moth since its first entry, just a few months before I moved from
Kansas City to Syracuse in 2004.

1. An ethics of experimentation. Participating in the RSA panel last May on
the ethics of amateuring greatly pushed my thinking in this area (I even read
Booth’s For The Love of It on Jenny’s recommendation). The blog
understood as an experimental space does not always need to explain itself in
terms of "professional efficiency" or productivity drive. This does not make it
unprofessional. Instead it (re)establishes the necessary and delicate
orchestration of "for pay" and "for love": professional and amateur.
Experimentation, like inquiry, favors the side of wonderment, mystery, and
intrigue, the side of "I do not know, but I can’t resist the delight in finding
out, the delight in toying around with possibilities, with unknowns." Now,
this commitment to experimentation does not always come off well. Often,
it fails or rather is about failure, interruption, digression. Yet, in a blog,
it plays out in the midst of others and in such a way that it lays a skein of
re-discoverable pathways for the future. Re: professional ethos, this principle
seems to underscore the vitality in networked experimentation.

2. A second principle involves an ethics of engagement, stale commonplace
though it risks seeming. This is, rather, a point about the outward blog ethos
as one that conveys investment, conviction, and panache for a professional
trajectory, in a disciplinary orientation, in a research specialization, in a
body of work: I am going to make my living doing this, and, thus, I am going to
put my greatest possible effort into it. So: in the blog (as a collection) and
in specific entries, I have sought all along to be genuinely engaged. It
has not always worked this way, and this principle, perhaps like all principles,
grows weaker as I describe it in more idealistic terms. Nevertheless,
where professional ethos is concerned, blogging affords graduate students a
venue for engagement appropriate (arguably) to the rhythms of graduate
education.

3. An ethics of lifework harmony. When I started blogging, I was a
professional, but I wasn’t a graduate student. Thus, when I became a graduate
student, I didn’t experience any remarkable change in how I thought about myself
as a professional or as a professional-in-becoming. Sure, I was leaving
behind a livable salary, a private office, home ownership, and certain daytime
schedule constraints to become a "student." But I had already trampled on
the faux-dyad of work and home or personal and professional for seven years, and
I find in blogging (granting that this is a privilege) a healthy and rewarding
breach in the hemispheric division that would separate life from work.

More to come…