A drizzly Sunday mid-February. Woke up to onomatopoeia percussing in downspouts out the window. “Good news. At least they’re not frozen solid any more.” I expected that feeding and watering the chickens first thing would be slipperier, which before I ventured out with the watering vessels detoured to listening karaoke-style to Paul Simon’s 1977 Slip Sliding Away and then to Little Richard’s 1957 recording, Slippin’ and Slidin’ (Peepin’ and Hidin’), an associative path unfolding from the difficult to track down Simon quotation in which he says, “I didn’t originate that title. It came from that Little Richard song Slippin’ and Slidin’,” slip sliding owing to slippin’ and slidin’. Mo crowed. By that point I was filling the water carriers and delighting in the chickenicity implied in Little Richard’s parenthetical, peeping and hiding. Moments later, imagine what a changed chore it was to find that each footfall held without trouble, a better than expected grip in the mud-ice-grass trivium.
Among the rewards of a sabbatical, aka research leave, aka duty off campus is that I have made it a point to reclaim studying; with a little bit more time than usual, studying fans out again. It is possible for these few months to chip away at a bigger writing project, to hold a scatterplot of meetings each week (usually with grad students), and, to lay out a mosaic of readings purposefully juxtaposed. Read for accidents, surprise angles. With a little bit of time, eclectic reading totters again; its balance otherwise, in entrained semesters, is prone to tilting heavily toward the necessary, pragmatic, and bureaucratic anchors for professional attention.
Past few days a rewarding zigzag has come from clicking along in PDFs of Meg Sweeney’s Mendings (2023), Roland Bathes’ Mourning Diary (1977), and Tim Ingold’s 1993 article, “The Temporality of the Landscape.” Sweeney’s book is helping me think about gone noting and about the personal-theoretical in familial memory work; it’s a marvelously visual book, too, and at 47k words helps me gain a feeling for the scope of my current project. Ingold is (maybe?) jogging some of the earliest motivations for worknets when I drafted that 2015 Composition Forum article and plotted its rationale using Lines: A Brief History (2007). I will have occasion early next month in Cleveland to say a few words (as “prespondent”) about worknets, about what I imagined they would activate in service of reading in service of research design beyond the typical ramp-ups to literature reviews. The gist of this is that worknets promote reading expectant of wider and weirder flight paths; literature reviews are prone to formulism, IMRAD-pleasing, over-torqued to function. Which is another way of saying a generous comparison will take more time and nuance; I tend to be nap time! with lit reviews. What was the last unforgettable lit review you read?
The Barthes reading is just because I hadn’t read it before. It’s a fast read because it amounts to 262 pages, 14k words or so, of translated notes, journal entries, and introspective asides. They’re diaristic, abrupt, reflective in a manner of ritualized self-noticing. How am I doing? How am I doing now? Richard Howard, translator of several Barthes books, wrote in the afterword about how the entries served as warm-ups, as RB would cut paper into quarter sheets, then type the date-stamped missives as an exercise, perhaps, to shift from the underlayment of private grief to a more readerly register—although, that said, Henriette is unavoidable in his other writing around that time, late 1970s, Camera Lucida and Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes.
I highlighted sixteen passages, some as small as words or even symbols, like the Φ on p. 177, with a footnote that RB used the phi as a symbol for photograph in Camera Lucida. The highlights glowed brighter in the second half as can be seen in this highlighted contact sheet, where just over half of the sixteen annotations landed on or after p. 200.
Here are a few of the corresponding passages, which I will end with because the afternoon is a’slipping.
July 18, 1978
Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.
August 18, 1978
To share the values of the silent dailiness (to manage the cooking, the cleaning, the clothes, the choice and something like the past of objects), this was my (silent) way of conversing with her. —And this is, her no longer being here, how I can still do it.
October 3, 1978
The profound modesty she had—that made her possess, not no belongings at all (no asceticism), but very few belongings—as if she wanted, at her death, that there would be no “getting rid of” what had belonged to her.
January 30, 1979
We don’t forget, but something vacant settles in us.
