Tag: stick.henge

Collectanea 26.25 Henge-Dogma-Bees

/ Derek Mueller
⏳ Approximate reading time: 5 mins

Week of June 23, 2025

Oversimplified the Multiplicity

“As I have tried to demonstrate, the use of key terms such as ‘current-traditional rhetoric,’ ‘process,’ and ‘post-process’ has contributed significantly to the discursive construction of the history of composition studies. On one hand, these terms have helped to clarify changing currents in the intellectual practices of composition studies; on the other hand, they have oversimplified the multiplicity of perspectives within each ‘paradigm.’ These keywords also imposed discursively constructed boundaries on complex historical developments, as new ‘paradigms’ criticized previously dominant theories and pedagogies for certain features while appropriating or ignoring other features—as in the post-process dismissal of social process theories and pedagogies. Such negotiation is inevitable because knowledge is discursively constructed in so far as discourse is used as the dominant medium of thought and communication (Bazerman, 1988; Berger & Luckman, 1966; Rorty, 1979)” (74).

—Paul Kei Matsuda. (2003). Process and post-process: A discursive history. Journal of Second Language Writing, 12(1), 65–83. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1060-3743(02)00127-3 #terms #keywords #oversimplification #process #post-process #current-traditional

Gardener’s Ascent—Illustration Paired with the OnlyPoems POTM for June

Figure 1. “Gardener’s Ascent.”

June’s OnlyPoem’s Poem of the Month, “Diocletian Upon Being Asked to Return to Rome,” by Kate Deimling, greenleafed for me this illustration, an experiment with horizons and scale, rolling and peaked, striped in cabbages. I guess this is the fourteenth monthly POTM illustration I’ve done for OnlyPoems since April 2024. I’m low-key exploring the possibility of an ekphrastics exhibit this fall, thinking through how best to arrange for printing the illustrations alongside each poem. #ekphrastic #POTM #illustration

Taken to be Dogmas

“How many ideas that were so sure they were taken to be dogmas have disappeared from knowledge?” (38).

—Michel Serres. (2020). Branches: A Philosophy of Time, Event and Advent. Bloomsbury Academic.

From the Mail Bag

Figure 2. Letter from Z.

Zed,

Thank you for writing in. It’s always nice to get old-timey mail. And foremost, my compliments on your handwriting. It looks a lot like my own, the scratches of a Gen-Xer who half-heartedly practiced cursive letterforms forty-some years ago and whose script habits have dwindled though not to the point of illegibility, not yet. I have the weak hands of an aging English professor and so have chosen to type in reply; I hope you understand.

The most number of times I have been stung since moving to Rosemary Road in 2021 is three. Three times. The record is now, this summer, in fact. Last week I was moving a pile of big rocks to the creek bed, procrastinating civilian corp of engineers-style, one by one, giving the flow path something to think about, rocks and water doing their endless dance and such. With the final rock, I bumped the plank fence and out from where the ivy lushly clung to the boards swarmed what I’d guess were 20-30 wasps. I know they say to keep calm because so many of the stinging insects can sense fear. But no. That does not work. There is no keeping calm when swarmed by wasps. I fled, scrambled for some distance. Ribs and left arm. Two stings. And then the third sting was just this week. While walking in flip-flops I stepped such that a bee found its way underneath my left “ring” toe (fourth toe; seems to me strangely matrimonial to call a fourth toe a ring toe). I would have described myself as bee+hornet+wasp allergic in my younger years; now, less so. The toxin is uncomfortable and would be worrying if I was stung more than, say, four or five times, but I’ll be fine, and I know there are more allergic people out there encountering stinging insects with more justifiable alarm. -DM

Stick Henge Update

Figure 3. One-third of Stick Henge.

As of the end of June, just one pile of branches still needs to be integrated with the accumulating sections of the henge. Here, pictured, is one section of the larger circular form. I’m still trying to decide at what rate to clip branches from the red oak, and this week’s “heat dome” discouraged me from working on it.

5ives

The Profiteering Publishing Corps

  1. Elsevier (Computers and Composition, Journal of Second Language Writing); Dutch, 2022 revenue: £2.909 billion
  2. Springer Nature; German-British, 2024 revenue: €1.82 billion to €1.85 billion
  3. Wiley-Blackwell; U.S., 2023 revenue: $2.02 billion
  4. Taylor & Francis/Routledge (Rhetoric Review, RSQ, TCQ); British, 2022 revenue: £593.6 million
  5. Sage Publishing (JBTC, Written Communication); U.S., 2023 revenue: $140.0 million

I will never get used to the idea that scholarship gets written, voluntarily reviewed, voluntarily edited, and then it is published by these corporations before being sold back to colleges and universities through library subscription packages.

Farther from Home

“Of course, the farther from home you go to solve your problem, the more expensive the solution will be” (68). from “Three Ways of Farming in the Southwest,” 1979.

—Wendell Berry. (1981). The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural and Agricultural. Counterpoint.

Flock Under Cover

Around ~11 a.m. is the latest the chickens will linger on hot days before seeking shade. Mo appears to be doing his diligent best, keenly alert to disturbances and anomalies, though I am nevertheless nervous because it was just about exactly a year ago when we lost three chickens to a raccoon attack at the edge not 30 feet into the thicket behind the house.

Figure 4. Wonder Hollow flock. Perla, Mo, Lightfoot (back row, left to right). Tiny Honey, Betty, Wizard (front row, left to right).
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 fifth in this series from Week 26 of 2025, or the Week of June 23). 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

F., hyped about suppertime. #wonderhollow #rollcall

Collectanea 25.25 Microthemes-Slash-Felt

/ Derek Mueller
⏳ Approximate reading time: 5 mins

Week of June 16, 2025

Microthemes

“One new approach that I incorporated was the use of microthemes. A microtheme is defined as ‘an essay so short that it can be typed on a single five-by-eight inch note card.’ There are four types of microtheme that I have used successfully. These are (1) summary writing, (2) supporting a thesis, (3) generating a thesis from provided data and (4) quandary posing. Each can be used to have students focus on a small segment of material and write short responses” (33).

—Janet D. Hartman. (1989). Writing to learn and communicate in a data structures course. Proceedings of the Twentieth SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, 32–36. https://doi.org/10.1145/65293.71191

A reference to Hartman’s work on microthemes appears in Chapter 5, “Writing to Learn,” from Bazerman et al.’s 2005 collection, Reference Guide to Writing Across the Curriculum. As I followed this farther, I stumbled upon Trish Roberts-Miller’s 2020 blog entry, “Teaching with Microthemes.” Initially I’d been wondering about whether writing-to-learn bore even the smallest hints of drawing-to-learn, but so far I haven’t found anything connect them directly (over and above the “[blanking]-to-learn” phraseology). So, that’s it–microthemes widened to an etcetera, miniatures, the dinky heap of speck genres we have named as a way to patch wee scale pedagogical interactions and large scale genres.

Felt Sense

Figure 1. Think of it as a snowball.

F. sheds. A lot. A LOT–a lot. And so, what might these wool heaps become? From a 2009 Maker page and from elsewhere, we’re lint-rolling for ideas.

“But that hair! It gets everywhere. I’ve seen it floating around like snowdrifts under the couch, and of course it gets on every piece of clothing in the house! Grooming your dog is the best way to keep the hair from finding its way into your wardrobe permanently. The hair that you remove from the dog when you brush her can be put to crafty use! It can be felted, just like sheep’s wool. Well, not exactly like wool, but close enough! Don’t let the soft fibers go to waste. Use some pipe cleaners and a felting needle to create a replica of your pet, made from her fur!” –Brookelynn Morris

Methods of Placing

“Some methods of placing freshman writing before students are particularly interesting. Fifteen schools [out of 186 respondents] place themes on a bulletin board for student inspection. In nine schools, themes are returned and circulated in class for reading and comment. Three schools place themes which exemplify certain assignments on a reserve shelf in the library for use by students in the course. One school devotes the entire May issue of its alumni bulletin to the publication of freshman composition work. The yearbook, a printed anthology of themes used as a text, and a local newspaper are all used as media for the presentation of freshman writing.”

This, from the first CCC article, Edith Wells’ report on a survey of 400 colleges and universities’ first-year writing publications.

—Edith Wells. 1950. “College Publications of Freshman Writing.” College Composition and Communication 1.1.

Food Poisoning

Figure 2. “Easy Queasy.”

Stick Henge Update

Writing this week about branching indices in the morning and then in the afternoons, when the skies cooperate, piling sticks to hengiform monument. Stick Henge has three perimetering arc segments; each amounts to a cradle held vertical by hammer-set wooden posts. Two sets of posts are 3.5 feet tall; the third is seven feet tall. The twiggy offshed from the two black cherry trees and the catalpa have been piled into the cradles, along with a few branches from the red oak, though that one is harder to cut and slower to sculpt with. I thought I might be able to get Stick Henge finished by solstice, but Thursday’s work session convinced me that even as it is well begun and more than half done, not unlike a book project, the finishing shall be a Zeno’s paradox considering there is a slower-more to do and even after that another stick can always be placed atop.

5ives

Writing’s Microgenres

  1. Microthemes (Hartman, 1989)
  2. Aphorisms (Haynes, 2016)
  3. Representative anecdotes (Rice, 2015)
  4. Hundreds (Berlant & Stewart, 2019) (or nineties, my preferred variation)
  5. Crots (Weathers, 1980)

What other microgenres can you think of? I am teaching two sections of ENGL3844: Writing and Digital Media this fall, and I think I might build the class around microgenres and digital circulation.

Somewhat of a Virgule

“I have been hailed by a slash, called into these questions (How has the slash between rhet/comp come to be and to mean? Will the slash between rhet/comp persist?) by a virgule, a solidus, a dia/critical mark (of sorts). It is not a task I take lightly, nor one that I find distasteful. I am somewhat of a virgule myself, poised on the cusp of a slightly disreputable figure. (I once bristled when an oh-so-proper official of the MLA requested that I remove a slash from the title of my already-accepted MLA conference presentation. Before the program went to print, you see. I said no. The slash was necessary, and it stayed. For once in my life, it was an either/or decision.) Such it is with rhetoric/composition—both doomed and/or fortunate to live with this aporetic virgule between them, listing like a slightly disfigured lightning bolt” (para. 1).

—Cynthia Haynes. (2003). “Rhetoric/Slash/Composition.” Enculturation 5.1. https://parlormultimedia.com/enculturation/5_1/index51.html #slash #virgule #punctuation

Serpents/Jungle Fowl

Unexpectedly, ill-advisedly, Betty briefly took an interest in doppelgänger Hisstilla. The encounter was short-lived, peaceful. I am convinced there are at least two black racers canvassing Wonder Hollow, this younger, smaller one at the front (east), and an older, larger one at the back (west).

Figure 3. Betty, Hisstilla; Histilla, Betty. 🫱🏿‍🫲🏽
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 fourth in this series from Week 25 of 2025, or the Week of June 16). 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

The diverter pond’s liner experiment. #wonderhollow #rollcall