Tag: teaching

Collectanea 30.25 Syrup-Ceiling-Advisors

/ Derek Mueller

Week of July 21, 2025

Another Grows Short

“Sometimes a branch grows long and another grows short, although the pattern stays the same the branches can point in different directions. They seem like different trees, but if you look carefully…” (16).

—Bruno Munari. (2017). Drawing a Tree. Edizioni Corraini. #branching #pattern #directions #trees

Dawnwatcher Heliotropism

Figure 1. “Morningdala Gloryala.” In seasonal presences, summertime’s acuity.

Erin Manning on Sap-to-Syrup

“Experience grows from theoretical premise, but does so incorporating ecological emergence. It becomes sensitive to how a process is interlaced with the complexity that makes it singular in all its different ways. It’s not just a question of knowing what to look for – it’s about having been attuned to the quality of a practice over a long duration such that its minute shifts are discernible in the feel. It’s about being in the care of its many durations” (para. 8).

—Erin Manning. (2025). Promiscuous Pedagogies – on Creativity. Three Ecologies. Substack. https://threeecologies.substack.com/p/promiscuous-pedagogies-on-creativity

5ives

Degree-Granting Institutions, Year, and Chairs of My Dissertation Committee Members

  1. University of Texas–Arlington, 1997 (Victor J. Vitanza, chair; Frank, Kellner, Kolko, Van Noort)
  2. Case Western Reserve, 1980 (P.K. Saha & Frances Wolpaw, co-chairs; Stonum, Sweeney)
  3. West Virginia University, 1984 (Patrick W. Conner, chair; Almasy, Elkins, Madison, Miles)
  4. SUNY-Albany, 1997 (Not available in the Proquest filing)
  5. Michigan Tech, 1999 (Marilyn Cooper, chair; Selfe, George, Durfee, Bolter)

Writing Studies Tree bonsai, How might we re-activate, or re-engage, the invisible ramuli of advisory genealogies?

The Big Kettle Drum

Painting the front shed ceiling. Dark blue because a miss-mixed gallon was nine bucks at the hardware. Opportunity in the mistakes of others. Also being dumbshit because only recently have I discovered that one gallon will not quite cover the entire ceiling. Another fifty bucks for a second dark blue gallon to finish. Step ladder to reach. Step up, step down, step up, step down. Temporarily anchored thin chain segments to release the old, rusted, and very heavy florescent light bays each into a cradle so the electrical wires can stay put. Paint around the edge. La la. Johnny Cash Unearthed for a while. Hymnals for church of holler projects. Jesus, let it dry. Re-attach with same mildly corroded lag screws. Right shoulder aches familiarly. Pain Friend forewarns a visit. Overhead painting summons the pair of 1995 surgeries. Back when I was twenty-one. Pins to hold its many unpredictable slippages, hem in structural flaws. Paint on Monday and Thursday afternoon because those are the right recovery intervals for the age I happen to be now. Not finished but soon. Painting the front shed ceiling. Dark blue because.

Disappeared

“Suppose all of the syllabi and curricula and textbooks in schools disappeared. Suppose all of the standardized tests–city-wide, state-wide, and national–were lost. In other words, suppose that the most common material impeding innovation in the schools simply did not exist. Then suppose that you decided to turn this ‘catastrophe’ into an opportunity to increase the relevance of the schools. What would you do? (59).

—Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner. (1969). Teaching As a Subversive Activity. Delta. #reboot #education

About Collectanea

Collectanea is a series I’m tiring 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 ninth in this series from Week 30 of 2025, or the Week of July 21). 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

2025 John Lovas Award showpiece arrived in July’s mail. #wonderhollow #rollcall

Collectanea 28.25 Maps-Memory-Mists

/ Derek Mueller

Week of July 7, 2025

Maps of Maps

“Perhaps the most profound relationship between walking, thinking, and writing reveals itself at the end of a stroll, back at the desk. There, it becomes apparent that writing and walking are extremely similar feats, equal parts physical and mental. When we choose a path through a city or forest, our brain must survey the surrounding environment, construct a mental map of the world, settle on a way forward, and translate that plan into a series of footsteps. Likewise, writing forces the brain to review its own landscape, plot a course through that mental terrain, and transcribe the resulting trail of thoughts by guiding the hands. Walking organizes the world around us; writing organizes our thoughts. Ultimately, maps like the one that Nabokov drew are recursive: they are maps of maps.”

—Ferris Jabr. (2014). Why Walking Helps Us Think. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/walking-helps-us-think #walking #thinking #writing #embodiment #movement #onfoot #maps

Fetadala

Figure 1. “Fetadala.” The hound arranged in hues and textures of her own making.

The Teeming World of Funes

“I now arrive at the most difficult point in my story. This story (it is well the reader know it by now) has no other plot than that dialogue which took place half a century ago. I shall not try to reproduce the words, which are now irrecoverable. I prefer to summarize with veracity the many things Ireneo told me. The indirect style is remote and weak; I know I am sacrificing the efficacy of my narrative; my readers should imagine for themselves the hesitant periods which overwhelmed me that night” (151).

—Jorge Luis Borges. (1942, 1999). Funes the Memorious. Collected Fictions (A. Hurley, Trans.). Penguin Books. #remembering #forgetting #mnemonism

Nudged from a Write! conversation earlier in the week, I re-read Borges’ “Funes the Memorius” and have been thinking about the accursed blessing of remembering more, remembering less, and the pleasurable inevitability of forgetting (thanks to CGB‘s mention of the 1942 short story).

Mists of Academic Majors

Figure 2. A Tagcrowd word cloud rendering of the majors listed for the forty-four students enrolled in two (online-asynchronous) sections of ENGL3844: Writing and Digital Media coming up this fall.

5ives

Midsummer To-dos

  1. External review letter No. 1
  2. Syllabus for ENGL3844
  3. Electrician to lend me a bzzt with swapping out remaining switches and outlets in front shed
  4. Virginia DMV registration renewal
  5. Finish painting shed

A Map May Be Concealing

“Such maps are widely assumed to convey objective and universal knowledge of place. They are intended to orient us, to tell us how to get from here to there, to show us precisely where we are. But modern maps hold no memory of what the land was before. Few of us have thought to ask what truths a map may be concealing, or have paused to consider that maps do not tell us where we are from or who we are. Many of us do not know the stories of the land in the places where we live; we have not thought to look for the topography of a myth in the surrounding rivers and hills. Perhaps this is because we have forgotten how to listen to the land around us.”

—Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder. (2018). Counter Mapping. Emergence Magazine. https://emergencemagazine.org/feature/counter-mapping/. #maps #histories #land #before #memory

Soon Enough

“Soon enough it will be me struggling (valiantly?) to walk–lugging my stuff around. How are we all so brave as to take step after step? Day after day? How are we so optimistic, so careful not to trip and yet do trip, and then get up and say o.k. Why do I feel so sorry for everyone and so proud?” (42).

—Maira Kalman. (2009). The Principles of Uncertainty. Penguin Books. #walkingmood #proud #lugging #walking #steps #trip

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 seventh in this series from Week 28 of 2025, or the Week of July 7). 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

Downspout, PVC drain line near-neighborliness, or where, with a plastic joint and a piece of rebar to shield it from the garden house, mending is overdue. #wonderhollow #rollcall

Collectanea 27.25 Atrophy-Monarchs-Garage

/ Derek Mueller

Week of June 30, 2025

Cognitive Atrophy

“The integration of LLMs into learning environments presents a complex duality: while they enhance accessibility and personalization of education, they may inadvertently contribute to cognitive atrophy through excessive reliance on AI-driven solutions [3]. Prior research points out that there is a strong negative correlation between AI tool usage and critical thinking skills, with younger users exhibiting higher dependence on AI tools and consequently lower cognitive performance scores [3]” (10).

—Nataliya Kosmyna, Eugene Haptmann, Ye Tong Yuan, Jessica Situ, Zian-Hao Liao, Ashly Vivian Beresnitzky, Iris Braunstein, Pattie Maes (MIT, MassArt, Wellesley1Why don’t citation systems include institutional affiliations?). (2025). Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task (arXiv:2506.08872). arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2506.08872 #cognition #debt #writing #LLMs #AI #frenzy #atrophy #performance #humanbrains #consequences

A prepublication version of the Kosmyna et al. article, “Your Brain on ChatGPT,” circulated a couple of weeks ago. At >200 pages, whew, it is long and ornately specialized at points. I’ve read enough of it to conclude a) it will, on the sunny side of review, be a landmark study, an important account leading to further research on the cognitive consequences of LLM over-reliance (notably, a developmental vortex fueled by enthusiastic, uncritical adoptions and battering-ram marketing efforts by boom or bust AI startups), b) the approach to writing essays at the center of the study is woefully reductive (i.e., timed for 20 minutes, AP-test-styled prompting without much context or purpose), c) the ability to quote one’s own essay shortly after writing it is a bizarre and not altogether persuasive indicator of cognitive performance, yet this was the greatest differentiator among the three participating groups (brain-only, search engine, and LLM), and d) there remains a vast gulf between cognitive neurosciences, rhetorical invention/eureka/epiphany studies2We don’t really have anything like Eureka Studies or Epiphany Studies; perhaps all of the Humanities should retool in this direction, renaming minors as Epiphany Studies, or, if you are at a tech/stem school, Epiphany Engineering. The curriculum would draw upon writing and rhetoric, philosophy, history, language and literature, and cognitive neuroscience, regarding learning as a so-called “open period,” of the sort that the neuroscientists studying psychedelics describe in reparative/therapeutic terms as a window for synaptic rerigging., and reading and writing research as it is valued in the humanities, much less in Rhetoric and Composition/Writing Studies.

Visual Portmanteau: Monarch Butterfly + Mandala

Figure 1. “Monarchdala.”

Mature, blooming milkweed at the back of the holler is aflutter, buzzing with pollinators, including a small kaleidoscope of Monarch butterflies. And lately I had been exploring in Procreate various brush and palette customizations, watching a few tutorials, learning how to make stamps. What followed were experimental, exploratory pieces, like this one, which uses drawing guides for mirrored quadrants, then bending and combining selected elements, adding color from a custom butterfly photograph palette, and inlayering a gradient backdrop for a fade of center-to-periphery brightness.

The Standard Way into the Sheepfold

“What is the good of research ?
What is worth doing ?
Shall we be allowed to do it ?
Who will do it ?
In answering the first question, I hold that by the scholarship which is the product of research the standing of our work in the academic world will be improved. It will make us orthodox. Research is the standard way into the sheepfold” (17).

~

“Now, is there any reason, in this age when every other branch of human knowledge is being ruthlessly pulled to pieces and tested why our branch should be passed over?” (18).

—James Winans (Cornell U). (1915). The need for research. The Quarterly Journal of Speech, 1(1), 17–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/00335631509360453. #branches #research #orthodoxy #sheepfold #speech #communication #disciplinarity

From the Mail Bag 📭

Sadly, there was no mail from readers this week.

G-l-o-r-i-a

Figure 2. Summer 2025’s first morning glory bloom.

5ives

CCCC Covers and a Poll

Five years, five program covers from past Conferences on College Composition and Communication. Why these? Albeit somewhat peripheral to my current research project, they’re quirky with their idiomatic, time-spanning expressions of then and now: the phrase “composition and communication” repeated 53 times from 1960; warpy, nested Cs from 1962; an optical illusion from 1974; seven missiles soaring from left to right in 1977; and an earth-sized pencil from 1983.

1960
1962
1974
1977
1983

Walking as Artistic Practice Syllabus

“This workshop is designed as a brief survey of some of the origins, theories, processes, and manifestations of walking as art. We will read, watch, and discuss perspectives on walking-based projects. Using this information as a springboard, we will complete walking exercises, and execute our own original walking projects.”

—Ellen Mueller (Arts Midwest). (2021). Walking as Artistic Practice. https://teaching.ellenmueller.com/walking/.

I have been meandering in wide arcs toward a plan for this fall’s pair of online-asynchronous sections of ENGL3844: Writing and Digital Media. The course description mentions digital writing within “the context of business, organizational, and political practices.” It also mentions production, devices, data visualizations, videos, web design, “and more.” Sample syllabi I have been able to track down tend to outline three major projects, usually something related to podcasting or sound editing, something related to data analysis and visualization, and something related to video. The official, CUSP-approved outcomes are keyed toward ethics (“ethical design strategies”) with three bullets emphasizing visual, video, and web. I haven’t taught this particular class before at Virginia Tech. The online-asynchronous format adds complications to the kinds of engagement and interaction one can reasonably expect, of course. But I have been thinking more about short-form exercises paired with an anthologics-styled (perhaps ABCDEary format) assortment. Self-introductory account of digital mecology/technologies of self; microthemes prompted with alternatingly terrestrial (food, walking, fieldwork) and digital (photo, sound, hypertext, map, 4D/time, etc.). Inflections of Ashley Holmes’ device-mediated environs (writing on location), inflections of Ellen Mueller’s walking courses reframed as writing on foot, Geoffrey Sirc’s seriality, throwback maps of the imagination (e.g., what goes on in that building I walk past every day?), and more. “And more” as the inventive indeterminacy better fitted with digital writing than anything else I am finding or can think of as of yet, seven weeks or so from the start of classes.

Waiting There for Me

Figure 3. In the garage.
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 sixth in this series from Week 27 of 2025, or the Week of June 30). 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

Buck moth larva, near posts at SW corner of the holler. #stinging #caterpillar #wonderhollow #rollcall
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Meal moth

Notes

  • 1
    Why don’t citation systems include institutional affiliations? ↩︎
  • 2
    We don’t really have anything like Eureka Studies or Epiphany Studies; perhaps all of the Humanities should retool in this direction, renaming minors as Epiphany Studies, or, if you are at a tech/stem school, Epiphany Engineering. The curriculum would draw upon writing and rhetoric, philosophy, history, language and literature, and cognitive neuroscience, regarding learning as a so-called “open period,” of the sort that the neuroscientists studying psychedelics describe in reparative/therapeutic terms as a window for synaptic rerigging. ↩︎

Collectanea 22.25 Dash-Ghost-Kite

/ Derek Mueller

Week of May 26, 2025

But When Are We, Then?

“But what are we, then, in this space of all spaces all at once and no temporal flow? Under the sense of literacy we unpacked in the earlier/previous part of this writing, we rely on our ability to construct ourselves at some nexus between past and future, to have faith in the present as the point where past and future meet like (exactly like) a reader progressing through a linear text, uniting what has gone before with what is now and with what will come.

[P]ersonal identity is itself the effect of a certain temporal unification of past and future with one’s present …. If we are unable to unify the past, present, and future of the sentence, we are similarly unable to unify the past, present, and future of our own biographical experience or psychic life” (Jameson 27).

—Anne Wysocki & Johndan Johnson-Eilola, “Blinded by the Letter: Why Are We Using Literacy as a Metaphor for Everything Else?” Hawisher, Gail E., & Cynthia L., Selfe (Eds.). (1999). Passions, Pedagogies, and 21st Century Technologies. Utah State University Press.  https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/usupress_pubs/119. 349-368.

Longue—Illustration Paired with the OnlyPoems POTM for May

Figure 1. “Longue.”

Longue, as in a duration of waiting, a rest, an eventually. An em-dash-like figure relaxes in repose, punctuation appearing to grow tired of always the highs and lows of overuse followed by neglect. The editorial illustration paired with the OnlyPoems May 2025 Poem of the Month, “Ars Poetica as the Sexy Little Em Dash,” by Katherine Irajpanah. #ekphrastic #POTM #illustration

Remain a Ghost

“As I said, I was a ghost. The truth is that, even all these years later, I remain a ghost. You wouldn’t know it if you saw me. I’m not morose or retiring. I laugh a lot. In fact, I’m genuinely happier than many people I know. But I can’t help but feel that, on one level, I do not exist.”

—Vauhini Vara, “Ghosts.” (9 Aug. 2021). The Believer Magazine. https://www.thebeliever.net/ghosts/. #AI #interface #authorship #ghost #existence #loss #grief #design

Learning to Love You More, 2002-2009

A., in the midst of class planning for fall, sent me a link to this project from back when the WWW felt funkier, freer, more alive, interactions less overdetermined by platforms. It’s like a click-around at a bygone thing, a plunge on Boblo Island’s Log Flume. In it, teaching possibilities. Seventy assignments, complete what you will. -DM

“Learning to Love You More is both a web site and series of non-web presentations comprised of work made by the general public in response to assignments given by artists Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher. Yuri Ono designed and managed the web site.

Participants accepted an assignment, completed it by following the simple but specific instructions, sent in the required report (photograph, text, video, etc), and their work got posted on-line. Like a recipe, meditation practice, or familiar song, the prescriptive nature of these assignments was intended to guide people towards their own experience.”

—Harrell Fletcher, Miranda July, & Yuri Ono, “Learning to Love You More.” http://learningtoloveyoumore.com/. Accessed May 27, 2025. #installation #digital #art #participation #throwback #assignments #teaching

Peculiar Form of Intellectual Currency

“In particular, I am troubled by the limited circulation of student texts in our field—very few of which are requoted or reanalyzed outside of the articles in which they first appear. Student texts thus turn out to be a peculiar form of intellectual currency. We establish our bona fides as compositionists by quoting them, but we seldom revisit student texts quoted by others.”

—Joseph Harris. (2012). Using Student Texts in Composition Scholarship. JAC, 32(3/4), 667–694. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41709848 #student #texts #disciplinary #epistemology #subjectivity #usable #writing #circulation

Twenty-six Titles, Sixteen Years

Figure 2. Computers and Composition Digital Press logo.

Computers and Composition Digital Press (CCDP), an imprint of Utah State University Press, has published twenty-six titles since its launch in 2009. The first book, Technological Ecologies & Sustainability, edited by Dànielle Nicole DeVoss, Heidi McKee, and Dickie Selfe, reads as especially salient for the 2026 Computers & Writing Conference in Charlotte, NC, considering that sustainability will be the conference’s theme. Sifting for a moment through the TES materials, the mixed modalities, from the 383-page PDF (size noted as 4.8 “meg”) to the embedded videos, call up impressions suggesting both novelty and time-capsulism in its feeling much more than sixteen years removed from today’s digital environments. I have been perusing all of the titles as I think about the still-complicated prospect of producing scholarship that simply cannot abide the constraints of the printed page, while still living up to long-held commonplaces about what constitutes a “book.” One more noticing: there are titles published in every year since 2009, except 2023. #digital #press #publishing #books #reliquary #sustainability

Phenakistiscope Mock-up: Kite Lost to Upsky

For the past few months, in the narrowest of narrow slivers of eveningtime, I have been attempting to create a phenakistiscope workflow in ProCreate. I first heard about phenakistiscopes from CGB a few months ago, and I found I was thinking about them more than I expected I would. Phenakistiscopes are pinwheel animations of old; they spin out stroboscopic movement from one wedge to the next. Insofar as rounding the bend from admiring them to making them, I am still puzzling through some of the finer points: which elements should be fixed (or in the exact same position), if any; what sizes of figures show up more legibly than others; whether text can be fitted into the sequence (so far, not with any result worth celebrating; how many layer-frames amount to something both visually inviting yet with a lean file size; and how to manage the bleed-edge for circular rotations converted to a square canvas. I had envisioned this one below, Kite Lost to Upsky, as a child flying a kite on a beach, only the kite catches a gust and the kite string snaps the kite sailing off irretrievable. So, as you can maybe? see, not quite a disastrous failure, but also not the sort of success you’d send to a friend with a Wow! subject line.

Figure 3. Phenokiteiscope.
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 first in this series from Week 22 of 2025, or the Week of May 26). 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

Lightfoot and Mo. #wonderhollow #rollcall

The Last Human Teachers

/ Derek Mueller

Tuesday. February snow day. One app said 8-10 inches of snow. Another said 1-3 inches followed by a coating of freezing rain. Artificials slackly forecast the weather, having never shivered much less set foot outside. Put on a scarf humans. School’s out. My fingers are cold but not freezing as I type this. Snow day not a great difference maker for me. Because I am teaching online this semester, the snow day is better news for everybody else. We haven’t had much good news lately. CNN and Fox sniffing each other’s indigestibly rotten reflux. Al Jazeera wide-eyed half a world away. Social media dead zone. Another twirl of enclaving and homophily, each whispering ta-ta-ta in best friend’s ear, the whole scene with less thunder from the device-glued herd. Thinning wisps as fuhrer DonJay’s hair, not that I can stand to look at it much less imagine for a microsecond its sadness. Gel, mousse, weariness. Context collapse. An ever distanter relative party pops on nimshit Zuckerberg’s tired platform about how DOGE is rooting out FEMA excesses. Are we even related? A part of the context that collapses would if it could tell of how weird it is to labor, to give away a third of your income to strangers, and then for those strangers to be wealthy oligarchs who have abandoned financial disclosure rules, who have carried menacingly a “corruption detector” to the beach and here we all are mere granules of sand at shores that keep washing wave-wash after wave-wash not even touching a coin Foucault. Beach appears smooth, pristine. Nothing to see here. And the penny is going away, soon gone. Ephemerality of the nanoscale.

Snow Day Chores

Tuesday. February snow day SW Virginia. Slippy Blue Ridge. Figured we would lose power. We’re only ever an unkempt tree branch away from all of it shutting down. So I was up earlier than usual for the juice meaning electricity, to make coffee and heat water. Predictable oatmeal bowl. Sucks bawk-bagawk feeding the chickens in the snow. The youngster pullets looked at me and it felt like they understood something like what the hell you acted like spring was coming. Hush now have your layer pellets, I didn’t make this weather. Neither am I free from participating in the day’s rituals just because this rarer, noise dulling precipitation has blanketed us over. Elkhound Feta in her Scandinavian element. I shoveled a little as she dashed about, gulping flavorless snow maws midstride. Bursty joy contagion, now come on let’s go back inside.

Have You Heard This Song?

Couple of weeks so not so long ago Is. first-yearing along up north texted me first thing, first class of the day but the teacher hadn’t arrived yet, so Gen Z-style whatevering at 8:30 a.m. and wondering had I heard Big Thief’s “Simulation Swarm.” I hadn’t. So I listened. Spotify is a contemptible pillage for artists, extracting at that razor’s edge between profitability and streaming use. Here we are. Flawed world accruing flaws the more you really think about it. But I’ll take the song rec from my daughter with an ounce of Spotify forgiveness. Good enough to add to Liked Songs playlist, hoggy trough that it is, such a careless curation with a declining chance of replay. There in the song, a burdock line about “the last human teachers.” It stuck. I wrote it down. Everyday collectanea.

Guest-Led Class Gets Bigger

The same week, a day or two on, collared shirt and good shoes, I guest-led an in-person class, same class I guest-led last fall though it has a different professor this semester. Last semester, they all gathered in a nondescript classroom, capped at 40 students. This semester, the cap doubled to 80, it meets in a lecture hall. Clip on a wireless mic for audibility. An activity on what you were eating for lunch in 2016. Lunch tray handout. Northern Virginia schools and memories about cow jokes printed on half pint milk cartons. Here, now, theater seating, and weren’t those corny puns the days. Here, now, discussion groups made into flat-lines by bolted down row seating and meanwhile from outside the ambience of heavy equipment building new and sparklier halls.

The same week, two days on, in my Shanks office on a Friday morning, small talk check-in with a colleague, and I learned that home department now has an online-asynchronous class capped at 500 students. Theme is true crime. People are ooh-ahhing about it, tongues out cash register pupils emoji, this new model for scaling up English Department’s offerings. Bigger being better, when bigger refers to the translation of credit hours pouring in, black gold, Texas tea. First thing you know, humanities are a millionaire, but the sing-along gets interrupted because, that’s peanuts considering there is another class, design appreciation, capped at 4000. I only know of design appreciation because from time to time someone in a much smaller technical writing section (capped at 22) will mention it as the only other online class they have taken before, hinting that it forges schema and functions almost as a model, an ur-experience, of an online learning sort, forget Dewey. So the road forks; teaching changes. The more costly and higher caliber thing dies out. The new thing is better because it cheddars more lunches, whopper profitable and there are so many other institutional priorities to underwrite. Sure, we could hold a yearning seance with the days of human teachers and human students gathering in a room and talking, interacting, making stuff, connecting, puzzling through. I’m not writing this as a proposal, only a thought-yarn, “last human teachers” setting in motion that flurry of questions, much as before, about what we’re doing now and why, about what the something-doing does.

Run-up to Theories of Written Communication 📆

/ Derek Mueller
A black and white photograph of a row of old desks topped with typewriters in a desert.
Photo [I’m retitling “Bloom Spaces”] by Matt Artz on Unsplash

A full month has blinked by in this run-up to the start of classes on August 26. That’s the day of our first meeting in ENGL6524: Theories of Written Communication. Recent weeks at the end of Rosemary Road included welcoming four new pullets, building a new coop and run, welcoming a rooster, hosting A’s friend from Minnesota, hosting Is. and then driving her to Michigan for her birthday, completing the final external promotion review letter of the season, and keeping aging grandpa’s pace with the rest of it all. This week I picked back up with class preparations, and I am making headway on the online hub for the class and the documents that will live there: syllabus, schedule, project descriptions, and bibliography. Here, for example, is the elaborated course description I settled on well enough to plug it into the landing page and syllabus:

Our seminar-styled study of theories of written communication this semester will begin with 1) considerations of what theory (θεωρέω, theóreó, 🔭) is and what it does, 2) how/why to engage with the theorizing sojourns and sightings of others, and 3) how this “bloom space” called theory has made us feel, especially as it hands a bouquet of possibilities to writing and rhetoric. Together we will read articles and chapters, book intros, and dissertation intros grouped with selected theoretical antecedents, thereby listening carefully for how theory circulates. Themes among these small sets include -isms and -graphies, root metaphors, academic writing and its alternatives, intellectual genealogies, expertise, rationalism, literacy development, and how we write. Readings will include selections by Gloria Anzaldúa, Mikhail Bakhtin, Deborah Brandt, Michel de Certeau, Manuel DeLanda, Yrjö Engeström, Harvey Graff, Joy Harjo, Cynthia Haynes, Julia Molinari, Beverly Moss, Stephen Pepper, Louise Phelps, Michael Polanyi, Malea Powell, Paul Prior & Jody Shipka, Jenny Rice, Jacqueline Royster, Kathleen Stewart, Eve Tuck & C. Ree, and more. Class activities will include weekly writing, discussion, a substantive project (Theory Deck/Microanthology), a presentation, and a course reflection.

For five or six semesters I have focused weekly writing on delimited increments called Nineties, which are ninety word flash responses later tuned stylistically because a ninety must have ninety words (allowing ±5) or a multiple of ninety. Like with The Hundreds, the incrementalism tends to elicit intensities, touched nerves, goose bumps, books thrown across the room, PDFs dragged to Trash, the felt weight of worlding now. So, 185 words is okay, as is 87 words. But 200 words is a bust. Although it may seem at first wrapped too snugly in a quantitative obsessiveness, it abides the principle of liberation by constraint, providing one less thing to think about, encouraging stylistic precision, and implicitly inventing an economy of intentional scope (favoring neither reductionism or expansionism by default). I continue to think there is value in a short planning pitch around Week Four or Five, and a share-out pitch nearer to the end of the semester, but then again, the schedule is busting at the seams and the readings and step-back readings will have to be cut back if there are two pitches. The larger project is also taking shape, though I have not written a prompt yet. I foresee it living up to the title Theory Deck/Microanthology, and assembling through defined sections: cover, frontmatter/intro, three articles, chapters, or excerpts, each with two theoretical antecedents (so six nine pieces total), and a glossary of 6-8 elaborated keywords. Each section will have a suggested deadline, and then the eleven seminar participants will alert me to what sort of feedback they would like to receive: conference, audio comments, written comments.

I am still sorting out the order of readings and project pieces, and I am fairly sure I will have to scale back a bit (to say nothing of whether I have the willpower to stand at the scanner for hours getting this into accessible shape). I have already begun to understand that the book and dissertation intros will have to scale down from four of each to “choose one” from a set of four options, but even this might turn out to feeling denser than we’d like. Cake sponge needs air bubbles. And some class meetings will give us 30-40 minutes at the end for returning to the in-progress projects and for pace-keeping check-ins. Allowing for that possibility, here are the readings I am, for now, feeling good enough about and taking steps to assemble. Weekly placeholders are lightly and noncommittally noted, and second tier bullets are the corresponding step-backs:

  • Eve Tuck and C. Ree, “A Glossary of Haunting” (2013) (Week2)
  • Stephen Pepper, World Hypotheses: A Study in Evidence (1942) (excerpt) (Week3)
    Julia Molinari, What Makes Writing Academic (2022) (excerpt) (Week3)
  • Jacqueline Royster, “Academic Discourses or Small Boats on a Big Sea,” AltDis (Week4)
    • Deborah Brandt, Literacy as Involvement (1990), excerpt
    • Beverly Moss, “Creating a Community: Literacy Events in African-American Churches,” Literacy Across Communities (1994)
  • Malea Powell, “Listening to Ghosts: An Alternative to (Non)Argument,” AltDis (Week5)
    • Michel de Certau’s The Practice of Everyday Life (1984) (excerpt)
    • Joy Harjo, “The Woman Who Fell From the Sky” (1994)
  • Jenny Rice’s CE article, “Para-Expertise, Tacit Knowledge, and Writing Problems” (2015) (Week6)
    • Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (excerpt)
    • Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects (2007) (excerpt)
  • Cynthia Haynes’ JAC article (later updated in The Homesick Phone Book (2016)), “Writing Offshore” (2003) (Week7)
    • Gerald Graff, “Hidden Intellectualism” (2001)
    • Manuel DeLanda, “Extensive Borderlines and Intensive Borderlines” (1998)
  • Paul Prior and Jody Shipka’s “Chronotopic Lamination” (2003) (Week8)
    • Mikhail Bakhtin’s The dialogic imagination (1981) (excerpt)
    • Yrjö Engeström. From Teams to Knots: Activity-Theoretical Studies of Collaboration and Learning at Work (2008)
  • Gloria Anzaldúa, “Putting Coyolxauhqui Together: A Creative Process,” Counterpoints, 1999, Vol. 90, How We Work (1999), pp. 241-261 (Week10)
  • Louise Phelps, “Rhythm and Pattern in a Composing Life.” Ed. Thomas Waldrep. Writers on Writing, Vol. 1. New York: Random House. 1985. 241-57. (Week10)
  • Book intros or first chapters (Choose one.) (Week11)
  • J. Logan Smilges’ Queer Silence (U Minnesota P, 2022)
    • Manning, Erin. The Minor Gesture. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016. (excerpt)
    • Malhotra, Sheena, and Aimee Carrillo Rowe, eds. Silence, Feminism, Power: Reflections at the Edges of Sound. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. (excerpt)
  • Debra Hawhee, A Sense of Urgency (U Chicago P, 2023)
    • Fukushima, Annie Isabel. Migrant Crossings: Witnessing Human Trafficking in the US. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019. (excerpt)
    • Vivian, Bradford. “Witnessing Time: Rhetorical Form, Public Culture, and Popular Historical Education.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 44, no. 3 (May 27, 2014): 204–19.
  • Jennifer LeMesurier, Inscrutable Eating (Ohio State UP, 2023)
    • Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. (excerpt)
    • Oum, Young Rae. “Authenticity and Representation: Cuisines and Identities in Korean-American Diaspora.” Postcolonial Studies 8, no. 1 (2005): 109–25.
  • Eric Detweiler, Responsible Pedagogy (Penn State UP, 2022)
    • Arendt, Hannah. “Reflections on Little Rock.” Dissent (Winter 1959): 45-56.
    • Ellison, Ralph. “Leadership from the Periphery.” In Who Speaks for the Negro? by Robert Penn Warren, 268–354. New Haven: Yale UP, 2014.
  • Dissertation intros or first chapters (Choose one.) (Week12)
  • Walwema, Josephine. Tactile Interfaces: Epistemic Techne in Information Design (2011, Clemson)
    • Buchanan, Richard. “Wicked Problems in Design Thinking.” The Idea of Design. Ed. Victor Margolin and Richard Buchanan. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995. Print.
    • Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Routledge, 1982. Print. (excerpt)
  • Sackey, Donnie. The Curious Case of the Asian Carp: Spatial Performances and the Making of an Invasive Species (2013, MSU)
    • Mol, Annemarie. (1999). Ontological politics: A word and some questions, in J. Law and J. Hassard (Eds.), Actor network theory and after (74-89). Malden, MA: Blackwell and the Sociological Review.
    • Callon, Michael, and Law, John. (1982). On interests and their transformation: Enrollement and counter-enrolment. Social Studies of Science, 12(4), 615- 625.
  • Faris, Michael. Rhetoric, Social Media, and Privacy (2012, Penn State)
    • Cooper, Marilyn M. “The Ecology of Writing.” College English 48.4 (1986): 364-375. Print.
    • Wysocki, Anne, and Johndan Johnson Eilola. “Blinded by the Letter: Why Are We Using Literacy as a Metaphor for Everything Else?” Passions, Pedagogies and 21st Century Technologies. Eds. Gail E. Hawisher and Cynthia L. Selfe. Logan: Utah State UP, 1999. 349-368. Print.
  • Carr, Allison. Negative Space: Toward an Epistemology of Failure (2014, Cincinnati)
    • Rose, Mike. Lives on the Boundary. New York: Penguin, 1989. Print.
    • Stewart, Kathleen. (2010) ‘Worlding Refrains’ in M. Gregg & G. Seigworth (eds) (2010) The Affect Theory Reader. London: Duke University Press, pp. 339-53.
Eleven books are piled on a desk. Titles correspond with readings in ENGL6524: Theories of Written Communication at Virginia Tech, Fall 2024.
Heap for scanning selections.

I glance it and see a heap of a list, with pairings or trios matched with ten of the fourteen weekly meetings. I’ve opted for no readings ahead of meeting one, the 26th. And I want to hold as a clearing Week Nine for project starts and for a round of dialogue focused on one well-begun component. Readings fall away at the end of the semester, too, allowing space in the two meetings after the late November break for short form presentations about the projects and for reflecting on what theories of written communication amounted to. My hope as I continue planning is that by the end and all throughout, ENGL6524 will feel like something we’ve been in, recalling that line I can’t stop thinking about from Kathleen Stewart’s “Worlding Refrains,” “Anything can feel like something you’re in, fully or partially, comfortably or aspirationally, for good or not for long” (340).

Theoroses 🍎

/ Derek Mueller / 3 Comments
Photo by Nazarizal Mohammad on Unsplash

In what will be the fourth new grad class prep for me in two years, in seven more Mondays, I will begin teaching ENGL6524: Theories of Written Communication. 6524 is one of four required core courses in VT’s rhetoric and writing PhD program. The course description, which I would carbon date back to the program’s launch in 2007, reads, “Studies in theories applied to written communication. May be repeated twice for credit for a total of 9 hours when the topic varies.” Two sentences. The first sounds quite a bit like tautology, or maybe even doublespeak because the repetition isn’t varied enough: theories of written communication is a class that promises studies in theories applied to written communication. Notable here is that this graduate program also features an MA-level (5xxx-numbered) class called “Composition Theory,” and by implied design, I guess this means that theories of written communication and composition theory are demarcated well enough that these are two classes but not one and the same. The second sentence from the course description suggests that the class could be repeated not once, but twice, for a total of nine graduate credits. Trouble is, the class is only offered once every other year, or one time in each two-year cycle of coursework. So it hardly seems possible to repeat it even once, much less twice.

As I’m prone to doing with most classes I teach, I have been mulling over possibilities for several weeks albeit in a low-key, backburner sort of way. I notified the bookstore on Tuesday that I will not be ordering any books for the class. Instead we will sift then trace theoretical antecedents from shorter units of scholarship: 1) published articles, 2) book introductions, and 3) dissertation introductions (or first chapters). In practice, several weeks (~9) of the semester will entail reading the article or chapter along with the theoretical referent and, as such, learning to alternate similar to the way theater-goers might, between actors and props, and a cyclorama, or backdrop. Finding and following theory’s antecedent traces should, if things go well, reward us with a repertoire for theory-finding and, in turn, for theorizing. The approach is similar to the one taken in Cultural Conversations: The Presence of the Past, a textbook that I happen to be familiar with not only because I taught with it a few times but also because a professor and mentor in my MA program at UMKC, Stephen Dilks, was the book’s co-author and co-editor. Cultural Conversations laid out a two-step archeology: a historical-archival text, a contemporary uptake, and then contextualizing pieces that drew connections and filled in gaps. Our upcoming fall semester is fifteen weeks long, but some of the weeks will focus on short-form presentations, or pitches, conferences, workshopping one another’s work, and so on. The class will include weekly writing and a larger project designed in the spirit of anthologics, or assembling and introducing an album of theoretical favorites, influential and inspirational beacons for scholarly offerings students one day hope to create, whether with their own dissertations, with articles or chapters, with teaching materials, with all of it, and so on etcetera.

I want to begin the class with some consideration, together, of our experiences with theory, especially if there are any adverse reactions to theory. I am thinking here both of fear and loathing. Under what conditions, if any, has theory been scary? Are there theories that you loathe? That elicit worry? Why? Like distasteful foods, how many times would you suggest trying a theory before disqualifying it, ruling it out, casting it aside, or dismissing it altogether? This opening segment, then, points to the title of this entry. With theoroses, or something like theory’s neuroses, we might begin to parse why and to what extent theory designated as such may be offputting, difficult, time-consuming, perhaps even abruptive, steep, hazardous-seeming, or even upsetting, dare say violent. Part of this line of inquiry is meant to open up a greater awareness of our dispositions toward (or against) theory and what has formed that disposition. And part of this line of inquiry is meant to reset theory with a light-admitting aperture of possibility. If there is a third part to this line of inquiry, it rests in a few questions I don’t know the answers to yet: Must theories be named to be useful? Must theory be communicable to be useful? Can scholarship proceed with unnamed theories, and might there be any advantages in (or rationale for) shedding antecedents? Can scholarship in rhetoric and writing be theoryless?

Paired with the theoroses check-in, I want us to read Eve Tuck and C. Ree’s “A Glossary of Haunting.” The glossary is a list of keywords, and these keywords are followed by vignettes, images, and microhistories/microanalyses. The set is referential, naming other texts, but it is also personal, heeding gravity in the co-authors’ standpoints, which intersect in their collaboration but also outwardly to their respective and sometimes overlapping ways of being, knowing, and acting. So I am imagining this as an imitable text; each project (theory microanthology) will include a custom glossary of haunting and an introduction to the contents, including some engagement with the question-led threads above: fear? loathing? named? unnamed? possibilities opened? foreclosed?

Some of what I’m sorting out includes, Where to start with theory? And, How well-formed a grounding case, or object of analysis, will serve us well in coming to terms with any theory? There is of course the French critical deck with cards featuring major figures from the 1960s and 1970s. There is, alternatively, a cluster of more contemporary theorists who have given language to deleterious and destructive -isms, late Capitalism, the Anthropocene, climate collapse, globalization, and colonization and its aftermath. And, too, there are earlier models, like Stephen Pepper’s World Hypotheses: A Study in Evidence , which looks into root metaphors for formism, mechanism, organicism, and contextualism, notably nodding toward but then leaving out animism and mysticism. In yet another deck, we could have theories that direct us to consider phenomena differently still, such as with CRT, standpoint theory, intersectionality, and misogynoir, though this might also include Polanyi’s The Tacit Dimension (1966). Whichever thread I begin to work with, it pulls the others, and eventually what surfaces returns to the other part of the course title, written communication.

I would like our step-back antecendent throughlines to follow a narrowed few specific choices. Early maybes are from Alt Dis, such as Royster’s “Academic Discourses or Small Boats on a Big Sea,” stepped back to Deborah Brandt’s Literacy as Involvements (1990) or Beverly Moss’s Literacy Across Communities (1994), or Malea Powell’s “Listening to Ghosts,” stepped back to de Certau’s The Practice of Everyday Life (1984) or Harjo’s The Woman Who Fell From the Sky (1994). Another possibility is Jenny Rice’s CE article, “Para-Expertise, Tacit Knowledge, and Writing Problems” (2015) stepped back to Polanyi or to Stewart’s Ordinary Affects (2007). Another is Cynthia Haynes’ JAC article (later updated in The Homesick Phone Book (2016)), “Writing Offshore” (2003) stepped back to Worsham, “Writing Against Writing” (1991), Graff, “Hidden Intellectualism” (2001), or De Landa, “Extensive Borderlines and Intensive Borderlines” (1998). Another is Paul Prior and Jody Shipka’s “Chronotopic Lamination” (2003) stepped back to Bakhtin’s The dialogic imagination (1981) or Engeström for a check-in on CHAT. And for the book introduction step-backs, I am thinking in particular of the winner, runners-up, and perhaps a few other nominees for the RSA Book Award this year: Hsu’s Constellating Home (2022), Hawhee’s A Sense of Urgency (2023), Smilges’ Queer Silence (2022), LeMesurier’s Inscrutable Eating (2023), Detweiler’s Responsible Pedagogy (2022). And this leaves as yet-to-be gathered a small set of dissertations whose introductions and/or first chapters we’ll read similarly.

I’ll pause here, this entry vining long enough and several other to-dos lingering. But I hope to return to this, to say more about the short-form weekly writing, the intervals of pitches and workshopping, the build-ups to the larger project, which I hope will find synchrony with lead-ins to our exams process at VT. I would also like to work back to first principles, to say a bit about what I understand theory to be and do in the context of research, scholarship, teaching, and writing, both within and beyond the academy, and also to revisit the commonplace in rhetoric and composition that theorein requires practice, or application, that theory without practice is baseless, harmful, chaotic-evil, etc.

What’s the Word?

/ Derek Mueller

For a few years, maybe more, I have at times in my teaching practice opened a class session with a round of “What’s the Word.” “What’s the Word” is a segment from ESPN’s Pardon the Interruption, a sports talk show featuring broadcast journalists Michael Wilbon, Tony Kornheiser, and, when one of the two of them is traveling or vacationing or otherwise unavailable, a substitute counterpart who balances the exchange and the screenspace. For 30 minutes in the 5 o’clock hour out east, the show is led along with a ticker-tape and marked by time intervals; clock-keeping governs the otherwise spirited dialogue. This clip will give you an idea:

It’s a toss-up whether students in classes I teach know the show or have any frame of reference for the premise. We watch the video, and proceed thereafter, usually with some solo word-whatsing, which then gets transferred to a marker board or Google Slide, and after this, we read them, and we talk about our neologisms, puns, and coinages. It’s not as if streamers and confetti fly from overhead, but it’s usually fun to play with words.

“What’s the Word” can with brevity open and span worlds1Similar to Thich Nhat Hanh on mantras, which are magical (or rhetorical) for how they can instantly transform reality., querying how the week is going, how a project (or some dimension of it) is unfolding, or how a reading resonates or fails to resonate, what instigates a click or a eureka. It sits in a single class meeting, so it’s not quite ENGL1999: Writing One Word, which I have (only half) jokingly pitched as a prototype for self-set minimalisms with labor and workload. “What’s the Word” fits into the discursive-unitroscope, which runs from the small to the large, and these measures include the Four Word Funk Review (variation on Four Word Film Review from back-back in the day), Fives, or lists of five what’ve-you-gots that then play into ranking and re-ranking, sharing out, writing rationales, and so on, and Nineties, which are a micro-genre adapted from Berlant & Stewart’s The Hundreds, and which amount to 90-word clips, give or take five words, that can, if they must, jump to the next multiple of 90. In other wordcounts, 85-95 is permissible, but above 95 the writer has to take it to 175-185, and below 85, it’s not a ninety because that’s where the cork edge of the dart board ends and you’ve dinged the drywall. I’m two years along in fairly routinely layering nineties into my teaching practice, and the results have been positive enough to continue, sometimes prompted, sometimes unprompted. I have yet to incorporate the indexing moves that elevate The Hundreds from distinctive and memorable to a book I consider truly one of a kind. Could be that’s what the future is for.

I’m thinking about “What’s The Word” this afternoon because we’re reading the first 28 pages of Han’s Non-Things for Monday evening, a book, which, in itself and in translation blooms a terminological cornucopia. We’ll have just an hour on Zoom for discussing the opening section, before we switch to open review of in-progress blog carnival entries. “What’s the Word” seems to me right-sized for the hour, for sorting out de-fleeification, or digitombed rhetorics, or smart-phoniness, or like-iod addiction.

Notes

  • 1
    Similar to Thich Nhat Hanh on mantras, which are magical (or rhetorical) for how they can instantly transform reality. ↩︎

Comfort Inventory 10

/ Derek Mueller
Shadowy paths near the Sycamore (is it?) between Henderson Hall and Squires Student Center, Blacksburg, Va. (37.229927, -80.416902).

Funny in a way not funny that the last in the series of comfort inventories was titled Discomfort Inventory and posted two years ago in April, a run-down of WTF holy-smokes how the heat then was a’rising. That playful inversion, comfort marked dis-, fuckered the numbering system so now it’s unclear whether this one is CI 9 or CI 10. Executive decision consulting with the EWM advisory board: I’m going with CI 10, so let the footnotes resolve that Discomfort Inventory Unnumbered also was counted. 

  • Owing to an upcoming WPA hiatus (or, more technically true, indefinite but careful and non-harmful evacuation of the role) I am at the end of June transitioning to the first email-unencumbered and otherwise work-appointment-free summer months in more than 14 years, the last ten of which were lurched along with one foot snagged in that bottomless and unpredictable quicksand of administrative responsibilities, late July surprises, and then some. Feels like something…different. Notably I would’ve thrown a handful of confetti for myself on-around May 12, but I was told I must oblige an unwritten rule that pins switch-over date on The Calendar at and only at June 30. Pope Gregory sighed in relief. 
  • Is it possible at the age of 48 to have (meaning host) new feelings, or feelings unfelt before? If so, I have and am in that standing aside from writing program administration has elicited the faintest of mixes. Not bitter+sweet only, though that’s a familiar sentiment and not entirely distinct from this particular structure of feeling. Easier to name, the bittersweet. We have the word for this paradox. Oh, your feelings are crossed up? But right now, these work-facing feelings are curiously small, faint, light, but also complexly mixed and parts wow-wonderful with parts whoa-startling—sort of like at the froyo bar where the eager but ascetic everything-topper only takes the smallest unit possible: a shred of coconut, a violet petal, a fragment of toffee bar, a speck of syrup-soaked strawberry, one boba tapioca, a sprinklet, sugar granule, a raisin if you must. Don’t overdo it. Let me not get too too too lost in these feelings. 
  • But then again I did order a chicken coop today to make better on a commitment to a different kind of holler life here in SW Virginia. I have the good fortune of working with a few chicken enthusiasts who are sharing with me and A. every possible angle to consider, from the hazards of automatic door closers (remember that Jim Johnson article?!; it’s sort of like that one fused with this one) to the predator barriers, to the problems and opportunities with chicken trucks/mobile coops, and so on. Get the heated water vessel, I’ve learned. Expect rodents to nosh the feed off-shed, I’m told. Park them under a canopy tree in the hottest heats of summertime. And so on.
  • We’ll start with six chickens. ??????
  • I received a Red Bubble take down notice the other day because the “rights holder” complained about one of my illustrations, from the Pandemic Bestiary, #18 Write (turkey hunched at a keyboard). The takedown notice, according to Red Bubble, was initiated by Virginia Tech. I contested it, of course, because I happen to have the Procreate file, which can play back the production process, and it includes the stroke count (1,082) and the time I spent on that drawing (3 hours, 13 minutes). I suppose it must be some sort of lax image-matching AI running interference on this sort of thing, and it turns out that it can be difficult to convince an AI that you are human, or that you, as a human, made something that to the AI’s still sort of iffy matching operations presumes your “original work” to belong to someone else. So it’s not possible for now to purchase a Pandemic Bestiary #18 Write sticker for under two dollars at Red Bubble. World turns. Loss of side-hustle counter-claim pending for .35 USD. Maybe I’ll follow-up on this, continue to chronicle the very low-level hijinks. Or maybe right along with that drawing everything pleasingly digressive and light-hearted and playful will be disappeared. Fun while it lasted!
  • For Monday’s Food Writing class we’re leafing the last of the semester’s readings, one from Savor, on apple eating, and another from A Pebble for Your Pocket, “Eating an Orange.” We’ll have apples and oranges. Write a 90. And maybe I’ll go one step farther, time allowing, with “Four Mantras,” because the opening line is in itself a simple—perhaps the simplest—theory of rhetoric: “A mantra is a magic formula. Every time you pronounce a mantra, you can transform a situation right away; you don’t have to wait” (111). 
  • In January, on a phone call (following an email exchange) with longtime mentor LWP, I mentioned this line about mantras. She reminded me that the most reliable mantra she’d been advised to recite as an administrator came from one of her mentors: Be kind. Be fair. Be brave. Even as my WPAing decade winds down, perhaps this one can continue to transform situations. Teaching preparation situations. Absurd takedown notice situations. Chicken tending situations.

Wonder Bouquet

/ Derek Mueller

Slow to catch on but oh howdyboy now I get it what with confetti popping re growth mindset not as wonder bouquet but as sardine-canning certain meatpacker programs so they are crowded spilling SCH profit-marginalia troughs oink!, irresistible course cap headfakes and Canvas viewport salvifics, the market has intuited what they wantneed, what was once only needs discourse now more suasively reframed as wantsneeds discourse, millready but who has the grain enough for bread alone teaching+learning when the engines theatrical and merciless have supply chains so stopped. #ninety [Carol Dweck, Sharon Crowley, David Noble, Geoff Sirc, “Supply Chain Pressure”]