Checking back in

Time. time time time
I've spent the last six months filling myself with theory. About the individual and society. I am embarked on a long journey, one that was expected in terms of length but reading hundreds of pages a week has left little else in terms of writing or traveling. I'm not complaining although it sounds like it. I'm warm in San Diego. Far from Michigan but also far from my recent history and connections that would seemingly add some stability to my narrative. It feels like I'm starting over again. A new academic mountain. But I've traveled through so many interesting detours and pathways that I don't want to discount or forget. How to keep from forgetting? We ended up in Ann Arbor four years ago by accident. There is very little circulation of people or ideas from here to there. And now that I'm back in this particular intellectual gyre, I am an independent island again.

I need to figure out how to reconnect on some level.

We will be in San Diego for another 5-1/2 years. I have to decide on my research. I have tens of thousands of pages to read between now and then. There is an exam at the end of the spring quarter of eight papers over seven days. Two papers per core class. There is the summer. I am an expectant father again. June 16. There is a foreign language to learn. There are classes to teach and classes to take. And on and on.

Annie is 4.
Jessica is pregnant.
We haven't decided on a name.
We are selling our condo and buying a house with a yard.
And I am reading Foucault today, and Freud last week, and Nietzsche, and John Stuart Mills, Locke, Stuart Hall, Marx, Marcuse, Adorno and Horkheimer, Vygotsky, and Lave. My mind is sharpening in some areas at the expense of its daily competence. Car keys and wallets are far from my thoughts.

I wanted to check in. To see if I could do this again. I am doing it again.

Living in the Liminal

I've entered that long period of transition familiar to transient families, now a week out of my various professional roles here in Ann Arbor as teacher, graduate student, and part-time journalist. I've started on the long-tail of preparation that culminates three years in Michigan. What that means exactly is yet to be determined but it feels like a state of taking repository narratives and trying to reconcile as many of them as I can. Lay them down in some orderly fashion for the next step. And the step is coming, although staring down the end of an empty day doesn't always feel like it. I'm still looking for closure in some way for why my latest teaching endeavor seemed to fail or at least felt very haphazard and unfinished. Was it my attempt to apply Eastern Michigan's pedagogy of first-year writing that emphasized scaffolding (asking students to grow into assignments based on learned competencies throughout the semester)? Are students at Washtenaw Community College just not ready for that and better suited for modeled writing, like here is a profile, here is an interview, here is an argument, this is a rhetorical analysis. 

The population of my class, which started with 20 students and ended with a whopping eight passes, including four D-'s, was so vulnerable. I sat down one night as I was trying to fall asleep and wrote out all the excuses I remembered from this semester. While it broached absurdity, they also revealed a population on the edge of chaos. Filtering out the authentic excuses of course takes a seasoned eye. But I somehow failed these students, I'm sure of it. So many just didn't come to class, or sauntered in 20, 30, 40 minutes late, or would leave for 30 minutes in the middle of class. You don't want to disrupt your lesson every time someone breaks the bounds of respect or the rules of the class. But I can't help thinking I should have been more preachy in the beginning about what constitutes a college student with consistent habits. I was hired by the department director, who I never saw again. Perhaps I didn't do enough to seek out advice or face time. I knew I would only be there a semester. Maybe that came through in my approach. Yet I agonized over lesson plans. I went back and forth between what I could expect of my students. I had to condense a 14-week semester into 10 weeks. Some things I had to leave out. Some things I had to compress. I'm obviously still working out that experience. 

This should be behind me. I should be focusing on my present and my future. I was accepted into a doctoral program in March that will not start for nearly six months. What to do with myself in the meantime? How much of that future do I inject in my present? How much should I be shaping my mind now to the thinking that will be expected of me? How many books on communication theory and post-human theory should I be reading. Should I be starting to formulate the kind of PhD candidate I will be? Should I be thinking of something to publish? 

Or lest I forget the other struggling writer here who is sitting on a heap of unfinished work. There are so many literary journals to read and submit to. So many circles of names to learn. And then there is the writing I wanted to do given the time (whose ideas now seem to have evaporated into air of the coming summer)? Can I write with nothing but time ahead of me? And then, can I somehow combine the two types of writing, fiction or creative projects informed by communication research, which was always my ulterior motive? 

And then there is Annie. The most important of role and the hardest. To what extent do I dedicate my future research on her behalf? Exploring the narrative of disability. Exploring the way that the autistic mind interprets and expresses, her paradigm of communication that we are struggling so hard now to reframe. We are doing everything possible, and she is working so hard everyday to open her attention to people and social cues and the way "typical" people interact with each other. She is a systems builder, creating meaning by rote and repetition of the objects around her and the environments she moves between. Her mind wants to wrap itself around what she sees, and we want to open it wider. 

And here I am without the structure of my own schedule, having to construct the architecture of the summer mind. My summer mind. A way to categorize and label all the narrative strands that criss-cross over my consciousness. 

Other categories: moving out of Michigan in six weeks. Long or short, depending on your point of view. Six weeks of intensively treating Annie's autism, six weeks of purging items and papers (3 years of my students' work) for the move to San Diego, six weeks of preparing Annie's transition into ABA therapy and early intervention pre-school, six weeks of days filled with to do lists. Even now as I write this, I am breaking away to make a list of morning activities before I leave to pick up Annie from preschool. As the to do lists grow, the space for creative thought seems to constrict -- the struggle between creative man and task-mastering robot. I bought milk this weekend that will expire after we arrive in San Diego. Time is short. And then, once we are settled and have painted the walls, cleaned the carpet, welcomed our arriving furniture and cars, wake up in our San Diego condo, then what? Two more months of waiting for school. We will literally walk back into our old home in our old neighborhood. Will three years in Michigan just have been a dream? 

On Scaffolding

Leonardo da Vinci learned engineering in order to construct scaffoldings such as the one he created to hang fresco ceiling panels in the Hall of Five Hundred at Palazzo Vechio in Florence. The scaffold is the byproduct. The microwave oven, which generates friction by polarizing molecules, is a byproduct of military radar research conducted in World War II. Sildenafil citrate, originally developed by British researchers for the treatment of Pulmonary Hyper Tension, is better known for its byproduct of treating erectile dysfunction. In Hong Kong and other parts of Asia, scaffolding is constructed from bamboo instead of wood and metal, which softens and thematizes the urban landscape. I am the scaffolding for my DNA. The scaffolding is the byproduct.

Unabashed Sucatash

Cathy Park Hong’s Dance Dance Revolution (W. W. Norton, New York, 2007) imagines a heightened collision between the language of commercialism in a futuristic, globalized world. She read from the work on Thursday at the most recentBathHouse Reading Series event at Eastern Michigan University.

The poem sequence features a fictionalized dissident from South Korea — turned tour guide — who is leading a historian through an imagined futuristic city, called the Desert, which resembles in many ways the surreal commercialism of Las Vegas.

Her tour guide speaks in a pidgin assembled from English, Korean and other dialects that spit out cliches as if they were jingles written for the occasion, such as “unabashed Succotash” and “I get laid in me Escalade, then I drink Crystal before I take out my pistol.”

The sequence of poems, which won the 2006 Barnard Women Poets Prize, bears a loose connection to Dante’s Inferno, where Virgil guides the reader through the nine circles of Hell.  This guide, instead, has on the surface sold her lyrical soul to commercialism as she touts in the language of commodities, musing on “Colgate white teeth” and her caveats for dating “even if them wining and dining me” as she leads her historian through a fictional hotels based on the cities of the world.

“Behold, the toilet!’

Hong reads without lights or special effects. Diminutive with a clear, melodious voice she riffs on commercials through the words of the guide who makes one nostalgic for the actual desert, a natural occurrence, in comparison to the commercial construction of the Desert in city.

The narrative of the historian (gender unspecified) is also interspersed throughout the collection, as he recollects his own experiences, including the Civil War in Sierra Leon, where it was safer to draw the city streets than to walk them. Though, he said, he was a poor illustrator. “Childish draftsmanship forced me to focus on smaller things,” his says in a poetic primer than I put in my own pocket for later.

“les’ toast to bountiful gene pool, to intramarry couple breedim beige population!” a celebrant offers.

Hong also read from her forthcoming book that consists of a trilogy of poems — from three imagined boom towns: an Old Western in the 19thy Century, Chengdu in president day China, and a cyberpunk city of the future.

From the first, she read three short sound poems, including two lipograms that relied on a single recurring vowel.

In the second, the narrator’s boyfriend from Chengdu works in a Rembrandt replication factory, where he paints five fake Rembrandt’s a day that are exported to a far off land called Florida.

The cyberpunk world is inhabited with “smart snow” which is nano-like computer dust that connects people without the need for computers. People can read others’ thoughts and vacation by spelunking in another’s mind.

Hong pulls from her own influences to sculpt her work in prose and verse. A former journalist, she tends to look to the world at large to inform her poetics. She spent a year in Korea interviewing defectors from North Korea in 2005. While there, she was amazed, she said, to find the Korean language so newly laden with English words, which was different from the Korean spoken by her own parents.

Still, in the bilingual household in California, she said, her family always spoke in broken sentences.

Open Mic and Sound Reading

I'm looking forward to Sunday's open mic in Detroit organized by Sean Kilpatrick. This will be my first time reading/performing a poem outside of a classroom, which is an excellent opportunity to discuss Peter Quartermain's Sound Reading essay. How should we read a poem, how is a poem heard?

Despite conventional wisdom that a poem is best read by its writer, Quartermain argues this is not the case.

Wordsworth's Cumberland dialect -- which was provincial and specific to a limited group of people -- rhymed water with chatter, July with duly, according to Quartermain. Audience expectation also determines the success and nature of a performance. But should a poem be read in the dialect of the audience? What audience is so homogenic as to share a single dialect?

"Most of us manage our vowels with consistency and precision (or we suppose) but each of us manages them differently, and if we move into an unfamiliar dialect region we may find (as a result of our listening) that our vowels begin to slide all over the place," Quartermain writes.

Pronunciations are inconsistent -- even to a single reader. Since living in Michigan -- going on 10 months now -- I've notice my a's taking a provincial turn from their audible iteration in San Diego. Like many people, I've moved around so much my original accent -- central Louisiana -- is so over-layed with other influences it doesn't recognize itself. I don't sound like my childhood friends who stayed there.

These days, I'm picking up a Michigander intonation. Words such as that and fat -- I now catch myself stretching out my a's -- that becomes thyatt and fat becomes fyatt. My o's have taken on a high stretch. Words like Pop sound like phhhaaaap. The effect might be lost in translation here, and I don't meant to make fun. My point is that pronunciation is always slippery.

Now that poetry is printed on the page, there are other variables in play. The poem may have a visual rhyme scheme in similar spellings, where July and duly could work even if we don't hear them as rhyming.

"There is a wide and inevitable disparity between how we hear the poem when we read it silently, and how we sound it, saying it aloud; the poem performed in the head is an imagined poem int he world of sound," Quartermain says. "This may be why, when we voice the poem, we can never match what we breathe to what we think we hear."

I am notoriously poor at performing my poems in class -- and prefer them to be read by a competent reader who might bring his own and different interpretation of meter and annunciation. That to me is the best treat. When you work becomes new to even you!

Response to Lucy Lippard Lure of the Local

Lucy Lippard's piece Lure of the Local discusses how the narrative history of place personifies a place -- which is the aggregation of culture, nature and history.

You can't separate a place from its narrative history, which continues to be informed by people's intersections with it. We're constantly cross pollinating places moving from one to the other.

"Each time we enter a new place, we become one of the ingredients of an existing hybridity, which is really what all "local places" consist of, writes Lippard. "By entering that hybrid, we change it; and in each situation we may play a different role.

Places are just as dynamic and organismic as people. This takes me on a slight tangent to another "place" where I spent a lot of time living. That's New Orleans. I lived there before the storm and near there during the event. When I returned afterwards, there was a period of rebuilding, which was as much about rebuilding damaged structures as rebuilding the narrative of the city. Deciding who was going to come back and who wasn't. Many newcomers arrived -- hispanic migrant workers because of all of the construction jobs, and pioneering artists and entrepreneurs that wanted to be part of its cultural recovery.

They all spoke about the unique vibe of New Orleans. The thing I kept returning to in my mind was -- that if so many people are not returning, what vibe is it these newcomers were sensing? Was it a vibe of architecture? Were there enough New Orleanians still around to share it or was it the vibe of the narrative of the city before the storm waiting to resume? For a while New Orleans was a ghost town -- its vibe was of abandonment and despair. These days six years later, it feels very much as it did before Katrina, except a little different. Less stagnant in some way. A lot of the driftwood has been shorn away. But there's still the palimpsest of identity that is comprised by a number of things: from buildings, to street names, to old homes, to people, to the creation legend of the city itself. However it changes, that deeper imprint of will always find a way to interact and interrogate its latest incarnation.

"The intersections of nature, culture, history, and ideology form the ground on which we stand--our land, our place, the local. the lure of the local is the pull of place that operates on each of us, exposing our politics and our spiritual legacies," says Lippard.

New Orleans is a cultural and artistic laboratory right now. It was completely emptied of people at one time and slowly repopulated with slightly different people who brought different stories to the city. Locals who returned had their own tales of woe. Much international attention has been focused on it too. All of this has created an outside narrative of New Orleans that has to influence life there and influence visitors' attitudes when they arrive.

That would be a great dissertation project to somehow -- without being too reductionist -- track the change in attitude and civic and social character with the change in narrative about the city. Maybe more of an artistic project. And I wonder what kind of tension is registered between the various narrative constructions and the various realities on the ground?

Calling an Audible

I just received word that the folks at 826Michigan are concerned that there are not enough good pieces by students for the book. This has been my concern as well. I received this email from the project coordinator yesterday.

"Amy and I met last week and went over lots of the pieces that have been submitted for the book. Both of us feel that a lot of the writing isn't up to the standard we'd like to see--this book is something that 826michigan as an organization needs to be able to fully stand behind. All of you have done an amazing job working with the students on editing, and have been really patient and wonderful even when the students have resisted the work. Most of the pieces that really reflect this work are the 2020 stories. Amy and I were thinking that we could use this Tuesday to gauge the students' energy levels/interest in the book, and to propose a new focus for the publication:

- using the 2020 stories as the main focus of the entire book. The publication would be centered around these pieces, as just about everyone has written one that's good enough to be published--or better. The theme of the book would be about looking toward the future, and how that connects to history, rather than attempting to create a straight up (alternative)-history textbook..
- since there are many suitable pieces in the other genres, the book would also feature a substantial appendix of "Further Readings." That way the students who *did* work to create many types of writing could be featured several times, and the most historically-focused writing could be used to support and inform the future/2020 theme."