Washington DC is lovely right now. Flowers are blooming, traffic is flowing, birds are singing and shitting on my car. Granted I haven't made it too far from my sister's house, where I'm staying and taking care of my niece and nephew while the regular baby sitter takes a vacation and gets her driver's license. This week will be a full week of 8-6ish child care and right now, as my nephew is sleeping, I have a little time to read and write and continue the work I started at Purdue to be ready for the Fall semester. He's squawking and squeaking right now and soon I will have to pick him up out of his crib and make some lunch.

Yesterday we spent the morning playing "garbage truck/man" putting pieces of torn up newspaper into a toy garbage truck, napped, made lunch and hung out at the house until 3, where we went and picked his sister up from day care and (oop. i just picked him up, started making lunch, ran around the house with an accordion.etc.(six hours later...)). Okay. Today was a long day. Had an afternoon with James drawing pictures and changing diapers then picked up Beatrix from school, had a snack, and took her to ballet. Meanwhile James and I hung out at the toy store and played with a toy garbage truck. Got Beatrix from the ballet and then went to Chipotle and fed both of them dinner. This was not fun. They would not sit down and kept flopping all over the bench and Beatrix kept getting up to get things and meanwhile I kept trying to feed James who kept laying down on the bench. After we left they both started crying, Beatrix crying over a mermaid doll that she wanted me to buy for her and I don't know why James was crying, but we made it home eventually and had a tea party / birthday party for "elephant" and waited for her mother and father to come home but both were late. It really wasn't that bad but I saw how things could turn south quickly. I made a mental note to meditate tomorrow because tonight I'm drinking beer. Overall though, it was a good day.  

Originally I was going to sit down and write an insightful and sensitive post about my first year of graduate school but I guess that will have to wait. Viva la summer!

A letter I sent to The New York Times a couple weeks ago in response to an article about disgraced public figures and their absorption into academia. I'm still annoyed about how they covered Occupy Oakland...

 

Dear Public Editor,
 

Interesting article on the trend to hire public figures who "flamed out," or however Ariel Kaminer put it. Since there were no comments, I wanted to respond in person:

 

The article seems to suggest that universities are the refuge of washed up sexual miscreants, and does a great job discussing what it's like for the school and teachers and the students who come into contact with these people. That said, many of these public figures were written about in this very newspaper, and you all did as much as anyone to ruin these people's reputations. Mr. Kaminer's article still makes them, and universities, look like fools.

Another way to put it might be that universities are willing to hire remarkable people with interesting experiences. It's a classic second chance, and an acceptance of other view points. Universities get much from them in the form of attention and celebrity status, and of course, money. I'm just saying that it's not surprising that The Times, who are just as guilty of following the heard mentality, reporting exactly what officials tell you, pick a bone with institutions that absorb people screwed over by reporters reporting on other people's reporting. As if sending a picture of your penis, or whatever, to a college girl is really that much worse than whatever we've done at some point in our lives.

While the university system is less than perfect, and headed towards changes, it's an example of a public institution that has fared reasonable well in the last twenty years....Unlike mainstream journalism, which, The Times included has, more or less, been co-opted by conglomerates of politically driven billionaires. If not directly than indirectly in the sense that its the big medias (CNN, Fox News, ABC, etc.) that drive the market for news, and how much attention you devote to each story.

In short, I'm saying you could have just as easily spun this as a good thing, rather than an implied bad thing. Or taken some responsibility for how they got there in the first place. Or better yet, provide critical analysis of things like the Moody's report on the economic state of higher education, rather than just telling us what Moody's says about it.

Maybe I'm just confused about what newspapers are supposed to do, and maybe it's in your every right to call it like you see it (or don't see it). But as a representative of academia, we do a lot of good work, and are a heck of a lot more careful than you guys about what we say and why. Who knows what the future of journalism is, but you all could stand to take some criticism yourself, beginning with owning up to how much influence you have in shaping public opinion, and how much that influence is squandered on politically driven slander.

Sincerely,

Writing a paper about Occupy and found this in my notes. An oldie but a goodie, 2011

Spring breezes sweep the green meadows.
Rains have stopped, but from the oak leaves water still drips
Suddenly a white bird appears on the scene.
He breaks the green universe of the mountain slope. 

                                                     -Po Yu-ch'ien

Ode to an Empty Jelly Jar

You were some good jelly

You laid down on my sandwiches and my toast

I liked to eat you with peanut butter when I was too lazy to cook which sometimes happens when you're living alone and are a graduate student living in Indiana

Back in California I'd probably get a burrito

Anyway, at first I thought you were overpriced 

A dollar fifty more than Smuckers or Kroger
And I thought why not try it? At least I'm not giving those assholes my money

Every time I spread you on wheat bread I could see actual strawberries

And you tasted delicious

O jelly jar, how empty you are

You were really a pretty good tasting Jelly

This last month has been a strange one. About four weeks ago my hard drive stopped working. I took it to the computer shop just up the hill from where I live and they replaced it. Unfortunately they weren't able to recover any of the data. The items of the most immediate importance, documents relating to teaching and all my school work from the fall I had luckily backed up at the end of last semester, but all my creative work from the beginning of the summer; a play, hundreds of music files along with random writings and field recordings are, at the moment, lost. I'm going to take the "dead" hard drive somewhere else and see if they can revive it, and we'll see. It was surprising how disturbing the whole process was, as someone who likes to think that he's not too attached to objects or ideas (there's always more where that came from + we imbue things with meaning, not the other way around), perhaps I'm not as free as I'd like to think. I was talking to a friend about it and he made the connection between a loss of monuments to self (selfish objects? rhet/comp is getting to me...) i.e. art objects, and a loss of parents, i.e. idealized monoliths of people we use to negotiate ideas of self. A loss of identity naturally leads us to search for new ones. Granted the last ten years of writing was not lost, but all the momentum of the last year was. Identity not as an idea, but as a real time indicator of how we spend our time (days, hours, minutes, seconds).

Two weeks ago Monday I took my cat, who had not been eating and was uncharacteristically spending her entire days under the bed, to the vet. She was diagnosed with a fairly advanced kidney failure plus and infection in her mouth that prevented her from eating. It's hard to say which lead to which, as both were feeding off each other (the vet speculates that the mouth infection exacerbated the kidney failure), but everyday of Spring Break was spent taking her to the vet, testing, giving medication, and talking to doctors. The good news is that she's feeling a lot better, her mouth infection is gone, and she's out from under the bed, but she's still not really eating all the much and there's really not much to be done about kidney's that no longer clean the blood and absorb nutrients. Twice a day I have to inject her with saline solution, which as a process means sticking an thick needle into the folds skin on  her back. Oddly, she doesn't seem to mind this nearly as much as when I was giving her oral injections for her mouth infection. In the long term, care for her does not necessarily promise a long life or good quality of life, and I've been weighing options in terms of cost, time and money. Taking care of her while considering that it may be soon for her to move on, trying to enjoy what's left and make peace with possibilities.

The third loss I'm not going to go into explicitly, and it's not a life or death loss, but is still painful. Oddly enough, my spirits are generally good, I've been exercising, meditating, eating well enough, and talking a lot with friends and family about this absurd month, which I think is probably the biggest reason that the bumminess of all this isn't sticking, the fact that I am loved, etc. School is generally good as far as the work, and teaching is generally the best part of my day, as usual. Two quotes from the paper about six weeks ago, the first from an article about education in China, and the second about the meteorite that fell into Russia. The third is from Plato's Phaedrus (line 249c):

"All the parents in the village want their children to go to college because only knowledge changes your fate."

"A meteor fell. So what? Who knows what can fall out of the sky?"

"...the things our soul saw while traveling with god...."

Sunday. Sun Day. The cat lies in it, his body a jackknife his hind legs the blade. Nothing to publicly reports aside from school work, but two poems in relation to rhetoric (the first in relation to Memory, the second on the dangers of literacy as "skill") that have been floating around in my head. The first by Kiwao Numura translated by Forrest Gander & Kyoko Yoshida, the second a section from George Oppen's "Of Being Numerous." See you,

On Prose

Then I
committed to memory everything
I felt compelled to remember

I don't know why I felt that way
but one winter night.
I was driving my car over the limits
along the highway that stretches west from Tokyo
hurrying to see my dying mother
but the traffic backed up
and I lost time
finally emerging from the congestion
a radio tower
crowned with radiant purple light
that eerily stained the night sky as I passed beneath it
my cell phone abruptly rang
I pulled over to the shoulder
and listened to a relative's voice tell me the hour of my mother's end
and then I noticed
that a large tanker truck
whooshed past within inches of my car
and that across the highway
inside the incandescently lit convenience store
a scattering of people were browsing magazines
and their heads looked like fly heads
and that on my side of the highway
inside the driving range already closed for the night
golf balls sprinkled on the grass
looked like mercury drops or something floating in the dark
I committed all of it to memory
compelled to remember
in other words
I lost at that moment the residue of my umbilical cord
and definitively tumbled into the world
or rather into the universe
in other words it was
the moment of my second nativity
and as though it were leaving me behind
a refrigerated truck whooshed past me
followed by a sport car
followed by another truck
then some of my own verses occurred to me:
there goes rust and lichen
there goes the soul's departing shadow
there goes the orgasm peddler again
up through the windshield
a few stars sparkled in the sky
and above all the radio tower
the radio tower
from whose apex
purple illuminations glared fiercely down at me
in a kind of swelling intensity
as if the radiance
ominously announced the calm of tomorrow
or tenderly announced the unrest of tomorrow
the purple singularly purple
thing I committed to memory
I felt compelled to remember 

                -Kiwao Nomura (trans. by Forrest Gander & Kyoko Yoshida)

**

13 (from "Of Being Numerous")

           unable to begin

At the beginning, the fortunate

Find everything already here. They are shoppers,

Choosers, judges; . . . And here the brutal

is without issue, a dead end.

                                            They develop

Argument in order to speak, they become

unreal, unreal, life loses

solidity, loses extent, baseball’s their game

because baseball is not a game

but an argument and difference of opinion

makes the horse races. They are ghosts that endanger

One’s soul. There is change

In an air

That smells stale, they will come to the end

Of an era

First of all peoples

And one may honorably keep

His distance

If he can.

                    -George Oppen

 

Recently I've finished (and by finished I mean stopped working on and set aside) two full length albums. If you, friend, enemy, stranger, whoever, would like a copy, send me an email with your address and I'll send you some CDs.  Regardless of the date you come upon this message, this offer stands until I remove this post. Unlike tomorrow, my brother's birthday.

Too cold to send a text message, a picture of the thermometer that read 13.3 degrees. It's cold here. 13.3 degrees at 12:08 PM. It's 8:16 PM as I write this and its 12 degrees. Week 3 of the semester. Sorry I've been ignoring you. You. It's just that I haven't found myself feeling obligated as I have felt (in a good way) towards writing in this blog. Instead, its obligations towards reading books. And writing for my classes. I haven't wanted to write any emails. And now it's time to get back to reading. Plato and some old Greeks tonight. It's fascinating! I had no idea! Though its not exactly beautiful writing, or else I'd share some of it with you, but it accumulates, as far as ideas. Like snow. Or like Lafayette, where there is no snow but two cats sitting in front of a heater and the Wisconsin game on in the background. Okay. Back at it.

I arrived in Madison around nine thirty last night. The snow had begun to fall about an hour previous to that and the roads were fine. I went out side before I went to sleep, maybe around one, and the snow was about a foot deep and falling quickly like rain and sticking to my jacket and my hat. This morning there was more of it. After some pancakes I went out with my niece and my mom ("grandma") and made a snowman out of the sticky and heavy snow. By now, the middle of the afternoon, I just woke up from a nap and the snow is still falling, the wind starting to blow a little bit. The room where I lie has the blinds down but I'm going to get up now so I can watch it from here. There. Glad that's done. More light but the condensation on the inside of the storm window obscures the details. Oh well. 

Five days until Christmas, eleven until New Years, fifteen until official duties for the next semester starts, eighteen until classes start, and nineteen until teaching starts. Obviously, if I'm writing this I've made it through the trials and tribulations of the end of the semester: two twenty page papers, a take home essay test, grading student projects, revising and rewriting the syllabus and calender for teaching next semester, three presentations, and a few shorter response papers. In comparison to some folks it wasn't that big of a final crush, and I have to admit, after getting done with the first twenty page paper (a short history of expressive rhetoric and some of the roots of English departments, going back about a hundred years) it began to feel like I was already done. The second paper (an overview of the identity approach to second language learning, plus an informal case study of a former student through this lens) was not quite as polished as the first. But it was a lot of writing, based on research that I had been doing for the previous two months or so. Neither paper felt finished but both had reached their limits as far as pages, and I was happy to be done.

Writing in graduate school is a different kind of writing than, say, writing in this blog. It's not like writing an email, and I worry that the more time I spend doing the academic work the less I will be able to do this. Both in terms of consistency of voice as well as motivation. Already, the last two months, the blog or any other kind of 'personal' writing has been a low priority, and more fundamentally, has not been a habit, which is how most of my writing gets done (as opposed to inspiration or request or whatever other reasons exist to write). Is this bad? Am I headed in a direction that I'll never come back from? I don't know. BUT I will say that what I've been studying has been absolutely fascinating, half in world of rhetoric and composition, thinking about writing, teaching and institutional ideologies, and half in the world of Second Language Studies, taking a more empirical and hard science derived approach to what language (including writing) actually is, including how we learn it. I'm not sure where either of them will lead, but have another couple semesters coursework before I need to worry about the answer to that question.

One thing though, that I've figured out, for the time being, and I might be wrong, that has been enormously helpful, has been the difference between a rhetorical approach to writing and a poetic approach to writing, and why it is so difficult to mix the two together. Simply, the rhetorical approach to writing is concerned with what writing can do in the world, i.e. how it leads to action. The poetic approach is concerned with the internal cohesion of a given piece of writing, i.e. the rules that it creates for itself independent of external conventions. James Berlin calls this the action/contemplation dialectic. Coming from poetry and spending a lot of time on the 'internal cohesion' of a poem, line, book, song, drawing, email, mixtape, etc. I find that I am resistant to thinking about writing as a way to act on the world. In doing this, we have to consider audience, their expectations and the conventions we might use to reach them. This blog, generally, has never been concerned with audience hence the six or seven hits it might get on a good day. Yet, audience consideration has little to do with, say, any satisfaction I might get from writing a post (and the motivation this satisfaction brings with it), or how I actually go about writing. I can imagine an audience, or invite an audience in depending on what, and how I write (for example, the audience for this blog is generally people who know me), but all this is apart from the actual act of writing, and audience consideration is more or less a matter of interpretation that occurs after the fact/act. 

(Look at those long sentences! A tangible example of how all this writing and reading is rewriting some of my habits. Who is this person?)

And so it's been a struggle to consolidate a poetic approach with the rhetorical approach, and produce, what I'll call Academic Writing. It's not about the writing itself in academic writing, but the ideas that develop in and from the writing. How interesting! But writing into this 'voice' will take a while and I wonder if this process will create a more versatile writer, or a reptilian intellectual. Or then again, in the spirit of the end of the world says MF Doom, "When the poles shift / it won't matter which crew you roll with / cold and stiff" speaking of which I'm going to get back to things here in wintry Wisconsin. In these next couple weeks, I'm going to post a few short essays that I wrote for the Second Language Acquisition class. Merry ifmass. Happy clueyear.

The sun is coming through the now leafless trees and landing on top of the cats, splayed on the rug on the floor in the morning. The dining room window is now exposed and as I sit there eating macaroni off wooden plates, I can look out onto the street and whoever is out there can look back. I need to get my books and folders together and head off to school in a second,  the last day of the week before Thanksgiving. It's been much more relaxed these last couple of weeks, especially this week and the next. Relaxed in terms of urgent class work, and so I have time to read and research for the two twenty page papers I have due at the end of the semester. It's strange, different subjects ranging from identity approaches to second language acquisition, to investigating the roots of composition and where it split off from creative writing, to the work I do with my class, working on discourse communities and remediating work for different audiences. All of it's different, but it feels like it's part of the same project, and each subject or class is bleeding into each other. I guess I am the constant, and naturally, it all flows through the one making sense of it. I wonder if it would even be possible to hold all these things in mind separately. 

Meanwhile, a cat gets up and walks to another patch of sunlight, WWIII gets underway in the middle east, and Jack Gilbert, the poet, dies. Here is an excerpt from "A Brief for the Defense." Have a lovely weekend:

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies

are not starving someplace, they are starving

somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.

But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants.

Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not

be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not

be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women

at the fountain are laughing together between

the suffering they have known and the awfulness

in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody

in the village is very sick. There is laughter

every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,

and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.

If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,

we lessen the importance of their deprivation.

Response to Carl Herndl

Carl Herndl’s lecture on Latour’s connection to sustainable environmental policy and academia's trouble with communicating what it does to the outside world? Carl Herndl’s lecture on the myth of Latour’s connection to reality. Carl Herndl’s lecture on bringing back reality into discourse. Carl Herndl’s lecture on bringing back reality to Latour’s discourse. Carl Herndl’s lecture on bringing Latour back to reality. Carl Herndl’s lecture on bringing Latour back to Carl Herndl’s lecture on reality. Carl Herndl’s lecture on bringing Latour back to Carl Herndl’s lecture but arriving a few minutes late. Carl Herndl’s lecture on arriving late to reality and Latour’s lecture on arriving early for Carl Herndl’s lecture. Carl Herndl’s lecture on arriving late to Latour’s lecture or at least, arriving late to Latour’s ideas in Carl Herndl’s lecture. Carl Herndl’s lecture on fact vs. artifact, anti-representation vs. anti-real, Tyler Carter vs. Carl Herndl. Tyler Carter’s lecture on Carl Herndl’s lecture on Latour’s reality vs. Latour’s lecture on Tyler Carter’s lecture on Herndl’s reality. Carl Herndl’s lecture on historicizing Tyler Carter’s reality using Latour’s construction of the modern. Have we ever been modern? Carl Herndl’s lecture on Latour’s translation of reality including the process of, the research of, the writing of reality.

Carl Herndl’s lecture on Latour’s critique of a perfectly circular reality. Carl Herndl’s lecture on unmodern ideas of reality as odd shapes and lines below the second dichotomy. Latour’s lecture on the unmodern ideas of reality as the odd shapes and lines below the second dichotomy below the two circles below Carl Herndl’s lecture. Below Carl Herndl’s lecture below unmodern ideas of reality as the odd shapes and lines accross the first dichotomy between humans and nature. Below Latour’s reality of Carl Herndl’s lecture beyond the first dichotomy we pretend to exist. We pretend to exist above the second dichotomy above the unmodern ideas of reality as odd shapes and lines. Carl Herndl’s lecture on Latour pretends to exist above the second dichotomy above the unmodern ideas of reality as odd shapes and lines.

Carl Herndl’s lecture on Latour’s Relationist Realism was difficult to understand. Carl Herndl’s lecture on Latour’s Relationist Realism was difficult to understand because Tyler Carter was unfamiliar with the ideas of Latour’s Relationist Realism. Carl Herndl’s lecture on Latour’s Relationist Realism was difficult to understand because Tyler Carter was unfamiliar with the idea that "nothing is reducible to anything else." Carl Herndl’s lecture on Latour’s Relationist Realism was difficult to understand because Tyler Carter was unfamiliar with the idea that “an entities identity is determined by its articulations with the other entities and its consequences.” Carl Herndl’s lecture on Latour’s Relationist Realism was difficult to understand because Tyler Carter was unfamiliar with the idea that "things are true because they hold." Carl Herndl’s lecture on Latour’s Relationist Realism was difficult to understand because Tyler Carter was unfamiliar with the idea that “the real is that which resists and perturbs other entities.”  Carl Herndl’s lecture on Latour’s Relationist Realism included a definition of sacrifice: to give up one thing for another thing you value more.

Today is my birthday. I am 34 years old. It is 17x2, or 29+5. When I turned 33 I felt happy to be 33. Turning 34 feels like one year away from 35, and 35 seems much closer to 40 than 33. An in between number. Not on the other side of 35, but not a comfortable distance from it. All this a strange measure, when we live in moments and make it through days and do our planning by the week. If we're lucky we look forward to the break, as I do as a teacher and a student. Yet I set my alarm to the minute, stay under the covers for an extra fifteen, feed the cats, piss, meditate, cook and eat breakfast and get on my bike, and depending on the wind and the traffic lights and the song in my earphones, get to class with a few minutes to spare. Onward.

  

Wow. I'm busy! Last night I had a dream where one of my cats encountered a skunk, sniffed its butt, and then bit it on the back of the neck. For some reason I was proud. I'm not sure if there is any meaning to be gleaned from this.  The other day I was walking down the street in Lafayette and came across a pumpkin bowl that was filled with cough drops, sitting on a stoop. But it had been raining, the the bowl was full of water, and the twelve cough drops were all floating at the top. The meaning of this too, is uncertain. Happy Halloween. I have to get back to work now. Daylight savings time here we come.

Forgetting this morning's dream I was plucking weeds.



-Hosai Ozaki translated by Hiroaki Sato, from Right under the big sky, I don't wear a hat

Sunday morning. October 14th. It's fixing to rain. Rained yesterday afternoon and then got humid, low sixties but lots of warm air. The wind is blowing hard but it's a warm wind, a weird wind bringing something, probably rain. Eight weeks have passed in the semester and there are seven left. All the busy business has continued but the pressure has subsided. I'm getting to a be a faster reader, more focused and getting more comfortable with the idea that not everything is going to be relevant, and that I can be selective as to how to spend my time, what to read and what I want to know. I'm finding a rhythm to the work, one based in the week and knowing how much time I have to spend on what portion of the week. Ah! It's raining now, and the leaves are turning colors and falling off the trees. In front of my apartment there are piles of dried leaves that crunch when we walk through them, and on the well traveled parts of the side walk it's not leaves but flakes of the leaves that have been walked over, and these don't make as many sounds.

Last weekend, the "October Break", last Monday and Tuesday off, Dara came to visit. We tooled around Indiana, saw a couple of movies ("The Master", "The Thin Red Line"), made dinner, made a pie. It's stopped raining and the sun is coming out. At four I need to meet a member of my group for Second Language Acquisition and continue to work on our presentation for Monday. I'm nervous to be responsible for presenting so much material (80 minutes) on the subject of "Young Learners and Age" which, before a couple weeks ago, I knew very little about. I guess that's what I'm doing, that is, "learning" which there's been a lot of lately. I wonder if I'll forget how to write poetry, which actually, might be a really good way to write poetry. But more so, I wonder (read: am worried) if I will lose the impetus. The rhetorical mode is all about what our words "do", which poetry is not so much interested in.

Colouring of Pigeons

I've really been into this song, by The Knife and a few other musicians and made for an opera about Charles Darwin, a scientist who discovered a really big and useful idea through bit by bit accumulation of scientific observation. Is inspiring. I believe most of the lyrics come from his journals and when the opera singer starts singing his observations of birds at the end, O! For more context, this youtube version is narrated and shows the lyrics, which I would of put here on the blog but for the Swiffer ad that comes first. In other music news, I've uploaded a short little downloadable collection of songs (of my own) to my soundcloud page that I've added a link to on the right. Happy Fall.

Discontinuing Dinner: Avoidance Methods, (Re)defining Cat Food Expediency, and the Role of Ambiguity in (un)Professional Discourse

These cats don't let me sleep. Why does it need to be this way? A precision in language cuts both ways, like a spade or what the seventh grader called it, "a garden hoe" knowing full well double speak implications and the pathologic memory of seemingly agent-free class clowns. Cuts the tools and the reader, we couldn't arrive at precision without smaller and smaller infinitely unsatisfying delineation of language. This is the work, so to speak. And so to speak what moves us forward can also like the classic argument against gun control, it's not the gun that kills people but who pulls the trigger, an uncertainty between what is purposefully and what is needlessly complicated within distinctions motivations get lost, though experience may be able to dig through the litter box what makes good "scholarship" proves no difference, Persian or American tomcat. Generosity not just in how much chicken paste scooped from the open tin but in value, nutritional and otherwise inedible, unable to understand if properties of deliciousness, habitual, or demanded by wery wery cute little furry little fuzzies.

That is to say there are expectations beyond the sun rising but every morning and it's impossible to sleep past six and maintain neutral relationships with both animals and the expectations of animals knowing they are hungry will be hungry and will continue to sniff as other, objectifying thier relation to the human ear. Through verbal cues discontinued and rarified impulses of walking softly never pressing but presence alone delineates consciousness and an end to dreaming. Big yellow eyes, yowling, or the little brown one habitually vomiting before the day begins as a biological function or dysfunctional pet owner relations that yes, we do have the power but not the motivation. The job of some to get the others to do the work or in the case of creature with no thumbs a life or death necessity spurned as motivation, not avoidance of associative necessity or a lack of affective filters. A leading ambiguity can lead into generative succession but when the methods work in the other direction meaning signifies other meanings and we are lead into the specific conclusions and to reiterate, this is the necessary work if one is to work against uncertainty towards a vertical accumulation of capital always at a moment on our way towards the next.

We're torn between wanting to communicate with animals, the expectations of the animals, and the facticity of not having ingested any cat food of the sort. That to pick up an animals and throw it off the bed will not necessarily prevent said animal from returning to the scene of instigation and picking up where it left off. As with ambiguity, that it too can be equally used and abused much in the same way as perpendicular cross-talk and it's no wonder we're still hungry or always hungry as our standards will always be in disagreement so long as questions of "is it time to eat yet?" are articulated outside of both the body and the academy. There is not a single shoelace for cats to wear and have no use for tools and those they do know such as claws and ears and cute faces are extensions of bodily desires. Ambiguity hides laziness of thought while precision disallows access, either due to mismatching discourse community or bioengineered apple-ness looks good tastes like nothing. That the scholar is able to make these distinctions between baloney and insight just as the poet delineates between genre fed cliche and experienced reality. Cats do not differentiate between dinner and breakfast but are equally persistent in both and know despite cat food breath and smallness of stature the power of presence and what engagement entails. There is just as much ambiguity in precision but it operates on a different unit dependent solely on when you ate last. To sleep well is to build a machine to feed these animals at a specific time and they make them, I've seen them, and I'm going back to sleep now.

Holy shit am I busy. One day when I wasn't so busy I asked one of my professors what the pedagogical purpose of being so busy was, and I didn't get an answer. Probably because the answer was something related to sorting, and weeding out the people who have a hard time keeping up. Twenty percent of people who begin PhD programs finish. Eighty percent drop out. It's a cold world. Meanwhile, the heat came on in my apartment. The cats are happier. I'm happier. Dear Margie, Hello, it is 10:16 PM. I need to finish another three hours of work for tomorrow and I'm already late. Bye.

The end of week four. Fifty-six weeks to go before I take qualifying exams. It's getting easier, schedule wise. On Tuesday I woke up dreaming of categories and on Wednesday I woke up from a nap dreaming of reading. The physical strain of the academic work I hadn't anticipated but I'm settling in and by nine thirty on Wednesday night I experienced the strange sensation of having caught up with the day's work. I celebrated by eating some crackers and cheese spread and a week old episode of the Daily Show. This weekend I have two full days of work, preparing for teaching, preparing for Monday and Tuesday class, starting a paper that is due next week, and grading student essays. I would be happy to get a good start on three of the five tasks, but am slowly gaining confidence that if I don't, it will be okay. 

The cats are settling in and there is one sitting next to me as I write this. The brown one stopped puking and the black one started yowling, which means things are back to normal. They don't come to greet me at the door like they used to but that's probably a function of the distance between their preferred sleeping spot under the bed and the door. I gave them a stern talking to about their duties as house cats but they didn't seem take the lecture seriously. I miss writing like this in the blog or otherwise and right now, it feels good to be doing this. I finished reading the David Mitchell novel The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, which was pretty good. About Dutch traders in Japan during the end of the eighteenth century, and mystery and intrigue. His narrative is constantly interrupted by the details and movements of the characters, and it was a book about moral conviction, its pros and cons. In the last week I've been reading, at night, in bed, Violence and Splendor by a philosopher named Alphonso Lingus. Here is one short essay from the book:

The Stone

On my last day in the Highlands of West Papua, a Lani man I came to know gave me his precious possession, a black stone some four inches long strangely marked with think white lines and thin white lines intersecting in the zones the thick lines squared off. It is oval in shape and smooth and nestles in the palm of my hand. He gave me to understand that he carried it with him whenever he left his compound to go into the jungle, and was giving it now to me to guide me on my onward wanderings. He had seen that every day I wandered about without any discernible objective or goal, and understood that I had wandered over the planet to New Guinea without any task or project.

Older white travelers would say that this stone is for the Papuan a fetish. What is it for me? It is not really a cherished souvenir of his friendship; in fact I can no longer remember very clearly what he looked like. Yet I am often drawn again to this stone; it summons me.

Cats! They came on an airplane thanks the efforts of Amy, Steven, Dara and Kamal, the pilots, baggage handlers, customer service representatives, gas station attendants, oil refineries, and coffee vendors. I left around 8, picked up Kamal and drove through severe thunderstorms to the Indianapolis Airport where the flight, coming in from Cleveland via San Francisco (the cats transferred at Cleveland) was about two hours late. But it arrived and though a little freaked out and tired and hungry, the cats were in good condition. Brought them home and the big black one got comfortable pretty quickly sicking his paw off the edge of the couch while the little brown one wanders around the apartment. And is still wandering Saturday afternoon the black one is sitting next to me. Just like old times and it feels good to see them, hold them, feed them, talk to them, and to have them here. We all slept last night in a fur/skin/blanket mound.

Essay On Change

The feeling begins before anything happens. It's a mindset that colors every word and interpretation. In a good mood, a clear mood, I don't follow the sparrow. It begins in the chest and scrunches every word that comes in or goes out.

One word for feeling is pretension, but it's a loaded word that applies to an interpretation of why the feeling exists. A better way to explain it is the assumption of the thing before the thing, ideas of what the world is without consultation.

Meditation is one way to disarm assumption and in a way, it works. Paying attention and learning to pay attention to things other than expressions of self. For every moment my attention is elsewhere, its not busy interpreting signs or generating meaning.

*

What is this relation between what I don't know and what I don't want to know? The fact that I devote time to putting off questions, playing games or making music or writing, a kind of busy work that keeps me from what?

Yet I remain on a Sunday afternoon. It's not about some incalculable distance but a few simple facts, my desire to be alive a desire beyond articulation. No words can alter its course through the body, and the best I can do is describe it.

Whereas purpose occurs concurrently with language. A hardening stance or a poem coming into focus. It is a course of action. Listening to music, consuming news, counting the number of ships coming into the harbor, all this purpose.

*

Pleasure becomes purpose but I get lost in my own feeling. There are entire worlds untouched inside us. Entire subjects we never think to mention. It's not fair to compare anything to what we have been through, but even desire can be segregated.

We perceive the one. Oneself in one's body, one's hands and one's thoughts. There is something god-like in numbers, but to think the one and the two and the three is universal, only guides us back to pictures of ourselves, standing in, our arms around each other.

I wonder what my statue would look like? Said the little girl to her father.

She held her hem at arms length and admired her shadow.

He did the same.

About that first week (see last post), it's not often that every single second of one's day one's week is an entirely new experience. That, and coming out with arms and legs and health, for the most part, fully intact. This second week was not nearly as difficult and I'm beginning to relax and get a sense of the rhythm, what I need to do and how much time I can take doing it. My students are smart and proactive, and definitely different than the academy students. They seem a lot more driven, are younger, and are better readers. It's nice to be able to assign longer readings. And the material that I'm teaching is more interesting than the Academy courses. This is part of what I came here for.

As far as classes, I oscillate between mind-on-fire and there's-no-way-I-can-finish-all-this-by-tomorrow, but it's, for the most part, completely engaging and energizing. The world of rhetoric and composition is surprisingly unfamiliar, having spent the last ten years amidst writing teachers, it's strange that most everything I'm encountering here, as far as ideas, is news. On the other hand I've gotten the impression that all my teaching experience doesn't count for much in terms of the Rhet/Comp conversation. What I was teaching, a variation on "current-traditional", is considered "bad" teaching, and so I've been experiencing, first hand, the divide between the academic world and the "real world." A quick dismissiveness of experience, and faith in a certain kind of intelligence that I'm not convinced holds up well beyond campus (see the Republican National Convention and the possibility that Romney might win, for proof of this).

But I'm going to try and keep my mouth shut, as best I can, try to keep my ego in check, and try to submit to the discipline. I trust my teachers and I trust the program. Change is hard and doubt is useful. It will take some time to settle in, and in the mean time, why not enjoy this sliver of perspective? Balurble wargle. Waddle waddle waddle. Flallulaluls. Yeeeea howwwh. Uhf. Blaburble bloggle bah. Hffft. And so ends the second week. Dara is back (in California) from her silent meditation and thank god, I missed her. The weather people say Hurricane Issac will make it's way as storm, up here this weekend. Looking forward to staying in and reading, taking care of my sore throat and resting. Happy Labor Day.

A classic is something that is always nice.

One day when I was a kid, I felt something in my ear. I tilted my head and a fly covered in ear wax came out. I expected a bean or something. Once I woke up with something in my mouth and this time, thought it was a fly. But when I opened my mouth into the bathroom sink and let it roll out, it was a tooth. Last night I had a dream about playing cribbage with my brother and he was cheating. He played five cards straight in the counting round and made a slew of points and I got so mad I stood up and left the the table. Later in the dream, or maybe in waking life, I realized that you can't play five cards straight if you follow the rules of cribbage. And thought about how if I hadn't gotten so mad and blinded my reason, I would have called him out.

Graduate school has been difficult so far. It's wonderful to have to time to read and study and discuss but the adjustment to taking classes, the schedule and relentless work load, that I'm certain will only get more intense, has left me questioning if this was such a good idea after all. Change is hard and this is going to be painful. Of course, there are worse pains and worse problems, but it will be some time before I settle into a manageable rhythm. On top of the work, there is the work of teaching, teaching a brand new course in an unfamiliar format. Fifty minutes five times a week. I told Don that I couldn't set the chairs up like I was used to doing, the rooms being so small and full. Don said, "it changes your pedagogy [these kinds of adjustments]." I've been thinking about that simple phrase ever since.

And so I'm at the bottom of the learning curve, and in some sense, slightly below it, having to unlearn six year of teaching habits while simultaneously adopting new pedagogy and approaches to teaching. The good news is that all these approaches are interesting and I think, better and more helpful to students than some of the ones I was using. And that's why I'm here, to grow into a more versatile creature. But in the mean time, survival mode is on and the walls are up. Lots more to say but there is even lots more to do, and I need to get to it. See you soon. Love,

One of my neighbors, I just learned, used to be a hog farmer (he's now studying veterinary medicine) and it made me think of one of this poem. By David Lee, from the Porcine Legacy (Copper Canyon Press, 1978). It works best when read out loud as fast as possible.

For Jan, with Love

1.

John he comes to my house
pulls his beat up truck in my drive
and honks
Dave John sez Dave my red sow
she got pigs stuck and my big hands they wont go
and I gotta get them pigs out
or that fucker shes gonna die
and I sez John goddam
well be right down and John sez Jan
he yells JAN wheres Jan shes got little hands
she can get in there and pull them pigs
and I sez Jan and he sez Jan and Jan comes
what? Jan sez and Johns red sows got pigs
stuck and his hands too big and wont go
and hes gotta get them pigs out
or that fuckers gonna die (John he turns
his head and lights a cigarette)
(he dont say fuck to no woman)
and Jan she sez well lets go
and we get in Johns beat up damn truck
and go to pull Johns pigs

2.

Johns red sow she doesn't weigh
a hundred and sixty pounds
but he bred her to his biggest boar
and had to put hay bales by her sides
so the boar wouldn't break
her back becasue Carl bet five dollars
he couldnt and John he bet
five she could and John he won
but Carl enjoyed watching anyway

3.

Johns red sow was laying
on her side hurting bad
and we could see she had a pig
right there but it wouldn't come she
was too small and John sez see
and I sez I see that pigs gotta come out
or that fuckers gonna die
and Jan puts vaseline on her hands
and sez hold her legs and I hold her legs
and Jan goes in after the pig
and John gets out of the pen and goes
somewheres else

Jan she pulls like hell pretty soon
the pig come big damn big little pig
dead and I give Jan more vaseline and she goes
back to see about any more
and Johns red sow pushes hard on Jans arm
up to her elbow inside and Jan sez
theres more help me and I help
another pig damn big damn dead comes
and Johns red sow she seems better
and we hope thats all

4.

Johns red sow wont go
out of labor so we stay all night
and John brings coffe and smokes
and flashlight batteries and finally Jan
can feel another pig but Johns red sows
swole up tight and she cant grab hold
but only touch so I push her side
and she grunts and screams and shits all over Jans arm
and Jan sez I got it help me and I help
and we pull for a goddam hour and pull
the pigs head off

and I sez oh my god we gotta get that pig now
of that fuckers gonna die for sure
and John sez what happened? and Jan
gives him a baby pigs head in his hand
and John goes somewheres else again
while Jan goes back fast inside
grabbing hard and Johns red sow
hurts bad and Jan sez I got something help me
and I help and we start taking that pig out
piece by piece

5.

Goddamn you bitch dont you die
Jan yells when Johns red sow dont help no more
and we work and the sun comes up
and we finally get the last piece of pig out
and give Johns red sow a big shot of penicillin
her ass swole up like a football
but she dont labor and John sez
is that all? and Jan wipes her bloody arms
on a rag and sez yes and John climbs in
the pen and sez hows my red sow?
and we look and go home and go to bed
because Johns red sow that fucker she died

I moved into my new place in Indiana last last Thursday and tomorrow I begin the orientation for the Rhetoric and Composition program at Purdue. It has been an amazing summer, focused on the sensory and experiential rather than the intellectual, which might make for a difficult transition this coming week as I'm plunging back into the world of academia. Next week I start teaching and taking classes but I'm told even though this week is an orientation, it will be intense, a kind of boot camp for the coming teaching and course work. Who knows. In the mean time, here are a few facts about my move to Indiana: there was a dead mouse in my toaster, 179, 451 thousand people "like" the website dmv.org and Chris Rock doesn't relate to his kids. The cicadas are sustaining a high pitched drone that isn't that annoying and I keep finding their carcases on the sidewalk. The sky is over cast and it's about a fifteen minute bike ride to get to campus.

I have health insurance now, and a spacious apartment in Lafayette Indiana. People are nice here and it's been not too hot. Last night there was some kind of festival on main street but I stayed in to apply a few changes to the collection of songs / album that I've been working on this summer. Here is one of my favorites, it's rather long and I recommend you sit down and plug in. Pause pause. It's been a very non-literary summer in the sense that I've done hardly any writing. Having Dara next to me almost twenty-four hours a day for two months meant, amongst other things, that instead of sitting on thoughts until I had a chance to express them, I just talked all day non-stop. Why write anything down if you can just lean over to the person next to you and say it? There's an answer to that question. I don't know the answer to that question. But it might take me a little while to find my "voice" again for the blog.

The Wabash river runs through the middle of the town, dividing Lafayette from West Lafayette. The county is named Tippecanoe, which you might know from the expression, "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too" which, growing up, I heard about three hundred times from different people when they learned my name. Google search. The short version is it was a campaign song for the Whig part in the 1840 presidential election. Better yet is the actual song, as re-recorded by Oscar Brand for the Smithsonian and easily found on Wikipedia. And by better I mean pretty weird. This one goes out to the state of Indiana...

 

Still in Madison. Big storms last night. Scary but I have yet to come to harm from a thunderstorm. Went swimming in the lake before and watched the clouds roll in across the lake. Approaching the end of the summer, also approaching the end of putting together a collection of songs. Mixing and mastering and ironing out kinks is takes time. My mother gave us a bag of cookies. Having a washer and dryer in the kitchen leads to more washing and drying. Like my professor said, when they invented the washing machine instead of saving people time everybody just bought more clothes to wash. We don't really need three blades on a razor. I left my hat at the old folks home and people in Madison don't make eye contact. I met my brother's new baby and finished reading All The Pretty Horses, speaking of border crossings. I'm back where I started. An excerpt:

At a crossroads station somewhere on the other side of Paredon they picked up five farm workers who climbed up on the bed of the truck and nodded and spoke to him with real circumspection and courtesy. It was almost dark and it was raining lightly and they were wet and their faces were wet in the yellow light from the station. They huddled forward of the chained engine and he offered them his cigarettes and they thanked him each and took one and they cupped their hands over the small flame against the falling rain and thanked him again.

De donde viene? they said.
De Tejas.
Tejas, they said. Y donde va?

He drew on his cigarette. he looked at their faces. One of them older than the rest nodded at his cheap new clothes.

El va a ver a su novia, he said.
They looked at him earnestly and he nodded and said that it was true.

Ah, they said. Que bueno. And after and for a long time to come he'd have reason to evoke the recollection of those smiles and to reflect upon the good will which provoked them for it had power to protect and to confer honor and to strengthen resolve and it had power to heal men and to bring them to safety long after all other resources were exhausted.

Bonjour! I am writing this email from a cafe in Le Madison du Wisconsin. New Mexico is behind us. Ahead of us is Indiana. Here until the end of this month and then into my new place in August, five years in Indiana.  Been on the road and without internet for most of the week. It's hot here! It's hot everywhere! Kansas was like nothing on earth. Iowa stormy. New Mexico is in the past. Texas was short. Oklahoma had lots of police. Missouri contains Ozarks. May contain peanuts. I haven't read a newspaper for a week and am not sure what time it is. 4:30. Metaphorically. Actually it's 5:30. My clock is off. But I did finally get a good night's sleep last night. Motel 10. Camping. Super 8. Back to a regular work day tomorrow. I hope you're well. Just glanced at the paper and crazy in Colorado. What's wrong with us?

An edited email I sent out this morning...

Hi Again C, Thanks for those songs! You sound really great. Steven is also an amazing musician. You all should play some together. Do you have wave version of those songs or any other songs? I like doing remix projects and I'd love to play around with some of your stuff. Respectfully of course, if you have waves to send. MP3s loose too much fidelity when opened and closed.  

At any rate, I'm writing from a hotel room in Soccoro right now. Dara and I are on our way back from Santa Fe, nine or ten days at her second cousin's two million dollar house back down to our trailer in Silver City. I think tonight we'll go the long way around to stop by the radio array and camp on the west side of the Gila mountains before we get back to SC. Dragging our feet. It was so easy to get work done in Santa Fe with all the space the house afforded so it's a bit of a come down to back to the hot box. 

Speaking of which, we weren't in Santa Fe proper but just north in a town called Tesuque, which is, according to wikipedia, where Cormac McCarthy lives. Didn't see him but reading the Border Trilogy for a second time around the area where they take place, is a multi-dimensional experience. Those books are so much about "nature" or place, or country side or god's indifference to us, or whatever one calls it, and so specific. I need to read Blood Meridian again. I think I was too young when I read it the first time and didn't really get it. But I remember it being a kind of surreal version of the southwest/mexico. What I love about the border trilogy are the monologues, especially in The Crossing. It's philosophy in the guise of a narrative, mostly concerning god and death. 

But it's tough down here, the weather the living and the people. I mean, I don't understand the people, not as people (people are people right?), but as an sociological ecosystem. California is sort of easy to get the hang of (slightly superficial, laid back, consistently late, good taste), but I have no idea where to start here. Apparently NM is one of the poorest states in the country and least populated. There's a kind of desert lifestyle that my body and my mind need a lot more time to get the hang of. Native peoples abound and everything is old. It makes a lot of sense to be thinking about death and eternity (see the border trilogy) in the low desert. Anywho, time to get on. Thanks for the songs and send me some waves if you can. About the play, it needs a lot more work before I put it out there. I miss the writing lab too. I actually miss teaching right now. Work. Yuck. Onward...