Below you will find a link to Snow White, an album of music I made with Ableton Live and a sampling rig over the course of the last year and half. It is sample heavy music, a "mixtape" in the hip-hop definition of the word, i.e. using so many parts of other people's music that there's no way I could sell it without getting sued (not that anyone would actually buy it). But it is an album in the sense that it has a beginning a middle and an end, runs about forty some minutes, and has been worked over diligently and thoughtfully over a long period of time. Here are the liner notes: 

A poem in music and sound, built around the following samples and musicians: Cory Russel on guitar, "III" from Born Into Trouble as the Sparks Fly Upward by A Silver Mt. Zion; Nas, Mendelssohn, Derek Fisher, Pajo playing “Horror Business”, Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow (book), Billy Holiday, Ron Artest a.k.a. Metta World Peace;; The Tree of Life (movie); “The Singing from Mt. Eerie” by the Microphones, David Pajo (again), 21st Century Flute Music, “Tititoli” from the Good, the Bad, the Ugly Soundtrack, Stars of the Lid, and Snow White and the Three Stooges; Sparklehorse’s “More Yellow Birds” + Nite Jewel’s “One Second of Love” + Cornelius’ remix of “Windy Hill” by The Pastels + Some Hendrix; D; Aric Naue on guitar, Aesop's fables; “The Skye Boat Song” and “Donald Blue” from The Best of the Black Watch (London Records, 1975),  as well as select moments from Snow White and the Three Stooges (Columbia, 1961); pieces of Roberta Fleck’s cover of “Sweet Bitter Love.”

Click on the link in orange below to be led to a Dropbox folder that will enable you to download the album in one swoop. After clicking the link look for the "Download" box at the top of the page. If you would like a hard copy send me an email and I'll send you a CDR (which will have better sound quality since the download is made of MP3s). Thanks for listening.

Snow White

**

And have a happy August. I take my big test next week, and then will leave for parts beyond, Wisconsin and California, and hopefully, after all of this is over, will not be so grumpy. See you then,

**

The True Encounter

"Wolf!" cried my cunning heart
At every sheep it spied,
And roused the countryside.

"Wolf! Wolf!"—and up would start
Good neighbours, bringing spade
And pitchfork to my aid.

At length my cry was known:
Therein lay my release.
I met the wolf alone
And was devoured in peace. 

              -Edna St. Vincent Millay

This morning I got up around eight. I woke up around six something but thought I needed to get more sleep, for my health, the idea that I could catch up for lost time, which as an idea has been propelling me for some time, trying to get back to something I had lost instead of simply moving forward. Easier said then done. This could be the story of the summer or the entire year, a series of unfortunate events that has left me in a constant state of "why me?" Planning for failure and falling into the habit of waiting for someone or some thing to wrap its perfect wings around me. The few years before I moved to Indiana I had come to an uncommon place in my life, feeling content with not just where I was materially as an adult, a teacher and writer capable of taking care of myself (and two cats), but also as a person who had figured out, though a long course of trial and error, how to maintain a reasonable level of health and happiness.Yet now I am not so sure I actually had any answers, and am thinking this forced recalibration might be a good thing in the end.

These days I am tired of myself and my stories. So bored of eating my daily meat cake of anger and sadness. Do I have a right to be unhappy? I suppose, but then there is the rest of the world: my students and my studies, writing and hiking and making jokes with friends. There is loneliness and then there is the fan spinning above, the little clicking noise it makes and Jinx sleeping on one end of the couch. The noises of birds, bugs, and cars as they drive down Main. These things in the world that when I take care to see clearly shifts the attention away from my self, making a positive or negative sentiment just one more thing to set on the coffee table (or the internet) for display. On Saturday my uncle had a heart attack and by Sunday evening the date for his double by-pass heart surgery had been set. He's my father's only brother and an important person in my family and to me. His health has not been good for some time, living with diabetes and its long term impact: near blindness and a set of missing toes on one foot. But he has been there for us over the years, one of the funniest people I know, and especially since my dad went away, been looking out for my brother and sister and I in various ways for the last fifteen some years. At my dad's service in February there was no other person in the world I wanted to be sitting next to more than my uncle Jim.

So on Monday morning I cancelled my appointments and drove down to St. Joseph's in Lexington. I met my cousin outside the hospital and we sat with Jim in the afternoon. My sister flew in around five, and more family came until it was time to go to bed. I volunteered to stay with Jim through the night (we all did, but I insisted) until his surgery the next morning at 6AM, and everyone came back and saw him off before the procedure. The messages the doctors had been telling us were mixed, and we were all worried. Another Carter family medical emergency, and at this point we all know the drill. Jim was distressed, understandably, to be put under when there was a real possibility he would not wake up. It's hard to imagine what this feels like. But the surgery went well, and yesterday, Tuesday, by 6PM the news was good: his heart was working, though at reduced capacity, and he was waking up. It will be six to eight weeks before the doctors will know if his heart is strong enough for him to lead his normal, everyday life. So, for the first time in a while, the worst possible outcome did not happen. I had forgotten that was possible while I was dwelling deep in my wounded ego. Prelims are in six days and I'm glad that instead of going to a funeral and wondering what I could have done better, all I have to do this week is study rhetoric, teach a few students, play some softball (the tournament begins this week), and do some laundry. Onward,

On Friday after work I went up to Chicago. I met up with Nate in Hyde Park and we drove up together to Cole's art opening, standing around the gallery, chatting with random art people, and later, having a few beers at a bar near downtown, we capped the night off in Cole's studio before heading back down to Nate's. It was a nice break from the monotony of studying (and now prelims are only a week a way and to be honest, last week I kind of slacked off). Saturday morning Nate and I got breakfast and walked by the lake and around the neighborhood. Our conversation centered around a discussion of Orange Is The New Black, which both of us had recently been watching, like the good Times readers that we are, bending some of our interests to the cultural Zeitgeist/hype machine. Regardless, I've been enjoying OITNB (as it's abbreviated) and in particular have really been into the Piper Chapman character both for the obvious reasons (charming, beautiful, entertaining) as well as how her character has, to my mind, been a vehicle through which to critique the selfish desires that can co-exist with "good intentions," and illuminate the unseen consequences of a particular American lifestyle. Or to put it in a more narrativistic way, I read the personal change that Piper undergoes during the first fifteen or so episodes as a kind of karmic reckoning for a particular mode of charm that usually goes unchallenged.

Some of the first conversations Piper has in the show are with Officer Healy, who tells her that she is like him (a white, seemingly educated and middle-class person, "normal," etc.). Later an attractive female guard tells her the same thing, that the only difference between her and Piper is that Piper got caught, implying that most everybody is guilty of criminal activity but only some are punished. Piper herself, early on, makes statements that coincide with this outlook, feeling like she didn't belong in prison with the other inmates who not only looked different than her, but acted in ways indicative of their less privileged backgrounds (for more on this idea, see Bourdieu's Distinction: a Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, an empirical study which suggests, amongst other things, that people from working class backgrounds tend to favor the literal pleasures of "base" desires; cheap beer, sex, action movies, as opposed to the deferred pleasures of contemplation; conceptual art, literature, and opera that are favored by those in the upper classes. These specific aesthetic preferences mix together more now in 2014 America then they did in 1979 France, but Bourdieu's point is that our preferences, however cleverly masked, are shaped by economics more so than the intrinsic qualities inherent in a given form of entertainment or person. To put it another way, the pleasure of distance, deferment, or something like irony, is enjoyed from a position of relative power). 

As Piper establishes herself inside the inescapable walls of the prison she relies on her physical desirability to attract "protectors," but also uses her wit and charm to defer the inevitable problems that come with assuming one's intentions, rather than our actual impact on those around us, are what matter. Early on (spoiler alert) she offends Red, the inmate in charge of the kitchen, by spouting a fairly typical complaint: "the food is terrible," and thus, stops being given food. Eventually she does Red a favor, concocting a soothing back rub (since Piper was getting into the business of making high-end lotions before she got sent to prison) and the episode is resolved. This is one example of the kinds of interactions she continues to have, which as the first season progresses, shows her learning that the rules of prison are considerably different than the rules outside of prison. As the show depicts it, a person's status in prison depends solely on the materials at hand. One cannot use their social status to protect themselves (i.e. I will sue you) or trade in future shares (I'll just put it on my credit card) to acquire what one needs. That if you want something of material value you need to have something of material value on hand to trade for it. Another inmate gives Piper the ingredients for the lotion because the inmate is in love with Piper. Thus while Piper is able to get out of Red's bad graces, she creates another problematic relationship along the way.

Piper continues this trend, of solving one personal problem by creating another one, pissing everyone off along the way, and so Piper continues to defer the referendum on why she is there. This chain of events continues up until the last episode where (I'm serious: spoiler alert) another inmate is going to kill Piper and Piper, having alienated herself from everyone around her, has to deal with it herself. The experience changes her and we see a shift in how she relates to people, her prison experience, and the outside world. The violence she engages in to save her life causes her to reexamine her self-conception, and that maybe, in fact, she is not as "normal" as she thought she was. As season two progresses we find Piper at a kind of peace with the fact of her incarceration, which, as I interpret the show, comes from the viscerally induced realignment of her identity. That indeed, she too is a sinner, and is not above her responsibility to others; regardless of her other virtues. More politically, the kind of deferment that Piper practiced, masked by a sheen of middle-class health and common sense, is widely accepted in the States: taking out massive loans to go to school, starting a company that doesn't turn a profit for its first twenty years (Amazon), justifying the purchase of eighty dollar cheese because you work at a non-profit, or assuming that when we run out of oil scientists will find us another power source. Deferring the consequences of our pursuit of happiness until another time, which as some would argue, is what capitalism and Democracy as we know it has been founded on from the beginning.

One thing that OITNB does really well is depict the cultural and material practices of "liberals," Piper's fiance as a prime example. From The New Yorker to Whole Foods, a wish to do good awkwardly aligns with the practice of defending one's economic turf. Or more simply, that "success," i.e. winning in a capitalist society, always comes at the expense others. I'm definitely not above any of this, and arguably am a prototypical example of this kind of person, one who reads The New Yorker and, say, works under the pretense that if I work hard now I'll be rewarded later. But as as I've been watching the show these are some connections I've been making. Nate and I talked about all this stuff as we walked around Chicago yesterday, and while my reading of Piper above is largely literary. I am charmed and awed by Piper, and want her to do and be well, yet on the other hand am bothered by how she uses others to get her through. Alex, her ex-girlfriend, calls her out on this at one point towards the end of the first season, accusing Piper of doing anything, using anyone, to avoid being alone. But in the end Piper's change, a real and significant one that ultimately leads her to a better way to live and be with others, happens because she runs out of options. Abundance is a good thing, but sometimes it keeps us from moving forward. At any rate, it's Sunday afternoon and I think I'm going to take a nap now. ttyl.

The last week has been unusually cool for the middle of July. Mid-60's and overcast, no rain and nights that require at least a hoodie when the window is open. On Friday evening, sitting at my dining room table, playing cards with a couple friends, I unsashed the window curtain to find, sitting in the middle of the gold/brown fabric was a big black beetle, probably a cedar beetle, or as the entomologists on the internet call it, a Sandulus niger. It wasn't bothering anyone so I just left it (after taking a picture and posting it to instagram). Slow and seemingly innocuous. Vague memory of luck and scarab beetles and the story that Jung told in relation to synchronicity, about finding a golden scarab knocking at the window when his patient was talking about a dream about a golden scarab. This morning, Sunday, I picked up a pile of worn clothes to put into the laundry basket and found the beetle sitting there. I got an empty jar from the kitchen, covered the beetle with the jar, and slid a piece of junk mail between the beetle's feet and the wooden floor. I carried him/her downstairs and showed it to my neighbors who were sitting on their porch. I lifted the jar off the piece of paper and the beetle sat there with us as we chatted. Eventually I took it accross the street and released it into the dirt beneath a row of hedges. Beetle just sat there and so I nudged it along with a stick and it started moving and burrowing into the dirt and I left it there. 

I went back and sat with my neighbors but continued thinking about the beetle, wondering why it was in the apartment and what it was doing underneath the pile of dirty clothes. With the unseasonably cool weather maybe it was warmer under the pile, or maybe the beetle liked hanging out in my apartment? Or maybe it was friends with those two ants who were hanging out on my stove in June or maybe it was lost. Or maybe it knew exactly where it was and what it was doing. It doesn't matter really, but as I was sitting there, I wondered if I should have kept the beetle. If it wanted to be in my apartment maybe I should of let it be there. Who am I to presume that a big black beetle (with a greenish tint) is better off underneath a shrub then underneath my dirty laundry? Maybe this beetle and I were destined for each other and I speculated on possible long-term scenarios, keeping the beetle in my little flower garden on the porch or in a glass tank on top of the mantle so we could continue our story.

Tangentially (eventually), I saw the movie Snowpiercer last night and really enjoyed it. It's science fiction, about a train that travels around the world carrying the last living people on the earth. A silly premise and a long story, but the movie is also thoughtful critique of class warfare, a surreal and intense action movie, and a kind of Buddhist parable (the director is Korean but the actors are mostly American). I bring it up because it also offers some insight on narrative and drama, suggesting that aspiration couched in the realm of improvement (self, social, or otherwise) more or less just keeps the train going. The revolutionaries can overthrow the dictators but eventually, and inevitably, all we're doing is starting the story over with a different cast. Constant jostling for power on both a macro (free markets) and micro (an argument between two people) scale is another kind of entertainment, something to do for and with each other as we speed towards the end. Of course these stories of success and failure are what give our lives meaning, and meaningful lives are what we (sorry to generalize all of humanity) generally aspire to live. But meaning upon reflection, and thus purpose, remains contained entirely within language. I don't know if this is good or bad. On the one hand it's silly to fantasize about the beetle and how it and I may be connected in a deep cosmic way. Yet on the other it gives me a kind of pleasure when I do. It is nice to feel that someone has put me at the center of a story. Alternatively, on neither hand, jumping off the train (of language, humanity, etc.) is certainly not a life path I've been encouraged to pursue (and I don't mean suicide by "jumping off the train"). At any rate, it's a thoughtful and entertaining movie. I'm going to stop here and go to bed. I'm going to the dentist tomorrow. Goodnight.

**

Postscript: Oh, and one more thing. Friend/Poet Matt Turner has some poems on Dennis Cooper's blog. Matt was living in China for the last five, six some years and now is back in the States. Here is the link, and here is a very brief excerpt:

Some say we should enjoy the rain, and our soaked boots. I don’t have an opinion on it.

Saturday in Indiana. A little past noon. It's been raining this morning, nothing serious, but the cooler air feels good and Jinx and I are sitting on the couch. In a minute or an hour or so, whenever I get done writing this, I'll work on a practice prelim answer to keep pace with the study group and make new material that hopefully I can use towards the real prelim come August 4th. Prelims work like this: there is a 24 hour component, five questions, each limited to 1200 word answers, and each question is from one of the core classes. Then, after a day break, we're given 7 days to write a 20ish page paper on a topic chosen by the department. It's a nine day task and begins in about three weeks from now. Since the middle of June I've been studying, rereading the important texts and reading the things I hadn't read during the semesters, taking lots of notes, thinking ahead to how I'm going to answer prelim questions, and trying to build a workable framework for each class in the sense of understanding the movements within, say, rhetoric from Ancient Greece to the Romans, or composition/rhetorics development during the Enlightenment and how it's been carried over into higher education in the U.S. It's a lot of work and stressful.

And while I don't want to say, at the risk of sounding ungrateful, that it's been miserable during these last four weeks, it kind of has been miserable. But this is what I've been told to expect, that studying for prelims is not fun, and like most of the things that I've been told by people in the program who have been there (done that), they're right. It's hard to imagine that sitting in a chair or in a library reading and writing on a sunny day in July could be stressful but, well. Or the very act of studying, as opposed to say, writing what one already "knows," is a kind of a lowering, and so to hang out all day with the idea that I don't know enough about, say, the transition from 18th Century rhetorical treatises to transcendentalism or Deluze's Control Society in relation to Derrida's theories of deconstruction put me in a constant state of not being quite good/smart enough. This wears on me, and while maybe some can maintain a degree of confidence in the face of daily self-immolation, I find the whole process demeaning and disorienting. As most people say after prelims, they didn't want to read or pick up a book for a while after the ordeal had passed. So tired, is the claim.

But I understand that it's a "hoop" (as people call it) to jump though, and on the plus side I get to reconsider and relearn this material in a more concrete way. If I'm ever in a position where I am called to teach a class on, say, post-modern philosophy, I'll be in a better position to do this. Um, so yeah. That's what I'm doing these days. In less bitter news, after the day's work (including teaching, which, thank god, puts me in touch with human beings) is done, I've been taking evening hikes along Burnett's Creek, sometimes solo and sometime with friends. A canopy of trees covers the valley and at night all the fireflies come out. They don't land on me, or bite or eat my food. And when the sun sets all of a sudden they're everywhere, like I'm walking through a city at night. I wonder if they can distinguish the different hues of each other and read them as we read people walking down the street. Which lights call us out of ourselves and which don't? Now I will eat some lunch and get back to studying/writing/Summer.

I've posted four tracks (an EP as they call it) to Soundcloud. If this appears to be an effective way to distribute music then soon I will post the album that I have ready to share. About these four tracks, they are from the Spring, mostly reworkings of compositions I made with Cory and Eric. The first track "Daniel" is actually the third track, but it seems to be the one people like best so maybe that is the best place to start. Also I changed my music name to tyty, since the death and prison reference in the old moniker didn't quite fit. Thanks for listening. Here are the links to individual tracks, to listen to or download:

Daniel
Somnambulations (with Cory and Freddie)
My Corpse on a Futon
Crazy (version)

Here is the Link to the "playlist" so that you can stream through all four. If you'd like a hard copy / CD send me an email. And last, this is music that sounds best loud, in headphones or whatever. Hope all is well,

loo
king
at
the car
pet
and the

chair

 Ryonji

      An aesthetic of perimeters emerges: the shoji screen slides
open and disappears, migrating cranes. The rocks perform their
heuristics in freshly tamed gravel; borrowed scenery looking
on, and over the oiled earthen wall. Her conversation drifts
laterally.

        If I entered here, my heels would not break off their
monologue with the stage. So would present love be displaced
by longing.

                -Forrest Gander, from Deeds of Utmost Kindness

The river is high but it hasn't rained much. Indiana summer. The weather been just about perfect for the last three weeks, fairly dry but the creek was overflowing when I tried to cross it the other day. I'm not sure where the water's coming from. Temperatures in the seventies and sunny. During the last couple days there have been two black ants hanging around my kitchen, and I can't decide if it's the same two ants or if they only send two ants at a time. There is a single dried oat, spillage from some oatmeal, stuck to the stove and they seem to like hanging out around it. A couple cool dudes hanging out on the stove stuffing themselves. I caught one of them by a drop of mango juice when I was making lunch today. He seemed happy and relaxed.

Lazy days in Indiana sort of and sort of not. After one glorious week of no teaching responsibilities, the end of the Spring semester, I'm back working at the OEPP as a summer tutor, writing in the mornings and early afternoons, and finding distractions in the form of company or media or music or all of the above in the evening. Next week I start studying for preliminary exams and the summer will become more complicated. I planted some flowers on the porch and am the pitcher for my softball team. It's fun because I get to touch the ball every time instead of touching my knees or wiping my forehead with the back of my hand in the outfield. I have to admit that I like performing as a pitcher. Throwing the ball, catching it, throwing it, catching it, etc.

The reason that I'm writing is to just say hello. All the writing I've been doing has made me wonder where you are. Do words conjure people or is it the other way around? There's a bright moon almost every night in the Indiana sky. Only a few clouds, and the sun doesn't set until 9:45. Jinx pretty much sets repeatedly all day, usually on the blanket on the porch but right now he's on the couch with me. I have to admit that I like small town living after spending the last fifteen some years living in variations of cities. There is nothing here to buy but that's okay because I don't have any money. Forthcoming on this blog: about an hours worth of new music, stuff that I have been working on since last summer and over the course of the year. Once I figure out how best to put it out there. Anyway. I hope you're well.

Since Spring began I've been watching the tree next to my porch. I chose a single bud, one bud in from the tip of the branch, close enough to reach out and touch, and have been paying attention to how it's been changing. First, it was a red cluster, a little wound ball, and then the cluster began to peel away from itself and the red tips of leaves began to appear. The tips started to separate, turn green, and grew out into the beginning of singular leaves. I lost track of the bud for a week or so and yesterday looked for it, but it was no longer where I thought it should be. Its branch had moved lower by a foot and a half, the weight of the branch's leaves bending it closer to the ground. Of course, this must be the same for every thin branch, sagging from the weight of its leaves. I'd never noticed this before, that the shape of a tree in Winter is different then in Spring. The trees in winter stand straighter and more erect, and we can see through their branches and wish for warmer weather and imagine what it will be like when it finally comes. And it has come, but in my mind the image of a tree is still the one made from cold air and contraction, inward and stiff. I can no longer see the shape of the tree, its parts, but instead see its color.

Across the street in big sloped yard of the victorian on the hill yellow daffodils are coming up. The tree next to my porch is starting to grow its leaves. Yesterday in this same tree I witnessed a cardinal, a woodpecker, a flock of little brown birds, and a bluish grackle like bird all hanging out and twittering at each other. Spring feels so good after such a long winter and last week, after passing through a number of deadlines, has brought the end of the semester. Three more weeks + a week of finishing up papers/projects/grades/evaluations for classes and soon it will be summer. Did I mention that it feels good? Yesterday I presented at my first conference, a paper connecting David Hume, Buddhsim, and making a case for the pedagogical functions of "expressive" discourse. I ran out of time and didn't actually get all the way through what I wanted to say but it was a good experience. Next time I'll make sure to time my dramatic reading of academic prose more carefully. On Friday I finished a midterm for the empirical class and on Wednesday wrote a response to the Rosi Braidotti's The Posthuman and now all I have left to do for Post Modern Rhetoric is write one more page and an end paper that doesn't need to be researched, as it's more of a response/synthesis paper of all the books that we've been reading. All this to say, the semester's end is in sight. 

This week I have to read student drafts for their Discourse Community reports which under such a short deadline (10 papers in 24 hours to be ready for Tuesday conferences) is kind of stressful but all the hard work and hurdles of the semester have for the most part, been traversed. The other day I was meeting with one of my students at the OEPP, a graduate student in the material sciences, and out of our conversation, uncovering problem words and sounds, and collecting them into a sentence, we arrived at the following: "We can imagine the image of a very ugly diamond in our minds for months." Sometimes longer. A couple weeks ago when the leaf buds in the tree next to my porch were beginning to appear, I touched the one closest and wondered if that little bud would remember, if it would grow more or less, faster or quicker, and I looked at it today and it seems to show no difference but my eyes are big and if there has been a change its too small to be seen.

Summer is going to be busy but pleasant. For starters, Indiana summer is nice and this apartment, with its light and doors and air coming through is good place to work. I'm flying out to Portland as soon as the semester ends to visit Aric and his family, and then flying to New York to see my brother and his family, along with my New York friends that I haven't seen for three or four years. When I get back I'll have about a month to work on writing, a new project born out of the reading I did last month, putting together a manuscript and with my remaining time hopefully writing out the dregs of the fall, of trauma revisited one last time, extending my memory to the page and letting the page do its archival work. Writing stories like I'm putting away winter clothes, and maybe I'll need them again or just move back to California. Work wise I'm tutoring at the OEPP, the perfect summer job in that I don't have to teach but meet one-on-one with students. No grades to drag on the horizons of conversation. But the main event is studying for prelims, the big test that I need to pass so that I can get started on my dissertation, and those come at the beginning of August and stretch towards the middle. All this I'm excited about, and I'm also on a softball team. Carter, #5. Got a glove the other day and this afternoon I'm going to go play catch. Yah.

Once when I was eleven I told my dad that I was "bored." It was a Sunday afternoon. He was laying on his bed watching This Old House and on Sundays us kids would head back to Madison for the school week. He would drive us to the parking lot of Club 18, a biker bar located outside of Mt. Horeb, the halfway point between Mineral Point and Madison, and we'd find my mom waiting for us in her grey Buick Skylark. Every week it was the same, leave for Mineral point on Friday and come back to Madison on Sunday. Bored was the best word I could find, that I would go to school for a week and then come back to the farm for the weekend and it all seemed the same and nothing seemed to change. And even now its hard to pin down exactly what was bothering me, but it was more an existential pain of being without purpose, a fear that regardless of where I was or who I was with this odd, empty feeling would always be there. And I walked into the room and said, "I'm so bored," and started crying and couldn't help it, and I layed down next to him and he held me a while, and later we all got in the car and drove back to Madison.

I've told this story before. I wrote it down in the blog about seven years ago. I write it again today because today is one of those days where I'm feeling that odd, existential sadness. Maybe this is Spring, when the cold turns to warm rain and all day it's been grey. Low pressure weather systems carrying invisible change. Spring time is sleepy time, some of the Chinese students I've been working with keep saying, that we need more sleep and feel more tired when Spring comes. I think this is true. But I've also been thinking about the last couple months, about not writing and taking a break from telling stories, that since my dad died, and the initial waves of grief and shock and weirdness have passed, I've been oddly happy. Not happy like whee, this is fun! happy, but happy like free. Like wow, I can't believe it's over. Happy like relieved, that my dad and everyone can finally move on. And it seems like a space long occupied has been freed up. Like an old sofa that I'd spend years sitting on has been taken away, and there's an empty spot, an outline and a few dust balls where it used to be.

One night, three or four days after he died, I was going through the pictures I keep in an old shoe box, looking for pictures of him for the memorial service that my sister and brother and I were planning. I pulled out the pictures of him that I had and set them in a pile. Along the way I couldn't help but notice all the pictures of myself, my twenty year old self in Japan, my twenty-three year old self in Seattle, my twenty-five year old self in Providence, my twenty-eight year old self in California, my thirty-one year old self still in California; and thought about how for my entire adult life it's felt like some sad secret I've had to carry around. That because it was difficult to explain, that he was both alive and dead at the same time, I simultaneously had a right to grief and no reason to grieve. Jan told me, in a conversation a few days after his death, that he wished I didn't feel like it was secret, that I felt like I could talk to other people about it, and did on occasion. But I never talked about it with my family. And I kept waiting for him to die, and kept waiting to have those conversations about him and his absence, about growing up and missing him. I am thirty-five years old.

To put it another way, now that his death and all this has finally surfaced, and seemingly, at least in these initial months, now that we all can move on, I'm wondering how to do so when my entire adult architecture, especially in terms of writing, has been built around the idea there is something wrong. It could not have been any other way that they way its been, but if I'm not running for my life then why am I running? If there is no longer a darkness to skirt around, then what will be the mystery? If I am free to say what I need to say then how can I be lonely? There is a river and then there is the river's bed. Something like that. Today I came home and said to no one in particular, "I'm so bored." and I sat down and cried. And I don't know why. But I feel better now. And I miss you.

On Friday it was in the sixties but today it's fallen back into the high twenties. When I went out this morning to move my clothes from the washer to the dryer (having forgotten to do it last night) I thought I saw a few errant snow flakes flittering around and on Monday night it's supposed to officially snow. Today is the last day of Spring Break, a break from classes spent catching up on work, sleep, and attending the College Composition and Communication Conference (the 4C's or CCCC when one speaks the lingo) in Indianapolis. Six more weeks left in the semester and tomorrow I'm subbing for a friend all week long. His class begins at 7:30 in the morning so I'm going to have to get up earlier this week. I'm not looking forward to that but am looking forward to subbing for a 106i section, a composition course for international students that I was thinking of teaching at some point while I'm in graduate school. This week will be my trial run.

It's been a while since I've written in the blog, relatively speaking. This lack of public processing has been intentional for the most part, deciding that I wanted to let the energies and conversations of the last couple of months do their thing without interference from my meaning making / story telling tendencies. Observation of the thing changes the thing and it had been a while since I let anything just be. Of course the gap in writing is also a response to a shifting attention, and I've been more locally oriented lately, towards school and my future as an academic. This recent conference serving as a good example, the first time that I actually physically enjoyed being part of Rhetoric and Composition. I spent two nights and two days there, mostly attending panels. On the first day I listened to some folks who used corpus linguistics (the study of word frequency) to investigate the question of students shifting from written to oral language (or in other words, the question of if "text speak" is infiltrating academic prose...answer: not really), next I watched a movie about adjunct/contingent labor at universities and listened to the discussion that followed it, then I attended a panel on Chinese rhetoric that poked holes in stereotypes about "direct" and "indirect" communication styles (the prevailing stereotype being that students from Asian countries are more "indirect"...which is not necessarily true. The researchers suggested that direct and indirect communication styles are more about power dynamics than any inherent feature of a language or culture), and last I tried to go to a panel on recent trends in teacher mentoring but went to the wrong room and listened to people speak about technology and race. At that point I was too tired to listen anyway.

The next day I went to a panel on mindfulness practices in the classroom, followed by a panel on crossovers between creative writing and composition, which was helpful because I met somebody who knew something about empirical studies on creative writing, which has been a recent interest of mine and there's not too many people out there doing that kind of work so was glad to make a connection; then I went to another panel about adjunct/contingent labor, and the last panel I went to was about "cultural rhetorics," the world of R/C growing to include rhetorics beyond the Greek and Roman (thanks post-modernism!). I learned a little bit about Chinese and Japanese rhetorics, the idea that we have to look through these approaches to understand them rather than judge them with a set of outside criteria. At that point, while there was more to do and see and say, I decided to get back to Lafayette and start preparing for the week. Anyway, all that is to say it was exciting and fun and full of generally nice people talking entirely about rhetoric and composition. Which is why I wrote that it was the first time I physically enjoyed R/C. Positive associations felt in the body (of smiles, eyes, handshakes, cigarettes, being away from home and the bonding that takes place between others in a similar situation, a massive group "high" of indoctrination) that ultimately form habits. Another reason I came back before the conference was over was that I was beginning to feel like I was part of something. 

And so I wanted to write today to swing things back the other way, a singular voice speaking in grey words over a black background. The crux of the entire "problem" with becoming an academic here, that if I commit to R/C fully maybe I lose my connection with poetry, and what has been a fairly fruitful process of introspection? I don't know, but most everybody tells me who has gotten a PhD that the creative writing thing goes away in the process. I don't know, but I'll keep writing, poetry or not. Speaking of which I'm going to get on with the days work, beginning a short paper for class that I think is going to be a post-modern music review, applying Foucault and Althusser to the new Bill Callahan record, and then getting started on the mid-term evaluations for the OEPP. Onward. Happy Spring.

Actually, you know what? I don't think the story I planned to tell in the previous post is going to be a public offering at this time. Not for any other reason than I don't feel like writing about it at the moment. Maybe all the talking, people, love and kind conversations that have taken place in the last three weeks has burned off the immediate impetus. Or maybe I'd just rather be looking ahead. Speaking of which, the reading that I was going to join a month ago is happening again, in a different incarnation, come this Thursday. My first poetry reading in three years. Very exciting, through I'm still not sure what I'm going to read. I prepared some things a month ago about love-ish related things (since it was going to take place the day before Valentine's Day) but now looking at those pages again I'm having second thoughts. As of today I've been leaning towards a prose poetry medley (kind of like a fruit medley but with prose poems instead of grapes and melon balls), and will make some decisions about it tomorrow. Regardless, here is the flyer (apparently Jared is from Indiana), and oh, it seems like Spring is coming. 

Three weeks ago Tuesday, February 11th, at a little before midnight, my father passed away. He had been sick with a nerodegenerative disease called Pick's disease, a kind of dementia associated with loss of speech, memory, and early on-set. He was diagnosed in December of 1998 at the age of 54, and by the end of 2004 most all his language and human-ness, including the ability to recognize other people had dissapeared. It had been close to ten years since he said a word, eight years since he'd been outside, four years since he'd stood on two feet, and since then, he's been confined to a bed asides from when the nurses would take him out and set him at a table with the other speechless old men. In this sense of decay it is with great relief that his story has finally come to an end. In another sense its impossible to know if he was suffering or what possibly could have been happening inside of his mind during the last ten years. It's comforting to think that with language comes judgment (or is it the other way around?), and without words from which to create categories of self or time, one moment is as good as the next. Or at the very least, that successive moments are not compounded onto each other, i.e. memory; human misery more a product of our relationship to suffering than the suffering itself. Regardless, my father's death has brought an odd mix of sadness and relief.

**

Over the next couple months I plan to write the story of the last three weeks + digressions. Granted I am busy with school and teaching, so it won't be an intensive project like the story I wrote over the summer. One caveat: I'm writing from a single perspective, and do not make any claims that this perspective is shared by others, or that it is the "right" perspective. His official obituary, that my family and I wrote, can be found here. As much as I would like to write a long story about "who" my dad was, the fact is that he has been under the spell of Pick's for my entire adult life, and frankly, I didn't know him as a person. So as, under the cliche directive of "write what you know," the story continues through the strange and ill-defined parameters of blogging. Onward...

(it will actually begin at 8:30 and i think i'll be reading towards the tail end of this thing...come one come all)
(update: due to circumstances i will actually not be reading tonight. bummer. but i hopefully in a month i'll read at the next one)

At the bus stop today I noticed that there were some puddles mingling with the ice on the sidewalk. It rained heavy on Saturday and got cold again. Ten inches of snow due tomorrow evening. But I was wondering how there could be water on the ground when the weather machines tell us the temperature is below freezing. Maybe these numbers are more of an average, and the "real" temperatures are more dynamic, where the sun hits or where the feet and the tires keep coming through. That it might be 26 degrees in one spot, and 34 a few inches away. And then an hour later, maybe this shifts, because the sun moves or traffic gets redirected. All that is to say that maybe the temperature is not a fact, but an approximation, and while it means something to us, paying attention to the moment to moment of where we are and what we are doing is another way to consider the weather. The colored temperature maps on our screens make it look like we're all of one thing, but maybe our sense experience isn't so universal. 

These thoughts vaguely related to the reading I've been doing in post-modern rhetoric, thinking about "modernism" and the almost impossible-to-imagine idea that there was a point in history (pre-modern, pre-Enlightenment) when ideas of universal truths weren't what we were going for. Pre-science, pre-searching for facts and 'better' ways to do things. Books like Stephen Toulmin's Cosmopolis and Heidegger's Parmenides suggesting that it hasn't always been the case that us humans have been looking for answers to questions of why and how. That history hasn't always existed, and we haven't always wondered where we came from or where we are going.

"In a play propelled by macho decision and action, the idea that there is an order of success that can come of knowing the right moment to go with the flow is appealingly counterintuitive—if you can't create the right moment, you'd better be able to recognize it when it comes."

            -Joanna Biggs, writing on Chang-rae Lee's On Such a Full Sea

**

Ugh. School started this week and by started I mean really started, like, work has started to pile up and there's not enough time to do it. A big part of my coping strategy when it comes to this kind of stress is to deflect or "subvert" my energies into existential questions of why am I doing this? Do I really belong here? Should I really be spending my time trying to enter a discipline that, from my perspective here at Purdue, has little regard for what I value? Of course during the break and the early stages of the semester I'm in such a good mood and am so ready to engage with these questions in productive ways. Yet by week three the palpable sense of alienation I feel on a daily basis begins to acquire momentum and push me off of the autonomous base I'd spent the break recovering. Making it through the week becomes the priority and I lose perspective on what it was I came here to do. So as, I seek ways out of this immediate discomfort rather than engaging with the work. I'm not talking about drinking or drugging, but about worrying and blaming others (self-as-other included) for my situation. But I move through, I hope either something will change (as something inevitably always does...for example this semester and prelims and then I'll have more latitude to determine my time) and try to stay ready to take advantage of opportunity when it comes up. 

Or maybe I just need a mommy to feed me and enforce nap times. Maybe we all do. My students this week were feeling it too, as well as many of my colleagues. Last week was so atypical that the grind didn't really start until now. That picture I posted a few posts ago? People flitting round like birds yet anchored to the ground? Anxious importance? Graduate school. Sorry for complaining so much.

**

"...all is not to be thought at one go..."

                                             -Derrida

**

The True Encounter

 "Wolf!" cried my cunning heart
At every sheep it spied,
And roused the countryside.

"Wolf! Wolf!"—and up would start
Good neighbours, bringing spade
And pitchfork to my aid.

At length my cry was known:
Therein lay my release.
I met the wolf alone
And was devoured in peace.

               -Edna St. Vincent Millay

On Tuesday I went swimming. It was the first time since two Monday's ago, which was the first time since the middle of December. That Monday I swam for about ten minutes until the pain in my left should forced me to stop. An old injury, first appearing eighteen years ago during my senior year of high school. An inflamed rotator cuff said the physical therapist at the time, and I bombed out of competitive swimming. The shoulder being one reason, the other being not wanting to swim anymore. But my shoulder, the left one, has always been the "normal" shoulder in comparison to the right one, in that the right shoulder can pop out of its joint. Without any difficulty the right can rotate 360 degrees in a circle, bending backwards like a G.I. Joe or a Barbie until it comes back to its normal position. My left shoulder has always felt pressure to keep up with the right, and it can do the same thing but does so not by popping out of its socket, but by being flexible and flexed for many years. If the right shoulder needed a good stretch, I would clamp my hands together behind my head and give it a good stretch backwards. It felt good, though from what I've been told, looked gross. 

But I think all that spinning and stretching has caught up to it, and these days it just hurts. Last semester I went swimming a lot and I think I aggravated the rotator cuff then. My guess is that the other muscles in my left arm, from being somewhat in shape, made up for this aggravation but now that I'm back in the pool, and not really in shape, I'm feeling the inflammation more. On Tuesday I took a couple ibuprofen and tried it again, mindful of not putting too much pressure on it during the "pushing down motion" (not sure how else to say that, the part of the stroke when swimming the Australian crawl, just after my hand enters the water in front of my head, and pulls down the entire length of my body, exiting just past my hip) and generally the shoulder felt okay. Not throbbing or throwing off sharp pains when pushing down. And I noted a few kinds of pressures that aggravated it, like holding a kick board, and compensated with other motions and positions to keep my body moving through the water. 

I did my usual set, about a mile of swimming and kicking, taking about thirty minutes not including warming up and down. After I was done I got out and stretched on the side of the pool, as usual. First my arms and legs using the tiled pool wall, and then on the ground stretching out my calves and thighs and back. While I was stretching I watched the little kids who where there for swim practice in the evening. Some of their parents were sitting up in the bleachers above the pool watching their children swim laps, talking with other parents or reading books. I thought about going to swim meets and swim practice and how I never wanted anybody in my family to come watch me. I thought about how important it was to me to stay separate from my family when I was a kid and when I was a teenager. I wondered how that distance has carried over into my adult life, and I wondered how responsible I am for the aches and pains I carry. I finished stretching and got up and took a hot shower and put a warm hat on. When I got home I made dinner and watched the President's speech. Today was a full day, and I'm going to get on with some school duties before I get into bed. The intense cold of the last couple days has lifted and tomorrow I'll finally be able to get back on my bike.

This apartment has been so cold lately. It's lovely the other three seasons but when the temperature falls below 20, draftiness begins to constrict functionality. I have to close doors, cover windows, wear blankets, and stay close to the heater. Jinx has been camping out under the bed, where I put another little space heater, and when the covers are draped over the side, makes a little hot box / sauna that he hangs out in most of the day.

Come tomorrow morning it's supposed to drop below zero by six or seven AM, and if you include wind chill, negative 25 or or something, I'm wondering if they're going to cancel school. This possibility seems unlikely because last week, with MLK day, a half day on Tuesday because of the shooting, and all of Wednesday off (to give everyone a moment to catch their breath); it seems unlikely that the powers that be will offer any more days off. Productivity cuts you know? We have to keep things rolling or else the terrorists win. Last night I went and saw the Bucky Badgers play the Purdue Boilermakers, and the Badgers beat them pretty handily. I felt guilty, like it was one more crappy thing that happened last week at Purdue. There were school shootings in Pennsylvania and South Carolina last week as well. Of course what happened at Purdue was not classified as a school shooting, but as a "violent crime" or a "homicide." Categories that make us feel a little bit safer, I guess, but give the impression that there is no institutional connection to this violence. 

In my composition class on Thursday we talked about it, and my students were a little freaked out. There was a vigil on Tuesday evening and a press conference. The school newspaper has been writing stories about the student's reactions. I learned from a professor that the shooter attended a linguistics class and hour and a half previous to his actions. Amongst us teachers we've been discussing what to do in the future, the old barricade the door and turn off the lights trick. Logistically everything has been backed up, but along these same lines, it doesn't seem all that important to try and catch up. That we, students and teachers both, can take our time and get done what we needs to get done when we get to it. It was a strange week last week, and whatever haze we slipped into seems bound to continue. I have a feeling that when the cold goes back to wherever cold comes from we'll begin to unwind from all this. 

**

Mozart, 1935

Poet, be seated at the piano.
Play the present, its hoo-hoo-hoo,
Its shoo-shoo-shoo, its ric-a-nic,
Its envious cachinnation.

If they throw stones upon the roof
While you practice arepeggios,
It is because they carry down the stairs
A body in rags.
Be seated at the piano.

That lucid souvenier of the past,
The divertimento;
That airy dream of the future,
The unclodued concerto...
The snow is falling.
Strike the piercing chord.

Be thou the voice,
Not you. Be thou, be thou
The voice of angry fear,
The voice of this besieging pain.

Be thou that wintry sound
As of the great wind howling,
By which sorrow is released,
Dismissed, absolved
In a starry placating.

We may return to Mozart.
He was young, and we, we are old.
The snow is falling
And the streets are full of cries.
Be seated, thou.

                        -Wallace Stevens