(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

Today at Purdue there was a shooting. You can read the newspaper story here, or here, or here  (post script: more articles on the shooting, one is a short history of gun violence at Purdue, a day after summary by the local paper, and a link to a CNN article that is interesting because of the comments...predictably they have nothing to do with Purdue and instead are people arguing about gun regulations in the abstract).

At about 12:15 I was sitting in the library reading when I got a text from campus safety that read, "Shooting reported on campus. Bldg Electrical Engineering; Avoid area; Shelter in place. Check (website) for updates." It seemed a little bit unbelievable. I looked around and others were reading their phones. We looked at each other, but eventually we all went back to what we were doing. I can't speak for them, but I figured that if something was really happening, I would get another text or hear an announcement. Since I was sitting pretty far back in the library I also figured that I'd have time act if the trouble came closer. I could see nothing from the windows and had no other information. So, I sat. There was an announcement, and we all stood up and exited the library into the foyer, receiving vague instructions to head into the shelter in the basement. Some people went, and some people, like me lingered, and went back into the library, back into the back of the library and sat down. I texted with some friends on campus, all was well, and messaged for a while with an off campus friend. All clear text messages were sent out by campus safety, and that was that. I got a burrito with a friend, stopped by the IRB office (Institutional Review Board, they handle the ethics of studies that involve human subjects), and went home, unsure of what exactly went on today. I'm certain that over the next couple days some answers will be provided.

 

The Week in Graduate School

"It could be that we are wandering about in an unnecessary delusion if we believe the essence of the negative is itself something "negative."

                           -Heidegger, from Parmenidies (trans. by Schuwer and Rojcewicz)

**

Since the beginning of the year I haven't been smoking. On the one hand its an effort and I miss it. On the other, and its usually the other, I have more time (8 cigarettes a day = 50 minutes of standing outside smoking contemplating standing outside smoking, chatting, watching snow fall, taking cigarette breaks, etc.). I notice that I am less patient, more irritable, hornier, hungrier, quicker to jump into a discussion, more decisive, more testosteroney. Some of this is physical, and some of this is mental. After all, when smoking, no matter how bad things are going, I can always just step outside and have a cigarette. Ahhh. That's better. Now what was I worried about? If only for a second or two I could be "Alive With Pleasure!" (Newport). A feeling I know quite well, an old friend. But without this option I kind of have to deal with things as they happen. Or be annoyed, which is also an interesting feeling.

**

"When God works miracles, he does not do it in order to supply the wants of nature, but those of grace."

                             -Leibniz (though I wonder if the two are necessarily distinct...)

**

Of all strong feelings, sexual emotion appeared the gravest threat to the hierarchical Nation-State. Novelists from Defoe to Thackeray and on knew that "love", and "falling in love" are no respecters of class distinction. A scientist who loved his Goethe, and who, like Goethe, saw no strict division between science and the humanities, Freud took pleasure in emphasizing the power of repressed sexuality in the life of "respectable" social climbers.

                  -Stephen Toulmin, from Cosmopolis, writing on some of                                            the cultural impacts resulting from assuming the mind is                                          separate from the body (Descartes, Newton, etc.)

**

"Live unnoticed."   

                                 

                      -Epicurean proverb

"Be concealed in the way you conduct your life."

                      

                     -Epicurean proverb translated in closer alignment with its                                           original syntax and semantics (i.e. Greek)

**

As I finish this post I look out the window and it's snowing again. Again and again and again and again this week. I love it (when my heater works and I have food and the internet and don't have to drive anywhere). Last night I went to a memorial service for Linda Bergman, a professor in my program here. I did not know her but wish that I did, R.I.P. and again, our lives are short. While there is virtue in patience I do not believe that we should wait to do what we want to do. On Monday there is no school, Martin Luther King Jr. Day. While in past I hadn't ever really given the "holiday" much thought, I was reading Ray Allen's take on the day, that it should not be regarded just as a day to celebrate MLK and black civil rights, but all civil rights, genders, sexual orientations, etc. and our societal push towards inclusiveness. It's crazy to think how much things have changed (in the U.S.) over the last fifty years, but it seems that institutionalizing and promoting the acceptance of others is a good thing. So yeah, MLK day as a secular spiritual holiday for all. Or as they might call it at the meditation center, Metta day. As far as I know there are two things most Americans can agree on: money is good, and discrimination is bad. I can agree with one of these things.  Man, its really snowing right now.

This morning, the last full of day of winter break, I went for a hike up Burnett's Creek. About half way I stopped off at The Trails, a big red barn looking building that serves brunch on Sundays. Most of my cohort that I started the program with was getting breakfast and I joined them. The woods along the creek were quiet, and because of the rain yesterday, it took some energy to trudge through the thin layer of ice that covered the still thick snow. This break has been eventful, finally arriving back into town last Thursday night after a week of unexpected travel. Last semester was miserably busy, and as I put the finishing touches on my schedule this evening, I'm afraid that I've set myself up again for the same kind of rigor. Hopefully it won't be as bad, not having to do nearly as much prep for teaching as I did last semester. I'm taking post-modern rhetoric and empirical research methods in writing, two courses that are required for my degree, and teaching second language pronunciation. I'm also teaching two courses, a composition course and a speech/pronunciation course, the same courses I taught last semester. In a perfect world I would only be taking two courses but I could not resist finally getting an opportunity to take an actual "teaching pronunciation" class. At long last I will get my hands on some theory and research on one of my favorite subjects. I think of you everyday. O! I had a thread to pull but I spent the entire day working on school things, and have used up all my writing energy. Ah well. Something about old friends calling me on the phone over the weekend, and investing energy into people who aren't actually here. From Hilare Belloc's poem "Jim",

Always to keep hold of Nurse,
For fear of meeting something worse.

My apologies for the incoherence. I'll try and come back and finish this post later. In the meantime I'm going to bed. Goodnight. (postscript: nope, not coming back to finish this post. onward...)

from une semaine de bonté, Max Ernst, 1934

school begins on Monday...

 

Hi. Happy New Year. Today I wanted to post a poem that had something or other to do with a "new year" but didn't find anything appropriate asides from this gigantic rubber duck. Instead here is a very long Friedrich Holderlin poem ("In the Forest" said to be a fragment, i.e. an unfinished poem written not too long before he went a little nutso and stopped writing, 1805), translated by Richard Sieburth, and at times, by Maxine Chernoff and Paul Hoover (two translations mixed together, sorry if this is against some kind of translation orthodoxy), and slightly edited by me. Though it's not really a new years poem, it's what I found most interesting today. It's quite long (keep scrolling) and there's lots of space in it. Also, in the middle section there are many many names from many languages (Tip: they sound good read out loud). Holderlin was into names, the act of naming things, be it people, places or more broadly, giving shape to narratives. He thought that names/words were where humans and gods / god found a middle ground / neutral channel through which to communicate. And sure, why can't this also be true? But I love the little patches of lucidity that appear amongst the monuments he describes. And how the poem ends is one of my favorite little bits of poetry. Always on my mind. May the year go well,

In the Forest (Im Walde)

Noble deer.

But man lives in huts, wrapped in the garments of his
shame, and is the more inward, the more alert for it, and
that he tend his spirit as the priestess tends the heavenly
flame, this is his understanding. Which is why recklessness
and the higher power to fail and achieve are given him,
godlike creature, and language, most dangerous of
possessions, is given man so that creating, destroying,
perishing and returning back to her, eternal mistress and
mother, so that he might bear witness to what he is, having
inherited and learned form her the godliest of her attributes,
all-preserving love.  

He remains nowhere.

No sign

binds.

Not ever 

A vessel to contain him.

Good things are three.

I have no wish 

to destroy your images

                            and maintaining the sacrament

Holy keeps our souls

Together, the ones that God has given us, life-light

Companion

To our end

By all means, 

                                differences are

                  good. Each

                                    and every

Has its own existence. 

                                         the dark leaf

                             And the growth

Was perceptable

           and                             the Syrian soil

   shattered, and flames underfoot

Stinging

and queasiness coming

Over me from raving hunger

Friedrich with his bitten cheek

Eisenach

The renowned

Barbarossa

Conradin

Ugolino—

Eugenuis

Heaven's ladder

                The farewell of Time

                         and in peace they part 

Thus Mohammed, Rinaldo

Barbarossa, qua free spirit

Emperor Heinrich,

But we confuse

our dates

                  Demetrius Poliorcetes

Peter the Great

                         Heinrich's

Crossing of the Alps and that

with his own hand he gave the people

food and drink and his son Conrade died of poison

Perfect visionary

Reformer

Conradin, etc.

all significant

as relations.

Tende   Stromfield    Simonetta.

Teufen    Amyclae    Aveiro on the river

Vouga    the family    Alencstro its

name therefrom    Amalasuntha Antegon

Anathem Ardinghellus Sorbonne Celestine   

and Innocent interrputed the dis-

quisition and dubbed it (the Sorbonne)

the nursery of the French bishops—

Aloisa Sigea differentia vitate

urbaanae et rusticae Thermodon

a river in Cappadocia Val-

telino Schonberg Scotus Schonberg Tenerife 

Sulaco        Venafrom

                    Region

of Olympos.    Weissbrunn in Lower

Hungary. Zamora    Jacca    Baccho

Imperiali.    Genoa    Larissa in Syria

When there are flames above the vineyard

Which looks black as coal

Around the time

In autumn, because

The reeds of life breathe fire
In shadows of the vines. But

How pretty when the soul unfolds

And this brief life.

And the sky becomes a painter's house

With all his pictures on display.

Like the man who eats men

Is he who lives without

(Love)

                             

               and describing shadows, his eyes

Would fill with anger

                                       Quite simply
                                       this time, but often
Something happens inside one's head, impossible
To understand, but when a freeman
Goes out for a walk, he finds
the path waiting.



As for the horses, an endless desire
For life, as when nightingales
Sing their sweet-home-song or the snow goose
Sets the tone, high above
The globe, longing.
                        




                                         stripes of blue lilies
Do you know              of the work
Of artists alone or like
The stag rambling in the heat. Not
Without limitations.





Narcissi, ranunculi and
Syringas from Persia,
Flowers, carnations, cultivated in pearl
And black and hyacinths,
As when instead of music heralding an entrance
There's the scent of an evil thought,
My son should forget to enter
Loving relationships and this life
Christopher's        dragon has exactly
Nature's walk and spirit and shape.


He should take
Everything
Except the long ones
To a pure place
Where someone
Scatters ashes
And burns the wood with fire.






From pagan
Io Bacche, let them learn to work with their hands
And, by the same means. Be
Forward or avenged. Vengeance,
In fact, should return to its source.
While we are raw, don't let God
Lash us with
                     waves. To be sure,
We are godless,
Common folk all,
Whom God tests
Like nobility,
Yet it's forbidden
To boast about this. But the heart knows
A hero. It's for me
To speak of my homeland. Don't
Begrudge me that. In the same way,
A carpenter makes
A cross.


                Sword
and hidden knife, when
        sharpened
                                more or less well,
But don't let our native land become
Too small a place. Heavy is the              to lie
at rest, feet and hands outstreched.
Only air.






I want to build


and raise new
the temples of Theseus and the stadiums
and where Perikles lived



But there's no money, too much spent
today. I had a guest
over          and we sat together.

It's a warm day in Indiana, warm for winter, no snow on the ground and the sun is shining directly into my eyes as I write this. School resumes on the 13th and until then I'll be here working on various writing, reading, and music projects, sleeping in and trying to remember how to cook, and after the New Year going up to the meditation center to do some sitting and some service work. So, I've posted more this year than any year since 2007. Being in school surrounds me with interesting people and ideas, and its rigor keeps me firmly entrenched in habitual content production, whether I like it or not. This is one reason I've written so much. The other is that is that the writing took on an urgency that I've rarely felt before, convinced that I could change the material future directly with words. Over the Fall I continued to indulge this impulse, and my system, rewired over the Spring and Summer, is still grasping for reasons and causes to explain the disconnect between my ideas of what love can accomplish and reality as it played out.

**

My gizmo is probably just tired. To put it another way, while I like to think that all my experience mediating, adademicing, and articulating the minutiae of my feelings has given me a modicum of control over the future, I think what it's really done is helped me write more words, with the end goal of typing a single word that makes everybody's computer explode into a terrific light of happiness. This sent to me recently by a friend, translated from the Kurundogai, a book of Tamil poetry compiled around 2AD:

It was midday in summer. There was some butter on a rock; it was melting in the heat of the sun. There's a person who's supposed to be watching the butter--to make sure it doesn't melt. He's just watching it melt. He can't do anything. He has no legs, no hands, he can't speak, so what on earth can he do? He's just watching the butter melt. Like this, love has spread over my body like a disease.

**

I turned 35 in November, which is significant not because of the number, but because I had never really considered my life beyond the age of 34. I guess I assumed that certain things would happen by this time and that I would naturally be a different person...no need to plan as my future self would take care of that. I assumed that I would have found some kind of stability in my work and romantic life. Neither has happened. On the one hand this could be seen as a failure, where on the other it means that I'm in the bonus.

**

 “He had elbow pasta, and I had shell pasta, and I told him how my shell pasta was better than his elbow pasta, and he was pretty upset about that. He loves elbow pasta. But I disagreed. I think shell pasta is better. I don’t care. I will stand by that. Shell pasta.”

-Metta World Peace (formerly known as Ron Artest) in response to a reporter's question about an altercation during the game.

**                                                           
 
I finally got a smart phone. I've made an Instagram account and signed up for Twitter. So far I've posted three pictures to Instagram and nothing yet to Twitter. Still not sure about that one. But even better, I finally have a camera that can take real pictures and videos with, like this one:

Thus I move into another diaristic area of media consumption. It seems to be where people are, so I'd like to be there too. Or at the very least, I'd like to be able to capitalize on the three times a week or so that I have the impulse to take a picture, and share it with my three (so far) followers.

**

After dinner on Christmas, all of us still sitting at the table, my aunt pulled out a pack of "wish papers." Thin little tissue papers that you first crinkle up, and then roll into a structure that will stand vertically on a flat surface. In this case, our plates. You then light the paper on fire from the top and as it burns down you make a wish. When the flame reaches the bottom the heat propels what is now ash into the air, and if you can catch the ash as its falling back to earth you get your wish. We did this, first my brother and then my aunt. We made our way around the table (my mom didn't get her first wish but on the second try she got it), including my brother's 18 month old son. He wanted "more" (which he indicated with a hand signal) and so my brother and I both lit one more and made one more wish. The ash rose and fell, and landed in our hands.

The night before I left Lafayette I went to the grocery store to pick up some cat litter. I also got some beer, cat food, a cylinder of oatmeal, and three frozen pizzas. The cashier asked me if I babied my cat, and I said not really, and mumbled something about him sleeping a lot. I really baby mine, she smiled and said as she put my groceries into plastic bags. I put the bags into the cart and reached back to get the cat litter which was still sitting on the conveyor belt. It was heavy, and I quietly grunted as the lady behind me in line stood watching. "That's why I don't have cats," she said to no one in particular. I turned and pushed my cart towards the exit and as I was walking, thinking about that lady, about Indiana, a guy hands me a piece of paper folded into thirds. I said thanks, and continued walking out the doors, through the parking lot to my car.

I figured the piece of paper was some kind of religious message, as the guy seemed a little sheepish giving it to me. In my experience its an unusual event in Indiana to have someone actually put something into your hands. "Indiana nice" as far as I can tell, is a kind of hands off politeness. Opinions are offered but not put upon you. The mysterious and un-articulated discourses of the mid-west. I turned the car on and unfolded the piece of paper. A hundred dollar bill fell out. I looked at it making sure it was real and wondered what the catch was. I read the letter:

I thought, wow. My next thought was about the guy. And then I thought about what I was going to do with the money. I don't consider myself to be someone in need so the question was who I was going to give it to. 

I got home, put away the groceries, and went over to my neighbors to return some dishes and chat. The whole experience made me think, kind of like a performance that demands audience participation. Only in this case instead of an art world impetus, the kind of activist art that I became familiar with living in the uber-political Bay Area, the gesture seemed to come out of a religious impetus. The two oddly similar in their thought and guilt provoking effect. So I talked about it with my neighbors, and because I didn't want to randomly profile "people in need," and couldn't think of any people I knew off the top of my head who needed a hundred dollars more than the next person, they suggested giving it to the food bank located at the end of the street. A little bit the opposite of what the man who handed me the money was doing, putting himself out there. The next morning on my way out of town I gave the money to the lady at the food bank's desk. I told her the story and said, "weird huh?" And she said yeah. And then I got in my car and drove to Wisconsin. The only part about this experience that made me feel "good" was getting rid of the money.

last night i had a dream that i had 3.2 bitcoins

no context. but now the semester is over, or at least the classes are. in about ten days i will be able to say that the semester is really over, two papers, one class to grade, and one set of final evaluations to fill out. my writing students finished their podcasts and they were generally pretty good and most of my OEPP students were certified (to teach courses) so that is also good news. if i worked hard on anything this semester it was teaching. i know that the blog has been quiet lately but well, i've probably said enough to last at least until the new year. and i am so looking forward to the break and getting some rest, maybe going to new york, and getting back to creative work. finishing up a new collection of music and debating how to go about a few different writing projects. applying for some grants and to the TESOL certificate program. that is to say, i got nothing to say, plenty to do, and it's cold as hell not a leaf on a tree the birds have all went south. the river is low and calm and the moon. from the last paragraph of No Country For Old Men, Cormac McCarthy:

I had two dreams about him after he died. I dont remember the first one all that well but it was about meetin him in town somewheres and he give me some money and I think I lost it. But the second one it was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin through the mountains of a night. Goin through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin. Never said nothin. He just rode on past and he had this blanket wrapped around him and he had his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carrying fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up.

(hi. there is/was a picture of a tree here that I've heard is not visible on some computers. so, i wasn't even trying to post a blank space, but in case that is the case on your computer, the pictures is of a dogwood tree full of fall colors that i took with my phone camera. it's not a pretty picture but it is a pretty tree)

                       

There was a new bird in the tree this morning. It's about twice as big as the little brown ones that hop around and chirp, and instead is darkly colored with thin streaks of white on its back and wings. It puffed out its cheeks and sang a little as I listened. This morning is cold in Indiana, twenty-two degrees as I write. In a half hour I need to get dressed and get on my bike and head to school. Most mornings during the week I'm at the Oral English Proficiency Program working with the same eight students, one at a time, one hour per week, individually on pronunciation and other speaking skills. Even more than teaching writing I enjoy this work, in part because it's one-on-one and more often than not the students are motivated. Not that any of these students, graduate students, can't speak English, as all of them are more than fluent (and quite far advanced in their respective fields), however the purpose of the program and my work with them is to make sure that they are ready to teach undergraduates. If you are lecturing to a hundred people, say a hundred freshman (since tenured professors rarely teach introductory classes) it's more efficient to make sure the instructor is an effective teacher than it is to make sure that the students are skilled learners. In terms of the work itself, there is a fine line between helping someone become a better communicator and telling someone how to speak and behave, the former approach as a more collaborative process and the latter as a top down imposition that at the end of the day, is less likely to help a person speak well.

Thus the job is one part tutor, communicating the nuances of why English sounds like it does, working with students to develop their ears, bringing attention to lingering grammar issues, intonation, etc; one part therapist working to build trust, since tinkering with the way another speaks can  quickly turn into an counter-productive self-consciousness; and one part detective, working with a student, particularly students who have had to take the course more than once, trying to figure out exactly what little idiosyncratic hitches are holding them back. By this I mean it is rare that a person is not able to make particular sounds given proper instruction and intensive practice, however there is so much more to the choice and voice of how we sound than a mechanical knowledge of where to put our tongue or which word to stress. 

Yesterday I was speaking with one of these students about speaking English in Korea. She talked about the perception that if your English is "native like" (I put this in quotes because the term "native" indicates that there is such a thing when it comes to language acquisition. For example English is spoken fluently in many countries in the world, such as India and Jamaica, however the variety of English is radically different than the variety spoken in the United States. So as, in the field of World Englishes using the term "native" is to suggest that one variety of English is more authentic than another.) and she went on to say that to use the American variety of English is to indicate that you have had excessive schooling and opportunity and in short, is interpreted as a kind of showing off. So as, to speak like an American is actually not a desirable quality at times. We wondered together how her preferences to be, and be seen at any given time were shaping the words coming out of her mouth.

This reminded me of a conversation I had with a friend from Japan over the summer. We were talking about identity in other languages and she told me that she was suspicious of  people, born and raised in Japan, who spoke English, like somebody who was born and raised in the United States. She couldn't relate, and saw it as the person casting off their "home" (not her word, but it's the one I'm going to use) identity in order to fit in. In fact, she continued, there were certain words and ways that she kept distinct from the American variety because she enjoyed her status as an outsider. We talked about that. We talked about if there was a difference between the status of men and women in this regard, that maybe a Japanese woman can enjoy a higher status in the United States because she is Japanese but a Japanese man may not. Anyway, it was interesting. My point is not so much about Korea or Japan or the United States, but that there are certain aspects of our identities that sometimes keep us from getting with whatever program certain interest groups are encouraging us to get with. And I admit, the word identity is awfully ambiguous but it will have to be a place holder for the time being. Or a more English centric example, that just because one was born and raised in Boston doesn't mean that a person necessarily speaks with a thick New England accent. Studies (not cited here) have shown that the voices we adopt and choose to speak with are more in relation to who we relate to and model ourselves after than our geographic location.

My interest in this idea relates to the OEPP, discovering these little social context issues that solidify our preferences, so that I might better understand and help my students develop competencies on level with being effective teaching assistants (nice huh? can you tell that I've been doing some serious graduate school writing lately?), but my interest in the relationship of identity to learning also relates to the writing classroom. Because reading and writing is something we all know how to do and something that we've been doing our entire lives, to teach writing is to come against these solidified identifies (that manifest as "voice") that may or may not be helpful to learning other varieties of writing. Voices want more of themselves. Others to talk to and be heard by and listen, always projecting in some direction.

Today is my birthday. I am 35 years old.

To briefly interrupt this on-going discourse on decision making, 3 Scenes from Indiana:

1) The corner of Perrin Avenue and Main Street that my porch overlooks has recently developed a puddle. I noticed it a couple weeks ago and thought it was strange that water was pooling on a single square of sidewalk. I rode my bike around it and went about my business. Last Wednesday I noticed from the porch that some utility people had painted some lines on the street around an area near the sidewalk, blue lines that I suspect map where the water mains are located beneath the pavement. On Thursday there were even more lines, and a few words: OK, OK, OK, OK. On Friday morning, standing with a cup of hot tea I saw a water utility truck parked across the street and I looked at the man at the wheel and he looked back at me. When I came home that evening I found that they had dug up a little patch of street and refilled it with black top. Now there is a crack extending from the patch of blacktop to the curb, and it oozes water constantly. Clean and clear water, and in the street light I can see ripples, quarter inch waves covering this small patch of street.

2)

Little plane! You move
so slow it seems like you might
fall out of the sky.

3) Since July of this Summer, I've been hiking the same stretch of trail on a semi-regular basis. For a while it was hot and full of bug noise. By late August the weeds growing on the East side of the river all of a sudden shot up ten feet high. During the last month I've been looking for signs of Fall and until this weekend hadn't seen much. Tracking progress gradually, over the rusty bridge that crosses the Wabash, though the canopied valley where Burnett's Creek flattens, crossing the creek on the mix of concrete and rock stepping stones, passing under the highway, and climbing the little ridges on my way to the trail's end. I usually bring a snack and book and a notebook, and sometimes I bring some music, and sometimes I bring a friend. The leaves have begun to drop from the highest trees and but most of what I saw was still green. I noticed that the chest high foliage that makes the canopied valley so pleasant was beginning to droop, and as I was walking imagined them gone. I imagined mud, and rain, and eventually imagined snow. I imagined that I would continue walking this patch of trail, and I imagined changing too.

There have been two times where I have had a real decision to make. Of course I make decisions constantly, hundreds, maybe thousands a day. Little ones about when to get up, what to wear, what to make for breakfast, to run a red light on my bike or slow down and stop. Or even smaller, what word to use when I write, what to say to a student who hasn't been to the last couple of classes, when to turn over in bed, or in what order I eat an assemblage of lunch items. Some of these are so small I wonder if they can considered choices or inevitabilities, habits and reflexes of deeply ingrained preferences, petting my cat absentmindedly as I read an article for class or staying in the hot shower for an extra minute or two. Most of the moderate size choices, when to head up to Wisconsin to visit family or replacing my computer's hard drive, seem like choices that have already been made, opportunities that present themselves as one way trips to a now or a never without too much consideration of an alternative. Or even bigger choices, the decision to come back to grad school for example, or move back to Oakland from an unaffordable San Francisco, presenting themselves as logical next steps in the social and economic momentum of the moment.

But there are two decisions I have made that I have always wondered about. The first was when I was living in Seattle, about a year out of college, working at the accounts and distribution office of a small publisher named The Laughing Elephant and doing an intense but satisfying long distance thing with Amy. My father had been diagnosed with his dementia a couple years previous, and every Sunday since then I had made it a point to call and try to have a conversation with him in his increasingly fractured English. My motivation to call was tied to a deeper motivation to do the right thing, to "do unto others," to be a good kid, as much as it was a desire to engage with my dad or share the details of the life I was living. Susan, his wife at that time, offered praise, that my dad really appreciated the attention, and Amy and Joel and others commended me for my efforts (these were the days before ubiquitous cell phones, making a phone call in a house full of people more of a public event). Feeling bored with my job, and wanting to devote more time to writing, I decided to leave Seattle and move out to the farm to help Susan take care of my dad. It seemed like his mind was going fast, and my twenty-two year still developing adult self still didn't really know much about him. I figured that if I was going to I had to do it before he slipped further down hill.

About three weeks before I left, and a week before I was going to give The Laughing Elephant my two weeks notice, my boss offered me a position managing some of the accounts in addition to my shipping and filling duties. It was a family business, a small publisher that specialized in "gift books" (books that are given for occasions like weddings, or new borns) and atypical greeting cards. There were five of us who worked at the business office: Skip, Brady, Susan, Binder, and me. They were all implants to Seattle via San Diego, proto-punks who settled into jobs as they got older. A group of friends ranging in age from their early thirties to their early forties. They were cool and smart and funny, and I looked up to them. But I had already decided what I was going to do, and when Binder offered me the job I had to say no, and explain the plan. When word got out, Skip asked me if I was close to my dad, and I had to say no, not really. And I could tell by the expression on his face that he thought it strange I would leave Seattle to go back to Wisconsin. Part of me at that time thought it was strange too, not entirely comfortable with the story I had been selling: the good son doing the right thing. It was also for selfish reasons, I thought to myself, so that I wouldn't have to get up and go to work, to have more time to write, and even more so, to gain the experience my father's illness as a subject to write about. In every story that I ever told about being back on the farm I could claim righteous motivation. 

I could not admit to myself at that time (or maybe even in the present) that it was much more comfortable to be the sweet boy I saw on the TV of my mind than to forge a new and uncertain way forward. The thing is, I was never asked to help take care of my father. There was never a real need for me to be there. Susan had been watching after him, and I was the one who suggested coming out there. Some of my other friends were confused about what I was doing; not entirely buying the caretaker angle or seeing the value of gathering poetic experience. Regardless, I spent three months with him, futzing around the farm and Mineral Point, doing some writing and making sure he didn't light anything on fire or kill himself. And then Susan, more or less, asked me to leave and I went back to Seattle, depressed and broke, but proudly in possession of having done "the right thing." Unfortunately the right thing didn't help me find a job when I got back. I broke up with Amy and started dating T. T went back to Japan and I tried to date Amy again, and then there was nobody. I found work making minimum wage as a business card delivery person and lived in a cruddy little studio apartment in an old drafty building. etc. etc. It was a confusing time. 

But I have always wondered what would have happened if I had taken the promotion instead of leaving Seattle. Maybe I would have gone into business, or at least I would have learned the ins and outs of managing accounts and getting book sellers to pay up. Maybe I never would have moved to Portland or gone to poetry school. Maybe I wouldn't have broken up with Amy and we would have followed through on our plan to move in together. One never knows. Or maybe that decision became a kind of regret because I had so much time, underemployed and relatively isolated, to think about what went wrong. Maybe its value as an event arises not intrinsically, a two paths diverging in the woods kind of thing, but maybe its a product of the kinds of attention I gave it sitting alone in my green chair, and have given it, in retrospect, through the silent analysis of fossilized sentiments. As if anything could have turned out other than the way it is. It's also possible that no matter what I would have found something to regret about that time. And I know, it's unfashionable to talk about these things, to dwell in the past. Instead we should concentrate on the present, etc. etc. But goddamn, this is just one of those things I've always thought about but never articulated. Thinking about decisions.

Last night I went to dinner with a friend. He was telling me about a class that he was thinking of dropping, about the difficulty he was having with the material and how much time it took away from his other classes. Plus he was running, at present, a high C, and didn't want that kind of mark on his transcript. He told me about this ongoing debate he was having with himself, where on the one hand it was a class that he should take and besides, at this point in the semester he was already half way through. On the other, he could take it later, another semester where he had more time to devote to learning its concepts and performing well on the tests. After he finished speaking he asked me what I thought, and I told him that it seemed like he wanted to drop it. He asked what gave me that impression, and I said that it just seemed like he did from the way he was speaking. Who am I to tell another person what they are thinking or feeling? But that was the impression I got, and I reported my impression. 

There's a concept in Eastern philosophy that has some analogs in Western thought and philosophy about the three "minds" that help us make decisions. The first is our thinking mind, the mind that reasons and analyzes. It makes lists of pros and cons, listens to or disregards advice, it plans birthday parties and balances budgets. It works hard to find words to explain, usually in the past tense, why we do what we do. The second is our heart mind, or moral mind, the place that tells us an act is good or bad. It is the voice of should or should not. It's not so much reason as it is a disembodied presence that affirms or gives us pause. I should prepare for class and I should clean my cat's litter box. I should not stay up all night watching Breaking Bad and sleep in tomorrow. It is love in a universal sense, love for others including oneself. In a sense it is our social mind. The third mind is our body mind. It thinks in terms of feeling, of hunger or sleepiness, or fear or desire. It tells us we are uncomfortable or warm, that we need to move somewhere else, or are happy where we are. It dances, or feels terrible when everybody else around it is dancing, and it is not.

All three work in tandem, and people tend to rely on one more than the other. There are analogs in Freud's concepts of the ego, super-ego, and the Id (respectively, in the order presented above); in the concepts of logos, pathos, ethos in rhetoric; and more recently in neuroscience, where a group of scientists diagrammed every single synapse and neuron in the brains of round worms (which are much simpler, but considered to be a reliable analog for the human brain) to discover that there are three systems of synapses constantly interacting, rewriting, and changing each other i.e. three minds. Further, all three are located in different places: the head, the chest, and the pelvis. In a more popular application, when people say to "follow your heart" it might be more accurate to say, like G.W. Bush, to follow your gut, or what feels right. But what feels right is complicated, like the round worm's mind, by the other two minds, and it's easy to get confused as to "who" to listen to, all three changing and influencing each other.

Cultures too, have preferences. We could say that certain parts of the United States and most of "The West", at least historically, has been a logo-centric / ego-centric / thinking-centric culture, governed by laws derived from reasons. A country like Iran, where the laws come from Islam (Sharia law) could be said to be governed by morality, or the heart. I think it's very difficult for one mind to understand the other, simply because other minds function through an entirely different "language," though language isn't the right word. How do we compare feeling bored with what the word "bored" signifies? How do we compare what's "right" in social situations with what's "right" in logic (linguistics is a kind of attempt to solve this problem)? Not that it's not worth trying to find the answer to these questions, and the humanities have made their living mashing different modes against each other in a logo-centric framework.

But back to my friend's dilemma. We talked about all this because he said that he was told to "follow his heart" but didn't know which part of him was his heart talking. It's a good question. How do we know and is it even possible to separate these minds? In my opinion, when we can somehow come to a place where all three centers of thought align, we feel good about our choices. (Though this idea too could be seen as a cultural construct rather than a universal principal. In Japanese culture for example, from what I've been told and from what I've experienced, one's ability to hold these contradictory minds together is seen as desirable and as a sign of strength.) Of course, this rarely happens in important matters. Sometimes we run out of time, and are forced to make decisions. Sometimes we make a decision and come to feel good about it afterwards. Sometimes we regret decisions we made. Sometimes we just know, and sometimes we never do. Sometimes we are sitting on a ferry, coming back from a long day, watching the sun set and the other boats find their way home. Sometimes we are so caught up in the process we don't realize a decision has already been made. Today I saw my friend, and he decided to drop the class. He seemed to be happy with his decision.