Busy day busy night. For a moment I will pause and be grateful. I’m grateful for the view I have from my office window (and a little embarrassed by my luck). My office looks over the Hillsborough River flowing through downtown Tampa. Every time I watch a storm roll in over the skyline I’m grateful for this space. Every time I turn away from my computer screen and get to see sunlight and water I’m grateful for this view.
That gray building in the center is the Tampa Museum of Art, and the multi-color structure next to it is a parking garage. The white fence is the Tampa Riverwalk, so I almost always can see people walking, jogging, riding bikes, walking dogs, hanging out, etc.
The last few months Sunday afternoons have been a good time for me to watch random old movies. Last Sunday I watched Nicholas Ray’s Wind Across the Everglades. Not a particularly good movie, but some nice shots of the Everglades circa 1958. It was also an early role for Christopher Plummer, and Burl Ives as a villain.
The movie is supposed to take place in 1900 and in Miami. Towards the opening of the movie, as the train carrying Christopher Plummer arrives in Miami, we see the following sign.
There is a book titled Welcome to Fairyland about queer Miami, but I couldn’t find another instance of this sign on the internet. I wonder if it still existed in 1958, or if it was created for the movie.
On a related note, the fairy research continues, although slower than I’d like.
This is a week of ennui. Is it only Wednesday? Work is steadily busy. It’s that final push before the end of the semester. Students, faculty, and staff (myself included) are working to wrap up the semester in the next couple of weeks.
I finished a short-short story yesterday and now it wants editing. Editing is my least favorite part of the creative writing process. I have a longer piece I’m working on but I’m mucking around in the muddy middle right now. I’m not riding my bike this week because the wind had been peculiarly strong.
See? It’s just kind of bleh. Nothing egregiously bad, just the boring mundane shit of another work week.
All that was abstractly floating around in my brain when I read —
“Scarano: I go back and forth on this in my writing and my relationship to my writing. I think the main burden on my writing is capitalism; it’s the main thing that keeps me from writing as much as I’d like or being a more prolific writer. I struggle w/ depression and anxiety—as many people do in our current climate—and I feel like a large percentage of it would not exist if I didn’t have to deal with capitalism, if we weren’t in that system. So much of what we need is just time to do what is important to us, and time is what is taken from us because we have no choice but to work to continue to survive. 40 hours a week plus something else sucks mentally, like it literally sucks energy from you. The challenge of sitting down and thinking, “I’m going to sit down on and do an hour or two of writing this morning,” when I just want to lie on the couch and eat a cupcake.
“So where does that leave me? Do I just beat up or criticize myself for not waking up at 4/5 am and working on my poems? Or do I have some patience and grace for myself within this very inhumane system? There are so many reasons I already feel shame and blame that I don’t want to add to it because I’m not writing as much as I think I should. The main reason I would want to make money as a writer would be so that I could quit my job and have more time to write. I’ve never been very interested in being rich or famous. Money is an access to time, which is the actual, valuable thing.”
I’m not familiar with Scarano’s work, but she caught my attention. Here’s her website.
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And this bit of self-revelation caught my attention as I was eating lunch and browsing the internet —
“Since the pandemic started, and for many disparate reasons, I’ve made a habit of leaning into my more obsessive tendencies, partly to dig a bit into my own personality and tastes, partly because I keep making “jokes” about how I’m interested to find out who the hell I am once the pandemic is over, but, well, who knows when that will be? I might as well try to figure out who I am now. And partly (though I hate to admit it) because I genuinely think the world is ending, so I’ve been trying to be as present as possible for the last few years, and to give myself what I want as much as possible, just in case I’m not present at all in the near future.”
And, just to follow the rule of three, here’s an excerpt from a poem I read this morning –
A short guided meditation by a thought leader
As a thought leader, I’ll be leading your thoughts in today’s guided meditation.
Think of this exercise as a form of change management. A way to move the needle on your future potential. A chance to touch base with yourself. Are you ready to take things offline? Let’s pivot.
Close your eyes. Collaborate with your breath. Action that in-and-out. Be purposeful. Be the champion of your diaphragm. Get yourself in the loop. Connect to your own best practice and really put those boots on the ground.
“Transformational festivals, from Burning Man to Lightning in a Bottle, Bhakti Fest, and Wanderlust, are massive events that attract thousands of participants to sites around the world. In this groundbreaking book, Amanda J. Lucia shows how these festivals operate as religious institutions for “spiritual, but not religious” (SBNR) communities. Whereas previous research into SBNR practices and New Age religion has not addressed the predominantly white makeup of these communities, White Utopias examines the complicated, often contradictory relationships with race at these events, presenting an engrossing ethnography of SBNR practices. Lucia contends that participants create temporary utopias through their shared commitments to spiritual growth and human connection. But they also participate in religious exoticism by adopting Indigenous and Indic spiritualities, a practice that ultimately renders them exclusive, white utopias. Focusing on yoga’s role in disseminating SBNR values, Lucia offers new ways of comprehending transformational festivals as significant cultural phenomena.”
I don’t know how many constellations I thought there were. 12? 24? I assume over the last quarter million years humans have ascribed a nearly infinite number of patterns to the scatterings of stars.
Today I learned that the International Astronomical Union officially recognizes 88 constellations. (Including the Serpent which seems pretty unimaginative, but it’s part of a larger constellation known as the Serpent Bearer.)
If I read the following correctly it sounds like a little over half were named by those living around the Mediterranean during the early bronze age, and the rest were named by Europeans during the second wave of European colonialism.
“Over half of the 88 constellations the IAU recognizes today are attributed to ancient Greek, which consolidated the earlier works by the ancient Babylonian, Egyptian and Assyrian. Forty eight of the constellations we know were recorded in the seventh and eighth books of Claudius Ptolemy’s Almagest, although the exact origin of these constellations still remains uncertain. Ptolemy’s descriptions are probably strongly influenced by the work of Eudoxus of Knidos in around 350 BC. Between the 16th and 17th century AD, European astronomers and celestial cartographers added new constellations to the 48 previously described by Ptolemy; these new constellations were mainly “new discoveries” made by the Europeans who first explored the southern hemisphere.” [source]
I googled around a bit for decolonizing cosmography and its variants and discovered Baltimore artist René Treviño has thinking about decolonizing the constellations, and discusses his work in this Walters Art Museum video.
I also found this very cool paper from 2012 titled An Early American Zodiac. In the article Robert McIvor proposes the following 13 Zodiac animals for the Aztecs:
python
vulture
scorpion
turtle
rattlesnake
lizard
jaguar
death
deer
frog
bird
peccary
butterfly
While the Aztecs had 18 months in their calendar, the author makes his case for thirteen Zodiac animals.
And, before I had to stop goofing around on the internet for the day, I found Native Skywatchers, a site created by Annette S. Lee to highlight indigenous stories of the celestial night sky.
It’s rare I’ll post a long-ish video, but I thought this one was great. I love Nguyen’s enthusiasm for his topic.
Attention conservation notice: Persuasive argument for why Twitter and FB suck so much (ties together echo chambers, moral outrage porn, and gamification).
“Social media has turned conversation into a game, where we compete for points in the form of likes, retweets, and follower counts. This tempts us to trade away the subtle goods of discourse—like connection, understanding, and wisdom—in return for the thrills of success in vividly quantified terms.”
I recommend watching the whole thing, but here’s a little bit of his discursion on porn.
What do we mean when we talk about food porn, or real estate porn, or organization porn? We’re talking about something that gives us “immediate gratification freed from the costs and consequences of actual engagement.”
“Moral outrage porn is using a representation of moral outrage for immediate gratification freed from the costs and consequences of actual moral engagement.”
“This is not a criticism of moral outrage:
“Genuine moral outrage involves the orientation towards morally good action.
“Moral outrage porn involves using one’s moral outrage for the sake of immediate gratification, while avoiding the demands of genuinely good action.”
Therapy Comics by Mardou – Mardou’s therapy comics help me feel less alone. I don’t think the RSS is updated anymore, but I read new comics on Instagram.
“For the past couple of years, I’ve been working with researchers in northern Greece who are farming metal. In a remote, beautiful field, high in the Pindus mountains in Epirus, they are experimenting with a trio of shrubs known to scientists as “hyperaccumulators”: plants which have evolved the capacity to thrive in naturally metal-rich soils that are toxic to most other kinds of life. They do this by drawing the metal out of the ground and storing it in their leaves and stems, where it can be harvested like any other crop. As well as providing a source for rare metals – in this case nickel, although hyperaccumulators have been found for zinc, aluminium, cadmium and many other metals, including gold – these plants actively benefit the earth by remediating the soil, making it suitable for growing other crops, and by sequestering carbon in their roots. One day, they might supplant more destructive and polluting forms of mining.”
WikiNews – Wikipedia has a news page. It can be kind of hit or miss, but I always use it when I’m following a big breaking news story.
Wikipedia Post of the Week
Defamiliarization – “the artistic technique of presenting to audiences common things in an unfamiliar or strange way so they could gain new perspectives and see the world differently.”
I read a lot of scholarship, both for work and for fun. I tend to read mostly in the social sciences and the humanities, and almost never in the natural sciences. A decade ago, nearly all scholarship was locked behind database paywalls and virtually unavailable if you weren’t associated with a university. In the last decade or so the open access movement has made a substantial impact on the amount of scholarship available to the non-university affiliated. Here are some tips on how to unearth some (but not all) current scholarship.
For demonstration I’m going to use “science fiction” “octavia butler” as my search. (I put terms in to quotation marks to force the search to look for those two words next to each other. This quotation mark trick works in nearly every search engine.)
Here is my initial results list. Note, however, the date of publication. (I think the search algorithm is using some combination of ‘most cited’ combined with ‘most accessible’ and emphasizing works with the keywords in the title.)
Ten years ago, probably none of these would be freely available, but now you are free to read all three top results. Click on either the title name (to be taken to the JSTOR site) or directly on the link in the righthand column ([PDF] jstor.org).
I’m not sure what the ‘Sort by’ date function in the lefthand column does, but it brings back radically fewer results and so I don’t really trust it. If I want to look at more recent articles, I use the year restriction tools listed under ‘Any time’.
So far, so good, but here’s the option I think most people miss. If you click on the title and it takes you to a paywall, it’s still possible the article is available. Click on the link that will give you a number of versions (‘All X versions’). Sometimes one of those versions is the freely available version posted in the institutional repository or on the scholar’s webpage.
In this next example I’ve restricted my search by selecting 2018 in the lefthand column (just materials published since 2018). In the example I’ve circled, if you click on the title you are taken to Proquest’s dissertation database and you only get a sample of the dissertation, and not the whole thing. However, if you click on the escholarship.org link you are taken to the whole dissertation.
In the third example I’ve moved to page two of my results list and I see a book option. If I click on the title, I’m taken to the database which requires I pay or am affiliated with an organization that pays. However, clicking on the link in the righthand column takes me to a complete .pdf of the book.
More and more scholarly books are being made available to allow open access to scholarship. Not the bestselling ones, and not the most notable, but I’ve been kind of amazed recently at how much is available through Google Scholar. Presumably because no one reads scholarship, and no one buys it, so you might as well give it away to those dedicated enough to hunt it down.
We still have a long way to go before most scholarship is freely available, but a tremendous amount is accessible now. Keep in mind that, just as with news sources, there is a spectrum of quality within scholarship. Some disciplines expect more from their scholars, and even within disciplines the journals fall on a spectrum of quality. Google defines scholarship broadly so you may find undergraduate honors theses mixed in with results that include notable scholars publishing in journals with a high impact factor.
I also use the ‘Create alert’ feature so I get emails when there are new publications using that search term.
This results list is a good example of Google including results I wouldn’t consider reputable scholarship, but I suppose that’s the risk I took when I chose the term. So, it’s not perfect, but it’s a way to dig up (often) high-quality information outside the traditional Google/Bing/DuckDuckGo strategy.
“By bringing back square dancing, as well as other primarily Anglo-Saxon dances like waltzes and quadrilles, [Henry] Ford believed he would be able to counteract what he saw as the unwholesome influence of jazz on America. People, he imagined, would leave the dance halls and cabarets in droves to swing their partners round and round at liquor-free square dance clubs. If jazz was the cause of America’s moral decay, he reasoned, the road to repair it could be as simple as replacing it with fiddles and square dances.”
One of my recent favorite collections of short stories is Wild Milk by Sabrina Orah Mark. Maybe her work might be described as surreal humor? Dream-like literature? I love her use of language and the playful leaps of imagination. Here’s the title story from the collection.
“On the first day of Live Oak Daycare, all the children are given shovels and a small bag of dirt. “We encourage the children—even the babies, especially the babies—to work hard, imaginatively.” Miss Birdy, my son’s teacher, winks. She sits my baby boy in the middle of the floor with his shovel and dirt. He is not even a year old. I look around. The babies are happy. I have never seen such happy babies. Chewing on their shovels. Spreading around their dirt. Miss Birdy gives me a hug. I wave goodbye to my boy, but he doesn’t see me. “Go, go,” says Miss Birdy. “He’s in good hands.” She shows me her hands. They remind me, for some reason, of my hands.”
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Yay! We made it to Friday. Have a great weekend, and if you’re passovering or eastering, I wish you much delicious eating.
Not a lot going on so let’s catch up with some television.
I’m currently in the middle of Our Flag Means Death. It got off to a slow start (for me) but I’m utterly charmed by the developing relationships between the characters.
I’m also catching up on Doom Patrol, which I’m only now discovering. The Thing About Pam is doing just enough to keep me coming back.
What I’ve kind of gotten bored with and stopped watching: Upload, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Starstruck, Raised by Wolves, All Creatures Great and Small, and Cobra Kai. I also never made it through Game of Thrones or The Witcher.
Soon I’ll be starting the current seasons of Woke and Atlanta. And I recently finished Disenchanted. And I’ll watch the rest of Resident Alien as soon as it drops. And What We Do In the Shadows when it comes back. I’ll watch anything with Matt Berry.
More or less, I wrote diligently in notebooks for 20 years, I wrote infrequently in notebooks for the next 20 years, and toward the end of 2019 I started writing diligently in notebooks again.
It took me about 10 weeks to fill my most current notebook. (I use a Mead composition notebook.)
And today is new notebook day!
I don’t have the involved ritual Austin Kleon has for his notebooks, but I like his notebook style.
