Head of a Woman Reading

I've been reading Jess A. Goldberg's new book, Abolition Time: Grammars of Law, Poetics of Justice  for a an academic book club. The book proposes a lot of interesting ways of close reading through the lens of abolition in literary texts. I might gather my thoughts more completely once I've finished the book, but for now, I was particularly struck about the way that Goldberg writes about the difficulty of imagining abolition: To think justice in excess of the law is not posited as a task with a definite answer, where ethics is a crude list of good and bad imperatives. Rather, to think justice in excess of the law is the messy project of abolition. In the words of contemporary abolitionist Mariame Kaba, “we’ll figure it out by working to get there. You don’t have to know all the answers in order to be able to press for a vision.” (Goldberg 22-3) The task, again in the words of Mariame Kaba, the abolitionist writer and activist whose work first helped shape my thinking down t...

I want to write for myself, out of my own weirdness and onto my own page. I want to write something that other people will read, will read and feel seen, feel buoyed. I want to be a hermit in a cottage by the sea lost in a flow of words and water. I want to paint into being a community of writer witches with messy hair and dire thoughts. I want escape, other planets, distant futures, magic. I want to be always aware, to never look away, to stay with the people who are also looking. I want a fever of creation that is fast and steady and urgent. I want to rest in stillness, find strength in now. I want precision. I want surprise. I want to make plans, keep the end in sight. I want to meander aimlessly through revelation, experimentation. I want change to come, swiftly and exacting. I want progress in measured teaspoons without the violence of the knife. I want to be less angry less often. I want my writing to come from the bitter, twisted vitriol inside me and inside others. I want the c...

Public Universal Friend   Saw a mention of this semi-elusive figure on twitter and immediately needed to know everything about them. I listened to an entire podcast episode and am fascinated. I think like most the name is what I find the most generative. As I've been thinking a lot about asexuality and how we value relationships the words "public" and "universal" feel so striking and yet I'm not entirely sure why.  Lincolnshire Poacher Numbers Station  Read this hybrid poetry/theory collection by Joseph Harrington and loved learning about these numbers stations used by spy networks but available for anyone to listen into the random codes on broadcast. Harrington does a series of poems based on the numbers, and I am drawn to this kind of code breaking form of writing that's more about process and language than narrative or sense. H.D.'s Horoscope Notebooks  I am in love with this little archive essay (more on it soon I think)

There's a hurricane headed towards Florida today, and I feel like something isn't quite right. I am not in Florida, but my body feels off. I feel sluggish yet antsy. I can't seem to focus. My mind is uprooted. I keep thinking that I forgot to do something important, that I should be doing everything and nothing at the same time. I am anticipation. There's a hurricane headed towards Florida, and even though I'm not there, I can understand what people mean when they talk about somatic, embodied responses. Like most Floridians, I can archive my childhood by weather--hurricanes, yes, but really all matter of storms, lightning strikes, floods, tornadoes. I remember my brother driving us to church and the wheels through the puddles arced the rainwater up and over the side of the car like some eerie combination of tunnel, bubble, and fountain. I remember seeing lightning strike a tree outside my bedroom, the whole trunk ablaze in an electric blue like a neon sign and then ...

 Am I allowed to admit that I don't have a passion for teaching students that don't care?  Nothing gets my imposter syndrome rollicking like teaching. I did not dream of being a teacher. I was an intensely shy child, and though I loved learning, I never wanted to be a teacher. I wanted to write and research and think, and at some point along the way I accepted that teaching would be part of it. The more I've taught, the more comfortable and confident I've become as a teacher, but I guess even I have a limit.  Has teaching changed? Have students changed? Were my professors just as annoyed by students who were totally unengaged? Was I just oblivious to the slackers around me? The irony is that the only way humanities as a discipline is barely surviving is through general education classes, but then we are just stuck teaching students who don't care. And then the burden of teaching becomes making them care--and I feel like confessing daily that I don't have that sk...

The advice for academics was always that you should use your teaching to help foster your research and vice versa. Ideally, you would make things easier for yourself by teaching what you wanted to research. I increasingly understand the pull of this inclination as my reading list grows and my time and brain energy for reading shrinks. Just the other day I caught myself wishing I could do oral comps again, but with a new list of books that I didn't even know I wanted or needed to read when I was in graduate school. Of course, the problem with this advice is that it takes for granted steady student enrollment in literature classes and thus that students will want to read the same things that I want to research. But for now, here's a random little daydream about a class on gender and socialism in literature, which is also just me selfishly turning my reading list that never gets read into a class that will force me to read it.   

 As an exercise for writing personal essays, I had my students write a boast. The prompt was to write a paragraph telling everyone about something they are good or proud of, large or small. I can't take credit for the assignment; I stole it from a friend who stole it from a famous writer. But the students seemed to enjoy it and even read theirs out loud. My friend rightly suggested I write one myself and share it as the example. In some ways having an example maybe limited their creativity, but I think it did make them feel more comfortable praising themselves. Anyways, here is my little example:  I am a really good friend. I’m a good listener. I’m good at checking-in and following up and keeping track of and setting aside time. I don’t prioritize friendships less than other relationships. When K had to quit her job because something shitty happened, I met her every morning for a walk until she got a new one. I show up. I try to only give advice when it’s asked for. When L had...

 In my election cycle re-watch of The West Wing, the Toby vibes are strong. I have a theory that I can chart my own radicalization and/or the increasing neoliberal-ification of politics by how I feel watching The West Wing during election season. The show shifts surprisingly from timely to outdated to inspiring every time I watch it. Right now, there are some especially interesting scenes and conversations given the genocide happening in Palestine. Perhaps the gutless brilliance of the show is that it never actually says anything fully, allowing so many of its scenes and conversations to feely weirdly relevant no matter when you watch it. All of that is to say that I am not an apologist for the show's politics, I just like shows with ensemble casts and clever, unrealistic dialogue. Call me a millennial, I guess.  This election cycle re-watch, however, the vibes are coming up Toby. Does this mean I am in my cynical era? The obvious irony, of course, is that the more that Toby ...

I have thoughts to say about writing, teaching writing, and what writing looks like in universities. But for now I just want to leave these little tidbits for my future self. "We aim to make better writers, not necessarily--or immediately--better texts." --Stephen M. North, The Idea of the Writing Center "The second thing that it's made me realize is that English departments, film departments, art history departments, comp lit departments do not teach students how to write criticism. They teach them how to write a college level essay that has an audience of one, it’s the person who is grading that essay. I think you need an entirely different curricular structure to teach criticism. The same way I think you need an entirely different curricular structure to teach journalism. It's not just about recording somebody and then writing down what they're saying. You need a different curricular structure to teach something like broadcasting or podcasting or translati...

There is no beauty without a public. I listened to this podcast episode with Andrea Long Chu recently. She talked about the role of the critic, what it means to dislike things, and the subjectivity of beauty. The above quote really struck me in its simplicity. She was talking about theoretical approaches to beauty (lots of name dropping Kant), something along the lines of beauty only exists such that you feel the need to tell someone else that you think something is beautiful--the "compulsion to speak about it." This line made me meditate much more personally about my own loneliness, though. I told a therapist several years ago that sometimes I just wanted someone to be in cahoots with, to conspire with. I find it very hard to act on my desires sometimes without someone else to spurn my momentum. It's usually the small, everyday things. I think to myself, "Ooh I've really been craving chocolate chip cookies." And then the thought passes and I never make ch...