doctoral candidate in rhetoric and scientific and technical communication
Archive for April, 2009
the moments in-between
0
There have been moments in-between. The moments where I feel the most lucid, where my head isn’t filled with theory, or concepts, or longing for family and Arizona and sunshine, or any of the millions of things that fill my head so much that it hurts constantly.
Those moments are precious.
This morning I looked out the big window in my living. I love this window. It’s what keeps me sane sometimes. Right now, it looks over green grass, bird feeders, a line of trees, and, ultimately, a little pond. Today the grass was a beautiful new spring green. The trees are starting to fill with budding leaves. The sky, since the window faces the west, was tinged with pinks and blues from the sunrise, but mostly overcast. It was an odd color that brought out the greens in a really amazing way.
And in those moments, I love Minnesota. I love the way it embraces life after a long cold winter (and truth be told, I LOVED the winter here — loved it).
I was complaining to my brother a few days ago that we seemed to have bypassed spring. We went straight from winter (below 30F) and straight into summer (getting into the 70sF). I wondered where those 40F and 50F days were, the ones that get you excited about the warming weather. He told me that’s what I get for living so far north.
We took a slight turn and came back to those spring days. We are getting the gorgeous spring rain showers and thunderstorms that herald in new life.
Nature, I find, gives me the moments in-between. It reminds me, as it did in Arizona, that everything is cyclical, that it all works out, provides, and replenishes eventually. I’m filled with moments of peace when I watch the large male turkey during the winter, the beautiful robins in the spring, and the way the sun ripples across the water and ice in all seasons.
These moments, these in-between moments, encourage me and give me hope.
aural intimacy
0It began long ago. Isn’t that how this starts? Or, perhaps, not so long ago, but still far enough in the past that it’s becoming hazy and dimmer as the years go by. When you read this, those of you who know my voice, do you hear it? Do you hear the inflection, the pauses, the stutters, the sighs? Do you hear the way my voice rises and falls with thought and inspiration and consideration?
I’m sure many of us hear a “voice” when we read. It’s that voice we apply to a reading to give it character, to make it come alive. Often, for me, it’s not my “inside my head” voice, but the voice of some narrator type mixed in with character voices.
Where does this come from? Is it from the foundational readings we had as children when our parents read to us? In my case, I’m not sure. I don’t remember being read to very much. I remember doing a lot of reading, but not being read to.
What I do remember is that sometime in my mid to late 20s when my youngest brother, Shadow, and I worked together, we traveled throughout Arizona quite a bit. During a few of those times, we read Raymond Carver’s short stories to one another. I loved that. It was fun to listen to the stories while we drove to a town down a long highway.
I don’t remember listening to many books on tape. They just didn’t seem that good to me. There was something that was too distant, too removed to get me interested.
That changed when I joined an audio bookclub at my last job. While I didn’t like most of the books we listened to (that’s bound to happen in a bookclub since everyone has such different tastes), I did enjoy books that others recommended to me. The first book I remember listening to that turned me around was Neil Gaiman‘s American Gods. I already owned a few of his other print publications (the Stardust graphical novel, the Sandman series, etc.), but I was blown away by this audio version. I could not stop listening. This book came alive in the same intimate way that the readings with my brother came alive. It was rich and beautiful and amazing.
I figured I would stick with Gaiman for Neverwhere. This time it was even better. Gaiman read it, and was able to introduce the pauses and changes in speed in just the way it should be read. The underworld of London was right there, in my mind. I pictured the London above that I knew, and then translated it, through his storytelling, into the London below. It was, in a word, magical.
I know, I know: magical and Neil Gaiman. It’s not all that original, is it?
But what these two books did for me is open up an entirely new way of enjoying that aural intimacy of books that I had come to love. I have listened to hundreds of books in this format by now (a few favorites: Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake — Campbell Scott is an amazing narrator, Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto, Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns (I cried through both of them), Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (haunting) and the Hugo Award nominee, multi-authored/multi-narrated METAtropolis).
While I haven’t liked everything I’ve listened to, nor have they all brought me that same intimacy, it is those books that do that allow me to be excited about “reading” again. I will never lose the love I have for holding a book, but I think that there is something to be said for listening, too. It allows you to open your mind to a different way of reading. An aural experience versus an optical experience is different. It is an intimate encounter to have someone reading a book directly to you, as if you were his or her only audience.
what has meaning
32 years ago
This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship.
David Foster Wallace — Commencement Speech at Kenyon College
I’ve had a hard time being a fan of David Foster Wallace. I mean, I’m supposed to, right? He’s the intellectual’s intellectual. But I have a hard time with his writing, much in the same way I have trouble with theorists in my field. They go on and on and on, never quite reaching their point. They talk in circles about their ideas, and we are to bow down before the alter of this philosophy. Why? Well, because–these are brilliant philosophers (dead white men, most of them).
I can’t. I keep trying to believe that what I read is important, that maybe if I understood it more it would make more sense. It doesn’t. Not only do I not find so much of the theory incomprehensible, but I also find it steeped in a belief system that I don’t hold, don’t follow, and won’t be converted to.
Perhaps this is the real meaning of my college education. It’s to give me the voice to say I don’t like this person’s theories, or that I don’t believe in what this person has to say, and to stick to my guns.
It’s hard sometimes, especially when it seems that everyone around you worships this philosopher or that, and you haven’t bought in. Or maybe, just maybe, I trust my own instincts more than I do people who write to an audience that didn’t include me in the first place.
a teenager — new and improved!
3
I was reading Wil Wheaton’s post on a problematic issue he has with people associating him with the character he played on television while he was a teenager. One of the things he said was
Imagine having something you’ve worked so hard to create being dismissed out of hand, because of completely unrelated work you did when you were a teenager – work that you had no control over – and you may understand why this is so upsetting to me.
There are people in my life who have only known me as a teenager (isn’t Facebook grand?). And there are people in my life who still talk to me or treat me like a little girl or a teenager. I don’t even remember that time in my life, let alone still act like that person (or look like that person — I looked so young and cute, and my hair was still very red!). Life has ensued. I have changed (for the better, I hope).
I don’t think Wheaton is alone in this desire, although he may have to face it in an ongoing and more public way than most of us do. We reach a point where we want to be known for who we are now, the accomplishments we’ve had over our lifetimes, and the people we’ve grown into.
Which, I suppose, is a nice segue into my next item. I’ve been thinking about how, even as a teenager, I was never interested in the typical guy: the football captain, the all-round jock, or even the student body president. I was interested in those who were a little on the edge like I was — not quite in the center of things, but not quite outside of it all, either. I hung out with the popular kids, but was never quite one of them, and the men I liked were very similar.
I was speaking with someone on Friday about a friend. I said that being single might be a good thing when you’re working on your doctorate — there is so little time for much else. The person I was talking to looked at me and said he thought I should date men who have been working on their own dissertations or projects, locked away in labs and socially inept. I laughed. I’m attracted to geeky men, so it struck me as a funny comment.
But then I started thinking about it (or over-thinking about it, as the case may be). What did he mean by that? Did he mean that only socially-inept men would find me attractive? Did he mean that, like them, I’m socially inept so we’d fit together? Or did he mean that I’d be good for someone socially-inept? I have a feeling he meant the former two, and not necessarily the last. Hrumph.
I’m still attracted to geeky men. They are smart and fun and interesting. Who wouldn’t find that appealing?
never enough
0
Me: I thought I’d use this summer to catch up on some readings, learn more about different theorists, understand more concepts, and delve into more ideas surrounding our discipline.
Professor: You can read the things you think will help with your research. Or you can read the things you think will help with your exams. But if you try to read everything, you’ll never succeed. There is far too much out there. You’ll spend your life in circles chasing after the citations mentioned in each book.
I already do this online. Can I afford to do it in books, too? Or maybe I started in books, and it carried over my online methods as well. I seem to chase after things, in a never-ending quest to reach…what? The end? Is there an end?
This is a problem in how I approach my studies, too. I want my writing to be perfect. But then I read something new and I realize that my research is so far from perfect that I become paralyzed with the fear of turning in a less than stellar work. What happens then is that I end up turning in something even worse because I have to rush through it to get it done after spending so much time agonizing and worrying over the concepts and theories that came before.
It’s a vicious cycle.
inside –> out
02 years ago
“There are trees in our hearts.”
Nalini Nadkarni
On Facebook yesterday, my friend, Betty Schlueter, (who is an amazing photographer), posted a link to the TED video of Nalini Nadkarni, an ecologist who looks at tree canopies, interdisciplinary studies, and urging people of different backgrounds to unite for a common cause.
The first time I watched, I was attracted to the emotional appeal. I’m a tree-hugger. I love trees. I love to touch them, smell them, and talk to them. I’m not ashamed to admit that. I was interested in the idea of creating bonds between people who don’t have that connection to nature to nature itself. But I was also amused by her humor and the way she connected that humor to a very serious issue.
My second time through the video, I began to see the similarities in the way we approach our particular fields of inquiry. She invites artists into the forests to interpret them in a way that connects two seemingly different areas of interest: the sciences and arts. And this is how I approach my studies and teaching practices.
Yes, I’m a writing instructor. But I started off in geology. I like looking down, thinking about how everything is constructed from a foundational support, how it is built, layer upon layer, until it becomes something stronger and more stable.
When I’m in a writing class, I think of writing in different terms. I don’t think about how I interpret it. I’m much more interested in how the students in the class interpret it and how they can find it useful.
We’re working on the final projects of the semester. My classroom is entirely collaborative and students are working as a part of a team to put together the projects. I asked them, “what matters to you?” “What are your interests?” The class isn’t about me. I already know how to do this stuff.
So I ask them to be creative. Not because I expect them to be artists. I don’t. Many of them are pre-professional (med, vet, dentist, etc.), and others are business or agricultural students. While some of them may consider themselves artistic, what I really want to encourage them to do is to look outside of the box to think about what will suit their project the best. Sometimes that’s a wiki, sometimes a webpage, sometimes a video, and sometimes a message in a bottle (yes, I’ve received projects in all of these forms).
It’s about taking what is inside and bringing it out. It’s about going into the forest, looking up, and seeing the possibilities. It’s about looking into their hearts, and seeing the roots that grow there, waiting to connect to something bigger.
It’s about communicating with one another, sharing the excitement, and watching a project come to fruition.
I haven’t been disappointed yet. Each of them is amazing and contributes in ways that I could have never imagined.