Digs

"Probably new to science," and other links

2019-05-05T15:29:15Z

"Probably new to science": Locating Indigenous Knowledge in Colonial Archives, by Keri G. Lambert at Environmental History Now. I love this blog -- they do a wonderful range of posts from scholars working in environmental history. This essay about archival work on 1880s Gold Coast rubber plantations and how knowledge becomes "scientific" is definitely going into my file for the "worldbuilding politics of rubber in Discworld" piece I'm not writing, HBBO ... :)

"... If you skimmed that, I urge you to read it again. It’s just a short letter talking about plants you’ve probably never seen and a language you may never have heard of. But seriously, take a look at what is going on here: a reasonably powerful colonial official is drawing on indigenous botanical knowledge (as reflected in Twi nomenclature) to report to the metropole’s epicenter of imperial science what he believes to be a novel scientific discovery.

In one fell swoop, Tudhope recognizes a sophisticated knowledge regime that classifies plants by genus and sex… yet he defines that knowledge as not quite “science,” which he insinuates is that which is advanced by non-Africans. In much the same way, Evans, in his letter (above), had described coagulation-via-“Diecha” as a “new process”—but to whom was it new? It’s highly likely that he learned it from experienced Gold Coast rubber workers.

In four letters, exchanged over ten months, we see the extraction, exchange, and embrace of indigenous knowledge, as well as the delimitation of a narrow “scientific” knowledge."

Hermeneutical Injustice in Consent and Asexuality, by starchythoughts. Developed by philosopher Miranda Fricker in Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, hermeneutic injustice is “the injustice of having some significant area of one’s social experience obscured from collective understanding owing to a structural identity prejudice in the collective hermeneutical resource.” This post is specifically about ace issues but this concept seems rich and powerful to me -- it makes it possible for me to recognize the extent to which, as a writer, I'm invested in the internal and external formations and effects of this kind of injustice. Fricker, via starchy: “The primary harm of hermeneutical injustice, then, is to be understood not only in terms of the subject’s being unfairly disadvantaged by some collective hermeneutical lacuna, but also in terms of the very construction (constitutive and/or causal) of selfhood. In certain social contexts, hermeneutical injustice can mean that someone is socially constituted as, and perhaps even caused to be, something they are not, and which it is against their interests to be seen to be.”

The Disability Gulag, Harriet McBryde Johnson. I wish Johnson were still alive; I wish I had found her work soon enough to put it on my syllabus. This piece is specifically about the harms and threats of institutionalization. Despite the pain of the subject matter, I find her to be an absolute pleasure to read.

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Final finals

2019-05-04T18:06:57Z

I didn't think I would ever cry while grading papers, except maybe out of fatigue, but this batch is so good! I'm a mess. Hopped up on love and pride and a not inconsequential amount of rage that I have to leave this job ... tempered with the intense and continually-intensifying relief at the prospect of getting out. But I actually did a good job teaching this course this semester; I really think overhauling it paid off. If I could stay I could do so much more! You should see the transformations we made this semester! Going to go have a different life now! Augh!

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The pragmatics of consent, and other links

2019-03-11T03:35:39Z

Sex talks: The language of sexual negotiation must go far beyond ‘consent’ and ‘refusal’ if we are to foster ethical, autonomous sex, by Rebecca Kukkla for Aeon.

I found this piece really interesting, skeptical as I was, given that Kukkla seems uninformed or uninterested here in the relationship between the feminist language of consent and its analysis of gender violence. But she draws distinctions between requests, invitations, and gift offers as types of speech in a way that seems like it might actually have some uses in prevention education and policy-making.

The "Tragedy of the Commons" was invented by a white supremacist based on a false history, by Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing.

I had no idea!

Ingenious: Vijay Iyer, by Kevin Berger at Nautilus

This interview is from back in 2014 but I just returned to it and I really like it. Iyer, a jazz pianist, has a really nuanced way of talking about the relationship of "genius" to political and historical context.

Words, binary and biphobia: or, why "bi" is binary but "FTM" is not, by Shiri Eisner at radicalbi

A long and thoughtful consideration of the "'bi' means 'two' so it's binary and transphobic" argument. Eisner is writing as a bi, genderqueer activist. I self-identify as bisexual or queer, but not pan, and I was thinking about that and this gave me some food for thought on, you know, the Discourse.

Sundown Towns in the United States: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism -- the website for the book by James Loewen

Found my way here through a twitter conversation about "best places to live," hometowns, and sundown towns; I particularly recommend the searchable database. The town where I grew up isn't listed, but the longer-established posher town one over sure is.

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Some Jean Valentine for a Tuesday morning

2019-02-26T14:20:00Z

A leaf, a shadow-hand

A leaf, a shadow-hand
blows over my head
from outside time
now & then
this time of year, September

—this happens—
—it's well known—
a soul locked away inside
not knowing anyone,
walking around, but inside:

I was like this once,
and you, whose shadow-hand
(kindness) just now blew over my head, again,
you said, "Don't ever think you're a monster."

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Link Roundup and not-dead notice

2019-02-11T05:51:07Z

I tapered off my SSRIs and I'm almost all done with the ensuing sensation of being periodically electrocuted and I feel great. I have interns now which seems like a mistake. Here are some things I have liked.

Freedom Should Be Free: A Brief History of Bail Funds in America. Robin Steinburg, Lillian Kalish, and Ezra Ritchin. UCLA Criminal Law Review, Vol 2, Issue 1. 2018.

Bail funds have long presented a pathway to freedom—a disruptive fissure in a system that criminalizes both poverty and race. In many ways, the story of bail funds provides a window into many critical moments in American history over the last century. Bail funds have sprouted up during times of intense conflict between the United States government and political activists, suspected Communists, civil rights leaders, and students. Visually, the history of bail funds would look much like the ebb and flow of an ocean’s tide, growing with consciousness about injustice and falling into extinction once the momentum, or often the money, dies out. The creation of bail funds in the United States is a tribute to the power of individuals to create a collective force to push back against the complex and growing force of mass incarceration.

Bail funds build on the tradition of churches, families, and other community members who, as black communities did during slavery, join together to purchase the freedom of their loved ones. As mass incarceration has entrapped more and more of the country, communities have responded in recent years with an increasing commitment to the direct action of bailing strangers out of jail. While marginalized communities have long been pooling resources to pay bail, organized bail funds—often aimed at bailing out strangers—were few and far between for much of the twentieth and start of the twenty-first century. But as mass incarceration has spread across the country, more Americans have come to understand the injustice that has long been apparent to low-income communities and communities of color, and there has been a subsequent influx of resources into decarceration efforts.

Digital Media is a Wasteland: a prose poem in 11 parts, by John DeVore.

So I decided to create a slideshow to boost my pageviews, but I had no idea what to create. I clicked around the internet for inspiration and read a slideshow on a website that I forget. The title was “Navy SEALS vs. Baby Seals.” It was alternating photos of buff Special Forces soldiers and adorable baby seals, with some meaningless copy underneath. I almost wept at the brilliance of this slideshow. (I like to think I was a pioneer of slideshows.) There, in front of me, was another subterranean internet Morlock who also had to hit their traffic goals. And so they built a completely meaningless and utterly irresistible blackhole of clicks. If you created that, please, I want you to know that someone out there, a colleague, gazed upon it with wonder. I was inspired, obviously, so I grabbed some stock photos of creepy dolls and stuffed animals and wrote “13 Toys That Whisper Things In Your Ears While You Sleep.” No, it wasn’t nearly as brilliant as “Navy SEALS vs. Baby Seals.” But I thought it was brilliant.

Two articles reviewing the promises of fair trade cocoa certification programs: Fair game: How effective is cocoa certification? by Olivier Nieburg for Confectionery News back in 2017 and Ethical cocoa schemes no panacea for struggling farmers by Ana Ionova for Reuters in spring 2018.

Three poems by Jos Charles at The Spectacle -- my favorite --

A current gives
as much as it has
given

you who, I swear, I saw

gone round the tidepools yesterday at noon But the world is
gone But the world is

a lake the size of
a lake

And one, Autobiography, by Kristin Tracey, via Poetry Daily, originally on The Seawall.

When I was a child

the Teton Dam broke.

Everyone lost their carpet.

The mildew wouldn’t stop blossoming.

Over time, everything got better.

People bought more dogs.

I loved the yippy ones most.

Tiny and fierce and shitting everywhere.

My closet was so small.

I had almost no clothes.

We were rich in other ways.

My grandparents owned a speedboat.

And here I am today, timid

around water, but enduring.

Responsibly burying everyone I love

into that dry earth.

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"On Poetry and History," by Aracelis Girmay

2019-01-20T05:22:49Z

--- after Joy Harjo

On a panel of men who spoke about history & poetry, she sat quietly for much of it. They, the men, were saying strong things, good things but in authoritative voices, voices that knew they knew things. & she remained the only quiet one. She listened as if she weren’t listening. Her face looked forward. Her quiet seemed distant. It had a straight back. & then she interrupted one of the men & said something like,
“That reminds me of the time…” & she spoke of a fellow Native American teacher in her region who committed suicide near the end of one of the years, & how he must have been hurting & isolated & in pain, but not many people spoke about that, or spoke about his death or their loss when he died. It was swept under the rug, that was the phrase she used, & she said she was at home one day & looking out of the window & she noticed a black thread or string there, floating in the frame, & she observed it for a while, floating there, until she realized that that black string was grief. The grief of the professor, the grief of the students, her own grief, the grief of silence, a historical grief, & that she knew that it was her job to take that thread & put it somewhere, weave it into the larger tapestry (she made a gesture, then, as if that tapestry were just above her head). She said it was her job to put that grief in its place, or else someone else, some child or grown person would be out walking & just walk right into it, without knowing what it was they’d walked into, what they had, then, inherited in a way, what they were, then, carrying & feeling. The danger of that. The grief of that. & that was what she said about poetry & history. & that is all I remember from all of the things that were said that entire day.

from the black maria, BOA Editions 2016, via Vandal Poem of the Day and Claire Schwartz

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Cooking Advice Poll

2019-01-17T19:57:03Z

All right, friends, I've recently come into possession of a lightly-used 1.5qt (very small) slow cooker. I've never used a slow cooker before and I'm trying to figure out if there's a way for me to incorporate it into my life as a single person who likes to eat or if I should just pass it on. Because I only have enough brain to cook and clean a couple times a week, and am picky, I usually try to make larger portions of more-complicated dishes 1-2x/week and extremely simple things to fill in the gaps.

Does anyone have a slow cooker that they have successfully incorporated into their life? Especially a small one? Any favorite recipes/workflow?

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"From the Closet to the Grave: Architecture, Sexuality, and the Mount Royal Cemetery," by Evan Pavka

2019-01-13T20:47:12Z

from the introduction:

Using case studies from French and American cemeteries alongside those in Mount Royal Cemetery in Montreal, I argue that, for those whose memory is directed by the living, the grave functions much like the closet—closing or disclosing what institutions and society deemed “abominable.” However, more powerful individuals were able to subvert the authority of the cemetery by immortalizing their “romantic friendships” in the grave. By navigating the binaries of the closet—closure/disclosure, hetero/homosexual and repression/pride— the grave has the potential to function as an important archive of identity, sexuality and memory.

published in Field: A Free Journal for Architecture, vol.7 (1).

(For Wilde and James fans, there's some stuff about their graves in particular!)

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Hot take machine

2018-12-23T14:49:02Z

maybe She-Ra will make coalition-building cool again ~~

( whisperspace )

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"US Poetry and the Politics of Form," by Sarah Ehlers

2018-12-20T20:57:37Z

Coming out of this week's research on the question of "what is 'political' about literature in the American context?"* -- an interesting review of an interesting-looking book, on midcentury conservative criticisms of modernist poetics.

Counter-revolution of the Word:
The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945-1960
By Alan Filreis
University of North Carolina Press, 2008, 422 pages, $40 cloth.
LAURA BUSH’S 2003 “Poetry and the American Voice” symposium is infamous because it never happened. Intended to be a White House celebration of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Langston Hughes, the event was cancelled when several poet-invitees (including former laureates) declined the invitation and, instead, composed poems protesting U.S. involvement in Iraq. When the symposium was called off, the First Lady’s spokesperson explained that a celebration of poets was in danger of being turned into a political event.

From one perspective, Alan Filreis’s important new book Counter-revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945-1960 seems to unearth the variegated history producing the former First Lady’s public declaration that an event celebrating American poetry shouldn’t be “political.” Indeed Filreis describes a striking paradox: in the middle of the 20th-century, conservative critics decried experimental verse forms in an attempt to destroy the modernist avant-garde and to undo its associations with the Left. Yet by treating modern poetic experimentalism as a form of communist subversion, and by privileging a traditional lyricism defined by individual expression and reflection, it appears that these critics effectively convinced American audiences that poetry and politics don’t mix.

In this sense, Counter-revolution of the Word maps the creation of a notion that Laura Bush’s press corps had apparently internalized — that is, that American poetry should be distinct from politics. But Filreis also reveals how tangled poetry is and has been in U.S. politics, and his book’s specific focus on political re-narrations of poetic forms reveals the ways in which seemingly innocuous statements like Bush’s are actually the product of a long ideological antagonism ...

* I know ... if you have any suggestions for not-overly-technical readings that lay out ideas related to this topic in 5-15 pages I'll kiss you on your head

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King, by Layli Long Soldier

2018-12-17T03:48:41Z

( I'm so wound. With built up key stroke, dog bite and growl. )

I’ve fallen into depression I’m sorry. I thought I was fine then I dropped
into what pulls. For so long my anchor’s been pain, a lodestone
magnetized and electric I came to understand this what
as, feeling. But who cares now it’s between the page and me. Personal,
private. I am two and then twice that, as I call my name four times.
Layli, Layli,
Layli, Layli.

At the door, Layli Pain and Layli Joy. A child-self enters with me.
Layli Think and Layli Do, they soft step to the threshold I imagine.
I want no resolution to this friendship of self, halved into halves.
Pain, you boss and lord this existence slow as white blooms
along the sky crumpling into themselves then loosely breaking
away away I call my name. I wait for my return, strange
strange stepping toward me I see no one.

first published on Hyperallergic, via Poetry Daily.

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Some medicine

2018-12-07T06:34:37Z

to start us off. This is just something I was reading today, in between grading and having regularly-scheduled conniptions.

So I read this cute little piece in Nautilus by Clayton Dalton, An Rx for Doctors, which explains some research laying out "a model of control dynamics" for doctors and Nautilus readers as a plane, instead of as a linear spectrum from "trying hard" to "giving up," and that this might make us all feel better given that the world is a scary place. So I looked at Shapiro's original study* marrying this control dynamic stuff to the problem of doctors getting stressed out and, wow! The model seems kind of goofy to me but it describes some recognizable human situations, so, ok:

The positive modes of control are represented by the terms positive assertive and positive yielding. Positive assertive involves active, assertive ways of gaining or regaining control. Positive yielding involves letting go of active control efforts. This mode is distinct from helplessness or passivity and represents the capacity to accept and respond effectively to potentially stressful, yet largely uncontrollable circumstances. The two negative modes of control are identified as negative assertive and negative yielding. Negative assertive or overcontrol involves inappropriate or excessive efforts to gain control, particularly in situations that are outside of one's personal control. Negative yielding, or helplessness, involves giving up and resigned passivity.

But Shapiro et al's point appears to be that if the "control model" is your hammer, every single doctor is a nail you can hit firmly upon the head. I would have to know more about medical infighting to know how spicy this take is; my sense is that she and her team are using this model in order to make their points about medical education reform palatable to a decent publication, because their larger game is "remember how we did all that research that said that wellness was biopsychosocial but then we still hated feelings and were incapable as a profession of dealing with them" --

Suchman (2000) has suggested that medical culture in many ways prizes control over most other values. This is apparent in the emphasis medicine places on making accurate predictions and achieving desired outcomes, the hierarchical structure of relationships, and “cure” as the overriding criterion for clinical and personal success. Suchman (2000) further suggested that given such unrealistic personal and institutional expectations of control, it is understandable that physicians would be motivated to try and limit the “territory” for which they are responsible (e.g., “the body”) and correspondingly less inclined to deal with other matters (e.g., emotions, thoughts) that they experience as less concrete, harder to observe and quantify, and more importantly less amenable or subject to control and prediction.

I found the description of how the control model predicts doctor response to patients to be particularly butthole-puckering:

When we use the lens of “control,” the ideal patient is one who agrees with the physician's diagnosis, accepts the physician's agenda, is willing to follow the physician's treatment plan, in general shares the physician's world view, and finally, is grateful for the physician's time and assistance (Khalil, 2009). Such patients support the physician's feelings of being “in control” of the encounter and the relationship. However, certain patient behaviors may be more likely to elicit feelings of loss or lack of control for physicians. These include: (a) demanding that doctors “fix” the problem, despite the problem not necessarily being “fixable,” or insisting on inappropriate treatment (the “demanding” patient; Strous, Ulman, & Kotner, 2006); (b) becoming overly dependent or reliant upon the practitioner (the “needy” patient); (c) failing to take personal responsibility for their own health care choices; (d) communicating certain emotional states (e.g., anxiety, fear, anger, depression) that the provider is either personally uncomfortable with or finds difficult to address; and (e) having multiple coexisting psychological and medical problems, none of which is easily remediable (predictive of “difficult” clinical interactions) (Rosendal, Fink, Bro, & Olesen, 2005). Relationships with such patients tend to generate negative physician responses (e.g., anger, frustration, discomfort, blame, helplessness), which we relate to loss of control, responses that are likely to adversely affect patient care and create emotional distress in the physician.

I bet they do!

*Shapiro, J., Astin, J., Shapiro, S. L., Robitshek, D., & Shapiro, D. H. (2011). Coping with loss of control in the practice of medicine. Families, Systems, & Health, 29(1), 15-28. If you'd like to read the whole thing but don't have access lmk.

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Oh boy oh boy oh boy

2018-12-06T15:46:17Z

Are we doing this? Are we migrating? Oh boy!!

I'll be at dignityisforotherpeople on tumblr until they bury us all in salt, and fic is on AO3 as Digs, but I don't want to miss the start of a magical adventure ...

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