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Freeze / Melt
The ice storm of a week and a half ago turned out to be the most destructive weather event here in the last 30 years. I didn’t ever really have a moment where I felt endangered, but going through the motions of survival was probably good earthquake preparation. Being disconnected from the internet was a
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Search for Clarity
Even now I still search for clarity. Where did I go so wrong? Where was the point at which I stepped from safety into all the danger. How might I have kept myself safe, how might I have survived all that. What didn’t I see, and still don’t see? What didn’t I understand then? Not
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candy
In order to get my graduate degrees in the program I had been admitted to and chosen, I had to take classes in my department. I had no reason upon enrolling to believe that this would be a problem. But it was. It was the kind of abuse which is very difficult to describe and
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Interregnum
Autumn is usually when a deeper, bereft sadness and sense of uncertainty and out-of-jointness has tended to surface, it’s just the time of year when hard or stressful things have tended to accumulate over the years and leave a heavy residue. Usually I don’t get through it without buying a few school supplies (though I’ve
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just passing through
I recently attended an online conference that was enormous, but the online format at this time allowed for a much more paced digestion of the content and general exposure. The experience has been valuable in understanding more about the structure of the field and academia, the current questions and the work being done. Some of
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purloined letter
I was living in Berlin, had been working steadily towards my dreams of finding my place in academia. I was exhausted between teaching at three different language schools in order to stay afloat, the stresses of applying to and preparing for grad school with no guidance, and the details of the everyday of negotiating life
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Coviding
What a time to be alive. For me covid days have meant looking longer and harder at things both outwards and inwards. The collective pause has brought a space to stand back into, to assess in ways one usually reserves for the change of year either annually or personally. When covid started, I was embarking
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Renaissance – maybe.
For better or worse (I think largely better) the covid-19 interval has spurred such a plentiful offering of online arts, cultural, and intellectual events. For someone like me who exists on some plane outside of large institutions but who holds interest and curiosity, and who is also in an active phase of attempted self-integration and
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streams
Why is and isn’t the right question to ask. Why there is abuse in the academy. The resources are few and competition is fierce. There is no incentive to collaborate. The path to recognition and reward is primarily independent research and production. The system is an indisputable hierarchy, built to support those at the top
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Mount St. Helens
Last week I went to see the Mount St. Helens exhibit at the Portland Art Museum during the typically – but that evening especially sparsely – attended Friday evening open hours. Just afterwards, the museum closed for at least a month but now probably two in order to help flatten the curve. Because this means
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Streaming feature
The truncated 2020 Portland International Film Festival featured a film by Patricio Guzmán called Cordillera of Dreams. Though I had planned to go, I didn’t due to a cold and Coronavirus isolation. However, I was able to find his two other documentary films which began his trilogy capped by Cordillera: Nostalgia for the Light and
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Death, Love and German
How did I become interested in German? I’ve never been one of those savants who have an “ear for languages” or accents, though I’ve always been able to assemble strong vocabularies. Nor do I thrill to the hard work of constant repetition and drilling. Nonetheless, German drew me. This started with my Oma. My great-grandma,