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ireadathing · 10 months ago

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A small, perfect book

"In October there were yellow trees. Then the clocks went back the hour and the long November winds came in and blew, and stripped the trees bare. In the town of New Ross, chimneys threw out smoke which fell away and drifted off in hairy, drawn-out strings before dispersing along the quays, and soon the River Barrow, dark as stout, swelled up with rain." (1)

"It was a blustery afternoon in April; beyond the wide, clear panes, a blizzard of white blossom was being torn and blown off the roused-up cherry trees, and Furlong had opened the pane a little as she had never liked being in a closed room" (22)

"As he waited for the kettle to boil up once more, he thought of the hot water bottle Ned had given him all those Christmases ago, and how, despite his disappointment, he'd been comforted by that gift, nightly, for long afterwards; and how, before the next Christmas had come, he'd reached the end of A Christmas Carol, for Mrs Wilson had encouraged him to use the big dictionary and look up the words, saying everyone should have a vocabulary, a word he could not find until he discovered the third letter was not a k. The next year, when he'd won first prize for spelling and was given a wooden pencil-case whose sliding top doubled as a ruler, Mrs Wilson had rubbed the top of his head and praised him, as though he was one of her own. 'You're a credit to yourself,' she'd told him. And for a whole day or more, Furlong had gone around feeling a foot taller, believing, in his heart, that he mattered as much as any other child." (26-27)

"When he let down the tail board and went to open the coal house door, the bolt was stiff with frost, and he had to ask himself if he had not turned into a man consigned to doorways, for did he not spend the best part of his life standing outside of one or another, waiting for them to be opened." (58)

"He gave Furlong a welcome, as always, and soon began to reminisce over him being brought as a n infant into the house, going over how Mrs Wilson used to come down daily to look in at him in the basket. 'She never once regretted it,' he said, 'or said a cheap word about ye or took advantage of your mother. The wage was small but hadn't we a decent roof over our heads here, and never once did we go to bed hungry. I've nothing only a small room here but never did I go into it to find so much as a matchbox out of place. The room I live in is as good as what I'd own - and can't I get up in the middle of the night and eat my fill, if I care to. And how many can say that" (82)

"What most tormented him was not so much how she'd been left in the coal shed or the stance of the Mother Superior; the worst was how the girl had been handled while he was present and how he'd allowed that and had not asked about her baby - the one thing she had asked him to do - and how he had taken the money and left her there at the table with nothing before her and the breast milk leaking under the little cardigan and staining her blouse, and how he'd gone on, like a hypocrite, to mass" (87)

" And of this was truth, hadn't it been an act of daily grace, on Ned's part, to make Furlong believe that he had come from finer stock, while watching steadfastly over him, through the years. This was the man who had polished his shoes and tied the laces, who'd bought him his first razor and taught him how to shave. Why were the things that were closest so often the hardest to see." (100)

"As they carried on along and met more people Furlong did and did not know, he found himself asking was there any point in being alive without helping one another? Was it possible to carry on along through all the years, the decades, through an entire life, without once being brave enough to go against what was there and yet call yourself a Christian, and face yourself in the mirror?" (108)

"He thought of Mrs Wilson, of her daily kindnesses, of how she had corrected and encouraged him, of the small things she had said and done and had refused to do and say and what she must have known, the things, which, when added up, amounted to a life. Had it not been for her, his mother might very well have wound up in that place. in an earlier time, it could have been his own mother he was saving - if saving was what this could be called. And only God knew what would have happened to him, where he might have ended up.

The worst was yet to come, he knew. Already he could feel a world of trouble waiting for him behind the next door, but the worst that could have happened was already behind him; the thing not done, which could have been - which he would have had to live with for the rest of his life. Whatever suffering he was now to meet was a long way from what the girl at his side had already endured, and might yet surpass. Climbing the street towards his own front door with the barefooted girl and the box of shoes, his fear more than outweighed every other feeling but in his foolish heart he not only hoped but legitimately believed that they would manage." (109)

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ireadathing · 2 years ago

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Michael Ondaatje, In the Skin of a Lion

“This is a story a young girl gathers in a car during the early hours of the morning. She listens and asks questions as the vehicle travels through darkness. Outside, the countryside is unbetrayed. The man who is driving could say, “In that field is a castle,” and wit would be possible for her to believe him. She listens to the man as he picks up and brings together various corners of the story, attempting to carry it all in his arms. And he is tired, sometimes as elliptical as his concentration on the road, at times overexcited - “Do you see?” He turns to her in the faint light of the speedometer.

Driving the four hours to Marmora under six stars and a moon.

She stays away to keep him company” (1)

“The only connection the loggers have with the town is when they emerge to skate along the line of river, on homemade skates, the blades made of old knives.” (8)

“The previous midnight the workers had arrived and brushed away officials who guarded the bridge in preparation for the ceremonies the next day, moved with their own flickering lights - their candles for the bridge dead - like a wave of civilization, a net of summer insects over the valley” (27)

“His own life was no longer a single story but part of a mural, which was a falling together of accomplices. Patrick saw a wondrous night web - all of these fragments of human order, something uncovered by the family he was born into or the headlines of the day. A nun on a bridge, a dare-devil who was unable to sleep without drink, a boy watching a fire from his bed at night, an actress who ran away with a millionaire - the detritus and chaos of the age was realigned.” (145)

“Official histories, news stories surround us daily, but the events of art reach us too late, travel languorously like messages in a bottle.

Only the best art can order the chaotic tumble of events. Only the best can realign chaos to suggest both the chaos and order it will become...The first sentence of every novel should be: ‘Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.’ Meander if you want to get to town.” (146)

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ireadathing · 3 years ago

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Katie Kitamura, Intimacies

“This was done for obvious reasons, there were great chasms beneath words, between two or sometimes more languages, that could open up without warning.”

“But none of us are able to really see the world we are living in—this world, occupying as it does the contradiction between its banality (the squat wall of the Detention Center, the bus running along its ordinary route) and its extremity (the cell and the man inside the cell), is something that we see only briefly and then do not see again for a long time, if ever. It is surprisingly easy to forget what you have witnessed, the horrifying image or the voice speaking the unspeakable, in order to exist in the world we must and we do forget, we live in a state of I know but I do not know.”

“I nodded. I saw that she had already started to dismiss me in her mind. I had the feeling that I had wasted her time. She was right to say that it was a question of temperament, and that I did not have the correct kind. But I no longer believed that equanimity was either tenable or desirable. It corroded everything inside. I had never met a person with greater equanimity than the former president. But this applied to all of them--to the prosecution and the defence, to the judges and even the other interpreters. They were able to work. They had the right temperament for the job. But at what internal cost?” (218)

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ireadathing · 5 years ago

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Amanda Jernigan, All the Daylight Hours

Reading this again, I don’t love it as much as I once did. Or, at least, I feel differently about it. There are still a few careful lines and poems that I think are very beautiful. And I remember holding these lines so closely when I was younger and aspiring to them and wanting to understand them. I had so much hunger and so much fear. And yet, frankly, there’s some snobbery in this book. A cleaving to tradition and convention - the precision can sometimes be stiff rather than evocative. It reminds me of that vein of maritime, traditionalist thought, that way of looking at wilderness, life, and things that is so mired in itself and its rules that it is blind to or erases a few especially important ways of knowing. A settler Canadian perspective that props itself up on European and Greek classics and the references that have been created here, around those, without looking far enough beyond those conventions. Very Mount A. Maybe, it is personal to me because I feel that it is a world that I never measured up to. And now, nearly 30, I realize that this is not a perfect or even useful measure, but, in fact, limiting.

I thought I couldn’t be a poet if I couldn’t write like Amanda. I still admire her, and I no longer wish to be a poet in the way that I once did but... I feel freer now. And more able to be critical of this book, as I think I value my own perspective more now, and know more. When I was younger, I was so excited just to meet a real, live poet.

This book does put me again in the headspace, though, that I recognize but enter less frequently - the calm place in my mind created from reading poetry. It reminds me what I love about poetry and makes me want to write my own again.

I still love Lullaby. It is implanted in my head. Here are two other poems -

Death and Taxes

Here together we are wholly love’s, and I forget that “Noli me tangere,” Wyatt’s fable Insisting we are all on loan --

Ceasar’s warning not reserved for courtly lovers: we are wild, as we are mortal.

If love’s currency’s debased by death’s impression on the face, while there’s breath in us we’re able to render unto each its own.

Rushlight

We two alone will sing like birds i’ th’ cage ...

It is not easy, however half in love we are with easeful death, to sing by rushlight in a cage of rushes that diminishes with every breath; nor yet to leave

off singing -- taking for a stage direction the prompter’s whispered Love, and be siltent, to swallow Cordelia’s line and exit -- however half in love we are with fretful life.

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ireadathing · 5 years ago

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Anna Burns, Milkman

“’Your younger sisters,’ he said ‘sight bright little girls, such wonderful curiosity and guts and passion and engagement. A natural sense too, they have, of entitlement which as you know in this place is rare. More often it’s the case that keenness and initiative gets stifled here, turned to discouragement, twisted too, into darker channels. But it’s that in their nonage they are little girls somewhat wild and uncontained. At times they’re ghoulish,’ he went on, ‘and I’m sure too, they must be a mighty handful for your mother.’” (147)

“Looking out the window on my way upstairs to change for running, I could see this international couple had really taken off. Little girls were falling over everywhere. It seemed the whole district of them was out, playing, flouncing, and at first glance they appeared mainly to resemble chandeliers with added lusciousness such as golden brocade and embossed wallpaper. By the time I did go out, all the streets were overrun with them: beribboned, besilked, bevelveted, behigheeled, bescratchy-petticoated and in pairs or else alone but pretending to be in pairs, waltzing and periodically crashing over. Meanwhile, the little boys, oblivious of the little girls, temporarily too, suspending operations against that army from ‘over there’ - owing, probably, to the current absence of that army from ‘over there’ - were taking turns at being good guy in their new play of the latest martyr killed recently in the political problems: Renouncer Hero Milkman, shadowed, set upon, then gunned down in their usual cowardly fashion by that murder squad spawned by a terrorist state.” (341)

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ireadathing · 5 years ago

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Brene Brown, Daring Greatly

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ireadathing · 5 years ago

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Christina Sharpe - In the Wake: On Blackness and Being

“Wake: the track left on the water’s surface by a ship; the disturbance caused by a body swimming or moved, in water; it is the air currents behind a body in flight; a region of disturbed flow” (3)

“(Opportunity: from the Latin Ob-, meaning “toward,” and portu(m), meaning “port” : What is opportunity in the wake, and how is opportunity always framed?)” (3)

Saidiya Hartman - “The autobiographical example is like a personal story that folds onto itself; it’s not about navel gazing, it’s really about trying to look at historical and social process and one’s own formation as a window onto social and historical processes, as an example of them” “Like Hartman I include the personal here, “to tell a story capable of engaging and countering the violence of abstraction.” (8)

“This is what we know about those Africans thrown, jumped, dumped overboard in Middle Passage; they are with us still, in the time of the wake, known as residence time.” (19)

“Just as wake work troubles mourning, so too do the wake and wake work trouble the ways most museums and memorials take up trauma and memory. That is, if museums and memorials materialize a kind of reparation (repair) and enact their own pedagogies as they position visitors to have a particular experience or set of experiences about an event that is seen to be past, how does one memorialize chattel slavery and its afterlives, which are unfolding still” (20)

“That set of work by Black artists, poets, writers and thinkers is positioned against a set of quotidian catastrophic events and their reporting that together comprise what I am calling the orthography of the wake. The latter is a dysgraphia of disaster, and these disasters arrive by way of the rapid deliberate, repetitive, and wide circulation on television and social media of Black social, material, and psychic death. This orthography makes domination in/visible and not/visceral. This orthography is an instance of what I am calling the Weather; it registers and produces the conventions of antiblackness in the present and into the future.” (21)

“The logics of the slave ship and the hold instantiated Obama’s reiteration of that terrible calculus of the inability to “save every black life”: an awful arithmetic, a violence of abstraction. We are positioned in the knowledge that we are living in the afterlives of slavery, sitting in the room with history, in a lived and undeclared state of emergency. The ground of compromise, the firmament, the access to freedom and democracy, littered with Black bodies. With the optic of the door of no return on our retina ,we might envision, imagine, something else--something like what Joy James (2013) calls “a liberated zone” even though under siege. Across time and space the languages and apparatus of the hold and its violence multiply; so, too, the languages of beholding... How are we beholden to and beholders of each other in ways that change across time and place and space and yet remain? Beholden in the wake, as, at the very least, if we are lucky, an opportunity (back to the door) in our Black bodies to try to look, try to see.” (100-101)

“So here we are in the weather, here in the singularity. Here there is disaster and possibility. And while “we are constituted through and by continued vulnerability to this overwhelming force, we are not only known to ourselves and to each other by that force.” (134)

Dionne Brand - “If you’re lucky you spend the rest of your life fighting them, if you’re not, you spend your life unquestioningly absorbing” (149)

To read:

Kamau Brathwaite

M. NourbeSe Philip

Dionne Brand

Elizabeth DeLoughrey

Claire Harris

CLR James

Fred Moten

Kimberly Juanita Brown - Regarding the Pain of the Other

Edwidge Danticat

Lewis Hyde - The Gift

Joy Jackson

Michel-Rolph Trouillot - Silencing the Past

https://forensic-architecture.org/

https://www.slavevoyages.org/

https://www.moma.org/artists/1422

To watch:

Daughters of the Dust

Timbuktu

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ireadathing · 5 years ago

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ireadathing · 5 years ago

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Loleen Berdahl and Jonathan Malloy, Work Your Career: Get What You Want from Your Social Sciences or Humanities PhD

This book has been so helpful to my thinking. After spending the late winter and spring of this year trying to write a SSHRC application, I started feeling so... frustrated and not excited about so many things--about my research (and my vague sense of it); about my prospects of being in the world if I pursued a PhD; about the UofT Archives, oddly, because I know there's cool stuff in there, I just wasn't finding it; about the relevance of my research interest and the way I'd have to warp my interests, which are ultimately more divergent and creative than traditional “research”, for academia.

So I picked up this book, and the more I read the more clear eyed I felt about pursuing academia vs. not. I made a list of pros and cons. The list of cons was expansive compared to the pros.

I decided to think on it. On Wednesday of that week I talked to some friends of mine on the phone and the fact that I was thinking about not doing a PhD came up. I didn't want to be boring or take over the conversation with it, but they asked and so I sort of word vomited about my thinking. About how I want to be doing something concrete in the world - I've been thinking this in particular in light of the pandemic. And how it's occurred to me that not doing a PhD doesn't mean I won't be a person who thinks and reads and produces things. I can do all of those things in a different way, in a different context.

I also had an interesting conversation with Andrew on one of our walks about how I've felt a certain amount of pressure to do something extraordinary - for reasons I won't get into here. And that has prevented me in some ways from logically seeking out more practical options.

I want to be of use in the world. And I'm already excited about the things that I can do with my life that aren't this.

I think I would like to write an email to the professors who wrote this book to thank them. It’s so clear, logical, straightforward and practical. I’ve honestly never thought practically or intentionally about my life. I’ve never planned for things, at least not far in advance. I think I’ve been scared to work with the actual substance of my life and instead of staying hidden in a few removed dreams.

I'll also write a few notes from it here, because I think it’s so generally useful:

---

Chapter 1 - Get What You Want from your PhD

“Rather than moving through your doctoral program with your eyes solely on the next step, we will push you to maximize your personal agency and strategically position that next step into the larger context of your career trajectory. What those steps and trajectory are is ultimately up toy ou; this book is oriented toward helping you decide what is best for you.

To achieve this, we structure our guidance around an overarching question for you to continuously ask yourself:

Given both my future goals and the information currently available to me, what is my best decision right now?

...The question forces you to explicitly consider your future goals, and to be realistic as you do so. It pushes you together whatever information is available to you and to go beyond relying on what you presume to be true or what your well-meaning but perhaps not fully informed professors and fellow students are telling you. T he question demands you to use the information you find to weigh your options as you make your choices. And the question requires you to continually reassess your decisions and to make corrections to your path as new information emerges, as circumstances change, as your goals evolve.” (2-3)

“Making the best decision for yourself will not necessarily result in the exact outcome you predict; life lacks guarantees, and this certainly applies to the advice we provide. But ideally, by asking yourself this question about both your large and small decisions, and by continually returning to the question to reassess and change course as needed, you can avoid any future feeling of regret with respect to your career choices. You can also develop a sense of confidence that you are capable of making the best decision for yourself and that you can strategically pursue your own best interests.” (3)

“Table 1.1 Worksheet: Considering future goals and available information

Given both my future goals and the information currently available to me, what is my best decision right now

Questions to get you started:

Future Goals:

What kind of tasks do I want to be doing in my future work life?

What would my ideal work day look like? How do I envision balancing my future work and personal lives?

Where do I want to live? How important is that to me?

How much money do I want to make? How important is that to me?

What kind of difference do I want to make in the world? What do I consider to be meaningful work?

What do I like doing, both day to day and over the course of a year or more? What motivates and energizes me? What does the opposite?

Do I like immediate payoff and rewards? Or am I comfortable with investing for the long term, such as through a PhD, even if exact results are not guaranteed?

Information currently available:

What types of career skills are valued in the sectors that interest me? Do I feel I can build/acquire these skills?

What are the average PhD completion rates in my field? Time to completion rates?

In what careers do PhDs in my field work? Is a PhD necessary to do this work?

Who are recent PhD graduates in my field that I can identify as possible role models (or cautionary tales)?

What are my resources, personal priorities, and personal commitments at this stage in my life? How might they affect my pursuing a PhD?” (4)

“While many students have a single, narrow goal in mind--specifically, a tenure track university professor position--we encourage you to adopt a broader goal that takes into account all relevant information” (7)

Proposed goal: a successful rewarding career that uses your talents and the skills that you’ve developed throughout your education

“Be conscious of current experience with particular competencies and what you can do to develop further. We suggest you create a portfolio that you update monthly with absolutely everything that is even remotely relevant as evidence of your competencies. Future You will be happy you did so” (13)

“Table 1.2. Worksheet: Creating your portfolio of career competencies

Career Competency | Examples of Evidence | Your current evidence | Options to build more evidence

Critical thinking and problem solving

written and oral communication skills

Digital technology

professionalism and work ethic

teamwork and collaboration

leadership

global / intercultural fluency” (13)

Informational Interviews

“One of the best ways to learn about career options and what specific careers are really like is to speak to individuals who are working in a field. Informational interviews are a standard way to do this: They provide inside information and allow you to build and expand your professional networks. The idea of cold calling strangers to ask to meet with them may make you uncomfortable, but informational interviews are common and you should not feel that you are making an unusual or outrageous request. In the early years of your program, such meetings will provide you with key insights on the competencies that are valued in different careers; in the later years of your program, these meetings may lead to critical networks that feed directly into your job search.

1. Establish a list of 20+ names

-brainstorm people you know personally

-ask those in your circle then move out to the true strangers realm

2. Make the request

-ask for a short meeting at their convenience, ideally in their office

-if in a different city, request a short telephone conversation

-clarify that you are not asking about a job, but rather than you are seeking information on careers more broadly

-request should be straightforward such as the following email:

Dear Ms. Adams,

I am writing to request a 20 minute meeting with you to learn more about careers in community relations. I am currently in the last year of my PhD in sociology and am curious to learn how community relations work. I am happy to meet with you in your office or speak with you by telephone at your convenience.

Thank you for considering this request. I look forward to hearing from you

Sincerely,

3. Prepare

-background research

-learn about org, field, individual

-prepare a specific list of questions to ask about what the job type entails what skills are involved and what the entry points are

-include in that list of questions a closing question that asks if they recommend addition people that you should talk to (and permission to use their name when contacting)

4. Work the interview

-use time to gather information and develop your professional reputation and networks

-arrive early but not too early, dress professionally, and be respectful of their time

5. follow up and reflect

-send a thank you email and keep a record for yourself of the date and details of the interview

-reflect on what competencies you learned to be valuable in that sector and consider how you might build experience with (and concrete evidence of) that competency

How can I cultivate a professional reputation

- a number of qualities tied to professionalism

-reliable, conscientious, and attentive to detail

-understand need for appropriateness relative to their circumstances and the importance of acting graciously

“at it’s core, professionalism is largely about treating others respectfully in a broad sense. When you make the effort to be punctual and to ensure that your work meets a particular standard and that your behavior is appropriate to the situation, you are showing respect for other people’s time, energy, feelings, boundaries, and so forth.” (138)

Adopting three mindsets will help you avoid unintentional disrespect:

1. Graciousness is not optional: A lack of attention to gratitude will seal your reputational coffin if you are not careful. Always say please. And, closing the loop, thank people when they do something for you, even if it is small, and even if they are your supervisor, instructor, or committee member. When people do things for you... they are giving you a gift of their time and attention... People typically notice when they are not acknowledge for their efforts, and you can easily turn a potential champion into someone who has no investment in your success. If someone is helpful to or supportive of you, take the minute it takes to express your gratitude. IF someone provides you with detailed feedback on your work, provide a more lengthy posotive response (even if you don’t agree with their comments). If you intend to say thank ou but fail to actually do so, the person is left with the impression that their efforts are not valued by you or that you feel entitled, and that person will be unlikely to help you again in the future. Make it a habit to thank people within 48 hours for all things large and small. (139)

2. Your department is your workplace and the people in it are your colleagues... Professionalism requires a strong sense of context as well a respect for differences in power and authority. Here are somethings to avoid: being late; showing up at meetings unprepared, without a pen and paper or tablet / laptop and a clear purpose; profanity; discussion of illegal or illicit activities; sloppiness, be it in personal attire, non-proofread emails and materials, or data and file management; anything beyond light alcohol consumption.

3. All information is private unless you are told otherwise... you need to become highly sensitive to showing others respect by developing a hyper-instinct for discretion... sometimes it’s crystal clear; other times not. Always err on the side of caution, asking if something can be share. And if you are gossiping or voicing opinions about faculty, other graduate students, undergraduate students, staff or anyone else, know that it will get back to them or be repeated to someone else. If you wouldn’t say it to their face or send it to them in an email, rethink voicing it at all (140)

How can I be productive?

Professionalism means doing what you say you will do and by when you say you will do it. You cement your professional reputation by getting things done--and done well, on or ahead of schedule. This requires the ability to manage time, resources, and energy to make things happen, over and over.

1. Make a list of what needs to be done

-write a list of everything you have committed to and the associated deadlines and organize the list by due date

2. Break activities down into smaller tasks, distinguishing between high- and low-energy tasks

create a more detailed list to create target completion dates to manage your time and energy

some taks must be done when you are at your peak and other tasks can be done when energy levels are lower

clearly label high and low energy tasks

3. Block work time into your calendar

the trick to getting things done (and don well and on time) is to schedule the work times into your calendar and to respect these times. Remember, an unstructured schedule and its illusion of endless time is yoru enemy; imposing structure on your day is necessary

- block off all committed times

-for each task and project, est. the number of hours you will need - because most things will take longer than you assume and to provide a cushion in case of unanticipated events - increase this number by 50%

-working back from the deadline, schedule task-specific working time in your calendar, assigning high energy tasks to the high energy time slot

this allows you to identify if you’ve taken on too much

4. Work your calendar

-execution takes discipline - honour your commitments

-many writing problems occur because people are trying to plan, write, and edit simultaneously. To get around this, start with a clear outline and then focus your daily efforts on small units within the outline. Allow yourself to put ideas in point form, making notes to yourself in the draft to be dealt with at a later time

-avoid the temptation to edit as you go

Networking

“you should develop equivalent summaries of yoru skills and competencies. Be able to speak convincingly and confidently about what you can do and why it is relevant and valuable. You set the tone. You’re a professional.” (153)

Launch your Career

“organizations...do not hire people for the sake of hiring them. They hire people because they have identified a need a gap--a problem-- and at least part of the solution is to hire someone to solve it.” (157)

Figuring Out What You Want to Do

-3 dimensions - activities, subject matter, work environment

Activities: What energizes you? What triggers your flow? - look for ovrelap between dominant competencies and types of work that energieze you

-identify which activities jazz you up and which ones wear you out along with evidence and examples

Subject Matter - What angers, inspires you? areas you feel strongly about and where you dream of making a contribution

Environment - large or small? Dynamic or slower pace? Stability or change? Routine

Use this to identify 3-4 career options that might be a good fit for you - push yourself to break apart the components

After you narrow in on ideas, do additional roudns of informational interview, to gather information and build networks - research industries and sectors - listen to your gut

Approach as research challenge

Tone: Optimism & Possibility

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