Something I thought about:
- I read a lot this week and have been sitting with the quotes that I pulled out below from various articles and podcasts (mostly relating to place, archives, and maps) and considering what/who gets centered, why, and how to disorder that.
Something I did:
- Had a few meetings
- Played many board games with the child
- Caught up on podcasts
- Closed some browser tabs
- Did a lot of planning (the next four weeks are *packed*)
- Attended orientation for an intensive course that I’m beginning on Monday
- Homework!
Something I read:
- A Rover’s Story by Jasmine Warga
- Rupture Tense by Jenny Xie
- Inciting Joy by Ross Gay
- From author Sara Zarr’s newsletter / podcast:
I keep thinking about this article from J.P. Brammer, in which he answers a reader's question about burnout. Especially this:
What do you want art to give you? Do you want art to be your full-time job? Do you want people to appreciate your art? Do you want to feel the catharsis of expressing yourself with your art? Don’t think about the book you haven’t written or the drawing you haven’t sketched out. Think about what role you want art to play in your daily life. It will help determine what kind of artist you are.
- This whole VS podcast conversation with Joy Priest is good, but I particularly liked the discussion of literary mapping — of how Black and immigrant narratives offer a counter map to dominant narratives of place by centering what’s considered by those dominant voices to be the “periphery.”
- Sumana Roy on "uselessness" in poetry.
“I do not mean what has, after Salman Rushdie, come to be called a 'chutneyfied' English, holding within it phrases and sounds of the Indian languages. I mean, instead, a spirit and critical intelligence of the language system—in my case Bangla—that has conditioned my manner of thought and articulation even when I have migrated to other languages such as English."
“Novelists and poets provided the models for creatively disordering the archive, transforming and rearranging its statements, looking at its documents from below, from the vantage of those in the hold, contesting its regime of fact and truth."
- This paper on English-language bias in cognitive science is both interesting and important.
“English is the dominant language in the study of human cognition and behavior: the individuals studied by cognitive scientists, as well as most of the scientists themselves, are frequently English speakers. However, English differs from other languages in ways that have consequences for the whole of the cognitive sciences, reaching far beyond the study of language itself.”
