WILL WONDER WOMAN BE ON THE PANEL?

Academics enjoy a constant stream of conferences about their specialities which can be so “cutting edge” and esoteric that I’m amazed and jealous at once.  The pattern is that there’s a sponsoring umbrella organization.  I’m on environmental and language lists, so I get notification, but I can’t afford the dues so I can’t participate, much less travel to faraway locations.  The idea is that someone has an idea for a panel, gives it a title and gathers up a few presenters with related ideas.  At the conference they read their papers, interact a bit, and then the audience discusses.  I can’t go to the conferences -- I’m not sure who’s picking up the tabs -- I presume the institutions do for which they teach and do research.  I did go to one in Banff which was close (relatively) but didn’t present.  These people are almost always young teachers, sometimes fresh from field adventures.  This is NOTHING like how professors used to function, which was to sequester themselves and only share ideas at cocktail hour.

I cope with this inability to “get there” in a strategy something like the way I treat current scholarly books, or more accurately the pop derivatives of them.  So many of them have only one idea, that it’s practical to just read the reviews or maybe watch a YouTube lecture.  The books about neurobrain research have been too complex and multisyllabic to do this.  In that case I end up watching the YouTube talks repeatedly in an effort to really grasp the books.

Some panels I would dearly love to hear.  I’ll repeat the announcements of three in case you can attend, but I think they are fascinating even in this form.

I.

From ancient Greek myths to 21st century post-apocalyptic novels, cannibalism abounds, forcing us to reconsider easy binaries of self and other or civilized “us” and a savage “them.” As Maggie Kilgour argues in From Communion to Cannibalism, incorporation—the most basic example of which is eating—“depends upon and enforces an absolute division between inside and outside; but in the act itself that opposition disappears,  dissolving the structure it appears to produce”. What, then, when the food being eaten is human flesh?

This panel proposes to examine the various ways literature explores acts of cannibalism to break down notions of absolute difference and articulate the dual fears of anthropophagy: the fear of being cannibalized and the fear of becoming cannibal, the fear of becoming human meat and the fear of eating it. Often considered the demarcation of civilization and barbarism, cannibalism in fact explores the problem of our status as human beings who become hungry: the specter of our common animality. As Simon Estok points out, “Cannibalism is an unambiguously ecocritical issue.” One cannot be a cannibal without also being human, and meat cannot be but human flesh to mark the consumer of it “cannibal.”

Following the conference theme, then, this panel explores “the importance of experiences that lie beneath (and before and after) the shiny edifices of progress, rationality, and industry […]. to consider what lies beneath us” in terms of culture, definitions of humanity, and what makes us human via explorations of fictional anthropophagy and what those representations mean.

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II.

The Poetics of Grass, panel proposal for the ASLE Eleventh Biennial Conference, June 23-27, 2015, University of Idaho, Moscow, ID. The panel will focus on grass—which is so often underneath—to think about the following questions:

• For Whitman, grass emblematized American democracy and vitality in the wake of the Civil War. Recent environmentally-aware poetry suggests that the Whitmanian question “What is the grass?” bears re-asking in the twenty-first century. How is Whitman being reinvented in the 20th and 21st century, in an era of environmental crisis, multiple wars, and the emergence of ecopoetics?

• Grasses can grow from rhizomes, underground root systems that laterally connect. Can we draw connections between this kind of lateral multiplicity and formal experimentation in poetry? Might certain experimental or avant-garde poetic forms be considered “grassy”? (Implicit in these questions, but certainly not imperative to their answer, is Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical concept of the rhizome in A Thousand Plateaus).

• Where does the presence or absence of grass signify “nature” or “city” in poetry, and where does it transcend these categories? How do post-pastoral, anti-pastoral, and urban pastoral poems turn to grass to think about space and how those spaces intersect with race and class?

• “O grass of graves,” wrote Whitman, echoing the Biblical passage, “All flesh is grass.” More recently, in his review of Tracy K. Smith’s book Life on Mars in The New Yorker, Dan Chiasson writes that “grass is the very signature of human presence.” How does grass construct the presence or absence of humanity in poems? How does grass function in contemporary elegy? How does it function in poetic constructions of gender and sexuality?

• Grass is one of the many names for cannabis. Does the literature of cannabis use (broadly interpreted) offer us a way to interrogate environmental impact of a growing marijuana industry? (See Josh Harkin’s “The Landscape-Scarring, Energy-Sucking, Wildlife-Killing Reality of Pot Farming” in Mother Jones for more on this issue.)

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III.

You don't know what it is? Me neither.

 “EcoMaterialisms: Organizing Life and Matter” will bring interdisciplinary graduate work to bear on the ongoing critical discussions grouped under the umbrella of “new materialisms.” While what exactly these new materialisms might be or look like remains a vitally open question, this conference is an attempt to map a number of conceptual coordinates that give this emergent field of inquiry some consistency. As Diana Coole and Samantha Frost write in the introduction to their edited collection on new materialism, “If we persist in our call for an observation of a new materialism, it is because we  are aware that unprecedented things are currently being done with and to matter, nature, life,  production, and reproduction. It is in this contemporary context that theorists are compelled to rediscover older materialist traditions while pushing them in novel, and sometimes experimental, directions or toward fresh applications.”

While reconfiguring materiality and our relations to environments has significantly opened the scope of our theoretical engagements, there remains in this same gesture the risk of ignoring other potential lines of thought and practice. “EcoMaterialisms” is intended to open a forum for thinking through these possibilities and their attendant problems. Submissions may address the following topics, but are by no means limited to:

Philosophical approaches to new materialism

New materialism: problems and limitations

Ecocriticism, ecopoetics, and other practices of reading

Biopolitics: governing life and matter

Postcolonial studies and the politics of location

Indigeneities and new materialist thought

Environmentalism and political praxis

New materialism and theories of race

Material feminisms and gender and sexuality studies

Animal and/or posthumanist studies

Materiality in the arts and a material aesthetics

Corporeality and modes of embodiment

Historical materialism and revivals of other materialist traditions

New materialism in visual, sonic, and digital media

New materialism and Speculative Realism

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I had never heard of “new materialism” but on reflection I see that if a 3-D printer can make you something solid and useful, if the chip in your refrigerator can talk to the chip in your automobile and the chip in your furnace, if your Google Glass can interact with your wrist Fitbit, then the new materialism is at the very least on the Internet, webbed and talking.   And if our techological capacities are now capable of making materials that never existed before -- like nano particles that can travel in the blood (with chip, of course), or elements at very extreme temperatures never before achieved on this planet, or living growth patterns that develop in no-gravity space stations -- then indeed this materialism is new.

Data, man of the future

How do we develop the consciousness of how to manage the new materialism when so many people are unable to understand the limits and intrinsic nature of all the old materials ?  We are reduced to wondering.

LOGON '83: A SEED THAT GREW

When Lynda and Michael Sexson organized “Logon ‘83” I was circuit-riding through Montana and didn’t own a computer but had worked on one at the U of Chicago Law School, transcribing. The name of the conference was a pun, of course, since one “logged on” to a computer and the Internet and “logon” relates to reason, order, word as in the Christian theological word, logos. Lynda teaches religion and Michael teaches English. The conference, anchored in the computer, was both inspired and enabled by their national circle of friends, which was remarkably eclectic and at the same time in harmony.

I’m still looking for my notes, which I’m sure I saved somewhere, but I’ll draw on my memory for this informal post. One of the speakers was the inventor of a counseling program, very Rogerian, which said, “Would you tell me more about that? How does your memory of your mother relate to this? Do you think that’s unique?” The psychologist inventor was chagrined to discover that his own secretary was sneaking into his office while he was gone so she could be counseled by his machine.

It was a summer conference and the temps were hot, along with the local feminist movement. One session became so inflamed that it looked like violence until Michael, who was “enabling” the session, mildly suggested that we all go have a cold beer and that was enough to break up the deadlock. I can’t even remember what had everyone so wrought up.

I wish I could remember more of the sessions, which created categories in my mind that have never failed me since. One of the most potent was Thomas Moore (who has written MANY books and maintains a website at www.careofthesoul.com) whose session was about our tendency to anthropomorphize our instruments, from the ventroquist’s dummy like Mortimer Snerd to guns like “Ol’ Betsy” to, of course, computers -- like Hal. And now, 25 years later, it appears that Hal-like computers can think for themselves. (Shudder.) They don't just counsel -- they fly airplanes.

In addition to Thomas Moore speaking, he taught a class on dream interpretation and I was kindly allowed to audit since the Sexsons were technically part of the Bozeman UU Fellowship and therefore my parishioners. The class was so desirable that it had been closed early and the room was crammed. Two attendees were party crashers.

These two boys were still trying to understand the great Counter Cultural wave in this country and their own interior lives as well. They were college age, but not college students, I think. They had not paid the fee to register. They had a dream they wanted to present for interpretation. As nearly as I remember, it was about driving an endless road and running over a snake which deflated with a long hissing sound. Innocents, they had not understood the phallic connection to snakes or even journey-as-life. They were still unraveling “Star Wars,” (1977) just finding out that there were other religions besides Christianity. I suspect some girl had told them about Joe Campbell and even fished out of her backpack a copy of one of his books, which is how books got around in those days. (“I’m Okay; You’re Okay” traveled in backpacks as an unpublished manuscript for years, gradually losing its outer leaves.)

Thomas Moore carefully and kindly guided them through free association: what snakes were there in their lives? What did the highway mean to them? As this whole new world opened up to these boys, their mouths hung open in astonishment. Others among us smiled smugly. Then the door burst open and in came the female registrar on the prod. She gave those two boys the hook -- they were outta there in a hurry -- and the class was aghast! We were all liberals, tolerant, inclusive, and so on.

So then Thomas Moore treated the occasion as if it were a dream. It DID have its surreal elements, so sudden and such a change in mood. What did we think of when we considered authority figures? What does it mean to limit a group? (There’s a whole body of scholarly comment on “fencing the Communion,” which the early Christians did -- only allowing baptized people to take the bread and wine.)

All of a sudden we realized that EVERYTHING is metaphorical, everything has both a personal history and a larger history plus relationship to old and deep patterning. And that much of the work of consciousness is bringing up some of that while maybe suppressing other elements we’re not ready to handle.

Tim and Cinematheque are beginning to do dream work, which is about all these things, because the antiretroviral called Sustiva causes over-vivid dreams, nightmares, and the temptation for the guys is to just evade them by not taking the drug, but it is one of the few drugs that can get into the brain. Maybe the “only.” Tim’s thought is that doing dream work -- not the way my mother used to with her gypsy meaning book on her nightstand -- it mostly dealt in reversals -- but personally and specifically with each guy trying to recover his dream on video. This turns something uncontrollable and mysterious that grips a vulnerable person into something that can be objectified and even aestheticized. Made into an art work. Shared. Even sold, because these drugs cost like hell, which is part of the nightmare. Even nightmares can become part of the healing instead of more of the affliction.

So I went looking on the Internet for Thomas Moore and there he was, sturdy and gentle and unafraid of guys at risk with compromised life-paths far worse than driving over snakes. He sent me an email and now I see he’s a community. I’m waiting to be admitted to the forum list.

Lynda and Michael Sexson are still professors in Bozeman and just published two things. One is a video about historical children’s books, like primers, (stand by for a review as soon as I get the DVD) and the other is a revival of “Corona,” which was a literary magazine they edited decades ago. Now it is an $80 “box” that includes things like a little figure made of mud from Arlo Skari’s daughter’s ranch and her article about it. I say it in that roundabout way because Arlo Skari has traveled with the UU community and is a staunch guardian of the Sweetgrass Hills where the stone dreambeds of the ancient Blackfeet still exist. The box contains a number of articles uniquely printed and the expensiveness comes in part from having to hand-pack each box. This is where I’ve predicted that “books” will go post-codex, freed up by the eRevolution. Humanities Montana pays no attention to all this stuff, except they did make a grant. They’d rather stay in Missoula on the safe side of the Rockies.