Beginnings

I am terrible at titles. I agonize over them and generally spend more time coming up with a title than I do creating whatever piece the title is supposed to describe. So you can imagine what it was like to try and find an appropriate title for my blog.

Let me start first with what I almost called this blog: “Pierglass,” after one of George Eliot’s most famous metaphors (see above quotation). I am sure in some other post I will blog about the merits of George Eliot and why she is the most awesome writer ever, but for now I just want to point out what Eliot points out through this metaphor.

We tend to see life through our own perspective.

Radical stuff, huh? If you actually think about this for more than two seconds, however, you realize just how much this fact of our own egoism influences the way we go through life. It can be a jolting experience when we find someone with a similar perspective (if we thought we were alone in the world in feeling or thinking a certain way) and also just as jolting to discover that other people do not think like us and do not feel that things ought to be done the same way we do them (the “right” way of course).

Living a full life, has something to do, I think, with learning to hold someone else’s candle up to our mirrored reflection. I thought to name my blog this in an effort to keep the egoism, which has caused me to disdain blogging for so long, at bay and to indicate my desire to engage with many different ideas in these pages.

But that was a very long explanation of the title that I did not choose for my blog.

I came upon the title Lumia Compositions while reading one of those short articles in the “talk of the town” section of The New Yorker. It began describing the image that pops up at the beginning and end of the movie Tree of Life that has apparently been driving movie critics crazy. The image, entitled “Opus 161,” comes from light artist Thomas Wilifred’s “lumia compositions,” his creations that seek to sculpt light rather than use light to sculpt art.

Perhaps it was the fact that I have discovered this image, like many now will, through a movie set in Texas. I decided to start this blog in part to chart my transition from a medium sized town in North Carolina to a small town in Central Texas. I think why the title “lumia compositions” really caught my attention, however, was the way Gregory Zinman described the method behind Wilifred’s art. In his article Zinman says Wilifred’s artworks “are both feats of bric-a-brac engineering and ethereal works of art…to look inside a lumia instrument is to see an apparent scrap heap put to near-magical use.”

The combination of scrap and magic, bric-a-brac and ethereal captures, I believe, the very essence of life and being human. I am constantly amazed at the wonder that erupts from the most ordinary, mundane things (perhaps this is why I am obsessed with nineteenth-century realism). In a less momentous way, this combination also describes the process of writing and producing scholarly work: out of the bric-a-brac something ethereal, or at least hopefully something interesting, emerges. This, then, is the struggle every scholar and every person faces, how to turn the scrap heap into something magical. Or maybe we shouldn’t see it so much as a struggle but as the wondrous mystery of the creative process and of life.

This blog engages with that mystery by charting my academic experiences, transitioning from a recent graduate to assistant professor, and my life experiences, transitioning from the home and family I’ve been part of for eight years in Greensboro to see what awaits me in a new place.

You can read more about Thomas Wilifred and his art here:

http://wilfred-lumia.org/index.html

Tribute to Greensboro

To the city perfectly placed between Charlotte and Raleigh, the mountains and the sea.To the greenways, whose endless trails centered me one footfall at a time.

To the local greensboro breweries, Natty’s and Red Oak. You taught me how to drink beer.

To the downtown farmer’s market, where I witnessed what having a relationship with your food provider means. And to the I40 farmers market, where I got my Christmas tree every year.

To the man who alerts me to the beginning of football season. He sits front and center every Sunday morning, wearing his Redskins’ jersey from September to February. I hope for his sake that God is a not a cowboys fan!

To Rudd Farm, who helped me mark my personal first day of summer every year: fresh-picked strawberry milkshakes. Summer arrives in the all the glory of nature’s signature desserts.

Do you like waffles? Yes I like Waffles. And the Greensboro Grasshoppers. The all-American combination: beer, hotdog, and baseball. Whoop Whoop!

To Lindley Filling Station. My favorite place to meet up with people, half price Wildflower on Thursday nights, half price appetizers on Sunday nights, half price bottle of wine on Tuesday nights.

To seeing Christmas movies at the Carolina Theatre. I can’t think of a better way to bring out the holiday spirit than an old theatre decked out in holly and lights and a giant Christmas tree, clapping with a room full of fellow audience members at the end of It’s a Wonderful Life.

Every girl needs a night out. To my girls--thank you for those nights. You are all irreplaceable.

To the Triad Stage and my friends who have gone with me over the years to various shows from the amazing The Glass Menagerie to the oops-I-fell-asleep-in-the-middle-of The Night of the Iguana. And to the strange girl in the upper deck seats who laughed at all the wrong places during A Christmas Carol.

To tea at the O’Henry. I drive a truck to make sure I’m not girlie, but damn do I love scones and little teacups and fancy dresses.

To pool time with the Pell kids. I highly recommend to everyone who has a neighborhood pool: find some kids you can borrow and take them to the pool. Lounging in a chair with a book is for the birds.

To the giant wind chimes I discovered one day while walking in the arboretum; when the wind plays here I feel caught in the breath of God.

To the kids I tutored and to my car riders. You have taught me more than I could ever teach you. How big and beautiful life gets when I am not at the center of it.

To Grace Community Church. You embody all the foibles of organized religion, yet your unconditional love and amazing grace emanates from the way you live out the good news.

To softball, with a view from the bleachers. And for chick-fil-a nights afterwards.

To small group making Greensboro feel like home.

To book talks with the girls. You gave me the gift of doubting and asking and embracing mystery.

To UNCG, the reason I was here in the first place. I will miss the tree behind Foust. I will miss McIver, where it all began and where it all ended. I will miss the grass pathways I wore out with all the other students who knew the sidewalks were in the wrong place. I will miss not getting to teach the new students I saw taking a tour last week. Mostly, I will miss the amazing faculty and staff who saw me from 22 to 30, from terrified, newly-minted graduate student to assistant professor.

To Tate St. Coffee, my first job in Greensboro, where I honed my skills of doing ten things at once. And to the customers whose names I still know and who still say hello to me when I see them in town.

To superbowl parties and cookouts and thanksgiving dinners and birthdays. To the laughter and the kids and the conversation and the food that defined these Greensboro family gatherings. You revolutionized my understanding of family and community. This tribute to Greensboro is really a tribute to you.

Reading, Summarizing, and Synthesizing

**Disclaimer: I promise not all posts will be this long**

I wish we talked more about reading scholarly texts and how to take notes. Because we don’t, I have this fear that it should be something self-evident. And I suppose one would assume that after being in graduate school for 8 years I would know how to read. But alas, I feel woefully inadequate when faced with a pile of library books, a document folder of “to read” articles, and a timer in my head that says I should have started writing by now, by yesterday as a matter of fact.

Although by now I’ve learned that the best way to resolve my writing issues is to actually write, I do think this was a worthwhile detour. So my mission right now (and I need to use a word like “mission” to reinforce to myself the dire necessity of doing this) is to gather some strategies together for improving my reading and note-taking strategies. I’ve listed below some guidelines I synthesized from two excellent sources: Joseph Harris’s Rewriting: How to Do Things With Texts and Wendy Laura Belcher’s How to Write a Scholarly Journal Article in 12 Weeks, as well as some tips I’ve picked up from colleagues along the way. Please add your own insights!

From various conversations with colleagues and my own trial & error:

· When a book is particularly hard to grasp, book reviews can often help as a launching off point for your own understanding.

· Another handy exercise: freewriting. Choose a quotation or two that seem important and type them up on a blank page. Write about them for a bit and you will find that through writing you come to understand the author’s main point. This enacts one of my mentor’s philosophies that we write to learn.

· I have recently tried switching to taking notes straight on the computer, but I am now reconsidering this strategy because something about writing down notes, either in the margins or on a piece of paper is a tactile activity that connects better with my brain. Several of my colleagues have also found this to be true and can even break down their marginalia commenting strategy into the two things they comment on most: they either identify the move the author makes at a certain point in the text or they identify how a particular passage or section relates to their own ideas.

· One colleague reads all the way through first simply marks significant passages along the way. Later, she copies the passages out and then writes a small summary paragraph for each of those passages.

· If you do nothing else, at least read the introduction (of the article or the book) then stop and write a summary of the what the writer is doing (ex: George Levine is doing x).

From Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks:

The key things you need to glean from any piece: the topic, the approach, and the argument.After you read a few things, be sure to write them up and even begin incorporating them into a draft of your own text. Otherwise, you will forget the relevance of the pieces you’ve read. Belcher suggests the following principles of reading: “reduce articles to their essence, read and write in the same day, subscribe to journals, and learn to skim” (150).

The next step in reading and synthesizing according to Belcher is to figure out your entry point, or how you relate to the literature. Typical “entry points” include extending past research, filling in a gap, addressing a contradiction or tension in past research, or weighing in on one side of the debate. Belcher summarizes these entry points into three positions one can take toward previous research: 1) arguing the research is inadequate or non-existent, 2) using the research as a spring board to extend the discussion, 3) arguing something is unsound about the research and providing a corrective (152).

Belcher also cites Henry A. Giroux’s reading method:

“Whenever I read something, I mark off in the text those paragraphs that contain important organizing ideas. I might circle and paragraph and write an organizing idea in the margins. When I finish the piece, I copy it and go through a cut-and-paste procedure in which I type out the source on the top of a piece of paper, type in the organizing ideas from the piece (article, chapter, and so on), and place the paragraph underneath its respective organizing idea. Hence, I may read a twenty-page piece by, lets say, Fred Jameson. In that piece, I may find fifteen sections that I marked as important. I then reference the piece, type out the organizing ideas starting with the order in which I read the piece. I then paste the respective paragraphs under the typed heading. In the end, I may end up with a four-page cut-out of Jameson’s piece. I then duplicate it so I can have a clean copy and I file the original. When my research is done, I read all of the cut-and-past articles, one by one, and I write next to each paragraph in each article an organizing idea. I then type out a cover sheet listing all of the organizing ideas for each working article. I then paste all of the cover sheets on artist boards and try to figure out from reading the sheets how I might develop my arguments”

From Rewriting: How to do Things with Texts

One of the most helpful points in Harris’s book has to do with how to read a text and how you present your reading of the text. When you are including the argument of another scholar, Harris claims you need to do more than just explain the argument, you also need to explain the perspective from which you are reading the argument (by which he means the values you bring and the moments you notice). This creates a balance between respecting what the scholar actually said while admitting how you are using their research for your own ends. Like Belcher, Harris lists three key things you need to glean from each source to write an effective summary: the aims, methods, and materials. To help you find these, he suggests a reading practice that also includes three tasks: 1) define the project, 2) note keywords or passages, 3) assess the uses and limits. I especially like his explanation of number one because I have always had trouble picking out the thesis or main idea of a complex work. Harris argues this is because most scholarly articles and books do not pursue a single claim but instead “think through a complex set of texts and problems” (17). Instead of asking the static question “what is the thesis,” he suggests instead a list of questions that suggest movement (and I quote):

What issues drive this essay? What ideas does it explore? What lines of inquiry does it develop? What is the writer trying to do in this text? What is her or her project?

Understanding that you want to actually show your perspective on a writer’s work as you are summarizing them also helps with pulling quotations from the work. Harris suggests, “You don’t quote from a text to explain what it means in some neutral or objective way. You quote from a text to show what your perspective on it makes visible” (20).

What I like most about number three, assessing the uses and limits, is Harris’s more generous approach to agreeing and disagreeing. Rather than discount other scholarship in order to make your own seem worthwhile, he suggests showing what is both useful and limiting about other’s work. Although my own tendency has been to rejoice when I find an article that seems just flat out wrong, Harris has changed my thinking through his provocative statement that, “simply proving someone else wrong rarely advances your own thinking” (27).

Harris has much more in his book about incorporating other’s work into your own, but these few points encapsulate what he says that helps me think about how to read and take notes.