Kristen Orser's Blog, page 4

on being found

An under the microscope feeling to this season: as a new mother, curriculum interruptor (developer?), and as someone working out standards and assessment from one program to another. Under a microscope, I’m sure I would look pulled. As if a tightly bound thread coming to its smallest hairs. 

To slow down, a book review for Sean Thomas Dougherty, a hopeful return to Sprudge, and a new project: 

“Nomadic Reading: Carnal Reading as Antidote to Digital Diaspora”

Digital readership changes the processes of reading, providing ample playing ground for a renewed conversation about how a text is read. The shift from text-as-object to text-as-space renders the body homeless, seeking a site of interaction. This threatens anonymity or nomadism, making it difficult for readers to spend time with the fits and starts, the physicality, of a sentence. The physical absence also lessens physical reactions: muttering out loud, re-reading, squinting, scrawling in margins, feeling bodily sensations. As a disembodied experience, has digital reading ushered a “fever reading,” where the reader goes in and out of multiple texts and where textual dialogue is less about the echo of the text and more about the dislocation of the reading experience? This research hopes to re-embody reading, to focus on the texture of the text, the movement of the text, and the arrangement of the text.

 

 

At the edge of the Pacific, I still

At the edge of the Pacific, I still think about cornfields.

In the East and the Midwest, it was the same: corn, cows, wood, and lakes. I’m jostled by the murky feeling I get when I look at the Pacific. I remember the house on water, the woods, the open meadows of another place.

At the end of the day, we just want something open: sometimes, a page.

I’ve taken to page again. I’m looking for a sentence, but I can’t past my stomach, past the baby that will be here in eight weeks time.  I do need to start looking past the states between here and there; over a year into California and I am upstate NY through and through, but I’m making something that is utterly not, something that is entirely new and not from or of anywhere in particular yet.

types of books

I pick up a book,  branch with pink flowers. It was in the yard. In the yard for years. It was in the years. It was there for years, there in the yard. It was in the yard for years. Go on, go on. Look. The wood sorrel flowered yellow and the tree branched branches, it pinked. That’s how we knew it was spring,that’s how we knew where we were. I mean, where we are.  The baby is coming in summer and it’s not quite spring, not directly spring, but the yard turned to sorrel. Suppose branch doesn’t mean branch, if it ever did. Little chance it changes orientation: bed to door and door to yard, the lamp faces nothing (except the book). Direction wavers, you say north and I ask left or right. In one city, it was east to the water and in this city it’s west to the water, but I’ve never been south to the water. The baby is coming in summer, should we turn left or right? The next and best is not the same as the new. Did you also feel it kick? And days later, nothing. Please more. Please more branches in the vase because the smell of old water is nearly enough, is nearly a bath. In the yard and past the pink branches, ocean. The yard joins the ocean approximately. The yard nearly oceans. No, I didn’t plant the tree nor did I tend to it. Put salt to it. Put salt to it and then the yard is really ocean. I pick up a book, a branch, a dead fish, anything to put to my ear—

Happily, back to the page

Earlier, this was published and I’m still nostalgic for the midwest. My family says I like all the places I’ve been until I’m there and then I’m restless for the next space: Buffalo, Prague, Margarita Island, Chicago, Ithaca, Santa Cruz…I get restless.

Today, we read Gertrude:

“The only thing that is different from one time to another is what is seen and what is seen depends upon how everybody is doing everything.”

They liked to taste the words in their mouth, I could tell. Even the students who stumbled over the reading thought it was all yummy to say. But it was harder to discuss what it meant. We will look at the fall of Icarus (Landscape with Fall of Icarus) and the Falling Man photograph from 9/11. What we see is different: the farmer who misses Icarus falling to the building that, maybe less impersonally, is alongside the falling man. And who watched? How did they watch? Now they watch with cell phones up to photograph instead of remembering and, over dinner, retelling the story. It’s different how we see and how we do (how we “do” seeing).

The larger issue was the composition, which is always happening. We take in the world and shape it.

But it’s hard, it’s hard to see the desire to put meaning on and pull out symbols and “heaviness.” They so want things to be heavy and full of symbol after symbol. It’s hard when we document, hard because it isn’t always many-angled; the depth might come from the purity of seeing, simply seeing.

For that, we’re reading Reznikoff. I can feel a bit of resistance and others who love the playfulness; one student who said, “This just gives me a warm feeling.”

 

Mid-Winter

In Albany, the snow was past our knees. On the train to Buffalo, we watched water push through, a whole landscape of sticks.

Away from the snow, it’s something to miss. Quiet.

It’s quieter in California, but it is an alone quiet and not that still quiet. Mac says it best, “Kristen is upstate through and through.” It stays true even as a mark new homes and temporary stays in a series of other places.

Jesse and I look at each other, at my expanding stomach, and I think we both get afraid, but he says he isn’t afraid at all. Will our memories of eating snow, of feeling snow on eyelashes, and carrying sleds to hills be memories that our someday-soon (June or July) child will know? And if they know them, will they know those memories the way I knew the ocean: as something of a spectacle, but not a pattern or promise?

It might not matter, but it seems somehow developmental: the winter always in my head or under my skin. And here, the child might know rain and fog, will certainly know tide and wave, and will see trees taller than the pines of my own childhood; will those things sit differently in the body?

standard

It’s about a change in writing practices :: a renaming of process.

I tell Luke, because he asks, that it’s about relationships. I tell Joey, because he wondered, that it’s about connecting the dots. I tell Farheen, because she wanted to know, that I keep it close to the body and don’t stretch too far.

A change in consciousness to think about something other than the rule. Maybe the reverberation; at least the reason.

Take the comma: The comma encloses and separates ideas. In this way, it acts like a wall or a barrier. Everything I think grows along and on the walls, but the prettiest ideas are so hard to see, are so covered by walls :: behind them, inside them, and I have to take a ladder up to see those ideas.

No, I don’t use the comma correctly, but I use it for transformation. Sometimes, I use it so I can see past the mountains or peek into someone else’s bedroom. It’s like pulling strings.

It is, always, about being aware. I am putting a mark on the page and it suggests an entire thought that is somehow deeply hard to say in words, but finds itself in tiny punctures.

 

 

winter, when the roof caved in

None disordering, a feeling pales :: in the hand

the home with a fireplace. Someone to take

along and pick up stones. The way some

fit thumbs, are held and rubbed. If kept

many take shape :: the way color comes

up from the chest, until the whole face is reddened.

 

 

 

going back home

all season, thought to write.

at one point, a deer’s knees bent inward and buckled, which seemed like a place to start. now, the tree is decorated and dying, the train is leaving for Buffalo, and there’s an opening there. if it can be grabbed, there’s even something to hold: pinecone or tied ribbon.

in the new season, soon new year, endings and beginnings come at the same time. come all at once. the thought stays on while the geography passes by, tells the same story of eastward to westward.

east again. atlantic again. snow again. and still, the thought to write is heavy, but not leaning on the page.

fact, a new

For the past three years, my energy has been moving: Chicago to Ithaca to Santa Cruz. The investigation is a history and a relationship: I go back to Buffalo and think about when I was leaving Buffalo to go to anywhere else. Historically, I’ve put some pins on a map and counted countries. Personally, I haven’t stopped wanting some semblance of a home—two sticks to triangle and the smell of cinnamon rubbed off the stick.

Intellectually, I’ve excavated the concepts of a home and found it mostly false and caught up in the other illusions of a stable and secure life. Still, I married and I prefer to know what time dinner is happening so that, every night, the uncertainty is that much more difficult. I fold laundry and do all the things that seem like a trapped person’s routine, but the domestic and the tethering feels less knotted: I like to know it’s avocado season and that Colby liked the shortbread cookies.

So when the brunette woman turns to me and says, “So you won’t be going dancing now that you’re pregnant,” I want to punch her in the face. I see her look at my belly like I’ve given up, like I’ve somehow forgotten Anna Karenina, how Kitty was tied to her child, her house, and both her husband and child refused her breast; or how badly Tolstoy wanted to problematize the routine of  domestic and family life.

I don’t think this is stable or secure and the rising stomach reminds me that everything will change, but my body is home and it’s the only place I haven’t been able to leave. I put my energies into living less in my head, less far and away, and starting to inhabit the place of my body (since someone else is inhabiting it too).

 

 

Alarm Clocks Between Toes and Other Ailments Of the Moment

It might be about the personal narrative and authenticity, but I’m feeling a little anxious back in the classroom. For all my Derrida and Artaud, I’m not as brain flexed in this new pseudo modernism.

One of the reasons I rolled my eyes as a grad student was because postmodernism made me want to vomit radios. It crushed the possibility of invention, voice, and intuition. The whole emphasis was the elusiveness of meaning and knowledge and all I wanted to do was make, explore, and wonder. What was the point: eye roll eye roll eye roll.

But I was good at the discourse of it…good at the shoulder shrugs it seemed to let happen.There was process process process, but it seemed like what was being made was always a conversation about what was left out.

Absences. Pauses. Silences.

What about what’s filling those spaces: thoughts, readers, wandering and meandering ideas.

And now we’re in the age of the audience: voting, liking, clicking.

What I want my students to know is that the essay here, the essay now, is akin to the hyperlink (for all it’s emphasis on hyper and linking). It is the individual clicking his/her mouse, inventing a route through knowledge and a frame of knowledge that is only their own and only that one time that matters. Can the essay mirror that?

It’s intense engagement. It’s intense authorship. It’s a one-time only. I cannot click through this and author that route the same way I did yesterday. If I tried, that page might have changed or I might see something new this time. This feels like the author is way more alive and vibrant than ever before. So that the essay, thinking, the author movement might look like this: