this evening I folded socks with punctuation from moving piles of paper about (for the yet to be uncovered) and listened to Kathleen Stewart talk about/read from her upcoming worldings book. my ears couldn’t write quickly enough her words, so many arrangements and sensations that become a thrumming pulse, an imperative to write, a coherence of that’s just it. she said (among many other things), “words are an intimacy of substance, flesh, trope, and tone. There are crystallizations in a gregarity of elements. There are reservoirs of feeling, a potential in the splash of a rhythm or the pinch of a noise. A walk is a venturing out on the thread of a tune.”

In my folding and rewinding/lingering on words, I recalled my sleepwalking/narrating bot on X (the code of which died out in the spring), struck by the resonance of “during counting our stillness remembered like diffraction” to listening presently, writing then, and approaching generativity in the rounding of obstacles ))))))))))))

[writing group 12.12.2024]

This week in writing group I worked on the zine my colleague and I will be providing students as a pre-requisite reading for beginning their research residency as a part of Finding Yourself in the Archives with the Special Collections Research Center (SCRC). It will serve as an introduction to the center, what makes up archival collections, what and who is behind the scenes in an archive, how to find materials, and how to turn groupings of materials into something.

pulp print and magazine snippets from my own archive of collage generators

As I come up on two years in my role as SCRC’s first instruction librarian, I’m really proud of being a part of creating this unique experience for first- and second-year students to explore archival research of their own design. It’s a pilot and my/the center’s first endeavor with an undergraduate research fellowship, so I’m sure it will be indebted to the process/problems/potentialities in its playing out. Below is the description I wrote for the program:

You’re a student at Syracuse University. Maybe you’re from the city itself, or somewhere nearby, or perhaps you’re from another state, or even another country. But you’re here now. You’re learning places on and off campus, being introduced to new topics and ideas through your classes, and you’re becoming part of a larger community here. There’s a history to Syracuse University, to the city of Syracuse, to this region of New York, to the United States, the Americas, the world. Ideas and stories turn into books, letters about life are sent from one friend to another, photos are taken to capture a moment, inventions are dreamed up and then created, culture is made and re-made each day through humans just living on earth. History is made up of countless stories that needs many to give it voice; your voice included.

Have you ever wondered where documentary filmmakers get their archival footage? Have you found yourself thinking about what trying to record sound was like before the iPhone (or even before electronics)? Are you curious about what college was like in the 1960s? Not just college, but what life was like in the 1960s? What about the 1400s? Have you ever questioned how our understanding of scientific fact came about? Or, how different cultures form their own myths and ways of communicating knowledge? What about where your takeout food container came from? Or where writing came from? Have you ever just wondered?

Let your wonder wander through doing archival research in special collections. Join Librarians Amy McDonald and Jana Rosinski in the Special Collections Research Center (SCRC) for a one-month research residency through The SOURCE Explore: Finding Yourself in the Archives program. Over the course of one month, students will not only learn how to do research in archives and special collections, but will get to explore something of themselves—their own experiences, their own interests, their own curiosities– within SCRC’s collections. Students will create a presentation of their researching experience to share in an informal forum, along with a publication of their project in the SCRC blog, in the SU Libraries’ SURFACE digital repository for scholarship, and in a zine with their fellow research residency cohort.

A professor I was working with in my capacity as the special collections instruction librarian found out I was a doctoral student in a back and forth as I re-set the materials in the room between multiple sections of her class. She asked when I was getting back to the (serious) work of an academic, continuing on by describing what I was doing currently (a career in an expansive and interdisciplinary field) as a fun distraction (a break from rigor). To her, me facilitating and supporting inquiry in the space of the library without a course topic or credential proper was as meaningful as disposing of a now empty food container or someone with hands flashing performing a parlor trick. But possible worlds are created by prisms refracting, not models representing (Kathleen Stewart); I remember the imperative of functioning as an educator, a connector, a generator, a being who takes in/reflects out: research as a refracting, not as representing.

In 2020 I was still a student working at SCRC and co-curated/created this exhibition (which is still on view). It was designed to not just present collections, but to elicit curiosity in a person in developing something–an interpretation, a context, a noticing, a deep inhalation, a lingering. Below is the link to the exhibition’s description and a narrated tour of the installation.

Survival Kit: Provisions for Your Research Journey

An artifact can be an object of inquiry—even on its own, but in finding and articulating relationships among artifacts, a world emerges with its own history to tell. Survival Kit: Provisions for Your Research Journey utilizes a selection of artifacts, documents, and photographs from the Edwin F. Bushman Papers, a mid-century plastics engineer, and the Plastics Artifacts Collection, to guide students and visitors through developing primary source-based research projects that dare to inquire into the unexpected.  From the discovery of materials, to the unfolding of their analysis, this unique exhibition has been designed to function as a standalone resource for students, as well as a scaffold for instruction in any course that emphasizes primary source research. SCRC intends to provide live-streamed interactive class sessions, as well as asynchronous video tours, to immerse students in the environment of the exhibition.

The labor, skills, and perspectives that built this interdisciplinary exhibition were a collaborative effort between Courtney Asztalos, Curator of Plastics and Historical Artifacts; Jana Rosinski, Curatorial Assistant of the Plastics Collection and PhD student in Composition & Cultural Rhetorics; Lynn Wilcox, Design Specialist, Syracuse University Press; Ann Skiold, Librarian for Visual Arts; and Emily Hart, Science Librarian, Research Impact Lead. Also, we want to acknowledge the invisible labor and absent voices of those who made the manufactured objects from which these plastics collections were created.

[writing group 12.5.2024]

I feel it throughout my whole body, most often at night when my body is no longer in motion and I’m forced to be still. To be still with myself. To still be myself. A flashback, a flood of sense memory; I’ve just woken up from a coma and am reminded that I was doing something then, that I was a person with a purpose, with a past, and the obligations of living up until that moment. 

A void appears–but not one of absence, one of presence. It feels tangible in the back of my eyes if I can figure out a way to look behind the within of myself. It has dimension that I can see but can’t penetrate. Unto me but somehow still removed, it sits, felt by but obscured to my senses (not my senses, my ability to make sense of it). 

I tell her I’m worried I can’t do it anymore. It means too much. I can’t remember her from before it happened. I can’t embody me before it happened [italicize backwards. these its are not the same (except they are)]. I worry that everything I do will be defined by it, by the inverse of presence. 

absence

1. a state or condition in which something expected, wanted, or looked for is not present or does not exist

2a. a failure to be present at a usual or expected place

2b. the period of time that one is absent

3. inattention to present surroundings or occurrences 

/// a visiting poet-archivist comes to campus to do a small press reading and a creative writing workshop in the archives. After her reading, I* [*I: a librarian-grad student-used to be creative (but not quite poet)] go out to dinner with the poet-archivist, the other reader-translator, and the organizer of the event, another librarian-poet-friend. When the poet-archivist asks polite and artfully po(i)sed questions of the get-to-know-you variety, the librarian-poet-friend speaks generously of me and my work (before). Since I black out in most performances of self, I can’t recall what I stitched together as an articulation of self and work (read: self-worth). The following morning in the workshop the poet-archivist asks participants to speak of two points of influence for working with archives; I write:

Exploded diagrams + mechanical modes of illustrations – dad’s plotting of machines from the engine plant on our small kitchen table

Health inventories of self data of each day – but where’s the experiential? The cataloging of the body

After her visit is over, the poet-archivist sends me a note: “I found myself very struck by your own poetic approaches in the archive”. I think to myself about my own hyphenated persona (as we are all selves held together as a singularity) that I wouldn’t describe myself as a poet, but maybe as one who has a tendency toward the poetic. I-poiesis. I think earnestly about being creative, as being gathers from nothing.

/// something without input isn’t nothing, it’s still something. Tending to the overstimulation, saturation, and consumption as a glutton for nothing. Without stillness everything remains everything, without place. Fear becomes perceptible absence, blackness without. Nothing can grow with too much the same as too little*. 

*I read and I watch and I listen, leaving no space no time for my own. 

creation has happened since. unaccounted for but accountable across surface topographies and relationships and homeostasis. with ebb and flow come the Janus pairings of living intentionally suspended in unfurling unknowns.

…

returning to the rituals of practice (reading, writing, researching, creating threads and openings and worldling wormholes), a duration of dissertating in situ, I’ve joined a writing group and will be sharing words and works and wrecks weekly wherein.

content notice: trauma from sexual assault

(on the anxiety that lives within body and space after being sexually assaulted in the small academic community that I must still live ((and thrive)) within)

Starting again

 

It begins to swell.

Bodies and faces fill in

the spaces that were private.

I try to reason with myself

about percentages and likelihoods of

your form casting shadow

in publicprivate spaces.

I see you in real and story truths—

you’re driving around the block

buying groceries and out on dates;

Being of no consequence and

living without consequence.

But truths are embodied( , )

and of you( , )

and consequentially I am

afraid of privatepublic spaces.

Starting again each time laid bare.

i pull hairs from her hairbrush and inspect if they are mine or hers. i stand square in the bathroom mirror pulling my hair back to see her upturned nose, her square jaw, her round forehead, her round blue irises. the veil shifts, i am florescent lit on the rug and standing before her backlit silhouette in the hallway; the first time she looked sick. june comes like shadows on my periphery vision, phantoms of not t/here. i feel my body trying to buttress itself against the onslaught of july. july the fever and her seizures and the waiting room living room of the breathless. july the second year.