Here’s a question: is Neil Brewer a fiction? Somewhat of an inside joke, but I’m wondering because I have to provide him some sort of eval. Is Neil the man in the mask?

Block quote test

Blockquote test

I’m wondering what Maureen Durkin is up to these days?

Read Neil Cohn’s A Love Story and then some of the comments in the thread. It’s a nice comic workshop. I like the orientation of the comic but think the story too dependant on devices.

Via Scott McCloud.

Good and instructive words here from Susan Gibb.

Susan Gibb in her journal writes of Visitation

Each event or complication, usually involving something that the invaders have either damaged or destroyed, is met by passive reaction both on the part of the protagonist (narrator) or the other characters who are his neighbors. They allow themselves to be taken over, simply because they can’t agree to come to some sort of major confrontation with the aliens who claim to be gods–and this may be the real meaning of the story, if you care to search for one, because other than “eyes with a golden tint,” the description offers little to mark them as very different than humans.

I included Visitation in the line up because the story is short, clearly arc’d, big in scope, and pleasantly ambiguous. It has one of those endings that just rings true–i.e., “it feels like the right ending given what’s been told.” That doesn’t mean it “tells” a truth, a human truth, even though it may.

How do we respond to and rationalize the strange? How do we respond in the face of the ambiguous? How do we respond in the face of change and aggression? Are we sheep? Are we tigers? Why, at the end of the story, do the people rip at each other?

Ah ha!

Jesse Abbot writes

But that does not repudiate the possibilities within the postmondern and deconstructive delight in the absence of intrinsics. We should so delight — at the same time recognizing we are treading on sacred ground. We are not the ones inscribing and erasing – this is a cosmological operation of remedial creativity much larger than we can remotely conceive. I will begin my upcoming “syllabus” of Cosmological Revision Poetics around such willfully presumptive premises.

I’d like Professor Abbot to write more about his conception of poetics, which is, I suspect, a penetrating exposition, and, I’m also suspecting, very much in the tradition of William Blake, but this may be entirely presumptuous. There must be a reason why (and I mean that in the sense of “insight”) Jesse will be drawing forth soon, especially in the conglutination of poetics and cosmology. I wonder what the tools will be.

For me one of the most interesting things about “understanding” in general is the “problem” of language and continuity between inside and outside (what I know and see and what I say I see), the internal and the external, and the cohesiveness of human space. I remember Neha’s quote from Augustine coming from The Confessions about losing an understanding of phenomena by trying to explain them. In many ways explanations lead to confusion, which is why we attempt clarity with terminology and extensive definition or skate away from the phenomenological approaches that may seem quaint these days.

What should Otey do next?

1. Compose another dispatch
2. Call in the signalmen
3. Run like hell

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The above is a possible starter scenario. The object could be to have students build the paths, one of which would reflect events as they are best known. Two approaches are important here that reflect the objectives of the course on the war: to teach what happened (history) and to teach multiple kinds of analysis (the means of examining evidence). We don’t need to think of such exercises as totalities but as small exercises in immersive experience.

The fact is I don’t know what happens to Otey. We do know that Chatanooga is cleared of non-combatants, Bragg returns on the 21st, and Rosecrans tries to figure out how to cross the Tennessee River for an approach to the city from the west.

It;s one thing to say: Rosy had a tough time crossing this massive body of water. It’s another to think at the cursor. The key is “thinking at the cursor” to enliven historical problems.

I remember stepping outside of my sister’s house in Alaska and witnessing sheets of color in the sky. Photos of the Alaskan aurora thanks to my sister, Cathy: