I definitely just smiled about school for the first time–maybe ever … when reading through the Dream Karaoke page for [Beth Nowviskie]. What made me happy there? I think just the encounter with someone who was so being themselves, for no professional reason, with no pretension, and in such an excellent, developed, open, and cohesive way. I’d say I aspire to that, but I’m also more or less already there. I just need the time to get it down on paper.

April 16 2020

What a tension in this entry–between the quote I chose and the one that follows the space break in the 2020 entry. That next section, the one I’m leaving in the past, is about the fellowship I got last summer. I managed to do so little with it. (Mainly because of pandemic: the library where I was to be working was closed, and the camp where I was to send my kids while working there was closed, because life was closed and I wasn’t even in New York for the chunk of time it felt most possible to do school or think about a project focused on the rhetoric of the NYC Parks; I wasn’t feeling any of it.

What I’d like for this summer is to feel things again. Instead of this attitude (“take the money and figure the rest out later”) I’d like to flip the elements of that sentence: to take a rest and figure out the money later. We’ve always managed to do that, figure out the money, even in the brokest of our broke times. We’re doing it again now. The problem is the meeting of basic needs, and one of those needs is rest, I learned yesterday, something I don’t recall from AP Psych, though maybe an 18-year-old just reads over that.

Beth Nowviskie, powerhouse, manages to find time and space to capture and organize and present something small and funny and generous–about other people, about the songs they’d sing in a fictional third space, the digital and the imagined and the pop cultural all come together. It’s an in-joke sure and has that in-joke kind of obnoxiousness, but that edge is not so sharp, leavened as it is with enough nerdiness that if you feel excluded, you don’t mind so much.

(Unsatisfied as I was, though, they published this brief post on the project.) It’s a good little thing.

Dream Karaoke: the most fun you can have without leaving your own head. And that’s what this project of the summer was–it led to a semester long thought experiment about the gutta-percha. So what if it withered the minute someone with an eye for how universities really work blew on it, reminded me that this is a university, that this is a pandemic, that I was nobody, and that nobody listens to a nobody. (But who are you?)

In that same class, we’re talking about digital literacy. And what I keep thinking has to do with the notion of practice, of literacy as a practice, a set of practices, as a thing you practice. A thing we’re not good enough to not practice, as Kiese Laymon puts it. Not a thing we have but a thing we do.

How different is it from faith?

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