“The writer is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do.”

Donald Barthelme, “Not Knowing”

On Throwing Junk

This piece was originally written as an “intellectual autobiography” I was asked to write for an exam. Surprisingly, I liked what I wrote. Here’s an audio version if you’re so inclined.

To read my work, see my publications page.

In a scene from David James Duncan’s novel The Brothers K, Papa Chance, a former major-league pitcher fed up with his situation, takes out his anger on a fence with a baseball. His boys aren’t sure how to understand the behavior of their father, whose success had roots in his temperament: “As a young fastballer he’d needed the calm because his tremendous speed was so hard to control, and as an older, cannier junk pitcher he’d needed it still more, because when junk pitchers give way to adrenaline surges they lose the cockeyed perspective that gives the juju to their junk” (118). As an older doctoral student with children who came to school partly because my own disability made it impossible to continue working as an ASL-English interpreter, it’s that “cockeyed perspective” that I found after my first year. Specifically, I have found its utility, the way a person at 40 can use such a perspective to give their own particular “juju” to the intellectual work constituting “their junk.” 

Not that this intellectual work is junk, in the pejorative sense. I see my areas of scholarly interest (literacy, disability, ethics of care, universal design for learning, and digital pedagogy) as equally important to me and newly urgent to the broader world due to COVID-19. I have refined my approach while navigating institutional systems and individual attitudes not always designed universally, recognizing which prior experiences are and are not helpful, and balancing the demands of my schooling with that of my two children. To Papa Chance, junk is how pitchers read a situation, draw on experience, and maintain perspective. Junk is, in short, a rhetoric. 

Like a black hole or a Billy goat, a rhetoric is most powerful when it sees anything in its path as a candidate for ingestion, a next source of energy. In my first year, experiences I thought might be junk (in the non-Duncan sense) exceeded my expectations. One example is the required course “Introduction to Doctoral Studies,” where I encountered Stuart Hall’s notion of an “organic intellectual.” He describes the double-duties of such thinkers in ways that felt familiar and inviting. First, he writes, 

it is the job of the organic intellectual to know more than the traditional intellectuals do: really know, not just pretend to know, not just to have the facility of knowledge, but to know deeply and profoundly…but the second aspect is just as crucial: that the organic intellectual cannot absolve himself or herself from the responsibility of transmitting those ideas, that knowledge, through the intellectual function, to those who do not belong, professionally, to the intellectual class. And unless those two fronts are operating at the same time…you can get enormous theoretical advances without any engagement at the level of the political project (218). 

Hall’s emphasis on the thinker’s “responsibility of transmitting” their ideas is essential. That responsibility to transmit informs my teaching, the courses I take, the faculty I turn to for support. That responsibility shapes my sentences as much as my neuroqueer brain does: it sorts out the highway pile-up first-draft clauses, whittles down my penchant for nonlinear Deaf-influenced discourse, leavens my Lisicky-level lyrical logic. “Transmitting” is half the journey; the other is digging into what it means to “really know.” 

Knowing is something I approach skeptically. This stems, partly, from the contact my special needs family has had with various “experts” who pathologized us: the educational psychologists who said my autistic brother would never live independently (he does), the audiologist who told my father he was too deaf for jury duty (definitely illegal), the doctors who told my parents my brain tumors were inoperable (they were, until they weren’t, and then weren’t again). We each willed our way through the barriers raised by our bodies (better understood, of course, as the barriers raised by the social construction of our bodies by ableist institutions and their representatives). Even now, I struggle to untangle knowing, the intellectual performance, from “below the shoulders” knowledge that lived experience lends to theory. Tobin Siebers calls the latter “complex embodiment;” embracing it is a long, uncertain journey, not without risk. Academics rarely “get it,” since they—we?—are trained to know, not to not-know. Though Hall comes close, I have yet to encounter a scholarly equivalent to Donald Barthelme’s idea that “the writer is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do” (11). Amongst critics, I have found an embrace of that kind of vulnerability to be generally discouraged. Now I embrace mine more quietly. 

But, reader, I embrace it anyway. And in coursework, research, conversation, and reflection, I have learned to think with confidence and pride of the “junk” I throw as my own neuroqueer rhetoric. I have learned from the inimitable Talia Schaffer that a feminist is as a feminist does. I have learned from Clare Wilson, Dhipinder Walia, Bonnie Oglensky, and Kandice Chuh that institutions will respond when they have to—and sometimes only then—to the imperatives of accessibility and equity. I have learned (and borrowed) so much from Amy Wan about the theory and praxis of teacher-scholars in literacy studies. And I have learned from Beth Sherman that these arguments are ones I am well-positioned to make at my age, having “completed my sentence in the prison of the nervous and insecure” (Sedaris). 

Mostly completed, anyway. In writing this portfolio exam, I have learned that Doubt is still a danger. 

One of the memories I cannot shake from this year comes from “Intro Doc,” a lecture on palaeography and bibliography. I was not shy for the part about secretary hand, but then I got shy—you’re talking too much, said Doubt—as the instructor projected a new slide. 

“Whose writing is this?” he asked. 

Joyce, I thought, not sure how I knew what I felt I definitely knew. I said nothing. 

“There’s a U, a y, a double ss. It’s the handwriting of Joyce,” he said, “as he went blind.”

I knew it, and I knew it for no intellectual reason, but because of a “felt sense” (Perl 3). I said nothing only because of my own unrazed barriers. I yielded the floor to Doubt. 

The care work I have done with others for years is work I now undertake internally. As politely as possible, keeping others’ needs in mind, it seems clear that the next step of my intellectual development is to keep going, to resist wherever possible any temptation to yield.

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Works Cited

1. Barthelme, Donald. “Not Knowing.” Not Knowing: The Essays and Interviews of Donald Barthelme. Ed. Kim Herzinger. New York: Random House, 1997.
2. Duncan, David James. The Brothers K. The Dial Press. July 15, 2010 (Reprint).
3. Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies.” Cultural Studies. Eds. Grossberg, Lawrence, Cary Nelson and Paula A. Treichler. New York: Routledge, 1992. 277-94. Print. 
4. Lisicky, Paul. “On The Fugue, Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother, DFW, and the Resistance to the One Thing.” Essay Daily. Published May 2013. Accessed August 6 2020. https://www.essaydaily.org/2013/05/paul-lisicky-on-fugue-alison-bechdels.html 
5. Perl, Sondra. “Understanding Composing,” COLLEGE COMPOSITION AND COMMUNICATION, December 1980, pp. 363-369. https://college.cengage.com/english/perl/writing_true/1e/resources/student_essays/sondra_perl_understanding_composing.pdf Accessed August 6, 2020. 
6. Sedaris, David. “Me Talk Pretty One Day.” Esquire. Published January 29, 2007. Accessed August 6, 2020. https://www.esquire.com/lifestyle/a1419/talk-pretty-0399/