Tag: Personal

Ambient TV, Comfort Watching, and Focus

On By BrettIn Media, pandemic, Personal, Pop cultureLeave a comment

With down time around the holidays, I’ve been thinking about an older idea called “ambient TV,” taken from Kyle Chayka’s piece in The New Yorker on “ambient television.” Using Emily in Paris as an example, along with scores of cooking and home improvement shows, Chayka compares ambient television to ambient music, quoting composer Brian Eno, that it is “as ignorable as it is interesting.”

Ambient television, like its music counterpart, is meant to move between background and foreground seamlessly. As we scroll through Twitter or write an e-mail, Emily’s prosaic journey continues on screen. Then, our eyes look up again, taking in the Haussmannian boulevards and cafe conversations. We can figure out what happened in our mental absence and expect a calming, comfortable view when we look up. We don’t get lost, and the drama is largely inconsequential. But unlike something “boring,” it still entertains. As Chayka writes:

Ambient denotes something that you don’t have to pay attention to in order to enjoy but which is still seductive enough to be compelling if you choose to do so momentarily. Like gentle New Age soundscapes, “Emily in Paris” is soothing, slow, and relatively monotonous, the dramatic moments too predetermined to really be dramatic.

Analyzing Emily in Paris and other shows, Chayka remarks on their placidity and homogeneity. Seamless edits, drifting montages, voice-overs, B-roll, and other editing techniques smooth over discord and difference, lulling us into a frictionless drift, as we move our eyes and attention between screens, tasks, and distraction.

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Emily St. John Mandel: Station Eleven and Survival

On By BrettIn Books, pandemic, Personal, society, Things that have stuck out, ThoughtsLeave a comment

Station Eleven is a difficult book to summarize. Covering a tight but dynamic set of main characters and a sprawling timeline, the book layers settings, memories, people, and situations, jumping back and forth between a world devastated by a pandemic, the early moments of the disaster, and the years and decades before the event. But most of all, the book explores a range of themes: loneliness, longing, belonging, meaning, and survival.

But, if anything, the core tenet of a post-apocalyptic roving Shakespearean acting troupe and orchestra acts as a sort of leitmotif, even a mantra, lurking in the back of most scenes and tying the text together: “Survival is insufficient.” What we mean by survival, what we do to attain it, and what it may mean to transcend it.

So it is once a book about plague, about Shakespeare and acting, about failed relationships and drifting conversations, about loneliness and hope, and most of all, about what it means to live.

I listened to Station Eleven during a series of long car rides a few years ago, and I found myself hooked. I had wanted to read it during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic but lacked the mindset, preferring escapism to reflections on a pandemic-ravaged world. Revisiting it then, over a year and half later, I felt more distant, more ready to reflect. And a few things struck me. So I started reflecting on some of those changes. I put it, as well as a lot of non-required writing, on hold. Here are some of those thoughts, though rather late.

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Stardew Valley, Sorge, and Martin Heidegger

On By BrettIn Media, Philosophy, Pop culture, society, videogamesLeave a comment

I’ve been playing a lot of Stardew Valley lately. The pixel-graphics farm RPG has enjoyed a  one-year anniversary this past Feb. 26, but mostly I’ve found the game to be a bit of an escape as Syracuse’s nickel grey March and school’s looming deadlines deepen a seasonal depression.

For those of you who have not played Stardew Valley, the plot is simple. Inheriting your grandfather’s rustic farm in the bucolic Stardew Valley, you start with some lose coins and tools and gradually nurture the farm back to health, interacting with the community and the surrounding countryside–from mysterious woods, to mines, to the ocean–as you plant and harvest seeds, forage, mine, and care for animals. Like any RPG, you level up your skills, from crafting and combat, and build relationships with NPCs by giving gifts and completing small quests. The player can eventually get married and raise a family.

The game has some overlap with the Harvest Moon and Animal Crossing series, placing the player as a caretaker enmeshed in a community. The simple music, pixel graphics, and winsome, quirky cut-scenes have their charm, and while the mechanics can get a bit grind-inducing (depending on one’s style and goals), the rhythm of rising, getting set for the day, working, and heading to sleep is a calming metronome that structures your daily actions, whether attending a community celebration, fighting “Slimes” in the mine, or simply fishing away a few hours.

More deeply, though, I kept coming back to what Stardew Valley teaches about Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), especially his notion of sorge, or “caring,” as it’s often translated.

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Clogged Up

On By BrettIn Personal, Thoughts, WritingLeave a comment

I have other more “pressing” things to do this morning. Perhaps some housework. Definitely some teaching prep and student feedback. Maybe research. But I feel like I needed to write this morning to get rid of a certain clogged feeling. So I’m setting a timer for 30 minutes and writing. Let’s see what happens.

I guess I’ll start looking at the feeling more directly. I’m not quite sure what it is, but it feels a bit like cabin fever for the mind, like I’m stuck doing similar intellectual activities. Or just sort of stuck in a general life way. I was doing a freewrite the other day, and this came out describing the feeling:

I don’t know how I got here. Well, I know in a literal sense, the sense that if a cop were to ask me how I got there, I could tell him. Tell him in pretty solid detail. And I’m not trying to be all abstract, thinking about genetics and geology and all that—how I got here in space time or geologic time. No, it was really more of a feeling, really. Like I was drifting in an aimless current and suddenly beached like a piece of drift wood, with the current flowing further down stream.

I think this sort of mood is pointing to some of the intellectual ambiguity that comes from overthinking existence. To thinking, learning, being, but not necessarily acting because despite all this thinking and learning, sometimes it’s hard to figure out what to do. Or how to do what you want to do. Or what there is to do.

Right now, in terms of my life, I’m on summer break before entering my second year of coursework in a 4-year PhD program in composition and cultural rhetoric. I’m teaching a summer class. I’m vaguely trying to work through an idea about video games, trying to improve my programming literacy, and read for exams next summer. But I am, largely speaking, in coursework.

This brings me back to writing and that clogged feeling. One of my friends and colleagues described that coursework feels like being a sponge loaded up with water, and since you are not doing much non-reflective writing, you don’t have an outlet to squeeze out all this intellectual saturation.

I also think this feeling has a connection to another conversation I had–a few times, actually–about the “selfish” nature of grad school, especially when it is intensive and absorbing. Doing all of this learning feels a bit cut off. A professional writer has an audience, but in coursework, I’m not sure why I’m learning quite yet, what all this knowledge is supposed to lead to, what I’m supposed to do with it.

This seems to be one of the difficult things about knowledge production to me. In the past, I’ve generally looked at intelligence and what I would term intellectual productivity in an emergent, almost playful sense. That ideas come from playing with other ideas, thinking through them, talking through them, etc. I’m having a hard time transitioning to the “production” of knowledge, from learning as work in stead of play. Learning, even when it was difficult, has always been play to me, not “work.”

I suppose I’ve been dwelling on this “work” and “play” distinction lately, which I imagine is inevitable when researching play and games. I’m not sure what keeps sticking me to it, though.

I suppose it’s the question of why work matters. Why we work. Why we work hard, in particular. Many don’t have a choice–it’s work or die–but I think a lot of people do have some choice about work, or at least the illusion of choice, and the existential anguish involved with that (maybe false) choice. This is one issue. That sense of “am I doing what I love?”Or even, “Can I do what I love?”

But that’s not the only question. One has issues like “fullfilling work,” a fairly recent idea, or the odd tyranny of play that may happen when one is expected to know certain media and play becomes work. The difference between productive hobbies and wasting time. Production v. play. What it means to earn a “living” and not just “an earning.” When a passion becomes something else.

My timer is winding down, so I guess I’ll end in this messy set of contradictions. But I think this this particular fixation does point to larger things, or could. I’m just not quite sure yet.

Productivity?

On By BrettIn Personal, Philosophy, ThoughtsLeave a comment

As the years go on, I see the false idol of long hours. Long hours, when meaningfully deployed are great, but so often quantity takes the place of quality. I worked x hours, instead of getting x done. Or in its more haunting form, I still have time and work to do today, so I can’t rest.

I think of a distinction raised in Sogyal Rinpoche’s Tibetan Book of Living and Dying between what I call lazy laziness v. busy laziness. Lazy laziness refers to what we normally consider lazy: the archetypal the couch potato, the binging of Castle reruns, the downing of Atomic-Fire-Lazer-Charged chips. Busy laziness refers to the layering on of hours that ultimately distract us from more meaningful activities, simply exhausting us until we pick back up the next day to do the same thing, ad infinitum. Though I think we rarely fall in either extreme, that spectrum has followed me through the years.

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Life, Database, and Narrative

On By BrettIn Personal, Thoughts, Writing4 Comments

Days are pretty packed affairs. Like over-stuffed omelets. Seemingly compact and straightforward  on the outside–24 hours, dawn to dusk, 9-5, breakfast to dinner–but within the structured folds of our narrating scheme a lot can take place.

Today, in a mundane sense, I didn’t do much. I prepped for teaching, which involved me reading a lot of articles and book chapters. I talked a bit with a friend, dropping him off while navigating construction-marred streets further thinned with parked cars. I drove home in an oddly bristling, bustling early bird rush hour. I discovered that my car may need a new tire, is overdo for inspection, and has a wonky door. Stressed and a little sickened by the world–like Trump’s remarks this afternoon on the shooting–and the layered little anxieties of my own life, I meditated. Now, I am writing.

I don’t know why I list this little litany. I don’t suspect it makes for good reading, much like those old journals of daily meals or routines that historians–and few others–go bonkers over. But I feel like I just wanted to put some of the basic things I did, leaving out even more granular things like meals or a nap I took.

It may be an odd connection, but doing this reminds me of Lev Manovich’s distinction between the non-narrative, collective pool of data that comprise databases compared to the more narrative, often linear data in a novel. A novel has a beginning, middle, and end with well-orchestrated plot points punctuating the read, making “arcs” or “movement.” And essays do the same thing, for the most part.

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Return (for now)

On By BrettIn Personal, Philosophy, rhetoric, society, Writing2 Comments

Hey all, it’s been a while. Though I’ve kept blogging on a school-based site, the nature of the blogging has been more academic, mostly reaction to readings or conferences. It wasn’t the sort of writing I was doing here.

But I think I’ve come to miss this space. Primarily for three reasons. First, it’s a chance to voice my thoughts in a public setting that is a more involved than most social media. It’s uncanny, for example, that my last post before the hiatus was about gun control, since the news of the Orlando shooting has left me blank and sort of shell shocked without a space to vocalize anything. The echo of the news is sort of reverberating in my body and thoughts but not really going anywhere. I’m not ready to talk about it, but I need a space to just sort of say that. That I am literally sickened and dazed at the news and can’t seem to figure out next steps or previous steps or any steps at all. This blog used to be that space, and I guess it is today.

Second, while I’ve been doing a lot of writing, I’ve been writing in a vacuum. True, I’ve been writing to peers and professors, occasional strangers, and fellow academics at conferences, but I miss a public place interface with an audience on a semi-regular basis outside of academia. Not a big one. Or a constant one, likely. But someone. Because I miss the sense that now and then my writing was doing something. It was a small something, but the occasional thank you message or thought was more nourishing than I gave it credit.

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New blog, New Post

On By BrettIn Blog, Personal2 Comments

Hey all, I hope things are going well. I’m adjusting as I move back into school, starting my PhD in Composition and Cultural Rhetoric. As part of orientation, we had to make a new blog and blog post for our next meeting. So in place of a post here, I figured I would send you a link to my new blog over there.

At this point, the blog is still pretty basic and unfinished. Like an apartment that you might move into as the workers are still finishing up some walls, wiring, and plumbing. Or, like my current life-in-transition. But it is what it is.

I will likely continue to use this blog, but it’ll be more of a personal blog, I’m thinking, and I may use the other for more professional development and class-related content. We shall see.

But in the meantime, here is the link, and I hope you have a nice day.

-Brett

Back to the Backyard

On By BrettIn Personal, Thoughts8 Comments

Hey all, it’s been a while. I have finally decided that I am far enough on work and settled enough in my life to find my blogging rhythm again, and after a long departure–Oct. of last year–I am back to posting regularly.

I don’t have a particular theme for today. Mostly, I just wanted to check in, since a few changes have taken place since October.

First of all, my thesis is “done,” and by done I mean that I have given a copy to my readers for my defense next week. By “done” I also mean that I can’t stand looking at it for some time. Though I guess I should glance it over before the defense. *cringe*

It ended up being about ecological theory and fanfiction. So a brief explanation about both of those things.

Ecological theory, as its name suggests, has environment roots, but has more recently been used to complicate our expand our view of writing. While many people still look at writing as a solitary process–i.e., the lone writer at a desk “inventing” or “discovering” some text–ecological theory takes the opposite view.

In a “writing ecology,” the writer is just one participant in the writing process, which can also include other people, historical and cultural influences, and nonhuman elements, like the environment or technology.

For example, right now, I’m using my old MacBook, sipping water, listening to Hello Saferide, and sitting alone in a (somewhat) cold kitchen near a broad window. Moreover, I’m writing through an interface called WordPress, designed by a bunch of programers. This interface has certain ideologies and capabilities, like the ability to just grab something from online to make a point, like this:

A different writing environment–a different ecology–would affect my writing, and that’s not even considering you, the reader, and your own access and influence.

So that’s ecology. Fanfiction, at its most basic level, is fiction written by “fans” of a particular source text. It is typically about popular culture texts and is typically done by amateur writers without compensation. Moreover, it is often a social endeavor.

Fanfiction has historical roots, like Gulliver’s Travels fanfiction in the 18th century, but has surged in prominence in recent decades through digital technology. These technologies have also changed how we look at fanfiction, affecting the ecology that gives rise to fanfiction texts.

Essentially, my thesis tries to explore fanfiction ecologies, showing how looking at fanfiction like this changes what fanfiction “resistance” and “literacy” means.

In other news, I’ve also been accepted into some great PhD programs for rhetoric and composition, with full funding, so that’s worth celebrating. Overall, it is a bit nerve-wracking, but ultimately affirmative and exciting, especially after the alienating application process of the past few months. I made it through the first few gates. Now I get some difficult choices for my next one.

With these changes in mind, I imagine my usual posts will also change. While I can’t foresee what that means, I predict that posts may center more on my current research, allowing me to think through things–and share these thoughts–in a less stifling setting. But I still hope to retain some of the feel from past posts, like their connection to daily questions. I can’t say this will always be the case, but it is my temperament, and something that I enjoyed doing.

With that in mind, I’ll end this here. I’ll be sure to keep up writing and apologize for the long (but deeply necessary) hiatus. I hope all is well.

Cheers.

Why be better?

On By BrettIn History, People, Philosophy, Politics, Pop culture, Thoughts6 Comments

I said to myself, “Look, I have increased in wisdom more than anyone who has ruled over Jerusalem before me; I have experienced much of wisdom and knowledge.” Then I applied myself to the understanding of wisdom, and also of madness and folly, but I learned that this, too, is a chasing after the wind. For with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief

-Ecclesiastes 1:16-18

I once acted in a series of one act plays, and when I wasn’t running lines or rehearsing, I watched the other shows. One particular line has stood out from the experience: “Why be better?” I almost missed it, but hearing that line over and over, I finally realized how nihilistic it was. Yet, some days, I ask myself the same thing.

For the most part, it seems to be a modern question. Ennui, hysteria, and melancholy became common, even expected, medical diagnosis for the growing middle class in the 18th and 19th centuries as prosperity and public reform democratized leisure. Prior to that, some historians argue, people didn’t have the resources for ennui.

Couple this with growing cities, rising industry, increased skepticism for religion and morality–Darwin’s work being one cause–and one can see the anxiety and hopelessness that spurs such questions, especially by the start of the 20th Century.

19th Century Middle Class at its finest. [Renoir image from artinthepicture.com]
19th Century middle class at its finest. [Renoir image from artinthepicture.com]
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