I love rock music, so since I started teaching in 2004, I have been using the same post-it note to compile rock songs about teachers. Some are about the general theme of “school,” but you get the point. My intention was to create a motivational playlist I can listen to as I prep for class or drive to school. Recently, I read a post by Nels Highberg on Profhacker, titled “The Soundtrack of the Semester.” He asks, “What would be on your CD this semester?” All I have to do is retrieve my list of warm-up songs…
Finally I have arrived in the digital age and can liberate my list from the yellow post-it note! Here is what I have so far:
- 38 Special, “Teacher Teacher”
- Pink Floyd, “Another Brick in the Wall”
- Van Halen, “Hot for Teacher”
- School of Rock (Jack Black), “Teacher’s Pet”
- Loudon Wainwright III, “Final Exam”
- Alice Cooper, “School’s Out”
- Brownsville Station, “Smokin’ in the Boys Room”
- Beastie Boys, “Fight for Your Right”
- Twisted Sister, “Be Chrool To Your Scuel”
What other rock songs do I need to add?
[cc licensed photo by flickr user House of Sims]
Filed under: commentary | Tags: lyric, noland, poetry, posthuman, self, technology
What fascinates me about emerging media studies is that its lines of inquiry almost always cause cracks in the most foundational definitions, value systems, and assumptions that a vast majority of people accept uncritically. What we take for granted in the human world, technology calls into question and complicates. What was once transparent, media studies brings into opacity and demands critical attention. For example, considering artificial intelligence, we begin to wonder what it really means to be “human” and what (if anything) makes human consciousness so distinct from machine consciousness. Considering social media and how it complicates our privacy, cognition, identity, and supposedly our health, the definition of “self” obfuscates so that a fractured/incoherent online identity actually suggests a fractured/incoherent offline identity.
In Poetry at Stake: Lyric Aesthetics and the Challenge of Technology (1999), Carrie Noland interrogates the identity of poetry as it collides with the alterity of technology. She studies the interplay between technology and lyric poetry and how technology challenges a lyric aesthetic dedicated to the expression of a private and interior self. In this case, Noland uses media studies to question a traditional definition that sets lyric poetry in opposition to technology, popular culture, and the “commodification of the human voice” (5). The genre of lyric poetry is associated with a single speaker or voice, and especially in the Romantic period the lyric was elevated to pure and unmediated expression. Noland references poetic and artistic approaches that have clouded that pure aura with uncomfortable liaisons of self and machine. In what is more like a collection of essays than a deliberately chaptered book, Noland explores poets who treat technology as an analogy (Char, Rimbaud) and poets who apply technology as a material condition (Patti Smith, Laurie Anderson).
Noland takes Guillaume Apollinaire as her starting point and agrees with his provocation that external forces (namely commodification and technology) would ultimately not threaten lyric poetry but actually would “play an instrumental role in the composition of the lyric text and […] in the construction of the autonomous (lyric) subject” (5). Apollinaire does not just seek a new poetic language, but more radically a new conception of how subjectivity is constituted through social interactions, discourse, and mechanical interventions. In her chapter on Adorno, titled “Confessing Philosophy,” Noland analyzes his atypically confessional philosophical work Negative Dialectics. One important conclusion that Noland makes in this chapter is that the concept of self-exposure and confession is a troubled one. In using a first-person pronoun to “confess philosophy,” Adorno highlights the fact the the “I” of lyric poetry has never represented the autonomous, transcendent, individual self. In fact, confession is “a highly public gesture, defining […] consciousness as a rhetorically and historically overdetermined form” (63). To understand how the self is determined by external conditions, Noland writes, Adorno focuses on “the technologies responsible for the production of what is commonly taken to be the self” (64), i.e. the lyric confession and the personal memoir. Like Apollinaire, Adorno worries about the myth of the individual, autonomous subject since it is too easy to forget that it has a source external to itself and that it is mediated. Noland concludes that Negative Dialectics is “the testament of the human subject as cyborg, a creature who must write through a distorting apparatus in order to achieve, paradoxically, an authentic voice” (88).
The tension between poetry and the distorting potential of technology is clear in the chapters following “Confessing Philosophy.” In her chapter on Blaise Cendrars, she finds that poetic language and popular commercial discourse make a tenuous opposition, since each category constitutes the other. We can only identify poetic language insofar as it is distinct from the mediated language of popular culture. In the chapter on René Char, Noland analyzes the paradoxical relation that Char has with technology in his poetry. On one hand, Char affirms Heidegger’s view that poetry (poiesis) is a privileged receptor that can channel a pure essence, whereas technology (enframing) only reduces and vanquishes nature. On the other hand, Char was a member of the Surrealist movement and at least partly endorsed “theories of the technological and its potential relationship to poetry that were decidedly not Heideggerian” (143). Also, Char was willing to host a technological Other in his poetry, since he integrated elements of encrypted radio code transmitted during World War II. As Noland points out, the presence of the technological language (code) in his poetry is complicated and reveals Char’s admission that poetry cannot remain totally removed from technological mediation. According to Noland, Char’s Feuillets d’Hypnos (Leaves of Hypnos) demonstrates the question of “poetry’s relation to cryptography, and, therefore, of the poet’s relation to the radio-controlled, ideological actor in history” (159). In other words, by integrating radio code into his poetry, Char admitted that the language of poetry—like the language of communication technology—has an origin outside of itself.
In her chapter on contemporary performance artist Laurie Anderson, the relationship between the individual self and communication/reproduction technologies is at issue in a more explicit way than in her previous chapters. (Noland begins the chapter with a mention of Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto.”) Noland’s primary premise is that Anderson, similar to Apollinaire, “problematizes the distinction between what is intrinsic (internal to the self) and what is extrinsic (technology, institutions, politics, the media, etc.)” (189). In Anderson’s work, the self as an individual mind and body is penetrated by technologized messages and what we commonly consider nonhuman, self-destructive systems. Although it is a little unclear how Anderson fits into Noland’s expressed focus on lyric poetry, the analysis makes an important point that poetry should “strive to confess mediation [...] while simultaneously challenging mediation’s limits” (211).
In following this last point, the final impression I have is that subjective expression in poetry has traditionally assumed a concept of the individual, autonomous, and transcendent self, and that this concept functions in lyric poetry only as it is placed in opposition to technology, popular culture, or some other external entity. Thus, only by excluding technological mediation as “not poetry,” the identity of “poetry” emerges. To interrogate this binary means that more than poetry is at stake, since we must also “place ‘natural’ images of selfhood at stake [and] recognize them as objectifications and yet continue probing their traumatic content” (Noland 216). At the point where media studies and poetry analysis begin to elucidate each other and blend, a chaotic and radical line of inquiry emerges.
Filed under: commentary | Tags: Dickinson, history, literature, poetry, technology, W.C. Williams, writing machines
The technology used to create poetry never becomes obsolete. It lives through physical artifacts and discourse, constantly mediating the reading experience.
I tend to be in the “language camp” of readers. Rhetorical analysis of a text has always been a productive critical approach for me. Yet, I am also deeply concerned with the materiality of a text—specifically the inscription technology or technologies used to compose a text. Upon reading the title, I was immediately attracted to Lisa Gitelman’s 1999 critical-historical study, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era. Her book positions writing technologies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the context of the discourse that shaped public reception of the technology, but she also considers also how the writing technology itself shaped the very discourse (in the form of texts or records) it was used to produce. In other words, in her study of print and non-print modes of inscription such as shorthand, phonographs, and typewriters, Gitelman tries to account for “the double-sided boundary at which the built system both represents technology and is technologically represented” (10). For example, the phonograph displaced shorthand as a “vehicle of memory” (51) in court proceedings. Yet, the phonograph was more than a tool for producing records. It shaped the American climate of representation and helped create a culture of the machine and a self-conscious rhetoric of “progress” (70). Thus, as reading and writing practices change, subjectivities change. Gitelman’s method interests me since it answers to both the language and the materiality of texts. Writing machines determine writing practices, but at the same time the rhetoric of technology determines the machine and the ends to which it is used. This “double-sided boundary” is present throughout Gitelman’s study.
If “writing machines, in particular, get some of their meaning from the way they are used, including the writing they produce” (6), as Gitelman suggests, I wonder to what extent the reverse is true, for poetry in particular? Obviously poetry makes meaning from language, and in many ways we could say that poetry’s subject is language itself, but to what extent does poetry get some of its meaning from the writing methods and machines used to create it? This really is a central question for me. From one view, poetry is an artifact in the traditional (dictionary) sense of the word—“any object made by human beings,” or “a handmade object characteristic of an earlier time or cultural stage.” The poet works in and against language, using language as a way to craft meaning. But from another, less anthropocentric view, neither language nor inscription technologies are neutral and passive; the poem is a hand-made artifact but it is also a machine-made artifact. It is a technofact, distinct from artifact, yet one and the same. The poet is a user of language and a user of writing technology, but he or she is also used by the technology to author certain texts and articulate certain identities. Moreover, the poet may be unaware that this reversal is taking place. McLuhan is an appropriate reference here, since he writes that the effects of technology on humans are profound and inescapable, happening below “the level of opinions and concepts,” happening “steadily and without resistance” (“The Medium Is the Message” 114). For Gitelman, the effects happen through discourse:
Artifacts become knowable in part because they are enmeshed within the back and forth and round about telling of what they are, and because telling devolves upon discernible rhetorical conventions, like genres and specialized vocabularies, that are themselves largely the result of unconscious consensus. (7)
As she demonstrates repeatedly in her book, inscription technologies have intended and unintended consequences.
In poetry, specifically poetry that is frequently anthologized, a narrative about the poet’s writing practices and/or methodology accompanies the work and mediates our reading of it. This narrative is sometimes printed with the poem or sometimes circulated as a rumor. For a poet like Emily Dickinson, the narrative of her methods—i.e. hand-copying poems on scraps of paper, binding them into curious volumes, pinning additional lines to the end of poems, and other analog remixes—is well-known and practically permeates the experience of reading Dickinson. In her excellent article, “My Digital Dickinson,” Lori Emerson observes that Dickinson’s exploration of writing technology is key to understanding her poetry. Emerson notices “instances of Dickinson’s desire to draw attention to the mediating effects of pen and paper, and therefore to denaturalize the media” (61-2). Dickinson was not only writing with media, however. She was also being written by the media, written into the literary imagination and American history. Emerson correctly points out that digital poetry is not just an artifact, “an instance of a foreign, textual object of fascination” (65). Digital poetry must also be read within the network of its material context, within “a shared ongoing poetic exploration […] of language as an elusive and yet multi-dimensional dwelling space” (65). This is what Emerson means by saying that we can read pre-digital poetry with a critical lens germane to our present digital moment; we can “[read] the digital into and out of a poet such as Dickinson” to “enrich our understanding of her work” (57). Emerson’s approach does not treat Dickinson’s poems as stagnant artifacts of pure human creation, but rather as technofacts created with a writing technology at a specific historical moment.
William Carlos Williams, successful physician and figurehead of the Modernist poetry movement in America, also is known for experimentation with a writing technology: the typewriter. As Gitelman observes, “the typewriter reportedly became a sort of object-muse, a fetish, in the creative processes of William Carlos Williams” (218). The word “reportedly” is code for “as the story goes…” yet, in the case of Williams, there is truth to the story. The writing technology of the typewriter to some extent determined his composing method and thus the composition of the poems themselves. As Peter Halter puts it, the “Cubist” poems of Williams, like many poems from Spring and All, “are presented not only via language but also visually in the organization of words on the page” (194). It seems safe to conclude that the technology of the typewriter—which allowed the poet to see the typescript on the page and consider blank space as a unit of text—was instrumental in this highly visual creative process.
Williams has left a trail of materiality behind him. The University of Buffalo houses the poet’s “favorite fold-up typewriter” in addition to typed and handwritten drafts. As the library’s web site explains, “often poems originally written on Williams’ prescription pad precede the typed versions,” and the Williams Collection of Buffalo has these artifacts available for viewing and “for literary research.” Treated like objective artifacts, however, it is easy to forget that the poet’s typewriter and manuscript drafts have authorial significance. Each time the typewriter and manuscripts are viewed, Williams is recreated and his poetry rewrites itself in a new technological moment. These preserved writing machines are not dead, but they are alive and they alter our reading of Williams’ poetry. In a sense, his writing technologies authored Williams in the same moment he used them to author his texts. As both artifact and technofact, his poems bear the human and machine touch as all poetry does. If these materials in the university’s collection are viewed only as residual traces of Williams’ creative process—just as we view dinosaur bones in a museum as evidence of prehistoric life—I believe an opportunity to find “the double-sided boundary” that Gitelman mentions is lost. Williams, like Dickinson, could not master his writing machines, no more than we can master his poems’ language and arrive at a transparent understanding of their meaning.
Gitelman’s last chapter attempts to bridge (or rather re-frame) the history of older, non-digital technologies with the digital textuality of the World Wide Web and hypertext. It is quite obvious that she views technological development as an evolutionary process in which digital textuality is just another chapter in the history of inscription technology: “I want to question and elaborate the parameters of novelty that recent accounts of hypertext seem to posit as the foundations of a new democratic future” (222). Gitelman here and throughout her whole book reminds us of the “gleeful claims” surrounding the invention of shorthand, the phonograph, and other inscription technologies from 1877-1914. The novelty and democratizing power of digital hypertext, she claims, has been overstated, especially by authors like George Landow. For Gitelman, the claim that digitality is the biggest revolution since the printing press is reductive and skips over a complex and interdependent history of pre-WWW writing machines, intellectual property laws, and shared experiences of textuality that “are as variable as they are fluid” (225). Gitelman cautions readers to be wary of perspectives that view technological development as a process of improvement. She writes:
All new media, in failure or success, in rejection or in erratic, faddish appropriation, inspire conflicted cultural moments of self-consciousness about the making of meaning. (224)
Her perspective, though at times very difficult to discern in her historical accounts throughout the book, is a valuable one for readers of digital poetry. As both artifact and technofact, new media poems cannot be read exclusively as works in language, authored by a human presence—they must also be read as works in machine, authored by the materials that represent them in our time.
Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/gentlepurespace/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
Filed under: commentary | Tags: digital poetry, literature, new media, poetry
In his book Digital Poetics (2002), Loss Pequeno Glazier is on a mission to bring poetry into the discourse of contemporary digital culture: “For one not to see the connection between poetic practice and new technology seems to undervalue a literary genre that [has been] at the forefront of artistic investigations of the 20th century” (152). While he focuses on the traditions of modernist and postmodernist poetry, Glazier develops the claim that poetry in general—by its very essence or generic qualities—anticipated the advent of digital texts, long before digital texts were even conceivable. From Blake to Dickinson to Gertrude Stein to W.C. Williams to Jackson Mac Low, “post-typographic and non-linear disunion is no news to poetics” (35).
In the chapter “Hypertext/Hyperpoeisis/Hyperpoetics,” Glazier points out that within the critical discourse surrounding digital literature and writing, poetry has been overshadowed by prose. Although theorists and hypertext poets “often seem to evoke postmodern theory, postmodern poetry is surprisingly overlooked” (93). The problem with this, according to Glazier, is that assumptions and claims about new media prose would probably be refigured/revised if scholars were to consider concerns specific to poetry, concerns founded in poetic composing practices: interrogations into materiality, form, nonlinearity, semiotics, and sense of self. Glazier claims that what is currently considered innovative practice in hypertext prose has long been at stake in poetry, even when poetry was limited to print media. For the past one hundred years, “rather than focusing on the information of the text, poetic practice has explored the conditions that determine that information, the procedures, processes, and crossed paths of meaning-making, meaning-making as constituting the ‘meaning’” (32, italics mine). Thus, poetry has been working towards a critical approach to mediation for some time, and now that it has moved into digital media, poetry should have a more important place in the conversation.
In one sense, it is as though hypertext is poetry’s “soul mate”—the ideal match for poetry, the medium poetry has been waiting for all these years while it made do in oral history, script, and then print. Glazier writes, “digital poetries are not print poetry merely repositioned in the new medium. Instead, e-poetries [make] possible the continuation of lines of inquiry that could not be fulfilled in [print media]” (26). Here, it seems a dimension is unlocked as poetry moves into a new writing technology. In another sense, however, Glazier acknowledges that poetic traditions are not carried over from medium to medium without undergoing serious transformation by the medium itself: “the Web […] has become a part of a transformed social fabric: writing will never be the same again” (52).
This is the key distinction/question I come away with: to what extent does innovative poetic practice alter and advance digital media (or create new media in some cases), and to what extent does digital media alter poetic practice and what it even means to do poetic work? This is a bit like the distinction between technology determining society vs. society determining its technology—who or what is in control? As Glazier asks, “What should be questioned? What […] should be accepted or rejected?” (18). I don’t think he or anyone else has the answers, though it is crucial to keep asking these questions as new poetic forms emerge.
Filed under: pedagogy | Tags: assignments, blogging, blogs, teaching, writing
Another grad student and I are hosting a focus session during the orientation for new and returning teaching assistants this week. These are the notes I drafted for the talk. I am referencing my experience with classroom blogging, as well as a number of outside sources. My own experience has been on WebCT (BlackBoard) for the past few years. This year, the Rhetoric program has adopted a new textbook (which is not a book but a flashdrive), Choices: Situations for College Writing, that comes with its own blogging program. It seems similar to blogging on WebCT, since neither blog program has a customizable design. Also, these “sponsored” blogs don’t offer students the same public forum and networking opportunities they could find on WordPress or Blogger. (The Choices blog can be made “public,” but it still remains part of the course web site.) At any rate, I have tried to pick out the most important tips that inexperienced teachers can use when implementing a blog project assignment in their college writing courses. Let me know what you think!
Blog Project Overview
- The project as a whole constitutes 10% of the final course grade.
- Project is meant to be adapted and developed to meet individual instructors’ needs. The blog can work for in-class or at-home writing assignments.
- Choices provides prompts for blog posts in Chapters 2 and 3; there are also blog prompts included in each assignment description. Guidelines for the project are on pg.31 in Choices.
- Instructors decide additional blog prompts, such as free writing exercises (select your own subject) at least one per week after week 2.
- A suggested length for blog entries is 100-250 words. (Choices has a 10,000 character limit, which is about 1,600 words.)
Differences & Similarities between Choices Blogging & “Real World” Blogging
- Difference: Customization
- Difference: Evaluation
- Difference: Exposure
- Similarity: Space to play
- Similarity: Public audience
- Similarity: Multimodal composing opportunities
- Similarity: Critical thinking
Tips for Teaching Blogging
- In Using Blogs to Enhance Literacy, Diane Penrod offers some basic rules that good bloggers follow (40). Here are three that writing students can really use:
- Students can experiment with the many different rhetorical situations that blogs present.
- Although individual entries are not graded, the blog is graded writing as a whole. Maintain grammatical standards and discourage students from writing in “txt msg” speak.
- To make the blog assignment more dynamic, try asking students to make a set number of comments on classmates’ blog posts over the course of the semester.
1. Pay attention to tone in your blog. Adapt it to the subject and audience, and write to keep the reader’s interest level high.
2. It is important to blog original content, even though you are writing for the web. Cite or link to all outside sources, including images and videos.
3. Use good sense when deciding to post personal content. Think of blog entries as something you would be willing to say in class or have someone read aloud in class.
Examples of Different Types of Blogs
- http://www.huffingtonpost.com/the-blog/
- http://rsa.cwrl.utexas.edu/
- http://feministmentalhealthuk.wordpress.com/
- http://thesituationist.wordpress.com/
- Others?
Miscellaneous Resources
- A tutorial on working with HTML
- A multi-use prompt (courtesy of Annie Mendenhall)
- Annotated bibliography blog post:
- Additional resources
“The response blog gives you an opportunity to explore blogging as a personal, political, or opinion-based public platform. In this blog post, you may respond to a class discussion OR any text (blog, article, video, image) you come across in your own time that is relevant to the course theme or reading. You should describe what you are responding to & then offer your thoughts & opinions. Your response can be a rhetorical analysis that explains what the text is trying to accomplish, a thoughtful response to an issue or idea that came up in class, or an opinion piece responding to a text. Feel free to be creative in your responses & to incorporate images, videos, or hyperlinks throughout your post. Keep in mind the rhetorical principles we have been discussing. What do you want your audience to understand? What are you trying to accomplish in your post? Which rhetorical techniques best suit your needs in this situation?”
In lieu of the formal annotated bibliography, try asking students to post three or four sources they have gathered for the Academic Essay assignment. For each source, they can describe what they like/don’t like and how they plan to use the source in their papers—just as they would in a traditional annotated bibliography. They should do this before class. In class, ask students to review the bibliographies of two or three other classmates and then conduct online research to contribute an additional source the student could possibly use. Ideally, students who are writing on similar topics would review each other’s bibliography posts. Diigo Educator (a specially designed social bookmarking tool) may facilitate a collaborative research assignment more than blogging software.
1. Advice about teaching blogging for the first time: http://cac.ophony.org/2009/06/12/lessons-from-a-first-time-course-blogger/
2. Blog project at Ohio State (with sample prompts & links to blogging resources): http://dmp.osu.edu/blog/index.html
3. Annie Mendenhall’s class blog: http://wi09mendenhall110.blogspot.com/
4. Blog search engines: www.blogdigger.com, www.technorati.com, & www.feedster.com
5. List of blogs in Cultural Studies, Theory, Literature, & Rhetoric: http://www.academicblogs.net/wiki/index.php/Culture%2C_Theory%2C_Literature
Primarily, “The Delirium Waltz” is the title of a poem in Blizzard of One by Mark Strand. Strand has been a tremendous influence on my poetry and my thinking in general. At my family’s summer cottage on Kelleys Island, I remember floating out on the lake in a giant black intertube, entertaining myself with a copy of Strand’s Reasons for Moving/Darker/The Sargentville Notebook. 
The bizarre scenarios, artful stanzas, off-beat sense of humor, and haunting imagery… I couldn’t get enough of his poetry. In a way, Strand demonstrates the power of poetry to literally create worlds; I wanted that power in my own writing. I had to seal the book in a Ziploc bag for transport to and from my floating spot a hundred feet or so off the rocky shoreline. Even with this highly technical protective measure, the book became damp, and its crinkled, wavy pages are now a part of my reading experience each time I come back to the text. The memory of floating in a delirious suspension of summer, water, and words is a part of that book and a part of me. While “Delirium Waltz” is not my favorite poem of Strand’s, the title has always captured my interest, and I chose it for this web site as a sort of tribute to Strand. A way of saying thanks for the words that are interwoven with my growing-up years.
When I picture a delirium waltz, I see people dressed in gowns and tuxedos, tumbling and gliding around a grand ballroom. In fact, that is the central event in Strand’s poem. Guests with names like Muffie and Glenn come and go, in and out of the ballroom, dancing and dancing. The dancing happens in pantoums, but prose stanzas are spliced in between each pantoum, as though to narrate the events. The speaker’s memory in pantoum form is very clear-cut, but in prose form it is… well… delirious: “And the rush of water was suddenly loud as if a flood were loosed upon the ballroom floor. I seemed to be dancing alone into the absence of all that I knew and was bound by, […] the smear, the blurred erasure of differences, the end of self, the end of whatever surrounds the self. All that I saw was a vast celebration of transparence, a clear dream of nothing. And I kept on going.” Or, are the events themselves delirious, prior to the narrative account? Herein I find the cross-genre problem of narrating a moment as the moment happens, and this problem is really exposed in Strand’s poem—the problem of bearing witness to incomprehensible, indescribable events.
Like the poem, a delirium waltz is the central event of my life, tumbling, chaotic, set to music and choreographed in the most ambient, unchoreographed way possible. In Strand’s poem, one senses an astounding confluence of time and bizarre weather. He writes, “We moved in the drift of innumerable notes, abstractions and histories and as we passed over the ground it formed for us the shape of the earth. We moved toward the future, or was it the past?” It’s all very disorienting. It’s delirious.
The dictionary provides some great synonyms for “delirium” – frenzy, fury, hysteria, craze, folly… What words could better describe my life? For every loose end I tie, I sense that nine others have come undone. From school to work to family to friends, I always come in under the bar I have set for myself. Yet, what does it mean to set a frenzied state of hysteria… to music? In 1867, the famous composer Johann Strauss II tried to capture that very paradox in “Delirium Waltz” (you can listen to it here, with a few interruptions). It is a beautiful piece that flirts with order and chaos, just as the waltzing folk do in Strand’s poem, “Holding each other and turning and turning.” The etymology of “delirium” offers one last tidbit of meaning. The word comes from the Indo-European root phrase “de + lira” meaning “out of the furrow.” For me, the furrow represents the narrow thinking and false rhetoric that we all encounter in day-to-day life. Personally, I’d rather be out of the furrow, in a state of disorderly delirium, than stuck in the plowman’s linear rut.
