wrestling w/ coherence

starting a waste book [06/18/24]

When I studied art, my professors always used to ask of our work, “How are you going to make this feel cohesive?” It was the question I hated most, because my answer was usually, I don’t know yet??¹

I think I’ve been hearing this question in my head while I write. I get stuck re-reading-and-editing-and-re-reading-and-editing, ruminating on my own coherence, or lack thereof. Not posting because it’s not finished enough, because there’s no clear thesis, because I can’t write a solid conclusion.

The truth is that I don’t really know what a thing is until it after I make it; I always start from a few grains of sand, and the whole reveals itself to me through sediment.

Some writers talk about commonplace books, those little notebooks where they keep random quotes, ideas, and sketches. Apparently Isaac Newton invented calculus in a book like that — he called it his ‘waste book’, which is what accountants used to call the journal where they chronologically recorded all their random daily transactions. I never even attempted calculus (I had a hard enough time with algebra), but I find it poetic that the mathematical study of change grew out of waste.

When I started this newsletter, I was doing link round-ups, but slowly over time, they morphed into multiple tiny essays in one. Maybe because I have a tendency to tangent, or maybe because I felt the pull of coherence, IDK, but what was fun at first became a lot of work, so I stopped doing them.

“Does the demonstration of coherence indicate a stronger mind?” Margaret Price asks in Mad at School. I recently read a paper that mentioned the ‘finished text’ could be considered a neurotypical concept, and I felt that in my soul. I think I’ll start to keep a waste book here — it won’t be in any sort of order, and I will not attempt coherence, although connections will surely emerge. Maybe you can help me see them.²

---

1. Florence Ashley keeps surfacing on my screen — first in this interview, where they say this thing I found extremely relatable re: gender-affirming surgery:

   “There’s I think a tradition of trans writing about surgery as this transcendent, quasi-religious, mystical experience that fundamentally changes you. And I'm just like…not really. It was dope! But it was dope in that way that most human things are dope. After surgery, I wasn't a completely changed human being. Although, weirdly, in certain ways, over time, it did change me because it changed my relationship to other people and changed my relationship with my own body. And over time, that changes you because you are defined in part by your relationship to yourself and to others. 

   But what I wanted to share is the profound messiness of surgery. But a positive messiness! To me messiness is not a bad thing. Messiness is the most human thing.”

And then in this paper where they craft a pluralistic definition of gender identity as an ongoing process, different for everyone:

“What ties together accounts of gender identity is not the unending quest for the fount of gender, but the process by which it is made and remade out of gender subjectivity.”

---

2. Tyson Yunkaporta on time-place:

   “..it’s time-place because place has meaning, you know, place is specific. Place is specific seasonally and regionally and in a million ways; it has story, and it has meaning—all the special places there. It has your maps of meaning on it, your travel roots and what they mean to you and how you store your knowledge in that. Every human being’s got that. Even the worst people in the world still have a remnant of that, you know? I don’t care if your ancestors going back ten generations have been living in cities or towns—you’ve still got that. And that doesn’t go away, because that’s what human beings are. We are like: I’m located, therefore I am.”

---

3. How I’ve been activating my prefrontal cortex lately:

---

4. Gray has been helping our neighbor tackle a serious ivy problem (poison and English) that was killing two trees and starting to take over her house, so I’m working on some low-maintenance perennial flower plantings for her instead.³ Because I need to do everything the hard (and cheap) way, I just started cold-stratifying wild phlox, rudbeckia, zig-zag goldenrod, and aster seeds. There are lots of wildflowers that need a period of cold in order to germinate — you can either sprinkle them outside in the fall and wait til spring, or you can trick them by putting them in the fridge for a month or two (depending). Prairie Moon Nursery sent me this how-to:

   

   (not sponsored i just legit love them)

   I’ll start them in flats somewhere around August, get them in the ground in the fall, they can spend the winter working on roots, and maybe bloom next spring?? (Look, mom, planning my life a year ahead! I want to live!)

---

5. This video by Radical Planning on how business improvement districts turn gayborhoods into consumer havens is a fascinating Pride month read. You thought the Chase Bank float at the Pride parade was bad?? A BID is basically a non-profit where landowners get to take taxes from a neighborhood and put them back into their businesses, and basically every gayborhood in the US is part of one!

(Why am I obsessed with urban planning videos lately? This TikTok on walkability is also great.)

---

6. I’ve been reading Thinking About History by Sarah Maza (which I think was a

   schizophrenicreads
   rec?) and it is de-mystifying historiography for me. First: there is no History, capital H. Historians dig through archives with a question, and then they make arguments based on what they find. Apparently, historians are always arguing; Maza says the arguing is what keeps history alive. It’s also a great field for amateurs, she argues, because historians all specialize in different time periods, so there’s no unifying jargon. They have to explain everything in regular words to each other, which means it’s also easier for the rest of us to read, too. “The research process itself is something most historians learn about on the fly, just by doing it,” Maza writes (fuck around and find out, my MO). Maybe I can auto-didact myself into historiography?? A part of me longs to grow old in the archives.  

---

7. Feeding by Haley Nahman is the best essay I’ve ever read about breastfeeding, something I never, ever wanted to do, and also something that’s being weaponized in all the anti-trans right-wing propaganda I can’t stop reading for some reason pls help. (See: conservative detrans activist Chloe Cole telling Jordan Peterson that she ‘felt like a monster’ for denying her possible future unborn children the magic of breast milk, which manages to be both anti-trans and anti-feminist..) Nahman writes about the experience with a realism I aspire to in my own work about embodiment — it can be beautiful, sure, but it’s also a struggle, and a kind of horror at times.

   ---

8. Speaking of anti-trans propaganda: I finally read Irreversible Damage, and then I read every critique of Irreversible Damage I could find, and then I read this Southern Poverty Law Center report on the vast and incestuous network of right-wing groups behind all of it. One thing that stood out to me is the fact that groups like the “Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine” use their donations to pay for the studies they fund to be open access, which makes it easier for them to spread data that seems to legitimate their ideological positions. Publishers charge anywhere from $1K to $11K to make a paper open access — the fact that people with money can just pay for scientific credibility is a great argument for the open access movement, actually!

---

9. In reading all this propaganda, I have noticed that the main rhetorical strategy is an appeal to reason. Sanity is invoked over and over again (cries for coherence, you might say). Nathan J. Robinson describes it thus:

   “..people who insist they are Just Being Reasonable and Care About The Facts—and say everyone else is motivated by Ideology and Politics and Political Correctness—are often the most stubbornly unreasonable and unwilling to examine the actual facts. It’s the rhetoric of reasonableness rather than actual reasonableness..”

   Samuel Huneke discusses this in a recent critique of gay centrists mad about queer theory:

   “These appeals are generally presented in moderate language to assure the reader of the author’s reasonableness. They suggest intellectual heft and empirical rigor. Their authors often go out of their way to mention their progressive bona fides. They are on your side, dear reader, but they want you to be utterly angry and absolutely terrified about whatever it is they’re recounting. It’s absurd that queer theorists hate gay men! It’s shocking that progressives are enacting a new Jim Crow! It’s beyond the pale that our doctors are mutilating children! It’s insane that even Lincoln has been canceled!”

   We must resist being manipulated by a facade of reasonableness.

   ---

10. A group of neurodivergent scholars published a letter in the journal Autism arguing that the concept of neurodiversity was theorized collectively on autistic listservs in the 90’s, contrary to the claim that it was coined by Judy Singer (which was popularized by the book Neurotribes). Singer has, unfortunately, been sucked down the TERF hole, prompting other autistic scholars to start fact-checking her claims to the neurodiversity concept. Personally, I love the commitment to collectivism going on in Neurodiversity Studies.

    ---

11. The coneflowers and yarrow I started from seed⁴ last spring are blooming for the first time.

    

    

---

12. A post-script for my Scar Care essay: there’s honestly not enough quality information out there about scar massage! This is a huge gap in post-surgical care — massage is expensive and not usually covered by insurance, but it’s actually so helpful. This video convinced me to try bodywork and holy shit, almost immediate range-of-motion improvement, they are not lying:

---

13. I continue to investigate dopamine culture — right now I’m interested in the term ‘dopamine hit’. I found this early mention in a 2001 Wall Street Journal report on e-commerce that sounds like it could have been written yesterday, verbatim:

    

    Dr. Greenfield is a psychologist who wrote a book in 1999 called Virtual Addiction. “Really what happened that sort of moved this forward, is that The Associated Press was at a presentation that I did, and once the wire services picked this up, it has been non-stop media focus, no exaggeration, for the last 20 years,” he said in an interview. Interesting! I guess worrying about dopamine gives us dopamine..

---

14. I am really skeptical of the trope that our attention spans have gotten shorter, that no one reads books anymore, etc etc. 4-hour deep dives on Youtube are crushing it! People are reading 4000+ word essays sent to them by email! The content marketing group Storythings advises their clients that there’s actually a spectrum of attention patterns, and that they have gotten both shorter and longer. They attribute this to the way that the internet unlocked distribution channels that previously were monopolized by media companies — now we scroll random storytimes by strangers on TikTok, yes, but we also can binge (and create) multiple hours of content about our niche interests. Media got wider and deeper, simultaneously, and so did our attention.⁵

---

15. Last but not least, my advisors tell me that I must plug my paid subscriber content: I’m working on a project about the political concepts underlying Russell Barkley’s ideas about executive function,⁶ and invite generous patrons of my slug arts to read along as I explore and build my analysis. Part one is on Barkley’s genetic ideas about self-control, and part two is on time, which he calls ‘the central executive’. Next up is a post on evolutionary psychology, the great naturalizer of the free market!

Where Does Self-Control Come From?

Is Clock Time the Boss of Me?

---

1. Playing on repeat: 🎶 I don’t know what I’m doing, more than half of the time 🎶

2. I realize I’m not reinventing any wheels here; the newsletter is, by nature, a curatorial format. Since we swim around in so much data now, we need human curators to sift through it for us, and pull out little treasures. I am not qualified for much in this life, but I do think I am qualified for this.

3. Me, at the garden center: Do you know any plants that can compete with English Ivy? Gardener, pity in her eyes: Oh, you’ll be pulling that up for the rest of your life..

4. There is nothing inherently better about starting from seed (except for that it is way, way cheaper) — honestly, it’s a lot more practical to buy starts! I’ve just always been an immediate gratification type, so seeing a flower bloom bc I did something an entire year ago is a new experience for me. You know, they say ADHDers are all about the Now, no sense of the long-term, bc of our prefrontal cortexes or something — but I think it is difficult to imagine a future if you’ve learned to see yourself as an irreparable fuck-up.

5. There’s also something to be said about there being multiple types of attention, which is seldom addressed — usually the panic over attention spans is talking about selective attention, “the ability to avoid distracting stimuli”, but there’s also alternating attention, where you shift between various stimuli. Katherine Hayles called it deep attention vs hyperattention, and proposed that maybe we’re just going thru a societal shift in attention styles.

6. who, despite our many ideological disagreements, does read me for filth when he talks about the ADHD need for immediate feedback.. why research if I can’t immediately infodump to someone about it??