reflection
[youtube]https://youtu.be/b-2Z4xqt-G4[/youtube]
Nolan’s Final Felt Sense Reflections
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwvxLBXEsv0[/youtube]
Alexis’ response to Lavender readings
felt sense response 3/5/2014 From Lavender, “Bodily Felt Sensing”Sills describes BFS as a kind of “global perception of the whole of arising process in any one moment of emergent experience – a sense of “all of it.” All those sensations, emotional tones, mental constructs, symbols and images that compose our self-constellations are directly experienced as an embodied and coherent whole.” This description also, I believe, corresponds to what I usually call “intuition,” which is itself something I describe as an explanatory function rather than a function of its own. That is, I usually think of intuition as a word to explain something that doesn’t seem to have an explanation; it isn’t magic. An experience of “sensing it all” and having meaning—something to new to say--arise from that feeling seems, to me, to be another way of describing intuition, because just saying “intuition” is unproductive in a classroom. It seems related to the clich “trusting your gut.” In both of the Lavender articles, she cites Madison, G to describe “felt sensing as a “temporary wave, from the sea of being.” I think this is where it could be thought of as spiritual for those interested in non-western philosophical traditions that are often translated as “spiritual” practices in the West (I am thinking, specifically, of yoga and Buddhism). As we move “forward” in new media and new ways of collaborating in knowledge “communities”—it’s worth questioning, in a separate discussion, what we may legitimately call a community, knowledge or other--the concept of “interbeing” seems useful. In another class, I have been thinking of a phenomenon for which interbeing may also prove to be of some theoretical use. Some students in another class have taken an interest in theorizing violence. [...]
Alexis Larsson’s Evocative Object
https://prezi.com/amzfc4f4ujg9/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy Original text: I got my Rivendell Atlantis when my grandmother died. She left behind a safe deposit box with about five grand. That’s essentially nothing. I chose to spend it on something that would be durable and essential to my life, and settled on an Atlantis, Rivendell’s touring frame. It’s a posh bike. My friend, Ben Tabor, built it in the shop where he worked. I asked him to build me the bike of his dreams. Ben and I went on rides together. Ben is perhaps the best storyteller I’ve met. He has one of those mothers who always brings something, always has a present for someone when she visits. It’s a gift. Even if it is a Costco pack of imitation crab. Even if that someone is a vegetarian. Ben might have been able to tell great stories without her example, but she gifted him with some fabulous content. They taught me that there’s deep love in the relationship between the one who is heavy handedly ridiculous and the one who narrates the other’s antics. In my vision, the bike would take me everywhere. In a way it did. We went camping together. I say “we” because the bike was also a protectant against loneliness. We travelled. We rode between 100 and 120 miles, on some stretches, alongside rivers, through the high desert of Eastern Oregon, and over Cascade range. I rode to meet a friend, or just to meet the coastline. Growing up in a suffocating house with my volatile parents, my bike gave me a chance to wear out my restlessness and find balance. It gave me access to places and people, but I generally chose not to stop. Stopping [...]
Response to Wysocki, “Drawn Together”
Wysocki's review of research/writing on graphic narratives was enlightening. I am not sure how the content was meant to be "less stimulating" when aimed at a working class readership, but I find the argument that these word/picture combos were aimed at "educating particular bodies toward passivity"(32). It seems important, generally, for the cited authors to establish a set of categories. Wysocki's lit review/argument travels quite a bit, so I'll try to at least point out some take-away threads. She starts with Hall's assertion that, as she puts it, "we see ourselves in what we produce" (25). Ultimately, pitching words and pictures in the same work makes available more alternatives for how one can see herself in such media. Various authors did what they could to establish hierarchical categories that would stabilize the significance of images and neutralize any threat they might pose to norms as they perceive them. However, these categories can be worked across, disjuncted, and thus destabilized by putting the words at cross-purposes with the images, heightening awareness through satire in the image or meta-ish commentary on what is seen by the characters in the image as well as the reader. "In Fun Home, the fraught household is described as resulting from the tensions of people trying to live as though "male" and "female" were cleanly defined by lists of dichotomous qualities like those I quoted some pages back" (40). The texts she'd cited had contributed to a discourse in which dichotomous thinking discouraged the characters from recognizing their less cleanly defined lived experience of gender and sexuality. I'm not sure I'm convinced that putting text in less predictable or more ambiguous places than adjacent to their respective, normative gendered images...I'm not sure [...]