This is one version of strategic inefficiency: how some are relieved from doing the work that would slow their progression. And, of course, others then inherit that work. That some people end up being given more administrative work because they are more efficient might seem so obvious that it does not need to be said. The obvious is not always obvious to those who benefit from a system; the obvious always needs to be said. We need to learn from how inefficiency is rewarded and how that rewarding is a mechanism for reproducing hierarchies: it is about who does what; about who is saved from doing what. In academic career terms, efficiency can be understood as a penalty: you are slowed down by what you are asked to pick up.

— Sara Ahmed, “Strategic Inefficiency”

Best of 2018

To close out the year, here are some of the things I most enjoyed in 2018! (Find previous years here.)

Books

Articles

Film & TV

  • Capitu directed by Luiz Fernando Carvalho
  • Annihilation directed by Alex Garland
  • Gran Hotel created by Ramón Campos, Gema R. Neira, & Carlos Sedes
  • Call the Midwife created by Heidi Thomas
  • Sorry to Bother You directed by Boots Riley
  • Bonus: they belonged culturally to last year, but I watched Lady Bird directed by Greta Gerwig and The Shape of Water directed by Guillermo del Toro back in January and loved both.

Podcasts

Performances

Art

Things I made

Moments I had

  • After two years of studying, I passed my M.A. comprehensive exams!
  • I had my first radio appearance.
  • I graduated.
  • I got mentioned in the New York Times, which I will go ahead and admit was totally a bucket list item.
  • I got to show my sister around Barcelona and Madrid!
  • I taught a course of my own design (more or less) for the first time, which was incredibly fun. Shout out to my summer SPAN 1020 students!!
  • I passed my Catalan reading exam, which believe it or not, I’ve been working slowly toward for eight years.
  • I hosted Thanksgiving for the first time.
zle-dziecko: “ onlyusefulphrases: “I don’t want to criticize your parenting, but that sounds like a bad idea. ” For those of you wondering about my URL: meet my inspiration. ” I’ve started a side blog to chronicle my language learning adventures, if...

zle-dziecko:

onlyusefulphrases:

I don’t want to criticize your parenting, but that sounds like a bad idea.

For those of you wondering about my URL: meet my inspiration.

I’ve started a side blog to chronicle my language learning adventures, if you’re interested! Right now I’m bumbling through the Polish course on Duolingo, but I also plan to use this space to maintain my Portuguese and Catalan. Follow @zle-dziecko on Tumblr and friend @caddington11 on Duolingo :)

More than others you can be compared to the Church. When you are in your room, then, at night, think always on Christ, and wait for his coming at every moment. This is the person Christ has loved in loving you, the person he has chosen in choosing you. He enters by the open door; he has promised to come in, and he cannot deceive. Embrace him, the one you have sought; turn to him, and be enlightened; hold him fast, ask him not to go in haste, beg him not to leave you. …  Whoever seeks Christ in this way, whoever prays to Christ in this way, is not abandoned by him; on the contrary, Christ comes again and again to visit such a person, for he is with us until the end of the world.

— St. Ambrose, in the office of readings for today’s feast of St. Lucy

Self-Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria, c. 1615–1617 Artemisia Gentileschi National Gallery, London “Her eyes look away, as if thinking of a painful memory, yet there is a calm in her monumental pose. She’s got the strong, muscular arms...

Self-Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria, c. 1615–1617
Artemisia Gentileschi
National Gallery, London

Her eyes look away, as if thinking of a painful memory, yet there is a calm in her monumental pose. She’s got the strong, muscular arms Artemisia always gave the women in her paintings and as she ponders the past, the fingers of her left hand rest on a shattered wooden wheel with vicious metal spikes embedded in its rim.

Just a few years before she painted this self-portrait, those fingers were deliberately crushed in a courtroom in Rome, when an 18-year-old Gentileschi was publicly subjected to a thumbscrew-like torture called the sibille. Cords were twisted round her fingers then pulled tight, supposedly to ensure her evidence at the trial of the man who raped her was honest.

–Jonathan Jones

I won’t wash the dishes anymore
Or dust the furniture
I’m sorry
I’ve begun to read
The other day I opened a book and a week later I decided
I won’t carry the trash out to the trash bin
Or clean up the mess of leaves falling in the yard
I’m sorry
After reading I noticed each dish has its own aesthetic,
an aesthetic of traces, of ethics, of static
I look at my hands as they flip the books’ pages
Hands much softer than they were before
I feel that I can start to be all the time

—

Cristiane Sobral
translated from the Portuguese by John Keene

from Words Without Borders, December 2018: Afro-Brazilian Writing

De una Mujer se convencen
todos los Sabios de Egipto,
para prueba de que el sexo
no es esencia en lo entendido.
¡Víctor, víctor!
Prodigio fue, y aun milagro;
pero no estuvo el prodigio
en vencerlos, sino en que
ellos se den por vencidos.
¡Víctor, víctor!
¡Qué bien se ve que eran Sabios
en confesarse rendidos,
que es triunfo el obedecer
de la razón el dominio!
¡Víctor, víctor!
Las luces de la verdad
no se obscurecen con gritos;
que su eco sabe valiente
sobresalir del ruido.
¡Víctor, víctor!
No se avergüenzan los Sabios
de mirarse convencidos;
porque saben, como Sabios,
que su saber es finito.
¡Víctor, víctor!
Estudia, arguye y enseña,
y es de la Iglesia servicio,
que no la quiere ignorante
El que racional la hizo.
¡Víctor, víctor!

—

The learned men of Egypt
by a woman have been vanquished,
to demonstrate that sex
is not the essence of intelligence.
Victory! Victory!

A wonder it was, a miracle—
the wonder being not the fact
that she has triumphed over them,
but that they would admit defeat.
Victory! Victory!

How well we see that they were wise
in admitting they were beaten:
it is a triumph to concede
the supremacy of reason.
Victory! Victory!

All the clarity of truth
cannot be shouted down,
for its echo, brave and long,
surmounts the noisy crowd.
Victory! Victory!

The learned men think it no shame
that she has convinced them,
for they have learned, as learned men,
their learning has its limits.
Victory! Victory!

She studies, and disputes, and teaches,
and thus she serves her Faith;
for how could God, who gave her reason,
want her ignorant?
Victory! Victory! 

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
VI, Villancicos a Santa Catarina de Alejandría (Carols to Saint Catherine of Alexandria), 1691
Translated by Electa Arenal and Amanda Powell

At the Hirshhorn that afternoon I touched my hands to glowing glass sensors that converted my pulse into ripples across a shallow pool. Soft blue lighting turned these streams into a play of light across the wall, interrupted or completed by the silhouettes of passing museumgoers. It’s impossible to know how much of the light show came from my own heart, and how much from the archive of patrons who had participated before me. But the surge in activity spoke for itself. It was a wonderful thing to stand inside my own heartbeat, to trap dozens of unwitting strangers in there with me, to watch my anxiety be made mesmerizing, to be not-alone with it.

Earlier that day I’d attended the much-heralded baptism of a much-loved little boy. There was a snake outside on the sidewalk. It was still there when we returned to the parking lot afterwards. We joked about it striking our heels, our crushing its head. But nothing happened, of course. It was at rest.

I have thought about that little snake for weeks now. I think of it every time I do my coding homework—we’re learning Python, because God likes to make me laugh. When our instructors introduced us to for loops, they said look, how convenient, computers will do all those boring tasks humans won’t. They’ll do the same task over and over again no matter how repetitive. Just make sure you don’t introduce any syntax errors that will interrupt the loop. Then the program won’t run. (When a program doesn’t run you get a blank screen, black terminal, pensive command line, awaiting your instruction, no results to share. It’s so peaceful to look at. I wish I could do that.)

I wish it were true that humans were so bored by repetition that we made computers to sub in for us. There is no limit to the nonsense over which my brain is willing to iterate, frittering my energy away over the minute absurdities that make up a given day. It is exhausting. I am so tired of un-learning this chatter. I wish I would run up against a syntax error that would shut my brain down until we can figure out what is going on.

The mass, that’s what I’m describing. Every day God throws me a syntax error in the form of the mass. It’s at precisely the same time every day, in the only window of time I always have free, in a chapel that’s on my way to everywhere. God interrupts the loop with a quick hello. I kneel, and it’s quiet, and it’s the only place where there is no alternate priority, nowhere for my automatic worrying to go. It is the one absolute space, the objectively better part. In lieu of the recessional we call upon St. Michael the Archangel.

And then we go out into a world full of snakes to crush, loops to break, such loud and full screens. He loves it though, all of it. He makes light shows out of anxious heartbeats and invites everyone else inside. None of this is for me alone.

lectio divina: mt 16:13–20

You asked your disciples, who do you say that I am. And this is a good question, to which Peter gave the only good answer, you are the Christ, the son of the living God. You have been asking me the same question and I gave you a strange answer, or rather you gave me one.

I might as well say it here: you are kind in an age that is cruel, and you are punished for it, incessantly. I should be able to withstand Mass so much more easily if it were all symbolic. To think your body is broken while we all stare you down. Every time I look at you on the altar I remember what you told Beata Conchita about the pain you feel when a sacrilegious priest celebrates the Eucharist. When they consecrate they do not say ‘This is the body of Jesus,’ but rather ‘This is my body, my blood.’ How horrible, you confided in her, it is to be joined to a body that reviles yours. In persona Christi: to make your personhood vulnerable to abuse. You know what it is to have your person violated, to have someone force themselves upon you with so little care, such utter indifference, absent all tenderness or even fear. You are God, and you are man, and both are assaulted on the altar and out in the world, in your image and in your liturgical presence, every time some demonic arrogant soul proclaims that sort of possession. This is my body. Not yours.

These days, I say that you are among those hurt by all of this. We have always called you Victim and we are so slow to understand what that means, how that feels, what your justice will look like. I say you too.

Peter gave the better answer, I know. And you promised him in return that the powers of hell should not prevail against us—or rather, against you. It’s complicated: you said they shall not prevail against your church. Who is that? Who are you? For we use this term so carelessly, body of Christ, adding mystical like that will bandage our injuries to the Church and to each other and to you. Mystical, we emphasize, as if the spirit could not feel pain.

I return to your promise: The powers of hell shall not prevail against your body. The powers of hell shall not prevail against ours. You ordered your disciples that day not to tell anyone who you were. I’m sure you had your reasons then, but you said no such thing to me.

Teaching Transcription (and Secretly Metaphysics)

As part of the Praxis program’s unit on pedagogy, each member of the cohort has developed a low-tech workshop on a digital humanities topic. Mine focuses on print-to-digital transcription, and the materials are freely available here: lesson plan and slides.

At the link above, I share some reflections on how I came to this topic and what my goals for implementation are.