The shapes of grief: Witnessing the unbearable.

What I read

Each morning, for the last three or four or five months, I've been reading something and writing about it, trying to both summarize it and form or communicate an informed opinion about it. I don't know what to write about this in any coherent or summarized or informed way, so I will try it in a non-coherent way and leave the thoughts unsynthesized.

I think I know that design is important. I know that words are important. This whole living experience is shaped and words and things are ideas that shape it. The author writes that "We should rid our writing of the domestication of atrocity, rid our writing of the tense that insists on the innocence of its perpetrators, the exonerative tense of phrases like 'lives were lost' and 'a stray bullet found its way into the van' and 'children died.'" I'm not very qualified to critique words like this but I'm qualified to make connections to things I am qualified to think about, and we should probably rid our world of the domestication of atrocity of design. Someone nearby in this gated community that I'm staying in for several months raised their garage door and it's powered by an absurdly loud motor and it's sort of a perfect example of the domestication of atrocity of design through suburbia.

The author has worked themes of mourning and grief, and killing and artistic criticism and colonization. Colonization has become a sort of signal for guilting, and it has increasingly seemed to me to be overly simplistic and not very useful for thinking about design. I don't know if it's a very useful way of thinking about genocide, either. The author dedicates not very much time to that explicitly and the other text or stanzas or considerations give the ideas much more space. Israel and Gaza is literally colonization, almost like the real life game (yuck) of Risk or Civilization, but maybe the word is the exonerative tense, they were colonized or colonization occurred. The act of colonizing in action! Is quoted from a tweet, which is probably a terrible old word for acts of invasion. The bird tweeted? "Out of sheer fear, our hearts reached our throats, as if we wanted to vomit them out. The bombing didn't cease for a single moment. I don't know how the sun rose upon us again." A few weeks before we left Austin, the UT game had a flyover by some sort of fighter jet, and the sound was sheer and complete panic. The dog could not see how the world was ending for the football game to begin. That's sort of a poetic but domesticated way of saying "The military almost gave me a panic attack."

I think but am not sure that Professor Crooks is using this paper not for its content but for showing a form of critical analysis, of weaving ideas together to form a theme. I think but am not sure that he also assigned Private Fiefdom for the same reason, as that book review was not a book review. This week's readings are about how to read things and then how to write about things. I don't know the difference between a critical analysis and criticism and critique and having opinions and forming opinions and sensemaking and being public. There's something very circular about the author writing about colonization and the action of words and quoting a post about genocide from someone in the middle of genocide who posted on the platform run by Elon Musk who is from another country. This is an interesting intertwining of design and words, and I am writing a thoughtful critical analysis.

I wonder if the author of this work views the work as a piece of art or design or political activity, and I could probably ask her, but even wondering this seems like it's not doing justice to something that feels important. I just sort of glanced at the word count in Word to see if I had written enough words to make whatever this post is into something important enough. I should analyze the writing more so this isn't just a journal entry from my 13 year old self, but that really does seem reductive, so I will leave this here.

I will add one more thought, about the quoting of Steffani Jemison's definition and view of Craft as something that is a top-down applied word to the Craft of being published. I don't think that is a fair view of craftsmanship (craftspersonship?), because craft is, even if the crafted is never shared. It is overly twisting to say that care and detail and expertise—fuck me, I just glanced at the word count again—

I can disable and have disabled Word Count in the status bar by right clicking on it and deselecting Word Count. It still says "Accessibility: Good to go."