This winter, my friend Nick Mitchell and I decided to take a class together. The class we picked had the name English 420: Technology and the Humanities- A Limited Fork Theory Perspective on Remix Culture. While we thought there was something a little crazy about the class--maybe the length of the title or that we didn't understand what it meant (even after reading the class description)--something about those words and the class they might represent excited us.
For some time, Nick and I had been vaguely talking about making a website. Both of us hoped the class would be an opportunity to do just that. I say vaguely so much because prior to beginning English 420 the only fragment of our website idea we understood was "branches." We wanted to make a website where things moved in branches. We came to the class looking for directions: for mile markers to count on our way from here to there. Of course as advocates for branching we should have been prepared for what we found instead.
On the first day of class, I realized the class was on North Campus which wouldn't be a big deal if I had not been a poetry major. Since freshmen year, a majority of my classes, food consumption, partying, and general existence had taken place here:
This picture at the right is East Quadrangle. Those people in front of it I am lucky enough to call friends. Some of us are part of what the University of Michigan calls the Residential College. The RC sells itself as a "a unique liberal arts community," and the students at UofM agree that it is unique. The first time I heard someone talking about the building she was referring to it as "Odd Quad"--"you know the one where they read the commie manifesto on the rooftop." While the people I met there didn't do that, they certainly went their own directions. Steering off the course of normal whenever it seemed obtrusive. For a long time I thought I wanted to be normal:
Oh to be
"the kinda guy you'd have a beer and watch the game with"
if the game were Jeopardy maybe or
Cash Cab...
Suburbia has been the monster under my bed and my greatest
aspiration
since it ceased being my surroundings
But is the normal of the 1970s
the normal you know from the analogue tv
even here among the blogosphere and local
music scene
Sure mtv still wants a hand in normal
but they have babies at 16 or giant birthday
parties or get married.
3 years after that mark I listen to banjo music
want to start a commune and my best birthday
was spent with flasks of whiskey crazies and a 4am
swim in a 40 degree river
Can I at least get back in long enough to sit
feverish on the couch and watch Wonder Years
marathons with you
til I recover or
have I lost whatever
normal I had and the way back with it
I spent most of middle school and high school trying to be average from a wheelchair. Until one day, this weird boy with red hair refused to be everyone else. He kept telling us we didn't need to fit into a perfect suburban mold and when he wasn't saying it his orangered dreads said it for him.
He showed us being normal is not particularly possible and being strange is not only fun but has the power to transform the normal around you spreading like paint spills until everything is tinged orange or red.
But I was still afraid to deviate too far from my normal path, even after making a normal path that didn't fit into mainstream culture's concept of normal. When I found out this technology class was on North Campus, I had a minor freak out. North Campus is generally the place for engineers and dancers and overworked art school students and nature. I once heard a rumor that a deer jumped through a window one summer into a dorm room and died only to be found right before move-in. The people assigned the room were told they would have to live somewhere else for awhile while the carcass was removed. Never in my career at the University of Michigan had I thought I'd need to go to North Campus to learn anything. Sure, I knew of the Duderstadt. That was the place my engineering friends went to make like that deer. While we had picnics in the Arb back on central campus, they disappeared for days and came back unshaved and covered in bits of junk food. Why would I need to go to the place even animals know as dead for an English class? But my schedule clearly said Duderstadt: DL1. As I asked around to figure out which buss to get on and when to get off, I concluded this was a much longer journey than the 2.5 miles counted on google directions.
I got on a bus with Commuter North on its display. Later I'd realize that this is probably the slowest of all possible bus choices for getting to North Campus, but then I knew I needed to head north and north was in the name. That day I had decided to leave for class two hours early with a Winter Weather Advisory posted for the night. I wanted to be inside before the snow started so I was no where near late despite the slow trip.
Which one is the Duderstadt? I asked the crowd making its way from the bus to a building where signs advertising Quiznos and Panda Express were lit up. Someone pointed me away from the food and down the cold street. What was this semester going to be? I found DL1. Design Lab One. Was I in the right class? I can't design anything. Labs are for chemistry majors. I waited another hour outside the room clicking impatiently around facebook on my laptop, wishing I had cash for food next door to hold as a prop so my fingers would cease their nervous tapping.
Sound started emanating into the lounge. Sound from my future classroom. Maybe class was about to start? I closed facebook into my backpack, and walked toward my alleged destination. In DL1, there were couches. There was a large television. There was a workstation that looked like sets might be created at it. There was a projection screen. There were macs with those Bamboo tablets (the ones that let you draw on your computer). I felt I had entered a room where the wants of all the Art School and Engineering kids were pieced into fruition. My eye darting slowed as a woman approached me, speaking in a breathy cheery voice she was obviously controlling. Somewhere behind the breath I picked up on a much stronger sound being held-back. To make out her words over the sound that had drawn me into the room in the first place, I had to lean in and look and focus. Otherwise her voice just added another layer to the noise or I guess I should refer to it as music because it was coming from an ipod.
The first time I ever listened to music people might consider noise music, I was listening to a CD burnt for me by a friend on my way to Freshmen Orientation in Ann Arbor after a sleepless night worrying about driving there alone from my home 2.5 hours across state. When I got to A2, I got off at the wrong exit (which I didn't know then) and couldn't find the next road google told me to be on. I spent an hour getting later for the orientation, asking folks for directions. All while the unfamiliar music ground at my nerves and the summer morning turned to 95 degree summer day in a car with no AC. When I hear music considered noise now, I feel particularly lost. My first day of Limited Fork was then more directionless and anxious than I ever imagined.
When Nick finally sat down beside me in the class, I felt a little less lost and more able to focus in the noise. As the breathy voice continued over the music, I understood a bit more. She guided us to a site that explained as much of Limited Fork Theory as she was capable of explaining. Between the fork pendant pinned into her shirt and pictures of the bifurcating bronchi and bronchioles in the human lung posted on her website, I realized forks sure look a lot like branches. While our teacher whose online identity was forkergirl would be as likely to give Nick and I a single destination in our creative process as the noise music was likely to help me find my way, she would probably be excited to cheer on our unidentified journey. Forkergirl would be ok with Nick and Jessica wandering through the internet, hoping to change something or other.
I remember leaving class that day a little sick to my stomach from all the noise. Some people walking passed us mentioned they were so dropping that class. Nick was confused but kind of excited. At first, I wanted to assume the teacher was crazy was weird was too outside of normal for me. But I as a proud resident of Odd Quad should have been above that kind of thing. I asked Nick to put on music with no recognizable chorus or melody that night when we got back to his apartment to hang (the bus ride back was easy with Nick to follow). I realized I wanted to learn how to love being lost instead of fear it. To try to maintain normal would be to limit possibility. To try to aim the branches of a tree from point a to point b would give me a trunk and no branches.
So "this"
this blog
this project
this is being lost
without defined
destination.
Our goal is not
to get to any end goal
but to always figure out
how to keep going
This is every cliche
about the journey
being more worthwhile
than the destination
you've ever heard
this is our road trip
through over out of in on above between after before with
the internet
"Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.”
Henry David Thoreau
No comments:
Post a Comment