One day, four corners, one chapter

at Four Corners, San Pablo Avenue at Solano Avenue

...and how many cappuccinos?

Today is a day befitting the title of this blog, if there every was one. I've been shying away from it, again thinking that any writing energy I spend ought to be put into my dissertation, and not into the more 'frivolous' project (if one can call it that?) of blogging here--not even on Found in Translation where, I don't know, it counts, for something or, conversely, on Facebook where you can at least feel as if more of your friends will be seeing it, maybe even giving it a like or two.

And, thinking about it a little more, I guess I'm not the only one of the people I know and think most of as bloggers in my immediate (digital/real) surroundings. Lots of people seem to have given up on it, for now or for the longer now, having moved on to bigger and better (?) writing or other projects. Who has time to be blogging, right?

But it's funny how much the ecologies of media and writing seem to shift over the years. Where before blogging seemed to me (and who am I writing this to anyway--still seems to me) distracted and self-centered, egotistical, etc. etc. (you know, putting your private thoughts out there in the blogosphere for 'the whole world' to see, blah blah blah), NOW it seems like Twitter and Facebook and Tumblr and text messaging and all the rest have given a new name to distraction, while blogging requires some kind of commitment to the development of a text, and requisite centering of attention. Especially when you're not writing to sell through ad-clicks, or optimizing your posts for search engines. I mean, this post would have to be a whole lot sexier to get any attention at all, right?

So here I am writing, and feeling pretty good about it, with a section of the dissertation chapter on methods down, and another big one to go, before the day is through. Rotating through the four corners while I do it, and having a drink at each, is the way I thought I could stomach what looks to be a full day of writing, on what looks to be a fantastic day of clouds and sky outside. Choose places with good cappuccinos, nice ambiance, and big windows. Started at home up Solano, spent the last few hours in the next-generation Four Corners Cafe, and about to turn this western movement south and march down San Pablo to...

1, 2, 3 clouds...

First time sitting in Local 123 in quite a while, at that point in being sick--that is, getting better, but still carrying around the remnants--where there is a tinge of the melancholy written into everyday sights and smells. Something about body chemistry, which is amplified, for sure, by the overcast, slightly cool weather.

(tbc...)(?)

liveblogging 1-2-3

That's liveblogging at Local 123 on quite a mellow afternoon in a May that has seemed more like a February, in a year when February seemed more like July...

• 2:26pm. So, yes, things are a little out of balance, which should make for perfect blogging. Considering the theory that when everything's right with the world, and you're feeling satisfied about the way things are, then you're too immersed in the moment to get the remove you need to write about the moment. Blogging and meditation, on that count, wouldn't go all that well together. I wonder how many meditation blogs there are out there...
• 2:28pm. First task of the day, after catching up on emails, is to get back to the Leather & van Dam Ecology of Language Acquisition chapter from Michael Toolan: "An integrational linguistic view of coming into language: Reflexivity and metonymy". Ooohh. The trees outside the window respond, waving back and forth gently in the afternoon window, shadows playing on the sidewalk and concrete cafe floor. It's the first time I've noticed that the front wall is actually a sliding garage door. And Journey's "Faithfully" comes on, but then is cut off before Steve Perry can hit his soaring notes in the end. We better let him finish:

• 3:27pm. We continue our journey through the 1980s as A-ha's "Take on me" echoes through 123, mixing with the jingling change at the register, the passing cars, conversations from tables at the other end...
• 5:08pm. After various other activities, eating, getting another cappuccino, feeling the afternoon breeze kick up through the door (window? where IS that breeze coming from?), staring more at the Tooley chapter, talking to neighbors, checking email, reading another article, and now finishing writing up a summary of the chapter on my wiki for Rick to read--and thinking about my post-in-progress on Found in Translation--I'm again struck by the question of whether or not writing for myself in whatever intellectual pursuit I'm engaged in, is enough. And writing these words on this blog only heightens this sense of contradiction. I'm triple publishing right now. Must everything be visible? Is it really just writing anymore when writing is simultaneously publishing, of some sort, on some platform? Would I myself as a writer (or should I say blogger?) be motivated to write as much if these words, and the chapter summary I'm typing up, and the FIT blog entry I'm writing as part of (or leading to) my dissertation, were not online? Does Writing nowadays = writing + publishing?

some transcaffeinated techniques of disciplinary marking

Here the title of the post makes a promise that the body won't be able to deliver; that much I know. I'm sitting marking papers for a Berkeley class on Language & Power, and as I work my way through the stack I'm starting to notice some--what shall I call them--eccentricities in my grading tendencies.

Perhaps you've experienced this, too, if you have a job that is composed of repeating the same procedure a discrete number of times, each of which seems like a job unto itself, the completion of which seems deserving of celebration, taking a break and, yes, procrastinating from the next one by starting on a blog post.

In the class, we've been reading Deborah Cameron's Good to Talk?, where she decries the way that language has become commoditized and made into a tool of worker empowerment and self-realization, corporate branding, and object of therapeutic intervention: learn to talk better, and you'll be more in touch with yourself and more able to smooth out any 'misunderstandings' that might be plaguing you in your home and work life. And students are being asked to relate this back to Foucault, whose notions of discipline as a socially normalizing force that is internalized and exercised by individuals upon themselves, from Discipline and Punish, are key for thinking about how language is being used.

But actually, as I sit here plowing through a pile of papers (sorry, kiddies, I luv u just the same! :), I'm thinking more about Foucault's invocation of Borges' bizarre taxonomy that he calls the "Chinese encyclopedia"--an example of the kind of assemblages of radically different kinds of things into a single list or category or other form of association, for reasons that are totally befuddling to the outside observer.

What spurred this thought? Well, as embarrassing as this may be, I guess I'll just have to go ahead and write some of the things going through my mind as I'm grading, deciding not what grade to give on a certain student response (although I'm thinking about that too, but that's work), but which paper to grade next, and just how much progress I'm making (or not) as I grade.

Now, I present a procedure for grading a stack of papers, foregrounding principles of logic and efficiency. That is, basically a taxonomy of random thoughts that, together, help me make it through the pile:

1. First grade those papers that are not stapled together, so as to remove them and their potential for decomposition and confusion from the pile. Try not to blame the student for not having a stapler or access to a stapler (though I'd be lying if I said that thoughts like this didn't float through the mind on a subconscious level)
2. Then grade those papers in which students have not written the question prompts for their paragraph responses; these require more work as you have to refer back and forth to a printed copy of the questions, or, to save time, another 'more diligent' student's response sheet with said questions written down.
3. Count papers frequently, preferably after each is graded, to make triple sure that you haven't over-estimated in your mind the number of papers remaining to be graded. Arrange them all in a neat stack after counting. 
4. Extending point #2, give slight preference to those papers where students have put the question prompts in bold (better) or italics (still good).
5. Give slight preference to non-Times New Roman fonts. Such papers give the impression of being attended to more carefully than those with the default, though this is a theory that is often disproved. The point, though, is that there's a curiosity that goes along with discovering whether the student has unusually witty responses, that makes the task of grading somewhat more tolerable.
6. Try not to look back at the stack of papers too frequently. But do feel the pile of completed papers as it grows. For added pleasure, pick up the pile frequently in your hand. Weight = accomplishment. 
7. Save for last those papers that are printed only on one side with double spacing; they are thickest, quickest to read, leading to a rapid sense of progress as the pages can be turned more quickly and the stack of papers depleted.
8. No definitive statements can be made about papers that are longer or shorter, all other things being equal. Shorter responses often take longer to grade and, more often than not, require marginal comments. A definite timesink.
9. Whatever you do, reward yourself frequently: stretching is nice. Checking email or Facebook updates is another option. But when things are really getting tough, you need to resort to ingestion. This post, for example, and the work that has gone into grading this pile of papers, has drawn on at least 2 pastries and 4 caffeinated beverages, from Strada, Local 123, and probably somewhere else too. But I'm repressing that thought now, because I still have 6 papers to go. I'll see if I can make it on this cappuccino...

opening closing moments

6:45pm, Local 123. I was in that in-between state, fifteen minutes before closing, when you know that no more work is really going to get done but when it feels premature to pack up and leave. That table was not easy to get, and I was loathe to give it up too soon...

Enter the Imperial March from Star Wars, one of John Williams' master compositions:

Yes, doesn't it make the hairs stand up on the back of your neck too? Suddenly I was transported from the cafe onto the deck of the Star Destroyer, plying my way through space with Tie Fighters all ar--

Wait a minute, this is just a sample. What song is this? It was a rap song of some sort, with the Imperial March sampled into it. Well, cool enough. They had good taste, gotta give 'em that. So my task then became finding out just whose song that was. As of this writing, I didn't quite get there, because, at 6:49 PST, from left field or Dantooine, out rings the barista Tucker's voice:

"Attention dear patrons of Local 123!! The time is now 6:50 and the cafe will be closing in ten minutes!!"

She goes on in loud and animated style, the remaining denizens--that is, computer users, students with piles of books on the table, and everyone else in between--slowly emerging from their electronically-induced comas. People look around. A few smile, even laugh. Others are resolute, and remain buried in their screens.

Tucker continues: "How can I help you make this close smooth and easy? Well, since you asked, if you would bring all your dishes and cups to this lovely bin over here on my right, we would really appreciate it."

At this point, the two women at the next table are breaking up in laughter. I start closing windows, closing down, stretching. One person starts clapping at the barista's performance. I join in. And look over at the next table.

Wait a minute, one of the women has a Cal sweatshirt on. I ask if they're grad students at Cal, and it turns out one is at Mills and the other at Cal. They ask about the book on my table--Mark Hansen's Bodies in Code--and it turns out one of them is really into new media as well. We talk as we pack up our stuff, and keep talking as we walk out, yelling bye to the baristas and moving into the night on San Pablo Avenue.

A spell had been broken, and for the better. I thought about it riding home from the cafe--thought so much that I rode past the juicy temptation of Everett & Jones without even a thought of one of their signature brisket sandwiches. About the spell that is cast over our activities in 'normal' times, during the usual 'opening hours' of life, when we all go about business as usual, engrossed in screens, books, jobs, schedules, routines, and the like. Nothing wrong there, I suppose, and all very necessary.

But it seems like a bit of a shame, along with being special, that only in the closing moments does the tempo quicken, the music change. Only then, with a deadline approaching, that people can, must, and do step out of the usual flow and let themselves be heard, feel unencumbered in turning and speaking with their neighbors, reaching out and smiling. Somehow, things have to close for others to open.

Or maybe that's just me? Or, perhaps, just a rhetorical flourish to draw a close to this post?

An outlet for creativity

It's with a mixture of pride and guilt that I write the first line on this new blog.

Guilt because...nah, let's start with the pride. For the inspiration behind this blog, I credit my long hours and days of sitting with my good friend Taekjin in countless cafes, poring over books and looking into screens, gazing into laptops, scoping out the scene, searching often in vain for available electrical outlets, even occasionally deploying unconventional tactics (how many cafe-goers do you know who carry extension cords and desk lamps?)...and other sordid details that will no doubt become clear as the Spring 2010 semester at Berkeley unfolds.

Chronicling these experiences, the hundreds and no doubt thousands of hours spent in and around cafes in the Berkeley and San Francisco area, has long been a desire of mine. Yeah, I'm proud, and I was even thinking about writing "dream" or "fantasy of mine", but I'm not sure it quite qualifies for either of those. That's where the guilt part comes in. Because, truth be told, every word of every post written on this blog represents (already) and will no doubt represent, at least in part, some form of procrastination from the work that I should be doing in order to get this doctorate written, PhD finished, and no doubt well-paying job landed. I guess that's a tension that's going to run through these pages.

But thanks to conversations with certain friends about New Years' resolutions, I thought, what the hell--why not just hit the "create" button and start writing, and see what comes of this. Of course, the world does not need one more blog. And there is no way in hell that the thoughts here are going to--can come close to--approach the kind of insights and coverage of local cafes and their menus, prices, and atmospheres so well chronicled by the thousands of pithy and opinionated users on sites like Yelp.

But I do have dreams for a project like this--that something of the bent for qualitative description and reflection that are the tools of the trade in the area of educational research that I'm working in, and something of the literary, critical, and digitexual interest that animates my own online ventures (how else to justify the vanity of having something like 20 or 30 profiles on different social media and other sites?), will give Caffeinated Nomadology some insights into cafe life in Berkeley and surrounding domains that are worth reading. Or at least worth writing.

OK, I said it: I have dreams about this.

But I don't have my heart set on doing this alone! In fact, dear reader, if you think you've got a thoughtful or funny angle on the subjective side of plugged-in cafe life--the tastes, sights, sounds, smells, attitudes, events & perspectives only visible to those who've spent a good part of their lives alternately on screens, surfing, reading, talking, meditating, and living in cafes--I'd love for you to join the team.

So I'll stop there for now on the platitudes and mission statements for this first post. I guess what this blog's about will become clear as it actually gets written. For now, having moved from Cafe Leila where there was nowhere to plug in a 3-pronged cord in the front room where computer use is allowed (smell a future topic, anyone?), to Local 123 on San Pablo, I'm glad to have finally found an outlet for creativity.