| in america 12 part 6 - 2007 may | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
1st May What it's like reading Journey to Ixtlan now. Frightened sometimes, remembering what it was like to become unsure of myself. Puzzlement about what happened. Questions about loss of soul, by which I mean original realness. Questions about power - what it is - what is evidence for it - what its costs are - the Dames rocket era is that. Now I'm sure of myself - in GW unsure only in relation to Tom, very sure in work - in AG sure in the garden, unsure in relation to Louie - in DR unsure in relation to everything, for a while. I also feel how much of what he instructs I already do, how much of it I have come to do since I first read him. He was born in 1935 in Peru. He somehow got to UCLA. He was there for both his BA and his PhD. He wrote beautifully in English. First anthropology class 1960 when he was 35. The teachings of Don Juan was 1968 when he was 43. 8 million copies. Lived in Westwood. Last book was posthumous, 1998, when he was 73. In your last dance you will tell of your struggle, of the battles you have won and those you have lost; you will tell of your joys and bewilderments upon encountering personal power. Your dance will tell about the secrets and about the marvels you have stored. And your death will sit here and watch you. Place of predilection. The beauty of his story. It is like a land-based existentialism. It's heroic. It's soulful in the sense that it's about feeling one's mortality and only life, it advocates impeccability. It describes an old man who is physically attractive and strong. It has a diffident bumbling sincere self and a benevolent larger self who teaches without ego. There is weather, desert space, empty space. His language is perfectly clean. It seems to me it is always the same mood, it is soft, modest, suited to the land, simple, effortlessly skilled, interesting, inventive in technical terms when he needs them. He's close to experience. He is interested in body. Don Juan is like having someone call me personally to attention. 2 At Taft today cutting out buddleia with Tom. Now it's 5 with sun almost straight west. Whole window on the floor. Dollar Brand in the mail, Anthem for the new nations. Hearing it looking at the xerox of a Grande Prairie Herald Tribune clipping for Sept 17 1963, photo of my mom 39 years old holding out her hand for the scholarship check I won for being the county's best grade 12 student. They were stars at a banquet for county graduates - I gave them that. There's a photo of David Mann in a group of principals and school inspectors, in his early 40s. I gave him that too. - In the nostalgia of the music and looking at a land map for 1955 cracking a bit because of loss - David Mann young, Mary Epp young, David Mann before his wife died, my mother still proud of me, both of them rising in estimation because of me. I'm cracking because they were beautiful then, they were on islets of good. What I could give them then was part of the good that neither they nor I knew would not go on. There next to the computer is the text of Wild oats, my dad's voice. Who is on an islet of good now, what have I bought with their ruin - Janeen, Frank, David Mann, Ed, Joyce - Luke. Why is that the only name, because no one else is real to me the way they were. What's on the islet of good is realness. So it's my own ruin.
3rd On PBS last night in a doc about Atlantic Records, Aretha young singing Let's talk it over. Her young face, any keen young woman's face, pouring forth a towering authority of sound. The way she rode a flood, upright and in precise control on the rampage. Put on sunglasses and sit out on the roof. I've been transcribing notes in origin texts noticing what happened in the red and white house, that I somehow have been forgetting. I found something lovely. I found what I had been looking for. The desperate gambles of the Dames rocket time worked out. I think of it as a time of defeat and misery but the defeat and misery were shallow, the record says. If I hadn't been attacked by the gang when I got back into town could I have gone forward in what I found? I say that forgetting that I did go forward - I went to Melbourne, San Francisco, Montreal, Ottawa, London. But I mean go on doing what by then I was doing well rather than leaving it to be a garden person.
4 Journal piece by Francis about consciousness studies - says it's interdisciplinary, subjective and scientific. That's fine, though the body isn't mentioned - body seems to be assigned to 'materialism' and science. It isn't really about consciousness - they think of consciousness as transparency and therefore spirit, and then use it to support what they actually want, which is to believe in disembodied spirits. There could be embodied consciousness studies and that's what I've done all my life, what is it like to be, how can being shift, what is a state, what is excellence of state, what can I perceive, what can I know. I dreamed Frank came to me with library books that were picture books about gay men. He said he was gay. We had our arms around each other. I said now we could be friends. When I arrived at his place there was a pot on the floor that I recognized. I'd made it years before. It looked like a small stack of thrown pots opened into a vase and partly crumpled. Pale green glaze on white clay. When I picked it up I saw it had pieces broken out of it and was cracked so more parts were breaking off in my hands. A piece in the Union yesterday about gender and brain quoted someone saying men have sexual orientation but women don't - they are turned on by men and women. Checking a scanning service - drum scanning would be better - whacking away at Dames rocket - I can make notes in origin the core - the photos. On Jim Lehrer's news hour just now Gwen Ifill interviewing Martha Raddatz who wrote a book about soldiers and their families [The long road home]. Two women speaking quietly. 7
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Is there anything I could want - bland balance, is that good for anything? The embodiment site had visitors in the last couple of days in Tokyo and Malta. It comes up first in a google search. The [college] consciousness studies site comes up on page 6 and is hideous and dully stupidly written. In CS all the other schools have more, and more qualified, faculty. With mbo [the college] could have something of its own. But looking at the red dot of the Japanese flag this morning I was realizing I should think of mbo as the site not the school. I'm inventing something that can stand on the web as a resource. I can develop it that way. Use it to show a matrix of allies keeping their heads in the goldrush of people longing for irrational magic. In the last days and now again I've seen the moment at the red and white house where I was passing through the spruce hedge and struck the branch and gold powder rose into the sunny air and I said, I'm in paradise, this life is heaven. [list of slides from 1979]
9 Cathar belief had a rite of death where the dying starve themselves in their last days - there was a name for it - inconsolatio? Something like that. 10 Taking a shortcut yesterday through the theatre forecourt in Balboa Park on the bike I passed a tall mild-faced black man lounging on a bench, who said "Nice hair, miss" as I zipped past. Early twilight. I was taking the long way to Tom's so I wouldn't have hills. Soft air after a hot day, leaves and scents. Justin this morning writing about his love affair with a woman he doesn't name. Terror he's afraid will dissolve him. I tell him how to process. He says she vacillates wildly, I tell him I know all about female vacillation. She should indulge it, observe it, build a third position, and not inflict it on him. Juliana asked for an embodiment exercise and I described the two sides one. She did it with her epistemology class after taking them through what will we know. Wrote this morning to tell me how it went. Structural conflict and discovering structural conflict. Been thinking I should do it with fac. In six weeks: hit counter on the embod site says visits from Assam, Middlesborough UK, Philippines, Luqa in Malta, Colombia, Thessaloniki, Noord-Brabant in the Netherlands. - I've sent an email to the fac saying that it means we own the brand, crowing. (Only Lise and Tomás reply.) [The college] will have to think of me as a research academic who happens to be employed there. And I will think of them as financing work they are not themselves able to see. - When I wrote Justin I said, Hey, I know who she is, I know her name. He replies today that it's Polly - I thought it was Melody, the blond he was always with at the res - Polly isn't a good idea for either of them - he gallops away in obsessional thought - I say it's anxiety, he has to keep bringing it back to that - he starts again - I say not much of it is really for her. Galileo "not to see what they do see." 12 On Moyer last night clips of Condi Rice suavely attractively lying about the war, helmet of straightened hair immobile, red lipstick. And then Marilyn Young being interviewed about Iraq and Vietnam, a thick frumpy lesbian with grey hair and no makeup, [college]-looking but very smart and assured. I was watching her intently because I was wanting to see what I am in my elderliness. She was very steady in her speech, steadier than I am, kindly and incisive. Her face was mannish in its elderly plainness but there kept being glints of beauty I could see when she moved her face to speak, I was feeling her head is a remnant of realness in the land of plastic surgery and hair dye, like parkland. If I can be that I'm pleased. Jonathan Miller's history of unbelief on Friday nights. What else - when Tom arrives these days he's grey-faced. Just that. His face warms up when he's with me but that face looks ill. 14 Yesterday someone from Jawa Timur Indonesia went to Being about by google-searching Ellie Epp Being about. The same person then went to my index page. North Carolina person who got into the embod site by googling embodiment studies. Al Morrison - Dave says - traveled as a civil engineer and got "enormously fat." His dad was Norman Morrison who came into the country with his mother Christina and four brothers, who all filed for homesteads in Buffalo Lakes 1911-12. "There were 8 of the family living in a small shack just north of the little bridge we crossed to get to school ... I can recall the teacher always asking Al how his father was doing." This was when Al was in grade 4, 10 years old. His father by then would have been in his mid-60s, dying after a long illness. Then Sam McKeeman marrying the widow with six children and moving them to that good big house east of us. Happy weekend with Tom. I got there late afternoon on Saturday, looked at the plants, cooked steak and baked potatoes and mushrooms with onions. We watched a surf movie reconstructing beach culture in California in the early 60s [Big Wednesday], then the first Lara Croft, then a doc about a hairdressing school in Kabul. We were very cozy talking about what we were seeing, Tom was happy happy to be in front of the TV with me. Then the mockingbird sang, or what to call that - spoke - all through the night so I didn't sleep well. Then in the morning the sun came out after a while. We read all the papers and watched Wolf Blitzer and then C-Span of Bush's dinner for the Queen, jeering at Heifitz's dreadful music. I walked to the farmer's market for cherries. Cooked him scrambled eggs with feta cheese. Mid-afternoon he walked me home across the park carrying my laundry. We took the dirt path down into the canyon. Still nasturtiums climbing into bushes, the scent of pine in warm country air. Tom's happy time - Tom so pleased and loving, so grateful to himself and all. When I am with him struggling up steps I never feel him anything but friendly, he is not finding me ugly. He in jeans and a teeshirt and moccasins, new short haircut. A gay man in a red truck tried to pick him up. 16 Padua, medical students learning anatomy by dissection, considered heresy. 1542. "For he who had been far away is with me now" a Protestant law student writes from prison. Boiled alive in a cauldron of oil, tar and turpentine. Piazza Novona. He remained alive for 15 minutes. 17 Transcribing the fall of 1979 when Jam and I were in the lake house or I was there alone. Lines I've used for the Notes show up standing brilliant among the dull anxious lines I've forgotten - what is there to discover in that. I wasn't doing anything all day, why wasn't I writing more, why didn't I record more, I'm thinking now. There are beautiful photos from the time, a few. I think of it as a beautiful time. Later I precipitated something beautiful out of it that when I look back seems to have been the time itself, and that I think is carried in the cadence of the recorded reading. "Kicked snow singing on the crust" is what I hear this morning, but what's in the journal is awkward and broken up, autistic. So was I awkward and broken up because I had gambled myself intentionally? I think so. I think it was a deep adventure and I bore myself valiantly through humiliating loss of competence, bewilderment. The journal records that bewilderment, and I intended it to - it doesn't record it, it shows marks of it.
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- So along with the DR transcription there needs to be the work bewilderment was the matrix for - such a slow work of time - but quite a lot of it -
The way I read aloud was an achievement of it. It was unstudied and exactly right as a cadence that makes a state.
Grey's anatomy - the season's last today. The driven Sandra Oh character shying at marriage because what she is is her work. She tries but she sabotages it. We leave her weeping. It's been absorbing, it's shot in a way that dotes on people's faces. We see these people as if we were their lovers. Beautiful feeling people. Competent fragile people. Real doctors aren't that competent if they're that fragile. Some of the characters in the midst of these star people are and look closed, and they are interesting to look at too. Something about color design and light, makeup, the color of the rooms and clothes. A loveliness, something soft. Love eyes, I suppose. ER afterwards looks hideous: distanced, unvisual. Grey's is very visual. I've got my letters out of the way 'til ten days from now and today cleaned the top file drawer and the closet shelves. This little place gets so dirty. The closet was crammed so I had nowhere to put things. I should clean once a week - I should do that faithfully because it gets too dirty this way. But I hate routines. Sky has been covered for days. I phoned Luke today. His Vancouver cell number has been discontinued. Roy has offered him to take over his deck-building and fence-building business. He's living in Crouch End. He may be able to get a housing co-op place. He has his whole neighbourhood nearby. I've lost him from my continent. He got what he needed to get from me. This time he's left for good. He sounds happy. 19 1979 daily journal at the lake house with Jam. I look for anything about the place and am impatient with almost anything about her. Does it mean I never liked her, I never was interested in her? It feels like that, physical disregard. You're nothing to do with me. 20 Baboon troops on the Zambesi - I was on the couch watching with my fist against my jaw and there was the troop boss sitting on a tuft with his fist on his jaw. The way he would stand up to fuck. Night shots of the creatures scrambling into the ends of branches to find sleeping places, and then in the grey night vision light leaning their heads back and closing their eyes. Weekend with Tom. Grey skies. I was quite blank. I wasn't feeling him. There he was. I'd find moments to cuddle up but it's just for warmth. The way many times when he talks I just sail away. He doesn't notice I'm not listening. He says many times, Are you happy? Do you love me? I'm sad that Luke is moving back to England. I feel he's closing the book on me. Is he? Yes. He needs to do that. Is it because I'm old and ugly and fading? I have less grip.
What about Susan. I want her to be well and find her work. I'm in her way. I want something for her that she doesn't want. I want her to go on with that wonderful writing and embodiment research and she wants to be happy and powerful in the New Age market. Is that true? It says yes. Is that the right thing to want? NO. So I'm separated correctly. YES.
22 Row's birthday. He answered the phone eating mushroom soup alone in the flat in Victoria and about to go out somewhere. A girl baking him a cake. He's happy. Part time job in a second-hand camera store. Nikon Ftn I said, 1967. Nikkormat? he said, looking in his book. No, no. His four year old mechanical self recovered. He's 22. What did I do today. Becci - edit of final packet. Transcribing 10 pages of spring of 1979 in the Olson house starting to work at the lake house. (Endless anxiety about Jam.) Starbucks two newspapers. Lay on the couch and faded briefly. Read through reply to Dave's from yesterday. Rode the bike to Whole Foods, stopped at Cape Cod Clutter and gave her books. Came home and ate a wonderful ham and cheese toasted. Phoned Row. Phoned Tom. Watched bad TV and am still doing that. Won't say what. 23 Where did that dream start - a famous artist at a little community college rapidly sketching - I was sitting behind him as if in an audience liking what he was doing so much I wondered if I should learn painting. Then next morning I came back to the community centre to look for the drawing, which I assumed had gone into the trash. My car the old Mercury parked in the alley. Talked to the janitors, wandered the hillside looking around, came back and the car was gone. Etc. I don't want to be writing this. Began to because I wanted to say the dream went on into the frustrated tension there is whenever there's a goal in a dream - trying to copy a phone number and the menu board it had been written on was gone, then the newspaper I'd written it on was gone, then when I was trying to get to the address, the sidewalk suddenly turned into an 18" rim on the outside of a bridge over a chasm. I knew I shouldn't dare it. Could see the bus stop on the other side. I was wanting to get to Union Street, which I thought was near the railway station. Why do I now have no interest in dreams. Is it a curmudgeonly fact of old age, hormonal? Or was earlier interest a hysterical fact of young femaleness, hormonal? It says the former.
- Transcribing the spring I was moving into the lake house. I don't remember any of the writing though I remember some of the moments. So like to be with the place. Starved with Jam but so right in the house - couldn't I just have been there alone - was the whole of Jam just a waste. She gave me Pound and that last month with her books. And a few passages from the late fall of 1979. 24 Ivan Doig on Foothill, Montana [This house of sky: landscapes of a Western mind, 1978] - reading it alongside Dave Leonard's letters and the Valhalla journals feeling more than I have about the historical depth in a place - the way other people in my country knew so much more in it than I did - the way my dad was always working at understanding it - the way he was local and she wasn't and I'm not - he could roam and sit in coffee shops and talk to strangers - drive the grain truck and scour for Case parts in back corners we never saw - he was the one who spoke the names and studied the bodies for national and personal character - traced the connections of people and their homesites. As I'm reading I'm feeling the way, if I was there, up north, there'd be people who'd still know me and be interested in me because I'm the Epp girl from La Glace. There's pressure in my chest, saying this.
What I have instead of my place, a place - that abstract beauty of phrases - what I learned to do - but my heart is still aching for my place. - Finished it just now. Crying because of the loyalty in it. His father's to him, and then his to his father and his grandmother and the many of his country. I was saying to my mother with tears, he was too mean to ever praise me or be proud of me. Crying for my own disloyalty to my kids and to everyone behind me. I've been loyal to something - I have - but I haven't been loyal to my people. He was fortunate to be able to be - I feel - but it's a measure too, more than good fortune, it is good stuff, what he is. I let people go, I give up on them, I slip away. Doig writes the two of them - he writes their speech and their tasks. He can't keep them alive, which is what he'd want, but he can say what kind of people they were - he can say that by saying the landscape they worked in and how they took their work in it, how they spoke to him and to each other. There wasn't a sentence I wanted to copy, though sometimes he tried hard to be poetic. The kind of boy he was, who was good at school. He read but when he was a boy he didn't expect to be leaving when he grew up, he was completely part of his country. Nothing separated him from the people in his country. He isn't writing about the boyhood of a writer - he could, but that didn't interest him, he's more a historian. He quotes Isak Dinesen and Ecclesiastes. [Below is the transcripton of a faculty conference call on the topic of our program's "personal development" degree criterion, followed by the memo I was asked to write afterward.] KC: We have a lot of students with mental health issues. We cannot legislate personal transformation. LW: This is a charged issue with the administration because of a difficult situation with one student that came to its attention and created concern over boundary issues. EE: On the one side we're under pressure to minimize anything that could be construed as therapy; yet many students want to do deep personal emotional work. Emotional work can look and feel like therapy; identity work is something more cautious than that. Students have different needs. Artists/writers can't do good work without deep personal work. CG: What does personal development mean to each person? EE: Personal development is key to everything else. The first thing with new students is to see where their weaknesses lie and work on strengthening those. For some it will be critical thinking; for some it's conceptualizing the learning - they can write from experience, but then have difficulty moving into the conceptual. Emotional work versus identity work - getting them internally connected. CG: We provide the containers for students to do their own transformation. If someone is too self-referential, I will push them to develop a critical context. Most new students work on the identity essay - how they see the world and how they are seen. But they are in the driver's seat. If it starts to get too psychological, I draw the line and encourage them to get professional help. With writers, sometimes the personal development work is needed to help them break through to their own voice. But others are working on something different, and need critical writing and connection with the larger world. KC: What's the blockage that prevents someone from seeing what they're passionate about from a larger perspective? What is it that they're afraid to do, but want to do, and can I help them? I'm not in a position to decide what the student is going to do. Sometimes the expectation of personal transformation on the student's part is unrealistic. Graduating from [college] doesn't mean that you are completely transformed forever and ever and that the world will recognize that in you. RL: I don't think of my work with students as personal transformation; don't work with students on a psychological level, but do it to assist them in putting things in a larger perspective. It's more of a contextual than psychologized enterprise. There is transformation when they can place themselves in a larger context. FC: I fit somewhere between RL and CG/EE. Students have to acquire knowledge and bring themselves into relation to that knowledge, and then to relate this to the world at large through action. So "being" is not independent of "doing" and "knowing." LW: I want students to wake up to what's inside and what's outside. You work with each student to help them develop the part that they've never developed. The goal is wholeness and fullness. JS: Don't think of the work as transformation in terms of engaging with the student. Self-development, personal transformation may or may not happen. Dialogue can help. How can we get them to engage their fore-knowledge? How can they encounter their own prejudices, who they are, and who they imagine themselves to be? LW: Likes the stealth factor in transformation. RL: But we're discussing this within the context of degree criteria, so we should make clear to students what we mean. There should be informed consent. Some folks in the administration are concerned about legal issues that could arise if faculty are engaged with students on a therapeutic level. EE: Amongst ourselves we know our specializations. Students know whom they want to work with to do what they want to do. CG: We need to flesh out what we mean by personal development. KC: We have to start with the students where they are. JS: Students tend to misunderstand what we mean by self-development. LW: We need a discussion about what we consider therapeutic and where it is inappropriate - what it is we don't want to do. FC: We need to follow up and consolidate this. * To continue: EE will formulate some questions to carry this discussion further and will circulate them for feedback. * Education vs therapy in alternative education I was asked to come up with questions to structure our discussion of therapy and advising. Below is a beginning of a framework that we could fill in on email or the conference call. The question has come up in our understanding of the personal development degree criterion, but the more pointed question is whether or not some of us overstep into the purview of therapy in our advising aims and practices. In conventional education, lines between personal/emotional and scholarly work are in theory at least carefully drawn, but part of what makes progressive education progressive is a rejection of the personal/intellectual distinction in principle. We say scholars are personally/emotionally involved in their work whether or not they admit this fact, and even or especially if they deny it. We say, at [the college], "Come as you are, leave as you want to be." We declare that we wish to promote integrated knowing, being and doing. There are always pressures to cut back our progressive commitment to working with the full personhood of our students and ourselves. (Some of these will be mentioned below.) Keeping in mind both the reasons for these pressures and the reasons for a progressive pedagogy, can we make ourselves clearer about whether we do, or should, or shouldn't, overstep into practices that are thought of as reserved for licensed professional therapists? ** I'm proposing six categories of questions that I think are related but distinct: liability, harm, fear, application of standards, pedagogical philosophy and therapy-like aspects of good advising. 1. Liability. I'm naming this point first because it's admin's first concern. We accept students who are unstable, who are on unknown regimes of drugs, and who can suddenly go off their meds. There is always the possibility that a student will respond positively to something that happens in advising and then later decide it was abusive. In that sort of instance lawyers instigating the suit would likely always be able to find a professional therapist willing to testify that something the advisor had done or said was out of bounds. Consequently we do need to be mindful about avoiding an appearance of therapy that could be used against the college in a lawsuit. Do we know anything about what laws apply and how they are interpreted? What would the law consider unprofessional? Margo has suggested that we should use the phone rather than email for some kinds of communications. Are there other ways to safeguard ourselves and the college? 2. Harm. Students may wish to sue even when they have not actually been harmed so I am separating the category of harm from the category of liability. The question of harm comes up because one-to-one advising unavoidably evokes transference negative and positive, and transference means students can be vulnerable in the advising relation. Therapists are trained in understanding and working with transference. We are not. What are our individual rules of thumb about dealing with transference? In any particular instance, how do we judge what amount of personal warmth or honesty is safe for a student? 3. Fear of feeling and bodily sensation. Along with nervousness about liability, administrators (and fac and students too) can be nervous about feeling and bodily sensation themselves. Anyone is dissociated to some degree, and people who gravitate toward admin can be more dissociated than most. Wherever there is dissociation, fear of feeling and fear of bodily sensation can be intense and unexamined. Advocating any sort of work with personal feeling or somatic sensing generally means 'therapy' to such people, and the notion of therapy consequently has a frightening and mysterious charge. Is this fear part of admin's nervousness about whether our program is unduly therapy-like? Where else do we see this fear operating? Is it operating in our own discussion? Are there ways to allay it or work around it? 4. Application of criteria. This is where the 'personal growth' or 'being' criteria come in. We all have experience with students who are stuck emotionally/intellectually in ways that are spoiling their work. Examples are procrastination, blaming, confusion, or a blind spot. Where this sort of stuckness isn't addressed by the student and does not shift throughout their MA semesters, do we say the student hasn't satisfied the personal growth criterion? A hard case might be where, with a lot of advisor curbing, a student has completed an acceptable graduating project but we know they are hanging onto a mad belief system they are going to be preaching when they leave. 5. Pedagogical philosophy. Therapy and education are highly distinct professional sinecures, but how distinct are they in their actual aims and effects? Therapy from the Gk therapeuein to serve, take care of. Educate from the L educare, to bring up, to lead out. Successful therapy is definitely a form of learning, so a good therapist is definitely a teacher. Is a good teacher also a therapist? In an embodiment studies perspective, education and therapy are both ways of restructuring bodies so they will be happier and/or more capable in the world there is. (So is successful spiritual practice. So is successful art, successful cooking, successful sex, successful architecture. Etc.) Both therapy and our one-to-one teaching format use conversation as their means of restructuring. Both are only very partly reciprocal. Both aim toward personal liberation. Both (can) aim toward wider social welfare. Keeping in mind the feminist insight that the personal is the political, do we believe there nonetheless is an essential difference, beyond the entrenched institutional differences? 6. Therapy-like aspects of good advising: containment, interpretation, reframing. Below are examples of advising moments that can seem therapy-like (everyone could supply their own instances here): Student sending boring packets, advisor says, I noticed in advising group that you really perked up when you were talking about X, student replies that she has now had a dream that she should switch to another graduating project, advisor replies enthusiastically, student switches into a new project she has more energy for. Student sends a panicked email saying she has just done a piece of art that terrified her, advisor replies telling her to breathe and try Gendlin's focusing technique, student does so, realizes why she was frightened, calms down. Student (writer) sends a series of dreams, advisor responds with an observation about what they seem to be saying, student leaps on the interpretation and incorporates the suggestion in her approach to good effect. White student writing about the history of the notion of race in America only in terms of blackness, advisor says, Isn't your family Jewish, is there something central to your interest in race politics that you haven't explored yet? Writing student is sending family memoir that feels falsely positive, advisor reports this feeling and suggests naming negative things too, student does so, has a hard time in the process of doing so, but comes up with a more honest final product she is proud of. Heterosexual student working on a performance piece is writing about the roots of erotic feeling in childhood relation to her mother, advisor says, So far so good but you're leaving out your dad, what's that about? Student says !! Oh. Do any of these examples seem illegitimate in an advising relation? In practice do we experience puzzlement about whether
something we are doing is over the line? How do we decide?
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