Alyse Knorr Conversation and World Wisdom Traditions / PS: Moonlight and Living
What all we've been up to
It may not look like much. Sorry about that! The lack of new posts around here lately will not, I hope, have discouraged you from browsing some of the archives in the meantime. Reading around in the links, podcasts, and resources we've put together over the years, there should be no shortage of secrets to find and people to meet. But I think there's more going on even now at our humble Video Game Academy than it might appear. And it's not for nothing that we are still here.
Over a summer extended with paternity leave on the front end and now quickly licking at the heels of fall, I've been able to read and re-read some good stuff, that is by listening on Libby audiobooks but occasionally holding an actual book (usually also from the library) with my free hand that's not holding the child, or more often than either, just on archive.org on my phone. Still threading my way through Spariosu, I subject Ben to my takes on that and Omeros, and Alex and Danny get my thoughts on Ulysses, Lea my questions about Either/Or. So I keep up with a couple of book groups, formal and informal, and I've started up again writing reviews, including a couple new ones, on The Pixels. Their push for Hawaii aid is well worth your consideration.
Ben, too, has been pitching in and accumulating wisdom. While preparing a new course in World Wisdom Traditions, the Professor's rolling along with the Pentateuch piece of his larger hermeneutical-ethical project. Between that and moving house, he took some time out to make a new video: Replaying Assassin's Creed, 2012-2014. And to go by the site stats, a decent audience is out there awaiting his next journal on Lobotomy Corporation...
As far as Twitch videos, I've shifted away from game playthroughs back to more text-based discussions. The current series is on William James' Talks to Teachers and other foundational books for teachers and students. We'll look at Douglass' Narrative of the Life next, still making the connection to video games with the ways in which the theme of learning to read comes through in JRPGs like EarthBound and Dragon Quest.
Podcast-wise, here's a conversation with Alyse Knorr, 'achiever' (to cite her Super Mario Bros 3, where I first encountered her work and reviewed it for The Pixels). In which we discuss:
- Sweetbitter Podcast, with new episodes coming soon about Mary Magdalen and a fourth season in the works
- Switchback Books, which she edits with her wife
- Regis University, where she teaches alongside colleagues such as Russ Arnold
- her poetry, research, and the novel she's writing
For all you completionists: we talk about meaning and connection, truth and beauty, compassion, collaboration, and community; love poetry; queering religion and the reclamation of faith in a Jesus who speaks truth to power; spirituality and mystery; God (or goodness) as the still small voice; falling in love; taking inspiration from her students' energy; Annotated Glass and Sappho fragment 31; coming out of the postmodern moment when sincere feeling was the most uncool thing; 'Bright Star,' Keats, Eliot, Carson's Autobiography of Red; Gilgamesh and Enheduanna; 'Anatomy Exam'; Garcia Marquez; style and form, lyric and epic, ancient and sacred, emotion and bodily sensation, and finding new ways to render them, borrowing lines without knowing it; how form emerges and helps generate lines and line breaks; checking out legs at the library; respecting the uselessness of her art and the usefulness of her students' (nursing); the act of naming; birdwatching as a mom of an infant; going from Edenic nescience to that corrupted knowledge place; naming the world; Ardor, a book of eco-queer domestic life and love; Every Last Thing, a book of tantrums and embarrassed apologies...
Does the poet hope for some response? Or is it nothing but a gift, this act of writing and learning from others' experience and one's own? To think about love, sincerity, earnestness? To celebrate queer joy as a political, radical act?
Micaela Tore's MA thesis on Copper Mother; editing women and nonbinary authors; Gandalf the cat; the Voyager Golden Record (and around here you'll get a musical interlude from moonbowmusic); the poets' communal economy; editing and publishing poetry vs. prose, ie. at Boss Fight; the contest model; video game books with Gabe Durham, their upcoming Minesweeper, Xenogears, Animal Crossing; being an ideal reader; her SMB3 and GoldenEye 007 projects, memoir and journalism and creative writing; Nintendo interviews and how the limits of poetry, like early technology, feed creativity.
Topophilia: Elizabeth Bishop's 'The Map'; Henry Jenkins' 'Complete Freedom of Movement'; Sean Fenty's nostalgia piece in Playing the Past. The completionist impulse; worlds in games, in Anchorage, in the self; secret areas, heroes and princesses; Miyamoto's childhood explorations; the Bishop archives; growing up in the South; lines on the map; exile and the Garden; Dante; ways of incorporating games in classes.
Video Games and Meaning: topics, problems, persuasion and social justice: Hair Nah and microaggressions; Oregon Trail and colonialism; Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin; Passage; citizen science; This War of Mine; Papers, Please; Train; Anna Anthropy's Dysphoria, Queers in Love at End of World, and ZZT. Her new novel (agents, check it out), a post-apocalyptic story of love and a journey; Dhalgren; Ico; too much stuff, not enough people.
Teaching-wise, I'm working on a collaborative research project with MG Prezioso, who studies literary enjoyment and understanding. Joe and I still have our liberal arts and leadership segments under the banner of the Thoughtful Dad, just not lately managing to record much.
Life-wise, back from visiting family. The Baltimore Aquarium, crowded as heck. Steve and his wife came down from Philadelphia (congrats you two!). DC museums with crying kids and a flash flood in the streets. Braving it all with the folks and Auntie Oli. Rehoboth Beach for a couple of days. Then back to Spokane, just trying to breathe through the smoke.
PS. On the flight home, I watched Living and Moonlight. Each on its own is very good. Together, they pair beautifully around the theme of play. In the one, a remake of Ikiru (itself based on The Death of Ivan Illich), we get renditions of 'The Rowan Tree' and musings on the metaphor of play, with dying like a mother calling her children home. In the other, a movie that is almost too good to believe it found a way to exist, much like Everything Everywhere All in that at Once though different in practically every other way, we see one of those children who sits out of the game, almost, before being brought back in by a friend and making another kind of play all their own. Their song: 'Hello Stranger,' by Barbara Lewis.