Finding Her Voice: The Good and the Bad

Perhaps the name for today’s blog is a bit of a misrepresentation. Maybe I’m somewhat picky with what I choose to read and maybe I’m too kind with trying to meet authors where they’re at, but I’ve read remarkably few articles that are truly “bad”. Of course, after many years of university, I admittedly have encountered some articles I haven’t enjoyed reading, but my lack of personal enjoyment certainly doesn’t equate to an article deserving to be labelled as “bad”. Since this week we’re spending more time with my final paper, Beauty in these Broken Stones, and I have yet to find a source for it that has made me groan with exasperation, we’re expanding our scope and exploring an article that is “good” and another that is “not as good”. Sorry for my initial slight deception.

And oops, I lied again. Since most of the sources I haven’t yet read for Beauty in these Broken Stones are book chapters, in the interest of tackling my reading list I’m covering a relevant book chapter and a relevant article instead of two relevant articles.

Now that I’ve come clean, here’s a little on my selection process.

The first work I ever read by CD is a chapter in this edited volume. In it, she uses a case study on an abandoned atomic weapons testing facility in the UK to explore the concept of palliative curation, which is essentially allowing a site or an object to undergo its natural process of deterioration without any attempts to halt it, slow it down, or speed it up. I was intrigued by the concept when I was first working on Beauty in these Broken Stones. Palliative curation is playing a larger role in this revised iteration, so I wanted to see if other scholars are talking about it (not many, from what I gather so far) and I also wanted to see what else CD has written.

I have learned CD has since published her own book where palliative curation looms large, which 1) excites me that she’s continuing to work on this topic and 2) gives me great information for my paper. After Harvarding the table of contents (thanks KL, more on that in this book on Chapter 5), I thought What better way to crack open the book than to blog on one of the chapters? And so that brings us to our first reading selection.

To understand CD’s evolution as a scholar, I decided to see what she had written before any of these works on palliative curation. Instead of the university lecturer and later professor, I discovered her as a researcher with a newly minted PhD who was establishing her publication bibliography. Our second selection is an article she wrote shortly after receiving her PhD which elaborates on her attempts to curate a homestead in Montana. This too is a solid piece, but “not as good” as the chapter from her book that was published over a decade later.

To be clear, I thoroughly enjoyed both works and they are both “good”, though one is simply less so. Reading these two pieces by CD allowed me to witness the development of her voice. In both works, it’s evident she knows what she wants to do structurally and stylistically through choices she makes. Over that decade-plus of evolution and growth, however, she has refined her execution and her voice is stronger and so much more compelling.

Before I fulfill your eager anticipations by finally telling you about both of CD’s works, I have one more confession to make. I have deceived you once again with the order of words in my title. Since I want us to end on the highest note possible, we’re starting with her “not as good” piece before exploring the “good” one.

The “Not as Good”—Article by CD

This article is about storytelling as it imagines new ways of interpreting things that are decaying. When a thing is succumbing to the processes of decomposition and destruction, not only is cultural memory lost, other types of memory are regained. This is caused by the blurring of boundaries between nature and culture that happens when things fall apart. While this creates confusion of how this thing is to be interpreted, it also reveals exciting possibilities of storytelling through collaboration with nonhuman agents.

CD uses a case study of a deteriorating homestead in rural Montana as her backdrop to illustrate her ideas. As the curator of the site, she quickly realized the traditional conservation and heritage doctrine of ridding a thing of ambiguity through neat categories like “artefact” and “waste”, and stabilizing a thing to be perpetually affixed to a singular meaning, would not work at the homestead. By viewing things like a process, she explains that allowing changes in the physical form of a thing allows for different interpretations. Ultimately, instead of things being adversaries to her attempts to instill a specific kind of order at the homestead, she endeavours to work with things so as to permit ambiguity and more interpretive possibilities.

It has become abundantly clear to me that CD likes to be present in her work. Not only does she use her own photos in this article, she tells the reader the story of her work on the homestead, the intriguing things she found that blur the line between nature and culture, and how she experimented with nonhuman agents contributing to interpretations. Still, like any good scholar, she does not exist in isolation from academia: she ties in theoretical underpinnings and ideas from other scholars.

Unfortunately, at this point in her career CD is not yet the best conversationalist. She bounces back and forth from telling a story of her work and engaging in conversation with other scholars, but the integration between these two different elements is a bit off. There is a disconnect, and these two elements appear more like distinct and still separate pieces rather than an interconnected whole. We go abruptly from a scene of a thicket of trees on the homestead’s property to comparisons of another scholar’s work in Papua New Guinea. The transitions are clunky rather than flowy.

Perhaps less awkward phrasings would help. More times than I can count, we are directly greeted with statements along the lines of “this is what I saw” and in my view, excessively expository sentences like “this article will do this” and “the next section will do that”. While these stylistic choices can be helpful for organization, here they interrupt instead.

I love vivid descriptions any day, but not when they are rambling and list-like, and especially not when there are superfluous details that are dead ends instead of connections to the argument. These meandering descriptions make the reader go “we get it, there are lots of weird blendings of different types of matter, enough with the moulds and mouse skeletons intertwined with magazines and jars of preserves”. (To be fair, not all of her descriptive passages in this article are so wandering like this; some that are exceptionally well-done.)

The contributions from other scholars at times seem shoehorned into the article due to the lack of flow and often appear under-digested in the sense there is too much direct quoting and not enough paraphrasing. I get it, sometimes a scholar says something I cannot better express myself, but there were some places where a scholar’s contribution could have been better integrated through paraphrasing instead.

I give CD credit as unlike many researchers, she dares to be more explicit in the fact she is telling a story. This bold strategy of hers is evident in this article, and improves over time.

The “Good”—Chapter 7 from CD’s Book

Like in her article written over a decade earlier, CD tells a story here. By recounting the events that lead to the Orfordness Lighthouse’s death and interspersing them with anecdotes from her grandmother’s death, she demonstrates the constant parallels between the death story of a thing and that of a person. CD argues that like people, things live and die, making us all alike in that sense. Both things and people thus require care as they are approaching the ends of their lives. Similar to palliative care for humans, palliative curation for things helps ease the transition from life to death. Sometimes, there can be disagreements between caregivers about what to do and there can also be tough palliative care/curation decisions to be made. For instance, when establishing a “care plan” for the lighthouse, the Orfordness Lighthouse Company advocated for “the equivalent of architectural life support” and the National Trust was championing “a “do not resuscitate” order” (2017, p.162).

CD concludes that sometimes simply letting go and accepting ruination is the best decision, and expands on her earlier thoughts by exploring things as processes instead of as fixed entities that live and die. A thing as a process means it simply changes form: a thing’s materials existed before the construction of the thing and they will also exist after the destruction of the thing, albeit in different configurations. Reflecting on this new configuration that surpasses the boundaries of life and death, she proposes that some parts of the Orfordness Lighthouse be salvaged and incorporated into something else.

(While the Orfordness Lighthouse had not yet died/changed form at the time of publication, it was demolished in the summer of 2020 and some artefacts from it were kept.)

CD is still very much present in her work, and perhaps even more so here than in the earlier article. When reading academic texts, it is rare (and refreshing) to feel as if you are getting to know the author and it is even more rare (and refreshing) to have them relate such personal details about their life. CD reflects on witnessing her grandmother experience palliative care, and is exceptionally open and honest about her regrets, details she wishes she remembers, and how she felt during the memorial gathering. There is truly something to be said for being vulnerable, and I admire that. And to then tie that vulnerable honesty to similar themes that occur with buildings, and to theoretical discussions? Triple wow!

Unlike in her earlier article, CD has elected to follow a similar approach to what I use when doing makeup: less is more. She focusses on fewer themes and seemingly has selected more carefully the scholars with whom she converses, resulting in a much more focussed analysis. We also have a more coherent narrative with no random details that lead to nowhere. With fewer elements to juggle, she seamlessly weaves them together, successfully interconnecting events of her grandmother’s death story, the Orfordness Lighthouse’s death story, and her engagement with ideas from other scholars. There are no awkward breaks or dead ends in the chapter, and like a mass of things in ruination that have melded together, I can’t always see where one discrete thing ends and another begins. These parts are a cohesive and interconnected whole.

Not only is CD now a much better conversationalist with how she brings other scholars into her work, the days of the awkward transitional sentences are also gone; her integration of ideas is smooth and flowy. My single issue is that the absence of transitional sentences and subheadings slightly irks me, which is ironic as I criticized her earlier article for the use of impeding transitional sentences.

It’s no secret I’m a fan of clear structure in academic works. However, I now realize this work is a hybrid, similar to a mass of ruinous matter. Not only are the boundaries between sections undefined, the boundaries between genres similarly are unclear. CD’s chapter is not exclusively of a monograph, nor of a novel. That said, while the uncertainty was initially a bit unnerving for me, I still embrace the freedom of this approach. It allows for more interpretive possibilities for the reader, just like abandoned things in ruination offer the observer.