doing good things. im writing a collection of short vignettes, in the spirit of Ryszard Kapuscinksi's The Emperor, about Henry Walter Bates, a 19th century amateur entomologist who traveled on a four year expedition to Amazonia to collect insect specimens. im writing from his own notebook, published as Naturalist on the River Amazons, from the perspective of those around him, his assistants, residents of Para state, workers on his ship, etc. its fiction, but ethnographically based:

J. S. :

Took us a month to cross from Liverpool. I kept the stoves below deck going hot. Two of my mates down there got scurvy, but in a month we arrived in Pará state. Across the Atlantic, a long way from England, but the naturalists needed to come here, to get specimens. The Mischief needed more hands, and a job's a job, eh? Better than working the mines.

Our first stop was a small jesuit village off the coast. Too hot and humid, made the stoves and the mines seem fair. Those two, the scientists I mean, they began talking to the natives, using their translator, asking about insects. The next day we sailed up the river, finally arriving in that port city, Belém. We helped carry some of their things to the house, passing the merchants and shanty dwellings. I remember the one, the younger one, early twenties, the way he eyed those dark skinned women as we passed by. But then again, there were more than enough plants growing around the place to keep him occupied.

on another note, i was brainstorming and decided to list my top classes ive taken at Bard, in terms of how much ive taken out of them. it was surprisingly easy to generate a list.

ecology of infectious disease

photography, history & news

writing the world

ethnographic fiction

political ecology and poetics

the gift of literature

hooke's micrographia

history of technology of economics

biology of infectious disease

doing so gives a good idea of what interests me now, and the direction i am trying to create for myself right now. i once said to somebody that i wanted to write, and hemmingway said to write what you know, and that im never going to content with what i know in any given moment. always wanting more, learning more, expanding. and so i didnt become a writing major. and i dont immediately want to write. i want experience, outside of academy, outside of programs. i want to travel. i want to experience mundane detail. i want to work and toil for some time. i want something to torture me in the back of my mind so much that i know i need to follow it. i want to go back to brazil, i want to do work in global health, i want to keep interviewing about Lyme disease and organize support groups, i want to mediate conflicting opinions and stances. i want to learn poetics, i want to explore the microcosm. and extrapolate.

today my adviser made a point to remind me of the shift in ethnography: away from order and "making sense," and embracing the realism of chaos in form. i keep it in mind both for senior project (with which i feel a heavy obligation, in the motivational sense, for this group with which i am working) and for my fiction-nonfiction hybrid writing i hope to do.

if you took ryszard kapuscinksi's the emperor, italo calvino's invisible cities, and deniel defoe's journal of the plague year and combined them, i think it gives some image of what id like to do. its not fiction. but its playing with fact to accomplish something while still conjuring representation of some kind. one of the greatest lessons i've teased from anthropology and ethnography is that all writing is a fiction of sorts: all texts include and exclude, omit something, order information. there is no completely objective recording of reality. social scientists refer to this as the politics of representation, and throughout 4 years of anthropology and history classes, its the one thing that has held my interest. i think some fiction represents better than nonfiction. the hungry tide by amitav ghosh may be one example, the brothers by milton hatoum might be another.

im eager to see where next year takes me. each step forward i take better shows me what will or will not make me happy and grow.