“So many things are a matter of knowing whom to ask.” -Katherine Addison, The Angel of the Crows, p. 305

                One of my favorite things about being in graduate school (and running away from graduate school to meet organizers, activists, librarians, gardeners, poets) is talking to so many different people who think so deeply from so many different perspectives.
                I wonder if one of the reasons scholars/experts get a bad rep in the United States is that there’s this cultural assumption, this pressure, that an expert should see everything. Understanding everything. Like Sherlock in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes or House in House MD or (yeah, deep cut) Vin Diesel’s Riddick in The Chronicles of Riddick. A bunch of wild unpredictable shit happens, and then Riddick says, totally seriously, “That was my plan.” In the movie we’re supposed to believe him. In real life someone told me “There’s no one stupider than someone smart and sure of himself and outside his understanding.” I believe that more than Riddick. I’ve met lawyers with the most bone-headed takes on linguistics. Linguists with the strangest misunderstandings of language teaching. The list goes on and on. I don’t mean that you can’t learn about linguistics by studying law. I’m sure you can. But anytime someone is sure that their perspective captures and overrides everything, I think back to Riddick.
                So then there’s this delight. The delight of looking at a community garden and talking to an ecologist, and another time a farm organizer, and a gardener, and a birder, and an entomologist, and a local poet, and a painter, and people who are so much more than their one profession. Asking what they see. Sitting with it, and sharing our questions about what our eyes still hide from us.