In one sense, a session is a singular episode in a durational practice. In another, a session can also be a useful palaver, a coming together of a group for an exchange of ideas for the purpose of exploring something. When we think of something as sessionable, like lower alcohol beers, it means that we can let it work on us for a while, we can stay with it. We think of writing with and through theory as a sessionable practice. In this exercise for Doing STS, we bring for the first time our notes on our individual sessions—what we are working in and thorough in our particular research projects—to each other and to you to explore individual sessions, palavers, and the sessionability of writing and thinking together.
Coleman’s session notes take up caring for her dead father’s body, Amanda writies interview notes in the car, and Lindsey is still thinking and writing about running and the work that session notes can do not only as a record of times and distances, but also when taken up together, as a conspectus of the feelings and haptics that run with and alongside something we can call for simplicity sake, effort.
Session Notes
LINDSEY A. FREEMAN
A practice is something you are invested in enough to repeat over and over. What you practice adds texture and rhythm to your daily life, becomes part of your personality. Session notes are a complementary practice to a practice. They are their own method and microgenre, a research style and form of writing jotted down in a notebook or tapped into a phone while still feeling the high, exhaustion, boredom, or frustration of a period of effort. I’ve been thinking about what these kinds of notes can do for a practice, what they might pop open or set spinning, especially when shared. Session notes are a way to love the rhythms of the desire for activity and exertion, even if those efforts are not bringing you to where you want to be. They are useful for staying attuned, they help to “keep the faculty of effort alive,” as William James writes in Habit. Session notes also allow for catching a feeling in its complexity before the compulsion to story, to fully explain. They can fix a fatigue before it becomes narratological or hold a pang of pleasure felt in the body so that it resists being contextualized in a ready-made explanation. Session notes written over a collection of sessions or across a group of people even in a single session form a concatenation of resonances, individual and collective affects, insights, and confusions. They can evidence hapticality or compersion and they can show you what is shared and what is lonely.
Peppy
COLEMAN NYE
My brother and I aren’t religious people. We didn’t have a ritual at the ready to help us care for our father when he stopped breathing. Noses dripping tears, we packed up our takeout containers and leftover beer cans in the darkness. I remember walking through the bright corridor leaving him behind. The hospital kept moving as if my father wasn’t lying dead down the hall. I felt ashamed of how messy my grief was and angry that there wasn’t space for it and so terrible leaving my dad there, helpless and alone, waiting for strangers to handle him as work. I kept apologizing to him and searching for the window of his room as we pulled out of the parking lot in my stepsister’s shitty red Honda civic that had every dashboard light on. I keep returning to this night and making notes. I grope for words that can enfold my father’s bruised flesh and aching lungs, that can hold this complicated and gentle man, who had been breathing underwater, slowly drowning in lungs that could once make a horn scream with music, that could still make me scream with laughter. I try to wrap him in my words, tenderly removing the tubes from his tired arms and chest, lying beside his still-warm, bony frame, caressing his patient hands and rosy cheeks with a warm cloth. And I dress him warmly, bundling him up in his soft green sleeping cap, his now too-big hoodie, and worn gray slippers, to offer some protection against the cold efficiencies of death that are to come.
Flextime
Amanda D. Watson
It takes a village and you need to build it or buy it, she says. I wonder when she learned that. We value quality time, she says. She used to be a ballerina. Angles in a leather club chair, one hand pulls her calf to her ear as she lifts tea to her lips with the other, sipping without moving her jaw. She tells me how she fills the cup of her Deeply Feeling Kid. We are the same age and so are our kids, but money is funny. She lets me walk my teabag to the compost under the farmhouse sink where I find it unused. Not a stuck strawberry top or slime of coffee grounds, not even a smell. I need a haircut, my socks have sand in them, my teeth are stained. Still extended to the sky, her hamstring looks pleated like the underside of a whale. They always eat dinner together. The bedtime ritual is the same each night while the nanny cleans up downstairs. Her behind-the-house neighbour thinks Joe Biden sniffs the heads of children. Too far gone, she says, but we must hold other people to account if we want to be fully held ourselves. She takes LandBack and the hopes and dreams of rednecks seriously all while criticizing EDI-washing. She just has a whole lot of space for other people. A tangle of dust falls from the skylight above and we both panic. Did something just drop? Just dust, I say. Impossible to clean.
