Blurring the Boundaries: Explorations to the Fringes of Nonfiction

Ander Monson

165 Ander Monson Outline toward a Theory of the Mine versus the Mind and the Harvard Outline I. Start with the Roman numeral I with an authoritative period trailing just after it. This is the Harvard Outline, which comes in Caps and is a method of organizing information a. remembered from high school as a major step toward creating an essay i. though there was a decimal method, too b. but I’ve never been comfortable with the thing—its seeming rigor, its scaffolding so white against the language i. never felt the top-down structuralist method of constructing writing to be useful or effective; the mind, so idiosyncratic, unusual 1. its strangeness and its often-incoherence a. the lovely anomaly c. and the Harvard Outline is the reason that I get 55 5-paragraph essays every month d. it is, I think, suspect, (its e. headings i. subheadings 1. sub-subheadings a. etc. b. though there is a pleasure to this iteration, this recursion—like mathematics and the 166 ander monson algorithms I played with and admired in computer-science classes, writing functions that called themselves i. which called themselves 1. which called themselves a. until they were satisfied 2. and exited ii. right back c. out i. like those Russian nesting [matryoshka] dolls; a lovely symmetry; such satisfaction comes in nesting ii. such starkness 1. elegance) f. all those steps out and down across the page—like the writing task is that of going downhill, like a waterfall in its rush i. or the incremental, slow plod down the slope, skis buried behind in some drift g. While technically called “the Harvard Outline” i. it has nothing to do with Harvard 1. according to their archivists, “it appears to be a generic term” ii. so it’s difficult to track it down in the history of organizing information 1. which is what this culture spends increasing time (and money!) doing a. witness the amazing success of the search engine Google i. as created by Larry Page and Sergey Brin ii. with its elegant mechanism of concordance outline toward a theory 167 1. of ranking searches by the number of pages that link to each individual page or site in order to establish the relative importance of that initial page or site a. and look—there’s no need for parentheses in 1. above thanks to the Harvard Outline b. again that attraction to selfexamination c. again that attraction to what elegance there is to find II. My family has a background in the Michigan mining industry a. a history in copper, iron, the cast-off leftover materials necessary to process ore from rock b. though less my recent family i. not my father who is a professor—whose job, like mine, is (reductively) the mining and refining, then the distribution of information for (small sums of) money 1. though perhaps this is a cynical view of the profession a. and light-as-knowledge metaphor is hardly breaking new ground 2. still I like the image of the light-helmeted professor plowing through the darkness a. though it is romantic to say the least 3. “like mine” (from above)—mining is a story of possession a. of legal ownership of land and rights, the permission to go below the crust 4. “breaking new ground” (from above)—again the construction terminology 168 ander monson a. the invocation of the building, of the engineering 5. my father teaches at Michigan Technological University, formerly the Michigan College of Mines, a school that is just about to lose its Mining Engineering program a. which is older than the oldest living humans b. which is “one of only 15 mining engineering programs in the U.S. that has been uninterrupted since the beginning of the century and has also held accreditation with the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (abet) since 1936” according to the mtu Mining Engineering website i. this tidbit brought to you by Google ii. this tidbit being no longer accurate (now we should use past tense, as the program has been retired, killed, phased out): this is an information shift between the writing of the essay and its publication c. but further back i. since nearly everyone who emigrated to Upper Michigan from (mostly) Scandinavia worked in the mines, or worked in industries that supported it 1. the mining boom in the 19th century was...