{"id":9717,"date":"2026-08-28T05:03:25","date_gmt":"2026-08-28T05:03:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/?p=9717"},"modified":"2026-09-10T05:33:34","modified_gmt":"2026-09-10T05:33:34","slug":"missy-woods","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/?p=9717","title":{"rendered":"missy woods"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I was reading about the American trial of Yvonne Woods, a detective accused of omitting crucial information from investigations involving rape and murder, and what stayed with me was not simply the alleged cruelty or negligence but her own inability to explain herself. Unable to say why she behaved as she had, as though the person responsible for the decisions and the person now asked to account were only a little bit acquainted. I find this fascinating because I have never been convinced the self is the solid object we pretend it is. We speak of ourselves as if somewhere behind the eyes there is a permanent little administrator receiving information and signing off on behaviour, but when we go looking for them we encounter memories, fears, habits and explanations. In the middle of a solo, a hand moves toward a note before the musician has consciously decided upon it. A phrase appears, another answers it, something ugly happens and is suddenly transformed into the beginning of something beautiful. Asked afterward why the F-sharp occurred, the musician may invent a reasonable explanation, but at the moment it happened there was no committee meeting. The note just arrived. This does not absolve anyone of responsibility. We still have to answer for what our hands do. But it makes the question Why did you do that?<\/em> much stranger than it first appears. Perhaps identity is itself an improvisation, assembled from whatever has just happened, with consciousness sitting in the audience taking notes and later insisting it wrote the score.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was reading about the American trial of Yvonne Woods, a detective accused of omitting crucial information from investigations involving rape and murder, and what stayed with me was not […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"Layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[899,119],"tags":[],"class_list":["entry","author-rockbob","post-9717","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-improvising","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9717","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9717"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9717\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9717"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9717"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9717"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}