Joe Siegenthaler:
I decided to try out this medium with some basic data on Sarawak history, which I've been revisiting via J.H. Walker's Power and Prowess: The Origins of Brooke Kingship in Sarawak (2002). Here's one entry:
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There's a lot to this, but I suppose (like any wiki environment) it'll become easier to use as I practise. I'm not sure how much detail to include or link to, but it's refreshing to be thinking about Sarawak again.
Blog writing is id writing—grandiose, dreamy, private, free-associative, infantile, sexy, petty, dirty. Whether bloggers tell the truth or really are who they claim to be is another matter, but WTF. They are what they write. And you can't fake that. ;-)(last sentence of Blogs by Sarah Boxer, in NYRB 14 Feb 2008)
If I still had a classroom to work in, I'd devote several classes (hell, why not a whole course? ...though under which rubrics I ain't sure...) to the issues discussed in the Plagiarism episode of Wisconsin Public Radio's To the Best of Our Knowledge, featuring interviews with Jonathan Lethem, DJ Spooky [That Subliminal Kid], Judge Richard Posner, and Malcolm Gladwell. The hour of talk and examples is absolute must listening for those whose lives are entangled with teaching-and-learning.
I'll also remind you of a posting from almost a year ago, pointing to Christopher Lydon's interview with Jonathan Lethem, and (if Harper's will let non-subscribers see it) to Lethem's article The ecstasy of influence: A plagiarism (Harper's, Feb 2007).
Just a few teasers from the WPR show:
"Art comes not out of the void, but out of chaos" (1:35)
Barthes to Twain to Emerson to Lethem (1:55)
"the software that we use to edit is just as much a part of the artwork, you know?" (1:00)
"it's like playing with respect for the history of things" (0:55)
If Son House isn't a household world out your way, he might just be after you watch this one:
A decade or so ago I bought a print version of The Secret Museum of Mankind, a treasury of sorta-ethnographic curiosa of the sort that I lingered over as a boy (and perhaps their rampant exoticism was a big part of why I became an anthropologist-- that and living down the street from Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, wherein I studied as an undergraduate). Boing Boing informs us that Ian Mackie has scanned the whole thing. He's done a beautiful job of it, and pretty much any place you start will insure a therapeutic time-out from what you were supposed to be doing.
a master of spare but utterly original accompaniment:
John Zorn and the Masada Trio (thanks Daniel!):
Old Blue Bus keeps offering relevant commentary on the quotidian, this time with James McMurtry's We Can't Make It Here
James McMurtry's Web site... I'm impressed.
quick update: Shoulda looked at YouTube first:
It doesn't surprise me that my son John sees the Tip of the Iceberg more clearly than I did myself:
And the timing is just right for the internet -- just the sort of little pearl for the attention-deficit medium. I'll bet you've got thousands more just like this lined up -- and to watch them tumble forth to cause unknowable whorls and eddies in countless minds is certainly tantalizing.Now there's a challenge, and indeed I did awake this morning with about fifty-leven ideas for the next few YouTube nuggets. Flash video does seem like an especially effective means to spread the dandelion seeds of my various collections. Stay tuned.
This has been a long time in gestation... been thinking about how to do it, what to include, what software to use, and this is the FIRST of what might be quite a few:
I have a lot to learn about what works, what doesn't, how to produce and edit narrative, etc., but the winter is long...
via Christopher Sessums, whose comments are well worth your time.
thanks Nick!
And he busts some great dance moves too
(from http://www.thevincent.com/)
Two readings of the same text. Me, I've never been a participant on motorcycle lore, though I have friends who were and did. But I know a Good Song when I hear one, played here by one of the reigning geniuses of the guitar:
(lyrics)
It's Richard Thompson's song (from Rumor and Sigh, 1991), one of a great many from his pen that capture humans in vulnerable moments and make their exploits live on (see an interview with RT for some background). And Del McCoury does a remarkable job of translating it to Tennessee (Knoxville replaces Box Hill):
There's a novel, due to be published in March 2008: Vincent Black Lightning 1952: A Novel, by Al Sciarrino ("...a business and entertainment law professor at State University of New York, teaches a course on Music and the Law at the Eastman School of Music and has been an aficionado of country music and motorcycles his entire life..."), but whether it'll cast any new light on the original James Adie remains to be seen.
Cory Doctorow pointed to Marseille Figs: uptempo pop from a "small big band" -- Violent Femmes meets Tom Waits meets Squirrel Nut Zippers and I followed up with a little venture in downloading via Amazon, but perhaps I shoulda gone with CD Baby for a few bux more... Anyhow, I'm enjoying them, and some of you will too (probably the same ones who respond with glee to the excesses of the Holy Modal Rounders). Others won't (probably the same ones who can't bear The Pogues). But take a look at the band's Web site and perhaps sample Low Low Thing, Caesar's Revenge, and Good Year, and see a useful review by Chris Daykin: Something new, for a change
Here's what occurred as I unfroze pipes and washed dishes: cultivate the Art of Contextualizing Juxtaposition, spinning out the stories liberated by juxtapositions, and encouraging others to play at doing the same. In the context of teaching-learning, it's encouraging students to MAKE things; whether they're haiku or collage or mashup or essay matters less than the evolving taste for making and mooting own expression, in [semi-] public space. The essential is that the instructor be seen to be doing the very same thing.
Sometimes a confluence of quite disparate influences provokes a blog posting that bursts out into a new vector of interest and attention. One never knows when that's going to strike, and sometimes it comes to nothing: having stricken, moves on. At the moment, the bits that seem to be shouldering their way to the fore are:
A curriculum is more for teachers than it is for pupils. If it cannot change, move, perturb, inform teachers, it will have no effect on those whom they teach.and Paul Greenglass
...freedom, improvisation, the moment, the... the thing that happens in front of your camera that you didn't predict..."
He points to the Edge Foundation's annual Question, this year's being What Have You Changed Your Mind About?. Hmm, I thought... and I still don't have anything coherent to say myself, but O'Reilly is right that it's quite interesting to read what others have written. And it's the extraordinarily broad compass of rethought things that's the really interesting part. I've spent half an hour looking at various people's takes on topics quite tangential to what I thought were my own concerns, and recommend the exercise most heartily, especially as a New Year's calisthenic.