Sometimes what I write in the basically 1:1 medium of email needs to be saved where I can find it more easily, and/or seems like it might want to be shared more widely, so I contrive some way to nudge the text into the semi-public medium of the blog. A continuing series of exchanges loosely centered on writing is a current example, and so I’m following up my post on Writing with yesterday’s thoughts tending toward Reading. Don’t know that I’ll ever refine these thoughts, but if I ever want to, I’ll be able to find where I started.
Eight years ago (as I was on the final approach to Retirement) I was wrestling with the discontinuity between my visions of Education in the liberal arts context and the gelid realities of liberal arts institutions. At that time I was in the habit of keeping running logs of thoughts and discoveries, and these four seem especially relevant to today’s thoughts:
…a place to accumulate odds and ends that have to do with preparing for retirement –ruminations, legacy stuff, things to do and not-do, etc. This is it. To some degree, it’s also a continuation of The Disgruntlement File, but the Watchword is/should be Fuggeddaboudit!, liberally applied, with a dash of Master Kung:
The Master said, “To learn something and then put it into practise at the right time: is this not a joy? To have friends coming from afar: is this not a delight? Not to be upset when one’s merits are ignored: is this not the mark of a gentleman?”
(Leys translation –but see the end of this page for other renderings of the passage)
In the nearly-eight intervening years my engagement in the scuffles and food fights of Education has waned to almost nothing –I still track some edublogs, but nowadays I don’t usually feel inclined to try to influence anybody (something I used to take pretty seriously) or even to post my thoughts in the quiet backwaters of this blogspace. In the last year or so I’ve watched the buzz about MOOCs go from mumble to frenzy, and I haven’t been provoked to register my own (jaundiced) opinions on this most recent version of The Emperor’s Clothes. Here’s the bit of what Cogdog said that got me started today:
I remain astounded that anyone with a fully functioning neocortex talking seriously about MOOCs being some model of saving educational costs when the word is each course rings up a tab of $250k (edx) or even more. What does an institution get for dropping a quarter of a million per course?
I can tell you what you do not get- an ongoing open sharing of the processes, of what worked, what did not work. Not a Udellian narrating of the process. It’s more like another loaf of pre-packaged Wonderbread off the racks.
I spent 6 months working at UMW thinking they had some magic in the water (did not taste any). But it’s a culture of open sharing, not the final products, but the makings thereof. It’s not a mindset of saying, “Look what we experts hand you like Greek gods”, it’s an ongoing narrative of trying, asking, failing, reflecting, of process, not just product.
Exactly. Ongoing narrative is precisely the Grail to which teachers and learners need to attend, and to which they need to commit themselves. I now think that it’s always been true (though I didn’t discover/realize it myself until maybe 20 years ago, after I made the leap from classroom to library), though we now have tools at our fingertips that make the individual narrative distributable and greatly broaden the possibilities of collaboration as a basic modality of education.
So once again I thank the lucky stars that I got out when I did.
In my freshman year at Harvard I studied Swedish (Scandinavian B –there was no Scandinavian A) under Göran Printz-Påhlson, a pleasant if (as I thought) somewhat lumbering Swedish poet (I particularly remember that he wore leather jackets which creaked when he moved). He was a friendly and generous teacher, though I was too much in awe to actually seek him out and, well, converse. Just today I happened upon an electronic version of his Letters of Blood, and Other Works in English, and learned that he died in 2006. The introductory materials tell me some of what I missed by not, well, conversing.
Poetics is a subject of which I am largely ignorant, but a quick flip through the pages of the prose parts of the book suggests that I might enjoy discovering on some winter night when the snow howls without. And I’m mostly immune to poetry, though sometimes my attention is caught. And caught it is by some bits of Printz-Påhlson’s, like this from My Interview with I.A. Richards
Inversion is a counterfeit experience there is but one irreversability. Chestnuts, rabid squirrels, slosh and sleet, the sullen, birdstained wisdom of John Harvard. O Fyffes bananas, obscene planks, the flexes bared to vision like the sinews in Vessalius. I grope my way through the intestines of heuristic house.
Last night we heard in Kresge Hall a lion-vested English poet fulminate like an under-paid volcano against Science, applauded by a host of boffins. Afterwards, a girl called Shirley took my hand and wished to lead me through the maze toward the magus posing there as Tannhäuser, fettered with electric wires in a great maidenform…
and here’s the whole of Songs of Dock Boggs
There are gridiron reverberations in the hills, sourmash blandishments bleating from the sheriff’s office
He offers a smile, mild as pick-axe handles a mile wide which kindles the hide of rutabaga; their red necks swabbed by cool, pale blue grass in the abstracted stare of poverty Bushwacking the melodies of God for the breakdown of bushfires he nurtures illustrious health with the grating pap of pink indulgence, plucking the lure of life from the audible mouchoir moment when distant authority suppurates the blueridge landscapes of childhood.
Raw death: a clodhopper shovel smack in the kisser.
and from The Lyndon Baines Johnson Lavatory Seat Refurbishing Rightwinding Leftbranching Recursive Selfperpetuating Paradox Memorial
Here I sit thinking: Aw, shit, think how great our country is.
Here I sit, scratching my ass, thinking: Aw, shit, think how great our country is.
Here I sit, smoking some grass, scratching my ass, thinking: Aw, shit, think how great our country is.
Here I sit, sticking my middle in, smoking some grass, scratching my ass, thinking: Aw, shit, think how great our country is. … Here I sit, waiting for the end, entertaining a friend, bridging a loan, blowing my horn, sucking my stick, flexing my prick, farting through my ring, sticking my middle in, smoking some grass, scratching my ass, thinking: Aw, shit, think how great our country is.
Sometimes I enjoy Dave Winer’s perspectives on stuff, and sometimes I get annoyed and toy with just deleting his blog from my RSS feed (I’ve even done it a couple of times, but then gone back). I’m glad to be in a reading-Dave phase now, since it yielded a nice piece of autobiographical writing today (I’m glad I went to college). Here’s his last paragraph:
The thing is, you don’t know in advance if going to college is going to be worth it, so you don’t know if you should or shouldn’t go. Like I said, everyone has to decide for themselves. But for me, not only was it worth it, but it gave me the life I wanted. I wanted to be creative. I wanted to make a difference. I wanted people to know me, and I wanted to be self-sufficient. I didn’t like what the adults were doing, and I still don’t like what most of them do. But some of them were looking out for me, and I was lucky enough to find them when I needed them.
This inspires a silent but heartfelt thank you to those adults who looked out for me, all of them now gone…
I’m ALWAYS interested in what Gardner Campbell has to say, even when it’s in a realm of which I’m largely ignorant (e.g., Miltonics) or one where I have a different and possibly complementary take on the subject (viz musics). Gardner has a way of putting things that piques and niggles and provokes hmmmmmm, and my chief regret is that my responses don’t see the light of blogging day more often. Today’s case in point is his post on the origins and prospective utility of the RFC. Vintage Gardner, riffing like the bass player he [also] is:
extract an essential nubbin of metastuff (here it’s the tale of the origin of the Request For Comment, an essential integral to the evolution of ARPANET, instantiated by Steve Crocker) and labelling it memorably (“a new genre of professional writing”),
summarize the intellectual linkages and broader significance in a few trenchant phrases (“a praxis of intellectual discourse”) and offer cogent linkages to familiar domains
You can see the similarity to blogging right away. At least two primary Network Working Groups are involved: that of all the other people in the world (let’s call that civilization), and that of the network that constitutes one’s own cognition and the resulting “strange loop,” to use Douglas Hofstadter’s language…
and then challenge, in the nicest way possible, all of us to rethink what we do and how we’re doing it:
Why would we not want to produce such a record within the academy and share it with the public? Or are we content with the ordinary, forgotten, and non-riveting so long as the business model holds up?
and then close with a rumination on self:
I yearn for documentation conventions that will produce an extraordinary record of thought in action, with the production shared by all who work within a community of learning. And I wonder if I’m capable of Crocker’s humility or wisdom, and answerable to his invitation. I want to be.
My admiration for Gardner’s Way is unbounded and perpetually renewed with each post at Gardner Writes. AND the bookshelves chez my splendid otium are incremented when the Brown Trucks roll to bring me the volume he’s mentioned…
I dunno how healthy it is to read a lot of ‘dystopian’ fiction (or non-fiction, for that matter), though I guess I’m pretty much guilty of participation in that schadenfreudian excess. Stefan Raets’ review of Will McIntosh’s Soft Apocalypse catches the poignancy very well:
The real sadness of Soft Apocalypse is seeing normal people operating under the illusion that life will still go back to what it used to be. They try to hold down a job or complete a post-grad degree, and even though the world falls apart around them, the changes are too gradual for them to lose hope completely. It’s like watching rats in a maze, unaware that their paths are slowly being closed off around them and the maze is starting to catch fire at the edges. A soft apocalypse, indeed.
Several times a day I encounter yet another exemplar of the decline of, well gosh, pretty much everything in civic life: Nazgul politicians, vapidity of mass media, venalities great and small, eduscams, etc. Here’s a masterful summary of the higher ed side of the malaise, via E.D. Kain’s Forbes blog. But WHAT is to be done?
This is pretty obvious, but I don’t think I’ve seen it so clearly stated:
Academic historians now write almost exclusively for one another and focus on the issues and debates within the discipline. Their limited readership —many history monographs sell fewer than a thousand copies— is not due principally to poor writing, as is usually thought; it is due instead to the kinds of specialized problems these monographs are trying to solve. Since, like papers in physics or chemistry, these books focus on narrow subjects and build upon one another, their writers usually presume that readers will have read the earlier books on the same subject; that is, they will possess some prior specialized knowledge that will enable them to participate in the conversations and debates that historians have among themselves. This is why most historical monographs are often difficult for general readers to read; new or innocent readers often have to educate themselves in the historiography of the subject before they can begin to make sense of many of these monographs.
…
The problem at present is that the monographs have become so numerous and so refined and so specialized that most academic historians have tended to throw up their hands at the possibility of synthesizing all these studies, of bringing them together in comprehensive narratives. Thus the academics have generally left narrative history-writing to the nonacademic historians and independent scholars who unfortunately often write without much concern for or much knowledge of the extensive monographic literature that exists.
(Gordon S. Wood “The Real Washington at Last” NYRB 9 Dec 2010)
