Dr. Elizabeth Phillips in her office in Trible Hall at Wake Forest University. I’m not sure when the photograph was taken, but this is how I remember her from my first class with her in the fall of 1975. Whatever I say here will be too little or too much or not quite right. I persevere in the saying because of the light Elizabeth Phillips shared with me, and shares with me still.

Dr. Phillips died last Tuesday night at the age of 89. Here is her obituary. Here is a news story about her death. (Edit: the second link is now broken.) She was born the same year as my mother. As it happens, she died in the same hospital where my mother died almost nineteen years ago, Baptist Hospital in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Now I have lost two mothers, for Elizabeth Phillips was surely my intellectual and academic mother. To say that she inspired me to become an English major is to say far too little. Elizabeth inspired me to think that there was a place in school for someone like me, someone lost in wonder and and confused by his own relentless exuberance, someone who loved ideas but kept veering from the analytical to the figurative in his work, someone who had given up on the idea that studying literature in a classroom could be anything much to savor. She not only inspired me, she welcomed me, encouraged me, corrected me, and was my first and deepest lesson in what it means to be an intellectual.

I remember the room where I first heard her speak.  No one in my immediate family had been to a four-year liberal arts university or college. I had no idea what to expect. After that class, I left the room feeling dizzy, giddy, elated, and not a little anxious, for everything had changed, and I knew I had to at least try to be answerable to that revelation.

Elizabeth Phillips always gave me the courage and desire to be answerable. She was an extraordinary teacher whose “pedagogy” consisted of intense thoughtfulness, challenging material, a willingness to let us witness how deeply the literature mattered to her.  I was asked recently if I had thought about just how Elizabeth Phillips worked her magic in the classroom. Of course I had thought about it. I think about little else when I try to do my best in the classroom. But how exactly had she done it? I had no complete answer. She read beautifully. She had a wonderful sense of humor: sometimes a line of poetry would begin with a throaty rumble and build to quavering glee. She was smart as a whip and curious about everything. She knew me by heart. She never once coddled me and never once turned me away. She introduced me to verbal art with a level of intense, total engagement that I had never known before and have rarely seen since. She trusted my instincts and taught me to trust them too. I took every course I could from her. Is that a methodology? I am skeptical it can be so reduced. All I can tell you is that of course Elizabeth Phillips brought the literature to life for us. But she also let us see how, and to what extent, and with what consequences, literature brought her to life for us. This without a whiff of the maudlin, the confessional, or any cloying insistence that she was “one of us.” How could she be one of us? There was only one Elizabeth Phillips.

Once when my mother came to visit me, I asked her to come with me to Elizabeth Phillips’ class. My mother and Dr. Phillips liked each other and asked about each other for the rest of my mother’s shortened life (my mother died of leukemia in 1989 at the age of 69). Not everything about my college education strengthened my ties to my family, but Dr. Phillips could strengthen any bond, and the connection between these two mothers of mine filled me with hope for a future I’m still trying to work toward.

In memoriam, I offer five items. One is a tribute to Elizabeth I was privileged to contribute to a whole series of such tributes at a luncheon in her honor in May, 2007. Elizabeth was in the audience, so I take some comfort in knowing that she knew, as precisely as I could articulate it, how I felt about her and what she had meant to me. I share this tribute with you so that you will know it too.

Following the video, I have put up four lyrics from a set of poems my dear friend and college roommate Michael Thomas and I recorded Elizabeth reading in the summer of 2005. I am very grateful to Michael for arranging this occasion. These readings are extraordinary testimony to the depth and power of Elizabeth’s poetic and critical sensibilities. I hope they give you at least some idea of what was so compelling about her, and what we have lost now she is gone from this earth.

The first poem is Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Dirge Without Music.”

The second is Theodore Roetkhe’s haunting villanelle “The Waking.”

The third is a great poem about faith in the here-and-now, Marianne Moore’s “What Are Years.”

The fourth is the conclusion to Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” and it will explain part of the conclusion of my tribute to Elizabeth in the video above.

Lux aeterna.

Inspired by Alan’s post–and amazed he’s not in a coma after the high-energy marathon of the NMC annual conference just concluded–I offer my own Wordle del.icio.us tag cloud. Jonathan Feinberg has built a compelling visualization tool that can generate a tag cloud from del.icio.us or a word cloud from any text. (I just saw an amazing Wordle made from Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech.) Because the image is more interesting–elegant, pretty, intriguing–it’s actually more informative, at least in my view. The emotional design bespeaks a fellow netizen with a deep understanding of the beauty of mutual augmentation.

Thanks as always to the big dog for the link.

In the mid- and late 1960’s, Charles Marowitz directed an interesting remix of Hamlet called “Collage Hamlet.” The technique, according to Marowitz, borrowed from Burrough’s cut-ups. It’s also eerily prescient of contemporary remix/mashup culture. I saw excerpts from his production in the A&E Biography episode on Hamlet. I wish I could see the whole thing.  (Digression: I’ve got a personally taped and now digitized copy of that A&E episode, but it seems otherwise unavailable. A&E appears to have bought the show’s content from the BBC–Melvyn Bragg narrates much of the material–and simply provided a Peter Graves “wrapper” consisting mostly of obvious remarks and bad puns. Perhaps A&E didn’t buy the retail video rights, thus accounting for the absence of this episode from their other offerings. A pity! I find it very useful in my intro. to lit. studies classes.) In any event, I was googling ’round today for information on “Collage Hamlet” as I was viewing Henry Jenkins’ closing keynote at the 2008 NMC summer conference. Jenkins was describing,  and showing footage from, a kind of remixed Moby Dick, and “Collage Hamlet” popped into my mind as an early analogous example of the technique.

Googling didn’t lead me to the footage itself–yet–but I did find an article Marowitz wrote that included his thoughts on the production. Here’s the citation:

• Notes on the Theatre of Cruelty
• Charles Marowitz
• The Tulane Drama Review, Vol. 11, No. 2 (Winter, 1966), pp. 152-172
• Publisher: The MIT Press
• Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1125194

If you have JStor, the links above should take you to the essay. If not, I hope your library has The Tulane Drama Review.

I’ve only dipped in to the essay so far, but Marowitz is marvelously articulate (another demonstration that media literacy must include verbal fluency as well!), and a section called “Contact” seemed especially rich to me as an evocation of the tight-knit, even telepathic sense that grows among members of a true community. Marowitz writes:

The building of company-sense demands the construction of those delicate vertebrae and interconnecting tissues that transform an aggregation of actors into an ensemble. A protracted period of togetherness (at a rep, for instance) creates an accidental union between people, but this isn’t the same thing as actors coiled and sprung in relation to one another-poised in such a way that a move from one creates a tremor from another; an impulse from a third, an immediate chain-reaction. Contact doesn’t mean staring in the eyes of your fellow actor for all you’re worth. It means being so well tuned in that you can see him without looking. It means, in rare cases being linked by a group rhythm which is regulated almost physiologically-by blood circulation or heart palpitation. It is the sort of thing that exists between certain kith and kin; certain husbands and wives; certain kinds of lovers or bitter enemies.

This idea of “ensemble” (perhaps sans “bitter enemies,” but who knows?) is at the heart of what I most value about communities of learning. It’s hard to get there, but some things I’m learning about priming and emotional contagion from Daniel Goleman’s Social Intelligence are convincing me that we can make a much nearer approach than we are currently doing. And I’m more convinced than ever that it is this kind of resonance (Goleman says the term of art is “empathic resonance”) we should be striving for, what our processes should foster, what our learning spaces should support, what our curricula should inspire. Cognitive diversity can actually serve this resonance, so long as that diversity is not simply about contention or sorting or anything but humility and gratitude for the humbling magnificence of the gifts we share.

Goleman’s book gives the lie to the idea that we are all locked away inside a cogito. Turns out there’s massive evidence that we can’t help sharing the feeling of our experience, as the feeling of our experience, our psychic responses to experience, are indeed written all over us.

Goleman thinks that online communication actually deprives us of social intelligence. I concede the dangers, but must also insist that online communication (blended, typically, with periodic face-to-face meetups) have provided for me an extraordinary growth of the “delicate vertebrae and interconnecting tissues” Marowitz says are essential to company-sense. No, online alone is not enough, just as books and painting and sculptures and movies and concerts are not enough. But vertebrae and interconnecting tissues are also not enough. No one’s saying they are. But they, like the artifacts and networks I hurriedly list above, are essential for support, for nourishment, for imagination.

Hi-tech vs. Hi-touch? Bah. A false dichotomy. Try “blood vs. bone” to see how silly such dichotomies can be.

There’s also something to juxtapose here with Bruner’s idea of “learning episodes,” but that will take even more mulling.

EDIT: I bet a few folks will see “company sense” and think “corporation sense.” But the word “company” need not simply be “what the man owns and operates,” whoever “the man” is. The company is the ensemble, the troupe, the dramatis personae, the group of companions. Companions, those who break bread together. What is it about taking nourishment together that knits those connections? We eat as individuals, but gathering together to feed ourselves we somehow also nourish the company.

Milton: Where full measure only bounds excess….