Let’s see. I think I remember how to do this….

There was a continental divide of sorts in my semester this spring, neatly marked by Spring Break. The Thursday before break, I did the Coleridge reading detailed in the preceding post. It seems to me now that I may have sensed how much was about to happen in the ensuing weeks. It would have been better for me to blog my way through it all, certainly; I know myself well enough to know that. Yet for reasons I’m still sorting through, I didn’t. I tweeted a good bit. I talked and traveled and presented and met. The blog, however, fell silent. Tending it in my mind, which I did every day, doesn’t count. But perhaps the fact that I did tend it every day, mentally at least, will be at least a little reassuring for anyone who wondered if something was wrong.

Fact is, a number of things were right, but I fell into a blogging trap. It happens sometimes. So that was then and this is now, and we move forward–well, sort of. I have some unfinished business to sort through and I intend to do it over the next few days. I’ll be jumping around in the chronology a bit, for which my apologies.

The stoppage began just after I did my talk at the University of British Columbia on “Computers as Poetry.” Here’s a page on Brian Lamb’s blog with an embedded webcast as well as many other viewing/listening options. As always, Brian is very generous with his praise and encouragement, for which I am eternally grateful. Cyprien Lomas, another ed-tech inspiration for many years, was also very warm, welcoming, and supportive; his introduction was humbling and deeply gratifying. My thanks also to Scott Leslie for his very kind and thoughtful remarks. Meeting Scott was a most soulful and satisfying experience. I sure hope we have some more face-to-face time very soon; I feel we’ve just gotten started and have some very cool places to go.

The whole experience was great for me, so why the stoppage? Hard to say, but I know that at least two factors contributed. One is that I wanted to do some justice to an overwhelming experience, which is my typical blogging trap. I wanted to do a fantastic post that would convey my gratitude, my excitement, my stimulation; I wanted to communicate soul and a head full of ideas. I also wanted to write a post on the process of writing the talk. It’s a peculiar talk in many respects, one of the most ambitious I’ve done. I confess that I felt a little self-conscious about it, both because it was pushing into new public territory for me, and because my love for poetry is very, very close to the essence of what makes me live and move and have my being. I thought that blogging about the process might help reduce the self-consciousness and reveal more to me about what I was going on about. I do feel as if there’s some interesting work to be done in this area and I feel I can contribute to it. (I owe Bryan Alexander some gratitude here as well: he heard a very early version of some of these ideas back in November, 2006 and encouraged me to push on.) So now I had two mother-of-all-blog-posts to do, both of which I was excited about, but both of which grew to Sisyphean proportions as time went on (as time is wont to do).

Well, enough of fatalism and Hades for now.

How did “Computers and Poetry” come to be? In outline:

• I tried out the “readers’ theatre” idea at the aforementioned NMC Regional Conference in 2006. I love the play of voices and will be trying this tactic again, even more intensely. I also got considerable inspiration from the Fear 2.0 presentation that Martha, Barbara, Barbara, Laura, and Leslie did at ELI 2008.
• I taught my New Media Studies course last summer (2007) and completely baked my noodle, as my son Ian would say. During that course I discovered Marshall McLuhan, a writer and thinker and artist whose sensibilities are hovering over “Computers as Poetry.” The whole thing threatened to become completely McLuhanesque at times, and it even became a bit of a struggle to keep my own voice sounding. A worthwhile struggle–fun, even–but I could feel the effort.
• As I prepared to teach the unit on poetry to my “Introduction to Literary Studies” students last fall (2007), I once again read the opening chapter in Mary Kinzie’s A Poet’s Guide to Poetry. This time, having come off of my “Digital Imagination” talk at James Madison University, as well as my conversation with Jon Udell on his “Interviews with Innovators” podcast series, my mind was prepared to see that much of what Kinzie says about poetry was powerfully analogous to what I’d been trying to say about my experience with computing, particularly networked computing. Then, when the invitation came to speak at UBC, I immediately accepted (of course) and told them my topic would be “Computers As Poetry.”
• Then, of course, all I had to do was write the presentation. Commit first, compose later; it’s a methodology.

In this case, I decided to write the presentation out. Lately I’ve been experimenting more with speaking from notes or even from slides, but for this presentation I wanted the words themselves to resonate a particular way, and I also wanted to frame the quotations very deliberately. The tradeoff is a little less spontaneity for a little more precision. Given the abstractness and even idiosyncracy of some of my approach here, I thought more precision might be helpful.

As one colleague remarked recently, this is not light listening. It’s not anecdote-driven, or particularly sparkling or entertaining. I wish it were a little more sparkling, frankly. Perhaps I’ll find a way to do that as it moves through more iterations. First I’ll have to listen to the whole thing again, something I’ve been a little reluctant to do. Like everyone, I wince when I hear my own stuff played back, though in my radio years I learned to get past the wince pretty quickly and move straight to the self-critique. This one’s a little tougher along those lines, however, given my hopes for the topic and my sense that I’m only at the beginning of what I want to say.

I suppose one is always only at the beginning of what one now knows one wants to say….

POSTSCRIPT: The experience really was overwhelming. Brian’s already blogged and Flickred about the record-shopping and jamming. (I’d never been in a rent-a-room band hotel before. There’s a novel there, or at least a short story.) I had lovely meals with Cyprien and his family and with Brian and his family. (Both Cyprien and Brian are formidable cooks.) I got to see some very beautiful land and water. And I had a truly great breakfast at Joe’s. Clearly I live a charmed life.

I was privileged to read several lyrics by Coleridge this past Thursday as part of the University of Mary Washington’s venerable “Thursday Poems” series. The idea is simple: gather on Thursday afternoon to hear someone read thirty minutes worth of poetry. No lectures, minimal commentary, mostly just great verse. My colleague and mentor Bill Kemp (of Kemp Symposium fame) started the series several years ago. For my money, it was a great accomplishment. My colleague (and fellow music- and poetry-lover) Eric Lorentzen has kept the tradition going with panache, and with deep devotion.

Coleridge’s poetry can be difficult to read, and certainly difficult to take in on one listen. I’m not sure how intelligible I make it in my reading here. I gave it my best shot, aiming for a climax with “Kubla Khan,” one of my favorite lyric poems, and then a graceful close with the beautiful “Frost At Midnight,” also a favorite of long standing.

I got through “Kubla Khan,” only a little disappointed by the fact that my timing was off and I didn’t have the minutes I needed to read the prose at the beginning of the poem, a story of a forgotten dream that I’m convinced is an utter fiction, indeed part of the poem itself. But never mind: “Kubla Khan” does just fine in its traditional form, and I had a great time reading it. Then I turned to “Frost At Midnight”–and encountered a huge surprise.

I had not read that poem aloud in public for decades, probably not since I was an undergraduate. I’d read it to myself many times since, and of course had read bits of it aloud here and there when I taught it, but not the whole thing, aloud, in public. As I read, I found the pent-up yearning inside the poet as he recalls his lonely boyhood got more and more intense inside my own spirit. The poet thinks of the longing he felt as he watched that film of ash on the grate, the fluttering “stranger” that portended a visit from … someone, and as I read the lines I felt something welling up inside me, too–an expectancy, a grief, an overwhelming hopefulness.

The scene in his memory ends The poet turns to look at his child who is lying in the cradle at his side. “Dear Babe,” the section begins. And as I read those two small words, I was overcome. I struggled through the rest of the lyric, unwilling to let it stop, and at times unable to keep it going.

I’ve decided to podcast the reading pretty much as it happened. You’ll hear a long pause at one point, and you’ll hear the evident emotion as I try to continue. I do make it to the end.

I worried a little about the people in the room, that they would think something was wrong with me, or my family, or otherwise. But there was nothing wrong. There was simply beauty, and love, all the way through. My thanks to STC for giving us this wonderful gift, this poem called “Frost At Midnight.”

I’ve turned off comments on this post. If you enjoyed the reading, please go read some Coleridge for yourself. There’s more where this came from.

And may all seasons be sweet to thee.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (21.9MB)

WFB in 1984, about six years after I met him. Photo from NY Times story here.

Strange but true: I shook this man’s hand. It’s strange because I never enjoyed the two or three episodes of “Firing Line” I watched when I was a high school debater and eager to learn more about the dark arts of competitive argumentation. I didn’t like the snark (I can do snark, I understand snark, I do not like snark). I didn’t like the shouting and posturing. I didn’t like the predictability of the side-taking and the uber-partisan politics. I didn’t like the way WFB’s voice seemed to come out of his mouth and his nose simultaneously. And at that time in my life, anything remotely resembling patrician would get my hillbilly blood boiling. (I’m still not real big on patrician, but I don’t tar all patricians with the same broad brush anymore.)

But it came to pass during my junior or senior year at Wake Forest University–I forget which–that William F. Buckley, Jr. was invited to speak on campus. For reasons I no longer remember, but probably related to my work at Wake’s NPR station WFDD-FM, I ended up backstage with Buckley in the green room before he gave his talk. I shook his hand and exchanged pleasantries as best I could given my age and my mixed feelings about the encounter. Standing before him, I found that Buckley had a great deal of presence in person, though unusually so: it wasn’t a matter of physical size or charisma or extraversion so much as it was a matter of still intensity and a preternatural alertness. He seemed to me to be completely undistracted. That I was the person in his visual field was both unnerving and weirdly compelling, as he was completely undistracted from me, when there was no earthly reason he should be paying anything but cursory, polite attention to a 20-year-old college kid who had no clear reason for being in the room with him at all.

I’ve often noted how distractable many folks are in conversation. Their attention will wander, and their eyes will follow, and for some reason it doesn’t matter that the thread is lost. Most of the time these folks don’t even notice their attention has wandered, which of course suggests their attention has wandered long before any explicit sign of the wandering appeared. But Buckley had none of those signs of distraction. Quite the contrary. As soon as we had finished our how-do-you-do’s, he began asking me direct, warm questions about who I was and what I did at WFU. I answered him. He asked more questions, not to interrogate me, but certainly not as a matter of small talk either. I was shocked to get the strong feeling from him that he actually cared about my responses and was learning from them. I found this a little confusing, but also bracing. I mentioned that I worked at the campus NPR affiliate. He asked me how I liked that, what I thought about NPR, what programming I enjoyed most, what my particular role at the radio station was, and so forth. There wasn’t a whiff of condescension in his manner or his questions.

We couldn’t have talked for more than ten minutes, if that. I never saw him again in person. I didn’t follow his career, and I haven’t read his books–though one day I may–and I didn’t watch “Firing Line” with any more frequency or enjoyment than I had before. Nevertheless, in the years that have followed I have often thought of that brief conversation, and how rare it is to be able to feel any authenticity of encounter in such a situation, and how great it was when I did feel it that evening. I think what I felt a little of in that moment was not only Buckley’s intelligence but also his talent for friendship, a talent that many have testified to in the stories I’ve read since his death last week. That’s why I may yet read his books, whether or not I agree with any of his political points. In that moment, he not only put me completely at my ease, he taught me that I must never lose faith in the possibility of authentic conversation, no matter how exotic or odd the encounter.

I’m too tired tonight to do any justice at all to this story, but I would like to note it and perhaps return to it another time.

Today in the 11:00 section of my Introduction to Literary Studies class the discussion was particularly rich and intense. At one point I was asking one student a series of questions about some of her own cognitive states as she was grappling with the indirection of parts of the discussion.  As I was trying to weave her own answers into the responses other students were offering to related questions, suddenly yet another student, two rows back, made a quick joke about “author-function,” recalling our discussion of Foucault. In that instant, I could see that the student two rows back had made a huge cognitive leap. It was quite a thrill to witness. The joke was an aside, not a formal contribution to the argument, but it was catalytic and breathtaking. In that moment, the student had realized that for critics of identity, our sense of self is the same as an “author-function.” Foucault had said as much earlier, but it was in the midst of a dense explication of his point. Judith Butler had argued something similar. Said resisted Foucault’s argument at the point of identity and agency. Long story short: the student’s quick joke made several connections in several directions all at once, and launched the class into an even higher plane than it had been before. It was, for me, a moment of high cognitive drama to watch her find that idea. And the class discussion that followed fed on that moment wonderfully.

I’d like to analyze the moment and the events leading up to it in more detail. For now, I suppose what sticks with me is how right until the moment of “Bingo!” things felt to me tentative, uncertain. I had a feeling of “better get back on track.” I put the feeling aside for a little longer than I was entirely comfortable with. That’s not always a successful strategy. Sometimes stirring the pot keeps it from boiling. Today, though, we got to an understanding of certain kinds of arguments about identity that I don’t think we’d have gotten to if I’d been more systematic. Hard to say.

I do know that at one point I said, “There’s thinking going on in this class!”  For so there was, and it was very exciting to be in it.

We finished the McLuhan video in New Media Studies today, and the students learned that MM had children (six, in fact) with a very charming and intelligent wife who both marveled at her husband and waxed rueful about his idiosyncracies. We learned that his son could not convince MM that in fact Brasilia was now the capital of Brazil. This TV special, hosted by Tom Wolfe, is quite the ride. Highly recommended for anyone with any interest in McLuhan. At this point, I’m going out on a limb and suggesting that nearly everyone should have some interest in McLuhan. I can’t believe that it’s been less than a year since I read him for the first time. So many gaps, so little time. Yet desire still cries, give me some more to read. (Secret handshake there for “Astrophel and Stella” lovers.)

Rock/Soul/Prog was a mixed bag today. Some folks are not yet on the bus. I know I shouldn’t worry so much; I know all will be well, and not all is up to me. Yet I also know that there’s energy, passion, commitment to burn in these students, and I know they and we will need it for the work now and the work ahead. I think last term’s class learned that a little later than was optimum, and I think there were some regrets. Every narrative has its own arc, and hope springs eternal–Thursday is another day….

I was shocked when two students from my Intro. to Literary Studies class brought me flowers. They said they were being nice to their teachers today. I confess: I melted. Am I weak, uncritical, unskeptical? Posterity will judge. The flowers are lovely and I was touched. I’ve tried hard this time to be as imaginative about the symbolism assignment as I can be. Perhaps the ideas of resonance I’m working on and with have helped push the effort a little farther along. Hard to say. So hard to get readers to pay attention to the texture and conceptual-tactile joys of language. Maybe it was the Twilight Zone episode that helped. “Walking Distance”–the carousel as symbol–try it at home and report back. What resonates?

Then at last to an orchestra rehearsal. I have a voice-over narration part in one of the pieces commissioned to celebrate Mary Washington’s Centennial. We were rehearsing in the band room tonight. It’s a small room, and the orchestra filled it. I stood next to the conductor. To my right, a young cello player drew dark-toned beauty from her instrument. Ahead, I could see the winds, and I focused on the flutes and bassoons, the two wind instruments I played back in the day. To my left, the violins. Back and to my right, the brass. A harp, a full percussion ensemble, a score spread on the conductor’s desk, a baton dividing time in the air. A room full of timbre, vibrato, popping articulation, melisma. I was taken back to those many late nights I spent rehearsing in my high school bands, in the Roanoke Youth Symphony, in my college’s wind ensemble and orchestra, to that huge sound that took me out of myself and into a much larger arena of being. I wish everyone who loves music could hear a performance from the middle of the orchestra. Surrounded by that sound, one cannot think of power as a merely cultural phenomenon….

Today’s Washington Post features an unusually fine article from Joel Garreau (registration required) concerning the ways in which cellphones have changed, and continue to transform, our lives as a species on this planet. Twenty-five years of cellphone technology have brought us to the point that Google CEO Eric Schmidt can say, “Eventually there will be more cellphone users than people who read and write. I think if you get that right, then everything else becomes obvious.”

The article is full of insightful quotations and balanced judgment. There are the expected laments for lost privacy, for intrusive conversations in public spaces, but they’re contextualized in a much larger and more thoughtful analysis than I usually see. I’m especially impressed with the way in which Garreau has understood the intimacy of human contact represented and enabled by cellphones.

No educator can afford to overlook or downplay the ways in which cellphones are changing civilization on personal and global scales. It’s hard to imagine a technology in which microcosm and macrocosm are so tightly linked. We should have better ways inside the academy to think about these changes with our students, and to create within the possibilities these technologies afford us.

Here’s the way the article ends:

[Robert] Wright muses about adults in this new world: “An organism only gets to new levels occasionally. I wonder, has it ever seemed to any other generation that this is just a different world than the one you knew in adolescence?”

This is not the hyperbole of a techno-utopian, though some may say that “new levels” is too optimistic. The extent and character of the change, however, should not be in doubt.

Northern Voice 2008 comes to a jubilant end. (Maybe I’ll be lucky enough to get there next time-please, please, please.)

Barbara Ganley decides ’tis not to late to seek craft a better world.

In “The Medium is the Message,” Marshall McLuhan writes, “The serious artist is the only person able to encounter technology with impunity, just because he is an expert aware of the changes in sense perception.”

This gathering of inspired and serious artists, this serious artist of the blogosphere and beyond making her own way through her vocation: oh brave real school, that has such people in it! (and never mind Prospero’s cynicism). Tonight I hope I will see and hear them in my dreams.

The Intro. to New Media Studies class today was pretty explosive. I had assigned excerpts in The New Media Reader from McLuhan’s Gutenberg Galaxy and The Medium is the Message. I was up this morning about 5, reading some insightful and tremendously inspiring blog posts from the class. A couple of the posts were especially provocative, hortatory, probing. As it turns out, there was one highly engaged post I couldn’t understand fully. On the way in to school, I puzzled over what had led the student to make what I was fairly certain, but not altogether sure, was a mistaken identification of one of McLuhan’s references. I concluded that McLuhan’s reference to Coleridge must have been the thing the student couldn’t quite pinpoint. As I considered what I thought to be the mistake and a probable cause, it occurred to me that the mistake actually pointed to a deep and important connection that I should consider more carefully than I had. In other words, what I thought to be the student’s mistake, and my own attempts to diagnose its cause, stimulated my thinking in some very fruitful ways, to the point that I couldn’t wait to get the conversation started.

When I got to class, I asked the student for clarification, and as soon as the student realized the mistake, the student became embarrassed. I was dismayed by the embarrassment and tried to tell the student how thought-provoking and rewarding I had found the experience of grappling with the question of whether a mistake had been made and if so, how. The student replied with more embarrassment. In my ardent attempts to frame the mistake as a portal, I finally blurted out, “Penicillin was a mistake!” and then carried on with some reflections on how we must trust each other with our mistakes. We must be willing to open our minds to each other as we learn, and endure our mistakes, and be alert to the possibilities of learning that mistakes can reveal or even inadvertently stimulate. I said to myself how terrible it was that schooling had kept mistakes from being turned into opportunities while the learning was taking place. What messages have the designs of schooling sent to me, and to my students, when the rightful desires for accuracy and precision become massive inhibitions that block the revelations that are one or two steps away?

I hope the penicillin story was helpful. I followed it up with one of my favorite aphorisms, from Pasteur: “chance favors the prepared mind.” I thought again how vital trust is for any community, but especially a community of learning. I hoped against hope that the student understood how grateful I was for a risk, a mistake, and an opportunity for deeper engagement with the essay.

We’ll see.

EDIT: Re-reading this post, I see I left out one of the more interesting small ironies: I was mistaken about what had caused the student’s mistake. It wasn’t the Coleridge reference, it was confusion over the name Adam Smith. But behold another portal! My search for a plausible error-diagnosis led me astray in terms of the student’s mistake, but led me on quite effectively to focus my attention on a passage I’d not yet fully mined. There’s some elasticity of inquiry here, as well as a willingness to be entertained and instructed by one’s own great big floppy clown shoes. I’m working on loving my clown shoes and following where they lead, when I have the patience and grace for it.

So write Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg.

Corollaries:

An introduction to New Media Studies is a metacourse.

The third pitch we throw had better be a metapitch.

The metalevel is the most generative level, the most frustratingly inexact level, the most emergent level, the level where experts and beginners can have interesting meetings. It can be a wide-eyed level, an untethered level, a level where imposters run amok by asking pseudo-profound questions. But each level has its irresponsible party-crashers. The levels below the metalevel have their own versions of irresponsibility, not least the droning mediocrity of lockstep apparatchiks.

I always thought the metalevel was where professors lived. Sometimes we do, I suppose. Other times it seems the level that professors protect for ourselves or our disciplines. Still other times it seems the place that “theory” pretends to go while always already stopping one step short. And finally, it seems the place that goes away in the press of academic production day-by-day. Articles must be written, courses must be managed, service must be done: who has time for the metalevel? And isn’t there something terribly unsophisticated about anyone getting excited about the metalevel? Self-awareness is more useful for sophisticated self-congratulation than for readiness to go out onto that unknown plain with the Red Crosse Knight, Una, the dwarf, and the donkey.

I want to extend the metaphor, but that will need to wait for tomorrow.

A too-brief follow-on to the previous post:

• I would much rather see learning objects in a container like David Wiley’s course than in any CMS (I refuse to call them LMS’s–just my little gesture of protest) I’ve ever seen, for all the reasons everyone’s pointed out.
• That said, I am still not enthusiastic about the “content” and “resources” I’m seeing here. I wish I were more excited. Four years ago I probably would have been. And yes, I understand that incrementalism is valuable, and that taken together the elements here constitute a significant advance. I suppose I’m wishing the steps had been taken in a different direction.
• I see that the course feeds out. But what feeds in to this course?
• Honestly, for resources that simply feed out, I’d much rather listen to a podcast of a really good lecture, or even a YouTube video of a great presentation, than see a set of links or an outline of a lesson. The links and the lesson are valuable, too, and I’d much rather see them exposed like this than sitting behind a Blackweb wall. But it’s the human context that I want to see, hear, experience.
• Maybe it’s the word “content” that gets me restive. I want to see content that’s more responsive to the medium. And I don’t think that such content necessarily replaces books, or essays, or any of the things we experience in schooling now. I think the digital medium, and the digital imagination, moves us off default positions and into a much more intelligent place from which to choose and craft the experiences we want to lead our students through–and to equip them to choose and craft those experiences for themselves. (Both are necessary, in my view–but I’ve written about my concerns about a completely learner-centered paradigm before.)
• As I understand it, learning objects did not really catch on for precisely this reason: a resource without a rich context is difficult to adopt, and not terribly attractive to a faculty member who rightly or wrongly believes that she or he is being paid to develop materials reflecting her or his own expertise and judgment.

Most of all:

I’m still finding my way with all this stuff myself. But I have a strong sense that we need to get to Alan Kay’s vision of the computer as an instrument whose music is ideas, and I don’t see this paradigm getting us closer. I could be wrong. Help me understand! It pains me to think that any part of the conversation would turn bitter.