Quite a philosophical romp this time, as well as an unusually long ADAD podcast: upwards of fifteen minutes (you have been warned). The poem takes up most of that time, though I confess I found myself warming to the explication as I went along. You may be the judge of whether that process produces more light than heat.

Responding to a private email from Andrew T. in Monash, I comment on the issue of two ways of reading Donne’s poetry: for the syntax, and for the line. Today’s poem doesn’t force that choice quite so starkly upon the reader as some other of Donne’s lyrics do, but even at that a tension remains between trying to make sense of Donne’s syntax (which weaves, sometimes tortuously, from line to line) and emphasizing Donne’s lines, principally by a) signalling the line’s end and b) giving a little more weight to the end rhymes. Before tonight I had been trying hard to read for syntax, reasoning that Donne was so difficult that reading for the line would make the reading less intelligible. Andrew’s email made me rethink that strategy, and indeed if a short enough lyric presents itself, I may try reading both ways and invite (copious) comment on the results.

C. S. Lewis distinguished two types of poetry recitation: the Bard (edit: no, he calls it “Minstrel”) and the Actor. The Bard, at its bardiest, is something like the heavily incantatory recitation of a W. B. Yeats, as in this excerpt from “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” The Actor does not treat the poem as an incantation, but is likely to de-emphasize or even ignore the formal aspects of the verse in an effort to get to the sense. As Lewis argues, and as Andrew reminds me, these are extreme positions. Moreover, any lover of poetry (will the guilty parties please raise their hands) must admit that the formal aspects of the verse are inextricably tied to the semantic weight of the verse (or, indeed, vice-versa).

The matter becomes extremely difficult at time in Donne, whose “strong” lines (as they were called by older critics) are at times metrically crabbed or metrically ambiguous. Reading for the form can obscure the sense if one is not careful. Ah, but such care is no doubt part of what Donne sought to encourage by writing as he did. Keep the music, the polemic, the arch self-awareness, and the zealous intensity all in a carefully taut matrix. Something like life.

Martha Burtis once did some very smart and thoughtful (and poetic) work on understanding Donne’s reflexivity by means of the literary theorist and linguistic philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin. I wish she’d put her paper online. It deserves to be read again.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (11.4MB)

IBM’s ThinkPad X41 Tablet PC is here, if not quite in the shops, and one early review (at MIT’s Technology Review) is quite positive.

I’ve been a tablet fan for some time now, and I welcome IBM’s entry into the market. I’m also very intrigued by the biometrics built in to this model. Apparently the fingerprint recognition works quite well and obviates the need for a series of logon passwords. (Should give hand-washing a boost as well.)

Ernie blogs on an interesting piece by Laura Turner, “20 Technology Skills Every Educator Should Have.” As Ernie notes, Turner’s links point to valuable (and, I hope, persistent) resources and tutorials for understanding and acquiring these skills.

Turner describes the list as “comprehensive,” which is a little bolder than I would be given the rapid pace of change in the digital world, but it’s certainly a fine starting place. I might replace the PDA item with one on multimedia authoring, though. Are there certain core concepts involved with manipulating audio, video, and still images that could usefully be aggregated? Web 2.0 means we’ll have to answer that question sooner rather than later. Anecdotal evidence: this year my first-year students were markedly more web-pervaded than my fourth-year students. That doesn’t mean they were more sophisticated in their thinking, it just means their horizon of expectations was in a different place–a place we should be prepared to journey to ourselves. Quick, trivial, but perhaps telling example: many of my seniors didn’t know about Bananaphone, but most of my freshmen did. Why? Because the younger students live on, and in, the Web.

Not to be confused with “The First Anniversarie,” a completely different poem, “The Anniversarie” celebrates what I take to be the first anniversary of Donne’s marriage to Ann Donne. No one knows which, if any, of Donne’s Songs and Sonnets are addressed to or inspired by his wife, so perhaps I may be forgiven my speculation. Note that this perfect kingdom has two monarchs. Presumably they reign over each other, as well as over the faithful subjects who look to them as examples of a perfected love.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (4.5MB)

Of the many poems in Donne’s Songs and Sonnets, this is the only one written from the point of view and in the voice of the female beloved. Lyrical, pragmatic, accusatory, and poignant, this poem demonstrates Donne’s self-awareness as he imagines the charges his beloved could bring against him.

Enjoy.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (4.1MB)

University Channel is a Princeton project uniting a blog, webcasts and other video content from several universities, and now a podcast service. The recent, accelerating convergence of streaming, download, RSS, the blogosphere, and podcasting has coincided very nicely with this service’s official launch (the mission statement on their blog dates from December, 2003). I immediately ask, “is the University Channel podcast in the iTunes podcast directory?” The answer: yes. Search on “University Channel” and there it is.

Thanks to the Chronicle for the alert (subscription required).

There’s lots to argue about and mull over in this famously difficult lyric. My commentary advances one view, and I hope it’s coherent and plausible, but I’m sure it is not definitive. The enigmas will outlive us all.

Parallelism, or chiasmus? You be the judge.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (5.3MB)

Or, more accurately, Hugh Blackmer on a powerful enabler of real school:

It’s not that we need to find the one best way of presenting information, but that the presentation should be easily [re]configurable to suit the user’s needs, preferences, purposes. User Interface is surely as much a conceptual problem as a design problem or a matter of hardware contingencies.

The intersection of pedagogy/cognitive science with UI: X marks the spot, or one spot … a place to start digging, or building … arrange the metaphors like facets in a diamond, both to gather and scatter the light.

Can we find a Theory of Everything that preserves both the One and the Many? That’s the kind of question that makes a few of my readers gnash their teeth, and perhaps even charge me with “being literary.” Well, guilty: You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. (And I’m not even sure that’s a good song–but it’s salutary to have that line juxtaposed with another bit of truthtelling from Lennon’s work: “No one I think is in my tree; I mean it must be high or low.”)

Or maybe I need Walt Whitman: “Failing to find me at first, keep encouraged.”

Or perhaps Doug Engelbart, again, and always:

We do not speak of isolated clever tricks that help in particular situations. We refer to a way of life in an integrated domain where hunches, cut-and-try, intangibles, and the human “feel for a situation” usefully co-exist with powerful concepts, streamlined terminology and notation, sophisticated methods, and high-powered electronic aids.

I repeat myself to remind myself: a liberal arts education ought to be the best opportunity for imagining and crafting, privately and in community, just such an integrated domain.

My son taught me about fan fiction, an Internet genre I find fascinating–although the concept is more interesting to me right now than the examples I’ve seen. Doesn’t matter: if the idea is interesting, there’s bound to be some stellar instances.

Tonight I discovered the intriguing world of recaps, where people write long and detailed accounts of television episodes. These are not summaries or synopses. They’re chronicles. I’m only at the entryway, but it seems as if recappers (no doubt they have a cooler confraternal word for themselves) even compete with each other to see who can craft the most engaging and compelling recaps. One I perused included a running editorial/one-liner/aside commentary within the recap itself, sort of like a Mystery Science Theater 3000 without directing all the sarcasm at the episode. (These are fans, after all, not camp aficionados per se.)

Recaps aren’t remixes. So what are they? Short-story-izations? And how would we use literary theory either to analyze or account for them? (That’s a semi-facetious question.)

One set of recaps: House, M.D. at “Television Without Pity.” Note the report cards and pull quotes.

Steve Greenlaw sends me a link to a fascinating Wired column by William Gibson: “God’s Little Toys.” Here’s my response (query: why doesn’t Wired permit comments on their essays?).

My initial thoughts are two. Gibson’s right about God’s little toys. I feel exactly the same way about the audio work I’ve done with tape and now with the computer, and word processing has always seemed like magic to me. Gibson’s take on recombinant or remix culture is also very compelling. The problem here, as is always the case with remix evangelists, is that a weird implication emerges: in the future, there will be no authors, and no authority. Instead, mass-produced culture will magically be reformed by clusters of users into either compelling or faddish new stuff that we’ll all go “woo” for.

I don’t believe that for a second.

A person’s sensibilities will always be the most potent remix engine of all, and when those sensibilities filter, mix, and reforge a new creation, the world will turn its attention to that person. Not that group or that culture or that demographic. That person. Of course that person will have made his or her collage out of everything else in the world. That’s the way creativity has always worked, and must work. No one invents the material of the world or a culture or a language out of whole cloth. In this respect, remix culture is a sped-up and amplified version of what has been going on since civilization emerged. But it is not something new–and in fact this is a point that Lawrence Lessig always emphasizes when he advocates copyright reform.

The remix always makes something, and that something is not just a remix. The album is not dead. The song is not dead. (Terrible truth: mashups are often boring, and even the good ones are no substitute for the songs themselves–more like an interesting mini-essay on music.) The novel is not dead. The essay is not dead. The author is not dead. King Tubby and Lee “Scratch” Perry are one way to make art; they’re not the paradigm of the new and only way to make art. (The fact that Gibson names them–and that their names mean something in terms of identifiable practice–supports my point.) Audiences are not “passive” (what a very strange idea–where does that come from?), and they’re not going away. Gibson’s enthusiasm is understandable, but his argument is inconsistent with his own practice, and it does not do justice to the complexities of history or contemporary culture. Unless we can think more clearly about these issues, we’re just taking a ride on the Eternal Pendulum. (Like most teachers, I am officially committed to the belief that such pendulum-riding is not inevitable, though I understand its likelihood is always very strong.)

But this essay is still required reading, if only because Gibson blurs the usual boundaries between images, sounds, and text. That blurring may be the most significant practice to emerge from the new digital culture we inhabit. It’s also one that deserves more attention than it’s yet received. I’d like to read Gibson on that topic.