This I like, very much:

Sometimes I share [Perry] Miller’s frustration that the genre of “essay” has so much disappeared from academe. Much could be gained if scholars, drawing on accumulated moments of instruction and reflection, could feel free to venture forth without the fear of loss. Let me venture, with no scientific proof, that academics rarely refer to their shorter works as “essays” any longer. While passing each other in the hallway, colleagues are more likely to refer, alas, to this or that “piece.” They are even more likely to refer to an “article,” which like “piece” is a reifying noun. Both names make scholarship sound like an article/piece of clothing, rather than the nervous but exhilirating process of dressing for a safari.

These are particularly brave words from a grad student in the thick of a dissertation. They also serve as a salutary reminder of the way in which this new (or new/old) genre of blogging may help to shake up the industrial model that currently shapes much of education.

Thanks, Caleb.

Johns Hopkins grad student Caleb McDaniel has written a very intriguing and persuasive essay in Common-Place on historical analogues for blogging. McDaniel’s argument makes a strategic move away from writers and toward readers-who-write, a move I have found very helpful in trying to make sense of canon debates as well. Favorite pull-quote of the moment:

And despite our differences from antebellum readers, the central challenge for us, as it was for them, is not how to gain access to an abundance of information, but how to decide what information to acquire and which associations to make. In real terms, bloggers do have access to more information than nineteenth-century readers did, but there is only so much information that any one reader can digest, so the problem for both still becomes what to read and how to read it.

McDaniel’s essay goes a long way toward explaining the blogosphere’s fascination and compelling power for me, although I’d expand its parameters beyond print culture (as I suspect McDaniel would too). It really is an Engelbartian augmentation of a practice as old as civilization itself. The interesting question that follows, for me at least, is whether the difference in degree made possible by high-speed networked computing amounts to a difference in kind as well. I’d argue the answer was yes in the case of the printing press, and that it’s also yes in the case of the Internet. How to understand and constructively use the difference is then the next question.

McDaniel’s essay is available online, for instant scholarly gratification. Thanks to The Chronicle of Higher Education for the initial story.

The BBC links to video taken by passengers and passersby just after the London bombings last week. There’s some distant footage of the wounded and, perhaps, the dying, but thankfully nothing so clear or sensational that it would be appealing to voyeurs.

Surprisingly, some of the most compelling video is not of carnage at all. Much of the footage depicts people calmly evacuating Tube trains. One clip has audio from the train driver urging calm. I am deeply moved by the shots of people who are simply walking to safety. There’s no panic, just resolution. I’m sure there’s fear and confusion and all the swirl of dread one can imagine. It may be that other footage shows more of this response. The clips I’m seeing, though, offer a humbling portrait of human courage.

The tone in this lyric is tricky. Not because it’s ambiguous: the anxiety and grief are palpable throughout. No, the tone is tricky because even in the keening pitch of sorrow, the poet sends the emotion through very tangled syntax that demands careful attention, and such syntactic manipulation seems somehow antithetical to a rush of emotion. The result is a curious and difficult mix of cerebration, terror, and frantic love, with a dash of anger at the beloved for the death she might well suffer soon.

A curiously and complexly wrought poem, then, that’s also nearly beside itself with emotion. It may reflect Donne’s grief over his wife Anne’s illness, or it may be written for someone else at another time in his life. The fever in question could be the result of childbirth, or infection, or any number of other mishaps. It could all be a dramatic construct, no less authentic for being fictional. But something tells me there’s biography here: “A Feaver,” by John Donne.

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This one’s a toughie. As in “Sweetest Love,” Donne imagines every parting as a kind of death. True to form, he takes that “death” as another chance to analyze what it means to be in love. Parting is a kind of test case, then, that allows him a peculiarly intense opportunity for reflection. And the reflection in this case turns to the confusion of selves within a love: confusion in the sense that the two lovers become one, and in the sense that a certain wounding loss of identity also occurs. Donne’s cerebrations are hard to follow, but with some patience and persistence the reader may find that Donne describes very well the power and vulnerability that accompany love. One feels wholly given over to something greater than oneself. At the same time, one feels disintegrated, open to pain and betrayal, almost helpless. There’s more than a hint of bitterness at the end of the poem, but it comes in so late that the earlier analysis (and, oddly, exuberance) doesn’t get eclipsed by it, at least for me.

Here’s “The Legacie,” by John Donne.

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Interesting survey; I’ll be curious to see the final results in July. Apparently one can change one’s responses all the way up until the end. I don’t believe I’ve seen that feature in a survey before. (Perhaps my survey chops are just not what they need to be.)

You can take the survey yourself by clicking on the graphic above.

I should try to find a musical setting of this poem, if not for the podcast (it’s not “podsafe” music, I’m sure) then for the class I’ll teach in the fall. For all his intellectual fireworks, Donne can be intensely lyrical, as I hope my reading demonstrates. He’s never just lyrical, or not for long, but the moments of verbal sweetness do persuade me that he chooses his more angular, dramatic style deliberately.

This is a love poem that returns to Donne’s favorite playground by the end: the mind, both in the sense of “intellect” and of “imagination. ” This poet might say, “I think, therefore I love.” Or perhaps it’s the other way ’round. In any event, I hope you enjoy “Song: Sweetest Love, I Do Not Go.”

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The Frye Institute sent me into a deep, deep mull. That’s an excellent thing though hard to manage in some respects. The preceding post came from my center and I’m reluctant to move it from the top of the blog. At the same time, it needs to take its place in the timestream if the words and the parting command and the comments from people I grew to love are to be realized. So there’s another message in a bottle, tossed from the riverbank, sent to the sea.

I hear that the sea refuses no river.

Thank you, friends at Frye. Thank you, friends at UMW. Thank you, friends from other cities and nations. Especially, thank you my family, for supporting me all this time, and for the gift of those astounding two weeks, and the gift of all the weeks and months and years ahead.

I’m back.

In the waning moments of one of the most remarkable days of my life, I set this down as a reminder of the answer I received:

I believe real school is possible.

I believe I am discovering a community, here and at home and elsewhere on this planet, that can preserve, renew, and re-imagine real school in higher education.

I believe I can help these efforts, both as myself and as part of this community.

I believe I must help. This is my vocation.

I will hope, with “a heart full of grace” and “a soul generated by love.” This too is my vocation.

Remember this.

It’s been quite a week.

We’re on break now; classes resume Monday morning. Some of us have gone home, some have had their families join them here, some are staying through the weekend and doing work or sightseeing or combinations of both. If it doesn’t get rained out, I’m going to a Braves game this afternoon with some Frye folk. This morning I hope to get some more work done on a podcasting article I’m writing.

The break allows me to begin to take stock of what I’ve learned, whom I’ve met, and the new horizons that are becoming visible. The break is also a free-form serendipity field. This morning’s breakfast, for example: I went to the dining room with an article to read, not expecting to find anyone there from Frye, or at least not the critical mass that instantly forms after each session as we proceed from a mind-bending class to refresh ourselves at the buffet. But then serendipity struck. A small group of seminarians formed quite casually. The talk began. By the time it ended about two hours later, we had covered Plato, AI, the Book of Kells, kennings, Gothic, the military and war-gaming, organizational experiences, the uses of analogy in education and understanding generally, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, video art, manuscripts of silver ink on purple parchment, spell-checkers across variants of English usage (specifically Australian and U.S.) and the subtly enforced convergences of orthography that can result, tablet computers, Bonnie Raitt, Fredo Viola, schools of education, mind-mapping, haptic and ergonomic considerations in hardware, software, and fountain pens, gluggy rissoto, note-taking in journals, mind-mapping both free-form and software-enabled, settling in one spot vs. moving around, conceding vs. considering, microcues in film directors and in contextual learning generally, Stanley Kubrick, the Zone of Proximal Development, IT Conversations, prisoner dilemmas, the way medieval monks would describe good light by saying one could see to crack lice even at midnight, first contact stories, human beings considered as a species, cats and curiosity, cats that are more like dogs than cats (including a Burmese that would play fetch), leaded glass eggs and the trouble they cause going through airport security, rearranging furniture, tolerant spouses, karaoke, low-tech tech, OS X, and I’m positive I’ve left a great deal out.

All that and a Belgian waffle too. A good morning and a fine example of what Bruner calls consciousness-raising about the possibilities of communal mental activity. Part of me wishes I could record these moments more fully, in words or video or audio. Part of me understands that I myself will be the record of the moment, in the sense that these interactions are writing (or revising) parts of me into being, and in very interesting ways. I suppose I am the notes I’m taking. That’s one way to think about real school.