Today was not a terribly good day. I’m well, so far as I can tell, so that’s not it. I didn’t carry a ton of bricks around, at least not the kind you’d build a house with. I worked hard at some prep for tomorrow’s classes, some reading and Big Thinking and some video editing. Two scenes from Dog Day Afternoon, with each shot separated from the other so we can study the editing: the Leon sequence near the middle of the movie, and the climactic ending. (Mild enough not to be true spoilers, I promise.) I discovered that one student has not handed in the first reading exam. I wonder if emailing the student will work this time. It didn’t before, not really.

Maybe I’m just a bit toasty, a little fried. Maybe it’s almost a year since the last time I didn’t worry very much about an imminent viral threat. Almost a year since I ate at the local sublime Mexican restaurant just a couple of miles away, the one with great food but also, and now especially, a warm and friendly wait staff that always greeted us with extraordinary hospitality, the kind of welcome that would put a beautiful glow on a bad day and bring heaven itself to a rousing cadence after a good day. It all seems like a dream now.

I’ve had my ups and downs, but nothing like what many people have suffered. Still, the sense of futility laced with rage (and more bad swears than I’d want you to know about) keeps recurring. Two articles from the Atlantic help me mourn what the world has endured over the last year. They make me grateful, again, for the soul food that deep, honest, skillful writing can provide.

I’ve had so much trouble remembering certain things lately that Ellen Cushing’s “Late-Stage Pandemic Is Messing With Your Brain” came as a relief. It seems that going blank is going around.

Sometimes I grasp at a word or a name. Sometimes I walk into the kitchen and find myself bewildered as to why I am there. (At one point during the writing of this article, I absentmindedly cleaned my glasses with nail-polish remover.) Other times, the forgetting feels like someone is taking a chisel to the bedrock of my brain, prying everything loose. I’ve started keeping a list of questions, remnants of a past life that I now need a beat or two to remember, if I can remember at all: What time do parties end? How tall is my boss? What does a bar smell like? Are babies heavy? Does my dentist have a mustache? On what street was the good sandwich place near work, the one that toasted its bread? How much does a movie popcorn cost? What do people talk about when they don’t have a global disaster to talk about all the time? You have to wear high heels the whole night? It’s more baffling than distressing, most of the time.

That little coda in the last sentence says it all. I’m so very glad Ms. Cushing wrote that article, in that way, for us, now. It’s a terrific article in both senses of that adjective, and there are some new TikTok videos I’ll be checking out when I recover a few of my cerebral wrinkles. I want to read Ms. Cushing’s article again. I don’t want to forget about it. I record it here, now, to help me remember.

The other article is also about forgetting but even more about remembering, and being haunted by memory. It’s called “We Have to Grieve Our Last Good Days,” and it’s written by Julie Beck. Even the title calls to me, iambic tetrameter with a spondee at the end that’s both bracing and melancholy. The article makes it clear that even the lucky ones mourn and are worn away by this grief we share:

I find myself wanting to apologize whenever I show sadness. I’m incredibly lucky, and I know it. I’m not sick, I have a job, I live with a person I love whom I can touch. No one I know has died from the virus. I’ve lost nothing this year but the life I used to know. Which everyone else has lost, too.

But it’s too much, isn’t it? To carry this weight and politely pretend that it doesn’t make us stumble because others are carrying more? “What that does is set up a competition of whose loss is better and whose loss is worthy,” Devine said. “As if there is a finite amount of sadness in the world and you shouldn’t take more than your share.” She thinks that we can respect all the different losses people are experiencing without suggesting that they’re equal. “When we normalize and respect our own losses, that gives us the energy to respect other losses. When we’re stingy, that’s when we get into compassion warfare.” Those who’ve lost “more” resent those who’ve lost “less,” while those who’ve lost “less” may think they don’t have permission to mourn.

Our last times are losses, and they need to be grieved along with everything else. Boss suggested some kind of ritual: “Burn a candle; put a balloon in the air. Someone should be with you, or if they can’t be, tell them. The way we deal with grief is to share it with someone else. You dishonor it by not noticing it as a loss.” These small, private griefs add up: If we each lit a candle for each of our last times, the whole world would be on fire.

Many times during the last twelve months it’s seemed to me that the world is on fire, with a blaze that makes a mockery of candlelight. But there were terrors and injustices aplenty before. How is this different? Why has my brain turned to murk?

“Therapists told me that this grief can manifest in many ways we may not recognize as grief—anger, irritability, sleep disruption, anxiety, even digestive issues. And it can manifest as dwelling on the Last Good Day.”

Ms. Beck explains the concept of the Last Good Day in her beautiful essay. I commend it to you. In this season of Lent, the reminder that I come from dust, and to dust I shall return, feels less like a memento mori and more like the baseline I have to try to rise above each day.

See you tomorrow.

Building on this post:

I have a workflow for my synchronous Zoom sessions. It’s very much like a cinematic workflow–or at least the analogy is illuminating for me:

1. pre-production, in which I scout and gather the material, assemble my storyboards (my PPT slides), which in this case are also kind of a “script,” though I don’t write out what I’m going to say,
2. production, the live-in-the-studio synchronous session, with my PPT slides as a set of storyboards and my own riffing as what a director might do on location on the day of the shoot, guided by the storyboards
3. post-production, in which I take the Zoom recording, the “storyboards,” and the Zoom chat transcript and prepare them for “release,” i.e., posting to the LMS (yes, this part does involve an LMS, at least for now).

It occurred to me today, in large part because I read Jon Udell’s marvelous and re-inspiring back-to-the-future post, that when I do that post-production, it’s a little like what happens when a director and cast and crew look at what what used to be called “the dailies” or “the rushes,” the footage shot that day (or the prior day, back in photochemical times). It’s the raw footage that accumulates from a day’s work. It’s a way to assess what you’ve got, what you might need to redo, what you should plan to do next.

When I edit the Zoom sessions, then, and amass and prepare the associated materials for upload, I’m reviewing the “dailies’ from the day’s class meetings. And when I do that, I’m creating and encountering a massive feedback loop for myself, as I’m reviewing and revisiting the day’s teaching as well as the chat backchannel (sometimes so lively I can’t track it in real time) as well as all the things I thought I was going to do when I was in pre-production. As all that happens, I’m also casting my thoughts ahead to the next class, and already in my mind I’m drafting the continuity as well as the new materials for that next session.

It’s a much more mindful and continuous process than I can recall from pre-pandemic times, to the extent I can actually recall those times (it’s getting harder, as this article helps me understand). It’s a more immersive process. I also find that each day’s classes become more inspiring to prepare and also more exhausting to experience, though when I’m in the live session the adrenaline kicks in–and when the chat lights up during the session, I get very excited indeed. (The chat often responds to my excitement by becoming even more energetic–I love that.)

In sum, more of a ramble today, for which my apologies. But I wanted to get some of these ideas down, even in rough shape. (My blog posts are also “dailies” of a kind, I guess.) I recall Alan Kay’s maxim that we shape our tools, and then our tools shape us. I find the cinematic stages of my own experiments in online teaching have begun to do the same to me. It doesn’t feel like a rut at all–at least, not yet. Instead, it feels like I’m comprehending my own efforts better than I have to now. At the same time, I’m using my comprehension immersively, in a strange but rewarding loop, inhabiting my own cognition and creativity in a deeper and more extensive way.

All very meta, and sometimes more than a little exhausting. Also, exciting. Now showing on the Gardo Cinematech: Thought Vectors In Concept Space: A Teaching-Learning Odyssey. Now In Imax.

I’m delighted to share this piece with you, published today in Campus Technology online. Mary Grush has done several of these Q&A pieces with me, and I’m always very grateful for the opportunity. Mary has a particular way of asking questions that are invitational. She listens carefully to what I have to say, then asks follow-on questions that start to shape and focus my responses, just the way a good teacher can begin to elicit work from the student that’s sharper and more interesting the longer the questions continue. The result is better than anything I would have accomplished without that leading.

When Mary and I discussed the article, we remembered that it had been about ten years since our first conversation. Where has that time gone? In this case, for me it’s gone into a marvelously reciprocal relationship with a very gifted editor. Working with Mary has been one of the great delights of my post-2003 career–the career that took me by surprise. Perhaps the career that’s not yet quite done.

Thank you, Mary.

https://soundcloud.com/lschwart/mixolyread-into-e-drone?in=lschwart/sets/aurika

Live at the Visual Art Studio, September 6, 2019. Robin McLeod electric guitar, Louis Schwartz amplified acoustic guitar, Gardner Campbell bass, Dave Ellis percussion. Composition and recording: Louis Schwartz. Mastering: Gardner Campbell.

To date my only gig with Aurika. The regular bass player returned for the next months’ gigs, and just when it looked like a sub-spot might come my way again, it was pandemic time.

I have vivid memories of playing this night. The venue was small and the four of us were pretty tightly assembled in the corner next to the shop window that looks out on Broad Street, just a few blocks down from VCU. When you’re that close together, listening is not just listening, and getting the feel of a jam is not just a metaphor.

About 5:36 into the track something starts to happen. I heard something in Louis’ playing, a little arc of a plaintive melody. A little yearning moment. Robin was mirroring the arc in a descant. Dave started to leave more space for the melodies, focusing on the backbeat, and then did a quick little fill. And that’s when I knew, I felt it: I will help to shape this moment, now.

5:48. I start to go up chromatically, higher and higher, with more rapid notes. And as I do this, I hear that we have all heard what I have heard, and that we all know, right then, that we will shape this moment, now. Hammering ostinatos in the guitars, crushing tight chords, percussion focusing and reinforcing what I’m doing, up we go, and I hear it again: I will help to shape the end of this moment.

I play three long descending notes as Robin and Louis trill on either end of the hinged moment. Dave hears exactly what I’m doing, moves from one more measure of flurried notes to a strong and final

One

Two

Three….

Then a pickup eighth note and we’re back in.

6:12-6:13 or so, and the moment is done. Robin’s trills ascend and we follow.

I remember this moment happening. I remember the decisions I made, and when I made them, and yet it also sounds to me now as if my decisions were coming from somewhere else. It’s not just that we were all playing together, all listening together. I feel as if we all heard one thing, and by playing along, we transcribed what we heard into what we played. That seems a very fanciful description–very woo-woo, as I read it now. But you tell me: how can I have been there, and done that, and remember doing that, yet feel such a mystery about the agency of it all?

It was indeed an ecstasy, a standing beside myself.

I hope you can hear at least a little of that as you listen.

To Louis, Robin, Dave, to the Visual Art Studio, and to a warm September evening on Broad Street in Richmond, Virginia: my thanks. May we meet again in the aftertimes.

Let’s back up a couple of days, and review the last sentence of this comment. The words are Alan Levine’s.

Yes, they do. I keep thinking about these small acts, the good mornings and the readys and the proceeds and the one I asked them to do just yesterday in my film class: CUT! We were beginning the lesson on editing, which means we were going to learn about the most common way of joining two shots together: the cut. Turns out this powerful editing method is also nearly impossible to see, until you train your eyes–what my film students this term are calling their “film eyes”–to see them. (Any symbolic meaning there is purely intentional, but blame the universe, not me.)

I think about these small acts in at least two ways: filling the tapestry, and establishing ritual.

“Filling the tapestry” comes from Alfred Hitchcock, who spoke of this concept in an interview with Francois Truffaut. Truffaut had asked Hitchcock about a bystander in a particular shot, a woman at the side of the frame who was eating an apple. No lines, and no other action. Just eating an apple.

F. Truffaut: [Y]our pictures are very elaborate throughout….

A. Hitchcock: They’re elaborate in an oblique way; yes, they are.

F.T.: They’re so elaborate that it’s difficult to believe that these things just happen to be in your films. If so, they must be credited to a powerful cinematic instinct. Here’s another instance of what I mean: When [in I Confess] Montgomery Clift leaves the courtroom, he is surrounded by a hostile crowd of people in a lynching mood. And just behind Clift, next to Otto Keller’s lovely wife, who is obviously upset, we see a … woman eating an apple, and looking on with an expression of malevolent curiosity.

A.H. That’s absolutely right; I especially worked that woman in there; I even showed her how to eat that apple.

F.T. Well, what I’m trying to bring out is that these elaborate details are generally overlooked by the public because all the attention is focused on the major characters in the scene. Therefore, you put them in for your own satisfaction and, of course, for the sake of enriching the film.
A.H. Well, we have to do those things; we fill the whole tapestry, and that’s why people often feel they have to see the picture several times to take in all of these details. Even if some of them appear to be a waste of effort, they strengthen a picture. That’s why, when these films are reissued several years later, they stand up so well; they’re never out of date.

These small acts are a way of filling the tapestry. And of course by filling the tapestry, students begin to see that this required course, this course that fit their schedule, this course that they parachuted into willy-nilly and never thought for a moment would be anything other than coursework and a grade … might well be a tapestry. A tapestry that they have helped to fill.

The other way I have learned to think about these small acts is that they are rituals. Motifs. Reminders. The rituals locate us in time and space, especially for those moments in which we are together there. (For a synchronous Zoom meeting, we are certainly together in time and space even if we are not in the same physical room.) The rituals also give us a strong set of shared experiences that are not tasks so much as they are acknowledgments and preparations. Like a nod of recognition, or a smile at a neighbor as you go out to check the mailbox, or the greeting I used to give the folks at the pizza place where I’d get my lunchtime slice in the before-time, these are rituals. Some are small, and some are mighty. Some rituals transcend being, some concentrate being, and some do both. Rituals are both intimate and utterly transpersonal.

The key, as I have learned from my friend Louis, is kavanah. That’s the Hebrew word for ritual that’s fully inhabited, fully meant, and thus fully meaningful. Kavanah is the energy coursing through our good mornings and our readys and our intro music and our farewell gifts.

Do the students realize all of these things? I don’t speak about such things directly, or even hint at them much. I’m sure some of them never notice. I’m also sure some of them do … and I know for sure that I do. And if I’m the only one feeling the kavanah on a particular day, it’s still what I yearn to feel, because I know it makes me a better teacher.

So I ask for kavanah, and I seek to fill the tapestry, and I want us to do that together. I ask for a good morning. I require an avatar. And lately, I’ve come to insist that anyone who blogs in my courses must have a tagline for their blog site. We’re nearly at midterm, and there are still some students who have the default tagline on their RamPage: “Just another Rampages.us site.” I bet I’ve asked my students five or six times to change those taglines to something else. I’ve emailed them with instructions. I’ve been stern but kind, like Maria in The Sound of Music.

But the kids are alright. (I can call them “kids” at my age, can’t I? With affection, never with condescension. I often envy them, after all.) Many of them have already caught on. Many of them have learned from each other’s examples. And there’s time, plenty of time, for everyone to fill the tapestry. I won’t forget.

I’ve always tried to make the beginnings of my class meetings special, to set the stage for the learning encounter that will follow. When classes are separated by 10 minutes and students linger after class (as I welcome and hope they will), that sometimes means that the teacher I follow or the teacher who follows me in that physical location doesn’t have time to get the stage set the way we’d like.

With my online class meetings, that’s not a problem–one of the things I’ve come to love about teaching online.

So I begin admitting students into the Zoom space only after I’ve shared a screen with the title slide for the day. I choose a background for the title slide to set the tone for the day, intellectually or emotionally or ideally both. I also play a song or two so there’s music playing as the students become present in the Zoom space. I start it all up two or three minutes (or more, depending on the length of the song) before the time scheduled for the meeting, so students enter the immersive world of our meeting with the world already in place. Then, once we’ve pretty much all gathered together (I often wait a minute or two past the meeting start time, because I know it can take a few seconds to join the Zoom space), I greet the students with some (hopefully) lively patter, a bit of an overview of the day’s work, maybe a weather report in my radio voice if I’m feeling daffy. Finally, to get us properly started, I ask all the students to wish each other good morning or good afternoon or happy Tuesday (again, depending on my mood, and theirs) into the chat.

So we’re all together in the world that preceded our arrival, and we’ve all sent good wishes to each other in a way that would never be possible in a physical co-location, and we’ve got some music in our minds and a bit of a daffy welcome from the prof. Then there’s often some class business, reminders, etc. And then, when I shift gears into the main lesson for the day, I say, “so if you’re ready for (whatever it is we’ll be doing), please type ‘ready” in the chat.’ Almost always, I’ll tell them what a thrill it is to see that beautiful cascade of readiness (and reaaaddddy!!!!! and woohoo let’s go!! and whatever they feel moved to type) pour down the chat window.

Thus, mutually strengthened for the work ahead, we enter the lesson together.

As a bonus, the title slides from each lesson become a dandy scrapbook, a little souvenir of each meeting. I’ve taken to using these as a montage sequence in the little farewell video I make for the last day of class, the day we each bring to the class a digital “farewell” gift.

Here’s a little gallery of some recent title slides. Looking back, I see some are more graphically effective than others, but they all get the job done, at least. And when I make my little farewell montage for the last day of class, a little movie I run in Zoom (typically with a little fair-use song as a soundtrack), these slides, along with screenshots of RamPage sites and avatars from our discussion Forum, are a reminder of the journey we’ve completed. I can say farewell and, with each student’s avatar onscreen at one point or another, I’m rolling the credits too.

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It’s been bittersweet and a tremendous education reading Tom Woodward’s series of “Long Goodbye” posts following his departure from VCU’s ALT Lab for a new position at Middlebury College. I’m part of the story, in the early going anyway, so I can hardly pretend (and won’t try to pretend) I don’t have a personal connection to the ongoing narrative. But it’s also fascinating to read how Tom thinks about the work he’s done and the work he will now do in a new setting. It’s something like a memoir, something like a journal, something like a set of comments in an long piece of computer code. Maybe something like an operating manual, too, though Tom’s a fine teacher and understands that in the end no set of instructions offers simple answers to complex questions.

The most recent post outlines Tom’s philosophy of design for WordPress-based learning environments. It’s an extraordinary post, maybe the best look I’ve ever had at Tom’s conceptual frameworks, which is saying something given that I worked very closely with Tom for nearly three years.

Tom was the one who taught me the phrase “low threshold, high ceiling” as a way to think about platforms and affordances that offered powerful results right away but could be extended, deepened, and refined into much more complex and sophisticated environments if one had the skills and interest to do so. I do think one can learn to want to want things, so skills and interest can be developed over time, but it’s a long journey and people learn at different rates. It’s just that I wish we could develop a consensus about the need for that journey and that learning, as we’ve obviously done for readig and writing.

It won’t surprise you to know that I think of language as the quintessential “low threshold, high ceiling” medium in our lives. It also won’t surprise you that I strongly believe that facility (or literacy or fluency, pick a word) with language uniquely empowers one not only to communicate effectively but also to imagine one’s own being, and that of others as well, more profoundly.

The alternative would be to have a phrase book in your pocket with 100 easy-to-use phrases that describe common needs and desires. For the rest, you’d have to point and grunt, gesticulate somehow, etc.

And the thing about striking out on a hard but rewarding journey of learning facility with language is that you’ll also be learning more about all the things language does (some of them will surprise you) and all the things it might do (which is where your voice comes in). That’s the meta-layer I prize very highly in all learning. You learn something and at the same time learn something about what it is to learn that thing, about the deeper implications of that thing, about why it matters and how it might be more deeply and beautifully experienced. You learn facility with language and the world turns into a more high-definition experience. I think the high-definition world awaits our facility with language and does not result from it, but we don’t have to engage in a debate about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis to agree that there’s a unique richness of experience that one gains access to when one learns to read and write. And part of that richness is what happens when you’re able to share that experience with someone else, and they with you.

So when Tom puts this great image in his post, you might imagine where it takes my thoughts:

For me, having to work through the choices and complexity of something farther out to the right of that continuum means that one will learn not only how to make the Web do more intricate and sophisticated things, but also what “intricate” and “sophisticated” and “Web” mean in terms of this pervasive global light-speed telecommunications environment, a new medium. You learn how to speak Web without a phrase book. And because higher education never really made that leap of learning, and in many cases fought it, we have neither taught our students well nor set a good example ourselves regarding the most powerful communication medium our species has ever built, aside from writing and perhaps even language itself. And the real tragedy is that we might have, and we nearly did, somewhere around the dawn of the widespread Web in the mid-1990s.

I’m on record as saying the sweet spot is somewhere around that “domain of one’s own” area. I was challenged early on by folks who thought that asking people in general (let alone faculty) to run a server of their own was simply asking too much. Maybe that’s true. (I once gave a talk at a school that was running a Domain of One’s Own initiative, and as near as I could tell, only one of the faculty leaders actually had a domain of their own. Depressing but true.) But the core idea, then and now, was that until or unless people had to establish their own address on the Web, they would never feel at home there, and thus never feel empowered or responsible in the way that homeowners must perforce learn to be. To use Tom’s analogy, “you are in a rented apartment and you are not allowed to paint the walls. You can be evicted at any point for any reason and have no recourse.” But of course people want to be on the Web anyway, because we’re social and it’s fun and you can also do work on the Web. So we give ourselves to the landlords, where as it turns out, again quoting Tom, “You pay with your content and by giving them data.”

It is true that building a home on the World Wide Web with your own URL and your own server space can feel like terraforming Mars at first (I’ve been watching The Expanse lately), so maybe the best of all possible worlds, for now, is to have RamPages demonstrate, again and again, what’s possible, and thus extend the range of what’s desirable and imaginable. In that sense, RamPages is much more than a proof of concept. It passed that stage long ago. RamPages is the Zone of Proximal Development. And it is that in large part because Tom Woodward built it that way.