Gardner Writes

Not quite the day-after report I’d hoped to make, but as we’ve discussed recently in the Milton seminar, time is a difficult dimension that consistently weighs on Milton’s mind and ours. So later and briefer than I’d like, here are my thoughts.

The evening was magical as ever. This surprised me a bit, truth to tell, as I had lowered my expectations given the compressed summer schedule, the size of the class (there are six students enrolled–what a luxury for real school!), and the scarcity of folks around campus during the summer term. I figured that nevertheless the occasion would involve “fit audience, though few,”and would have its own special character.

It did have its own special character–how could it not?–but in scope and intensity it was right up there with all the other readathons. I blogged about the upcoming reading, and I sent out an event invitation on Facebook, and that plus word of mouth and the seminarians’ devotion were enough to bring over thirty people to the readathon. Fit audience indeed, and more numerous than I had dared imagine. The best of it, of course, was not how many but who. My wife Alice attended and read, as she has each year, and worked behind the scenes to help everything run smoothly. (Our children were both at camp, as it happened, so this year was the first time they didn’t attend and read.) I couldn’t do any of this without her. Many Miltonauts Emeriti attended, students who’d been in the seminar ten years ago, five years ago. One, a student, friend, and colleague named Happy Herbert, was there for the tenth time, and for the tenth time she stayed for the entire reading, driving all the way from Richmond to attend. Happy’s presence always means the world to me. She is a wonderful example of how deep and true the bonds forged by education can be. I count myself her biggest fan and cannot imagine the readathon without her. Two more former students and Miltonaut alums, Devin Wais and Erin Donegan Frere, surprised and moved me mightily by driving from Maryland and Tidewater to meet in Fredericksburg and come to the reading. They too stayed all night. I hadn’t seem either of them for several years, probably not since their graduation five years ago, but hearing them read in that cozy (and, given July and the tiny wall unit AC, sweltering) room brought back many happy memories of many classes together, and filled me with pride to see them as young adults making their way into the world. Erin, like Happy, is now herself an English teacher, while Devin is working as a project manager. To see their friendship and reunion was sheer delight.

Two other families were represented. One was a current seminarian and her father. The other was a current seminarian and her teenaged son. All read (the only readathon rule is that everyone there must read), and all read well, entering fully into the spirit of the event and bringing yet another dimension of time, heritage, and love into the experience.

My colleague and friend Jim Groom, the Reverend, Mr. UMW Blogs himself, was there for the first two books despite the many responsibilities that come with two small children (not to mention his tireless participation in the greater distributed conversation we call the “blogosphere”). Having him there and hearing him read was a real treat, and brought together the two academic worlds I’ve inhabited over the last five years: literary studies and information technologies in education. Did I say it was a treat to have him there? It was a blast. I am profoundly grateful for his work.

My dear friend and longtime Milton colleague Louis Schwartz of the University of Richmond was there as well. Louis and I go back many years, to the advent of my professorial career in 1990, and we have shared many tears, much laughter, and much deep delight during that time. (Louis has a book on Milton coming out very soon. I promise you it will be a corker, a book that will change the conversation in Milton studies permanently and very much for the better.) Louis has done his own readathons at UR many times, so he’s no stranger to the experience, but with one thing and another it had never worked out that we had attended a readathon together, either in Richmond or in Fredericksburg. Thus I was particularly grateful and moved that Louis made a special effort to be at this, my final readathon at UMW. As it happened, he got several wonderful parts to read (the epic is pretty much all wonderful, so that’s not unusual) that figure crucially in his forthcoming book. To hear Louis bring those words to life with all the years of his thought and love and expert devotion within them was exhilarating and very humbling. To think that he’s my friend! I am a lucky man.

More, and yet more. Students came who’d been in other courses I’ve taught recently, even though they’d never taken Milton with me. Some brought friends from outside the department. We had wonderful baked treats from Rachel and richly flavorful vegetables from Madeline’s garden (apt, given Madeline’s scholarly work on vegetation and gardens in the epic). We had all the props: the blacklight poster of Satan overlooking Paradise, the little snake-with-apple plushy, the magnificent Dragon that Happy and her daughter Sara made for me shortly after they’d taken the Milton seminar together. We had Alice’s strange and compelling little antique story-of-creation wheel. We had a big volume of Dore illustrations from Madeline and her dad. This year we also had the cast-iron statue of Milton my colleague James Harding had given me to celebrate my return to the department in the spring of 2007. And of course we had a real apple to pass around during the reading of book 9, to be eaten by the person who was reading at the moment Eve took her fateful bite. (Last year I was the lucky one; this year Brittany did the honors.)

And we had the readathon journal, now almost filling a second volume, with reflections, exclamations, silly stuff, and heartfelt responses from readathons going all the way back to my first at UMW, in the spring of 1995. One day I will scan those pages and post them. These days I get teary just touching their covers. (Maudlin, but true.)

As I say, magical. The students‘ own reflections demonstrate I wasn’t just dreaming (though I did nod off several times, I confess it). As Madeline keenly observed, the occasion felt like a journey we took together. Indeed. And for me, as always, the visible and interior journeys we take together during the readathon make me more mindful of the other journeys that we share. The journeys of learning, of living, of community and communal experience. It’s a cliche to say “it’s all a journey”–sounds rather like daytime TV speak–but when the journey is as intense and uplifting as the readathon is, the cliche blooms into new and vital life.

So: from a professor who feels much of the time like Chance the Gardener in Being There, simple and often bewildered but devoted to his work, to all the many exotic, varied, and beautiful blossoms I have been privileged to tend and watch grow over my fourteen years at the University of Mary Washington, my thanks, my love, and my deep respect. I will not forget you.

Keep in touch.

A little over a month ago I was privileged to attend and speak at the 2008 SUNY Conference on Instructional Technologies, splendidly hosted this year by SUNY-Genesee Community College. (You’ll need to use IE to get to the program pdfs; at least, I did.) The theme was “Are We There Yet? Teachers and Learners in a Digital World.”

I met some extraordinary people there and once again was encouraged by the way imaginative faculty and staff have persisted in their visionary efforts to make sense and good use of computers in teaching and learning. As I listened to folks’ stories and learned something of the history of the conference and of FACT (Faculty Access to Computer Technology, the primary sponsoring group over the years) I was struck by the commonalities with my own experience, as well as with the stories I’ve heard from similar groups: early adopters, early resistance, the slow growth of a critical mass, the difficulties with communication and cooperation and resource allocation that come with all large organizations, the successes, the professional networks, the immense satisfactions. Most of all, I came away inspired by this community’s enduring playfulness, curiosity, and devotion to innovation and improvement (indeed, augmentation) in teaching and learning.

The day was full of magic. I met the justly famous NY Mary, whose blog PowerPop is a musical education, a constant inspiration, and great great fun. (It’s also one of the most well-written and heartfelt blogs I’ve read. Indeed, its excellence motivated contributor Steve Simels to start writing about music again on a regular basis, which is an endorsement at the Very Highest Level.) Mary and I got to talk about everything from graduate school to Joyce to Flann O’Brien to XTC. Doesn’t get much better than that. I met Harry Pence, a professor on the verge of retirement who is more energetically visionary than most professors half his age. I met Jim Greenberg, who used to be Andy Rush’s boss. (Yes, we traded classic Andy stories.) Craig Lending, current chair of the SUNY FACT Advisory Council, was a marvelous host and a fascinating conversationalist. Nancy Motondo organized a great conference with amazing stamina and patience. Patrick Murphy, director of the SUNY Center for Professional Development, made me feel right at home and gave me a great overview of the conference and its history. I got to reconnect with Alex Reid of Digital Digs (Alex is at SUNY-Cortland–more on Alex and Cortland in a forthcoming post). I met with the FACT Emerging Technologies group and talked about everything from Second Life to haptics. I’m confident I’m forgetting someone–if so, my apologies. I plead packing amnesia.

The whole experience was intense, revelatory, and encouraging. My only regret is that I couldn’t stay longer and take in more of the conference.

Here’s the abstract for my keynote presentation:

“How to Get There from Here: Building an Imagination Infrastructure”
We’ve been waiting nearly half a century for computer-based information technologies to revolutionize education. While some in authority (including vendors) may supply glowing eports on the progress we’ve made, visionaries and pioneers like Doug Engelbart and Alan Kay insist we’re not only “not there yet,” but that we haven’t yet fully grasped what “there” might mean. I’ll offer a highly selective tour of the optimism, pessimism, triumph, and disappointment that have characterized the use of computers in education, and offer some thoughts on how we might redirect our footsteps and rediscover a truly radical perspective on information technologies in education, a perspective that might enable more consistent progress toward more idealistic goals.

The audio is at the end of this post. Caveat auditor: something went awry with my Edirol recorder–I think I didn’t plug the external microphone in quite firmly enough–so the audio is mostly listenable but not pristine. (And the questions in the Q&A aren’t always intelligible; I hope they become so in context. Yes, I should have repeated the questions, something I habitually forget to do.) I hope the content, and my attempts at some postproduction cleanup, make the experience worthwhile. I tried hard in this talk to articulate something of my vision for personal learning environments constructed by the students themselves as part of a larger personal cyberinfrastructure project that would be the unifying activity for all four years of college, an activity that would stimulate metacognition, foster innovation, and by the way offer opportunities for learning and using valuable digital skills.I did a workshop later in the day titled “Simile, Metaphor and Symbol in Web 2.0: Playing Education.” No audio from this one–the format didn’t really lend itself to audio capture–but here’s the abstract:

This interactive workshop will give participants the chance to use their imaginations to play with ideas in a learning community, to amalgamate new wholes from that play, and to recognize the poetry hiding in plain sight within Web 2.0. Come with your favorite information and imagination technologies—laptops, pens, pencils, paper, colored markers, you name it—and come ready to be creative, thoughtful, and spontaneous. My goal is to stimulate us to think about how the experience of Web 2.0 creates meaning for the user, and how those thoughts might be of value as we consider our uses of Web 2.0 in teaching and learning.

I had a lot of fun with this workshop, which was an elaboration of part of my presentation at the 2006 regional conference of the New Media Consortium. The workshop participants made the whole thing come alive: they were playful, inventive, and willing to take some risks. Mark Smith, an Information Systems Librarian at Alfred University, introduced me with a great (and cautionary) display of the power of Google. (Suffice it to say that he had the goods on yours truly, making me glad that I at least try to heed Jon Udell’s call to use the Web to present my professional self deliberately and thoughtfully.) Best of all, at the end of the workshop Eric Feinblatt, an art professor from NYC’s Fashion Institute of Technology, came up to me with a poem he’d looked up on the Web. The poem is “Ezra Pound’s Proposition,” by Robert Hass, and it was a breathtaking coda to a workshop devoted to exploring connections and the power of the imagination to perceive and create those bonds.

So imagine the moment, dear reader: I was pumped up from sixty minutes of shared inspiration and imagination and creativity, as well as from a day of intense conversations and intense learning on my part, and there I stood in the lobby of the building where the session had just ended, looking at a laptop carried by a colleague I’d met just hours before, experiencing with him a poem he had looked up on the Web via a wireless connection and a portable computer that he cradled in his arms as he shared the screen and its beautiful contents with me, making an indelible mark on my consciousness and spirit.

How could I not love teaching and learning technologies when such fascinating people make, use, study, and discuss them? At their best, the technologies are nothing less than compelling instances of those very people at work and play.

 

 Keynote address at SUNY-CIT 2008 [76:57m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Final at UMW under my supervision, that is. It may happen again at my next post, and for all I know the Miltonist who succeeds me at the University of Mary Washington may be just ambitious, idealistic, and nutty enough to want to keep the tradition going. Time will tell. (Yes, I will blog about my new job very soon.)

The readathon will be at Alvey House from Friday, July 11 to Saturday, July 12. We’ll begin between 7 and 7:30 p.m. and read until we’re done. If the past is a guide, the event will conclude about 6:30 or 7:00 a.m. on Saturday morning. If you’d like to attend, just come when you can and leave when you want. Bring a copy of Paradise Lost with you if you have one. If you don’t, we’ll have some extras on hand. Readers of all ages and abilities are welcome. I extend a particularly warm welcome to alumni of the University or the reading or both.

No reservations are necessary for the reading. If you’d like to join us for the traditional Parthenon Restaurant supper before hand, please do let me know by Thursday, July 10 at the latest.

I’ve given an account of the event and its history earlier on this blog. It’s a simple and very moving event. This year, it’s also a loving farewell to my fourteen years at Mary Washington.

I hope you can join us.

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1104 College Avenue, Fredericksburg, Virginia.

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. 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 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 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.”

Download “Dirge Without Music”

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

Download “The Waking”

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

Download “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.

Download “Song of Myself” (conclusion)

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….

Given my love of metaphor, juxtaposibility, and “mappingness” (to say nothing of my love of oddball neologisms), I have to report on a particularly intriguing juxtaposition I found for my talk at the 2008 CHEMA meeting in Louisville last week. As I was finishing my prep for the talk, I’d pretty much settled on beginning with the Big Bang of Michael Wesch’s “The Machine is Us/ing Us.” Michael describes his creation as “Web 2.0 in Five Minutes,” and the five-million-plus views on YouTube testify to its power and clarity. What better way to start? Then it occurred to me that Robbie Dingo’s beautiful “Watch The World” would make a dramatic and poignant followup to Michael’s piece. If, as Michael suggests, the machine is us (and I agree with him totally, by the way), Robbie Dingo’s creation offers a stunning example of new modes of artistic expression and discursive reasoning available to us by way of our machines. Of course, Michael’s piece is itself a work of art as well, something that’s even more obvious when one watches Michael’s and Robbie’s works back to back.

I admit that I was also looking for an affective continuum here–aiming to present varieties of wonder acting on the heart and mind in different but complementary ways.

In any event, the juxtaposition was revelatory for me, and I think it worked pretty well for the audience too. Try it when you get a moment. First Wesch, then Dingo. Then take a moment for optimism, hard-won but necessary, about humanity at its best.

Promising new functionality from ITConversations: one can build a URL that will excerpt a portion of the recorded audio. I’m testing it here:

[audio clip]

The only hitch in the get-along is the requirement to specify a start time “after the intro.” As a former ITConversations post-production audio editor, I reckon this means after the show theme, sponsor mention, etc., ending with “and now, here’s blank from blank.” But I also reckon “after the intro” will be ambiguous to most users (heck, I may have it wrong too), and in any case, there’s no easy way to calculate this time. I’m guessing the intro lasts about 2 minutes, and doing the math from the readout on my iPod, where I heard the bit I want to quote. It would probably be a little easier to do this on the website, but one would still have to slide the slider back and forth to get the times, and then one would need to do some simple but tedious calculating. (EDIT: I was about 35 sec. off my first try, and needed to time my way into the clip and make the appropriate edit to the code. And it was a lot of hunt-and-peck to get the out time where I wanted it. Fortunately, the code is transparent and easy to tweak, even for a nonprogrammer like me. Still, at the outset I feel I’m shooting with a blunderbuss.) If the clip works for you, you should hear the line about low-risk activity and high reward being bad for fun, with some elaboration and a supporting example.

All of that said, this is a vital step forward and I congratulate ITConversations on taking it. Not for the last time, I am proud to have been associated with this operation.

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.

 

 Lyrics by Coleridge, read by Gardner Campbell [31:52m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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.