There’s a lot I want to blog about, especially the fascinating distributed work on alterity, collective intelligence, and the individual being done by Alex Reid, Lanny Arvan, and Rafael Alvarado. Rafael and Lanny are working on Web 2.0 and teaching, with an eye on the way collectivism can turn either to thin gruel or to Kool-Aid. Alex writes on the issues raised in and around a recent book called Liberal Fascism. (More from Alex on other questions of collective intelligence and authorship here and here.) Each of these writers engages with crucial concerns in very thoughtful ways. I want to take up a very small part of the discussion myself, thinking about the market economies surrounding popularized notions of performative identity and contingent values.

But I have no time to do that tonight. Instead, I offer a quotation from e. e. cummings, by way of Steve Martin’s magnificent autobiography, Born Standing Up. Steve embraced this quotation for his development as an innovative comedian. Something here for teachers too, I’d say:

“Like the burlesque comedian, I am abnormally fond of that precision which creates movement.”