As ever, Brian Lamb not only draws the community together, but provides its most heartfelt and eloquent history. It’s a gift.

My thanks to Brian for all his encouragement and support, as well as to Jim and D’Arcy for being such cool-cat collaborators in our NMC Online Conference session today. Jim and I even had a brief intimate moment of cross-editing our presentation wiki this morning; we share some obsessions, it’s true.

Brian’s already characterized D’Arcy’s and Jim’s contributions far better than I could. He’s also pointed to the crucial contributions of the indispensable CogDog himself, Alan Levine. All I can add here is a humble and slightly awed testimonial.

When a roaring flame goes out, the room can get awfully cold all of a sudden. When the fire starts up, even fitfully, it’s a welcome moment of returning warmth. Last night, as I went through the wiki of nominations and started to think inside the material instead of about it, some of that old fire sparked up a bit. I didn’t want to go to bed. I got more ideas. For a minute or so, the last nine months melted away. Brief as it was, it was a very nice surprise. 

Brian, Jim, D’Arcy, I owe you. Thanks for the invitation. 

P.S. I’m delighted that one of my film students, Brad Efford, has already jumped in with a contribution to the wiki page. I hope he’s the first of many.

Funny how writers can unlock one’s mind.

Joan Acocella’s article on Matthew Bourne (New Yorker 12 March 2007) helped me understand something about modernism, camp, and sincerity that I’d not quite understood before. Many milestones on this journey for me: John Hollander in 1978 talking about returning to “the truth of the noble remark,” ASE‘s Barbara White talking about glam-rock in 2003, and now Joan Acocella writing about a choreographer whose name and work were new to me:

In his move away from camp, Bourne was following a well-worn path. Camp was an escape route from modernism, a return to the charm and glamour that had been banned by that austere movement. The purveyors of camp had been raised on modernism, and so they treated their pretty things with irony as well as with love, but, over time, in the work of many artists–Pedro Almodovar is a good example–love won out. The left turn (irony) became a U-turn (sincerity). Macaulay, in one of his interviews with Bourne, says of Julie Andrews and “The Sound of Music” that he thinks “half the point of growing up is to outgrow her films.” “Oh, I can’t take that kind of talk,” Bourne replies. “That film’s so much a part of me.” This statement is echt camp, but it is also about three-quarters heartfelt, and it is on that ratio that the post-camp artists, including Bourne, have built their art.

Reading this, I feel the tumblers in my mind click into place, and I hear a door swing open. That’s the grim evangelism I felt in my Modern Novel class in grad school. That’s the reason camp leaves me cold, but not as cold as modernism. That’s the strength I feel in Eliot more than in other high modernists. That’s why I prefer Woolf’s essay on Thomas Browne to her essay on Modern Fiction. Ah.

Apologies for the silliness, but what can I add to what Jim and Brian have said already? I am not worthy. But just to make sure I catch the vanishingly few people in the blogosphere who might come to my blog before they go to Bavatuesdays or Abject Learning, let me accept some nominations here as well for the upcoming NMC online conference festivities. Allow me to quote Jim quoting Brian:

The Web 2.0 Online Learning Film Festival! My colleagues and I have designated ourselves as Festival Jurors. From what we hope will be an avalanche of nominations we intend to select a 45 minute program, adding bits of commentary, analysis, trash talk and awards. (All legitimate nominations will be included on a supplementary program.) We intend to use Mojiti (which allows for annotation of online videos) to facilitate the communication of juror and audience input. We will argue about discuss our respective choices during our NMC online presentation on Wednesday, March 21, and when the conference wraps up we’ll open up the discussion to the wider web world.

‘Nuff said, no-prizes for all, and may the force be with you. My definition of education is as wide as Brian’s, as broad as Jim’s. D’Arcy is still doing Extreme Vacationing in Hawaii, but I’m confident he’s as latitudinarian as the rest of us.

Put your nominations in the comments here. Don’t be shy. This is your chance to shape the Delta Quadrant of the eduniverse. We await your destiny.

Great stuff, as ever, over on The Fish Wrapper. This is my response to Martha’s latest post.

The computer is not only a tool but a meta-tool; I think that’s what makes it so hard at some points to “get” computers. A computer is a tool that morphs into other tools. This, I think, is what calling the computer a “universal machine” is all about. As the author of “Dreaming in Code” noted on a recent IT Conversations podcast, programming is pure imagination, nothing else. Rigorous and ordered imagination, but also weirdly arbitrary, and sometimes uncanny (this is me talking now, if there was any doubt).

Getting people to think of computers as tools is the first step. But then there’s the next step, in which they think of the computer as a tool the way they think of their brains as tools. The brain is a tool that makes tools, and then uses them once they’re made. And every so often it will indeed crash….

An experiment in audio restoration, at Jon Udell’s suggestion. I finished taking out the mechanical clicks (this was a manual process, oy) and then turned my efforts to ameliorating the high-pitched hum in the background. Working in Sound Forge, I ended up with a parametric EQ notch of -6.5 db and a bandwidth (or “Q”) of 2.5 at 973 Hz. It’s really a trial-and-error process for me, but I think the gains outweigh the losses. Compare this version with the version I posted first, and keep the one you like best. 🙂

(Both versions benefited greatly from the Levelator, by the way.)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (7.0MB)

Steiner’s Lessons of the Masters closes on both pessimistic and hopeful notes. His pessimism, it seems to me, emerges most strongly from his sense that the very idea of Master and Disciple has been rendered problematic, in some cases all but impossible, by “the democratization of a mass-consumption system (this democratization comporting, unquestionably, liberations, honesties, hopes of the first order).” Here, though he does not mention him, Steiner touches one of Ivan Illich’s central critiques of industrialized schooling, but at a spiritual level that Illich, the ex-priest, fights shy of. Steiner writes,

I would entitle our present age as that of irreverence…. Admiration, let alone reverence, have grown outmoded.We are addicts of envy, of denigration, of downward leveling…. Celebrity, as it saturates our media existence, is the contrary to fama…. Correspondingly, the notion of the sage verges on the risible. Consciousness is populist and egalitarian, or pretends to be. Throughout mundane, secular relations the prevailing note, often bracingly American, is that of challenging impertinence. “Monuments of unaging intellect,” perhaps even our brains, are covered with graffiti. At whose entrance do students rise?

A haunting question. A colleague at another university once told me of his fond memories of applauding the teacher at the end of term, an act of gratitude and reverence that was the norm in his undergraduate school. He has other memories, less fond, of the time when he began his own teaching career, not so very long ago, when as the last days of term played themselves out he realized that there would be no applause from these students at this school, ever. That’s not to say that his students were not appreciative. Individually, they have often been overwhelmingly grateful, admiring, and even at times reverent, I suppose. In turn, he is grateful for and to them. But the memory of a class owning its owing, communally, at the end of term, is a hard one to shake.

Although Steiner suspects that technology will make the master-disciple relationship less frequent in higher education (a distinct possibility, though I would be sorry to think so myself), he does close with a soaring hymn to that relationship, to its essential reciprocity, and to its enduring value:

Libido sciendi, a lust for knowledge, an ache for understanding is incised in the best of men and women. As is the calling of the teacher. There is no craft more privileged. To awaken in another human being powers, dreams beyond one’s own; to induce in others a love for that which one loves; to make of one’s inward present their future: this is a threefold adventure like no other…. It is a satisfaction beyond compare to be the servant, the courier of the essential–knowing perfectly well how very few can be creators or discoverers of the first rank. Even at a humble level–that of the schoolmaster–to teach, to teach well, is to be accomplice to transcendent possibility. Woken, that exasperating child in the back row may write the lines, may conjecture the theorem that will busy centuries….. Where men and women toil barefoot to seek out a a Master ( a frequent hasidic trope), the life force of the spirit is safeguarded.

And then, finally, a terrific burst of insight as Steiner drives to his close, one that awakens my own ache for my many Masters, those teachers who have shown me distant horizons and the crafts to take me there. I wish I could be back in their classrooms, listening to them again, instead of trying to stammer out my own halting words. I wish I could find them somewhere, sometime, still in their prime, still scouting for talent among their students, their eyes resting on me with encouragement, with stern reminders and pedagogically sound impatience with my many delays and distractions, and finally, sometimes, with approval, sometimes even with pride and love. I think of one of my greatest Masters of all, Elizabeth Phillips, standing outside her house as I prepared to drive to San Diego to take my first job as an assistant professor of English. Seventeen years earlier I had first heard her voice, and begun to dream of the day I might earn the benediction she gave me on that July afternoon. Of a colleague in her department, she said, “he knew you were one of mine.” Indeed I was. To know that she knew it, and to hear her say it nearly two decades later, was a joy almost too great to bear.

Steiner’s final question is for me the most haunting of all. It sounds the ubi sunt? that I hear with increasing urgency as my own days increase:

We have seen that Mastery is fallible, that jealousy, vanity, falsehood, and betrayal intrude almost unavoidably. But its ever renewed hopes, the imperfect marvel of the thing, direct us to the dignitas in the human person, to its homecoming to its better self. No mechanical means, however expeditious, no materialism, however triumphant, can eradicate the daybreak we experience when we have understood a Master. That joy does nothing to alleviate death. But it makes one rage at its waste. Is there no time for another lesson?

Four years ago, and what seems like a lifetime away, I was fortunate to be able to speak with filmmaker Ken Burns just before his Fredericksburg Forum appearance at the University of Mary Washington (then Mary Washington College). The interview was published some time ago, but in my newly urgent dedication to getting my archives out of my boxes and into the cloud, or at least into the bottle I’ll cast on the waves, I offer this podcast of the interview.

The audio isn’t top-notch: I was using a small cassette recorder and its built-in microphone. There’s also an annoying “click” every so often. But I think the results are at least listenable, and worth hearing for the particular emphasis and tempo of Burns’ responses.

Burns was ready for the questions, though he had no inkling of what I was going to ask. I admired his candor, his intensity, and his immediate willingness to go deep. In another life, perhaps I should have been a journalist, or at least a radio interviewer. I like the sense of occasion.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (7.0MB)

A belated response, and some penultimate thoughts on this book.

When it comes to Steiner’s Lessons of the Masters, Oook is right on all counts, in my view. (Great set of Steiner aphorisms on Wikiquote, too–many thanks, oook, for the link.) To awe, regret, and irritation, though, I’ll add a feeling of immense satisfaction, in the sense that Steiner gets at the depths of the experience of teaching and learning in ways few writers do. I don’t know, but I wonder, whether some of the feeling of “stuck-ness” folks overtaking folks like Will Richardson comes from a nagging sense that much edu-chatter, to which I’ve added much chattering of my own, is fine so far as it goes but doesn’t go nearly far enough.

What does “far enough” mean? Is it a radical re-thinking of the entire enterprise, a la Illich? Is it an unwearying critique of meet-the-new-boss-same-as-the-old-boss thinking, a la Stephen Downes? Is it patient, insightful, inspiring narratives of the teaching experience, a la Barbara Ganley or Steve Greenlaw?

Yes. Many times yes.

For me this morning, thinking about teaching and learning and Steiner’s magisterial survey of how those activities have been imagined and portrayed in human culture, “far enough” means also intensively, obsessively focused on relationship, charisma, passion, intensity, the fire in a teacher’s belly and the light in a student’s eyes. So far as I can tell, these are in some respects unfashionable thoughts, but I come to them via my own experience, not just as a teacher, but as a student. I hear again and again that we must not teach as we were taught. I recoil from that instruction. My students would be most fortunate if I could, indeed, teach as I was taught, for I had masterful teachers whom I struggle to channel in my own teaching every day.

I know I am not alone. Pick up a memoir, and look to see the teachers who changed the writer’s life, often with something entirely informal or even casual, like pinning an artwork onto a bulletin board. That’s how Robert Hughes saw his first De Chirico, back in his Catholic high school in Australia in the 1950’s. Of course that casual gesture was the overspill of his teacher’s active, questing mind, one that constantly left bread crumbs for his students, furnishing their experience with every succulent intellectual morsel in his cupboard. As the Richardsons once said of Milton’s poetry, the teacher obviously strove to surround his students with sense, to charge their environment with meaning, attention, passion, to make all moments potentially transformative.

That’s a high standard, but I’ve known teachers who could do it. I’ve seen it happen. I remember what it was like to be, not in “a” classroom, but in their classroom. Sometimes the air was so charged at the end of a class meeting that I could not imagine another teacher being bold enough to enter that space.

Steiner’s book is satisfying for me because it insists on the power of these human interactions as absolutely fundamental to a deep understanding of teaching and learning.

“[Leonard Bernstein] congratulating Nadia Boulanger, internationally celebrated teacher and musician, after she became the first woman to conduct the Orchestra in a full concert, February, 1962” (from “The Bernstein Years,” booklet included with the boxed set of Bernstein conducting the NY Philharmonic in Beethoven’s nine symphonies).

One of Steiner’s more haunting examples is that of Nadia Boulanger. I’m fascinated by larger-than-life personalities generally, and Boulanger has always been one of those who fascinated me most. (In fact, now might be a good time for me to seek out a biography–can anyone point me to a good one?) She taught a staggering array of the most important musicians of the twentieth century. Their chorus of praise for her was almost unanimous. Here’s what Steiner says about this master:

No one who has not been a Boulanger pupil can articulate what must have been the spell of her teaching. The dicta tend to be of monumental generality: ‘I don’t believe in the teaching of aesthestics unless it is combined with a personal interchange.” To her Radcliffe choristers: “Do not merely the best you can; do better than you can!” “May I have the power to exchange my best with your best.” Or, in 1945,: “The teacher is but the humus in the soil. The more you teach, the more you keep in contact with life and its positive results. All considered, I wonder sometimes if the teacher is not the real student and the beneficiary.” Ten years later: “When I teach, I throw out the seeds. I wait to see who grabs them … Those who do grab, those who do something with them, they are the ones who will survive. The rest, pfft!” And in the Musical Journal for May 1970: “One can never train a child carefully enough … we must do everything we can for the one who can do very much, and it is unfair to our human justice. But human justice is a small justice” (how Plato and Goethe would have agreed).

Plenty to argue with there, and yet for me there are home truths that burn in all these quotations. Agency, inspiration, dramatic and stealthy and oversize and subtle encounters with master and apprentice learners in highly charged contexts, a sense of occasion and a drive toward meaning: these may be monumentally general dicta, as Steiner observes, but they are too often overlooked in ed-talk. Without them, however, I hear tinkling gongs and clanging cymbals. I have no quarrel with second things like workforce preparation, credentialling, assessment, issues of scaling and sustainability and support. These are vital things. But they are, finally, always, second things. When they serve first things, the priorities are straight.

Steiner concludes his section on Boulanger with words that would likely provoke many howls of outrage among my colleagues, here and elsewhere, perhaps rightly so in some respects. I myself feel that social justice cannot be incompatible with recognizing excellence in human accomplishment–but of course, finding that compatibility can be a very fraught endeavor. Still, I want to close this post with Steiner’s assessment of Nadia Boulanger’s gifts:

Anecdotes illustrating Nadia Boulanger’s technical mastery abound. They tell of her ability to spot instantaneously the minutest error or oversight in a student’s performance; of her anger at any mode of compositional or executant bluff; of a memory beyond compare. One suspects, however, that the genius lay elsewhere, that it would have characterized whatever discipline she taught. Boulanger’s engagement in the act of teaching was absolute, “totalitarian” in the rarest sense. Her axiomatic insight that talent, that creativity are not subject to social justice underwrote not only her own elitisim but that of her students. She gave them the confidence to become what they were. This is a Master’s supreme donation. As Ned Rorem put it, Nadia Boulanger was quite simply “the greatest teacher since Socrates.”

I can readily understand how provocative or even repellent some of this description may appear. Yet I also wonder what positive things we can learn from it as we continue the conversation.

“May I have the power to exchange my best with your best.” I feel I should begin every class with these words. How small my efforts, how large my hopes!

into film studies.

Walter Korte, with whom I studied film as a graduate student at the University of Virginia.

I met Mr. Korte (all the professors are “Mr.” or “Ms.” at U.Va.; only the physicians are “doctors”) my second semester of graduate school, when I took his class in Film and Literature. I remember spending many hours alone in a storage room in Wilson Hall with a 16mm projector and a print of The Magnificent Ambersons; I watched those images over and over, my eyes wide open for what seemed to be the first time. The analytical vocabulary, the exquisite visual insightfulness, and most of all the committed love of cinema that Mr. Korte brought to every class session were deeply inspiring. I began to haunt the local repertory cinema (this was pre-video, my children). I began to go to each Wednesday’s “Filmwatchers” screenings at school. I started buying film books. In short, I became a cineaste, or at least a cineaste manque.

Mr. Korte introduced me to a world of films I’d never seen before–or never truly seen. Welles, Antonioni, Altman, Kubrick, Scorcese, Hawks, Brakhage, Bunuel, Visconti, Resnais, the list goes on. An unrepentant auteurist, Korte had his own pantheon a la Andrew Sarris, but he was always interested in the new, the fresh, the daring, and many times I saw him on a Monday morning in the grip of a movie he’d seen just that weekend. The man was simply besotted with film, which suited me just fine.

Best of all, Mr. Korte introduced me to the films of Errol Morris when he screened Gates of Heaven for our Film Aesthetics class in the fall of 1981. I later helped host Errol’s visit to the University of Mary Washington in 1997, just as he was finishing up Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control. Thus the master’s lesson came full circle for the disciple.

For the last three years of my residence in graduate school, I was very happy and indeed extremely fortunate to share an office with this man. We used to talk for hours about everything having to do with movies. Those were golden moments for me. He let me have the run of his collection of cinema books, too. Even now, I will sometimes feel myself pining for those days. Though they were otherwise full of late-stage grad-student pre-dissertation angst, they were also full of discovery and intense conversations that continue to fuel my own work in film studies, both when I teach and when I write.

Read what Korte has to say about film here. You’ll understand my veneration for this teacher.

Thanks, Mr. Korte.