I’m just getting into full-on del-icio.us mode (I guess I’m becoming del.icio.us–couldn’t resist), and before moving on to other errands (errants?) I tried out the “popular” page. Just a little roll of the dice, or what Eno would call an “oblique strategy.” What to my wandering eyes should appear but a very fine piece by Dave Pollard that successfully distinguishes collaboration, cooperation, and coordination. This is one strong essay, and it comes with a nifty matrix that provokes much thought. There are all sorts of ramifications here for what I do as a supervisor, leader, manager, teacher, and student.

Another good one here.

Thanks, Dave. This grey day is starting to look up.

Thanks to Robert McFarlane, who taught me a new word today: katascopos. The lesson emerged from his recent Guardian article on Antoine de Saint-Exupery, an author I admire (and was just discussing with my colleague Dan Hubbard–synchronicity indeed):

In Saint-Ex’s writing, we are always seeing down on to the world, and reinterpreting it as a consequence. “A person taking off from the ground,” he once remarked, “elevates himself above the trivialities of life into a new understanding.” The Greeks had a name for the person who saw from above. They called him the katascopos – a word which later came to mean spy, or explorer – and for them, the sight gained from height was close to god-like. Saint-Ex was a katascopos in every sense of the word, and to read his prose – terse, epigrammatic, visionary – is to share in some part that salutary aerial view, that fresh cosmic perspective.

I love the sound of “salutary aerial view.” Perhaps if I say the words over and over again, I will keep alive the possibility of becoming a katascopos, of preserving what Milton calls the “empyreall conceit” (heavenly or cosmic imagination).

From Saint-Exupery’s The Wisdom of the Sands:

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.

As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it.

Saint-Ex, Milton, beg from above / A pattern of your vision!

Thanks to ALDaily for the Guardian link.

Usury is moneylending at interest. Donne accuses the God of Love of being “usurious” (note to self: check OED to see who else uses that adjective) and tries to strike a bargain with his “love broker.” Because it’s Donne, unpredictable results ensue.

I’ve been mulling the poem over since I recorded the commentary yesterday and I’m confident there are many depths I haven’t plumbed in my brief chat … but the red light’s on and I’m going for it. Here’s “Love’s Usury,” by John Donne.

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However, the growth of plagiarism is not just a result of the internet, or of American students’ laziness – it also comes from students’ new perception of education. Most American students do not attend university to embrace knowledge; university is just a gateway to a successful career.

So writes Jessica Durkin in a column for Spiked. A UK citizen currently enrolled at Boston College, Durkin goes on to argue that knowledge has “intrinsic value–in broadening [students’] minds and expanding [students’] horizons,” and she insists that “society needs to promote the value of learning over a degree’s increased job potential.”

I agree with Durkin. The catch here is that we are society. We need to compose a petition, sign it, and deliver it: to ourselves. And we need to find a more rigorous and profound way to describe the intrinsic value of education. Behind the loosely inspiring talk of self-actualization must be an ethical argument that will stand scrutiny and opposition, especially when education could soon become merely a commodity.

And speaking of commodities, what of our own ideologies? What exactly is the value of learning if one believes that discourse is nothing more nor less than the circulation of power? Perhaps our students have learned from us all too well: cf. Lennard J. Davis’s article titled “The Perils of Academic Ignorance,” in Friday’s Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required, I think). Davis writes:

But our attempt to balance the misleading objectivity of earlier scholarship has probably created too strong a tilt toward the purely personal. Students have become so focused on their personal likes and dislikes that they tend to discount the importance of objective reality and the wider world. We’ve put the “moi” back in memoir and taken out the “liberal” from liberal arts.

Objective reality. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen those words without scare quotes around them. Without some notion of objective reality, however, it’s difficult to see how knowledge can exist to be embraced, unless it’s the absurd (and poignant) embrace in Waiting For Godot:

ESTRAGON:
(giving up again). Nothing to be done.
VLADIMIR:
(advancing with short, stiff strides, legs wide apart). I’m beginning to come round to that opinion. All my life I’ve tried to put it from me, saying Vladimir, be reasonable, you haven’t yet tried everything. And I resumed the struggle. (He broods, musing on the struggle. Turning to Estragon.) So there you are again.
ESTRAGON:
Am I?
VLADIMIR:
I’m glad to see you back. I thought you were gone forever.
ESTRAGON:
Me too.
VLADIMIR:
Together again at last! We’ll have to celebrate this. But how? (He reflects.) Get up till I embrace you.
ESTRAGON:
(irritably). Not now, not now.

Ah, Estragon. Ah, Vladimir. Ah, humanity! But if not now, when?

It can’t be two weeks since I was fretting about Faculty Academy on Instructional Technology 2005. I could have spared myself the anxiety. Once the Academy began, it took on a delightful life of its own, hardy enough to survive every one of my mistakes. All I had to do was get out of the way, which I was very glad to do. UMW faculty, students, and ITSs contributed excellent presentations and poster sessions, while our three guest speakers–Diana Oblinger, Bryan Alexander, and Brian Lamb–challenged our assumptions and enlarged our vision with wonder, delight, and of course information. (Information technologies, after all.)

I’ll be reflecting on the experience in more detail in the days ahead, but I want to begin with a photo to complement Brian Lamb’s shot of the In-N-Out Burger where he, Bryan, Kevin Creamer, and I ate on the night we all met for the first time, at the NLII meeting in San Diego in January, 2004. This photo shows Bryan, me, and Brian at Carl’s, a Fredericksburg landmark that serves extremely tasty soft ice cream made in vintage mid-1940s “Electro-Freeze” machines. Note Bryan’s new cell phone, a recursion device he used frequently during Faculty Academy.

A theme emerges: exotic local dining spots. What will come next? (Or: where shall we three meet again?)

He says he doesn’t care. He says he makes a point of not caring. He says he prefers faithlessness for himself and his “love.”

Methinks he doth protest too much. He may think so, too. Anyone who advocates apathy risks oxymoronitude.

Here’s Donne’s “The Indifferent.”

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Scripting News is usually a set of one- or two-liners with links, but every now and then Dave Winer lets loose with something a little longer. Here’s one that takes the cake: “It Worked!”, a report on an incident during Monday’s debut of KYOU, the new “all podcast” radio station in San Francisco. Sure it’s a bit of a rant. Those numbers that don’t mean anything to Dave probably do mean something to the administrators of the public radio station he’s punching, which may be one of the reasons they’re administrators. That said, Dave gets a bunch of things right in this essay. One is that podcasting really is a dream come true for old radio guys and gals: “Of course the really good [radio people] are excited, because podcasting is the realization of the reason so many of them got into broadcasting in the first place.” Another is that public radio is too often a snooze-fest. A third is that people are creative in ways that not only surprise and refresh us, but also stimulate us to reimagine aspects of our daily lives and make something golden out of what appears to be mere dross. Deeply inspiring stuff.

That’s another truth about radio: those invisible voices coming out of nearby objects (call ’em “radios” if you want) simulate a kind of telepathy, or at least an internal conversation. Radio is an intriguing way to virtualize and share consciousness. “The theatre of the mind” is anything but a cliche. And now with podcasting, radio extends its reach and, potentially, its intimacy, while at the same time it allows all of us to share our surprising moments of revelation with each other. Case in point: the other day I was listening to one of Adam Curry’s “Daily Source Code” podcasts, and as Adam walked around his Guildford “cottage” grounds I had a very vivid sense of walking alongside him. Partly that was because of the live you-are-there nature of Adam’s podcasts, and partly it was because Adam is a very skilled radio guy who understands how to let that moment-by-moment narration breathe and convey the experience to the listener. At one point, Adam took us down into a bomb shelter the previous owners had constructed during the Nazi bombing raids of World War II. Adam cleared the brush away, stepped down into the shelter, and suddenly the echo of the room and the sharp change in Adam’s voice gave me goose-bumps all over. I was there in that room with him, feeling the cold and clammy air, and thinking with him about the people who had once huddled in that small space to save their lives.

Just a podcast. Just a moment of revelation that has stayed with me for days and would have been lost otherwise. Just a chance to connect, once again, and very powerfully, with a moment of shared humanity.

At this rate, perhaps I should call the series A Donne Every So Often, or maybe A Donne A Day Most Days.

Here’s one of Donne’s most famous lyrics, “The Sun Rising.” It’s a different twist on the “aubade,” or lover’s song of mournful parting at the break of day. In this poem, Donne has no intention of leaving. Instead, he abuses the sun for a couple of stanzas, then opens into a celebration of love that’s still so intense and intimate it can take your breath away, four centuries later. It certainly leaves me breathless, just as it did the first time I read it almost three decades ago.

As you’ll hear in my commentary, there is a possible dark side to all this apotheosis. Even though Donne and his lover and the sun are all warm, cozy, and basking in the afterglow (both physical and metaphysical), the very completeness of the love raises a small anxiety on the horizon, a cloud no bigger than a man’s fist. I’d say I’m reading too much into the small phrase “nothing else is,” except that Donne knows full well the cost of true love: he married for love but without asking the father’s permission. Since the father was his patron, by the standards of the time Donne had committed a particularly grievous kind of treachery. Donne will later on find the cost of true love to be even dearer than he had imagined in his disgrace. But that’s another blog entry.

For now, cuddle up with your sweetie. All is well. Here’s “The Sun Rising,” by John Donne.

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This one’s a little hard to follow and may take a couple of listens before it begins to sink in. My commentary follows the poem and may make it easier, or harder, to understand. You tell me, dear listener.

The poem makes a case for the poet as an exemplary lover, indeed a philosopher of love, one who understands both the essence of love and the best means of publicizing that love–or not. (The poet often argues that his love is elite and would only be degraded if the riff-raff learned of it.) As you’ll hear, the poet speaks directly to the reader, and in some respects turns the reader into a version of himself, almost the way a master would do to an apprentice. By the way, there are nine Worthies, those exemplary men whom the poet boasts he has outdone.

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The UMW Faculty Academy on Instructional Technology was a wild and wonderful ride. I’m not recovered; in fact, I may never recover, and I don’t think I’ll mind. More on that exhilarating event soon.

For now, however, A Donne A Day resumes with one of Donne’s more entertainingly sarcastic poems, one that manages to be quite a backhanded compliment as well as an assertion of the poet’s superior faithlessness. If that last adjective-noun combination sounds odd, even oxymoronic, you’re on the right track to encounter a neat, disturbing, and darkly funny little poem.

I’ve heard from a couple of listeners who’d like comment, but at the end of the poem–a good idea, since it will allow anyone who wants the poem as a self-contained unit to stop the playback when the poem is over.

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