March 20, 2007
March 09, 2007
Twins are Birds
Based on a recent anthropology conversation in which I was educated about the Nuer tribe and their belief that twins are birds, I offer this poem, written sitting on an airplane with the sun streaming in the window
Sunlight Through a Window
Twins are birds,
Or so they say,
In words not yet polluted
By Cartesian sway.
We’re pulled apart
At birth. We stray
From Mother,
Sisterbrother,
Father.
Sun.
The God terms gone.
But still
There’s warmth
That shows
Through windows,
Hitting skin,
Yet heating body
From within.
It warms the core
But shines
From without.
I feel an outside world
So distant its heat
Is light years old,
Yet still brand new.
Both and.
The sun’s in me.
The past is now.
That twins are birds
Makes sense somehow.
February 27, 2007
Want fries with that order?
Based on personal experience, I have to recognize some grain of truth in this piece reporting on narcissism among Gen Y college students.
The Narcissistic Personality Inventory asks students to react to such statements as: "If I ruled the world, it would be a better place," "I think I am a special person" and "I like to be the center of attention."The authors end up tarring YouTube and MySpace with the same brush, which at first struck me as specious, but is now making me wonder. What are the connections between self-made media and self-promotion? The study also "seek[s] to counter theories that current college students are more civic-minded and involved in volunteer activities than their predecessors." So, that makes me wonder about the oft-applied "civic" label that goes with social software activities. Are there ways in which the label masks ulterior motives or projects a kind of optimisim that needs questioning?The study found that almost two-thirds of recent college students had narcissism scores that were above the average 1982 score. Thirty percent more college students showed elevated narcissism in 2006 than in 1982.
If nothing else, the piece makes me want to think further about the links between the physical and online social activities of today. Read to the end to get to this posting's subject line.
February 26, 2007
What's wrong with this sequence?
From this weekend's it feels nice outside let's roll in the dirt files, this sequence shows the fun of not just the initial roll and subsequent brush and wipe, but the re-roll. Multpily that by our three other cats and you get the idea.
February 22, 2007
To meet or not to meet
Just a quick link to something that caught my eye merely for the headline, Meetings Make Us Dumber, Study Shows. At first I thought this was good for a laugh, knowing how many of us sit in countless meetings every week. Then I got to thinking about teaching and the penchant for relying on group work in writing classes. I still believe there are lots of good things to be had by collaboration, but the perils of groupthink do raise some intriguing possibilities for revisiting notions of the individual author. Plus, I knew there was something about all those brainstorming sessions that brought out the beast in me.
February 18, 2007
Monkeytown
Some cell phone shots from a dinner visit last night to Monkeytown, a Brooklyn eatery built around the premise of video immersion: a square room ringed with futons and coffee tables for eaters with giant screens on all four walls. The warm up was some bizarre video mashing, and the main feature a Thai film with the translated title of Citizen Dog. Really a fantastic mix of magical realism and satirical optimism. Dinner and a movie for even the most desensitized media aficiondo.
February 16, 2007
Behind the Words Beats the Heart
These times are musical
Digital packages sent
Into ears over wires
Not through the air.
What's shared is understanding
Not waves of sound,
Those target brain
But don't surround.
iPod, therefore
I'm alone.
"Storm clouds may gather
And stars may collide,
But I will love you
Until the end of time."
No one wants that
Swirled over them in public
But to hear it makes me say . . . yes
And wonder . . . What is love?
The reply rings
Like hammers hitting strings
Percussion bouncing
Clear and bright
Behind a question
Never meant to be answered
With the emptiness
Of words
January 10, 2007
Writing for Life
Anna Quindlen's "Write for Your Life" hit the newstands and internet a couple of weeks back, but I just had a chance to read it.
I like the piece for the way it tries to resuscitate writing by pulling it away from professional contexts that have sucked out its life:
But as the letter fell out of favor and education became professionalized, with its goal less the expansion of the mind than the acquisition of a job, writing began to be seen largely as the purview of writers. Writing at work also became so stylistically removed from the story of our lives that the two seemed to have nothing in common. Corporate prose conformed to an equation: information x polysyllabic words + tortured syntax = aren't you impressed?The essay might be interesting to me because it lays out one of the biggest problems writing teachers face--trying to engage students with what feels like a foreign language. But the essay matters more because it really steps one pace further, suggesting that writing works as a legacy of the self--more lasting than a phone call, it leaves behind traces that others can follow. "Write for Life" is careful also not to fall too hard toward print nostalgia: "The age of technology has both revived the use of writing and provided ever more reasons for its spiritual solace. E-mails are letters, after all, more lasting than phone calls, even if many of them r 2 cursory 4 u." The point is not about looking backwards toward parchment, but about using words to capture and share something about the self.
Great stuff, but not enough. The piece takes one more step, explaining that writing works not only because it helps people connect. Writing matters because it helps us make sense of the distractions and traumas of our lives, and, with any luck, writing helps people make it through these difficulties. Tired sentimentality? I don't think so. Wheeling writing back toward personal struggle and survival closes the loop. It's not just that we need a space for writing to be non-professional and alive. Instead we need a place where writing can help keep us alive.
December 09, 2006
Rebirth Video
For this 15mb video Andrew took a segment from This American Life, edited it, then did the visual overlay. I post it because it makes me feel good here at the end of the semester to look at class work and be moved.
December 06, 2006
Collages
These are some tidbits from whatever fritter time I've had lately; actually I've been assigning collaging a good deal in writing classes, so I've enjoyed playing my hand at it myself. These are from conflict neighborhoods in Belfast, taken last Spring.
November 28, 2006
Army Life
We had these family tapes I used to listen to in the late 60s, reel to reels. There were two spools that I can recall. They were some kind of mix of union songs and protest music. I have no idea where we came by them, but my brothers and sometimes my parents would play them pretty regularly. At the time I took in the rough sounds and the humor pretty directly through the ears, but the messages of resistance also seeped in. My brother recently salvaged the tapes and sent us all CDs. Here is a chunk that is sadly appropriate again.
November 25, 2006
Blue Christmas
Following up on the last post regarding consumerism and nature comes this 4.6mb video riffing on a report on black Thursday in the New York Times.
November 24, 2006
Affordances
The animted gif was 466kb so I decided to link it instead of embedding it here. I also tweaked a version into a 4.4mb video with some sound. The riff is just some quotes and images from found articles this morning, juxtaposed news pieces on consumerism and nature.
November 18, 2006
I've Got Mine
In the background of this 9.8 megabyte video you might make out some lyrics from UB40: "I don't walk the streets in fear, cause I've got mine. . . ."
November 02, 2006
Professional Twine
Cheryl and Kristin asked for brief thoughts on professional development for an upcoming online C & C segment. I did up a quick video (8.1mb) to share some ideas. The notion of professional twine involves thinking less of teaching, research, and service, and instead conceptualizing academic work as transversing a self/private and other/public continuum.
With this in mind, I suggest that upon arriving at a job, somewhat counter-intuitively, it makes sense to focus some energies outside of the self, establishing a small program, set of classes, computer lab, or other initiative that will give you a presence and create connections with colleagues and decision makers. Of course, these efforts should not be completely other-centered--when I arrived at UNC, there were no computer-assisted classrooms, so creating such a space was needed to facilitate my own work, but the project had a public face.
Clearly, also you need to transition in the early stages of a career to a self-interested mode, probably working up dissertation materials into publications. Having established a public presence initially, any retreats into a work cocoon are likely to be revealed in a positive light--willing to reach out, but committed to research and able to hunker down to perform.
Over time, you want to move back into public realms, this time likely extending to work in the institution as a whole. This work is likely to be service oriented, but the larger point is you are networking now beyond the department level, sitting on campus committees, organizing events, maybe co-teaching.
With this movement (actually all the time in an academic position), you are likely to find that you need to operate in both self- and other-interested spheres simultaneously. Here is where learning to commingle your personal areas of interest with the public work you do will pay off. If you do technology, perhaps say no to the curriculum revision and yes to the distance education committee. If you participate in a large-scale campus initiative, see if you can present or publish on institutional decision making. A progression in which you extend yourself publicly should eventually translate into connections on a level outside your institution, working on advisory boards, reviewing or editing submissions to journals, perhaps organizing conferences.
Ultimately, the transition to tenured professor should, in my mind, bring the personal and public interests into closer alignment. The rationale for aiming for such an alignment is not to be more productive. You will no doubt have to continue doing work in both areas, but these activities can lap over each other. The rationale is to emphasize your personal interests, even as you willingly apply them to helping others and make them public. You need to aim for a place where you can do what makes you feel good, share that work, and get attention for it.
September 20, 2006
Where I'm At
This 10 megabyte QuickTime movie started as an effort to write about the fruit trees in the front yard. As soon as I began to map my yard on the planet, though, a time warp descended into the room, in part inspired by an ear-prod from an old Steel Pulse song: "Your House," from the album True Democracy. The vinyl memories from that overwhelmed any effort to focus on the now, and so I sketched out some thoughts, mapped, grabbed some YouTubes, and mixed in some iamdan into this Where I'm At (Prelude).
September 01, 2006
Three Versions
of a poem I posted a couple of weeks back
August 15, 2006
Haiku
This 10.3 megabyte video offers images, words, and sounds collected from a recent trip to L.A. It's also my meager first attempt at using Sophie, a kludged slide show that I screen recorded so it could be posted.
August 13, 2006
Name These Oceans
August 06, 2006
Name These Places
Step up or click down and try the guessing game (48 second audio file).
There are two places here--not cities, but environments or rooms. The key to recognizing them should be the background music. These are from a recent trip to New York, if that helps. If you can't get it, try a second audio file with more clues. (63 second audio file).
August 04, 2006
From the Front Yard Files
Looks nothing special
In late summer.
In the rain in the yard,
You’d cut it down,
Its thick branches drooping
With the weight of water
Flown over lime-colored leaves.
Even in a sky without sun
They glisten like liquid sugar.
If you live in the woods,
You ought to know something about trees.
A home sits among hickory or beech.
Scrubbed, polished,
Swept and mopped,
Filled with love,
Likely anger,
Indifference,
All the emotions
That seep into a place
Mix with the vibrations
Of the growth around it.
The lumber itself steeped
with the whispers of the forest,
The hush of trees as they sway,
Ocean sounding and woeful
In a changing way.
Each day backed
By a sound track
Of trunks stirring air
With the movements
Of the turning earth.
It’s what starts the seed
Before the sun climbs
Into springtime’s sky;
What stops the man
In the heat to say nothing
Of the rays of summer;
What turns the worm
Beneath the forest floor;
What tints the willow
Pale green, then yellow
As the days grow short.
What else could change the world,
If not the wonder of whatever
That soaks into the fibers
Of mountain aspen,
Southern pine,
Or, here, the dogwood?
Stooped, wet, and green
Against the green and growing world,
You’d cut it down
Not knowing
Its sheet-white blossoms
Will flower the yard in spring.
July 19, 2006
34 Seconds of My Morning
she's got a serrated edge
that she moves back and forth.
it's such a simple machine.
she doesn't have to use force.
when she get what she wants
she puts the rest on a tray
in a zip-loc bag. . . .
"Italian Leather Sofa," by Cake
July 03, 2006
Found
From the coolest-thing-found-at-the-beach-last-weekend files, I give you Blue. Blue hails from Swansboro, NC, where he grew up under a bush near the bay. I had hoped to bring back some audio files discussing the ways the visceral movements of ocean sounds might give life to composition. This is much better.
June 18, 2006
Drifting
Just as the layer mask hazes over the horizon beyond the empty beach chair, the looming start of summer school makes my thinking vague and insubstantial. And yet my emoticon selection is clearly Cool. I am Dan. Can you guess where I am. Task Progress--why must some programmer add that to the mix? :-|
June 07, 2006
E-Books and Physical Education
I thought I'd send my ping into the echo chamber amplifying recent pronouncements regarding electronic books. Today a posting at the Future of the Book links to some of the resonances, and just yesterday a message came across two e-mail lists pointing to "Digital Publishing Is Scrambling the Industry's Rules" in the New York Times. The postings pick up on recent conversations spawned by Kevin Kelly and a speech given by John Updike at the BookExpo (more on those below). I'll highlight three frequencies in these discussions. First, the key dimension for me of "Scrambling" is the analogy between book publishing and music:
Hovering above the discussion of all these technologies is the fear that the publishing industry could be subject to the same upheaval that has plagued the music industry, where digitalization has started to displace the traditional artistic and economic model of the record album with 99-cent song downloads and personalized playlists. Total album sales are down 19 percent since 2001, while CD sales have dropped 16 percent during the same period, according to Nielsen SoundScan. Sales of single digital music tracks have jumped more than 1,700 percent in just two years.
Clearly, this move to sampling snippets evokes both concern and celebration. "Scrambling" cites author Jane Hamilton:
"Does that mean 'Anna Karenina' goes hand in hand with my niece's blog of her trip to Las Vegas?" asked Jane Hamilton, author of "The Book of Ruth" and a forthcoming novel, "When Madeline Was Young." "It sounds absolutely deadly." Reading books as isolated works is precisely what she wants to do, she said. "When I read someone like Willa Cather, I feel like I'm in the presence of the divine," Ms. Hamilton said. "I don't want her mixed up with anybody else. And I certainly don't want to go to her Web site."
Geoffrey Carter, though, e-mails to suggest,
Hamilton's refusal to allow Willa Catheter a re-mix across her niece's work might be expressed as the mainlining of Willa Cather.
And yet, like the coursings of her niece's journal, W.C's work along the Platte River, might be extended into a thousand different platte.aus ... A
million tiny plattes following the dashes of dis and dat, rather than a recipe.
So, frequency one in the swirl has to do with the status of the text and the authorial voice and might be simplified along a familiar unified, linear vs. fragmented, remixed split. The response: call it a continuum not a split and let people traverse the lines as they see fit. Nothing to see here, move along.
The second frequency in my mind relates to shifting economic models. Much of the recent conversation has rolled forward from Kevin Kelly's "Scan This Book!" (now ironically sealed behind the pay-for-view archives of the New York Times). Kelly also suggests that electronic books will matter because they shift the statuses of texts and authors:
Turning inked letters into electronic dots that can be read on a screen is simply the first essential step in creating this new [e-book] library. The real magic will come in the second act, as each word in each book is cross-linked, clustered, cited, extracted, indexed, analyzed, annotated, remixed, reassembled and woven deeper into the culture than before. In the world of books, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages.
What sets Kelly's premise apart from the continuum of fragmentation and unity is the way it is hard-coded into economics, technologies, and culture. The vision is not that different from earlier conceptions of docuverse, but is colored by its alignment with google books and search engines as its driving force. Kelly sees two competing business models, a prior model based on cheap but controlled copies (that could be sold) and an emerging model based on free copies (that must be extended with money-earning value-adds). What I find striking (and perhaps part of what worries others) about this otherwise sensible proposition is that it contains a sub-text that de-emphasizes autonomy and individuality. Yes, Kelly allows that individuals can release their remixed "bookshelves" into the network, but closes (and emphasizes) how "the technology of search will transform" what we think of as culture and knowledge.
The problem, really, is that one of the smaller transformations included among the four implications of e-books listed by Kelly--the suggestion that e-books "will cultivate a new sense of authority"-- is really one of the larger concerns for writers and teachers. Kelly aligns authority with a collective sense of complete knowledge--authority as increased truth value founded on access to a larger pool of information. For the writer, though, authority emerges in the complex of assessments, decisions, and manipulations that happen as we struggle to translate idea into expression; whether through remix or reflection, authority forms as we manage to place an identity behind the statements we create.
So, frequency three: John Updike responding to Kelly. In the podcast of Updike's speech, we catch something more than desire for economic control or exclusivity when it comes to identity and authorship (although those can be found in the file as well). As he recounts the many books stores from his past, Updike reveals a nostalgia for the concrete, for "his world of books, physical, handsome, nice-smelling books." All of these conversations about e-books touch at some point on the sense of loss that might accompany the physical engagement with the printed artifact. Too often, however, these concerns are dismissed as discussions reel toward economic or epistemologic paradigms. This early dismissal is a problem, though, because the tensions are not between "the conventions of the book and the protocols of the screen" as Kelly suggests in closing his argument.
The tensions are between reader browsing through (dusty) book store shelves and searcher googling electronic space, print and screen writ large as physical world and virtual space. It is telling that Updike misreads Kelly's contention that authors will begin interacting with readers as a physical act--more plane trips, coffee hours, late night signings. The misreading reveals the conundrum left unexplored so far in the conversation: how far are we willing to transform the self from a physical reader of tangible books, to a virtual patron of the electronic library.
June 04, 2006
Name that City
Play this 39 second mp3 file and take your best shot. If you aren't sure, try the 5 second bonus clip.There should be a couple of clues in there. Context and answer coming on Wednesday, unless anyone gets it first.
June 03, 2006
On Wee
<framebreak>I'll be turning off the comments for a while as I search for a Movable Type spam plug-in--don't worry, folks, we won't likely miss them. <digression>In the meta conversations, blog discussions are often questioned in their ability to facilitate productive conversations. I don't have enough blog experience to definitively say one way or another. The GAM3R TH30RY project seems to offer a strong example of blog exchange, so the conversational usefulness may not be something inherent in the medium. The spam factor also seems to be making e-mail (at least for me) less and less usable. I wonder what other ways there might be for people to exchange ideas. Hmmm. Maybe I should go downstairs and ask somebody. </digression> </framebreak>
<framerepair>On second thought, I'll probably leave the comments on while I search for the plug-in. Not much happening today, anyway. I just seem to be sitting around. . . .</framerepair>
May 23, 2006
The Bus Stops Beyond Language
I’ve made a video of my presentation (23.6 mb) for Friday afternoon at the Computers and Writing Conference. It took a while to figure out that I wanted to riff off of something I had presented at my first computers and writing conference in Missouri. There I talked about MUDs and the constraints/transcendence of language, at least that’s what I thought I was talking about. I’m reminded of Colin’s recent post on dissertations now—thinking about that twelve-year-old presentation reveals to me how true it is that writers never realize their limitations until some time later. There is an old copy of that paper linked to a broken article back in TexasBut that presentation matters to me because I tried to weave in something personal, something expansive in the prose and metaphor. And it really matters because John Slatin afterward told me to trust my ideas, to do more with the metaphors and language play. It was a powerful suggestion that I had forgotten, and remaking the piece has helped me savor it once again.
In the video for this year’s conference I repurpose the bus stop metaphor and use less prose, more sound, and some images. The video itself simply makes the point that instructional materials need to emphasize composing over consuming new media. (I’m not sure how much longer one can get away with that angle in these presentations, but still it resurfaces for me.)
The video also hopes to open some questions, including,
Why is there so little collaboration between programmers and content providers in most electronic text production models?These are all good questions, but more than anything I want to open a metaphor. A word. Door.Does the power of autonomy and individual authorship undermine collaborative paradigms?
How much new media composing practice must authors of instructional materials have?
What should be the role of familiar pedagogical terms and structures in new media instructional materials?
What limits and benefits derive from the print biases of current electronic materials?
How can publishers facilitate projects that enable more new media composition for authors and students?
May 15, 2006
Commencement
Debra Hawhee posts a reflection on the joys of commencement and I want to second that message with some thoughts on the ceremony we held this weekend for English majors. Amid the daily detail work and grunge labor of academia, these moments make it all worthwhile. This semester is the first time in my eight years at UNC that I have taught English majors--I've been teaching first year composition courses and seminars, education classes, business writing, teacher training, anything but literature courses for English majors. But what a blast I have had in the Literature and New Media course. It made me reflect on my own bacehlor's in English and what it has meant to my life.We also did a lot with images in this literature class, so I took inspiration from that to craft some of the remarks I gave this weekend to our graduating seniors. I paste a version of them below.
I’d like to ask your indulgence for brief experiment in visualization. I’d like you to think about the way our minds move between looking at the details in life and taking in the bigger picture. On the computer if you are working with images, there is a function that helps you switch between looking at the details and seeing the bigger picture, the magnifying glass or zoom tool. Think about a well-known image like Monet’s painting of lilies and clouds. Zoom in on Monet’s lilies, and you see some leaves and yellow flowers; zoom in more and you see merely the paint blobs, built up into hard-to-recognize shapes. Recall this painting or some other favorite image and zoom in, then zoom out. See a small detail and feel the zooming effect.
They say that verbal learners, like language-focused English majors, tend to hone in on the details—this passage, this sentence, this word. It’s what makes us great readers. So now we’re into the most minute of details, the last semester, the last month, the last hours. So before you leave English, we’re going to complement all that verbal and language learning with one last lesson, a lesson in visual learning—we still have six minutes to teach you something and we don’t want you to go away without getting your money’s worth. So start with this afternoon, or this weekend—the splotch of paint. Then zoom out to the semester—the yellow flower. And then zoom out to see the image of the lilies on the water—your career here as an English major.
Now the real tricky part. Imagine zooming out fifty years from now and walking up to a larger picture framed and hanging on some museum wall. Now imagine what the image would be like if it were missing the lilies, or even the yellow flower. If, instead, there were merely a dull pond or an empty space. What seems like a small detail, a brief moment in zoom mode contributes to the entire image when we zoom back out. And so, I ask that you don’t doubt that what is happening today and what has just happened in your years with us will continue to color and shape you as you pencil in the bridges on your horizons and figures in your lives. And I ask that you remember your zoom tool works both ways. As you move forward, take some time now and then to zoom back in and remember these teachers, these moments, and these friends. We’re honored to be among the important details of your lives. Now go out and continue filling in your canvas. Congratulations.
April 25, 2006
Family Photos
I thought I'd post a small slideshow with some photos from my recent trip to the UK. Not much of academic interest here. I will say that the visual mixing options available now for the most basic of digital photo activities are pretty extensive--this is just a series of snapshot in iPhoto with some music added. I did, then, resize the movie made by iPhoto in the hope of getting it to less or more fit on the Web (37 mb forewarning). I'll probably take this down soon; it has commercial music in it, takes up the 37 megabytes, and is also a bit on the hokie side.
March 23, 2006
The Greening
The next two weeks will be all about the greening; I'm taking the family and heading to Ireland. I did a summer abroad sixteen years ago in Colchester England and made it to the ferry at Holyhead but never crossed over to Ireland. Time to rectify. We'll also hit London and Scotland, taking the sleeper from London to Inverness. Look for pictures and reports after two weeks of radio silence.
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