These pieces were not written by the late British poet, Ken Smith (1938-2003), nor the other Ken Smiths who make bass guitars, study marine biology, sell cars, teach card counting, paint war scenes in oils, guide bear hunters in Idaho, teach forest management, study immunology, do war reporting, sell real estate, photograph nature, teach cryptology, provide legal counsel to the gay and lesbian community, realign the spines of athletes, listen for seismic faults in the Sierra Nevadas, operate a 4-axis milling machine, work for sustainable development in Alberta, play blackjack, or criticize Junk English. Nor were the pieces written by the Ken Smith who is “the Elvis Costello of Landscape Architecture” nor the one who serves in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives nor the one who hit a home run for the Atlanta Braves in 1983. I only wish.
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Yesterday’s questions…
…were these: Can the university hope to escape the forces of change that have imposed themselves so disruptively on journalism? Or must the university too learn how to earn its authority in a new way? Judging by the ways I hear people talking about social media on campus, this new set of tools is seen…
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Reading Jay Rosen
I’ve been reading and listening in and watching the work of Jay Rosen this summer, as he continues to collaborate with Dave Winer and others on the problem of reshaping journalism for the challenges of our time. I’d like to jot down some of my mental notes and see what they look like. I take…
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Language, tension, change
In a celebration of the career of the late literary critic Richard Poirier, Alexander Star addresses the tension central to literary language, and perhaps many other uses of language as well. A writer struggles with and against the meanings that have gone before: In painstakingly close readings, [Poirier] showed that poets like Robert Frost and Stevens and…
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Carrying on
There are just under 1400 posts over at the earlier blog, Weblogs in Higher Education, which focused on pedagogy and the web. As good as the blogging software was, pMachine is feeling a little behind the times, so I’m going to start a new project here under my own name. Also known as…
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June 2003 blog archive
Archives: June 2003 [source] Mon Jun 30, 2003 A well-known writer Here is an anecdote passed along by Annie Dillard: A well-known writer got collared by a university student who asked, “Do you think I could be a writer?” “Well,” the writer said, “I don’t know . . . . Do you like sentences?” The…
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May 2003 blog archive
Archives: May 2003 [source] Sat May 31, 2003 Foucault on getting a life In an interview, Michel Foucault reflects on self-knowledge and making something of yourself: I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not…
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April 2003 blog archive
Archives: April 2003 [source] Wed Apr 30, 2003 Experiment on the last day of class: advice to next semester’s students Today in W130 I asked students to give advice to next semester’s students, as a way of starting to experiment with the idea from Sunday’s post. # I asked for their advice about how to…
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March 2003 blog archive
Archives: March 2003 [source] Mon Mar 31, 2003 Never having spoken in public I’ve been looking at the first entries of various new and long-standing weblogs, some attached to college courses and some enjoying the natural liberty of the form. There are interesting things to notice about the rhetoric of first entries, the relative sophistication…
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Going to See the Mouse
I discovered that planning a trip to Disney World is very much like getting on one of the Disney rides. Almost anywhere you sit in the Magic Kingdom, you find a chrome bar settling across your lap, and then they’ve got you. The theme music revs up, the gears engage, the little carriage or hollow…
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On Becoming a Crank
I was walking home from work the other day, scrambling and unscrambling the day’s broken eggs. When I reached the dysfunctional three-way intersection about a block from our house, I looked up from my imaginary omelette to check the traffic before crossing. A large white truck was making its way down Longfellow, using that residential…