Digging the a5.gg in-browser notepad that uses the browser’s memory, loads in a snap, and is happy to live in the toolbar below the address box if you drag it there just once. Nicely done, Jason Cooper (@jasecoop).

Conversation in the check-out aisle, two white-haired women each with a cart and a modest number of items. Chatting about nothing, then about Downton Abbey, then about the beloved old movies on the cable. “My husband taped those,” one said. “My husband taped them too,” the other said. “How long were you married?” “Fifty-six years. And you?” “Fifty-nine. When did you lose your husband?” “Three years ago. And you?” “Three weeks ago.” “Oh, my dear,” she said, gently placing a hand on the other woman’s arm. Knowing enough about what another person might have endured, a deepening…

Having no voice, or no voice that extends very far beyond the hedges at the boundaries of our private lives. That is the topic. But the question is whether we start there or end up there–whether through the shaping forces of the society or our own choices or a combination of the two. In a postscript to an old posting, I summarized a friend’s view that people end up there, but until he said so I had been thinking that our position as citizens starts out with not much of a say beyond the private life.

Maybe there is some truth to both positions–starting there, ending up there–as well as both mechanisms–limits shaped by society, shaped by our own choices.

Maybe there is another element to consider. I remember the mothers of young people in South America who had been kidnapped and killed by government death squads–“disappeared” was the term. They lived private lives until they couldn’t take it any longer, and they began to stand in a public square and ask where their children were. They formed up into groups, so that was political, and they gathered in public places, and that was also political–actions they claimed for themselves. But a society with death squads is all about silencing voices like theirs, and yet day after day they could gather. Why is that? Jean Franco, a scholar who studied these events, suggests that the position of being someone’s mother entitles a person to care about her child, and this entitlement is so basic and so deeply ingrained that only the most grotesque of governments could refuse it. Ask the dictator: can a mother ask after her child? The answer seemed to be yes.

So there is some potential for public speech in our positions as family members, parents, siblings, children, or as friends. The web of social life was not so bastardized as to break down those bonds or stifle the expectation of caring and seeking answers about a loved one. To me that means that civil society has woven into it some degree of public right to speak, even though the powerful do their best to ignore and silence on many levels. So if you are human, we feel in our guts somewhere that you are entitled to speak about certain things. If a society forgets that gut-level right, that’s a shame, but it seems to be there a pretty far distance down the road into dictatorship. Not all the way down that road, though.

We’re not guaranteed the chance to ask a question of El Presidente at a press conference, say. But our common humanity grants us something of a place to speak from. As we see in many an episode from Nazi history, a brutal and passionate enough dictatorship will slash away at those who try to assert the right. But the less extreme cases suggest that speaking and asking go with being human in even a damaged society. People have to claim the rights or they will drift away.

I wrote a note to our IN-2nd district House representative to the US Congress, Jackie Walorski (@RepWalorski), a couple of days ago, and an email reply came today. No doubt it’s a form letter.

I asked about a recent press release on her official government website, where among other things she said that a 2.3% tax in medical devices (an important Indiana industry) would destroy 10% or more of the industry work force. The math seemed unlikely to me, so I wrote to ask for the source of the information.

As I said, a form letter came back, so of course my question was not answered. Here is the complete email reply:

Dear Mr. Smith:

Thank you for contacting me in regards to the new medical device tax. I appreciate you taking the time to inform me of your thoughts on this important issue.

I recently visited an orthopedic manufacturing company in Mishawaka and spoke with the owner. He expressed concern that the medical device tax – proposed within the president’s Affordable Care Act – will increase the cost of medical devices and prevent him from hiring new employees.

Our economy is currently in the slowest recovery since the Great Depression. The last thing we need is another tax that weakens the economy and makes it harder for new jobs to be created. Instead, Congress should enact legislation that allows our jobs creators to do what they do best—create new American jobs.

One of the first bills that I cosponsored was H.R. 523, the Protect Medical Innovation Act of 2013. This bipartisan bill eliminates the 2.3 percent tax on the sale of medical devices. This legislation is needed to ensure seniors maintain access to life-saving medical devices, and prevent another crippling tax increase from going into effect.

Please know that there is no greater honor than serving the people of Northern Indiana. As Congress examines the best ways to create jobs in our economy, rest assured that I will keep your thoughts in mind.

Sincerely,

Jackie Walorski

Member of Congress

Indiana Second District

JW/ms

October 7

• Testing, testing
  • Just wondering.

October 6

• Remembering Eileen and Harvey Bender
  • Remarks at a dedication ceremony on the IU South Bend campus, October 5, 2013.
  • Planting a tree in autumn takes me back to Westover Greenhouses in St. Louis, where I worked when I was in college. Our customers knew that there were a few choice weeks in the fall, just right for planting trees, but you could see the uncertainty on some of their faces when they looked at the trees themselves, which might very well already have started dropping their leaves. Even though a laborer like me didn’t need to know very much biology to earn a paycheck at Westover, we all knew how to check an autumn tree. Out there near the end of the smallest branches, you would use your thumbnail to scrape away just a little bark. And if you weren’t standing on a highly fertilized lawn like this one, what you would see when you scraped away a little bark was easily the most brilliant green you could find in October, the undercurrent of green cells called the cambium that is the fiber of life in a tree. When I checked this tree the other day, it was beautiful to see that undercurrent of green, not just because that’s what you want to see in a tree but because living in this town and working on this campus I feel the beautiful, lively undercurrent that still flows through us from the lives and spirits of our friends Eileen and Harvey.
  • Let me give you a few quick examples. Just over there in the quad a couple of months ago I was chatting with a former student of Eileen’s, and I asked him if he was reading anything good. He mentioned a novel he was enjoying and said that it was the perfect sort of book to talk about with Eileen. And I could tell that a conversation about literature that went back to one of her classes was still flowing—still flowering—in his mind months, maybe years later. He is one of those lucky people who knew she kept her office door open for hours a day and with great generosity made herself available to students and colleagues who wanted to talk long and deeply about literature and education and society. The example she set is still green in our memory.
  • I think I will never forget the care Harvey took of Eileen in her final years of teaching here. He would fetch her from work at the end of long days. I would see the two of them walking through Wiekamp Hall, Eileen walking really pretty slowly because of her vision, and she and Harvey talking about their days. And while I saw them leave the building together many times, I never could spot the slightest impatience in Harvey even though it cannot have felt very natural for such a tall man to walk so slowly. But it was as if he had somehow over time distilled in his heart a blend of love and service that meant that walking the speed Eileen walked was the perfect speed to walk through life if you get to walk next to Eileen. His example, for me, is evergreen, and I aspire to be as decent a man as Harvey.
  • Harvey was a learned man but wore that mantle lightly, I thought. There was the playfulness of his FACET lecture on genetics a couple of years ago, and a light playful streak in everyday conversations that always put another person at ease. I’m tempted to say that people who are really smart and at the same time humane, as Eileen and Harvey were, are likely also to be playful, or even mischievous. I remember Eileen revealing a small portion of her theory of leadership. She said once, “You know so-and-so is a good leader. He gets other people to do his work for him.†I think what she meant was that there’s a way of respecting people and inviting them to join you in a worthy project that makes our lives better, and people will do a lot of work when they feel that respect and believe in the shared mission. I think that’s the secret of FACET, by the way. Eileen figured out a way to get dozens and dozens of good teachers to aspire to be even better teachers and to work together playfully, for years and years, on the quality of Indiana University. Eileen, we’re on to you—you wanted IU to be a better place and you figured out how to get the rest of us to do the work.
  • Oh, but she worked and worked too. I don’t know that I ever talked with her about religious faith, but I saw the dozens and dozens of hours she put in on projects like the IUSB campus self-study, and in that work she quietly testified to her faith in teachers and students and public higher education. There’s something evergreen, too, I think, in the example she set—being able to return day after day believing in the good work of the university and in its improvement.
  • So it’s true that we’ve lost Harvey and Eileen, but at the same time I feel the undercurrent of their lives still as green and present as the bright cambium of the tree that is planted here in their honor and memory.

October 5

• What I wrote my representative today
  • Living in South Bend as I do, I follow our IN-2nd Congressional district representative Jackie Walorski on Twitter — @RepWalorski — and I check out her press releases on her Walorski.house.gov site from time to time. I know that she signed the August letter (top of page 3) urging House leaders to play hardball on the budget deadlines this fall and to link those political maneuvers to a long-term attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act. But as the days go by and she blames the Senate over and over again for the government shutdown, I find myself dismayed, as it seems like relentless political sloganeering at best and utterly dishonest propaganda at worst (given the plans revealed in the August letter). So I wrote her an email through her website today. Here’s what I said:
    • Message Subject: Your criticism of the Senate
    • Thank you for this reply to my recent email about the shutdown. I am disappointed that you continue to blame the Senate–on Twitter, in press releases, and there in your letter of reply. Be brave and take responsibility for your actions. You are attempting to win a legislative battle without having a majority in the Senate by withholding funding and refusing to vote on the Senate’s bill. Respect the voters of IN-2 and just say what you are doing. When my elected officials choose rhetoric that is so obviously political, as you are doing here, I turn away from them. When they tell the fuller story and stand by their values, I respect them. It has taken so short a time for you to learn the worst of Washington’s ways. Ken Smith

October 4

• The endless courtesy of Facebook
  • I am always grateful when Facebook wakes up in the morning and says, “Well, it’s been four, maybe five days since Ken chose ‘Sort: Most Recent’ instead of ‘Sort: Top News’–surely by now he needs a break from that. Should we ask him? Naaaaw, let’s save him a step and go ahead and switch the setting for him now. We’re sure he’ll be grateful.”

October 3

• Slow poison
  • It would have been interesting to raise up a family of sons, but I don’t have any sons. I am, as the song says, a man who’s rich in daughters. One thing I understand better than I did, before having daughters, is that not a few elements of society are slow poison for girls. But here’s what I suspect now that I’m getting close to being out of the child-rearing business: that we won’t get better in raising our children until we understand more clearly the things in our society that actually nurture children, the good many things that poison children, and, terribly important, the particular ways our society harms boys as well as the particular ways we harm girls. The truth is in the specificity of our understanding, as always. The power of truth is in not just the broad patterns but the details. And in finding a way to converse usefully about these things.

October 2

• The most powerful sentence I read today
  • “When the noise gets louder than I can stand, I explain – as gently as I can – that my wife would likely still be alive if ACA had gone into effect even three months sooner.”

October 1

• Magic wand moment in American health care
  • One day he was in the middle of the eleventh year of nagging anxiety over not just a serious health issue but the fact of being “uninsurable” as far as his homeland was concerned. (I know a couple that moved to Central America two or three years ago to deal with a similar crisis.) The next day he had health insurance. A magic wand moment.
  • I wonder what will happen to the mood of the country this week if, say, a million people tell their friends and acquaintances that a few days ago they were “uninsurable” but now they have been able to secure the health and financial protection that everyone needs in the modern world. Time for blogging, social media, chatting over coffee, phone calls, emails, bumper stickers, radio essays, letters to the editor, hiring of sky-writing airplanes. I wonder how much a billboard costs? Scholars of social media, you should be keeping track this week–something might happen.
  • Of course no magic was involved. Policy, the actions of government, and so forth.

Living in South Bend as I do, I follow our IN-2nd Congressional district representative Jackie Walorski on Twitter — @RepWalorski — and I check out the press releases on her official Walorski.house.gov site from time to time. I know that she signed the August letter (top of page 3) urging House leaders to play hardball on the budget deadlines this fall and to link those political maneuvers to a long-term attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act. But as the days go by and she blames the Senate over and over again for the government shutdown, I find myself dismayed, as it seems like relentless political sloganeering at best and utterly dishonest propaganda at worst (given the plans revealed in the August letter). So I wrote her an email through her website today. Here’s what I said:

Message Subject: Your criticism of the Senate

Thank you for this reply to my recent email about the shutdown. I am disappointed that you continue to blame the Senate–on Twitter, in press releases, and there in your letter of reply. Be brave and take responsibility for your actions. You are attempting to win a legislative battle without having a majority in the Senate by withholding funding and refusing to vote on the Senate’s bill. Respect the voters of IN-2 and just say what you are doing. When my elected officials choose rhetoric that is so obviously political, as you are doing here, I turn away from them. When they tell the fuller story and stand by their values, I respect them. It has taken so short a time for you to learn the worst of Washington’s ways. –Ken Smith

One day he was in the middle of the eleventh year of nagging anxiety over not just a serious health issue but the fact of being “uninsurable” as far as his homeland was concerned. (I know a couple that moved to Central America two or three years ago to deal with a similar crisis.) The next day he had health insurance. A magic wand moment.

I wonder what will happen to the mood of the country this week if, say, a million people tell their friends and acquaintances that a few days ago they were “uninsurable” but now they have been able to secure the health and financial protection that everyone needs in the modern world. Time for blogging, social media, chatting over coffee, phone calls, emails, bumper stickers, radio essays, letters to the editor, hiring of sky-writing airplanes. I wonder how much a billboard costs? Scholars of social media, you should be keeping track this week–something might happen.

Of course no magic was involved. Policy, the actions of government, and so forth.

“When the noise gets louder than I can stand, I explain – as gently as I can – that my wife would likely still be alive if ACA had gone into effect even three months sooner.”

September 30

• Civic literacy blog
  • It’s nice to see that the Center for Civic Literacy at our cousin campus in Indy, the alarmingly named Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis or IUPUI, has a blog underway on civic literacy, a topic they phrase as a worthy question in an early posting: What exactly do American citizens need to know in order to be effective citizens? Another good entry talks about the difference between raising up young people who take satisfaction in volunteering for community service and those who have the skills and motivation to contribute as active citizens in the political process. [My own memory of school is that the first was addressed and the second for the most part was not.] It’s good to see faculty and staff at a public university raising these questions as part of their work.

September 29

• Spoilers? What spoilers?
  • A small sign of public-spiritedness: it was difficult to get a sense of what was happening in the final episode of Breaking Bad in real time by following the #BreakingBad hashtag on Twitter. Most people were showing great restraint here in the eastern time zone, knowing how many fans were waiting patiently west of here. Well done. I had to read the episode account on Wikipedia to discover what went down.

September 28

• Stalking the wild di Suvero
  • South Bend has a sculpture called “The Keepers of the Fire” mounted on a platform in the river. It was created by Mark di Suvero in 1980, and he has since placed orange steel sculptures in cities all across North America. This one has sections that move in the wind, and a mirrored surface that I never took much notice of until recently, when a student mentioned that it sometimes reflected the light of the spillway of the low-water dam. She made it sound rather magical, the light playing in the arc of mirror there. I have made a couple of trips to see if I could be there at the right time, in the right light conditions, to see the reflections come alive in the mirror. Twice today I stopped by–it’s just a few minutes from our house–once in bright light and once when the sculpture was in shadow. Both times it was turned away from the spillway, so the mirror was reflecting the calmer waters above the dam. The first time I could see very pale reflections working across the mirror, almost invisible, like the palest edges of a natural gas flame, almost completely without color. The second time the water was dark and mostly still, and the mirror was largely dark as a result, but one edge sparkled between dark and light very steadily. It wasn’t like a flame so much as a mirror, though–the bright light was much more magical than the shade, even though the shade was easier to see. Tomorrow, I hope to have another chance or two in bright light, maybe even facing the spillway if the wind is right. I am persuaded now that there is more to see. The orange structural steel, beams and curves, parts turning slowly, and the arc of mirror catching the light of the moment and holding it there–I like the sculpture more and more.
  • [The Flickr image excerpt by Andrea Wiggins. In this image the mirror, the only part that is not orange, faces away from the photographer.]

September 27

• The survivor’s lament (Beowulf, lines 2247-2266)
  • You hold the treasures of princes now, earth,
  • now that princes’ hands hold nothing.
  • They took those prizes first from you,
  • before the anguish of battle gripped them.
  • Death took everyone who knew
  • the joys of our people’s great hall.
  • They’ve all left this life.
  • No one carries the sword now,
  • no one polishes the feasting cup.
  • They’ve all gone off somewhere.
  • Now the stout helmet of finely-hammered gold
  • falls to you, the polishers who
  • should shine the war mask sleep.
  • The mail coat that endured battle
  • among the breaking of shields
  • and the bite of swords
  • rusts on a corpse.
  • Its chains won’t ring out
  • while a war-prince rides
  • with heroes beside him.
  • There’ll be no joy from the harp,
  • no hand touching the sweet strings,
  • no hawk flying from beam to beam
  • across the people’s great hall,
  • no swift mare stamping
  • on the courtyard stones.
  • Death has pointed
  • many peoples on their way.
  • Translated from Old English by K.S.

September 26

• Literacy big and small
  • The article said “mediate” and maybe that’s okay, but I’m looking for more ordinary words to make it clear to myself. The “it” here is literacy. Literacy, small, is the ability to decode the words and send out your own messages and be understood. Literacy, big, is the ability to think it through, not just the message but the context, the implications, the stakes for you and others, the way it does or does not line up with what you know of the world, and the ability to speak back, to push back if need be, to use words to be a player in the world, not just a listener and a reader. The article said literacy, big, was the ability to mediate between yourself and the big world around you. So “mediate” is okay but it has no urgency, no presence, as a word. It holds a good idea at arm’s length when we really need to look it in the eye. But that’s the way specialists tend to talk–in jargon, to their colleagues–when if their field is worth a damn there are people who wish that they would speak with them.

September 25

• Blogging graffiti-style
  • There is a surprising opening move in an old article by Kenneth Burke where he criticized the book reviews people were writing about a new English translation of Hitler’s Mein Kampf. No, the reviewers weren’t praising the book, they were slamming it, Burke said. But it was how they were doing it that was the problem. They were dropping a few true but easy criticisms and leaving readers no smarter at the end than they were at the start. He called this vandalism–essentially high-class graffiti–and said that it “[contributes] more to our gratification than to our enlightenment.”
  • For Burke, it’s lazy just to tag even this vile book with a few critical slogans and move on. Sure, the book is racist, for example, but spraying that word in large letters across the front of it doesn’t help us figure out how that racism worked so thoroughly as to lead to millions of deaths. There is a mechanism, a vile philosophy, a set of practical political tools, a psychological foundation of human desires and weaknesses all at work here, a body of slogans and imagery, etc., and the accurate word racism does not illuminate this complexity. The writer pats himself on the back; the ready applauds; but the brain shuts down.
  • The chance for understanding requires specificity. When we read a blog post or an editorial or a tweet, the phrases may turn essentially to graffiti–simple phrases repeated in frustration or outrage or self-assurance rather than the specificity of the subject starting to unfold. It’s a question we should be in the habit of asking ourselves: when so-and-so announcer or columnist or blogger gets on a soapbox about this or that topic, are we smarter at the end or have we mainly been tagged with graffiti?
  • And here is the Burke paragraph.

September 24

• The part for the whole
  • Maybe this is a follow-up from yesterday, the true story of the street preachers and the street theater protestors yelling at each other in Berkeley in 1974.
  • There is a cousin to metaphor and simile, a type of figurative language called synecdoche. It’s a fast way of indicating something big by mentioning only a part of the thing. When it’s done well, the reader gets the big picture from the little piece.
  • “The hand that signed the paper felled the city.” Well, of course it didn’t really. The tyrant signed the order, the army he had assembled over the years carried out the order, but in context the sweeping power of the tyrant leaps out of the synecdoche. The part brings to mind the whole.
  • It has seemed to me that synecdoche is the key to empathy and ethics. At some point in life a person realizes, “I don’t really know what the other person has suffered. Try as I might, I can’t really walk a mile in another person’s shoes.” Once you know that you only partially understand what another person has gone through, you can practice empathy and try to imagine the unseen part. From the part you can look for the whole. A person begins to see it as an ethical obligation to try.
  • But it’s really good to add the insight that synecdoche may imply: you only have partial knowledge. It says to me: I should be modest in my claims about the suffering of others because I only see the part, not the whole. My knowledge is not going to get larger than that. I should speak moderately when it has become clear to me that my knowledge is incomplete. And to the degree that knowledge of my fellow humans always resembles synecdoche, it is always incomplete.
  • And “And yet” will surely follow. A discussion of times one must speak boldly….

September 23

• A fable (though true)
  • Visiting Berkeley, in 1974, one spring afternoon as the crowds passed up and down Sproul Plaza, I stopped to watch the confrontation between a couple of street preachers and two or three guys who had brought along a large papier-mâché cow nearly as tall as they were. On one side the preachers with Bibles in their hands were threatening damnation and calling people to the Lord, and beside them the young men were inviting people to kneel and pray to their cow. They drove the preachers crazy, all the more so when they said that the cow had been made from pages of Bibles torn from the hands of street preachers. Their sacrilege was deeply intentional and the preachers were outraged. The crowd was fascinated by the conflict, but nobody stopped to attend to either of their calls–nobody stepped up to be saved and nobody knelt down to pray, street-theater-style, to the cow. Off in the distance I could hear a hot dog vendor, one of those people who worked the job so long that he developed a song-like patter, calling out to the crowd. People were lining up for his wares. I remember thinking: His calling out is musical, and sells.

September 22

• Writing that doesn’t want to conclude
  • Some kinds of writing are stamped with a badge of authority–the king wrote it, say, or the head of the research lab confirmed it, or the writer’s last book won the Pulitzer. Other kinds of writing operate in a space that has been cleared of competing voices, so pieces seem to have authority because of the silence around them. But some kinds of writing come with a little card that says, “This is my best understanding, right now, at the moment.” No external claim of authority, but rather: “Take it or leave it, reader, here is what I have for you today. I’m thinking on my feet. I hope it’s good, sure, but it’s yours for the using now.”
  • A different dynamic forms in writing without claims of authority, both at the writer’s desk and in a reading and writing community. In 2005, Jay Rosen described the results for both writer and community, I believe, when solo and shared inquiry trump claims of authority:
    • Sure, weblogs are good for making statements, big and small. But they also force re-statement. Yes, they’re opinion forming. But they are equally good at unforming opinion, breaking it down, stretching it out, re-building it around new stuff. Come to some conclusions? Put them in your weblog, man, but just remember: it doesn’t want to conclude.
  • This won’t stop someone from replying with something dumb or hurtful, but it leaves the door open for conversation. It’s hopeful and realistic about the ways insights build and accumulate when conditions are right. Dogma, by comparison, is pleased with itself and considers its thinking work to be done. [That’s one style of talk radio, for example.]
    • The image above spells out “blog” in semaphore.

September 21

• Readers write part of the paper
  • The Guardian gives away a nice Jack Wolfskin backpack each week for the best contribution to the reader-generated GuardianWitness Been There travel site. For example, the recent call for 100-word entries on this outdoor walking theme:
    • The UK’s countryside is beautiful for a walk or hike any time of the year, but in autumn, with its dazzling colours and delicate sharpness in the air, there are some trails that really prevail. Where’s your favourite hike to embrace the changing seasons?
  • The principle could hardly be any simpler: Guardian readers know their countryside and can create useful content. All a paper has to do is encourage readers to share in the writing and make those new writers look good with proper design, photography, and editing (as needed). Here is a tempting reader contribution to an earlier call for posts on microbreweries:
    • Beerwolf Books, Falmouth, Cornwall
    • Approaching Beerwolf feels like you’ve stumbled on a secret: it’s up an easy-to-miss alleyway between chain stores, in a beautiful 18th-century building on Bells Court. Through the door, there’s a staircase and a view of shelves of books. So it is a bookshop. Then there’s the smell of beer and the sound of chatter. So it is a pub. There are several cask ales and an interesting range of bottled beer, not only from Cornish breweries. beerwolfbooks.com
  • I’d stop by that establishment, and I’d keep reading a local paper that got readers involved that way.

September 20

• Sorry, no links
  • The campus has a new newsletter, two pages, attractive design, nicely written, with an informative selection of news and views, and even a Twitter #hashtag for stirring up conversation about the contents. It comes as a two-page pdf file via the campus bulletin board, a format that is probably fine for a sizable audience. But no web links, nothing you can click on, even the little articles that you know stand in for a bigger article on the university site. For example, a Nobel laureate is giving a talk in a couple of weeks. Now that’s worth a link, but there are no links, and as far as I can tell the pdf’s content does not live elsewhere in a more web-smart format, like a blog. I would link to it but there is nothing to link to. I would click links to read more but there’s no links to click. I would occasionally throw a few readers over to the newsletter on Twitter, Facebook, and the blog, but no can do. So, there you go. Wanna go hear the Nobel laureate talk? Go find the web page–it’s out there somewhere.

September 19

• Blogging in an expert society
  • We owe a great debt to experts. They got us to the moon before our enemies; they saved my father’s life in the ICU years ago; they made this truly beautiful machine I am typing on right now; they cured the common cold. [Well, not that last one.] Our debt to experts is profound.
  • By contrast, bloggers cast a ridiculous figure in a society shaped so cunningly by experts. Who are these typists with their stray thoughts and their hopeless, rambling plans? Their informal little essays almost instantly forgotten, their links rotting and, soon enough, cobwebs decorating their servers. Who do these bloggers think they are fooling?
  • But expertise can rob us of a little of ourselves:
    • When we use only the lens provided by a profession, there are some things about our fellow human beings we will never know.
    • When we are guided only by expertly-framed policy, we will from time to time stomp on the souls of other people.
    • When we speak only in the words of expertise, some people will believe that we are also quietly saying, “Be quiet and listen. An expert is speaking. It’s time for you to shut up.”
  • At least there are certain mistakes that bloggers don’t often make:
    • They usually don’t pull rank. They usually don’t insist that a problem can be solved only by a certain kind of expert or talked about only in one kind of language.
    • They tend to think that people’s experience has something to offer. They assume that tradition or dogma should be challenged by people reflecting on their experiences.
    • They get riled up, but down deep they like to hear more voices, not fewer. They want their turn to speak, not the only turn. They get really impatient, but down deep they want democracy.
  • So: we bloggers aren’t entirely serious. That is our weakness and our strength. We aren’t systematic. That helps free us from the ethical failings of expertise. We have no authority and we can’t make people listen. That means that the people who turn our way are free people, making their own choices. Those are very cool people to have as friends. No money changes hands, just ideas and experiences. Nobody pulls rank. And on a good day, interesting things get said and sometimes they ripple out into the world. In an expert society, bloggers give me hope.
    • [This post was sparked by Dave Winer’s idea that blogging resembles the fast-painting practice of fresco. The three men walking image is a representation of “RSS” in semaphore.]

September 18

• Generosity of the web: Chess department
  • I noticed the generosity of the digital age even in my earliest days reading email lists, when I had a phone modem in our cinder block apartment on the Rutgers campus in Piscataway, New Jersey. The modem’s speed was 200 words per month or something similar, but still there were people in my field all across North America trading ideas every day. It was a bookish, trivia-loving crowd, admittedly, and I signed off one list in despair after most of the crew spent several days remembering every pop song that used spelling in its title or lyrics: “Our D-I-V-O-R-C-E became final today….” D-O-Z-E-N-S of these songs came to the minds of the assembly that week.
  • But on my main list there were these elders in the field who would show up day after day and share resources and answer questions and point people in the direction of previous studies or mention who someone should email or call to collaborate on a project. The generosity was mild-mannered, anything but pushy, and somewhere between tireless and infinite on the stamina scale. Younger folks would be working on a problem in the field, and this handful of elders would just simply help out. Every day.
  • When I started blogging, in 2003, I quickly ran into communities of bloggers who had the same ethic. Librarian-bloggers, for sure, and educators interested in making the web work for the good of students, for example. And occasionally I’d see the same thing in the land of various pastimes and hobbies, such as chess.
  • And the bedrock generosity of some folks online continues today. I ran across the YouTube chess feed of Mato Jelic, a teacher who has given the world over 800 short videos celebrating and unpacking the brilliance of the games of great masters. He shows the board, the moves of a particular game, and some alternate variations, all the while talking casually about chess tactics. Even with my over-the-hill chess brain I can feel neurons being nudged into fresh alignments when I watch one of Mato’s videos. And you have not trouble spotting his love for the game.
  • People talk more about spam and the cruelty of the web, but this other strand is also everywhere, in abundance, and has been for years.

September 17

• Adequate mental health care
  • People come up to me in parking lots and compliment our bumper sticker. I have to agree with them. I’m grateful to the friend who created the design and had a big pile of them printed. The bumper sticker says:
  • “I Wish Adequate Mental Health Care Was as Easy to Get as a Gun.”

September 16

• Manologues
  • The videos are out, a little rough around the edges but you can get the idea. Men from the community writing stories that they might otherwise never tell, submitting them anonymously to the reader’s theater group, where they are shaped into an evening’s performance. This was the first year but it will become a tradition here, as it follows on a longtime women’s Michiana Monologues series with the same structure. The results, in both cases, are funny, thought-provoking, moving, and, in spite of how deep a person’s woes can sometimes be, affirming. Things about men’s lives right here, right now, get said that otherwise would simmer on for who knows how many years in silence. Proceeds from both the men’s and women’s shows go to local anti-violence and family justice centers–just beautiful.
  • Here is an example from the Manologues show, at 9:05 of the first video. Later in life a man recalls how as a child he could see his father struggling and eventually being swept under by his demons, while he as a boy felt keenly both powerful love and powerlessness.
  • So: Part 1 and Part 2 of the 2013 performance. Their website, where they tell the production’s full story and where writers can submit work later in the year for the 2014 production.
  • But don’t miss the joyful finale!

September 15

• Or not
  • News that gets out stays out? I thought the title of my last post was clever, but since I hit “Publish” I have wondered if it is only partially true. I think, for example, of the urge to speak indicated by graffiti in any American city. In South Bend a huge gallery of art underneath one of the river bridges was painted over a couple of years ago, and as far as I can tell no record remains online. I was fond of one image particularly, a huge ant peeking over a wall almost exactly as the playfully drawn Kilroy did in World War II-era “Kilroy was here” graffiti.
  • My favorite South Bend street image probably lasted only a few days. It was a blue man with his mouth sealed by an X of tape above the slogan, “Where is your voice?” It looked like it was a stencil and spray paint job and it was centered on a really prime section of wall on the downtown river walk, almost exactly as a painting would be hung in the galleries immediately across the river in the South Bend Museum of Art. If it was a stencil job, then maybe it will appear again someday, who knows. The city painted over it very neatly–they don’t always bother to make a reclaimed wall look good, by the way.
  • Here and on Twitter I’m very interested in voices that are heard or silenced, news that gets out, or not. Images that are seen or obscured. The structures of society that influence who is heard, and the impact of these inequalities on our democracy and our quality of life.

September 14

• News that gets out stays out
  • The Chinese national arts censors asked film director Jia Zhangke to make surprisingly few changes to his new film, “A Touch of Sin,” even though it tells embarrassing stories about contemporary China. Why? According to reporter Edward Wong‘s NY Times article, the answer involves social media’s ability to make events part of the public record.
  • In spite of state oversight, Jia’s new film tell stories of individuals grappling with troubling political, economic, and social conditions:
    • “In these few years, because of the speed of China’s transformation, I have become very interested in history,†Mr. Jia said. “And I have also become interested in China’s societal problems, its economic problems, its political problems. So I feel now with ‘A Touch of Sin,’ it’s not just an issue of individual emotions, but it is also an expression of the state of the entire nation…. Reform has brought about many problems…. Prominent among these are the problem of social inequality and problems such as distribution of income.â€
  • Now Jia is telling the stories of individuals lashing out violently against the conditions of their lives, which could easily have tempted the state censors to react more firmly than they did, in the interests of good national publicity. Jia has become just the kind of artist a country touchy about the control of image and information would censor. But social media was already playing a public role.
  • Thanks to “the world of Twitter-like microblogs, which many Chinese have been reading in recent years to get the unvarnished daily news and opinions that are all but absent from the state-run news media,” the four interwoven stories in this movie, and other stories like them, were already part of the public record. This fact, the director suggests, protected his film from strong censorship. The kind of stories he was telling had already broken out:
    • The news articles on which the film was based had already made the rounds on microblogs. The narratives had entered the public consciousness in a way that might never have happened 10 or even five years ago, before the Internet became such a social force in China.
  • But even though the news was out, Jia points out that these violent episodes are not well understood there “because society has never had a widespread discussion of the problem.” Here a distinction is made between the attention that is drawn and paid via social media and the kinds of discussions that form a national consensus and then shape policy. As an artist, he heard the evidence and witness of the microblogs and Internet news feeds, but still saw the nation in a state of emergency requiring a response: “Certain things need to be said, and need to be said directly, clearly, to as large, and as activated, a Chinese audience as possible.†Because social media attuned people to the crisis, but could not resolve the crisis, it was a necessary but not sufficient tool for Chinese society facing its problems. Other arts and other institutions need to be healthy and active in order to work the issues further.
  • Edward Wong’s article helps us understand more exactly the nature of social media–not a replacement for other forms of media and other institutions but a necessary widening of a society’s toolkit. A way of preparing the ground for more focused national conversations and a way of keeping the pressure on. The chatter on a Twitter or Weibo can swell into political awareness but the working out of a national consensus about action probably cannot be completed there. Great social decisions are not, so far, anyway, made on Twitter.
  • It might be interesting to think more, too, about why Jia told these stories in a familiar martial arts genre–perhaps audiences can empathize and understand challenging material more readily through the lens of a familiar kind of story? I don’t know.
  • [“Filmmaker Giving Voice to Acts of Rage in Today’s China,” NY Times, 9/14/13]

September 13

• Fast food follies
  • So there I was, betraying my principles, contradicting my religion . . . well, maybe just disobeying my doctor’s orders, walking into a fast food restaurant. I’d been running errands, and I needed a quick lunch. I thought maybe a fish sandwich and some fries would go down easy. I tossed my dietary scruples aside and walked up to the counter, where a pleasant, clean-cut young man in a tan shirt offered to take my order. I mentioned the fish sandwich and the fries, and I thought maybe they could throw in a medium cola and a cheeseburger, just to round things out. The total did some major damage to a $10 bill.
  • I saw my sandwiches make their way up the cooking line. A woman in a blue shirt walked over to the bin where sandwiches awaited their fate. As she did, she raised her right arm, tilted her head down, and quickly and quietly coughed, just once, into her hand. Now I was really interested. I watched her read my order from the big screen, then grab both my sandwiches from the bin and slide them into a brightly-colored paper bag. She dropped in the order of fries, folded the bag closed, and turned and handed my fresh, tasty lunch to the young man at the register. Now I faced a dilemma. Should I make a bit of a scene? I reached back for a combination of good manners and self-assertiveness, and I said to him,
  • “Just before she filled my bag there, she coughed into her hand. So I was thinking maybe we should do this whole thing over.†He turned to his co-worker and said, “The customer said you coughed into your hand and he’d like a fresh order of food.â€
  • She blandly asserted her innocence, then told the cook to remake the order. The young man put the first bag of food under the counter, and everyone waited. I watched with renewed interest as a lovely new fish sandwich, hidden from germy danger in its box, made its way slowly toward the woman in blue. I caught the eye of the young man and started rubbing my hands together in the air – the universal sign for handwashing. “Maybe it’s time for her to go wash up,†I said. The poor guy turned to his co-worker and, using all the politeness his mother had taught him, said, “The customer thinks you should go wash your hands.â€
  • She disappeared into the back of the kitchen for a minute or two, and soon the young man handed me a fresh bag of food. A few days later, in a friendly way, I told the story to one of the managers. She coughed into her hand, I said. So then she went to wash her hands, the manager asked, cheerfully. No, I said, she assembled my bag of food. So then she went to wash her hands, the manager asked, hopefully. No, I said. I requested a new bag of food. So then she went to wash her hands, the manager asked, faltering just a little. No, I said. Everyone waited for new food to be cooked, and I suggested that she go wash her hands. So then she went to wash her hands, the manager asked one last time, always looking for the good in people. Yes, I said, then she went to wash her hands.
  • You’d think I would have savored my lunch that day – those sandwiches so freshly prepared, my little victory over bad manners so fresh in mind, myself so thoroughly in the right that nobody could say a word against me. But no. For who cannot identify with that employee? Who has not taken a shortcut or skipped a procedure or overlooked a little personal failure? It could as easily have been me sliding sandwiches into the bag with my germy hands. For as my mother tried to teach me long ago, all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. [Source]

September 12

• Our fading Do Not Call law
  • The regional public radio station gives me four minutes of air time every seven weeks to talk about quality of life here in the area. A few years ago I wrote about Indiana’s Do Not Call law, which for a time was among the strictest in the country. The law made for a huge reduction in the number of unsolicited sales phone calls most of us received at our homes.
  • But now the calls are coming back–more often, and more companies, though some of them may be the same companies using the same methods in difference industries. Credit cards and home security systems have been most common.
  • I managed once, a few years ago, to record one of the calls in which the person I was speaking to said that it was not against the law to call because he was representing the federal government. It was a gutsy, I-don’t-give-a-damn performance on his part. I wrote the Indiana attorney general’s office to let them know that I had this recording, but got no answer.
  • So I told the whole story on the public radio, and I sent that along to the attorney general, and now that they saw I was actually reaching a wide audience they answered me. So it goes.
  • Now there is a different attorney general and I’ve written to ask for an update on the issue. I told them I might be getting some coverage in the media up front this time, so we’ll see if they reply. I’ll report back later. Until then, would you like a free home security system? Cause I know a company that will be in your area later this week installing these fine systems for people just like you.
  • Want to read more? Here’s the first of my radio pieces, in which all my elected officials in Washington blew me off until they knew I had access to public radio. And here, in the second of the radio pieces, at 3:30 in the audio, the lying son of a gun credit card salesman tells me over the phone that he works for the federal government. And the office of the attorney general is too busy to reply to my query until they hear that I have media access.

September 11

• Aids to invention
  • Poets like rhyme not just because it’s part of their tradition or because it makes their poems easy to remember or because it helps give a musical effect to the lines or because it links the meaning of two words or because it can be witty. All true, but there is this other thing. Rhyme is an aid to invention. The poet says, essentially, I am going to force myself to think about possible words for the next line that I would probably have never considered. For the sake of rhyme, I am going to try out language in this draft that I would never have bothered with. And sometimes, as a result something fresh and surprising happens.
  • And that means that, for poets, rhyme is an aid to invention. As a starting blogger, back in 2003, I used pMachine software, which included a calendar in the sidebar highlighting each day of the month whether there was a posting. The blue highlights were clickable links and the purpose was to draw readers further into the site, but I loved to see the weeks fill up, without, if possible, missing any days. The challenge of daily writing all by itself was an aid to invention. The discipline of at least trying, of looking around for topics, of reading other writers and seeing if there was something I could contribute to their conversation. The image of the calendar as a reminder of my aspiration to write daily. The truth that along with the weak entries daily writing captured good things that would otherwise never have been written at all, possibly never even been thought about. So the calendar visible on the page, the habit and aspiration of daily writing, the not-so-intimidating format of a blog post, the appeal of having a real audience–all these things help make blogging itself, and a good blogging tool, into aids to invention. Bravo.

September 10

• Johns Hopkins and academic blogging
  • In helping to tease the Johns Hopkins faculty censorship story into public view, longtime academic blogger Jay Rosen beautifully, at lightning speed, and just in passing, sketches what should be a seamless bond between traditional faculty duties and blogging:
    • In commenting critically on a subject he is expert in, and taking an independent stance that asks hard questions and puts the responsibility where it belongs, Matthew Green is doing exactly what a university faculty member is supposed to be doing. By putting his thoughts in a blog post that anyone can read and link to, he is contributing to a vital public debate, which is exactly what universities need to be doing more often.
  • The reward system for most faculty ignores or devalues this public role. This institutional structure famously tempts faculty to turn inward toward a small and narrow audience made up of only disciplinary peers. As a result, they (we) serve our communities less well and in time come to deserve the ivory tower stereotypes that are applied to us.
  • Of course there is more. Writing for a wide, thoughtful, general audience involves academics in a more layered exchange of ideas and information than we would otherwise see. We academics get smarter when we listen to more people. This is one of the normal experiences of web publishing that most academics never bump into.
  • A later stage in the Hopkins story here.

September 9

• Slow learner
  • It’s true, I’m a slow learner. I want to read what my old friends, neighbors, and colleagues post on social media, and I set the Sort button on Facebook to “Most Recent” and not to “Top Stories”–which I don’t know the meaning of, anyway. Then I seem to get the most recent posts from friends and neighbors and colleagues. Seem to. Then a few days pass and I notice that FB has changed the setting over to “Top Stories” without asking. I change it back. A few days pass, FB changes it back again. Sometimes I complain but there’s nobody to complain to, nobody at FB who would ever read the posting. And tonight, FB changed the setting back a second time in a single day. I’m a slow learner but I’m starting to get the picture:
    • There’s nobody to complain to. They don’t care and they don’t listen. It’s their playground and they make all the rules and we don’t get to know what the rules are anyway. Thanks, Facebook.

September 8

• Young people, reflecting
  • The Corner Office interview in the NY Times almost always has good advice for young people in the final question or two. Today Adam Bryant asks Daniel Lubetzky what he would tell graduating seniors, but the answer, I think, should reach younger college students, too. He recommends turning off the gadgets and making time for introspection, for thinking about your values and evaluating your efforts:
    • The most important is to make sure that you talk to yourself, that you think hard about what’s important to you and gives you meaning. When I was 19 and walking between classes, I didn’t have a phone, so my brain would take me in different directions. And it’s so healthy and important to be thinking, “Oh, I could have done that better.†Or, “What about this idea?†But nowadays, we’re on our iPhones all the time, and you don’t have time to talk with yourself, to analyze.
  • I imagine that most college students don’t have anyone sharing this kind of good advice, but Adam Bryant gives it away for free a couple of times a week in his interviews. I often start by reading the final few questions.

September 7

• Passivity? You’re soaking in it!
  • Here is one good reading of what’s at stake in our passive, consumer society today, by Kurt Spellmeyer:
    • If culture is where we live, so to speak, if it gives form to our values and extends them into the future, then the promise of democracy remains unrealized so long as most of us are uninvolved in the making of culture itself. (Arts of Living 7)
  • My quick read, maybe unfair, maybe too gloomy, is that the average university course focuses on replicating expertise within the limits of a single discipline, not on tools for creativity or collaboration, and usually not on interdisciplinary tools either. My quick read is that the university does not entirely support consumer culture but it does not really take it on either, not in its teaching methods. A course reading or lecture might offer an intellectual critique of consumer culture, but the medium by which this message is communicated is still a problem.
    • Passivity? You’re soaking in it! [Just ask Madge.]

September 6

• While freedom slowly broadens
  • On March 5, 1946, someone, presumably Frank McCluer, the president of Westminster College, introduced President Harry Truman, who then quickly introduced former prime minister Winston Churchill, who went on to give the “Sinews of Peace” speech famous for the phrase “iron curtain” that sharply defined the conflict between Soviet-dominated countries and western European countries after World War II. It was a big day in Missouri higher education and in world political thought. But not remembered: McCluer’s brief introduction (audio: 2:03-2:37) described a long history in which:
    • …freedom slowly broadens down from precedent to precedent.
  • McCluer’s phrase helps me think about how democracy works. It is true that elections steer the great, heavy, slow-turning ship of state a little bit, one way or another, and some elections are decisive. But those precedents are another matter. They often come at the end of long periods of activism and debate, and they define one political concept or another newly or more decisively, and their definitions endure. They guide us for years ahead, and if McCluer was correct, they are the markers of freedom’s progress over the centuries.
  • The role of citizens in an election: at the least, it is to vote. The role of a citizen in setting a new precedent that redefines and broadens freedom: activism. The difference is huge, isn’t it? [More ideas from that introduction about the role of higher education in bringing decisive ideas to the wider community.]

September 5

• Outlining Syria
  • Daniel Bentley is setting a great example at his Worknotes site, using the Fargo outliner to capture, organize, link to, and annotate resources addressing our possible Syrian military strike. Each day’s entry includes several standard categories–a recent day included eighteen entries sorted into six categories. The annotations, usually two or three lines long, are specific enough to help a reader decide whether to click the link, and the fact that they can be hidden and revealed adds a layer of practicality to the page. You could do all this without an outliner tool, but you’d be making work for yourself and your readers to do so.

September 4

• Of use in the world
  • It’s fun to make up a statistic. Here goes. Right around 96.5 % of all school work carried out in the United States this year will be thrown away after it has been completed.* Sure, you might come up with a different number–after all, students make cool stuff worth keeping in art classes, for example. But most of the rest is tossed away at the end. It’s a test, really, in which we say to students:
    • How long are you willing to carry on doing things you would never in your right mind choose for yourself to do? If your answer is “a long time,” then you’re the one we want. You’re just our kind of young worker.
  • But it doesn’t always have to be that way. Find an out-of-print document that tells part of the history of your town, say, a pre-1923 text with no copyright problems attached, and work up a small custom-published print-on-demand edition of it with your students. Study the context, the main players, the key terms. Gloss difficult references. Write an introduction together that helps a reader make good use of the text. Proofread it like crazy. Hold a public reading. Get your students into the newspaper with their project. Have a companion website. Blog the whole process. With the students, finish up by writing a guide to how to carry out this kind of project. Etc.
    • For example, in the history museum here is a log book of all trading post sales made in the earliest days of this settlement. How cool is that? I don’t know, I’ve never seen it. It’s fragile and not on display for the public and it has never been published. Correct me if I’m wrong, but people would love to have access to it, yes?
  • Next year, have the new students update the little volume and then make another. Send your students on their way with 21st century publishing skills and a clear memory of a time when they made something in school that was of use in the world.
  • * * * * *
  • *Just to make sure I’m being clear: I made up the number, for fun. But it’s more or less correct, isn’t it?

September 3

• Tech for democracy
  • I subscribed to a daily email for a member of Parliament, to see how They Work For You gets the word out for British citizens who want to keep their elected officials accountable. I picked one I knew from past episodes of Murdoch scandal news, Tom Watson. Now I receive a daily email from the site, very nicely set up. Their motto is: Keeping tabs on the UK’s parliaments & assemblies.
  • This morning there is an email, for example, letting me know exactly what Watson said in Parliament yesterday. A link in the email takes me to this page, right down the page to where Watson asks a question of the Secretary of State, who replies in the following paragraph.
  • In the right margin, several options present themselves. I can write a blog post linking to Watson’s single speech or to his speech in the context of the ongoing debate. I can see where this debate appears in the Hansard, which is the rough equivalent of our Congressional Record. Readers who are logged in can add annotations to the speech, providing context or rebuttal or informative links–that’s pretty nice. Some key terms in the speeches are set up as links to informative pages of various kinds.
  • And each speaker’s name links to a page devoted to information about his or her record of public service. On Tom Watson’s page, like the others, you find an astounding assembly of information. Voting and committee records, profiles on journalism sites, financial records, key issues for this figure, some statistical data, ways to communicate with the person, social media sites, and more. Also, on each of these individual pages there is an invitation to sign up for the daily emails covering the Parliamentary speeches and votes of that person.
  • That’s a very nice example of Tech for Democracy, isn’t it? Correct me if I’m wrong, but here in the United States we don’t have any tracking of elected officials as good as this in place, do we?
  • PS. On 9/3 I wrote both Indiana Senators through their web submission sites about this excellent tool now in use overseas, and the two websites returned form email messages within the hour, both promising a proper reply sometime soon. Just now, on 9/10, a second form email has arrived from our Democratic senator, caste as a reply but not mentioning the particular thing I wrote about in any way.

September 2

• Students, against their will
  • So I was thinking about students who resist their schooling and, by chance, while wandering around in the essays of Samuel Johnson and a book about him, I came across this:
    • Men may be convinced, but they cannot be pleased, against their will. (Life of Congreve, II, 217)
  • We teachers may very well overpower our resistant students for a time — some of our colleagues may do little else, I suppose. But each student still chooses an attitude toward our coercions, and in the long run, based on our own experience as students, shouldn’t we suspect that the coerced will wise up and make their own decisions? When students assent to a teacher’s coercion, isn’t it little more than a way of saying, “Yes, you have the power today”?
  • But, to return to a phrase from another post, if the work we’re doing together seems to make a difference, then a student might assent not to a teacher’s power but to the value of the work. The student would be saying, in effect, “I accept this this project as my own.” When you can rise in the morning and say that about the heart of your day, life is probably pretty good, yes? [Source]

September 1

• Blogging as dwarvish cryptography
  • Elrond, the elf master of the Last Homely House, in The Hobbit, reads a mysterious treasure map made by dwarves, at first using the light of the room and then moonlight, letting the beams shine through from the back of the map. Along with the runish letters visible to anyone there are moon-letters, which can only be read by the light of the same shape moon and in the same season as when the letters were first written. (On 53 in the Del Rey paperback.)
  • The best scripters could easily create a blog whose posts were only available in the same stage of moon as when they were written. That would make a curious web site, something like waiting for some rare flower to bloom, as it does, once a decade for one hour in the dead of night.
  • In a sense the deep archive of an old site like Scripting News is a collection of moon-letters — the old messages vanish (in part because of their large number and in part because their context is lost) and all we see are the posts visible to the naked eye, today’s or this week’s. True, there is a search engine, but there are thousands of messages you will never find because you don’t know how to call them up, unless you are the sort of scholar who gives up his life to run his fingers over the traces of someone else’s life.
  • Blogs, then, as dwarvish cryptography, with no masterful Elrond waiting at the Last Homely House to read the words, to replenish the saddlebags with food, to fill us with hope and good wishes, before we set out on a dark quest. That’s why I think some bloggers should mine their archives and write a book. [Source]
• Why I give reading quizzes
  • I sent this note via the online course software to my undergraduate class just now. If you see a way to improve on this approach, I’d be pleased to hear.
    • Class members, this is a quick reminder that we will sometimes have a reading quiz at the start of class. You know from past experience how much better a course is when people have done the reading ahead of time and given it some thought, and that is what a quiz might ask you about: basic details that a careful reader will have noticed, along with an opportunity to show that you have thought about the reading–maybe connected it in your mind to previous readings, previous class conversations, or things you know from other classes and readings or from life experience. All of those are great ways to prepare to contribute well to class discussion.
    • Because that kind of serious homework preparation hugely changes the quality of a college course, I ask you to do it. In my experience, the conversations are deeper and many more people speak up, and both of those things are great to see. If you have suggestions about other ways to strengthen the preparation for class and the class discussions themselves, please let me know. I look forward to our conversations.
  • I also usually ask undergraduates to evaluate their preparation and participation from time to time during the semester.
• What students love
  • The book group had been meeting every other Tuesday for several weeks, and many good ideas about the campus came up for discussion along the way. But I sat up and took note when a colleague said this:
    • Students love it when faculty ‘own up’ to not knowing something. (R. duC)
  • I connected this sentence immediately to another thought I had been carrying around for a few weeks, something spoken by a teacher to a group of students:
    • I don’t know how you will apply this [thing we are studying] in your life. (Source lost)
  • Seen together, the two sentences help teachers remember why students aspire to be the center of their own learning. It’s respectful for us to help them do so, and important, too, since they become the users of the knowledge that is passed down and reshaped for new times and invented wholesale along the way. And between the respect and the potency of knowledge that they get to work with, students become energized as learners. You remember whenever you’ve witnessed such a thing in your own school.
  • Too often, however, we behave as though we know down deep that we must eventually pass along the cultural heritage, the tools and habits of mind and bodies of information that is our common property, but we don’t want to let it quite out of our hands just yet:
    • No, you can have this stuff later. You know, it’s the good stuff, so we can’t let you try it out just yet. While you’re waiting, could you memorize this other stuff here for a quiz? [Source]
• Silencing the natural stakeholders
  • That’s the move you want to make if you are at ease with your authority and judgment and see no reason to share power. One of the clearest expressions of this problem I’ve seen came from Celina Su (@CelinaSu) in a brief NY Times letter in 2009. Talking about school reform, she spoke of the deep knowledge held by students, who “simmered with complex analyses of the ways in which school conditions prevented them from learning.” Occasionally, students rise up and demand a seat at the table when their schools are being discussed, but how often are they invited naturally, without pressure? The powerful are almost always comfortable keeping hold of the controls. Su’s writing about this problem continues. My fuller reaction to her 2009 letter went this way:
  • Silencing the stakeholders. One way to make clear the power of social media is to identify the thing that is broken without it. Clay Shirky, I’m guessing, might speak about creating the opportunity to coordinate a group that can’t easily act in concert, or to call to the microphone a group that usually can’t speak on its own behalf. I noticed in a 5/11/09 letter to the NY Times from Celina Su a classic circumstance where a group is ordinarily silenced even when they are central figures in a social structure.
  • Su is responding to a David Books column that sets up a particular school as a model for reform. He concludes one thing about the meaning of the example the school provides, and Su asks him to slow down and reconsider a wider body of evidence. She talks about listening to the students themselves, who are in one way the most expert of anyone involved in the schools. Midway through the letter, Su says:
    • It’s startling that urban youth remain hypervisible symbols of the “culture of failure†but are never quoted as the ultimate stakeholders in education policy debates.
    • Once we get numbers [indicating success] like those Mr. Brooks trumpets, we need to ask the students themselves about the causal links. The students my colleagues and I spoke with simmered with complex analyses of the ways in which school conditions prevented them from learning.
  • There is the classic social structure that can be challenged by enlightened practices among bureaucrats or careful work by researchers or by grass-roots organizing or by engaging with social media: “…never quoted…the ultimate stakeholders…simmered with complex analyses of the ways in which school conditions prevented them from learning.”
  • Silenced. Knowledge ignored. Activity toward goals thwarted. Then what? Rage? Alienation? Indifference? Cynicism? And so forth.
  • I recall having been invited to help review my own high school’s programs when I was 16 or so, and in many ways this was the most powerful part of my education in those years. It was a chance to speak on something that mattered and that was close to my experience. It was a challenge for me to formulate useful ideas about the swirl of experience, too. It felt respectful to have been asked and to have been given a seat at the table, along with some of my classmates. It felt great, and I learned a lot. In other areas, those years were pretty standard times of alienation and waiting for life to open up.
  • The school’s review created a structure for engagement, just as social media do now for some people. Su’s letter clarifies the circumstances that mark the problem, all too common, and hint at some different kinds of solution.

August 31

• What Cicero knew
  • He knew this:
    • Who knows only his own generation remains always a child.
  • Another way to put it: if we can’t be bothered to understand the words of others, whether they live now or lived in the past, then they are dead to us. In their words people try to name what they have seen of life. They try to pin down their fears and activate their hopes and make their lives move ahead. They offer their best insights. If we can’t be bothered with the specificity of another’s words, then down deep we can’t be bothered with anything human besides ourselves.
  • [Thanks to Tom Vander Ven, who once published a piece on the shortsightedness of translating Shakespeare into contemporary language. That piece ended with Cicero’s advice.]
• The way we are living
  • These few lines from Seamus Heaney, the great poet whose death was just announced, deserve their own posting:
    • The way we are living,
    • timorous or bold,
    • will have been our life.
  • If you aren’t a regular reader of poetry, but wonder if there is something in poetry for you, I recommend some of the text plus audio pages where you can hear the gravity and thunder of the words in his voice as you read along. “Clearances 3” is a favorite of mine because it attends so carefully to ordinary family memories, seeing closeness and coolness and longing interwoven in just a few lines of vivid storytelling.
• Sparked by the poet
  • An essay from the wonderful poet who died this week, Seamus Heaney, once sparked a blog entry of mine about what we can hope for from blogs that are essentially personal diaries. Heaney was talking about writing that has enough layers to engage readers deeply, and he pressed into service a quotation from another writer to make his point. Here’s how the idea played out:
  • Diary blogs. Irish poet and Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney quotes or paraphrases a comment by Patrick Kavanagh that may shed some light on diary blogging:
    • …as Patrick Kavanagh insisted, the self is interesting only as an example.
  • The diary writing we see on some blogs may engage us when we know the person, but when we don’t know the writer we need some other context for engaging with the words. If they are lively, that can be enough. Similarly, if we identify with the life circumstances of the writer, that too can be enough.
  • But otherwise we need the writer to put her life into a context — make herself into an example of something (the small town kid on the big university campus, for example). Or else we need to do that work ourselves. We might read as a specialist of some kind who asks, “What are young people going through these days?” or other question that creates a context. Even the act of identifying with the writer is a way of putting her words into a wider context — making her an example of something (me!).
  • Without a literary, social, or intellectual context, whether supplied by the writer or by the reader, the diary blogs remain enclosed in the personal. They may serve the writer’s purposes, but if Kavanagh is right, they don’t do the work in the wider world of readers that they might do.
  • Knowing this, teachers who use blogs would be in a position to decide, then, if diary blogs serve their pedagogical purpose or not.
  • [Passage quoted from the Forward to Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-1978, an oddly unnumbered page that appears to be page 12.]

August 30

• Pages (academic) never meant to be read
  • The epigraph from a book on Shakespeare by Clinton Heylin:
    • The greatest advantage of Shakespearean studies seems to be that questions may be asked over and over again, and that almost nobody pays attention to the answers — unless he borrows them for his own use in an article or a book. — Hyder E. Rollins, 1944
  • My general interest here on the blog is in the ways that people’s voices come to matter in their society, their democracy, and a quotation like this makes me think that I need to add a category to my inquiry: speech and writing that is hardly meant to matter at all. Or meant to matter so narrowly that hardly anyone should take notice. Speech and writing deeply alienated from almost all of the society’s needs or ways.

August 29

• James on experts
  • On the subject of experts controlling the conversation, here is William James:
    • There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is to contradict other philosophers. (238)
  • How many other fields can be substituted for philosopher here, at least on bad days? We get the picture of a profession as a closed system, powerful because it controls its realm, and weak because it can’t imagine a reason to open the borders for commerce.
  • Open the borders.
  • [The Oxford Book of Aphorisms, John Gross, 1983.]

August 28

• How you know it’s time to reopen the schools
  • On Sunday I walked the dog along a nice wide path through the woods at the edge of one of our area’s beautiful college campuses. The dog and I came upon two coeds standing still there on the path. One was trying the cell phone, and the other turned to me and said, “We’re afraid of the deer. They were looking at us.†Sure enough, just off the path in the woods, well cloaked by the leaves, were two does and a fawn. The young women calmed down, though, when they realized that they could walk beside my valiant dog until we reached a more civilized part of campus. Pedant that I am, I took a moment to teach them the word herbivore, and then we parted. Yes, I thought, it’s time to throw open the doors of all the schools. (Source)

August 27

• First day of class
  • If you ask a good question on the first day of class, and act like you mean it, your students may very well give you some clues that they are smart, interesting people, that they’d rather care about a course than game the system the way you have to when a class is no good, that they’ve been burned before by educators but not always, and that you have a chance to do something worthwhile together if you’re careful and skillful there at the front of the room. Respect plays into it, and a light touch at times, but some backbone and commitment to ideas rather than to feel-good chatter as well. Fingers crossed, hopeful, knowing how good a good day can be, how deadly dull failure is for all concerned. Go for it.
• Mapping race in America
  • It is called “the most comprehensive map of race in America ever created.” One dot for each person in the country; 300 million dots, all color-coded. The image I have shared here comes from the part of Saint Louis County where I grew up, in Missouri, where a newish white suburb, Crestwood, arose next door to an older black unincorporated district, Meacham Park. Among the notable episodes in Meacham Park history was neighboring Kirkwood paying tuition for Meacham Park students to attend high school in the city of St. Louis rather than in Kirkwood–it’s hard to imagine an excuse for that move except racial segregation. The bit of map I’ve shown here reveals how enduring is the segregation that was formalized a century ago. Thanks to the map’s creator, Dustin Cable, University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service.

August 26

• Ham radio rises to the occasion (bloggers too)
  • Ron Chester did what good bloggers so often like to do, which is to take the questions, ideas, or experiences of others seriously. In a recent posting I was musing about the communication networks that need to be well in place for democracy to stay healthy, and I made a comparison to semaphore, as an example. Ron talked in the comments to that piece about the fact that ham radio operators have carried out the functions I was speculating about many times over the years. I asked for an example or two, and he produced a posting with seven links, a primer in ham radio crisis operations. In the stories you get the sense of a service ethic and pride in having the tools in a crisis and using them well–take a look. Thanks, Ron.

August 25

• Wanting to be represented
  • People call for representation of two kinds. We want to be represented in government—we want our votes to count and our elected officials to speak on our behalf. But we also want our stories to be told in the wider society—we want our lives to be represented in journalism and the arts, to become a recognized and valued part of our culture. In an age of multiplying media platforms, there is a difference, too, between telling one’s story and having it be heard. In an age of big-money government, the structure may be unresponsive to voters, too. Several tensions arise from these wishes and barriers as they play out in our lives.

August 24

• Moyers on literacy as democracy slips away
  • Bill Moyers reflects that the satisfaction we might take from our favorite political satirists hides our impotence:
    • Sometimes I long for the wit of a Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert. They treat this town as burlesque, and with satire and parody show it the disrespect it deserves. We laugh, and punch each other on the arm, and tweet that the rascals got their just dessert. Still, the last laugh always seems to go to the boldface names that populate this town. To them belong the spoils of a looted city. They get the tax breaks, the loopholes, the contracts, the payoffs.
  • The public speech of these notable comics, critical though they may be, is not enough. The social media writing of their fans is not enough. Moyers implies something about the nature of public writing–that the words are not enough. Their power is achieved only when they help to animate social networks, groups of affiliated and committed and skillful people. It’s an example of the semaphore lesson I was considering the other day:
    • Messages are easy, easier than ever, but they go nowhere, they are useless, if the network has not been prepared. That network is a piece of open technology and a web of people already aligned with each other and inside each one of them the knowledge, attitude, and skills needed to pitch in.

August 23

• What? A truly visionary English department?
  • First, a taste of the spirit of the remarks:
    • We are living in the time of the most significant change in human expression in human history. That’s a big statement but I think it is uncontestedly true…. We live now in a world where it is possible for people to communicate instantly and globally through computer technology, and English as the site that excels in human expression and in the study of human culture related to expression should be the place that is at the very cutting edge of education for students in these areas.–Richard E. Miller, video at 1:35 and 2:15.
  • Then, please view the rest of the short video for specific ideas about how the university and the English department ties into that world. Failing to address the astounding reality of literacy practice today will doom English departments to the back waters of the society, yes? A fuller version of the Writers House story here, where Richard Miller says at 4:40, “To be literate in the 21st century, you have to be able to communicate on the screen.”
  • He continues at 6:15: “With this media, the students can transcend state, national, continental boundaries, and transcend distinction in terms of race, class. We must educate our students to be fluent in the new media so that they can be a force for social change.” And the vision rises from there to the end.

August 22

• Borrowing wise Fargo eyes
  • Hey, creative technologists of the Fargo community, my home town, South Bend, Indiana, has starting putting huge portions of the city’s data sets online for the good people of our city to use in innovating and problem-solving. This seems all to the good to me, but I wonder if there is something missing. What about the synergy of people trading ideas about these data sets, for one thing? Where will those conversations be held?
  • And I wonder if Fargo people might spot something else that would deepen the impact of this new open data policy? South Bend has many beautiful things going for it, but also is still scarred from industrial losses decades ago. [“Bail out Studebaker” was a popular bumper sticker here four or five years ago.]
  • If you feel like checking out the city’s new data site, I’d be really interested in hearing what you notice and what ideas you have for making the most of it. Thanks for maybe taking a look.
• My rattlesnake
  • [audio] There in a patch of woods in the bottom of a Colorado canyon our encounter with rattlesnakes began with screaming. The teenage family member who was leading the hike didn’t notice the rattlers until she was right among them; as she took off screaming down the path, she saw one strike at her bare leg and miss. Some distance behind on the trail, I heard her loud voice moving very fast through the woods. Wide awake now, her brother saw four snakes, and he and his two cousins backed off. The parents and grandparents called out and were answered and now we knew that for eight of the nine of us, a cluster of rattlesnakes blocked the path out of the canyon.
  • Grandpa Tom had a walking stick and he forged ahead toward the snakes–I felt like I was seeing my father-in-law as the young Marine he was 60 years ago. One snake stood its ground directly on the path, and Tom began herding it to the side with his stick and reprimanding it as you would a naughty dog. “Get out of here, get out of here,” he said. Another rattler slid maybe four feet from the path and turned in its coil and gave me its full attention. I returned the courtesy. Its body was graceful loops of solid muscle, and the wedge of its head was keen and threatening. The front third of the creature hovered above the ground tense and springlike, ready to explode, and its tail began to shake. A stupid part of my brain said quietly, “Wow, it really is a rattle.” The dry shivering rattle blurred into a hiss that echoed off the leaves of the trees and grasses until all I could hear was its song of anger and venom. My snake was going nowhere. It had room in its sleek ugly head for only one evil thought.
  • Up ahead Tom had cleared aside the larger snake. It seemed logical that they couldn’t strike more than a yard away, so we began to move through. Still the leaves echoed with rattling and a person had to gather a little fortitude to step down that path. I didn’t realize until later that the last of our hiking group never saw the snakes. They must have thought we were out of our minds to urge them to come forward into the rattling grove. I don’t know what I would have done had I been in their shoes.
  • Back at the cars we shared what we had seen. My nephew mentioned four snakes. My father-in-law, still a Marine when he needed to be, herding rattlers with a walking stick, said that they could only strike about half their body length, so he understood with some precision the danger zone. But if Sgt. Joe Friday of the cop show Dragnet had asked for “Just the facts, Ma’m,” he would have gotten different stories out of every one of us. Most of us saw only half the snakes. One family member saw a snake by her leg and backed away, another was warned and backed away from a snake he never saw. The nine of us had all attended the same rattlesnake convention but each had a different experience. I felt as though we walk down life’s path guided by half-knowledge and foggy misperception, most of us armed only with two fingers crossed behind our back.
  • Driving back toward the city, I noticed a bear making its way across a field. It seemed completely unthreatened by the humans passing in their cars. I decided not to pull over to take a closer look.
  • Recorded for broadcast Friday, August 23 on 88.1 WVPE, the NPR affiliate for the South Bend and Elkhart, Indiana region.

August 21

• Knowledge, attitudes, skills
  • A few years ago I heard a talk about success in college, and the speaker said a person needs a whole package of knowledge, attitudes, and skills to have a good chance there. The trio of terms has stayed with me: knowledge is not enough by itself, but we have to orient ourselves in positive ways toward the world, so attitudes as well, and we have to build up the skills that move knowledge and right attitudes productively into action in our lives. All three are essential: when thinking about change, or personal success, or group action and success–these are all easier to think clearly about if we look at all three aspects. Knowledge, attitudes, skills. Good talk, whoever you were.

August 20

• A post-Berners-Lee major in English
  • Yesterday I wrote my way through to this point about the networks that have to be in place for a person’s public writing to matter in the world:
    • Messages are easy, easier than ever, but they go nowhere, they are useless, if the network has not been prepared. That network is a piece of open technology and a web of people already aligned with each other and inside each one of them the knowledge, attitude, and skills needed to pitch in.
  • I also posted this on Twitter:
    • Despite revolutionary new literacies the major in English is untouched by change. Profs, you have tenure, dream up something to astound us!*
  • So what would a new English major look like, if one of its main goals was to connect students skillfully and thoughtfully with literacy in an age of astonishing literacy developments? And how would yesterday’s idea about the nature of communication networks be reflected there?
  • What technology would you want students to learn? What people-connecting, people-organizing skills? What knowledge about how the world works, what attitudes toward problem-solving and citizenship, what reading and writing skills?
  • Would the study of literature enrich these questions and be enriched by them?
  • And so forth.
  • There are enough good questions out on the table, aren’t there, to start imagining a new major in English for our time?
  • *I confess: that was a little mischievous of me, to put it that way, since I am an English professor.

August 19

• Semaphore for 2013
  • For a while now I’ve had an odd feeling that semaphore still had something to tell us. You know, before there were telegraph lines, and a coup was underway in the capital city and this bit of menacing news really needed to get out to good people in the provinces in a hurry. No problem, just use some version or another of semaphore. Lights flashed from hilltop to hilltop would do the trick nicely.
  • If the code has been prepared. If the hilltop stations were created in advance of the emergency. If they were staffed by loyalists. If the staff had good technical training. If the people in the provinces understood the importance of the message. If they saw ways to respond. And so forth.
  • Here is the post-Berners-Lee, post-Snowden takeaway:
  • Messages are easy, easier than ever, but they go nowhere, they are useless, if the network has not been prepared. That network is a piece of open technology and a web of people already aligned with each other and inside each one of them the knowledge, attitude, and skills needed to pitch in. That’s the message I’m getting from semaphore today.
• Teaching via Twitter
  • For a writing teacher, Twitter has one or two real advantages. Young writers tend to think that whatever words that flow out of them are good enough, but Twitter’s 140 character limit invites them to revise in order to make things fit. The quickest way to make something shorter is to make it general, but a teacher can help writers see how boring that is for readers. So that alerts students to the challenges of earning a real audience of busy human beings. And that leads to the idea that judgment and specificity animate our best writing and can guide revision. And that leads to more daring sentences from writers who are now putting themselves a little further out into the world. An example:
  • I was interested in tweeting about an idea in a video game review by Chris Suellentrop from the NY Times. Here is the source paragraph:
    • What game designers lose in control, however, they gain in player attention. “Anything the player voluntarily engages with is going to make a much bigger impression than something they have no choice but to look at,†Mr. Gaynor said during his lecture.
  • What I cared about here–my own judgment, for my own purposes–was the idea that teachers could benefit from thinking about Gaynor’s insight. I wanted to write a tweet sharing his idea and including a link to the article. But I could see that his sentence was too long to quote. Time to paraphrase, then. And I wanted to alert any teachers who were reading my Twitter stream that this tweet was for them. I began this way:
    • Teachers, a clue from gaming:
  • And I reread the quotation from Gaynor in order to select the important ideas. Something about the things a player chooses to engage having a bigger impact than things the game chooses for the gamer. A teacher should see the value in that idea.
  • Notice the repeated words in my quick paraphrase–to me, this means that it can be made shorter somehow. Repeated phrases can be elegant and memorable, but they are often just wordy and lazy, so I assumed the worst about my rough paraphrase.
  • And I notice that my paraphrase is about the things chosen, not about the players who choose. That’s not the right emphasis. I’m trying to claim a small insight about how learning works here, so the focus should be on the players who engage, not on the things they engage with. I understand my point better now as I revise.
  • I build a different paraphrase into my draft tweet:
    • Teachers, a clue from gaming: Players engage more with things they have chosen for themselves.
  • That’s still paying too much attention to the things and not to the players. Trying again:
    • Teachers, a clue from gaming: Players engage more deeply when they get to choose what to engage.
  • Fine tuning now–no need to sound like a telegram even on Twitter. Make the phrases fuller, more natural:
    • For teachers, a clue from gaming: Players engage more deeply when they get to choose what to engage. [Plus the link.]
  • Because it’s writing, not math, there isn’t a single right answer, a single best version of a tweet, but this process is an example of the way Twitter can help writing students pay attention to specificity, to attracting a particular audience by offering something that might matter to them, and to brevity that doesn’t default to generality.

August 18

• NPR’s local ties
  • I keep hearing that the bonds between NPR and the regional stations must evolve, and today I see that npr.org guesses that WVPE is my regional station–correct–and places a big WVPE logo and link on prime top-of-the-page real estate right next to the NPR logo on the network’s home page. I guess this means that a regional station is going to need to have a website worth return visits. And that has to mean more than just syndicating national shows–it must mean regional news, say, or music, or political talk, with an emphasis on regional. It means that the regional stations are probably going to be under some pressure to publish as well as broadcast. There may be new opportunities for community media production partnerships. It should be interesting.
• Democracy depends on crisis
  • I took a surprising course in college from Professor Fordyce Mitchel. It was about the development of Athenian democracy. The thing that surprised me at the time from that course, which was probably in the fall semester of 1978, was Dr. Mitchel’s proposal that a good number of the steps forward for ancient Athenian democracy came as reactions to power grabs. Some group or leader would see an opportunity to narrow the rights of citizens or extend the power of the few at the top, and in reaction to that, after some struggle, rights would be asserted more clearly, more broadly, and institutional structures and protections would be established or extended or made more explicit. Democracy grew not because people sat in a grove theorizing about it and admiring it but because crisis by crisis people saw that it was better than slow-or-fast-encroaching tyranny and that it had to be struggled for and extended and built explicitly into the social order by people who gave a damn and had some skills. In that sense, citizens always have their work cut out for them if they care about democracy. In Professor Mitchel’s class I first began to see that admiration for voting is not a good enough understanding of democracy, important as voting is.

August 17

• Tags and keyword search
  • This is rudimentary. [See Theron’s nicer version.] It’s a script that inserts the Font Awesome search icon plus Tag: mytagword on a new line indented just below the title of a blog post in a named Fargo outline.
  • It also makes Tag: mytagword clickable, and if you click it a Google search page opens up with mytagword already entered. Also already entered is the site: myname.smallpict.com search restriction.
  • If you click “search” there on the Google page, you get not only any blog posts that contain Tag: mytagword but also any blog posts that contain mytagword in the body of the text. If the word itself has multiple forms, like write/writer, Google will find both versions.
  • In the example script, I used write as my tag word and the URL of my named outline. Replace write with your own tag word in two places and replace my URL with yours. Here is a test post with the feature in service.
  • So this is a hybrid tag and keyword search. Maybe you set up four or five of these for your blog’s main obsessions, as an aid to readers who are into what you are into. If Google hasn’t indexed your newest posts for a few days, then of course those won’t show up in the search.

August 16

• Just do it, democracy-style
  • In Fahrenheit 451, a number of people decide that a particular social good will not survive unless they themselves undertake to preserve it. [In this case, literature.] The society’s institutions were corrupt and books would not endure otherwise. [So people take to memorizing great books in a society that burns them.]
  • Maybe there are two principles in that episode: Something may look like a democracy and quack like a democracy but that doesn’t mean it’s much of a democracy. [After all, democracies don’t quack.] And if the institutions aren’t working, the people have to get to work. And maybe a third: Murphy’s law suggests that the people had better count on getting to work. There should be a chapter in the high school civics book that explains that democracies are always being stolen away, brick by brick, and for them to endure citizens must always be about the business of defending them.
    • Have most Americans read that chapter? I guess not. I suspect that it’s hard to find a copy of that chapter, anyway.
  • Fans of Jay Rosen’s work on Edward Snowden will have no trouble connecting these brief thoughts to his post about “Fourth Estate situations“–where it is not the social structure or the job title that qualifies a person to act as the best journalists act, bringing truth into the light. It’s the will to speak to the nation, as he argues there.

August 15

• Turning aside from the news
  • A private club
  • After I learned
  • the secret handshake
  • of the Partners in Misery,
  • I saw it everywhere.
  • Somedays this poem seems about right. I wrote it long ago, after seeing Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the remake, especially recalling the scenes when the good guys couldn’t see what the audience was seeing, which was the passing of alien seed packages from hand to hand throughout the city.

August 14

• Spot the space station
  • NASA has a handy SpotTheStation website for space station fans–enter your country, state, city and NASA returns with a calendar of times when you have a good chance to see it pass among the fixed stars. You’ll get the dates and times, the point of the compass where you should start looking, and the length of time the station will be passing by. All you need apart from that is a cloud-dispersing ray gun and you’re set. It reminds me of checking the newspaper for the times we could see Echo 1 pass over St. Louis when I was a kid.

August 13

• Negativity meter
  • Gonna get rich with my new invention, a meter that monitors the chat at a meeting, counts the words that are negative or positive in attitude, and registers the spirit of the group on a big old dial. It will look like a device you’d see in a mad scientist lab in a black-and-white movie, a heavy dark Bakelite case and a dimly lit dial with just one needle swinging back and forth between the word NO on the left and the word YES on the right. Stay too long in the red zone at the left of the dial and a cheap-sounding electric buzzer rattles the room for a moment or two. The deluxe version would give a clattering teletype printout at the end of the meeting ranking the participants by their negativity and positivity. Of course some people would be proud to be at the negative end of that list, the sad bums.

August 12

• Snowden’s victory
  • Jay Rosen has been tracking the results of Edward Snowden’s rebellion against the surveillance state for weeks now in blog posts and tweets. In a recent posting, Rosen draws up into view a quotation in which Snowden talked about his hope of winning this battle and inspiring others to stand up when circumstances require it.
  • Snowden’s remark about winning implies that we now know a modest amount about how small voices can sometimes stand a chance in the big fights. If he’s right, it’s time to start writing the user’s manual. But it’s not a manual for a person–it’s for webs of individuals and groups that find common ground in protecting and reshaping their democracy.
  • There’d need to be a chapter for educators, and another for journalists, and another for active citizens, and another about all the ways that elections, though essential, are simply not enough for healthy democracy. And so forth.
• Valuable testaments
  • “By and large, you have to believe people’s stories,” says David Hilfiker, who blogs about the unfolding of his own Alzheimer’s disease but also draws on the insights of his service work with impoverished people. Doing this work, he saw the lack of direct experience, the layers of ignorance and myth, that prevented more fortunate people from understanding the experience of others.
  • An ethic emerges from his service: “One of the things I’ve learned is that you have to listen to them.” No wonder, then, that he chooses to blog as long as he can and that he values the “testaments” of other Alzheimer’s patients who do the same. People are not needy; they need to be heard.
  • People’s chances for a better life are bound up in their chances to speak and be heard, to write and be read, to break down the ignorance and distance of the comfortable who go about their business not having to know much about the lives of others.

August 11

• Not having to know
  • I met a brave firefighter once who risked his life to rescue a small child who fell down a narrow well. This man, who grew up in in South Bend, was invited onto the Oprah Winfrey show after the rescue. But many public servants perform their work almost in private, and we acknowledge them only occasionally and often from a safe distance. I don’t know any of the miners who risk their lives to provide coal for our foundries and power plants. For that matter, I don’t know the name of anyone who digs foxholes or picks coffee beans or packs bunches of bananas into crates or sews leather uppers to the soles of shoes or picks up trash at the curb. Sometimes I wonder if this is the central, the most ambivalent middle class luxury – not having to know.

August 10

• Blog-to-book interviews
  • It would be a service, I think, to gather some success stories showing the process of turning long-running blogs into books or ebooks. You’d want to ask about the process the particular writer went through, how much material went from blog to book more or less unchanged, how much was substantially revised, how much was new. You’d want to talk about how to organize a large body of content when some of it was produced piecemeal, without organization, possibly before the book was even dreamed of. Maybe there would be insights to glean about what blogs do really well and how that overlaps, or not, with what books do well. But down deep you’d want practical, practical, practical–how to carry it off. I have one writer in mind who might agree to an interview. You might be able to think of others.

August 9

• Always
  • No person in any customer service role of any kind should ever begin a sentence with “To tell you the truth….”
  • It is always a mistake.
  • See also: “To be honest with you…”

August 8

• Havel outline
  • It takes hours to start to wrap one’s brain around “The Power of the Powerless,” a crucial essay about democracy by Vaclav Havel written before he helped bring down the communist government in his homeland. But I wrote a summary in outline form, which I pass on now in case it is of use to others.

August 7

• Money quote
  • “My dream is that really smart people with all kinds of ways of looking at the world find that their work is relevant to each other’s and that you have a collaborative environment where meaning is given to those intersections and they benefit from each other.” (Dave Winer, 8/7/13 podcast, starting at 11:10)

August 6

• Democracy’s edge
  • In a book by that name, Frances Moore Lappé contrasted “thin democracy,” which is little more than a structure of government, with “living democracy,” which is a web of cultural patterns and habits of engagement that surround, support, and challenge the bare structure of government. For example, experts and elected officials run the economy and the government, but Lappé says they can’t do their best without us:
    • The market and government can only function to create strong, healthy communities if guided by the insights and engagement of citizens closest to the problems. Citizens share responsibility for public problem solving. (319)
  • And if the citizens lean toward silence and private life, then what surrounds, supports, and challenges government is special interests.
  • So the model of citizenship most of us follow today is literally fatal to democracy. Educators need to counter that model; journalists need to recover their adversary mission and challenge us; technologists need to keep inventing tools that help us publish and affiliate and demonstrate. We need to cast off the consumerist private life and recover the pleasures of working on our democracy, which is, after all, not a thing but a process.
  • Democracy can’t stand still. It’s either being worked on or it’s fading away.
• del Taco report
  • A few weeks ago I stopped by a newish franchise in our town, del Taco. The food looked interesting, and the dining room was shiny clean. It was a little past the dinner hour so the place was kind of empty. I chose a table near the center of the room and settled down. A news show was ending on the big flat-screen TV facing the dining room, and one of those familiar, angry-toned talk shows was beginning. I felt the tension in the air, the very thing the talk show was going for, and I could see that the pleasure of trying a new food joint was evaporating. Thanks, angry American television.
  • When I got home, I checked out the corporate website. At the Contact page they invited feedback, so I sent them a note about the TV spoiling the experience. The web page indicated that I would hear back in 48 hours, but I never did. Today I visited the site again and asked about their silence. We’ll see if they reply. We’ll see if I go back. Besides, the TV is probably still blaring there.
  • On the other hand, I recently gave some feedback to a small business owner whose tech product I use nearly every day, and when I visited his website today I could see that my suggestion had been given some real thought. I felt respected even though I am not an expert in the field, and my allegiance to the product grows and grows, both because of the interesting product and because of the way users are treated. It produces a great feeling, sets a fine example, and makes life a little better.

August 5

• Notes for a course description or an essay on literacy
  • Definitions that strip away context make us stupid. Literacy, out of context, is the ability to read and write. In more fortunate circles, the ability is unremarkable and its meaning is a matter of common sense, something agreed upon and obvious. And in this way we begin to take the world for granted, and we lose the ability to think about what we experience.
  • In context, in a particular life or segment of society, that changes. Literacy grows urgent and powerful in particular ways, and its natures are manifold and fascinating. As we move toward specific lives and experiences, literacy sheds bad definitions and muscles its way past dopey common sense and becomes itself. A poor question is this: What is literacy? A better one is this: What is literacy in this place, for these people?
  • In this course we will try to put the first question out of our minds and proceed with the second. We will look at a variety of lives and social contexts and see how far we can take our understanding of this rich subject.
• Damage control report
  • A few hours ago I couldn’t open Fargo in Chrome or Safari any longer–it would show me the pre-login stuff but never drop my name into the upper right or add the icons on the left. My first guess was that tinkering with an old copy of TiddlyWiki on the same browser had messed things up–it too operates in the browser, I believe, but I didn’t imagine the conflict until later. Anyway, that’s my guess. When I tried to open my published pages, I started getting error codes that said something like tag opml incomplete line 2. I know, I should have written it down exactly.
  • I tried restarting the computer. I tried emptying browser caches. I picked up a new browser and then another. I logged into Fargo via another Dropbox account, finally, in one of those browsers, and it did operate. I inspected the opml files from the original Dropbox account in that handy OPML software from deep in Dave’s site and saw that the named outline was full of code and looked kind of like RSS but the other outlines were just outlines. So I guessed that the named outline was corrupted. I was able to load a backup copy of the named outline from Dropbox into the OPML editor and see that it was not wrapped in code but looked like a regular outline.
  • So I guessed that a backup copy from earlier in the day of the named outline might load, and I tried it, and it did. Fargo opened again and all the files were there, all the tabs, all the scripts, etc. Current theory: somehow the named outline became corrupt, and it wouldn’t surprise me if it had to do with tinkering with TiddlyWiki while Fargo with sitting in another tab. Something like that. Browser memory wars?
  • My impression: the Dropbox backup is strong, with so many copies on hand to use if needed. From a position of ignorance I will guess that there is a danger if two apps that play in the browser memory are in the room at once. Or maybe if the two apps both use Java? I don’t know, but in trying to be a good citizen I report the afternoon’s festivities! It’s good to be home safe.
• Cairns
  • In the mountains, when the trail grows faint, hikers sometimes set up cairns for those who follow–stacks of rocks, small rough pyramids that mark the path, guides where a guide can make a powerful difference, generous little messages that matter. I see this same generosity and care on the web, too, even though the web’s PR often overlooks that profound part of its nature.

August 4

• More ideas about breaking the space-time link of blogging & RSS
  • Earlier today I thought, very possibly incorrectly, that Fargo’s isFeedItem attribute already enabled or might someday enable a writer to compose new parts of an article or book chapter in a non-calendar section of outline that was instantly offered to readers for feedback in the RSS feed. It seemed like a masterpiece and for a time this morning I was sure we were already there. (Now I can’t tell.)
  • What’s the big deal, you ask? It’s mind-numbing to reshape a time-sequence of blog entries by hand into an idea-sequence of chapter paragraphs, and if isFeedItem + RSS can’t readily achieve the idea-based organization of a chapter or book draft along with the time-based organization of a blog feed, then this powerful twin act of organizing might be accomplished in other ways.
  • To summarize more plainly: you want to post once but have the new content take its place accurately among the other ideas as well as its correct place in RSS and on the calendar pages. Now you have to do hand-reorganizing to make that happen, I think.
  • Other possible approaches:
  • 1. Redirect. This would be, I think, carried out by hand by the writer, who would post a new section of the article or chapter, then copy it into the blog/rss stream where it could receive feedback. I’d love to avoid this kind of double-entry work and I imagine there is a way around it.
  • 2. A script. Perhaps a script could copy a new section of outline from its place in the article or chapter directly into the blog/rss section of the named outline, where again it could be improved by the feedback of readers. Or vice versa: compose in the calendar section, scripted over to the chapter/article section?
  • 3. Or maybe, as I imagined earlier today, isFeedItem can draw non-calendar article/chapter sections into the blog/RSS stream for feedback automatically.
  • It seems like we are on the verge of breaking the space-time link for serial web publications and making easy idea-based organization simultaneous with time-based organization.
• Five T/F questions about our failing democracy
  • Please read this brief slide show playfully or maybe give it a pass–thanks.
• Why I care about isFeedItem’s range
  • Earlier I asked: How does isFeedItem work outside the calendar? Or does it?
  • I wanted to understand how or if the isFeedItem attribute works on posts that are not in the chronological stream of the Fargo calendar. I posted something as a test and promised to report back. As far as I can tell, the presentation I posted, including the isFeedItem attribute, did not join my RSS feed.
  • And here is the question I was trying to answer: if non-calendar posts can appear in the main RSS feed or perhaps be in a folder-like outline area that has its own feed, then RSS would become involved in a break from chronology, potentially, and you could write a book or article that would have an RSS feed for the segments in development (I am guessing).
  • I believe this would be a huge change for web writers who know the power of serial publication (blog, Twitter, etc.) but want to write idea-structured material (articles, books). Instead of time-intensively editing a blog into a book chapter, a writer could write the chapter and also engage readers serially via RSS.
  • If isFeedItem=true works, or could work, outside the calendar structure of Fargo, then the idea-based structure could come first and the time-based serial publication could flow instantly from it, via RSS. If this is true, then Fargo would have broken the space-time continuum that leads to great blog content sliding down the screen into the archive where it almost always dies a sad, peaceful death.
  • Working on hunches here, prepared to be wrong. The code may simply not allow it. But the possibility is breath-taking and mind-bending.
• How does isFeedItem work outside the calendar?
  • This post is updated here.
  • Suddenly I need to understand how or if the isFeedItem attribute works on posts that are not in the chronological stream of the Fargo calendar. I will post something as a test and report back.

August 3

• Reverse graffiti
  • Political prisoners in South Africa’s apartheid-era Robben Island prison signed their names next to passages in a copy of the complete works of William Shakespeare. Many years into his sentence, Nelson Mandela signed next to these lines from Julius Caesar:
    • Cowards die many times before their deaths,
    • The valiant never taste of death but once.
    • Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,
    • It seems to me most strange that men should fear,
    • Seeing that death, a necessary end,
    • Will come when it will come. (II.ii.32-37)
  • It’s a kind of reverse graffiti. Instead of making your mark on the world by putting a slogan on a blank wall, these prisoners put their mark next to an eloquent, already-existing text, signing it as in some way their own. It’s an example of something that is probably always going on, sometimes subversively: revoicing, which we might say is claiming a new tone or context for an old text.
  • A fictional example of this might be in The Hunger Games, when Katniss mourns the fallen Rue and then salutes the people of Rue’s district who she knows must be watching on the public video screens. The ordinary gesture has compounded its meaning in this context, letting the spectators know that one person shares their loss even though the political order effectively silences them all. This allows the spectators to acknowledge their own emotions and express their rage by rioting. Writing, speech, even a gesture, grows richer as the inventive person recasts old signs into new messages of solidarity and resistance. Something like that, anyway.

August 2

• News box
  • Sure, I get “It’s even worse than it appears.” But that’s not the mood I’m in when I’m using the software. I suggest dropping something like this into the news box rotation:
    • Cool and getting cooler.

August 1

• A citizen’s toolkit
  • Alan Rusbridger of the Guardian spent a couple of hours recently answering questions on Reddit. One person asked how to get into journalism these days, and Rusbridger said:
    • Main thing is to publish. Blog, tweet, write, photograph, tweet, video, code, play around with data – or a combination of all of the above. a) it will keep your journalistic ‘muscle’ in practice. b) if you’re any good, you’ll get noticed.
    • And bear in mind you can do these things at other places than conventional news organisations. Many businesses, NGOs, arts organisations, public bodies, universities, etc are now publishers of extremely high quality stuff. Good places to practise your craft before moving on…
  • I’m guessing that he would give a similar answer–not identical, though–if someone asked how to be an effective active citizen. The basic skills or toolkit covers a good bit of the same territory, I think.
    • [Not that most young people are trained for this full toolkit and taught its role in active citizenship, as far as I can tell. It wouldn’t be a bad research question for a certain kind of college course: What is the full toolkit for contemporary active citizenship?]