In I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith’s charming novel about coming of age in a time of austerity, the youthful narrator, who wants to be a writer, by the way, speaks ruefully about the slender offerings each day at the evening meal: “I thank heaven there is no cheaper form of bread than bread.” (p. 10)

And yet in the years since the 1948 publication of the book, we have come to accept and perhaps even enjoy emptier and emptier foods, especially in the United States. We should be able to imagine and create better lives as easily as we do these more impoverished ones, but often we do not.

This may be a timeless struggle, however, considering Karl Kraus’s belief that his society, a century ago, was metaphorically “baking bread from breadcrumbs,” a demoralizing judgment if it is deserved.

It took well over a thousand posts to get there, but I still like the concept of blogging expressed in an entry near the end of the run at my old blog. The post starts with “Blogging is not a genre” and ends with:

The mistake here is not just thinking that there are only one or two approaches [to blogging], but also in thinking that the written posts are the genre. They are not, or not entirely. The posts are the places where the genre puts its feet down for a moment as it walks along. The genre is, rather, the motion of writer through experience of self, events, text, and audience. It’s a self-observation, a self-recording, and an engagement with experience and with others, all tracked and promoted and provoked further along its way with texts that are the traces. Blogging is a reflective practice that casts off texts as it goes.

Read the rest.

The normal path for many academics is to ignore the wider uses of their research:

“I saw a number of studies [at an academic conference] this weekend that working journalists would find fascinating and helpful. Yet they’re not available in forms I’d feel comfortable sending around the newsroom. In fact, I’ve never seen scholarship cited in the newsroom that wasn’t accompanied by a readable narrative translation of its findings. I understand that most scholarship is pointed at the academy rather than the industry. But that shouldn’t preclude industry-relevant conclusions from being written up in industry-readable language.”

Quoting Matt Thompson, who is “currently undertaking a year-long research fellowship with the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri, previously the deputy Web editor of the Minneapolis Star Tribune.” Newsless.org

“All over the world serious work is being made in all sorts of unauthorised ways. Old-fashioned opinion, meanwhile, is tying its shoelaces and not noticing.” (“Mere Fact, Mere Fiction,” 4/17/10, Guardian)

That is David Hare, from an essay on writing, theater, and journalism. If he’s right, then the next thing to hope for would be for everyone to know it and think it’s for the best…which surely it is.

Sadly, Posterous no longer exists so the links below are dead.

For those who might still want to listen in on the 4/6 Lundquist lecture about social media, literacy, and democracy, four segments of the talk are available as streaming audio with annotations giving clues to what each portion of the talk addresses.

Part 1 — Frederick Douglass and Walt Whitman give a few clues about the nature of literacy in the public sphere.

Part 2 — Otto and Elise Hampel use postcards to protest against the Nazi government in Berlin in the early 1940s.

Part 3 — Twitter alters the balance of power in a case of corporate secrecy.

Part 4 — Some thoughts about the ways social media allow citizens to make their messages in the public sphere matter.

A talk on literacy, democracy, blogging, and Twitter

The 2010 Lundquist Lecture–Ken Smith, Department of English and Master of Liberal Studies Program

7:00 p.m., Tuesday, April 6 in 1001 Wiekamp Hall (1800 Mishawaka Avenue)

Reception to follow. Free and open to the public.

As Franklin Roosevelt noted, education—literacy itself—is a precondition for improved democracy, as well as a force in a country’s political progress. Certain classics of American literature attest to the generative power of literacy, but the short forms of writing common in blogging and mandated by Twitter are strange and disruptive. Familiar institutions, such as newspapers, are threatened in part by the appeal, especially to young people, of these more informal paths for information and dialogue. In fact, a rising young generation now has grown very comfortable using new social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook, working out their lives in part online. There is no shortage of bad behavior on the Internet, but we also find examples of community-building and active citizenship that inspire hope for a more constructive future of democratic exchange. We don’t know for sure where this great shift will take society, but many institutions are already being challenged by these changes. In time, our public universities will have to prepare a more informal, less authority-driven generation for a new social order that takes digital media and collaboration for granted. This may be the start of one of the greatest changes in human society since the printing press, making these years very exciting and challenging for educators, journalists, and active citizens.

An episode from the April 6 talk, the story of Otto and Elise Hampel. They were trapped in Berlin during World War II and wanted to protest Hitler’s government. They had no political skills or allies, no  kind of public voice. They hit upon the idea of writing short, Twitter-like messages on postcards and leaving them around town. What happened next survives in police records and Gestapo files.  We’ll see pictures of some of the actual postcards as well as film footage of the Nazi judge who tried their case, and then we’ll talk about aspects of the Hampel’s story that are more visible to us now that we have social software like Twitter and blogging. See you, perhaps, on April 6th?

The story of Elise and Otto Hampel was passed down in the form of a 1947 novel by German writer Hans Fallada. Recently translated into English and published in the United States as Every Man Dies Alone, the novel uses and fills out the chilling details contained in the historical records.

Writing seems to have this increasingly outward-looking psychological mechanism–Margaret Atwood says that writing encourages a natural progression beyond one’s first hopes in art and beyond one’s narrow self:

The third period [of my writing] runs from 1976 … to the present [1982]. It covers my growing involvement with human rights issues, which for me are not separate from writing. When you begin to write, you deal with your immediate surroundings; as you grow, your immediate surroundings become larger. There’s no contradiction.

When you begin to write you’re in love with the language, with the act of creation, with yourself partly; but as you go on, the writing–if you follow it–will take you places you never intended to go and show you things you would never otherwise have seen. I began as a profoundly apolitical writer, but then I began to do what all novelists and some poets do: I began to describe the world around me. (“Introduction,” Second Words 14-15)

It would be interesting to see if we could trace this progression in different writers using different genres, including the new social media.

In the NY Times Deborah Solomon asks and writer Douglas Coupland answers:

How would you define the current cultural moment?

I’m starting to wonder if pop culture is in its dying days, because everyone is able to customize their own lives with the images they want to see and the words they want to read and the music they listen to. You don’t have the broader trends like you used to.

This is an appropriate anxiety for our time, and Alan Rusbridger talked interestingly about it in his state of journalism talk in the spring of 2006. Jay Rosen calls it “audience atomization” and he sees evidence that social media have created opportunities for it to be overcome. In order to think further, we can’t stop with this little quotation in Solomon’s usual “edited and condensed” NY Times Magazine Sunday interview.

Similarly, we can’t stop at the ending of the new Charles Peterson review essay about Facebook in the NYROB:

But most of us still know, despite Facebook’s abuse of what should be the holiest word in the language, that a News Feed full of constantly updating “friends,” like a room full of chattering people, is no substitute for a conversation. Indeed, so much of what has made Facebook worthwhile comes from the site’s provisions for both hiding and sharing. It is not hard to draw the conclusion that some things shouldn’t be “shared” at all, but rather said, whether through e-mail, instant message, text message, Facebook’s own “private message” system, or over the phone, or with a cup of coffee, or beside a pitcher of beer. All of these “technologies,” however laconic or verbose, can express an intimacy reserved for one alone.

Those are the fears; what are the hopes?

It’s a pleasure to catch up with Stephen Kuusisto’s blog, Planet of the Blind.* Some recent highlights:

We are listening for something; we’re trying to protect our souls. We want to know what words keep others alive; what words keep the soul reading. We want to make an ark out of this knowledge. But a poem will do. (“Poetry Singular, Plural Then“)

[It’s true; we should live as if something were at stake, as if our lives mattered, as if art helps.]

The plural poet knows that her audience “is” the world, the world in which words will find their utility; that words are much like the fallen acorns gathered by wintering animals, they must be carried away and become something beyond their first intention; that poetry lives in the bewildering weather of others, many many… (“Poetry Singular, Plural Then“)

[It’s true; good writing lives in and among the actors who we might mistakenly think of as passive because we call them readers.]

Then there is “Think Beyond the Label, Pilgrim,” which reminds us that we live partially in the discourses of our culture [and can break things open there from time to time] and quite a bit too in bodies that need jobs to pay rent and eat decently and like life and ourselves and others. Hurray for symbolic breakthroughs; hurray for decent jobs.

Those changes in discourse matter: think about the feeling many of us had in about 2002 that the press had stopped insisting that global warming was just a theory that one might readily dismiss; think of Frank Rich today in the NY Times saying how important it was this week that an American general said before Congress that it was just rather an ordinary fact of life that homosexuals had served well in the military all the decades of his career, and nothing much happened in the way of an uproar in the media. But one grim view of the end of the civil rights movement would be a person of entitlement thumbing his nose at a good number of fellow citizens and saying, “Sure, vote all you want. I still have a better house and job than you have, if you even have a job or a house. Who cares if you can vote?”

We live in the symbolic realm of culture; we live in houses and bodies supported by our jobs. We live in two realms of justice and hope for justice.

Footnote:

*S. K. and I were classmates, writing poetry in graduate school, so it’s not like reading the work of a stranger.