This just in via email from Craig, a reader of this blog out in Wisconsin:
Happy “Talk Like a Pirate” Day!
I wish people would tell me these things before I go to work in the morning. A whole day of normal talk wasted… wasted I tell you.
ARrrrrgggh.
Thank ye fer tellin’ us, matey. So, dear readers, don’t be wastin’ the rest of yar day — start talkin’ like the pirate you truly arrrrr, shiver me timbers.
A new photoblogger posts top-notch images, many of which can only be described as meditative. Almost no text allows you to focus on the quiet, meditative photographs — where else could you find an image of Che Guevara which calms rather than incites? Some of the images are more in the documentary line but still excellent. The only real downside is when you want to view an image in a larger size, you have to deal with the clunky AOL interface — but if you’re reading this blog, you’re already putting up with AOL’s clunky blogging software.
Update: Blog no longer on AOL.
Here in New Bedford, we have perhaps the most perfect weather possible — sunny, light breezes, cool, dry. So you’d think I’d be out enjoying this beautiful day, wouldn’t you? Nope. I’m dealing with computer problems. (If you’re a techno-geek, it’s preferences problems for Mac OS 10.3 which prevent the Finder from launching.)
I sat in front of my laptop all morning, and at one point I had this sudden memory of bending over the engine of my ’69 Plymouth Valiant, twiddling with the carbuerator. Suddenly it hit me. The evolution of computers today is about as far along as the evolution of automobiles was in the 1950’s — back when you were lucky if a car lasted five years, and you needed to have a tune-up twice a year or the car wouldn’t run, and when basically cars were pretty unreliable. Therefore, my ’69 Plymouth Valiant was further along the engineering evolutionary path (and therefore more reliable) than any computer made today.
Which is kinda depressing to think about.
Worse, when I had to bend over the engine of my old Valiant at least I could do it outside if the day was as beautiful as today is. At least I got to use my hands, and move around. But not with computers. Computer maintenance means sitting for hours indoors and doing nothing but typing.
I admit to some nostalgic fondness for my old Valiant, which finally died because there was such a big leak in the gas tank, my mechanic wouldn’t even let me drive it into his garage (think: “boom”). And I admit to some nostalgic fondness for my old Mac SE running OS 7, a nice stable operating system on nice stable hardware. My nostalgic fondness is completely overpowered by my desire to see a qunatum leap in engineering evolution of computers to the point where they are as reliable, and as long-lasting, as my ’93 Toyota Corolla.
Back to the Mac, as I try once more to get it working.
My older sister teaches writing at Indiana University East in Richmond, Indiana. She let me sit in on a couple of her classes a few years ago, and she is one of the best teachers at the college level I have ever seen. She sent this comment along in response to a < a href="http://www.danielharper.org/blog/?p=288">previous post:
You’re right about the “old group process techniques.” They’ve become hackneyed, reductive, and unfortunately, often, required. I am all for nurturing the voices of my students, but too often “small group work” or “student centered learning/teaching” means nothing more than busy work or chaotic jabbering. Even my students will say: how can we critique each other’s work in small groups when we don’t yet know how to critique our own? Good question, kids. My teaching combines lectures, guided discussion, mentoring, apprenticeship, and judiciously teaching the students how to teach one another. Maybe the only postmodern thing I do is to teach to different sensibilities, or, I suppose, intelligences. We draw, eat, talk, write, take walks, watch films, talk, write some more, take self-created impromptu field trips, sing, argue, write, write, write. I suppose the fact that I won the big teaching award last summer validates this intuitive approach. Who knows.
My partner is a freelance writer, and while she specializes in writing about ecological pollution prevention issues, she also writes about other topics. Yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle has an article of hers that manages to tie together religion, architecture, and Italian racing motorcycles….
San Francisco Chronicle, Sunday, August 28, 2005
“Divining Architecture: Designing churches and collecting motorcycles is a spiritual practice for a San Francisco architect,” by Carol Steinfeld
In his SOMA live-work loft, architect John Goldman weaves through his collection of historic and vintage Italian racing motorcycles. He kneels next to an unrestored 1951 Bianchi — still covered with half a century of soot — and points to its parts.
“See, there’s symmetry, harmony, proportion,” he says reverently. “Everything is out there: You can see the springs, the flywheel, the tank and transmission. It’s a combination of curves and streamlines, ovals and parallel lines. Its exposed functions are its primary ornament. It’s the same language I use in architecture.”
Around him, more than 30 racing motorcycles — many of them veterans of long-ago races in Italy — spill out of alcoves, even his bedroom.
It’s an unexpected sight in the office of an architect with nearly 20 Bay Area churches and synagogues to his credit.
But “dissolving artificial distinctions” is the mark of the work of this designer, whose home was designed after a Texaco station, who likens buildings to living organisms, who transformed a mortuary into a synagogue and modeled a church after a castle in a Japanese film. To Goldman, it’s just a continuum of good design, beauty and connection.
That’s really all I can put here and comply with copyright restrictions. But you can go to SFGate.com and check out the rest of the article.( And if your congregation is thinking about hiring an architect, wouldn’t you prefer someone who arrived at meetings riding his 1970 Ducati?)
Ferry Beach Conference Center, Saco, Maine
I was hanging out last night with some people from a music conference who were doing a little impromptu singing. One of them wanted to sing “Ode to Billie Joe,” originally recorded by Bobby Gentry, but no one could quite remember the lyrics. So they turned to the laptop that one of them had brought and did a quick search of the Web to find the lyrics….
It was the third of June, another sleepy, dusty Delta day
I was out choppin’ cotton and my brother was balin’ hay
And at dinner time we stopped and walked back to the house to eat
And Mama hollered out the back door “y’all remember to wipe your feet”
And then she said “I got some news this mornin’ from Choctaw Ridge”
“Today Billy Joe MacAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge”
One of the musicians later said how pleased he was to be able to sit around and play music that was not electronic. And none of the instruments, none of the voices, was electronically altered in any way. But I’m in a postmodern, deconstructionist mood today, and very interested in how finding song lyrics on the Web alters the reality of folksinging.
Which makes me think about something else. In the next room over from where I’m sitting, there’s a workshop going on. Although I can’t hear much, I can tell from the rhythms and tones of the voices, by how many people get to speak at once, by the occasional bursts of polite laughter, that this workshop is using techniques of group process that grew out of the ferment of 1970’s pedagogy and group work — the human potential movement, second wave feminist group process, and so on. They are using, in fact, the same techniques I typically use when I lead small groups.
But in my present deconstructionist mood, I’m questioning whether those techniques still match the reality of our lives (almost definitely not). And wondering whether we can reconstruct new ways of teaching and learning that move beyond the tight limitations that I have begun to see in those old group process techniques. And thinking that teaching and learning are even more limited than I had ever thought.
Hey, just call me a postmodern kind of guy.
We’ve moved everything into the new apartment. Cardboard boxes everywhere. I hate moving.
Reader of this blog (and former housemate) Michelle sent along a link to just the kind of blog I need to read while the rest of my life is in chaos — a blog devoted entirely to recipes using bacon. Ah, comfort food… I can feel my arteries hardening just from reading these recipes… mmm….
A couple of days ago, I was idly browsing the Web, looking at different blogs. Generally speaking, people have a very limited conception of what might go on a blog. Personal confession and strident political commentary seem to be the dominant content in blogs, with a very few people experimenting with other genres of writing. I’m especially interested in “place blogs,” where the author of the blog gives you little portraits of where he or she lives. I like writer’s blogs, too, especially where the writer posts work in progress.
But imagine if Charles Dickens were alive today. I think a blog would be a great format for some of his novels, which after all were serialized when they first appeared. Which got me to thinking about blogs I’d like to see….
Strident commentary and personal soul-baring have barely begun to tap the potential of blogs. Dream big, bloggers.
Hot and sticky today. Not as hot as the midwest, nor as hot as it gets around here a few miles inland. At a meeting this afternoon, we all talked about the heat. Strategies varied, from cranking up a big old air conditioner, to getting cranky. I don’t like air conditioning, and prefer to get all mean and cranky. But today was mostly cloudy, the lack of sun made it bearable — for me, anyway. And I’m reading Wilfred Thesiger’s book Arabian Sands. He is travelling with five Bedu tribesmen through the Empty Quarter of Saudia Arabia, by camel and on foot. They have no more than a pint of liquid, camel’s milk mixed with brackish water, a day. The landscape: sand dunes, hundreds of feet high, almost no vegetation. Thesiger writes: There would be no food till sunset, but bin Kabina heated what was left of the coffeee…. I lay on the sand and watched an eagle circling overhead. It was hot…. Already the sun had warmed the sand so that it burnt the soft skin round the sides of my feet. No shade. Uncertain supplies of water. Whereas in New England, summer is a chance for us to bake our bones in comfort before winter sets in again.