Archive - Jan 2015

January 31st

Banks of Snow

Another winter storm watch is in effect for parts of New England, starting Sunday evening at 7 PM, shortly after kickoff for the Superbowl. I suspect many Patriots fans are hoping for a snow day on Monday, and also hoping, perhaps without the thought having yet crossed their mind, that we don’t lose power during the game. Others will hope that a travel ban doesn’t go into effect until after the game ends.

I am not a big football fan. I’ll watch the game at home with my family. No, we won’t be traveling during the storm. And throughout the storm, I expect that I’ll be working to get the message out about any closings or other considerations for my co-workers.

It is bitter cold outside today, at least by New England standards, with wind chill factors around zero. I did make the trip to the dump, not because there was a lot of trash, but in case I can’t go next week and the trash piles up.

I glance outside as I hear the latest gust and the creaking of the house. I see light snow blowing from roof to drift to driveway.

A child said What is the snow? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.

I’ve spent my day, besides the time I spent going to the dump, resting, and participating in online courses. This afternoon, I read section six of “Song of Myself” and watched a video of teachers talking about the poem. Leaves of Grass, Banks of Snow.

As I listen to the teachers speak, the words of Emerson come to mind:

Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views, which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote these books.

Are these teachers, critiquing Whitman as a teacher about grass forgetting Whitman’s educational experience, who ended his formal schooling at age eleven?

I made it further. I didn’t end my formal education until I was twenty, just shy of getting a college degree. Yet I find my thoughts about education closer to those of Emerson and Whitman, perhaps tinted with a little Piaget, Papert, and now, perhaps, George Siemens.

Besides the Whitman class that I’m taking online, I’m taking a course on Teaching with Moodle. As part of the class, I needed to set up my own course using Moodle, so I set up Moodle and Connectivism. The course, currently, has a link to Siemens’ paper, and a sample quiz and assignment; the parts of the course needed for the teaching course.

Of course, it is something that I’m constructing as I go, and learn more about Connectivism. It is also set up for other students to connect in, so that we can all learn together, and perhaps that is part of what Whitman is talking about anyway.

What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?

“All goes onward and outward…”

January 30th

Thinking about the Super Bowl Ad Previews – Gender Constructs

I’ve just watched the 2015 Super Bowl Ads as listed in Variety and thought I’d look for a moment on the social constructs they are built around.

One of the biggest constructs is around gender and sex, and there are several interesting ads. At the top of the list is the Kim Kardashian cellphone carrier ad with the idea that the reason we need as much online data as we do is to look at her. Um, not.

The second ad focuses on Marcia and Jan Brady; how Marcia gets grumpy if she’s hungry and Jan gets grumpy when it’s not about her. A traditional idea. It does make sense that people get grumpy when they’re hungry, but there are probably better ways of dealing with hunger than eating a candy bar.

The car ad featuring Pierce Bronson does a great job of tweaking ideas of the suave male spy, yet another gender construct. The ad for a television show about royalty doesn’t do a good job of exploring the constructs and is fairly forgettable.

The lingerie ad is fairly predictable, and the only thing memorable is the tag line, let the real games begin.

Yet the most compelling ads in the gender construct category are Dove’s #RealStrength and Always’ #LikeAGirl

They challenge traditional constructs and present emerging constructs that are more positive.

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January 29th

Political Engagement

It is easy, as a politically engaged person, to wonder how other people cannot be politically engaged. This evening, I sat down to write about bills currently being considered in the CT State Legislature, and maybe comment on some Federal legislation, and, if I had energy, talk a little bit about the latest in town politics. There is so much to write about.

Yet it has been another long hard day, and I don’t have the energy to write that post. It is a useful reminder of how people cannot not have the time or energy to become more involved politically.

I do spend time trying to balance out my writing, my studies, my work, my tasks around the house, my responsibilities to various committees I serve on and at times, it just seems as if there isn’t enough time.

It begs the question, what really does matter? I think that’s a useful question to ask. I find I ask it of people in political discussions. For many, it seems to be a question of getting ahead, or simply not falling further behind. Underlying that is the question of who is getting ahead or not. Are we concerned about ourselves? Our neighbors? Our country?

Back to social constructs and the social contract, at least when there is time to think about such things.

January 28th

The No Longer Blank Page

And so, I confront the blank page once again. I think of the ground outside, with the recent snow, you’d think it would resemble a blank white page as well, but the dog has run everywhere. With the fatigue that comes after a snow storm, it would seem easy for the mind to be blank, perhaps as some sort of tired enlightenment, but the mind is not blank, it is just tired, with all the random thoughts floating around, and no energy to organize them.

I’m reading “Song of Myself” for the Whitman class right now, yet I don’t have the energy to join in the singing of myself. Fiona will be in the ensemble in her school production of Xanadu. Olivia Newton-John mixes with Samuel Taylor Coleridge and from Kubla Khan I see a link to William Butler Yeats’ Byzantium.

This isn’t a link in my thinking, it is a link on the poetry website where I briefly read a little Coleridge, followed by a little Yeats. On Facebook, I’ve been getting into various discussions on politics and find myself coming back to my underlying religious beliefs to challenge the assumptions of conservatives.

I also read people reflecting on Auschwitz. A friend showed me a disturbing video shot from a drone flying through Auschwitz, and my mind goes back to that powerful essay, No News from Auschwitz” by A. M. Rosenthal.

Slowly, I am catching up on tasks that are long overdue, but I don’t have energy to tackle more of them this evening, so I look back at the no-longer blank page, hit publish, and head off to bed

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January 27th

Literature, Legal Decisions, and the Plastic Palimpsest

As part of the Walt Whitman course I’m taking online, I watched a fascinating interview between Supreme Court Justice Elena Kegan and Harvard professor Elisa New. I’ve often blog about court decisions, but I’ve rarely thought about them as a literary form and the interplay of court decisions and other literature.

At one point, Justice Kagan, speaking about a poem said,

So reading this made me think a little bit harder about what I was seeing every day, in a way, that I guess, great poetry can do-- is to make you notice things that you don't notice in the world.

It struck me that we need Judges and Justices that read poetry; that notice things that normally aren’t noticed.

In another section she talks about quoting other judges

All the time, I use what other judges have said. And if I'm a judge and I have this amazing quote from Louis Brandeis-- man, I make sure to use that quote, right? Because it's an amazing quote, and because Louis Brandeis said it gives me a kind of credibility.

It was a wonderful discussion.

Today, I have been cleaning up some of the dangling fragments of ideas for blog posts on my computer. There are so many ideas bouncing around in my head that I would like to explore. I decided I would write a blog post exposing and exploring some of these ideas.

I was going to title the post something like, palimpsest. It is a wonderful word, dating back to Cicero, talking about writing over something, such as on a parchment that has been scraped off and is being reused.

Yet the idea of palimpsest that I always go to is from Judge John Woolsey in his decision about James Joyce’s Ulysses.

Joyce has attempted — it seems to me, with astonishing success — to show how the screen of consciousness with its ever-shifting kaleidoscopic impressions carries, as it were on a plastic palimpsest, not only what is in the focus of each man’s observation of the actual things about him, but also in a penumbral zone residua of past impressions, some recent and some drawn up by association from the domain of the subconscious.

It is such a wonderful quote, and I often think about this blog, with its ever-shifting kaleidoscopic impressions and the penumbral zone residua of my own past impressions, sometimes written about, sometimes, just in fragments, sometimes not even yet in fully formed thoughts.

But now, I’ve written my blog post of the day, exploring literature, legal decisions, and the plastic palimpsest underlying my own blog, so I’ll have to explore the incomplete fragments in a later post.