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.]

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.

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.]

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.

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.]

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

[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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.