returning home

I am delighted to announce that we at the Kelly Writers House have a new Assistant Director for Development. On July 1, Arielle Brousse is making her return to the Writers House after several years of superb work on the staff of the development department at The Franklin Institute here in Philadelphia. Having been a work-study student at the Writers House for four years as an undergraduate, and an active member of the “hub” (our Planning Committee) Arielle is “thrilled to bring my experience back home.” At The Franklin Institute, Arielle worked on everything from non-preferred State appropriations and competitive federal government grants to designing punchy flyers, writing custom-tailored proposals, and helping to plan cultivation events. The switch from working at a science museum to working once again for a literary arts center might require a bit of re-adjustment, but she is confident she'll be able to handle it: if anyone in the hub ever needs a Spock costume or a Galilean thermometer, she's got you covered.

digress 10% and you too can become a verb

Google CEO Eric Schmidt gave a nice but predictable talk at Penn's commencement yesterday. I was on hand, having a soft spot for pomp and circumstance (more the latter than the former, but still...) At something like half the commencements I've attended, the College of Arts & Science students send up lusty boos upon hearing the business school students (Wharton) announced and touted. I thought I had a good barometer for this, and yesterday--given the apparently fallen status of the figure of the businessperson in America--I expected the boos. But they didn't come. Not a one. Is it that the Classics and Art History majors know that they are just as lost in the world of prospective employment as the 22-year-old now-former student of finance or management? Or that today's college student is too smart and nuanced and individualistic to draw generalizations about what people choose to study from the media's recent second thoughts about business?

Was Schmidt's talk going to be about better management? I doubted it. I thought it would be about innovation and the ethics of the workplace.

But Schmidt's messages were Google's oft-repeated twin messages: (1) don't be evil; and (2) "70-20-10." Spend 70% of your time on the basic expected activities of what you do; 20% on innovation (new projects); and 10% doing whatever digressive, miscellaneous thing you feel like doing ("side projects"). Most of the good new stuff comes from that final 10%. But all that depends on leisure, on other deadlines being met, and--for most businesses--a currently profitable or at least growing core (70%) business. So some of this fell into the "easy for you to say" bin of graduation-speaker platitudes. Perhaps what struck me as more remarkable than any of this (above) was his absolute assumption that technological change is always for the good. Where once we did this, now, lookee here!, we can do this (faster, better, sooner). It's all good. Just a few years ago such statements would always rhetorically require some acknowledgment of the doubts, the counterargument that technological innovation without ethics and good content was empty progress and indeed alienating. None of that yesterday on Franklin Field. To be sure, the Google CEO would ever truly have conceded the legitimacy of such doubts; no, but my point is he didn't feel the need even to acknowledge their existence. And I suppose most of the 10,000 of us there didn't feel that lack pass us by: we were (I too) playing with our phones, texting friends not there, checking the weather to see if it would rain before the end of the ceremony, sending pics to friends and family who didn't have the close-up view of the stage, live-Twittering condensations of the speaker's points, watching the new email pile up.

This is what I'm doing for my 10% today: I'm casting about for things I've achieved or made that might someday become a verb.

don't work

"I really would like to stop working forever--never work again," said Allen Ginsberg to his shrink. [ MORE... ]

American routes

Nick Spitzer, an musical ethnographer who loves to talk about the nexus of cultures that is New Orleans, came to the Writers House this afternoon to tell some "stories and songs from the road." He's of course the producer and host of public radio's "American Routes." Of course we made a video of the event - also downloadable audio. I happily introduced Nick, grateful that a few years ago he found me at the Writers House and instantly understood the experiment in creative learning community we were trying.

ArtsEdge

This was the first year of our ArtsEdge artist-in-residence program, which we're doing in collaboration with the department of fine arts in Penn's School of Design. We offer housing, workspace, and a significant rent subsidy--and, if apt, a course to teach. Greg Romero was our first ArtsEdge-er, a playwright. Not long ago he staged a play-in-progress at the Writers House and today the Philly Fringe Festival blog ran an entry about it.

high school, haiku, tweet tweet

I just twittered the following:

A poet in a serious discussion yesterday used the example of 140 characters as a constraint-based poetics. He was talking about haiku, natch

The tweet in itself was precisely 140 characters. Here in blogger, though, it seems so bare, so minimal. In the twitter format I use (the application called "Tweetie") the full 140-character update fills the space and makes me feel downright loquacious. These new media really are our messages. You'd think I'd have discovered this before now.

By the way, the poet mentioned in the tweet above was Tom Devaney. At the Writers House, I hosted eleven eleventh graders who are currently in a one-trimester poetry class. We had a 2.5-hour session. I decided to bring in six Philadelphia poets--of all sorts--to present to them each in 20 minutes a single short poem. The chosen poem was to be a way for the students to learn about the poet making the presentation.

Tom cheated a bit--bringing in not one poem but three. First, two translations of the Basho favorite (the old pond, frog jumps in, kerplunk) and then John Ashbery's haiku from A Wave.

It worked. After discussing the Basho, they were ready to take on Ashbery and spoke remarkably well and freely about the Ashberyian line as if it were as explicatable as a haiku. Generic familiarity. I don't know how accidentally Tom fell into this pedagogical move, but it worked. Below is a portion of Ashbery's "Haiku." The line that encouraged the best discussion, a favorite of the students:

"And it is a dream sailing in a dark, unprotected cove."

It is the most haiku-like (static and imagistic yet open and resisting sense) and yet just the sort of line that causes Ashbery's readers (outside the haiku context) to scratch their heads. Nice going, Tom!



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A few weeks later: we've now created a PennSound page with links to audio and video of each 20-minute session.

Rodrigo's poetics

The new episode of PoemTalk is out today--about Rodrigo Toscano's poem called "Poetics." Listen here.

my audio letter to the world

Julie Harris (b. 1925) recited poems by Emily Dickinson in three sessions, the first in 1960 and the second and third in 1961. I own the LP. We at PennSound will try to get permission from Ms. Harris and/or HarperAudio (who have assumed control of the old Caedmon recordings) and perhaps someday will be able to offer these remarkable readings for free as downloadable mp3 files.

decisively extreme

Only very rarely--and even then, cautiously--do I think of heroism in the old-fashioned sense. When I do, I can count four or five figures (of any era) whom I consider heroic. One of these is Kazik. Here is Kazik, alive and mostly well, a few years ago, on the set of Uprising (standing with Stephen Moyer, the actor who played him in the movie). A few years ago I had a chance to speak with Moyer about what it felt like to stand with Kazik, to play him, to attempt to do justice to the decisive extremity of his behavior. After this talk--certainly indirect contact with the man--I was sweaty in the palms. This was the city of my people--who'd gone, easily or with difficulty and maybe even somewhat resistantly--to the Umschlagplatz and gotten on the trains, bound for Treblinka. Kazik of course was one of those who did not get on the train. What is my relation to him? It's hard to decipher.

I promise that others on my list of heroes do not create such complex figurations.

My son, by the way, owns a signed copy of this photo.

sitting shiva

On an otherwise sad day (yesterday), Miriam explores with the garden-expert calico.

his books were like vaccines

By the time Michael Cunningham showed up to talk with my students they were already in love with him - with the prose of The Hours (but, to be sure, we'd read each of C's novels). But there he was in person: kind as could be, ready to listen to these young people, and he had on a great pair of boots, with a heel and a seriously shitkicking pointed toe. The kids were knocked out. That was 2002 and the scene of Michael's entrance into the room of expectant, bright but ready-to-be-wowed 18-22 year olds is what I remember. Now I've gone back to listen to his reading (he read from The Hours) and the interview/conversation I conducted the next day, and realize what good content there was too. Dan Fishback, now a pretty successful political comic writer/performer in New York, gave the introduction--and we've preserved the text of it. It begins:

I signed up for this class in a kind of prideless, bumbling squirt -- I emailed Al, "Cunningham is my personal Jesus, you have to let me in, you have to, you have to." But then I calmed down, because I realized I'd be taking these books into the realm of other people -- and new perspectives seemed dangerous somehow. Just before I came to college, I read A Home at the End of the World, Flesh and Blood, and The Hours; and they were like...vaccines.

taking the plums

New audio: William Carlos Williams offers commentary on
"This Is Just to Say" (the "rape of the icebox" poem) and includes his reading of his wife's reply to the poem. This is an audio-only clip from the documentary film about WCW's life and work made as part of the "Voices & Visions" series, so you will hear the music put behind an animated recreation of the writing of the note-poem, Flossie's discovery of it and her response to it.

inescapable rhythms

The chamber group pictured here a decade ago decided to name itself "The Eighth Blackbird," having rejected several other poetic references such as "Red Wheelbarrow." There are thirteen blackbirds, of course. So why the eighth? Is it the music's unavoidable, inexorable meter? Is it the focused circular knowing of the musician in the midst of his or her playing? Well, anyway:

VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

It's good to know that in the mid-90s someone at Oberlin College was apparently teaching Wallace Stevens.

Aw, but enough lucidity. For my part, I want to listen to the music of a group named "First Blackbird," making sounds based on this:

II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

And on some days, "Tenth Blackbird" would do very aptly:

X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

Russell Banks

Russell Banks visited for two days in 2004. He was introduced by Jamie-Lee Josselyn, fellow northern New Englander. We've made Banks' reading (from the opening of the novel The Darling, then not yet published) and the interview I conducted the next morning available as downloadable audio recordings. They are linked here along with photos and an essay about the Banks visit written by Megan Scanlon.

the sun is still not the sun

In the past four months Matthew Abess, Cecilia Corrigan, Ned Eisenberg, Kim Eisler, Trisha Low, and Kaegan Sparks explored the topography of testimony to life in extremis (in particular, the Holocaust). This follows, for Matthew anyway, from my course on the problems of representing the Holocaust, where the issue is most discernible in our discussions of Claude Lanzmann's Shoah, the poems of Paul Celan, the study of survivors made by Terrence Des Pres, and the videotaped survivor testimonies housed at Yale University. That's the intellectual geneology or paths that converged, roughly speaking, and this group, led by Matt, journeyed along it quite a bit further. Recently they made a presentation at the Writers House; now we have both audio and video recordings of the event available.

any one doing something and standing

New audio. A brief informal introduction to cubist language by way of Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway (the 1920s Hem, to be sure).

Stein: "Any one doing something and standing is one doing something and standing. Some one was doing something and was standing. / Any one doing something and standing is one doing something and standing. Any one doing something and standing is one who is standing and doing something. Some one was doing something and was standing. That one was doing something standing."

Hemingway, from "On the Quai at Smyrna": "The strange thing was, he said, how they screamed every night at midnight. I do not know why they screamed at that time. We were in the harbor and they were all on the pier and at midnight they started screaming. We used to turn the searchlight on them to quiet them. That always did the trick. We'd run the searchlight up and down over them two or three times and they stopped it."

Here is the audio (mp3).

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Joseph Hutchinson has blogged in response to this entry.

Pete's 90th

Dave Matthews at the Garden last night.

I and 15,000 others sang "Happy Birthday" to Pete Seeger last night at Madison Square Garden. Springsteeen sang "The Ghost of Tom Joad" with Tom Morello, after a longish introduction by Bruce which ended: "He's gonna look a lot like your granddad that wears flannel shirts and funny hats. He gonna look like your granddad if your granddad can kick your ass." We saw and heard Dave Matthews, John Mellencamp ("If I Had a Hammer"), Ani DiFranco (selflessly sang to accompany several others), Arlo Guthrie ("Oh Mary Don't You Weep" with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band), Billy Bragg (prefaced by a great story of Pete's musical teachings), Bruce Cockburn (intense as always), Emmylou Harris (the most moving performance of "The Water Is Wide" I"ve ever heard), Joan Baez (two songs--the first not quite her usual, the second, "Jacob's Ladder," fantastic), Kris Kristofferson ("Got a Hole in My Bucket, Dear Liza"), Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Richie Havens (sang "Freedom"--his Woodstock song), Roger McGuinn (did the Animals version of "Turn, Turn, Turn"), Steve Earle, Taj Mahal (a favorite of mine), Bernice Reagon, Dar Williams, Tom Chapin, Tom Paxton, Eric Weissberg, and others.

The opening of the 4-hour performance: a lone light shone on Seeger (but we didn't really know it was Pete) as he played a flute solo called "Menomonee Love Song." As the lights came up, they revealed the outline of a sloop, apt for an event titled the "Clearwater Concert" after the organization's vessel, the gaff sloop Clearwater.

Best:

1) Dave Matthews, after telling us he should introduce himself as "David," since that's what his mother called him and she was the one who took him to his first concert, near Croton NY--a Pete Seeger concert. Matthews sang an emotional but musically pure version of "Whiskey Rye Whiskey."

2) Emmylou Harris, "The Water Is Wide," as noted above. Not a dry eye in the house.

3) Springsteen and Morello, trading verses of "The Ghost of Tom Joad." Earlier in the week (!) I'd seen Bruce with the E Street Band, a great concert. The whole band did its hauntingly good "Tom Joad," but this, Bruce in the clear voice of a guy singing for just 10 minutes in a whole evening, and two acoustic guitars, and a harmony with Morello, was even better.

4) Seeger, Baez, Billy Bragg, Emmy Lou Harris singing "We Shall Overcome."

immense dew

Regular readers of this blog will know that I tend to follow the contemporary uses of Wallace Stevens. Most of this is of course trivial and/or incidental. Yet some of it makes startling great sense. Laura, a watercolorist who seems to reside in or aesthetically dwell upon some tropical clime, re-read "Nomad Exquisite" (presumably while painting one of her florid watercolors) and it suggested to her that it was time for another whiskey smash. She gives the recipe for the whiskey smash just below the poem, in similar format. So I read the poem and the drink recipe and realized that as parallel texts they make a great deal of sense. Especially after a few smashes. (Laura calls this drink her "summer Manhattan.")

Nomad Exquisite

As the immense dew of Florida
Brings forth
The big-finned palm
And green vine angering for life,

As the immense dew of Florida
Brings forth hymn and hymn
From the beholder,
Beholding all these green sides
And gold sides of green sides,

And blessed mornings,
Meet for the eye of the young alligator,
And lightning colors
So, in me, comes flinging
Forms, flames, and the flakes of flames.

Holocaust verse

The blog, "Writing the Holocaust," as of this morning has just two blog posts, one for March and one for April. But it's of interest to me nevertheless. April's is a longish entry giving "some cautions on writing Holocaust poetry." It begins with Charles Reznikoff and makes reference to Holocaust verse by Snodgrass, Rich, C.K. Williams, et alia.

who shall say I am not the happy genius?

William Carlos Williams, "Danse Russe"

If I when my wife is sleeping
and the baby and Kathleen
are sleeping
and the sun is a flame-white disc
in silken mists
above shining trees,--
if I in my north room
dance naked, grotesquely
before my mirror
waving my shirt round my head
and singing softly to myself:
"I am lonely, lonely.
I was born to be lonely,
I am best so!"
If I admire my arms, my face,
my shoulders, flanks, buttocks
again the yellow drawn shades,--

Who shall say I am not
the happy genius of my household?

[c. 1917]

- - -

Shawn Walker and I discuss the poem - an audio mini-lesson recorded for an all-online version of my English 88 course around 10 years ago. Williams recorded the poem a number of times, but here is a version made in 1950.

begging the reader's indulgence--not

On Tuesday morning I interviewed novelist Mary Gordon during her second day here as our final Writers House Fellow for '09. The recording of what was a live video feed is ready. There is also a downloadable audio recording as well.

I told her that the stories I admired most were her meta-stories - stories in which narrrative problems are foregrounded, in which the narrator's problem is part of the story, in which a Gordonian figure appears to talk about how the story got constructed or nearly prevented. The most upbeat of these is called "Storytelling." The most compelling is one called "Intertexuality," where the narrator's (indeed, and Mary's) embarrassing and sometimes hateful stolid grandmother angrily responds to her house having been completely made over while she was sent away for a vacation in Florida, and then gets treated to a finale in which she enters a scene in Proust, whom the narrator/Mary has been reading. The second intertext is this story itself.

After chatting about such meta-stories, and about "Intertexuality," I asked M.G. to read the end of that story. This is near the beginning of the recording. At the end, I ask her to read from the memoir she wrote in the mid-90s about the awful father whom she nonetheless adored (and somewhat still adores). In the passage she reads, from a preface directed "To the Reader," she is just about to ask the reader's indulgence--that conventional gesture--but then realizes that she's not writing for readers, but for her father, and so, she says, the writing is an undying. Powerful, compelling and not just a little creepy.

poet missing

As of April 30, 2009, poet Craig Arnold is missing on a small volcanic island in Japan. He went for a solo hike to explore an active volcano on the island and never returned to the inn where he was staying. The authorities are currently on the final day of the search mission. If he is not found by today, the search will be called off.

The Poetry Foundation is following the situation closely.

poetic sweep

Proudly, I pass along part of a note we received from Sandy Van Doren, a member of the Board of the West Chester University Poetry Center:

ALL FOUR IRIS SPENCER UNDERGRADUATE POETRY AWARDS, sponsored by the West Chester University Poetry Center, were won by University of Pennsylvania students! Congratulations, and wow! The biggest award is for the Iris Spencer formal poem, with a prize of $500.00. That is going to Molly O'Neill. The second award for a formal poem is being given to Frances Wright, with a prize of $250.00. The two haiku winners are David Doyle, for $300.00, and Victoria Lee. As you may remember all four students will be honoured at the international West Chester Poetry Conference on Wednesday, June 10, with a panel discussion at West Chester University's Sykes Union Theater from 3:00-4:00 and then are invited to attend the reception and banquet that follow. The keynote speaker that evening after the banquet will be poet, Donald Hall.

many tweets in poets' recordings

Are you following PennSound's twittering yet? Give us a try.

poetry is like capris and hybirds

From an interview conducted with Katia Grubisic* for the Afterword:

What's the most exciting thing happening in poetry these days?

Poetry is not like capri pants, or hybrid cars. What’s exciting now in poetry is the same as what always has been—the spaces between words, the truthy concision, the astonishing leaps; listening to, and articulating, what Wallace Stevens called “the cry of the occasion.”

Well...another chance to quote Stevens. And this phrase is perhaps the one most often quoted, but she got it wrong: "The poem is the cry of its occasion."

What's more: capris and hybrids are the cries of their occasion!

*Katia Grubisic is a writer, editor and translator whose work has appeared in various Canadian and international publications.

"so masterfully exposes & explores..."

A new review [PDF] of Counter-Revolution of the Word is now appearing in Against the Current, written by Sarah Ehlers.

four's a pair

Gertrude Stein, "Readings" (1921)

Kisses can kiss us
A duck a hen and fishes, followed by wishes.
Happy little pair.

- - -

I adore this little poem. It's got a lot of Stein it it - and by that I suppose I mean that it's teachable in an introduction to Stein overall. Back in '99 or so I recorded a short improvised reading of the poem with Shawn Walker and have now converted it to mp3 and added it to the English 88 intro to modernism pages.

novelist on KWH-TV

Novelist (and memoirist and short story writer) MARY GORDON will be visiting the Writers House here in Philadelphia as a Kelly Writers House Fellow - next Monday and Tuesday (April 27-28).

The Tuesday morning session - an informal interview & conversation, moderated by me - is an event in which you can participate. You can watch it live on KWH-TV. But, more, we encourage you to ask Mary Gordon questions by sending them by email. And we also encourage you to phone us with your questions--to talk directly to Ms. Gordon and me.

The Tuesday morning event will begin at precisely 10:30 AM eastern time.

To participate in the KWH-TV live Mary Gordon program, please RSVP to

whfellow@writing.upenn.edu

- at which point we will send you simple instructions for connecting to the video and for posing questions.

Writers House Fellows are made possible by an ongoing generous grant from Paul Kelly.

- - -

Kelly Writers House Fellows: http://writing.upenn.edu/wh/people/fellows/

2009

* Robert Coover
* Joan Didion
* Mary Gordon

2008

* Art Spiegelman
* Lynne Sharon Schwartz
* Jerome Rothenberg

2007

* John McPhee
* Jamaica Kincaid
* Donald Hall

2006

* Richard Ford
* Cythia Ozick
* Ian Frazier

2005

* Roger Angell
* E.L. Doctorow
* Adrienne Rich
* Lyn Hejinian

2004

* Russell Banks
* James Alan McPherson

2003

* Walter Bernstein
* Laurie Anderson
* Susan Sontag

2002

* Michael Cunningham
* John Ashbery
* Charles Fuller

2001

* Tony Kushner
* David Sedaris
* June Jordan

2000

* Grace Paley
* Robert Creeley
* John Edgar Wideman

1999

* Gay Talese

what is today's beauty? - c. 1970

These are the opening lines of 'Quand le Grand Foyer Descend Dans les Eaux,' a section of Robert Duncan's anti-war Passages. In 1982 Duncan went to Buffalo to read poems mostly from the "Regulators" sequence of Passages, published in Ground Work II: In the Dark.

Duncan began with a nearly 18-minute preamble--a talk about the imagination, nationhood, Christendom and Dante's Divine Comedy, Ludwig Wittgenstein, being a "poet of the spirit", being a "Christian non-Christian," language mysticism, and prayer. He ended with what he called a "sermon" (21 minutes).

Someone at Buffalo had the presence of mind to record this event - and now the recording has been added to PennSound - and (thanks to the amazing Jenny Lesser) it's been segmented into individual portions and poems.

Jennifer Scappettone

We at PennSound are pleased to announce our newest author page: that of Jennifer Scappettone. Jen has been to the Writers House twice recently. Her page now includes a Segue/Bowery Poetry Club reading; both audio and video of a session she did at KWH with Lyn Hejinian, hosted by Rachel Levitsky; another session in which she read a series of her poems; and a conversation with me, done as a PennSound podcast.

choosing

I'm pleased to see that a New York Times education blog, responding to a high-school senior's choice among Barnard, Tufts and Penn, mentions that a reason to choose Penn is the Kelly Writers House. Okay, then...

"what a great face he had"

John Giannotti has recently completed a sculpture of Matthew Henson, the African American explorer who assisted Robert Peary in the first visit to the North Pole on April 6, 1909. The sculpture will be part of a new maritime museum built out of an old church (the church was original constructed of ballast stones from the days when Camden was a shipbuilding town and busy port). PBS-affiliated NJN ran a segment on John and the Henson sculpture yesterday and here it is as a video recording. The piece on John comes at around 13 minutes into the program.

sock it to him, sweet Tito

Lawrence Felinghetti's "Baseball Canto" sits in the (I'm imagining April) sun, early-season baseball, schmoozing with the left-field bleacher-bound grungy populace. And makes the presences of blacks and Chicanos on the S.F. Giants into a reason for associating the limitations of the Anglo-Saxon poetic tradition and Poundian modernism and American conformity (the latter imposed by Irish umpires). Its aesthetic and ideological oppositions are all hilariously confused. Does Larry F. know that the pitcher, although Caribbean and thus blessed, is not likely to hit a home run as his means of out-performing the white players? It's a mess but I love it all the same. Yes, that's Lawrence Felinghetti's Baseball Canto. (I also have made available a RealAudio recording of F. performing the poem.)

start with Stevens

Meaghan O'Rourke began to write poetry after being assigned Wallace Stevens's "This Solitude of Cataracts" in a class. This fact came out in an interview with a student newspaper in north Texas where O'Rourke recently gave a reading.

believe you me

TV film: a young Jew helps his skinhead friends desecrate and try to destroy a synagogue. He doesn't protest when one of them urinates from the balcony, but some residual religiosity makes him urge the others to stop tossing around a Torah and put it back where they got it. He identifies with Hitler in part because the Nazis recognized the importance of the Jews.

It's The Believer.

Reviewed by Julie Salamon in 2002.

which way are you going, Walt Whitman?

Michael Silverblatt's Bookworm radio show does a tribute to Walt Whitman. For details and a link to the audio: click here.

happy Passover from the NJ Turnpike

widowhood = slapsticky humiliation

Joyce Carol Oates.

Have you thought about writing a memoir? I wanted to write a memoir about being a widow. It was going to be the opposite of Joan Didion. Hers is beautiful and elegiac. Mine would be filled with all sorts of slapstick, demeaning and humiliating things. Like trash cans whose bottoms are falling out.

Do you think widowhood is properly understood? I think that Didion took it on a very high plane, and she does have assistants and maybe a maid. But it’s actually a very hardscrabble experience. It’s not placid and tragic so much as it’s physically arduous.

From an interview conducted by Deborah Solomon.

perfers serial killer novels to poetry

A few days ago I wrote about what happened when NY City schools chancellor Harold Levy asked members of the School Board to read and discuss three poems by Wallace Stevens. Now I want to add one of the letters to the editor the Times published in response to their article about Levy's unusual move.

To the Editor:

Reacting to the possibility that Harold O. Levy, the interim schools chancellor, had put three Wallace Stevens poems and other interesting reading matter in her mailbox, Ninfa Segarra, a school board member, said, ''Probably if I had gotten it I would have thrown it out,'' and added: ''I'm not a poetry kind of person. I like serial killer novels'' (front page, May 2).

As New York City public school students face the start of an intense testing season and while the march toward more teacher testing continues, Ms. Segarra's close-minded remarks make one wonder whether school board members, too, should be subjected to academic testing.

ELLEN FREILICH
New York, May 3, 2000
The writer was an English teacher.

the prof you know personally

A year ago (3/20/08) I wrote this:

In today's NYT "Thursday Styles" section the lead story, under a huge photo of a famous crusty TV law prof, is a story about "the professor as open book." Wow! News! Now students and others can discover their professors' red wine preferences, their favorite films, their social-networking profiles, "friend" them. Or not - or not - if the academic in question does not choose to put such stuff up, which is most often the case, even at this late date into the internet age. So what really is the story here? The key perhaps is where the story runs: the "Style" section, not the higher-ed page/half-page in the main first section. This story befits the My Space/You Tube/no-one-is-private-anymore craze and has nothing to do with academics or education or the professoriat per se.

"It is not necessary for a student studying multivariable calculus, medieval literature or Roman archaeology to know that the professor on the podium shoots pool, has donned a bunny costume or can’t get enough of Chaka Khan.

Yet professors of all ranks and disciplines are revealing such information on public, national platforms: blogs, Web pages, social networking sites, even campus television....

While many professors have rushed to meet the age of social networking, there are some who think it is symptomatic of an unfortunate trend, that a professor’s job today is not just to impart knowledge, but to be an entertainer."

Now ponder this last part. The professor's "job" seemed to be in part to create an aura of personal impenetrability and solitariness and remoteness only when, as it happens, the technologies of personal knowing were what they were. Now that they are what they are, the "job" seems to be changing. These things are not innate. And as for entertainment, it's the Times that's asserting this by putting the "story" on its Style page. There's nothing more or less entertaining about a teacher who is known as distinct from unknown. It all depends on the teaching.

Now some Facebook friends and I have discussed the matter further and here are some of their comments:

[] M.L.: The professor's "job" seemed to be in part to create an aura of personal impenetrability and solitariness and remoteness only when, as it happens, the technologies of personal knowing were what they were. Now that they are what they are, the "job" seems to be changing. / If you remove the word "personal," 2x above, isn't this the same argument for all learning these days? Do you think that job is actually changing?

[] B.R.: Unsurprisingly, while I wholeheartedly agree with your general sentiment, and while I think you are actually a fascinating case study of someone who's utterly webbed up (2.0, natch) yet almost never in the "bethou me" sense -- in fact the contrary: almost always in a pedagogical or at least intellectually engaged/evangelical sense -- unsurprisingly, I'm not sure that, for some people anyway, the personal sh!t isn't possessed of some potent magnetism. Prof as celebrity, as it were: that same bone gets tickled. / But then, OTOH, isn't the poetic (STS) fallacy of YouTube & Facebook & whatnot that we can all be like celebrities, and have our wine preferences and our bunny suit escapades broadcast for consumption? YouTube -- to paraphrase Amis, "'TV, innit?'" That's a sexy promise. I suspect that demurrals about "the job" are, in some cases, cloaks for its indulgence.

[] D.M.: Personal impenetrability, solitariness, and remoteness are part of the mix when someone has a title that makes them the smartest person in the room. If it makes you feel better, those three qualities are minor superpowers.

[] J.F.: In a public school setting, administrators would frown upon this kind of formalized personal contact between teachers and students. (I have former students as facebook friends, but no current students, no matter how close I might be to them in class.) But you're right -- artificial boundaries inhibit education. I have, on more than one occasion told my students, "You're smarter than me; I just have 35 years on you, that's all." And the longer I do this (10 years now) I realize the absolute value of personal connections with students.

[] K.A.: blah blah blah ...what page are we on!?