Text and Hubris

There is a lot that happens behind the scenes in a University town. Often, there are small subcultures that are formed purely from the shifting movements of students and faculty. These people move back and forth, silent and unseen, but they often form an important part of what makes a town like Iowa City run so smoothly. Today, I watched one of these people in action, an appliance and furniture hunter who was looking through dumpsters for student cast-offs.

It’s actually a really good idea. Every year, as the Spring semester comes to a close, thousands of students pack up and head home or head out into the world to seek their fortune. In either case, they are often unable or unwilling to take everything they had with them. What this means is that an incredible amount of valuable and high quality furniture and appliances are simply discarded on the side of the road, near dumpsters, and all across the city. This is especially true where I live. Many of the students here are foreign nationals who plan to returning to their own countries. It’s impossible to take these items on a plane. Early on, we will see flyers for sales but eventually the left over items are simply left discarded and abandoned to the trash heap.

This is exactly what Courtney and I were doing. We’re in the process of moving and our couch is too old and too big. We had no place for it, so we set about lugging that heavy monstrosity to its appointed place near the dumpster. We made it down the stairs and were resting while mourning how far away our final destination still was when what appeared to be a moving van drove by. It was yellow and the lettering on the side was faded and worn and it circled the lot slowly, then stopped in front of us. A pleasant man with a few white hairs still ringing his balding head opened the door and and asked us if we were going to throw the couch away. We told him that we were and he asked if we would rather just have him take it off our hands. Essentially, he was offering to save us from a miserable journey with a couch that weighed more than any couch should. We readily agreed. He came over and inspected the couch carefully. His truck was already full of other finds: two couches, a painting, and an odd assortment of lamps. After his inspection of our old couch, he decided against keeping it but offered to drive it over for us. This alone made him my hero for the day.

He was experienced at what he did. He knew what to look for and he asked us if we knew anyone who was moving out this week. We didn’t and gave him our thanks as he left. As I thought about it, I realized that he probably saves the city millions in terms of discarded trash and waste. He takes these cast-offs and gives them a new life. He isn’t alone, either. Within an hour of our couch landing near the dumpster, it was gone. It had disappeared into another truck ready for another life.

I wish it and all those treasure seekers well.

A quick addendum to my last post. I do not think the novel as a form is going away. That would be—to put it mildly — silly. What I am saying is that we to have an ever increasing array of ways to tell a story. Conversely, we have an equally increasing number of ways in which to experience a story. This should be a cause for publishers and authors to celebrate not mourn. I would hope that we all know that the supposed death of the industry is—as I already mentioned —very silly. Rather than panicking and fearing the 99 cent novel or whatever comes next in the long line of tech scare fads, laugh, write, create and be glad there are so many ways to share your story.

Ah the joys of Spring Break. The sun is shining and the days here in Iowa have been nothing short of gorgeous. Of course, some of us don’t get much down time. Courtney and I took a much needed long weekend, but I’m back to completing projects today. Time is ticking down and that clock is starting to sound a bit ominous. I feel a bit like Captain Hook.

I did do a couple things to improve my work-flow, though. I switched back to using Linux as my primary OS. Windows has a lot of great tools but I find I work faster and more efficiently under Linux. Simply put, I have a wider set of tools at my disposal and I can optimize the environment to my specific needs. I won’t go too far into my reasons here. Instead, I’ll post a couple of specific posts on Linux and how I use it over the next few weeks. Hopefully, it will be helpful to some and it falls in line with a couple of articles I am writing for another site that is in development.

With that clock ticking down, a lot of my attention has been focused on the next step. While grad school looms as a possibility in the future, the truth is that I am looking at my next foray into the workforce. I love academia. I love teaching and learning and I don’t think I could stop now if I tried. For right now, unless something totally unexpected occurs, that is going to have to be as a volunteer or for very specific classes.

I’m kind of looking forward to stepping back into the workplace again. I want to take what I have learned and apply it to different scenarios. I have the knowledge and I have years of technical practice behind me. What comes now is really combining my talents and abilities in different ways. When I first started using computers I do so as a communicator. I used them as tools of communication before I used them for any other use save video games. That is why I was such a Sun guy. I bought the idea that the network is the computer. Look at where it has brought us. Social media has exploded, people more connected than ever, communication is happening everywhere. In every second, thousands of stories whip past us on beams of light or in electric pulses that hum with a rapid rhythm that helps to beat out change on worldwide basis. I know it all seems like old news but there is still something really cool about what we have accomplished. It still thrills me.

Sure, it’s not perfect. There are a lot of issues to work out but that’s true of any technology. We’re still adapting and that is where I see opportunity now. No longer is this about the digital vs the real. It about the synergy between the real and the digital. If you want one reason why Facebook succeeds, it is because it understands that a real person carries his or her digital self beyond the the online space. It blurs that line until it doesn’t exist anymore. Obviously, I have my issues with this in some regard but this is where we are going. It is why tablets and smart phones are paving the way. People want to have their digital life infuse their real one. We as creators, as builders, as toolmakers, and maybe even as guides have to understand this and adapt.

I’m excited about that. I am excited about writing and creating in a totally new environment that keeps shifting at unimaginable speeds. It’s terrifying to be sure and I still haven’t found a door in, but it’s where I want to be as a writer and a creator.

So now I’m looking for options and even that is nervewracking but still kind of fun. In two months, we’ll see where those new possibilities take me. Keep your fingers crossed and if you have ideas feel free to let me know by clicking on the “contact me” icon next to my name!

I had the opportunity to attend an informal discussion/presentation by Lance Mannion with occasional comments from Stephen Kuusisto titled Literary Writing in the Second Digital Age. In it they discussed whether blogs deserve their still often-maligned status as the creation of narcissists screaming into the echo chamber or whether they were something more? Mannion and Kuusisto argue that for many writers the blog has become the next evolution of the much vaunted author’s journal. As such, they contain snippets of ideas that can evolve and build into future poems and stories. They become a place for an author to share opinions, moments of reaction, and whatever else seems to fill their lives. The blog, then, for these authors becomes a medium for sharing and, almost more importantly, for storing and recalling important moments and thoughts. While it is not a replacement for other forms of writing, it is a valuable tool for the authors who are so inclined to use it.

Listening to Mannion talk, what quickly became apparent was that his blog primarily acts a way to stay connected with the world beyond his computer. According to him, the best part of running his blog comes when he is able to leave the screen behind and, instead, meet and talk with intelligent, powerful, and connected people the world over. The blog became a way to connect, share, and meet these people. It was, in a sense, his contribution to the commons and the discussions that were going on. I love this idea because, at least in my mind, this is the real reason the Internet should exist. It opens the doors of communication even wider. Even as I type this, my twitter client is streaming, collecting a #litchat discussion stream which I will read later and I have added both Mannion’s and Kuusisto’s blogs to my RSS feed. While we may not always like to admit it, writers like community. We want people to read us and, in turn, we want to read other people. That is almost a required function of the job.

While both Mannion and Kuusisto made clear that blogs were not a replacement for print publications, Kuusisto did note how publishing his work in a digital format made it more accessible and allowed for a much faster translation and dissemination of his works than did traditional print. This idea that there is a balance between print and digital publishing is one that I wish more people would take into account. Print isn’t going away, it will be a tragedy if it ever does. Instead, there is this great balance where digital access is opening new doors for distribution and even creating new ways of making print accessible. This is, in almost every way, a symbiotic relationship not a parasitic one.

Beyond that, what really caught my attention was a brief discussion on how literary fiction and poetry is, in some sense, a (and I am trying to remember the exact phrasing here) “socially informed and culturally aware form of vanity publishing.” Somewhere, I hear a clamor of authors gathering their pitchforks but I think there is some truth to that statement. There appears to be a false notion for many undergrads (and even some grad students) that there is money in writing. I’m not sure where that comes from as we have been told from day one that there is no money in writing but I am sure the first year out of college will disabuse them of such a notion. If we’re not doing this for money, then, if we write, we do so because we think we have something to say and that is, in a very real sense, vanity.

It’s why this blog is called Text and Hubris. But that is the point, after all. I want to share and I want to tell my stories. I hope that there are enough people who want to listen/read and in return I do my damnedest to be great listener/reader as well. It is the least I can do.

As I close, I will continue to complain about notification for these events. If I had known about it earlier, I would have have noted it here and in the CW4 forum as well. I am sure this would have been very valuable to the Intermedia and New Media students but it didn’t look like it made it to any of them. As with so many things, my only notification came from a hastily propped up sign on the door to EPB. Obviously, this was a talk that fell directly into my interest and study area, so I did cancel a meeting in order to sit in. I’m glad I did. I just wish more people had that opportunity.

Links
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Lance Mannion: Lance Mannion
Stephen Kuusisto: Planet of the Blind

[nbcite author="justinjfj" title="Le Louvre - Do Not Touch Works of Art" year="2009" city="Paris" publisher="Flickr" month="04" day="29" type="blog" ]

Before entering the gallery, we were stripped of our coats and packs, our notebooks, pens and pencils. Nearby, a man with a golden badge and balding head watched us wearily as we left pieces of ourselves outside the door while a woman who looked like she should have worn large colored glasses spoke in clipped tones that dripped condescension.

“Stay at least two feet away from the art at all times.”
“Do not touch.”
“Do not look too closely.”
“Observe from afar.”
“I will tell you what it all means.”

I knew then that this was no place I wanted to be.

When I was 16, I was nearly kicked out of a museum in London because I could not keep my hands off the scultpures. It only made sense. These were creations of the hand. They all but begged me to reach out and trace their lines, those smoothed edges, the hidden nooks and crannies all carefully crafted by artists now gone but always here, always alive in the form and feel of these creations. How could I not touch them?

We walked through the gallery where the images were set in antiseptic gray and listened to the story of an artist defined through another’s eyes. We could not, dared not, judge the work for ourselves. That was sacrilege.

I reached out a hand.

Thank God for Heresy.

[nbcite print="apa" ]