Thinking about the Roman Empire

In the future, we may have forgotten how various social platforms spent a significant amount of time analyzing how often men think about the Roman empire, how shocked some of us have been to find out how many men think about the Roman empire daily.

And then there was the question of what kind of men:  what race, what economic class, what nationality?  In a recent episode, the NPR show 1A covered this Roman empire phenomena in a way that was intriguing, funny, and full of insight.

As to the question of how often men think about the Roman empire, over on Twitter, poet Alicia E. Stallings wrote, "Women think about the Iliad about once a day."  

I replied, "Or is it the Odyssey? I think of Penelope, weaving and unweaving, of the men making their way home, of us all, stuck in so many ways, dreaming of something else."

This idea that men think about the Roman empire once a day made me think about what we think about when we're barely conscious of thinking at all.  I thought of James Joyce, trying to capture the elusive nature of our internal monologue, how mundane those monologues can be, how they point us to what we really value.

Enlarging the Platform: Joining Twitter

For years, I resisted having anything to do with Twitter.  It seemed like an extra burden, in these days when we have so many social media distractions.  I wasn't sure that I was even capable of tweeting--posting something when I only have 140 characters?  No way--I'm a long-form blogger.

At least, that's what I told myself for years.  But then I started noticing that most of my Facebook posts aren't really that long.

Still, I resisted, especially as I heard tales of how mean the Twitter world can be.  And I wasn't sure I could keep up with one more platform, even though I understand how important those platforms can be.  Every so often, a thought nudged its way in:  at the very least, I could put the same posts that I put on Facebook over on a Twitter platform.

Yesterday I read this article that advised academics how to begin writing for a more popular audience, and there was a link to this 2016 article about why we should be on Twitter.  This experience has become more and more common during the last few months:  over and over I've been stumbling across articles that talk about how writers really do need to be on Twitter.

Long ago, when Twitter first bust onto the scene, it did seem to be a platform built for people who are always on their phones, and I have a bit of worry about the fact that I don't have a smart phone.  And yet, I'm never very far from other kinds of computers, my laptop at home, and my desk top at work.

Yesterday I went over to Twitter, as I have several times--but this time, I actually started an account.  I decided that a Facebook post from earlier in the week would make a good first post: "In the concrete wasteland of the parking platform, some people watch apocalyptic videos about cryptocurrency or the new corona virus. I quietly water the butterfly garden."

I changed my handle/user name.  At first it was AbbottBerkey, so I tried to change it to Kristin Berkey-Abbott--too long.  I changed it to Berkey-Abbott--no hyphens allowed, which seems like a design flaw to me.  So at first I went with BerkeyAbbott, and then made one more change to KBerkeyAbbott.

I confess that once I successfully navigated all of this, I felt this glow, akin to writing a blog post that makes me happy or creating something out of shreds of something else.

I'm still not sure how often to tweet, and in the end, that decision will probably be made for me.  Most days, I don't have time to tweet throughout the day--and most days, I'm not sure I have enough tweet-worthy material to tweet throughout the day.

Maybe one of the benefits to an additional platform is that my brain will be on the lookout for postable bits.  Maybe it will be like writing a poem a day, that magical time when my brain feels ablaze with inspiration, not the time when my brain feels burdened/exhausted.

For me, the trick is always to manage these social media opportunities.  I have wasted far too much time, scrolling, scrolling, looking for something to read.  I could have read whole books or submitted poetry or put together another book that languishes in the files of my computer--and any of these activities would feed my brain more than scrolling, scrolling, scrolling.

So, we shall see.  If you want to find me on Twitter, I'm using @KBerkeyAbbott as my user name (or is it a handle?).

Facebook as Hospice Care

Three weeks ago, we'd be about to learn of the closing of the Art Institute of Ft. Lauderdale.  In some ways, it wasn't a surprise--the school had been declining, and with enrollment falling below 500 students, in some ways, it was just a matter of time.  

I'd spent over 5 years saying that the current path was not sustainable, yet some part of me was still shocked when the closing was announced.  I wanted to analyze it all, yet again for the umpteenth time.   I wanted to create alternate scenarios to see if it could have been salvaged.  But what was the use?  As had been the case since the company had been sold to Goldman Sachs, it wasn't going to be up to the people at the school.  Maybe it never had been.

I've been interested to see how others have reacted.  Most reactions I'm gleaning from social media--I'm not in the kind of daily contact with AiFL folks.  I've been most interested in Facebook as a space for grieving and hospice-type care when an institution closes.

There is now a closed Facebook group, We Were AiFL.  I've been enjoying seeing people's posts about good memories, and I've been happy that most of the anger has been kept off the page.  There's sadness about what has been lost, but for the most part, it's been pictures and stories of what the school did well.

The historian in me wonders what will happen to all of our social media posts--a lot of our history has been stored there in recent years.  But that's a question for a different post.

I've been reading much analysis through the years of the dangers of social media, and I'm willing to admit that social media can be a sucking black hole that leaves us tired and brain-frazzled and angry and _______.  But it has some benefits too.  It's worth remembering those benefits before unplugging completely.

In fact, I would argue that the problems with social media may be more about our phones than the social media sites.  I don't have a smart phone, so I'm not continually plugged in, the way others are--thus my social media usage is slightly easier to control.  However, I do spend a lot of time with the larger computers in my life.

Instead of arguing about the dangers of social media, perhaps we should spend more time thinking about how these sites can create community and utilizing them to do that.

Monetizing Our Efforts

Yesterday the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce offered a workshop on using Facebook advertising to boost one's business.  I went because it was free and because it might have offered a nugget or two.

I don't have the freedom to do much of what the presenter suggested, but it's interesting to know how internet marketing works these days--at least as it pertains to Facebook.  If you've wondered whether or not ads are targeting you because they know you, you've probably already figured out the answer--they are.

I wish there was a way that I could respond to say, "Yes, I looked at these suitcases and more than once.  Yes, I already bought them.  Please stop sending me these ads that make me sad that I no longer have a vacation to look forward to."  Our session yesterday did not cover that subject.

Our presenter kept telling us that we had to think like an online marketer.  That thinking required lots of actions, of course.  I continue to be amazed at what we're all expected to do these days.  Some of the people at the workshop were there because they're in fields where they might have known they would be expected to do a variety of marketing, like the woman who makes jewelry.  But the dentist?  He not only has to clean teeth but figure out an online marketing plan?

Some of the approaches seemed downright onerous, like the advice that a realtor interview the principal of every school in a district where they represented houses and offer that information on a website that would then convince people to hire them for their real estate expertise.

I came home and put the finishing touches on the article on female medieval mystics that's due today.  I did some grading for my online class.  I did not figure out ways to monetize this blog.  I did not create a Facebook page that will declare my skills and services as a writer.

While I am glad that I went to the workshop, it's not what brought me the most joy yesterday.  What did?  I spent time in the parking garage taking pictures that will eventually make their way to Facebook.  Our EMS students were working their way through a simulation:  a car wreck with a dead person in the front seat and an injured person (the medical mannequin) in the back seat. As with more traditional classes, I was impressed with the way that the instructors made complicated concepts accessible to the students.  I was impressed with the creativity of the class.  Several times yesterday, I realized once again how lucky I am to be here at this school, at this particular moment.

I'll leave it up to the more talented people hired by the school to figure out how to monetize the pictures that I send them for the Facebook site.

Unsettling Week-end Reading

The week-end before this past one, I read part of The Sense and Sensibility Screenplay and Diaries : Bringing Jane Austen's Novel to Film.  I didn't read the screenplay, but I enjoyed the introduction to the book, written by the producer.  He gave interesting insights about what it takes to bring a novel like Jane Austen's to the screen, as well as his history with the book.

I was fascinated by Emma Thompson's journal that she kept while the filming was happening.  She had to rewrite chunks of script, as well as act.  I found her accounts of how the cast and crew interacted to be very compelling.  Of course, it's England, and the weather was often against them.

But more disturbing was Emma Thompson's self doubt--disturbing and endearing.  She talks about seeing her face pasted all over magazines after her appearance at Cannes, and how distressed she was.  Who can't relate to that? 

She was in her early 30's when she shot to movie stardom, and she worries about being old and fat.  I, too, worried about being old and fat in my 30's, and now, I wonder why I felt old back then.  It's startling to see Emma Thompson, worrying about the same things, back when I considered her one of the most beautiful stars out there--but of course, there are always other stars in the firmament, and Thompson compares herself to them and finds herself lacking.

I found it bother heartening and sad to see her wrestling with what seems to afflict most women I know.

On Friday evening, I picked up a book that's been on my to-read shelf all year:  Claudia Rankine's Citizen:  an American Lyric.  I read it straight through and found it a bit overwhelming:  imagine every distressing state of our union story that comes across your Facebook feed and reading them for 166 pages.  Perhaps that wasn't the best way to read the book, or perhaps that feeling of despair and bleakness was exactly what Rankine wanted to evoke.

The book has gotten a variety of awards, most of them in poetry, but as I read it, I kept wondering how we define poetry in a modern age.  I loved the inclusion of all the art, much of it works I hadn't encountered before.  It was an interesting counterpart, and I wondered if it's more affordable to include this art now, and other aspects of book production.

I read it on the front porch, by the light of the setting sun and then the porch light.  I might reread parts of it in front of my computer.  Dan Chiasson's review in The New Yorker notes the fact that many of us might look up events in the book:  “'Citizen' conducts its business, often, with melancholy, but also with wit and a sharable incredulity that sends you running to YouTube. These kinds of errands into the culture could not have been performed before the Internet, which provides, for all of us, the ultimate instant replay."  We are both inside the history and outside, where the past isn't ever really the past.

I also found myself thinking, this work is intriguing and exhausting, this piling of image after image of oppression both overt and subtle and minute and deadly--but is it poetry?

I could argue that it's one long prose poem--or lots of prose poems interspersed with other art, both the image and the written.  Chiasson suggests that maybe something other than the poem is the model for some of this work:  "The rectilinear language blocks that make up much of 'Citizen' suggest the prose poem, that hand-me-down from the French Symbolists. But another model for these entries is, I suspect, non-literary: the police log, the journal entry, or—a new form familiar to anybody who visits student unions—the confession board papered with anonymous note cards."

It's a non-traditional work of poetry to be sure, perhaps experimental, perhaps more aligned with collage, perhaps something new for our time and technology that we have yet to name.

When I first finished it, I thought, I'm never reading this again!  But I've found my thoughts returning to it, and I know that I'll return to it.  It was disturbing and unsettling and it contained much that makes the modern world so wearying.  But as a white woman, an older woman, a middle class woman, I have the luxury of looking away--but I should not.  I am a woman committed to a vision of a world that's better, a world where no one has to look away because no one is abused in the ways that Rankine documents--I am not going to look away.

It's a powerful piece of art.

I also want to spend more time with it so that I can return to some of the analysis of it.  There's much richness in it all, and my brain hungers for that richness.  I'll return to this interview with Rankine.

If I had more time, perhaps I would think about the juxtaposition of Austen's work, Thompson's journey in taking that work to screen, and Rankine's documenting of this time/past time of our collective history.  But that topic will have to wait for another day.  Time is short today, and I have to go to spin class.  Then I'm taking today off to go on a birding/nature photography outing with my church group (see this blog post for details).

Journals, Old-Fashioned and Modern

For almost two months now, I've been experimenting with different types of journals, most of them offline.  Today I started yet another one--I've written 3 pages of my new 10 day shred journal (my 10 day shred is an elimination diet of sorts:  No gluten, no dairy, no alcohol.  Lots of veggies, fruits, and lean protein, plus nuts and seeds.  One or two protein shakes a day.  Start the day with a detox tonic:  1 tsp. of apple cider vinegar, 2 T. lemon juice, 4 T. cranberry juice.  Only one caffeine drink a day).

Why another journal?  I wanted to delve into my process and my thoughts, and I didn't think it would be of wide enough interest to write extensively about it in this blog.  Indeed, some of you might already be saying that I've delved into it quite enough.

I did something similar with my retreat week journal that I started as I went to Mepkin Abbey.  I knew that I couldn't pick up a signal and thus couldn't blog, but I wanted to record my thoughts.

I kept it separate from the offline journal that I keep, just so that I could find it easily; the same is true with my 10 Day Shred journal.  I now have a separate folder in my Documents file on the computer that is labeled "Journals of Various Sorts."  I have my offline journal there, along with my spiritual journaling that's a picture of each sketch I make, and my dream journal.

I no longer keep the journal I once had in a big, 5 subject, spiral bound notebook, but when I travel without my laptop, I do keep handwritten notes.

If ever I am deemed important enough for scholarly study, and if my handwritten papers and offline material still exists, it will be a lot for some future scholar to sift through.  But that is not my problem.

Longtime readers of my blog know that I periodically wonder how our online records will be processed by future scholars.  Many blogs are similar enough to old-fashioned (offline) journals that it's not a stretch to see future scholars analyzing those.

At Beth's blog, I responded to her post about the future of blogging with this comment:  "I love the blog as a place for both long and short formats, for pictures, as a sort of daybook or sketchbook or idea incubator or journal--a road map of my creative self, of all my selves. I would continue to keep the blog even if I knew I would be the only one reading it, because I use it to store ideas, to be my journal that I share with the world--and because in grad school, I was taught the importance of this kind of writing (less formal, more free-form, more collection of ephemera than polished/finished work) as a window to the artist's world, and as art itself (I think of the journals of Dorothy Wordsworth). I like the blogs of others for these very reasons too--they make me feel less alone in the world, and that, for me, is a compelling reason to keep blogging."

I do wonder how future scholars will deal with our Facebook sites along with Pinterest, Instagram, Tumblr, Twitter, and all the rest.  They do seem a sort of journaling too.  I know that there's been a lot of discussion about how honest we can be if we're putting our lives out on the internet.  I'm fairly honest, but there's plenty that I consider off-limits, which is why I have my offline journal. 

It seems like our online records might be preserved forever, but anyone who's had any sort of online presence for any amount of time knows how quickly things can vanish.  I used to take great joy over being published in online venues--but then some of those disappeared.

Of course, I realize that few of us will lead lives so accomplished that we're of interest to future scholars, although it's often hard to know at the time.  I think of people like Keats, who died when he was young; he died with no idea that he would be seen as one of the most important British poets of all time. 

The real benefit to keeping these daily records is to the record keeper.  And that's why I don't hesitate to start a new journal here and there.

Friday Fragments

I feel a bit scattered, so let me record some highlights from the week, in a fragmented form:

--My dentist visit was better than I expected.  More brushing has paid off, much as more flossing paid off 20 years ago.  I have kept up the flossing; I will continue to look for ways to brush more often.  My dental hygienist told me that brushing with a dry toothbrush is more effective at plaque removal--I could do that at the office (I'm not willing to brush in the bathroom).

--Our solar panels arrived and the installation has begun.  The panels are still on the ground, but that's O.K.  They're safe.  I've felt very stressed by this home repair/upgrade, but now that it's underway, I'm feeling better.

--I wrote a draft of a poem this morning--the angel Gabriel cross-dressing in demon clothes. It's still very rough, but it's reassuring to write a poem.

--Likewise, yesterday I sent two packets of poems out into the world.  It feels like a long time since I did any submitting.  It was good to get started again.

--I went back through e-mails about our Purgatory Project, and I was reminded that I have been writing more on that than I thought.

--I created a new board with my Pinterest account.  If you've been enjoying the pictures of the visual journaling that I've been posting, go here to see all of them.

--I also created an Instagram account.  Maybe this week-end I'll do something with it.

--Of course, if I'm getting around to Instagram and Pinterest, it must mean that the cool kids have moved on to something else long ago.

--One of my week's highpoints that I don't want to lose sight of:  I applied for a grant for our Vacation Bible School--and I got it!  It wasn't a hard application, as grant applications go.  But I'm so glad that I did it, and so happy to get some money to help with VBS.  Now we can provide dinner for free.  And since our VBS is primarily neighborhood kids, many of whom are not well off, maybe that will help more than I know.

--I want to believe that I am helping more than I know--especially in weeks like this one, when I haven't felt like I'm buzzing with efficiency but instead buzzing with paralyzing anxiety.  It's good to collect these fragments to remember that even in weeks like these, I'm still basically on track.

Dancing Days Are Here Again

Some vignettes from the past week:

--Here's another strange juxtaposition of modern, multicultural life.  On Wed., I headed over to my church to help set up the annual pumpkin patch:

Photo by Pastor Keith Spencer

My Hindu writer friend's high holy days also started this week--lots of dancing for those who are able.

Hindu dancing, a Christian pumpkin patch--could one rework a Cinderella tale here?

--Yesterday in my Composition II class, I went over what I hoped my students had already learned about structuring an essay.  I am old-fashioned--I wrote on a white board.  My students took photos of the board with their smart phones.

Now their smart phones will also know how to write an essay--how computers learn!  That, too, seems like it should be a nugget I could use in my writing somewhere.

--One of my students came up afterwards to show me his notes that he took in an old-fashioned way, with a pen on paper.  He told me that his notes were gold, that he had learned more about writing from the morning's class than in the last year and a half.

Cynical types may say that he was insincere--but if so, he's got great acting skills.

--I am listening to newscasts that use the word "deconfliction."  Did this word exist two months ago?

It sounds like a word that describes some sort of peace process.  But it seems to be used to describe talks between Russia and the U.S. so that their respective war planes don't crash into each other over Syria and so that troops shoot Syrians of various factions and not each other.

--I prefer my church's vision of deconfliction--put pumpkins in our yard and welcome the world.

Photo by Pastor Keith Spencer

Poetry Saturday: Maps and Fibers

 Once I was inspired by the poems that I read in old-fashioned books, and as I was teaching, I often wrote poems that had their spark in the poetry I was teaching.

Now I tend to read poems online.  I love the Via Negativa site, because I find a wide variety of inspiration there.  And Dave Bonta, who started the site years ago, is so generous to post the poems inspired by other poems.

Some of my better poems have come from this process of reading a blog post or a poem online and then responding.  I'm not sure that the one below will be one of my better ones, but I thought I'd post it.  It was inspired by this poem, which in turn, was inspired by this post.  And as I was revising my poem, I thought that I might write a new poem that would take off from the last stanza. 

I've spent the week being intrigued by the nature of the word fiber:  the fibers in cloth, the fiber that we eat, the fibers in our muscles.  Perhaps a new poem is percolating.

But in the meantime, here's a poem for your Saturday.



 Fiber of Existence

“Some maps clearly mark
the exits we need”
—Luisa A. Igloria, “Meander“


You will study the maps,
make a plan, pack
the right clothes, only to find
yourself in a different country,
the one you didn’t know
you needed to explore.

It is here you find the answers
to the unspoken questions.
Here is the journal written
in a language you can’t understand.
Here the box of letters
written between two souls
you do not know.

Here you pledge to drink from a dirty
glass, to ignore all your dusty duties.
Here you will ride the beast that scares
you most, the elephant or the motorcycle,
the couple married multiple decades
or mornings of solitary coffee.

Listen for the wind to whisper
your name. Go where the wind commands.
The rains will wash
away all evidence of your longing.

Eat the mush of memory.
Remember every dreary breakfast.
Resolve to find the fiber of your existence.

Technology Miracles Old and New

Yesterday was delightful.  I worked on my angel Gabriel poem and accompanying documents (writing process, updated bio, picture), while also working on the online classes which started yesterday.  My brother-in-law popped by for a visit while he was on call, and I worked on a quilt while we chatted.  And at the end of the day, I got the mail that told me that Atlanta Review accepted a poem of mine, "Coracle of Prayer."

I thought about how I would likely not have written that poem without the Internet and blogging.  I came across this post and video that Dave Bonta posted.  In pre-Internet days, perhaps I would have come across the facts about coracles--but would I have been as intrigued and inspired if I hadn't had the video to watch?

My purple legal pad where I write poems shows me that I was playing with the Gabriel idea before I saw this post of Beth's art that she posted in January.  I had the idea during Advent, the mingling of the thought of John the Baptist as that homeless guy under the overpass, the idea of God coming where we least expect to find the Divine, and the godlessness of South Florida. 

But when I saw her post on a day when I saw other images, I wrote a blog post about the poem I was trying to write.  That blog post led to an electronic conversation with Beth, which has led to a publication opportunity, about which I will say more later.  It's another opportunity which I wouldn't have had without modern technology.

Or perhaps I would, but at a different pace.  I could have written a letter, after all.  But without the Internet to distribute information, I would likely never have seen her piece of art from her studio in Canada.

It's a theme I return to again and again, how technology has changed our lives.  I thought of this in a different way as I set my oven to self-clean yesterday.

Note to self:  it's better to clean the oven during cooler weather.  Having the oven self-clean at a high temperature on a sultry summer afternoon is not the wisest approach.  But the result seems miraculous.  No noxious chemicals!  No scrubbing!

I wonder what technology that's just now being tested will come to seem like a miracle to future generations?

Now it's off to motorcycle training--another technology which once seemed miraculous.  I will bring a book to read during down times, if there are any--an old technology, which still seems miraculous.  I will use my reading glasses--yes, another miracle.

The world is full of wonders, if we had but eyes to see.  What poems will I weave out of these ideas?

A Lake District to Call Our Own

This week-end I was struck by Beth's post ; she says, ". . . most of the poets who are working on Annunciation are people I met through qarrtsiluni or other online venues. I sometimes forget to stop and trace the lineage of those relationships back, since all this has happened over just one decade, but it strikes me as a sort of rapid evolutionary process, where creativity and human relationships have partnered with advances in technology and communication, changing all of our lives and probably our brains as well."

I, too, am routinely grateful for all the connections the Internet has created, and a bit in awe of what it has made possible.   It has been an amazing decade.  I can hardly remember how I used to find poets whom I liked.  Now, most of the books I buy because I'm familiar with the poet's work online, and usually because the poet blogs.  There are the occasional Facebook posts that lead me to a poet, but for the most part, it's still blogs.

I realize that for some people, finding poets through blogs may seem as ancient a technology process as reading a paper magazine and searching out the poets found there.

I love the connections that the online world make possible.  For example, this week-end, I read this poem by Luisa A. Igloria, who posts a poem every day on Dave Bonta's blog.  Some of the lines in the poem reminded me of my posts that I wrote earlier in the week about gender and Caitlyn Jenner (here and here).  In this blog post, I wrote these words that I knew would need to be in a poem soon:  "I'm afraid that I worship the god of self-improvement plans.  It's the idol worship that seems to be running amok in our society."

On Saturday, I sat down and wrote a poem.  It was likely a different poem than I would have written without Luisa's poem.  It was better.

And then, as I have done occasionally, I sent it to Dave.  He suggested adding the word "pilot" to the last line.  Brilliant! 

On Sunday, Dave posted my poem on his blog.  And then he wrote a Facebook post.

As a result, this poem may have gotten more people reading it than the poems from earlier in my career, long ago, when tiny journals published my work on paper and mailed those journals to a tiny database of subscribers.

I like how this process shows, in close to real time, the writing process of this poem.  I don't have to wait for years for the poem to appear.

I also like how inspired I feel.  I like how these poems talk to each other.  I like that we have it documented.

I do not envy future grad students, who will have so much more material to mine as they write their scholarly tomes about this time.  But I am excited to be living in this time.

I predict that future generations will see this time as one that's as exciting as the time when Wordsworth and Coleridge wrote or when Mary Shelley wrote her masterpiece, Frankenstein.  Just as I see writerly networks of the Romantic age who were influenced to become much better than they would have been on their own, I see our own time through a similar lens.

We have a Lake District to call our own.

Poets and College Curriculum, Online and Onground

Jeannine Hall Gailey has a great post about book sales; it's the kind of post that has links to other posts that discuss the same topic.  She then posted the link to her post on Facebook, which sparked more conversation.  One of the topics that came up was how book publishing has changed in the past 10 years.

One thing about book publishing that has changed in the past 10 years is the explosion of online classes. In 2004, when my chapbook came out, I thought about being a visiting poet in a classroom, which meant travelling to a campus. Now, with so many classes being online, what are the implications?

I wonder how the explosion of online classes will impact the chances of getting one's book adopted for classes.  It would be easier for a poet/writer to visit an online class that adopts one's book.  I wonder if in future years, poets and writers will be expected to have resources for online teachers who adopt the book.  Writers could record mini lectures and/or readings of all sorts.  As an online teacher, I'd be more inclined to adopt a book if it came with resources.  Of course, at some schools, one doesn't get to create one's own content.

And then there's the question of charging for the extra content.  All teachers wrestle with how much content to create for free, and what happens to online content--who owns it?  As a poet, do I want to create readings or lectures for students for free?   Do I do it for love?  Do I do it in the hopes of increased book sales?  Do I only do it if the book has been adopted?

I've been thinking about creating curriculum, if one was allowed to do that.  In fact, I'll be spending some time creating curriculum for an online class called Critical Thinking.  Yesterday, as I was out on my morning run/walk, I came up with a great idea of how to shape the class.   There's a textbook that has sections on Thinking Critically about Movies, Thinking Critically about Music, and so on.  I had a vision of using Gailey's  Becoming the Villainess--most of the poems are based on fairy tales and video games and classic mythology--lots to appeal to student readers, very accessible and also very smart.   

 

I have this whole series of modules mapped out in my head--students interpreting a poem and discussing it as a class and then bringing the living poet in to the conversation--and from there, seeing how other artists have used the fairy tale--in song and film for example, or TV shows--and from there, having students create something with the fairy tale and/or write an analytical essay or something that involves mixed media, since it is an online class.  Happily, the textbook fits with these ideas, since the last part of the book has chapters on thinking critically about magazines, music, TV, etc.

 

I had this vision of having the students choose their favorite poem from the text and having to convince their classmates that their choice was the one we should talk to Gailey about, probably by way of e-mail.  It's not the kind of class that happens in "real time"--no online lecture time.

 

I thought it might be worth her time because there would be 15-25 students who would have bought the book.

 

But then I found out that we couldn't do that--the online curriculum has to mirror the onground curriculum, which makes sense.  But I might be allowed to go in a different direction if I could create a completely electronic curriculum which wouldn't require students to buy a book.

 

So, this morning my brain is still whirling.  Could I create a completely electronic curriculum out of my own head?  It would be different from what I've done in the past, which was to create a series of Powerpoint slides based on a textbook.  At some point I might teach an onground class again where I control the curriculum.  My ideas for Becoming the Villainess would make a great base for our onground Topics for Composition class.

 

And then there's the other set of questions:  if we say that the ideal would be to have students buy the book, but for a variety of reasons that can't happen, are there other ways to incorporate the poetry and make it worth the poet's time to be part of the class?  If one was a visiting poet at a traditional school, one would hope to sell a few books along the way.  In many an online class, I suspect that the students don't have extra funds to buy a book, no matter how much they love the poems discussed in class.

 

This post has become quite long, so I'll stop now.  I suspect it's a topic we'll all be revisiting again and again as we make our way through this brave new world.

 

Time, Technology, and (Im)Permanence

In past weeks, I've said that I love having visitors because they get me out of the house to be a tourist in my own town.

These past few days, I've realized that visitors also teach me about Internet destinations.  I've been watching my 8 year old nephew watch YouTube videos that show people playing Minecraft.

I've always said that few things are more boring than watching someone else on the computer, and I still stick to that assertion.  I won't be watching these videos once he leaves.  But how fascinating that they exist.

I said to my spouse, "Who says to themselves, I'm going to record myself playing this game.  And then I'm going to create a voiceover feature to explain what I'm doing?"

That's the age we live in, of course.  We have cheap technology that makes it possible to record all sorts of things--and to upload them into a forum where we can all find them.

And of course, who am I to even ask that question?  One might ask the same of me:  why do you need to keep a public journal of your daily thoughts and theological musings?  Why upload?

There are many reasons, of course.  I like that by uploading, I can then have access from any computer.  I like to believe that my writing affects some people in some way.  I like the feedback and the support and the exchange of ideas.  I like that I can write a blog post and link to it on Facebook and thus I don't have to write a lot of e-mails and letters to people to let them know how I am.

I think of future researchers who will have a lot of material to slog through as they do their work.  I think of my grad school self who devoured the journals and letters of Dorothy Wordsworth.  That researcher doesn't have as much that documents the time period as a future researcher will have.

Or maybe our future researcher won't have those materials.  After all, if Google decides to delete the Blogger platform, my writing vanishes.  If YouTube vanishes, what becomes of all those videos?

I think of John Keats writing his poems despite the fact that he must have been convinced that they would not survive him and in the face of bloody evidence each morning that he would not be surviving much longer.

In so many ways, almost every creative person faces the same questions.  We know that we are only here for a short time.  We know that our works may not survive us.  What keeps us going?

Those of us who have been creating for some time, we know that the work itself must sustain us.  It's not the praise, although that would be nice.  It's not the assurance that our works will outlast us.  We cannot be sure.  The poets who were the most famous during Keats' time would be unknown to most of us.  It's Keats that we see as one of the greatest English poets--and most of the people who were alive during his time would not have known his name either.

I have time on the brain.  Sandy Longhorn has been having great conversations about those of us who have multiple creative outlets and how we decide which one to follow.  I said, "I tend to follow the muse that's calling me at the moment, what I passionately yearn to do. It's often writing, but sometimes cooking, sometimes fabric art, sometimes simple sewing of a long seam, sometimes planting, sometimes collage. As I've grown older and my work life takes more time, I find myself thinking about the fact that my life will end at some point, and I ask myself which work is most important, which will have lasting impact. I also ask what will make me most sad if I don't finish the work at hand. The idea of partly finished quilts when I die doesn't haunt me. But oh, all those book-length ideas I have!"

I wonder if Keats had other creative pursuits that he put aside once he realized he had contracted the TB that had killed so many of his loved ones.  I wonder if those gamers who record themselves have all sorts of creative interests.

I wonder what will survive the next 200 years and what that will tell the future researchers who think about us.

Swirls of Old Language and New Technology

--The last Navajo Code Talker has died.  You may or may not remember the history of the nearly unbreakable codes developed by World War II soldiers; they used many Native American languages.  When I heard the news of the death of the last Navajo Code Talker (should Code Talker be capitalized?), it seemed like it should be a metaphor for something.

--Yesterday was our last day as a Reading Pal to this year's first graders.  I went to the school, but my student wasn't there.  I gathered his remaining books, and his teacher says that she'll make sure he gets them.

As I worked with my student, and I listened to the reading going on around me, I was struck by how code-like language and reading are.  I have always loved reading and linguistics in the larger sense.  Watching a student who is fairly new to literacy helped me see why people would give up on reading--language so often makes no sense.  Think of the words that have a gh in them:  tough, thought, for example.  Try to explain those words to a first grader.  I understand his exasperation.  Still, we took turns reading, and he improved, and I'll hope it's enough. 

--Speaking of languages I'll never understand, twice in the past week, I've heard the songs of ducks in flight.  We hear lots of birdsong down here, but in the 16 years we've lived here, I've never heard ducks in flight.  Parrots in flight--yes--much screechier.  The ducks sounded almost mystical,  yet also misplaced.  Have they misplaced their northern lake?

It immediately transported me back to my parents' townhouse in the Virginia suburbs of D.C.  They lived on a very small lake, but the lake was home to regular ducks and Canada geese and all sorts of wildlife--just a half hour from the nation's capital.  I miss that house, and more, I miss getting back to that part of the country as often as I used to.  They lived in that townhouse for just over 25 years, so I guess it's not strange that it felt like home in ways that the houses of my youth did not.

--And in anniversaries that are related to language, today's entry on The Writer's Almanac tells us,
"On this day in 1977, the Apple II computer went on sale, and the era of personal computing began. Developed by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, it was the first successful mass-produced microcomputer designed for home use. It came standard with 4 kilobytes of memory, game paddles, and a demo cassette with some programs on it. Most people used their televisions as monitors.

The Apple II sold for about $1,300; today that same money will buy you an iMac, with 4 gigabytes — one million times the original amount — of memory, a sleek backlit 21-inch monitor, and a 2.7 gigahertz processor."

And for much less money, you can buy a lot of computing power that you can carry with you in your pocket in the shape of your cell phone.

--And in this language-related post, let me take a moment to praise language when it works in old-fashioned ways.  I made a new Facebook friend who liked my poem "Heaven on Earth."  That poem has opened more doors for me than I ever imagined that it would. And to think, I hesitated to send it out in the world, for fear that it would seem irreverent and would alienate a majority of readers.

The new Facebook friend called his twin brother and read the poem to him.  They laughed.  The twin brother then found my poem about Jesus after the hurricane (read it here) and called his brother back to read that poem to him.

I was struck by this swirl of old language and new technology that allows for all sorts of connections that wouldn't have been possible in the 19th century.  Poetry would have been possible, but the exchange of poems would have been improbable--research postal rates and times and see if you don't agree.  The Internet has given my poems a travelling range that they wouldn't have had in 1977 when that first Apple II went on the market.  Long distance rates are much cheaper now too--you can call a friend and read poems together over phone lines.  And because of Facebook and other social networking sites, you can find that poet and have a chat, if all parties are so inclined.

Mourning Colored Sunrise and Other Inspirations

This morning I was writing a blog post about the Create in Me retreat.  I started thinking about the ways that the words integrated and integrity are so similar.  It makes sense of course, and if I'd had those Latin classes I've always regretted not taking, I could explain it better.

The ways to live an integrated life full of integrity are never far from my mind.  I was talking to  colleagues yesterday, and I said, "I feel like every money-making idea I have is rooted in old media technology:  good book ideas, something like that."

One colleague is writing one of those old media books, and we talked about a different colleague who is going to part-time because he's making so much money from an app he created.  Can one still make money writing books?  There have been recent reports that make it sound like no one is reading, at least nothing on paper.

And then, this morning, I came across this blog post by Marly Youmans, which ends with this wonderful idea:  "All you lovers of reading and shapeliness in words, defy this crazy world! If hopeless, still be brave. Read better books, make better books. Encourage taste, a human achievement that used to support culture. Online or in-person, recommend what's best in the arts. Make the better world, even if you fear that you are the only person who inhabits it. Dream of a better culture, a more worthy gift to hand on to our children."

I walked to the beach with those words in my head; I watched the sun rise.  The cloud cover made it less dramatic than I expected.  I watched as the sky turned from a dull grey to a lovely violet.  I thought about Victorian mourning customs, where one could tell what stage of grief the mourner occupied by the color of the clothes, which went from black to grey to violet to lavender as the year progressed.

I thought about the sun and sky in concert every day, creating wonderful vistas which most of us will never notice.  I often feel that way about poems and blog posts, which is rather liberating.  And then, suddenly, something I've written gets attention, and it's almost always a bit of a surprise.

I'll continue writing the compositions that make me happy.  I'll continue hoping to find a gathering of readers who will also be made happy.  I'll lay the ground work and show up for the daily tasks and take the long view and see what happens.

And here's a last piece of inspiration from Michael Cunningham, who was recently on The Diane Rehm show.  A caller asked for advice for newer writers, and he said, "Don't panic."  Diane Rehm asked if he had panicked ever, and he answered:  "On occasion, which is why I feel confident that "don't panic" is good advice. Because finally, finally, the people who get to be writers have to have some knack for it, but maybe -- well, at least, as important is, you have to be the one who won't give up. The one who will just sit in the chair, and sit in the chair, and sit in the chair and write this sentence over and over and over again. And who refuses to be discouraged by rejection notes, by whatever comes your way as you're making your way."  You can listen to the whole interview or read the transcript here.

Technology and the Future of the English Department

Yesterday at work, our student records system, CARS, quit sending documents to the printer.  For reasons I don't fully understand, a CARS issue requires a call to the Corporate IT people.  So, I called.

The IT people have always been very kind when I call.  Yesterday was no exception.  As we waited for the computer on his end to do its thing, I heard the IT guy mutter, "Come on, come on."  And then he said, "Why does CARS hate me?"

I had to laugh.  You mean it's not just me who feels undone by technology?

My issue turned out to be a simple one to fix.  But the larger issues will linger longer.

I thought of tech issues again as I read this article by Marc Bousquet, in part about the various reactions of English departments to technology and new media.  Some departments remain committed to classic texts and a classic approach to literature.  Many more have trained their grad students to be able to teach Composition and Rhetoric.  And some have glimpsed the future and begun to talk about all the sorts of electronic texts which have become part of our lives.

It doesn't take a careful reading of that paragraph to get a sense of my opinion.  I was a classically trained English major and grad student.  I'm glad I was forced to wrestle with those texts.  But I think we do our students no favors if we train them in the way I was trained.  Most of them are not going on to graduate work in literature the way my favorite professors understood that term.

And let me pause to admit that this argument about what deserves more attention, classic texts or electronic texts, is a luxury in many English departments.  Many English departments spend much of their time trying to figure out how to bring students up to a basic level of literacy.

You might assume that everyone who graduates from high school can be assumed to have that basic level of literacy, but sadly, many students do not.  And some state legislatures, like ours in Florida, have decided that state supported schools of higher ed shouldn't teach remedial skills.  This kind of decision makes the Composition classroom even more challenging than it has been in the past.

Most Composition teachers have always dealt with students who have a wide variety of skill levels.  Now that width is even broader.

What role will "new media" play?  What role will "old media" play?  Stay tuned.  It's going to be very interesting. 

Geography of Siren Songs

The always wonderful Denise Duhamel has an essay on women poets up at The Huffington Post.  What I love is that she assumes we've all heard of Adrienne Rich and other well-known poets.  But look at this paragraph, how artfully she works in the names of poets whom so many people have yet to discover, and yet she gives us all the benefit of the doubt by assuming we may have discovered them--and she reminds us of why we should rush out to get their works, if we haven't already:

"You may have read Sharon Olds, Alicia Ostriker, Ruth Stone, Kim Addonizio, or Dorianne Laux, for their taboo-shattering wisdom. You may have read Tracy K. Smith or Amy Gerstler for their otherworldly take on pop culture and social issues. You may have read Rita Dove or Natasha Tretheway, who both explore the United States' complicated past when it comes to African Americans. You may have read the terse and brilliant lyrics of Sappho, Emily Dickinson, or Jean Valentine. You may have read Barbara Hamby, Molly Peacock, or Marilyn Hacker who infuse female spirit in fixed literary forms. You may have read Nikki Giovanni, Sandra Cisneros, Adrienne Rich, or Nellie Wong whose performable politics are transformative. You may have read Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Lucille Clifton, Daisy Fried, Sharon Dolin, or Beth Ann Fennelly who write about sexuality and motherhood with harrowing clarity. These voices were probably covered in Introduction to Women Poets. But don't worry if you haven't taken that class--there is room in this Advanced Women Poets seminar, no prerequisite required."

And then, she gets to the heart of her essay, recommending even newer poets, likely less well-known, that we should read.  I was happy to have heard of most of them, even if I haven't read them all yet.

I spent some time at the website of one of the poets mentioned, Stephanie Strickland.  I spent some time with the work Sea and Spar Between.  Wow.  She's doing amazing things with her electronic tools, where she mixes Emily Dickinson and Herman Melville.  Or is it the computer doing it?  Does she get credit as the poet for telling the computer what to do, or more accurately, for setting up the random phrase generator and telling the computer to pair random phrases?  In this instance, is it more accurate to call her a poet or a computer coder?

These are issues for some graduate student to explore in a dissertation.  I will not solve them this morning.  Much of it is  such an unfamiliar geography to me, this world of multimedia/new media/digital media--and yet, I feel its pull.

The always wonderful Dave Bonta alerted me in this post to a wonderful article about the limits of the online world.   In this article, Chris Clarke says, "I spend so much time staring into a computer screen. It’s an odd problem to have. I earn my living writing about the natural world, trying to convey the things about it that make it different from the conceptual one we increasingly inhabit online. Few things online hold the surprising complexity of an oak leaf, a beetle’s wing. Online, we create the world in our own image, and we filter out the nuance in our image when we do it."

His essay goes on to talk about the pull of the desert, which took me back to a year ago, when I'd have been about to head out to the desert southwest, the California side.  I have felt the desert's siren song even before I went, and it haunted me for months after I got back.

Oceans, deserts, mountains--it's the geography of siren songs, of seduction.  For the first few weeks of 2013, I resisted that voice that said, "Pack it all up here.  Move to the desert."  It's not a good time in the history of the planet's water supply to be moving to the desert.

Of course, it's not a great time to be living by the ocean side either.  My spouse watched part of a documentary last night that mentioned that if all the ice sheets melt, the seas will rise 200 feet.  Yikes.

Good thing we're living in geologic time, where that melt will take place slowly, over hundreds of years--if I'm lucky.  In the meantime, I'll enjoy exploring the various geographies that sing to me.

It's 1517 All Over Again

I have the Protestant Reformation on the brain--yes, that Reformation centuries ago that started with Martin Luther nailing his theses on the Wittenberg door in 1517.   I'm a Lutheran, after all, and Reformation Sunday is this Sunday.  But this year, I'm thinking about the Reformation and how it was made possible with the help of technology.  It's a fact that's often overlooked.

Maybe I'm thinking about that because I've been thinking so much about technology in the past few weeks, indeed years.  I wrote an e-mail to a librarian friend of mine who is the online librarian for what used to be our local community college before it expanded.  An online librarian!  That's a job that didn't exist 20 years ago. 

I signed off by writing "See you in cyberspace!"  And then I wondered if anyone uses the term "cyberspace" anymore.  As a sci-fi geek-lite kind of gal, in a long ago incarnation, I was often one of few people who understood that term, who could even begin to comprehend the ways that an Internet might change our lives.

Back then, I didn't think that whole industries would be wiped out.  With the optimism of the young, I assumed we'd just add new elements to our societies.  We'd work more efficiently, to be sure, but we'd work.  We wouldn't be giving over jobs to robots or lesser forms of mechanization.

You'd think an apocalypse gal like me might have considered these things.

I've been talking about online education with a variety of people.  Yesterday, when I described an online class to my friend who's not in education, but who is a bit of a computer geek himself, he said, with quite a lot of disbelief, "You mean, it's like a giant chatroom?"

I could hear him wanting to say, "That's so 1990's."  He'd be right.  I imagine that within 10 years, we'll be amazed at what is possible.

Or maybe we'll keep using old technology.  There's something to be said for maximizing old technology, which is familiar to more people.  I thought of this element all day yesterday, after hearing this NPR Marketplace interview with LeVar Burton.  He talked about his show Reading Rainbow and using an old technology, television, to fortify an even older technology, books. 

That brings me back to the Reformation.  Very few people understand how the invention of the printing press made the Protestant Reformation possible.  We have this vision of Martin Luther nailing a handmade document to the Wittenberg door.  We don't think of the mighty Reformation as being powered by the lowly pamphlet.  But it's a legitimate interpretation. 

The printing press is the main reason why the Catholic church couldn't contain Luther's dangerous ideas (a great book, by the way:  Alister McGrath's Christianity's Dangerous Idea).  Those darned pamphlets just kept popping up everywhere.  In a way, Luther was an early incarnation of a blogger:  someone who knows how to use technology to get his ideas more widely distributed.

If he had stopped there, the world might not have been transformed so completely.  But then Luther translated the Bible into German, which meant more people could read and interpret for themselves.  And then more people wanted to learn to read, so that they could read the Bible.  Those events have a direct link to the world we know today.

We see the same kinds of things happening today.  Cheaper technology means that more people can learn, not just in our country, but across the world.  And I predict that those of us who once had first world power will not recognize the world that's coming at us.

Yes, in my metaphor, I'm the Catholic priest, much as I'd like to be the upstart Martin Luther.  I'm the one who's seeing the old world sliding right out from under me. 

To paraphrase T. S. Eliot's Prufrock, "I am no early adapter, nor was meant to be."

It's 1517 all over again.  That idea both excites me and terrifies me.  The Protestant Reformation did not spark a time of peace and prosperity, after all.  Massive numbers of people died in the following centuries as people fought about these ideas.

We may not unleash literal war, although I don't discount that possibility.  Perhaps we will look back and say, "Ah, 2013, when we thought the decimation of the middle class was the worst we had to face."  

We have unleashed all sorts of forces that we can no longer control.  And indeed, maybe the idea that we were in control was a massive illusion.

Still, I feel hopeful.  For all the negative developments, I'd still rather live in a post-Reformation world than the world that gave birth to Martin Luther.  I'd still rather live in a world of technological possibilities than one where the computers were massive and expensive and only available to the very few.

High Tech Failures, Low Tech Book Joys

I'm in a high tech bad mood today.  I have spent far too long on the phone with AT&T.  It used to be simple to transfer service.  Now it's not.

I try not to think about places with better connectivity and cheaper costs than we have in the U.S.  Eventually we'll get there.  We're a bigger country, and it will take longer to get the fiber optic (and better!) technology to everyone.

But in the meantime, could we please program our computers so that when I talk to one customer service rep it's clear what others have done?  Or so that the customer service rep can find me in the system, even if I don't have a reference # handy?  You should be able to type in my name and have a whole record come up.  And my last name is very unusual--it's not like there are 28000 Berkey-Abbotts in my zip code!  How hard is this?

I won't even go into the variety of tech troubles at work:  textbook companies that launch a whole new electronic curriculum (not the one we adopted and paid for) just before the quarter starts.  Fine if you want to do that, but get all the bugs out first.

Grrr.

No, let me focus on some old technology that's making me happy this week.  Let me return to the world of books.

Since we've had no Internet connection at the new house, and I have yet to move my computer over, I've been reading when I get up early in the morning.  I've been reading Meg Wolitzer's latest, The Interestings.  Wow!  What a great book.  It's funny, and I love the characters, and it's profound, and Wolitzer has the most astute societal observations.  I imagine students hundreds of years from now reading her books to glean what life was like during the beginning years of the 21st century.

She also has keen insights on the lives of people with artistic aspirations.  How do we express our creativity if the world isn't open to it?

It's a fabulous book; I had trouble putting it down.  Monday night, while I waited and waited and waited for the AT&T tech to be done (not done yet, alas), I settled in with that book, some cheese and crackers, and a glass of wine.  I felt supremely satisfied.

Unlike Tuesday morning, when I was bounced to 5 different people, none of whom could tell me when the tech might return to finish the job.  But I said I was going to focus on the book related events making me happy this week.  There's one more.

Our school library has been weeding books and putting the books weeded out of the collection on tables for anyone to take.  I've been adding rejected books from our personal collection too. 

On Monday, as I walked by the tables of books that need a new home, I heard a student gasp with happiness.  In her hand, she held The Journals of Lewis and Clark, a book that I had donated.  I saw the stack that she was creating:  lots of books from our history collection.  And many of the books from my spouse's Philosophy collection are gone too.

The nuclear war castaway books are still on the table.  Does that make me happy or sad?  Many of them are no longer relevant.  Alas, they've lost relevancy not because we're in a much safer world, but because the Cold War world they describe is no longer accurate.

It makes me SO happy to think that our students are taking these books away. May they enjoy them thoroughly.


And it makes me happy to know that I can still enjoy a book the old-fashioned way:  turning pages by lamplight, eating a snack, enjoying a libation. 

And it makes me supremely satisfied that I got the book from the library.  I love the Broward County Public Library.  I'm lucky to have this kind of system.

I'm lucky that I've always had access to good libraries--I'm very lucky.  And I'm happy that authors keep writing books which still find their way to the world.  I'm happy that there are still publishers that will deliver books to me in the old-fashioned way, on pages.

Four Essential Questions

You may be one of those people who scoffs at technology.  Or perhaps you embrace every new gizmo that comes along.  You might be the type of person who has lots of accounts that need constant updating.  Or maybe you're the kind of person who will only agree to meet in person and won't even chat on the phone.

Regardless of your approach to technology, you'll likely find this interview with Seth Godin to be worth your while.

I tend to feel that way about every guest that Krista Tippett has on her On Being show, so I admit my bias.  But still, some are more fascinating than others, and Seth Godin has much to say that's important.

He's promoting a new book, The Icarus Deception.  This Godin quote will give you an idea of the book's thesis:  "So if you and I had been sitting around just after the Dark Ages and heard the story of Icarus — what we would have heard is this: that Daedalus said to his son two things — one, put these wings on but don't fly too close to the sun because it's too hot up there and the wax will melt. But more important, Son, do not fly too low, do not fly too close to the sea, because the mist and the water will weigh down the wings and you will surely perish. And for me the most important message that I've come to after thinking about this for so many years is, we are flying too low. We built this universe, this technology, these connections, this society, and all we can do with it is make junk. All we can do with it is put on stupid entertainments. I'm not buying it."

Krista Tippett mentioned the 4 questions that are worth asking about our work, and it holds true for our creative work too:  "Four questions worth answering. Who is your next customer? You mean that conceptually. Their outlook, hopes, dreams, needs and wants. What is the story he told about himself before he met you? How do you encounter him in a way that he trusts the story you want to tell him about what you have to offer? What changes are you trying to make in him, his life, his story? And then you wrote, start with this before you spend time on tactics, technology, scalability. I think that's really refreshing."

Refreshing indeed.  In a world that tells us we need ratings, we need people to spend gobs of money, we need a platform that people visit all the time, it's good to remember why we do this.

The lust for ratings and placing high on the charts is an industrialist mindset, Godin tells us.  And even if we have it, we may not be saved.  Look at all the TV shows that were once popular but are no longer with us.

Here's a better way of thinking about our work:  "Whereas, the other way to think about it is, how few people can I influence and still be able to do this tomorrow? Because if we can influence just enough people to keep getting the privilege to do it, then tomorrow there'll be even more people. Because we're doing something genuine that connects, as opposed to doing something fake that's entertainment."

Go here for a link to the transcript or to listen to the show.  Today I need to spend time deleting old e-mails; I may just listen to this interview as I do it!