if only I had known about Audio Flux when the semester began, it would've been great to challenge students to meet the circuit 7 criteria for part of our class. ah well.
my students did some great work anyway. here are a couple of their final projects:
Everything Breaks (episode 1 and episode 2)
I hear that circuit 8 of Audio Flux is coming soon, at least, so maybe I can work it into something for English Composition (our first-year writing class) this fall. in my one 10.35am section I want to focus on listening and understanding and responding thoughtfully. I am not yet sure how, exactly, but hopefully the students will be open to it and cooperative with each other. part of me is skeptical about building real community within the deeply trenched constraints and stretched-out shallowness of classrooms. Dead Poets Societies are not and never have been real, right? but more of me is gonna try anyway. it is worth trying, no matter how slowly and incompletely each little classroom community seems to develop.
my very intermittent course prep thoughts are mixed in among many, many other plans and ideas and projects and to-do lists. that is what summer is, usually-- a big mishmash of ambition and dreaming and doing stuff and lounging about.
I finished reading (and lazily annotating) John Durham Peters' The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media some several ages ago now. I keep meaning to send my marginalia-ed copy to friend Chris sometime. we'll see if I get around to it.
this week, I'm getting around to posting all the neat quotes and concepts from all the dogeared pages. they are a little grandiose and navel-gazey at times, but maybe that is okay given that all our navels are made out of the same dusty star crumbs anyway.
as I compile and remix these quotes a little bit here, I'm thinking a lot about place. it's been 6 full years and a bit since we moved to Arizona. a new record for longest-time-in-one-area. and while I never really wanted to settle down much there is something nice about being known and being somewhat settled.
still, we'll see how much longer we last in this scrubby desert land. I can only be in one place at once, physically. and there are so many places! media can bridge them somewhat (and times also, a little). but old postcards from California aren't the same as actual California.
"We make meanings, but do not so in media of our own making; our bodies are embedded in climate history, fire regimes, the spin of the earth, north and south, and relations with plants, artifacts, and organisms of all kinds, especially each other. Whatever nonverbal communication might be, it is certainly richer than our bodies' hints and gestures, rich though they are" (p. 380)
"Real meaning is not fragile: it is exuberantly abundant, overwhelmingly so" (p. 379)
"Nature has meaning, but not for us" (p. 379)
"But the human condition is recursive; it is a conditional condition: our actions change the conditions they act in, especially since they change us; we speak and act, and as we do we change the conditions in which we speak and act" (p. 51)
"Communication is deeper and older than language" (p. 133)
(that bit reminded me of this little post by Ian Leslie, which I usually ask all of my students to read in any writing or communication class I'm teaching. the communicative force field around us all has an elemental nature, I suppose.)
"The stars were both divine and cozy" (p. 386)
"This is what the universe has yielded: another being in your same form, improbable and precious, with whom you may be able to contribute to the ongoing history of life. Love and beauty are the meaning of the universe, and such meaning is not a human fiat imposed on raw and unfeeling matter by the effort of our will, but rather the product of cosmic history" (p. 385)
"Perhaps the past cannot be tapped in its full immediacy because the present is not fully immediate. There are vast patches of unobserved magnification, for different organs of sense, for minds quicker or slower than ours. Even for the most acute observer, descriptions might be incomplete, not only because of limited tools but because reality is lacking. Just as we often do not know what we mean when we speak, so the universe might not always be so sure of itself. The cosmos is structurally incomplete, as gap-ridden as its files. Such wonderful conditions these are! The universe generously accommodates our every new act, word, or thought. There is still plenty to do. It is open for new events; it is a container with a gracious void. A growing universe is a (retroactively) incomplete one." (p. 354)
"A phonograph record, tape, or compact disc does not really hold sound: sound exists only as pressure in time and space. Acoustic storage media hold recipes that, with the right equipment, can produce more or less the same sounds over and over, but they don't hold sounds the way a cave wall or canvas can hold an image. Everything that happens in time has to be started over and over in real time. The sound does not last, the word flies away, the vibration dissipates. The vinyl record can endure, but the music it plays on a stereo does not." (p. 311)
"All complex societies have media inasmuch as they use materials to manage time, space, and power. Kittler's point, that culture was always already a procedure of data processing, follows confidently in Innis's path. Kittler's word was Kultur, a term that can mean both "culture" and "civilization"-- and, never shy about grand claims, he certainly meant to include both." (p. 20)
"For [Norbert Elias], the civilizing process involved three fronts in need of taming: pressures inside people, pressures between people, and pressures between people and nonpeople" (p.159)
"There is an old clash between the ethic of detachment, which calms the soul so well, and the ethic of commitment, which calls us to upsetting action." (p. 384)
"Death can feel completely normal, dull, and expected, as blank as boredom, and also unbearably bitter and impossible, as hard as thoughts of falling. Death is a great revealer of infrastructures, and, like them, it partakes of the habit of coming out of hiding traumatically." (p. 383)
"... but this blessed earth will live on, and the clouds and sun will continue to radiate for a season, and the beauty that pulses in our senses will continue to pulse to other senses or just to itself, and that will be enough. Knowing that this beauty will persist gives some comfort. When we go, natality might well bring something new forth. There might be long periods of anoxic oceans and arid wastelands, but something will happen and eventually wildflowers might sprout in the ash we left behind." (p. 387)
I will blog more this summer. so much has happened already and classes haven't even been over for a full month yet.
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